Losing Buckley

I just finished a book today, “Losing Nelson” by Barry Unsworth. It’s fantastically well-written, the story of a man obsessed with Horatio Nelson, the quintessential British hero. Nelson was a man who makes Winston Churchill look like Neville Chamberlain, an admiral whose greatest naval triumph took place as he was dying, one-armed and blind in one eye with a bullet lodged in his spine.





The story’s narrator, Charles Cleasby, has devoted his life to researching Nelson. And he has eventually come to identify so utterly with Nelson that Cleasby sees himself as a dark side shadow of his “angel”, the admiral. The novel brilliantly intertwines the biographical data of Nelson with Cleasby’s OCD-tinged existence: timing his life to the events of his hero’s accomplishments. Of course, the story takes a very dark turn at the end, a kind of morality play with a message against wrapping your life in someone else’s cloak.



Recently The Onion Online published a list of “20 pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python.” Since I'm a geek, too, I could laugh and agree with the enumerations of hobbies they included: World of Warcraft, “Star Trek”, anime and cosplay, Renaissance fairs, MySpace and other social networking sites, fantasy sports, fan fiction, Magic: The Gathering and other card games like Pokemon.




The Japanese have a word for it: otaku, meaning someone obsessed with a particular hobby, activity or interest. We call it “fanboy,” but now that’s become sort of like the N-word for the hipster set, a badge of both honor and censure.


But the more I think about it, the longer the list gets. Just off the top of my head I added Bob Dylan, Heroclix, “American Idol”, Apple Computers, Harry Potter, stamp collecting, golf, the Internet in general, Elvis impersonators, Lord of the Rings, scrapbooks, Solitaire, taking pictures of your pets, reorganizing your CD collection, making lists like “100 Best Supporting Actor Performances by a Male”, The Grateful Dead, armchair philosophy (armchair theology if you’re religious), “Lost” and “Heroes”, Marvel and DC comics, correcting improper grammar, The Simpsons, conspiracy theories, miniature model-making, and biographies of Abraham Lincoln or Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.





[On a side note, politics has been called the ultimate spectator sport. So along the lines of fantasy football, why isn’t there fantasy politics? Choose your team from any historical/political personage, living or dead, and match them up in various combinations and settings. How would Caesar Augustus and William Pitt the Younger fare when pitted against H.R. Haldeman and Alexander the Great at the Scopes Monkey Trial? Now, keep in mind that Geraldine Ferraro is refereeing.]



These are cult things that have such a wide following (or maybe have such a large congregation of Kool-Aid drinkers) that they’re no longer cults – they’re mainstream niches. Sort of like Mormonism, now seen as a sect of Christianity, not a cult. (Or like Scientology will be in 15 years, once Tom Cruise stops embarrassing them and fanboys forgive Isaac Hayes for quitting “South Park.”)



I’m not innocent here: my philosophy has always been that if it’s worth paying attention to, it’s worth obsessing about. I’ve got my idols in need of killing: in music (U2, Jeff Buckley, The Arcade Fire), literature (T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Chuck Palahniuk), comics (The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen), film and TV (Dead Poets Society, Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development).



But I’m tired. I’m tired of the things I adore and the things I despise. I’m tired of creating heroes and villains, erasing subtleties and fine distinctions to place objects on pedestals. It gets exhausting being a tireless evangelist and apologist for my pet subjects, refusing to acknowledge imperfections in what I love or merits of things I hate. It just gets to be too much.





I don’t know that there is something inherently, fundamentally accurate that makes Jeff Buckley’s music infinitely truer and more keenly observed and more beautiful than Jerry Garcia’s. (No matter how firmly I believe it to be so.)



Now, I love a good argument, I seek it out, I’m always hungry for a debate, spoiling for a hard fight. But I’m losing confidence in that kind of zero-sum approach, that there are winners and losers, and rhetorical eloquence or ironclad logic is a path to truth. It’s the equivalent of “might makes right” for the debate club.



