Through a CRT, Darkly

 Give a clue; leave a kind word
Hint as to a destination
A domain where our cyber-souls might meet
I read the blog of a woman here in Madison on a fairly regular basis. Earlier this year, she had an abortion and found herself in a downward spiral. It was a real shame as she is very intelligent, fun-loving, beautiful, and has a good heart. I have never met her and don't maintain regular email contact with her or anything, but it still depressed me to read about her predicament. Take for instance:

"i still see babies and preg women on tv and i cry at them, at episodes of ER, of episodes of anything really"

"the bathtub vision of me and warm red water seems better every day skin is so soft and vulnerable"

Now, I grant you that people who write do take liberties and also indulge themselves with literary devices such as hyperbole, but I still find such things irksome.

She has friends and family that read her blog which must make things a bit more difficult. Ya know, there are times when I rue having let certain people know of this place. There are certain things that, however tempted I may be, I dare not publish here. I had another online ditty a couple years back which no friends nor family knew of. It was rather a lot of fun to be able to write with impunity. I mean, I put some stuff in there that I've only told 1 or 2 friends and other things I've never confided in anyone I know. Plus I was able to put anything in there no matter how poorly written it was. Some oddball writing techniques, poetry, my puerile attempts at erotica - whatever struck my fancy.

One really neat thing about that journal was the comments of readers. Since we didn't know one another from Adam, our dialogues were very open and honest. Now, they could have been lying, of course, but I suspect not. People are very willing to reveal some of their most intimate secrets to total strangers under the veil of anonymity. I have some very revealing emails stored away. It seems a shame that we are often times incapable of removing our masks with those we trust. You know, to speak in confidential terms and share a dark, unspoken fear. You'd think we'd be able to stop the performance for a while.

From one reader:

"Last Christmas I attended a bonfire at my mother's house (she's crazy). It's a long story, but I was taking the loss of my marriage badly and she thought it would be therapeutic. The idea was to write down your pain and toss the shards of paper into the fire - confront the demons and burn them alive My mother and sisters watched as I tossed my pain into the fire - only I don't think they knew what to do when I stripped off my clothes in the 20 degree weather and tossed my underwear into the flames.

I guess I got caught up in the symbolism and wanted to be free of everything he'd touched. I think if I could have shed my skin, I would have. I'm better now, but I thought you knew me, knew my story when you left the note, 'I've heard about you and bonfires'. All of the sudden you became very dangerous - someone that could know too much about my real life. I know, I'm a freak, but a very private freak."

From another woman:

"You want to know what I fantasize about? By the way, sexually I'm usually fairly white bread, but my fantasies are decidedly wicked. I guess we are all that way. *wink*

Anyway, when I'm alone, and I feel the need for release, I fall into many different fantasies. My imagination is extensive (not always a good thing :). The one that never fails goes something like this:

Note: In real life I am decidedly hetero, but somewhat bi-curious. (i.e. have never acted on it and most likely never would)

In my fantasy I am with a man and another woman. The man is an artist and loves visual stimulation as much as physical arousal. The woman is present as a helper of sorts. The man begins by tying my entire body in a spider web of intricately arranged knots. The effect is that my breasts are bare, but framed by rope which criss-crosses my shoulders in front and back and weaves patterns across my smooth, flat stomach. The patterns continue around my buttocks and between my legs so that my pussy is bound by silken twine on either side - leaving my core bare and exposed. My wrists are tied together and secured above my head by a larger rope that can be raised or lowered so that I may either kneel or stand.

While the man decorates me, the woman caresses my body with her hand and mouth lavishing attention on my breasts, buttocks and pussy. When he is satisfied with his artwork, he lowers me to my knees..."

I think you get the picture.

All of the people who wrote to me were women. It amazed and saddened me that several of them were in really bad relationships of whatever ilk and it seemed like they were reaching out through the aether for someone to listen. So they didn't feel like they were just a voice in the crowd.

"When I explain things, it is probably going to sound a little crazy. I know there is obviously a problem with myself, a problem with my marriage that I would get myself in this situation, that things would get to this point. I am very aware of things. I know it's not healthy but as much as I know this, I cannot control what I feel. That's one of my major problems...my feelings always control me."

JoAnna, a woman in a bad marriage, wrote this to me:

"Hi there~ I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy your entries...it is an escape..."

She and I had very interesting email conversations. Even in her most upbeat emails, there was always something to betray all that had come before, something that revealed her intense loneliness and the sense that she felt trapped in her life.

"I am sitting in my empty house and thought that while I am all alone I would write you a note...I am imagining what you look like. It turns me on, not knowing. I like the way you write to me. I find your stories very arousing and some times I have to step into my room and lie upon my satin sheets and 'relieve' myself. As a matter of fact I can feel myself about ready to go to my room. I want you to write to me, and tell me what you imagine, your fantasies. Tell me that I turn you on and just what you would do to me if you could. Make me want you. Make me imagine what you can do...I'll give you all the details about what you are doing to me. Oh God, how I am longing for some touch, not necessarily physical, but emotional. Can you make me feel special?" (Emphasis mine.)

"I just wanted you to know that I truly appreciate your kind words in your entry. Talk about tingles. It is so nice to hear those things. It is something that I have needed for quite some time."

"I look forward to your e-mails, and reading your diary. I love the way you talk to me, as if I were the only woman in the world. I seriously felt as if I were going to cry..."

It was nice to be able to bring a smile to her face, to make her feel "special", even if my powers were ephemeral. It was rewarding to be able to bring a modicum of cheer to someone who seemed to have an otherwise fairly gloomy life. And it was fun to write erotic stories about a woman that I had never seen. An exercise for the imagination. But this woman obviously had problems that some schmoe sitting in front of a keyboard hundreds of miles away was powerless to cure.

What does this say about people? I mean, what did housewives trapped in bad marriages do before the advent of the Internet? Take little yellow pills and just lead that life of quiet desperation?

A girl (she was 16, if memory serves) wrote this to me in an email:

"as for the honesty in email, isn't it queer how easy it's become to open up to strangers?!"

So much said about the Internet is negative: pornography is luring men away from women, behind every chat room door lurks a stalker, most email is spam, and everyone out there is seeking only to relieve you of your money. All of the utopian rhetoric has fallen by the wayside and we're left trying to figure out how to assimilate the technology so it can co-exist with all the foibles and failings we've always had and can't get rid of no matter how hard we may try. As I discussed in a previous entry, the Internet is too new to really to set many sociological impacts in stone. We can do so with the Industrial Revolution because it ended well over 100 years ago. But the Internet has only been a major force for less than 10. Aside from stalkers, spammers, and the salacious, surely millions of people put the Net to good use. Emailing kith & kin, chatting with loved ones on the other side of the globe, shopping, paying bills, et al. But let's return to the question posed above. Are people so dislocated, so estranged from the real people in their lives that they are compelled to make "confessions" to a total stranger via the anonymity of the Internet?

I think that being anonymous is the key. There are plenty of reasons to wear one's heart on one's virtual sleeve. For instance, telling a flesh & bones person a secret opens you up to opprobrium. It does as well on the virtual side of things but this can be remedied by closing a window or putting someone on a chat program's ignore list. You don't have to suffer scornful glances on the Internet and, generally, word does not leak out to everyone else in your neighborhood. Secrets are usually no fun to keep and the swellings of the heart need to be relieved. So confessing to a stranger across the aether can be a relief - a relief without repercussions. You can say what needs to be said while saving face, in essence.

While it's not fair to say that this phonomenon is wide-spread based on a dozen or so people from my experience, I surely can't be the only one to see this happening. I'm no sociologist but I wonder if we are interacting with our fellow human beings face-to-face less and in less intimate ways. By this I don't mean to suggest, like Naomi Wolf, that men prefer porn to real women, but rather do people go online to meet "friends" instead of social gatherings in their communities? Is there a general way in which friendships are declining? About 400 years ago, Francis Bacon wrote, "A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce." Are we discharging the swellings of our hearts electronically more often that when looking a friend in the eyes? Lots of questions without answers.

Being optimistic on the odd occasion, I don't believe that we've lost touch with the people in our lives. I do think, however, that, as our lives become more hectic, we lose some patience and, in general, become less willing to just listen. Perhaps, in a certain sense, we have come to expect everything from the news to entertainment to the deepest feelings of those in our hearts to come packaged in short, pithy sound bytes. And I think this is the primary reason those people (women all of them) opened up to me as they did. My blog entries were open, honest, as well as lengthy (and, often times, meandering like this one). And when they wrote to me, I wrote back and answered their questions in addition to asking questions of them - and I "listened" instead of spuriously passing judgement. Here's an excerpt from a chat I had with a woman who told me about a boyfriend she had had who beat her:

Her: I dont talk about this enough, I am very ashamed
Her: I have flashbacks
Me: Don't feel ashamed!
Her: after he beat me I did not leave him right away
Me: How long did it take you to leave him?
Her: 3 months
Her: I was beat a lot in that 3 months
Her: I called the abuse hotline once - useless
Me: why did you stay with him? did u think he'd change?
Her: its like I was in a trance or something - SO much fear
Her: I felt like I could not live without him
Her: a common thing with abused women apparantly, it builds slowly
Her: it was absolute agony - like an addiction
Me: Why didn't you report this guy to the police?
Her: too scared - get this - the truth is - I DID NOT WANT TO LOSE HIM
Me: Emotions are such wonderful things but can be so fucking weird sometimes.
Her: thank you for not telling me to 'get over it' or saying 'what the hell is wrong with you'
Her: very rare - you are cool

I don't mean to come across as Joey Blow-My-Own-Horn here but I think this dialogue really says something. People want others to listen to what they have to say, to share themselves, and to know that they are not alone in how they feel. If this takes an interlocutor hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, so be it. Francis Bacon began his essay On Friendship thusly: "IT HAD been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, Whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god." Setting aside the "untruth" which Bacon goes on to consider, it must be admitted that human beings are not merely the solitary beasts that Hobbes envisions. We are creatures of proximity - social creatures. Sure, we do require time alone but we also spend a good chunk of our time craving and seeking the company of others. Love is supreme and criticisms do sting, especially from those we love. Was Brutus' cut not the unkindest? It is a bitter irony to think that, in our attempts to get closer, we look to people far away. How many of us read or hear the words of a friend and feel something bubbling underneath the surface - a need to explain or get something off of the chest - yet turn away onto the next email or let the comment go thinking "well, they'll get over it"??

