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"And here is Earth, a bright-blue jewel glittering in our modest galaxy, wandering in the darkness like a tourist in a bad neighborhood, about to be mugged." From "Stephen Hawking is a Peeping Tom," in Essays.

The Critical Mass

Aug 29th, 2010 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Aug. 29

Still no end to these awesome Upstate New York global warming mornings. The coffee’s on, last of the stuff from some island in the Flores Sea. First music of the day: Now is the Hour, Charlie Haden Quartet West.

1, In today’s lead story The Times notes that President Obama “is the first president in four decades with a shooting war already raging the day he took office – two, in fact, plus subsidiaries.” He’s had to learn this commander-in-chief thing on the run, and seems to have been doing so at a very hands-on level. “He has learned how to salute,” The Times reports. “He has surfed the Internet at night to look into the toll on the troops. He has faced young soldiers maimed after carrying out his orders. And he is trying to manage a tense relationship with the military.” Unlike his predecessor, he is a man “hungry for information” on which to base his decisions. “Where George W. Bush saw the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as his central mission and opportunities to transform critical regions, Mr. Obama sees them as ‘problems that need managing,’ as one adviser put it, while he pursues his own mission of transforming America at home.”  As Defense Secretary Robert Gates says – and don’t forget, Gates was also Bush’s defense secretary – “From the first, he’s been decisive, and he’s been willing to make big decisions.”

2, Society is running in reverse throughout the world. Ultranationalists are holding unprescedented loud street demonstrations in what The Times describes as “conflict-adverse Japan.” “Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Asian and other Chinese workers, Christian churchgoers and even westerners in Halloween costumes. In  the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that read, “This is not a white country.”

3, In an editorial called “Waiting For Mr. Obama,” The Times urges the president to turn up the volume on his rhetoric, and turn up the heat on Republicans. “Mr. Obama must tell Americans,” it writes, “that claims from Republican leaders that the country can both cut taxes and tackle the deficit are absurd and cynical.” That’s just one point he must make. “We believe Americans are ready for hard truths and big ideas,” The Times insists.

4, But not Glenn Beck’s ideas. While the Fox News bombthrower was playing host to his “Reclaiming Honor” rally this weekend in Washington, D.C., columnist Frank Rich is busy pointing out just who is bankrolling these supposed “grassroots” Tea Party events. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, is one, of course. The others, lesser known, are two Texas brothers, David and Charles Koch, whose combined wealth is exceeded, Rich notes, by only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The amount of money that these tycoons have poured into conservative causes is staggering, all in the name of arranging favorite-corporation status for their vast conglomerates. Speaking of blue-collar supporters of the Tea Parties and their Glenn Beck microphone, Rich writes, “The Koch brothers must be laughing all of the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests.”

5, Martin Dannenberg has died. His name may have been lost in history, but not the circumstances that surrounded him. He was a U.S. Army intelligence officer who, days after he’d seen dead bodies stacked at the death camp at Dachau in April of 1945, opened a swastika-covered  envelope that he found in a bank vault. Those four typed pages were the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, signed by Adolph Hitler, stripping Jews of German citizenship, outlawing marriage and sex between Jews and people of “German blood” and establishing the swastika as the national symbol of Germany, while banning Jews from displaying it.  “I had the most peculiar feeling when I had this in my hand,” he said in a 1999 interview. “Because here is this thing that begins the persecution of the Jews. And a Jewish person has found it.” Interestingly, Gen. George S. Patton kept it himself as a war souvenir, then  passed it on to a California library whose founder had been a close friend; It was secretly kept in a bomb-proof vault for 54 years, its existence revealed in 1996.  When Dannenberg learned that year that Patton had kept it for himself, rather than for use at the Nuremberg Trials as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had instructed, Dannenberg called Patton “that scoundred.”

6, “Belief in reincarnation, traditionally part of Eastern religions, is gaining acceptance in the West,” says Sunday Styles. Dr. Paul DeBell, a psychiatrist who specializes in past-life regression through hypnosis, believes he was once a cave man, “going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten.” The story does not say what, or who, ate this proto-DeBell, but it does cite a study last year that claimed one-fourth of Americans believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation, DeBell says, “allows you to experience history as yours. It gives you a different sense of what it means to be human.”

7, In 17 of the last 21 presidential elections, the taller man has won. Eighteen of the last 21, if you count Al Gore in 2000, as many people do.

8, Seattle appears to be the next new jazz hotbed, thanks to a groundswell of interest among young students in the classrooms and coffeehouses. Fueled by inter-school rivalries, one drummer says big bands “are kind of like high school football in Texas.”

9, We have infrastructure fatigue. The nation’s dams are typically 50 years old. “Despite their monumental size,” The Times reports, “the dams can be weakened by foraging gophers and squirrels, whose holes undermine the foundation.”

10, The Book Review introduces me to Shirley Jackson, who wrote disturbing stories from the 1940s until her death in 1965 at age 48. Stories such as “The Lottery,” which this review will only tease as “about an exceptionally nasty small-town ritual.” Houses play a big role in much of Jackson’s writings. Often, they’re weird, twisted houses, as with “Hill House,” a story of ghost hunters. Houses as a box of our fears. It’s in a collection called Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories.

11, But zooming to the top of my reading list is Milan Kundera’s Encounter. A collection of essays about art and thinking by the Czech novelist who moved to France and uncovered, as he writes, “the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying  because the need for art, the sensitivity and love for it, is dying.” Kundera’s wide-ranging interests in the arts opens windows for Icelandic novelists and Bertolt Brecht’s substantial body odor.

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Posted in Books, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Science |

The Critical Mass

Aug 27th, 2010 by Jeff

Free speech: How embarrassing

The country was being rushed into war in 2002. And a lot of us knew that. We knew that George W. Bush had no reason to invade Iraq. Despotic as he was, Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with 9/11, or Al Qaeda. In fact, in one respect, he had been a part of the solution. With Saddam running Iraq, Al Qaeda was nowhere to be seen in that country. All you had to do to know all of this was read, pay attention, think for yourself.

And so, before it was too late, thousands of us descending on Washington, D.C., to protest the oncoming war. Our leaders could ignore the truth, but we didn’t have to. Margaret and I drove down and stayed with my old high school buddy and his family.

That Saturday afternoon, it was lightly drizzling. We ended up joining what’s been variously estimated as 100,000 to 400,000 people marching – no, actually, strolling – through the streets. Having seen what 400,000 people at the Woodstock reunions of 1993 and ‘98 looked like, I’d side with the high end of that estimate. People were having fun, chatting, laughing, talking about the troubling issues that the Bush administration was bringing down in our names.

Other things that I also remember: A nice free concert at the end of the march, with people like Steve Earle and Joan Baez. And how, in the gray light, the White House had looked like a unfriendly place as we walked by. No sign of life, except for armed guards on the roof. Helicopters silently watched from overhead. George Bush was not at home to hear us, his fellow citizens.

