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Saturday, March 16, 2002
Fear the Reaper Man, has death been shoved in our faces lately. Death always lingers about, stalking the recesses of our minds, waiting for the final, inevitable pounce; but lately it has been marching down the street, pounding a big bass drum, screaming obscenities and exposing itself at passersby, and really stinking up the joint. Even a friendly annual ritual - a second-rate regional Groundhogs Day - the buzzards returning to Hinckley, Ohio each March 15, is steeped in carnage and decay:
I hope none of carrion-eaters show up in Aurora. My office is in my parent’s unreasonably large house; about ten days ago my mother’s large-scale goldfish - at least ten years old - finally gave up the ghost. As she was incapacitated with grief, or at least grossed out, I had to fish it out of the tank for her and dispose of the heavy, lifeless lump. Why is it that dead fish bought at the store, or caught in a stream don’t have nearly the same yuck factor as a dead pet? I imagine it has something to do with their respective purposes and our resultant expectations. The purpose of a fish bought at the store is to be dead, and to be cut up and eaten. It’s just food. But a pet’s purpose is to be alive, and swim around, and eat smelly flakes, and poop out little weird squiggles - not to lay there inert and utterly out of context. What is more absurd than a huge fish tank, filters purring, gravel sparkling, filled to the top with water, with a big dead off-white thing mocking its surroundings by laying there on the bottom, staring at nothing, thinking no fishy thoughts? It’s obscene, it’s ridiculous and you just want it gone. When pets die, why can’t they just melt like the Wicked Witch of the West? Aw, even that would leave a mess you’d have to clean up. So anyway, I reached way down into the huge tank with my hand inside a plastic grocery bag to retrieve the recalcitrant corpse, the death-tainted water defiling my arm almost all the way up to my elbow (very high yuck factor), then swept former-fishy into the bag, poked a hole in it to drain the excess water back into the tank, tied the bag handles into a very secure knot, pinched the bag between my forefinger and thumb to achieve minimal contact, and, dripping death-water all the way, hurried out to the trash. My parents have one of those plastic houses for two trash cans - I opened the top of that, then took the top off a can and threw the mess in with a resounding thunk. End of story. That was about a Wednesday and the pickup isn’t until Monday morning. We had a few days of unseasonably warm weather, causing me to give the trash-house some extra space on my way in and out of the house. Atmospheric conditions then improved vis-à-vis putrefaction, the temperature dropping into the teens and 20’s for a couple of days, staying below freezing into Monday morning. I picked up the already dumped cans with relief upon my arrival bright and early last Monday, but then I noticed that a blue plastic grocery bag was frozen to the bottom of the can, and had refused to be dumped. The remains remained!! In disgust and horror I clamped the lid on the can and hauled it back to its house. It stayed cold a few more days then hit 60, then almost 70 by the end of the week. When I absentmindedly took out a trash bag yesterday, I was pummeled about the face and head by the hideous aroma of rotting pet fish flesh as I opened the trash house. Good God. I hurriedly stuffed the trash bag into the offending can feeling cursed. Would the dead fish never leave? I should have buried it. I should have fed it to the cat: that would have been much more holistic. I count the hours until the trashmen return Monday morning to rid me of this plague, this tell-tale heart, this vivid reminder of mortality. And it’s just a stupid little fish! My personal ordeal with a half-pound of putrescence has coincided with the unfolding hell in Noble, Georgia. My mind absolutely boggles at the thought of over 300 human-sized bodies just laying around the yard - not for 10 days, but for YEARS - doing what dead bodies do. One would think the property would have been constantly beset by scavengers - by Hinckley’s buzzards even. This is WAY out in the country where Mother Nature still roams free, gnawing on anything left lying around. You would think Marsh would have had to fire off a cannon just to get out of his freaking house for all the creatures rooting around the place, inexorably drawn from the four corners of tri-state area by the unholiest stench this side of a third world slaughterhouse. Talk about olfactory fatigue, if I hadn’t seen pictures of him, I would swear this deranged freak Marsh DOESN’T HAVE A NOSE. Or maybe he’s some kind of X-man mutation who LIKES THE SMELL. Eau de corpse. No wonder he won’t be released on bond FOR HIS OWN PROTECTION. This fucker has broken every taboo known to man: his perverse, cavalier disregard for the remains of people’s loved ones, his humdrum daily life SURROUNDED BY HUNDREDS OF CORPSES and a forest full of snarling scavengers, pictures of decaying bodies and PORNOGRAPHY on his computer. Well at least he isn’t a cannibal, that we know of. At least he didn’t have sex with a goat, though it might have been a buzzard or a possum. Arne, Eddie, and Bobby Indians backup catcher Eddie Taubensee has been ordered to rest his aching back for two or three months before beginning rehab - he’s out of the picture for some time, maybe forever. This is bad but not fatal news for the Indians, who will now have to find a new backup. Taubensee is a good hitter but only threw out 19% of runners stealing against him last year, which is not good. Interestingly enough, my brother Arne had the same doctor, the vaunted Dr. Robert Watkins, treat him for a major weightlifting injury nearly 20 years ago. Everyone is entitled to make mistakes, but not only did this arrogant (look at the picture) assplow foul up the surgery to reattach my poor brother’s freaking groin muscle to the bone - which caused him excruciating pain for, like, 15 years - but he denied screwing up (naturally), ridiculed my brother’s agony, THEN TOTALLY BLEW HIM OFF. When you’re a famous sports doctor, you don’t need these pesky civilians bugging you about their damn aching crotches. Best of luck, Eddie. News and Commentary Roundup Our enigmatic friend Jerry selects the most important recent journalistic pieces, often relating to geopolitics or something. No sense going anywhere else. "Tom Make Peace, Should Israel First Take Back Land? No peace will hold until Palestinian hard-liners are persuaded that war is a losing proposition” by Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic
