A Reason to Go On Living: That Chord

(#2 in a series -- crossposted at NewCritics)

Recently, a dear friend lent me a guitar he wasn't using.

Not just any guitar. He lent me a Rickenbacker 360-12:

You can be forgiven if the words "Rickenbacker 360-12" don't send shivers up your spine. Guitar fetishes quickly grow tiresome to the uninitiated, and it's hilarious to me that adult men (I've never met a truly committed gearhead of the female persuasion) can be led to believe that ownership of one ax or another will automatically confer on the owner the mojo, the swagger, of the rock star who made it famous. Two minutes spent with Musician's Friend catalog sales-copy will show how silly gearheads can be.

But this -- this is a Rickenbacker 360-12, man! It played that chord!

What chord?

That chord, man! You gotta know the one I mean!

That chord!



In our overstimulated time, our computerized, synthesized, digitized, 500-channels-and-nothing-worth watching time, when even the word radical has been drained of its meaning, it's impossible -- we're so burnt! -- to know how brain-meltingly radical, how charged with promise, how laden with possibility, was that one overtone-soaked BLANNNNNG when it was first heard in 1964. Think about it: Was there ever a single noise, a single sonorous crashing KLANNNNG, that more totally changed everything that anyone knew? It was so...so...so... modern! But like all harbingers of change, this single electric crash, joyously, orgasmically received by its audience, was not unambiguously benign.

You could get badly lost -- and many, many people did indeed get lost -- in the universes that that one monstrous chord opens. Those overtones -- those ululating frequencies bashing violently against each other as the chord decays -- scream an unmistakable warning of twisted confusion dead ahead. When did the Sixties begin? Was it when Oswald's bullet hit Kennedy's cranium? When Johnson proffered the Great Society? When troop levels rose in Vietnam? I submit my own candidate for your consideration: That chord.



Like almost everything about that decade, that chord still sows dissension. The Sixties will forever be fought over; the chief, nearly defining characteristic of that decade's history is the hellish ambiguity of the changes it wrought. I confess my own ambivalence over things that I once considered unarguably positive; I can't help but intuit that I might have loathed the self-congratulation of the Woodstock Notion, or the gibbering stupidity of someone under the impression that an idea conceived on LSD deserves particular validity. I have, I suppose, grown up to that extent.

The iconic noise of that chord, as I say, is still fought over. Nothing that large, that explosively clangorous, can be pinned down and defined. Those attempting to do so will find themselves at odds with others in the field -- as this page at Wikipedia will attest. At that page, I count five musicologists -- at least three known to me as excellent scholars of the Beatles' musical output -- who cannot actually agree about the component notes or the harmonic function of that chord! In researching this post, I've found that even the magisterial Ian MacDonald, in my opinion the best and most sympathetic critic of the Beatles' recorded work, gets the component notes of the chord quite wrong, as do the authors of The Beatles: The Complete Scores (and not for the first time!).

What can we say about something so huge and yet so strangely ambiguous, both in composition and in meaning? What is it even possible to say? Best just to let the thing reverberate around in your head, speaking for itself. And speak it will.

Now hand me that guitar!

I'd Love Me For It

This afternoon, I managed to lock myself out of the building at work. I'd stepped out to my truck in the parking lot to fetch something (it was ensconced comfortably in the Handicapped spot -- thanks, Medical Science!). When I tried the front door I realized I'd left my little magnetic key-card in my jacket pocket back at my desk.

There is a little subterfuge one can employ in this situation, but it involves walking about 100 yards to the parking garage and waiting for someone to use that door. For a man in my sore condition, this is not a minor undertaking.

I did what any red-blooded man in my situation would do: I screwed up my eyes, threw my head violently backward and then forward, and uttered one single extremely obscene syllable.

As I eructed this syllable from my mouth, a small pool of saliva went along with it. I'm not talking about a droplet or two, I mean a good quarter-teaspoon's worth. I really hadn't been anticipating cursing with such ferocity, and I didn't rearrange the buccal contents in anticipation. Clumsy of me, I know. With the accompanying vehement forward head-fling, the small blob (gobbet? loogie? lunger?) of spit splashed rather forcefully directly into my left eye.

Yes, that's right. I'd actually managed to spit in my own eye.

Ruefully wiping the goo out of my eye and off my nose with a sleeve, and gratefully noting that I hadn't been observed by anyone, I realized I'd actually been lucky, in a way. There are worse bodily fluids you can accidentally slosh into your own peepers.

