There’s only one thing that would turn Trump supporters back around as quickly as they jumped on his bandwagon—and he’s doing it. All that crazy talk during the campaign got his followers revved up—but only a lunatic would actually plow right ahead with all the silliness that sounded great at a rally, but actually creates major problems, once you’ve taken office.
That is to say, it was bad enough he talked so loose about serious issues, like some cartoon character, but to actually play fast-and-loose with the ship of state—well, all I can say is, ‘He’s gonna need a bigger goon squad’. And he’s not just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—he’s actively widening the gash in the side of the ship. But that’s a bad turn of phrase—America had been doing pretty good, all things considered—and, had a competent President been elected, allusions to the Titanic would not be involved—I should say, rather, that Trump is the iceberg itself, destroying one of mankind’s greatest creations, merely by sitting his fat ass in the Oval Office, where clear, deep water should be.
His most delirious grasp for power is his antipathy towards video evidence, photographic evidence, reliable information sources, and journalism. Trump really thinks that he can shape information flow so completely that the truth will remain hidden for the next four years. As with all his activities, one is confused as to whether laughter or weeping is the appropriate response. These alternative-fact worker bees on the alt-right can say black is white, night is day—and that will confuse people for a time. But their lies cannot change a person’s income, lies cannot create jobs, and lies cannot reduce the stress and violence that affects so many Americans they were willing to gamble on what they thought was a ‘loose cannon’.
I might have gone along with all that ‘loose cannon’ BS—if Trump were a real maverick, an independent spirit with his own ideas about the status quo. But that is not the case here—Trump does not have his own ideas, he has delusions—Trump is not an independent spirit, he is an entitled bully who mistakes his wealth for validation. Britain is struggling to crawl out from under their big Brexit mistake, but we have to own our big mistake for four long years—no do-overs.
Still, remain calm. Once Trump gets bored, he may just sit around tweeting for the remaining three-and-a-half years. One way we could help make that happen is if the media stops giving him their full attention. After all, they could rightly point out that they are not in the business of interviewing people who always lie to them and insult them—and that’s a pretty accurate description of Trump’s administration. They could still report to the people—all they’d have to do is report on what the Congress is actually cooperating on with Trump, what other departments and agencies are being affected by Trump’s directives, and how other foreign leaders are reacting to him. They don’t really have to talk to Trump or his minions at all—especially considering what they’ve been getting out of them so far.
We know what Trump is like. How do you think he’d feel if no one came to the White House Press Room anymore, or bothered covering his ‘press conferences’, or giving him interviews? He’d probably feel almost as bad as he’s made the rest of us feel. Media, do the right thing—start giving Trump all the attention he deserves. And if you can’t do that much, at least stop putting his fucking lame-ass tweets on the front page every other damn day.
There was a burst of potentially-watchable movies in my video menu this morning—all kinds of movies—must be the run-off from the summer-movie influx in theaters. It’s strange for those of us who wait for the movie to leave the theater and get onto cable—we see the summer movies in winter, and the holiday movies in summer.
I started with “Suicide Squad”. I’ve pretty much had it with comic book retro-fits—and Suicide Squad is a poor excuse for even a comic book. But I like Will Smith—and I always enjoy it when some hot young actress does a star turn as a psycho-killer, as Margo Robbie does in this. But sometimes the over-arching concept of one team of good guys against a team of bad guys can strain the bounds of credulity—even within the ‘willing suspension’ paradigm.
In this movie, a ‘transdimensional’ witch with seemingly unlimited power, both natural and supernatural, stands against a group of admittedly tough customers—but none of them equipped to face down something from beyond the limits of time and space. Well, there’s one—a reluctant pyrokinetic with supernatural powers of his own.
But the rest of them have to be kept busy fighting minions of the witch, to distract from the fact they can’t possibly fight her. It’s just senseless—and believe me, I’ve swallowed a lot of sci-fi and comic book foolishness in service of maintaining my willing suspension of disbelief—and enjoying the story—but there has to be a minimal coherence to the thing. I need to be accorded that much respect.
Anyway, for a two-hour movie full of nonsense, it went by fairly quickly and painlessly. I gave it a few hours, then I went back.
“Florence Foster Jenkins”:
I went back earlier this evening for another film, “Florence Foster Jenkins”, starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg.
There was a French film on Netflix recently, “Marguerite” (2015), with a similar story—a moneyed matron of the arts is surrounded by sycophants who never tell her that she has a terrible singing voice—a secret carefully kept by a mad-cap retinue, using carefully-curated venues and selectively-bribed music critics to maintain the illusion until the catastrophe of a large, uncontrolled, public performance threatens to expose the entire charade.
Both films claim some basis in historical fact—but the French film is set at the turn of the century and the American film is set in 1940s New York. This leads me to wonder if rich woman are historically misled about their true abilities—and, if so, why? But beyond that question, there’s the tone of such a movie. In the case of “Florence Foster Jenkins”, much like “Marguerite”, there’s a contradiction between the hilarity of bad singing and the tragedy of a person being lied to by everyone around that person—supposed friends and lovers who, whether through kindness or avarice are, nonetheless, doing the poor woman no favors.
Even the surprising tenderness that Hugh Grant brings to his role as FFJ’s husband cannot render this story a happy one—or a particularly funny one, since the impending slip-on-a-banana-peel is always the looming exposure and destruction of the woman’s sense-of-self. Meryl Streep brings humor to the character, but for me, the set-up is more suitable for a psychological horror-thriller, such as ‘Gaslight’, than for any light-hearted costume-comedy.
No one could fault the technical efforts, or the performances of the cast, in this film—but I guess I’m just too squeamish to enjoy laughing at someone who insists on making music badly—perhaps it cuts a little too close to home for me. Yes, that’s probably it—I see a little too much of my own musical strivings in the story of “Florence Foster Jenkins”.
Have you ever argued with someone who is wrong? Have you noticed that they are just as sure of being right as you are, even though they are wrong? And here’s the funniest thing of all—when we realize that we’ve been arguing for the wrong side, when we suddenly see the other side of the argument as correct—oh, what a symphony of confusion, embarrassment, and frustration we go through, how we choke on the gall of it. Some people get so upset that they just stalk off, pissed. I always make a point of swallowing that mistake and facing up to being the idiot that lost the argument.
We all are the idiot, eventually, at one time or another. There’s little use in pretending we are the one person who’s always right—that person doesn’t exist. And I firmly believe the most important part of an argument is not letting the argument itself become the point of conflict. In truth, when I lose an argument to someone, I eventually come to accept that I have learned something I didn’t know. I may never have the grace to be grateful for that, but I concede to myself that I should be.
Don’t get me wrong—I love to win an argument. But my motives are based on my belief that I’m thinking clearly about a problem, avoiding the temptation to ‘bend’ things in favor of my personal preferences—or my desire to be the ‘winner’ of the argument. I force myself to concede the other’s point, when a point is valid—sportsmanship is as important in argument as it is in sports—perhaps more so.
When arguing, it is good to cite reliable sources for one’s information. And that becomes a problem in the modern world—when something like ‘Fox News’ becomes a source for false information, the argument quickly devolves into a sub-argument about the validity of one’s sources. The reverse is also true—when an asshole like Trump tries to invalidate actual sources, such as The New York Times.
Trump is the champion of the dull and the easily-swayed—and he has spawned a whole counter-culture of people who imagine their own truth, outside of the popular, ‘observable’ variety. They believe in argument shorn of either sportsmanship or sources—argument where denying facts need only be shouted louder and longer than the opponent’s words to become ‘fact’, where talking about something else is the answer to uncomfortable, undeniable facts. Kelly Conway has made a career of this kind of argument, if you can call her rantings argument.
I’m sorry, KellyAnne, but if your mind is incapable of conceding anything said by your opponent, you’re not really arguing—you’re cheerleading. That’s all well and good at a ballgame, but it gets rather threadbare and feeble when it comes up against real life. Every time you ‘win’ an argument on TV, you’re making the whole country that much stupider—and for what? Let me tell you—I wasn’t always this way—I had a penchant for willful contrariness myself, once upon a time—but you can only juggle logic for so long before it bites you in the ass. I found that out—and you will too. Time is the great teacher.
Afterword: I nearly forgot my main point—which is this: You can have arguments all day long, but unless someone wins, it’s all a big waste of time. And if you haven’t changed a person’s mind, you haven’t won the argument. Even if you did succeed in making them feel hurt or sad or angry, you’ve still wasted your time. Miracles do happen—a person might change your mind, instead—and even that—even losing the argument (and maybe learning something) is time better spent than simply arguing with no end.
One entitled, lecherous, ignorant pig with too much money reaches the age of seventy and decides he’d like to rule the world. I laugh. Our democratic process agrees with him. I weep and curse the heavens.
It isn’t that I’m afraid of his presidency—hell, an asteroid could wipe us all out someday, just as senselessly—it’s just that I mourn the proof that this country is peopled with idiots who mistook an election for a reality game-show. It makes a joke of democracy—and truly, without solemnity, judgement, and good sense, democracy is a farce. And now we have a clown where a leader should be. I never thought we’d have a president that I couldn’t respect—I foolishly thought that Bush-43 had taught us all a lesson.
It can’t be helped. These are the times I’ve lived to witness—and nothing I do or say will change the facts. My problem—my job, if you will—is to learn to live my life, in spite of disaster. I’ve done a fair job of avoiding the subject since Election Day—and that was the right way to go.
I avoid the news—but there are some tidbits that can’t be avoided if I watch TV at all—today’s tidbit was a Trump tweet about hanging flag-burners or some such idiocy. It got it all riled up in my head again—am I going to have four whole years of this crap-fest? So I wrote a ranting post—just like I used to, back before the election rendered discussion moot.
(In fact, I allowed myself crudities that I avoided in the heat of the campaign, back when calling a POS a POS might have been seen as partisan, rather than as simple observation. Now that everyone else has given that jerk a free pass, I’ll give the same to myself.)
I posted my rant—then I walked away—but the next rant had already started writing itself in my head. I realized that I was foolish to let myself be drawn back into arguing with a brick wall—and that it would lead to nothing but stress, anger, and frustration. So, let this suffice for as long as possible. My next blog-post (if there is one) will be about things that matter—or, at least, things that don’t make me ill.
The Election was followed by Thanksgiving, which allowed us to pivot—now that we aren’t concerned with lack of progress, lack of change, from our president—we can just be thankful for every day that things remain as they are, instead of getting much worse. If you close your eyes, you can almost believe that Trump won’t do any serious harm for four years, and then we’ll get a real president in there, and get back to work in 2020.
Perhaps the homunculus that ate at the center of Castro’s heart has given up the ghost because it finds a much more welcoming and powerful host, just a few miles North of Cuba. Trumpland—Viva el Nuevo Cuba!
We continue to block the news, here at the Dunn house. As I’ve remarked to many friends, I don’t need four years of the details on the bad news—I’ll wait for the movie to come out. Claire still reads the NY Times, so some news still leaks in—but at least we don’t have to wonder if it’s BS or not.
I’m curious how the ACA issue will play out. The way I see it, they have two options—they can just cold-bloodedly repeal the healthcare act—and let the medical costs just eat us alive again, with no security that it’ll cover us when we actually need it, or that we can even get coverage when we’re sick—or they can try to reform the existing legislation.
But the only way to really fix Obamacare is to make it single-payer, like it always should have been in the first place—and they can’t do that, can they? That would hurt the insurance industry—and god forbid they suffer—that’s why Washington fought it in the first place—and it’s the reason they can now claim it isn’t working.
The anti-socialized-medicine crowd hobbled the ACA so as to keep Capitalists in the game, to retain their ability to profit off of our suffering—so my money is on them trashing the whole thing. Why not? The time to stop them was November 8th—and that’s already past. Once the people have spoken, the lobbyists can get back to work—and they’re willing to do whatever they can to screw us out of money, even if it kills us.
So lobbyists are a big problem—as is business’s all-around choke-hold on our democracy. And the 25% of voters who voted for disaster are a problem—and the 50% of voters who just didn’t bother to vote are a problem. Our new president will not do anything to change that, or fix those problems—he is the result, not the cure.
People are eager to protest and petition and dispute the election—they don’t get it: the Election was the protest we were supposed to show up for—and nobody came. Well, that’s not entirely true—at last count, two million more Americans voted for the loser than the winner. But it wasn’t enough—and a protest after the fact is a pretty futile response—I mean: are we protesting Trump, are we protesting the Electoral College, are we protesting the stupidity of the American voter? What are we doing here? You can’t un-ring a bell.
I admire their spirit—but their timing sucks. Social media has given us all hot pants—we can’t sit down and plan for two years from now, or ten years from now—we have to organize a protest for next week or whatever. Why? Protesting isn’t an artistic expression—it’s a political statement. We can’t just run into the streets and yell about our feelings—we have to have a plan. We have to lengthen our timeline, build an engaged base, and strategize the hell out our next move—or this nonsense will never end.
America, you are headed down the wrong road—it looks like the same direction, but we’ve taken an unseen turn due to changing conditions. We’ve embraced too many of the cut-throat practices that enabled other countries to catch up to us—when we should have kept our lead by out-innovating other countries, instead of this panicky adoption of all their worst habits.
That whole Japanese thing in the 90s about working 20-hour days worked for them, but for us, it just made it harder to stop and think about what we’re doing. Other changes have similarly-tainted sources and similarly-tainted results. And now Americans either don’t have jobs, get underpaid, or get worked like a hated mule.
Capitalism needs a good kick in the balls. Its advantages shrink and its dangers loom larger and larger. I know it was our ‘battle standard’ during the Cold War, but that was then. It’s okay now—if Capitalism needs a ‘time out’, we have to give it one. We can’t be squeamish about it—Capitalism certainly isn’t going to scruple at sucking us dry. With the election of a debased billionaire, America has proven that making money has ascended above any other American ethic—and the destruction of two big buildings in NYC has made us a nation of cowards. We have to nut up—and start living as if we had money, instead of money having us.
I say we stop buying stuff. No, of course, I know we can’t do that. I don’t know—maybe we could buy less stuff? Maybe we could determine some things to be unnecessary? Maybe we could try to maximize our local purchases, replacing purchases from the big stores? I really don’t know how you kill Capitalism—but I think the democracy thing comes into it—if enough people start doing something new, the old thing dies, right? Maybe the best first step is to recognize our enemy for the deadly threat it’s become. All I know for sure is that electing a brainless billionaire, just because he’s a billionaire, is a giant-step in the wrong direction.
But enough about politics—I was never much for team sports anyhow.
Like me, you may have wondered at times how to fix people, how to make society better—that sort of thing. The answer is that you don’t—or rather, you can’t. Imagine a world where everybody is kind and caring and generous. Now forget that—because people are kind and caring and generous, at certain times (if at all—some of them) but that is not our constant state. That’s not how humans work. Being kind and caring and generous is part of what we are, but it is only a part, and it is not permanent—it is an intermittent thing that we do when we are not being something else, something less angelic.
Think of all the time we spend without eating—most of our time, right? But it would be silly to say, “Why can’t people ‘not eat’ all the time?” We don’t spend most of our time eating, but we still must eat. The same with sleeping—eventually, we need to sleep. There are a bunch of other things we have to fit into our time—less basic things, but still important—pay bills, gas the car, go to the bathroom, even. Many parts of our lives have little or nothing to do with our character—they’re just included in the deal, the ‘parts and maintenance’ of living our lives.
Whatever list of things you collect as basic parts of living your life, if that list becomes too big and life becomes too precarious, the opportunities to find gaps in that life which allow you to display your character will dwindle. Living in poverty can create a treadmill so exhausting that poor people can find no time at all to look up from their grind and ponder the good and bad of things. Conversely, the wealthy often contrive to make themselves very ‘busy’ to create the pretense that they’re in the same situation. Either way, you end up with a lot of people who either can’t care or won’t care about all the causes and charities and politics and ethics.
So I say—don’t put the cart before the horse. Don’t try to turn people into angels right off—start out by trying to make a world where people don’t go hungry or naked, where their education is easily available—a world that isn’t just crouching there, ready to eat us alive. Then, maybe, start worrying about people being good. You can’t throw someone’s ass into a wood-chipper, and then lecture them on ethics.
And another thing—stop worrying about how intelligent people are. If everyone around you seems to be acting like an idiot—enjoy it—you’re of above-average intelligence. If you weren’t, someone else would be watching you act like an idiot—and maybe they are. How can you know? Human intelligence is a range of values—that’s just the way it is. Being on the high end may be frustrating, but it beats the alternative.
I’m grateful for all the education I’ve received in my lifetime—but I don’t assume that those without it are uneducated by choice. Education is something your community and your family provide—without that infrastructure, some people never get a good education—and that isn’t up to them. Also, if a whole area is weak on public education, even the best intentions have a hard time ‘injecting’ education into a neighborhood where it’s never properly existed before.
Thus, while I am always eager to badger some poor bastard for being willfully blind or proudly ignorant, I accept that people will be quick or slow, learned or not—and shouldn’t be judged on that, either way. It’s no different from judging people by their physique or coordination—we all have our places on the various scales of ability, mental or physical. These are not the measure of a person’s character.
I take all of the above as contextual—a given. Even so, when I complain that someone is being ‘stupid’, and I’m assuming that you, dear reader, understand all that—I’m really only saying they’re being mentally stubborn or arrogant—but I still worry that someone might think that I despise people who aren’t real smart. And that would go against what I really believe. So I try to avoid it—but I get angry enough to use the word sometimes—I should find a better word.
The difficulty lies in the difference between political correctness and the hard truth—yes there are people who lack intelligence or education through no failing of their own—but then, there are people who could and should know better than they pretend. These people hide within that ‘range of values’—they dare you to prove that they’re knowingly embracing an ignorance. They glory in their willful blindness, as if having the right to our own opinions gives them the right to ignore truth, and to go on hating something out of pure spitefulness—these people need a good kick in the ass.
Regardless, there are limits to how broad a range of understanding we can allow for—clever people are busy day and night, trying to think up new stuff to make life better. They invent cars and computers, medicines and space stations—but as they proceed, life becomes more complicated. Now that we have enough industry and energy-use to threaten the atmospheric environment, for instance, we have to be smart enough to see the threat coming before it’s too late. If we create complicated problems, we can’t rely on a handful of clever people to keep a lid on all the trouble.
The recent election of a simpleton is a perfect example—being the head of the United States puts him at the center of a web of complex interactions. Someone as ignorant as Trump could cause a variety of disasters, just by virtue of what he doesn’t know or doesn’t understand. And he was elected by mostly uneducated people—most of whom chose him out of desperation, without thinking through how dangerous he is.
So we are living a demonstration of my point—this country’s development by clever people has built up a house of cards—and if the majority of us are careless enough, the whole thing will collapse at the first bump of the table. It doesn’t matter what we invent, achieve, or figure out a plan for—once it is in the hands of people who don’t understand it, they will misuse it, or break it, or let it go to waste.
American democracy can survive a range of values of intelligence—but there has to be a minimum average of intelligence commensurate with the complexity of our nation’s functioning. You can’t build a nuclear arsenal—and then hand it to a baby. That’s trouble waiting to happen. Maybe it’s time for the clever people to ask themselves, “If I am clever enough to use this, will it be safe to assume that everyone else will use this, and not abuse it?” Maybe it’s time we design society to fit the least-common-denominator of carelessness and obliviousness—I bet those same class-clown types would quickly start to complain that they’re not as stupid as we seem to think they are.
It’s human nature—expect people to be on-the-ball, and they’ll act like they’ve just been hit on the head—but if we expect people to be dull, they’ll bust a gut to prove how on-the-ball they really are. The electorate just recently so much as insisted that they be allowed to roll in the mud of ignorance—I say, let’em. Once they sampled the leadership of someone who isn’t just pretending he’s a moron, they’ll wise up surprisingly.
It is far past the time when we can continue to conflate humanity with reason. Reason is unnatural—humanity is far more influenced by feelings than by reason—our judgements are emotional, not rational. Democracy sounds like a good idea—but it tends to give us what we want, not what we need. The biggest failing of democracy, it seems, is that there are no wrong answers in an election, just a consensus. It’s like taking an opinion poll of reality—it tells us what we feel, but it doesn’t tell us if we’re right to feel that way.
Still, I support the supremacy of feeling over reason—I support the will of the majority—not because I admire these ideas, but because they are the only fair way to go about organizing ourselves. Even within that paradigm, we find ourselves surrounded by unfairness and violence—but without those principles, it just gets worse. Government by fiat and firepower—a proven cancer on any hope of economic development, or personal security.
So, here I am, at the far side of a long life of reading and learning, having found that people (including myself) are both far more and far less than we believe ourselves to be. Cynicism and nihilism plague me—I’ve gathered enough knowledge to learn that knowledge is itself a relative term, without the rock-sure permanence the word implies. And when I consider the dysfunction in the world around me, and feel that urge to ‘change the world’—or even merely ‘improve my neighborhood’—I must ask myself if I’m really the proper person to do that? Would I want everyone else to end up like me? I don’t think so.
Changing society is little different from raising kids. When two kids are arguing, my impulse is to break it up and bring peace to the situation—but kids grow up better if they learn to work things out—so my impulse may be the worst thing I could do. Or it may be the correct choice. I’m not the sort of nurturing person who could easily discern which is which. And if I’m unsure of myself while supervising two children at play, I should perhaps think twice before I decide I’m going to change society. Is society perfect? No. Is it useful for me to think in terms of changing the system? Maybe it would be better if I confined myself to helping out a single person, in a single moment, as I go along—of thinking as much about the people around me as I do of myself.
But then, I might get tired of helping person after person with the same problem—I might decide that they are all being victimized by the same flaw in the system. At that point, I might consider becoming an activist for change, because I would have a specific issue that I knew about and understood. That makes plenty of sense. But for me to just speculate on broad changes to our whole society, based on whatever tweaked my beard that day, would be the height of arrogance—especially if I’m doing so from the remove of my office, basing my opinions on what the TV says, rather than mixing with actual people.
And this is something that goes for TV and media, in a broader sense. We watch these programs and reports—and we absorb the idea that the universe being presented is the complete reality. The globe is reduced to a chessboard, the players become whatever labels the media puts on certain groups—and it is presented to us as a contest, where enjoying the contest is as much the point as who wins or loses. You don’t see kids in Aleppo watching CNN—and if they did, they’d be horrified by their commodification as info-tainment, their lives and the lives (and deaths) of everyone they know concentrated down to a brief segment-subject.
You want to know the World? You can’t. Okay? The world is too big. So you can watch the world news, if you enjoy it, but don’t kid yourself—you’re watching a show. You don’t know nothing. (Hey, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded—I mean, I don’t know nothing, either—I’m just making a point.) When I think about it—my neighborhood is never on the news. Does that mean nothing happens here? Does that mean we aren’t important? No, it just means that we don’t bleed enough to make it onto the show.
The election is over and people still want to talk about it, even protest about it. I don’t think they understand what the word ‘election’ really means. I was happy to argue over the choices, while the election was still to come—indeed, I did little else. But we are no longer arguing about what Trump might do—he’s president-elect now, and he’s gonna do pretty much whatever comes into that fool head of his.
The time to stop him has passed. You lose. Or, rather, we lose—I lose—and I don’t feel much like talking about it anymore. It’s painful enough to know that half the voters didn’t even show up, that Hillary got the most votes of those who did show up, and that Trump won the race anyway.
What else is there to talk about? Are we going to torture ourselves, watching every stupid move this clown makes, every mistake that sets the world a-shudder? Not me—if the country is this stupid, I’m not watching it self-destruct on TV—I’ll wait until it shows up at my front door.
In the meantime, I’ll try to stay busy and stay positive. I try to remind myself that, underneath it all, Hillary probably feels great—she’s free as a bird, she did her best—it was the country that lost out in not getting her for our president. What did she lose? Four, maybe eight years of the most grueling job on earth—she’s well out of it.
From a personal point of view, Hillary won big. She got a million more votes than Trump, but she doesn’t have to be imprisoned on Pennsylvania Avenue for the next few years—she can take it easy, take some time for herself.
An eighteen-month presidential campaign is no picnic (and she had to bull through pneumonia along the way) so I’m sure she could use a little downtime. Truly, I’m almost as happy for her as I am heartbroken for myself. Hillary, you win Nerd-dom hands down—this is the supreme example of the cool kids not listening to the head-down, hard-working, smart girl—you are the Queen of the Nerds for life.
It’s done wonders for us here—after the initial shock of disappointment, Claire threw out her TV and got intensely busy with her various projects; Spencer seemed galvanized to start doing all kinds of projects (I think this election has convinced him that there is a threatening world out there—something I was loathe to teach him myself, but that may have some good come of it); and I am emerging, too, into a fresh, new world that doesn’t revolve around watching news channels and writing my election blog-posts.
I enjoyed the last eight years of politics, particularly after the preceding eight years of frustration (and war and economic crisis). I felt the arrow of time bending towards progressivism—which only makes sense in a world growing ever more closely-bound together. But the future must wait. The next four years will be an epic hiccup in our social progress—and excuse me if I choose to ignore it entirely until 2020.
I am impatient with any waste of time—and following politics, for the present, will be nothing but an exercise in masochism. I’ll just keep my head down and hope for something better, next time around. You younger, healthier people should spend the next four years getting your ducks in a row, preparing to take the government back from the dickheads. I’m not saying everyone should be old and sick like me, unable to bounce back from this debacle—in fact, you should be working on getting some Dems elected in the 2018 races—you’ll want a plurality in both Houses, when and if you get another Dem for Prez.
But I am done. I’ve watched Cronkite report on JFK’s assassination, LBJ’s war protesters, Nixon’s tapes, Ford’s fumbles, Carter’s hostages, and Reagan’s Cold War victory. I’ve watched CNN’s Wolf report on Bush Sr.’s Iraq War, Clinton’s peccadilloes, Bush Jr.’s Iraq War, and Obama’s Health Care. I’ve seen enough—and the turd that just rolled up has no place among these past leaders.
Yes, somehow the world manages to become a better place, year by year, but not without a lot of problems lingering, or even getting worse. President-elect Aberration is a perfect example of that. But Trump’s election is no reason for total despair—his incompetence is still preferable to the polished evil of his VP. And four years of practice will prove to his supporters what they refused to face during the election. The Republicans have finally ousted all their favorite excuses—what will they say when they have no Obama to blame, no Hillary to scapegoat?
Oh, they’ll still lie—they’ll still make excuses—getting elected doesn’t change anything. But they’ll have a lot less cover. And the truth will out—no matter how many biased news-reports try to hide it. Congress will still suck—and now they’ll be working with a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing—should be great fun, eh?
But I don’t watch reality TV—and now that politics has commingled with that genre, I’m going to watch something else for the foreseeable future. Please let me know if journalism makes a comeback, or if voters become engaged, or if a competent person replaces our new president-elect. And don’t worry, I’m not gonna hold my breath.
But I will not torture myself by following every dick move this guy pulls, day after day. I gave up two years being mesmerized by TV, watching them play this media game, where the truth is hidden under one of the shifting teacups—‘that’s right, viewer, just keep your eyes on the swirling teacups….’ I’m done, I tell you.
Now that I’m much older than 99% of the talking heads, I see them more clearly than they see themselves—and the kernels of truth squeezed in amongst all their sensationalism get rarer and rarer, like gems in the mud. I’m like one of those old master-butchers—you give me a carcass of story and I’ll trim away all the fat with a few expert slices of the knife, leaving only the lonely fillets of factual info—but present media reporting is a conveyor-belt of animal parts fit only for dog-or-cat-food. Presenting such a fact-free wasteland to an old butcher like me is an insult, and I won’t take it anymore.
Sunday, November 13, 2016 5:24 PM
Even If Flames Surround Them
As the veil of anti-depressants falls away
The mind doesn’t clear so much as catch fire,
The clarity cluttered by the rawness.
The first thought is ‘Retreat!’—losing a grip on the cotton
Clouds, peering over my shoulder at the long fall
Back down to the ground.
And between that downfall of an election
And the constant shouting of the still, small voice
That says, ‘Quit smoking!’ this may seem a bad time
To stop softening the edges of the world in my head.
Yet down we must come. Down we must be,
Here on the ground where we can touch the
Things that matter, even if flames surround them.
As the grumbling gremlins become visible,
And all-too-well heard, shoulders hunch in revulsion.
Words jumble; memories tumble, stumble, and fumble.
Why do I need to be here? What’s my job?
I stand on that lone promontory, confused.
How do emotions get broken—and how do we
Clear them from the road ahead while they remain
Too heavy to shift? If I can climb over, if I
Can get through, if I can keep moving,
I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.
And descend to the valley of the real, down
On the ground where I can touch the
People that matter, even if flames surround them.
Monday, November 14, 2016 12:08 PM
Something Everybody Does (2016Nov14)
You know that feeling when you’re just starting to wake up? It’s comfortable and fluffy, but you don’t know anything—where you are, who you are, what day it is—that sort of thing. It’s a beautiful moment—I remember enjoying that immensely. But now I never get passed that feeling. I can’t get a firm purchase on the surface of my thoughts—they slide around me like wisps of smoke. I miss having a working brain—they are handy.
So many things can be accomplished with good wetware—I’ve been exiled from their kingdom, but I refuse to join the people who hug their ignorance to themselves like a fur coat in a strong breeze. Maybe I can’t think anymore, but I can still tell the difference between what is and what I wish would be. All this pretending is so childish.
We pretend that we are not animals. We make excuses for our impulses, pretending there are reasons behind them. It makes me laugh—the more ignorant we are, the more proud we are of our opinions—intelligent people are never sure of themselves. The world is a complicated thing—thinking you’ve figured it out is a sure sign of idiocy.
There is nothing as hilarious to me as someone with the confidence of his or her convictions—I remember when I was that young. I was so sure I was right and everybody who thought otherwise was wrong. But I was a little kid, then—there’s no excuse for that kind of childishness when you’re a grown person.
People can be very demanding—they want what’s theirs; they want their rights; they want their fair share; they want free speech for themselves—and a little peace and quiet from everybody else. And they don’t even see the paradox in their hypocrisy. We want our kids to behave—and we want them to think for themselves. We want our parents to give us everything we want—and protect us from the things we shouldn’t have. We want to make a killing in business, but we want businesses to be fair to us. We don’t understand why we have to wait, when we are so busy. We try to get past the rules we don’t like, but we want to punish those who dare to break the rules.
William Blake once drew a picture symbolizing childhood—it was a child at the foot of a ladder that goes up to the moon, the child reaching up and crying, “I want! I want!” I think he was going easy on the human race, implying that all that sort of thing ends in childhood. I certainly have little more to offer the world than my urges, my needs, and my desires—and I can’t think of anyone else who could honestly claim differently. I suppose his point is that children don’t climb the ladder—they wait for someone else to fetch them the moon. But while an adult may climb the ladder, it’s still in thoughtless pursuit of the bright object—little different from a myna bird seeking tin-foil for its nest.
We still seek food and shelter—but we do it in this deferred-reward capitalist square-dance that trades time and effort for money, then money for food and shelter. The stress of this requires escapism, so some of the money goes to our leisure pursuits—though the fact of ‘leisure’ being necessary to the system tells you something’s off about the whole thing. Then there’re the layers of pretending—the wealthy get to pretend there’s a reason why they have it easy, the poor get to pretend that the system that keeps them poor is a good one.
We’re just a bunch of animals who’ve learned how to play pretend on a grand scale. But for me, the pretense takes something out of the grandeur. A culture based on facts and common sense would undoubtedly be less imaginative, perhaps even less fun—and that is probably why Progressives have such a job getting people to change the way they think. Their mistake is in assuming that thinking is something everybody does.