"Strange Love" by Lloyd Grove, Washington Post
"The Phases of Arafat" by Michael Kelly, Washington Post
"Saddam, Again" by June Thomas, Slate
"A Truce: It's Worth a Try" by Jim Hoagland, Washington Post
"Philosophy, reviews of Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty. By Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy. Chatto & Windus, 182pp.; Liberty. By Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy. OUP, 382pp.” by John Banville, The Irish Times
"Terrorist Says Orders Come From Arafat" by Matthew Kalman, USA TODAY
"Dubious iraqi Link" by David Ignatius, Washington Post
"Shareholders In the Bank of Terror? A previously unpublished list reveals that backers of a bank that the U.S. says helped fund al-Qaida include prominent members of the Arab world” by Lucy Komisar, Salon
"The Justice Wife's Tale" by Michael Kinsley, Slate
Friday, March 15, 2002
Cool Tunes Special show! This week we play the winners of the Cleveland.com/Cool Tunes/Tres Producers readers poll: Who should get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? See Cleveland.com for results. Cleveland.com Managing Producer Johanna Hoadley joins me for the show, which will be archived here. You can hear the show live Saturday night here or though the WAPS site, or anytime from Sunday-on via the Cleveland.com archive. Yeah! I will also be webcasting the Rock Hall Inductions Ceremonies live on Cleveland.com Monday night. Bios, pics, links, stories relating to the inductees right here. Check it out. Cool Tunes is a radio show in a magazine format Saturday nights at 10pm (Eastern) on WAPS, "The Summit," in Akron, Ohio. I play new music, reissues, and preview shows coming to town each week. Musically it is among the widest-ranging 2 hours in the country: modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae and ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, hip hop, avant garde, etc. - if it's cool I play it. Cool Tunes has been proudly serving humanity since 1990. A written bio/review relating to Cool Tunes now appears every Friday/Saturday here on Tres Producers, this week: Who should be in the Rock Hall? Last week: Norah Jones. Since this is a special episode, I am going to list the bands featured on tomorrow’s show, with a brief mention of why they belong in the Rock Hall. Donovan Scottish folky turned psychedelic rocker, Donovan had 12 Top 40 hits in the U.S., was a brilliant songwriter and charismatic singer. “Catch the Wind,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Mellow Yellow,” “There is a Mountain,” “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” “Atlantis”: how can you keep him out? The Cure Most important and enduring English modern rock band - began as minimalist punkish trio before defining and transcending goth, mutating into psychedelic jam band, before returning to bright alt-rock. Robert Smith is iconic singer/songwriter. Roxy Music The single most important band of the ‘70s. Huge in Europe and Britain but never as big here. Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno presented duality of feverish romanticism and icy avant-art. Great songs, great albums, great musicianship, complete worldview. Must get in. Depeche Mode Most important, popular and enduring techno-pop band. Style evolved from bright dance pop of early-’80s Vince Clarke era, to darker sounds and images as Martin Gore took over. Started playing guitars in the ‘90s. Seem to have survived drugs, fame, etc. and still going. New Order Enigmatic ‘80s evolution out of brilliant bleakness of Joy Division, New Order developed odd hybrid of dense Yes-like guitar and lead-bass sound coupled with electronic dance discipline. Remixes ruled electronic modern-rock dancefloor in ‘80s. Actually has made best complete albums in ‘90s (Republic) and ‘00s (Get Ready). Madonna Never a great musical talent, nevertheless the most important woman in music over last 20 years. Has redefined herself continually - usually around some form of dance music - from disco through new wave, house, hip hop, urban balladry, and electronica. Surrounded herself with best producers, but always at least co-written most of her songs, and ALWAYS has defined her own style. Ironically for a boundary-pusher, her greatest asset has always been taste. Public Enemy THE classic rap band, developed hard-edged, jagged, buzzing sound based upon rhythm, samples and urban outrage. Helped break rap to rock audience, made the most consistent rap albums. Beastie Boys Caught music world eye as obnoxious opening act for Madonna. More eclectic, and much more white rap act than Public Enemy, the Beasties have covered some of the same terrain, blending rap and metal, then finding a more organic, soulful sound, before returning to hard hip hop, raw R&B and even punkish roots. Have proved that “white hip hop” is not an oxymoron. Tool Johanna loves the band, and more so singer Maynard, who also fronts Perfect Circle. Dark, hard textures meeting somewhere between prog-rock and Nine Inch Nails. Excellent musicianship and live show. Red Hot Chili Peppers Founders of funk-punk in early-’80s, developed rabid L.A. following based upon amazing energy of live show and tubesocks on weiners. Flea is the funkiest white bassist around, Anthony K. great singer-frontman. Became superstars in early-’90s before fading when Dave Navarro replaced John Frusciante on guitar and continued drug problems. Huge return to form in late-’90s, now an institution. Toots and the Maytals Toots Hibbert is second only to Bob Marley in reggae history as singer and songwriter. Career spans early-’60s ska to today. Gritty, soul-dripping voice along