The Bile shall rise again

A man driving a panel van cut me off on the highway on the way to work today. The van had a bumper sticker "Never apologize for being white." In case that message was too subtle for some people, a Dixie flag accompanied the words.

I guess he isn't apologizing for discourteous driving either.

Well, I guess Adrian wouldn't do it either

Preparing dishes for daughter L's b-day bash, Mrs. Bim was concerned about the proper spice mixture of her fratatta.

I ventured a suggestion: "Why don't you just taste it?"

She responded quickly: "But it has raw eggs in it."

"I guess you you've never seen Rocky."

"Is he a famous chef?"

Ah, the joy of being in 5th grade in the '70's and trying to imitate your celluloid heroes.

At the Dark End of the Street

I took a different bus to work today through a part of town that is a little rough. For my adventure I was rewarded with one of the only times in my adult life that I witnessed a street fight. (The other time was at a Dead show.)

The bus was stopped at an intersection and I was fiddling with my Ipod because the Soft Drugs had ended. Then I heard some commotion and looked up to see two swarthy combatants slugging away at each other on the sidewalk. One guy slammed his opponent against the front bus door, shattering it. They continued to brawl across the street. Finally, the "victor" appeared to having fully vented his anger and walked away. The "loser" shook it off and they both disappeared. The bus driver picked up his phone, spoke for a couple of minutes, then informed us that this bus wasn't continuing. We would have to catch the next bus that came along.

I felt nausau from watching the brutality. And a certain admiration for their stamina: I imagined that any one of the blows sustained by "the loser" would have put me on the sidewalk. But he was still able to attempt to defend himself. I felt shame because I felt powerless to stop it and didn't even call 911. I expected the bus driver to do it.

I've been reflecting recently that there is a fundamental difference in how liberals and conservatives digest new information about the world. Liberals mock this difference, saying "facts have a liberal bias." Most notably, this difference was recognized by the unnamed Bush aide who in 2004 dismissed the importance of the reality-based community. Based on unscientific observation I would say the difference boils down to this: liberals tend to take a fact- say "over a billion people per day exist on less than a dollar a day" and their world is shaped by this fact. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to take a few viewpoint- say "they hate us for our freedom" and arrange new information around this perspective.

I imagined that my stereotypical conservatives would view this morning's slugfest as evidence that the City is a bad bad place and the suburbs are great place to raise kids.

Though I felt a visceral reaction to aggression, I was inside the bus and could see their aggression was only directed at each other and didn't threaten to include others. The combat quickly dissolved. I don't think the world is any more dangerous than I did yesterday.

Meanwhile, those actors who make the world considerably less safe go unnoticed. One can suffer from a host of oppressive forces that are not termed "violent" in the general parlance, but are instances of people enduring devastating losses and even death. Frequently, when actions are embedded in our economic system, there is a societal agreement that such behavior is not criminal.

Peel back the headlines that scream the latest looting and shooting and the real impact of "urban problems" pale next to the violence inflicted by large corporations: Sub-prime lenders force thousands from their homes, agri-business sends farmers prison for saving seeds, US Corps of Engineers build sub-standards levees, car manufacturer's products emit fine particulates that ravage fitness buff's lungs, developers build sprawling suburbs that cripple the residents, and HMOs deny or delay coverage that succeeds in killing their customers. Most likely criminal charges won't be filed in against any of the perpetrators of this sort of violence.

My point isn't to trivialize street violence, but to state that our definition of "violence" isn't a big enough net to catch all the criminals that prey upon us.

Afterwards, when I hopped on the next bus, I put my Ipod on shuffle. First song up was Gram Parsons and friends singing "At the Dark End of the Street," immediately followed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra's version of the "Sunny Side of the Street."

I've seen fire & I've seen rock'n'roll

While one can find much comment on the presence of fire in Greek myths, there is less mention of it as an everpresent staple in rock'n'roll. Some connections between rock and fire are legendary albeit unintentional, such as the flaming Lynyrd Skynyrd album cover or Michael Jackson shilling for Pepsi and setting his hair on fire.

My favorite uncanny rock reference to fire occurred when the Austin instrumental group Explosions in the Sky decided to release an album entitled "Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever." Innocently enough, the album cover had a flying biplane illuminating a rising angel, with the silhouettes of soldiers massed below. The first song on the recording was "Greet Death" and the the gatefold image was a flying plane captioned with the phrase: "This plane will crash tomorrow."

Did I mention that album's official release date was September 4, 2001? Needless to say, it didn't top the charts.

Sometimes fire is simply divine retribution for imposing disco upon the world.

O Mesopotamia!

Well, unless you're faced with scant career choices or profiting from the war industry, you can't be blamed if you don't remember that there's a war going on. I mean, they're not even bothering to issue war bonds for this one.

But I have a few digressions to add to the voluminous spiels, rants, and bloviations about the war in Iraq.

1. Anyone who espouses an opinion that includes "boots on the ground" is not entitled to use that phrase. I don't care if they read it in Janes Defence Weekly while in the bathroom at Uncle Walley's; that doesn't mean that they get to have a serious opinion about the war and buttress it with that slogan.
2. I really feel no nationalist shame about "redeploying the troops," or an "immediate withdrawal" or whatever you want to call it. It is a military defeat no matter how you define it. I have no shame for withdrawing from a civil war where our soldiers are faced with the shameful task of nation-building and where we had little chance of winning anyway. Invading Iraq to oust Hussein was as absurd as it would've been to go to war with the Soviet Union in 1990 to unseat Gorbachev. Surely the dictators were a domestic menace, but they represented no active threat to the US's national security and their regimes were due to implode eventually anyway.
3. I decided over the weekend to dig into the Epic of Gilgamesh. An enlightening tale, I would say, but with no application to today's events. Gilgamesh, who was semi-divine and heard messages from the Gods, built a great wall at Uruk to protect his people and ventured on long quests with his hairy mythical wild man friend Enkidu. At a pivotal moment in his odyssey, he is given a beginner's test to start on the path to achieve immortality. He has to stay awake for six days and seven nights. However he cannot stay awake and fails the test. Although the story's end is somewhat is in dispute, it is assumed that armed with lessons of wisdom from his quest, he spent the rest of his days appreciating the simple joys of life.

