Frontier Hippy

Zombieproofin', Drunken Lawn Moving, 0-0-100

2011-11-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Chronicling Southwest Louisiana and the Cajun World

Zombieproofin’

Those who think of Louisiana as bringing up the bottom of lists may or may not know the state is near the top of the list when it comes to zombie-proof architecture.

With NASA releasing a paper on what should be done if aliens invade, maybe it’s not such a bad idea for Louisiana architects to be thinking of ways to use architecture to circumvent the zombie threat. The architectural firm behind the recent Zombie Safe House Competition effort is Architects Southwest, which is based in Lafayette. Artists, architects and others were invited to submit designs for structures that could best withstand a fierce attack of zombies.

One entry was the Zombie Ranch, which is (hypothetically, of course) powered by a big turbine that’s turned by zombies as they chase around bait traps. Other designs feature houses that float on air or are built into cliffs or atop abandoned oil rigs. One design looks exactly like a birdhouse.

You can see the entries at zombiesafehouse.wordpress.com. Architects Southwest will have chosen a winner by the time this issue hits the stands.

Zombie movies have long considered the relation of architecture to the zombie menace. In George Romero’s first zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead, barricading oneself in a solidly constructed basement turned out to be the one viable defense against zombies. Subsequent Romero films explored the feasibility of keeping a shopping center, a military bunker and a high rise free of zombie infestation. The films have shown that architecture is only as good as the people who use it and that zombies are hard to stop.

You Mean That’s Illegal Too?

Please excuse me for delaying the Up Front look at the vital October elections while I make a brief police report. In the last Up Front, it was revealed that the Ville Platte gubment had outlawed the act of walking on Ville Platte streets. Now, it might be possible to convince a Louisianan he couldn’t walk on his own street at night. But what Louisianan worth his salt would ever submit to being forbidden to driving his riding mower while he was drunk?

Bobby Punch, a 22-year-old resident of Lafourche Parish, was recently obliged to endure the indignity of being arrested while he was on his own lawnmower. Punch probably hurt his case somewhat with his apparent inability to keep his riding mower in his own lawn. After cutting down some shrubs in a neighbor’s lawn, Punch took his mower on the road, forcing cars on Highway 1 to back up behind his mower.

Nothing puts a Louisianan in greater jeopardy than forcing other drivers to slow down. Police were all the more interested in that Punch was in the mood to drive on both sides of the center line.

After they arrested Punch, police found that he had a blood alcohol concentration of .312. They obliged him to take a sobriety test at the station. In an unintentionally humorous note, WVUE-TV reported that Punch “performed poorly.”

One of several crimes Punch was charged with was “Not Driving on the Right Side of the Road.”

Election Report No. 2,109

The races for lt. governor and secretary of state turned out to be real mud-slingin’ and character-assasinatin’ smackdowns. It was fascinating stuff, but not fascinating enough to get the public interested in the races.

Predictions were correct; barely a third of Louisiana voters made it to the polls for the elections of statewide offices, such as those of governor and lt. governor. It was the most anemic turnout since at least 1975.

It will go on that way for a while. In Louisiana, the Republican Party is in like flint and the Democratic Party is in a rout. The Democrats will eventually rebuild and become aggressive opponents. But I predict that process will take quite a while.

You’d think that transitional process might slow down the flow of political news in the state. Most likely it won’t. Any party that’s in power eventually grows accustomed to power, gets complacent and starts making mistakes. Things will stay interesting.

Of course, on the local front, there was election news that came as a great relief to all, regardless of political affiliation. The great anxiety about who the next tax assessor is now at an end. With the cessation of the long-term agonizing about the outcome of the tax assessor’s race, stress-related illnesses in the are will decrease, and workers will no longer call in sick, or will simply find themselves unable to get out of bed as they struggle with and succumb to the mental anguish of tax assessor uncertainty.

One thing’s for sure: no trial or tribulation we go through hasn’t been endured by others who came before us. I remember many and many a time hearing an elder at the old country breakfast table saying, “Lord, I just don’t think I’m goin’ to be able to relax and enjoy my biscuits and gravy until I know who the tax assessor is goin’ to be.” Well, now we can all rest easy and get back on our feed.

0-0-100

The Up Fronter keeps reading that the Republican presidential candidates want not only to roll back taxes on the rich but also to increase taxes on the middle class. Pooyee! Have the Republican candidates developed a taste for the wacky weed? If I’d spent a decade trying to think of a more effective way to come in second to Obama in spite of it all, I wouldn’t have been able to think of a more surefire election loser.

One of the Republican candidates, Herman Cain, has a tax plan he calls 9-9-9. Part of the plan is that a 9 percent sales tax will be imposed on the entire U.S. population. Imagine that. You wake up one morning and all your expenditures increase by 9 percent. Now that’ll put a spring in your step, eh?

It’s been a while since I mentioned my campaign for president in the Up Front column. But I am running for president and my campaign is almost as hot as Buddy Roemer’s. I’ve come up with my own tax plan. I call it 0-0-100.

Here’s how it works. I pay 0 percent tax, people who make more than $250,000 pay 0 percent tax and people who make less than $250,000 pay 100 percent tax. I think this bold plan will eliminate once and for all the tiresome discussion about whether rich people pay too much taxes and people who aren’t rich pay enough.

We Are in the Northern Hemisphere

Herman Cain may be getting some attention. But when it comes to making comments that trigger the raising of brows and dropping of jaws, Cain is still a neophyte in comparison to presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, who’s previously earned Up Front space with her unorthodox utterances. In an Oct. 19 Republican candidates debate, Bachmann said, “He [Obama] put us in Libya; he is now putting us in Africa.” This is like saying Obama put something in Monroe and is now putting it in Louisiana.

If Bachmann didn’t think Libya was in Africa, where did she think it was? Back in the 1970s, when President Gerald Ford said in a debate that Poland wasn’t communist, everyone figured (I guess) that Ford knew what continent Poland was in.

Not everyone could get worked up about it. The morning after the debate, the lead story on Google News was “Ohio Police Hunt Escaped Wild Animals.” As the guy in Anchorman says, “Ooo, that’s a hot lead.” The Republicans could get more coverage for these debates if they could knock the number down to five or six a day.

More on Avoiding Victory

The award for Funniest Political Tweet of the Issue goes to Time columnist James Poniewozek who wrote “Herman Cain leads NYT/CBS poll. Does he have enough time, staff to avoid winning the GOP nomination.”

The day the poll was released must have been a very bad day indeed for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was able to muster only 6 percent.

Don’t Be The Last To Be Steampunked

What's the hip new word everyone is using? Steampunk! No consumer product or experience wants to be the last consumer product or experience on the block to describe itself with this awesome, bodacious and extremely popular term.

Let’s see what’s new in your steampunk world. Of course, there’s Tim Burton's automated feature Steampunk Willie, in which Micky Mouse subdues Pete with coal gas delivered through a hookah. Justin Beiber's new CD, My Little Steampunk Girl, is set to drop any day. There’s the new talent show, Bristol Palin's Steampunk Explosion, and two new reality TV shows: Steampunk Brides, in which brides-to-be compete to incorporate the heaviest amount of cast iron into their bridal dresses, and Steampunk Staten Island, in which a group of young, photogenic boot models sit around a luxury loft drinking beer, cursing, whining and listening to Rasputina MP3s.

Finally, look for the two New York Times bestsellers The Huff and Puff Principle: Using The Green Steampunk Law Of Attraction To Grow Your Life by Victoria, Mistress of Charlton Grange, and the latest Sookie Steampunk vampire novel Dead As A Hydraulic Punch Press.

Still not sure exactly what steampunk is? Just watch that old Will Smith movie Wild, Wild West and you’ll know everything there is to know about it.

‘This Has Got To Be Weird’

Now, to shift the focus to something that really is hip, word is that Tim Burton is working on a film version of the hippest of old TV shows, Dark Shadows, and Johnny Depp will play the suave and sinister vampire Barnabas Collins. Burton is just the man to tell the story and Depp is ideal for the role of Collins.

An entertainment blogger for Yahoo incorrectly identified Dark Shadows as a 1970s show. While episodes aired briefly in the 1970s, the show became a controversial hit in the mid-1960s. The Up Fronter can remember being forbidden to watch the program when he was a young boy. Depp says, in a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, “I do remember, very vividly, practically sprinting home from school in the afternoon to see Jonathan Frid play Barnabas Collins. Even then, at that age, I knew — this has got to be weird.”

Dark Shadows was a cult phenomenon from the beginning, and the Yahoo story may be an early instance of the sort of thing that will take place as young writers struggle to pin down a pop culture phenomenon they’re unacquainted with.

Those who haven’t had the Dark Shadows experience are invited to watch the creepy adventures of Barnabas; his neurotic, vampiric assistant Willie; and the con man Jason, Willie’s silver-tongued partner in crime. DVDs of old Dark Shadows episodes are a little expensive if they’re bought at full price. But they’re available on Netflix for the regular prices.

News Counseling — $150 CHEAP!

The Up Fronter recently saw on the cover of some magazine — it might have been People — that Ashton Kuthcer and Demi Moore were going to marriage counseling. How, I wondered, is that going to work? I imagine it happening something like this:

Counselor: OK, so, uh, Ashton, you’re, like, uh … married … so, uh, you can’t uh, like, go to, uh, clubs by yourself and, like, spend the night with, uh, models.

Ashton: Wow! I never thought of that! That’s amazing advice. This marriage counseling stuff really works.

The whole thing gave me an idea for a new business — news counseling, which I’ll be happy to provide at a cost of $150 an hour. In the first session, I’ll explain that news about celebrities isn’t really news unless I write it.

Your Governor Wants To See You ... NOW!

2011-10-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

News From the Bayouland (and in particular, Lake Charles, La.)

Your Governor Wants To See You … NOW!

This was the big news from WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge: “44 percent of Louisiana's public schools have received a failing grade in the newest school performance scores.   … Bobby Jindal has been briefed on the scores, the source says, and is said to be very disappointed.”

Uh oh. Governor is very disappointed. I wonder what happened to the schools. Were they spanked, or grounded, or maybe something even worse? I’m not a school, but I’m going to try really, really hard to be good and not disappoint governor.

I Just Love Your New System

The mutual admiration society whose members are Govs. Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry produced an interesting statement a while back, when Perry said, "When Bobby Jindal comes up with a new way to deliver health care … we'll snitch that in a minute and implement it in our state."

Perry, who was being interviewed on CNN at the time, apparently really did say "snitch" rather than "snatch." But I’m not one of those self-appointed arbiters of politics who judge a politician's performance in terms of whether he got a particular letter wrong. I’m a different kind of self-appointed arbiter of politics.

The key issue isn't Perry's vocabulary, but the little matter of whether Jindal's health care delivery system works. Then there's the equally little matter of whether Perry will in fact implement the system in Texas. Many of us are in the habit of thinking that when a politician promises to do a particular thing it's a clear sign the thing in question is exactly what he's planning not to do.

Almost Like No Election At All

For those who are overwhelmed by the tension of not knowing who the next Lake Charles, La., tax assessor will be, the upcoming election will be a matter of tremendous urgency. Others will be pleased that their nighttime viewing of True Blood and Dexter won’t be interrupted by any election updates.

In Baton Rouge, at least one major figure in the political sign business is on record as saying that the lackluster campaign is putting a hurt on revenue. "Business doubles in political years and triples in active political years," says Stephen St. Cyr, owner of Vivid Ink in Baton Rouge. "This is almost like an off year … The big races will be in 2012." Well, we've heard that before, haven't we? (St. Cyr was quoted in the Sept. 6 edition of the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report.)

We can take consolation, though. This is Louisiana, and even if the elections are painfully bland, some shocking political event is bound to take place within days after the final results come in. Sooner rather than later, politics will once again get interesting in the Louisiana way.

Roemer’s Main Street Move

Some political junkies in Louisiana must have been surprised to read that longshot Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer supports the Wall Street protesters. But support them he does, and rather enthusiastically at that.

In a recent press release, Roemer wrote of “the young Americans currently taking part in the Occupy Wall Street movement.” The ex-governor went on to make these dramatic comments:

“Please know that I stand by you … It is Main Street that is being foreclosed on; and it is Main Street that is suffering while the greed of Wall Street continues to hurt our middle class … Both parties are guilty of taking the big check and are bought by Wall Street …   Wall Street grew to be a source of capital for growing companies. It has become something else: A facilitator for greed and for the selling of American jobs. Enough already.”

