"Made in California....For Enjoyment throughout the World"

I just ran across this on David Wm. Sims's blog, Too Big to Fail, and had to share. Enjoy:

Pick a card, Scully....any card.

I heard about this fellow, Professor Stephen E. Braude, thanks to the Wisconsin Public Radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge (if you download RealPlayer, or have a compatible player already installed, you can listen to the audio here). He's a real-life Fox Mulder (even to the point of talking about the man who could do Polaroid "thought-o-graphs," like in "Unruhe," from season 4).

My favorite quotation from the clip below: "If we've learned anything from the history of science, it's that human kind is not a very good judge of the empirically possible." Mulder couldn't have said it better himself.



You can find out more about Dr. Braude's professional work in philosophy here, and his work in parapsychology here. If you want to do some further reading, I've pasted an Amazon link to his book below, as well.




Disclosure: I am an Amazon.com affiliate If you choose to purchase products through links on this blog, I will receive a commission.

Charon & Me

"What do you think we do? We take them over a river of despair, until they can see a glimmer of hope, and then we push them out."

# # #

In August, I had one of those abrupt, life changing moments that come unexpectedly now and then. Perhaps to you it will seem a little thing. And perhaps it is just a little thing. For me, however, it was a seed crystal. You know about seed crystals - in a super-saturated solution in a chemistry lab, for example, a seed crystal is what can suddenly transform a beaker full of liquid into a solid lump. Or, though of another way, a seed crystal (say, a grain of sand) when paired with an oyster, is what gets you a pearl. For me, though, on this day, the crystallization was very rapid. And the pearl was priceless.

I was sitting in one of the far booths at Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, eating breakfast (best breakfast in Memphis, and don't you forget). I was eating there most mornings because Kira was still in Nashville, finishing an internship. I had just gotten the first issue of a new magazine called AFAR. It's sort of an existential take on the old travel magazine model. Lots of interesting articles, but most of them are pretty pedestrian in terms of, you know, life impact.

There was a one-page feature, though, under the heading "NOMAD." A brief piece, intended to focus on someone in medias res, with a snapshot of their life on the road. The nomad featured in this first issue was web designer Mark Salvatore. One page of interview was on the right, and on the left was a picture of Mark. He is sitting on a table, somewhere in an apartment he rented down in Mexico. He's sitting cross legged, and to his left and right are several pairs of pants and some shirts, folded and piled. There's a camera, a laptop, some computer accessories, a flashlight, and a couple extra pairs of eyeglasses. On the floor in front of him are three pairs of shoes, two bags, and a tripod.

The caption to the photo reads, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

# # #

Let me back up a minute.

Ten months ago, my mother died.

There's a lot I should add to that sentence. However, if you're human (and, if you're reading this, I suspect you probably are), chances are quite good that you, too have had a complex loss occur in your life. Meaning you will understand me when I simply say that Mom and I had a fair amount of unfinished emotional business between us when she shuffled off this mortal coil. So let me leave it at that, and press on to the most pertinent aspect, for this writing, of her passing. That pertinent aspect would be, of course, a rented house, full from floor to two storeys of ceilings, with stuff.

When Kira and I arrived to deal with funeral home arrangements and such, we had about four days before we both had to be back in Nashville. That meant we had a lot of very hard decisions to make in a very short period of time. Decisions about all these various items, from my mother's artwork and drawings to tchotchkies and knicknacks. Some of these were tied up with my childhood memories. All of this had had some sort of inscrutable significance, for her, in her life. It must have, right? Why else would it all be held on to?

But I couldn't hold on to it. We had one small car - a backseat and a trunk - that was all. The trick was finding the things we had to keep, no matter what. The rest, at the end of the four days, was turned over to an estate company. It had to go.

# # #

Have you ever read Anne Sexton's poem, "All My Pretty Ones"?

Years ago, maybe I was sixteen or a little after, I first read, it, and had the uncanny experience of being moved to tears by words alone. I'll leave others to recite it whole for you. For now, these words will suffice. I was thinking these words throughout those four days, and I have thought them again and often again, after:

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

What saddened me the most, standing as I was beneath that mountain of items in my mother's house, was that I had there, in front of me, all the locks, but no keys. To my mother, these may well have been treasures; to me, they were but ciphers. How to know what is wheat, what is chaff?

The answer, of course, was now dead. My mother held those keys, and took them with her to the next world.

I remember all those bad detective dramas I watched on TV when I was a kid. Remington Steele, Hart to Hart, Quincy. How many times did I watch a variation on the theme of someone murdering someone else so that they could get their things? Here I was, then, in the exact reverse situation. It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little. In fact, the things I kept were the very things I could connect, in some way, to her life, or our life together.

Only in this hoarded span, Sexton wrote, will love persevere.

But what are we to hoard?

# # #

I cried again at words on a page, that morning in August, when I read, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

I don't think my mother ever had the kind of relationship she had wanted with her family. In fact, I know she didn't. I don't think my father ever did, either, though he may still be working to correct that. But because they lacked these essential relationships, they did what many, many people do. They filled the hole with things.

I can make that claim with some authority because, you see, I am my mother's son. Like her, and like many, I also spent a ton of years (and I mean exactly that) collecting, hoarding, holding, and hauling "my stuff." Books. Records. CDs. Posters. Knicknacks. Tschotchkies. Clothes. Shoes. Hell, I even held on to broken and busted items because, well, you know, I might fix them someday.

Or maybe I was holding on to all this stuff because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed that one day Someone (who? I'm not sure. But Someone) was going to be coming around to check up on my to make sure I had kept up with all this stuff, had shepherded it and hauled it like a good little boy.

Because. Because, when you don't have actual relationships with human beings to anchor you, that's what you do. In lieu of actual praise, you anticipate the praise that will come on that day, whenever that day comes, when Someone, whomever that is, arrives to check up and sees what a good job of hoarding and hauling you've done. Well done. Well done, thou good and faithful lummox.

Sitting in my mother's house, that scared me. That pile of stuff scared me, because I knew what it meant. Even though I didn't have the stories, the keys, to unlock all the locks, I knew what the whole thing meant.

Mom had died alone, in a town she hated, far from a family she largely no longer talked to, in a big house, surrounded by this mountain of inscrutable stuff.

I did not want that to be me.

# # #

After those four days dealing with Mom's things, Kira and I got back to Nashville and started trying to fit what we had brought home in the back seat and trunk into our apartment. Photos, mostly, and lots of artwork my mother had drawn, and all of her personal writings and correspondence was the bulk of it. I spent some weeks sorting through boxes, organizing it and getting it re-packed into manageable containers that could be stored, and hauled. It took some time, but I got it settled.

Then a new job came up, here in Memphis. Kira and I got ready to move. We tried to pare down and weed out things as we packed. We made a lot of trips to Goodwill, and had a yardsale or two. We got rid of a lot of things. It felt good.

But on moving day, I was chagrined to find that I was still not done packing all the stuff. Our plan had been to have everything ready to go, and I was not ready. Like so many times before, little things were getting shoved in boxes without good labeling or organization. Every time I looked up from the latest sealed box, I saw the pile of what was still to be packed. It seemed huge.

(Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.)

Then there was the move itself. We had budgeted for eight hours. It took closer to twelve, and that was only because I stopped caring whether the movers put things in the right place, and just told them to get the stuff off the truck as fast as they could. I helped. Neighbors and Memphis friends helped. But there was still so much stuff. So much to move. So many things.

