Archive for September, 2010

Because It’s A Desert

Published September 29, 2010 Capital Crime , Destry , Eternal Recurrence , Rutting For Office 24 Comments

it’s a desert because
because it’s a desert

—Rickie Lee Jones

In her $120-million campaign to not become governor of California, Meg Whitman continues to dine on her feet.

Last Tuesday Whitman told the editorial board of the San Jose Mercury News that the California city of Fresno “looks like Detroit—it’s awful.”

Two days later Whitman was flapping into Fresno itself, assuring everyone there, via Fresno’s hate-radio outlet KMJ, that “Fresno is a great town,” and that her previous assessment, which she admitted “didn’t go over well,” was meant to refer to the city’s unemployment rate, which she deemed “unacceptable.” She did not, she stressed, intend to condemn the city itself.

“I love the Central Valley,” she chirped.

Uh-huh.

Whitman was born on Long Island, and attended Princeton and Harvard, preparing for life as a pencil-pusher. She first moved her graphite through Proctor & Gamble and Disney, then scribbled over to Hasbro, where she oversaw Mr. Potato Head, and was responsible for inflicting the Teletubbies on America. Finally she pushed her pencil to eBay, where she assaulted a coworker, and, after paying her off, decided she would like to buy the governor’s office. Whitman lives in Atherton, one of the most exclusive enclaves in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before she set out to purchase the governorship, Whitman had probably never been to the Central Valley in her life.

In comparing Fresno to Detroit, maybe Whitman meant there are too many people there with melanin. Detroit is 85% black, and Fresno is getting there—officially 50% black or brown, but in reality more than that, as people with melanin are notoriously undercounted in official surveys. The white people who founded and for decades ran the town are Scared: they know the Valley was once Mexican, and fear it will be again. Which it will. No doubt about it. It would make sense for Whitman to play to these fears, because the elections of 2010 are, at root, and throughout the country, all about fear of a black planet.

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Adventures In The Spice Trade

Published September 26, 2010 Animal Matters , Oddbins , Wyrds 1 Comment

The process of collecting cinnamon is still more remarkable. Where it comes from and what country produces it, they do not know; the best some of them can do is to make a fair guess that it grows somewhere in the region where Dionysus was brought up. What they say is that the dry sticks, which we have learnt from the Phoenicians to call cinnamon, are brought by large birds, which carry them to their nests, made of mud, on mountain precipices, which no man can climb, and that the method the Arabians have invented for getting hold of them is to cut up the bodies of dead oxen, or donkeys, or other animals into very large joints, which they carry to the spot in question and leave on the ground near the nests. They then retire to a safe distance and the birds fly down and carry off the joints of meat to their nests, which, not being strong enough to bear the weight, break and fall to the ground. Then the men come along and pick up the cinnamon, which is subsequently exported to other countries.

—Herodotus, The Histories

Pissed It Away So Fast

Published September 25, 2010 Caribbean , Oddbins , Variations In B-Flat 16 Comments

Last Sunday was International Talk Like A Pirate Day. It’s okay that I’m not getting around to it here until almost a week later. Because, in the early years, even the fellows who came up with the holiday—while playing racquetball in June of 1995, my sense behind plenty of beer—sometimes forgot to remember the thing . . . back before Florida humor-columnist Dave Barry gave it wide play in 2002, thereby making it stick.

John Baur and Mark Summers were batting the ball around on June 6, 1995, when for No Known Reason they were suddenly seized with the need to comment on the game in pirate slang. Rather than express themselves with a “damn, you bastard!” or “jeez, my hamstring,” they instead began “arrring,” and observing “that be a fine cannonade,” and other such pleasantries.

After an hour of this foolishness, they decided “that what the world really needed was a new national holiday: Talk Like A Pirate Day.” They elected to eschew the actual day of their revelation, June 6, already well-known as the date of the D-Day landing, settling instead on September 19, the birthday of Summer’s ex-wife.

Summers and Baur were additionally inspired to inform Dave Barry of their brainshower . . . but then (beer again, most probably) they promptly forgot all about the Barry notion. As the years washed by, they occasionally even forgot about the holiday itself—”frankly, we usually forgot exactly when Talk Like a Pirate Day was supposed to be, or even that there was such a thing.”

