Q21

 That's the location of Tom Artis's grave in the Camp Butler cemetery just outside of Springfield, IL. When you get there, and go to the visitor's center, there's a pretty brick building with a sign that says Grsve Locator, and there's a kiosk where you type in the last name, and ir prints you out a map with the location listed. If you come there on a Thursday morning , you won't see a living human being,and I think that's as it should be.

My dad was cremated, my older brother was cremated, and I guess I will be too. There's a carelessness about the process that either bespeaks confidence or despair, depending. There's no idea of reciprocity, or continuity, or tradition, in going to his grave on the anniversary of his death. Just a necessity I don't think I can describe.

It was just two bodies, one dead, one not yet dead. It wasn't my intention necessarily to do this alone, but it turned out right. It was better not to stand in front of his headstone armored and comforted by friends or family: alone and unarmed is maybe best.

Because it still hurts like the collapse of all the joy of my life to look upon this: not just the Big Mystery, but the savage injustice to his talent and the loss of my best friend. It's a thing that sucks music out of music and sunlight out of sunlight, and makes one's heart beat an angry and distraught complaint, again and again. 

I came, not to pay my respects to Tom, but my respects to Death. The process of dying can easily be thought of as an action of living: it's a falling, a rising, going through a door and shutting it behind, crossing a river and going into the trees, whence no report returneth. Going further up and further in, with this lion beside you? It's going to Hogwarts, Narnia, or Valinor. You can call it  part of life.

This lying in the ground a year later, not so much.

Ultimately, I think I did it to keep Tom from being a fancy. Telling a story about him now, even to myself, would make him more a character of mine. And he's not.

He's Q21.

 Baraminology

 You may have noticed the release of this movie Expelled, this Ben Stein-fronted propaganda film about how creationists and intelligent design painters are being run out of town, forced to find positions with right-wing billionaires, and have their intellect and taste in wine derided by elitist science-type people who think they're smarter than everybody. Now despite the fact that Ben Stein is an interesting cultural phenomenon--an actor who markets himself as a laughable pompous stuffed shirt with an Ivy League drawl who in reality is a laughable pompous stuffed shirt with an Ivy League drawl--I have no desire to see this. I've had friends who were Velikovsky adherents, hollow-earthers, Kirlian photographers, professional astrologers, UFO adherents of every flavor, I refuse to allow Republicans into their scientist-disdaining, gap-examining party. My friends are at least fun to be around. If I could be assured that Ben Stein would show off a Dean Drive in the second part of the movie, or mention metachlorians, I might go. As it is, no.

However, my brother sent me a URL to Expelled Exposed, a site that debunks the movie, which led me to the site of The Palaeontological Association of America, where the editor of their journal, Richard Sternberg, inserted an Intelligent Design article in their publication--after first resigning. And from the Association's narrative of the incident I was led to a group Sternberg associated himself with--and found myself an the island of Laputa. 

Baraminology is an earnest attempt to codify in science-like terms an actual 'creation science'. complete with Venn diagrams, Greek solecisms, and acronyms. And in so doing, these doctors of thinkology are writing papers on what the pre-Fall functions of microbes could have been. (They must have been beneficial!) And working out a calculus of the array of living things on the planet without bringing in all that evolution stuff.

The result is, despite my snarky noun substitution really rather wonderful.

It was Eric Auerbach in his book Mimesis that first made me aware of how sparse and spare Biblical prose is. Although we've been taught that these are complete stories, and been supplied all sorts of visualizations that seem to make up half the art in the world, when you look at it, you'll see that they're only the spines of stories--not even a complete skeleton. Everything there is vital: a careless reading will lead you astray, but large amounts of what we want from a good story is not there. (Auerbach points out that this is peculiar to the Bible, and not just an antique thing: Homer has none of this skeletal quality.) It's a nice observation, and went a long way to my appreciation of the Bible as art.

However, if for some reason best known to themselves, a bunch of people want to use this as a design manual for the world, and as a scientific report on the mechanisms of the universe, it will throw you into the deep end of the pool and break for lunch.

This is an opportunity as well as a challenge, but it leads one, as it is leading the baraminologists, in an entirely different direction from scientific research--towards the midrash, a place in discourse phase space near and dear to my heart.

One of the saddest thing about Christian theology is that the imaginative speculation that is its body has almost never been allowed to wander where it will: the spectre of hierarchy, dogma, and various curved metal instruments have always stood in the way. At nearly every theological round table, somebody begins the discourse by putting an AK-47 on the table:: get too creative, have too much fun, exercise your mind a bit too freely, and you're burned as a heretic. Judaism, on the other hand, with no authoritative hierarchy,speculation about what the Torah really meant in this one sentence was exposed to extensive, exhaustive--and wild--speculation. And since nobody was in a position, for most of non-legendary Jewish history, to put a curved metal instrument to anybody else, no corner is left unexplored. Christians, who have grown up hearing one and only one interpretation of the Bible verses, are unprepared for this imaginative freedom.

I come to the midrash by one of the few non-Jewish routes--from studying at the feet of the legendary ascended master Roy Thomas. Roy, as the first vicar of Marvel Comics' Stan Lee on earth, learned pretty early on that, if you created a new character while you were writing for Mighty Marvel, you got zip. nada. bupkis. He was also in attendance as such amazing people as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Stan himself, were creating thousands of characters like God realizing the six days were almost up. Roy became the master of rationalizing what was becoming the Marvel Universe. Instead of following suit, he took this titanic fount of characters, alien races,demons, dark dimensions, Hungarian mad scientists (Stan had a thing for guys named Zoltan) and, by reading closely, was able to thread together various bits of business already lying around and not only turn them into stories, but make the whole background more coherent--and that was a comic-book excitement heretofore unseen. We all followed, and followed eagerly, after Roy, fans and pros alike.

I ended up becoming the de facto regular writer in the latter days of one of Roy's most delightful creations, the book What If? Doing alternative histories of the Marvel characters, and doing it right, demanded a close reading of the characters' story, changing one aspect, and then reasoning out what would change and what would not. It was a midrash. And like the midrash, it offered the opportunity to shed light on the character of the figure (character, as Aristotle put it [loosely], is what the actors would be doing if they were doing something else than the plot.)

Frankly, when I saw what these baraminolgists were doing in thinking about microbes before the fall--was midrash. Of course, it was a strange version: it's kind of like having Robert Heinlein and E.E. 'Doc' Smith rewriting the Talmud from scratch. It's rather awe-inspiring, to tell you the truth.

Honestly, I think that a great deal of good can come out of it: when one of the Laputans can actually contemplate whether the six days of creation may actually not be one right after the other, there's a wonderful thunder on the horizon. It reminds me irresistibly of a joke by Steven Wright (my absolute favorite comedian):

I went down to the convenience store, and I saw the guy locking up. I said, "What's going on? The sign says 'Open 24 Hours'!" And the guy snorted and said, "Not in a row...!"

When you start applying the principles championed by not just Roy Thomas but Steven Wright to Christian doctrine, there may be hope for us yet.

(Oh, and Cain married his sister.)

(Named Candy.)

(Don't forget to tip the waitstaff. And try the veal.)

Will You Won't You Will You Won't You Won't You Join the Dance?

 Every so often I have to admit I'm beaten.

There's this movie that I've just watched for the third time without really intending to.