And one more thing: Virtually no media. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and we were being virtually ignored. The only TV crew that I saw was from Germany, in front of The White House. They pulled me aside and asked some questions. “We’re here to speak to him,” I said, pointing to the Oval Office. “But he’s not listening.” We watched the newscasts that night; virtually no mention of what was happening. The next morning, the hometown newspaper, The Washington Post, covered it with story in the metro section. It wasn’t even national news to those editors.

But of course, you know what’s happening this Saturday. Glenn Beck’s rally at the mall in Washington D.C., at Abraham Lincoln’s marble feet. The event is mockingly called “Restoring Honor,” as though the only American point of view is the vision of Beck, special guest Sarah Palin and the Tea Party shouters who are expected to be such a large part of the rally. You know all about this because it has received extensive media coverage beforehand. You’ll see it all over TV on Saturday, and read more about it on Sunday, for those of you who still read newspapers.

They’ll pretend they’re speaking for America – “Real America,” as Palin likes to call it – ignoring the rest of us unreal Americans who have exercised our patriotic right of dissent over what’s happened to this country for the past decade.

They’ll talk of defending the Constitution, but only the parts they like. The Second Amendment, of course, which they say allows them to carry guns and threaten anyone who they fear. Maybe they’ll talk of the 14th Amendment, the one that declares that all children born in this country are American citizens. That’s one they want to repeal, because they don’t like that one.

And there will be talk of the First Amendment. That’s the one about freedom of expression, which applies to their right to explain that they are reclaiming Civil Rights on this anniversary of the great “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on that very same spot where Glenn Beck will be on Saturday. Beck, who has called our first black president a racist. These patriots demand their right of free speech, while labeling those of us who speak different words as un-American.

But isn’t it curious that the organizers of “Reclaiming America” have asked their followers at Saturday’s rally to leave behind their home-made signs. You know the signs I’m talking about. The ones that bewilderingly demand that the government stay out of health care, but keep its hands off of Medicare. The ones that draw Hitler mustaches on Obama. The ones that call for murdering anyone who opposes their point of view. If you’re reluctantly leaving your signs in the garage back home while on your way to “Reclaiming America” on Saturday, it’s because the organizers of that event find your free speech to be embarrassing.

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Posted in Life During Wartime, Politics |

Happy 100th: The Critical Mass

Aug 19th, 2010 by Jeff

Celebrating the fall of civilization, and The New York Times

Dick Storms, right, and I toast photographer Garry Geer moments before the start of the web site release party.

Dick Storms, right, and I toast photographer Garry Geer moments before the start of the web site release party.

The Critical Mass today celebrates it’s 100th posting, since November’s tequila-soaked web-site launch party at Abilene Bar & Lounge. One friend is unimpressed; she told me she’s filed 5,000 blogs.

But this blog doesn’t report on every time I take a shower, although it usually does report on what’s in Sunday’s New York Times. When you sit down to read The Critical Mass, our Quality Control Department assures this blog’s consumers that they will be enjoying prime intellectual content and highbrow humor, a rigorous process that has disfigured well over two dozen crash-test dummies.

So strap yourself in, this one might take two glasses of wine to get through.  Here’s the best of the first 100 postings of The Critical Mass:

Opening-Day Blog: Nov. 2, 2009. Thank You for joining me on the Internet. I’d rather we could do this face-to-face, sitting in a bar. Nonetheless, I shall have a dirty martini, thank you. And The Essential George Jones.

Nov. 5. I was never very good at math, and it appears politicians aren’t as well. I’m hearing the word “mandate” being thrown around the nation after Tuesday night’s elections, including here in Rochester by Republican County Executive Maggie Brooks. We had a 30-percent voter turnout. If your political party gets little more than half of that (and we’re only talking registered voters, not the folks who have given up on the game in disgust), then the public mandate seems to be: disillusionment… And by the way: If experiencing an election lasting four hours or more, call your doctor.

Nov. 9. Sunday afternoon at Deb’s 40th, I found myself with James Via of the rockabillies Krypton 88 in the kitchen with two women friends who were discussing their extra-perceptive abilities. Nothing paranormal, both insisted, but, “if you’re in pain, like you have a bad knee, I can tell you where you’re hurt,” said the one with more tattoos than the other. “I can feel other people’s emotional pain,” said the lesser-tattooed one. They started trading stories about how tough it is to be a human antenna. ”Three Xanax,” was the antidote, they decided. Via and I glanced at each other: “I’m just a selfish guy who doesn’t pick up on others’ needs,” I said. Via nodded. He is, too.

Nov. 10. Driving home the other day, I spotted about 20 cars lined up at the McDonald’s drive-thru window. “I wonder if they do that in France?” I said to the car radio.

Nov. 11. Some homeless fellow chased me down the street the other day, again. They’ll walk right past some lawyer-type in a suit and stop me, because I have long hair and look like the progressive liberal type (Actually, a pretty good guess) who’s likely to hand out money. He quickly showed me his Georgia driver’s license, a new tactic by panhandlers that I’ve noticed (some kind of validation thing, I guess), and quickly explained how he had to get on a bus to Buffalo, it was leaving in a half an hour, and something something something about his baby daughter. “How much do you need?” I asked. “Eighteen dollars.” OK: He wants me to give him $20 and tell him to keep the change. I fished into my pocket and pulled out something like $1.20 in change. “This is all I have,” I lied, handing it over. He didn’t say thank you. He just hustled on down the street, going in the wrong direction from the bus station.

Nov. 15 According to the writer Jean-Paul Sartre, “…after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all of the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them.”

Nov. 16. This Facebook, this Internet, it’s changed my brain. I now think like a graffiti artist. Write quickly, get away. Non-sequitur synapse. Set the bar for public discourse so low, even my dog can set her elbows on it. I practiced for it by reading the news crawls at the bottom of the cable-news shows. Make weird connections. What was that one I read last summer? Oh yeah: SHARK ATTACKS DROP; AILING ECONOMY CITED

Nov. 29. I went next door to the hunting shop. In the doorway there, I found a brochure featuring a sexy babe fondling a gun. Not the kind of gun that you use on deer, but the kind of man-hunting pistol that your kid finds hidden in the nightstand and uses to accidentally blow off the top of his head. Leaning on the counter inside were two beefy fellows dressed in camouflage, probably so you couldn’t spot them in the aisles amid the other merchandise. “I wouldn’t hesitate running an arrow through her,” one of them was saying. He was talking about a nice doe he’d spotted the other day. I think.

Dec. 6. Thirty-five years after “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk is re-releasing remastered versions of its danceable kraut pop.  “Machines are funky,” says one half of the founding duo, Ralf Hutter. I guess that’s why all of the cool guys hang out in hardware stores.

Dec. 10. Outrage. It’s the word these days. “ADULT-THEMED ‘FROSTY’ VIDEOS STIR OUTRAGE,” reads the headline on one of the web news sites. Outrage! How dare a bunch of backroom network TV geeks giggle and diddle with their computers to ruin the name of one of our children’s most-revered victims of global warming! Frosty bragging about his porn collection! Outrageous! Every damn thing is an outrage. Otherwise, I guess it’s just not worth talking about. Can’t you just feel Western Civilization coming apart at the seams?