We also all have the need for not only emotional closeness but for physical nearness as well. And I don't just mean sex, I mean also the simple consolation of touch such as pats on the back, holding hands, and hugging - just simple acts. Who among us hasn't sat around petting a dog or a cat and thought how wonderful it must be to have such physical affection given so freely and so often? What kind of society would we have if it one could touch another (in a non-sexual way) without fear of being seen as too effeminate or of a lawsuit? Men espeically. Generally, we can only engage is such activities if our team wins the Super Bowl (subliminal message: Go Pack!!) or if a loved one dies.

While it may seem like an odd notion, touching is part of listening. It indicates understanding and sympathy. The next time you find yourself in a conversation, think about this. How well do you know this person? How are away do you position yourselves from one another? Do you or your interlocutor touch one another during the conversation? For instance, does one of you slap the other on the shoulder with the back of a hand to indicate agreement? Or perhaps put your hand on the other's? We, in America, at least, have this sense of "private space" or "zone of comfort". A radius of 2' or so from our bodies and, if a stranger enters this space, it's considered intrusive or threatening. But, for people we know, it engenders a feeling of intimacy. When you're at a table with just one other person, do you sit next to or across from them? Perhaps some things to cogitate upon.

Writing this brings a whole host of things to mind, not the least of which is irony in my act of writing this in a blog. In addition, Ervin Goffman's ideas of our front and back selves and how we present ourselves to each other. Also, why were the people who wrote me all women? But I suppose these are for another time. I leave you with a quote from Erasmus which is nice because it presents a view of the topic at hand, sort of summarizes Goffman's theories, and ties in with a recent entry of mine about Marillion as it appears on one of their album sleeves. To wit:

" If a person were to try stripping the disguise from actors while they play a scene upon the stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? . . . Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows."

Eureka!

I finally found out the name of a painting I love as well as that of the painter. The painting in question is The Rock by Peter Blume. It's in a contemporary section of the Art Institute in Chicago and I just think it's da bomb. The picture at the link I gave doesn't do it justice. The colors aren't saturated enough and the size in woefully inadequate. Go see it. Now.

 

Viqueens C-H-O-K-E

The Packers pulled it off - with a little help from Arizona. Mike Sherman oughta send everyone on the Cards a 10lbs wedge of cheese in thanks. I called my brother, who is a Vikings fan but got Andy, his roommate. Unfortunately, Andy was on the other line so I asked him to have Carl call me back but was told that he refused to do so and called me a name. Ah, filial love.

OK, now I'm pissed. Camille Paglia is on C-SPAN2. The host asked her for her thoughts on Michael Moore. She replied that, while she generally agreed with his political views, she found his use of a staged scene in Bowling for Columbine disagreeable and thought that only "truth" belonged in documentaries. Ya know, Ms. Paglia, you have no idea what a documentary is and are completely oblivious to the fact that staged scenes have been used in documentaries virtually since the beginning of cinema. This is not to say that every single documentary style includes such but, traditionally, fictional scenes have been used by documentarians for decades to serve non-fictional narratives. It's good to know that someone who earns a living, in part, by commenting on the media has no idea how an important bit of it works. Let's send Camille Paglia back in time to tell some of the pioneers of documentary filmmaking, like Vertov and Flaherty, her view on how documentaries ought to be made. I swear, the more feminist diatribes I read, the less I feel that I will ever find a feminist with whom I agree to any significant degree.

Why are there no feminist writers out there who can make a cohesive, logical argument based on facts that she understands? Christ, other than images of women, feminists seem to have no idea how the media works. Fuck, and I only have a modicum of understanding, at best. How is it that a dumbass like me can pick out logical fallacies, lies, non sequiturs, inconsistencies, etc. in the works of academics? Doesn't our society train polemicists to actually know of what they speak and how to speak before they are allowed to speak?

An Admonishment

Let me give you guys out there a word of advice: If you’re a poor sap like me, don’t ever read any books about the evolutionary psychology of sex. They are just too depressing. I’ve read two or three now and, after finishing each one, I have spiraled downwards past melancholy, past utter perdition, and straight to suicidal. This is because these texts lend scientific credence to what I have suspected all along, namely, that I am not particularly attractive to women.

These books all tend to say the same thing: “The idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is basically a bunch of junk. Look. Genes are selfish and just want to be passed from one generation to the next. And evolution has instilled within us various methods for finding the best possible person with whom we can reproduce. These methods vary depending upon our role in the whole affair, i.e. – our gender.”

Women, for example, bear the burden of having an embryo develop in their wombs for nine months, risk life and limb in that dreadful business of childbirth, and then suffer with an infant suckling at their breasts for a stretch, causing them to become sore, etc. Men, on the other hand, don’t have wombs and thusly needn’t worry about some parasitic fetus gestating therein or its egress. Ergo, the only worry we have is getting frustrated for a time because we are forced to watch some wrinkly ball of skin take our place at the breasts of our goodly wife. We tend to think that those tits are ours and don’t like to see anyone else playing with them. Except, of course, if another woman is playing with them. (Or our wife is playing with her own tits.) Let’s face it here, we men just want to get laid. It wasn’t a bunch of women drooling over the release of the DVD director’s cut of When Larry Ate Sally or The Hunt for Pink October – it was men.

What this all boils down to is that women invest quite a bit in this whole sordid baby-making affair while we men ideally need only donate a single sperm and then bust out of Dodge. The spanner that gets thrown into our works is that we human beings take forever and a day to grow up and become self-sufficient. Other animals are out in the world kicking ass and taking names within a few months of birth while we humans are weighted down with lazy-ass, unemployed slugs who live in our basements well into their thirties. (You never see adult horses playing Nintendo in Mr. and Mrs. Ed’s stable, do ya? Sloth seems to be a uniquely human trait.) Ergo, human fathers need to hang around after meiosis.

“So what?” you ask. “The fact that men go out and try to get laid all the time while women seek commitment isn’t exactly news.” Fair enough. But I’m getting to my point. You see, these various roles dictate what we seek in a mate. When we say men primarily look at the physical beauty of women, we are really saying that men are looking for signs that a woman is healthy and can carry a pregnancy to term and beyond. Our male ancestors sought women with clear skin, long hair, good hips, etc. and so do the men of the 21st century. (Regarding the last item, there seems to be a universal preference for women whose hip-to-waist ratio is about 0.7.) While this may be the year 2003, our brains are still wired in the same way as those of men c. 40,000B.C. If a woman can’t grow a decent mop and her skin is all carbuncular, she probably ain’t long of this earth. And if her hips are too narrow, what are the odds of being able to squeeze out that eight-pound mini-me from her belly?

Women, on the other hand, are thinking, “If that son of a bitch doesn’t want to stick around, I will just have to make him.” One of the ways they do this is by concealing the fertile time in their menstrual cycles. Unlike female chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, women don’t find their labia turning pink when in estrus, however funny that would be. Instead, women merely undergo a small change in temperature. Although I’d be willing to give it a shot, I suspect that most women would be turned off by some Neanderthal wielding a thermometer during foreplay. Thusly, we men are compelled to stick around to ensure that the offspring we raise are our own and not the milkman’s.

Anyway…So what do women seek in a partner? Since women invest so much of their time and physical effort into the production of progeny, they, not surprisingly, seek men who can materially invest in them and their children. Hence, women seek men of stature and material abundance. Joe Six-Pack may be a nice, handsome guy, but if he’s poor, what will he be able to provide to his offspring? The Aztec Sun-King didn’t have a harem of 1,500 nubile, young women because he blew his paycheck every Friday night down at the tavern.

Women look for men with power and with stuff. And it is for precisely this reason that I am unattractive to women and thusly get depressed. I may have a basement full of stuff, but it ain’t the stuff women are looking for. I haven’t amassed piles of wealth nor do I have armies of men who obey my every word. As Hank Kissinger observed, “Power is a great aphrodisiac.” And, being a lowly Help Desk Analyst, I ain’t got none.

About the only thing I’ve got going for me, say the evolutionary psychologists, is my above-average height. If someone is bigger than we are, it is natural for us to feel at least some initial intimidation. Our brains equate physical size with power. This probably accounts for why men tend to make $3000 a year above the norm for every inch of height they are above the average. This also probably explains why I’ve gotten laid in the past. My height sort of fools women for a time, they go temporarily insane. But it wears off eventually and they leave.

If you think this is all bullshit, sit back and ponder it for a while. Did the hot chicks in high school date the A students or the jocks? You don’t see groupies hanging out backstage after the performance of a symphony orchestra. They’re looking to hook up with a rich rock’n’roll star. Do you think Anna Nicole Smith married that old geezer because she thought he resembled Brad Pitt? Fuck no! He was rich and powerful. Did I mention he was rich and powerful?

