Oh, my corazon!

Year of Ram --

2011-12-20T05:57:00.007-05:00

I think I might have written a book? I also wrote a song called "Let's Get Married for Tax Purposes" and furthermore I recorded an old song called "Who Needs You, Darling?" which I'm having trouble uploading but anyway you've probably heard it.

Happy Winter Solstice! Everything is great.

Half ventured is boldly won --

2011-07-02T00:34:00.006-04:00

July 1st being the 182nd day of the year, we are now halfway through the Year of Ram. I thought maybe this was a good time to take stock and, since I never talk to anyone because I’m a misanthropic hermit, give my friends an update on where I am in life. My blog automatically updates to Facebook, which I recently learned means that anyone at all ever reads it, which is different from both the past and my expectations. So, you know. Here are answers to some of the most obvious questions, starting with what I think is most important.

Q. Did you shave your pubic hair?
A. I did, I really did. I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. It wasn’t a big deal. I don’t think I’ll do it again.

Q. Why is it the Year of Ram, exactly?
A. Because I’m tired of knowing how things will turn out, viz. badly. Because at the beginning of this year, I achieved a number of things I wanted ten years ago, and that made me wonder if maybe I’m not as terrible as I thought. Because I wondered if maybe it’s possible to succeed in this terrible world.

Q. Didn’t you once think you would die at twenty-seven?
A. I still might: September’s still a ways off, and no one can predict fate. But twenty-seven is a pretty rock and roll age to die, and there’s a lot more in my life now besides rock and roll.

Q. For example?
A. Prose, poetry, languages, travel, symbolism, education, knowledge, the Lord.

Q. Weren’t all those things in your life before?
A. Yes, intensely; but to be an artist, you have to be inside of your art all the time. For a period of my life, everything I knew or thought or did came to me through music as light moves through the luminiferous ether.

Q. So have you written any songs recently?
A. I have, I really have. I wrote two in the last month. They are called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cockroach” and “Bat House.” I think they’re okay. (N.B., if you’re reading this on Facebook I think that means you won’t see those as links. I recommend visiting http://lovesolveseverything.blogspot.com/2011/07/half-ventured-is-boldly-won.html if you want to hear a couple of songs about animals.)

Q. What about that book? Weren’t you writing a book?
A. I was. I still am. I expect to finish it and revise it a few times during the course of the Year of Ram. If you told me when I started that you wanted to read it, and I haven’t sent you anything, it’s probably only because I want to wait a minute and send you everything together.

Q. What are you going to do when you’re done? Are you going to just sit on it and move on with your life like you did with your last two novels?
A. I am not going to do that. I am going to make some effort to get it published. If you or anyone you know can help with that and thinks twelve thousand-odd rhymed lines of iambic pentameter about a fat Indian Jesuit looking for a huge bird sounds like a good time, please let me know.

Q. So do you want to be a writer, then?
A. Rephrase the question.

Q. What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. No, I still don’t like that. It makes certain assumptions that I don’t agree with.

Q. What do you want to be if you grow up?
A. I’ve gotten this question a lot, and the answer is always different. True answers I’ve given in the past include, but are not limited to: an astronaut, Chico Marx, wise, dead, naked, Childe Harold, smart, well-read, Diogenes the Cynic, a musician, Joseph Campbell, cool, a novelist, an itinerant preacher, a literature professor, a legend, a favorite uncle, a mystic, a hesychast, a hermit, a saint, a sage, an omphaloskeptic, an ascetic, a prophet, a rock and roll philosopher, a tzaddik in peltz, and a psychonaut.

Q. So what are you doing now?
A. I’m still teaching. I teach English, science, Western music, and drama.

Q. Where?
A. In a village called Anaikatti, outside of Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, India – the same state in which my parents were born. It’s a small village set among gorgeous rolling green hills. My best friends here are three mama cows, two baby cows, and a dog named Jimmy.

Q. Why are you there?
A. That’s a more complicated question than it appears to be, and I never have a good answer for it because the true answer is one that I don’t usually like to share with people. In a nutshell, it’s this: when I was young, the only course of life that appealed to me was that of a swami in orange robes. So I imagined that as soon as I was old enough to control my own destiny, I would go to India, find a guru, and spend the rest of my life based here.

Q. So you wanted to renounce the world?
A. Well, at the time, the only swamis I’d ever met were the ones associated with some organization, because otherwise it’s difficult to go to the United States. I didn’t really think about asceticism or anything like that; I was thinking about these people whose whole job is to travel around and educate people about religion, spirituality, and philosophy. It should be clear why that appealed to me.

Q. So why did you change your mind?
A. I only kind of changed my mind. But the real issue was that I went to college and started playing rock and roll, kissing girls, and reading Ulysses. And the rest, as Stephen Dedalus would say, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. But somehow I never lost the idea that there would come a point in my life, when I had finished all my journeys and adventures, when I would go to India and not leave again until I was enlightened, if then.

Q. So do you still want to renounce?
A. See, that’s where it gets complicated. The basic issue is this: on the one hand, I see every achievement possible in this world as a fleeting, ephemeral, and ultimately worthless confection of spun sugar, and all the pleasures of Earth seem shallow and pointless to me; on the other hand, everyone else seems to be having a pretty good time, so maybe I should just try more fun things. And then, on the third hand, I really like reading and writing and those kinds of intellectual or aesthetic enjoyments.

Q. So did you come to India only for spiritual reasons?
A. No, there was one other huge worldly reason as well, which is Tamil. I am now pretty well versed in a whole mess of different languages (of which some I can converse in, while some I can only read, but read decently well), but I have a lot of trouble with my mother tongue, which I spoke before I could speak English. This is a source of shame to me, and has been my whole life. I have always wanted to improve my Tamil enough that, if nothing else, I can read the works of my grandfather, who was a somewhat famous writer.

Q. How’s that going?
A. Briefly: not so well. After six months here – and, lest we forget, twenty-seven years of speaking and hearing the language before that – I still can’t open my mouth without the people around me complaining that my Tamil is so bad. Compare this to Japanese and Thai, of which I knew nothing before I arrived in those countries, and in which I could carry on a reasonable conversation after six months.

Q. Are you giving up?
A. Part of me wants to, but that’s not what the Year of Ram is about. It’s about persevering and getting shit done. It’s about Taking Care of Bidness. One thing that would help would be getting out of the village and going to a city, where I could find some kind of Tamil class or something. I spent a month in Madurai during the summer holidays, and my Tamil improved more in that one month than it did in the preceding four. And since I got back to school, I’ve lost all of those improvements in a matter of weeks.

Q. What other cool stuff have you done in India?
A. I visited the village where my grandfather the writer was born, and while there I talked to a bunch of people who knew and admired him and talked to me at length. I went to Delhi to participate in a puppet workshop. I visited the temple of my family god. I went to a few classical concerts and dance performances. I attended some lectures at the local ashram (all in Tamil, but I was able to follow). I saw a whole mess of historical temples and other sites. I joined in with local tribal dances. I made friends with some elephants and cows. I was bitten by a tremendous number of mosquitoes. I darkened pleasantly in the sun.

Q. How’s the food?
A. Everything I dreamed and more. When I was young, I ate South Indian food through a glass, darkly: imported frozen vegetables, close-but-not-quite spices, slightly altered snacks, and so on. My mother is a great cook, but she was working with different ingredients. Here I eat the food as it was always meant to be. There’s a garden in the school, and all my favorite vegetables that you can’t get in the States I can get straight off the tree or bush or vine here. One thing I miss is my mother’s rasam, because no one makes rasam like my mother does.

Q. How is your job?
A. It’s pretty great. The kids are a lot of fun, and we get an amazing amount of freedom to do what we want in class. The headmistress is a huge supporter of the arts, and anything creative we can do with the children is heartily encouraged. Which is obviously a big advantage for me.

Q. Are you going to stay?
A. I’m not sure. For one thing, there’s the need to go into the city I mentioned before. For another, the way that no one will accept me as Indian wears on me and makes me want to go to some country that isn’t America or India.

Q. Like where?
A. Somewhere with a language I like. Italy, Ireland, Taiwan, Greece, Indonesia, North Africa, and northern South America come to mind.

Q. If you went to those places, would you teach?
A. Secretly, I’ve kind of always hated teaching. (It’s a secret – don’t tell anyone.) I always assumed that it was because I wasn’t good at it yet, and that when I got better, I’d stop having this feeling of dread before every class and this sweeping relief at the moment when every lesson ends. Now I’m not so sure. I think maybe I have the same problem as the aforementioned Stephen Dedalus:
–I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.
–A learner rather, Stephen said.

Q. And here what will you learn more?
A. We will see. Possibly much, and possibly very little. I’m definitely finishing this school year. Next April, I’ll reevaluate the situation.

Q. What do you want?
A. Deep down, underneath all my desires, only two things: to be free, and to feel like I’m worthwhile.

Q. What do you believe?
A. I believe in the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth, and His only begotten son, Christ, Who is born in every soul in every moment but is seen only by those who have cleared their vision by means of love. I believe that there is no such thing as useless knowledge. I believe that most, if not all, problems can be solved by working with the way of things rather than against it. I believe that any act can only be completely effective when performed without attachment or desire. I believe that the universe is the way God looks when viewed through the prism of time, space, and causality. I believe that the world as we know it is the interference pattern caused by the intersection of matter/energy and consciousness. I believe that even the most profound mystical speculation can be known and proved or disproved. I believe that nothing is difficult when one truly understands oneself. I believe that I am destined for greatness, even if that does not include anyone recognizing my greatness. I believe that religion is mostly a load of shit, but that its symbolism and ritual can be useful to one who wants to know the Truth. I believe that the vast majority of activity of the vast majority of people is useless service to an arbitrary system of meaningless and artificial laws, and that to let myself be bound by that system would be paralyzing and soul-crushing. I believe that everything is sacred. I believe that the sum of human knowledge is close to nothing.

Q. So?
A. So I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: learning everything I can, refusing to do anything without what I consider a decent reason, and creating interesting and beautiful things. I’m never going to have what other people would call a career, because I’ll never be able to see the point. And I’ll never settle down, because settling down feels to me like a prison. All I know how to do is to keep being what I am. And, ultimately, that’s what I’ve learned in the first half of the Year of Ram: how to just kind of be what I am. It’s not easy, but I’m getting there.

On smoking them out of their holes --

2011-05-03T04:25:00.005-04:00

I'm well aware that no one gives a shit what I have to say. But it makes me feel better to say it. So, this is what I've been thinking about since last night:

First of all, the day I rejoice at the death of any living creature is the day I quit. Altogether. That would be the single easiest way to violate everything I believe in. Yes, Osama bin Laden was a bad guy who did bad things. But he had a mother, and he was once a little baby who just wanted to eat candy and watch "Davey & Goliath." I would not have liked being shot in the face upwards of two hundred times, and it seems unlikely to me that he did, either.

Once, when I was still living in the Shanty, I got up early to give a ride to some people my housemate didn't like. She said, "Why are you doing this? They aren't even nice to you." And I said, "Yes, but if I were in their position, I would want a ride. So I'm giving them a ride." She said, "It's not that simple." And I didn't want to argue, so I let it go. But what I wanted to say was, you're wrong. It is exactly that simple. It is that simple because I have decided, for me, that it will be. And I may not always live up to that ideal, but that doesn't make it stop being my ideal. And the fact is, that if I had killed thousands of people for vaguely-defined, mostly self-serving ideological reasons, I wouldn't want to be killed, and though this man was definitely what my father calls a "lower form of life," I can't help but empathize. If I don't, I'll feel like I'm betraying myself. I realize this isn't a particularly original sentiment, and it doesn't make me a particularly great individual; it's just what I have to do and think to get through the day and live with myself.

Second: I think it's important that all of us remember that we don't know how much this really changes. People have been talking about that question a lot in the Indian news, but I don't know how much it's coming up anywhere else. Had Osama bin Laden died much, much sooner after he (most likely) caused nineteen unhappy people to kill three thousand unhappy people, I think it would have been a much bigger symbolic victory. And it would almost definitely have prevented the whole mess of attacks in London, Madrid, Tunisia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and so on that followed in the wake of September 11th. This, to me, would have seemed like a good thing, although I would have had no way of knowing how many attacks had been prevented. But right now, when Al-Qaeda has been on the skids for five years, when the man has been doing nothing but avoiding this exact fate since Bush promised to "smoke him out of his hole," what has really been proven? Several Middle Eastern journalists have noted that the recent (partially) peaceful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia does more to contradict Osama's rhetoric of the need for militant Muslim uprisings to cause social change than his death. It seems like this will cause a lot of changes in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda did a lot to finance the Taliban, but the simple fact is that America has not won the War on Terror. Because there is no victory in the War on Terror. Because terrorism is caused by exactly the kind of short-sighted self-serving foreign policy that the War on Terror specifically exemplifies.

That's the kind of statement I always make, and it's the kind of statement people always get mad about. Which is a completely sensible reaction, because it's an infuriating statement. What it sounds like I'm essentially saying is, this bad thing that happened to you is your fault. And I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that terrorism is America's fault. If I kill thousands of innocent people by flying a plane into a tall building in a large metropolitan area, that is categorically my fault. I am a murderer. This is not complicated. But just because it's not America's fault doesn't mean it isn't America's responsibility. The fact is that the developed world, with the United States in the lead, has created a world to which terrorism seems, to a lot of people, to be a reasonable response. And no matter how many years the War on Terror continues, no matter how many high-profile brown people are killed in very public ways, that's not going to change until the Western world's fundamental approach to the developing world changes. I would argue that the One Laptop Per Child program has done more to combat terrorism than the death of Osama bin Laden (although let's face it, OLPC is kind of a failure in a lot of ways).

The fact is that I see a difference between ethics and necessity. Maybe I'm wrong and there isn't one, because it seems really obvious to me but I always have a hell of a time explaining the difference to other people. But it seems entirely plausible to me that a person might be placed in a position to have to do something that isn't right. Like killing. In war, killing someone may be necessary. But just because it's necessary doesn't make it less terrible. It was probably necessary to kill Osama bin Laden. I have no way of knowing; I live in a village in India where four of my seven closest friends are three cows and a dog. I was not in Abbottabad, but I believe the President when he says that it was necessary to kill this guy. But we should not be celebrating having done what was necessary. I don't celebrate every time I go to the bathroom (Aaron does, but I rarely consider him to be a good example for anyone). We should be mourning. Not because a dude who sucked a lot got iced, but because we live in a world where we had to ice a dude rather than bring him to justice. Because justice would have involved a trial, a condemnation, a public review of every crime the man has ever committed, possibly even the revelation of many we didn't know about. Justice, as Katie Holmes points out in Batman Begins, is not the same as revenge. See? Even Katie Holmes understands this, and she married Tom Cruise. On purpose.

I know that this is idealistic. I have been around. I was shot at in the demonstrations in Bangkok (unless you're my parents, in which case I wasn't really; please don't have a heart attack). I once got in a fight in a club in Japan because some white dude didn't like my Japanese. I understand that the world we live in is not one in which we can deal with all our problems by hugging them out. But here's my position on that: it fucking sucks.

So what are you going to do about it? What are you doing to make a world in which it does not seem reasonable to send a bunch of Navy SEALs into a military camp to shoot a kind of insane bearded guy in the face two hundred times?

Happy New Year --

2010-12-30T14:38:00.003-05:00

First of all, here's the only half-decent song I recorded in calendar year 2010. It was an okay year to be me, all things considered, but it wasn't a great year for music. Anyway, this song represents my vision for 2011. More or less.

I guess I should tell you what's up? I probably (but not definitely) got my Indian dual-citizenship. So I guess I'm going to fulfill my lifelong dream and move to India, finally. I may or may not have gotten a job at a school already. It's hard to say.

I feel bleak all the time, but this has been a particularly bleak year. But I've had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. I still don't have any particular interest in the joys of this world, but I know a lot of stuff, and I'd like to know a lot more stuff. I guess that's something. But Jesus H. Christ, it'd be pretty nice to do one goddamn thing without doing it wrong.

Hindus, who have been telling me things my whole life, always talk about concentrating on actions, and not the fruits of actions: doing things without worrying particularly about the outcome. Like a kid who is obsessed with marbles growing up and playing marbles with his granddaughter. He can still enjoy the game, but with age comes detachment, which means he can enjoy it without his entire sense of self-worth depending on whether or not he wins. For a very long time I have tried to develop that sense of play in life, the feeling of putting on a great performance without being fussed about the audience. I think slowly, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to understand what that really means.

Happy New Year.

பொங்கலோ பொங்கல் --

2010-01-14T09:14:00.002-05:00

Today was Pongal, one of the most important holidays in the Hindu calendar -- primarily the Tamil version. In Chennai right now they're having a three- or four-day extravaganza that will, by the time it's over, involve painting cows, burning old clothes, and eating pongal, the eponymous dish made from rice and sugar. (This, incidentally, is a move that I think white people should consider with regards to Thanksgiving. Just give up all the pretense and say, "Come over to my house! We've made enough thanksgiving for everybody!" "No, thanks. To be honest, I don't really like thanksgiving except on Thanksgiving.") I celebrated Pongal by saying some prayers to the Sun and the Ganges in the morning and evening, then eating a loaf of bread with some cheese and butter. I tried to watch a Tamil movie, but got frustrated at how little I understood and turned it off.

My cultural identity crisis is tautologically a first-world problem: it is a problem caused directly by my parents' move from the third world to the first. But while I know how good I've got it compared to so many in the world -- compared, let's be honest, to my father, who grew up penniless next to a crematorium -- I still can't help but feel crushed whenever a day like this comes up. I've been living away from the United States for a few years now -- an exile from my exile -- and I've seen how other Americans feel sad around Thanksgiving or Christmas. They miss the things they used to do with their families, the foods they used to eat, the thousand little traditions each family had and maintained as a way of showing each other that they were just that -- a family. I, meanwhile, have just gone through an entire day that means nothing to me outside of what I've read in books. We've never celebrated Pongal at my house, because it's always during the school year, most often on a school day. For me, the day was usually marked by my mother reminding me in the morning that it was, in fact, Pongal, and then mentioning at dinner what she and her family used to do when she was a child in India. That's what it's like to be born in exile: the motherland is always dreamlike, fantastical. India to me has always been a collection of anecdotes I've heard from my parents first and a real country that I've visited second. And to be in exile from the exile in which you were born, unlikely though it seems, is to make the alienation more palpable, more poignant because more prominent in your life. I find myself feeling nostalgia for things I have never experienced, wishing not that I were celebrating Pongal right now, but that I had done so when I was a child.

Every holiday on the calendar makes me feel like I'm not Indian enough. Every festival that dawns on my face looking puzzled, with no clue as to how I'm supposed to celebrate it, is another tiny casualty in the battle for culture -- mine, India's, the world's. Every time I hear a Tamil word I don't know, or encounter a Hindu religious tradition I'm not familiar with, I think of the Library of Alexandria: an incalculable loss for world culture, sure -- but imagine how minimal it would have been if those books had been in people's heads instead of on shelves. Until extraordinarily recently, the greater part of India's monumental body of literature, spanning centuries and showing a tremendous degree of sophistication and beauty, existed primarily in the memories of Indians. Priests memorized entire recensions of the Veda, thousands and tens of thousands of verses, and spread them solely by teaching them, face to face with students. The epics, the Itihasa and Purana, were transmitted by memory long before anyone thought to record them. There were a number of reasons for this: the Vedas, and possibly the epics, were composed long before the advent of a writing system, for Sanskrit or any other written language. Even after the Brahmi script and its descendants had become current, the tradition remained mostly oral in the name of -- well, of tradition. And certainly it's useful, in a debate or as a teacher of scripture, to have an entire body of literature at your beck and call whenever you want to support yourself with a quotation. But I can't help but wonder if the sages who composed the Vedas considered a situation like mine, that of an Indian born in America living in Thailand who wants nothing more right now than to perform the right rituals for the winter transit of the Sun. Imagine, if I had volumes and volumes of hymns and religious manuals stored in my brain, how much easier it would be for me to understand what it means to be an Indian who knows so little about India.

Or maybe it wouldn't. If I'd spent my whole childhood just learning the Vedas, I wouldn't know much about the Tanakh, the Gospels, the Qur'an, Ulysses. Or the Beatles. Or Star Wars. All of which have had as much effect on who I am now as being Indian has. But I constantly wonder what it would have been like to grow up just knowing all this stuff. Would I have been more comfortable and confident in my identity? Or would I just have found new ways to feel insecure and inadequate?

I read The Namesake on the plane back from India this time and thought: I'm twenty-six, and it's time. I've spent my whole life slowly drifting toward Chennai; now it's in my power to just decide I'm going there. I love this school here in Bangkok, but my contract is up in August. After that we'll see.

2009-03-01T22:45:00.003-05:00

Finally! --

I've been writing "Monica" for about three goddamn years. I'm so glad I did it. I have kind of a lot to say about it.

1. I didn't give it the full twenty-four-guitar treatment because I'm just trying to illustrate the basic idea. I'm trying to kind of show the dynamic contour. It starts out very quiet, just the acoustic guitar and the voice, and then the band comes in really light for the Cairo and Hong Kong part, and then the solo is loud and rock'n'roll, and then it goes quiet again for the "all the sailors" part. Only it's an intense quiet, a driving little buildup. And then it explodes again for the ending.

2. Speaking of the ending, I'm not sure what to do about it. I was thinking of "Be Mine" by REM, where it ends with playing the chorus without words over and over again. A fade would fit the meaning of the lyrics, but it doesn't feel right for the song somehow.

3. Sorry the "solo" sucks so much. But the idea I'm trying to get across is that when the outro chords come up in the solo, it kind of suggests the riff from the outro without actually being the riff from the outro. I'm not sure how to explain it, so I hope that makes sense. The ending is pretty much exactly like I want it to be, I think.

4. I'm not entirely happy with the lyrics to the verse about Cairo. I think the rest of the lyrics are pretty okay, though. I do feel like something's missing, but maybe it's just because I tried to fit too much story into one little rock song.

5. The stretch from the first "never going to love me" to the solo is all by Tyson. He also suggested a breakdown where it goes into four and rocks out. I'm starting to think that might have been better to make the crash into "the only thing that's left to me" more dramatic. I don't know, I kind of like the idea of the tempo never changing, though.

6. I want a rich vocal tapestry all over this. Like, using a combination of background "oooooo"s and harmonies with the lead vocal to help accentuate the dynamic changes. Especially in the actual "Monica" part, about the sailors and everything. I tried to record some harmonies there, to show what I meant, but I just could not figure them out, so I skipped it.

So, in summary, the key word is epic. I only kind of suggested it here, due to limited resources and even more limited talent, but I think you can pretty much see what I'm going for. Also, I'm sorry it became seven and a half minutes long. I don't know how that happened.

2009-03-01T02:29:00.003-05:00

Wait, don't go home --

As always, a bad recording of a possibly decent song. "Used-up Fagged-out Goodfornothing Blues" is a timely commentary on the current socioeconomic situation. Now, I'm not very good at playing the guitar, and I'm not very good at singing, and this song is demanding in both areas, but I promise you that I can do better than this; I just had some technical problems this time. Oh, and the parts where nothing is happening are where solos go.

2009-02-02T11:39:00.003-05:00

Same as the old boss --

I think a lot, and I have all these notebooks and no idea what to do with them, so I had this idea. I figured out that I can just kind of carry a little notebook around with me and write stuff that I thought of. So I'm going to start doing that, and then I'm also going to post anything I think is interesting up here. I don't think it's going to be structured or anything, like the sermons I was writing before I came to Japan. It's just going to be some ideas about things. Ideas and things being pretty much all there is. Just, you know, caveat lector -- they're not all going to be winners. So here's the first one:

I've had this idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while. The term I came up with is "teleological crisis," which isn't wholly accurate but does sound impressive as all hell. The idea came to me when I was thinking about CSI. Bear with me:

My last girlfriend really liked CSI. I can't figure out why, because as far as I can tell the show is complete shit. It's just stupid. And David Caruso is the most embarrassing thing you can look at. But, you know, there's no accounting for taste, and hers is already questionable because she was dating me at the time. Anyway. One of the seventy-two million currently-airing CSI shows, the first one I saw, uses "Won't Get Fooled Again" as its theme song. I remember thinking that was an odd choice. But then I learned, somehow, that the original show used "Who Are You" as its theme song. And that actually makes sense, because it's a song that's thematically appropriate for the show. So here's what happened, as closely as I can reconstruct it: they made the first show, with an appropriate theme song, but then suddenly were in danger of not making a shitload of money and had to quickly produce another show. So they had to pick a new theme song, and they picked another well-known song by the Who. Only this one had nothing whatsoever to do with a show about detectives; it just happened to be by the same band as the first theme song. Teleological crisis. The purpose of a custom or cultural artifact was partially (or wholly) misunderstood, and thus the custom was maintained improperly in a way that accomplished nothing.

