The Bomb Garden

My New Fiction Blog

2010-04-07T21:03:00.001-07:00

Not sure anyone still reads this, but I wanted to let anyone who might that I'm doing a new fiction project.

Writing 500 words a day then blogging whatever I write. Whether it's on one story or five. The beginning, middle or end. No real context, just the words. We'll see what happens.

lukebaumgarten.tumblr.com

The Scene

2008-12-03T23:41:00.000-08:00

A film review as a scene of a group of friends watching the film as told in a style that recalls Kurt Vonnegut:

The three sat in the middle of a row, midway back from the screen. The film they watched was about a man who doesn’t understand himself and is unhappy. Desiring happiness, he observes his life to find out what’s wrong. He doesn’t find happiness, so he observes others observing him. He doesn’t find happiness there either, so he observes himself observing himself. Nothing. So he observes others observing him observing himself. And on and on.

The layers of observation build until he’s watching entire cities worth of people observing entire cities of people observing themselves and everyone else.

Then, after two hours and four minutes, the man dies.

When the film ended but before the credits did, they stood to leave. They guy noticed the girl with the short hair wore a furrowed-brow frown. He noticed the girl with the long hair looked peevish. He himself bore a kind of wry, mouth-half-open smile. They walked down the hall and out of the theater. They walked into the lobby and rode three sets of escalators.

They paused at the bottom.

The looks they wore after the escalators were the same as when they had just stood from the theater seats. They stayed that way for a long moment, not looking at each other and not looking at anything else either. Just staring into a middle distance, a seam in reality not populated by objects, but ideas, words and thoughts.

Being more or less precise people, they sought in that seam the right way of characterizing this film. This being's quest for understanding. This sad half thing who had spent his life being merely an observer, a fastidious chronicler of the minutia of life, as though by observing life in great enough detail he might learn how to live it. A voyeur of such relentless joylessness. An infinite regression of self-reference. A man frozen by thought. An inactive agent. A being that was, in fact, no kind of being at all.

After a long while, the guy spoke: “That was exhausting.”

More or less silently, they agreed that that was about all that could be said. The three parted ways without really saying proper goodbyes.

The film was by Charlie Kaufman.

Turning from God's Middlemen

2008-01-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

Mike Huckabee is splitting evangelicals along caste lines.

Check it:

Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.
[via NYTimes.com]

This is what good populism should do, something that John Edwards — more because of his place on the political spectrum than because of his ability as a politician or his views — never has. Mike Huckabee is connecting on a deep, broad level with a large group of people who feel their leaders' views falling out of step with their own.

It shows the extent to which the Pat Robertsons of the world were able to piggyback pro-business conservatism atop evangelical faith and sell the whole thing to millions of conservative Christians as a set of holistic political and moral principles. A complete worldview basically, not simply an ethics or a politics. Whether that exact worldview was shared by the entirety of the religious right when it was winning elections for Reagan and Bush 2 or if it was just the best fit at the time can never be clear, but Huckabee has certainly exposed a rift now, one that cuts along caste lines.

(I say "caste" because the leaders of the religious/political right — the remnants of the Christian Coalition/Moral Majority —aren't just all rich white men, putting them in an economic class above their followers. They've also set themselves up as God's middlemen, making themselves the high priests, the law-givers.)

What Huckabee has given middleclass, middle-of-the-road conservative believers is a third way between liberals and the pro-God/pro-business of their presumptive demagogues. That doesn't make Huck's way the right way and it doesn't make him the right candidate (he scares me to death), but we live in a deeply pluralistic society whose political system masks the diversity of its people. The more candidates like Huckabee and Ron Paul (and Edwards, though he hasn't found the cleavage point the other two have) that can ignite people's passion against what Edwards somewhat tritely calls the status quo, the better it is for America.

... and also for Democrats, if one of these wedge candidates ends up running as an independent.

Thoughts on Tone

2008-01-06T23:05:00.003-08:00

A few caveats, some background and at least one digression to get out of the way before I get around to the matter at hand: (1) despite once dating a girl who worshiped the ground he walked on (having discovered him whilst working her way through the Modern Library's 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century), despite his having won every major literary award available to an American short of the Nobel, despite his shoe-in status for getting the nobel (unless perhaps he's deemed too American), despite having enjoyed a film adaptation of his work — despite actually owning five of his novels — I've never read anything by Philip Roth until now.

(2) The book I'm reading isn't any of the ones I own, The ones I bought on the recommendations of friends or girlfriends or the Pen/Faulkner people or whoever gives out the National Book Award. No, I'm reading Exit Ghost, his latest novel (which, with massive type, generous margins, film-script dialog formatting for and a relatively slim 290 pages, might easily be called a novella). I'm reading it with the intention to review it. (3) I generally don't like books I review, for whatever reason.

(4) I'm exactly seven pages in. (5) They've all been about prostate surgery and its frequent sidekicks, impotence, incontinence (adult diapers; involuntary pissing while swimming; flaccid, nerve-damaged pork swords).

Having said that, let me share my very preliminary thoughts: Page 1: Written from the perspective of an aging, self-important writer, his sentences are complex bordering on labyrinthine. Page 2: he's explaining the minutia of his boring life in great detail. Page 3: too much detail, in fact. Page 4: needless detail. Stultifying detail. Page 5: the writing reminds me — a lot actually — of my own. Page 6: I don't think I like it. Page 7: It's boring.

So then: should I be happy that I write like Philip Roth or worried that I write like one of his 70-year-old luddite characters?

My Insatiable Melancholy

2008-01-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time. A really long time. Thanks to Don and my insistent depression for getting my brain to want to write for itself again.

The backstory: I'm depressed. I have a job that no longer fulfills me (which, un-ironically, was the impetus for starting this blog 4 years ago). I live in a town where I connect with so few people I might as well not connect with anyone at all. I've tried to remedy this, I've gone out every night for weeks to places I've never gone, being a kind of outgoing I've never been, looking for a group of people worth finding.

I never find them.

A friend from high school was in town this weekend. He, his wife and I had these amazing, topic-hopping, existence-spanning conversations. The kind of thing I haven't gotten in years. It was beautiful. It's the kind of thing I want more of — the kind of thing I feel I need in my life — but am fucked to find it. So here we are.

(One of the great ironies of this situation is that another great conversationalist and dear friend of mine is planning to move back to Spokane — to take a fantastic, prestigious job at a big law firm — at exactly the time this spring I feel I NEED to be gone.)

I need to move away. Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco. Somewhere. I need a job before I get there so I'm updating my resume and checking job boards. Teaching kids to beat standardized tests for Kaplan or Princeton Review is one idea. I'm a hell of a test-taker. I could do that, make decent money and still have time for other things. Like the only thing I've ever really wanted to do: write.

Still, not writing full-time feels like a step back. Unless it isn't. Confusing.

I'm also working on a new writing project with a friend and colleague — the kind of person I have great conversations with; the kind of person who lives nowhere near me. I want to travel to old war zones and write about how cultures heal themselves. Our plan is to head to Italy to report a story about a friend who's going to school to be a democratizer and builder of nations (a master's degree! In only one year!). While there, we plan to jaunt down to Sarajevo and then further, to Kosovo, examining two types of nation-splitting conflict — the kind that involves genocide and the kind that doesn't — and how people cope with them.

This requires a lot of money and a ton of planning, so right now we're writing grants and pitching the story to anyone who'll listen. This is a hopelessly long process. The kind that's hard to keep a firm grasp on the culmination of. Suffice it to say: we're not far enough along. That both frightens and infuriates me. I'm beginning to question my friend's dedication to this plan. I'm beginning to question my own.

Right now, in Spokane, I have a lot of irons. Some are dedicated to stoking the tinder I've already built (the job here, my few friends, my family). The majority are working to build new fires in other places. It's hard to manage these things, their sizes and scopes. Their end-points. When it feels like too much, I tend to focus on the already-built fire. I have bills for fuck's sake. Loans. et cetera. It infuriates me that I can't juggle this better, that I can't let go of the current job enough and focus on the future.

I'm a loyal person and I'm also not great at organizing things — finding other writers to write the things I'd normally write, etc. (I'm an editor, this is what I should be doing) — I don't want to be here, but I don't want to fuck those that have returned my loyalty with a career (I owe this place a lot, but not my life or my happiness) by churning out dreck.

That's the long and the short of it.

SO: Last night I'm talking to one of the people I care most about in this world, explaining to her that I feel like shit — a ton of shit — and that this amount of shit is squeezed into an impossibly small sack. I tell her the dimensions. She doesn't seem impressed. She's known me a long time. We've shared almost everything. She knows I feel like a shit sack. I've felt it before.

I then shift gears, telling her the path I see — off in the distance, yeah, but in my line of sight ("I squint, I can see it dear, I swear!" — I didn't really say that, but I should have) — leading out of this valley of chest-tightening sorrow. I start with the most physical, easiest to explain instance of the road: When I workout, I feel better. When I wake my ass up early enough; when I cut through the miasma of dread that confronts me every morning; when I spend the languid minute or two lacing my trainers, donning a still-sweat-soaked shirt, sidling into a pair of mesh-underwared running shorts; when I run the mile-and-a-half to the gym; when I run another 3.78 on the treadmill (in 30 minutes! a personal best!); when I gasp and drip through a circuit of flys and overhead presses and rows and crunches and windshield wipers and deadlifts (sets of 14! four times each!); when I run the mile-and-a-half back home; when I stop sweating; when I stop gasping; when I've done what I've set out to do — when I've conquered it — I feel really, really good.

I feel amazing.

I feel like I used to feel, like the world is open and I can just walk out into it and be embraced for my natural talents, my hard-won skills and for my personal goodness. I also feel like the world will forgive me shortcomings, my personal quirks (which, I've learned recently, are more numerous that I'd ever imagined!) and, generally, the person I am. This is a rare thing for me, and a beautiful thing.

At first, I thought I felt this way because I was losing weight, getting in shape (running faster! jumping higher!) and looking better. That's part of it, certainly. As I continue to do it, though, as less fat falls off, as less muscle is built, as I experience on my body what is called diminishing returns in economics, I realize that can't be it entirely. The biggest thing is taking control. Affecting change. Creating the person I want to be in that small way.

Realizing this: rewind to the part where I've accomplished the task I set for myself. Now I reflect on the times when I've been most happy. Professionally: when I first started writing the blog. When I first started writing for a paper. When I first started writing for an important regional paper. When I set about rehabilitating the music section of that regional paper. When I set about trying to make a difference for a community I saw as needing more than was being provided. Personally: when I am open to the occasional emptinesses caused by my self-imposed solitude and seek to fill them with people who edify and excite me. Personality-y: when I see my flaws of character (there are many of these, which I usually only see after I've really, really hurt someone I care deeply about, as I was about to do last night), and set about righting them. When I set about becoming a better person. The person I deserve to be and the person others deserve to be around.

I'm happiest when I'm becoming better. I'm often happy too when I'm not doing anything, in periods of flatness, but this is always fleeting. I inevitably feel a stirring. I always come back around to it. I eventually want to move forward.

I tell her this, in much less detail, but just as emphatically, because whenever I even talk about it, it energizes me. Then I ask her what she thinks. "I don't know man, it just sounds like a lot of words." She's right, in a sense, of course. It is words. The difference is that she doesn't have much faith in words, whereas I've build my entire life around them.

I ask her what she means and she comes around to basically that same thing. I'm talking, but not doing anything. This is partially true, partially false. There are things I'm doing. There are things I'm not doing. I am doing things, though, and I need to keep doing them. I need to do more things. I need to do everything I've set out to do. Words help me organize that ... "I mean, why aren't you seeing a counselor?" She asks. I feel like she's not listening.

This snaps something in me. Something deep and hurt and childish. "Fuck, why aren't YOU seeing a counselor?" Then immediately regret it. I've done what I often do. I got hurt and, rather than allowing that hurt a voice, I lashed back. It's one of the things that makes me a shit-heel to a lot of people I care about. She gets quiet the way she does, says she's going to go to bed. She's sick. I apologize. She says she'll talk to me later. We hang up. I'm fucked up, I know that, but I'm getting better. I lash out less than I used to. Every day I get better. Every time I blow it, I learn.

This is it: I have career problems and I have personal problems and I have personality problems. I'm not the person I want to be in any aspect of my life, but I'm excited by the prospect of becoming. I see the roads leading out of those several valleys and it's like, "fuck, which do I take first?" Maybe that's what a counselor is for. Maybe it's for seeing other roads. Maybe, though, it's for becoming comfortable in the valleys. If there's one thing I don't want, it's to become comfortable in the valleys.

Comfort scares me because, besides a life writing, it's the thing I most crave. Comfort comes in many forms, it's easy to come by, and it's immensely destructive. It dampens the spirit and makes things seem better than they are. It breeds complacency. It stultifies. Last time I went to counseling, I felt like I was being taught how to be comfortable with myself. If there's one thing I don't want to be comfortable with, it's that.

I don't know what I'll ultimately do vis-a-vis this whole thing. know I need to find an edifying career and an edifying group of peers — neither of which can be found in Spokane, I've looked for so long with so few results it makes tears squeeze out between my bitter eyelids. There's nothing left for me here.

I know I need to achieve a better self, but I can do that from anywhere.

A pain worse than lower back

2006-10-20T02:21:00.000-07:00

When planning this blog some 10 hours ago, I had decided to begin with "butt nuggets:" by way of salutation. It'd've been funny, but most of the humor's been sucked out since 10 pm, when Adrienne got a call from her Dad saying her Momd had a stroke. I won't tarry on it more than to point you to her blog and to ask for your thoughts and prayers, as your beliefs and creeds deem appropriate. To those of my friends (in the traditional sense, not the MySpace sense, which is hopelessly dilluted [j/k we're all totally bff, swear]) who are athiests -- which I think is most of you -- take this time to curse the intentionless void for our hopelessly small existences. For you agnostics, then, hedge your bets however you see fit. I know I have been.

[This was supposed to be about my cover story, and now it's going to be about something else ... let me dispense with this then quickly: I spent the last two weeks writing myself stupid over the newish phenomenon of Evangelical Environmentalism. It's conservative Christians, essentially, who see the environment as a pro-life issue and it's fascinating. The view point is fascinating that is, whether or not the article is I leave to you.]

Back to the thoughtful agnosticism with to which I generally resign myself. I once had a friend tell me that agnostics were cowards who couldn't pick a side. My reply at the time was: "choke on that yoga mat you ideological claim-jumper. Come talk to me when you find a religion you didn't get out of the liner notes of a Ben Harper album." That retort clearly doesn't work for all situations, but the sentiment is essentially the same in each. And though it may seem counter-intuitive, experiencing this thing -- an out of the blue phone call, a hurried walk to the car, a frantic jaunt cross-town, a mother with clear misfirings in the communication centers of her brain, frustration, anguish, utter fucking impotence -- has only made that assertion (agnosticism = cowardice) more absurd and myopic.

After these last fourish hours, I wish I'd just have a Holy Ghost moment already, or some blinding point of clarity that would allow me to put away all notion of God. One or the other, then at least I'd know how to react. I'd either be able to engage on some level whatever spiritual experience Adrienne is accessing, or just be there as a person and feel that mere personhood is enough. As it is, though, I sit idly, providing what I can as she does her thing, not having that spiritual tug and yet -- since she certainly does -- feeling inadequate as shit to just be one dude, trying to comfort a species-deep sorrow. So I acted like a go-between, calling the people I know who do know God, hoping that the connection they have that I don't would do some good to someone.

In order to avoid coming to terms with that intense feeling of inadequacy, I decided to detach and do a little reasoning. This'll keep my mind off things:

The armchair anthropologist in me now sees the birth of religion coming not in the need to explain the vast unknown but in the desire to quell grief. Though it's certainly a more romantic image to picture some human ancestor looking up at the stars and seeing God there, it's more likely he/she looked into the eyes of a helpless, agony-stricken loved one and needed God so as to reassure his/herself the pain wasn't for naught. Pondering an immesurable vastness seems far less primal -- and ultimately less important -- to me than needing reassurance and purpose. Put another way: a man-sized embrace is way less comforting than a God-sized one.

Tonight, I felt inadequate as shit offering either.

Wanna buy a monkey? (an update and a promise)

2006-07-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

God I'm handsome (see below). Devastatingly handsome, but lately, crippled.

Here's what: the devil-may-care lifestyle of Luke John Baumgarten -- a fitness enthusiast, socialite, journeyman writer, scoundrel and peddler of various salves (and a mere 25 years old I might add) -- finally caught up with him on no less a day than July 4th.

The irony.

The very day on which he was to celebrate his great country's 230th year free of the yoke of bondage, the young chap himself was placed in the manacles and leg irons of his ill-functioning middle region. After a nice sun-warmed wake up, a "how do you do Lord's morning, hail and well met," and a spry run of no less than three miles, the young and estimable Baumgarten was cut down in his prime by what would be diagnosed via MRI (some two weeks and like 300 dollars in Blue Cross co-pays later) as two herniations between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebra and the fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebra respectively.

Two bulging discs, kids, and I'm twenty-mother-fuckin-five.

The good news: I might not need back surgery. Might not. The twenty-five year old mightn't need to have his spinal chord laid bare and fiddled with. Sometimes young bodies can fix themselves. Unsure as yet but, fingers crossed.

Some bad news: After four days of chiropracty and general homeopathy failed to offer relief (and four nights of sleeplessness, punctuated by midnight thigh cramps that made the usually cool-tempered lad Baumgarten scream like a wraith and very nearly piss himself), I went the route of Western medicine and was given a round-robin cocktail of drugs. An anti-inflammatory, a muscle relaxant, and enough Vicodin to bring down a team of bear wrestlers and their bears. The bad part: one of those three drugs, it seems, I have a fairly severe allergy to.

Not sure which, really, because modern medicine hasn't yet mastered the art of figuring out which drugs kill which people. That is: while we know how to figure out which molds and pollens will give junior a runny nose come hay fever season, we haven't figured out which opium derivative will -- in the dead of night, some weeks after junior began taking it -- cluster his body with hives, seize the muscles in his chest and block his air ways, then continue doing so nightly for some five days after the drug ceases to be taken.

(actual conversation with my primary care physician: "which [drug] is it?" He asks, rhetorically, "Short answer: we don't know." Shrug, chuckle. Eyes widen to show good-nature, light-hearted sympathy, then narrow to denote solemnity, earnestness, a Clintonian feeling-of-my-pain.)

Sweet.

A bit more good news: I went and had acupuncture, something that's been on my list of things to do for some time. Didn't seem to accomplish anything at all, but it's nice to dabble in the art of the Orient from time to time, and though it didn't fix me straight away, it at least didn't cover me with leprous, weeping lesions.

Whatever else can be said of the Chinese, they don't often make things worse. Except for that Great Leap Forward, which was remarkable for its ambition and decentralized focus, but was a clusterfuck of implementation. The goodly Mr. Liu (the acupuncturist, you see) took this lesson-learned and relieved a bit of pain, reduced a bit of inflammation, and sent me, head-well-patted, scampering on my way, one good leg trailing one now-slightly-less-crooked one.

There are no miracle cures in life, my friends, only herbal anti-inflammatories peppered with quaint Chinese glyphs that leave your breath smelling of kelp.

I'd planned on making some grave and foundation-shaking conclusions about youth, agedness, life, death, the market economy, the frailty of the mind and it's indebtedness to a stout body, but it seems I've run the hell out of time.

Though I will say this: from a careful study of the acupuncture chart (which was gorgeously illustrated), the place I'm most frightened of catching a stray needle is the old' taint. Yes, male friends, there's an acupressure point on our respective perineums, though I didn't have a chance to ask what aches a needle so-placed is good for relieving.

Ask your boyfriends what a perineum is ladies, you'll be horrified.

And yes, it seems, Chinese -- at least so far as the chart suggests -- practice (male) circumcision. I didn't realize until I was looking at the poster on the wall there that I really have no idea about the foreskin trimming habits of far-Eastern cultures.

I left edified.

So nothing brilliant or groundbreaking, I'm afraid, but at the least, as always, I strive to be informative.

I love you all and I think I'll be writing more now. Pay for words isn't as much fun as words for their own sake. You've been warned.

Pray for Mojo.

Milestones and Earthtones

2005-11-08T22:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's got a circulation of 5000. Yes, it's a weekly paper in Nebraska. Rural Nebraska. But that tiny little paper from the geographical median of our Yankee-centric universe wants to reprint my story on Murrow, Edwards, Clooney and Moonves and why broadcast journalism sucks.

The key terms in that run-on were "reprint," "my" and "story".

That's a first.

Also, I've decided to buy more browns. Natural fibers and whatnot.

I had something to complain about, but I've forgotten it ... I'm going to blog from work tomorrow, I think. Until then me hearties, adieu.

Meet the new blog, same as the old blog

2005-10-27T22:34:00.000-07:00

The new, improved, far less ambitious mathematician vs philosopher is online and guess what? It's one day traffic already equals roughly 10 days worth of this blog and Mike's old blog combined.

How'd we do it, you ask? Synergy!

There's a little Baumgarten freshness on there, if you need a taste.

Downsides

2005-10-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

The complaining I did earlier -- about how I'm working a lot, how I'm doing editor duties without the pay or the title -- has just been placed into glaringly sharp relief.

You either do the work of an editor, and get to give yourself the assignments you want, or you are given assignments by an editor, who doesn't give a shit about what you want.

Case in point: for the winter sports issue -- a season and genre of sportage I roundly avoid -- I have been asked to write 1200 words on ski patrols.

Quoth Snatch: "What do I know about diamonds?"

I've learned my lesson sirs, I'll take the extra non-writing workload.

Google, advocacy, misconception

2005-10-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

This has nothing to do with me, other than being the transcriber of Colin Meloy's words. Without knowing it--certainly without planning it--the questions I asked him last Sunday would discredit the story our competing publication, 7, would run today. Read on.

Quoth 7's piece on the Decemberists:

A great artist needs an obsession ... Jeff Mangum has Anne Frank ... The Decemberists' Meloy has pirates, folklore, history, soldiers and old, fancified language ... One of the all-time coolest songs about pirates, "Shanty for the Arethusa," works as well today as it would in the 17th century: "Tell your daughters, do not walk the streets alone tonight."

Alright, remember those bolded, blue-colored terms. For the record: Jeff Mangum is Neutral Milk Hotel -- He's the whole band. The Decemberists get compared to him non-stop, especially in indie webzines. It's an atrocious comparison. Granted: Tom Bowers, the writer of the 7 piece, only makes the implicit comparison between the two.

From our interview, now:

What are the big things writers get wrong about your work?
. . . Secondly: that we sing songs about pirates, which we do not. There is not a single song that involves a pirate.

Any plans to write one?
No, no, no. [laughs] I am completely not into pirates. Pirates are Halloween costumes. I have no interest in them.
I know you hate the comparisons that get made between you guys and Neutral Milk Hotel, but you're into archetypes and collective mythos, so it's gotta be flattering to be compared to somebody who has such a . . . massive footprint in the hipster consciousness. [Jeff] Mangum is like some magnificent, absentee indie God.
I'm totally flattered, I'm not angry about it. I think it tends to be, -- it ends up being a sign of lazy journalism. Letting other people do the work for you.

I only bring this up because (1) I care about music (2) I've come to care about Spokane's music scene (3) I believe the Decemberists to be the most important show coming to Spokane this winter (though Andrew Bird is also coming, and I can't WAIT for that), for the simple reason that we're finally, FINALLY, getting a zeitgeist-y indie band who are fully on the upswing. This could mean big things for (A) the national acts that play here, which would (B) at least expose more Spokane kids to a world outside metal and top 40, which would, potentially (C) create a local scene that consists of more than bands who sound like Mudvayne, more than singer/songwriters who sound like Jack Johnson/Jason Mraz.

TO WHIT: As one of the two influential arts publications in town--who should thus be helping educate and advocate for our town and our scene--7 has written an article about a very important band that was cobbled together entirely from Google search detritus, then sprinkled with misconceptions.

How does that help us, as a community?

Dead links tell no tales

2005-10-19T23:53:00.000-07:00

It somehow feels more real to me when I complain by ennumeration. So here it goes, the things that are annoying me:

I had to beg, borrow, (administer backalley handjobs) and steal to get 2 ad-free pages for my Decemberists piece. Shouldn't be that hard. The 2 pages I got were in Arts and Culture, not Music.
After Colin Meloy's publicity human drug her feet on getting me an interview, I had exactly ONE day to write my article.
The Inlander has a crappy website.
The Decemberists piece doesn't show up on the main web page (see 2 above)
The Decemberists piece doesn't show up in the music section of the website (see 1 above)
No one going to the web page will have any idea where to find the article (see 3,4,5 above)
The transcript I promised you folks should be linked at the end of the print piece (which, as you recall is in Arts and Culture, not music, and is inaccessible from the front page). It's not.
Even if it were, people looking for it (I mention it at the end of the print edition of the story) wouldn't be able to find it (see 4,5).
There's never enough time to do anything well. I feel like everything I do is half-assed by necessity.
The thing that's annoying me most of all--at the moment--is how whiny I've gotten.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the article itself, without the kickass art Collin, Joel and I worked so hard on, and without a link to the transcript. And, now that I'm reading it with a day's distance between the article and my critical eye, it seems pretty damn choppy. Vapid. Meandering. Pat. Flowing over with cliches. Fuck.

Yes, things

2005-10-17T01:02:00.000-07:00

You're sick of my update posts, so here's one more: I worked upwards of 60 hours this week, I think.

In exchange for that I got to interview Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Bob Edwards (for 30 years the host of NPR's Morning Edition). Both were good. One was great, but I'm not saying which (though it might not be the one you think. Or is it?).

You'll soon (hopefully) have access to both transcripts, unabridged and unadulterated. When these things become available, I'll link them.

Because I love you.

Crowns worn clumsily, sexily

2005-10-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

I'm an asshole, as of today. Forever. I've asked--for the first time--that a freelancer do a re-write. Not because other pieces haven't needed rewrites, but because I am a man of towering ambition, and this poor fellow got his story into me early, not 5 minutes before print, like everyone else.

My stable of crack music journalists. All ladies. All fabulously talented.

Proving this: punctuality is not good for you, it's good for the people who control you.

And also this: I need to run a tighter ship.

The thing was actually pretty good too. I just want something more, and I know he can give it to me. Holding certain people to a higher standard, also something I do now.

I know I'd be mortified (resentful, angry) if I was asked to do a rewrite. So I worded the e-mail very carefully. It really wasn't that bad, seriously. I just had another idea. I feel guilty, like I'm not qualified to ask for one since I've never been asked for one.

Apparently they happen all the time, though, rewrites. Just not at our paper. At more prestigious ones.

Until now.

Does that make me a bad ass? Let's just say yes and move on.

I am. Bad ass.

A few somethings spoiling the something

2005-10-02T17:01:00.000-07:00

Turned on comment verifying because this weekend comment spam has been raining down like [insert natural disaster]. It asks you to copy a small line of garbled text before you can publish your comment. If you're a person and not a spambot, this should be easy. If you are a spambot, boy, you're in for a headache. If you're a human, spamming the old fashioned way, you are a pestilence without a cure.

Except possibly shame.

But probably not.

Though just in case:

You're a bad person.

Pressure, direction, skeletons, closets

2005-09-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

So, given my past life (now barely kicking, on life support) as a highpowered whiny-ass with a lowpowered blog, and given the push for old media to somehow catch up with new media, I'm getting pressured pretty hard to start a blog.

You know, a work blog. Music and movies . . . which is more or less what this is. This right here.

When it's anything at all, it's that.

SO: Do I do it? Do I just use this? Do I make a new one?

Upside: This already has a built-in audience.
Downside: very few of you live in Spokane

Upside: There's already quite an archive of crap here.
Downside: A lot of it is my highpowered whine whining about things.

Upside: As stated, when this blog is anything at all, it's basically what the editors are looking for.
Downside: It would also, probably, become something else. A local music spotlight, from time to time.

However, there's a pretty good case against that last thing, as the music writer at our competing publication (you can find an email exchange between he and I somehwere on this blog) already kinda does that scene spotlight thing on his work blog. So why should I?

I've been mulling this over quite a bit--when I have time that I'm not wasting on things like videogames and other escapism--and I had a pretty good idea. At least, it's an idea that I liked. Now I'd like your ideas on it.

Here's the genesis: Spokane doesn't get many press or promotional screenings of movies, so most of our movies come from a guy based in Boston. Most of the time, I heartily disagree with his opinion. At the very least I have some pretty severe reservations, even when we both like the movie.

To whit: I was going to call it "Me vs. Symkus."

Then I realized that would be too narrow, esp since my thing here is primarily music. Then I also realized that I often have fairly severe reservations about the opinions of MANY critics in all aspects of pop criticism.

To whit: I was then going to call it "Me vs. The World."

Then I decided I didn't want to be so obviously narcisistic and self-satisfied. My writing conveys these things well enough without coming out and saying it. I also thought that this kind of criticism of criticism would take a hell of a lot of time. Time I don't have, for all the other writing and videogames. So I thought I'd open it up to ye, the audience, to complain about people as well. I would, of course, retain control of the content. Whose rejoinders get posted, adding a facet of populism to the site, while still allowing me fascistic control.

To whit: I'm thinking of calling it "Us vs. The World" to make it seem young, inclusive and exclusionary at the same time. You know, punk rock.

Whether this will be the full thrust of the site depends on a lot of things, really. Most notably your feedback.

So which is it?

2005-09-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

This new thing I do, it exposes me to a lot of things. Branding, for one. Advertising for another. Marketing, for still a third.

Except--and I've put this to marketers and ad sales people and I get nowhere--there's no definable difference, from my perspective and the perspective of these other people, between marketing and advertising.

And then branding, you know, is just an aspect of one of those, right? So aren't these all words for the same thing? Yes or no, your ideas.

Here is the dictionary's stance:

Advertising: The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.

Marketing: the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service

So then, is marketing the umbrella under which advertising sits? Is marketing the thing that decides I want my hamburgers sold by asian kids with turn tables? Is advertising the actual kids that end up on my screen?

No, that kid with the hamburger and headphones is an ad. The final thing. The end of the advertising chain. So then, what's advertising, some middle thing between market research and the actual ad? What would that be? Wouldn't marketing handle what advertising claims to, distribution channels, message, all that stuff?

Teach me.

Human ritual, conflict, and self-esteem

2005-09-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

I just took fourth place in a barroom spelling bee. Fourth out of about 30. Not bad.

[This is where pictures usually go]

I spelled the following words correctly: tyrannous, misspell, ketch, veldt (the latter two because, not in spite of, a childhood wasted on videogames [ketch coming from Rise of Nations, veldt from Final Fantasy 3]).

On all of these words, I went with my first instinct, spelled with confidence, made sure to ennunciate the letters I thought might be sticking points (v-e-l-D-t, I had said). I lost on "limousine," wherein I left out the "u". Shit.

Including the "u"--though you may not believe me--was my first instinct, which I fought off. I overthought it, decided against the "u" and spelled l-i-m-o-s-i-n-e, with none of the confidence and careful ennunciation of previous rounds.

Let this be a lesson:

Don't drink.

The spelling bee was curated by my colleague at the alternative weekly newspaper for which I work, as he was the previous champion. It was won by my colleague at the alternative weekly newspaper, with whom--over the course of an evening--I had developed a healthy rivalry. He wins, I get fourth. That's irksome. I learned, though, that when it comes down to brass tacks, and I'm concentrating--and relatively sober--I'm not half bad as a speller.