Despite how positive my mother says it is that I am a nice and intelligent young man, neither of these traits has gotten me very far. After all, nice guys finish last. Rich and powerful guys finish first, however. (And most rich and powerful people are assholes.) This being the case, in the interest of my sperm, I have decided to forsake my niceness and become a jerk. $$ + power = pussy. When I’m in public, I’ll have a gorgeous babe on my arm featuring a slender gynecoid figure and its attendant 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. She’ll be nice and hypermammiferous too. I’ll be able to buy her collagen injections for her lips so they’ll look like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I don’t care if she’s only after my money because I am only after her snatch. True love is a myth, people! And since I’ll be so rich, I will be able to afford to hire someone to keep an eye on her. Yeah, you heard me right. Men have always felt that way – witness eunuchs, chastity belts, and female circumcision – we just have gotten to the point of using less gruesome methods of making sure the pussy stays put. I ain’t footin’ the bills for some other guy’s genes getting passed on down the line.Despite how positive my mother says it is that I am a nice and intelligent young man, neither of these traits has gotten me very far. After all, nice guys finish last. Rich and powerful guys finish first, however. (And most rich and powerful people are assholes.) This being the case, in the interest of my sperm, I have decided to forsake my niceness and become a jerk. $$ + power = pussy. When I’m in public, I’ll have a gorgeous babe on my arm featuring a slender gynecoid figure and its attendant 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. She’ll be nice and hypermammiferous too. I’ll be able to buy her collagen injections for her lips so they’ll look like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I don’t care if she’s only after my money because I am only after her snatch. True love is a myth, people! And since I’ll be so rich, I will be able to afford to hire someone to keep an eye on her. Yeah, you heard me right. Men have always felt that way – witness eunuchs, chastity belts, and female circumcision – we just have gotten to the point of using less gruesome methods of making sure the pussy stays put. I ain’t footin’ the bills for some other guy’s genes getting passed on down the line.

So, if I seem a bit glum, know that it’s only because I am all-too aware of my brackish countenance. And if I seem a bit quiet, know that it’s only because I am plotting away to become rich and powerful. My goal is to put as many copies of myself on this planet as possible.

Tortelvis Has Left the Building

I don't care what anyone says - Dread Zeppelin are fucking awesome! Back in 1991when I lived in a dorm, a few of us sat on the lawn playing cribbage with my roommate's stereo pointed out the window blaring DZ's first album. Someone shouted, "What the hell is this reggae/Led Zeppelin crap?!?" I thought the whole point of college was to explore new things, learn esoteric knowledge, drink, and fuck. Well, we were doing half of those on that fine spring day. (The exploration and the drinking.) Close-minded fucks.

So I've got Dread Zeppelin's version of "Moby Dick" playing. Fucking classic. Over the drum solo, Tortelvis reads from Melville:

"'Give way!' cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar."

Come on! How can you not like Dread Zeppelin? While I liked Jane's Addiction, some guy from Marinette played them and (seemingly) only them constantly. It would be a year or so before I discovered Nirvana and I wasn't interested in the alternative scence. Most of the people who listened to Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, and that ilk did so just to get out of listening to other music. They reveled in and proclaimed their alternativeness at every given moment.

"Yeah, yeah - you're cool."

Personally, I got along with the rednecks listening to The Replacements better. And Husker Du. (Where does the umlaut go?) This is probably because they listened to such bands for the music and not for any scene. They had no pretensions that they were somehow hipper than the rest of us. This is why it took me so long to get into Nirvana: I dispised all the hype surrounding "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the media making blanket statements about me and my peers. Finally, some months after grunge broke, I saw Nirvana doing "Territorial Pissings" live on MTV and that got me interested. After all was said and done, I had fallen in love with Nirvana's music, Bleach becoming my probable favorite. Nevermind was too slick-sounding and most of the songs lacked the raw power of their first album. I was sorrowed by the news of Kurt Cobain's death but I shed no tears and had no need to call an MTV-sponsored suicide hotline. Cobain wrote a bunch of great songs but I never really felt like his lyrics somehow chronicled the inner workings of my mind. Some of his lyrics were fun while others were meaningful in generic kind of way. In the end, he was a great songwriter but also a fucked-up person who was so troubled that he turned his back on his daughter, his wife, his friends, and his life.

Back in 1990, alternative music still had a modicum of alternative to it. But, ya know, I've always like music that was alternative. That is, music that most of the world's population hated. Going around telling people that you listen to old Genesis, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant is not a good way to be popular in high school, especially when there are only 200 students in toto. And everyone hated Marillion.

Ragin' Cajun

Oh man! James Carville is goin' off on the Republicans AND the Democrats on CSPAN2 right now. Awesome!

Bacon Redux

OK, you know I had to look. And I found.

Bacon-of-the-Month Club.

A Wonderful, Magical Animal

In return for having driven his drunk ass home last night, my friend took me out for breakfast this morning. And I will admit that we ate our share of pork products. Mmmm...bacon...

Lisa: No I can't! I can't eat any of them!
Homer: Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute. Lisa honey, are you saying you're *never* going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

I feel sorry for people who don't eat pork for health reasons. I don't understand people who abstain from it for ethical reasons. And people who refuse to eat pork for religious reasons are just crazy and have a good excuse for apostasy. It's just too fucking good. On our way home, I dreamt aloud of a world in which people put out dishes of bacon around their house instead of candy. My friend opined how cool it would be if the dishes floated and followed you around. I then asked him if he thought there was a Bacon-of-the-Month Club. Imagine, a nice slab of bacon delivered right to your door. Mmmm...hickory smoked bacon, peppered bacon, bacon cured between the thighs of a virgin...the possibilities are endless.

News

Well, a judge finally told the RIAA where to stick their subpoenas. According to the AP:

"WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected efforts by the recording industry to compel the nation's Internet providers to turn over names of subscribers suspected of illegally swapping music online.

The ruling from a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was a dramatic setback for the industry's controversial anti-piracy campaign. It overturned the trial judge's decision to enforce a type of copyright subpoena from a law that predates the music downloading trend." I wonder if Kazaa traffic is gonna increase because of this.

Also newsworthy is Ralph Nader's decision to run for Prez again next year. This will, no doubt, engender more argument between my landlord and I as he is dead certain that Nader cost Gore the election. hehe

More Music

Here's another humorous band to check out: Beatallica. They do Beatles tunes in a Metallica style. Their singer does a good James Hetfield. My personal fave is "The Thing That Should Not Let It Be".

Connections

I watched a couple episodes of Connections 1 by a historian of science who goes by the name of James Burke. One episode traced the development of radio technology. He ended by asking in the most prescient voice, how will our ability to communciate over greater distances and in shorter times affect us. I shall have to find out what he thinks of the Internet.

It's strange to think that I was in my 20s when a revolution began. I wonder how it compares to having lived in late 18th century England as the Industrial Revolution kicked in. Many people take the Internet for granted and can barely remember what life was like before it but, really, the revolution has only just begun. In England, the Industrial Revolution lasted about 100 years - 1770-1870 - and the Internet was foisted upon only about 10 years ago. People can polemicize all they want but we won't really know the effects of on the world of the Web for some time to come.

The second episode began with Burke demonstrating a global positioning system. But, since the show was made in 1977, the GPS he had was not like the kind you can buy at your local Best Buy today which fits in your hand. Instead it consisted of several bulky components - much like a stereo system with Dolby 5.1 Surround. Funny how in 20 years, the GPS has gone from an expensive, cumbersome item in several parts to a relatively cheap bit of electronics that fits in one hand. This episode is one of my favorites as he traces the use of the waterwheel and cams to the computer punch card. While they're no longer used, I grew up with punch cards. My dad worked for IBM and we'd take down phone messages on them. (Our phone was of the rotary type with pulse dialing.) Yeah, I'm just a computer geek.

Stephen Hawking in Effect

Everyone has got to check out MC Hawking. Heeeelarious! Here are the lyrics to "Fuck the Creationists":

Ah yeah, here we go again!
Damn! This is some funky shit that I be laying down on your ass.
This one goes out to all my homey's working in the field of evolutionary science.
Check it!

Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass.
Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve,
straight up fairy stories even children don't believe.
I'm not saying there's no god, that's not for me to say,
all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.

Fuck, fuck, fuck,
fuck the Creationists.

Break it down.
Ah damn, this is a funky jam!
I'm about ready to kick this bitch back in.
Check it.

Fuck the damn creationists I say it with authority,
because kicking their punk asses be me paramount priority.
Them wack-ass bitches say, "evolution's just a theory",
they best step off, them brainless fools, I'll give them cause to fear me.
The cosmos is expanding every second, every day,
but their minds are shrinking as they close their eyes and pray.
They call their bullshit science like the word could give them cred,
if them bitches be scientists then cap me in the head.

Bass!
Bring that shit in!
Ah yeah, that's right, fuck them all motherfuckers.
Fucking punk ass creationists trying to set scientific thought back 400 years.
Fuck that!
If them superstitious motherfuckers want to have that kind of party,
I'm going to put my dick in the mashed potatoes.
Fucking creationists.
Fuck them.

You've got your phat hip-hop beats and that goofy electronic Stephen Hawking voice doing the rapping. Caaaalassic.

The Quality of Yale Graduates Is Somewhat Lessened As of Late

 

(Photo found here.)

Alright, now I'm pissed. Naomi Wolf is really on my shitlist. I've been reading The Beauty Myth and I am disgusted with her bullshit. And I'm only 90 pages in, for fuck's sake! It starts in the first chapter in which she clearly demonstrates her ignorance of science and her excellent grasp of fallacious logic. How in the name of Jehovah did this woman graduate from Yale? She ignores facts she deems inconvenient, uses false statistics, and posits statements with no proof. The chapter on women's magazines is fucking ridiculous and she commits the sin of omission. She blathers on about the power of advertisers and their power over content in Cosmo, etc. and she makes it seem like the phenomenon is restricted to such periodicals. Fuck - all she does is reiterate the arguments of the likes of Bed Bagdikian and Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman without bothering to mention that the problem is epidemic in the mass media generally and not just women's magazines. So maybe what's happening is the result of greed as opposed to a desire by all of us evil men to keep women down. Another classic: she trumpets that anthropologists have finally disproven the idea that males are by their nature polygamous and cites research about higher primates (excepting we humans). What kind of fucking bullshit sweeping generalization is this? Certain primates exhibit a certain characteristic thusly all animals are so. Oh my fuck. Lady, I knew this was bullshit in 6th grade yet you, a Yale graduate, fail to grasp this basic bit of logic. And Wolf obviously knows nothing about science. One of the chief characteristics of science that distinguishes it from, say, religion or superstition, is that it is self-correcting. So when she quotes Darwin, the reader is supposed to assume that he was right about every fucking detail of natural selection and that it has not been in anyway modified over the course of the past 153 years to accommodate newly discovered facts and observations. Nice appeal to authority. You know what? I knew about that logical fallacy in the 6th grade too.

