Last Gas For 200 Miles

belated greetings

2012-01-17T10:43:00.001-08:00

Waiting For Godot @Zuccotti Park

2011-11-07T19:27:00.000-08:00

They were right outside my office for so long, and now they’re gone. And while they were here, I couldn’t think of anything original to say. It seemed like everybody had an opinion, from well-considered to knee-jerk, but few had anything original to offer. And then they left, and then it hit me.

The reason I was so slow on the uptake was the dazzle. What we were witnessing was something that hasn’t been seen in America since the late ‘60s/early ‘70s: true political guerilla theater. This is not to disparage the work of activist/actors with the various and multifarious workshop scenarios in Seattle, dramas in Davos and the like, nor to ignore the significance of the ACT-UP acta during the AIDS wars. (And, no, I will not dignify the Tea Party Sale-a-thons and their astro-turf roots as anything more than a paper house—albeit one that managed to fool a lot of people in the cheap seats.) It is just that none of them had an extended run on this scale.

I want to quote Hamlet’s fave line: “The play’s the thing/In which to catch the conscience of a king”—but I can’t. Besides the fact that I quote Will far too much here, ANNND the only ‘king’ would be the Republican members of the House, this is NOT a classical statement of the Bard or “the boards”. It is most assuredly Samuel Beckett—someone for whom (very similar to Thelonius Monk, now that I think about it) silence spoke volumes—whose voice is heard here; muttering and grumbling under his breath, with the loudest sound of meaninglessness I know: Waiting for Godot.

This is not to say that what went on and went down had no meaning; far from it. But the salient criticism you heard of the movement (and I eliminate all the jokes and talking points manufactured by the NeoCon media and their think tanks) was that it was leaderless, had no goals, offered no plans, was little more than an inarticulate cry of anguish. Ok. So, strike the “inarticulate” remark and that’s exactly what Godot is: absurdist exasperation to the nth degree.

Now, some may take exception and say something like, ‘No! Godot’s basic message was always about the futility of trying to do anything’, or such. Times, however, change.

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!" Word is, from the high critique, that this bit is about Vladimir “wasting his time in idle discourse” by simply choosing to make a choice. Which is fine, under any proscenium (As opposed to choosing to NOT make a choice? A contradiction in terms on the face of it…and also stuff the makes theater hachet-men cream their jeans.), though when you drag it out into the street and say it to passersby—people who paid for no ticket, got no program, have no expectation of entertainment or insights to be offered—it is not only articulate but righteous! And even if it falls on deaf ears, it is no way “futile” when the TV cameras come around.

So why would this be different from the Tea-bags? Simple: when you put your ass on the line for an event, that’s one thing—when you do it everyday, 24/7, that’s another.

But, for certain, it was the opening night and the opening lines that hit me as pure serendipity:
“Where did you sleep last night?”
“In a ditch.”
And while the accommodations—between lower Broadway and Trinity, just off the Canyon of Heroes, under a canopy of tiny golden leaves—were somewhat more hospitable, when matched up with the mission, the resonance with Godot was always there if only from this. And, as well, this is why the guerilla theater that was in that plot of earth and stone was so utterly significant, and why it so reminded me of this radical departure from live drama, one even more wrenching than Brecht’s dissolution of the 4th Wall. In the same year in which Maddow could dub the campaign of The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Herman-Cain “an act of performance art”, anyone who passed by this redoubt of democracy and freedom on a regular basis could tell you OWS really could put the “camp” in encampment.

I mean—just look at this mask! We’re back in Greece, where amphitheater and senate weren’t so far apart in distance or purpose. In those days, the tragedies were to inform of the will of the Gods, the satyr plays and comedies of the pretensions of humans, and this was the sort of thing that influenced the polis and the deliberations of their representatives. That was also when things were smaller and easier to portray in a couple of acts. Then, they didn’t need an “Occupy the Agora” movement; that was a given—you couldn’t get away from it. Today, we can barely encompass the conflict when “The Social Network” gets better coverage than a departure from Rousseau’s Social Contract.

"We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste... In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!"

Nowadays, the world requires you get an audience first. Then come up with demands. Only after you have made a spectacle of yourself will you ever be noticed. And then, maybe, some one will ask you: What’s it all for?

"But that is not the question. Why are we here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come."

Yes. And maybe this time, he’ll bring the noise.

MUSIC AFTER - the anti-9/11

2011-09-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

MUSIC AFTER
Eleonor Sandresky and Daniel Felsenfeld, co-producers and artistic directors Music After is presented in association with the Joyce Theatre Foundation.
And in collaboration with Vision Into Art, September 11, 2011, 8.46am - after midnight
Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Si., New York City

Some people have short attention spans. Others incredibly long ones. Patience probably serves the latter best, but consider that, if of the former stripe, what could be better than something new every 15-20 minutes? If you have endurance, then it is then not a question of ADD as much as adding up.

As the St. Marks Poetry Marathon has been covered at some length here previously, it should come to no surprise that one might find a similar passion for the event above-captioned. If you have not noticed the date, you are among a very few. It ill behooves me, or even moves me, to comment on the national threnody associated with this; suffice it to say: having lived through it, here, I have no need to have my memories stirred, nor feelings repackaged with lap fades and so-mo-focus and lite arpeggios of mourning and renewal.

So this is something brand new, and guaranteed to please. And definitely not rehashing the past, as much as inviting it in and offering it a seat on the couch to have a bit of art and entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: At times in the past, there have been some unwelcome comments on the inaccuracy of items masquerading as “journalism” from this author. What the following represents is as much sense as can be made by someone who is a compulsive note-taker, scribbling in the dark on very cluttered handbills. Do that as thou wilt.

Set A: 8.46am - noon
At approx. 9:15am or so, totally delightful squee-scree-&-squawk set which was probably Daphna Naphtali on f/x and vocalisms and Hans Tammen (probably) doing Cage-like stuff to the guitar on the table)) doing her music…but it’s difficult to say, except the title “Mechanical Eye” seemed fitting. David Del Tredici’s contribution was “My God or Tres Gymnopedes” with Blair McMillen on piano, and did it remind of Erik Satie? Well, enough of Del Tredici does that so I’ll say so, without actual notation of same. Phill Niblock handed in a tape piece—which fit his oeuvre as well as the day: “Parker’s Altered Mood.” Ostensibly for saxophone, it might as well have been for a hundred harmoniums in the wash of single tones, only slightly interrupted by overlapping harmonics, which actually added a lot of texture for the listener, like trying to find the flaw, or even a brushstroke, in a monochromatic painting…and ended close enough to the feeling you get when the “all-clear” siren sounds.

Therein followed The Universal Thump (Greta Gertler and Adam Gold), who did one of the very few “rock” sets. I forgot to write down the name of the other tune, which was one by Rufus Wainwright, because I was so happy to hear “Information Rain” by Judy Nylon. And I was not the only one: co-producer Daniel Felsenfeld: “You know, we don’t hear enough of Judy Nylon these days. So I’m going to ask them to do an encore of it.” And they did! (Remember when a line from and Eno song could be so influential you’d make a whole number out of it?)

Not quite in the place of his name, David First went fifth, with Ahmed Abdullah (I think) on trumpet and Tom Chiu on violin. As soon as he picked up his guitar and laid on the e-bow, I recognized him from the old days; the somewhat American Eagle profile, though, wasn’t part of the memory. (Ah well, we all change.) That device on the fretted strings produced a semi-Frippertronic infinite sustain, aided by the organ-chord tremolo, and the ghostiest part came from the muted horn, like “Taps” from the fourth dimension.

This was the only set to end early. (Later, an explanation was offered that, due to the occasion, a lot of people were having trouble with trains. Including this reporter, who had to walk over from the East Village—a whole 10 blocks and 5 Avenues!)

Set B: noon-3pm
The notes are so scrambled on this set, only a few are dead certain, but best guesses are provided as well.

David Linton (‘80s drum luminary and tech-experimenter with so many bands I refuse to consider looking them up) kicked it off with a completely electronic piece (excepting a few strums of an autoharp, I believe) which was likely “from the Bicameral Research Project” (See? What’d I tell you? Math rock be damned.) as he warned us in advance “there’s going to be some flickering lights as part of this so if you’re susceptible to that sort of thing, you might want to step outside.” What was thrown up on the wall (the only one who used any visuals) was not dissimilar from old TV interference patterns of zig-zag jags when it was like a digital Rothko, and no—no one had any seizures.

If there was a “star” of this set, it was Annie Gosfield, if only that she had two pieces performed. The first was Blair McMillen returning to the Steinway & Sons for “October 5, 1941”—titled after the first Subway Series (between the Yanks and the Dodgers) wherein, upon this date, a fatal error cost Brooklyn an out, a game and the whole shebang. Humorously enough amid the sturm-und-drang of the Rite of Spring-like forte, the full count came from him leaning in to caress the strings with a couple of horsehide pills before donning a mitt and bashing the keys with it. (Why are so many composers baseball fans?) As for what came next? Too many scribbles. It may be that there was a Carter Burwell piece entitled “On Judgment: Human and otherwise”, but whoever is the author, the MIVOS String Quartet performed it. (Probably.) All that is certain is that the rumble of car wheels on cobblestones outside meant that it was probably not a very loud piece…or that I like the sound of car wheels on cobblestones.

Somewhere in here was an unannounced gem. Jonathan Hart Makwaia (pronounced almost British, like “McQuire”) may have been on the front of the program, but he was most likely on a contingent basis. (Remember the trains?) What he does is play the piano and vocalize—and while the first one was possibly Swahili, it didn’t matter if there was any Randy Weston or Abdullah Abrahim in him—it was great: pseudo or voodoo. The second was too charming for words, literally. If you could label it Call-&-Response, it would be the piano setting the joke, and Jon laughing at it: trills, arpeggios, hammerstrokes and clusterchords all repeated in giggles to titters to guffaws to barks and howls. There was a third piece as well which may or may not have been notated as “sun ra w/better cartilage” but whatever; this guy could be a heliocentric Victor Borge, no lie.

It is certain that Lisa Moore played the music of Don Byron, also on the ivories. These were entitled “Mad Rush” and “7 Etudes”. I’m pretty sure Eleonor Sandresky, the other co-producer, did a Philip Glass piece…but she did one piano performance per set, at least, and so it might as well as have been her. There are no notes on what it was but if you’ve experience one Glass piece live, you will know it by how clean you feel after. There was a tape piece by Tim Mukerhjee called “Heat Multiplier”. And then David Lang’s interpretation of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” as a recital piece by Anne Hiatt and Kate Springarn on vocals and cello…which is in itself kinda stunning: late ‘60s NYC drug-nihilism retooled for a garden party?

Julie Heyward is fondly remembered as one of the leading lights of tech savvy performance artists who could make concepts into theatricals. (Think first time I’d seen her perform was with T-Venus on the Kitchen Midwest Tour launch party on the Staten Island Ferry. 1981? Memory does not always serve.) Here it was four songs. “This is the audience participation section and the question you have to answer is ‘Do You Believe?’”, and ended it with “please leave your questionnaires with the usher at the door.” Pretty cute still. The others were “Body on the Bayou” (“written 15 years before Katrina” she’d have you know), “My Mind Likes to Take Little Trips on Its Own” and the fourth passed by because the third title took too long to write.

Jon Gibson had two numbers performed but I only have a scrawl on the second, in which the composer himself came out to play an alto sax solo.

Set C: 3pm-6pm
It is fair to say that, by this time, it had occurred to me to not try to make all the notes on the same schedule, and instead, get a new one and mark that up…for the duration. For which I have mi espousa mousa to thank.

Laurie Anderson was sort of an open question; if anyone could perform a composition by her, who would it be? Well, seeing as how she lives 10 minutes away, and how she has been as generous as possible this summer with appearances all over town (see previous post)… She was in a chair, sitting, to read a short story/reminiscence, or parable—if you will—so suited to the mood of the moment as to be a tailor-cut, rather than a fitting. I hesitate to relate as to reveal would spoil other’s fun. Suffice it to say, in the world of today, we are all like confused terriers, watching for hawks.

The numbers are slightly off here so it is a good guess to say that Charles Waters and Sparkle Trio played the music of Matthew Shipp next, in more or less the only avant-jazz set of the event. (Which is confusing only in that without Charles Waters on tenor sax, Sparkle Trio would be just bass and drums…but what of it?) This is true olde Knitting Factory stuff—like from when it was still on Houston. Angular, jumping, and popping in so many directions, spontaneous applause broke out when the drummer flung a small cymbal onto the floor: not in frustration, but as an accent. It was that intense. Even mi mousa squeaked in favor.

It is likely that this was followed by Laurie Spiegel, introducing her portion with the anecdote, “Most people who are aware of my work know it is primarily electronic. After 9/11, for several days, I was entirely without power so I went back to the banjo.” The piece, "New York November 2001 (for solo banjo)", played by Taylor Levine, managed to go from a music box to broken nickelodeon to John Dowland without being any of them, which prompted mi esp. to ask if same was available for the consumer. (Sadly, Ms. Spiegel split before I could buttonhole her.)

Eleonor Sandresky returned to the keyboards to render Nico Muhly’s “Hudson Cycle”. This is played twice, here and in Set D as well, but somehow, this one felt more rapturous, and that I can’t explain. This was either before of after very nice songs of Michael Friedman (of the Civilians, I gather) with Robbie Sublett (vocals, and who was on piano?...the ink is too smeared to tell).

This was likely the point of the other big name performer, who should need no introduction, but when you say “collaborator with John Cage, Robert Ashley and Merce Cunningham” then Joan La Barbara seems to be easier to see against those lights. About as good an advert for hot for a woman of years, silver hair and white lab coat makes her as stark as her mouth music. “The Gatekeeper” (possibly the title) is just her, accompanied by tape, in a performance as a textbook definition of “spellbinding”, weaving in the faintest aspirations of breath, clicks, guttural snatches amid sighing winds and babelogues, whispers and creaks, croaks and groans, until you end up in every jungle movie cliché you’ve ever heard, to resolve in some vast fog-bound harbor, having gone from the shore to the moor and back again.

Tough act to follow, so once more into the “rock” as Daniel Felsenfeld took to the piano with Rick Moody, vocals, to do Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”. And, for those of us who were there, the one sterling image of the hours between dawn and dusk was just how amazingly pretty it was. September in New York always is. And Moody’s crisp characterization fit that Big Apple tartness like a Granny Smith.

Here or there, returned The Composer Charles Waters, again with Sparkle, and augmented by piano, cello and violin, to do three originals. Stopping here to acknowledge the Herculean efforts of the organizers, he went on to explain how people had two moods about this occasion, summed up in “Fatalism, that’s bad; and Faith, that’s good,” before alluding to “hexachord analogue of Paul Auster’s name,” a Robert Creely 'lost poem’ he found again entitled “Night in New York City”, and expressing his ongoing astonishment at the skills of the bassist/composer William Parker (yup, ye olde skool Knitting Factory alum, again). And of the three, the Parker ode was about as close to a groove as would be heard in the whole, but mighty fine it was at that.

Mick Rossi played Joanne Brackeen’s “Picasso”, and the note says only that it sounded like cat’s steps into something vaguely recalling the early work of Eddie Palmieri—if that makes sense.

That the set ended with an operatic duo of piano and unamp’ed vocals by Paul Appelby (likely, with Thomas Sauer ivories—no apologies folks!) made it about as close to an afternoon musicale on as “Beautiful Ohio”—a song cycle by Harold Meltzer—as could be, if that particular river was rendered by Charles Ives.

Set D: 6pm-9pm
By this time, truth be told, attention to detail had begun to flag a tad. This was also the first set to start late. Some 20 minutes after the hour, Todd Reynolds, violinist extraordinaire, was part of a group doing a Roseanne Cash song, which name and other players’ names escape me (but might have been Rose Bellini included). However, the guest appearance of Ms. Cash did not. With her husband on piano, she did the kind of “500 Miles” rendition you wished everyone could, and few can.

The producers took another turn or two, the Sandresky reprise of “The Hudson Cycle” and Felsenfeld/Moody duo returned to do David Bowie’s “Five Years”…but that would not be Ziggy’s only appearance.

Eve Beglarian can be typified by the sly counterpoint of her titles. “I am really a very simple person” may have been nothing but a chorale sextet doing Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do, but when you do it so many times inside and outside up and around and braids and tesseracted…it sort of makes you dizzy…in a good way, like dervish dancing. Which is also how the “audience participation part” of “Did he promise you the universe?” also worked, with a “nananananana”-kinda Meredith-Monkish nonsense phrase in rising and falling ostinatos, repeated into oblivion.

Justin V. Bond, in a modest two-piece dress-suit tailored to compress the flesh into its best, strode out with her guitar accompaniest (in net dress and feathered brow-wreath) and proclaimed, “I was told not to do anything political in deference to the occasion. So if you hear anything political in this that’s your problem.” “Tomorrow is going to be the 22nd Century”, is Nina Simone's original but would not have been out of place on a Bert Brecht/Kurt Weill songbook, stridently slashing at the petty differences and tyrannies and prejudices of the 20th and 21st ones, Bond belting away like Ethel Merman on testosterone supplements. And with that, as Felsenfeld, said, “hey, how many opportunities am I going to have like this?” requested Justin to come back for an encore, “…as sort of my fee for putting this on” and accompanied on Bowie’s “Lady Stardust”.

Elliott Sharp, the man with a fractal guitar, watched from the seats with his daughter as JACK String Quartet played a composition whose name I neglected to get. But it would be hard to miss the impact of the piece. From a nearby vantage, one could se the precision of soldier ants marching across the score sheets, and the sound was just as extreme. Switching between three “bows”—the standard gut, what appeared to be a long machine spring, and (maybe) pins inserted in a dowel?—the tight coils scraped and the pins barely rasped, and the gut simply stretched. Time signatures? Motifs? I would hesitate to call this sherbet, but it served a similar function: cold and cleansing, it delineated that which had come before from whatever would come after. This is by no means a slam: I also enjoy the sound of car wheels on cobblestones, remember?

At eight o’clock, however, enough, and best of luck for the next group.

Oh yes, and why not look to the future?

22nd Century by Nina Simone

There is no our children in the air
Men and women have lost there hair
Ashes and faces and legs that stand
Ghost and god blends work in this land
When tomorrow becomes yesterday
And tomorrow becomes eternity
When the soul with the soul goes away beyond
When life is taken and there are no more babies born
When there is no one and there is everyone
When there is no one and there is everyone

Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
It will be, it will be, it will be, Ah…

21st century was here and gone
And the 20th century was the dawn
In the beginning of the end was the 21st
When the 20th century was at the end
1990 was the year
When the plagues flood the earth
1988 was the year
When men and women struck out for freedom
And bloodletting was the thing that was

People say there was no cause and
There was no reason and there was no cause
1972 was right all way

Drums and blessed all through the day
Right way, left way, middle of the road
And side wind, bench wind

Race
Stockings,red stockings
Liberation of women, liberation of men

Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
It will be, it will be, it will be,Ah…

Liberation of animals
Men and beast,flying and on flying
Prevention of employ to animals
Flying things,revolutions of music
Portrait,love and lives
Sex's changing changing changing
Man is woman, woman is man
Even your brain is not your brain
Your heart is a plastic thing
And can be bought
There're no more businesses can be court

Man became the thing,that he wash up man
Every gone is god,that was the day
That man and woman truly became bored
Man became his eagle,man became his evil
Man became his god,man became his devil

Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century
It will be, it will be, it will be,Ah…

Young women without money caught
Big dogs living in marble love
Young men die in the spring
Boys of seven falling in love
Give the lady wear a diamond ring

Wedding, wedding, wedding
You know all wedding ain' the thing
Don't want to know prayer,don't want to know man
Give me your hand,and take my hand
This is better than tanbobrs
Prayer men, yeah
The choose is now on pole
It says somebody else,soul and toe
Don't try to sway one over
To your day,on your day
Your day will go away
Tomorrow will be the 22nd century

...Summer's end, coming home...

2011-09-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

The end of summer really needs a valediction of one sort or another. As season's go, it's value has an inverse proportion to it's brevity and its weight. Being light and short means all events within have more moment than most. And for city dwellers, who don't get to "winter" at anyplace we don't spend rent, the pleasures of the harbor (oh yes, and why not use Mr. Ochs, who was not immune to things beyond the political) like Governor's Island, concert evenings in Central Park or any of the other half-dozen outdoor venues, dinner at Del Posto and that long walk through humid waves and human seas, but, as well, those day trips to Fire Island (as Neil PAtrick Harris sang at the Tony Awards' show, w/r/t Broadway, "It's not just for gays anymore!") and the Sunken Forest/Sailor's Haven area--all feels about as close as you can come to the Florida Keys without passing through communities of bible-thumping, gun-toting reactionaries, or alligators. I look at these bathhouse curtains waving and I hear Brian Wilson, smell SPF 70+ lotion, see the drift-polished bits of nacre and shell glinting at the waterline where the wash withdraws. Empty mind and brilliant sun.

Yet, the urban texture cannot be dismissed. You pay enough for living in this burg, once in a while it should offer you a favor or two in compensation. And while there are treasures to be plucked from the aether all during the sweating weather, a couple standout.

So then, one peek at a peak from this remove.

This summer has seen a phenomenal number of appearances by Laurie Anderson (frequently with her more famous mate, Lou Reed) in which young could have seen her ambient, noise-jamming, doing a spooky cover version of Shel Silverstein, but of all attended, the August 10 set at Damrosch Park one stands out head and shoulders. It was not as spare as a solo, with Rob Burger on a variety of keyboards and Eyvind Kang on viola, and long past the production values of "Home of the Brave", she has been doing a lot of minatures, and then a book like "Moby Dick" and even some improv. And it is all the best work of a mature artist who can carry her vision to any material, sure, but, for a lot of us old-time downtown followers, nothing has felt like coming home in a while. For someone--let's call this someone a fan of Dylan's amphetamine-fueled rock period when for three or four albums (depending upon your method of calculation) he could do no wrong--who can recall seeing "United States, Part II" at the Orpheum on 2nd and St. Marks, in early 1980, this was like "Blood On The Tracks".

The best reason for this is that the text she'd chosen was "The Real New York City".

And why?

The obvious reason is that cities of this sort deserve more than a cursory glance. As you will see below, what Ms. Anderson displays, above and beyond the musicianship, is a talent for observation comparable to few. Back in the last century, when in conversation with her, she said that, while she did enjoy narratives, she was more and more being drawn towards fragments, like Borges—and, like movies. Hers, then, is a prime example of the Editor’s Art. Set the scene in a snapshot. Advance this one more frame and you see someone entering Chaos Theory. Take it a few more, however, and you find self-organizing structures within the turbulence. And, for this reporter, that is what these fragments are: bits of napkin-written, back-of-the-receipt, envelope-scrawled flashes of insight into places, like a Beaudrillard Psychohistory done with tweets and camera phones. But, again, for this reporter, that’s just a fancy way of saying postcards. (And postcards are something well known here.)

A few too many metaphors in the mix? Ah well, more power to them whose road lead directly to the palace of wisdom. The rest of us will have to be contented with the excess off-ramp.

What follows then are the rapid snatches of meaning culled from her dream-of-consciousness spell, in her own voice (not that of her snarky vocoder buddy) that is as much a cunning seductress as a calming nurse, all in this ethereal suspension of light and air.

“…there’s this blimp…and it’s been circling the island of Manhattan…and it drifts right by this man’s open window…and on the side of it…in HUGE Helvetica letters…is the word ‘DELERIUM’…” This segues into a snippet about the strangeness of the San Genaro Festival being held on the streets of Little Italy every year, of carnival rides outside your window, “and the smell…of burning sausages…”

From here she glides into a few topical references on our post- 9/11 era, the reign of Bloomberg, Dominique Strauss-Kahn “now known world wide…as a chimpanzee…”as part of a general section called, one gathers “Life In The City/Hard Times.” Still even as she is saying “Tonight, they’re rioting in London, again” she can’t help but smile as the sound of the police siren comes not from her speakers, but Ninth Avenue behind her. She draws this to a close with “So there’s the good news…and the bad news. And the bad news is the Earth keeps spinning, spinning, spinning…trying to throw us off…And the good news is, as Willie Nelson says: 90%of all the people in the world, end up with…the wrong person. And that’s what makes the juke boxes….keep spinning…”

This dives into a ride on violin and synth that blends in with the dusk so well you almost don’t notice, “…night…the city…the air…and you can see…ghost trains…along the High Line…long, black limosines, and EMS trucks, carrying the drunk, and the dead…tourists descending from the Enterprise…” And as each bit unfolds, you have to wonder if she really does cruise the avenues at that hour, chronicling the changes wrought by time and temperature.

This segues into something more metaphoric before grounding again in that well-know slogan of our New York state-of-mind: “…If you see something, say something… But what, exactly, are you supposed to say? Officer, there’s something not quite right about that person there… OR…Officer, there’s something wrong about that bag in the middle of the station… OR… Officer, there’s something not quite right with YOU, you’re sort of slippery around the edges, like you just might melt down into an officer-sized puddle, right in front of me…” then, to slam the point home: “Did you know that 1,400 new spy agency’s have been started in the last ten years, in America?”

It is just these contrasts which bring the somnambulistic reverie into diamond clarity, like that sudden focus wherein a 2D picture snaps into a 3D relief, in some transfictive Playstation event.

“Uptown…downtown…countdown….&, in Midtown, the lights come on in the high-rises…the cleaning machines moving slowly…you can see the paper shredders shredding, shredding, shredding…the mist surrounds the tallest towers, until there is no escape…except for the heat, which rises up, rises up, rises up, in the jade-like night…”

And then if you wonder where you are going, a series of directions begin to trace a route down from Westchester, ending up in the Lincoln Center parking garage, and you realize you’ve been guided by the sexiest GPS module ever.

Lest you think this all apiece, it should be noted that without the aural component, this would be stand-up comedy with little chance of making it at Caroline’s past the first open mike, or an op-ed that wouldn’t get past the assistant at the copy desk. What give performance art the kick is this use of electronics and text: you can’t have one without the other. Hence, this poor approximation.

So when she and the guys slip into what, in—say—1985 might pass for a “dance” track, “Step Into The Flow” carries just enough data to give the feet a reason to beat there. Unless you notice, this ultra-rap-trip, in mild iambic-pentameter, seems to be one step ahead of you. And when it side-slips into a reverie on “Voila Paris”, you begin to feel like its no stretch to bring the other metropolii into the mix, finding the common thread in them all.

And should you THEN think it all impersonal distance of the detached adventurer, “the space…between…the beats….on 14th Street, the nightgowns hang on the racks…people in sturdy khakis, and pre-washed jeans…” and begins noting the number of names for polyester mixes and blends like discovering exotic sea-creatures, “…and I tell myself…if only I didn’t feel so lost, maybe I could…” as if drowning in these seas of fabrics.

A sequencer’s bell tolling as muffled alarm form a buoy on rough seas? “South Street Seaport…cars whoosh by…lights flash in the studios…of photographers…high rises, rise and fall… people fall off bar stools… Hard Times…give it the gas…I just keep falling behind …heat rises, people sliding …in a dream like mine, One World Trade rises, you can se it from here… heat rises…” The viola takes a solo here in a Middle Eastern mode which soon becomes saw-dense as it rips through a hornet’s nest and keens like a Yom Kippur shofar, Laurie waving him on to moan out another chorus of uncorked cellulose eerie.

And at the end of this fever-sweat, we drop back into context with “The United State is the oldest country in the world, because it has been in the 20th Century the longest. So said Gertrude Stein, when she said it…that’s what she said…” sounding a lot like Ms. “A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose” herself, there. But if GS is forever enigmatic, Anderson can have her own propers as spin doctor, finding the whirl within a word. “…and on Wall Street, futures are being bought and sold, buying and selling…things, that don’t exist yet-have-not-been-made …thing that have only been thought about—they’re thoughts! …and that’s what’s for sale…and in this way…the city, start to grow around you …not the one you imagined, but one made of something else …adrenalin…delirium…”

Then shifts into telex signal mode, “We are always inventing people…maybe we need to lighten up… so we can travel---light!”

Almost too dark to make another note, her summation begins, as always, somewhere in the real. “The city has changed a lot in the last few years, and its replaced the former city. Fewer bookstores, but hey!—lots more cupcake shops! So that’s one thing. And also, lots of goofy talk about…texting and …tech conferences—and yeah!—plenty of gizmos—oh yeah!—plenty of apps, presented by a few good guys in button-downs and chinos …who’ll analyse us all, for the good of mankind…”

Any why do I feel compelled to write down everything I can remember? And here? Because, in times t o come, I may want to be able to turn my memories into cloud computerland, but right now, this is the best shot I got.

“Much Ado About Nothing”

2011-09-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

It is most satisfying to return from an hiatus and enter with another aside from the Bard, a tradition (if such exists) at this blog.

It has been an odd week; some might say ‘biblical’, were they inclined to be overly melodramatic as, it seems, the entire broadcast Media is wont to be. The earthquake, a 5.9er I am told, was weak enough to provide comic relief for anyone from Japan, or our West Coast. (My Tweet? “Has anyone seen Chicken Little running out of the Capitol Dome screaming about the debt ceiling?” One thing about electronic haiku: it forces the prolix to become tidy.)

These lamentably feeble comparisons aside, however, they are nothing in light of the East Coast weekend weather event. Our region suffered a far greater physical impact from the political effects of shifting winds than any in the atmosphere.

But first, the actual atmosphere surrounding this should be noted. From this outpost in the East Village, the humidity alone was a telling point. When flesh sticks to everything, your thinking becomes tacky as well. Just envision a world without air-conditioning: would it ever have been possible to ship tech sector jobs to the tropics? Then there was the darkening skies. Watching this come in was the textbook definition of ominous. Outside of this, the number of conversations one hears impending towards the immanence of the eschaton falls quickly into absurdity.

WOMAN ON CELL PHONE IN ELEVATOR LOBBY: …I’m as prepared as I can be. I’ve got my batteries, my water, my Jack Daniels…

WOMAN ON BUS ON CELL PHONE: …Trader Joe’s is cleaned out…Just things like capers, cocktail olives, and pickles…Why all the canned goods? Like how long is this going to last?...

Food forays being paramount though, on my last rip out Saturday morning, I wanted to put something on the iPod suitable for impending doom and found “Atom Heart Mother” by Pink Floyd quite fit for the occasion. Brooding, slow, almost grimly pompous with trombones and French horns heralding the apocalypse. Which was, in this case that not only was the woman on the bus right, but both Trader Joe’s AND Whole Foods were already closed. Unless it was only meant as an augury of the first rain bands coming in once I’d gotten out of the last L train before the system began shutting down at noon. This was a city primed for DRAMA! (…or dharma? Never could remember the diff…)

Which brings up the rest of the evening’s score: a mp4 disc with 15 albums of the soundtracks from Godzilla movies. “Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)” (by Akira Ifukube) hit the perfect note to follow Floyd’s bombast. We often overlook this aspect of the package in our youthful passion for daikaiju (Japanese name for Japanese monster movies), more excited by the conflict between two or more manifestations of the battle between Ego, Superego and Id, or Anima and Anime, if you’re Jungian than springtime. The beauty of the recycled themes is recognizing that the way the best noise comes from brass: the trumpets blaring on a four-note alternating leitmotif while tympani pounds and booms, the symbols hissing, all ending with a gong!!! This is all a fair example of the production values of telejournalism.

Which is what I meant by political, of course, and spin control, inflated rhetoric, photo-op positioning, etc., and its attendant battles for our consciousness and attention. But it is not the MSNBC/Fox kind. It is the policy of panic.

The central theme here is our complicity in a pact with fools: a/k/a—our media.

All those preparations and all those warnings and press conferences—it seemed like we had to pay attention because, at any moment, things might turn ugly, quickly. Perhaps it was necessary, in some way, to make us feel calm and secure and content, but certainly all the better to make mandatory evacuations work, to empty the streets for better passage of emergency vehicles, and aid in getting service back on line faster. This is good for the public service sector who need this kind of cooperation and hat’s off to them. And wouldn’t it have been nicer and in the interests of full disclosure, for Mayor Bloomberg to have said, “I am on top of this situation…because I fumbled the ball last winter”?

Dream on.

It’s just that all these things would be more laudatory were they not also part of a massive con. Say what you want about New Yorkers; they know a shell game when they see it. It may have had the desired effect of making the world safe for democracy, but make no mistake: a benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship.

This nothing new in the news. There will always be a few out there who still carry the torch for investigative journalism, but they are giving way too much to the same sweep of events that brought infotainment to the fore of all the major outlets. (This phenomenon was noted by Tom Brokaw as beginning with the O.J. Simpson trial and the 24-hour-a-day coverage that it generated.) Those who promulgate this waste of our attention will argue that an overload of data and live on-air standups and “BREAKING NEWS” crawlers are empowering. They will say the great thing is that they offer so much choice, and if you don’t like it, you can always go somewhere else. Yes, and when everything looks the same and sounds the same and says the same things, where is the choice? Offer a menu to a herd of cows.

What makes it worse, worst, is the fill of cant over real intelligence. The meteorologists and hurricane experts go on and on describing the physics of the formation of Irene, its dimensions, speed, millibars of pressure…and still manage to avoid one essential fact. Once an ocean-born vortical storm leaves its native element, warm-to-hot water, it begins to die. By the time it finished wreaking havoc on Kill Devil Hills (a name to conjour with, if any there is) in North Carolina, the eye wall was collapsing even before it reached Washington. All the worries about the storm surge were not going to be realized, that was certain; coasting flooding, yes, but rain does enough to New Jersey on a regular basis to make calls for disaster relief routine. Common knowledge, and yet no one bothered to take that bite of that apple. Instead, more lip service to the party line: we are in DANGER, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

The reference to the “Lost In Space” robot, cliché tho’ it may be, isn’t just for effect. The difference between arm-waving wildly and hand-wringing intently is negligible. However, this is the same fact that emerged from my musical box: you want people to respond emotively, you hit them with every iota of sentiment and experience you can, and—the key factor—in bite-sized chunks. The cuts on the Godzilla albums are no longer than 3 minutes, tops, most just cues under 2, and—equally important—repeating key themes. In this instance, rapid-fire cut-aways one after the other, with almost no one staying on talking head in the rain, to notice that all he or she was getting, really, was wet. If anything else, it was usually being the object of derision by screen-hungry teenagers, out in the blow to have bragging rights about anything, which a major portion of their existence. Then comes the radar, then the graphics, then, the commercials, then the bumper intro with the stacatto motif of the event: omninous, breathless and, most assuredly, the augury of a monster…not, this time, in a wobbling laytex costume.

The meaning is clear: the sum total of its scope couldn’t hope to live up to the noise generated by it. This isn’t a reference to the damages, which are significant, as much as it would ill become this blog to refer to this as the Lemming Factor; especially for those who had property damage and the loss of loved ones. It is all very well and good to insult those who deserve it, but not those who don’t. Yet when you stop and think about it, the “better safe than sorry” attitude of civil administrators and FEMA officials, it becomes trite, if only in retrospect. Which also where today’s graphic comes in. This is a brochure distributed to all downtown office building lobbies…on Wednesday. Yes, talk about closing the barn door after—and how much did it cost to print up these little bundles of paranoia? Like we needed to be told Manhattan is an island?

What was the ostensible reason for hating Communism? Totalitarianism, rule by one voice: the State. What they called “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and…like what do THEY know about running a government, eh? Well, what should be shunned as well is the dictatorship of the Dictationists, the Telepromptarians, the People Who Speak With One Voice. And what is that?

Panic.

Yes, trivialites and aesthetics—this is what this boils down to isn’t it? Well, when faced with the melodrama of the Media, why not? What we are left with, then, is a script written to turn reportage on an exceptional storm condition into something between a war and a World Cup match. You doubt? Listen to the verbs—thundering, crashing, blustering (and that’s just to describe the on-air talent)—and the widely-vaunted “team coverage”… To hear them talk you’d think that nothing could be greater or worse than this beach, that surf, those winds, and them interviews with passersby who are asked questions like “What is your greatest fear?” and never a one with the wit to answer: “Dying penniless, alone and unloved,” trying to make them into sage examples of native wisdom when they best they can offer is a chuckle and shrug: “Naah. I just wanted to see what it looked like out here.” All one can do in the face of such dull responses is to further exhort for more extempore panting prose of the moment’s portents in those hyperinflated tones to punctuate every line with a punch. Didn’t anyone ever tell them, when they were Communications Studies majors, that the only place you can add crescendo upon crescendo is in music?

If all this sounds like an overreaction, it is. Then again, when you’ve spent that much time absorbed on one topic, everything becomes enlarged, much like the subject matter itself. This text itself (talk about "meta") is an example of the kind of hyperinflation that occurs when a heated discussion boils up from beneath the quiet surface and explodes in furious gusts across a set path. For all the bombast, it will have little impact. Hence the Bard up top, who knew a thing or two about "sound and fury/signifying nothing".

Still, where's Inshiro Hondo when you need him?

check out time

2011-06-21T19:15:00.001-07:00

Summer daze in a heat haze… wander down the aisles of a few shows, set in seats or concrete or marble, to marvel at the way a bit of air can be rescuplted (a tip of the hat to Tom Waits’ acceptance speech at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies: “Singing is just doing fun stuff with air”) and the treasures of the past which only became so with the value of proximity to greatness.

Part of New England, New York, east New Iarsey and Long Iland. (ca. 1702-1707)

Like the New York Public Library has an exhibition on until 2012 entitled: “Celebrating 100 Years”. You’d expect books, and they are there, but an astonishing variety of them in ways you would not expect—such as 2,300 BCE cuneiform tablets that keep records of account long after the sheep and olive oil jars have ceased to have value. The Gutenberg Bible you’d know, of course, if you saw the 1966 movie “You’re A Big Boy Now” starring Peter Kastner as a post-modern Holden Caulfield who’s father’s claim to fame was getting one of them between the lions. But how about the innocuous collection of stories “Thirty Years” by John P. Marquand, a standard bound volume, that actually contained, written in pencil on its last folio sheets, a draft version of Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech? You can feel the immediacy of the man in just that impulse: decides he needs to collect a few thoughts, grabs a handy book and a pencil, and begins to compose.

But there’s also dime novels and pornography! I am told they make a buy once every 10 years, in order just to chronicle; but can you imagine the schedule? “Oh, I see its time to acquire some smut. Volunteers?” The arcana also includes Malcolm X’s briefcase, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, and one of Kerouac’s butcher rolls of scrollwork. There’s so much to see that touches on the word, and image, and both, that you wonder that you don’t spend more time reading.

