Icono-Curmudgeon-Clast - Loring Wirbel's Rants

When Outlaws Hold the Moral Edge

2012-01-20T12:32:00.000-08:00

It was not a fun week for a cloister of Democrats who like to think of themselves as liberals - Rep. John Conyers, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Patrick Leahy. In the week of furor involving the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, the only Democrats preserving some shred of independent thinking were President Obama and Nancy Pelosi. The Leahy-Franken-Conyers crew ended up looking like shills for the big media barons, particularly the industry associations Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Some people just didn't know when to stop digging their own holes. When Republican Rep. Lamar Smith read the writing on the wall and pulled SOPA on Jan. 20, Leahy complained loudly that he was being forced to do the same with PIPA due to populist thugs. Former Sen. Christopher Dodd, who now serves as a cheap-suit shill for MPAA, called the Internet blackout initiated by Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, et. al. on January 18 "immature and silly." Of course, thuggish comments were not limited to present and future members of Congress. Hollywood unions, including Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild, came out with strong pro-SOPA statements on Jan. 19, proving that they are not unions of a traditional sort, but company unions beholden to the large studios.

The news media tried to quell the interesting series of events on Jan. 19 when the Justice Department pulled off a multinational raid on the business of Megaupload (which may have been a White House attempt to appease Hollywood), and Anonymous followed up the raid with its broadest assault yet on the computer systems of 11 federal agencies, nine film studios, and the offices of MPAA and RIAA. Let's face it, Congress caved on Jan. 20 by withdrawing SOPA and PIPA because all hell was breaking loose.

So-called liberal members of Congress were grumbling Jan. 20 because independent citizen-activists of all types caught them with their hands in the media-giant corporate cookie jar, and they couldn't easily give their actions a veneer of do-gooderism. They were shilling for Hollywood, just like Chris Dodd. If Dodd can get George Mitchell to serve as a mediator between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, it's possible an intellectual property act can be drafted which does not fundamentally destroy commerce on the web, though I am skeptical.

But something else is bothering representatives of both political parties. In emails, phone calls, and correspondence to representatives, constituents (many of whom were also supporters of the Occupy movement) let it be known that, given the choice, they would prefer the outlaw behavior of Megaupload or Anonymous to the daily way of doing business of elected representatives. I wrote a letter to Dodd in which I stated that nihilism against a corporate-government infrastructure is to be preferred over the government itself, even if it is destructive in nature.

Obviously, when we get into destructiveness of the Anonymous or Black Bloc variety, we have to be careful. It's like applauding the work of Somali pirates, invisible hackers, Bonnie & Clyde, or gangsta rappers, merely because they're disrupting the system. Even nihilism can have its moral, amoral, and immoral variants. But the fake liberals in Congress should have gotten the message during the SOPA-PIPA debates - it's not just the lobbyist-authored bills we don't like, we don't like the entire government-corporate infrastructure you represent.

The List 2011

2011-12-31T15:06:00.000-08:00

Edit

The List 2011 Part 1

by Loring Wirbel on Saturday, December 31, 2011 at 4:02pm

Some might call 2011 a long-anticipated year of minimalism, though not necessarily in the sense of fewer releases, even if output might have decreased ever so slightly. Instead, many artists were emphasizing the understatement – Civil Wars, Kate Bush, Low, Bon Iver. There were also many short albums clocking in at scarcely above 30 minutes – such as those by Maria Taylor and Richard Buckner, though brief did not by any means imply bad. What remained true in the minimalist year was the same trend observed since the start of the recession – a good three or four dozen albums deserved calling out as exceptional, and they came from artists of all ages and experience. In fact, the economy seemed to be driving plenty of musicians back out on the road, so that a good number of bands hailing from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even 00s seemed to be reuniting in 2011 – some for just best-of stadium tours, but many generating new content.

Seemed like a lot of re-releases were begging the consumer to part with $150 or more of money that was not there for most, begging the question of whether anyone needed a super-edition of The Who’s Quadrophenia, The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, even The Beach Boys’ Smile. And then there’s the lush re-releases of four or five back albums at once, in HDCD editions – Smashing Pumpkins, Throbbing Gristle, This Mortal Coil – excuse me, we’re having a recession here. The Specials section of this list does not grade re-releases, though Smile deserves a nod of some sort. If anything, the monster releases prove that physical copies of musical works are not going away in the era of file sharing, though when companies ask us to shell out three figures, it might make more sense to give money to charity instead.

Anyway, there’s still more to look for in 2012, with new Guided by Voices, Kathleen Edwards, Flobots, Leonard Cohen, Cate LeBon, and Pere Ubu debuting early in the year. It will be interesting to see if any of the planned “Occupy” benefit albums will be any good. Sad to see the year end with REM broken up, Amy Winehouse gone, Gerard Smith of TV on the Radio gone, and Gil Scott-Heron dead, though thank you Jamie Xx for remixing “I’m New Here” before the master died.

