Hellaciously busy. Finished a column this morning. Went to the office and wrote another. Am writing the third tonight between Bleat notes. Will write another column tomorrow. I feel like the guy in Metropolis moving the arms of the giant gauge as the steam billows and curls around him. Except that I do not work stripped to the waist, or labor underground, or serve at the pleasure of an effete ruling class whose carefree life in the skyscraper penthouses will soon be confronted with the inscrutable force of Rotwang’s robot. Other than that, though, that’s me.

The Power of the Screed! I wrote about Patch Adams a few weeks back, and some ill-advised remarks he had made. Today the mail brought a puffy package from the eastern Seaboard; inside were two books by Patch Adams.

Signed copies.

No note.

Send to my home address. Geez, I get the message; it’s like finding a severed clown head in your bed.

The Power of Soul. Some people think “Green Onions” when they think of Booker T and the MG’s. Or vice versa. “Green Onions” is for driving 20 MPH through a neighborhood where you want everyone to notice how bad you are. But you want absolute cruising cool? “Time is Tight.” It’s for driving 35 MPH and hitting every light and noticing how fine everything looks at 2 PM on a hot summer afternoon. Hello Spanish grocery store. Hello Thai take-out. Hello Rib Shack. Hello Porky’s Drive-in, hello guys on the corner, hello America.

Play this song in a Tibetan monastery, and heads will bob and smiles spread. It’s the sound of the universal yeahhhh. We’re good at that.

Yes, another box full of Amazon one-click late-night impulse purchases showed up today. Always order something that has to be imported from some Czech warehouse, insist that everything be shipped at once; this delays the shipment by weeks, so you forget all about it. Then voila! The Booker T CD was the result of hearing “Time is Tight” on the satellite feed one afternoon, remembering how brilliantly Elvis C. redid it as “Possession,” and wishing I had the real thing. Also in the box: the Trainspotting CDs, which sum up everything I like about 90s British music. I ripped them all without problems - one of the virtues of having tastes that mine the past more than prospect the future is that everything I really want has been pressed without copyright protection. I’m sure the recording industry will want to confiscate all existing CDs and retrofit them with a chemical that makes choking chlorine gas spew from the speakers if I burn the songs to a disc. Let them try.

The Power of Karen Allen. “Starman” was on HBO the other night, in the wee AM ghetto; taped it because I recall enjoying it long ago. Now, of course, you realize it’s another John Carpenter knockoff. “The Thing” was his “Alien,” “Ghosts of Mars” his “Red Planet,” and “Starman” is his “ET.” I still like it, although in retrospect it consists entirely of two people driving from upper Wisconsin to lower Wisconsin. It’s such an 80s movie - the government’s SuperSecret ET HQ, for example, is a big dark room full of desks where people stare intently at GRIDS, like they’re all playing the arcade version of Tron. Those of us who were around & awake in the 80s know that the GRID was the symbol of futuristic computer thingey stuff. Looking at these graphics on the computer screens, and realizing that the power of the CPUs was probably less than 33 Mhz, you have to smile. We thought computers could do anything back then, and we were staking our faith in a two-pole abacus.

Then again, those underpowered machines got us to the moon and to Mars, so I oughtn’t dis.

The Power of Didactic Theater! By now you’ve heard of the “Not in Our Name” letter - the brave statements of Ed Asner et al they they stand foursquare with anyone the US government opposes. (Interesting how they waited for the Taliban to fall to leap into the arms of US adversaries.) I started to screed the letter, but it was just more of the same from them and from me. I did enjoy googling some of the artists, though. Kia Corthron in particular. Here are the synopses for her plays. One is fake. Can you spot the made-up synopsis?

1. Splash Hatch on the E Going Down The protagonist is a very bright pregnant 15-year-old in Harlem living with her parents and her 18-year-old husband.  Though Thyme can cajole her best friend, also 15 and pregnant, into getting into the tub with her so she can experiment with water birth techniques, her encyclopedic knowledge of environmental racism (Thyme's latest social-academic obsession) tragically does not provide her with the emotional tools necessary to witness her husband's rapid health deterioration by lead poisoning.


2. Light Raise the Roof Cole, a homeless man who makes his living building homes for other homeless people, ventures down into the subway looking for help from an old friend. He runs into a Vietnamese woman who was once an active spokesperson for the homeless. He is disturbed by the fact that, being overworked and exhausted, he built a slipshod place (which later crumbles with the help of the cops) for a young man recently expelled from an institution for the mentally ill. Cole’s energies are directed toward finding a young man and renovating an old abandoned school into apartments for the homeless.


