the museum of lost causes

MetaClip Open Source Project

2011-12-14T21:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a new open source project I recently launched on Codeplex:

It's called MetaClip and it's a tool that lets you store clipboard contents permanently in a portable file format. Development is still just getting underway, but the current version does all the basic stuff it's supposed to do fairly well (stores and restores clipboard contents, lets you organize and filter clips by category, etc.). I've only tested on Windows XP SP2 and Windows 7.

Just be forewarned: it doesn't warn you before deleting stored clips if you select delete from the context menu or if you delete a category.

Faust the Movie (A Novel) - A Web Serial

2011-09-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a new project I'm working on. It's been going, erm, slowly, but going all the same. It's the original story of Faust that I began working on around the same time as "Faust, the Movie" the album I released under the name Tangemeenie with my wife Lori. In fact, this story was always meant to provide the background context for the album itself, which was a sort of mock-soundtrack concept album.

Anyway, it's not in anything resembling a final draft, but it's not exactly a first rough either. I've already got another 26 episodes in the bag, it's just a matter of putting some finishing touches on them and getting them online, and I'd appreciate any feedback I get along the way.

There's a possibility I'll decide to make some fairly substantial revisions about halfway through the material I've already got, so there may be delays further down the road, but for now, I plan to post at least one of these a week. (Sorry for the delay in the latest post, on the off-chance anyone is following along at home.)

Episode 1: Before the Audition

Episode 2: The Audition

Episode 3: Bad News

Episode 4: Poisonous Fruits

Faust the Movie (a Novel) - Episode 3

2011-09-10T19:44:00.001-07:00

BAD NEWS

When the results of the audition arrived by post three weeks later, he knew without even having to open the envelope that the news was bad.

On looking back, he couldn’t say specifically what it was that tipped him off. Had the envelope been too thin? Or too thick? No, it had been just right, and the ambiguity had sent his mind racing in random directions?

He remembered there had hung a sort of aura around the thing—a dark aura—but that detail was surely an embellishment, the product of a faulty memory under stress.

In cold reality, it had been an ordinary letter like any other official communication from the university, distinguishable only by the fact it bore the music school’s silver foil insignia and return address on the outside. There had been no dark aura.

The important part of the letter read:

“…regretfully finding that, while the jurists did give your performance a generally positive appraisal--despite noting certain irregularities in the audition process--your personal and academic history suggest you lack the requisite personal experience or supplemental training needed to excel in the music program, given the current, highly competitive academic environment.

“Recent state legislatively mandated funding cuts have made it difficult to accommodate all qualified students. You are encouraged to audition again during the next open audition period, for entry to the school beginning in the next successive term. In the meantime, you can improve your chances to be admitted by pursuing extracurricular activities related directly or indirectly to your chosen field of study. For example, string majors might choose to join a local, all-volunteer chamber group, to gain experience in live performance. On the other hand, even a full-time job…“

Nick had never imagined himself as the kind of person who broke down before. But he broke down now, his shoulders heaving and his breathing speeding up in fits, as tears streamed down his face.

It was a moment of madness. He wailed. He tore at his clothes and gnashed his teeth. It was biblical. For a minute and a half or so he went on in this fashion.

Then finally he managed to shake it off, at the same time remembering there was still a half pint of vodka in the freezer and a dime bag of weed that a friend had given him at a party in the shoebox where he kept his stash.

He closed his eyes and envisioned the next few weeks unfolding: he foresaw himself getting so drunk he forget everything else, quickly going beyond hopeless, caught in the iron grip of self-pity. He could already see where things were heading.

When he came-to a few days later, he had a throbbing headache, and the bottle of vodka had nearly run dry. He had been taking his time with it, drinking small sips, enhancing its potency with weed. But the bottle now lay spent on the coffee table.

He had fucked up. He had fucked it all up. He had lost his job. Or more accurately, quit his job. By abandonment: the coward’s way. He just hadn’t ever shown up. Not so much as a phone call. And it had been how many days now?

But it really didn’t matter exactly how many days it had been. It had been enough. That much was clear. There were messages on the voicemail from the night manager. Nick had ignored them, leaving them there, nagging only at the edges of his awareness. He knew already. He’d have to go back home. No other options. Until now, he had lived from one paycheck to the next.

Home, he thought, such a strange word for it. The place where he had lived since his grandmother died when he was fifteen—it was that much—but he could hardly call it home. That word suggested security, warmth and comfort. He had known nothing of these things when he lived there. Or if he had known them, they had just popped into view for an instant and then disappeared again, like shooting gallery clowns at an outdoor carnival.

He knew all of this on one level, but on another, he still couldn’t face the reality of it, try as he might. So instead he soaked his wits in liquor and smoked too much, regressing to an infantile state, lying fetus-wise on the living room floor until daybreak, where he awoke nuzzling his bottle of watered-down vodka.

But at least now there was one last thing to look forward to, he realized. It was Friday, the night of Jesse’s graduation party. With some luck, he could re-up his stash there, or snag a flask full of vodka or rum. Even whiskey was a possibility. Jesse, like many of his friends, was generous.

Maybe he could even meet someone tonight. His heart ached at the thought of sleeping alone again. His ambitions were getting loftier than ever now, he thought, ironically.

Maybe he could seduce a trust fund girl, live parasitically off someone else’s unearned wealth for a while. He simply didn’t want to consider the only immediate, practical alternatives. So he didn’t.

When 11:00 PM came around, Nick found himself there, standing at Jesse’s apartment door, knocking briskly.

Jesse answered. This was apparently supposed to be another of Jesse’s 70’s pop-culture themed party, for he modeled a sparkly mauve trimmed jumpsuit, with an enormous and almost comically ill-fitting white collar. His chest hair was not only exposed, but also conditioned with glistening styling oils to heighten the dramatic effect. The entire costume was complemented, both fittingly and absurdly, by a thick gold neck chain under which a marble-sized silver disco ball medallion hung glinting in the street light.

“Hey—what’s up, man! You look rough. Is everything cool? Is that your costume?”

“Yeah, no, everything’s fine—“ Nick stammered. “I’m fine. I didn’t realize this was a theme party. It caught me off guard. I had a really late night last night, couldn’t sleep I guess. Getting the party started a day too early. Hey, hate to ask this but I could really use a smoke. Do you mind?”

“Oh, no way, man. Help yourself. Here, take a couple for the road. Come on in and enjoy yourself. I think I saw Greenblatt heading toward the smoker’s lounge a couple minutes ago. You can probably still catch him if you hurry.”

Nick took the loose cigarettes and deposited them in his shirt pocket, noting with a touch of disappointment that they were a generic brand. Like asbestos spikes in the lungs, he thought. Pure poison.

But he quickly lit one anyway, thanking Jesse as he departed in the direction of “the smoker’s lounge,” the spare room in the back where all the pot smokers in his social circle congregated when they partied at Jesse’s, passing around tortoise-shell colored glass pipes of various shapes and sizes, stuffing them full of exotic and unctuous strains of cannabis, then drawing in the musky-smelling smoke with relish, and choking and laughing uncontrollably as the smoke swirled around them.

Nick wasn’t disappointed by the scene that awaited him inside as he entered that familiar room tonight. The first person who greeted him as he pushed in through the door was indeed his good friend, Greenblatt.

Faust the Movie (a Novel) - Episode 4

2011-09-09T18:38:00.000-07:00

POISONOUS FRUITS

Greenblatt, as Nick and his friends all implicitly knew, was not the name of any particular person at the party that night. The name (a pun on the German word “blatt,” or “leaf”) was more of an inside joke. It applied to any number of mutual acquaintances, who sometimes became the focus of interest during certain sly, knowing exchanges that took place on nights like this.

Tonight Nick recognized Greenblatt as Gary, or Gary the Hippie, whom as far as Nick could tell had also arrived sans costume tonight, although he couldn’t be too sure on that point since Gary’s regular wardrobe consisted mostly of thrift shop clothes that had originally circulated in the 60s and 70s anyway.

Nick liked Gary. Not only because he was generous with his weed if he liked you, but because he was affable and easy-going, with a mischievous streak that made his company more pleasant than some of the other Greenblatts, who were sometimes on the paranoid and short-tempered side.

Gary greeted Nick’s arrival with a broad, crooked grin.

“Hey, Nick—good to see you, brother. You showed up just in time.” Gary offered Nick a pipe with a freshly packed bowl full of pungent-smelling, hydroponically grown marijuana. “When was the last time you saw bud like this man? This is pure White Widow. Picked up an ounce of this stuff a couple night ago. It’s choice. Barely even remembered to drag my stoned ass off the couch to come here tonight. Go ahead. Spark it up. Take the green off it.”

The abrupt transition into the thick, smoke-filled air had left Nick slightly off balance. He caught a look on the one or two faces he could distinguish as he scanned the dim-lit room that struck him as unnaturally spaced out and distant, even for stoners.

Finally re-acclimating himself, he became painfully conscious that the others were probably anxious for him to take a hit and send the pipe back into circulation. So he grabbed the pipe and lighter Gary had offered him without further hesitation, and took a deep hit, retaining the harsh smoke that filled his lungs as long as he could.

The familiar feeling of release came almost instantly. As he finally exhaled, a soothing, numbing warmth settled instantly over his body, and his mind’s grip on itself eased ever-so-slightly, like a fist unclenching.

Nick passed the pipe off to the next smoker in rotation, a skinny blonde girl he vaguely recognized from other parties he’s attended here. Her skin looked blotchy and pale in the flare of the lighter’s flame as she put the pipe to her lips and took her turn. Her face bore the same peculiarly vacant expression that Nick had noticed on the others. He found that look vaguely unsettling.

Gary had sidled up beside him now, still grinning.

“Told you, didn’t I? Quality bud like that doesn’t seem to make the rounds much anymore. Neither do you, I notice. So where’ve you been holed up anyway? It’s been awhile.”

“I haven’t been getting out much lately. No real reason—well, no, now that you mention it, I guess rehearsing for my MFA audition was taking up most of my free time for a few weeks. But that’s all over now.”

“Good, good,” Gary said approvingly, ignoring the undercurrent of desperation in Nick’s tone. “So it’s time to put all that stress behind you now, and I think I’ve got just what you need for a proper celebration of the occasion.”

Nick thought he anticipated where this talk was leading. He quickly drew Gary aside, out of ear shot of anyone else who might listen in on their conversation.

One of the earliest lessons Nick had learned in his life as a pot head was that within the subterranean marketplaces in which the Greenblatts of the world set up shop, the normal principles of competition are inverted, with customers falling over themselves just to be let into the store. So it was best to be discreet about it, if and when you happened to find a store open for business.

“Sure, Gary, sure. What have you got in mind? I could probably spring for as much as an eighth, but this stuff’s probably a little pricy for me right now, so no more than that. I can’t swing more than an eighth right now.”

“No way, brother—you’ve got it wrong. I’m not looking to do business with you tonight. I’m not selling you anything.” Gary must have registered the look of discouragement that flashed across Nick’s face because he quickly elaborated: “Wait, I didn’t mean it that way either. Listen, I know all about the music school thing. Got the word from Eric. It’s a shame. What are you going to do?”

Eric was a music school grad student and teaching assistant who also traveled in Nick’s loose social circle. It wasn’t hard to imagine where he’d picked up the news; the efficiency of the music school’s rumor mill was itself the subject of endless gossip.

“That’s got to hurt. Don’t lie.”

Nick avoided eye-contact, nodding abstractly.

“But not tonight. Tonight’s a pain-free night. And it’s on the house. I’ve got a nice little sack of Widow just for you right here.” As Gary spoke this time, he pulled a compact but dense bundle from his pocket and proffered it to Nick, who stuffed it into his own pocket unhesitatingly. “And that’s just an appetizer. Hold on. You’re up again.”

Gary broke away from Nick to accept the pipe as it completed its wobbly orbit around the room. But he didn’t take a hit himself, gesturing instead for Nick to take another, which he did gratefully.

As Gary continued his speech to Nick, he extracted a carefully folded square of aluminum foil from his shirt pocket. “Like I was saying, the weed’s just an appetizer. Tonight, this is the main course.”

“Is that what I think it is?” Nick said, paying close attention now. This, he realized, probably explained the strange expressions he’d noticed on certain faces in the room. They weren’t high, they were tripping.

“Interested in taking a little trip tonight?” Gary unfolded the square of aluminum foil, which enclosed about a dozen small irregularly shaped squares of white blotter paper.

Nick was past playing it cool. The local supply of acid had all but evaporated over the last couple of years; he hadn’t dropped in nearly a year.

“Goddamn it, Gary. I love you,” he said.

Gary flashed Nick his familiar crooked grin again. “Here. These three hits are all yours. Believe me, you won’t need more. It’s clean stuff, too. So you won’t get any twitchy side effects like you get with the strychnine-cut stuff.”

Nick wasted no time in shoving the tiny white paper squares into his mouth, tucking them under his tongue to ensure the most efficient delivery of the chemical agent.

Nick wasn’t sure what to say next. He sensed it would be ungracious not to at least make an effort to offer Gary a few more moments of conversation, but in fact, he’d never had a real conversation with Gary before, so he had no idea what subjects, apart from drugs, interested him. And the effects of the two hits of pot smoke were already starting to frustrate Nick’s attempts to marshal his thoughts enough to make intelligible conversation. Once the acid kicked in, of course, all bets were off.

But then, for a second time, Gary demonstrated an almost supernaturally keen intuition for what Nick was thinking, letting him off the hook with a quick pat on the back to signal an end to their exchange.

“Well, it looks like my date’s getting bored,” Gary gestured toward the blonde with the bad complexion that had caught Nick’s eye earlier. She had withdrawn to a far corner of the room, where, absurdly, she stood staring intensely at a damaged section of the wall, tracing the paths of cracks in the plaster with her fingers. “Good to see you here tonight, Nick.”

Nick thanked Gary what must have been a half dozen times, making what he knew was likely an empty promise to get together for drinks before he left town or whatever it was he ended up doing next.