And what about women's responsibilities for the state of affairs she criticizes? Holy Mary Mother of Jesus! She explicitly says that she is not espousing a conspiracy yet only men are responsible for the situation despite the fact that women permeate nearly all the power structures she claims are out there oppressing women. Wolf mocks the notion that men are hapless and can't control their sexual urges while she supports the notion that women are hapless and can't help but be taken in by this "beauty myth". Everyone is a fucking dunce in her world. Then there's the way she modifies her definition of "beauty" to suit her tastes, which really irritates the living fuck out of me. One minute it is not just a notion of physical appearance and the next time around it is.

I can't wait to get to her claim that 150,000 human females die each year from anorexia. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Summers has shown this to be bullshit. Wolf's comeback? OK, so some of the statistics are false but, hey, the rest is all good. They don't put lying in lists of logical fallacies because it's understood that falsehoods require no explanation as to why they're wrong. And we're not just talking, well there were only 149,999 so I rounded up, we're talking more like one hundred (100) deaths from anorexia.

While I think that the problems Wolf discusses are serious and need to be addressed, she is not the person to do it. Her methods are...unsound. Intellectual malfeasance and there's no excuse for this.

The Return of Papa Bear

It's official. Tony Levin will be reunited with King Crimson.

 

(Photo found here.)

 

We Have Some Snow

After a rather crappy day, I spent yesterday evening actually being productive. I can now see the top of my desk in spots!

The trim for the house arrived yesterday. My landlord did some experimentation with polyurethane and today is gonna be sanding day, methinks.

I was watching CNN International and saw a plug for a show on Sunday called Design 360. What really caught my attention was that they're gonna profile Vittorio Storaro! Yeah, that probably doesn't interest you but, for me, it's like manna from heaven. Storaro is one of the best cinematographers ever. He is know for being Bernardo Bertolucci's partner in crime. He shot The Spider's Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, and The Conformist - which is a fucking masterpiece - in the 70s. in the 1990s, they collaborated on The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha. He also shot Apocalypse Now and the recent Dune mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel which was made using his Univisium technology. Needless to say, I am fired up to see the segment on him.

I got some emails from a friend who lives in Minneapolis. He's been in Rockford at the Burpee Museum of Natural History the past week. His father is an archeologist and has been overseeing the restoration of Jane, a T-Rex. They are still trying to figure out The Critter's biological age - they suspect she's from the Cretaceous period. In addition, he is learning Portuguese in anticipation of the arrival of a frined from South America. He may here in MadTown tomorrow and I'm hoping he is able to visit.

A different friend has invited me to happy hour this evening but I ain't sure if I really wanna go. In addition, she is keen on having me over to her new apartment for dinner in the near future. We shall see.

Alright, I need to head to the credit union'n'such...

The Body and the Flesh

It's your day -- a woman's day
It's your day -- a woman's day
Turning the tide, you are on the incoming wave
Turning the tide, you know you are nobody's slave
It is quite fitting to be listening to “Shaking the Tree” at the moment. This is because I’ve got women on my brain. More specifically, women’s/feminist issues and problems. Honestly, there is no surprise considering the events of a few days heretofore.

The whole mess started fairly early on Sunday when I read some of Andrea Dworkin’s writings. Personally, I found most of them to be venomous screeds full of misandry and etymological obfuscation. The lone exception was her mournful tale of having been drugged and raped at a hotel in Paris a few years ago.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I did a stint of dogsitting despite the fact that I had retired. If Michael Jordan can emerge from retirement, so can I. At least I think that was my friend’s reasoning. Another friend of mine stopped by Sunday night to drink a few cocktails and to avoid festering on her couch alone. Well, not having eaten much and gulping down bourbon as we did only served to loosen out tongues hastily.

Conversation took a turn towards the prurient after Buddy, the Black Lab-Dalmatian mix, began his customary post-prandial activity – licking his penis. Buddy is 12 years old and has not had gonads for most of his life. Nonetheless, he remains cuntstruck and tries to hump Pesto, the Airedale, often. Since Pesto is a cocktease, however, he is always denied. Apparently getting blue balls transcends the actually possession of testicles so, after failing with a bitch (as well as after dinner), he heaps generous oral pleasure upon himself. And thusly we sat there drinking bourbon & sours while Buddy licked his erection.

Although human, my companion and I are still animals and sex became the topic of choice. As the night harrowingly progressed towards its climactic drunken stupor, I was complete unaware that I would be learning more than I had bargained for. In fact, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my understanding of women and relationships was distressingly more limited than I had previously imagined.

Things began innocently enough with the usual not-getting-enough/any bitching. Then came the first lesson – my friend’s knowledge of erections was a bit hazy. I made a comment to the effect of being a schoolboy again and getting hard-ons.

”What?!?” she asked incredulously.
”You know, getting an erection in the middle of class…”
This did not register with her. “What?!?
I was a bit shocked. “Don’t you remember in, like, 4th grade, the teacher would call on some boy to come up to the blackboard and diagram a sentence or write out a multiplication table and he’d be like ‘No way!’?”
”Yeah, so?” she replied. “Maybe they just didn’t know the answer.”
”OK, sure there were times when that was the case but I’ll betcha at least 75% of the time the kid had gotten a boner and didn’t want everyone to see it.”
”What the hell were you guys thinking about in the 4th grade to get a hard-on?”
”Nothing. It’s just that, when you’re a boy, you get spontaneous erections. I’d be sitting there thinking about how much I hate math and BAM! Next thing I know, I’ve pitched a tent and I’m sliding my chair further underneath my desk.”
”Really?”
”Really.”

Honestly, I thought all women knew this. Granted, not when they were in grammar school necessarily, but a full-grown woman? Come on. As boys, we males sit in school during the day and get erections for no reason and then go to sleep at night and have wet dreams. I’ve always assumed that women knew this shit and that these things figured heavily into their view that men are simple pigs who just wanna eat, sleep, and fuck. Surely I can’t be the only one to have seen an infant boy touching his tiny pecker. We come out of the womb priapically inclined and we spend the majority of our lives trying to get back in. The penis is the center of our lives.

To summarize: As infants, we touch ourselves. A little time goes by and we’re pee racing with other boys when we’re not trying to get some girl to play doctor. Then erections start to appear out of thin air and usually at the most inopportune moments. Not long after that, we find our reproductive systems doing trial runs while we’re asleep. From there it’s all downhill towards jerking-off and chasing skirts until we die with our sexual peak at roughly the age of 18. How depressing.

The conversation continued. Yadda yadda yadda. Then came the next interesting bit. My friend’s ex-husband was one of those assholes that Andrea Dworkin feels characterizes the entire male gender. I knew that he was emotionally and verbally abusive towards her but I never knew that he’d grab her hair and basically force her to give him a blow job. I was mortified. While I might have gotten fellated more often in past relationships if I had done the same, I could never do that.

This revelation was followed by others equally shocking though, thankfully, less horrifying. She said that she’d never had an orgasm with a man. Then she revealed how controlling her ex was. For instance, she would have to ask permission from him (and would often be denied) to just go out with her friends.

I sat there listening in stunned silence. For my part, I’ve never required a girlfriend to ask for my permission to do something with her friends sans myself. WTF? All they had to say was, “Since we’ve got nothing planned, I’m going out with Jill and Julie.” OK. Well, I must take this concept of trust and recognition that she’s no my serf to an extreme because I’ve had more than one girlfriend tell me that she feels this attitude means that I don’t care about her. Each time this completely flummoxed me. The only conclusion I have been able to draw from this scenario is that most women want a benign dictator for a mate. If you’re too controlling, then you’re a malicious asshole. But if you’re not controlling enough, then that means you don’t love her. See, nice guys finish last.

Anyway, now that the events of that night are a few days removed, some of the details are lost to my mind. I will say that I am unable to say if some of the things I recall were part of a dream or actually transpired. I am hoping for the former. Whatever the case, I still feel a profound sense that Dworkin is perhaps not as crazy as I may have previously thought. Don’t get me wrong, I continue to take offense at her notion that romance = rape + wine. And while I don’t think she ever really said “All sex is rape”, one certainly gets the feeling that she’s dying to. She writes as if evolution was actually some patriarchal force that gave men first dibs on choosing genitalia and we knowingly made our selection. Dworkin constantly bemoans the fact that the penis penetrates (emphasis mine) the vagina. Indeed, at some point in her life she chose not to “have intercourse” which I presume means that she is so offended by the plumbing nature has endowed us with that she refuses to allow a lover anything into her naughty bits. I personally don’t understand how this is a blow against patriarchy. If anything, it seems to be an act of self-loathing and pointless restraint.

Alright. I don’t wanna think about the crap Andrea Dworkin has written any more tonight. As for dogsitting, I did a couple more nights but have been emancipated – finally. What’s happened this week? Aside from the usual fecal matter, not a helluva lot. Been doing a fair amount of reading - The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. It’s one of those meta-history texts which attempts to explain why the West has come to so dominate the globe. I’m only 150 pages or so in but, so far, Landes seems to be taking a different tact than Jared Diamond did in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond seemed to put more emphasis on geography than Landes (so far). Being an historian, Landes throws the reader smack-dab into the middle of the Age of Explorers. Although I’ve read about it in several places, I still cannot understand why China encysted itself in a shell of stagnation about 600 years ago. They thought themselves so be so highly advanced that everyone else was a barbarian and not worth having relations with. Harumph.