What matters, though--if I may nail myself to the cross of teamsmanship--is that my paper beat the other paper, who had a rather dreadful showing. I myself did better than any of the other paper's humans. I think you know what that means in terms of journalistic superiority.

Though I must confess this: last week, in print for God's sake, I did misspell wierd twice. Rather than the correct way, I spelled it like I just did. Twice. Normally Word would catch and autocorrect such an error (which has something to do with why I have no idea how it's really spelled, Word fixing it automatically, which is no way to learn, children), but I was making two 11th hour changes directly to the page (meaning I typed directly into the paper-constructing aparatus known as Adobe In-Design, which doesn't have its own spell check, stupidly). So there it is, on page, 50 thousand odd copies, under my byline: WIERD.

No matter how many drunken spelling bees I take 4th in, it won't be enough to wash away that stain.

***

It's kinda fun, reading over this, to write something that doesn't have immediate bearing on any current events, but which is simply the outpouring of brain to binary, filterless and without form. I'd forgotten that.

I just interviewed someone today--for a freelance position, which is what I was doing some mere two weeks ago--and asking him all these questions and explaining all these editorial standards and my half-assed vision for my section (over which I have near complete control), and I thought to myself how strange it was that I would be imposing what are, admittedly, my own, fairly arbitrary, aesthetic standards. Speaking like some kind of professional. A journalist even.

Rather than like some kid who started writing, very recently, because he was depressed and narcissistic and desperately wanted the acceptance of others.

That was pretty weird.

From this diarrhetic trough--this thing right here--this flash flood evacuation zone of half-thoughts and poor execution, I have developed a set of standards and practices, with which I rule a small stable of writers.

Take a look back at some of the shit I've written, in all its smugness, hauteur and filth. Is this the kind of shit you want to see your child write?

More update bullcrap

2005-08-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

I lost my office, and with it, my door. Now I'm in the new guy corral, which is still a massive and very private office, it just doesn't have a door. And the walls are partitions.

So I guess that makes it a "cubicle" by some standards, but not mine. Big desk to pile shit on is a plus, and an almost new eMac with OS X Tiger, which I'm quickly falling in love with. Good things.

I have a bunch of stuff to post, and I think I will, tonight.

A stuttering march of progress

2005-08-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

Open letter to anyone who isn't as dumb as me:

Blargh. I'm on a Mac at the moment (as I will be for the rest of eternity, it seems, at my new job, in my very own office. Which I have now. An office, with a door), and I want to blog a few of my recent writings, but I can't figure out how to cut and paste from Word into the Mac version of Firefox.

Drop-down menu doesn't work. open-apple C, open-apple P doesn't work. Dragging the text onto the little Firefox icon sure as hell doesn't work (using some version of OS 10 . . . 10.3.9 as it were).

Mac people: how do you make this work? Am I going to have to use another browser? What is the name of that thing? Isn't it Safari or something? What does the Icon look like?

This is going to be a long, steep ascent to the world of so-called user-friendliness. Quote, unquote.

For your troubles you'll get like 20 new reviews of various things, including several new albums, Broken Flowers, Stealth, 40-Year-Old Virgin, and other things. I'll also link to the article which has, by now, made me many country music enemies. In a town filled with Nashville-ophiles, that's not good.

Yours with more questions than answers,

Luke Baumgarten
Staff Writer
Pacific Northwest Inlander

Have I forsaken you?

2005-08-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

No, but I have news. It appears the wheel of fortune may have finally spun my fate from its recent nadir [jobless in Spokane, WA, getting grad school rejection letters via EMAIL {for God's sake!}] to somewhere approaching [relative] favor.

Cogs are turning at a certain inland northwest paper such that I have been informally asked to come in and talk about a staff writer position, which also seems to double as a semi-official editorship.

Glad tidings.

On the other side of various coins, I haven't been blogging, and for that I'm sorry, but I wrote 6 articles last week, so I haven't stopped writing.

Also, if you're in the sandpoint area, pick up this week's Reader, it has my usual nonsense, but it also has a fairly scathing attack on the censorship proclivities of a certain junior senator from New York, care of our good friend Ben. Though I don't often share his conservo-libertarian views, his points are always well articulated.

And this time, his analysis is right.

You can't win, so run

2005-07-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

War of the Worlds
This originally appeared in the Sandpoint Reader a few weeks ago.

Steven Spielberg is the supreme master of many things, but the subtleties and vagaries of human emotion are not among them. Oh he’s not bad. Yes yes, there’s Schindler’s List, Jaws et cetera and furthermore: E.T.

He’s certainly made emotionally resonant movies in the past, but not with any kind of regularity. And even those, like the above mentioned, owe their impact more to good acting and the situation’s enormity than to directing. In Schindler’s List you’ve got Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and 6 million dead Jews, for example. When Neeson and Fiennes are off-screen, the considerable emotion doesn’t come from the screen so much as it wells up within the audience, as Spielberg presents the carnage unblinking and unabridged. What I mean is: a Nazi newsreel of the slaughter would be just as troubling as the view from Spielberg’s lens.

Creating emotion is something different. He’s never been better at creating emotion than in the quiet moments between father and son, at the dinner table, in Jaws.

You know, 30 years ago.

Since then, he’s proven to be at his best when squeaking by on just enough to give his spectacles gravity. When he goes for more emotion than that—or God forbid when he makes a feel-good movie—the result is something like The Terminal.

I thought he understood that about himself. That is, until The Terminal.

What he does well—what he does perhaps better than anyone—is something that often gets mistaken for emotion: behavioral response. I’m sure this will lead to gasps from psychology students—and if so, you know my email, jerks—but there’s a difference between the experiences of sadness and joy and the experiences of terror, wonder and panic. The latter being less like strong feeling and more like instinct. Of course, language is stupidly inept at explaining these differences, but there is a profound difference.

It’s not wailing in fear and it’s not rushing headlong into battle. It’s cold and fueled by endorphins. It’s doing what is necessary to survive. It’s icy realization. Roy Schieder, on that beach, realizing there’s a shark in the water, camera zooming in on his eyes as the rest of the scene drops away. It’s dumb and emotionless scrambling up Omaha beach. You’re either paralyzed or spurred into action.
Or dead.

There are no blood-curdling screams until after the Tyrannosaurus bites you in half.
The screams are emotion. They come after you get hunted down.

Likewise, Spielberg never tries to hamstring wonder with philosophy. He allows it to be what it is, awe and curiosity. As the aliens of E.T. and Close Encounters touch down, Spielberg is Zen like Phil Jackson. Likewise, as lightning strikes the same spot 26 times in War of the Worlds, and some intersection in the Bronx opens up like a gaping maw, no one talks, but everyone moves in for a closer look, like they all had the same idea. In the moment, there are no words for the experience. The emotional reaction comes later.

These things lack the irrationality of emotion because rationality doesn’t even come into play.

War of the Worlds is an entire movie built around instinctual responses, perhaps Spielberg’s first, further distancing himself from the blockbuster crowd he created. Unlike the Michael Bays, those glorified pyrotechnicians, and the George Lucases, those soap opera writers, Spielberg has the patience to let his shots and situations stand. No one-liners, no ominous string section, no “it’s quiet, too quiet.”

Nobody, after 30 years, understands better than Spielberg that nothingness isn’t dead air; it isn’t down time. Nothingness is potential. Nothingness is pregnant with the specter of menace, which is why nothing builds tension like silence.
Not even an ex-marine with nerve gas filled missiles. Not even the two-note shark’s theme in Jaws. Certainly not Vader’s Imperial March.

Silence is where all those intangible things live: Terror. Wonder. Panic. The survival instinct.

War of the Worlds, in its best moments, is blanketed in silence and those moments become Spielberg’s canvas. Against an undefeatable foe, the screamers die. The revenge-seekers die. The thinkers, they die first. Those that use their terror, though, who live in their instinct, occasionally give in to panic—most of them die too—but only they get blessed by the law of averages. They alone are aided by the fact that these massive, three-legged death-machines can’t catch everybody.
To a species so married to its dogma—the holy trinity of dominance, certainty and logic—what is more frightening or counter-intuitive than living by instinct and hoping for a lucky break?

It’s a fear greater than the fear of the unknown. It’s the fear of realizing that thinking is too slow, that knowing doesn’t help.

In War of the Worlds, Spielberg conveys this fear to the audience the way he always has: an uncanny sense of perspective. Sometimes the camera stays close to the character, just over the shoulder, peeking from behind a corner. It is claustrophobia and obscured vision.

It’s the hopelessly imperfect human machine.

Just as often though, he explodes the perspective. He’ll show hills full of strong points and enemy soldiers or gaping fissures or buzzing, mechanical human cities. Or in this case, massive tripods silhouetted on the horizon, dwarfing the people scrambling below.

It’s the hopelessly small human individual.

Like H.G. Wells and Orson Wells before him, Spielberg shows us an enemy that can’t be stopped, gives us a weak, indefensible and slow body, then tells us to run.
He’s made a career out of documenting fear and human resilience and you’ll see situations in War of the Worlds that you saw in Jurassic Park, Jaws, Catch Me If You Can, Saving Private Ryan and even Schindler’s List.

Here, though, a key element is missing: the possibility of winning. You can outthink dinosaurs. You can leave the water. You can throw off a federal manhunt. You can kill an enemy soldier. You can be spared the gas chamber through altruism and money.
War of the Worlds, though, is a zero sum game. Against countless tenacious enemies, you can’t hide for long, you can’t stall, you can’t wait for reinforcements, you can’t buy them off. The best you can hope for is survival.

So run.

Mountaineering, Palahniuk, Harry Potter and other things

2005-07-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

I hate how little I've been blogging. I actually have a bunch of stuff to put up, but my laptop is hosed and the one I'm using doesn't have any photo editing software. A CMS blog with no picture feels lifeless, especially when it's a movie/music/book review.

So, to tithe you over, this week's Inlander includes:

The Wizard of Quid
My article on the inverse relationship of Harry Potter's popularity to his profitability [a vitally important paragraph was cut out for space constraints, which is maddening. There's also some clever editing that I don't at all endorse *sigh*].

Tackle Rainier in Three Mountains
My article for the summer adventure pullout. Learn to climb mountains like people who are paid to climb mountains.

Finally, from last week, my review of Chuck Palahniuk's new book Haunted--also the victim of space constraints.

I'm going to get a decent photochop program on this comp and we'll be back in business, swear.

Blogger's spell check contains neither the word "blogger", "blog" nor any variant thereof. Morons.

Sometimes an arterial spray is just an arterial spray

2005-07-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

George A. Romero's Land of the Dead

Certain movies, regardless of their content, are automatically labeled social commentary. Any hood drama is social commentary. Most movies adapted from plays—by simple virtue of having been plays and thus high art—are considered to be social commentary. These are just two examples.

Many directors, writers and producers, having spent time in one or more of these genres get automatically grandfathered in and all of their work, the entire gaping maw from music videos to video wills, is considered deep social commentary (because, after all, it was created by a social commentator!). Each film is then studied and restudied.

And so it is that every movie ever touched by Woody Allen, Spike Lee, John Singleton, David Mamet, are all considered penetrating critical works. The less obvious are just the more cleverly disguised.

Except they aren’t.

For every “Annie Hall”, there’s a “Curse of the Jade Scorpion”.

Every “Boyz ‘n tha Hood” has its "Shaft".

Every "Glengary Glen Ross" and "Wag the Dog" has its "Heist" and "Ronin".

Every "Do The Right Thing" has everything else Spike Lee has ever done.

As much as we may love these latter examples, they aren’t social commentary. They aren’t satire. They don’t have their finger on the pulse of the Common Man. They aren’t a withering indictment of modernity.

Sometimes a crappy noir homage, a blacksploitation remake, two caper flicks and an assload of black comedies are just that.

Then come the inevitable comparisons to Vonnegut and Twain that these withering indictors—these pulse-takers of the common man—ultimately garner. I won’t justify them other than to say this: Even Vonnegut has his Hocus Pocus; even Twain, his “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”.

Or simply: sometimes a jumping frog is just a jumping frog.

Yes yes, and 300 words without even mentioning the film I’m actually reviewing. Here’s the bridge: What John Singleton is to the hood, what Woody Allen is to neurotics and New Yorkers, what Twain is to every red-blooded, progressive, freedom-loving American, George A. Romero is to the B Zombie movie.

Both its progenitor and most confident auteur.

He is, essentially, the whole genre. Judging by the Entertainment Tonight segments and from years of hearing my friend Ben talk the finer points of zombie flicks, it seems Romero—and, hence, the genre—has lots to say about your elected officials and your way of life in general.

I haven’t seen much of his work, so I took Ben and the hype at face value, expecting George A. Romero to be Elizabeth Cadie, Jonathan Swift and Jesus Christ simultaneously.

I expected to emerge changed.

Being conditioned to look for a bold statement, that’s exactly what I did. Look.

“Land of the Dead. Well hell, that’s a statement right there, right? Isn’t it? It has to be. Like ‘this land is your land’, except it’s not anymore, because it’s overrun. Yeah. By evil. Yeah. Utterly inhospitable to life. Yeah. Because of the zombies, but also because of repression. YEAH. And denial of rights. GOD YES,” really cheering myself on now, “brought about by the Patriot Act. And globalization. The failing dollar. And McCarthyism. Good God: taxation without representation! America really is the Land of the Dead!”

Before the opening credits, this was already the most broad and convincing social satire I’d ever seen. Unbelievable. A master stroke.

Except it wasn’t. And once the zombies popped up and people started fleeing from them, I had to double back. That reading didn’t quite work. Not much about globalization here. Or the Patriot Act. No Texan Presidents at all really.

“So: the zombies are the victims here, not the people they’re eating. Right. Okay. So the zombies are killers, but only because they are the lowest of the low. They are this way because of repression. Because they cannot exist within the system, they must exist outside it. YES. They are the proletariat. Oops, that’s Marx, can’t be that. So: Like: The pursuit of wealth has made them animals, made other humans mere objects—mere stepping stones toward greater power. Power being wealth. Wealth being capital. Das Kapital. Damn.”

If the only rhetorical subtext you can find in an American film is Marxist, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. That dog don’t hunt around these parts, even in liberal Hollywood.

Nancy Reagan made sure of that.

Point being: if you have to try that hard to find the angle, it ain’t commentary and it sure ain’t satire.

Even at a very immature, very ignorant 16, I knew The Crucible was appreciably different than The Scarlet Letter. I didn’t know why, but if I had been an immature, ignorant 16-year-old growing up during the Red Scare, I think I would have nailed it.

So here I was, watching flesh torn gorgeously from bone, heads lugubriously lopped of shoulders during a time of unrest, paranoia, red alerts, Amber alerts, Wal-Mart and the Patriot Act, and I just couldn’t see it. The satire.

So I made the tough call and gave up the search.

Thus I conclude: Dennis Hopper saying “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is not enough to justify calling an entire film into social commentary.

Or simply: sometimes a zombie is just a zombie.

That is not to say these zombies are without worth. In a time when the expedient answer for any technical problem in Hollywood is a computer generated effect, “Land of the Dead” shows just how woefully inadequate that technology is, even with a fairly high budget.

Romero uses CG for some things but not others. There are very few CG shots in all. John Leguizamo’s weapon of choice is some kind of bolt shooter. Most of the rest of characters just use guns. When John kills a zombie, it’s CG and it looks laughably bad, obviously fake, like the whole of “Star Wars” Episodes I through III.

When everyone else kills a zombie, Romero is actually placing explosives into a latex cavity with fake brains and fake fluid and fake blood. The latter way of exploding heads—the way directors have been exploding heads since the golden age of Hollywood—is so much better and more realistic as to not even be a contest. And when a zombie takes a big bite out of a forearm or twists off a woman’s head, sending her pearls scattering—Mister, you better believe that ain’t a computer.

Maybe that, finally, is the commentary I was looking for.

No matter how fast your workstation is, no matter its rendering capabilities, it’ll never beat a real fake head, exploded with care, in the old way, like Lucio Fulci used to do.

Things are better now

2005-07-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

Here are links to the two stories I have in this week's Inlander, a review of The Machinist and a story about a local production company's new movie, and their attempt to drum up local talent for the soundtrack.

Machinist Review

North By Northwest Story [half-way down the page]

My Reader stuff, as usual, will be appearing here in full Baumgarti-media format throughout the next few days. In lieu of payment, last night, they bought me lots of alcohol and gave me a couch to sleep on. The new kid, unable to keep eye contact through the layers of microbrew and grey goose glaucoma that build up when it's late and it's dark and you've shut down a bar early so you and your friends can drink in the back, told me that I should pitch to Salon. That it was my duty.

In lieu of payment I got liquid and verbal self-confidence boosts.

I thank them for that.

Then, foot to the floor on some North Idahoan highway early this morning, frantically racing back to civilization for an early afternoon appointment [being a jetset mogul, now], I had to pull into some separatist's ranch house and unload the contents of my stomach onto their driveway.

I apologize for that.

On this day in history

2005-06-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

I started blogging a year ago today [1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th posts in one day, unbelievable]. God that was a depressing and optimistic time. . .

Over the year, it's been a thing I've needed it to be at different times. At first [painfully] it was a soap box for my disaffected [pseudo-]corporate foray. Then it was something of an intellectual [political, religious, philosophical, sociological et cetera, ad infinitum] revolt against it. Now it's a gallery showcase for whatever human being might want to pay me to write [it's worked twice now].

Since it's really no one thing the way other blogs are one thing, and probably because my writing is an acquired taste [that is, not very good or even comprehendable] and I no longer post very often, not many people read it. To those that do, though, thanks for being critical and kind as needed, helping and forcing me to become a better writer and--dare I say--earth citizen.

Give yourselves a round of applause.

As a reward [or punishment, you know which you deserve], here's my favorite snippet from that first day [fourth post, which also gave us the blog's original title "Cripplingly Narcissistic and a Horrible Speller", also crappy]:

The last entry was too snotty and punk rock. I'm not nearly that thoughtful or tortured a soul. It's a big goddamned front. I was playing at being overtly cynical because secretly I feel so giddily optimistic about where this blogging thing could take me. Artistically.

I imagine myself sitting down at a coffee shop somewhere while I pour over the constructive comments posted about my blog and, by extension, myself. The creative inspiration literally gushes out of me. This upwelling causes quite a commotion and I'm asked to leave. I cross the street to another coffee shop where I bravely churn out page after page of my novel, taking breaks only to finish my short stories and order more scones.

I'm immediately the talk of the goddamned town--all towns really. And then the imagining ends more or less and a blithe feeling of contentment takes it's place.

This is what blogging seems to do for me and it's awesome and I feel I'm definitely going places. Though once again in the interest of veracity, the delusions aren't new, just more frequent.

Gutwrenchingly transparent but also, in it's own way, fake. Almost seems like I was reflecting on months of writerly successes and failures, rather than 48 minutes worth [of failures].

American Homoerotic

2005-06-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

Your host for this evening

We never talk anymore, I know. I'm just slammed at work. You know that. My feelings haven't changed though, I swear. I feel about you now the way I felt last June, when this whole mad experiment began.

I swear.

Here, let me do something nice for you. A guest blogger. You'll like that. Truth told, he doesn't know I'm posting this, but I don't care. When he starts paying me, he can bitch. This is from my editor. The guy who's been keeping me busy and away from the blog. Blame him. He's not replacing you.

I swear.

For interactive fun, try and guess what he got his degree in:

( [Chuck] Palahniuk is suffering from the same over-sensualized mania that grips cultures in decline.

Notice the parentheses. what follows is a mere aside in a much longer tyrade, prompted by the statement "The Inlander is having me review the new Palahniuk, not his best work"

You do know that Caligula invited all the Roman senators to bring their wives and man-lovers to the Senate floor for orgies. You do know that nearly all the high-level Nazi leaders were raging sexual deviants. You do know that Mao Zedong bathed in the collected vaginal juices of young girls.

I see this nonesense in nearly every aspect of our popular culture. Whining pretty boys croaking and groaning about the fact that their penises are pencil thin and flaccid as liver flukes; silicone-pumped asses and calves (what the fuck is that all about?) on MTV; and my favorite, the Puritanical, prudish, maniacal anti-sexualism of the Evangelism that currently masquerades as "Moral Authority" in this country.

Ironically that is the greatest manifestation of this culture-wide belly-button gazing. That kind of rabid fear can only be one thing -- an emotionally maladjusted morbid curiosity with deviance. Lurking beneath the pious grimace of every televangelist is the leering, sweaty visage of sado-masochism; child molestation; fecal-philia; Asian children contorted in all manner of humiliating positions. It's all about power for these fucking people. It's prison eroticism. At these high levels it manifests secretly in $100,000 a plate private dinners (17-year-old Senate pages drunk on ruffies and wine coolers) and publicly as frothing denunciations of that great culture-threatening demon: "ho-muh-sexyooality."

Meanwhile, the military anally violates 10,000 prisoners a week at GITMO and in every rat-hole, shit pile prison from Kirkut to Basra. By the time this weird culture of power vs. powerlessness reaches those of us near the bottom (Palahniuk included) it's manifested inwardly.

Standing for seven hours in front of the mirror staring at your "nasty parts" is something little kids do before they're sexually developed. It's an attempt to identify self. Our culture has drifted so far from a mature understanding of identity it's reverted back to a stage at which we try to exert power over ourselves by constantly revisiting our own sexuality [emphasis mine], as if it held some key to unlocking our true nature.

NONSENSE I say.

This ridiculous obsession people have with sex -- Michael Jackson, Jim West, "ho-muh-sexyoo-uhls," R. Kelly -- is unproductive and frightening to me. Vladimir Lenin once kicked Emma Goldmann out of his office for even mentioning "abortion" to him. He said concepts like that should never be discussed at the national level. Sexuality and sexual decisions, in his mind, for a country to operate effectively and provide best for its people should never become the main preoccupation its people.

I say amen. . .

So this is why I put up with not getting paid: edifying conversation. That along with getting published, resume bolstering, total content freedom and having a bizarrely large fanbase in a little liberal enclave of Idaho's northerly panhandle.

That and he tells me that payday is just around the corner. And I believe him . . .

Batman Reborn

2005-06-25T01:28:00.000-07:00

I don't often write out and out disclaimers. That said: Disclaimer -- I wrote this after an eerie confluence of events [freak summer storm and bad seafood] left me shivering in the dark with no internet, stomach in knots, curled fetally in an uncomfortable faux leather chair for the better part of 24 hours with a deadline looming. Less horrible on its own merits than horrible next to the article [only realized in my brain] I wanted to write.

Still, it touches on some things I'd like to talk about. So please do.

Batman, from it's earliest incarnations as a pulp comic in the 1930's, has been about fear. Five feature length movie adaptations in, Hollywood types have finally seemed to figure that out. Credit capitalism and the realization that obsessive 30-something comic readers are a tremendously powerful demographic who don't like being condescended to. Credit also the notion that blockbusters needn't be vapid and riddled with plot holes to attract crowds.

But before we get into all that, let's talk some more about fear.

I have fears of my own, as we all do. One of them is a recurring nightmare. It is a nightmare much like the ones that haunt Bruce Wayne after that fateful plunge into a well led more or less directly to his parent's death.

Mine goes like this, ever the same: Two women are perched next to each other, on stools. The younger and prettier of the two is asking her older, more ornately-dressed, vigorously-implanted and ornately-jeweled colleague questions I can't hear. The older, weighed down my countless strings of faux-pearls, gushes visibly about this topic and that. Finally, the young woman asks a question I can hear: "tell me about the . . ." She pauses, looking a little embarrassed and devious, "nipples."

The old woman looks about to jump from her skin with joy. "Oh God, I saw it. The batsuit has nipples! Nipples and a huge codpiece!" Her tone shifts, turning confessional: "This new Batman is all about sex and being sexy."

Violence on television doesn't scar children, Entertainment Tonight does.

No, Joel Schumacher, Batman isn't about sex and any attempt to sexy him up makes for an absurd and ill-wrought hodgepodge of innuendo and pointless homoerotic speculation [See: Batman Forever; See Also: Batman and Robin]. Even if Batman were gay it would not be the defining crisis of his life. He'd never have to come out to his parents, because they're dead. He'd never worry about the acceptance of his peers because, if given the chance, Bruce Wayne would never hang out with anyone. He'd sit around brooding in the day time, probably in a cave somewhere. Then, at night, he'd go out and beat the piss out of purse-snatchers to assuage his guilt. He might have random, impersonal sex to assuage his Batlibido, but he'd do that straight too.

Thankfully Batman Begins trades codpieces for Kevlar and rubberized nipple-like protrusions for an obsessive and candid exploration of Batman's genesis. Director Christopher Nolan [Memento] and writer David S. Goyer [the Blade trilogy] set a perfect tone early, and take the time to explore the intricacies of the character from his driving, formative neuroses to the discovery of the Batcave and the vagaries of prototyping the Batsuit.

They correctly understand that Batman's two greatest abilities are his recklessness and his tremendous buying power.

Of the four actors who have now played Batman, Bale is the best at expressing Wayne's consumptive, internalized grief. Where previous actors and scripts have played Batman like the ultimate bane on any kind of social life, Bale helps suggest the opposite is true, that dealing with Gotham's idle rich is the curse. That characterization, given the circumstances, feels much more authentic.

Watching Bale try to fit in with the upper crust, affecting that haughty air and playboy demeanor is a fish-out-of-water experience that Nolan deliberately makes surreal with pacing and simple sight gags. This is neither the life Bruce lives, nor the one he wants.

The trial and error process Wayne and Alfred go through to test and retest their designs is wonderfully archival, adding further to Batman's humanity in general. This has been the most interesting aspect of the Batman paradigm, the super hero with no super powers, and Nolan and Goyer bring that aspect to light for the first time.

Beneath the growth of Batman as a symbol, and as a technically achievable crime-stopping force, is Bruce's internal growth, from a youth blindly striking out at elusive revenge to a young adult refining and grappling with the nature of justice. It's no simple task, differentiating between the two, and this tension lurks throughout the film, informing and adding emotion to each encounter with evil.

The most satisfying moment, though, comes near the end. After a climactic fight and clever planning, Batman overpowers and outthinks his nemesis, leaving him hurtling toward death. At the moment of recognition, when the nemesis realizes his life is rapidly waning, he closes his eyes and sets his jaw. He doesn't scream or run or curse the name of Bruce Wayne. There's no fist shaking, only cold realization. And fear.

Most big-budget movies can't be bothered to even create a coherent plot. It's wonderfully edifying to see Nolan and Goyer craft a story so tight that it not only
reins in all of its many plot lines, it even manages to bring its thematic elements and image patterns full circle. When this happens it feels like closure. Catharsis. Things I desperately needed after the bat nipples.

In the preceding two and a half hours, I knew I was being entertained by a good and faithful comic book movie. In that moment--jaw set, eyes closed--I realized I was watching a great film.

A Darker White

2005-06-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

The White Stripes : Get Behind Me Satan

Whatever else can be said about them; whatever hope can be expressed that the MTV set likes an ambitious, bluesy rock band; whatever complaint can be lodged about how the band's success might be affecting their work, The White Stripes know how to write a kick ass single.

De Stijl had “You’re Pretty Good Looking [For a Girl]”, White Blood Cells had “Fell in Love with a Girl”, Elephant had “Seven Nation Army”.

Get Behind Me Satan has “Blue Orchid”, a frenetic delta-blues-meets-butt-rock pot boiler that multi-tracks a massive guitar sound like if Billy Corgan produced a Judas Priest album. While up-tempo, the song is propelled by a bleak, venomous undertone the innocence-obsessed White Stripes have never expressed before. From vague foreboding at times to out and out betrayal, the dank corruption of adulthood pervades the entire album.

“The Nurse” intersperses fierce drum hits with calypso-inflected marimbas, alternating Caribbean rhythms with metal crunch, to drive home a simple point: When you’re at your lowest, beset on all sides with nowhere to turn [etc, etc], it’s the person you trust most who’s going to work that knife between your ribs. And twist.

The refrain, “I’m never gonna let you down, now,” isn’t at all convincing.

“Red Rain” nicely juxtaposes the sweet innocence of childhood [A la “We’re Going to Be Friends” and, really, all their previous work] with the bitter, gnarled mess of everything after.

You think not telling is the same as not lying, don't you? / Then I guess not feeling is the same as not crying to you

That’s a great couplet that balances outrage with naiveté very well. That tension, though, is present even at the level of instrumentation. As Jack sings “If there is a lie, then there’s a liar too / If there’s a sin, then there’s a sinner too,” Meg plays a set of children’s chromatic desk bells, sounding like those of a clock, signaling an end to blamelessness.

Jack White seems to view childhood not only as a time of innocence, but also of virtue and purity. Both the platonic friendship of “We’re Going to Be Friends” and the quaint love of “Fell in Love With a Girl” demonstrate this.

Here though, on “Passive Manipulation” that obsession turns straight creepy, as I suppose it was eventually bound to [call it Jackson’s Law]. It’s slightly ambiguous, but Meg seems to be singing out against Carl Jung’s Elektra complex, and also perhaps against its Appalachian corollary: dating within the family. I don’t know. Lyrics provided without commentary:

Women, listen to your mothers / Don’t just succumb to the wishes of your brothers / Take a step back, take a look at one another / You need to know the difference / Between a father and a lover.

Kudos for urging temperance, Meg, and for keeping the song under 30 seconds.

While the drumming is better than any of their other albums, Meg still couldn’t earn a seat at the kit of my seventh grade jazz band. Jack’s riffs, though, are percussive enough to pass, and adding elements like the marimba and those crazy bells to Meg’s percussion repertoire create enough novelty and depth to lighten the burden of her bratty cymbal-crashing.

I’m not sure who is responsible for it, but one of them knows how to shake a mean maraca.

The only other song that really would have benefited from some polishing is “Little Ghost”, a bluegrass caterwaul that really doesn’t fit with the rest of the record. A better context would probably be the b-side of Loretta Lynn’s “Portland, Oregon”, or anywhere on her gorgeously schizophrenic Van Lear Rose.

But even Ghost’s impromptu, back-porch ambience points in a good direction, toward a band that, having made a technically ambitious album in Elephant, is anxious to apply what they learned to churning out off-beat, ebullient, and densely emotional [if occasionally creepy] records.

All the best elements from De Stijl and White Blood Cells have returned from a short break [Elephant was mostly disappointing] with a new and intriguingly sinister pallor. The dissonant crunch of lost innocence has never been this much fun.

Tony Hawkjam

2005-06-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

At the behest of my semi-new handlers, I wrote a [gasp] news piece on Tony Hawk and the Boom Boom Huckjam, which is hitting the hometown arena today. The content is trivial, but this is the first piece of journalism I've been immediately compensated for, proving that I can earn a modest living with quill and inks.

Subversively, I made it less about his skateboarding or the tour than about how he got retardedly rich by catering to kids who don't skate at all.

They're stricter with content than The Reader [and better about updating their website], so a short excerpt and a link follow.

The Pacific Northwest Inlander 06/16/05:

Tony Hawk: The Brand, . . . saw gross earnings in 2003 of nearly 300 million dollars, according to Forbes Magazine.

Much of that comes from the video game franchise, which snagged non-skaters with simple and addicting game play. Recently, the game makers have fought to retain that fan base with clever cross promotion. “Tony Hawk’s Underground 2” features Bam Margera, star of MTV’s “Viva La Bam”, putting the franchise on solid ground with people who are less likely to skateboard than they are to videotape themselves seriously injuring their friends. Given the immense popularity of Margera, the testicle-kick set seems to represent a massive hunk of the vital youth demographic Hawk and his companies target.