It's The Holiday, and on the surface there's a lot of unpromising things about it. The premise is so obvious as to shake your head (two women with shitty love lives due to shitty men in their lives do a vacation house swap between LA and Surrey England--and guess what happens?) and stars glossy Hollywood stars in pretty places. It has unbearably cute kids on one side of the Atlantic and an unbearably endearing old guy on the other. It's a Hollywood movie that smooches Hollywood (which can get embarrassing and is done entirely too much these days.) 

But my crusty populist alienation from people who are just too pretty playing supposedly ordinary folks, I found, was curiously absent watching Jude Law and Cameron Diaz. And the LA couple was only partially glossy, with Kate Winslet and Jack Black as the other couple. (Jack Black as a romantic lead?)

And Jude Law is not only Jude Law, but Too Good To Be True, a widower with the aforementioned adorable kids (the phone calls from other women? They're from them!) The movie could easily have gotten away with a divorce, but goes for the triple. And of course the endearing old man (Eli Wallach) is a living Hollywood legend with an Oscar on his windowsill who finally receives his just recognition. It's the piece of wedding cake with the rose on it.

And yet, and yet...Jude Law and Cameron Diaz are not improbable figures, and that mainly because they have all sorts of interesting, warm and above all disarming things to say to each other. Engaging, confessional, witty, but not too witty for the room. There's at least one time when Jude Law tries for witty (he'd been doing well so far) and it slips through his fingers. "Asking if you were unmarried was just a back-door way of--asking if you're married." and he realizes he's reached the city limits. In short, it's the writing.

It's not dazzling writing, it's careful writing. And that's the kind of miraculous thing about it. Jack Black (and it's a bit of assured expectation management that he's the first character you see in the film) is given a spare , restrained script, and Jack brings it off, by being given a part of a guy who's smart, talented, funny and decent--but who is aware every so often (not always) that he's a short, slightly pudgy guy in an environment of--well, Jude Laws. Too clever and he's Jack Black™, to pathetic and he's (as Eli Wallach puts it) the best friend and not the romantic lead.

There's a good panicky-crossed-signals incident at the critical point in the movie, a cute little narrative trick that is used just often enough (and that's twice) as treats to the viewer, smilers rather than laughers. All the energy of the script is poured into the romance. 

Looking at Nancy Meyers' previous career, I might have even given The Holiday a skip--I don't even remember Something's Gotta Give--and Father of the Bride I & II? What Women Want? The remake of The Parent Trap, for Lubitsch's sake? The best that could be said is that she's paid her dues. I'm tempted to say that she may have been sabotaged by casting--those who remember the original Father of the Bride with affection (I even have the original novel, with illustrations by the great Gluyas Williams) have got to rise up out of our rockers and say Steve Martin? What were you thinking? (Martin may be the Keanu Reeves of comedy--in the same way that, incomprehensibly, Reeves seems to be the first choice among producers of SF, Fantasy and Comics filmmaking, despite his inability to act his way out of San Dimas--Steve Martin seems to be, in their money and cocaine clouded minds, both Spencer Tracy and Peter Sellers. I liked his stand-up, but I'll swallow my tongue before I'll watch the new Pink Panther.) (and the less said about Mel Gibson the better.) Moreover, she produced them, so there's less excuse.

But it did, in fact seem to be dues paying, because here she chose exactly the stars she wanted and wrote them to near perfection. She couldn't have gotten that box office boffo a cast without those dues, nor the control to do this right. At the same time that it's sad that somebody has to go through that low arc, it's still warming to see someone come out the other side.

This film is not going to seduce you, I expect, if you have too much irony in your soul, or if you rebel against the genre in the first place. The Hollywood romantic comedy really is  its own thing: it's different from stage romance or farce, since the heart and soul of it is in the close-up, the two-shot, the deep familiarity the camera has with the small reactions of the actor's face. The romances of previous eras had to be done with big gestures, door slamming, and the falling in love part was the simplest of facts as the curtain falls. The Hollywood romantic comedy (and the best of its romantic drama, is made up of all the things that go between the grand gestures. As a result it seems more frothy and inconsequential, but it's really not--although it's easy to devalue. This movie says very little about L.A. or England, and the social forces are covered with a layer of chintz--and the message of the movie is Stop Going Out With Assholes, There Are Wonderful Guys Out There. (which has a certain appeal, I admit.)

But the work of romance is not to tell you that. The work is to make you believe it.

The truly great romances of the world can actually make you believe that the nature of the world really runs on Love--if you are young and still believe in the God or Goddess within you. It's too late for most of us, though: it's enough of a miracle to believe in it for the time that you've surrendered yourself to the movie, or book, or sonnet, and not for you, for them. And even in that reduced circle, it happens terribly seldom.

(I'll just mention one movie that, though passionately romantic in intent, left me with nothing but a tremendous bitterness, and that was Notting Hill. Julia Roberts, playing Julia Roberts, Hollywood Superstar, meets Hugh Grant, self-effacing semi-failure book shop owner. Despite the whole Two Different Worlds thing, they fall in love, and after the usual Daisy Method  (which The Holiday also uses: she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not), there's a Mad Dash To The Airport and Julia holds a press conference saying that she's abdicating her throne to be with The Man She Loves. (There's a Mad Dash at the end of The Holiday, and it goes on just a bit too long--mainly because it's on foot.))

(Nothing wrong with the plot--the failing of Notting Hill was that Julia Roberts fell in love with Hugh Grant because he was Hugh Grant. The writer/director/producer/stars just had it happen, an instantaneous thing that was done and complete at the first meet cute , and the rest was just admitting the fact. The real energy and charm was in the supporting cast, who would have been even more fun without the two big stars getting in the way. But the truth the creators tried to say is that Love Conquers All, and can bridge the gap from the highest of our present-day nobility and the nobody peasantry--and they didn't do a damn thing to make you believe it. They were perfectly happy with two movie stars falling in love with each other. And for me, while they essayed this great romantic truth, by abandoning the effort, they said exactly the opposite. I finished the movie and said out loud to myself, "It's a lie.")

The virtue of The Holiday is that, while it didn't quite convince me that it's Love that rules the universe, it did manage to convince me that I would like these people up on the screen if I met them, that they are worthy of my sympathy, and that they well deserve whatever happiness they get. It's very simple idea--but just try it sometime.

It really takes a great deal of confidence to have the climax of the movie simply to have the cast of the movie (minus the villains and the old guy in the walker) simply dancing around. And it takes a great deal of care and skill to make that both necessary and sufficient as an ending.

 Artes Liberales

 There are definitely points where I detach myself from the progressive community--or at least a certain portion of it. I am after, a comic book writer (again) and was mainlining pure Marvel 4-color since there was a Marvel, and rushed home to see whatever Republic Serial Officer Joe Bolton was running on Channel 9. I grew up reading and collecting comics and eventually realized the dream of writing them. And I was a hippie and a war protestor and one of those people Richard Nixon was trying to save America from.

And through the 80's I watched and listen to supposed progressives say how awful what I was doing was, how terrible the stuff I grew up with was for the children, and found myself angrily shouting at Al Gore's wife on the teevee. 

Especially over the last eight years, with the American Polity in flames and American Honor bleeding in the ditch--and surrounding myself with more like-minded people, I bitched about it less and less, and found compensatory characteristics in Al Gore to tip the balance in his favor. 