Thanks!

I noticed that Family Man mentioned me in his blog- twice!

I really appreciate it and now formally apologize for waking you in the wee hours with my spoo-making.

Evil is boring

In my life I've reserved quite a bit of face area (eye glint, wry smirk) and brain time (innuendo, word play) for the ironic. I relished themes that undermined dominant narratives and twisted the undies of convention. Over the years though, I've noticed that my enthusiasm for irony and poking a stick in the Eye of Society has diminished.

One ready example that came to me recently involved the Whitey America Loves to Hate, Adolf Hitler. I was once involved in a bit of street theater with Isaac Sanchez and Eddie Lee Sausage where my role was a Deadhead puppet master controlling the actions of marching brownshirts. The piece skillfully connected the stagecraft and mass-mind control of Alpine Valley '89 and Nuremburg '36.

A flimsy and slanderous connection? Before hippies pelt me with love beads and falafel, they should note that History doesn't wholly refute the connection, as this image of Der Fuhrer and his pet transportation project reveals.

So, thanks to my friends I had a perspective of Hitler that was a little more nuanced than simply as a Bogeyman to promote fear as means to advance political agendas.

A few years later I inherited a largess of photos from my Aunt Ione who had served as an Army librarian in Europe after the war. One of the more curious images she had was a postcard with a photo of a trim overly large ranch style home on a mountaintop. The card identified the structure as Berghof, Hitler's vacation retreat.

I put the photo in a small frame on my wall. I liked it for the obvious linkage of modernist architectural style and the banality of evil. I felt a fiendish delight in the idea that the style of Hitler's leisure palace could easily nestle in a '50s vintage suburban America cul-de-sac.

But no more. I've grown weary of such play. Besides, Third Reich architecture is no longer subversive and relegated to the bland suburbs. It's gone prime time and been coopted for more prominent monuments.

Myth is mightier than the Pen and the Sword

Biking in this morning to work, I was almost sideswipped by one of those doorstopper sedans with a "I brake for leprachauns" bumper sticker.

I guess braking for bicyclists is optional.

Cracker Jacks surprise inside

It seems that communications innovations have rendered everything more transparent. In the main, I think this is a good thing for the Righteous and a blow against the Wicked. But it comes as a loss for the Oblique and Obscure.

When I was growing up in the '70's-'80's, I remember fondly the joy of stumbling onto new worlds through friends or just random occurrences. Since my peers and I were isolated in our worlds- confined by geography, communication networks, social ineptness, etc.- the Brave New Worlds we found in print or on vinyl slabs meant so much. Unlike the ease and mindlessness of mouse-clicking, there had to be intention driving us to discover, with risks attached.

Now, I'm not saying we were Shackleton or anything, but risk was present because we had to be out in the Real World and had to touch Real Things. There was a physicality to it: a material object, space to traverse, and new atmospheres: a room in a house, an urban street, a patch of woods, or a record store.

We touched things and they touched us. The pranks RE/Search publication, Omni magazine, prog rock classics (Discipline, the Lamb), a Hundertwasser biography, Beat authors, and being gobsmacked by Codex Seraphinianus, were just a few touchstones from that era.

Along the same lines as the obscure in Olden Days, the recordings of the "numbers stations", compiled in the The Conet Project, is a good example of something that survives all good attempts at explanation, without getting all Grassy Knoll about it.

It's good to know that transparency doesn't expel all mystery; and that the weird is still as inscrutable as ever.

Selling in a Market where none come to buy

I love the idea of a "curated" retail outlet. Though I come from a family of merchants and ministers, I think the only way I could do a store is if I could pick the merchandise and without regard to the preferences of the market's invisible hand.

Come to think of it, I have conducted curated merchandise sales. It's called a garage sale. And it lasts as long as I would be in business if I had a curated store: exactly one day.

Older, wiser or not?

Time was, there would be occasions when driving around with high school buddies, we would see something like a cardboard sign propped up by the side of the road with black spray-painted letters reading: "BUD PARTY," with an accompanying arrow pointed down the road.

Now, that was an incidence that would startle us into rampant mythologizing. Who would attend such an affair? And there would be active debate as to whether we should follow the direction of the arrow to find out.

Well, last Sunday I saw such a sign. My son K was in the back seat and we were headed to a trucker's house to purchase a split queen box spring to replace the full queen box spring that couldn't navigate the switchback in our New House stairs. All I could do is glance at the sign looking lonely by the freeway off-ramp and curse myself for not having a camera to capture the image. I continued on my task and let "BUD PARTY" rage on without me.

Or, there was a time when we reveled in the irrelevant. A card celebrating an event was most treasured when it had the least connection with the sentiment that should've been expressed. Thus, a birthday card was most likely a wedding anniversary message meant for an octogenarian and "get well" cards served all occasions because we all needed to get over something.

Or, gag gifts were prolific. Thrift stores often yielded t-shirts that said things like "Relax, I'm a pro" or "Lincoln Elevators, we guarantee our erections." These would suffice for serendipitous gift exchanges.

Now, I don't do these things so much anymore. I still have the urge, but I think: If I'm really going to give a gift, I don't simply want to add to a friend's accretion of stuff. So, I'm more cautious, but I do buy those high school friends the gift that everyone should have.