*

...or so say those lovable, rapidly aging Gen-X'ers at Married To The Sea. Go visit them. The kids can still knock one out of the park a few times a month.

Friday Night Fish Fry (!)

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Been awhile. Happy birthday, Frank! (21 December 1940).



This is the wider world's introduction to FZ and the Mothers of Invention. First tune---grand slam in every way, from attitude to lyrics to arrangement to teen beat. I wonder whether the US counterculture would have been different had Zappa's management and the Verve label had invested several-thousand bucks in strategic payola and disc jockey blowjobs to get this track on the AM radio in fall 1966 (and backed by "Trouble Every Day"). There's a lot on this album that sounds not unlike the Stones. But... fat chance. Have you ever heard lyrics like this on any commercial or NPR radio station?

You know the routine---jam in the earbuds and crank it up to where snot starts running down your upper lip. My first version of this tune and the album it's on was vinyl:

Hungry Freaks, Daddy, The Mothers of Invention (1966, from "Freak Out," Verve V6-5005-2X), embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

"As the nation searches for answers..."

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The title of this post quotes a rhetorical formulation that I'd already heard too many times long before the nation once again began last week to "search for answers" to the problem of "evil." The media love this formulation because it suggests that mass murders committed with military-style firearms are mysteries (like superstorms!!!) that not even reporters and celebrity pundits can shed light upon. It's convenient---helps editors avoid the assaults that right-wing thought leaders launch against facts, logic, and human decency.

Just because "Wayne LaPierre" goes on TV and presents his vile, deranged point of view, like he did this morning, it does not follow that such opinions "complicate" the task of legislating sane and reasonable arms-control policies. In fact, the NRA company line helps to clarify the matter. The fetishism his organization promotes for the benefit of the gun-peddling syndicate it serves verifies everybody's hunch (including LaPierre's) that some form of mental illness is at the root of gun violence. Josh Marshall assessed the contents of a recent SEC filing by a gun-manufacturing consortium like this:

You’ve got fairly candid discussions of male insecurity as a decent on-going growth opportunity, women as a new source of gun purchases and a general migration from hunting and target shooting toward gun ownership as a way of simply feeling more awesome.

In order that the public doesn't get suckered into turning an impulse to formulate civilized gun-control policy into an amateur witch hunt for the "mentally ill," I'd suggest trying to focus the mental-health piece of the discussion on gun-related mental illness.

In that connection---and considering that a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is being prepared---I think it should be a high priority for the mental health community of practice to identify and quantify the particular variety of paranoia that might be called something like "firearms obsession disorder." Yellow flags that indicate the probable need for counseling might include a subject's frequent verbal conflation of "gun rights" and "freedom," or "gun ownership" and "masculinity." Red flags that indicate the urgent need for immediate psychiatric supervision and possible involuntary confinement might include a subject's hoarding of firearms that have no inherent historic, aesthetic, or collectible value (and especially the hoarding of ammunition for such guns), or the repeated public expression that the solution to gun violence is yet more gun violence:

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

...

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Individuals with Firearms Obsession Disorder believe that "the only way to fight fire is with fire." Most of us regular people think that it is more rational to fight fire with water.

Saturday night

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No fish fry tonight; an elegy.



Christo Redemptor, Charlie Musselwhite (1967, from "Stand Back: Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite's South Side Band," Vanguard Records VSD-79232), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Monsters

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Wanton marquee-grade killing, whether the media label it as "terrorism" or "tragedy," understandably raises the eternal question of where "evil" comes from, and why. Opinions are diverse, understandably, because this is arguably the central mystery of existence to anyone who believes that life has a moral or spiritual dimension (in other words, that the universe is more than a bin of particles that follows "laws of science" to move from chaos toward order). My opinions on that aren't important; they're as unimportant as, say, Mike Huckabee's.

But around these events, the question of what to do about them always struggles to be considered. Predictably to anyone who knows something about post-70s America, Second Amendment enthusiasts and the politicians who exploit their preoccupation tell everyone else that "now is not the time" to talk about gun carnage because, after all, it is people who kill people. Everyone else is also admonished not to "politicize" tragedy, even though it's legitimate and imperative to discuss whether public policy is partially to blame or whether changes in public policy could reduce the frequency and carnage of mass shootings. Corporate media always propagate this conservative admonition, and are its foremost adherents.

I've got nothing profound to offer, but here is a small survey of media response with a comment or two.

This whole Charlie Pierce piece is worth reading. He ties any discussion of gun "tragedies" to the fundamental conservative fallacy---that (to borrow Margaret Thatcher's radical confession of global conservative principles) "there is no such thing as society":

There are things we must do together, in a political context, because these things are too big — and, in this case, too monstrous — for us to handle alone. Self-government and its institutions — public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries — are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.

I agree. The absolute minimal conversation we should be having about gun violence, whether or not conservatives think any time is an appropriate time, is about the necessity of understanding that America needs fully funded and professional education, law enforcement, emergency response, and healthcare institutions... period. If the well off and the Job Creators don't want to pay for the privilege of enjoying an orderly society, they should repatriate their warty asses to China or Haiti.

Second, there is this piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker about "what science says" about gun control. Here is her profound takeaway:

Some studies are funded by biased institutions. Some studies aren't peer reviewed. Some studies feature poorly thought-out methodology.

All of that leads to a mess of frequently contradictory conclusions that can, frankly, be used to support just about any position you'd like to put forward. So, basically, just because you can support your position, don't think that makes you absolutely correct.

As so-called science writers go, Koerth-Baker is especially useless to me, with her patronizing and pseudo-profundities. But I think her conclusion is typical corporate media treatment: it's all just too complicated for us poor journalists and citizens to make heads or tails of, so let's all just love one another. Thanks for nothing, Maggie.

Speaking of the "media role" in public tragedy, the following is something I stumbled across this morning. It's a Roger Ebert anecdote about an interview he gave to NBC news (never aired) after Columbine (via BoingBoing again) in which the reporter was looking to cherry-pick quotes about violent movies causing gun violence. Ebert wouldn't play along:

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them.

As much as public policy, this is a piece of the problem that needs to be discussed. Logos and branding---bullseye. Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the media's normalization of violence as sensual and pre-political entertainment as quickly as Ebert seems to, but Hollywood is not directly responsible for Columbine or Tucson or Newtown.

And finally, there's this last word on the topic, straight from the mouth of a genuine monster:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom. 

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

As Rob Bechizza said about Huckabee's comments back on BoingBoing: "Don't be angry. Just understand what he understands: that this is political."

I think the conversation needs to be much more far-reaching than the topic of gun control. It needs to examine how this society has become so detached from its own collective humanity that even a discussion of gun control is taboo within both of our major political parties while kids are slaughtered on their mats in kindergarten.

Coming back soon

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Well, hello there! How are you? I am fine!

Life intervened for awhile, and so I likewise decided to stay away from here for awhile.

A small factor has been a small learning curve related to my obtaining a new MacBook Pro 15 in. job, which came with OS X 10.8, which really, really wants users to work from the computer's touchpad. It's a little different, but I've already decomissioned my wireless mouse because I really like the feel of the glassy touchpad. The interface works very much like an iPhone, but in a good way as opposed to being a change for the sake of change.

I'll document an event or two that has occurred since I was last here. So come back soon if you like.

Sheltering in place

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I'm going to close the clamshell in a few minutes. I should probably stay offline until tomorrow, but I may check before I retire for the evening.

About the only thing I feel like saying right now is about what Gurlitzer said in a comment about the Mingus song posted below. So I'm delegating the bulk of tonight's writing chore to her (i.e., I'm plagiarizing her work):

Fuck the GOP and their just plain criminal behavior. And fuck the justice dept. for not doing anything about it. And fuck the corporate media who say no tax returns, Mitt? Well shucks, that's just fine with us. And while we know you are lying about everything, it's not our place to call you on it.