Then Gary strode easily away and, in what may have been the first real sign of how strange the evening was going to get, literally melted into the crowd.

Another Failed American Success Story

2011-08-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

My grandfather died 15 years ago, and yet,

sometimes I still catch a glimpse of myself

in a mirror and think, “there he is: I see him!”

Then reality slaps me in the face

and I remember again, that he was

never my biological kin, so any family

resemblance I think I’m seeing is only

wishful-thinking—a fact I’m still unused to,

and will never really accept. No, when my

grandfather married him, she was pregnant

at 16 by another man, and he proposed

for two reasons: one, because he wanted

to help keep her respectable, and two,

because he loved her. He was a tough,

Alabaman, hillbilly sharecropper, who

sometimes got into knife fights at juke joints,

and once turned up outside the soda fountain

where my grandmother worked part time,

with a crowbar in his hands, crouched behind one

of those big shiny cars with enormous fins that were

hip at the time, ready to bash in the head

of the handsome young G.I. Joe she had been

flirting with at the soda counter. My grandfather

was the kind of guy who washed the open cuts

on his fists with gasoline. He dropped out of school

before finishing sixth grade to help feed the family,

his eight siblings, when his father died tragically

and unexpectedly; he had to take to the fields.

His mother was full-blooded Cherokee, and so he

was considered a mulatto, ostracized. All the same,

through sheer bullheadedness, a way with machines,

and hard work, he became first a master heavy

equipment mechanic, and finally, a timber man,

owner of a multi-million-dollar-a-year logging

and chipping operation in Florida. Years later, he

would end up a victim of his own basic decency:

being a man of his word, he mistook those he did

business with for the same. So it didn’t take long

before he was ruined, and when he finally saw it coming,

he had a heart attack and died on the spot, in the woods

on a job-site somewhere down in Georgia, in the morning,

just after sun up. And not long after that, what remained

of his legacy disappeared too when a crooked circuit judge

banged his gavel for the last time and told my grandmother

she had no claim to what was left of his timber business

because—and I quote:—“What do you need it for?” and so

we were all left without our inheritance, all my poor

grandfather’s relentless toiling—waking before sun up

and returning well past dusk, reeking of engine grease,

sweat and beer—which had left us with so little

of him all along—had in the end left us with nothing at all.

The Two Wolf Mothers

2011-07-07T18:13:00.001-07:00

(The following is a first draft of a children's story/allegory that recently occurred to me.)

Once, in a clearing next to a muddy little river deep in the woods, there lived a pack of wild wolves.

Though their numbers had once been much greater, vicious territory fights with rival wolf-packs in the region had, in recent years, worn the pack down to a small but resourceful group of a half dozen adults.

Among the wolf pack also lived the two wolf mothers. The first wolf mother was known for her wicked temper, spitefulness, and cruelty; the second was known for her generosity, fair-mindedness, and wisdom.

As it happened, that spring, both wolf mothers gave birth to new litters at the same time.

Now, it is a well-known but ugly fact of nature that even the best wolf mothers, because they are only animals, are sometimes known to gobble up the smallest and weakest of the cubs in the litter, especially during lean times like the pack now faced.

And so, since she always was a stickler for observing the traditional ways of the wolf-pack, especially the uglier ones, the cruel wolf mother immediately hardened her heart against the runt of her little litter in due fashion.

The plucky, but tragically slight and feeble cub had seldom managed to fight off his brothers well enough to earn a mouthful at feeding time even before his own mother began pushing him away. Now, he didn’t stand a chance. So each day, the hungry little cub grew weaker and weaker, until one day the cruel wolf mother, in a final fit of wickedness just gobbled him up whole.

The second wolf mother, meanwhile, took a very different approach to raising the runt of her litter.

Instead of harassing and abusing the frail little cub as his littermates did, she protected the runt from his more aggressive littermates and ensured that he always got the first and largest share of milk at feeding time.

And because he always ate more than his share of food and was kept so well sheltered from harm, the runt soon caught up and eventually exceeded the other cubs in size and physical development.

In fact, the runt over time grew to be the largest male wolf in this region of the deep woods. And because his mother had always cared so tenderly and lovingly for him, he was fiercely devoted to her and served vigilantly as her guardian and protector.

One summer afternoon, toward early evening, a larger, rival wolf pack stealthily encircled the pack as the two wolf mothers and their brood slept in preparation for the night’s hunt. A vicious and terrible fight ensued as the rivals swept in, claws and teeth flashing.

In the confusion of the attack, at the first opportunity, the cruel wolf mother‘s cubs abandoned her to the invading marauders and ran off into the woods. The rival wolves surrounded the wicked wolf mother, who was snarling in a nasty way, and finally they just gobbled her up.

Meanwhile, the runt of the kindly wolf mother’s litter remained his mother’s devoted protector. As the invaders came near, he flashed his enormous fangs and growled his deep, rumbling growl at them, and it was soon evident that not one of the rival wolves was a match for him.

All that night, the great gray wolf who had started life as the runt of his litter, kept his mother safe from harm as she had once done for him, fighting ferociously to defend her.

And in the morning as the little family rejoined the remainder of the pack to lick their wounds and regroup, they were surprised and relieved to find that, in the end, their little pack had won the battle and held its territory after all. Almost all by himself, the wolf mother's guardian had battled the pack’s enemies to a standstill, fighting like a lion to protect the mother he so loved.

That’s how the runt of the litter came to be named the new leader of the pack. And from that day forward, the newly crowned wolf king, his kindly mother, the resourceful wolf-pack, and even the cruel wolf mother’s surviving children, lived happily ever after.

The Great American Fart-Room

2011-05-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

There’s a story I’ve been meaning to tell that might ring true to those of you who, as aging adults, have been in the quite literally uncomfortable position of undergoing some form of diagnostic colonoscopy. Rather than dwelling on the morbid aspects of that particular torture (and there are many), it’s what happens immediately after the procedure itself that actually left the greatest imprint on me.

You see, over the course of such procedures, the good doctors who deal in these arts sometimes make surgical use of large quantities of compressed gas—gaseous air injected into the gastrointestinal tract, which the body later has to expel in the form of flatulence. And so as it turns out, farting excessively is crucial to the post-operative recovery process. Great, right? Who doesn’t relish the thought of farting in front of nurses and other strangers? But wait. It gets better.

Because as they wheel you out into the recovery area, the nurse’s hands busily pumping your gut to force you to emit one honking indignity after another, playing you like the hand-horn on a speeding clown car, you suddenly find yourself exposed in what for all intents and purposes is a public space.

You might as well be in a crowded bus station, or a big box store. There you are thronged by representatives of every species of humanity. Sure, the other patients you pass, lying on their sides, farting as if their lives depended on it, tend to skew to the elderly—but rich and poor alike are on display, people from every segment of society. And they all have one glorious absurdity in common: For the next ten to fifteen minutes, they will be separated from each other by little more than a thin linen curtain, and they will be farting like they have never farted in their lives.

It’s an almost Rousseauian arrangement, accidentally a near-perfect expression of the Enlightenment Era’s egalitarian spirit. All of humanity farting together, publicly, unashamedly—out of necessity. If only we could work so well together, overcoming our tendencies toward both taking offense and being offensive, in other aspects of life, putting aside our petty differences, transcending even the ridiculous together, in service to necessity. And well, isn't it strange that these days, the idea of everyone just working together almost seems more ridiculous than the notion of a room full of Americans, trying with all their might to fart their troubles away?

The Perils of Treating Legal Arrangements as People

2011-03-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

I posted this comment somewhere else on the web earlier today, but it seems worth sharing here as well. I'm interested to hear what others think about this idea. To me, it cinches the case against corporate personhood. But then, I'm no lawyer.

Here is why Citizens United and this entire issue of corporate personhood is problematic, and does not make for sensible law, no matter how much you squint at it. It all boils down to two questions and the obviously very different answers to them:

1) How much can an individual contribute to the campaign of any individual politician running for election in a Federal race? The answer is straightforward: $2,400.00.

2) How much can an individual who is the head of multiple corporate entities contribute to any individual politician running for election in a Federal race? The answer is not at all straightforward, but it's definitely much more than $2,400.00, because they are free to donate that much as individuals and that much more many times again through directed funds from whatever corporate entities they have sufficient influence over. Under Citizens United, this second individual--the wealthy CEOs--can theoretically contribute multiples of the maximum individual campaign contribution limit to a single candidate. The only limit is the amount of money the individual can devote to spinning off corporate entities that are plausibly independent enough not to run afoul of the letter of the law. An extremely wealthy person can pay many dozens of times more to the candidate of their choice.

These two questions instantly show the real problem with the flawed legal notion of corporate person-hood generally and the Citizens United decision more particularly: They result in a de facto uneven application of law, with one law for the wealthy, and another for the rest of us. That's not permissible regardless of what makes for a convenient legal framework.

Faust: The Movie (a novel) - Episode 2

2011-01-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

THE AUDITION

The door snapped shut behind Nick like a sprung trap as he sloshed absurdly into the front lobby of the music school’s performance hall.

He found himself enclosed in a space dominated by high-ceilings and dull marble tile, where haphazard architectural anachronisms came together to create an overall impression of stolid severity while a faint but deep-seated odor of mildew hinted at decades of slap-dash housekeeping.

His breath came in labored gasps as he collapsed onto a bench just inside the entrance, his sides aching from the exertion of his sprint through the rain.

Rainwater had drenched his hair and clothes, soaking him to the skin, chilling him. And so as a burst of cool, air-conditioned air passed by, he started trembling. Or were his nerves playing tricks again?

Either way, his first priority now had to be getting himself cleaned up. He couldn’t show up for the audition in this soggy state.

It was lucky he’d reached the hall with extra time to pull himself together. Roughly a half-hour remained before he was scheduled to present himself to the audition jury, time he’d hoped to spend preparing psychologically. He would need every minute, now, just to make himself presentable again.

He found a restroom around the corner and slipped inside. Looking into the mirror above the sink, he set about cleaning himself up. His clothes hadn’t been much to start with, but at least they’d been dry. He took his t-shirt off and stood at the sink, squeezing water out of it. He did the same with every other article of clothing he wore, leaving only his shabby boxer shorts in place. He used the electric hand dryer systematically to dry each article, and soon, he was dressed again and looking only a little worse for the wear.

It was then, with this latest mini-crisis barely behind him that he realized he no longer knew where his canvas tote bag was. Frantically, he retraced his steps in memory.

He felt sure the bag and its crucial cargo had still been in his possession when he first came in out of the rain—or had it? Was it possible he’d already lost it in all the haste and confusion of his dash across campus?

The only place he could think of where he might have left it was on the bench near the entrance, so he rushed back to check there. But his heart sank as he approached the heavy concrete structure; he saw no sign of the bag. He was sweating now, his mind racing.

What were his chances of making it through the audition without the sheet music? He knew the pieces well, but did he know them that well? Besides, he was supposed to bring copies of his music for each of the jurists evaluating his performance.

But that didn’t matter now. He would have to make do. The time for his audition had arrived. There was barely enough time left now to make his way through the maze-like series of hallways to the rehearsal room where he was expected.

******

“Ah—I assume you are Mr. Faustino. I’m Dr. Steinhertz, chair of the graduate piano department. My colleagues and I are glad you could join us,” the lead jurist dead-panned, his fingers absently working one leg of his steel-framed eye-glasses. “We’re holding auditions today, you know.”

Nick had arrived five minutes late. His stomach-lining seemed to fold in on itself as he stared into the skeptical faces of the jury.

“I’m sorry, I—I got caught in the rain during the walk here. I’m afraid I also lost my sheet music somewhere along the way. But please, I’d like to proceed with the audition, or reschedule, if that’s in any way possible. This really matters a lot to me.”

“You’re prepared to perform without sheet music?”

“Yes. I think I am.”

“Let’s hope so. Well, then, since the selections listed here on your application are all fairly conventional ones—” Nick thought he detected a note of condescension in Steinhertz’s tone. “We’ll make a special accommodation and allow you to proceed with your audition. But please don’t disappoint us. If you start noodling and improvising, this audition is over.”

Any relief Nick felt was short-lived because in the same instant he also realized there was no turning back. The all-important moment had arrived. Everything else depended on this, on what happened next: he was at the crossroads.

He seated himself uncertainly behind the massive, black grand piano that stood at the focal point of the room, his mop of coppery blonde hair giving him the appearance of a mad scientist sitting down to work before some infernal machine.

Summoning up all the resolve he could muster, he opened the keyboard cover, stretched his fingers, and began to play his first piece, a well-known Beethoven piano sonata.

What happened next caught him completely by surprise. He suddenly felt as if all the self-doubt and uncertainty he’d built up in his mind that morning—over the entire last year, for that matter--had suddenly been transformed into a feeling of absolute and totalizing freedom: in an instant, he felt released from all the ordinary burdens of human existence, transformed into a living musical instrument being played by an infinitely more rational power, as if he could do no wrong, each note flowing flawlessly into the next without a trace of hesitation or self-doubt.

He had often heard his fellow students describe classical musical performance using lofty terms like “transcendence” and “liberation,” but in truth, music had always seemed like just a more abstract variation on arithmetic. Wasn’t it all about ratios and technical tricks? Until now, he’d never thought of musical performance as a particularly profound activity. It was a labor of love, to be sure, but it was first a labor. What he was doing now was not labor. It was Art, with a capital ‘A,’ so to speak.

By the time Nick concluded his audition performance, he had convinced, if not the jurors, then at least himself, that he was a shoo-in for admission to the program.

This performance had showcased exactly what it needed to showcase: Both his technical proficiency and his attention to the more subtle interpretative nuances of the music. He felt elated, rejuvenated.

In anticipation of a favorable audition outcome, he’d already begun the financial aid process. He’d likely be granted a substantial scholarship award upon full admission to the program; this was a customary courtesy in cases of financial need such as his. And he was eager not to take out more student loans. His father’s annual income—despite their estrangement—disqualified him from participation in needs-based financial aid programs, so he’d depended on subsidized student loans to pay for his previous four years of education.

