26 June 2009
[answers to last week's baseball advertisement quiz may now be found beneath the photo, in last week's blog, just below]
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http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-politics/20090617/US.Obama.Dead.Fly/
I'm trying to figure out why this story affects me the way it does. Actually, I'm still coming to terms with even how it affects me. The problem isn't that President Obama killed a fly: I sent a spider down the bathtub drain to its death the other day without wondering much about it. I might have tried a rescue mission-enticing it onto a sheet of paper and throwing it out the window-in more normal circumstances, but it was a particularly dangerous lookin' cuss.
Nor is my problem PETA's quite admirable and apparent concern for life in its many forms. No, my problem is PETA. I have broken faith with PETA, and this is just a mild representation of why some of that must be.
First off, I should admit/boast that I have a lot of empathy and admiration for "animal rights extremists." I find the concept and most actions of the Animal Liberation Front far more inspiring than appalling, and I understand that once the passion builds and the ante's upped-you feel no choice but to double up or back down- and so choose to go on…right on over that line, sometimes. And sometimes that's right, you really do have to. I tend to be more concerned about dogs than flies, but still, yeah, ok.
That being my natural predisposition, I have stood with and supported PETA for more than 20 years. My first action-it wasn't much of an action compared to what they did-was to stand with them at the University of California-San Diego in 1987 when no one had even heard of them, honouring the hardened criminals who had liberated a hallway full of dogs awaiting vivisection in the name of better cosmetics. But there were only about 20 of us, and a nearly equal number of cops taking pictures. I didn't smile but I did point out to one photographer than my nose from a certain angle renders me unrealistic.
I don't know if PETA has fallen apart since then, lost its moral compass, or if it was just a moment when their nuttiness matched my informed and mature position. I do understand, now, that if you take a stray dog to PETA it has a substantially lower chance of survival than if you just take it to the pound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETA, check out the "policy on euthanasia" section, or their most aggressive critics at http://www.petakillsanimals.com/). So they've got better things to do than save dogs, but apparently nothing better to do than jump up and down grandstanding about a fly.
This gives me pause. I wish I could surf better, I wish that I was a good painter. But there is nothing that I wish that I was better at than forgiveness. I flat out suck. I try, pretty much and that's part of the problem, it requires some kind of investment that I'm not easily prepared to make. Still looking for that switch. But I'm also struck by whom I'm willing to forgive, and whom I'm disinclined.
I've damn near forgiven President George W. Bush. For everything, hundreds of thousands of deaths already and another fifty years of conflict. But I see his goofy-ass self on tv trying to be a Dallas socialite and living on a cul-de-sac, my instinctive response is that he's just another frat boy who's never got much of a handle on much anything else. Is it his fault that we (well, not me) elected him? Who should have known better? What did we expect him to do?
I hear Mick Jagger on the radio and I'm still trying not to be pissed off about that knighthood bullshit. Forget for a moment-or better don't- that A Bigger Bang really was their best album since Some Girls (I think 98 percent of the ever ingratiating reviewers have used this phrase about every Stones album since '81), forget that Keith Richards was at least as horrified about it as I was---hell I still hold it against the entire band . I haven't bothered to see 'em ever since and I didn't listen to 'em at all for years. I didn't even hear A Bigger Bang for nearly two years after it came out. But when I bought Voodoo Lounge in '94-before the knighthood crap but on the heels of their two worst albums to that time -and the teller asked me if it was any good, I quite honestly replied "I don't know. I owe 'em fifteen bucks."
If you just read me saying that I'm more disgusted with Mick Jagger than George Bush, you either didn't read it right or I didn't say it right. I no longer idolize Mick, but I'd be happy enough to have a beer with him. He's done great things, he no doubt deserves aesthetic diplomatic immunity. I don't know if I could shake George Bush's hand. If I tried to there are at least even odds I would literally puke.
When it came out that David Bowie had turned down a knighthood he brushed the question away with the utmost dignity, "Oh, it's too stupid to even talk about." And it is, much less hold grudges over against people you've never met.
So an important element of forgiveness may be expectation. If I expect George Bush to be an asshole and an idiot and he is, there's little psychological impact. It's easy enough to look on to his extraordinary personal loyalty to [admittedly, disgusting usually] friends, in that great political arena where it never happens and can only bring you down. He tried to put his personal attorney on the Supreme Court of the United States !!! I might have voted against her, but I love the sentiment.