And Husted in Ohio now changes the rules on provisional ballots as just the latest in a string of attempts to curtail the vote. And no one will call it for what it is, blatant cheating. AND WE LET THEM ALL GET AWAY WITH IT.

And by the way, Watergate never really ended. These bastards will still do anything to win. 

Before I turned off the radio half an hour ago I heard an NPR news reader announce that his network projects a win for Bernie Sanders, an "independent" senator representing New Hampshire (he's a Socialist). I also heard two NPR newsgirls --- honestly, that's how they were behaving --- all giddy about the silly Republican county Supervisor of Elections in Florida who "accidentally" activated a voter turnout robocall a day late, possibly misleading some people to think they could vote on Wednesday. "Even ex-governor Charlie Crist's wife got a call!" one of them tittered. They were just tickled pink.

None of the accounts of election ratfucking in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (especially Philadelphia) seemed to be making it in any detail to NPR --- the general impression given by them is that other than a few hiccups everything is going fairly well, or something. So all the news about this I'm seeing comes from new media, basically, and Esquire online. All of those sources are well known to be skewed by liberal bias, so their reports can't be true. Phew! (Sorry about the lazy sourcing for the above; I want to get offline asap.)

I fear that there's a nontrivial probability that unsubtle attempts to steal the election have now moved from the planning to the execution stage, and that I will wake up tomorrow morning to a spectacle of drama where there should be a clear winner... and in which the corporate media give an Oscar performance of dumb-all-over. If that happens, it is feasible that we might not be looking merely at another 2000 in Florida or 2004 in Ohio (yes, it happened): a constitutional crisis could loom... one much bigger than the Sandra Day O'Connor Y2K junta.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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First, read this. Read it all, including this.

Then, listen to this:



...while reading the following (provided by YouTube uploader Charles Van Driel, whomever he may be):

"Original Faubus Fables" performed by Charles Mingus. Taken from the 1960 "Charles Mingus presents Charles Mingus" record. Composed by Charles Mingus.

It was written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers. This composition was also released a year earlier on the "Mingus Ah Um" record as "Fables Of Faubus" but only instrumental as record company Columbia refused the lyrics.

Lyrics:
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.

Charity toward all and malice toward none, my foot. In 5 years all we will have on the national political stage is Republicans and dissidents.

Original Faubus Fables, Charles Mingus (1960, from "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus," Candid CCD 79005), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Miscellany [updated]

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I've been "falling back" all day---what have you slugs been doing?

I'm listening to Lenny Bernstein conduct "The Firebird" (1919 version) while preparing to announce the identity of Rodan, the avian raptor who visited final hell on a squirrel in my back yard the other morning. Bernstein's interpretation of the final triumphal theme (not sure what it's called, but it's what most of us rubes think of as the "famous firebird theme") is really kind of tacky, in my opinion---weird melodramatic "stutter steps" thrown in during the first woodwind leg of the lyrical melody, presumably so Bernstein could majestically profile for the society ladies and gentlemen. Then, as the brass join for the thrilling climax, he turns the thing into some kind of stilted, wooden march with approximately zero excitement or soul. It's the only version I have at this point, so I guess I'll shop for another.

Anyway, after poking around on Cornell University's bird site (home page here) I found a specimen of juvenile red-tail hawk that resembles my local guy. The juveniles have little or no red in the tail. What did surprise me, though, is how many "morphs" of this species there are---not only white-breasted ones, but some that are almost entirely a graphite color. Even though they are present around the year, the do migrate as Gurlitzer pointed out, so new individuals pass through.

Update: I just discovered that I've been wearing one brown and one black shoe most of the night. I suppose this phenomenon closely complements the increasing amount of drool that I'm finding on my pillow case these days.

The dawn of Rodan

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Look at this monster. This is what greeted me when I raised the honeycomb-type window shade in my bedchamber this morning.

I see hawks in the yard fairly often owing to all the hawk feeding stations (i.e., songbird feeders) I have deployed throughout Moronica International State Park, the confines within which I live. But when I raised the shade, this juggernaut startled me all the way from the back of the property, at least 50 ft away from the window. My best guess is that his body alone, excluding his head and tail, was the size of a football.

Naturally, the battery was dead in the Nikon D-80 I've hung by the windows for such occasions. But Rodan seemed to be taking his time, so I was able to load a fresh cell, open the special non-screened shooting gallery window in the so-called breakfast nook adjoining the master suite, and began firing off snapshots. The zoom lens, extending only to a maximum of 200 mm, is barely adequate for capturing detail at such a distance.

After spazzing out just to make sure I captured something, I slowed down to start watching in order to select shots. The raptor's head was pretty mobile while eviscerating his breakfast, so timing matters. (I've never used a motor drive to capture "the decisive moment" through an accident of statistical probability since I consider it to be lazy.) While watching more closely I noticed some interesting detail accompanying nature's majestic pageant of evisceration. Pictured is an example.

After capturing about a dozen shots I put the camera away. And then, a minute later it occurred to me that I was stupid for not trying to sneak up on him for a closer view. So I got out the D-80 once more and sneaked out the quiet way---out the front door and around the west side. I couldn't get any closer, but I was able to shoot from a different angle. Obligingly, Rodan pivoted clockwise to show me a couple of profiles. Here is the best:

After this shot, I moved closer and Rodan effortlessly hopped over a 5 ft. fence with a partial squirrel carcass in its talon. Neither a Cooper's hawk nor the sharp-shinned hawk is large or strong enough to own a squirrel like this; I've watched and photographed one (either/or) be thwarted by your typical, everyday d-bag squirrel for several minutes. I have never seen this species before at close range, and my quick effort to identify it using my phone app turned up nothing. I think this is the same bird I pointed out to Beer-D recently, looking every bit the monster soaring lazily at 200 or 300 feet aloft. Apart from his size, I can't find any hawk species native to this area that has a clear, white breast. Also distinct from the local populations is the eye color---almost a light green-gold---and the rufous-brown shading behind the eye and around the beak. (However, the color around the beak might also be a swab of squirrel blood.) Judging from the tail so nicely displayed in this photo, he's (she's?) obviously not a red-tail. But then, there are differences in species based on gender, age, and even subspecies variants.

It will be a day or two before I can identify this beast. Maybe there's a bird watcher reading who knows what it is. If you click on either photo, it should display itself much larger.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Not necessarily apropos to the nth degree, but, nevertheless, I am embedding this video in honor of the memory of Vaclav Havel, whose nonfiction writings I have just discovered and about whom I will have more to say later. For now let it suffice to say that the essay I am examining these days like an MRI scanner appears in a cheap edition printed on thirsty pulp paper that begs for marginalia to be inscribed by my genuine Fisher bullet Space Pen.



Now, as to the featured tune, and this particular performance of it, the following:

I've always loved it. My brain originally perceived it as being off-kilter in a way I couldn't explain. First, there's that George rhythm guitar riff that filled the radio like an anthem, but more closely resembled the random tones and percussive, lurching rhythms of a pinball machine to my delicate ears. Then, there's that part---repeatedly---that sounds like a ritardando-slash-meltdown, which is in all cases slapped aside by an abrupt return to the Harrison riff with Ringo bashing his tubs. And finally, there are the words: a song that has nothing to do with girls or whatever that other mysterious stuff was that they were singing about when I was in 7th grade (such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine"). This was just a song about a guy who wanted to write paperback books like the ones I used to like to smell at the drugstore news stand next to the comic book racks. (Like Dr No From Russia With Love, of which I could never get past the third page because it was too sexy---just kept reading the first three pages over and over.) So even then, in the back of my unsophisticated brain (infused with anti-knock leaded gas, as it was) I still found myself thinking, "huh?!?" It worked on me sort of like a zen koan.