The side project that wasn't

2005-06-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

The Headphones

This is a confusing album, though not so much in its sound or lyrical content. Those can be succinctly described as the Postal-Servicing of Pedro the Lion. David Bazan and TW Walsh, the two permanent members of Pedro the Lion, forgo guitars on this album for minimalist synth and live drums.

Minimalism already being a primary aesthetic, it means that Bazan has just switched to keyboards. He still manages to bring along [critics of Pedro the Lion’s last album, Achilles Heel might say “bring back”] his bardic storytelling and eagerness to explore things the rest of the indie world seems uncomfortable with. Things like God and stuff.

“Major Cities” is a protest song framed as a lesson from father to daughter.

I agree this doesn’t favor me / still bullies have to get what’s coming

He says, as bombs fall around them. He doesn’t want to die, but can’t escape the feeling that he and his country have brought this on themselves. Bazan’s keyboard is slightly off the beat at times, making the simple melody feel like it’s coming out of a child’s music box. You can only expect to get what you give; he doesn’t mince words, and the message is given tremendous power by the setting and circumstances. We teach our children fair play, then ignore those lessons in our foreign policy.

“Natural Disasters” also takes up the theme of bullies. This time, though, they are trying to get Jesus in their posse.

Now I know we disagree / But soon enough we will all be free / to worship any way I choose.

Bazan sees in our current political climate the same thing he sees in almost all of [contemporary American Protestant] Christianity: rigid theological [and political] dogma masquerading as religious [and personal] freedom.

And now we’re taking over, and no one is the wiser / With Mexican and Negro Cabinet advisors.

Anglo-centrism, dominionist ideologies, flat taxes and greater executive powers presented as smiling, obedient, multi-ethnic throngs.

See also: Wolves in sheep’s clothing.

These are the same matters Bright Eyes frequently attacks with venom. The twist here, though, is that, while Connor Oberst is dubious of religion in general, Bazan feels his is a peaceful faith that has been hijacked by rabid jingoists.

The next track, “Hello Operator” is a surrealistic narrative of a man’s plan to possess his ex-lover’s telephone and strangle her with the cord. Here the grimness of his subject is given a strange levity; hope that the bitterness he feels will be quieted by indulging his barbarism. It’s a pointless fantasy, and you can tell this person isn’t capable of murder, but the catharsis he feels just plotting it is electric.

Bazan tackles his impulses with an openness that would make Jimmy Swaggart blush, at once asserting and lamenting that finding God doesn’t mean losing your humanity. The Headphones finds him in excellent form.

The arrangements, too, show a step back from Achilles Heel’s more elaborate arrangements and less elaborate stories [coming dangerously close to, you know, ordinary pop]. So I guess The Headphones is a side project in a strict sense. At the same time, though, it’s really not.

Granted, there’s no guitar, but Pedro the Lion has never been defined by its guitar work. The essential element is Bazan’s novelistic, frank and explosive examinations of faith and fidelity. Against that style and those themes, Achilles Heel was more of a side project than The Headphones are.

Meaning that, despite the synth and the hipper, more urban moniker, The Headphones are Pedro the Lion, with all the angst, theology and swearing that entails.

Bazan remains a weary cynic searching for redemption. As long as he keeps writing songs like this, one hopes that someday, somewhere, he’ll find it. In the meantime, artists like Bazan and Sufjan Stevens embody my own hope that more bands will begin to stab at issues of faith without traipsing headlong into the unctuous void--the staid, artless barrens--of Christian Praise Rock.

On that day I will, in Bazan’s words: “Rejoice.”

Near Miss

2005-06-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

Crash overcomes a weak first act

After five minutes of Crash, the movie seemed destined to live up to its name. It would be a wreck alright, a fiery implosion caused by the hammering repetition of clichés as written by some white freshman film student who interned at the NAACP or the ADL and noticed with shock that some people are victims of racism.

Detective Graham [Don Cheadle] begins with an overwrought soliloquy about how Angelinos are so segregated in their cars that they get in wrecks to initiate human contact. The moment feels forced, the theory unlikely [Our film student seems to be minoring in psychology as well]. Soon after, Graham mocks his girlfriend's Latina heritage as a bunch of people parking cars on their lawns.

The first twenty minutes are mind-numbing. By the time Sergeant Ryan [Matt Dillon] squares off with an insurance agent named Shaniqua [a sophomorically stereotypical name for a black women] the film is on autopilot. Paul Haggis seems content to depict racism without trying to understand it. One by one the multi-racial cast trots out to spew some righteous and ignorant vitriol, then disappear. Muslims hate African-Americans hate Latinos hate Asians hate whites hate African-Americans hate whites, et cetera.

The high point of this cavalcade of intolerance comes in a scene between Anthony [Ludacris] and Peter [Larenz Tate]. The two walk out of a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Anthony complains about the bad service they received. He thinks the waitress treated them poorly "because we're black, and black people don't tip." Peter asks, "Well? Did you tip her?" Anthony replies, "I'm not going to reward that kind of behavior."

It's an extended scene with very few cuts and great acting by both Tate and Ludacris.
Anthony goes on to point out that if two white people were to walk through Watts or Compton the way they are walking through Beverly Hills, the white people would be scared out of their minds. But, Anthony says, white people wield vastly greater power than blacks. Why then, he wonders, aren't he and Peter just as scared, outnumbered as they are in Beverly Hills? "Because we have guns?" Peter asks.

The scene ends with Peter and Anthony stealing an Escalade. The dialogue is funny and the timing is on, but the observations are nothing we haven't heard before.

Not until all the prejudices and animosity of the characters have been fleshed out and Crash begins to work its way into the the lives of these people does the film begin to gain altitude.

His course set by the events of the first act, Haggis begins to examine how the politics of race mix with conditioned responses in some, with emasculation and social inequality in others, with ignorance and impotent fear in still others to breed hate. He then patiently demonstrates how these things feed on each other.

Affirmative action, for example, was nobly designed to combat hate discrimination, however here it seems to create more animosity than it alleviates. Is the issue race or class? Or education opportunities? Have we made the debate about blacks and whites when it should really be about rich and poor? Perhaps, but Haggis' message seems more general still.

Graham [Cheadle] is pressured into making a hero out of a crooked African American detective who was killed smuggling cocaine. The district attorney [Brendan Frazer] needs a black hero to lock up the minority vote. He needs loyal black men in visible positions of power to keep the minority vote. He wants Graham to help him with both. The DA dangles Graham's brother's criminal record as incentive to cooperate. In Crash, the weak are impotent and the powerful are self-serving. Gradually, Haggis begins to suggest that these concepts--black and white, rich and poor--are specific instances of a more universal struggle. Power over weakness. Domination.

Haggis' greatest insight is that no one formula for hate exists because there is no single source of domination. There is no cure-all for injustice because it comes in so many forms, and a failure to understand the nuances of race relations results in blanket solutions that only make things worse. Discrimination and reverse-discrimination do not create non-discrimination.

As such, Haggis cannot suggest a solution, but he does offer a direction. These lives jostle around, making contact with each other, often violently. In some cases, though understanding is reached. Certain characters [and not the ones you expect] come to see the humanity that underlies skin tone and perhaps, begin to work through some of the intolerance. The result is imperfect and idealistic, but Haggis' argument carries weight because he weaves it into a tapestry of experiences and voices that is as complex and rich as anything since Traffic.

Don Cheadle creates a memorable character, as do Matt Dillon and Thandy Newton, but the two most surprisingly powerful performances come from Terrence Howard and Ludacris. The scene they share [after Anthony looks to steal another Escalade] is acted with subtle power. Howard's character Cameron, his hair conked the way Malcom X did as a young man, has been struggling with his lost identity as both a black man and as protector of his family. Sensing Anthony might be lost down a similar path, Cameron's words are impassioned. Though it's never stated, Ludacris gives us the sense that Cameron--this stranger he's known for 20 minutes, whose car he is trying to steal--is as close to a roll model as Anthony has ever had.

Each set of relationships in Crash is emotionally rewarding and fashioned to make pinpoint statements about modern race struggles. It is gorgeously written, plotted and paced, gradually working from broad surface hatred to its deep and specific emotional and socio-economic underpinnings. The presentation is compelling.

Crash's ultimately forceful, shocking and balletic movement of discovery makes the initial conceit--the thing about the people of Los Angeles subconsciously causing car accidents--seem pointless and abstract next to the concrete bounty of the film's human voices.

In all, though, Crash is a daring, hopeful film and a towering achievement for a talented writer.

Familiar Affairs

2005-06-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

The only film genre more formulaic than romantic comedies is Hong Kong action. Every time out it's the honorable cops versus the craven triads [or honorable triads and craven cops]. At some point we are introduced to one or more soulless, doting, ineffectual female characters who exist only as testaments to the hero's startling animal magnetism. There are always double and triple crosses ending in bloody showdowns. In Hong Kong action, bullets are drawn to foreheads like East Asian Mafiosi to the heroin trade.

There's often a mystery to unravel or a game of cat and mouse. Those films lacking in mystery generally compensate with a revenge plot and absurd amounts of blood--gushing out of foreheads split in two with precise gunplay.

For better and for worse, Infernal Affairs [Hong Kong action titles also generally sound like soft core porn] finds a way to incorporate each and every on of these things into a single film.

You've got your cops, who hunt your gangs who push your drugs. You have no less than two dumb female love interests, a testament to the stunning virility of both our hero and his nemesis [differently heroic in his own right]. You have your dumb former love interest, a testament to our hero's devotion to his work. I counted one double, one quadruple and one quintuple-cross, leaving everybody any of the main characters ever cared about dead. Lots of bullets find their way through lots of foreheads.

Infernal Affairs' central conceit, further, has been done countless times, but is developed well enough to be exciting. See, instead of having a triad mole in the Police Department or a cop deep undercover within the triad, Infernal Affairs does both.

Since Hong Kong action conventions have no qualms with presenting honorable criminals, Infernal Affairs allows itself to offer dueling heros. Both are so incredibly good at what they do that each man quickly realizes the existence of the other. Both are so dependable and honorable that their respective bosses [who they are deceiving remember] quickly puts each man in charge of sniffing out the other. So each man is aiding the establishment he has infiltrated while simultaneously seeking to undermine it. Sound tough to follow? It is. Probably about as hard to follow as this review.

The plot is so convoluted that I'm sure I missed the significance of half the stuff that flashed onscreen. The nods, the tapping fingers, the obsessive use of morse code. But rather than alienate the viewer, Infernal Affairs becomes incredibly compelling, because this confusion seems to mimic the confusion the characters themselves--who have had to essentially kill their real identities--must feel, constantly serving two masters.

All of this makes Infernal Affairs one of the best and most faithfully executed Hong Kong thrillers I've seen, taking convention to such a dizzying extreme that it somehow becomes fresh again.

Then finally, when one man emerges triumphant over the other, the ending is bittersweet. Both of these individuals had been treading the path of redemption, only to find those paths intersecting in the deadliest possible way. Also bittersweet is the denouement, in which those moronic female characters are trotted back out to weep and gnash their teeth lest we forget that this fallen hero was also some kind of super-virile God-man.

The last note strikes sour, but that's the fundamental tension of a story that borrows this heavily from the genre that inspired it. A step in either direction is the difference between being a masterpiece or a complete failure.

Infernal Affairs is rated R but has very little actual violence and no profanity or sex. On several occasions, though, Szechwan noodles are flung disrespectfully.

Another blog on science and morality

2005-05-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I was challenged by [or I challenged, I can't remember] the Sandpoint Reader's conservative op/ed columnist to a duel over intelligent design. A battle for hearts and minds. He's no slouch. His father aparently having invented televangelism, he's no doubt accustomed to reconciling irreconcilable things [the Christian call to charity and the millions of dollars swindled annually from TV audiences to continue God's ministry--in Bentleys, wearing fur coats]. I haven't read his half yet, but here's mine. Once the new issue is online, which might be months, I'll pass the link along. If you visit this blog with any consistency, you've read modified versions of this countless times. This time, though, I come strapped with quotes! Without further ado . . .

Evolutionists have refused to take part in the intelligent design hearings in Kansas. It's beneath them, they say. ID is just creationism in a more inclusive blanket. Current Intelligent Design proponents, though, say it's unfair to lump them in with the quaint ideas of creation science. Their conclusions are based in observation, not dogma. Indeed their conception of life's origin is so pure that they are able to even see through the near religious zealotry of the Darwinists. They are the hip new kid on Science Street. They've come to shake things up. Except Intelligent Design isn't new, and their underlying goals probably aren't even science.

The Discovery Institute is a major ID think tank based out of Seattle. They have published a five year plan called the "Wedge Strategy" aimed at igniting their "natural constituency . . . Christians" against what they called the morally destructive power of scientific materialism [a broad term under which evolution sits].

But is it good science to question a theory's moral implications?

Science is, by nature, descriptive, not proscriptive. Science attempts to explain what is, not what ought to be. The question of how we ought to live is the business of philosophers and theologians. Put differently, the moment a scientist turns away from a theory because he worries the ideas will lead to immorality or worries that the ideas are somehow dangerous, he ceases to be a scientist.

Which is fine, the world needs people to discuss ethics and morality, to contemplate the way people ought to act toward each other and toward their world.

But we don't call these people scientists.

And if their primary interest is "[t]o defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies," Intelligent Design theorists are most certainly not doing science.

Those, like William Dembski, who seem to truly want to prove ID is science [and who rightly see the wedge strategy as a hindrance] nevertheless fail to realize that their work is meaningless. It may ultimately be considered science, but only in the way students dropping different sized fruits off buildings to gauge gravity is science.

ID breaks no new ground, it offers no new insights. They take existing data, draw a contrary conclusion, and stop because that's all the farther their conclusion can possibly lead. God did it, end of story.

"Kansas wants your child to get a crappy job."

That was the title of my first draft. I wrote it to be funny, but it's essentially true. These Kansans, they want your child to go to heaven, but down the path they propose, a crappy job is likely to be the best earthly reward available. Intelligent design teaches children who have been brought up believing in something greater than themselves that the God they trust rewards and encourages ignorance.

Intelligent Design suggests that, whenever there is a puzzle that's too tough to crack, we should assert that God made it so, and all the pieces fall into place. Do that and we'll go to heaven. Whenever the words of an ancient people, translated hundreds of times over thousands of years, do not match up with what we see before us, right now, today, Intelligent Design teaches us to shut our eyes and follow blindly. Do that and we'll go to heaven. If something seems unlikely, it is a miracle. Inquire no further, we'll leave this wretched, over-populated, disease-infested earth behind. We'll go to heaven.

But I don't believe that blind obedience is the same as faith. Neither Abraham nor Job nor even Jesus carried their burdens lightly. They questioned their God. They sought answers. Why, then, should we think God now wants us to bury our heads in the sand? The most absurd thing about Intelligent Design is that it broadly asserts life was created perfectly, yet asks us to ignore our most perfect and valuable possession, our big human brains. ID posits that God gave us a glorious intellect, but doesn't want us to use it. That is more than paradoxical, it's moronic.

The debate fundamentally boils down to chance, a roll of the dice in a history so remote that we cannot even fathom it. Yes, the chance of certain organic compounds lining up to form certain replicating amino acids is a tough bet, but billions of years is a long time to get lucky. Neither Evolutionary biologists nor Intelligent Design theorists know what happened that day, but they draw their conclusions from the same set of data. Given long odds, creationists and intelligent design theorists like to point to the glorious unknowable omnipotent force of God and say that's all the answer you need. Look no further children. They then hang up their quill and inks and go back to comparing Genesis to Aristotle's Physics while starvation and disease create untold agony in billions of people. They say God made us perfectly and that disease is just decay. But if it's just decay, how do we stop it? What medicines exist to stop decay? None yet. Will there ever be such a drug? With a research program built on the principles of ID, I can't imagine how. Unless God hands it from on high.

Evolutionists, though, take God at his word.

Believing Him when He said He was unknowable, they focus on what can be known. Over the last two hundred years, as what we know has increased, the facts suggest more and more that evolution is the most correct theory we have. As we learn more, the theory expands and contracts to become more correct still. Along the way, we come to better understand ourselves, we cure diseases, solve problems and even, you know, get good jobs.

Aristotle lived 400 years before Christ. If we trace the legacy of Intelligent Design back through creationism, back through Saint Thomas Aquinas' cosmological argument we end up eventually at Aristotle. Design theories have been around for almost 2500 years, Evolution has been around for less than 200. In a tenth of the time, evolutionary theorists have told us more about our organic world and its composition and inner workings than design arguments have ever been able to. That is why the vast majority of scientists who also have deep and abiding faiths [Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, whatever] are Evolutionists, not Intelligent Design theorists. Evolution explains things better, it solves more problems, it helps more people, it makes the world a better place. It eases pain. What could be more moral?

My grandmother would really like this

2005-05-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

A Very Long Engagement

At some point in the history of things, certain stereotypes became so pervasive that they turned into facts. Women crave romance is one of these facts. Men, in the collective consciousness, can take it or leave it, mostly in hot 5 minute intervals. Women, though, need it. At least, that's what my mom tells me.

It's a pretty good rule of thumb, but I'd like to add a little something to it. Women, as a function of how satisfied they are with their lives, often also take their romance with a dollop of gut-wrenching tragedy. I'll simplify that: the extent to which your mom feels underutilized and underappreciated equals the extent to which she craves her romance novels to end in a murder-suicide.

It should be said that I'm not a woman, but I've had time to study two such subjects very carefully. My mother and grandmother. I've spent far more time with them than with any two humans on this earth [insert emasculation jab here, you earned it]. My mother has always seemed incredibly happy with her life. She has a fulfilling job, a warm home, a doting husband, two offspring that haven't embarrassed her lately and a small dog she treats like a human infant. She buys it clothing and gave it our last name.

She likes her romance cheery and light with splashes of open-mouth-kissing. Ideally, difficulties, white lies and misunderstandings neatly wrap themselves up with an apology by the love interest ["I didn't know she was your sister"] in under 90 minutes. The strong young lady forgives all, eager to move on and start a strong young life with the clumsy dolt she loves despite herself. Curtain. The credits roll against a wedding montage. Faces streaked with cake. Grandfathers dancing with flower girls. Often, Adam Sandler or Jennifer Lopez is involved. Mother calls these things "chick flicks".

My Grandmother, though, takes her romance a little darker. When I was young, this meant I had to turn Nickelodeon off so she could watch the dumb and likeable heroines of soap operas die horrible deaths at the hands of their twin sisters, separated at birth, disfigured by acid, taken out by the tide, left for dead, back for revenge. She'd comment on the tragedy with a devious glint in her eye. She now forgoes the romance altogether and just listens to the police scanner she got for Christmas. Grandmother calls these things "my programs".

I don't know why Mom likes to bask in people's happiness while Grandma likes to see that same joy shredded like an animal carcass. It could be that in the late 50's an unplanned night of hormonal surges, a culture of inadequate sex education and endless rounds of couples skate at Pattison's Rollercade left her a housewife instead of a high-powered trial lawyer. That's my hunch, I can't confirm it.

Fact is, though: grandma likes to see people suffer, and if she didn't hate the French so much, I'd have her watch A Very Long Engagement.

It's a two and a half hour gauntlet of human suffering, incorporating all the plot elements popularized in soap operas: mistaken identity, self-mutilation, botched executions, amnesia, everything. Audrey Tautou plays Mathilde, who lost her fiancé in World War I but was never able to let him go. Manech shot himself to avoid rejoining the front lines and was supposedly court-martialed and sentenced to death. Rather than face the firing squad, his superiors order him thrown out into the no-man's-land between the French and German trenches, where starvation would take him if stray bullets did not. This reality is doubly difficult for Mathilde. Not only is her fiancé considered a coward and a traitor, but she has no body and no grave, nowhere to morn him. More importantly, though, she has no proof he's even dead.

A Very Long Engagement is Mathilde's journey to retrace Manech's steps, with all the flashbacks and battlefield reenactments that entails. It's brutal, and she seems kind of crazy, or at least simple. No way could Manech have survived. We've heard the tales, seen the footage, the piles of bodies, the hip deep death. Despite it all, and because of love, Mathilde perseveres. Or something.

Eventually, finally--mercifully--Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet [Amelie, City of Lost Children] coaxes an ending that is both happy and sad while being neither sappy nor bittersweet. It is what it is, for better or worse. Like life.

For that reason I'd also suggest my mom watch A Very Long Engagement, because at the very least it's better than Monster-In-Law and 50 First Dates. And there are moments of real and devastating emotion.

Best of all, it's so tragic that Grandma might not notice that it's also sentimental. Conversely, it's so mushy that Mom might not mind how disturbing it is. Movies are what we make of them, and Jeunet's brilliance is that he allows us to make his movies into whatever we want them to be.

So play nice you two, watch your movie.

Then, if Grandma wants another two plus hours of impotent weeping and anguish--this time with no hope of redemption--I'll tell her to go watch Revenge of the Sith with someone who doesn't own a Storm Trooper uniform.

Sometimes drugs > no drugs

2005-05-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

Imagine you want to end 80% of the world's opium production, and you could actually probably do it. See, you're essentially the only military presence in the area, and you're highly technologically advanced compared to the drug runners. You could probably take them all out with defoliating raids and be done with the destructive and destabilizing element of opium forever.

Sounds good, but Slate suggests that ending opium in one fell swoop would be more destabilizing than leaving it.

See, in a country that produces 80% of the world's opium, that crop amounts to roughly 50% of the country's gross domestic product, and to destroy 50% of an already poor country's national income would be infinitely more disastrous than the money drug lords funnel into local militias. Or so says Barnett Rubin, "an irascible NYU Afghan expert".

It must ire the hell out of drug hawks, but even the military seems to believe this is the way to go. It's a sad reality, but if we destroy Afghanistan's #1 industry without having another to make up the difference, the destabilization we see in drug kingpins and corrupt local militias will pale in comparison to the destabilizing factors of poverty, famine.

And whereas this current destabilizing influence is kind of diffuse and self-serving, just enough to keep the drug lords in power and profitable, the rage of a destroyed cash crop with nothing to fill the void would be concentrated directly at one thing, the people that destroyed it.

You know, us.

The Afghan people seem pretty happy with us at the moment [despite the Newsweek riots; relative to other nations we're building; relative to the sentiments of other predominantly Muslim nations] why screw with relative calm?

Et tu, iTunes?

2005-05-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

Seen that cute little commercial for the cute little iPod Shuffle? Heard the cute poppy little number all those silhouettes groove and shuck and jive to? That's The Caesars.

The song is called Jerk it Out. It was released in 2003 on a compilation album called "39 Minutes of Bliss".

No one heard it because The Caesars are a shamelessly derivative band that hasn't made it much farther than their native Sweden.

I heard they played Northern Ireland once but, halfway through the set, the IRA chased them back to Stockholm or wherever. Thankfully The Caesars are good swimmers.

Now, with the help of Apple, their fourth album is poised to circumvent the UK media gauntlet altogether and penetrate deep into the American heartland the way Jerk it Out has already penetrated our collective consciousness. From this position, The Caesars are set to rob our brand-loyal youth of their [vitamin D fortified] milk money. If young Frederick gets rickets, send Steve Jobs the bill.

I think, though, that we still have time to head off this scenario.

So tell your friends and children to watch out for The Caesars' new album "Paper Tigers". Each of the 13 songs [including a shameless re-release of Jerk it Out] are an indistinguishable succession of clap-tracked, surf-rocking, brit-popping, cliché-over-utilizing, bile-surging, distorto-voiced Oasis impersonations.

Sweden has never seemed more sinister.

More cross-promotional proof that Apple doesn't care about you. Thank God I do.

This is important

2005-05-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

For those of you who live in the following cities, get out your credit/check/debit cards:

Via Pitchfork
05-10 Vancouver, Canada - Commodore Ballroom *
05-11 Seattle, WA - Showbox *
05-13 San Francisco, CA - The Independent *
05-14 San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore *
05-15 Los Angeles, CA - El Rey *
05-19 Chicago, IL - Metro *
05-20 Detroit, MI - St. Andrews *
05-21 Toronto, Canada - Opera House *
05-22 Montreal, Canada - Le Tulipe *
06-09 Boston, MA - Avalon *

These are select dates for LCD Soundsystem's tour. They're good. The asterisks mean the show will include the ultra-sexy Sri Lankan revolucionista M.I.A. Speaking as a human who never wastes an opportunity to mock the repetition and contrivances of dance music: she's great.

This deserved a full post.

Coming down the mountain

2005-05-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

A Rock and Roll Invervention
Look: there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about. I'm worried about us. It's okay, we're all friends here. Hip friends. And like hip friends, we like hip, contemplative music.

Freak-folk, folktronica, post-folk. Whatever. We like hip, accessible music. Brit-pop, new-wave, neo-wave, no-wave. Whatever.

We like genres.

We like to put music into little bins like the bins mean something and then draw conclusions as though square-pegging a sound or a movement adds something to it. It's almost like making music ourselves. It's not enough anymore to be consumers, we also have to be critics. All of us.

We like to be hip by association. Or rather, in as much as we, the consumer, are responsible for our buying trends, we create hip. We are the pop King Makers. We. Our web logs. King Makers.

But this is exhausting, and sometimes we just want to rock a little. Sure we do. Come on. We're all friends here.

It's hard to decide what's going to be the new thing all the time. All that buying. It's hard to decide who lives and dies. Every once in a while we want to put down that pissy, moany pop and that glitchy, schizophrenic hip hop and just rock our faces off. Without cynicism or commentary or psychoanalysis. Uno, dos, tres, catorce. Like that.

Sometimes we want to bang around, thrash, not caring what number comes after tres. Like Bono. But he's a little wiener, so not like him. Like other people who rocked and didn't care. Old people. They knew how to rock.

Sometimes it's good to rock like our parents rocked. Like their parents rocked. To Lynyrd Skynyrd and Chuck Berry. Sometimes we need to.

We need to rock like music means something beyond the categories we place around it. We need to rock without constraints or distinctions. Holistically. Wholeheartedly. We need to rock like Buddha would have. Rock like Foghat did.

Sometimes it's good to get in a massive-ass truck with a lift kit and speakers mounted in the wheel wells and spin brodies on our neighbors’ lawns. That narc's lawn who busted up the keg on state land.

Back in the hills there. After the big game. Just before graduation.

Come on, it's okay. We're all friends here. Every once in a while we want to rock like we don't know any better. Own it. It's alright.

Do you feel better? Let it out.

We want to rock, yes. God, yes. But we've forgotten how. We've lost our way. We tried to double back, through lo-fi and delta blues. We even started listening to Tool again, but it was no good. We couldn't find our way. But it's okay. It'll be fine.

Black Mountain is here.

They'd like to show us how to rock again.

Bigot mayor not "gay", merely has "relations" with "men"

2005-05-05T22:45:00.000-07:00

Spokane Mayor Jim West, a 20 year veteran in the war against gay rights, admitted to making sex with male humans on Thursday.

Still, he said, "I wouldn't characterize me as 'gay.'"

There are larger allegations of molestation which he has, of course, denied. He also apparently trolled Gay.com soliciting man-friends with the promise of signed sports memorabilia. While there, West offered internships to the man [undercover investigator] he was courting.

I won't bore you with the tawdry details but will point out with some satisfaction the immense hypocrisy and self-loathing of this wretched and pitiable human being. I wonder if West agreed with most of president Bush's supporters when they said the most important thing ithe last election were, "moral issues."

Moral issues evidently not being the same as morals. Or ethics.

The story is national:
New York Times
USA Today

But the best headline award goes to Editor & Publisher, for the following:

After 3-Year Probe, Spokane Paper Alleges Sex Abuse by Mayor

The longest, hottest probe ever, to be sure.

UPDATE [11:11]: One of his Gay.com screennames, Cobra62nd, has the following profile [yes I registered at Gay.com to get this info]:

Sexuality
Bisexual
I'm looking for

Men

Interested in
. . . I am a really typical str8 acting/looking guy that just happens to be attracted to the same.

How "Out" are you?
Not out at all yet

West might want to update that last one. Other than that it's just about as boring a profile as you'd expect from a gay republican politician.

Uneasy Education

2005-05-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

Pedro Almodóvar is a grave robber. Stalking the scorched, neglected earth at society's fringes, his pace is easy, assured. He's been at this a while; he knows what to look for. Turning the soil, he plumbs down past the debris flung aside by polite society to glimpse what lies beneath. Just under the drug addiction, the fetishism, the gender crises – the tawdry desolation – he finds shards of humanity so bright and tenderly polished that they reflect back at us images of ourselves.

Except we're, you know, in drag with a needle stuck in our arm.

His latest film, “Bad Education”, is a disturbing and frank exploration of victimization and obliterated innocence. The narration isn't linear, but the film can be broken into three historically distinct sections. The first centers on the destructive forces of abuse and molestation. Two boys, Ignacio and Enrique, have their adolescent journeys of self-discovery stopped short by the most powerful figure in their life: the priest who runs the boarding school they attend. As the only father figure, spiritual or otherwise, in the whole movie, Father Manolo should be the ground upon which the boys grow into men. Instead he exploits them and leaves them wandering and broken, unsure of who they are.

Some sixteen years later, wearing lipstick and a skirt, Ignacio still hasn't figured that out. He is a writer now, or so he says, as he stumbles unannounced into Enrique's production company. He wants Enrique to make the story he has written about them into a movie.

The middle section, between childhood and their reunion, is the focus of that story. Enrique is unsure at first, but after reading it through, decides eventually that the story needs telling. The details soon come into dispute, though, and as Enrique looks deeper into Ignacio's past, it's unclear exactly whose story he's been telling.

The narrative and direction are cunning and complimentary. As Almodóvar folds in pieces of Ignacio's story and Enrique's movie, reality and fantasy become a vivid tapestry of delusion and coercion, expectation and desperation, hope and loss. After a while, it becomes hard to tell truth from fiction in the stories upon stories, but it's never tough to spot what's real. Almodóvar works it into every steeled gaze, every set jaw, every furtive glance, every posture and every pose. In his world, no one is innocent, no one is brave. Each character, in his own way, is a coward and an opportunist, relying heavily on past martyrdom to wash away present sins.

The redemption narratives these men spin for themselves are as twisted as the priest who set them on their paths, and Almodóvar suggests an institution that insists we will have salvation if we remain obedient has more wrong with it than a few pedophiles. For these men at least, there will be no happy ending.

The journey, though, might prove cathartic.

Even if his stories were linear and his direction flat, Almodóvar would be important because he forces the audience to admit the humanity and history of people we see every day and turn away from. There is no respite for those two hours. These oddities, these stage decorations from the periphery of our lives, become people. Like us they are tired, soul-hungry, beautiful, strange and despicable. Their selfishness and self-destructiveness are horrifying for the frankness of depiction and because we know how they feel.

“La Mala Educación” is on DVD now after getting nowhere near a Sandpoint or Spokane theater – it probably played nowhere between Seattle and Minneapolis. It might have hit Boise, those magnificent bastards. That's okay, though, we don't need their theaters. We are patient and technology is the great equalizer.

Rent “Bad Education”, along with any other Almodóvar film you haven't seen, and get a good look at yourself.

God plus Hutch is enough

2005-05-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

TGtSDSaaMCC [Thank God the seven deadly sins are a medieval Catholic construct] or the Reverend Doctor Ken Hutcherson might be dead.