I’ve heard this position called postmodernism or the death of objectivity or relativism. I’d like to think of it as a kind of generosity, a humility that whatever my opinions and my reasons, I MIGHT BE WRONG. (Thanks, Radiohead!)



What I’m coming to see is this:



Your passions aren’t worthy of the devotion given them.



Nothing can ever be as good as we paint these things to be. We can’t honestly believe that focusing exclusively on this particular area or activity is going to be ultimately beneficial to us. We’re receiving some reward or high from this, so we keep chasing it. But the law of diminishing returns keeps kicking in, and it takes more time, effort and expense to keep getting to the same rush of pleasure.






I don’t know if it’s a quirk of personality. It could be a side effect of 21st-century changes in traditional means of creating community. Or maybe it’s just cheaper than psychotropics or prescription drugs for “realigning the doors of perception.”



But for some reason obscure Dadaist comedy, escapist fantasy and science fiction, and role-playing seem to give people something they can’t otherwise get. Are things just too intolerable to ourselves AS ourselves? It’s easier to cope with existence as James Tiberius Kirk or Aragorn or Jean Grey?





I know there isn’t one specific reason – there are as many explanations as there are people. But I’m looking for the overall threads, explanations for my own behavior and the behavior of my friends.



My current thought is that maybe we celebrate not the objects themselves, but the pleasure they give us. We rejoice in the themes they speak to. We celebrate ourselves as we see ourselves reflected, like Narcissus in the still pool.


We love what we love because there’s something in them that resonates, some flavor of myth or basic physics, that gets to the root of how we perceive the universe to be. Something we want to be: grace or strength or power or intelligence or creativity. We say something is true because there’s a flavor of our personality and philosophy and experience in them.



I hate The Grateful Dead with a passion – to me there is nothing at all redeemable in their bland, shambling solos or rambling, obtuse lyrics or shaggy, mellow image. But to Deadheads it’s their identity, their inspiration, their community, their escape. And doesn’t there have to be something there? I can’t for the life of me find it, but I’m willing to accept on faith that it’s there.



W.H. Auden wrote,



“How should we like it were stars to burn


With a passion for us we could not return? 


If equal affection cannot be, 


Let the more loving one be me.”



I must beg to differ with Wystan on this point. I’m rather fed up with adoring those unworthy of my affection. Let them adore me for a while.




All this to say, I’m ready to give it up, expand my interests, give up depth in favor of breadth. Any suggestions?

Working for the Church While Your Family Dies

The Arcade Fire gave me a reason to live. It’s such an emo cliché, like “Our Band Could Be Your Life” or “This Ain’t a Scene (It’s an Arms Race).” But I still believe that there is always the potential for your mind to be blown, for you to disbelieve that what you’re actually listening to could possibly be this good, for your life to be changed by a dozen or so songs.



In this case, it’s the 11 songs on The Arcade Fire’s album Neon Bible, 47 minutes of joy, paranoia, hope, doubt, insecurity and faith. And they come out like gangbusters, blasting this music I’ve never even imagined possible: some kind of mix between Bruce Springsteen, Sigúr Ros, David Byrne and Bach. Part of it has to do with the state my head’s in. But I guess whenever you become unduly influenced by any kind of art, it mostly has to do with where your life’s at.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the city where I live, of the schedules set for me, of my persistent issues and weaknesses. Worst of all, I’m tired of the music I make. Monotony sets in, everything is grey (especially in Boston, where everything really is grey for about 8 months a year). “Nothing tastes good,” as Win Butler, Arcade Fire’s main songwriter, puts it.

And then music comes along that makes you remember when you loved music and it mattered to you, remember who you wanted to be when you were five years younger and hungry for life.