It’s possible these statements were made to draw attention to the Roemer campaign, which remains conspicuously marginal. As late as Sept. 7, Roemer was excluded from a debate of Republican candidates because he had failed to earn 4 percent of support in a single major national poll. I’m not sure the Roemer bandwagon is picking up riders even in his own state. It took two days for the story I’ve reported here to show up on the state news service The Dead Pelican.

Apparently, even Lake Charles is doing a riff off the the Wall Street protests. The Occupy Lake Charles walk is set to take off from the corners of Ryan and Alamo Streets at noon on Oct. 15. I wouldn’t bet the family inheritance on the long-term success of this movement in Lake Charles. But I suppose it’s good that some people still have the spirit. If any readers want to learn more about this, go on to Facebook and search for “Occupy Lake Charles.”

Walk While You Can

Suppose there was was a rash of burglaries in the town you lived in. How would you like your elected officials to respond?

I suppose many folks would suggest that local police do whatever they need to do, within the law, of course, to target car thieves. That might be seen, by many, as a straightforward, sensible approach.

The mayor and city council of Ville Platte, La., have a better way. Their idea is to make it illegal for citizens to walk on the streets of Ville Platte.

That’s right. The powers that be decreed it was illegal to walk in Ville Platte after 10 pm. People who got caught breaking the law could be fined $200 and given a 30-day jail sentence. I guessing the rationale was that things would be pretty rough for car thieves who ply their trade on foot.

That busybody organization the ACLU filed suit against the Ville Platte law. As usual, the ACLU was advancing a wacky left-wing notion, in this case, the notion that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees U.S. citizens the freedom to walk in their neighborhoods. Oh, one other thing — the ACLU also alleged the walking ban was “creating a monetary windfall for the City and thus, a tremendous incentive to continue the curfew.”

The area NAACP also got involved, apparently on the grounds that a lot of poor black people can’t afford to own cars and find themselves obliged to walk whether they want to or not. It sounds like a small version of what was going on after Katrina, when a bunch of white folks were saying, “Why didn’t those people leave New Orleans?” and a bunch of black folks in New Orleans were saying, “We don’t have cars!”

At any rate, the ACLU suit must have annoyed either the mayor or city council, as the law was suspended, at least temporarily.

That’s really too bad. This law would have freed Villa Platte law enforcement from the heavy burden of having to keep an eye out for pedestrian car burglars. It’s true that citizens would have been unable to take a walk at night. But in hard times, everyone has to make a sacrifice. That’s what I’ve heard.

I’m going to give Ville Platte’s law a 7 on the Silly Scale, which will put it quite a bit higher than Lake Charles’ droopy drawers law, which only merits a six. It’s one thing for politicians to tell people how they have to wear their pants. But to tell people they can’t even walk down their own street — now that’s doing something.

Newshound Carries The Day

The Woofstock Festival took place at the Lake Charles Civic Center on Oct. 8, and it was a tremendous success — for my dog Barnabas! My wife, Nydia, dressed Barnabas up as the Lagniappe Newshound. He wore a fedora hat with a press pass and a stylish tie. He worked the crowd and aimed to please his many fans.

Barnabas managed to earn the 2^nd place award in the dog beauty contest. I’m not sure exactly what qualities a dog must possess to win a beauty contest. But whatever they are, Barnabas must have them in droves.

There was a good turnout for Woofstock, with booths stretching from Lakeshore Drive to Bord du Lac. Everyone was preaching the gospel of dog rescues. (Barnabas, a relaxed and happy mastiff, was a rescue.)

Johnny “New York” Latham was the emcee of the event. He introduced me to a few members of the Flat Out Roller Derby team. A couple more members came over to introduce themselves to the Up Fronter and Barnabas when we were taking a well-deserved rest on a park bench. Johnny “New York” will keep Up Front readers informed about the next Flat Out Roller Derby bout, which will take place Nov. 20 at 5 pm at Skate City on Nelson Road.

Another star of the show was the T&I Culinary Institute, which was selling very tasty apple turnovers for just 50 cents per. The crust in these savory treats was rich and buttery. High school students who want to learn to cook appetizing foods are invited to check the institute out.

The Up Fronter wishes future Woofstocks success in promoting the cause of animal rescue.

A More Informativer Headline

What was the outcome of LSU quarterback Jefferson Jordan’s recent arrest for participation in a 1:30 am bar fight? Intellectual growth. Consider the following comments, which Jefferson made in a Oct. 3 news conference:

“I'm a lot more wiser and I'm a lot more smarter than what I was back in August.” That was one of two times he used the phrase “more wiser” in his remarks.

I know I always become a lot more articulater and a lot more lucider and a lot more intelligibler when I read statements by big-name athletes who’ve acquired great wisdom from their brawling experience.

A reporter asked Jefferson if he wanted to apologize for what he did to the team. No, said Jefferson, he figured he didn’t need to apologize to the team because the team was there when it happened. Makes sense!

Besides, it wasn’t as if Jefferson really did anything. Consider his words: “I was just being a college student. I wasn't trying to get myself into trouble. I was just enjoying myself with my teammates. And a certain situation happened to me off of my popularity.” He didn’t do anything in this situation. The situation happened to him. I get it. I wonder, does it always work that way? For instance, the next time Jefferson throws a touchdown pass, will he think he did that or will he think the situation just happened?

I don’t know. But there’s one thing I’m pretty sure of. Every football fan thanks his lucky stars that a basic grasp of English grammar isn’t a prerequisite for a starting position on a university team.

The 10/12 Exit

After only four years, the publication of the big, glossy 10/12 magazine is coming to an end. The last print edition of 10/12 will roll out in November. The online operations will wrap up at the end of the year.

The magazine had been printed for four years by publisher Rolfe McCollister and his Louisiana Business Inc. in an effort to report business developments in Louisiana along the 10/12 corridor.

McCollister didn’t skirt the issue of the magazine’s premature death; in fact, the story about it was the lead story in the magazine’s internet newsletter. McCollister cited “the need to focus resources on new technologies,” and in particular, “the development of new online and digital distribution opportunities,” as reasons for the departure of 10/12. New websites for Louisiana Business publications 225 and inRegister are among the projects planned.

In this case, it may be that the corporation is being up front. In the last three years, consumer migration to the internet, and particularly internet usage on such devices as smartphones, has gutted the magazine and newspaper industries. It may be that in spite of its sophisticated layout, graphics and color schemes, 10/12 just wasn’t able to stem the tide.

The Bounty of Reality TV

After the recent suicide of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Russell Armstrong, we shouldn’t really need any reminders of the bounteous gifts that have been bestowed on our culture by reality television. But it looks like we’re going to keep getting the reminders anyway.

The latest reality TV blessing comes courtesy of former 16 and Pregnant stars Josh Rendon and Ebony Jackson-Rendon, who were just arrested for endangering the welfare of their 2-year-old daughter Jocelyn. On Sept. 27, Arkansas Children and Family Services removed the girl from her home in the Little Rock Air Force Base. According to the police report, "every room in the residence had human and dog feces on the floors, walls and clothing. The house was full of flies and, in some areas, maggots."

The daughter wasn’t the only one removed from the squalid domicile; animal control took away three dogs.

In addition to the endangerment rap, Rendon and wife were charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, the maintaining of a drug premise and unauthorized use of another person's property to facilitate a crime.

We don’t want to let the sensational nature of this story distract us from the merit of other reality television blessings. For instance, the title 16 and Pregnant is a blessing in itself.

And if all of that isn’t blessing enough for you, there’s this, just in from ABC: pastor Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Evangelical Association, is set to appear on the spin-off series Celebrity Wife Swap with his wife Gayle. According to the story, Haggard, who, in 2006, more or less admitted to engaging in homosexual activity, will pair up with a wife rather than a husband in the swap.

You Compressor, You!

I’m sure we all realize that from time to time politicians provide explanations and arguments most people won’t find really compelling. Let’s take an example. Suppose you’re a Florida Republican who’s responsible for scheduling Florida’s Republican straw poll. Would you be swayed by the recent argument by South Carolina GOP chairmain Chad Connelly? Said Connelly:

“If you guys in Florida want to be the bad guys and compress this calendar and lose out for all the voters in America and have a calendar that’s chaotic and compressed even if it’s against your own state GOP, then go for it."

So bad guys are guys who compress calendars. This Connelly fellow seems to be arguing that he owns the moral high ground as a result of his opposition to the highly abstract concept of the compression of time — or more specifically, calendar dates. Even those Republicans who do know what a compressed calendar is may reason something like this: “OK, if the worse that can happen is that we wind up compressing the calendar, then we’ll risk it.” After all, they haven’t gotten into politics as a result of their overwhelming passion for the proper regulation of calendars.

Connelly’s comments will have a profound effect on such crucial themes of the philosophy of time as the relatively of simultaneity, the causation solution, endurantism and perdurantism, and, of course, the central issue of the nature of the compression of time. The comments will, however, have no effect whatsoever on the U.S. electoral schedule. Connelly’s remarks were reported by The Hill on Sept. 29.

Dreams, Piano and the Tyrant of Men

2010-05-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

Lebensessenz is a pianist and songwriter who presently lives in Brazil, but would like to get gigs in the U.S. While his music is often lyrical and compelling, what's just as compelling is the intense personal story behind the compositions.

You can get hints of that story both in Lebensessenz's song titles and in his autobiographical essay "A Monologue About Lebensessenz," which can be found on his My Space page.

Lebensessenz says the motifs of the music are derived both from his "hard times" and "strong emotions." The hard times sometimes find musical expression in songs about dreams. (At least three songs have the word "dream" in the title.) The "strong emotions" aren't necessarily negative; for instance, Lebensessenz cites "happiness" (and perhaps in particular happiness over the recent birth of his daughter) as one of them.

But what's usually underlying his music is a keen sense of, and sadness about, loss or abandonment. Hard times related to loss have made Lebensessenz's music sensitive to matters related to love, intimacy and the denial of these. He's written a song cycle on The Sorrows of Young Werther — the best known literary work about unrequited love. And one gets an almost physical impact from the starkness of his 2008 CD title: "Tu deorum hominumque tyranne, Amor!" ("You, Love, Tyrant of Gods and Men." One of the record's songs is titled "Cruelty.")

As for the losses and abandonments that shook him hardest, in his essay he's explicit that these relate to his treatment at the hands of a distant father and to two important intimate relationships that ended badly. One reason we know the almost constant distance and apparent indifference of the father are important is that Lebensessenz writes a great deal about his feelings of rejection and sense of inattention on the part of his father and the effects of those feelings on Lebensessenz’s composing and compositions.

His father, who was, he says, a "fabulous musician," didn't live with him. The father, who was big on music theory, felt his son "needed to play with the correct methods" -- not something Lebensessenz was keen on at the time. As time passed, says Lebensessenz, "I wanted his help and his teaching, but, through a reason that I don't know," the father didn't want the same thing.

Even when the father was present, he seemed somehow absent. We are told he didn't comment on the early recordings of his son's music. “Why doesn't he say anything about what I do?" wonders the son. "It hurt me so much, but with time I just tried to forget it."

The result of all this was a son who was self-taught when it came to playing the piano. After the son’s composing began, the Father did, at one point, overhear the son playing the composition "Der Walzer von Lotte" ("Lotte's Waltz" – one of Lebensessenz’s most moving pieces and a surprisingly energetic work). The father told Lebensessenz 's mother that the songs were "sounding good." This Is the first time the father is seen as being aware and attentive to his son. It’s a moment Lebensessenz will mention more than once.

In a song cycle based on Schiller’s work The Robbers ("Die Rauber"), one song, “The Letter,” is about a character in the Schiller novel who writes a letter asking to be forgiven by his father. The son experiences "anxiety waiting for an answer."

Part of the result of Lebensessenz’s father’s distance and apparent indifference is the composer’s feeling of loss of the father. In the long process of creation behind the body of Lebensessenz’s work, there are times of fragmentation and total loss, at least as far as the work is concerned. He says that two early tapes of his music got lost in mysterious ways. In 2006, he says, he started to write a romance, but, in a statement that is itself mysterious, he says the romance now exists only in fragments.