If you expect PETA to be liberating dogs from labs-and instead find them massacring them in their own offices-the good will's entirely expended, I'm afraid. I hold PETA in the same perspective as those long-faced guys in dresses who elect a pope and come out to tell us who our new lifeline to God is. An impediment, the pope is not a lifeline he's a barrier. And so's PETA, you'd know it if you were a dog in their "care."
So I feel for the fly. In a way President Obama shouldn't have killed it. It would have been nice if he'd just had a handy bug purgatory box, and could have released it back into the wild where it might have enjoyed the balance of its too short life sniffing daffodils or living in a maggot or whatever.
But I don't feel for PETA. Don't tell me about saving flies when you're actively killing dogs that were entrusted to you. It's a substantially worse sin than releasing Bridges to Babylon .
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http://cbs2.com/national/bo.obama.baseball.2.1053083.html
Yeah, see, the President's great with animals! Just another sign how great minds think alike, I've always intended to make baseball cards of my family, including obviously, our dogs. Baseball cards are an art form. Maybe a lower art form, but definitely an art form:
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GUITARIST OF THE WEEK: Richard Thompson. I've seen him twice, both times during periods of some personal turmoil. He pulled me out of both slides, the first with "When the Spell is Broken," the second with "Outside of the Inside" (his rant as a Sufi Muslim against al-Qaeda). He is a wizard. His recordings are great, but don't begin to catch all of it. His presence is incredible, as unique as his guitar licks and now we're in a stratosphere where sensible description has long since faded from possibility. In reviewing a 2004 concert for FM Sound I wrote:
Richard Thompson is a force of nature in almost Nietzschean terms. He is an alchemist who transmogrifies discord into harmony. His artistic sensibilities engulf force fields exponentially beyond any yet identified. He is no less than thirty-five feet tall, and he is the best band in Britain.
PUT THIS ON YOUR iPOD: "A Love You Can't Survive" (off The Old Kit Bag )-Richard Thompson (2003). Maybe not quite as great as "Angie," but even greater than Dean Friedman's [also incredibly brilliant] "Love is Not Enough," and in the same vein that never stops giving to you by celebrating what incredible thing has been lost to someone else. Chock full o' guaranteed to give your beer a saltwaterey tear taste. Hank Williams would have had it on his iPOD and would listen to it five times in a row to start any Thursday. "Now I remember the promise I made you…" I don't believe that I've ever heard a more strained or perfectly delivered opening lyric.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090622/us_time/08599190602500
Jerry Brown spoke about this several times every single day, when he was running for president 17 years ago and I was a loyal foot soldier.
Whether President Obama's a genius and visionary, or just a really good researcher, remains to be seen. Neither one's bad, neh? In Das Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game, an absolute masterpiece by any definition] Hermann Hesse writes (1943) of how we are entering an Age of Digest. The big original ideas and thought frameworks and patterns and rhythms and sequences have pretty much been discovered. The challenge is now to apply them in new ways. Consider the drug cocktails most affective against AIDS: one drug goes in to do its work (does nothing), but opens up an opportunity for the second and third to strike.
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LOUD MUSIC OF THE WEEK: Gogol Bordello - Gypsy Punks (Underdog World Strike) (2005) The uninitiated might begin with that this ensemble is composed of Eastern Bloc (mostly Ukrainian), Israeli, Ethiopian and Vermontese individuals, playing what they believe to be "gypsy punk" music. Maybe-if you invent the genre you get to define it-but it's more punk in spirit than sonic nature. The musical structures clearly owe a good deal more to the many styles of Spanish guitar, reggae, and that place where gypsy music and Jewish music fall together. Not that there's nothing loud about it (consider attack-violins), and it is all a lot more outrageous than so much of what gets categorized as punk these days. All of their albums are great, this one the best. As a live act… I think what's missing so much these days is a frontman worth paying any attention to at all. Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia…how could you not want to hear what they had to say? The bands these days are fine, maybe there's too much unnecessary recycling going on but that's the momentary aesthetic (flailing Age of Digest work, or maybe rock and roll really has reached all of the summits; now doomed to passionate cult music and cafés…nah!)…but with the obvious exceptions of Jack White, Larry Kirwan and maybe the seemingly entirely lost refuseniks like Amy Winehouse, who could look to these people for any sort of philosophical inspiration? Gogol Bordello (even the name is literary/decadent!) harkens back to the time when rock 'n' roll recruiting was more regular among the social revolutionary/pseudo-intellectual set. Eugene Hütz , in addition to being an extraordinary shaman, brings a lot of cache with him from his days as a Soviet Bloc…I don't know, dissident, inmate, lunatic, all of that and more I guess. But now he sprays that uneven freedom-loving light on the Promised Land of Western Culture, and finds a lot of stuff that wasn't in is dreams. My favourite cut is probably the typically and gloriously poorly-sung narrative "Dogs Were Barking," but Alexandra can't even think of "Start Wearing Purple" without laughing out loud.