3. Safe Box Rame has kidnapped Spurl, locked him in the other room; she rips up the pages of her journals, throws them into the fire; wrestles her prosthetic breast from her dog. In her living room she has built a safe box – carcinogen free – to protect her expectant baby from the cancer that killed her young daughter. But her own tumors are back: tonight she’s putting an end to it.

4. Fall Out My Teeth Treacherman, a dyslexic Gulf-War-syndrome suffering 14-year old homeless transgendered boy, meets up with a Guatemalan woman who was impregnated by the top-hatted character from the Monopoly game. Together they confront their gluten allergies to forge a new alternative to neighborhood copier shops, whose toxic cast-off toner cartridges have caused all the local babies to be born with fangs and Ronald McDonald makeup.

Sometimes I wonder why people go see the Scooby-Doo movie. And sometimes I don’t.

Today: The end of Ventura, the latest suicide bombing. But first, domestic news of no particular use.

I will not trouble you with the forthcoming intricacies of potty training the Gnat, but I will say this: today at Target we bought a potty chair designed by Philip Starck. This makes me an ur-yuppie, I know, but it completes the cycle: in New York, I stay in a Starck-designed hotel. My dog’s food is kept in Starck-designed containers. My child will void herself in Starck-designed receptacles. Who could have predicted this stylistic convergence?

As we were winding through the aisles, I met another column reader who recognized me from my crappy picture. I’m about three weeks past needing a haircut, so I looked like hell; I always want to apologize to people who meet me on unguarded moments. Usually my hair’s 19% more kempt! Really! There’s a blogsite that posts the pictures of various bloggers, and I’d link to it except that the picture hails from 1987, and suffice to say I’ve aged a bit since then. Gone are the plump cheeks and twee twinkly smile. I need new headshots, but that’s always a dicey move; you age at catastrophic speed, and people think you’ve had an intense bout as a meth user. When really it was more of a casual fling.


Governor Ventura has declined to seek reelection, and I think I know why: he’d lose, and he knows it. No one I know who voted for him the last time would do so again. Granted, the demographic slice I polled weren’t his hardcore fans, those being the people who tie bandanas around their dog’s necks and believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with one Budweiser that another Budweiser cannot cure. Those people didn’t vote much before Jesse and won’t vote much after he’s gone, either. Jesse won because he beguiled the ripe juicy middle of Minnesota politics - the people who are right-of-center on government growth, taxes, regulation but agnostic on social issues. These people abandoned Norm Coleman, who struck them as a hologram of an actual politician.

So why did the Jesse-come-lately voters turn on him? I can only speak for my self, which is to say I was mortified by the man half the time. He was like a Dad who shows up at your party with three shots under his belt. I didn’t mind the TV appearances, or the books, or the Playboy interview, or the “St. Paul was laid out by drunken Irishmen” crack - he’s a colorful fellow, and it was amusing to have a politician who said these mildly outré things with a roguish twinkle. But “colorful” also describes the contents of my daughter’s diaper after a meal of peas, corn, and strawberry Twizzlers. When Ventura got in bed with Vince McMahon - who always struck me as John Gotti after an hour in a trash compactor - he spit on his office. When he wasted time as an XFL announcer, or got in a wrestling ring with Mr. Ass, he was telling us that he was either a low-class lout at heart, or willing to play one for a paycheck. Maybe both.

There had been less of Jesse the Clod Ventura in the last two years, though - since the XFL died, he settled down and got to work. And the more he worked, and accomplished, the less he seemed to like doing it. I suppose any honest man in his position would be unable, in the end, to mask his contempt for the average professional politician. He was attacked by both parties, and had no party of his own to defend him. If he’d tempered the blunt straight talk with the bumptious cheer that saw him through the election, he might have kept his popularity - but he acted like a prickly paper-skinned bully a drama-king who personalized everything, and it just got dull. The SEAL act wore thin. The whole macho "you haven't hunted until you've hunted man!" bit was micron-thin by 2001.. He inverted the Shylock question: if you bleed me, do I not turn into a prick?

He could have been a two-term governor, and a good one, too. If he’d been someone else, that is.