About 25 years ago the concert from which this clip was extracted was issued by some obscure Italian label which, if memory serves, could get away with selling this bootleg recording at that time due to European copyright laws pertaining to live performances. I enjoyed the rawness of it, and for the first time I heard that the little "meltdown" segments were actually an ear-ptical illusion: when played live, Ringo kept the rhythm audible in the background to keep the lads together. In the studio recording, though, it just seems as if the band holds together via ESP.

Unlike some people, I'm not fazed by all the technical flaws of this recording. It is a document from early days, when the stars set up their own equipment on tour and they probably had no way of hearing themselves in their puny stage monitors over the screeching crowd and arena reverberations. But it does present Paul (fighting with his wobbly mic much of the time) phrasing the melody less "up-and-down" than on the single. It's too bad we don't have some high-quality relaxed, live performances from this era of their careers.

Paperback Writer, The Beatles (live, 2 July 1966, Budokan Hall, Tokyo, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry (After Hours)

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Here's an unpublished (so to speak) set of Beatles tunes performed live by Frank Zappa and his ill-fated "best band you never heard in your life," from a 1988 concert in Helsinki.



I reckon Sir Paul will authorize commercial release of these recordings by the Zappa Family Trust about the time he officially designates Heather Mills as the Fifth Beatle.

Two things stand out to me in this clip: the quaint topicality of the lyrics and the technical acumen of both the musicians and the engineers in echoing the studio-type feel of the original Beatles recordings.

At this point in Frank's life, he was preoccupied by (among many other things) how TV evangelism had infused US politics with a sinister overtone, and so he was delighted when preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were publicly exposed as sexual "perverts" and moral hypocrites, and he gleefully used it as "material." Most of the lyrics here focus on Swaggart, whose sex scandal broke into the news during the band's 1988 tour. But these were the waning days of the second Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra affair and other Republican outrages having broken the windshield of our little democracy flivver and flattened three of its tires while the President drifted into senility. So we hear Zappa's mocking references to such one-hit wonders as National Security Advisor Admiral Poindexter and Attorney General Ed Meese. I think Zappa's parody lyrics are at their best when they remain vulgar and playful, as opposed to the more coarsely obscene texts for which he became infamous (in the Clean World, at least). In these pieces he veers over into the "obscene" lane, but arguably expresses no greater magnitude of depravity than Swaggart guiltily preached on any given day in his ministry. And all these lyrics are based on True Facts---set to the music of the Fab Four!

As one commenter on this video said (but for a different implied reason than I would give, and with which I disagree), the Beatles could not have performed most of these songs live with anywhere near the fidelity that FZ and his band accomplish in this performance. That's partially explained by the level of sophistication that synthesizer technology had reached by the end of his career, but much more so by Zappa's almost-supernatural ears and almost-peerless skills as an arranger. The musicians must also be credited for their technical skills, but as herded and over-rehearsed by FZ and---worse---a junior musician whom he put in charge of drilling the band on a daily basis as his own health began to emerge as a debilitating problem. Because of his stature, Zappa could get away with rehearsal schedules that could fairly be called abusive, but his second-tier foreman couldn't command the same obedience. So Zappa's musicians revolted and the band fell apart halfway through the world tour. (Strangely, Wikipedia doesn't have any account of this major milestone in Zappa's career---the end of it as a performing musician, to be exact---so I can't link to it.)

This video presents the same 12-piece band documented live on Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make A Jazz Noise Here, which Zappa issued to help him recover from a financial loss of about half a million dollars (in an era when that probably meant twice as much as it does today). Broadway is the most broadly (hurhurhurrrr) appealing, but bristles with Reagan-era political topicality that isn't universal enough to have aged well. The others have a few high points, but come across as thrown-together filler tour tapes. The Beatles suite played here is much more entertaining and respectful of the source material than the pointlessly condescending covers of "Purple Haze" and "Stairway To Heaven" that show up on Best Band.

I think FZ really believed that this lineup was in fact his best band ever. From a technical standpoint, that would be his call to make. But as a fan, I've never gotten much enjoyment from his '80s ensembles. They achieved their precision and impressive responsiveness to Zappa's extemporaneous direction through the maestro's extreme exercise of control and, as I say, over-rehearsal to the point of sounding brittle underneath it all. Nevertheless, this particular segment sounds more relaxed and human than I've come to expect from Zappa's latter-day aggregations.

What do you think? Does this music do anything for you?

Beatles Suite, Frank Zappa and band (1988, live in Helsinki, Finland, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: as Fifty50 readers who have taken Music Appreciation will observe, this music isn't actually a medley, but a regular sequence of songs with each having a segue into the next.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I wish that whomever posted this clip on YouTube had obscured the identity of the musicmakers. It's an epic bit of fucking around by Brian Wilson that hints at what he might have accomplished in the studio armed with better mental hygiene.



Starting at about 0:12 and repeating through the track you can hear the Woody Woodpecker motif in the high register of the accordion, which accounts for the subtitle of the composition. There's also a bonus cartoon theme that's even more prominent, arrangementwise, though to my embarrassment I can't identify the source material by its proper title. (Maybe one of you can.) It's featured in at least one Bugs Bunny episode---the one where he has invaded Elmer Fudd's surrealistic dreams (the one with the Salvatore Dali landscapes) for the express purpose of driving Mr. Fudd insane. Bugs gives lyrics to some old saw of a classical theme, thusly: "The rabbits are coming, hurrah, hurrah...!" Wilson uses a slight variation of it. What a nut!

I really enjoy, and am still taken aback by, the psychological tone of this piece. It certainly conveys something foreboding along the lines of a return to winter... at least the winters of yesteryear when all the leaves dropped from the trees, the insects died, the birds flew south, and the landscape was blanketed in frozen gray water crystals for 3 or 4 months.

Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (Woody Woodpecker Symphony), The Beach Boys (reissue 1990, "Smiley Smile & Wild Honey," Capitol C2 93696), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Coulda been a contender

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Well, whatever, I guess. Liberal bloggers everywhere all pumped by the "open letter" that Vikings punter Chris Kluwe wrote to a bullying, homophobic Maryland state legislator on Friday. You can read here, in addition to the letter, the circumstances prompting Kluwe to write it. I don't have any reason to doubt the authenticity of his motives for writing it, and he falls on the same side of both issues he addresses---freedom of speech and equal rights for gays---that I do. Hooray for both of us and all our fellow travelers! But after reading the piece line by line I ended up feeling like I had wasted my time.

I have a classical view of public communication: in order to have impact, it should have a clear purpose and a target audience. In a case like this, I'd expect Kluwe's purpose to be persuasion, and the target audience---beyond the purported addressee, Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr.---to be the mainstream media for maximum reach. If not, then why not... and what instead? The only two answers I can think of are (1) self promotion and (2) stirring up the pot for laughs.

Kluwe is obviously articulate and thoughtful, so I thought it was too bad that he squandered his shot at the public ear with pointless obscenities and stock badboy smack talk. An articulate and thoughtful person can cut any stupid asshole to ribbons with a simple, logical rebuttal and festoon it with plenty of invective that could still feasibly be discussed on Sunday morning networks or even NFL pregame shows (assuming the purpose of saying anything in the first place is impact and reach). Even assuming that probably wouldn't happen, because they are the corporate media, after all, there would still be no room for anyone to dismiss what Kluwe wrote with prejudice simply because he couldn't restrain himself from using the swear words.

Yet check out the second-to-last paragraph in his letter, where he buries the serious, well-thought-out point of his piece:

I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?

I don't object to Kluwe's deft deployment of the term "cockmonster" here, because it forcefully and justifiably ridicules the consciously rationalized premise of homophobes. (Myself, I would have framed the word in quotation marks since it is a term of art, so to speak.) It's too bad that this---Kluwe's actual point---is virtually invisible, and it's one purposeful obscenity neutered by the three gratuitous paragraphs that precede it.

