People That Matter

What was that about a cacophony of mindless nastiness permeating everything in this election year? Sorry, didn't hear a thing. October was spent going to high school and college reunions, a tour of Midwest poet friends, a Guided by Voices reunion, and otherwise re-connecting with the ones that matter in this world. As for nonsensical nonpersons, forgive me if I have no time.

Let's begin by thanking the beneficence of the government of India for banning a conference at which I was going to speak, thereby allowing me to attend my 35th high school reunion in Grand Ledge, MI. My wonderful sister Lisa, and her husband Pat and son Alex, opened their home to us, reminding me how thankful I was to not have any dysfunctional siblings.

We did all those marvelously dorky things like attend the homecoming parade with Winky the Comet, go to the homecoming football game, stop at Gwen McLean's for a post-victory bonfire, you get the picture.

While the Midwest can seem a parochial place when you're far away, I not only remembered what a beautiful place I came from, but how the people in mid-Michigan are much more empathetic and kind than some stereotypes would suggest. I care about these folks as much as I did in the late 1970s.













People That Matter: My sister Lisa




People That Matter: Chico Rivera and Gwen McLean





On Saturday, Oct. 9, we hiked the Ledges trail and then went for a long spin to Dansville, where Don and Ruth Mowry keep a beautiful farm on one of the oldest roads in Michigan. Ruth is a poet, photographer, and tireless MSU English advisor who's been a friend since I was a wee sprout, and her husband Don is an elementary school teacher and former keeper of exotic chickens. Spending a couple hours with them reminded me why I like them so very much.

People That Matter: Ruth and Don Mowry

Some people dread high school reunions, particularly that post-25th era when we all turn visibly older and our bones creak something fierce. It's all too easy to ask "what did I ever have in common with these people?" In my case, I found plenty in common - Tom and Lori Cox were there, along with a universe of friends I still care about very deeply. Carol and I got gussied up right nice for this event:

People That Matter: Lori and Tom Cox

If I was to share the dozens of pictures and stories from 1975 classmates, you'd be bored silly and I'd overtask Blogger. Suffice it to say that no one went away sad, no fights were broken up, just a lot of hugs and silly stories. On Sunday, my nephew Alex and I went to the color tour at the Island Park, where a couple sang Cheryl Wheeler's "When Fall Comes to New England," with "Grand Ledge" substituted at the appropriate place:









Sunday night, former Surf City denizens Marilyn Basel and Sam Mills met us at Beggars Banquet for tales of present glories, "Burning Desires" and all, so much better than tales of past glories. Lee Upton and Rosa Maria Arenas were missed, but present in some fashion nonetheless:

People That Matter: Marilyn Basel and Sam Mills

(Did I mention, Marilyn followed us to Grand Ledge to spend a day wandering trails, visiting the Ledges Playhouse, and finding the necessary pince-nez so she could convince the world she was Amy Lowell, back for a second round? She certainly had me convinced.)


I had forgotten about the Popeye Rock, playing chicken on the train trestle (though Paul Baribeau should have kept that memory front and center), and what fun it was to hang out with the John Peakes - Richard Thomsen crew at Fitzgerald Park. Marilyn saw everything with new eyes, and shared special likes and dislikes with Carol at Lamb's Gate Antiques and Sweet Linda's.

The next stop on the way back involved an 18-hour stopover in Minneapolis. Andy Scheiber, a regular reader and singer at Jocundry's/Seed&Stamen/Invitation events, now heads the English Department at St. Thomas College in Minneapolis. Better yet, he's married to my high school English teacher, Mary Lou Sabin. They retain every passion they had when they lived in Lansing, and when they taught in China, which made dinner with Andy and Mary Lou so special.

People That Matter: Andy Scheiber and Mary Lou Sabin

Tuesday in Minneapolis concluded with the First Avenue stop of the reunited Guided by Voices, where I met poet and Iowa State University Librarian Extraordinaire Dan Coffey (oops, also new dad), and his friend Matt O'Neal, for a round of yo-hos for 21st-century bard Robert Pollard, chief kicker of his band of elves (that's Dan and Matt in the audience). Very brief sleep, and a flight home to Colorado Springs.


(But wait, there's more! - There's always more.) I got a day's rest, then it was time to drive to Omaha, where I was slated to speak at a peace conference with Mike Moore, former editor of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Tim Rinne fed us beers and Greek food before the Saturday conference, where the surprise was seeing Conor Oberst and Saddle Creek Records win the Peacemaker of the Year Award, and getting to meet Conor's parents, as their son was on tour yet again. But the biggest surprise awaited us at the place I was staying, good friend Frances Mendenhall's house, where her post-conference garden party turned into an engagement announcement with Alan V. (wish I could spell his last name).

People That Matter - Alan and Frances in their
Omaha-sustainable home.