In early 2002, Baur chanced upon Barry’s email address . . . and recalled that seven years before, he and Summers had intended to inform the Great Man of their Pirate Wisdom. This time, they actually did so. And Barry liked their idea. And so, on September 8, 2002, he wrote about it, introducing Summers and Baur, and their Day, in that inimitable Barry style: “Every now and then, some visionary individuals come along with a concept that is so original and so revolutionary that your immediate reaction is: ‘Those individuals should be on medication.’”

And, eight years later, here they, and we, are. Big time.

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Thar She Blows

Published September 24, 2010 Eros , Into The Light , Oddbins , Variations In B-Flat , Wyrds 1 Comment

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

—Job 38:1-2

This season my daughter was transformed into a hurricane. Rude and abusive things were said about her: “despite becoming a monster [a monster?], she will not pose any danger to land.”

Of course not. She’s always been a good girl.

As a hurricane, my daughter blew with winds of about 125 mph. Seems a fair breeze. I presume that all water creatures—birds, fish, boat-people—had sense enough to steer clear, as she churned through the Atlantic.

Because I live in the age of Science Men, I know that wind is a meteorological phenomenon. The flow of gases on a large scale. Movement of air in bulk. Generated by pressure dif-ferentials. Deflected by the Coriolis effect. Etc.

I know that wind no longer has anything to do with bumptious folk like Boreas, or Njord, or Fujin, the venerable Japanese deity who let the winds out of his magic bag in order to clear the primordial world of mist. I know that Stribog may be the Slavic grandfather “of the winds of the eight directions,” but the guy was placed in a Home, long ago, and no one really pays attention to him anymore. These days it’s all about specific heat, equations of motion, anemometers, and the Magnus effect.

But you know: why not both? Why can’t a hurricane be both an area of low atmospheric pressure, driven by the release of large amounts of latent heat of condensation, and also a pissed-off dude with a hundred hands and fifty heads, whipped into the world from the stormy pit of Tartaros? Or my daughter, turning over in her sleep, in dreams venting spleen at the hoary-handed robber barons of Kaiser?

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“Big, Black, And Could Be Trouble”

Published September 24, 2010 Eternal Recurrence Leave a Comment

Former professional basketball player John Amaechi was denied entrance to a Manchester, England gay bar when the doorman determined he was “big, black, and could be trouble.”

Amaechi is himself gay.

Two members of Amaechi’s party were allowed into club Crunch before Amaechi himself was barred; after Amaechi was turned away, the doorman granted passage to “an inebriated Batman (complete with cowl) and a group of five men and women dressed as escaped convicts and absolutely blasted out of their minds[.]“

According to Amaechi:

I was told I was being barred because Crunch is a “private members bar” at first, not because I had been previously aggressive.

Only when I made it clear I knew Crunch was NOT a private bar, did the doorman tap his radio to say they had been told “I was a problem.”

I stated that I knew I was being rejected for how I looked and what they assumed about me—I said because “I am big and black,” they said ” . . . big and black and trouble.”

When my friends told the doorman that I was a Patron of Pride, and gay—he laughed and turned his back.

In a pathetic attempt at damage control, Crunch spokespeaks claimed that the bar had received a radio message that a group matching the description of Amaechi & Co. had been “argumentative and aggressive” with another venue’s door staff. This lie was demolished when personnel at the two Manchester clubs Amaechi visited before he was barred from Crunch confirmed that they were not even linked via radio with Crunch. A representative of one of the clubs, VIA, told Pink News that in his establishment, on that night, Amaechi was, “as always, very pleasant.” This man also left the following message on Facebook:

Just wanted to add a point from VIA—John and his group were in our venue and were as always polite respectful. I do not know John personally but i have a great respect for the amount he does for OUR community. I was on the nitenet system all night as well as my head doorman and i do not remember any messages that were connected to Johns party . Tony -Via

Seems clear that the Crunch bunch, like George Bush and the racists at Daily Kos, just don’t like black people.

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Saturday Night

Published September 18, 2010 Eros , La Musica Leave a Comment

Hallowed Be Thy Thong

Published September 14, 2010 Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Rutting For Office , War On Terra 3 Comments

The wingers and the bigots and the charlatans and the fools are no match for Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the public face of a proposed $100 million Manhattan edifice that would include a swimming pool, gym, basketball court, 500-seat restaurant, culinary school, library, reading room, art studio, child care center, September 11 memorial, and also a mosque.