Tuesday is Election Day. Hopefully, this will be the last time I write about Trump. Even if this country’s voters are sane enough to elect Hillary on Tuesday, in future I will be writing about Hillary and all of her many obstructionist opponents—but I will happily ignore his name for the rest of time. Once the danger of seeing that expletive-deleted man-child elected president has passed, a lot of the urgency will be gone.
I was always going to vote for Hillary. Way before Trump announced, I trusted Hillary as much as I would trust any politician. She is respected by people I respect. Her life story and her curriculum vitae are impressive, without any regard for gender. Finally, her job experience is as close to ‘presidential trainee’ as you could get if you had planned it.
But as the election went on, it became clear that the most important reason to elect Hillary Clinton was to make sure we don’t elect Trump. At this point, if Hillary wins, all the great things she will do will all be gravy—she will have already saved the country, the economy, the environment, and the planet—simply by beating Trump. Oh, and we’ll finally have a woman president—something her opponents would like us all to forget.
Choosing our first president from that half of the citizenry, the half that has had the vote for a just shy of a century, is no small thing. We like to think we live in a post-racial, post-misogynist culture—but we don’t. Bias is not so easily banished. And gender bias is the most intractable. Electing Hillary is as important because she is a woman, as it is because she is Hillary Rodham Clinton—and it matters to every little girl (and boy) in this country because of the example it sets.
Even a President Hillary would still have a Congress of mostly males, a Cabinet of mostly males—as in business, the higher up the chain you go, the less women you find. That’s no accident—and that’s not women’s fault. Chauvinism is alive and well—Hillary’s election won’t end it, any more than Barack’s ended racism—but it’s a darn good start.
The Republicans, and their Faux News channel, describe Hillary as the worst person that ever lived—but if even part of what they’re saying had any facts behind it, you wouldn’t see the First Family trying so hard to get her elected. And remember, Obama is a guy who does what’s right, even when it’s not politically smart. Many Faux News stories are laughed at outright by more level-headed journalists—and, in my opinion, even the anti-Hillary rhetoric with some grounding in truth is overblown to the point of unrecognizability.
In trying to make her quite-human lapses seem equal in horror to the monster running for their team, the Right have made themselves ridiculous—and dangerous. If this country had a lick of sense, the Democrats would run the entire ballot, up and down—the Democrats would screw it up, of course, but they would get some things right. The Republicans have gone so far to the right that they don’t even hew to American ideals any longer—and their policies are just their way of turning the country into a for-profit business. That goes beyond opposition, all the way to treason, if you ask me. And it doesn’t help that they nominated an ignoramus who makes Bush-43 look like a gosh-darned genius.
But there is the great conundrum all of us are faced with—do we want a guy who doesn’t read the paper—or a woman who has made the news the papers write about? Yeah, I can see why this election is so close….
Today’s video is called Kindergarten because it was played while I was remembering my own kindergarten days. They’re pretty thin memories, at sixty, but those early experiences are so full of emotion that they seem to retain their impact, even when they degrade into shards and flashes.
The idea that repetition suggests authority is no doubt rooted in the days when anyone who would gainsay the head man rarely got to repeat themselves. In fact, the value of free speech is more than mere human rights—it is the assertion that truth exists outside of, and in spite of, authority.
This can be used and, just as easily, misused—the Scientific Method is an example of the use of truth-seeking through disruption of the established consensus—science-denial is an example of the same principle, turned on its head, by conflating Science with Established Authority. The latter use amounts to saying, ‘I’m not gonna be bullied by all this provable, reproducible experimentation.’
This is irrefutable logic within the bounds of free speech, but it still falls outside of common sense, and is suggestive of a motive or agenda, rather than pure objectivity. Pure Objectivity doesn’t help matters any, by being an imaginary ideal that we aspire to, rather than obtain—so the arguments persist, simple by virtue of the complexity of the ‘knot’.
Propagandists, thus, still live by the rule—say anything three times, and people start to believe it. Trump states this in his Art of the Deal—as if he discovered a big secret. Whenever Trump lies (or rather, whenever he speaks) I always listen for that third time. It would make a deadly drinking game—a shot for every third repetition of a lie—the whole party would be passed out in the first fifteen minutes.
But Trump has become too used to this concept of the pliability of reality—his flights of fancy become ever more outlandish, more self-evidently false. Or, as he put it, ‘the shackles are off’. What gets me is, every time he lies, he’s saying that we are stupid enough to believe him, just because he says it three times in a loud authoritative voice. I find that incredibly offensive—not much different from the time he asked a crowd of Ohioans, “How stupid are the people of Ohio?”
He insults our intelligence with all these lies—I find it hard to grasp why people would take so much disrespect from him. But then, I’ve always had a great big chip on my shoulder, so I react pretty strongly to that sort of thing. He doesn’t ‘get’ that, yes, many politicians lie during campaigns—but they limit themselves to lies that can’t be technically disproven, at least not easily—like, with a quick Google search. Yes, ‘the Donald’, politicians lie, but within the bounds of reason—they don’t force cognitive dissonance upon their constituents, making their continued support require a blind rejection of the obvious.
I think, after this election is finally put to sleep, the media should start to take stock of the Outlandish factor: ‘Obama is a secret Muslim, alien Kenyan’, ‘Death Panels’, ‘Obama founded ISIS’, ‘Hillary is a she-demon’, ‘Trickle-down economics’, ‘Muslims are dangerous’, ‘Weed is dangerous’, ‘Poverty is a choice’—you name it, the Republicans are allowed to go on TV and say whatever crazy bullshit comes into their heads.
The media needs better ground rules—Trump supporters have been spreading their unblinking, shrill crazy-talk across America for a year—everyone, including the anchors, knows they’re lying, twisting the facts, and supporting a dangerous psychopath, yet they are rarely cut-off, or even interrupted, while saying things that make me physically ill. WTF, media? Mental disease can be just as contagious as germs, you know—you’re creating a health crisis by your lack of quality-control on the disingenuousness of your guests—in the name of fairness. It’s not fair, it’s a false equivalence and everyone knows it.
Journalism has a responsibility to give both sides of an argument—not one side of a very lopsided issue versus plain old crazy. That’s not ‘both sides’, that’s an invitation to inanity in nice clothes. And the media has had a parade of that from the day Trump declared. Once we are saved from ourselves, assuming Election Day isn’t a death knell for America, the media needs to rethink their ‘equal time’ policies—crazy doesn’t need any help—and it sure don’t need any free air-time.
Which reminds me—Trump says the media is rigging the election. Is this the same media that gave him billions-of-dollars-worth of free campaign advertising by reporting on his every word, obsessively, daily? Like I said—plain old crazy.
[Fit the Eighth : The Vanishing]
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away —
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
Sunday, October 16, 2016 5:25 PM
Made a video today—not too bad—but then the darn camera’s charged died before the very last note—Arrgh! But the pictures of the grandiloquent granddaughter more than make up for the music’s shortcomings.
As you can see, when Seneca goes out in her stroller, she looks a little like a tiny granny-lady—very fussy and querulous—it’s so adorable.
It’s a fine day. I just finished hearing Obama’s dedication address at the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture on C-SPAN. Stirring, inspiring, as always—isn’t that strange? Our president’s default setting is ‘stirring, inspiring’—I don’t think he can give a speech without sending a thrill through his listeners. Very strange. The combination of ‘president’ and ‘cool’ is almost overwhelming.
And Stevie Wonder sang and Patti LaBell sang—it was an eye-tearing, joyous celebration. When President Obama finished speaking, he introduced a family of four generations—a 99-year-old woman, daughter of a slave, her son, his son, and that man’s little daughter—and they rang a bell from the first African-American church, in Virginia, which was echoed by bells all across the country—a further echo of the bells rung all across the nation to celebrate Emancipation, a century and a half ago.
I love it when I can spend a day being proud and loving this country, for what it has done, for what it is, and for what it will become. And the sun is shining. And a gentle breeze is blowing. Life is too good.
The New York Times came out with an endorsement of Hillary Clinton today. I was pleased to read it—it said much of what I’ve tried to say in my blog posts (but better, because, let’s face it, it’s the Times). And I started to think about how the conservatives rail against the media as a bunch of lying propagandists. It’s not true. I’ve never been lied to by the New York Times—they may not always be perfect, but they do not have an agenda, per se, beyond journalism itself. Neither do many of our media staples.
The social media, guerilla journalism, and cable news—those people are new to journalism as an idea—they have it confused with show business, with capitalism, or with political gamesmanship. You can indulge in that stuff, if you don’t mind having to fact-check everything they tell you. But the Gray Lady, the Washington Post, and other traditional sources are no more biased than they were in the days before Tweeting. Anyone dismissing their reporting as ‘spin’ is trying to hide from the truth, not reveal it.
In the same way, the authorities in Charlotte, NC have claimed that the video from body-cams and dash-cams is inconclusive, yet still feel the need to hide the video from the public, even after the family of the murdered man requested its release. This is not transparency—when you hide something, it says you have something to hide—it’s as simple as that. The Charlotte community marches night after night, demanding this evidence be made public—yet still the authoritarians hide the evidence. Release the videos.
It’s a fine day for me—but not for everyone. There is still work to be done.
Breakfast—is there anything sweeter than a hearty breakfast—and a handful of pills? Well, the pills are something I’ve acquired over time—what I really like is the bacon and eggs and hash browns—and then the sour of orange juice washing it all down—and then the hot, steamy, rich coffee (I take mine with lact-aid milk—the half-n’-half of the lactose intolerant).
And the best thing about it is that one isn’t supposed to have a hearty breakfast—all those nitrates, and fats, and the salt—OMG. Heaven forfend! But that just makes it taste better. And no breakfast is truly enjoyed without a newspaper, or at least a crossword puzzle or something—so you feel like you’re preparing your body and your mind for the day ahead. Well, the rest of the day—I don’t usually get around to breakfast until noon-ish—I know, I know—but it takes me a couple of hours just to wake up all the way. I’m kinda punchy for a while, at first.
Now, take a look at this picture of my niece holding my granddaughter—just look at the smiles on these two gals. It’s quite a photo, no? I stared at it for a good few minutes—it’s as good as a TV show.
But before I have my breakfast, I’ve uploaded this morning’s improv—it came out pretty good because I wasn’t entirely there. See, I tend to overthink things—so, when playing the piano, the more asleep I am, the better.
Thursday, September 22, 2016 12:43 PM
Aaah—so satisfying. Now that’s a breakfast. I made the mistake, however, of substituting the TV-news for a newspaper. When really bad stuff starts to go down, I realize I didn’t know how good I had it, when it was all presidential election claptrap—they were just filling time because they had no news—and no news truly is good news.
I see video of a pack of Tulsa police gunning down a stalled motorist in the middle of the highway in broad daylight. I ask myself, ‘what the hell is it like, living in Tulsa?’ I ask myself, ‘what would it be like if our cops just shot people down in cold blood like that?’ I find myself grateful, not to live in Tulsa—what a stain on this country. Then the stain running for president, the Donald, becomes the first Republican to hassle the cops about shooting black people. Why? Because, this one time, the shooter is a woman—Trump’s not castigating the police, he’s saying women don’t have the balls—a very different issue—but Trump’s an ass, and wouldn’t know the difference.
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the cops shoot another black man—this time they say he had a gun—his family says he had a book. The cops won’t release the video—they had one excuse yesterday—today they have a different excuse—they’re saying they’re just following the law. But the law about releasing cop videos just got rushed through their state legislature—so it doesn’t take effect until next week—and on the hypocrisy goes. But that doesn’t stop the media from drooling in anticipation of more violence during community protests there—so they can say there’s violence on both sides. Vultures.
I must confess—if the cops made a habit of shooting at me, I’d be tempted to shoot back—but I’m white, so maybe I just don’t understand the situation? Regardless, it sure ruins a good breakfast.
I’m an escapee. My disability sidelines me from the distractions of life, so I get to watch the rest of humanity go about its business. It’s a disturbing show—we’ve got a lot of chaos going on in the world. You who have jobs and other distractions are lucky; you don’t spend the day poring over the problems of the world.
I’m an escapee. I already died once, so my concern over dying is not the big deal it once was. Everyone knows we all die someday—but we don’t usually accept it—and that’s a healthy thing. I’ve accepted it—and while that tones down the fear of dying, it also detracts from the ambitions of living. Plus, I’ve gotten old, so any ambition of mine would just annoy people. My day is past, just like Dr. Evil holding the world hostage for a million-dollar ransom, in a time when a million bucks barely pays for a new house.
I’m an escapee—even from myself. I used to be very intent, very tightly wound—now I have trouble concentrating, so I’ve let go of all that OCD behavior, as much as I could. I enjoy playing the piano when I first wake up, because I’m not all there yet—I don’t get in my own way as much.
We’ll all be escapees in November, when Hillary gets elected—we will have escaped an unholy confluence—NBC Universal, The Republic Party, and the Alt-Right movement have created a monster out of a joke. In truth, Trump remains laughable. It’s the half of the country he’s bamboozled into supporting him that’s scary.
We’re also beginning to escape from our past Conspiracy of Silence shielding police misconduct in the persecution, and murder, of minorities. For generations, certain police in certain communities have indulged their bigotry in a calculated and cold-blooded fashion. For generations, minorities’ claims of unwarranted search, seizure, arrest, beatings, and killings have been waved away with a ‘he said, she said’ and a ‘who you gonna believe?’
But now we have video. The old tradition, the evil conspiracy, is being shot through its own heart—its secrecy—and I confess to a certain glee as I watch these criminals-in-cop-clothes try to explain away the truth as it plays on a screen in slow motion. The thin blue wall of silence doesn’t work against YouTube footage—bigots, your day is come.
Unrest will be part of this process. The unwillingness to absorb this age-old confederation of persecution, even while it plays on our TV sets, faces tremendous inertia among white people. We don’t want to believe that such villainy has been sniggering behind our backs while we trusted our men and women in blue. And we recognize that many police do their jobs with pride, competence, bravery, and integrity.
But our respect for the police as a group cannot be a shield for this pernicious evil that resides within it. Black communities gather in outrage, risking harm themselves, to protest this cancer within law enforcement, and within the hearts of communities. Evidence is plain to see—yet we do nothing but debate talking points.
Changes must be made. Perpetrators must face consequences, even when they wear the uniform. Improved training and community outreach must become the norm—as must criminal prosecution for these brazen killings committed under the guise of ‘keeping the peace’. Ironic, and unacceptable—and most of all shameful. Shame on them. And shame on us if we don’t root out this corruption with the same intensity with which we support our cops.
But I see all this as ultimately good, as progress—an ancient evil has been caught in the light of day and, if we do right, will be hounded into non-existence. Trump points to this unrest and other violence, and tries to say that violence and crime are increasing—statistics, as usual, make a liar of him—but that’s how he wants to frame our reality, so we’ll all get scared and vote for a bully. Crime and violence are at historic lows. The recent unrest is a part of making the police a force for good for everyone, including every shade of skin.
This is important work, not cause for hysteria. But, regarding Trump, that could be said about many of his positions, on just about every issue.
La-dee-da…. I don’t care. Let it all swirl around me. I usually feel obligated to pay attention, to try to sort the wheat from the chaff. But it all roils on, with or without me—I could live the rest of my life without a glance at the world and no one would ever notice. I could stop watching TV or going online, wait until November, vote for Hillary—and the result would be the same as if I had obsessed over all the political reporting, day and night, leading up to election day.
Those of you with the health and strength can rush down to campaign headquarters and volunteer to get out the vote—you may even decide that you’ve found in Politics a lifetime career—you can make a difference. I am unable to do so—but that’s okay—like I said, my lack of involvement frees me from worrying about my level of engagement.
We live in a media-centric culture. It is a mirror that we hold up to ourselves—and so our lives are judged not just on what’s happening, but whether we find ourselves entertained. It’s a lot to ask of ourselves—as if the whole family-of-man was driving its car down the interstate, admiring itself in the rearview mirror, trying to keep one eye on the traffic and the road signs. We must pay attention—but there are some things that don’t require our attention—they get in the way of the stuff we must keep watching for—dangers, opportunities, and responsibilities.
Not that we don’t need entertainment—I’m not saying that. Ever since fireside storytellers lit the imaginations of their tribe to mark the end of the day, people have hungered for entertainment. It is a part of who we are—just as much as eating or sleeping. In modern America, we’ve found that an overabundance of tempting foods can transform nutrition into a health threat. By the same token, it seems that we have the ability to over-indulge in entertainment to the detriment of our mental health. Sensationalism leads us on, to shorter attention-spans, lack of exercise, sleep deprivation, and carpal-tunnel syndrome.
As a bookworm, I was an early-adopter of today’s media overload. Long before it was popular to spend the entire day staring at a rectangle in your hand, I was reading a book during every free second of my time. Even back then, I found that reading books (a supposedly relaxing activity) could become a binge activity. I’d reach a point where the eye strain, stiff neck muscles, and headaches made it necessary to stop awhile—even at three in the morning, with only one chapter left to find out the ending.
I got a lot out of those books—I learned a lot and I was exposed to new concepts and perspectives that broadened my understanding. But I also missed out on a lot of other things—the kinds of things other people did—which narrowed my understanding. It’s that whole ‘balance’ thing—it always bites us in the tush. And when it comes to the popularity and ubiquity of the I-phone, balance goes completely out the window.
People in olden times often resisted having a phone put into their home—if they wanted to talk to someone, they would go and see them. Nowadays, landline home-phones are only remarkable in that younger people have begun to feel landlines are superfluous. And, as in those days, we have many people today who don’t wish to ‘be online’—if they want to talk to somebody, they’ll call them on the phone. But like the people before, their children are using texts and Twitter and Skype, et. al., to keep in touch—so they are forced to adopt the new tech, if only to talk to their kids.
But what if you’re among the millions of people without the money for gadgets, without access to the internet, perhaps without even literacy? We are creating a divide between the digitally-enabled and the dark-zoners—and these two groups live in worlds that the other cannot comprehend, much less share.
We are approaching a point where digital illiteracy and lack of access will become more disabling than a lack of money. It is a new form of what film-director Godfrey Reggio called ‘Koyaanisqatsi‘ or ‘life out of balance’. Only, in this case, it is specifically Humanity that is putting itself out of balance.
Prototypical ‘wild’ humans evolved to live a life of constant struggle and frequent deprivation. We have built civilizations that free us from such rigors—but being free of the necessity of fleeing from predators, free of hunting, gathering, and finding water and shelter—that doesn’t change the way we evolved.
We still need to exert ourselves. We still need to balance food with activity. We still need to bond, to form social groups, and to share stories. We still need to keep these animal bodies of ours balanced on the tightrope of biological function. Any extreme unbalance of exertion, food, leisure, entertainment, or self-regard causes problems—as lack of balance always will.
So, in the end, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with eating McDonalds or playing Black Ops or Tweeting—the danger lies in imbalance, in overdoing any one thing to the exclusion of a diversity of activities. Just as a conversation must include both talking and listening, our lives must balance our pleasures with our requirements. We take our bodies for granted—but we ought to stop using them occasionally, just long enough to listen to them and give them what they need. But I should talk—I collect unhealthy habits like they were baseball cards.
Okay, videos for today—one new one, and one from a week ago that I’ve put off posting.
It’s a cold. It’s a friggin cold! It’s not even a virus—and she’s already on antibiotics. And we can state for the history books—this is the first time anyone has ever been criticized for not announcing to the media that they had caught a cold. She ignored it—why should she think to tell you about it? She ignored it, and kept going, against her doctor’s advice—you want to criticize her, criticize her for not taking better care of herself. Not that anyone else, man or woman, wouldn’t have had a complete meltdown under the kind of scrutiny that goes with becoming the first woman president.
If I was her, I’d be furious that she gets compared to Trump. You compare me with that racist, sexist ass-hat, and I’d punch you in the throat. And I haven’t spent my lifetime trying to help you people—you Americans, half of which seem ready to make the stupidest vote in history. Do you have to get hit with a sledge-hammer to know you’re being manipulated by a con-man? Or do you just hate women that much?
She was being kind, saying only half of his supporters were deplorable—those who get taken in by that joke-in-a-Chinese-suit have deplorable judgment. They may be fine people, but they are deluded if they see in Trump a dependable leader or a trustworthy person. He has whistled all the haters out of the woodwork—let’s be real. And bigots hate to be called bigots—they spend time and effort, trying their best to rationalize their biases, trying to use the right wording to avoid being called on their true feelings about people who are different. They get on their high horses and say, “I said all the right things—I never revealed any of the hate I feel—you’re the hater, for calling me a bigot.” Well, they don’t put it that way, but that’s what I hear—that’s what they’re really saying.
Of course, the media-sphincters are shouting to the rooftops, “Hillary said something rude!” I think, after all the crap that’s come out of Trump’s mouth, it’s Hillary’s turn. And, of course, she did it wrong—she admitted it wasn’t a nice thing to say, she apologized and took back the ‘half’ part. Ask Trump—that’s not the way you do it. You say something hateful and then just stand by it, and then send out a platoon of word-twisters to explain why it wasn’t really hateful.
Ailes is an ‘alleged’ pig (alleged by 30 people), that CEO guy is a neo-klansman, Conway is the new Goebbels—these are the best people Trump could find (after he fired any legitimate consultants). I wouldn’t even be in the same room with them—he’s taking their advice.
He hasn’t released his tax returns—and he won’t. There’s truth in those tax returns—Trump’s kryptonite is the truth. We’d know far too much about the real Trump if we saw those tax returns—but don’t hold your breath. It looks like plenty of folks (with deplorable judgment) are willing to overlook what, in any other candidate, would be disqualifying. They’re going to be super-loyal to this guy—because loyalty to a stranger makes so much sense.
I don’t know—do what you want. Go ahead and vote for that fucking asshole if you really think you should. Just don’t come crying to me. And you media-sphincters—you all should be lined up and shot. She’s a fucking woman—get over it and grow the fuck up.
I am a bitter, angry old man. Have you ever wondered what an angry old man does with his time? Well, here’s how my day usually goes:
I get angry at the media for forcing a fifth-grade reading-level on public debate—and for lunging at any wisp of sensation. But then I tell myself that the media aren’t the problem, Trump is.
So then I get angry at Trump for trashing our global image, for sowing ignorance and fear, and shredding any solemnity we still felt towards our quadrennial ritual of choosing the Leader of the Free World. The gravitas of holding the fate of the globe, of humanity, in the palm of a single hand—is totally lost on this grubby con-man. But then I tell myself that Trump isn’t the problem, the Republicans are.
So then I get furious with the Republicans for choking the breath out of our government. Their obligation to lead their constituency is forfeited, for craven pandering to the most vocal, extreme, ignorant minority, for fear of being criticized by a mob of besotted malcontents, who hate the USA as it is, and yearn for a ‘return’ to some fantasy, fascist past.
Blocking appointees to vital offices and judgeships, strangling our economy with a sequester that punishes Democrats for the crash the Republicans made—and keeps that crash lingering, well… I could go on, ad infinitum, about the neglect and cynical sabotage the Republicans call ‘service’, but we all have things to do. So, anyway, I get mad. But then I tell myself that the Republicans aren’t the problem, the voters are.
And then I realize that calling half of American voters gullible, clueless, and deluded is not going to make me any friends—neither will it change anyone’s mind. Then I get mad at humanity in general, for its propensity towards destructive and lazy ideas—ideas that contain more inertial persistence than our rare insights into love, and all the work it entails. I get mad at the super-rich for toying with the whole of humanity, absent of any ethics and overcome with selfishness. I get made at the NRA, the arms-makers, and the arms-dealers for profiting on death. I am enraged at the injustice of seven billion mostly good people, used and misled by a mere handful of greedy, hateful pigs.
Then I go lie down and try to get my pulse back to normal. So what’s your day like?
Is there anything Trump can do or say that will deter people from voting for him? Is there anything he can say that will finally push the media to report it as a lie, instead of just reporting his quote, and having a debate over it? Will this toxic confluence of media sensationalism, nationalism, and misogyny actually propel a border-line-psycho ignoramus into the Oval Office, edging out the best potential leader our country has ever seen?
They say the best way to win a fight is to act like a madman—it unnerves the opponent. This is the first time that strategy has been employed in an election campaign—because, prior to now, people who act crazy have been disqualified by the voters. Apparently, we now have voters for whom ‘crazy’ is acceptable. When fact-checkers report that 95% of what a person says is False, that usually disqualifies as well. But in this election, it actually helps Trump, because one of his lies is that ‘we can’t trust Hillary Clinton’.
I admire the way Trump obscures his total lack of experience by accusing Hillary of not fixing anything for thirty years—yes, she has done the hard work of public service, for thirty years, and more. But she hasn’t been President for thirty years—blaming her for all the (supposed) mistakes of her husband or Obama or Democrats generally—that only works on Survivor or The Apprentice. It shouldn’t be working in an election—it should be disqualifying in an election.
If a seventy-year-old visits one black church for the first time in his life, does that erase his racism? If his close friend, the alleged sex-assaulter, isn’t an ‘official’ member of his team, does that erase his chauvinism? If the one unchanging feature of his ‘supporter-commentators’ is that they never answer a direct question, does that make him a man we can rely on?
One thing that Hillary has done for thirty years is study policy—most of Trump’s policies (if you can call ‘secrets’ policies) are thirty days old, if that. When are we going to stop harassing Hillary about non-issues, like her emails, or Benghazi, or the CGI—and start asking questions about the millions of dollars wasted on investigating, interrogating, and always, eventually, vindicating her?
And, speaking of, why is Hillary the only person in America who can be accused, investigated, cleared—and still be guilty? That’s not a conviction, that’s a wish. And the media, apparently, is in the wish-fulfillment business—always talking about Hillary’s unfavorables as if she had earned then, when they’ve been dishonestly smeared on her, and embraced by people who ‘just don’t like her’. Hillary’s unfavorables say nothing about the woman herself, they are a verdict of ‘ignorant’ against the public. Why do we never hear discussion about why people are gullible enough to fall for dirty-tricks politics?
Media people, enjoy those high ratings—much good may they do you when our new Hitler takes the oath (with his fingers crossed, no doubt).
Debates are coming. Can Trump hide ignorance with sheer bluster? Can Hillary Clinton overcome public awkwardness to reveal her inner beauty? We shall see.
People say ‘if Trump wins, I’m moving to Canada’—but for me, it’s more like cause to slit my throat—America is the greatest thing on Earth—we just can’t give it to a jerk who can’t see that greatness, who wants to replace it with his own conceited idea of what ‘greatness’ is.
But if there is a God (and even if there isn’t) Hillary should kick his ass. (And here I insert the obligatory reminder that we shouldn’t take it for granted—we must Vote—and get out the Vote.) If the world is made right again in November, and Hillary does win, I will feel a warm glow inside, knowing that America is safe from that bullying charlatan. But…
Here’s the thing. We have ‘checks and balances’—the tripartite nature of our government is meant to prevent excesses in any one branch—including the Executive. It is not meant to paralyze our government. And it never has before now, when subtle racism has made the Legislative branch into a stone wall preventing the Executive branch from any action, not only in legislation, but even in filling the complement of the Judicial branch. This is cynical politicization of government beyond the bounds of responsibility, or of shame.
After the disaster of Bush-43’s presidency, the GOP did an autopsy to see why their bankrupt ideological platform wasn’t getting any votes outside of their carefully gerrymandered pockets of influence. They solved the problem, and then ignored the solution, because the solution was to be more like the Democrats—that is, ‘decent human beings’. Not their scene, apparently. So they went down a rabbit-hole of lies, rationales, and bluster against the Democrats.
That conglomeration of ignorance and dog-whistling became so threadbare that a reality-TV celebrity was able to outshine them—when he should have been laughed off the primary-debate-dais by the contrast between himself and a dozen serious politicians. But by that point, he wasn’t facing rational, reasonable, serious politicians—he was facing Jeb, Marco, and Ted. Plus, the GOP had curated themselves a base of yahoos before the primary even began—so Trump won. They’re sorry now—but still, not because of their platforms, but because Trump made fools of them.
Now, these people are saying, “Okay, vote for Hillary if you must—but make sure to vote the party on the down-ballots, to provide a ‘check’ against Hillary”. In other words, if the GOP can’t govern, no one else should—and Democracy be damned. I say, if you’re going to elect a President, elect people who will work with her. We’ve had it, we little people—let someone get some goddam governing done. If the Dems fuck it up, elect a GOP president and Congress to replace them, but let somebody do something.
‘Small Government’, in a highly-developed country, in the 21st century? Yeah, that’ll work, alright. ‘Nationalism’, when we need the injection of fresh blood that only immigration can bring—and when we need the real Muslims, as our greatest defense against extremist murderers? Yeah, that’ll work, alright. Ignorance and Science-denial, in the midst of a cyber cold-war and increasing automation and AI? Yeah, that’ll work, alright. I know, I’m an egghead—but how smart do you have to be, to see the hypocrisy of the GOP or the unfitness of their candidate? How ignorant do you have to be, to fall for it?
Slowly we turn, step by step…. Please, God, let this fuckin election be over. The Congress decided to sleep for eight years and the media have decided the people should sleep through these last two years (in solidarity?), mesmerized by the incessant drumbeat, ‘Clinton or Trump? Clinton or Trump?’
Completely outside the issue of that question being similar to ‘Gourmet Meal or Shit Sandwich?’, surely there are other things, other issues, other people in this world that we could spare a few seconds of attention on. I am constantly frustrated by so-called journalists reporting on the squeaky wheels of the world—has Research become completely forbidden? Is it impossible for newspeople to report anything other than the voices of spin-doctors, to find a story that doesn’t already have armed camps facing each other with oppositional memes? You know—actual news (as in new information).
The TV News has a tradition of arriving at the scene of an event, finding the stupidest person on the sidewalk nearby and asking their ‘opinion’ about what just happened. Nobody likes it, nobody gets any smarter because of it, but no one can seem to stop them from this exercise in inanity.
But today, they have a new thing—they don’t have to go looking for the stupidest person anymore—they just quote Trump’s blather-of-the-day, and call it news reporting. That’s beyond lazy—especially as they inject no hint of judgment or fact-checking—they simply parrot his words—as if they had meaning. News Fail. Get it together, cable news.
The thing that really gets me is when the media harps on Hillary Clinton’s ‘untruthfulness’—they can’t say her name without repeating this popular theme. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying she’s a paragon of honesty. But if they must add that ‘popular opinion’ to every mention of her, can’t they also always add that studies find her exceptionally honest compared to other politicians? Can’t they add mention of the fact that while it’s popular to call Clinton a liar—it is also incorrect? Why is that so hard? Are they afraid that confronting their listeners with the facts might turn them away?
This bothers me because I empathize. If the world thought me a liar, and I wasn’t, and all I heard from the news was repetition of the opinion that I lie, without any mention of the fact that I didn’t lie—well, I’d be pretty unhappy about that. Wouldn’t you? And what ever happened to being wrong? If Hillary Clinton says anything that turns out to be incorrect, she’s never wrong—she’s always ‘a liar’. If we follow that logic, we must elect Hillary Clinton—we could use a president who is never wrong.
I wouldn’t even be writing this rant right now—I was trying to relax and watch the news on TV. But rumor, fallacy, and claptrap are not my idea of news reporting. I can’t watch it. But I keep going back, vainly hoping for some common sense. What a fool I am. Journalism as a popularity contest just doesn’t work—telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear may be profitable, but it hurts us, where it used to help us. It distracts us where it used to inform us. Like reality TV, it shows a semblance of reality that has been curated for entertainment value.