The point here is not to assemble an exhaustive travelogue of my October vacation, but to gather a great big circle of the remarkable friends I've made over 30 years or so. This could have been an opportunity for final goodbyes in the event of an unexpected mid-season cancellation - it has already been a life more abundant than I could have dreamed - but I have a feeling this was merely a hello, to bring everyone close for another three or four decades to come, and to remember daily how much I love the folks that matter.

If you're feeling disheartened and exhausted with the invective and negativity around you, remember that these people don't matter. You matter. And this song is about you. And there are many verses left to sing.

Game Over!

First, let's clear up any misconceptions: I am the same person I was yesterday, joyful to a fault and utterly convinced of the worth of the human condition. I don't think people should avoid going to the voting booth in November to keep the Tea Party at bay, and I think there are plenty of things the average citizen can do to stave off disaster. But on Sept. 25, I was slightly more willing to snap up that Republican bumper sticker, "How's that hopey changey thing working out for you?" I was slightly more ready to mouth the anarchist mantra, "If voting could change anything, it would be illegal."

The feeling has been there in the background since Scientific American published a study a few months back, saying that on at least four vectors of ten, the environment has already passed the tipping point of irreversible damage. This is not an excuse for inaction, but a reminder that the world's a shit and we're knee-deep in it.

Yesterday, I saw the movie Gasland after heavy prodding from my friend Hilary, and I'm very glad I did. Josh Fox demonstrates that natural-gas drilling is perhaps the most toxic form of resource extraction, yet there is little that can be done to mitigate the poisoning and brain lesions, because Dick Cheney's secret energy-policy meeting of 2001 was set up primarily to craft a 2005 Energy Act that exempted oil and gas drillers entirely from the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Since hundreds of thousands of new natural-gas drilling sites now dot the U.S. landscape, it's almost too late for catch-up. And now several oil drilling advocates are actually rejoicing about the North Polar ice cap melting, since it will allow tankers to traverse the North Pole, making further exploitation easier. Shit, we won't stop until the last landscape is devastated.

Meanwhile, my annoyance with the present administration went up a notch on Friday when the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force raided peace centers and activists' homes in Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, South Carolina, and California. Oh, sure, they have great stories about looking for FARC and Palestinian connections, but at the end of the day, it sure looks like a Bush administration action - meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And this is not surprising. Obama and Clinton, as I am never tired of reminding everyone, were candidates of the Democratic Leadership Council. This is the minuscule range for change allowed in this country, yet it enrages the paleo-right to talk about "socialism in America." The only question left is whether the republic or the environmental landscape collapses first, but time's pretty much up.

Crystals, Annealing, and A-Ha Moments

The following two poems require a bit of explanation. 'Local Minima' was a proem (prose-poem) written in early August 2009, in an attempt to draw together problems in annealing algorithms and their relation to new ideas, with the repetitious faults one might encounter in the Tibetan Buddhist wheel of reincarnation. It deals with only two souls, albeit many lives, and one instance of crystallization. 'Local Minima' seemed unfinished at the time, though I performed it twice in 2009, with some random lines from Laurie Anderson's 'Closed Circuit.'

This past spring, I discovered the wonderful work of Liane Gabora and her 'Beer Can Theory of Creativity,' explicitly bringing the concept of simulated annealing into the apparently random process of creative enlightenment. Last week, I had a discussion with the astonishing poet Carolyn Srygley-Moore about the hidden math patterns of Jackson Pollock (which even Pollock himself was unlikely to be consciously aware of), and their relations to the random walk and traveling-salesman problem. She just finished a poem, 'reflections on a conversation with a friend,' which forced me to think about crystallization, melting, parasitic minds and emergent intelligence. Now 'Local Minima' has found its companion, 'Hive Crystals.' The two poems are NP-complete. They're a closed circuit, baby.

LOCAL MINIMA (for Jess)

My depth of gratitude for Clint Takeda’s simple words was not evident until the evening we leaned against the Knight Rider pinball machine in the long-demolished 15th Street Tavern, our inclined angles almost in parallel to the careening ball finding temporary traps in the pockmarks of David Hasselhoff’s painted face. Isobel was chanting, whispering perhaps, and it suddenly occurred to me the bardo pond looked just like the oscillating trap that those testing mixed-signal integrated circuits call “stuck-at-fault.” The bardo pond felt just like the point at which the energy daemon in a game of simulated annealing becomes “stuck at local minima.” The energy daemon felt just like the last pinball in the round.

Experts in genetic algorithms tell us that the energy required to overcome a local minimum is at least twice that to begin the process of annealing. From the point of view of the pinball, the valley walls are sheer and high, and the pond is cozy, maybe a bit warm for the mountains. There’s beer and brats for the beachfront property. Only that ominous I-70 sign warning truckers they have not reached bottom yet, reminds the pinball it is far from its poky little home, where its mother is no doubt greatly displeased. How does the pinball reach the flippers? In the wheel, the minimum quantum of energy is one lifetime. In pinball, the minimum quantum of energy is tilt. Twice the energy at go would suggest cheating at some point.