I have been doing much of my reading over at a coffee shop. As I was sitting there one day this week, a guy walked in and ogled at the book. He came over and asked if I were taking an economics class. I told him not to mistake Landes’ tome with that of Adam Smith’s. So we struck up an all-too brief conversation. It was nice to have a midday chat with a liberal artsy-fartsy type like myself.

Oh! I got an email from an old friend of mine from Chicago. He’s spent the last 8 months in Morocco and has posted some pictures at a web site for perusal. Looks like he had a blast and some of those North African women are drop-dead gorgeous.

I made the mistake of watching a thingy called Scarborough Country on MSNBC last night. The host was a complete maroon. Let’s bash Howard Dean for weaseling out of a stint in Nam but let Bush off scot-free for the same thing. Fucking hypocrite. Not that I’m a big Dean fan or anything, mind you. I must admit that I did enjoy the host ripping into Paris Hilton and her fame or infamy or whatever you wanna call her media presence. I was just thankful that someone on TV came out and called her stupid. I don’t know if this is just because of a dislike or wealthy people or only of certain wealthy people. I mean, Ms. Hilton is not dot com rich, she’s like part of a landed gentry. There’s just something about seeing wealth as a license for hedonism that gets in my craw. With the possibility to go to the best institutions of higher learning, she decided that college was a waste of time. Rather than better herself as a person, she wants to make a life of putting her body on display. And how the fuck could her daddy call the release of her little homemade porno vid onto the Internet a “tragedy”? 9/11 was a tragedy. A spoiled blonde airhead getting fucked on tape is vulgar humor.

Christ, dumb blondes are everywhere. Jessica Simpson was given a TVs how for reasons only know to a small cabal of people bent on littering television with only the most vapid, banal crap. These same people have given Jessica’s little sister a shot at fame with her own reality TV show. Then there’s Anna Nicole Smith. And Ann Coulter.

This brings me back to that schmuck of a host on MSNBC last night. What a dickhead. He gave preference to those with whom he agreed. They got the first and last words, he’d interrupt the “liberal” guest and give the soapbox back to the “conservative” guest. And he made out every question he had to be of paramount importance. Lacing each syllable with the urgency normally reserved for people in life and death situations. Every other question for the lefty either setup a straw man or false dichotomy. He was a joke. So much, in fact, that I just burst out laughing at him at one point. I was incredulous that this shit passes for journalism or learned discourse or whatever. Why does it seem like all conservative commentators on TV today lie and/or are in need of a lesson to discern logical fallacies? Despite the fact that Bill Buckley and I have little common ground ideologically, I have tremendous respect for the way that he goes about engaging issues with people. It’s easy to find someone saying that he laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement but it seems to have gone off course. Most conservative pundits share little of Buckley’s class, reasoning skills, and vocabulary. Instead they turn to Jerry Springer for help in these areas. The discourse is not civil – it’s about wrapping oneself in the flag and yelling at the opponent. It’s the kind of shit that goes down in a schoolyard.

I’m outta here…

Bitch

I am such a dumbshit. I got suckered into doing an indeterminate bit of housesitting. The Pollack is off to Sioux Falls and had Sussy to cover for him. Then last night Suss left a voice mail saying something about his dad so he wouldn't be able to dogsit. Then the phone rings this morning and, against my better judgement, I answer it. It's The Pollack and he sweet talks me...yadda yadda...and I am going over there tonight. He'll get a hold of me tomorrow morning to gimme the skinny on the rest of the week. (He's gone til Friday.) Fuck me - why do I bother to answer the phone? It only brings bad tidings.

About a Boy

At the behest of a friend, I took "the most scientifically grounded and customized personality assessment on the Internet." Ah, the power of the Internet. My results:

Who You Are
You're smart, insightful, and have an insatiable curiosity about life. (Well, they got this bit right.) In fact, you're always studying problems and finding ways to fix them. You have a talent for rising above the details of life and seeing the big picture. You have a vision for how to live the "good life" so you refuse to settle long-term for a boring job or doing something just because it's expected of you. You have good friends, but you're also a pretty independent guy. You're not someone who "wears his heart on his sleeve" so those close to you don't always know how you feel. (Fuck that. Almost every girlfriend I've ever had could read me like a book.) Still, they're drawn to you by your fun and easygoing style.

What's Dating All About to You?
You believe dating and life in general is about learning and growing as a person. You're a great listener, so women tend to enjoy going out with you. However, it's hard for you to have a real intellectual connection with an attractive woman. Hopefully, you've found a way to "go with the flow" in dating as you already do in other parts of your life.

You face 2 major challenges in finding the love of your life. First, because you're shy, you feel like you have to be someone else or "wear a mask" to go out and meet new people. (Sheesh! Haven't these people ever read any Erving Goffman?) You're left feeling like a distant observer, and women find it hard to truly understand you. (Hell, I don't even understand me.) Second, although having a vision of what you want can be helpful, the risk is that your high standards can get in the way of loving a real-life imperfect woman.

Quirks Women Notice
You have a pretty even-tempered personality and may not have any especially annoying or quirky habits. (Oh, that's just rich...) Of course, seeming to be "perfect" could be seen as a flaw by some, in which case you may just want to pretend to have a bad habit!

Who I'm Looking For:
She'll Be an Enigma
You're looking for a woman who's smart, insightful, and has an insatiable curiosity about life. The two of you could share a very interesting and exciting intellectual connection. Getting closer emotionally takes time, since she's an independent and sometimes shy person by nature. But she's worth the effort to get to know! Your best strategy is to see her "in action" when you go out with friends but still find quiet time with her to talk. You'll discover she's a good conversationalist, especially if you get her talking about books, current events, or any of her many interests and hobbies.

My Ideal:
You don't expect your partner to be in a good mood all the time. You understand that sometimes your partner will be down, get pessimistic or worry too much. These days are balanced by the many good days the two of you will share. In fact, you share a number of positive qualities, including:

1) No strong similarities were detected, which suggests that you may be more attracted to certain "opposite qualities." Please read the next sections to see if you may be seeking someone with different or opposite qualities to balance your own habits and style.

Of the women who have taken this test:
Exactly my type - 9%
Mostly my type: - 16%
Somewhat my type - 16%

Mostly NOT my type - 54%
Definitely NOT my type - 5%.

Yay for me.

Tiresias Was Right

Courtesy of Reuters via Yahoo:

LONDON (Reuters) - Wanted: women to test new orgasm machine.

No, really. An American surgeon who has patented a device that triggers an orgasm has begun a clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) in the United States and is looking for female volunteers.

"I thought people would be beating my door down to become part of the trial," pain specialist Dr Stuart Meloy told New Scientist magazine on Wednesday.

But so far only one woman has completed the first stage of the trial, with apparently breathtaking results, and a second has agreed to take part.

Meloy, of Piedmont Anesthesia and Pain Consultants in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is hoping to find eight more volunteers willing to have electrodes inserted in their spine and be connected to a pacemaker-size machine implanted under the skin to heighten their sexual pleasure.

The married woman who tested the machine, dubbed an orgasmatron, had not had an orgasm for four years. But during the nine days she used it, she had several.

"She even told me she had the first multiple orgasm of her life using the device," said Meloy.

He stumbled on the unexpected side-effect while using a spinal cord stimulator a few years ago to treat a patient suffering with severe back pain. The woman had already had back surgery for degenerative disk disease and fusion surgery.

When Meloy placed the electrodes into a specific spot on her spine to find nerve bundles carrying pain signals to the brain, she moaned with delight.

"You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that," he quoted her as saying.

The tiny impulses of electricity applied to the electrodes seemed to have turned on the patient's orgasm button.

Although the device has been compared to the orgasmatron featured in the 1973 Woody Allen film "Sleeper," Meloy envisions patients using it temporarily to retrain their sexual response.

The women in the trial described it as "really excellent foreplay."

Although some medical experts are skeptical about the procedure and say a vibrator can produce the same results, Meloy believes it could help to improve sexual response in women who cannot have orgasms and might even help men as well.

A full implant of the device would cost about 13,000 pounds ($22,000).

"I don't see it any differently from procedures such as breast implants," Meloy told the magazine.

Good News!

The "Honorable" Herr Scalia has recused himself from the Supreme Court's hearing of a case seeking to ban the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

Click here for more.

New Johnny Cash!!

The Johnny Cash box set, Unearthed, has been released! Here's a review. Now run out to your locally-owned music retailer and grab a copy for me. For anyone here in Madison, might I recommend MadCity Music.

Tech Industry News

For all you tech geeks: Dell has begun re-routing some corporate tech support calls back to call centers here in the US. I also found this site giving an in-depth look at the debacle of I.P. (intellectual property) lawsuits over that Unix core involving that unholy trio of IBM, Red Hat, and Caldera.

More Local Hijinks

Pesky college kids.

An Amazing Journey Ends

Trey Gunn has left King Crimson. Will Tony Levin return or will another Fripp disciple take his place? Only the Shadow knows...

 

Put the Star Wars Kid in Episode 3!!

Click Here

My First Ever CD Release Party!

Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 14:42:10 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
From: "christine costanzo" {chcostanzo@earthlink.net}
To: ********@yahoo.com
Subject: Christine Costanzo--CD release party

Hi ****,

I just wanted to invite you to my Cd release party this Sunday at Cafe Montmarte (7pm). John Hasbrouck will open up. I'll put you on the guest list.

And thanks again for the reviews--they were my first official ones so I really appreciated them.

Christine

Powwow To Celebrate the Crandon Mine Victory

The Forest County Potawatomi Community and the Sokaogon Chippewa Community Mole Lake Band invite you to A Powwow to Celebrate the Crandon Mine Victory.