Both in his writing and music titles, Lebensessenz makes frequent reference to states one easily associates with a sense of inattention at the hands of a valued object, or rejection by, distance from, loss of, such an object. The composer returns and returns to references to night, solitude, melancholy. "Most of my compositions,” he tells us, “emerged through nocturnal moments." The waltz Lebensessenz writes based on material in Werther is danced in the night. In 2005 he uses a computer to compose "Der Abend des Abschields" ("Farewell Night"). The title’s twin reference to night and separation is linked to music built on "longing, platonic passions" – the sort of passions one can develop for much sought-after objects who aren’t available. A 2006 composition is titled "Das Drama de Einsamkeit" (“The Drama of Solitude).”

When he became an adult, Lebensessenz asked his father "to help" him "with some exercises, but he was not so interested." He rationalizes his father’s lack of interest by considering that the father may think the son will lose interest. There is, perhaps, more rationalizing; in "refusing to help me,” writes Lebensessenz, the father wanted to give him “an answer to find my own way"

As years pass, Lebensessenz will engage in rationalization about his father that is more elaborately conceived and less convincing; he will state that he’s come to the realization that his father’s "silence of old times had its importance. He said few things, but it was sufficient ... “ And at about the time Lebensessenz realized this, he experienced a loss whose existence we don’t need to conjecture about: “In the same year, I lost him." In 2009, he is still rationalizing for the father; his album is titled Ihr Leben war fur mich ein Beispiel" ("Your Life Was An Example To Me"). But one song is titled "Days of Voluntary Exile." The solitude that has so often been the legacy he’s taken from his father is still with him.

After inattention, perceived loss, real loss of the father and a loss of two crucial intimate relationships lost as finally and as mysteriously (that is, with as little description) as the loss of the early cassettes, it is small wonder that Lebensessenz chooses to title a CD "Tu deorum hominumque tyranne, Amor!" ("You, Love, Tyrant of Gods and Men"). His music at this time is, he says, melancholic, introspective; his music continues to have "melancholy, sadness." Solitude remains, entrenched, and with its sometimes companion fragmentation: "Again I see myself alone.” Fragmentation of work still reflects fragmentation of life by the loss of key people; he says he remembers "the ruins of things that ended badly.”

But it is a distortion not to note the degree to which Lebensessenz says his music has been formed by feelings of happiness. The happiness is also expressed in the writings, and in particular in statements of such individuality that they are heartening and show the composer is driven by an energy that is, at least during much of his composing time, able to match the weight of the loss he carries. Here are some examples of the sort of aphoristic statements that Lebensessenz seems to be able to put to express with great facility:

The work, he says, is "a learning"
"There are no secrets in what I do"
"When I face good or bad situations, I play; when I'm quiet also, I play with all my heart."
"There are things that only me and my piano knows."

The music, which Lebensessenz calls neo-classical, always sounds like music of the 20th century and the first decade of this century. Quiet passages can sound like Satie or Poulenc. (There are also rare, extremely sparse passages that are reminiscent of Morton Feldman.) More complex, and slightly louder, post-Romantic stylings may sound a bit like, say Scriabin.

Then there are the pieces in which Lebensessenz performs in the neoclassicism so popular at the moment — a kind minimalist neoclassicism. While his pieces of this ilk can sometimes sound as calm and simply melodic as those of Harold Budd, more often they have the fast, driving quality of Robert Moran or Michael Nyman. In these driving pieces, which are liberally flavored by lyrical passages, the melodies are simple. The chord sequences are simple enough, and close enough to those used in rock, that even those who've never listened to classical music will be able to appreciate the music immediately.

A visit to Lebensessenz' My Space page will give you seven or eight MP3s of his songs to listen to, his blog, information about his CDs and books of essays, and ways to download or order.

On True Crime

2010-05-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

Would you convict a man who had a pet ant to life without parole?

That's a serious question. I'll say more about it at the end of this essay.

First, let me tell you a story a friend once told me about his trip to a porno shop. It's an uneventful tale. What struck me was an observation, which I think I can express in words close to an exact quotation: "As soon as I went in the store, I smelled that smell that porno shops always have, and I got that feeling you get when you're doing something taboo."

What interested me was that he felt sure he was breaking a taboo even though he was doing nothing illegal.

Many of our taboos have nothing to do with legality. Suppose I give a speech to a group you belong to. And suppose I begin by picking my nose, burping, putting one of my feet up on the podium, pulling up my trouser leg and calling the audience's attention to my bright white athletic socks. In this story, I break at least three taboos in a few seconds. But I do nothing illegal.

The taboo against going to porno shops is of greater interest than the trivial taboos in my speech story be cause pornography has an effect on American culture that's far-reaching, profound and — because porn is taboo — off-limits to analysis. Before the Internet and DVD came along and vastly extended the range of porn, the sale of XXX videos was a $20 billion-a-year business. One of every five videos sold was rated XXX.

Obviously, many millions of Americans were privately engaging in an activity that in public they would assert was taboo. Such a phenomenon must indicate something significant about American culture. But outside of the Village Voice and a few academic journals on popular culture, the phenomenon receives no critique whatsoever for the simple and obvious reason that the subject is taboo in this country.

All of that is a belabored way of getting me to the point where I tell you that I frequently read true crime books even though I know it is taboo to do so. Just as it's easy to find evidence of significant consumption of porn, it's easy to demonstrate that many people engage in the legal taboo of reading true crime by noting the significant presence of true crime books in any bookstore.

The taboo nature of true crime is lampooned to splendid effect in a book that is itself taboo — American Psycho. I refer to the scenes in which the killer protagonist disgusts his dining companions with details about serial killers he's gleaned from his reading.

While the scenes are humorous, I think the author, Brett Easton Ellis, was playing around with the reality (as he was during most of the book). The truth is most Americans do know at least the basic facts about such notorious killers as John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and most who did not know would want to. Furthermore, Gacy's true-life story was less outré than that of the fictional sensation Hannibal Lechter.

In the situation depicted in American Psycho, the group aware ness of taboo arises when a speaker relates the dirty details of dirty deeds says something like, "Boy, I really get into reading about people who do stuff life this." Not until that comment was made would folks raise their eyebrows.

As an independent thinker, I read what I like without any concerns about whether the material is taboo in this or that place. I admit that if I'm in a bookstore whose counterperson has a sophisticated look, I won't buy a true crime book. There's still certainly that much of the bourgeois in me.

My motivations for reading true crime have changed over time. My first true crime reading spree began in the mid-1980s when I realized I was interested in what I called "marginal culture" — the culture of those who indulge in unusual acts or thoughts. At the time, I thought the gap between the marginal and the typical was much larger than I presently think it is.

These days I read true crime because reading it is the least demanding thing I can do without doing nothing at all. That's the case because I don't own a television.

At this point, I might as well mention that doing nothing is taboo. I say that not just to make a banal comment on the insanely frantic pace at which we choose to live, but also to point out that if a person genuinely does nothing — or comes as close as people can to doing nothing — he'll fear he's suffering from mental illness. In the psychiatric trends that obtain at present, "doing nothing" is a symptom of severe depression, and hence taboo. All of this may inspire even the most jaded person to think, perhaps at an unconscious level, that he "should" do something.

I fear that at times, such thinking is my motivation for picking up a true crime book. Reading true crime is a minimal way of doing something. It's an act that requires next to no intellectual activity. Like fictional works that fall in the category of subgenre, true crime is formulaic in the extreme. The reader never needs to struggle to impose order on the text.

Of course, it's the failure to use the formula in a thoughtful way that makes most true crime books the dreck they are. People read true crime books for one of two reasons: either they want to learn the gruesome details of crimes or they want to learn about the freaky personalities and idiosyncrasies of over-the-top criminals. The successful true crime writer will keep the focus on these motifs and never stray from them.

Most true crime books fall apart the moment the investigation of the crimes begins. In any major case, the sequence of events from the start of the investigation to the announcement of the verdict will involve dozens of individuals at various levels of the criminal justice system. Even a brilliant writer cannot develop so many characters. Yet most true crime writers try to do just that. The reader is inundated with banal detail about a multitude of players. Detective So and So, the reader is told, was tenacious, put in 14-hour-days, gobbled down Cheerios for breakfast at 5 am and paused once in a while for a Dunhill. Clotted with such tedious and pointless details, the book becomes a bore and is tossed in the trash.

I recently read the aptly titled book Rough Trade by talented true crime writer Steve Jackson. I kept noticing that Jackson rarely used even a sentence to describe one of the many individuals in the criminal justice cast. Often his only description was a short parenthetical phrase ("Police Sgt. Bill Smith, an old-school street cop, arrived ...").

Writers such as Jackson, or the more talented Jack Olsen, Ann Rule and Aphrodite Jones, keep their works engrossing by focusing squarely on the criminal at all times.

But why would one want to read such works, even when they're skillfully crafted? If one wants to
learn about freaky people in a fast, easy manner, or if one simply wants to make time pass, reading true crime is a viable activity. For those with no such desires, there's no reason to read it.

To say that true crime is taboo, has a limited audience and is usually poorly written is not to say it's worthless. Most true crime books provide a good view of the human condition, provided one is willing to read between the lines, and work backwards from the adult's expression of violence — the key subject matter — to the influence of the childhood role models for whom the criminal learned violence was an acceptable form of behavior.

Without exception, children who eventually grow up to be the subjects of true crime books are victims of repeated severe psychological, sexual and violent abuse by at least one caregiver, and usually by more than one. People who think criminals commit crimes because they read a particular book are people who haven't read true crime books.

The abusers who transform a child into a violent criminal are usually, though not always, relatives of the child. And it is inaccurate to assume the abusive caregivers are always adults. In the most dysfunctional families, children may be abused by caregivers who are 12 or 14 years old and have long since learned methods of abuse from adult role models.

But what does this have to do with the human condition? Aren't such extreme cases aberrations? They are. But the aberrations are skewed reactions to experiences that are universal. Early on, babies fear abandonment when they can tell a parent is leaving a room or house. And all children, when they are very young, fear they will be abandoned or rejected when they sense parents are displeased with their behavior. Parents with certain dispositions express disapproval of children's behavior by withdrawing affection from the child or becoming resentful or angry. Most parents, of course, will not do these things to the point of being abusive.

Children's fears of abandonment or rejection will be more or less pronounced depending on the parents' gifts at parenting. But even relatively minor childhood fears don't magically disappear when the child reaches the legal age of adulthood. Societies could not exist if people did not to some degree fear rejection or abandonment. Most adults deal with these fears by just coping with them in a catch as catch can manner or by channeling the fear into manageable neurotic symptoms.

The adult who's the subject of a true crime book learned from damaged caregivers that violence was an acceptable way of dealing with fear. At first, such adults don't seem to have much in common with us. But their behavior, extreme as it is, is a response to fundamental insecurities all people have: insecurities the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described with the term "lack." Throughout their lives, said Lacan, people lack a sense of completeness; of being fully understood and accepted by another.

In the rare moments when the brutal criminal sneaks through the filter of violence and expresses the feelings that motivate the violence, what he expresses is the same sense of lack, of incompleteness, of ultimate alienation, we all carry deep inside. This explains why a talented writer who carefully interviews and quotes a vio lent criminal can create passages that move a reader to intense empathy — empathy, not sympathy — with the criminal.

This brings us to the case of Riggans, the man whose brutal crimes Steve Jackson wrote about. When Riggans was interviewed in the Colorado State Penitentiary, he didn't cry about the wives who'd divorced him or the women he'd killed or abused. But he cried profusely when asked about a pet dog he'd had as a child. In a home where the people dispensed no affection, Riggans found it in a pet. That led a prosecutor to wonder whether Riggans had a pet in his jail cell. He did. A pet ant.

The three judges who determined Riggans' fate felt it was painful to pass judgment on a man so severely alienated he sought affection from an ant. But they also understood that if Riggans were released, he would certainly murder again. Their solution: life in jail without possibility of parole.

The book is taboo; the story is worth telling.

Fat Millie's Lament and the Metal Machine

2010-05-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

This entry is the result of an effort to generate interest in this blog by creating a piece that will contain a host of potential search terms. In this case, the terms will relate solely to music.

In particular, it's hoped the entry will attract the interest of those with special tastes for dark ambient music, doom metal, black metal, experimental classical music, triphop and drum and bass. To maximize the number of potential search terms, I'll simply list performers (and in many cases, composers or songwriters) who make the kinds of music I've listed.