So much to do, so little time…

Yet Summer is the time to get out and about and experience the joys of dining al fresco and attending concerts the same way. At “Celebrate Brooklyn” the early monster of the season was June 16’s “Hal Willner’s Freedom Riders Project” in Prospect
Park. Outside of it being a weather-perfect evening, the master Totalist (a term loosely ascribed to those singular curators of art who manage to encompass an historical and cultural worldview while still making corking good entertainment) had assembled a line up marked by a diversity that is as hard to encompass as the scope of the early Civil Rights movement. So, in justice to the whole, let us do the briefest of thumbnails before the whole enchilada. What one would expect would be a lot of folk songs and constant attempts from the stage to exhort a lackadaisical crowd into ill-considered sing-a-longs. That was the barest minimum. What we forget is that this was a movement of East Coast intellectuals, college students and local African-American churches, and when you put that together, you get a dreamy mix of jazz and gospel, protest songs and march chants, and spirituals both accapella and instrumental.

PARTS LIST (in order of appearance):

1. “Haitian Fight Song’ (Charles Mingus) – The treasure of any Willner mashup is putting Charles’ son Eric onstage, and here he does a field holler accompaniment to the fine band, led by Steven Bernstein, which could raise hackles on your spine, or recall the Mothers of Invention’s Roy Estrada’s operatic pachuco aria of “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually-Aroused Gas Mask”.
2. So, after we start in the field, why not stay there? “Stand Fast, Old Mule” is another of Mingus pere which gets oomphed by Mingus fils, with a chorus backing straight out of the amen corner.
3. After Eric’s exit, the quintet remain to do “Gallow’s Pole” which some may know from the Led Zeppelin cover, but means an entirely different thing when a old English ballad is sung in the South, now north.
4. That they continue into “Why Don’t We Sit Under The Apple Tree” you will have to hand to Hal, for finding the perfect redemption for the previous number’s reference to a hanging tree.
5. Catherine Russell (?) steps out from the chorus to bring it on home with the band backing on “Motherless Child” which breaks all over the place into the kind of Salvation Army temperance brass blat we’ve come to know as much from New Orleans’ funerals.
6. This sets up the first solo interlude as Geri Allen solos on grand piano with a tune that I didn’t ID but sounded awfully good to watch clouds by.
7. Rosanne Cash comes up with John Leventhal on guitar to continue the folk roots with “Wayfaring Stranger”, but also gets that Sally Army band backing again.
8. She finishes her bit with Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” which reminds you that, yes indeed, there was also a bit of Top 40 in those days that could handle some content.
9. Eric returns with his tribute to the era’s not-so-passive resistance advocates and the late Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”…albeit, by his own admission, it had to be read rather than recited from memory, and with glasses on. So there’s even funk too.
10. Tao Seeger, of Pete’s clan, gets to get the old school transport feel going with “Come on over to the front of the bus (I’ll be riding up there)” which is catchy AND easy enough to follow along from the cheap seats. (Which are all the seats. And which did.)
11. To follow up on that, Toshi Reagon brings up the gospel group to try to rouse the rebels, and somewhat succeeds with “Buses are comin’ better get you ready, oh yeah”, “Freedom comin’ and it won’t be long” and the epitome of the age in a nutshell: “Which Side Are You On?” Perhaps a bit preachy and overlong in her bringing in women’s oppression as an equal issue (especially on the last number, which she equated with a need for a renewed protest movement, good luck soldier-woman) but that had to be there or it wouldn’t bring the care.
12. Now the moment that most hipsters and old rockers in the crowd were waiting for, the Athenian warrior, Lou Reed, take the stage…very slowly, showing his age and recent infirmity. But once he gets going, on Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”, and the Blood Sweat & Tears-type arrangement of the band begins churning, Lou just turns toward the sound and lets it lift him to close the first set.
13. To come back with Geri Allen doing “Wade in the Water” recalls the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s hit with that number, reminding of a time when even jazz could have a popular hit. But this comes on like thunder and lightning with a call-&-response to the bass on “god’s gonna trouble the water” in keyboard ripples and wave-like surges. Brilliant ivory.

The notes get a little garbled after this. It was getting dark, very. Someone, who may be Jason Walker(?) does “Gimme Little Time To Pray” with sax accompaniment. This is what we call a tour-deforce: it is half jazz-aria, half-glossolia/melisma and wholly aether regions where scatting can include a quote from “The Magic Flute”! Todd Rundgren shows up, and if you think he’s a sore thumb, not much more than Marshall Crenshaw in a gospel tent. (And Todd goes back with Hal to his first mashup, a Nino Rota tribute, so they guy has chops and props.) There’s a tape of Leroi Jones’ famous “I, Too” poem, “I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned” by Catherine Russell (?), reminding us that these two terms have been applied to people in ways we will never understand today. And much the same as Tao coming back to do one of Pete’s favorite, Hang Down your Weary Head and Cry” which makes one wonder at how much the long, lonesome road” still moves us so. Lou comes back for a personal elegy to aging, Eric sings “Ain’t Gonna Study War No more”…”’CAUSE WE’RE TOO DAMNED GOOD AT IT!” From here on is indecipherable. Also inexpressible.

This also, more or less, covers the Bang On A Can Marathon, on June 19, and not always for the best. The World Financial Center has many things one may applaud—architecture, location, dining, palm trees—but acoustics isn’t one of them. The sad fact is, unless you are in first twenty rows, and what you are listening to does not have a fragile sonic envelope (i.e.: anything not LOUD), and the crowd obliges by being so quiet you could hear a pin drop, you are going to miss a lot. So, on a scale of 1 to 10 (from mismatch to perfect match) the late Fausto Romitelli’s “An Index of Metals” was a big loser (unlike last year’s ovation-hit “Professor Bad Trip”, as in LSD-induced psychosis) as the soft patches of vocalisation could barely carry to the first rows seated on the marble staircase. (And at one hour, not just cold and hard but hemorrhoid-inducing.) In between would be Phillip Glass’ “Music in Similar Motion”, benefiting from his oeuvre overlapping arpeggios and runs with the BOAC All-Stars. At the peak, coincidentally enough, is “The Ascension” Glenn Branca’s 1979 opus and the first masterpiece of his guitar ensemble’s true wall-of-sound. (Poignant aside: last time he was here was to perform “Hallucination City”…but on the other part…over the West Side Highway…in the plaza of the World Trade Center.)

Yet, again, it’s a freebie, and you can’t cry too much when you’re getting the cream of the city without curdling costs. And that brings up another event of peerage without compare, being “Rufus Wainwright Goes To The Opera!” on a rather delightful Tuesday evening of the 28th. As it was just a last minute stop by after the first third was over, my friend and I found him in the middle of an excerpt from his own opus “Prima Donna” doing “Les feux d’artifice” at the piano, solo, elegantly attired in tux coat, bowtie and…shorts and sandals, far as I could see. While always a bit too Lincoln Center queenly for my friend’s taste (musically, although he would not say the same of Anthony & the Johnsons), even he had to enjoy the Roofer’s selections performed by other vocalists, including Bizet and Wagner. And being that his following is the sort of crowd that would say “SHHHH!” to a pin, and that the entire rotunda was so packed I expected to see monkeys in the palms, every nuance communicated well throughout the expanse. (Tho’ our appreciation appreciated more likely due to us lucky enough to grab a couple seats down front as quick as they were vacated.) And, in deference to the adoring throng, he stepped out of his role as superstar to do a couple of his “pop” originals. Prefacing with “I love this city…Because it’s the kind of place that NEEDS two opera companies,” before launching into “Who Are You New York?” After a famous Massenet number and “Carmen” “Seguidilla” (even moreso), he capped his appearance with “(My phone’s on) Vibrate (For you)” that would’ve brought the house down, had it already not been by that airdrome iron dome. And, while it took me back to days tromping around Doylestown campaigning for our present President, my friend had to quibble that maybe he held onto that note a tad too long. Pish and tosh.

Beyond the given fare, the pickings were neither slim nor standard. A June 25th stop by the Exchange Restaurant (can’t call it Soho and too far north for Tribeca; just what is Vandam and Charleston?) found the Awa Odori Dance Festival in full swing. There may have been enough “Save Japan” events for most of us by now to have reached a saturation point, but this was another sort entirely. And that being the emphasis on the title dance festival, held on Shikoku Island (one of the big ones down South of Kyushu) every year. As mi espousa mousa explained, “Most Japanese dances and songs are sad. This dance is simple and fun.” One reason for that is the costumes. Some of the boys and girls wear these shoes that are like toe-mocaisins and blue/white pants/tunic combos. Then there are the gals in the robes with the reed-mesh hats that look like shark fins. And the shamisen player really knows how to whack that catgut with his ice-scraper. Suffice it to say, with a silent auction, regional food specialities and an open bar, no one was suffering from anything but surfeit.

But back to the dance, it really IS sort of like bhangra beat, with frame drums making it wobble and the twang making it wiggle, and then there’s all these crouch-step bounces with these fishy hand-gestures…I mean, what's not to like?

Then, to walk home through Washington Square Park, you immediately notice why the renovations took so long of the east side. A new raised stage has been emplaced that is now occupied by a dance troupe. However much the regular denizen and habitué of WSP may be used to impromptu musical and comedic throwdowns on the Plaza, dancers have had a bit more of a problem when it came to reserving enough space to move in. Not anymore. And, while it is well-known that the dancer’s half-life is less than that of a professional athlete’s and with about one-zillionth less the compensation (to say nothing of the medical coverage), one may expect pretty girls in leotards and diaphanous frocks—one doesn’t also expect aged crones and house-muffins as well.

This was a tribute to all ages of women and so, inasmuch as you have two generations up there, the passing of the baton, the mirroring of motions, all attendant mother-daughter trophes were visible and optionable for interpretation. What lasts overall is the timelessness of this place, swirling twirling bodies with the fountain spray and the campagnille of the Judson Church as backdrop, and the setting Summer sun.

You could lose your time in a lot worse ways.

A SNITCH IN TIME SAVES NONE

2011-06-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

[sorry folks, you're going to have to click on the image for this one...sometimes is takes a complex pic to sell a simple song...]

“W-what happened?”—is the question, but "where" is the best place to start—is in the ESPN Socioverse Stellar-gym, where the textechs yet twiddle knobs and pull levers, attempting to find out what went on…and got off. Was it a time/space wormhole, another attempt to save the Socioverse, or just a bad call?

Tarro the squidkid was reknowned for sticking to anything, and, as Vicerep for the Brooklyn Queen, he usually got his way. However, the Face-it-Book (FiB) com-link was something else. His assistants—Blacky and Capeman—couldn't understand his fascination with it. But little did they know that his entre-chats with the anamorata-'bot were fixed with a hypno-ray!

And worse, what he thought was a 'bot, was actually ESPN Socioverse feature editor Fatale Zalda’s Com-i-Pod! Had her CiP been invaded by some protrusion from her FiB friend Tarro’s trouser tentacle OR only a reproduction of his reproductor? With such confusion of fleshy-fishy parts, the call went out to Doctor Flack! The Blogmaster-baiter might be the only one who could lure the truth out, having already saved the Socioverse from the dreaded ACORN pimps, the fiendish Brown admin, and the Wingnuts of NPR. Adjusting the bright-bart intensity of the screen, Dr. Flack's magno-coil now takes over and forces all galactic viewers to look from every nookie cranny. And what may have seemed to a banal close encounter with a wicked wick is been blown up to the size of a Washingtron obelisk!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the star system, Blacky and Capeman try to pull Tarro’s reputation from being further ensnared in Doctor Flack’s deadly media trap! Alas!—even tho' he FiB'd and FiB'd and FiB'd ‘twas no avail; the Brooklynsquid’s profile couldn't be updated to avert disaster! Even though it was only part of his costume that went thru the Ether-waves, it was too late. Once the “send” had been pushed the die was cast!

Some might say it is all smoke and mirrors. Others call it a tragic decision. But "whatever happened", the vapo-mists of the cloud computer will only tell us that scandal does not function in a vacuum: something had certainly been sucked in.

“PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF PALE-INN

2011-02-03T17:31:00.001-08:00

All one need do is examine this excerpt from the purported “PROTOCOLS
OF THE ELDERS OF PALE-INN ” to recognize its true intentions. This is
not a charming piece of archaic folklore but a plot by the Lames,
agents of the Zar’s secret police. Not only has this document been
used to inflame passions against the Pale-Innites and Pale-Innism in
general, but, as most recently, against the Grizzly Mama herself. This
is why the latest to hold that honored title was led to speak to the
latest outrage...and in the manner most familiar to her ‘Tea’ Sect.
All is revealed in the Book of Tweets, Holy Scroll-down binary code
00101001101010101, to read her testimony in her blackest berry ink, in
the unmistakable tone of pure Mama Bull.
“The message is clear here. This is a rerun of the tired, old
plot by the Lame Brains, trying once more to destroy all the work
we’ve done to rebrand our faith, for middle class consumers of heady
potions, by creating a superstition around the origins of the Grizzly
Mama. Pale-Innism was born out of a thirst for religious freedom–not
just some vague party for teas! Why is it every time some bohunk shows
up with a shaved head and a bunch of women running riot, do we Grizzly
Mama’s get blamed? This nefarious plot is nothing less than a blatant
attempt to slap us with a blood label! And you know how hard it is to
get the UPC’s to work when they’ve been damaged–it just won’t scan!
That bald-headed guy isn’t the victim here–we are!”

Congresswoman Gifford's Assassination (hopefully) attempt & axioms of our times

2011-01-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

This will be off-the-cuff. I do not believe it necessary to compose in the usual manner to speak on the topic above and label below.

This blog actually began as an outgrowth of my activity on behalf of candidate Obama and the encouragement of a few co-workers at the campaign office. It was as much a chronicle of that growth in political awareness as it was a social medium, which is more or less what it has become. However, it remains part and parcel of its origins and so should not pass another day without a comment on another watershed in our era.

"Watershed"...that's a funny term. It also reminds me of another way of saying "crocodile tears". And "crocodile tears" also reminds me of another Aesop/Animal Farm/animal axiom: "The chickens have come home to roost."

One thing is for certain, I am thoroughly disgusted with the tagline EVERYONE uses: "...our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and the loved ones of [fill int the blank for victim status]" It reduces it to artifice, a coda, a diminuendo that allows for a safe segue into the next talking point/weather update/commercial. Which brings up another cliche: "Closing the barn door after all the horses are gone." (I think it is horses; must admit agrarian analogues are not my particular forte.)

Will such neologisms as "put 'em in the crosshairs" and "DON'T RETREAT! RELOAD!" come to replace them as the adages of our age?

Finally, to refer to a previous post, the Rally to Restore Sanity has been (unfortunately) validated in everything it stood for. Period. If you do not think this does not underscore the need for toning down rhetoric (see above) then you need to seek professional help on some level or other.

So, let the blame start elsewhere but, as well, let us hope that the debate is more reasoned than this outcome. Thusly, I can, in all honesty, offer a sincere interest that those who were damaged in any way by this heinous act may find strength and courage to transcend it and have the fullest possible lives of which they are capable.

{This includes America, too.)

...another year...another calendar...turn the page...

2011-01-03T14:55:00.000-08:00

On NY1, the local cable channel with the singular distinction of being first on the dial (which is a misnomer as tv dials have ceased to exist) one of the little segments run in regular rotation over the past few days has been on a dish, now available at a Williamsburg eatery, called Potrine: a popular French Canandian hangover cure. (Read into that what you want.) This is timely as that is what most people are reputed to need the morning after the night before, espeically when the night before was New Year's Eve. The item in question appears to be a mess of gravy and cheese welted over some fries...and reminds one more of the reverse but, well, Vive le France and down the hatch, eh?

Mine has, for the last 20 years or so, been the St. Mark’s Poetry Project Marathon. And it has remained so long after I gave up excess (wretched and otherwise) as a means of celebrating another calendar. Sitting still for 10 hours (+/-) while wordsmiths of every stripe, and musicians, dancers, philosophers, comics-turned-activists, social critics and performers who just don’t fit into any category spend 2-7 minutes (+/-) trying to give you anything from an all-encompassing worldview to a harmless diversion to a harmless diversion that masks a zen koan…which hides an all-encompassing worldview.

Sure, I’m missing football games and parades--and did miss wearing funny hats and numeral-shaped goggles and trying to find a gender-appropriate stranger to kiss at midnight--but none of these things stimulates me as they did before (if ever). Whatever benefit or satisfaction I might have derived from these participatory activities, they pale by comparison of this passive one. I watch the year-end summations on the news and opinion programs and find little difference between them except in commentator’s views, which are predictable and certain as climate change, if not quite as specific as weather. Here, I may not get the news, or the olds, but the content is immeasurably richer.

And there’s one more thing, brought up by the ever-tuxedo’ed Brendan Lorber (013) in his preamble. “The great thing about this day is the built-in optimism…you get an automatic do-over…” For me, it is more like a reset button. You get to take stock, change horses, re-prioritize your jobstack, and compile lists.

Like this one.

This particular one, being dedicated to Tuli Kupferbeg and Jim Neu (two guys I have known and liked much over the years, and Jim’s plays which I never missed before and will miss even more now) and a third person Dave Nolan who became revealed to me later [see below], also should be noted for the impromptu dedications to a poet(ess) named Janine (who was never properly ID’ed to my liking) AND the totally non-St. Mark’s savant: Don Van Vliet, a/k/a Captain Beefheart.

So, upfront, the usual disclaimers:
I cannot attest to 100% accuracy of these observations. They are my notes, some of which I am only guessing at due to the level at which scribbling becomes a scrawl. Then there are other contributing factors. All props to master tech David Vogen, who manages set-ups on the fly with a speed equal to one, but the sound system could not compensate for the manner in which a lot of speakers addressed the mike. Words come out faint, vague, watery, whispered, slurred; often you are filling in what you hear with what seems to fit. Those who are not noted are no less of merit; they just didn’t register with a capsule summary, or, at worst, acted as the sherbet between courses.

Here we go…

001 Bob Holman – “EVERYTHING IS NEW!” and songs for Tuli and Jim and shout-out for Cabaret Voltaire’s 100th anniversary (probably misheard him: 1916 in Zurich is the actual year—Bob’s too sharp to not have Wiki’ed that)
002 Peter Gizzi
003 Ted Greenwald
004 Marcella Durand
005 Elizabeth Willis – “Blacklist” about how all these people are witches but really meaning the McCarthy-Era-type witch-hunt as she includes Mary Baker Eddy, Agnes Moorehead and Agnes Varda, Eugene V. Debs and Leadbelly as well as sympathizers and fellow travelers…
006 Merry Fortune
007 Michael Cirelli – author of “Jersey Shore Poems” (incl. ones on The Situation and Ol’ Dirty Bastard) offers a mediation on the tax on indoor tanning parlors in the Garden State: “…first then come for our tans/next our pecs/our abs of steel…”
008 David Kirschenbaum – with two helpers does a parody song with “Subterranean Homesick Blues”-video-type placards as visual aids called “Padme, Watch Me” (maybe, but, as well, didn’t recognize the tune)
009 Bill Zavatsky – “Choices” w/r/t final ones, like where you want your urn of your ashes placed; “What I want my epitaph to say is: AWAY FROM MY DESK”
010 Tracey McTague – her baby cries in arms of father in audience, “That’s my biggest critic…”
011 Michael Lydon – in standard white beard and jacket-&-tie combo, “The Handsomest Man in the Universe” whistles up and strums another merry ditty, this time with piano accompaniment by his sig.oth. on "Paris in the Rain"
012 Greg Fuchs – seems to be working the old aphorism/words-of-wisdom route, most of which are about sex, but others include: “Try to use your imagination more and pornography less”; “It’s not where you put it but how you put it”; “Make a killing in the market and murder your broker”; and my favorite: “Lowering your standards is a good thing; consider where you got them…”
013 Brendan Lorber – see above
014 Elinor Nauen – “A to Z” books/poems on various subjects (list poems, I guess)
015 Don Yorty – song written over 40 years ago in a tent (accompanied by his son, as usual)
016 Nicole Peyrafitte, Pierre Joris & Miles Joris-Peyrefitte – family affair w/her on frame drum and chant and son on acoustic guitar, who then brings up sister(?) after to do “I’ll be home when the orange blossoms bloom” in a very Richard & Mimi Farina style
017 Bob Rosenthal – “Kiss my Year’s End”… “…meaning, “the loss of music I could once fix…” and IT wisdom (maybe?) in three aphorisms: 1. WALK DON’T RUN, 2. GET OVER IT (and #3 I didn’t get)
018 Julianna Barwick – solo Gregorian chant via f/x boxes and totally ethereal
019 Tim Griffin – (something about Yves St. Laurent as a playwright?)
020 Akilah Oliver – “When is life breathable?” (might be reading from Judith Butler?)
021 Paolo Javier
022 Ken Chen – “Love poems about Logic” which is, apparently, taken from the Q&A found on an ESL test: “When I miss you, does that make the first sentence false?”
023 Joe Elliot – something about situations in the rain: “even the Ark starts to look like a good idea…”
024 Ariana Reines – “I’m broke, I must be a poet”, kinda like a waitress in a cocktail lounge in stretch pants and heels, constantly flexing her legs
025 Vito Acconci – “Second Skin” really hypnotic use of repurposing of words in parallel and serial developments from one of the most original artists of the latter half of the 20th century
026 Alex Abelson
027 Karen Weiser
028 Nathaniel Siegel – “Man to Manifesto” possible Queer Culture militant, incl. quotes from Jack Spicer and Gertrude Stein on Harte Crane
029 Peter Bushyeager – dedicated to Captain Beefheart
030 Evelyn Reilly – (author of a cyberpunk book?)
031 Maria Mirabal – in a odd sort of split bonnet and hair shrouding face, she sort of speaks out for the latent vampire within, “When I am nervous, I always bite the inside of my cheek” and going on to enjoy the taste of her own blood
032 Diana Rickard – “…burdened as I was with second-hand consciousness…”
033 Christopher Stackhouse
034 Eve Packer – a nicely detailed report of a last minute visit to the nail parlor on New Year’s eve and includes nice slice-o'-life comments like: "What I LOVE about NY!? The Rail And Road Report!"
035 Paul Mills a/k/a Poez – got a good intro and then proceeded to animate a very good impression of old-style John Giorno
036 Tom Savage – guy with a head like the bust of Beethoven, “Words die, Language follows” which may have been about the extinction of languages worldwide, like we lose something like 7 or ten every year (?)
037 Suzanne Vega – looking as sharp as ever, reading from work-in-progress play about Carson McCullers, which may be a musical as she had one passage she thought might be a song, or should be: and yes, the rhyme scheme sure points that way and good humor too, like her comments on Faulkner, Harper Lee, Capote and others for ripping her off
038 Philip Glass – you look at his hands on the piano and you say: those are two of the most intelligent crabs on the planet
039 Kim Rosenfield – another musical treat, but a comic one as well. This is going to take a preface. In 1957, Jo Stafford—acknowledged as a possessor of one of the finest set of pipes on the planet—recorded a joke album under the name of Darlene Edwards. The gag was that she would sing so off-key both people and dogs would howl. It worked. Here, Kim, and accompanists, do a parody of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” (substitute “Rhyme” for “Dime”) and it really brings the house down.
039 Robert Fitterman
040 Wayne Koestenbaum – author of Jewish porn films (?) speaks on “the politics of drool” (?); in all honesty, can’t say when was the last time I heard a reference to “Taxi Zum Klo” since the ‘80s…
041 Mónica de la Torre – editor of “BOMB” magazine on “2011 Grid”
042 The Church of Betty – getting into the Sephardic bag this year with Chris on oud
043 Patricia Spears Jones – “I had to tech Comp this year! It should be taught; it should be beaten!”
044 India Radfar – a sure way to make an entrance: start at the announcer’s mike, walk across the stage, pass the poem at the lecturn, turn once on the far side, without much eye contact, and exit
045 Josef Kaplan – a testimony to the versatility of the actor James Franco…
046 Emily XYZ – just back from a residency in Brisbane, offers up a pre-recorded dance track called “A Little Revolution” (“…and for those of you not into it, now might be a good time to check out the merch tables and food in the back room…”)
047 Murat Nemet-Nejat – “The Spiritual Life of Replicants” is the work-in-progress, but this is some sort of recombinant haiku
048 Ed Friedman – former head of Poetry Project is always worth a listen, and when you get to the end of his dread of 2011 (fears for family, the country, the economy, etc.) you get the punchline too: “Is it really necessary to bash oneself in the head with a ball peen hammer?/Yes, for some people—BASH ON!”
049 Albert Mobilio
050 David Shapiro – “…and so the snow fell/and covered up…” w/piano
051 Steve Earle – reads from work-in-progress on doctor fallen on hard times and under dope addiction and scene of him sitting in a southern bar and ruminating on Hank Williams
052 Valery Oisteanu – “Beat the drums”; dedicated to another poet who died, not on the program cite, Janine (last name was garbled here)
053 Shonni Enelow – from chapbook, “Nietzsche is a girl”: “blood makes a pretty face prettier”
054 Kathleen Miller – “Juvenalia” w/heroine “Suckathumb”
055 John Yau – “They opened a gas station at the wrong end of the telescope/I know this because I am a hash slinger/at an abandoned noodle shop”
056 Todd Colby – mention of his dental problems makes him a man after my own teeth
057 Foamola – AH! This is what I live for! The poet’s band opens their 3-song set with one entitled “All the best dentists are Satanists”, and this is complete serendipity for me.
058 John S. Hall – all about his the ephemeral nature of “friending” and its utter futility and the total vacuity of life on Facebook.
059 Cliff Fyman – “Pepper” about first days as waiter and becoming a pariah with other staff
060 Thom Donovan – acknowledges the other dedicatee of the marathon as the other tech person who was here every year, then goes into an extended mediation on the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake from 1978 as template for our times
061 Judith Malina – “Coras” was 12 lines that became a Living Theater play, some of which may be: “the pure word that ungenders lonliness” and “…as long as there is a sacrifice in the butcher shop or the synagogue…” and “Beware the Law of the Land!”
062 Charles Bernstein – this one EVERYBODY LOVED! “Poem loading… [silence] [more silence] [even more silence] …please wait…”; and a second one called “Morality” which is more of the inarticulate speech of the day in stuttered repetitions of emphatic plosives that also echoes Giorno
063 Tony Towle
064 Secret Orchestra with special guest Joanna Penn Cooper
065 Linda Russo
066 Laura Elrick – “Beneath the beach, some tableture” (with Japanese words in there)
067 Edwin Torres – word stretching and bending while blues harpist wails at his side
068 Kristen Kosmas
069 Bill Kushner – on Robert Frost in his Great Grey Suit (and the time the boy William went to his reading and gave his autograph)
070 Jonas Mekas – has short one called “What’s Up” and, because he has two minutes, does it again! (Headline should be: “FILMMAKER LOOPS SELF!”)
071 Rodrigo Toscano – goes through a pile of index cards doing “Zero Friends” in a bunch of continual, repeated and repeated with slight variation and repeated without variation and repeated with seeming/purposeless variation in Facebook status updates
072 Alan Gilbert
073 E. Tracy Grinnell
074 Eleni Stecopoulos – “…to cut off the poor…” and “…downgraded to a tropical depression…”
075 Adeena Karasick
076 Julian T. Brolaski – extrapolations on clothes, and one poem for CA Conrad (see 081 below)
077 Reuben Butchart – (might be misspelling of Burtchart) songwriter on piano, very Rufus Wainwright
078 Lenny Kaye – longish piece on the subject of the experience of being in a band, any band and for any duration from years touring to a one-night stand, and truly about as succinct an explanation of the brotherhood I’ve heard since, oddly enough, Kim of Sonic Youth (and she’s a girl!)
079 Lewis Warsh
080 Erica Kaufman
081 CA Conrad – huge guy, like beachball rotund, with very soft voice, preambles about how he’d like to speak to that kid about to kill himself because of despair in high school and to just hang on for one more year and go anyplace else, etc., and then into “Book of Frank” and repeats of father’s despair “My daughter has no cunt!” and about “miscarriages kept in fruit jars” ending with “This fence keeps in your world!”
082 Erica Hunt – launches into a longish reverie on her past and its relationship to cars in her “Auto Biography”, which isn’t as coy as it sounds, going from the “Northern Taconic—the cash cow of three separate counties” to Robert Moses’ vivisectioning of the Bronx to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and her family’s favorite exhibit “Ford’s World of Tomorrow” with the magic skyway loving descriptions of the Mercury Futura and the new “Mustang, it’s headlights flirting…”
083 Janet Hamill – dreamier and spacier every year, looks like an acid casualty at a Dead concert but pours out the libation to the “Queen of Tara” (which is probably the Hill of the Irish Kings, not the plantation of the O’Hara’s) and dedicates set as well to Janine Fhaner-Vega (?)
084 John Giorno – long reverie on early college days at Columbia and the sort of rabid enthusiasm which comes with finding out that an actual dormitory room where Frederico Garcia Lorca slept when writing “A Poet in New York” is right across the Quad from yours…
085 Joel Lewis – remembrance of coming back to NYC just as 42nd Street is being malled over
086 Maggie Dubris – song: “Time and Memory” sort of blues lament
087 Joanna Fuhrman – “My Pet Brain” and “The Hippocratic Oath”
088 Marty Ehrlich – sax solo is the sort of thing that, in the acoustics of the nave, leave one breathless
089 Citizen Reno – no funny stuff here as our favorite activist goes on to tear the Left a new one for abandoning Obama. [Author’s note: opinions expressed here have already established similar views, so it is not necessary to make further arguments.]
090 Douglas Dunn – a solo dance w/two swordlike shafts of metal and a cut-out cardboard bird clipped onto one arm (possibly something piratical?)
091 Patti Smith – the Grand Dame preambles the year of the Iron Rabbit in which deeds and actions will speak for themselves, and then goes on to a tight discursion which could be from Revelations, the Apocalypse of John, or perhaps a treatment for a new 3D movie…
092 Elliott Sharp – dedicates his set to the passing of the two greatest influences on his life and art : Captain Beefheart and Benoit Mandelbrot, then shreds…
This is then followed with an ongoing experimental collab w/Tracie Morris keening and wailing a kind of glossolia and chant w/an almost operatic reach…
093 Eileen Myles – along with her new lover Leopoldine Core, they exchange their vows of mutual infatuation along with variations of the word “dirty” dressed almost the same (diff. shoes) and obviously the happiest persons in the room, bar none
094 Taylor Mead – getting frailer every year but determined to carry on despite the fact that his boombox is broken again and he can’t be accompanied by Charles Mingus who is really only good for himself and Emily Dickinson, whoever she is, etc. and into the poem that Allen Ginsburg plagiarized from him, but that’s Allen so who cares, etc.
095 Jibade-Khalil Huffman – poem as recording session
096 Alan Licht w/ Angela Jaeger – “Reno, Nevada” in REAL Richard & Mimi Farina emulation
097 Rachel Levitsky
098 Jo Ann Wasserman
100 Anselm Berrigan – because his mother asked him about NYC, and didn’t want to hear about the issues and the decay and the complaints, she just wanted to remember the place and asked him to tell her “What the streets look like…”
101 Anne Waldman & Marty Ehrlich – originally supposed to be with another musician, this one was a bit more wobbly than her usual set, dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Thailand Democracy advocate
102 Steven Taylor – a member of the Fugs last seen at Tuli’s benefit singing a song to him
103 Brenda Coultas – first time the term Hydrofracking brought up all night, despite it being a danger to all New York waters, asking the important question: “…who owns the water?”
104 Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers – standard-issue superior sounds, non-sequitors and sudden lurches into encapsulated wisdom while Sally’s forth
105 Penny Arcade – laments and praises for the fading scene, typified by Tuli, and then onto a song that we seem to be ignoring the fact that “WE’RE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE!”
106 ARTHUR’S LANDING – looser and much shorter than usual with a female singer added [at this point, as well, a bunch of late arrivals or returning attendees basically invaded my space and talked through the set so whatever went on…]
107 Edmund Berrigan – w/a ukulele, does sweet little number he calls “plinka plinka plinka” but is probably “Way Down in Asphalt Town”
108 Katie Degentesh – “Reasons to Have Sex”…is not what you think; her premise is that children are the ultimate reason and so, to that end, compiled a bunch of their responses to how they viewed their futures and offers the remarkably naive and poignant and confident answers that make us adults feel so wretched for recognizing these once-noble ambitions and self-assurance we possessed in youth…
109 Nick Hallett – offers an acapella song from an opera to be performed at the New Museum very soon and gives one very good reasons to see it, whether or not he sings in it
110 Stephanie Gray – even with a slight speech impediment, her takes on verbs and conjugations in tight variations is something else
111 Drew Gardner – an ode to “Pop Rocks” and the weird idea of explosions in your mouth
112 David Freeman – who just flew in to JFK and came straight here, offers a bag of jingle bells to pass to every member of the audience to…well, jingle for 5 minutes; and it does sound nice—pure tintinabula
113 Mike Doughty – preambles and tunes guitar about recent gig in Kyoto where he was lost and nobody spoke any English and getting back to his hotel was trauma [sorry folks: with problems like that, you get no sympathy here] and sings “Day by Day by Day by Day”
114 Samita Sinha – sings the translation of a ghazal “Beyond English” and the weird thing is how Indian songs still sound Indian in English, and follows that w/a Rabindnath Tragore lyric
115 Filip Marinovich – w/a green plastic pocket folder on head like a shark fin does “Mother Courage Pushes Her SUV Up Capitol Hill” in repurposing news ok…
116 Eric Bogosian – replays one from a few years back with one of his surprise endings about what appears to be some hip-hop streetkid trying to get props off vaguely remembering his face, then giving him career advice…
117 Douglas Rothschild – SO, ALL DAY LONG THIS GUY has been walking in and out of the artist’s entrance wearing a black pea-coat with a pair of feathery wings attached over it on elastic bands, a plastic golden helmet like something out of a Ben-Hur charioteer’s gear, and a cardboard harp dangling under his coat. His intro says that he is going to revive “the spirit of Ezra Pound” but when he gets up there is just to talk about walking from Troy, NY to Ithaca, NY which he didn’t do but somebody wanted to make a movie of his feet but they used somebody else and…

And at this point, we check out.

A tricky treat from Washington OR "..just another rally monkey..."

2010-11-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

“What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”—Nick Lowe

The epigraph above is one of those quotes/taglines that came out of my generation (don’t care about actual dates—if you danced to it at a high school mixer, party, or nightclub, it passes) that needs a lot of heavy rotation with respect to what follows below.

I forget who said something about happiness being calamity viewed at leisure (Santayana?), but it is probably safe to say they probably would have felt the same if they were attendees at the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. It was only after we arrived home on Sunday Night, taking the long slow cruise down Seventh, through the West Village and the remains of the Halloween Parade, that the TiVO would tell me how much fun I was having.

At three blocks from the stage, you could hear about three-quarters of what was going on and see nothing. The only Jumbotron repeaters were at the second block. We could see bits of it, but only if I held my video camera overhead, rotating the screen down. And that was only effective as long as—at arm’s length, mind you—I held it in the exact, precise position to get the secondary image.

What I got from the home viewing was pretty much what I remembered from those snatches. The signs were, as touted elsewhere (like HuffPost), all gems; MadAve/Superbowl-airtime, slogan-level good. (Wish I could’ve written them down but, see above.) The costumes (where you could see them) were also fine—like standard New York parade-level: not commercially-reproduced and with as much attention to concept and presentation as to execution. The peak, down at the bottom of the entertainment well, was the Cat Stevens/Ozzy song-duel (a pan-cultural tribal tradition from Inuits to Amerinds to pygmies to streetcorner soul circa 1955) that was solved by the advent of the O’Jays bringing “The Love Train.” Even in that place, which was the National Mall turned into a gigantic mosh pit, people sang along or hummed, and shook their hips to Sweet Philly Soul.

The only other salient point of the experience, that I can bear witness to and make any sense of, was the crowd itself. Woodstock was half a million over three days. This was half that in three hours. And not spread out over the rolling hills of Bethel, NY but packed into those few acres between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. Anywhere you wanted to go there—anywhere!—you had to squeeeeeze and oooooze. The best way was to hold onto your sugar’s hand and press gently, preferably with a humorous aside to the sides through which you sidled and slid. But here’s the kicker: it was much the same in Woodstock as—in my experience—nary was heard a discouraging word, nor even did anyone cop an attitude.

Here’s the telling detail. The Mall is a flat, straight piece of ground, but off by the National Gallery are an allele of trees, just high enough and sturdy enough to support about two-to-four people on the bottom branches. That’s where a bunch of younger guys decided to become birds for an afternoon. And every time a newcomer would try to shinny up one, there would be a rising tide of “whoooo”, as if for an aerialist at a circus, ending in a cheer and applause when they made a successful perch…and sounding a cartoonish “aawwww” when they missed at their attempt. You just can’t avoid comparison to that old stage announcement, “It’s a free concert… But that doesn’t mean free from responsibility… That person next to you’s your brother and you’d damn well better remember that, but we got it, right there—" And yes, it does sound hideously naïve in 2010…it just wasn’t on Saturday. In the spirit of co-operation, in its broadest sense, you did manage to get along without hurting anybody’s feelings, invading their “space” or depriving them of rights. The big kicker was this was EXACTLY STEWART’S CONCLUDING MESSAGE—a/k/a “the zipper merge”.

And no, I did not know that particular traffic pattern for entering the Lincoln or Holland Tunnels had such a specific designation that it could acquire its own neologism, unless it is some tech term in the people-moving industry. I got it from one of the pundits circling the event’s scent like internet vultures, picking off the weak prey among the conceptual herd of ideas. This guy (though from HuffPost) was very much akin to the rest; the tone of the media being almost unilaterally harsh. Across the board, the pundits (even the one’s I thought were the good guys) have laid into him for being too left and not left enough—which means he was doing his job right.

I haven’t mentioned Colbert because he is the perfect foil and, therein, they are one and the same--a team. They may not be the present version of Hope and Crosby or even Abbott and Costello, but they are, again, about all we have close to that. What it is, however, goes way beyond comedy. In point of fact, I was beginning to think of Mark Twain, but even moreso a figure from the past only known to unredeemable fans of the ancients: Will Rogers.