The death of print journalism has gutted the research departments of all the great journalism sources—the news today practically feeds on itself, working as hard, now, to share from other sources as they used to work on out-researching other sources. Reporters are flying blind, with virtually no back-up troops to dig into records, archives, interviews, analysis, or do good old shoe-leather research.
Yet the media has more news-channels and more hours of the day needing to fill those channels. It’s not a good situation. The public is no longer being informed—we are being curated by different media-moguls, fighting each other to indoctrinate their audience in their private agendas—journalism as a public service is nothing more than a legend from our glorious past. I miss Huntley & Brinkley. I miss Cronkite. I miss the news.
Two months ago, when our daughter’s pregnancy (and on the west coast, yet) lurked in the back of my mind—and it still looked like we might get taken in by Trump’s big con—and I was smoking too much and doing too little—back then, I resumed my anti-depressant prescription. That’s how bad I got.
But a half-a-pill a day of that stuff really pole-axed me. Yes, I smoked a lot less, because a lot less of me was there—I was zombified. But the cutting back on smoking was good for me—I felt much better. The only trouble was that I wasn’t doing anything else, either—and I wasn’t upset about that. I was very far from upset about anything at all.
Now, if I had wanted to spend my life on drugs, I could do that all by myself—and with much fun-ner drugs. So I compromised—now I take a quarter of a pill every day—and only until October, when I will stop altogether, and see how it goes. There’s a reason I stopped taking them, after all, and if I can do without, I’d really prefer that.
So, back then, it wasn’t just raining anxiety—it was pouring. But now, with our brand-new, cute-as-a-button granddaughter, I’ve been inspired to play new piano improvs. Claire’s trip has inspired me to get out and do more—like doing my own shopping. The influx of baby pictures has given me lots of busy-work in photoshop, making them fit into my YouTube videos. I enjoy my playing more when I’m looking at photos of that beautiful baby instead of myself—I think it makes me sound better.
Then Pete came by today—Hooray! I was pretty disappointed with last month’s recording, because of the anti-depressants making me punchy and basically out-of-it. But we made up for it today.
We started with a request: “Jesu—Joy of Man’s Desiring” by J. S. Bach. (That’s two requests in August—for me it’s been a banner month for music.) I played it slow, so I would make less mistakes—but Bach is good that way—it’s still pretty, even slow.
Then we did a couple of jams back-to-back. That video is called “On A Wednesday Afternoon”. I enjoyed it much more than the title might suggest—I guess I was going for the ‘soft-sell’, there. No Pete Cianflone session would be complete without a bunch of weirdness in the video—blame it on Jessy—if she had sent me a bunch of baby-pictures, you wouldn’t even see us on the video.
Then Pete suggested we cover a Golden Oldie from the 60s, so we played “Let’s Live For Today”. Now, about “Let’s Live For Today”:
Songbook from “Great songs…” series, titled “of the Sixties – Volume 2″ gives the following credits:
But Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia gives the following credits:
“Let’s Live for Today”
Writer(s): Michael Julien, Ivan Mogull, and David Shapiro. “’Let’s Live for Today’ is a song initially recorded by the English band The Rokes in 1966. The song was later popularized by the American rock band The Grass Roots, who released it as a single on May 13, 1967.”
I leave that mystery to someone else to solve, but we had fun playing it—it’s not really a piano piece, but we made do.
The last bit of improv was bang-ish, so the video is called “Monstrous”. Pete said he might be able to come back next week, so we may get two sessions for August—who knows? We toasted the baby—well, I did, Pete doesn’t drink. A good time was had by all. I hope it’s as good to listen to. Enjoy.
As I was saying—new baby granddaughter, clearer mind, more piano music—and having more fun at the piano, baby-picture photoshopping, regular shopping… and it looks like there’s no need to worry about Hillary being elected—(but Vote anyway!) Suddenly, it’s not just raining good things, it’s pouring. Ah, life. That’s what I say. Ah, life.
Okay, I give up. Yes, the computer room needs an air conditioner. In this heat I waver from wanting to stay in the cool bedroom, or coming out here to the hot-box and typing on my PC. I can be comfortable and bored, or engaged and sweating like a pig. Neither one is working right this minute—and I always decide I need A/C on the weekend, when I have to wait until Monday to order one. What a schmo.
I just got back from the supermarket. Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee pastas and Progresso hearty soups—it’s a can festival. Also some hot dogs. Now that I know I can make it into next week without shopping for a while, I feel better—plus, call me picky, but I like to eat dinner almost every day. I bought dill pickles and pickled sausage bites and some Laughing Cow and those round cheeses in the net-bag.
I found the world’s best microwavable breakfast—Eggo’s bacon-egg-and-cheese waffle-meals. And I grabbed some Polar Bears (Heath bar flavored). I was worried about getting those two things home and in our freezer before they were ruined—I think I made it.
Sunday, August 14, 2016 12:48 PM
“98.6” by Keith—what a great tune. It lifts my spirits. I collect one-hit wonders—the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of the music world—strange artifacts that belong to no movement or genre but their own personal musical ‘ear’. There are a surprising number of them—and it’s sad in a certain way. Think about it—you can try for a musical career, spend a few years touring local bars and clubs, then peter out from lack of determination or lack of audience interest—or you can get lucky and hit it big, get signed to a label, tour big venues, the whole nine. But with a one-hit wonder, the artists are served the success-banquet and then have the whole thing snatched from their mouths after the first course. The same amount of grueling giggery, PR, lawyers, fans, and yet more giggery—then the promise of fame and fortune—then the almost instant fading of it all—how hard that must be. I love one-hit wonders—but I truly feel for the artists that make them.
And it begs a question that often haunts a sixty-year-old would-be artist like myself: Is there a finite amount of creativity in each of us, to one extent or another? Would Beethoven’s Tenth have been anti-climactic? Did Van Gogh kill himself because he had used all the colors in every way he could imagine—and was loathe to repeat himself? Was Dickens’ last novel just ‘more of the same’? In olden times an artists could be satisfied with just one single ‘masterwork’. Of course, if one is capable of that, there was probably a bunch of stuff one could do—Michelangelo did sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry, but he did some things better than others.
But today, with the ‘industrialized’ arts, if you can have a hit record, contracts are drawn up by the money-people, as if to say, “Well, anyone who can please the public can continue to do so forever”. There is no recognition of the possibility that what makes someone creative may be the same thing that bridles at being expected to play those songs every day for years, or come up with another whole album of ‘more’. What the hell is ‘more’ when dealing with inspiration? And how can we expect inspiration to stick to a release deadline?
We think of art as a job. It was never a job. The musicians that played at weddings and dances were just the folks who had a knack for music—they had day jobs. The artists of old weren’t working on canvas—they were carving sculptures into the furniture they made, painting landscapes with glazes on the pots they were throwing. The ‘career’ thing started with court appointments—Michelangelo was part of his Pope’s court, Bach worked for his church choir until his fame made him a member of the household of the Duke of Brandenburg.
These early artists didn’t do anything but their art—but they were servants to royalty, at their beck and call—even with regard to subject matter and style. No artists made a living from their art except the travelling troupes of entertainers—and they were mostly fugitives, working sub-rosa in a culture that forbade merriment in general—criminals of art, in effect. No individual musicians made a living concertizing until the nineteenth century. The monetization of art has a fascinating history—but it is a history of the deformation of the original impulse to art.
Sunday, August 14, 2016 6:48 PM
I’ve made a nice video that contains our granddaughter’s latest pictures and, in between the two improvs, a piano cover of Cole Porter’s “Tomorrow”—so I tried to throw in some entertainment. It’s difficult to create a video under these rolling thunderstorms—I’m a computer hack since back in the ‘80s—lightning is my mortal enemy. I always rush to power down the PC when the lightning gets too proximate.
Usually a storm comes and I call it a day, computer-wise. But with this kind of late summer weather, I can either play the margins or wait for Fall—intermittent thundershowers are forecast for the foreseeable future.
So, I’m going to upload my video and get off until tomorrow—it’s hot and muggy even when the sun breaks through. Only a fool gets stressed on Sunday. Bear returns next Thursday, thank goodness.
Myself, my family, my neighbors, and my friends are all suffering from stress. This is a modern-day condition that is nothing new. However, I accuse the media of doing everything they can to increase stress in their viewers. Getting people worried and upset has become their bread-and-butter. When I was younger, we looked to the media to keep us informed—and when something bad happened, like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kent State Shooting, it was covered with grave seriousness and sad dignity. It was not virtually celebrated as a new ‘Breaking News’-banner to follow yesterday’s, which followed the day before’s, etc.
The media has become much like the pet cat that graces you every morning with a dead bird on the front stoop. The cat is very proud and pleased, but we are disgusted. When I was younger, the media would sometimes augment their reporting by having a sober, thoughtful expert give us details about the issue. Today’s media has a panel of six ‘commentators’, one of whom may be a sober, thoughtful expert, with the other five being mouthpieces forwarding some spin agenda—changing the subject, roiling the debate, or just out-and-out lying. This is ‘balanced’ reporting? More like unbalanced. And by making every news-segment a shouting contest, the media raises the stress level—and the confusion—surrounding every issue.
Granted, the world is more complex and faster-paced today—and an endless string of sober, thoughtful experts would make for a rather grueling show—ratings would certainly suffer. But, at the end of watching such a show, viewers would come away with some actual information—possibly even facts—instead of confusion and increased blood pressure. Today’s media is more like a roller-coaster ride—viewers feel terrorized and helpless in the face of a kaleidoscope of fears, suspicions, accusations, and uncertainty.
The media refuse to say that anything is simply ‘true’—and there are many philosophical arguments which could support that stance—in the absolute sense. However, on a practical level, there are lots of things that are true, spin-doctors notwithstanding. For instance, lots of people die from being shot with a gun. Lots of women are unfairly paid less than men doing the same work. Lots of veterans are committing suicide. Russia is trying to expand into Ukraine. North Korea is a rogue state. There are facts out there—and they are frightening enough without enhancing our helplessness and fear.
The ‘commentators’ have become so blindly partisan that we can even see the futility in the faces of the anchor-persons forced to give them the dignity and privilege of air-time. That’s not even addressing the partisan news channels that inject their own bias into the news-editing itself.
My neighbor had a panic attack yesterday—and I suspect that she, like me and many others, has her stress-levels exacerbated by the steady drumbeat of fear issuing from our TVs, our PCs, and our I-phones. Modern news reporting should come with a Surgeon General’s warning. They’re making money off of making us worry.
Don Pietro del Cianflone has returned from summer hiatus—sing laude and strike the tambor! Here, we have the Buds-Up Semi-Ensemble wreaking havoc with the laws of both rhythm and harmony in a spectacular display of bongo-osity and piano-tivity. If you spot this duo—notify the musical authorities at once. If you hear something—you’ve heard too much!
The rest of this is just me—nothing to see here, just move it along…
That’s that, for now. A big thanks to Peter Cianflone for the jam session!
We had it easy—our biggest worry, back in the day, was the commies shooting off their ICBMs and making a crater of the globe (with the help of our retaliatory strikes, of course). But it was called MAD for two reasons—the obvious acronym, Mutually-Assured Destruction—but also because it was literally madness even to contemplate—and everyone knew it. We could worry about a madman getting hold of a bomb and starting something that would quickly get out of hand—but that was a long shot, mentioned mostly in novels of the ‘thriller’ variety. And no one seriously expected our governments to find any rational use for their nuclear arsenals—MAD, remember? Purely defensive, or so we would have it—don’t start none, won’t be none.
We didn’t worry about the environment—most of the pollution, and all of the data, would come later. Rachel Carson had made an iron-clad research project out of proving that the American Bald Eagle and other birds were endangered by the use of DDT as a pesticide, which caused egg-shell thinning and premature hatching. But we all took “Silent Spring” as a special case, a one-off complication. We were still fine with lead paint and asbestos insulation. Even the ecologically-minded were unaware of the build-up of consequences our civilization was beginning to have on our environment, and on ourselves.
We didn’t worry about energy—gas was pennies to the gallon—‘cruising’, the act of driving one’s car around just for fun, was a popular tradition among American teens—we wouldn’t have our first gas shortage until 1976. And even as we worried over OPECs surprising stranglehold on oil production, our concern was mainly over reliable supply-lines and the economic implications of foreign-oil dependence. Catalytic converters were invented only to reduce smog in crowded, car-choked cities—we were still decades away from any concerns over carbon-footprints and greenhouse gasses.
We didn’t worry about recycling—the first recycling drives were reliant on the need to do something with all the garbage—we were busy picking up trash along the highways or vacant lots and it all had to go somewhere. Lots of it was bottles and cans—and so a push began to make them all deposit-return containers—to compensate the collectors. Recycling as a concept, as a way to mitigate against runaway consumption, came later.
We were focused on trying to “Make America Beautiful”. At the time, it was considered more important to raise the fines and enforce the laws against littering—doing something with all that trash that used to line the highways came much later. I can still remember a time when, on family trips, the end of a fast-food meal was the act of jettisoning all the trash out the car window, at speed. Nor did we have to undo our seatbelts to do it—nobody wore those things. Of course, without them, or a speed limit, Americans on the highways were dropping like flies. Today’s highway fatalities, while still the number four killer, are nothing compared to our old stats—today’s roads are baby-proofed in comparison.
We had worries—sure. But we trusted our leaders. We thought the world too big to be vulnerable to our industry. We thought that faraway people who hated the USA only affected our travel plans, not our national security. Everyone watched the same TV shows—everyone listened to the same radio stations—we were connected as a culture. And we still felt that oppressing women and minorities and the disabled was just the way of the world—and being gay was still the ‘love that dare not speak its name’. It wasn’t right—but boy, was it simpler. The fine judgments of the politically correct were still decades away—on the other hand, we didn’t laugh at its complexity yet, either. We were still busy trying to laugh it off, deride it back into invisibility.
Part of our difficulty with the present is that our many problems, and our social progress, contribute equally to the growing complexity of life. Complexity is a big problem. You give everyone a computer network that they can carry in their pocket and what do they do with it? Well, some of us plan trips to Mars, sure—but most of us use it to meet for drinks or play games. You offer greater complexity to the human race and only a few will dive in—the rest will look for the ‘easy’ exit, like Twitter, Snapchat, or Angry Birds.
Complexity is a deceptive indicator—we don’t want our problems to become more complex, but we are okay with the needs of social justice making our interaction more complex. Well, perhaps we’re not ‘okay’ with it, not all of us, certainly—but we accept its inevitability. It stands to reason that making sure we override our assumptions, forcing the equality of persons who may have never enjoyed equal status—is a complex process. The political correctness of our speech is nothing compared to the complexities of legislating equal rights, not to mention enforcing that legislation. And all of this is working against the inertia of generations of handed-down bias and hate.
Certainly it would be easier to get rid of all that hate—then we wouldn’t need to legislate social justice. But some things need to be brought out in the open—people can be childishly secretive, especially when their hearts tell them there’s something not quite right about their behavior. Domestic abuse, child abuse, corporal punishment—these things are still problems that trouble us—but the numbers are way down. Not so long ago, beating your spouse or your children—that was a personal decision you made behind the privacy of your own front door. And if things got bad enough that the authorities became involved, they turned a blind eye to whatever madness the head-of-the-household was indulging in. Now it is recognized as the felony it always should have been—and for the most part is treated that way (though pockets of ignorance persist).
My point is that if such obvious evil has traditionally been hugged to the patriarchs’ bosoms throughout most of history—if denying them that outrageousness is so relatively new—then we can see how much more difficult it is to try to limit prejudice and bias (merely mental violence) in our daily lives. The fact that some people ridicule political correctness just demonstrates how small they see that evil as being. They target the most progressive view possible, which admittedly can often have paradoxes and growing pains from being so new a concept—and deride the least thought-out aspects of it, as if that negated the value of social justice itself. Niggling whiners—they cherry-pick the weakest faults of the new, yet have beams in their eyes when it comes to the monstrous faults of the familiar, old ways.
Evil has time on its side—and tradition. Human civilization grows like a goat-path, retaining every kink and twist of its caveman days—the push for social justice is an attempt to straighten some of those pathways. And not only because it is right—though it is justice we seek—but also because society is more efficient when it affords choice and opportunity to every individual, when the weak are not oppressed by the powerful.
Human nature is on the side of evil—we are naturally greedy, selfish, and demanding creatures. The history of legislation is the history of people trying to outmaneuver the rules—so of course it becomes very complicated. Everyone has got an excuse why they should be exempt from the sacrifices implicit in fairness. Even those who benefit from new legislation will sometimes seek ways to get more than their fair share of opportunity. We are none of us saints—even the downtrodden have urges. Make a rule, any rule—and you’ll find you need to make five more, to modify the first—then ten more, to modify the other five.
In truth, legislation only enables the bare bones of justice—it is only when our culture has absorbed the spirit of the law and begun to live in that spirit, that the rules work properly—and, ironically, that’s when the rules become extraneous, their job completed. Take seat belts—people began using them to avoid getting a ticket—now they do it for safety, and teach their children to use them, too.
Even seat belts have their complexity. At the advent of seat-belt legislation, many complained that wearing the original lap-belt was as likely to cause harm as prevent it. The head rest and the shoulder strap were added, which made seat belts effective safety measures under virtually any conditions. It wasn’t until after these improvements that seat belt legislation could be enforced (because the cops could see the shoulder strap)—but it also made wearing seat belts the sensible thing to do.
Yes, everything was easier in the old days—but not better. We often yearn for simpler times—but they were simpler because they were dumber—we were dumber. Nobody used to use a keyboard—except stenos, secretaries, bookkeepers, and keyboard players—we wrote things down with a pencil—and if we needed two copies, we wrote it down twice. Nobody knew how to connect up wires on appliances—if appliances needed wires, they came with—or an expert installed them. Now toddlers hook up their own video game consoles. People used to disappear from our lives forever—just by moving far away. If you really wanted to, you could write them a letter (with your pencil), glue a stamp on it—and a bunch of people would pass it back and forth until it ended up in a mailbox. Imagine. You can still do that, you know—I wonder if anyone does?
We didn’t worry about climate change—oh, it was happening—we just didn’t have a bunch of satellites collecting sensor readings on the atmosphere over years of time—or recording time-lapse proof of the shrinking of the polar ice and the glaciers. All of that information is very new—which is why backward-looking folks can pretend it isn’t real. Old folks call it new-fangled—but new-fangled information is still data—it won’t go away—we can never go back. Yet it’s hard to blame them for trying—I’d like to go cruising again, myself.
What a beautiful day—but I wasted it staying indoors the whole day. I’m not feeling too well. Sometimes I feel just miserable—I always have trouble dealing with that. It doesn’t take much to put me off my game.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016 10:50 AM
Another beautiful day. I try to avoid the news—tragedy, massacre, terrorism, gun violence, anti-gay-hate-crimes, and demagoguery—the only good to come of it is the straight talk coming out of the White House. President Obama has some unpolitic things to say about gun lovers, the GOP, and their off-the-leash candidate—but all common-sense comments, long overdue for a public figure to say them publicly. It always does my heart good to see someone on TV who isn’t spouting absolute garbage.
I can’t help noticing that the talking heads have distorted ‘fairness’ to the point where insanity and ignorance have equal weight to mature reason. For example, I’ve heard Hillary Clinton’s statements described as ‘attacks’ on Trump. But if Trump is evil and idiotic, and someone says so, are they really attacking him, or are they simply describing him accurately? Is honesty an attack? I didn’t think so, but the media have taken ‘objectivity’ to the point where they don’t ‘judge’ a person’s words, even dishonest hate-speech and demagoguery, as being anything other than the ‘other side’ of an argument. In effect, they’ve institutionalized evil.
This mania for ratings and promotion of conflicts has made the news media a force for bad in the world. Journalism used to be thought of as an exposer of truth—but today’s TV journalism actual manages to confuse the truth by making it merely one ‘point of view’. That makes me angry—and every day I am less inclined to check in with the news, knowing that their distortions will only upset me. I increasingly find that my own take on what’s happening never sees air time nowadays until at least a month later, after the heat has left the story and all the yahoos have moved on to the next issue.
Only then will they say something like ‘but Obamacare is working’ or ‘but the Iran nuclear deal is holding’. They never say such things while there are still clicks to be had discussing the fear-mongering doubts and hollow arguments of the naysayers. They are literally milking the stupidity of every issue, avoiding any sensible remarks until the smoke clears—and while I used to think that conservatives were the main thing slowing us down and holding us back, I now see the media as a contender for first place in that competition.
I love Hillary Clinton! She made a speech yesterday that clearly explained why Trump is not a candidate, but a threat. She said that even if she wasn’t running herself, she would be doing everything she could to make sure he was never President of the United States. Best of all, she condemned him with his own words—the wild public statements that he makes in passing, to jazz up his base, become evidence—when held up to the light—that he shouldn’t even have a driver’s license, never mind a public office. And as she described the nightmare of a President Trump, in the situation room, during a national crisis—a chill ran down my spine—what a friggin nightmare!
The media couldn’t even wait until she was done speaking before they started to leaven her statements with chyrons about Paul Ryan finally bowing to the inevitable, saying he would vote for Trump, because he would make GOP dreams into law. To me, that only confirms what Hillary was saying—it’d be a nightmare. It doesn’t seem to occur to the GOP that the reason they can’t satisfy their base is because their base wants to fundamentally change America into a nation of fear and anger and weakness.
There is no contest—when our choices are between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. As far as I’m concerned, the GOP has failed to produce a viable candidate—they’re stuck with Trump, their booby-prize for courting ignorance for so many years, but no one sees his potential presidency as good, or safe, or helpful. Even his supporters don’t expect him to keep America going—they hope he’ll turn the whole thing upside-down. If I didn’t live here, I’d say let’em have their way—see how they like it. But, as Hillary said, America is still full of reasonable, well-meaning people who are proud to be Americans and want to see America continue to lead the world toward freedom.
A democracy tries to do the greatest good for the greatest number. An election is a chance to get what we want. But it is also a litmus test of the electorate. If Hillary Clinton doesn’t win this election in a landslide, I’ll be personally disappointed—but I’ll also know something about the majority of American voters. I’ll know that we have become too ignorant to look out for our own self-interest, suckers for any used-car-salesman who happens to talk a good game. This election isn’t about the candidates—it’s about us.
I receive spam from charities and from political parties—asking for my financial help—I don’t even let them make me feel guilty anymore, I just resent being reminded how I could use a little financial help of my own. Since when did politics require millions of people to donate their hard-earned money to run TV ads? And don’t talk to me about crowd-funding—you know what we used to call crowd-funding? An extended family—that’s crowd-funding for people you know and love.
I’m not interested in helping other people—I’m interested in helping the people around me, the people close to me. Contrary to Tea-Party opinion, I prefer to pay taxes and let the government sort out people’s problems—it has its faults but it’s bound to do a better job than I can do on my own.
I understand that most charitable services are run by religious organizations—because the church used to be the gathering point for a community, where its larger issues were discussed and dealt with. The decline of religion as a binding force of the community has hurt efforts to deal with the homeless and underserved—being without a religion doesn’t keep me from mourning the coherency of that community-model—but it’s evaporated now and greater government involvement, supported by taxes, makes much more sense in today’s agnostic climate.
I also don’t like TV ads for fancy cars—of the millions of people watching TV, the vast majority of us can’t afford to go out and buy a Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes, Cadillac—not even a Lincoln. It pisses me off—especially knowing that, even if I could somehow buy one of those fancy cars, it would quickly be joy-ridden, tire-slashed, paint-keyed, and generally dinged until it looked just as crappy as the rest of the cars on my block. Plus, I could never afford the insurance rate, or the maintenance—which are as pricey as the car.
But I’d rather watch ads for fancy cars than listen to side-effects warnings for a drug for a disease I don’t have. My doctor will tell me when I need a drug, and which one, thank you—take your drug ads and shove’em. Still, when you consider buying a car, even a little, ‘cheap’ one, puts the normal person in hock for several years—what purpose is served by making that same hard-working, and now indebted, person feel bad about a major purchase? Ads for fifty and sixty thousand dollar cars washing over the TV screen every night—why not have ads for becoming a business owner, or president? Those are just as far out of my reach—and would annoy me only slightly less.
Income inequality has gotten completely out of hand—it makes me glad I’m old—if I were a younger man, I’d join the throng of protestors outraged that the same system that keeps them in groceries is the system that keeps them in their place—nowhere but working for the Man and getting paid less than a living wage for it. I’d run around organizing protests, campaigning for Bernie—and I’d be too young to realize how futile all of that is—the ones with the gold make the rules.
Then the futility of the whole thing would dawn on me and, being a young man, my mind would turn to ways of making mischief for the people I saw as oppressors. That would be so sixties-retro, like the second coming of the SLA or something. And like them I’d eventually end up in jail or on the run—though it isn’t nearly as easy, now, to disappear from the grid like those sixties fugitives who popped back up in the eighties and nineties, too old to live like that anymore.
But the truth is the ones with the gold only make the rules when the electorate is too numb to their own self-interest to let them—and we have done a lot of that over the last three decades. Political movements like Bernie’s would have to start on the backlog of injustice all those lobbyists have been shoving through both the Congress and all fifty state legislatures for decades. It would take us a while to get back to the income equality—in taxes—we enjoyed in the mid-twentieth century, before we could even start in on making things better—we have to roll back some of the ‘worse’ first.
The main trouble is that you can’t give to one person without somehow taking from another—and rich bastards sound just like normal people when they whine about having to make a sacrifice—usually, even whinier. They try to frighten us by pointing out that, when we get rich, we’ll have the same ‘oppression’ hanging over our heads—yeah, that’s my big concern.
And the media adds to the problem by representing ‘two sides’ of the issue—but it’s not really two sides, when one side is a handful of rich fucks and the other side is hundreds of millions of people. That is particularly true when the rich fucks own the media, as they do today.
But that is a condition as much as an issue—certainly nothing that can be solved with a clever blog-post. About the only thing optimistic about the media situation is that it leaves so much unexplored material that a ‘counter-media’ can start to get sponsorship (as opposed to ownership) for journalism that covers the many things being avoided and overlooked by the establishment media. We hear so much about meta-data and ‘drilling down’—but we still see news that is endlessly busying itself with minutiae and wow-factor and click-bait.
If Edward R. Murrow had our modern resources for research and analysis, he’d be giving us very different stuff. He liked to follow things to their future consequences—his attacks on McCarthy were driven by a deep concern for this country’s future and the future of its people’s rights and freedoms. If he were confronted with the kind of accelerated change we’re experiencing right now, I’m sure he would be reporting on certain days’ events only as they relate to what will happen in five, ten or twenty years’ time.
Modern people are flooded with information—and everyone with experience in that will tell you—when data comes at you like a fire-hose, you don’t get lost in the minutiae—you look for patterns and trends. You can’t understand our culture through a single person or a single period of time. When reporters ask a bystander how they feel about what just happened across the street—it gives me a pain. Reporters with access to global resources and instant data should be virtuosos of pattern-analysis, artisans of the long-term take-away on any given issue—and lots of reporting on how issues interlock with each other—just as the peoples of the world are now beginning to interlock their fates across the globe.
Maybe it was my age, at the time, but when I was younger a talking head was always bright, sharp, educated, and informed—the TV was the smartest ‘person’ in the room. Now we get Harvey Levin and TMZ. Jeez, what a tool. I mean journalist.
There’s one good thing about the media becoming a mindless monster—they’re finally starting to chow down on the Donald. Yes, Donald—the media is your friend—until it isn’t. Even innocent people are helpless in the face of their onslaught—did you really think a scumbag like yourself could just play it like a harp, and emerge unscathed? Keep dreaming, Mr. wanna-be-president.
Trump’s attempt to ‘fool all the people all the time’ is a perfect example of how democracy requires an informed electorate. The left wing of the presidential campaign is focused on income-inequality—and for good reason—but we should take this election season as a warning. We need to improve our educational system, and do it right quick. No one as ignorant as Donald Trump should have ever gotten this far—and he never would have, if he wasn’t reaching a deep reservoir of shamefully ignorant Americans.
Plus, our country’s failure to finance higher education for everyone is part and parcel of the march towards permanent income inequality—we’ll never level the playing field without offering equal access to information and knowledge.
Wednesday, June 01, 2016 6:08 PM
Proud
I’m proud.
I’m proud to be me.
I’m proud of my family.
I’m proud of my principles.
I’m proud of my understanding.
I’m proud of my neighborhood.
I’m proud of my country.
I’m not sure if I’m right to be proud
But that doesn’t stop me.
Give me my dignity or you’re looking for a fight.
Doesn’t matter if I’m dignified.
What—do I gotta put on a show for you?
Just take it for granted that I’m as good as you are.
Even if I’m wearing sweatpants—they don’t signify.
I am as good as you are.
Pretending I’m not just puts you down—not me.
I used to enjoy wearing a good suit
But I never made the mistake of thinking
It made me better than someone else.
I used to be a manager—telling people what to do—
But I never made the mistake of thinking
I was better than them.
I made mistakes alright, just not that one.
That’s a doozy.
Jeez—dat ain’t even a poem—I don’t know what you call that crap.
Sometimes I just write to hear myself type, I think.
Thursday, June 02, 2016 10:38 AM
I wasn’t going to post any of the above—it all seemed kinda whiney and introspective—but some of the points I tried to make were being echoed by President Obama during his PBS Town Hall with Gwen Ifill last night—so I am emboldened to the point of posting.
I saw a couple of things on the news that I’d like to discuss.
Hillary got spanked today by the State Department—but like the Supreme Court Justice non-hearings and the Benghazi blame-a-thon, the whole e-mail-server debacle could have been handled far more swiftly if competent people had had any hand in it. There was no earthly reason for all this stuff ‘just happening’ to pop up right when her presidential campaign rounds the home stretch. But the GOP has always been more concerned with the timing of their accusations than with their probity. Now, onto whether she actually did anything wrong.
Here we get a display of ingenuousness you won’t see every day—according to the State Department, Hillary did, in fact, do wrong. That she did exactly what her predecessors did is hidden in the back pages—or, as the State Department likes to put it: ‘If she’d asked us, we would have told her no.’ The implication that Hillary Clinton has to ask the State Department to do its job doesn’t seem like a weird idea to them—though it does to me.
Plus this whole business is about new tech. It reminds me of when I was a young programmer—I coded computers for almost two decades, but when I tried to get a new job, I wasn’t qualified because I didn’t have one of those new IT degrees. The fact that there were no such majors, or degree programs, until the nineties didn’t signify for anyone but me, I guess.
To accuse Hillary Clinton, who’s even older, of high crimes because she didn’t use new tech right—well, that’s something only the GOP would think to do. Emails are not mentioned in the Constitution—they didn’t even exist until a decade or so ago. Pretending that there are hard-and-fast rules about them, that only Hillary Clinton is guilty of a faulty ‘tech launch’—that’s pretty effing precious, don’tcha think?
But I’m not too worried about Hillary—her opponent is still laughable. It is only Trump’s supporters who are scary—the man himself is a joke. The idea that there are enough stupid people in this country to elect him is terrifying—but he still makes me laugh. He’s like a first-grader that managed to steal a grown-man suit, and is fooling everyone.
But back to the GOP—words fail, ya know? GOP officials in eleven states are suing President Obama’s administration over the new transgender bathroom-law issue, saying it’s a ‘social experiment’—like that’s a bad thing, by definition. I guess they forget that America was the original social experiment.
I’ve listened closely to their arguments for opposing transgender bathroom rights (wondering how anyone could seriously object without exposing their bigotry) and their main tactic is a subtle bias in the use of the word gender, as if that word still has two, and only two, meanings. Well, that and the usual BS about how they need a century or two to wrap their heads around any new idea. (‘While we’re young, people!’—as my dad used to say.)