Because I'm a Lazy Git...

...And because I'm swamped at work, y'all can just watch The Coolest Man in Rock-n-Roll History instead.



Or I'll entertain your candidates for C.M.I.R-n-R.H in Comments. But be warned, you're gonna have to search long and hard (oooh! That's what she said!) to find somebody cooler than Bo Diddley.

Memphis, Tennessee

Lord almighty, how fast they grow!

Young Freddie Jingo, aged 13 going on approximately 24, contributes the rhythm guitar to this loose little studio jam on Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee," one of my most favorite songs of all time. He's playing the sweet little Squier Strat we gave him for Christmas, and we knocked out his part in a couple of hours. I tried to get him to sing an Everly Brothers–style harmony vocal, but he wasn't having any of it. Singing, apparently, is for buttmunches.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you for the very first time ever on the international stage, Freddie Jingo!

Memphis, Tennessee (pops).

(Freddie's on the left of your radio dial.)

You can keep your Dylans and your Springsteens and your Davieses; for my money the premiere rock lyricist is Chuck Berry. In four brief verses in this tune, a simple one-sided telephone conversation, he sketches an entire short story, a whole open-ended drama. His genius in this song is to fool our conventional expectations of a narrative like this one; we believe, because we've heard hundreds of other love-songs, that the Marie he's trying to call is an absent girlfriend. Only through details dropped through the lyric do we find out the truth of who Marie really is, and why Chuck needs to speak to her so badly.

The telling details are revealed slowly. First we get the fact that our caller's living with his uncle (who writes phone messages "on the wall"! -- what kind of house does he run?). Then the delicious, nutty, and wonderfully comedic description of the physical location of Marie's house in Memphis -- as though knowing that Marie lives "on the south side, high up on a ridge" is going to help the operator find the phone number. Picture the desperation of this poor man -- it's both hilarious and quite sad.

Next, we get the detail that "we were pulled apart because her Mom did not agree"; since we're still laboring under the delusion that this is a conventional love song, it's still possible that this is a Romeo-and-Juliet situation, that cruel parents disapprove of the liaison and have acted to forbid it.

Then Chuck hits us with the kicker, "Marie is only six years old!" and suddenly the entire song has to be reevaluated. We realize that the Mom who "did not agree" is a divorced wife, that Chuck's so completely estranged from her that he doesn't even know her phone number in Memphis, he's living with his uncle in the sort of hovel where nobody cares if you write on the walls, and in his loneliness and desperation he's pouring out his heart to a completely anonymous telephone operator who is extremely unlikely to be able to help him -- or even care.

It's perhaps the saddest little rock-n-roll shuffle ever written.

Chuck Berry: Here's to you, man.

And to you, Freddie. I hope there's lots more of these in the future. Maybe I'll even convince you you're not a buttmunch if you sing.

Thoughts on St. Patrick's Day

"Ireland is a great country. It is called the Emerald Isle. The metropolitan government, after centuries of strangling it, has laid it waste. It's now an untilled field. The government has sowed hunger, syphilis, superstition, and alcoholism there; puritans, Jesuits, and bigots have sprung up.

"Proverbially and by nature our peasants walk in their sleep, closely resembling fakirs in their froglike and renunciatory sterility. I think they are the one people who, when they are hungry, eat symbolically. Do you know what it means to eat symbolically? I'll clear it up for you in no time; the peasant family, a big roomful of them, sit around a rustic table as if it were an altar. In the middle of the table, suspended on a string from the ceiling, is a herring which could feed the lot of them. The headman arms himself with a potato. Then with it he makes the sign of the cross (my Tuscan friends say 'He makes the big cross') high up on the back of the fish instead of just rubbing it as any hypocrite would do. This is the signal, and after him, hieratically, each member of the family performs this same trick so that at the end the members, that is to say the diners, find themselves contemplating a potato in their hands, and the herring, if it doesn't get eaten by the cat, or rot, is destined to be mummified for posterity. This dish is called the indicated herring. The peasants are gluttons for it, and stuff their bellies full."

– from James Joyce’s course material, used while teaching English to Berlitz students in Trieste, in 1906. From Richard Ellman’s James Joyce, p. 217.