Western Missouri in 1842? Serb highlanders in 1942? Maybe the jerky pattern of those whispers is the sound of a record skipping. Call upon the gods of choice, but escaping the local minimum and leaving the canyon is a matter of chance. And the next annealing may not be the karmic destination you were hoping for. Maybe it’s best to sit by the pond in the bright sunshine and wait for the next streetcar to Pleiku.

Loring Wirbel

Aug. 8, 2009

Hive Crystals (for Carolyn)

Time it was the ones with guns
blotted my tears with tales of swarm intelligence, hive minds.
But if the living cell is a parasitic accident
the mitochondria as drone assassins
turn each instance of accidental grace
into the idealized snowflake,
the singularity of honey gone solid.

Emergent intelligence annealed is Jack Frost's friend
Each human hunch absent the need to know a frosted window.
One mind's stumble in an Ice-9 world
where every revelation begins with oops
with Honey Bear bottles in the solid entanglements
begging for a shot in the microwave.
Understanding introduced with a dose of Bisphenol-A.

Emergent intelligence melted, smelted
at a place where the crystallization moment
is lost in a Poisson pattern.
Worker bee's crystals embedded in dance.
Soldier ant's burden is and was weightless.
And the synaptic re-enactment enters the swarm.

Loring Wirbel
Sep. 19, 2010

Idiot Chic

Friends on Facebook know that this week, yours truly launched the "Idiot Chic" group, dedicated to worshiping the rise of know-nothing behavior in modern society, making art and humor out of the rejection of logic, discourse, and the scientific method. Is this cruelty? Is this irony? Hardly.

As David Thomas of Pere Ubu reiterates on his Hearpen site, it is important to rid yourself of an abundance of irony (or cynicism, for that matter), and say what you mean. OK, clown mask off.



An Irony-Free™ Site

In 1984, I was among a group of well-meaning clowns who ran a dog for president, under the double moniker of the Disgusted with Yuppies Party and the Stupid Toy Society. Though this was before the rise of Gameboys and smartphones, we could foresee the consumer world defined by its stupid toys. Revel in the madness, tra-la, tra-la.

Similarly, here in the 21st century, it was disheartening to watch Clay Jenkinson of Thomas Jefferson Hour get so disheartened over a "New Dark Ages" - sure, I agree with him, there is a surfeit of literacy and little concern for making a rational argument any more. In fact, large sectors of the political and cultural world stridently reject rationalism in favor of making emotional faith-based or authority-based arguments as a way of establishing identity. My old friend Sandy said that it's of little use to lament the passing of the Enlightenment - humans have been idiots through most of their evolutionary history, and are not going to change because you whine.

In fact, we are so busy spotting the two-steps-back, we fail to notice the baby steps forward. Sure, the society is getting scary-dumb these days, but at least in Western culture, we see few of the violent gangs to enforce conformity that we saw a century ago. Today, stupid is a fashion statement, an art form. If the three most common culinary icons in 2010 are bacon, cupcakes, and IPA beer, why fight it?

Hence Idiot Chic. Like the steampunk movement currently running out of steam, the rise of cultural vapidity requires a documentation, a celebration, a reference point. Dedicated web sites or blogs are too blase, Twitter fails to give us the cultural richness we need, but a Facebook group fits the necessary dumbness model. But for those of you who refuse to bow to Mark Zuckerberg's Frankenstein monster, consider this blog an occasional and indirect portal to the moron in all of us. Hail Idiot Chic.

Honor Among Witches

Here are two poems from late August I have been remiss at posting:

Restoring Honor and Yellow Pinstripes

(for a rodeo clown)

Some weekends restore more honor than others.

Languorous nickel cones, for example,
Plump eggplant A’s and T’s sighing searchlight pinstripes
in Fisher-Price choo choo rows
before McAllister pocket windows
flex valor in buckets
but won’t turn over for curse or blessing.

Or the ’57 Chevys overflowing from Rosie’s
Honorable keepers of keys left snoring in the lot
as an officer searches catacombs for an off-switch to alarms.
Restoration at a price, always a price.

If I still owned a timing light,
If I still cared for honor
Michigan’s loveliest pinstriper
could accessorize medal upon medal upon medal.

But I misplaced the dueling pistol,
sold off the rapier,
told the half-brothers that sisters aren’t strangled
for infidelities on my watch.
Honor leaves silvery tastes of beef tongue, dust motes
I wait instead for the instrumental moment.