Their insistence on repeating things like ‘one gender or the other’, or ‘boys and girls’—it’s just their way of insinuating that all this new gender-identity stuff is airy-fairy foolishness. In today’s political climate, they hesitate to say that, plainly and aloud (as if we don’t know how they feel) but they strain themselves mightily trying to say it without actually saying it. NC Governor McCrory practically injures himself with such contortions—he’d be hilarious if he wasn’t so revoltingly forked-tongued.
President Obama’s election should have put an end to excessively bigoted comments in the media—but it didn’t. The Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage should have done the same—and it didn’t. I don’t just resent the ugliness of such people—I resent that they drag us all backwards. Racism has been ruled on, repeatedly. Gay rights have been ruled on, also repeatedly. It’s fucking over. Get on the bus, or stay home—don’t parade your idiocy around like it’s a political platform. We grown-ups have got shit to do.
Hillary Clinton offers us our best chance at maintaining respect abroad and keeping us safe and economically healthy at home. Plain and simple. And that is partly due to her lifelong commitment to progressive but pragmatic government—an area in which Bernie Sanders certainly out-talks her, but doesn’t come close to out-performing her. And no one who cares a fig for social justice would ever consider her GOP opponent. Case closed.
But there is a mountain-range of BS to get yourself lost in. I recommend avoiding the cable news shows—at this point they’re trying so hard to drum up a contest between the most-fit candidate and history’s least-fit presidential candidate, that they stir up the mud between Hillary and Bernie, just to hug the shores of rational thought a little while longer. For any self-respecting journalist to suggest that there is a contest between Hillary and the orange clown is going to take several deep breaths, considering what a deep dive into the ridiculous that represents.
Certainly it is ethically allowable to report on the wave of mouth-breathers whose Orangutanal champion has emboldened them to crawl out of the woodwork in the name of political incorrectness, dog-whistle bigotry, and fear-mongering. But to report on his every smirk as if it stood up to Hillary’s lifetime of experience and service—please.
Politics is boring—if it wasn’t dry as dust, slow as molasses, and frustrating as hell, we’d have less voters and more candidates. Thus it’s understandable that journalists yearn for some point of interest, a scandal or a feud—anything to raise the pall from this deathly boring subject. But to abet a rising tide of demagoguery simply for the sake of ratings—that’s beyond the pale. If it weren’t the Media itself, the media would be all over this stupidity.
If they want human interest, they could easily delve into the depths of humiliation the GOP must be feeling right now—after cultivating idiocy in its base for decades, the chickens have come home to roost with a vengeance. I hear the late-night comics joking about it, but I don’t hear any serious journalists discussing it. Why should that be?
The party with a permanent nose-bleed from getting on its high horse has suddenly decided that rules were made to be broken, that platforms can conform to changing times, that the stupid have spoken—and they’re okay with that. Policies that they used to hate so much they shut down the government can now be easily overlooked, if only their candidate says so. That must be a bitter pill to swallow.
Not to mention the cognitive dissonance in realizing that supporting their nominee could destroy their platform—Trump is no Republican. And that is the miracle of him—who’d have ever imagined that American politics could find something worse than the Republicans? It boggles the mind. I urge everyone to vote for Hillary—if for no other reason than to get that horror-show off the airwaves. Just imagine it—a whole news cycle without Trump in it. Ah, paradise!
I was always one of those too-enthusiastic people—teachers’ pet in schools, messing up on jobs by trying too hard when everyone else was happier skating along—you know, an unbearable eager-beaver—easy to trick, easy to tease, and otherwise—undesirable company. I’m the same way about learning and words and stuff—that’s why the first thing strangers and bartenders say to me is usually “So you went to college, huh?” This is funny in a sad way, since I never actually got a degree—in spite of several colleges and universities. When I was younger, still in school, it was “You talk funny.” or just “Speak English.”
So, naturally, I get over-excited about the presidential election—a situation where rational judgement seems so obviously called for, and yet somehow precluded from the process. If the cable news shows keep repeating the word “Trump” a thousand times a day, every day, until November—we just might elect him—not because the man is fit for the office—or polite company, but because of the ubiquitous nature of his ‘brand’.
I’m also tired of the cable news shows manufacturing their own reality for the sake of drama—no one ever mentions Hillary without including the words ‘disliked’ or ‘mistrusted’. But she just won another primary last night—if everyone hates her so much, why is she still the obvious favorite? The idea that this sensible, responsible civil servant might lose out to a nightmare-clown with delusions of grandeur makes me ill. But like I said, I’m too serious most of the time—some people seem to be enjoying the whole circus.
I’d be one of them—it’s not as if the establishment doesn’t deserve a good kick in the teeth—if I weren’t certain that the GOP candidate is a greater threat to us than to the establishment. And Bernie’s no better—making a lot of rash promises without the first clue about the process of reaching those goals. Bernie is a wish-list come to life—he’s pointing out what’s wrong with capitalism—without any admission that we are capitalists, and that changing the system without wrecking the system is not something you can do overnight. I’m starting to wonder if Bernie Sanders isn’t just the second coming of Joe Lieberman—a Jewish Democratic presidential candidate who’s a closet Republican—and he’s just a spoiler for Hillary.
Gandhi once pointed out that throughout history, in all the great struggles, good always emerged victorious in the end. And I can see how that might be—good makes for a stronger team than evil. But I fear that the opposite is also true—that in peacetime, behind closed doors, evil eventually and inevitably creeps in and builds a nest. Without any obvious call for self-sacrifice or any effort to act as a team, people have more opportunity to indulge themselves—and in time, self-indulgence becomes the norm.
America has become so great, or to coin a phrase—‘huge’—that we can utilize a mere one percent of our people to wage global war—leaving the other ninety-nine percent free to quietly grub for money. It’s the worst of both worlds. I’m not a fan of wars or disasters—but it fascinates me that we are at our best in the midst of calamity. It’s such an intense heightening of spirit that if we try to act that way—in the middle of a quiet, peaceful day—we seem crazy.
Just about 300 CDs—that’s a rough estimate of my total collection. I’m closing in on the last few piles to be ripped to the hard drive. After the months of ripping, I’m somewhat disappointed that there’s not more—the process seemed endless. But if you figure an average play-length of 60 minutes per CD, that comes to twelve-and-a-half days of continuous music—nearly two weeks of non-stop 24-7 sound—and roughly $2,400 worth of intellectual property.
Oddly enough, my first impulse—as I approach the completion of the ripping project—is to start thinking of how I’d like to burn new CDs of selected tracks! It’s a detail we rarely consider—to truly enjoy a large music collection, it needs to be ‘DJ-ed’ into interesting play-lists. Store-bought CDs have to be single-themed, whereas a listener prefers to hear a variety of tracks (and some are better than others, too). I like to hear a little classical, a little rock, and a little new age—sometimes I even throw in some of my own piano recordings. Thus, I have nearly as many CDs ‘burned’ as CDs store-bought—but since my home-made CDs are comprised of selected tracks from the store-bought, I didn’t have to rip the home-made ones.
When burning personally-DJ-ed CDs, it’s important to print a jewel-case playlist-insert—after ten or twenty CDs, if you don’t have what you’ve already burned clearly visible, you’ll go crazy—or you’ll end up with a few tracks that show up on several CDs—it’s better to keep track. Also, if you use a short label-name to handwrite on the CD itself, then use that ‘label’ as the title for your printed graphic, you don’t have to do a lot of hand-printing on the CD. Does anyone remember trying to print all the track titles onto that tiny square of cardboard in a cassette-tape case? I like having a printing press in my house—even if it is an HP.
Some are illiterate, some are ignorant, some are just willfully wrong-headed based on family tradition or religious zaniness. The stupid are among us, both candidates and voters. In everyday life we have to deal with the stupid—they cause the majority of traffic jams, on the road or on line at the market—anywhere that rules are required to keep things running smoothly, the stupid are there to jam up the works.
We look up to the monumentally stupid because their grandiose idiocy causes flood-victims to languish, lead-poisoning in the water, underpaid workers—even wars that have no end, because their foundations are stupidity—and once they’ve started the violence, their stupid brethren refuse to let anything be dropped and forgotten. Great (but stupid) things are done by greatly stupid people—there are even stupidity hoops you have to jump through to be accepted amongst these morons. Fraternal hazing, unpaid internships, playing along with the head stupid in charge—there are many steps before someone reaches the point where they will be trusted with the reins of stupidity in leadership.
Or you can simply be raised ‘entitled’—that’s got the stupid baked right in, and the confidence to use your stupid to its fullest potential. God, it makes me sick just writing about these stains. Never mind.
What a crock of shit life can be. And it could be so different—god, people suck! You know, people being nice, being generous, open-minded, people caring and helping—that shit isn’t supposed to be the rare nugget in a sea of shit—it’s supposed to be most of society, with just a few poor, broken souls causing some trouble now and then. But we get the opposite—every leader, every rich person, every boss—a total shitbag that deserves an eternity in hell—and 90% of people just walking around—just as bad. Ask’em why—they’ll tell you that you’ve got to “look out for number one”—fucking idiots—as if they would exist if people hadn’t shown them kindness along the way. It’s like misogyny—show me a misogynist who wasn’t raised by a caring mother—then (when you can’t) explain that bullshit to me—I’d love to understand this assholery. People are so fucking stupid.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not dissing the mentally-challenged—those are some of the finest people you’ll ever meet. No—stupid is something altogether different—stupid is being unwilling to pay attention, to absent oneself from responsibility, to make one’s own interests a priority over being a part of society. You can always hear stupid people saying things like, “You’ve got your opinion, I’ve got mine.” Opinions are private things, preferences, if you will—you don’t make the rules, or set public policy, or treat people differently—because of your opinion—you do it because you’ve given the matter some thought and considered the needs of everyone involved. Having an opinion about public policy is no different from the classic ‘because I said so’—acceptable in the extremes of parenting, perhaps, but never when dealing with your fellow grown-ups.
It’s stupid that we have rich people and starving people—and it’s not just stupid for the rich one and the starving one—it’s stupid of all of us to allow that kind of chicanery to be ‘the ways things are’. And don’t tell me it’s always been that way—the longer it’s been that way, the stupider it is to allow it to continue. Ditto war. Ditto bigotry. I could go on, but I’m tired of listing the many ways of stupidity—I’m a goddamned connoisseur of stupid—we have so many flavors.
Sure, there are scientists in laboratories all over the place, making up extremely intelligent new shit—that’s great. But when are we going to stop confining intelligence to the laboratory? When are we going to apply humanity’s vaunted intelligence to our fucking lives? Our Constitution is over two hundred years old and it’s been more than fifty years since the Civil Rights Act—when are we going to do some more good work like that? I know it’s tiring to think about stuff, but how long is this ‘break’ supposed to last?
I keep finding new aspects of Trump’s popularity and media-attention that upset me. Today it occurred to me that everyone talks about what Trump said or what Trump did—but no one ever talks about who Trump is or what Trump thinks.
For instance, no one ever asks Trump why he suddenly decided to devote his life to public service—and the reason they don’t ask is because they know without it being said—Trump isn’t devoting himself to public service (although that is the job he’s running for) he’s going after a shiny power-bauble that caught his attention. His ego is actually doing the running for office—he probably has a tiny id somewhere deep inside that’s sweating how big of a hassle being the president is going to be.
The real president today scolded the press saying, “This is not entertainment. This is not a reality-show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States of America.” I’m even a little upset with his word choice at the end—it may be a ‘contest’, but it is first and foremost a choice—a responsibility that voters have on their shoulders, whether they recognize its seriousness or not.
Trump has never done any work in the field in which he has chosen to ‘start at the top’—far from ever running before, or holding office before, he has never so much as clerked in a public office, courthouse, or civic center. And he never served. Past debates over presidential candidates focused on who would do the job better—with a complete novice like Trump, the answer is clear—regardless of policy, Hillary Clinton would walk into the job knowing the context of her position—for Trump it would be like sitting down to a snazzy new video-game console—he’d have fun figuring out what all the different buttons do—and he’d get the biggest kick out of the stuff that blows stuff up. No matter how popular—why would we want an uninitiated child in the top slot?
Is it because the voters just don’t have the balls, or the emotional investment to take to the streets and rise up against corruption and obstructionism—and they’re going to vote for Trump as a way of destroying the government? It’s kinda like Tea-Party-gone-nuclear, if you think about it—arm-chair rebellion. This simple-minded showman will never get elected—unless the whole country has gone out of its mind. I just don’t know if I can take the media fawning over this jackass, after a year and more of it already, all the way to November.
Isn’t there one decent journalist left in America? Won’t someone please ask this idiot to explain why voters should trust him when he never gives any specific details about what he’ll do, if elected? Won’t someone please ask him why he thinks an ego qualifies him to rule the free world, absent any knowledge or background in either domestic or foreign affairs beyond shady business meetings with god knows who? Paycheck –journalists—that’s what I call you. It’s not about the job—it’s about the paycheck. Now that I think of it—no wonder you guys are behind him—you’re already living in his world. Gutless traitors.
I feel better about my piano-playing when I listen to some Erik Satie—but that’s a false equivalence—since his rebellious ‘ditties’ flew in the face of more than a century of standards and practices in Western music, whereas my plonking about comes long after Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Cage—not to mention Zappa. Still, there’s something similar there and it makes me feel better about myself and my playing. I’ve been practicing a lot of Chopin and Tchaikovsky lately—and those two are definitely not reassuring to later musicians but, rather, make one feel that music in general is far beyond mere mortals.
MORNING AND NIGHT
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky—it’s weird how most of my practicing boils down to these three nowadays—I used to be all about the Baroque—especially Bach, Handel, and Telemann. I still play them on occasion but in recent years I’ve developed a fondness for that intimate personal touch so prevalent in the Romantics. I’ve also progressed to where they have become more accessible—the Romantics can be more demanding of technique.
TELEMANN
I’ve been doing a lot of writing and a lot of piano-playing lately—but I haven’t had the presence of mind to include the piano recordings into the blog-posts, so this post will include several YouTube recordings I’ve neglected to share recently. Beyond that, there’s a great deal of piano-playing I won’t be sharing at all—sometimes I take a break from recording and just play—it gives me some elbow-room to take a break from being recorded. I’ve tried to learn to ignore the camera, but nothing I do seems to make me unaware of being observed—and that tightens up my playing in a way that makes playing without the camera a tremendous relief.
KLAVIERWERKE
I wrote a poem yesterday about Tchaikovsky—not a very good poem, but I can’t help that. Much has been made of Tchaikovsky being gay (true) and of his being pressured into committing suicide (false) so it’s difficult for me to imagine his life and times—however, it is true that in spite of his innovative compositions, his contemporaries sometimes criticized him for being too European and not Russian enough—kinda strange for the guy who wrote March Slav, huh?
Tuesday, April 05, 2016 3:16 PM
Pyotr Ilyich
My fingers plonk the keys—some Tchaikovsky
For beginners—full of Russian folk themes—
And the poor man’s life—under the thumb of
Entitled bullies and spoiled aristos.
Tchaikovsky is so delicate—so effeminate in some phrases,
Such fairy-like, walking-on-air-ish-ness—
His music is beloved—but for such a man
To live in the cold world—the horror.
I love Tchaikovsky—anyone, really, destroyed
By their own delicacy—to live is to die, and no matter
How long the course, among the many ways to die
What more glorious fate?
So many of us rail against the challenges of life.
But evolving acceptance of gays has rendered the isolation and frustration of millions of gay people through the centuries a uselessly cruel tragedy—in a way, by channeling his struggles into his wonderful music, Tchaikovsky got more out of his social taboo than most gays of the past. That doesn’t lessen his suffering—but his legacy is a lot more than most gay people in his era were granted. I sometimes ponder the possibility that most of the fine arts were practiced by a predominance of gays—it being the only place where they could express themselves without being thrown in jail or burned at the stake. Then I remind myself that there’s plenty of misery available to the straight life, too—enough to evoke creative expression to equal the biblically damned.
TCHAIKOVSKY
I also played an improv to go along with my previous post about Grandma/First Lady/Senator/Secretary/Candidate Clinton—which I belatedly include herein:
GRANDMA CLINTON
Then there’s this business, which I couldn’t think up a title for, so I used a misspelled version of a current movie title:
SUM
And that brings me up to date with my YouTube postings. I hope you enjoy some or all of them….
Golly, what a week. You have no idea how busy I can be, doing nothing. In between manically surfing my cable-box’s channels, shuttling new-release movies in and out of my On-Demand cart, reading books on my Kindle, doing the daily NY Times crossword, setting up my camera to video my piano-playing, editing and posting piano videos, and writing blog-posts like this one—I’m also trading comments and thread-posts on Facebook, WordPress, YouTube, and Medium—sometimes for hours at a time.
There was an especially tricky crossword today—it involved a phrase being written in a circle—with no clues except that it was of a part with the theme of the puzzle. Once I finally completed the puzzle I felt a great wave of futility—and I realized why I only like the easy crosswords. A tough crossword is just as difficult as figuring out what I’m going to say when I write—but when I’m done, all I’ve done is figure out what someone else was saying—what a waste.
I feel a similar futility when I get drawn into protracted threads of debate—or even discussion—online. I’m typing messages to a stranger (or a group of strangers) then they type something in response—and what do you get out of it? Nothing. It’s pitiful what a person will do for distraction when there are no useful alternatives.
Most days are interrupted by pills, and again by a cigarette-rolling session (and maybe another rolling session, IYKWIM). And there are countless times in a day when I make myself a cup of tea. But that still leaves an entire day without responsibilities or tasks of any kind—hours that desperately need filling.
I remember a time when everything was the reverse—I once dreamed of the thousand and one things I would do if I wasn’t chained to a nine-to-five job that left me with barely enough energy to watch a little TV, go to bed, and do it all again the next day. That’s where most people live—so I don’t expect a lot of sympathy for having too much free time—I must sound like those people who try to explain how ‘hard’ it is being rich or famous or something.
Still, when I used to dream of free time, I assumed I’d be healthy and of sound mind—which is not entirely the case here in reality. Think of me as crippled, if that helps—I do—worse yet, I think of myself as someone who is invisibly crippled—I get to be disabled, but I have to explain that to anyone I meet (because it doesn’t show) and I don’t convince everyone—there are still plenty of people who think I’m just lazy and rude—a quitter. Some things just can’t be absorbed by people who haven’t experienced it themselves. And if I thought it was frustrating being kept from my dreams of accomplishment by a steady job, it was nothing compared to this maddening inability to do anything requiring stamina, deftness, focus, or memory.
That does bring a certain amount of variety to my blog-posts, though. Since I can’t work on anything for days on end, I start each day as a blank slate—this past week I’ve done posts about piano-playing, music, copyright disputes, banking, terrorism, politics, literature, poetry, autobiography, history, and science fiction. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was fascinating. But here I sit in an empty room (and on a beautiful day—really beautiful) just typing away whatever comes into my head—hardly fascinating.
My most continual ‘effort’ lately has been my CD-rippings to my new hard drive—I have a huge CD collection; my old hard drive died weeks ago; and I’m only about one hundred CDs in (about 5 Gbytes worth) right now. I forget that I’m doing it some days—but these last three days I’ve been going at it pretty steadily, and there’re still months of ripping ahead. Nowadays, with everything being downloaded, a shelf full of CDs just seems like a waste—no one will ever listen to any of it unless it’s stored digitally.
Conversely, when I’m done, I’ll be able to buy another $40 hard drive and copy the whole collection for a friend or relative—that’s the equivalent of thousands of dollars’ worth of music that I can just give somebody—that’ll be nice. It’s about half classical and half the popular music of my generation—it would take weeks of 24-7 playing to listen to all of it—so there’s bound to be one or two people that would enjoy that.
The thing that takes the most effort in ripping CDs is when you hit a CD that doesn’t load all the info automatically—you who don’t listen to classical music may have never experienced that—but there are many obscure and ancient recordings on CD, and typing in the track-title, artist, and composer for every track on the CD can be painfully tedious—especially wearing the hi-magnification specs I usually need to decipher most CD printing. Plus, Windows Media Player is ridiculously touchy—and if my palsied fingers brush against the wrong key before I hit ‘Rip CD’, all my typing may disappear and I’ll have to start all over—I’ve learned to be very careful when doing this.
Finally, when I just despair of being productive, I play Snood or Candy Crush or my favorite, Candy Crush Soda. I play way too much of this foolishness—not every day, but more days than I’m proud of. That’s when I realize that people don’t need to accomplish anything much more than keeping busy at something that amuses them. In “The Matrix” the ‘nightmare’ scenario was that everyone was plugged into a virtual reality that wasn’t real—but let’s face it—the only thing wrong with that world was that the virtual reality they were trapped in wasn’t any fun. If the evil aliens had created a seductive virtual reality, then the humans would have told their hero, Neo, to get lost.
Happy Vernal Equinox (1st day of Spring) everyone! It’s colder today than it was on Xmas, so of course they’ve forecast a little snow for the area.
I’ve been asked about copyright issues. First, let me disclaim any education, pre-law or otherwise—I don’t really know anything—I can only give what is my present understanding of how these things go. Firstly, aside from my downloadable e-CD, “Opus Eleven by XperDunn”, I don’t have anything profit-based online—my YouTube videos are downloadable and are all part of their Community-Usage pool of material, my blog is not subscription-based, and I have nothing for sale on E-Bay—I’m a non-profit user.
As I understand it, that doesn’t exempt me from copyright law, it just makes me a low-value target for the litigious—unlike successful artists, who it seems must spend a great deal of time and money fending off pretenders to their work, valid or spurious. Were anything of mine to go viral, or to show any revenue-earning potential, then I would have rich people’s problems—but don’t hold your breath.
As far as what you can post to YouTube, there aren’t any hard and fast rules—you can even post a favorite album of yours, if you go to the trouble of making a video out of it. But if you do that, and the band you posted doesn’t like it, YouTube’ll take it down. What I do is slightly different. I post covers of music—meaning I perform a piece of piano music on video and post that.
A lot of my stuff is classical or folk—and that stuff is in the Public Domain—which means it’s at least a hundred years old and no one can ‘own’ it. But I do a fair number of jazz and pop covers from songbooks—and in these cases both the original music belongs to someone else—and the piano arrangement rights belong to the publisher of whatever book I’m sight-reading. Here’s the weird part—I own the video of my own performance.
In the case of covers, YouTube will send you an email asking you to agree that the song doesn’t belong to you—but they leave the video posted online. I always include a ‘cover’ tag with any such post of mine, just so nobody can claim I was trying to pull something. When I’m not feeling lazy, I try to include the credits and copyright info for each cover-song in my description text as well. It may subsequently have a suggestion-link that uses your video to sell the original artists’ e-tracks—but even if they don’t use it as advertising, the cover post itself is free publicity. Unpopular YouTube channels like mine don’t get a lot of views—and if I post a really bad cover, even my channel subscribers don’t watch it—so it isn’t as if it hurts the composer—unless he or she listens to it.
Perhaps I hadn’t made it clear in my previous posts about copyright claim disputes—in my case, it’s all about the principle of the thing. My sole downloadable CD for sale hasn’t sold even once in two years, that I know of—and that’s pretty much what I expected. Only when an artist generates revenue does the issue of copyright become a serious legal matter—after all, you’ve got to pay for the lawyers. If you are a piano player, like me (or play any instrument, or if you sing) then you should feel free to post whatever you record—nobody is going to sue you. No one’s going to pay you either, but no one’ll sue you.
I’ve just watched the final episode of “Downton Abbey”. I didn’t watch the first two seasons because it didn’t hit me right, but something clicked about the third season and I enjoyed it regularly from that point. The hub-bub about its ending is eyebrow-lifting, but only by being so unprecedented—not because it doesn’t deserve the fanfare. The show was exceptional in being dramatic without violence, and intimate without exploitation—and, of course, in the intelligence of the writing.
But as I come to terms with the termination of one of my regular pleasures, it brought sharply to mind the fact that too many of my life’s signposts have been fictional ones. I can remember how lost I felt when “The West Wing” went off the air—it had comforted me, not only by idealizing the presidency, but by suggesting that the Clinton administration was a sort of subtle second-coming of Camelot—an idealistic president with the guts to stand by his ethical guns. I was naïve, yes—but I was far more optimistic—happier in my lack of cynicism. In the end, it was good “The West Wing” ended before Bush W. and 9/11—so everything happens for a reason, I guess.
Then there was Jon Stewart’s exit from the Daily Show—I’m still getting over that one. I like Trevor Noah alright, but Jon Stewart’s absence is akin, in my mind, to Johnny Carson’s retirement—but worse, because Stewart was a champion of social justice, behind all the jokes—and in these times of brawling presidential candidates, he’s sorely missed. A long-time, late-night companion has left forever—and I don’t like change in even the little things.
Not all of the TV I’ve spent a lifetime staring at has been fiction. The news coverage of the Viet Nam war and the brutality against Civil Rights protesters was all too factual. My third grade class was marched to a sudden assembly one day to watch coverage of JFK’s assassination. I was thirteen the summer I saw Armstrong step onto the Moon in real time. And I watched heartbroken while the twin towers disintegrated fifteen years ago.
But most of it has been fiction—though, to be fair, we should acknowledge that the effort of making a great TV series, comedy or drama, is very real—as was my satisfaction in having a regular time each week when I could expect to be taken out of myself. The novelty of “The Flintstones”, the then-daring subject matter of “Hill Street Blues”, the sophistication of “Law & Order”, the easy hilarity of “Seinfeld”—there were so many shows—and while some, like “Law & Order”, metastasized into over-familiarity, and others ended with perfect timing, they all had their time, when their regular weekly appearance on my TV screen was looked forward to with relish.
I’ve never watched a reality TV show—what the producers save on screen-writers, the audience pays for in brain cells, it seems to me—but maybe I’m just old-fashioned. And I’ve never gone in for the talent shows, either—to make a naked competition out of artistic expression is to deny the respect normally granted a performer on stage—even a high school drama group doesn’t have to put up with that kind of judgmental nonsense. Cruelty may create drama—but what kind of drama? The entertainment business has enough rejection and judgment, without putting it on stage.
Therefore, what I consider traditional TV is only to be found in bits and pieces. But I’ve made the situation worse—I feel like I’ve outgrown sitcoms—I’d rather watch a half-hour of straight stand-up than the contortions of contrived circumstance and strained gags forced on the sitcom format. I’ll grudgingly watch “Big Bang Theory” or “Two Broke Girls”—exceptionally well-done comedies, but only out of lack of options and a desperate need to watch something, anything—I’m too jaded by the format not to see the gags from a mile off.
Plus, I’ve sworn off any dramatic show that centers on a murder investigation or a hospital ER, for mental health reasons—I’ve seen so many through the decades, and one day it occurred to me that these should not be my regular subject matter—even fictionally. That disqualifies a surprising number of shows—“Rizzoli and Isles”, for instance, is the kind of show I would normally watch, but now I object to the underlying theme being ‘someone always kills someone’—that doesn’t happen every day—not in my life, surely—so why would I invite it into my entertainment? Shows like “Rizzoli and Isles” or “Bones” have plenty of light-hearted comradery, comic relief, and beautiful women—but at some point, to me, this seemed like it trivialized actual murder.
Yes, drama requires conflict and there is nothing so basic as a murder mystery for conflict—but today’s TV is very real—and shown in Hi-Def. In fact, the slow-mo re-enactments on “CSI”—hyper-real details of bullet impacts and such—when the show first debuted, were a large factor in my swearing off murder-based programs. The hyper-reality of the set-dressings on “ER”, likewise, took a part in forming my desire to avoid being grossed out by my favorite TV shows. We are what we watch—and we want to watch that, if I may attempt a witticism.
I think the main trouble comes from being older than everyone else—well not everyone, but certainly all the young, starry-eyed writers, actors and directors in the entertainment business—and they’re certainly not targeting my demographic. Neither do I want to only watch shows with people my age in them—my grandmother used to do that, and it made me sad—Peter Falk’s and Dick Van Dyke’s murder mysteries were her favorite series—it was like programming for a rest home.
When I was young I gobbled up every book I could find, I watched every movie and TV show, I listened to every piece of new music—and I did perhaps too good a job of it. I’m quite familiar with things creative—I can look at a painting and name the artist, hear a few bars and name the composer, see a few seconds of film and name the title, principal actors, and how far into the movie or program it is. My younger self might have been proud of all this accrued erudition, but it leaves me starved for novelty.
I don’t get out much, but I get ‘in’ more than most everybody—I watch and read (and write) and listen and play all day, every day—and I’m thinking as hard as I can the whole time—if it were physical effort, I’d be an Adonis—if it made money, I’d be a Croesus. As it is, life is far less glorious, though I don’t personally find it so. My lack of outward success is partly due to unalterable events, and partly a willful rejection of what others may see as ambition. Had my life gone easier I might have achieved more, but I might have understood less. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m proud of what I’ve done with my life, but I believe I’ve made the best of it, and I’m satisfied with that, by and large—though I really wish I could still draw. I guess being unable to change means I’m doing what I was meant to do—and if not, I’m going to see it that way, anyhow. I lack choices in that department.
I know what would fix our economy—raises. Nobody’s been given a raise since the 1980s. You could double the salary of any working person today, and they’d still be underpaid if calculated by the same increases the wealthy have enjoyed these last few decades. But no—the wealthy fret about how the world would end if we had a $15/hour minimum wage. Are you kidding me? Who could live on $15/hour? And if you can’t run your business without paying a living wage—then you can’t run your business—you’re incompetent. Since when does a business plan include victimizing your employees? Well, I take that back—literally all business plans do that, and always have.
It seems strange to me that employers make half their money short-changing their customers—and the other half from short-changing their employees. Shouldn’t we just shoo these people away? We haven’t converted to an ‘office-free’ economy—we’ve converted to a ‘security-free’ economy—at least to employees.
And a business is not a person. Until a business can feel pain, it will never be a person—and it will never deserve the rights and considerations of a person. That’s just legal mumbo-jumbo being promulgated by the rich. Let’s shoo all them off too.
I’m serious—terrorists at least have the decency to chop your head off and make a clean end to it—American employers want to enslave us and abuse us until the end of time—who’s really worse? Capitalism has gotten out of hand—and the only way to restore the balance is to make the streets our workplace, dismissing all CEOs, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and HR personnel. Shoo’em off, that’s what I say. Their mismanagement is going to let our infrastructure rot away and be buried beneath the waves of global warming, anyway—dismissing these entitled fops wouldn’t cause any less disruption than their continued oversight will produce. We’ll just feed them the same line they feed everyone else—‘Hey, it’s not personal—it’s just business’. It is unfortunate that wealth confers power, without conferring one whit of good judgement. It that sense, it greatly resembles violence.
Harumph! Anyway—let’s talk about something important—how’s Hillary doing? It is Super Tuesday, and the sun’s getting low in the sky—though, if you ask me, Leap Day is pretty special—making ‘super’ Tuesday something of an anticlimax. It’s just a bunch of primaries. Still, if I imagine myself in Hillary’s shoes (and yes that does feel uncomfortable) it must be a thrilling day.
I’ve gone from sight-reading through Chopin’s book of mazurkas to his book of nocturnes—I have hours of recordings I’ve spared my listeners—I enjoy sight-reading through good music like that—but I don’t keep to tempo—and I go back and correct myself when I flub a passage—it’s a lot more like actual reading than it is performance—it’s quite unlistenable. I just do it for myself—it’s really fun. And after I find favorites, and do them over and over, I eventually get to play them better. I used to post some of the work—nowadays I only post the finished product—when I’ve gotten it as far as I’m going to get it. But that’s a tough call—take today’s nocturnes—they’re not great, but they’re a lot better than the other four that I’m not posting.
