Re-creation

We left New York under a gibbous moon and journeyed far into the past. Our goal was the beginning of time, but we only managed to go back about 40 years.

It began with a drive down the BQE towards the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 am. The lights of lower Manhattan twinkle on the other side of the river. A rush of adrenaline wakes me up as I speed across the bridge and fight for position with the yellow cabs. Then I’m winding down Chambers street dodging potholes. The sidewalks are filled with junkies, prostitutes and the homeless as I near the Holland Tunnel. The whores are calling the cops out for a suck. No, sorry. That’s just Lou Reed on the cd player. This is Tribeca, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S. It looks seedy to an untrained eye, but in reality it's difficult to drive through there without running over Robert Deniro. A few beautiful people are still on the street. That’s about it.

Then New Jersey, PA and WVA. The morning wears on. O-hio, a strange land where so many people still wear their Bush/Cheney decals defiantly on their bumpers. A few, however, appear to have scraped them off.

But Ohio only takes us back to 2004, or 1984 at best. Kentucky’s on the event horizon now, just across the Ohio river. There, I have been led to believe, we can go back all the way to the beginning of time, 4000 or so years ago, when the cave-men and their pet dinosaurs walked the earth.

Sorry, to be so hokey with the tease. The story is this: I came across this article about a Creationism museum the other night. I IM’ed my daughter a few choice quotes and asked if she wanted to go. She was pysched so we decided to make a road trip out of it. The next day I got a car, loaded up the children at 3 am, and off we drove.

As I was saying in the previous post... with all the instant messaging, cell phones, and other wacky new technologies, our family communication has suffered. We sit in our small apartment – my daughter in her room listening to the iPod, my son in his room playing the GameBoy DS, me in my cave, drinking cheap beer and thinking vast and noble thoughts, and communicate by instant message when we are not 50 feet away from each other physically. It makes me yearn for an earlier time.

I think back to the sixties before we had those technologies. How did families communicate? How did they spend time together? Well, one way, perhaps the best way, was to get in the station wagon and go somewhere. Preferably somewhere far away. Being cooped up in the same car for a long day would bring us closer together then. Maybe it would bring us closer together now?

But it didn't appear to be working. We weren’t three feet apart. My daughter sat right next to me in the passenger seat and listened to her iPod. My son was just behind me playing his GameBoy. And there’s nothing like a long road ahead to get the deep thoughts thinking. After a few beers, I decided to resume work on my 13 part treatise on the films of Studio Ghibli. I had become stuck on the fact that Princess Mononoke wasn’t really about the Princess, but now I saw a way around that obstacle. I saw a grand literary prize in my future. Finishing volume XIII would be a cakewalk. What would I wear to the ceremony? Those thoughts consumed me for several hours and nearly half a case of beer.

That was great, but the trip was supposed to be more about togetherness. I wanted it to be an educational experience for the children as well. That’s why we were going to the Creationism museum.

The chuckling household is non-denominational. The kids don’t learn anything about religion at home beyond the fact that it is laughable. Of course they go to a progressive private school where they study the bible, but I wanted them to learn about the real Christianity, not the one you read about in some old book. And it’s not enough that they intellectually know that it is laughable. They need to laugh at it themselves, to witness its irrational senselessness at the apogee of its glory, to feel it in the gut. And what better place to laugh at religion than a Creationism museum? And in Kentucky no less.

I was a child in the sixties and my parents were young and liberal. They paid lip service to the ideas of racial and ethnic equality and I was taught not to discriminate based on the color of a person’s skin or where they were born. The only exception to those fine ideals concerned Kentuckians. It’s sad and I am embarrassed to share this, but it’s true. I, and everyone else in my neck of the woods, was raised to disrespect people from Kentucky.

I don’t guess you could call it racism. Kentuckians weren’t really considered a different race. They were more of a sub-species, like monkeys only not quite as cultured. Sorry, it’s hard to break the ways of our upbringing. They were portrayed as an ethnic group, one like any other in which inbred stupidity and cowardice are the norm. These days we call them Republicans or conservative Christians, but back then they were just plain old Kentuckian dumb fucks. But now I realize that was wrong, that Kentuckians are just as good as anyone else and I vowed not to raise my own children with any of the those horrible prejudices.

Still, even though I have pulled free of my anti-Kentuckian roots, I have to confess that I got a bit of a snicker from the fact that the Creation Museum with its dinosaurs on Noah’s ark is located in Kentucky. Unfortunately however, the joke was on me. The article failed to mention the very important fact that the museum was not yet open and I hadn’t done any other research. When we pulled up at the gates I learned that the Creation Museum not open for another two months.

That was a bit of a blow, I admit, and the teenaged one was, as you can imagine, cruel, but we are a resilient people and I would have to make the best of it.

The plan had been to camp near the museum and spend several days there, but now there was no plan. I drove aimlessly, scanning the horizon for a sign. And it was a sign I saw, in the form of a giant inflatable bottle of Jack Daniels. What the fuck is the matter with these people, I thought. If there is one good thing you can say about Kentucky, it is that they make some damn fine whiskey. Why, in the land of Jim Beam Black, is there a giant bottle of Tennessee whiskey making eyesore of the skyline?

I stopped in to investigate and bought a bottle of Ezra Brooks to help me ponder these things. That’s just whut people like, said the cashier. Just whut people like. Just whut people like. God, fuck, people. Whut they like? This trip was going south. Whut was I going to do? I drove in circles around the giant bottle of Jack Daniels thinking, thinking. Going south, I thought. The trip is going south, so maybe we should go south. That was it. That was the ticket. We got back on the interstate and headed south. Soon we came to Louisville.

I’ve passed through Louisville many times but never learned much of anything about it. On the positive side I knew that both Hunter S. Thompson and Mark Ames, two writers who revolutionized the practice of journalism, came from there. It may seem counter-intuitive that cultured, creative people could come from such a place, but it’s really not so surprising. Talented people stuck in these hellholes just want to get out and the struggle fucks them up. They come out twisted in their own particular ways. I also know that Cassius Clay was from there, though I never quite saw what made him such a hero. I guess anyone that stood up against Vietnam and went to prison for it, especially someone with so much to lose, is deserving of respect, but if there is justice in this world, he may rot in hell for what he did to the English language.

Anyhow, Louisville's Main Street proved to be an artsy little mile. We saw galleries, museums, expensive gift shops, bars and trendy restaurants. We parked and walked around. They had commissioned a lot of art for the sidewalks. We passed various sculptures, a cool bike rack, that kind of thing. My teenage daughter made snide comments about how out-dated my anti-Kentuckian snobism. This place was cool and up-to-date, unlike some people she knew.

It also seemed that there was a vintage car revival going on. We saw several from the sixties, including a very cool Ford Fairlane station wagon that had been restored and painted. Funny how what must have been the un-coolest car of the entire sixties looked so cool now. And there were a couple of guys, not a couple, just different guys, and I don’t even think they were gay, in different locations who were wearing tight fitting gym shorts and t-shirts like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. What was up with that? I was forced to ponder. But that was not all.

We also noticed that Louisville was also doing the Kentucky version of New York’s painted cow thing from just a few years past. We saw decorative race horses at various points throughout the city.
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And soon we noticed that it was only 5 o’clock on a beautiful spring Saturday and almost all of those fancy art galleries, gift shops and museums were closed. My son, who is only eight, speculated that it must be a very Jewish city, but my daughter became increasingly angry and began composing Kentuckian jokes of her own. Why do all the shops in Kentucky close before five? So the yokels can get home in time to have sex with their siblings. It was obvious that my lessons against anti-Kentuckinan discrimination had failed, but I confess that I felt a shameful kind of pride. Where I’m from it's a big occasion when a child made its first Kentuckian joke. Sadly, we’re never as far away from our roots as we’d like to think.

But I made a game face. You have to be positive, I said. Think of it as time travel. Traveling to Kentucky is like going back in time forty years. It’s still the sixties here. Of course everything closes as five. But when you’re old and want to revisit your youth, all you have to do is come to Kentucky. They’ll be wearing the same fashion and listening to the same music then as you do now. They'll even be driving the same cars. And wearing the same underwear.

Unfortunately, by that time I wasn’t making much sense. I had drank way too much whiskey and was driving erratically. The only logical thing to do at that point was to get off of the street so I drove faster and took the sidewalk. Before going half a block, I ran over one of those god damned fake New York cows, a rainbow-colored horse and jockey. The damned thing was staring at me across my crumpled hood. I backed up, confused. Fucking Kentuckian horseboy, I yelled and ran over it again.

Umm dad, said my daughter, here come the police. Fucking John Law, I thought, just won’t leave me alone. Still, seeing the lights and hearing the siren sobered me up a bit. I spun around, raced down the street, up the on-ramp to the interstate and headed for the state line as fast as the little car would take me. But two sets of flashing blue lights were gaining on me in the rear view. One was right on my ass.