But something of that old alienation cropped up when, in the context of Mark Evanier's splendid new book on Jack Kirby, Novelist Glen David Gold characterized Kirby's imagery as 'angry,' It wasn't an indictment, but it seemed to me such a wrong-headed analysis that seemed to confuse background with foreground that I realized that I was still on a different side of the ditch from a lot of other people whom I was allied with in important ways.

And today I read two articles. One talking about Rep. Sally Kern and The American Family Association putting out a video on the Evil Gay agenda entitled "They're Coming To Your Town". Another article on a California Schools' ban on candy in vending machines creating a student black market that had commenters (more than a couple) thumping about high-fructose corn syrup, the fast food industry's agenda and the link between junk food and learning disabilities that will, no doubt, come to light one day.

Now hands up, everybody who immediately thought 'but that's different!" There's the ditch, and me on the other side. Now I believe in biochemistry more than in the Evil Gay Alliance, but there's something else I believe in that's consonant with both the awfulness of war and the glory that is comical books, with humane social policies and guys in rocket suits, and that's this: that the mind is not a machine.

You heard me.

A mind, properly developed and trained, is not limited by the present quality of its inputs. It can see injustice and learn justice, see crowded dirty streets and learn the geometries of nature, be exposed to vulgarity and banality and learn music and poetry. The process by which all this happens is called thinking, and it is the first and last of the artes liberales, the arts necessary for free men and women. It's important to teach children this task, because it's going to be required of them to be free even when in the presence of a transgendered person, and expected to think even when they're feeling a bit logy from too many doughnuts. 

And just in case you're about to object that one is nutrition, and the other is bigotry, I will tell you that the principle is the same: 1) indoctrination and 2) calling something poison which isn't. And blaming insidious conspiracies in order to boost indignation is the same bad mojo.

Intelligence is a powerful thin. It enables you to walk through the valley of the shadow  of bullshit, distortion, and fair and not succumb. It enables you to adjust your behavir where will and habit will not help. (especially when it's somebody else's will and habit imposed from outside. Intelligence will not necessarily make you happy or successful or attractive--it will allow to understand something of what happiness, and success, and attraction are--and that may be the problem.

What it may tend to make you is free. And that is something that no training, no nutrition, no purity of environment or adherence to doctrine will get you. 

I know many people who would be really indignant that I; a fat old white guy, would equate them with fundamentalist homophobes. And they're not. I would associate with progressives every single time, and  massive doses of gay people will not do to you what massive doses of corn syrup will. They're not the same.

But they're doing thee same thing. That's the crux. That's the chain in their hand.

 Y'all don't step in that there chronosynclastic infundibulum, y'heah?

 I picked up a book on tape at the local library with the promising title of Bootlegger's Daughter, by Margaret Maron. I was a little bit disappointed that it turns out to be a lawyer-mystery set in modern North Carolina. (There are cop-mysteries, lawyer-mysteries, psychologist-mysteries, forensics-mysteries, all of whichcan be sometimes over-laden with procedural details, as opposed to the more romantic genres of the PI mysteries, outsider mysteries, and mythical-figure mysteries (Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, who occupy a niche found nowhere in real life.) Still, rather than a great huge plate of ethnogrphic details, there's plenty of sprinkles on top of a more conventional mystery--which I always enjoy.

My first jolt was when the ultra-rich owner of the local pharmaceutical company was named Owen Barfield.  He's not only an important philosopher (who writes great stuff) but famous as one of the Inklings, the group that included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. It's a strange choice to name a mystery character, especially a(seeming) incidental one. Still, writers will pick up names from just about anywhere, and it didn't seem to be establishing a pattern. So it's possible to ignore it.

But after I get into it for a while, something positively eerie begins to dawn on me. The central story of the book is the fiercely contested election for District Judge between a white woman lawyer and a tall, angular black lawyer. After the other candidates drop out, the primary is between the two Democrats, and it begins to get ugly, with shadowy people bringing forth nasty characterizations: The black man is accused of being, well, black, and the woman (the point-of-view character) is accused, among other things, of being a Lesbian.

This was written in 1992.

I haven't finished the story yet--but then again, I don't know how the other story ends either.

Brrrrrr.

 It's the Thoth that counts

 Well, it's here. The moment you've all long ago stopped waiting for.

After a hiatus of *gasp* 18 years, I'm doing a comic again.

It's an online thing, for comicmix.com, under the editorial hegemony of my old bud Mike Gold.

It's at present only one Munden's Bar story, but I'm doing it with the he-should-admit-that-he's-legendary Alan Weiss., which really does make a tingle run up my leg, for all that we've been friends for decades.

Nobody asked us to, but we created a brand new character for the piece, which we've fallen in love with a bit. (I have, at least.) This may be his only appearance, but that's only my overly cautious security circuitry speaking.

And of course I can't tell you a release date because we haven't finished doing it. But not too far in the future. In the mean time, go over there and sample the many funny-book pleasures to be had, including John Ostrander and Tim Truman back on Grimjack, than which it seldom gets better.

Our guy's name is Thoth. Jack Thoth.

And nobody asked me to, but I came up with a logo. Herewith.

This should be fun.

 Myxomycophyta

 There's a really hefty portion of the progressive community that view large corporations as the root, if not of all evil, then of the biggest chunk in Hell's pie chart. 

There's small doubt that that's true quantitatively. Exploitation of workers, environmental rape, coverups, fraud that damages lives, and outright theft--happens all the time. As someone whose grandfather died in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, I have scant inclination to minimize these things. 

But is it legitimate to take the next step--that corporations in and of themselves are evil? Or the step after that, that property is theft, and owners and capitalists are a class to be overthrown, and a communist society the only just society. THe Right has mirrored those steps that 1) everything the unrestrained free market system is good, and 2) amoral social Darwinism is the best way to advance the Race. Both positions are fueled by the repugnance of their mirror images. Anger and hatred thus abound. It's pretty ugly.

Now there doesn't seem to be any cosmic necessity that an organization put together to make money should be, or become, evil. A company can be run by a tyrant and operate on fear; it can be run by a gonif and run on fraud and theft--none of that has to happen.

Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, especially at the time, was perceptive: owners will always try to get work for as little money as possible, and will support conditions to make labor as cheap as possible. It's a nasty engine for a race to the bottom, especially when anti-democratic forces make the push back nearly impossible for the other side of the negotiation.

Of course, the owner wants to sell the product for as much as he possibly can--which poses an interesting double feedback situation when the market for the product is the same as the labor pool. The same poverty that lowers your costs also limits your sales. So it's not so simple, and by no means an inevitable war.

And certainly, as long as a company is an extension of the owner, corporations can be as varied as human beings. 

But there, I think, we come to it. I always thought that there were two philosophical propositions underpinning the modern corporate world that were simply absurd in conjunction: 1) that corporations are legally persons, and 3) that the only purpose of a corporation is to create value for the shareholders. What kind of person do we then have in our polity that would have so little complexity in their makeup that they come across as a bunch of low-grade morons? What kind of society puts those morons in charge?Why should a corporate person be excused from the complex and multilateral relationships that all other persons live with?

And then contemplating that, it hit me: corporations are a low form of life.

