Summertime Aural Affairs

You've no doubt heard me ramble on numerous times (on social networks, if not on this blog) about the perfect summer album of the year being The New Pornographers' fifth studio album, Together. This is their first undeniably A+ album, with every song a keeper, every song perfect for beach parties and endless sunsets, complete with four-part harmonies and riffs you will remember all summer long.






Still, there were more jewels offered up in mid-June, before a drought that precedes the August-September flurry of Arcade Fire, Strokes, Belle and Sebastian, REM, and Interpol (oh, and did we mention, New Pornographers' own Kathryn Calder with her first solo album? Watch out, Neko "I'm white trash and I will pummel your ass" Case!) To wit:

1. Laurie Anderson, ""Homeland" -- A remarkable, eerie work that takes off where "United States" left off. Yep, on beyond Sharkey or Strange Angels. It's imperative to get the full Fenway Bergamot experience by picking up the 12" vinyl single and "Pictures and Things", a companion to "Another Day in America." And if the CD/DVD pack seems pricey, it's worth it for the DVD in which Laurie explains how the harmonic violin works, and Lou Reed tells how he had to play dictatorial hubby-editor, to convince Laurie she couldn't use 106 tracks on an album, and that "Laurie can do anything except the practical You would not want her to be a tour director, or negotiate a contract." And Eyvind Kang plays violin, what more do you want? One of the year's best.

2. Devo, "Something For Everyone" -- OK, I admit I really wanted to hate this album after seeing the band on Letterman and Regis & Kelly. Of course I've always loved the Mothersbaugh/Casale crew, but in the late 80s and 1990s, they were getting pretty insufferable. If I never see another flowerpot.... Sure, in the new album they use all those idiotic catch-phrases like "Don't tase me, bro," but the end result is more than a 21st-century whip-it disco, though it will never be as scary as Devo's Booji Boy roots. Devo just wants us to consume and dance until the edifice falls, and that's OK for now.

3. Robert Pollard, "Moses on a Snail" - I won't go along with reviews calling this morose or inconsequential, but it is not a Pollard party album. Despite a couple upbeat songs, it is the Pollard version of a Michael Gira "Angels of Light" project - pensive, introspective, all that. OK with me, but if I could change one thing, I think the cover art is hideous, even if it's supposed to be ironic.

4. The Roots, "How I Got Over" -- It would be understandable to worry about Jimmy Fallon's house band going uber-commercial, but that's not what is going on here. They've adopted a chilled-out Gil Scott-Heron type of sound, except many of the songs are in a minor-seventh key, so they drift together as a continuing riff, with guest singers and rappers fading in and out, including such odd collaborators as Monsters of Folk, Joanna Newsom, and John Legend. And of course, since it's The Roots, you know the lyrics are culturally-socially conscious, if a little down.

5. Elephant Micah, "Live at WNYC" -- Many thanks to Gavin Hobson for saying this was one folkie voice I had to hear, and WNYC for making this a free "Spinning on Air" download (http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/spinning/2010/may/16/) Hearing this guy is like hearing Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer for the first time - not because Joe Connell's/Elephant Micah's voice is like Dave's, not because the lyricism is similar, maybe because they're both transcendentalists, though Dave was a Buddhist transc., while Joe is more of a Thoreau/Emerson type. Songs about canoes on Indiana lakes are about as direct as anything gets these days. Really worth hearing.

No Free Passes

I (too) often complain in this blog about the tendency by many to place individuals on pedestals, and grant them groundless coolness cachets on the basis of gender, ethnicity, past accomplishments in social realms, or general reputations of being past ascended masters. We have a chance to invent ourselves anew each day, and should strive to work for kindness, integrity, and worthiness in our daily interactions with other people. Snaring a free bathroom trip from the hall monitor tends to make the anointed lazy.