The improvs are a poser as well. I try to make them all different and, technically speaking, they are all different. But inasmuch as they’re all ‘me’, they’re pretty much all the same, too. So I post them all, even knowing that some judicious editing would make my YouTube channel far more attractive. But when you post nearly every day, it gets to be like writing a journal—you’re too busy writing it to ever read it back to yourself. Same with this blog—sometimes I go look at a post from a year or two ago, and I think to myself, ‘Huh! Did I write that?’
In a reasonable world, Hillary Clinton would win the presidential race in a walk—and if I’m living in an unreasonable world, I’d just as soon not have my face rubbed in it. If, god forbid, a Republican did win, that would be a tragic-enough disaster, without making me listen to these people—as I have already for more than a year—for the rest of this year. I’ve listened to them ad nauseam—and in their case, that’s about three minutes in—do I really have to bear the sound of Trump’s voice until November? Hasn’t he said enough idiotic things?
I remember our last Republican president—do you? He was an idiot—he got us in a war by mistake—he destroyed our economy—he didn’t speak in complete sentences—and what sentences he managed to get out had made-up words in them. Cruz or Rubio would be just as bad—maybe worse—and the nightmare scenario of a Trump presidency conjures up the movie-title-to-be: “The Return Of Fascism” or maybe “The Rise Of American Fascism”.
We are all aware that there is a contest between these three Republicans—it’s all the news, all the time—but to me it resembles a bunch of drunks tussling on the sidewalk just outside a bar-room—my concern for who wins is nothing compared to my concern that a cop will come along and get them off the street before a passer-by gets hurt. But there are no cops on CNN, or in journalism generally. News shows can keep airing this stuff—but I’ve got better ways to spend my time than watching a stupidest-man contest.
Likewise, while I appreciate Bernie forcing Hillary to add a focus on income inequality to her platform—I don’t want to hear any more about how he’s going to make college, health-care, and whatever else, free for everyone—yes that’s the way it should be—there are a lot of things that aren’t the way they should be in this country—but nothing happens on inauguration day—and Hillary is better prepared for the day after inauguration—both domestically and internationally. I don’t think Bernie supporters understand what a president actually does—I think they think he or she’s a wizard who makes a decree, and changes things all by himself or herself.
So that’s it between me and the news—I’ll wait to hear from other people about anything important. Hillary should win—and even if she doesn’t—that’s just more reason not to spend until November listening to all of this back-and-forth BS. Seeing as how our government is already broken, I think it’s a pretty sweet gig—getting a free pass on all the work our government should be doing while we all have a two-year long conversation about the Donald. I’m sure the folks in Flint, MI or Hoosick Falls, NY are glued to their sets. If I ran CNN, I’m pretty sure I could find more interesting stuff to report on—but fans of ‘The Apprentice’ might tune out the news—and that’s a huge demographic. I can hear it now: “Mr. Dunn, you’re fired.”
It’s a wistful day—thoughts of long ago, dreams of the future, a strange contentment with the familiar troubles of the present—a day when happiness asserts itself, without any need for reasons. The specter of bad news is forgotten, still possible, but unlikely on such a day.
I played my electronic piano yesterday. I’ve been trying for years to figure out how to hook up the Yamaha and my PC—for many reasons—a MIDI recording has no ambient background noise—and a MIDI recording can be digitally transcribed into sheet music—and it would be easier to do multi-track recordings. Yesterday I attempted to hook up my latest effort—the M-Audio MIDI-to-USB converter—but whatever I did, I still couldn’t get it to record to my PC—so frustrating!
So, as a reaction to my frustration, I made one of my usual recordings, with my camera on a tripod. I did not name it ‘Disruptive Presence’ because my family takes turns walking through the room while I’m playing—I actually like it when someone walks by as I’m playing. The phrase just came to me—I’ve been described as a ‘disruptive presence’ myself in the past, and looking back, I’m proud of most of those incidents. Most people who might call you or me a ‘disruptive presence’ are pompous assholes who need to be disrupted—bad teachers, entitled middle managers, and other smug bullies. Thus I think of it as a badge of honor.
Another excuse for the title could be the sound-selections—this recording comes to over 15 minutes long—because for each instrument (piano, organ, strings, etc.) I played a little improv that suits the timbre of the sound I’m playing with. I play at least a little something using every voicing the Yamaha DP-95 has to offer. So it’s really ten improvs, ‘disrupted’ by changing sounds.
I often bemoan the lack of a filter on today’s media—but the filters media once had were based on avoiding criticism of the establishment, silencing cries of injustice, and a priggish abhorrence of prurience. I should be more precise in criticizing media—first of all, I should take the trouble to specify mass media, since by definition, my own blog—and that of many other individuals without malice or agenda—is part of modern media as a whole.
Neither is mass media truly without filter—there are all kinds of filters on mass media, Money being one—and Conflict (actual or goosed-up by obsessive coverage) being another. During the recent Oscars ‘white-out’ controversy, several filmmakers pointed the finger at backers who won’t take risks on their investments—and while that may display a lack of enterprise and independence among filmmakers, they still have a point—all mass media gets financed up front, so none of it gets through without a green light from some financier. And, if I understand correctly, the money-peoples’ influence doesn’t end with the initial approval—far from it.
News-reporting has an even more evil monkey on its back—the need for constant attention—but instead of throwing tantrums, the media manufactures tantrums for us to throw. It is hard to hear what any interviewee is actually saying when they’re constantly being cross-examined by reporters who echo the lies and suspicions of the ‘other side’ of the story. And here’s where there is a filter missing—there is no filter on how jack-assed the ‘other side’ can be—no matter how asinine, any controversial opinion is welcome. And often as not, in their desperation to find a counter-point, the media’s talking heads often overlook the actual forces in conflict—particularly when those differences are nuanced, or require some thought.
Trump, for instance, is just a bully—that’s plain to see. But the media flock to conflict, shining a spotlight of respectability on this wanna-be prater. On the comedic news-parody programs, they ridicule Trump mercilessly—it’s like shooting fish in a barrel—but if the real news did that, they’d have to admit that a real-estate hustler doesn’t deserve our respect—or our attention, whenever he says whatever crazy shit comes flying out of his mouth. Those golden pronouncements make lots of money for the news divisions in ad revenue—but they are still the mouthings of a monkey.
This ‘nobody is wrong’ attitude seems like pluralism—but it is simple lack of judgment—some things are open to question in a real sense, but other ideas and alternatives are either willful blindness or simple delusion. And this is where I feel obligated to debunk religion—the original alternative to what’s clearly right in front of our noses. I think of freedom of religion as being limited to faith itself—you can believe whatever you want—religion, in the stricter sense, is the aspect of faith that you insert into reality—even try to impose on the reality of others—and there’s nothing free about that. But I could spend all day trying to explain why it’s okay for us to believe differently, as long as your religion doesn’t impose any limits on my understanding—if you don’t understand the spirit of ‘freedom of religion’, it’s probably because you have one. The unfortunate fact is that the idea of ‘freedom of religion’ is really an ass-backwards way of admitting it’s all bullshit, without actually saying so—but I don’t want to get bogged down in that morass, either.
We should be avoiding conflict—not whipping it up at every opportunity. In truth, the solution to most of civilization’s problems could be solved if we threw money at it. We don’t want to make life fair or easy or comfortable for the least of us—we want them to suffer. Instead of figuring out the minimum amount of money that local governments have to spend to keep corpses from rotting in the street, we should be investing lavishly in public services, throwing money at every aspect of inequality. It seems counterintuitive, but everywhere it’s done, the effects are always remarkable, always hailed as a ‘miracle’ of success—when it’s only the right way to do things. Americans love conflict—but there are aspects of civilization that patently should not be competitive—that’s a simple fact. That may be why we’ve recently let Socialism out of the dirty-word closet.
The trouble with Socialism, at this point in time, is that it’s become Bernie Sanders’ brand-name, when the entire Democratic party have been ‘socialist’-leaning all along, Hillary included—but chose to couch it as intelligent governance, due to the unpopularity of words like Socialism in recent decades. America is inherently socialist—justice and equality are very much the people’s values—which is why the conservatives go to such pains to convince us that ‘the business of America is business’—it helps them justify their greed and subversion. But I can promise you that voting for Trump is the hardest way for us to learn that lesson. Voting for Bernie will only teach you the futility of electing a socialist to lead a GOP legislature and a polarized nation. I’m still voting for Hillary—she’s not perfect, she’s not superwoman—but she is better than all the alternatives by a long shot.
The trouble with Socialism is that it was initially offered as an alternative to monarchies and other autocracies—and Capitalism managed to present itself as an alternative to Socialism, when it was really just a burgeoning new form of autocracy, infesting the democratic process with special exemptions and entitlements for the rich and powerful. And Socialism, when described, can often sound suspiciously like Christianity, in its means, if not its motives—not the faux Christianity of Capitalists, with its Xmas shopping, judgmentalism and sexism—but the hard, pure Christianity of Christ, with charity, mercy, and love one’s neighbor as oneself. Hey—I’m an atheist, but I know a good idea when I hear one.
That was a poem (if you can call it that) I wrote yesterday—don’t ask me to explain it—I think the title does that, if anything can.
Had some strange recordings today—well, it’s yesterday now—and the day before was pretty awesome also. That day I played a slow but nearly accurate ‘Arabesque’ by Debussy—and then, after listening to Sibelius’s Second Symphony in e minor, I tried to pick out the finale theme on the piano—and that one I call ‘Playing with Sibelius’—I really shouldn’t use his name, since I made quite a mess of his music (which is really beautiful—check out the YouTube of Leonard Bernstein conducting it) but I couldn’t pretend that his theme, even as jacked-up as I played it, was my own creation.
Then today, or yesterday rather, our good neighbor, Harlan, came over to repair our plumbing—you can hear some handiwork clunking about and such—while I was making a video of the snow falling outside our window—and I played some song covers that came out good enough to post. The camera was pointed towards Harlan’s house (even though you can’t see it in the video) and you can hear Harlan, at the end of the recording, asking why we’re filming his house (ha ha).
The two improvs I played after everyone else left, so they have no interesting stories to them—but I kinda like the way they turned out anyhow. February has been a big recording month for me—this makes twenty-six recordings for February and it’s not even over yet…. But the biggest thrill for today is—the toilet flushes again! Yayyy. (You never appreciate stuff until it goes away, do you?)
Billie Holiday’s discography includes some beautiful old standards—one of my favorites is “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With Me” written by Jimmy McHugh & Clarence Gaskill in 1926. I find the sheet music demanding and if I can’t play the thing properly, I certainly can’t give you the slightest idea of how exquisitely simply beautiful it is on the Billie Holiday recording. Those early recordings of Billy Holiday with the Teddy Wilson Orchestra are, in many ways, the apotheosis of musicality—so weirdly perfect and so perfectly weird. (Apotheosis means “the highest point in the development of something; culmination or climax.”—I looked it up to make sure I wasn’t being stupid.) Here’s another favorite Holiday recording:
And that’s the context in which I first heard performed “Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me)” written by Jack Palmer & Spencer Williams in 1924. Again, I struggle too much with getting this sheet music played to give it the easy bounce that it should have.
The middle piece from today’s video is by Vincent Youmans—a real class act—influenced in later years by Jerome Kern—but this early song is more of a jazz take on a revival-tent choir—“Hallelujah” written by Vincent Youmans, with words by Clifford Grey & Leo Robin in 1927. Here’s another from 1927, “I Know That You Know”:
“Hallelujah” is a tricky piece, included today because I’m not likely to get a better take of it. So there you go, caveats included—my piano cover video for today:
I’m working on backups—I’ve had it in the back of my mind ever since the new year turned—and when the PC crashed yesterday, I was worried about how much writing, music, scans, and who-knows-what-else I might have lost—so—backups, right away—before I forget. And I have it in mind to try and think of a way to do intermediate, frequent backups of work-in-progress—just to keep this sort of thing from covering too broad a time period.
Thursday, February 11, 2016 11:05 AM
The pain is obscene—I’m having a bad day. God, I could scream. I’m not usually Mr. Comfortable—but I’m used to that. It’s when the pain is just so severe and so constant that I can’t think straight—that’s when I get a little bitchy about it.
I resisted the strong urge to respond to all the political posts on my Facebook wall—thankfully—there’s nothing to be gained by venting my ‘old crabby guy’ sentiments all over Facebook, just so some trollish meathead can engage me with what he or she is sure is ‘cogent reasoning’, but which in the end only proves how superficial, emotional, and peer-pressured their thinking is. The trouble with Facebook is that an educated, intelligent person can find himself or herself put on the same level as the dumbest ass in the country—and I recoil at the waste of time represented by arguing with someone who can’t even use the English language (or, at least, spell-check).
Also, there’s a mountain of difference between someone with fifty years of engagement in history, politics, and current events—and someone whose political involvement began when they decided to jump on Bernie’s bandwagon two months ago. I won’t even go into the depths of stupidity, and lack of self-preservation, represented by favoring the GOP. I could face standing in front of a classroom, trying to teach people what they don’t know—but I’ll be damned if I’m going to face them as equals, trading quips, while I try to educate them—and while they pretend to an equal understanding. That’s too hard for me—and much too easy on them.
And it is too easy to be a troll—they can just keep spewing bullshit until someone calls them on it—I, on the other hand, feel a responsibility to know what I’m talking about before I argue a point. I could twist the truth eight ways from Sunday—but I call myself on that stuff before it even leaves my lips—I don’t just throw it out there and dare someone else to refute it, just because it wins my argument for me. That’s debate-team bullshit—and everyone knows it—even the people who habitually use it in place of verisimilitude. Debate and argument are like government—none of it works properly without good will on both sides.
Not that I intend to leave the battlefield to the morons—I’ll post political comments on Facebook again someday—but using the cold logic of reason—not out of this pit of bitterness and pain.
Here’s some piano music from before the recent computer crash:
I am sixty years old today. I was born in 1956. Television is only a few years older than I am—but I’m a few years older than NASA. Some of my sharpest childhood memories are of watching NASA on Television—in between Civil Rights protests, Vietnam War news-reports, the assassinations of Martin and John and Bobbie, the Flintstones, Mary Poppins, and Star Trek. Computers used to be building-sized machines—cars used to have curves—and so many things used to be ‘shocking’—I miss ‘shocking’.
There was shocking art, shocking music, shocking language, shocking nudity (remember “Hair”?) and shocking space flights—orbiting the earth (Mercury), docking in orbit—and space-walking (Gemini), and landing on the moon (Apollo). I am not the only thing that has gotten old—‘shocking’ is showing some gray hairs as well—here in the future of wrist-computers, gay marriage, black presidents, and robots on Mars. I like it—I’m happy that we’ve matured to the point of accepting these new normalities—but I do miss ‘shocking’.
I miss kids outside, too. That used to be where you found kids—outside playing. I’m too old for kick-the-can—but it’s sad that no one plays kick-the-can anymore. I play Candy Crush now—and, yes, I’m too old for that as well, but I enjoy it—still, it’s no kick-the-can. As a kid, I was often chided for staying indoors all day, reading books—but even then, I spent more time playing outside than the heartiest of today’s kids.
My parents took us five kids camping in the summertime—Taconic State Park was a wilderness to a kid from Bethpage, Long Island—but we also hit Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia—hiking in the woods, building a campfire, sleeping in a tent—I’m often disappointed with myself that I didn’t do the same with my kids. Being the son of a Scout Troopmaster, I certainly had the skills—I guess it’s just one of those things where you have to grow up to appreciate it—and my kids grew up before I did.
My dad taught me carpentry, too. I knew how to use power tools before I had a shop class—my dad had a workshop in the cellar—and I used to have a small workshop of my own—I could build furniture and fix parts of our house—but it’s a library now and most of my tools are gone. My son is familiar with basic tools, but I never taught him as much as I should have—he’s like me—more a reader than a builder.
I find myself thinking about time—the past, the present, the future—and while my head is whirling with thoughts, I have nothing to write down here—I suspect I’ve blogged for so long that I’ve already told most of my life story—and I hate to repeat myself.
Claire has put flowers all over the house to mark the day for me—and with the rain pattering down outside the open front door it’s very spring-like for my birthday—how bizarre—I remember one early Long Island birthday party when my father had to shovel a tunnel from the front door to the street—not a path—a tunnel—to allow my party-goers into the house after a blizzard. While blizzards are not the standard, either, it is true that a February-third birthday has always been snow-covered—whether Long Island or Westchester, February’s coming is well into winter—and a lack of snow is unnatural—though these easily-chilled bones have trouble complaining about warm winters.
I feel sorry for my contemporaries—hitting sixty has traditionally been the beginning of a slow, comfortable slide towards the sunset—but for us, it’s more like someone has hit a reset button—saying, “All that you have known is no more—and all that is new is strange to you”. Between climate change and technology change and social change I don’t know which is more disorienting. I wish I could come at all of this brave new world with a young heart and a young body—that I could face with some relish. But to have things go whirling off into the unknown, now, when I’m no longer a real part of it—that’s disheartening.
Still, I cheer the good changes—and there have been many—the world is undoubtedly a better place than it was in 1956—all our present troubles notwithstanding. You learn that progress changes for good and for bad—the people with bad agendas and self-serving goals adapt and overcome obstacles just like the good people—computers and rockets can be used for good or ill. The fight for the soul of humanity abides—and always will—no progress can change that.
Have you ever heard the fourth movement of Sibelius’ 2nd Symphony? It’s the greatest—I mean the whole symphony is nice, but that last movement—OMG. It’s like the Beatles—you can hear the same tune a million times, but it stays exciting and new, year after year. The difference, with classical music, is that you get something that lasts a half hour or more—instead of a four minute tune—that alone makes classical music great—to me, at least—I like something that hangs around for a while. And the conductor can alter the tempo and phrasing so much—I swear, I’ve heard Tchaikovsky’s Fifth by at least five different conductors and it’s like they’re five different pieces of music—it’s really something. Even a piano solo—look at the difference between Bach played by Wanda Landowska and Bach played by Glenn Gould—you’d swear it was a different composer.
Anyways, here’s some of my piano-playing:
Wednesday, February 03, 2016 10:21 PM
Surprise Party!
Okay—talk about a contrast of moods—this morning I was all contemplative—I played a thoughtful improv—I got sentimental with my blog post. I assumed I’d have a quiet day—I had asked Claire specifically not to have any party plans for my birthday—and Pete had called and said we’d get together to jam today. But as soon as we set up to record—Claire threw me a surprise birthday party—Pete was there as a decoy—to make sure I was up and dressed when people arrived, and Harlan and Sherryl came, and Marie and Evan—Claire and Spencer, of course—and Greg came along eventually. It was a lovely time—there was Swedish meatballs and mac’n’cheese and angel-food cake with strawberry icing—and I got nice presents (mostly colored socks—my specialty)—and I had a captive audience while I played the piano. Jessy called by I-phone from California—so we got to see her baby-bump and her pregnancy ‘glow’—she’s so beautiful as a mother to be—even more beautiful than usual. But maybe I’m biased. I gave the camera to Spencer and asked him to take pictures of everyone.
I had “Groundhog Day” playing in the background for part of the day—Comedy Central ran it on a loop, in honor of the day. And for those of you following at home, Puxatawney Phil did not see his shadow this morning—which legends tells us betokens an early spring—as if global warming wasn’t threatening to bewilder the spring bulbs out of the lawn right here in early February. I have a special fondness for Groundhog Day because it has always been the day before my birthday—which I share with Horace Greeley, among others. And the eponymous film is one of my favorites because lots of people say they don’t care for science fiction—but everybody loves “Groundhog Day”, and if that’s not science fiction, nothing is.
My CD-library-designated external hard-drive died, and today I purchased a new one-terrabyte Passport by Western Digital to replace it. I’ve started ripping my CDs to the new drive—but I have hundreds of CDs, so it’s going to take a few days. I hope I didn’t lose anything irreplaceable—but I’m not going to spend $500 to find out (that’s the average cost of a data-retrieval service to restore a broken hard-drive’s data). I’m enjoying the review of my CD collection, anyway—so I’m just going to relax and enjoy rebuilding my digital music library. I was fortunate in using my C: drive for the downloaded music files delivered by Amazon or I-Tunes—I don’t know where I’d begin to restore that part of my music collection. Do I re-order it? Do I have to pay for it twice? What’s the deal? Here’s hoping I never have to find out.
Hillary won (just barely) and Trump lost in last night’s Iowa Caucuses, so I’m cautiously optimistic. I think people forget that Hillary Clinton would be our first woman president—and that’s aside from being the best candidate, regardless of gender. We’ve been so excited and proud, most of us, to have elected Barrack Obama—and now we have a chance for another first—but somehow, the fact that we’ve had our first non-white president takes some of the luster off of the idea of our first woman president—which is weird. I guess, emotionally, people can get too much of a good thing.
Ms./First Lady/Senator/Secretary Clinton has done a lot of the downplaying herself—I guess she doesn’t want to make her gender the focus of her candidacy—and I can see why she’d think that—but I’m excited. Female heads of state may be rare—but guess what’s rarer? Female heads of state who commit war crimes, or get caught in corruption, or do the many bad things that male heads of state get up to when they get the chance—that’s what (or should I say who?). Not that women are always good—perhaps they get less chances to ruin the world—but that still leaves them with pretty good track records.
Good old Bernie is a nice guy—but he’s promising the moon to college kids—and those young people have enough school-loan-debt and unemployment to make them hungry for change—even hungry enough to vote. But let’s get serious about a Socialist running in the national election—the Democratic primary is one thing, but getting the whole country behind him is altogether different. And that’s just getting him elected. Look at Bernie Sanders’ voting record in office and ask yourself how much bi-partisan support his programs are liable to generate—even an elected Bernie could never deliver on his promises unless those same people vote in progressive Democrats to the Congressional and Senate seats.
Anyway, I continue to watch the race with interest. Now here are some videos I posted recently—I hope you like them:
And, finally, this is a post originally from my Amazon Customer Reviews:
Monday, February 01, 2016 3:58 PM
Book Report: “This Long Vigil” by Rhett Bruno (2016Feb01)
This would be more properly titled ‘Short Story Report’ but I often fall into the pit of convention—and in this case I am helped along by my Kindle, which renders the purchase and consumption of all fiction into the same seamless ‘buy-with-one-click’ stream—with the exception of the length of time for which we will be beguiled by the author. In this case—blink and you’ll miss it.
I found ‘This Long Vigil’ entertaining, well-written, and engrossing—but far too short. In the case of such snippets, one is more likely to feel the resonance of what’s missing than the paucity of what’s not. In this particularly case, I was left wondering how the premise came to be—what devilish organization would decide to put humans into the situation which the protagonist of this story finds himself? A solitary life leavened only by the voice of a parental computer, but surrounded by a thousand sleeping bodies who will never wake—this story leaves a lot unexplored—particularly how someone could survive such a life without succumbing to emotional imbalance or outright insanity. The protagonist’s final option skirts the issue, but couches it as a hero’s choice—not the ultimate desperation of a tortured guinea pig.
In programming we have the ‘reality check’—we look at a program’s results and, rather than check the calculations, we’d ask ourselves ‘does the output make any sense in general?’ If the ‘number of orders shipped’ equals negative two, or twenty million—you know you have a program bug—that’s a ‘reality check’. Story’s like “This Long Vigil” can be haunting and evocative—but the lack of a ‘reality check’ in the premise always breaks my vicarious concentration. Fortunately, this story is over before you have too long to dwell on it—the doubts come after. I look forward to reading something of Rhett Bruno that is longer and less darkly-toned—and I must stop here lest my review outstrip the story.
Went down to Advanced Computer Repair, on Rt. 202 in Somers today with my busted-ass External Hard Drive. This thing is so old it needs to be plugged in—I’ve got two newer ones that run off the USB power—and are smaller, and have at least twice the storage capacity. I used the old one for my CD collection—which is large enough to overflow hard drives—or was, pre-tera-flop. I only used it because it’s so much trouble to rip all my CDs to a new drive. But it stopped working finally—I brought it in to Chris at ACR and said, “It made a clicking noise.” And he said, “Ah! The click of death.” Which I guess means he’s gonna have a hard time recovering the data.
I would have simply bought a new, better drive and started ripping CDs, but I’m not absolutely positive that none of my proprietary files were also on there. If he can’t do anything with it, I’ll have to re-think how much my doubts are worth before I send it off to a specialty data-retrieval shop—those guys can be pricey. It’s just that I have a morbid fear of losing data—I’ve done so much of it in the early days. I’ve owned a PC since the 1980s—I shudder to think just how many there have been—and how many died with little or partial back-up.
You can tell I’m old school—the fact that I post most of my recordings to YouTube and most of my writing to WordPress means that I can’t really lose much of my creative output—and there’s always the question of what value that junk actually has, in reality—outside of my ego. Back-ups were important to me for two reasons—first, I was running a business’s systems, so data-loss could have actually killed the company—and secondly, this was all before the internet, when a person’s hard drive held the only existing copy of a person’s files. There was no uploading—no cloud—your data was your responsibility and if your hard drive crashed or your PC caught a virus, you had nothing but your disk back-ups, and later, your CDs.
That was all long ago—it’s all different now. Now, like most old guys, I ask my son for help when I can’t connect to the printer. And the nature of my data has changed, too—I don’t even do the bills on this thing—Claire does all that on hers, ever since I got brain-fog and had to give up math. All I have to worry about is my photo scans, my piano recordings, and my poetry and other writing—none of which has any dollar value. But I’ve been trying to retain data all my life—even my library, which barely fits in a two-car garage, is only a fraction of the original collection—most of my books were ruined by flooding or mice or mold before I had a proper library—and 90% of my extensive vinyl collection to boot.
My music cassette collection is gone, my VCR tape collection is gone, my DVD collection is gone—nobody uses that stuff anymore, but I feel the loss of data anyway. I have a pile of short stories and miscellaneous creative writing that I printed out before that particular PC died on me—it’s been twenty years and I’ve yet to type it back into the computer—some of it was pretty good, but I just don’t have the energy. I used to draw a lot, but most of my sketchbooks were lost in the same flooding and mice as my book and record collections—and most of my big drawings were given away—I was always so pleased that someone liked my drawings that I gave them away to anyone who asked for them.
So after a lifetime of creative effort, I have little to show for it. I used to have an ego—and reason for one—I did grown-up stuff like running a systems department and tutoring mathematics—I did some copyediting and print layouts—I made a salary, I drove a car—it all seems so long ago. Now my big accomplishment is that I should have died from liver cancer in 2004—big whoop. So my data is relatively worthless—I’m just sentimental about it.
[NOTE: Many thanks to NASA for all the pretty pictures.]
I saw “Goosebumps” last night—I doubt I enjoyed it as much as a fan of the book series might have, but I enjoy Jack Black in anything and I enjoy any story where horror gets a light touch—the paranormal is usually treated with such darkness in films. I also saw the re-boot of “Fantastic Four”—I wondered at a re-make of such a recent film, but then I remembered the original had Chris Evans playing Johnny Storm and he’s now obliged to play Captain America in the whole tapestry of Marvel movies. The good news is that this new cast allows for a meeting of Fantastic Four and the Avengers in some future ‘free-for-all’ Marvel movie—wouldn’t that be cool?
DC Comics is making up for lost time with their new WB series “Legends of Tomorrow” and the upcoming film “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice”. Marvel has done a great job of translating their comics library into films, but DC has made more inroads into the television-series-adaptation and the animated films (I also watched an excellent animated “Wonder Woman” yesterday)—in a way, DC is more true-to-form in that comic books are for kids, and TV series on ‘the WB’ and animated films are more kid-centric, where Marvel sticks to live-action cinematic realizations meant to cover all age demographics.
I preferred DC Comics as a kid in the sixties—but now that I’m sixty myself, I lean towards the Marvel efforts. I can see how “Legends of Tomorrow” would appeal to the young—it has as many characters as Pokemon and it plays with time-lines and time-travel, creating a wealth of niggling details that appeal to obsessed kids, but are a turn-off for grown-ups. The WB already had Green Arrow and Flash series (and Supergirl is on CBS) which provide a steady stream of villains, co-heroes, and sidekicks—meat for endless discussions over ‘who can beat who’. The ultimate ‘who can beat who’ is, of course, “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” But I’ve never seen the fascination—Superman is Superman—Batman could spend his life in a gym and it wouldn’t help much—besides, who wants to see to good-guys fight each other? Aren’t there any villains, for crying out loud?
Anyhow, my VOD menu is pretty empty now—I’m trying to psych myself up to watch Spike Lee’s “Chi-raq”, but I expect it’ll be fairly heavy sledding. Greek Tragedy and Inner City Violence—not a light-hearted combo—but Spike Lee is a great filmmaker, so I’m going to watch it—I just need to steel myself first.
My biggest problem is the passage of time—I’ve watched a lot of movies. As a fan of the classics, I’ve seen silent films, black and white films, the classics, the not-so-classics, and ‘the essentials’ (as TCM calls them). I’ve seen many movies in drive-ins, in old movie palaces in NYC, and in local theaters—and since my illness, I’ve had ample opportunity to watch films on TV—some of them multiple times. With the exception of a few genres, like straight horror, I’ve seen every movie there is. I’ve thought about their stories, their plotlines, the process of movie-making, the work of acting, and the possibilities and the confines of dramatic tension—if I were any more involved with movies, I’d have to get a job in Hollywood.
This is a problem because I have acquired some pretty high standards—and originality is pretty hard to come by, after a century of creative people racking their brains for new angles, unexpected twists, and engaging serendipities. It’s been said that there are only a few stories—and that all stories are variations of these few ‘wireframe’ concepts—but I don’t know about that. There are a lot of stories out there—and while many of them are ‘road trips’ or ‘buddy’ films, ‘quests’ or ‘comings of age’, there are also a lot of unique stories that have no variations or spin-offs—modern-day fairy tales, and fantasies of myth, romance, or science that are unique in both plot and setting. Still, while there may be more than a handful of basic story ideas there are still not enough of them to fill sixty years of movie-watching with unending surprise. I’m in danger of outgrowing movies entirely—though I’m sure there are those who might think I should have done so long ago.
After all, movies are meant to be diversions from real life—and when illness took away my ‘real life’, I leaned heavily on diversion as an anchor for my sanity. Unfortunately, diversions are not meant to be the whole of a person’s life—so I’ve come to ask of movies rather more than they can possibly provide.
And now for the musical portion of our presentation—two improvs from last night that I share with you now. I’ve recently begun to question whether I should bother to post my improvs—their uniqueness is questionable and while they may each be technically unique, their style and sound is deathly familiar. I’m only one person playing one piano—the same person playing the same piano—and I’ve been posting improvs for years now. That’s my excuse, but it still makes me wonder some days why I bother. By my calculations, a person could listen to my YouTube improvs for a solid week-and-a-half—that’s hundreds of two-to-six minute improvs—and even Beethoven and the Beatles would get tiring in such large doses, never mind that I’m no Beethoven.
Still, here are two more. The first one, “In The Old Town” is followed, at the end, by a rendition of “A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight”—a song old enough to be in the public domain, so I don’t give it ‘cover’ status on YouTube, even though, officially, I should. The second improv is so weird that I had to call it “Spaghetti Fingers”. I hope you like them.
Unhappiness can seem like a deep pit from which there is no escape—but then something happens and happiness dawns—we look back and see that the shadows that surrounded our thoughts have all dispersed, that nothing is quite so bad as it seemed—that life is, in fact, good. And this happens to us whether we are rich or poor, lonesome or crowded, silly or distinguished.