Rogers was an Oklahoman of Cherokee descent who found fame as a cowboy performer (doing riding and rope tricks at rodeos) and got into vaudeville at a time when a horse could be a co-star. In 1915, he got into Ziegfield’s Midnight Frolics, and then graduated to the Follies in 1916. It was then, when he went Broadway, that he began to cross from home-spun, folksy, twangy vignetting into political satire. If you don’t know him, you know his quotes: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” “I don’t know any jokes. I just watch Congress and report the facts.” And, of course, the one on his tombstone: “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

FYI, I herewith freely copy a couple of bits from the Wikipedia article on him. (I have that right: I actually contributed $50 to their organization.)

Rogers thought all campaigning was bunk. To prove the point he mounted a mock campaign in 1928 for the presidency. His only vehicle was the pages of Life, a weekly humor magazine. Rogers ran as the "bunkless candidate" of the Anti-Bunk Party. His only campaign promise was that, if elected, he would resign. Every week, from Memorial Day through Election Day, Rogers caricatured the farcical humors of grave campaign politics. On election day he declared victory and resigned.
Asked what issues would motivate voters? Prohibition: "What's on your hip is bound to be on your mind" (July 26).
Asked if there should be presidential debates? Yes: "Joint debate--in any joint you name" (August 9).
How about appeals to the common man? Easy: "You can't make any commoner appeal than I can" (August 16).
What does the farmer need? Obvious: "He needs a punch in the jaw if he believes that either of the parties cares a damn about him after the election" (August 23).
Can voters be fooled? Darn tootin': "Of all the bunk handed out during a campaign the biggest one of all is to try and compliment the knowledge of the voter" (September 21).
What about a candidate's image? Ballyhoo: "I hope there is some sane people who will appreciate dignity and not showmanship in their choice for the presidency" (October 5).
What of ugly campaign rumors? Don't worry: "The things they whisper aren't as bad as what they say out loud" (October 12)

If that doesn’t sound familiar, you are in no need of a primer on the events of today but might want to subscribe to Modern Troglodyte magazine for decorating tips on curved stone walls.

So, to close, two points of comparison: both are unfailingly honest and both preach nothing more than good humor,civility and common sense.

Now as for the epigraph? A vast number of the pundits were excoriating Stewart for his skewering of them, and a lot mocking him for both presenting lukewarm comedy and open shtick before lapsing into sincerity and compassion (one step above the last refuge of a scoundrel—a/k/a: patriotism); basically for the values delineated above. He is also of the generation just after the Boomers, that juncture where New Wave met Old School, not necessarily of either; like he may have (like a lot of other guys I knew) found Patti Smith because Bruce Springsteen wrote a song for her. As for Nick’s tune, which was really an Elvis Costello anthem, that was another of those strange hybrids: crafted by a cusp hippie, recorded by aggressive arriviste and placed among his sneers and jeers like a flower among a bunch of roadside IEDs. (Which is why it could cross-over rearranged as a saxophone instrumental on the soundtrack album of Whitney Houston’s sole movie role, and thus making Lowe so independently wealthy on publishing that he could retire, more or less.)

Nevertheless, Stewart is solidly ID’ed with Generation X. Starting in the ‘70s and made in the ‘80s, playing a lot of bad gigs--from his early MTV misfires down to his abortive movie career—he took a while to find a niche. And if you saw any of his earlier talk show formats, tried over the course of the ‘90s, you’d say that he wasn’t going anywhere.

But he did get here. And, as much as any Borscht Belt tumbler, glad-handing and working the tables in a Catskills resort, whatever he picked up, he used. Over the years, he’s dropped enough hints to the fact that he remembers ‘60s television as well as, if not better, than a lot of his elders, and probably was no less into some flavors of the Psychedelic associated with them—at any rate, associated more with them than him. (The drug jokes aside; that belongs to any post-Vietnam graduating class.) Yes, he may have wanted to ride “The Peace Train” but is most definitely associated with a ticket for the “Crazy Train”. Which makes it funny (-odd, not funny-ha-ha) to have a rally about sanity.

Humor is universally associated with The Edge—manifest in contradictions, sharp juxtaposition, and high relief contrasts that cause the vital cognitive dissonance which demonstrates the distance between the real and the ideal, resolving into sudden, shocking truths that explode into laughter. It is only found in the middle of the road, today, if you have corporate backing and are named Leno. So then, to come from the extremes towards the center makes you a sitting duck for both.

Generally speaking, “Peace Love and Understanding” falls into the category of banality. On this basis alone, it is simple to make the argument that proceedings were less Comedy Central and more like Comedy Peripheral. Hence, the use of it here: to ask the musical question and to answer it without music. (Well, any audible.) “What’s so funny…?”—well, apparently, for a lot of commentators, not a lot. Period. Yet, that’s what happens when you take OTHER kinds of chances. Not the “will-it-offend-you-if-I’m-racist/homophobic/pro-life-gun-Tea/sexist-ageist-etc-ist?”, but the more dreaded “moonbeam-warmy-fuzzy/Deadhead-wavydance/therapist-office-vulnerable”. You wear your heart on your sleeve and you’re begging to have someone accessorize you. And if you fail to entertain to everyone’s satisfaction, you’ve failed all.

And this is where angels fear to tread—but not anyone who’s been heckled at the Improv. The one thing that stand-up’s have over the rest of us are bullet-proof hides. That which can’t be deflected by an ad-lib or a short retort can be chalked up to a learning experience, and later incorporated into the routine. If you followed the meteoric career of Bill Hicks, you saw the whole package—and the High Wire act as well. Like George Carlin, he could have gotten away with conformity, and, like almost every other male with an HBO hour, dick jokes. But he went for his own. And, after the news of his impeding demise, he let the guard down enough to show his ultimate humanity as well—and was still funny...if not quite as hilarious.

Which is part of the present case. It may be speculated that, for a lot of the critics, they might also have the teeniest, tiniest bit of resentment for someone who made such a leap of faith to embrace the glory, rather than stick with the shtick. It requires the desire to overcome everyone’s natural instinct to protect a safe and secure sinecure and step up to that dizzy precipice where the moral imperative takes over from self-preservation. Some have done it in the past, and Edward R. Murrow somehow comes to mind, who would only qualify as the driest of dry wits in any political climate, anywhere. But his act was bold if only because it was a direct mission to speak truth to an entrenched and physically dangerous power structure. I used to compare Olberman to him but have had cause to admire that worthy more for his taste and erudition than courage; it’s no sweat to bang out derogatory commentary on villains. Stewart’s a different animal however. Unlike a lot of pundits, he resisted the urge to go for the easy kill, and looked for the greater good.

So what was Rally, really? In form and substance, a pageant and a USO tour in one, but, as well, a much older form of quasi-entertainment: an allegory. Right. Don't mistake this as some sort of excuse for the whole shebang: this was entertaining the troops, and in a format that could be suitable for any home, sure. Then again, you don't make huge assertions on broad concepts out of one-liners; it takes a long time for most people to get into the overarching scheme. For a person who hates the sanctimonious, I confess to a juvenile astonishment when NET produced a one-hour, updated version of the medieval morality play "Everyman" (with David Hemmings as the pilgrim) way back when. It was then that I knew it wasn't wrong to look to theater to teach as well as amuse. Further, this is something I learned in my first high school forensics class: charm, flatter, lead, seduce, then--slam it home, which takes a little time. Real basic stuff to present a position, but one not employed much these days when a soundbite is the medium of choice. I'm sure that Aesop was more popular than Homer, and, yeah, no one ever accused Bob Hope of being avant-garde, or expected a parade down Main Street to be equal to NYC at Halloween, but it can happen. And it happened here.

Once more into the Wiki…
One of Will Rogers' most famous lines, "I have never yet met a man that I didn't like," was part of a longer quotation and it originally referred to Leon Trotsky:
"I bet you if I had met him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I didn't like. When you meet people, no matter what opinion you might have formed about them beforehand, why, after you meet them and see their angle and their personality, why, you can see a lot of good in all of them.”

This is why even though I like Rachel Maddow less that Keith, I love her genuine passion to engage in civil discourse with those whom she has a diametrical opposition. Someday, I’d like to meet one of those guys who likes to say “My country right or wrong” and see what he thinks about the entire quote. I really would. Despite the fact that that’s not likely to happen unless we can talk to each other, a situation that the present climate is not exactly conducive to, I still have hope.

It could happen.

And, in the interim, I still enjoy that song as a New Wave anthem, and the last gasp of flower power.

But I can’t stop humming “Love Train”, and that’s fine too.

...how i spent my summer staycation, part 3...

2010-10-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

And now, on a lighter note...

This one comes in under the heading of the Surrealism of Modern Day Life.

As part and parcel of the stay-at-home vacay must, perforce, involve a lot of old B&W movies on the big HD Plasma screen, possibly the greatest tech innovation since the bread slicer. However, if one wishes to archive said old B&W movies for later viewing (a/k/a "time-shifting", the first Supreme Court decision to be influenced by an amicus brief from H.G. Wells, and you can view it here, or just about anywhere on the web, but I prefer the case stated in purely legal terms because it is sooo much kinkier to think of the Nine in their august robes, playing around with precedent and antecedent as if wondering whether the Eloi and Moorlocks will still be using them tomorrow...)

Eschewing the standard complaints about any customer's relationship with Time-Warner cable, we pick it up with my last consult with the telephone person. After the usual unplug/replug/reboot routine, she asked me the question which we all know as the default penultimate "goodbye" line: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

The subtext of the projected conversation would be: "Of course not. My signal strength is rarely up to snuff, the TiVO-like box drops recordings and interruptions of service ruin movies regularly. What else could you do? Cut my rates until you get up to speed."

But we live in a polite society and so, to be polite, I made the archest query as unaggressive as possible. "Well, I was wondering if anyone could tell me why I get these little jaggies all over my screen--not constantly, but in clusters. So? Any ideas?"

And that's when I encountered Zombie Satellite Galaxy 15.

"Lady... you're joking? Right?" "..." "No?" "..." No kidding!" "..." "Really?" "..." (Just to put you in proximity to my phone to overhear this exchange.)

This is not anime; this is the world of Intelsat communications. You can read all you want about it from the link here but the reason it caught my imagination is first, that monikker. This is stuff to conjure with. It should be a song by The Fleshtones, or Shonen Knife, yes. More, Japanese magna, absolutely, and new project by Yamamoto or something. I mean, can't you see it circling the globe?--this dreadful sphere of dark menace, a black "x" over every navigation light, the solar panels broken and twisted as the sails of the Flying Dutchman? Following its set route of horror, every approach to other relayers causing them to flee in fear and confusion? Yes, it sounds like the worst sort of cheap melodrama; and I simply adore it.

Second, was a flash on an episode of "Max Headroom". Largely forgotten now, in 1985 (?) it was a spin-off from an early, and very successful ad campaign for MTV itself. Not to go into great detail, suffice it to say that it was, honestly, the first cyberpunk (well, 'lite') sci-fi TV show (have there been others?) and on a major channel, not basic cable. So the opening scene of one episode had the crusading telereporter (with the virus-like alter ego of Max) covering the annual Fall of Satellites. See, this was "20 minutes into the Future" (as the tag-line went, chronicling events something like 10 years to come) and it had become so easy to put up satellites, when they went bad, the most cost-efficient thing to do was to bring them down from orbit in a spectacular crash-&-burn display to shame the Perseid meteor showers. I ask you to go to the above link and regard the halo of extraterrestrial extras encircling our sphere and marvel at how such a cloud could so effectively mimmick our earliest conceptions of sub-atomic nucleii.

Which I would have suggested to the Time Warner operator, but, knowing their idea of efficiency, they'd probably send out mixed signals anyways and bring down my carrier right in the middle of "The Daily Show." So I dropped the subject and drifted off into a reverie about the movie I would have Joe Meek produce for me, "The Circuits of the Living Dead vs. Telstar..."

...how i spent my summer staycation, part 2...

2010-10-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

Even if you go to stroll in the sand but once, and that once being on Staten Island,if you take along a bit of text to relax with, it qualifies as a "beach read". Which, believe it or not, has become a subject for argument and, to wit, this entry.

So then, blogging (a subject explored heretofore...somewhere in heretofore) notwithstanding, the Electronic Lifestyle has become the gravity center of our Gutenberg Galaxy (and yes, I know: "Stop with the McLuhan refs all the time! We get it! You think the guy walks on water!") and not just in the obvious (like Facebook, natch--in which I must steadfastly decline to participate--and porn--which is always a novel experience--and Youtube, tho' not that much different from the former two and perhaps even a logical extension of them) ways.

(That should be enough parenthetical inclusions for one sentence. And this dispatch, I think.)

At some point or other, the whole issue of Darwin's theory will be addressed, and what it specifically means to the physiognomy and "mindset" of the species. But at this juncture, it seems appropriate to bring up as this entire entry is going to be limited to three items only, and open news items as well so there will be online links--YES! LINKS!--to their origins. Why? Well, because it worked for Darwin...is not enough justification, but a nice co-incidence. But more, because triangulation, in the traditional X, Y, and Z axises, is the natural method for locating anything in space and time, more or less, and applying the same to the social environment is a no less-viable model. This is one thing I have learned from all the science writing I've been soaking up for the past few years: we may think "about" subjects but we think "with" models. So, the reason I apply this model is that, while the subjects are actually all part of the Electronic Lifestyle, each one is part of a different "media". Hence the continued "Marshal arts" stuff.

First up, a device. No, not the ubiquitous phone/PDA variety, but Kindle. The way to tell that something in on the crest of a wave is when you, as I did, start noticing them more and more on metropolitan public transportation: subways and buses. When I got one, it was just before the price reduction, so I attribute the almost overnight blossoming of them--out of bookbags, purses, pockets, etc.--to their descent to the level of impulse-purchase affordability. So, now they are now everywhere, like a sunny spring after a wet winter in Death Valley, and in a similar profusion of colors, covers and configs.

However, there is also a meaning behind this: people who own them are reading more than they used to. The article referenced here [LINK ALERT!] is merely a confirmation of other observations as noted below, but it needs to be cited for two very distinct and dissimilar reasons: the first is germane to this particular entry; the second I will get to in a subsequent missive. For now, the only observation worth quoting is that in a Marketing and Research Resources study of 1,200 e-reader owners, 40% said they now read more than they did with printed matter, with the remaining 58% staying about the same. How significant is this? Depends upon the totality of your grasp of its implications. The 40% are simply saying "more", not how much more or what more. And, as well, the other 60% simply register no change, without being asked to distinguished if there is a difference between what they read on their device from that which they read in print, such as periodicals or website entries in any greater number, and not segmented into print/electronic media categories. This would be a much more interesting bit of data, but the subject of the article is limited to e-books only.

Owing to a near-total antipathy and well-nigh aversion towards possessions, I found the idea of a digital book something close to the perfect solution. Now, being a rather economically-minded individual, I did not especially want to give bookoo bucks to amazon.com to build up my library. So, the other convenience is that there are enough online sources--such as the Gutenberg Project (see! relevant!) (ok, so one more aside, everybody needs some slack) (ok, so that's two, and this make three, so STOP THE MINDLESS PROLIFERATION OF REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM MISE EN SCENE GOING ON LIKE HIV IN A T-CELL-LESS CIRCULATORY SYSTEM!!!!!) (Really, it was a ridiculous restriction from the giddy-up...)

Where was I?

Oh yes. Also, Google has out-of-copyright volumes in a variety of formats (.azw, .mobi, .etc, etc.) and there's a few net-based fan-blogs such as this [LINK ALERT!] one which uses the legal fiction of sending "reviewer" copies (which isn't really such a canard, at least here, as I expect to make further commentary on same at some point in the future). Further, after MUCH experimentation, found some free apps out there to convert files from one system to another. [TIP...not parenth--nevermind. Kindle likes .txt files. They are the simplest there are and can be created by scanning in books through an OCR program. And, if you have B&W pictures as part of the package, or charts or graphs, opening the same through a web-based app, like Firefox, and saving the whole as .html or .htm, is an ideal setup for an app called Kindle Creator which turns it into a very nice volume-sans-volume.]

The point of this is to point out that any prejudice towards e-books as being too limited is ludicrous.

But that's not fromm whence the major objections stem. Friends of long-standing and recent acquaintances, when informed of my choice of new media, have had reactions from raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses to expressions of disbelief and downright disgust. The accompanying statements are, as you would suspect, along these lines.

a) Oh no, I like to [curl up in bed, settle back in the armchair, linger at the coffee shop over--fill in your favorite furniture/ideal locale] and I just couldn't with a _______.

OR--

b) I just like the [feel of the weight, turn of the page, smell of the paper, PLUS: the endpapers, the binding, the covers, etc.] and its just so [cold and antiseptic, impersonal--as in the same font for everything--and it changes the text and uses buttons, etc.] and it would change the reading experience too much for me.

OR--

c) I like having a wall full of them, just to stare at, and then go over and pull one off the shelf, like getting re-acquainted with an old friend, or making a new one.

There are other responses, of course, but they are all pretty much variations on these themes. And it must be acknowledged that they are all valid aesthetic/ethic choices which cannot be disputed. Yet none of them addresses the essence of the reading experience, at its core:

d) The interpretation of symbolic representations of bound morphemes (the substance of spoken words) into complete and easily assimilable units of data to be transfered to an individual's consciousness to entertain or inform and hence, perhaps, lighten one's burden of life or illuminate a particular aspect of same.

Admittedly, that's pretty clinical, and it is supposed to be. Like Darwinian theory, it comes down to just a few basic laws that, when stripped of all the hoo-hah whipped up by mouth-foaming mysticism and religious rant cant, amounts to something as easy to understand as physics or geometry. When you read a book, it can be a), b) and c) individually and severally, but nonetheless: you would not be reading it if d) wasn't at the end of it.

My friends are not, as a rule, neo-Luddites into smashing machines for taking away that which was precious and permanent and replacing it with that which is disposable and transitory. And yes, it is easy to delete files from the Kindle. And easy to add them: click & drag. Does this take anything away from the writing though? This is not the dispute: it is the media.

I then pose the question of exactly WHEN it became an issue? Ah! There's the rub. And another LINK ALERT! OLDNEWSFLASH: "By the end of antiquity, between the 2nd century and 4th century, the codex had replaced the scroll..."

Ok. So drift back with me to, oh--say, the court of the Emperor Constantine. So, here we are at the Dardanelles, the crossroads of Europe and Asia, somewhere between 306 and 337AD. You just get told: we're scrapping the Roman Gods and going with Christianity.
Oh. Well, fine by me; never liked all those burnt offerings...though will miss some of the paeans, like Virgil, sure.
Don't worry about him; we're going to keep him on as a pagan saint, and he'll turn up later in Dante as a rehab. Oh, and we're getting rid of scrolls and going with codexes.
Now wait a minute! Or a quarter-inch on my sundial, at least. I like my scrolls! I like the way the papyrus curls. I like the way it crackles and gets all tawny after a while. I even like the knobs on the end! And my whole library is full of circular pipes! How am I going to fit these...boxes...in? These 'bound-volumes'...they're just a fad! No, no. That's fine for the kids, but not me!

(Yes. I rather liked that bit too.)

Old habits die hard. What's worse, however, is old furniture, it would appear. But resistance to change should be for things of value--not objects of value. Yes, after the apocalypse (or the Rapture, if you number yourself among the descendants of the people Constantine converted in his big HRE upgrade to State Religion 2.0) you can't read a Kindle: no power. Right. Didn't see many people in "Mad Max" or "Beyond the Thunderdome" really ensconced in Cattalus or Voltaire, did you? And how many hardbacks did you see dad shlepping along with son on "The Road"? Reading, then, is truly a luxury of civilization (and reading cartoons, where representations of the Prophet are concerned, only of Western civilization.) The argument for the permanence of printed matter is logical only insofar as you have a public with the leisure for study of the material. Or, as I believe Oscar Wilde put it so well: Giving a man a book is an impertinence, unless you also give him the time to read it.

There is an alternative, however. I am reminded of a favorite book of my youth, "Farenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, making the case for him being one of the finest allegorists of our day but most certainly one of the ABC's of science fiction (Asimov and Clarke being the other two way back when). The "Book People" were forced to give up physical volumes and commit their most beloved work to memory; in essence, turning themselves into biological equivalents of e-readers. This was then, and remains today, an utterly beautiful concept. Yes, they DID love their covers/paper/bindings/endpapers/ink/fonts, but once they were forced to make a choice, they opted for containing the KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEXT. As in sex--carnal knowledge of. As in...it fucks with your head to think of a book about books being destroyed to keep them meaning can you keep this book by memorizing it to repeat back to others and, if so, does that violate Bradbury's copyright?

I could go on and on but really this is enough. Thesis stated, logical reasoning, proofs and supports. And a few yucks on the side.

That is all said to say this: Darwin.

Yup. Natural selection and adaptation. That's all it is. Put them together, make it in plain speech and it sounds like this: the world of reading has changed, and changed more than once. It has evolved. Sometimes you make a choice to resist; sometimes you go with the flow. If it doesn't matter to you how you do it, have no particular aesthetic barriers or prejudices, then as long as it enters through the eye, in the medium of sentences (unless its poetry), its fine.

But if you need to get all tactile on my ass, fine. Get yourself a crimson Louis Vuitton faux-alligator wraparound. Yes: an accessory after-the-fact artifact!

...how i spent my summer staycation, part 1...

2010-10-11T21:43:00.001-07:00

The diarist impulse once more moves the figurative quill with a will of it own. So many points of entry have no significance yet pan out much better than one imagined; even Proust's was pretty mundane, if highly effective, in summoning up events of 30 or 40 years past. The choice then is as much "The Lady or The Tiger", yes? You think you are taking the best path when the option was merely chance.

But when chance is the only thing that breaks the logjam of Indifference, and its non-differentiation from Indolence, and its close relation Idleness, you take the first thing that falls in your path.

Hence an object that fixes a date is best. The National Organization of Women has received a lot of bad press over the years for being arch and uncompromising with respect to equality in rights and parity in wages. This is no worse than the "Extremism in defense of Liberty..." argument. Perhaps their approach to sexism--seeking to censure it in the culture as a whole--has become a bit too broad (no pun intended), but that's at least kept the other issues in the news.

When our longtime pals Shirley and Joanie decided they couldn't wait for New York to change its laws, they opted for Massachussets' more same-sex-friendly legislation and chose this Independence Day weekend meeting to make the celebration big-time. And what better way for lifetime supporter/members to show solidarity than to have it in the main hotel ballroom of the conference? The rest of the holiday was just so much butter-cream icing on the cake with the little twin dutch-girl Hummel-type figurines adorning the triple-layer confection. (Query: when they bring it out after the first slice, how is it that the original shape was round and all the divisions are square, of the same proportions and none showing evidence of a wedge? is there actually a second one done in breadpans? Do they throw out the V-shaped cuts?) The national chairwoman congratulated them as this was the first time NOW had hosted a wedding, bringing this up to a near State-wedding category--if you rate Feminism up there with other big "isms" of the 20th century.

Rather not dwell on the whole issue of rights here as it takes away so much from the occasion itself. Remember? This is the 4th of July. In Boston. The home of the original Tea Party...when it meant something other than narrow-mindedness and self-absorbtion. (See a previous post here for more on that subject. And I'd tell you which one it was....but I just can't seem recollect exactly which one that was at this moment...) At any rate, revelry was in the atmosphere, the wine of exhilaration...as much as the $3 lemonades necessary for walking any distance in the heat. And The Freedom Trail is just such a pilgrimage that no American can resist. The great thing about Boston is that even though the downtown evelopment is as rampant as New York's, they managed to preserve enough of the locations intact so that, if you use your imagination, you can see the human scale of events, wherein the highest point would be the Old North Church where Paul Revere sighted those lamps: one if by land, two if by sea. If there is anything resembling hallowed ground, outside of a few Civil War battlefields, this is it. So is it any wonder that, as we strolled--post-hitching--from the Commons to the Old State House (and look through the actual window to the intersection where the fabled Massacre took place) to Fanieul Hall to Old Ironsides to Revere's house... Could I be forgiven, even amid the lovely piper's demonstration of period musical themes in the silversmith's courtyard, still humming the wedding music from last night, k.d. lang's exhilarating "Just Keep Me Movin'"?

"Free-eee-dom! Free-eee-dom! Free-eee-dom! Ooooh-Ooooh-Ooooh-Ooooha! Ooooh-Ooooh-Ooooh-Ooooha! Ooooh-yeah!"

If I didn't know it was flying, I might've had less fun...

2010-08-25T05:15:00.000-07:00

TIME: I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my pow’r
To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient’st order was
Or what is now receiv’d. I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To th’ freshest things now reigning, and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing,
I turn my glass, and give my scene such growing
As you had slept between.... What of here ensues
I list not prophesy; but let Time’s news
Be known when ‘tis brought forth...in hollow laughter,
And what to here adheres, which follows after,
Is th’ argument of Time. Of this allow,
If ever you have spent time worse ere now;
If never, yet that Time himself doth say
He wishes earnestly you never may.

--from "A Winter's Tale", Wm. Shakespeare

Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke--original Youth International Party slogan...ok, but what's so funny?

2010-04-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: The header here was originally “Everybody’s in show biz/Everybody’s a star”—Ray Davies of the Kinks, from the album and song of the same name. That was when it was simple. But nothing is that easy. The new title came as the work-in-progress began to coalesce, and it became clear that a lot more was required. Then came the next inspiration, a quote attributed to Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's go-to actor, a last gasp that has come down to us, through the ages, as either perfectly formed or adapted and adopted, whatever, of the apocryphal summation of art: "Dying is easy; Comedy is hard."]

Today marks a peculiar anniversary, one that is probably only familiar to those obsessed by the Yankees/Red Sox feud ongoing since they traded the Babe to the Bronx. In 1774, two weeks after the other one, the NYC branch of the Sons of Liberty threw their own tea party, chucking crates of Tetley, Lipton and Earl Grey into the Hudson. Do you think anybody in the present world of “the rabble” (as many have self-labeled their groups, in honor of the King George view of our rebel forefathers) would care? After all, that is one of the two home fronts (the other being California) of the species Liberalus Elitus, their sworn enemies. Mind you, one supposes that they can now accept the other one, marginally, as South Boston was one of the districts that helped elect Scott Brown.

The Tea Party umbrella covers a legitimate, grassroots, honorable American protest movement…and also a ginned-up, astroturfed, shameful display of wanton childishness and egomania, blind to the assets of the opposition and too forgiving of their own lunatic fringe. These seeming polar-opposite opinions are not given to appear either indecisive or “fair and balanced”. The reason for saying so is only that within these extremes there is very little latitude for compromise or discourse, and it is much the same as our view of the Muslim world and its tepid response to our fears of terrorists. Here, the people with a desire for restrictions on Big Government and grievances at the loss of civil liberties cannot be debated because the only ones being heard, or having attention paid to them, are those who are the loudest, shrillest and generally the most obnoxious of the group.

When my friend Ed pointed out to me that Arlo Guthrie had given some reporter for the NY Times (for the feature “Five Minutes With…”, I think it was called) a reference to support of Ron Paul, he was dismayed to find the son of Woody had gone conservative. I pointed out that it could also be that the reporter was being young and snotty (or “snarky”, if that is the proper neologism—assuming that it is NOT the Lewis Carroll word but more the combination of “snakey” and “arch”) and Arlo just decided to flip-off with a curt blurt. When canvassing during at the last election, there were instructors who told us how to handle lawn signs as indicators of whether or not to approach houses (in that area) and the mention of Ron Paul supporters always brought a laugh (as being so rare) but also was encouraged as these were people who actually THOUGHT about the issues; who made a choice based upon what may be thought of as ultraconservative, but is, as well, almost radically Libertarian. And Libertarians are not people to be scoffed at—ever. Some of my best friends…

What I like, and what everyone must acknowledge, is that these are people who SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. That’s in uppercase for a good reason: it needs to be set off as the most important thing that we, as citizens and registered voters and taxpayers—whatever label you wish to apply—should do in order to participate in governance. When you talk with these people, it is safe to say you can readily admit that the Healthcare bill is flawed; that regulation is necessary to curb excesses that violate sound business practices but should not be a bar to competitive trade; that the President is not the Messiah or even the Pope; that you take orders from your conscience as much as they do, but will—knowingly—have to bend it, at times, in order to accommodate your ideals to practicalities. At its best, this is truly Democracy in action.

That’s also a discussion that is impossible in the present climate.

In an attempt to get away from the noise of overheated rhetoric and virulent images and evening news clip-loops of rally-monkeys, I read. First, a New Yorker piece on the movement, then a lot of blogs, then a Times piece, and then some more blogs. The best of the bunch was the NYer one. While it did not entirely avoid the kooks, it presented a lot of the arguments from the perspective of ordinary folk, and—outside of being suspicious of anybody from that city—mostly provided a look at it from their side of the fence, and, as well, its evolution (though many would dispute the use of such a Darwinistic verb) from a CNBC reporter’s shout-out on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange into the activist campaign that could replace Teddy, the Lion of the Senate, with Pick-up Truck Scott. What it did offer of value was an historical perspective and some links for investigation.

It's so easy to satisfy curiosity there days: Google any one of the cause camps and visit their websites or blogs and look for patterns. Start with the tech and then check out the chat. As they are also part of the blogosphere of which this site is a participant, assessing the level of manufacture is no trick; we all use the same set of templates, depending upon your particular server’s options. We get frames and fill them with stuff; some of your own generation, others provided gratis to make it look fancier. And yes, the postings are long/short, entered by each date or in one long list [ASIDE: note for all—don’t do that; loading takes too long], with/without graphics, black type or white on colored background but some with differently-colored type mixed in. These are not that sophisticated or loaded with resources (unless you go to something like the big guns, FreedomNow.org or such); they ARE personal. Then, as equals in the world of open journals, meeting them halfway didn't seem like such a stretch.

And we’re not talking Birthers, Deathers, Truthers, or any of those specific phobias. So then you start reading and the first thing that you realize is that the references in the article to Liberty Bell (an early “Tea Bagger”—but with the wrong binding metaphor in her call to arms—is depicted in superhero cartoon) is the same one in the article AND she is cited on almost every site. And the prevalence of Ayn Rand Objectivism as the highest sources of philosophical criticism. And the number of slogans and caricatures of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, etc., as well as the photos of demonstrations, and lots of bumper stickers. Finally, because they are there, you start looking at the Comments fields too. (If I had as many as some of these, I would feel very fortunate indeed.)

Once you are hip-deep in the thickets, it all begins to blur but salient points do emerge. The best of them, after authority, utilize arguments based upon such things as polling data from Rasmussen Reports, “The Most Comprehensive Public Opinion Data”, as they claim. And most authorities say they are that good, except there is also another statistical factor they say is important, what is called the “house effect”: that of the systemic differences in the way polls tend, due to their own search for evidence to support their clients’ desired conclusions. This is not “skewing” data as much as nudging a question towards an answer you prefer. The extreme example of this, from Law School, would be something like, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ (A better analysis might be found here FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: House Effects Render Poll-Reading Difficult) This does not say they are wrong, but it does indicate that they are probably Right. And if you go to this as your main source of support 5 times out of 10, you aren’t really interested in facts as facts any more than I used to be.

Still, if you are after public opinion, that’s what you do. It gets shakier when you start having to go after independent economic or scientific data, or philosophical slants that are wider afield than your sect. That’s when the volume ramps up alarmingly fast…like the Minutemen on laughing gas. Yes, the rhetoric (if you want to stretch the term to bad English) is nearly 100%, red-blooded, Revolutionary War (or the Colonial War, a designation equally descriptive but with less appeal to virulence and therefore never used in their sloganeering), fire-breathing oratory that wraps itself in all the symbols of the Founding Fathers’ major (ad) campaigns against the British, and talk about uniting again for a “Second” revolution…they just don’t talk about the rest of us. And even though a lot of them use the term “We” a lot (as in, “We, the People”), it sounds just like they’re saying “Me” in the plural.

Short aside for a minor confession. In my salad days, I admit to a similarly rabid turn of mind, albeit from the Left; uncompromising, arbitrary and disregarding as bogus any facts that did not fit in with my world view. (Ok. Almost. Bane of my existence: always looking at both sides of an argument. Only really useful in chess.) I would generalize, sure, but never without some modicum of evidence, and after much analysis and consideration. This is why we were called radicals--our opinions were out of the norm and extreme in their challenges to standards.

What comes through all of the speechifyin’ about the Real America and True Patriots and The Constitution and the Tree of Liberty and Don’t Tread On Me all that, is that the most authentic characteristic they all have in common is a sense of anger and aggrievement. As a rule, this sort emotional character comes from those who have been disenfranchised by a system and only want their fair share of ‘the American Dream’. However, what comes through in the Times article is that these people are better educated, have professional jobs in relatively stable employment areas, and are more affluent than the main. As well, the use of language and tactics is very close to what we used to use, and were often accused of taking dictation from Moscow and Fidel and Mao. When you add it up, then, this is not only co-opting the forms of your enemy but posturing like runway mannequins: they're messages are hollow and empty of any real content; the kind of stuff that's good for marches...but this is no different than what shows up on their blogs. And when you codify this behavior in a psychological/sociological profile, it rates as right up there with spoiled children: petulant and pouting. It is not, as they like to type themselves as the Radical Right, but simply reactionary. This is proven by the plain fact that the Party of No is against everything and proposes nothing new. One might argue that this is the way of any opposition group out of power.

But there's more.

The reason for the original title (the Kinks one) was that we all have realized, at some time or other in our blogging experience, that, with few exceptions, this is a trivial, useless waste of time and energy with no hope of any return of value for the time spent on executing our entries. (Take Ed, for instance. The amount of labor he puts into mediafunhouse.blogspot.com far and away outweighs the responses he gets for these little gems. And that isn’t counting the cable access show on which it is based.) At all but the most popular music-dl blogs, you can expect maybe 2-to-5 “thank yous” and are grateful for that, especially the idea of return visitors. In the TP world, it is more like 5-to-10 and better. And neither are these simple thanks; they are solid supports and hearty ‘fight the good fight’, ‘keep up the good work’, ‘don’t falter at the altar’-type-of-exhortations which express a vocal message much more than a written one. (Again: bad grammar; terrible spelling.) As well, these are people who tweet and Blackberry and IM lots too! And if you read the previous post, the attraction to this entire social-media networking is just as palpable. It is not generalizing to say that support-group re-enforcement for every impulse, no matter how ephemeral and trivial, which may add to the Foe’s consternation and frustration is trumpeted to the rafters right alongside Paul Revere’s Ride and The Shot Hear ‘Round The World and other iconographic events of the era.

It is not merely a mutual admiration society, though. This is not a small thing either. The idea of being ‘loud and proud’ may have come from James Brown and filtered through to Gay rights but it is squarely something the former ‘Silent Majority’ want…and they want it NOW! When you read the blogs, and the comments, you immediately notice that they are not out to make any arguments, compile any logical supports, create any plans to supplant that which they oppose (and believe me, this is something I recognize well from my own intemperate past) based in economic or demographic evidence. And, despite the Scott Brown victory (and the Hoffman defeat in upstate New York), they do not want to follow the strictest dictum of the game: ALL POLITICS ARE LOCAL. No, they must make an impression on the National stage, otherwise they won’t get their most sought-after prize: a 10-second loop on CNN. Think I’m exaggerating? Try this: one of the people in the New Yorker piece asked the writer if he knew who won the Battle of Saratoga. It wasn’t a pop quiz; it was to get to bring up Benedict Arnold. “One of the reasons he turned traitor was because he didn’t get the recognition he deserved.” (You may now insert a Rodney Dangerfield cut-away of tie-adjustment, shoulder-hitch and the “I don’t get no respect” grumple.)

They want to be famous…just like everybody else, if only for a minute…or 10 seconds.

When you live in a media capital, it is not uncommon for your waitstaff to have both Food Handler and SAG cards. On the other hand, what with the proliferation of “Reality TV” competitions and ‘unscripted’ family docu-soaps, more and more Average Joes and Janes are getting their moment in the spotlight as well. What differs from the past is that when you were on, say, Password or Jeopardy or Concentration, it was confined to daylight, workday hours. (Let us omit What’s My Line?, The Match Game, The Dating Game, etc. and those of their ilk as they would be either one or two a week, tops, or syndicated on the fringes of prime time.) Today, you see schulbs & bubbas, goombahs & goombettes, sluts & studs, nerds & cheerleaders, Six-Pack Abs & Joe Six-Pack, NASCAR Dads & soccer/hockey moms, all having their moment in the public eye. It does not matter to them that they are also being used in the same capacity as a freak show by venal carny barkers/programmers who have figured out how to garner the maximum advertising revenue stream from the least investment of capital. Nor should it matter; if what you want is to be able to sit around with the grandkids and point at a screen and say, Look! There’s ME!—that's fine. Performance art is a good place to start...but remember: drama, comedy, tragedy--it belongs on a stage.

Now to the substance of the subsequent title.

Spend some time with Stewart or Olberman and you will hear the subject of Comedy brought up: by the former as an explanation of what he does; by the latter as a critique of Fox News and their common-taters. Everyone knows that "The Daily Show" is on Comedy Central, but that doesn't stop a lot of people going after it as if it were a newsgathering organization with an editorial division. More than once he has explained--explicitly--that he is NOT "fair and balanced" BECAUSE THIS IS SATIRE. "Countdown" labels Bill-O the Clown, and Rush and Glenn as comedians, saying 'because that is what they are', in the main. So what we have, on one end, is a self-described humorist (I think that's safe enough to tag John, which gives him a point spread from Mark Twain to Will Rogers and leaves room for whatever heaviness may come from dealing in provocative ideas). He gets a lot of laughs, first and foremost, and he's happy. If someone wants to take something he says and start a crusade, he'd be the first one to tell them to seek professional counseling.

On the other, most prominently, are an ex-journalist and two radio-originated broadcasters offering views and opinions on the events and issues of the day, never claiming to have any authority or responsibility. No, they are just asking "why", arent' they? And here's the nut: they may be as described, but nobody treats them like that. When you see their summations, given as blanket statements echoing the deepest beliefs of those people on the aforesaid blogs, you have to wonder "why" as well. When it comes to public discourse, especially on the subject of the future of the governance, the last thing we should pay attention to are such vain, self-obsessed aggrandizers masquerading as patriots. Their broadsides are the permission slips for juvenile minds, inviting them to join a pre-packaged protest movement that looks like the old Vietnam/Free Speech/Ban the Bomb days without bothering to go through critical examination, the questioning of means and ends and motivations and desires, or ever reaching a conclusion on their own that does not eschew all doubt.