# # #

On Christmas Eve Kira and I went to see the new George Clooney movie, Up in the Air.

I'm not going to spoil it for you, because I think you should go and see it for yourself. Because I think it's worth seeing. So I'm not going to spoil it. But I will tell you this. Part of the way through the movie, George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, makes a speech about a backpack.

You can get the gist of it here.

Suffice it to say that I was with Bingham through the first half of the speech. In the movie version, after he talks about putting the sofa and the furniture into the backpack, he pauses, and then asks the audience to imagine setting the pack on fire. Liberating, isn't it? Yes, it is.

Imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. I have imagined that. And more than waking up to it, I have dreamed it. Longed for it. Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions. Yes.

But then the next part of the speech (you hear them blended together in the video): put all the relationships in the backpack. Feel the weight.

Bingham's answer, get rid of it all, may or may not ultimately work for him (that's the crux of the movie; I told you I'm not going to spoil it for you. Go see it). Regardless, sitting there in the dark of the theater, I had to ask myself, just what do you want out of all this paring down anyway, Dault?

Is it to get away from everything complicated, including and especially the relationships in my life?

Maybe one day, maybe in my twenties, I would have answered yes. Not now.

# # #

The other quotation from Mark Salvatore's interview, that kept me crying there at breakfast, was when he said (look - see - I have it written down here on a notecard. I carry it with me now, in my left pocket):

"I consciously decided to lower my expenses to have a higher quality of life."

# # #

Here's what I want you to do. The next time you're at a football game, or out at the big box bookstore, or shopping for groceries, or anywhere there's a crowd, I want you to pause for a moment.

Now this is going to be a little difficult, so stay with me.

When you pause, wherever you are, for that moment, I want you - just for that moment - to imagine to yourself the death of each and every one of those people you see. Not in some ghastly way, not in an accident or a massive explosion. Just imagine the reality of them, in graves and urns, all at once. Gone. Passed. Buried.

Don't linger on it too long. Being morbid is not the point here. The point is the brute fact of it all. Each person enjoying the football game, every soccer mom buying beets in the produce aisle, every bespectacled teenager waiting for the new Harry Potter book - each of them - they are going to someday be dead and gone.

And you. And me, too.

Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson? That sound is... inevitability.

# # #

It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little.

What does it mean, at the end of it all, to have had a "quality of life"? I may never get to the point where all my earthly possessions will fit around me, crosslegged on the table. That is not the point. And I hope I am never so buried by my possessions that they are, at that last breath, all that I am left with on this earth. That also, emphatically, is not the point - at least not for me.

Too much is not the point, and too little is not the point.

You are the point. You, and my mother, and my wife, and my soon-arriving child. My friends. My lovers, past and imagined. My brother. My father. My step-mother and my in laws. My cousins - even the ones I don't talk to anymore for reasons that are probably locked up somewhere in those things of my mother's that I either kept or let go. My colleagues. My students. Hell, even the folks I need to say "I'm sorry" to - even them.

The point is, in that fleeting moment of seeing where we're all headed, really and truly and inevitably, to allow yourself - just for an instant - to imagine your own death. What kind of death do you want? What, in that final breath, will be acceptable - to you - as a "quality of life"?

We're all part of that grocery store crowd. I know that. We're all goners. We're all lost. We're all going to leave such big, big holes when we go. I know that. I don't care.

You are what matters. To me. To each other. Don't forget.

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

Features: The Resurrection of the The Late BP Helium - Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA

I just came across this article about my old friend, high school dance commander comrade, and band mate Bryan Poole in the Athens, GA Flagpole Magazine. He mostly plays with Of Montreal these days, but this article is about his solo projects. I'm especially psyched to link the picture. Read, listen, enjoy.

Features: The Resurrection of the The Late BP Helium - Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA

Also, I just found this video interview. Fun stuff.

"There ain't no Santa Claus on the evenin' stage"

So, for your viewing pleasure, here are a bunch of interviews with Don Van Vliet, better known to the world as Captain Beefheart.

1982:


A mix, with a later interview talking about his paintings (the 1982 interview repeats at the end):


And hey, here's a multi-part, BBC-produced documentary:


Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

"Don't know who he is? You're not alone":



Maker of banned television advertisements:


And finally, a late-career live performance of the title track (though this is an argued point) of the album Bat Chain Puller:


Merry Christmas, everybody.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Trust me. I have dropped a name or two in my day.

Like many academics, I suffer from an almost indescribable inferiority complex. If the world's economies aren't enough to make you feel irrelevant in your life's work, your students are always there to seal the deal. The fear that no one, but no one, will care that I am breathing has, on occasion, driven me to some gauche behavior. And, I mean, come on. I have some really interesting friends. Lots of them are quite accomplished in their fields. Several of them are famous. A handful are really famous (and one, admittedly, is infamous).

So, on those occasions when I am weak from my fears of irrelevance, I have dropped a name or two, or stretched my own importance, thanks to the borrowed importance of my more accomplished friends and acquaintances.

I am reminding you of this, dear Reader, not because I am particularly proud of this behavior, but rather to establish my bona fides for the invective that is to follow.

Some of my friends and acquaintances are in the military, or loosely associated therewith. Thinking back to the build up to the most recent Iraq war, I recall many of those acquaintances and friends taking me to task for my hesitancy about, you know, invading. What I recall hearing, more than once, was a strange form of name dropping that, I think, is akin to what I was describing in myself above.

When I would argue against invading from the evidence I had (the evidence that was available in the media and through my researches beyond the limitations of the American media), these jolly ol' Jingoes would get a knowing look on their face and a sage twinkle in their eyes. These old Hawks, mind you, are ancillary. They are factotums. They are sideliners now, and armchair warriors at best. Yet they wanted me to know that they were in the know. And they knew something I didn't.

"Well, I can't say much now. But I've been talking to [fill in the blank], and he's close to Colin Powell, you know, and he said...."

The upshot of what "he" said, in these cases, was that there was a whole lot of intelligence that was simply too sensitive to leak to the media, but if we (us common folk) ever knew the full extent of it, we'd be demanding ol' Saddam's head on a pike and thanking Dubya and Co. for invading when they did. The implication, in other words, was that the evidence I had was irrelevant, in light of the evidence that I didn't have.

Now, of course, it turns out they actually didn't know something I didn't, after all. They wanted to feel important and in the know. They (and lots of other folks) bought into a culture that was fed off equal parts fear and self-aggrandizement. That latter factor, I think, was what gave these Hawks (some of them quite well placed and influential - hey, I told you I know important people, didn't I?) the impetus to take the little crumbs of rumor they had and talk like they had fat seed cakes of certainty.

Let them eat cake, indeed. And we did. And why not? After all, "they knew something we didn't." A-yup. And we should have known better. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

But if you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe one of the knowiest in the know fellas in the game, Tony Blair, himself. Yesterday he pretty much admitted that the whole WMD justification was a pretense, and that he would "still have thought it right to remove" Hussein regardless of whether there were WMD's or not.

This has led a prominent international lawyer, Phillipe Sands, to remark that Blair may now be open to war crimes prosecution, given that he joined into the war, and the justificatory posturing that preceded it, "irrespective of the facts on the ground, and irrespective of the legality" of invasion in light of the lack of positive evidence.

There's a full story on this developing fiasco here.

Tony Blair, however, is not our problem. He merely is a good, close friend to our problem. He had tea with our problem just last week, in fact, and they had such a fine time, and...