Regular Studio Albums, 2011

The Decemberists, The King is Dead – When this album came out very early in 2011, I thought that Colin making a conscious pitch for more pop accessibility, and thereby creating “the perfect REM album,” might be a little too precious to last. I was wrong. This is one of those “no weak cuts” type of albums, where you somehow never get sick of Gillian Welch chiming in on ‘Down by the Water.’ Best keeper of the year. Bonus Edition Handicap: Decemberists join the list of bands that offer five versions of their album, including a $100 art edition, but in this case, you get a DVD about the making of the album, and silly tchotchke like a T-shirt and artwork. Skip it.
The Civil Wars, Barton Hollow -- Are John Paul and Joy calculated as can be in their smoking passion? Are they deliberate in generating the kind of heat that gets audiences hollering “Get a room!” by mid-set? Of course. Does it matter? Hell no. This duo has crafted some of the finest country-folkie-pop songs in years, rightfully putting them into the pantheon of Johnny Cash & June Carter, Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris, Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer…
Mogwai, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will – Reviewing expansive instrumental albums can be tricky, as there is often a fine line between majestic and overblown. Mogwai has had albums in both categories. This one is the perfectly-crafted cusp of what the band has been about for nearly 15 years, the kind of effort that brings chills. Bonus Edition Handicap: The two-disc version of this album comes with the absolutely essential 20-minute cut, ‘Music for a Forgotten Future.’ If you were to get an extended edition of any album this year, here is the one to get.
Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne – My expectations were a bit low for this collaborative effort, but the two ego kings turned out to be a perfect foil for each other, devising an album that is tense, political, layered, full of puzzles and clues, and worth multiple listens. Compare this to intriguing concept-style R&B/hip-hop albums like Drake’s and Roots’s new ones – the latter are great, no doubt, but this one really stands out. Bonus Edition Handicap: The four extra songs and the elaborate packaging of the bonus edition is well worth the price of admission.
Florence and the Machine, Ceremonials – After I expected a slight slump for a sophomore release, one that might have used Florence’s awesome windpipes for less interesting material, Florence instead comes out with a second album that outdoes her first, with songs very unlike any on Lungs. The odd thing is, many critics chided her for going with holler-material anyway. The critics are wrong. This is a superbly-crafted album full of interesting songs, and Florence reaches a bit for this one. Bonus Edition Handicap: The 20-song version of this album is best, but you’ll only find that on the British double-disc package. The best alternative is to get the U.S. 16-song deluxe single-disc edition, search on Torrent for the extra four songs, and wallow in the Florence goodness.
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life – I had to get past my abhorrence for hardcore punk and death-metal bands that use growls as a substitute for vocals. Even if Pink Eyes/Mr. Damian sounds like a cross between Cookie Monster and Sam Kinison, this was an ambitious and remarkable screamer rock opera, complete with string quartet. Some might question putting this one up high and snubbing the Lou Reed/Metallica concept album, but it’s just a matter of personal taste.
Charalambides, Exiles – The crowning achievement of Tom and Christina’s 20-year career, and obviously a carefully-crafted work to expand their fan base. And that’s OK. For a couple that has built a portfolio on improvisational and difficult music, Charalambides has compiled a suite of beautiful work. Bonus Edition Handicap: The two-LP vinyl version with extra songs is essential, too bad it doesn’t come with digital downloads.
The Kills, Blood Pressures – Jack White fans would say that Alison Mosshart’s best singing has come with The Dead Weather, but I’d say her first home and first allegiance lies with The Kills, and that this new album in particular is the band’s finest, and is far superior to anything Dead Weather has done. Less heroin chic and more bright and poppy fun in his album.
Richard Buckner, Our Blood – Welcome back from an extended hiatus, Mr. Buckner! This one displays a little more sameness in material than his last album, Meadow, but it has that mysterious tension that characterized albums like Impasse and The Hill. Infinite sadness you can cut with a knife.
Robert Pollard, Lord of the Birdcage – One reason I’m listing the new Guided by Voices as a 2012 album is that Pollard released so much excellent solo material in 2011, this seemed like the fairest way to spread the Pollard love. This album was my personal favorite of the five released in 2011, mostly because it’s heavy on the poetry and ponderous sadness, evident in songs like ‘In a Circle.’ Other Pollard fans will no doubt disagree.
Kate Bush, 50 Words for Snow – Some might find this release a little more single-focus than Aerial, but I find the long ten-minute songs, the collaboration with Elton John, the mesmerizing rhythm of the title cut, a classic Kate work of mystery.
Wilco, The Whole Love – A nice mix of YHF-style experimentalism, and the whimsy shown in albums like Summerteeth. Tweedy is truly back in top form, particularly in the final 12-minute song, ‘One Sunday Morning.’ Bonus Edition Handicap: The second EP disk has some pretty clever and compelling bonus songs.
Tori Amos, Night of Hunters – It would be easy to dismiss Tori Amos reinterpreting modern classical works with the help of her daughter and niece, but this one is odd and ambitious enough to work more often than it doesn’t. Bonus Edition Handicap: The higher-end edition is better for its book-style perfect binding and its pictures, but the DVD on the making of the album is about as pretentious as you might anticipate.
The Black Keys, El Camino – I found The Black Keys mildly interesting when they were in their bluesy mode, but this album is the pop masterpiece they always seemed capable of making. Bouncy, interesting, and fun.
Dum Dum Girls, Only In Dreams – When DDGs’ first album came out a year or so ago, it seemed like a mildly interesting lo-fi surfer grrrl band. Not sure what has happened with Dee Dee’s voice in the meantime, but in their EP and full-length in 2011, Dum Dum Girls have an unforgettable power of presentation akin to Dusty Springfield in her Memphis album. If you can make it through ‘Heartbeat (Take It Away)’ without shivering, you’ve got a tough exterior.
Wye Oak, Civilian – Jen Wasner’s songwriting has always been mystical and exceptional in a Crazy Horse kind of way, but the new album Civilian is a concept work of sorts that puts all the power of her intense lyricism and strange musical phrasing to maximum advantage. Songs like ‘Plains’ and the title track are great masterpieces of mystery.
The Joy Formidable, The Big Roar – Ritzy’s exceptional EP work over the last few months raised the expectation levels for this album, and she and JF rose to the challenge. A powerful debut with plenty of unforgettable songs, and a stirring finale in ‘The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade.’
Low, C’mon C’mon – As majestic as albums like Drums and Guns have been, they have been crafted in the shadow of Alan Sparhawk’s continued behavioral demons. Low returns to a simpler, happier sound in C’mon C’mon, and the results not only sound great, but are a relief of sorts.
Iron and Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean – Sam Beam really tries to push his band in extended directions from its first couple albums, which works to smashing effect in albums like The Shepherd’s Dog, and to more hit or miss results in Kiss Each Other Clean. Despite a few minor misfires, still a major work for Sam.
Le Butcherettes, Sin Sin Sin – Native New Yorkers will insist that Shilpa Ray should take the punk poetess queen title from Patti Smith. I love Shilpa Ray, as you’ll see below, but the lyrics are a little too street-walker predictable. I’d rather go to the West Coast and get the freshness of Le Butcherettes. Exciting and strident work, beginning to end.
Lydia Loveless, Indestructible Machine – Not many women are making true shitkicker country punk these days, but Lydia Loveless is the real deal. Be sure to get vinyl for the bonus song.
Death Cab for Cutie, Codes and Keys – Considering that this might be called the first post-Zooey Death Cab album, this is pretty damned happy for Ben Gibbard. And despite a few points where the music gets maudlin, a happy Death Cab can be a worthy Death Cab.
Smoke Fairies, Through Low Light and Trees – Seeing as how Katherine and Jessica had pulled together so many interesting songs in the unofficial Ghosts compilation of early recordings, I thought the first proper studio album would have had a lot of overlap with Ghosts. Instead, it’s a long and complex album of all new material, which admittedly has a common bluesy folk-duo sound throughout, but goes through a lot of variations due to the musical talents of the women involved. Great work. Bonus Edition Handicap: Even though the bonus CD is mostly remixes, it’s worth it due to the different talents you get to hear.
REM, Collapse Into Now – Even though there was talk of a post-Collapse studio album, I wonder if the members of the band really figured this might be their last album, because the songs have a wider scope and a greater sense of retrospective than did Accelerate. The contributions of Peaches and Patti Smith are particularly important, and if we include the three new songs from the November 2011 compilation, the last batch of recorded work from REM proves to be one of the most important.
St. Vincent, Strange Mercy – I have to admit to never being quite sure how to take Annie Clark, as she sometimes gets too precious for her own good. I had my doubts with the video for ‘Cruel,’ but was pleasantly surprised to learn this album wasn’t too cutesy-pie at all, it simply sounded like Frank Zappa composing for a Busby Berkeley musical. And that’s a very good thing.
Bridget Hayden, A Siren Blares in an Indifferent Ocean – Refreshing to find that the best work this year from a Vibracathedral Orchestra alumnus came from the reserved and understated Bridget Hayden, who has given us a varied and expansive work recalling Inca Ore at her best. Worth several listens.
P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake – Because her intent was to make an antiwar concept album, some P.J. fans have moved this near the top of all albums this year. I had it down slightly because some of the compositions didn’t work for me as well as others, but it remains one of my favorite and most ambitious P.J. albums ever. Maybe if it had included another riff-heavy guitar number, it would have moved higher.
Gillian Welch, The Harrow and The Harvest – First, let’s just give thanks to David and the powers that be that Gillian is in the studio again, composing fresh and odd songs. After a hiatus of writing, her composition is not quite up to the Time the Revelator level, but these songs are finer than much of her strict 1930s nostalgia work.
Manchester Orchestra, Simple Math – Why do some critics seem to dismiss MO? Is it Andy’s over-emotive angsty presence at times? Hell, Conor Oberst was that way for years. Each Manchester Orchestra album gives me something to look forward to, and this label change has brought the band once again to new frontiers and new heights. And if they sound at times like a slightly dumb Americana band, at least they get to that space through honest endeavors, rather than deliberately trying to sound like Southern Rock a la Blitzen Trapper.
Bardo Pond, s/t – After all the scores of musical experiments this band has given us in a psychedelic haze, the self-titled album with the silvery eyes on the cover turns out to be the quintessential Bardo Pond to give to relatives and newcomers when you’re proselytizing the work of this criminally neglected band.
Adele, 21 – We can tear Adele apart for bitchy diva-ness and canceling her shows for vocal cord nodes, but really, the quality of ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Rumour Has It’ demands this presence. Her voice may give out, but at this point, she’s unlikely to follow an Amy trajectory, at any rate.
Bill Orcutt, How the Thing Sings – Depending on how you count, this could be the second or third album since the reincarnation of Harry Pussy founder as an experimental Delta blues musician. This is the Bill Orcutt album you must own. The tics, the guitar bursts, the flow of notes are incomparable.
Mars Classroom, New Theory of Everything – Another of Robert Pollard’s endless series of supergroups, this one deserves special attention due to such captivating songs as ‘Wish You Were Young.’ A very special and exceptional performance.
The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck – From a production standpoint, this is right up there with the Tallahassee trilogy, but it seems that John’s lyrics are a little more uneven than the last few years, otherwise this might have made Top Ten. Bonus Edition Handicap: The cassette-only acoustic demos session, called All Survivors Pack, is probably the least essential of all of The Mountain Goats’ recent rarities, but it’s still fun, if you can find it.
The Roots, Undun – A fine effort at a concept album to chronicle the trajectory of a brilliant mind gone sour, the only reason this is lower than similar hip-hop concept studies like Jay-Z/Kanye, is that The Roots seem to go for clichés from time to time. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a fine, fine album.
Tom Waits, Bad As Me – Yeah, this is a carefully crafted work that combines the drunken splendor of Small Change, and the weirdness of Swordfishtrombone. A classic Tom work. Bonus Edition Handicap: Even if the three songs in the bonus disc aren’t absolutely essential, the book format and artwork you get in the expanded edition makes it a worthy investment.
Lucinda Williams, Blessed – So great to see Lucinda put together such a beautifully crafted work. Many great songs here. Bonus Edition Handicap: I love discs that come with a demo acoustic version of the studio work. Members of the Lucinda listserv also got four extra live cuts, making the super-duper Blessed edition a bountiful blessing of Lucinda.
Brian Eno and Rick Holland, Drums Between the Bells – One of Eno’s more interesting projects in years, as his musical manipulations work very well with spoken-word poetry. Ideally, I would have liked to see this album and the EP The Panic of Looking released as a single unified work, but who’s complaining?
The Feelies, Here Before – When new bands like Real Estate are riffing off that breezy sound that Bill Million and friends have been offering up sporadically since 1980, it’s a crime when perhaps the best-ever Feelies album is as criminally ignored as this album was.
Alvarius B, Baroque Primitiva – This has the feel of a Sun City Girls covers album, the same loving attention to detail of others’ work, but the greater attraction in this album comes with the dazzling cover packaging, in both LP and CD edition, of nude flower arrangements. A work of amazing beauty.
Bev Barnett and Greg Newlon, Love Can Change the World – San Jose’s finest duo make the effort at stretching song styles in their most ambitious studio effort. Glad that the bonus track at the end gives us two versions of Greg’s song to his daughter.
Abigail Washburn, City of Refuge – When you’re a bluegrass expert, and married to Bela Fleck, and an occasional resident of China, everything you do in traditional music veins is going to be shot through with originality and tinges of weirdness. Abigail deserves a lot of credit for keeping old-timey music relevant.
Gang of Four, Content – It’s nice to see our friends in Go4 can reunite with an album that not only sounds like it has some 21st-century relevance from a socio-political perspective, but has updated its sounds and beats for a new era as well.
Thurston Moore, Demolished Thoughts – We all know that Thurston’s breathy voice can’t make for a multi-octave pop album, but what is surprising is that he can make a very accessible and beautiful pop album when he adds some strings courtesy of Samara Lubelski, and some production tweaks courtesy of Beck. This is a romantic Thurston Moore album, and who ever thought that might be possible?
Girls, Father Son Holy Ghost – Reviewers who went completely gaga over this album simply hear a different Girls than I do. They talk about the band’s ability to fuse sounds of the 1970s, which I wholeheartedly agree with, but the band chooses reference points from that decade I find irrelevant – say, the arena-rock sounds of Yes, for example. The people who like Girls would be the same people who find Pink Floyd’s best work to be Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here. Make no mistake about it, I find Girls creative and clever, I occasionally want to listen to them, but they’re much more predictable and snoozy than some would suggest. Bonus Edition Handicap: The early vinyl LP copies with the bonus song on flexidisc were worth it just for the novelty of the physical medium.
… And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Tao of the Dead – While the album occasionally has the same problem with pompous overkill that limits earlier Trail of Dead albums, as well as bands in a similar genre such as Mars Volta, this album crystallizes the good parts of Trail of Dead into a fascinating if perplexing whole. Bonus Edition Handicap: The two-disc version has fine artwork and extras, but the only difference between the two discs is the way the songs are separated and tracked. An odd experiment, not sure of its purpose.
Marissa Nadler, s/t – I love all of Marissa’s bootleg works, and was happy to see a proper studio release, but I find myself listening to her two volumes of cover songs she released in 2011. The reason is that her own songs for the new album are intriguing, occasionally hypnotic, but they don’t grab me as much as some of her earlier works.
Beirut, The Rip Tide – This is a more traditional and thoroughly enjoyable suite of pop tunes than the double-EP March of the Zapoteca, which had Zach Condon and gang sounding a little too much like Calexico. Some of these songs are among Beirut’s finest. But at nine songs and barely more than 30 minutes, and a few songs that sound similar, there’s a bit of an unfinished feel.
Laura Marling, A Creature I Don’t Know – An interesting name for the album, given that it sounds far different and more adventurous than her first two. She is obviously growing in both songwriting and arrangement craft, and she’s on her way to being one of the UK’s most important songwriters.
Crooked Fingers, Breaks in the Armor – I’m enough of an Eric Bachmann fan that I’d normally put any CF work in the top ten automatically. But he set a fairly high bar with Forfeit/Fortune and Dignity and Shame, to the point where the new album sounds a bit uninspired. Maybe a few more listens will inspire me.
Cage the Elephant, Thank You, Happy Birthday – Of all the new young bands out there that get wildly uneven promotion, CtE probably deserves more hype than the likes of Foster the People. Maybe not miles deep, but certainly unabashed fun.
Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues – If I was to judge by excellent craftsmanship, this album would be a lot higher. FF have figured out ways to mix sounds recalling old minstrel tunes and barbershop quartets, and merging them with CSN&Y-style harmonies. But somehow, I find FF to be a cold, beautiful jewel that has to be admired from afar, without finding any heat within. Maybe it’s just me, but FF impresses me without stirring my soul.
Sarah Jarosz, Follow Me Down – Based on the heavy promotion from Garrison Keillor and Tim O’Brien, Jarosz is the 20-year-old savior of bluegrass. In many ways she is, and her talents shine on this one, with help from Vince Gill, Bela Fleck, Darrell Scott, and other friends. But her experimentalism isn’t quite as adventurous as Abigail Washburn’s. But given her age, she can only get better.
Okkervill River, I Am Very Far – Here’s an example of what happens when a band tries to grab the best of several of its earlier styles. In the new albums by Wilco and Bardo Pond, the results are a powerful synthesis. Here, Will reaches to bring Okkervil elements together, with only partial success. Note that this is higher than the new Bright Eyes, though.
Lifeguards, Waving at the Astronauts – Coming at midpoint in the 2011 Robert Pollard releases, this duo effort with Doug Gillard includes my vote for 2010’s single of the year, ‘Producthead.’ It has a few other top-notch songs, but the effort is sort of uneven, more an occasional lag by Pollard than any slip by the always-excellent Gillard.
Radiohead, King of Limbs – One of the more pleasant and accessible Radiohead albums of the last few years, this one still meanders a bit, displaying the sort of chaotic random walk Thom Yorke has taken us on over the last five years or so.
Lou Reed and Metallica, LuLu – Some critics put this at dead last, calling it an exercise in overindulgence that is scarcely worth a listen. Others treat it very seriously, and place it near their top albums of the year. On different days, I can feel either way, so I placed it at about midpoint. Here’s what I will say though: I ranked it lower because of the mere presence of Lars and James, because I have never forgiven Metallica and still do not forgive them for their constant support of corporate interest in metal music. But I gave it some degree of genuine credit, because I don’t think Lou was trying to make some sort of faux-art joke. His poetry and spoken-word efforts here are intriguing, with moments of brilliance. You’ll just have to come to your own conclusion on this one.
Drake, Take Care – So many people want to give this a rave ranking because Drake can combine R&B and hip-hop with weirdness, but there’s nothing Kid Cudi or Kanye West hasn’t done better. Decent, but predictable.
Maria Taylor, Overlook – A few reviewers have chided the shortness of this album, saying it has an unfinished feel. Its brief nature prevents it from being a masterpiece, but the songs here are very finely crafted, and some of Maria’s best – ‘Masterplan,’ ‘Matador,’ ‘A Bad Idea?’ If you whine about a 30-minute album, maybe it’s best to just download a few individual tracks. But don’t miss it.
Mike Watt, Hyphenated-Man – Here’s one of those annual picks that should have been higher, but was hard to peg. Watt goes for a thematic set of short songs with a bluesy, chaotic quality that hints of Captain Beefheart or The Residents. A remarkably different and fresh album from the ex-Minuteman.
Yo-Yo Ma, Goat Rodeo – The world’s favorite cellist moves into a jazz-influenced bluegrass that recalls David Grisman. Many of the songs are fun, but Yo-Yo Ma deliberately avoids too much crossover in order to keep its popularity and listenability. More’s the pity.
Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer – The only reason Eleanor suffers on the list as compared to her brother, is that Matt elected to compose eight separate albums of special instrumentals that belonged on my ‘Specials’ list, while Eleanor went for straight pop where the competition was tougher. Do not be deceived – if you love her crazed word salad in The Fiery Furnaces, she applies the same rules to personal reminisces of wild summer days and nights as a teenager. Really quite lovely.
Van der Graaf Generator, A Grounding in Numbers – One of the more intriguing Hammill and Company releases of recent years, with short tracks, powerful delivery, and a vibrant sense of fun that outpaces much of PH’s recent solo works.
Bill Callahan, Apocalypse – After his exceptional live album last year, Bill returns with a nice studio piece that is not really about any global apocalypse, but more along the line of his usual personal and wry musings. Nice stuff, but nothing to blow your socks off.
Feist, Metals – Another release that may be ranked way too low, but I couldn’t quite get my arms around it. I appreciate the fact that Feist did not try to simply re-make her hit album, The Reminder, and instead went for fresher sounds. It’s just that those sounds didn’t grab me, a feeling I sort of had for Let It Die, as well. But give Feist credit where credit is due – the fact that she is doing a split single with Mastodon shows that the woman never sits still.
Juliana Hatfield, There’s Always Another Girl – Juliana probably won’t be making a work as striking as How to Walk Away any time soon, but this album represents a partial return to form from the largely lackluster “acoustic folk” album Peace & Love. While some songs on this album are throwaway, there are enough good ones here to make me continue to believe in Juliana with all my heart.
Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, Teenage & Torture – There are many New Yorkers who consider Hindu goddess Shilpa Ray the next Patti Smith. I love her stage presence, her use of traditional Indian instruments, her “sex as power, sex as a business” lyrics, but ultimately, the lyrics rarely escape the boundaries of sex-worker laments. As I mentioned above, Le Butcherettes come a lot closer to grabbing the Patti mantle.
Foster the People, Torches – I actually love to listen to this album when I need a pick-me-up, and think the heavy promotion it got from the label was at least partially deserved. But watching these guys on Saturday Night Live convinced me that Foster the People still is predominantly dance-friendly pop-lite. OK if you need a sparkly song or two, but not much of lasting value.
Circus Devils, Capsized! – It’s another great Pollard release, so of course it’s necessary, but I’m used to the Circus Devils collaboration exploring weirdo or Western themes, and this is mostly Guided by Voices under another name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
My Morning Jacket, Circuitous – Jim James tried really hard to make a more pop-friendly album, and songs like ‘Holdin’ on to Black Metal’ certainly are fun to listen to. But after many songs, I found myself asking, “So what?” Definitely a great car-driving album, but not much to startle.
Gang Gang Dance, Eye Contact – Those who have followed this list for a while know that I have a mad crush on Liz, and that I consider GGD to be the perfect mix of experimentalism and hypnotic dance. So why is this low? Maybe because they tried too hard to be accessible, and ended up sounding like any other techno-dance-oddball group. I liked their ‘Kamakura’ EP a lot better.
Lady Gaga, Born This Way – Don’t be fooled, I really do like Lady Gaga, and the title cut is excellent in many ways. But each succeeding album becomes more calculated in its presentation, which of course increases Lady Gaga’s popularity, but makes her less interesting in many ways.
Wild Flag, s/t – Isn’t the coming together of Carrie Brownstein, Mary Timony, Janet Weiss, and Rebecca Cole in one band the greatest idea in the world? Yes, on paper. I still want to see a performance of Wild Flag, especially playing Television’s ‘See No Evil.’ But Carrie’s a bit thin on vocals without Corin Tucker, and Carrie and Mary together are still getting their songwriting talents in order. I sure hope this band stays together, though, because Wild Flag has the potential to be great.
Eddie Vedder, Ukulele Songs – This only ranks a bit low because a suite of ukulele solo songs is self-limiting. Maybe this album should have been in the Specials section. But the mere fact that Pearl Jam’s lead singer tried something so unique, and executed it beautifully, is worth a thumbs-up.
Wire, Red-Barked Tree – This started off with the promise of being a Wire reunion bringing the band back to the quality of Chairs Missing. But after a few songs, it started to meander. Any Wire album is a good album by definition, but this one lagged after a while.
The Wild, Set Ourselves Free – This was a short work that might have been better off in EP’s, but the Atlanta cluster of hootenanny punks known as The Wild should not be ignored. There’s a similarity to the trajectory of X and Knitters here, in that the band members sound like they started out wanting to play 1978-era punk and listened to a lot of Peter, Paul & Mary along the way. Fascinating and wonderful.
Boston Spaceships, Let It Beard – True confessions – despite Chris S.’s cool arrangements and drumming from Decemberists’ John Moen, I’ve always found Boston Spaceships the least interesting of Robert Pollard’s projects, perhaps because it’s so hard-rock normal. This was a sprawling self-described concept album, and in something so broad, there’s bound to be several cool songs. But at the end of the day, I found it one of the less interesting of Pollard projects in 2011.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Belong – Hey, wait, this album is really good! Kudos for crunching up the guitars a little more to be less twee – it makes Pains a better band. I guess the issue remains that the band is a too-cute group in the Belle & Sebastian mode, but without the B&S richness in instrumentality. Still, this album is worth your attention.
Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi (w/ Norah Jones and Jack White), Rome – Many people have this album up high, and I can appreciate the effort to pull in some Jones and White talent to the basic tracks. But it’s time for another confession: Morricone-style spaghetti-western soundtracks have never interested me, so I found this version of the style to be merely mildly interesting.
Paul Simon, So Beautiful So What – Yes, the arrangements recall Graceland, and yes, the lyrics are wonderful, but even Paul will admit he’s an aging guy, maybe a little out of style, just having fun. So maybe he’d be perfectly OK with this ranking – because the album really is worth hearing. Bonus Edition Handicap: The CD/DVD combo is very much worth the price, as we see video jams of Paul at home, much better option than another “how this album was made” nonsense.
Arctic Monkeys, Suck It and See – I was one of the few who really liked AM’s last album, Humbug, because it was such a different sound – almost like The Doors’ Soft Parade. This album might be called a return to form, resembling AM’s first two albums, but I thought it was less interesting as a result.
Astral Social Club, Generator Breaker – Since this seems to be a live recording, maybe it should be in Specials, which should give it a higher ranking. I like the fact that Neil Campbell is attempting a little more popular accessibility, and there are elements of the dance sensibility we heard in ASC’s Happy Horse, though overall, I don’t find this album as compelling as the last one.
Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto – Just to be clear, I am not a member of the “Coldplay always sucks” club. Eno’s manipulations are put to good use here, and some of the hooks are good. But Chris Martin is often clichéd in his lyrics, and this album simply can’t keep up with the grandiosity of Viva La Vida.
Glen Campbell, Ghost on the Canvas – What a brave act, to complete a studio album in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. And what a choice of songs, including a Guided by Voices cover. Glen may be fading, but he’s leaving us with a stellar final legacy.
The Dodos, No Colors – Fascinating rhythms and structural fun on these songs, but without Neko Case singing on many songs, would the overall album be as fascinating? Maybe I’m underestimating this, but then, look what I’ve done with Dan Bejar and Destroyer below.
John Doe, Keeper – Doe played a great set in my neighborhood back in May, it’s great to see him find new relationship and song-duo potential with Jill Sobule, and this album definitely is a keeper. But it’s sort of predictable in many ways.
Real Estate, Days – This one was way up the list for many people, but I keep hearing something mid-way between The Feelies and a country-rock band like Souther Hillman Furay Band. Not bad, certainly, in fact pleasant, but what’s the big deal with Real Estate? Bonus Handicap Edition: Early vinyl editions came with a cool bonus LP of Real Estate playing the Days songs live – Cool, to be sure, but the songs are played in the album order, with no extra tracks. Just for fans.
Chad Vangaelen, Diaper Island – Chad is one of those slightly quirky indy songwriters like Lou Barlow that you can’t help but love. Hard to categorize, but this album is cool in its own strange way.
Steve Earle, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive – Earle deserves credit for attempting an album on death and mortality, and it obviously is a labor of love, but nothing grabs me in the way Jerusalem does, for example.
Fountains of Wayne, Sky Full of Holes – Fountains are on Yep Rock because they’re adopting a very interesting alt-country-Americana sound. Makes for intriguing listening on occasion, but nothing as jolting as their earlier sparkly-pop sound.
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Earthsoundsystem – We have to at least give Tom Greenwood credit for partially leaving his cowboy-ballad period in favor of a mixed jazz-cowboy bag. But Jackie-O has been lost in a less-interesting genre for the last five years than it had been in the decade or so previous, and Earthsoundsystem does little to move the football forward.
The Jayhawks, Mockingbird Time – Ooo, Jayhawks fans might be mad at me for this one, since this album has some of those great high harmonies that made the band such as integral part of the 1990s. But this reunion sounds forced somehow – cool as far as it goes, but little that was unexpected.
Steve Malkmus, Mirror Traffic – Again, Pavement/Malkmus fans are likely to beat me up (and many people had this album way up high), but I didn’t catch a lot of exceptional Malkmus work here. Any album Janet Weiss plays drums on is worth hearing, but notice that Janet has left Steve’s stable to go play drums for Wild Flag.
Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, Outside – I feel sorry for Tapes ‘n’ Tapes, with all the reviewers saying their third album is lackluster and lacks originality. I think their sound of a twangier Phoenix or even early Talking Heads remains intact. Maybe their creative juices were a little lagging on this one, but I’d still rather listen to TnT than half the new music out there.
Six Organs of Admittance, Asleep on the Floodplain – Ben Chasny has released so much great work under the Six Organs name, some are bound to be more meandering than others. This is nice background music, but not an astonishing album in the Six Organs portfolio.
Motel Beds, Tango Boys – Extremely likeable and jangly pop, recalling GbV and even Uncle Tupelo. Fun stuff.
Robert Pollard, Space City Kicks – In January 2011, this album sounded pretty bright and poppy. But Pollard ended up releasing so much exceptional material in 2011, this one ended up almost at the 100 level.
Blitzen Trapper, American Goldwing – After Dylanesque compositional weirdness in the last two albums, BT returns with a tribute to 1970s Southern rock. It’s interesting, particularly if you’d like someone to sound like Lynyrd Skynyrd for the 21st century. I enjoy hearing it from time to time, but it doesn’t bowl me over.
New York Dolls, Dancing Backwards in High Heels – Give David Johansen credit for realizing that as rock queens hit their 60s, it makes little sense to keep cranking out brassy hard-rock novelty numbers. Instead, the Dolls turned to 1950s doo-wop for this album. At least it preserves their integrity, it simply is less interesting.
Ryan Adams, Ashes & Fire – I’ve always been sort of lukewarm on Adams, but his growing Crazy Horse-like sound is worth hearing. This album pushes all the buttons, but doesn’t necessarily stake out new ground. Fun, though.
Foo Fighters, Wasting Light – Dave Grohl went to great efforts to give us a unique studio effort, and I appreciate all that went into this album. Maybe the low ranking is a sign that I’m just getting a bit tired of Foo Fighters. But there’s hope. I still find this album a lot more interesting than new efforts by Jane’s Addiction or Red Hot Chili Peppers, listed below.
Deerhoof, Deerhoof vs. Evil – Sometimes, Deerhoof’s eclectic odd rhythms and Satomi’s unique vocals work in perfect ways, as in Runners Four and Offend Maggie. Other times, the songwriting falls flat, and the new album seems to fall into the latter category. Still, Deerhoof could record an album of gargling and I’d still suggest a listen.
Cut Copy, Zonoscope – As we enter the realm of Cut Copy, Battles, and Architecture in Helsinki, you’ll have to understand that I’m not a huge fan of the electronic dancey-dancey style. A lot of techno and dub-step simply isn’t reviewed here. But Cut Copy deserve some respect for their lively interpretation of the early 80s dance sound. Fun if you like such things.
The Atlas Sound, Parallax – Another confession – I don’t think Brad Cox of Deerhunter, Atlas Sound, etc. is all that damned clever. Deerhunter bores me. Atlas Sound is sort of an improvement through its informal, longe-lizard style, and a couple songs like ‘Angel is Broken’ are great. But I’m still not getting Cox.
Architecture in Helsinki, Moment Bends – See note above with Cut Copy. A band that often falls victim to its own uber-cuteness, AiH is saved by the wonderful presence of Kellie Sutherland, who I would love to serenade with a rendition of The Partridge Family’s ‘I Think I Love You.’
Destroyer, Kaputt – OK, Pitchfork ranked this #2 (check #1 below), and I don’t get it. I like New Pornographers’ Dan Bejar, and I like Destroyer. I think these songs were fascinating in their compositional originality, and I credit Bejar with trying new things stylistically. But the style employed in this album is yacht-rock of the Christopher Cross variety. And at the end of the day, I can’t get past the yacht-rock style. Maybe ten years from now, I will find Kaputt to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Right now I scratch my head.
The Bangles, Sweetheart of the Sun – Hey, even if this is in the hundreds, I’m glad The Bangles are back. Hoffs has some good new ideas, and the Peterson sisters sound as tight as ever. They sound a little bit rusty – some critics said Vicki Peterson sounded slightly flat in many songs, but I’m sure glad she didn’t use AutoTune. Still, it’s worth it to welcome The Bangles back to the land of reunion tours.
Barn Owl, Lost in the Glare – I find Barn Owl to be one of the most consistently interesting drone/improvisational instrumental groups out there. Their work with Tom Carter and others is phenomenal. This album, however, fell a little bit flatter than the vinyl-only EP that came out in 2011.
Bright Eyes, The People’s Key – This had such a cool packaging and conceptual base, that I thought I’d like this album better. I guess the issue is that Conor Oberst had come out with such fine solo albums, the reunion of Bright Eyes had a forced feel. Maybe if I spend more time with this album in 2012, I’ll learn to appreciate it more.
Bon Iver, s/t – I actually got mad when Pitchfork awarded this album #1, and it garnered several Grammy nominations. I like Justin as much as anyone, loved the first album, was glad he went with this geographical theme for the new album, but….. nothing stuck with me in the whole album, except for unusual song titles like ‘Michicant.’ What do you do when the music that is supposed to be the creative pinnacle of the year simply sounds like ethereal Muzak?
Kathryn Calder, Bright and Vivid – OK, this hurts, because I like New Porns member Kathryn Calder perhaps more than Neko Case, and I love her work with her own band, Immaculate Machine. Her first solo album from last year was an acoustic album in honor of her mother, and I gave it some space. This one has some interesting poppy and ethereal moments, but frankly, Kathryn tries to sound like Enya too often, and her solo work can’t touch her work with Immaculate Machine or New Porns.
Exene Cervenka, The Excitement of Maybe – Hey, I kick myself for ranking John Doe low, but here I put his former partner Exene down in the 100s. This is a straightahead sorrowful love-song album, and it might improve greatly if I gave it more time and space, but right now, it just doesn’t grab me that much.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Hysterical – Most reviewers picked on Alec Ounsworth for trying too hard, after coming out with a fantastic first album, a dreadful second album, and then putting Clap Your Hands on temporary hiatus until this year. That’s not the problem I have. I don’t hear a lot of analytical navel-gazing on this album. I hear a turn to high-energy pop that starts out strong, but then fades away after three or four songs. Seems like the real sticking point of Clap Your Hands is Alec’s lack of much to say.
Explosions in the Sky, Take Care Take Care Take Care – Here’s an example of how finely balanced an instrumental album of the Godspeed/Mogwai style is. Mogwai’s latest shot way up to the top, while Explosion’s newest, despite some interesting riffs, was largely a snoozer.
Devotchka, 100 Lovers – Since Nick is a cool actor and vocalist and Devotchka is a Denver band, I always give them special dispensation for all their theatrical efforts. There are some good tunes on this album, but the majority of it falls somewhat flat compared to earlier albums.
The Mekons, Ancient & Modern, 1911-2011 – It’s fair to say that this is The Mekons best return to form since the late 1990s, but it’s still a meandering work. Mekons function best when they boil everything down to country-punk or pure country. This one is worthy, but with many throwaways.
Oneida, Absolute II – Despite the fact that this concludes the trilogy of work the band started three years ago, this seems a dark and somewhat sludgy instrumental work that isn’t nearly as interesting as the last two installments.
Anna Calvi, s/t – Her mix of occasional soprano runs and strident alto can be very compelling, but her work can try too hard to be melodramatic. I like what she’s trying to do, though, and hope for more.
Ben Harper, Give ‘til It’s Gone – Ben can be very uneven – some of his recent work with the Relentless 7 has been exceptional, but this work falls into the trap of hard-rock ordinary, and suffers thereby.
Urge Overkill, Rock and Roll Submarine –- This is actually a fun album as far as it goes, but folks who say UO have always been rock’s greatest parody act, have failed to show me where the joke resides. A keen and fun album, but it functions more as hard-rock straight story than self-conscious comedy.
They Might Be Giants, Join Us – It’s wonderful to see TMBG doing grown-up albums again, and this album started out sounding almost as majestic as 1990’s Flood, but the energy quickly started to wane and my attention started to wander. Still, it’s TMBG! Rejoice!
TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light – This ranking hurts more than TMBG’s, particularly given the death of TV’s Gerard Smith last spring. I am a fervent fan of all of TV’s work, but this album just seemed lackluster after the marvelous Dear Science.
Strokes, Angles – Seems like everyone loves to pick on Julian and The Strokes these days, heroes of punk-pop ten years ago, and left out with the trash in 2011. I tried hard to really like the new one, it’s a toe-tapping work to listen to while driving, but not a lot of magic herein.
Idea Fire Company, Music from the Impossible Salon – Graham Lambkin did some great production, Scott and Karla try some interesting instruments outside their usual domain, but this album meanders more than IFCO’s Postcards, listed under Specials.
Battles, Gloss Drop – Many hear echoes of the former instrumental band Don Caballero in Battles. Since vocalist Tyondai Braxton left the band, I mostly hear mildly interesting dancey electronica, all right in its own way, but doesn’t bowl me over.
The Gin Blossoms, No Chocolate Cake – Many will be glad to see their Phoenix heroes return to bring the years of mid-90s greatness. And they do, to some extent, but it seems as if there’s too much of an intent to mimic the earlier Gin Blossoms sound, a common problem in reunions this year.
Tennis, Cape Dory – OK, this band is from Denver, they’re channeling the new interest in beach music, but with more of a nautical theme. The problem is, the sound is a little thin, both Alaina’s vocals and Patrick’s guitar. You can only blame that on “lo-fi” so long. I’ll be anxious to hear more Tennis music, but this one didn’t grab me a whole lot.
Ages and Ages, Allright You Restless – This band has some interesting singalong and harmonic things going on, but they often descend into a mix of campfire sincerity and Rusted Root wannabe consciousness. Perhaps a bit more sarcasm would help.
Art Brut, Brilliant! Tragic! – Many people thought the producers made a mistake by letting Eddie’s vocals take over more of the album. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s just that the manic humor of Art Brut doesn’t shine through on this one as much as earlier albums.
Bjork, Biophilia – Many reviewers say, “Oh, the music is all right, but it’s the iPad and iPhone apps that really make this a classic.” Excuse me, this is a music album. Bjork’s heart is in the right place, as usual, but there’s too much that is silly or inconsequential in this album.
Deer Tick, Divine Providence – This one is right above the tie-for-last-place for a reason, having to do with anger or annoyance. I’ve always been a believer in John McCauley’s work, and have been pleased to see the band hit new heights of popularity. A drunken loose jam session was a good idea – heck, I thought that was what The Black Dirt Sessions was supposed to be – and I was expecting something like the Stones’ Exile on Main Street. But this album is sophomoric and silly, sort of like your college drunkard friend who never grew up and says “fuck” too much and passes out. Deer Tick, it’s time for a reset.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, I’m With You
Jane’s Addiction, The Great Escape Artist (tie) – These two albums are tied at the bottom for a reason. I don’t think they’re worthless. If you’re a fan of Anthony or Perry, you’ll find something worthwhile here. But for two acts that defined the 90s so well, both these albums are lacking a lot of energy. Go ahead and enjoy what is there to appreciate, but don’t expect a lot of nuances.

Special Albums (Live, Compilations, Splits, CD-Rs, MP3, etc.)