Or, for example, the electoral college. As far as I know, the two reasons it was started were that the Founding Fathers didn't trust ordinary people to vote right, and to simplify counting votes in a time when ballots were literally just pieces of paper with names written on them that human beings had to read one by one. Obviously neither of those is quite so much of a concern now. But because the practice has ossified into tradition, it's extremely difficult to change. Most laypeople agree that the electoral college doesn't really do us any good, and everyone knows the outcome of the presidential election by the morning after election day -- the day the electoral college votes goes by almost unnoticed. And yet, we keep on doing things that way, on and on.

Neither of those really illustrates what I mean by crisis, though, because they're both kind of dead ends. I said "teleological crisis" because I was thinking of cases where it actually leads to a sea change into something rich and strange. Like the electric wires that are conveying these words to your computer screen. They were originally intended for telegraph signals, which were then replaced by telephones, which were then replaced by the internet. Only throughout all those changes, the basic infrastructure has stayed pretty much the same. The wires have gotten more sophisticated, better shielded, more reliable, and so on, but essentially the system remained a length of copper conducting electrical information between two increasingly complex devices on the ends of it. Then came the crisis, when it was realized that now that we were no longer dealing with actually moving a speaker or a telegraphity clickity thing anymore, so we no longer need actual electricity electricity. And now we have fiber-optic cables all over the globe.

This isn't a particularly productive idea. It doesn't provide us with anything new. It's just a model for thinking about certain moments and events in history, especially cultural and technological history. I guess in the right hands, it could also be a useful model for figuring out what we still need and what we can leave on the scrapheap of Time.

2009-01-09T10:03:00.004-05:00

Two posts, one week, no prisoners --

Okay, I said I wouldn't do this, but here's Canto 34 of Ziz. If you want to just read it, just read it. If you want to read me talking about it, see below.

This is the end of the first of three parts of the novel. As such, it's a kind of sub-climax. I think it's awesome, because it's all action all the time and that's something I never really do. There is a major plot event in there, or at least poor Bluto probably thinks it's major, but let's face it: you're not reading it because you're fascinated and want to know where it's going, you're reading it because you know the guy who wrote it. The reason I'm posting it here, instead of just quietly sending it to people like I said I would, is that I expect you to have the following conversation with your friends:

YOUR FRIEND: Dude, this guy you know is writing a book about a giant bird? In verse? What a d-bag.
YOU: Okay, first of all, no one talks like that in real life.
YOUR FRIEND: For true, bro. For true.
YOU: Second, read the thirty-forth chapter of his book.
YOUR FRIEND: Why's it called a canto?
YOU: Because Ram fucking thinks he's Dante Alighieri.
YOUR FRIEND: (reads) Oh, man! I totally get it now! This book is great! Secretly, I've been the head of a huge publishing house this whole time, and I would rather publish this book than have a million billion dollars. Do you know a way I could make that transaction happen?
YOU: (slyly and wittily, with a twinkle in your beautiful little eye) Actually, I think I do. I really think I do.

You see? Now I have a million billion dollars and your irritating fratty friend is publishing a book about a giant bird. Everybody wins.

2009-01-05T08:39:00.002-05:00

Happy birthday yesterday, Aziz --

I wanted to say a lot of stuff, but I'm exhausted, so I'll make this brief.

First of all, happy New Year.

Second, as promised, here are the first four canti of Ziz. Lanala requested it specifically, but that was after I'd already started writing it again while I was in Hokkaido. It took me six months, but I got around to it. I think I'm really going to do it. However, I don't think I'm going to keep posting it here, for a lot of reasons, the main one being that it's a pain. I will send it to you by e-mail like a serial if you'd like. Keeping in mind that it might be out of order, if that's how I find myself writing it. I'll send it to a few people that I already know will want it, like Tyson and Ilana and Aaron, so if you want it please let me know. The price, naturally, being that I will then want you to tell me everything you liked and didn't like about it. Please.

It's already 2009, somehow. All things conspire to make my happiness complete.

2008-07-09T23:21:00.003-04:00

Already somebody's baby --

Okay, so, here's the deal:

1. "Boy oh Boy" is a terrible recording of what might be a good song. I sang it so badly you have no idea. In my defense, my job is to talk all day, and that's terrible for your voice. It's about gay marriage. Moving on:

2. "The Man Who Bought the World" is actually by Tyson, but I added some guitars to it. I think it's fun. It's a great song.

3. "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin" is why you're here. I met this girl, and nothing is going to come of it, but I was talking to Tyson about it. And I said it's going to end badly. And he said sure, but you should give it a try anyway. And I went to work, and I thought about it, and I realized something I should have realized before, which is this: for the last six months, I've been trying to stop assuming everything would end in disaster, as I told you. But the thing is, everything is going to end in disaster. That's inevitable. I currently live on an island that, sometime in the next thirty years, is unquestionably going to be leveled by an earthquake and then erased by Mount Fuji (which is a semi-active volcano, as you may not have known). Everything is going to end badly, and there's nothing we can do about it. But the problem was my attitude. It's not my job to prevent disaster; my job is to make sure everything ends in the most interesting possible disaster. So fuck it. I don't feel as good about that as I'd like to, but I can accept it and work with it. And so I wrote this song about Langdon Warner, a man who couldn't prevent the US from dropping two atomic bombs on major urban areas, but could prevent them from dropping atomic bombs on Kyoto and Kamakura, two huge cultural centers of Japan. There's a lesson in that for all of us.

And with that, I'm signing off for a little while. Writing songs recently has become a tremendous effort, and I've found that songs that I write like that are always bad. So I'm going to take a break from songs so I can learn some Chinese and Japanese, travel a little, and write that book I've been talking about. And so I can pursue some kind of interesting disaster with that girl I mentioned.

Next time I write here, I'll have a couple chapters of Ziz for you.

2008-06-13T11:20:00.002-04:00

Even if we can't --

I wanted to wait and post this when I'd finished "Monica," but I don't know. I've been writing "Monica" since before I left the States, which, given that 2008 is a leap year, is 365 more days than I like to spend working on a song. So maybe it will appear later, and maybe it won't. We'll see.

"Ram's Birthday Present" was written in under 20 minutes as a joke (which was itself the punchline of a group joke), but I kind of like it, and as you know I can't make something without exhibiting it, so here it is. It's about These Fucking Guys, to whom you can hear me saying happy birthday at the end. Happy Birthday, These Fucking Guys.

"Kalikimaka" is how the word Christmas is transcribed into the Hawaiian language. This is because in Hawai'i, they don't have consonant clusters, sibilants, or the letter r. I saw in the extremity to which the Hawaiian people had to butcher this word in order to make it fit their mouths a metaphor for European culture's historical inability to tolerate any culture less European than their own and the toll it takes on native peoples. But I don't think I really pulled it off. I do sing extra-low, though, which I guess is cool.

2008-05-22T22:38:00.002-04:00

I Left My Band in Pittsburgh --

So, I have a couple of things:

First, here's "Those Who Can't," which is actually by Tyson. You can find the original here, but you'll see some differences. For example: one major difference is that Tyson's much better at playing guitar than I am. Another big one is that he's better at singing. I'm always jealous of how inevitable Tyson's melodies feel. Like, it's one thing to write a good melody, lots of people can do that, but Tyson's melodies always feel so right, which is something else altogether. Anyway. You don't care about all the technical stuff I did to this song, and it's only up here because I'm psychologically incapable of making something without sharing it.

Second, here's "Spring Sprang Sprung." This song has been rattling around my head for a while. I keep thinking it's really nice and then thinking it's not so great. I had been thinking it would be like one of those European-sounding songs with an accordion, but then it wasn't. Oh, plus I stole the melody on the "nobody has a thing to say" part (which is to say, the best melody in the song) from a song in one of my favorite movies. But what can you do.

I guess that's it for now.

2008-04-13T22:59:00.003-04:00

A Song by Ruben Quintero --

This song is actually by the Mountain Goats. I got a grown-up guitar yesterday, for a number of good reasons, so I was playing her and I thought it would be fun to record this song. One thing I should tell you is that I screwed up the guitar part the first time, and instead of doing another take I just recorded it a second time over the first time. I'm working on some new songs but they're not very good, so if I write any good ones you'll know.

2008-03-29T09:05:00.006-04:00

Und dein Vogel kann singen --

I recorded a song called "Noch Spinnt die Welt" but I guess there are some things I should say about it:

1. I didn't want to write it. I got this clever idea for a title, because "Noch Spinnt die Welt" is, as you can guess, "the world still spins." But besides the obvious meaning of "to spin" (albeit only in the transitive sense, like spinning wool), spinnen also means "to be crazy." Like, sie spinnt is a kind of casual way to say "she's nuts." I had wanted to use it as one of those titles that isn't really in the song, but gives you a new perspective on the lyrics. Then I thought I would make something like "So Long to the Holidays," where there are just a couple of lines. Then I had the bright idea of having the last time say "noch spinne ich," which would be a bunch of my favorite things at once: a twisted version of a common expression, a reveal that changes the meaning of the song, a punchline that's only funny because the setup took too long, self-deprecation, etc. And then, all of a sudden, as I was walking back to work from my lunch break, this whole song popped into my head.

2. The vocals, the vocals, the vocals. I don't know what to do. The lead part is pretty clear, I think -- it's the one starting on the F# (which is the third, if you don't have an instrument handy). I'm pretty sure I want roughly three voices in there. The problem is the one that starts on the fifth. I can't decide whether I want it high or low. Or maybe it starts low, and then it moves up, like in "If I Needed Someone"? Anyway, on this recording it's the lowest and highest parts. And those execrable ooooohs on the b-section of each verse ("Every moment I spend thinking of her . . .") are just there because that part sounded a little empty but I didn't want to have the two secondary parts just keep harmonizing with the lead in the same way. I don't know. In my head, it sounds pretty great. Which leads me to

3. I think this could be a good song, but having no instrumentation except an out-of-tune classical guitar banging out chords isn't doing it any favors. I hear a whole lot of moving parts. The bass is running all over the place, the guitars are playing moving lines, and maybe there's even a keyboard. It's kind of a '60s throwback, like a Byrds song or something, all jangly and filled with cool runs. I'm not too attached to the so-called "hook" that I play at the very beginning and the very end. Either there's no hook or there's a better one with a real melody, like in "Und Dein Vogel Kann Singen."

4. When I first went back to Bethesda after college, I wrote "Eine Kleine Morgenmusik" as a kind of neurosis status report. "Noch Spinnt die Welt" serves kind of the same purpose, only where "EKM" ends in resignation, this one ends hopefully. I guess that's a pretty clear statement on its own, but regardless: I cannot stop writing songs. I tried, I really did. And while I have no particular desire to go back to the States I decided a few entries down (and almost a year ago, in a different way) that when I figured out what I had to do, I would do it. So, one way or another: next stop, New York City.

5. I swear I will work on Ziz. Honest Injun. I've made up a bunch of the plot already, and I'm pretty clear on most of the major characters. I would have been working on it all this time if I hadn't kept coming up with songs. But I cannot tell you how much better I feel when I'm working on projects than when I'm not.

2008-03-24T22:13:00.003-04:00

Letter from the front --

I feel a little better. I also feel a little the same. But that's not why you're here. This is why you're here:

1. First up is a cover that I made last night. I was on my way home from hanging out at the aquarium in Tokyo with my friends last night, and since today's payday and I had some spare cash in my pocket, I stopped by the mall on the way home and bought a melodica. In putting it through its paces and learning what it could do, I recorded this song. The reason I chose this song is that I've been feeling strongly about a girl recently, so I thought I'd express how I felt using a song written by her boyfriend. Sorry the recording's so sloppy; I made it for my own amusement, with no more than one take of any part, and I really shouldn't be sharing it at all.

2. A little better is "Pygmalion," which I think could be a pretty good song, although it's (as always) hard to tell from the recording. I used GarageBand drum loops, which as you know is always a bad idea, but I couldn't really show what I meant without them. The song should be a little faster than that, I think, and maybe there's another guitar part. But I think you get the basic idea.

3. My favorite of this batch is "The Last Good Guy in Pittsburgh," which came to me in a vision as I left the bathroom after shaving last night. I'm sure I ripped the melody off from somewhere, so if you know where, please let me know. The melodica playing here is a bit better, because I did it this morning, when I knew more about how to work the machine.

Enjoy.

EDIT, THAT NIGHT AFTER WORK: So, as is typical because I'm not a very talented performer, I recorded these songs badly, and as is also a familiar experience to me, I recorded "The Last Good Guy in Pittsburgh" when it was not yet fully written (as in, I came up with the melody and the title last night, and wrote the whole song in five or ten minutes this morning because I wanted to record it). Inevitably, this resulted in the songs not being all I wanted them to be. As soon as I got to work, I figured out what the chords of "Last Good Guy" should have been doing. Ordinarily I'd let that go, but Aziz mentioned that he wanted to learn this song, and I wanted him to learn the correct version. I simplified all the transitions and modulations, and now it sounds a lot better. There are reasons why I think the solo should be long, but I made it a reasonable length here just so we could all see what was up. Anyway. I kind of like this song.

2008-03-20T02:35:00.003-04:00

Sleeps on his back --

Here are some things I want you to know:

1. "The Million Year Itch" is maybe not so bad. I don't know. It's supposed to be Zeus singing to whoever he's sleeping with at the time, but that's not entirely clear. I think it could be fun if the arrangement is good. And I have no idea how it ends. Maybe there are just a few choruses and then it stops? Or maybe the Greek guys singing "I don't want to be alone tonight" make the bridge and not the ending? Anyway, the part after "everything I know" is, as you might have guessed, the solo.

2. I guess I'm writing Ziz. In verse. I don't know. Thanks for all your advice. I had intended to spend my day off today thinking about the plot, so of course I woke up at noon, learned about hieroglyphics, then ended up writing that song. I lack discipline.

3. Maybe everything's okay? I guess everything's okay. I don't know. I'm still feeling inadequate in all the usual ways. But what can you do. I'm trying very hard not to just buckle under despair, and I'm succeeding, but I'd like to do something else, you know? Anyway, the point is that I'm above water right now and hope you're the same.

2008-03-16T11:44:00.003-04:00

It's pronounced bay-a-tree-chay --

So, here's what happened. Julie came to visit. I was going to jokingly record "Julie Gone" by Sean Altman, but that would have taken a long time. And I'm a little sad that the songs I've been writing haven't been very good. Anyway, the point is, I've been pretty down all week, with one thing and another, but I thought a good way to slow down the ever-creeping despair that will inevitably kill me one day would be to make something. So just to prove to myself that I can, I'm going to write a whole book, and it's going to be a reasonable length.

So, it's called Ziz (or possibly The Ziz) and it's about a guy named Christopher Matthew Durante who wanted to be a Catholic priest but then decided there's no God. He's Indian, despite the name; he's adopted. The point of the story is that he becomes part of an expedition to find the Ziz, which is to birds what the Behemoth is to beasts and Leviathan is to fish. It's very loosely based on the Divine Comedy. And this is why I'd like to ask for help: I can't decide whether or not to write it in rhyming iambic pentameter. I really want to, and if it's just a question of it being harder for me, I will. But what I can't decide is if it becomes too much for the reader.

Anyway. Here's an extremely rough draft of the prologue. I know it feels like it rushes through the important parts, but by word count it's actually a little long, considering it's canto one of one hundred. Maybe I'll let it be long and make other chapters shorter. Anyway, that's not the point. What I'd like to know is if you would be pissed at an author who tried to get you to read a book that was one hundred times as long as that prologue and all following that rhyme scheme. Is it worth it for me to keep struggling upstream to write in poesy?

2008-03-14T01:44:00.005-04:00

Don't mean to be cru-u-uel --

I don't have a lot of time, but here's "Me and My Yeti." I recorded and uploaded it on my lunch break. I wrote some other songs, but they're not very good. If I have time I might upload a cover or something later. You know, to keep sharp.

2008-02-03T16:27:00.000-05:00

O-matase shimashita --

Today was very, very long. I'm sorry I didn't get those songs up when I promised, but I went to meet a bunch of foreigners at a deli in Tokyo, and then we accidentally went to a concert and ended up hanging out with one of the bands all night. You know how it is.

"Cold War Fight Song" is more or less exactly what it sounds like. I thought it would be funny to imply that the whole thing about the Cold War was that America and the USSR wanted to get it on. I hear an accordion, and maybe even some violins -- or possibly just one, to be even more Eastern European. And a lot more voices in the "I want to die with you" bit in the chorus -- not necessarily in harmony, possibly more like a bunch of drunk guys singing in a bar.

"Your Love'd Make a Good Man Turn Bad Blues" is kind of old and kind of new. Every chord of the guitar part is from a song I made up my senior year of high school. The words are something I've had in my head for about a year now, although I heard it more slow and dirgey, like Little Walter's "Key to the Highway." Anyway, this is how it is now. Solos go where you think they do. I'm pretty sure there's a harmonica in there.

I was hoping to get "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin" done by now, but I wasn't able to get it written in time. I guess it'll go up in the next batch, along with "Me and My Yeti."

2008-01-20T04:25:00.001-05:00

Bseder --

I mentioned to Aaron that my New Year's resolution was to stop assuming everything would end in disaster. I think we both realized that, taken to its logical conclusion, that means I have to start writing songs again. So I spent the day recording some songs that I've been thinking about for a while. Very badly. Sloppy playing, bad sound quality, lazy intonation and tempo in the singing -- just bad all around. Really bad.

And so:

"Fresh Meat" is about the Church. This is the most recent, seeing as I wrote it over the last week. It might also be the weakest, lyrically. I can deal with it. I don't know what the hell was up with my total inability to keep time in the verses. I know my sense of time is bad, but it's not usually that bad.

"The Great Equivocator" is about Jacob, which is to say it's about Ya'qob, which is to say it's about Yakub. Only it's, like, half Jacob from Genesis and half Jacob from the Nation of Islam. I made up the riff during my last few days in the States, and it took me a long time to figure out what to do with it. I didn't finish the words until this morning. This song really, really needs drums.

"Canī Dominī" is another one that's been rattling around my head forever. It's a dying guy talking to his wife, and there's some German in it. I think maybe it needs like a huge band. Horns and stuff. And maybe that one clarinet that's all doing whatever it wants. And then it gets all quiet for the "surely do love Jesus Christ" part and then explodes for the big climax. I think. I promise you, I can sing it better than this. I sang it perfectly in the shower the other day. I think my voice is a little worse than usual because my apartment's so cold.

"The Account of the Chariot" has been trying to be written since September or August. Maybe closer to August. My idea since the riff first popped into my head was that it's these layers and layers of acoustic guitars, and then the big finish is a huge finish with all the guitars everywhere. If there are drums in this song, I don't think they come in till the very end (you'll hear where I mean). When I was recording it, I realized that I had no idea what to do with the other guitars. So if I get some better guitarists from somwhere or other to help me, this song will be much better than it is now. I really like the idea of it, and I think it would be great if all the parts were in place.

2007-12-16T11:25:00.000-05:00

Mah Nishmah? --

I've been thinking about Judaism a lot recently. Like I've been reading the Tanakh in Hebrew and stuff. So this song is in Hebrew. It's called "Atah Yodeah?" and it's totally every word in Hebrew.

2007-11-14T10:40:00.000-05:00

Summa philosophica --

The last few days, I've been reading Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night because I felt bad that I didn't do it before he died. At first, reading this book filled me with a desire to finish the book that I recently started (it's called Rood and it's about cultural imperialism) and put up some other things that I've written that you may or may not have read; this seemed like a better use of my time than my recent pasttimes, which have been watching terrible movies and sleeping. But while stumbling home on the last train tonight (on a school night, no less! Scandalous!) I realized that all my dreams are temporizing strategies (the ambition equivalent of saying well or um during a conversation) and that it's time that I faced up to what I am and what I have to do.

I've been thinking recently of writing a philosophy book, especially one that dealt with the two (surprisingly, nearly identical) topics of how atheists should think about religion and how the religious should think about science. I had this whole syllabus of a book planned out, covering ideas like lack of proof is not the same as proof of lack and just because something isn't nice to think about doesn't mean it's not true (to explain God and karma, respetively). But, you know, fuck it. People do what they want to do and think what they want to think. The ones I can influence would have figured things out for themselves anyway. You don't really need my help.

So here's my philosophy book, boiled down to a thin broth so that you can drink it like tea: people are machines. People do what their experience has convinced them they have to do, machines programmed by karma to do whatever it is they do as if it's the most important thing they could possibly do. Every moment of your life is a moment of reaction, and there is nothing you can do about that, good or bad. Reading this paragraph is part of the stimulus to which you react in your preprogrammed way, and this stimulus is itself a reaction. So whatever. You can, if you're so inclined and have the information with which to do so, trace everything everyone has ever done back to the Big Bang -- or, if you prefer, back to October 16, 4004 BC, the day The Lord said Fiat lux and we were all forced to concede that, okay, maybe it was pretty good. But don't quote us on that.

When I was in high school, right after I read Candide, I was thinking about whether or not everything really does work out for the best in the end, and I had a revelation that changed my life. I remember it distinctly: I was riding in the car with my mom somewhere, and I was on the corner of Fernwood and Democracy, waiting for the light to change, and I realized that it all comes down to what you call the end. Because the fact is, as anyone who's listened to my song lyrics for the last six years will attest, there is no end. Things just happen, and there's no narrative flow, or rising action, or anything like that. If you decide that a certain moment is the end, then it is. That's the prerogative of novelists and historians. So if you just always choose to say that an event is over when something good happens, then you can justifiably say that everything works out in the end. If you'd rather, you could easily make a case for existentialism or nihilism. It all depends on where you draw the boundaries between events. History is only history when you add a narrative; if you leave it naked, it's just a whole bunch of shit that happened to people who didn't know any better. Reactions.

And that's exactly the thing. It doesn't have to be all reactions. All it takes is a redefinition of the boundaries between events -- only this time at the beginning rather than the end. If you just rearrange the billion little stories that make up your life, you're no longer the inevitable reaction machine that you and I both know you are -- you're an active participant. Hell, you're the active participant. Your actions cause everything else that ever happens ever. Congratulations: you have become the hero of your own life.

As for me, I'm tired of guest-starring in mine. And the only way to make a significant change in what is is to change what it means. And so: I, Ram Subramanian, hereby abjure the Devil and all his works. I abjure Art, hereinunder understood to refer to Music, Writing, and Saying Clever Lines in Conversation. I abjure anything that is supposed to make people be better or life be more tolerable. I hereby abjure -- not to put too fine a point on it -- fucking around. I'm done. Everyone else can write, and sing, and talk about writing and singing. I'm going to tend to my fucking gardens. I'm tired of America and everything it has come to stand for since it stopped standing for all those good things I learned about in elementary school. And I'm tired of being an exile, too Indian for America and too American for India. I'm going to live somewhere without expecting to like it. I'm just going to live my life and wait for The Good Lord to sweep me up in his Rapture, which, between you and me, is now just over eleven years late.

Om shanti shanti shanti.

Om tat sat. Shri ganesharpanam astu.

2007-09-10T03:31:00.000-04:00

Fell off the wagon again --

The day after my first typhoon, I went out, thinking that because it was sunny it would be like the typhoon had never happened. More the fool I; everything I could see was soaked with rain from the previous day. I had the funny thought that nothing would ever be dry again, so I wrote "The Whole World Is Soaked and Will Never Be Dry" (this actually happened almost two and a half months ago, I think, but I wasn't sure whether I should record a song, and then I had computer problems). This song is okay but not great. It's not one of my better lyrics, but the melody is kind of nice and I like the effect of the outro. No idea how to end it, natch.