Putting that pair of glasses on, things make a little more sense. Present a corporation with a resource or an asset or a pile of money, it will extend a pseudopod toward it. Try to limit its income, or block its access to food or light, and it will squeal. Wound it and it will fall apart and other corporations will eat the remains. Present it with a rainforest and it will try to eat it: it will consume a resource as fast as it possibly can, and begin to whine uncomprehendingly when the resource is depleted. Try to raise the minimum wage, institute safety standards, call it to task on its damage to the environment, it will squeal. And thrash about, and try to sting.

This is not true of companies that are the extension of a human personality, whether owner or CEO: Walt Disney, say, Tom Watson, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bud Frankel. As these men's intelligencce went, so went the company. But the thing that becomes increasingly obvious to me is that the modern big corporation, as it grows, sheds intelligence and discernment as it grows, until what you get resembles nothing so much as a big slime mold.

There are many things that help this along: Wilson's law, that communication is possible only between equals, that minimizes information flow in a hierarchical organization; insane CEO compensation and detachment from the consequences of their actions; CW and CYA--and the principle of shareholder value alone. There are a hundred ways where conventionnal corporate practice prevents the formation of a central nervous system, through bad communication and lack of corporate will. Complex and intelligent strategies that mean deferred reward  and long term strategy, of deferring immediate profit for long-term viability--At every point the pressure is to abandon those behaviors in favor of feeding, crawling, whining and squealing.

If there's one phrase that, in my lessmoral mooments, I think I could turn into the keystone of a Management best-seller and a subsequent round of richly-psid talks, it's this: A committee is incapable of holding an idea. It will drop it at the first opportunity. Forget it, or eviscerate it. If you need to work with ideas, you need to use a higher form of life, viz. human beings. It's possible to corporation to act like something with a notochord, but you have to both be aware of the devo forces at work inside the big slug and the will and power to counteract them.

And that means acting like a citizen instead of mycelium, respecting human rights and the environment, and working towards a sustainable future instead of the next pool of oil. The myxomycophytous corporation will make stupid decisions, greedy decisions, completely unimaginative decision, and squeal and bleat whenever its pseudopods don't find nutrients. This unfortunately translates into exploitation, brutality, lies and fraud, and the occasional mass murder. 

It's nothing that a nervous system can't cure, however. A corporation can act as intelligently as any other group of human beings, and making money is no goal that requires scum-sucking evil. The rest of society can, in fact, compel corporations to act intelligently--and in a world with an ever-increasing technology gradient, critical environmental issues, and all the woes that flesh is heir to, that's ultimately a good idea.

If there's one thing truly wretched, though, it's a bunch of people who, in blind reaction against what they see as fanatic communism, wide-eyedly defend and praise stupid behavior, low level predation, mindless cruelty, and joyously echo the whines and squeals of these big motile slime monsters, as if it were Schopenhauer.

Maybe someday we'll begin to realize that acting intelligently is a good idea. Sooner rather than later would be nice.

 Either Steve Gadd's or Carl Perkins' Birthday Random 10

 1. June Tabor - The writing of Tipperary /  It's a long way to Tipperary

2. Alice In Chains - Killer Is Me [Unplugged]

3. The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir - Schopska Pesen

4.  Blackpool Lights -  Empty Tank

5.  Karen Dalton - How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You

6.  Gordon Lightfoot - The Way I Feel 

7.  The Bad Examples -  Feeling Your Head Against The Wall

8.  Fenton Robinson -  Checking On My Woman

9.  Squeeze - Letting Go

10.  Pink Floyd - Run Like Hell

and because it's hard to know when to stop 11. Shannon Wright -  Rich Hum Of Air

Haven't done this in a while--maybe because I've run out of major things to say about music--or at least mah music. But I've had a couple of pleasant musical discoveries in the last few days. One is Yevhen Stankovytch. I'll pick up a composer I've never heard of almost without thinking and, as with my reading, occasionally I get rewarded. Stankovytch walks that perfet twentieth century line between classic forms and jagged adventurous noises. Kind of Shostakovitch with something to prove. Like Arnold Bax, another favorite, it' big, emotional, surprising and beautiful stuff he's doing. The other is Chumbawamba's English Rebel Songs 1381-1984. It certainly doesn't sound like their one hit, or much of anything else they've done (which is vastly more varied than their hit.) It's frankly a beautiful disc: kind of like Steeleye Span, if Steeleye Span were Wobbly agitators. Crystalline lefty songs of anger, defiance and class warfare. I'm in love.

Good as these were, they don't quite rise to what I conceive to be the proper level of a post, so I tack a RandomTen on top of it. And because I don't have any thing profoundly general to say about music, herewith a rundown on the tracks.

1. June Tabor has the archetypal bell-like English folk female voice, but it's matured into something finer. And this is fun: the chestnut "It's a long way to Tipperary" preceded by a song about the song. She not only sings each phrase, she tells you what she thinks of each phrase in her handling of it. Plus you'll learn somefing.

2. The best Alice in Chains album (good as Dirt is) is their MTV Unplugged disc. Face it: the buzz covers a lot of sins--but not in their case. They come by their darkness honestly, and some of the chords are downright startling.

3. I picked up "La Mystère des Voix Bulgares" before a couple of years before they became everybody's favorite sample source. Utterly strange harmonies in an obscure language--I played it to death when I got it. If you get introduced to them now, chances are you'll go "Oh, so that's where those strange backing vocals came from!"

4. It's your typical indie band, with typical earnest indie stretched tenor in front of an uncomplicated setup--but it's a stirring anthem on being a loser. It's hard to resist.

5. I've also talked about Karen Dalton before. Her voice is a little bit scary and a little more wrong, but it's as far as Andromeda from James Taylor's version of the song. I'm really not sure I like it, but it exercises a fascination. 

6. The first date I went on in college was to see Gordon Lightfoot at the auditorium theatre, and for the life of me I can't remember who with. This was back when he was still on United Artists, before he got on to Warner Brothers and "If you could read my mind" and LONG before the Wreck of the Annoying Edmund Fitzgerald. Fotheringay (the Fairport spinoff band) did a killer cover of this song, but the original is good too.

7. I know these guys. One of them did the assessment on my house. They had a fan-following that was deeply disturbing. And Ralph Covert is now a children's music god. But they were as fine a crowd-pleasing band, and Ralph wrote fine, much-better-than-they-needed-to-be-songs. This is one of them. 

8. Lest you think that I just love every one of the 17,000 songs on the iPod, I like rather than love Fenton Robinson. But we shallow white Chicagoans with a sometime pretense to hippitude can get complacent about The Blues. The rest of you have to limp along with something misnamed thee House of Blues, while any night of the year we could have our pick of the real stuff. Fenton Robinson was the real stuff. (I remember going to a restaurant with some comic-book people in San Diego that featured a blues band that was four white guys in Hawaiian shirts who all looked like Kenny Loggins, and I started to shake from something between unendurable sadness and blues withdrawal. How I made it through dinner I don't know.)(Hm? Oh, Ralph Macchio, Mark Gruenwald, Roger Sterm, Art Adams and Klaus Janson, I think.)

9. This is also later Squeeze, not their best stuff. Good songwriting but dull arrangements. With this album (Play) I usually go "Who is this? That's a good song!" before I look at the screen. The stuff from Cool For Cats and East Side Story were unmistakeable--but that's back in the age of Vinyl, and I'm not that obsessive yet to try to transfer and clean that stuff up..