The difference is that unhappiness has reasons—ask anyone who is down and they’ll tell you the many reasons for their dismay. Ask someone why they’re happy, however, and they’ll tell you they don’t know—they just are. Is happiness merely an escape from reason? That’s entirely possible—there are plenty of reasons for worry—happiness may be simply the ability to transcend the knowledge that all life ends, that all things must pass, that human beings are not always nice people.
Consider intoxication-it’s got ‘toxic’ right there in the word—we poison ourselves with alcohol, etc. to escape from reason, to become happy. Consider the song lyric: “Forget your troubles, come on, get happy.”—we are not told to solve our problems, just to forget them. Happiness isn’t the absence of trouble, it’s the ignoring of trouble.
This brings us to the somewhat insane conclusion that happiness is not about conditions, it’s about attitude—we can be miserable in total comfort, and we can be happy in a snake pit—how we feel doesn’t necessarily match what we feel. So be happy—nothing can stop you. Just don’t go to your friends’ funerals that way—sometimes we are obligated to be unhappy. On the other hand, don’t be unhappy at a party—nobody likes a wet blanket.
To some degree, happiness comes from being busy—being busy is like being intoxicated—things happen, we get distracted from our thoughts, and happiness can spring out of any corner of our minds. That’s why being idle is so depressing—our unhappiness is uninterrupted and we need to be interrupted to remind us that happiness is an option. Loneliness and idleness are dangerous because they form pools of uninterrupted unhappiness—no distractions.
Charity and charitable works, likewise, do not make us happy because we are being ‘good’, they make us happy because they keep us busy thinking about someone else. But nothing makes us happier than danger—life is never so sweet as when death has been recently avoided. Life is so friggin weird.
“The Martian” is Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the Andy Weir novel—I had just read the novel a few months back, so I was very jazzed to see a big-screen imagining of same—and this movie does not disappoint. I don’t know what it would seem like to someone who expected a straight action sci-fi pic—I think the movie was just as exciting as any of them. But the book, and thankfully, Scott’s movie, are both throwbacks to the age of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov—when the science-fiction was science first, fiction only as a palliative to help you swallow all the information. Even without the book’s realistic, exhaustive explorations of how a sole person can produce his own oxygen, water, and food—and how to turn a Mars habitat plus a Mars rover into a Mars mobile home—the movie is replete with technological and engineering problem-solving.
Mr. Ridley very ably constructs the story so that one can do what I used to do reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace—I just bleeped over all the long Russian names—and you won’t need to study hard to follow the gist of the story. But as I understand the book’s evolution, it was something of a thought experiment—and there are no evil aliens—so I’m glad the filmmakers embraced the Clarke-ian aspect of “The Martian”—a thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable movie.
Matt Damon seems genetically structured to play an astronaut—so that’s good casting. His character’s frustration with his music playlist, which the Commander had filled with only disco music, was funny in the book—it plays a far larger part in the movie—and skates the edge of letting us all feel the horror of being trapped alone on Mars with nothing to listen to but Gloria Gaynor’s greatest hits. (Not that I don’t love Gloria Gaynor—in moderation.) At nearly two and a half hours, there’s an awful lot to like (and learn) in this film. I find that much comes out of Hollywood these days, but we still have to wait a year or two for something really good to come out—especially in the sci-fi genre—and “The Martian” is one of the good ones.
“A Walk In The Woods” stars Robert Redford who, like Woody Allen, has been a big part of my cinematic life since the seventies—it also co-stars the equally familiar but more erratically-careered Nick Nolte. This movie was perfect for me in some ways—two old guys, grumbling about age, wondering what their lives had really been about, now that it’s too late to change them, and doing stupid stuff they’re too old for, because we never learn to stop liking the things we enjoyed—we just lose the ability. It’s definitely an older person’s movie—I can’t imagine a teenager sitting through it.
It made me proud in a way—the whole movie, I kept telling myself, “Hey, you’ve walked the Appalachian Trail—not all of it—but you’ve hiked alone through the cathedral of nature’s solitude.” Unfortunately, that thought was inevitably joined by the memory of how very long ago that was—and, worse yet, I couldn’t help thinking that those two geezers were still in better shape than I am—I couldn’t hike a half-mile, and don’t even ask about carrying a forty-pound pack on my back.
The cinematography was too beautiful to go unmentioned—but I hear that, since the movie, trail guides have been bitching and moaning about the sudden surge of wannabe hikers getting lost and needing rescuing on the trail. So, maybe the camera-person should’ve made it a little uglier—although, that’s a tall order. I’ve been, as I said, and despite all the rigors, the Trail is unendingly beautiful—awe-inspiring, really. Of course that poor little dirt trail is over-run after a movie like this—remember—it may be two thousand miles long, but it’s barely two feet wide in some places.
Still, “A Walk In The Woods” gave me a sudden thrill when it made me flash-back to my own time alone in Appalachian woods—I’d forgotten how magical it was. Plus, it’s always nice to see Redford on screen again—he’s pretty old now, but so am I. Great soundtrack, too.
“Irrational Man” makes me wonder what Woody Allen has against college professors—they often feature in his stories, rarely to the benefit of their image. But this movie pretty much spells it out—there’s something suspicious about people whose career involves having a kind of absolute power over the most easily-manipulated group of people in the world—college students.
The best education teaches not what to think but how to think—a familiar adage that overlooks the fact that teaching someone ‘how to think’ is not an absolute act—there is bias in human thought. We speak of machines that think—and by inference we imagine our brains as computers. It is ironic that the greatest challenge facing developers of AI software is that the human brain does not perform mechanically—indeed, no one is exactly sure how we think. We certainly don’t think in binary—we know it’s some sort of messy, organic process—we know that brains are processing feelings, senses, and emotions while they calculate, plan, and reason—but we don’t know how.
Further, in “Irrational Man”, Mr. Allen shows us how easily intellectualism can devolve into a tool for rationalizing narcissism and immorality. But it also shows, in the Emma Stone character, how core beliefs can be held without any rational underpinning. It’s pretty right-wing stuff, for a leftist Manhattanite. While the story of a man who disappears up his own ass is fairly familiar territory, Woody Allen makes it into a Greek tragedy—I could have done with a few more laughs from a director famous for comedy—but at least he’s learned to avoid awkward pretension in his serious films, replacing it with his own style of seaminess.
The inexorable nature of Greek tragedy is not my favorite entertainment—if I want disaffection, disappointment, and confusion, I can have all that without turning the TV on. However, I can’t deny that I share the auteur’s belief that watching a movie is not a waste of time—that cinema has intrinsic value—particularly for someone as unbusy as myself. And Woody Allen makes a watchable movie—I just wish he’d consult me about the subject matter. Then again, he’d probably tell me to go make my own damn movies.
Eight years and many a fine speech—but perhaps more impressively, never a stupid remark—take that, Republicans. We used to handicap poor Dubya whenever he made a speech. Bill had a good run—until the end when he started debating the definition of ‘is’—and lying some, which is its own kind of stupid. Before Bill we had Reagan and Bush—theirs was a kind of dazed-bully kind of stupid. But President Obama is an intellectual—he’s used to having to talk down to people without ‘talking down’ to them—but he’s always been more the knowledgeable guy you look up to than the guy you want to drink beer with. I’ll never understand the ‘drink beer with’ BS.
You may want to feel good towards your candidate for president—but you have to feel that they are more knowledgeable than Joe Schmoe from the local bar. I mean—even Dubya was a college grad—he wasn’t stupid stupid, just stupid for a president. It’s a hard job—you can’t have no idiot at the switch in there.
Which brings me to my favorite part of Obama’s final State of the Union Address—when he called out Trump and Cruz for their anti-American rhetoric of hate and division, saying we should reject all politics that target people by race or religion. That was good. I also enjoyed when he pointed out that America is too strong to be threatened in any real way by ISIL or Al-Qaeda—that citizens may be under threat from random craziness, but the country as a whole should deal with that without jumping the shark about national security. It’s refreshing to hear a politician tell us not to be afraid, isn’t it?
I’ll tell you why the healots have gotten out of hand—progressives have progressed—they learned that progressive programs are more subtle than a catch-phrase. The world’s complexity demands thought and patience—and we have to be sturdy in our grasp of change. Change without thought breeds chaos—catch-phrases work on the emotions, not on governance. The divide between good politics and good governance widens every day—it has always created a paradox, but now the ubiquity of media makes a monster of campaigning, completely overshadowing the whole idea of good government. So, while thoughtful politicians must be ever more careful of statements they know will be picked apart by nitpickers, the hucksters can shout their vitriol to the rafters without fear of an answering shout from their more serious rivals—people handicapped by their insistence on thinking before speaking.
I understand that people like Trump have to be covered by the media while they are running for president—but I hope we can enjoy a moratorium on idiots after the election is over (assuming we don’t elect one). I’ve heard enough from Trump to last me—and if I never hear him again it’ll be too soon. On the other hand, President Obama’s cool will be sorely missed—it’s hard being an egghead—and there’s something reassuring about having one in office. I felt like, even if the rest of the country is going crazy, at least the president gets it—I’ll miss that—I truly believe it’s better to have some brains in the executive office.
The major American wars were over legislation—the Revolution and the Civil War were both ultimately fought over pieces of paper. Granted, slaughtering the indigenous people—that original sin, the century-long continental sweep of genocide—that was pretty bloody. But given that, the subsequent Americans traditionally never fought over territory—we prefer to fight over the rules. We elect officials to office—but we are led by a piece of paper—it’s a doozy, but it’s still just words written on paper.
The words represent ideas, perhaps even ideals—but they’re not perfect words—they prescribe three branches: two places to argue over the words—and one place for a tie-breaker. It’s a prescription for an imperfect world—thus it breathes, it morphs, it accommodates us, as the changing times alter our problems and our perceptions. But I didn’t start out to write an Ode to the Constitution—I just can’t help myself—Hi, my name is Chris and I am a Yankee-Doodle Dandy.
But we do argue over the rules—we recognize that our rights and our voices are more valuable than property or privilege. Americans are a litigious bunch—and we’ve always been quick to expose corruption and malfeasance. Perhaps that is why gun violence is on the rise—now that the printed word is digitized, it’s lost some of its weight—not to mention the competition for attention from screens. Politicians and corporations play fast and loose with words now—words are branded rather than defined. Hard science is denied. Fear is popularized. The pen has lost its power—and we revert to pointless violence—something we’re used to seeing elsewhere in the world, but not here, in the land of the free.
An educated, literate constituency is so important to the proper function of America—our once-leading position in the world on Public Education was a major factor in all that we have become. And now our educational system seems to be broken—how can that be? How is it possible that we knew how to educate our kids in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s—but we don’t know how now? How the hell did that happen? That’s our present government’s major malfunction—lack of education bleeds into the economy, human rights, our international status—into government itself. It is the foundation—the fountainhead—our most valuable natural resource. Do we act that way? Do we fund it that way? No and no. That’s messed up.
Higher education has been made into a profit center—it now produces more debtors than scholars—score another victory for capitalism free of reason and restraint. How’s that ‘trickle-down’ feel on the back of your neck?
And that is what enrages me when I hear a Republican advocate persecution of Muslims—not that it’s Hitlerian (which it is) not that it gives aid and comfort to ISIL (which it does) but because it is crap like this that keeps our eye off the ball. Education and Infrastructure—and fuck the rest. Or rather—take care of the rest without performing Wagner’s Ring-Cycle over every goddamned affront to your God-given bigotry. And focus on Education and Infrastructure—that’s your job. People elect you—you work for them.
See, this is the trouble with turning politics into a popularity contest—in a democracy, you vote for the best person to do the job—not the one you like the most. That is, if voters have the sense to understand that government is work—it’s not a debate society—it’s supposed to be a bunch of adults who work out their differences and come up with compromises. It’s not a show. They make it one on TV, but government is not a show. It’s hard enough to get a good effort out of a bunch of politicians without giving them all the wriggle-room that mass-media and the dumbing of America affords them.
Polls are a thriving business these days—if we’re not careful we’ll end up spending more money learning how we feel than we spend on teaching our kids how to think. Congratulations, America—you’ve invented religion-free dogma. Better yet—someone’s making a good buck off it—and all you have to do is put up with the unwanted phone-calls at dinner-time and the spam in your email. It’s a great business model, really—the owner of the business pays minimum wage for the telemarketers who call and question you —and pays you, the callee, nothing—and makes a bundle selling the metadata—ka-ching.
Anyway, I’ve lost the thread of what I was saying. Here are two videos from last year that I forgot to post before now:
Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone! I feel a lot better than I did yesterday—yesterday, I was just gnawing away at my own insides for some reason—I get like that sometimes—temporary insanity—I’d be more comfortable with full-time work, as far as that goes—but we don’t get to pick and choose our personal brain chemistries, so what can you do, right? I’ll append my unposted rant from yesterday below—but don’t take it too seriously—it represents a mood more than a state of mind.
But before I get to all the screaming and shouting, let me talk about today which, as I say, finds me in a far more temperate state of mind. I was just watching “A Night At The Opera”, starring the Marx Brothers and Kitty Carlisle—the shipboard music number, to be precise, when first Chico plays piano, then Harpo goes from piano to harp, with the male lead (I forget his name) singing “Cosi Cosa”. The Marx Brothers make music seem so simple and easy, like they’re not even paying attention to what they’re doing. It inspired me to the point of muting the TV and going to play some piano myself.
Today’s improv is me trying to emulate the breezy, simple music they always played as a feature in each of their films. Can I play the piano as if I’m shooting the keys with my forefinger, like Chico? No, sadly, I can’t. Can I add that soupcon of old-world classical style, with a hint of angelic despair, like Harpo? I wish. But I can play in the same spirit—and that is what I’ve tried to do with today’s offering.
As much as I admire the Marx Brothers, I must admit I’m glad it’s New Year’s Eve—weeks of movie marathons, Hallmark movies, holiday specials, and Top-10-retrospectives of the year—with commercials promising to resume first-run programming, airing fantastic new stuff—has me wishing that at least the late-night hosts would come back from holiday re-run hiatus. Why interrupt a re-run to tell people that good TV will be shown next week—are TV execs just frustrated torturers that missed out on the Inquisition?
I depend too heavily on TV as pastime to be comfortable with half-a-month without oxygen. I’ve started checking the year-of-release of all the cable movies—I say to myself, “1992—let’s see, that came out twenty-three years ago.” I wonder how many times I’ve wasted two hours re-watching this movie on cable over the decades. It’s a sad exercise—one I would gladly give up to watch a new release—but even the VOD-movie-releases dry up during the holidays—as if the whole world had ‘things to do’ during the holidays.
Some genius should start a new cable channel for TV addicts—no commercials and nothing is ever shown twice. I’d watch that, no matter what they put on. No, I take that back—the so-called Science Fiction Channel (or Syfy) taught me that TV can ruin anything. There’s very little sci-fi on Syfy—it’s mostly horror and paranormal garbage. There’s little science on Science—and scant history on History (unless you’re obsessed with Hitler—what’s with that?) TV can be so disappointing.
Here’s wishing everyone a Happy New Year, with lots of good TV to watch. Now as promised, I append yesterday’s horrible writing, by turns deathly boring and insanely spiteful—enjoy:
Wednesday, December 30, 2015 8:52 AM
Those NASA photos get to me after awhile—they’re pictures of things so immense that if the entire planet Earth was in the picture, it wouldn’t be big enough to make out against the backdrop of nebular clouds and lenticular galaxies. Then there’s the ‘pretty picture’ issue—when astronomers take pictures using radio-waves or x-rays, the pictures are the color of radio and x-ray, i.e. invisible—and so are displayed using false colors—which is fine. I mean, a picture that can’t be seen by the human eye is of limited use—using false-color hues to indicate depth and shadow is mandatory—but when you give someone a box of Crayolas, you have to expect a little creativity in the result. And while the resulting NASA photos are spectacular, they bear little resemblance to what I see when I go outside at night.
Not that I want NASA to be boring—I find the whole subject fascinating—humans spent centuries puzzling over the nature of light—which can exhibit the characteristics of both particle and wave—before we realized that light is simply that range of electromagnetic radiation which our optic nerves respond to. That is just wild, to me—imagine—radio waves with wavelengths longer than a grown man, and microwaves of (naturally) microscopic wavelength, are also electromagnetic radiation, but too big or too small to be sensed by human eyes.
There is nothing special about visible light—except to humans, which have evolved eyeballs to see green—that’s why green is smack in the middle of the visible spectrum—because human eyes evolved to better find food (green vegetation). The other colors are just extra, a way for our brains to separate out the green. Electromagnetic radiation in the infra-red range—now that’s special—infra-red is what we call heat—small enough to be invisible, but big enough to excite molecules (which is where the heat comes in). Infra-red’s wavelength is so close to that of visible light that we can make goggles that display infra-red imaging as visible—though I couldn’t say how they do it.
I get confused by the idea of imaging non-visible electromagnetic radiation—I know that the original discovery of x-ray photography was based on the reaction of photographic plates to x-rays—but how in the world do they do that digitally? Mysteries abound. How does a magnet know which end is positive? How does a circular magnet know where the ends are? What is the difference between electric current in a wire and electromagnetic radiation moving through space? I love physics, but it’s very confusing.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015 1:08 PM
I don’t know why I’m so full of frustrated rage today—maybe I’m coming down with a cold or something—I have no patience, no mercy, and no interest in being polite. It’s probably best if I stay off of social media today—I was just cursing at the News on TV—just sitting by myself, watching the news, and cursing a blue streak at high volume, directed towards the subjects of the news, the interviewees, and the talking heads themselves, each in their turn. No one meets my apparently-too-demanding standards of common sense and objectivity—but I usually just turn the channel—not stay there, screaming at my TV. I need a change of scenery or something—I’m really starting to lose it altogether.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015 9:26 PM
Trumpelstiltskin (2015Dec30)
Donald Trump is a pompous dick. He says he’s a successful businessman but he’s really just a successful greedy person—there are lots of ways to get rich off of strategic bankruptcy filings, which let principle officers walk away with all the cash and leave the creditors, suppliers, and employees with nothing—but that’s not ‘good business’—that’s just being good at unethical, yet still technically legal, dealings. Trump, in his Mussolini-esque way, would insist that that’s still business—which says a lot about his take on ethics.
He’s never held office or won an election—how do we size him up? Maybe we should ask the people he has done business with—or maybe ask the people who work for him. He does a lot of talking—but we don’t hear a peep out of the people that know him. He’s pretty good at publicity—how is it he’s never been able to introduce us to his friends and colleagues? What is he afraid they might say?
Does he need ethics for a career in politics? Sadly, no. Politics is a cesspool and always has been—but the Republican solution—to elect incompetents and delusional morons to the legislature—is actually making things worse. This last hurrah of the Tea Party—a bid to elect the most incompetent moron to the highest office in the land—has been side-tracked. There are so many candidates with equally empty skulls—Cruz, Rubio, Bush, Christie—that they should by all rights be spoiled for choice. But that has all been swept aside by a reality-TV personality who has years of experience playing to the mouth-breathers. The Tea Party constituency has forgotten this is an election—they think it’s a game show—and they want their hero to win.
The GOP has only itself to blame—they’ve trained these knee-jerk reactionaries to run counter to common sense—and the party faithful have learned their lesson all too well. The Republicans wanted stupid voters and they’ve got’em—and they’re all gonna vote for the bully who’s ‘on their side’—how little they suspect what an elected Trump would truly mean for them and their families, and their day-to-day reality.
President Obama has been notably focused on positive results—so much so that, even with all the push-back, he has almost undone all the damage Bush did—but that still leaves us sixteen years behind where we should be. Imagine what would happen with Trump in that office, knowing nothing except how to bitch and blame and criticize other people. As an atheist, I can only say, ‘God help us’ if that happens. On the other hand, Trump actually making policy, making decisions about America—is an even more terrifying prospect. Bush showed us how dangerous a simple idiot president can be (the fucking ‘decider’—what a tool)—and we don’t want to find out what a reckless idiot president entails.
Doesn’t this smarmy, entitled prick have enough? Does his ego truly require the destruction of the greatest nation in the world? Why doesn’t he go back to ripping off anyone stupid enough to trust him, and building surprisingly ugly buildings with his name plastered over the door? Fucking asshole.
I call this election the last hurrah of the Tea Party because it can only end one of two ways. Either they’ll lose, proving that the electorate is too smart to fall for another Bush, or worse, a Trumpelstiltskin—or they’ll win, which will mean the doom of America—either way, the Tea Party will die. Republicans will have to go back to pretending they believe in science and pluralism and all those things they hate—they will have to accept that voters are people, with all the horrible variety that implies. Sorry, right-wingers—the world is just too serious for your childish tantrums; too complex for your simplistic pretenses.
In a world where change is so frighteningly fast that nobody can keep up, the conservatives are bound to take a beating—and ever since the digital revolution, they have had to rely on misdirection and dirty tricks to maintain any kind of influence. In fact, for people who want to live in the past, they are surprisingly adept at absorbing new technology to enhance all the misdirection and dirty tricks. The fat cats love the right because nothing panics a fat cat like the prospect of change—or fairness—and Americans, historically, have a bad habit of changing things for the better, making things fairer—so conservatism is the only safety afforded the wealthy and powerful—it’s been that way since we kicked out the British.
We let ourselves be fooled by leaders like FDR and Kennedy—men raised in wealth who still had more concern for the people than for the ruling class they came from—and boy, did their peers hate them for it. But they were special men—great men. Outside of such rare exceptions, we should never be voting for rich people—rich people suck. I submit that Trumpelstiltskin sucks big red hairy ones—he’s special, alright—just not in a good way. If he wasn’t so afraid of political correctness, he’d probably ask for a wheel-chair ramp for his brain. Then again, he’s very sly and nasty—that’s almost like being intelligent, if you don’t look too close.
I saw two thought-provoking items in the New York Times Art Section today. One was about laser-scanning ancient historical sites under threat from ISIL vandalizing—and the other was about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s return to movies after the birth of her son.
I love the laser-scanning—once completed, a good laser-scan allows us to buy up some real estate down in Anaheim (next door to you-know-who) and recreate an entire site—right down to the texture of the stones—suitable for family visits or archaeological study. Indeed, we live in a world where, before long, even the reconstruction will be unnecessary—virtual-reality headgear will allow us to visit the site without leaving our homes. Meanwhile, science-denying thugs wandering the deserts of the Middle East can crack all the stones they want—was there ever such a display of ignorance?—destroying the remains of our past out of fundamentalist superstition. What children. Our only remaining threat would be Chinese-ISIL—people who could hack our digital heritage sites.
It is fitting that the season of Santa Claus would be a time for Jennifer Jason Leigh to start wishing for a role in a film her five-year-old could see. We parents are careful to keep our children from growth-stunting stuff like caffeine, alcohol, or cigarettes—and we do the same with perceptions. We feel (correctly, I think) that children’s minds cannot mature properly if certain memes are presented too early—vice, violence, betrayal, and despair can overtax a growing mind, killing its spirit before it has a chance to grow strong enough to handle adult issues.
Thus we raise our children in a fantasy world of happy endings, magic, and limited evil—we lie to them about Santa Claus for their own good—even though we must be revealed as liars, in time. Movie stars like Jennifer Jason Leigh act in challenging roles that suit their young ambitions—but when they become parents, they invariably start to think about roles in family-friendly fare—they become Santa Claus actors. Are they surprised, I wonder, when they discover that it is just as difficult to act out fantasy as reality? Ask a children’s-book author—it is as hard to write an engaging children’s story with limited vocabulary, devoid of adult issues, as it is to write adult literature full of big words and complex problems.
And if it is truly necessary to raise our children in a bubble of innocence, why have we never addressed this scientifically? Scientists might be able to determine the exact age at which children are best told that Santa Claus is a fiction—instead of having those uncomfortable confrontations between kids whose parents let the cat out of the bag—and kids whose parents want to hang onto innocence awhile longer. It is one of those ‘givens’ that we recognize, but never study outright. Doctors and nutritionists give careful study to which foods are appropriate for growing infants—when to start on solid foods, etc.—but we leave the decision about emotional maturity to the MPAA, which determines how old you have to be to watch each film being released—and the MPAA, trust me, is not a scientific institution with our children’s mental health as their primary concern.
Of course, even if we studied this issue, there would be parents who would take exception for their kids—as some of them do now, with polio shots and other school-mandated vaccines. Ignorance is an important part of childhood—and we parents sometimes want to prolong their ignorance—yet no parent would admit that they want their children to grow up to be ignorant adults. Even though reproduction is the cardinal activity of living beings, we still have debates over whether we should enlighten our children with sex education classes. That attitude seems more for the parents than for the kids—wishful thinking that our kids won’t have sex. Some school systems even have so-called sex-ed classes that supply misinformation and focus on abstention, rather than giving kids the information they need to avoid early pregnancy or STDs.
We even lie to teenagers—take any class in business administration and show me the chapter that deals with bribes, protection, or corruption—unavoidable factors in real-world business that we nevertheless overlook when we study the subject. Criminality is like an unrecognized sovereignty—it doesn’t officially exist, but any real-world activity must take it into account. This accounts for the phenomenon of college-graduates who don’t know a damned thing about real life—for all the debt being incurred, that seems kind of wasteful.
Eventually, we must admit that the lying never ends—even adults can be grouped into levels of greater or lesser reality-facing. There’s a group that believes in the efficacy of group prayer. There’s a group that believes America is great because it is rich and powerful—and never asks how it got that way, or how it stays that way. People can be categorized by how much childhood innocence and ignorance they retain, and how much, and what kinds, of reality they embrace. We live in a world where, no matter how true something is, there’s a group of people that don’t believe it—and, conversely, no matter how silly something is, there’s a group of people that do believe it.
As T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We have difficulty living in the present. We have difficulty accepting hard truths. Outside of the infinity of truths even a scientist cannot know, there is a further infinity of truths we refuse to acknowledge—it is troubling for me, a seeker of truths, to accept that for many people the avoidance of truth is a valid pursuit. Long ago, in my youth, I used to see religion as the prime avoidance technique—but now that mass media has come into its own, I see that misinformation has no limits. Some people are so insistent on falsehood that they can contradict themselves without embarrassment—or deny that they said something, moments after they said it.
It is fitting, I suppose, in this age when knowledge is exploding in every direction, that misinformation should explode as well—but that doesn’t make it any less tragic.
The affectionate whip has snapped and lies still—all its uncoiled energy came to a head with the crack of Christmas—and it is now hung coiled and still on a hook on the wall. We wake to the absence of holiday and the unnatural warmth of winter in a world out of balance—as if petrol prices weren’t low enough, the eastern seaboard is sporting shorts to New Year’s Eve parties.
The Stock Exchange reminds me of the Republican party—good news for humankind (the unexpectedly speedy, easy progress of conversion to alternative energy) is bad news for Wall Street—which is the same as saying it’s bad news for the fat cats. The petroleum industry, combined with the military-industrial arms-makers, make humanity’s doom the largest global profit center—what’s good for us is bad for business. You can’t pull down that kind of profit selling food or clothes or books.
The whole idea of making civilization a competition is stupid. Cooperation is the only smart thing to do—but there’s no profit in that; there’s no excitement in that; and there are no sinecures in true cooperation—nobody gets ahead. Yet if we insist on a society that allows us to get ahead, we are insisting that someone be left behind. Individual freedom is sacred to Americans—but a person without civic responsibility or a willingness to cooperate with the community is not exercising freedom—just willfulness.
We tend to include amongst our freedoms the right to be impatient—if argument goes too long or reason becomes too complex, we feel justified in cutting the Gordian Knot, throwing up our hands and saying, ‘Nuke the bastards’ or ‘Build a wall’. Being willfully stupid has become Americans’ favorite way of exercising our freedoms. I watched a beautiful program yesterday—it was a movie of new citizens being sworn in—a ceremony in each of the fifty states of the union—with interviews of newly-minted Americans extolling what they most loved about their new country. A common thread was voiced by one of them—‘Americans take their freedoms for granted—they don’t appreciate the miracle that is the United States’.
But that is only true of the loudest and sloppiest Americans—many of us are deeply appreciative, every day, to live here—and to keep vigil over our history and our ideals—and feel real pain at the words of demagogues—especially the ones who become media darlings through their outrageous subversion of our American way. Does CNN really think that the constituency that elected Obama to two terms is going to vote for John Wilkes Trump or Benedict Cruz? No, they just want ratings—and the hell with public service. We lost an important sinew of American cooperation when the news media went ‘for profit’.
We used to have champions of the public good acting as journalists and editors—now we have paparazzi and businessmen in their place—people who give a megaphone to any nitwit with a sensational way of spouting their ignorance. People like Trump and Cruz have always been with us—but the media used to keep its lenses trained on the sober, rational leaders who focused on the public good—and trusted that their honest efforts would gain them votes, without millionaires backing expensive hucksters to pump out propaganda. Sensation now substitutes for substance in the media—but the substantial challenges abide, and the sensations only distract us from the work of real change. The fourth estate used to help—now it just gets in the way, another tool of those in power.
People ask how America became so sharply divided—simple—the media made politics into a sporting event, encouraging people to pick a side and root for their team, rather than think about issues or answers. ‘Playing the devil’s advocate’ can be a useful exercise, in moderation—but when it’s the only thing you do, you’re just a rabble-rouser—a trouble-maker who profits from a fight and doesn’t care what the fight’s about.
Like a waterfall in the ocean, or a cloud beneath the ground
Or if toes could type like fingers, or the flowers sniff themselves
Like rain all night in weather dry, or songs without a sound
Or heaven without angel wings, or Santa without elves—
If I could only fly aloft by lying in my bed
Or make a universe exist with a logarithmic word
I’d think up all the great ideas with nothing in my head
And make a world of common sense seem patently absurd.
Friday, December 11, 2015 2:10 PM
Fragments (2015Dec12)
I was struck today by the image of a waterfall in the ocean—see, you can’t have a waterfall in the ocean—you need solid ground to make a waterfall—isn’t that weird? Stoner thinking—I know. But while we stoners seem pretty silly, ceaselessly marveling at the simplest things—I can’t help wondering if a penchant for being blasé about the universe is such a great alternative. The ability to see things anew, with a fresh appreciation, isn’t a distortion—it’s a gift beyond price. Being bullheaded about everything is just as foolish—and I see people do that all the time—without benefit of any self-medication.
I’ve decided to back away from politics—not that it doesn’t matter—it matters plenty—it’s just that I see now that politics is just a bunch of people fighting over the steering wheel while no one is looking out the windshield. In the end, people run politics as much as politics run people—if the politicians go too far wrong, they’ll always get corrected by public pressure. Look at Trump—front-runner for prez one day, shunned by the entire globe the next. While politics is important, my giving myself a stroke watching it on TV doesn’t do anyone any good—especially nowadays, when TV anchors report both sides of the news—the sensible and the idiotic. They used to report on different sides of the sensible and simply discount the idiots—and I miss that—but that may have been my youthful ignorance and there’s been idiots all along—whatever.
Feelings are so confusing. Sometimes I feel that I’m on the cusp of a great notion—something new, an exciting idea, a fresh insight—then a gear slips and my mind is blank—nothing left but a vague notion that I had an idea. I’m confused about which part of my mind is malfunctioning—is it my memory that collapses every time I get inspired—or am I just delusional and never had an inspiration to begin with, just the notion of one? Given the result, it hardly matters which—I guess I just want to know which to grieve over.
Today’s post is a great illustration of my mindset—every paragraph is about a different subject—nothing coheres. I used to wield my mind like a chainsaw—buzzing through any obstacle—focused on one job at a time—but now my mind is more like a river that I sit alongside of and watch go by. The thoughts and ideas drift into view—then drift away—and while new ones come after, none of them can be held tight and examined closely. People think that intelligence and memory are separate things but I’m here to tell you—you can’t have one without the other.