Just passed the TV downstairs; a PLO rep was talking to Spock Jr. about the latest suicide bomber, and was asked if he condemned them. “Of course we do,” he said, “because they strengthen Sharon who wants to bring more settlers into Palestinian lands.” BUZZZ. Wrong answer, O killer-shiller. Actually, right answer, since it’s accurate, but you’re just amazed to hear a PLO spokesman say something that honest. He is opposed to blowing apart high-school girls because it will increase support for Sharon. Not because it is evil. Not because it tells the world that his cause has descended into utter depravity, and embraced the death of children because his people’s children go to heaven, and the other people’s children go to hell. (They’re just pigs and dogs anyway, right?)

I was sitting outside on the back steps this afternoon while Gnat napped, listening to the radio; a caller on the show said something that made me realize why, in part, I support Israel. It’s the Jewish media, to be honest. Specifically the medium of the book, and one book in particular: “The Diary of Anne Frank” I saw the movie when I was 12 or 13, and it made a great impression on me. I knew the Nazis were bad guys from “The Sound of Music,” but the badness was indistinct, coiled, shadowy. According to “Hogan’s Heroes” they were stupid and clueless - as well as bumbling and lovable, what with old Schultz insisting he knew nutting, saw nutting, and vile he vas at Owshwitz vurking der incinerrrrators he smelt nutting, yust like a gut German. But that didn’t seem right. That didn’t seem right at all. Then I saw “The Diary of Anne Frank” and I got a better picture. The Nazis terrified me. They weren’t just the thing in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, but the thing that bolts up the stairs and bursts into the light shouting orders. But I didn’t get the why. Why were the Nazis after Anne Frank? Because she was a Jew. But this was an answer that answered nothing.

And then you learned that to a Nazi, it answered everything.

If you don’t see that in the shining faces of the mothers and fathers and little children celebrating the glorious martyrs, where will you see it?

Let’s talk oppression. Let’s talk occupation. Let’s talk genocide, as Arafat likes to call any Israeli action. In college I fell in with a group of Ukes, and learned a good deal about the Soviet horrors visited on their nation. Churches: razed. Language: forbidden. Menfolk: off to the camps. Land: collectivized. Population: starved to death by the millions. You’d talk to the old men, the partisans who made it to America after the war, and their hatred of the Soviets was white-hot forty years later. Ukraine at the time was still under Soviet control, remember. And let’s pause a moment to remember all the campus protests over Russia’s illegal, genocidal occupation.

Didn’t take long, did it.

We housed a dissident who’d been kicked out of the USSR after spending a few years in a “psychiatric” hospital, where they’d done all sorts of horrible things to him and broken his health for good. Sixty years of occupation, oppression and mass extermination, and not one of these men would have taken the war to girls on a bus bound for a Moscow high school. Not one. If a Uke had burst into a home of a Russian official and shot his little girl in her bed, they would have been deeply ashamed that their cause had been corrupted thus - the Metropolitan of the church would have condemned it, the activists abroad would have denounced it, the children kept from the news lest they think that opposition to the Soviet occupiers justified splitting open a baby’s head in her mother’s lap.

The next time someone blows up a bus and kills children, it will be blamed on the wall Israel is building.

Because the wall means checkpoints.

Because checkpoints mean you have to wait to go to your job in Israel.

Because waiting is frustrating.

Because frustration gives you the right to perforate 74 people with hot jagged nails.

Did I say people? My mistake. Just Jews.

The Ukes won in the end. They have their country back. (It’s a basket case, but that’s another matter.) A few years ago I was at a Uke wedding, and the crumbly musty church had many old old folks who’d made the pilgrimage home since the Soviet Union fell. You wanted to hear their stories. For contrast let’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that Hamas wins in 20 years, and Israel is destroyed, and you find myself at a party talking to a fellow who’d made a trip to Liberated Jew-Free Palestine. No matter how civilized the fellow sounds, no matter how urbane and moderate his demeanor, I don’t think it would be possible to hear his words. You’d hear the crunch of bones underfoot. The sound of boots coming up the stairs.

The story I read about the bombing described one girl who was laid face down on the road side; the reporter noted the long neat braid down her back.

When I was growing up it seemed as if there was just one Anne Frank. Who could have imagined she would have so many sisters?Today: The end of Ventura, the latest suicide bombing. But first, domestic news of no particular use.

I will not trouble you with the forthcoming intricacies of potty training the Gnat, but I will say this: today at Target we bought a potty chair designed by Philip Starck. This makes me an ur-yuppie, I know, but it completes the cycle: in New York, I stay in a Starck-designed hotel. My dog’s food is kept in Starck-designed containers. My child will void herself in Starck-designed receptacles. Who could have predicted this stylistic convergence?