Dec. 15. The New York Post has run a Tiger Woods story on its cover for 13 straight days. This is the second-longest streak in Post history, following 19 straight 9/11 stories after the terrorist attack. Don’t try to tell me America’s watchdog is asleep.

Dec. 25. At Sue and Scott’s for Christmas Eve, someone’s gifts included a Jesus Christ action figure. In truth, it’s probably a Ted Neeley action figure, named for the actor who played the title role in Jesus Christ Superstar, since I don’t think we know what Jesus Christ actually looked like. Which may come as a surprise to anyone who thinks they see the Saviour’s face on their morning toast.

Dec. 26. A few years back, some of my Jewish friends would gather for a Christmas Eve party of activities like dancing to the Ethel Merman disco album. Things that had nothing to do with Christmas. They called the event “What Jews Do On Christmas Eve.” But the Christians have won some inroads here, and I see them at Christmas parties all of the time now, having embraced the idea, eating pork, yet not stressing out over buying gifts because they’re still Jewish, and Christmas isn’t their holiday.

Dec. 27. The lead story in The New York Times Sunday Styles ends the debate on how badly we’ve dumbed down: Lady Gaga is the year’s “enduring style phenomena.” Indeed. And the Black Death of 1348 was that year’s persistent medical puzzle.

Jan. 3, 2010. Rushing to the defense of Twittering, The New York Times reports in “Why Twitter Will Endure” that a report last summer in Time magazine claimed the instant communication trend was “looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.” Indeed, both services move vast quantities of waste.

Jan. 6. It was a bad omen last winter when, one evening while walking the dog, I came upon Santa Claus’ head in a snow bank.

Jan. 17. In The New York Times Travel section, Graham Bowley writes of his journey to the Himalaya’s K2, second-tallest mountain in the world, and probably the most dangerous. “Parts of some of the bodies were visible, and occasionally I glimpsed a piece of ripped climbing suit or an old boot, or smelled something sickly on the air.” I guess that’s one advantage that Disneyworld has as a vacation spot: They don’t have to leave the bodies where they fall.

Jan. 24. “Can chess be erotic?” The New York Times chess column muses. I always thought it depended on who was playing, and what they are wearing. But a new film just released in France and Germany, Joueuse, explores that very question, as a woman tries to use the game to fire up her romantically disinterested husband. Meanwhile, a top female chess player and her husband are writing a book, Chess Kamasutra, in which they will be, she says, “reviewing the most interesting openings and middle-game positions and relating them to positions from the Kama Sutra.” I have never been so happy that Bobby Fischer is dead.

Feb. 5. On my way out the door, I glanced through the now-depleted $1 book sale table. Among the clutter was L. Sprague De Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography. The flyleaf describes how Lovecraft – a man of “weird upbringing” whose parents both died insane - ”worked his nightmares and neuroses into the stories that became a legend after his death.” Indeed, he never had a book of his horror stories published until after he died. Yeah, I’d have a beer with Lovecraft. Now owning such a book reminds me of a passage I once read by Paul Theroux. While riding a train, Theroux told of reading a book with LOVECRAFT on the cover, and wondering if his fellow passengers thought he was reading a sex manual.

Feb. 7. I knew this was going to happen: Karaoke has been shown to be deadly to your health, particularly in the Philippines, where murderous brawls have erupted during performances, particularly versions of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” It’s been estimated the pop hit has led to to perhaps a half a dozen deadly hits on karaoke crooners in the past decade. Theories include the song is difficult to sing, driving listeners to take revenge on the tuneless victim, or perhaps the defiant words are accepted as a challenge by others in the room; It’s estimated there are one million illegal guns in the Philippines. The violence is not limited to that country, or to Sinatra. In Thailand, a man killed eight of his neighbors after they karaoked John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Feb. 12. What is it with this phrase,”Still workin’ on that?” It’s as omnipresent as your waitperson complimenting you with “Excellent choice!” after everything you order, as if she admires you. You’re the most discerning and erudite gourmand to walk in the door that night. I can live with that. But, “Still workin’ on that?” really roiles me. It makes it sound like, instead of enjoying a great meal, you’re digging a post hole.

Feb. 19. Small, ineffective dogs?  I blame the English. Particularly Londoners. They’ve spent centuries down-breeding their pets into manageable, rodent-like stature, so that they produce tiny, tiny turds that can easily be kicked into the gutter.

Feb. 20. The Pentagon and Halliburton would rather you not see what they’re up to. They’d prefer you think that foreign terrorists are driven by blind hate for our culture, as though they’re not dancing to Madonna in their own discotheques. Which they are.

Feb. 21. In The New York Times Sunday Styles section, we learn that one of the most-resilient of fashions is preparing for yet another surge: battle gear. “You can’t really improve on a field jacket,” says designer Marcus Wainwright. “It’s a silhouette that’s going to be cool forever.” No word yet on the always-possible return to the dance floors of World War II era German coal-scuttle style helmets.

Feb. 26. The cedar trees in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, and the stone saints with their upraised arms, are draped in robes of snow. A man leans on his shovel at the end of his driveway, looking pooped, while holding his black-and-white spaniel on a red leash.

March 4. Faith can be a wonderful motivator, in the church, or within organizations that do important social work. But ours is a society that has moved forward through science. Science has made life better for everyone on the planet. We’re still shaking off the ill effects of an anti-science president, George Bush, whose administration actually ordered changes in government scientific findings in order to suit its political agenda.

April 4. Ricky Martin has announced on his web site that he’s gay. More surprising, that anyone’s even looking at his web site these days.

April 14. Thoughts turned to the surge in self-styled militia groups. Oddballs like Hutaree, the folks busted last week in Michigan after their plot to kill cops was uncovered…. These people are unable to cope with civilization, so they’ve embraced tribalism. They are a maze of contradictions. Some are on disability, the city probably collects their garbage, they likely send their kids to public schools, yet they claim to fear socialism. Their culture isn’t music and art, but DVDs raising ridiculous conspiracy theories about government involvement in 9/11.  ”If it weren’t for the state police,” my friend Dick said, “ those guys would be conducting raids on the village down the street.”

April 15. I have a friend who says the Internet has destroyed the art of joke telling. Two lines into a joke, and someone interrupts to tell you that they read that one last week in their office e-mail.  Bar arguments used to go on for hours: Who was Bewitched’s first Darrin, Dick York or Dick Sargent? Now someone pulls out a Blackberry, and instantly has the answer: Dick York.

April 18. In Southeast Asia, the dung of civits – a nocturnal, cat-like animal – is gathered from the hills in an exotic harvest: coffee cherry seeds, fermented in the animal’s stomach acid and enzymes, produces (The New York Times writes with first-person authority) “a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.” And, as is always the case with foods of curious origin, you must wonder, “Who was the first person to decide that beans extruded from a varmint’s digestive tract would make a tasty cup of coffee?”