This is what reminds me of something I said earlier, about how the most important thing we can do is speak truth to power. If the news organizations want to show them making noise and raising hell, they should also acknowledge that these are empty, unconsidered statements, at best; and no less than professionally-produced simulacra/clones of our best aspirations towards the nobility of humankind and sanctity of the individual via Mad Ave-quality scripts and graphics for end-user industry lobby efforts to increase profits, suppress actual dissent and escape consequences of actions made possible only by continued manipulation of policy and regulatory agencies.

The worst is, these are people who literally do not think. Another generalization that seems too overarching? On Maddow last night, a perfect example: a Tea Party-identified woman was interviewed (or polled) and asked whether or not she approved of “big government”. She, of course, replied in the negative. Then she was asked if she was on Medicare or receiving Social Security. She answered yes. Then she was asked whether or not she approved of them. This caused her an actual conundrum, almost an Orwellian doublethink, wherein she had to confront her blanket statement of the TP line she had dl’ed to her frontal cortex for a knee-jerk response, but at the same time having to face the facts that her best interest lay with two programs that were emblematic of governmental intervention. She then had to say, “I don’t know, but I guess I’m changing my mind as we speak.”

See? These people are not dead between the ears; they CAN think, they just don’t want to ratiocinate. The problem with reading those blogs is how easy it is to feel superior to them, if only for one’s ability to run rings around their arguments. But smugness ill becomes anyone, and I would rather have a dialogue than talk to myself (despite what this particular blog appears to be doing). These are not evil devils doing bad as much as frightened and marginalized everyday folk who want what they see on TV to conform to something in their lives. Warhol’s most quoted line is “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”; most from the ‘burbs would settle for a blurb.

Am I immune? Yes and no. For me, this blog is a means to organize my thoughts, so to speak, in an open forum. I do not invite comments but neither do I reject them. This is first and foremost a journal of what goes on in one mind towards one end that may or may not be meaningful or purposeful. Whatever ‘fame’ I had was in the past; enough so that, in mine own little circle, I found some sort of admiration and popularity. But that’s what youth is about; on a bunch of grey retirees on pensions and middle-age guts and secretary spreads, it looks kinda sad and pathetic. What makes it ugly is that everything they ask for—like not leaving this debt to our grandchildren and such—is only making it worse.

One last quote. “Do not go gentle into that goodnight/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I know what John Donne meant, but it sure don’t look like they do.

First you have to see the light.

I’m losing status at the high school.— “Status Back, Baby”—Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

2010-04-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

I’m losing status at the high school.—
“Status Back, Baby”—Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

Of late, it has crossed the mind that there is a new form of behavioral control being proscribed upon the socio-cultural sphere with brand new set of obligations as subtle as any Japanese court politesse, as tightly-bound as Emily Post in Moroccan leather, and, as finely delineated as B.F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior. And, amazingly enough, the metaphor comes built-in with the subject matter!

It is, of course, the Web. It is also, The Net. It is as well, not to stretch a point, an electromagnetic attraction. (Why do all these apply, and so aptly? That is something unponderable at this moment; suffice it to say—worthy subject for a follow-up.) Thus, as anyone can see, these all have built-in restraints and constraints and dynamics in their very definitions, let alone their poetic usages and implications. Here & now, though, they transcend those definitions to become…(we’ll get back to that…)

The exact instant this rose above the level of background processing (and yes, I know: too many computer metaphors for “thinking”? READ THE OTHER BLOG!) and began to consume major RAM, was after seeing an episode of “South Park”. Normally, this cartoon is off the radar as it is sort of boring (disgusted bus non dispute tandem bicycles), except, on this occasion, as the advertised subject was Facebook. It must be admitted: curiosity got the better of me. The influence of this phenomenon has not gone unnoticed, if only for the Marshall McLuhanesque aspects of it. (cf. SEE ABOVE, then BELOW) No novice here but hardly an acolyte, the prospect of seeing the world’s most popular (arguably, but not by me) social networking site reduced to a series of topical gags as appreciated by a gang of hyperactive 4th graders would, of necessity, strip away the overarching aspects of its place in the world of media and render it its essential functions. (Forget the potty-mouthed aspect: anyone who wasn’t at that age was raised in a vacuum, bubble or commune.) And that is enough of an introduction.

Though it is possible I am living in one of the aforementioned containment vessels, I have managed to get by without ever having sent a text message or engaged in an online chat. A cheapo cellphone only came into my life a year or so back, and I only signed on for a FB account to look at an e-mail sent by a friend. From this it would be easy to conclude the identity of a reluctant Luddite with a hard-on for hard disc space, or something. Well, were that true, why off earth would I have a blog? (Case closed.)

Yes, I like these toys but I also like CONTENT. As said in the last post, I prefer to emulate that sterling pedestrian equestrian of palomino persuasion, Mr. Ed, and not fritter away my time with drivel and doggerel. Yet the fascination with Facebook needs to be grappled with at some juncture. An attorney at the firm said that he found a witness he was looking for via FB. Now how modern is that? No skip tracer, no bondsman, or private dick—all you need to do is hunt him down…by his profile or…whatever.

And this is where the “South Park” show entitled, “You have 0 Friends”, came in handy. For those not in the know, of which I number myself, the enormous fan base has created its own language. Herewith, I intend to employ SP-ese—the shorthand and (I suppose) txt-version of conversation garnered from webchats and the like, whenever possible—but with a translation: such as refs to the “ep” (episode).

The boys have a new craze, Facebook, and as usual, are doing it to the exclusion of all else. Stan (the level-headed one, primarily, or at least, the killjoy of the bunch), loses his temper and says: “Why are you guys wasting your time on Facebook? We’re supposed to be out playing videogames!” As is common amongst them, their idea of a prank is to make him an FB account, against his express wishes.

Somewhere along here, the example of someone named Kip Drordy is mentioned as a complete social failure: he has a FB account with 0 friends for six months. (Hence the title of the episode. Kip is a one-time character.) He is seen sighing and staring at the screen of his computer; he has a sad clown picture on the wall behind him. (This is almost genuine pathos, here.) Then, suddenly, he is “friended” by Kyle and becomes renewed, focusing around this new addition to his life with utter infatuation. As soon as Stan’s father, Randy, finds out he has an account, he begs Stan to “friend” him. Then is told to friend mother and grandmother.

Kyle (the one whose hat has earmuffs) is playing a FB game called Farmville. (There are others, I gather, called Mafia Wars, Vampire Hospital, Pet Salad, and possibly Farkle and Super Farkle, and Bejeweled Blitz and Jungle Jewels. There also may be Yahtzee…but more on that later.) It appears to be some kind of group participation game where you can earn points when people visit it and do things like water crops or harvest or such. However, inexplicably, Kyle begins to lose friends (his counter showing them dropping off.) There is a cut-away to a Cartman podcast where he offers instructions on how to get friends on FB in a Jim Kramer parody called “Mad Friends” wherein stock and a friend count are equated. “Chick friends are worth almost triple what dude friends are” in his promotional view. Kyle decides to go to him for advice.

Meanwhile, Wendy (angry-looking girl with mouth-braces) confronts Stan about Susan92's post "I think you look cute in your bunny costume", not interested in explanation that this is his grandmother. She also demands he update his status to "In a Relationship". Later, he is walking down the street when a random stranger stops his car, accosts him for not “friending” him and then says: “I'm just a guy that gets ignored I guess!”, then, enraged, spits on him and speeds off.

The second half shows Stan trying to get his homework done but neglecting to respond to his FB friends, his father telling him "Stan, poke your Grandma!" Then, Cartman, schooling Kyle, suggests he go on Chat Roulette to gain new friends. Kyle demurs, saying, “It’s justa bunch of guys jacking off!” And, sure enough, that’s what they encounter one after another, leading to Cartman’s pithy summation: “To find a good friend, you've gotta wade through a lot of dicks.”

Then comes the adventure part of the show, wherein, Stan, frustrated by the waste of his time, tries to delete his account and becomes literally sucked into FB a la the old computer game fantasy movie, “Tron”. In that movie, the master CPU turned programmer—“user”—Jeff Bridges into a game piece and forced him to compete in his own creations, with the threat of elimination of his actual reality outside of the game. The games were all in glowing neon and featured high-speed grid running or “Space Invaders”-type shooters. Here, however, Stan has to play Yatzhee—an old school board game with dice—and wins every time. He is told that, in order to get out of FB, he has to find and battle his own “profile”, and, in order to do that, he has to find it. Here, Stan goes onto Kyle’s FB page and tells him to locate it for him, but first has to do something to help out on his farm. Instead, Stan begins kicking the crops until Kyle tells him he is hosting an online chat party for all his “friends”--almost 1,000,000 people—at Café World.

Meanwhile, there is a cut-away to Kip enjoying quality time with his new “friend” by taking a laptop to the movies and putting it on the next seat. (Poignant and creepy.) The climax is Stan—again—playing Yahtzee, only against his monstrous doppelganger, and winning with one throw. Shortly thereafter, he reappears in the material world and, when confronted by his father as to why they are no longer “friends” tells him to fuck off. Then, Kyle “un-friends” Pip, leaving him near-suicide when suddenly, all Stan’s friends are given to him.

And that’s pretty much it.

After all that, you’d think: “Oh, this must be a terrific fan in disguise to have gone into such detail.” No, all this was culled from chat rooms on the ep. The fanbase is rabid and ardent, but also varied. Within this world, I found slavish devotion, curiously unbalanced perceptions, petulance, and as well solid critiques and even a bit of historical perspective. And a lot of bad spelling.

However, that’s not the point of this.

As said up top, what has come to mind is how demands are made to participate in completely superfluous events because it is expected, and anticipated. Just not by you. By others. It is not even that these activities are not important to those others either. They can be. Stepping out of the SP view of FB and into a rather limited, first-hand, brush with the site, one thing came clear immediately. The service called “update status” or “profile update”. It comes, seemingly out of nowhere, unbidden, and arrives on your computer (or PDA or phone) with all the authority of a stop sign. It may not MEAN, “PLEASE RESPOND”, but neither does a ringing phone MEAN “ANSWER ME!” And neither of them means “PAY ATTENTION TO ME! I’M IMPORTANT TO YOU!”

But they do, don’t they?

And this is where those metaphors come in handy as perfect cliches: like the stickiness of the Web, the inescapability of the Net and the magnetic pull of polar opposites. Any competent writer could create extended metaphors from more obscure forms but these are so natural, they would seem made for the job. (This is where the transcendence part comes in again.) I’d like to think it was all McLuhan’s doing—from the premise that all media are extensions of the human organism, senses and capabilities in particular—but he wasn’t around when the Internet was created in 1972. Still and all, we’ve learned to appreciate how present concepts can anticipate future developments beyond their immediate application and follow language to that place, and some of that was from him. I mean, he wrote “The Medium is the Message” before changing it to “The Medium is the Massage”. Was he seeing the way newscasts would become ego-stroke-books or was it just a “hands-on” approach?

In order to appreciate the prescience of the Marshall, you need a bit more post-science too.

Which brings up the story of “mands” and “tacts”. In the world of Behaviorism there are two giants which most people know: Pavlov and B.F. Skinner—the former for the dogs, the latter for the rats. But there’s more. In 1957, Skinner published Verbal Behavior. With this ambitious volume, he wanted to apply his form of operant conditioning to language learning, saying that a sentence is merely part of “a behavior chain, each element of which provides a conditional stimulus for the production of the succeeding element.” So, part of that is figuring out just what those elements are, and here are two salient ones. Mands (short for deMANDS) are defined as utterances (note: whimpers and groans communicate just as well) that are reinforced by the elevation of deprivation. Utterances (note: they can be grunts as well) that are produced when the speaker is not deprived are called tacts (short for conTACT). Tacts are verbalizations (or sounds) that the speaker produces to provide information instead of attending to states of deprivation. While on the surface, tacts and mands may seem similar, their underlying motivations (stimuli) and their reinforcements are different. When a mand is reinforced, the need is sated. When a tact is reinforced, there is no need to sate.

Yes, and that and $2 will still not get you any closer to a Tall Starbucks Regular Blend.

You see, this is EXACTLY what this whole shebang has been about. When you break it down to wants, needs and desires, the Individual doesn’t require attention; it just WANTS, and feels a lack of satiation. Mands need, but sometimes don’t need anyTHING. Tacts are more tactful, similar in many respects to eye conTACT or a head-nod, a tip of the cap. Nonsense, and not necessary, but nonetheless… And this has been proven time and again under strictly-controlled laboratory conditions and in multiple orders and environments. It is approaching a Law of Behavior, ok?

(After his book was published and critiqued by Noam Chomsky, Skinner failed to respond immediately to the issues and problems raised. His slow response coupled with both a growing disdain for the behaviorist paradigm and the influence of technology, computers, and information processing led to the strengthening of the cognitive movement in psychology and other social sciences. In other words: he was definitely right as far as that went, but HE LOST STATUS!)

So, is a Tweet more of a mand than an FB update is a tact? Or is it the other way round? That is not the question, however. It is more like: Why bother?

There is little more ephemeral than electronic communications, but also little difference between a mand or tact, in e-mail form, than a whim or even an impulse, despite the fact that one satiates a need and the other doesn’t. Such thoughts, without composition, are no different than autonomous functions; a gesture barely one step up from a knee jerk. And just because you think something needs to be said, it doesn’t mean it needs to be heard.

Interruption Science is the study of what happens when one activity is presumptively halted (usually by exterior forces) without explanation or consideration, in favor of another. In the modern world, this has become epidemic, as more and more we attempt multi-tasks that require the monitoring of many activities simultaneously—like the magician trying to keep a dozen plates spinning—all it takes is one lapse of attention and BANG! Schnabeleens… Not to get too pedantic about it, but to give you some statistics, it has been calculated that when you are on the computer and working on some project, you can get an e-mail or phone call or someone walk-in and say I need this right away. So you go ahead and TCB. However, that isn’t the end of it. You are just as likely to spend no more than 11 minutes before that one is interrupted, and those are as likely to be some three-minute segments as well. Then you want to get back to where you were, ok? This is not to say you can’t just jump back in, BUT, in clinically-tested studies, it averages out to 25 minutes before you can, given the complexity of the task as well. Now that is a heavy toll on efficiency, sure. Then consider our buddy Coleridge. “Kubla Khan” was a poem he was composing in the midst of a drug-fueled paroxysm of creation, and was interrupted by “a person from Porlock.” For being only some ten lines which he could remember, it is still one of those pieces most often quoted (and an inspiration for the Canadian Rock gods, RUSH to write “Xanadu”…and maybe even “Closer To The Heart” as the chord progressions—uh, I don’t want to start something else right now…) and most speculated upon as to what the rest of it might have been like…had not that person from Porlock come a-knockin’.

To return to something said earlier, there is a factor in thinking which I call “background processing”. It is, in other terms, as well, “day-dreaming”, “idling”, “a brown study”, “woolgathering”, “meditating”, “musing” and even just “fucking off”. You’ve heard about it before, in various places and such guises aforesaid, but what it really means is sort of like ‘thinking about nothing…to think about something’. This is how scientists come up with those “Eureaka!” moments when they have theoretic breakthroughs. It is all about how you fill the head with as much intelligence and data as you can, and then—well, the process really is something similar to letting a pot come to boil. No one can tell you exactly how they got from A to B, but they are just as frequently A to Z—it’s almost that startling, in many cases. Of course, if you call up Newton and say, Yo, Ike, whassup? and Ike says, Nothing, whas by you, dog?—he may have been on the verge of falling asleep, true, but just as possibly on the verge of starting the Enlightenment.

You don’t have to be in an opium trance to write a dream, but it helps…and more if you can languidly stretch out your arm across satin pillows and poppy-smoke billows to finger quill, ink and parchment at the ready to begin following a delicate-yet-rhythmic line of image-into-text as it flows from the soft tissue where dawn and dusk hide in hyperbolic arcs until BANGBANGBANG! ALLOALLO! MRCOLERIDGEYOUINTHERE? And Ike was probably going to find his way to a theory of optics, anyways…but maybe not on that particular day.

A while back, one of the entries quoted John Donne’s meditation 17 (http://stationsign.blogspot.com/search?q=no+man+is+an+island) so a further cite is off limits., but this still goes as far as the connectivity thing aforestated herein: the spider’s Web, the drag Net, the way positive charges can’t escape from negative charges, etc. I need inputs of all kinds from all sources; that’s a given. But there are stretches when I must ignore EVERYTHING that is not part of…something else—but specifically “THAT” [which stands in for “EVERYTHING that is part of”]. And this does not mean I do not want that contact or input, but JUST NOT RIGHT NOW! When it look most like I’m wandering about aimlessly, it MAY be so, but is just as likely that I’M NOT EVEN HERE. If it is really important, make it fast and I’ll deal with it. But if you want more of my time than a scan-&-reply, be prepared to wait.

It should be clear by now where this came from and is going. No point in prolonging. On the Simpsons, I’d be Lisa not Bart. In Warner Bros. cartoons, I’d be Daffy more often than Bugs, sorry to say. In SP, Stan. I don’t want to tell the world (or Randy) to f*ck-off…but yeah, I do.

So how is this all related to FZ’s song?

Everything else is just status. Long ago I figured that the rich, thin, and famous were always going to be at the top of the pyramid and then found out it was for no good reason other than people paying attention to them. It may have meant something to me in high school, but I am so far from that now I can’t even remember whether those brown spots on my back are incipient melanomas or acne scars. It is almost the definition of the term “juvenile”…as much as SP is today, what “Beavis & Butthead” were before, and on into the past of our animated doppelgangers, and, allowing for convention and adaptation of formulas, on into puppetry to “Punch and Judy” and beyond. Like Commedia del’Arte, they may wear the cloaks of buffoons but are just as certainly our stalking horses for the limits of social intercourse. (Here you may insert a snickering simpering Butthead…)

The impression I got from SP (as well as a funny bit done by Dimitri Martin on “The Daily Show” a few years back) is that what counts is the number of “friends” you have—not whether or not you could hold a decent conversation with any of them. (“Chick friends are worth almost triple what dude friends are,” don’t forget!) Of course, both were done as jokes, right? So nobody takes that seriously, right? And why are jokes funny? It is of many opinions that they tell some essential truth about ourselves, but in such a manner that the recognition factor is turned and the burn of embarrassment becomes sublimated into a gasp of astonishment which produces laughter.

So, it’s stupid, but true, right?

I don’t want to think about this stuff. Status is only good for making one feel superior to another, and it only exists in a universe where there are values more important than mine. I don’t mean Laws or Morals or Ethics—just Values. (Now I know why this sounds familiar: it was one of the entries in the Brain blog.) Is this selfish? You bet. Is it wrong? No way. If I give you my time and I place no value on it, then I am giving you nothing and saying, by implication, you are worthless as well. On the other hand, if I do place a high number on the word count/face time, you are getting a really good return on your investment of a couple of minutes or hours. (As opined earlier: “To find a good friend, you've gotta wade through a lot of dicks.” Sage counsel, indeed. I would hesitate to call him the Buddah of the show, but he does exhibit some of the insights of Bacchus.) And that’s better for all concerned.

...after the thaw...

2010-04-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Being that it has been a while since posting, the best explanation one may offer is that of Sir Thomas More who, when asked, by the royal inquisitors, why he had not voiced approval for King Henry the Eighth's divorce and remarriage, was said to have remarked: Silence implies consent. You may then say: Consent to what? OR what is this sh*t? And be quite right to do so.

However, if that don't grab you, then appreciate, if you will, the sage counsel of a 60's tv icon:”People yakety-yak the streets/And waste their time away/But Mr. Ed will never speak/Unless he has something to say...”

Which brings me to my next post...

Uh...that is getting waaay too far ahead.

The subject of the return to the blog is, sort of, where it all began: politics. Or, rather, the struggle of certain public initiatives by individuals of some merit and groups of some influence to wrest the destiny of this country back from those who would govern by consensus of financial cartels and theocratic aspirations. On reflection, though, it might not really be that as much as a sort of celebration of participation. One of the tags on the accompanying video is “civics 101”. This is not an attempt to be arch or coy but more in the same vein of something Zappa once said. When asked why he, a musician, chose to get involved with politics and international relations he shrugged, “That's just what I learned in my high school civics class.” That is what is so striking. Some of us were actually paying attention then. Why was that?

The e-mail was one of those press-gang attempts to get anyone to respond to a call for volunteers to “March for Healthcare Reform”. It was, unfortunately, for a Monday. Then again, the timing was perfect, coming right as the debate in Congress was reaching a fever pitch on the subject aforesaid. It hit exactly where a personal level of outrage had reached someplace near the autonomous function, touching the soft palate at the back of the mouth, inducing a gorge reflex.

So, rather than vomit, we signed on. After all, it was a beautiful weekend to be in our nation's capitol. There were only a few cherry blossoms out but the ones on the trees fairly quivered in anticipation of the next dawn, or two.

Oddly enough, it was also the weekend of a big march for Immigration reform! So all Sunday it was huge with Mexican and Latino families and banners for SEIU (hospital workers—coincidentally). Despite that turnout, they all left with the sundown.

The real drama was on the Hill. We missed the Tea Baggers trying to intimidate the Majority leaders entering Congress and then linking arm-in-arm (and no, the comparison with the heydays of the Civil Rights movement was not lost on most observers) to walk through them, and, as well, the bear-baiting by the extremist members for them to get in the gallery and disrupt proceedings. No one disputes their rights to make their voices heard nor their right to peaceful assembly and even loud protest, but things started from this have gone beyond that and—well, no more of it will be mentioned here. The final act was the end of the debate in fury and vitriol of a sort that is rare among the Right, and sounding more than ever like petulant children. And then, way past midnight, some twenty blocks from our hotel, you could swear you heard the chimes of freedom flashing. (Why couldn't you hear the hurrahs and hallelujahs from the street, like when the Yankees won? Hard to figure, but Washington IS another country.) Then on come the Man himself to make the announcement (excerpted here) and you get a sudden spring shiver, what the Elf calls a “Kyoto chill”, not from the weather—which, bytheby, shows showers all day tomorrow—but from the occasion. History is being made all around you.

Upon arrival at the gathering point, it becomes clear that the march was primarily for the medical community, as the banners indicate. Nonetheless, they are most welcoming to any and all who would care to go along, but “lab coats in front please!” To make matters just more interesting, the bus from New York, the one with all our other recruited compatriots, is stuck in traffic and probably an hour late. Scheduled marches wait for no man or vehicle, and the clouds grow ever darker overhead. By the time the gathering speeches are even started, those who have not already encased their placards in plastic are wrapping, and also tearing holes in the corners of garbage bags for improvised ponchos. (The Elf, as ever, has her own faux leopardskin one.) As we turn up Pennsylvania Avenue, it is pouring, and hard to keep any chants going as the line gets strung out at the street crossings. Breaching the Capitol precincts, we are given canned beverages and a waxed cardboard box lunch for the equally daunting leg to the Hart Office building. There is quite a scrum at the doors because of the number of umbrellas trying to pass through security...”AND YOU CAN'T BRING IN YOUR SIGNS! PASS THEM TO THE COLLECTORS OUTSIDE!”...but someone apparently forgot to place collectors there.

Ah, the rest is self-explanatory.

...but one post-script: this is what change looks like...

Last Chants for Health Care Reform

2010-02-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

Within the whimsical title lies the mission of the previous weekend: a stroll with another 699 or so hardy souls across the Brooklyn Bridge.

That we were culled from the rolls of Obama supporters was a cinch. Who else would stage a protest in mid-February over the span of the windy East River? I would not rule out Tea Baggers, except that most of their activities seem to be confined to optimum climate conditions and never without adequate press coverage (meaning: Fox News). As much as memory serves that there were some official-type cameras out there, but the only one I recollect as being part of some media was the live webcast of the guy behind me carrying his iBook open to the built-in lens as his buddy carried a sign saying "KEEP IT ON THE CHEEP" written in copper paint and more significantly (and photogenically, I might add) while wearing what might be a classic Yves Saint Laurent grey twill suit, his jacket liberally coated with shiny pennies.

Ok. So I lied. It wasn't that cold. It was actually very nice. After gathering at the North end of Cadman Plaza under the eyes and prodigious muttonchops of the bust of some NYC mayor from 1910 (whose name escapes me), there was some attempt made to stage manage the presentation. First, it was important to get the health care professionals up front behind their banner, and it was ok to not wear a white lab coat either, as long as you were one. (Honor system.) Second, a variety of placards were distributed; some pre-printed, some homemade. Some people (like the above) brought their own banners like, "Upper West Side Baby Boomers for the Public Option" or affixed their own slogans to paint stirrers or a pizza box. (Liked that one--so American.) What impressed most about this melange was how random it was: the only homogenity was (probably) geniality. This is pretty much EXACTLY what I saw in the campaign: old, young, black, white, asian, dumpy and dowdy, sleek and chic, athletic and last legs. A common purpose, yes, but that defining factor as well: not just to talk the talk--a desire to walk the walk...literally.

That is not the subject of this, however. You want to read about the whole thing, I understand the Daily Kos has some mention of it. It is one thing to go on at length about the experience and its minutae; it is another to add the critique from that perspective.

The reason for the cutesy-pie play-on-words title is that the quibble here really is with one of the whole activities behind ANY march: that is--to protest, to RAISE A HUE AND CRY! (Ok. One aside: Without looking, I'd venture that the "Hue" part comes down to something like "Show your colors" or such. Any bets?) They spent a few bucks, most likely from the DNC, on the placards. But zero on the actual function of the whole thing.

That is: to raise your voice. To be heard above the din. To stand out from the noise.

That is: to chant, too.

Having been in a few of these in the past, experience teaches that a bunch of people carrying signs are a lot more effective at attracting attention when they speak with one voice. Or at least one snappy rhyme.

So, to wit: this.

Point ONE: Not enough megaphones. For even 700 people you need one at either end and one in the middle. Battery-powered bullhorns are cheap; hardware stores carry them for probably no more than $20 bucks. If you want to unite people somebody's got to lead and keep time, and fill in the gaps when weaker, meeker folk fall faint. These are people for whom volume is unnatural (sans sporting event).

Point TWO: Iambic pentameter. This is obvious--don't make it too rhythmically complicated.

Point THREE: If you ARE going to have more than one, you need to pass out cheat sheets...and rehearse!

Below are the ones from the cheat sheet I got when they were to be got. Comments are between the brackets.

Two four six eight
Time to reconciliate!
[Everyone knows the first line. The second is a chore, and a word few people outside of the Office of Budget ever use.]

President Obama, Senator Reid,
the public option is what we need
[Too many syllables! No way to gauge the stresses on vowels!]

Hey, Congress, you've got health care!
Don't you know it's nice to share?
[This asks people to do not only a CONTRACTION! BUT! to add an inflection to make it a question! Much too subtle.]

Hey hey, ho ho
pre-existing conditions have got to go
[Too many fucking syllables!]

Two four six eight
health reform cannot wait
Anthem Wellpoint is raising rates
[Too obscure. Also as this whole thing was organized--by MoveOn.org at least partially--to protest the aforementioned insurance monster jacking up rates in California by 39%, it makes a fine speech...but becomes utter nonsense in an exhortation.]

Get it done, do it now!
You bailed out Wall Street, HEALTH CARE NOW!
[Confusing the message, and, as if it matters, repeating the rhyme word.]

We need health care across the nation --
Time for reconciliation!
[See the first here.]

As for the rest? Just read.

Pass the bill, don't pass the buck!

We didn't vote for the status quo
Health care obstacles have to go!

Let's finish Teddy's fight:
Health Care is a Human Right!

Health care for people,
Not for profits!

Health reform for people,
Not the special interests!

If special interests win,
We the people lose!

and finally...

What do we want?
Healthcare! (Change!) (Public Option!)
When do we want it? NOW!

The last here is the only one that managed to get anything going. Period. Part of the problem is, as well, the Doppler Effect. As the Yell King (to borrow from collegiate rah-rah, pep rally terminology) went down the line, people DID pick it up...but at different points. This produced the smear effect of having some sections in sync and others way off, turning an aggressive statement of position into something approximating LaMonte Young's Harmonic Series or "I Am Sitting In A Room" by Alvin Lucier: canceling out the frequencies over time.

The singular charm of this last one is that it is the only one with a call-&-response format. This was good enough to come out of black churches in the South and have the SCLC bring segregationists to heel, its good enough for the present. So, yeah--good structure, easy to remember, easy to know your part. And then there's the other side: do NOT give Democrats (or liberals for that matter) too many choices. They will argue about anything as much as Republicans follow a party line like baby ducks. The only way to deal with Democrats is to LEAD THEM (you listening, Barack?) and they will follow, reluctantly, but eventually.

How do I know? Because I did. Having seen enough "boot camp" sections of war movies, the beauty of cadence count was not lost on me. One strong, well-nigh monotonous shouter can do the same to a bunch of raw recruits as it can for disaffected-but-disgruntled New Yawkuhs. So, I basically blew out my pipes on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sonny Rollins did the same on the Williamsburg a few blocks North. He made great music and I got a bunch of raw recruits to make a tempo.

Nice day for a stroll, anyways.

Tino Seghal, Guggenheim Museum - a meditation

2010-02-09T21:13:00.000-08:00

negative space, positive emotions
positive space, empty emotions
full house, empty chatter
empty house, talk-filled

The world engages us at many points, enticing us to enter into the dialogue with it at whatever juncture chance and circumstance permit or dictate. We never know at which encounter we shall find paradise or disaster but we have no other choice but continue along, seeking some meaning even when it is obvious further intersections at specific junctures are no longer available. All around are examples of fruitful and intense discussions of the moment while all you have left is the knowledge that you can go to the edge and hurl yourslf over. Or watch the lovers in their obsessive embrace of each other from afar.

This is not a suicide note or a Beckett commentary but a review of the latest work by Tino Seghal. The Guggenheim Museum has taken a bold and startling step into the void. By commissioning a work by this "artist" they have actually taken Kierkegaard's leap of faith as well.

The tradition of performance art is one in which the line between the creator and the viewer is often no more than an participant and a non-participant. Theater, after the end of the Greek mixture of story and parable, myth and religion, was pretty much the set proscenium until Brecht destroyed the fourth wall--that separating the actors and audience. the main difference would be that the actors have a set mission, the audience none. The heyday of this was the '60s, mainly, with Fluxus (as a group) and individuals of various stripes and stars, planting their flags to claim...whatever territory they could as an experience of neither one nor the other cited above, but, perhaps, with bits of both somewhere in there. As far as I read it, the final product wasn't a piece of commercial art, in any sense of the term, as much as a concept or conception of reality. What comes for the viewer/participant (and in some cases, witness) an attitude or philosophical view you could take home with you. That's why these things are of the moment and the moment only. Afterwards, you can think about it and ruminate on meanings and the whys and wherefores until the cows come home. This is what they use as the dividing line in the Law--it is called the "bright line". (For anything else on the law, see the other blog...)

The substance of Seghal's previous work has been the use of concepts involving human interactions. One I've heard of was a Whitney Biennial where the security guards at the exhibit suddenly began bursting into song. At one gallery on 57th Street, I sat in a room for an hour or more as various persons, in one or more groups, meandered about in the traditional "white cube", perhaps stretching like dancers in the middle, standing or sitting, moving between clusters but always chatting. the thrust of this one had to do with the idea of sustainable growth, as much as I could figure. But the key point was their selection of certain individuals--average gallery goers (or gawkers) for their opinions (or contributions) on the topic as participants. They then might be engaged for a few lines of exchange and dropped when another actor/speaker comes in from a direct approach, followed by another at oblique or even a non-sequitor, until that "thread" has disappeared or mutated into another discussion altogether. The one contiguous line that was sustained between a participant and "actors" was about recycling and waste considered as an asset rather than a problem or a hazard to communities. And this was fascinating. Moreso because, after hearing the elliptical chat come around at least twice previously, I could sense when the set of instructions given by Seghal were beyond the reach of this digression. The only way to bring it back was a reset by (I suppose) the event "leader". This was conversation as cocktail party, sans social lubricant.

What his work emphasizes is the abiding fact that we, as social beings and cultural participants, all understand, inherently, implicitly: conversations are not scripted dialogues; they are living breaths--an expulsion of gases to project an ephemeral thought into the air, just to see what happens. Sometimes it immediately offends (especially when there is neglect of dental hygiene), at others it might merely rankle as it disturbs our preconceived notions. Then, there are those that draw us in, sometimes slowly, sometimes via an immediate spark of recognition. And the maddening thing is, among a group, you can be having the most engrossing discussion with one or more persons and then, suddenly, one remark from someone will completely change the subject, and what was an alternate universe (where two more sentences and you might have discovered the meaning of life) goes spinning off into the aether as a possible-but-unrealized, magnificent completion.

But that's all it is, all it was. And the wisest thing you can say about that moment is that it transcended itself. (What? Nevermind, it becomes clearer soon.)

The present case is a study in space and time--but not of quantum physics or the cosmic as much as human dimensions. For one thing, Saturday night after 5:45PM is the pay-what-you-will period. Whoever shows up is therefore...frugal, but with an avid interest in art. Also, this being if not the coldest f*king night of the year then pretty close means, as well, that these are not only a hearty but determined lot. Once in, the first thing are confronted by is the fact that you pay at the entrance--not at the usual one in the center of the ellipse. That is already occupied by les amorants. The French is there just because the man and woman making out in the middle are so locked into each other it looks like a Rodin mobile, wherein they circle about, writhe and join (all clothed--don't get the wrong idea), kiss and carress almost as if they should have a Michel LeGrande or Serge Gainsbourg soundtrack. I mean, it has been a while since P.D.A. meant more than personal desk assistant to me, but I know it when I see it. (And if they are acting, one can only hope that they won't be, after a bit.)

The elf and I were joined by a friend who knew a bit more than I about the doings, and said, instead of doing the usual elevator to the top, that we said we should walk up the ramp. As we stopped by the side of the first turning to view the obsessed two, he was approached by a little girl, who introduced herself with the statement, "This is the work of Tino Seghal. Would you like to come with me?" He shook her hand and they were off. We followed at a discrete pace but couldn't catch the entire drift. My friend attempted to bring us into the sphere by explaining they were discussing technology and economic growth. With a 12-year-old, no less. Intriguing, to say the least, but she did not seem to know how to react to a 3rd party opinion. Deferring to the young lady's lead, she took him into a side corridor while we looked around.

If you know anything about the Guggenheim, you know that it is one long spiral from bottom to top. Inside of it, it looks like a perfect white orange peel on the surface. It is on the secondary peel where the artworks hang...only there aren't any right now. Bare walls--that's all. Absent the paint; naked as the day it was born.

When I turn again, I see my friend has acquired a new companion, a post-teen or college-age male and they are deeply into whatever the topic has become. We continue up, at a discrete distance, looking for whatever cues are next. After passing several clusters of similar folks as ourselves--hanging at the rim and occasionally peering down at the evolving embraces--I note my friend has another person, and far down and behind us. Also, there is the overwhelming sense of the utter strangeness of this event, or, if you will, exhibition.

You see, there are few opportunities where one of the world's great buildings is the star of itself, and this is one of them. Even as I realize that there is some connection missed to the piece in question, there is the overwhelming sense of its opposite. I am reminded of the Library of Umberto Eco as described by Nicolas Nassim Taleb in "The Black Swan" (cited heretofore, and probably waay too much). NNT was more fascinated by the books Eco had not read, but more, as an extension of that thought beyond the potential for what might be learned, at the information NOT available, and especially how that information would shape what IS known.

And what is known is that the building is a hive of voices; not a buzz so much as rumble, the echo of so many people shuffling and murmuring. And as you check out the pair down there, it becomes more startling to see everyone else doing the same...and then you, as them. Remember: these walls are empty, their hard surfaces bouncing every nuance of sound, but also highlighting our silhouettes; outside of Kara Walker, no other "art experience" comes near it. And this is the other salient object of a performance piece; after the author, the audience. The constant evolution of contours notwithstanding, we move alike and apart yet without differentiation. It is also evident that we are looking at each other because we were not chosen to be active in the piece's positive aspect...but are fully the background to it: neutral actors in a positive space.

When I meet my friend at the top in the small side gallery (where there is a neat cache of surrealist canvas gems) he explains that it was as I suspected. Each talker conveys you to the next in a chain of increasing age and intimacies. This realization had come to me already: I have no access point by which to enter the relay. Even as he expresses intense enthusiasm for the exchanges with his handlers, I am examining my choice, and find it not that far from Robert Frost's "The Path Not Taken". My mistake was in believing that my previous exposure to Seghal would continue to rule the game here. At the gallery, it was completely non-linear and looping; here, it was not only linear but fixed duration. And of course it should be: a spiral is nothing more than a line. Yet there is more geometry going on here than that of coordinates on an x/y/z set of axes; there is also the minus signs on those integer sets. The place where one's feelings may curve into negative space.

In the earliest known work of Franz Kafka, "Description of a Struggle" a fragment entitled "Excursion into the Mountains", he has personified loneliness (or alone-ness, if you will) into a character refered to as Nonexistence. (Now that's what I call an imaginary friend!) In the course of this brief, he also forms concepts out of "nothing" and "non-doing". But, unlike the standard issue emotional content of these terms, Kafka finds a serene joy, and even a kind of comeraderie, joining in a trip of these no-ones ("Diese Niemands"), these solos, walking arm-in-arm with the other numberless no-ones. The virtues of a negative experience require more justification, to those with a positive experience, and will never be envied or probably even asked about their journey, but is not less fulfilling. Perhaps many would say, this comes under the same heading as "differently-abled" but cannot be dismissed as a "short bus" ride.

On the walk down, it remains an open question as to whether I should take the hand preferred by the little 12-year-old girl at the bottom and have the positive experience everyone is here for...but not for me. What all these people are happy about is not a good conversation as much as an invitation to a dialogue and a one-to-one performance; half-script/half-inquiry, all-customized to their reactions. And all I can think of is Eco's unread books--the unknown vs. the knowable, that which remains available: the potential. I can say, as easily, that I missed it. But what was it? If I asked any of the participants, how many views would I have, and how many would be right? Would they be "winners"? And if I asked "Diese Niemands", would their answers be worse, or better? Or that of "losers"? Should they have settled for less and wanted more, or settled for more and wanted less?

At the end, if there is wisdom at all, comes the realization that being alone is neither sad nor tragic but an eventuality we all must face, and the sooner one gives up on hope the better...to admire the view.