Let me venture this: there is a deep inferiority complex at the heart of this nation. It has been endemic for generations, and it became epidemic in the last ten years. From Enron to the housing bubble to the credit crunch, we as a nation are running amok, from one fiction to the next, trying our best to feel relevant and important without the substance of fact or character to bolster us. The names we are dropping now, however, are names like "patriotism," "freedom," "security," "opportunity," and, yes, "hope."

These are the names of acquaintances whom these days we barely know. However, if we drop the names often enough, and broadly enough, everyone will assume we're still all old chums, won't they? And if those listening to us are convinced by our associations, then that's close enough to being real, isn't it, to fill the hole?

Sure it is, chum. That's the ticket. Take it from one old name dropper to another.

Ave Atque Vale

Just got the word that, after 25 years of peeling the paint off the walls, Chicago's incendiary Touch and Go Records has ceased releasing new music. They'll still be supporting the back catalog, but the A&R wing is, sadly, closed down and shuttered for the foreseeable future.

Now, I gotta say, this is a bummer. It is hard to find a record company with integrity (I say, speaking as a guy who had his toes in that stagnant pool of commercial rock'n'roll for a few years as a performer as well as a consumer). On that front, Touch and Go had integrity in spades. Unlike, say, SST Records and the debacle that is Greg Ginn's accounting and royalties policies, I have never ever heard anyone say anything ill about Corey Rusk and company. They ran a good outfit, paid their bills, and supported their artists. Most of all, they put out hella good stuff.

And by hella good, I mean bands that I have flat out loved for most of my dissolute life. Big Black, fer gosh sake, was a TNG band, as were Pinback, The Jesus Lizard, Slint (!!), and the almost indescribably forward-thinking 3RA1N1AC (the most toothsomely listenable unlistenable band there ever was, Charlie, and make no mistake).

So here's to a quarter century of blistering music. Here's to making the anger of my youth have volume and melody. Here's to treating people decently and having your business associates speak well of you. Here's to Yow, Albini, Durango, Captain Dave Riley, David Wm. Sims, Rob Crow, ABSIV, John Schmersal and Timmy Taylor, God rest his soul.

And here's to you, Touch and Go. You done good. Hail, and farewell.

Irony is a dish best served cold...

Kudos to Deana

A high school classmate of mine, Deana Bass, has recently had a commentary on The Princess and the Frog featured on the National Public Radio website, entitled "Still Waiting for Disney's First Black Prince." Bravo to Deana, who, when she is not writing for NPR, co-runs the Washington lobbying firm CS Corporate.

You can read her commentary here.

"Dialectical materialism is the revolutionary arm of the Proletariat"

I was just typing in the word "Uebermensch" on Facebook. It spell-corrected me, and offered me, as an alternative, the word "Lumbermen."

Can you imagine the possibilities if I had actually jiggered the umlauts right, instead of just being lazy?

It just goes to show: there is nothing quite so classy as a revolutionary class consciousness. Rawk.


(Bonus: In finding the Mao quote I was looking for above, I discovered this. Brilliant.)

Like a spreading disease... this is one eerie map

Douglas Coupland just posted a link to a map that shows the spread of unemployment over the last several months. Here's a YouTube version:



The online version is available here. It's worth checking out full size, but its a little scary, too.

Overheard on Facebook

Concerned citizens on the move, tweeting us to victory:

"Please pay attention to terriorist, they r on facebook also, I spoke to the fbi, an they said that it can be possible an that facebook has to deal with this correctly, ;-)"

The fbi is right, kids. Please pay attention to terrorist. Srsly.

Kids today, with their hard rock, and their yodeling...

I especially love the Jazz Flute break we get around minute three. Ron Burgundy's got nothin' on this guy.



Thanks mucho to Thad Thomspon and Jason NeSmith for putting this on my radar. Enjoy.

Physicists worried about time-travelling sabotage: The elusive Higgs boson

I am very intrigued by this notion that certain otherwise sober and respectable physicists have that "scientists from the future" may be impeding the work of the CERN supercollider. As Faraday once said, "Nothing is too wonderful to be true."

Read all about it here: Physicists worried about time-travelling sabotage: The elusive Higgs boson

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This is it

I have held on to an old issue of Time Magazine, from June 22, 1998, with a soft-focused picture of Michael Jordan on the cover. The story has the tagline, We may never see his likes again.

This is one of several press clippings I have saved about Jordan over the years. I remember being struck by an account of him that described him playing a game when he was sick with the flu. With fever and sweat pouring off of him, he was still an absolute team player and still led his team, inch by grueling inch, to victory.

I was, and am, impressed by this story, as much for what it says about Jordan's commitment to the team as for what it says about Jordan himself and his abilities. The ability to motivate an organization around you when you are not at your best is a feat worthy of noting. That Jordan had some of the greatest basketball skills - and all-around athletic skills - of any human who ever lived just adds to the sweetness of the moment.

I thought about this story the other night when Kira and I took a walk to the local theater to watch the new, and final, Michael Jackson concert film, This Is It.

The film documents the rehearsals leading up to the point of Jackson's death last Spring, as Jackson was rallying his own organization around him for a final set of fifty shows to end his career. This Is It collects footage shot during the rehearsals, and they reflect the roughness of the early days of the vision for the shows. We see dancers auditioning and sets being built. We see Michael, frustrated with himself and with his band at times, and at other moments elated and lost in the music and his own movements. He often sings half-voiced ("I'm saving myself for the performances," he says a couple of times), but even so, I was amazed at what I saw on screen.

Jackson was half a century old as this footage was shot, and he easily bests the energetic dancers half his age. His control, focus, and energy during rehearsals seemed to me to be greater than that mustered by many performers I have seen when they are on stage for real, when it counts. Despite the roughness of the staging and the sets, despite the occasional halts and false starts, it was hard for me not to get lost in the performances. Say what you will about Jackson's personality and life (and there is much that could be said), the man had singular talent.

In reflecting on these two Michaels these last few days, I have come back again and again to just how amazed and blessed I feel to be living exactly now, at this point in history.

I can remember a time when there were no personal computers. Hell, even pocket calculators were behemoths when I was a kid, often requiring a pretty large "pocket" for the name to work. I can remember when there was no internet, no email, no cell phones. With these memories, I look around at the Copernican leap we have taken in information and communication these past thirty years and I marvel. I feel like I have the best of both worlds - the before and the after.

I am amazed to have been alive at a time when Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson, both, were at their prime, as I mentioned above, but not only these two giants. There are many more. During this brief window I call my life, I have shared the Earth with Orson Welles, Fred Rogers, Claude Levi-Strauss and Jim Henson. I have been alive and breathed the same air as Phillipe Petit, William S. Burroughs, Nam June Paik and Steve Jobs (not to mention Steve Wozniak!).

I once bumped into Jacques Derrida in a Philadelphia train station, and shook his hand. He had a graciousness to him that inspires me to this day. I am happy that we shared the same ground beneath us at the same moments. I am happy to be able to say, "I was there, then."

Another time, on a whim, I called up Douglas Englebart, just to say hello, and to thank him. What I learned from that exchange is that genius does not always reap a just reward. On the phone Englebart was also gracious, but he sounded a little broken, too. It was not until a few years after we spoke that he truly began to receive the public recognition for his many visionary accomplishments. You may never have heard his name, of course, but if you are reading this, then odds are you have interacted just now with at least three of the many visions with which Englebart gifted the world.