10. And a cramped, menacing doomed  vocal by Roger Waters completely undercut--and made, by the joyous positive anthemic guitar of David Gilmour.

The Wall is Tommy written backwards, and could not have been done without Townshend leading the way. The difference is that the music in The Wall rocks harder, and fights the bloodless cynical paralysis of Waters' vision. It's that tension that makes the Wall listenable, 

and 11. Shannon Wright proves that you can be a female musical eccentric without being Tori Amos.  (or Kate Bush.)

So there you have it: I probably won't try this again, because it feels too much like trying to tell you why every song on my iPod is cool. That's not interesting--or possible. And I have this vision of being the guys I knew in college, absolutely compelled to say something about every track on the record changer.

I've already turned into my father, I don't want to turn into those people as well.

 Department of nasty Scots similes, part one

 Just finished The Torment of Others, a quite decent police mystery by Val McDermid. It takes the standard Ed McBain police procedural format (One major investigation/one minor investigation; one professional development/one emotional development in the ongoing cast of characters) transports it to Scotland, and pumps up the intensity to compete at serial psycho/sexual killer weight.

It's not my favorite kind of potboiler, but it delivers. Thecharacters are just believable enough notto stick out like fence posts: in books like these the agonies and frrustrations of the protagonists are just another plot engine--which is why fictional detectives tend to veer towards eccentricity rather than depth. (Not that that's the case here.) My only unfair minor complaint is that, although it's set in Scotland, as soon as it gets going it might as well be in the 87th Precinct. (Not that I'm asking for bagpipes and haggis. but I've gotten a little spoiled by Alexander McCall Smith's deft and colorful Edinburgh novels.)

But it becomes worthy of a post because  of one line that leapt up and embedded in my brain like a pushpin. 

"He held his erection like a pet rat."

It's worth reading an entire conventional book for something like that. 

 Sea Level

 Near as I can figger out, this here banking crisis and extra added recession is caused by people not being able to pay their mortgages.

It's being represented as due to new creative financial instruments wrapping risky mortgages into financial instruments that were not supposed to contain them, and a whole bunch of people "using their houses as piggy banks," as one particularly obnoxious poster put it. There was this housing bubble, see, and everybody just went a little crazy from those low interest rates and high housing prices--and then it burst--so what do you expect? John McCain expressed his distaste for helping out 'foolish people," and who can blame him?

Shady instruments and popular folly definitely had something to do with this--but the fact remains that none of this would be happening if people could afford to pay their mortgages.

When I was deciding whether or not to buy a house, nineteen years ago, I looked at all the advantages built into the system. When you rented, it was just plain money poured down a hole. Buy a house, and what was interest was tax deductible, while what was not was equity. Such a deal! And improvements you made to the house increased its value, so money spend on central air or a new deck was practically not spending at all! Even though I was a freelance writer an life was uncertain (as events shortly afterwards were to prove), I felt I'd made the right decision. In fact, I really wished I had done it earlier when prices were lower.

But now it's foolish to get a mortgage to buy a home?

ARM's are bad, bad, bad, and Alan Greenspan deserves fierce opprobrium for going out and encouraging people to get them. And because they're tied to federal interest rates, when they started to go up, suddenly the payments went up too, and they couldn't afford to make the payments. Awful! 

Now if you turn on the water in the shower stall and hear a shriek from the cat, you turn the water back off, right? So when you raise national interest rates, and people with ARMs start to shriek and run to bankruptcy court, the solution seems to be to ratchet the interest rates back down again, the ARM's rates readjust, people are able to pay again, you wipe your brow and apologize to the cat.

Didn't Ben Bernanke (no fool) do just that? Certainly looked that way. Then why didn't it work?

Certainly there was an awful lot of irresponsible mortgage writing to people who couldn't vaguely afford them. I read about the Ninja mortgages--no income, no jobs or assets--and was appalled. But then the question is, why is this happening all at once? Shouldn't these Ninjas have been defaulting all along? Why the catastrophe? Because the shower metaphor was wrong: you were instead turning up the flame on the stove, and the cat caught on fire. Simply turning the knob back down will not solve the problem, and neither will apologizing.

Is this crisis one o greedy speculators, dodgy financial innovation and enthusiastic rubes? Is this just more Enron? Is it another New Economy?

Or is it a story of people unable to pay their mortgages?

I've said previously that I don't like the whole metaphor of the housing 'bubble' and its overtones of prosperity. It's become one of those commonplace metaphors that's a loose cannon on the level playing field of common discourse. This financial escapade was no bubble rising to heights of uneconomic transcendence--a better term was an economic polder. I know it has no chance of widespread adoption, because you have to know what a polder is. It's a Dutch word for an area of land reclaimed from the sea, still below sea level and protected by dikes. This irresponsible financial shenanigans didn't raise a glittering bubble to the skies, but unnaturally created solid ground to stand on against the overwhelming pressure of being below sea level.

A 30 year mortgage for more than you think you can ever repay of necessity involves faith, dreams and mythology. For many (including me) it went from owing nothing to owing everything, and while that's a more accurate description of the human condition, it's a bit of a blow to any sense of cosmic self-sufficiency  one might have. Plan for the next thirty years? Yeah, sure. 

What a person trembling on the brink of homeownership in America believes in, beyond their own courage, is the myth that things get better when you work hard here. (by 'myth' I don't mean falsehood, but cultural narrative, you know, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Stan Lee.) And it hasn't always been false.

But as progressive economists have pointed out, that hasn't been true of the American middle class for a while. The appearance of prosperity has partly been fueled by one-income families giving way to two-income families, and the occasional layaway (and mortgage) receding in favor of a life of credit. Inflation and technology further obscure that perception, but the statistics are plain.

And the worse thing is not that the rich have been getting richer with respect to the middle class (that really doesn't bother most Americans) but that the risk and uncertainty haas been transferred from the rich to the middle class. As time has gone by, there are more and more economic wallops delivered directly to the middle class.

And since George W has gotten in, things have gotten a lot harder a lot quicker. Health care, climbing funicularly for decades, crossed a line where even large companies can't afford it. Skilled tech jobs vanished in the .com bubble--and not just the jobs, but the training itself was devalued. And the jobs lost in W's first recession didn't come back--or came back in Bangalore. And the media started talking about the 'jobless recovery'--and then stopped.

And energy prices shot up, and bankruptcy laws were restructured against the consumer, and credit card minimums doubled--the waters started rising. But after Alan Greenspan (him again) raised interest rates five times in 2000 to bring the economy to a halt just as the .com bubble was collapsing, he found he had to lower interest rates practically to zero to pull out of the nosedive. And thus was created the Housing Polder. And a bunch of people found themselves standing on solid ground below sea level.

And now, as the dikes of the polder crack, as the interest rates rise--as the grain prices rise, as the gas prices rise, as health care follows its asymptotic path towards infinity. 

AS the bubble bursts, and we wonder hoe ended up without security, without power, afraid to get sick, insulted by our news media, ruled by people stupider than us, and somehow below sea level.

Tolkien Time

It's been a while, so I figure It's time to reread the Lord of the Rings again.