The story could have been "NFL player treats politician, club owner to lesson in rights". Instead we have a patronizing story line, relegated to the liberal blog ghetto, about a pro athlete playing against the widely held public stereotypes of ignorance, homophobia, and conservatism. In other words, the story is mostly about Kluwe the celebrity and the novelty of his letter, and hardly at all about the thuggish and chilling machinations of whistledick state lawmaker Emmett C. Burns Jr. That's too bad: Kluwe coulda been a contender.

Enough of the "Big Dog" crap already!

*

I wish another member of the Bush-Cheney administration would get explosive diarrhea for each time I see a variation on this particular idea:

Move over little dog, the big dog's moving in.

I'm truly and eternally mystified why every card-carrying liberal seems to worship Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband, who signed a law to end the Glass-Steagal Act for banking system integrity; signed the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act; established the humiliating Don't Ask/Don't Tell military personnel policy; beat up on poverty-stricken Americans by adopting a Republican plan to add to the misery of public aid recipients; signed the authoritarian Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and pranced around as one of the nation's biggest cheerleaders for a tidal wave of economic globalization initiatives that give us (and citizens of all other nations) much less leeway to run our own affairs, delegating sovereignty upwards to trans-national corporations.

Bill Clinton "beat" the Republicans simply by adopting much of their program and tongue-washing it in expertly-delivered feel-your-pain rhetoric that might either have issued from the mouth of a man with a conscience or a man without one. This is the real reason why he drove Republicans crazy: he was in a position to make them obsolete. They simply had to neutralize him, if not destroy him. And Clinton obligingly gave them a prong they could hang an impeachment trial on.

Too, I'd be surprised if there aren't many liberal Democratic women who are, secretly, at least a little uneasy about all this Big-Dog adulation, considering that the one accomplishment Clinton will always be remembered for is seducing a White House intern into a grossly uneven power relationship that involved having his lumpy pecker (possibly the veteran of a dozen chancres). At very least, it seems that the Big Dog may not have much more respect for women and their feelings than any off-the-shelf rock star.

Can anyone point to a single constructive, progressive piece of legislation promoted and signed into law by Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband that every made anyone's life better outside of a corporate shareholder's meeting or a beltway political consultancy? Truly, I can't think of a single Bill Clinton accomplishment that matters today in any positive way.

You're welcome

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Starting tonight in Tampa, Fla., and continuing for the next several days, the national Republican Party will transform a cavernous ice hockey rink into a cavernous horse hockey rink.

Slice of life

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I decided to mow the lawn for the first time today since Memorial Day weekend. So as I crouched over the lawn mower carefully pouring gasoline from a 2 gallon can, directly from the neck without the spout, I noticed that the ember of my lit cigar was about 15 in. from the tank. "Hmm," I said to myself, "I need to go park this cigar somewhere else." So I did.

Mitt Romney, telepath?

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It seems that Dubya-II either anticipated this morning's rumination on this blog or, perhaps more likely, had himself a Freudian slip about something that may be gnawing at him underneath it all:

Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — his Vice Presidential running mate — as the “next President of the United States,” on Saturday.

I was listening while I was typing my first "patsy" post, and didn't catch the remark. In all seriousness and humility, I am certain Dubya-II has never read this blog. See what he's missing? Validation!

For whatever it's worth, I got the link from Krugman's blog.

Ryan and Dubya-II

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I'll be interested to see how many years of tax returns Paul Ryan makes public now that he's VP stock. His nominal mentor now, Dubya-II, may stand to lose no matter what Ryan does. If Ryan releases more than 2 years of returns, he makes Romney look bad and at least temporarily refocuses the "national dialog" on what Dubya-II might be hiding, financewise. And if Ryan releases 2 years or less, then he redoubles Romney's vulnerability on tax secretiveness and helps to keep the issue alive "with a bullet," as they used to say in Variety Billboard.

If Romney really has demoted himself to the role of patsy for a cabal of evil men, as at least one observer suggests, then Ryan could shiv him and twist it a few times by releasing 10 full years of returns. Anything that makes Romney a more untenable candidate than he already is now helps Ryan and that highly hypothetical, almost completely improbable cabal.

Creepy hypocrite

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Here's another kernel from Charlie Pierce on Paul Ryan, the right-wing congressman

who lies awake at night worrying that The Deficit will come and eat our grandchildren, lives in a house overseen by the National Park Service, which means that he qualifies for a 20 percent investment tax credit for the house he lives in. Of course, his "budget" would largely decimate the NPS, but that would be only those parts of it enjoyed by other people.

Pierce also reminds us that Ryan, who told the Virginia crowd this morning how he lost his father at an early age, was supported throughout his youth by Social Security survivor benefits that kept a roof over his family's head and food in their stomachs. For Ryan, Social Security benefits are an entitlement; for our kids and their offspring, it's a handout reeking of moral hazard that must be eliminated.

Bullied

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I think Charlie Pierce at the Esquire Politics Blog makes the two most important points you'll hear in the coming week about Mitt Romney's VP candidate:

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn't believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth -- our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he's ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as an something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

Pierce, like Paul Krugman specifically on economics, has been way out in front of the pack in their fingering Ryan as a phony and a troglodyte. They've made it clear, with argumentation and documentation, that his reputation for both intellectualism and decency are thinly sliced baloney served to us corporate celebrity pundits.

But I think Pierce makes an even more salient point as a throwaway line:

Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.

I agree. Think about what what Romney personally has to gain by selecting a clone of himself. A clone who is actually popular with the Republican base and may be popular with many so-called swing voters. Answer: nothing.

I think there is a nontrivial probability that Romney has been bullied into demoting himself to the role of patsy, so to speak, in a scheme by a cabal of evil men.

Wise sayings

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Since Willard Romney wants to continue and expand the Bush tax cuts so people like him pay less tax than nail ladies, I think we should just start referring to him as Dubya-II.

Tomorrow's matinee tonight

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This looks like a job... for Superman!



Kee-reist, Clark---why don't you just announce it to all of Metropolis on the electric radio?

This is the third Superman feature released by Fleischer Studios, and it's some pretty weak sauce compared with most in the series. One thing that's odd is that it's really light on dialog; odd because the Fleischers usually give us a heaping helping of unhinged villains chewing up the scenery with their turgid threats and declamations. Here, after seeing a headline about the "largest single shipment of gold ever attempted" on a flashy, coal-fired streamline deco passenger train (?!), we are on our own for most of the feature. Not that it's very challenging to decode, but these cartoons generally spell things out very explicitly for the juvenile target audience. Why has it become a runaway train, for example, instead of just rolling to a stop or---more plausibly---Lois taking over the controls? She's a skilled pilot, after all, as we learned in episode 1. (She also has no problem handling a Tommy gun here.)

The scenery and action are beautifully rendered, as we would expect from the Fleischers. But the physics are mostly awful, especially where Superman is manhandling the train to keep it off the floor of the gorge. Usually, one of the best things about this series is the way the animators convey a sense of mass and kinetic energy through The Man Of Steel's interaction with objects. So even in this weak episode, they do come through for us in the scenes where Superman struggles to pull the train uphill. The sound effects of the train axles help to sell the illusion.

It's fortunate for this gang of gold rustlers that railroad rights-of-way were so wide and drivable in the early 1940s and were so accessible from any stretch of highway. I love the scene where, although the teargas seems to be getting the best of our hero, one of the bad guys panics and just chucks the whole crate of grenades at once. Something else the kids and I used to laugh at: the scenes where Superman pulls the train toward the camera and gets his crotch all up in the viewer's grille. This is not the only episode in which Fleischer animators used that visual point of reference, either.

One throwaway animation effect that looks quite difficult to have rendered is the guard's shadow moving on the newspaper front page starting at about 1:39. Also, at about 7:55 we get a nice architectural view of the Depression-era "government mint" complex, but I wonder why the monumental inscription on the arch faces the building interior.