Last weekend I learned of the passing of an old friend, David Knauert. I knew David from our time at seminary together. While our professional lives had taken us in different directions these past few years, it was always a joy for me in the moments we got to spend together, whether at a conference or is a chance meeting during our travels. The heroes of my life are not just these remote figures that make the news or shape the contours of history; they are also the simple kindnesses of folks like David Knauert, seeing that I'm feeling down and suggesting we go see a James Bond movie (as he did a few years back when we were both far from home at a conference). I don't think I ever properly thanked David for those many gracious moments he gave me during our friendship. Faced now with the finality of his passing, I am saddened by this fact almost to desperation. The moment we have to be amazed, to be thankful, to be touched, and to express our gratitude for all this abundance and this monumental coincidence of being together on this Earth, at this moment, in the midst of all these amazing changes and kindnesses, is only ever this one. This is the moment. Right exactly now.

This is it.

We are sharing this world with so many such visionaries. We are sharing the world with those whose minds are re-forming the world before our eyes. I am amazed at how many heroes I have today; genuine heroes, great and small.

You and I, we are living at an amazing moment. Think of all we have seen, and all there is yet to see. Think of the changes you have witnessed, and the amazing performances, great and small, with which we are blessed each day.

I am so thankful for these huge and remote heroes, yes. I am thankful for being alive to share the world with a Jordan or a Jackson. I am even more thankful for the friends with whom I have been blessed to share this world, and this time, in this little window of our lives on Earth. I am thankful for the kind words, and encouragement, and the love of these friends. I am thankful for the many ways in which they inspire and amaze me. I am thankful for the talents and the visions and the dreams and the ways - great and small - in which this amazing family of friends is changing and re-forming this little corner of this big world, the world we are sharing together in this little window of a lifetime.

This is it. This is the life I have been given, and I am amazed and grateful for it. I am thankful for my heroes. I am thankful for you, my friends. I am thankful for inspiration, and for graciousness. I am thankful for those who enter my life and shape it and shift it, no matter how fleetingly. I am thankful. Thank you. Thank you all. Amen.

One less key

I did it.

On October 30th I took my car out to CarMax (a bit of a haul from where I live - the ride took about 40 minutes) and got it appraised. This was not a glorious process, and the price offered was not high. After all, I had owned the car for almost fifteen years. I had toured in it when I was a musician. I had used it as my main vehicle for not one, but two, long-distance recruiting jobs (Outward Bound an Vanderbilt's Programs for Talented Youth). All told, I had put almost 200,000 miles on the car myself, and it had close to 60,000 on it when I bought it. It looked like Hell, but it ran. It got me where I needed to get to.

And where I needed to get to, spiritually and existentially, was here: the place where I no longer need a car.

This sentiment has been brewing in me for a long while. It started when I briefly lived in Europe, and saw how de-automobilized travel is and can be. In Germany, France, and the Netherlands I have experienced city life and travel that is convenient and easy thanks to both a good train system and my own two feet.

When Kira and I lived in Nashville, we tried to walk as much as we could, but in a lot of the city it was just impossible. No sidewalks, for one. This lack, combined with a sadistic ethic of urban planning that actually made it impossible to walk in some retail areas without jumping fences or endangering one's life, kept me driving, even as I dreamed of car-lessness.

In that regard, moving to Memphis has been a breath of fresh air (in more ways than one). The area in which we live, the Cooper-Young neighborhood, has lots of sidewalks, as well as a good supply of stores and restaurants nearby, within easy walking distance. We can get groceries and necessities, as well as a good variety of meals on nights we don't feel like cooking. Best of all, I am a seven minute walk from work.

I have been building up to this switch. When I first arrived, I used the car a lot. Over the past two months, however, I have been steadily, and rapidly, tapering off my driving. After I went four weeks without using my car, and not feeling the pinch of not using it on my life, I was ready to take the plunge.

The real moment for me, though, was a couple of weeks back. It has been raining like cats and dogs in Memphis through most of the month of October. One day in particular, about three weeks ago, it was really coming down - just bone-soakingly torrential rain. I was due to teach my morning class, and I wavered. Was I really going to try to walk in this? I should just take the car...

I cowboyed up. I gave Kira a kiss, shut the door behind me, and set out. By halfway down the block, I was drenched. I had on a really good rain jacket, so my top was dry, but my pants were soaked through. I put the contents of my pockets into the secure pouches of the rain jacket and trudged on.

Almost all the clothing I wear is somewhat rain-ready, so the pants were manageable even though they were so wet. Once I got to school, I made a quick stop by my office, where I have a towel (stashed there for just such occasions) and did my best to reduce the immediate moisture. My top was still dry, so it wasn't completely uncomfortable. I set off to teach, and made it through the day just fine.

(What I learned from that was not that I should have taken the car. What I learned was that I needed a good set of rain pants. They came in the mail a few days ago, and are now a permanent part of my rain gear. I am looking forward to the next storm, so I can try them out.)

A lot of what kept me from getting rid of the car sooner was fear. Even after I had proven to myself that I could survive just about anything - including a monsoon level storm - and be okay, I still wavered. I dislike change, and the unknown. I had never in my adult life been voluntarily without an automobile before. The couple times I had been without a car and hadn't wanted to be had sucked. Would this suck, too?

After a solid week of non-ownership, I can tell you, no. It does not suck to be without a car. It does not suck to stop paying auto insurance, to no longer have to save for repairs, or to no longer buy gasoline. It does not suck to no longer so directly participate in or support a bloated petrochemical culture. It does not suck to regularly get fresh air and exercise, to see things I like because I have time to notice them as I walk by, or to have an excuse to travel lighter on a daily basis.

I realize not everybody will be able to do this. It took me a long time to build up the gumption, and to arrange my life such that it would be possible. But I'm telling you - even if its just in little ways, you ought to at least try it. The world is a lot more fun on foot.

Movie review: Paranormal Activity

"Horror" is such a broad genre that I feel uncomfortable, generally, admitting how much I really and truly enjoy horror movies - mostly because this admission immediately conjures up images of Jason and Freddy and Chucky and all those things that I actually don't like about horror movies.

When I lived in Atlanta, a regular ritual each Fall was to walk up the street to the Haunted House at Agnes Scott College. This was a kid-friendly affair, short on gore and long on spooky atmosphere. I preferred this sort of Halloween affair because it allowed me to get the adrenaline rush without dangerously spiking my post-traumatic stress disorder - the best of all worlds.

A little chill up the spine and lots of spooky atmosphere is what I enjoy. I like it when the experience gets into my head and not just my gut. These days, though, that's a rare find. M. Night Shyamalan's early films definitely qualified - I couldn't sleep for several nights after my first viewing of Signs - and there have been others. For the most part, however, I have pretty much given up on Hollywood feeding my enjoyment of the horror genre.

And, it turns out, Hollywood didn't - at least this time. A couple nights ago Kira and I went to the local theater to see Paranormal Activity, an extraordinarily effective film shot on the lowest of budgets (under $20,000) and the smallest of crews (including cast, it was about seven people). What the film lacked in production budget, however, it more than compensated for in imagination, story and overall chills. This movie gets into your head.

The movie presents itself as a simple assemblage of footage found in a camera after an "event," that took place in the house and the lives of a young couple, Katy and Micah. There is no narration, and no narrative (at least on the surface). Instead, the editing of the movie follows the mere "documentation" of these events through the lens of the video camera Micah purchased to get to the bottom of the noises waking them up in the middle of the night.