Part of it is that music is my profession – I’m surrounded by it on a level that would have staggered me a few years back. Perhaps it will be a strength later, but it’s a drawback now – I’m losing my ability to listen. In high school, I would turn on my portable radio at miniscule volume levels to avoid my parents’ detection, and I would just lay in bed for hours with my left ear pressed against the metal grille. I could listen to a song and just go wherever it took me.

I heard Iggy Pop’s “Death Car”, with its eerie, portentous chorus, “In the death car/We are alive,” and I saw black maria vans in the USSR, the trains arriving at Birkenau, long black limousines carrying gangsters and/or gangstas, maybe just a family station wagon on a dead desert highway. Now I hear the chord changes and rhyme scheme and try to pick out which instruments are being used.

I can’t listen to music anymore – I analyze it. And that, coupled with some crippling doubt about my own music and abilities, really sucks the fun out of listening to songs. It doesn’t help that most music is mediocre by definition: mediocrity is the middle of the road, the majority, the not particularly good or terribly bad. And even your own Top 100, the music that means the most to you, peters out. It has to have some time to lie fallow; you must forget your favorite songs in order to hear them again.

There’s also a good bit of personal failure and breakdown that goes into this peculiar state of mind that prepared me to have my cranium exploded by that beautiful band from Montreal. Really, you can practically name an area of my life at random and land on one that is dysfunctional, broken or in flux.



So along comes music that is gorgeous and bittersweet and well-crafted. And it sounds like an orchestra meeting The Talking Heads. And it’s all about brokenness, and mediocrity, and a crisis of faith, and dissatisfaction with the world you find yourself living in. It’s about needing more and being left wanting. It’s about being weighed and being left wanting. Mostly it’s just about wanting.

Here are some sample lyrics.


“Don’t wanna work in a building downtown.”

“I know a place where no planes go. Let’s go!”

“Keep the car running.”

“I don't wanna hear the noises on TV, I don't want the salesmen coming after me, I don't wanna live in my father's house no more.”

“Every spark of friendship and love/ will die without a hope.”

What is this?! Should I sue them for copyright infringement on my life? Somehow they found a way to articulate these things, these desires and fears, in ways I haven’t even scratched the surface of. I’m writing white-guy hip-hop songs for class assignments while they’re nipple-tweaking my soul!

This is probably most explicit on “My Body Is a Cage,” the last track on the album: it’s a haunting, mournful requiem for faith, but it somehow has a redemptive uplift. It’s just the way they do things. Here's the first verse:

“My body is a cage/
that keeps me from dancing with the one I love,/
but my mind holds the key.”

In a recent interview Butler said, “Neon Bible is addressing religion in a way that only someone who actually cares about it can. It’s really harsh at times, but from the perspective of someone who thinks it has value.” The whole record is staggering, and it’s really made me examine if I believe what I believe.

I think a lot of things have combined to create a perfect storm on my sea of Galilee. Church sucks, and it makes me want to abdicate from Christendom. I’ve been reading a lot of viewpoints that diverge from my “orthodox” Protestant upbringing, in particular an article by a gay seminarian examining what Scripture has (and doesn’t have) to say about homosexuality. I have a good friend whom I would have in my youth called “a typical postmodern,” with whom I’ve had some really gripping and heartfelt discussions about faith and religion. Old friends have told me about their difficulty believing any of the bullshit we were taught as kids. And one of my brothers condemned me for “getting soft” spiritually and ended the conversation in tears.

And I’m beginning to realize that from the very beginning, my faith has depended on doubt. It’s what’s in the I.V. drip that keeps my spiritual life going. I don’t really have any more of the puzzle than that, as of this moment. I’m not making any resolutions or penance, right now I’m simply observing.

I’ve flirted with atheism before, seeing if it changed anything. It didn’t. At least not in terms of morality or external behavior. My parents raised me as both a polite Southern boy and a Presbyterian, and I can’t tell you which one of those is more deeply ingrained. (Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew, in the South you say, “Yes, ma’am.”)