As we were winding through the aisles, I met another column reader who recognized me from my crappy picture. I’m about three weeks past needing a haircut, so I looked like hell; I always want to apologize to people who meet me on unguarded moments. Usually my hair’s 19% more kempt! Really! There’s a blogsite that posts the pictures of various bloggers, and I’d link to it except that the picture hails from 1987, and suffice to say I’ve aged a bit since then. Gone are the plump cheeks and twee twinkly smile. I need new headshots, but that’s always a dicey move; you age at catastrophic speed, and people think you’ve had an intense bout as a meth user. When really it was more of a casual fling.


Governor Ventura has declined to seek reelection, and I think I know why: he’d lose, and he knows it. No one I know who voted for him the last time would do so again. Granted, the demographic slice I polled weren’t his hardcore fans, those being the people who tie bandanas around their dog’s necks and believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with one Budweiser that another Budweiser cannot cure. Those people didn’t vote much before Jesse and won’t vote much after he’s gone, either. Jesse won because he beguiled the ripe juicy middle of Minnesota politics - the people who are right-of-center on government growth, taxes, regulation but agnostic on social issues. These people abandoned Norm Coleman, who struck them as a hologram of an actual politician.

So why did the Jesse-come-lately voters turn on him? I can only speak for my self, which is to say I was mortified by the man half the time. He was like a Dad who shows up at your party with three shots under his belt. I didn’t mind the TV appearances, or the books, or the Playboy interview, or the “St. Paul was laid out by drunken Irishmen” crack - he’s a colorful fellow, and it was amusing to have a politician who said these mildly outré things with a roguish twinkle. But “colorful” also describes the contents of my daughter’s diaper after a meal of peas, corn, and strawberry Twizzlers. When Ventura got in bed with Vince McMahon - who always struck me as John Gotti after an hour in a trash compactor - he spit on his office. When he wasted time as an XFL announcer, or got in a wrestling ring with Mr. Ass, he was telling us that he was either a low-class lout at heart, or willing to play one for a paycheck. Maybe both.

There had been less of Jesse the Clod Ventura in the last two years, though - since the XFL died, he settled down and got to work. And the more he worked, and accomplished, the less he seemed to like doing it. I suppose any honest man in his position would be unable, in the end, to mask his contempt for the average professional politician. He was attacked by both parties, and had no party of his own to defend him. If he’d tempered the blunt straight talk with the bumptious cheer that saw him through the election, he might have kept his popularity - but he acted like a prickly paper-skinned bully a drama-king who personalized everything, and it just got dull. The SEAL act wore thin. The whole macho "you haven't hunted until you've hunted man!" bit was micron-thin by 2001.. He inverted the Shylock question: if you bleed me, do I not turn into a prick?

He could have been a two-term governor, and a good one, too. If he’d been someone else, that is.

Just passed the TV downstairs; a PLO rep was talking to Spock Jr. about the latest suicide bomber, and was asked if he condemned them. “Of course we do,” he said, “because they strengthen Sharon who wants to bring more settlers into Palestinian lands.” BUZZZ. Wrong answer, O killer-shiller. Actually, right answer, since it’s accurate, but you’re just amazed to hear a PLO spokesman say something that honest. He is opposed to blowing apart high-school girls because it will increase support for Sharon. Not because it is evil. Not because it tells the world that his cause has descended into utter depravity, and embraced the death of children because his people’s children go to heaven, and the other people’s children go to hell. (They’re just pigs and dogs anyway, right?)

I was sitting outside on the back steps this afternoon while Gnat napped, listening to the radio; a caller on the show said something that made me realize why, in part, I support Israel. It’s the Jewish media, to be honest. Specifically the medium of the book, and one book in particular: “The Diary of Anne Frank” I saw the movie when I was 12 or 13, and it made a great impression on me. I knew the Nazis were bad guys from “The Sound of Music,” but the badness was indistinct, coiled, shadowy. According to “Hogan’s Heroes” they were stupid and clueless - as well as bumbling and lovable, what with old Schultz insisting he knew nutting, saw nutting, and vile he vas at Owshwitz vurking der incinerrrrators he smelt nutting, yust like a gut German. But that didn’t seem right. That didn’t seem right at all. Then I saw “The Diary of Anne Frank” and I got a better picture. The Nazis terrified me. They weren’t just the thing in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, but the thing that bolts up the stairs and bursts into the light shouting orders. But I didn’t get the why. Why were the Nazis after Anne Frank? Because she was a Jew. But this was an answer that answered nothing.