April 25. Ali Hassain Sibat is sitting in a Saudi Arabian prison, awaiting execution by having his head chopped off by a man wielding a huge, curved sword. He has been convicted of sorcery, as host of a Lebanese call-in TV show which featured him “manipulating spirits, predicting the future, concocting potions and conjuring spells,” The New York Times writes. “It was, in effect, a Middle Eastern psychic hotline.” If so, why didn’t he see this coming?

April 28. Our radio transmissions are slowly spreading through the cosmos. The sensitive equipment on the monstrous alien ships may be picking them up as you read this. Imagine what they’re seeing and hearing. The Three Stooges. American Idol. Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. Old Washington Senators baseball games. The Hindenburg disaster.  F Troop and Hogan’s Heroes. Congress on C-SPAN and Space Ghost cartoons. Our future masters should find Orson Wells’ 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds encouraging enough. We are a culture of incompetence, filled with fearful and conniving souls, and likely candidates for elimination. I’m afraid there are not enough episodes of Masterpiece Theatre out there to save our asses.

May 5. I see where Stephen Hawking (Hailed in an April 28 post by The Critical Mass as “an astrophysicist so brilliant I can’t understand how he puts up with the rest of us”) says that time travel may be possible.  I’ve known it for a decade. My garage is a time machine. I was just in there yesterday, and found a 1985 Mazda RX-7, a two-year-old bag of charcoal, a horse’s skull, an Obama-Biden lawn sign (I’m saving that for 2012), a cool-looking tree stump, a garden hose that I might patch one day and, nailed to the wall, license plates from every car I’ve owned.

May 12. Last weekend, I spent a few hours in one of our chain bookstores, a supermarket of publications that are as bright and shiny as the waxed cucumbers in your grocer’s vegetable section. Browsing the  highbrow section, just a few degrees of separation from the bodybuilding mags, I sat with a handful of these things, surprised at how inaccessible the fiction can be. Too dry. Where’s the humor? Where are the interesting characters? Where are the great ideas, the satire, the hypocrisies laid bare? Is your navel really that interesting? I won’t name names. OK, here’s one name: The Objective Standard, supposedly inspired by the philosophies of Ayn Rand. The cover should come with a fine layer of dust. If you’re going to publish a magazine with its main themes established by a famous writer, try the Marquis de Sade.

May 22. A friend told me last night that she had a dream… not about me, but about my dad. An 80-year-old man she’s never met. He looked like the comedian George Gobel (which means it actually might have been my Uncle Bill), with the old-man brush cut, and was insisting that my name isn’t Jeff, or Jeffrey. It’s Jefferson. He named me after George Jefferson, “The funniest negro on television ever.”

May 23. Dead, finally, is David E. Durston, director of the movie cult classic I Drink Your Blood. The 1971 film was about a Satanic hippie cult that terrorizes a small town; when a local boy attempts to stop them by baking the blood of a rabid dog into meat pies, and giving them to the hippies, they become rabid zombies. “In the course of the film, nearly every human appendage that can be severed is, on camera,” The New York Times writes. Durston, 88, died when his head was cut off by a utilities employee whose rage was triggered by Durston’s gas meter reading of 666. No, wait, I’m wrong… it actually says here that Durston died of complications from pneumonia. Don’t know where I got that other idea.

May 25. A handful of scientists have just left my house, having concluded a battery of tests on me that included asking me to sort colored objects, examining my hair follicles under a powerful microscope and drilling deep into my cranium. I don’t know why that one squirrely fellow kept insisting he had to measure my penis, but I guess it is science. All of this, because I somehow managed to go seven years without having watched one minute of Lost. There is no explanation, they muttered.

June 6. John Wooden, the basketball coaching legend of UCLA, died Friday at age 99. In a nearly full-page tribute, The New York Times recalls what was written on a piece of paper that Wooden always kept with him, advice from his father: “Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

June 9. Wednesday morning, I’m browsing through the tables of Barnes & Nobles’ recommended summer reading – Catch-22, In Cold Blood, been there, done all of that – when some guy comes up to me. He wears the badges of homelessness. Unshaven, rumpled clothes, long hair, unfocused eyes. But so do I. I figure I’m about to be hit up for some money. My hand starts creeping toward my wallet. “We might as well have a joke,” the guy says. “People go to school for a free education. But they don’t want free things. Unless they can eat it or drive it.” “Oh,” I said. He walked away. I left my wallet in my pocket. I guess that philosophy, or whatever, was on the house.

June 23. According to a new poll, 41 percent of Americans believe the Second Coming of Jesus will occur within the next 40 years. I find this fascinating. Forty-one percent of you! Can I ask: How do you know this?

June 27. GPS companies have determined that drivers prefer to get their automated instructions from a woman’s voice. Garmin, a leading GPS manufacturer, has voices named American Jill, Deutsch Yannick, Espanol Paula and Norsk Nora.  I am still awaiting confirmation of the story I once heard that one GPS company was planning to use the voice of Bob Dylan. “Turn right on Desolation Boulevard!”

July 13. Harvey Pekar, who died on Monday morning, was the cartoonist responsible  for American Splendor, a grumpy exploration of his life. Maybe cartoonist isn’t the right word, as he didn’t actually draw the strips. He wrote them, based on incidents in his life, and other artists brought the words to life, most notably R. Crumb, who Pekar first met through their mutual love of old records. Pekar’s words rang true. They sound like my parents, and aunts and uncles, and grandmothers and grandfathers, and cranky neighbors. People railing against the small, criminal injustices that plagued their tired, battered lives, lived out in the decaying, Rustbelt city.

July 20. My bus – the No. 1, a straight shot from my house to the office downtown – is usually standing-room only. We are a public transit sausage. Every seat is taken and the aisle is packed with people pressed right against each other, a package under one arm, the other arm clinging to a strap or chrome bar, in an effort to negate the G forces generated by the driver being forced to slam on the brakes when a fellow citizen desires a sliver of open asphalt in the next lane over and cuts us off. Sometimes the air conditioning on the bus is even working. Once in a while, you’ll sit next to some guy jabbering to himself about how he personally named all of the planets in the solar system after people who have pissed him off over the years. One day, the teenager next to me suddenly announced, as we were pulling up to a bus stop, “Throwing up!” He leaped to his feet, blew a few chunks in the aisle, stumbled out the side door and continued retching on the sidewalk.

Aug. 8. I generally don’t remember my dreams; but last night, John Mellencamp came to stay at our house while he recorded his new album. He was kind of a talkative guy, and while we were sitting around the dining room table, listening to music, I was trying to remember if I had any of his albums around the house to play. I asked him what he wanted for breakfast the next morning and he said, “Just a couple of Cokes.”

Aug. 15. The New York Times Sunday Business opens with a spectacular photo of a landscape ruined by the mining practice called “mountaintop removal.”In that state,  Coal River Mountain is about to be destroyed, never to be replaced, in the hunt for fossil fuels, and opponents want to replace that project with a wind farm. But the mountain is privately owned, and its demise appears inevitable. Which raises an interesting question for me: Just because you “own” something, like a mountain or the rights to mine a vast reservoir of oil beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, does that give you the right to take actions that will change that part of the planet forever? Particularly in a demonstrably provable negative way?