He owed a substantial sum already.

Faust: The Movie (a novel) - Episode 1

2010-12-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

BEFORE THE AUDITION

Nick Faustino woke in a panic, mistakenly believing in his half-drowsing state that he had already overslept, fully two seconds before the chintzy digital alarm clock on his nightstand started issuing its shrill mantra.

The intrusion of the alarm buzzer on his senses when it came—which in a less confused state he might have recognized as reassurance that the fears he’d woken to had not materialized—only rattled his nerves more. His agitation swelling up, he groped in the semi-dark for the alarm reset button, but his hand caught instead on the electrical cord.

Peevishly, he jerked the plug from the wall outlet and sent the clock clattering to the floor where it lodged in the space between the wall and bed, waking himself and failing to stop the alarm buzzer in the process.

A few moments later, he fumbled his way along in the early morning half-light of his one-bedroom apartment out into the main living space and over to the kitchenette, where he expected to find an urgently needed pot of steaming hot coffee waiting.

He had carefully planned out every aspect of this morning beforehand, in order to leave no potentially nerve-rattling contingency unaccounted for.

So when it turned out the auto-brew mechanism hadn’t engaged to start the coffee maker’s brew-cycle (which happened from time to time, he noted ruefully, but not often enough he’d taken the possibility seriously until now), he let out an audible groan.

Impatiently setting the coffee maker’s switch to the brew position and slumping into a chair next to the ugly Formica-topped kitchen table that constituted his apartment’s sole dining area, he listened, half-mesmerized as the ancient coffee maker sputtered to life and gradually settled into its familiar, gurgling rhythm.

He’d known this day was coming for years, had fretted and fussed over it, and yet somehow it still seemed to arrive without warning. The day of his audition for the masters program had finally arrived. Passing this audition represented what he had long viewed as his one and only real chance to continue along the upward trajectory he’d been on for the last four years, as he’d hustled, borrowed and worked his way toward an undergraduate degree.

It was his one chance because he had no other immediate prospects remaining. And at the same time, he had no reserve of shored-up resources to tap into in the event of a serious setback. He currently lived from pay-check-to-paycheck—and only barely at that.

Failure at this stage would leave him no recourse but to capitulate, to turn back and solicit his father’s support—like a beaten-down dog that chews through its rope and escapes for a fleeting night of freedom, but then skulks back to its master’s house with its belly rumbling before sunup, ready to take its beatings so it can get a fat ham-bone to gnaw on in the moonlight. The thought made his stomach turn.

And even that escape route wasn’t certain. He’d had no contact with his father since that night he’d first set out four years ago in his rust-speckled ‘76 Volkswagen Scirocco—without a word of warning to the few loved ones he would miss and against his father’s explicit wishes—on a one-way trip two hundred miles up the coastal highway to accept a partial scholarship from a prominent state university. For all he knew or cared, his father could already be dead by now. He should be so lucky.

But this was no time for dredging up the past, he decided, restraining his thoughts.

Thinking along these lines was counter-productive, a waste of psychic energy, because in fact he couldn’t be better prepared for today’s audition. He would not—could not—fail to deliver the virtuoso performance he'd been born to deliver. He'd rehearsed obsessively—even dropping weight he spent so much time at his instrument. Not a doubt existed in his mind: when he performed at his peak (as he would today), his technique equaled or surpassed that of any other undergrad in the music school. And even when he didn’t perform at his peak, he was still very good. He wasn't being immodest in observing these facts. He was merely being unsentimental and clear-eyed. That was his nature.

By now the coffee maker was a quarter of the way through its brew-cycle, and Nick was in no more mood for waiting. He shambled over to the cabinet above the sink and removed two large cups, one to hold under the filter basket assembly to collect the coffee flowing out as it brewed, and another to fill from the partly-filled pot before quickly returning the pot to its rightful place.

He’d used this trick on previous occasions to fast-track a desperately needed caffeine fix. But it had never occurred to him the technique carried a risk of injury until the precise moment that, inexplicably, his left-hand jerked apoplectically, and the cup collecting the scalding black liquid escaped his grip.

“Dammit!” Unconscious reflex mercifully took the motor control away from his sluggish conscious mind, enabling his body to respond deftly to the danger on its own. He somehow managed not to spill a single drop of the coffee from the glass pot whose handle he still clenched in the fist of his right hand.

But he hadn’t made it through this micro-calamity completely unscathed: the back of his left hand had been caught in the backsplash as the stray cup had somersaulted through space and the freshly-brewed coffee had kept flowing, indifferent to the hissing burner plate. That cup now lay smashed into dozens of lethal pieces on the porcelain floor.

After quickly replacing the glass pot, switching off the coffee maker, and tidying up the rest of the mess, he inspected his injuries.

Small patches of raised, red flesh had formed here and there on the back of his hand, but the pain from the wounds seemed negligible, a nuisance at worst. He felt his heart beat settling back into a less frantic rhythm.

The coffee was meant to help cut through the residue of the early morning fog. And so in a round-about way, it had done its job perfectly, even though he hadn’t drunk a single drop. He felt more alert now than he usually felt by the middle of the day. Caffeine, he decided, might as well have been a placebo compared to the adrenaline jolt his sympathetic nervous system had just delivered.

Though he no longer needed its active ingredient, he finally poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he crossed the main room and seated himself before the boxy, functional-looking upright piano in the corner. This item also happened to be the most valuable piece of personal property he currently owned. He’d sold his Scirocco for the cash to buy it from a local junk shop to use as a practice piano during his first year of school.

When the piano had originally been delivered to his apartment, it had been in a state of near-total disrepair and neglect. A dull, yellow film coated the entire run of major keys (several of which also stuck), and the flats and sharps offered almost no dynamic response; spidery hairline fractures and scuff-marks marred large sections of the exterior cabinet’s finish job. And more than an entire octave range of notes the instrument produced came out sounding either sharp or flat.

But working steadily on weekends and late nights over a couple of months, Nick had stripped and refinished the cabinet, and then painstakingly repaired the hammers and retuned the strings himself, using tools borrowed from the music school’s piano labs.

As performance pianos went, it didn’t amount to much. But it made a more than adequate rehearsal piano. And Nick believed, almost to the point of superstition, that the many hours he’d spent restoring the instrument gave him a special understanding of its tonal characteristics, special insight into the subtleties and quirks of the sounds it could make.

Setting his cup down on the floor beside the piano bench, he raised the keyboard cover, and began playing his customary battery of warm-up exercises, taking a deep, calming breath as he did. He played tentatively at first, almost too cautiously, as if the tiniest slip might shatter the keyboard to bits, like glass. His confidence had been deeply shaken by his accident with the coffee maker.

Had anxiety over the audition triggered the little nervous twitch that had sent the cup and its scalding hot contents tumbling from his hand? Or had he, on some unconscious level perhaps, been bent on self-sabotage and trying to injure himself? And what if he experienced just such a nervous twitch in the middle of his audition performance?

But even as he entertained these worrying new doubts, he knew he couldn’t afford to let his thoughts continue in this fashion. He knew what it was like to choke under pressure, so he recognized the warning signs when they began: how the many small anxieties lying dormant in the mind began to thrive and multiply by feeding on each other, until at just the critical moment, all those isolated anxieties coalesced into a suffocating and certain paralysis of body and mind.

The burns on his hand ached dully as he played. But he forced himself to filter out the distracting signal by focusing only on the rising and falling mechanical action of the keys under his fingers. The trick wasn’t completely effective, but it worked well enough.

By the time he arrived at the more technically challenging exercises in the series, the last traces of morning stiffness in his wrists and fingers had departed, and his confidence had finally begun to return.

Two hours later, freshly-showered and refreshed, he shoved the three-ring binder that held his sheet music selections for the audition into the canvas tote bag he wore on his shoulder and rushed out the door of the apartment.

*****

He was almost ten minutes into the twenty-minute trek it took to reach the performance hall by foot when he suddenly found himself caught in a heavy summer downpour. Not knowing what else to do, he clutched the tote bag and its precious cargo to his stomach, hunched his body to form a protective shield around it, and started running as fast as he could.

I'm Sick to Death of Thinking. How About a New Poem Instead?

2010-12-01T19:20:00.000-08:00

The Man Whose Shadow Gained Weight

At first the change was so subtle
he hardly noticed anything at all:
Maybe he felt more winded
than usual as he made his way up
the stairs in the evening, after chasing
paper swans all day at the office,

although he had climbed these stairs
at least a million times before. Must be
getting old, he probably thought, as he
woke in the morning, the sunlight spilling
into the room like clear epoxy, even
the simple act of lifting his head

from the pillow akin to entering an
alternate reality, a dream-state.
Then came that afternoon downtown
when the problem became impossible
to ignore, when the sun dipped so low
in the sky that his shadow stretched

out to the ocean, and its cumbersome
bulk fixed him helplessly to the spot,
where he stuck out like the gnomon
of a sundial or the needle of a compass,
perpetually pointing in one direction
while the world danced circles around him.

Photo Gallery Maker Tool

2010-08-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

I posted here previously about a project I recently worked on that required me to develop a simple JavaScript-driven photo gallery and filmstrip viewer interface.

Well, since then, I’ve gone on to build a simple Windows-based desktop tool called "Photo Gallery Maker" that lets you design, stylize, and add photos to a custom JavaScript-driven photo gallery that can then be published for use on the web at the click of a button.

Photo Gallery Maker auto-generates all the file structures, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code you need to implement your photo gallery. The application includes a simple but functional style-sheet editor tool that allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your web photo gallery.

The screenshot above shows the Photo Gallery Maker tool window, which contains a live preview of any design changes you've made to the photo gallery. Images can be added to the gallery from any folder on the local file system. Visual styling can be modified using the style-sheet editor window. The “Publish Photo Gallery for Web” feature publishes the source code and directory structure for the newly designed photo gallery to a specified file or ftp location. Working settings on a gallery in progress are preserved on application close for future development.

The code generated by the tool can be further refined (it’s not perfect, believe me—this was only a weekend project) or tweaked as needed to meet your specific needs. If nothing else, it’s an easy way to make new HTML photo galleries.

This tool came out of a recent weekend project of mine, so I’m offering it here for download only on an as-is basis. I’m not offering any support, and there may or may not be any future versions. After installing the application, you’ll be prompted to set a working folder when the application first launches. This should be an empty directory where the tool can store the files for your photo gallery while they are under development. You can specify a different destination folder or ftp location later, when publishing the final product.

Click Here to Download Photo Gallery Maker Set Up Files [zipped]

Late Update: This app is a little buggy. Under certain rare circumstances the application may make duplicates of the images in your source image folder, but this does not occur typically. I know, I know... I should fix it... But I'm a busy guy. And this glitch, as far as I know, won't result in data loss, only in the creation of redundant data. It's a minor bug... I'll try to get a fix in when I can. Otherwise, this tool seems to work pretty well for what it does.

Andy Matchett and the Minks: The Apple Tree Circle

2010-08-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t already checked out Andy Matchett and the Minks’ new release, The Apple Tree Circle, I highly recommend you give it a listen (which you can do online, for free, over here).

Andy Matchett (known to many of us in Tallahassee for his role in local indie rock heroes The Monorail and People Chasing People) has made a truly exceptional album with The Apple Tree Circle, and even though it includes reworking of some material that might already be familiar to those of us who’ve kept up with Andy's musical output over the years, The Apple Tree Circle is a groundbreaking departure from anything he’s done in the past—a near perfect chamber/power pop record with swelling string sections, sing-along hooks and only the occasional nod to the math-rock influences that featured so prominently in Andy’s earlier projects.

Andy and his Minks recently released The Apple Tree Circle online. You can also get a physical CD, if you're still into that, with really nice packaging. And for the record, I’m not just hawking this album for Andy because he’s been kind enough to let me bum cigarettes from him in the past. No, this is just a damn good record.

A New Poem on the Occasion of W.S. Merwin's Being Named the New U.S. Poet Laureate

2010-07-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

Embarrassing Discoveries of Future Archeologists

Part 1: Mistaken Identities

Like that tiny but tell-tale oily smudge on the hotel
plate glass, from that millennial window pane they

eventually found and which time had rendered
into such ruin that the shards were barely discernible

among the scum and grit collected in that particular
corner of the gleaming glass display case of mechanical

contrivances that conspired to form the city. And how it
took a million pairs of tweezers to sort out the mess,

but finally, they extracted the crucial evidence
and proved that at least one charming mystery woman

who claimed to be the deposed Russian oligarch
Anastasia Romanoff had in fact been Eva Braun.

Part 2: Inglorious Endings

Or how when they finally recovered the wreckage
of Amelia Earhart’s “Flying Laboratory,” she was still seated

at the helm, and in a betrayal of history, or like the punch
line to a sexist joke, she clutched a silver pocket mirror,

now dull and barely recognizable, in those bony fingers.

Part 3: La Fin du Monde

But worst of all were the tiny humiliations, the unsightly
blemishes memorialized forever in the mathematics

of the universe. Every poorly-timed belch or fart of existence
captured forever in the amber, at a particular point in time and space.

These were the horrors that the men who studied the artifacts
of history seemed to visit and revisit endlessly, with their most

sensitive instruments—unearthing the tiny chicken bones of human failure,
dusting them off, and tucking them lasciviously into the pockets of their lab coats.

Et tu ASCAP?

2010-06-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

Wired Magazine reports that ASCAP (which is the music association I use for publishing my own stuff, like tangemeenie), is now "urging [its] membership to donate money to battle the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and even Creative Commons."

Since I also release all my stuff under a Creative Commons license, I guess I'd better pick a side.

Hmm. Wonder how one goes about canceling an affiliation with ASCAP?

UPDATE: Well, darn. The very day I posted this entry, what should appear in my mailbox but my first modest but spunky little check from ASCAP for publishing royalties owed to the Soft Targets (whose publishing royalties from their last record I administer through my Cloud 13 Records publishing company).