But as much as I sometimes can’t believe in Christianity, I really can’t believe in no God. I would simply like to know what “Believing in God” means to me now. I’m a grown man, and I guess this is about the time I have a pretty major re-evaluation of who the f*** I am.

And I guess that just shows you how on the fence I must be: I can think the f-bomb but can’t bring myself to write it. Sounds like a bumper sticker: “Jesus hates the F-bomb. It’s the A-bomb he loves.”

Peace.

Power Games

I've recently been re-reading all the books in the "Dune" series, and it's definitely been thought-provoking. I discovered "Dune" when I was 10 and for a while I tried to read it every year. But it's been several years, and I've really enjoyed the cerebral nature of the books. The novels are so full of far-flung connections, plots and things between the lines, it all boggled my mind in my teen years and now I'm starting to figure it all out.

But in my reading, one quote in particular caught my eye and won't get out of my head.

"All rebels are closet aristocrats."

An ageless tyrant, jaded and world-weary, remarks on how easy it is to control rebels because they all simply want power, however passionate their oratory on liberation and freedom for all.

And it set me thinking about the nature of power, (as Jon Stewart said, "Obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.") and the cycle of politics. A gentrified, decadent aristocracy (the late Roman emperors, 18th-century France, the Romanovs of Russia) sinks into a quagmire of indolence and indecision, which is taken advantage of by a small cohesive group of free-thinkers using popular discontent for their own ends ( Alaric and the Huns, Danton and Robespierre, the Decembrists and then the Bolsheviks). So there's internecine warfare and usually massive bloodshed as the deteriorated old guard musters up its last strength to deliver a few ineffectual licks to the new wave, which promptly rolls all over the bloated corpse of the previous regime (barbarian skirmishes, mass beheadings of French aristocrats, the October Revolution).




It's all couched in us vs. them language, the future vs. the past, ideals vs. dead dreams, virtue vs. vice. (Try saying that quickly.) But, really, what is, at root, the underlying cause? It's resentment that THEY are doing what WE want to do. They lounge around in their expensive mansions partaking of whatever pleasure they desire, while I am denied those things. It's not that the old government was bad, it's just that we weren't a part of it!

So what happens next? The rebels, energized by their swift, decisive victory, begin to lay the groundwork for a new infrastructure or even leave massive bits of the old one lying around, changing a few names here and there. After a brief honeymoon period the duped masses figure out that being ignored by the old guard is just as useless as empty promises from the new guard. There's dissatisfaction and call for a "return to the dreams of the revolution." Which is, of course, quickly and ruthlessly put down, lest any younger young turks get stupid ideas and try to start The Revolution 2.0. Heck, the Soviets offered "Land and Bread!" to every citizen, and within a few years was executing subsistence farmers in order to seize their gardens.



So years pass, the government must become more and more brutal in its quashing of rebellion and dissent, meanwhile those at the highest echelons of power become isolated from the common people, trapped in their vices and newly aristocratic lifestyles, and in short, transmogrify into the very thing they hated and rushed the barricades to defeat. Heck, the Goths didn't hate Rome, they just wanted to be Romans! Who can tell the difference between the Romanovs and Party members? So time goes on, dissidents form a quiet network to bring down the system and the whole morality play starts all over again.

Heck, look at Star Wars! The Empire was just trying to get the trains to run on time and not form a committee to form a committee to examine the transportation schedules. Does anybody honestly think the Rebellion is going to do much better? Nobody wants to see Han Solo in a budget meeting! The chain repeats itself: we just skip the boring parts and move from one "glorious" revolution to another, after waste, mismanagement and luxury work their magic. (I guess I'm also thinking of our wonderful 2-party system here in America, which begins to look more and more like a beauty pageant every midterm election. "Who SEEMS like they're not greedy crooks about to inherit the House and Senate?")