Various Artists, Japan Recovery Benefit – Since this involves some of the same musicians that took part in Jack Rose’s tribute last year, which captured #1 on the 2010 Specials list, it’s no surprise this one takes a similar position, since it’s so good. Plus, it’s a benefit for a tsunami- and nuclear-ravaged land, so there’s the feel-good component. Although this is dominated by experimental artists, you’ll hear melodic groups like Parts & Labor and Sam Prekop, which means this is cool in every possible way.
Output Noise Ensemble, Soundtrack for the DSM-IV – This is in Specials because most of the performance are live, but the concept behind this album, named after the reference guide for behavioral disorders, is beyond cool. All the tracks are named for Tourette’s, schizo-affective disorder, etc. And in the realm of experimental jazz and improvisational music, the results are way beyond cool.
Pere Ubu, Lady from Shanghai Demos – These are not leaked demos, but ones placed on sale deliberately at the Hearpen web site, to give listeners an idea of a new Ubu work in progress. Wow and double wow. All indications are that this is one of Pere Ubu’s most important works in gestation.
Various Artists – Sing for Your Meat, A Guided by Voices Tribute – Some well-known artists and some very unexpected ones get together for a one-of-a-kind tribute. And No Fake Record Labels gave us a vinyl version on colored vinyl. Whoopsters.
Graham Lambkin – Amateur Doubles – An intriguing suite of sounds recorded inside a Honda Civic by Graham, Adris Hoyos, their kids, and any assorted person who might have been around, with haunting results. Interesting that Adris is photographed but not credited anywhere in the marvelous gatefold packaging, and since she is behind the wheel in the photo, one wonders if there is a hidden meaning of “in the driver’s seat” implied. Or not.
Christina Carter, Trickster Who is Like God – Even if Christina’s spacier, breathier albums don’t do much for you, this limited release finds her making a long, pointed composition and asking direct questions of the listener. A frank and beautiful work.
Marissa Nadler, Covers Vol. 1
Marissa Nadler, Covers Vol. 2 – In some ways even more intriguing than her solo studio work of 2011, Nadler in this work explores songwriters ranging from Townes Van Zandt to Neil Young, with some superb renditions.
No-Neck Blues Band, YTIU – As usual, this vinyl-only limited release has almost no information on the band lineup or the date of recording, though it appears to be a fairly recent live set. Don’t ask questions, just appreciate the existence of more No-Neck.

10-17. Matthew Friedberger – Eight Solo Works (Napoleonette, Meet Me in Miramas, Old Regimes, Cut It Out, Death-in-Life, Arrested on Charges of Unemployment, Goodbye Forever, Artemisia) – This was always a fairly ambitious project by half of the band Fiery Furnaces, and Matthew’s intent to make one album featuring one instrument was bound to make for a mixed bag. Rather than rank them all over the places, I’ve ranked them together. The last two are perhaps the fullest, but it’s surprising what does and doesn’t work. I’d rank the first and third as most interesting. The fifth, while sporting the best cover, has some of the most meandering compositions. But at any rate, the mere effort to come out with something like this leaves other multi-instrumentalists in the dust.

18. Magik Markers, Mother Was Magik

19. Magik Markers, Isolated from Exterior Time – Even in off years, Elisa and Pete manage to come up with noisy, creative albums that at times recall King Crimson, when not collapsing into chaos. The two 2011 releases are particularly worthy.

20. Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie Xx, We’re New Here – Jamie, of course, had no idea when initiating this project that it would end up being Gil’s last, but how fitting that Gil could work with modernists on remixes as a final unexpected way of saying goodbye.

21. Starving Weirdos, Rolled in the Midst of Never-Ceasing Currents Flowing Without a Rest Forever Onward – Many feel that this is the quintessential Starving Weirdos live set to own, but I feel it’s not as interesting as, say, Self-Hypnosis, or studio works like Into An Energy. Nevertheless, it’s new Weirdos, which is really all you need to know.

22. Dismemberment Plan, Live In Japan 2011 – With a snappily-produced, expansive two-disc live set marking their reunion, the only question for DP fans was, would it capture their energy as well as the 2000 Crocodile Café live set? Not completely. Perhaps it’s too polished. The new live album has all your favorites, might be the quintessential work, and has newer songs not on the 2000 release, like ‘Ellen and Ben’. But reunion tours always leave out a little bit of the original spark. Still, this might be the one Dismemberment Plan album to own.

23. Glands of External Secretion, Reverse Atheism – Hooray! Barbara Manning and Seymour Glass are back together, with freak-out compositions dealing with faith, belief systems, and odd people. You know it’s essential. Bonus Edition Handicap: Early LP copies come with a bonus CDR of extra Barbara and Seymour studio work. Of course it’s fabulous.

24-26. Sunburned Hand of the Man, Gum Arabic, Agony, The One You Forgot to Forget – Hell, often the detritus and leftovers of Sunburned are more interesting than the official releases of other bands. In this case, all three are intriguing, particularly the Agony set that got them thrown out of a club for employing a four-year-old boy to play drums. Oh those crazy Sunburned Hands, always in trouble, always displaying staggering genius.

27. Green Pajamas, Green Pajamas Country – One could call this a regular studio album, since the songs are all Jeff Kelly originals, but it had such a specific intent of producing a country album, I’m listing it in Specials. A much better album than one might expect, this is a suite of serious, beautiful country songs from the experts in all that is folkie-psychedelia. Fun.

28-29. Grouper, A1A (Dream Loss, Alien Observer) – Who would have guessed that this odd, ambient, two-album instrumental concept suite would garner Liz Harris more fame than anything she had done before under the Grouper label? Both the first and second vinyl printings of this album sold out immediately, which may be a sign of fanaticism more than anything else. The two records are beautiful background piano-driven music, to be sure, but no particular earth-shattering advance over anything Grouper has done before.

30. Call Back the Giants, The Rising – Tim Goss of Shadow Ring provides electronic strangeness of a type similar to his former band, with help from his daughter and Rob Stewart, though CBTG is more ambient and gentle than anything from The Shadow Ring.

31. Tom Carter, All Ahead Now – This cassette may be all we get from Tom this year, but it’s a nice acoustic set that is very accessible for those just being introduced to the Charalambides stable.

32. Amy Winehouse, Lioness: Hidden Treasures – You’ve no doubt seen the reviews by now that say this compilation is no great undiscovered work of posthumous material, but rather a gathering together of all the material that is left. But that does not mean this is a thin collection. With covers of odd numbers like ‘Our Day Will Come’ and ‘Girl from Ipanema, this is an essential work, and a reminder of all we have lost.

33. Sonic Youth, Simon Werner a Disparu – A sweet but only partially essential soundtrack from SY, but what with Thurston and Kim calling it quits as a couple, this might be the last SYR release we will see from the band’s archives. Then again, there might be dozens more.

34. Idea Fire Company, Postcards – This unique cassette-only release collects IFCO live sets from a variety of times and cities, giving us a cross-section of Scott Foust and Karla Gay Borecky that is missing from this year’s official IFCO studio release.

35. K. Flay, I Stopped Caring in ’96 – A suite of downloadable remixes and parodies that shows just how much a genius as poet and DJ that K. Flay really is.

36. Mars, Live at Artists Space 1978 – Let’s remember, Mars only wrote about eight or ten songs through their short and volatile career. This LP is bootleg quality, and offers the same songs in the same order in two different sets that took place in May 1978. Still, it’s Mars, and this is an important chronicle of the No New York period.

37. Brandi Carlisle, Live at Benaroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony – Worth hearing if only for the unusual orchestral arrangements, this set was unexpectedly good.

38. Fucked Up, David Comes to Life – Live – The audio recording is offered by NYC Taper from Day Two, while an HD video is available from Day One, complete with cellist. In either event, a life performance of the complete ‘David’ work is important.

39. Ben Folds, Anthology – Does this collection mean that Ben is going to show up mostly on TV music judging shows and on the occasional variety show from now on? I have a bit of a problem with the new Ben Folds, but that’s his decision to make. This two-CD collection combines a best-of suite with some cool B-sides and unreleased sets for the Ben Folds completeist.

40. Neil Young, International Harvester – I’ll admit it, I didn’t much like the 1983-84 Neil Young, since he was promoting Ronald Reagan and being grumpier than usual. Still, this set shows what wonderful country tunes the master could crank out when he wished to do so.

41. Stephen Merritt, Obscurities – Yeah, sure, you’ll want this one if you’re a Magnetic Fields fan, there’s some unreleased numbers and unusual takes, but it seems only worth picking up if you can get it on a discount.

42. Taylor Swift, Speak Now World Tour Live – Fun to own if you have a kid who’s a Taylor fanatic, but also a guilty pleasure if you’re just gaga over one of the nation’s finest songwriters. The DVD isn’t that necessary, unless that’s you’re preferred medium. Nice to hear ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ performed, but I might have opted for including a couple of her Tori covers.

43. Foo Fighters, Live – This underscores the problem I had with FF’s studio album this year. Dave Grohl seems to enjoy the 70s-era double-album live set, with overblown versions of popular songs. OK, I suppose, but predictable – although better than Soundgarden.

44. Tim Buckley, First Album Plus – It’s good to see the extended re-releases of all the Tim Buckley work, and this one includes some very early acoustic work, but I think with Buckley, as with Pavement and other artists, there’s a point of diminishing returns that can be reached.

45. Sigur Ros, Inni – Not sure why I put this below Foo Fighters, since the principle is the same, but maybe it’s due to SR’s added pomposity. The B&W artsy DVD is cool, the audio CD is a nice cross-section of Sigur Ros’s work, but all the reviewers calling this special and essential ignore the fact that it’s yet another live album.

46. Frightened Rabbit, Demos – This was a cool little cassette item released on Record Store Day, containing very early demo versions of Frightened Rabbit songs. More good for novelty than anything else.

47. Kate Bush, Director’s Cut – Given that she came out with a decent studio album of new material this year, it’s uncertain why Kate felt she had to release re-recorded versions of her 1990s albums, Sensual World and Red Shoes. In most cases, the new versions are not all that great. Still, an interesting experiment.

48. Sun City Girls, Gum Arabic – Mostly a repackaging of previous material, but interesting in being a beautifully packaged edition of Arab-associated music, released in Tunisia.

49. Casper and the Cookies, Live – A free download from the CC site provides a recent live set from Athens. OK but not superb sound quality, but a spirited set.

50. The Mountain Goats, All Survivors Pack – I mentioned this as an adjunct to the main 2011 studio release, All Eternals Deck. An interesting exercise in that it was only released as a cassette, but the acoustic songs are only re-spins of the Eternals tunes, with no bonus songs, thus making this the least interesting of any recent Mountain Goats rarity.

51. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Live at ATP – Sure, the recording is muddy, sure the songs are sloppy at times, but it is the return of TFUL282, and greatness is thereby implied.

52-54. The Weekend, House of Balloons, Thursday, Echoes of Silence – I love the free download ethic, but don’t see a lot of other useful hip-hop creativity coming out of The Weekend, which seems to be everyone’s favorite new star. Still waiting to figure out what I’m supposed to be astonished by.

55. Soundgarden, Live on I-5 – What was Chris and Company thinking? Even some strong, clear renditions of ‘Black Hole Sun’ would have held off fans until a new reunion album was out, but this live collection was muddy, sludgy even.

Singles and EPs

Polvo, Heavy Detour – Apparently, there is more to come from the reconstituted Polvo in 2011, but we got two songs on a 7-inch record in 2011, and that was enough to get them single of the year.
Future of the Left, Polymers Are Forever – I still am not convinced that FotL walks on water, and a couple of the songs on this EP are a bit unfocused, but in general, this band is exciting, and the new EP extends FotL’s work in unexpected ways.
Brian Eno and Rick Holland, The Panic of Looking – My only gripe is, wouldn’t this have been better combined with the Drums Between Bells album to begin with? Oh well, it extends Eno’s spoken-word poetry work with several writers, and is thereby worthy.
Deerhoof and Jeff Tweedy, Behold Jeff Tweedy in Darkness – Deerhoof almost redeemed themselves for their lackluster Deerhoof vs. Evil album this year, by releasing this weird-as-hell single with Jeff from Wilco. Huzzah.
Beth Ditto, s/t – The best thing to come out of Record Store Day was this 12-inch vinyl EP of Gossip lead singer Beth Ditto going all-out 80s Madonna on us. You could tell the dance direction from the last Gossip album, but on this EP, she belts it – even more than Adele with her vinyl remix EP.
The Decemberists, Long Live the King – This EP of leftovers from The King is Dead sessions contains more heavy-on-the-sea-shanties numbers, which sounds like earlier Decemberists, and raises the question – Was Colin trying to purge more traditionalist Decemberists numbers on the studio album to get a poppier sound? It’s OK, we get our fix here.
Mogwai, Earth Division – An essential companion to Hardcore Will Never Die, absolutely essential in many ways.
Guided by Voices, ‘Human Race’/’Fats Domino’
Guided by Voices, ‘Doughnut for a Snowman’
Guided by Voices, ‘Chocolate Boy’ – One thing is immediately apparent from the three singles pulled from the new Let’s Eat the Factory LP. GbV is giving us plenty of strange, lo-fi 1-minute tunes and plenty of Tobin Sprout material, which fits the Classic GbV mode more than the late 90s/early 00s period, when GbV tried to get more professional. I love this quirky stuff, which is replete in the new album and will be reviewed on next year’s list.
Bill Orcutt, ‘A King or Something’
Bill Orcutt, ‘Tic Fit’
Bill Orcutt, ‘All Tongues’ – These three singles are great for giving us more of the spastic, tic-heavy acoustic anti-blues that Bill plays on his full-length albums. And he also brings back the whimsy he displayed when releasing Harry Pussy singles – the singles are impossibly limited and difficult to find, they have no information on the music inside, and they have random pictures of people who have nothing to do with the music – in this case, Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton. Welcome back, Bill!
Terra Naomi, To Know I’m OK – Terra called her first work with producer John Alagia a full-length album, but I’m not going to rank it that way, because it’s eight short songs with some bonus live tracks on the end. Still, that should not distract from the marvelous singer-songwriter work she continues to release. EP or not EP, this one is another keeper from Ms. Naomi.
Air Dubai, Day Escape – Denver’s Air Dubai is a rhythm and poetic powerhouse, reminiscent of Sly and the Family Stone in some ways. While not every song on this EP is up to the incredible opener, ‘Soul and Body’, this is a great cross-section of their work.
Astral Social Club, ach ach ach – Neil Campbell’s coolest work of 2011 was a cassette single produced through cutting, pasting, and splicing longer ASC works. The results are hilarious and exciting, a Neil original.
Pinback, Sherman – Another great Record Store Day special, a concept single on sunken treasure and deep dark maritime secrets, a wonderful work.
The Wild/Run Forever – I’ve become a fan of everything Atlanta’s punk-folk-hootenanny band The Wild releases, including this split.
Adele, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ remix 12-inch – Can’t get enough ‘Rolling in the Deep’? Seek this sucker out. Yes, it’s worth your while.
Bon Iver, Bonnie Raitt covers single – This 12-inch single of covers not on the 2011 album is as good as anything from the album itself.
Gang Gang Dance, Kamakura – An eerie and cryptic extended dance single that is more memorable than anything from the band’s 2011 album.
The Civil Wars, Tracks in the Snow – Partially a Christmas album, with an original song and a cover of ‘O Come O Come Emanuel,’ and partially a live release with two unique live cuts. This one is produced on 10-inch all-white vinyl, so it’s inherently cool.
Barn Owl, Shadowland – An extended vinyl-only EP from the very prolific improvisational duo, more intriguing than their full-length.
Paul Baribeau, Unbearable – Baribeau is back with more quirky songs of loss and longing. What more do you need to know?
Dum Dum Girls, He Gets Me High – Just as with the full-length DDG release this year, the band takes things up a notch with this EP, which includes a cover of The Smiths’ ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’. Dee Dee is becoming one hell of a vocalist.
Broken Bells, Mayrin Fields – Cool in its own right, but James Mercer and Danger Mouse leave me scratching my head as much as they did with their self-titled full-length release of last year.
K. Flay, s/t – This woman just amazes me with the mix of rap, poetry, DJing, and mash-ups she puts out.
Dead Fingers, s/t – Maria Taylor’s sister Kate and her husband Taylor Hollingsworth are cooking up all kinds of southern-fried hell. I can hardly wait til the full-length comes out in the spring of 2012.
Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, Venus Shaver – A single from the new album, and a sure keeper.

Thank You, Time

2011-12-14T12:18:00.001-08:00

Wuhan thanks you, Tunis thanks you, Wall Street thanks you, everyone's home town thanks you. For those of you who sat out 2011, what will you do when your children or grandchildren say, "What did you do in the insurgency?"

Three Recent Poems

2011-12-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

A little catching up:

Parables of Famous Economists - #39 in the occasional series

Seventeen Volatility Varietals

”I think volatility is here to stay. This might be the new normal.” – Sanjay Ramchander

1. Tendency to vaporize. Eleven months held close to flame, pup tents stripped of fire retardant, the chants that resonate from urban canyon walls, gone to vapor trails every one, o when will they ever learn, o when will they

2. Relative vapor pressures in a liquid mixture. EnCana’s salaried guinea pig testing the cement fracking chamber for explosive levels of three benzene derivatives, but they never tell you that the liquid must be preceded by the horizontal 50-caliber shot that helps the pressurized solvents find their way home. The sickly sweet aroma clinging to your nostril hairs may be the last remembered smell, or just another among the half-dozen drill pads of the day.

3. Compounds from a planet’s crust, all characterized by low boiling points. That last hydro shot did little more than remove a layer. The rest of us boiled over long ago, leaving dried beans in the bottom of a scorched saucepan. Add water, compress crust, rinse and repeat, call it Cairo.

4. Organic compounds evaporating at room temperature, usually regulated by governments. It didn’t turn out so well in this year of strangeness and charm, now did it? In the absence of regulatory authority, the vaporization follows global annealing.

5. Volatile anesthetics. As if that was an option. The Spectacle expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.

6. The abuse of household inhalants containing volatile compounds. The step from Pam cooking spray to toluene might be considered a gateway drug, though this gate swings both ways.

7. Oil derived from plants with aromatic compounds and flavoring. A year massaged in cloves and rose hips and patchouli, then engulfed in flames.

8. In winemaking, a term to indicate an unacceptably high level of acid. The pinot noir left blistering, split canker sores at the Quito sidewalk café, apply the Espiritu de Ecuador balm, again, again, again, the healing process cannot dissipate the image of marching laborers with duct tape wrapped earlobe to earlobe.

9. Variables capable of being changed by an external process. When the long-half-life radioisotopes on the chamber floor coat the tender planet, there are no externalities.

10. Memory that only lasts while the power is on. Which is flash, and which DDR3? What is flash, is flash unchanging law? We both have flash, is mine the same as yours?

11. A measure of the risk of a financial instrument. China apparently said no to the European Union instruments to rescue Greek and Italian debt, because the debt was tranched and re-bundled into debt obligations that looked exactly like the toxic mortgages of 2008. There are no new risk arbitrages under the sun. Nobel mathematicians have been hanging themselves as a result.

12. Compounds of magma that affect the strength of volcanoes on the brink. We’ve barely made it through the initial caldera bulge. Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait.

13. Stochastic theories of probability. Shit, we’re past the nonlinear stochastic flip. The rest is sideshow. The rest is silence.

14. Pedersen Index measure of volatility in political party systems. Seen as all but irrelevant given the greater strength of volatile compounds mentioned above.

15. Video game manufacturer. You already failed the test with the sixth-level boss. Return to sender.

16. 2008 album by A Hero A Fake. Ironic given the denouement of the three years between.

17. 1988 Lime Spiders album. Second verse, same as the first. Contents need not be shaken further.

Loring Wirbel
Nov. 23, 2011
Copyright 2011 Loring Wirbel

When Feedback Squeals

Ode to third-stage chicken pox/shingles, the delayed reaction brat

One mustn’t blame the synapse,
any more than the frayed shoelace tip
felling the last-lap runner.
No fault can be assigned to weary muscles
or the tactile flood of carnival or party,
the festival of simply-is sensation.
If a perpetrator must be named,
blame the pox, the bloody pox.

Old hands learn to tag the cusp of faulty backpropagation,
while newbies know only the incessant sledgehammer,
the second-degree burn of perpetuity.

Sometimes a charley-horse is just a charley-horse,
but odd moments let the cumulonimbus pile higher, higher
in the outback west of Alice Springs.
At the first blue sprite, some strange resonance is reached,
a certain tinnitus of the neural network.

The limbs, the belly are Hendrix’s ‘Red House,’
Lou’s Metal Machine Music,
a Merzbow sonnet.
And how does the body sense a neural chime?
As standing waves,
as tsunami,
as pounding on denuded shore,
until ebb tide sorts muscle to muscle,
touch to touch,
sound to sound,
leaving only an exhausted residual sparkle,
and the nagging uncertainty -
Is this the way the brain breaks, too?

Loring Wirbel
Nov. 26, 2011
Copyright 2011 Loring Wirbel

Smoke Detector Batteries

The nose of a husky at 2 a.m.
must always be trusted,
particularly when synchronized
with random chirp of smoke detector.
If puppies are not dyspeptic,
something is afoot.

Crystals of ice-fog deposit layers on each hyperdefined branch.
Coyotes straddle the ridge like a K2 climber, whispering
“Remember Karakoram. Remember 1980. The watchers have returned.”
The white beast might be lost amidst a subzero whiteout,
but for that whine in the back of the throat
matching the next lonely mating call of smoke detector.

This is not about a range-war romp under new moon.
This is not about cursive marks of tangerine piss.
She will sleep by the back door the rest of the night,
each shiver anticipating that for which we could not be warned.
I am sleepstepping on an uncertain ladder,
removing protective covering,
calculating half-life of Americium-241,
realizing that for this particular premonition,
there are no fresh batteries to be had.

Loring Wirbel
Dec. 2, 2011
Copyright 2011 Loring Wirbel

When the Hammer Falls Everywhere, Hammer Back

2011-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

A funny thing happened on the evening of Dec. 1, after the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act with amendments allowing the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by military authorities. Conservative groups, including both Tea Party and Libertarian factions, reached out to Occupy and progressive groups to suggest joint efforts to work for the impeachment of every senator who had signed on to the so-called "Levin-McCain Compromise," which really was a blanket surrender to military law-enforcement power. The movement is like a miniature, grassroots version of the wider "Kick Them All Out" campaign, to simply remove everyone from Congress and start over.