You may think that I am writing this from my jail cell, but it wasn’t all that difficult to outwit the Kentucky state police and escape across the river. When I came to the last exit ramp before the bridge, I turned on my right turn signal and slowed down as if I were going to exit. At the last second, I gunned it forward. The cop, unable to react in time, took the exit.

That was easy, but the second cop car took its place on my ass. No exits remained. We were on the bridge. I didn’t know how I was going to lose him. It was a conundrum.

Then I thought, what the hell, it’s worth a try. I flipped on the right turn signal and slowed down as though I were going to exit. The cop was totally fooled and drove right off the bridge and his car exploded into a giant fireball when it hit the water.

Nevertheless, our bad experiences in Kentucky taught us a lot about inclusiveness and I think the whole family came away more open minded. And next time we will visit the Creation Museum.

Communication breakdown

Poor chuckling has a teenage daughter and the following exchange will tell you a lot about what that can be like in the year 2007:




I know you have no interest in chuckling's personal life, I only share that as a stepping-off point to discuss larger societal issues.

First one cannot fail to notice the horrible sass a parent must endure in these confused times. It'a not like the good old days when the kid would just scream or call you names. Today, it's all irony and sarcasm. It's not just the jab at my cooking skills. Subtle, am I?

Then there's the avatar. Chuckling's avatar is borrowed from conservative religious imagery, as is appropriate, but the teenage girl seems to think she is Michael Nesmith. That, in itself, is a signifier of the sickness in our society, but to top it off, she looked up Michael Nesmith after noticing he was the producer of Repo Man. She had never heard of the Monkees.

And finally, parent and child, living in the same house, are communicating by IM. We do this all the time, but last night it hit me that something was wrong with that, I don't know why, just because, so I called her on her cell phone to try to re-establish a more traditional way of communicating, but she didn't want to take my call, and I left it at that.

But I realized that I didn't want to just leave it "at that." In the coming weeks I am planning on a re-examination of our family values. That will, of course, remain private, but at the same time we will examine American values in general from a more conservative perspective. The itinerary is not yet fully planned, but I will tell you this: We will begin at the beginning of time. And there will be photos.

Not as funny as we think

We often ridicule the unsophisticated conservatives, and rightly so, for their inability to understand humor. Take the current popular joke making the rounds:

Knock Knock. Who’s there? I’m a stupid ugly bitch who wants to destroy our great nation and install Satan on the throne of heaven. Honey, Hilary Clinton’s at the door again.Tell her to go away, ha ha.

Numerous valid scientific studies indicate that the typical conservative “brain” lacks the ability to find humor in much of anything more sophisticated than that, genitalia, farts, belches, or pratfalls. Many scientists even speculate that the conservative’s evolutionary purpose is to be the butt of jokes, especially considering that the rest of their behavior is so counterproductive to the survival of our species.

Personally, I think that the scientists who claim that conservative’s inability to appreciate sophisticated humor is an evolutionary advantage are just plain whacky. Chuckling believes that there are sophisticated political operatives out there who take advantage of conservative’s evolutionary stuntedness demonstrating that it is anything but an evolutionary advantage. I am on a mailing list that specializes in conservative humor and see the dark side of this phenomena. Take the following for example:

John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets", and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs (for you city folks).

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.

Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning, John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate.

The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. But to Farmer John's amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result? The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making: Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention.........

It is a conservative joke in that its content is about animals having sex, but its purpose is propagandistic. Government just wants to screw you, so you better vote for those who hate government. Of course I could be wrong in this particular instance, but there is a lot of this kind of writing going around conservative mailing lists that never makes it into the mainstream, even the blogs. It’s passed off as homespun humor and/or wisdom, but these things are not written by wise old farmers, upstanding churchgoers, or heroic housewives in aprons and oven mitts. More likely, they are produced by a sophisticated political organization whose purpose is to keep the morons stupid. And they are doing their part. Much more than most anyone suspects.

Living in shit

Chuckling is not a sophisticated character. You may think that because I claim to read such authors as José Saramago or Paul Auster and comment on films by luminaries such as Hayao Miyazaki that I am a professorial type whose ancestors crossed on the Mayflower, but that is not the case. My grandparents on both sides of the family came from mud. At the height of the great flood of ‘37, my father’s family escaped from the second story of their house in a rowboat. The fact that they kept a rowboat upstairs tells you more than you need to know about their economic situation. They were tenant farmers working the floodlands. And my great-uncles were all losers of one sort or another, most of them drunks along with bootleggers and chicken thieves who did time in the county jail. My father was the first to go to college, but he listens to Rush Limbaugh, watches Fox News, supports President Bush, and considers himself an open-minded and good Christian. And I am a high school drop-out. So it’s not all Italian wine, French cheese and 18th century English lit in the chuckling gene pool. If you think of the term “Wild Turkey” as a concept as well as a brand, it can be used to describe chuckling and his family on so many levels.

I only confide that plebeian history to prepare you for what I am about to say, which is far more embarrassing than all of the above. I am a big fan of American Idol. Yes, it’s true. I love the show and watch it often. And furthermore, I think Idol goes beyond the realm of mere entertainment. And I’m not just talking about sociology or anthropology as is the wont of pseudo-intellectual characters justifying their attendance at monster truck rallies. I think that American Idol is art. I think it tells a great story, one worthy of Tolstoy (though not Dostoevsky). It did for at least one year anyway. I have to admit that it sucks right now, but more about that later.

The numbers support the contention that American Idol fans are a bunch of rubes. Nearly twice as many people watch it in the American south than in more civilized parts of the country, and much of the apparent viewership in New York and Los Angeles is made up of tourists in hotel rooms or parents visiting their children. And I’m sure it’s not just the south. Most people in small towns throughout the midwest are without rewarding intellectual lives as well.

The only thing I can say in my defense is that it took me awhile for my hillbilly roots to catch up with me. My cultural free-fall began, as these things usually do, with me stumbling drunkenly through the living room on my way from the blog cave (in which I contemplate universal truths and the like) to the bathroom (one can only hold so much universal truth inside oneself ) and ridiculing the family for watching whatever stupid tv show they are watching as I pass through. From time to time I stop to rest on my way back to the cave and spend some extra time making sport of these programs and occasionally start to watch them myself. That’s how I began watching shows that I eventually came to like such as Star Trek Next Generation and Buffy. (Now they are watching Lost, which I refer to as Loser Island. There’s talk of bricking up a passageway so I’m forced to go through the kitchen instead of the living room, but that’s a different story).

But I never thought it could happen with Idol. Beyond the hype, which is usually more than enough to keep me away; and the horrible singing, which is truly horrible indeed; and the judges, who have their own issues, to say the least; and Ryan Seacrest, who actually comes off as the least annoying of the bunch which is a sad, sad statement – I had an even greater reason to hate the show. During its second season I was commuting to Jersey in an SUV with a couple tech dweebs and just about all they ever talked about was American Idol. Not only did they talk about it, but they actually called in and voted for contestants and complained about not being able to get through. Many were the days I dreamed of the SUV flipping over and skidding in front of an oncoming tractor-trailer in the hopes of shutting them up. It would have been sad for the children, and maybe even painful for me, but at least I wouldn’t have had to hear to another word about Clay fucking Aiken.

But something caught my attention in Idol’s third season. The company I worked for was circling the drain and they had cut my salary which resulted in me drinking cheaper liquor and more of it, which may explain part of my soon-to-be respect for American Idol, but for whatever reason, I found myself stopping off to ridicule the show for longer and longer stretches and by the time the contestants were deep into the finals I was discussing their performances and the idiosyncrasies of the judges just like all those ridiculous people in the heartland (though I have never voted and my wife is under strict orders to shoot me if I ever do).

Seriously though. In order to appreciate Idol as art, it’s important to understand its story structure. Being named America’s Idol is the MacGuffin, the thing that everyone is after. In order to get the MacGuffin, the characters must overcome a series of obstacles, most notably the judges. The judges are a troika of iconic characters: the fool, the drunken bimbo, and the total asshole. Interesting subplots develop among themselves and in their relationships with the contestants. As in most great literature, actually getting the MacGuffin is anti-climactic, a sadly hollow experience. I won’t describe the plot progression from cattle calls and Hollywood hijinks to the finals in which twelve contestants vie for the MacGuffin by singing a new song every week which results in the elimination of one of them from the competition. That tells you no more about the artistic merit of the show than describing The Maltese Falcon as a story about a bird.

In addition to each other and the judges, the idol wannabees also have to deal with theme nights in which they have to sing songs of a particular genre or by a particular entertainer, which makes it difficult for contestants who are only comfortable with one style of music. How they overcome, or don’t, being forced to sing songs outside their comfort zones makes for some good drama. For example when Chis Daughtrey, a fan of mediocre heavy metal, turned Johnny Cash’s I Walk the Line into a Bob Seeger-like stadium rock weeper on country music night, it was something special. More often than not though, the result is laughably bad and those who fail to grow fall by the wayside.