The list for black metal includes bad-news-making Scandinavian bands, such as Emperor and Belphegor, and their American counterparts, the not-bad-news-making Xasthur and Azrael. A stunning Greek version is Rotting Christ, whose short songs, usually built with traditional pop structures (but not pop delivery) are replete with soaring and substantial melodies.

Xasthur makes the least structured music of the bunch, with a sound that mixes overlayered grinding guitars and the simple melodic chord progressions associated with all sorts of minimalism.

For doom, the earth2 recording has yet to be surpassed for its calming effect; for agitated or frustrated individuals, early Swans is ideal doom.

The reach of dark ambient is vast, embracing Lustmord, Metaconqueror, Lull, Robert Rich and the dozens of recordings of Steve Roach.

Performers melding all the sounds mentioned thus far, and power electronics as well, are Navicone Torture Technologies (the project of a fellow who calls himself Leech) and Abyssic Hate — two acts whose recordings can always be counted on for rapturous beauty.

Less rigorous in its demands on the listener, but sometimes as lyrical, is the work of such triphop DJs as DJ Spooky, Coldcut, DJ Shadow and others. Comparable melodies (thought to be vaguely in the tradition of jazz) are found in the breakneck drum and bass beats of Kenny Kenn, DJ SS and the David Bowie album Earthling. To venture further into experimental electronic music, and formulate lists of the talented crowd that gets classified with such tags and terms as experimental techno and shoegaze music, would be to introduce a number of potential search terms too big for this writer to manage.

As for experimental classical composers (whose work often overlaps with dark ambient or power electronics), the very long list includes such names as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio (hear, for example, his Laborintus 2), Sal Martirano (for example, L's GA), Kenneth Gaburo (for example, Fat Millie's Lament), Maurizio Kagel, Luigi Nono. Such composers paved the way for the great, early nonacademic noise works, such as Lou Reeds' Metal Machine Music, the compositions and anguished and angry performances of Diamanda Galas and Joanna Went, and what I feel is the greatest recording of noise music to date, Yoko Ono's Fly. (For what it's worth, I'm guessing that New York No Wave owes a greater debt to experimental jazz than to experimental classical. While I'm not an unusually honest person, I'll admit I'm not familiar enough with experimental jazz to write about it with any kind of real authority.)

Additions to this very short list are heartily welcomed

Ding-A-Ling Prose And The Slippery Word

2010-04-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

I sometimes have a little fun with self-help programs, which fall somewhere on my long list of targets. As a concession to potential opponents, I'll state that I think there are most likely a few good self-help programs floating around out there. I sympathize with those who try to use them.

What I want to do now is distinguish between solid self-help advice and fluffy feel-good prose. I never look at books with titles like Chicken Soup for the Soul or Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned in Kindergarten. First, I consider such titles an insult to my intelligence. Second, I have no wish to read vague, flowery prose whose sole purpose is to shut down readers' brains and give them a fleeting sense of animal satisfaction.

Some local publication recently published a piece of feel-good slop called "Ten Rules for Being Human." I'd like to amuse myself for a time by unpacking some of this ding-a-ling prose.

The so-called 10 rules are vague and nonreferential and imply a constantly positive valence. In short, they're designed specifically to make the reader feel good about himself regardless of the reader's condition or environment.

One of the wearying aspects about American culture is that one is always obliged to be positive no matter how dire the situation is. Even when people get a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, schizophrenia or incurable cancer, they feel they must come up with some sort of positive statement about the prognosis. In much less extreme cases than the three I just listed, I've sometimes found myself wanting to say to a person, "Well, I really don't see anything positive in your situation." But I just stay silent, because I know that it's pretty much forbidden to say things like that.

Having said that, let me go back to my description of this list as one of so-called rules. I want to be clear: nothing in this list is a rule. The items in this list are assertions about what it is to be human. For example, it is asserted that people will learn lessons, will repeat lessons and never stop learning lessons. A rule would have to take a linguistic form such as "You must learn lessons." There is nothing like that in this list. There are no rules here. There is nothing the reader is obliged to do or refrain from doing.

Let's start looking at the text itself. No. 3 on the list asserts "there are no mistakes, only lessons." Item four asserts "lessons are repeated until they are learned."

If there are no mistakes, how exactly does one "learn" a lesson? The assertion that one can learn the lesson assumes that there is a correct way to respond to the lesson — in which case it has been "learned." If one does not respond correctly, one has made a mistaken judgment about the lesson, in which case one has yet to learn it.

Now we are told "When you have learned [a lesson], you can go on to the next lesson." This is an assertion that human life presents lessons in a linear, sequential form. For example, one may first learn the lesson of what must be done to secure a job. Then one may learn the lesson of what must be done to secure an apartment.

The assertion leaves no room for the notion that lessons might overlap; might come in clusters; might come in an infinite variety of orders or in no order at all. There is no room for the notion that a lesson — say, for exam ple, the lesson of ways to enter new groups — would be accessible at some times and inaccessible at others.

No. 6 reads as follows: "'There' is no better place than 'here.' When your 'there' has become a 'here,' you will simply obtain another 'there' that will again look better than 'here.'"

Can we conclude from this item that people who live on the "here" of Riverside Drive do not feel that they live in a "better" place than the "there" of Ward 9 in New Orleans? Is it reasonable to conclude that a black male living in the "here" of Compton should think that a person living on Long Beach does not live in a "better" place? In New York, is the "here" of Harlem qualitatively indistinguishable from the "there" of Long Island?

I know from experience that while it may not always make sense to talk about places being "better" than other places, it certainly makes sense to talk about the cultures of some places being different from those of other places. In Southwest Louisiana, where I reside, difference is strongly discouraged and independent thought is blasphemous. People in this area are expected to be team players, refrain from the questioning of all authority figures and just basically get with the program. In Portland, Ore., where I lived at one point in the past, difference and the degree of one's independence of thought don't have any effect on social relations. Portland is the most libertarian city in a very libertarian state. The approach in Portland is live and let live. People there base their self-concept on what they have in their heads and what they do and accomplish. They don't feel the need to coerce others to accept their points of view about anything. It's taken for granted that a multiplicity of points of view is to be expected; is not a problem; and is never a hindrance to social discourse. It seems to me most unlikely that a sensitive or shy or introverted or creative person who has dedicated herself to the high arts or to complex thought or literature would feel as good in the "here" of Lake Charles as she would in the "there" of Austin, Taos, Ann Arbor, Santa Cruz or any number of places.

Now, back to the list. Time and again claims are presented in this list without one shred of evidence being offered in support of the claim. Let's look at No. 7, which reads "Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself."

OK. Let's apply this claim. If I hate my spouse for striking me with a closed fist, this means what I really hate is the psychotic aggression in my subconscious mind?

Did I get that right? If I hate to be beaten, that reflects my own hatred of my wishes to beat others — and that's the case even if I've never beaten anyone else or felt the conscious desire to beat anyone else. If I hate to be yelled at, that reflects my hatred of my own wish to yell at others, even if I'm utterly unaware of any such wish.

If I understand No. 7 correctly, I cannot hate what a sadistic, sociopathic thug or control freak does to me without at the same time concluding that I must subconsciously wish to engage in the behaviors of the thug that I find so repulsive and must therefore hate myself on that count.

I cannot get my head around No. 7. If a complete stranger is rude or treats me with lack of consideration, must I hate something in myself to hate what the stranger does to me? Just what in myself would I hate? Would I hate my preference that people treat other people with common decency?

On to No. 8. It's designed both to make the reader feel good and to lure him into the current pop psych fad of "empowerment."

"What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours."

Now, can I conclude from this that I can make my life what I want it to be if I have Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, severe mental retardation, leukemia or a painful terminal cancer? If I am paralyzed from the neck down at, say, age 18, can I just use all those tools and resources up in my head to make up my mind I'm going to feel chipper while I spend the next 60 years lying in bed staring at the ceiling?
What about the single mother of two children who's working a minimum wage job; has no savings and only a high school education; whose friends are as poor as she is; and who's just lost her last relative, who left her nothing, having nothing to leave her? What little miracle is this person supposed to whip up with her poor, skimpy network and the "resources" in her head?

What about the fact that more than 25 percent of this country's citizens don't have health insurance? Is it the case that a quarter of the population is just too lazy to make the choices and take the actions necessary to get health insurance? I don't think so. The insurance is overpriced and the people are underpaid. People can't change that basic state of affairs by thinking a certain way about it. It's not just a lie but a vile lie that gross economic inequalities can be erased with acts of individual will. On occasion, some single-minded, hard-working individual will rise out of destitution to a position of economic se curity. But for every one who does there are a thousand — or 10,000 — who are as single-minded and work just as hard and die on the treadmill of the working poor (and now, the middle class poor as well).

OK. No. 9: "Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust."

Like all the items, this one suffers from sloppy language usage. Due to the nature of American culture, almost all Americans who hear or read the phrase "your answers" will assume that the answers are both definitive and positive. In the rush for a positive outcome, it may be forgotten that the choice we are given is often the choice of the least bad alternative.

There is no simple, positive an swer — whether within you or with out you — to the state of dying a slow, painful death in the twisted wreckage of a car. You will search in vain for "answers" to intense physical pain that lasts for a long period of time. Where is the answer for the myriad individuals undergoing torture, genocide, famine; for those who are being beaten or raped or murdered while I write this column? The author provides no evidence that there are any types of "answers" about anything whatsoever. She does not even provide an example of an answer. And I suspect I'm not the only one whose sense of logic is troubled by the assertion that while "there are no mistakes" there are "answers."

"All you need to do" to get the answers, we are told, is "look, listen and trust" what is "within you." First, that's bad grammar. One could look at, listen to and trust what is within one. Second, it's ridiculous for me to "trust" what is within me if I know I'm schizoid, bipolar, severely depressed or have a tendency to extreme guilt, shame or anger. If I am in such a position, I should, far from trusting what is within me, carefully scrutinize what is within me at each shift of mood to be sure I'm not creating my own problems with my neurotic or psychotic thought patterns.

Sloppy, vague, insubstantial, feel-good language doesn't give us psychic security or even psychic direction. Pain, adversities and unexpected reversals are going to come. We are not going to find "answers" to all of them. Sometimes, no matter what we do or how hard we try, we're simply going to feel bad. In most of the world, there's no law against feeling bad.

The Great Book of the Couch

2010-04-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

As I write this, it's 2:18 p.m. according to my Mac. Thus far today I've eaten two biscuits with gravy, half a link of sausage, two individual pizzas and three individually wrapped Reese's SnackBarz. Who knows what I will send through my stomach and liver before I finally take my sleeping pill and drift off into insomnia tonight?

I feel like the narrator of Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King, who tells the reader at the beginning of the book, "I'm a bum."

I could say I'm a slacker. But before I did that, I'd want to make clear that there's a long and great American tradition of literature about people who just kind of hang out and work little or not at all. Read the great 1960s and 1970s novels by Bellow, Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, Joan Didion (her essays too), Robert Stone, Marco Vassi, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, Ronald Sukenick and on and on and on.

And all these people were working in the great tradition established by Herman Melville in the 19th century in his story "Bartleby the Scrivener." You remember Bartleby. He was the guy who answered every request (and order) with the phrase, "I prefer not to."

These books and stories are about people who've given up on that old American idea that you just have to show up and be ready to work and you'll be successful and happy. And the 1960s and 1970s fictional works were written in a time when Americans who weren't rich actually had some money.

So, having said all that, I go on to say, Call me bum. Call me slacker. If you ever see me with my mouth open, put a pork rind in there.

I used to blame my outrageously bad eating choices on stress. Now I think they're just habit. I don't feel right if I go to bed without having had at least two or three kinds of sausage during the day. And I go to bed early. Real early. Would you believe, say, 7 pm?

When I say I go to bed, I don't mean what most people mean when they say, "go to bed." What I'm referring to is not really going to bed; its going to couch. For me, the quintessence of slackerism and slackness is not eating biscuits and gravy with cracklins on top. It's lying on my couch doing nothing.
I thought I might one day follow in the footsteps of Ivan Goncharov, Samuel Beckett and John Kennedy Toole and write a book about a guy who did nothing but lie around all the time.

But then I decided there would be something not quite right about this. As I see it, my whole life has been a book about doing nothing. My life has been a long song of praise to lying on the couch, staring at the wall.