the lines of Otis Redding. Should be next reggae Rock Hall inductee (then Jimmy Cliff). R.E.M. Returned a Byrds-like jangle to modern rock in early-’80s. Enigmatic lyrics and unique allergy-inflected vocals from oddly charismatic Michael Stipe. Most important American band of ‘80s and early-’90s. A lock. U2 Most important rock band of last 20 years, period. Has uniquely combined guitar grandeur of arena rock, punkish independence, Celtic spirituality, even electronica: all held together by Bono’s transcendent vision and charisma. Nirvana THE grunge band - put the genre and Seattle on the map. Kurt Cobain’s brooding integrity, ragged voice, and monster guitar flamed out quickly but left indelible mark. Nevermind was rock album of ‘90s. Alice Cooper Cooper has been a hard rock/metal journeyman for 20 years, but the original Alice Cooper band combined shock, glam, hair, with chunky, tuneful rock ‘n’ roll to make something new and dangerous. Was much more integral part of pre-punk than most realize. Original sound not dissimilar to NY Dolls, whom they preceded. Genesis Visionary Peter Gabriel and excellent musicianship made them one of the two (with Yes) great prog-rock bands in first half of the ‘70s. Elaborate, theatrical live show and high concept albums left when Gabriel went solo in ‘75 and band settled on drummer Phil Collins as unlikely lead singer. Drifted in a more pop-rock direction, verged on electronic side of modern rock for a time in ‘80s before absorbing the regular-Joe pop of solo Collins into band sound. Traffic It astonishes me that Traffic isn’t in the Rock Hall yet: late British Invasion-era pop-rock band with some great tunes, evolved into jazzy jam band, all led by singer/songwriter/guitarist/keyboardist Steve Winwwod, one of the brightest talents in the history of rock. What’s the freaking problem? Yes Veering between sublime beauty and egregious pomposity, the Yes catalog is very large and uneven, but the supreme musicianship, welter of great music, and enduring if vague cosmic vision make them one of the two great prog-rock bands. And they’re still at it. Todd Rundgren Here is Todd Rundgren’s entry The Encyclopedia of Record Producers.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s Rundgren has pioneered interactive software development and Internet music distribution, testing and pushing the boundaries of pop culture. Musicians, fans and critics agree Rundgren has not stood still since the first Nazz release in 1968. Born June 22, 1948 in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, Rundgren was in locally popular Woody’s Truck Stop in high school, before gaining a larger reputation in 1968 with the Nazz. Their version of "Hello, It's Me" was a minor national hit. In mid-’69 Rundgren left the band to work as a solo artist/band leader under the name of Runt (with Hunt and Tony Sales, sons of Soupy), and as a staff producer at Albert Grossman’s Bearsville Records. Hitting with the bouncy, wistful single “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” Runt released two albums before Rundgren went officially solo with the classic Something/Anything? in ‘72, a mostly one-man operation that overflows with wit, melody and charm. Synthesizing Philly soul with Brit Invasion rock, the double album features “I Saw the Light,” “Couldn’t I Just Tell You,” “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference,” “Black Maria,” and the hit version of “Hello, It’s Me.” By then Rundgren had produced the American Dream, Ian and Sylvia, the Butterfield Blues Band, Jericho, and James Cotton, but he came to prominence as a producer with the release of Badfinger's Straight Up (coproduced with George Harrison). In ‘73 Rundgren released his second great album in a row, A Wizard, A True Star, wherein he used the studio as an instrument, seamlessly running together Side 1 under the rubric of “International Feel” - again with melodies galore including a touching, radiant version of “Never Never Land.” Side 2 offers Rundgren originals “Sometimes I Don’t Know What To Feel,” “Just One Victory,” and a cool soul medley. Rundgren’s next album, Todd, was a step down in consistency (a recurring theme), but still has “A Dream Goes On Forever,” and “Sons of 1984.” Rundgren’s solo albums have been spotty affairs ever since, with his live Back To the Bars, and The Hermit of Mink Hollow (with “Can We Still Be Friends,” “All the Children Sing,” and the clever “Onomatopoeia”) as pleasant exceptions. Rundgren also formed the band Utopia with Roger Powell on keyboards, Kasim Sulton on bass, and Willie Wilcox on drums. Adventures In Utopia and Oops! Wrong Planet are the highlights of several albums that typically have functioned as an outlet for Rundgren’s more esoteric progressive rock leanings. Of Rundgren’s outside productions, the highlights are many over a large catalog. The most notable include Grand Funk’s move from boogie sludge, to crisp, tuneful rock’n’roll on We’re An American Band, with the kick ass title track (No. 1), and “Walk Like a Man” (No. 19); and the follow-up Shinin’ On with the No. 1 remake of “The Loco-Motion” (with an army of overdubbed vocals). Rundgren’s taste and sense of proportion is perhaps most starkly apparent in the contrast between his production of Meat Loaf’s neo-Spectorian extravaganza Bat Out of Hell (which emphasizes the humor and drama inherent in the Wall of Sound), without ever yielding to the bombast-for-bombast’s sake so evident in the multiproducer sequel Bat Out of Hell ll: Back To Hell. Also of top importance is the New York Doll’s proto-punk first album, where men in drag never sounded so tough as on “Personality Crisis,” “Looking For a Kiss,” “Frankenstein,” and every other song on this crucial classic. The Psychedelic Fur’s Forever Now exhibits Rundgren’s ability to take a band with promise and adjust the lens so that everything comes into focus and stands proudly in relief. A fine selection of Rundgren’s outside productions are collected on Rhino’s Todd Rundgren: An Elpee’s Worth Of Productions. An excellent engineer, mixer and life-long technology buff, Rundgren helped develop interactive music software that enables the listener to vary the