Now granted, this can get pretty difficult in figuring out how to weigh the integrity of artistic vision. I might grant that a misogynist wife-beater can crank out good prose, maybe that a transcendent vision even requires a but of antisocial behavior, but I'll be damned if Ezra Pound will ever make my pantheon of poets after all his years as a Nazi sympathizer. The personal is political, and personal faults do hamper integrity of (artistic/cultural/political) vision. Why is this so hard for some camp-followers to accept?

This came to mind in early June because of all the attempts I saw by some team players to excuse the inexcusable. Examples:

* Thankfully, few feminists today are ready to say that a woman winning a political race represents a victory merely because of her sex. It was good to see two former high-tech CEOs enter California congressional races, and I would have no problem seeing either Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina be declared Republicans with a message of fiscal responsibility. Where I have a problem is watching both women pander to the tea-party irrational conservative movement. Whitman was bad enough, spending her way to certain victory and making unsupportable statements on tax policies. But Fiorina has left the sane world behind, rejecting the reality of global warming and trying to sound like Glenn Beck's best friend. Is it any wonder some Hewlett-Packard board members wanted to remove someone this disturbed from HP management?

* Barack Obama has taken hits for everything from civil liberties to the BP oil spill, but few have noticed how much his recent actions with drones and Special Operations expansion, negate most of what he has said about zero nuclear weapons and a new National Security Strategy. Granted, his views on preventive war are not as extreme as Dick Cheney's, but as Ivan Eland pointed out at antiwar.com, what you say in public is not nearly as important as actions on the ground.

* I know I bore you all with my tirades as a confirmed Apple hater, but I tried to give design expertise its due when I got an iPhone as a birthday gift in late May. As I posted in Smartbook Blog, I loved the phone and its apps, but did not love my experience after the digitizer glass smashed only one week into ownership. I could forgive this not being covered under warranty, but I could not forgive the cult-like experience of entering an Apple Store, or the staff's refusal to admit that you can buy digitizers in the after-market. Apple simply is not a company that treats its customers (or partners) fairly.


So let's go through the ground rules one more time - be you a woman, African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, disabled, LGBT, a politically-correct do-gooder or an artist with decades-long reputation, you are not entitled to a coolness quotient on the basis of identity or past actions. You must win the respect of your admirers anew every day, and those participating in bad behavior should be reported to the principal.

A Spectacular Guardian of Sleep

"As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep."
-- Guy de Bord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967

Well, hello! I have a blog over here, don't I? Poor little critter has been neglected in the unusual avalanche of spectacle that characterized April and May of a year that has already proven itself a mad Sufi whirl, even before its halfway mark. No, I am not trying to deliberately push the sensual limits, to see what happens to pixelslip if my eyes drink so much they hate themselves in the morning. It wasn't me that gave us a late-April snowstorm knocking full-sized trees down everywhere, mere days before a big corporate personhood forum, which itself was mere days before student immigration walkouts and a Haunted Windchimes performance. And who told Shearwater they could come to the Walnut Room before I'd taken my first breath at the end of that April week? It wasn't me that just happened to place Frightened Rabbit, Heartless Bastards, and Flobots on three successive days in the middle of May, to be followed by Deb Walker's fabulous immigration forum and Bill Sulzman's study group on the Fort Carson Combat Aviation Brigade. (Oh, and ye gods, I forgot Vince D. visiting Colorado between the Deb and Bill events, sampling beers and listening to Smoke Fairies and Laura Marling. The event horizon starts blurring within 72 hours!)

One could always let certain events pass by, but then who would be living the unexamined life then? Or wait... is experiential passion unexamination? Don't ask such questions! Go away son, you make me nervous. There are plenty of bottles of patent elixir left to sell.

I will plead guilty to launching the cartoon version of One Great Big Conspiracy during this time of madness. Yes, Amir Fassad begged to be brought back to life, and what better time than during an oil-spill-German-funding-crisis-Greek-collapse-Icelandic-volcano-Kyrgyz-riot-Thai-boilover-and-Iran-bluster safety dance, all brought to you by Strategic Command? Below is the most recent installment, where Angela Merkel plays the lead role in Clarissa Explains It All.