There are some who think doing nothing is a form of being lazy. That's a grave error. When I say I lie on the couch and do nothing, many, if not most, will assume I mean that I lie on the couch and watch television, or at least listen to music.

If that's what these people think, they and I are on two different pages. When I say I do nothing, I mean I do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And thus it is demonstrated that what I do (or don't do) has no relation to being lazy. For if most people actually did nothing (as I do), they would immediately become unbearably bored. They would soon be in acute distress. They wouldn't be able to stand it. After five, 10 minutes max, they'd have to turn on a TV or grab a magazine or pick up the cell phone.

I'm light years beyond that. I lie down in absolute silence and I do not move.

Oh, I don't say I never get up and put a CD on the boombox. That happens once in a while. But I'll do such a thing only after a long period of deliberation about whether I'm up to doing it. And actually getting up off the couch will require a tremendous act of will. It'll be something I'll have to build up to. I'll lie on the couch thinking things like, "OK, Brad. You can do this. Come on. You can make it." Seriously.

Now someone reading this may think, "Why, this fellow's powerless to do anything. He has clinical depression!"

I'll go with that diagnosis as long as we both agree I'm suffering from junk-food-induced clinical depression. And if any person with the appropriate medical credentials is willing to give me free anti-depressants, I will happily take them.

But I don't want the basic nature of my life to change. I lie there on the couch, looking at all the books around me, thinking, "You know, Brad, you could get up and read one of those books." But then I think, "Oh no, not another book! You've read 10,000 and you've got another 10,000 to go. I'm tired of reading. Let's just defocus. Defocus. Ah. Now, doesn't that feel better?"

A book is a great project of diversion. And what is there about me that has changed after I've read yet one more book? I am, as the Floyd sang, "another day older and another day closer to death." All I've done is amuse myself for a few hours. And by the time I quit reading, it's time to go to sleep. There's no time left for just lying on the couch doing nothing.

I'm over half way through this essay and I still don't have the slightest idea what it's about. Let me just make up some topics out of the blue. Let's say it's about my perpetual tendency to do much, much less than could ever be expected of any American man. The idea of being successful, practical, ambitious; these things are inscrutable to me. The idea of staying active for the mere sake of staying active I find distasteful, and the idea of staying active because I'm expected to or supposed to is downright disgusting to me.

What about the idea that there's something wrong with me if I don't have a social life? I say, "Fine. Let there be something wrong with me. I'd rather have gangrene than have a social life." And the notion of taking steps to prepare for the future seems ridiculous. What? I'm supposed to prepare for the nursing home? That's crazy. I say let the nursing home prepare for me.

Even after I've trotted out and dismissed all those potential topics, the essay still seems a wee bit aimless. But that's OK. I have plenty of time to make up a topic before I get to the end.

What's it like to be the bum, the slob, the neurotic, the curmudgeon, the cynic, the introvert, the hermit, the underachiever? Well, I don't know if it's quite right to say that such a life requires a great deal of work. But it does result in a great deal of cognitive dissonance. To be such a person is to be a fish out of water. The moment I encounter a group of human beings, I'm lost. I don't care what anybody's children or grandchildren are doing. I don't care how cute anybody's baby looks. I don't bother about discussing current affairs because I know that if I do, the other people will just trot out their respective ideologies and shove them down my throat. And if I tried to initiate a discussion of philosophical ideas, why, they'd just look at me as if I were some kind of freak. And since they're already doing that anyway, why should I make the stupendous effort of forcing myself to say something they don't want to hear?

No, when I'm in a group, I just stand there, smile, look pretty, and think, "Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!"

If I wanted to make myself sound better than I really am, I might compare myself to Sherlock Holmes. There's a Sherlock Holmes story in which a doctor tries to intimidate Holmes by showing off his physical strength and threatening Holmes. He insults Holmes' insular, intellectual, gentle life, calling Holmes "the meddler; the London busybody."

The doctor is macho; a man's man. I'd be scared to death of him and say, "No problem, sir. I assure you, you've seen and heard the last of me."

And in fact, Holmes says this is the most frightening case he's ever worked on — but not because of the doctor. Holmes is frightened by another aspect of the case that I won't mention here so as not to spoil the story.

Holmes defeats the doctor not through strength, but through his quiet, solitary Holmesishness. While the overconfident doctor strides around his estate like the cock of the walk, Holmes lurks in the shadows, waiting for the right moment, slowly and carefully working out all the right moves: an antisocial ninja of the 19th century British countryside who ends up snapping the manly doctor like a twig.

It would be a mistake to think that Holmes, for all his bitter pragmatism about humanity; for all his sideways, cerebral approach to experience; is really comparable to me in a fundamental way. You may recall that Holmes was driven; was only happy when he was working on a case. In that sense, he is a sort of mirror opposite, a sort of Janus face, to me — a person who's only happy when his life is free of work.

I could conjure up some kind of bogus philosophy of the couch, or actually try to write some sort of crudely lyrical paean to the couch. But that sounds an awful lot like doing something.

How much better it is just to type out the words as they come into my head. I type the words, I borrow money from my mother so I can pay my rent, my credit card companies charge me interest and the world goes round. What is wrong with this system? Well, there are a few things wrong with it. But it keeps me passive, so I like it.

And when I die, what will I, the consummate underachiever, have accomplished? What will anyone have accomplished? The ordinary person looks back over his or her life, and thinks, "I busied myself with this and that. And in the end, what did it all matter? What difference did it make in the general scheme of things? And now I feel it all drifting away. That's what I did. I busied myself with this and that."

As for me, I'll say, "I busied my self with this and that — only less so."

Like Holmes, I can take a certain pride in what I do. Yet again, I've managed to write a full length essay about absolutely nothing.

"Well, so what?" someone says. "Jerry Seinfeld put together a hit show about nothing more than 10 years before you wrote this."

Beaten to the punch again! An underachiever even at underachieving! I couldn't be more pleased.

When I leave this vale of tears, the great book of the couch will be complete. Floating on the astral plane, it will drift there, waiting for anyone who dares to plunge into this anti-epic story of the ordinary man who was nothing but what was in his head.

"We Do Not Loan Out Our Under Things" — Pristine Gibberish and Deep South Music

2010-04-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

Summer, 2010, ushered in two new CDs by a group of folks who are playing and promoting the music of Abita Springs, La. (home of Turbo Dog beer) and south Mississippi.

I Remember the Night Your Trailer Burned Down, by pianist, singer and songwriter Bobby Lounge, is a series of long New Orleans piano rolls in a variety of styles, including blues, ragtime, boogie woogie and gospel. The rolls are of the rapid-fire, bang-'em-out variety. This isn't gossamer make-it-sing stuff.

Even more impressive than the virtuosic fireworks of the piano playing is the raucous, absurd humor in the songs' lyrics. Lounge has staked his claim in Southern culture on the skids subject matter, and let his sense of the ridiculous run wild. Try not to laugh as you read these passages:

• "He won't show you nasty movies ...
"He won't take your night shift down at Popeye's fried chicken." -- "I Will"

• "They ran Tippy out of town on a morals charge ...
"Tippy met some Communist Chinese.
"They toasted him with wine until his head was swimmin'.
"They tattooed him all over with motorcycle women ...
"The queen said, 'We do not loan out our under things.'
"He said, 'Ma'am, just send me home to Abita Springs.'"
— "Take Me Back to Abita Springs"

• "It's pitiful, 'cause Shauna don't know who her mamma is.
"He said Rosa said the other evening she came in there and looked up at Rosa and said, 'Memaw. Memaw. Be my momma memaw. Be my momma memaw.'"
— "I Remember the Night Your Trailer Burned Down"

I can't remember the last time I heard such pristine gibberish on a popular music recording. Just keep this CD on your player and you can throw away your copy of Chicken Soup for the Humor-Impaired.
For more information, visit www.Bobby Lounge.com or write John Preble c/o Abitian Records, 22275 HWY 36, Abita Springs, Louisiana 70420.

The second CD, New Mardi Gras Classics, presents 16 songs about Mardi Gras that have been written over a 40-year period.

The Abitians, who have the lion's share of the cuts, are real genre-jumpers. In "This Is Endymion," the calypso sound is dominant, but there are nice touches of rockabilly and melancholy burlesque guitar. That same guitar, along with some sweet sock-it-to me organ, shows up on the tribal burlesque rocker "King Zulu." This cut would have been the perfect accompaniment for a screening of a stag film in the dark back room of a downtown New Orleans storefront in the 1950s. The calypso vibe is dominant again in "When the Levees Broke."

"The King of Bacchus" is a mock Dylan ballad, with such clever lines as "No facts-based logic could prepare me for this."

In one cut, a man with a gravely bass voice sings,
"I'll wear some high heal shoes and a boustier
"To some it may be a little risqué.
"I'll be the cutest thing you ever saw.
"I want to be the prettiest girl on Mardi Gras."

"Mardi Gras on the Mind" is purist hillbilly music.

But with all this genre-jumping and mixing, the Abitians are still perfectly comfortable playing "Mardi Gras in Evangeline," which is a straightforward traditional Cajun rocker.

"Mardi Gras Season" offers the most insightful line of the CD: "It's so much fun when you're not you."

This is a sound endorsement of a New Orleans Mardi Gras that has meat on its bones: that allows for absolute improvisation and near absolute self-indulgence in street theatre — the kind of thing one sees in Charles Gatewood's Mardi Gras street photos of the 1970s.

Dash Rip Rock, a band that's starting to work Lake Charles, La., venues, pulls down the best hooks on the record with "Orpheus Night," an upbeat pop number with lots of playful guitar twanging.

You can tell from the pictures on the inset that there aren't any woe-is-me 20-year-olds on these records. Some of these musicians have been at this a long time. It's a recording with good execution all the way through that never takes itself too seriously.

For information, visit www.abitianrecords.com.

Both discs are being promoted by the UCM Museum (pronounced You-see-'em Museum), 22275 Highway 36, Abita Springs, 70420. This place is a DIY art center. Don't expect to see any Blue Dogs paintings here. The museum caters to low-brow and outsider art and little models of old-fashioned service stations and the like.

Evil Word Gods And The Biological Telescope

2010-04-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this blog, you're probably well aware that dozens, maybe hundreds, of fine rants appear on the Internet every day. In the reviews that follow, your correspond will introduce you to three that stand the test of time. They are guaranteed to provide satisfaction and amusement for as long as any freak anywhere is able to track them down. Prepare to be puzzled.

Val Valerian "The Markabian / Orion Scenario for Planetary Control" and "The Markabian / Orion Model of Earth's Future"
(www.geocities.com/Area51/Aurora/4519/scenario.hmtl)

The long distant origins of this planet's culture, according to this author, were pleasant enough. Earth's culture was started by "fun-loving beings who created mock-ups of games" with "planets, forms, colors, sounds and lots of action and sensation."

If it weren't for the unintentionally humorous language — "fun-loving beings" and "lots of action and sensation" — this scenario would have a lot in common with the theological concept of the universe as the game of God, which is found in Buddhist, Hindu and Christian traditions, and perhaps in others.

Our author calls his version of this construct "the master game." Immediately after interjecting the phrase, he writes, "But that's another story."

So what story does the author tell? His story is one of "cosmic players" — immortals who go from one incarnation to another in a long effort to leave human beings "subjugated and enslaved."

The "master players" are "Markabians/Orion Group/Reptilian Groups." They've created the world we live in now — AKA "the Markan Scenario" — and appear to serve a "master player" named Xenu.

The master players first started messing with Earth 75 million years ago when Xenu undertook an "atomic blasting" that pretty much wiped out living things on Earth. In a fancy flourish, the reader is told "Xenu was his name and terror was his game."
Master players demand conformity from human beings. They get it through the use of "government extension" and "influence by mind control." The fear of government extension may have motivated the "Markabians" to "[work] flat-out to defeat President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher." Our author is perhaps working from a pre-neoconservative view of conservatism. One could hardly think of the Republicans of the W. era as taking a strong stand against excessive government control.

At any rate, Markabians are striving to bring about a "One-World-Police-State" through a tricky device: the offer of "peace, friendship, new technology, trade, and economic and political alignment," all of which is to be delivered by aliens called "Markab."

It's not clear how Markabians will deliver this offer to earth folk; it may come, says the writer, through a "biological telescope receiver."

The text confused me a bit when it used the word "Markab" to describe both the aliens making the peace offer and "world bankers."