On Monday, Rauf caused all of their heads to explode, when, in response to their ceaseless ululating that the site was somehow “hallowed ground,” situated as it is two long blocks from the crater of the World Trade Center, he observed mildly that “it’s absolutely disingenuous, as many have said, that that block is hallowed ground,” seeing as how it contains two strip clubs and a betting parlor.

Well, yes, that it does. Women rhythmically remove their cloth-ing at The Pussycat Lounge and New York Dolls, while over at the parlor bettors lay their money down on horses. A customer of the latter scoffed to the Wall Street Journal at the would-be hallowing of the ground, noting that “the bums used to sit right in front of” the former Burlington Coat Factory that the community center will replace.

Chris, employed to strip at The Pussycat Lounge, says she volunteered for the Red Cross after the 9/11 attacks, to which she lost eight friends. But she has no problem with the community center, and no illusions that she dances on hallowed ground.

“It’s all good,” she said of the community center. “You have your synagogues and your churches. And you have a mosque.”

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Satan Was A Dancer

Published September 13, 2010 Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , Variations In B-Flat , Wyrds Leave a Comment

Feasts of Fools, Mischief Nights and Bonfire Nights once chirped up the whole cycle of the year, wherever in the world you were. From Brazilian carnivals to ancient Festivals of Swings in parts of Asia, using see-saws to encourage crops to grow high, from Mardi Gras to Hopi festivals, serious fun has been a part of the annual round for thousands of years.

There is saying in the German Rhineland that “whoever is not foolish at Carnvial is foolish for the rest of the year.” A calendar vivid with carnivals varies the year’s course and patterns the social experience of time; all human societies have some form of off-time, of carnival or festival, for without festive rhythms, time is too sensible, too well behaved, too regular and too clockworked. The spirit of carnival is quite the reverse; time-mischievous, time-misbehaved, insensible with inebriation.

In Britain, there were once hundreds of carnivals. There are still cheese-rolling days, that eccentric English custom, occurring in many places including Brockworth in Gloucestershire. “If you can’t hurl yourself down a steep hill after a few drinks chasing cheeses, what’s the point of being British? Not even the Black Death stopped our cheese-rolling,” said one local.

Broadly speaking, carnivals have five important attributes. First, they are almost always tied to nature’s time. Second, they have an ahistoric quality, not tied to specific events in a recorded past. Third, they transform work-time to play and have a quality of reversal, turning the tables on ordinary social relations, or expected behavior. Fourth, they are characterized by an earthy vulgarity, deeply sexual in their traditions and symbols. And last, they emphasize a community of people and a locality of land.

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The Santa Question

Published September 13, 2010 Capital Crime , Eternal Recurrence , Oddbins , Rutting For Office 4 Comments

“Hitler humor” is parlous; Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is today in trouble for regaling a youth rally Sunday with a real Adolf kneeslapper. Seems Der Führer, having been discovered alive by his adherents, is urged to return to power. At first the former paperhanger demurs, but eventually he says: “I’ll come back, but on one condition. Next time I’m going to be evil.”

Of course, Berlusconi is something of a professional boor: at the same rally he claimed to be fit for public office because ”I am friendly, I have money, legend has it I know how to ‘do it,’ and lastly because girls think: ‘He’s old and rich, he will die soon and I will inherit everything.’” The richest man in Italy, Berlusconi urged the young people assembled to “marry into money,” noting “I have a daughter who is free to marry.” He also claimed that his football team had lost Friday due to decisions made by “left-wing referees,” and de-scribed Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev as “a gift from God” to Russia. Pictured there to the right, we see Berlusconi giving a Wrong salute.

Opposition party leader Antonio Di Pietro observed: “At this point the problem is not political or judicial, but psychiatric.”

In any event, the following piece offers a bit of “Hitler humor.” Some people think that—The Producers notwithstanding—there can be nothing funny at all about the man. Accepted and understood. So if you are one of those people: horseman, pass by.

Today in the store the Christmas merchandise was out on the shelves. Seems a little early to me, but what do I know? No one put me in charge of capitalism.

Trailing down the aisle ahead of me was a small girl child and her mother. The child paused in front of a display of Christmas goodies, and said to her mother: “Will there be a Santa this year? Or will he not be coming?”