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You know, I think of the elderly Italian men weeping on the sidewalk outside the prison, when Sophia Loren went in for tax evasion. I didn't think they were stupid, I found it very moving. Lives too often have to search for meaning, and she'd provided their lives with the physical embodiment of an ideal. What could a measly few million in taxes be compared to that? Niente! Niente!!
I pride myself on intellectual and aesthetic independence, but I'm happy enough to jump on the bandwagon when the herd is obviously right. And so in the late '70s I shared what was probably the single most common, but deeply held, conviction among teenage American males: that Farrah Fawcett was not only the most beautiful woman on the planet, but in fact represented absolute physical perfection amongst all possibilities conceivable to womankind. Heaven just got better lookin'.
19 June 2009
Overcome the finite with the infinite.
--Mother Teresa, Love: A Fruit Always in Season
I try to meditate three times a week: on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning, after ginseng tea and checking email and before my cup of coffee. Everyone's different, but if you're like me there's no point in trying to meditate after coffee, or a beer, or irritating mail is read…also make sure to brush your teeth and put hydrocortisone cream on any dry skin patches…otherwise that kind of stuff will just distract you.
And for meditation you don't want any distractions, negative associations, nothing like that. Meditation is a pure process, for me, rather than a purifying one. I begin by reading a brief passage of something relating to my religion: I've been meditating for about 15 years now and I've gone through every line of the four gospels a few times, typically stopping to work with anything that Jesus allegedly said as a meditation gateway; some of the Nag Hammadi texts, and for the past few weeks I've been working off Mother Teresa.
To oversimplify things, the teachings of Jesus are multi-layered. It is rare to find a statement that doesn't have a clear meaning, and it's rare to find one that doesn't yield something further if you turn it over in your mind a few times. Whoever wrote the Book of John is a much better writer than the (presumably) guys who wrote the synoptic gospels, but my sense is that he puts more of himself into his work than the others. In the contradictory areas my general tendency is to accept the synoptic gospels. There are more than a few, but my sense is also that arguing about dogma is a distraction in itself. John is definitely the one that's absolutely on literary fire and ever exploding further, by any measure the most passionate and passion has its own way of encompassing truth.
The Nag Hammadi texts vary in quality and intent even more wildly than the New Testament. My favorite, so far and probably forever, is unquestionably The Gospel of Truth. As a gnostic gospel (also incomplete, only relatively recently translated, etc.) it can be difficult to comprehend, but it's very exciting and full of wisdom.
After The Book of Truth I wanted to get to something a bit simpler and so I ended up with Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa's observations are so spectacularly simplistic-and yield so much upon reflection-that it leaves me the feeling that the cosmos are this paradox of everything being simple and nothing being that way. The paradox of unity.
So her point in the quote, above, is essentially that whenever we're upset the first thing to understand is that we're making mistakes, we're doing it wrong. As the Infinite is wonderful, good, perfect, and comforting…if we're getting anything different out of it that's because we are focusing on something smaller and-we mistakenly think-closer. We are suffering because we have juxtaposed the great and the small. Upon refocusing everything returns to its natural order, and peace is upon us. Easier said than done unless you're a guru who's able to just flip the switch. And for Mother Teresa I believe that it was usually just that easy.
I'm not great at meditation, it's not one of the things that I consider myself particularly good at. I don't find myself in altered states of consciousness basking in profound truths and sensations. Sometimes, maybe, at best, I feel a little something wonderful moving into the corners of the empty spaces. But it does relax me, it does make me less irritable.
And I believe that relaxed people tend to make better decisions, so maybe in that small way sometimes a little bit of the magic is mine.