Powwow to Celebrate the Crandon Mine Victory
Saturday, December 6, 2003
1:00 PM
at the Brown County Arena 1901 S. Oneida Avenue Green Bay
Grand entries 1:00 PM & 7:00 PM Celebration Feast at 5:00 PM

MC - Artley Skenandore Head Male - FCPC Male - Gordon Waube Head Female - Sokaogon Youth - Tashena Van Zile The event will feature 11 invited drums (one from each Wisconsin tribe). Other drums are welcome. Honorariums.

In order to help plan this memorable feast, kindly RSVP to 1-800-241-7053.

The Naomi Wolf Myth

Last month, feminist author Naomi Wolf wrote an essay entitled "The Porn Myth" in which she argues that the prevalence of pornography via the Internet has magically transformed men into automatons disinterested in and incapable of enjoying the company of real women. Sex bloggers everywhere went ballistic and returned Wolf’s anecdotal evidence in kind.

After having read Wolf’s essay, I felt the need to laugh. I found her assertions to be hilarious. I’ve never read any of her books and wondered if all of her work is equally facile. Perhaps my expectations were unfair. Seeing as how she is a notable figure on the feminist scene and, perhaps, on the intellectual landscape of the U.S., I thought that she would be able to do something other than spew aphorisms. It’s not that I consider her idea to be beyond the bounds of reason, but rather because I would expect someone with her credentials to present her conclusion as a possibility rather than a truth given the evidence she provides. Had she written, “I’ve noticed on college campuses that some young women are feeling like they cannot compete against pornography for men’s attention. This is disturbing and I wonder if it is indicative of a larger trend...” my inquisitive mind would have jumped into overdrive. What would account for these feelings? How can we find out if it is more widespread? But she didn’t. “The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity." Where’s the evidence? What she did was to use an unrepresentative sample of college women and extrapolate from it the workings of all men. If pornography does have such an effect, is it only upon young men? What about, say, a 40 year-old guy? How about non-college educated men? White vs. black vs. Latino? Wolf notes: “In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.” Is she inferring that 40 year-old men do not view porn? Or that they do but the effect on them is different? Why would this be? This is intellectual treachery and Wolf ought be roundly castigated by everyone regardless on which side of the he or she sits. By ignoring so much she deals a blow to an otherwise much-needed endeavor, feminism. Well, equality feminism.

Women are due equal pay for equal pay, rape is horrendous and must be stomped out, women have the right to pursue a career and not be bound to the home if they so choose, etc. There can be no doubt that feminism generally has achieved some great things and changed our society for the better. But to say something like, “’Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.” is retarded. It kowtows to the notion that human beings are tabla rasas and denies the ever-increasing evidence of a human nature which is forever engaged in a pas de deux with nurture. Reading Wolf’s tract and some choice quotes, I get the impression that she views all the wrongs in the world as an instant drink – like Tang. Just take men and add pornography.

Such a view has led to some unfortunate consequences which only acts as barriers towards gender equality. For instance, sex has become disassociated from rape. Steven Pinker: “But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed.” Related to this are sexual harassment laws and the politically correct notion that looking at a woman is potential harassment. This dehumanizes interaction between men and women and transmogrifies them into a series of sterile Lockean contracts.

The porn myth is really that pornography can do much more than make a guy horny. Wolf’s words are degrading to men because they indicate a belief that men are inherently stupid, unable as we are to distinguish between a picture of a woman and the women we encounter everyday in real life. At best, Wolf implies that men are slaves to, often times, destructive urges and have no self-control. Thusly we are primal and lack the civilizing palliatives of intellect and restraint. That shit didn’t work for describing black people and it doesn’t work for describing men.

Since Wolf provides nothing more than anecdotal evidence to bolster her argument, let’s try a mental exercise. Can we think of any other factor which could be the cause of Wolf’s observations? I find it disturbing that she never actually defines by women not being able to “compete” with porn. She doesn’t even have the courtesy to give us an anecdote. What does this mean? Are young women unable to get dates? Do men deny them physical contact? Do men come out and tell them, “No thanks, you don’t look like Jenna Jameson.”? What competition are these women losing exactly?

So let’s put on our thinking caps and try to imagine other causes for her (debatable) effect. E.g. - could it be the case that abstinence among women in college is up? Think about it, men are constantly in musth at that age and at the most sexually competitive point in their lives. So, if young women are less inclined to have sex, could young men be turning to porn and masturbation as an alternative to never hitting a home run or getting a bad case of blue balls? Again, I present this as merely a hypothesis with no data to bolster it but it stands on the same ground as Wolf’s claims. Similarly, are messages of abstinence and fear of AIDS promoting “safe sex” (ie – masturbation) among men?

Are the women who are doing the complaining speaking of relationships they deem as “serious” or of an inability to get a one-night-stand? Are young college women making demands in their serious relationships that were not made by similar women of Wolf’s generation? Could society-at-large (outside of pornography) being promulgating messages that would discourage sex outside of marriage? Let us here again take into account AIDS and the promotion of “traditional” family values.

Personally, I do not feel that Wolf’s claims are evidence of a larger trend. Even if they were, to paint a simplistic cause and effect relationship as she has done is ludicrous. Like basically everything else in life, a drastic change in a large population would be the result of the interaction of a number of factors working in concert.

Ms. Wolf’s essay is an act of stupidity by someone of obvious intelligence. That she makes conclusions based solely on ill-explained anecdotes is intellectual nonfeasance. It is an atrocity in the fight for gender equality. Such tripe does little to encourage others to take seriously any other ideas she may have which could very well have great merit. Instead of debunking a “porn myth” she merely creates her own.

I Am a Godless Heathen

As I watch footage of the damage wreaked upon Istanbul by the various bombs that exploded there today and of the burning shells of HUMVs in Iraq, I can honestly say I just wish it would end. The whole mess. I want the Iraqis to have their country back, our soldiers out of there, and peaceful bartering for oil to begin. Why do so many people hate Americans? What caused all of this to happen? While I concede that the problem is complex and the causes many, I still can’t help but feel that religion has a primary role in this mess.

The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to agree with Gore Vidal:

”The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal--God is the Omnipotent Father--hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good.”

I am not a militant atheist and have no desire to go around chiding religious folk. Rather, I’m inclined to let people believe in their deity of choice. However silly and degrading to human dignity I find it that a person would actually believe that there’s an old, bearded man in the sky directing the universe, the mere belief is rather benign. It’s when, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out many a time, when religion is a tag foisted by one group upon another that things get messy. It encourages and justifies repugnant actions.

One of my favorite authors, the late Douglas Adams, waxed philosophical on an absurdity in our society:
”…[religion] has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not?--because you're not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, "I respect that."”

So what’s an atheist to do? I still have to live with my neighbors and my life would be hell if I went around lambasting their beliefs. On the other hand, giving religion free-reign to label and kill as it pleases is no good either. I suppose I’ll continue to do what I’ve always done – defend myself as the need arises. Unlike some Xtians, we atheists don’t go around to people’s home uninvited prodding them on eschatological issues. So you won’t find me at your door asking if you’ve come to terms with immanent explosion of the Sun in 4 billion years or not. However, if an Xtian comes to my door unannounced and starts asking me whether I’ve accepted Jesus, they can expect holy hell.

The last time this happened, I was coming home from the store. As I was parking, I saw the proselytizers approaching the front door. I took my sweet time in getting out of the car and grabbing my things so I wouldn’t have to deal with them. In my stead, Pete got to speak with them. Upon answering the door, Pete was asked whether or not he’d taken some time that day to think about what’s going to happen to him when the world ends. It having been a weekday evening, he replied that he had not as his mind was busy with more mundane things such as work, bills, and generally dealing with the everyday trials and tribulations of day-to-day living. I would have told them that I won’t be alive in 4 billion years so, no, I haven’t really given thought to the end of our world. And then I would have taken it from there...

Saruman 86'd

I'm dismayed. I have just read that all footage of Christopher Lee as Saruman in Return of the King has been exorcised. What a bummer. Lee is awesome and his presence in any film in striking. What a shame. He had some great lines in the first two films such as "You will taste man flesh!" Here's the dope from the Beeb:

Lee, 81, who plays the wizard Saruman in the trilogy, said he had expected to appear in seven minutes' worth of climactic scenes.

"Of course I am very shocked, that's all I can say," he told ITV1's This Morning on Wednesday.

Lee fans have now started an online petition to restore the scenes.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm only telling you this because it has been revealed on the internet, someone has talked and it certainly wasn't me," he told the UK TV show.

"If you want to know why you would have to ask the company New Line or director Peter Jackson and his associates because I still don't really know why.

"I can't say any more because I signed a confidentiality agreement and I honoured my word."

Asked if he would attend the première, he said: "No, what's the point? What's the point of going? None at all."

Lee, who also appears as Count Dooku in the Star Wars films, said appearing in the first two Lord of the Rings movies had been "a dream come true".

Tempests in Teacups and Breaking Butterflies on Wheels

"But the lover of intelligence must be patient with those who cannot readily share his passion. Some pangs the mind will inflict upon the heart. It is a mistake to think that men are united by elemental affections. Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up."
---John Erskine, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

I spent some time a few nights ago engaging in my daily routine of checking email and surfing over to various web sites to keep updated on the activities of my favorite rock bands. I had read last week that Phil Collins was to make a revelation on Monday so I first I went to Genesis' web page to get the straight dope. (He was announcing a farewell tour, of sorts.) After giving the forum there a once over, I headed to Jethro Tull's home on the web. At the top of the page was a link to something Ian Anderson had written about some previous comments of his regarding the American flag. Funny. I hadn't heard anything about any such comments. Hastily, I clicked on the link and read. I was shocked.

