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.

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.

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.