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Posted in Life During Wartime |

The Critical Mass

Aug 18th, 2010 by Jeff

Racism is not “Some special interest group”

Dr. Laura Schlessinger has self-immolated. She says after 30 years she’s shutting down her syndicated advice radio show after apologizing for using what we in the media politely call “The N-Word” 11 times during a broadcast last week.

I’d never listened to Schlessinger, although I know she’s important to some people. But the Internet has made her comments readily acccessible, so I checked them out: While speaking to a black woman in an inter-racial marriage, and who was seeking advice on how to handle her husband’s friends who make racial comments, Schlessinger called the woman “too sensitive.” Then she does indeed go on to use the “N-Word” 11 times.

I recognize this woman, Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I’ve encountered the same kind of arrogant, self-inflated cartoon who excuse the history of racism in this country, and fails to understand how prevalent racism remains, allowing it to thrive even today. Schlessinger’s advice should have been that the woman’s husband must evict his redneck friends from their home. Instead, Schlessinger excuses it because black men use the word all of the time. As if Dr. Laura Schlessinger takes advice from black men on a regular basis. Something tells me her collection of hip-hop records is pretty slim.

She apologized, of course, in the hope of saving her radio show. But General Motors and Motel 6 quickly dropped out as sponsers. Others would have most assuredly followed. So her show was doomed anyway. Larry King, always ready to lend an accomodating ear to the self-righteously stupid, allowed her to make the announcement of her show’s demise on his show. There, she added stupid on stupid. She backtracked on her apology, and ran straight into her comfort zone, the rising ride of intolerance in this country. “The reason is,” she said of her decision, “I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors.”

I’ll make two points, and then shut up.

1, Just as writing a check is a sponsor’s way of supporting her words, withdrawing financial support is a sponsor’s way of voicing disssent. Schlessinger is still free to exercise her First Amendment rights, and say what’ s on her mind and in her heart.

2, Racism is not “some special interest group.”

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Posted in Life During Wartime |

The Critical Mass

Aug 15th, 2010 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Aug. 15

The coffee this morning comes from an island off  Sumatra. “You get a geography lesson with every cup,” said my coffee guy, Java Joe, as he filled my usual order for a pound of whatever beans he was roasting that day, and pulled a globe from the shelf to point to the spot, north of Australia.

1, “Is Weather  Chaos Linked to Warming? Probably,” reads one of the lead stories on a very lead-story morning. Citing heat waves and floods, The Times quotes Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the National Climatic  Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “The climate is changing. Extreme events are occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity.”

2, The U.S. war on terrorism is far more covert under Obama than Bush. In a long,  exhaustively considered piece, the administration is backing away from Bush’s grand and costly adventures – the hammer approach – in favor of what it calls  “surgical” response.  A shadow war. “For its part,” The Times writes, “the Pentagon is becoming more like the CIA.” Civilian casualties are on the rise, as is a reliance on allies with sketchy motives. Evidence exists, as well, that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda are using these actions as recruiting tools, just as they used Bush’s invasions, and Guantanamo. “And, as American counter-terrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military,” The Times writes, “private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States had outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.”

3, Japan, which has long been home to many of the world’s  oldest people, is now checking on whether those folks are actually alive, after the body of  a man who was once listed as one of its oldest citizens, at 111 years old, was found mummified in his bed. Police said his 81-year-old daughter hid the death in order to collect his pension. Other cases are emerging, with differing motives. “Living until 150 years old is impossible in the natural world,” said the director of an elderly services office in Japan. “But it is not impossible in the world of Japanese public administration.”

4, “Despite Flurry of Achievement, No Reveling for Democrats” is the headline on a story in which Senator Christopher Dodd muses that “Democrats don’t know how to celebrate.” Unwilling to put up their own “Mission Accomplished” banner, Democrats have nevertheless instituted a historic amount of legislation, The Times writes, in the first two years of Obama’s term: “the $787 billion stimulus package, an anti-age discrimination law, long-sought tobacco regulation, expanded community service, credit card consumer protection, the landmark health care law, Pentagon contracting changes, Wall Street regulation, tax cuts, credits and more.” According to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Obama “said what he was going to do, and he did it.” Even Republicans, The Times writes,  “grudgingly concede that Democrats compiled a record perhaps unrivaled since the Great Society programs of President Lydon B. Johnson,” or perhaps FDR’s New Deal. Yet, no one seems to have noticed. Republicans are controlling the narrative through a media driven by reporting conflict. And today’s chatter is all about: Anchor babies.

5, Sunday Business opens with a spectacular photo of a landscape ruined by the mining practice called “mountaintop removal.”In that state,  Coal River Mountain is about to be destroyed, never to be replaced, in the hunt for fossil fuels, and opponents want to replace that project with a wind farm. But the mountain is privately owned, and its demise appears inevitable. Which raises an interesting question for me: Just because you “own” something, like a mountain or the rights to mine a vast reservoir of oil beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, does that give you the right to take actions that will change that part of the planet forever? Particularly in a demonstrably provable negative way?

6, A study shows that 80  percent of illegal-immigrant mothers in this country were here for more than a year before they had their child, which The Times calls “a statistic that seemed at odds with a recent assertion by Senator Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina, that many illegal immigrants ‘come here to drop a child’ and immediately leave.”  Perhaps Senator Graham should focus less on his concern about “anchor babies” as a gateway to Mexicans gaining U.S. citizenship through their newborns (which isn’t nearly as easy as Graham and his cohorts would have you believe), and dwell more on the dangers presented by children whose procreation was inspired by the romantic life of parents living on the run as illegal aliens.

7, Columnist Frank Rich lauds  “Angels  in America” who worked against the spread of AIDS in the 1980s, a legacy that may now be pushing out the last vestiges of discrimination against gay people with the overturning of California’s Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage. He pauses for a moment on assertions that  the ruling judge in the issue may be gay. “By this standard,” Rich writes, “the only qualified judge to rule on marital rights would be a eunuch.” Warning that gay rights is not a done deal, Rich also points out that, “Even if it were, that would be scant consolation to the latest minority groups to enter the pantheon of American scapegoats, Hispanic immigrants and Muslims.”

8, In the magazine, Martha Woodruff takes a moment to seek out the West Virginia filling station where Hank Williams was discovered dead in the back seat of his car in 1957. It’’s gone. His music is not. As she writes, “Hank Williams did not write songs for hillbillies; he wrote songs for anybody interested in facing life with a modicum of openness and honesty.”