At first I thought this poor child was referencing the recession—perhaps she thought conditions were so bad the fabled Nordic fat man may have been laid off. Then I concluded that this child had probably been bushwhacked by classmates who had sneeringly derided her belief in the mysterious midnight gift-giver.

That’s what happened to me when I was around her age. I can still picture it. This pint-sized smart-ass—who later arrived at the bad end that for this he deserved—arrogantly declaimed that Santa Claus was a figment, shit just made up by grown-ups for Some Unknown Reason. He said he knew this because his father had told him so. I told this kid he was heavy with bollocks, because my father had told me Santa was Real, and my father would never lie. And anyway, the previous Christmas Eve I had seen Rudolph, when I peered out my window. And I really had.

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Australia Moving To China

Published September 12, 2010 Asia , Capital Crime , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples 2 Comments

BusinessWeek is reporting that Australia is moving to China. At the rate of a million tons a day, Australia is excavated, poured into trucks, loaded aboard barges, and floated off to the Middle Kingdom. There it is employed in the service of high-winding the national economy so that the Chinese may live like Americans. Which is their right: if Americans can live like Americans, everyone else should be able to, too. Problem is, it would require the resources of 5.3 earths for everyone to live like an American. And we only have one.

It is the iron-rich region of Pilbara that is migrating to China. “Pilbara” is the Aboriginal word for “mullet,” the fish that used to run in the mountain creeks there. That was before the native peoples were displaced by stockmen and ruffians. Now the earth itself is leaving.

The red earth here contains an estimated 24 billion tons of iron ore. In the 1970s it left in smaller quantities and returned to Australia in Toyotas and Mazdas; now the dirt is going offshore forever, to house and transport workers in the cities of China.

While it’s a complex industry, at the basic level mining is dead-simple: Dirt is dug from the ground, loaded onto trucks, taken to trains, then put on boats. It is the scale that stuns, particularly in this operation. The trucks are two stories tall. The trains are two miles long, and they pour like rivers down the mountains to the coast, where the carrier ships await. The million tons of ore the ships carry away each day is up by 70 percent in the past five years, and most of it is bound for China.

[The ore] is loaded onto 325-yard-long bulk carriers waiting by purpose-built wharves 500 yards long. About eight of these massive ships leave every day.

Selling itself to China has allowed Australia to evade the global recession—its unemployment rate, at 5.1%, is the same as it was before the transnational money-munchers went into a swoon.

Some Australians, however, wonder whether, in the words of one Tony Wiltshire, the mining people are “just here to make a buck and go, or build something sustainable? The question is whether we’re going to have mines with towns, or towns with mines.”

That’s a question easily answered. I lived in a mining town for 15 years. Except it’s not a town anymore. It died, slowly, long before I moved there, after the mines played out. It has always been thus, for mining towns. My “town,” when I lived in it, was no longer a town—it was, rather, a “ghost town.” Once the earth is all used up, the Pilbara will go ghostly, too.

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Oops

Published September 12, 2010 Johnny Law 4 Comments

(Nobody’s perfect. But when it comes time for the trial, or even the evidentiary hearings, the police ofttimes tend to pretend they are. That’s why I’m filing this one away for future use. The house-search where the police managed to overlook a body.)

Our story begins on August 28, when police dispatched to a home at 1066 Crepe Myrtle Drive in Hercules, California found there the remains of Ricardo Sales, 73, who they determined had been bludgeoned to death the day before.

The police quickly focused their suspicion on one Efren Valdemoro, 38, who had been “seen fighting the elderly man and his son the weekend before, according to Hercules police, who were called to break up the fight.”

Hercules Police Chief Fred Del Torchio said Val-demoro’s violent spree was touched off by an argument.

“He was upset,” Del Torchio said. “At this point, I can’t tell you why he was upset. Suffice it to say there were one woman and three men living in a house and he got into an altercation with a couple of them and he didn’t live there.”

According to one report, the owner and landlady of the 1066 Crepe Myrtle Drive property was Cindy Tran, 46, Valdemoro’s girlfriend.

Valdemoro himself had resided, off and on, and for the past 10 years, at a home in Vallejo occupied by Macaria Smart, 60; Segundina Allen, 63; and Allen’s husband, Charles Rittenhouse, 72.

Those folks didn’t want him there anymore, however.

Allen had grown scared of Valdemoro after initially allowing him to stay with her. She and Rittenhouse had asked Smart to change their locks twice in recent weeks to keep out their unwanted house guest.