And one could say that my near-lifetime of TV-watching during my infirmity is much like watching a river go by—a stream of media, if you will—yet I can’t do anything useful, like fishing if I was watching a real river. But I am struck often by the archival footage of old conservatives, espousing hatred of all the different groups—at every distinction they can find, really—and how one can match them up with people speaking today, on CNN, yet no one seems to see the direct line-of-descent of this changeless ignorance.
It’s holiday time—lots of Christmas carols on the piano (prepping for caroling parties) and watching lots of Hallmark’s latest seasonal TV films, but not enough buying of trees or presents—I’m better at celebrating in my head than actually celebrating. Christmas is a wonderful time of year, but it’s also pretty confusing and emotion-laden to the point of stress—even more so for us atheists who don’t let our disbelief ruin a good holiday.
And as if there weren’t enough stress to the season, we’re experiencing a record-breakingly warm December here in New York—far from a white Christmas, we’ll be lucky if it even rains. With our climate, a white Christmas is never guaranteed—but in the past at least it managed to be cold! Pacific island nations may be in danger of disappearing beneath the waves, but a warm Christmas will probably do more to promote climate-consciousness in New Englanders than any other weather phenomenon—so perhaps it’s a good thing.
Technically (at least with regard to Amazon.com) there are only ten ‘Culture Novels’ listed in their website’s ‘Kindle department’—but there are, to my knowledge, twelve Culture Books to date. Amazon’s Kindle-publishing didn’t offer “Against A Dark Background” [1993] on Kindle until just recently—and it still doesn’t offer “Transition” [2009] (or “Inversions” [1996], though they list it as one of the ten—go figure). There are debates about whether something is distinctly a Culture novel or not—but as far as I’m concerned, they’re all written from a Culture frame of mind and are set in the same ‘universe’ (though vastly extended over both time and space) and are thus all Culture novels—but that’s just me.
In the course of my choice to re-read all the Culture Novels in chronological order, this and other details led me to create a table—and for anyone with a yen to do the same, I hereby save you the trouble:
I’m presently on ‘book 6’—which means that I’m reading “Against A Dark Background” on my Kindle—with plans to read “Inversions”, which I luckily have a printed copy of, the next time Kindle interrupts my reading for a charging of its battery—take that, Kindle! Truth is, I have them all in print somewhere—but there’s a lot of rooting-around implied in that phrase ‘somewhere’, so I’m just biting the bullet and paying for the Kindle versions (where available). I’ve become spoiled by reading a lit screen—and I really can’t read print by lamplight for very long nowadays, anyhow.
“Fans of the Culture novels by Iain M Banks” is a Public Group on Facebook that I just joined. Iain M. Banks is the ‘science-fiction-name-version’ of Iain Banks, a Scottish author whose initial renown springs from his gruesomely violent “The Wasp Factory” published in 1984. “The Quarry” and “The Bridge” are subsequent non-sci-fi novels—and the Iain Banks without the middle initial is thus a bestselling novelist. Still, ‘Wiki sez’ that he began as a sci-fi writer and couldn’t get published—and further, that there are aspects of “The Wasp Factory” that are sci-fi in disguise, so to speak.
I find this odd, but not that odd—science fiction should have its own publishers and editors—how can we expect a ‘regular person’ with no interest in science fiction to recognize what makes great sci-fi reading? Iain Banks, by manipulating his own talents in a more commercially-acceptable genre, gained acceptance as a writer first. Then he was able to slingshot around the imagination-opaque editors and get his sci-fi published. Being a logical kinda guy, he used his middle ‘M.’ to keep up the Chinese Wall between his two audiences.
I first read “Consider Phlebas” in the 1980s—I was its dead-center demographic—a sci-fi reader with a hard-on for anything T.S. Eliot—my favorite poet. Banks uses Eliot quotes for book-titles, sometimes—my kind of guy. I was pleasantly surprised by ‘Phlebas’—many writers throw in some T.S. Eliot for legitimacy—and who doesn’t want to quote the greatest poet of the last century—especially back in the last century? Most do it out of a well-founded sense of inadequacy—but Banks’ writing makes it clear that his affinity for Eliot comes from an affinity for the same kind of ‘big picture’ concepts dealt with in the great man’s poetry—and no small amount of literary talent. Banks’ fiction is exceptionally good reading—an even rarer prize in the sci-fi genre than in fiction generally.
Banks is also amongst those writers whose envelope-pushing in their own medium make them difficult fodder for the cinematic-conversion that so many writers envision as the end-game to success—he succeeds in his writing perhaps too well to succeed as the germinator of movie adaptations. His writings’ best features are also almost a list of things that are hard to adapt from the literary—though great screenwriters have adapted some wild stuff from past writers, so I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Culture novels will never be adapted for mass media in some way. Still, I can almost guarantee they will lose something in the process.
When I was ill for many years, I read very little—I had such poor memory that I could only read a Banks novel by keeping a few index cards between its pages—on which I would write the names of the many humanoids and ship-minds that filled the story. Ship-mind names proliferate—and any reader with a poor memory will have difficulty keeping them all straight—I noticed this particularly last week, while re-reading “Excession” [1996]. I do enjoy the serendipity of the naming of the mind-ships, though—and I enjoy the concept of super-AI minds being housed in starships whose size and power match their imagined mental capacity.
Fiction takes us to another world, another time or place, and allows the vicarious experience of other characters—when it’s done well, it’s transportive. In the case of science fiction, that escape is heightened by the absence of any boundaries of place or time—it can let us be not just different people in different places, but things that don’t exist in worlds that are different from Earth—even with physics that differ from our observed reality. What a trip. Iain M. Banks is one of those rare sci-fi writers that can comfortably, confidently take us on such limitless journeys and I recommend his books to anyone who has hitherto been missing out.
[Blogger’s Postscript: I wrote this post yesterday under the assumption that Iain Banks was still living and that he would bring us more books in future. I’m saddened to learn that Mr. Banks passed away in 2013 of cancer–and I hope no one feels I have disrespected him by writing about him as if he was still with us.]
Ant Man is a strange choice for a superpower—to get very tiny hardly seems like an advantage aside from crawling through key holes to get into locked rooms. But Ant Man’s power is that he retains his inertial mass—Dr. Pym, played by Michael Douglas, explains it as ‘making the space between atoms smaller’ which makes tiny Ant Man capable of punching with all the force of his full-sized self—but it is, of course, all nonsense.
Like Superman’s power of flight, which has no connection to any notion of propulsive force, Ant Man’s inertia is very convenient in its manifestation. It doesn’t make Ant Man leave behind man-sized-deep footprints or make him weigh as much—but it works when he’s punching the bad guys. But one doesn’t watch superhero movies for the logical train of physics—that just spoils the fun.
Insouciance was a favorite feature with the old-school superheroes—but it has lost cool points here in the twenty-first century. Paul Rudd, thankfully, has managed an updated, Portlandia-ish style of insouciance that is fun to watch. And the supporting cast of bumbling petty crooks tilts the movie towards farce, but not too much. As with all the Marvel movies, there was a business-like hand at the directorial helm—so the movie didn’t push any envelopes, other than casting Rudd in the first place. And there was the obligatory tie-in sequence that only die-hards get to see after all the credits have rolled.
The tie-in got me to thinking—when they’re done, these Marvel movies are going to be a ‘Sistine Chapel’ of movies—a panoply of stories, each with their own features, but each a part of a whole—I can imagine 24-hour viewings of chronologically ordered Marvel movies—just an immersive group-journey into the mind of Marvel. Only the Star Wars series and the Tolkien movie series can match it for single-themed sequential run-time. Actually, the Tolkien movies top out at six and the Star Wars, while (I assume) unfinished, is only at episode seven—while the Marvel movies—well, let’s see: there’s the Iron Mans (are there three or four?—I can’t remember.) there’s the Hulk movie (take your pick) two Captain Americas, two Thors—they’ve already exceeded both franchises and they’re just getting started over there, it seems to me. Comic books have been selling for decades—why should they ever stop making movies of them?
DC Comics, you say? Sorry—yes, there are plenty of movies of DC heroes, but they’re not themed—they’re not centrally coordinated by a far-sighted team that treats them as a single brand, as Marvel does. Don’t ask me why. Then again, if we look at the younger graphic novel scene—there are far more movies based on Dark Horse comics and the like than even Marvel can match, so it’s not as if they’ve cornered any market but their own—still, they’ve done a better job than DC. And I appreciate the glimmer of grandeur they give their whole enterprise (not an easy thing for me to say, since I’ve always preferred DC, as far as comic books go) by tying together all their movies, giving it the resonance of a cinematic tapestry. It counterbalances the simplicity of the stories themselves because let’s face it superhero movies have a pretty narrow scope for story-telling, by the time you’ve gotten past the origin story, the intro of the villain, and all the frippery of human-interest plot-points.
Ant Man is a case in point—the storyline is packed with exposition and development—there’s hardly time for the big action sequence at the end. Paul Rudd and buddies (played by Michael Peña, David Dastmalchian, and T.I.) add all the humor they can fit into the script—but the rest of the cast are straight-faced enough to more than balance it out. It’s hard to say whether a longer movie might have allowed some more breathing room into this story—or whether that would have destroyed that balance. I enjoyed it—but you can’t go by me—I have the critical faculties of a ten-year-old. All I can say is, they promise a sequel and I’m looking forward to it.
Well, it wouldn’t be the holidays if friends didn’t get together and sing some Christmas songs—and that’s what me and Pete did today. We also managed a couple of brief improvs. It was grand and glorious.
It’s a long way from sheet music to video—I started this holiday season with the idea that I could video myself performing an entire book of Christmas songs and carols. I play them cover-to-cover every December, and most of the songs in the different songbooks are the same—there’s only so many traditional holiday songs that remain popular over the years. Carols and such have to be good songs, but they also have to be accessible to the untrained voice, and catchy, without being too challenging for the average kid to sing.
It’s its own genre of music—but don’t be fooled—some of these babies are just as demanding to play on the piano as your average piece of classical music—it may be for the kids, but it’s not kid-stuff to play. There are pared-down versions, of course—but it took me some years to be able to play the intermediate versions—and I don’t like to backslide.
Also, I pretty much have to sing along. It’s more difficult to sing while I play, but I know most of the words—and what’s a Christmas song without the words, after all? Anyway, the thing is—I start to record the songs—and I find that the recordings are not as good as they felt like, while I played them. So then I try again—and by playing the songs more than once, I hope to get a useable recording of each—but then the camera’s battery died just as I was getting warmed up—and an hour of playing goes unrecorded. The next day, I try again, but now my back hurts and my fingers are stumble-y.
I consider backing off, taking a day or two off from playing piano—but then I realize that if I don’t keep going, I’ll forget what I was doing (this is a common problem for me). So I keep pushing when I should be resting—suffice to say I won’t be publishing ‘recordings of entire songbooks’ on YouTube anytime soon. But I got a few done.
Sunday, November 29, 2015 9:55 AM
Okay, Christmas carols—Now, I’ve made no secret of my atheism so someone might reasonably ask why I’m so crazy about the holiday music. Well, firstly, I love music—and the holidays provide the only real opportunity to suggest a sing-along, outside of a boy-scout campfire, without hearing a chorus of moans in reply. Besides that, there’s also the matter of childhood memories—when I was a kid, we not only sang Christmas carols around the piano, we still went to midnight mass.
The carols are fun to sing and play, but they lose a bit of luster when you no longer ‘feel’ the lyrics the way a young, Catholic-indoctrinated boy does. Nowadays, I am comfortable enough in my atheism to allow some nostalgia for faith—to allow myself to pretend to still believe while I’m singing—and the thrill is back, to a certain small degree. For me, there’s no smidgen of cognitive dislocation involved at Christmastime—what with the irony of Santa Claus being a belief we grow out of, and Christ being a belief we’re supposed to maintain. But it is just that irony that now allows me to pretend that Christmas is what it once was—at least while I’m singing.
I would, if I could figure out how, prefer to make videos of a crowd of carolers—a video of just me, singing and playing carols, lacks something in the holiday-cheer department—but I have to work with what I have available.
Saturday, November 28, 2015 11:25 AM
Treacly Ever After (2015Nov28)
Have a holly-jolly…. Oh, hello there! And welcome to the dreamy snowflake happy kids express—yes, it’s that time of year again—and if you share my sickness, you’re once again binge-watching the Hallmark Channel’s offerings of Christmas-themed TV movies—partly because it’s crack for the romantics and partly because it’s a fascinating infinite loop of wishes coming true and impossible dreams coming true and fantasy—and while that may not be, as Hallmark claims, ‘the heart of Christmas’, it is certainly the heart of good TV.
Last night was an especially rich vein of fantasy—two movies which both combined Christmas miracles with becoming a princess: “A Crown For Christmas” and “A Princess For Christmas”. It got me thinking about how royalty is an old-fashioned type of myth that no one believes in anymore—and how Santa Claus is an old-fashioned type of myth that no one believes in after grade school—and how Christianity is an old-fashioned type of myth that many people still believe in. I think it’s odd how these Hallmark Channel movies focus so much on fantasies and miracles and dreams coming true—it’s as if theism has a market value, and this holiday-centric company is willing to intermingle Christianity with other, admittedly-pretend ideas—just for the entertainment value—in spite of how it lumps Faith in with childhood imagination and wishful thinking.
It’s like they’re admitting that Christianity is more of a ‘feel-good’ idea than a fact—something we keep as a tradition more for the sake of innocents and children rather than as a core belief—it’s quite undermining, if you think about it. There are so many of their Santa-based plot-lines that end with the kids being right all along—there is a Santa Claus—and that seems a dangerous concept to mix in with Christianity, which expects followers to keep believing into adulthood. Are they trying to say that real Christians believe in Santa Claus, too—even though the grown-ups are buying their kids the presents, and know full well that if they don’t, there’ll be nothing under the tree?
Or are they saying that Christianity is just an idea—and you have to do all the work yourself? Because, I’m sorry, but that’s Humanism—atheism with a smiley face. Now, if Christianity is just a thing for the kids, like Santa Claus, and all us grown-ups are supposed to play along, both for the kids’ sake and because it’s just a nice thing—that’s cool—I can get on board with that. It’s just when some very serious grown-up, like a politician, starts talking about how we should sprinkle magic-dust on public policy—that’s what I can’t deal with. If we could keep religion at the Santa Claus level, where we only talk seriously about it when we talk to kids, but laugh about it amongst ourselves, that would be fine with me. Maybe that’s why I like the Hallmark Channel.
We got new chairs—they’re classy, made out of unpainted wood—not folding chairs, which have been our go-to chairs, mostly. It’s good to have chairs—that way you can have company—uh-oh! Company? Wait a minute….
I started to write a post today, then about three pages in, I realized I was mistaken in my facts. I had to walk away—I hate when I realize I’m wrong about something—it’s not like it happens every day (more like every other, but never mind).
But I walked away with a cigarette burning in the ashtray. I came back just now, hours later, and the smoke-eater ashtray is still on, wasting its batteries, and there’s a butt that’s gone out on the newspaper that I use for a mouse-pad, with a little burned-out circle in the paper. I almost burned my house down because I got upset about being wrong.
It’s partly the chairs’ fault—you don’t usually get a parade of new chairs coming through the front door, which I’m sitting next to. So, stunned by being wrong and confused by a shower of furniture, I walked away from a lit cigarette—but I was lucky. The house abides.
Then I misspelled “Haydn” on my video graphics, and had to go back and correct all that—it’s just my day for screwing up, I guess. Day after tomorrow is Thanksgiving—there’s a pressure (for me at least) building from the approaching holidays—opening ourselves to feelings, in the tradition of the season, makes the thought of trouble more intimidating. When things go wrong during the holidays, they don’t just go wrong—they ruin the holiday. Not that I expect things to go wrong—but bustling shoppers and stressed-out parents and heavy store traffic, all together, just need a little complication, like bad weather for example, and the whole thing becomes a nail-biter. I kinda feel like ducking, until January 2nd makes it all go away—I love January 2nd—it’s like that day you come home from vacation—the good times are over, but it’s nice to just settle in again.
Well, next blogpost, I hope to know what I’m talking about—if that was ever the case.
I noticed that today’s YouTube-posted improv was exactly one week after the last one—I used to post almost once a day—am I now going to post only once a week? Am I slowing down because my sixtieth birthday is only three months away? I think it’s more likely that I’ve finally accepted that I’m my own biggest fan and other listeners are not eagerly awaiting my next post.
It’s true that I like my own music—it’d be a pretty sad state of affairs if I didn’t, I guess. And I am one of those few people that enjoyed classical music right from childhood, without being told it was important or impressive—or without having to be taught to ‘appreciate music’ in school—though I did enjoy those classes. So I’m used to liking music that doesn’t interest a lot of other people—music that is more (and less) than just something to dance to. So, for a long time I figured that I might just be ‘inaccessible’, like classical music—but now I think I have to give that up—I am not going to draw a crowd—ever.
My big ‘idols’ are Glenn Gould, George Winston, and Keith Jarrett—and since I’ve never surpassed any of them in any way, I can’t really call them ‘influences’. I think I’d have to go past them in some way before I could relegate them to ‘influence’ status—they remain my idols, people far more talented than I. So, if recorded musicians of forty or fifty years ago are still unreached targets—if I still think of myself in terms of someone who’s trying to get started in music—then I take it as given that my dreams of being notable in music will never be more than dreams.
Not that they were ever very promising dreams—I never received the slightest encouragement from parents, teachers, friends or loved ones—more like discouragement, in many cases. I stuck with music through plain stubbornness—I wasn’t about to let myself be excluded from something that great. And if I had to be a lousy musician, then so be it—I was not about to spend my entire life just listening to other people have all the fun.
Anyway, I stuck to it for a long, long time and now I’m liking my own recordings—some more than others, but that’s how that goes—a few I’m quite pleased with. I have the luxury of having my own music—other people aren’t interested in listening to it, but that doesn’t change the fact that very few people have their own personal music soundtrack they can switch on whenever they get tired of pop music. Just another luxury—did I tell you I have my own library? I am so rich—and on so little money—I must be pretty clever.
I used to make a decent wage—we had very big bills back then, but we didn’t have half so comfortable a lifestyle. Sometimes mo’ money is mo’ problems. Sometimes being able to indulge your whims isn’t healthy. I’ll never be wealthy but I’ll always be rich. I’m lucky that way.
I’m exhausted—and no wonder. The pope, the speaker, the UN, refugees, drought in California, water on Mars, a super blood moon, the new Daily Show once again precedes the Colbert show… is it just me or is the world turning twice as fast these days? Have you noticed a lot of news shows start their segments with, “Well, there’s a lot to cover tonight…”? That used to signify a ‘busy’ news day—now it’s just what they always say.
My personal life, away from the TV, isn’t quite as busy. But I did just post a big Brahms performance I’ve been working on for months—and I just found out today is my son’s 27th birthday! (I wish Claire had told me before I said to him, “Good Morning”—like it was any other day…) We had our daughter and her husband here for a visit from California last week. Claire just passed her big OT qualification test—a culmination of years of study for her OT Master’s Degree—and a sign that she will soon be job-hunting. But first she has to do jury duty in NYC—we were relieved she was only called downtown last week for Thursday morning—commuting right through the pope’s visit to ground zero—that would have been a hassle. I’ve got a road-test next week that will re-instate my driver license, if I pass it—Spencer just passed his a few weeks ago. So, okay, maybe I am busy.
As they say, it beats the alternative. I’m sitting here at my keyboard, on watch to tip the delivery man when he gets here with birthday lunch Chinese take-out. Tuesday is new movies day On Demand—Melissa McCarthy in “Spy”—so there’s even a good movie in my ‘cart’. Time to catch my breath, I think.
Patton was right—“Americans love to fight”—but I think he oversimplified it, thinking in bellicose terms. Our Revolutionary War was a declaration of our willingness to fight when we encountered unfairness. “Live Free or Die” seems overly familiar and trite to us today but it was a formula for suicide in the centuries before the Declaration—when the greatest prior advance in social justice had been the allowance that a person owned their own soul at death—“Free Doom”. Somewhat less ambitious, wouldn’t you say?
And after the revolution, when Texas was willing to enter the Union rather than submit to Spanish imperialism, we fought for them. Then the majority of Americans decided to fight against slavery—give or take a week-long Civil War historians conference on the ‘root causes’. It was unfair—and we were willing to fight over it. In both World Wars, we entered on the losing side—fighting unfairness. The internal struggles over racial equality, gender equality, and the rights of the sick, disabled, LGBT—all fights over unfairness. You show me an injustice and I’m ready to start swinging—why? Because I’m American, that’s why. I really would rather die than live in unfairness.
There are always those who don’t get the central premise—as early as Hamilton’s arguments with Jefferson over Federalist versus Republican, there were those who sought out the ‘easy win’—people who felt that leaving the mother country was simply a chance to be an England of our own, with a monarchy and all that implies. They wanted Washington to be “President for Life” and be addressed as ‘your majesty’—but Washington said ‘no’, like an American. Hence he is known as the Father of our Country not just because he fought the war, but also kept the peace as an American would and always will.
Today we have many people who don’t get the central premise—they think America’s greatness resides in its wealth and power—its shock and awe. Nonsense—childish nonsense. The unbelievable success of our country comes not from any material richness or military prowess—it comes from our ambition to fight for the truth. Yankee ingenuity has been finding new shortcuts towards a better future since the founding. Freedom of speech has made our democracy into the strongest of ties between a government and its people of any country on Earth. Open minds and open commerce have exploded into a global community of digital thinking, space exploration, genetic manipulation, super-sonic travel, and on and on.
Our greatest threat is the explosive variety of our success—the ‘easy wins’ float around like fish in a crowded barrel—the opportunities to exploit our success by working either in lieu of the American spirit (through hyper-capitalism) or in direct opposition to it (through extremist bible-thumping and xenophobic exclusion) are more numerous, and get better media coverage, than the real goals of true Americans.
The enemies of America seek to reinstate unfairness through new pathways—income inequality, religious division, jingoism, and denying the existence of intractable racial injustice—and all their arguments are based on fear and hatred, with a big dollop of laziness and greed to top it off. They make me tired—traitors in our own land. Fight the power!
There—I had to get that off my chest. I always get self-righteous after watching a documentary. I just watched “Standing In the Shadows of Motown—The Funk Brothers”—about all the great studio musicians whose uncredited artistry was behind hundreds of number one hits—hits that I remember from my childhood as the ‘product’ of the lead singers and groups whose names are so familiar to us all today. A handful of men in a Chicago basement would be responsible for over a decade of a multi-million-dollar music industry, without so much as a credit on the dustjacket. That kind of unfairness burns my chaps and it always will. Why? ‘Cause I’m a ‘Murican, that’s why.
My old friend, Jon Kruk, has been telling stories to schoolchildren for decades. His premiere ouvre, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, is a great favorite here in Westchester, where Washington Irving originally set the tale–and Jon’s lively re-telling verges on a one-man re-enactment. Below I share with all my readers his latest email:
Hi My Friends –
My headless horseman gallops live! If, you support me in the chase.
One sleet-gripped November evening, a couple for years ago, Andrea, my film-making wife, galvanized a crew of film makers to gather in 17th century Old Dutch Church. We got an audience of fans to fill the ancient setting of the “The Legend.” Jim Keyes pulled out all the stops on the grand pipe organ. They filmed me performing with passion and panache, my signature story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Now, we need to your help producing and getting the out film; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – a solo performance by Jonathan Kruk, Master Storyteller.” Here’s the full story, in just three hundred in fifty words,a trailer and a pitch (two and four minutes each)
It’s very rude to say things about people we care for—but it is impossible not to think things about people, no matter how much we love them. The analytical part of our minds has no filter—that comes after. This leads most men to believe that lying, frequently and profusely, is a vital part of a happy marriage. Still, I’ve found that any thoughts that may occur to me will be skewed by my emotional inertia—if I’m feeling critical, I’ll find criticisms; if I’m feeling good, I’ll notice goodness.
Emotional inertia is a very important thing—if I keep an eye out for it, I can sometimes stop myself before I really get ‘on a roll’. And that’s not to say I stifle my feelings—when we’re ‘on a roll’, conversationally or interactively, we start to look for the next rung on the ladder we’re building—it leads us on, but it can also lead us away from our intentions. Sometimes it leads us to a place we don’t want to get to—so I find being ‘on a roll’ to be vastly over-rated.
Further, I don’t really like to be definite about anything immediately—the more important a decision is, the better it is to give it time to work itself out in my head. ‘Sleeping on it’ is folk wisdom in this vein—to go to sleep and wake up the next day, on its surface, doesn’t appear to have any value—yet I can’t count the number of times that doing so has allowed insights to present themselves, insights that took their time coming to the forefront of my consciousness.
Conversely, “time and the tide wait for no man”—taking one’s time isn’t always an option. While I can be pretty clever at a slow pace, I’m terrible at snap decisions—I’m slow-smart but fast-stupid. It amazes me sometimes how stupid someone can be—and still beat me in an argument. Part of that is due to the old saw: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” – Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (1933). But in truth, there is also the simple fact that my education doesn’t recall itself to my mind instantaneously—another person with less than a tenth of my knowledge can nonetheless easily out-talk me.
Thus I am forced to disagree with another famous quote of his: “To realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.” – Bertrand Russell, “Our Knowledge of the External World” (1914). No doubt, in context, his use of “Time” and of “unimportance” refer to aspects other than those I am addressing—especially as he is speaking philosophically, while I’m talking about a sort of ‘applied mechanics’. He speaks of understanding—I’m going on about missed opportunities and un-ducked punches.
One last Bertrand Russell quote: “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”
I saw Jimmy Fallon doing a comedic interview with Donald Trump—who didn’t seem to find any cognitive dissonance in being laughed at by the entire audience for his policies and positions—as if he knew he would get in the last laugh. His platform seems to be: “I’m ridiculous—trust me.” We do, Donald, we do—we trust you to be ridiculous. Trust you with the presidency?—not so much. Survey question: What scares you more—Trump, or the people who would vote for him?
The GOP isn’t the only institution being put through the wringer of self-regard by Mr. Trump—the Media, as well, is finding it difficult to air anything other than Trump coverage—he’s such a ratings-magnet that they completely abandon all pretense of keeping us informed. We will be entertained by the news—and nothing more—until their new clown-god drops out of the race. Should the Donald actually become our Chief Executive, we will never see another straight news story ever again.
He will be ‘proof of concept’ that we will watch the news no matter how skewed or devoid of substance it becomes—the last barrier to infotainment, the audience’s expectation of maturity and analysis, will have fallen.
But none of this is the media’s fault, or Donald’s fault, or even the GOP’s fault—this is about human nature. We are all being given the option of either thinking seriously about difficult issues, or being distracted by the funny clown. I confess, the funny clown calls out to me—he says, “Why worry? Why be all serious about things? Let’s just wing it!”—and who can resist him?
The only counter-weight is the Presidency itself—it stubbornly insists that running the most powerful nation on earth involves life-or-death decisions about complex issues. It refuses the premise that running our government is like running a business—it refuses to place profit above human rights, faith above freedom, or wealth and power above the people. It fairly screams that Donald Trump’s election, rather than investing him with dignity, will strip any vestige of dignity from the office itself.
And someone will have to explain to me how a majority of us would have the wisdom to elect an Obama, twice, and then become brain-damaged enough to replace him with a joke in a suit.
The answer is probably that we are all willing to take a suggestion for a fact—Hillary Clinton, it has been suggested, did something wrong with her e-mails. It’s not a fact. There are no specifics. There’s no evidence of any harm done by her admittedly unwise combining of personal and professional e-mails. Still, between the GOP spin doctors and the media’s lust for scandal, it has become a meme—Hillary is dishonest. Who can say? Perhaps she is. She’s a politician, after all—their profession is as notoriously vulnerable to unpopular, bare facts as it is to popular, but false, rumors.
I’d like to ask all the people who say they won’t vote for Hillary because they think she’s dishonest—do you trust Trump? Do you truly trust any of the other 16 candidates? Or is this just another example of the double standard for women, i.e. a dishonest man is just a politician, but a dishonest women is a criminal?
And just how dishonest do we think Hillary is? I think she’s defensive—the GOP began to attack her when she was only the First Lady, without any actual standing in government other than a symbolic one. But she has been cleared of any substantial wrongdoing in every one of their manufactured scandals, from Whitewater to Benghazi. I don’t understand how so many failed attacks by the GOP has left their reputations untouched, yet managed to taint her image through sheer persistence—how stupid are we, the voters?
We are like the high school class that witnesses a bully pick on the weak kid every day—and decides to join in the ridicule rather than doing the right thing and defending their classmate from the bully. We have the opportunity to elect a great American, and our first woman, as President—and we’re seriously considering, instead, a spoiled billionaire with no experience. Again I ask—how stupid are we?
My last few posts are not of the type I admire or enjoy—I don’t know why I post them. They feel right at the time—but in the rearview, they always seem kinda mean-spirited—as if I catch the meanness from the meanies I rail against. But time will take care of them—time makes everything seem less urgent, less dire—and it doesn’t need me to do that.
I’ve been too distracted lately to interweave my posts with anything other than my anger. Today I present a recital, warts and all—fairly representative of my usual morning’s doings. There are works by Mendelssohn, Bach, and Brahms—unedited, with all my slip-ups, and a nice little two-minute improv at the end. I would have preferred to edit the page-turns and the garbled notes—for the sake of you, dear listener—but today you get the real deal, just by way of full disclosure. I have also appended some videos which I left out of recent postings. No pressure—watch’em when you want the musical equivalent of ‘peace and quiet’ and you won’t go far wrong.
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) is an interesting guy. Considered one of the pillars of twentieth-century poetry, he was born in 1865—much like our twenty-first-century pop stars who were all born in the 1980s—centuries can be a weirdly illogical dividing line. Yeats’ life was a full one—he excelled early on, and it is said that he is one of the few writers who wrote their best work after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry is like walking through a dream—he really had a knack.
It always surprises me that a great artist and creator can have such subtleties of expression and nuance of feeling—yet their relations with women are always as confused and complicated as any moron’s. It’s as if women are men’s blind spot—and if you look at the present-day struggle simply to recognize women as equal, you may consider the theory proved. What is our problem?
His poem, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is a strikingly beautiful bit of writing—it has been quoted in books, movies, and songs galore. One of the most famous musical-setting versions is “Yeats Songs”, for baritone & piano, by Richard Bunger Evans—I’m not crazy about ‘modern’ atonal stuff, but you may enjoy it:
Yeats Songs, for baritone & piano:
The poem also inspires its share of artwork, as well—for example:
Gorgeous imagery, isn’t it? But isn’t Aedh being a little passive-aggressive? Aedh is one of Yeats’ three mythic characters—the others are the Artistic one and the Rational one, but Aedh is a pale, lovelorn victim of La belle dame sans merci—a passive-aggressive take on love if there ever was one. It’s not too far off from a rapist blaming his behavior on the woman’s attractive attire—as if, when men find women attractive, it’s their fault that we suffer when they fail to reciprocate our feelings. It’s as romantic as misogyny gets.
Still, it is romantic, much like when Elton John can’t remember what color eyes a girl has but still ‘loves’ her enough to write her “Your Song” (I won’t get into the details of Bernie Taupin being the lyricist—or of John being gay, for that matter). Much of our romantic-themed media is layered with latent misogyny—perhaps indicative of the confusion men feel when women want to be equals in public but still prefer a more brutish, or brutish-seeming, mate—that this is just the flip side of men’s feelings about the same things never seems to occur to us.
And speaking of gay—I think it’s possible that our emotional problems with the LGBT community are largely based on our tendencies to separate the female from the male—and when we’re struggling to meet public standards of political correctness concerning the ‘weaker sex’, gays make it all just too confusing—like an added complication that breaks our mental backs. It’s just a theory.