I hate to think I'm this easily bought out, but... The Soft Targets deserve that money (if you ask me they deserve a lot more). So maybe I won't quit ASCAP just yet.

Still, I do find ASCAP's hostility to Creative Commons bewildering. Creative Commons offers licensing structures that are just as protective of intellectual property as conventional copyright in addition to their more open, share-and-share-alike terms. As an artist myself, I appreciate having the additional flexibility that a Creative Commons copyright can offer. As an ASCAP affiliate, I'm still a little puzzled and disappointed by ASCAP's position on Creative Commons.

How to Build a Scrolling Filmstrip Photo Viewer Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript/jQuery

2010-06-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

The following walkthrough describes a simple approach to implementing a JavaScript/jQuery-driven film strip photo viewer on a web site.

When I originally developed this approach, it was implemented within an ASP .NET driven content management system, and included administrative components for uploading, categorizing and publishing photos to multiple custom galleries. I have simplified the implementation for purposes of this example, but the same basic approach can easily be adapted to other frameworks or extended to include additional features.

In a server-side scripting scenario, for example, it’s fairly simple to populate the filmstrip simply by looping through all the images in a specified directory on the server, rather than hard-coding the images into the gallery. Another approach to populating the filmstrip might involve the use of XML and XML style-sheets, making updates more manageable without requiring you to implement a full-fledged CMS.

All of the source code required to implement the film strip viewer can be downloaded here.

View a working demo of the film strip photo viewer here.

Step One: Create Site Directory Structure

1) You'll need a place to put all the supporting files for the filmstrip viewer. So create the following directory structure on your web server and copy all of the files required by the filmstrip viewer into the appropriate folder:

+ Images - This folder must contain the navigation control graphics

+ PhotoGallery - This folder should contain the photos to be displayed in the film strip viewer

+ JavaScript - This folder must contain the custom jQuery library

2) Add the HTML shown below to the main web page in the root folder. (Note: For the sake of simplicity and portability, all CSS styles are included inline in the style attributes of the relevant HTML tags. This is not good programming practice. In a proper implementation, all CSS styles should be defined in external style sheets).

The sections of code highlighted in red must be repeated and customized with the appropriate filename for each photo item displayed in the filmstrip.

<body>


<div style="text-align:center;">

<div style="white-space:nowrap; display:block; width:800px; text-align:center; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" onkeydown="whichKey(event)" onkeyup="killTimer()">

<div class="content-scroll" id="content-scroll" style="width:800px; height:110px; margin-top:5px; overflow:hidden; border:solid 1px black; border-top:solid 4px black; border-bottom:solid 4px black; white-space:nowrap; text-align:center;">

<table style="height:102px; overflow:hidden; margin:0 0 0 0; padding:0 28px 0 24px; text-indent:0px;">

<tr style="margin:0 0 0 0; padding:0 0 0 0; text-indent:0;">

<td>

<div class="content-holder" id="content-holder" style="width:auto; height:90px; margin:0 0 0 0; padding:0 0 0 0;">


<td class="highlight" style="white-space:nowrap; height:102px; width:90px; border:solid 1px black;" onkeydown="whichKey(event)" onkeyup="killTimer()">

<div class="content-item" style="margin:0 0 0 0; padding:0 0 0 0; width:90px; height:90px; display:block; vertical-align:middle; text-align:center;" onmouseover="swapImage('photogallery/04-08-097.jpg')" onkeydown="whichKey(event)" onkeyup="killTimer()">

<img style="max-width:90px; max-height:90px;" alt="Test Photo" src="photogallery/04-08-097.jpg"/>

</div>

</td>

</div>

</td>

</tr>

</table>

</div>

<div id="leftNav" style="display:inline; position:relative; float:left; z-index:1; margin-top:-114px; margin-left:0px;" onmouseover="timedScrollLeft()" onclick="clickScrollLeft()" onmouseout="killTimer()">

<img id="navleft" alt="Back" src="images/LeftNavButton.gif" style="opacity:0.4;filter:alpha(opacity=40); visibility:visible;" onmouseover="this.style.opacity=1;this.filters.alpha.opacity=100" onmouseout="this.style.opacity=0.4;this.filters.alpha.opacity=40" />

</div>

<div id="rightNav" style="display:inline; position:relative; float:right; z-index:1; margin-top:-114px; margin-right:-2px;" onmouseover="timedScrollRight()" onclick="clickScrollRight()" onmouseout="killTimer()">

<img id="navright" alt="Forward" src="images/RightNavButton.gif" style="opacity:0.4;filter:alpha(opacity=40); visibility:visible;" onmouseover="this.style.opacity=1;this.filters.alpha.opacity=100" onmouseout="this.style.opacity=0.4;this.filters.alpha.opacity=40"/>

</div>

</div>

<br />

<div class="new" style="text-align:center; display:block; width:800px; min-height:800px; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;">


<img id="BigImage" alt="Big Image" src="photogallery/04-08-097.jpg" style="width:800px; border:solid 1px black;" />

</div>

</div>



</body>

Step Two: Link Your Page to the jQuery Library

1) Add the following reference to the external jQuery library file anywhere in the header of your web page (example assumes page is in the site root):

<script src="javascript/jQueryLibraries.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step Three: Add Custom JavaScript to Page Header

Add the following custom JavaScript anywhere within the header of your page, or better yet, link to it in an external JavaScript file.

This script drives the horizontal scrolling action of the filmstrip viewer, swaps out the main image with the selected image on the mouseover event, and responds to keyboard input for scrolling (this last feature is currently supported in Internet Explorer only).

Changes to the 'scrolling interval' and 'clock timer interval' variables can be made to adjust the scroll rate.

<script type="text/javascript">

var t; //timer variable
var p=1; //scroll position
var i=23; //scrolling interval
var c=100; //clock timer interval
var timer=1;

function whichKey(event)
{

if (event.keyCode == 37)

{

clickScrollLeft();

}

if (event.keyCode == 39)

{

clickScrollRight();

}
}

function swapImage(imgSrc)
{

document.getElementById("BigImage").src=imgSrc;

}

function clickScrollLeft()
{

killTimer();
timedScrollLeft();

}

function clickScrollRight()
{

killTimer();
timedScrollRight();

}

function timedScrollLeft()
{

if (p>i)

{

p=p-i;
$('div.content-scroll').scrollTo(p);
t=setTimeout("timedScrollLeft()",c);
timer=1;

}

else

{

p<=1;
p=1;
$('div.content-scroll').scrollTo(0);
killTimer();

}
}

function timedScrollRight()
{

if (p >= document.getElementById("content-scroll").scrollWidth)

{

killTimer();

}

else

{

p=p+i;
$('div.content-scroll').scrollTo(p);
t=setTimeout("timedScrollRight()",c);
timer=1;

}
}

function killTimer()
{

if (timer=1)

{

clearTimeout(t);
timer=0;

}
}

</script>

Step Four: Add CSS Image Highlighting Effect

The following CSS is used to create the highlighting effect on the selected image. It can either be incorporated into to an external style sheet, or added anywhere in the page header:

<style type="text/css">

img
{
border:none;
}

td.highlight:hover
{
background-color:lightyellow;
}

</style>

Wrapping Things Up

So that's a simple example of how to implement a dynamic, visually interesting filmstrip viewer using only HTML, JavaScript/jQuery, and CSS.

It's nothing fancy, but the nice thing about this approach is that it's lightweight, easy to implement, and can easily be extended, using ASP, PHP, or other server-side scripting technologies. Other improvements can be accomplished simply by using XML style sheets.

Feel free to use any of this code in your own (non-commercial) projects, but if you do, please credit me (Steev Taylor) as the author somewhere in your comments on the source code.

Superman a Welfare Lovin', Liberal Commie? Et tu Kal-El?

2009-08-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

So you still think government sponsored health care is just for commies and pinko liberal bleeding-heart america-haters?

Well, tell it to Superman, buddy. Interestingly, it would seem that even at the height of the 1950's anti-communist hysteria when this ad was published, we Americans didn't equate government welfare programs with the creeping menace of communism so readily as we do today.

UPDATE: So I've since been informed there in fact was a backlash against Truman's ambitious welfare proposals, including murmuring accusations of socialism in some rural communities, though President Truman took office a beloved war hero and remained popular throughout this period.

Of course, America had a sharp reactionary streak going back even long before the McCarthy era. It's been noted that American eugenicists were a key influence on the development of Hitler's Nazi ideology. So it really shouldn't come as a surprise that even a well-regarded president like Truman drew the ire of the powerful conservative interests in America.

Love for The Very Best of Spaz

2009-03-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes love comes unexpectedly and from the unlikeliest of places. This time around, it comes from acclaimed fantasy writer and editor Jeff VanderMeer (who happens to be an old friend and former coworker of mine), who was kind enough to offer raves about "The Very Best of Spaz Rock" on his blog, JeffVanderMeer.com.

As it turns out, the track "Killer Squid" is shaping up to be a big hit in Jeff's beloved city of Ambergis. Maybe the positive response has something to do with the approach of the upcoming annual Festival of the Fresh Water Squid.

Oh, and "The Very Best of Spaz Rock's" official RPM Challenge Jukebox is now finally up-and-running, so forget about those previous download links below (those were only working versions of the mixes after all) . Instead, go check out our official RPM Challenge Jukebox to listen to and download the final version of "Volume I: Monsters of Spaz" in all its peculiar mystery.

Link: TheVeryBestofSpazRock.RPMChallenge.com

My First Multitracker (or: How I Went from Lo-Fi Hero to Hi-Fi Villain)

2009-03-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

Part 1: Winning the Lottery
Part 2: Tangemeenie's Early Days
Part 3: Making "Faust"
Part 4: A Failure of Imagination
Part 5: Welcome Home, Baby Bear!

Winning the Lottery

When I was around 16 or 17 years old, I bought my first piece of home recording gear: a brand new, then state-of-the-art Yamaha MT-120 4-track cassette multitracker.

It cost exactly $500 cash, because Tim at the music store discounted the price to the exact amount I had on hand. I'd gotten the $500 by winning the Florida Cash 3 lottery with a ticket my grandmother bought for me, playing the numbers 1,2,3--I'd gotten the inspiration to play these unlikely but ultimately winning numbers from a vivid dream I'd had about winning the lottery. In that dream, my winnings had not just been in the hundreds but in the millions--so naturally my expectations were high.

It sounds far-fetched I know, but that's actually how it happened.

Only recently, the band I'd been playing bar gigs with for the last few years (my first serious band) had broken up. Disappointed by our failure to take the world by storm, I'd been driving myself crazy trying to figure out a way to buy that multi-tracker, drooling over the display model at the music store, convinced that the ability to overdub was all that stood between me and total creative independence--and of course, all the fame, fortune and high times to come.

So to my hormone-addled, teenage mind, my implausible stroke of luck in winning the lottery cinched the matter: it was now my destiny to become a recording artist. From the moment those numbers fell until many years later, I knew this was what I would one day be. Not a rock star. Not a performing singer/songwriter. Not the front man for a band. Not even simply a musician. But a recording artist. An artist who used recorded sound as a creative medium, the way a painter uses paint, or a sculptor, clay. What more perfect way could there be to balance a love of making music with a predisposition toward crippling stage fright and shyness?

That multitracker cranked out new recordings for more than a decade, remaining one of the few constants in my various lives as a musician and songwriter. Amazingly, some of the early recordings produced with that MT-120 managed to make their way out into the world at large, finding their way onto various mix CDs and playlists, even showing up on random websites here and there. One from the early 90s, "The Boy Whose Mother Was the Venus DeMilo" shows up here and here, for instance.

The links below include MP3 downloads of that song and a couple of other recordings from an unfinished concept album I worked on briefly (until the realization that my working title, "Farewell to Arms," was an egregiously bad pun instantly crushed any enthusiasm I had for the project) when I was living in Panama City in the 90s.

These vintage MP3 files were originally featured on MP3.com in its first incarnation, back when MP3 compression was still a relatively new and obscure technology. They're encoded at 128 kbps bit rate because that was the standard bit rate for high-resolution MP3s back then. (It was the accepted dogma at the time that encoding MP3s at a higher rate would never be practical or desirable.) You'll probably also want to crank up the volume on your computer speakers to listen to these because recorded music just wasn't as loud in those days.

Tangemeenie's Early Days

When Tangemeenie first began to come together years later, that old Yamaha workhorse was still fully operational. Lori and I even used it to produce a handful of our earliest recordings (under various names we adopted and quickly discarded for various reasons, like "Nobodaddy," "Dakota Ring," and "Blue Star Highway").

Some of those recordings got airplay on the local college radio station (WVFS), and we slowly and reluctantly began edging our way out into the world, playing one-off shows around town as an acoustic guitar-driven vocal duo. In our first real show as Tangemeenie, we opened for our friends in the local band "Welcome to Nagaland," some members of which would later go on to join better known bands like Mira and Iron & Wine.

Below are a couple of downloads of tracks we recorded during that period. I've always thought Lori delivers a haunting vocal performance on "Disappearing Ink." These were among the first recordings we ever released as Tangemeenie, although they were also released at one point under the name Nobodaddy. Like the downloads featured above, these tracks are vintage, 128 kbps MP3s, and were recorded on the MT-120.

Making "Faust"

Then my grandmother died unexpectedly while Lori and I were in Germany on our honeymoon visiting my mom.

The loss struck a devastating personal blow, following only a couple of years after my grandfather's similarly tragic death. For at least the next year, music-making took a backseat to sorting through the wreckage of my family life.

Then as all the ensuing noise and confusion settled to a manageable background din, my thoughts began turning back to one thing: That naive idea that had lodged itself in my mind almost a decade earlier when I won the lottery. The residual feelings of self-confidence and optimism that still clung to those memories proved more alluring than ever to me now.

By now, my reliable old MT-120 had become an anachronism. Cassette tape multitrackers had lost their relevance in the age of the CD. Newer digital workstations and desktop computer-based tools offered more tracks for the dollar, more flexibility, more fidelity.