The noted ecclesiastical fag-basher [wrath] and megachurch [greed?] bully pulpit claims that he alone [pride] steered Microsoft from supporting a gay rights bill before the Washington State legislature. The company, who had supported the measure the last two years and was generally regarded one of the most gay-friendly companies to work for, took a "neutral" stance.

Microsoft said he had nothing to do with the change. Hutch calls that a "flat out lie" and proclaims "God plus Hutch is enough."

Also, comparing the fight for gay rights to the fight for rights by all other people/sexes/creeds/whatever really makes him mad:

"You tell me what I went through as an African-American, when they talk about discrimination, compared to what gays go through with discrimination - it's the difference between night and day, not even close," Dr. Hutcherson said. "I even get upset when people say, 'Well, you got to understand what they go through.' Not when they've chosen to do what they do. They can stop choosing what to do what they do, and they can hide it anytime they want. They can hide their homosexuality. Could I take a 'don't ask don't tell' policy as an African-American?"

Yes. They called it 'passing', lots of people did it. There is even some evidence [perhaps planted by Satan or the pope--or both--like dinosaur fossils] that gay people have not chosen this life.

He also looks to weigh about 300 pounds [sloth? gluttony?].

Thankfully, to some in the new [old] American Christian Right, arrogance, pride, conspicuous consumption, blind hatred, war-mongering jingoism, etc are virtues, not vices.

Hopefully the progressive Christian ground swell that people like the Reverend Jim Wallis are championing comes. Soon.

Tangentially--in a nod to abstinence-plus--I never, ever, condone bumper stickers, but if you're going to do it anyway, do it right.

Tepid fuss: The Killers in concert

2005-04-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

The Killers were impressive. In that they left an impression. I hope it was the one they intended.

Failed vision and children
My vision was skewed, as it happens. The hipsters stayed home, quietly hating themselves. The top 40 set came, but not the right ones. This concert belonged to the kids, aged 8 to 15. Throngs of them. Entire classrooms/daycare centers paired off and followed dutifully behind wild-eyed adults. The grownups looked tired and thankful for the buddy system.

Before the show started I had to spend ten minutes or so defending my Bright Eyes review, again. I'm getting good at it. Compromise is the key. That was up in the all ages section with its free ice water and soft drinks. The bartenders looked like they wanted to isolate a few of the preteens and shake them down for their milk money to make up for the lost tips.

Chris DeCleur, Publisher of the Sandpoint Reader; Josh Hedlund, singer-songwriter, and I went downstairs for adult drinks and a better view. That's when the party started. We'd been trying to talk to the eight year olds, but they really couldn't keep up intellectually. Chris was discussing the vagaries of the newspaper trade while I quietly scolded a girl in pig tails for not knowing the square root of 81. Josh interrupted a game of Yu Gi Oh to ask a diminutive Asian child if he'd ever known real heartache. He hadn't.

The grownup floor was more our speed. The opening band began their set just after we got our drinks. Tegan and Sara. Their sound was compelling and their lyricism earnest, and it was fun to watch the two girls bob around onstage, trade guitars and lead vocal duties, then try and guess which is Tegan and which is Sara. They never tell. They introduced their band, told us where they were from [drummer from Castlegar, parents in the audience], but left their own identities uncertain.

Chris figured the girl on the right was Tegan because she seemed more comfortable onstage, and that would naturally lead to her getting first billing. I thought it was the girl on the left, because she had hipper bangs. Later, as we left, Tegan and Sara were working their t-shirt booth. Chris and I almost went up and asked them, but the line was long and some questions are best left unanswered.

As we played this game, a woman mistook our glee for mockery.

Woman of indeterminate age: You don't like them?
Chris: No, I do.
Me: Yeah, I like them.
WoIA: [faintly slurring] They remind me of a band I listened to when I was younger.
C: Pat Benatar?

Good thing she'd had a few grownup drinks.

Halfway through their set, Teigen and Sara slowed it down a little bit, playing back to back songs which would have, in a simpler time, been called ballads.

The youth of Spokane began to pogo. Then mosh. Then crowd surf.

"That's never happened before," said either Tegan or Sara.

Tegan's [or Sara's] voice has a pretty unique affectation. Like Eartha Kitt and Minnie Mouse. Maybe a little Billy Joel at times. Coquettish and soulful, but with pomp and an odd upturn. Chris said it sounded like the Cure, but not British, or male.

I'll leave it to the reader to choose the more evocative.

Tore Up
Between sets Chris and I marveled some more at the preteens. Josh returned to dwell among them. Someone poked the guy next to me, who had mockingly head-banged his way through the Tegan and Sara set. They knew each other, kind of. Well enough to know they drank at the same bar in Pullman, but not well enough to know each other's major. Filled with energy [verve?], his was broadcast journalism. His hair was a post-modern take on David Schwimmer's. Moments later another person walked up. If the first guy was an anchor, this had to be his producer.

Anchorman: What's up you slut. I'm trashed!
The Producer: This band, playing--on CD--these guys are called British Sea Power.
A: God I'm f__ked up--f__ked the f__k up!
P: They're great aren't they? They're in the studio--
A: Aaaaooooo
P: --it's just, no one plays them because no one knows them.
A: Tight.
P: Yeah, tight, I love--
A: Tight, I'm hammered! Aaaaooooo!
P: Anyway, if you like them they're called British Sea Power.

Anchorman was a ball of energy, The Killers' entire set was a never ending succession of fist pumps, devil horns and vehemence. He used his entire body. My position behind him was such that he'd tag my junk on the backswing and clip my face on the follow through. To my companions, from the balcony, it might have looked like I was dancing. I was avoiding the devil horns. Anchorman responded to every statement by adding a degree of intensity to whatever adjective had just been used.

P: That's such a good song.
A: GREAT!

P: These guys are great.
A: AWESOME!

P: I'm pretty buzzed.
A: TORE THE F__K UP! Aaaaooooo!

Everytime he howled, he looked back at me to see if I was feeling him.

The rest of the crowd joined Anchorman and the Woman of Indeterminate Age in rapturous ecstasy throughout The Killers set. The object of their considerable affection, though, was unequal to it.

Skin, bone, guts, hearts
There is little doubt that The Killers are a technically accomplished band, but there are lots of tight ensembles that are never able to transcend being accomplished musicians to become something approaching artists. The encore was a microcosm of their set--of their entire sound. The first song, unreleased in the US, was "Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll", wherein Flowers mocks the sincerity of acts like Pedro the Lion and Postal Service [and Tegan and Sara for that matter] as childish. Rather than distance themselves from love songs, though, The Killers choose to revel in the sentimentality they mock, hemorrhaging sarcasm and disingenuousness with every song.

Flowers has figured out quite a few charades-like movements to mirror his lyrics. This is designed to make him seem cute and knowing. Josh said he was prancing around like Mick Jagger's understudy, stalking around and gesticulating. He seemed more practiced to me, like Billy Joe Armstrong lampooning Dean Martin. A snide post-punk crooner. Two video screens on each side added to this effect, framing the plaid-sport-coated Flowers in washed out monochrome, a la Ed Sullivan.

Despite understanding the irony that most indie bands all sound the same, every Killers song is just that, a generic mix of arena-ized Britpop and new wave synth [Meaning Brandon Flowers occasionally plays a keyboard].

Put differently: The Killers drink from the pot they piss in.

The final song was worse, because it began with a hint of saccharine honesty, "This song is about skin. This song is about bone. This song is about guts. This song is about heart."

It seemed like too much to ask that they'd add a dash of sincerity to the end of their set. Perhaps hoping to walk away with a good impression, I kinda ignored the lyrics until the coda, "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier." Maddening.

The crowd surfing continued as people pulled out their lighters and struck them. Many of the field trip chaperones had brought enough for their kids. As Flowers sang, "I got soul, but I'm not a soulja," drowning us in irony, everyone was enraptured, thankful for this postmodern deluge--this fake-schmaltz baptism--perhaps failing to realize that The Killers openly mock exactly the devotion they elicit.

I think we deserved better.

Being and Rhyme

2005-04-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Books : Lost and Safe
Since being death-marched through Victorian literature – the poems of the Brownings, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, et al coming one after another, endlessly, like footsteps composing a lit student's Trail of Tears – I've been on holiday from proper poetry. I've gradually forgotten how much depends on a red wheel barrow and for whom the caged bird sings. In the place of such ephemera I now concern myself with how to dismantle atomic bombs, among other things.

Most often, when I choose to think about it, I like that pop and indie rock are able to convey most of the ideas and emotions of traditional poetic forms without needing a dictionary, a Bible, a slide-rule and a copy of Aesop to understand what the hell is going on.

What I miss is the sense of historical context poetry often brings, as well as the meditation and variations on classical forms. I miss the layers of meaning.

When something manages to bridge that chasm, to be both contemporary and historically-minded, both allusive and accessible, the effect is jarring. Also a little frustrating. I wonder why everything can't be like this thing here, whatever it is.

Listening to The Books creates that effect.

Their latest album, Lost and Safe is lots of things at once. Found sounds intermingle with banjos, industrial percussion, Nick Zammuto's half-spoken lyrics, big ideas, nonsense poetry, indecisive found soliloquies, and enough staccato mandolin to force Captain Corelli's unconditional surrender.

[When I can't properly describe something, I make lists. And jokes.]

The paradox being that the dissonance somehow seems to create harmony. Each track is viscerally magnetic and still earnestly contemplative.

[Somehow. Whatever that means. Maybe I should try to say something knowing and profound about the process itself]

Found voices and sounds are usually a tough sell. Above the technical difficulty of making the voice of a parliamentarian mesh with the clanking of dishes and the broadcast of an all-points-bulletin, the artist assumes the added difficulty of not looking like a self-indulgent prick.

On Lost and Safe, The Books manage to explore their environment and contemplate the art of sound without being narcissistic or masturbatory.

[Somehow. I guess. Maybe this will be easier if I go track by track].

The album is worth buying just for “Vogt Dig for Kloppervok”, which sounds wet like a rain shower and rearranges lines from Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky (which feels damp itself) to create a thoughtful meditation on aggression.

On “Be Good to Them Always”, Zammuto's moan comes in alone initially before sublimating quietly beneath found voices, turning declarative statements about hardship into plaintive cries. Mimicry.

The glitchy beats pound out irregularly, like the clop of cavalry, but not boldly riding or well; rather, with uncertainty and trepidation.

Zammuto's voice slowly drowns out as the tone turns increasingly psychoanalytical and condemnatory, before a found voice returns to the same statement Zammuto made initially:

"You know, I simply cannot understand people / Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our imagination."

The same words, in a different context, at the beginning and end respectively, have vastly different meanings. The voices are now barely audible over the march, as though we as humans can speak to our symptoms, but are blind to the underlying disease. And before we can identify it, life has already moved on. This feeling of obscured vision--of partial sight and missed opportunities--resurfaces throughout Lost and Safe.

“Smells Like Content" broods over another pervasive motif, The Books' seeming dissatisfaction with modernity and the answers it offers. There are no found voices until the last twenty seconds, but swells with rolling guitar; a simple, grungy percussion loop and Zammuto's vaguely existential ruminations.

"Most of all, the world was a place where reports of holes were described / within an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy / the context of which makes possible an underlying sense of the way it all fits together / despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such."

Zammuto then contradicts himself with an identical rhyme scheme. And then again. Once the found voice returns, its affected knowledge is unconvincing even to itself:

"Expectation leads to disappointment / If you don't expect something big, huge and exciting / usually, um I don't know it's just not as . . ."

The voice trails off.

In the context The Books have created, conventional wisdom seems as ineffectual as nihilism. Traditional authority is meaningless and the individual is unable to make up the gap.

[Somehow. Whatever that means].

If any of this sounds at all intriguing, Lost and Safe is probably the best place to start investigating The Books' sound. Of their three albums, it relies least on found sounds and voices, weaving what samples there are into careful balance with singer Nick Zammuto's voice.

It's storytelling by committee and of all the found voices on the album, perhaps the most important is the listener's. The result is immediately accessible and listenable, but as successive plays reveal new layers and details, it becomes more unsettling, perhaps as we realize that The Books have left one part of the composition for us to fill in ourselves.

On Lost and Safe, The Books poke at big ideas, but offer no theses. They seem content to leave those to us. Dispassionate analysis is always easier than contemplation and self-reflection. Maybe that's why Lost and Safe has been so tough to review. Any critique of Lost and Safe reflects back on the listener. That's an uncomfortable spot, but it's probably why I find myself replaying it compulsively.

[Alright, that wasn't bad, now just tie it back in]

Most days the line delineating pop from literary poetry – contemporary and throughout time – seems sharp and exact. Then, some days, I hear a band like The Books and suddenly I'm no longer sure. Those days feel important.

[A slightly more self-loathing version will appear in this week's Reader]

No longer telling us how to live

2005-04-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

This is a sad day. Not only is my favorite mad cap rock star cum Green Party pacifist no longer blogging:

Due to the 3 1/2 hour daily commute to my new job, RATYHTL will be shutting down indefinitely.

In the meantime, please DO NOT clutter up either my inbox or my voicemail with messages.

But aparently I could have called him up and talked to him . . . until now. Damn.

Perhaps a more tragic loss for the world at large, though, is being denied Rodney's gift for de-rose-colored-glass-ifying history's facade of austerity.

This week alone he posted three brilliant portraits of Popes the Holy See would rather forget:

Fabulae Pontificalis (Today's episode: Does this miter make my ass look fat?)

Fabulae Pontificalis (Today's episode:I was a teenaged Pontiff)

Fabulae Pontificalis (Today's episode: Pope 9 From Outer Space)

Prior to that flurry, he had recently

Created a flawless overlay of the shroud of Turin on Terri Schiavo's CAT scan
Speculated that newly dead Andrea Dworkin "will be buried with an apple stuck in her mouth"
Demanded a Black pope, if for no other reason than to document the reaction of his [racist] Irish and Italian neighbors
Written a perfect synopsis of Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or [either life is full of torment, or the afterlife will be]
Invoked Ward Churchill as proof that

today's college students are a bunch of pussies. [And that] many collage administrators are out of their fucking skulls.

Given this free piece of advice:

"Electra is pissed."

"Well she did sleep with her father…"

A bit of free advice, if you'll allow me: NEVER make an obscure
mythological reference to someone who is angry at you. They will NOT find
it endearing.

And written this:

where is the ire that non-fire and brimstone Christians should have for the "God Hates Fags" branch of the Jesus worshiping family? If you Peace and Love Christians would reign in your outhouse dwelling, Bible thumping, Fag hating bretheren, I could go back to writing about the Ancient World.

Among other funny things.

Hopefully he finds himself a new job soon. Until then, here are some of his photoshops:

Frist's gonna have mah legs broke

2005-04-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

In two separate Slate articles--one advocating to keep the filibuster and another explaining various stalling tactics employable by the minority to throw a wrench in majority steam rolling in the event that a democratic filibuster is deemed unconstitutional by [uh oh] Dick Cheney--we get a good look at how uncivilized and combative our legislative process is.

Holy shit I don't know why I used the word uncivilized. More like divisive . . . which is a synonym of combative . . . damn.

It's trench warfare and there's always tons of the collateral damage of real change suffered for the sake of politicking, always with the justification that if enough effective politicking is done, the party you like will eventually have the power to affect real change.

So where is the real change?

Wouldn't it be better if, instead of two parties slogging it out, the majority imposing upon the minority and the minority scrapping to deflect those plans with guerilla parliamentary procedure, we found a way to include more [ideological] diversity in our lawmaking body. That would, hopefully stimulate the gradual move toward a representative government that truly represents its constituency [I'm arguing here for stronger hardline parties, strangely enough] and a legislature whose makeup is less likely to include a true majority for any one party.

Even if conservatives, as it were, in their many parties, still comprised a majority, they would be forced, if they hoped to accomplish anything, to create coalitions a la European parliaments. Having to parley and appease the hardline parties in lawmaking would do two things, force real dialogue between members of a specific ideology [conservatism lets say, broad a category as that is]. This would lead to concessions for minority groups in exchange for vital votes and also give members of the ruling party pause [is our bill worth these concessions? Do these concessions destroy the bill's intent?].

It even allows, given sufficient support, for the sidestepping of the ruling party altogether. Though this is probably rare given that the ruling parties are usually fairly moderate and would thus require lions laying down with lambs, it could nonetheless serve as a vital check on a particularly abusive hegemony.

That seems so much better than the polarized quagmire we have now.

But the one thing the dominant parties in America do agree on is that they should remain dominant. With that kind of concord, the filibuster is absolutely necessary.

Zero-th trimester abortions

2005-04-19T20:25:00.000-07:00

If anyone could please answer any of the following questions, I'd be much obliged:

Why is this morning after pill raising such a ruckus?
Is it fundamentally different than the older, daily Ortho-whathaveyous?
Are there really even that many pharmacists denying women the drug?
Does this seem to anyone else like another pointless "moral" touchstone like poor, vegetative Terri?

Argh, I was going to use these questions to rouse you to action but I just got curious and figured out number 2 myself.

The morning after pill works on the same principle as the daily pill. Essentially it messes with the levels of progestin [and also sometimes estrogen] in a woman's body, effectively preventing conception from occuring.

Given that, the only conceivable reason I can imagine for the current moral impetus against this drug--which has existed for years, and was actually recommended for over the counter sale in 2003--can only be that a perception exists that taking it after intercourse means you are also taking it after conception, effectively aborting the 4 cells that would become a human child. Another reason being the current hegemony of faith-based legislators.

I can sympathize with pharmacists not wanting to be connected in any way to abortion. Many people are uncomfortable with abortion. The subsection of doctors and even OB/GYNs who perform abortions is small, and these doctors can certainly decide for themselves if they want to conduct those procedures. I am certain there are physicians who are pro-choice in principle, and still can't bring themselves to orchestrate the procedure.

But allow me to direct the medically-trained, morally-outraged pharmacists to teenwire.com. There they will find a question by caezeriv. He/she asks: "How long does it take for the sperm to get to the egg in a woman?" Teenwire's answer: "It can take up to six days after intercourse for sperm and egg to join and form a fertilized egg. Usually, it's because the sperm gets into the fallopian tube before the egg is released." So concievably, the drug could be prescribed as the Five Mornings After pill and you'd still have a comfortable window to avoid being accomplice to a Zero-th term abortion.

It is further vital to note that the morning after pill is ineffective once the egg has seated itself in the uterine lining and pregnancy, in a technical sense, has begun.

That is to say: the morning after pill is obviously not an abortion pill.

But the argument upon which the moral objection rests will probably not be what ultimately decides if pharmacists are required to prescribe the pill. The final judgement might not have anything to do with morality at all.

Senator Frank Watson of Illinois is a pharmacist by trade. He believes forcing pharmacists to sell the pill is "an infringement on a business decision."

This is the opaque realm of State regulation, herein free-market/government-control quagmires dwell.

It may just be here, where liberals confidently tread, that they finally stumble. Suddenly the question is not one of ethical responsibility, but of the struggle between state regulation and free-trade principles. To whit: Is a pharmacy like a traditional business? If pharmacies are deemed to be just businesses, with little or no special status as government regulated entities, then it doesn't seem likely that the constitution would allow for the government to force people to sell a product they don't want to. In a free market system, I might be pissed that I can't buy a Jaguar in Elk, Washington, but I can't expect my state representative to be able to do anything about it.

However, if--and this is another thing you people who know more than me should look into--if pharmacists have some kind of special status, being one of a very small percentage of people who are allowed to legally distribute controlled substances, then it seems likely that the FDA or even state-level agencies should be compelled to enact such a provision. It could easily be argued that in exchange for the priviledge of doing business in a limited, government-regulated marketplace, it's not much for government to ask that the pharmacist offer every drug the government has deemed safe and legal.

The extent to which the government is empowered to controll the flow of prescription drugs, in short, may end up dictating the final outcome more than politiking will.

That is not to say there would not be political ramifications. What were to happen if someone decided he didn't want to give out AZT or whatever because HIV is God's punishment of queers and race-mixers? He'd get fired from Walgreen's, but what if he owned his own pharmacy? What power would the government have to force him? Take a more mundane drug like Claritin. Remove the moral non-dilemma from the equation and see what happens.

Of course, with a faith-based legislature, this quasi-moral righteousness rules legislation.

Even without the sex police, this is very dicey territory for pro-choice advocates because in pushing to spread the availability of sexual health options like the morning after pill, they are also seeking to limit the kind of choice freedoms many [moderate] people feel are mandated by the constitution and by a free-market. In the sense that they may be accused of limiting personal freedoms, this dangerous territory is largely unknown to social liberals.

The waters are murky and the stakes are high, but most trepidatious, the payoff is uncertain. The Times suggests no one is really sure how big an issue this is--to what extent it is being inflated by both conservatives and liberals--and advocates of reproductive health risk alienating large swaths of people, moderates certainly and even libertarian leaning democrats for what may amount to a battle for a few small towns in the heartland.

This is a non-issue in cities of any size, where even if one pharmacist denies the prescription, it would most likely be filled by another. That only leaves isolated rural towns and communities in danger of having this drug denied altogether.

So if the issue is forced, and people feel they are being asked to choose between the guarantee of a bail out pill and what can be spun to resemble an erosion of personal and market liberties, I think a lot of people who are normally perfectly fine with such drugs will bolt, leaving social liberals with a few very happy country folk and a whole lot of scorched earth.

The logic of popular activism. Also, eating as self-defense.

2005-04-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

I am a philosopher. That is, I was a philosopher. That is, I studied philosophy in college. That means, essentially, nothing.

There aren't many philosophers anymore, people who do real philosophy, above explaining Kant to business majors. I do neither. But the desire to philosophize persists, so I spend lots of time taking simple events and assessing them with the steely logic of Aristotle.

Feats of reason often happen when they are least expected. The other night, as my jaw snapped shut on a bit of tri-tip, I wondered, "If humans are animals, and we find eating people ethically repugnant, then why don't we also avoid eating other animals?"

Immediately and clearly, my philosopher's brain saw only two options:
• Eat people
• Don't eat animals.

Desperately needing the rigorous logic I learned in those Philosophy classes, but not wanting to do any real jail time, I decided I really should feel bad about eating animals.

I went to PETA's website for a little re-education.

Before it had time to load I was drawn to the first thing that came up. A link: PETA2.com. Why would I waste my time at the original website if there's already a number two?

As that page loaded, I asked it: “Why not eat animals, PETA2?” It responded with a concise and logically explosive argument:

Premise: Ethan Hawke has a dog.
Premise: PETA2.com has free iPods.
Conclusion: You should not eat at KFC.

There it was, Ethan with his dog on the gossip page, iPods on the iPod page, anti-KFC vitriol tagged everywhere else. But those are just the explicit terms, and it can be difficult for a non-philosopher to pick out the various implied premises that support the conclusion. They are:

Ethan Hawk has a dog.
PETA2.com has free iPods.

Dogs are too cute to kill.
You want an iPod.
Dogs are kind of like chickens.
KFC kills chickens.
KFC doesn't offer iPods.

Therefore, boycott KFC.

It's bribery and cuddliness-by-association, but that alone isn't enough. Logical arguments are also founded on a set of assumptions. The assumptions in play here are:

You are twelve
You are confused easily
You think celebrities are gods

Since idiot preteens are exactly PETA2's demographic, the argument works perfectly.

They see the cute puppy, all floppy-eared and doe-eyed, on the same page as Colonel Sanders disemboweling a hen, and say, "Yes, I should stop eating that." They wait, patiently, for their iPod to arrive.

Whatever austere opinion, whatever impassioned plea PETA.com has made for the responsible stewardship of Earth's creatures, PETA2 does infinitely better with marketing, celebrity worship and free iPods.

They're beginning to catch on.

Since my own celebrity worship has long since become resentment and jealousy, and because I already own an iPod, I was about to close the browser in disgust at this cynical activism. Then I saw something from my own childhood. There, on PETA2.com, was Davey Havok, lead singer of AFI – the Goth-punk skateboarding Wiccans who also play music.

That eye liner. That lip ring. That razor sadness. That bone-deep mournful ache. Those vinyl pants.

God that guy is cool.

Peeking out from behind his black, satiny devil's lock, Havok's sharp eyes transfixed me. Beckoned me. Told me of the Church of Havok, which has among its bylaws the following: "and we shall all follow a vegan diet."

Take me into your fold! Yes. I shall take up the red paint, the foraging.

I was about to sink again into the adolescent languor of pop idolatry, but National Geographic Explorer was playing somewhere in the background. It spoke quietly to me about animals.

Explorer said there is a class of animals called "predators", meaning animals who eat other animals [some even eat each other]. Most of these so-called "predators" would eat me if I got close enough. Unlike other herbivores, or "prey" as they are often called – e.g. the zebra, the Stegosaurus – vegans don't have the herd mentality and striped skin needed to avoid predators. Nor do they have plate armor and a spiky tail to fight them off.

In denying their inner omnivore, vegans even lack the only real defense available to a plucky though tender, hairless ape: the foresight to eat first.

Forced to decide between Davey Havoc's cultic wrath and the business end of a mountain lion or Allosaurus, I decided to keep my animal-eating skills sharp by vigilantly eating less dangerous [cuter, often pre-killed] game.

As of this post, I have not yet been forced to use my skills to preemptively eat a feral cat or Velociraptor, but I live deep in the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington, and nature favors the prepared.

[A shortened version will bookend the Reader's self-styled eco-consciousness issue]

Prophet of Rock

2005-04-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

I've been trying not to do two entertainment posts in a row, but last night I had a hawk-eyed vision of things to come. In a couple weeks the Killers play Spokane. Lions will lie down with Lambs.

When the Killers play the Big Easy, expect a sharply divided crowd. On one side, drinking heavily, men with large-striped shirts and white hats facing backward will be moving their hips just enough to intimate movement without spilling their bull blasters. This courtship ritual will attract women wearing Stefani and Abercrombie on their bodies and something European over their eyes [Coco Chanel, Gucci]. Dressed like teens, the minimal beige gradient of their sunglasses will not hide their crows feet. The garter minis and strappy lace tanks will not hide their cesarean scars.

They will look to be having the best time of their lives.

On the other side will be lots of diminutive figures. Black hair on black hooded sweatshirts on black Dickies, shooting furtive glances around the room, hands in pockets. They'll probably only be visible when a drum kick triggers a spray of flame from the pyrotechnics cannon Clear Channel insisted the Killers use to cater to the guys in the stripes. They'll be sipping dark beers, huddled in enclaves, discussing things. Ideas. They will cling rigidly to a hierarchy built on the brand of cigarettes they smoke. No one will talk to the kid with the Marbs.

They will look vaguely dissatisfied.

I haven't decided which I'm going as.

The Killers are the kind of band to inspire exactly this kind of following in our area. Possessing the marketing clout to have had some mainstream radio time, they appeal to people who listen to Top 40 stations. Weird but kinda cool. Between 50 Cent and Kelly Clarkson, The Killers are a novel drive time interlude.

The Killers appeal also to area kids who wouldn't be caught dead listening to the radio--unless it's KEXP in streaming audio from the website--because they have a little of that post-punk, new-wave vibe, which translates loosely into indie cred. People know that, barring a second round for the Pixies reunion, a little cred is all the Inland Northwest is likely to see. These people, for some reason, haven't moved to Portland yet.

When Modest Mouse, probably the most inclusive show-bookers in the world, skips your region to play Billings and Sioux Falls, you have to know times are rough. Though it boasts a healthy local scene, our Inland Empire doesn't get much ultra-hip seeping in from outside.

Point being: at least it's somebody.

And it may turn out that their strange polarity will make for an interesting show. The Killers' arena-ized take on bands like Interpol and Franz Ferdinand hint that, even if their album didn't affect you, their show might.

[a shortened version will appear in this week's Reader]

Frances the [long-winded] mute

2005-04-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Email correspondence as record review

The Mars Volta's first album was great. If you would have talked to me a couple years ago, I would have used big, laudatory words and pointed out single drumbeats and anguished wails, to describe it. Clearly evidence of some unearthly genius.

I eventually got over it and formed a more modest opinion of it as a triumph of ambition and experimentation.

their second album, Frances the Mute, is not. Somehow, TMV's logical progression was toward thematic dissonance and self-absorption, I couldn't even bring myself to review it--mostly because a review would have forced me to confront just what I hated about it. My hatred, at the time, was diffuse and directionless.

Then, last night, something magic happened. I was trolling a few blogs and came across this:

Is it just me...

...or is The Mars Volta the new Radiohead?

It was late. I was cranky from writer's block, so I decided to write an email. It looked like this:

"...or is The Mars Volta the new Radiohead?"

For that to be true, TMV would have to make meandering but thematically uniform music with cohesive lyrics and a commitment to craft over ego.
Frances the Mute shows the exact opposite. It's an excuse to play around with bleep machines and indulge teenage lust for gnarly guitar solos set against salsa percussion. Formless prog regurgitate.
Bixler and Rodriguez-Lopez have been preoccupied with flexing lyrical nuts since At the Drive-In, and now that they don't have anyone to ruin their fun, it's all nonsensical poly-syllables and prostitute references.
Further: Radiohead has never written a song title in Latin
TMV=Radiohead might have worked better just after Deloused in the Comatorium. Now they're more like Smashing Pumpkins after the Batman and Robin Soundtrack.

Isamu Jordan graciously replied:

I'm surprised you don't find Frances the Mute to bw "meandering but thematically uniform" (the super-Latin touch being one of many uniform themes throughout the album). You don't get much more meandering than the opening track.

To me, The Mars Volta came up with a relatively unique sound in De-Loused, and then threw all sense of compromise out the window to fully indulge their creativity in Frances, winning over fans while giving the finger to contemporary pop music and any radio potential. In my little bizarro world, De-Loused is the OK Computer that led to the Kid A equivalent, Frances the Mute (if I were to make a comparison to Smashing Pumpkins, it would be Mellon Collie).

Not that TMV and Radiohead sound remotely alike, but the principles and impact seem to be following the same pattern.

Wasn't Kid A just an excuse to play with new toys?

And I'm as reluctant to call Yorke's lyrics cohesive as I am to say Bixler's are not.

Good points, all. To whit I replied:

That's not a bad analogy really, I get where you're coming from. Though I think there is a crucial difference. You're probably right that both bands have had a stepping off point [Kid A and Frances], distancing themselves from the mainstream, but I think they stepped in opposite directions. Or perhaps, took opposite approaches.

This is my personal thing, but I hate solos [guitar, drum, otherwise] in pop music more than anything. Hate Santana. Barely survived the 80's. They're tangential and destroy a song's rhythm. They represent the worst of rock star hubris.

I also think there is a difference between lyrics that employ veiled imagery and symbolism and lyrics that stab at poesy with mindless polysyllabism.

Compare [from Mars Volta's Miranda, that Ghost . . .]
The nest they made couldn't break you
Along the fallen
Scowled a fence of beaks
But the temple is scathing
Through your veins
They were scaling
Through an ice pick of abscess reckoning

With [from Radiohead's How to Disappear . . .]
I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here, I'm not here

In a little while
I'll be gone
The moment's already passed
Yeah, it's gone

Neither song has a particularly explicit intent, but I think the latter actually means something. "Through an ice pick of abscess reckoning" -- They've been writing lines like that since At the Drive-In, and its formula that pops up pretty often:

Vaguely dangerous implement [icepick] + some sort of wound [abscess] + an accusatory or judgmental noun [reckoning] that sounds good with the first two = An AtDI or TMV lyric

When you have two egomaniacs like Bixler and Lopez constantly trying to one-up each other with ever zanier instrumentation and ever more ostentatious lyrics, you can never hope to have cohesion. The fundamental difference between them and Radiohead, in my opinion, is that while both bands "[gave] the finger to contemporary pop music and any radio potential" I think TMV were simultaneously giving each other the finger as well.