If the end-of-year exasperation begins to sound like nihilism at its least useful, there's a reason for that. The wheels have fallen off the great machine of empire, and there is simply nowhere left to go but dissolve the body-politic of the great republic.

This past week, we lived through an example of that when the Occupy Colorado Springs movement-in-exile went to Venetucci Farms to challenge Gov. Hickenlooper while he dedicated a solar farm. Now, don't misinterpret this, SunShare is a great little startup that is encouraging cooperative solar gardens for shared photovoltaic electricity use, and Colorado Springs Utilities is to be commended for signing up to the concept. The intent of the mic-check was not to pick on Venetucci or the solar garden, but to chase down a governor who has been denying his partial responsibility at unleashing the goons of the Denver Police Department on state-land encampments. (Even former city employees now charge the DPD with having a culture of violence). The mayors of Colorado Springs and Denver, Republican Steve Bach and Democrat Michael Hancock, are equally to blame for being just like the mayors and city councils of most major U.S. cities who are quashing dissent.

In fact, I lost a few friends at Venetucci when I said that in 2011, liberal Democrats have been as much to blame for repression as conservative Republicans. Too bad if they don't get it. It's time to bring the system down.

Colorado Springs Raid, and a Statement of Principle

2011-11-21T09:03:00.000-08:00

Well, the city government dragged its collective feet about extending the Occupy permit in Colorado Springs for another 30 days, but they sure didn't waste any time calling the cops to tear down the encampment at 1 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 21, once they decided not to extend the permit. This is the pattern that has been followed around the country, thankfully without arrests and violence in Colorado Springs, but always with intimidation and subterfuge. What we can be sure of, as I wrote in my last post, is that the hand of the federal government in the form of Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security is obvious. What we should mourn is that city, county, and state officials are ready at all times to use government-sanctioned violence - and that multiethnic liberal Democrats are just as ready to use that violence as conservative white-male Republicans.

Will the model for the United States be Egypt, where violence escalates on all sides, or Greece, where the government tries to pretend the shuffling of parties for an "acceptable" government for the EU actually matters, even as the street explodes and Greece becomes ungovernable? In either event, the bickering between Republicans and Democrats matters as little as the ruminations of the "supercommittee" on the deficit. Maybe if Repubs and Dems could both be on a Supercommittee, members of Occupy and Tea Party could both be on a SuperLynchMob, with pitchforks and torches at the ready. Because it sure looks like there is little worth saving in government as we know it.

Let's make a simple statement here: Now that Forbes magazine itself (the Voice of Capitalism in its most conservative form) has come out against the use of heavy-handed tactics nationwide, I think it's safe to say that if you believe in the methods used for Occupy takedown, you are simply wrong. It's nice to live in a country of freedoms where you have the right to be wrong, but never doubt that you are flat-assed wrong. And speaking of never doubting....

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

Defending the Ancien Regime

2011-11-14T07:32:00.001-08:00

I'm glad that hyper-tweeter 'blogdiva' (Liza Sabater) made the point early on the morning of Nov. 14, as Oakland was cleared out by a multi-city police force, that the raid was as much a product of President Obama and DHS head Janet Napolitano, as of the multicultural, ostensibly liberal government of Oakland. Whenever multiple jurisdictions are involved, you can be sure that DHS law enforcement funds are involved, and likely the regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces are involved as well.
When you come right down to it, the federal government perceives the continued presence of semi-permanent encampments in multiple cities as a threat to the public order - and there are always enough "Black Bloc" provocateurs in many cities to give that perception some validity. I won't go so far as Liza to say that DHS considers Occupy as "low-level terrorism", but the feds certainly give cities plenty of tactical riot funds to make park-clearance a major goal.

What is to be done? A phalanx of judges in Nashville, including some rather conservative ones, have slapped down the governor of Tennessee and the state police for clearing public squares, saying that political encampments are themselves a protected form of free speech. Why not extend that argument to multiple cities with a class action lawsuit against those municipalities who are quick to ban protests? I'm thinking Albany, Atlanta, Austin, Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Denver, Nashville, Oakland, Portland, St. Louis, Salt Lake City... hmm, the list is getting long. Notice how many cities with "liberal" governments are listed? Arguments for public safety appeal to conservatives and liberals alike. Maybe it's time to initiate an economic boycott against these cities and others.

On Thursday night, I'm on a panel at Colorado College called "What if there were no Bill of Rights?" I'll argue that most Americans shy away from the Bill of Rights if it interferes with their entertainment bubble. And those in political office at municipal, county, or state level, even if they are liberal Democrats, are quick to eradicate free expression when a special event comes to town, like a G20 meeting or political party convention -- raiding organizing spaces, banning the wearing of bandanas within city limits, etc. Judges in locales like St. Paul, Minn. have fined city governments for suspending Constitutional rights on "emergency" grounds, when they know full well their temporary laws will not pass Constitutional muster. Maybe it's time to get serious on the punitive fines for such cities.

(On another topic, I spoke on a panel about the changing role of automated warfare and what it meant for the veteran. Here 'tis.)

When All Hands Are Unclean

2011-10-30T07:21:00.001-07:00

The Occupy Together movement made it pretty clear from mid-September that it assigned equal blame to Republicans and Democrats for placing their parties at the beck and call of corporate lobbyists. This baseline position made the efforts by Republicans to claim the Occupy movement was started by ACORN or unions look sort of silly (yeah, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, I'm talkin' to you). What has been fairly predictable since the post-Sept. 11 period, however, is the degree to which Democrats have compromised themselves by making tactical deals with the national security state. We could see this at the local level when cities played host to party conventions or IMF/World Bank meetings. It was often Democratic members of city councils who argued the most vociferously for rules to bar protests or ban the wearing of bandanas within city limits.

The chickens certainly came home to roost at the end of October, as Denver, Atlanta, Nashville, and Portland vied for the title of the city that could look the most like Oakland. And in many cases, the city, county, and state leaders left with the most egg on their faces were liberal Democrats, often members of minority groups. Oakland in particular was graced with the trifecta of Mayor Jean Quan, City Administrator Deanna Santana, and Vice Mayor Ignacio de la Torre, sharing the blame for the out-of-control riot police. It is likely that Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock will look equally pathetic after blame is parceled out for the Oct. 29 melee that put two in the hospital and 20 behind bars. What is equally ironic is that it is often conservative judges, as in the case with Nashville, who keep freeing protesters after police arrest them multiple times, saying the city and county do not have the authority to make such sweeping ordinances preventing free assembly.

Outsiders may say the Occupy movement has gotten out of hand, demanding the kind of crackdown we are seeing nationwide. Are there instances of provocateurs and overly boisterous protesters pushing the lines of police netting? Absolutely. Do some war veterans with PTSD and a few gun owners ignore the Occupy insistence on Gandhian principles of nonviolence? From time to time. But have there been any cases where protesters have attacked police? Don't be ridiculous, particularly when said police are in full body armor.

The militarization of first responders has taken place in the aftermath of Sept. 11 as the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security have thrown out money for Joint Terrorism Task Forces, intelligence fusion centers, and tactical SWAT teams in any cities over half a million in population. And the two major parties have been right there taking the money and largesse from such militarization. When New York police from all boroughs staged a near-riot Oct. 28 to prevent Bronx cops from being indicted on ticket-fixing charges, the police attacked the media and representatives from Commissioner Ray Kelly's office. Kelly and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg should take this as a warning that the New York Police may no longer be a controllable mob as they confront Occupy Wall Street. Let this be a broader warning for the nation. We may be seeing rogue cops emerge as uncontrollable forces in many cities in the next few months, and some Democrats may regret making such deals with the devil that the Republicans are all too happy to serve. By then, of course, it will be too late to say you are sorry.

Truly Unthink(able)

2011-10-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's certainly not surprising that many political organizations (I'm looking at some Democratic Party-affiliated groups here), and many corporations, want to cash in on the new activism in any way possible, in order to sell stuff. This is at least as old as citizen-activism itself, and picked up speed significantly in the late 1960s, when Madison Avenue wanted to make advertising bucks off the "youth revolution." In fact, the second-ever issue of National Lampoon in 1970 had an article, 'Crossing the Rubicam,' ("Up against the wall-to-wall carpeting, Max Factor!") about how the revolution would be sold back to you so that you could be branded. Damn, that piece predated the arrival of Adbusters magazine by almost 20 years!

It's hard to get mad at all the new corporate-sponsored efforts to "stick it to the man," and some scarcely seem worth mentioning, though the irony and paradoxes associated with protesters at Occupy Together often seem overwhelming, and become a constant source of satire for Fox News and others. It might be unfair of me to place the launch of social-networking site Unthink.com in this category, because it never claimed to be an aggregator of nonprofit and activist networks - it only claimed to be a killer of Facebook by respecting privacy. But because it moved into beta during the height of Occupy actions, many commentators have claimed that it's the social network to help bring about the revolution - or at least smack down Facebook and Google+ in one fell swoop.

If it mildly failed at that task, it would not be worth a blog item here. But there is something more insidious going on at Unthink, something I think Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn and cultural critic Thomas Frank will have fun dissecting. The site creates protected zones similar to Google+, and in that sense is an interesting spin from the latter. But it also collects information about the type of activist a person wants to be, and attempts to correlate that with how innovative a user might be in trying new technology. And it brings in the concept of brand loyalty and brand equity, which suggests that Unthink would like to get multiple big-business sponsors, and create databases of how a person might see him/herself as green, culturally liberal, economically collectivist, etc.

At this point, a civil libertarian might sit up and say, "What? Perfect consumer marketing databases? This sounds like something both large corporations and the CIA/NSA might want to invest in, even more so than Facebook or Twitter!" Maybe so, but I'm not trying to make a paranoid reach here. Instead, my complaint is about assumptions that are more subtle and pervasive.

Remember, Occupy Wall Street grew out of Adbusters, and the magazine has a larger critique than economic or political specifics. It makes the cultural observation that the individual has been wooed over from the former role of citizen, to the role of corporate consumer, defined through buying and selling in the market, first and foremost. It's a point Thomas Frank has made eloquently in the books What's the Matter with Kansas?, The Conquest of Cool, and One Market Under God. Lasn and Frank have been quick to point out that Occupy protesters might be a wee bit hypocritical when they purchase supplies at Wal-Mart, hold a sign along with a Starbucks frappuccino, and carry their Androids or iPhones with them everywhere.

Now none of us can be purists, though some try harder than others to divorce themselves from branding, eating locally, bartering or buying green, etc. I'm not arguing for ascetical purism. But I'm suggesting that when a new social networking site claims to be the anti-Facebook and to divorce itself from corporate malfeasance, and then collects information on how the subscriber wants to use high-tech toys and adhere to brand equity, they are performing the worst type of sins that the Occupy Together movement is trying to address. I don't think that Unthink is a conscious trojan horse for Apple, Nike, Samsung, and the federal government. Instead, it's worse in some ways through its own unawareness that there is a problem here. Its founders fail to realize that the key to 21st-century activism is enacting the divorce from corporate branding, and to a certain extent, that includes distancing yourself from high-tech gadget fetishism. The Unthink profile reinforces the image of the Occupy Wall Street protester with the iPhone 4S and Starbucks coffee, and yes, there is something wrong with that picture.

When the Street is the Sole Deciderator

2011-09-28T17:52:00.001-07:00

I know, I know. Even as the Occupy Together web site edges ever closer to the magical number of 100 cities supporting the continuing Occupy Wall Street actions, it would be all too easy to be as jaded and snippy as Ginia Bellafante, telling us in the Sept. 25 New York Times that the protesters in Zuccotti Square were young, aimless, unsure of goals, and as grubby as the Liberal Hawks of the 1960s charged Vietnam protesters with being. It would be easy to place bets that most of these cities with support actions would be lucky to bring out 100 people, let alone thousands. It would be easy to let our sarcasm be as big as our despair.

And yet, and yet ... When I went to the Sept. 27 General Assembly for Occupy Denver, I saw more than 100 smart and attentive protesters in it for the long haul. We could call this a Children's Crusade of a surprising sort, because the backbone of protesters in Denver were young families in their late 20s and early 30s, dragging babies and toddlers in their wake - not a movement dominated by college students, a movement dominated by young working familes. This doesn't imply that power brokers on Wall Street and across the nation need to start trembling in their boots, but the number of people from all walks of life and every state in the nation, writing in to the New York Times to complain of Bellafante's writing, and to complain of Inspector Anthony Bologna's pepper-spraying of New York protesters, indicates that the protesters speak for a whole lot of people who are fed up beyond fed up. Fine, the jaded say, but does that translate to votes? Maybe not.

And yet, and yet.... the students in Spain, Greece, Israel and elsewhere who are bringing traffic and urban business to a stop do not speak for a particular political party. They simply want to make the economy unmovable and their particular nations ungovernable. More power to them. It's no accident that Occupy Wall Street originally was promoted by Adbusters magazine, which doesn't really promote a left or right line per se. It plays the somewhat nihilist refrain that the entire society and culture is ailing, and needs to fall. This attitude was reflected in a big, sprawling front-page article in the Sept. 27 New York Times (perhaps paying penance for Bellafante's terrible hatchet job), in which the author saw the Arab Spring, Occupy Together, and movements in India, Greece, Spain, Israel, and dozens of other nations as a flat and simple rejection of the electoral process in its entirety, and a desire to take back public space.

Let's look at the >75 cities of Occupy Together in the context of the increasingly irrelevant 2012 elections. Obama's approval rating has now dipped below 40 percent and is heading lower. Meanwhile, each new savior from the Republican Party is pilloried before getting to the second level. Bachmann? Still tied to the Palin-Santorum nutter wing. Perry? At turns, too rash and Texan or too flat to be acceptable as a candidate. Christie? Too overweight, let's face it. We need a buff president to take on a Mayan calendar. No one is electable in 2012. Sound familar? That is what Spain, Greece, and so many other countries are finding.

If the Occupy Together momentum keeps up, I'm not anticipating any major urban area shuts down, or that there will be localized general strikes that will even approach the limited ones of the 1930s. But I do see a melding of street-occupation movements worldwide that will make 2012 a modern equivalent of 1968, a year in which politics as we know it simply won't matter. If the U.S. economy continues to tank, if the Euro stops being a unified currency by year's end, then time will be up for central banks and international institutions and political parties as traditionally defined in any nation, not just the U.S. At that point, the street will be the sole remaining source of legitimacy.

Fall Musical Madhouse - Don't They Know It's a Recession?

2011-09-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

Y'know, even in the early part of 2011, it would have been difficult to compile a best-of list for the year, what with important works from Decemberists, Civil Wars, The Joy Formidable, Mogwai, Wye Oak, etc. coming out. During the summer, we saw ambitious works from artists as diverse as Smoke Fairies, Brian Eno, and the Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration. Then, in mid-September, the floodgates opened. Didn't anyone tell these musicians and labels that the UBS collapse makes it certain we're diving into a double-dip recession? Who needs art when we have to buy groceries?

Some short-sighted reviewers automatically called the Sept. 13 release of "Father, Son, Holy Ghost" by Girls the album of the year, and I have my own reasons for thinking that's wrong, as explained below. Keep in mind, as you peruse this list, that we still have fall releases from Wilco, Kate Bush, Florence and the Machine, Bjork, Real Estate, Coldplay, and Tom Waits yet to land. Here's my take on most recent, but the year end will be a tough call for 2011.

Tori Amos - Night of Hunters - Writing lyrics for modern classical composers, with her daugher and niece helping her sing? Too haughty for words, right? Wrong. This album is layered and strange and beyond description, might have to be deciphered over several hours. Orchestration only rarely goes over the top, and usually brings in the strings in a spare, strident, and minimalist way. And Tori's daughter sounds like CocoRosie.

Blitzen Trapper - American Goldwing -- Whod've guessed? This is Blitzen Trapper's Lynyrd Skynyrd album, the band has decided to cut a perfect Southern-rock-genre album. Fact is, they do it with a lot of talent, and the result may be less confusing for many folks than the Rundgren-like spastic hop between Dylan and MMJ sounds that characterized Blitzen Trapper's Destroyer of the Void. The problem is, is it better do one style really well, or to try and offer up A Wizard, A True Star style of gumbo? Probably depends on if you like a reincarnated Lynyrd Skynyrd or not.

Bev Barnett & Greg Newlon - Love Can Change the World - Folk duos used to playing the house concert and coffee house circuit always take a risk when expanding studio sounds to include layered percussion, woodwind, and the like. Some might begrudge the Zen references to Thich Nhat Hanh styles of teaching (I'm not one of them), but the power in songs like 'There's a Light' makes it obvious they're steering in the right direction. Inspired move to include two versions of Greg's 'What Makes a Man', too.

Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost -- This is a very ambitious, varied, and accomplished album with lots of stylistic references from the 50s to the 90s. I'm sure to have it in my Top Ten, but I'm getting a little perturbed with everyone from LA Times to Pitchfork to Pop Matters chomping at the bit to declare this the instant Album of the Year, and anoint Girls as the saviors of rock. Why do I have problems with this album? Because the styles from other decades they choose to borrow are the swooshy, long-chord arena-rock styles that often put one to sleep. Case in point: the NPR reviewer (again, worshiping Girls) pointed out that the song 'Vomit' sounded like parts of Dark Side of the Moon. To me, that's not good, and not just in being too derivative. To me, Pink Floyd hit their stride with Ummagumma and Obscured by Clouds, and had already gotten middle-class and predictable by the time Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were released. Same with U2 - Boy and War were the exciting albums, less so Joshua Tree. But Girls has chosen for the band's riffing points the broad arena sound of crowd-pleasers that may be the most popular way of presenting a song, but at the same time can lead to finger-drumming tedium. And believe me, there are a couple definite clunkers on Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Still worth hearing, though.

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know - Very aptly named album, because this is very different from her first two, to the point where her voice is close to unrecognizable on some tracks. She gives us old-timey hillbilly on 'The Muse', 1930s Norah-Jones-style crooning on 'I Was Just a Card', Neil Young and Crazy Horse-style buzz guitar on 'The Beast', and she pulls this all off with some excellent arrangements and playing. Laura Marling has moved from being a capable bluesy-folky indie rock artist to being an amazing chameleon.

Mogwai - Earth Division EP - In the tradition of the magnificent Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, maybe a trifle more acoustic, and if you like the majestic end of 'Music for a Forgotten Future' from the two-disc version of Hardcore, you will love the way this EP ends with 'Does This Always Happen?'

Barn Owl - Lost in the Glare - I listed this one after Mogwai, because Barn Owl is sort of morphing into Mogwai. Since they signed with Thrill Jockey, they've tried to get a more accessible instrumental sound than the days when they played with Charalambides and My Cat Is An Alien. It's still droney, but it's a richer melodic sound that builds from quiet intensity to a Mogwai-like crash and boom. Nice instrumental work.

St. Vincent - Strange Mercy - I thought the 'Cruel' video was a bit too pretentious, and I was almost afraid to try this album, figuring Annie was turning herself into the ice queen. But she has pulled it off, with a whole bunch of very interesting and odd songs. Even more so than Actor, St. Vincent is beginning to sound like Frank Zappa directing a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical. And that's a good thing. Good and weird.

Wild Flag (s/t) - It's great to get Carrie Brownstein out of Portlandia, Janet Weiss out of The Jicks, and Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole out of whatever self-imposed exile they've been in, putting them all together in one rockin' band. The grand dames of riot grrrls can show others how it's done, and they do so aptly, but remember - there are newcomers like Le Butcherettes and Shilpa Ray and the Happy Hookers who will be challenging you out there on the road, and that's what good slash and bash music is all about.

Scott Wannberg: A Captain Spaulding for Our Times

2011-08-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

Poet and satirical roustabout Scott Wannberg died today. The world got a little sadder.

Spaulding Auditions

For Scott Wannberg

The endangered list was initiated
when Acme cornered the market
on dynamite, bad cigars,
and boxing gloves on extendo arms.
Monopolists of the damned
insured a continuous run of triumphant roadrunner
leaving each trickster flattened.

The joyful curriculum vitae is toughest,
“looking for people who like to laugh”
a pitiful understatement
in the search for Groucho eyebrows,
Kathy Griffin cornhusk,
Peter Bergman squeak of Porgie Tirebiter,
and the ceaseless Captain Spaulding push to another frontier.
Living lightly on the earth is always the heaviest option.

That Foster Wallace applicant captured the rhythm,
but proved a great disappointment.
How could he sleep through Jonny 5’s fist-slam demand
that defeat is not an option?
How could he keep talking in the back of the class
as zen-master said,
“I love my cigar, but at least I take it out once in a while.”

Your laugh seems subversive enough.
You can start on Monday.
Here is your squirting flower,
your itching powder,
your peanut brittle can of jumping snakes.
Hooray for Captain Spaulding.
Hooray hooray hooray.

Loring Wirbel
August 20, 2011

Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

Galapagos

2011-08-20T09:36:00.001-07:00

I'm frankly at a loss as to how to summarize or even talk about the trip to Galapagos, which we took Aug. 3-16 in honor of our 25th anniversary and Abby's 21st birthday. There are some who might say no humans should visit the Galapagos, in order to protect its pristine status, but I'm pretty impressed about how well the Ecuadorean government is limiting access to the island chain, which bears some resemblance to Hawaii, both in volcanic origin over a plate hotspot, and in the NW-SE diagonal of the chain (Galapagos, though, is a mirror image of Hawaii, in that its youngest island is in the northwest, vs. Hawaii in the southeast). Visitors to the islands must have a guide at all times, even hikers planning an overnight camping trip or sport fishers who do not plan on landing on the islands at all.

Iguanas, penguins, blue-footed boobies, land tortoises, frigate birds, and sea lions all are fearless of humans, and even allow hikers to come relatively close to nesting areas - the government is more strict about keeping tourists away from turtle nests, albatross mating areas, and the like, than the animals are on their own. It's a lot easier than you might imagine to see a boobie mating dance, a mass boobie flight, etc. We explored the islands on zodiac boats that were launched from a midsized Xplorer ship.