Please note that this is not a confession of weakness. I say this in all seriousness that THe lord of the Rings is one of the great fictional works of the 20th century. (and I say this as someone who's read and enjoyed Ulysses twice, and am a big Thomas Mann fan, and loves me some Henry James.) The Lord of the Rings is a big, serious, masterfully written book. It tried for different effects than what critics were used to, and was shaped differently from their criteria, and so  a lot of them missed the boat. In the mean time it simply bowled over millions, myself included.

Just to hopelessly typecast me, I went to Woodstock with friends, and we parked my 1965 Rambler American by the side of the road because traffic was bunching up and we figured the site was just a little bit ahead. As it turned out it was over 5 miles, and we ended up riding on the hoods, roofs and trunks of cars as we approached that unbelievable bowl of people with Richie Havens' voice echoing out of the distance. As we rode, a hippie pair climbed over the previous car and onto ours. "Hi. We're Lúthien and Beren," she said, and I said, "From out of the Mountains of Terror to Doriath?" We knew each other.

The bond of that book was as strong as Woodstock. J.R.R. Tolkien was as thick a thread in that skein of the 60's counterculture as Timothy Leary, and nearly as powerful as the Beatles. This of course appalled Tolkien at first, but eventually he accepted it with grace. You do not revivify myth in the Western World and think it won't grow beyond you.

I was completely overwhelmed by the book. I started writing my own fantasy novel, but after maps  and histories and thousands of words, I began to realize that all I was doing was rewriting the Lord of the Rings. And I stopped. It had filled up my imagination to such an extent that I couldn't get beyond it. (Of course, I was 16.)

But as I learned how to read a book,  I went back to the trilogy and discovered that it wasn't just that he wrote about elves and magical rings and made up maps that made LOTR compelling. By then thousands of writers were doing the same thing, and nearly none of them were doing it well. Looking at it carefully, I discovered a number of things: that there was actually very little magic in the book (a tree gets set on fire, a door opens, things are seen in a dish of water, a rope unties itself, and you disappear when you put on the Ring. Not a power bolt or a morphing in evidence.) unlike everybody else, who would put in a marvel at every opportunity. He was always careful about point of view--always from the most humble character--hobbits, or when he couldn't get hobbit, the dwarf. And when Frodo began to get too changed by the Ring, the viewpoint shifted to Sam. (We get in side Gandalf's head exactly once and Aragorn's never. Tolkien had at least three prose styles and switched them with care. And the Professor would echo a mythic model--but only up to a point.

This was especially amusing among the critics: although Tolkien said flat out at the very beginning that it was not a goddam allegory, critics immediately started treating it as such. And every path they turned down, before very long there was the Oxford don standing across the path waving his finger at them. The WWII analogy he handles in the preface; the Christian one? Frodo's Jesus fails in his quest, which is completed by Gollum. THis is moreover a world without a Fall--and when the great Redemption is done, the angels leave. And the one character that may be God does nothing in the story. No, no, no. What did I tell you?

And he uses a Ring, forged under tragic circumstances, picked out of a Great River, but that's as far as the Wagner goes. And Gandalf is Merlin and Aragorn Arthur (not the Tennyson Arthur, but the Wace and Layamon Arthur, who is marching on Rome to become emperor when Modred raises rebellion)--but Gandalf is also Odin. The Ring is actually the Holy Grail inside out: you've got it, and you can only get rid of it at a certain place and if you are virtuous--or bite it off with your teeth and trip. And Gollum is Caliban without a Prospero.

There's no one novelty in LOTR that you can point to--and that's also deliberate and important. All the cleverness has been planed down, added to the cauldron, and left to simmer for half a lifetime. It is a work of imagination--but it's very much a medievalist's book. Wonders and delights--but every point is anchored to our (half-remembered) traditions. It is new and astonishing--but we're already at home, just as he intended.

And it keeps throwing up little rewards: it wasn't that long ago that a friend (and you know who you are) pointed out that the two orcs Shagrat and Gorbag translate out of Middle English as Ratfucker and Bag of Shit. (We probably don't know their real names then.)

So it's time to jump in once more. I'm going to warm up with the Hobbit, and who knows? Maybe all the way through the twelve volumes of Christopher Tolkien's heroic History of his father's work. Yes, I read them all.

(And that, I guess, does qualify as an admission of weakness.)

 April Fool

 I've been thinking about this a bit, and the most weird and bizarre part of where we are today is that the airwaves are filled with what no one, but no one, believes.

1. We're winning in Iraq.

Nobody believes this. What most people, even those not committed to the question know is that (as I put it) if we were winning, we'd have won. It's this .com startup that was going to give us $2 a barrel crude, peace in the Middl East, and an American Century. They missed their first product ship date, they tried to rewrite the business plan to their advantage, they've missed  their revised product ship date, the auditors have all sorts of horror stories to tell, they've missed their second revised product ship date and are coming to the VC's with confident smiles plastered on their face, asking for a big new infusion of capital and a vastly extended schedule and saying "we're winning."

What these people actually believe ranges from "We're in the crapper, but if we stick at it long enough, we're bound to win." to "We're losing it, but if we beat people over the head long enough and hard enough, we'll make Americans think we're winning, and that's all that matters" to "We've lost, but if we keep up the barrage until we leave office, we're home free."

And yet the airwaves are filled with the message that nobody believes. Even the most rabid of warhawks does not believe "we're winning in Iraq" but "Liberals are evil." It's a cause they're willing to lie through their teeth for. In their heads they're coming up with excuses like the ones for Vietnam and erupting in the desire for nuclear solutions. 

2. Global warming is a liberal myth.

The arctic icecap is disappearing. The Antarctic ice sheets are collapsing. All the scientific organizations in the world are saying the same thing. 

What these people actually believe is "What's more important is maximizing profits now" to "I hate liberals." The problem with the latter in this case is that it has turned into "I hate scientists" and the equally delightful second term of the enthymeme, "Scientists" are liberals."

Actually, that's not getting deep enough. I think the actual beliefs range from "Being really rich solves everything" to "I'll be in my grave before anything really bad happens" to what I think is the most prevalent, "We'll come up with something."

That, I think, is the basis from where they feel comfortable to lie. From the corporate point of view, I think their strategy is to make the changes they feel they can make without jeopardizing profits while denying there's any reason to make them, because they're not idiots. Likewise the people who  take up the cudgels for them, though they may be closer to being idiots, have as their fallback comfort that "We'll come up with something", even though that 'something' will unquestionably have to come from the people they're slagging off publicly.

And they back and fill, and charge themselves up with their hatred of Al Gore, which they're really eager to get into, and they can assuage themselves in thinking  "They're making it worse to get people's attention."

And so they lie in the thinnest fashion. THey accuse nearly an entire profession of dishonesty and make ignorant arguments against experts, get them refuted, and make them again. On TV. They set themselves up against people they're deeply inclined to respect, since the religious Right does not, as a rule, take part in this. These are the corporate Right and the libertarian right,who on the one hand are made rich by science and on the other laud science as their Objective virtue. 

And so the airwaves are filled with lies that no one believes, and the yahoos insult and deride the people they are relying on to save them.

3. We have the greatest health care system in the world.

I wonder: why do the rich squeal like colon-irrigated pigs when the government steals from them via taxes but not when the health care industry steals from them by exorbitant charges? They can afford both--but do they really feel they are getting value when the health care industry gouges them and not when the government does--or do they object to taxes because they can do something about them?