A Reason to Go On Living

(Cross-posted at NewCritics)

It was with a hearty whinny of joy that I stumbled quite by accident recently upon a rebroadcast on The Biography Channel of "The Adventure of the Empty House," one of the Sherlock Holmes series made by Granada Television between 1984 and 1994. The prospect of spending even the merest hour with Jeremy Brett's unspeakably wonderful portrayal of the great detective was a delicious one, and when, through the magic of TiVo, I discovered that the whole series was being rebroadcast, I mashed the "Season Pass" button, poured myself a glass of medicinal brandy (the Seven-Percent Solution being no longer an avenue of pleasure open to me), lit a fire in the grate and prepared to bask in the glow of Brett's portrayal -- an unalloyed pleasure I had missed for a decade.

The intervening years had done nothing to dim Brett's light. He is magnificent.

When, as a stripling of twelve summers, I first came across the Sherlock Holmes stories, my first impression of Holmes was this was one hurting mamma-jamma. Those miraculous feats of near-psychic deduction near the beginning of many of the stories, where Holmes divines a visitor's profession, marital status, and military service within three minutes of his entry in the room, seemed to me to speak of a rather tortured soul -- who would ever want to be cursed with such acute powers, if they came attended by such heartache?

Brett's Holmes is a marvelously twitchy bundle of neuroses, a clearly tormented man. The episode I happened upon is (as any fule kno) the triumphant return of Holmes to London after the absence occasioned by his encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls; Watson (played with consummate aplomb by Edward Hardwicke) has believed Holmes to be dead for three years. What struck one about their reunion was both the tenderness of the affection between the two men -- evinced by Brett with brilliantly acted fleeting moments of warmth breaking through his otherwise austere face -- but also a deep sadness at Holmes' imprisonment inside his genius, which leaves him strangely immune to ordinary human happiness.

It's perhaps difficult to see through the filter of 100 years, but Holmes would have been seen by his contemporary audience as a profoundly eccentric man. Brett understands this to the core of his actor's soul, and imbues Holmes' every movement with revealing quirks. When interested by a new development, he doesn't merely sit in a chair, he leaps into it with feline quickness, folds his legs under himself, and glares with attention. When a sofa blocks his path to Watson, he flings himself onto his knees on the cushions, leans over the back, and continues talking -- a caprice perhaps forgivable in a child, but terribly gauche in a Victorian gentleman.

Yet in other ways, he is urbanity itself. He wears the proper clothes for the occasion and location (the archetypal deerstalker cap and Inverness cape being ridiculous on a gentleman in the city). His diction is perfect. His manners are, if brusque, never misdirected. He gives an ineluctable impression of a man steeped in, yet immune to, the infinite variety of human evil. Tiny movements of the muscles of his face betray compassion, empathy, identity with the plight of his supplicants, the blameless victims of fortune (except, of course, when they're not). He often tests Watson's patience by withholding information, but it's a measure of both Watson's trust and Holmes' gentlemanliness that the relationship survives without recrimination.

I detested the Basil Rathbone Holmes films. Rathbone himself was not to blame; his Holmes was as good as the script could allow. What I hated was the fact that the filmmakers didn't trust their audience to follow Conan Doyle's plots or his dialog, and revised both to the point of complete unrecognizability. It was a point of some pride in my youth that I could (admittedly, with some difficulty) track with Doyle's late-Victorian prose; the howling 1940's anachronisms that would emit from Rathbone's mouth made me cringe. Holmes fighting Nazis, for all love!

Of course, editing the Holmes canon down to a one-hour television format necessitates some telescoping and elisions, but the job done by director John Hawkesworth and his team of writers is skilled and sympathetic. At no time have I been irritated by the redactions to Doyle's immortal stories. I now keep my well-worn copy of the Complete Stories on the coffee table in the den, and amuse myself by following along in the text as the show plays. I'm fascinated by the differences between the two, the decisions the writers made in trying to keep faith with Doyle's blueprints. I followed with great interest during "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"; a speech by Holmes that begins, "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," marks, as far as I remember, the only time that Holmes ever seriously discusses God except in passing, or ever conflates mystery with Mystery. Doyle's version of the dialog fizzles a bit -- it opens a parenthesis in the story that has no real corresponding closing parenthesis. The Hawkesworth passage ends with a bang, leaving no doubt as to the subtext under discussion; Brett's Holmes replaces the rose that has sparked his reverie in its vase and pronounces with great import, "...and I am no magician!" It is, by God, an improvement, and I'll fight anyone who says it ain't.

It's a monumental shame that Brett died in 1994, before the whole Holmes canon could be completed. But Brett's Holmes will forever be the definitive one in my mind. He is precisely the character that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, the man who enslaved this twelve-year-old boy forever.