And then you learned that to a Nazi, it answered everything.

If you don’t see that in the shining faces of the mothers and fathers and little children celebrating the glorious martyrs, where will you see it?

Let’s talk oppression. Let’s talk occupation. Let’s talk genocide, as Arafat likes to call any Israeli action. In college I fell in with a group of Ukes, and learned a good deal about the Soviet horrors visited on their nation. Churches: razed. Language: forbidden. Menfolk: off to the camps. Land: collectivized. Population: starved to death by the millions. You’d talk to the old men, the partisans who made it to America after the war, and their hatred of the Soviets was white-hot forty years later. Ukraine at the time was still under Soviet control, remember. And let’s pause a moment to remember all the campus protests over Russia’s illegal, genocidal occupation.

Didn’t take long, did it.

We housed a dissident who’d been kicked out of the USSR after spending a few years in a “psychiatric” hospital, where they’d done all sorts of horrible things to him and broken his health for good. Sixty years of occupation, oppression and mass extermination, and not one of these men would have taken the war to girls on a bus bound for a Moscow high school. Not one. If a Uke had burst into a home of a Russian official and shot his little girl in her bed, they would have been deeply ashamed that their cause had been corrupted thus - the Metropolitan of the church would have condemned it, the activists abroad would have denounced it, the children kept from the news lest they think that opposition to the Soviet occupiers justified splitting open a baby’s head in her mother’s lap.

The next time someone blows up a bus and kills children, it will be blamed on the wall Israel is building.

Because the wall means checkpoints.

Because checkpoints mean you have to wait to go to your job in Israel.

Because waiting is frustrating.

Because frustration gives you the right to perforate 74 people with hot jagged nails.

Did I say people? My mistake. Just Jews.

The Ukes won in the end. They have their country back. (It’s a basket case, but that’s another matter.) A few years ago I was at a Uke wedding, and the crumbly musty church had many old old folks who’d made the pilgrimage home since the Soviet Union fell. You wanted to hear their stories. For contrast let’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that Hamas wins in 20 years, and Israel is destroyed, and you find myself at a party talking to a fellow who’d made a trip to Liberated Jew-Free Palestine. No matter how civilized the fellow sounds, no matter how urbane and moderate his demeanor, I don’t think it would be possible to hear his words. You’d hear the crunch of bones underfoot. The sound of boots coming up the stairs.

The story I read about the bombing described one girl who was laid face down on the road side; the reporter noted the long neat braid down her back.

When I was growing up it seemed as if there was just one Anne Frank. Who could have imagined she would have so many sisters?

Blah, blah. Too beat to think; tired of the world at large. I just want to listen. I have so little time for music these days - it’s only in the car that I get to hear anything, and I can’t rely on the radio. The 80s station plays exactly six songs, and every time I tune in I realize that Bon Jovi is still wanted Dead or Alive, and that the Talking Heads wish to be taken to the river. The “Alternative” station plays naught but mopey baritone sludge-rock; the FM Hot Rockin’ station seems to think that people need to hear “Money” by Pink Floyd once a day just so they can wait for the moment when “bullshit” isn’t bleeped and they can exult in living in these progressive times. Dude! They let that go! They are so high! (One of the more amusing beliefs of the stoner is the conviction that everyone whose work they enjoyed was completely stoned at the time, from Monty Python to Victor Hugo.) So I burn my own CDs. Today while playing some mid-90s trance number from Underground, Gnat started singing the Itsy-Bitsy Spider as loudly as possible. I took the hint and switched it off. And sang along. Second verse, same as the first.

So now I’m listening to some recent acquisitions. Okay, OKAY, I bought the Star Wars soundtrack. Stone me. I use a lot of movie music in my home movies, and there’s a few sound cues in the score that are true tear-yankers, good swelling-breast man-of-destiny themes for which I will probably have no need, unless my wife is captured by Tuskan raiders and I not only have to go fetch her body but remember to bring the video camera along. I am a sucker for film scores - the entire genre is like a lush island where the late German Romantic symphonic tradition retreated to thrive, away from the coruscating glare of modernism.