9, The book shelves are roaring with alternative histories. I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States, which opens with an excruciating indictment of Christopher Columbus as a slavery-driven exploiter of the New World. The fact that Columbus’ reputation is flayed by his own written words, Zinn points out, shows how historians often overlook troubling facts when casting judgment in favor of a greater good. Even when genocide is involved. In today’s Book Review, Johann Hari, a columnist for London’s The Independent newspaper, examines Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made. Hari opens with his own anecdote: “George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire.” The portrait of Church that emerges – through Churchill’s own words, mind you – is one of a genocidal, racist empire builder who as a young man who took part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples.”  He’s clearly for exterminating any non-whites who get in Britain’s way. Yet Richard Toye’s new biography also notes that, in dealing with Hitler, Hari writes, Churchill “may have been a thug, but knew a greater thug when he saw one.”  Churchill wrote beautifully of freedom – a basic human right that he extended only to the white race. But now the grandson of a man that Churchill’s regime once imprisoned is the most-powerful man in the world. And while Churchill once wrote, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” the emerging India superpower  is racing beyond its old colony master even as, Hari writes, “Britain’s imperial conquests use his own hope-songs of freedom against him.”

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Posted in Books, Life During Wartime, Music, Politics, Science |

The Critical Mass

Aug 11th, 2010 by Jeff

More decline of Western Civilization

John Mayer, the noted pop singer (”Your Body is a Wonderland”) and race-relations expert (”My dick is sort of like a white supremicist”) dedicated his entire show Tuesday night  to the Jet Blue flight attendant, Steven Slater, who wigged out after his flight had arrived Sunday at Kennedy Airport. Slater was reportedly hit on the head by an overhead bin door being slammed by a rude pasenger who had been cursing him. When she didn’t apologize, Slater grabbed the in-flight microphone, called her the “fucking asshole who told me to fuck off,” informed the rivited crowd that “I’ve had it, that’s it,” grabbed a beer, opened the jet’s side door and jumped down the emergency slide.

And a folk hero was born. “If you’re gonna go out,” Mayer said, “go out like that.”

Well, we’ve all had that fantasy, haven’t we?

This morning, I got a look at the surveilance video of the Toledo woman who pulled up to a fast-food window and ordered some Chicken McNuggets. When told that breakfast was being served at the time, and McNuggets were not available, the woman went Visigoth, punching employees through the open drive-through window. It took three of them to shut the window, at which point she ducked into her car, pulled out a bottle, threw it through the window, and drove off.   According to police who arrested her on felony vandalism charges, she was drunk.

She is not a folk hero.

I guess the lesson here is, if you’re going to lose your cool, pick your spot wisely and your lawyer fees will be taken care of by an understanding public. Airlines and rude people are socially acceptable reasons for anger. But a drunken, violent passion for Chicken McNuggets? Except, this isn’t the first time we’ve had this kind of thing. A Florida woman was arrested after she called 911 three times to complain that a McDonald’s was out of McNuggets. “This is an emergency,” she allegedly said. “If I would have known they didn’t have McNuggets, I wouldn’t have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don’t want one.”

The decline of Western Civilization continues.

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The Critical Mass

Aug 8th, 2010 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Aug. 8

I generally don’t remember my dreams; but last night, John Mellencamp came to stay at our house while he recorded his new album. He was kind of a talkative guy, and while we were sitting around the dining room table, listening to music, I was trying to remember if I had any of his albums around the house to play. I asked him what he wanted for breakfast the next morning and he said, “Just a couple of Cokes.”

1, Reacting to the over-reaction to the building of a mosque a few blocks from the site of the Twin Towers,  The Times writes, “In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates  have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for marches and planning board meetings.” Citing other areas where Tea Party groups and Christian ministers have lead similar protests, The Times notes that communities once questioned the effect such buildings would have on local traffic, parking and noise. “But now the gloves are off,” as “opponents have said their problem is Islam itself.” The fear mongers are turning American into a land of intolerance.

2, Hate is running hot. Ten aid workers were executed in Afghanistan by the Taliban. “They appear to have abandoned previous taboos on using woman and children as suicide bombers,” The Times writes, “and now have dealt a blow to the longstanding custom of giving safe passage to aid workers, who have often been free to work in both government and insurgent dominated areas.”

3, Ignoring similar trips taken by Laura Bush during her husband’s reign, critics are attacking Michelle Obama for taking her younger daughter and a few friends to Spain, a trip that the Obama family is largely paying for.  The Spaniards, however, are ecstatic, The Times writes, with “one study claiming the publicity from her visit would be worth $1 billion for a country where tourism is at its lowest level in seven years.”

4, In a story headlined “Leading the Way into Deep Water,” The Times explores how the now-disbanded Minerals Management Service abandoned its mission as the public watchdog over activities such as offshore oil drilling in a corrupt pact with energy industries. In Louisiana, “oil saturated the state’s culture long before it covered its marshes. Oil is equally prized as a source of jobs and tax revenue.” The MMS’ long history of mismanagement of its duties may have helped make an accident such as the gulf oil spill inevitable, but that doesn’t stop folks such as Louisiana governor Ding-Dong Bobby Jindal from telling 10,000 people at a pro-deep water drilling rally to “defend our way of life.”

5, Fritz Teufel, ” West Germany’s answer to Abbie Hoffman,” has died at age 67. While leading a protest of the Shah of Iran’s visit to West Germany in 1967, he compared the event to “low comedy,” and said “the public is justified in throwing eggs and tomatoes if the performance does not satisfy them.”  Teufel was also the mastermind behind a foiled attempt at throwing bags of yogurt, flour and pudding at Vice President Hubert Humphrey to West Germany. The “Pudding Assassination,” as it was dubbed, was typical of Teufel’s Woodstock-era frame of mind. “We were young, carefree and inexperienced,” he said in an interview before his death from Parkinson’s. “In 1967 and 1968, confidence and cheerfulness prevailed, and an unbelievable sense that a new beginning was under way.”

6, Photojournalist Lee Lockwood has also died, at age 78. He was known for being allowed access into communist regimes such as Castro’s Cuba. In 1967, he took a famous photo of an American prisoner of war, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton, in prison pajamas, bowing before his North Vietnamese captors. Stratton gave a long confession condemning the U.S. bombing on the country, and Lockwood’s description of the empty-eyed Stratton as “like a puppet” led the State Department to accuse North Vietnam of brainwashing POWs. Years later, Stratton said it wasn’t brainwashing. “You are being tortured,” he said, “all all you have to do to get them to stop is say the same thing that Bobby Kennedy is saying.”

7, In The Week in Review, even free-market advocates are admitting that, in a country offering few job opportunities for its 14.5 million unemployed, government may indeed be the answer. “We think the coma will last for years unless government policy changes to re-stimulate the private sector and bring unemployment down,” says Bill Gross, one such free marketeer who runs the world’s largest bond fund, Pimco. “In the new normal world, there are structural problems, which require structural solutions.”

8, In an editorial, The Times wonders why Democrats have been so timid in celebrating their accomplishments, with the mid-term elections just 90 days away. The Times points to legislative successes in health care, insurance, financial regulation, three million jobs preserved or created and communities benefiting from stimulus projects. “As the economy recovers,” The Times writes, “there will be money available for sane and careful deficit reduction, territory the Democrats know far better than their opponents.” Indeed, does everyone remember what happened to the national debt under Bush? The Times quotes recent remarks on the Republicans by Obama: “It’s not like they’ve engaged in some heavy reflection. They have not come up with a single solitary new idea to address the challenges of the American people…. they’re betting on amnesia.”