The lo-fi aesthetic that had once been considered a mark of authenticity and artistic integrity in certain circles now seemed almost quaint. The world was moving on, and those particular concepts of artistic integrity were rapidly becoming obsolete.

Bands like Stereolab, Air, Heavy Vegetable, and Broadcast were in constant rotation on our stereo, alongside reality-blurring digital art-hoaxers like Senor Coconut and Negativeland, replacing our long-cherished, but now dishwater dull-sounding mix tape collections. Even many well known lo-fi artists had begun to embrace hi-fi digital recording techniques in ways that brazenly violated what had once been taboos for artists hoping to retain their "indie cred."

In large part, this was because at no previous time in history had there been so many affordable digital audio production tools on the market. Suddenly, an eight-track multitracker capable of capturing audio at 24-bit resolution--the kind of studio gear that had once sold for upwards of ten grand--could be bought for around the same price as a high-quality electric guitar.

So with part of the proceeds from my grandmother's estate (though they weren't much), I started scrounging up new pieces of musical equipment and recording gear, with the near-term goal of owning everything I would need to finally produce an album of my own.

My first major investment was in a Roland VS-840 digital multi-tracker (now out of production), which offered what at the time seemed the unimaginable luxury of a full eight tracks for overdubbing and many other previously out-of-reach features.

(Incidentally, remember zip discs? The VS-840 actually used them for storage in lieu of an internal hard disc, if that gives you any sense for just how much the device was a product of a particular point in time in the development of consumer-oriented recording technology.)

I eventually picked up another now obsolete piece of hardware to complete my new studio, a higher-end consumer sound card produced by French manufacturer, Guillemot (which at the time was billed as a breakthrough in economical, hybrid gaming/home studio platforms, before quickly becoming obsolete when a chipset design flaw prevented the release of Windows XP drivers; Guillemot has since dropped its technical support for the product, which apparently caused some longer-term harm to its reputation).

The combination of the sound card (which accepted digital SPDIF input) and the VS-840 allowed me record at full 24-bit resolution and then pipe the resulting audio into my computer without ever leaving the digital domain. And once the 24-bit audio was in my computer, I could tweak, polish and manipulate it to my heart's content.

Thus equipped, I decided to set a challenge for myself: Would it be possible to produce an album on the cheap--using only the readily available consumer grade digital recording gear I'd cobbled together--that could plausibly stand alongside bigger budget, studio releases?

With this challenge set before me, work on Tangemeenie's first album, "Faust," began in earnest, as I found myself making deals with all kinds of new devils (including countless varieties of audio editors, DirectX plug-ins, and loop-based composition tools)--in other words, all the tools of studio trickery I scoffed at in my days as a lo-fi purist.

Finally, after many months of recording, editing, looping and tweaking, the album was finished. And while "Faust" ultimately didn't turn out to be as polished and hi-fi as a big-budget studio release, it sounded better than an album produced using such cheap recording gear was expected to sound.

It was originally supposed to be a concept album: the soundtrack for a film within a film, as composed by the film's protagonist, an aging, film soundtrack composer whose successes followed after a Faustian bargain he inadvertently struck while on a bad acid trip. "Faust" was intended to be an artifact from an imaginary film, an occasionally campy soundtrack composed by a man coming psychologically unraveled as one fact in his life after another is shown to be a lie.

Needless to say, this concept wasn't exactly clear to most reviewers or listeners. Lori and I had previously released a CD-R only release under the title "The Movie." But this clue, too, didn't exactly drive the point home.

Co-released under our own imprint and the Animal World Recordings label, "Faust" sold out of its initial small pressing quickly and got generally good reviews. A critical consensus formed almost immediately: Lori was a star, her voice, to paraphrase one enthusiastic reviewer, sounding like a space age siren song, luring hapless spaceships to their doom.

A Failure of Imagination

At first, the album didn't draw much attention outside of the online indie music press of the day, but what attention it did receive initially was, if not always as glowing, at least generally positive. And day by day, "Faust" quietly gained momentum.

But all along, Tangemeenie had been more an idea than a band. In a complete failure of imagination, our focus had been exclusively on recording. So when touring became the inevitable next step soon after the release of "Faust," and we were invited to perform in a label showcase at the 2002 CMJ Music Marathon, we suddenly realized we had no idea how to pull it off.

How could Lori and I perform all those layers of overdubbed parts alone? We couldn't use midi sequencing and samplers because we didn't own any samplers, and for that matter, we didn't really have the technical know-how. And could we ever be truly comfortable on stage, pressing buttons and merely singing along to drum machines, karaoke style?

Despite years of experience performing in live bands, I'd never played in a band with anything besides a more conventional guitar, bass, and drums set up. And Lori's background as a vocal major at the FSU's music school hadn't prepared her to put together a live, two-person electronica act.

On the other hand, we couldn't go back to playing our old acoustic sets now, with the expectations we'd set with the release of "Faust."

It seemed the only practical solution to our dilemma was to bring outside musicians into the fold. What happened next is a long, complicated story with a very messy ending, so I won't go into all the details here. But the long and short of it is this: the band we originally formed to tour as Tangemeenie spun off into a completely new project before we ever went on the road. (Meanwhile, Lori and I still played at CMJ, but with only Lori on keyboards, me on guitar, and an additional bass player; and the performance turned out to be a train wreck.) The new group, which took the name "Pocket Novel Mystery," went on to record one album ("Eight Days in the Life of Grace")--and then broke up almost immediately after the album was finished.

(Incidentally, the track "Her Favorite Records" which later made its way onto "Eight Days..." was originally released as an acoustic Tangemeenie song on a CD-R-only release we sold at live shows.)

Her Favorite Records (256 kbps MP3)

Welcome Home, Baby Bear!

When the original line-up of "Pocket Novel Mystery" imploded, Lori and I were determined not to repeat our mistakes with "Faust" by letting ourselves be diverted from promoting "Eight Days..." We felt we'd sacrificed too much at this point not to at least try to promote the new record. So we continued performing on our own under the name Pocket Novel Mystery with a new line-up for another year or so.

The new line-up toured regionally and even made a short-lived attempt to record a second album. But it had already started feeling like a lost cause by then; Lori and I weren't really doing much more than going through the motions, and we knew it.

When Lori became pregnant with our son Ander in December 2005, we finally disbanded Pocket Novel Mystery once and for all. At the same time, I began spending more and more time working in my project studio at home in the evenings, learning how to use new digital audio production tools and techniques, dabbling and experimenting as I retooled my studio yet again.

My latest studio set-up eliminates the need for an external audio capture device and moves everything into the desktop environment. Piece by piece, I've rebuilt my desktop computer over the intervening years to better meet the needs of desktop audio production--replacing the motherboard, upgrading the processor, replacing one hard drive and adding another; even replacing the case and power supply. There literally isn't a single original component left of the desktop computer I used when "Faust" was produced.

The first finished track I produced using my new desktop studio set up (actually, I still used my VS-840 for capturing the drum parts because I had to record them at a remote location) is one named "Clueless" that I wrote and recorded shortly after the original line-up of Pocket Novel Mystery dissolved, but before we'd put together the new line-up.

Much later on, when Lori and I decided it was time to resurrect Tangemeenie, "Clueless" became the first track we considered using for our forthcoming new album, "The Gilded Age." It didn't make the cut for a variety of reasons, not least of which being its sound quality (which isn't terrible, but falls far short of the other tracks on the new album). Here's a high resolution download of that track:

Clueless

Now with work on "The Gilded Age" nearly finished, it's impossible not to reflect a little on what a strange trip it's been since I got that first multitracker.

The Very Best of Spaz Rock: Download It Now for Free

2009-03-02T12:23:00.001-08:00

Well, I almost lost my mind and destroyed my marriage in the process (not really, but it did put a bit of a strain on the old personal life), but the RPM Challenge entry I've been working on since Friday, February 13th is now completely complete at last, and can be heard in its entirety over here at our profile page on the RPM Challenge website. [Actually, since the time I originally posted this, it's come to my attention this is no longer true.]

You can also download the entire completed album here (a zipped file) in MP3 format for free.

Considering it's a last-minute product of pure noise rock improvisation spazziness, I couldn't be more pleased with how musical and polished sounding it all ended up being in the end.

Here's the final track listing, in order:

01 - Killer Squid
02 - Immortal Jellyfish
03 - Troll Under the Bridge
04 - Baby Big Foot
05 - Demon Clown
06 - Chupacabra
07 - Frankenspaz
08 - Cerberus
09 - Creeper
10 - The Thing (Of Beauty)

Enjoy!

The Very Best of Spaz Rock - Volume I: Monsters of Spaz

2009-02-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

I'm really excited about participating for the first time in this year's RPM Challenge.

I'd been thinking about trying to enter the challenge this year, but then, with a full-time work schedule and a two-and-a-half year old son at home--not to mention all the other projects I've already got underway--it just didn't seem practical.

With my current project studio setup, it's fairly trivial for me to work on mixing and mastering on headphones late in the evening after my son goes to bed. But recording sessions for new material require some pretty complex schedule coordination, with my wife Lori having to take Ander out of the house for the day to make it possible, and in general, it's just not easy to find time to record these days.

So I kept putting participation off, telling myself that with luck I might find myself in better circumstances and able to try my hand at the challenge next year.

But then, just when it seemed too late to even consider taking on the RPM Challenge anymore, an email from an old friend in Manhattan sent a Friday the 13th miracle sweeping into town: that miracle, friends, was the miracle of Spaz Rock.

For years now, a revolving stable of musically-inclined buddies of mine and I have had this open-ended project where we get together every few months when the stars align just right, to get a little rowdy and make a joyful cacophony we like to call "Spaz Rock."

To the untrained eye, what we call Spaz Rock appears to be little more than an extended improvisational jam session, but in fact, Spaz Rock differs from a typical jam session in a couple of crucially important ways.

First, as a general rule, we always try to bring as many different kinds of instruments as we can with us to a Spaz session, and then we frequently change up who's playing on what instrument as we play--regardless of whether we know how to play the particular instrument or not.

Second, we don't pick a key to jam in or start playing from any prepared riffs or seed material, we just start playing with no communication other than each other's performances to guide us, and regardless of how good or bad it sounds, until we're too exhausted to keep playing on a particular session, we follow only one rule: Don't stop.

Third, we record everything we do. We've got probably close to a terrabyte's worth of music we've recorded since we first started doing Spaz Rock about six years ago. At our most recent session this past Friday 13th alone, we recorded over 20 Gigabytes of raw, improvised live music.

So this last time around, I explained the concept behind the RPM Challenge to my collaborators in Spaz, and asked if they'd be up for doing it. They agreed enthusiastically. And so now, all the source files from our most recent Spaz session have been transferred to me for post-production, and I'm positive I've got more than enough raw material to fashion a good entry for the RPM Challenge.

For the next 12 days, until the Challenge's deadline, I'll be spending late evenings cutting, splicing, mixing, tweaking and otherwise paring all that musical chaos down--almost two hours worth of musical performance--into a coherent, relatively polished-sounding album of 10 songs or 35 minutes in length. (This on top of getting ready to launch the new Tangemeenie record--but that's another subject.)

So wish me luck. I see the job ahead of me now as kind of like being the copy editor who, after the proverbial 1,000 monkeys with typewriters have finally finished typing out all the works of Shakespeare, has to go line-by-line through the mile-high stacks of typing paper they left behind, editing out all the passages of random gibberish until only the right words in the right order are left. Only in this case, there's no way to know what the right words or order is in advance. (I really am psyched, actually... I love a good challenge! I just hope my sanity and personal life make it through the next 12 days intact.)

Last night I stayed up after my son went to bed and finished the first rough track for the project. For now, I'm calling it "Welcome to Spaz," because at the conclusion of the jam that provided the source material for the track the mic picked up somebody shouting that spontaneously into the room. That particular piece of room ambiance didn't make it into this track but will probably find its way onto the finished album somewhere.

In the meantime, here's a link to the RPM Challenge profile page for the project, called "The Very Best of Spaz Rock - Volume I: Monsters of Spaz," where you can hear "Welcome to Spaz" now and other new tracks in progress as they develop.

Pop Psychology for Blogs

2008-12-22T23:37:00.000-08:00

The Typealyzer is a modest little web-based diversion that takes the modern craze for self discovery and navel-gazing to even more absurd extremes by allowing you to generate a personality profile simply by providing the URL of your personal blog.

Below are the results it returned after analyzing the contents of The Museum of Lost Causes. Are they accurate or meaningful? Eh, who cares. Either way, the real fun in playing with this app comes from feeding various random URLs into it--especially the URLs of big commercial or institutional websites like CNN or the Defense Department--to see if the results plausibly align with reality or have any sort of funny relevance to them (or don't, as may be the case).

(For example--and this seems apropos of something, though I'm not sure what--when I ran the CIA public website, the results that came back took the form of a single, unambiguous message: "An error occured when downloading 'http://www.cia.gov'." Hopefully, this doesn't mean the good people over at The Typealyzer will be getting a friendly visit from the men in black soon.)

Discovered via MeFi, which it turns out falls under the personality type classification of "The Thinkers."

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work in their own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

The Making of a Global Financial Crisis: A Visual Guide

2008-09-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

As someone who's had his own struggles with understanding how all this financial meltdown stuff started, I decided to try to put my now greatly improved (though admittedly still limited) understanding of what got us all here on the precipice of this calamity into an easy-to-digest illustrated form.

Understanding how exactly these complex events unfolded is challenging enough in its own right, but further occluding the issues, there are serious political stakes involved and that naturally means the real issues can be hard to separate from the surrounding political rancor and partisan spin-doctoring.

So to try to cut through all the jibber-jabber and get to the heart of it all, below is my simple, visual guide to how the financial crisis unfolded. You'll probably want to zoom in on the diagram for a more detailed view (just click the image and it will open in a full-sized view), because there's really no way to present it here in a more practical size.