“This guy would sneak into the house, almost like a ghost,” [Smart's husband Joe] said.

Allen also called Smart for help a couple weeks ago when Valdemoro showed up at the house. He said he drove over, grabbed the man and forced him to leave.

A neighbor, Antonio Nicolas, said that at one point, Allen and Rittenhouse had posted a sign on their front door saying, “Efren, don’t come back or we’ll call the police.”

He said he sometimes saw Valdemoro outside late at night, often saying he’s looking for his cat. Nicolas described those conversations as “nonsense.”

“Some days it would look like that he was out of his mind,” Nicolas said.

That he was. By the time this story is over, Ricardo Sales, his son Frederick, Tran, Allen, Macaria Smart, and Valdemoro himself, will all be dead.

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Ornery

Published September 12, 2010 La Musica Leave a Comment

“Now, son, you wanted to know what made me? What made me. When I was in school in the first grade, the teacher told me, she said one and one was two. I said, now wait a minute, how do you know? And right then we had a big problem. She said it was. I said now I don’t believe that shit. How do you know it ain’t three? Now, you know what I was tryin’ to say. She got upset and called my mother up there, and it’s been that way ever since. Now, she was right, one-hundred percent right. But at six years old I didn’t feel that anybody could teach me anything. Don’t tell me that one and one is two. And don’t tell me that Jerry Lee Lewis isn’t the right kind of person. Because Jerry Lee Lewis is the right kind of person. If he wadn’t the right kind of person he’d be dead. Or in jail. Now, that’s Jerry Lee Lewis’ success. The way it is. I am what I am.”

—Jerry Lee Lewis

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911

Published September 11, 2010 Into The Light 5 Comments

Cocooned

Published September 10, 2010 Asia , Cineman , Oddbins 6 Comments

So the Japanese are flagellating themselves because they seem to have lost several hundred thousand old people.

They thought they had a bunch of centenarians among them—they were there in the records, alive and well—but when they went looking for them, the old folks were gone.

The Justice Ministry is blaming “poor bookkeeping” for the disappearance of these oldsters, opining that they “apparently” died or moved, but no one bothered to update any records.

In some cases, claims the government, there has been Nefariousness:

The furor over Japan’s missing centenarians began two months ago when the authorities in Tokyo discovered the body of Sogen Kato, the man thought to be the city’s oldest living man, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades.

In late August, the police arrested Mr. Kato’s 81-year-old daughter and his granddaughter for fraudulently collecting his pension and failing to report his death. They said Mr. Kato had gone into his bedroom after a family fight in the late 1970s and never came out.

The Japanese have now identified some 234,000 people listed in government records who are over 100 years old, but who cannot be found.

I know where these people went off to. And, if you follow past the “furthur,” you’ll know, too.

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“We Love Each Other No Matter What Happens”

Published September 9, 2010 Afghanistan/Pakistan , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , War On Terra , War On Women Leave a Comment

Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

—John 8:1-11

Nine years on, Operation Enduring Fiefdom is proceeding so well that the Taliban and associates, now dominant throughout much of Afghanistan, have returned to publicly stoning to death people who love against their rules.

Last month a 47-year-old pregnant Afghan widow, Sanam Gul, was flogged and then shot for conceiving out of wedlock a child with a man she intended to marry. That proved to be just the warm-up act for the death sentence meted out a week later to 25-year-old Abdul Qayum and his 19-year-old beloved, Siddiqa. Their crime? They had eloped against the wishes of their families.

The punishment was carried out by hundreds of the victims’ neighbors in a village in northern Kunduz Province, according to Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, who was interviewed by telephone. Even family members were involved, both in the stoning and in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled.

Mr. Khan said that as a Taliban mullah prepared to read the judgment of a religious court, the lovers defiantly confessed in public to their relationship. “They said, ‘We love each other no matter what happens,’” Mr. Khan said.

These lovers were beings of light. Those who killed them: anathema.

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Boulder To Birmingham

Published September 8, 2010 Eros , Into The Light , La Musica 1 Comment

Thinking of friends out in Boulder, Colorado, where a late-season wildfire is making mischief, disrupting people’s lives, dusting the mountain landscape with fire, smoke, and ash.

M-O-O-N: that spells “let the flames pass you by.”