RH, even in its most experimental moments, feels like a band, Frances the Mute sounds like a Santana album featuring Slash that has been given over totally to the forces of ego and entropy.

Frances the Mute has been a fairly polarizing album. Spin gave it a 90. Rollingstone sided with Isamu calling it, "the beastly spawn of Radiohead's OK Computer and Rush's 2112," en route to awarding it four stars. On the other hand, Cokemachineglow gave it a 17 [out of 100] and Pitchfork called it a "homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity," giving it a 20.

What do you think? Prog fans, Mars Volta fans, Radiohead fans, anyone. Weigh in on this.

Knowledge gaps, and those things which rule therein

2005-04-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

Here are thirteen things Science, as it is, cannot explain.
These things should not exist. But they do.

Scientists believe these are the frontiers of knowledge, to be braved and understood. Critics of secularism believe these are the latest in a growing list of reasons science is fundamentally wrong. Why science can never explain things as well as the Bible does.

Scientists and creationists alike often assert that we, knowing about such things, and such opinions, have a decision to make. It's science vs. the Bible, winner take all. I don't think it's like that at all.

[Thus begins the childhood reflection that had a point initially, but whose structure folded under its own girth and can now be read primarily as a cautionary tale against excess sentiment. Skipping to the conclusion is advised.]

As a child [and, as I think about it, also as a adolescent, teenager, young adult], science was considered by certain family members to be, at worst, the subversions of Lucifer, and, at best, the dangerous and capricious acts of mortal hands.

To watch Nature or Nova or National Geographic with my dad was to court a lecture:

TV: . . . the ground sloth became extinct 10,000 yea--
Dad: Ha! That's about 4 thousand years and seven days too early pal.

Wild America with Marty Stouffer was generally free of evolution talk and hence a demilitarized zone.

The evenings I drew up the courage to ask questions went something like this:

Me: But, dad, what about the dinosaurs?
Dad: What about them son?
Me: Well, didn't they have to live before us? How could we fight a T. Rex? [After I read Jurassic Park 'T. Rex' became 'Velociraptor' and the argument gained power]
Dad: No son, they lived right here with us.
Me: But [and there would be any number of questions to this, the most enlightening of which was] the bible doesn't mention dinosaurs. Does it?
Dad: Sure it does.
Me: Which ones?
Dad: . . . Triceratops.
Me: Where?

I'm still waiting on the answer to that one. The behemoths of Job chapter 40 not bearing any descriptive resemblance to a Triceratops.

My father has a naturally suspicious nature, dubious of the unknown, the novel. He moved here from California because he didn't like being around so many people. Before meeting my mother in Spokane, and striking the bargain of settling down in a town called Elk, Washington, he lived in the more isolated Rathdrum, Idaho. There being no jobs in Rathdrum, he still had to commute to Spokane daily.

Spokane being just larger than the town in California he'd sought to escape.

Here atop our foothill, quarters of miles from our closest neighbor, some twenty miles from any population center, up an imposing private drive with signs warning against entry without prior approval, father is constantly on the lookout for people looking to take his things. People like an easy score, father says. Easy being a half-mile drive up a rutted road to a house that might not even exist, but in which, upon discovery, one would find two large dogs, heavily dead-bolted door, guns everywhere and, you know, almost nothing of value.

My father is not a stupid person. There are times when his intelligence frightens me. My mother isn't dumb either, nor is her youngest brother, her sister, father. Nor are my dad's brothers, sisters.

They're believers.

They watch the news, see death upon death, murder upon murder and believe people are trying to kill them. They listen to talk radio and believe that taxes should be lowered, and that our borders must be closed, our language preserved from swarthy encroach [my father being, himself, half Mexican]. They believe there is a vast conspiracy against America's collective values, homogeneous as they are. The conspiracy involves faggots and college professors. They see thousands of angry Arabs with guns shouting down America on television and believe, as is suggested, that Islam, as a whole, is out to get us. Us being we, specifically, up our driveway, invisible from the main road. We with our dogs and guns and lack of strategic importance. Terrorism can happen anywhere.

Also, primarily, they listen to their pastors, read the bible's delicate and varied poetry--written by so many hands, re-written by so many more--and they believe.

They believe not only that God is who he says he is, and that God sent Jesus, the word made flesh--part of but also separate from God himself--they believe each word of the bible is utter and immutable, unchanged yesterday, today and tomorrow. Most critically, they believe that this homogenous truth is to be understood literally. They believe, also, as every generation of Christian has before them, that the end times are near. They point to wars and rumors of wars as signal that God's return is nigh.

Against that kind of truth, that juggernaut of prophesy and tradition, and in such dangerous times, the come-lately guess and check uncertainty of science holds little weight. Some people, understandably, are uncomfortable with the ideas that today's truths might be proven wrong in the future.

Yet it is exactly that intellectual nimbleness that scientists (and science fanboys) believe is their great strength. Anything as turgid and inflexible as dogma, religious and otherwise, cannot hope to adjust to change at any speed, let alone at the breathless pace of [technological, population, ethical] expansion in the contemporary world.

Until college this dialogue, this difference of viewpoint, was totally unknown to me. Christians were right, scientists were morons. My World History teacher told us to skip the first three chapters, prehistory to Egypt loosely, because they were anthropological speculation, not history. My biology teacher [runner-up to Bill Nye for that coveted PBS gig] taught evolution but prefaced it the way certain Georgia school districts tried to. It's a well-accepted theory, but still a theory, as such . . . In hindsight it was a brilliant survival strategy within our school district, but the effect on me personally was to view evolution as in direct conflict with the Bible's teaching, varied as it was.

[The conclusion, more or less, begins here]

The perceived insolubility between science and [ostensibly, my] religion didn't end until I met some very intelligent and very religious people in college. They suggested that the faith of my parents and the science of most everyone else wasn't in conflict.

The Bible, really, has nothing to say about science and science, insofar as it concerns itself with only the experiential, only those concrete things we can touch and see everyday, has nothing to say about the religious experience.

Whatever tension exists, then, stems from an arrogance on both sides. On one hand, it is a reach to suggest that a book written between 3000+ and 1500 years ago can still tell us things about how our world works [most people agree, after all, that Aristotle's physics suck, and I trust him more than whoever wrote Joshua]. Similarly, it's an indefensible leap of logic to assert that not being able to observe something [i.e. God] is not sufficient to exclude it entirely. Such people overreach their explanatory realm.

It is equally dishonest, intellectually, to say, "this book says X, and this book is true, so X is true," as it is to say, "We have not observed Y, therefore Y cannot exist." Both these assertions can be defended the same way.

To "this book is true" and "Y cannot exist" just say:

"Prove it."

Of course that's never good enough for hardline anti-scientists and staunch atheist/secularists, but really, no one could hope to reform either group anyway.

The experiential world is not a thing to be taken on faith. It can be observed, and understood. This process is continual, and ongoing. Everything that is known was once unknown. Those things we can know will, one day, be known. Those things that remain, then, being not of this world--unknowable--are matters of faith and carry no less power.

So let us rejoice

and concern ourselves accordingly.

Choose Your Own Sin City

2005-04-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

The film adaptation of Frank Miller's classic comic has shocking things to say about our generation [or perhaps just about Luke Baumgarten]. If shocking things frighten you, you can read a less earth-shattering version.

While my comrades went off dipping quill and ink into that southern den of iniquity, no doubt indulging all manner of wanton desire, I made a day's journey west in search of what celluloid truth and beauty [beauty, truth] might, someday, find its way inland.

Strangely, we found [intoxicants, breasts, ultra-violence, asocial computer programmers] essentially the same things.

However, where they found these things in real life, front and center, under the epilepsy lights of Las Vegas, I found them on a massive movie screen, which I chose specifically because it was a relic of 1950's cinema, and as such made viewing an homage to crime dramas and film noir all the more poignant. I was forced to sit near the front and to the far left side because asocial computer programmers also care about poignance in movie watching, and because they like to stand in long lines for days to get good seats. Also, it's hard to find parking in Seattle. When I saw the movie, it looked bent and a little pinched on one end. Distorted and poignant.

[If you haven't read the comic or if you just don't care about comics, skip to the third to last paragraph]

Sin City is a lot of little orgies. Orgies of violence, blood, dismemberment, bondage gear, breasts, dangly earrings, overacting, under-acting, smoking, drinking, criminal insanity and others. Most of all however, it is an orgy of hyper-exact adaptation. If you're a big fan of the comic, it might leave you feeling schizophrenic.

The astute media critic Ben Kromer [asocial, though not a programmer] has argued that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's adaptation of the comic all my friends gleefully hid from their parents is perfect in every way, which is to say it's too perfect in all the wrong ways.

Because he has far more pulp, [maladjusted geek] and noir credibility than I do, here are his words:

"What's bothering me? I look for the word and come up with 'inflection'. The actors are saying the words I remember, but they're saying them wrong. They don't sound the way they do in my head. It's not the actors' specific voices, it's the inflection. Too fast, too slow, too high, too low."

The biggest problem with comic book movies, if Mr. Kromer is right, is that they can never play as well onscreen as the comic played in your head.

This is true of novels as well, though it's not such a bad thing. I never fell in love with the voice I made for Moll Flanders as she slept her way up and down the social ladder of 18^th century England or even Robert Langdon's as he deciphered DaVinci's code.

Comics, though, beg you to make up voices. They beg you to play out scenes. The voices you make up always kick ass. Each scene carries the perfect tone. Everything in your head is always perfect.

Then some plebian like Michael Madsen comes along, probably doesn't even read the comic, and screws up everything. Fifteen minutes after the opening day's first showing gets out, 10,000 blogs post saying just that. He ruined everything.

Sometimes though, taking liberties with dialogue works.

The comic was at once a fervent homage to and a gentle satire of the pulp and noir genres. The film takes the satire one step further, as now there are actors, forced to recite the implausibly hard-boiled dialogue.

If you've ever read a crime novel or a pulp comic and thought to yourself, real people don't talk like that, Sin City proves you right. Shellie's [Brittany Murphy] parting soliloquy to Dwight [Clive Owen], urging him on, is brash and babydollish. With a single, massive tear poised on the apple of her cheek, she takes her time, pouting, over-mouthing the words, pausing between them.

It's time Rodriguez gives to her, offering an extended and uncharacteristic pause in a highly frenetic movie. The audience laughs.

Comic book dialog sucks, and we, realizing that it sucks, are awesome. Likewise, 15 minutes after the first showing of the day, 10,000 blogs post to that effect. That was, and we are, awesome.

This, in a sense, is what the cult of pop culture is, either what it always was or what it has become. We watch, read, or listen to things and either revel in them until they become a part of us, or we critique them with detachment, depending on which clique you roll with [depending on if you ride a Vespa or if you live with your parents].

Sin City, the film, is the perfect illustration of this. For people who loved the comic, it's just about the most faithful adaptation imaginable. As such, it's awesome.

The person who wrote and illustrated the comic also co-directed the movie. He practically used his comic panels as storyboards, but still it lacks something untouchable and certainly unfilmable. Something like childhood. As such, it's not good enough.

[Comic haters skip to here]

I could continue, but to those that have never read the comic--to those who didn't devote large chunks of their childhood and adulthood to pop culture in general--such meta-aesthetic pondering and psychological posturing would mean nothing. It probably means nothing anyway.

Sin City is starkly black and white, with occasional splotches of color. The film has lots of blood, but it's usually not red. There are beheadings and dismemberments and a lot of joking about both of those things. There are lots of female breasts. The bad guys are rapists, child molesters and murderers. The good guys are murderers too, but while onscreen they demonstrate profound good will, masculine compassion and self-sacrifice, almost not like murderers at all. Despite the strangeness of this, Sin City has many familiar tropes and themes. Good and Evil [in the Platonic sense] fight it out here. Good always wins.

If this sounds appealing to you, go watch it.

Titles are meaningless

2005-04-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote an op-ed this week. I have no idea how many Catholics live in Sandpoint.

After his death, on Saturday, following a long battle with Parkinson's disease, television stations all over the world preempted their reality television shows for a dose of reality. Pope John Paul II, probably the single most powerful spiritual leader in the world, was dead. God's Catholic man on planet Earth was gone.

The broadcasts were a retrospective of John Paul II's most courageous moments in office. His fight against communism in Poland. His struggle against what he called the "culture of death" worldwide. They were laudatory. For now, besides Christopher Hitchens, everyone in the world loves him. Even most Evangelical Christian commentators have momentarily stopped referring to the Bishopric of Rome as the seat of the anti-Christ to praise this particular pontif. Most commonly since his death, people have marveled at the unique swath he cut across the philosophical, theological and even political landscape. He seemed unwilling to ally himself with any one faction within the Church. He took bold strides to restore orthodoxy while working to reverse Anti-Semitism amongst Catholics and apologizing for the role of Catholics in the slave trade. He was conservative, but not rigidly so.

But after the world has wiped its eyes and mourned Pope John Paul II, and it takes a harder look at the man Carol Wojtyła, what will remain is the life of an unbelievably powerful man who fought for humanity in a maddeningly piecemeal fashion. While he didn't tow a party line, John Paul II was nonetheless a fierce ideologue who was both a liberator and an oppressor. Using a first-century rubric for good and evil, many sins of omission marred his pontifical infallibility.

His work with Lech Wałęsa's Solidarity movement in Poland is widely credited with bringing down Communism in that country. His force was so great among the religious of Eastern Europe that Mikhail Gorbachev said communism worldwide only fell through his influence.

The Pope himself at least believed he was present at an important crossroads. He referred to the attempt on his life by Mehmet Ali Ağca as "one of the last convulsions of the 20th century ideologies of force. Force stimulated fascism and Hitlerism, force stimulated communism."

While this is true, force needs no ideology to drive it. Force itself is a sufficient motivator for oppression. Governments of force existed well before fascism and communism, existed contemporaneously with them, and persist still. And while Carol Wojtyła stood in staunch defiance of both the Nazis and Soviets, his record against the equally lethal and repressive dictators of South America was deplorable.

His hatred for Communism ran deep and, fearing its growth in the Americas, he publicly condemned the liberation theologians of South America because of a tangential connection to Marxism. He forced his priests to make peace with the likes of Augusto Pinochet and other tyrants because of their ostensible ties to capitalism. This was especially disastrous in El Salvador, where Cardinal Óscar Romero sought the Church's help ending the brutal murders perpetrated by right-wing death squads.

Far from being a revolutionary priest, Romero was a conservative who merely recognized a desperate need. John Paul was unable to see the distinction between liberation theology's solidarity with the poor and the class struggle of Marxism. As a result, thousands of people, including Romero, died in a country as rigorously Catholic as Poland.

John Paul II often rebuked the West for employing an "imperialistic monopoly of economic and political supremacy [gained] at the expense of others," but allowed exactly this trampling of the poor by right-wing dictators because the thought of collaborating with pseudo-Marxists was too distasteful.

John Paul II's later magisterial work focused on questions of human agency. His 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae was a pointed rebellion against what the pontiff claimed was a world-wide "culture of death," in which babies are routinely killed before they are born and old people are similarly killed before they should die. John Paul deftly laid out a line of demarcation for believers, which included contraception, abortion, embryo manipulation, euthanasia and capital punishment. All these things, he wrote, were intrinsically evil.

As with communism, he ignored certain vitally important contemporary issues [overpopulation, disease etc] to ensure his culture of life message was consistent. So concerned was he with not preventing or abridging life that he seemed to spend little time in reflection about the quality of those millions of lives he urged into existence.

Get born, Stay alive, don't die. Food, employment, shelter, personal freedoms, economic parity--all that is up to you. Good luck. Do whatever you can to have a good life, as long as your good life includes ten kids or celibacy. Or the rhythm method. And capitalism.

If your life stops being good, becomes unbearable--if something in your brain misfires, and you're a vegetable, drooling, unable to feed yourself, or if you're in horrible pain every second of every day--know that God's will is nigh.

If someone you know is suffering, alive but in excruciating, impotent pain, let it go. Let them relish what life is left. Morphine is fine, just keep him plugged in.

And if your husband--who sleeps with prostitutes, who beats you, who has boils on his flesh and whose teeth are falling out--if he forces himself upon you, relent, he's your husband. Even if whatever he has kills you, he's your husband. You'll be in a better place soon.

For overpopulation, unrecoverable states, and AIDS, there are no biblical correlates. You can't look to Matthew, Isaiah or Deuteronomy.

However, where there is no textual evidence, thankfully God gave us pragmatism and the power to invent. We can wipe out an astounding number of these horrible human blights with just one tool and some honest ethical inquiry. We need condoms [male and female] and the power to question.

Forget for the moment about abortion, the death penalty and stem cells. Focus on condoms. Maybe contraception is against God's plan. Rape is too. So is murder by retrovirus. Pick the lesser.

That is not to say we should always utilize the technology available. We live in a time of rapidly advancing medical technologies and must develop an ethics to keep up with our inventions as well as our plagues. We have the power to keep almost anyone alive, or at least breathing. If not their minds, we can at least keep their hearts beating. We can keep oxygen flowing to their brains. Given these most amazing of powers, we must now select the right ideology. We have to honestly ask ourselves, If God [through the processes of nature, the body's ability to heal, miracles] isn't keeping this person alive, why should we?

More than communism or fascism, the ideology of power that is most dangerous in this bioethical quagmire is the one that answers, we should because we can.

Right now, lying in state is a man who symbolizes the fundamental shortcoming of all ideologues, rigid views and a myopic perception of context. Given his many accomplishments, his work in ending oppression in Poland and his efforts to end capital punishment worldwide, Pope John Paul II was still a man who made peace with murderers like Pinochet and who told a world crippled by overpopulation--which is also, this minute, being decimated by AIDS--to not protect themselves.

A lot happens between encouraging life and not taking life, between birth and death. When absolutism and idiologism rule, it's that long stage--the living part--that we forgot.

Flaming oaks out bedroom windows

2005-03-31T12:40:00.000-08:00

There are people whose job it is to travel to plane crashes and pick through the debris. With the heaps of steel and aluminum they find, amidst the ruined humanity--the indescribable chaos--they must somehow create order. Their job is to understand the story of what went wrong, they must find answers. After watching the Ring 2, I feel a kinship with these people. More than mere empathy, an understanding of the helplessness of bearing witness to such a tragedy, I have a desire to ensure that such a thing will never happen again.

A Conspiracy of Blandness

Ahead I have compiled conclusive evidence that The Ring 2 is nothing short of a concerted effort to drain all that was good and original in a movie concept and replace it with insipid nonsense and slasher cliché--and a chase scene [for God's sake].

The opening scene is ripped from every horror movie you've seen since Halloween. Two teens, a boy and a girl, about to do what boys and girls do. But before we fondle each other, I got this tape I want you to see . . .

Mind-numbing and portentous.

Ten minutes in they take the tape away. Samara doesn't need it after all. Perhaps she was just pretending. The you'll-be-dead-in-seven-days motif is gone as well. She can kill you right away. That must be liberating.

At first, though, she plays by the original rules to track Rachel Keller down [in Astoria, which hasn't seen this much violence since One-Eyed Willy or John Kimball], killing people via video tape, making her way down the coastline. But once she finds Rachel, whom she has selected to be her new mommy, all rules go out the window. She's free to stalk people anywhere, though generally only when there aren't a lot of witnesses around. She can now also possess their bodies. She does all this to get Naomi Watts to like her. That part I understand.

"She wants to live. For real this time."

It's a quality of life issue for Samara. I see. Her mom was crazy and she drove her foster parents that way. Now she just wants a normal [after]life. But you have to ask yourself, Samara--sweetie--with everyone around you going crazy, do you think that maybe you're the reason?

Another thing Ring 2 ruins about the mystery of Samara, is that the child's soul wasn't twisted and enraged by her murder, she was a demon to begin with. Demon babies are old hat, but the assertion that evil in life creates evil in death is wonderfully fresh, possessed of an Eastern sensibility that American horror is mostly unused to.

But maybe Samara doesn't get that she's a crazy murderous demon. Ignorance of self has propelled lots of great movies, I could get behind that.

The newfound stupidity of Rachel Keller, though, is inexplicable. She was so smart in The Ring. Decisive too. She figured out Samara's puzzle, all the way to the end she nailed it. Then, confronted with a terrible choice, an impossible choice--one's child or one's lover--she acted with strength and resolve. Exactly half of the original brilliance of The Ring was its strong characters and difficult moral dilemmas. When it's you deciding who lives and who dies, everything is more terrifying.

Now, after seeing Samara again, and after it's obvious that she's got eyes on Rachel's son, Aiden, Rachel continues to leave him in big houses, alone in dark rooms. Then, each time [5 by my count] she comes in to find the boy soaked with sweat yet freezing cold to the touch, she seems surprised. The wall paper in Aiden's just burned in the shape of a flaming oak tree . . . that couldn't happen twice.

The state eventually comes in and actually takes Aiden into their custody, accusing Rachel of abuse. This is meant to be a tragic irony--it's obviously Samara doing the abusing--but you can only leave a kid alone in so many bathtubs with so many demon babies before you're guilty of at least neglect.

Earlier, as her Volkswagen is being pummeled by twenty-odd rampaging whitetail deer [murderous deer being as close to the first movie's suicidal horses as you can get in Astoria, Oregon], and Aiden tells her to floor it, rather than speeding away, Rachel stops to marvel that the boy knows just what to do in the situation. The Rachel I know would've hit it, and taken out as many death-deer as possible.

The Ring 2 is possessed of no coherent logical structure, and as a result, makes no sense. Way more troublesome than not making sense, though, this structure was what made the original film scary in the first place. Without it, Ring 2 fumbles even basic chills.

The Hannibal Correlate

We've seen this kind of thing before. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is fantastically scary. He's a brilliant psychotic, capable of using the power of suggestion to kill. People literally swallow their tongues in fright when he's around. He exudes preternatural evil. The scariest thing about Lecter, though, is that he sows his violence without ever leaving his cell. He's in an ultra-maximum security lockdown and he still manages to kill. This is the power the original Ring wielded, Samara could kill--was very successful at killing--despite confinement [in a VHS tape]. Despite logical structures in place to protect us, we can still die. So we fear, but this internal logic also imbues the audience with a false sense of control. If you know the rules, you stay alive. Of course, you never know all the rules. That sense of unpredictability, in the end, is what creates real terror.

The Ring 2 stumbles the same way Hannibal [sequel to Silence of the Lambs] did. It takes away the internal logic that kept Samara [and Hannibal] seemingly distant. Once those constructs are absent, naturally, evil goes on a rampage. All of a sudden, and perhaps counter-intuitively, with the maniac on the loose, we know exactly who will die: anyone who gets in his or her way. There's no unpredictability to knowing that everyone's going to get it. At that point, you have nothing to work with but the promise of gruesome murders and a reliance on wacky camera angles and madmen in closets to sustain any level of tension.

The perception of threat is an extension of the unknown. Uncertainty is menace, and that is always scarier than some veiny, tensed corpse with its face all screwed-up i

Cavalcade of the Little-Known!

2005-03-29T23:30:00.000-08:00

I know it's been a long time since I've updated, but I'm a for real journalist now. That is, a for real journalist who works for a independent weekly in a small northerly town. That I work for free does not diminish the fact that what I am doing is actually work. Working. I.

Here's the thing I've been working on. Being a for real journalist for a small independent weekly means you research conspiracies on the internet. This is the first of three things I have in this week's issue. I call it, Cavalcade of the Little-Known!

M E M O R A N D U M
To: Zach Hagadone, Chris De Cleur
CC: Linden LaRouche, Dan Rather, the People of America
From: Luke Baumgarten
Subject: A Cavalcade of the Little-Known!

From the desk of the Truth Editor:

Enclosed, find a brief survey of groups and happenings whose existences are yet to be officially proven but which seem pretty obvious to some people. These include, but are not limited to: government programs, secret societies, strange [satanic and/or luciferian and/or kabalistic and/or homosexual and/or occult] rituals and several inexplicable creatures. If you aren't acquainted with the differences between Satanism and luciferianism, my sources suggest you get your head right, quick.

If you have not heard of these things until now, you have either been overtly brainwashed or are one more of the millions of people kept ignorant by the media establishment, which is, depending on your source, controlled by the occult, [The] Jews, the Right, and/or the Left, some [or all!] of whom are working together to bring about a New World Order [NWO]. Believers warn that any evidence to the contrary is proof of the vastness of the NWO’s reach in the global marketplace of ideas.

Anything, big or small, you see or hear, anywhere, at any time, will be further proof of this vastness.

If you do not see this vastness, or are skeptical of it, my sources again suggest you get your head right.

I expect this memo will bring some kind of reprisal. My untimely death would, obviously, be proof of the above-mentioned vastness.

If nothing else, I hope such an event will lead some of you to get your heads right.

Yours in Vigilant Watchfulness,

Luke Baumgarten

HAARP
Official Line: Short for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP's mission is to "understand, simulate and control ionospheric processes that might alter the performance of communication and surveillance systems." It is a joint project between the United States Air Force, her Navy, and the University of Alaska. Proponents say it is safe to shoot massive amounts of electricity into the ionosphere, comparing the array's effects to an "immersion heater in the Yukon River."
Those who know say: A variant of the Wardenclyffe Tower, it’s a giant death machine based on the notes of Nikola Tesla himself, which were seized by the FBI after his death. Of alternate theories, this is the most probable. Others include HAARP as weather control device, earthquake generator, atmospheric hole maker, mind control broadcast array, and, depending on who you talk to, either a device for signaling aliens, or for blowing up their interstellar invasion / colony ships.
Probably connected to: Illuminati; MJ-12; Sightings at Roswell; J. Edgar Hoover

The GEMSTONE FILE
Official Line: So secret it doesn’t have an official line.
Those who know say: It chronicles the massive conspiracy led by Aristotle Onassis to corner the US shipping market [by abducting Howard Hughes, forcibly injecting him with heroin for several months], grow his heroin trafficking empire and claim the presidency for his own. According to the file, he achieved the latter three times. Onassis was also into synthetic rubies, which is where the file's name derives. Onassis had his hands in the election of JFK, the Bay of Pigs debacle, the assassination of JFK, the presidency of Johnson, the election of Nixon, and everything else that happened in America from 1932 until the 80's.
Cinematic correlate: Oliver Stone directs The Aviator.
Alleged co-conspirators: The mafia, seven major oil companies, [then V.P.] Richard Milhous Nixon, all the Kennedys, senators, congressmen, the Roosevelt boys [Franklin, Elliot], Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer, the Pope.
Eyewitnesses say: Nixon couldn't cop smack to save his life.

The MOTHMAN
Official Line: Large sand hill crane. Yet carnivorous. Perhaps a red-shouldered hawk. Big one.
Eyewitnesses say: He was out by the abandoned TNT plant. Nigh on 7 foot. Eyes big as bike reflectors. Folks had been seeing lights out that way for a couple, three nights. Some kids, necking on a back road, saw him first. Scared them straight. Then he killed Newell Partridge's dog, left the carcass 90 miles away. Car full of newlyweds found it. Scared them half to death. Most folks didn't know what to think. Then that strange fellow came around. Beady eyed, didn't talk right. Stole Mary Hyre's pen right off her desk, ran away, laughing.
Possible ties to: UFOs, Men in Black, Cornstalk Curse

The BOHEMIAN GROVE
Official Line: Begun in the late 19th century to bring a little class to the frontier, the Bohemian Club. It is an all male club that boasts some very powerful and influential people as members. The grove is their playpen.
Those who know say: A giant stone owl [voiced by the throaty, distinguished Walter Cronkite] is their worshipped centerpiece; world domination is their aim. The Bohemian Grove is another who’s who of the world’s [financial, military, governmental] elite which--through Masonic occultism, networking, power-lunching--plan to grip the planet in [or have already!] a puppet-master meritocracy. Certain people suggest Adolph Hitler was a member. However, he was not known to have ever made the trip to Northern California. Further, insiders admit there was no love loss between he and Cronkite. From the air, looking north, The United States capital and the lawns and walkways around it take the shape of a stone owl.
Members include: Presidents, secretaries of state; Military contractors; oil barons; federal reserve members; World Bank officers; vast, right wing conspirators.
Recurring character Richard Nixon said: “The Bohemian Grove -- which I attend, from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine. . .” [Harper’s 2000]

The JERSEY DEVIL
Official Line: Another sand hill crane. Again though, carnivorous. Perhaps a pterodactyl.
Those who know say: Devil is either the 6th, 10th, 12th, or 13th child of either Mrs. Leeds of Esteville or Mrs. Shrouds of Leeds Point. The child was born deformed because one of the women either prayed for a devil-child, had treasonous sex with a British naval officer or had luciferian sex with the devil himself. The child, upon birth, was confined to the attic or the cellar, or it scampered from the womb to the chimney and out into the night. Sightings persist to this day, making the devil roughly 260 years old. Artillery fire does not kill it. Rabid dogs do not kill it. Power lines kill it, as do forest fires, but it always comes back to life. It can slaughter the deadliest of animals, but has been reportedly shooed away by farmers, and warded off by spinsters with just a straw broom and moxie.
Seen with: Mermaids, the ghost of Captain Kidd, Joseph Bonaparte
Juxtapose against less dangerous folklore of New Jersey: The White Stag; James Still, the black doctor
Zack Cozzens said: "It was as fast as an auto." [Jan. 16 1909]

DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Official Line: Big airport for a major metropolitan area. It boasts a massive underground luggage ferrying service that was a catastrophe when built in the early 90's, but has since been renovated and is partially functional.
Those who know say: DIA is the western headquarters of the New World Order--housing a massive underground city where the automated luggage system should be. This is intuitively obvious because of the airport's needless sprawl and its remoteness to the city it services. Apocalyptic artwork that looks vaguely cultic and strange [Masonic, alien] symbology on its walls further supports this claim.
Alleged collusion with: Illuminati; MJ-12; Events at Roswell; Richard M. Nixon
Art critics say: Art shows bad taste, not globe-domination bent.

MARISA TOMEI'S OSCAR
Official Line: Bang up job in My Cousin Vinny. The young, talented beauty transcended stereotype with insight and nuance.
Those who know say: She wasn't supposed to win. Presenter read the wrong name [on purpose!], possibly at behest of Illuminati/Freemasons/Jacobins/Aliens. Academy, in retaliation, black-listed Tomei for years, only giving her parts in indie films and mainstream parts no one else wanted. The Black-list may have been recently lifted, however this is difficult to gauge because she still takes parts no one else wants.
Sources: My Cousin Vinny (1992), Four Rooms (1995), What Women Want (2000), Alfie (2004)

The ILLUMINATI
Official Line: Many groups have taken this name over the years, and are unconnected to each other. Illuminati means "the enlightened ones" in Latin and would obviously be a popular name for mystics, sophists and the arrogant. The most famous of these groups were the Bavarian Illuminati [1776-1785]. It's principle founder, Adam Weishaupt, was a former Jesuit. Many of its members were also Freemasons. The rigidly conservative [papist] government of Bavaria repressed the movement in 1785, along with all other secret societies.
Illuminati in history: Alumbrados of Spain [founded c. 1490, blighted by Inquisition into 17th century], Illumines of France [founded c. 1620, suppressed 1635], Rosicrucians [founded 1422 or 1537], Martinists [occultist cabalists, founded1754]
Those who know say: They're all the same organization! And persist to this day! They seek to control [or already do!] governments through back door power brokering. They seek to control [or already do!] the masses by channeling the global flow of information. They are so huge and powerful you've never heard of them before.
Suspected ties to: Freemasons, the Occult, Majestic 12, America's founding fathers, The Jesuits, The Jacobins, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, everyone you've ever met, except you of course, and the people on your mailing list.
Probably responsible for: Russian Revolution, American Revolution, all anti-monarchy and anti-papacy activity throughout recorded history. Stuff you never even heard of.