[Note: Since I originally published this illustration, I've come to realize that its characterizations of events are inaccurate on a number of fundamental points. And with the benefit of hindsight, it's also become apparent that my illustration includes some potentially misleading characterizations of key historical events that I'd originally intended as jokes, but that I now see could easily help to perpetuate common misconceptions about the major contributing factors to the financial crisis.

For example, the chart emphasizes the roles that the Clinton White House and the government sponsored entity, Fannie Mae, played in the events leading up to the financial crisis. To be honest, I only chose this particular, controversial interpretation of events in order to set myself up to make a cheap joke about Clinton having used his powers of seduction to talk Fannie Mae into doing things "she" normally wouldn't do.

For a serious discussion of all these issues that tries to pierce the veil of political spin that still so often keeps us in the dark, I'd recommend this recent discussion on MetaFilter, for starters. I should have been clearer up front that this chart was being offered as satire, not a serious examination of these extraordinarily complex matters.]

We're Doomed.

2008-09-12T11:59:00.001-07:00

With the latest news about gas runs and price spikes here in Florida, I can only conclude that America is doomed, if our best hope for the future depends on our abilities to manage our affairs as informed citizens.

Why? Because there is absolutely no good reason we as consumers should be falling for this kind of blatant price-gouging scam again, and yet, here we are. And we'll probably blame it all on the Democrats not wanting to drill of the coast of Florida (never mind that those rigs would be just as susceptible to the impact of hurricanes like Ike).

Responding to increased demand fueled by rumors and what can only be described as a child-like superstitious belief that Hurricane Ike is bound to cause near-term gas shortages and drive up the price of oil, Florida gasoline wholesalers have apparently decided to raise their prices by some 50% or so. This despite the fact that oil prices and oil futures are actually down right now, with the current price of a barrel of oil dropping to a new low of $101 just today. From the linked news article:

Andy Klein, director of legal affairs for the company that operates Gainesville’s Kangaroo stations, said Thursday he could not say for sure whether gas prices might spike overnight.

Customers in some stores said they believed there would be an increase in gasoline prices because of Hurricane Ike, which is forecast to hit Texas early Saturday.

In other words, even though it's not true, customers are willing to believe Ike might have some kind of impact at the pump, and gasoline wholesalers are willing to indulge them in that fantasy, and between those two facts stands a lot of money to be made.

And what are the odds, I wonder, of certain state politicians trying to spin such a fictional gas shortage on the Gulf coast in favor of the energy lobby? Hmm.

America, Please Don't Be Stupid

2008-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

While the conventional wisdom continues to be that Republicans are better for business, the actual hard data consistently demonstrates this to be wishful thinking. As a recent article in NY Times observes (see below), historically, even those on the higher-end of the economic spectrum have tended to do better under Democrat administrations on average than under Republican administrations.

The reasons are simple: Democratic administrations provide more ground-up economic stimulus and social services that offset costs normally absorbed by consumers. This stimulus works its way around the economy promoting growth at all levels--in a consumer-driven economy like America, the economy is only as strong as the spending power of ordinary people. Their spending benefits the private sector both directly by increasing sales of goods and services and indirectly by increasing state and local tax revenues, which increases local government spending for private-sector goods and services.

Republican economic policies radically undercut consumer spending power in a short-sighted grab for tax relief at the upper-end of the economic spectrum. This fairly quickly leads to an overall economic contraction that proceeds according to a non-linear function--in other words, it pushes the economy into a negative feedback loop that quickly begins to impact virtually everyone's bottom line.

In the 80's, Republican ideas about supply-side economics (popularly known as "Voodoo Economics") had a demonstrably negative impact on America's overall economic health and were broadly rebuked. McCain's platform would continue to perpetuate many of these same spurrious economic ideas, at a critical point in American history when doing so could well lead us into an irreversible spiral leading to long-term economic collapse.

Placing a vote for McCain in the upcoming election amounts to adding your signature to a collective economic suicide note.

Sure, when the collapse comes, there may be a few well-connected actors who end up wealthier than ever, just as the Great Depression created new fortunes for some. But far more fortunes will surely be wiped away. And to gamble on coming out on the winning side of such a catastrophe at the expense of all the other hardworking Americans who also deserve a chance at improving their economic circumstances would represent not only an act of self-deluded pride, but the most poisonous kind of self-centered ambition.

Economic View
Is History Siding With Obama’s Economic Plan?
By ALAN S. BLINDER
Published: August 31, 2008
The United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans, a new book says.

(Yeah, I know, I said no more politics a while back. Well, I guess I'm becoming more and more like a politician myself every day, because I lied.)

Do You Dare Cross the Picket Line?

2008-01-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

Holy crap--the museum is being picketed! (Via MetaFilter.)

Fatherhood and Ethics in a Post-Post-Modern World: Confessions of a Mostly Reformed Ne'er-Do-Well

2008-01-07T23:17:00.000-08:00

Lately I’ve found myself reflecting on the kind of moral example I hope to be able to set for my one-and-a-half year old son, Ander. It’s no mere cliché that as a new father you find yourself tending to reexamine aspects of yourself you might have taken for granted in the past. For me, nagging questions about ethics and morality have been a recurring, lifelong preoccupation anyway, only now I find myself reexamining all the usual questions from a new angle.

I should confess at the start that, from early adolescence on, I’ve sometimes been less than what can be characterized as saintly in my personal conduct, although I’ve always tried at a minimum to adhere to a sort of layman’s Hippocratic oath (“at least to do no harm…”). But even that hasn’t always worked out quite the way I’d hoped (who knew there were so many devilishly subtle ways to do harm?)

At various times since I first shed the devout religious faith I held throughout my early childhood, I’ve been a liar, a truant, a juvenile delinquent, a sexual libertine, a substance abuser, a wannabe rock star, a political conservative, and perhaps most egregious of all, a telemarketer (though for what it’s worth, even in the absolute depths of my moral debasement, I couldn’t stomach this last role for more than a couple of months).

When temporary lapses in ethical judgment happen, we’re lucky if the damages are minor and easily containable. But my experiences suggest that such lapses are inevitable, even for the best of us: Sometimes we just glance up a moment too late, just in time to see that pint-sized demon that squats on our left shoulder cough up a little puff of white feathers while the angel that normally sits on our right is suddenly AWOL.

In my case, I could easily lay the blame for my personal failings on my early upbringing and my parents’ bad example.

After all, I could point out, my mother was a heroin addict who met my father while trolling for American soldiers in the pool-halls of Frankfurt, Germany—and she not only shot up in front of me, left me to care for myself while she was high, but even sometimes let me take hits of pot smoke from her homemade coffee can bubbler-bong when I wasn’t yet even five years old. (Incidentally, the lullaby she most often sang to me as a child was “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which to this day brings tears to my eyes, on account of how sweetly and honestly she sang it.)

My father, meanwhile, was a borderline sociopath who shortly after meeting my mother got himself ejected from the US military by calmly walking into his commanding officer’s office one day and shooting up heroin in front of him.

To some, such a troubled personal history might seem like a sort of moral “get out of jail free” card. But not to me. I decided long ago that I’m solely responsibility for my intentional actions, both the morally laudable and the morally reprehensible ones. And I stand by that principle, even though I’ll admit I can’t necessarily construct a persuasive argument for it. Given what we know now about the elaborate interplay of environmental factors and genetic propensities in shaping our potential intellectual and moral capacities, the idea of absolute personal responsibility almost seems quaint and old-fashioned. And yet, the principle of personal responsibility nevertheless seems axiomatic to me: Like a necessary assumption we make before we can even begin to have a discussion of ethics, not a point to be debated along the way.

Anyway, it’s an often touted but nevertheless accurate claim that we live in morally-challenged times. The very best among our moral, religious and political leaders are ultimately nothing more than ordinary, decent men and women, and the worst among them are penny-ante charlatans and outright criminals, so it can be hard to know where to begin looking for sound moral guidance. And we often put on such peculiarly creative cultural blinders when it comes to the absurd ethical contradictions common in contemporary American life.

Here’s an example of 21st Century American ethics in action:

Every year to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday our self-professed freedom- and peace-loving nation slaughters, braises, bakes and carves millions of hormonally-fattened, cage-farmed Turkeys (and the turkey, if you recall, in a twist of historical irony, was once a leading contender for the title of national bird, although we eventually ended up with the fittingly ill-tempered bald eagle, a near cousin of the vulture, instead).

At the same time, to assuage our peculiarly dissociated collective guilt over the ugly reality of our carnivorous holiday habits, every year like clockwork, our President takes time out from his busy schedule of marketing the Global War on Terror™, demoralizing civil rights activists, and systematically dismantling the constitution, and with a flick of his imperial pen, he publicly issues a pardon for a single, free-range farmed turkey.

The lucky bird is then, in a public ceremony with much media fanfare, spared the axe and retired to a petting zoo, his head still securely attached to his shoulders.

Never mind that the entire spectacle is essentially meant to signal the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday, an occasion for which millions of other birds with no less legitimate claims for clemency are hastened en masse into the ovens.

Never mind that, with yet another flick of that same imperial pen, the President just expanded the Iraq War budget by another 700 billion or so.

Never mind that some of this money will no doubt be used to replace the American bullets that killed a pregnant Iraqi women and her cousin as they sped without stopping through a military checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad, the woman being in heavy labor and her cousin in a state of complete panic at the time.

But I recently promised myself to stop talking politics, so let’s just leave those points where they stand for now.

Suffice it to say, the modern world is full of difficult moral problems. Which is why it seems just that much more important to me to think long and hard about what values I’d most like to pass along to my son. My own religious beliefs are an idiosyncratic co-mingling of Christian and Buddhist teachings, and I’m deeply mistrustful of organized religion, which I was raised to regard cautiously, as a fertile soil for hypocrites and opportunistic con-men, of which recent decades have produced bumper crops.

I remember a conversation I once had with a devout Christian woman I met through my work. She was telling me about her recent decision to pull her children—good, faithful Christian children whom she feared would be corrupted by secular influences—out of public schools and start them on home schooling. I should probably have minded my own business, but instead, I poked my nose in and tried to reason with her from a Christian perspective: What happened, I pressed her, to the time-honored notion that Christians ought to aspire to be like lights of truth to the world, helping to lead sinners to righteousness by their shining moral leadership? What happens when all the lights go out in the public schools? What happens to all the kids trapped in the dark?

The woman acknowledged the validity of my point, but replied that it wouldn’t be right to knowingly expose her children to the wickedness and perversity rampant in the public school system. What’s more, she wanted to keep her children from being indoctrinated with secular propaganda such as the Theory of Evolution.

I told her I understood even if I didn’t agree, wished her well, and left. There’s no use in trying to reason someone out of an unreasonable position. So I politely dropped the subject and vamoosed.

Looking back, I’m not sure if I should have done more to make my point or not. But then, what more could I have done? I could have shouted political slogans in her face; I could have whacked her over the head with a copy of “Origin of Species.” But none of that would have changed anything one iota, except perhaps to further open the divide between our points of view. And she was, after all, only a decent and well-meaning, if slightly confused, human being, just like me. Besides, a mother probably should have the right to take her children out of public school if she wants to, whether for good reasons or bad, and regardless of whether that choice ultimately serves the best interests of the rest of the world or not.

In an ethics course I took in college, I was introduced to an idea dubbed, as I recall, the “Good Samaritan” principle: The gist of it was that while certain choices might not necessarily be moral imperatives, they might however be requirements of basic human decency. If you found a small child lying unconscious and bleeding in a street gutter, for example, you might not be morally obligated to look after the child, but your humanity might suffer grievous harm if you didn’t.

Personally, I think that the kinds of moral distinctions the “Good Samaritan” principle tries to draw might be useful to a point, but they also threaten to go too far, potentially opening up that nasty can of worms we call “moral relativism.” It seems to me that, as a matter of fact, there is a fundamental moral obligation to help our fellow human beings when we find them in immediate danger: Not throwing a life preserver out to that poor fellow out in the middle of the lake who is “not waving but drowning,” as the poet wrote, constitutes a crime of omission, doesn’t it? That is, if we know he’s drowning and happen to have a life preserver handy?

At the same time, it’s surely not a moral requirement that we all spend every day of our lives scanning the water for potential drowning victims in need of rescue.

But let’s talk a little bit more about that nasty bugaboo called “moral relativism” whose specter I raised earlier.

The basic idea behind moral relativism is generally understood to be something like “in reality, there are no moral absolutes, no simple, right or wrong ethical choices.” To the extent that this abstruse system of ethical hocus pocus is not exclusively a straw man invention of fear-mongering political opportunists (passing themselves off as high-minded moral zealots, of course), moral relativism leads to some pretty odd ethical judgments: An armed robber from a working-class neighborhood devastated by economic collapse might even be held largely blameless for robbing an interloper from a wealthier neighborhood—especially if the hypothetical robber is a family man with children who might otherwise go hungry while the robbery victim is a man with more than enough wealth to spare.

Let me state now for the record that I am not a moral relativist. I am, however, also not a simpleton, so I can’t deny that many situations and choices do elude simple analysis in terms of moral absolutes. Not every moral question can be answered in simple terms of right or wrong.

Many choices, for example, are morally neutral.

Turning left or right at a fork in a road when there’s no compelling reason to prefer one choice over the other is not a choice with any obvious ethical consequences. It’s a morally neutral choice, as many routine choices are.

Other choices may have obvious moral dimensions, but upon further analysis, turn out to be intractably subtle. It may be difficult or even impossible to determine which out of a given range of options is more ethical in some cases.

For example, consider the matter of the environmental impact of disposable vs. cloth diapers. At first glance, to someone concerned about the environment, cloth diapers might seem an ethical choice because they generate less landfill waste. But as it turns out, the reality is not quite so simple: As you’d expect, cloth diapers need to be washed frequently, using significant amounts of potable water and energy generated by fossil fuels. In addition, the chemicals most frequently used to treat and wash cloth diapers are among the worst offenders in terms of their environmental impact. The question of whether cloth or disposable diapers are better for the environment is a highly controversial topic, as it turns out. Google “Cloth vs. Disposal Diapers” for yourself to get a flavor for just how controversial.