Much better, in my opinion, is "You Always Pretend You Don't Know Me". This is a little gem. I wrote it during school my first week on the job.

2007-08-16T09:29:00.001-04:00

State of the union --

I'm in Japan. I'm having a great time. I went to Kyoto last week and am now Writing About It. I'll probably have internet in my apartment in about a month, at which point I'll start seriously writing again. Maybe.

2007-05-08T13:59:00.000-04:00

Of chicks and their rights --

So, I was listening to Word FM again this morning. I'm beginning to learn that I shouldn't do that. Every time I listen to the radio, I'm reminded of how my father used to mute the TV whenever George Bush, Sr. appeared on the news. I never understood that when I was a child, but now I'm beginning to see the light.

Sorry, I'll try not to get so misty-eyed. Anyway, this morning I heard a teaser for a program coming up tonight. The lady on the advertisement was talking about the ERA. That's right, the Equal Rights Amendment. They've been talking about it for nearly a century, and now it seems that it has some small chance of succeeding. Let's hear it for equal rights.

The lady on the radio disagreed. She was advertising a program about the danger of the Equal Rights Amendment and what we as Christians can do to fight it.

I'm going to repeat that, because it bears repeating. The fucking ERA. The Equal Rights Amendment. That's not special rights, or pagan rights, or homo rights, or even rich people rights (which is a group you'd expect Christians to dislike more than pagans, homos, and women combined). It's equal rights. It seems completely clear-cut.

Not so, say Concerned Women for America. The Equal Rights Amendment, they say, will do three things:

1. Aid in the killing of unborn babies.

2. Usher in homosexual rights.

3. Suppress true femininity and womanhood.

With apologies to Dave Barry, I swear I am not making this up.

Now, before I get into the serious theology and really exciting liberal indignation, we should review what the ERA actually says:

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

This is copy-pasted right off the CWfA website. I have altered it in no way, not even the format. So, it sounds innocuous enough, right? All it actually says is that men and women should be equal under the law. So why does the Bible object to that?

Well, the short answer is that it doesn't. What the Bible says is Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind . . . and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Period. Those are the only two commandments that matter. I didn't say it, Jesus did. So anyone that says anything that isn't be nice to people needs to shut the hell up right now and you can tell them I told you so.

Here's the long answer:

1. Let's start with the second fear, which is that this amendment will usher in a new era of homo-friendly legislation. First of all, there's no good goddamn reason to think that's even true. The official ERA website goes out of its way to point out that this isn't about gay rights, it's about women's rights. I think that that's kind of a cowardly dodge, but I understand why they have to do it, politically speaking. And the fact is, there's nothing in that amendment about homosexuality. Read it again if you have to; I've got time. Even if we ignore the question of whether or not gays are a problem in the eyes of Our Heavenly Father, it's a pretty severe stretch of this legislation to say that it has anything to do with queer rights. It's as severe a strech now as it will be if the amendment passes and is applied to gay rights questions. It's a stretch no matter how you look at it.

But while we're on the subject, let's talk a little about homosexuality. Personally, as a terribly devout follower of a religion that thinks you shouldn't kill cows, I have managed to live in a nation of cow-killers for twenty-three and a half years without incident. My secret: I don't kill any cows. Ingenious, right? It's like the catflap -- it seems obvious now, but how could anyone else have thought of it? I really don't understand how you can live in a place like America, which exists exclusively so that people with different lifestyles can coexist without bothering each other, and say that it's a problem for you that your neighbor is a dude who sleeps with dudes. Get the log out of your own eye, etc. This is not complicated.

But let's see whether or not God really hates fags. The usual defence of homophobia is Leviticus 20:13, which even I will admit is pretty clear-cut. men lying with men is an abomination. Of course, that particular commandment only occurs once in Leviticus. Surely a command that occurs twice is more important? Like, say, the commandment that men not cut their beards, which occurs both in 19:27 and two chapters later in 21:5. The religious right is fighting the wrong battle: instead of combating pillowbiters, they should be fighting against shaving. I want to see guys with beards down to their feet standing on street corners preaching about how much the Lord hates razors.

There are a dozen other examples I could have chosen, just in Leviticus alone. The Lord Our God says we have to wear fringes on all our garments, we can't eat something called an ossafrage, we have to make a sacrifice for our firstborn sons, and on and on and on. It's hard to say why some of these rules are still important and others are not. The safest thing seems to be to obey all of them. I expect to see public stonings of people who don't honor their fathers and mothers within a few weeks. I guess the alternative is that everyone could realize that each individual is responsible for his or her own salvation and no one else's, and then everyone could shut up. But that does seem less likely.

2. There's not a lot that I can say about the feminity and womanhood argument, except this: a FedEx delivery guy once told my roommate that he couldn't deliver at our house because we couldn't hear him knocking and he wasn't allowed to use the doorbell. "They train us not to," he said, "because sometimes they don't work." "That's not an argument against doorbells," Aaron replied. "It's an argument for knocking."

If you don't understand the difference, then all I can do is pray to my Father in Heaven that one of the other two arguments convinces you; this one is a lost cause.

3. I could write about abortion all day. If anyone would read it, I probably would. But for now, let's say this:

The usual argument against abortion is that it's murder. Fine. There's a commandment for that. It's either the fifth or sixth commandment, depending on how you look at it, and that big crucifix in your foyer is already breaking the first one. Whatever. The point is, let's assume for the time being that abortion violates that commandment.

There are big people, who breathe and walk around and feed themselves and pay tithes, who are also killed by our government. We call them convicts. And before you get all up in arms about the difference between fetuses and murderers -- yes, even a godless pinko like myself recognizes that there is one -- I should clarify that I'm not giving you my position, but the official position of the Catholic Church. The Catechism states pretty unequivocally that the Vatican does not believe capital punishment is necessary in this day and age. Nearly every Christian denomination in America agrees with them. Look it up. Jewish law agrees in principle that the death penalty might be necessary, but in practice it is frowned upon so hard that the Talmudic sages nearly injure their face muscles when you bring it up. Rabbi Akiva, who pretty much invented modern Rabbinical thought, says that if he had been on the Sanhedrin, no one would ever have been put to death.

To summarize: while the Bible supports the death penalty to some extent, everyone whose job it is to read and think about the Bible seems to agree that it's overall a pretty bad idea. And yet, in a country where undereducated Jesus freaks who couldn't find Nazareth on a map spend entire months on end camped out in front of Planned Parenthood clinics with pictures of embryos on big placards, the religious right seems strangely silent about the 60 executions carried out in 2005. Now, I wonder why that is. Is it because abortion is a sexier banner to carry on news reports? Are these people that terrified of taking on an issue where they know the establishment might not agree with them? Are they using religion as an excuse to spread the beliefs they already had instead of a basis for building their beliefs?

Anyway, while I feel very strongly about all that and voluntarily spend hours -- um -- discussing it with anti-choice protestors whenever I get the chance (and I haven't even gotten to the legal argument! You'd like it -- it has hamburgers in it), the simple fact is that the ERA has nothing to do with this. I stand before you an individual who has, in the last two and a half months, contributed to Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, and I say to you: the ERA does not protect abortion rights. Read the text of the amendment again -- I'll wait. The whole point of the amendment is that we live in a society that is inherently unfair to women and we're doing something about it. Period. Just because this legislation was cooked up by the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy (which is kind of a strange conspiracy, since we seem to control everything except actual legislation) doesn't mean that it will single-handedly bring about the Big Gay Abortion Fiesta that conservative America seems so terrified of. It is a very simple amendment to carry out a very simple purpose. The religious right's stupid shit -- I mean, perfectly valid opinions with which I respectfully disagree are in most cases, completely irrelevant.

That took forever. I guess my point is this: I respect religion more than the next guy. I love Jesus a whole lot. I love Him so much that when His followers start trying to pull all this asinine fascist bullshit in His name, I swear to God it makes me want to nail myself to a fucking tree.

2007-05-05T02:28:00.000-04:00

Of loaves and their guardians --

I've been listening to a lot of Christian talk radio recently. My job requires me to do a really absurd quantity of driving, so the Christian talk radio is a natural solution to the all my CDs are scratched because they've been in my car for more than twenty minutes problem. There's a fair amount of shoddy theology and lazy reason there, as one might expect, but the questions it raises for someone like me (read: someone who has read the Bible) are different from those that I imagine it raises for most of its listeners. One that occurs to me every time they talk about any person of the Trinity is: while I buy Lord as a term for God, why would they use it to refer to Jesus?

So, let's learn a little history. I've been considering doing a few sermons on the history of the Bible, but that's a little in-depth for this little foray into Abrahamic theology. Let's stay focused right now. The usual etymology provided for God's given name, which is YHWH, is that it comes from the third chapter of Exodus, where the burning bush speaks to Moses. God gives him a message to communicate to his people, and he asks, who should I say sent me? and God gives one of the most thrilling introductions in literature, the famous אהיה אשר אהיה, or I am that I am. So YHWH is usually taken as a derivative of EHYH. Simple. The problem is the prohibition against saying the name of God, other than the one time when the kohen gadol (which is a phrase I love, because it means high priest but says big priest) says it in the kodesh kodeshim on the high holy day. So there are a number of euphemisms that arose so that you'd have something to say when YHVH occurred in sacred texts. The big ones are Elohim and Adonai. Elohim actually probably comes from the name of a competing sun-god worshiped by another sect, but I won't tell if you won't. Adonai means, in no uncertain terms, my lord. See, I get to the point eventually. Those two words are actually interesting (to me) because they both use the idiomatic trick of pluralizing a word to make it particularly respectful, which as far as I know only exists in Hebrew and Tamil two otherwise unrelated languages. But I digress. The point is: Adonai is the common socially acceptable way of referring to the Almighty, and it means Lord. It's involved in certain other names, too, like Adonai Tzevaoth (Lord of Hosts).

Where it gets complicated is also kind of where the question of how this tiny tribal religion became the theological currency of the entire world gets complicated. It starts with the Jewish expansion into Greek-speaking territories, which is where we get the Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This translation was the introduction to the Torah for entire societies, since Greek was and is much better known throughout the academic world than Hebrew. There were some problems with the translation (the most famous being the translation, in Isaiah 7:14, of the Hebrew word 'almah for young girl into the Greek word parthenos for virgin), but the cultural impact of the work shouldn't be underestimated. What concerns us here is the use of the Greek word Kurios, which, like Adonai, is not too terribly far removed from the mundane sense of lord, just as a person with authority over other people. The Septuagint usually uses theos where the Hebrew uses YHWH, and Kurios where the Hebrew has Adonai. This makes it pretty easy to distinguish. When the definitive Latin translation, the Vulgate, hit shelves toward the beginning of the fifth century after Christ, it followed a similar scheme, using Dominus for Adonai and Deus for YHWH. And so on.

Then came Jesus, and Christianity, and the bizarre transformation of a ethnically-limited mythology meant to explain the relationship between one very specific tribe and its deity into the pseudohistorical mythology of the entire planet. Genesis turned from a highly metaphorical explanation of the relationship between the Infinite and the Finite into an actual history of what the Living God said as He made each item in this world and the order He did it in. And the Tanakh, the Little Scripture That Could, spread over the entire world and found itself applied to goyische cultures its writers wouldn't have associated with for all the falafel in Tel-Aviv. So now that little word Adonai was being translated into all the languages of Europe. Usually, the word chosen was simply the local term for a mundane potentate, a landowner or ruler: anyone with power and authority over other people. Thus, in Spanish they say Señor, and in German, they say Herr. The reason the English word Lord is particularly interesting is its etymology. The earliest recognizable form of the word is the Germanic Hlaf-weard, which literally means loaf-ward. This is exactly what it sounds like. Feudal lords in the early Germanic societies, from which the various peoples that eventually became the English originated, customarily acted as providers and protectors of food to their vassals. Hence, guardian of the loaf. The term implies devoted, unquestioning service in exchange for basic sustenance and protection. The King James Bible, which is to some extent responsible not only for all English Bibles but also for the modern English language as we know it, adopted the custom of translating YHVH as THE LORD and Adonai as the Lord.

That's great for God, and actually kind of sweet. It expresses the divine-human relationship in an interesting way that's worth thinking about. But more than once in the New Testament, and terribly frequently on Christian talk radio, The Lord is used as an address to Jesus. This seems odd:

1. Lord is an economic title, insofar as the authority of a lord is distinguished from the powerlessness of his subjects by the Lord's wealth. This is a strange concept to apply to Jesus, who didn't even want His followers to have two coats.

2. The term King of the Jews is strange enough, given that there's precious little evidence for any kind of political agenda in the canonical Gospels. It's understandable as a term used to legitimize His teachings among His students (who were exclusively the lost sheep of the house of Israel; Jesus had little truck with Gentiles during His lifetime), but seems a little out of place now, given our understanding that we're not living in the New Jerusalem today.

3. This is the big one: Jesus was an itinerant rabbi. He preached a simple message of love and forgiveness in the Temple on Saturday afternoons, and because His miracles and His anti-consumerist teachings were too radical for the established government, He was executed. He wasn't a king, or a lord, or a duke, or a soldier, or a co-pilot, or a scientist, or a Republican. He was a teacher. By calling Him Lord, by making the man more important than the message, we make it terribly easy to forget the bits about loving our enemies and giving away as much as we can.

And as always, I guess that's my real point. The entire tenor of modern life, founded though it may be by white Christian males, is completely contrary to the teachings of Christ. By buying into the whole bewildering edifice of Christianity as it is currently practiced worldwide, we're supporting a misconception that is impossible to believe in if you actually read and understand even a few chapters of the New Testament. It's in the little things: the bumper stickers that say "Jesus is Lord," the heaped-up wealth of the Church, the several inexplicable and inexcusable wars being waged right now between true believers and infidels in and around the Holy Land.

2007-05-03T19:20:00.000-04:00

Capellam novam --

Both "New Hat" and "Kittens" are actually hell of old, but I like them. In a fit of nostalgia, I recorded them both today. enjoy. I recently started feeling bad for not writing columns anymore, so I'm going to start writing again. I'm going to write one on the provenance of the term "Lord" to mean the Most High. This weekend. Honest injun.

2007-04-11T00:31:00.000-04:00

If therefore thine eye be single --

Tonight at the bar, Mark mentioned his recent revelation that where most religions have a broad and lively body of stories making up their mythologies, Christianity is pretty much all about Christ. This seems like a ridiculous statement until you stop to think about it. The point he was trying to make, which really is worth considering, is that where other traditions combine a variety of different types of stories with different characters to make up their narrative foundation, Christianity is really based entirely around one story -- admittedly a sublime one, if you understand it, and one that has changed almost as many people for the better as it as for the worse. But for someone like me, who comes from a culture where stories are more common than middle names, it can seem a little austere. One thinks of Mel Brooks in History of the World, Part I: "Have you heard about this new sect of Christians? They're so poor, they only have one God!"

Which is an interesting issue from a lot of angles. If we ignore, as I can never really do, questions of truth and the mystical aspects of all these stories, there is the purely sociological question of what it means that one society is so thoroughly saturated with myths and legendary characters while another survives on essentially one of each. Is the Hindu mythological landscape, with its dizzying rainbow of gods, monsters, heroes, kings and queens, a symptom of insecurity, a need to fill an otherwise bleak world with sound and color? Or is the dry desert that is Christian mythology a symptom of a lack of imagination, an unwillingness to admit that a healthy world must contain more than one Son of God?

I'll admit that the phrasing at the end there makes the situation seem like an either/or, as though one mythology is healthy and another sick. In reality -- avoiding all the luftmenschische newagey pablum about how every culture is good in its own way and we need to respect each other and really all the religions are saying the same thing anyway -- I mean, they are, we do, and they do. It would actually be more accurate to say that how one culture stacks up compared to another is an impossible judgment to make, given the biases we are all stuck with. The practical upshot of which is that questions like the ones I was just wondering about can never really leave the realm of the theoretical. We're too small to evaluate something that big.

But we can observe and correct occasions when what our religious leaders seem to enforce doesn't make any goddamn sense. And we can also think for ourselves, and when we find that the current philosophical climate hinders rather than encourages personal growth, we can take steps to pluck the psychic weeds that want to choke out the daffodils of our souls.

Save that last sentence. That's going to be my fucking epitaph.

The advantage of a diverse mythology is the same as the advantage of diversity in biology: a genus containing several species is more likely to survive than a genus with one species. It's very simple. If your whole culture is based around a single idea, and something happens to undermine that idea, you're shit out of luck. Everything falls apart all around you. If your whole approach to religion is accepting fables and myths as literal history, and people start noticing that the Earth is not the center of the solar system and creatures evolve from simpler creatures, where can you go? You either abandon your religion, abandon your reason, or try and develop some kind of watered-down version of each and are left with shoddy science and soulless religion. And if you've got a very strong authority at the center of your religion that makes all your decisions for you (even though Jesus was pretty clear that everyone relates to God on his or her own, and priests are unnecessary), then whatever the authority says the story means becomes what the story means. You never get a chance to puzzle it out for yourself.

You'll forgive me if I choose Christianity as my example again. You ought to forgive me seven times seventy times, ha ha. The Powers That Be tell us that the important part of the story is the bit at the end, where they nail him to the big wooden thing and he dies and comes back. The Gospel of Mark, which most scholars agree is the oldest gospel, may have left out that last bit in its oldest version. No matter. The myth concerns the awakening of the light of divinity within yourself, et cetera, et cetera. I'll tell you all about it sometime. But by focusing so firmly on this one aspect of a complex and many-layered story, we create problems for ourselves. To wit:

1. We forget the rest of the story. A myth is very hard to understand when consumed piecemeal. In most cases, the whole thing has to be properly understood for the parts to make sense. The Christian religion in its modern form is mostly a religion of death: fear of death, escape from death, suffering as a sacrament, and so on.

2. Staring so hard at a single event tends to concretize it, to make the whole thing more real. That's not what a myth needs. A myth needs to be less real. I have no problem believing that Jesus cured lepers and turned water to wine and came back from the dead. Even the Virgin Birth isn't terribly hard for me. I believe more ridiculous things than that for fun. Just to stay sharp. But the question of whether or not these things happened is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the story matters. The story is the important thing: the story, and what we do with the story. But the story of Christ's life is not a road, it's a map; it's not a meal, it's a menu.

3. The more divine Christ becomes, the less important are the things Jesus said. And this kind of gets into the myth versus history problem again. Because the church would have us believe both that Jesus really existed and everything written about Him in the Bible really happened exactly as it was written (which is weird, given how different are the four accounts of His life), and also that the important thing about Him was the story of His life rather than His teachings. His teachings range from the deeply practical to the incomprehensibly mystical. Most of the Sermon on the Mount is just good, solid advice for living a life of love, where we return kindness for hatred and generosity of spirit for cupidity. That's great. I could write whole books about that, only it seems dumb because it won't accomplish anything. Parts, like Matthew 6:22, are so profoundly esoteric that Biblical scholars don't even try to figure out what they mean. Given the rigidly anti-mystical stance of modern Christian orthodoxy, it's easy to see why they wouldn't want us to pay too much attention to that part.

(Not to brag or anything -- it's nothing to be proud of, especially in my case -- but I know what Matthew 6:22 means. You can figure it out for yourself without much difficulty. All you have to know is that the Greek word haplous means single, not healthy or perfect -- think about haploids in biology -- and that Hindu mystics refer to the ajña cakra as the center by which light enters the consciousness.)

Anyway: a story is just entertainment until you think about it enough to figure out what's in it besides the literal meaning. And as I mentioned about a week ago, we don't generally do that with the stories that are so familiar that they become meaningless. The story of Christ is so ubiquitous that most of us would rather ignore it than think about it. It has, after all, been the only weapon in the Christian arsenal for two thousand-odd years. It would probably be good for all of us to take some time, far away from the clamoring voices of priests, historians, scholars, and schmucks like me, and just really think about it. Even if it doesn't teach us where we're going, it's always good to know where we're coming from.

2007-04-02T02:32:00.001-04:00

What did Abe Lincoln say about fooling people? --

Or, why I'm always complaining about advertising and don't understand how people can enjoy it.

The vast majority of my most important ideas can be traced back to my father, either directly or indirectly. Damn near all of them, in fact. If nothing else, he can be credited with instilling in me a love of reading and thinking and a contempt for the kind of complacent irrationality that characterizes most people's thought processes. A large part of that was conditioning me to almost instinctually revile television and all it stood for. Growing up, I was never allowed to watch television or play video games on school nights. I never really rebelled against this or saw it as unfair, possibly for the same reason I've never really wondered what meat tastes like: never having had a taste, I've never felt the need to start. I did, however, frequently get in trouble for reading books and, later, playing guitar when I was supposed to be doing my homework. Looking back on it, I think my father may have been secretly proud of me at those times; my favorite uncle, his younger brother, once told me a story about the two of them blowing their last couple rupees on books instead of food and getting chewed out for it. This was an addiction my father could comprehend.

Anyway, the point is this: I don't mind television, particularly, other than the same way everyone else does (three hundred channels and nothing on lowest common denominator blah blah blah thinly veiled elitism). I enjoy some programs, mostly cartoons, and I still wax nostalgic about the old "Ghostbusters" show which, between you and me, really didn't age very well at all. So, no, I don't hate television the way smart people are supposed to. But it really doesn't get me going the way it does for some people. If "Scrubs" is on, I'll be more than happy to wander in and take a seat, but I have trouble digging the kind of unfocused love for the medium that leads people to, whenever they walk into a room where a TV is on, forget what they were doing and just stare at it. I don't think this makes me particularly better than you. I guess that's not entirely accurate. I know, rationally, that this doesn't make me better than you, and I'm not proud of feeling like it does anyway. I only even mention it because I want to have some context for the white-hot loathing that characterizes my feelings toward advertising.

As far as I'm concerned, the real problem with television is not that it showcases and panders to the worst in people, and it's not that television is making less people read. The first is only a problem if you don't take the time to find good, smart programming, and the second is only a problem if you don't understand history. The problem is that by and large, television programming is determined by advertisers rather than artists or entertainers. I say is, but has always been would probably be more appropriate since this condition was even more blatant at the very beginning of television's conquest of the American heart. This strikes me as similar to the problem with government-sponsored education programs: the government has a job, and educators have a job, but the government doing the educators' job badly leads to neither job getting done. The big difference to me is that in this case, advertisers don't really have anything like a respectable job, unless convincing people to buy things they don't want or need is somehow a job now. In which case I've clearly missed Armageddon and the Antichrist is now The Prince Of This World. So, yeah, sorry about that. That makes me a bad minister.

The point is that advertising is, to put it bluntly, intellectual warfare. An advertiser has an agenda that relates in no way to your wellbeing, and he or she is wholly dedicated to breaking down your defenses as much as possible and fulfilling that agenda no matter what you want. As we as a species have gotten better at advertising, it's gotten more and more insidious and deplorable, cutting closer and closer to the bone in its surgical strikes at our psychic health. I know this sounds unnecessarily alarmist, and it probably doesn't help my case that I never whisper when I can yell, but the fact remains: marketing is that process by which all that is right with humanity is defiled in the interest of all that is greedy and low. That's just a fact.

Wait, but Ram, some commercials are very clever and well-made. I like some commercials.

But that's worse. Because, for one thing, a tremendous volume of talent in a wide range of fields is being perverted and ruined by its enslavement to advertising. The kind of creative minds that could excel in any number of fields are instead selling us toasters. Shitty toasters. Moreover, the quality of the commercial really just makes it worse. Because the idea of commercials isn't actually to convince you that a product is great. Advertisement is all about name recognition. When you go to a grocery store and look at seven different kinds of paper towels, you're not actually trying to remember what qualities each has based on the marketing slogans; you're either looking for the cheapest one or just picking up Bounty because that's what you've heard of the most. It's all subliminal, if you'll forgive me for sounding like a street-corner loony. It's a very small war between us and them, and because we've been conditioned so long, we don't even notice it's happening.