Not everybody thinks this is a lie--there are still people insulated from the reality. And there are probably people who don't know people who have met the Beast. But that's not many. The chairman of General Motors isn't one of them.

Those who say the lie range from "Sure there are problems, but it would be worse if the liberals got ahold of it" to ""It IS the best--because it's capitalist" to "Poor people are losers and a drag on the upward progress of the Race". 

And yet our airwaves are infested with this  lie. The victims don't believe it. The predators don't believe it. The experts don't believe it. People who are ignorant of both the reality and the theory believe it, of course. On TV.

4. Mexican Immigrants are going to take over America.

Nobody believes this. The rich Republicans don't believe it, because they profit from it. The politicians don't believe it, because they love it as a boogeyman: if Mexicans were actually a threat, they'd act differently--but a bugaboo that can keep people roused up without being a threat--you keep that in your flower beds as a perennial. 

And even the xenophobes don't think that. (actually 'xenophobe' is not the greatest term, since it's hate rather than fear. 'xenopath'?) They don't believe that Mexicans will destroy America, or American culture--just American cultural purity. And that's been wrecked since at least the Polk administration, and definitely since Jelly Roll Morton. 

They hate Mexicans, but they also hate blacks, and Asians, and Arabs, and Jews and Catholics, and above all liberals. And it's sort of like the rich and health care--they complain because they think they can win on this one. There's nothing about Mexicans that are any scarier than black folks--and they're nothing compared to the Jews. The Mexicans are not wolves across the border--they're vermin. La cucaracha. And at the core, "they hate liberals."

So nobody believes the Mexican menace. And yet they scream in the Congress about it. And all over the TV.

So here we are on April Fool's Day, where stories are printed and aired that strain credulity, that are strangely askew--and end with the annoying but revelatory "April Fool!"

Well, I'm waiting. I've been waiting a while

 His grey-black eminence

 Every so often, they get caught out in the light, and every so often, I get a twinge of what it feels like to believe in the Illumnati.

For a lot of people, myself included, the story isn't that Max Mosley was caught in an underground Nazi S&M sex orgy (although you can just feel the journalist's fingers trembling with ecstasy as he or she types those words)--as the fact that Max Mosley is where he is at all. Max is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, who was the founder of the British Union of Fascists. He was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, was virulently anti-Semitic and had his Black Shirts march through Jewish areas of London. He was married to his second wife, Diana, in Josef Goebbels' drawing room with Hitler himself in attendance. He is widely considered among World War II obsessives and  alt-history geeks (of which I am ex officio a member) as the Prime candidate for puppet ruler of Great Britain if Hitler had conquered it. 

So why is his son head of the International Formula 1 racing commission?

My mind immediately flashes back to Juan Antonio Samaranch, the corrupt Spanish Fascist  (officially!) who ran the International Olympic Committee for twenty years until he retired in 200o, having left behind a scandal of bribery, arrogance and privilege. 

Back when I found out about Samaranch, I started to wonder: how doe one get on the IOC? I had previously thought (when I thought at all) that being involved in sports would have something to do with it. Except insofar as people tend to move to the IOC from the national OC's that was pretty stupid. The answer is: there's no process. There's no oversight to the overseers. These are benefices, and bestowed on the privileged by the privileged. It's a ways away from running the world, but it certainly is Plunder Because They Can.

Oswald Mosley certainly embodied the contradictions, if not the outright hypocrisy, in the English Nobility in World War II. He was out of Winchester College (a 625-year old public school whose motto is  ‘Manners Makyth Man’) and Sandhurst, he was married to the daughter of the former Viceroy of India, whom he cheated on with the daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale. (who was married to the Irish Baron of Moyne). He was deep in the embrace of the British upper nobility (not just the Sir Somebodys but those who don't seem to have a name: the 5th Duke of Wellington and the Duke of Winchester were part of Lord Redesdale's 'Right Club'.) That Lion of opposition to Nazism, Winston Churchill, did have him arrested (without trial) in 1940 and the Black Shirts broken up, but he also personally intervened to allow Mosley and his wife to live together in a little cottage inside Hollowell Prison--a women's prison--and allowed to hire other prisoners as servants.

(excuse me while I beat my head against a wall for a second.)

They were released while the war was still going on, and after the war formed a right-wing publishing house and a magazine and worked to ban non-white immigration into Britain. They moved to avery nice house in France to be near their dear friends, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, (the former King, who'd been known to give a Nazi salute now and then.) 

And their son administers the formula 1 circuit, and does S&M in his own bunker--and that's the only way anybody was going to mention it. Just like Samaranch was able to swagger like a princeling and rip off the system for 20 years.

Now the Republicans are not so smart: instead of making him something like Commissioner of baseball, they take the questionable scion of the Nobility with Nazi connections and shove him into an elected position where he loses two wars and sets off two recessions. And in that context we begin to notice the children and spouses of the Washington Press Corps waltzing in to top positions in--wow--the Washington Press Corps. They do damage, not only to their political party but the very principal of showering the children of the rich with the confiscations from the children of the poor.

The Europeans gave it right: slot them into strange but well-paid positions in non-crucial and ungoverned boards and commissions. Who cares about governing commissions on sports or culture? You can park both your Nazis and your rich degenerates there. Not the Presidency.

And this is because it really bothers the rich Republicans that they don't have an actual aristocracy, and they want to have wealth power and cultural eminence. Therefore they have ended up not only stealing from the middle class, but destroying its cultural dominance, and, therefore, it. They may realize what they're doing or they may not, but the result is that they have been, more or less overtly, smashing the lives of the basis of the economy. Add to that delusions of empire and you have a naked and besmeared aristocracy caught in the spotlight.

The european aristocracy already have the cachet, and have know that if peopleare happy with their lives, they won't care hat there are others vastly richer and more powerful than they are. They will also sit still for an awful lot of privilege and theft as long as it's out of that spotlight. They can take off the black shirt and retire either to their nice house in France or their underground S&M bunker, and everything's fine.

Everything's not fine, as long as the beautiful, the brilliant, the talented and the courageous find themselves trapped, ignored, scared and dying in this world. It matters less that there are stupid, petulant and complacent rich people dipping into the revenue stream with both hands, but I still don't like it.

And Nazis? Big buzzkill. Not a big fan of nice houses OR presidencies for them.

 Get down with your atonal self

 Podcasts are one of those wonderful things that I admire the hell out of but don't use all that much. Text is, all things considered, better, and there's a tendency to find dozens of these files filling up space that could be better occupied by Norwegian death metal. (Dimmu Borgir, if you must know.) Still, it's completely populist radio, massively facilitated by Apple, since anybody can put podcasts up on iTunes for free. Everybody's in showbiz, with a million channels of talk radio. It's kind of exciting.

Still, I've been very sparing in my subscriptions. One was the Firesign Theatre's podcast, though that was less of a new thing than an audio dump of all sorts of Firesign rarities and curiosities. It's less an ongoing commitment than an archive, but still worth a mention.

The other podcast is from Naxos Records. It's not a big surprise to find that a classical music label is smart, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic about their music, but their podcasts cover the more arcane and fun parts, like Charles Ives's band music and the alt-classical rebellion. There are also thick meaty chunks of music, and interviews. (And, well, since it's classical music, I don't have to be up to the minute on it.)