I Can Never Remember: Is It Libel or Slander if You Do It in a Blog?

• Michael Burgess, of 2348 Pine Meadows Drive in Bethesda, MD, a low-ranking aide to Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), personally rounded up 400,000 Jews, Gypsies, Communists and homosexuals at gunpoint and delivered them to the Nazi occupiers of Holland in 1941. Mr. Burgess now claims that he was not yet born in 1941, but has so far failed to produce his birth certificate.


• Angelina Rodriguez, of 456 Palatine Terrace in Racine, WI, regularly beats her dog Zip, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, with a leather strap she hides in a toolchest in the garage. The dog is despondent over Ms. Rodriguez' frequent capricious and sudden reversals of opinion that he is a "good dog" or a "bad dog." Zip has not urinated on the carpet in over three years, although he does occasionally dig in the azalea bed.


• Jimmy Twistleton, a six-year-old boy living at 12 Overton Road in Charing Cross in the United Kingdom, is a frequent bedwetter. His parents, Bob and Lila, who regularly practice anal sex, are pondering giving him up for adoption, but doubt anyone would take in a "stupid leaky little git like that."


• José Maria Pérez de Galindo, of 77 Calle de los Leones in Montevideo, Uruguay, will blow anybody for cigarette money.


• Abdi Abdullah bin Hossein, of 14 Kafr Hanut Road in Port Said, Egypt, is a gun-runner for Al-Qaeda. He is also a coprophile.
  


• Jeanne d'Amboise, of 11 Rue de la Paix in Lyons, France, divorced mother of Charles, 12, and Angelique, 10: Had her.
  

This I Believe

I believe that the only honorable option left us in this evil old world is to stand onstage on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour Alan Freed's "The Big Beat" in 1956 with Bry[l]creemed hair, bowtie, zoot jacket with velvet lapels, white bucks, whanging on a dreadnought guitar, legs spread, back foot beating a frantic tattoo on the floor while you howl "Lonesome Train."

I also believe that all our voices should come equipped with 1956-vintage slapback reverb. From birth.

Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio!



Jesus Christ, look at that geezer with the Tele! (Paul Burlison, if Wikipedia is to be believed; Johnny's brother Dorsey is on bass) He's HUGE! As far as I can tell that's a standard-sized Fender Telecaster (probably worth as much as my house, if it still exists). It looks like a goddamned ukelele on the guy!

(Wow: Apparently, Burlison accidentally discovered amp distortion in 1956 when he dropped his Fender Deluxe and a tube came loose...)

A Note on Branding

Damn. I just thought of the greatest name for a blog ever:

Shemp the Penman.

You want it, it's yours.

(Update: That wacky Kevin Wolf!)

A Joke That Will Be Understood By Approximately Four People

It's really funny how many Kenyon people find their way to these Friendly Confines. An old pal, an alum, nudged me in the ribs recently about Walker's Pond (a popular off-campus destination for class-skippers, dopers and trysting couples), and up pops another, somewhat more mysterious, entity with a comment that clearly also betrayed an intimate familiarity with that dear old mud-puddle.

It's occurred to me:

I am become the Host of Lords!

Metro Section, p. B04

Buried deep inside this morning's WashPost Metro section was a rather unprepossessing little piece, tucked up next to the obituaries and the local-crime roundup:

Expert on Soviet Intelligence Shot in Adelphi

...Paul Joyal, 53, was shot Thursday, four days after he alleged in a television broadcast that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the fatal poisoning of a former KGB agent in London.

Law enforcement sources and sources close to Joyal, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the motive for the shooting was unclear. But several sources confirmed that FBI investigators are looking into the incident because of Joyal's background as an intelligence expert and his comments about the Alexander Litvinenko case....

So let's see, here... Two mysterious men walk up to a man who just happens have been interviewed on "Dateline" this past Sunday saying that "A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence you -- in the most horrible way possible.' " The men shoot him in the nuts and disappear. The police are unwilling to part with any informative detail.

And the Washington Post plays it on page B4 of the Metro section.

I suppose it could have been just a random mugging. Nobody slipped any Polonium into Joyal's Rice Crispies, or carved portentous Cyrillic warnings into his bleeding flesh, but what do you think the odds are of getting "randomly" shot within a week of your appearance on "Dateline" in which you accuse Vladimir Putin of murder?

I think this one bears watching, don't you?