The most astonishing part of the text (aside, perhaps, from word of a massive nuclear attack circa 75 million B.C.) is the promise that all the people of the earth will hold a simultaneous "world vote" to decide whether to accept the Markab peace proposal. If the Markabians win, we are told, folks will lose their "chance for an exciting, independent, expanding future." No matter how many times I'm told I have a "chance for an exciting, independent, expanding future," the news always surprises me. How have I become so thoroughly convinced that my future, like my present, will be boring, dependent and meager in options? Perhaps it's Markabian mind control that's led me to believe these things.

As for the present texts, I can't imagine you'll find much reading material that will cram this amount of interesting information into four pages. The mythos presented here is almost as detailed as Lovecraft's and more systematic. "Markabian/Orion Group/Reptilian Groups" are at least as intriguing as sottoths, and as easy to imagine. (Really, what does Nyarlathotep look like? I have no idea.)

As for language, I think it'll be tough to beat such phraseology as "biological telescope receiver." Of course, any reference to mind control is always tantalizing.

There's much to recommend these texts; nothing that I can find fault with. This mythos is different, but has lots of bite.

(If you want to read Valerian's out-of-print 400-page-long books, you can find them for sale on the internet at prices starting at $100.)

Randy Crow "Antichrist Anointed President because of Rigged Diabold Voting Machines — Abominations Fault Ukraine Election"
www.randycrow.com/articles/112904.htm

While many Bush detractors have tagged the emperor with derogatory names, few have found as colorful a moniker as Randy Crow, who habitually calls Bush "antiChrist Little George."

Crow is just as colorful when it comes to describing the program he thinks Bush wants to institute: "a zioni$t communi$t police state." Crow's not afraid to play fast and loose with capitalization, spelling and the free exchange of one type of symbol for another.

For the most part, Crow's critique resonates with that of most of Bush's critics. But there are differences. One, the notion that Bush is a communist sympathizer, we haven't seen elsewhere (as far as I know). Information about such theories is welcome. Some may recall the popular right wing rant in book form None Dare Call It Conspiracy that declared Richard Nixon was a communist sympathizer.

Crow also maintains that Bush wants to "engage the United States is [sic] a self defeating war by attacking Iraq, Iran, Iran, India, and China." Were any country's leaders dumb enough to engage in an attack of all the countries Crow has listed, defeat would, I agree, be inevitable.

Of all the things Crow could pick as the No. 1 problem in the U.S., he chooses "communi$m." To this and 25 other problems he lists, Crow offers a "solution," which is this: "Tell the People the Problems and the People will Solve The Problems." Crow seems to have great confidence in the as-of-yet-unexercised will of the people to familiarize themselves with current issues and think them through.

Without really, as far as I can tell, explaining what the "zioni$t plan" is, Crow levels a devastating attack on it by describing it with the single word "stupid." He argues that "communi$ts" and "zioni$ts" are identical, and both are "paranoid."

This large, paranoid group, Crow asserts, will somehow persuade Russia, India and China to lob nuclear missiles into California and New York.

Near the end, the text degenerates into rant babble:

With zioni$t and blood flowing all over the globe and the end of the world a near done deal, Democrats, Republicans, zioni$ts$ will say OK God you're cool, we will vote for Randy, zioni$ts will give up their money is God religion.

I don't know what that means. But after it happens, says Crow, "the world will start acting right."
About time.

Gene Ray "Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous 4-Day Time Cube"
www.timecube.com

In this 76-page long manifesto, the author, who describes himself as "the wisest human," presents an often belabored and vague, and sometimes incoherent, explication of his concept of the "4 day Rotating Creation Principle of Cubicism."

To get the most out of this document, the reader should try to follow Ray's advice and "think cubic." The accent in this text is decidedly on the number 4, and in particular the relation of the number 4 to the ways in which people measure the passage of days and minutes.

Ray's phrase "4-Day Time Cube Creation Principle within 1 Earth Rotation" seems to mean that each 24-hour earth day contains within it 4 days. But the cubic principle extends beyond the traditional concept of one day per every 24 hours. For people too are cubics: "There is no human entity, just human Cubics — as in 4 different people in a 4 corner stage metamorphic rotation." This could mean that each person will, at some point, be at each intersection of some sort of unseen cube. On the other hand, it could mean a million other things or nothing in particular.

Sometimes Ray uses that old rant trick of simply declaring the opposition is not only wrong, but cerebrally challenged; for example, consider this mathematical foray: "-1 x -1 = +1 is stupid and evil."

Still, several of Rays recurring motifs — and there are many, many recurring motifs here — are appealing to this reader. Ray is skeptical of the notion of self, perhaps even feeling there is no such thing. ("You think self, you are evil.") We tend to believe these days that selves are constructed with words inside the head. Ray is also skeptical about words, feeling that they're inaccurate or misleading — at least in the ways they're presently used. ("You word murder your children ... Adult word worship is an evil adult scam.")

Since teachers, as Ray accurately asserts, use words to indoctrinate, they are, in Ray's words "evil word gods" who are "teaching commercial plunder of nature." That last clause indicates he may see a danger in a too-eager trust of words and a personal immersion in consumerism.

Fortunately for the reader, Ray's manifesto often turns into indecipherable rant word salad: "Evil 1 day Biblekills children."

In similar passages, he sometimes seems to be getting very close to something that sounds sensible: "Burn the bible, honor Childhood via which adults evolve. Babble Power is suicidal." But at other times, the meaning is just elusive: "Creation has two sex poles & 4 corner races of humans. God is cornered as a queer." So, 4 corners up, God down. Read this and maybe you'll get the message. For adventures in cubic thinking, this text remains unsurpassed.

On Bad Writing

2010-03-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

When I taught university-level English courses, I told my students it was useful to study bad writing. The idea was that if we could figure out what things made writing bad, we could avoid those things, and thus reduce the likelihood that we might produce bad writing.

I also taught that all writers have two fundamental tasks to perform. They must:
1. Have something to write.
2. Write it in such a way that the reader can understand it.

In the bad writing I'm about to discuss, writers fail about equally on both counts.

Let's explore. The poorest writing I've seen is that done in a certain kind of periodical I'll call "true confessions magazines." I've only read one of these, but it was a howler.

Remember, the stories in these magazines are all supposed to be "true." The most badly written story of the bunch was one concocted by an author who claimed to have been the mother of a teenage son. The son, she wrote, had taken explosives to his high school and killed 16 students.

Immediately I knew the story couldn't possibly be "true." To state the obvious — if a student killed 16 students at a school, we'd all have heard about it innumerable times. As our media experience repeatedly demonstrates, the killing of even a single student at a school immediately generates a multi-day national media event.

Worse than the obvious falsehood about the killings was the explanation of the "mother" for the behavior of her "son." He did this horrible thing because he wore black clothing. That was the writer's sole explanation. It wasn't that the black clothing was a symbol or expression of deep-seated psychological disturbances. No, it was the mere fact that he wore black clothing. The kid was an all-American youth who immediately turned into a monster the day he put on his first black overcoat.

The writer failed on count one. She had nothing to say. She threw together a tasteless, facile rip-off of the Columbine story.

In trying to account for writing of such wretched quality, I keep in mind that the writer may well have been someone capable of producing good work who merely dashed off some fast, poor work in order to get fast money from a magazine with extremely low standards.

Harder to explain is the work of writers who are established in their fields and tend to receive positive reviews (at least in some quarters). Let me focus on genre writing, which is thought by serious critics to be little more than a refuge for bad writers.

Let's turn to point two above: The way in which the writer says what she intends to say. The characters in the books of horror writer Clare McNally use language that sounds so contrived and stiff that an attentive reader will refuse to see the language as credible. In the novel Ghost Light, a six-year-old character says to another character of his age, "Someone has fastened a lock to the door!"

I put it to you that no one raised in the United States would ever say such a thing. The standard spoken American English expression for what McNally tries to convey is something such as: "Somebody's put a lock on the door."

Almost as clumsy is overly formal language used in a popular literature narrative. Zero at the Bone, a true crime book about mass-murderer Gene Simmons, was written by a Paul Williams, who apparently has an academic background in poetry composition. He quotes his own poetry liberally throughout his book. He writes the sort of verse students are taught to compose in university creative writing seminars — verse that can be deciphered by those willing to engage in intellectual concentration, but not by Joe Sixpack. The book's title is a phrase from an Emily Dickinson poem. I see no application of the phrase to the life or case of Simmons. The writer just wants the true crime reader (of all people) to know that he knows his Dickinson.

In the first 10 pages of the book, Williams treats the reader to such obscure academic lingo as: "that iambic closure," "immobilis in mobile," "the isinglass patina," "an ell of the wall," "iambic tom-tom." Such language in a true crime book, a genre second only to porno books in hastiness and sloppiness of writing, is about as appropriate as a cycle of Latin sonnets.

Depending on the nature of one's sense of camp, one can see inappropriate language as amusing (as I did in the Williams book) or annoying (as I did in the McNally book, which I quit reading at page 50).

Let's now turn again to point one: what is written. Those who write either true or fictional stories ("narratives," if you prefer the fancy term) will earn respect for their work only if they make the effort to develop characters who are distinct from each other and are at least minimally interesting to the reader. Character development needs to be an essential part of what storytellers write.

The failure to develop characters is recognized by horror book readers as the most common flaw of horror writing. I quit reading John Shirley's fairly well-known novel Wetbones after 200 pages because I couldn't distinguish one character from another. The book's two male protagonists are young men who work together as script writers in Los Angeles. After 200 pages, the only way I could differentiate the two was by reminding myself that they had different names.

But Shirley's no fool. Consider the following observations he makes on the human condition in his novel: "Garner had to search for his little girl in this endless sea of irrelevancy and indifference and preoccupied people and deteriorating places. This is crazy, this is hopeless ... "

Or this: "Line up the ifs like toy soldiers, move them around the way you want, try to make yourself feel better. It's still just playing with ifs."

Or: "He had preached at himself by preaching at other people."

Shirley likes to take time to think about life. He won't take the time to contemplate what sorts of people might lead this life.

I quit Reading Richard Laymon's horror novel Darkness Tell Us after the first two chapters. Laymon introduces 10 or so characters in these chapters. I could only get a sense of one of them: the misfit and outcast (the character type that is, for whatever reason, the one that always seems to get fleshed out even in poorly written horror novels). The first sentence of the third chapter contained the name "Glen." I had to flip back through the first two chapters to see whether I'd been reading about a character who had that name.

In contrast is a novel by horror writer Edward Lee, whose many devoted fans seem to take pride in his reputation for bad writing. In Lee's Flesh Gothic, there are some clanky passages. But in this novel, the gaffes don't matter much. Lee's careful to begin by devoting a chapter to each of the more than 15 major characters. While this makes for a somewhat slow initial read, the approach pays off in spades in the last 300 pages, when the reader feels compelled to find out what happens to these characters whom he understands better than his own acquaintances.

It's not necessary that one identify or feel deeply for a character. But one must at least know enough about the character to feel an interest in what happens to her. It is no great feat for a good writer to create credible characters who are more interesting than the people we know.

When established horror writers create flat characters, they do so, I think, because they've gotten too caught up in the plot to take the time to envision the personalities of their characters. Novels by these writers build to a rapid sequence of shocking events: the payoff for the horror book reader. The bulk of the creative work has gone to the creation of what is the most exciting part of the narrative. The writer's intoxicated with the plot twists she's contrived to make the knock-out climax or ending.

In terms of how they write what they write, it's often possible for the writer to play around with or even mess up the words and still deliver a readable story. But if there's a story, character development seems to be a requisite of good writing. You can have fun with language. When it comes to character — watch out. I can imagine that some extremely experimental writer, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, might write a good, solid story that contains a plot devoid of a series of discrete actions — for example, a plot that consists merely in the narrator's description of a photograph he is presumably looking at. But even in such writing as this, the intrepid reader (which is the only kind who will make it to the end) is working backwards to construct in his head the kind of character who's looking at the photograph.

In order to be interested in stories, whether true or otherwise, we need to know that the things that happen have happened to or been done by creatures that strongly resemble the people we are or we know. We can watch full-length movies about pigs and mice and dogs, provided these creatures act (and "talk" or "think") like people who are familiar to us.

And the tortured efforts that networks go to to convince us that the people on reality television shows are just like us convey a message that's all too true. If it weren't, how would any sociologist ever explain the popularity of the things?