The contestant’s ability to grow is what elevates Idol so far above all the other talent shows. Although the judges are portrayed as the most formidable obstacles, it is the contestants struggle to overcome their inner obstacles that is much more interesting. Each contestant must raise the level of her game from show to show – to evolve from being a talented amateur to a polished professional in a mere twelve weeks. The great majority of the performances are dreadful, but there are times when a contestant manages to transcend her limitations and move on to a higher plane. When one of these transformations occurs, and you have watched the individual jump through all the hoops from the cattle call onward, it can come off as truly special.

And just as in literature, the results are not always fair or just. The best singers do not always advance, nor do those who perform best on any particular night. There are politics involved, Q ratings. The judges don’t give a flying fuck about quality. They want ratings, they have focus groups and demographics, they know who votes for whom, so they try to influence the audience to vote for the most telegenic, or at least the most popular contestants so people will continue to watch. And the audience, the unseen character, the deus ex machina of the show, are a fickle bunch. They may vote for a hairstyle, a regional favorite, a fellow Christian, on race-based considerations, or for the worst singer just to be obnoxious. There’s just no way to know for sure, which is not a bad definition of drama.

But although it is so much more, American Idol is also a singing competition and much of its appeal depends on the abilities of the contestants to sing. And that’s ultimately why I watched the third season enough to appreciate the finer literary aspects of the story arc. Fantasia won that year, but there were a number of very good singers who constantly topped each other with transcendental performances. The year after that, the one with Bo Bice and the country chick, I watched less and less. Last year’s show, which was won by a smarmy wedding singer that at his best could manage a decent Joe Cocker impression was mostly insipid.

I haven’t watched this years show much at all, but from what I’ve seen it is truly horrible. There is precisely one good singer, Melinda Doolittle, and the others are as horrible as Simon Cowell’s worst put downs. They are all the bad singers from high school musicals, cruise ships, Holiday Inns, weddings and bar mitzvahs, and karaoke bars that you never want to hear.

And the judges have lost sight of what made the show popular and, as I have argued, art. We, the audience, may be direct descendants of bootleggers and chicken thieves with all of the high culture you would expect based on our backgrounds, but we still recognize shit when it’s hurled at us by a bunch of talentless assholes. When the show was good, the judges recognized that as well and did not hesitate to say, each in his or her own way, that shit stank.

Now, however, they seem traumatized by the near complete lack of talent on the show and are trying to convince the audience that it is really not that bad. Although the ratings are still there, I have trouble believing that much of anyone is buying it.

I’m very sorry to fall back on such a previously popular analogy, but it’s like the episode in Happy Days when Fonzi jumped the shark. Before that, he was cool. After that, he could never be more than a self-parody of something that used to be. I’m sure Idol will sputter on for a few more years. In a desperate gamble to stay relevant, they will bring in Pamela Anderson to replace Paula Abdul or someone like Jamie Foxx whose career is spiraling down the toilet to replace Randy, but nothing they try will work. When they stopped calling shit shit they became shit and although all good things may eventually become shit, shit will never change itself back into chocolate ice cream. If American Idol was ever great art, it ceased to be so after season three. We are not now witnessing the hero’s downfall in the last act of a great play. We are talking sequals and not Godfather II. The current Idol is down there with Godfather III or Police Academy VII.

Living in truth

‘Anti-political politics’ is possible, says Václav Havel, a Czechoslovakian playwright and political dissident. It’s 1978 and he’s formulating a strategy of non-violent resistance to the totalitarian state that imprisons him. At the time, virtually no one on earth thought it possible to overthrow the Soviet Union from within. The state was too strong, the secret police too powerful. To criticize the system meant prison. Violent resistance meant death. Any kind of political resistance was futile and could only end badly.

Yet for all its oppressive power, the Soviet Union was overcome without violence and practically without political resistance. ‘Anti-political politics’ was not only possible, it was powerful, arguably the most powerful political force the world has ever known. No other empire has simply ceased to exist because people simply stopped participating.

The United States today is not the Soviet Union of 1978 or any other year. As citizens, we are free to criticize the government until we turn blue of our own accord. We can participate in politics, tell the president to go fuck himself and generally do or say whatever we want, as long as we do it non-violently. It’s true we could be investigated for our thought crimes, possibly even harassed at work or, worst of all, put on the no-fly list, but we will not be jailed, tortured, disappeared or killed.

Of course those who are not citizens of the United States may not be so fortunate. We reserve the right to arrest anyone we please anywhere on earth for any reason or no reason at all -- put them in secret jails, torture them, then try them in secret courts with secret evidence, or just keep them jailed indefinitely and execute them if the secret court so decrees. Or we can help overthrow their government, seize their assets, train their secret police, bomb their infrastructure, invade their country, kill millions. Literally. Kill millions. We’ve done it. Count em.

Havel lived in an empire that jailed and killed of millions of its own citizens for their politics and would think nothing of killing him. He lived in a workers’ paradise. We, on the other hand, live in a democratic paradise in which we kill millions of other people for their politics. Of course neither regime phrases it that way. They/we kill to protect socialism/democracy, our great nation, our way of life. But it’s all politics in one form or another.

Havel’s insight was that politics is a lie and those who participate, however passively, are living a lie, The only effective resistance is to an all-powerful state, he saw, was to live within the truth.

People who so define themselves do so in relationship to a prior “position.” In other words, they relate themselves specifically to the power that rules society and through it, define themselves, deriving their own “position” form the position of the regime. For people who have simply decided to live within the truth, to say aloud what they think, to express their solidarity with their fellow citizens, to create as they want and simply to live in harmony with their better “self,” it is naturally disagreeable to feel required to define their own, original and positive “position” negatively, in terms of something else, and to think of themselves primarily as people who are against something, not simply as people who are what they are.

Chuckling is among the ridiculed few who see the U.S. as a one party state. Of course there are minor differences between the “parties,” particularly on domestic matters, but when it comes to controlling the world through violence, including mass murder on a global scale if “necessary”, the only disagreement between the putative parties is “how much?” The “democrats” and “republicans” are, at best, different wings of the same party. A more cynical interpretation sees their relationship more like that of the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters. Resistance to our one party state is probably more futile today than resistance to the Soviet Union was in 1978, though not nearly as painful, at least for us citizens.

But we are not evil and we are not cowards. The great majority of us are decent, moral people opposed to violence and oppression, yet we do nothing to stop those things from being done in our name. Why not?

Well, the obvious reason is that there is no political party that represents us. We have no choice in the matter.

And yes, that’s true, but why don’t we have representation? There is no law against it. There is no state apparatus stopping anyone from organizing a political party or five. We could, theoretically, elect representatives who are actually representative. Why don’t we?

I think Havel’s insight into what was wrong in his society applies to us now as well as it did to the Soviet society in 1978. We are living within a lie. Many people don’t even know what the U.S. does to people abroad and the great majority who do have some facts at their disposal do not acknowledge it, certainly not publicly, but not even in their own minds. The lie is all they want.

I also agree with Havel’s prescription for resistance. Although the U.S. government will not crush its opponents under the proverbial iron boot, people can waste their lives if they choose the path of political resistance. They certainly won’t accomplish much of anything beyond compromising on the lesser of two evils and ultimately being compromised.

But we can engage in ‘anti-political politics.’ We, as individuals, can live within the truth. For whatever that’s worth. Havel’s example notwithstanding, probably not much in the big picture, but maybe a lot for ourselves and those around us. Realistically, that’s the only hope we’ve got.

More harping on the obvious

It is unfortunate, but Chuckling is something of a slow thinker, if not an outright dullard. I only bring that up because I am still thinking about a recent article I wrote on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and the questions surrounding random meaninglessness vs. purposeful narrative that they engender.

After writing that piece, I spent days in front of my computer screen, staring unfocused, engrossed in thought and contemplation of those issues. Why do we need purpose in our narrative? Is it some kind of evolutionary thing? After all, there are over 200 billion galaxies all containing 200 billion or so start and the universe is at least 17 billion years old. There are more giant stars in our own galaxy than there are humans and human existence in time is not even a blink of the cosmic eye. Relative to the universe, we are ever so much smaller and less important than ants are next to us. Is our need for purposeful narrative just a lonely whine against the meaninglessness of our existence? I sat for days lost in these thoughts. Actually, I only thought about spending days thinking those thoughts , and only for a few seconds at that. Unfortunately, I had written about Antonioni early in the morning and had to interrupt my contemplation of time, the universe and the meaning of life in order to take a shower and go to work.

Things happened fast after that. Almost before I knew it, I was in Washington, D.C. on a completely unexpected business trip. Normally when I go to D.C., it all ends badly in a haze of booze, drugs, strip clubs and prostitutes, but this time, I vowed, would be different. Of course that’s not actually true about the sex and drugs and this time, as usual, I found myself at the zoo.