Call a lawyer,
Paranoia!
Let me will my ass to you forevermore!

(BTW, as of the article's date, Joyal is in critical condition at "a hospital.")

Later Edit (Monday, March 5): It turns out Joyal was robbed of his wallet and briefcase in the course of the attack, which, according to the Post (which has now elevated the story to p. 1 of the Metro section), "supports the theory that he was shot during a robbery rather than in retaliation for public criticism of the Kremlin, according to two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing."

While I'm prepared to concede that this attack may actually have been a mindbendingly unlikely coincidence, I don't think that the fact that his effects were stolen proves anything one way or the other. I can quite easily imagine that the attackers' marching orders included the instruction, "And remyember, mek it look like a muggingk..."

The newer Post piece includes one sentence that's a real insight in to the Editorial Mindset: "Joyal was shot hours after meeting with a former KGB general, Oleg Kalugin, near the Spy Museum in Washington." It's a fascinating combination of the possibly relevant with the shriekingly immaterial: "Met with a former KGB general" -- a potentially useful fact, combined with "near the Spy Museum," a detail that's plainly included purely for the purpose of titillation. Other public places "near the Spy Museum" that might have been mentioned include the MCI Arena (thus inserting the all-important Basketball and Hockey Factor into the equation) and (frisson!) Chinatown, which would have suggested the involvement of Jake Giddes and/or the Tongs.

Come to think of it, the office of the Washington Post itself is only a few blocks away from the Spy Museum...

At any rate, this story is just deliciously weird.

Update to the Update (Tuesday, March 6): Joyal's son says his father's wallet wasn't stolen after all. Down the rabbit hole we go!

So Happy It's Thursday

I've come to a stark realization: Postoperative Vicodin and my usual brand of thoughtful, carefully composed, measured, closely reasoned blogging...

Don't mix!

My powerful brain has turned, I find, into something with all the intellectual acuity and initiative of a bowl of six-day-old vanilla pudding. By way of illustration: It just took me fourteen minutes to come up with that lame-assed simile.

Physically, I improve daily. I can now walk short distances without a cane or a crutch, climb stairs foot-over-foot, and lift seven and a half whole pounds on the Nautilus machine using only the muscles of my thigh. (My preoperative record was a still impressive four pounds.)

I've come to the regrettable realization that my burgeoning career as a barnstorming professional pole-vaulter will have to go into cold storage until a great deal more healing has taken place, but this sad fact is more than offset by the fact that I'm stoned to the gills most of the time. Hey ho: God never closes a door without opening a window, dig? Which is good, because Jesus Christ has that deity got some evil farts.

Was going to say something else, but can't remember what it was. See? See?

Oh, yeah, I remember. A certain Dartmouth/Columbia Biz grad who just waved his little fucking magic wand and erased, nullified, annihilated, liquidated, obliterated (see note at DESTROY, 511.3) the product of the last fourteen months of my professional life needs to be Extraordinarily Renditioned to Turkmenistan and sliced into small pieces by an angry mob of Capuchin monkeys armed with plastic sporks. Fuck you, you piss-stained little MBA twat. Fuck you and your fucking sleek turtleneck sweaters and your $900 camelhair jackets and your fucking mousse-tousled, highlighted coiffure and your fucking BlackBerry and your ugly children and your frigid, neurotic courtesan -- here's a little food for thought, you revolting little business-school dog-turd: Are you really convinced she loves you for who you are?

There. Enough of that, eh? Let's just conclude that the Executive Class and I aren't going to grow old together and leave it at that.

From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capital

I have many friends who work in the advertising industry. Individually, these are bright, funny, engaging and thoughtful people -- they'd have to be; they wouldn't be my friends otherwise.

That's individually. Collectively, they (and, it must be said, the journalists who cover them) are stupider than a fucking box of hair.

The Double-Edged Sword of Hipster Eyewear

I have a pair of hipster glasses that I nearly never wear. They're tiny little wireframe things, the lenses a very rounded-off octagonal shape, not much bigger than my eyes themselves.

I bought them in the early Aughts, when my hair was longish, and I tended toward laziness in the shaving department. I labored under the apprehension that they gave me something of a Benjamin Franklin aura, suggesting an aging eighteenth-century rakehell with an eye for a well-turned calf, a nose for scientific discovery, and well-honed skill for putting the latter in service to the former. I pictured myself in a Paris salon circa 1780, fascinating the throngs with "To Anacreon in Heav'n" on the Glass Armonica and setting the ladies a-twitter with my Leyden Jar, administering mild electric shocks to the naughty bits.