Cortez, The Distressed Hillbilly

2010-03-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Aaron Thomas, a native of Southwest Louisiana, who brought by Cortez del Mar's recent CD You Did This To Yourself.

With a little imagination, you can see this CD as a musical portrait of the gothic backwoods mischief of a bunch of inbred country musicians who spend many long nights drinking Everclear and listening to albums by American Music Club. You pick up the vibe from such lyrics as "Here's to something sinister" ("Bigger Skies") and "You know I'm a little crazy" ("Sugar Skull"). And the "Cities of Gold" line "Just wait till I get you alone" doesn't sound like a promise of tender romance.

Gothic content notwithstanding, what makes the whole shockabilly approach work is that our skewed singer is relating tales that come from the hard living of real life. In "All Smiles," he sings to his lover about "all the pain there in your chest." In "Cities of Gold," he reveals the kind of honesty that only comes from people who've given up the effort to put up a good face: "I'm not sorry or sad. Should I lie?" Those are the kind of lines Johnny Cash felt compelled to growl out now and then.

Mar's recent CD You Did This to Yourself. I had the idea this band was from Lafayette, but I was mistaken. Thomas says most of the band's members live in Sulphur (right across the river from Lake Charles).

In the CD, Cortez leads with its strongest suit: a soaring, euphoric minute-long instrumental intro. Beautiful hooks are layered on by electric guitars and keyboards. It ends abruptly, and the audience is introduced to the distressed hillbilly vocals that will be its companion for the next 45 minutes. Think of the voice of Mark Eitzel after he's been through one of the prodigious drinking nights he's always writing songs about; or imagine Chris Isaak taking the mike right after he's chugged a couple of bottles of cough syrup.

Though there are lots of change-ups (which I'll describe), the default sound on the disc is a downbeat, quiet, steadily paced country-tinged rock with a melancholy cast. Departures from the default sound include "Sea of Sound," an upbeat power pop number with lyrical hooks that could have come straight off a 1980s SubPop record.

"Cities of Gold" starts as a mix of mariachi, a Cash Ballad and "Ghost Riders in the Sky." This chirpy little gem about personal and shared misery ends up with some good, creepy off-key guitar string plucking, weird off-key piano tinkling and what sounds like — of all things — a French horn solo. Compare this ending to the off-kilter cabaret music beginning of "Burning Whiskey River," with its fine Link Wray-style electric guitar decays.

I don't know whether Cortez fits into the postrock category. You can hear some of the crazed hillbilly stuff in Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But aside from that, I don't hear a lot of overlap. Don't buy this disc expecting to hear a Mogwai or Sigur Ros record. As for the shockabilly vibe, this disc sounds closer to the sort-of mainstream shockabilly of The Reverend Horton Heat than the psychodrama shockabilly of Shockabilly. The bottom line: if you're interested in avant country rock ballads on real-life topics, you'll want to have this recording. If you want to listen to country rock ballads about idealized life, just turn on the radio to any station that doesn't have an angry guy talking on it.

CDs like this one indicate there are almost amazingly talented bands right here in Lake Charles, La. But they don't stay here long. They don't have venues to perform in and thus can't build a big support base.

Of course, Lake Charles always has the option of embracing and supporting bands like this. Hell, for all I know, pigs always have the option to fly. But I don't expect to see a pig flying in my lifetime. Whether they fly or not, you can keep track of the band's progress on its site cortezdelmar.com.You Did This to Yourself

Neopets and Creepy Moves

2010-03-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

It's never been news in my lifetime that we are living in both a material and a virtual world.

In theory, the virtual world of the present resembles by ever greater degrees our thoughts and feelings about whatever we mean when we use terms such as "reality" or "the real world."

It's true that none of the television shows that ran when I was a kid had anything to do with the realities of anyone's everyday life. But when I first heard the Rolling Stones' song "Jumpin' Jack Flash" on the radio, I knew it resonated with emotions I had; I just didn't know what the emotions were.

The virtual world that exists 40 years after the release of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" has this distinction: it's interactive. One can make choices about one's place in it. If I have the right program, I can make "Jumpin' Jack Flash" sound any way I want it to just by moving a mouse around. In an online game, one can go down one hall or another; talk to another character or keep quiet; even take actions that will get oneself killed (in a virtual sense).

How does virtual interactivity affect the life of the typical American consumer? The marketing think tank Trendwatching (see trendwatching.com) gets at it when its representatives write (in somewhat overworked prose):

"The new consumer ... creates his or her own playground, comfort zone, universe ... At the core is control: psychologists ... agree ... that human beings want to be in charge of their destiny, or at least have the illusion of being in charge. And because they can now get this control in entirely new ways, aided by an online, low-cost, creativity-hugging revolution ... consumers now weave webs of unrivaled connectivity and relish instant knowledge gratification. They exercise total control over ... identities in cyberspace at a whim, wallow in DIY/ customization/personalization/co-creation to make companies deliver on their terms. (They make) ... virtual worlds in which they can truly be whoever or whatever they want to be."

In its description of a general on-line virtual experience, Trendwatching listed, by my count, 12 states of interest to the contemporary consumer: possession, comfort, a sense of control, economical alternatives, access to new technology, acquisition of information, gratification, socialization, a sense of identity, collaboration, an opportunity to create and reality creation.

In the long passage I quoted above, Trendwatching didn't specifically mention Internet games. When it turns to online gaming, Trendwatching quotes experts who see gaming as meeting consumer's desires for these states:
• escapism
• the "drive to explore" (Mediaedge)
• the "promise of reward" (Mediaedge)
• a sense of accomplishment (economist Edward Castronova)
• the experience of "feeling ... be friended" (Castronova), and
• "feeling ... loved." (Castronova).

Now we're moved into the uneasiness many associate with the "simulacrum." What's the simulacrum? Philosopher Jean Baudrillard believes contemporary consumers — that is, you and I — live entirely in an illu sory world created by electronic media. He calls this the simulacrum — a fancy term for the imitation.

An imitation is by no means bound to afford an accurate representation of what it imitates. Reality, Baudrillard would say, is seeing a space ship blow up with your own eyes at the very place where it blows up. The simulacrum is seeing and hearing 1,000 media representations of a space ship blowing up.

Let's use the term "simulacrum creepiness" to describe a situation in which my experience of electronic media inclines me to experience potentially dangerous states of mind or symptoms of mental illness, such as, say, unwarranted terror or traumatic disappointment.

Consider the idea that a game makes me "feel loved." I can easily understand that a person would have nostalgia for a game he spent a lot of his youth playing. But when a person tells me he thinks the game loves him — or even that a participant in a mas sively multiplayer on-line game "loves" him — I start thinking "ther apy."

Does a corporation that puts its advertising in a on-line game want the user to feel loved? If it did, it would presumably at the very least have to insert an ad that works.

Let's start with the basics. What makes an ad in a game effective? Trendwatching can get us started:

"In-game communication [such as advertisement] should always facilitate escapism ... There's a delicate balance between enhancing realism and obstructing escapism. Wizards with cola cans or aliens brandishing chocolate bars are almost certainly wrong."

In one respect, those who advertise in games are realists who have the advantage over idealists, cynics and Luddites; Nicholas Longano, CMO of Massive, describes the advantage: "If (the game is) set in the 20th century or beyond, you expect to see advertising. Advertising enhances the sense of realism," he tells Business Week.

Smart marketers know that if they can figure out a way to integrate their brand smoothly into the game's story line, there's a possibility they can get gamers to use their products and services. A 2005 study by Nielsen Interactive Entertainment found that in-game advertising increased players' awareness of the product by 60 percent. Product awareness isn't the same thing as product consumption, but it's enough to put a smile on the marketer's face.

Locate the role of the simulacrum in this quotation from MediaEdge: "The opportunity and challenge for brands is to figure out how to add something relevant to virtual worlds: providing players and inhabitants with experiences they actually enjoy and could even co-create with you."

I felt a shiver of simulacrum creepiness there. Can I really co-create with companies run by people who have 100,000 times the amount of assets I have? Does the owner of a chain of multi-million dollar seafood restaurants co-create with an oyster shucker? I doubt that happens even in the virtual world.

Let's look at the specs of ads imbedded in games. Games about race cars can have brands on the virtual cars or on billboards along virtual race tracks. One expects race cars to bear advertising to begin with, so when an ad appears on a virtual car, the ad seems perfectly realistic. Such an ad — one that seems to belong — is called "imbedded." It's one of the millions of details imbedded in a long believable storyline.

Virtual billboards can be changed at any time. Brands using them include Honda, Cingular, Reebok, Coca-Cola, Comcast, Honda, NBC, Verizon, Warner Bros., and a few jillion others.

In the NBA's cleverly named 2K6 video game, more than 200 of the virtual basketball players wear Nike shoes in the game. Users improve their performance by collecting various types of Nike shoes and storing them in the game's "Nike Shoe Locker."

The PC game of the television show "CSI" was a collaboration between Visa and Ubisoft that resulted in a game plotline in which credit-card fraud protection was a central motif. Visa got 10 minutes of exposure in the game CSI 3: Dimensions of Murder. Nokia and General Motors also worked in ads.

Before we get stuck in games, let's look at imbedded, as well as pretty much open, advertising in virtual "being spaces." A being space, such as the 50-million user Habbo Hotel, is a virtual meeting place where people can communicate with friends or strangers online and engage in a multitude of online tasks and diversions. Being spaces aren't games that one wins or loses. Consider them gigantic online communities.

Each of the 50 million regular users of Habbo Hotel creates an online persona called a "Habbo." Habbos explore the hotel and create and decorate their rooms with furniture ("furni") that are purchased with "Habbo credits." Habbo credits are paid for with real-world credit cards, whether mom's or dad's or the user's.

Habbo rooms can be named after an advertiser. The advertiser's virtual billboard is placed in its virtual hotel room. The virtual maids and personnel who come and go in the room speak ad lines that promote the product.

In Habbo Hotel Germany, L'Oreal's Party Proof Gel opened two sponsored rooms: the Party Proof Club and the Party Proof Lounge. At mid-year, the first had been visited by 174,920 users and the second by 99,996.

In Canada, Habbo Hotel leased its largest club space to "Miles Thirst," a Habbo who's a virtual walking, talking advertisement for Sprite. Not only does Miles have Club Thirst, he has "virtual pouring rights" in Canada's Habbo Hotel, meaning Sprite's the only virtual soft drink users can get there.

Miles Thirst opens up his penthouse to all Habbos twice a week. If you visit, you get two Habbo credits, which are worth 40 cents in real-world money.

Sprite ran a television commercial for its Habbo Hotel set-up on MuchMusic. After that, Club Thirst became the most popular site in Habbo Hotel.

Here we come to another simulacrum creepiness moment. Most people are aware of risks that can arise when users start to think of virtual characters as actual flesh-and-blood people. There's a host of users who adore the set of electrons that is Miles Thirst. "Miles" has gotten more than 9,000 emails. Many include accounts of very personal experiences and of daydreams and fantasies that center on Miles. I realize we're mainly talking about kids here. But when a kid is expressing intense personal emotions to an ad, what's going on? Is the kid all right?

Speaking of kids, there's concern about advertising in the Neopets site, since it's geared towards children. The site draws 70 million Neopet owners ("Neopians"). They can communicate electronically with each other, and play more than 160 games in several zones. Zones and games are sponsored by such companies as Nestlé, McDonald's, General Mills, Atari, Frito-Lay and Disney. Neopets is itself owned by the monster corporation Viacom.

I don't know that I necessarily find all this troubling. In an age when every consumer is disconnected from every other consumer in the material world, it may be helpful if some consumers find solace in the ad-imbedded virtual world. And I know that marketers have to earn a living.

If one has a concern, one can look toward the source of the marketer's clout: the corporation. Aside from the occasional Enronesque fiasco, the corporation is always silent.

Don't shoot daggers at the player; don't rage at the imbedded ad. Ponder what is imbedded within the imbedded ad.

If the corporation wants me to believe the corporation loves me and co-creates with me, I may find myself wondering what the corporation really wants to do to me. The corporation is the entity on which I depend for my shelter, water, food, clothing, heat and health care. Can I afford to ignore its moves — however imbedded they may be?

Marginal Culture, Marginal Writing

2010-03-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

Radical Calls To Impossible Actions

I figured out what marginal culture is through the process of induction. It all started, I think, at some time in 1987, when I noticed what a peculiar assortment of books I'd been reading in the previous few months.