Shocked that he felt the need to issue a public apology. So I went out onto the Net and found the full article which has caused the commotion. The part which seems to have stirred the ire of many of my fellow Americans was:

"I hate to see the American flag hanging out of every bloody station wagon, out of every SUV, every little Midwestern house in some residential area. It's easy to confuse patriotism with nationalism."

After having read the article, I felt clueless as to why there was all the hub-ub, Bub. I'm an American and I also happen to live in the Midwest. It seems that I would be a prime candidate for taking offense at the comments. But I took no offense whatsoever. What I did offense at, however, was the knee-jerk reactions of some of my fellow country(wo)men.

The apology echoed sentiments expressed in the interview itself, namely, that he has great respect for Americans and at the end of the statement, Anderson asked fans to share their ideas about what can be done to improve the image of Americans in the eyes of non-Americans. To do so, one could email him directly or go to the message board at Tull's site. Reading the messages, I got the impression that most of the poster were engaged in a concerted effort to avoid any attempt at amelioration. I was hard-pressed to find anything that wasn't rebuttal by epithet.

I would urge my readers to read the article in its entirety and it can be found below. Anyone with even a modicum of intelligence will read the article and understand that his remarks were not anti-American, American bashing, or whatever jingoistic piece of bullshit you want to call it. He clearly states that he has the "highest regard" for the American people in contrast to much of the world. His line of reasoning begins with two problems: 1) A great portion of the world's population hates Americans and 2) that there is a war going on in Iraq which he sees as being unjust. For Anderson, these two problems are intertwined. In addressing the first issue, nowhere does Anderson indicate he has any animosity towards Americans generally. The bit about the flags here people, relates to the perceptions of others, specifically Europeans. He addresses the issue of displaying the flag and contrasts when/where Europeans do so with American displays. Europeans have a slightly different history when compared to us Americans and thusly the exhibition of the flag takes on different meanings for them. Ergo, when every SUV and house in America has a flag waving from it, some people associate this behavior with less than savory elements of humanity's past.

Nowhere does Anderson make any blanket statement about Americans being a bunch of maroons or any such thing. What he does say is that, in order to help their own cause, Americans might think about how the display of the Old Glory is perceived by foreigners. For the long run, what's the best way to get people to not want to fly planes into your buildings? Is it by killing them or putting them into perpetual fear of being killed? Or perhaps by building bridges and understanding one another to reach, at the least, détente?

In the aftermath of 9/11, the company I worked at gave out pins with the American flag on them. It became increasingly rare to find a lapel that was not adorned with such a pin. Outside of the workplace, the flag popped up everywhere, as Anderson noted. Were these people being patriotic? To be sure. Was there also an attendant attitude, on the part of some of these people, that this gave the U.S. carte blanche to, as Ann "Thrax" Coulter said, "...invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? Most definitely. For many, even most, I dare say, of my co-workers, shrouding oneself in the flag was like their fulfillment of any perceived sense of civic duty. Trying to understand why terrorists would want to fly planes into the WTC was unnecessary. Looking into the long, tense history of the relationship between Islam and Christianity was unthinkable. For these people, donning the Stars & Stripes was enough. But Anderson is right, it's not enough.

As I read the posts at the Tull message forum, I was saddened. A certain Ryan White finds it necessary to yell "God Bless America" at the end of his posts as well as to label anyone who disagrees with him a "liberal". He goes on in one post to generalize about all of these so-called "liberals" by saying that they love to commit "ad hominum" (sic) attacks only to finish his comments by labeling another poster a "moron". Aside from Mr. White's blatant lack of intelligence, two things disturbed me greatly. The first was the prevalent attitude that, once Osama bin Laden is brought to justice or killed, the terrorist problem is effectively solved. This is curing a symptom but not the cause. Terrorists are not born, they're made. Al-Queda is not the lone repository of people willing to kill Americans. This is what Anderson was alluding to in his comments. No one person is the cause of anti-American sentiment in the world thusly it's gonna take a long time and the efforts of millions, including we Americans, to change the situation. For better or for worse, the United States is the most powerful country on this planet. By saying, "These are powerful forces that folks are playing with. To have that power is something you can't take lightly. You have to realize there are people out there whose lives you may affect by what you do.", Anderson is imploring the American government to take on the role of a steward and not that of a bully. His opinion on the matter hasn't changed since 1978 when he said: "That's one thing money buys: the right to acquire responsibility for things or people or animals or whatever."

To answer his question about what can be done, I would say that the most important thing is for Americans to be intelligent.

1) Approach those who are different than you as a chance to learn something, to experience something new.
2) If you go abroad, don't rush to the nearest McDonalds, for Christ's sake. Be open-minded and engage the local culture.
3) Think critically for a change and don't believe everything you hear. Just because CNN or Faux News says something doesn't mean it's so. Did you really lose your job to a foreigner or are you taking Rush Limbaugh's word for it?
4) Understand that what we Americans do collectively has an impact around the world. Pollution does not discriminate upon whom it has effects.
5) Realize that a government and its people are distinct in many ways.
6) Stop calling people with whom you disagree names as a first resort.
7) Stop thinking that 9/11 was the worst fate to befall a nation ever. It wasn't. So quit bitching about any perceived lack of sympathy from the rest of the world. We Americans have no problem drowning ourselves in schadenfreude when it comes to our own. Witness Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson, et al It was a tragedy whose causes go beyond OBL and we have to comprehend this to make sure it never happens again.

The Genesis of the Controversy

The following is an interview with Ian Anderson, leader of the band Jethro Tull printed in the Asbury Park Press. Some of the more ascerbic sentiments expressed herein brought the opprobrium of many flag-waving Americans down upon him. Anderson has since written a clarification and apology which can be found at Tull's web page.

The Interactive Ian Anderson
By Mark Voger, Staff Writer

"Americans are in a dreadful pickle at the moment, being they're the villains of the planet as far as roughly half the population of the world is concerned. Half the world pretty much hates Americans."

Ian Anderson -- the Scottish-born, English-bred singer-songwriter who usually leads Jethro Tull, but is now in the midst of a thought-provoking solo tour -- insists he isn't America bashing. He's just telling it like it is.

Anderson will admit, though, to being less than a fan of President Bush -- or British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for that matter.

"Bush and Blair haven't got the faintest clue what a real war is," Anderson says. "As a couple of guys who have at their disposal considerable forces in the way of weapons of mass destruction, it seems somewhat cynical to be engaging in an act of invasion on foreign soil without the sanction of the international community and with guns blazing. Frankly, I hope both of them have an early demise."

Why is the flute-twirling rocker behind the '70s FM classics "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath" and "Bungle in the Jungle" suddenly waxing political? Actually, it isn't so sudden. Anderson has always been that most rare of rockers -- an articulate one -- as evidenced by his lyrics, interviews and song introductions. His "Rubbing Elbows With Ian Anderson" tour, coming to Red Bank on Friday, is the musician's chance to finally let it rip verbally.

In each city, Anderson will invite a local radio or TV personality and several audience members to join him onstage for an evening of conversation and music. There'll be Q&As, acoustic performances of Tull songs and, most interestingly, a local musician performing an original song backed by Anderson's band.

The format sounds either novel or nutty. Anderson says it can be a little of both. "It is very much an improvised situation," he says. "It works around a format, but we don't know what the content is going to be. We try and find a local singer-songwriter who can get up on stage and is looking for a good backing group for the evening. We try to fulfill that need."

How did Anderson come to create the format?
Says the musician: "As a direct result of 35 years of doing radio station visits and the occasional TV thing, you do build up a catalog of experiences. I thought it would be interesting to take that visit as a guest in somebody else's domain, turn it around and bring the radio guys into my world. And to give the audience -- rather than the radio listener or TV viewer -- the opportunity to participate to some little extent in the show."

Anderson meets with the local radio or TV personalities on show days to go over the format. "It's important that they're relaxed," he says. "The first two or three minutes of the show are rough, because they're a little anxious walking out in front of a live audience. Even though many of them have done this before, it's usually limited to, 'Hey, Cleveland, let's hear it for Jethro Tull!' You know, the rabble-rousing DJ moment that you get before a lot of rock concerts. "But beyond that, to actually have to think and provide intelligent commentary and take questions from the audience is something they may not be used to."

A Missed Rehearsal
The musical guests present a different set of challenges. "So far, it's all worked out apart from one person," Anderson recalls. "He was supposed to be there for 5 o'clock rehearsal to run through his song, which we'd carefully written out and learned. At the last minute, we were informed, 'You know, I can't get off work 'til 7 p.m.' "At 7 p.m., the doors open and the audience walks in the theater! It's a little bit late. So that poor, unfortunate guest couldn't make it. Luckily, we had a stagehand, a girl who just happened to be a singer-songwriter. With about five minutes of quick rehearsal, she was shoehorned into the show. She was great.

"It's really rewarding to see these folks' faces light up when they finish their song. I mean, it's a mixture of relief, abject terror and sort of orgasmic release. "It's been always a great little part of every show, giving our musical guest the opportunity to feel good for four minutes. And then," Anderson adds with a laugh, "back to their wretched, miserable, struggling-musician lives."

Anderson's co-host in Red Bank will be Terrie Carr, program director at WDHA in Cedar Knolls. "It sounds like it's going to have almost like a 'Storytellers' vibe," Carr says (referring to the VH1 program of that title). "Ian's such an intelligent, witty guy. I'm looking forward to the spontaneity of it."

The musical talent will be Jeff Gaynor, Dumont, who gigs in the Bergen County area. "Over the moon doesn't begin to describe it," Gaynor says of his response to this opportunity. "Ian Anderson is one of my greatest musical heroes. Just to meet him would have been incredible, but to actually perform with him is beyond description."

The question of which topics emerge during the "Rubbing Elbows" chat segments is what sets Anderson off on a diatribe about the ongoing American-led war in Iraq. "I like to sound the audience out a little bit," Anderson says. "I usually bring your president into the conversation at some point, and perhaps Tony Blair. I like to hear the audience divided, as they always are, over the pros and cons of Bush policy and the Iraq so-called war."