The people of Galapagos (a few tens of thousands of citizens that live on one of four populated islands) worship Charles Darwin for his work with the HMS Beagle that led to Origin of the Species, and there's even a statue to him on San Cristobal Island. Plenty of caps and T-shirts said "EVOLVE!" and "Join the Evolution Revolution." Since the islanders have to be concerned about rising water levels, there is no questioning about the reality of global warming. In short, Republican candidates for the U.S. presidency would be ill-advised to visit Galapagos, they'd be laughed off the islands.

Visiting Quito was an adventure as well. The city is in a bowl of Andean peaks at 9000 feet, and has plenty of mountain attractions nearby and Spanish colonial architecture within the city limits. Had a particularly good time seeing the modern art museum for Oswaldo Guaysamin.

I was a little worried that President R afael Correa might be creating a personality cult of the Chavez/Morales variety, but no such worries. Most Ecuadoreans appreciate his efforts to maintain social safety nets at a time when global economies are collapsing, but few citizens will hesitate to tell you that Correa is long-winded and full of himself, too. The president doesn't seem to be too interested in self-aggrandizing in the manner of Hugo Chavez. And he looks like Stephen Segal with a crew cut, which brings to mind more of an Ah-nold jock bravado than anything else.

Indigenous artisans are given a lot of space in Quito to set up market shops and hold protests when appropriate. It was interesting to discover that Quito was one of the few large cities in South America without a true shantytown on its outskirts, though there are certainly poorer sections of town.

I'm posting two poems from the trip, one on the sleeptalking and dream sequences on discovering palo santo trees, the other on coping with the women of Pachamama Alliance, who sort of monopolized the Cafe Cultura hotel with lofty talk about "teaching" Amazon indigenous groups on spiritual practices. Gag me with a spoon. Below the poems, I've embedded one of six videos of Galapagos (also one of Quito) which are on YouTube. I embeded #1, you can check the others in order....

Sleeptalking

The world presents itself as lovingly incoherent
Clothed in today’s architecture that is yours,
all yours.

The garden variety of sleeptalk
is the slurred syllabic
born of anger or fear
from deepest pontine dream.

Today’s architecture is that rarest of subspecies.
The conversation of prefect diction
devoid of semantics, dancing in syntax.

Is the luggage in wet storage?
Couscous kesskess keeskees kohskohs
The dodo, the bellringer went to town
Embrace each syllable, leap to fricative stop.

Today’s architecture of the waking is the hill that bristles
with palo santo tree.
Rub the region of damaged bark,
breathe vigorously the remembered liquors
as you learn the common parentage of palo santo
and frankincense tree.
Intoxicating vapors bring forth epiphanies
of Balthazar, Melchior.
The momentary slurred syllabic allows the briefest memory
of the statement that consciousness enfolds,
“The traders also called it sandalwood.”
Perfect diction awaits.

The world presents itself as lovingly incoherent.
Clothed in today’s architecture that is ours,
all ours.

Loring Wirbel
August 13, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

Cafe Cultura lobby, sans Pachama

Pachamama Annoyance

With, at best, partial apologies to Pachamama Alliance

And who am I to choke on womanfire power,
awakening the dreamer,
monopolizing the lobby,
declaring that one more Amazon venture
will convince the Kichua to unlock the simple
spirituality that is theirs to share,
while the passel of white women head north
to fill dozens of social science journals.

Kill me, my snark makes me evil,
I tell Fernando,
who agrees he'd rather suffer untold male-dominant lunkheads
than this coven of faux-feminist pomegranates
burning Café Cultura in sage,
swelling in syrup of sincerity.
"And the karaoke," Fernando adds,
"well, you don't want to know."

Loring Wirbel
August 18, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

Here's the first of the six Galapagos videos:

Catching Up, Round 2

2011-08-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'll have Galapagos goodies soon, but in the meantime, here are two poems from July lamenting about many deaths, and griping about the devout and their discontents:

Arms

Corrine could fist a bicep to take down Rosie the Riveter,
Defiant nose ring chimes
I take this world in love,
I take this world by storm.
The pigtail declaration that promised decades
of standing akimbo astride the world crinkled ugly
from the Valley of the Jolly ho ho ho.
But one small blade can slice two arms.
Giant topples three days before Amy,
while villagers not crushed by flailing limbs
are reminded that the gentlest women leading pedestal lives
leave embossed eddies of dust like a falling Saddam,
a Lenin laid fallow.

In the photograph, he stood between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,
one arm around each Smith.
He was not the dream investor he appeared to be.
He was an arms dealer.

Summer camp is optimal for upper-arm development.
Breast stroke, slipknot tie, slow crawl, secret tryst,
ring around the rosie.
But on the weekend of Amy pedestals,
some arms prove bigger than others.
Beach coagulation is guaranteed
unless your stroke can pull you from shore,
no coming up for air,
no sex on the beach,
no freeze-frame of a city center in shattered glass.

He would have been Japan’s greatest slugger,
but for George chiding “Fat toad, fat toad.”
He hadn’t held a bat in ten years.
He could hold a weapon of arm destruction.

Balasubramanian has studied such things. If each neuron is dense-packed in pyramids of orange, the brain burns hotter, a sacred fire. If the neuron gets bigger, the myelin sheath thicker, we become stupid before our time. The thinner, smaller neuron would seem to be optimal, but the ion channel opens more frequently, the synapse fire gets leakier, schizophrenia predominates.
We’re stuck.
Unless a dozen gooey brains can chant as one.
Join hands.

This is the bench press for Amy.
This is the arm curl for Corrine.
This is the lateral roll for Utoya names I will never know.
I’ve tapped out the book of brain teasers,
the bottle of lecithin is empty,
two good arms are all that’s left.

Loring Wirbel
July 30, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

No, God Must Bend
(Use of the comma in the title is optional)

Warren Jeffs and Kher Mohammed
were skipping class the day they covered
that which is Caesar’s.

I transcend cyclically in next-plane chimes,
but am mired to shit and blood,
the particular instantiation
of the long arm of which law,
which law indeed.

When the next strident radio jock declares
every knee must bend,
I’ll say “You first, God.
You first.”

Loring Wirbel
July 31, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

Catching Up, Round 1

2011-08-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

Since the late 1970s, I've worked on a random series of poems called 'Parables of Famous Economists'. Pondered at one point publishing them as a series of Garbage Pail Kid-style trading cards. It's been a little while since a new parable emerged, but in early July, #38 suddenly appeared from nowhere. I have appended the poem itself with a brief history and geography of The Scapa Flow:

The Scapa Flow

Parables of Famous Economists - #38 in the occasional series

”Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, even while exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate … Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, … ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state.”

-- Nassim Nicholas Taler, The Black Swan of Cairo

Becalmed in anti-horse latitudes
He paces aft deck,
confusing the frostbite of debt ceiling
with the bo’sun’s all clear,
and shivers at the deafening absence
of magpie song in Orkney pre-dawn.

Great-great grandfather’s flapper season
was punctuated by sparse hello’s in the Scapa Flow.
Only the littoral ships where invisibility was intended,
drifted in sweeping arcs around a barrier of Graemsay.

Now, the dissolution of polar ice
brings daily petrogreetings
from Archangelsk to Alert Bay,
and still the bridge is enveloped in a cone of antisound.

She tried to speak clearly amidst the Delphic columns,
explaining to him that land sharks in Athens,
salty flotilla dogs in Piraeus,
vibrated at a frequency accomplishing nothing,
save a generous gaseous escape of beer foam,
dissolving representatives of the European Central Bank,
who were waiting for their chance to whimper
“Even anarchists can be wrong half the time.”
He offered the oracle a backpropagation lesson,
her opiated heavy lids failing to register his insistence
that the imperceptible wake of ships within the Arctic Circle
generated the slow delta waves more likely to go critical
as flotilla becomes Flotta.
Perhaps they whispered to each other the same sweet nothings
in mutually unintelligible dialects.

Ship’s whistle resonates in tooth and testament alike.
Call to neither reveille nor seven-bell prayer,
but a fitting remembrance of a Von Reuter call to scuttle,
a June 21 hymn of sinking below a featureless Scottish horizon,
where even a storm-petrel is wrong half the time.

One dozen renegotiations of a national limit,
spanning months or years of indeterminate length.
It is calm.
Unaffected bond markets, Dow stuck at 12k.
It is calm.
Ship lists subtly to port.
It is calm.
Spray-spattered deck at 21 degrees
as list becomes coffin to be.
It is calm.
The trembling is laughter and laughter alone.
The economist to first identify the point of kinase cascade
goes down with the ship.
Yo ho.
It is calm.
Please notify my next of kin.
It is calm.
This wheel shall explode.
The surface of the Scapa Flow is always calm,
as he notes with no little irony
that admirals of the current era
must expand their definitions of scuttle.

Loring Wirbel
July 16, 2011
Copyright Loring Wirbel 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapa_Flow

Scapa Flow (Old Norse: Skalpaflói - "bay of the long isthmus" [1]) is a body of water in the Orkney Islands, Scotland, United Kingdom, sheltered by the islands of Mainland, Graemsay, Burray,[2] South Ronaldsay and Hoy. It is about 312 square kilometres (120 sq mi). It has a shallow sandy bottom not deeper than 60 metres (200 ft) and most of it about 30 metres (98 ft) deep, and is one of the great natural harbours/anchorages of the world, with sufficient space to hold a number of navies. Viking ships anchored in Scapa Flow more than 1000 years ago, but it is best known as the site of the United Kingdom's chief naval base during World War I and World War II. The base was closed in 1956.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_German_fleet_in_Scapa_Flow

The scuttling of the German fleet took place at the Royal Navy's base at Scapa Flow, in Scotland, after the end of the First World War. The High Seas Fleet had been interned there under the terms of the Armistice whilst negotiations took place over the fate of the ships. Fearing that all of the ships would be seized and divided amongst the allied powers, the German commander, Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, decided to scuttle the fleet.

The scuttling was carried out on 21 June 1919. Intervening British guard ships were able to beach a number of the ships, but 52 of the 74 interned vessels sank. Many of the wrecks were salvaged over the next few years and were towed away for scrapping. The few that remain are popular diving sites.

Back Soon, After Galapagos Interlude

2011-08-05T06:21:00.001-07:00

So much to catch up with this blog on. Have three or four good poems to post, and I just got elected vice president of Poetry West (it was such fun throwing a poets' election). And there's so many interesting to things to talk about in world at large this summer. But for now, I'm getting drunk in Quito, Ecuador and awaiting a trip to the Galapagos islands. No intent to abandon all the loyal followers (ha!), but stay tuned, I'll have Galapagos stories by mid August!

Random Corks, Random Bottles, Random Seas

2011-07-03T09:19:00.001-07:00

We were having a little discussion about individuals trapped up in large-scale natural, political, cultural, economic processes, a meditation spurred in part by Albert Brooks' disturbing little novel, 2030. It occurred to me that there are at least two distinct ways to view your own interaction with large forces during the course of a very short lifetime. You can see yourself as a corked bottle being tossed about in random fashion in a large ocean. What appears to be free will might send the bottle in a deliberate if minuscule direction from time to time, but that free will might be indistinguishable from Brownian motion. The point is not to deny all existence of free will, but to remind us that the ocean is pretty friggin' big.

Alternatively, you could think of yourself as a target with a large bullseye on your chest. The large forces might be warriors with taut bows, ready to shoot arrows directly at you that say, "Big Uncaring Government", "Earthquakes and Tsunamis", "Intelligence Agencies", "Impact of Gay Culture", "Modernization and its Discontents", and on and on, you get the idea. Each force is all about you, and the impact of a large flow is considered solely on the basis of what it means to your life, and whether you should feel guilty because its impact is the result of some mortal or heavenly will.

Now, I'm not trying to deny any role for works or grace here, but it seems to me that the latter view incorporates an extreme narcissism, and leads inevitably to paranoia and to a fear of the external world. I keep thinking of Nicole Kidman participating in a grief support group in the movie Rabbit Hole. She is confronted by a couple who take solace in thinking that everything happens for a reason, because God wills it. She calls that the worst kind of hypocrisy, since many random events happen for no reason whatsoever. That may feel kind of harsh when trying to deal with the death of a child, but if we allow for divine intervention, we are left with the conclusion that God must be cruel in intent. We are left joining Pat Robertson in thinking that Katrina happened because God wanted to punish New Orleans.

It could be that people adopt this extreme narcissism, and sometimes paranoia, because they harbor a greater fear that many events happen in their lives simply because shit happens. If you were a Roman citizen living a dull patrician existence in 460 AD, your house might have been pillaged by an Ostrogoth, not because you were bad, not because you were singled out, not because there were hostile Ostrogoth forces targeting you directly, but simply because you were living in Rome in the fifth century CE.

The random bob can represent an important survival strategy for living in a time of generalized collapse like the 21st century. The younger people in Brooks' novel wanted to target older people for being the source of insanely large budget deficits and health-care costs, leading to a Soylent Green-style scenario. Now certainly we can place blame on human agency in recognition of real evil in the world. The Hitlers and Stalins must answer for real crimes. But it is also important to remember, particularly as far as divine will is concerned, that some of us simply live in a time of world war, of Holocaust, of economic collapse, and we are random victims of large historical processes. Maybe our chances will be better in the next turn of the wheel. The true agents of others' sorrow must be held to account for the wrongs they have done. But the more you play the blame game, the more you are letting your narcissism get the better of you. Most of what goes on around you is a random bob in the ocean.

When does digitization = death?

2011-06-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

You are not watching infinite recursive images.
You are watching a Mandelbrot zoom.

OK, time for some intuitive leaps and logical inferences that might make some perverse sense from time to time, if only by accident (or design, but that's another story).

I'm writing a blog item in Design News at the end of June to honor two geniuses in analog design engineering, Jim Williams and Bob Pease, who happened to die within days of one another in mid-June (Bob while driving away from Jim's funeral, as a matter of fact). Theme of the blog item is that we should never assume the deaths represent the great passing of precision analog talent in a world gone all-digital. Sure, digitization has wrought daily miracles, but if anything, there seems to be a hippie-dippie backlash that assumes analog representations of life and the physical world are warmer, closer to the earth, representative of the world in all its glory, yada yada yada.

I would no more rant against the digital representation than make blanket assumptions that all economic globalization is bad. Binary representations and Boolean logic have allowed us to fill in more gaps in our knowledge in the last century than was accomplished during the early Enlightenment era and the fleshing out of Newtonian physics. By the same token, we can identify victims of globalization while realizing that, had it not been for globalized markets free of tariffs and protectionist trade barriers, a far greater percentage of humans on the planet would be starving right now. But that doesn't mean we don't point to the aspects of the world lost through digitization of real-world analog information. In fact, it's an excuse for screaming real loud, as Pee Wee might say.

Jon Pareles of The New York Times screamed real loud on Sunday morning, warning of the limitations of obtaining all music from the cloud. We can say that cloud-based storage is more environmentally sound, since we don't make any physical representations of our music (the same might be said of books, e-books, and the decline of printed words). And Pareles, living in the typical minuscule New York apartment, expressed relief at not having so many CDs and vinyl LPs cluttering everything. But, as I've ranted on this blog before, the MP3 file on a small media player or smartphone takes us back to the time of crappy sound representation exemplified by the transistor radio of the 1960s (and the saddest thing is that many younger people say they actually prefer the sound of an MP3 file to a lossless WAV file - their ears have grown accustomed to the craptastic). In addition, Pareles said, if all possible musical compositions are available instantly, at sharply declining prices (and profit margins for the artist), the entire music-listening experience is cheapened.

The world around you is a smear. It is an analog slope that can only be approximated in digital format. Yes, a high-resolution A/D or D/A converter may give you a representation accurate enough to fool any human perception, but you will never live in a digital world. You will live in linear fashion in a world overrun by digital processes. When I'm pondering all this crap, I speak in a shorthand that assumes a black and white image is more digital, while a rich color image (even if pixellated) more closely resembles the electromagnetic spectrum. The static image is digital, the flow is analog. You might call this a conversational successive approximation register, or you might call it sloppy thinking. I agree. It makes for an easier way to bitch.

Which brings us to the poem below. This started out as a lamentation for a nephew-in-law who decided to emulate Ian Curtis by hanging himself in his mother's kitchen. Because Curtis wrote such songs as 'Digital' and 'Transmission' (not to mention 'Atrocity Exhibition', which might have some relevance here), and because Anton Corbijn directed the black-and-white film, Control, that explored Curtis's death, I let the two hanging deaths in Macclesfield and Tampa stand in for the world gone digital.

The intermezzo was my elegy to Williams and Pease. Maybe they died at an appropriate time for a world gone digital, but it bears mentioning that Williams was an experimental artist (specializing in sculptures of analog components) who had more intuitive vision than most so-called digital artists gracing the 21st century. Cause of death in both cases (stroke and Parkinson's for Williams, car crash for Pease) involve inherently linear processes. This does not mean the analog element of their lives passed with their particular genius. It means their lives and their deaths are mixed-signal representations.

The gloria in exelsis deo second movement is the non-stop babble of a toddler, free of AutoTune voice synthesizing and free of any digital avatar. It is the life resurgent, the joy formidable. It defies a digital representation. Long may it blur, long may it smear.

Mixed Signal

I. Lamentation - Digital
Problems are always evident in the Family Guy A/D conversion
of a black and white Corbijn film.
The stark binary Macclesfield noose
displays dozens of spectral reflections
in a bright Florida sun.
Mom finds body just the same
but what remains monochrome
for an Ian Curtis freeze-frame
enters Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
for a forgotten detailer of floors and window casements –
be it loneliness or pills.
I could go on as though nothing was wrong.
Dance to the radio.

Intermezzo - Mixed Signal (Baseband)
A night of gin in an era of Smiths and Paula Abdul,
playground of found art where the voltage comparator
displaces all wire and clay.
Marty reminds us that a single well-placed cruise missile
might wipe out the nation’s analog design talent
by flattening a single-story Eichler home.
Crumpling dashboards and Parkinson’s tremors
extend the cruise-missile descent window by 25 years,
but the 32 feet per second per second
of face kissing steering column
leaves little doubt as to the denuded analog landscape,
the empty bottle of gin.

II. Gloria in excelsis deo - Analog
There is no freeze-frame of toddler,
only Mach blur of chatterfield
Pirate guy knows the purple snail buried treasure.
It’s probably in the potty,
and we can march there,
here’s your trumpet pirate guy,
and you can color Tinkerbelle’s friend,
and did you learn to play the piano?

Thus do the gods assure me
that flow representations of an analog world
are neither created nor destroyed
in Palo Alto
in Tampa
in Cambridge
in Macclesfield.
No matter how finely you zoom your Mandelbrot
on a two-year-old smile
you find no digitized freeze-frame,
only a Mach blur.

Loring Wirbel
June 25, 2011

Boston and Near-War Myths

2011-06-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

The weekend of June 17 was a meeting of the Global Network in N. Andover, MA, north of Boston. It was wonderful to see all kinds of friends from 20 years of activism in the field, and to make new friends as well. But the best part of the weekend was staying in Cambridge with friends Matt and Kelly on Saturday, and spending time with their delightful daughter Anna, who taught me how to play the piano, how to be a pirate and search for buried treasure in the form of purple snails in the potty, and how to color Tinkerbelle's friends in the appropriate magical shades.

Incidental Battlespace
The theatre of war
is by both accident and design
wherever you happen to be

I flew out to Boston with Bill Sulzman, got picked up by an old Colorado Springs friend Chris, held a vigil at Raytheon headquarters in N. Andover, and then spent all day Saturday in plenary sessions and keynotes. Below, I've embedded Part 1 of a workshop we did - Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.

Mission Trip

2011-06-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

Odd collection of mission trips this month - an unexpected dash up to Cheyenne to see my sister and niece (picture), an upcoming trip to Boston for a Global Network conference to rant about militarization and other icky things, and two specific spiritual missions, spelled out in two poems below:

Jacou's Children

Jacou has carried the agony of all Liberia
across the shoulders of the zig-zag batik
that reflects the specific cries of a missing family.
It has been a particular burden to listen for faint cries
in a noisy year.

Blood echoes as it coagulates.
Hama echoes 30 years.
Sana’a echoes 30 years.
Monrovia, Abidjan in gurgles of the half-remembered.
But the very moment sobs choke each possible Pranayama,
the perfect cast into Cavally River
brings forth four escaping the forest of anechoic chamber.
For every thousand broken, one is made whole.
Ignore the success ratio, fishers of men,
embrace the few you may catch and release.

Loring Wirbel
June 5, 2011

Let It Be Said Of Us

“Every blessing and curse a choice.” – John G. Waller

If the moving saccadic finger of autism is a language of inclusivity,
then the task of the translator is to banish each bandpass filter,
for a spectral roar of color and near-color in messy splash,
for a blasphemous babel joyful noise where song is scream,
for strawberry become wasabi become digitalis on the tongue,
for the tactile coming indistinguishable from herpetic nerve damage,
we sing them back to life.

Be as mud children set loose with fingerpaints on butcher paper.
Be as Lot’s wife in a Springerville summer,
frightened of scorched earth and turning to trace the manara,
the pentecost, the pillar of fire by night,
spreading salt along U.S. 60 to the pulsing salvation of radio-dish array.

Sing to melt the last traces of the semipermeable membrane
that keeps weepy country murder ballad from harsh saxophone trill,
that keeps smooth cold Remington steel from the stippled areola of erect nipple,
that keeps the hand blistered in a dozen post-hole prayers
from the hand cramped in a Sharpie observation of God’s thousandth name.
We sing in the inclusive tongue that never noticed a difference.
Let it be said of us, we sang each cell to life.

Loring Wirbel
June 12, 2011

Testament to Gil Scott-Heron

2011-05-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

On Friday evening, May 27, We were attending an open mic poetry session at Modbo in Colorado Springs. It was getting near the end of the evening, and a brash slam poet recited some Langston Hughes, then announced that Gil Scott-Heron was dead. I was stunned. He had been a soundtrack to my life since I was 16. I wrote this overnight, then discovered many friends such as Dom Gabrielli, Marilyn Basel, and Aad de Gids had written pieces of their own about Gil. He had survived many years of prison, many years of being strung out, and had come back with an exceptional 2010 album, I'm New Here, as well as an exceptional remix album in 2011 produced by Jamie Xx. I guess dying in a time of renewal was preferable to dying when broke and forgotten, but it still hurts all the more. And I guess that learning of Gil Scott-Heron's death at a poetry slam was the optimal way to find out.