As the footage unfolds, we learn, piece by piece, that there is a lot more at work (and at stake) in these events than merely a creaking and settling house. There is an entity at work, and it is not friendly.

It is clear from the start that the movie borrows from the "found footage" trope of movies like The Blair Witch Project. To simply dismiss this as a copycat, however, is to miss the creepy effectiveness of this technique across decades of the genre. Blair Witch did not invent the "found footage" trope. Though the movie used it to terrifying effectiveness, you can find precursors in such gems as John Carpenter's The Prince of Darkness, and the little-known but very suspenseful and creepy nuclear-nightmare TV movie from 1983 called Special Bulletin. There is something about grainy video and point-of-view filming that gears our brains to feel like we are right in the thick of the action.

Being in the thick of it results in exactly the sort of seriously creepy spine-tingles I was talking about earlier. To be merely scary is pretty easy. BOO!, and your hiccups are gone. Done. However, to be eerie and chilling is a trickier demand. Paranormal Activity pulls it off in spades, however. It succeeds by taking everyday activities and objects - sleeping, domestic life in a suburban condominium, and young love - and rendering it uncanny.

The performances are perfectly understated. Both the Katy and Micah characters are played by relatively unknown actors who seem very natural and real. This, coupled with the "found footage" approach, lends heavily to the "this is really happening" vibe. Both the characters are even more believable for the traits each reveals as the events get weirder. Katy becomes more bitchy and whiny, and Micah tries hard to "alpha male" his way through the haunting. Neither approach works, but both add an air of truthfulness to the documentation. We are seeing people under stress and unguarded; the makeup is off. It does not make them more sympathetic characters, but it does get us even more involved as viewers in the immediacy of the moment.

What I found most interesting were the questions raised about the act of observation itself. As the film progresses, you get the subtle indication that this entity, whatever it is, knows that it is being filmed. Whether Micah's camera provokes anger or exhibitionism on the part of the intruder, it is arguable that things got a lot worse once the camera got involved. There's a media studies thesis in there somewhere, for your grad students reading this. For the rest of us, it makes for one hell of an effective movie.

Thanks to a well-handled viral marketing campaign, this film is now in theaters nationwide. I recommend going to see it on the big screen - it is worth it. Moreover, the experience of being around other folks getting creeped outta their gourds is kinda neat. So yeah, go see it in the theater, definitely.

But I also recommend going earlier in the day. This is one film you don't want hanging over your head when you go home to turn out the lights.

Favorite songs of the moment

The Brains: Money Changes Everything

While this song was made popular by Cyndi Lauper, I have always been a fan of its original incarnation, written and performed by Atlanta band The Brains. This version was recorded at the Wax-N-Facts 30 year anniversary, and I think that's another Atlanta band, the Swimming Pool Q's, backing up the lead singer.




Romeo Void: A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)

I am a huge Romeo Void fan. The 80's were an interesting decade for music all around, but Debora Iyall and the rest of the group made some of the most challenging music - musically and politically - that I've ever heard. This particular song gets stuck in my mental jukebox pretty regularly, so I've included it here.



El Ten Eleven: Every Direction is North

I first heard these guys as part of the soundtrack for the film Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface. I like this video clip especially because you can watch the song being built from scratch in real time.



Avishai Cohen: Smash

Israeli-born Cohen is a phenomenal bass player. This is from his 2006 album Continuo. I like the whole album, but this was the track that made me say, "I have to go buy that right now."



The Producers: She Sheila

Another Atlanta band (I have them on my mind this week, it seems). Sorry for the poor-quality video. Best I could find. The song rocks, though.

The Nicene Creed, Colbert style

Yep. The whole creed. You go, Stephen. Nice ending, too.

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Books that changed my life: Biodegradable Man: Selected Essays, by Milton Mayer

When folks ask - and sometimes they do - I describe myself, vocationally and ideologically, as an "ex-newspaperman." My history, my context, my weapon of choice, is the long narrative, the nonfiction essay. The biting phrase, lemon-peppered with political bent and righteous indignation, is my mother-tongue. Mencken, Lardner, Trilling - these are my kin. Hell, even ol' Uncle Karl, the salty Marx himself, was a foreign correspondent before the long years of the British Museum and Das Kapital. In my mind's eye, I sweat ink. Young men, as the old Latin teacher once hissed, standing atop the writing desk, throaty and Brooklyn-born, I love woids!

But of all those many woids I love, by far the woids I love the most are those of Milton Mayer.

At the end of 1990, I was in my second year of college. War (the first one of ours in the Persian Gulf) was either well underway or heating up, depending upon how you mark the particulars. I was working at the campus bookstore for my work study.

One of my weekly tasks was shelving books after they came in from deliveries and were processed. The week we started back to school after Christmas break was in mid-January. It also happened to be the week of my birthday, and I made a spur of the moment decision: I was going to pick one of the books I was shelving and buy it for myself as a birthday present.

When I came across Biodegradable Man in the bin, I am not sure what first drew me to take a second look. Perhaps it was the title. More likely it was the "Selected Essays" bit. In any case, something about the book prompted me, as I was carrying it to the shelf, to flip it over and read the back. There I found the following (quoted from one of Mayer's essays inside):

If we reject Karl Marx, it has got to be because Marx too man first and last for an economic animal, moved to every other end by his economic considerations. A Calvin Coolidge who says, "The business of thei country is business," has no quarrel with Marx except on the technical nicety of the management of the enterprise. The business of this country, and every country, is liberation, liberation from political and economic servitude and from the subtler but more devastating servitudes of ignorance, bigotry and boredom. Man is a thinking as well as a feeling animal whose self-realization, unlike that of the barnyard critters, requires the life-long activity of a persistently inquiring intellect and a persistently discriminating taste. These are the objectives that the liberal arts serve, and liberal education is nothing but the beginning of their habituation. It is a platitude (but none the less valid for that) that the masterpieces of the liberal arts do not teach us what to think and feel, but how. There abides the great Latin pun - Facio liberos ex liberis libras libraque - "I make free men out of boys by means of books and balances."

If Mayer didn't have me in rallying common cause with me against ignorance, bigotry and boredom (though he did), I would not have been able to resist the grand gesture toward the benefits of the liberal arts (a muse with which I was just then becoming smitten) and the Latin. On the strength of the back cover alone, I bought the book.

It is important to let you know a bit of where my mind was at this point in my life. I had been raised, by my Mom, mostly, on conspiracy-theory laden skepticism and hyper-conservative Libertarianism. Mid-way through high school, however, the former went to work on the latter in my psyche, right around the time I was introduced to the writings of Karl Marx. What emerged from that brackish bouillabaisse of competing claims was a new me; a nascent leftist with a strong pacifist streak and a healthy wariness of what passes for both conservatism and liberalism in our current political sphere. I was angry and over-educated - precociously and verbosely ferocious - and Mayer, God bless him, seemed to be speaking my language.

Evenings for the next few weeks I spent reading from essay to essay, in sequence. I was please to no end with my purchase. The first section, America the Beautiful, was a series of six essays of cultural commentary, where Mayer examined (and skewered) and America both present and vanishing, whether the demise of hitch-hiking culture and the commuter train, or the rise of bourgeois refuges like the gated community and the country club. The middle essay, "In the Tomb," is an extended meditation on the limited comfort the art of interior design can offer to the owner of a backyard fallout shelter whom Mayer, with measured cudgels of sympathy and irony, interviews.