I'd read about movies made on minuscule budgets and the amateurish hustling directors who made them. I'd read true crime books. I'd sought out books about people I considered conspicuous failures in their personal lives (Nietszche, Pollock, Strindberg, etc.). I rented a P.O. box and started an organization whose letterhead I used to appeal for copies of rants of all types on the grounds that I was forming a "free information database."

While some might consider the material I was reading just so much junk, I had the feeling it was all shaping a particular and peculiar view of the human experience in my head.
I discussed the situation with a friend, who said he had been reading exactly the same sorts of materials, and that these were the materials that were likewise being read by the small number of people he wished to associate with. We both agreed we were hooking into an odd and noteworthy cultural phenomenon.

But what kind of culture were we investigating? I didn't have to look at the data too long to figure out I was reading about misfits, freaks, fish out of water and guys who were so ordinary that their unblemished banality made them de facto weirdos. To some degree, and usually a large one, these people failed at everything they tried to do. Some were way beyond the whole question of success and failure; one might have been a diary-keeper obsessed with the notion that the supervisor who'd fired him two decades ago was a CIA assassin; another might have been a self-publisher convinced the Vatican was administrated by the Trilateral Commission.

Others about whom I read were simply eccentric in the extreme: they were robot builders; music makers who used jackhammers, industrial saws, caves and explosives as musical instruments; performance artists who tore up their bodies for nauseated audiences.

I wound up tagging the collective written work of all these authors and subjects "marginal culture." The projects to which they devoted themselves, or their lack of success at these projects, kept them at the margins of social activity. Their preference for the workings of their projects over the niceties of social interaction made it likely that few of the marginal people were popular with their contemporaries or are popular today with present-day book readers. (There are exceptions. The writer Edward Lee is popular, and it must be a great strain for the typical reader to imagine in even a vague way the bizarre worlds he creates with words.)

Each marginal writer or subject of marginal writing was or is off in his or her own little world. That puts each in stark contrast with the drones contentedly immersed in the mediocre mechanics of everyday living — the zombies whom you and I must tolerate and work around just to survive.

Before I was even 20, I'd said to a friend, "Life is banal." Never, as far back as my memory goes, have I been able to generate any interest in the conversation about fripperies that is zombie talk: the discourse of middle-class American society. People talk about how so-and-so is "doing." Some other so-and-so is said to be going to such-and-such a school. He's in such-and-such a grade and making such-and-such grades. Another so-and-so is working at such-and-such a place. And how is he doing? Oh, he's doing pretty good, I guess. He's started dating again. Oh, really? Who's he dating? Oh, so-and-so. Really? How's she doing? Oh, she's doing pretty good, I think ...

And on and on and on it drones. When I can manage to think in the mist of this verbal spew, the only thoughts I can muster are, "Who cares? Do the people talking care about what they're saying and hearing? Why do they keep talking?"

But people will always do as they have always done and talk as they have talked. That's why one seeks out marginal cultural. Vicarious experience of marginal culture is the means of escaping the democratic populace; of fleeing the discourse of those who find it fascinating to discuss Wal-Mart parking conditions.

The marginal is anything that falls far outside of convention. The marginal shaman has the useful power of making the everyday and banal magical by putting it in a context for which it was never designed. A simplistic but precise example is that of the writer who took Donald Rumsfeld's press conference meditations and ramblings and published them in the form of poems.

Readers of the marginal can make a text marginal by placing it in a context different from that used by the text's author. To take another painfully obvious but apt example, if a writer puts in words his experience of terrifying, complex and far-reaching paranoia, he creates a piece of writing that's in the margin. Now, if the reader reads the text not as an cautionary guide to the dangers of mind control or the revelation of a vast conspiracy, but as an unintentionally humorous schizophrenic rant, the reader places the text in the margin.

Any text the reader sees as kitsch (whether it was meant to be kitsch or not) is a marginal text. Also qualifying are any texts the readers sees as evidence of outlandish and indemonstrable theories and ideas, radical calls to impossible actions, evidence of lunacy, demonstration of appallingly bad taste and documentation of lives lived in squalor and monstrous excess. Street people, pimps, crackheads, backwoods loons, serial killers, homeless schizophrenics, channelers — their stories lift us out of our habitual stress and tedium and give us relief. We feel, for a moment, as if there might be real life on the planet.

There is a gargantuan storehouse of marginal writing that extends far beyond library walls to the boxes in vanity publishers' warehouses, the graffiti-covered walls of dead factories, the diary-filled boxes of estates and the rant-covered telephone poles in the urban wasteland.Nietzsche: A Critical Life

Foot Loops: State And National Flavors

2010-03-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

Froot Loops: State And National Flavors

The March 5 edition of The Dead Pelican carried the irresistibly interesting headline "Louisiana Cops Plan for 'End of the World' Scenario." When I clicked the headline, the Pelican hooked me up with a Feb. 27 story Kurt Nimmo wrote for something called Infowars.com.

Said Nimmo, The Shreveport Times had reported on a local police exercise called “Operation Exodus.” Bossier Parish Sheriff Larry Deen said he aimed to protect Bossier Parish’s grocery stores, hospitals, gasoline stations and so forth "in the event of a catastrophic event, such as war or a terrorist attack."

Well, of course I know the terrorists are just lining up to attack Bossier Parish. So, what's Deen going to do about it? According to Infowars, the plan involves the use of "volunteers ... dispatched to vital areas to protect them." These volunteers won't just be using just riot shields and batons. Deen would have them using .50 caliber machine guns mounted on something called “the war wagon.” As of Feb. 20, reported Infowars, police in Bossier Parish were training volunteers "in hand-to-hand combat techniques."

My initial thoughts were, "OK, this will be one more chance for national media to have a hearty laugh at loopy authority figures in Louisiana." But as I read on, my bemusement turned to astonishment as I realized the reporter not only took all this stuff in Bossier Parish seriously but also thought it was a great idea.

Writer Nimmo broke out the heavy ammunition. He quoted Paul Joseph Watson as writing, "Numerous public figures, including Sen. Christopher Dodd, leading economist Nouriel Roubini, top trend researcher Gerald Celente, the head of the International Monetary Fund, the head of the World Trade Organization, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former national security director Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair have all warned of coming civil unrest and global instability.” (BTW, Watson writes for PrisonPlanet.com.)

Next came a link to a video of trend forecaster Celente. Under the headline "Fox Business: Gerald Celente Predicts Revolution" and over the subhead "PREDICTING OBAMA'S IMPACT" sat the image of Celente. (This isn't the only time Celente has appeared on Fox News. On Fox News Sunday, he deplored "Obamageddon," and on The Glenn Beck Show, he called the Obama stimulus package "fascism," It was for a different media venue, The Washington Post, that Celente predicted the "Panic of 2008." He may wish he could unpredict that one.)

"OK. Maybe the story's a little biased," I thought. But then Nimmo called the Bossier Parish end-of-the-world scenario inevitable, referring to "the inevitability of civil unrest as the economy continues to unravel." See, I would use the term "possibility" rather than the term "inevitability" and the term "if" instead of "as." But I'm stupid that way.

At this point in the story, I got that ecstatic feeling I always get when I realize I'm in the presence of the froot loop, the loony toon, the nut bucket. This was the real deal My ecstasy grew more intense as Nimmo ended the story with this riveting sentence: "Short of dismantling the Federal Reserve and arresting and prosecuting the bankers, there is no solution short of training police to shoot starving food rioters and declaring martial law." (Nimmo has a thing about bankers; at another point, he got behind the notion of "throwing out the banksters.")

Whew! Ahem. After I caught my breath, I clicked on the home page of Infowars. Sure enough, the first prose I saw told me "an ultra-secret global elite controls technology, finance, international law, world trade, political power and vast military capabilities." Wow! Where do I sign up?

As I investigated the page, I found ads for "the most lethal self-defense system in the world," dehydrated food sold at patriotfood.com, a "bank" that enables its clients to "Plant A Full Acre Crisis Garden," a "New Crisis Cooker," and notice that a "Millionaire Patriot Wants YOU Armed and Trained" with "a new, FREE Springfield XD HANDGUN." T-shirts proclaimed membership in the "Tyranny Response Team" and called on buyers to "Resist The New World Order." Headlines read, "Can Obama Assassinate Americans?" "MSNBC Continues Propaganda Campaign Against Patriot Groups" and, my favorite, "Hooray For Starbucks." Don't believe me? Just go to Infowars.com and look around.

I eventually realized the site was constructed by the Alex Jones radio show staff. (In fact, the thing is called "Alex Jones' Infowars.") Jones describes himself as "a prominent figure in the 9/11 Truth Movement." Even though the political personage who takes the most hits on the site is Obama, Jones is correct in saying he is not partisan. He takes pot shots at W. and the Neo-Conservatives. And his guests have included Ralph Nader and Gore Vidal. They've also included such fascinating cuckoo birds as David Icke, who believes the world is run by giant reptiles (but also makes insightful and perfectly valid observations about human behavior).

For the sake of fairness, I'll concede that Nikko's story contained some thought-provoking ideas, such as these from The Christian Science Monitor's Bill Bonner: "The establishment tells us the worst is over. The mainstream economics profession is guilty of dereliction of duty. They should be telling people that this ‘recovery’ is a scam. They should be warning investors that the markets could fall apart any day.” And then there were comments Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead made to Reuters: “I see nothing but large increases in the deficit. I just want to get people thinking about this, and to realize this is a road to disaster. I’ve always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don’t see a solution here.”

I don't have a problem with things like Infowars being on the Internet. In fact, I'd glad they're there. So .. let's all raise a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon to all the citizen volunteers sitting on top of the "war wagons," cradling their .50 caliber machine guns and waiting for the terrorists to arrive. I predict they'll be able to wait exactly as long as they want to.

Not So Cunning Testimony

The good news, or sort of good news, is that all the froot loops aren't in Bossier Parish. Take the case of the recent testimony of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic at the Hague.

When a war criminal is on trial, he isn't just trying to avoid jail or execution; he's also trying to salvage some hint of decency, and possibly even dignity. At any rate, in a perfect world he'd be trying to do that.

No such luck with Karadzic, who has the habit of dictatorship. Like the late Slobodan Milosovic and long-time Ukrainian strong man Viktor Yanukovich, Radovic just looks like a thug. He may be 64, but every time I see a photo of him, the first thought that enters my mind is, "I don't ever want to meet this guy in a dark alley."

Karadzic isn't just a thug; he's also a goofball. True to form, he's so desperate to save his skin he's willing to tell stories he knows no one will believe. He's not sophisticated enough to come up with the kind of stuff that would make a judge pause and think, "Hmm. There could be something to that."

In his testimony, he said Bosnians were both sniping at and bombing other Bosnians — on purpose. He says notorious bombings of Sarajevo markets in 1994 and 1995 were "faked." How, exactly, is a bombing faked? Remarkable as it sounds, Karadzic had an answer for that: "Perhaps it was corpses that were planted."

And why were the Bosnians engaging in all this wanton destruction of each other? That's easy, said Karadzic. They wanted to make the Serbians look bad. He said it was all a "cunning strategy."

Do tell. Karadzic is charged with being responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 7,000 were killed. "It is going to be easy for me to prove that I had nothing to do with it," he said. "It is a myth." Karadzic belongs to the school that believes it's beneficial to say that things that are impossible are easy. It's interesting that when Karadzic testified at the Hague, he asked for more time to prepare his defense. Sounds like this project may not be quite as easy as he thought it would be.

Choosing Negativity

2009-07-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

I would like to advocate the option of choosing undiluted, unallayed, unqualified negativity. I posit that nihilism, pessimism, cynicism, misanthrophy and other negative mindsets can with perfect propriety be held with equanimity and without any qualms.

I also posit these attitudes can be perfectly free of the almost inescapable assertion of the glimmer of hope.

I posit there is never any requisite for any person of any negative mindset to accept such platitudes as "There's always hope" or "Things'll work out" or "There's a light at the end of the tunnel." It's not just that it's often simply not the case that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I don't think there's any need for there to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

The negative can stand, exactly as is, without any assistance from the positive. And I find nothing at all undesirable about that state of affairs. Obviously I'm expressing a very subjective stance. In other words, I'm not offering up an equation that I think can be proved.