John Williams is a master of pastiche - His theme for Princess Leia, if I remember correctly, is essentially Grieg’s “Dawn” refitted with a new melody. But he has his own style, and it’s usually heard in the brass. This score suffers from its limitations as a film soundtrack; it’s yoked to the action, which means it has to be both reactive and didactic. But there’s one pure movement that stands alone, and that’s the very unfortunately named “Love Theme from Attack of the Clones.” (Jebus. Poor man.) It has the sweep of a Panavision-era score, something you’d hear under one of those Event Epics like Dr. Zhivago or Lawrence of Arabia, and the melody - which occurs several times - is one of the reasons I probably liked the movie as much as I did. A good composer can do Tragic, Grandeur, and Yearning, but Tragic Yearning Grandeur is no small accomplishment. It’s a love theme that spells doom, and there’s not a drop of sugar in it.

Should I ever get a server here at Jasperwood - and it’s my fond dream for down the road - I’m going to run a nifty little radio station out of the closet. All soundtracks. Don’t scoff: now I’m listening to an a capella version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish, from the Mulholland Falls soundtrack, and it’s one of the more remarkable things I’ve heard this year. I hate divas; I hate that whole overemoting pseudo-passionate crap that defines the modern chanteuse. This is not that. This would put goosebumps on a skeleton. (Hah! It just faded into Hammerstein’s “Every Little Star” done in 50s doo-wop style, also from Mulholland Falls. That’s the other thing I love about Lynch: his ear.) (Not the one in the grass in the beginning of “Blue Velvet.”)

There’s a show called “American Idol” on one of the groundling networks - a talent search to find some tight-torsoed youngun who can belt and grind and thus establish themselves as an “Idol.” The very notion makes me get in touch with my inner Moses, and smite the lot of them with my tablets. Idol. Right. All these post-Whitney wailers mistake volume and facial grimaces for emotion - confronted with the depth and breadth of human emotion, they speed past A through Y and spend every song beating Z to death. It’s adolescent self-dramatization draped in the trappings of adulthood -

Ah, well, perfect. Just got an old scratchy version of “Anything Goes,” which is lyrically brilliant and melodically perfect. Pure complex simplicity, a weightless ditty whose every stanza is full of gold bars. This is the sort of song that comes from a culture of adults. When adult sensibilities lose control of pop music? There was a time when the work of adults - real musicians, real arrangers, pros all around - fed the youth market. Somewhere on my playlist is a tune called “Happy Feet” by the Paul Whiteman orchestra. (The outfit that premiered “Rhapsody in Blue, as a side note.) At first it sounds like a silly song; it oompahs along like a jittery “Li’l Rascals” tune, but modern ears don’t easily hear everything that’s going on. The song is all over the road - as fits the period, there’s a long long instrumental intro, then some throwaway vocals, then a key change and a guitar solo, then back to full orchestra, everything played as fast as possible with half the band sweating hard to keep it together. Modern ears snicker; we associate this sound with nightclub scenes in 30s mobster movies - women in long shimmery white gowns dancing with tuxedoed dandies, the music fighting the hisssssss of the old film stock. But this stuff kicks - put it in a club, liquor up the audience, lay the lights low and let the band tear into this thing and you’ll blow out the doors. This music included the youth market, but wasn’t limited to it.

I realize that it’s simplistic to speak of the pre-WW2 “youth market” in the same way we discuss the demographic juggernaut of today, and I don’t mean to suggest that Mom and Pop did the Lindy along with their Jazz Age kids. No. There’s an annoying but instructive 30s Warner Bros. cartoon about an owl who wants to be a “crooner,” and his parents - German accented Serious Owls - will have none of this garbage in their house. (They come around at the end, of course.) Look at the 40s Warner Bros cartoons as well, and you’ll find sneering references to Sinatra and the Bobby Soxers that now look as clueless as Alan Sherman’s sneering references to the Beatles. I guess I’m referring to some sort of technical proficiency that was required for pop music in the Olden Days, before guitar combos drove the influence of jazz into the margins. Rock and roll took music out of the hands of musicians and gave it to people who just wanted to make music. Of course rock had great musicians, but they’re not required to make great rock and are often an impediment.