IN YOUR DREAMS THERE ARE NO COMMERCIALS

2010-01-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

Nothing: a benefit for Tuli Kupferberg - St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY, produced by Hal Willner

This isn't going to ramble, but meander as, in the decades since ending any critical assessments, it is no longer second nature to scribble furiously, processing events in real time, to bear witness, but more scattered and fragmented, unfortunately, resorting to sentiments recollected in tranquility, which is now.

That sentence was falling apart from the giddyup...and that's alright too. There's something anarchic about too much punctuation, like the way it breaks up a smooth thought into a bunch of jaggies, as if blowing up j-peg beyond its pixellation limit. Which is how memory works too--no seamless flashbacks, only flashes, and that which remains lights up a broad sketch with few recognizable details.

For instance, the opening loop of the March on Washington in 1967, when Allen Ginsburg and the Fugs were part of the attempt to levitate the Pentagon is just an audio excerpt of a huge watershed event, like one big wave in a tsunami. Still, it is worth repeating, as it did, an overture over and over, this insane, irrational act, and just what the times demanded. If didn't remind you that this night was coming from another world, you might as well have been home with reruns of American Idle.

The lights go down and the noise comes up and it is the celebrity jam session. Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, and a guy on beatpads or turntables (hard to tell amid the wash of f/x)--that's skronk, screech and squawk to say the least. The headliners come on first? And no songs? Depends. It could be anybody up there trying to rip the stirrups off your anvil and puncture your drum, but was them. They brought a celebrity cache to the mix--alright, yet it wasn't any of their sets (excerpt Zorn, who can always wail in a maelstrom, still pumping a knee under his sax the add extra wobble warble). What they delivered was the brain eraser, the preconception purger. Couldn't have been more than 15-20 minutes, but it burned about that long after as well.

Some may wonder why this free jazz is set among the crazy lyrico-rhetorists, and those probably have forgotten how much the scenes bled into each other back in those days before we split up to follow our labels. This is the part where the real memory play comes in--part personal reference, part social history. In the 1960s, you could have a band like the Mothers of Invention doing a two-year residency at the Garrick Theater in Greenwich Village and incorporate post-bop blurt, doo-wop and stuff approximating encounter therapy with an audience, without anybody worrying about appealing to a demographic. Which is exactly what comes on the stage here. Even as excellent an organizer as Hal can't overcome some last minute snags, and so the guy who intro's them and the next and a couple others is not Richard Belzer, who bowed out with the flu. The guy makes a mention that their may be a surprise visit via videophone from the man himself, but that's for later.

For now is The Fugs, in the band's longest line-up since the first days: Ed Sanders, Steve Taylor on guitar and vocals, Coby Batty on drums and vocals, and co-producer Scott Petito on bass and keyboards. Ed looks pretty good, all things considered, as does Taylor, a regular at St. Marks Poetry Marathon (see previous post), and Coby you'd swear was Iggy, from distance. They do one of Tuli's finest ballads "Morning Morning," and one of their famous poem-to-song adaptations, "When the Mode of the Music Changes." Which is not exactly a poem, per se, as much as an excerpt from Plato, referring to the observation that the entire order of the State is affected by such things and should be carefully monitored. When Fugs (the poet's band) became The Fugs (a rock band with a definite article added on by their record label) it was not only a transition from a downtown bunch of scruffy folkie malcontents into a (semi-) professional electric group it was at a time when people actually believed "rock" could change the world. (Let us allow this discussion to slide with the proviso that, perhaps, hip hop may prove to be a greater threat, if only for its overt anti-establishment appeal...masking a more conformist approach than envisioned in the blandest beatitudes of Pat Boone.)

The mention of St. Marks and the Poetry Project wasn't casual. That's where I'd seen Tuli the most over the previous decade, but not since 2003 or 2004, leading me to wonder if he'd been boycotting it for getting too bourgeois, or something. Now I know it was health. This is one of the main reasons for coming there; I'd given a couple bucks to S. Clay Wilson, Obama's campaign, Haitian relief and now it was time to pony up for someone who I knew, if only slightly, and admired, but quite a lot more. Small price to pay.

Now there might've been Elliott Sharp playing with Jeffrey Lewis in here, or something else. But about then Philip Glass was playing piano to the abstract films of Harry Smith, another Fugs contempo. He's the same guy who came out with the "Anthology of American Folk Music" back in the day, influencing generations with his choices. The movies are that etched-frame animation of colors and textures and stuttering and shaking shapes that signal a hand-made product. This is another Willner touch--add in an element that some may see as tangential to the subject, and others as key. And it you can employ a new sense as well, that doesn't hurt either.

Peter Stampfel comes up next with his daughter and someone else to do his new number off a new CD, telling of his own influence on another generation, "The Duke of the Beatniks". He and Steven Weber were in the original Fugs, 1965 edition, and shortly thereafter both formed the Holy Modal Rounders (with Sam Shepard on drums) though they remained in Fugs off and on for a few more years. It is lovable coots (for that is what he is) like Peter and Tuli that give you hope for your future, if you manage to make it past post-menopausal depression. This is not growing old gracefully, but screeching and howling--Tuli would snarl out anti-war rants then song parodies and Peter still jitters like an R. Crumb cartoon with a sugar rush.

More or less at some point around here John Kruth and his All Star Band slouched on. This rag-tag gaggle consists of John S. Hall and Dogbowl and some other guys that made me think of members of the Great Small Works puppet theater that has been throwing leftist/anarchist spaghetti dinners around town on scattered Tuesdays for the last 20 years. So, am I certain they did "CIA Man"? No, I am not. I heard it, and it could've been Lenny Kaye, but... It was the 'list poem'-sort-of workout of "The Ten Commandments" that I'm sure of, especially enjoyable for the ex-red-diaper-baby Hall getting around the text and under the mike to torque the tablets into heresies.

It was about this time, or earlier or later, when Peter Stampfel comes back with Tuli's pal the author Larry "Ratso" Sloman to do a bit of commercial theater. Ratso makes sure that the memorabilia table and t-shirt concessionaire are noted straight away, all proceeds going to Tuli, natch. And then to up the ante, gives it over to Peter to auction off a classic original poster of The Fugs from 1967 (maybe) with the faces of Tuli, Ed and, Peter notes, "my old rotten partner Steve" (although that may not be the exact term used, and only half in jest--lotta water under the bridge with those two). With the promise that they will get signatures from both Ed and Tuli, the awkward and comic bidding by Peter gets up to a $1,010...or not. (It was a little confused at the end as to who had the last bid and what it was.)

I met Tuli through a long-time buddy of his Lanny, who produced a show on Manhattan Neighbohood Network public access called "The Coco Crystal Show". When I was working at the "bump shop" (making photo repro line-screens for print) for Lanny, he got me and my friend Dean to work camera. Tuli and Lanny would often appear on the show as well. That's when he showed me what was in those FedEx envelopes he was always carrying around: these funny-looking line drawings. These were his early political cartoons that would appear in Downtown magazine, late '80s, as I recall. When I asked him why he wore shorts in late November he said it was something he picked up from the Long Range Desert Patrols of the British Army--helped to acclimatize him to the cold. I liked that he always seemed to have a good reason for behavior that would otherwise seem a little crazy. But this is beginning to sound too much like an obit. Back to the jams.

Now, whether or not she was exactly next, Shilpa Ray and her band (name escapes) came on to do "Supergirl", offering apologies in advance for only having learned the song that morning. In case you hadn't noticed the previous rave for this little lady, she was one of the showstoppers at the Sly Stone Tribute at Castle Clinton last year, and her throaty chuckle at some of the sexual attributes assigned to the heroine of the title managed to be both self-mocking and sexy. For that alone, she deserves a red S on her chest.

We'll add the other headliners here. Sonic Youth played the longest set, maybe 30 minutes, with one shredder at least by Thurston. The odd thing was the other guitar was not Lee but Kim. I have already said I was out of touch, but when did the line-up change? Maybe not--I saw them at the 4th of July show at Battery Park only two years ago and they were the same band I remember since Richard Edson left. Their place is secured as some of the last standard-bearers of what was the real downtown scene; the last of the experimentalists who made it big. This is why they're here; having made gigs with Sun Ra and other ancient luminaries, they've continually demonstrated their hearts are in the L.E.S. place. They may rock harder than any Fugs tune ever, yet the torch they carry is the same.

Ok. You can't call this the producer's moment, but yeah, Hal Willner comes on with Lenny Kaye, telling us that, instead of doing a live hook-up to the house (as Tuli had already gone to bed), and he couldn't find anyone else who'd do this and Tuli specifically requested it and so, another of his parody songs, a tribute backatcha to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: "A Septugenarian in Love".

Along about then, Jolie Holland did a song and I think she was pretty good. Then Gary Lucas--the guitarist of a 1000 ideas--one of his multi-layer, self-accompaniment, live-double-tracking time-flanging whammy-wah-wah numbers. And the All-Star Band did another turn, leading the audience in a good-old-fashioned sing-along to "River of Shit", before launching into my friend Ed's favorite parody number: "I've Been Working For The Landlord".

The final segment was given over to the Fugs. At the penultimate moment, Ed began to introduce a beautiful slow number to end the show, but gave in to peer (and crowd) pressure that wanted just one taste of the band that could, when necessary, knock it around the stage. So they searched through their sheets and came up with what Ed called "our psychedelic parody song". "Crystal Liason" did not disappoint at all, giving Taylor a chance to pull a few wails from the paisley ether, and--with no explanation I can fathom--Ed goes to the back of the stage and puts on this long, fire-engine red cloak and starts shimmying around like a dervish with disc problems...which detracts in no way from making you think something almost like: Oh, So this is what it was like! That he chooses to end according to his original plan, "Dover Beach" only underscores the loveliness of that tune.

But yeah, where would we be without a coda, huh? And it is a pre-recorded message from Tuli, thanking everyone for their support, wishing all a good night and "Enjoy yourself...It's later than you think..."

...the harmony in the dischord...

2010-01-18T08:56:00.000-08:00

Subtitle: A minor key meditation on “Birth of the Uncool”

The above link leads to an online article by Brian Eno which is sort of a toss-off (in my opinion) but well worth your time, as was mine, in reading more of the comments/reactions to the piece. As one of the contributors made mention of the fact that another's post was somewhat excessive (longer than the original article), I had to agree, in principle, that one's response should not be greater than its inception. (With the exception of religio-politico nonsense which requires the marshalling of ideas and facts to counterpose the points of faith-based statements.)

So, with that in mind, I present the following as a response to the responses:

Outside of the unfortunate resemblance to the UnCola, this seems to have engendered a lot of very well- informed and well-spoken remarks. This is what I consider the best of the web -- random contributions from all points of view, pro and cons, that bring keen insight to a piece.

What I found is my usual amazement that, when all opinions are compared and resolved, they actually seem to form the same mechanism of a metaphor. Mind you, I understand that it is all in my mind, but, nonetheless, it seems to follow exactly the models of two major league philosophers, and one groundbreaking composer, of the last century. They are, not to make any further mystery about it, Derrida, McLuhan and Schoenberg. And, as we are talking about music, the latter’s application is particularly startling.

I would call it Schoenberg’s Ultimate Symphony, really. Why? This appears to be everything that stemmed from his liberation of tonality in 1909: the unstructuring of everything associated with Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the introduction of Chaos in the form of Atonality and 12-tone Serialism, were all auguries the arrival of the same messenger: The Internet.

When you stop to consider, as no few have here, what this development in human relations means (and it is nothing less than that; mere technological innovation? Puh-leeeze!) is that everything that can be digitalized can be made available to everyone at all times. Factor this with Zappa’s work ethic: “anything, at any time, for no reason”, more or less. Between jpgs, mp3s, and .wav/.mpg/.flv files, you can see or hear almost anything you want to, on a whim. We are talking magic here.

At the same time, this also eliminates Local Identity and the exclusiveness associated with discovering new, unheard sounds and scenes and events. The combination of Global and Local is used here as “Glocal” – a neologism which may or may not catch on, but is just as descriptive of the phenomena of something that is both nowhere and everywhere. (If Derrida was into using Marcuse, he’d’ve said “the negation of the negation” probably.) This simultaneity is straight out of McLuhan, even if his “Global Village” analogy, which has been often cited without proper interpretation, looks like it was made for just this purpose.

In this case, any segregation of interests or niches perceived are merely the result of our attempting to duplicate, in our minds/tastes/labeling modules (whatever) the same sort of discrete notation understood in terms of machine intelligence and design: things not applicable, or at least not previously available as standard variations of human thinking, such things as “identity”. If you follow, say, a couple of late 90’s trends that I recall, named “handbag” and “Baeleric” (both being some Euro-variant of late-stage Acid House, I believe) noted as different from one another by their BPM counts, you are not talking about “taste” as much as an ability to count, or take a pulse. These are less “lifestyle choices” (to use a popular socio-psychobabble phrase for what used to be “your thang” or “my bag” or that kind of earthy, pseudo-afro slang) than micro-preferences (just to nudge it further into the “processor-speak” of the day). The simple exercise of reversing the process, of taking these rivulets of data courses up the creek to their sources will eventually reach the gathering of waters where everything is “mainstream” now. (The prejorative terms, “overmixed” and “diluted” also fit the descript.)

This is where the concept of Atonality enters. When there is no tonal center, all things are equal: stress, pitch, timbre on each note can be increased or decreased without limit and without any relation to what had come before and what would come after. What structures remain exist under the same description as those of free-form improvisers: aleatory. At its core, all “must” then must be organized by the listener. This also is equally descriptive of social networking sites (the obvious development of earlier childhood “playdates” as well) and device-happy moderns, in that there is nothing in the original structure (which gets closer and closer to Derrida’s Deconstruction premise) which comes unselected, as part of the package. All options are up to the user. (How computerese!) Even the idea of “uncool” or “cool” itself. (All things ARE relative, but only when you’re Ego Prime.)

A side effect of this is, however, increased fragmentation and alienation among listeners, fans, users (whatever). The seeming contradiction here is: the more the sounds get driven into one indistinguishable mass of micro-preferences, the less need there is for like-minded groupings to create the old style “us vs. them” scenario. The only possible way to find or accumulate a gathering of people with these sort of specific turn-ons is via blogs or social networking sites. The concept of the new verb “friending” (and the associated conjugations: “I accepted a friend…” and “I friended” to the ultimate insult of “unfriending”—a/k/a: a “face-slap”) even shows how the distance of space requires a qualification (not “I made a new friend” or “I befriended” even, to “I lost a friend”) which comes from never actually being in the presence of that other. (Which is pure Derrida, again.) In other words, Facebook does not equal face-time.

These are the silences, the rests.

And what that leads to its maddest issue. What used to be a desire to distinguish one’s set from another’s by what is au courant is now more like what’s-plugged-into-the-current. It has been said here that fashion is what is repeated several years later, and that today’s VH1 oldie was last month’s big hit. Further, this was addressed by replacing the slag of “That was sooo last week” by “WHOA! Someone hasn’t been online since this afternoon…” This bespeaks a tempo racing beyond the capacity of human players, possibly even human ears.

That the time signature.

Finally, the comment “we are all cultural magpies” seems well-observed and pointed. We nest anywhere we can find a perch, owing no allegiance to anything but our nature, which is constantly shifting, regardless of the past, seeing as more little than a “fat tail” (to use Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” neologism) of experience in our comet-like trajectory. The ad copy that goes something like, “It isn’t important, where we’ve been, but only where we are going” re-enforces this attitude with a vengeance. This is how an example cited of a London DJ having nights of “dark ambient” sounds at some club or outlaw warehouse party can be so treasured. These exhibiters are our arbiters of “cool”, our curators of the gallery of sounds, and create the closest thing available to an “in crowd”.

And yes, under this title, it is possible for “uncool” to be “the new cool” even as the label “hipster” becomes unhip. Thus we arrive at the only unifying chant remaining to us: “ARE WE NOT HIP? WE ARE MET-A!”

And that’s the only key in this piece.

So just sit and listen to the harmony in the dischord.

All Is For Naughts

2010-01-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

Or, "Catching up with the Zeros..."

Yes, it has been much ballyhoo'ed about as to the disunity in nomeclature with respect to the decade past. I will go with the above simply out of the way it reminds me of Jethro Clampett trying to count, but, as well, a short piece by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. found here

And so, as 2009 drew to a close, as is my wont I went to the St. Marks Poetry Project Marathon on New Year's Day. The major change this year was the dedication of the event to the passing of Jim Carroll. As there is a previous post here upon that gent, I will not wax prolix again.

The standard disclaimer still applies to all the Hash Marks.

This is not a review anymore than anyone can scribble anything on over 100 performances of various stages of abstraction and concrete references and still maintain some kind of appreciation for each and all. This is simply the list transcribed in the order of appearance with the raw notes of solid impressions and a few asides. If anyone happens to stumble across this and feels slighted, don't be. You were part of a day I always treasure if only for the fact that it gives us all a way of celebrating the passage of time without referring to the previous eve's false sense of overwhelming jollity and gay abandon, usually associated with Re-Marks like, "Whew! I shouldn't oughtta ___ like that!" (Fill in your debauch of choice.) Such it is that the Question Marks after some entries represent whether or not I heard right what was coming off the stage (acoustics, and the natural ambiguity of poets' word choice and/or their level of articulation). The Quotation Marks enclose possible titles or sharp details that sprang out of the mix.

And everything else is just...St. Marks.

1. David Shapiro -- "forget..."
2. Cliff Fyman – bad waiter
3. Phyllis Wat - platonic solids
4. Richard O’Russa
5. Marcella Durand,
6. Michael Lydon – the handsomest man in the world sings another warm and friendly well-nigh children's song
7. Michael Cirelli - re: muslim/or non-WASP wife endiring airplane security checks, “she doesn’t hide the bomb/she is the bomb”
8. Joe Elliot – advertisements for the new world (sorta zen slices form the image factory)
9. Pierre Joris
10. Joel Lewis
11. Dael Orlandersmith – on a personal encounter w/a famous celebrity on a cellphone walking across the middle of 6th avenue
12. Nicole Peyrafitte & Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
3PM
13. Brendan Lorber – advice for the be chic?
14. Tony Hoffman – Intertidal Zone?
15. CA Conrad
16. David Mills – “if it has a face/don’t eat it” and a list poem (lobotomy is? or a body is?)
17. Tracey McTeague– What Shelley began, Redd Foxx finished… ‘Look out, Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to you!’” [consort/wife of Lorber, is stone sex fox in leather and choker and heels, even w/baby]
18. Denizé Lauture,
19. Lisa Jarnot
20. Magdalena Zurawski – lesbian w/real vocab for sex (why is it that they seem to do the eros thang so much better than the porno thang?)
21. Tyler Burba – "last night I had a strange dream, sitting with a group of children and we were all singing this song about death..."
22. Gary Parrish – ex-vet: “two days to go/I might be standing here/for years”
23. Elinor Nauen
24. Mónica de la Torre – (on job applications, overhead? over-heard?) “My English is no…”
25. Steve Cannon – gal (protege?) reads poem ending "hope is where our heart lives" and he chords piano like a goofy Monk, to end on "No Small Matter"
26. Tim Griffin – (has apparently put on a similar marathon with the Serpentine Gallery in London) “What are the new topics?”
27. Will Morris – a/k/a Billy Cancel (options titles = “or” repeated w/innumerable funnies, such as "an ode to my father or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is or citigroup building 51st floor...")
28. Renato Rosaldo – Sam Spade and Effie Perrine discuss case in shooting script terminology
4PM
29. Church Of Betty – a song from Araby
30. Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan – “a poem is true if…” [sorta XYZ and Meyers, w/o rhythm]
31. Diana Hamilton – “describe…”
32. Eddie Hopely – a list of first names of the 15 largest company’s CEO’s (a large number of which are women)
33. Mina Pam Dick – “let us mourn Mona Lisa’s eyebrows…”
34. Susan Landers – poem based on the Chicago Manual of Style
35. Bob Rosenthal
36. Don Yorty (& nephew on 2nd guitar) do blues songs: “Goin’ Back to Work Again” w/line “Sisyphus did fine/pushin’ one rock at a time”, and “White Trash Baby”
37. John Godfrey
38. Rebecca Moore - "is now working part time at an upstate farm animal rescue shelter..." and still clocks in as downtown's own version of Tori Amos, or better
39. Donna Brook – driving instructions on Health Care (like "people who drive on the political left must learn important rules of the road...to reach your destination it is most important to do so without injury to self, passengers or vehicle...there will be wrong turns, false starts, and dead ends...but always keep your hands on the steering wheel")
40. Kim Lyons – from “Secret Sharer”?
5PM
41. Michael Brownstein – plastic bottle squeezing to demonstrate the enemy ("20% of these end up in landfills"), conscience on full blast, projects us into Soylent Green world…
42. Philip Glass – a new one! (that is, new to me...)
[who was the guy in the Nudie-type suit of cacti, teepees and campfires patches reading “WAGON MASTER” in sequins?]
43. Peter Bushyeager – thinks of the Stones’ “No Expectations” and speaks on the contrast between blogging and the countryside extremes
44. Robert Hershon [great presence in the room]
45. Greg Fuchs – “so excellent to sit in this room, quiet, and listen to one another”
46. Karen Weiser – “Suppose you surrender ‘til we hum about you”
[I want tech support on my life!]
47. Paolo Javier
48. Joanna Fuhrman – “I hid the 20th century in my Marcel Duchamp lunchbox” (w/a Rrose Selavy ref. too)
49. Yuko Otomo
50. Steve Dalachinsky – “I was shanghai’ed years ago/by my book” (ending w/”Thank god/He gave us God” almost orthodox jew in citation)
51. David Freeman
52. Tom Savage – for Merce Cunningham, and a Ned Rorem song to a Whitman text
53. Ari Banias (amazing baul out?) “Love takes its Sharpie and draws a mustache on everything” (& a disco ball moved by 2 guys on street: stunning image of the nightlife icon in the real world…)
6PM
54. Kristin Prevallet – OLD STYLE! w/bongos!
55. Judith Malina and Red Noir Ensemble – reading of classic Julian Beck rabble-rousing rhetoric, followed by semi-STOMP and group grope! (boy, they don't make them like this anymore...)
56. David Kirschenbaum – “Dorothy Hamill, Farah Fawcett, Shawn Cassidy” in song tribute to hair!
57. Sharon Mesmer – “A few things I’d like to see in the next year…” (She gets better every time I see her...)
7PM???
58. Jon S. Hall – a) Christmas trees rolling down the street like tumbleweeds” from accompaniest, then, b) “EVERYTHING’S CLOSED!” poem w/ultracute baby daughter
59. Avram Fefer – sax solo
60. Adeena Karasick
61. Eugene Ostashevsky – “The Parrot & The Pirate”, quotes Descarte, and olde saw about two frogs in buttermilk: one drowns and the other kicks up such a fuss it becomes yoghurt and makes an escape, then Gilligan’s Isle!
62. Toby Goodshank (from Moldy Peaches)
63. Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
64. Maggie Estep - new novel about pirates? ("She was tall for a girl, not ugly for her time, and someone had stolen her dog...")
65. Patricia Spears Jones
66. Dan Machlin & Serena Jost
67. Murat Nemat-Nejat – “The structure of Replicants”(?) and, “I’m a parakeet/twit-wit-twit-wit/Good Morning!” language lesson record thang that actually got the stoic crowd to do repeats!
68. Gillian McCain – comes up w/Lester to play tapes of Jim Carroll talking about the day Kennedy was shot finding him on toilet masturbating to pix of Streisand in bikini, and 2 more, then Lester gets audience to sing one chorus of Happy Birthday to her and gives her a Snuggie as present
69. Steve Earle – “Peace”
70. Maggie Dubris
71. Edwin Torres – “Grunt” (yup! All about scatological functions...)
72. Steven Taylor
73. Ed Friedman
74. Bill Kushner & Merle Lister [2nd year w/Chihuahua bit]
75. Janet Hamill – song paean to “Metropolitan Avenue”, in two parts
8PM
76. Foamola – just as much fun and chaos, but w/repeat of “I Like Heroin” song
77. Todd Colby – “Thanks for 2009 - it sucked!”
78. Tony Towle - toasts
79. Christine Elmo - dancer
80. John Giorno - dusts off one from 1993
81. Laura Elrick
82. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs [in Hawaiian and Cherokee]
83. Charles Bernstein – “Not for all the whiskey in heaven…”
84. Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater – extended enigmas with members in the audience chairs adding oddities, best of which is guy who keeps interrupting to hang either quotation marks or Nixon peace signs over the proceedings
[there is no expiration date on______]
[note: Jim Carroll memorial, Feb. 10]
85. Elliott Sharp
86. Penny Arcade – “I took it on myself…” for 2nd year
87. Lenny Kaye
88. Legs McNeil – from intro to his Ramones book
89. Anne Tardos – anti-war
90. Tonya Foster – (uses of the term ‘bitch’ and ‘b-ball’)
91. Miguel Gutierrez – dances along to, then sings/screams a Radiohead song, blonde wig goes flying in paroxysm
92. Lewis Warsh - imagines a conga line and sexual metaphors, long and complex
93. Eileen Myles
94. Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers – utilizes a white-trash ethnic soundscape of semi-comprehensible morphemes and syllables while she dances
95. Jonas Mekas – “KEEP ON SNOWING! …JUST LIKE RUSSIA IN 1812!”
96. Reuben Butchart – very nice song set to poetry of John Carroll, not Jim
97. Taylor Mead - (for a change, his portable Mingus tape works okay)
98. Patti Smith - beaming: "I actually feel pretty good about the year to come..."
99. Oliver Ray - real nice, long song
100. Anselm Berrigan
101. Yoshiko Chuma – starts w/music for a change, actual medley of Bernard Herrmann themes!
102. Callers – nice music set
103. Joan Larkin
104. Tracie Morris
105. Simon Pettet
106. John Kelly – terrific song
107. Peter Zummo Group (with Ernie Brooks and Bill Ruyle) – fascinating work taken from Newton’s book attempting to track a comet around the Earth to prove theory of gravity but feels like you're following with your astrolabe in hand and tripping through the solar system
109. Jim Neu – dedicated to Bill Rice and another guy…
111. Roy Nathanson and bassist – great jazz workout

Slay bells ring, are you listenin'?

2009-12-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

As the holiday season has come to be the winter of our discontent (yeah, Richard III--didn’t think I’d forgot Willie the Shake, did you?), I have decided to pay less attention to the press and its blandishments, and survey the mood from the loftier, if not imperial, heights of Art.

Ok—so I went to the movies.

This is an occasion as much because there is very little I or mi espousa find all that interesting in general release, and as for the indie world? Feh. Indifference comes with the fact that worn carbons make for indistinct clichés and that the trend towards same is a drawback on the casual plunk-down of $15 (minimum) for 2 hours of pre-digested formula with 20-30+ minutes of earsplitting commercials. (More on that later.) Not to beat around the bush any longer, it was the appearance of three flicks with end-of-the-known-world themes which piqued my interest.

The first was “Zombieland”, which under normal circumstance, no amount of discount would have otherwise induced me to attend. It was entirely due to the intervention of my nizzo, DMVP, who lent me a pirated DVD copy he’d purchased au naturel off a blanket in the underground. I have seen many before that were excellent, but this was exactly what all the ads were warning you about. Someone set up a camera in the back of a theater, pointed it at the screen and just taped and burned what it was, with no attempt to augment or enhance the ambient audio (which included the sound of the cameraman’s sleeve over the condenser mike only at the very beginning.)

Then there was the passion mi espousa has for anything with Vigo Mortgenstern in it. Alternately, Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers I admit I’d admired from afar; that is to say: I’d like to say I’d read him, hadn’t. However, after the amazing “No Country For Old Men”, it was pretty hard not to miss the reviews of his book “The Road”, described as his most harrowing work in a c.v. that already has enough blood and guts to compare with Peckinpaugh on a bad day. So, the film version wasn’t exactly my cup of holiday nog, if you know what I mean.

And neither would be the ultimate disaster flick of the moment, “2012”. The tv spots seemed to offer all the dramatic equivalent of a trip to Six Flags. (“More Destruction! More Fun!”—which may be too local a reference…) I had also seen a few clips of John Cusak defending his choice of leading man rather sheepishly, as if to say: Hey, being an Indie fave is all well and good, but you gotta pay the bills too. My mea culpa is: after items one and two...sheer curiosity.

So, codicils and drawbacks aside, there is something to be said for this serendipitous alignment of the dark matter, and here it is.

The appearance of Woody Harrelson in the first and the last is no coincidence. For some time now he has represented some figure on the fringe of the national consciousness. The wild-eyed stare of gonzo is his speciality; the kind of madness that brooks no compromise. (And, yes, I know he does subtle roles as well, but this is dealing with his almost type-casting as an over-the-top extremist.) In “Zombieland”, you have a world (“two months since patient zero took a bite out of a burger at a Gas 'N' Gulp") perfectly suited to someone for whom the rules have never applied, one which is now the equivalent of a free-fire zone for mayhem and slaughter. It then becomes significant that his character establishes himself before you even see his face, driving a Cadillac Escalade with a snowplow front, weaving amongst the abandoned vehicles on some interstate like the Grim Reaper in an SUV. But it is the tell-tale sign of the Number 3, crudely painted on the door (and repeated later on a HumVee) which signals, to the cogniscienti, that he is a follower of the cult of the king of the stock car racers, the late Dale Earnhart—“The Intimidator”. Even though the nerd-protagonist, Columbus, is the narrator (with his “rules” that float upon the screen whenever in a situation of possible danger arises), it is Tallahassee who gives the story its organizing principle. So then, firmly grounded in a kind of redneck defiance of conventions and a love of arbitrary violence (like choosing to off the flesh-eaters by banjo, bat, shears and even, unnecessarily, an open car door), what follows allows for the gallow’s humor to take over what has been a staple of sheer terror-mongering ever since “Night of The Living Dead” in 1966. Black comedy is usually limited to drawing room plays, like “The Truth About Harry” (Hitchcock’s only foray into the genre) or “Arsenic and Old Lace” or such, wherein death is treated more as a guest who has overstayed his welcome. Not to give anything away (as if it matters) but it is such that, on their cross country peregrination that they stop in Beverly Hills to pay homage to a great star by visiting his mansion. That star is Bill Murray playing himself. And playing himself playing a zombie—with stage make-up (“I like to blend in...just corn starch, a little berries, some licorice for the ladies…”) to make himself look like a zombie because, “it suits my lifestyle. I like to get out and do stuff...” With zombies. Right. And that he could also die a comic death only underscores the levity.

Nothing could be further from this than sitting in the theater for “The Road”. The apocalypse that this is post- is never specifically ID’ed. In an interview, McCarthy has speculated that it sounds like, to friends of his in a high-level think-tank study group he hangs out with, a possible result of meteor showers. This is what gives an unrelieved gray cast to everything: dun brown, ashen, an eternal twilight. The unnamed man and his boy are on a journey to “the coast” and “south” in hopes of finding someplace not completely dead. The Grim Reaper here is completely grim, and made worse by the few remaining member of our species who have, in order to survive, descended into cannibalism. This is the end we fear the most, and with good reason; to be thought of as nothing more than meat? And by beings that are capable of that thought? And who we may regard as the same as well? It not only boggles the mind, it destroys it. The terror then is amplified by the knowledge that every encounter with others is a competition for food and that other threat as well, but also that the focus of the story is a father trying to save a young son, one who has never known another world than this, and thus must always be viewed through the eyes of innocence. This amps it into another zone: no threat is greater; no stakes greater. Even the few moments of tenderness or humanity are then tinged with fear as well, never knowing when this basic economic necessity may crop up.

To round it out, thrill-rides are well known by now to sell popcorn in buckets and sodas in gallon-cups. There is little else we can expect, or even should. But there are a few which have, at least, some semblance of scientific reality about them, conforming physical laws, and offering more than cardboard cut-outs for CGI to play out around. This isn’t, exactly, the worst one I’ve ever seen. But its close. The first 40 minutes are the introduction of primary and secondary characters (most of the latter killed off for effect, as you guessed from the moment they entered the picture), then comes the carnage, as advertised. Cusak is the divorced father who has written a rather unsuccessful sci-fi novel (which sold 400 copies and sounds like that was a stretch) and becomes privy to the auguries on a camping trip with his adorable children in Yellowstone. This is where he meets Woody. Introduced as a wild-eyed, pickle-munching prophet of doom, this sets him up as a cross between Art Bell (the famed overnight UFO-ologist/conspiracy theory talk radio legend) and one of the Black Israelites who quote scripture over bullhorns in Times Square. Being off his rocker but only just, he is also privy to the secret information of “the End” AND the governmental conspiracy to save a few remnants of the species from it. You are not supposed to ask any more questions, ok? Not, why do the cell phones work when there are no more repeater towers? Not, oh—so the survival is going to begin in Africa after the plates stop shifting….and there’s going to be no dust cloud from all those volcanoes spewing earth and dust into the atmosphere? Not, why is CNN covering quakes in South America when California has just slid into the Pacific? Not, how much product placement can you feature in a catastrophe before people begin to associate your brand with a disaster? Any more examination would do a disservice to logic. Suffice it to say, the last 30 minutes…well, the black guy sitting across the aisle from me summed it up well, during one impassioned speech, muttering, under his breath “oh niggah, pleeze…”

Yup.

But one more thing. The volume levels for the pre-show commercials--just way way to bury the needle in the red. And the selection? One for the National Guard to that Carl Orff "O Fortuna"-type over-the-top exhorted-chorus to jump cuts of uniforms in Power Ranger stances, all re-enforcing the holy warrior subliminal message (or maybe it was also those "Avatar" previews). The one for this Glenn Beck X-mas story so indescribable I really don't want to recall it. (But who would go to this thing? In Manhattan? I fail to see the market.) Gad. When did someone get the brilliant idea that you could sell things to a captive audience and it wouldn't actually alienate them from your product? It makes TCM feel like paradise.

(Move it along.)

Point is, this is IT, folks. Nada. Zip City. The Big Zero at the end of the Zeros. The Last Gas For...(nah, I can't stretch it that far.) Outside of "2012", none of them really reference The Rapture and the whole Book of Revelations just blends into backstory. There is no "On The Beach" civility or "going to meet your maker" jazz, nor bitter, rueful irony. The only values that anyone possesses, common in all three, are that we really do treasure our links to each other. "What a piece of work is man," said the Bard, and he's still got the goods on us. Sure, he was speaking from an ethnocentric viewpoint of Anglo-European domination of international commerce and geo-political territorial possessions, but it wasn't wrong then or now. This is what endures. And yeah, all three use family as a focus for this, which in one is an iron compact with Life, in another pretty cheap; and in the last another plot device. Still, what need for morals or faith or social behavior? Really? Yes, I would prefer the Man and his Boy of "The Road" because they are real...but in reality, I don't think I'd be around long in that story. And the Epicalypse? Hey, I've never won Lotto, what's the likelihood I'll get a plane in the nick of time? But why am I looking for myself in these final curtains? It actually goes all the way back to Tom Lehrer's "We Will All Go Together When We Go" and Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War Three Blues". When I heard them, something about my youthful paranoia and gloom seemed to dissipate in these cheery threodenies. And what did Tom hook me with? "And we will all go together when we go/What a comforting fact that is to know/Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement/Yes, we all will go together when we go." And Bob? "Nowadays it seems/everybody's havin' these dreams/...I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

See? I gotta let it go. If there's nothing more to live for, and I discount kinship systems of any kind, then you might as well laugh your head off. So, the only one of the three I'd consider watching a second time is "Zombieland". It may start on "The Road" but it ends up in an amusement park, and if I gotta go, it might as well be from a busted gut.

“Nut up or Shut Up”

2009-10-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

Of late, discussions in the office have brought about a fuller understanding of this “phrase that pays”, so to speak. As the subheading of the adverts for “Zombieland” it obviously refers to the other popular locution, “Man Up”: i.e., to act like a man; do not whimper or complain but, instead, to demonstrate the courage of your convictions. The sum total of this text is to create an Us vs. Them proposition wherein opposing sides cease the war of words and, in effect, join in combat.

In previous eras, the phrase “to get one’s nut” or “to make our nut” was the slang showpeople used for the cost of goods and services in the presentation of a performance (or whatever) weighted against box office receipts: i.e., “the net”. How it got down to “nut” I have no idea. (I would suggest asking William Safire, but, like “Mistah Kurtz” in “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, “he dead”.)

However, there is a secondary effect as well. In Hip Hop, or Gangsta, or whatever label you choose for post-Rap lingo, the meaning takes on a fuller dimension. In Too Short’s old usage (back in the ‘90s, or ‘80s depending upon when you twigged yer wig), to get your “nut” was to find male sexual release. Hence, today, “nut up” is the completion…with prejudice..solo. It remains an open question as to whether the campaign for the movie was designed with that in mind yet there is no doubt it cannot but help benefit from it as lots of testosterone-oriented persons find it equally provocative and humorous.

H.L. Mencken and Marshal McLuhan would be proud of any and all of these definitions, and maybe even Carl Sandburg. This is “the language that” not only “rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work”, but, does triple duty in the measure. And, as well, engages the imagination and provides a continuous flow from one generation to the next.

Slang is a beautiful thing.

October is the time for catch-up ball in the extreme

2009-10-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

Another hiatus, another afflatus. At first, it would have been 'coming to terms' with the nature of the Blog: spontaneity. Then, it was the words themselves: chosen? found? Finally, some sort of arrangement of them into... Ok. Not that it matters, but it occurred to me that if I wanted to say something, it might sound better than just blowing in the wind...

The trick of talking and not saying anything, and garnering a lot of attention, is easy. Look at Glenn Beck. So much is written about him and his fantastic ravings that the essential picture is being missed. There is a philosophical method of argument called, loosely, "the sacrificial straw dog". In this, you simply set up an extreme that is wholly outrageous and then allow other people to take note of the obvious: why, he's insane! Then you can say: of course he is! Now you can't really compare him with me!?! Can you? I'm the reasonable one...and therefore, whatever arguments you make that are just as insane, but couched in calmly, must be considered as valid. Even when they are ludicrous.

Another illustration of how such a ruse works can be seen in the health care debate. By letting semi-pro flacks and rabid-rousing radio rangers ramp up the rhetoric via lunatic fringes of crowds, while placing "outside agitators" (amazing, no?--that was once used during the civil rights' marches era to describe voting and poll workers and lunch-counter sit-ins with 'yankees stirrin' up our colored folk', etc. such it is how the wheel goes around) inside town halls, the "silent majority" (another jaw-dropper, eh?) is effectively negated. The content (conservative think-tank tick-tock disguised as fervent homespun stories of heartland issues forgotten by the Eastern Standard Liberal Establishment) isn't at issue here, and neither is the form. It is in the summary.