It was a cold and windy day. The sun was bright. I had forgotten my sunscreen and had to keep to the shadows as much as possible. These shadows diverted me on my way to the zoo when I noticed I was near Mount Pleasant. It had been many years since I had visited that neighborhood. In the old days it was very dangerous. There were crack dealers on every corner and the sound of gunshots was common. Now it is very yuppified, but not entirely and I was able to find a great Peruvian chicken place where they didn’t even speak any English. The creamy green hot sauce was excellent.

I’ve spent many cold rainy days at the National Zoo. Cold rainy days are the best days to visit a zoo. The animals are out more and seem to act more naturally. I don’t think they like having thousands of people stare at them all day. I’m sure being stuck in a cage is bad enough without that. The point was reinforced in one of the exhibits, a kind of “discovery zone,” one of those hands-on environments where normal people and kids can get a feel for how scientists work.

Observation is, of course, a key to our scientific understanding of animal behavior. An Orangoutang was in a big glass cage with chairs around it where visitors could sit like great zoologists and observe the unfotunate ape, unlike in the regular Orangoutang cage where we could only gawk like tourists. Anyway, professor chuckling, ph.d in zoology, observed the poor Orangoutang for nearly half an hour. Actually, I was hoping that a female Orangoutang would happen along and they would have sex, or that it would at least masturbate, and with Orangoutang’s you usually don’t have to wait that long, but on that day it spent all of its time building a little fort to hide in. The creature piled a big wall of straw around itself and then put a large piece of brown paper over its head. Every now and then it would look out to see if we were still there. Sometimes I hate zoos.

Back at the hotel I rested a little while and read snatches of Invisible Cities, the novel by Italo Calvino. I have been working on a review of that work for quit some time now, but it is not going very well. Invisible Cities is a perfect work. Every word is precisely the right one; each word fits as well as it possibly could within its respective sentence; the sentences work together to create paragraphs of perfection, the paragraphs form perfect chapters, and so on all the way up to the novel as a whole, which is as perfect as its parts. I asked myself, is there any other novel as perfect as Invisible Cities? After some minutes reviewing every novel I’ve ever read, and then some, I realized that yes, there was another perfect novel, Pan by Knut Hamsun. Perhaps if I were to re-read Pan, it would help with my review of Invisible Cities? I rushed right out, after a short nap, to have a leisurely dinner at my heretofore favorite Peruvian restaurant in D.C., which has gone sadly downhill, and then hastened to a used books store on 18th street in the hopes of finding Pan.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Not only did they not have Pan, they didn’t even have any titles by Knut Hamsun or Italo Calvino. At first I was crushed, but an idea began to dawn on me that perhaps this trip had a larger purpose, that there was a book that I was meant to find that would, if not unlock the secrets of the universe, at least give some clue as to the purpose of life. I spent several minutes that seemed like hours, scouring the literature shelves, then the history, the politics, the religious, women’s and gay studies, philosophy, how-to, and humor, all to no avail. Then I thought, maybe I missed something in the H’s? Maybe a Hamsun book was poorly shelved?

And so it was. I found Under the Autumn Star , a thin volume that is more in the tradition of Hamsun’s earlier work than his later. On the way back to the hotel, I noticed a jazz trio playing in a bar. The music was good, the crowd was sparse, I ordered a bourbon and began to read Hamsun. Unfortunately, the band finished their final set before I finished the whiskey and within days I had misplaced the novel without coming close to finishing it.

But I’ll tell you this. I enjoyed the smell of the used books and the whiskey. I enjoyed the cries of the toucans in the birdhouse at the zoo and even the shrieks of the ambulance which triggered memories of the old murder capital days. I relished the sight of the grizzled old jazz pianist and my old neighborhood, and even the White House which is now fenced off like a zoo exhibit. It's similar in that it's filled with dangerous animals, but unfortunately they get out whenever they want.

And now I’m home, the slop from yesterday’s sleet storm is melting and I’m thinking it might be a good day for some Antonioni. You know what I’m saying?

Outside in society

I recently started listening to Patti Smith again and it soon spiraled out of control. I began, of course, with tracks from Horses, but thanks to ITunes I soon had most of her recent work. It’s amazing stuff, but more about that later.

I discovered Horses when I was sixteen. I think it’s common for those of us who leave home to look back and try to peg all the little incidents that helped us get out of our own personal hellhole. I used to hang out at the trailer of my best friend’s older brother Ron. He was one of the smartest people in town and one of the coolest as well, a hard feat to pull off since it’s generally not cool to be smart in hell. We’d smoke dope, play chess, and listen to music. He had a great stereo system, a Yamaha amp with those big old wooden Advent speakers. We were a Ted Nugent, Bob Seeger, REO Speedwagon kinda town and he was listening to Patti Smith. Horses was a revelation for a young troublemaker like myself. Yea, Jesus died for someone else’s sins, and that was the hook, but it was the raw sexuality and ecstatic poetry that conjured visions of previously unimagined possibilities. I wanted to get me some of that life.

I saw the Eastertour in Santa Monica. The only details I remember are of Smith playing an interminable guitar “solo” in which she picked one note over and over again long past the point where it was still interesting and then of her singing an astoundingly beautiful version of You Light up my Life, the Debbie Boone song that was the most reviled radio hit of the day.

But after Easter I pretty much forgot about Patti Smith. I was too deep into the harder side of punk in 1979 to like Wave, then ten years later found Dream of Life unlistenable. Outside of society, that's where I wanted to be. I don’t know what Patti Smith was feeling back then, whether or not she still wanted to be outside of society. Superficially, the choices she made suggest otherwise. She married, dropped out of the New York scene, moved to a Detroit suburb and raised two children. But perhaps for her that was being outside of society?

I saw her again at the annual Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall several years ago. In a truly transcendental performance, she read/chanted Allen Ginsberg’s poem On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa backed by Phillip Glass on grand piano. From a review of the same performance at a different venue:

The program reached a kind of crescendo when Ms. Smith chanted Ginsberg's poem “On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara.” Mr. Glass accompanied her on the piano, playing the music he had written for the poem in a minor key.

“I noticed the Guru was dead,” Ms. Smith chanted. “I noticed his teacher bare-breasted watching the corpse burn in the stupa, noticed mourning students sat crosslegged before their books, chanting devotional mantras.” Ms. Smith's face reddened, tears streamed down her face. “I noticed the sea, I noticed the music. I wanted to dance.”

I’ve noticed that she often plays at various venues around New York, but never got out to see her.

That’s pretty much the recap of my life with Patti Smith up until last week when I downloaded a few songs off of Horses. I was surprised to find that there were two versions of each song, the original and one from a live set. The live versions are fantastic, pretty much note for note with the original but possessing an exceptionally full and well-defined sound and an added urgency. Unfortunately, you can’t just download the live album, the two together are expensive, and the live version of Land is only available if you buy the whole thing. I’ll just have to wait till I find it at a stoop sale someday.

But rediscovering Horses got me curious about Smith’s recent work. I did the 30 second preview thing on most the songs on Trampin’, her most recent release, and bought the songs Gandhi and My Blakean Year. The problem with buying singles from ITunes is that it’s then hard to buy the album. So unfortunately, Trampin’ is another disc that will have to be found at a stoop sale.

My Blakean Year starts out sounding like the Velvets, with a kind of Venus in Furs vibe. It’s based on the work of William Blake.

In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole
Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

In my Blakean year
Such a woeful schism
The pain of our existence
Was not as I envisioned
Boots that trudged from track to track
Worn down to the sole
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

Brace yourself for bitter flack
For a life sublime
A labyrinth of riches
Never shall unwind
The threads that bind the pilgrim's sack
Are stitched into the Blakean back
So throw off your stupid cloak
Embrace all that you fear
For joy will conquer all despair
In my Blakean year

She ends the song chanting verses from Blake’s poem “The Divine Image:”

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine:
And Peace the human dress.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,

Then ends it repeating Mercy shall embrace.

With no deep knowledge of Blake’s work, I’m not exactly sure what a Blakean year is supposed to represent, but those are some fine lyrics that stand up just fine with the classic poetry.

And the two roads dichotomy is interesting. One is paved with gold, the other just a road. Bitter flack is juxtaposed with a life sublime. She speaks of mercy, love, pity, and peace, but in this song those things are not weak-assed new-agey shit. I have yet to go back and listen to Wave and Dream of Life, but my memory of those works is that the peace, love, etc. that they depicted were not consistent with the wild, powerful stuff in Horses and Easter. In Smith’s Blakean Year, and her recent body of work as a whole, the songs about mercy, love, pity and peace transcend any kind of happy hokeyness. They radiate strength, not weakness. , They were clearly born of violence, pain and sorrow. They are things that were earned, not given.