Loring Wirbel
Aug. 30, 2010

*******


In a Land of No Witches


Goodwill trembles in the thistle-choked ditch
Fruit fly proboscis in each tear duct
Afraid to look at the aid administrator declaring
“Witchcraft has been banished since Lugard
bullwhipped the Niger.”

Emilohi weeps behind a battered door
Clothes with buttons
Only-thing-greater-is-God
dictate the separation of cups – Six of Cups? –
terror of spells, child abuse

Abby asks if the expansion of scientific inquiry drove miracles away
I tell her Lives of the Saints is a bullshit Bunyan tale
Goodwill begs there be no witches

The clinical saints march in cadence,
Forbidding clitorodectomal horrors here, there
eye of a newt, a purple flurp
a large, one-eyed, no-nosed nothing
The clerical saints panic, torn between exorcisms of choice
and a temporal alliance with the ancient ones,
living outside the law of Newton
Pagan priest, pederast saint, both in the last band
Of armed ‘Ndrangheta
Hawking hollers, “Come on out with your hands up!”

And as our rationalist gang plays Whack-A-Mole
We miss the hairline cracks seeping spells
Even still, even still
Goodwill trembles.

Loring Wirbel
August 27, 2010

When Nuns Bring Beer

Sister Barbara poured two perfect-head MGDs
Just as the sun’s neutrino vomit hit the upper atmosphere
She wondered out loud about reeling in the contemplative sisters
who dismiss the warmth of the barroom.
What fishing lure can return them to the necessary breath?

I reminded her that every Stylite needed to eat and shit
Even if it took a diocese force-feeder ascending that column.
The breath is here, the choice has been made.
But then again, Catholics always proved better at works.
A new crowbar might be required to pull a Calvinist ascetic
from the bubblegum stuckness of prevenient grace.

Not stuckness, Barbara smiled, stuck-in-againstness.

We could feel the corona spillover while we watched the condensation rings
warn us that the necessary breath is a closed circle.
Accept the gift, accept the terror of each anonymous death
without once averting your eyes.

What if the astronomers were wrong,
I thought as I got up to leave.
Maybe that walk to the car, a seach for auroral lights
would leave my bones pliant.
She wondered if a squid was any easier to reel in,
and reminded me of dozens of assassins, closer than the sun,
that might lurk in those last two hundred steps.
And besides, she said, you must finish your beer.

Loring Wirbel
August 4, 2010

Eating Habits: Two Poems for August Harvest

Sparse Nutrient

for Mitch Miller, whose death helped me remember Ray Heatherton's crucial role

monsoon timpani thunder cracks
dreams to Dolby 5.1 surround
as I sing of weevily wheat and cake for Charlie
lightning splits Ponderosa pine,
a revelation that Agnes of God was covering the Merry Mailman
all along
making manifest your tears during intermission
that left the leaven far from neat and far from sweet and far from dandy
Merry Mailman sang of heirlooms basil fingerlings
Big Rock Candy I am sure of these hymns
but only the next track played for the hailstorm shuffle
“I don’t want to play in your yard.
I don’t like you any more.”

Loring Wirbel
Aug. 2, 2010















Chemtrails

I. “My mother is toxic.”
Her hiss unwraps to a scream to be heard over warm bath of scramjet
as the waking me insists F-15s are not cropdusters.

Our Amelia makes no such distinctions
But an Adderall, any SSRI
is the minimum needed for biplane stunts
With second-seat status I sit back for the show.

First Mach 5 swoosh over fallow heart
counts back one –
the May morning a stealth bomber stammered my attic
counts back two –
a day before drones silenced aerial bombing forever and always
counts back three –
the fine dust of pleas, doing the best that she can, and her brother despised her, and it’s only
one payday and it isn’t dependence

Navigator claims no ancestral, antecedent poisons
only the pilot, only the pilot

The fence line approaches, pull throttle phallic and

Oh the genetically-modified hearts still in want of this dust.

II. In Mach 1 days Schwinn brigades
raced the town pesticide tanker
Pride in the Jack of Spades clothespin spoke and
Pride in the white sticky shower
Unaware then, molecules clung like a lonely biphenyl
Got milk, got dread and longing but we live Mach 5 now
Scramjets blast dust, sandblast tears, pulverize tangential bloodclots
to a featureless surface from a year with no corn.

Where boom resonates was two betrayals ago
She has breached the horizon for a soybean approach
counts back one –
foreclosures layoffs leave vapor-trail scarring
counts back two –
the broken doll for Green Giant desire
counts back three –
when dust cements thumb and index together
there are no pilot prayers to eat locally
only a pilot chant you never called you never called

Until the cropduster defining the maps of your own restraining order
has broken the sound barrier
leaving every combine sticky to the Iowa border
finding grain silo, missile silo jointly unsound
only then will her chemtrails
disclose the latent pull of what
all the local wheat farmers call collateral damage.


Loring Wirbel
July 17, 2010