But that's not where I wanted to begin.

I wanted to start by listing some books I'd read. Then I thought: that's really tooting your horn, isn't it? That said, I'm blowing the whistle on my ambitions; the way out of the labyrinth is showing the tracks and letting others follow if they have a mind to, if so inclined. However, there is also the beauty of the track in the snow. The best way to do that is to make a case for some startling models of classical physics which could translate into quantum mechanics: Mandelbrot's fractals and Cantor dusts. Equally, that Primo Levi's meditation on the periodic table of Elements is a God's-eye-view of what scientists call 'metals'--which should be touted as same by the 'Intelligent Design" school, if they had a whit of wit betwixt them. And, moreover, how the Theory of Evolution and the General Relativity Theory seemed to both be on the same track to the same laws, and we could see them too if only we had more perspective. On the other hand, the curiosity of how the same relationship pattern runs through so many peak-bonding and break-ups among French men of arts and letters--Robespierre and Danton, Camus and Sartre, Godard and Truffaut, Debord and Lefebvre--that you might think it also display some kind of law, but would be even more hard-pressed to find one out of those pairings than the Darwin/Einstein connection.

But then I thought about Jim Carroll.

Here's one or two things I know about him.

Back in the day, I'd interviewed him and written about him for a couple of mags, and was on what we call a 'nodding acquaintance', like: when I see you I make eye contact and offer the briefest of head jogs, just to say, I acknowledge your existence. And that exchange would be every year he'd show up to the St. Marks Poetry Marathon on New Years Day. For the last few, it was pretty much excerpts from his book, his first real novel. It will probably be published soon and I'll buy a copy like everyone else. But when I read it I will hear his voice. I always hear his voice whenever I read his words. Halting, almost at the edge of a stammer, reedy as befits an Irish Catholic Boy, and with the faintest taste of whistle. He had a similar way of addressing the mike, preferring the stationary angle-poise fixture to a hand-held, always rocking it forward and back--no different between slinging it onstage at the Ritz or Irving Plaza or at a quiet reading. At one time he WAS All-City and played against a really tall black rail named Lew Alcindor, who we now know as Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And according to Jim, "I may not have been able to smoke him, but he'd get game all the same". See? Modest too? "It wasn't the heroin that seduced me away from basketball, but poetry." And in no way in love with death, or maudit morbidity, despite junkie-saint persona in the press, and all the hoopla surrounding the Columbine incident. He'd rather talk about Love, carnal and eternal, like Abelard and Elouise. But all people seem to really use is his own ready-made-for-MTV-memorial (well, probably VH1, these days) obit, the soundtrack of which be on every commercial-break bumper outro: "Those Are People Who Died".

I prefer to think of how he lived.

Which brings me to what would appear to be an idiotic comparison; all the former rhetorical jizz vs. a guy who makes love with the muse. Not quite, yet; it is the stuff in between that is what matters. In between what? Those subjects...on this page. So let's examine the latter first. Jim would talk street (which is now "ghetto"? or "hood"?) but also come up with dazzling classical refs and do it in the course of the same conversation, even same sentence. When you say, 'I hung on every word', that's just what that means. You never know where the next turn of phrase will take you so you'd better pay attention. That's the kind of speech (not in the sense of "prepared" but the general one of spoken language) I enjoy the most, and which, coincidentally enough, is also the subject at the core of Information Theory.

That's the stuff in between, the stuff I read. (Yes. I know. Didn't expect that, did you? Honestly, that's the fun of this: neither did I.)

When Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver came up with the whole shebang at Bell Labs in 1948, it was pretty arcane stuff. At the core it was the measurement of Information Entropy, which "quantifies the uncertainty involved when encountering random variables". If this seems too far afield of the subject, just accept that this is the basis of packet-switching, which is the sum total of what actually happens in this service called the Internet. The essential idea to get, for the purpose of this essay, is the comparison of two packets of data, seeing what doesn't match in the other, and then figuring out whether that was an error in transmission, or new data to incorporate. Today, it boils down to what has entered the common usage as "signal-to-noise ratio". It actually has an even simpler manifestation: the Surprise Factor. What led me down this bizarre, jagged path was Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan". In it, he was describing how much space/room/storage/volume (whatever) it took to convey something like, well, his book--to illustrate the point. On every page, it seemed, he was taking turns into history and philosophy and mathematics and economics and even popular culture that could neither be anticipated by what preceded it nor dismissed as immaterial to what succeeded it. You needed almost as much space to get everything in it IN IT as there was in it.

(That last bit sounds a tad desperate. Or maybe impassioned? Let's leave it at that.)

Taleb cited Shannon and Weaver as saying much the same. To recap the previous, the whole issue of 'transmitter/receiver' is important only when the transmitter has more information than the receiver. The receiver can have all this data, and it can be complete, as far as its particular set goes. (I will not digress into set theory here except to say that's the part about this that led to Cantor sets and, hence, Cantor dusts. Yeah. Not today.) But, when the transmitter sends something new, that is a surprise. And not only that, it changes things: the parameters of the set, the organization of the data, the priorities, even 'what you know'. Sure, that all goes without saying. And something else that goes without saying: EVERYTHING ELSE!

This is where the other part comes in. Unless you are speaking only to a population composed entirely short-term memory loss patients, you do not have to repeat everything every time! Stop the presses, break up the front page and get out an extra: nobody cares if you are a talking-point parrot! At least nobody who has any self-respect. The aforementioned with the attention spans of ants may be what keeps your ratings up but, outside of the 24-hr cable circle jerk, this doesn't even count as high as yesterday's papers: you can't wrap fish in them or line the bird cage. Yet, there they are, always in your face or ear, buzzing about things which have no value of any kind because they are not enduring truths but merely enduring signals, caught in a loop like Bernie Maddoff walking out of 500 Pearl Street, accompanied by his attorney and the media pack, for the last time. They run that footage (along with his one shove of an obnoxious cameraman) over and over because they don't have anything else to fill in the time. And the only reason they stay on the air for people stare at is that they don't have anything else to fill in their lives.

This is not 'News'; this is something like 'Olds'. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of it as it is labelled, but it needs active resistance. I will admit, learning to ignore that which offers nothing new requires a lot of discipline. Kinda like not turning your head when an attractively-attired teenaged member of your desired gender-group passes on the sidewalk. I would be remiss not to admit that I will still have occasion to watch Olberman or even Maddow, despite my pledge to only attend to Stewart, as I find more honesty in comedy than comity in honesty. Who needs the agita?

Now, to get back to the alternate. A poet requires much more attention, given. And there's nothing even vaguely au courant about a bound volume. You are not going to be able to offer commentary on, oh, say, some local municipal scandal, or outrageous testimony before a Senate subcommittee, or even a special report on sex-slaves in the Suburbs! No, you are going to have nothing to say which anyone would be interested in as your take on the pre-digested pap and "press-play" press releases disguised as reportage. And isn't that awful? But you will feel a whole lot better about being powerless...and you may even find some power in that. I have to admit, I hadn't picked "Fear of Dreaming" off the wall in a while. It was strange, though, how only a few pages in, I am walking on a beach with Carroll as he ruminates on romance and mortality, using flash images of sky and waves to put me, perhaps, in the same Coney Island Of The Mind that Lawrence Ferlinghetti did for us both, how many ages ago? And that's a surprise because it isn't the same waves and the same sand and the same walk as the last time, but it is just as engaging.

And his voice lives in my head; even as a vague outline of an awkward crow casting shadows on my wall. I am not hiding my head in the sand of his beach; I am paying attention to that which offers me information--real information. It may be objected that, "Oh, you're saying that art is preferable to Life! Sure! But I have to live in the REAL WORLD, chum!" Uh-huh. Like just because something is broadcast over airwaves by living humans, that this somehow constitutes "Life", the "REAL WORLD"? Try swallowing a little quantum physics and superstring theory and then tell me you know what is real. That stuff is based on mathematics, which is a whole lot more certain than anything you have your retirement funds in, I can assure you. Or grasp a tiny fragment of "Origin of the Species" or even the great library of popularizers of this monumental work and then let's discuss the situation of Man on Earth.

This is why I didn't want to do a reading list at the top. I am getting more and more smug by the phrase. It is only that, and here's the payoff: talking heads and op-eds tell me why people think they are right, and none of them cite any authorities which could remotely be related to the "REAL WORLD". This blog was actually, physically, begun during a rare moment of personal civic engagement in which I decided that, instead of talking the talk, I would walk the walk. Things did change, enough so that I moved onto more cerebral concerns, perhaps, but that doesn't negate the experience, any more than research into original sources of enlightenment means I'm a book-learnin' snob. If Jim's right, about a "Fear of Dreaming", then sure, you can accuse me of living in a dream world...only if you'll admit you're living in a delusion.

Now, if that seems like an extraordinary request, remember: we are merely coming to terms.

...idyll, not idle...

2009-07-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

As much has transpired since last we met, allow me to slide, elide, and glide thru the high points.

Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra pays tribute to Sly & the Family Stone (as you can see here) was a week ago, but that doesn't mean its over, for me. If I could hazard a guess, I would say that it was so easy to get into (physically) because it had no "big name" guests in the line-up, outside of the aged sage of Funkadelic keyboards, Bernie Worrell and Vernon Reid, BRC/Living Color guitarist. Yeah, but with material like this, who needs a Who's Who? As this is not a review blog, I will limit myself to but a few comments. Bernstein may have arranged the Family Stone set for the nonet to maximize instrumental voices, yet he's no slouch in picking his people pipes either. Now Sandra St. Victor was fine, and Dean Bowman can toss African glossolia like Leon Thomas and still belt it from the bottom. But Shilpa Ray's cover of "Everyday People", pumping away on harmonium and seeming to open her mouth wider than her head, and Martha Wainwright's interp of "Que Sera Sera"...while both were certainly Sly's own showstoppers, they also proved to be theirs. This is here just to remind all that Fame may make it easier to use your talents, but it can never surprise you like up-&-comets whizzing out of the night sky.

Before that was a long weekend in Bermuda. Forget the cliche of your parent's getaway, and your preferred Cancun or Ft. Lauderdale school-breaks. It really is like nothing else out there. A hunk of limestone with stalactite caves that date back to the 2nd Ice Age and the entire 34-kilometer coastline dotted by public beaches, some with sand as smooth as human skin, over Magritte/Ernst rocks under skies with random rainbows. But when it gets dark, then you remember why the early sailors called this "the island of devils". It wasn't due to the fact that the ring of shoals around the whole has been the cause of some 30-40 shipwrecks thru various eras. No, it is due to the night calls of the tree frog. Neither as extreme as Lou Reed's "Machine Metal Music" nor as ambient as Fripp & Eno, their soiree serenade will remind only the tone-deaf of countryside crickets. To walk thru them after the rain is almost deafening, and when you get home, their choruses are barely drowned out by the air-conditioner hum, even on full.

So many blogs have much more gorgeous vacay photos, I will not attempt to compete. Then, to that end, an end.

...a toast for the King of Pop...

2009-06-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

KING RICHARD II

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

...it's just a temporary condition, I'm certain...

2009-06-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

For once, I am not going to write this in my usual style, composing in Open Office 2.0 (a fine text-handling/spreadsheet program with many more options than I have use for, and when I get flush, I plan to donate mad cash to their organization as thanks for making this alternative to MS Word available) and then transferring to the html-processor provided by Google. It may make the flow better, and improve the overall flow, but it also slows me down. However, as on this occasion, when I have an actual bee in my bonnet, I feel it best to open the window and wave the buzzer out rather than let it flit about anymore, and give it a chance to sting me.

It is also a rite of exorcism.

See I've got Uighur
on the brain. There is probably a name for what I have; some sort of pathological thing with "itis" at the end. I would call it a merely a fixation because it probably isn't extreme enough to be called a condition. In the immediate analysis, I can put the major mind-lock down to the funny name. It is pronounced "WEE-gur". It makes me go numb and grin every time I say it, or think it. Which I do, too often. This is possibly due to the smurf story in the news simultaneously.

For the complete data package behind this you could hit the links and see for yourself, but the upshot is, in this instance, the strange tale of how innocent civilians ended up in US military authority. I had to look it up because, in all the broadcast pieces on this, nobody bothered to tell me WHY these people were detained, and even here (see link above) there is no explanation of HOW it took so long to free them. EIGHT YEARS? IN PRISON FOR EIGHT YEARS? That should be enough outrage in and of itself. The idea that anyone could be astonished by the government paying 11 million dollars per person to post-patriate them to a Pacific paradise is what drops my jaw.

On the other hand, you have an offshoot of the human species (Hip-o-Campus Goofus) painting themselves blue and being neither commemorators of Pict/Celt/Scot warriors in Woad nor the incarnations of Krishna but of a French comic strip which found a brief vogue in the mid-80's as both a cartoon and a method of Breakdancing. (Which makes me wonder if they were dancing to DJ Kool Herc or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five or Slick Rick or Kurtis Blow or The Fat Boys or even DJ Jazzy Jay and The Fresh Prince...ah!, those were some fine, fun times...)

This has nothing to do with reason. It does have to do with a free-associative imagination. It is not so much that I want to reduce a population to a caricature, a cipher, a symbol of the "alien"--which is, as far as I can figure out, how they ended up in Guantanamo--but, somehow, I have to, can't stop it. The Weegurs are small blue homunculi with white trousers and gasconne caps, and will soon being to thrive amid the palm trees and coconut groves, in a totally predator-free environment (sans-Gargamel and cat, you see), creating a truly marvelous civilization in miniature which we will then dub Lemuria because of the way they all swarm together like some hive mind...

That is not a Wikipedia definition from the deranged. It is just the way I am, and, right now, I think I need medication.

"Friends, Roamers, countrymen, lend me your earbuds..."

2009-06-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

(Why another Shakespeare-framed number? It's kinda like the Bible for secular humanists: you can quote it as often as you like and without explanation.)

"This groove is out of fashion  These beats are 20 years old" -- Strange Overtones, David Byrne/Brian Eno

It may come as something vaguely shadowing your track, behind and away; not so close as to be conspicuous but never far, dogged, nagging--not so intrusive as the cough you can't suppress but more: the itch you can't scratch. The nuisance of knowing there's something you should be liking more but have no idea why your appreciation should be less than it ever was, not the same as it ever was.

When the new David Byrne/Brian Eno collaboration got its first ink in the New York Times, a lot of us were agog, if not a-twitter (which presents an entirely different verb in the instant moment), with anticipation. It was nice to know it would be out soon but that isn't the same as when you would have made sure the release date was marked on your calendar. Thing was, no matter how much you may have liked Byrne in the past, nothing in the 'solo' catalogue has really grabbed you since "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" (which wasn't all that far from a Talking Heads album of the era). So when the above lines were included in the body copy of the report as song lyrics, you were, of course, intrigued. Who wouldn't be, eh? Historical context in Adult Contemporary? And self-reference to one's own oeuvre? But also a promise, implicit in that line, that this would be real old-style, old school.

So, you play the album and...

The start of this goes back further. It was the question: what is it about modern music that leaves me cold? The quick response would be: your own lack of warmth...or, the lack of James Blunt in your romantic agenda. On the other hand, a gal pal o'mine avows that "Something" by George Harrison is the greatest smooch music of our time, showing that this can be endlessly debated, as much as the cuteness factor of the Jonas Brothers vs. early Beatles, and those who would "Usher" in more candidates, say Go "West" old man...

But that's not where I'm going with this.

As it so happens, the only news-reading I do on a semi-regular basis is the New York Times. It isn't snobbery; more like, listening to the attributions on the major broadcasters and comparing their breaking reports to yesterday's edition. It usually comes up: Been There, Done That. (Incidentally, also another Eno collaborative effort, this one with John Cale.) So when I cite two authorities from the Grey Lady, you will understand it may look like a generational position paper, or some kind of taste-test ticket-to-ride, but it ain't. Just coincidence.

There was a thesis put forth by Jon Pareles, from what was probably considered a minor "think piece" years back, with respect to why and when people stop listening to new music. And by new I don't mean "new" as in avant garde. I mean new as in anything not old. Like contemporary. Like popular in the present. Like "of the moment". His conclusion: you stop listening at about the same time you settle down to adult responsibilities and raising a family, or, generally, when you hit your late 30's. And it makes sense too, delineating estrangement from the point at which you begin to think of one thing as "my music" and everything else as "their music" (more or less, as I recollect it). Then there was another, more recent, op-ed by Kalef Sanneh on "Rockism" which came to similar conclusions, albeit, to my mind, much more patronizing, smug and age-baiting. Rather than go into them in detail, I feel it fair to say that while the latter sounds its argument in prejudice, the former is more wistful, even conciliatory, in expressing something like regret that we cannot sustain the adventure of living (& listening) in the present as we did in the past.

I cite the above because they are the most cogent and intelligent articles I've read on the subject in some time, speaking to me from the stance of people who actually care about this stuff as much as I once did. In my span of years, I had stayed with the revolution, party and party-hearty, for as long as I could--at least until I found I was the only one left under the banner. Which may not, in actuality, be true, but certainly the cessation of my writing about music, and the culture in general, can be attributed to the fact of editors stopped listening to my suggestions, and then stopped returning my calls.

But I come not to Pareles seizure, but to borrow him. And not to slam Sanneh; for brutes, he’s an honorable man.

At any rate, something had changed; either I, or my appreciation, had become no good. This is not to gripe but to establish that I have, in my time, not been all that different from the aforementioned—if not on the NYT level. Therefore, I have both reason and background for putting forth the following.

When I played “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” nothing really grabbed me. And that was worse than disappointing. These are master craftsmen of a school I have always enjoyed and I refused to admit that they could have gotten so lame as to think this bland slab of Wonderbread was even worth toasting. So, could it possibly be me? Had I, as described in the “rockist” profile, become so calcified and truculent as to be inured to the subtle beauties of this? Just because it wasn’t a big hit in the charts? (As if that was ever a concern?)

No. What I hadn’t factored in was the Distraction Factor. In the old days, I would have played a new purchase two or three times a day, studied the album art and liner notes (usually under some form of sensory augmentation, it must be said), until I had gleaned every last byte of info from the experience. At most, I would have read a comic book, but that would be an extreme case of stimulust. Today, if not catching up on hanging clothes, checking e-mail, updating the Tivo (or whatever that new cable box is called), or trying to see if I can find something in the ‘files’, then I would be doing them all at once, or twice. I’ve known for a while that I wasn’t bringing enough to the table to make up my share, but now it was getting terminal. Like: I couldn’t even put a little time aside to figure out how to enjoy something?

Well, it comes down to the MEDIUM, I guess. And long-suffering friends (few though they may be) recognize that I might be veering into McLuhan territory. Suffice it to say, I put enough of that on the other blog.

Then, what I actually refer to it the method of transmission, and that would be the iPod. As is my habit and practice, I d-l’ed it to make sure that, when a hook or a line came around, that I’d at least try to put the sinker in my head by looking up the song title. But what struck me was not something new as much as an earlier…inclusion, of… exactly what? I can’t say. Maybe it will come to me in better terms later. Right now, it was this faint nimbus of consciousness that songs had gone so much further than verse/chorus/verse/ chorus/bridge/chorus that there was no reason a title had to be anything more than a tangent to the matter of the rest of the lyrics. So what was I trying to attach to, and WITH, exactly?

Colbert called it his "magic brick", and GOD, I thought that was awfully funny. For a lot of people, however, especially those with high-end sound systems, it is considered as much a pine box in Potter's Field: stripped of all adornment (i.e.; EQ, etc.), the vibes coming out at 128-320kbs into pair of microscopic speakers are tantamount to John Doe's graveyard--a nameless, graceless, barren plot of ground where nothing may grow but rank and bitter weeds. Or at least a premature burial. (Also, one of Poe's most frightening stories, to me.) So then, perhaps it is a casket of hopes, more than a cedar chest? This is something I cannot shake nor fault; it is a given that the analog sound of a vinyl record is superior to the AAD version. Yet this particular subject is not, never was, and never will be, vinyl. It is straight DDD to DDD, which negates that argument. The other one is the missing 'vibes', or, the missing frequencies. Ok. Valid...except when you are a bit long in the tooth, with far-from-factory-spec listening equipment. Yes, I'm not talking dog-whistle sensitivity either. That is then when you want to concentrate on mid-range and not worry about the infinite. However, we are the clever mammals; the one's with opposable thumbs, right? And as I am reminded of the horror of Edgar Allen Poe, so I am reminded of H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West: Reanimator"...or the 1985 movie. (Who can say?) WE MUST NOT ACCEPT DEATH! (Ahem...little lurid there, eh?) There should be a way, a trick even, to get more out of this electronic bleed to my earbuds. Hence the title...(...but let's not hammer it too much, pal.) The idea was to find a way to turn the 'coffin' into the 'magic brick'. Yes, it could tell me song titles, and show the art but...

Then it hit me: no matter how strange the phrasing of the singer, and cantilevered the rhythms, if you knew what at least a portion of the tune was about, you stood a better chance of getting into the groove, if only for that anticipation that comes along with any endeavor where you are a participant—passive or active. That moment when you say: Oh yeah…I know that bit! And more: to see it IN CONTEXT!--what came before and what comes after.

Lest you think it is Ego, please let me dissuade you of that notion. It is precisely the opposite. To lose oneself inside the material it is necessary to overwhelm yourself with the entirety of the Other--that whichever you want to assimilate into your being. You must utterly surrender to the work, at least once, every last bit of it, an infostream in the veins where the blood replaces the intellect...but also functions as one.

Because...no matter how much we may say ‘it is the music that matters, not the words’, when you get beyond mindless floorwax (with beats designed to move rooms), jazz and classical, or some ethnic specialty which dazzles on its own merits—completely freed from all associations and filled with an internal modality that moves one emotionally through sheer catharsis—sooner or later, even those of the most desultory curiosity will end up scratching their head and looking for the lyric sheet. If only to find out exactly what it was you were pumping your fist in the air to express, and about whom, you've got to check out the other half of the experience.

Having been aware of the iPod option to store and show song lyrics for some time, I decided to try my hand, literally. I would, for a brief period only, become one of those totally self-absorbed idiots who stop on subway stairwells to answer the phone or push strollers into crowds texting like mad or check their e-mail in the middle of the street, oblivious of the fact that there are others sharing their airspace. I would not only listen but read, while in motion.

Now, there's one more thing to add here as well. There's a lot of amusement these days and even some countenance given to such things as "air guitar" competitions. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade so let's just say, whatever... Others, especially girls, so I am given to understand, like dancing--whatever...blows your dress up. Mosh pits, ah...well, same impulse, perhaps, but...what...is that? Motion and music. AM radio, muscle cars, freeway flying and backstreet cruising--for a lot of us, these values (encapsulated in Springsteen songs circa '72-'79) were an excitation to a part of our brain that was neither related to sex or money or ambition or fantasy or mystery yet could touch on them all simultaneously and find tangents never before envisioned. This was the way we could focus full concentration on the songs and store an emphatic charge of interest without even having to carve out a sacred space in the brain. You only had to do two things at once: drive, and fall in love.

This may seem a bit extreme of a claim but think about it. Or don't. This is my opinion and it doesn't need any defense. You've either been to the mountain top or you haven't.

On the face of it, this might seem to belie the whole bit about learning lyrics. Ah, no, it don't. Top 40 hits, then FM jocks who would add in commentary with the playback lists, then 8-tracks, all made for a very tight set of tunes in heavy rotation. Constant repetition was also a benefit when learning the cadences and speech eccentricities of the singers and thereby enhanced the appreciation. Of course, the final factor can't be ignored either: the slang, the nuanced phrase, the emphasis, the elision--all these things were part of the message. And even if the message was only "I love her/And she love's me" it resonates through the cosmos with only one more line, "But I don't fit/In her society". The "Down in the Boondocks" excerpt merely demonstrates how much more the whole can mean when you fit all the parts fit together. (Which isn't to say that one bit is better than another, or doesn't have a life of it's own. Just ask Herbert West.)

That said, David Byrne's website is most accommodating with the lexical portion. Copy and paste, then... Byrne's strangulated croon has always been among the most extreme in modern rock, but he's pretty articulate--in print. When the words come out, especially when accompanied by music, they don't follow the standard linear exposition. Like poetry, each one finds its own end-of-line, and in its own time, and meter. So, if this is a review, it sure took me a long time to get to the point, didn't it? Lester Bangs is pithy, by comparison. Rather, think of the following as an illustration of the discoveries that free-association and active participation may produce.

But to skip back a graph, there was a reason I said "lexical portion" rather than just "words". in some languages, the look of a word also carries meaning, and, like poetry, a particular stress at one point modifies what came before as well as that which comes after. And then there's the album art. The house that comes as the cover is an orthographic projection which might be from an AutoCAD program or a screen shot from one of "The Sims" suite of suburban dreams. In the modern era, I don't need to tell you that it is the symbols (a/k/a "signifiers", if you like Lacan) that matter most, and are most enriched by the overall gesamstkunstwerk (that lovely, crazy German word for the whole ball of wax, the whole shootin' match).

That it opens with "Home" pretty much reveals what's behind this mind. As the shuffle-cascade emerges from the gauzy synth layers, the allusions are inescapable. References Paul Simon's catalogue (both the "an old photograph" line--"Kodachrome"--and the Simon & Garfunkel refrain) get you as solid as the brick-&-mortar image on the front suggests. This clearly shows how deep the authors can go, indirectly, to play with their audience's roots. There is also quite a bit about David tapping his own as well, a nascent spirituality not present since Rei Momo, yet one always quietly napping in the background of Talking Heads material as well.

“My Big Nurse” embraces something between mother and lover in a waltz-across-Texas-of-“all the possibilities”,which comes in the form of a list of neo-aphorisms. And it is this same sort of piling-up of examples of human frailties and household calamities that builds up through possibly the highest-energy number here, "I Feel My Stuff"--augmented by what is the only guitar solo of any notice and one of the weirdest Eno riffs ever: a crazy arpeggio along a piano keyboard like a skittering spider. This would appear to be a full recitation of non-sequitors except for the fact that the whole draws the strands together to reveal that, even in these helpless circumstances, the one thing we CAN count on, and control, is our “stuff”, as much as the early test pilot’s of Tom Wolfe’s book called it…and leaving it just as undefined. The cut “Life Is Long” could easily be mistaken for “Soul To Soul”, which has equal prominence in the chorus and is delivered with the same punctuation and prominence, but when that kicks in, sinking the hook in with “Chain me down/But I Am Still Free” and that "whoaOaa!" interjections, you get enough organic juice boot from the baritone saxophone boost to slow fuck, or get a Deadhead to truck.

The themes of light, river, water, all re-enforce the wonder of continued existence while alluding to one beyond as well. Moreover, the title cut may be the dreamiest, if only that it goes all the way back to “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens” from “Fear of Music” (1978). With a slight update, the fadeout repeat on “nothing has changed but nothing’s the same” might be seen in the same suspension, even down to the sustained chords of the church organ and questions to “o my brother”. That he’s not addressing Eno (or maybe he is--after all these guys made some savory slabs of albs back in the day) at this point is made plain by “Strange Overtones,” the one song where they seem to be coming out of the closet, so to speak, and openly discussing the situation of their work ethic in first-person singular. “In the music you are playing/I’ll harmonize”, “Your song still needs a chorus/Iknow you’ll figure it out”, and more.

There’s a lot more I could say but rather than repeat myself, in variations, I’ll move on. But, to conclude, if this is sort of a “Second Life” survey course (The Human Condition 2.0), I would call it less 'artifice' than 'artificial life'. (And with Eno around, possible AI.)

So, what was the conclusion? That I could write a better review? Nah. Too old-style to go on and on about this. The learning lesson was that what I had previously described as a "slab of Wonderbread" now feels like a real assimilation into my aesthetic, like whole grain from the neighborhood bakery. I actually hum little bits now and (after seeing his working band do a preview on Colbert this week) am really looking forward to David's appearance in Prospect Park on Monday.

But to get back to the main point, I have now started investigating some music which I had formerly dismissed. I no longer wish to be shut out of the dialogue in the contemporary idiom, nor do I wish to reject out-of-hand any particular school of transmission of the cultural "meme". (And for that, uh...maybe take a look at my other blog or simply accept that Richard Dawkins or William Gibson, or wherever you heard the term--or just try GOOGLE!--has a pretty good binding metaphor for a concept which is as vauge and indefinable as the position and mass of an elementary particle/wave) I was thinking that maybe it was time to go back to Radiohead, and further, to van der Graaf Generator, or more, something as crazy as the late 1960's/early 70's Italian psychedelic/progressive outfit Le Orme.

Then maybe tackle some late-period Jay-Z. Out of curiosity, I did go and look at some 50-Cent and Kanye West lines before sitting down to this. And yup, while the former lives up to his rep as car-speaker breaker, can't see much contiguous content. I will grant, however, that if I were in some pimped-out ride, rolling crosstown, I might feel different. The same goes for the latter. While I may admire Kanye for his unprecedented throw-down of the gauntlet at Prezboy after Katrina, his compositions offer little more. So yeah, don't I belie the fact that I said I have to absorb the whole package? Nope. If there's nothing I like about it at all, there's no reason to begin, like nothing there I feel is worth the effort. I mean: no riffs, no hook, no guitar...you gotta start somewhere...

(Ooops! Must have betrayed my prejudice as a "rockist"...)

O judge, I meant their art has fled to brutish beats, and men have lost their reason, bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with cease-yr-jive, And I must press pause till it come back to me.

“No man is an island, entire of itself…”

2009-05-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

“…every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me…”

The time has come to acknowledge a sad truth of blogging. The sidebar adjacent to these words is a relic of interests that existed at the inception of this enterprise. If you will examine it, you will note that Any Major Dude “left home” 4 months back, and now Red Telephone 66 has ceased operation. John Donne’s meditation 17 is the lamentation aforesaid and the theme here.

This brings up something that has been bubbling about in the back brain a bit. My first attraction to the blogspot-o-sphere (specifically) was the vast reservoirs of mp3 rarities from personal collections. Having weathered the final days of Napster (and no, I was not in until the end because they didn’t have any Macintosh/Apple software until the last year), I was not unfamiliar with ‘file-sharing”, but only as an anonymous source of amazement, an endless cornucopia in a void, being able to find albums and artists I only vaguely recalled from the dim past, summoning up songs on a whim, seemingly from nought but a brisk rubbing of Aladdin’s modem.

Blogspot, however, had identities galore. For a lot of people (not necessarily you), it has always been a habit and practice to vet potential friends or lovers by an initial visit to their digs. This affords a chance to check out their furnishings, then books, then record collections, and, in the '60s, their medicine cabinets. (I purposefully ignore the implications of closets and underwear drawers as they are not germaine to this essay. And you should be ashamed of yourself!) You can figure out where this is going so I will skip over the obvious. More revealing, however, is the way each deals with the standard templates, dressing them up and fitting them out with avatar photos, quotes, and then all the available widgets. After that, the links to their favorite blogs as well—for if we are not all one in fun, none are random in fandom.

As revealing as these runes read, it was the blogger's write-ups that showed I was not alone in the zone. In praise of these obscure-to-downright-unknown records, their uploaders—waxing rhapsodic-to-effuplosive in some cases—rivaled Lester Bangs in insight and exposition. And, despite the bad rap about “stealing from the artists”, a large bulk of these were straight from vinyl to Rapidshare, without advent of re-issue, even more treasured for having missed the CD craze altogether (which I am beginning to think is as over as the 8-track). The “community” was such that I felt no compunction whatsoever in d-l’ing like a fiend, leaving only a few thanks here and there for such bounty. But more, it was the whole interaction, the conversation and creativity among the blogs (and yes, it is as if these journals of interest and observation ARE personalities and—in as much as they are fonts of self-expression—artforms equal to sprawling canvasses and ongoing performances) that kept me coming back...and lingering.

I liked these people for more than what they gave me. I liked having them around. So, I would like to cite them here as an honor roll, exporting my bookmarks to pict.files and hence into ReadIris to become text.

A Million Miles Away - ARCA DO PYRATA - A Closet of Curiosities - Acesso Raro - Alma Matters - And then the chimney spoke.... - ARSENAL-X - Back On The Road - Bring Me The Heads - California Harmony - Caverna do Som - Cheeseonion - Crap I Found at the Library - 8 Days In April - Are Friends Electric - BigO Worldwide - Cantina do Rock - Cantos e Encantos - De musica alterque - De Pouco Um Tudo - Good job I kept my turntable... - Lagrima Psicodslica - Music Eldorado - misterlesterkeen - Phlegm Noir - all that jazz - bongolong land - Bossa Nova Music - elsebasto - Fidelisharium - Groovy Fab Index - insect & individual - Kinda Kinky - Lounge Latin Funk Beat - Acid Dazed - ACID VISIONS - Acorde Final - Brazilian Nuggets - FEIJEO TROPEIRO - Marmalade Skies - Martian Shaker - The Annex - the packet switcher – TWILIGHTZONE! - zerodimension - Lost Bands Of The New Wave Era - grown so ugly - X-Y-Z -Cosmonaut - sounds of champaign (side-C) - MOODSWINGS music - PixelMutt - RecordBrother - Rato Records Blog - Razzle Tazzle - roggelstroe - Play It Again, Sam - Hipidetripi - 7 Black Notes - Skypilot - Kiddie Records Weekly - That's the Way It Is - Skunkape's Crap - The Slaughtered Lamb - Soundtrack Sharity - You Don't Have To Visit This Blog - Rare and OOP Soundtracks - Psychoplasmica - ScoreBaby Annex - Le Blog de Pekis - curved-air - Palestinian Light Orchestra - ORGY IN RHYTHM - SCORE, BABY! - Rock Progressivo Portugues - Prog Not Frog - Time Traveller - realm of [X] - zinhof - The Tuna Melt - lellebelle - Honey, Where You Been So Long - 6070Rock - Green Fuz - These Records Are BenT - The Sky Moves Sideways - It's Psych - The L.S. Bumble Bee - DISTORCOES, ACIDO E FLORES - Chocoreve - Acht Tage - Krautrockdock Ohnes - Musica para Todo - Discos Completos Varios Artistos - Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll - Musica Boa Sempre - Musicology - Solo Buena Music - The Orange Cornflake Zoo - VINYL VELHO - Time Has Told Me - EZHEVIKA FIELDS - Psychedelic Rock - The Music I Like - 1967 0 Ano da Psicodelia - Garden Of Delights - A Pound for a Brown - Artery of the Sun - thebbmusicfactory - Loronix - Sarava Club - El Diabio Tun Tun - La nuit detend - Visions of Juju - Capsula da Cultura - Abracadabra-LPs do Brazil - PEP SONIC BLUE MUSIC – Lost-In-Tyme - Quimsy's Mumbo Jumbo

The list is by no means complete; and it is not an obit. A lot of them are still around (if you wish to check out their viability, please do so by all means. I would suggest you start with this one link to totallyfuzzy and go from there), but no few have gone in for “comment moderation” in order to allay poor conduct by visitors and rude remarks or flame wars (is that term still used?), and even more have “gone private”, becoming more like clubs with memberships. This latter action being a defense against, I suppose, people stealing their “links” or reporting them to the administrators for violating copyright laws or whatever, seems to often be the case when people let their guard down to all comers in a cruel and indifferent world, which is yet another part of the sadness. And still more of them have folded their tents, gone onto other vehicles or vanished like those tunes from Aladdin's modem, into the aether from which they had come.

My only regret is that I didn't spend more time with a lot of them. They are, in point of fact, for me at least, an online village more real than anything you'll find at Second Life.

So that's the reason for the lead.

Now for the real body copy.

The idea of Sharing is not very compatible with Capitalism, which exists on the premise of acquisition for individual ownership and exclusive rights to property. There are truly expert people—and I include economists and philosophers and all those others who really give things a lot of thought—who will liken Capitalism to Democracy, using some variation on Churchill's famous line, “It's the world's worst system of government...until you consider all the others.” http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/18/depression-financial-crisis-capitalism-opinions-columnists_recession_stimulus.html Which is correct, as far as it goes. But Evolution is a funny thing; in advancing the species (more or less), it also makes certain parts useless, even obsolete. I was just reading about the human appendix here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermiform_appendix, and found “the appendix is traditionally thought to have no function in the human body” written just before secondary thought that it may have served a function in the creation of intestinal bacteria at some previous stage of existence. See? Why do humans still have to deal with leftover organs and vestigial tails? Because it takes hundreds of thousands of generations for them to vanish completely, and, in this, if in no other way (not saying I agree with him totally, nope!), validates a portion of Richard Dawkins' theory of genes and evolutionary biology: DNA has memory, that's for sure.

Back to Sharing, it is also something wherein competition is more subtle. The only “honor” or “status” conferred may come from being the first to introduce something to the group, or perhaps having discovered its essential beauty or authored the most resonant concept. We call that a “coup”. (And yes, I know it's a French word but who cares?) Among native American tribes, some of the fiercest warriors ever to grace this planet, this was, as well, a way to wage war without war. It is my opinion and belief that I have read an account of how, when the Sioux first encountered US Calvary, they thought them such poor horsemen, they would ride around them in circles and tap them with the blunt end of their spears, taking a “coup” instead of a life. It was something of a shock then, when the soldiers opened fire on them. It was as if these bluecoats had not learned the delicate art of combat and knew only brute savagery.

Yeah, I know. Kinda turns the tables on the John Wayne view of this, dud'n'it?

There's been a lot of cant bruited about in the right-wing press about the so-called “socialist agenda” and even the “communist conspiracy” of the present chief executive. I won't dignify this further but would just like to point out the panic, an almost ingrained knee-jerk reaction to these terms, that happens whenever laissez-faire capitalism is threatened by legislative reform. It is as if we must rear up on our hind legs (note the imagery of the allusion as well: primitive, feral, predatory, appealing to an animal instinct) and kill, before it becomes a menace. And why? To protect 'what is “ours”…', of course. And by that, of course, to say, '…which is “mine”'; for, in the end, there can never be an “ours” when speaking of something that I would kill for (with the exception of national service, which enters an entirely different sphere of civic participation); it must forever be “mine”—frequently, as well, from motives that are selfish and often greedy. (And if you didn't check out the link above, the title of it is “Laissez-Faire Capitalism Has Failed.” And that's from FORBES, people. Not me.)