My other problem with her post- Easter work was the politics. It’s not that I disagree with her politics, I don’t. It’s just that songs like the straightforward political screed like People Have the Power bore me half to death. They are not what I call art. Or even Rock & Roll.

So I wasn’t predisposed to buy a track titled “Gandhi,” but I liked the music in the 30 second clip and although I’m primarily a lyrics-appreciating-type-guy, I’ll forgive a lot for a good sound. Gandhi is classic Patti Smith – the slow, seventies rock guitars and her low voice building incrementally to an emotional crescendo, or two. And, as I’ve found with most, if not all, of her recent work, the art has transcended the politics. Or maybe it’s better to say that the art and the politics work together. In Gandhi, she makes pretty much the same political argument as People Have the Power but does it with greater artistry:

I had a dream Mr. King If you'll beg my pardon
I was trespassing The sacred garden
And the blossoms fell
Well, they dropped like candy
And nature cried
Gandhi Gandhi

The flowing hair And the golden flowers
Of the young girls
Well they dropped all around
They dropped like candy
And people cried
Gandhi Gandhi
Awake little man
Awake from your slumber And get 'em with the numbers
Get 'em with the numbers

After listening to these new songs, I was so happy. Patti Smith was back after all these years.

Of course she had been back for awhile and it was really I coming back to her. But she really had been gone for long stretches. Wave was released in 1979 followed nine years later by Dream of Life. Then it was another eight years until 1996’s Gone Again, so she was almost 20 years out of the limelight.

Chuckling, as you may know, is very shallow when it comes to art reviews. I do not like to speculate about a work’s meaning. I do not like to talk about the artist’s biography and I particularly dislike tying biography to any meaning that a work may or may not contain. Even in cases in which an artist explains his or her art and how it sprang from a particular experience, I don’t want to consider any of that when judging the work. I don’t even want to know about it. If I know I’m going to experience a work of art, I make every effort to avoid all knowledge about how or why it was created. For the most part, I succeeded in approaching Smith’s recent work from that shallow perspective. Although you probably don’t feel the same way, I will try not to give much of anything away. Getting the big picture overview of how Smith spent those years is just a quick Google away. Still, I can’t help mentioning a few details.

After listening to all of the new work, I learned that she had gone to the Detroit suburb to be a housewife. That kind of seemingly reactionary life change was something I was ill-equipped to understand back in the Horses and Easter days. But her recent work shows that she was clearly much more than a housewife. Or perhaps her life demonstrates (yet again) that being a housewife and having a great and productive life as an artist are not mutually exclusive. And Smith’s period of domesticity was not without incident or interest. Nor is her present situation.

After listening to my singles purchases for a couple weeks, I dove in all the way, purchasing Gung Ho, Gone Again, and Peace and Noise, in that order. Gone Again was the first release after her return, followed by Peace and Noise and then Gone Again. Trampin’ followed those and she has a new disc coming out in April.

The new songs may lack the hard guitars and punk sensitivities of her earlier works, but they are on the same level artistically. Her band is a tight group of professionals. They handle the slow parts and the fast parts; they can be a grungy or clean.

Glitter in their Eyes off of Gung Ho is a good example of their professionalism. It is a catchy pop song with clean guitar hooks. But the song is not what you would expect from the title. Glitter in the eyes in this case doesn’t refer to being blinded by the glitter of Hollywood, New York, or Paris. It refers to the glitter of evil, the sick enjoyment of the kill or swindle. It’s about people in power taking from those who either have none or choose not to use it. The song, with its pop hooks, driving guitars, and soaring chorus, is deceptive, not at all what it seems. It is an example of Smith’s ability to package her political sensitivity as art as well.

Other good pop songs include Gone Again and Summer Cannibals and there are quite a few mid-tempo numbers. all very well done. Don’t Say Nothing and Lo and Beholden are good examples.

Of course this is Patti Smith we’re talking about. How many “good pop songs” have lyrics like this, from Gone Again:

Hey now man's own kin
we commend into the wind
grateful arms grateful limbs
grateful soul he's Gone Again

I have a winter's tale
how vagrant hearts relent prevail
sow their seed into the wind
seize the sky and they're Gone Again

fame is fleeting God is nigh
we raise our arms to him on night
we shoot our flint into the sun
we bless our spoils and we're gone we're gone

As well as being a good pop song, Gone Again is representative of quite a number of her recent songs in that they appear to be about death. Some are angry, others contemplative, still others transcendental.

The grimmest songs are on Peace and Noise. Waiting Underground is one of the more explicitly morbid songs you will ever hear:

if you believe all your hope is gone
down the drain of your humankind
the time has arrived
you'll be waiting here as I was
in a snow-white shroud
waiting underground

As Smith sings those lyrics, you can picture her on a stage, fist raised and screaming like some angry Valkyrie. Other titles include Death Singing, Last Call, Dead to the World, Ravens, Farewell Reel, and Dead City. Consider those titles and you may be able to identify a consistent theme.

The transcendental aspect of Smith’s work is more often represented through bird imagery. It has always been a staple of Smith’s writing, going back to BirdLand on Horses. Wing and China Bird, among others, continue that tradition with added depth. From Wing:

I was a vision
in another eye
and they saw nothing
no future at all
yet I was free
I needed nobody
it was beautiful
it was beautiful

and if there's one thing
could do for you
you'd be a wing
in heaven blue

Or China Bird:

If they say it's not that way
Hold your view
[Fly above and with my love]
A light anew
Oh spread your wings
The open sky
Is calling to you china bird
My heart is yearning for you

To complete the upward thematic spiral apparent in Smith’s work from Horses to present, we have to consider the “boy” theme along with politics, death, and birds.

About a Boy from Gung Ho is reminiscent of the Horses spoken-word poetry style.

whirling, whirling,
The boy, now that I... have you in my face,
I.... embrace you, I... I... ...welcome you...
I stood among them... I stood alone.

Memento Mori from Peace and Noise is another example:

oh Johnny! some day they'll make a movie about you
and in the making of that movie
some mad apocalypse
it will become even stranger than the simple act
just a boy going up up up
just a boy going up

With the benefit of hindsight we can see the new work bringing Smith full circle. We can see how Horses was eerily prescient of the arc of Smith’s art and life. Boys, funerals, birds, Blake, transcendence: it was all there from the start.

From Land:

And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake
Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck,
All his limbs, everything was twisted and he said,
“I won't give up, won't give up, don't let me give up,,,

And he put up his hands and he said, “It's me, it's me,
I'll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up...

And he saw raven comin' in
And he crawled on his back and he went up
Up up up up up up.

Note the boy going up up up from songs more than twenty years apart? It’s like she saw the outlines of her future, artistic and otherwise, in the ecstatic throes that must have been Horses.

I’ll wrap this up on a somewhat different note. Patti Smith once wrote of Dylan that the intensity of his political perspective had only been successfully revealed through abstract expressionism in rock'n'roll. “I look at him and I don't see a guy giving out leaflets, holding a banner. I see a machine gun.” I think that is also an apt description of Smith herself.

Although I haven’t discussed it to this point, the themes of anger and alienation are integral to much of Smith’s early work and they have pretty much been left behind in her new songs. Rock and Roll Nigger off of Easter is an all-time classic of anger and alienation and is part of the sound track of my own angry youth.

Oh, look around you, all around you,
riding on a copper Wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?

Outside of society, they're waitin' for me.
Outside of society, that's where I want to be.

For many years I was unsure of that lyric. I didn’t know if she was saying ”outside of society“ or ”outside in society,“ or alternating between the two. If she was saying ”outside in society“ I understood that as her wanting to be an outsider who goes into society to shake things up, to initiate change.

If we look at the arc of her life as it relates to society we can see that she has managed to do both at the same time: to be simultaneiously outside of and outside in society. She has stayed outside of society in that she has kept her personal and artistic integrity through 30 + years in the music industry, which is no mean feat. And she has managed to be an outsider in society to such an enviable extent that you just know she is at least as special as a person as she is an artist. In addition to going outside in society to communicate her art and political messages, she is an integral part of a society of incredibly accomplished outsiders: Allen Ginsburg, Phillip Glass, Jim Carrol, Lenny Kaye and the rest of her band, Lou Reed, Fred Smith, John Cale, and I don’t know how many others.

I mention all that with great hesitation. As noted above, to appreciate an artist’s work, I don’t give a flying fuck about their personal history, much less who they hang out with. But as a human, not a critic, I admire her for how she’s handled all that she’s been through and I’m happy for her that she belongs in such a wonderful society.

Rock and roll doesn’t have to be all love, sex, and noise. At it’s best it can be art and humanity in the highest sense of those words. Patti Smith’s work is worthy of consideration on those levels.