Look at Africa for extreme examples of this: warlords rising to power, promising to make nations instead of fiefdoms, and instead there's civil war, unrest, and 10 years later? Another warlord holding the reigns. For that matter, look at America's kingmakers, supplying Afghan freedom fighters with weapons and intelligence against the Soviet "evil empire." (For that matter, did Reagan take the Star Wars theme too much to heart? "Evil empires" and "rebels" and "slave princess bikinis.") And now the Wall has fallen, the biggest threat from the former Soviet bloc is Borat, and those freedom fighters decide maybe the Russians weren't as bad as the country that's now running the world.

Again, I'm not really political, in the sense that I don't believe politics will ever change anything. It won't solve world problems, for the most part. Politics won't kiss the owie and make it better; politics is not our mother. It's just some bimbo we know around the block who we'll screw over as soon as it's profitable for us. In that sense, politics is just like any other human endeavor - prone to abuse, corruption and failure. I'm more interested in what politics tells us about people, Bronze Age to Information Age.

So I guess American culture has a rebel complex: we love the young, handsome activists fighting for change. We even love rebels WITHOUT a cause, as long as they've got a red jacket and blonde pompadour. Look at rock and roll: every rebel becomes part of the Establishment, because that's all rebels really want.


The King turned in his black leather for spandex and rhinestones, and rockabilly gave way to Lounge Vegas. Jay-Z becomes head of Def Jam Records, Ice-T becomes a "B" movie actor! The man who aroused the fury of a nation, who had his biggest hit with "Cop Killer", is now a detective on "Law and Order."

Maybe I'm on the lookout for the counter-counter-culture, the alternative to the alternative. Perhaps every rebellion is another evil empire waiting to happen.

Death and Dying

..................................It has been a very, very long time, and for that I apologize. I won't elaborate on the banal circumstances, suffice it to say that there have been numerous mitigating factors in my extended silence.

So this post is about death. On and around my birthday I usually think a good deal about it, but not for any romantic purposes a la' the goth and/or metal subculture. Those who most exalt death are inevitably those too young to fear it or those too old to struggle against it. I am neither and would like to think I have a fairly clear eye in considering the subject. My rationale for pondering my own eventual demise is neither to venerate nor to denigrate it, but to allow it to serve as a memento mori, a reminder that all now living must die.

And as such, it gives a clarity and a purpose to the present moment: what are you doing with your life as it hastens to its end? What use are you making of what time remains? If this sounds reminiscent of the platitudes spouted in any Oscar-nominated drama or NY Times Bestseller, perhaps it is. Certainly, for me this has been an internal process which when brought into this public forum seems to wilt rather sadly, like an aged rose under glass which is suddenly exposed to the outer air. Carpe diem and all that, what what.

But I have often found great benefit in considering other's views on mortality and comparing it to my own. Case in point, on my 26th birthday my wife and I drove to Concord, Massachusetts to visit the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and specifically, Author's Ridge, where the Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott and Emerson families are buried, together with the most celebrated scions of their lines. Before ascending the hill into the burial ground, we walked around Concord, a quaint and picturesque town which nevertheless presents a whiff of dissembling: is it a tourist site because of its charm, or is it charming because of the tourists?

But in a less-visited corner of the town was a small burial ground very similar to the Granary in Boston (resting place of Paul Revere and John Hancock). Many of the gravestones dated back to the mid-17th century, and most were in fair and legible condition. The designs were spartan in their simplicity, and the images so childlike as to be almost chilling. Rather than infantile cherubs or majestic eagles, these angels resembled nothing so much as stylized human skulls with wings at the neck. These images present death not as gruesome or terrifying, but simply as a sober reality with which each person must grapple.

The inscriptions were even more revealing, written as they are TO THE PASSERS-BY! "The finest of flesh is dust, prepare for death, for follow me you must." "The longest life is short, happy the man who lives it to his God. No other life is worthy of our choice. What tho we wade in wealth or soar in fame, Earth's highest honour ends in, 'Here he lies:' And 'Dust to dust' concludes her noblest song." The directness of appealing to future generations, as though from beyond the grave, holds for me both a theological attraction and a morbid repulsion.