The upside: an entirely new musical idiom. I was listening to “School Days” by Chuck Berry on the way home from work, and it’s as compact and inventive as a Cole Porter tune. It integrates artist and song in a whole new way - Chuck sings a line, plays a lick. Sings a line, plays a lick. Paganinni never stopped mid-coda to yodel a few bars. Satchmo sang and played, sure, and good luck trying to duplicate that. He was a jazzman without peer, untouchable - but almost anyone could be Chuck Berry. You don’t have to have the skill or training of a professional musician. So pop music was flooded by amateurs who learned on the job, and that did away with the guys who knew scales and could read music. No small thing, that.

The apotheosis is not only musicians who can’t play music, but singers who cannot sing - but I won’t get into that. I’m just listening and typing, and I already regret the gentle, well-informed but dissenting letters that will follow this incoherent ramble. At the risk of being misunderstood: if it’s a choice between Noel Coward and Chuck Berry, well, it’s not even a choice. Especially since Chuck’s in his 70s now and still singing “School Days.” The adults won in the end after all. Hah!

Been a long time since I rock and Ralled!
(DA dum, da dum da dum)
Been a long time since I Spocked and brawled
(DA dum, da dum da dum)
Been a long time been a long time been a long lonely lonely screedless time

But I finally find something that seemed screedworthy: a survey of college students. Oooooh. Be my guest.

Couldn’t imagine a better day. Sunny, hot, humid. Took Gnat to the beach, and as we approached the shore I caught the Most Holy Whiff, the perfume of fish and weeds and sun--laved water. In these parts it’s an ancestral smell, and it needs only the tang of outboard motor fuel to bring back a dozen hundred memories of heading to the lakes with the family. (And, later, your friends, one of whom brought the Pabst you’d be throwing up in seven hours.) Gnat was unsure of the lake - so big, so wet, so unstable, so devious in the way it lapped the land and retreated discreetly. I took off her shoes and socks and held her over the water (average depth: .3 inches) and asked if she wanted to go in.

“No.”

Fine. I put her shoes and socks back on, and put her back on the sand. She walked into the lake. Took off the shoes and socks, and held her little hand as she walked along the shore. She picked up sand and returned it to the lake. She peered a dead fish (He’s sleeping, I whispered.) She stood in the water and faced the great watery maw, and said: okay. Then she picked up a handful of lake and gave it to me. If I could have put it in my pocket and saved it forever, I would have.

Off to the Mall of America for some OS X system updates. I almost got dragged into a debate on the Mac the other day - I held back, BUT if I’d given in to the temptation to defend the machines, today would be a good example. I went to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store, handed them a blank disc, and the fellow burned the updaters with the relevant help docs. (None of which were needed, of course.) I can just imagine going back to CompUSA where I bought my PC, and asking for some drivers or security patches. Even if they'd had what I needed and were willing to give it to me, the chance that the store would be as cool as an average Apple Store would be, uhhh, unlikely. You walk into any PC store, and the machines are either showing prefab demos, screens spattered with icons, or screensavers full of pretty fish. In the Apple store the machines are all doing something - they're editing movies, arranging photos, ripping CDs, and since all the programs look alike the casual observer realizes that if they can do one, they can do all the others.

I won’t get into this. I won’t. I will only repeat the conversation I had with a PC fellow who was utterly contemptuous of the Mac, and when I pointed out it was a great platform for digital photography as well as editing home movies and burning them to DVDs, he scoffed and said who does that?

I’m sure when the telephone was invented some insisted it was a waste of money, because people just didn’t have that much to say.


I’d promised Gnat some ice cream, which is a rare treat around here. It’s not that I forbid it or oppose it - we just don’t have it on hand. No Doritoes, no Oreos, no ice cream. Believe me, I love all of the above, and I’d enjoy it daily if it didn’t add needless inches. She gets a few sugary snacks, but I’d rather hand her raisins or bananas, just as I’d rather she watch an instructive Busytown video than some mindless animated rot. It’s just too easy to get fat and stupid; why encourage it? On the way to get ice cream (nonfat fro-yo, actually) I passed a group of teens in the food court; one girl was hugely, hugely obese, shoveling a Cinnabon the size of a sofa cushion into her face. It was an remarkably sad sight, her evident glee to the contrary. I’ll never make that stuff forbidden - no, we’ll have our happy refined sugar binges now and again. It won’t be a special treat, either. It won’t have any elevated meaning. Moderation and rotation. We have red meat once a week; we have ice cream once a week. Sometimes Daddy loads the cheese on the turkey tacos; sometimes we have curried lentils for supper. Moderation, rotation. Sometimes Daddy cuts the horse with Enfamil; sometime he shoots it pure. You have to teach your kid about balance.