9, Uh, oh, two pages later, columnist Frank Rich writes, “Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not losing, wager in America.”  A handful of evidence, such as anti-health care reform protesters evidently forgetting that Medicare is a government program, and the millions of Americans who still apparently believe Obama was not born in America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is reason enough to worry that these issues are not being decided by any intellectual process.

1o, A bedbug panic is unfolding in America. “This Bedbug’s Life” offers exciting insight into these tiny critters. Writes May Berenbaum, the head of the entomology department at the University of Illinois: “They not only attack while we sleep, but they also inject anesthetics, so as to not awaken us, and anticoagulants, so that in every 10-minute feeding they can suck in two or three times their weight in clot-free blood.” Berenbaum also gives us a little bedbug porn: “Because the female bedbug has no genital opening, the male inseminates her by using his hardened, sharpened genitalia to punch a hole through her abdomen. With no elaborate courtship ritual, males in pursuit of a sexual congress often blunder into and puncture the bodies of other males, occasionally inflicting fatal wounds.” So in that last observation, perhaps there is something for proponents of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.

11, The re-awakening of interest in vinyl records is well said in a report on LP re-issues from the legendary Blue Note label in Arts & Leisure. “Yes, they’re available on compact disc, but the CDs lack the LP’s visual cool – the urbane photos and silk-screen lettering on the hand-pasted cardboard covers – and fall short of the first edition vinyl’s sonics: the vibrant horns, wood-thumping bass, head-snap drums and sizzling cymbals.” Interestingly, a couple of companies manufacturing these re-issues are doing them in 45 rmp, rather than the standard 33 1/3, because the turntable tracks the groove better at the higher speed, producing a better sound.

12, Brilliance has its limits. In the Book Review, we read that for ourselves in Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. Reviewer Blake Bailey writes “Two stoned white guys writing almost exclusively about dhyana and the like – and I can think of no better way to describe the long middle section of this book – are generally only interesting to each other.” Yeah, I’ve been to that cocktail party, too. Ginsberg aged with dignity, Kerouac went out in flames. One year before his death at age 47, he appeared on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., “bloated and drunk, knocking hippies and explaining the war in Asia as a Vietnamese plot ‘to get Jeeps into their country.’ ”

13, The Book Review also examines Mary Roach’s Packing For Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. We learn all about “spaceflight’s grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea – or, if containment fails, surviving a spacewalk with a helmet full of perilously acidic upchuck.” Reviewer M.G. Lord manages to make a case for this as compelling reading, along with Roach’s previous books: Stiff, exploring the science of death, and Bonk, exploring the science of sex. In the new book, we read that male astronauts get a pee unit that comes only in L, XL or XXL. What, no small? This, I assume, is what Roach really means by “Packing For Mars.”

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Posted in Books, Music, Politics, Science |

The Critical Mass

Aug 3rd, 2010 by Jeff

If the choice was high school reunion or holding my hand on a hot grill for a minute…

An e-mail arrived a few weeks ago. My 35th high school reunion is coming up. Nordonia High School, a suburb of Cleveland. I will not be attending; The folk singer Peter Case is playing at a friend’s house that night, and I’m choosing that event. In truth, if the choice was high school reunion or holding my hand on a hot grill for a minute, you’d be seeing me in the emergency room. This despite the fact that I’ve just scanned the list of people who received the same e-mail – it’s a very long list – and suffered no virulent flashbacks. People were nice; the ones I remembered, anyway. Like, one in  three.

A questionnaire arrived. I’ll fill it out while you watch, skipping the personal questions, just so they don’t think I’m dead:

Tell us about your children… And now tell us about your grandchildren…

I didn’t much like kids when I was one, time hasn’t altered that. No kids, no grand kids.

How about pets?

Now you’re talking. Abilene, my 2-year-old, 90-pound Weimaraner, is sleeping on the couch. Sometimes I catch her in the back yard, eating cat shit. Before that was Mosel, another Weimaraner. She lived to be 13, probably because she didn’t eat cat shit, is what I tell Abbie. Before that was Hormel, my college dog, a mix of Rhodesian Ridgeback and a white retriever. She lived to be 13, probably because she drank beer.

What have you been up to… the last 35 years?

Well, in 1979… Jesus, where do you begin? I’ve interviewed Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose, Oliver Stone, porno star Traci Lords, Johnny Cash, James Brown, Patti Smith, Peter Gabriel, most of the Allman Brothers Band, did a shot of whiskey with Bo Diddley. I’ve been in barbecue competitions, gotten in bar fights, consoled friends in bad times, watched a man drown in a swollen river, slept with my wife in a phone booth in the square of a small German town in the middle of a rainstorm.

Tell us about your hobbies and leisure activities.

My life revolves around building fires, mostly for grilling and smoking meat, but sometimes just to watch the embers late at night. I like a good cocktail, or five. I read Beat literature from the ’50s, and history books about what an asshole Christopher Columbus was.

What do you remember as your most memorable moment from high school?

Actually, it was the 10th-year reunion, and I stepped out into the parking lot for a moment. It was a beautiful night. A handful of ex-classmates were out there. One of them, whose name I shall not reveal, had a goofy grin and pupils the size of housefly heads. Heroin, I figured. “Life is beautiful,” he said.

Do you have a “most embarrassing” or maybe funniest moment…?

I think this was high school; maybe it was junior high. Either way, the now long-dead afternoon newspaper, The Cleveland Press, published a story declaring Nordonia as some kind of haven for student drug use. As I had gotten home before my parents, I hid the paper that day.

What was your favorite school lunch?

Mom’s bologna sandwiches. I haven’t had one in 35 years.

Who was your favorite teacher? Why?

Thirty-five years later, I now think I liked them all. They were normal people who had jobs and lives outside of the building, and were watching the clock just as fervently as I was. I now empathize with them.

What was your favorite song or saying when you were in high school?

I started listening to Bob Dylan when I was a sophomore. I still do. One of my favorite lines was always,”There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.” That’s from “All Along the Watchtower.”

What is the one thing about your life now you’d like your former classmates to know?

I have a web site, www.jeffspevak.com.

After high school I though I’d….

Have a beer.



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Posted in Cultural events |

The Critical Mass

Jul 25th, 2010 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: July 25

First music of the Day: The Flaming Lips’ re-interpretation of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, in its entirety.

1, Scholars who have analyzed the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts, now in its fifth year, say it is the most conservative in living memory. “If the Roberts court continues on the course suggested by the first five years,” The Times writes, “it is likely to allow a greater role for religion in public life, to permit more participation by unions and corporations in elections and to elaborate further on the scope of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Abortion rights are likely to be curtailed, as are affirmative action and protections for people accused of crimes.”

2, As the mid-term elections approach, the big issue is likely to be the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Democrats want to allow them to expire at the end of the year. Republicans will fight for them.

3, This super-heated summer has 2010 on track to overtake 2005 as the hottest year ever recorded on the planet. California refuses to go along with this trend. There, the average temperature is 2.4 degrees below normal.