Perhaps more to the point, many of the gravestones contained not just names and dates but descriptions of the deceased. "She was of a pleasant temper, a respectful wife and of a good conduct and behavior in her life." What more could one desire as their epitaph? What obituary could more fittingly capture "The Good Life"? To live rightly with man and God, it seems such a simple, homely existence. But it is the strange, paradoxical nature of the Gospel that those things which are most simple confound the wise, and those things most humble are most glorious.

I've taken to reading much Kierkegaard lately, and in "Fear and Trembling" he writes, "With infinite resignation [the knight of faith] has drained the cup of life's profound sadness, he knows he bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher . . . And yet, and yet the whole earthly form he exhibits is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He constantly makes the movements of infinity, but he does this with such correctness and assurance that he constantly gets the finite out of it, and there is not a second when one has a notion of anything else."

I aspire to live and die that way.

By way of contrast, gravestones of a later era in the same cemetery became more elaborate and refined, the angels became more rounded and cherubic, the epitaphs began to reflect on the deceased's accomplishments and station, and classical allusions and images (such as the weeping willow in the funerary urn) became more prevalent. The Puritan graves reflect the acceptance of death and its transformation from a grim specter of grief into the handmaiden of the Lord, the coachman from God's earthly Kingdom to His Heavenly one. These more Romantic and Enlightened graves present a bland, pretty, hollow Death in which the afterlife consists solely of the deceased's former accomplishments and the memories present in friends and family. It is, so to speak, a whitewashed tomb which ignores both the power and the tragedy of death and denies both its victory and its purpose. It is a Nothing pretending to be Deep Thoughts, a shallow philosophy which can hardly pretend to offer any form of consolation.

The Puritans were Shakespeare, the Transcendentalists were Hallmark.

My thoughts have also turned towards dying in my choice of music. I recently purchased Mozart's "Requiem Mass" as well as My Chemical Romance's "The Black Parade," an odd mixture at best, but both address the same theme: how best to die. I mean this not in terms of methods or reasons of ending one's life, but what does it mean to die a good death?

Certainly Mozart's death is a well-known cautionary tale, and his Requiem is inextricably tied to his passing. He reportedly had the "Lacrimosa" section sung to him on his deathbed and he was moved to tears. Though "Amadeus" (both movie and play) were very fast and loose with historial details, it's a powerful staging of events and frankly, if fiction is a better story than biography, I'll take it. The figure of Mozart's father in black as a harbinger of death and guilt is an amazing addition and one that works both dramatically and for the character, in examining his issues with his father.

In speaking about "The Black Parade", Gerard Way (songwriter for My Chemical Romance) said, "[Death is] your strongest memory from childhood or adulthood. For the main character on this record, The Patient, his strongest memory is his father taking him to a parade when he was a child. So when death comes for him as he's dying tragically in a hospital, it comes in the form of a black parade." Composing a rock-opera-esque concept album around a young patient on the verge of death is such an act of hubris, but it's amazing that they can get away with it.

So if you're going to talk about death in music, you'd better make it big, just to do it justice. I guess that's my sole conclusion in speaking of the matter: everything else seems very, very distant and I think no-one knows how well they'll die until they do it. It's like I've always said, death is easy. The dying is hard.

Iraq and the Cylons

It takes j.p., once again, to shame me into action and writing more. Congratulations to you, your bossy attitude has once again proven its effectiveness!

It seems my noble intentions to maintain this record of my thoughts are again thwarted by my indolence. This is only exacerbated by our recent purchase of both cable and a box called TiVo, both of which are convenient and both of which have a tendency to make me rot my mind. So there you have it.