music in his TR-1 projects. More recently, he has helped pioneer the web as a direct source of music, bypassing the industry delivery apparatus entirely. Rundgren has worked in video (his "Time Heals" was the second video ever shown on MTV) and radio. -Eric Olsen and David John Farinella Iggy Pop The Velvets, Stooges, and the Dolls were the most important of the ‘70s pre-punk bands, and Iggy Pop, after leaving the Stooges, has soldiered on through very long and winding road of punkish, angular hard rock - his signature baritone pounding, cajoling, proclaiming and threatening. Though he has made much great music, Iggy would deserve the Rock hall for simply surviving. Sex Pistols The Sex Pistols were nominated this year, but the voters couldn’t quite bring themselves to elect a group in the first year of eligibility that only made ONE COMPLETE ALBUM. That they were nominated and almost elected tells you how important, seminal, powerful, and enduring Never Mind the Bollocks is. Steve Jones’ slashing guitars and John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon’s eccentric, propulsive vocals on amazing punk standards like “Anarchy In the U.K.,” “God Save the Queen,” “No Feelings,” “Submission,” hell, the whole album, will get them in eventually. New York Dolls Only two albums, but what albums, and what a wide swath they cut. Marty tells it best, here, here, and here. The Clash The second most important English punk group (after the Pistols), they evolved into the most important English post-punk group, expanding their style from thrashing punk to incorporate elements of reggae, dub, funk, hip hop, modern rock, even twisted Brit-folk into an amalgam always branded with a fierce rebel attitude. AC/DC AC/DC, led by the diminutive Young brothers, have somehow turned infinite variations on the same five elemental guitar riffs into a 25-year career of great rock ‘n’ roll. Also never straying far from bad boy party themes of destruction, reckless abandon, inebriation, and leering lust, they have been nothing if not consistent. Black Sabbath Led by the ubiquitous aggro-rock icon (and great singer) Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath refined a massive guitar and bass wall-of-noise punctuated by high, scary wailing about psychological terror that came to symbolize ‘70s heavy metal. Both heavier, and at times more delicate, than Led Zeppelin, Sabbath is the greatest metal band of all time. It is a crime, a sin, and pure prejudice that they are not yet in the Hall. The Guess Who A stunner at the top of the reader’s poll (we have suspicions of a fan club attack), the Guess Who are nonetheless a much-underappreciated Canadian rock band who appealed to both pop (13 Top 40 hits!) and FM rock audiences in the ‘70s. The right credentials are there - a tremendous lead singer in Burton Cummings, classic lead guitarist in Randy Bachman (who also rocked hard in BTO), and some outright classic songs: “American Woman,” “These Eyes,” “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature,” “No Time,” “Undone.” More voter prejudice. Catch music by all these artists Saturday on Cool Tunes and archived on Cleveland.com. Thursday, March 14, 2002
Blogging Now that I have been blogging for around six weeks, I have some observations. First, the established bloggers don’t exactly welcome you to the club unless you already know them or blow them. Neither was the case for us, so we’ve been pretty much on our own. This makes sense on one level, because there are, like, 500,000 blogs, so you can’t pay attention to them all. But we rule, so more bloggers than the great Tony Pierce (who now also has a Baseball Blog) should be linking us by now. One high ranking blog insider conveyed to me on condition of anonymity that they have a secret teleconference every day to decide who gets to join the club. Only special cases even get considered after less than three months of operation. This source also suggested that I start linking to other blogs with reckless abandon - known as "blogrolling" - so they would feel obligated to link back to us. I referred him back to this. What can you do? I am not very patient and expect people to do what I fucking tell them to do, and they don’t always do it, so I get pissed. Sometimes I DON’T tell people what to do, I leave it up to them to figure it out for themselves, and when they don’t I get even more pissed because they must be stupid or something. So there you have it. Anyway, I have it from good, albeit anonymous, authority, that the top bloggers have formed a transnational cabal that broadcasts super-high frequency soundwaves causing impotence and incontinence. And wait 'til you hear what happened at the Blogger's Ball, which was held in Noble, Georgia and the DJ was Ray Brent Marsh. More as it develops. By the Way In case you hadn't noticed, Blogger, which was down for at least four hours yesterday, SUCKS MY ASS. As has been mentioned, I have an attitude today. Don't piss me off. General Thoughts The "9/11 and Time" piece about killed me. I knew what I wanted to say - I hope it wasn’t too dense. Just wanted to tell you that. We are very excited about the Rock Hall poll; today is the last chance to vote because although Cool Tunes airs Saturday nights, it is - "NO, I CAN’T TAKE THE TRUTH" - in fact recorded late Thursday afternoons. That’s radio in the 21st century. Much of what you think of as live, is, in reality, recorded. Sorry. Since I only do a show once a week, the main reason mine is recorded is that no one wants to hang around the station on a Saturday night. If I had a choice - which I don’t - I would come in and do it live because I really miss interacting with the audience. I used to love taking calls from listeners who wanted to make requests or just blab. In fact, that’s how I met my wife. Although for people like me who do a show once a week, the main reason for recording is convenience, the reason full-time people record is purely economic: it’s much cheaper to pay someone to tape a week’s worth of shows in 4 or 5 hours, than to pay them to come in every day. How is it possible to record, say, 20 hours worth of radio in, say, 4 hours? By cutting out all