My hatred of advertising actually boils down to the same basic complaint I always have, which is the same one some Greek guy voiced by saying something about an unexamined life not being worth living. Life sucks enough as it is, but then people just fuck with us and fuck with us and we not only put up with it but actually pay them for the privilege. This strikes me as insane. Advertisers to not make commercials to entertain you; they make them to trick you into buying their products, which you neither want nor need, without you really realizing that you're doing it. They don't like you. I'm not saying you need to, like me, find something more interesting to look at every time the commercial break starts or start hyperventilating every time you see the billboards in Times Square. All I'm suggesting is a healthy wariness of the mental viruses that run our lives.

2007-03-31T13:57:00.000-04:00

Wow wow wow! --

I just got a new computer. I'm using it to make this entry. I also learned to use GarageBand to record songs. Like this one, which is by the Beatles.

I'll be making a "column" soon. It will be about advertising.

2007-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Generation of vipers --

Aaron accidentally joined a march against the war the other day. That night, we went to eat burritos and talk about it. It made me think of the protest in Washington, D.C. a few years ago, where we marched past the White House and shouted a lot and saw Le Tigre and Ted Leo. That march was a very big deal. I think there were something like 300,000 people there (the best guesses seem to range from 150,000 to 500,000). It was a very powerful feeling, being there with all those people, so convinced that, as The Good Doctor put it, "our energy would simply prevail." It felt as though, with all those good vibrations everywhere, all those great musicians and thinkers and all those cool kids like me, college-educated or working on it, full of ideas and enthusiasm -- it felt as though with all that it would be impossible for the insanity to continue. Everything would work itself out through love. It felt, God help me, like the sixties.

I should know better. Only children and half-wits think that the sixties were really anything like how they looked on TV. It's clear to anyone who's read a book that the hippies weren't all flowers and enlightenment. Most of them were just overgrown children who wanted nothing more than to be allowed to play all the time. We know this. This is not news. And that's probably why it's so hard for us to admit how badly we want to be hippies.

I guess that's not wholly accurate. Really, we just want to be something. I get the feeling from our generation -- and forgive me for the generalization, but it's kind of what I do -- that we aren't apathetic so much as we are unfeeling -- and, etymological arguments aside, there is a difference, and it's vital. Those of us who are my age, or close to it, spent our formative years listening to bands like Nirvana and Green Day, whose raison d'etre was to speak to the spirit of enthusiastic, balls-to-the-wall listlessness that, in my experience, characterizes our generation. We're unmotivated -- the unimaginative joyless Greatest Generation hopefuls who call us The MTV Generation have that much right, at least -- but we're deeply unmotivated, we're passionately unmotivated. I look back at history, and I just can't comprehend how something like The Rite of Spring could have been so inflammatory as to cause honest-to-God riots. That idea is just inconceivable to me.

I suppose that it's because we were brought up without any real conception that ideas and feelings matter, that dreams can change the word. And history notwithstanding, we've seen precious little evidence of it in our own lifetimes. Nelson Mandela's triumph in South Africa is frankly astounding, but I for one was far too young when it happened to really process the moment of the occasion -- I distinctly remember being irritated that the newscast interrupted an episode of "Ghostbusters." Since 2000, we've been living in an America that no longer seems to respect the basic rules that we learned as children: elections matter, civil servants are there to serve civilians, and if you do something really bad, like Nixon bad, then The System will naturally remove you from circulation.

The example of Nixon will probably be edifying here. President Nixon is someone who fucked up very badly and was punished for it, and now his surname is shorthand for criminality in a position of authority. But even his fiercest detractors don't think he was evil. His motto was If the President does it, it's not a crime, and, sure, that's a fairly inappropriate attitude for an elected official. But honestly, I would take someone who wants to be President for the sake of being President over the evil and cupidity and blatant fascism that's running the show right now. I think most of us would, given the chance.

So why, then, did Nixon provoke so much heartfelt feeling while The Bush League does whatever they want? I suppose that one problem is that it's very, very hard to fight a battle that's so obviously doomed. The current administration has made clear to us, over the last six years, that no matter what we do, they're going to do what they do. Nixon was not a very good president, and it was right for the American people to be outraged at his flagrant disregard for honor. But he was a savvy politician, and he did a lot of good while he was in office. Our current president holds the record for most vacation time in a term. We're dealing with an entirely different class of fuckup here.

No one, neither the President nor his cohort nor the American people, believes that these elected officials are accountable. And, really, that's the problem with these protests. Deep down, neither we nor they believe that it makes a difference. And maybe it doesn't. But if protesting is the safe alternative, the road that those in power want us to take because it makes us feel better without accomplishing anything, then I'm honestly very scared. Because I have no idea, then, what the effective alternative is. And Lord knows we need one.

2007-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Stop me if you've heard this one --

So, when I was maybe five or six years old, Dad used to have a beer now and again. We never had more than a six-pack in the house; this was a terribly low-maintainance habit. One day, I learned the term alcoholic at school.

"Alcoholic," I declared that night.

"Who's an alcoholic?" my father asked innocently.

"You're an alcoholic."

"Why am I an alcoholic?"

"Because you drink beer."

My father, being who he is, didn't miss a beat: "Alright, I'll make a deal with you. I won't ever drink beer again if you promise you never will, either."

I, being who I am, didn't miss a beat, either: "Deal."

And, being who we are, neither of us has had so much as a drop of beer since. I've never tasted it. I stay away from hard cider, too, just to be safe. A friend once made beer bread, and I made it a point not to have any (although, looking back, I can't remember whether or not it had eggs in it, and that is also verboten).

I've told this story a lot in the last six-odd years. It comes up pretty frequently, because I don't drink beer sometimes isn't a good excuse by itself. My point, which actually has nothing to do with beer or my father, is that there are stories that we tell so much that we take the edges off of them, make them safe or, what's worse, make them history. These are usually stories that really happened, because stories based on real events tend to run out of steam much faster than those that speak directly to and from the collective unconscious. They usually involve a major historical character, and too many such stories can crowd around those characters and make it hard for us to see their faces. They often, though not always, have a moral; when they do, the moral is always trite and usually nonsense.

For example: George Washington and the cherry tree. For those of you who grew up in another country or are lawless goddamn animals, the story goes that young George obtained an axe as a present and, in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, used it to chop down a cherry tree; subsequently, the tree's owner becoming upset about this event, George chose to come clean about the crime. The obvious moral is that honesty is the best policy; the subtler moral is that George Washington is really great. This is what I mean about overtold stories obscuring the truth about historical figures. Unless you've gone out of your way to learn more, if you were educated in an American school then your knowledge of Washington is pretty much the cherry tree, crossing the Delaware, and the dollar bill. We don't learn, for example, that he was vigorously opposed to political parties and hoped that America would never have any. And most people have no idea that he was one of only two Commanders-in-Chief to ever accompany the army into battle while President (and the other, James Madison, probably shouldn't count because the White House was burning down at the time). Never mind that the cherry tree incident is probably fictitious; it's easier to teach charming little fables than true history, so we get little anecdotes like this one in place of the truth. The anecdotes are then told over and over until, like a word repeated too many times, they lose all meaning and become pointless. All we have of George Washinton is this cherry tree story, and even that is stupid now.

If you think back, you'll find that most of your understanding of important historical figures takes the form of these now-meaningless little chestnuts. And these stories, because they are so familiar, live in a vague grey middle realm between myth and history. Myths are powerful, and speak to that which is best in each of us; history is true and helps us understand where we are and why. But this hazy no-man's-land in between is meaningless and artificial. Our history fails to explain this ever-changing world in which we live in, but also fails to shed any real illumination upon ourselves. Total crap, in other words. Strictly for suckers.

It's a big problem. In a lot of ways, culture is made up entirely of stories. History is a very long story, or a lot of little stories, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's a complex story that's hard to understand, which is why so many people have so may different versions of it. The only way to perceive why history is so confusing is to understand that it is a tale, and a tale has to be told by someone, and that means that there will be a bias. I don't think objectivity is as important as everyone else seems to think it is, but knowing that the bias is there is vital to figuring out what really happened. And myths, real myths, are just as important as history -- in some cases more so. The myths that spring up naturally in a community give the people who tell and listen to them a sense of identity, moral and spiritual advice, and an understanding of priorities in a world that doesn' t provide them. Myths are the mother's milk of a human being's psychic growth, without which he or she will be stunted.

Carrying the analogy further -- no doubt too far, as always -- the kind of lifeless stories I'm talking about, like the cherry tree, are badly-made formula. They're sugary, but they don't taste good; they're filling, but they're not nutritious; they're fattening, but they won't put any meat on your bones. They take up psychic space that could be otherwise filled by really meaningful stories. We grow up surrounded by stories that fill up our heads without helping us grow. That's where the real cultural failure is: not in the big, easily visible battles, over whether modern novels use the word fuck too much or if all great literature is by dead white males, but in children growing up without any foundation on which to build themselves. The real purpose of religion and mythology is to help every individual relate to himself or herself and the world with grace and understanding. And the problem you and I face is worse than just a lack of a viable mythos; through careless handling by an unenlightened culture, the myths that should be lighting up our hearts and souls become mass-market pablum.

For example: the story of the life of Jesus. Specifically the end part. You know, where the Jews kill Him. Understand that just because something really happened doesn't make it history, and that just because something is history doesn't mean it can't also be myth. The story of Jesus' crucifixion and ressurexion is a microcosm of every individual's most important moment of spiritual crisis. It is a story that has the power to mirror the deepest divinity within all of us. This watered-down bargain-bin version we have has the power to confuse people and make them kill and torture each other.

(Incidentally, today marks the fourth anniversary of the first troops landing in Iraq. In memoriam copiarum nostrarum.)

2007-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Go team --

I've been promising I'd do this for a while. Tonight I finally came home early enough to do all my research and really think this through thoroughly. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so you should probably get comfortable. Grab a blanket, maybe something to eat. And take off those sunglasses. They make you look like a state trooper.

You and I are going to have a little chat about the two-party system.

First, some background. We essentially have the two-party setup we're currently suffering under in America because of two Pretty Great Guys, Jefferson and Hamilton. Hamilton now has his face on the ten-dollar bill, while Jefferson is relegated to a bill that's more sort of a novelty than a currency. I hope all those illegitimate half-Hemings babies all over the country make up for it a little. Oh!

Sorry. I got a little sidetracked. Hamilton, who was less concerned with ideology and more with practicality, tended to advocate a strong government. He tended to interpret the Constitution pretty loosely, usually leaning toward giving the government more power rather than less. He hated British tyranny as much as the next guy, don't get him wrong; he just, you know, wanted to be safe. Jefferson, on the other hand, usually sided with smaller government and more personal liberties. They clashed about this a lot, in their dignified British way, and in a lot of ways those conflicts spawned the entire modern legislative system in the United States. Ever since then, most political issues have pretty much been boiled down -- with varying degrees of success -- to Big Government v. Small Government. I understand that this is a simplification, but it's one that sheds a lot of light on the current political debate. Ideally -- very ideally, so ideally that it's hard to conceive in real-life terms -- the GOP is the party of small government, minimal federal interference in private life, maximum personal freedom, and the Democrats are the party of big government and keeping people safe from themselves. The degree to which this is a goddamn dirty lie is actually pretty comical. But I'll get to that soon.

The thing is, we don't really tend to think in terms of Democrat and Republican anymore. Officially, most people who choose to register as a member of a party still register under one of those two, but in practice, in private and public discussion, the real lines are drawn between liberal and conservative. This distinction is a little trickier to unravel, because it's relative to the times. Women's suffrage was a very liberal stance in 1904; now, wanting to take the vote away from women would technically be liberal. See? Complicated. What's harder to deal with in any meaningful, practical way is the visceral reaction these two words elicit in the American consciousness.

Strictly speaking, a liberal is an advocate of social change, and a conservative wants to maintain tradition. Period. Anything beyond that is subject to the whims of history. By studying history (for seriously, like, ten minutes) we can see that any culture tends to go through phases. Just as in any art form, there tend to be periods of romanticism alternating with periods of classicism, so too do liberalism and conservatism tend to roughly alternate in cultural and political history. This is obviously natural and desirable. New ideas will always be springing up, and some are more worthwhile than others. The really worthwhile ones will tend to come forward and become traditions themselves; this is, of course, how society evolves. Change tends to encourage other change, so there will be periods of tremendous progress in society. When the people who got all that transformation going get old and tired, they don't leave power immediately. The period between when they're done reinventing their society and when they actually give way to the next generation of innovators is a period of conservatism, of sitting back and taking stock. This is all a lot of commonsense historical tautology. None of this is very hard at all.

Now: in any society, who tends to be at the forefront of sociopolitical innovation? Well, most of the population doesn't give a damn, because their primary concern is survival. Most people are not only happy with the status quo, they'll fight for it if they have to. That's good, because if properly directed, that self-interest is what drives the world. That's what makes farmers, truck drivers, builders, miners -- the people who actually make civilization possible -- keep doing what they do. But if that kind of thinking went unchecked in society, we would never make any progress. So we also need the other kind of people: the thinkers, the dreamers, the overeducated, the artists. Throughout history, in societies around the world and in every age, these are the kind of people who come up with the new ideas. Again, this is not surprising; these are the people who tend to be well-read, have a wide knowledge of what has worked and what hasn't, and have the educational and social background that prepares them to see where changes need to be made and accept that they have to happen. It seems pretty obvious that both forces are completely necessary to a healthy culture. The rate of innovation should never exceed our ability to assimilate and understand the innovations. In an ideal world, the two forces are properly balanced so that we're never stuck with harmful institutions, old or new, for longer than it takes to realize that they're harmful. Isn't that nice?

But then there's politics, which is a whole other kettle of openly self-serving, corrupt fish whose cold, black hearts are turbulent, howling maelstroms of short-sighted cupidity and who would sell their own mothers for a vote. And the funny thing about politics is that it's so far removed from the legislative process it's comical. So on the one side -- the left, to use a term that hasn't really been applicable since the French Legislative Assembly of 1791 -- are politicians who support things like gay rights, women's rights, and ecological conservatism, things that aren't really condoned by our traditions; and on the other side are the people who want to conserve those traditions by, for example, illegalizing gay marriage, banning abortion, and burning lots of petroleum and petroleum byproducts. Simple, right? One side advocates radical change, the other caution. All this makes sense.

And, of course, around here is where the whole thing falls apart. In a number of ways, to tell the truth. We'll ignore for a moment the fact that the Constitution is pretty clear on many of these issues, much clearer than you'd realize if you haven't, you know, read it. Zing! We'll also gloss right over the part where for some reason, people think "I'm a Republican, but I disagree with their policies on abortion, gay rights, the war in Iraq, social services, and education" somehow makes more sense than "I'm a Catholic, but I don't really believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, nor in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." Speaking of the Catholic Church, I'm going to wait until another day to wonder why their opposition to abortion is the alpha and omega of U.S. policy regarding the issue, but their opposition to the death penalty is completely ignored. All these are issues we can deal with another time. Right now, I'm a man with a mission. The enemy's gate is down.

Here's what I want to say: remember at the beginning, when I talked about how the argument of Democrat v. Republican is really the question of Big Government v. Small Government? And remember just now, when I named a whole mess of issues where the Grand Old Party wants to enact stricter laws and the Democrats want to relax the laws? I didn't even mention drug laws, education, our quasi-imperial foreign policy, surveillance of private citizens, for Christ's sake . . . the list goes on and on. Certainly, the Democrats advocate more federal restriction in the areas of the environment, big business, and social welfare programs, but overall, the trend is clearly toward Republicans trying to do more to ruin your day and Democrats trying to do less. Do you know what it's called when someone claims to be doing one thing and is actually doing another? It's called fraud.

There are a lot of complaints about the two-party system. The most common one I've heard since H. Ross Perot was making a mockery of the electoral process back when I was in fourth grade has been that it tends to drown out any dissenting voices. This is a problem, to be sure; Ralph Nader had a lot of good points to make about ways we could improve the government, but amid all the shenanigans he had to go through just to be heard at all we lost his message altogether. I'd say that those shenanigans also cost the Democrats the 2000 election, but we actually won that one. Oh, snap! Anyway, my point is, as big a problem as that is, I don't think it's the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. The problem is that the two-party system encourages -- requires, even -- the kind of lazy thinking that makes democracy meaningless. The voters get lazy because they don't really have to make decisions or have opinions anymore. If you've been a Democrat since childhood, then the Democratic Party has told you exactly what you should do, and you can just follow the step-by-step instructions they've laid out for you. This is the part where dissenting voices tend to get left out; if you assume you're with the Democratic Party, then it doesn't make you want to start agitating for change if you decide one day that you actually don't think welfare is a great idea. You still go along with the general consensus; you just sort of go along with The Party. That's where we are now: if most people agree with most of one party's policies, then all people have to live with all of that party's policies. That was never the goal of this republic. The politicians are supposed to be responsible, and the will of the people is supposed to be their unfailing guide. Getting 51% of the vote is not now, nor has it ever been, a mandate to do whatever you want.

If it's bad for the voters, it's almost worse for the candidates. In order to succeed in Washington, you have no choice but to be a member of one of the two big parties. Otherwise you're only a step removed from the nut on the street corner shouting that the Antichrist is on his way and gummint satellites are shooting slave rays into your skull and a maximum wage would actually go a long way toward stabilizing our economy, reducing the gap between rich and poor, and deflating the plutocracy that's been growing in this country since the Industrial Revolution. But you can't succeed within the party unless you do what they say. So you become a shill. QED. It's a sad reality of succeeding in Washington in the two-party system. But it also means that really new ideas have pretty close to zero chance of ever being heard, let alone acted upon.

So there you have it: Hegel was right all along, and we've reached the end of history. The United States government is a zero-sum equation. The two parties are meaningless and will maintain the status quo indefinitely. Unless, of course, people like you and I stop pretending that we like the way things are going. A store that gets no business has no choice but to fold. So if there were only some way to let those in power know that we're fed up with the lies and the round-the-clock mudslinging. It would really be great if there were some way the American people could all say together that they want Capitol Hill to stop being a bizarre Manichean chess game and become a dynamic exchange and development of ideas. There's got to be some way that we could, like, write our views on paper and give them to the people in charge. Or even better, what if we could decide who was in charge? Maybe, only allow in people who have some semblance of honesty and support the values we believe in. Wouldn't it be great if we could decide who was going to govern us?

Sorry, that's probably silly. I don't know what came over me. The best thing to do is probably change as little as we possibly can about our current governmental system and maintain the party affiliations we've had since elementary school. It's safer. Oh, and can I please borrow those sunglasses sometime? They're sharp.

2007-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Mama, don't let your children grow up to be philosophers --

I'm posting this from my sister's apartment in Manhattan. I love New York, I really do. Today on the subway, I had a conversation in Irish. No lie. Dude's from Belfast, and we chatted about how much I like Joyce. I talked to a nice lady in Hawaiian for a little while, too, but my sister called and I had to go. I guess I'm kind of a one-trick pony. But it's a good trick.

That's not the point. The point is, I packed pretty light, for me. What this means in terms of actual practice is that I brought the usual amount of clothing (not enough), the usual number of toiletries (not enough, but enough because I'm staying with my sister), and less than the usual number of books (one for the whole trip instead of three for each day spent away from my library). I tend to be fairly generous when I'm packing books for what I assure you are purely practical reasons: suppose I'm sitting on the subway, and it's only two stops, but I get really bored and want to read something? There's no point in pulling out The Master and Margarita for two stops. So I like to have a little book of poetry. And I always have some kind of philosophy book I've been working on, but what if it's late at night and I'm too tired for philosophy? I have to have some fiction, then, don't I? It's just common sense.

I disobeyed all my own rules this time by just bringing one book (although it is a particularly great one), which was fine -- better than fine, in fact, because this book really is very insightful -- until I, of course, finished it as soon as I got to Mathu's apartment. So here I was with nothing to read, just because I felt the need to prove to myself that I wasn't addicted. People: I am here to tell you that I am addicted. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

So, in order to fight off withdrawal symptoms, I asked my sister if she had anything to recommend in her library. She gave me some vague answer about how what was hers was mine and then ran off to one of her seventeen jobs. This was last night, so I think it was the one where she wrestles alligators in order to turn little kids' untreatable tumors into delicious candy. Unless maybe it was that thing she apparently does with the Justice League. Anyway, the important thing is that because she had to run to work, she didn't have time to help me find a book. I swear, people are so selfish sometimes.

So: she left, I ate the extraordinary enchiladas she made me, and I glanced over her shelves to see what was likely to entertain me. And lo and behold, I heard angels singing and saw a book I found interesting by a guy I find totally dreamy. And since I picked this book up, it's been nothing short of a Herculean task to put it down. This thing is incredible. It's engaging, it's thought-provoking, it's startlingly well-written. And I know I'm biased -- it's probably been about six months since I've referred to Senator Obama as anything other than a dreamboat -- but as someone who's read an awful lot in my time, I feel that I do have some basis on which to judge its literary merits. And it really is quite meritorious. Even if you don't like the senator from Illinois -- and there is a "column" coming up on teams and party prejudice, don't you worry -- you really owe it to yourself to read at least some of this book. It tells a compelling story in a way that raises a lot of questions and really does make you think about race in different ways. I'm about 150 pages in (keep in mind, this is the progress I've made in about 24 hours including a four-hour job interview and watching a two-hour film) and I'm already a little better for having read it.

It took me half a "column" to get this far, but I do have a point. I was going to vote for Barack Obama as hard as I could and as often as I could pretty much no matter what. But reading this book really impressed me because I was surprised that a professional politician could also have a real literary talent. But it got me thinking, and I did a little research. President Clinton published his memoir amid a blaze of publicity last year. President Kennedy famously wrote Profiles in Courage and that book about immigration. President Carter, meanwhile, has been quietly cultivating quite the literary career, and has now apparently written everything from political opinion pieces to children's books. Because what we needed, right, was more reasons to love Jimmy Carter.

Here's where it gets interesting. Get on Google and try to find books by Ronald Reagan (ptui!). Now try George Bush, Sr. If you're really bored, you can try Bush Jr, but you know and I know how that will end up, so I'm not going to ask you to or anything. Hell, try Nixon if you want. It's still a free country.

So I ask you: why do all these famously liberal presidents and politicians write books, and all these luminaries of modern conservatism don't? It really is getting to the point where it's, you know, a thing. I know that it's tempting to say it's because our guys are great and their guys suck, but that's an awfully facile answer and really not worthy of us or them. There's got to be something more serious going on here.

Here's my theory. The kind of people who write books -- good books, I mean, not dime-store crap -- are the kind of people who read books. No, that's not entirely accurate; really, they're the kind of people who are compelled to read, who remember life lessons learned from pages just as vividly as those learned from experience, who have favorite novels that they think of as fondly as old friends who have gone away, who would sooner live in a house without a bathroom than a house without a bookshelf. There's a word for these people, and it's recently become a very dirty word, a filthy, filthy word that shouldn't be repeated in mixed company, so I'll ask that if you're underage, or have a heart condition, or just don't like bad language, that you avert your eyes for the next paragraph.

The word is intellectual.

And it's really sad how far that word has fallen in the popular imagination. Even I, avowed intellectual, hereditary intellectual, proud intellectual, self-proclaimed Army Chaplain in the Culture War, even I feel a little awkward just typing it. Because we're not supposed to be intellectuals anymore. There's an unspoken feeling that intellectuals are sort of effete, useless, freeloaders, not honest hardworking folk like you and me. If, through some flaw in your upbringing or genetic material (or, as in my case, both), you should discover that you are an intellectual, you're supposed to hide your torch under a bush. The last thing you want is for people to identify you as part of the liberal academic elite.

I would love to just say that this is proof that the American Left are the Good Guys, that we can all rest easy in our liberalism because the smart people are the liberals. I can't just because I know it's not that simple. The blue-collar aesthetic affected by the Grand Old Party is bullshit, but so, if we're totally honest, is the revolutionary ethos of the Democrats. And while it's cheap and sloppy and facile to say that you're just buying into the system, man, you're just playing by their rules -- well, you are. Being a member of the more educated of the two parties is meaningless if every time the President says troops you ask how many. The two-party system really is just an elaborate puppet show, now, and the entire democratic system as we currently practice it is a thinly-veiled excuse to stuff politicians' pockets. There's nothing radical or revolutionary about saying that; everyone who has ever observed standard Capitol Hill operations will admit it, including the participants.