Anderson scoffs. "I mean, you know, to call it a war is to attempt to dignify a spurious invasion as something that sounds rather grand. As a career-molding war for you-know-who. I mean, to call it a war is just a disgrace. "But that's not an area that I go into in any depth (during the shows). For a lot of people, that's dangerous talk, because they are keen supporters of flag-waving nationalism and, dare I say, retribution and revenge, which is what they see this as being. I find that utterly deplorable.

"I hate to see the American flag hanging out of every bloody station wagon, out of every SUV, every little Midwestern house in some residential area. It's easy to confuse patriotism with nationalism."

Overseas View
This, Anderson warns, is one reason America has become unpopular overseas. "Unfortunately, the way the world sees it," Anderson says, "we don't look kindly on the flag-waving stuff anymore. In Europe, the only time you see flag-waving is at soccer games when people beat the (excrement)out of each other. A lot of flag-waving goes on there. "But most of the time, we keep the flag-waving out of normal society these days, because we know that it just engenders old animosities -- we old Europeans who are a little sadder and wiser as a result of having the (excrement) beaten out of us a number of times, and our cities and national monuments destroyed. We're probably a little more sanguine about this than the very sensitive American psyche, which has not experienced or had to endure these offenses on its home turf."

Some Americans may disagree in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, though 56-year-old Anderson is referring to the bombing of England and other European countries during World War II.

'Good Ambassadors'
"I sympathize with the American people," he says, "who I have the highest regard for as being warm, invitational and mostly pretty good ambassadors around the world. The fact that they, we, count them as being the bad guys -- flag-waving ain't gonna do it.

"We have to work over the next two or three generations, not the next two or three months or two or three years. We're talking about a multi-generational, skillfully worked job of re-education, of stepping out into the world gently and showing a kinder and a more human face. We have to correct the misunderstandings. We have to correct the prejudices. And we won't correct them by sending in the tanks and the guns and the bombs and the missiles. We are all going to have to learn that sad lesson -- that what was done in Iraq is the wrong thing. We had Saddam Hussein pretty much under control. The lesser of evils at the time was to play the game; send the weapons inspectors back in; do the stuff via the United Nations. To do what was done by Blair and Bush is, I think, a great sin for which I suspect both of them will pay in terms of career and reputation in the way that it is written up in history.

But some folks, just like Sigfried and Roy, will do anything for the show-biz buzz. And the show-biz buzz of being out there doing the big, spectacular Las Vegas show with a bunch of poor animals -- you know, so Bush and Blair will do the same thing for the different buzz that comes with the power of political leadership.

"These are powerful forces that folks are playing with. To have that power is something you can't take lightly. You have to realize there are people out there whose lives you may affect by what you do."

Porn Shui

Porn Shui: noun, refers to the art of positioning oneself in one's office or cubicle so that one can surf porn undetected. Usage: "I have great porn shui- I face the hallway and the desk behind me is vacant."

Rush to Judgment

This quote is attributed to Rush Limbaugh: "There's nothing good about drug use. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."

This being the case, Rush should voluntarily submit to being sent up. If he had a single shred of integrity, he'd walk into his local courthouse with hands extended pleading to be put in jail for the good of society. I haven't listened to his show but there can be little doubt that money and whiteness can squash any estoppel.

I Am Not P.J. Crook

f

I'm really getting into the work of P.J. Crook. Her work is definitely surreal. (I love how "Expresso" tips a hat to Magritte.) Don't get me wrong, it also concedes to naturalism, but only just. There is perspective but it's rigid and angular. And I love how faces are more impressionistic than realistic. Times like these really make me wish I had even one artistic bone in my body.

The Ties That Bind

Put some Onkel Fish on and realized that continuing to write might be fun.

Did anyone catch that Jessica Lynch made-for-TV movie last night? I didn't see it all but my roommate had it on and I didn't feel like moving. As the credits rolled, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Joel Ransom was the cinematographer. For those of you asking who Joel Ransom is, he shot many an episode of The X-Files. So it would at least look pretty. Well, after the scene where Ms. Lynch is captured I left the room having lost interest in the story. But I will say the battle scene was shot and edited really well. It had that Black Hawk Down look which, in turn, had that Saving Private Ryan look. You know - very crisp with a little motion blur. It seems like all shoot 'em up scenes are shot this way nowadays. If I remember correctly, Kaminski modified the shutters on his cameras to 45° in order to achieve the effect. Like I said below, he's a genius.

I also watched a documentary on HBO about that hostage-taking incident in that Moscow theater last year. While not as interesting as something by Errol Morris stylistically, it was pretty interesting nonetheless. I was fascinated by the thoughts of the hostages and their conversations with the Chechen women who had bombs strapped around their waists. It seemed that these women didn't want to die anymore than the hostages despite their leaders' rhetoric. And those 2 goofballs who wandered into the theater. Some guy and a young woman - both were shot. I wish the program had said more about them - who they were, why they would have done such a thing, etc. but, alas, it did not.

A few days ago, I caught another good documentary on Black Starz. It was entitled Last of the Mississippi Jukes. The movie first gave a brief history of the juke joint and then gives a brief profile of Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero in Clarksdale, MS, a modern juke joint. The rest of the film was dedicated to the Subway Lounge, a joint stuck in the basement of a dilapidated hotel in Jackson.

The owner, musicians, and patrons were interviewed and gave their stories of the importance of the Subway in the community. The lounge is in the old Summers Hotel which was the first black-owned hotel in the city. Many black musicians and members of the Civil Rights movement stayed there so the building has great historical significance.

As a profile of the place and of a bit of Southern culture, it was interesting. That the place served an important function in its community was beyond doubt. But why was it important? Why is the preservation of a hotel where the first Freedom Riders stayed important? What is significant about a hole-in-the-wall bar that larger, corporate venues lack? There were so many "larger" issues that I wanted to know more about. Why do human beings preserve their pasts? How does the community of the Subway Lounge compare to the community of the various casinos in the area that also offer live music? To what part of the human psyche does a place like the Subway speak?

I accept that such questions were out of the purview of the film. Still, the questions remain. So, when it was finished, I went onto the Internet and watched another documentary about the Wooten family called Sweet Is the Day. The Wooten family have been shape note singing for generations and the film demonstrated the role of singing in the family - how it serves as a unifying force. Now, maybe I'm being a dork here, but I'm still curious as to how music can serve that function whether it be in a family or in a community. What's really going on in these situations? Are families/communities without such ties worse than those who do?

Films'n'Such

I'm giving serious thought to heading down to ChiTown one day this week to catch a flick or 3. Not only is the director's cut of Alien playing, but the new Matrix flick is showing on an IMAX screen out in Lincolnshire. And there's Bubba Ho-Tep too. You know what else is playing? La jatee, the short that 12 Monkeys was based upon. And then we have a Polish film festival going on down at the Copernicus Center. Fuck me! And the Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival on top of it. I may a breeder but film festivals of any ilk are just cool. Mayhaps I can convince a friend to head down there with me.

Looking ahead, I see that there are some flicks with potential hitting the big screens. Ollie Stone's Alexander opens on 11/5/2004. Rodrigo Prieto is shooting. (He was the DP on Frida and 8 Mile, among other films.) I wonder what happened between Ollie and Bob Richardson...Speaking of Bob, he's shooting Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a biopic of Howard Hughes starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Hmmm...What else? Tim Burton returns in a few months with Big Fish. Another PKD short story is hitting the big screen - Paycheck. John Woo is directing and Uma Thurman stars. Personally, I think Woo's American films have been shite but, like a moth to the flame, I'll always go see a flick based on a PKD story. And I do have that infatuation with Uma. The next installment of the Harry Potter series comes out next summer. Gary Oldman is playing Sirius Black so that should be cool. I sure hope they leave what little conflict there is between him and Severus Snape in the book intact because Oldman vs. Rickman should be classic. On the documentary side of things, Errol Morris returns in February with Fog of War. Everyone's favorite Canadian goofball, David Cronenberg, has Painkillers on tap for us. Janusz Kaminski is shooting Spielberg's next opus, The Terminal. I don't care how bad Lost Souls is, Kaminski is probably the best DP working in the biz right now. Speaking of which, Vittorio Storaro shot the new Exorcist flick. No doubt it will be a waste of his talent (and Stellan Skarsågrd's) but I gotta see it. Darius Khondji photographed Wimbeldon. The story of a tennis player doesn't interest me but I'll prolly see it anyway. Khondji's work on Se7en was so awesome and then he goes and does all these crappy flicks like The Beach. Going back to fave directors, Terry Gilliam's work on The Brothers Grimm continues unabated while Robert Altman gives us The Company starring Neve Campbell. Curiously enough, she is given a writing credit.

Well, that oughta keep me busy in the sinny next year.

I've been listening to Porcupine Tree this morning and it ain't doing good things to my head. Let's see here...ah yes, let's hear some Pavement. There was a thread about the lyrics to PT's In Absentia up at the G forum in which some guy asked about the lyrics. Steve Wilson doesn't like to say what individual songs are about but someone posted an interview excerpt in which he related his fascination with "...people on the fringes, on the edges of humanity and society. I have an interest in serial killers, child molesters and wife beaters - not in what they did but in the psychology of why, what caused them to become unhinged and twisted? Why are they unable to empathize? It's [In Absentia] sort of a metaphor - there's something missing, a black hole, a cancer in their soul. It's an absence in the soul." So the guy who made the post replies that he cannot listen to the songs relating to this theme for reasons of "personal ethics". What the fuck? I asked him what he meant and he reiterated the spiel about personal ethics and that a sibling of his was raped at a young age. OK, so why does this preclude him from listening to songs that ponder why the person who raped his sibling would do such a thing? Like the woodcutter said, I just don't understand. Harrumph.