the music time and just recording the spoken breaks. What makes this possible? What else? Computers. Most radio stations are now run by computers. Software like this one for noncommercial radio, or this, or this, allow you to treat individual units of programming - songs, announcements, promos, news and weather, satellite links - like computer files, which the software allows you to organize in advance. All you have to do is record the individual files into the computer (you only have to input reusables, like songs, once), tell the computer what order you want them to be played in, and let her rip. We used to put on really long songs, like “Maggot Brain” or something, to get a break and go to the bathroom or jog around the building, or whatever. I remember hearing Larry King tell a story about his early radio days, when he put on an album side (about 20 minutes) in order to visit a nearby female listener. One thing led to another and he didn’t make it back in time. Listeners were treated to the hypnotic sounds of the needle bouncing against the record label - “thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk” - for something like a half hour before he made it back to the station, sweaty and disheveled. Well now you can take a week and visit a battalion of your female listeners before you have to go back to the station, except that now there is no way for you to meet your female - or any other kind - listeners because you’re not really there when they call. So anyway, we’ll be recording the big “Who-Should-Be-In-the-Rock-Hall” episode of Cool Tunes today and I’ll let you know tomorrow who the winners are, I mean were, I mean will be. Listen to the show Saturday night right here. I will also be webcasting (writing play-by-play) the Rock Hall Induction ceremonies for Cleveland.com on Monday. We will be offering all kinds of supplemental info on the inductees and crap like that right here on Tres Producers. Don’t miss it. Or do and be a buttplug. Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Jerry’s Picks Our friend Jerry selects the most important journalistic pieces of the day, often involving geopolitics or something. "Arming Pilots Is the Best Way to Get Air Security" by John R. Lott, Jr., from L.A. Times
"Thoughts About America" by Edward Said, AL-AHRAM WEEKLY
"The Fallout of Desperation" by Robert Scheer, L.A. Times
"Mushroom Clouded Minds: The press cheap-shots Bush's nuclear policy” by Scott Shuger, Slate
"Attacking Iraq Now Would Harm War On Terror" by JOSEPH S. NYE, Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
9/11 and Time The six months passed since September 11 seem paradoxically both a lifetime and the blink of an eye. September 11 is the day that "America was changed forever," according to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Monday’s six-month commemoration ceremony. There have been many perceived changes in America since then, involving geopolitics and political philosophy, mass culture and civic society, religion, ethics, semantics, and the nature of leadership. It is my contention, however, that the most profound post-9/11 change hinges upon our perception of time. Our typical field of “time vision” is a few days: the immediate future slips steadily through the present into the recent past creating a small zone around our daily lives like a cocoon. For most adults, the intricacies of planning and executing a single day consumes the majority of our time-awareness: the particulars of work, family, personal finance, hobbies, and citizenship in a democracy not only fill our time, but add daily to a reservoir of things undone, always threatening to overrun its banks. This constant threat keeps most of our attention in the here and now. No wonder so many of us have trouble sleeping, or even break down and abdicate all responsibility. “Time management” is based upon the very assumption that there is never enough time to attend to our responsibilities and interests - that the best we can do is to prioritize and “manage.” But the more we manage, the more constricted our view, the more “tunnel” our vision. Many observers have noticed a certain excitement, even an odd euphoria in the air accompanying the grief, outrage, and fright since 9/11. It isn’t that we are ghoulish sadists just beneath our civilized exteriors; nor is it primarily the case that, as in the words of essayist Daniel Harris, “any crisis becomes a catalyst for instant togetherness ... our fierce tribal instincts reemerge with a vengeance, having been thwarted by the curse of autonomy that afflicts advanced Western cultures.” Indeed, the opposite is more true: beneath the surface of our apparent autonomy, there is great community in our battle against time, our shared Herculean struggle to meet schedules and responsibilities to family, self, and society. There is even a communal sense of virtue in our acceptance of anxiety and not-quite-enough-sleep. So, it isn’t longed-for community that generates the current buzz; it is the fact that the catastrophic events of 9/11 have shattered our work-a-day time vision, our little cocoons. There is a collective shiver of excitement as a strange new dichotomy has been created in our perception of time, away from a centralized, “time managed” here and now, toward the extremes of the very long and the very short. This change in focus has been necessitated by our dual needs to comprehend, contextualize and assimilate 9/11 intellectually, forcing a long view of time on the one hand; and our need to scrutinize and document ever finer details of the horror in an effort to assuage our emotional pain on the other. By distributing the enormity of our pain (and guilt over surviving and/or not preventing the catastrophe) over an ever-larger, ever-finer series of moments, we seek to disperse it, to make it less dense and oppressive. We also, somewhere in the deepest recesses of our collective subconscious, hold out some hope that - counter to all intuition and every ticking clock - if time can be cut finely enough, perhaps it can be stopped or even reversed, giving us back what we had lost, returning us to an Age of Miracles. There is abundant evidence regarding our