Atrios thinks I suck

Atrios gives some valuable advice, at least in a what-not-to-do kinda way, on how to be a popular blogger. This may surprise you, but poor chuckling has studied the question extensively. Before you die in a fit of laughter, or more likely shake your head sadly at the pathetic vanity of yet another blogging nobody, let me hasten to add that after studying how to become a popular blogger, I decided not to.

Nevertheless, Atrios very much is a popular blogger so his advice is as interesting as it is valuable. I will comment briefly on each of his points and then add a few that he failed to mention.

1) You don't post often enough... Oh, and truly excellent, original, and important content.

Duncan is kind enough to give us two key points for the price of one. Chuckling’s crack team of statisticians crunched the numbers and found that it is indeed true that popular bloggers post a lot. But we could find no relationship between popularity and quality or originality. In fact, for those who post more than once a day, the correlation between the number of posts and their quality is illustrative of the law of diminishing returns.

2) Your page design sucks.

Ha, is about all I can say to that. Atrios’s own site is readable, but isn’t about to win any design rewards. Sites like Glenn Greenwald’s or Digby’s are eye-gougingly ugly. Granted, there are many that are unreadable, but beyond that chuckling’s band of design experts could find no correlation between design excellence and popularity. If that were so, poor chuckling’s site would be in the top 10 percent, easy.

3) You need to get some mad blogwhoring skills.

I’ve no doubt that this is true.

4) Your blog actually sucks.

Yes, in so many cases, that truth hurts but it stands. Still, there is too much excellent writing out there to make an absolute connection between quality and popularity. Blogs like Gall and Gumption or Writhe Safely are good examples of high quality sites with little traffic relative to the big blogs.

5) You post all your best stuff as diaries at Daily Kos.

I wouldn’t know anything about that, but if you substitute Alicublog for Daily Kos, there are more than a few prominent commenters who could probably cop to that.

6) A sizable chunk of your content involves complaining about people not reading or linking to you.

I can see how that would be a turn-off. Atrios apparently gets a lot of people harassing him for publicity. That’s unfortunate, but I guess it goes with the territory.

Chuckling, as mentioned above, spent some time a few years ago researching how to create a popular blog. Unfortunately, or not, I have neither the gumption nor the attention span to do what it takes. And for me it’s a question of ethics as well. I just can’t see the writing that comes naturally to me ever being very popular in the blog format, even if I were to raise the quality significantly. So I would have to be artificial in order to be popular. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that it is necessarily bad for other people to seek popularity by giving the masses what they will pay for, it’s just not me. Nor am I saying that popularity necessarily equates with poor quality. Many people’s natural inclinations gibe with large swathes of the populace and good for them. But again, that’s not me. Here at chuckling, we only hope to tell little stories, be they by prose or by photo, that may amuse guests such as yourself. That and it's just good writing practice.

Anyway, in addition to Atrios’s valuable lessons on how to be a popular blogger, I’ll add a few of my own.

1) Be one of the first.

Those who were there when the blogging was new have a nearly insurmountable advantage. The boundaries of the format are now well established and the early settlers long ago homesteaded on the highest hills. In order to start now and become popular, you’d better follow Atrios’s number 3 and unleash some awesome blog whoring skills. A shitload of advertising and perhaps a corporate sponsorship may be necessary as well.

2) Join a well-established circle jerk.

Most popular blogs regularly link to the same group of other popular blogs. This increases their traffic as well as the number of sites that link to them. This strategy has been carried to ridiculously cynical extremes by the right wing nut cases. They are quite open about what they are doing. On the left, I think it developed more organically. In the early days, there weren’t that many bloggers and it was natural for the like-minded ones to link to one another. And since most (maybe all for all I know) of the popular lefty bloggers are decent people, they regularly link to writers they like with no requirement of reciprocation. Nevertheless, it would be a good strategy to identify a well-established circle jerk and start yanking its members. Many people will have decent enough manners to give you a wraparound, especially if you swallow.

3) Specialize in attacking someone famous

Everyone who is famous has a lot of people who hate them. Pick somebody and ridicule every move they make or word they write. If you can do it with either élan or over-the-top vitriol, a ready-in-waiting audience of tens of thousands will eagerly visit your site to see the famous schmuck cut down to size.

Since we’re speaking of Atrios, I’ll admit that it occurred to me that one could become popular by making a specialty of attacking him. There are probably people out there doing that from the right, but I don’t think anyone has made a full time job out of doing it from the left. I’ve made critical comments about him on a couple occasions and got a lot of feedback, both positive and negative, so I know the audience is there. That, however, is not the kind of person I am. And although I am critical of Atrios here and there, in general I like him and agree with the great majority of what he has to say. It’s just that I am a critical person and when someone has an opinion on hundreds of issues, there will be some with which I disagree. A follower I am not.

Anyway, that concludes professor chuckling’s lessons on how to be a popular blogger. We can all probably agree that it’s best you ignore them.

Random note from the cave

You may not know this about me. I admit it’s a bit embarrassing, and it may even be true. I have very good reason to believe that I am the last person in the continental United States who doesn’t have cable tv.

Now I usually count that as a good thing and tonight I was reminded of why. I went out to a happy hour after work and ended up in one of those bars where there is no possible place you can sit that is not facing a television, and this one was tuned to Lou Dobbs on CNN.

My memory of Dobbs was from the old days when news was more news and less entertainment and he was just another grave gray personage reporting the doings of the day’s market. I’d read that he was now a right wing nut case, but this was the first time I’d seen him since the devolution. Fortunately, the sound was off, but it was obvious from his pinched angry face that he was a Nutzi propagandist. So I was a bit surprised when the headline read “Iraq Plan already a Failure?” Well, duh, I thought, but I didn’t expect a prominent right wing nut case to state the obvious, even as a question. But then the graphic changed to “Democrat’s Iraq Plan already a Failure.” Not even a question mark. Cable? You can have it.

TK

Sorry to those of you who have been dropping by. I've been working on a rather long article about Patti Smith's recent work and haven't posted anything else to help you while away the empty hours in between. Hopefully, that will give you something to look forward to. I can’t promise, but it should be a bit better than chuckling’s usual nonsense.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about something I saw today. It’s nothing of great importance, I just thought I’d share it to pass the time until my Patti Smith article writes itself.

I often walk down Flatbush Avenue between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Church Ave. A lot of stores along that stretch sell clothes in the style of what the local folk refer to as “ghetto fabulous.” If the words “ghetto fabulous” do not immediately bring a picture to your mind of a large black woman wearing bright pink boots, tight jeans, and a pink tank top with back-fat spilling out around the bra strap and the words “baby luv” emblazoned across massive breasts, or something along those lines, then it is safe to say that you are not a Brooklynite. You may live in Park Slope or “the heights,” but that does not necessarily count.

Of course I mean no disrespect to my sisters in the ghetto. Is there anything more non-sensical than fashion? In the near future, today’s couture, both haute and prêt-à-porter, will likely look ridiculous. Still, the mannequins in these stores are interesting on several sociological levels. Unlike the mannequins in Soho, or pretty much anywhere else I’ve ever noticed mannequins, the ones along Flatbush Avenue have what local folk refer to as “big fat asses.” Now before you think ill of poor chuckling for pointing that out, realize that my wife shot me an evil look the first time I mentioned it. What’s wrong with women with big fat asses you big fat ass? Nothing, I say. Nothing at all. It’s a good thing that mannequins in these parts represent what people really look like. The world would be a better place if the human mannequins in Cosmo would learn a thing or two about real women from the plastic mannequins in Flatbush.

But I mention it today because I noticed something else. Many of the fat-assed mannequins were wearing low cut jeans and the ass crack was showing. I had always thought that the ass crack on display was a result of poor design, or real women trying to fit into pants that only a Soho model could wear. It had never occurred to me that the ass crack was an actual fashion choice. I found that reassuring. It kind of strengthened my faith in humanity.

This all reminded me of an interesting conversation about the Trilogy of Alienation by Michelangelo Antonioni that took place a few days ago in comments over at Alicublog. For those of you not up on classic avant-garde Italian cinema, L’Aventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse are stylistically incredible, but their narrative structure is not what most people would call compelling. Many would describe them as films in which nothing happens to a bunch of bored, boring people who do pretty much nothing througout the film. Although the running time may be no more than 90 minutes in objective time, they can last for days in subjective time. Very long days.

Paul K and Grant, redoubtable commenters over at Alicublog, as well as the proprietor himself, discuss these films at a depth beyond the capabilities of poor chuckling, but something that one of them said did spark thoughts in my poor, battered brain. The idea that Antonioni’s films functioned as non-judgemental recordings of people’s lives in all their random meaninglessness rather than stories with anything remotely like a traditional narrative, and that this was a good thing, kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong. If you, or anyone else likes that kind of thing, I’m happy for you, but chuckling spends a lot of time observing the random narratives of people on many different streets and a wide variety of social situations, and I find this endlessly fascinating, but I just do not need to watch a movie to appreciate that experience. I can enjoy the cinematography, but when it comes to the mundane, the cinema is a poor facsimile of real life. It doesn’t even smell, unless you have the misfortune to sit next to someone eating “buttered” popcorn. But I don't want to smell popcorn. I want to smell flop sweat, and flowers, and vomit, and perfume, and the perfume of wet pussy. And I wouldn't mind touching some of those things, too. There is nothing tactile about images on the screen. Story can be another matter.