Now, before this sprawl gets worse, I must state clearly: this is not about competing economic theories and practices of supply of goods and services and the distribution of wealth therefrom. Neither is it about the repression of blogspot uploaders by record labels, nor the issue of copyright infringement. (For a fascinating and witty presentation on that subject, I would point you towards an old friend of mine's comic book on the subject.)

No, this is about “stuff”.

I have some friends who are collectors. Almost everybody these days has one little eccentric passion or other for some serial progression of artifacts that they can file, alphabetize or arrange in orderly rows, which gives meaning to their lives and, hence, the Universe, and I can appreciate that. (Or, more simply—as they will explain when given the least opportunity to someone who has looked askance at their walls covered with Transformer dolls still sealed in their original packaging—that it is an investment opportunity which will appreciate over time as others who DO have that passion or other will pay through the nose to satisfy it. (Although, for the life of me—Nancy—Fiestaware? Can't see that.)) These are not necessarily fetishistic and sense-memory devices that go straight to our core identity like electric daemons, hot-wired to favorite stuffed animals and puree-of-whatever tastes that babies understand intrinsically as “goo-goo-goodies”…but they can be There is nothing wrong with accumulation, per se, especially when it satisfies some primal drive or urge. (Unless it is the mindless pursuit of wealth at all costs—but no, I have already said all I wish to about that subject. Thank you.) It is a bit more useful when it has some bearing on one's profession, and easier to manage if you have a spare room or basement or garage. And always better when it isn't strewn all over the place, like an infant's toys. There comes, however, a stage at which the inert matter builds up to a point where the sheer mass may constitute a potential for collapse into a dwarf star. For guys especially, this is when their “stuff” can be the cause of much friction between themselves and their girlfriends/wives. (Having little experience in G/L/T-G relationships, for all I know it could be the same, but I am not going there.)

But for one of them, in particular, this constitutes a mania. Not that that is such a bad thing or makes him anti-social or something (as is wont to happen to certain people who inordinately value inanimate objects above all else). And, as said, I am not immune to the charms of a well-ordered display of one’s possessions; it is just the word “possession” that makes me a little wary. In “The Exorcist” it was another thing altogether, but that's just, y'know, superstition. Yet, that is not so far off the march from my objective. It is one thing to own a house, or even a car; and these “big ticket items” are, without question, the most desired in most people’s lives. But after the tornado or the hurricane or the rebel uprising that led to the genocidal war, isn’t it the same thing every survivor tells the man with the mike?—I mean, after the tears for loss? “I still have my health.” Now, what kind of ownership is that?

It makes one re-think the “big ticket item” category a bit, at least. I pay approximately ten grand a year for the privilege of calling myself “insured” when, in point of fact, that coverage may turn out to be a tissue of lies, should the company decide for any reason it likes, not to honor that policy. Maybe all I “own” then is peace of mind…as long as I don’t think about it to much. But this is straying again.

The “Exorcist” reference brought up that age-old question that, for me, started when I first saw Scrooge McDuck diving into his bank vault of gold coins. “Do we own our possessions or do our possessions own us?” Ok, admittedly, anthropomorphizing and assigning motivations, wants, needs and desires to a chair is ludicrous, but not when you accept the fact that your personal space, the one you exist in, becomes overtaken, compromised even, by the amount of it you allot to said “stuff” and also by the amount of time you spend trying to keep said “stuff” in order or cleaning or just schlepping it around.

So, it was while trying to help him out, to build a “library” of sorts, that we had a discussion on this subject, and I was forced to defend my position with this: I have come to believe that I would rather have the experience of an object than the object itself.

This is a position I took a long time to come around to, or, rather, to become aware that I held. It is not something that you choose out of the box, so to speak. It requires a major disassociation from the physical touch of the sacred objects, but, as well, a re-establishment of the connection to the spirit behind those objects; what they represent, not just to the personal religion from which you formulated their worship rites, yet the actual source of their excitement towards reverence.

“Wait a minute. Where did that come from?” Is that your question? Consider: what other tangible goods do we hold in such high regard besides holy relics? This isn’t a joke: it doesn’t have to be the Shroud of Turin or the Buddha’s sandals to be venerated. Do you think the “Mona Lisa” is just a painting? These are all extreme examples, yes, but nonetheless NO DIFFERENT FROM BEATLES MEMORABILIA!

I first became aware of this when I stopped caring about my record collection. Somewhere between the ongoing debate of vinyl vs. digital and all the nuances lost and found and the quality of the former and the perfection of the latter, it struck me that, what with all the mp3s I’d d-l’ed into my collection, it would take upwards of 30 years to listen to everything I had. Once. And that’s assuming I did nothing else all day. Every day. Then I began to consider all the movies I’d picked up. And the books. And the fact that I do have an interpersonal relationship with a significant other who might appreciate me more if I did something else for the next 30 years but listen to, watch or read my stash. Oscar Wilde, I believe, said something to the effect that, giving someone a book is something of an insult, unless of course they also give that person the time to read it.

That’s it in a nutshell.

This is where I began to turn around on the subject. See, I used to like having records. They had these 12-inch square pictures, sometimes front and back for 24” and with gatefold sleeves inside too for 48”, sometimes with just liner notes. They were pretty, sometimes stunning, and you could also use the gatefold sleeve to separate seeds and stems from your lid. And afterwards, stare at the cover for an hour, trying to glean every last scrap of meaning and symbolism from the artwork (if intricate) or idealize and adore the artist (if you like), much the same as you would—gasp!—a religious icon! Alas, both that herbal preparation and innocence are long past, as is the purpose of that album jacket. All that remains are the memories associated with the sounds and lyrics (those of which I could understand). And, with hearing less, ah, “dealer prep” shall we say, than it was when the vinyl was new, I have my doubts as to whether a 25hz variation between the midrange of a needle and the track of a laser is going to be detected by my ears. But I’m not arguing aesthetics now.

My Time and Space have begun to assume more than mere arbitrary designations; I now class them among metaphors for the cosmos, giving them Einsteinian properties and capital letters the same as I would Matter and Energy. As I become aware of such concepts as a “carbon footprint”, I begin to see greater significance in all that I do, and, consequently, devote less attention to that which I see as without purpose to my existence.

This does sound grandiose, I suppose. I am also aware that this particular argument may be a convenient rationalization for that of “sour grapes”. Granted. I freely confess that all I say is utter conjecture and stands upon a logic base which is specious, at best. Blogspot, sharing, Communism, ownership—I’ve been all over the map, it seems, only stopping to create transitions from one paragraph to the next. However, if we go all the way back to the start, I believe I can tie it up here.

“…because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.”

Yes. Sonorous and ponderous, ain't it? But really, that's all i was saying top to bottom. Trivialities are great when you got time for the Pursuit, but kinda sad when you consider the Big Thief With One Slow Hand and One Fast Hand.

See, I really DO like my mp3 lifestyle with the magic brick and the DVD and the master list. Now it isn’t so much what I own as if I can find it when I want it.

"rough winds do shake the darling buds of May..."

2009-04-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

That I haven't posted anything here for a while might seem to indicate a loss of interest in self-publishing, but that would be precipitous, to say the least. It will come as no surprise to anyone that, after having read Steven Pinker's latest, "The Stuff of Thought," I would beg off as being suffused in that very same brown study of gray matter. It is of such relevance to my thesis on the other blog (on this subject, if you haven't visited) that it appears that the Work there might have to undergo (if not drastic then at certainly pertinent) revisions before the conclusion would be secure enough to satisfy inquiring minds. Such as mine.

However, one point on which I have gained some firm footing is the way that metaphor weaves in and out of our thought, expressions, language, our very lives. It is not like I haven't known of the purpose of the Central Binding Metaphor (let's call it CBM to save some time--I do so enjoy acronyms, even better when they become words) for some time, it was just when you place it, as Pinker did, at the summit of a series of proofs, that it sort of pops out at you all over again. The use of "as a" frames our discussions, issues, answers; the whole of our existence is set as much by how we describe it.

Now, I know that Materialists will state that there is a firm, concrete Reality which owes nothing to our descriptions of it, and that--in substance, and please note the codicle!--I will be glad to grant. My only question would be: can you get everybody to agree that a chair is a chair and only a chair and that all chairs are equal and all that and speak only in the English language?

But I have yet to introduce the relation of the preface to the most salient point of this essay: The Title. Yes. The Bard's Sonnet 18, arguably his most famous, came to my mind when visiting Washington, D.C. for the Cherry Blossom Festival last weekend. The classical view for Westerners is, traditionally, colored by any chance memory of Japanese fans or room screens or wall scrolls in delicate sumei strokes, sipping green tea to the strains of "Sakura"... The reality is more like the Mongol Horde, using double-wide troop-carrier strollers as their advance guard, tromping about the tidal basin in a death shuffle as fervent as hadj-bound muslims attempting to circle the kabbah seven times. This is, you may note, an absurd metaphor. Ok. Maybe not. Envisualize a religious devotion wherein it is the adorant's responsibility to take continuous still-life pictures of themselves and their loved ones, without including others in the lens, from as many points as possible within a 360-degree circumference, and to not only cell-phone transmit and conference, but to do so within the two days between storm fronts. The Ideal and the Real: now you may see the gap more clearly.

That's whitecaps there, and not from the falling petals. These buds ain't just shaken, they're stirred.

So? Are we talking troubled waters?

Yet what good is a metaphor if is does not resonate to higher planes, greater issues? Despite the fact that the President was overseas for our jaunt, from start to finish, it was the kitty-faced Elf's determination to simply bask in the sunshine of his love (to paraphrase the Cream's big hit...which was also one of the few covers in the Jimi Hendrix catalogue, just to show you its ubiquity), along with the floating clouds of yoshino (the only cherry blossoms that deserve the name as differentiated from the "Wild Mountain" cherry trees--where the green leaves are a dead giveaway--and the loathsome "false" cherry trees that bloom as late as a week after). So, in extending our comparison to the new "Camelot", the "winter of our discontent" given way to this "son of York" (ok, stretching it a bit...), the Spring of...well, let's not belabor this further. Like there isn't enough Shakespeare here already.

It was more to bring up the weather, you see. I know I am not alone in having a fascination with it, the Weather Channel itself having shown up as a topic in movies and tv shows, just the view of it out the window as a George Kuchar film subject (for more on that, see mediafunhouse.blogspot.com) and, yes, as I may have said before, is the only front page item in every newspaper throughout the known universe. Then it can also be employed to compare the situation in the ecotropic dominion (is this a word?--dunno, but I like it...it stays) to that of the political realm.

As I have made the acquaintance of neither lottery winners nor the independently wealthy, almost everybody I know is struggling against the big blow after the downpour of money bummers. And, like the above (ok, now we're talking simile, but that's ok too; no reason to limit our expressions), we may just be having a holiday in the calm. But still, it was a lovely couple of days, which is actually, if you follow the haiku vision of Life, exactly the purpose of a cherry blossom festival. You are supposed to stop. Consider the moment. Look at the fluffy white hovering around the low-lying trees with the same hazy quality of morning mist. Look at the beautiful petals--even now!--starting to drift away in singles, couples, then torrents. Small wonder it drives her to tears.

We can't tell if the present Chief will be one of the greats, but he has a great start. Right now, he appears to be in the same space as Sunday's viewing: bright and summery, dry and comfortable, mild temperatures. There are clouds on the horizon, sure, but none today, and that's what matters.

So, to return to the preface, it is the framing of this that is most important. Those of us who do not have control of nations or wealth or influence must content ourselves with the liberty of choosing where to fight our battles and when. And when not fighting to appreciate the luxury of simply existing, with a fraction of our attention attuned to an aesthetic beyond these things. (Which, incidentally, is not translated into Latin as Procul Harum, even though the British pop-psyche band touted that as their origin--another case of bad translation...yeah, like that's going to stop me from thinking of it every time I hear "A Whiter Shade of Pale"? Gimme a break!) Some might call this "god" but others prefer a more organic spirituality.

Me? I like cherry blossoms.

Subversive resistance to authoritarian regimes

2009-03-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

Not the same thing as open revolt, armed insurrection or fighting in the street, nonetheless, there is a place for wits and whimsy as a device for showing such beautiful things as hypocrisy and the arbitrary nature of all totalitarian states to be incapable of responding to the anarchist who eschews throwing bombs for...jellybeans! (Those in the know have already joined me in a half-smirk at the memory of our fearless leader's masterpiece. For the rest, please read "Repent, Harlequin!...said the Tick-Tock Man" by Harlan Ellison. Why does it still give me goosebumps to just recall the first time I read it?)

It was, then, utter serendipity to discover the above on the front page of the NYTimes today. I believe that it might be legible if you click on it, but, having whetted your appetite, I am certain you could find any number of other embellishments (as I have). There is something so marvelous, bright and wonderful to this collective sedition (for that is what it truly is, a well-nigh planetary protest against the forces of censorship and repression as people all over join in the weaving and linking this into a veritable web of ridicule) that I almost want to be smug as a conservative in a CPAC rug. But I can't be. Watching the Chris Marker cinemessay "The Case of the Grinning Cat" the other night must be part of it.

(I herewith include a link to Ed's blog on, coincidentally, the exact same subject!--Marker, that is http://mediafunhouse.blogspot.com/2009/03/elusive-genius-chris-marker.html--with, undoubtedly even more amazing insights!)

To summarize (as briefly as possible), the filmmaker chronicles his observance of this graffiti feline (usually signed off as "M. Chat") in places all over France, and then the world. And, as he sees it cropping up at anti-Iraq War demonstrations, begins to yearn for it, finds it to be the most inspiring part of it--this universal imp of the preverse, one might suppose--to the point where, during the biggest march, he is almost in despair of its appearance, ready to turn away if he doesn't see it...and then THERE IT IS! IN ALL IT'S CHESHIRE-GRINNING, GOLDEN GLORY! This is, then, his sign from the Forces of Cosmic Truth and Humor Department of the Zen Trickster Ministry, that all is well.

Well, this is mine. It appears that neither of us sees much so marvelous as people working together towards a common purpose and shared goal of achieving liberte, egalite and fraternite (still haven't figured out how to do accent grave or ague or whatever those Frenchies do with the final "e") as much as finding satisfaction that there is a thread that doesn't forget the value of a carnival atmosphere. Or absurdity.

And one more little popcult ref from obscurity. A long time ago there was a band called Brute Force. They were set to release an album for Apple and gave them a single to sort of prime the pump. I think it got very limited release, but I am unsure. (Any Beatles experts in minutiae may provide a definitive answer below.) The reason they lost and were tossed was more that Capitol (who was distributing Apple then) refused to touch it. And why? It was called "The King of Fuh", and the chorus went "OH HAIL THE FUH KING, THE MIGHTY FUH KING..." etc. This is an example of subversion that didn't make it past the gatekeepers of our puritan sensibility.

But it was a nice try, guys.

Remember: they also disserve who only stand and thumb their noses.

Continuing with the program...

2009-03-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

I have been told by Ed that I should post more often. I tried to explain that I was busy working on the other blog but that sounded like a lame excuse even to me. That being said, I herewith include the video below entitled: "Campaign Diaries 2".

As it opens with the Saturday bus ride from Port Authority through the wetlands of northern New Jersey, one may initially think this lacks, perhaps, a short snippet of "America" by Paul Simon. and yes, I would not argue that the tradition of US youth casting off from home on a Greyhound or Trailways was never far from my mind. (However, the one album which I played throughout this period was Rufus Wainwright's "Want One".) This covers the first weekend or two with the camera at my side and Gene at the wheel. I can say without qualification that this may have been the most work, but was also the most satisfying and fun. If we seem to approach missionary zeal it is because we were approaching missionary zeal. If it also seems too relaxed, well--like I said, it was fun. Glum revolutions never happen; a happy cadre is the best advertisement for change. Championing optimism over anger and revenge works wonders for getting people to believe that radical transformation is a good thing.

As for my usual rants, screeds and jeremiads, I'll probably get back to that before long, but, as you may guess, I am still not over the glow...

An exercise in futility...

2009-02-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

...or maybe not. In any case, I have created another blog to deal with one subject alone. Ok, let me rephrase that: in my view, it is ONE subject, even if I am not 100% certain what that subject is.

So, let's say it is about the human brain, the mind, consciousness, the "soul" (immortal or not), evolution, and language & philosophy. What it boils down to is a sequence of essays which attempts to explain all the above in one continuous extrapolation.

Why?

Exactly. Nothing more than pure curiosity started me on this kick and...well, ending it? I had thought it was sheer vanity to think that I had anything to say on such lofty matters but I had second thoughts after reading a lot of Darwin (and Steven Jay Gould, his ultimate popularizer for this generation. Darwin wasn't a trained anything; he was a Naturalist. There's nothing wrong with being a Naturalist, a person who uses what they know and what they have found to draw conclusions based solely in their understanding of things. All the opinions expressed below are solely the author's and reflect only a few intersections with Wikipedia. Here's the link:

http://brainiacology.blogspot.com/

The title I was "of two minds" on. The reason for the quotation marks is that it is just that tricky. I called it "recent trends in cognative research" but it could just as easily be "recent trends in cognitive research"; one is referring to language, the other to sentience (etc.) and it is about both! But the MS Word dictionary didn't flag it as incorrect so I will let it stand.

When I finish, I may change the name to the other spelling

I GOT THEM LONG-GONE INAUGURAL-BALLS, BI-PARTISAN/SCHMI-PARTISAN, IF-YOU-CAN'T-BEAT'EM-TIE-A-NEWS-AROUND-THEIR-NECK, WASHINGTON POST-COITAL BLUES

2009-02-14T06:53:00.000-08:00

(or KEEPING IT UP WHEN THE HONEYMOON'S OVER)

First, a little couplet:

Forget the grape gripe
(viz, no whine before its time)
about the taste of the unripe
or cerveza without lime

addicted to the rush
but crashing, all because
after bush has got the push
hey!--what happened to my buzz?

There is a natural tendency to denigrate one's experience in the light of subsequent developments which detract from the whole and reduce it to a series of logical propositions that all things borne of Man are destined for dust and decay. And you can get your mind out of the gutter right now: there aren't going to be any libido euphemisms here. That was strictly a teaser head.

Participatory democracy only works when you participate. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes (or at least, whoever is in there is just as scared as you, irrespective of pieties), there are no cynics knocking on doors. There may be some professionals at the top who are pretty jaded, but, again, THAT'S NOT A TRENCH ON THE MARNE, ok?

Our president has been in office a little less than a month, yet the number of active detractor's has shot through the roof. Should any creedence be given to the divisionists and revisionists who seem to work less by concrete facts based in the authority of comprehensive investigation and appreciation of a subject than misleading interrogatories, sly innuendo and scripts tailored to climax at 6.8 minutes into a 7-minute segment peaking with, "I'm sorry but that's all the time we have right now..." before the commercial?

So much for the romance, eh? (Ok. One bumper ref.)

Over standard coffee morning conversation with the Elf herself, in discussion of this lamentable phenomenon, she mentioned what the Obama election meant to her: "The return of common sense." And it struck me that, yes, I did learn something way back when in American History; this was also the name of the pamphlet (their "blogs") by Thomas Paine that was the most widely-read piece of literature in "the colonies." This was a truly revolutionary bit of wisdom in that it spoke in plain speech about subjects that everyone could understand. Just to be able to hear a chief executive say something like, "We screwed up," is so precious and honest that we tend to undervalue it just because it was over something fairly trivial. (Mistakes on two nominee's tax returns vs. One Trillion Dollar Bailout Plan? Don't see the logic in putting them on the same plate, nope!) In the relatively short continuum of the United States, the amount of disunion has always been pretty big. Why should the present be any exception? Perhaps it just seems worse because of the aforementioned professional gainsayers. The other day, Colbert is putting up a new "on notice" warning to another of his pet peeves, amusing as always, when I notice, right at the top, the one put there by the Man himself when making a late stage televised appearance via satellite: "DISTRACTIONS." During the Civil Rights Era (hard to conceive that we actually had eras of social concerns), there was a saying, either out of the gospel churches themselves or the SCLC itself: "Keep your eyes on the prize." And despite modern interpretation of it as some sort of "get your game on" exhortation to win the big bucks, this usage was more about focussing on an ideal and not being swayed from belief that the true path was there, even when, at times, it was hard to see, obscured by brush or rubbish or the dark.

I had fallen prey to this very malady. It is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans: Life.

Over past week, however, I had been re-encouraged, shall we say, by two "better angels of my nature." One was a serendipitous Saturday afternoon stroll through Chelsea with a friend that stumbled upon this group exhibition. As art goes, not exactly thrilling (or even as art propaganda--for that, better to cross the same street to the Robert Miller gallery to see the DJ Spooky (Paul Miller, no relation, far as I can tell) show satirizing Soviet revolutionary posters for the rebel state of Antarctica), but as signs of the times, nothing short of exemplary.

The other was more personal, having actually received two e-mails, quite unexpectedly, from former campaign staffers with whom I worked in Pennsylvania. It was so touching and unexpected, I had to haul out the video diaries and have another look. And so, I offer here...another look. What you will see below is how the campaign looked from the skirmishes, the hand-to-hand combat. It is not comprehensive, merely the infantry perspective.

Lux has left the building: The Interior is now Exterior

2009-02-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

Primordial. That's the way I and a few of my like-minded schizicens felt about the Cramps. The funeral oration of Pericles will probably resound from some of the pulpits, but it won't be here. Never met the man, only saw the band twice, yet the connection was formed before I even knew how deep the twisted and gnarled roots entwined below the surface of the culture. So, instead of going on to Lester Bangs length (as I am wont to do), a few brief remarks.

The first hint of that was the ep, with liner notes about how they gestated, fairly festered, in the blue glow of b&w monster movies (language that evoked the mysteries of radiation and mutation so dear to those sci-fi pioneers), reading EC comics (my first love before rock and roll) in a Cleveland suburb. The whole impact of the prose was to herald a sound as a supporating lesion, the open wound that art seeks to heal but never can. (Ok. Maybe a little Greek tragedy, like Philoctetes, if you want.) And it was all red too. I now know that "Human Fly" was not an original, nor "Goo-Goo Muck", but it belonged to them after that point.

Even the name, Lux Interior--it was like a joke that was raving before you heard it. The punchline was a voice like a hyena's laugh in the Serengetti: giggles, whispers, moans and gurgles. The rest of it were feral glints in the night...don't wander far from the campfire.

While still rusticating in the Midwest, a friend wrote me about the new club opening up on Halloween on Second Avenue called CBGBs Theater. It was only open for a couple of shows, I guess, but that one found the band in full glory. Brian was still with them and glowering. Ivy lifted her legs to reveal what most males wanted to see. Lux gnawed on a raw bone--either cow or pig--and threw it into the throng. Then repeatedly stabbed stuffed animals until the front rows were covered in kapock. Then a roadie brought out a box under a tarp...and Lux opened the cage and released the rats onto the audience.

Uh. That's Dada, folks.

Smack dab in the center of the "New Wave" was this band who had totally escaped the distancing of Cool. They never bothered with Existential Dread; they were too busy running from zombies, and pumping out a lurching rhythm on so much echoplex and reverb you'd have thought you'd fallen into the Cavestomp Dimension, where "The Mole People" were ruled by Rocky Horror, dictating his fiats through a Ventures amp on 11. No matter how alienated you got, all it would take is some of that throbble to thrombosis your neurosis and get you to wriggle-wiggle with the worms.

A friend tipped me to the tape called "The Purple Knif Show" wherein Lux went on a radio station in LA in 1984 and DJ'ed a 90-minute set of favorite tunes. What made it more impressive was that he was using the code words known only to ex-North Ohioans of a very particular period. He had stepped very forcefully, in his fishnet hose and stiletto heels, right out of the closet and opened declared himself a f.o.g.--Friend of Ghoulardi. If you have to ask, don't look at me--I can't tell you. Not in a million years. And I've tried, elsewhere. But that's another reason they endured through the years; the Lux/Ivy unit made for this astonishing enigma. Not that they wouldn't speak to the press, but nothing they ever said went beyond this space-out of childlike naivete to abstract terror; the sincere innocence necessary to generate the core of jibbering madness that opens the door to escape. And from what? To where? Remember the Doc's dying breath to Captain Leslie Nielsen in "Forbidden Planet" on what killed the Krell? "Monsters, John! Monsters...from the ID!"

On every Labor Day Lobster Bake we'd join in with other psychempaths on the rockbound coast of Portland, Maine's Thousand Islands and they were always near to top of the playlist in heavy rotation. The booze cruise on the ferry would resemble a batch of drunken sailors on shore leave, but I can't forget stomping with my avowedly hetreosexual male companions into a collective high kick on "Bikini Girls With Machine Guns." Some people wait their entire lives for such liberation.

The last time was the 25th Anniversary celebration of CBGBs. I made sure to see at least the Ramones and the Cramps...which was apt, as it was so cramped breathing was difficult. Still, you don't get any better moshing than when there is no room for independent motion. Whenever I moved, you moved, and whenever Lux lunged, we caromed. But despite the close quarters, it was without friction because no one there would rather be anywhere else with anyone else for that time. Was it similar to the aforementioned Ghoulardi cult? Perhaps. Who can answer the Sphinx?

Shall we see his like again?

...monsters from the ID...

[post scriptum...the music upload thang is done far better by far more than i, so for that, i suggest you try the mediafunhouse link to the right. it may not be your oedipus-type riddle-buster, but i guarantee everything there will be a lot more fun than sticking hot pokers in your eyes...]

A work in progress…

2009-01-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

…was, as I recall, said of America (read: USA) itself. (Not de Tocqueville, if memory serves. Whoever he was, he was probably native to the soil; either a prez or equally eminent.) As I view the news aslant and as askant as I can (trying very hard not to become calloused again), I note that the early “reports” (the facts, mind you, not the interpretation of same by journos nor their licensed mouthpieces in the world of punditry) are that the Boss is doing pretty good--sang froid, savior faire, joi de vivre, et alia. (I do so enjoy using foreign expressions; I get to put them in italics and use extra html code. Also, makes me feel sophisticated, don’cha’know?) This heartens me and gives enough courage to throw down the enclosed.

I believe the youtube ID says “campaign video 1”, which was the working title when I uploaded it. The reason for this was also that, in my “video diary” of that particular portion of 2008, it was supposed to be at position one on the DVD. It was actually the last one of the batch (there were two, actually) because it had to be d-l’ed from the cell and then sequenced. And because of the fact that it was silent, it had to be (gulp!) narrated. There was a Vegas lounge vet on Ed Sullivan who used to do these bits about people doing slide shows of their vacations; that was my first exposure to “dry” comedy. Also, I believe it forever queered me to the idea that anyone would want to see somebody else’s home movies, or ancillary events. So, well…this is just to say that it was neither an ego thing or sequelmania or anything like that. That there might not be a second or even a third didn’t occur to me; I just wanted to get it done by the Inauguration. However, life, as it is wont to do, intervened.

That is enough preamble. Further discussion is purely up to you. Period.

As The Page Turns…

2009-01-09T12:00:00.001-08:00

Having a journolance past, this habit of copious note-taking endures as part and parcel of my enjoyment of live performances of any kind. And yet, even after decades of making my annual pilgrimage to the St. Marks Church in the Bowery at 10th Street and Second Avenue for the Poetry Project New Years’ Day Marathon – an event that is artist-oriented as well as political, with no small doses of humor, and not just 5-7 minutes per speaker but music and dance as well – and it has never occurred to me to comment.

However, I never had a blog before.

It starts at 2pm and has gone on as long as to 2am. And yes, it is a marathon for the audience as well as the performers, volunteers, food court helpers, the ticket sellers sitting in the cold, cold lobby as well as those by the back entrance where the various acts go to check in. I mention these worthies before all else because without their devotion to the wordsmiths (of which they number as well, just later or earlier in the day, as the schedule runs) this would not be possible. I will never fade on applause for them when some orator decides their horatory is failing and offers the obligatory, “And let’s have a little show of thanks for the people who put this together…”

Overall, every year does have a trend, or at least one or two themes, politically. 9/11 was a huge rift, in some ways. A general sorrow pervaded, but the staunch Leftists had to condemn the US policies that led to same (via the Noam Chomsky school) while a select few had to stand up for the nation, if not just being New Yorkers all. Then there was Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, and, as always: Bush Bush Bush… So you’d expect a lot of Obama paeans…and you’d be worng. (You know, I know I just misspelled “wrong”. But I actually love the way it looks. I love the way it is underlined in red by my spellcheck, informing me that it is a rude incursion on an otherwise proper essay. So it stays. Must be under the influence.) The headliner, ever since Allen Ginsburg died, has been Patti Smith, usually straight from her own annual New Years concert, and she’s always the bellwether, pretty much capping the mood, the zeitgeist, weltanschauung, etc. (And why must I resort to German? – because these are the words we use! What would you have me say? “The full magilla”? Well, that would be “worng” as well, for two reasons: 1 - the standard American slang picked up this phrase directly from Borscht Belt comics who were referring to the reading of the “meghilla”, the Purim story from the Torah in a non-abridged version; and 2 - because anyone over the age of ____ will associate it with the cartoon “Magilla Gorilla”, superseding any presets with respect to an all-encompassing, undefined socio-psychological aether.) What was specifically different this time was the number of couples (both poets, both reading) who brought along progeny, frequently just going up on stage to bop around with mommy or daddy. Irresistible charm.

Here then, are the observations of a regular, sitting (reclining as much, veterans bring cushions!) up front, stage (altar) left. The notes are just names and a snatch or two of immediate impressions, not in any way to be interpreted as slur or more than a blur and not even a roll call (I stopped numbering them after 101). When you’re there to have articulate individuals transmit complex information, you must pay attention to even follow along. So this is sequential (more or less) and safely attributed (within reason), at best. At worst? Eh, who cares? Call it A Day In the Life (Beatles cop) or A Life In A Day (Simple Minds cop) or All The Livelong Day, recorded by… (never mind)

The ever-natty Brendan Lorber (I mean, the guy wears a tux every year!) who was with Tracey McTague and child. His bit was intro’ed as “What Makes The Depression Great” meaning not the loss of revenue by the powers-that-be as much as the unison of the powerless-that-are in a kind of realization that we really do share a common interest in saving our country, and by that, the world. (And while I am not a “nationalist”, per se, one needs but scroll down a few posts to find mine own take on the matter. “Nuff said.)

The “Franco-Pyrranean” Nicole Peyrafitte came out from the back to do her word nuber and then went back to the kitchen where she was in charge of the chili this year. And as if to attest to the authenticity of the batches, every time she emerged thereafter, it was wearing an apron.

Murat Nemat-Nejat is a man after my own heart, making reference to “Blade Runner” and the Replicant’s 4-year lifespan (perhaps some application to the outgoing admin, but I’m not sure – think accent) before going into a personification of geometrical properties (shades of “Flatlands”!) called “Triangles”.

Susan Mauer asked, as a preface, “Does every body know what a jongleur is?” It didn’t seem to be that crucial information, but, in that crowd, it was very unlikely that it would need explication.

David Shapiro’s intro was longer than his poem, which was equally ok. It is your 5mins. –do what thou wilt.

There followed the irrepressible Bob Holman who had his own extensive lead-in, fresh from an African trip where he was hoping to “save the oral tradition digitally” and took along in trade 50 Obama t-shirts. (First direct ref. to the prez-elect, by the way.)

Saying that she was going to do “3 poems, the first one is my ‘hot mama’ poem and the others are serious,” was Patricia Spears-Jones way of prepping. So? Independent Black Woman stuff, you’d expect pro-Barack? Nope: more anti-Palin. Shows to go you.

My only note on Maria Mirabal is “What a dish!” – which doesn’t tell you a whole lot about her words (…as much as mine do about me…)

Peter Bushyeager closed with “Cookie”, a collaboration with his 9-year old daughter, abetted by another baby, this one black, cute-as-button in Oshbigosh overalls, climbing up and down the altar steps to underscore the maximum fun of the Sesamestreetwise.

The ever-dour-with-Jewish-guilt of Hal Sirowitz, our hilarial perennial prophet of doom, shifted parental responsibilities from the “Mother Said” series to implicate his father on this occasion, with respect to a bonding experience flawed to guffaw.

Unsure as to whether Vyt Bakaitis is native Lithuanian or just home-schooled, just one line jumped out of the mix: “and according to legend/only trees will swallow their own shadows.” It is that sort of thing which brings it back to the roots. (Yes, I know – am I being clever again or sincere?)

Foamola is a…what? Music collective, spontaneous aggregation of minimalist monotoners, adults driven crazy by children’s instruments? I should post a video here.

Whatever, they precede the only break this year, at 5pm.

Bob Hershorn offers a “Primer for a New Audience,” meaning those who had not been to previous marathons, and basically puncturing the punctuation for all he’s worth. (Think of MAD’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and you’ll get the drift.)

Jon S. Hall (ex-King Missile frontman/present Attorney-at Law) wanted to actually say something positive about the change of the guard, but had gone to a reading entitled “Retire Your Bush Poems” (which was probably a hoot) but unfortunately came up with one more and felt the need to venti latte one last time.

One should make note of the few remaining legends who show up, and one of them is Steve Cannon, he of the Gathering of the Tribes project. I can’t recall off-hand any previous marathons he’d attended, and even though it was only to tinkle the ivories as a backdrop to some gal reading his work at the lecturn, it was a rare moment.

Chris Rael has an Indian-punk fusion band called Church of Betty in which he’s been known to play sitar and show off his micro-tonal singing. However, like most here, he has an affection for words as well, inspiring him to a song-cycle based upon James Joyce’s “The Dubliners” and this was an extract.

When someone goes on at length, the way Nathaniel Siegel did, they’d better have a lot to say, and a fine way of saying it. Suffice it that this one was his mini-“Journal of the Plague Years” as rendered by Armistead Maupin. And a big hit with the crowd.

Paul LeFarge’s line, “It was like the Decameron, but no one was telling stories,” seemed to resonate with me, at the time. I have no idea why now.

For many years, Ed Friedman ran the Poetry Project. Now he is just another beloved alumnus, but still a good reason to pay attention as he talks about his youth in the Junior Red Cross.

“Cumming is a way of realizing I’m a lump of human sludge,” is not the most romantic description of mammalian male orgasm, but it was Cliff Fyman’s way of breaking up the audience.

The sotto voce playwright/actor Jim Neu is another fave of mine. Guy just cracks me up with savvy takes on the psychobabble of cultural doublethink which passes for discourse in the tabs ‘n’ blabs. His brief today is entitled: “You can’t make this stuff up”, and his subject: Situationology.

In another omnibus presentation, Harris Schiff gave his bit on “Thing To Know On Earth” (presumably for visiting, non-resident aliens), but for us natives, it began with the basics: “There is New, Old, Ancient, and Primary.” Some things we do have a tendency to forget.

Emily XYZ and Meyers Bartlett have been doing these duets, sort of simultaneous double-speaking texts at seeming cross-purposes yet always (when you can focus on one or the other) dead-on the money. As Emily has been living in Ann Arbor for a few years, it would seem the plight of the auto worker was on her mind: the piece was entitled “Will the last one of Michigan please turn off the lights?” The killer stop-synchro was on the line “…YEAH, SO EVERYBODY’S BROKE” WHO’S LAUGHING NOW? US—THE ARTISTS, BECAUSE WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN BROKE!”

The agitprop cowboy Steve Earle needs no intro, but he did have an explanation as to why he missed last year’s shindig: the death of his father. This was also the subject of his piece, eschewing previous appearances admin opposition, giving sway to a more tender side in eulogy.

Apparently, Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle is a name writ large, and if not here then, primarily, in the field of erotic horror. Whatever, a nice enough imagist in the Lovecraft vein.

Bringing it all back home, Joel Lewis wanted to correct a fallacy promulgated by the Republican propaganda machine. “Contrary to popular opinion, Manhattan does have a Main Street. It is on Roosevelt Island.” If that weren’t enough, his dream-trance, astral-projection back to a bizarre fantasy of the Brill Building heydays was the icing on the cupcake.

“Citizen” Reno came out early and off her speed (some shmuck didn’t show when they should’ve) but ramped it up quickly, basically going to the thought at the back of most minds. “So who cares about this Rick Warren at the inauguration? Barack’s got enough problems without us ganging up on him..” to paraphrase would be the best I could do. The thrust is there. “And Gay Marriage? I thought that’s why I became Gay – SO I COULD NEVER GET MARRIED!” This does not do justice to the woman: Rage-o-holism made trenchant. Not Bill Hicks, but then, who is?

The first time I saw Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks, the choreographer’s work was entitled “The Little Mermaid” and WELL before Disney got its hands on it. Every year she does an improv in complete silence. This is body language for empathic linguists.

And as if to honor another of the departed, Mitch Highfill bowed out of the spotlight to read poems by the late, lamented Jack Spicer. On sex. Always good to hear from the dead on sex, by Spicer’s worth extra.

If the name Elliott Sharp means anything to you, calling this “acute musicianship” would be just a cute underscore. Unlike previous times, no Chapman stick or dual-necked monster; just a National Steel played with fingers in a hammerstyle technique. I’ve seen a lot of Steel players but they were almost exclusively slide and blues. This was a strict as his Fibonacci Series, and jaw-droppingly awesome.

It would seem that Anne Tardos has a thing for Spinoza, but further than that I cannot say.

Abraham Gomez-Delgado was on the congas, but playing them as if he’d stumbled on them on a voyage of discovery. Which isn’t to say he couldn’t keep time, but accompanying Samita Sinha, on her vocal improvisation based on songs by Sui Gen, China’s most famous rock star, the time was the last thing either kept.

Bill Kushner always brings a twisted humor into the mix, and this time it was even goofier. For “My Little Chihuahua” he had an older lady friend put on a pair of ears and nose to actually do the dog, act out the yips and yaps of his hairless friend from the front row. (Really, showstopper.)

Continuing on the musical vein (they seemed to stack up around the 8-9pm period) the large ensemble called Arthur’s Landing assembled with Steven Hall on acoustic guitar and vocals, Ernie Brooks (original Modern Lovers bassist, among other things), Yvette Perez on violin (I think?), and rounded out by a couple of long-time avant-garde music stalwarts: Peter Zummo on trombone and Bill Ruyle on hammer dulcimer (I think). The reason for this talent pool was to honor the music of the late Arthur Russell, a composer and performer with feet in both the ambient “World of Echo” and fronting lotsa 1980’s dance one-offs, even garnering some semi-hits in town way back when. Being something of a show-stopper, they were given close to 12 minutes for three spatially-transparent floating jazz numbers with undercrooning and guest-ghost go-go gal moves by the aforementioned Ms. Chuma.