change of focus to macro and micro views of time. Largely academic debates over the nature of the grand sweep of history have gained cultural urgency: the public is now familiar with Francis Fukuyama's historical progress toward an “end of history” vs. Samuel Huntington’s perpetual “clash of civilizations, Benjamin Barber's “McWorld vs. jihad” and beyond, Robert Wright’s "non-zero-sum" evolutionary arrow toward greater complexity through cooperation. Robert Kaplan’s Warrior Politics, a survey of classical political and military philosophy, was a recent best-seller. The cover story of the current American Heritage is an explicit context-piece, “The Longest War,” Victor Davis Hanson's lengthy treatise on the millennia-old struggle between East and West (he favors the West). The evidence regarding new interest in micro-time dates to September 11 itself, when every telecaster with a tape machine and an antenna ritualistically ran images of the planes embedding themselves in the buildings, the effulgence of flames springing from the wounds, the subsequent implosion of the buildings, over and over again, burning them into the collective retina, focusing more attention on one sequence of events than any other in world history. (Only the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination even comes close.) It was as if having recorded the monstrosity, somehow the results might be different on the 17th, 63rd, or 996th running of the tape: that perhaps if we s-l-o-w-e-d down the tape enough, we might discover an escape hatch between the frames, a tiny “Get Out of Disaster Free” card, Bugs Bunny’s “air brakes.” Stranger things have happened: according to the beliefs of 85% of mankind, God once created the universe. Besides micro-interest in the event itself, there is intense general interest in "quantum weirdness," including the indeterminacy of time at the subatomic level. If time is indeterminate, perhaps fate can be avoided. We can also draw some faint hope from philosophers, whose “tenseless” view of the universe (space-time as a whole does not change - change is represented by the relations of its parts) dates back to Parmenides in the 5th century B.C. Arguably, the most famous argument against time was presented by John Ellis McTaggart early in the 20th century. (Paraphrasing Savitt on McTaggert: 1 - there can be no time unless it has a dynamic element, that is, movement of an event from future to present to past; 2 - there can be no movement because the supposition that there is movement leads to contradiction. The contradiction alleged by McTaggart is that: for there to be movement, every event must have more than one element from between past, present and future, whereas, since past, present and future are mutually exclusive, no event can have more than one of them. This contradiction has been addressed by Seager, who asserts that these terms are mutually exclusive only at a given instant of time; they are not mutually exclusive over the course of time - a “time” that he audaciously asserts moves at the rate of one second per second. Take that, time bandits.) Physicist Julian Barbour also concludes that time does not exist in his 2000 classic The End of Time, a position he summarizes thusly:
According to Saunders in his review of The End of Time, Barbour
All of this work has been ongoing, but there seems to be redoubled urgency among the scientists and much deeper interest from the public since September 11. Just today in the NY Times, a substantial profile of the venerable physicist Dr. John Wheeler - who invented the term “black hole” - is headlined, “Peering Through the Gates of Time.” Headline editors get paid to know where their reader’s interests lie. It is a subconscious flicker of hope that the awful recent past may somehow be altered that causes our pulse to quicken when we read, in the words of Dr. Wheeler, that black holes teach
This leaves room somewhere for a “miracle,” whether it be religious, scientific, or both in origin. Wheeler also points out that
Imagine the look on the hijackers’ faces had they flown right through a Twin Towers made of quantum foam. Perhaps they might have caught a wormhole and ended up in their own assholes. It gives me great pleasure to picture Mohamed Atta spinning ineffectually around his own sphincter. Unlikely? Yes, but the existence of the universe (or universes) is much more so. Consider this:
In a 1993 paper Dr. Wheeler likened such a particle to a "great smoky dragon," whose tail was at the entrance slits of the chamber and its teeth at the detector, but in between — before it had been "registered" in some detector as a phenomenon — was just a cloud, smoky probability. Perhaps the past itself is such a smoky dragon awaiting our perception. The implications are obvious. Time is on our minds - but not normal, everyday time. We are looking to the great sweep of history to help us put the agony of September 11 in perspective, and to help us divine the future - a future we desperately want to go our way. We are also looking hopefully to the uncertainty of the infinitesimal with the unspoken longing that time is not a one-way street, that somehow egregious wrongs from the past can be righted, not in the hereafter, but in the here and now. Emptying Out The Bookmarks #13 Raymondo's Dance-o-rama Get your retro synthesizer fix with sound samples from The Plastic Cow goes Moooooog, Richard Hayman's Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine and of course the inevitable Popcorn... Why, yes, I do own a few of these, how did you guess? Monday, March 11, 2002
Jerry Picks the Hits With the Dexterity of a Migrant Farm Worker "Comment In a Dark Time" by David Remnick
"Sorry Mr. President, You've Lost a Fan" by Mark Steyn
"Whodunit Dept: The Anthrax Culprit" by Nicholas Lemann
"To Withdraw Is to Surrender to Terrorist Blackmail" by Yossi Klein Halevi
September 11 and Its Aftermath As we all know, today is the six month anniversary of September 11. There are many fine analyses out there for our information and edification. Below is an analysis of where we have come since that fateful summer day from our forthcoming book America.com: On September 11.