Now for heaven's sake, don't worry about me out on that there dance floor, this is not a scene from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Leftover poems from poetry month are like overflowing flasks of water, and I've been handed wonderful refreshers from Marilyn Basel and Ruth Mowry and Carolyn Srygley-Moore and Sam Mills and Lee Upton and many more wonderful EMT specialists ready with intravenous sticks if the dancers are too far gone. Not there yet, not close. The dervishes stop reflecting when the spinning pixelslip makes the world fall away, and this particular spring dance made the world grow closer. But now it's time to change partners and do-si-do, which means the smart dancer catches a quick nap under the punchbowl.

I noticed something about deBord's quote at the top of this post. He assumes the spectacle is always a nightmare, yet my recent dreams have been happy and full of grace. The one you'll find sleeping in chains is probably the well-meaning agent of change who expected something that looked like evolution in this particular physical life. Silly rabbit. I told someone the other day, we have been Homer Simpsons for thousands of years, and Homer Simpsons we shall remain. Yeah, I've been touting that "loving universe of shiny things" shtick, and I'm shticking to it. But the shiny things are not all going to display provenient grace at once. In fact, some of them will look pretty durned nasty. But if each turn on the dance floor reveals a flash of grace, the chains have vanished and the spectacle is no longer a bad dream. It is only your underlying soundtrack until the next dance begins. For now, though, careful about spilling the punch, I'm sleeping right below you. I'll be up for another dance after Memorial Day ends.

Enemies List

The beak that wreaked havoc is pressed against brick,
As useless as the pistol of Bloody Bill Anderson
after his last Missouri rampage.
How many dreams in this Hannah-Barbera head
have ended with my fingers in the Gripmaster embrace
that bulges eyes, cuts tweets in mid-throat?
How many times have I roared at my pocket Kissinger
To add the next name, to start the next tape,
To find an effective new alias for vengeance
Only to mumble just under Henry's hearing,
"We could kill him, but that would be wrong."

A wish made manifest is vanity
But so is the hope for patterns in bodies
of dead birds, dead rebels
deleted names in the enemies list.

The funeral no doubt brings friends and relations
Armed with weapons creating a nail-gun chorus
Overwhelming my screams to my pocket Kissinger
Enemies large and small fly as fast as woodpeckers,
Who use strips from the list to line their nest.

Loring Wirbel
April 28, 2010

Pot-Kettle-Black and the Arizona Problem

Some Arizonans were out in force April 25, denouncing Gov. Jan Brewer and thanking Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon for warning out-of-staters not to come to Arizona if they're seniors or under 16. But others, maybe a majority given recent polls, were muttering at that damned Seth Meyers on Saturday Night Live, for having the audacity to suggest that the real Nazis in the debate over SB1070 were not Obama and the Justice Department, but the residents of Arizona that approved the "track aliens" bill. "Hey Arizona," Meyers said. "You know who says 'Show me your papers'? Nazis. Hitler even gets a commission every time someone says 'Show me your papers.' Arizona: It's a dry fascism, but it's fascism."

I get sick of name-calling, admittedly, but I have two bigger problems that loom larger than both the current immigration bill and how Americans fear the unknown and those that are different. My problems stem from the 1992-93 era when Colorado was referred to as the "Hate State" after passing the notoriously homophobic Amendment 2. Rationally, Coloradans should have admitted their stupidity when the nation reacted in anger. Instead, they (I can't say we) circled the wagons. What's happened to the notion of publicly admitting you're wrong, maybe admitting you're a moron?

First, Americans don't easily grasp that democracy does not mean the majority rules. It means majority rules in the context of preservation of minority rights. Therefore, any legislation initiated by legislators or citizen initiative is bound to be overturned if it seeks to take away rights from a certain class of people. As well it should. You cannot take away rights from people by popular acclaim - even from undocumented aliens. I might add that conservatives who defend the Arizona law say that this is intended to make the federal government "get off its ass" in enacting immigration reform. Wait a minute, isn't this the same group of people that don't want any new federal laws, because they want lesser federal government at all times? Seems as confused in the role of the feds as the attitude of many tea-partiers regarding health care.