My little walk down Flatbush illustrated those points. I could conceivably film it in a way that captures its beauty and depth, and perhaps even communicate the perspective from which I see the fat-assed mannequins, but without some kind of story to ground the scene, I wouldn’t find it interesting. For the most part, we are a people who appreciate purposeful narrative. Some of us can appreciate the immediate meaninglessness of day-to-day life, the random snatches of conversation, the sounds and passing smells of an everyday situation from a detached, artistic perspective, but what’s the purpose of going to the cinema to see it represented when we can walk out the door and get the real thing. I agree with Paul K’s contention that a director should fucking direct, otherwise his or her title might as well be “recorder.”

All that’s not to say that I don’t like Antonioni’s Alienation Trilogy, but putting cinematography aside and focusing on the here/now, I can get the more better 3D getto fabulous version on Flatbush.

IU sucks

The other night I went to a party where pretty much everyone was very wealthy. I've been to a few over the last few years and the thing that has surprised me the most is that they are generally very decent people. But still, one can only take so much. I'm sitting there drinking their wine, a nice bottle from the cellar, and eating their cheese, a wonderfully creamy Camembert, and the conversation is all "it's so funny, like everyone I meet lately went to Wellesley, and it's such a small, exclusive school. What are the odds? I know what you mean. It seems like everyone I meet went to Harvard. Ah Harvard, those were the days." And I get a kick out of this, in a visitor-from-another-planet-kinda way, and it occurs to me to ask if I could come over and fire bomb their house, but I have matured, mellowed, and I just think the thought for old times sake. They're actually quite nice and very decent people who make the world a better place.

So the next night, it’s after dinner and I check out ESPN on-line and find that Indiana is up pretty big on Michigan State at the half. I've just finished my own wine and cheese dinner with my wife, albeit the $2.99 Trader Joe's variety, and I decide to go out to the local bar and catch the second half.

I've lived in this neighborhood for going on three years and never been to the local bar. It’s the kind of place where you see 45 year old platinum blondes smoking at the entrance and grizzly old alcoholics stumbling out into the night. I've always meant to go there but just don't get out like I used to.

So I order a bourbon on the rocks. What kind? Whatever's cheapest. We get to looking and they don't even have any Bourbon (only Jack). So I say, what about the Jameson's, how much is that? $4, I'm told, do you want the white label or the black. I'll give the black a try, I say.

Meanwhile, as I drink as much 18 year old Jameson at $4 a glass as I can afford and meet Dougie and a few of the other regulars, IU is scoring a total of like 6 points in the entire second half. The crowd is surprisingly mixed. There’s a few older white guys who seem to be limo drivers. A couple of them are with women and there’s a little drunken drama going on. Some young Latino’s are playing pool, there’s a couple black guys and, surprisingly, a few young women. The music is mid-nineties style Rap.

I’m equally comfortable, and equally out of place, in this dive as I am at the dinner party. I can’t deny that I have more to talk about with the upper classes these days, but ultimately I feel pretty much the same with the one crowd as the other. Most everyone is at least superficially nice, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that the wealthy are any happier or better adjusted in their personal lives. I agree that there is a lot to be said for knowing how to appreciate the better things in life. But is Bordeaux and Camembert ultimately any better than beer and pretzals. Is it more enjoyable to look at and discuss the fine art on the walls than the sports on the television? No, I’d say (as long as the beer is decent, unlike the Buds my new friend Dougie is guzzling, and it would help if IU could make a fucking basket). It’s better to enjoy both (and plenty of other things as well). The problem for the lower classes is that they are generally unable to enjoy both worlds. I find that the working classes harbor a lot more prejudice against the enjoyments of professionals than vice versa. Most people can enjoy beer, snacks, and TV, but a large percentage of the population is missing out on the pleasures of fine arts, wine and cheese. And it’s not just a matter of money. Dougie spent as much on his Budwiesers as my wife and I spent on our entire dinner, bottle of red from Trader Joe’s included.

Then the bartender goes out for a smoke, someone jumps behind the counter, puts on Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive and the crowd erupts in a sing-along. I run out of money, pull out all my change and ask the bartender if he has anything for $3.50. He scratches his head and says, sorry, all we got at that price is Dewar's. I can live with that, I say. And the next one's on the house. Sometimes I just love Brooklyn. And if I were a religious nut, I'd weep and thank Jesus I didn't go to Harvard.

A complicated range of other factors

Today’s Guardian reviews Why do People get Ill, the new book by the psychoanalyst Darian Leader and philosopher of science (whatever that means) David Corfield. In it, Leader discusses the benefits and problems associated with popular mental health strategies (Parisian-style psychoanalysis, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the American-style throw-the-medicine-cabinet-and-pocket-the-loot strategy) that I discussed a couple posts down.

Listening is not a big feature of modern medicine here or anywhere in the west." Leader's book claims that, on average, a patient speaks for 23 seconds before being interrupted by their GP. The book concedes that most doctors have such staggering workloads that the average consultation with a GP in London lasts between six and eight minutes (the shortest average in Britain). But this may well make quick-fix diagnoses more likely.

...He talks about the government's preference for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) over traditional talking therapies. "The government favours this because it is about correcting surface symptoms and reintegrating people who report psychical problems back into the workplace where they can become useful again."

CBT aims at modifying everyday behaviour. Patients are often encouraged to keep a diary of significant events and associated feelings and thoughts. They are urged to question unhelpful or unrealistic assumptions and to do activities that have been avoided.

...it sounds potentially helpful for ameliorating just the kind of symptoms Leader's book spends a great deal of time discussing. Only one problem: he despises this form of therapy. "When was CBT used most widely? It was in Mao's China, when people had to be re-educated to see the world in the way that the authorities wanted." Indeed, he regards CBT as akin to drug prescription. "Some forms claim to target specific aspects of illness; they are supposed to be administered like a pill or injection, and this no doubt makes them attractive to health service providers. But I think it is horrible and fatuous."

Leader believes that unless root causes are addressed, they will simply resurface in another form, some months later.

...But surely one reason analysis is not popular, and particularly not popular with the government, is that psychoanalysis does not claim to produce results, while supporters of CBT claim that it does. "That's true. Having said that, a lot of my colleagues disagree with me and claim that studies show that, over the long term, symptoms will permanently disappear through analysis and that there will be lower rates of consulting GPs." And what is the long term? "They're talking about 20 or 30 years later." No wonder, then, that the government isn't calling on psychoanalysts such as Leader to cure Britain's depressives.

Dr. chuckling doesn’t have much to say on these issues, just finds them interesting. Viewed as a matter of simple distrust, it’s probably accurate to assume that strategies favored by government and big business are worthless at best, more likely counter-productive. Though CBT does not sound that bad to me, even though in this and the other article it is described as insidious brainwashing. But what do I know? Not much, not much.

If I must take a stand, I’ll go for psychoanalysis. It may take twenty or thirty years to produce measurable results, or not produce any results at all, but at least it has a coolness factor whereas CBT sounds like a cliff notes version of a dime-a-dozen self-help book and SSRI’s are definitely not cool (at least for the great majority of users who don’t really need them).

But psychoanalysis? With all the wacky writings of Freud, Jung, Lacan et. al.? And Woody Allen? Just about everybody likes to talk about their dreams (and what can it hurt), but who the hell wants to listen to someone else talk about theirs? Psychoanalysts deserve big money to sit through that shit for thirty years.

The more I think about it, the better it sounds. I propose that we create a huge government agency that guarantees everyone the right to 30 years of psychoanalysis. Think of how much better off people would be talking to a professional on the couch rather than ranting on blogs or sending people off to die in foreign wars. You dream you are Conan, killing hoards of brown people? God tells you what to do? But what about your mother? She laughed at your pee pee? It made you feel inadequate?

Twenty or thirty years? I see immediate results. In order to get bi-partisan support, we can cut taxes to pay for it.

(the following is just an experiment, pay no mind. Britney, shaved head, Anna Nichole, Obama Clinton feud, American Idol)

Britney, st. john, hil, and the last honest man

Matt Taibbi reports on some excellent work done by the good folk on Bernie Sanders’s staff.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget,...

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Of course the fact that news organizations have no interest in reporting the most important news of our time is nothing new. The idealistic and just plain naive among us get confused because we continue to refer to them as “news organizations.” In easily observable reality, the real question is rather they are primarily entertainment organizations or ad delivery systems. Six of one, half dozen of the other. But news? Puh-leeze.