Billion Dollar Limited (1942, "Superman" cartoon by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures; Myron Waldman and Frank Endres, animators; Dave Fleischer, director), via YouTube, a work in the public domain embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Purfuit of Happineff

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There's a reason behind the neglect of my personal writing here over the past month or two: I've been absorbed in the "endgame" of editing (and designing and laying out) a book on the topic of construction management for a professional associate. Just between us girls, this work has taken over twice the amount of hours I'd expected based on the author's original proposal, and I'd estimate that the task has probably been three or more times the original anticipated difficulty.

I've stuck with this forlorn task for reasons that I need not go into here except to say that I may see more financial potential in the project than the author actually does.

A few weeks ago I encountered an event horizon, so to speak, marking the beginning of this publishing endgame. Specifically, it was a more or less final definition of the project scope (which is ordinarily the first order of business on a publishing job). So now I'm pushing the issue pretty hard and have declared myself to be in control of the final schedule. At the moment I'm dealing with a few last-minute efforts by the author to "creep the scope" of the editing task too far for my energy to endure. So while there is still some uncertainty remaining with the closeout, I am within no more than a few weeks of being done.

At that time, I will be free to indulge in my own personal Purfoot of Happineff to the full extent I wish. That, of course, includes tending to that garden of earthly delights you know as Fifty50.



Click here for provenance of the audio recording. The clip embedded here also includes a candid recording of the true story of General George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River, which addresses another seminal event in the colonies' struggle for independence from those British Imperialists!

Stars and stripes

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A few years ago while drifting into sleep on a Sunday night, I had an aesthetic experience with a John Philip Sousa march. Our FM public radio station used to run a show called Pipe Dreams, which featured a fairly wide range of music as performed on genuine pipe organs. (In its effort to make WILL-FM "even better," the program was eliminated 2 years ago and replaced with the same syndicated (i.e., simulated) classical music programming that fills about 18 hours of their 24-hour daily schedule.)

Anyway, that evening on Pipe Dreams was presented a rendition of Sousa's iconic "Stars and Stripes Forever," zestily pounded out on a major league, one-off concert pipe organ. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to retain either the organist's name or any information about his mighty instrument into the next day's waking world. But my mind was in a peculiarly receptive state between waking and sleeping, and the performance enthralled me.

I had enjoyed playing alto and tenor saxophone parts, both first and second, on this ditty in high school because most of the other instruments (especially the piccolo) were doing all the hard work. Yet the arranger---Hal Leonard, no doubt---was generous enough to let all the saxes play soli on one of the several famous melodies penned for the march... the one that goes "Dah Dah Dah-duh-duh duh-Duh-Duh" and so on. As with my K-12 concert band experience (starting in 5th grade, actually), my marching and pep band experience helped to plow a larger field for my musical tastes than I'd have tended otherwise.

But hearing "Stars and Stripes Forever" in my mentally, and I'd even say psychically, receptive state, made a memorable impression on me even on the verge of slumber. First, I was able to hear that the organist was hitting every essential note in the score outside of the percussion parts. That was plenty of a mind-blower to me, physical-coordinationwise, who admittedly is not familiar with the level of virtuosity needed for, say, Bach's baroque organ works. But more important was the clarity with which I grasped Sousa's composition. It was the first time I had ever experienced Stars and Stripes as a masterpiece of form, coherence, and even arithmetic.

I tried earlier today to find the specific performance of my memory on YouTube, but I couldn't (not on the first page, at least). The versions posted there are flawed, soundwise and performance-wise. The main problems are excessive echo or audience noise, which obscures an organist's precision; or, more typically, an organist's actual lack of precision and expressiveness. The version I heard that night was a well-engineered studio recording with all requisite reverb, but not too much. And the performer, whomever he was, sounded like he really got the piece. At the time of its composition, Stars and Stripes was not a mere patriotic chestnut written to be pried out of its shell once a year, but was actually a huge pop music genre of the period. I have no serious knowledge about American music before the emergence of jazz, but I suspect that Sousa marches were about the equivalent of rock and roll at the turn of the 20th century.

Not for nothing do we call him Big Rock Head... with bonus technical report!

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The lad we sometimes call Big Rock Head (BRH), who has now adopted "Rock Head" as his Official Rock & Roll Stage Name, proved that he deserves this monicker late Friday during a nighttime game of Capture The Flag at a park in Urbana. It is reported that some drinking was involved, not that it's unusual for drinking to be involved in anything that grad students might do on a Friday evening. Much more unusual is the fact that the youth of today were out playing like kids of yesteryear on a weekend night, at a baseball diamond in meatspace, exerting themselves physically.

It seems that BRH, in defending his goal, was pursuing his quarry with a singlemindedness of purpose that led him to become unaware of a chain-link fence installed along the third-base line. The slanted fencepost with which BRH posed for this photo spread this morning brought his sprint to an abrupt halt, skullwise (upper right). The placement of the split could not have been executed any more purposefully by a Hollywood makeup artist. So if the 10 stitches shown above leave a scar as a legacy, then the graphical layout makes a fine style statement in addition to its reeking of masculine essence.

After getting his noggin rattled, and the contents probably lightly concussed, the poor baby was surprised in the dark by what a sweat he had worked up---it was even streaming into his eyes! As we now know, this was actually leakage from his circulatory system, which still dotted the dirt on the dugout floor Saturday morning (center right), along with a fat drop on the left Converse sneaker which he had discovered a bit earlier.

The fencepost is not one of the security-grade jobs you find at industrial and government installations, but it is a steel fencepost after all. Because I am not a trained incident-site investigator, my forensic analysis was necessarily informal. I judged the post to be well-anchored, with indications of some ductility when the cap was pushed back and forth. The slant of the post is significantly more pronounced than the corresponding post at the far end of the first-base line (not shown), and the direction of the lean corresponds well to the vector of the BRH sprint. At the base of the subject post I found well-defined buckling (bottom right). The discolorations above the buckling are ambiguous. They could have been made by a previous impact with the post, such as might occur when scuffed by the deck of a riding lawnmower. However, the marks do not make any obvious sense as an effect of the deformation of the post, either Friday night or at a previous time. Therefore, I judged the markings to be a red herring, forensics-wise.

Finally, if you click on the spread and look closely at the enlargement of the lower-right picture, you may see a few crisp cracks in the parched mud in the lower-right quadrant adjacent to the base of the post. These cracks show up better on the high-resolution images, so you may take my word that they are there. These cracks radiate out from the base of the post opposite of the direction from which BRH impacted it. This is a geological artifact I would expect to see as a result of such an impact.

Big Rock Head is somewhat over 6 ft tall and weighs approximately 200 lb. Having some knowledge of his physical capabilities and the joie de vivre with which he plays, I do not think it is farfetched that he might have struck the post at 15 mph---a sprint that could produce a 4 minute mile, but which need be sustained only for a few moments of alcohol-assisted galumphing to produce the documented effect on the pole.

Therefore, it is concluded that solely with the hardness of his cranium, body mass, and autolocomotion, BRH caused a ductile failure in a steel fence post during a nocturnal session of Capture The Flag. The young gentleman whom he was tracking at the time should feel thankful for the good offices provided by said fence post, bodily-harmwise.

What I saw south of town last evening

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Touring on the road bike, trying out a new pair of shoes:

1. A soaring red-tail hawk, landing atop a tall utility pole, then pacing me with slowly flapping wings about 100 ft to the east, heading south. I wasn't sure of my identification and I told it to show me his tail, not expecting to have my request acknowledged. After about 15 seconds he caught a draft and executed a soaring banked hairpin U-turn that gave me visibility of his back, including a fiery red tail that was emphasized by the late-afternoon sun.

2. Upon my approach, a sudden rustling in some short rows of drought-stressed corn at the edge of the field to my immediate west. An awkwardly galloping groundhog, bounding along the row opposite my direction, with a cartoon-like cloud of dust drifting on the wind from where he first bugged out.