But now and then, when I learn something like the number of books published by Jimmy Carter as opposed to the number published by Ronald Reagan (ptui!), I like to sit back for a moment, close my eyes, and pretend I'm in a different America. Maybe the America of the Founding Fathers, or maybe one that hasn't arrived yet. I like to think of what it must be like to live in an America that values things like being able to read and write great books, or knowing how to speak Irish and Hawaiian, or understanding the historical background of a situation you're trying to pass a law about. Can you imagine an America where we admit that ideas and knowledge matter?

When the debates and circuses for this next election really get moving, I would love, just once, to see someone say, Well, I simply have to vote for Senator Obama -- I mean, have you read his book?

2007-03-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

There will be a quiz --

So, I have a problem. I guess I have a lot of problems. In 2006, I had a steady problem growth curve of about 36% per day. In 2007, that rate of increase has become less regular, aligning itself with rates of dog barks leading up to the full moon (see Fig. A.)

Sorry. One of my problems is that I'm easily distracted. So, the problem I'm dealing with right now is my notebook addiction. In discussion with some friends, the subject of note-taking came up. One commentator remarked that she really loves using Moleskine notebooks. And I looked at the website and -- hand to God, now -- I seriously considered buying one. I should mention that for the last couple of weeks, I've been seriously thinking about what I would have to do to start writing little pieces like this for a living, and the obvious answer was journalism. (How come no one ever thought of that before?) So I was looking at all those notebooks, and I felt the itch of desire for acquisition that I feel so rarely and am so guilty about when it comes. I was so thoroughly seized by the itch this time that I bought a knockoff Moleskine from Barnes and Noble's today. For half the price of the genuine article. Eat me, Madison Avenue.

The point is, even being wise enough to save five bucks by buying a sub-par Moleskine, I was spectacularly stupid for even considering buying a notebook of any kind. Any kind. Hello, my name is Ram and I have a notebook addiction. It's nothing short of a neurosis. By a rough count, right now, not getting up and looking, I have the following: three standard-size spiral notebooks, three composition books, four bound journals,three books of staff paper, two little reporter-style top-flip books, two legal pads, and a whole sea of slips of paper, sheets of paper, packets of paper, folded-up hats of paper, every conceivable shape of page with notes, song lyrics, quotations, plots of novels -- you get the idea. I have a lot of goddamn notebooks is the idea. And if this doesn't effectively explain the extent of the problem, my room isn't what you'd call organized. So I can't get dressed in the morning without upsetting about three half-full notebooks and a half-dozen empty ballpoint pens. When the phone rings, I have to dig into a hip-deep pile of notebooks to find it. If I want to open a window, I'm shit out of luck, because the windows are all barricaded behind towering, teetering walls of sketchbooks and steno pads.

That bit about half-full is the problem. I have this pathology about opening up new notebooks. Part of it may well be the neuroses I inherited from my forefathers about every new beginning having to be auspicious. I do have that problem in my life, and I find it to get in the way of what should be simple activities like starting to write a novel or making lunch. And what this means is that when I pick up a new notebook for the first time, it's a tremendous act of confidence in whatever new endeavor I'm about to embark upon. If I start a notebook to write my dreams every morning, it means that I'm certain that I will be continuing this practice for at least as long as it takes to fill up the notebook. If I'm starting a new journal, diary, or what-have-you, I just can't get myself to feel good about it unless I know that I'm going to carry it through to the bitter end.

And that's the real issue. My big problem is my total inability to finish a single damn thing I start. So I've got all these notebooks half-filled with half-finished ideas lying all over every aspect of my life. That's what really bothers me about the notebook addiction, to be honest: if I just kept one notebook regularly, and had anything to write in it, I would feel a lot more comfortable with the whole thing. The appeal of notebooks to me is the appeal of the idea of notebooks. I like thinking of myself as the type of creative element who finds life unliveable without a notebook on my person at all times in case I have a great idea. Recently, seized as I've been with journalism dreams, I find that I'm growing even more interested in notebooks qua notebooks. Not that I have any idea where that could possibly productively lead. It's not as though I conduct interviews or anything like that. I really don't have anything in particular to write in these notebooks I'm so obsessed with acquiring.

I know I'm always searching for symbolism in everything, and I'm sorry. But I can't help but see in my compulsive note-taking a deeper-down urge to prove myself creatively. I don't fancy the notebooks as much as I want to be the kind of person who has to be filling up a notebook at all times. I imagine most people in our generation, all of whom are supposed to be artists for some reason, have at least one little habit like this cultivated out of a desire to seem a little cooler than we are. It's hard for me to say, because many of the people I see regularly enough to observe these habits really are that cool.

I always work very hard to end these "columns" strongly, since I know that's the hardest part most of the time. But in this particular case, I think it might be appropriate to just leave you here, just like this. Now you feel how all my best projects feel: begun with the best of intentions and the utmost enthusiasm, and allowed to die peacefully when something else came up. Ending not with a bang or a whimper, but simply with a refusal to take responsibility for seeing the project through to the end.

2007-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

The Pinot's divine --

So, a few months ago, my father got me a subscription to a certain respectable magazine on the grounds that, being literary types, we would both enjoy it. He had already gotten my sister a subscription a while before. Something you may or may not already know about the New Yorker is that it arrives weekly. So I have about two dozen issues of this glossy, shiny magazine lying in vaguely ordered stacks all over my room. Because as we all knew already, if there's one thing my room needs, it's more written matter.

Which is, I suppose, the whole problem. With my high-flying agenda of going to work, sleeping, and occasionally playing with the cat, I have a hard time finding a spare moment to just sit with a New Yorker and a tobacco pipe and read about high culture. Which is too bad, because there are invariably at least a couple of articles in every issue that strike me as completely fascinating. In what I assume is the latest issue -- there are so many now that it's hard to tell, but this one is right in front of me and has a very recent date -- I see an article about Sri Lanka, one on new findings about the Cretaceous Period, and one about the history of duelling. Seriously. Duelling. I know this only because just now, in the interest of verisimilitude, I picked it up and looked at the table of contents. I haven't even looked at the cartoons in this one yet.

I blame my failure to read this magazine on my lack of time, but if I'm totally honest, that's not entirely fair. I should admit that deep down, the New Yorker always makes me feel like a bit of a poser. I'm used to this feeling. In 2001, I enrolled in a fairly prestigious music school as a French horn major, of all things. I stayed in the music school for three years, although I did change my major to composition after one, and I never stopped feeling like some kind of spy. Again, it's the High Fidelity problem: I was sure that at any moment my classmates would come upon my beaten-up copy of Bringing Down the Horse and I'd be found out. I would have to walk home with my head hung low in shame. I never really made friends with my classmates, but I really never tried, truth be told. They just weren't my people. My people played video games, read Douglas Adams, knew the name of Luke's wingman in A New Hope (it's Wedge Antilles, you philistine). I think I'm a pretty talented composer, and I know an awful lot about music, but I really was just never one of them. I'm not positive I could tell you why.

Before my senior year of college, I changed my major to creative writing. This was slightly closer to a set that I could comfortably call my people. These were people that quoted T.S. Eliot in casual conversation, watched "Arrested Development," wrote double-dactyls for fun. But they had also been together for the last three years getting to know each other and developing their own subculture. And I refused to accept their little addictions and in-jokes, somehow. They all thought they were very smart; I thought they were mostly pretty mediocre, with a few really spectacular exceptions. And I won't have you thinking ill of me -- I'm not saying I've ever thought I was anything but mediocre. I'm remarkably mediocre. I'm exceptionally medocre. I'm extraordinary in my mediocrity. Anyway: I never bought into the basic aesthetic of the college English major. So I never really fit in there, either. My prose isn't terrible, and I've read an awful lot of books, but I really just never fit in with them, either. Again: I'm not sure why not. It just turned out that way.

Which brings us to the New Yorker. Because while I will read anything you put in front of me, and gleefully devoured the New Yorker articles my father used to send me in the mail before he got me the subscription, I have a lot of trouble buying into the, you know, crowd associated with the New Yorker. The events pages describe a whole mess of happenings that no one would ever think to invite me to. I will never read most of the books that get reviewed. The writers' quietly superior tone frequently irks me a lot. And it's not because of any problem with the magazine, which covers a whole world of topics that frankly enthrall me. It's really just my constant feeling of insecurity, and my fear that one day, the Secret Gestapo New Yorker Poseur Identification and Neutralization Squad will bust in through my windows and call me out. That will be a cold and sad day for me, watching the SGNYI&NS agents rapelling down my walls, getting down on the ground with my hands behind my head, waiting for the cavity search and the harrowing interrogation under a single blazing light. No, sir, I have no idea what the difference is between a Chardonnay and a Chablis, and frankly, I don't care much, because I don't drink wine. And I'll be honest with you -- I really didn't get that one cartoon where the two sheep are looking up at the sky and the one sheep is telling the other one, "Grandpa's up there somewhere." Could you explain that to me, please, officer?

I still, out of love both for my father and for information, glance through the New Yorker religiously every week, scanning for articles that will be delightful to read just a little while later, when I have the time. There's one about Steve Reich that I have to get to, because I really like Steve Reich. And there's one about the storytelling tradition in Rajasthan, India. That should be great. But every time, after lying on my desk open to the appropriate page for about three and a half weeks, the magazines find themselves scooped up en masse and rudely shoved onto the closet shelf that I've reserved for that purpose. It's a sad life, being a magazine for me; I wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors. But you know and I know that I'm never going to get into any of those magazines. Even if I had the time, let's face it: I'm just not cool enough.

2007-03-07T01:38:00.000-05:00

All's right with the world --

While I was at work today, Mark sent me a Gchat message about an article he was reading about religion and evolution. Only it's not what you think. The question raised by this article is: even if we assume that God does not exist, what possible evolutionary advantage is there to religion that has propagated it so thoroughly for so long? The essential thesis being whatever it was Voltaire said about how if God didn't exist, we would be obliged to create Him. This is an intriguing argument, and it's got implications that reflect upon our entire society in all its aspects. The question I have about this article is the question I asked Mark, which is this: who gives a shit?

The argument that we would create a God in a universe without One is old and, to my mind, completely uninteresting. In a lecture to his students, Ludwig Wittgenstein made a point that I really admire but have never, until now, found a good opportunity to use. He asked his student, "Why did people think the sun went around the Earth for so long?" To which the student sensibly replied, "Because that's how it looks." So Wittgenstein, with the condescending smirk that I'm sure so endeared him to the Cambridge faculty, says, "Fine, then -- but how would it look if it were otherwise?"

The point being this: we're stuck in this world, with these surprisingly versatile but still frustrating instruments to perceive everything that happens, ever, and given that context, it's hard to say whether we're in a world with a God, a world with a Vengeful God, a world with a Sleeping God, a world with a Deranged God, a world with a God Who Was Just About To Get To That Seriously Don't Worry About It . . . you get the idea. The point is that we need to accept that this just isn't a realm where we can use the kind of rational tools we're used to. This is a problem for a lot of people because scientists are attached to science and religionists are attached to religion. You know. Religionists. And this is a problem for philosophers most of all, because philosophers try to be both.

So what we've essentially got is a whole mess of confused ideas flying helter-skelter and pell-mell everywhere with no sense or decorum. And the reason that it's so impossible to sort through it all is that it's like trying to piece together the events of a boxing match based on the testimony of three drunk old blind guys who don't really understand boxing. Or English. Only one was even at the game; the other two just talked to him about it afterward. Badly. You'll have to speak up, Lenny's ear hasn't really been the same since The War. What's that? Oh, no, you're thinking of a right hook. What really happened was a right hook flattened the guy, and then the other guy -- oh, no I see what you're saying there. You're talking about the other time. No, no, see, what you're referring to is that an invisible force flattened him. Oh, you can't prove that it exists -- but you can't prove that it doesn't. No, no, the other guy didn't have one, and you can't offer any proof that he did. It was a good clean bout, all above the belt, totally aboveboard, only I think I saw that guy in the Roman collar making mooneyes at an underaged boy over there -- a minority, no less, can you imagine! -- so all of a sudden I'm questioning whether or not the collar actually means anything, since the action of this one deranged guy is really making the entire institution of which he is a tiny part seem pretty dumb. Oh, no, wait, that's not what I meant. I meant at the end of the third round when he hit him right in the breadbasket -- I thought he was done for -- and oh, I would have prayed right then, but even if there were no point I would have done it anyway because it would have made me feel better.

Douglas Adams makes the very good point that religion is hard to deal with maturely because it's a whole realm of human experience that no one is allowed to really think about. If I forced my children to spend all of Saturday sitting in the dark it would be looney, but because I say it's Shabbat and I'm obliged to, all of a sudden people all over the world bend over backwards to accomodate me. When our small friend and I are out at a restaurant, no one bats an eye when I say that I'm vegetarian because I'm Hindu, but there is tremendous consternation when she mentions that she doesn't eat meat because she doesn't really like it. And on and on. This kind of thing happens everywhere, and the reason is that we all sort of think, deep down, that all this is probably bullshit, and we have every reason to believe it is, but what if it's not? The article I referenced at the very beginning mentions Scott Altran's social experiment in which he brings out a wooden box which he claims is an ancient African relic. If you put something in it and have no reverence for religion, the box will destroy it. Even people who ought to know better hesitate a moment before putting their hands in the box. Because we are religious people, raised in a religious society, and there is no cure for a disease that is part of who and what you are. That's just how it is, and we should all be prepared to deal with it.

But at the same time, there's a reason why it is the way it is. I'm one of the most devoutly religious people I know. Top five, easy. And I'm also -- well, I'm hesitant to say smartest. I do a lot of dumb things. But I certainly have a much wider array of facts at my disposal than many people do. I could tell you, for example, the lineage of the Bible as we have it today, from the original Hebrew through Greek and Latin into English and other vernaculars. And I could also give you an explanation of quantum physics that, if it didn't satisfy you as such, would at least be mostly accurate. Most of the way through. As long as we didn't get into the hard stuff. The point I'm trying to make is that I have no problem reconciling the idea that the scientific method is the best and most powerful tool we have for understanding our universe with the idea that there exists something divine in this world and that it's in our best interest to seek it out wherever it hides. And no one who really thoroughly understands both science and religion actually has a problem with either. But we live in a time when everyone has a certain level of education and most have no more than they have to, with the result that everyone around us knows enough about science to take the mystery out of life and not enough to rejuvenate that mystery, and enough about religion to take the fun out of life and not enough to make the fun more meaningful. And that's where the the science-and-religion debate stands in today's America: vast armies of undereducated theologians and humorless scientists squaring off across a field of trivia and inanity. Both sides make the same point over and over again, and in most cases, both sides are correct when they make those points.

It is in my best interest to prolong this argument as long as possible, being as I am a minister and a humble servant of the Living God, so that I can talk as much as possible about three of my top five subjects, which are (in no particular order) religion, spirituality, and unabashed balls-to-the-wall hair-splitting. (The other two, just so's you know, are language and songs I like.) And even if it weren't, as long as the clamor of voices keeps raging across the intellectual climate, it's going to be my responsibility to keep abjectly begging for a little peace and sanity. But, for the record, I want everyone who can to pay attention, so that later you can testify that you were here, reading, when I brought this whole goddamn idiocy of a theodicy to its rhetorical demise.

Stubborn, joyless scientific dullards: You're Right. Rational thought is the only reliable tool we have for analyzing our universe. But it's not a very good tool for analyzing ourselves. Rationality will never explain, for example, how the artist produces art. It arises from the unconscious self in a way that cannot be explained with the rhetorical, philosophical, and perceptual tools that we have been using to unravel all the other mysteries of the universe. Accept that, and revel in it, because, let's face it, the real fun isn't in knowing, it's in finding out. It's not as though God is a mystery that will never be revealed; It's a mystery that anyone can reveal to himself or herself with a little effort. All it takes is a willingness to perform a completely different type of experiment, one that has worked in practice for thousands of years around the world. Just because there's no proof for God doesn't mean God doesn't exist; it could also mean that God is just a different sort of Thing than we've been believing for a while, and we need a different way of thinking to accomodate it. I'm not saying that the scientific community should all come down to the temple with me tomorrow; all I'm suggesting is that given that lack of proof is not and has never been proof of lack, any scientist worth his or her salt should be willing to actually scientifically investigate the matter. That means attacking the Religious Question on its own terms, with meditation and other related religious exercises. Nearly everyone who can make a plausible case for having experienced the Divine claims to have had very similar preparation for the experience. If you really want to know the truth of religion, the only way you can find out about it is to experience it.

Slow-thinking, bigoted religious troglodytes: You're Right. The persistence of the religious impulse in mankind, the need to explain the irrational, the inexplicable beauty of the human eye, blah blah blah, we get it, there's probably something we don't understand. But we're not going to understand it while you're around. All you people have done, for as long as you've been able to get away with doing it, is make a whole lot of noise that made the pious stupid, the intelligent heretic, and everyone in between a civilian casualty. You've been poisoning the minds of people who could otherwise benefit from religion to give them an allergic reaction to it that they will never shed. The Buddha compared religion to a boat, which is wholly necessary when you're using it but just a burden once you're across the river. I understand that, as professional ferrymen, the clergy and other ontological go-betweens are wary of too many people escaping their flock, but they don't really understand their religion that well if that concerns them so much. No one really paid attention when Jesus said that anyone with a tiny bit of fiath could do the same things he did. If we've all got that kind of power in us, then why do we need you, Slow-Thinking Bigoted Religious Troglodyte, to make God do all our work for us? The Koran specifically states that no one can come between a human being and God, and yet that's exactly what you people are making a career out of doing. We'll work out our own damnations, thank you.

So. I hope that cleared it up nicely. Now please, both of you, shut the hell up. I've had a long day and I want to sleep.

2007-03-05T02:02:00.000-05:00

And the crowd goes wild! --

Aaron's been all about the hockey recently. I guess that's not entirely accurate; Aaron's been all about the hockey since long before we met. What's more accurate is that the hockey has been getting more intense recently as the playoffs approach, so he's been more visibly all about it than usual. Almost every other day, I can hear him shoutin' and hollerin' and carryin' on in the next room. Professional sports have never really appealed to me much; only my extraordinary love of Pittsburgh has gotten me to enjoy the Steelers, and even that sputtered out a bit this season when they started losing. But watching someone who enjoys anything this much is really kind of inspiring. If nothing else, it inspires me to think about the socio -- you know.

The thing about the kind of fanatical devotion people have for sports teams is that I can't tell whether I think it's an overall good thing for society or not. I love the way it brings people together, obviously. Having been around for the big Superbowl victory last year, I would have to be deaf and blind not to appreciate the magnitude of empathetic emotion roused in this city by the failures and successes of Our Own Sweet Boys. And it's also worth noting that sports fandom really does bring together people who support rival teams, too, in a way that's hard to describe. But you're nodding right now if you've experienced it. You know exactly what it's like to be in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people, and you mention your team, and the next thing you know you're in a heated argument with someone who virulently disagrees with you about every aspect of the sport who nonetheless is a new and genuine friend by the end of the conversation. It's a common ground; it's something we can all participate in together, even though we're working toward different ends. That idea really appeals to me.

But at the same time, the unabashed atavism of the thing really does bother me. One of my more elaborate theories of human history -- and, before you judge it too harshly, it's one of the newer ones, one whose rough edges I'm still trying to smooth out -- is that our entire cultural and philosophical development up to this point has been a movement away from the kind of groupthink that is and has always been the professional sports world's bread and butter. The really big victories of ideological history seem to tend toward the focus on the individual. Certain philosophers have suggested that the real reason for the victory of the Europeans over the Americans was the European respect for individuality as something to be treasured rather than shunned, and that the true conquest was ideological rather than military. That's an idea that speaks to me intuitively, because to me it seems to help explain the rampant spread of the European ethos across the globe. Whether or not the Western respect for individuality and independence is a good thing, per se, it's certainly becoming the norm from sea to shining sea and from the North Pole to the South. And I think there's a case to be made that understanding and nurturing one's uniqueness is a necessary facet of healthy spiritual development. Regardless, whether it's desirable or not, this kind of thinking is clearly the future, and the sports-fan nationalist groupthink encouraged by Führern and coaches alike goes against it. It doesn't have to, certainly, if you know what you're doing, but left unchecked, it clearly will. And that does concern me a little.

Regardless, professional sports fandom is something I always wanted to be a part of but never could. I always felt like Rob in High Fidelity: as though at any moment, someone would go through my old yearbooks and diaries and scream out to the world, "Ram is faking it! He didn't always love the Hadysburg Hyenas! He's a goddamn newbie! He's not one of us at all!" That thought bothers me not because I'm concerned about what the community would think but because if I'm going to dedicate myself to a cause like that, I want to do it all the way. I know, deep down, that I'll never be able to do that with sports. Part of me will always know that I just started doing this because it kind of seemed like fun, and not out of a genuine outpouring of emotion, and that part will rebel endlessly against the rest of me.

And there is a lot about following a sports team around that speaks deeply to my nature. The most important, of course, being the gorgeous opportunity to accumulate more knowledge. Being an expert in a specific sport and a specific team is terribly attractive to me in that it's one more field of interesting facts that I can sift through, collect, run through my fingers like sand, gather in piles in the corners of my room and go through on snowy afternoons when I'm lonely and there's nothing on TV. The appeal is really in being able to learn and share my knowledge -- just like all my other interests, I suppose. I'm really a pretty simple creature, deep down.

The thing is: it came to my attention fairly recently that I do follow a professional sport. Rabidly. I've been keeping track of statistics, watching my favorite players, rooting for my favorite team even when they stopped being good, going to every possible home game and a pretty fair number of away games, and even sending in the odd fan letter every now and then. The sport, of course, is politics, and it's one that has enthralled me since I was fairly young. I love watching a good campaign, from beginning to end. I can spend hours -- literally hours; I nearly got in trouble for it at work -- poring over old voting records, finding copies of ancient speeches, watching the development of party platforms and the platforms of individual politicians. This shit is just endlessly entertaining to me. I will be enjoying this show for years.

And the problem is that, as interesting and fun as this game is to follow, it's really not the game we should be paying attention to. I love a good demographic chart as much as -- probably more than -- the next guy, but it's missing the point in every possible respect. Politics is not an end in itself, it's a byproduct. It's a necessary evil that we put up with because it's an inevitable result of the way we handle democracy. The more attention we pay to who's voting for whom, and who went to what fundraiser, and who appeared on what television show promoting whose campaign, the less attention we're paying to the important bit: what these people will do when they're elected This is not a high school student government election we're talking about. This is the process by which our nation selects the people who decide how we live. You can watch a news program -- any news program, I'm not picky -- for days on end, carefully scrutinizing every second of their political coverage, and never hear a word about anyone's policies. I know because I have done it. The analogy I keep using, because I'm particularly proud of it, is that it's like watching a show where commentators comment on commentators: "Well, Jerome did something there that I don't really agree with -- instead of remarking on the yardage gained, he remarked on the strange play by the defense there. Is that something we see a lot?" "Well, you know, that's sort of his commenting style. He tends to focus on the things he thinks you're not likely to have noticed yourself, you know."

You would not watch that show. No one would watch that show. And yet we all love watching the equivalent of that in political reportage. We must love it. Because we live in a capitalist society, and if we didn't love it, it wouldn't exist. There's a lot of complaining being done about the American news industry, and with good reason: they're sloppy, they're lazy, they're biased, they're greedy, they're power-mad, they're obessed with the lowest common denominator -- whatever you say, I'll agree with you. The Fourth Estate in this country is reprehensible and it has been years since they have done their jobs. They anger me like very little else can even hope to do. But the thing, the really infuriating thing, is that if you stop giving these people money and attention, they'll shrivel up like thirsty houseplants. The only requirement to be successful in this country is to fill a demand. If the people demand news that means anything, then whoever fills that need will be a moral and financial success unbelievably quickly. All we have to do is ask. It's odd that we haven't.

Anyway: there's a continuation of this thought coming soon, in which I will consider (loudly!) the significance of and problems with the two-party system, probably using an extended simile between the parties and sports teams. But I'm already approaching my self-imposed word limit. I will mention, before I go, that on my Fantasy Democracy League, Barack Obama is currently leading the pack in just about all the major statistics. Plus, he's a total dreamboat.