Days Gil Whispered in My Ear

I. “And what would Karen Silkwood say to you, if she was still alive?”
I know precisely what she’d say, Gil.
She’d say it’s high time to wake up.
Protestations of broken alarm clocks and dissipated late nights aside,
I picked up a placard in 1976.
I never let go. My arms grow weary.

II. “Tuskeegee 626, scientists getting their kicks.”
Dolores DeLuna beams a benevolent mannequin smile
On Iggy’s Lust-for-Life grin
And the somber Leninist busts of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson.
“It’s so social realist,” you say as I slit shrink wrap.
I go grand-mal trembling in an excess of social realism.
Gil almost lost Detroit, I lost Detroit that day
Unwilling to play bedsitter to a Michigan gone Alzheimer’s.

III. “My name is what’s-your-name, you might reject my claim,
I expect that you won’t vary from the norm.”
The riot of desert color in Tempe, Ganado, Buckeye,
blossoms resembling the obscured face of an
Iranian exchange student in rectangular white mask
The shah is
“You mean to take it as a symbol”
a U.S. puppet,
“But look closely, who does it resemble?”
down with the shah!
Fedayeen collapse in multitudes as the first of dozens
of bearded stern faces are displayed in our shooting gallery
providing room for decades of bogeymen keeping us awake at night.
“Shah Mot. Shah Mot. Shah Mot.”
(Gil was the one to inform us that the chess warning of checkmate
is derived from the Farsi declaration that the shah is dead.)

IV. “It’s 1980. There ain’t no way we can reclaim ’75,
much less 1969.”
This is what democracy looks like!
This is what checkmate looks like.
as Gil Scott-Heron and Captain Beefheart go silent 30 years.
Silent all these years.
The needlework of desire keeps Gil from showing up
in New Mexico, Colorado, stations of the cross.
While this same needlework traces out the map
of a different desire, the material gone global,
gone derivative,
where even the chronicling of the exponential cancer
makes for hunger, makes the fingers twitch.
Brecht is there, sitting in for a silent Gil,
“even anger against injustice makes the brow grow stern.”
Hands on the placard falter,
but this remains an act of love, not fear.

V. “Womenfolk raised me and I was full grown,
before I knew I came from a broken home.”
Gil’s voice returns unexpectedly,
not hoarse in bitterness and regret,
not angry at 30 years’ unchronicled injustice,
but happy and humble in declaring that the
African-American male is only defined
by the women who shape him and carry his burden.
Works in all colors, Gil, works for all men.
Women as the strongest heroes
pulling a lost cause from the fire,
the one with dicks taking comic sidekick roles,
Vichyssoise, vichyssoise,
as they remind us again and again not to slacken the placard grasp.
The chador, the burqa, the undrivability in Salafist climes
opened the floodgates to chase the bearded ones away.
And Gil was there, learning dub step with Jamie XX,
discovering the untapped power of being new here.

VI. “The sheriff of Monroe County had disasters on his mind.”
The brash poet with shaved shining ebony head
announced Gil Scott-Heron is dead,
bookending Gil and Langston Hughes in
a declaration that will never stop reverberating.
“And what would Karen Silkwood say to you, if she was still alive?”
In my dreams she’d say, “Job well done.”
The real words mouthed by these lips,
“Go then and do likewise.
Do not falter. There is still a world to win.”
Gil wholeheartedly agrees.

Loring Wirbel
May 28, 2011

Catching Up

2011-05-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

You've scarcely heard from me all month, due not to a depressive writer's block but to crazy activity keeping me constantly hopping. I will use this post to update you on a few things, followed by a tribute to Gil Scott-Heron, a favorite poet who died May 27.

One of the bigger challenges of the past month was getting through May 14. I gave a workshop at a local evangelical church on global economics and the new slave trade during the day, and hosted a house concert of Bev Barnett and Greg Newlon at Kevin and Diane Lindholm's in the evening. A bit chaotic, but all was well. Living Hope Covenant Church provided a video link of my talk here, though at over an hour, you can be excused for not watching it all. Bev and Greg were having a wonderful mountain tour, and the weather obliged by snowing ever so slightly in Monument late in the evening. Here's a sample of their concert, with more songs on my YouTube channel:

Busy month to challenge powers that be with signs and slogans, but you've seen enough of those. I also had two friends die unexpectedly at very young ages during the course of the month, so I wrote them a poem that also goes out to someone who just left a bad marriage:

The Winch of Reciprocity

For Sean. For Clem. For Karen.

Five broken ropes translate the lies behind
the echoed hollabeck of reverberating promise.
I’ve got your back.

Most often met with the fumbling cockpit belt,
the rope burn of acidic tears
for both a gravity and an escape velocity betrayed.
You choose instead to move three teeth up
the ratchet and pawl,
the lips pulled back in sputter of red balloon,
gums at Mach 4,
a second-stage separation for unpowered flight.

I am that silver shadow on the high-res magnification
of a torn and wrinkled sepia aerial reconnaissance photo,
two-thirds across the minefield,
shuffling in north-by-northeasterly vector.

My two hiking companions
noted only by the shreds of clothing and random body parts
that might be dribbled pbj on the wide-angle minefield view,
but for the cirrus wisps,
manifested as cries inaudible through a sealed cockpit window.
Would you die for me?

I crane my neck to watch you
enter an atmospheric layer where promises are invalidated.
I put my best foot forward.

Loring Wirbel
May 15, 2011

...And Unlawful Humans

2011-05-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

It certainly was a productive weekend - first, precision-guided NATO bunker-buster bombs take out Saif Gaddhafi and three of Moammar's grandsons, then a SEAL team with sharpshooters scores Big Daddy, Osama Bin Laden, with a bullet in the left temple, and he is unceremoniously dumped at sea. And stock markets are up, jubilation is universal, and.... Ooops, here's CNN's correspondent in Pakistan, not only explicitly using the word "assassination," but saying that the civilian government of Pakistan wanted to make sure everyone knew that its agents were involved on the ground with the SEALs - and the Pakistan government was trumpeting the word "assassination" in public. In the 1970s, the CIA was raked over the coals for aiming at Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro by name. Now, the targeted assassination is a useful tool in the quiver, recognized as legitimate the world over.

Full disclosure - although I am a peace activist, I am not a pacifist, because I do indeed believe that there are many people on the planet who look better dead, and I'd place all members of al-Qaeda and most members of the Ghaddafi family in that category. But my concern with semantical trends began with the Bush administration's use of the term "unlawful combatants" following the Sept. 11 attacks, which I discussed in a blog item last week. I am convinced that, should Moammar Ghaddafi attempt to bring up the killing of his son before some UN body as a "war crime", the U.S. and many of its Western partners (not just NATO members), would defend the new methods of targeted assassination as addressing "unlawful humans." And just as an unlawful combatant does not deserve the protection of Geneva conventions on POW treatment, an unlawful human has forfeited his/her human rights. Be aware how willing many world leaders are to expand the scope of the targeted assassination. Vladimir Putin thinks that any believer in a Salafist/Wahhabist school of Islam has forfeited human rights, and has no defense to suggest remaining alive. And, as I suggested in this blog a year or two ago, what happens if the U.S. develops a weapon that can disrupt brain cells based on analysis of brain-wave patterns showing adherence to a catastrophist religious/political doctrine. Can we conduct assassination on the grounds of the unthinkable thought?

The poem below was a droll image of the head on a pike, the result of watching Game of Thrones at the same time as watching the presidential mesage of May 1. Yet it's not so far off. An artist from a Christian organization circulated a triumphalist image of a U.S. soldier carrying the bloodied head of Bin Laden. Onward Christian soldiers, we've got plenty of unlawful humans out there. But how often do some of us have to whisper, whine, scream, "Be careful what you wish for!"

Mixed Messages Amongst Crusaders

Two Bose speakers, sinusoidal cancellation of sound
The third episode of Game of Thrones
A president talking about SEALs gone wild
The only image through the bandpass filter
is that of a head on a pike,
marched around a cobblestone square.

Loring Wirbel
May 1, 2011

Ghost Pepper Jampong for Dinner, Infinite Licorice for Dessert

2011-04-30T19:37:00.000-07:00

Our taste sensation begins with a poem challenge during National Poetry Month for the recipe style. I was experimenting with strange blazing soup concoctions and having strange dreams as a result, anyway, so I offered this recipe. Note that the Jalokia (spelled by preference with an "a", unlike the Melinda's bottle at left), has been displaced as world's hottest by the Naga Dorset, not available in the U.S. since it is considered a crowd incapacitant and would be subject to ITAR arms regulations. It is sold in Sainsbury's in the U.K., though not to minors and not without the proper handling:

Simmered Naga Jalokia and the Party of Silence

2 cups jampong from Jackson Creek
1 T garam masala, the old jar in the back of the cupboard
2 optional fresh jalapenos, roasted over a gas-stove flame
5 fresh basil leaves, as faux fresh as one will find them in a Colorado April snow
¼ c of the stuff in the green Tupperware at the back of the refrigerator,
apparently chutney of some sort, don’t ask questions
½ t Naga Jalokia sauce, there’s a reason they call it ghost pepper

Prepare in industrial kitchen, preferably the kind with open windows so that customers may watch the sous-chef. Poets who believe in the walled-off preparatory process are not to be trusted, mistakes and spills in preparation must be visible to all. Appropriate mental state is achieved after a four-hour excruciating board meeting and a drive from Denver in an ice storm, chef must be rash in adding ingredients of uncertain genesis. Roast the jalapenos over the gas stove for promptness, rather than a proper oven sweat, so that random items in the kitchen may be set on fire to add to the show. Ignore cries from family members who say naga jalokia so close to bedtime may be dangerous to the large intestine and the subconscious.

Steam jampong over an open book describing the 1915 assault on Gallipoli. Whirl the basil as Mustafa Kemal moves up his troops for the anticipated Australian meat-grinder effect. Shrimp and soba noodles may be slurped during trench atrocities for proper emphasis. Shout “Third Ypres! Third Ypres!” because Carolyn would want it that way.

Collapse on dog-hair-saturated mattress. Dream of the cocktail party in some kind of open court, perhaps the veranda of an adobe mini-mansion, but more likely a bombed-out shell in Trebizond. Your oldest friend is there, try to catch her eye, she denies the gaze, will not speak, even though you sense no hostility. A terror more complete than dreams of zombies or trench warfare. Maybe you are not at the party, maybe you have left this life, maybe that’s why they call it ghost pepper. You search for socks in ruins of a dresser that may have suffered a direct hit by artillery shell.

For variety, final five ingredients may be added to tom yum gai instead of jampong. Lather, rinse, repeat. Return to the party and ask why.

Loring Wirbel
April 27, 2011

***

For dessert, we offer a treatise on infinite parallelism and the pink and white candies known as Good & Plenty. Impetus for this was the remarkable film starring Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole, which has since become my favorite release of 2010, and in my Top Ten of best films of all time. Many reviewers found it unbearably depressing, but I found it infused with hope and possibility. We watch two people with different conceptions of coping with intolerable grief, try to find ways to respect each other's expressions of grief. And we watch Nicole learn two things from the teenager indirectly responsible for the death of a family member: 1. The parallel existence of an infinite instantiation of lives helps redeem us from grief. 2. When grief becomes unbearable, turn it into a cartoon. Those are two of my mantras, hence my obsession with the film.

But wait, there's more - assuming one believes in the Hugh Everett "many worlds" theory of infinite numbers of our selves living through the infinite variety of decision points we face in our lives, I have always pictured the collapse of the wave function that Patti Smith calls "the sea of possibilities" as the bow shock that follows an object on descent from space. And because of that, lives trace out trajectories that can be modified slightly in the trick we call "free will," though are unlikely to undergo major modifications at the bow shock, because at that point, a new universe is created. But that assumes a bow shock moving at the parabolic speed of a descending rocket. What if the decision point is on board a pokey little steam engine, driven by our old friend Charlie Choo-Choo? What if he has an infinite number of Good and Plenties to represent each possible bow shock, each possible decision point? What if there is always time to throw the switch? If the train should jump the track, do you want your money back?

But wait, there's more. Statisticians love to befuddle people with the Monty Hall Paradox, named for the former host of Let's Make A Deal. It says that if you choose Door 1, and Monty opens Door 3 to show a losing choice (what Nicole might call "the sad version of us"), it is always mathematically preferable to switch your choice from Door 1 to Door 2, even though the disclosure of Door 3 gives you no information about Doors 1 or 2. There is no reason this should be true, but it is demonstrably true, time after time. It holds true for any number of doors, briefcases, or Good & Plenty candies, and hence should be used for modern games like Deal or No Deal. Even if the worst of the choices, the sad version, the loser, has been disclosed and removed from the bow shock wave front, it behooves you to switch your choice. This is a remarkably subversive notion.

Bow Shock

“Maybe this is just the sad version of us.” – Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole

“The Monty Hall Paradox is a veridical paradox, in that what seems to be odd and scarcely believable, is demonstrably true.” – Marilyn vos Savant

Collapse of the wave front of possible yous
Always presented itself as a rocket’s trajectory
Child of Apollo assured by Mission Control
that a returning Gemini capsule would never implode
So your possible futures were annealed at that
exoatmospheric edge we nicknamed free will.
You adjusted that dial labeled ‘attitude control.’
Your course corrections fine-tuned Kwajalein Atoll.
But trajectory was trajectory,
Old souls intersected on re-entry
Amidst G-forces too enormous to turn
a glancing bow shock into parallel harmonics.

Nicole’s roll of a many-sided Hugh Everett die
Made me toss the rocket for the Choo-Choo Charlie.
Is there a wave front tailored for Thomas the Tank Engine?
A think-I-can escape velocity?
Consider the infinite alternating pink and white licorice,
Parallel now upon parallel now upon parallel now,
of course each box has its singular dried bad candy,
a sad version bow shock.
That is what spitting’s for.

Charlie says
conductor guides the brakeman.
Charlie says
each divergent track is yours.
Charlie says
we can replicate the horror
But the Good and Plenties reveal themselves
as Monty doors.

One minor course adjustment.
One switch to siding where little Nell is bound to track.
Always more Good and Plenties.
Let’s make a deal.

Loring Wirbel
April 30, 2011

Happy End of National Poetry Month!

Unlawful Combatants, Unlawful Prison

2011-04-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

Any fool could have told you that as soon as The New York Times compiled and interpreted its WikiLeaks collection on the prison at Guantanamo, the Obama administration would come along and blame the messenger (Assange and Manning more than the media itself), and refuse to discuss the content of the Gitmo papers. After all, this is the administration that gave up on its plans to close Gitmo, gave up on its plans for civilian trials for detainees (back to military tribunals), gave up on efforts to end the National Security Agency's FISA bypass. In fact, I think that Eric Holder has fallen so far into the secrecy domain, I would classify him as an attorney general as reprehensible as John Ashcroft. And that is a sad state of affairs.

There's a factor of a blind spot of the nation-state that makes the statements of people like Diane Feinstein and Joe Lieberman as creepy as those of virtually any Republican, or most members of the Obama White House. They all want to throw the Espionage Act at Assange, Manning, and the media outlets that publish WikiLeaks, for a very specific reason: the WikiLeaks project undermines the legitimacy of the nation-state, and suggests that when a state gets too powerful, its regular mode of operation becomes too dirty by nature to allow the state to operate comfortably from a position of transparency. I have to applaud the editorial in the Winter 2010-11 MERIP Middle East Report with describing this tendency with an accuracy few other analysts reached.

A couple months ago, I wrote a poem called 'The Legitimacy of a Naked Manning' in which I used the words "legitimacy" and "assume" very deliberately. The poem concluded by suggesting that 500 years of the Westphalian system of nation-states was no more legitimate than Bradley Manning's piss. The intent of this poem was not to pose the case for utter nihilism, saying that the state was so illegitimate that all sources of political power and authority should be torn down immediately and replaced by 40 acres and a mule. Rather, it was to say that nation-states help make people's lives run in a smoother fashion, particularly with the rise of complex technical bureaucracies, but that we should not grant them any automatic assumed viability that is any greater than a single individual. If Julian Assange shows that the emperor has no clothes, it is just as legitimate as if a political leader says so. Similarly, just because the U.S., UK, Russia, China, et al. have owned nuclear weapons and cryptographic infrastructures for more than 50 years, they are no more legitimate as "keepers of the keys" than would-be nuclear states. We assume certain things about the realities of power to make our lives easier to understand, but we should not assume that these shorthand descriptions of nation-states and power bear inherent legitimacy.

That being said, I will surprise some of my friends in progressive movements and in the ACLU by saying that George Bush and Dick Cheney got a concept half-right when describing Gitmo detainees as "unlawful combatants." These are individuals who seek to attain unachievable goals, like restoring the Third Caliphate, by declaring war on the entire planet. Does this make the detainees unlawful human beings who have automatically forfeited human rights? Of course not. But the Bush administration recognized that, once a jihadist or other form of non-state fighter rejects the globalized system of the nation-state as the source for legitimacy, that jihadist becomes an "unlawful combatant" under the global system of law, who should expect the combined states of the world to array their full powers against the combatant, even if it is a single person or a handful of jihadists challenging the world.

In this sense, the unlawful combatant is not unlike Randy Weaver, challenging the FBI at Ruby Ridge back in 1992. Right-wing anti-state conservatives wanted to make a martyr out of Weaver, because he declared himself an autonomous being, inside the boundaries of the United States, ready to wage war against the state. Once he made his mind up to be autonomous and armed, Weaver and his followers should have fully expected federal forces to drag out tanks, APCs, even tactical nuclear weapons, to put down anyone who armed themselves and challenged the legitimacy of the state.

Does this mean I rationalize Syria sending tanks into Dara'a to preserve the state? No, because the protesters there are practicing nonviolent massive civil disobedience, against which any use of force is illegitimate. What about Libya? Tougher question, because the rebels are armed, yet Ghaddafi himself is illegitimate. What about the U.S. using armed drones? The drone is the cheapest, quickest way for a state to declare its legitimacy against the unlawful combatant, yet it quickly extends itself into a general robotic war of the powerful against the powerless.

At the end of the day, the jihadist, anarchist, or nihilist who takes up arms and declares the entire nation-state system to be illegitimate, should expect and prepare for any and all tools of war to be used against the rebel. Only the power of absolute and total nonviolent disobedience can bring down the state. But in the meantime, we should not grant any legitimacy to a nation-state trying to preserve, wield, and hide the dirtier aspects of its power, and we should praise the WikiLeaks backers of this world for trying to expose that power. Assume nothing, legitimize nothing.

Monster Magnet Takes on the Catastrophic Death Angels!

2011-04-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

(A word of explanation - April 19-20 was unusual - an evening presentation by two former death-row inmates, followed by an overnight toxic gas leak that forced the evacuation of half my town, and word that Gerard Smith of TV on the Radio had died of lung cancer. The only way to process it was as an adventure cartoon.)

for Gerard Smith, and for Marianne

Marianne knew that all the crap about the surface-sensitive patch
clinging to a microcracking tank car was solely to justify
the BNSF team coming up from Texas and Arkansas,
miming in yellow jumpsuits for the yokels skeered
to touch the HCL remnants.
Make it sound scientific.
They're evacuees, after all.
As far as she was concerned,
fate hung on Monster Magnet,
one of a dozen Wham-O heroes
who could whomp X-Men,
Justice League of America,
with equal abandon,
and lift up to 20 pounds of steel!

But the story doesn't begin here.

He is the one who comes after me,
the straps of whose sandals
I am not worthy to untie.

Seven hours before the toxic cloud,
Shabaka and Juan were telling us
how to wait to die,
how to dream of the master executioner,
how to hurt your own hand.
"It's the toothpaste-tube theory of hope," Shabaka said.
"No matter how flat, you can always squeeze
a day's worth of hope from a tube."
Index fingers wiggle from eyebrows.
"Do I look like the devil?
I was the only one waiting for the angel of death.
Was it the prosecutor? Was it you?"

Juan sought vengeance on a nurse practitioner
stuffed with Red Man chewing tobacco.
"The death row brothers taught me
the silly ways of anger,
'Hey Puerto Rican Johnny!'
they would call,
'Learn to read! Learn to write!
Learn to speak English!
Learn not to hate!'
And some were Muslim, some Buddhist, some Christian,
but I left them condemned
when my walking papers came."

You will be visited by two spirits.
Prepare ye the way of Monster Magnet.

Reverse 911 calls at 5 a.m.
serve as proof no prophet is accidental.
Death angels are common critters
on a Maundy Thursday eve.
A pressurized tank on a rusting siding
sang an executioner's song in faint hiss.
The 250 imitation-Sendai wanderers
paying homage to Grace Best
dodged this particular bullet
with the grace of higher power and Monster Magnet
which is more than one could say
for the flamenco guitarist from
SUNY's cookie mountain,
paid purchase just as evacuations commenced,
and even the Lorentz force of a Monster Magnet
had little influence in the matter.
The Church of Wham-O
taught me the grace of cartoons and extra digits
six finger six finger man alive,
how did I ever get along with five.
The eulogy of Bullwinkle.
The tennebrae of Sponge Bob.
Disney's Flowers and Trees for a misplaced Gerard.

But the story doesn't end here.

This day gone flat from one too many evacuations,
and the shadow of the gallows of your family tree.
But a flat tube still holds hope,
and Monster Magnet still has pull.

Good thing.

The second-tier Wham-O's in the bullpen
are all nondescript Superballs, Hackysacks.
And by last count, there seem to be plenty
of catastrophic death angels in the neighborhood.
If you don't like the look of today's catastrophe,
give it six hours.
Another will be along shortly.
Looks like a job for Monster Magnet.

Loring Wirbel
April 20, 2011

A TV on the Radio song in memory of Gerard Smith:

A Late Easter

2011-04-19T11:34:00.001-07:00

Where do we go now, Mom?

The Bedouin and Tuareg are old hands
at alleviating clutter.
Pull four corners to the center of the old kit bag,
smile and move on.
Not so easy in Askewville, North Carolina.
Staying put in mobile homes is not
the optimal survival strategy, clucks the expert.
They should have known better.
When every piece of pocket detritus
is a sign of the True Cross,
How do I lay my burden down?

The liars call our pocket gadgets the new nomadic gifts,
but where is the nomad?
We drown far easier along the Via Dolorosa,
our Thingmaker churning out Creepy Crawlers
faster than a semiconductor plant on three-shift schedule.