Still [probably] got straight edge

2005-03-18T14:42:00.000-08:00

I don't even think about speed / That's something I just don't need / I've got the straight edge -- Minor Threat

24 years later, it remains unclear whether Ian MacKaye himself, founder of probably the most boring youth movement ever, advocated stabbing drunks with their own beer bottles. The music he made then was certainly antagonistic towards substance abusers, but not without a mitigating undercurrent of pacifism.

Regardless MacKaye's convictions, acolytes of his lifestyle, which promoted health and avoided [sex, drug, tobacco, alcohol] dependence, ended up making life a whole lot less healthy for anyone on the heel end of a pair of hand-me-down Doc Martens. It remains unclear, further, if straight edge's enduring legacy will be built upon the idealism of its founder or the entropic hoodlumdom that followed.

Though its legacy will probably never die [unless killed, hacked off at the neck, mercifully . . . God willing] Minor Threat was only around long enough to release one full length album. I have the entire discography in my car, on one CD. Like 40 songs in 12 minutes. So, by the time the straight edge tendency toward ass-kicking gained national attention, the nineties were half over and MacKaye was eight years into a new, less angry, more determined period of music creation/social action.

Rock scholars, Sit-in organizers and thirty-something fanboys dub this turbulent age of driving chords, churning bass and political awareness the Fugazi epoch [1987 to forever]. Michael Azzerad, in his book Our Band Could Be Your Life, credits Fugazi, along with Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth, et al., with fostering the DIY spirit, pioneering the alternative sound, and, essentially, creating the scene that allowed younger acts like Nirvana their meteoric rise.

And those things came and went. MTV invented grunge, bands sold out [bought in], people got rich and complacent, or rich and unhappy, or just unhappy, complacent. Some lost their creative edge, their focus, and made still more money on ever less inspired projects. Others put steel cylinders in their mouths and, with a toe and some ingenuity, swallowed a pound of double ought buckshot.

Through all the hype and carnage remained Fugazi and Ian MacKaye, faithful to the indie label he started because he hated record labels. Long after their peers had stopped, Fugazi put out album after album and remained relevant not just lyrically, or as activists, but sonically as well.

Then people started having babies.

It's now three years and six months since Fugazi last released new material. Baby-making has probably given way to baby-rearing. Their drummer, I imagine, now jokes, "I've got this really great side project in the works. It's called a family." Then high-fives. Mercifully, whatever fornicating he's been into, MacKaye has found his way back into the studio.

Minus Fugazi. Plus some girl.

An equation for intrigue, to be sure.

He and she [Amy Farina] are The Evens, and their sound isn't so different from latter-day Fugazi's stripped down post-hardcore. They're just stripped the rest of the way down, a little less experimental, a little more acoustic. MacKaye might have taken some voice lessons, but he still has a narrow vocal range. Until Farina comes in, The Evens is essentially Fugazi Unplugged, but once she does, things start to happen. Such as one's toes tapping, one's finger wagging in the air. One doing the Lindy-hop.

Or so I hear.

The interplay of Amy Farina's throaty, expressive voice and MacKaye's unmistakable yowl makes for good music. She has range, and her talents allow something a MacKaye project has never had. Melody.

He's long since perfected the one-chord-song, strummed every three or four seconds, over a drum beat, flirting with the listener--like Hemingway--suggesting what it might sound like if he wasn't so busy deconstructing everything. Tearing it all down.

Now, from the pieces, he and Farina build catchy pop melodies on lyrics that still yield the rewards of a Fugazi album, but which are more immediately accessible. All with their voices. Frankly, the one song that doesn't feature Farina prominently on vocals, Sara Lee, is too damned boring to listen to.

And that's not all! Her voice isn't even the best part. Girl drummers are so hot right now, and, like Janet Weiss [Quasi, Sleater-Kinney] and Ezra Holbrook [say Meg White and I'll punch you in the mouth], Farina plays with virtuosity.

Perhaps most strange--maybe it's that girl again--MacKaye's lyrics have broadened and softened, turned to themes of love and loss. What's that, puppet regimes? No, love. The importance of protective tariffs for emerging nations? Pay attention, I said--Police brutality? Ineffectual bureaucrats? Well, of course. But also: love. Weird. I know.

Frankly, after four years without Fugazi, I'd take a Roc-a-fella tribute to Minor Threat if I could get it. The Evens, though, are almost too much, a fully enfleshed premise that builds on motifs imported from previous projects to explore new avenues of musicianship and lyricism. All the while being, you know, easy on the ears.

Genocide in the age of information

2005-03-16T12:42:00.000-08:00

In 1994, as during World War II, as continues today, hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered because they looked funny. Eleven years ago, in Africa, they tended to be tall and light-skinned with thin noses. But this rubric was often faulty, and didn't lead to nearly enough killing, so ultimately it came down to five letters stamped on a birth certificate. Tutsi. Those were the enemy. As in similar situations, looks alone aren't really concrete enough to effectively kill off an entire section of humanity, so it boils down to a word.

Jew. Kurd. Croat.

In early 1941, when Adolf Hitler began rounding up the Semitic peoples of Europe, to be killed at his leisure, America did nothing. We were later able to lessen our pangs of guilt by lamenting, through clenched teeth and fists, through tear-soaked lips, that we just didn't know. We had no idea. The humanity. The senselessness. Such a waste. It wasn't until later, we cried, until the war was over, that we knew. God, If only we had known.

In 1994 we knew, yet nothing changed.

By then we had the internet, we had satellite feeds and 24-hour cable news. We knew what was happening. The whole world saw it, and knew the name for it. Genocide. Knowing this, the U.S., Belgium and others actively lobbied for a complete UN pull out.

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is." -- Rollo May

Terry George's Hotel Rwanda is a historical meditation on this idea. His tale is set at the breaking point of one of modern history's most gruesome ironies. Before the Belgians colonized Rwanda, the Tutsis and Hutus never really had beef. The Tutsis had conquered the Hutus in the 15th century, and had ruled since then. The social strata of these Tutsi kingdoms, though not egalitarian, at least allowed for Hutus in places of power. The Belgians, however, marked the taller, lighter Tutsis, with their generally slender noses, to rule absolutely, stripping the Hutus of whatever power they had and stratifying the country along a [mostly imagined] racial divide. What was administratively expedient for the Belgians created deep animosity in the Rwandans, eventually breeding genocide. But, having left the country in 1962, the Belgians didn't consider themselves responsible.

Into that tempest steps Paul Rusesabagina, manager of a five-star resort hotel in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, and the focal point of a story about people sandwiched between hate and indifference.

Don Cheadle, as Paul, assumes most of the film's emotional burden. He's kindly and understands the importance of making connections with important people, as well as the value of a bright smile, a well-greased palm and a carefully placed Cuban cigar. He believes in the power of the west and, more significantly, that having friends in places of power is akin to wielding power oneself. As we meet him, though, attending to his daily rounds at the Hotel Mille Colline, events are in motion which will destroy those beliefs.

While Cheadle works miracles, and others do well with what they're given, each character only really exists to aid the exploration of the central question: to a people powerless to protect themselves, which is more dangerous, the hatred of those who want to kill them, or the indifference of those who might help? While not lessening the culpability of the Hutu killers, George suggests that the international apathy toward the Tutsis--toward Africans in general--that sealed their fate. At least, in the case of your killer, you know who to hide from. In 1994, in Rwanda, He'd be wearing a bright shirt and wielding a machete.

This politicized focus gives Hotel Rwanda a coarseness that fails to pay proper tribute to the human toll of genocide. While possessed of emotion and real poignance, George generally opts for narrative trickery and righteous vitriol to make his case, along with a few truly hokey cinematic choices.

At one point, a mob of Hutus demand the hotel's guest list. An assistant begins pulling the data up, but Paul brushes her aside, typing with a look of both concentration and worry. Startled by what he's doing, the assistant says, almost yells [men with guns and machetes close by], "but that list is from two weeks ago."

Of course it is. Everyone knows something is up, even the Hutus. This vague knowledge gives Paul's detente real tension. But George has inserted this assistant to foil what could have been a guileful and desperate moment, giving the scene away before it can mature.

He plays a similar game with the film's themes of abandonment and culpability. As all the whites are evacuated, Jack [Joaquin Phoenix], sobbing, gasps, "I'm so ashamed." Declarations like this continually follow and overshadow Hotel Rwanda's more nuanced gestures. Immediately prior, Jack, impotent, wanting to help but powerless to, starts handing out money to the people he's leaving behind. That alone, without the explanatory soliloquy, would have been vastly more forceful.

"We think you're dirt Paul. . . You aren't even niggers, you're Africans." -- Colonel Oliver

Hotel Rwanda, though, is not primarily a work of art or high drama. Hotel Rwanda is a polemic, a critique and condemnation of former imperialist powers [you know, white people--yeah us too] who raped and robbed a continent, only to abandon those we exploited once nothing of value remained.

Late in the film, as the foreign dignitaries and guests at the Mille Colline Hotel wait to be evacuated, the camera pans the side of the chartered bus they sit in. Hundreds of worried-looking European faces stare out the windows, afraid for these people outside, whose deaths are at hand. Someone, near the back of the bus, takes a picture.

George's thesis is clearer in that moment than in any of his monologal diatribes. We are responsible, yet we do nothing. We talk of freedom from oppression, about the unalienable rights of man. We claim to be just, but we do nothing. We intervene, protect, nation-build where our interest is best served, where a prize is to be had. The suffering and squalor of the rest, unluckily born to a nation low in natural resources or strategic military value, is placed on exhibit nightly, to be browsed and digested, mined for all its shock and fear and then to be forgotten, as though merely having heard about such things is its own kind of heroism.

Digital [Cr]ash, Digital [B]urn

2005-03-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

Review: Bright Eyes, Digital Ash in a Digital Urn -- In late January, Conor Oberst's cult of personality, Bright Eyes, released two LPs at the same time. I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning garnered immediate awe from everyone with a pulse [and a secret crush; black painted fingernails], while Digital Ash in a Digital Urn was either ignored outright or juxtaposed negatively against its more analog [and accessible] sibling. So complete was the snubbing that I didn't bother buying Digital Ash until this week, when I couldn't find even one single CD I wanted. Since only Communists and hobos leave stores without consuming, I had to buy something. Pouring over rows, I'd almost given up hope when I found it there, behind Blondie.

***

Speaking of Communists, Conor Oberst is one--or at least he'd like to be. He wants drastic change without 30 million bodies in common graves and gulags and great-leaps-forward. Egality without the mess of moral purges and forced labor. A Socialist, I suppose, but not some namby-pamby healthcare-for-all moderate. He'd be Hasta-ing la revolucion siempre. But all bloodless coups this time, for God's sake. One day the capitalists will roll out of their four poster beds and Comrade Oberst will be standing in the doorway to their bedroom. Backlit. Moved, they'll hand over the keys to the great machine and the magnetic man-child will ascend the stairs of the New York Stock Exchange, to that platform where they keep the bell and gavel, and shout, "Shut . . . it . . . down . . . Forever!"

Blue collar and white, seeing the wisdom of the 25-year-old's vision, would embrace, merging into one--lighter blue--class of workman. Even the idle rich would want to get their hands dirty.

There's a name for this: Idealism. I love idealists. Truth be told, I love Conor Oberst. He hates war. Death. He wants economic parity. Justice. He wants love. Passion. He wants all of his friends to live forever. He wants them to get good, meaningful jobs. He wants innocence and to leave the world better than he found it.

Me too! How odd (I am reminded of the time an ex-girlfriend and my mother marveled that they both liked chicken).

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn doesn't present a new Conor Oberst, it shows the same guy who made I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, singing about more or less the same things, but with all these weird, artificial constraints in place. The latter's sparseness keeps Oberst's anger, frustration, sadness, and joy palpable and close to the surface, bubbling through the cracks in his voice. So fluid the lyrics, so free the verse, you wonder sometimes if he isn't just making up the words as he goes, allowing his emotion to expand and contract dynamically.

Digital Ash, though, in as much as it relies on looped snare hits and synth, hamstrings Oberst's passions as he works to jimmy his bombastic sentiments into the lull between downbeats. The effect recalls both Peter Gabriel and David Byrne, which certainly isn't bad company [or a bad sound], but the frequent starts and stops serve to accentuate his shortcomings as a songwriter. Again, these failings aren't anything new, but on I'm Wide Awake, Oberst's single greatest ally was the earnestness with which he pursued his truths. He never sounds disingenuous here but he's not charismatic either, or not nearly as persuasive.

By the time he loosens his digital fetters seven songs in, he's stretched so thin thematically that he resorts to hackneyed metaphors and cliche to fill minutes, essentially stretching six songs worth of material into twelve. On Light Pollution, he even offers a kind of political autobiography. At 25, he should hold off on the memoirs. Time Code, for its part, is the most sophomoric treatment of corporate culture I've heard since the last time I talked with my straight-edge cousin Errol, who actually is a sophomore. Ship in a Bottle, I'm pretty sure, is actually a Postal Service song. No, can't be. Not even Ben Gibbard is self-indulgent enough to sample a baby crying. Take It Easy (Love Nothing), though, featuring Gibbard's beat-mate Jimmy Tamborello, is the album's high point, a textured comprimise between compelling beats and Oberst's lyric sensibilities.

If I'm Wide Awake is an attempt to demonstrate his folk pedigree, Digital Ash shows just how much he remains an emo kid who writes protest songs. Even that, though, is significant. In a time of apolitical rock, it's he, Justin Sane, Ted Leo and a handful of others [say Jack Johnson and I'll punch you in the mouth] picking up social consciousness where Billy Bragg will eventually leave off. Thank God someone is.

I like that Bright Eyes is diversifying, fiddling with beat machines, synth, formal [sounding] meter and insane amounts of reverb. Now though, I'd like Oberst to find a way to also do that thing he usually does, which is make me cry.

Paper, and what it hath wrought

2005-03-07T20:10:00.000-08:00

Ms. Marrus, who has been writing letters since she went to summer camp, is convinced that there is a growing market for what she calls "the simple joy" of the handwritten note. -- NYT

Deception! There most certainly is not. Well, perhaps there is, but it's certainly not growing. Or, at least, not for long. . . if I can help it.

Speaking as a thoughtful, bright, [handsome] and highly learned individual who can only just barely write with traditional implements, and having countless friends equally bad with such tools, I can say, unequivocally, that there is no joy, simple or otherwise, in a handwritten note.

There, just now, I typed about 100 words. Took me a minute or two, probably. In that time, I also went to the bathroom. Last week, thanking three professors for writing letters of recommendation to graduate schools I have no chance of getting into, I handwrote cute little notes on expensive-ass cards telling them how much I appreciated them for indulging my futile endeavor. Took me two sweaty hours. And my hand cramped up. And you couldn't even read them. Thank God I made brownies.

Point being: I've only had computers since, say, 8th grade, a period of about 10 years--less than half my total years, and none of my most formative. Prior to getting my Quantex 486 DX2/66 from the pages of Computer Shopper, I won awards for penmanship. Now, looking at my gnarled e-Hooves clickety-clacking away at this keyboard, I see that it's hard to be both good at typing and good at writing and impossible to be skilled at both. People who are really good typists, if they have any sense at all, see the futility of dropping one's keyboard in favor of one's fountain pen and India inks. People who are really good word processors, further, measure the tools laid out before them on the computer screen against what their enfeebled man-paws can do with a pen and laugh.

I don't know what "summer camp" Ms. Marrus went to, but her bus certainly didn't reach it via the Information Superhighway. Nor did the respective busses of her aged peers. Hence, such people, though they may have adapted to a life of ecommerce and hypertasking, will inevitably long for the simpler life of their youth and young adulthood, when people hamfistedly communicated through marks scrawled with messy inks leaked from awkward cylinders.

Once these people die, so too will the paper economy.

In South Korea, right now [the most wired country on earth], countless people are taking dates to internet cafes, where they sit next to each other and instant message. Disturbing? Yes. Pitiful? Sure. A window into our near, near future? Word.

And when that day comes--our atmosphere an orange-hued reaper--I'd like to see Ms. Marrus stuff a hand-engraved, parfumed, cotton-papiered card into my hermetically-sealed Lexan bubble.

Get thee to hell, Prime Minister

2005-03-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Archbishop of Calgary said that the Holy See might want to think about excommunicating Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. Sounds almost quaint, especially coming from a continent built, in large part, on individualising and decentralizing [freeing] the religious experience.

Paul Martin, clearly a man of intelligence and integrity, will not be swayed by this overreach of ecclesiastical power for a myriad reasons.

First, it's never the Pope who does the excommunicating, but whomever the ranking local official is. Also, the thing about religion and its dogma is that its open to interpretation, which is why we currently have so many schisms in protestant churches like the Episcopalians and Anglicans. Similarly, the Catholic Church is not without its dissenters [see: almost every priest in every Jesuit University in America]. Knowing this and knowing the rules of excommunication, the Archbishop of Martin's diocese has remained quiet on the issue [which would be significant], making the Archbishop of Calgary's suggestion seem all the more flailing and flaccid a gesture. It further shows just how divided the Church is on this issue. Even if sympathizers to the 'Homosexual Agenda' within the clergy remain silent, in not acting, their voice is heard.

Thing is, even if he were to be excommunicated, Mr. Martin, a deeply religious man [who, for deeply religious reasons, no longer wants homosexuals given second class status in his country, a lesson to other deeply religious world leaders] would understand the act as a human detente against progressivism, not God's fury. He knows this on account of the following:

Events that made Excommunication Meaningless:
The Gutenberg Press -- For a long time reading wasn't that important because there wasn't much to read, and everything to read was mostly cloistered in some monastery somewhere. Monasteries are where all the churchies hang out. Thus, pretty much the only people who could read were priests, so theirs was the power to shape God's word as they saw fit. Gutenberg essentially gave book-lernin' to the masses, making reading [and eventually, learning to read] a cost-effective pass-time. When people started reading, they realized that none of the bullshit preacherman had been preaching for 1400 years was actually in the bible.
The Protestant Reformation -- Proved there was another game in town. Partial credit goes to the Great Schism for parting with Rome, but, as the Eastern Church and the Western maintained a sharp line of demarcation, Rome's power remained mostly absolute until Erasmus and Gutenberg's great equalizer lay the foundation for Zwigli and Luther. [Still, old habits die hard in Renaissance Europe, Luther was a rabid anti-Semite, making the break with Rome incomplete]
Vatican II -- Rome really shot themselves in the foot this time. By the 1970's most everyone knew how to read, diminishing the preacherman's monopoly as the conduit to God. However, also by the 1970's, almost everyone had forgotten how to read [or speak] Latin, the arbitrarily chosen holy language. So Vatican II rolls around and all these people, empowered by the ability to read and whatnot, complain further about their access to the almighty, and that their sacraments and worship should be in a language lay people can understand. Rome relents and localizes the holy liturgy. Everyone realizes that the dude in the hat isn't saying any kind of mystic or incomprehensible incantations, he's just repeating himself like 50 times and calling it a day.

. . . And so it came to be, in those days, that even the deeply religious understood excommunication was not a spiritual mandate from Almighty God, nay, but the political flailings of ineffectual men who long for the days of Crusades and Inquisitions.

[Archbishop Frederick Henry also served as the Calgary Stampede's Rodeo Princess for 2002]

Nazism and the Warhol of cadaver art

2005-03-02T20:37:00.000-08:00

There's quite a tumult in Poland these days. I should say: there's quite a tumult about Poland, and what might be built there, and by whom, and for what dastardly, bone-chilling reasons.

You've probably heard of this man, Gunther von Hagens. He's an anatomist and pathologist, formerly of Heidelberg University, who now makes his living freaking the hell out of people with his [patented] plasticized cadavers, former humans infused with various polymers, then carved up in interesting and artsy ways.

Once a mild-mannered research scientist with no artistic pretensions, He displayed his work at a University open house in the late 70's and has been doing cadaver art ever since. While he says he originally felt uneasy that his work was being considered art, that is, it was resonating emotionally with people, he gradually came to understand it.

plastination opens the hearts of the people to themselves. They recognize themselves, get a new kind of body pride.

The current controversy: he wants to build a factory in Western Poland to churn these suckers out. The facility would employ up to 300 people and would be located in the small town of Sieniawa Zarska, very close to both Prague and Berlin.

This seems to worry people. Certainly the commercialization of death is nothing new, but for some [the devout] it remains a sticky subject. So let's enumerate the concerns:

Artistic Medium is dead folks

Factory will mass-produce dead folk art
Western religions tend to sanctify the dead and their bodies

Factory will be in Poland, which is virtually 100% Catholic, 60% of whom consider themselves deeply religious

Poland is scene of another kind of industrial event involving human bodies, the Holocaust.

Those last three are, I believe, the kickers. Von Hagens already has a factory like this in China, where there are no strong cultural feelings about human remains and no connection to the Holocaust. I'd never heard the Orient factory mentioned anywhere before. Now, all of a sudden, the new site is Poland and the press are having a field day.

“How can a German come up with the idea of processing dead bodies for commercial use on Polish soil 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz?” one Polish daily asked.

Firstly, All Germans were not Nazis, and von Hagens is not a grave-robber, each cadaver he uses has consented while still alive. It's more of an ethical quandary for the person being plasticized than for von Hagens, because they are the ones obligated to address the feelings and fears of their loved ones, some of whom are probably religious. He's got factories doing this stuff, that makes him prodigious, not a monster.

Frankly, the biggest problem I have with von Hagens is that he's a bad artist. His compositions are trite and perfunctory. A man playing chess with his brain exposed. A body playing basketball. One hanging its skin on a coat rack. He's terrible, but there's nothing evil about his incompetence. He's certainly not Dr. Mengele. Where that doctor made infamous lampshades of human skin, von Hagens offers handy backpacks of, presumably, nylon. Again, tacky merchandising makes him a capitalist, not a monster.

I'm annoyed at the way the media--especially the American media--has tried to paint him as some kind of mad scientist, playing on people's fear of death and the cultural aversion to playing with remains without explaining his motives. Motives? He's just craaaaazy. Two years ago the BBC ran an article after von Hagens conducted the UK's first public autopsy in 170+ years. Then, they called him "a professor of anatomy" and went on to explain that his fascination with the human body comes from childhood: "it was seeing his first autopsy when he was 17, which he says absolutely fascinated him, that encouraged him to take up medicine."

Then yesterday, ABC, using a Reuters feed, ran this article, calling him a "Controversial German artist . . . known for his displays of preserved human corpses stripped of skin." The report then noted his desire to, "build a factory in Poland to mass-produce his art." A similar story run yesterday in the Telegraph is more measured and, well, journalistic, calling him an "anatomist". It then allows von Hagens to explain what the press chooses to call a factory is intended to be a "cathedral of science". Still weird--maybe more so--but that destroys the implicit argument that this shop and warehouse are simply for the wholesale distribution of desecrated remains to the consumer market.

The biggest part of the tumult, though, involves that 5th point up there. Turns out von Hagens' dad--who handled von Hagens' business affairs in Poland--was a stormtrooper.

Already suspect, von Hagens is now portrayed as a Nazi by association. Von Hagens denies it of course, saying he didn't know about his father's past, but we know the truth. He's gone so far as to fire the father, but that's smoke and mirrors. He's also going to replace him with a native Pole, whom we'll all decry as an Uncle Tom. The subtext of these articles is startling that way.

My friend [L] has an interesting story about her time in Germany. She was befriended by a couple Austrian students in a cafe and eventually [she says inevitably] the talk turned to the holocaust and how the German people try to hide or deny personal, familial involvement, since they can't escape the legacy as a nation. The girl [adjusted to represent L's bad Austrian caricature] said something like:

Eferyvon in Germany says zey housed a family of Jews. Eferyvon ver hiding little Anne Franks in zeyr Attik. Zis is just not pohssible. It is impohssible, no vahn vould have died if all der Germans had Jews in zeyr attiks.

Point being: There were very few innocents in Germany, and you can't throw a rock, be it Baden-Baden or Dresden, without hitting the descendent of a Nazi, them's the facts. There must come a time when we stop looking sidelong at people, condemning them for the sins of their forbears.

We can, however, condemn von Hagens for making crappy art, then shamelessly merchandising it. And condemn the world for buying it and making him rich. And then him again for wearing that fedora like the Indiana Jones of embalming.

Selectivity and inclusivity, now and then

2005-02-28T23:53:00.000-08:00

One day, some time ago, in the halls of my high school, a friend [K] walked up to me and asked, Hey, have you heard of the Dead Milkmen? This was a game we played with each other, a way of gauging who was the more culturally adroit. As we lived in a town named after a species of deer [no ready cable access] and attended a high school that required only 3/4 of the credits to graduate as the school you probably went to--and were further hampered by slow internet connections and the fact that, in 1998, the internet didn't really have anything on it anyway--we didn't know much about pop culture. So, to begin, the detentes were usually small and safe. We'd score points for being the first person to hear a band or song on 93ZOOFM and report back. Questions like, Hey have you heard of Weezer [this circa 1994] or Hey did you hear the new Prince song [Circa Purple Rain, no later, I swear] were common.

Then, sometime around 1995, our friends started snowboarding. Soon everyone--even those, like myself and this friend [K], who never actually snowboarded but sure as shit wanted to look like we did--everyone started buying their clothes and shoes and accessories at the not-so-local skate shop. You probably have one in your not-so-local vicinity. There, in this skate shop, were strange pieces of merchandise, unique to the hemisphere of what would later be called 'extreme sports.' These things were called 'tapes'. True to name, they were honest-to-God tapes, video ones, depicting snowboarders, skateboarders, BMXers, anything really ["Just so long as it wasn't corporate," they told us, in the days before they found a way to successfully go corporate].

These tapes, in addition to telling us how to dress and how to act and what to think and how to feel* [*only offering masculine feelings, like the pelvic tingle of hot snowboard chicks and the impotent rage of being pissed on while you sleep], also introduced us to a strange and foreign kind of music. Mostly punk, with a little hiphop, the unifying aspect of these power chords and breakbeats was that they were nothing at all like anything you'd ever hear on the ZOO.

Suddenly what was hip was anything that wasn't conventionally so, anything that hadn't been previously hip. We would be, and would remain, changed at the core. It meant no longer listening to anything on mainstream radio [though the consensus was that Weezer would be grandfathered into this new and contrarian lifestyle]. NOFX, Pennywise, Social Distortion, Bad Religion all rocked our trans-pubescent worlds--rocked them hard--and did so without ever, ever, selling out, something no one really understood the intricacies of [it was connected, somehow, to going corporate], but which all knew was not to be done. Most of us figured selling out was communicable, so we'd never admit to listening to the ZOO, and when someone slipped up [especially if they owned like a Burton coat or something] we'd call them out as heretics of our youth rebellion, slandering them mercilessly. NARC! Poser! Those who screamed the loudest were surely the most Just, the most Faithful. Those not with us were against us.

Rancid, a band, now mostly forgotten, was the hottest shit one summer, until the day the ZOO played Ruby Soho. By the dawn of the next they had been stricken from every place of honor. I hid my CD so as not to be tempted by it. Thankfully, it didn't really catch with the ZOO kids, so after a lengthy quarantine . . . Out Come the Wolves was admitted back into our ideological cannon.

To sound as trite as I possibly can: that thing we worshipped, I think, was youth itself. Youth and rebellion. However, most of our parents were really nice and our teachers permissive and I suppose most of us were fairly logical, so the rebellion part never really manifested outwardly per se, against the structures of power; God, family and school. But we were thinking it. Oh yes. We were just waiting for someone to impose their values on us, tell us what to be or how to act. On the day that happened, we were prepared to do exactly what those board-riding tapes and punk CDs had suggested.

actions could erase all the fear we suffer/
people segregated no one understands each other/
he's a different color but we're the same kid/
I will treat him like my brother he'll treat me like his/
...
the inner city's burnin' yea it's screamin' black and blue/
the power and the passion of a million youth

Yes, that. Our city was a Post Office, a VFW and a place called "The Backwoods Store" but, by God, did we scream, with power, with passion, and usually, with Miller Highlife and Goldschlager Cinnamon Schnapps. Individualism! A hundred mall-shopping rednecks called out, in unison. Power. We were a motley and vigorous cultural experiment, nay a movement, free to anyone with $500 for a snowboard [or at least the matching coat]. God that was great, the life of the elect, completely free of posers and existential irony.

But, but . . . there was a point to this story . . . "Hey, have you heard of the Dead Milkmen?" Remember how I said a friend asked me that? A thousand words ago or so, at the top there.

About then K and I had kind of decided that the rest of our friends had listened to but not really heard the music that bound us. They had spoken and sang the messages of inclusion and unity but had failed to internalize this punk ethics--so we shunned them. Because they were lukewarm, we spit them out of our mouths, but not in any real, demonstrable sense. The power of such movements lie in their great numbers, and, like an inquisition, it only took one whisper--poseur--from one darkened corner to bring down a whole, carefully-crafted persona. So K and I, we kept up appearances, drank and sang and pumped our fists and pretended to snowboard, but secretly we went out on our own, to the very hinterlands of even this, our most fringe of teen groups. And we searched. For music. That spoke. To our souls.

That kind of soul-speak you can't hear on the ZOO, remember, nor even on snowboard tapes.

Then, on that fortuitous morning, K walked up and asked me about these weirdos, these punks, previously unknown even to we few, so in the know. He said he'd found them in a discount tape rack at a convenience store on Highway 2, behind Martina McBride's Greatest Hits. I was dubious but soon turned, though not ever as fully as he did, to the subversive dissonance that is [was] the Dead Milkmen. They had songs; Lord had they songs. Songs about reckless consumerism [Bitchin' Camaro], about spousal abuse [Gonna Beat My Wife], about New Wave kids [You'll Dance to Anything], about finding your Messiah in the signature drink [Manishevitz wine] of a culture that is resistant to the idea of messiahs [I dream of Jesus]. They were just what a good counter-culture movement should be: anti-everything. They were anti-establishment, anti-coherent theses, anti-singable choruses. Their music, far from the elaborate production of even the punkest of punk bands at the time, sounded like it came from a Radio Shack microphone hooked to a tape deck sitting in the middle of a grain elevator. "These guys don't give a fuck about anything," I remember K saying. He was right.

The last thing they cared to do was offer alternatives to the lives and lifestyles they caricatured and lampooned. The world was a festering sore--a sucking chest-wound--they proclaimed, and the band-aid of activism was useless, the triple antibiotic ointment of change, ineffectual.

No, the only thing to do with such a flesh schism is to pick at it.

Such a glorious thing, this criticism and superiority without personal accountability. I immediately took to it. Rather, I continued what I'd always been doing, empowered by the knowledge that there were other people doing it too. Cool people.

My immutable high school truths:
Everything sucks.
Nothing will change.