To the committed moral relativist (if such a pitiful, self-hating creature actually exists), the fact that even a single scenario can give rise to an intractable or hopelessly ambiguous ethical dilemma invalidates the very concept of ethical absolutes. Our choices simply can’t ever be sorted into tidy moral categories of right and wrong, so the argument goes. Devoid of black and white ethical categories, the world offers nothing but endless shades of gray.

I’ve had many friends over the years who attached considerable significance to the notion that “There are no moral absolutes.” Well, I suppose I strongly agree with that statement, yet at the same time, I completely disagree.

Confused as I am yet? Well, let me explain.

It seems to me that absolutely denying the possibility of moral absolutes, perversely, entails making an absolute moral claim. The claim “there are no moral absolutes,” is essentially self-refuting, like the claim “this sentence is false”: If it’s true, it must not be true, because it amounts to an absolute moral claim of exactly the kind it asserts can’t be made.

So much for strong moral relativism, then. So what does that leave?

John Stuart Mills proposed a system of ethics called Utilitarianism, which, to put it crudely, holds that the guiding ethical principle behind all our choices should be to create by our actions the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. So if for some peculiar reason it makes everyone really, really happy to kill a random stranger every so often as part of a ritualistic bloodletting, I don’t suppose Mills would object, although I don’t think that was his point. Still, if it’s that easy for me to misread Mills’ to reach such a specious conclusion, I’m sure there are plenty of others who can do a lot worse.

Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, came up with a nifty little ethical rule of thumb called the “Categorical Imperative,” which in likewise grossly simplified terms works something like this: If you’re not sure whether or not a particular choice is ethical or not, imagine what would happen if everyone else behaved in exactly the same way. If all hell would break loose, raining negative repercussions down on you and everyone else’s heads, then the choice is unethical. In other words, if it might cause harm to you personally if everyone did it, then you shouldn’t be doing it yourself.

Another simpler way of putting Kant’s Categorical Imperative, of course, might just be to say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the infamous Golden Rule, one well-known formulation of which is found in the Christian bible, but its origins can be traced back even further to Chinese philosopher and all around wise guy, Confucius.

When I was a child, I thought I had accidentally discovered a logical flaw in the Golden Rule, a sort of loophole that could all too easily be exploited. What if some of the individuals reckoning their ethics according to the Golden Rule were sadomasochists, I conjectured? Or suicidal depressives, looking for a release from their suffering and presuming that others felt exactly as they did? If such individuals were to take the rule too literally and actually do to others what they would like to have done to themselves—well, you probably get the picture.

This little piece of Sunday-school sophistry points to an interesting problem, though: While morality, in general, may not be entirely relative, people’s individual values systems plainly are.

One well-meaning guy thinks monogamy is the only way to go; another equally well-meaning guy thinks anything less than radical polyamory is a barbaric form of human bondage. Who has the right to settle that argument? Ideally, both guys would just agree to live and let live, staying out of each other’s way and otherwise enjoying a kind of separate peace.

But get this: Over a couple of beers, the second guy convinces the first guy’s wife that his radical pro-polyamory views are correct. She drops the first guy like a sack of potatoes for a roll in the hay with the second guy. Then a third guy, a fourth guy, a fifth guy, etc. The first guy confronts the second guy, and with the Golden Rule in mind demands “How could you sleep with her? I would never in a million years do the same to you. What about the Golden Rule?” The second guy just flashes a quick Cheshire-cat grin and replies “Maybe so, but of course, I wouldn’t mind in the least if you’d done the same to me.”

But then, maybe in this hypothetical example of one way the golden rule might be subverted, an even more fundamental offense has been committed. Surely one thing both guys have in common is that neither of them would relish the idea of someone else forcing him to live according to a values system other than his own. And yet, isn’t that more or less what the second guy did, in violation of the Golden Rule?

Either way, it seems that even the most elegant, time-honored ethical principles aren’t without their potential complications. In fact, I suspect there are rarely occasions when questions of morality generate easy answers (except, of course, when they do, as I suspect those occasions do exist as well).

More importantly, just asking serious questions about ethics at all seems vitally important to me. In fact, after giving it all this thought, I suppose that what I really hope most for Ander’s moral development is that he, too, learns to ask ethical questions and try to work through the answers for himself.

Sure, you can crib all the answers from someone else’s paper for the math exam, but if you don’t learn to work through the problems for yourself, your brain never forms the connections needed to solve them, and you deprive yourself of a certain degree of autonomy and self-integrity that should rightfully be yours.

Weighing the ethical dimensions of one’s actions and grappling with the complex moral challenges that come with being both human and alive are just fundamental aspects of what it means to be a healthy human being. And without earnest, ethical self-examination and probing, no matter how aimless these activities may seem at times, what possibility of meaningful personal growth is there? And what is anything that doesn’t grow but dead?

The Future of Music

2008-01-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

Check out David Byrne's fascinating take on the future of the music business and advice for how independent artists can survive these changes here. A fascinating discussion of what's really happening in music from someone who should know. Thanks to Wired magazine for bringing this to us.

New Project: Tangemeenie's "The Gilded Age"

2007-11-19T23:00:00.000-08:00

If you haven't yet, check out the new project I've started over at tangemeenie.com.

Tangemeenie is an indie pop/electronica/experimental band my wife Lori and I started way back in the early 2000's. We released one well-received but lesser known album on the now-defunct Animal World Recordings label.

This new project we're embarking on will ultimately lead to the release of our first new full-length recording in nearly six years.

Water, Water Everywhere...

2007-11-14T07:02:00.000-08:00

With all the news lately about the drought in the Southeast region and the continuing disputes over the freshwater in Apalachicola Bay, I've been thinking quite a bit about my Uncle Corky over there in Apalachicola. His claim to fame is being that area's last oyster tong maker, and possibly the last oyster tong maker in the world.

We called him my "Uncle" when I was growing up because he and my grandmother were raised for all practical purposes as brother and sister, although he was actually a cousin.

Back before my extended family fell apart with the death of my grandparents, my immediate family was extremely close with Corky and the whole Richards' clan. But it's been many, many years since I've seen any of them now.

I've been reflecting a lot lately on the fact that my son Ander doesn't have much of an extended family to speak of on my side of the equation. My remaining relatives in the states are all scattered and we no longer maintain any contact with them. My family in Germany hasn't fared well since my mother died either, and though we still occasionally hear from my sisters and my uncle Olaf and his family, even my contact with them is sporadic, at best.

Ander's really the only blood-relative I have that plays any meaningful role in my life right now. And over this past weekend, he was nearly killed, or at least badly injured, during a visit with my wife's side of the family in Orlando, in an accident involving a shoddily-constructed shelf and a three-hundred gallon aquarium.

Ander tugged on one corner of the shelf, and the whole structure just collapsed unexpectedly, teetering over and dumping the 300 gallon aquarium almost directly on top of him. If my wife and I hadn't gotten there in time to push and pull him out of the way--anyway, we did get there in time to get him out of the way, and apart from a small scrape on his chest, he wasn't even hurt. But I've felt badly shaken up ever since.

My uncle Corky, in addition to being the world's last great oyster tong maker, is a top-notch cabinet maker and all-around master carpenter. Pieces he's built have been featured prominently in several national architecture and design magazines.

If he'd built the shelf that the aquarium was sitting on, the accident this past weekend would never have happened. His work is solid, made to be passed down from one generation to the next, made to withstand the abuses of time.

But he didn't build the shelf that almost killed my only son. That shelf was made in an anonymous factory somewhere, out of pressed ply board, for pennies on the dollar.

What a bargain.

On Being an American

2007-08-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

Until I was five, I was a German citizen living with my mother's side of the family in Frankfurt, although I was born in the US and my father was an American, so I always had a legal claim to American citizenship.

Back in those days, I desperately wanted to live in America because the two things I wanted most to be was a cowboy or Superman, and that's what America meant to me: America was the old west movies my Oma would occasionally let me stay up past my bedtime to watch, and the Superman comic books that my grandmother from my father's side would send me every few months in care packages from the states.

Then when I was five, my Oma and I were in the states visiting the American side of my family when unexpectedly my father and grandparents staged a dramatic "rescue" at the airport, by simply dropping my Oma off at the airport and driving away with me still in the car. My mom was a heroin addict, and my grandparents had become convinced that my life in Germany was too unstable, and so they felt they were acting in my best interests. And by this time, though I was young and spoke very little English, I had also made my feelings on the matter plain: I wanted to stay in America where I could one day become a cowboy or Superman. As far as I knew, such things were really possible in a place like America, which by all accounts--as confirmed even in the gossip of the youngest children on the playground in Germany--was like no place else in the world, a place where anything was possible.

But when I started school in the states, I found the reality of America to be quite different than expected. Through the earliest parts of my school experience, I struggled with an English language-skill deficit and paid a heavy price for my disadvantage.

In Germany (where kindergarten started a year earlier than in the states and extended for two years), I'd been designated as gifted and called a "wunderkind" because of my advanced language skills, and other children my age considered my intelligence to be a positive trait and actively sought out my friendship because of it. In America, my poor English skills made me a playground pariah. My American classmates, most of whom scarcely seemed capable of conceiving of people who didn't naturally speak English as human, taunted me mercilessly, and assumed the guttural intonations of my native tongue were a sign of mental retardation. In Germany, I had been popular and accepted by my peers, and playground bullying had been the exception rather than the rule; in America I was bullied relentlessly and bullying was regarded as more or less a part of normal play.

By the end of first grade I'd established myself as the highest-level reader in my class, motivated largely by a spiteful desire to prove to all my cruel American classmates ("die Schweine," as I often called them under my breath) that I wasn't mentally deficient, but in fact, was just as capable--even more so--than they were.

With the language problems that playground bullies had used to justify their abuse behind me, I figured I would finally be granted some peace and social acceptance. But then word soon began to spread among my classmates that I was smart. And pretty soon, the bullying began all over again, this time because I was considered too intelligent.

After that, I pretty much gave up on making sense of American playground society and I just did whatever I could to blend in and gain the acceptance of my peers. Often this meant engaging in acts of petty delinquency. By middle school, I was a class clown and unrepentant delinquent who's claim to fame was skipping as many classes as I attended and being part of a crowd of other boys who once set a gym locker on fire.

On several occasions, I became a bully myself, letting myself be baited by playground antagonists into fight with weaker kids for the amusement of the crowd, even when in reality, there was no good reason to fight. I remember once, I gave this really harmless, nice kid a bloody nose because a crowd of kids had formed around us in the gym, fueled by rumors about some petty sleight, and one of the kids in the crowd shoved the kid into me, as several of the other kids goaded: "Oooh, you gonna let him hit you like that?"

I only had to punch the kid once and the fight was over. His nose just started gushing blood all over his shirt and he started crying. He didn't even bother to act tough or to act like he was going to fight back. And in spite of what I'd done to him, from the hurt and confused look on his face it was clear he still felt no ill-will toward me. I'll never forget how bad I felt when I realized that even though I had technically won the fight, in reality, he was the winner, because he was clearly the better person. He was just a good, sweet-hearted kid, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the crowd turned ugly. And I had for a short time been transformed into the disfigured and petty-hate-filled face of that crowd.

So this is what it means to me to be an American: Sometimes you're the bully, and sometimes you're the bullied. But either way, when the crowd gets restless and starts spoiling for a fight, you'd better believe they're not going to settle down again until they see some blood. So sometimes the best you can do is just to try to anticipate when and where the crowd is likely to start getting restless again, and then just quietly go the other way.

[This piece originally appeared in a comment I wrote for MetaFilter. It's reproduced here with minor revisions.]

How to Start a Fire

2007-07-13T21:38:00.000-07:00

I still vividly remember the exact moment I lost faith in organized religion. I had already been flirting with doubts by this time, and I’d had more than a few heated debates on the finer points of Christian theology with the various Sunday school teachers I had over the years (one of whom, for example, taught that Biblical prophecy foretold the Pilgrim’s landing on Plymouth Rock, which in a miraculous proof of manifest destiny already had the date of their landing carved into it when they arrived!).

There were plenty of opportunities for a precocious kid who started life in Frankfurt, Germany, before being transplanted to the American South at age five to spot evidence that grown-ups all over the world were making it up as they went along where religion was concerned. But until this one moment, nothing ever deeply challenged my faith.

I took the little logical inconsistencies and factual errors that seemed to proliferate as I continued my religious education over the years to be nothing more than the honest mistakes of well-meaning but occasionally ignorant grown-ups. It never once occurred to me that some of them might knowingly embellish the truth, much less, that they might intentionally lie about something of a religious nature—I couldn’t imagine such a thing, because I naively thought they believed in what they were saying, too.

Until the year I joined the Royal Rangers and went to revival camp.

The Royal Rangers, in case you’ve never heard of them, are an outfit like the Boy Scouts, but with an overtly Christian orientation. For a short time, I was a member of a Royal Ranger troop (or were they called “cavalries”?), and during that time, I participated in one of the group’s weekend camping trips, which as it happened also served as a so-called Christian revival. I think I was ten at the time.

What I thought was going to be a weekend of outdoor fun-and-games and learning wilderness survival skills like how to start a fire turned out to be something more closely resembling an army boot-camp. I don’t remember many of the details of that weekend. What I do remember is pitching tents in the dark with my fellow campers, and then all of us being marched in military fashion out to a remote spot in the woods, where we were forced to stand rigidly at attention for several hours in the freezing cold as we listened to a seemingly endless procession of youth pastors delivering sermons.

A couple of younger campers actually passed out from exhaustion over the course of the evening. Many, many others spent the evening shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other performing what’s familiarly known as “the pee-pee dance.” But every request to step out of line—even briefly—to heed nature’s call was sternly rejected: We had to sacrifice personal comfort, we were told, and humble ourselves before God.

But here’s what I remember most vividly about that weekend, and what ultimately changed everything for me.