So it’s not their fault. They are what they are and the only question left to be answered is “how much?” Or more accurately, “how many?”

How many are watching? If more of us would watch them report on the looting of our country by the Walton’s, Cox’s, Nordstroms, Gallos and their political lackeys in all branches of government, then that’s what we’d see.

But are the lefty blogs that much better? Are they significantly less personality driven than the old-fashioned media? Is the constant hubbub about the various wankers and progressive heroes really that different than Britney and Anna Nichole?

I don’t know if Sanders’s office is trying to get the lefty blogs interested in that very well-presented research, but if they are, they’re not having much, if any, more success.

Some pundit or politician says or does something stupid or smart. That's news. If Joementum shaves his head and checks into rehab, that's big news. It doesn't have to matter a whit to those thousands whose health will suffer so the Waltons can have many more millions.

Yea, the daily adventures of Hil, the Joes, Obamas and Osamas, Britneys and Carols don't matter a whit, not much more anyway, but if their name recognition is big, they provide a spike in hits and a bump in click-through advertising.

We’re still not sure what we are, and we’re not yet asking “how much?” But “how many?” That resonates on the same frequency these days.

Thinking is the cause of your illness

Flawed plan at Writhe Safely calls attention to an article by London Communists that criticizes contemporary mental health care in Britain which consists of happy-drugging the poor sods and/or happy-talking them into mental health with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), “in which patients are told to control their thinking, block negative thoughts and to think only positive thoughts.”

Our Communist friends, it seems, believe that our ascendent Capitalism, with its wars and economic injustices, makes it only natural for people to be depressed. In these times, they say, severe depression is proof of good mental health.

This approach insists that the depression comes from inside the brain of the patient – not from the objective reality of the outside world. But in a world threatened by global warming and ecological disaster, by wars involving nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and by extremes of wealth and poverty, is it madness to be depressed? At a more personal level the working classes are now more exploited, more in debt and working longer hours while traditional community and social structures are disappearing. What is the sane response to living in a mad world?

Personally, I do not know what mental illness or depression is. Of course I sometimes feel depressed, but I don’t know how that relates to other people who say they are depressed. Are we really feeling the same thing? Is there some kind of MRI or like device that can compare the mental state of different individuals? And where is the line that separates what is a normal, albeit occasional, state for human beings? I don’t know.

I hope this does not come off as disrespectful, but I will tell you frankly that I think the great majority of treatment for normal type depression is hokum. I grew up in the seventies and have tried, recreationally, many of the common drugs that doctors prescribe for depression, and even severe mental illness, over the years. When I was in high school, just about everything could be found among the medicine cabinets of my family and friends? Not only Valium and Xanax, but strong stuff like Tuinal and Nembutal. Why were doctors prescribing that crap to normal housewives? What the fuck was the medical purpose of a Quaalude? Why did my grandmother have a prescription for Nembutal in her medicine cabinet, from which she took precisely one pill? And speed is off the subject, but back then the quacks were prescribing it to anyone with cellulite (Kurt Vonnegut writes well about this in his novel Bluebeard).

I was older when SSRI’s came along and had gone happily beyond mom’s medicine cabinet for my recreational activities, but I tried Prozac and Paxil just to see what the buzz was about. Apparently, the quacks pushed these “remedies” on any woman who walked through the door. With my experience, it was glaringly obvious that these were terribly dangerous drugs and that normal people had no business taking them. It was especially clear that Paxil would cause far worse problems than it alleviated, the comedown leaving people worse than they were before they took the shit. So my opinion of the pharmaceutical industry and the quacks that peddle their pills comes from personal experience and is significantly less than positive.

These drugs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), include Prozac, Serotonin, Cipramil, Fluoxetine and others. They do help some people but many patients find the side-effects cause more problems than they solve. These side effects include kidney problems and water retention and they can be addictive or they can make the depression worse. These drugs have been linked with suicides and violent outbursts.

On the other hand, I have read articles, I remember one in particular from Harper’s, that told of people for whom SSRI’s were miracle drugs that allowed them to function as they weren’t able to before. And a friend of mine, the brother of my best friend, turned schizophrenic and eventually killed himself. This was someone I knew for many years, had many deep conversations with, and deeply respected. The last time I spoke with him, he emphasized that he had a serious medical condition, that there was no way it was some kind of depression resulting from something that happened in his personal life (a devastating book on this subject is The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut).

Last year a senior executive of Glaxo-Smith-Kline admitted that most of their drugs are effective on only about a third of patients. Even when they work, the drugs do not address the root cause of the problems of depression.

So yea, I trust that there are medical conditions for which these drugs are necessary, and maybe even helpful in the long run, but I suspect that they represent a small percentage of the prescription base. For the most part it’s insane, and should be criminal, to give that crap to regular folk.

What really interested me about the article was the information about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I had come across CBT recently in my reading and thought it sounded like a very good idea.

The National Association of Cognitive Behavioural Therapists (based in the United States) described CBT:

“It is a form of psychotherapy that emphasises the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. CBT therapists teach that when our brains are healthy, it is our thinking that causes us to feel and act the way we do. Therefore if we are experiencing unwanted feelings and behaviours, it is important to identify the thinking that is causing the feelings/behaviours and to learn how to replace this thinking with thoughts that lead to more desirable reactions.”

Sounds about right to me. I’ve spent most my life informally studying this type of thing. Thoughts are real. They affect the our brains and bodies. We can train our minds to control our bodies, at least to some extent. That is not some kind of new agey shit. It is scientific fact.

But can scientific fact and social services bureaucracy co-exist?

Patients (no longer called patients, that is too negative, but renamed “service-users”) who report that global warming, ecological disasters, wars, injustice, poverty and exploitation make them feel depressed are told that they are thinking too much. “Thinking is the cause of your illness. You must stop thinking your way and start thinking our way. You must think positively about the world.”

…This perpetual optimism, totally at odds with objective reality, is likely to make depressed patients feel worse, not better. They are told that the world is as it is and cannot be changed but that thinking it might be changed makes you ill and depressed.

Apparently not. The bureaucratic logic doesn’t hold water.

…Bourgeois psychologists have wrestled long and hard with the problem of optimism. Statistical analysis shows that pessimists are usually better at predicting the future than optimists. Yet they insist that optimists have better mental health. They also say that those most in touch with objective reality are the sanest. Both statements cannot be true.

Then we get the Marxist analysis:

CBT is taking the place of religion in persuading the exploited masses to resign themselves to their lot in life but it is grounded in an idealistic philosophy which ultimately claims that the material world exists as the creation of an idea (God’s) and is experienced through our ideas of it. This is the opposite of the Marxist-Leninist historical materialist view of the world which says that objective reality exists outside our own heads. And not only can it be changed but it is in a constant state of change in any case. For us, the sane method is to analyse that objective reality and the way it changes in order to be able to influence those changes – to think for ourselves and not be fooled by rosy illusions.

But what does it mean?

If we take the view of the CBT advocates, we cannot do anything to change any of this but must adjust our minds to see it all through rose tinted spectacles. This leads some people to hedonism – escapism through refusing to listen to the news, being obsessed with the celebrity culture, drinking and partying as much as possible: “if there is no hope we might as well enjoy ourselves while we can”. This is one trend that has taken a large proportion of the working class away from active participation in anything political.

That’s supposed to be a bad thing? Okay, I'll grant them celebrity culture, but partying?

The other trend is despair, which has captured many of those who cannot turn off their minds, who cannot help but see what is happening around them. But feeling isolated and helpless they become paralysed by depression and or by suppressed anger. They become unable to function as part of a society which they can see is going mad.

The only sane and rational alternative is to ignore the CBT people and the pills, take stock of objective reality and set about trying to change it.

I’m afraid that I have to disagree that political activism is the only sane and rational alternative. I would call it a courageous and noble alternative, but effective mental health therapy? I very much doubt that political activism is any better in that respect than pharmaceuticals or happy talk, could be a lot worse.

But maybe that’s just me projecting again. I know all about the sad state of world politics, far more than most people, but I neither let it get me down or try to do much of anything about it. I can tell my Communist friends from personal experience that it’s possible to know of the great and myriad crimes committed by our government abroad and be personally screwed by the current economic system and still be positive and happy in one’s personal life. Although I am not a Communist, I share their Materialist world view and believe that this life is all we’ve got. Those of us fortunate enough to have been born in relatively wealthy societies are only trapped by our desires. As noted below, I would be more than content to live in a tent in the desert. Unless you are genuinely mentally ill, otherwise sick, starving, jailed, or being tortured, happiness is all in your head. Think happy. Stop wanting all that crap. Be happy. And if that fails, eat well, get exercise, consume quality alcohol (mostly)in moderation, and maybe smoke a little weed or something on occasion. And don't forget good sex. The more, the better. Thus spake dr. chuckling.