That, my 80,000 dollar college education would teach me, is essentially Nihilism [Rancid, in hindsight, wrote a song about it], and it's great. It's the absolute best thing to happen to a kid who's smart enough to have realized there's something screwy about the status quo, but too dumb [and lazy] to find a way to change it. You might catch a nihilistic young punk saying--probably over the churn and yowl of the Sex Pistols tape his mom just got him--"Gaw there aren't any good revolutions any more," without reflecting that revolutions don't just happen, and that the Sex Pistols didn't revolutionize anything except working class Cockney fashion. When there is no moral impetus, you can't feel guilty about sitting on your ass. Right up my alley.

[Sex Pistols also killed rock and roll, but my friend K says he's pretty sure it was already mostly dead anyway.]

In college I grew out of nihilism, kinda, once Nietzsche told me what was wrong with it, and I sought out progressive bands who had also grown out of it. These bands sought to reinvent rock whilst simultaneously reinventing our minds and our social strata. Fugazi was doing such things while I was toddling and I had some catching up to do. Post-punk it was called, and what a great and descriptive name that was. Ian MacKaye was a prophet, preaching the coming of a [highly dubious, pinko] utopia that, if we'd all just try a little harder, would be just about perfect for just about everyone. Wow was that going to be cool. I got excited about that.

But, in the meantime [aka my adolescence and young manhood], NAFTA had happened and Republicans controlled the legislature and later the presidency [after someone decided to run an android against everybody's best friend from college], labor movements were losing clout with the rise of outsourcing. I realized with some desperation that this strange, smelly, small-concert-venue egalitarian political ethics would never see the light of day.

Later, sometime after I first heard the name John Forbes Kerry, I realized that this woeful state of affairs, the wealth gap, the education crisis, unaffordable health care--all the multifarious incongruencies of capitalism--the things post-nihilist me had railed against as new and startling evils, would not have changed even with a different legislature or executive. These things had been going on since well before I came to be here, in this lanky body, in this little town, listening to this angry music. It had been happening, probably, since the discovery of fire or the first irrigation project. A cynic might say humans--or at least their nation-states--were born on stratification. That egality is a heckuva idea for deer and moron college kids, but that civilization just can't function that way. It's fine for the kibbutz but impractical for the industrialized super power. Where does that leave us?

Even after women's suffrage and the civil rights movement and the coming [inevitable!] acceptance of homosexuality, there will still be people who can't feed themselves and can't keep themselves healthy and are denied, fundamentally, all those wonderful things the founding fathers talked about every person having. This is inevitable. There is a finite amount of resources, of capital. Money don't grow on trees.

And we'll have names for these people, these degenerates. They will be bad names, epithets. But no longer Nigger or Faggot or Feminist. They'll be Low-life; White-[black-, red-, yellow-]Trash; Welfare Mother [Father]; Leech; Drain. They'll be Poor People, and we'll hate them because they aren't like us. They'll be brought up poor and they'll stay poor. They'll raise poor children. They'll be sickly and they'll smell and we'll hate them. Because. They aren't like us. And they won't be suitable for employment, like us. Because, you know . . . they aren't like us.

These people--filthy--looking to pull even, to start level, they're communists and pagans. They hate America and God and our magnificent freedom. You want medicine? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps friend. If you can't afford bootstraps, that's just the providence of the free market. This is the Calvinist capitalism. Taxation is theft. The wealthy are elect. Who the hell are you? They're the Narcs, Posers. Trying to act like us, be us. Heathy. Alive. But we'll see through that. We've gotten really good at seeing through that. We know how to deal with them, did that in high school.

That other thing, though, it was such a good idea. Great even. That thing between Nihilism and whatever this angry and impotent new thing I feel is. Egalitarianism. Egality. That was a hell of a thing.

Pity it didn't work out.

Well fought though.

Handsome Boy Modeling School - White People

2005-02-24T14:41:00.000-08:00

Review -- As you know by now, I approach anything by Dan the Automator the way that smelly girl Sheena, from fourth grade, approached tater tot Fridays. Left hand over mouth, right briskly fanning myself. Ohmygawd, ohgawd, ohgawd, raspy and high-pitched, trying not to hyper-ventilate. Since the first time Peter Murray popped Dr Octagon into his player freshman year of college I've been hooked. I heard the first Handsome Boy Modeling School album soon after and the two albums, taken in tandem, unveiled to my hickish, malformed teen brain the possibilities of hip-hop as a destination art form, rather than merely something to listen to when you got tired of your Bad Religion albums.

HBMS is a team-up with Prince Paul, a fairly seminal DJ in his own right. In high school, his work on Gravediggaz' first album helped break the rap stranglehold WuTang Clan had on my tape deck since freshman year.

So there's that, the three of us share a lot of history [known only to myself], and I credit them with much of the open-mindedness I possess today. Gravediggaz made me scared when I was brave, Deltron 3030 made me feel space-aged even in my vintage wrangler shirts, Dr Octogon made me laugh at poop and pee when I thought I was over that sort of thing, and HBMS reminded me that personal grooming is important, even if you never talk to any girls.

But I'd heard really, unequivocally bad things about this new album, White People, so I avoided it the way Cure fans avoid Blue Sunshine. Then, in Seattle this past weekend, I came across a used copy of their first album and bought it again [I lose CDs at a rate of 3 per hour], which meant I obviously also had to buy their new CD as well. Which meant I also had to buy a handful of non-rap CDs so the guy with the devil-lock at the register wouldn't think I was trying to date a black girl or something.

White People is bad--real bad--but, contrary to what I'd heard, not unequivocally so. By now I'm just about sick to death of hearing HBMS mainstay Del tha Funky Homosapien rap over an Automator beat, but the first album's strength was the eclectic collaborations Prince Paul and Automator willed into existence. This time, like last, while the usual suspects burnish tired flows, the guests shine like new dimes. White People has John Oates [yeah, of Hall and Oates], The Mars Volta, The Rza, and even schizophrenic indie diva Cat Power. The result is spotty at best. On I've Been Thinking, the latter brings her sad, frightened croon to lyrics Coolio gave up on ten years ago.

You can slide slide slippity slide/you can hip hop, and don't stop

She sounds really uncomfortable saying such things. It's hilarious.

The Greatest Mistake, with John Oates, is all fuzz-wah guitar and trite lyrics delivered with that crappy Jason-Mraz-style white boy funk thing. It will play well on college radio.

The most fully executed track is the simple drum beat, Bee Gees violin and dirty riffs of A Day in the Life. It's a good compliment to Rza's marble-mouthed kung-fu growl.

We collect antique ammunitions and plus we got them big guns you only see in science fictions

The chorus is supplied with the usual operatic decadence of Mars Volta's Bixler and Rodriquez-Lopez.

How many times have you let your tongue go slip from the grin in your teeth and the cracks of your lips/ I never heard such nerve before, but your vanity'll spill slowly through the cracks in my pores/Just to please you honey

But then, after that, they replay a Tim Meadows skit they'd already put on the first album. Tacky.

So here, go to iTunes or whatever and get those tracks [not The Greatest Mistake], then write a letter to The School, reminding them of their pedigree and asking them to clean up their act and fly straight.

Into the trite, I commend thee

2005-02-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

Or: Things Constantine taught me that I already knew

Here are the first 16 that came to mind . . .

Anything with a cross on it kills demons [and vampires].
Anything blessed by a priest kills demons [and vampires].
Demons are a lot like vampires.
Hell is Los Angeles after a hydrogen bomb.
Spoofing comic book cliches while also slavishly exploiting them isn't hip or tongue-in-cheek or post-modern.
Smoking is risky.
You don't have to worry about plot holes if your source material is dogmatic tradition.
Committing suicide is risky.
You don't have to worry about plot holes if your hero is always running.
"There's no 17th act of Corinthians"
Suggesting the Bible has missing chapters no one has ever seen is a great way ease your guilt over all those damn plot holes.
The nice-guy-is-a-crazy-villain twist ceases to be a twist if every movie has a nice guy who's really a crazy villain.
Gavin Rossdale is in league with Satan.
The William Shatner cadence delivered by any one else still sounds like William Shatner.
Gavin Rossdale dressed up like Morrisey still sucks like Gavin Rossdale.
The Earth bar where Satan's minions kick it plays adult contemporary rock--just like Gavin Rossdale.

. . . also the actual number of chapters in Corinthians.

Bonus: no one on the internet grasps the difference between commend and command.
Also: lots of people on the internet liked Constantine.

Hunter S Thompson remembered, by proxy

2005-02-21T13:54:00.000-08:00

or Judge a man by his acolytes? Why sure.

I didn't know him in any meaningful way, so I think the best way to eulogize a guy who recently ate a bullet, but who had previously been a fairly influential writer--nay a pop-culture juggernaut, the god-head of a self-indulgent one-man literary movement--would be to map out the effect he had on my life and the lives of other people I know. Frankly, other than two pretty decent movies based on his life, there's not much good to report.

I liked his writing well enough, and he's anti-Bush, but he just didn't grab me by the any of the meaningful places his work often seizes others by. The friends [only one really] who have done most of the drugs Thompson listed, chronicled, and re-listed are dubious about just how good a time he was having while on them. "That's just bullshit, you don't feel like that" I believe, was that friend's reaction. For other friends [still only one really], too scared to actually do any of the things Thompson did, but still possessed of a pointless malaise and an addictive personality, Thompson's effects were more disastrous--mostly on my pocketbook and my personal stash of cheap booze [remember: letting people see where you stash your booze defeats the purpose of having a stash at all].

So my run-ins with Hunter S Thompson will really be recollections of one moronic friend [K] who, somehow, identified with the man despite sharing none of his experiences or predilections above the passing desire to be a journalist. I've always assumed he wants to be a journalist because his other favorite author is Hemingway. More likely he enjoys seeing alcoholism romanticized by productive people.

I rented a house with K right after coming home from a year in Italy. He'd spent his in a shithole towneshippe south-west of London. This house was to be shared with three other people, one of whom K'd dated briefly many years previous and whom he still carried a torch for. Soon after moving in, it was clear that this girl had no intention of getting back together with K, despite his best efforts. Before the last of his things was even moved in, he'd set about moping and ho-humming and acoustic-guitaring Clash songs. He buffered all of this with staggering amounts of drink. Self-defeating as it sounds, I knew these acts were thematically encoded transmissions to the girl, letting her know that he still liked her and that life without her just weren't no good. She responded in similarly oblique fashion: she started sleeping with K's brother for a while.

Just about then, give or take the day he ritually destroyed all of his books [and a few of mine] and broke that innocent but hopelessly-out-of-tune guitar, he set about cobbling together a costume that allowed him to more closely mimic the man whose books he'd left in tact. From then on, with crusher and boat shoes, a pipe empty of tobacco, aviator sunglasses, Rum Diary and Hell's Angels tucked into trouser pockets, K set about making my life utter goddamned hell. I suppose he made everyone's life hell, but I'd been stupid enough to put all the utilities and what not in my name, so my hell involved real earth dollars, not just purloined alcohol and cigarettes.

Hell was five of us in an old house with a crumbling foundation in a bad neighborhood full of methamphetamine and intimate partner violence. The back yard was large and supported roughly a hundred thousand rosebushes that [magically] bloomed almost 10 months out of the year and added a fake austerity that somehow transcended [for me personally] the cat-piss reek indoors. The whole situation would have been more than manageable, the rosebushes were high enough and dense enough to keep the neighborhood out, mostly, unless we wanted to let it in--to go slumming--and watch our neighbors kick and scream and stab each other while we, behind bushes and barred-windows, watched with giddy terror. But the false-bottomed sanctity of that rosey wall was obliterated when, less than a week into our tenancy, K took root on the stoop, swaying and cussing daily, from six in the morning until whenever the booze ran out.

From there it was all stumbling off to sleep in neighbor's yards, crashing their graduation parties, passing out in a Honey Bucket at Hoopfest, getting mugged then felt up in Mission Park and, eventually, the DUI that probably should have come much sooner.

K displays a little hurt still, when talking about the mugging and mild sexual assault, that he'd come to me at 4 in the morning scared and piss drunk without a wallet or a clue about what to do, and I turned him away. I locked my door. Then I get a little sad too, but just for effect, then tell him to go to hell.

I found a job by late June, about a month after I got back. He found one in September. That is, I had my parents cash in some favors and find a job for him so that I wouldn't have to drive him to the blood bank or hold him down while he called his parents and asked for money or sleep with my wallet. Slowly, after he got the job and the girl moved out--kinda--and he started paying his bills, the costume went away and he became, more or less, the K of old, who was still a walking scandal and a unrepentant thief and a goddamned sad sap, but he wasn't drinking as much, and he'd put those damned books away, so it was okay to be friends with him again.

I still sleep with my wallet.

So that's my view of Hunter S Thompson. People who know about drugs think he was a little optimistic about them, people who don't think he was some kind of messiah. Such people usually go on to ruin my life. On par, I didn't really like him.

K remains the only person I've slapped out of malice [Jeremy Jordan, who kicked my ass in 8th grade, doesn't count because I was trying to make a fist].

Unpopular girl monkeys lose sex drive

2005-02-18T21:45:00.000-08:00

. . . in so doing, lose any chance of becoming popular.

newscientist.com's got monkeys! God have they got monkeys. Monkeys galore. These monkeys, though, they're not just show monkeys, these monkeys tell us things, possibly about ourselves. Shocking things. Perhaps even genetically normative things.

See, these are science monkeys.

The science monkeys [through their language-using handlers] have interesting things to say about possible correlatives between popularity and a host of infirmities. For instance, we already know that, for humans, being a social outcast causes depression, which can lead to heart disease and potentially death. Brits in menial jobs with no friends die young, sounds almost intuitive. This new study of cynomolgus monkeys, published in The Journal of Biological Psychology, notes the same health affects as their human counterparts, along with something else that I find very interesting. These monkeys, like most primates, show a high level of social sophistication and stratification. Like their cubicle-sitting, upright-walking cousins, the farther down the social strata you go, the more likely you are to be emaciated [probably the opposite is true of humans] and have heart disease, owing to depression. But more bizarre is the effect on sexually mature females. The study noted that, as in close knit groups of human ladies, the monkeys tended to menstruate at the same time, in the unpopular ones, "levels of oestrogen and progesterone both dipped, indicating impaired ovarian function."

What does this say about our own species? Could socialization have been helped along by some sort of gene that shuts off the baby factory in those who aren't socially adept?

mp3s: Devendra Banhart

2005-02-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

Mike, in his arithmetic wisdom, made good sport of deconstructing The Arcade Fire. That was a week ago, and in the intervening days, I've had access to a broadband connection. With that and a little moxie I've coaxed into existence tAF's utter antithesis, Devendra Banhart.
These are from his penultimate release, Rejoicing in the Hands, I'd heard about him a long time ago--probably when the album actually dropped--but Pitchforkmedia, where I'd seen the review, has this wierd thing of not always liking good bands. Sometimes they like something I utterly abhor. With a name like Devendra Banhart and mug that looks equal parts Charles Manson and Ernest Hemingway, I figured he might be one of those.

He wasn't. What exactly he is, I haven't really figured out yet, probably closer to Ricky Skaggs and Billie Holiday, but even that is simplistic. Who are those people? A bluegrass juggernaut and a jazz singer who died almost 50 years ago. So old, but more than merely retro, his albums have a studied archival feel. From the simple arrangements [rarely employing even percussion] to the vocals sung as though through a Campbell's Soup Can, his sound actually feels like it was made in the period. Kitschy? Yeah. Dated? Maybe, but not at all fake sounding.

There's a sincerity and scholarship to his gender-neutral vibrat that evokes and brings current musical forms that lost favor before my dad was born. It's wierd, but compelling. His lyrics have a lush and meandering quality, taking time to develop and elaborate on patterns and images that build on and juxtapose themselves to create swells and troughs of feeling. The formal repetition aids this greatly.

I know I was born, I was born/when I slipped out of my mother's womb/I know it was warm, it was warm/because I slipped out on a hot afternoon
And I know there was sun there was sun/because I felt it on my human skin/And I know it was done, it was done, when I saw the moon risin'

Because of the repetition, the accompanying guitar often sounds like early Leonard Cohen, another significant thing, but like Cohen, the simplicity and repetition never outstays its welcome. Banhart successfully navigates complex sentiments in around 2 powerful minutes. I can't get enough.

Insect Eyes, I think, is actually in sonnet form, but I can't be sure. If it is, indeed, then it's a wonderful and perverse update of Shakespeare's satiric 130th. Actually, there's no way it could be a sonnet, what a stupid idea. It still feels Elizabethan.

Your black two lips have time/and your hands rejoice in mine
That seed, it grows all day/that seed, it grows all night/and our veins are intertwined

So there it was. One dude, one guitar, a warbling falsetto and 50 odd songs later I was in tears, teeth-knashing, lamenting audibly that this 20-year-old hadn't managed to release more albums, worlds for me to swim around in. Even putting out two a year, as he did in 2004, won't nearly sate my desire for his pretensionless anachronisms. The utter goddamned shame of it all.

My ships are frozen sticks, they lay stuck to the floor/My wrists and my breasts are bleeding bricks, they don't float anymore .

The terror that Adam's sin unleashed

2005-02-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

. . . was the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But Noah let it on the Ark anyway, according to the new Creation Museum. The ambitious 25-million dollar monument to absurdity will re-prove definitively to indoctrinated morons that T-Rex and all his dino pals lived and worked right alongside all of earth's contemporary mammal life, including a plucky species of soft, chewy ape. Details are still to be hammered out, but this information suggests this new complex of learning will follow closely the toddler-friendly Hanna/Barbera theory of speciation.

While many historical museums choose to include artifacts that actually came from history, curators at the Creation Museum are blazing a brave new trail, making sure that everything on display is brand-spanking new.

This "wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the Scripture" will be a beacon to all believers, shining brightly from the cultural hub of Petersburg, in Northern-gatdam-Kentucky.

Strangely, after searching the internet for hours and finding tons of blog traffic on this, I have yet to find any of the site's frequently asked questions actually being asked, by anyone. The questions that are asked, unfortunately have not been answered, questions such as "who the hell are you people," and "Oh God they've given them money." The latter, in fairness, isn't a question.

The organization's website, Answers in Genesis, also features instructions for planting bombs in schools. Ostensibly an indictment of evolution, the cartoonist failed to mention, of course, that bullet-point number 2 has less to do with Charles-gatdam-Darwin than with James-gatdam-Madison.

Then, if you don't feel convinced, browse the archival evidence that evolution is the driving force behind abortion [and feminism], euthanasia [and humanism], racism, misogyny and both Communism and Nazism [fascism] which are, of course, polar opposite movements. Evolution's misogyny is a particular slap in the face to creationists because, before Darwin, keeping women pregnant and in the kitchen had been the exclusive territory of religious conservatives. Frankly they want it back.

Men lost a rib, so women lose their personhood. That's called a balance of power folks.

While they're right about evolution's contribution to U.S. eugenics projects, that kind of Aristotelian end-focused selection bears no resemblance to current Evolutionary theory. The problem, it turns out, is that some zealots thought Darwin's Natural Selection was a path to God, so they forcibly sterilized people with glaucoma.

Eugenics ended not by removing Evolution from science, but by removing God from Evolution.

Yeah I got this from Maureen Dowd, who most likely got it from the 10,000 bloggers that were on it a month ago. That makes me uninformed. I'd like to point out that again she draws the wrong conclusions.

Memoir

2005-02-02T03:05:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that I haven't spoken in sometime about a subject dear to me, my inconstant progress though life.

This installment finds me tending shop in a small township in Washington's eastern prefecture, bordered on the North and Northeast by the grand Spokane Valley. To my proximate west lie the channeled scablands, an undeservedly bad-ass name, and all the tedium they bring. Here, in this mining camp of malaise, this border fort at the confluence of nothing in particular, fierce libertarianism and grain subsidies live together without the slightest irony. Farmers till and sow the very soil, or not--depending on the mood of the USDA--and earn the same either way, while the youth of other small towns converge on a regional university to ensure that they will not, ultimately, meet the same fate. Somewhere, in the midst of this, dwell I, attempting feats of suggestion to discourage these disparate types from parking their cars here and engaging me in acts of business.

I will not be accepting your currency today, I project--kindly but firmly--through the sounding board of my frontal lobe, there will be no goods offered hence, nor any services rendered. Most people get the hint.

Father says January and February are his slowest months. With me in the shop, he's right.

It's not as though I wouldn't want to parley with some frontier type--I'm terribly lonely here--but I haven't yet met anyone who lives up to my mind's lofty expectations. Ideally she would be an elderly trapper, a widow. Fattened by her prodigious trade and able to settle down, She'd spin yarns of her continual march back to the wild, pulled by a love of nature's creatures. A love expressed in the simple desire to kill them and take their skins. We'd talk of Baudelaire and the territoriality of feral cats. Upon meeting, monthly--she in town for dry goods and hardtack, I quietly tending shop--we'd hug the big hugs of bawdy folk, unashamed of our affection for one another. She'd hail from the forests of Baden-Baden, but speak the queer Gaelic inflection of a Newfoundlander. To bad no one like that exists.

As it is, my only companions are foul-mouthed drunkards who hide their considerable wealth in vast expanses of fallow land. Their complaints are numerous but uniform and hinge on an apparently startling number of people hereabouts who's fat, and so gatdammed ugly you can't hardly stand it to look at 'em. One of these elderly gentlemen, a real-estate mastermind I'm told, sports a red ball cap with an upturned bill and the finest set of manufactured teeth you're likely to ever see. He affects a slack-jawed ignorance that hybridizes Columbo and Moose from Archie and Veronica, yet he has steely, intelligent eyes. His stupified look and penetrating gaze make me feel like a joke is being played on me. Watching his interaction with others, it seems as though he's playing it on them as well.

So I try to keep my mind sharp against such trickery by undertaking feats of science and induction. Today alone I discovered the exact number of sheets the office shredder can handle without jamming. Utilizing the myriad newsprint flyers at my disposal and through careful planning and execution according to accepted standards and practices, I've concluded the number is 24, no more, no less. If fed incorrectly, leading edge off-parallel with the device's teeth, that number often drops to 18.

I've also begun to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, written this thing here, studied up on the dialects of Newfoundland and Labrador to add depth to a passing comment made about a fictional woman, then looked further into Hiberno-English and it's variants, which are funny and quaint.

What have you done with your day?

Now, as the 4 o'clock hour approaches, I conclude that my mind tricks have been mostly successful, for a Wednesday, keeping all intrusions at bay save that of ~~that gatdammed Newfoundlander~~ Graham Bell's soul projector. The phone is outside my mind's range, as I lack both the psi-rating and technology to project such distances. I'm currently fashioning a crude transmitter from discarded aluminum windows, from which I hope to blanket the area in brainwaves like a wireless hotspot of psionic coercion.

In the meantime, it's edifying to watch people drive through our parking lot on the way to other businesses. Makes me feel generous and sad--maybe a little noble--alone here, waiting to serve.

Six dollar and fifty cent baby

2005-01-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

I knew it was going to be a good movie-going experience when, at a theatre where I was carded going into The Life Aquatic, the zit-speckled sentry with the power to discount my ticket didn't even ask to see my ID when I told him I was a student. I don't actually have an ID anymore, and I was betting on just such a response. Poor kid's not going to last very long at Regal Cinemas.

Then again, sometimes Dame Fortune, she smiles on you.
I realized early on that my critical palate was soiled, that I wasn't able to tackle Million Dollar Baby with the singular focus the movie deserved. This is the trouble with seeing movies after the Oscar nominations have been announced. Rather than the simple rubric of what is good and what is bad about a given movie, I am preoccupied with specificities: did Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman/Hillary Swank deserve their respective nominations? Will they win?

These are essentially the same questions I ask anyway but, having some external benchmark, I also start to question my own opinions. What do these people--industry types, degrees of separation closer than I--see that I don't see? When the movie has been nominated for 7 academy awards, and almost all the big ones, the pressure is especially great.

I really hate that.

Adding to the discomfort, Million Dollar Baby is essentially two movies. The first is a formulaic tale of overcoming adversity. With a plucky protagonist, a surly mentor, a wizened old sidekick, and a handful of colorful side characters, the first hour-and-a-half you've seen a million times before. You've seen it in Rocky, you saw it in Mighty Ducks, Major League and even, you know, Top Gun. The first two acts are fun and heartwarming and wouldn't get nominated for anything. Morgan Freeman might squeak in as the one-eyed ex-boxer, but I don't think he'd win.

I was beside myself trying to figure out what Eastwood had done that was so fantastic, but I just couldn't get it. Maggie's journey is imbued with a powerful sense of destiny. The pacing is brisk, obstacles are overcome quickly. There's very little time for the characters to doubt themselves or their abilities. Maggie's ascent is as quick and sharp as her left hook. As an audience, we like her because she's so damned determined and so damned good. She's the LeBron James of women's welter weight boxing. She's not actually big enough to fight welter weight, but nobody her size will fight her, so she has to fight up several classes. Her character, like her record in the ring, in unimpeachable. She passes up chances for betterment to stay with her mentor. She is unmoved by the trappings of success. She uses her considerable winnings to help others while living in little more than a tenement. This imperviousness to the world and her forceful presence in the ring give the story a very beguiling and mythic feel.

Then the movie changes, becoming something totally different. The action climaxes with a force so unexpected that it knocked the wind out of me and sent the film spinning in completely new directions. There, on screen, something happened that made my jaw drop and my hand instinctively rise to cover it. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my free arm around them like some damned child looking for solace. Somehow, this simple movie had managed something that no other movie has. It made me, in utter disbelief, gasp like my mom. Suddenly it is obvious that Eastwood and screen writer Paul Haggis have been playing us for suckers, this will not be a film of easy success or simple redemption.

Morgan Freeman's character, Scraps, narrates, and quickly we realize that only now, after ~~shrieking like your high-strung mother~~ the climax of action, can the real movie begin. That's the reason for the odd brevity: there's a more important story left to tell. Still, what becomes a rich and fulfilling emotional payoff would be blunted without a detailed inquest of both Maggie and Frankie's lives. Only in seeing her skyward ascent can we appreciate the finality of her circumstance, and only by seeing the man Frankie Dunn [Eastwood] is, can we understand why he must do what he, ultimately, does. So Scraps is in a tough place, with two very different but interdependent stories to tell, and he manages it admirably.

Eastwood's direction mimics Scraps' unadorned speech. The only conceit he allows himself are subtle homages to The Third Man. Simple sleights of lighting ensconce the characters in shadow, a trick he's used since The Bridges of Madison County. In shirking the gimmickry and gauzy sentimentality of many sports movies, Eastwood forces the weight of narrative onto the shoulders of the characters, who all give gorgeous, quiet performances.

By the end, Million Dollar Baby has become none of the things it pretended to be initially. Despite the divergence, the two ends eventually meet, and the movie never feels fractured or fake. Eastwood has told a story that is both a simple, rousing sports flick and something much more painful, real and, well, Oscar-worthy.

Sword-crossed lovers

2005-01-25T13:18:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid and I'd play war with my buddies from the neighborhood [neighborhood meaning the 3 closest houses by foot through the forest], I was always the one that'd just been gut-shot, the one fighting off gangrene. In the tide of intense mock-battle, I took up the mantle of war-muse, inspiring the pity and rage of my compatriots, creating a personal cause for which to take up arms. "Treeeeeeevooooor [my name of choice]! Blllaarrrgh!" Tom would say, springing from our hand-dug trench--usually in slow motion--to wring vengeance from the pulp of a vast, cruel world. This usually lasted about five minutes before Tom and Jay tired of trying to patch my wounds. The two would then wander off in search of excuses to accidentally sock younger kids in the face with the butts of laser rifles. I, however, would remain, fighting my private war against God for the glory of melodrama, reveling in the aesthetically rich act of dying with honor. I didn't know it at the time, but I was Chinook Lane's Zhang Yimou.

His newest movie, House of Flying Daggers is much like my performance as that gut-shot private first class with no last name, a heart-wrenching and vivid portrayal of anguish and grief--one that's still writhing and kicking in front of your eyes long after you've stopped caring.

It is sentimentalism forced through gritted teeth and hacked at with swords. It's the worst romance novel your mom ever read rewritten by your martial arts-obsessed friend Seth. It's a near perfect example of Wuxia genre cinema and, perhaps as a result, often unbearable to watch. That's a shame, because House of Flying Daggers is the most visually stunning movie I've seen since--maybe ever.

As in previous films, Yimou goes in for visual decadence, drenching the screen in color. Hero focused itself on single colors, taking each in turn, varying tones and shades to suggest meanings lying beneath the tales themselves and to hint at the prejudices of its storytellers. This worked beautifully for a movie that told the same story from several opposing viewpoints. Flying Daggers, told in a frilless, straight ahead narrative, allows the colors to mix with one another, creating complex patchworks of visual symbol I can't even begin to wade through. And while Hero was full of color ramped up to the brightest, richest possible hue, at select points in Flying Daggers Yimou chooses to wash out sections of frame. During a climactic battle, he drains the yellows from the field in which two men fight, leaving a hazy white foreground against brilliant autumnal colors. Minutes later, as rage builds and the fight takes on supernatural dimensions, affecting the very seasons, Yimou obscures the rest of the scene in a maelstrom of snow as well. Where the grandeur of Hero's cinematography was often purposefully caricatured, House of Flying Daggers displays a studied--and more mature--nuance throughout.

Frustrating then, that such visual beauty would be met with dialogue whose mediocrity I have a tough time expressing. Slapdash, hackneyed, inane and spent all work, but some kind of guttural roar of frustration might be closest to what I was feeling whenever these gorgeous people opened their mouths. Something like blllllaaaaarrgghghgh; so horrible I can't speak it. It ended up a tremendous detriment to the experience. There are of course, questions of translation and whatnot and that's not to say the love in this story feels cheap or fake. There is real chemistry between Zhang Ziyi and co-star Takeshi Kaneshiro, but it's not in their words, it's in quiet moments between lavish action sequences, and even in the action itself, as cool technique and mastery of arms often gives way to hacking and slashing with blind passion and personal disregard. While brilliantly shot, it's ultimately unfortunate that a writer/director who exacts such precise control of his visuals and such care in crafting unspoken emotion would treat the dialogue like a throw away element.

Thematically, it's a story about love and death and how the two are often connected--especially in a place where everyone has a sword. But there's a point, in that climactic scene, as two master swordsman are driven by some other-worldly chivalric love to literally cut each other to pieces, that the film almost becomes more, transcending the hokey dialogue certainly, but transcending even the genre itself. As this battle rages, spawned of a friendship divided by a love triangle orchestrated--to an extent--by warring factions, Yimou momentarily cuts away and shows imperial troops headed for a clash with the rebels. In contrast to the emotion and individuality of the two combatants, the imperial troops are faceless and uniform, their swords raised back at an impractical angle. Right then, Flying Daggers feels like more than just a love story, more than even a story of manipulation and betrayal. It feels like something timeless, an allegory of how passion and duty are instruments wielded by the powerful to incite people to kill and be killed for affairs of state. In that moment it seemed as though a great upswell was coming to elevate the story--finally--above a mere exercise in chivalry. But then someone talks and, you know, ruins it.

From there Zhang Yimou entrenches himself firmly in the melodrama he has created, becoming preoccupied with a half-dozen or so fake deaths and real deaths, swoons and finally, kind of, redemption. It overstays its welcome, but everything before it is so rivetting I wasn't going anywhere for a while anyway. In never returning to the larger battle against the state, it seems as though he saw what the movie might become and shrank from it. That's a presumptuous gripe, but it's unfortunate that a movie of such magnificent scale should ultimately be so narrow in scope.