I loved the language, the style, and the wit of this man from the outset. His voice was a voice I both esteemed and envied. I, too, saw things in my community that I thought were absurd, and I, too, had a desire to write of them with this practiced ire.

It turns out, however, that this first section - enjoyable though it was - simply was an appetizer for all that followed. As good as Mayer was at social commentary (and he was very, very good), his real talent lay in political commentary. His was the engaged discourse of the populists of a long-lost generation, and he walked the talk.

Indeed, I quickly came to learn, Milton Mayer was that Mayer, the Mayer of Mayer vs. Rusk, a Supreme Court case I had been taught in my high school American History and Government class during my overeducated youth. Mayer had taken on the McCarthy-tinged torpor of his times, challenging the American government to a battle of quills when he was denied a passport for refusing to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath (or, indeed, any oath, Quaker that he was - but I am getting ahead of myself). He took on the government and he won, and what's more, he wrote about it, in a remarkable essay, "A Man with a Country":

It would be much more useful if a senator of a congressman - or a President who vetoes it - would resist a bad law like the Internal Securities Act [under which Mayer first went to court] or a bad regulation like the State Department's; but they will not. They will say, "It's the law. We may not like it, but it's the law." But we hanged the Nazi leaders at Nurnberg for saying that, and properly; a man who will obey the law, whatever the law, wants a form of government in which man exists for the state and not the state for man.

In this day and age, with language like that, you might mistake Mayer's rhetorical cant for those of cultural commentators on the right, those of a much less intelligent stripe - those who would resist government encroachment for more partisan, less principled reasons. But Mayer - God bless him - would have stood his ground as well against our current bumper-crop of pinheads. The Glenn Becks and the Ann Coulters of Mayer's day were eviscerated (and rightly so) in the wake of his mighty pen. "Veepings," he called the lot of 'em, naming them for the toadies they were (and remain).

So after a couple sessions of reading, I was pretty pleased with my purchase, to say the least. The best, however, was yet to come.

A little over half-way through the book is a quiet little essay, an essay entitled "Sit Down and Shut Up." This essay was a description of Mayer's first encounter with the Religious Society of Friends - the Quakers, as they are more popularly known. This little essay, to say the least, has had a profound effect on my life.

You see, up to that point, I had little truck with organized religion. I had been raised an atheist, as I mentioned. In high school I had dabbled with some eastern mysticism, reading the Tao te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita and the like. I had been to an Episcopal church a few times with my friend Robert, and Sewanee was an Episcopal school, but in 1991 I would have told you I was a long, long way from Western religion, let alone Christianity.

But God is not without a sense of humor, and moreover is patient (and kind). Mayer's little essay is no more than four pages long. Midway between the third and the fourth pages I read this:

What do I know about the Quakers? I know that they were persecuted, not merely as dissenters, but for many of their positive tenets, such as their denial of special priesthood; their indifference to sacrament, including their refusal to take oaths; their complete democracy of organization, down to the point of determining action on any issue by the "sense" of the Meeting and not by vote; their historic opposition to war, though in this, as in all temporal issues, they refuse to bind individual conscience; and their recognition, as original as their opposition to slavery, of the complete equality of women with men.

Having read that for the first time, I went back and read the essay again. And then a third time. At that point I think I must have said, "If there were still Christians like that, I shouldn't so much mind being a Christian."

Thanks to Mayer, I idealized the Quakers. I idealize them still, having spent twelve years of my life being one, starting that next fall, in 1991. I idealize them even though contemporary Quakers are, by and large, a long way from the enemy-less pacifism of which Mayer wrote (most of them, myself included, discovered over time that when they weren't being partisanly aggressive, they were still itchingly passive aggressive). I idealize them even though most Southern Quakers, reacting to the fundamentalisms of the Bible belt, are a long way from Jesus as well. No matter what they are, I love and always will love the Quakers of that page, the page Mayer wrote. That page gave me a hope, a direction, a fervor, and - God help me - a religion, for the first time in my life.

How can I estimate the effect that essay had upon me? The effect is incalculable. My career, such as it is, and all my schooling, from bachelor to master and beyond, has been shaped by the glimpse of the Kingdom that paragraph held for me. That essay helped me get right with Jesus, though it took a long, long time for me to realize that truth.

Those who knew me in my twenties are better equipped than I to decide whether I was too bad, or too good, a Quaker to remain one. Like Mayer, I love the Society of Friends despite the problems and shortcomings I see in them. Unlike Mayer, who remained a fellow traveler of the Friends throughout his adult life, I eventually made my break with them. Though I admit I delayed the formal severance until long, long after I had stopped attending Meetings for Worship with the Friends. I delayed, in fact, until the last, the absolute last, possible moment.

My journey continues, the journey begun in that essay, in this book. Though I am now, and shall remain, a Catholic (and I leave it to those who know me now to decide whether too bad or too good of one), I am deeply thankful for that mystic stillness I learned as a Friend. I am terrified by many things in this world, but not by silence. Silence, the Living Silence, is a friend to me.

I carry that silence in a special place within my heart, a place right next to my ire and my righteous indignation. As my heart pumps the ink I let pass for my blood, the cadence of the beat, to the words that I write, to the joy of a well-turned phrase landing pie-like on the face of yet another Veepings - all of that is thanks to old Milton Mayer, and for that, for so much more, I salute him.

Detourning Women

Ladies and gentleman (and ladies): detournement.

(Thanks to Jennifer Randles for bringing this to my attention.)

All of these lives... rearranging themselves for me

A couple of months back I posted about a series of ads I noticed in the Atlantic monthly, and the subtle (or not so subtle) racist undertones I noted in them.

Now that the most recent fracas -- that being over whether Joe Wilson's outburst at the President was an act of racism or not -- is finally starting to die down, I figured it was time to say a little something about this:



Now, yes. I want to give this some benefit of the doubt. It is a stunning ad, and quite amazingly executed (assuming these are actual human acrobats, and not cgi). Be that as it may, however, every time I watch this I think the exact same thing to myself:

Look. Here's over a thousand black-haired, brown-skinned people, arrayed reverently (given the saffron-like robes, one might even say, worshipfully) around the supine blond white woman.

At her every whim, they whirl and shift themselves into new patterns around her: "All of them rearranging themselves... all of the time..."

It is hard, what with the visual imagery being what it is, not to think of all the gyrations and rearrangements that third-world economies have gone into in order to provide us (supine white folks) with the earlier generations of our American comfort objects, our shoes and our handbags.

The fact that she is the focal point is clear. The fact that she is the only one not working her ass off is also clear. What is even more clear is that she seems completely oblivious (or uncaring) to all this black-haired motion that is, quite literally, everywhere she might care to turn her gaze.

The technologies of the industrialized world's white reality -- whether we are talking about television (where it took us a long, long time to get from Father Knows Best to the Cosby Show) or the American electoral process (ditto) -- have always been geared to generate illusory results. White technologies obscure the plain realities of racial, economic, and class disparity that haunt the green meadows of our "civilized" world. We may present ourselves with prettied-up images of all this, but the actuality of it is actually much more grisly and horrific and absurd.



I'm not telling you anything new, of course. You know this. James Cone and Jacques Ellul told you all this a long time ago, and many others besides. But now here is the Palm Pre, reminding us again, only now in much more direct manner, of this simple truth: For every relaxing, oblivious white girl out there, there are a hell of a lot of hard working brown skinned people, rearranging themselves and their lives.