3. During a water stop, a frantic group of killdeer trying to pester and lure me away from some nearby ground nests. Three or four flew around me in wide, interleaved circles, producing a din of racket that sounded like angry baritone seagulls (I've never heard these birds say "kill-deer" as the are reputed to do). At the same time, about 50 ft back toward town, one of them put on the famous broken-wing act, which I'd never seen before. Typically, when a cyclist rides through their territory, they will escort the rider about 30 to 50 ft in advance, flying low and alternating with a rapid walk until the bike closes in to about 20 ft. At that point, they resume low flight over the blacktop.

4. The red-tail again, or one of similar proportions, flapping lazily toward the south from where I was returning. Behind it, a small, fast black bird of some kind. This puzzled me as big hawks should be kind of scary to smaller birds, but this one closed on the raptor quickly, looking like it was trying to win a race. Then suddenly, from slightly above, the blackbird divebombed the hawk, pecking once at its back then swinging wide to the right and getting lost fast. I recognized the call as belonging to a redwing blackbird. They are very aggressive about protecting their nests, which they build in ditches using grasses and mud. The males will perch on telephone wires to watch over their territory, and will sometimes get aggressive with passing bicyclists, pecking at their heads or helmets. Evidently they don't take any crap from red-tailed hawks, either.

Voodoo economics

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In a dream last week I was granted an important revelation:

We now have more empirical evidence for the existence of real-world zombies than we do for the validity of supply-side economics.

First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.

It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.

Update: post title changed to the obvious, which I started to do several times during composition but forgot.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This is neat!



For starters, I never get tired of listening to the radio version of this tune. There's so much to like. First, it's a delicately balanced rock ballad; the tempo is danceable and almost brisk while the chord progression includes lots of nifty chromaticism that carries an emotional tinge.

Second, the lyrics deal with the overworked topic of young heartbreak with precocious maturity and a heartening lack of melodrama. As an expression of support for a friend who has lost the "game," I always perceived that Gerry was singing to a female friend, but that's not actually "hard-coded" into the lyrics. Assuming my interpretation represents the band's intent, there is one big way this type of song can go wrong: the consoling party (that is, the singer) is using sympathy as a pretext to worm his way into a distraught lady's undergarments. There's no room for suspicion of that in these lyrics, though.

Third, the arrangement handles the orchestration perfectly. The small string section provides atmospherics, the brass instruments contribute dignity, and the oboe phrases evoke the moments before sunrise better than any other voicing I can think of. This part of the chart reminds us that some adults took part in the production, too---George Martin, maybe? Whomever: they did themselves and the band great credit through economy and understatement, avoiding both cloying sentimentality and over-formality.

But this performance, as I say, is particularly neat to my earbones. It's from a 1964 edition of The Ed Sullivan Show. The boys are playing live, for real, with a small orchestra stashed away somewhere behind the theatrical flats or on the sidelines. As you can hear, there were some problems keeping the orchestra in sync with the band in a few places, particularly a brass flourish at the end of the bridge (around 1:40). I find these production artifacts to be endearing, and don't hear them as errors. These are the fingerprints of a noteworthy pop music performance by talented musicians who at the same time sound like regular, approachable people.

Along those same lines, they Pacemakers sound like they're playing regular, everyday instruments. The rhythm guitar and piano don't sound cheap, but unprocessed and unaffected. Their tones are the same sounds that talented kids in the neighborhood could produce in Dad's garage if they had the same equipment and experimented with the knobs. And I enjoy hearing all the raw detail in those instrumental parts---especially the guitar---that were not conspicuous on the single.

Although I can't be certain, this sounds like the same performance included on a disc I own that collects Ed Sullivan Show recordings of five British Invasion bands from 1964 - 1966. A few months ago I dug it out after it laid dormant in my "stacks" for almost 20 years, and became enamored of it. As I've implied, the sound will not impress audiophiles, but the audio fidelity is perfectly good for a live recording of the period, and most of the tracks offer fine performances replete with previously unheard details and artifacts like those I've mentioned above. The Billy J. Kramer material is good (two Lennon-McCartney songs). The Searchers track, Needles and Pins, is also very nice and makes me wish a few more had been included. Peter and Gordon are alright, and even the four (!) Herman's Hermits tracks are decent---much better than I expected. Besides the Pacemakers' three tracks, the disc ends with a great "set" by The Animals, who exude a genuine and unprocessed character that you could imagine being played in a bar or college gym. The only stinker of the lot is I'm Telling You Now by Freddie and the Dreamers (sorry, lads, but even as a kid I didn't care for your sucky novelty music). A production note about the disc: each "set" is well engineered to sound like a single performance, but many of them are edited together from different locations in the space-time continuum.

Anyway, back to the libretto: below I'm providing the catalog information from the version I own, which will deviate from the YouTube particulars because mine is audio and theirs is video.

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Gerry and the Pacemakers (performance 10 May 1964, from "The Sullivan Years: The British Invasion" [1990], TVT Records TVT 9428-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Odd: gas prices have fallen

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I almost failed to notice that a gallon of gasoline costs about $0.50 less than it did here at the end of March. I guess this price decline didn't rise to my awareness because I haven't heard Republican congressmen and centrist pundits gabbing nonstop on NPR about how President Obama has done such an extraordinary job in this connection.

Out back

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Still have more days off than I've used so far this hiatus. Here are three snaps of a job I dreamed up 2 years ago. I think slow.

I started the project 2 years ago by buying the wrong kind of cedar for the frame, but only discovered that after assembling the frame last summer. Since worrying about that for a year didn't transform the cedar into below-grade quality, I decided to sink it into the ground just to avoid more delays. I assumed this would would be a crap job that I'd have to redo in a few years anyway.

As it turned out, the quality happens to be pretty high. The photo on the left shows the frame with a compacted bed of soil and brick rubble, with four sacks of patio-base gravel (also called roadpack) tamped down over it manually. (The brick rubble backfill was probably a stupid idea that I will regret later, along with the off-spec wood.) The three sacks pictured just about filled the frame to where it needed to be. Lots more tamping ensued with an 8 x 8 cast iron plate mounted at the end of a heavy garden-tool handle. My big innovation was discovering that the paver stones are the same thickness as a 2 x 4, so I screwed together a float-type device, center picture, to level the roadpack to the correct recess, pulling the device back and forth and merrily tamping it all until I was pretty flurking sick of it. The right-hand photo shows all the stones in place, with roadpack having been carefully poured, swept around, tamped, etc., to fill in all the cracks. I should have wetted the stone for this final photo so it would match the other two. The pavers aren't as pale as they appear in the final shot. If you want a closer look, by the way, clicking on the picture should load a larger version.

Note the clump of Shenandoah switchgrass near upper left. After construction I backfilled around the frame with soil excavated from elsewhere on the estate, then moved the switchgrass to the end of the path to prevent drunken visitors from falling over the ledge. This edifice constitutes the scenic overlook of the estate, which is known to myself and the lads as Moronica International State Park.

To the left of the path is the asparagus garden, which is not doing so hot this year. Now that I have this job in the Done column, I can begin thinking about extending the path 90 degrees to the left. Why? Because some moron laid a mess of these pavers on top of playground sand on the west side of my house about 20 years ago, creating a paradise for ant colonies and invasive weeds. Two years ago I dug them out and stacked them on a palette. So this is a recycling project. Also a weight-control project.

Editor's note: Please forgive rusty, mediocre text. I am on hiatus, and so is my brain.

Sixteen-day weekend

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Starting this evening. I will reacquaint myself with the enterprise soon.

I've gotten one rabid monkey completely off my back now---my ill-fated experiment in volunteerism. Any such future endeavors will be limited to monkey work only.

One more to go---the construction management text I've been working through a long developmental edit for about 18 months. I think the author and I both agree on the form and scope of the book, and the main text has finally been written in a coherent form. Some substantive editing remains (naturally).

After that I think I'll consider taking up opium smoking (medicinal applications only, of course).

Go Cubbies!

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Hey-Hey! Holy Mackerel!

As in: "Holy mackerel, Andy!" No doubt about it!