Second, whenever radicals, liberals, or even middle-of-the-roaders point this out to conservatives, the conservatives are ready to act shocked and talk about "liberal hate speech." The conservatives talk about liberals as oppressors. Is this attitude-projection, schizophrenia, or denial of reality? I am someone who doesn't particularly like liberals as they are traditionally defined, because they are compromising types who are unsure of their own value systems. Thus they are very unlikely to be spewing "hate speech," because they are the ones most likely to say, "Well, you may have a point..."

Closed-minded hate speech comes from people who have a high emotional content to what they are talking about, and those are people who are using fear and anger to point to a group of outsiders - such as illegal aliens. "Hate speech" comes from the likes of Beck, Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, Malkin, and Limbaugh. Sure, it can come from the left, I've seen Maher and Olbermann go overboard, but it's native to the right.

I love to chat with conservative friends, but I demand rational-based discourse of the type you might see from Eric Cantor, Rob Corker, Andrew Sullivan, precisely the types you don't hear on Hate Radio because they don't scream really loud. When conservative acquaintances start quoting Beck or Coulter, I say to them "I'm sorry, there's no there there. I'm sorry, but Seth Meyers is right. I'm not trying to engage in name-calling, and I won't call you tea-baggers. But I am telling you my limits of acceptance of crazy rights-denying shit like SB1070, and I am saying that if you reject rationalism and make decisions based on fear and anger, then you are just as mentally disturbed as the Saturday Night Live folks want to make you out to be."

That's not hate speech from me. That's reality-based riffing. Sorry if you don't get it.

Proliferating Sunshine, Navigating Grief

Curmudgeon took a vacation in mid-April, surrounded by sunshine and funny people, visiting Sanibel and Key West with Carol and her good buddy Patty. We hunted gators with Patty's husband Steve, visited old friends Chico and Pam and Annette, went snorkeling and took high-speed ferry service to the keys. You shoulda been there.



I learned a valuable lesson about the discernment between needful things and shiny objects, a key doctrinal distinction in the religion of the Loving Universe of Shiny Things:




Every laugh resonated from moment to moment, yet there were shoals of intense grief visible at every moment. They may not have impinged on vacation time, but they reinforced the idea that this practice of unconditional joy I rave about is something that must become a 24/7 occupation, helping anyone through their grief who can be helped, and recognizing when something is beyond your reach. I made some brief mental notes:

Grief

A flash mob of tears coalesces in river blindness
One nematode for the fun drained from every offhand remark,
Another nematode sucking blood from a hospice hand
with grasp so much stronger than any realization
left in clouded eyes
Larvae feed on each frustration
of a body pulled beneath your glassy surface of tears
of a body thrown under the little engine that could

Little engine crests the hill just the same
Telling the brakeman that satisfaction for a job well done,
the maddening flash burn of a joy that will not be extinguished
is the shortest path and toughest task, all at once.

Don't smear on the smile denial that he might be dead by Wednesday
Puncture the river blindness retinas, murmur I-think-I-can
and smile because he is dead by Wednesday
and because each nematode brings a pinprick of relief and joy.

Loring Wirbel
April 18, 2010

Trucks Enough

The freeway exit two miles from my home was closed for 12 hours on April 7 when a tanker tipped over, spilling a load of gasoline. More than 35 hazardous materials trucks were aiding in the cleanup that evening.






Trucks Enough

Amber winks of welcome home
In cadence of three dozen hazmat trucks
Scarcely seem ominous.
Time for parades and fashion runways
Make way for ducklings.

Could this be a caribou’s backrub instinct,
Demanding shiatsu
From a Rosneft pipe segment?
Chakra release and comfort fuel,
They’re called organic chains, after all.

But then I remember the terror of carrying steaming posole
In a cracked purple tureen
Spillover burns, aromatics on the tongue
And wonder if there will ever be trucks enough.

Loring Wirbel
April 8, 2010