I know it's a little self-contradictory, and I'm sorry. But I will not -- let's be fair, I cannot lie to you. No matter how much the news media reform themselves, and no matter if the problem I've been complaining about for years resolves itself and we find ourselves living in a world where policies matter and politics is a regrettable and mostly-ignored sideshow, I will stick with my team. I'm addicted to this sport. And come hell or high water, I will see you at the Big Game in November 2008. I am all about the politics.

Go team.

2007-03-02T12:31:00.000-05:00

An Apology --

The management regrets to inform you that Ram has not slept or eaten in about two weeks and is currently laboring under the delusion that he can control traffic lights and shatter glass with his mind. This being the case, he will not be producing a "column" today. Expect a glorious resurgence of his throbbing purple prose on Monday.

2007-02-27T22:50:00.000-05:00

What you get is no tomorrow --

This post will be link-free. This will save me quite some time, which is nice, because I don't have a whole lot. That's not the point, though. The point is that I don't want to be Part Of The Problem. In this particular case, The Problem is the amount of attention paid to celebrities and their antics -- or, more accurately, the always-fascinating sociopolitical implications of that attention. And to keep linking the things I'm talking about will only exacerbate the problem. Really, talking about it at all, and encouraging you to use psychic space for its consideration, is already irretrievably making me Part Of The Problem. If The Problem were Field Day at my elementary school, I would get a certificate for participation. If The Problem were the Vietnam War, I would be whatever the opposite of a conscientious objector is -- going home in a bag, I guess.

The thing is that for some reason, we as a society have given up on assigning fame for achievements or respect or anything concrete at all. Fame is an end in itself. I suppose that that's always been true, but it seems like our society has a great deal more respect for fame qua fame than previous generations. This isn't The Problem as such; we're leading up to it. You're going to have to be a little patient, is all. I understand that this kind of fascination with the upper classes is intrinsic to human society as we understand it, and I'm certainly not criticizing. Fashions have always been determined by those in the higher social strata. All that's changed is what defines the hierarchy. In the past, social standing has frequently been determined by birth, which really helps put my current gripe into perspective. How much worse would it be, after all, if the only qualification of those who determined our fashion and culture innovations were elected by genetics rather than by the whims of hoi polloi?

The ways in which class differences affect society are both too subtle and too huge to do justice here. Howard Zinn suggested that "The history of America is a history of class struggle," which I like because, let's face it, fuck the bourgeoise. Yes, I know that I grew up in a rich family in a Maryland suburb. I'm still of the people. When the revolution comes, I don't feel that there will be any question which side I'm on. Part of my security comes from my theory that class lines are shifting in twenty-first century America, and money and influence are becoming less prominent as determinants of social placement. The important thing now is your importance as a cultural icon. The actual worth or impact of your cultural contributions is more or less irrelevant. The advent of reality shows, especially the kind that are contests, has turned celebrity into a major life goal rather than a regrettable byproduct of contributing something worthwhile to your society. The only aim of one who has fully understood the significance of our culture is to escape from obscurity.

And you know what, that's fine. Later on, I'm going to write one of these about the misinterpretation in popular culture of the terms liberal and conservative, and when that happens I'm going to go back over some of these points in more detail. The general gist I want to get across now is that in any society, the young tend to be the innovators. Studies abound in the anthropological world of communities, both of humans and of animals, where an invention originates among the young and spreads only gradually after the death of the generation that opposed it. One major example is the oft-quoted story of the macaque tribe who discovered a new way to wash potatoes. The children taught each other the technique, all eager to learn this new and fascinating wrinkle on a process they'd been forced to carry out their whole lives. The older monkeys were reluctant, preferring the time-tested method they had gotten used to. Of course, within a decade, every monkey in the tribe became accustomed to washing their potatoes the new way, and an innovation had become a tradition.

This story appeals to me in a major way because it involves monkeys. But the principle is simple: cultures change and we should get used to it. A thing's not good because it's tradition, it's good because it's good. This seems obvious, and I'm sure most of the people reading this don't need convincing, but I do have a point. The point is that the statement this transformation of our society is ruinous to the values we hold dear is crap in any context. First of all, if cultures didn't change regularly, I would be scrawling this in ash on the wall of a cave, and the comment rock would be covered in complaints about how I'm taking up room that could be occupied by a picture of some dudes killing a bear. Goddamn bears. Second, it's just not possible for a person living at one time to make any kind of value judgment based on a comparison to another time. The changes our society goes through are just too big and too far beyond our level of perception for that kind of decision. Things change, people change, and it's not only impossible but really kind of stupid to try to stop it. Things happen as they do as a direct result of tremendous events whose causes were too far back for us to do anything about it. Deal with it.

All that was so that you would understand that I'm not complaining about the way modern society views celebrity, nor the change in those views that's obvious to anyone who tries a little to pay attention. It interests me more than anything else. As a pampered intellectual, I like to look from the turrets in my ivory tower and observe the big trends indicated by small events. That's just fascinating to me. If I knew more about the history of pop culture, I would really like to write a whole series of books about why we've turned out the way we have. Wouldn't that be interesting? I think it would, at any rate. But then, I spent this whole morning researching the influences of Arabic phonetics on the development of modern Persian. You know, for fun.

But there is a Problem. I started this off talking about a Problem, and by God, I'm not going to go to bed tonight until I've explained it to you. The Problem is this: about five months ago, I shaved my head. The Problem is, why am I not on the cover of every tabloid in the goddamn supermarket?

Anyone?

2007-02-26T01:09:00.000-05:00

God ana wat --

When I was a child, my dinner-table impressions of the over-the-top foreign accents I heard in cartoons were a source of endless amusement to my mother and my sister. For some reason, they (and, by extension, I) thought my ability to talk like Pepé le Pew made me some sort of linguistic savant. In retrospect, I suppose I should give myself credit for having, at such a young age, an interest in the mechanics of language, as well as the abiding mystery of what it is that makes languages different -- not on the obvious grammar and vocabulary level but deeper down, in the brain, where we assume language originates. This is an interest that has been with me all my life, and has fueled many of my more interesting intellectual experiments. The fire of my enthusiasm was fueled when I was in elementary school by my grandmother's swift and by no means exhaustive course in Tamil, the language of my parents, which by all rights I should have grown up fluent in. This whirlwind education, provided by my grandmother during one of her all-too-brief visits to the US, furnished me with a reasonable fluency in the Tamil script, which has remained with me to this day, and a basic understanding of grammar and mechanics of the language. But the most important thing I got out of it was a thirst to learn all the languages I could, as quickly as I could.

This is an interest -- or perhaps I should say compulsion -- that many will find unfamiliar, but most of the kind of people I associate with will understand immediately: the desire to learn a thing thoroughly, not out of any desire to use the information in any practical sense but just for itself, for the sake of knowing it. I had more than one close friend in high school who, more or less on a whim, learned about 110 digits of π; by the time I graduated, saying "three point one four" was enough to get a rather sizable choir all reciting the same litany with real passion. And I suppose that this is the same kind of person who memorizes huge swaths of poetry in order to have it at the tip of the tongue at a moment's notice. My father is this kind of person. Specifically, his peculiar talent is knowing the same little snippets of verse that everyone knows, but also knowing where it comes from and the few lines that surround it. If you mention around my father that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, he can inform you not only that what Pope actually said was learning, but also that one should drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring. But the important thing here is that he doesn't know these things specifically for the sake of quoting it in conversation. If he could never display this knowledge to anyone, I doubt that it would have a serious impact on his enjoyment of knowing that he knows it.

But we were talking about languages. When I was about nine or ten, my father decided that he was going to stop being an atheist and start being Hindu again. So he took us to classes at an institution called the Chinmaya Mission, which is actually a worldwide institution that has done wonders for bolstering Hindu culture both in India and abroad. (Some time in the near future, one of these columns will explain to you why that's necessary.) The first thing that happened on the first day that we attended these classes was my sister and I meeting a terribly interesting lady (or, as we call her in India, an auntie) who went on to spend roughly the next six years teaching me Sanskrit. I started out going because my father made me, but by the time I was learning the present tense indicative conjugations, I had fallen in love. To this day, there's little if anything that makes my heart sing in quite the same way as when I suddenly realize that I understand a truly beautiful line of Sanskrit verse. It's a strange language, unnecessarily complex in some ways, terribly intuitive in others, one whose sounds and phrases resonate in the bones of every Indian, even those who grew up here. I had already been memorizing Sanskrit prayers since I was much younger, as most Hindu children do, and even before I could understand it the poetry rattled off my tongue as easily as Beatles lyrics.

I'm not entirely sure whether or not my fledgling career in comparative linguistics would have flagged had I learned Tamil or Hindi in that time. It's impossible to say, of course, but it's definitely true that the tightly regulated structure of Sanskrit was very conducive to my interest in the secret inner parts of language, its bones and sinews. I learned Spanish in school, and by high school was good at it in a way that bewildered my classmates. They assumed that my skill came from all the years that I had put into it. I know now, as I think I only vaguely imagined then, that it was entirely because of my burning love for the subject. I picked up a little Latin in high school, too, and enough French to read children's books. (My Latin has improved since then; my French has not.) Seeing the similarities among all of these completely different tongues thrilled me the way that finding a bottle cap to play with thrills my cat. But that was just about the time that I was starting to be consumed by my love of music, and all of my other interests took a brief sabbatical until about the middle of college.

My junior year of college was when I started reading Tom Robbins, and this quest naturally brought me to Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, a book that started a little slow but that I devoured during a month in India when I had nothing else to read. The hero, Switters, among his other interests, shares my fascination with languages and what makes them go. Reading this book on hot afternoons in my uncle's apartment in Madras reminded me of the profound degree to which I had once enjoyed this pursuit, and when I got back to the States I found myself picking up literally every language book I found for a reasonable price -- which, on my college student budget, meant somewhere between five dollars and free. Even with those price restrictions, I still managed to amass a pretty reasonable collection. I quickly learned how to discern the helpful teach-yourself guides from the dispensible ones. The Made Simple series proved excellent: the German and Italian instalments are still on my shelf, and I have managed to fool native speakers into thinking I knew both tongues on more than one occasion. I love Italian an unreasonable amount as a result of that book. The guides for travelers, that promise "just enough" or "Greek for tourists" are probably effective enough, if that's what you're going for, but I've found that they bore me and represent poor pedagogy, at best. They've never really taught me what I want to know, which is the kind of grammar rules that everyone else tries so hard to avoid.

Which brings me to the Pimsleur method, which was originally supposed to be the subject of this entire post. I took a class on Linguistics and Society with someone who turned out to be one of my favorite professors, and he mentioned in passing how effective these Pimsleur recordings were. So when my job recently turned into spending weeks at a time driving around bringing rich people overpriced food, I remembered his advice and picked up a couple of the CD sets from the library (Hebrew and Mandarin, if you're wondering). I was floored. The CDs were fun and interesting, and in the guise of being exactly the sort of watered-down just enough guides that I was just complaining about, they very slyly provide a good basis from which to more thoroughly learn grammar and mechanics, if you are so inclined. They represent everything I believe in not just in language education, but in education in general: that school and classes are not the end but the beginning of education, and a good lesson in anything should serve primarily as a preparation for the students to teach themselves the rest of the material. With the basis of the Pimsleur recordings, one is fully ready to stride off into Tel Aviv or Beijing or Jakarta or wherever and just start learning from one's mistakes. The CDs teach you what Anthony Burgess insists are the most important phrases in any language: introductions, requests for help, and apologies that you do not know these people's beautiful language.

Really, the system is perfect for me, and I'm deeply in love with it and prepared to go on several dates. The problem is that it's designed for people whose interests are more -- shall we say, practical than mine. Today at work (the part where I'm at the office), I was reading a textbook on Old English and I realized that I would love to have a Pimsleur Guide to Anglo-Saxon to listen to in my car. But I suppose that's the thing about the kind of love affair with knowledge that I've been carrying on since childhood. The more a subject interests me, the less it seems to interest the kind of people who would otherwise make it readily available. The more I want to know something, the more difficult it is to learn it. The process of learning these things is just as rewarding, if not more so, then the part at the end where I can bask in the pleasure of knowing them. It has to be, or my life, and the lives of so many of my friends and relations, would be nothing but constant, unmitigated disappointment.

Ah, you see? She wants to play ze Hide-Go-And-I-Seek.

2007-02-22T22:05:00.000-05:00

The same thing that happens to everything else --

So, I might have to go see this new Fantastic Four movie. I'm not proud of it. I'm not going to enjoy it. I won't enjoy the drive there, I won't enjoy eating the popcorn, and in all likelihood, I won't even enjoy burning the theater down when the movie disappoints me. I especially won't enjoy having to watch the first one, because I'm sure as hell not seeing a sequel without seeing the original. Even if it sucks. Even if they both suck.

The reason is simple: the Silver Surfer is in it.

And this is my whole problem with comic book movies. I told someone, years ago, explaining why I saw the Daredevil -- well, I hesitate to call it a movie. It resembled a movie in that it was a series of photographs in sequence, linked to sounds, but that's pretty much where the resemblance ends. It was more sort of a secretion than a movie. But anyway. I saw it, and it was wretched, and someone asked me why. And I said that I have to see comic book movies for the same reason that I would have to see a movie that starred someone I went to high school with: I have to show support. It's very important that I'm there for moral reasons, if not for entertainment reasons. So, my old buddy Matt Murdock is in a movie, and everyone says that it's bad, and it's probably bad, but it's Murdock, you know? So I go, it's terrible, I'm miserable for two hours, and then some idiot thinks it's a good idea to make a Ghost Rider movie and I'm all, "Ghost Rider? That's awesome!" It's like I don't learn.

Admittedly, it doesn't always lead to that kind of heartbreak. Both Spider-Man movies were great, and I have very high hopes for the third one. Of course, I had high hopes after the first two X-Men movies, too, and we saw how that turned out. And again, there's the Superman franchise, which turned out equal parts quality and crap until out of nowhere, last summer, they somehow turned out absolute gold. I have no idea why that suddenly happened. I mean, seriously, people, Richard Pryor?

The point is, as good as all those movies (and others!) were, I didn't go watch them because they were good, or even because I expected them to be good. I watched them because they had superheroes in them. Superheroes I knew and loved, specifically. As I've gotten older, I've grown to avoid movies that I knew for certain would be trash, like The Hulk and Punisher, but in general I go see these films not because I expect to be entertained but because I can name the title characters' secret identities. And I'll admit that as many times as I've been burned, I still get my hopes up from time to time. For example, I'll admit that this Preacher thing has really gotten my heart pumping. I don't know how I'm ever going to see it, given my total disinclination to ever turn on a TV even if we assume that I can afford HBO, but the idea appeals to me very deeply. Still, even if it's terrible -- and I want you to note who's in charge of the project -- I'll find some way to watch it. I mean, come on -- it's Jesse Custer.

Which brings us back to the Fantastic Four. Now, they were never one of my favorite groups -- I've always preferred brooding, thoughtful, intellectual madmen to big monsters when it came to villainy -- but I've always had a healthy appreciation for them. Making the leader of your team a supergenius scientist shows that your priorities are in the right place, and I have to respect that. And sometimes they had adventures in space, which is 100% guaranteed to be completely awesome. But, overall, my feeling was lukewarm. I always preferred the X-Men, with their constantly shifting roster of frequently-interesting characters, or Spider-Man, whose boy-scout morality appealed to me deeply for reasons that anyone who knows me will find obvious. Plus, I've always liked breasts a lot, and the Fantastic Four wasn't really the best place to look for those. So it was easy for me to look at the original Fantastic Four movie, observe the casting and the character of the trailers, and decide to give it a miss. I can only take so much heartbreak -- I'm just one boy. I vaguely noticed the film debuting in and then leaving theaters, and missed several chances to see it with very little effort. The new Spider-Man had just come out, and X-Men 3 was only a year away, so I was able to stay strong.

But here's the thing: a Fantastic Four movie is one thing. But when you show me a trailer where the Human Torch chases the Silver Surfer around Manhattan, we're talking about an entirely different situation. The Silver Surfer is cool enough -- his adventures have always been bizarre in a way that spoke to me deeply, and besides, he's an alien. From space. How cool is that? He just surfs around space looking for adventures! It's a dream come true. I would watch a whole series of movies about the Silver Surfer. In a heartbeat. I've done things I was less enthusiastic about in the last hour, just because I had nothing better to do. And that's not all. A Silver Surfer movie is cool enough, but if you've got a movie where the Fantastic Four meet the Silver Surfer, doesn't that mean Galactus is in it?

Stop the fucking presses.

And this is the problem with comic book movies. It's a problem that seems insurmountable, and yet so many take on the challenge -- and, even more surprisingly, succeed. The problem is that the stories and characters and situations that you're committing to film are stories and characters and situations that 90% of your target audience have read about, imagined, fantasized about, rewritten, discussed, analyzed, drawn, acted, sung -- none of this is unfamiliar. And if you're a film director, that really doesn't seem like a fun basis on which to make a movie. I, for one, would feel a little like Pierre Menard. How do you make a movie that everyone has seen even though it doesn't exist yet? When I think of it that way, what's remarkable is not that so many comic book movies are so bad, but that so many are so acceptable. I've been reading about Spider-Man since third grade, and I was still floored by the film. It made me see a character as familiar to me as a relative in a completely new way, and that's no small feat. And I think I know what the difference is, if you'll stick with me just a little longer.

My favorite kind of moment in film is the moment when a character suddenly realizes the power within himself or herself. This can take a variety of forms, from the sublime to the asinine. One of my favorites is when Marty McFly goes, "He's an asshole! I don't care what he thinks -- I don't care what anybody thinks!" And I love it when Luke Skywalker throws his lightsaber away and says, "I am a Jedi, like my father before me." But symbolically, I see moments like this everywhere, like when the elevator doors open to reveal Mario and Luigi in their familiar overalls, or when Inspector Gadget finally says, "Go-go Gadget Copter!" I see these moments any time the filmmakers are clever enough to put off inserting a catchphrase or some other nod to the original franchise until right before the big climax. And, admittedly, I have some kind of neurosis that makes me see mythological and spiritual symbolism in everything, but I really think that the movies that touch us deepest are the ones that have a big moment like that, where we see that the hero is really just some ordinary schmuck like you and me forced into an extraordinary circumstance.

Deep down, I think that this is the appeal of superhero stories, for young and old alike, whether we realize it or not. It's not just the excitement of the story, but also the thrilling thought that at any moment, without warning, I just might run into a radioactive meteor, or cosmic rays, or an alien artifact or what-have-you and suddenly, I'll have powers, too. But I won't be a superhero just because I have superpowers; I'll be a superhero because deep down, I was actually much stronger and smarter and better than everyone thought the whole time, and I was just waiting for the right moment to express it. Hell, you know what? The truth is, I was actually the on the last ship that escaped Krypton before it exploded. I've been superpowered this whole time, and all I needed was to understand and control the powers that were already within me. I know that I spent all of my childhood thinking like this. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a suspicion that I'm not alone, at least among those who read comic books about as obsessively as I did.

I'm probably going to end up seeing the Fantastic Four movies. And they will probably redefine my ideas of how bad a movie can be. And the reason is that the film producers don't understand what you and I now understand: I'm not going to the movies because I want to watch the Silver Surfer; I'm going because I want to be him. When comic book movies are made by comic book nerds, I feel like that small but vital distinction is clear not just to me but to everyone in the theater.

2007-02-20T22:33:00.000-05:00

Get thee behind me, Santa --

Listen: you and I need to have little talk about Lent. I know, I know, Mardi Gras just ended, and we're all still a little hungover, both from drinking too much and from looking at too many titties. If there is such a thing, ha ha. The floats are still cooling down, the pancakes are still settling in our stomachs, beads are still rattling upon the underage girls' necks, and the last thing we want to think about is that Ash Wednesday just kicked off a brand new season of penitence. But think about it we must, I'm afraid, because we live in a Christian nation and we all just have to deal with it as best we can. And so, as your minister, I strongly advise you to pay attention, because whether you participate or not, it's probably best to know why everyone else does. I feel that just sort of vaguely saying "I'm going to give up soda for Lent" is an unacceptable response to the advent of this season. So take notes. There will be a test later.

The word Lent comes from the Old English Lencten, meaning spring. This word is peculiar to English; pretty much all the other European nations call this period some variation of their word for forty, because the period of penitence is forty-six days long. (You're not supposed to count the six Sundays.) The forty days of penitence are reminiscent of Christ's forty days of fasting in the desert in preparation for His ministry among the Hebrews. This period in the desert, during which He was tempted by Satan three times and (go team!) resisted three times, was actually an initiation of the kind still participated in by shamanic societies around the world. The candidate fasts and prays until he receives guidance and knowledge from some kind of spiritual ally. Carlos Castañeda had an experience like this, as did Black Elk and other seers. The point is that the complete removal from everyday experience transforms your outlook on the world and -- if you'll forgive me -- your inlook on yourself. You're more attuned to the natural rhythms of both the physical and psychical worlds. Generally, drugs are used in these initiations, but we have no particular evidence that Jesus had any truck with the mind-destroying poisons of savages. Some Godless heretics have suggested that John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelations, may have been fond of certain fungal refreshments, but that's neither here nor there. The principle is still the same: Jesus went into a barren, unpopulated place, a place with a landscape and feeling decidedly different from the one He was used to, and took advantage of His isolation to meditate and pray. The result was a spiritual experience that marked Him as worthy to be the representative of holiness among His people. Now, two thousand-odd years later, we have Lent.

Now, the Lenten season was once a time of fasting and prayer for Christians, just as it was for Christ. The tradition started among the very early Christians, in Greece and Rome, when Christianity was still a tiny, exclusive cult. Lent was a time for initiating new Christians into the fold, in big ol' batches. The fast was originally preparation for the mass baptism that took place on Easter Eve. Most mystery cults (of which there are still more than you might think) encourage fasting or some other form of physical and psychic preparation before any major personal event, such as initiation or marriage. The early Christians, a mystery cult par excellence, understood that before the kind of huge personal transformation they were encouraging among their acolytes, the ego had to be weakened a little to make room for the new values being introduced. Lest we forget, these values were mainly universal love and compassion. Which, you know, I'm all for. The Christian rituals of the first couple of centuries AD borrowed heavily from other mystery cults, like the Eleusinians, the Gnostics, the Osirists, the Orphics, and the Mithraists. That borrowing is still visible in modern iconography: if you observe any street-corner Nativity scene, you'll see a bull and an ass, representing Osiris and Set, respectively, and three wise men wearing the traditional caps of initiates to the Mithraic Mysteries. Joseph Campbell, one of my heroes, has suggested that St. Paul's great revelation on the road to Damascus was that all mysteries were the same mystery: the mystery of this world, which appears to be so many things but is really only one thing, which I hope you'll forgive me for calling the Holy Spirit. The early Christian initiates were being accepted into a religion every bit as mystical and exotic as the Eastern traditions so favored by hippies and flakes worldwide. Fasting, for them, wasn't a form of asceticism or penitence so much as it was a vision quest. The idea was not purification so much as it was transformation.

Which brings us, of course, to the moral of today's sermon, which is: one should understand these things if one expects to participate in them intelligently, or if one knows others who do. The Catholic Church, true to form, has taken a beautiful tradition and turned it into theological tetrapyloctomy. The normative term really ought to be pilpul, a Hebrew word referring to a specific form of Talmudic analysis that became popular in the seventeenth century. Don't get me wrong, I love unnecessarily close academic scrutiny of unimportant points much more than the next guy. If Pilpul were a professional sport, I'd be The Bus. Knockin' guys over, runnin' unbelievable touchdowns, then makin' nice with my mother after the show. When I retired from playing, I would be a professional commentator on Monday Night Tetrapyloctomy. Don't you worry about me; I'd be set for life. But all that said, I feel that we should exercise some caution if we find ourselves arguing over the exact definition of a fast. (The current consensus, according to the Catechism I have open here in front of me, is that you're allowed to have three meals, as long as lunch and breakfast together are still smaller than dinner. No joke.) The basic idea, according to the party platform, is that by imitating Christ's suffering we become more like Christ. To which there are two obvious objections:

1. Is carefully measuring out and calculating the sacredness of our meals and still eating more in a day than most people get to eat in a week really comparable to spending forty days and nights not eating or drinking and then later getting nailed to a tree? The phrase "imitating Christ's suffering" never seems to mean what I would expect it to mean. And,

2. When we say become more like Christ, I don't think of healing lepers and walking on water. I have no problem believing that He did that, but I have also seen someone walking on water before and have no reason to believe that anyone who knows how can't do it. Having skimmed the Bible during an idle moment from time to time, I feel strongly that the best way to be like Christ is to be nice to everybody. Does eating a little bit less for a while really accomplish that? My father is a doctor, and so in my childhood I managed to glean some cursory understanding of medicine, which makes me skeptical of this proposition.