At the front of the area where the assembly was held, the wood for a massive bonfire had been carefully stacked up beforehand. Before introducing the first speaker, the lead pastor told us he would demonstrate how to start a fire at the conclusion of the revival, as he lit the bonfire.

That’s more like it, I thought, because this was exactly the kind of survival training I’d been hoping to get out of the weekend. And since it was winter, we were all freezing cold and wanted nothing more than to warm our faces and hands around that bonfire.

When the last sermon finally ended what seemed like hours later, the pastor stood up to address the assembly again.

“Earlier I promised we would learn how to start a fire tonight,” he said (or words to that effect). “And now it’s time to make good on that promise. We learned tonight that the Good Book tells us a mustard seed of faith can move mountains. Well, Amen, because faith in the Lord is a powerful thing. And to prove that here tonight, we’re going to light this bonfire with nothing but faith. Halleluiah! That’s right—all we need is faith! All we have to do is believe, believe, believe, and God will do the rest! Now bow your heads and pray with me: ‘Heavenly Father we pray for You to light this fire so that we may warm our bodies from the cold just as Your Love warms our everlasting souls, Heavenly Father, In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen!’”

As he concluded this trite little prayer, the pastor dramatically swept his arm toward the unlit bonfire and proclaimed, in a perverse echo of the book of Genesis: “Let there be light!”

And just as his arm completed its arc, from my vantage point nearby I saw him let loose a small amount of powdery substance he held in his palm onto the wood stacked up for the bonfire. As the substance came into contact with the surface of the wood, it crackled and sparked, until an explosive chemical reaction brought the bonfire roaring to life. To many of the other campers, it probably looked as if our prayers alone had ignited the bonfire; but I had seen the trick.

We were supposed to go home from camp thinking we’d witnessed a miracle that night. We were supposed to go on after that night to tell other kids about the miracle we’d witnessed at bible camp, so they might become believers, too. But the miracle was a fraud. And the pastor had lied to us. He hadn’t taught us how to start a fire at all.

But not only had the pastor lied to us—with his repeated urgings to witness to others, he meant to turn us all into liars, working on his behalf to spread the lie to the rest of the world, like some satanic mockery of the gospel.

What exactly was the lie that he wanted us to spread to the rest of the world? On the surface, it seemed to be something like the idea that faith alone—that is, faith without works—can produce miracles, making the impossible possible and changing the world in some observable way. But when I dug a little deeper, I realized it was something else, something even more sinister. The lie he wanted us to spread throughout the world as if it were gospel was the idea that if enough people unquestioningly believe a lie, it becomes the truth.

As these realizations sank in, despite the welcome warmth of the fire, I felt a chill deep in my bones, and it was at that exact moment I knew I would never trust any organized religion or its proselytizers again.

Book Review: "The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems" by David Kirby

2007-07-02T13:51:00.001-07:00

This week, in lieu of the random observations, grandiose commentary, and generally over-blown marginalia the Museum usually foists on unsuspecting readers, I'm instead offering a book recommendation and review.

The book in question is a book of poetry, and the author is American poet, David Kirby, whose previous books include Big-Leg Music, My Twentieth Century, The House of Blue Light, and many others.

As recently as 2006 Kirby’s work was again honored with the closest approximation the world of contemporary poetry offers to an official stamp of approval: His poem, “Seventeen Ways From Tuesday,” was selected for the 2006 volume of the Best American Poetry series. This excellent poem and many others equally deserving of acclaim can be found in The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems, a recently released round-up of new and previously published poems by David Kirby, offered through Louisiana State University Press’s excellent “Southern Messenger Poets” series, edited by David Smith.

The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems offers a generous sampling of everything that Kirby does best as a poet. An acknowledged master of the long narrative poem, Kirby’s engaging, witty, and highly-literate narrative voice has the power to elevate the anecdotal to the universal, using the first-person perspective to transcend what I think T.S. Eliot once called the “merely personal” as he drags his readers breathlessly along on fugue-like reveries through personal imaginative landscapes that blur the geographic boundaries between memory and metaphor, fact and confabulation, the sublime and the mundane.

All of which is just a fancy way of saying Kirby’s poems go beyond the entertaining and often amusing stories they tell to touch on fundamentally universal human themes—like a modern-day Mark Twain, Kirby spins yarns that have the enduring quality of modern fables.

Over the years, Kirby has perfected the art of rambling coherently—of stepping out of the way of his own voice, so to speak, and letting each successive line of verse flow into the next so freely and naturally you can’t help but be swept along. And this subtle skill is on full display in The House on Boulevard Street.

Also on display is Kirby’s characteristic knack for setting up a big tent, and drawing everyone inside: Kirby’s poems are moral without being moralistic, absurd without being absurdist, culturally-literate but not elitist. And what makes such seemingly impossible feats of literary acrobatics possible is the richness of Kirby’s own voice, which by turns is witty, urbane, philosophical, and nostalgic. Each poem makes you feel as if you’re sitting down having a one-on-one conversation with the man himself.

If you were once an avid poetry reader, but lost the habit, or if you generally find poetry too dry or obscure to enjoy, but love a good entertaining read, give The House on Boulevard Street a try. After reading a few of Kirby’s poems, you’re sure to find something that makes you hungry for a few more. Then before long you just might find yourself with a healthy new habit. Vitamin P: It does the heart good.

Best. Music. Industry. Discussion. Evah.

2007-06-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

If you're so inclined, I'd highly recommend hopping on over to MetaFilter and checking out this excellent discussion on the current state of the music industry. There's a lot of talk to sort through there, but it's one of the best round-ups of the current state of the industry that I've seen, especially for the wide range of perspectives represented.

Inaugural Poem: New Domain Christening

2007-06-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

Well, now that I've finally gotten around to establishing this humble little museum of mine with a good and proper domain all its own (museumoflostcauses.com), I suppose it's time to declare the museum officially open for business.

In that spirit of new beginnings, I submit the following poem written just for this occasion.

In the Museum of Lost Causes

The old night watchman’s leathery face no longer registers
the fleeting contours of his disgust, though it’s hard to deny

that every new exhibit, nearly without exception, pushes
the bounds of good taste to previously unknown lows,

plumbing new depths of ignominy, as if all human history
could be reduced to a sort of existential limbo dance, each

man and woman’s life merely a more or less successful answer
to the call-and-response challenge “How low can you go?”

though he has been known to shuttle his head from side
to side on occasion, in his disapproving but avuncular way,

as if to say, “Well, at least it can’t get much worse than this,”
though of course it can, and he already knows it will.

And as the guys from the warehouse wheel in their crates,
unloading the pieces for the latest exhibit, the night watchman

can’t bear to watch (though this irony escapes him), for where
such crates in former times might have held harmless trinkets

like perpetual motion machines or shiny new instruction manuals
for performing English to metric conversions, these days they only

ever seemed to hold more and more dead bodies, stacked
thick: bodies of all shapes and sizes, bodies of soldiers, bodies

of school children, bodies of refugees, hollowed-out and putrid
remnants of despoiled lives, the worst lost causes of all—a missing

nose here, a gaping eye socket there, faces contorted into grotesque
rubbery masks of astonishment and grief, which in their ravages

seemed to mock not only human life but even the very idea of humanity.

Oh! Inverted World!

2007-03-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

I may not be an economist, but it recently occurred to me that something seems to have gone awry in the modern, mass-production-oriented marketplace.

As we all know, the principles of supply and demand are considered to be of fundamental importance in the workings of a healthy free market economy. The greater the demand for a good or service, so one crucial thread of the idea goes, the higher the fair market price of that good or service on the open market, particularly if the means to produce the good or service are in short supply. On the other hand, the price of a particular good or service might still be kept relatively low despite high demand if the good or service can be cheaply made available. In this way, supply and demand in classical economics act as counterweights to one another, theoretically, and ultimately work to bring consumer prices, producer costs, and everything else into a kind of optimal equilibrium.

But consider this: In modern, industrialized, mass-production-oriented economies, goods and services that aren’t in great demand actually cost more to produce than those that are in greater demand because the costs associated with large-scale manufacturing technology and infrastructure make it cost-prohibitive to produce smaller quantities of most goods.

Suppose, for example, that I wanted to buy a left-handed patio chair. What’s a left-handed patio chair? It doesn’t really matter, but let’s just say it’s a variation on the common household plastic patio chair.

So I drive down to the local patio furniture outlet and ask them how much it would cost me to buy a left-handed patio chair. Naturally, the salesman looks at me as if I’m crazy. I reassure him that I’m not, and I go on to explain exactly how a left-handed patio chair differs from a typical patio chair. After some back and forth, he tells me he can’t help me but directs me to the chair factory downtown that produces all the chairs sold in his shop. I thank him and continue along my way.

When I arrive at the factory, I tell the factory boss what I’m looking for, and he apologetically says that there just isn’t enough demand to merit producing left-handed patio chairs in his factory, but he knows a craftsman up in the Catskills who can whittle such a chair for me for about $500. I tell him I need it in plastic, like an ordinary patio chair. “Then you’re out of luck, “he replies, because he doesn’t even know if that’s possible.

As this rhetorical example illustrates, in a mass-production oriented economy, goods for which little or no demand exists are nevertheless significantly more expensive on the open market than goods that are in higher demand even when the raw materials needed to produce them are abundantly and cheaply available!

Doesn’t it stand to reason, then, that mass-production oriented industries are fundamentally incompatible with the most basic axioms of a healthy free marketplace?

Mass-Market Music Burnout

2007-03-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

If the latest CD sales figures reported in the Wall Street Journal (available via Slashdot here) are any indication, the future of the American music industry is starting to look a lot different than its recent past. With CD sales continuing to drop precipitously (another 20% according to the latest figures), the major labels are probably doing a collective spit-take right about now.

Which raises the obvious questions: What's behind these plummeting sales figures? Can the fall-off in sales be attributed solely to the Internet effect--i.e., are digital music sales and on-line piracy to blame--or are there other factors involved in these recent trends?

Just venturing a wild guess here, I'd say it's a combination of the Internet effect, and another, as yet largely unquantified factor: Mass-market music burnout. Although I don't know of any systematic attempts to quantify the effect of mass-market music burnout, anecdotal evidence and intuition suggest to me that increasing numbers of ordinary people simply find mass-market music boring.

Over the years, mainstream music industry A&R has drifted further and further in the direction of prioritizing commercial sales potential over artistic merit. The mainstream pop music industry long ago swapped any residual notions of artistic integrity in return for the cruel calculus of the consumer marketplace, because marketing spin-offs and product tie-in deals are often the only way to make the numbers add up in such a way as to both keep the bills paid and satisfy shareholders' and executives' demands for constant revenue growth.

The reality is, the hard numbers often just don't add up. And when they don't, its the artists who end up getting shafted first (for an excellent discussion of just how artists often get shafted by the majors, see Steve Albini's classic article The Problem with Music that originally ran in the now defunct Maximum Rock and Roll), and then it's the music consumers who indirectly end up getting shafted next.

Corporate demands for stable and consistent profit growth increase pressure on major label A&R departments to produce predictable and repeatable results--meaning, ultimately, that the end product coming out of most A&R shops will be a formulaic rehashing of the music of whatever act has most recently shown the highest revenue-generating potential, music that fits well into the major label parent company's broader marketing strategy. Frequently absent is music that genuinely innovates, that furthers music as an artform, or that doesn't bore more discriminating music consumers to tears. After all, that's not where the real money is.

Does it suck?

2007-03-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

The All-Knowing Internet has spoken, and I'm happy to announce that according to it, at least three of my most cherished causes don't in fact suck. The results are in and it appears that "Cloud 13 Records", "Pocket Novel Mystery", and "Tangemeenie" definitely don't suck; rather, they rock.

Find out if you've been wasting your time on things that suck, here.

The Death of Science

2006-10-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

Entropy in a closed system
always increases

according to the second law
of thermodynamics,

which is a polite way
of saying, not only is the world

going to hell in a hand-basket
but it's a trip down

a one-way street—
a pleasant little canopy street

that meanders here and there,
sure, but ultimately,

a street with only one possible
destination: heat death, a state

of complete and irreversible
disorder, the fraying of the vast

seam that stitches the sky
to the ocean at the c-section scar

of the horizon. Picture this:
You're out for a stroll along

just such a street one day
when BAM!, a grand piano

drops from the sky and smashes
to pieces mere inches from

the exact spot where your
next step would have carried you.

Only you don't so much as flinch,
as it happens because, by now,

the unexpected has become
the commonplace, with every

passing moment, a little more
chaos creeping in. Stranger things

have happened (recall the dead
hummingbird floating in your

morning coffee). And no doubt,
stranger things will happen still.

For instance, you might find yourself
promenading along some shady

little canopy street that, as far as you
can tell, existed only as a rhetorical figure

in a poem you were reading, a few
stanzas ago. How did you get here?

And as you round a corner trying to sort
through all these confusing matters

of use vs. reference, you bump into
a guy perched on a shaky bar-stool

in the middle of the street, performing
intricate calculations with a slide rule

for a small crowd of passers-by. He's
a member of a growing under class

of physicists and mathematicians forced
to eke out livelihoods as street-performers

owing to a sharp decline in demand
for their services, now that even simple

mathematical equations often fail to yield
consistent solutions. And as the force

of the collision sends the guy pitching
hard toward the asphalt, he doesn't

seem to know what else to do, so his
fingers keep working that slide rule,

only now more frantically, and you
almost can't bear to watch, because

it's only a matter of seconds before
the impact, and it's not going to be

pretty, especially since the guy still isn't
making any effort to catch himself, these

events unfolding in one of those awkward
slow-motion sequences where

every moment stretches to eternity,
and meanwhile, you're just standing there

watching, slack-jawed and powerless, as all of
science teeters on the brink of a spectacular fall.

Contact Info

2006-01-01T19:28:00.000-08:00

If you really need to contact me, shoot me an email at the email address below. There's a vanishingly small chance I'll read it and eventually get around to replying. I'd promise more, but I keep myself busy.

steevtaylor at embarqmail dot com