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PUT THIS IN YOUR iPOD: "Pistolero Sleep"- Pigmy Love Circus (2003) . For a short while, in the summer of 1988, I lived in the Haight District of San Francisco. San Francisco remains one of my three or four favorite cities, and the Haight my favorite part of town, but I was young and when the August late afternoon winds started blowing in off the bay to the extent that I felt the need to buy an overcoat…I headed south straight back to San Diego . But I had a good time while I was there. One night we caught Pigmy Love Circus at a bar way down Haight Street, almost all the way down to McDonald's and Golden Gate Park. I forget the name of the place but the Circus played a gloriously loud, raw, obnoxious, outraged and enthused punk set. Then it turned out, after they'd loaded their equipment, that their van had broken down. It wasn't a big bar, maybe 50, 60 people, most of us kind of gauging the situation as they kept making calls on the bar phone, locating parts, getting a mechanic friend to drive up from San Jose or somewhere. Of course the problem being that, although they'd found a 24 hour parts store they didn't have enough money for the parts. What little they'd earned from the gig had long since been used up as an economic stimulus package for one of the local underground entrepreneurs… Rather than requesting a government bailout the drummer set up a large hat by the piano-at the opposite end of what was essentially a shotgun bar from the stage. Just to the left, going in, from the front door. It was half in the shadows right next to some big neon machine or sign. He then proceeded to very gently play Neil Young songs from the dark, Tonight's the Night/Time Fades Away period. Interpreting Neil's very darkest moods requires some technique, and a lot more tormented soul than that too, and I have to say that the guy was just absolutely fucking brilliant. My friend and I immediately counted up all of our money, seventeen bucks and change I think, and put it in the hat and kicked back to nurse our drinks and live it out. The bartender, having witnessed our largesse, slid us very fresh drinks and continued doing so until we left well after dawn. It was the best time I ever had in San Francisco, until Theresa and I went there on our honeymoon. Anyway, this ain't no ballad…
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LITERARY FLOURISH OF THE WEEK:
It was established that the Tylwyth Teg obeyed him and carried his messages through the air on soundless wings. Children whispered of his acquaintance with certain mottled weasels which might carry on his vengeance had he need of such. Then, too, he kept a red-eared dog. These were terrific things, and Merlin one not to be trifled with by children who did not know all the signs for protecting themselves.
--John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold
It's what I'm reading right now; his first and only historical novel. I'm not deep into it yet, but my first sense is…well, he's obviously an incredible writer of the very highest order, that rare combination of someone with the ability to say anything and more to say than that. But I already knew that. So far it's quite deserving but somewhat flowery compared to his other stuff, a variation that I'm not entirely certain is the most appropriate for a work on the pirate Henry Morgan. We'll see, he's probably just clearing the pipes. Anyway, the passage is one of the funniest things that I've read in a long time. The rhythm that concludes with "dog" is disarming to the point of collapse. The only thing I can think of to compare it to is The Old Man in the Sea, when the old man and the boy are talking baseball and of their hopes for a pennant by the Yankees. The boy says he fears the Tigers of Detroit. The old man says yeah they may be tough. The boy says he fears the Indians of Cleveland. The old man says yeah maybe but you have to watch out what you fear, or soon you'll be fearing the Red Legs of Cincinnati and the White Stockings of Chicago.
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http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090615/tpl-brown-announces-iraq-war-inquiry-5b839a9.html
Ok, let's see… another enquiry into the Iraq War by establishment figures specially selected by Labour spindoctors for their un-unique blend of incompetence and lack of guts, and who won't let anyone else know what's going on behind closed doors. I do believe that I can save the taxpayers some money on this one:
Terrible mistakes were made, terrible and horrible mistakes, tragic mistakes that resulted in a quite nearly inestimable loss of life and limb. Mistakes were undeniably made, yet of such fabric is woven so much of life. No specific individuals were responsible for these now rather incomprehensible errors in judgment, however, nor institutions and particularly no member of the Labour Party or the aristocracy. Please find a comprehensive list of personal expenses incurred throughout this rather incisive enquiry, attached, to be remunerated with interest at the taxpayers' earliest convenience.
I wonder if this will be the one where they notice that no one in their right mind who actually believes that a madman possesses weapons of mass destruction that could destroy London within 45 minutes…then proceeds to launch a three-week assault against that madman?
If Blair believed that shit when he said it he should have been institutionalized on the spot. If he didn't, he must be imprisoned now. There is no statute of limitations on murder. We have no choice but to track him down until he dies or turns himself in.
Here's 15-1 that the expense account includes at least another £3 million for whitewash.
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And finally, for baseball fans only: In the UK baseball is a cool cult sport, kind of like lacrosse or ultimate frisbee in the states. But we (Exeter Diamondbacks) did win the UK Little League World Series last year, and so more people are catching on. Please consider the advertisement, below, brought to my attention by my wife, and identify the glaring weaknesses along with your description of them. At least five or six just jump off the page, and I was never great at these games. Answers and responses will be published here next week.