4, In a column bearing the headline “We’re Gonna Be Sorry,” Thomas L. Friedman laments the decision on Thursday by Senate Democrats to drop the energy and climate bill. “We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gasses into Mother Nature’s operating system,” Friedman writes, “and take our chances that the results will be benign – even though the vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so.” Friedman also quotes an energy company CEO who suggests that developing new green energy technology will result in 50,000 new jobs. We need jobs in this country, right?  But the lies of fossil fuel companies have won the day. Money, and the business sense of the people who pursue it, exposes this lie, and Friedman ends his column with a letter to investors from hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for… what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and right-wing politicians and think tanks?”

5, By now, we all have heard how Shirley Sherrod, who worked for the USDA in Georgia, was scandalously slandered by a right-wing blogger, whose criminally altered video “proof” of her racism – despite his history of such deceptions – was accepted without question by everyone from Fox News to the White House. Columnist Frank Rich skewers the usual suspects in this awful episode, including the media, race flamethrowers such as Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, a Republican Party that refuses to acknowledge the racism of  its Tea Party subsidiary, and an administration that “capitulated to a mob.” But Rich does what so few people, even those who belatedly rushed to Sherrod’s defense, have failed to do. He tells her story in its entirety, including how her father was murdered when she was 17 and, despite the testimony of three witnesses to the killing, a white suspect was never indicted. And how she married a man, Charles Sherrod, “a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” Rich writes, “whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation, including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the civil rights movement.” Sherrod could have fled from any of these parts of the story, as so many members of the media and political figures did last week, But she stayed in Georgia, hoping to make a difference. And she did. It is clear that people like Sherrod are hope that we can believe in.

6, Columnist Maureen Dowd gets the Sherrod story right as well, including the painful conclusion that our first black president is so bending over backwards to show he’s not favoring black people that he’s actually failing us on healing the divide of race.  Despite the right-wing claims that Obama is all about advancing black agendas, Dowd notes that the president was “raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia,” while top adviser Valerie Jarrett “spent he early  years in Iran.” That’s the extent of the black presence in the inner offices of the White House. According to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the House delegate from Washington, D.C., “The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community.”

7, The final word on Sherrod in The Week in Review  comes from Van Jones, the Obama administration official who a year ago was hounded out of his job by the same conservative pack. Jones admits his guilt – he was quoted as saying Republicans are rednecks, although that hardly seems a firing offense in a world where conservatives feel free to call the president a racist. In retrospect, we see that Jones was a victim of the same “combination of speed chess and Mortal Kombat,” as he describes the political landscape today. “The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as our national immune system, zapping scandal mongers and quashing wild rumors,” he writes. “As a step toward further democratizing America, we shrunk those old gatekeepers – and ended up weakening democracy’s defenses. Rapidly developing communication technologies did the rest.”

8, Perhaps the assault on reality that we saw in last week’s Sherrod episode can all be blamed on Lady Gaga. In an Arts & Leisure profile of the world’s biggest female pop star, Jon Caramanica writes, “No one in recent pop memory has been a greater enemy to the authentic than Lady Gaga…. Lady Gaga has become successful by adhering to the belief that there’s no inner truth to be advertised, or salvaged: all one can do is invent anew.”

9, Sunday night’s new season of Mad Men, set in the advertising world of the early ’60s, has been highlighted in several Times stories in the past few weeks, including today in Frank Rich’s column and the magazine. The show’s attention to detail, both in sets, costumes and language, is the legend of TV bloggers.  “No show in American television history, it is safe to say, has ever put so much effort into maintaining historically appropriate ways of speaking – and no show has attracted so much scrutiny for its efforts,” The Times writes.

10, In a magazine story called “The End of Forgetting,” the subtitle tells all. “Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starting over, moving on.” I’m sure we all have sent an e-mail that we now regret, except for my friend Dick, who does not use e-mail. Perhaps we need a legal statute of limitations on personal materials, such as adolescent postings or embarrassing pictures taken at parties, it is suggested. Apparently some research is under way that would allow specific electronic data to self destruct after a designated period of time.

11, Two new histories of yoga, The Subtle Body and The Great Oom, describe how Americans have confused yoga’s mind-enhancing aspects with Marilyn Monroe’s legs and an improved sex life. “This conflation of yoga with the Kama Sutra – India’s most-important exports to the west prior to information technology,” reviewer Pankaj Mishra writes, “would have startled not only its Brahman practitioners in the Himalayas or along the Ganges but also the sages of Walden and Concord who first embraced Indian ideas of non-dualism, the indivisibility of  mind and matter, and the essential oneness of the universe.”

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The Critical Mass

Jul 24th, 2010 by Jeff

A magical mystery acid trip

The Flaming Lips, bathed in the red glow of their videos. Photo by Stan Merrell.

The Flaming Lips, bathed in the red glow of their videos. Photo by Stan Merrell.

In recent years, I’ve turned my back on mega-rock shows at overstuffed venues; the same re-packaged tricks, nothing new, even the best artists’ creativity stifled by the sheer logistics of bringing the ideas to stage. I’ve retreated to the intimacy of club shows, where the audience can connect with the performer.

And just as my cynicism has been reaching new levels, as you see from the pictures from our friend Stan Merrell, omnipresent documentarian of western New York culture, The Flaming Lips created some real magic

Wayne Coyne, Wizard of Odd. Photo by Stan Merrell.

Wayne Coyne, Wizard of Odd. Photo by Stan Merrell.

Friday night at Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center. The manic madman who fronts the Flames, Wayne Coyne, found a way to present a huge show, filled with videos, lasers, confetti, balloons, a guy in a bear costume – every trick you’ve ever seen at a rock show – and make it feel personal. Coyne is the first notable rock star I’ve ever seen who, minutes before he was to go onstage, actually conducted his own final microphone sound checks, puttering around the stage and looking in on the last-second preparations, to the delight of the audience. Then he took the microphone and explained to the crowd – probably 5,000 or 6,000 people – that he was going to open the show by climbing into a space ball and roll his way across the audience, so they’d better put down their beers.

It worked perfectly; after the band stepped through a huge video screen one at a time, which in sync with the image onscreen made it appear that a woman was giving birth to them, Coyne walked and rolled and crawled in his space ball more than halfway up the pavilion, across a sea of helping hands, then back down again. From that moment on – no, actually, from those personal little touches at the sound check – he and the crowd had a personal relationship.

As the night wore on, The Flaming Lips’ raging machine of psychedelic rock was like a Woodstock Pink Floyd. Great sheets of color unfolded across the arena, Coyne’s gigantic face peering from the video screen like an insane version of the Wizard of Oz. My newspaper review of the show called it a “magical mystery acid trip.” The usual burly security presence of rock shows was not much in evidence; I was struck by how many guys, particularly as the show drew to a close, jumped onstage and hugged Coyne. And he hugged them back.

Coyne and his giant laser hands. Photo by Stan Merrell.

Coyne and his giant laser hands. Photo by Stan Merrell.

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