I have to add an explanatory note, given my apparently combative stance on technology. I'm a geek for gadgets: when they work and when they tend towards bettering humans and their lives, instead of adding just convenience and comfort. Case in point: my brother recently purchased a Mac laptop and has been doing a lot of recording and mixing in a very cool music program called Garage Band. One afternoon my brother gave me a call and we spent upwards of an hour collaborating on a track: he e-mailed his work in progress to me, I listened to it through my large speakers and suggested harmonies or lyric changes, which he could hear in real-time over the cell phone connection.

We could play music together despite being over 1000 miles distant from each other. Now there is true power: the capacity to transmit information over distances may be the most staggering innovation of the late 20th-century. Small wonder that Gutenberg, a minor tinkerer, a mere footnote in history, was elected the most important personage of the 2nd millennium A.D.

Let's have another case study of technology in the post-modern world. Unfortunately, to make my point, I have to make a television reference. In fact, a science fiction television reference, to make it all the more odious to the literati and cognoscenti of this age. If anyone has seen the new "Battlestar: Galactica", however, it's a feat of modern myth-making - the writing, especially, is breathtakingly good. The most recent turn of events on the series has seen the last remaining human population occupying a small, unpleasant planet as a semi-permanent refuge, upon which their cybernetic adversaries the Cylons descend and begin a troubled but more-or-less benevolent occupation.

A word of caution regarding politics: I am not so much ambivalent or middle-of-the-road in my political views, as I am apolitical. My point of view has perhaps been influenced by the traditional view of average Russians, which is that no matter who comes to power, they will take what they require (usually at the expense of their citizens) and leave as little as possible for their successors. Therefore, observing the political game, which is a national American pastime, is to me little more than unneccessary expenditure of energy, since we're gonna get screwed regardless.

Thus, with every new political outcry or scandal, I have found myself shrugging and wondering what the fuss is. After all, what did they expect: men of courage and conviction dealing honestly with the public which ostensibly brought them to power? My cynicism is showing, perhaps. But I've been challenged lately on a number of fronts, mostly on the order of, "So the men in suits won't change the world. It falls to the ordinary people, not excluding me."

And one major challenge to my way of thinking especially as regards Iraq, the Sunni-Shi'ite split, the possibility of civil war and the seemingly idiocy of the insurgency, has been this frakkin' stupid TV show. I know, it's pretty pathetic that current events have to be wrapped in a veneer of CGI and alien technology in order to pique my interest. But I'd always been, I guess, rather culturally myopic about the entire situation in Iraq. Something along the lines of, "What the heck are these idiots doing blowing stuff up when all we're trying to do is get 'em a stable government!"

Silly, I guess, but I feel like I now need to do some background reading and pondering. By making me empathize with the insurgents/freedom fighters/guerrillas/terrorists, I'm confronted with a lot of uncomfortable questions of who we are, what we're doing and why we're hated. (Not like that's a huge mental roadblock, just something I'm taking more and more seriously.)

It often seems that this country has no political dialogue, just demagoguery; no debate, just simultaneous monologue. I feel both sides of the argument have been misrepresented to me, and I'd like to take some time to comprehend the facts of the matter. Not really to cast aspersions or assign blame, but just to figure out what is the actual situation, and what it all means.

And if anybody is interested, here's a 3-minute summary of that aforementioned television series: Battlestar Galactica

I'd like to close with something profound about something shallow: "Time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted." - John Lennon

Prologomena

I assume first posts to a blog often have some form of introduction. Here's mine: I hate blogs. They're either cryptic or excruciatingly detailed, either hastily written or shoddily edited, mindless or snivelingly emotional or both. But my friend j.p.'s blog is so well-crafted and thoughtful that she inspired me make an attempt.