One
You will die when your things take ownership of you.

Two
Here is your talisman your rag your toy your bone your cross.

Three
Why, look at Mr. North Carolina!
He’s fallen and he can’t get up.
Too many toys in too many pockets.
She’s no fun she fell right over.

Four
Where do we go now, mom?
Mama can’t drive with her cataracts.
You just leave her be.

Five
Let the Libyan carry the Creepy Crawlers
Can you lay your burden down?
Can you give him the baubles the Romans call
SAMs, cluster bomblets?
Is this weightless?
Is this giving it to God?

Six
Will you wake from your dream,
with a wolf at the door,
reaching out for Veronica?
(She’s not allowed to take your toys away,
but o that forehead glistens.)

Seven
Debt burden, underwater mortgage, skinned knee,
foreclosure, chapter 11, ow

Eight
Did you know the daughters of sorrow were
gathered at the Wailing Wall?

Nine
Steppe warriors are long gone now,
Tuareg sell their kids to chocolate merchants
(not allowed to nibble the ears).
Can’t sell your Skechers or Jimmy Chus to any
cut-rate T.E. Lawrence.
Nothing left to d0 but fall fall fall let’s fall.

Ten
And if each tornado-alley chorus of survivors hollers
“Death to fashionistas! Give us Barabbas!”
You know this movie score.
You become naked.

Eleven
Could not lay those burdens down.
Each Creepy Crawler
Each installment plan shiny object
becomes a nail for palm or ankle.

Twelve
Father, into your hands
I commend my Mastercard, Toys R Us
Clutter of the Bedouin
Where do we go now, mom?

Thirteen
The body that never went nomadic,
the shell encased in burdens,
may now be anointed.

Fourteen
Locked in a shuddering Earth,
no stones rolled away,
but sure smells pretty.

Easter came late to a resonant planet.
The weightless chased across a Mobius-strip Sahel,
The weighted in tombs of laid-down burdens.
Where do we go now, mom?

Loring Wirbel
April 19, 2011

Dreams of Past Lives, Dreams of a Fear of Dancing, Maddening Joy

2011-04-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

Happy National Poetry Month!

I now firmly believe in reincarnation and past lives, as I struggle to move closer and closer to specific memories of old souls I have known through multiple reruns. The first poem here is from a dream, a realization that grasping for specifics can be dangerous. The second poem is for another old soul, a friend who may be losing her ability to witness and embrace the absurd. Pleasant dreams, pleasant next lives...

Diving Cylinder

My dreams of late obey no time decorum.
The next disoriented 3 a.m.
leaves trails of cowboy boots, guitar lessons,
hair at the back of her neck,
Lamaze classes, meconium,
kindergarten crises.
“Seven years,” sings Tuxedomoon.
“Seven years in one night.”

When I depended on snorkeling alone,
REM was reliable,
feeding hippocampus and movie screen alike
with familiar flashes of dead basset hounds,
body-snatcher doppelgangers,
the occasional sleepwalk to pee off the back deck.

Trying on scuba gear has been a subspecies of
Ambien zombie drives,
fearful and necessary exploratory dives
to Past Lives Marianas.
Too rich an oxygen mix?
That depends on the goal,
only the faintest echoes now,
but sound always traveled poorly underwater.

A warm September day,
a 1983 still called Bekaa,
began with my startled voice
in response to polite introduction,
“Oh. It’s you. I wondered where you had been.”
ended with languorous cunnilingus
in a cornfield ravaged by borer-worm.
The growing certainty that this breath
was hardly the first instantiation.

Now I’m accustomed to treasure-diving,
even in tectonic trench landscapes
gone ragged with tsunamis.
Rare bouts of insomnia
merely pull me nearer the surface,
While the nightly rituals return me
to the wetsuit.

Down to capture names
that are forbidden to own.
Down to trace each tributary of pubic hair
to its labial source.
Down to clap at phonetic teasers
promising relief from an Alzheimer’s moment -
Melanie, Marina, Malia, you were known otherwise.
Oh. It’s you. I wondered where you had been.

As I stagger to the sink at 3:45, I realize
the name of the pain, the groggy fear.
The bends.
In any subsequent forbidden dives,
the gauges on this tank are not to be trusted.

Loring Wirbel
April 5, 2011

Banishing All Semblances of Fun

It may have been the party of roustabouts
at your mother’s farmhouse
(admittedly a bad idea, it wasn’t me
who invited the lieutenant-governor to mix drinks).
I’ve always shied from Sangria spills
and the collateral damage of smashed end tables,
but your eyes did not suggest
a sanctuary from the boorish or a desire to be left alone.
The infinitely scarier message came from
two irises weary of the dance floor.

The Zen goof assumes an awesome responsibility.
Long past the first 12-step meeting or post-partum cry,
there is a shouldering of a standup comic burden.
We must wake from an epic failure and fall in love
with tedious or unfamiliar figure-ground,
part apostle, part Johnny Appleseed,
with a punchline capable of dispelling each random terror.
Some avert their eyes, some linger,
some fall twelve stories.
Some laugh hysterically another day.
Was it a random Japan that activated your dimmer switch,
or a specific tragedy too far?

The tightrope walker is here,
arm and umbrella outstretched,
spanning a landscape of atrocity rarely seen
since Belsen Dachau Hiroshima.
It is always your choice to stop watching cartoons,
but that may be the day the drones fly once more
over Shamsi, over Waziristan, over Djibouti.
The Zen goof assumes an awesome responsibility.
Lee Ann Womack croons almost imperceptibly
at the edge of hearing.
I hope you dance.

Loring Wirbel
April 12, 2011

Fractures and Fires

2011-03-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Way Gasps Fracture Myths

The way full-fathom stops
at an interchange amber
silence a freeway acclimatization,
Thus do ears flush residual
microwave background radiation
that was there for Pompeii
that was there for Clovis Man
that was there for removal of your training wheels.

Rapunzel’s one hiccup
grabs braid tangled mid-toss.
Apneatic freeze tag leaving remnants of Grimm’s,
Andersen’s, Scheherazade’s, Remus’s starchy tableaux.
Your president gurgles!
“Read me a story.”
But daddy and mommy and archbishop, Pharisee,
Leader Triumphant,
all left with nothing important to say.
Set bone! Set bone!

The moment of puffed cheeks,
of gills in the bathtub,
is the moment of no turtles all the way down.
No transubstantiation.
No Mostar-bridge troll for a Billy Goat Gruff.
No urgent-care indulgence for a faux blue-faced sin.

But remember,
before pedal hastens to metal,
the very same sup-sup now sucking your myth,
is the gasp that embalms the precise hypothesis
leaving us still-image now now and now
stifling knowledge-tree apple
returned to the vine,
with incisors’ reverse slo-mo healing made whole.
Asphyxiated shamans say it ain’t so.

But lights turn green.
Road roar resumes.
COBE background hiss offers a second lullaby verse,
while storytellers report gainful employment, for now.

Loring Wirbel
March 29, 2011

Reminders of Indian Gulch

An obvious plume over Morrison,
A Challenger contrail gone mad,
but none of the Hayman haze you’d expect
from a season of aircraft grounding.
Instead a Denver of clarity waxing unseemly,
brilliant Arapahoe sunset violating its own loitering right.

"Why are there fall smells everywhere?” Regina asks,
“I’m thinking s’mores and high jumps into leaf piles.”
“It’s the Golden fires,” I say,
unable to erase the image of a ministry building on the Nile
and a thousand other conflagrations from a year of plumes,
a year where fire and water and air
went looking for earth,
while we went looking for s’mores.

Loring Wirbel
March 23, 2011

ICU Waiting Room

2011-03-18T20:16:00.001-07:00

How many flat-panel images have been banished
from that damned Samsung pixellated wall-mount
harvester of tears,
In the naugahyde clusters where
the filter-tipped death sentences
the measured pace of pall bearers
were proscribed 7,000 patients ago?

Today, all I.V. drips arrive with another dozen dying
in an emirate square.
Today, portacaths are inserted in time with
the tango tap-tap of NATO bombs playing drum circle
with Tall King and Spoon Rest radar.
Today, intubations come free with potassium iodide pills
providing false solace for the plumes swirling,
even now, on rooftop ventilators of Beth Israel.
And if you act now,
perhaps the next voice is not silenced.

How do you favor your agony, friend?
Bedside immediate relatives and significant others,
Where your hand caresses the rough-hatched textiles
to surround the apparent thigh and calf
of persistent vegetative state,
Listen for the steady beep of lifelines?

Or in waiting room purgatory,
solitaire hands unplayed,
Grisham novels tossed in splayed spines,
hyperalert for the raised eyebrow
of a physician that never arrives?

The blank screen is not allowed to nourish me.
So I imagine a gymnasium in Sendai
and call it waiting room.
I imagine the tamped earth of Saudi border
and call it waiting room.
I imagine the uncomfortable seats
of UN Security Council
and call it waiting room.
I imagine the sand traps unfolding across
an infinite Sahel line,
called metastasis in the local vernacular
of cruelty on the public square
But I call it waiting room.

Shorn of emotion, exposed as Worthington
blares through ear buds,
“This is my son in whom I was well pleased,
and you bastard.
You bastard, you just sat there.”

Sitting, of course, insures a fresh coat of cesium
from a hospital ventilator,
an extra alpha particle in the ICU.
None dare call it solidarity.

Where, when, how to sign the
do-not-resuscitate order.
You bastard, you just sat there.
The millions before me form an infinite recursion
of victims on life support,
trapped in fun-house mirrors.
Who’s ready to listen to that many beeps?

Loring Wirbel

March 18, 2011

Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Those Pesky Unknown Unknowns

2011-03-17T17:39:00.001-07:00

Ive done all the worrying I can worry about the folks in Sendai prefecture and the unstable fuel rods at Fukushima Dai-ichi, and I just can't worry no more.

I've done all the worrying I can worry about the UN voting for a no-fly zone and air strikes to enforce it, and whether the strikes will come before Ghaddafi takes Benghazi, and I just can't worry no more.

I've done all the worrying I can worry about the despicable King of Bahrain and his proxy Saudi army, their obliteration of street protest proceeding even as the U.S. Fifth Fleet sits in its dry dock and watches, and I just can't worry no more.

So Bruce Gagnon and Dave Webb and the folks at the Global Network asked me to worry about something else, so I compiled a list of recent space launches of the National Reconnaissance Office, an article I reproduced below:

17 March 2011
NRO finds plenty of ways to burn through $15 billion annual budget
By Loring Wirbel

At a time when all other military operations are being asked to scale down by 8 to 10 percent to comply with a “reasonable” annual Pentagon budget in the realm of $500 billion (discounting ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan war costs), military space is as profligate as ever. The biggest attention has been paid to the billion-dollar launches of robotic space planes from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force, even though the Air Force’s X-37B “space plane” is shrouded in secrecy. But the most active client at Vandenberg and Patrick (Canaveral) Air Force Bases over the past year has been the nation’s largest intelligence agency by budget, the National Reconnaissance Office.

A half-dozen launches under NRO auspices have taken place in the past seven months with virtually no public notification, with at least three more NRO launches scheduled in 2011. The broad nature of the intelligence programs managed by NRO is cited as the reason for the agency’s budget moving up to approximately $15 billion a year, eclipsing the budget of its closest contender, the National Security Agency, by several billion dollars, and that of the CIA by almost $10 billion. Several gargantuan satellite systems have been updated in the last year, including Advanced Orion listening satellites, Improved Crystal optical spy satellites, White Cloud/Ranger Naval reconnaissance satellites, Satellite Data System communication and relay satellites, FIA 1/Lacrosse radar satellites, and a shadowy NRO research effort called Rapid Pathfinder.

These programs have been augmented by military satellite programs with a higher public profile, such as Global Positioning System 2E-1, Advanced EHF-1, and Space-Based Surveillance System 1. While the costs of classified and open military space launches often can be obscured by budget transfers in the “black budget”, the fact that NRO’s overall budget is in the neighborhood of $15 billion, while the overall annual costs of military space are believed to be $70 billion, indicates that military space launches of satellites and space planes amount to tens of billions of dollars a year.

The highest-profile launches of late took place in April 2010, when DARPA launched a space glider, HLV-1, on the same day (April 22) that the Air Force made the first test launch of the X-37B, an orbiting robotic space plane. The DARPA glider, which returned to Earth immediately, was conceived as an element of “Prompt Global Strike,” a series of conventional weapons which Strategic Command will use to conduct rapid-response warfare globally. The X37-B, while of possible use in Prompt Global Strike, is intended as a lingering, orbiting resource. The vehicle launched in April 2010 did not return to Earth until Dec. 3 of last year. A second X-37B test vehicle was launched March 5, 2011, with no indication of when it would return to Earth.

NRO launches moved into a busy schedule as soon as Barack Obama took office, with a launch of an Advanced Orion signals-intelligence satellite, which listens in to civilian communications from space, taking place just before the inauguration on Jan. 18, 2009. The Advanced Orion, also called Mentor, has been called the “largest satellite in the world” by NRO Director Bruce Carlson, with an antenna span in excess of 100 meters. The fifth such satellite in this class was launched Nov. 21, 2010 from Cape Canaveral. The prime contractor for this multi-billion-dollar satellite has never been revealed, though Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman are both believed to have major roles in subsystem development.

On Sept. 20, 2010, a synthetic-aperture radar satellite was launched by NRO on an Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg. This satellite was an element of the “Future Imagery Architecture” program and carried the name FIA Radar 1, though it is believed to be an upgrade of a radar program called Lacrosse. These are intelligence satellites that augment traditional optical imaging satellites through their ability to see through cloud cover.

On January 20, 2011, NRO launched an optical spy satellite from Vandenberg on board a Delta IV rocket, a satellite called Improved Crystal. This class of satellite is a follow-on to the “Keyhole” or KH-11 series, and resembles the Hubble Space Telescope in its overall size and shape. Improved Crystal is the Block IV series of this satellite, with extremely advanced multi-spectral imaging capabilities.

Two of NRO’s biggest mysteries were launched in February and March. On February 6, the agency launched a research satellite called Rapid Pathfinder Program from Vandenberg, on a smaller Minotaur IV rocket. This satellite is believed to test new listening, imaging, and communication techniques which may be used on full-sized satellites in the future. On March 11, the NRO launched its Satellite Data System 3 satellite, code-named Gryphon, on a Delta IV at Cape Canaveral. Although SDS satellites are described as primarily communication satellites, they are often treated with greater secrecy than working spy satellites. Most military communication satellites are run by Defense Information Systems Agency, but SDS satellites are run by the NRO. Some analysts believe this is because their primary mission is to relay information from Improved Crystal, Advanced Orion, and other spy satellites to ground stations in Australia, England, and Colorado.

Other communication and analysis satellites are managed in a more public fashion. Space-Based Surveillance System is a new network to watch other satellites in space, and the first SBSS 1 satellite, managed by Boeing, was launched Sept. 25, 2010 on a Minotaur IV rocket. AEHF-1 is an Air Force Space Command satellite network, contracted by Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman, which replaces the Milstar program with a more advanced, high-bandwidth network run from geostationary orbit. AEHF-1 is a substitute for a very ambitious and costly satellite system called Transformational Satellite or T-SAT, which was dreamed up by Donald Rumsfeld and former NRO Director Peter Teets, but canceled by a cost-conscious Congress.

There are more launch mysteries awaiting analysts in 2011. The NRO L-34 launch on April 12 has not been identified, nor have two launches slated for fourth quarter – the L-39 in October, and the L-15 in December. The latter launch uses a heavy-left Delta-IV, however, so it is likely to be a huge geosynchronous spy satellite. The April launch will probably go into a “Molniya” style highly-inclined orbit, which may mean SDS 3, or a “Trumpet” listening spy satellite. The October launch may well be another radar launch, like the one last September. What is certain is that military space launches are taking place in one of the most rapid paces in U.S. history. Despite the cancellation of some gold-plated programs like T-SAT, the Obama administration is overseeing a massive expansion of space intelligence.

#####

So aren't you proud of me? I gave you whole new categories of things to worry about! What's that? You're not satisfied? Well, just hold still, Ars Technica gave us a fine story this afternoon about contractors with the National Security Agency, including the little-known HBGary, who are involved in developing dirty tricks to take down WikiLeaks. There, that ought to put you in a perpetual state of panic. You're welcome.

"I got troubles, I got worries...."

Ten Centimeters

2011-03-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

Even a broken Gladwell can tell the correct tipping point at least twice an epoch. The 10-centimeter tip occurred in the days prior to the vernal equinox in the 2011th orbit following birth of the translator. A certain amount of irony might be noted that the tip occurred 48 hours before one more artificial slice of experience, change the clocks, refresh the batteries, leap forward leap forward. Ten centimeters might be enough to shift the first day of spring, leap forward leap forward.

The measuring mavens will show the data indicating the degree of subduction of Pacific Plate under North American Plate, but some of us know better. We could watch the sand tsunami in city after city as the days grew longer, taking its debris in Tunis, Cairo, Manama, then experiencing backsurge in Sa'naa and Ras Lanuf. We could feel the ground turn gelatinous under the dome in Madison. ("It feels like we're on an island." "We are on an island, knucklehead.") What is spoken for Sendai becomes Earth Island, the ball that tipped before the spoilsport could take it away and run home. Admit it - after the tragic failures west of Benghazi, after the midnight arrests in Wisconsin, you were thinking, "Wait for it.... wait for it.... wait for it...."

But if tipping points tip, is it cause for new hope or a ten-centimeter false spring? Confession: when a president hires bankers and corrects the State Department spokesman that Pfc. Bradley Manning is being treated just fine thank you very much, I've had my fill of hopey-changey. I anticipate no particular apocalypse, I do not await December 2012, but nor do I expect universal peace and understanding when the axis shifts. Hillary might call it reset, I call it stutter, but is it a stutter with anything to say? Most of the emergent language is unpleasant, a cooling-pump explosion at Fukushima Daiishi, drifting ships in Ishinomaki, one f-stop too close to the action in Crescent City.

This is the year, the decade of the aftershock, payment due, March 19 Super Moons, holding the slightest hope that the ride through one tipping point is enough. Human nature being what it is, the most likely scenario will be laughter, forgetting, ignorance, until the cascade initiates a second cascade, the real subduction. Then Malcolm gets to be right twice, oopsy followed by daisy. It is sunny and warm outside today, I won't fear the isotopes of Fukushima that may be in the air, but just go out and relish the extra spring ten centimeters may bring. But one short sharp shock can make you look like hell in the morning, and the most likely scenario is that this is the first of many.

Poems: Ekphrastic with Walker Evans and Mogwai, Brad Manning anger, and mistaken ecstasy

2011-03-09T08:50:00.000-08:00

If it weren't for Ruth Mowry, I wouldn't get the guilt level up to appropriate levels for updating this gol-durned blog, poor little neglected creature. It's been a busy time for poetry, since Colorado Springs is making the theme of its runup to National Poetry Month "Ekphrastic Poetry" - Poetry based on or inspired by works of visual art. There will be a big whoop-de-do at Marika's April 16, with artists and writers listed to the left, but to kick it all off, the Poetry West organization had Brian Barker of CU Denver and Copper Press conduct a workshop on ekphrastic poetry on March 5. Since Barker brought along a huge portfolio of Walker Evans' photography, and I still haven't gotten over the obsession in my teenage years with James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I of course had to pick my favorite Evans photo, with the result below:

Rivertown Apostasies (for Walker Evans' 'Main Street Faces')

Disdain of the downward glance
Hat brims 45 degrees from condemned.
Morgantown, Beantown,
collaboration or a temporary alliance?

Black-market vegetables,
the Capone we never saw,
Fallen in a Thunderbird stupor
or the getaway Schwinn of ruptured kickstand,
offering the rolled shirtsleeve as tourniquet,
but with every bank in failure who smirks at the fallen?

Loring Wirbel
March 5, 2011

I also realized after the fact that a poem from late February, based on a piece of music and the cover photo of Mogwai's Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, fit the ekphrastic definition nicely:

On Crying at Mogwai's 'Music for a Forgotten Future'

Some days, you just have to let out a primal scream – IdaRose Sylvester

I’ve sampled enough trails to brokenness
Minus a healing option
That missing doll parts
are the expected palate cleanser

Jigsaw pieces kicked under a walnut armoire
The wound of incomplete grown common.

The path to Chorro Falls admits no jaded warrior.
I see the cityscape in a waxing moon,
its back bay undisturbed
Still water to crusted sand
to cancerous mercury vapor Star of Bethlehem.
A pattern love enabled,
save the missing jigsaw.
This step in love, that step in love.
But mad belief does not replace a slate shelf
tumbling to the canyon floor.
Instead, this tightrope replaces one absent jigsaw.
Will the next?
My niece, priestess of high adventure,
is glad she did not fall to her death today.
I am glad that only the jaded turn around,
but so very tired of Godel’s incompleteness.

Why not a winter’s end
praising the melting ice carnivals,
Madison to Sana’a?
In Finland the finest hotels are carved anew
each year from blue ice
a crystal bed of consummate cum
a palate cleanser
But frosted concierge does little good
in the horse latitude of Carthage.
An ice sheet, a slate sheet
tumbles from a Siberian Camino del Rey
to the canyon floor.
So much for your revolution.
So much for the world made new.
So much for that jigsaw puzzle.

“Peaceful, peaceful!”
Manama moans.
I long to lift the Cabernet
to savor victory upon victory
to find my missing socks
but we always travel the path more broken
and that has made all the difference.

Loring Wirbel

Feb. 18, 2011

(If you click on the highlighted song title above, you'll find the music that inspired the poem. The truly obsessive can walk to Chorro Falls in the video below.)

Now, here are two other recent poems to conclude this mess. My friend Robert said that topical poems have a short shelf life, but when I heard about Bradley Manning being subject to new death-penalty charges and being stripped naked nightly in solitary confinement, well of course I had to offer this poem:

The Legitimacy of a Naked Manning

Synonym search in the Merriam put out to pasture,
a stolen NATO playbook,
assumes a dictionary legible to all.

No-fly in Tobruk
responsibility to protect,
assumes I voted a captive parent
in the last My Weekly Reader poll.

Dangerous toys in wrong hands,
boys in bound hands,
assume I trust my toy chest
to the warrant officer hiking nuclear football.