Age Of Reason

Published September 7, 2010 Afghanistan/Pakistan , Capital Crime , Destry , Eternal Recurrence , Rutting For Office , War On Terra , Wyrds 4 Comments

The [BushCo] aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

—Ron Suskind

Global warming is killing the conifers of the Sierra. The US Geological Survey, after tracking tree mortality over two decades in Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, concluded that Sierra forests are “sensitive to temperature-driven increases in drought, making them vulnerable to extensive die-back during otherwise normal periods of reduced precipitation.”

Of course, that’s just the view of reputable scientists. A screeching mercury monkey like His Holiness The Right Reverend Anthony W. T. F. Watts would no doubt furiously fling alternative explanations. Sunspots. “Natural cyclical die-off.” God’s wrath. Liberals. Frisbee damage.

It is amusing that anti-global-warming hysterics routinely couple their denials of climate change with tantrums against “liberalism.” For without the tolerance fostered by liberalism, goofballs like the Right Reverend would be cooling their bastinadoed heels in a musty dungeon somewhere. Prior to the Enlightenment, heretics were not permitted to ceaselessly spout foolishness. Those who denied reality—defined then rigidly and dogmatically by the church—were silenced, tortured, killed.

Today, however, and thanks to liberalism, just about anybody, no matter how ignorant, ill-informed, mendacious, or even downright dangerous, is entitled to an opinion . . . and a vote. Which is why millions upon millions of people, who believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church, were twice able to elevate to the US presidency a missing link who believes, in re evolution, that “the jury is out.”

And why the titanically dumb blog of that Dudley Do-Right retrovert Anthony W.T.F. Watts could, in 2008, be voted the “Best Science Blog” on all the intertubes.

And why Sarah Palin, an illaqueate fraud who, as recently set forth in a piece in Vanity Fair, cabins “on-the-record statements about herself to a litany of untruths and half-truths,” and whose own child has said to her “you’re just putting on a show; you’re so fake,” is afforded the sort of treatment due a serious person, instead of that appropriate for a hollow knave, which is what she is.

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On The A

Published September 6, 2010 Eros , La Musica 3 Comments

La Musica: Turn Up Your Radio

Published September 4, 2010 Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Variations In B-Flat Leave a Comment

Here at the way-station, there are neighbors, and from all appearances they are Normal. So I try to tread lightly. No more wandering around outside in various states of nakedness. No more greeting the day, or acknowledging the night, with hearty bursts of gibbering song. When I speak to the rabbits or the turkeys or the dragonflies or the trees, I try to do so quietly. Cat conversations are confined to the interior of the house. I think I’ve been pretty good about all this.

Then the other night I come roaring into the driveway, returning from a late-night shopping expedition, with the car windows more or less rolled all the way down, thereby treating the entire neighborhood to Joan Osborne pleading “I’ll Be Around” at pretty much top volume.

I didn’t cotton on to what I was doing until about the third trip into the house, lugging groceries, Joan continuing to loudly sound from the car. Is this Normal? I asked myself. Is this the sort of thing permitted by Neighborhood Watch?

Probably not, I decided. Oh well. Because it was just not possible to turn Joan down. A sin, that would have been. Akin to killing a mockingbird.

At least, I rationalized, this is the sort of abnormality the Normal can easily understand. Kids. And their music. Even if The Kid is in, uh, his fifties. And anyway the song is almost over. And it’s not even ten o’clock yet, for chrissake.

Back in the house, car radio silenced, flipping through the memory cards, I realized I had been unconsciously indulging in this behavior since I arrived here. Now that I know that, I don’t do it anymore. Probably.

I generally believe that inflicting music on people who don’t want to hear it is a form of rudeness, and so I try not to indulge in it. For instance, someone up the canyon here each Friday night feels compelled to drink vast quantities of liquor and then reel out onto his deck to serenade all and sundry with lubricated versions of such chestnuts as “House Of The Rising Sun” in a manner that would find him heaved bodily off any karaoke stage. I don’t want to be that sort of person.

The problem is that songs that come onto the car radio are different from those that you control via CDs or tapes or I-units or your own vocal cords. They’re ephemeral, a little gift from the cosmos. And sometimes even if your journey is at an end you have to sit there in the car with them until they’re over.

Jump the “furthur” for the five tunes I realized had over the past couple months drilled me to the driveway.

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Honeycomb

Published September 3, 2010 Eros , La Musica Leave a Comment

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