Lent is going to end in forty-six days with Holy Saturday, the penultimate day of Holy Week. This is a week of days with really exciting names. My favorite is Maundy Thursday. It used to be my favorite because I had no idea what Maundy meant but thought it sounded great. It later became my favorite because I found out that the term comes from the Old French mandé, meaning command. This comes from one of the last things Jesus said to the apostles at the Last Supper: "A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, so also you love one another."

Isn't that enough?

(Incidentally, I thought very long and hard about the title of this post. I ended up on the mildly funny title you see above. I thought it was kind of clever because it actually has something to do with the Lent story. But what I really wanted was a title that referenced the story my father once told me, about how someone thought that "Get thee behind me, Satan" meant that Jesus was gay. As you can see, I never figured out how to pull that off.)

2007-02-18T22:32:00.000-05:00

When news breaks, we fix it --

So, I watched "The 1/2-Hour News Hour" tonight. It made me slightly less unhappy than I expected, which I consider a win. In case you don't have friends like mine, who present you daily with a complete smørgasbørd of information found on the internet, I should explain that this show is the Fox News response to the infamous and wildly popular "Daily Show" found on Comedy Central. The idea is that this new show will provide the reactionary Yin to "The Daily Show's" radical Yang. As soon as "The 1/2-Hour News Hour" begins, its influences are obvious; it's not unlike reading a MAD Magazine parody in its slavish adherence to the source material. (I suppose it's worth noting that "The Daily Show" is already an homage to the classic SNL "Weekend Update" routine, but, you know, who's counting?) As a pinko commie faggot, I was expecting to see a show whose politics ran counter to my own -- for God's sake, the show is on the Fox News Channel. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the show lived up to my absurdly low expectations.

It is very badly written in a lot of ways. The main problem I had with the writing was that somewhere in that process, everyone involved forgot to put in jokes. I guess that's not strictly true; what they forgot was to make the jokes funny. As if to conceal that omission as best they could, the producers added a laugh track that moved me to truly legendary heights of pity. It sounded like nothing so much as that that "Family Guy" bit where Stewie and Brian make a sitcom: one very, very lonely guy, stoned off his ass, doing his best to stick up for the home team. The producer's brother-in-law, most likely. Don't make fun of him; he had a rough childhood. My other problem, which has nothing to do with the show's weak attempts at comedy and everything to do with its weak attempts at politics, was that all the research for the show appears to have been carried out by a highly trained team of five-year-olds whose job was to identify right-wing propaganda by recognizing the names of the authors. If Al Gore or anyone with Dr. before his or her name is listed as an author, little Billy was under strict orders to put it in the Left File, which is round and emptied once a week.

But I'm not here to review this as television; I am, as always, here to consider the deeper sociopolitical implications of this embarrassing afterbirth of a show. There's nothing in this world or out of it gets my blood flowing quite like sociopolitical implications. And "The 1/2-Hour News Hour" is fraught -- simply fraught -- with significance. The show represents, to me at least, everything that's wrong with the American political landscape circa 2007. The entire premise of the show is the assumption, common in the present culture, that there are two sides to every argument. If ninety percent of all scientists agree that global warming is a real problem caused by human activity, someone feels the need to have a member of the remaining ten percent to argue his or her side of the issue. As if there were no possibility that if ninety percent of all the world's experts on this subject agree on one view, it's because that's the truth. So we're given this show because if the left-wing has a humorous political news show, the right had better have one, too!

That alone doesn't bother me. I accept, as many who disagree with me don't seem to, that I live in a country that's founded on dissent and that debate and questioning authority are the lifeblood of the American political system. That's great; I'm all for that. You may or may not know this, but I was actually on the debate team in high school. And if there were a show that was liberal and funny, and an opposite show that was conservative and funny, then I'd be thrilled about this new and interesting way of thinking about important issues. But that is, of course, not even close to what we have here. What we're dealing with in "The 1/2-Hour News Hour" is a show that, instead of having views about issues, has knee-jerk reactions to other people's views about issues. Democrats say that global warming is a problem, so it must not be. Democrats support the ACLU? It must be crap! Left-wing kids wear Che Guevara on their shirts? He's an asshole. (My family has a history of blood-pressure problems, which is the only thing stopping me from spending about four paragraphs here explaining the difference between Che Guevara and Idi Amin, since the show's writers didn't seem to understand it. If you want to know, ask me the next time you see me.)

This isn't discourse; it's the political equivalent of "I'm rubber and you're glue." This show offends me not because I love my own opinions, but because I love rhetoric, logic, and arguments with any factual basis. Don't get me wrong -- I'm all about the ACLU. I'm deeply in love with the ACLU. I'm prepared to go on several dates. I'm saving up to get a tattoo of "ACLU" in a heart on my arm. But when a poorly-written, poorly acted sketch on "The 1/2-Hour News Hour" claims that the ACLU is "twisting the constitution" by allowing the KKK and Neo-Nazis to enact peaceful protests, it doesn't bother me as a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the ACLU; it bothers me as an individual who has read the constitution and knows how to think. And while I am obviously biased, and am constantly questioning whether I am reacting as I am because it's correct or as a reflex, I really do think that my cursory knowledge of science and debate remove me from this program's target audience. The show angers me not because I disagree with their arguments, but because I'm educated enough to understand why their arguments make no sense at all. And it does anger me. It angers me a great deal. Watching this show makes me wish that whoever invented television had instead invented a syphilis gun. When I'm watching "The 1/2-Hour News Hour," I find that I would rather live in a world where there is no television and anyone who wants to can give me syphilis just by pointing a firearm at me.

It's especially aggravating because the aspect of the show that parodies "The Daily Show" misses the entire point of "The Daily Show," which -- say it with me now -- is a comedy show, starring comedians, on the comedy channel. It's not a news program. No one ever intended it to be a news program. The main anchor (who is a total dreamboat) has appeared on a number of other programs protesting (loudly!) that it is not a news program. And yet, somehow, the show is regularly found to be a legitimate news source. As Jon Stewart constantly points out, this says far less about the quality of Comedy Central's news team than it does about the quality of everyone else's. And therein lies the problem: does the Fox News Network -- that's news, there, not entertainment or groundbreaking shows that are inexplicably canned after half a season -- does the Fox News Network really feel so insecure about its own shoddy reportage that it has to take a cheap shot like this at a program that so vastly excels its expectations? If Fox's skewed fascist view of the world were really accurate, wouldn't these jokes make themselves? Or -- and here's a novel idea, I just came up with it -- wouldn't it be great if the American press corps weren't too spineless to ask the questions we really need to know the answers to?

(Incidentally -- before we part -- let's have a quick word about the title of the show. The word is plagiarism. Kids, ask your parents.)

2007-01-19T17:29:00.000-05:00

God's mercy on you swine! --

It's done. Pau. Thirty. Ended. Kaput. Chapter seven is fin-i-to, which means that the entire first draft is completely over. It ended up being a little shorter than I had expected, but by the end of the second draft it will probably be a little longer than it has to be, so that might be okay. But, hey, check it out, I wrote a novel. If you know anyone who runs a publishing house exclusively for pseudointellectual claptrap, please do me a favor and put in a good word for me.

2007-01-12T00:20:00.000-05:00

Power to the people right on! --

Check it out: not only did I finish chapter five, but so great am I that I went on to finish chapter six in the same day. I'm a literary machine.

2007-01-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

The Great Samoan Dream --

Chapter five. We're getting into the home stretch now. I'm posting this and then immediately getting to work on six.

2007-01-02T21:50:00.001-05:00

How much for the ape? --

Chapter four. Don't read it all in one place. Oh, and sorry it's not very good. Three got a lot better this week, so I expect that once I finish this whole beast and get it over with, I'm going to revise this one so much that it will look like a different chapter. A better chapter. A kinder, gentler chapter where Diaz sounds like Diaz rather than like a discount-bin me.

2006-12-21T20:24:00.000-05:00

The weird go pro --

I finished chapter three. It's not as good as one and two, but I'm going to work on it this week. I mean, it's really quite terrible. There are no transitions between scenes, the last scene makes no sense at all, and there's just plain no ending. I won't start chapter four until after the new year, even though it's going to be my favorite one to write. And I may not even start it until after I've fixed three. We'll see.

2006-12-17T04:14:00.000-05:00

Face down --

After a brief discussion with my advisors, I had a better idea. Every chapter will go up when I finish, but will then be replaced when I finish the next one. So if you want the first one, let me know; if you want the second one, here it is.

2006-12-16T17:46:00.000-05:00

And you killed Jesus! --

I finished chapter two today, which was my personal deadline for pulling chapter one off of the internet. So if you follow the link below, you'll find it vacant. If you want to read each chapter as I finish it, let me know by any reliable channel and I will send them via e-mail or AIM roughly once a week, with two weeks off over Christmas when I'm at Hindu Camp and then dealing with various aspects of Real Life. Be warned, though, that I'm churning the first draft out just as fast as I can type it, and the final version will be more sensible and complete in more or less every possible aspect. Thanks for paying attention.

2006-12-09T13:59:00.000-05:00

This is bat country! --

I wrote the first chapter of a book called Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas. You can read it here (that links you to download the word document). I think it might be okay. I don't know. Maybe it's not. I have a feeling that the final version is going to be pretty reasonably different from this. Please let me know if reading it makes you want to read the other six chapters (which I haven't even started on yet).

2006-11-14T15:52:00.000-05:00

SATELLI-ITE --

While standing at the bus stop today on the way home from work, I made up "A Song by Ruben Quintero." Could you do me a favor and make sure he gets it?

2006-11-05T12:28:00.000-05:00

ALISON MARRIED KEVIN! --

I applied for a music reporter job, but I didn't have a lot of music related things written. So I made this:

When I say a song is perfect, I want you to understand that I don’t mean to compose any sort of top five. Nick Hornby has nothing to be jealous of here. I mean perfect in its simplest sense: these are songs that do something to you no other song can do, and more to the point, any change you make to any of them is strictly worse. Is there any way to improve the Mona Lisa or Hamlet? (Answer: don’t read The Da Vinci Code and watch the Kenneth Branagh version, respectively.) Similarly, these are five songs that I’ve noticed do everything exactly right, and achieve everything that I think rock and roll should. I’ll start off saying something that I think we can all agree on: the Beatles are pretty good.

1. “Hey Bulldog”: I understand that we are now in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Six, and that in this day and age, saying that your favorite band is the Beatles is like saying (in the words of my good friend Aziz) that your favorite character in the Bible is the Christ King. I also understand that no matter how good a band is, and no matter how deeply moving their work may be, some of the magic goes out of it when it is the most-covered body of work in the world for maybe forty years running. Given all that, I was very careful in choosing which Beatles song would make this list. For example, saying that “A Day in the Life” is a perfect song seems unnecessary in today’s world. I could tell you about the religious experience I once had listening to “Dear Prudence,” but that would mean telling a very uncomfortable story about a girl, and that might have to wait until we’re better friends. So I took the regrettably indiecore route and chose “Hey Bulldog,” a song that everyone loves but thinks no one else has ever heard. Our Own Sweet Boys themselves seemed to think of this song as a throwaway; they composed it one afternoon because they were bored while waiting for the camera crew on the set of the “Lady Madonna” video. Somehow, though, despite the way that this song was tossed together like so much haggis out of the various music byproducts John and Paul had lying around their lyrical meat lockers, it is a transcendent masterpiece, a triumph of old-fashioned, cheerfully snarling, ballocks-to-the-wallocks rock and roll. John’s casually vicious delivery is never better than when he sneers that you can talk to him if you’re lonely in a voice that is equal parts Help!-era sweetness and Imagine-quality growl. The crunch of the guitar and the manic bounce of the piano get straight into your bloodstream with a swiftness that no amphetamine could ever rival. Mostly, though, I’m in it for the big finish. I don’t care who you are: it is impossible to be truly unhappy when listening to John and Paul barking and howling and carrying on, just two boys from Liverpool having a bit of fun on the job. “Hey Bulldog” rocks to a degree that is impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand.

2. “Dinner Bell”: All right, all right, I’ll admit it, I’m twenty-three years old and I still love They Might Be Giants. I see them every time they play a show within 350 miles of me. I listen to their B-sides more than some people listen to music. Given that context, it’s easy to ignore what I say about them, and many would dismiss all of their work as funny, childish, or insignificant. However, if you do, I will find where you live and tell your neighbors you’re a child molester. As much as all of their work deserves serious attention and appreciation, “Dinner Bell” is a little jewel of a song, and every time I hear it I feel like it has improved me. This song is perfect in the simplest sense that I brought up when we started this: any change you make to it can only make it worse. As with all of TMBG’s best, the melody, structure, lyrics, and arrangement stubbornly refuse to do what you expect, and it’s hard to understand what possible thought process could have led to this series of sounds occurring in this order. Nonetheless, in spite of its unrepentant disregard for protocol, “Dinner Bell” feels, for lack of a better word, inevitable: there is no other way it could be, and it’s hard to imagine a world in which it doesn’t exist. I can’t tell you why I like it so much, or what is so great about it, or what it does to you when you listen to it. All I can really do is tell you to go grab a copy of Apollo 18 and put this track on now. You’ll thank me later.

3. “Dry the Rain”: I’m sorry. I really do feel bad for what this is doing for my credibility. I understand that “Dry the Rain” is the Beta Band song you like if you’re not smart enough to know other Beta Band songs. And I will fight you wholeheartedly if you suggest that I only like it because of High Fidelity, although I must admit that that’s part of the reason. But I’m going to be completely honest with you: “Dry the Rain” sends shivers up and down my spine every time I listen to it, without exception. Every note is like a telegram from Heaven telling me that I’ve won the lottery and they’re going to award the prize at a banquet where every other course is chocolate-covered bananas and pie. I’ve listened to more than one Beta Band song, and many of them are good, but “Dry the Rain” is more than a good song. This is the kind of song that is 20% what comes out of your speakers and 80% an emotional explosion right in the middle of you. The buildup that starts from the first second is so slow as to be almost unnoticeable at first, but by the time we hit the big climax, you are incapable of doing anything but surrendering yourself entirely to this song. It’s irresistible. If the lyrics in that big finish exhorted me to grow an afro, I would be out buying a hairpick within the hour. If “Dry the Rain” told me I should break my legs, I would be writing this in a wheelchair right now. The word is power: this is a powerful song, one that picks you right up and drops you on the other side of the world six minutes later.

4. “Just What I Needed”: If you don’t like this song, you are a goddamn communist.

5. “Get It On”: This kind of gets into the Beta Band problem again. Bill Chase, as the frontman of a band he inexplicably named Chase, wrote his fair share of hard rockers, and the only one anyone knows is “Get It On.” My friends and I refer to this as an artist’s poser song. Well, I’m here to tell you that while “Get It On” may well be Chase’s poser song, it’s also a miracle. The essential formula of “great rock band plus trumpets equals greater rock band” is unimpeachable in my opinion, and Bill Chase uses it to truly inimitable effect here. The whole track is a spectacular one, with its blazing horn hits and Bill Chase’s hotter-than-hell belt, and if that groove doesn’t move your rump then you need to see a doctor; but what vaults this one beyond the ranks of merely good rock songs into transcendence is that bridge. After a proposition you’d have to be wholly sexless to resist (“I feel it’s gonna be you / I feel it’s gonna be me / It’s gonna be just you and me / In ecstasy!”), Chase suddenly explodes into an oddly Baroque trumpet choir whose beauty stands in sharp contrast with the jagged heat of the rest of the song. It’s like emerging from a dark, smoky juke joint into the crisp night and suddenly seeing a big sky full of stars. I would love to have some drug that wipes my memory just enough that I can listen to this song for the first time three times every day (right after meals). And just in case you’re counting, that sexed-up “wow!” that introduces the organ solo is way up there in my top five rock and roll screams. No contest.

2006-10-19T00:25:00.000-04:00

Take that! --

Here's "It's Probably Fine."

2006-10-13T15:13:00.000-04:00

Aaron can tie a hangman's knot --

This song is called "How to Tie a Hangman's Knot." The bridge is going to be better-planned, and the arrangement is going to be all elaborate with the sixties-style harpsichord and twelve-string arpeggios and so on. I think it might be very nice.

Plus, check out this law! They're cancelling the fifth and sixth amendments and also the Magna Carta. Which is good, because who likes the British?

2006-10-11T12:13:00.000-04:00

Four more years --

About a year ago, I told Ilana that I would write her a song. I just did it this morning. It's called "Selah." It's for Ilana because there's a Hebrew word in it. I'm giving it to her as a birthday present to Aaron. For those of you for whom it is not a present but a song, keep in mind:

1. I have played guitar parts better in my life. Good part, bad solo, badly played. The less said about that the better.

2. I can't decide, but the final version might have five times as many voices in it.

3. If I'm not scared to shout a little, I think the voice on the verse will be better.

4. Heh. Voice on the verse.

All things conspire to make my happiness complete.

2006-09-30T17:22:00.000-04:00

Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong! --

I wrote a song called "Bananadine" that is the answer to "Baby Shoes, Never Used." I'm sorry that I keep putting songs up on Putfile when some people say they can't get it to work, but I don't know what else to do.

2006-09-20T01:17:00.000-04:00

Take a cha-cha-cha-chance --

Once every year, on the same day, Tyson calls me and plays me the same song over the phone exactly at midnight.

Thank you for everything, etc.

2006-08-25T01:04:00.000-04:00

Aaron and I won a sweepstakes --

We're getting a $500 online shopping spree, three days in any Mariott in the country, our faces on a billboard in Times Square, seventy-four $2 bills, a pound and a half of mackerel, a free trip to the world's largest ball of string, a night in Tunisia, twelve lords a-leapin', and a prize pig. See, because the pig is a prize. Prize pig.

This song is called "Arse Melancholiae." The title is a multilingual pun. Which, you'll note, is my favorite kind. The recording is even worse than usual, but it will rock pretty hard when it has drums. It sounds a lot like "Miss Misery," but I think it will be arranged more like "Long, Long, Long." After having to play it three times in order to get my recording program to work, I think it sucks now. I'm sorry I bollixed up the lead guitar part at the end. The ending is the best part. Here, as always, are the lyrics.

This one goes out to Pluto: you'll always be a planet to me, bra. Much love, much love.

2006-08-04T01:59:00.000-04:00

My heart is reeling --

My sister wants me to write in my blog, although she, unlike some people I could name, didn't address me as "homo." I'm not sure what she expects; if she reads this on a regular basis, she must understand that it's been years since I've used this space for anything other than alerting the world that I've written new songs so the world can go on to not listen to them. And in this case, I haven't written a new song. The last good one was that "Virgil to Dante" one that I wrote for Tyson, which you didn't hear because when I went to upload it, I learned that my CMU webspace finally expired. I'm probably not going to write any more songs because it's come to my attention that I'm the only one who cares about them. Well, and maybe Ilana.

I went to New York this weekend (weekend in this case being defined as Thursday to Tuesday). You can hear all about it from my small friend if you want real details. What I'm here to tell you about is the night that I went with her to watch a play called "A Bright Room Called Day," which is about the events leading up to the election of the National Socialist Party in Germany. Around the second scene, I found myself seized by a completely irrational fear. This has been happening to me a lot since last summer, when I didn't know what I was doing with my life, but recently it's only been happening in bed, before I fell asleep. Or didn't, as it were. I left Julie with her friends and headed out into the night, hoping something good would happen. One thing did make me feel a little better: I went into a convenience store to take out some cash and buy some orange juice and there were three people in the store. Two were clearly customers, a man in his late twenties and his girlfriend. The man was harrassing the cashier because he (the cashier) didn't know English. So when I went to buy my orange juice, I told the cashier thank you and good-bye in Arabic, and that made me feel pretty badass. I walked home through Times Square and pretended I was someone else.

I never got my paycheck from work for this period, and I'm still not totally sure why. Fortunately, I'm going home the day after tomorrow, so I don't have to spend a lot of money, but there's still the issue of rent. There's no worse feeling.

The kind of depression I've always had is the kind where nothing in particular is making me sad, but being sad is a condition of my whole life. I have trouble conceiving of what it's like not to be sad. I also, especially recently, have no capacity to imagine anything being good or working out for me. Everything just looks bleak and stupid. There is, however, good news: about a week ago, I went to the convenience store and invested in some party hats, and since then have been in a near-constant state of fiesta. So that helps.

Thank you for everything; I have no complaints whatsoever.

2006-07-24T00:08:00.000-04:00

Next time, start at the fourteen-second mark --

So, Aziz told me I had to update my blog. He also cast aspersions on my masculinity. How could I argue with that? He used to be on the debate team, you know.

Julie and I discovered a hometown superhero. The salient points here are mostly in the Biography section. Take special note of his theological doctrines, his operatic oeuvre and his alma mater. This fellow is what Dan Tasse would accurately call a champ.

I'm trying something new, which is using Putfile to hold songs. We'll see how it works. I'd like to start by fulfilling a request: Mike Croland IM'ed me to ask if I had a recording of a very old song. I didn't, so I threw one together very, very fast. The recording quality is low because that's how things are on this computer. It's called "Very Long Day". I hope you enjoy it. Sorry, I really don't know what's going on with that first note.

2006-05-12T13:03:00.000-04:00

Who cares that it makes grass grow --

This song is called "Who Needs You, Darling?" and I think it's pretty good. I wrote it last night and was hoping to just upload it and be done with it, but I had problems with my Andrew space, so it wasn't until just now that I got everything together. It's kind of about this girl I know, and it's kind of about music. I think it's sort of a goodbye to both. Lyrics are here, as always.

2006-04-23T17:59:00.000-04:00

They got a ranch they call Number 51 --

I was reading Boing Boing and it pointed me to The Integratron. There are a few things worth noting here:

1. It's "acoustically perfect."

2. There is a link on the Integratron home page labelled "Science."

3. I'm going to live there.

XOXO Ram

2006-03-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

I'm a ragamuffin child --

This song is called "The Lay of Eyvind the Plagiarist." You may recognize it as a version of a song I wrote and put up here months ago. This time, Aaron helped, and I also learned how to play guitar. We'll have some more demo-type stuff up later, but this time we were slowed down by learning how to use a new version of Acid and deciding with whom we'll live next year (it's complicated).

2006-03-06T21:57:00.000-05:00

She's got style, she's got grace --

I recorded "Ophelia vs. Sati" tonight. That's going to be a kind of clean, kind of dirty electric guitar playing the rhythm, and the "Do do do" that I'm singing at the start of each verse is the bass. I haven't run this by the Commissar of Vocals yet, so those other parts are still just a good idea I had. I don't know how long that part in three goes, or what happens during it. I don't even know how it ends. But I kind of like the music and I kind of like the words, so I think that we can arrange it to be good. Maybe. We'll see.

2006-02-13T11:17:00.000-05:00

Higamous hogamous --

I wrote this poem about something that happened in the news.

Shimmery shammery
Old Harry Whittington,
Shot in the side in his
Quail-hunting place;

"Cool it," Dick Cheney said
Vice-presidentially,
"You should be grateful it
Wasn't his face."

2006-02-07T00:12:00.000-05:00

Nor is he very avuncular --

I wrote this about the aftereffects of Super Bowl night. I have no other way to vent my exhibitionist inclinations than to post it up here.

2006-01-30T12:53:00.000-05:00

I do what I'm told --

Upon hearing about what I did at Aaron's behest, Tyson triple-dog dared me to write a villanelle about the Articles of Confederation. The difference is, this one I am submitting and then charging them for. So, sadly, it's not as funny.