That the result of this disparity is sometimes beautiful for us does not obscure the fact that it is also obscene. Tote that around in your Blackberry, little Miss America.

Senator Corker responds

Dear Dr. Dault,

Thank you for taking the time to contact my office about supporting a public health insurance plan option in comprehensive health care reform. Your input is important to me, and I appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts.

I strongly believe that no issue requires an innovative cure more than our country's ailing health care system. No matter whose statistics you believe, millions of Americans, including 800,000 Tennesseans, lack adequate health insurance. Beyond the chaos this causes to our health care system and the American economy, the human and emotional toll is enormous. I believe, as you do, that all Americans, regardless of medical history or preexisting conditions, deserve the opportunity to have access to high-quality health insurance coverage that is both affordable and transferrable between jobs. I also agree with you that increasing efficiency, reducing fraud, and maximizing competition between health insurance plans is the best way to achieve the best health insurance system.

I want you to know that I am meeting regularly with doctors, hospital representatives, the insurance industry, and patients like you to get a well-rounded perspective on every option available that presents a possible solution. As the Senate debates comprehensive health care reform, I assure you that I will be working with my colleagues to craft legislation with the best possible balance of choice, quality, and affordability among health insurance plans. The insight you have provided in your letter will certainly help my staff and I more effectively look in to this issue.

Thank you again for your letter. I hope you will continue to share your thoughts with me.

Sincerely,

Bob Corker
United States Senator

Tales from the Health Wars

When I was in college, a good many years ago now, it was right around the time of the first Gulf War. You might not remember the name of Tom Costen, but I remember that name. Tom was the first American pilot shot down and killed when the conflict broke out. Tom was also a Sewanee graduate.

The Sunday after Tom was shot down, the pastor at All Saints Chapel on campus preached a sermon in his honor. Actually, it wasn't so much of a sermon as a full-on eulogy. I remember that Sunday morning, and Tom's name, because that church service was pretty pivotal in my life.

The pastor did a fine job with the eulogy, all things considered. He certainly was clear that what had happened - Tom's being shot down and having died - was a tragedy. I had no quarrel with that part of the sermon. It was a tragedy, and the whole war was a tragedy, and I and my male friends were scared to death we somehow were going to get caught up in it and die ourselves.

I was waiting, however, for the pastor to give the rest of the story. I was waiting for him, from the pulpit, to fix his eye on the congregation and remind us that - no matter how tragic the loss of Tom Costen was - it was equally tragic, and wrong, that he was sent to drop bombs on villages and towns and possibly (or probably) harm innocent civilians - women and children - in the process.

I waited for the pastor to do what I thought was his Christian duty, no matter how difficult, in naming that uncomfortable truth. However, he did not speak that truth. He finished the eulogy, and left it at that.

I wasn't a Christian then. Hell, I was just barely a theist. That was the morning I stopped singing in the choir at that Episcopal church (the chapel, being in the center of campus, was the center of life and arts, so I had joined the choir the year before, interested somewhat in the Christian mumbo-jumbo, but mostly baffled. By that point, however, I had at least figured out that Jesus would not be cool with the bombing part). So I left, and did not return. I wish sometimes that I had had the good sense to go talk to the pastor and confront him about it, but I didn't. A few months later, I happened upn the local Quaker meeting - but that's a whole 'nother story entirely.

Why I relate this old memory, here and now, is that last Sunday I saw a pastor be gutsy in a pulpit, and preach a homily with some balls, and it got me thinking about that old, old Sunday of my youth.

This past Sunday Father Val, our pastor here at the Cathedral in Memphis, preached a simple and straightforward sermon in which he reminded those present that Catholic social teaching about the protection of life does not end with the birth of a child. He reminded the congregation that the Church considers health care - for everyone - to be a basic human right.

Father Val went on to speak of Mother Theresa, of blessed memory, who would confront visitors to her mission in Calcutta, who wanted to help her, and challenge them to leave and find their own Calcuttas - not in remote India but in their own home cities. Father Val related this story and then challenged us - challenged us - to take that example to heart. He challenged us to remember that all human beings, as children of God, have the right to demand of us, and loot of our comfort and excess, for their basic health and welfare. He suggested that, following the words of Mother Theresa, that we might find some Calcutta right here in our midst, and that getting involved in these conversations about health care and getting right with Jesus and the poor might be a wise course to take.

I tell you, it was a gutsy homily. I left the church that morning with a feeling wholly different that the feeling I had, all those years ago, in the wake of the tragic death of Tom Costen.

You know, they say Lincoln once snuck into the side door of a church in D.C., and slipped out right as they were passing the collection plate. An aide accompanying him asked him what he thought of the sermon.

"It was fair," the Great Emancipator replied.

"Only fair? Not great?" pressed the aide.

"It was not a great sermon," Lincoln concluded, "because the pastor failed to ask anything great of the congregation."

I think last Sunday, Mr. Lincoln would have been pleased. Lord knows I was.

***

***

Dear Senator Corker and Senator Alexander

I am writing to encourage you in the strongest possible terms to change your position on the health care debate. Please become an advocate for the hard working people of Tennessee who are being bankrupted and ill-treated by corporate insurance companies who value profits over people, who deny legitimate claims made after years of premium payments on the basis of recission (i.e., retroactively applied "pre-existing condition" status found after a claim has been made), and who refuse to offer affordable coverage to all citizens. Senator Corker and Senator Alexander, I pray that you will come to support not only health care reform and health insurance reform in the strongest manner possible, but that you will also fully and visibly support the public option, to allow the people of Tennessee, and of America, the greatest number of choices for their health. Thank you for your service to this state, and please, for all our sakes, do the best for your constituents. Health care and health insurance reform, WITH a public option, NOW!

***

You can reach your representatives' offices by calling the toll-free switchboard at 1-866-210-3678, or by going to the Write Your Representative website.

***

Getting involved in something great feels good. You might should try it, if you haven't in a while. Just a suggestion from a good pastor I know. Thought I'd pass it on to you, friend.

These are a few of my favorite things

In the words of Mike Watt, that last post was a heavy piece. So I decided I would lighten things up a bit.

For your pleasure, here's Unknown Hinson, playing Hendrix. Enjoy.

Walking in Memphis

"...prodigality is the law, and excess alone is sufficient..."

- Fr. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 1968

You never appreciate the subtle importance of a grid system until you have lost it - as I did for the eight years I was in Nashville. I could never find my sense of direction there. I even asked native Nashvillians (I almost wrote "Nashvillains") about this, and they, too, admitted that - despite having been born and grown up in the city - the cardinal directions still eluded them on an intuitive level. There is nothing so disorienting as trying to dead-reckon in a city in which you have no sense of direction.

In this sense, Memphis was a cool, clear breeze. North and south, east and west, these are on friendly terms again with my psyche. There are a few roads that remain cattywompous (that's a technical term for "indecipherable"), but they are the exception, not the rule. Moreover, Memphis was resistant to the introduction of an interstate through-way cutting across the heart of the city. By this little act of defiance, they gained a lovely green space (Overton Park, with a museum, a zoo, and a symphony band shell), and maintained these old, broad, tree-lined boulevards that give the city a very different feel than, say, Atlanta, with its cramped arteries and traffic congestion.

This city is an experiment. We are here for a year, at least to start with. We came up for three days in late July to find a place to live, and settled on a house that is perhaps a little beyond our means in terms of space and rent, but that is close enough to Christian Brothers University (my reason for being here for the next twelve months) that I can walk to work.