Anyway, I feel like I’ve wandered too far from any one topic to ever make a coherent post out of this mess, so why don’t I just offer today’s musical ‘sermon’:
You Tread On My Dreams:
O—and here’s something even weirder from yesterday:
I always knew I was special—and now I have proof. This morning I listened to a great YouTube of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Beethoven Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) in F, Opus 68.
So maybe I had nature on the brain—but then I went to lie down and listen to myself. It’s not as self-centered as it sounds—I play CDs I’ve burned of my improvs, so that I have something to listen to while I roll cigarettes or watch close-captioned TV on mute or read a book.
I usually play it pretty low volume—just enough to hear it well without it actually striking my eardrums (I’m a sensitive flower) especially if I’m trying to read. By doing this I can hear when a particular improv has a sour note or an ugly passage—any awkwardness of execution, beyond the endemic. It interrupts my thinking—because, like everyone else, I’m used to perfect music coming out of loudspeakers—it’s almost impossible to imagine an album with a sour note on it. Not surprising, since a recording studio is basically a perfection filter that catches any trace of clumsiness and rules it right out—not that there’s anything wrong with that…..
I’m occasionally, pleasantly surprised by a bit of musical soaring that catches my ear in a rare piece—something that makes me proud. These are important for several reasons—one, obviously, it encourages me to continue playing Don Quixote on the keyboard. But I also play them back repeatedly, trying to take note of what I did and why it works and how I might use it in future.
There are, among those rare moments, even rarer instances where the key to what makes a passage striking is the emotional energy—not something I’m famous for, but it shows its head every decade or so. These passages stymy me—how can I transport myself into inspiration once I’ve sat down to play? You might as well ask me to fly.
Anyway, sometimes I listen to myself turned up real loud so I can hear every sound and nuance on the recording, just to make sure I heard everything I did—and whether any background sounds that might ruin the recording show up at high volume. That’s what I was doing today—I had the Bose cranked to 50—and I get to the third track, which is called “Blue Lake”. Now Claire and I have often joked that the birds outside our windows like to sing along with me at the piano—and it did seem kinda eerie sometimes, but I was too busy to pay attention.
Blue Lake:
26 seconds in you hear a cricket or cicada or something, then after a minute in, you hear a bird chirping along for two minutes or more, with occasional chiming in throughout. But it’s right on the beat—you can even hear it get a little huffy about my messing up the beat (which I do).
So, I jumped up and went to tell Claire about it in the living room—and while we were talking about how strange it was, I felt inspired and began to record today’s improv, while Claire studied on the couch—and after a minute and a half of playing, the darn bird sang along again—but Claire says it was a different bird. There’s some other birds in there, too—although I can’t say whether the crow was doing his own thing or what. Once I heard them chiming in, I started to play to them, looking around the upper register for stuff they might react to—ultimately, this is less a musical piece and more a dialogue with my avian house-hangers. So I guess I have a fan club—boy, do I feel special.
Claire and I have been married thirty-five years today. And as the world has changed quite a bit since August, 1980, so have we—but some things stay the same—I still feel incredibly lucky, Claire still puts up with me, and we are still both happy as clams when we know that our two kids are both fine and dandy. I feel a little guilty, however, since there is only one Bear—and the rest of male-kind has to make do with less-perfect mates—sorry, fellas.
Today’s first video is “Xper Dunn plays Harpsichord on August 29th, 2015 – J. S. Bach’s keyboard transcription of Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto in D Major’”. As you will hear, it takes me a minute to get me sea legs underneath me in the first movement. The second movement (the slow one, of course) is where I make the least mistakes. And in the third movement, you can hear the computer suddenly make a weird tone, apropos of nothing, which distracts me—while you can also see that I am tiring by this point—just as I’m supposed to be making the last movement all jig-gy and jocular. So, a pretty terrible rendition of one of my favorite pieces of music.
Why, you quite sensibly ask, would I post such a horrible excuse for a performance of a piece I love so much? Well, it’s not about me, really. I learned to love this piece by listening to it over and over again, incessantly, on an LP re-recording of a wax-cylinder master-recording of Wanda Landowska. Wanda Landowska was a legendary harpsichordist and a great proponent of Bach’s enduring legacy to musicians and to music lovers. Even on a scratchy, antique recording, she makes this Bach/Vivaldi piece sound like heaven itself—pure, sweet, perfect, simple. I highly recommend giving it a listen, either before, or in place of, my own awkward attempt:
Back to me—I first came across the sheet music in a library book which I Xeroxed and created my own copy of—years later I would buy a printed copy, which is much easier to sight-read. It tickled me, over the years, to simulate small moments of the beautiful sounds I heard Wanda make—even though I would practice it for years on a piano until I acquired the Yamaha Digital Piano P-95, with the harpsichord setting, that allowed me to make today’s recording. And, as bad as it is, this is by far the best performance I’ve ever made of the Concerto in D—or ever will make, most likely. And when I play this piece, I don’t hear myself making a hash of it—I hear Wanda making it sound like heaven. That’s the trouble with most of my music—I hear what I want to hear, and you poor suckers are stuck with what I actually sound like:
Then again, you’re not going to hear anything like today’s improv anywhere else on the web—at least, I haven’t found it. This leads me to a couple of alternatives—one, the most likely, that I’m a wanna-be New Age musician trying (and failing) to sound like Keith Jarrett or George Winston—while completely overlooking the fact that New Age is no longer new. Or two, that I have succeeded, against all odds, in finding a style that is all my own—which incorporates my failings and what few strengths I may have into a form of music like no other. That would be nice—though it still avoids the question of whether I’m worth listening to.
The Yamaha P-95 once again comes into play today, in that I find touching a ‘piano key’ and hearing weird electronic noises is very refreshing and inspiring to someone who has spent forty years playing an acoustic piano, where a key gives a tone, the same tone, timbre, and texture, always and forever. So, today we hear my usual guff, but rendered into something new by the simple use of a few ‘effects’ buttons—I almost like myself in this:
My mother-in-law dropped off some great blondie brownies—and later I’ve been promised Chinese take-out for dinner (my favorite). I hope you all are having as nice a day as I am.
So deep in the woods one would think it already nighttime—until the late afternoon turns to brief dusk then vanishes into inky nothingness.
Now we know we’re being played (as if there were any doubt beforehand). The Dow dropped over a thousand points first thing this morning, said the news-crawl. As if the Dow were a sentient creature and not a room full of gamblers and crooks trying to out-scheme each other. How long will journalists maintain this false naivety—that the Dow or the S&P 500 or any of those indices do anything other than what the obscenely-wealthy, top owners and players want it to do?
Or let us examine the case of Hillary Clinton—the media have invented a thing called her ‘email scandal’—but they stubbornly refuse to address the question of exactly what wrongdoing Hillary Clinton is accused of. Her stalkers have engendered investigations in the Justice Dept., the State Dept., and the Congress—they even have a judge who, for whatever reason, has ordered a monthly press-release about the e-mail investigation—just so it is guaranteed a place in the news feed for the remainder of the presidential campaign. A real journalist might report on the lack of a single specific crime or harm that any of this mishegas entails.
I would sadly, resignedly accept that Hillary Clinton is more untrustworthy than any other politician—if someone would just say in plain words what proof there is of this universal assumption. In the absence of anything like that, I am left with the conviction that we’re being played. The ‘Hillary E-Mail Scandal’ has become a given—the media discuss how it hurts her polling numbers, how skillfully or unskillfully she is handling her ‘response’—but they never have time to talk about the specifics, the reality behind all the smoke and mirrors.
Or take the Trump circus coverage—the media can’t resist this guaranteed ratings-maker. They marvel at Trump’s decisive lead over the other sixteen GOP candidates—as if a reality-show star could help but outshine a crowd of narrow-minded white men. But they don’t like to dwell on the larger reality—that Trump supporters—like the Tea Party they came from—represent a vanishingly small segment of bitter, ignorant reactionaries. These congenital shouters and bitchers make a big splash on TV—but their numbers are so small that we not only expect Trump to lose to a Democrat (any Democrat) nationally, but we assume that it would be suicidal for the GOP even to nominate him.
Here we see a conjunction of un-enlightened self-interest—the media is drawn to shiny distractions over substance, and the GOP can’t get their baker’s dozen of extraneous candidates to step aside and let the poll numbers show Trump against just one or two opponents. Most of these GOP candidates are busy feeding their egos with public appearances and feeding their bank accounts with fund-raising—that their collective milling about leaves Trump free to destroy their party’s image doesn’t prompt a one of them to pull out of the race. Insanely, part of the coverage of Trump is the occasional observation by this or that pundit that the whole house of cards will collapse as we draw closer to the election—making all their coverage a complete waste of time. No one talks about what a waste of time it is for the other sixteen to be running at all—I guess that would be insensitive.
Just because no one’s ultimately in charge of anything, or responsible for anything, doesn’t mean that we aren’t being played. The stock market has been a scam since the day it was invented—banks themselves aren’t much better. Politics has always been a dirty business. And journalism, in its most common incarnation, is just large-scale gossip for profit—the occasional ‘heroes’ of the fourth estate were always backed by their editorial chiefs—but today’s editorial departments are being muzzled by owners, lawyers, and advertisers whose allegiance is to the bottom line rather than the bare facts.
Still, we don’t care. Life is too complicated if we view all of our institutions as con games and all political and military decisions as furtherance of corruption and ego-feeding. So, we trust the banks and the markets, we vote for the politicians, we work every day for the fat cats, and we watch the news as if it mattered. We know we are being willfully ignorant in doing this—but we have our own lives to live amidst all the craven conniving, so we close our eyes and step out into thin air, expecting concrete.
Technology makes some things ridiculous. Where television programming once seemed an ever-shifting gem flashing first this rainbow facet then that, prisms and beams, swells and clarions of relentlessly changing light and sound, it is now listed on a menu. As of three years ago, iMDB listed over a quarter of a million films—268,000 since 1888. There have been 364 TV programs of 150-300 episodes each, 167 of 300-550 episodes each, 87 of 550-1,000 episodes each, 124 of 1,000-2,500 episodes each, 51 of 2,500-5,000 episodes each, 35 of 5,000-10,000 episodes each and 8 TV programs of over 10,000 episodes each (that’s roughly 101,426 episodes just from the top eight programs). Granted, only the majority of these programs are from the USA and Great Britain—(TV is alive and well the world over and they’re not just streaming the feed from the Great Satan). But that’s still more than a lifetime’s worth of original programming available to the English-speaking audience.
So, proved: there are more TV shows and movies than a single individual could ever watch in a hundred years—why then, in the summer, on the weekend, in the middle of the day, is there absolutely nothing on TV that I haven’t seen a billion times? I would make a federal case out of this—but then I stop and realize that for the younger folks (like our kids) TV is no longer something you let schedule your life—you schedule it. Between On-Demand and Hulu and HBO-Go and who knows what-all else, everything is watchable when you want to watch it—worrying about when something is ‘on the air’ is something only old fogeys like myself are still doing.
Even PBS, which hasn’t the need or the capacity to follow all the latest forms of commercialization, like On Demand, has to make all of its content available on its website—just to make sure it gets seen by anyone under the age of fifty. But then, why shouldn’t they? I myself post whatever my videocamera records, to YouTube, almost daily—doesn’t cost a dime.
In addition to TV programming’s detachment from real-time, there’s the addition of all the ‘unfiltered’ content to be found on YouTube, podcasts, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Commercial interruption is no longer a given. Networks no longer work to give us an overview of our choices—they still push their own stuff during commercial breaks, but now that’s only a fraction of what’s out there. TV Guide, once a weekly magazine found in every household, is online—and even online, TV Guide still harks back to the 90s paradigm of broadcast-plus-cable—it’s impossible to list everything that’s available on every platform. It is easy today to miss out on a great new program, just because there’s no central entity that has an interest in guiding our viewing choices—no one central corporation, or group of corporations, gets a monetary return from driving our preferences or piquing our interest in new shows.
And even if there were such an entity, who would watch their commercials? Between muting them in real time, fast-forwarding past them on ‘On Demand’, and their relative non-existence on digital delivery platforms, commercials have also ceased to be the staple of entertainment they once were. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ has been decentralized and demonetized. It’s a free-for-all out there.
I do miss the old ‘water-cooler’ atmosphere of the twentieth century—everybody had something to say about last night’s Carson monologue, or SNL skit, or Seinfeld episode. Everybody saw (and more importantly, discussed amongst themselves) Roots, Ken Burn’s Civil War, and other legendary programs that became cultural events simply by existing in the tiny, communal feed that once was shared by every living room screen, like a village bonfire we all virtually sat around. Stranger still, new offerings with the same potential impact are now being produced rather frequently—but their influence is diluted by the fact that they appear in little corners of our modern media landscape—seen by only a sliver of a demographic—rather than being spotlighted by a major network’s primetime.
Complexity, too, dilutes the impact of today’s ‘exposés’—where once we had an annual Jerry Lewis telethon for Muscular Dystrophy, we now have a panoply of documentaries about MS, ALS, AIDS, HPV, HCV, etc. In recent months I have seen a dozen different programs regarding new cures for cancer—genetically tailored, site-specific, cannabis-based, modified viruses—apparently, there will be no ‘cure’ for cancer, but a whole new industry, a whole new category of science, of cancer cures.
And diseases are only one aspect of public interest—racism has come from pure bigotry to the specifics of police brutality, job openings, educational barriers, the culture of ingrained poverty, drug criminalization, and on and on—and that’s just racism as it pertains to one minority. Sexism ranges from equal pay to electing our first female president. Education issues turn from funding to tenure to technique to classroom size, just to name a few of the countless issues. The Middle East has gone from basically the survival of Israel to a pack of different problems being faced by thirty different countries, several religious sects, and the international implications of each Middle East nation’s ties to developed countries either allied with or opposed to the USA. If that’s not complex enough, just add in the global thirst for Middle East petroleum resources.
TV becomes complex at the same time that the world explodes in complexity. None of the people my age or older would have predicted that the average person would be helpless in their daily activities without typing skills—but a keyboard is a far more consistent part of our daily lives than pen and paper ever were. Even space, which used to be a matter of getting to the Moon and safely back again (and maybe Mars) is now a matter of all nine planets and their many moons, the Kuiper belt, geosynchronous surveillance satellites, radio astronomy, space telescopes, space stations, commercial space flight, the search for habitable worlds in far-off solar systems, and more.
Science Fiction has been hit the hardest—what was once good science fiction is now a matter of everyday life—writing that goes beyond the sci-fi-ness of our present reality can result in ‘hard’ sci-fi novels that are so ‘hard’, many readers will complain that they read like physics textbooks. Today’s emphasis is on near-future sci-fi, since it has long become impossible to imagine what our civilization will look like in fifty or a hundred years—just looking at the changes of our last fifty years of reality is enough to send us reeling. Some of William Gibson’s novels don’t necessarily require any future at all, except for a detail here and there—mostly it’s just extrapolations of our present tech, with just a soupçon of accrued infrastructure.
Now, given that, it is especially upsetting to see a group like the Tea Party, or their present incarnation, Trump supporters, being taken seriously. ‘Childish’ is the only word that comes to my mind. These folks want all the advantages of new media, new science, and new technology—but they want all of that to leave their older memes untouched. By rights, they should be called the ‘cognitive dissonance’ party—they want to uphold the myths, morals, and mores of the mid-twentieth century while living in the twenty-first. It’s like an Amish person wanting to drive a Lamborghini—it’s understandable—everyone wants to drive a Lamborghini —but you can’t have it both ways.
The strangest thing about these overgrown children is that they have enough awareness of their basic wrongness that they speak in euphemisms. They know that their beliefs, plainly expressed, would be roundly condemned by the vast majority—but they don’t see that as any indication of wrong thinking. They continue to search for new ways to ‘teach the controversy’ (doubletalk-speak for ‘supporting the ludicrous’) by reacting against seemingly unassailable progressivism.
Take for instance the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign. Any idiot will understand that this phrase is shorthand for “Black lives should matter as much as anyone else’s”. Their pretense of being blockheaded enough to misunderstand the phrase as ‘black lives matter more’ is so transparent that it becomes one of those things that make it hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. And that is their most popular weapon nowadays—to leave us so breathless at the profound stupidity of their words that we don’t know where to begin with our rebuttals!
Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Okay, okay, fine, alright—you want to talk about this clown—let’s talk about him. He’s a wonderful businessman. In a boardroom he can’t be beat—he’ll shaft you right between the eyes without hesitation; he’ll burn your house down with your family inside and he won’t even blink. And his famous, off-the-cuff, no-filter patter—that’s a powerful business tool. It lets whoever he’s talking to know that he’s up on all the political-correctness memes—he knows how far he can go without crossing a legal line—but he also lets us all know that he doesn’t give a damn about right or wrong—he’s all business. Or, in his own words: “I don’t have time to be politically correct—I’m too busy.”
He may be a misogynist—he may not be—in his heart of hearts, who knows? But Business is a misogynist culture where condescending to women is as acceptable as calling a man a pussy for not ‘going for the throat’—and he’s a Business Man.
This comes to the fore in what passes for his foreign policy also—trash-talking one’s rivals is common business practice and no American businessperson ever lost points for smiling at their Chinese or Mexican counterparts while at the negotiating table and then trash-talking them to his American cronies afterwards. Trash-talking is a part of sports and Business is a blood sport.
Would brash bullying be an advantage to an American President? Reagan had some success with it—but he was canny conservative, not a lord of the boardroom who had been lauded his whole life primarily for his cold-blooded willingness to attack all comers. If Business is like Football, then Politics is a Chess game—can Trump’s aggression, flexibility and maneuverability win the day against a longer, deeper game-player who looks many moves ahead? This question has two answers—because we are in the uncomfortable position of considering (a) whether Trump can win the election and (b) what kind of country will result from a Trump presidency.
I say ‘uncomfortable position’ because this will be the first time that our country’s choice of its leader may have no connection to our expectations as to what that leader will lead us into. But as Trump says when asked about policy, “We’ll get to that later.”
As a businessman, Trump is strongest in his domestic agenda (what there is of a Trump political agenda, that is). He’s made noises about fixing our infrastructure and improving the jobs market—and a real businessman may be what we need in that regard. It may come at the price of a sweeping away of most of the social progress of the last fifty years, but you don’t get nothing for nothing. It is conceivable that a single Trump term might get this country out of its domestic doldrums—and that the reactionary Democrat who follows him will have a fairly easy time putting our social justice agenda back on track.
But it is the breadth of the presidency’s powers and responsibilities that scares me—what consequences may result from four years of Trump leadership—and will those consequences be too heavy a payment for a surge in our domestic economy?
I don’t believe Trump himself expects America to be dumb enough to actually elect him—he may have underestimated the power of modern media. Jon Stewart when interviewing President Obama asked the president if he felt the public was fair in mistrusting politicians for speaking so ‘carefully’—and Obama replied to the effect that a citizen was freer to express himself or herself, while members of government had to consider the potential influence of their words on things like the stock market, international relations, and other factors—outside of whatever they might wish to say to their constituents in plainer language.
You can take that with a whole bag of salt but there is a kernel of reality there. A businessman/reality-show-host may find that distinction a bit too fine—Trump has never allowed himself to feel vulnerable. The great American empire, however strong, is far more vulnerable—not existentially, of course, but the point of America is not whether it will continue to exist.
The point of America has always been about what it will become. Will it offer social justice? Will it maintain human rights? Will it look after the old, the weak, and the sick? Will it reward honest effort and restrain the mighty from creating a de facto upper class? Will we retain our primacy in the arts and innovation because of the love of free expression we instill in every kindergarten child? Will we remain the first and most successfully unreligious government in history? And will America continue to be among the leaders of the United Nations that try to maintain peace and international humanity?
Some tall corn, I grant you—but whether that is what we are, or if it’s only what I wish we are becoming, it’s still my American Dream and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I’ve always felt that America isn’t great because it is rich and powerful, but rather the other way around. Successful businesspersons like Trump are playing the game of Capitalism. Like I said before, it’s blood sport—a serious game—but it is still a game, based on the conventions of property, currency and bookkeeping—it’s all somewhat fictional, in a sense. Governing America, on the other hand is no game.
Trump wants to stop all the blathering nonsense that is today’s Republican party—and I applaud that sentiment—but the answer is not to double down on the anger that seethes among the disaffected. I have never cared for the rich, elder citizens in Somers County who fight against real estate taxes for personal gain. That money goes to our public schools—something only a moron would underfund. I’m still happy to pay any kind of school budget, even though my own kids are long gone from our local schools—it’s common sense. You don’t want to be known as the county with the dumbest kids.
And I feel that this principle applies in a larger sense. People are always fighting against taxes. I don’t want to fight against taxes—I want to fight over what we spend them on (and who’s lining their pockets along the way). I don’t want to pay less for gasoline for two years—I want to drive on well-maintained roads (and breathe the air). I don’t want to be tax wise and infrastructure foolish. I don’t want to mine any more of the fool’s gold this country has been busily digging up for so long—interference in women’s health (to protect the poor things, I guess), interference in gay relations and lifestyles (to stop Satan, I guess), and caving to the personal whims of our nation’s wealthiest and most influential (because it’s “by business, of business, and for business”, isn’t it?)
Trump would say that’s all a bunch of ‘political correctness’. But it is interesting to note that we have come to think of that as a term for those who go too far in their socially-conscious vocabulary. People aren’t into subtlety these days, but there is a difference between rectitude and correctness. Political rectitude is farcical—but political correctness, in its literal sense, is what America is all about. Outside of their casting doubt on scientific verification, the invention of the term ‘political correctness’ is one of the right’s strongest moves in their eternal march towards the past. It allows them to poo-poo that which we hold most dear—the acknowledgement as equals of those who are different from ourselves.
The English language evolved in a society of god-fearing, bigoted, male chauvinists—trying to modify it to sound like free-thinking egalitarians makes for the occasionally ridiculous. Using that laughter to dismiss such efforts, however, is an urge from the pit of the evil one—and is only stressed by those who yearn to maintain that old-timey slime.
Yesterday, after I’d upgraded to Windows 10, I restarted my PC. Upon re-booting, it asked my for my MS account login. Had I not been able to, miraculously, dredge my password up from my foggy memory, my computer would have become a worthless chunk of chips and wires right then and there. Then the router started acting up—my son fixed it by plugging my PC directly into the cable modem, but now he and my wife have no WyFy access! Is it a coincidence that our router failed right when I upgraded to Windows 10? I’ll let you know after he’s bought and installed a new router. [Note from the following Saturday: Booboo installed the new router and all’s well.]
Operating System upgrades for Windows actually go back to DOS versions—before Windows, we had several versions of DOS. Sometimes a new OS would re-format the hard drive, erasing all the files. It always required changes to the software and the hardware-drivers—meaning that the new OS was useless until all the upgraded versions of the programs were installed. And OS upgrades had their share of bugs, too. After forty years of this, I am understandably leery of OS upgrades.
In the earlier days, a new OS would give noticeably faster response time, notably better user-friendliness, and noticeably more-reliable overall performance. As we’ve become more sophisticated, the changes are harder to pin down. And as OSes became more concerned with online connectivity, the changes have become blurred by differences in bandwidth, signal strength, and traffic density.
We see OS changes that benefit the computer industry more than the individual users—like adding the ‘Store’ option to our media-player apps. And we see an unhealthy focus on phones—as if having a desk to sit at is a bad idea—not that I’m against i-phones, PDAs, etc., but all that curries to the trend in making computing a superficial, convenience-based behavior, rather than an activity we use for specific purposes. It is glamour (and distraction) over substance.
But I’m mostly just grouchy because I’m having an off day—I suppose it’s to be expected after my recent run of very active, mostly successful days. Nothing is as reliable in life as ups and downs. I used to marvel at how the blackest prospects could turn around in a day, or how giddy climbing could suddenly come crashing down—now I just take it for granted. The miracle would be if change ceased and all days were uniform.
Today, I couldn’t play the piano worth a damn—relatively speaking. And I can’t get settled. And I can’t eat. And I went for my walk but I didn’t like it. Fuck this.
Saturday, August 08, 2015 11:53 AM
Stupid by Crazy (2015Aug08)
Stupid by itself is not a problem. Ignorance is nothing but a blank space where information might be, but isn’t. Kitties are stupid—puppies are stupid—babies are stupid—ain’t nothing wrong with stupid. Crazy by itself I have no problem with. I’m a little crazy myself—there’s nothing wrong with a little crazy—sometimes it even helps. But when you take Stupid and lead it around by Crazy—then you’ve got trouble.
That’s why we need to get a handle on religion. That’s why we need to get together on the history of religion. Anyone can know about it—Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” gives a dense (and somewhat boring) outline of how beliefs and rituals evolved over time—how no religion sprang from nowhere, how they’re all related and they all evolved over the ages as a continuum of human nature.
Further, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the library at Nag Hammadi give us insight into the early days of Christianity—when many different people had many different ideas about who Christ was, how He lived and died (and lived?) and what His message was. We have the record of the four Councils of Nîmes from the early first millennium, delineating the church rules that men ultimately formed based on their understanding at the time. And we have the history of the Papal Wars, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment to further show that religion is not set in stone—and never has been.
Then there’s the cognitive dissonances of religion. Ancient texts show none of the knowledge of astrophysics or astronomy that one would expect in a creator of the universe—they indicate only the ignorance of pre-science humans. Religions have differences based on geographical limits—where one might expect a supreme being to speak to all humans as one, all over the world. I could go on, but religion itself is a process of having faith without proof—it’s as hard to argue with that kind of idea as it is to argue with an idiot.
Yet I believe religion has a place in our lives. It enhances community, it provides purpose and meaning in a world that lacks both, and it is especially important for children to have some framework to overlay the cold-blooded chaos of the godless universe. But we must forever relegate religion to a ‘Santa Claus’-like status, wherein it is given no domain over the decisions of adults, particularly our leaders. It is used now to promote and perpetuate fear, conflict, and abnormal psychology—we must remove that absolutism from our society if we are ever to stop bigotry, misogyny, and charismatic megalomania.
We in America see the rise of wireless communication begin to transform our leaders into followers—the instantaneous response of large numbers of the electorate leads to knee-jerk reactions on the part of our politicians. They no longer sit and contemplate the future well-being of their constituencies—they’re too busy responding to tweets about what happened two minutes ago. I’d like to see a politician or two stand up to a podium and say that they are atheists—that they don’t represent modern mythology any more than they represent the ancient Greek pantheon of gods.
What I’d really like to see is all the big businesses lose the support of all that evangelical hogwash they use to befog issues that should be determined purely on human rights, without any hocus-pocus. I’d like to see leaders with the guts to stand up to the universe without imagining a ‘Blue Fairy’ god at their backs, protecting them with magic, promising them an afterlife in heaven (or hell) or giving them permission to judge harshly those who are different.
I take the approach of tonight’s GOP debate show as my cue to break my promise to myself not to upset myself by discussing current events. My love/hate indecision about talking politics is, I suppose, like my feeling about bad drivers on the road. There are a lot of bad drivers out there—if I allow myself to dwell on them, I only upset myself and make it harder to contain my own barely contained road rage—but I can only ignore them at the risk of mortal danger to myself and the others around me. It’s a catch-22.
As I surfed from one noon-time news reports to the next—all slathered with saliva over tonight’s big circus—I found myself yearning for November. I thought to myself, “By November it will only be a year to go before all this mishegas is over.” Think about that. These many months of back-and-forth babbling between the talking heads debating the 2016 presidential election (not the candidates so much, mind you, but the anchors, correspondents, and pundits) have been ubiquitous. And we still have more than a year to go before anyone actually casts a vote.
The idea that this election is that important begs the question—shouldn’t we be talking issues, and legislation? Shouldn’t we be talking about the other elected offices, federal, state, and local—if only to correlate their effects on whoever ends up with the office of president? It is a three-part system of powers in balance, after all—the president, in and of him-or-her-self, can do nothing alone. Even the executive orders that have been in the news lately are subject to review by the judicial branch.
Never has the term ‘weapons of mass distraction’ been so apt. Why does mass media get tunnel-vision over this single event scheduled for the November after next? I’m tempted to say it’s for the same reason that Donald Trump is ahead in the polls—because the media have become champions of ignorance and instant gratification. Election Day 2016 will be an exciting day—why not simulate a bit of it every day, just for the thrill? And why not flood us with examples of this one bully’s idiocy?—He sure is entertaining.
In “Good Night And Good Luck” we saw a reenactment of the moment when adult, responsible analysis of our times first when down in defeat to the public’s ceaseless hunger for distraction. Since then there has been an evolution of further and further focus on titillation in favor of substance on television. And commerce has not been lazy about nailing down its influence over many other aspects of our lives—the people who believe money is everything have managed to insert that belief into our laws, our arts, our culture, and our educational system. It would be quixotic to hope, at this late date, that any maturity could be brought to bear on the mass media’s choice of content.
I feel that Obama’s election to two terms is indicative of the majority’s thirst for enlightened government by sober, intelligent adults. Further, I consider all of the GOP candidates to be ‘far right’ in the historical sense, regardless of how they appear in relation to each other. The entire party seems to have been hijacked by cranks, cronies, and the super-wealthy. Their greatest support comes from those who get all their information from television. Their greatest detractors now come from the ranks of those with a passing knowledge of science, ethics, or the arts.
Therefore I think it’s perfectly safe to miss out on the big debate tonight—the biggest gaffes will be replayed ad infinitum over the following few days; the chances of someone saying something intelligent are vanishingly small; and by this November (still a year from the election) none of what happens tonight will matter.
To me, the only real question is whether Bernie Sanders will become so much more attractive than Hillary Clinton that the Democrats will forget that Bernie can’t possibly draw enough of the middle to win a national election. Not that I wouldn’t vote for him—it’s just that he’s less likely to win the big one.
Artist: Winslow Homer (American, Boston, Massachusetts 1836–1910 Prouts Neck, Maine)
Oil Paintings by Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
“Camp Fire” (1880)
“Searchlight on Harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba” (1901)
“Rainy Day in Camp” (1871)
“Harvest Scene” (ca. 1873)
“Moonlight, Wood Island Light” (1894)
“Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River” (1905–10)
[courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC]
Like me, you may have wondered at times how to fix people, how to make society better—that sort of thing. The answer is that you don’t—or rather, you can’t. Imagine a world where everybody is kind and caring and generous. Now forget that—because people are kind and caring and generous, at certain times (if at all—some of them) but that is not our constant state. That’s not how humans work. Being kind and caring and generous is part of what we are, but it is only a part, and it is not permanent—it is an intermittent thing that we do when we are not being something else, something less angelic.
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
I think, after this election is finally put to sleep, the media should start to take stock of the Outlandish factor: ‘Obama is a secret Muslim, alien Kenyan’, ‘Death Panels’, ‘Obama founded ISIS’, ‘Hillary is a she-demon’, ‘Trickle-down economics’, ‘Muslims are dangerous’, ‘Weed is dangerous’, ‘Poverty is a choice’—you name it, the Republicans are allowed to go on TV and say whatever crazy bullshit comes into their heads.
I was always one of those too-enthusiastic people—teachers’ pet in schools, messing up on jobs by trying too hard when everyone else was happier skating along—you know, an unbearable eager-beaver—easy to trick, easy to tease, and otherwise—undesirable company. I’m the same way about learning and words and stuff—that’s why the first thing strangers and bartenders say to me is usually “So you went to college, huh?” This is funny in a sad way, since I never actually got a degree—in spite of several colleges and universities. When I was younger, still in school, it was “You talk funny.” or just “Speak English.”