Upon Reading the Articles of Confederation

I watch the days go by, and though I know
I've many things to do, I always find
My thoughts turn back to things gone long ago.

And though I keep my ducks all in a row,
The way that I’m told they ought to be aligned,
My thoughts turn back to things gone long ago.

I'm living in the past, and even though
I've no idea why I am so inclined,
I watch the days go by, as though I know.

At night, I dream of shuttling to and fro,
From now to then, from forward to behind:
My thoughts turn back to things gone long ago.

Each day's the same: I do the things I do,
I live, and play, and work, the daily grind:
I watch the days go by, and though I know

I ought to concentrate on now, I go
Into a trance: as always, in my mind,
My thoughts turn back to things gone long ago.

The time goes fast, and sometimes it goes slow,
Peeling gently like an orange rind;
I watch the days go by, although I know
My thoughts will turn to things gone long ago.

2006-01-29T18:37:00.000-05:00

Check it out! Shut up! --

I have to write a poem for Kaplan. You know, my job. I still haven't written it yet. But Aaron told me I should write this poem, so I did.

A Poem I Wrote Because Aaron Told Me To
(Or, The Charge of the Fat Brigade)
By Ram
(not you)
This poem is about Legionnaires
And how they once fought polar bears.
Oh, how they sallied forth
In the cold, cold north
To waylay fierce Death unawares!

They marched through the ice and the snow
Up and down, near and far, fast and slow.
And that dark ursine dread
Filled up every head
But did they turn back? No, no, no!

Ever northward they marched, fierce and brave!
Ever onward! Their chances seemed grave,
But they knew, all too well,
That (high water or hell)
A hero's death is all they crave!

Left and right, left and right, left and right!
Through the ever-darker Arctic night
You can keep those six hundred
Who minced as they thundered.
Fuck Tennyson. These guys are alright.

Hark! Hear the Legionnaires' cry:
"Bears! Bears! Sprightly, men! Let's be spry!"
Oh, the snapping of jaws!
Even Death must take pause
At the sight that now seizes his eye!

Oh, the clashing and clanging of steel!
Oh, the teeth and the barking of seals!
And as the dust cleared
And the cold nighttime neared
The polar bears savored their meal.

God rest all those brave Legionnaires
Who were eaten by those polar bears:
Never more marching forth
From the cold, deadly north
And forgotten, except in our prayers.

2006-01-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

Eatin' piiiiiiiie --

smileyski : also. point of inquiry.
Ganapatya : The chair recognizes Ms Stern.
smileyski : thank you honorable chair.
smileyski : why have you ceased to post new music to your "blog." This has inconvienced many collegate delegates by giving us fewer mediums through which to procrastinate.
Ganapatya : The chair apologizes for the inconvenience and promises to remedy this issue as soon as possible.
smileyski : wonderful.
Ganapatya : As soon as he gets back from the library.
smileyski : fantastic. you are fantastic.

And so, as promised, here's "Sweet and High." The sound quality is bad because I was using the crazy li'l eighth-to-USB. I'm considering putting up "Cherchez la Femme," but Aaron and I are probably going to do it up right pretty soon. So, here you are, Lanala. A bi gezunt.

2005-12-28T14:50:00.000-05:00

The next one will be about Tristan, Gautam, and Josh --

So, you may remember sixish months ago when I posted some stories up here. And I kept promising that they'd be a trilogy. Well, what I actually did was rework them a little and turn them into this book. I wanted to read it over once thoroughly before I posted it like this, but Chicken says I have to go eat lunch and I am most impatient. What I would like to know is 1) Whether or not it sucks, 2) What I should title it, and 3) Where I should add more stuff or expand what's there. And, of course, anything else you'd like to tell me. If you want to know about the multiple layers of symbolism I've put in, I'll be fucking surprised. I guess that's really it.

2005-11-28T10:52:00.000-05:00

On the hills like gods together --

Okay, I don't have a lot of time because I'm moving back to Pittsburgh in a matter of hours and I am very excited about it. But here's "The Lotus-Eaters." It's really big, and it's got drums and stuff, and there may be "la la la"s at the end. I'm not sure. See you in Pittsburgh.

2005-11-26T16:34:00.000-05:00

I've been leaving on my things --

Funny story behind this song. I was thinking it would be cool to write a song called "Suzy Homewrecker" or "Little Miss Suzy Homewrecker" or something like that, so I got this kind of fifties-ish melody in my head. Then I found out that I'm not as clever as I thought I was and lots of other people have thought of turning "Suzy Homemaker" into "Suzy Homewrecker." So that was disappointing. Then I remembered the title "Kallisti," which I've been toying with since I read the Principia Discordia. So I thought I'd write that song. But then when I sat down to actually write it, I wasn't sure how. I first thought I'd play it in F on a piano, but that was too "Dinner Bell." Then I thought I'd put in in D and use recorders and other woodwinds to give it a kind of fifties educational filmstrip aesthetic, but that's really hard and I'm still working out the arrangement that would make that work. So finally I wussed out and just played it in E on a guitar so that you could hear how it's supposed to be. The words are kind of mediocre, but I'll work on them. I'm going to a wedding now, but while I'm there you can listen to "Kallisti".

2005-11-21T20:23:00.000-05:00

Promises, promises --

So, I guess it was maybe five hours ago that I somewhat dramatically predicted that "The Big Fat Despair" was going to be my last recording before I moved to Pittsburgh for pretty much all of the future that I can imagine. And now, here I am, already with an as-yet untitled song to prove myself wrong. Plus, didn't I say maybe a week or two ago that I was going to write songs that weren't for big rock bands? That should teach me not to make smarmy promises I can't follow through with. Anyway, this song is one that Aaron suggested be arranged like Radiohead's "Black Star," which I only kind of hear. I like it being a bright, loud rock-and-roll number with an acoustic guitar. I don't really see why we can't both be right. The opening of the song and the opening of the outro are both just guitar and me singing, I think. Except I'm pretty sure there are big choruses joining us for the "we don't love you"s. So, that's really it, unless I'm inspired in the next seven days. Which seems unlikely, because I'm going to be with my parents because my Dad will be here. Happy Thanksgiving or whatever.

2005-11-21T15:30:00.000-05:00

You make me sad, shooting star --

Notes on "The Big Fat Despair":

1. I don't know if it's good. I like it, then I think it's stupid, then I like it again. I guess it's not, you know, terrible.

2. I see this as an album opener. This and "Don't Leave Me" can be overwrought, overproduced, overtly maladjusted bookends, I think. The song as a whole will feel like a song off Pinkerton or one of those old blues records where all the players are tremendously talented at their instruments but completely unable to participate in a group, so it's just a whole bunch of too-interesting parts held together by tenacity and prayer. It's hard to describe, but I think you can sort of tell what I mean from this demo. There will be more singing, though.

3. This song does that trick I love where the drums cut to half time for the hook but go back for the rest of the song.

4. For Christ's sake, the girl is as patient as she is sweet. Patient,, god damn it.

5. I won't mess up the harmonica and the rhythm electric on the real thing. I really love that sound I got on the electric rhythm part, though.

6. This might be the last demo I post from Bethesda, like, ever.

See you next week.

2005-11-17T15:23:00.000-05:00

Paul wrote the music, John wrote the words / Thaaaaat's 'Ringo's Theme!' --

I didn't write this song, but I recorded it. Because it's pretty.

2005-11-15T20:48:00.000-05:00

Smile all the time, don't go --

Notes on "Don't Leave Me":

1. This is a pale shadow of how I want this song to be. There will be thousands of guitars, and they will be doing more interesting things than just playing chords -- right now it sounds like R.E.M., but for the real thing think Spiritualized.

2. Lots of singin's.

3. The drums come in when you think they do, and while they're important throughout, the song sounds very silly without them going crazy at the end.

4. This song kind of begs for Aziz's Edge-style echo-heavy noodlings.

Notes on life:

1. I sing and play guitar much, much better than I did a few years ago. I play guitar a whole lot better than I did when I graduated, in fact. And a comparison between "Buck Evil" and "Don't Leave Me" or "The Plagiarist" favors me, I feel.

2. I have sort of a rough plan for the immediate future. I think I have some jobs in Pittsburgh, so I'm excited about going back there. Once I'm there, we'll play as many shows as possible, also providing a demo to places that want us to open for people who are better than we are. I expect to have better nuts than many of them. If all goes well, then I feel that we can try to arrange increasingly bigger tours over the next couple of years. That would be exciting as hell.

3. I guess this is premature, but I'm excited about the next album. I'm looking at the songs I've written recently, and I'm thinking about interesting things to do that I/we haven't done before. For example, I'm going to do my best to stop having those put-on-a-Corgan-sound-and-play-all-the-chords-from-beginning-to-end guitar parts, because those are boring. I'm thinking of interesting things I can do with rhythm guitars.

4. I don't know, profit? I feel good. I'm 89% sure I'm going back to Pittsburgh in Decemberish, we finally got some semblance of a website, which is kind of like achieving official status. I'm excited about the future for the first time in about a decade. Things are looking up.

2005-11-14T15:21:00.000-05:00

I really should have said "how to avoid me" --

I saw Zox last night. They were great, as always. This time they mentioned that they liked My Summer Job, which I'm pretty excited about. Each of the four of them made it a point to mention it to me. Ilanala was with me, and now we're going to get married because a) she said she liked my songs and b) I have to prove to her that I'm not gay for Aaron. Did I say gay? I meant faygeleh.

Anyway, this is the reason you're here. I tried to write it for a long time and today it finally came. The idea was that I wanted to write a song that two people could perform, for what I feel are fairly obvious reasons. As a result, the guitar part is really hard, and if I weren't impatient to get out a demo I would have practiced it a lot more. I'll play it a lot better soon, but for now that's my excuse why it sounds like crap on this recording. My voice also sounds terrible because I have allergies and my head and throat feel funny. You know. Anyway, here's "The Lay of Eyvind the Plagiarist," which I'm actually pretty happy with as a song. I have a couple more two-person songs that I'm working on, and we'll see if they don't suck.

2005-11-09T14:06:00.000-05:00

Makes you say dang! --

So, this is going to be a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing. If you're Aziz, you should just listen to this song. If possible, don't allow yourself to see the ID3 tag before you hear it. You'll be glad you didn't. If you're not, and are therefore one of the two other people who read my blog regularly, then you can listen if you want, but be advised that there's a story that goes with it, without which it won't make much sense, and that it goes like this:

Senior year of high school, when I sang a lot worse than I do now, Aziz and I used to come back to my house every day after school and just hang around playing guitars and things and being generally unproductive. He always had to be gone by the time my parents got home from work because I wasn't supposed to have him over on account of my grades were so bad (I never did my homework, you see; I was too busy playing guitars and things with Aziz). One day, I had the bright idea of running a tape recorder while we did it. The first couple of times, we used the same cheap little memo microphone that I use to record the songs you listen to frequently on this blog. Later, I worked out a way to record with the speakers of the tape recorder, which was a good idea because, as you will hear, the single microphone made it difficult to hear whoever wasn't holding it. As a result of all these exertions, I am currently in possession of three cassette tapes full of inanity, vulgarity, and cacophany of truly Biblical proportions. A lot of it is just the two of us talking, including the occurrence, with startling frequency, of the words "Jenn," "Kateri," and "fuck" (no, not "Alexa" yet; that was still a month or two in the future). Some of the highlights include "Boney, Boney," a tribute to our friend Bridgette "Boney" Briggs (rhymes with "honey") to the tune of "Louie, Louie"; a version of "Heart-Shaped Box" to the tune of "Hot Cross Buns"; and an extended version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" which included verses about Nazis, Hindus, and rappers. However, above all else, there is a moment that stands out. Even five-going-on-six years later, there is one little item on this tape that excels all others by truly remarkable degrees. For six and a half minutes (and we were as surprised as you that it went on that long), Aziz and I served as the conduits whereby Heaven ejaculated pure genius all over the nice carpets in my computer room. One thing you should know is that Dr. Jerome Marco was, at the time, principal of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Another thing you should know is that when Aziz is talking through the kazoo at the beginning, what he is saying is, "Hello, Mr. Jerome Marco. There's a bomb. In your underwear. It's called your wang."

And the rest, as they say, is fucking intolerable.

I am working on several songs that I think will be pretty good once I figure out how to make them work. Keep your eye on this space and, God willing, I'll have them up sometime this week. Seacrest out.

2005-11-06T22:59:00.000-05:00

Just in time to go off in my hands --

When Beej listened to My Summer Job, he remarked on songs that were "interesting" rather than "good." Which is a weakness of mine to which I will readily admit. So with "Our Mutual Friend," I intentionally tried to go the other way. I think it's pretty. There are drums, like in "Like a Forest" by Low. Other than that, I think it's pretty much like this. I have to cut this short because I'm watching "The Boondocks," which is pretty wonderful so far.

2005-11-05T19:51:00.000-05:00

It's like a million pears! --

I was in New York City all of last week. Don't worry, I went to Strawberry Fields and everything. And, of course, as soon as I was on the bus to get there and was in my first hour of a guitar-free week, I conceived of this song and was forced to spend the whole week working it out in my head. The hook is kind of weak because I don't have a lead guitarist to make up hooks for me, but I think it's a pretty solidly cool song. It owes obvious debts to "John Lee Supertaster" by TMBG, "Blue-Green Olga" by JSBX, and "Style" by, um, the Lemonheads. Who should have a more abbreviation-friendly name for the sake of parallelism. The drums are crazy hard pounding on a really fat 70s groove thing the whole time; it's really vital that the drums swagger like the Fonz singing with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Seriously hard rock. I'm sorry that organ makes it so hard to hear that really nice chord that all the voices hit on the word "boooooooze!", because it's a pretty, pretty chord and I worked very hard on it. For those of you playing along at home, it's a C# augmented ninth, or C#-E#-G#-B-D##. It's my all-time favorite type of chord. Oh, and the parts I don't enunciate but should are "If you came back to me (I just get low!)" and "They're so in love (They're goddamn animals!)." Anyway, the point is, "Booze," which is going to sound awesome when it has drums and is way overproduced. Now I'm probably going to bed soon, because I have a cold and I feel like hell. I don't know how I hit that D-double-sharp on that one amazing chord, but somehow I did it.

2005-10-26T16:03:00.000-04:00

She is blue-green, she is blue --

"Like a Breeze" is another song that sounds really lame right now but could be brilliant. The drums are all crazy-go-nuts all over the place (although it's a very artistic kind of crazy-go-nuts; there are specific effects needed in specific places). There will be a lead guitarist who knows at least a little bit about playing lead guitar. I was going to have a long, "The Happening"-style sing-out in Sanskrit at the end, but it seemed like too much so I just put in that one Sanskrit chorus instead and let the end work itself out. I messed up the claps, which is something I wouldn't have thought it was possible to do until I did it. The basic idea, which may or may not come across, is that it's loud and brash and rock-and-roll and then the ending is all quiet and sweet. I think the hard rock is a nice contrast to all the kind of indie-pansy Elliott Smith songs I've been doing lately.

2005-10-24T16:25:00.000-04:00

I'm such a baby 'cause the dolphins make me cry --

I cut my hair last night. I ended up cutting a lot more off than I'd intended to. Then I was walking (which is when I get all my best ideas, the shower being a poor but adequate substitute) and thought, "Hey, 'Haircut' would be a good name for a song." So here it is. I'm actually a little disappointed with it; it sounded cooler in my head. The drums come in where the other instruments do, and they're playing the entire time except for right before the last chorus where there's nothing but bass. I hear kind of a Stonesy four-on-the-floor heavy rock beat, but that's just me. Sorry I misrepresented the guitars so terribly, but, as I'm sure you're aware, there will be three to five times as many in the real thing. Better songs coming, I promise.

2005-10-23T13:07:00.000-04:00

Was the son of a preacher man --

I heard this song on the radio on the way to the grocery store this morning and it was in my head since then. So I covered it because I thought it was pretty and sweet. I couldn't remember the bridge and I also thought it was kind of silly, so I left it out. I hope you like it. I've got several new songs by me on several back burners (each slightly more back than the others) so I promise I'll have real songs soon.

2005-10-11T15:17:00.000-04:00

Five more years --

Here's a birthday present for Aaron. It's all true.

2005-10-09T00:02:00.000-04:00

Don't blow your hand --

This is another recording of the same song described below, only I've figured out more how the melodies go and Aaron and I worked on the structure a lot. I thought this song would be a throwaway, but I'm starting to like it a lot. Imagine this, only with strings and electric guitars. When it's loud, it's really fucking loud, and when it's quiet it's just an acoustic guitar and my boyish voice. Sorry about the lower "oooooohs" in the penultimate chorus. They're embarrassing.

2005-10-08T18:33:00.000-04:00

But it's your heart, not mine, that's scarred --

I made a recording of "For a Girl I Used to Know" that I'm not at all happy with. Here's what you need to know to hear the way it's supposed to be:

1. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about the word "clover." I am. The singing is pretty terrible from beginning to end, but really, I apologize profusely for the word "clover." Plus, when I say "blossoms and birds" it sounds like in "Door to Door," which is exactly what I didn't want.

2. You can't really hear what's loud and what's soft, but I'll try and explain. It opens the way it does here, and then when it gets to the part about "la la la" the drums come in and a guitar playing hits. Then they both drop out and it's just acoustic and singing for the chorus (as it is for almost all the choruses). Then after that, where you can sort of faintly hear the trademarked Ram guitar sound come in, is where it explodes, with drums and that guitar and everything. Then another drumless, quiet chorus, then the loud bridgy thing, then the quiet chorus, then the loud last verse and from there on you can pretty much hear what I'm going for, dynamics-wise.

3. I really wanted there to be strings; in my head, this is an Out of Time or Automatic song, with big orchestral swells. The whole recording suffered because Audacity was having some kind of bad trip and I couldn't record as much or as well as I wanted to (cf. supra, point 1) but the main loss is the strings. All the parts that you think are boring have interesting strings going on through them.

4. You should probably look at the lyrics because I don't enunciate too well, and what I actually wrote is cleverer than what it sounds like I'm saying.

So, there that is. I think this song could be decent, with some work.

2005-09-12T17:15:00.000-04:00

I don't mind, I think they're crazy --

I think that "Eine Kleine Morgenmusik" could be really good. The way I hear it in my head, the drums come in after a couple of those guitar things, so from the beginning to the end of the solo they're playing continuously (except, of course, for the big-ass drop [note that the hyphen is between "big" and "ass" rather than between "ass" and "drop," since there's no such thing as an ass-drop]). The drums are playing slower than you probably want them to; there's exactly one kick and one snare between the end of the word "cool" and the beginning of the word "here," if that makes any sense. I tried to show which parts are loud and which quiet, but what that doesn't really demonstrate is that while the first verse is fully orchestrated, the last one (from the end of the solo to the end of the song) sounds almost exactly like it does here, other than that the guitar is probably cleaner: it's all quiet and anticlimactic. I think the song has the potential to be awesome.

2005-09-09T21:07:00.000-04:00

You don't have to be sick to be dying --

After I got home from school I had a very long dry spell. I guess I've been too depressed to be creative. So the day before yesterday I wrote a song, and then yesterday I wrote two more. Here they are:

1. "Elsinore" is supposed to be about not wanting to leave your hometown, but really sounds like it's about a girl. It's alright, I think. It could be better. The recording sounds terrible because I did everything in one take without worrying about how it sounded. The real piano part should sound more like "Son of Sam" by Elliott Smith and less like Jojo the syphilitic chimpanzee.

2. "Something Going Around" is, like "Painted Red" before it, a take on The Wasteland. Again, I keep fucking up the guitar parts. But the ideas are all there, and I think they're decent ideas. The real song should be all crazy guitarry, like a Mellon Collie song. The drums are all really slow.

3. "War Is Really, Really Stupid" needs a lot of work lyrically, but I think the music and the arrangement are great. I think it could be a really, really good song with some work. Like the other two, it would be a lot easier to show you what I mean with these songs if I had some kind of drums, but what can you do.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to the new OKGo album a whole lot for the past week or so. The first album ranged from good to great, but the new album is pretty stellar from beginning to end. Damien's lyrics on the first album were sometimes good, occasionally better, and most of the time just above average; the lyrics on this album are all great, and there are some moments of absolute brilliance. "Let's Crash the Party" is one of several songs I can't get enough of lyrically. Anyway. It's really good.

2005-08-17T17:12:00.000-04:00

I'm not fucked, not quite --

I made this instead of searching for a job today. Total time spent, not counting the twenty minutes expended in trying to get Galileo to talk to my house's internet connection, was under an hour -- writing, "arranging," recording, the works. I was thinking that it needed an organ and more vocals and a lead guitar, but that's kind of a band issue. I can never get myself to arrange up a song when there are no drums.

Speaking of which, My Summer Job is complete and will be at Aaron's house soon. Again, $3 for a nice one and a blank CD or the promise to paly it for all your friends for a burned one. It's pretty good, I think. Some of it might be great.

2005-08-09T16:06:00.000-04:00

So he shot straight to/for space --

I felt bad that I never said a proper goodbye to Tyson (he called me Wednesday, I got the call Thursday -- it's complicated) so I made him a present to make it up. This song is a lot of fun to sing. I hope he likes it.

New word on the albums: $3 for a nice copy, burned copy free, but in either case part of the deal is that you have to play it for all the record industry professionals you know. Really, everyone you know. Also, if you have been now or are expected to be in the future a member of our band, you're not allowed to pay.

2005-08-08T15:01:00.000-04:00

It's a relief to be down and out --

So, Friday was the last day of college. I took an exam, and apparently I did alright because the internet says I passed biology. So, there that is. I'm back at home. To show what it's like to be back at home, I recorded a bagatelle called "Down and Out in Pittsburgh and Bethesda," which isn't a great song but was a lot of fun. The title comes from Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, which my dad gave me to read. It's very good. This song is not on the new Dan and Jean album entitled My Summer Job, which you should get ahold of somehow. Either contact me or Aaron (depending on whether you're closer to Pittsburgh or Bethesda) and tell us that you want it. Or, if you'd prefer, e-mail DanJeanBand at gmail and we'll send it to you somehow. It's very, very good. The links in the entry below are all tracks from it. If you know any rock stars, producers, or record execs, please pass it on to them, because I'd really like to be playing rock and roll as, like, a job. I certainly don't have any other prospects in the near future.

2005-07-27T02:36:00.000-04:00

Four songs, two days, no prisoners! --

Aaron and I have been busy little beavers since we got back from D.C. Sunday night. Here's what we've done:

Sex Sells is actually a pretty old song; I wrote it in India over winter break my junior year, and then the Girls played it a few times. Tyson made an awesome keyboard line, which we appropriated and Aaron played it. I'm pretty happy with this track.

Haldo vs. the Spiders is another old song. It's from last summer. Again, the Girls played it a couple of times. The bridge is written by Tyson.

The Philologist in Love we did today. It's oldish, in that it was written around September or October. Aaron and I recorded a much lamer version then. Today, though, we had one of those days when everything goes right, and even your mistakes are gateways to discovery, and what was a song I ran hot and cold over turned into a track I love. You'll see just how right things were going in the next song.

The Prayer of Hunter S. Thompson is a song about debauchery, catastrophe, and redemption. I've always been very proud of it, but this recording is really special. As stated, it was one of those days where everything just works, and we took a good song and made a track that was pure magic. The Doors showed up; you might hear them in the bridge.

So that's what Aaron and I have been up to. Enjoy.

2005-07-15T03:37:00.000-04:00

Poet laureates of awesome --

I strongly suggest that you read this story and then visit this web page. I think you will laugh.

2005-06-30T01:42:00.000-04:00

Let us pray --

Lord, please don't let me forget that even if I stop, everyone else will have to just go on without me.

2005-06-16T00:04:00.000-04:00

It's a biting commentary --

This is a song called "Je Suis l'Eau de la Mer" and it's not bad. Plus, we recorded drums, and that's pretty sweet.

2005-06-09T13:12:00.000-04:00

With a ball and chain I call my own --

This is both old and new.

2005-05-29T02:20:00.000-04:00

A li'l bit of Pun'kins --

Aaron and I made this using a cunning formula of Smashing Pumpkins, Of Montreal, Elliott Smith, and Greg Gillotti. It's called "Door to Door" and it's for you.