The Avengers movie: worth not sneaking into

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I think Marvel Entertainment has done a reasonably good job on the more recent releases I've seen, namely Thor, the first Iron Man, and (going back a way), the first Spider-Man. This pleases me, because my first two boyhood favorites---Fantastic Four and Daredevil---were so mishandled that, based on reviews alone, I refused to go near them. Not even worth sneaking in to see.

A contemporaneous reader of 1960s Marvel Comics should enjoy The Avengers. My standard of excellence for movies based on comics I read as a kid is not Art, but a port from pulp paper to cinema that is faithful to the original in tone and atmosphere while using digital effects to make the exercise of superpowers seem feasible and naturalistic. Avengers succeeds at both of these "metrics" through excellent casting of the principal characters (with one exception) and very good battle choreography.

Each of the main heroes captures what an adult reader of '60s superhero literature would expect of the characters. Captain America is not that far on the good-looking side of average, and his personality is pretty wooden. That is good; lesser directors would have made the mistake of infusing him with glamor and wit, the same formula used to cast every male protagonist in a film aimed at a teenage audience. What makes him Captain America is that he's an operational wizard, commander-wise. Tony Stark is, as you would expect, a brilliant, arrogant asshole. Thor is a little bit dumb. And Bruce Banner was both entirely original yet correct in original spirit as a somewhat distracted, slightly disheveled scientist who is terrified of and addicted to his own capacity for rage.

The Hulk, incidentally, is one of the most problematic characters in this genre to portray, and all previous attempts I've seen (both live action and animated cartoon) miss the mark either somewhat or by a very wide margin. This one succeeds. For more on the subject, I'll commend your attention to a recent analysis in The New Yorker by a newfangled reviewer who goes by the monicker of Film Crit Hulk. He (she, or it) nails the topic for the most part, except that I disagree with his assessment of Bill Bixby's Bruce Banner.

Unfortunately, I feel strongly that Sam Jackson was miscast as Nick Fury. This is both a '60s fanboy thing and a matter of comics history. Originally created by Jack Kirby as a WWII commando squad leader, Fury was one of Kirby's two self-ascribed alter-egos within the literal universes of characters he created in his career (which he spent largely as an exploited piecework artist by Marvel). Fury had no superpowers, either as a sergeant or as a secret agent for SHIELD. We kids knew him as the cigar-chompin' tough guy with a Bronx accent who was much smarter than he sounded. A very similar personality, but much more insecure and alienated (not to mention having an epidermis of orange rocks) was Ben Grimm, who mutated into The Thing in 1961. Kirby has identified both of those characters as versions of himself, with Thing reflecting how he felt about himself and Fury reflecting how he would like to have been seen by the world. (Kirby wrote their dialog, and much more, but was never given writer credits by Stan Lee.) So, out of respect both to the original creation and to Kirby, I think that the producers should have passed on Sam Jackson's star power (and anyone else's star power as well) and cast an actor who could portray Fury as being instantly recognizable to geezer fanboys. But since Kirby---co-creator of all the principal Avengers characters plus Fury---was almost passed over in the end credits, thanks in large measure to decades of bad faith by Stan Lee, maybe it's no wonder that Fury's authentic character is nowhere to be found in the movie. It's not that Jackson does a bad job; it's just that he's nothing like Agent Fury or his barking, hard-fisted homunculus.

About the combat choreography: a trouble I always have with CG battles in superhero movies is that they're very hard to parse, visually. Everything happens too close and too fast for my eyebones to sort out. In the Avengers, things happen as loud and fast as you would expect, but somehow it was much easier for me to perceive the action taking place in a fixed landscape. The raw power exchanged between Thor and Iron Man, trying to kick each other's ass due to a misunderstanding in the Mighty Marvel Tradition, feels plausible as they fling each other into heavy, unmovable objects without restraint. However, the one thing I think we're always going to have to suspend our disbelief about is the dynamics of mass, momentum, and inertia: we just can't escape many incidents where the low-power and no-power humans such as Fury, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and even Cap should be liquified, decapitated, amputated, or blunt-force-trauma-ed by a sudden acceleration from zero to, say, 100 g (or the converse). These things occur when being swatted by the Hulk, or thrown by an explosion, or grabbing ahold of an alien flying motorscooter moving at about Mach 1. Deal with it, ya yardbirds!

Big Rock Head criticized the movie's style of humor as being too Scrubs. My reaction was that he may be correct in making the connection, but that the humor used in The Avengers was very much in the spirit of the original Marvel scripts, and even Mad Comics---simultaneously witty and corny---and predates Scrubs by decades if not centuries. We can see similar formulations in The Three Stooges, for example. At the root of BRH's observation (I'm assuming, here, because I've never seen an episode of Scrubs) is that the modern sitcom form has become so dilute that it builds entire teleplays on a series of round-robin quips that try to serve as substance instead of periodic punctuation. So the humor in The Avengers is not high comedy, but that's because it doesn't have to be. It serves the same purpose in the movie that it did on the newsprint pages 45 years ago---to lighten the violent action and humanize the characters.

All things considered, the director and producers deserve lots of credit. The Avengers is a movie worth paying to see. But reflexive cynicism tells me that it's probably not too early to start worrying about how The Corporation will do its best to lower the common denominator for the next installment by 30 IQ points or so.

Apropos of nothing still

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I've decided that I swear too goddam much. It sounds slovenly to my ears, except on the occasion of a well-selected, well-timed interjection that provides or reinforces an aspect of the communication that can be provided in no other way.

So, while I am not promising to swear off the practice (nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK! D'OHHH!), I do commit to reducing this verbal litter in my beautiful walled garden that is Fifty50. Please do make a note of it, and thank you for your attention in this matter.

Apropos of almost nothing

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In reference to the comments thread in this post, here's what a real Cubs manager sounds like:



Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Saturday Night After Hours

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Here's an oddly glorious-sounding ditty from the soundtrack of Frank Zappa's out-of-print movie 200 Motels.



I just happened to listen to my CD version of this tonight whilst making a batch of Utility Research Muffins, Bluberry-Orange, and felt like sharing it with the rest of yez.

They lyrics represent a lament of the late-sixties rock star, who it would seem did not always necessarily have access to the highest-class of groupie after any given show (particularly in a place like "Centerville: A Real Nice Place To Raise Your Kids Up." The falsetto vocals are by Turtles singers Howard Kaylan and Mark Vollman, who formed the core of Zappa's "vaudeville band." (The bass player in this aggregation was Jim Pons, yet another Turtles alumnus.) The subject matter of this band was heavily skewed toward obscene, surreal vignettes from "life on the road," which also was the theme (such as it was) for the movie.

It's hard for me to put my finger on what I like about the timbre of the organ in this one. It's churchy and industrial and atmospheric all at once, with lots of colorful fat-fingered dissonances. The trombone is used in an unusual way in this cut, too, being the only wind instrument in evidence. Even more unusual: it's played by George Duke, known pretty much exclusively for keyboards in subsequent versions of the Mothers and, later, in the jazz world at large. The reverb of pretty much everything is both completely over the top and just right to my earbones.

Another oddity: the mix on this version sounds significantly different from my CD on Ryko. don't know if the poster took this from the vinyl or the VHS movie soundtrack, or if the CD was released more than once with different mixes. Zappa was notorious for doing ridiculous things with the mixes and edits on CD reissues... and not necessarily well loved for it by his fans. In this case, though, the mix on this version is fine by me---it just highlights sounds and nuances that aren't apparent on any version I've heard recently. One day I will pull out the vinyl, wipe it down, and give it a hear.

What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning? Frank Zappa and The Mother Of Invention (1971, from the "original MGM motion picture soundtrack" of "Frank Zappa's 200 Motels," Rykodisc RCD 10513/14), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Go, you White Sox!

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Suck on this, you North Side yuppies, hipsters, and sorry hangers-on!