So I got around to listening to an interview with composer Charles Wuorinen. He's a twelve-tone composer who, although he doesn't transcend the frankly dodgy musical approach (a feat, that up until now I've only heard Alban Berg accomplish), he successfully avoids the trap of having it all sound alike. And he has an affinity for percussion pieces, which is a good thing. Although I've had an old Nonesuch vinyl LP of his forever and have checked his stuff out of  one library or other over the decades, but I know next to nothing about him personally. So, an ideal 20 minutes!

I wasn't disappointed: I got a good sense of why Wuorinen does what he does, and a blipvert version of his musical career. The really fun part, and the stuff worth reporting on, is when he lights into current popular music. He's a composer for whom structure is tremendously important, And while he doesn't believe that complexity of conception alone justifies a piece, he does differentiate art and entertainment by saying that entertainment is stuff that requires no effort, while art is stuff that demands something of the audience, with reward being all the greater. (I think that is true for him, and if that were true in general, I would be in High Art's camp completely. But it's a post-Warhol, post Cage art world out there, and there's a lot of high art-like stuff that requires only  tolerance and the indulgence of the artist.) But he lays into the stuff on the radio these days, and I found myself agreeing with him. The number of three-chord pop-songs without hooks or surprises are just as awful as he makes them out to be.

"And then there's pitch-free pop!" he exclaims. It's his term for rap/hip hop.

And the composer becomes my friend.

Not because I hate hip hop or rap: I was a P-Funk acolyte since the 70's, and have my share of  Afrika Bambaataa vinyl, and while my iPod is light on contemporary hip-hop, I enjoy it as much as any pasty old white guy. No, He's my friend because that phrase is so compact and deadly, so unfair but still accurate, and crystallizes what's wrong. Pitch-free pop is precisely what you get when you have unimaginative rhymes and unremarkable beats--of which there's too much out there.

One of the reason why this old white guy think rap works is that the same digital studios that allowed independent low-budget music production also allowed an unprecedented degree of waveform processing. While street poetry recited over a beat box and other people's records isn't necessarily the formula for mainstream success, one of the things that worked was the measured difference of the processed,darkened, processed, compressed and limited beats. THe authenticity was most of it, but it's what happens when people, non-academic, non-corporate, non-comfortable people, started grabbing the actual waveforms with both hands and mucking with it.

But once you start to get corporate and comfortable with it what you get is just what Mr. Wuorinen indicts: pitch-free pop.

Thank you, Mr. W. One nasty phrase indeed.

 Flatfooted

 I have very good friends who believe that 9/11 was an inside job. I'm in comfortable position as a Socratic because I can say a convenient "I don't know" to their assertions. We can stay friends. 

However, I don't think it was. And I'm going to tell you the most convincing piece of evidence IMHO in that regard.

It was George W. Bush, the president of the United States, sitting in that schoolroom for eight minutes, flummoxed, fugued and otherwise stumped.

If 911 was an inside job, it was a huge one, and the whole advantage to be gained was PR, then wouldn't Dubya have been rehearsed better? Not sit there until he had to be walked out of the room?

What kind of choreography was it that allowed the Republicans to let BILL CLINTON get to Ground Zero before George Bush? What kind of embarrassment was it, while all planes were grounded, to fly the Bin Laden family out of the US in full public view? 

But above all, there was that embarrassing eight minutes. This was not a man with a plan. A man who was about to launch the American Empire?  It looks like a man who doesn't know what to do. (And if you want to tell me that Bush could have brilliantly imitated a bewildered man, I shall have to ask you to step outside.)

The media churned with both rotors to make the plane disappear, turn GWB into a hero (a docudrama with Bush shouting defiance at OBL and commanding them to turn the plane around so he could strap himself into his trusty old National Guard interceptor so he could deliver the knockout punch to Al-Qaeda personally!) and paper over the delays, the gaffes, and the thousand-yard stare. I think there was a whole lot of people covering up--but what they were covering was the pants-wetting, bewilderment, and back and fill after the disaster they wanted to turn into Their Finest Hour.

Okay, just to give you proper value for your entertainment dollar, I'm going to move of the 'I don't think so" square and present you with my favorite conspiracy scenario. I've put this up in comments in various places, or parts of it, but here's the whole thing. It has a coherence to it,  and explains a number of things. Do I think it's true? Probably not. My affection for it comes from a love of a good plot. However, it's a crazy trick but it just might work. And it's more fun than just differing with my friends.

The core: the terrorist attack the neocons wanted, the Pearl Harbor mentioned on the PNAC website, was the anthrax letters. 

Anthrax was perfect: very deadly, but not contagious. Easily deliverable, and easily containable. In many ways scarier than a crashing airliner, because while you might not believe someone, no matter how evil, is going to crash an Airbus into your house, a deadly envelope is another story. 

And the targets? Tom Daschle and Pat Leahy. The major networks. The New York Post. And--the National Enquirer.

Now they had notes saying Islam is great, and Death to  America on them, so they were ntended to point towards the Middle East. The networks were an obvious choice. But Pat Leahy? Tom Daschle? Most Americans didn't know who these guys are--and probably still don't. Neither of them were big AIPAC supporters, neither of them were Jews. Nothing sent to the White House, by far and away the most logical target? 

No, it was supposed to both terrorize America, give us a casus belli in the Middle East, and be a horse-head-in-the-bed warning to the Democrats. 

And the Enquirer? Men In Black theories aside, remember that it was the Enquirer that broke the Rush Limbaugh drug story.

What happened was that, as the neocons were getting ready to stage this perfect terrorist attack, along comes Osama Bin Laden and trumps them by several orders of magnitude. 

The cosmic coincidence is that it happened just a week before their launch date. (Whether Cheney et. al. decided on the morning of the attack to let it happen, I don't know. But I tend to believe that it's a hard pill to swallow that four airliners hijacked at once just were overlooked because of bureaucratic inertia.) And since they had to have a great deal of distance from the process, it was too late to call it off. And, some might have said, why should they?

But on the day, one guy got caught utterly flatfooted, and that was George W. Bush. In this scenario, George had been coached and rehearsed on his actions and the speeches he was going to make on Der Tag, but when he was in the little Florida classroom, and he got the word that 'America is under attack," what went through his mind was, "What is this? It's too soon! It's not for a week yet! Did they move up the schedule and not tell me? Or did our guy snap or something? Is the jig up?Are we exposed? Or is it a false alarm? Shit! Do I make the speech or don't I? Here I am in front of these damn kids and I can't ask anybody what to do! Is the plot on or is it off?"

That could occupy a mind for eight minutes; I don't think simple surprise could. Simple confusion? That neither, but serious mixed signals very well could.

And of course the Anthrax Killer is still at large, but coverage of the search--and mention of it's history--have fallen right down the memory hole. If, as seems to be the case, the Republicans seem intent on scaring the public to remain in power, why have they not used the eeeevil Anthrax Killer who sends fatal letters, that even you, Mr. and Mrs. America, could get in the mail tomorrow? Why are they, who are so eager to invoke the bogeyman, absolutely silent on the matter? Why has there been no docudrama on that?

There's no investigation because they promised that the guy would get away free. There's no investigation because of the ties right to the top. And nobody is worried about this murderous bioweapons expert still at large with a mad on against the United States--huh? what? Still at large?--because the top knows, and the next level down have been told that he is not a danger any more.

That's my scenario, which is mine, and what it is too.

(An elk? Where?)