So a few caveats, addenda, and n.b.'s: I love pop culture, in all its variegated and tantalizing forms. I'm a comic buff (graphic novels!), a cinephile (viva Netflix!), a video game junkie (hooray for warp whistles!), a music geek (red snapper?!) and lately, have even found a half-dozen TV shows to which I have formed a powerful addiction (watch Veronica Mars on the CW!). But that is neither here nor there for this blog: there is a vast overabundance of information, an embarrassment of riches on comics, movies, TV, video games and pop music. There is no call for more inchoate rambling on these topics, so as far as possible, those topics will be touched on only insofar as they are germaine to such topics as may be under consideration.

I welcome any comments or e-mails - as Jeff Markham says in "Out of the Past", "I never found out much listening to myself." (There's my first breach of the above moratorium on pop culture.) I relish opportunities for discussion.

If these posts seem tangential or counter-productive of one another, pardon the interruption. As I tell my wife, I think by talking; and this space, more than anything else, is an exercise to remind myself that I am not what I buy, am not what I consume, and that humans experience life by thinking.

So there's the end of my author's note. Avante . . .

I'm currently enrolled in a class on "The History of Western Music." What has struck me most is the astonishing fact of how little music we have from any time period before the 1400s. We have circumstantial evidence, such as ancient artistic depictions of musicians, aesthetic treatises from the philosophers which give clues to the modes and usages of music, and texts such as the Homeric hymns, but very little else. Since traditional music notation was a by-product of the late medieval/early Renaissance period, all but the most fragmentary hints as to music in the ancient world have disappeared. To be sure, there has been a surge of interest in what is called "early music" during the 20th century, but from what I can gather on the subject, most of that information is conjectural or the product of retroactive thinking, using later music as a text from which to extrapolate sources. As a career musician, it's a pragmatic reminder of how ephemeral and transitory music actually is, despite the advances in music notation, not to mention the plethora of recording techniques and media. But music, unlike any other art form, exists ONLY in time - it has no other existence. Even notation is not music, it's a diagram of how to produce music: a blueprint of a skyscraper is not a skyscraper.

Art will never grant immortality. Shakespeare is dead. Durer is dead. Mozart is very, very dead. In the Kubler-Ross model of grief, the third stage of dying is bargaining. "In exchange for art that is aesthetically immaculate, emotionally riveting and conceptually powerful, my name will always be honored. Through art, I will live forever, undefeated by the inevitable mortality to which everyone from Homer to George Harrison succumbs." And in the words of Goethe, "That's a load of horseshit, son!" It's not what continues after you go: it's what you continue to do. A life well-lived is its own reward, not some fanciful delusion of ascension to some artsy-fartsy Valhalla where art-school girls and Goth chicks bring you and the rest of the pantheon absinthe and opium.




If you're wondering, "How long can he go on like this?", all night, baby. Pseudo-intellectual rant is what gets me through the week.

I should also start a tradition of enumerating the books I'm in the middle of, mostly to keep myself accountable and keep my face out of the TV screen.

Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick"
Stephen King, "Night Shift"
Frank Herbert, "Dune"
Soren Kierkegaard, "The Kierkegaard Anthology"
Sergei Lukyanenko, "Nochnoi Dozor" ("Night Watch")

Not the best: that's 4 works of fiction, three genre novels, no history, "hard science" (since no-one really considers philosophy a science anymore, much less "The Queen of the Sciences").

For a while I was in the middle of a book recommended to me called "The Irresistible Revolution: Life as an Ordinary Radical," a book on how the gospel challenges both the urban activist and the comfortable suburbanite, that Christ is currently transforming the world through believers, and is using (and has always used) methods and once extreme and usual to bring about his kingdom work. But it made me feel increasingly guilty and shallow, so I put it down until my sense of moral duty overcomes my ego. Hasn't happened yet.

One final note: October is a beautiful month, especially in New England, and the weather is finally beginning to feel as thought summer is really and truly gone. I'm making an attempt to spend part of every day outside, and not merely walking from home to class and back.

So there we go, the first post is done. I wait with bated breath to see how long the interim will be before the next.