Answers:
(1) home plate is square,
(2) home plate is elevated, better to trip and injure anyone getting near it my dear,
(3) the batter is quite literally standing on home plate,
(4) the batter is wearing what appears to be a hockey goalie mask, replete with face guard,
(5) the batting tee is placed approximately 20 feet away, rather than where the batter might actually hit off it,
(6) the batter appears to have mistaken the tee for a pitching machine, and so awaits its offering. One might think, for quite a long time.
12 June 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090608/ap_on_re_us/us_mayor_quarantined
Ever'body knows that New Orleans is my favorite city in the world (Theresa won't live it, cockroaches), and I do like the mayor, but...
This reminds me of one of the happiest moments of my youth, of my life. My high school (William T. Sampson High, U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) principal was one majestic Mr. Frank Andrews. Some might say that he was not a great principal, most agreed that he suffered-but most often appeared to enjoy-a particularly consistent and intransigent form of alcoholism.
We both played a lot of tennis at the club. I was ranked higher than he was, and he used to always cheat on line calls during tournaments. We knew he was cheating-rather than merely appearing in a diminished capacity-because all of the aberrant lines calls went his way, all of them. Some of them, we're talking like five feet in on shots getting called "out." Three feet on serves on big points, sometimes. Doctors wondered. He tended to lose anyway. He had the best collection of tennis racquets that I've ever seen, though, without question. His BOQ apartment was like a tennis racquet museum, and he would let us hit with any one we wanted: classics, really expensive new ones, he didn't care, he liked us. We liked him, too, kind of. Anyway we took good care of his racquets. He was amiable but not cool. On those occasions that my teachers misunderstood my truest nature and sent me to the office to be disciplined, it was the most simple thing imaginable to turn the subject to tennis. He loved tennis. "Who you gonna play doubles with this weekend?"
But he was still the principal. The High School Principal, Darth Vader by definition of position.
This particularly balmy Caribbean morning very strange rumours abounded amongst the coral dust and palms and strangely moving iguanas and shale and cacti of the student parking lot. Not that unusual, people most always say something when they're smoking together. People generally try to be interesting. We settled into Home Room for the reading of the Daily Bulletin. Usually nonsense about dances or clubs or vague opportunities of scholastic assistance. The teacher intoned, "Dear Students, Mr. Andrews has been captured by the Cubans…"
I don't know what anyone else did but I fell out of my desk laughing. Apparently Mr. Andrews and the wife of an enlisted personnel had loaded up a barrel boat full of beer or worse, got shellacked out of their minds and headed off past the checkpoint into Castro's Cuba. The Marine guard had urged retreat and fired warning shots into the air, but Frank merely smiled and waived bye-bye.
He had, once again, missed the line. This time by a few miles.
He apparently appeared later that night on Cuban television (I didn't see this) mumbling how he wasn't a spy, and was released several days later. He didn't return to Gitmo. My understanding is that he was reassigned as a dorm councillor in England. Best high school principal I ever had, and I had four.
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Classical Music of the Week : Joanna MacGregor, Deep River (2005) I saw her play most of this stuff at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter. It was incredible. She's a well proportioned lady, but her hands are bigger than my feet. My most singular sense was of a leading lady by any definition battering the keyboard with giant ham mallets and all of these beautiful explosions of notes flying out. For anyone not touched by the Gods a classical treatment of gospel and blues is prima facie disaster. For Joanna it turned out to be nothing but the most natural elevation of soul into nether realms that it deserves.
Loud Music of the Week : Led Zeppelin, London Playhouse Theatre 6/27/69 . I'll take live Led Zeppelin over studio Led Zeppelin, period. The studio stuff is great, obviously and unquestionably, but the signature lack of restraint of the live stuff, particularly the pre-'73 stuff, is absolutely debilitating. There is an argument to be made-and I've made it often enough-that early live Zep is the greatest music ever made by humans. They were too young to know or care, too talented not to cash it all in immediately and at every opportunity. This may be the ultimate "Communications Breakdown," and that's to open the set.
Put this on your iPod : "Loose Booty"/Funkadelic (1972). Most rock historians agree that Eddie Hazel is a guitarist to be considered in terms with the greatest, but this Funktune features co-writer Harold Beane on guitar whilst Eddie ad-libs vocals to what Wikipedia describes as "an obscene nursery rhyme." Yeah well, Harold absolutely tears it up and if this don't make you feel young, raunchy and bestowed upon by every decadent opportunity in the universe-against the lyrics, incidentally but I do believe with fullest intent-I give up.
see what in Laural's Dish today
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