* * *

Walking is the great adventure, the next frontier. For a long time, now, I have been stymied by my dependence upon the petrochemical culture in this country. I have resisted it in certain ways - most notably by refusing to buy in to the macho egotism of the semi-annual new car purchase. Instead, I got my absolute money's worth out of the old Nissan I purchased back in '96. It's got nearly 250,000 miles on it, looks like absolute Hell, and still runs fine getting nearly thirty miles to the gallon. If you discount the costs of gas, but include purchase and repair costs, that comes out to my having spent around $.06 for every mile I've gotten out of the car. Not bad.

So the plan, and the hope, is that, having moved to a central, walkable location, I can get rid of the car. Kira and I will pare down to a one-car existence, with added benefits like more exercise for both of us and less stress on my left (read: clutch kicking) leg and hip, which have both been troubling me of late.

There have been little forays already, in the several weeks I have been here prior to Kira's permanent arrival. Walking to Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, which serves the best freakin' breakfast in the city (Those of you who know me well know what a find such a place was, and close by!), was followed by a leisurely stroll over the Cathedral, which is about a mile from our doorstep, down the lovely tree-lined and shady Central Avenue. Evenings have been spent exploring Cooper-Young, our new neighborhood, with its panoply of shops and restaurants.

* * *

We call the new place "Kookyshoes." It is a two-storey, rambling collapse of a place, painted an indescribable shade of sea-foam green (is it blue? not exactly. Is it green? not precisely. It is too pale to be pretty, and too dark to be soothing - sort of like a hospital wall). I gave it the name one blistering hot day as I was pulling into the driveway, my air conditioning in the car failing yet again. Everything at that moment - no AC in the car, no AC in the house, boxes everywhere, no time to unpack them, too many huge things to do, money draining out of accounts like we had cracked a levee, and Kira two hundred miles away for the next several weeks - just seemed so absurd, the name just made perfect sense all of a sudden. Ol' Kookyshoes. Don't pay no mind, tha's just Ol' Kookyshoes's way.

Anthropomorphizing can help, those moments when you can only just barely keep from screaming with the rage in your skull. For me, I imagined the house as a doddering old man, well meaning but incompetent, and needy of our care and understanding. The house - Hell, the whole damn situation, was needful of much charity. That I have not yet murdered somebody in all this frustration piled upon frustration is proof enough to me of powerful forces of benevolence at work in the restraint of my soul, forces much greater than my own sorry will. I take a moment here to thank the angels for the patience I have been granted under their care.

* * *

Everything I wear these days is pretty intentional. A couple years back, Kira and I were traveling in the Netherlands with some friends and we got caught in a rainstorm on the way to the train station, and ended up shivering and being chilled throughout the rest of the long day on the train and after. Since that time, I have been on a quest for clothing that manages temperature and moisture more effectively than my old cotton t-shirts and blue jeans.

The result is that most days I dress, like my old friend Chris had pointed out, like I was ready for monsoon season in India.

I look a little peculiar, I guess, in my ventilated shirts, Tilley hat, and convertable cargo pants. However, the clothes I wear leave me mostly fearless in both the rain and the beating sun. Needless to say, as I was exploring Memphis neighborhoods near Ol' Kookyshoes on foot, I was well-served by this get up. With the exception of one unfortunate run in with a patch of chiggers (little red no-see-um bugs that make your like an itchy Hell for a week), I have been pretty well protected and comfortable.

One Sunday, coming back from the Cathedral and, after, the coffee shop around the bend, I spotted a woman in the late forties weaving her way toward me on the sidewalk. As we passed, she slurred the words (in an accent? Perhaps, or perhaps it was simple intoxication), "Hello, Austrian!"

I am not Austrian. Not yet, at least. But I took it as a promising sign.

* * *

Now it's thirty years ago, and I am sitting in the gymnasium, playing Governor Fob James. I am presiding behind a desk with a microphone, and my suit does not quite fit, and I have been given a top hat that now sits on the desk in front of me. For some reason I am the narrator over our elementary school play, written by our teachers. It extolls the history of all things Alabama, from our Phenix City, deep in the east, to the muscled shoals of the north, and all the long acres between stretching west and south. I remember I could not pronounce "Appamatox," always stressing the wrong syllable, no matter how many times my loquacious tongue tried to work its way around the word. I remember the parade of bored miscreants that passed for my classmates, the actors in this embellished pageant, portraying the shambling and various characters that, apparently from the representation, bumped and mumbled the state to great heights.

Most acutely, I remember the retiring and ashen-skinny young boy in blackface, clutching a borrowed coronet and clad in a bowtie, standing straight at the microphone and telling us the brief but vital history of the man W.C. Handy. I cannot today recall the name of the youth, but I have never thought of him as anything but noble. In such a hostile context, there in the rusty buckle of the Bible Belt, he could easily have played the role in many a deprecating manner, yet he wore his stain nobly. He spoke quietly, but audibly and articulately, despite his tendency in normal speech to stumble over words. That morning he took especial care to be heard, and in my minds eye I see his dignity. Sometimes, in the years since, though I cannot explain exactly how, that simple memory has strengthened me.

* * *

I ignored Jesus again today. He's the man who lives under the railroad trestle, just around the corner from where we live. He has buggy eyes and, every time I've encountered him, he's been wearing what I can only describe as one of those old-timey football helmets. I know he's Jesus, even though I have not yet met him, and he scares me, and I am afraid to talk with him, or to listen to his questions when I think he is going to ask me for money. Each time, as I pass under the trestle or through the little park where he sleeps some nights, I walk to the other side of the street if I see him coming. One time he nodded at me. He knows that I know.

Jesus is the toughest. The minor prophets are easier. The guy who stopped me on Central Avenue today to ask me for change for the bus told me his name was Malachi. No kidding. I gave him the six bits I had in my pocket, wished him a pleasant ride, and walked away wondering at how the stitching that holds together the universe seems more bare to me here - like the laces of a football beneath my fingertips, or the rough thickness of a sewn-up scar.

* * *

And then, later that night, as I was driving home, there, without any irony whatsoever on the Elvis-heavy radio station, was the old Marc Cohn song, "Walking in Memphis." As I listened, I was overcome with the oddest feeling. The feeling was full, and heavy, and very undeniably there, all at suddenly once. It was the feeling that follows the unexpected rearrangement of a long-familiar room. The fact that the room was inside me only made it that much more immediate.

Whereas before, I just enjoyed the song, suddenly when the lyric got to mentioning Union Avenue, and Hollywood, I suddenly had a picture in my mind of both those places. I get my mail down on Union, where the PO box is, and I pass Hollywood when I head east. These places in that old song are now, overwhelmingly, my places.

And I had to pull the car over. For, you see, I was weeping, and for a couple of minutes, I couldn't stop.

* * *

I am not sure what I am doing here, Lord. I have uprooted my life and my suddenly-expanding family to a new place, with radical hopes and not much in the way of security and assurance. I missed my wife so much when she was not here. Now that she is here, some moments I find I am also missing the solitude of those weeks terribly. My soul is always so confused. My life is a series of moments in which I always feel I should be doing something else, no matter what it is that I am doing at that moment.

I pray for some peace in all this newness and upheaval, some peace in my restless soul.

And a direction, Lord. Point me out a direction.

Prayer, and some place to walk to, that's what my soul needs.

I pray. I walk.

I hope.