Goddess Diana of the thousand-day epoch of Harvey Milk,
leading our blessed prayer of Espionage Act
assumes I have witnessed her halo afire in a leaked life hereafter
Assange assignation assertion assume assume.

I assume nothing.

Myriad miles of copper-zinc pipes springing WikiLeaks
at each T-joint
carry less legitimacy than Bradley’s hands
testing the slipknot,
The five centuries of Westphalian honor,
nightmare, triumphalism,
more transitory than the piss spattered on Manning’s toes.

Loring Wirbel
March 6, 2011

And finally, to rejoice in all the myriad things done wrong in a banner year-of-doing-wrong:

Ecstatic Mistakes

What if neither tactics nor strategies are intended to work? – Kent Ingram

Wisdom attained from the error of infinite looping is merely Lesson One.
Yes, the dessicated nerve endings of the phantom limb
howl like gangrenous bone shard.
And yes, many students flunk early.
Just ask the wrong-angled pile of rag and bone
who leapt from the steak-house roof
in a dizzy stupor of self-imposed identity theft.
He is not having fun.
He will have to take an incomplete.

But that was first semester’s lesson plan.
We skip the obvious sociopath for now.
Watch the peristaltic bile in the healthy specimen
collect for each lover’s lie, each agile cheat,
an acid meant as solvent for chronic pain.
Now here comes the hard part,
take it to the bridge.

Installed the flange upside down.
I love my wrong.
Let my child hear the audible bile.
I love my wrong.
Conduit cut to the wrong diameter.
I love my wrong.
Defrauding the lover that mattered most.
I love my wrong.

Newbie first-formers chant “The things which hurt, instruct.”
You laugh past hurt.
Let the cartoon clown hammering his thumb
be your silly satori.
Every fuckup sparkles in prevenient grace.

Loring Wirbel
Feb. 21, 2011

The Remarkable Carolyn Srygley-Moore, In Print At Last

2011-03-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

(Full disclosure: The blogger holds no fiduciary interest in Tjgrszmk, nor does he serve as public relations agent for Ms. Srygley-Moore. He admits to being obsessed with Ms. S-M's poetry, and with considering Tjgrszmk Publisher Marilyn Basel a transcended being of immense superpowers. [Well, OK, Marilyn's going to publish a chapbook of mine later, maybe I'm a wee bit prejudiced. But still.])

Seems like it's been not quite a year since I discovered Carolyn Srygley-Moore's remarkable poetry on Facebook, and wondered why the hell she wasn't world famous already. This woman does not merely give us singular and astonishing poetry on a regular basis, but writes three or four remarkable poems every single day. Scary, almost. It may seem presumptuous or self-absorbed for her to name-check Plath or Rilke, but in Carolyn's case, her work is just that good. She's had some poems in online journals, has a short YouTube clip of a reading, but had not yet published a chapbook.

Enter Marilyn Basel of Tjgrszmk Publishing. Marilyn made it a personal goal to see multiple chapbooks of Carolyn reach the light of day. The first of a series, Memory Rituals: An Army of Suns, hit the streets at the end of February. Not only did Marilyn judiciously choose from Carolyn's prolific suite of poems, her ordering is careful and well thought out. I'm not going to sample at length from the poems because I want you to buy the book, but let's look at the opening poem, Contingencies, and its passage:

now. & now, I am to crouch, animal
scraping my poetry from the walls image by image.
flower, broomstick, snail shell, slug.

In the middle of the chapbook, I return again and again to the poem of couplets called Knuckles, White, and to the simple stunning poem on the following page, Fear Dissipant, that ends:

The sun is bright on the backs of my hands, like anchor.
I have never thought of the sunlight as an anchor, rather

Strings pulling the balloon past the tree line.
Rather that.

Some of Carolyn's poetry is frightening, tough-going in memories of madness and violence, but she is very redemptive and joyful by nature (she even subtitles one poem Is It A Healthy Plath You Want). Well, yes, since you asked, and Carolyn is a healthy angel.

Marilyn did a loving job of hand-assembling and stitching the book. She wisely chose to end the collection with Once Upon a Time I Was a Sleepwalker. I'm not going to excerpt that poem because you need to buy the book.

Democracy Haters

2011-02-11T18:02:00.000-08:00

Millions mobilized over three weeks' time, check. Standing ground without provoking those with guns, check. Effective use of flag to avoid charges of foreign interference, check. Decentralized collective actions in Suez and Alexandria, check. No violence (except for Mubarak's thugs), check. Appointment of a military council to appease the clucking of imperial overlords, check. Wow, something for everybody! Even Charles Krauthammer had to sputter a new position during a Friday afternoon panel on Fox News. This is one victory that everyone, left to right, can celebrate.

Not so fast. Rush Limbaugh called the Cairo crowds a "rent-a-mob of leftists", while Glenn Beck is sure that Obama was engaged with a secret socialist cabal that managed to bring down Mubarak even after the buzzard's Feb. 10 midnight hysterics. Something tells me this might be too much even for Roger Ailes. After all, Fox wants to preserve the illusion that its faux-populists are grassroots libertarians. The mask is slipping. Critics have known all along that Limbaugh, Malkin, Beck, Hannity, et al., take their cues, not from the populist right, but from the proto-fascist movements like SA Brownshirts and Patria y Libertad. These little observations from the Egypt days of struggle show where our friends really come down on the line - not with conservative or liberal protesters, but with forces of oppression.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with Dr. Amir Fassad's warning of the task still ahead in the Maghreb:

Heart and Lung

2011-02-06T17:09:00.000-08:00

Two new poems, one for MJ, one for Egypt:

Aortic Call to Prayer

Perhaps the amazed embrace of millions
can turn pumping asymmetrical.
Your two weaving fingers,
a hummingbird minuet
but an oscillatory fever as well.
Can I leap this far?
Will you return again?

I have watched my father gaily disengage,
a delightful way to say farewell.
No amyloid plaque turns faces strange
merely a toss of mooring ropes,
slipknots undone,
a harbor in a rearview mirror.
Distant marina obscures a canine carcass.
Skiff masts clustered in Wullenweber now.
Daddy greets green flash of sun.

I can’t wave from leaving trains.
Better a crisp lift of tone arm,
last breath in a thousand arms.
Your unceasing revelations display uncertain breaths.
No stutter, no fibrillation
can stop the next verse, the next verse,
the critical lesson.
I cannot blink I cannot miss this.
How to say goodbye.

Your two fingers bedaze hypnotize.
I see the red swim cap shaping octogenarian speedo.
Air Force Academy’s highest dive.
No apogee pause.
Withered body cleaves water,
as sure as the scalpel can find the aorta.
Towel dry edits gasp laugh gasp laugh
Every dive lets him fall in love with the world again,
a columbine waltz, a contra dance.

Your two fingers snap.
The diver, forgotten.
Yet I plunge and I plunge,
disciple to your weakened voice.
The unkillable human allows no dimmer control,
no skylight departure.
Bring every wallflower up to the line.
Alleman left and do-si-do.
No pruning of synapse –
Hold ever tighter lips ever lusher.
No face forgotten
until aneurism, TIA, aortic muezzin,
seizes the piston in mid-iloveyou.
Two fingers plunge.
Tone arm lifts.
I’m learning to lose at musical chairs.

Loring Wirbel
Feb. 6, 2011

Pleurisy

The alveoli lining is distressed property
Eruptive barking of sputum a foreclosure
an unpaid invoice
You listen to my rutting-elk breath of kazoo orchestras,
lamentations as collateral for the gumdrops of evil.
“and he was the kind one”
You whisper condescendingly,
for a prodigal underbidder
the cheater at Angry Birds
who would crack the foundation
drill holes in oaken I-joists.
Another tracheal bubble pops.
I gasp.

Alexandria, too, is a clinging for air.
Too many Maghreb decades can turn waterboard mucosal.
We no longer sputter,
But hack a glue of least resistance.
“Can you swallow the greenies that come after?
Hopscotch the pavement of vomit underfoot?”
Apres moi, chant a chorus of Pahlavi, al-Abidine, Mubarak
Kazoo orchestra for an unruly encore.
Egyptian streets, a George Antheil audience of poor sports.

Here’s one fallow lung
that will not cheat
in a tranched mortgage
a shuttered Cisco router
a misdirected tear gas canister
Let deluge be phlegm be library mucilage
The edifice tumbles, but suddenly we breathe.

Loring Wirbel
January 29, 2011

"Twitter Users Are Smug"

2011-01-14T06:51:00.000-08:00

The raucous two women that form the musical-comedy duo of Garfunkel and Oates have a snarkily culturally-incorrect song about the assumed superiority complex of pregnant women, "Pregnant Women Are Smug." I've been toying with revising the lyrics for power Twitter users, to reflect the sense of closed-circle smugness I've been sensing from power-tweeters of late.

Even though I'm a heavy Facebook user, I'm not trying to launch a new Microsoft/Apple-style culture war. Users of Facebook and LinkedIn rarely lead any passionate defense of their social networks. (Users of MySpace, meanwhile, remain on life support, heading to flatline, as the network laid off half its employees in mid-January.) After all, Facebook is the network with the CEO everyone loves to hate. Few get as worked up over Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as they do about the junior svengali of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Nor do I have a serious problem with Twitter's notorious 140-character limit for posts, even if the striving for brevity usually leads to superficial thinking. This is the result of any social network designed first and foremost for a handheld smartphone (or even dumb phone) client. No, my main gripe is the benignly authoritarian network architecture of Twitter, and the way its single-direction, one-t0-many multipoint topology is ideally designed for celebrities and PR managers.

Asking followers to engage in layers of re-tweets while urging them to "join the discussion" would not be so annoying if passionate Twitter advocates were up front about the network's limitations. When I call Twitter authoritarian, we should look at the root of that word: authority. Twitter's hub-and-spoke is designed for followers to pay attention to the central authority figures gracing each sub-hub, and to mouth what the grand poobahs of Twitter have to say. Sure, Facebook has plenty of re-postings, people with 1000 friends, and recycled information, but it is designed with a more peer-to-peer infrastructure. If social networks were high schools, Facebook would be the unique environment in which jocks, freaks, goths, and nerds were all on equal planes, while Twitter would be one with a built-in reinforcement of cliques.

Stone and Dorsey are not responsible for the aura or arrogance that populates the network lately, nor are the early Twitter users who have become power-tweeters by default. Rather, we see a new breed of market analyst and journalist promoting others to join a discussion that rarely is as rich as one on Facebook or LinkedIn - and not because of the short tweets. When people complain of Twitter being a confusing cacophony of tweet, they could just as easily gripe about Facebook being a noisy party of pretty pictures and videos, signifying nothing. But many of the Twitter complainers seem to subconsciously understand that they are being fed one-way communications, as evidenced by Twitter's language of followers and followed. Commentators like Grayson Davis were recognizing this funny celebrity-driven atmosphere two years ago, but their critiques were misinterpreted as being directed to Twitter's superficiality. Let me re-state this clearly, I'm bothered by Twitter's fascist network architecture.

Mind you, I don't object when press colleagues at EE Times, EDN, and other engineering sites chide heads-down engineers to use more social networks, with an emphasis on Twitter. God knows such vertical network users could use any improvement in social skills, as could many scientific and academic sub-communities. No, what I find offensive are the media mavens on Twitter who have spoken out in recent weeks against tactics such as cross-posting, assuming that a savvy media user will be Twitter-centric by design. No, not unless one wants to emphasize PR or celebrity life. I'm not going to stop tweeting on occasion, but I will spend the bulk of my time on more egalitarian network architectures. And power-tweeters should understand that they are driving potential Twitter users away by assuming an air of superiority for a network that has some profound issues on how it defines a discussion.

Violent Depravity as a National Pastime

2011-01-10T18:11:00.001-08:00

At the time of the Tucson atrocities Jan. 8, I was busy reading Evan Thomas's fascinating book on Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst, and their manufacturing of the Spanish-American War, The War Lovers. What surprised me was the degree to which Roosevelt really came across as a profoundly disturbed individual. I'm not talking about pedestrian-level machismo like the formation of The Rough Riders for the charge up San Juan Hill. That level of nonsense is commonplace in U.S. history. I'm talking about Roosevelt's belief that all diplomats were "hermaphrodites", because it was evil and homosexual to aim for peaceful negotiations to solve problems, when the only "virile" way to build a nation was to go to war whenever possible. I'm talking about his belief that it was necessary to instill both hunting and fighting in a child at a young age, because the more gore one encountered, the better. Sure, he tried to shmooze up to the Progressives by 1904, but TR could never escape his Neanderthal, violent, and proto-fascist beliefs he expressed as a member of Congress and Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

It's fair to point out that in the late Victorian Era in which Roosevelt came of age, virtually everyone in the developed industrial world was pretty messed up. Colonialism had gone into hyperdrive in Africa, obsessive adherence to Social Darwinism and eugenics was considered cool, and Sigmund Freud could develop some rather odd theories about dream interpretation, female "hysterics", etc. etc., because everyone in the era Freud lived in was pretty wacked out in their day-to-day lives. Hmm, sound familiar?

When I posted a brief observation about TR on Facebook last weekend, a lot of people were wondering about the definition of 'mentally disturbed.' How could TR be so popular if he was so different? I explained that I don't define psychological abnormality by majority vote. If a person believes in theories that would be self-destructive or lead inevitably to large numbers of deaths, that individual is disturbed. If the nation/tribe/society/race/culture buys into that belief, then the group itself is collectively mentally disturbed. Germans certainly fit that description in the era between Bismarck and Hitler, Southerners in the antebellum era all the way up to mid-20th century, Islamic cultures in which a Wahhabist tendency is in the majority, etc. Yes, a society itself can be mentally disturbed.

Which is why pointing the finger at Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck for the crimes of Jared Lee Loughner is only partially correct. The strident and vocal standard bearers in the various Tea Party movements, exemplified in Arizona by the likes of Russell Pearce and Jack Harper, could not develop such a big fan base were they not enablers for a much larger group of people who take the Roosevelt way of looking at the world to heart. Using crosshairs in a gun sight to identify political opponents would not seem that strange to them, because they see politics as a zero-sum game in which one's opponent should be stuffed and hung on the wall next to the deer heads Sarah shows off on her Alaska show. Many progressives want to say that the lumpen proletariat would not be so wacko without a Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin to stir them up. I say we can assign a certain amount of blame to the chefs in the kitchen, but we also have to identify the problem at its source.

The Western industrial world and its former Soviet counterpart have lived through conquest and a Sparta-like culture since the Victorian era morphed into World War I, the Russian Revolution, and all that came after. The Asian and Islamic cultures that soon will be assuming planetary dominance from the Westerners are just as dependent on bloodlust. Yes, modern media reinforce these messages of killing and dominance, but those messages are also reinforced by the totality of myths and cultural determinants in all these societies. The peace-loving members of the Enlightenment movement (always a minority, even within the Enlightenment) never stood a chance.

In fact, that definition I gave for mental pathology earlier on, depended on rather unique circumstances - a rationalist, cortex-driven view of culture had to pass judgment on a mind that used its emotional limbic-cerebellar roots ahead of its cortex, maybe without even applying reason to the problem. But cortical rationalism has only been consciously favored since the beginning of the Enlightenment and the formalizing of the scientific method. For millenia before that time, the limbic system won, hands down. So violent depravity is bound to win out, it's got a long and proven history behind it.

You no doubt have seen the sci-fi films and books that talk about the creation of a rationalist clerical order that hides, like the monks in Lindisfarne, to preserve intellectual pursuit from the ravaging of the dogs of war. We're near that point in the preservation of rationalism and the scientific method, let alone the preservation of peaceful discourse. Now, in order to pretend that our society still protects diversity and multiculturalism, "proper" Republicans and Democrats may agree to criminalize a large part of the violent crazy movement. At first, rationalists may applaud, until the efforts turn into a generalized Palmer Raid, and we're living in a hyper-controlled state of the pseudo-rationalists, seeking to suppress our instinctual violence. The problem is, all such states live with violence at their cores, so their efforts to contain crazies are bound to fail. If the contradictions don't come to the surface in Afghanistan or Somalia or Cote d'Ivoire, they'll come to the surface in running gun battles between Tea Party cells and the forces of order.

Yeah, the vast majority of people in the Victorian Era were mentally disturbed. Majorities in many 21st-century cultures are mentally disturbed. And it's hard to envision an easy way to keep the crazies from winning.

Five Recent Poems

2011-01-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

Well, well, I've been remiss at re-posting poems of late, here's a recap of work from late November until now, oldest to newest.

Destination Tomah

A POWem per Marilyn Basel's lead

Blinking LEDs a semi-permanent landscape enhancement
"Tomah Road 14 miles" POW
For the love of God, why?
New dimensions in goal-oriented behavior
One KOA campground
The only emergency phone Monument to Castle Rock POW
Any pulloff becomes destination
"Congratulations drivers you have conquered Upper Lake Gulch"
My signs were never elaborate POW
No NY LA DC two-fers
Crossville Grand Ledge Tucson Palmer Divide POW
But each change in compass called home
its own Trail of POW Tears
Allie Hyperbole claims pets survive any move
with their very own squeaky toys.

I followed Upper Lake Gulch long ago POW
An 88 Oldsmobile ready for hospice
Scrub oak and mudbath POW
A forest of parabolic dishes behind hidden mountain.
"On-demand for the home.
We leveled the ponderosas,
but your new Ku-band forest
provides its own feast, POW, locally grown."
I turned tail for Tomah.

Four semi trailers and 29 cars obliterated Monday
in the suburbs of Tomah.
Not a one passing Upper Lake Gulch POW.
No home destinations of Denver, Cheyenne, North Platte, Salt Lake City POW
Tip the tow trucks, dear, for a KOA side trip,
your photo in Tomah POW POW
Again POW
Sudden POW run of squeaky toys, hot destination.

Loring Wirbel
Nov. 18, 2010

Initial Denial Authority

(My friend Bill filed a Freedom of Information request which was passed to a Pentagon office called "Initial Denial Authority". This explains a lot - and not just in terms of the federal government.)

The rigged Magic 8-Ball
calls home the negated universe
wrapped in icosahedral die.
Furies of abundance affirmation fertility
have stoppered the djinn in the orb of always no.
Shake for a sign.

A worthy conceit of favor returned
You, the one we were waiting for
Watch the facet of luscious,
Surely this pear can be plucked
But for a panel of Simons and a textbook committee of no.
Very doubtful.
Shake again.

A false-memory childhood abduction
Legos left behind, half-whispered "daddy".
When is joint custody sign of a tesseract tear,
When a promise of future food for giraffes?
Reply hazy, try again.

Tongue mango moist by sting of epoxy
Labia perma-seal a known docking station
Watch every sunrise from inside her eyelids
Surely fluids, minds merge
Nice try, my sources say no.

Then call upon fury for a splendor of gratitude!
Each day another measured victory step, minute source of joy.
See it? Absorb it? Engage or engorge
Infinitely, truly in love with each cell.
Very doubtful.

Call upon fury for perpetual ecstasy!
You may tremble, still loving,
Of the father's love begotten,
World without end amen.

Call upon fury to acknowledge, be fearless!
This day won over
This monster vanquished
This terror, cartoon
Following thread through the thousand-step labyrinth
Getting to yes.
Icosahedron tips in dense milk.
Let's not and say we did.

Loring Wirbel
Dec. 2, 2010

Pestilence of Dark

Taste me
Gale winds pummel the triple solstice bloodmoon virgin birth
Windows hum
One harmonic short of shatter
Yum

Smear your eyelids
Cross-stitch the lashes
Not one of 72 silent red diodes
is left to pierce a catastrophic retinal pixelslip of nought.

O holy light enough on a clattering lawn,
but none in your four-wall artifice,
silent box of black.
We let dreams leak this way -
The dark smudges any linear reference,
leaving the passage on a sea of chocolate,
dancing shadish with kindergarten blanket pals and TV celebrities,
as real as the tumble over sleeping dog that scars the forehead.

Taste the 72 percent cacao dark,
where fear is the nougat at a random wrapper's center.
Name your playground bully Dada,
anoint him proudly incoherent.
We know better.

Daybreak casts sequential shadows,
prettified intermittently in directional time,
but presented as offering in a stronger wind.
Red-tailed hawk plays Red Queen,
stationary hover, stay-in-one-place in a maelstrom of dazzle.
Rabbit stares intently, malevolently
from the downed ponderosa branch
mere hostel, never home.

"Her name was never La Niña.
Only one cage was left open.
She returns when the zookeepers abandon this place.
Our dance of liberation scarcely begins
when the layer of dark asperges blesses and condemns us.
Zookeeper remedies are nostrums elixirs placebos false flashlights.
You have done enough damage for this side of night."

Loring Wirbel
Dec. 21, 2010

Eugenics

Storage space exhales hantavirus dust
Through portholes of a beached container ship
Forgotten relics of that final millenium year
Where cash bled from each orifice,
Where failure to defraud was a sinful act.

These days I take tenor in a vast choir of Iron Chef ramen modifiers
Hantavirus dust spreads across a nation short of work, hope
We shut a locker to gain another $100,
Recovering evidence of credit-default swaps in an archaeological dig.
A winter breeze snatches the premiere issue of Darwin magazine.
Quadruple return on investment with non-existent web applications.
Imagine that.
This cough brings blood.

Loring Wirbel
Dec. 29, 2010

K-Day in the Trading Pits

A funny song spun from falling asleep watching CNBC commodity traders praise Freeport-McMoRan

Tantric buzz CNBC
Squawk Box copper commodity
Fast Money, rare earths,
Finding rare money in a fast, fast earth,
If we dig, K?

Freeport-McMoRan, all-time share high
Freeport, wasn't he -
JimBob Moffett, didn't he -
Time's a-wastin', polar cap meltin'
Explore is expand is exponential extraction
If we dig precious things, K?

Rio Tinto your target today
Who needs a Zuckerberg IPO?
Natural gas, coltan, gold in them hills
Open-pit silver, coal, heavier oil
Stripping another benzene ring
Is coming is coming is fracking the earth
If we dig precious things from the land, K?

Open sea lanes, Alert Bay to Petropavlovsk!
Full fathom five, bye bye to icebreakers!
A free Arctic sea for swapping the hydros
No rare earth as rare as a range war deferred
And the stock price ballistic, your hands never cleaner
We hide the dirt better than standoff-war blood
And her skin is stripped layer by carbon-ring layer
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
Koyannisqatsi.

Loring Wirbel
Jan. 4, 2011