Mom, creditors are bugging me

2005-01-24T19:20:00.000-08:00

Twixter Coverage Part Two: Proximate Causes -- In some kind of uncanny and inexplicable coincidence, officials at the University of Florida have noted increased numbers of parents who are unable or unwilling to cut the cord, remaining closely involved with their children's lives even when they go off to college. Often these so-called helicopter parents go so far as to fight their children's battles for them.

"Now we're often seeing the initial call coming from the parents instead of the students. Say it's something like a late charge on rent, the parent will say, 'What do I need to do?' and they'll handle it," Blansett said.

"And we go ahead and let them," she said. "But technically, the student is the contract holder, and dealing with those kinds of issues is a skill that would be good for them to learn."

Parents go so far as to "[dictate] the student's major and [set] up the class schedule." Strange, isn't it, that graduates should be finding it increasingly difficult to make it in the daily grind of post-college life from anywhere but their parent's basement? Granted, the University of Florida is far from a representative sample--Floridians being widely considered tools, narcs and even pussies by bigger, older states--and there has been no specific examination of the interplay between helicopter parenting and twixterdom. Nonetheless, I have to say . . . uh . . . sure sounds like my mom . . . besides the major thing, my parents didn't approve of those choices and they couldn't set up my classes because neither know how to use an internet. Given the chance, though, I'm sure I would've graduated early with advanced degrees in money-making and God-fearing.

But let's reexamine: while allowing mommy and daddy to handle your collegiate affairs would seem to be an obvious detriment to growth, I'm not so sure it's a horrible arrangement. If the Gainsville Sun is correct, that "the phenomenon is related to a baby-boom generation of involved parents who have been organizing their children's lives since infancy . . .when their babies go off to college, some parents are unable to deal with the empty nest," then University might not be simply about a young generation learning to stand on its own, but also about an older generation envisioning nothing ahead but a life of childless futility and malaise. It can be difficult to give up to a cruel and uncaring world that which a parent has worked his or her whole life to protect. Such a situation can and should be seized upon. Kids will learn quickly the value of exploiting the weak and the old.

I, for one, made use of my parent's moribund insecurity and looming sense of mortality by making them a proxy in my affairs. Any problem that couldn't be solved with a handful of pubic hair on a roommate's keyboard was cause for a pinch hitter, someone to step in and knock life out of the park. It's about playing to one's strengths, which, in itself, is a very important life skill.

So, in the long run, Twixters might be suffering the love of micromanaging parents, but in the short, ma and pa have a semi-full house again, and in turn they don't give anyone with a Pennsylvanian accent my phone number. If not perfect, it's at least a workable situation.

Worst . . . generation . . . ever

2005-01-22T00:46:00.000-08:00

I remember feeling a tangible pang the day someone told me I was too young to be part of Generation X. I suppose I'm technically part of Generation Y, a little on the old side, but that always seemed like an also-ran term, like all the second-rate sociologists who didn't catch the GenX train decided to go one step down the slacker food chain. They made us seem like GenX's adoring and naive younger sibling, which I guess we [I] are [am]. So, in place of Wynona Rider and Ethan Hawke, so cool and carelessly groomed, prematurely jaded and preternaturally hunky, who are we but Macaulay Culkin and--I dunno--Kirsten Dunst? Downright lameasses, a group I want no part of.

But alas I am part of it, and Time, a magazine I loathe, has forced me to admit it.

In the upcoming issue, GenY is effectively rent asunder, split into those of us who are old enough to buy cigarettes and those of us forced to steal them from our parents. The article states, however, that while the 18-25 year-old segment of this budding generation may be old enough to legally buy cigs and booze, we'll probably continue stealing those things from our parents anyway because most of us haven't moved out yet, preferring instead to shirk responsibility and flounder in dead end jobs.

I thought I was going my own way on this, but we're so big we've been named. They're calling us twixters, a seemingly odd mish-mash of candy bay and licorice brand names that actually derives from betwixt, a word that would get you beaten up where I come from. Twixters, it seems, are no longer the economically depressed victims of recession that our grunge forbears were, but a "distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people in their 20s stall for a few extra years."

This phenomenon has analogues in Canada and much of Europe as well, and while the ostensible excuses vary from country to country, the underlying factor cuts across cultural divides. Those who retreat back to the nest are still promiscuous and irresponsible parasites contaminating an already thin gene pool like GenXers, but now our numbers are great enough to be considered representative of a whole crappy generation.

But parents looking for a silver lining in spending their golden years helping offspring dodge creditors don't have to look far. Dr. Jeffrey Arnett says that, in not wearing pants most days, I'm actually doing "important work to get [myself] ready for adulthood." That's true. Today an egg I cooked--by myself--fell on the ground. After careful consideration, I decided not to eat it. I just left it there for my mom's Cairn Terrier to take care of. In that simple non-action, I avoided cross-contamination like the Lysol Anti-Bacterial woman said, and I also did a little something they call delegating duty; that's a trait of good management.

Also since coming home, I've taught the dog to selectively cull my unwieldy hentai collection and spongebathe me as needed. I'll be using him as a reference next time I apply at the multiplex. They're going to fire the kid with cystic fibrosis, I can feel it.

Related: I just filed for deferment of my Stafford Loan.

C in math, F in not eating everything

2005-01-19T16:45:00.000-08:00

Things might be getting a lot worse for dumb kids in Texas, as legislators mull over a proposal to grade kids on their weight. Under the plan, "school districts would be required to include the body mass index of students as part of their regular report cards." correlating education with health sends the clear message: Even the smartest fat kid in Texas is still a fat kid, and in Texas, that just ain't smart.

Breaking with an almost unsullied tradition of slandering Texans, I'm going to come out in support of this legislation. To commemorate the occasion, I'll use fiery rhetoric in the style of an Evangelical, minus most of the religious intolerance. It's high time we begin undoing the damage caused by a ~~Jew-controlled~~ entertainment industry that teaches our children, through its unholy four-headed triumvirate of Kirstie Alley, Delta Burke, Kelly Osborne and Fat Albert, that being husky is somehow okay. People in our permissive, politically correct society think fat people can lead happy, productive lives. Well I know someone who thinks otherwise. That someone is named God, and last time I checked, sloth was a deadly sin. Kids in Texas are sinning to the tune of 33%, that's more sin than even France or the Vatican can muster. Where I come from, education takes a back seat to salvation.

Know who was fat? Buddha, and look what Satan has done with him. New-agers try to tell you how similar the teachings of Jesus and Buddha were. I say look to the waistline and therein know the difference. The history of man is rife with plus-sized false prophets.

And now, to hedge myself against the secularist establishment, let me use their graven idol of science to do God's work. Researchers have documented that after meals the human body diverts energy from all over and puts it to work in the digestive tract, often creating a feeling of lethargy and an inability to concentrate. Now, in the body of a serial-eater, someone who will--with satanic relish--pack away untold thousands of calories a day, the digestive system monopolizes energy to fuel the near-constant process of shuttling waste material through the intestines like a midnight train to Georgia, leaving an anemic and undernourished intellect in its wake. Protest if you must, them's facts and figures.

There's another aspect to this, one long forgotten in today's politically correct classroom. The playground is a place of complex socio-political wrangling, a place where lessons unlearned quickly translate into friends unmade. The modern educator can't hope to teach children everything they need to survive in this networked, rolodexed world of power lunches and Christ-mandated hyper-Capitalism, but including the BMI on report cards will reinforce one of the fundamental truths of succeeding in an image-driven society. Nobody likes a fat kid. They smell, they breathe loudly and they steal your lunch when you aren't looking. F_(chubby)=undesirable. That's the arithmetic of popularity, baby, and it's way more important than long division.

***

In all seriousness, do kids who already have low self-esteem need a quantification of their inability to stack up to beauty norms? I understand the health implications and definitely see the value in education to battle obesity but this needs to be implemented in a more compassionate way.

'There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling.'

A young generation's irksome toxicology gap

2005-01-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

80% of college students drink, 50% of those binge drink. Meaning 4 out of 10 college students remain unclear about the purpose of alcohol.
I never understood this statistic, or rather, I've always thought it was wrong. Not the fact of drinking, I went to Catholic school. Those numbers should be higher. Kids--in college, to the tune of 40%--drink without the intention of getting drunk. One could say drinking responsibly. Sounds like there's a D.A.R.E. official looking for a promotion.

This is something so intuitively obvious that doesn't require statistics, it can be deduced with a bit of Socratic Metaphysicism, a Cartesian thought experiment.

Are there now, walking among us, humans, sufficiently adapted, who can relish the taste of Gordon's Dry Gin? Is there now a Natural Light gene that makes cheap alcohol serviceable to the human palate from anything but a latex tube shoved past the tastebuds? If no to the above: are kids more wealthy now than they were uh year ~~and uh half~~ ago?

In college, living among Spokane's wealthiest trustifarians and business majors, no one drank good beer and everyone drank to get drunk. Then, on special occasions, like one of the four-thousand observed Catholic holidays, when kids put away the cough syrup and stole dad's secret bottle of Grey Goose, they still got drunk, not knowing what else to do. In Europe, the third year of a four year tour of duty, when we got ass-canned on $50 dollar wines at the school's expense, it was a cultural necessity of living in-country. The nice men just kept putting bottles on the table.

Point being, there is nothing moderate about college. It's a binary place, a place of ones and zeros, ons and offs. Self-regulation is going straight.

In college, there were two groups, not three. Drinkers and abstainers. Those who casually sat down with a cold one in front of a favored sporting event were not one beer drinkers, they were beating off a hangover or fighting off the shakes, such full-blown alcoholics that drinking to get drunk is like breathing to get breath, instinctual. I had friends in both camps, often oscillating between the two.

I'd lay even money that the 40% who reportedly consume less than 4 drinks were caught early enough in the morning that they could still remember what beer they were on. 0,1,2 or 3 being the number left in the case he or she fell asleep next to.

This is why, in addition to non-smoking and drinking dorms, they now have dorms for recovering substance abusers.

That's not to say that my collegiate years were a whirlwind of debauchery, I was healthily in both columns myself for long periods of time, either having a good drunk or not. And, in the intervening years, my tastes have certainly undergone a process of sophistication, the kind of sophistication that can only come from disposable income or a knack for larceny. There are now, I'm happy to say, beers and liquors I can drink with moderation, beers and liquors whose taste I can meditate upon, whose aromatic essences reward a linger on the tongue. Beers and liquors I never had access to in college. These are lagers of breeding whose fermentation process takes place in the bellies of suckling pigs, and liquors of consequence, distilled from the perspiration of God himself. Beers that cost more than the minimum hourly wage of my home state; Liquors whose proceeds could feed an Indonesian orphan, allowing him to fend off rickets until he becomes a ward of Nike.

Looking around, I realize that I've come full circle and can no longer afford these treats. I guess it's back to binge drinking, or, more in line with my current fiscal solubility, cutting myself with razor blades and spending time in a closet with the nerve gas Grandpa brought back from Okinawa.

Spokane gays push for own district

2005-01-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

. . . Opponents argue from ignorance, stupidity, poor reading comprehension. Fear "culture based upon sex"; missing basic genetic truism that all cultures are based on sex.

The Inland Northwest Business Alliance is working to grow a dedicated gay district somewhere in Spokane and citizens are worried there will be a proliferation of lewd and wanton sex acts all over the place. I just found out about this yesterday. I might have known about it sooner if the Spokesman-Review let people read their paper online without also subscribing to the print edition.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry. Maybe Spokane is more progressive than I thought, or maybe the people here just don't feel the imminence of the threat. Maybe now that the Times has brought word to that trans-mountain Sodom in the west, people here will start worrying. Seattle is, after all, where all Spokane's crime and minorities come from. Seattle and California.

The push from the usually quiet gay community--which is in the messy thought-diagram on a large sheet of butcher paper stage--has its share of detractors among Spokane's much larger and more vocal bigot and moron communities. Many people (as perhaps litmus for the Midwest in general) still adhere with shock and horror to the idea that homosexuals are promiscuous Petri dishes for communicable disease. They are, I guess, but no more so than heterosexuals. People who think queers bring something vile and seedy to any community they inhabit don't know any queers, or at least don't know that they know any queers. That's why this is going to be perfect.

As long as the gay community remains silent, "closeted," as is says it has in Spokane, witch-hunting heteros are able to foster any kind of image they want. Until queers stand up and dispel the myths woven by an ignorant and excitable conservative majority, the myths will persist. We've seen this kind of thing twice before in minority communities. Both Blacks and Chinese have been victims of the sex-crazed savage image. Both images, of African Americans driven feral by their massive copulatory organs and the smokey, dragon-shaped monkey on the back of every Chinaman in Chinatown, weren't dispelled until the communities themselves spoke up. The same thing has happened in larger gay communities nation wide and now finally, hopefully, it's happening here.

One man is worried that his "pro-family conventions" are going to go away, presumably leaving only the troublesome anti-family conventions. Another is worried about Spokane no longer being thought of as a good place to raise a family. But the funny thing is, it doesn't matter. The new gay district, if it happens, isn't going to be open to caucusing or public discourse, it's going to be created in exactly the way conservatives want the nation run, with market forces and private money. It's not going to be some morally bereft braintrust of liberals deeding public land to an oppressed group. It's going to be a bunch of queers applying for small-business loans and purchasing real estate and growing businesses and turning a small corner of Spokane into a safe place where they can raise families. How creating communities without fear makes for a less family-friendly city, I don't know.

Now, allow me to prognosticate: Once the district is up and chugging along, slowly at first I'm sure, there might be an influx of homosexual men and women. After that, when violent and sexual crime rates do not go up, people will gradually lose some of their ignorant fear, left with only more general ignorance. Then, after a sufficient amount of time has passed and the memory of the fear is gone, they'll start coming to Queer Street because the Trading Post has cheap organic food, Gayspresso has fair-trade coffee and/or because the fag bakery makes a mean ciabatta. And, once there, on the street, they might bump into Bob, from church, or Chandra, from accounts payable. Nice people who, strangely, don't act the way fundamentalist pastors and legislators say gay people act. They're nice, law-abiding, god-fearing human beings, more or less just like you, trying to make a buck and live their lives. You might still be uncomfortable with who and how they love, what they do behind closed doors, but the thing is, they're doing it behind closed doors, where it can't bother you.

Then, when you hear from your racketball buddy that he read in the local conservative newspaper that queers, on average, make more money than straight people, you decide it might be a good idea to market to them.

And pretty soon, Queer Street's not so much a gay enclave as it is a nice, upscale neighborhood with good food and culture and lots of nice new potential clients and customers. Then, before you know it, Spokane is for real a better place to live, for a lot more people.

Bigotry will never go away, but this is a good first step toward dispelling and reversing ignorance.

If you can make unsubstantiated claims

2005-01-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

I've seen this bumper sticker a lot lately:

It's a nice sentiment. I like teachers, we should have more of them. They should be better trained and better paid. I also like soldiers, they help maintain our freedoms when not used in wars of aggression. I still like them even when they're not actually protecting our freedoms because they have more courage than I do and it's not their fault we have ocassionally barbarous leadership. I give them full and unwavering credit for a lot of very important things, like my safety, which I value above all else.

But they're not responsible for everything. It wasn't soldiers who invented the cotton gin [Eli Whitney] or the printing press [Guttenburg] or the computer I'm typing on [Michael Dell]. It wasn't, as much as I'd like to say it, soldiers who picked our language, and, once picked, soldiers haven't once had a hand in keeping English the national language. I'm not slighting their job performance, I'd never criticize Billy Jean King for not winning a Super Bowl. I'm sure they'd do a kickass job keeping English the national language, but so far, the opportunity has never come.

Sure, we've been in a few wars. We've even been in wars on our own soil, wars that threatened to take from us our independence. Both major wars [the Revolution and the Civil War] were fought against English speaking nations, so even though they kept us free, the soldiers didn't keep us speaking English. There was the Mexican-American [non-]war, but Mexico never even made it through the territory in dispute[Thus never really invading American soil], and most Texans were bilingual anyway. Prior to Texan independence, Mexico had asked Steven Austin to ensure that Anglos immigrating would learn Spanish, but made no attempt to force them to unlearn English. History: 3, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0

Then came the Spanish-American War, started by greed and a bunch of bullshit newspaper stories that openly and falsely slandered the crumbling Spanish empire and forced Teddy--through public opinion--

World War I wasn't even remotely near us, and we were in no danger of losing our sovereignity to either the Germans or the Austro-Hungarians. There no support for the idea that either nation wanted to invade us/change our language. None. History: 4, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0

World War II was a slightly closer shave, Japan bombed the hell out of us and Germany sped through Europe. Manchuria, Japan's puppet state in the 30's was forced to adopt Japanese as the official language, so for the first time we have a potential military threat to American English. But in the end, they couldn't even hang on to Eastern China--a land with almost no army that was fighting a civil war--let alone take the fight to America. The closest they got was occupying the Phillippines, which didn't really want to speak English anyway. Germany too was broken on its own ambition. The Reich really had no chance of making it to the US, even if it was successful in Europe. History: 6, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0

Though we could say: If you don't live in like Canada, Madagascar or Burkina Faso and you've babel-fished this blog into French, thank a soldier. But people with the sticker probably hate the French, so: History: 6, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0, Sticker Buyers: -1

Korea [History: 7] and Vietnam [History: 8] were wars of aggression, as was the latest Gulf War [History: 9]. The first Gulf War had nothing to do with invasion of the US by a foreign entity [History: 10].

The Cold War, which I grant was very much about the overthrow of America and the end of our democracy, nonetheless posed little threat to our loss of English as a language. Let's assume that things went differently, that there actually was a war against the USSR, and that that war went badly for us and that socialist elements in the US, along with entities from abroad, were able to topple our government, as happened in many nations, the Warsaw Pact countries and Cuba among them. In none of the states referred to as satelites of Moscow did Russian become the national language. And even if, in some unbelievable scenario, the Soviets directly invaded and took over America, English would still probably be alive and well. Even in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union [as opposed to being a satelite] and has a language very similar to Russian, not even state persecution of the language could wipe it from Ukrainian lips. History: 11, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0, Sticker Buyers: -1

And the war on terrorism doesn't even count because terrorists want to blow us all to hell, in which case we wouldn't be speaking any language.

Final Score:
History: 11
Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0
Sticker Buyers: -1

So there it is, 11 and 12 point victories respectively, which doesn't even cover the spread for such a moronic sentiment.

I should also say that I'm terrible at History. I've always gotten fantastically bad grades, so it takes a human of phenomenal [a factor of (Luke+n)] ignorance and stupidity to see this as anything but feeble-minded polemics.But by all means, thank a soldier for anything and everything they actually do, which is a hell of a lot.

A crisis of democracy, or something

2005-01-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

With the impending inauguration of Democrat Christine Gregoire to the boring and cynical position of Governor of Washington State, after a much more exiting election than that office deserves, Republicans want a re-vote. They want it so bad they've made a website for it. To further show that their blood is boiling, the main page for the state party has been ransacked and festooned with angry reds and emphatic exclamation points.

RE-VOTE!, it says.

But why? For what purpose, and, most importantly, to what end?

Is it a 'crisis of democracy' that an election should be so close? Not really. The problem is not with the closeness itself, but with the electoral problems the small margin of victory has exposed.

All votes were not counted. A critical number of ballots were not counted correctly. A majority of us doubt the outcome.

These startling revelations and they have the support by Washington's next-to-most-recent Republican Governor, a man who left office when I was negative 4 years old.

Yet, with trepidation, I admit that what they say is true. Not merely true, but foundationally so. So true that the critique is not limited to one race in one state. It's true of all elections. There has never been an election in history in which all votes have been counted, and all counted correctly. Such a thing has never happened, and never will.

The election process isn't uniform, the sheer plurality of voting devices is staggering, not to mention that there is a separate counting and reporting protocol for each county, if not each precinct. The whole thing is overflowing with an impossible amount of interference by those moronic but lovable primates, H. Sapiens. As long as people are somehow involved in the counting process--from physically judging ballots to just feeding them into a machine--there are going to be problems that will never allow for a perfectly accurate gauging of public opinion. As long as there are human hands behind the scenes, regardless of how well-meaning, there will be errors and hence, a margin of error. With margins of error come the possibility of differing count totals--ah, but we only count twice when it's close, so we only notice what are systemic inadequacies at times like this. That is, when the margin of victory is under the margin of error.

But even if we made the system perfectly automated, wondrously human-free [which we won't in 50 years, let alone in time for this democracy-righting re-vote], even if we took our grubby little meathooks off the whole thing, there would still be humans on the front end--voting--to screw things up. To once more borrow from LeAnn Rimes: you can't fight the moonlight.

Even this seemingly large shift, from two-hundred-something pro-Rossi to one-hundred-something pro-Gregoire, a shift of three-hundred-something votes, represents just over a hundredth of a percent [.00012 or so] of all votes cast.

Now, with the revote, the Republicans promise, "One simple ballot style; One clear set of counting rules; with Everyone watching very closely. But how do they plan to do that, and why didn't they do it the first time? Also, everyone was already watching very closely the first time, and the second, and the third. What's the fourth going to change? There will still be errors, there will still be omissions, there will still be disgruntled voters and a losing side, the best they can hope for is that one side or the other would manage to re-get-out-the-vote enough to push the margin of victory outside the margin of error.

But if they don't, what's it going to be, another revote? This could easily go off into perpetuity, when it needs to die a nice, inauspicious death now. If Rossi ended that third count ahead, or if the tables were turned, and successive recounts showed him the victor after Gregoire had won the first two counts, I'd still want to see this end. I'd be typing through more tightly gritted teeth, but who won is irrelevant to the argument.

This is not a crisis of democracy, it's an inherent and unfixable systemic shortcoming.

We should focus money not on a revote, but on homogenizing and streamlining the process for next time, all the while realizing that no amount of effort is going to yield a perfect election. Ever.

Another week between updates, but this time I had a [computer] virus, I swear.

Days late, dollars short

2005-01-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

The thing I'm about to talk about probably doesn't warrant a blog, or at least not a full blog. The thing I'm about to write, actually--under normal circumstances--would fit just fine on that right side of my blog there. That's the place, you may recall from the period when I actually wrote here with any frequency, where I said I was going to put little, unimportant minutia that didn't warrant my full and discerning writerly gaze. [You can tell I've been without oxygen too long when the adjective I choose to describe minutia is little]

This thing I'm about to write would fit nicely in there, because it's really a small thing--and a hopelessly outdated thing--but it's a thing that, due to my writing absence, has come, in the last three minutes, to occupy me completely. I'm filled to overflowing with it.

It's a realization, trite and small, which impresses upon me, like all of my realizations, that things I think to do are always done better and earlier than I do them or, in most cases, earlier than I even have them. Sure there was that one idea about Michael Chabon's narratives--the reason, incidently, I haven't blogged in weeks--which was, all told, remarkably original on my part, only containing perhaps a handful of blatantly stolen ideas. But that turned out to be a thing that stinks of shit and my grandmother Josephine's thesaurus and which I find utterly unreadable. But such things as readablility are not my place to comment on, and I've shipped it off to the proper authorities to scrutinize and libel what may, if the fates are kind, come to be known as an ambitious first draft of the essay that blacklisted me from graduate work.

But now, rid of the ballast of my crumbling ego, I've surfaced and am sailing high in the water, soaking up once more the delicious hemisphere of media and popular culture that I've forced myself, for the better part of a month, to have no contact with at all. This whole glorious world beckons me and, like a submariner on leave, away briefly from the pressures of spent fuel rods and detatched, heterosexual sodomy, I'm loathe to ignore anything.

So here it is, ready?

You may recall that, prior to the unannounced absence, I'd been up in my ivory tower, expounding on things I know nothing about, thinking I'll be the first person in history to break into the world of music journalism without knowing anything about music. Neat trick if I could pull it off, and I may still, I suppose. But now the point is moot. It's been done, and better than I ever have by a guy who's trajectory I'd like to closely model my own on. It was done, roughly, on April 12th, 2004.

These albums were rough-edged, with nothing like the production values common at the time. What might now sound familiar in early R.E.M. was utterly baffling in 1983. You couldn’t understand one damned word Michael Stipe was singing, and there were no clear hooks or guitar solos or bridges or anything. There was no candy. Billy Joel knew candy. The Beach Boys knew candy. But these new people didn’t have any candy. Or they had candy, but it was a much more subtle brand of candy–barley pops, maybe.

Or black licorice. I have no idea and should have stated this upfront: I have no clue what I’m talking about. I don’t know what a bridge is, and I don’t know how to play a guitar, or how to tell when someone’s playing the bass really well . . .

Shine on.

This article is filled with exactly the pointless and retarded observations that all pop reviews have, and done by a guy who admits he doesn't know anything about music. So not only did this Dave Eggers guy do something I'm trying to do, and on a larger stage, he sexied it up by admitting his ignorance. And therein lies the brilliance. Of course, it's snarky, self-congratulatory arrogant brilliance--also somthing I've tried with little success.

[the band] Kings of Leon are motorboats on crowded lakes and waterskiing in cutoffs and hiding Milwaukee’s Best in the forest, in the snow, in January, because your parents caught on that you were keeping cases in the fridge in the garage. Kings of Leon are knowing a guy in juvie and having a cousin who’s been in jail twice. And that cousin, by the way, the one with the burns all over his right forearm–nothing interesting, just an accident with coffee–that cousin, Terry, would love Kings of Leon if he gave them a chance.

Strangely enough, the other day I was bored in Barnes and Noble and I happened to thumb, briefly, a book of his short stories, wondering if I'd like his stuff. From the article, given his knowingly irreverent and autodidactic style, and the sheer number of clauses that bloom from what should be simple sentences, I'd say yes. Because he essentially bit my style before I created it.

This Dave Eggers guy wrote a novel and a memoir and has a publishing house, a magazine on books and a quarterly journal, also ostensibly about books. He's pretty cool, or seems that way. If I saw him I'd tell him how much I love him. And also that I hate him.

I'll now resume regular updates, semi-regularly.

Humans are somehow better

2004-12-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

Many long nights have passed now since last I updated and, low, the things I have seen.

I wanted to post sooner, but I didn't at first because I was consumed with numbers. Numbers that wouldn't possibly interest anyone who doesn't watch Sportscenter. Later it was other things, inertially fixing me in place, but first it was those goddamned numbers. I was taken over by them. The RPI, the AP Poll, the Coaches' Poll. The national spotlight is back on my Alma Mater thanks to a big victory delivered on the back of a homegrown sophomore forward with diabetes who may, in fact, admire Adolph Hitler.

Hitler you say? You're interested all of a sudden. Yes, him.

That nugget came to me by way of my 14 year old cousin. He told me about it on Christmas Eve, standing before our traditional Christmas Eve bonfire. He himself had heard it from a friend. This friend spends summers under the tutelage of the human design flaw in question, learning how to better control the dribble in transition, taking lessons in function from this paradoxical collection of proteins. Proteins with heartbreaking mastery of a spherical leather bladder but almost no natural ability to regulate blood sugar.

***

It has come to my attention that ideas are viruses, and that their success in seeding the human mind--their ability to survive--has nothing to do with truthfulness or profundity. Not even magnitude matters. Highmindedness, counter-intuitively, almost always signals memetic death. The most seminal and just ideas are now parchment. Recite for me, if you will, the Emancipation Proclamation.

The key to the life of a mind-virus is salaciousness. Love and death, good and evil. Sex, lots. The best pop songs make the best mind-viruses. Ideas need a solid-ass hook.

Tepid ideas are boring and are forgotten. To cope with this reality, idea viruses, like genetic viruses and indeed all organic lifeforms, mutate freely, quickly and often radically. So even if it wasn't Hitler when my cousin's friend heard it, or even when that friend told him, it somehow became Hitler by the time it got to me. The last thing that matters, as it passes to you, juicy and hot off the brain presses, is if it's true or not. It's an idea. In this case, it comes with additional baggage, a Hitler suitcase, loaded with communally constructed weight and meaning.

Because isn't Hitler so much more memorable than Slobodan Milosevic? And Milosevic so much more memorable than Luke Baumgarten, who hasn't, to this date, sought to eradicate groups of anyone? Isn't Hitler so iconic that it essentially had to be him?

And this Adolph Hitler--reviler, slaughterer--isn't he just about as collectively memorable as Jesus Christ, who hated no one and actually un-killed a few people? Archetypal representations make very good mind-viruses.

But this Jesus, is he memorable because he lived well, or because he died well? Or because he claimed to be God, the maker of all things, and got lots of people to believe him?

Or was it because the people who believed him were themselves good at mutating ideas? From four gospels we are given four Christologic conceptions. Four different God/Men for four different communities.

Or maybe later, because it behooved them a rational depiction, the cultivators of this mind-virus decided certain strains of the Jesus mind-virus should not survive? Strains were selected for memetic fitness. And so, this Christmas, your Christian denomination's local holy man chose selections from four Gospels instead of twenty-six.

That's strange thing about mind viruses, they interact with their environment in a way that is wholly different than their genetic counterparts. If our environment, Earth, with its particular climates and its atomic makeup--it's abundance of particular molecules; it's dearth of others--were stripped of life, rid of all genetic material, the Earth would continue to exist. It would be changed, a barren place of dirt, water and trapped gasses, but it would exist.

But if the environment of ideas, the Mind, were rid of thoughts, what would be left? A barren place certainly, but could it be said that it even still existed?

Maybe.

Maybe too the Earth couldn't be said to exist if it didn't support life, there would certainly be nothing around to comment on its barrenness. The answer to that question might hang on whether you think things have intrinsic value, that they come into being with purpose and an end goal in place. Telos. That was the idea Aristotle had. It's an idea many of us still have, probably because Jesus also had that idea.

Still, it seems that thoughts interact with and are interacted upon by their environments in a way that is different from how we interact with and are interacted upon by our planet, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am.

So before I convince myself otherwise I'll say that ideas, rather than viruses, are more properly sybiots. Where our Earth gives us blizzards and tsunamis and tells us to handle it or get out, human brains have a more cautious and parental relationship with their ideas. They nurture and coddle them. They shape them to be more compatible with our mental landscape and make them hardier to stand a better chance of taking root in one of the 6 billion other idea environments around us*.

Because without ideas, what are we but dirt, water and trapped gasses? Similarly, if we didn't have the idea that we should be more somehow than just dirt or water, none of this would be so worrisome. We might be more cavalier with our ideas.

So, to that one idea right there--the idea that humans are somehow better--all other ideas owe the lavish existence they've been given.

If not for that idea, I wouldn't be so carefully grooming these anemic bundles of ideas, these knowledge suites. I certainly wouldn't be giving the relationship between Archetypes and Stereotypes in the Novels of Michael Chabon nearly as much thought. I wouldn't be worrying about it like it were an infant in an iron lung I have to power by hand with a stationary bike or a man-sized hamster wheel. I wouldn't be typing it out. I probably wouldn't be thinking about it at all. I certainly wouldn't care if other people--specifically admissions counselors--thought these idea conglomerates were bullshit. If not for that idea, people probably wouldn't even create titles like admissions counselor for themselves. Michael Chabon probably wouldn't have ever even written anything. Maybe no one ever would have. If not for that idea, he and I might be together right now, foraging for something.

Assuming the sun was up and there were no predators about.

If it's 2:05 AM PST, what time is it in the Great Rift Valley?

*This distinction is null if it turns out that the earth herself is conscious, which is an idea some people have.