A common enemy in “terrorism” has nominally united such strange bedfellows as mortal enemies Pakistan and India (though a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament by Kashmiri separatists on December 13 left twelve dead - including the five terrorists - and led to an extreme flare-up in tensions between the countries, both of which claim to not want war); and the U.S., Russia, and China. Demonstrating the unpredictability and wingspan of this campaign, the first declared, if unanticipated, success occurred in October in Northern Ireland. The IRA, pressured by the post-September 11 zero-tolerance mood against terrorism and caught in some dubious business in Colombia, agreed to decommission its weapons, and in essence, shut itself down. Though all parties aligned against bin Laden and al Qaeda have stressed that this is neither a religious nor a cultural war, bin Laden and Islamist extremists worldwide have asserted that the struggle is just that, and issued a call to arms against all but their own that has been heeded by true believers from Indonesia to the UK, though enthusiasm for the jihad (holy war) would appear to have been dampened by the U.S.-led coalition’s surprisingly quick victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. People in the West, and especially the U.S., have been forced to reconsider their place in the world and the cause and effect of policy, to re-evaluate values and priorities regarding everything from civil liberties to security, tolerance, immigration, the relationship between religion and government - in fact, the very core of what it means to be American, even, to be civilized. The affair has made heroes out of rescue workers, police and firemen, (now former) New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and shed very favorable light upon the U.S. military. Compassionate but steely resolve is very much in, and testosterone has made a comeback from the harsh realm of “brutish Neanderthalism” to the more temperate “manly determination.” In times of crisis the ability to actually DO things rather than eloquently and sophistically discuss them (read “Clinton,” unfairly or not) comes to the fore. The ability to fix, move, and build things, protect people and property, endure harsh conditions, etc., all become critical when the system breaks down, when nature exposes her ugly side, when violence breaks out of the acceptable zone. Then the things that Bill Clinton and I are good at don't matter very much because they are nonessential: they don't help us survive, they merely make surviving more interesting, and "interesting" isn't all that important when life and liberty are threatened. Reflecting upon the deeply serious mood of the country in the aftermath of September 11, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, declared September 11 “the end of the age of irony.” Though doubtless a bit overstated, this and other similar declarations demonstrate how much of life as we know it, how much of what we have cheerfully taken for granted, is up in the air. There is much debate and wrangling regarding how much has “really” changed since September 11, but the very engagement that that debate reflects may be the biggest change of all. Robert Putnam, author of the famous and controversial book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000), a study of civic and social life in America, makes that point in an article, the title of which reflects the change: "Bowling Together". Putnam resurveyed the same 500 Americans in October and November of 2001 that had been his subjects for Bowling Alone. His conclusion: “The levels of political consciousness and engagement are substantially higher than they were a year ago in the United States. In fact, they are probably higher now than they have been in at least three decades.” Interest in public affairs grew by a whopping 27 percent among younger people. The world has been shaken like a snow globe: the snow won’t settle for some time and the terrain will likely look quite different when it does. (Ironically, there is classic irony rife throughout this entire panorama. The hijackers turned the objects, methods, and even ideals of the modern world against itself. They used the Internet to send email messages and transfer funds. They eschewed traditional customs and dress to blend in with Western society. And most tragically ironic of all, they traveled freely between North America, Europe, and Asia planning and rehearsing their attack before transforming the very vehicles of that travel, airliners, from relatively quick and safe transporters of people, into transporters of death and destruction, capable of felling tall buildings and killing throngs in an instant.) Islamic, and other fundamentalist extremists object to many aspects of modern Western life: commercialism; materialism; overt sexuality; (relative) gender equality; pluralism; individualism; secularism; the very vibrancy of the marketplace of ideas, styles and priorities bouncing off each other - excited molecules writ large - charging the air with an energy not found in universal subjugation to a single ideology. But it is modern electronic communication, at a pace steadily accelerated over the last 100 years, that has forced the issue into every corner of the globe. TV, radio, movies, recorded music, telecom, and the Internet foist the Western way of life into places that would rather not know about it, rather not have the comparisons so unavoidably ubiquitous. Temptation and cultural subversion are bad enough from the remove of half a world, but they are another when neither cave, tent, nor bedroom is safe from electronic predations from afar, mocking entire worldviews with an endless stream of winks, snickers, wiggles, caresses, and gasps. That same electronic communication, and especially the Internet, is intricately involved in the story on every level. As previously mentioned, the terrorists used the Internet to facilitate the plot. In the chaos immediately following the September 11 attacks, people turned desperately to the Internet and email to communicate their whereabouts, to set up lists of the missing, to list resources of assistance, etc. Millions have turned to the Internet for news and insight regarding the attacks and tumultuous aftermath. In fact, so many turned to the Internet for information immediately following the attacks that many of the most popular news sites - including those