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Over the past 6 weeks or so I've been bemused by American right-wing Roman Catholic hierarchs and politicians who seem to think that this here is the Papal States of America we all live in. They're dangerous nuts who should stay the hell out of electoral politics and thank the Trinity that their secular activities aren't taxed into destitution, where they belong.



In the 1960s, Tom Lehrer (who Wikipedia tells me is still alive, by gum!) could perform this type of comedy music on a nationally broadcast TV variety show, and I think that most of the audience of the time would have understood the setup he provides here before the song. We had a Catholic president at the time who had pledged sincerely and truthfully that the executive branch under him would be taking no direction from Rome. At the same time, the Vatican II reforms Lehrer refers to were making the Catholic Church less foreign-seeming and scary to everyday Protestant types (not to mention many in the American Catholic congregation).

Can you imagine what the likes of failed presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich would have to say about this performance today were it to be given on, say Saturday Night Live? Demands for boycotts of the network, apologies, congressional hearings!

And I must say, as I listen to these lyrics through adult ears for the first time (I heard this song plenty of times as a kid from the old blond Olympia hi-fi console in the living room), I'm suddenly much less sure that this parody was fully intended in good nature. I really wish Lehrer were inspired out of retirement by the repugnance of RC current events (including the church's indifference toward its own multigeneration pastoral sex-crime rampage and systematic cover-up) to record an update.

The Vatican Rag, Tom Lehrer (11 September 1967, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Gorgeous song; music maybe not what one would expect by the title.



As I've mentioned before, song lyrics have almost always been a secondary consideration to me because I could rarely understand them, articulationwise. I tend to listen to the vocals first as another instrument in the arrangement. Then, if I can understand the words as coherent phrases in English, fine. But I'm a pretty literal-minded guy, so I feel real proud of myself if I can extract the composer's intended meaning from roundabout poetics.

E's lyrics are very personal, always. People who know something about the personal tragedies he endured as a younger man may have a clue about the enigmatic lyrics of this song. I happened to think of playing it for you tonight because as we approach the climax of the Christian Holy Week it comes to mind that (1) some traditions hold that Christ spent the Saturday after his crucifixion in Hell and (2) we never learned about this part of the religion in Sunday School or even confirmation as young teenagers in the Methodist denomination. At this point I will invite The Minister's Daughter to shed any light on this, as available. (Allegory and all.) Also, Beer-D and/or Big Rock Head should feel free to disambiguate the content of the lyrics to this haunting Eels composition.

Your Lucky Day In Hell, Eels (1996, from "Beautiful Freak," Dreamworks DRMD-50001), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Diana Krall's peckerwood husband.



Just kidding! (Peckerwood-wise.) Elvis Costello has been a favorite of mine for over 30 years, and this cut stands out to me among his long list of masterpieces.

The zippy pop arrangement, as exuberant as bubble gum, provides the happy "vector" for delivering an apocalyptic prophecy for Empire. I assume that Costello's lyrics were understood much more directly by his British audience, being children of an imperial twilight, than by Americans. But his imagery is so vivid that the thrust of the words were readily discerned even by a complacent twenty-something college slacker in 1979 who had little detailed knowledge of colonialism.

This song has not become any less relevant with the decline of the great Western colonial powers, because those empires have been supplanted by extractive transnational corporate enterprises that rival the power of  any in world history. And ultimately, I think the new ones are every bit as doomed as the ill-fated empires of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. This is still a prophetic, snappy little pop ditty that should haunt the brain stem of any plutocrat within hearing distance.

Oliver's Army, Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1979, from "Armed Forces," Columbia JC35709), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Bonus fun stuff: while scavenging my vinyl LP collection for the catalog information I rediscovered the bonus 33 rpm demo EP packaged with the original US release of Armed Forces. It contains "Watching The Detectives," "Accidents Will Happen," and "Allison." Also stashed away in the sleeve: my ticket stub for the 10 March 1979 Elvis & Attractions performance at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Bruce Pavitt's girlfriend smuggled my camera into that show under her greatcoat after a security goon tried to confiscate it from me. Don't try that today unless you're prepared to get beaten in the skull with a five-cell Maglite or else give some fat turd a blowjob.

DuckDuckGo[ogle]

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In addition to some suggestions I recently offered about making your computer and your privacy (possibly) less vulnerable to invasion when using the web, I stumbled across another goodie that seems positioned for breakout popularity soon. It's a search engine called DuckDuckGo.

First, it reminds me of Google 10-plus years ago: a simple site that searches for stuff you type in real fast and returns results rank-ordered in terms of raw relevance in relation to your keywords. Many of us with broadband access at work developed a reflexive Google habit sometime during the second term of Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. And probably just as many of us have retained the habit, uncritically. This has enabled Google to build a colossal technology concern, funded by advertising targeted to your web browser and its search history (and by cross-referencing lots of other stuff in the background). Good for them; I'm happy to see a (somewhat) progressive competitor in the tech business to challenge Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, and whomever.

During the past decade, though, Google dove into an aggressively extractive business model that some people call corporatism. As it has happened everywhere else over the past 30 years, people on the internet have devolved from human beings into customers and then resources; from citizens into capital and then commodities. This isn't Google's fault, of course, but Google is evidently really good at delivering our eyeballs to merchants and marketing snoops who then use them to colonize our attention. (I say "apparently" because Firefox and its privacy plug-ins shield me from most of it, so I don't observe the full extent of the privacy invasion from where I sit.)

Anyway, I've found the Google search engine to be a lot less helpful to me in the past several years. Maybe you have, too. And you, like I, have probably read about why this is the case. For example, Google delivers search results keyed to our ZIP code, our search history, stuff reported back to the company by our browser cookies, and so on. At the DuckDuckGo site, they explain it. The term of art is bubbling, as in keeping you in a bubble of isolation, searchwise, based on what Google and its "partners" determine to be the best way to extract consumer-type attention from you. Check it out. It's the clearest and most concise explanation of bubbling I've seen. Likewise, read their explanation of how tracking works. Top-notch education in a dozen pictures and captions.

My initial results with DuckDuckGo seem to be a world away from the chaff that Google delivers these days. I've set a button on my Firefox bookmark bar and will install the DDG search plug-in as soon as Mozilla gets its act together and fixes the Firefox installation bug. (Dumbness that I won't get sidetracked on here.)

I haven't read anything about the company yet, and I hope their strat plan isn't to become "the next Google." If they were to set up as an open-source nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, I'd donate some green stuff to them.

I don't have any animosity toward Google The Corporation, but extractive capitalism is just not compatible with respect for the individual and his or her privacy. So their having a real search competitor is just fine with me.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This late-1940s public service announcement broadcast on the DuMont Television Network is, to me, a heartwarming artifact of an era in media history when at least some people may have been in the business for a constructive social purpose. Its target audience was kids, Video Rangers in particular---fans of Captain Video (such as Ed Norton). The PSA is earnest yet sincere, and the lesson is unassailable: fight discrimination by making friends. Prejudice gets in the way of making friends, and everyone wants lots of friends. Plus, prejudice is... un-American, of all things! Imagine someone saying that on TV today.



In fact, I cannot imagine a PSA of this caliber being created or broadcast in the current era. Even in the best case, I can hear in my mind's ear the condescension oozing through the glottis of some "cool" B-list celebrity paying lip service to some shallow feel-good message, as a vehicle for promoting someone's "brand." (Also: visibility and tax write-off!) The very idea of such a PSA would be considered "controversial," I'm sure, and thus focus-grouped to death before the project was orphaned to PBS where the message could be articulated by red, green, and blue Muppets.

Captain Video Anti-Discrimination PSA (late 1940s, DuMont Television Network), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Special bonus for all you Video Rangers:

I, Edward Norton, Ranger Third Class in the Captain Video Ranger Academy, do solemnly pledge to obey my mommy and daddy, to be kind to dumb animals and old ladies in and out of space, not to tease my little brothers and sisters and to brush my teeth twice a day and drink milk after every meal.