When it does get back to the roots, there are only a few Beats left, and John Giorno isn’t only the most vocal; he’s the most mobile. For XX amount of years (no, I won’t embarrass him with the number), he has been be-bopping around that stage to a drummer that defies gravity (or maybe redefines “spry”). This year, it wasn’t as ‘up’ as has been. Normally his reading of a line like “It doesn’t get any better than this” would be positive. But it is also his talent to show you how just that lack of emphasis could turn it negative.

As usual, Lenny Kaye went on just before Patti. For several years he’d been doing excerpts from his book-in-progress on the crooner/bandleader Russ Columbo. That phase has reached publication, as I could see a copy of the hardcover in the hands of his old agent Jane Friedman (and a handsome tome it looks to be as well). With guitar again, he sang a very simple love song that he’d done for his sister’s wedding the summer past, to another woman under the, soon-to-be-revoked-by-CA, SF municipal laws.

Patti is what packs the seats, so she gets the 15 minutes w/o question. In the past she’s been exhortative, especially when opposing the 2nd term of the present prez, leading all in “People Got The Power”, but not this year, even as it has been so amply demonstrated. No clarinet either, just strumming away with acoustic backing from Lenny. It was one of her monotonal trance numbers, letting the stream of consciousness dip into CNN headlines, briefly touching on Obama and the new admin, cautioning even as championing, and the Gaza incursion, the latter mostly for the slaughter on both sides.

Although she seemed well-enough informed about the effect of madelines on Proust, Erica Hunt found her sense-memory in a pickled pigfoot (causing me to ponder the homonyms of “awful” and “offal”). Other than that, I only recall the project introducer for the next person saying, “That was quite a revelation for me, considering I’m vegetarian,” proving that the aside-dishes are also part of the meal.

Roderigo Toscano utilized an “Improvised Poetic Device – an IPD” to some end, of which I have no further note.

Perhaps more flustered than usual (which is to say, par for the course), Taylor Mead flounced as well as might be for his age and, to these eyes, debilitated condition. As another of the legacies of bygone days and sleazier periods, he can get away with anything and the crowd roars, with fairly good reason. His main consternation today was that he’d forgotten to bring his boom-box with the pre-recorded accompaniments to his two poems: one always funny/poignant, the other filthy. The former would probably encompass both in any other forum, being a paean to Heath Ledger for his role in “Hollywood’s first straight gay movie.” (Uncertain if there should be punctuation there, but that’s part of interpretation ain’t it?)

And, as if to put the previous in boldface, there was a guy with a three-day stubble, kohl-rimmed eyes, in top-hat, feather boa-bolero jacket, black fishnets and heels walking around with a bunch of odd hand puppets. Apparently he was “Tabu” and was there to introduce them at the podium (one of which was Yma Sumac, another might’ve been Paris Hilton), before introducing Eileen Myles. Evermore butch every time I seen her, there is no doubt that some older lesbians make really great-looking men. Her poem was on “The Importance of Being Iceland,” but more of which I cannot offer. (You can tell that I’m beginning to get a tad frazzled by this point.)

Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth came to confess that he’d been getting into some bands way behind the curve, his latest being Fairport Convention. With that in mind he struggled through a Sandy Denny song…adequately.

The final note I have is on the late appearance of Justin Bond, the figurehead at the South Street Seaport’s Spiegelworld tent – an attempt to inject some modicum of decadence into this otherwise sober and staid burg. He is known for the sly stage presence of Joel Grey in Cabaret, while also being capable of fervently belting out strident rabble rousing anthems. Which is what he gave voice to here, chiding Obama for his preacher pick and giving vent to his outrage at unequal rights for alternate genders, sans microphone. Like old Weimar Weill on steroids.

So that’s where I left it. Hate to give short shrift to the tail end of the batting order but lying around for a full day can be exhausting too…

"...a bit of nostalgia for the old folks..."

2008-12-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

...which is, oddly, me. The title here is extracted from a side-long experimental composition by Frank Zappa called "Lumpy Gravy", released on LP in 1967. It is spoken with the insouciance of youth, ending with a sneering chuckle before a jump cut to a snippet of surf music, followed by F.Z.'s interpretation of Fibber McGee's closet-opening sound effect. (I know: too obscure, too soon.) The reason for the placement of the surf guitar was a mystery to all us post-'Heads until the release of a CD, several years back, entitled "The Cucamonga Years" which chronicled Frank's days as a line producer for Del-Fi Records, and one cut that jumped out of the tracks with that same refrain.

If a wry, self-mocking tone seems exhibited in this remark, it is also about as genuine an emotion as F.Z. ever betrayed in any of his songs (with the possible exception of "Watermelon In Easter Hay", which is not only an instrumental but, arguably, his most profoundly elegaic guitar solo). In text, it was the oft-quoted paragraph from the liner notes to "Ruben & The Jets"--his 100% retro doo-wop album, the last with the original line-up of the Mothers of Invention--wherein he explains: "This is just a bunch of cretin love songs by a bunch of guys sitting around in rock and roll suits, lamenting the old days. You'll be doing the same thing in a few years, if there's anything left around to sit on." Succinct and pithy, yet aching for a simpler, classic period of innocence and unadulterated passion for...well, music, I guess. But much more is implied in that statement as well.

Which brings me to the subject of this essay. Christmas.

And this is the last thing I am going to say. The text included here was written in 2003. A dear friend, Karen Jahne, was dying of cancer. Her husband Rick had decided to have an old-fashioned party at their home up in Tarrytown, where everyone would tell a story or sing a song and we'd entertain each other just like in "A Christmas Carol" wherein Scrooge drops in on his nephew. However, he didn't anticipate how tired she was and we never got around to making it that merry. This was what I wanted to say. (It was written to be performed aloud, remember.)

It is entitled: "Beats the Dickens Out Of Me"

"Once upon a midnight dreary—no. That’s not right.
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away?... Wait a minute! That’s not it either.
Uh... When in the course of human events...? Ok. I know this is going in the wrong direction. For sure.
Now... let me see... hmmm... uh--T’was the night before... NOPE! Even that’s wide of the mark.
Let’s get down to basics.
Don’t touch that dial!
Ahhh... Now we’re getting somewhere.
And where is that? Well, we could try to trace its origins back to the time when the channel 11 yule log would burn all night long. That it now only appears for two hours (is it still two? or less?) indicates how far we’ve come from the source...
And what source might that be? Well, it must be the Holiday Spirit. (I refer to it under that title as advised by the marketing department as being more friendly to those not of the Christian persuasion. And for those who would follow Dr. Ron Karenga’s Kwanzaa or the thirtythreehundredth or so celebration of the Festival of Lights, or even the stray Bahai looking for the Interkelary Days, we hope you will find a suitable translation available to the text of your own choice or tradition.)
But I digress.
Yes. The Holiday Spirit, to be sure, but also the most universal appeal of such: the television Holiday Spirit.
Right. Way ahead of you. What does the Idiot Box have to do with the virtues of commonality and communion via convivial consumption? Well, there’s no getting around it: just like that flickering fireplace loop aforementioned, it has stood the test of time, and like the Menorah miracle as well...it never goes out! It has been there for us, rain or shine, snow or surf, wherever and whenever, and always offering the options of choosing your level of involvement with the Holiday Spirit, whether you need it or not.
Try to imagine your world without these templates for white liberal guilt, bogus sentimentality, false nostalgia, and an impetus to spend beyond ones means. “Miracle on 34th Street”—a testimonial to New York as the cultural center of the known universe as well as the canniest publicity stunt for any retail merchandiser in the annals of cinema (actually equalled slightly by the Mays Co. copywriter who dreamed up Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer to lure more kiddies to their suggestion-laden Santa...and thereby gave birth to both the Tex Ritter rendition and the Norelco-sponsored, Burl Ives-narrated puppettoon special); “It’s A Wonderful Life”--which, following the studio’s failure to renew its copyright license, became so oversaturated in past season’s schedules that it was quite possible, on any given Saturday or Sunday up to the climax of the period on December the 25th, to deconstruct the entire life of George Bailey--perhaps, by simply zapping around, creating a viewing sequence to see his suicide attempt, the jitterbug dance over the swimming pool, his saving brother Harry from drowning, old man Potter gleefully marking everyone with an immigrant name 1A at the draft board, George attempting to embrace his wife-not-to-be and having the old maid scream, and simultaneously find him singing “Buffalo Gals” with her on the streets of Bedford Falls. (Almost enough to make the Wooster Group weep with jealousy); and--of course--the ultimate in roasted chestnuts, and I refer, without a doubt, to “A Charlie Brown Christmas”--and that this is being fast replaced by the South Park version, I attribute to the foul-mouthed funsters more eccumennical message in including, amongst the other hymns of praise, “A Lonely Jew At Christmas.”
Now, for those of you raised in a faith whose observance bars attendence to such pine bough substitutes, you may excuse yourself at any time to go forth and sing carols, spin draydels, whack piñtas, or don kenté cloth and dance the toi toi with Desmond Tutu--as you will.
But, passing all these other incidents of moderne ephemera, the one prescence that cannot be discounted is that of Charles Dickens immemorial perennial, “A Christmas Carol.” And the simple reason for this is that, as of this point, and discounting the rather unfortunate attempts at updating (including one role reversal with a woman playing the old bastard’s role, the extremely bland weeper as depicted--in a dubious coup of miscasting--by Henry “The Fonz” Winkler, and the all-too-much-of-an-in-joke-to-be-believed Bill Murray as the broadcasting network executive manifestion), there are no less than five feature-film and tv special incarnations of Ebeneezer going around the stations and cables. (I now have even seen one, on the overnight PBS programming, that pre-dates the 1936 Reginald Owen, being so ancient as to be little beyond the Muybridge kinescope.) Certainly, the post-war England version, with Alistair Sim in the lead role, is considered as definitive, and with good reason: it keeps most of the Hoggarth miseries and social realism amid the homilies to home and hearth. That no one bothered to do another until the George C. Scott made-for-tv in 1984, shows to go you how long and how strong it was and is. (I except the musical “Scrooge” with Albert Finney--admirable and charming as it is, in adapting the Broadway stage to the technicolor screen--from this sequence only as the novelty of adding song to the reveries imparts, to the major dramatic events, the strong warning gong of production numbers to the degree that the most famously creepy part (next to Marley’s introduction, clanking and screeching like the IRT hitting a bad section of tracks) of the long night’s journey into day--that of the visitation of the ghost of X-mas the Unknown--takes a side trip to become a delerious revel with the jolliest funeral this side that of the Wicked Witch of the East.)
Now, as for the Scott, it was still a tad less than the Sim-u-lation, but restorative to the general intent of scaring the living daylights outta anyone of tender years. (After all, even ol’ Chaaas subtitled the work, “A Ghost Story of Christmas.”) And yet, what with the Shakespearian-trained/Star Trek captain of Patrick Stewart doing the tour-de-force one-man-show on Broadway for a couple years, it seemed natural that Hollywood would want to put this in the stocking before too long.
And that brings us to the subject of our sermon...
Just what the heck happened to all those Ebeneezers?
Well, if we may slip temporarilly into the media-um frame of reference, as it was in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” so it is to these wrinkled uncles: “It was said that his heart grew three sizes that day.”
Ok. Perhaps this is getting a touch oversimplified. This is, after all, the children’s holiday. But we are all adults...more or less.
So...what maturity offers to youth is the assessments of time and a long view in human affairs. Yesss. In our earilest views, we saw him as a miser, an evil debt collector without mercy or charity, a mean relative who spat at the hand of friendship proferred by his last remaining blood kin, and--beyond all that--a sourpuss for the ages. He hated and snarled and cursed and reviled and raged...and? to what end? To go home to a bowl of broth and a spoonful of bitters? This is the good life? If anyone could ever explain Scrooge to a child (who--let’s face it--never understood anything beyond Christmas Present, the kind you unwrap from under the tree), it couldn’t be any more elaborate than “Oh, he’s just...unhappy. Dear.”
And, in that, there’s about as much as the parents could ever explain...even when we knew they were full of mincemeat—Scrooge was a BAD MAN! And that’s what makes television Holiday Spirit so emblematic: the worst villain becomes the bestest benefactor, a veritable demon-into-angel, as we might judge from any one of the movies...and with only one crooked rule to measure by.
AHA! But we have a veritable gaggle of geezers to use for our sample and each overnight conversion only adds to the available database. Take Reginald, the classic sourpuss... if ever there was one. His morning after is mostly done to the tune of twinkling eyes and open-mouthed amazement and open ho-ho-hos, a bit stiff but sprightly. Now Alistair, he is another piece of work entirely. His nature is that of the mischievious schoolboy, not just giddy, but scampering and capering in his nightshirt, dancing with the charwoman, slipping into doubt in one thought and then slapping himself out of it in the next, a whirlwind of activity and a flurry of merriment. (Of course, Finney promptly breaks into the song he’d learned with the Present Ghost...so, yet another reason to disqualify him: a reprise rarely augurs an authentic behavioral alteration. It’s more of a new arrangement.)
So. Onto the contemporary post-contemptables. Scott’s portrayal furthers the process of un-demonizing by finding him caught on the precipice, teetering between the dream and the day, hugging his bed-curtains and crying with relief, tearing down the window drapes and being dazzled by the light. His is a pure awakening, one that opens the future to unlimited possibilities, doubting his ability to meet the challenge, but then, laughing in stenatorian shudders and wild screeches, throwing his hands to the sky in all-encompassing embrace and supplication, then jumping on his mattress to trampoline up and down until he all-but passes out from hyperventilation.
Stewart continues the process of closing the gap between characiture and character by playing Scrooge’s hand close to the chest. More than wickedness, this guy’s a poker face, a cigar store indian, a mask--it is only the eyes that portray the fear of what people will think of him should the old cold fish thaw out. So. When he gets the spirit--it’s like a light goes on in a darkened room, like flooding emotions on the river with the dynamited dam... we’re talkin’ whitewater rafting...salmon leaping all over the place.
Point is, none of these guys were, like, transforming from black hats to white robes: they were remembering how to have fun...to take pleasure in every single moment—from public embarrassment to pranks, from walking a morning stroll to dancing a bacarole.
Which leads us to finally getting the goods on Ebeneezer: he wasn’t a bad man becoming good...he was a sad man getting happy. Like—Yahoo!
Hmmm... Didn’t I say that the mature view could add something to the youthful one?
--Oh! Right! It’s just like the series said: Mother knows best (Ok, literary license, alright?) and we just can’t figure it out until much later on...
But that’s Life--and Television--isn’t it? Receiving a signal from afar and uncoding it down the line? They’ll keep unspooling our past every year as much as we’ll keep playing the same songs, stringing up the same lights and hanging the same bulbs on the tree. With remote at hand, the distance between now and then turns into a flip of the channels until you get something to give you back a bit for paying attention to it. And better if you can fast forward thru the commercials.
So... think of the Holiday Spirit here as if it were an old acquaintance come on a regular visit, hmmmm? What makes it better are the presents the Present present!: a few new toys, some fresher woolens, a hot hardback from the bestseller rack... and different relations than we had last year. And an outlook on the future... Like who the heck will join the hoary hosts the next time the ghosts do the roast? Johnny Depp? Leo DiCaprio?? Keanu Reeves??? Brad Pitt??? Matt Damon??? Tom Hanks???
I dunno. Beats the Dickens outta me."

merry...merry...merry...

"Fattening Frogs for Snakes"

2008-11-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

The Blues contains a fair amount of folk wisdom, but the genesis of this song I could never fathom. Unless it refers to cultivating amphibians as a food source for reptiles. (I will gladly entertain, and would be most grateful for, any other theories.) No matter that, at first hearing, I found Howlin' Wolf so howlingly funny, I ran this groove through the bottom of my pitiful portable picnic player; it's purpose here is solely as an illustration (because--honestly--I can't think of any PICTURES to go with this post!) of something (i.e., every song from Charley Patton to Muddy Waters that may or may not refer to life in the Mississippi River delta) that was once understood by persons of particular geographical region, but is now a subject only fit for anthropologists. In general, this kind of disconnect between objects and subjects, forms and usages, occurs when the tradition from which it emerged has become something of an atrophied limb on the Tree of Man; one no longer a-budding and bearing fruit on the vine. Interpretation then requires an interpolation of facts with respect to its place of origin and historical era, socio-religious background, etc. Beyond that, you end up in the area of enlightened (or un-) guesswork, such as the above, if you want to reproduce the juice.

And why? What is it about folk wisdom (a/k/a: tribal lore) that makes it worth our time? Because what we were can teach us much about who we are today and what we are likely to become. Thing is, most people get a little irked when you start mucking about in their ancient burial grounds, and even testier when, say, you finally crack some scroll codes you find these precious relics were clay tablet 1040s. (See? Always be prepared for an audit!) Start to suggest their ancestors weren't all noble kings, priestesses, and great warlords and--lookout! Nobody wants to be descended from hack politicians, snake-oil salesmen, manure schleppers and charalatans. So, if you're going to get guff from digging up the past (not to mention the cost) there are still vast repositories of such ethnological lore to be found in among a variety religious practices, especially those with diligent scribes and roots going back well before what we refer to today as Western Civilization.

To find contempo corollaries of clan, kith and kin, one need only take a survey of headlines to uncover the subject of coverings. In my city, in my neighborhood even, the obvious is everywhere. On the street, Islamic headscarves and robes (even chadors!) for women are signs of chastity and modesty, but also reflect a practical concern: to guard against theft of breeding stock. Too callous? Not enough respect for the Almighty? Nope! The key word is "practical", as in "habit and practice" (a term of art in the legal world). This is not completely dissimilar to the rebbe parade and schmatta regatta of Williamsburg and King's Highway. When you look at those guys in the beaver hats, morning coats and white puttees, ever wonder why they don't have black hats like the Lubavitch? To payess or not to payess? It all comes back to what a particular theological theorist wore way back in the sheytl/ghetto when his sect split off from another. What you are seeing are fashion victims--albeit from previous centuries. It's just like mama said: you get judged by the company you keep. And it ain't just 7th Avenue, baby. Examine that in light of the cliques of today (hip hop, neo-Rasta, Neo-Cons, retro, etc.) and it gets even more obvious: You Are What You Wear.

Which, conversely and perversely, also must include the olde maxim of "De Gustibus Non Disputandem"--which has been given as a close reading of "There is no arguing with a customer" as much as "There's no accounting for taste"--in the discussion, along with "one man's meat is another man's poison". As much as the meal above-captioned might as well refer to a human appetite for the delicacy of the jumpers' legs en brochette, or a dish similar to smoked eel made from the primal tubesteak, we may enjoy these recipes in retrospect or re-creation, but is a rare thing indeed when one's own peculiar humors translate into the broader weal of the commons.

Like, why I find such things so revelatory...not to mention god-damned, funny/weird.

The funny-weird part is when, amid praise-songs for deity-of-choice, a fair amount of diet-of-choice will also be interjected. Of course, we realize, today, that such prohibitions were to avoid such things as salmonella, trichinosis, dysentery, rickets, and other odd-named ailments, as much "Rx" as recipe. The other provisos were a bit trickier, as in tryck-ier, as in Wikka-ier, as in white magyck and medicine man/shaman-type rituals disguised as advice from on high and prescriptions that read like performance art stage directions.

This is why I maintain that any religion which maintains these traditions in their 'gospel' (or whatever they keep as scripture/sacred text, worthy of counsel and advice) has got to be a bit verklempt. This is not a sudden revelation on my part, but, having recently stumbled on (nah, you don't want to know how) just such a Talmud (rabbinical commentaries on the Torah) section (specifically the Mishna and the Gemara, specifically the Babylonian treatises, and specifically within that the Gittin, 68b and 69a), I have found a further belief that true believers know no editors. You want to say "you can't make this stuff up", but what really mean is: "who'd write this stuff down?"...and why.

Mind you, this is NOT the "word" from YHWH as much as the aforementioned lore placed among the regular scroll studies as a viable subject for kabbalah-level scrutiny. Which should tell you a lot. What follows is verbatum, given the fact that I cannot reproduce Hebrew fonts. The only addition from this end are the upper-case notations at the end of the paragraphs with first reactions.

“CHAPTER SEVEN
GITTIN
The Gemara now returns to its presentation, begun at the beginning of it is chapter (6th), of the remedies to various conditions. The discussion is arranged according to parts of the body, from the head downward:

For blood of the head: Bring boxwood, willow, fresh myrtle, olive, poplar, cloves and yivla and boil them together, then pour three hundred cups of the mixture on this side of the head, and three hundred cups of it on that side of head. THIS IS THE STANDARD PRESCRIPTION

An alternative remedy:
If not, bring a white rose [whose leaves] all stand in one row ¬and boil it. Then pour sixty cups of the resulting liquid on this side of the head and sixty cups on that side of the head. THIS IS ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

Another head ailment:
For a migraine headache: Bring a wild cock and slaughter it with a sharpened zuz coin of pure silver over that side of the head which aches, so that the blood trickles down the side of the head. However, one must beware that the blood not blind one' eyes. Then, hang [the slaughtered cock] on the doorpost of the patient’s house, so that when he enters he brushes against it and when he exits he brushes against it. NOT EXACTLY WAVING A DEAD CHICKEN OVER IT, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH

The Gemara turns to afflictions of the eye:
For cataracts: Bring a scorpion that is spotted with seven colors. Dry it out in the shade, grind it and make a powder consisting of two parts antimony and one art ground scorpion] Then, apply three doses of the powder to this eye and three doses to that eye. One must beware not to apply more than three doses to the eye, because if one does not beware of this, his eye may burst. THIS IS A PRODUCT LABEL WARNING

[below, an explanation of method]
Literally: fill three applicators in this eye. Applicators for eye-powder were generally made of a bird's feather, or a thin wooden receptacle ONLY USE AS DIRECTED BY MANUFACTURER

For night blindness, one should bring a rope of animal hair and tie one of his own legs to the end of the rope and one leg of a dog to the other end of the rope. Then, children should rattle pottery shards behind him, and they should say to him the following Incantation: “Old dog mad hen” He should then collect seven pieces of raw meat from seven houses [each homeowner] should give him [the meat] in the doorway of his home. And he should eat [the meat] by the city dumps. Afterward, he should remove the animal-hair rope from his leg and they should say the following incantation: “Blindness of so-and-so, son of the woman so-and-so. Leave so-and-so, son of the woman so-and-so.” Finally, they should blow into the pupil of the dog's eye.THIS PRODUCT WAS TESTED IN CONTROLLED CONDITIONS ON LABORATORY ANIMALS.

For daytime blindness: Bring seven spleens from the insides of freshly slaughtered animals and roast them on a bloodletter's shard [repugnant earthenware vessel that a bloodletter uses to collect the blood that he draws]. Then, [the blind man] should sit inside a house and another person, whose vision is good, should sit outside, and the blind man should say to him: “Give me the spleens to eat” and the other one, who sees, should say to him: “Take, eat.” After he eats, he should break the bloodletter's shard, because if he does not, [the blindness] may return to him. THE "EAT, EAT, YOU'RE SO SKINNY"-VALLEY-OF-THE-ULTRA-YENTAS VERSION(PROBABLY INTERCHANGEABLE WITH CHICKEN SOUP).

The Gemara moves on to ailments associated with the nasal and oral cavities:

For nosebleed: One should bring a man who is a Kohen and whose name is Levi and he should write the name Levi backwards for him. If not, he should bring any man and he should write for him the incantation: “I Papi Shila bar Sumki” backwards. If not, let him write for him the following incantation: "The taste of a bucket in silver water, the taste of a bucket in tainted water." WOULD GEORGE M. COHAN WORK AS LONG AS HE CHANGED HIS NAME? AND IS THAT 'BACKWARDS' OR 'IN REVERSE'?

Another type of remedy for a nosebleed:
If not, one should bring the root of a stalk of aspasta [Aspasta is a type of plant which was usually used for animal fodder], the rope of an old bed, rag-paper, saffron and the red part of a palm branch, and burn them together until they turn to ash. Then, he should bring a ball of wool, and twist the fiber to form two strands, immerse the strands in vinegar and roll them in these ashes so that the ash adheres to them, and insert one strand in each of his nostrils.SEE BELOW

Yet another remedy for nosebleed:
If not, one should find a canal that flows from east toward west, step over it and stand with one foot on this side of the stream and one foot on that side of it. Then, he should take mud with his right hand from beneath his left foot and with his left hand from beneath his right foot, twist two strands of wool, immerse them in the mud and insert one of them in each of his nostrils.SHOVING THINGS UP YOUR NOSE SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA, IN THIS CASE

A final remedy:
If not, one should sit beneath a water spout and [others] should bring water, pour it on him through the spout and say the following: “Just as these waters stop, so too should the blood of so-and-so son of the woman so-and-so stop.” SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

(AND HERE'S THE FOOTNOTE)
[Although the incantation has no medical explanation, the shower of cold water is recommended in various sources as a remedy for nose-bleed (Biblical and Talmudic Medicine 9:3). [Apparently, the water is poured through a spout simply to make it shower down on the patient.]] NOTE: COMMENTARY ON THE COMMENTARY ON THE COMMENTARY. SOMEONE SHOULD MAKE A PRESCRIPTION INVOLVING SPLITTING HAIRS.

An ailment of the oral cavity:
For bleeding from the mouth, [the patient] is to be tested with a straw of wheat. If [the blood] sticks to the straw, it is coming from the lungs and thus, there is a remedy for it. But if the blood does not stick to the straw, it is coming from the liver and there is no remedy for it. ALSO BE A TEST FOR PASTA AL DENTE.

The Gemara digresses and focuses on the premise that blood from the liver is more serious than blood from the lungs:

Rav Ami said to Rav Ashi: But we learned the opposite in a Mishnah, for a—“

Here's where it goes on, but why bother? Ok. So what's the big deal? It's not like its Scientology or anything? (Well, actually, yeah--it kind of is.) You have to ask yourself that question, and the reply would go something like: Hey! Nobody's getting hurt here. And the Christian Scientists don't even bother with proscribed rituals as much as faith in the healing powers of prayer... Which brings up the following; a short note on the text by the official historian (I guess) who assembled the English-language version. Apparently, Hezekiah, a king of Judah, removed this from circulation as he sensed that ill people tended to rely exclusively on these remedies rather than prayer! And this deed was considered VIRTUOUS by the sages of his time! Also citing a further reason not to pay that much attention to them is that "since Talmudic times, these therapies, which were efficacious in those time are not necessarily so nowadays..."

And just what part of "The taste of a bucket in silver water, the taste of a bucket in tainted water" was "efficacious in those time(s)" and "[is] not necessarily so nowadays"?

I don't know, but something about the withdrawal of these potions and witchcraft seems even more sinister than keeping them under the tab for hot topics in the 21st century. Maybe it's just me. However, it does go a long way to explaining the kind of "magical thinking" prevalent among true believers, on the same plane with the fact that all the 9/11 hijackers were purported to have spent their last night before at a discotheque...and were of the firm opinion that 89 virgins (or so) awaited them in Paradise. Also, examine the social lives of the class of disaffected Moroccan youth in Holland, from whose ranks came kid who killed Theo Van Gogh for making an anti-Islamic movie, and you'll find that when similar aspirations of getting a date on Saturday night are thwarted, its an easy path straight to the extremist mosque. Ever wonder what makes fanatic commandos out of Bollywood-bes? (You may note the last locution tending towards a reference of the Mumbai incident. See, this is not faith-specific, only offered--like the aforesaid excerpt from the Wolf--as an object lesson. The thinking here is more along the lines of Jonathan Swift's Yahoos as opposed to just the Yehudin.) They see the same banquet of life that Auntie Mame talked about, and they really ARE starving to death. Which is how we get martyrs out of horny, easily-deluded teenagers: if you learn to swallow enough half-truths, a fantasy will taste no different.

Which brings us back about to the subject of cuisine as well. While I consider myself more health-conscious than my friend Ed, over at mediafunhouse.blogspot.com, he lives on junk food that would shame a long-haul trucker, but is constantly chiding me every time I mention a homeopathic solution to a sniffle or a fever. "You should take more Pills! Pills are something you can place a LOT of faith in!"

A BeatGen/Hippie saying was "You are what you eat," and I guess there's still some circulation on that axiom, mostly with reference to calorie counts dictated by pamphlets picked up in the checkout line. As for Ed? I can only put his lack of toxic effects from this consumption of chemical representations of edibles down to a metabolism so high hummingbirds would appear as sluggish butterflies. One would then suppose it isn't so much as what you take in as how you process it...out. Overall, then, organic is fine, just so long as it doesn't lead to the kind of ascetic self-absorption where holistic roots doctors and "chi" energy-flow specialists start charting yer chakras.

There's a lot to be said for preservatives, BHA, BHT, ascorbic acid, and Red No. 2 dye...at least by Ed. And yes, avoid old wives tales, feudal belief systems and regimens, and be as skeptical as you like about other people telling you what's good for you. So here's to another, now-rather-ironical slogan of a previous generation:

"Better Living Through Chemistry"!

heavy traffic on purgatory road

2008-11-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

"...snarlers, growlers, coughers, rumblers, roarers, rushers, whooshers, garglers..." This is the involuntary mutter of in the mind of a naturalist living in a contemporary urban environment. Not as much "Welcome To The Jungle" as "Yo! Grindcore!" The scientist within then, perforce, will have an impulse to classify automobiles, buses and trucks as distinct species (rather than a family or genera) and ordering their auditory according to engines/transmissions and/or exhaust systems. Morning calls are the most noticeable, greeting one with their full-throated throttlesong, tapitts a-rattle, gears-jamming--not all that different from their avian brethren,but more of a rookery chorus than individual songs or calls.

Audubon does the Autobahn.

Someone might wonder at the stretch required to connect the organic world to post-industrial production line models, but that person probably never gets out of the apartment. Especially not mine. Especially not that tenuous, first foray out the front door and down to the streets of concrete, the canyons of brick and glass. Hard, clean surfaces not only reflect sound waves, they amplify them; you might as well try hiding from a clapper inside the bell.

Most residents just let it slide, this tide, but a cacophony tsunami, for a select few, is just that physical, to the degree of interfering with one's ability to hold onto a patch of sidewalk, in order not to be swept away. Back in the 1960s, when the first supersonic aircraft were put into the air, as we lived not far from a USAF base, every now and then you'd hear the "BOOM!" and the realization would hit you that a jet had passed over you a few seconds before and this was the impact of its wake. That was my awakening to the fact that invisible forces are spilling over into our lives constantly.

Pretty melodramatic, isn't it?

Now as for the rush hour grind of gears? Why would anyone write about such a petty subject? That's the first question. The second is more complex, such as: If it bothers you that much, why not just tune into the iPod like everyone else?

That complaint comes WITH the iPod on. (And don't get me started on the Lexington line at Union Square.)

But, suddenly, and again as the result of indiscrimate browsing, I recalled another fascinating list, also discovered from that very same post quote in my post from October (?), appended here without attribution:

"My order of delusional goes like this (it is also the order of ‘emotionals’ by sheer coincidence):

Schizophrenics
Manic Depressives
Religiously Devout
Normal People in Love
Happy People
Depressed People
Neocons
Psychopaths"

One has to wonder if the blogger who put this up was, in point of fact, getting his source from someplace authoritative. For one thing: Manic Depressives? The theraputic designation these days is "Bipolar." Also the "order of emotionals" doesn't exactly make sense to me, going from Happy to Depressed in the middle with Schizophrenics and Psychopaths at either end. If you are not going to include garden variety Neurotics and Sociopaths, then where are you drawing the line, and how do you classify? Speaking technically, Sociopaths might be deleted due to the fact that they are so dissociative and removed from "emotional" mechanisms that they might not be open for consideration. However, your Woody Allen-type Neurotic is an industry standard that they should at the very least be placed between the Happy and the Depressed, if only to add a gradation.

One then must conclude that it was manufactured merely to be able to place "Neocons" among traits of personality disorders...which I don't necessarily disagree with, per se; so, nevertheless, this list is very attractive. But why would I want to try to match the two together? What purpose could there be? What profit in it?

It is obviously, the Naturalist impulse. We observe things in our environment and then try to order them. The question then must be: Why? You don't have to be some kind of university-trained scientist to do this, or to even WANT to do this. The term "naturalist" says it all: you simply watch things and take notes, and patterns emerge. Then, publish. And anyone who has seen the two buttons on this service will know how easy that is. The sole reason one does this sort of thing might even be put down to that primal impulse. Kinda puts you on the same level as Steven Jay Gould. Kinda. Ok, not really. But no worse off than some of the dreck that shows up in the papers disguised as "journalism" or "critical review".

Then, consider this map as a "sort of" list. Admittedly, it is copped from the Times, so if this is copyright infringement, so be it--but I have an agenda greater than appropriation of intellectual property for profit. First and foremost, it must be noted that they have chosen a pastel motif. This cannot be too strongly emphasized. It only occurred to me after having as my desktop background for days. As I had long ago discarded the article, I cannot say with certainty that the author does indeed make mention of this, nor that it could be attributed to a choice by the editor or even the artist. However, seeing as it was the Week In Review section, I doubt that demographic data as aesthetics is given much weight.

What you see is county-by-county voting in the most recent election, colored-coded along the lines of the hyped-up war between Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans. And I know this even without the accompanying article since I saw John King on CNN playing with his 'magic wall' like he was Tom Cruise in "Minority Report." And even though he'd randomly switch colors on 'reporting precincts' in order to make his devil's advocate positions, he'd switch them right back so nobody got the wrong idea that he was promoting one side or the other. But all this did was create a dazzling number of opportunities for people to see their districts flip-flopping worse than the chosen footgear of boardwalkers at Coney Island.

With that in mind, I have taken my trusty photoshop in hand and, with the same liberties (well, similar) as Mr. King, have found the following image within the data.

Ok. So not the DATA, itself, but more the aesthetic. Simply, I increased the contrast a lot and then increased the brightness. Easy as pie. The reason? I wanted to see the world the way the hysterical journos do: EXTREME! And here it is! Take away the obvious Arizona vote for their "Favorite Son candidate" (which is what he would have been if the election process were more about substance and less about hype) and what yet see is the Bible Belt vs. the Progressives. Couldn't be clearer, right?--that little Nike swoosh of red, outlined in a thin nimbus, before smashing into the overwhelm of blue-gray.

Television commentators will go straight for the jugular: BLUE BEATS RED! Their whole justification for such conclusions being little more than finding something to put between commercial breaks. They HAVE TO make HEADLINES THAT SHOUT! This is a lot of what is wrong with America: we shout too much. If that seems to echo something else said here, that was because it was supposed to. (Motif, leitmotif, theme & variation, sequential argument--same tricks, nuttin' fancy.) In the competition for our attention, there can be no second place. But life is not, I'm sorry to say, all that dramatic.

There is no mention of the Victory of White.

(Dramatic pause for the hushed intake of breath for possible expression of articulate bigotry.)

White is, above all, in this picture, in all paintings, lighting for movies--whatever--neutral. It is NOT "The Silent Majority". It is NOT Soccer Moms and NASCAR Dads. It is NOT "Fear of a Black Planet." (You knew there was hip-hop before gangsta, didn't you?)

It is, in point of fact, a toner. Some may not realize this since the only 'toners' they are in regular contact with are printer ink cartridges. CMYK, right? Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and K stands for Black (for some obscure reason to do with professional lithography, I vaguely recall). So where's the white? It's the paper, of course. When you start at neutral, it is easy to forget what the colors are on (except Cezanne, who liked a lot of blank canvass at the end, and was either so nuanced that he figured he didn't need to put in what was already there...or was so cheap he didn't want to buy more titanium). It may be more startling to paint on black (velvet, at least, when doing portraiture of Elvis or Jesus or Keane Kids), but it takes a LOT more paint too. (cf. Cezanne above)

(You are invited to click on any of the images for a larger picture. I believe that will open the jpg in another window of your browser. It is not so much for the detail work as to get a better gestalt, ja?)

Back to that first foray out the front door. This is about as close as one can come to a "naturalist" perspective on demographics. The whole idea of the naturalist is nothing more than a person who sees things and renders them down to results and interprets repeated patterns as some kind of law of nature. (Gad. I hate using the same terms over and over, but it can't be helped. Nothing else for it.) And one technique is to take lists of traits, habits, etc., and compare them across species (or disciplines) until some sort of general statement can be made.

The one victory that is not spoken about is neutrality. (I would like to add a sidebar here from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" about negative evidence and its manifestation as "invisible forces", then move on to Dark Matter, but...)

So let's go for another cliche, eh? Using terms like "dawn of a new day" may seem more apt to entitle some mid-70's fusion jazz-rock album than a description of the 21st century socio-political sphere, yet there are few that would argue an augury is not among us...and that is the prime conclusion from this version of the map. For this, I bumped up the brightness and brought down the contrast, so the picture (colors) is exactly what the previous sentence is saying (words). It is also something of an acknowledgment that, for the first time in a long time, the old strophe of "we're all in the same boat" reaalllly seem apropos, no?

This is what happens when you 'tone-down' the rhetoric and 'tone-up' the picture. (See? That's just what SJG would have said. Told you it wasn't hard.) And, yes, I could have made it more extreme, but that would defeat the point. All I did was nudge the values a bit. So even if that's all that happens to the nation in the next few years, it will be a whole lot better for it. Maybe not as profitable for the top 10% of gross incomes, but a lot less miserable for the bottom 50%. An economic boom wouldn't be bad, so long as it doesn't mean more sonic boom shocks of US vs. Them.

As a previous post made mention of Purple, I feel that this is the juncture at which we should give equal time to pastels as well. Lavender is nice. Not a big fan of Pink, I must say.

And that's about as Red State/Blue State as I'm going to get for a while, I hope.

DATELINE: Doylestown, PA - 1681: the origin of the "Two Americas" legend...

2008-11-05T06:31:00.000-08:00

The Bluestockings of Wm Penn and the Lenape, a tribe of Rednecks led by Chief Joe the Plumber, were in dispute over who grew the corn and who got to trade it on the Futures Exchange. After getting the short end of the stalk for decades, the locals joined the E.U.and began stealing lawn signs, trash talking and suppressing voter turnout. This led to the French & Indian War, in 1754, which raged throughout the rule of Mad King George, causing pundit skirmishes on all major networks, as well as basic cable. In the end, the Redneck's apoplexy turned them cyanotic and the Blue Sox scandals opened up enough old wounds that they bled to death. The "peaceable kingdom" was finally established when the Black Prince ascended the throne and began his Purple Reign.