run by CNN, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Yahoo - were virtually inaccessible due to overload. Rumors, testimonials, petitions, donation pleas have criss-crossed the globe by millions with the ease of a mouse-click in the form of emails which seem to take on a viral life of their own as they replicate across cyberspace. All will be addressed in this book. A secondary attack in late September - still of unknown, but now presumed domestic origin - of anthrax spores sent through the mail in powder form to media and government outlets in Florida, New York, and Washington, has thus far killed five, sickened 18 others, disrupted all three branches of the federal government and the Postal Service, and tightened the grip of apprehension on the hearts of all Americans. In response to the anthrax attacks and fears regarding the safety of the mails, email usage has jumped markedly as concurrently physical mail, “snail mail,” went down about 10% between early October and early November according to the U.S. Postal Service. Finally, as time creates space around September 11, 2001, respect for the dead and damaged seems to call less for silence regarding how the most powerful and advanced nation on earth could have allowed such a thing to happen, and more for a clear-eyed investigation into what made the unthinkable a reality. At least three U.S. administrations and an entire generation of intelligence, law enforcement, military, and policy officials bear some degree of culpability: not that any of them caused September 11 - direct responsibility for the most heinous act of terrorism in modern history lies with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda alone - but collectively they allowed it happen. Sins of omission are far less grievous than sins of commission, but they are sins nonetheless. The more we understand about the failures that permitted the horror of September 11 to occur, the more likely we are to prevent it from happening again. Secret Life of Art I took yesterday off and went to the Cleveland Museum of Art with my older daughter. We love museums - she is very much looking forward to luxuriating in the aesthetic abundance of New York this summer as a high school graduation present from her uncle - but an art museum visit is also always a strange and unsettling experience for us. We always feel similarly debauched when we walk out the door, crushed under an overload of sensory stimulus, eyes stinging from the concentration, minds numb, breath shallow. Part of it is our touring style. Since we don’t go that often - maybe once a year - we take in the whole museum in a single sweep. We blow through Asian art, visiting our wise friend, 13th century Japanese Zen Master Hotto Kokushi, taking a blustery sail on a 15th century Japanese scroll, wrapping ourselves in a 13th century Chinese Cloth of Gold, marveling at the strength of the 6th century Cambodian Krishna god in the act of lifting Mount Govardhana, and reveling in the thick legs and impish personality of the 12th century Indian elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha. We barge through ancient Egypt, captured by the immediacy of an encaustic-on-wood Funerary Portrait of a Young Girl, a girl ever alive but dead for 1,800 years; marveling at a civilization that 2,300 years ago had the sophistication and leisure to make bronze coffins for cats; silenced by the creepy ways people seek to conquer death. We are surrounded by the swirling delicacy of a 15th century Iranian "mihrab" (the focal point of the interior of a mosque), a riot of color and pattern. We are almost afraid of the overwhelming physicality Rodin imparts to his sculptures, unconsciously stepping back from the muscular expression of "The Age of Bronze," smiling nervously at the shared feeling of being keenly observed by "The Thinker." We follow reverently in the footsteps of England’s “Art Nun,” Sister Wendy, whose radiantly gap-toothed smile shines like a benediction upon her favorites from the museum, including John Rogers Clark’s 1942 heartland hymn, "Gray and Gold"; Albert Bierstadt’s 1866 wondrous “Yosemite Valley”; Church’s electrifying sunset in 1860’s “Twilight In the Wilderness”; Rousseau’s hothouse exoticism in “Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo” (1908); Bellows’ classic American dynamism in “Stag at Sharkey’s” (1909). There is so much more, much of it a blur in flavors of Meso-American, Early Christian and Byzantine, African, Medieval (with the ever-popular armor, and sharp, pointy things), before we work our way up to our personal core: European and American painting of the last 150 years. We smile in recognition at the addled, searing logic of the Van Goghs; the limpid water of Monet; the short-hand tour-o-the-periods of Picasso; and lastly, the rush of Contemporary art, where all of art history slams up against the present in an effulgence of odd shapes, angles, colors, and attitudes. After the three-hour tour we emerged not onto Gilligan’s Island, but into a stinging arctic gust of early-March-in-Ohio reality that cleared our woozy, art-drunken heads and put a spring in our steps. On the way to the car I had a weird vision: the individual museum objects we had just experienced gathered together in the private gloom of midnight to laugh and sing and dance together, each in their own way, in celebration of the human creative spark that was common mother and father to them all. Jerry's Picks Our friend Jerry selects the most important journalistic pieces of the day, often involving geopolitics or something. "Thomas Friedman: What makes the Timesman a great columnist? Not that peace proposal” by David Plotz
Saudi Arabia's reputation here-has been greeted as the only sign of hope in the ghastly war between Israel and the Palestinians. President Bush welcomed it, other Arab leaders have signaled interest, and even Israeli leaders-who suspect it's pure PR-have sniffed curiously at it. (Friedman, who's not famed for his modesty, hasn't written or talked much about the Abdullah proposal since airing it.)... "Human Rights and Out Allies" by Jim Hoagland
"Bombing Is Thwarted, but fear thrives. Latest victims nearly included writer's family” by Matthew Kalman
"Boca, Baby, Boca" by Tony Kornheiser
Florida Atlantic University. Not so much for who they are, but where they're from: Boca Raton, the Metamucil capital of Mondo Condo.... |
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