Funny, what a pair of glasses can do.

The Ben Franklin delusion was shattered when I submitted to a haircut a few months later. I tend to go all-in on haircuts, never trusting a mere trim to preserve the spirit of the coiffure. Far too many times have I allowed some black-clad fashionista to have his or her way with my locks, only to cringe at the asymmetrical horror that glared balefully at me from the mirror upon scissors-down. No, far better to crop the whole thing down to the scalp, leaving a bit of fun on top, and then let the mess grow out to shoulder length again. Thus is happiness preserved -- and, haircuts reduced to one or (at most) two a year, the savings are substantial. A penny saved being, after all, as my patron saint of eyewear once observed, a penny earned.

But donning my hipster glasses after one such shearing was an awful revelation. My eighteenth-century lothario was gone. In his place there sat instead a policy wonk, the second-string Washington figure that haunts the periphery of the Sunday gabfests waiting to fill in for an ailing Charles Krauthammer or Fred Barnes. I looked like the sort of bowtied academic twat who sits in a well-appointed office at the American Enterprise Institute and comes up with justifications for disgustingly amoral policies, for the failure of which neither he nor anyone in his miserable profession will never be held accountable: Numbers supporting an Iraq Surge? Possible deaths of five hundred US troops and uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians? For the purpose of quelling virtually universal home-front dissatisfaction with the miserable progress of your war of choice against the wrong enemy? Coming right up, sir! Next Tuesday sound about right?

The glasses, needless to say, came off immediately. On went the contact lenses I keep in reserve.

This morning, however, on a whim, I put them on again. A certain satisfying post-operative shagginess has set in, hair beginning to tickle the collar, salt-and-pepper beard filling in. Given a few more weeks of hirsuteness, it begins to seem possible that Monsieur Franklin just might make a comeback at the salon. Attendez-bien, mesdames!

Does Sarcasm Belong in Music?

I've heard some artists speak of of the act of creation as a compulsion. "I had this thing inside me, and I had to let it out!" you'll hear them say, as if making a piece of art were an impulse of a degree of urgency similar to that of taking a good, but deferred, growler.

It matters not whether the art be good or bad. I imagine a similar impulse moved the authors of both Rodin's Gates of Hell and any random Hummel figurine. Inspiration strikes, the materials are produced, and woe betide any man who stands in Art's way.

In my case, I nearly never feel this compulsion. To me, the act of reaching over for my guitar and strumming a few chords is almost always motivated from something far closer to boredom than to hunger. Perhaps this is what stands between me and true artistry, I don't know.

This piece isn't so much as compulsion as an exorcism. "Somethin' Stupid" (the Frank and Nancy Sinatra version) came on an episode of "The Simpsons" one evening. I guarantee I hadn't heard the song since approximately 1974 (it superseded The Turtles "Happy Together" at the Number One spot in 1967, if you can believe that), but all it took was that one verse of it on "The Simpsons" to burrow the sleazy motherfucker deep, deep, deep into my brain. When I came out from under general anesthesia after my hip-replacement operation, guess what was there waiting for me...? That's how badly the miserable thing was dug in there.

As the ineffable Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) said during House debate on the Iraq Surge, quoting Robert Frost, "The best way out is always through." With this wise thought in mind, I set about expunging the mildly sleazy "Somethin' Stupid" by absolutely slathering on the sleaziest possible of musical touches. The cha-cha-cha beat has always struck me as sleazy to the point of risibility, and so on it came. What more Muzak move can there be than to follow a sung phrase with the same phrase played in octaves on a piano? Throw it in! A Nelson Riddle orchestral passage to break up the monotony? Check! Herb-Alpert glissando trumpets? Check! Passing tones relegated to the Mighty Marimba? Where else?

So brilliantine up your hair, throw a rose between your teeth, swallow those icky thoughts about a father-daughter singing duo belting out,

The time is right
Your perfume fills my head
The stars get red
And oh the nights so blue
And then I go and spoil it all
By saying something stupid
Like "I love you"

and let's dance!

Play "Somethin' Stupid" (pops).

Got Your Back, Amanda

I haven't felt the need to comment on l'affair Marcotte as yet; Blogwars are not my usual beat, and usually the whole thing looks from this lofty angle like a massive jocks-versus-nerds namecalling contest. Something best avoided.

However, it now appears that the Pandagon blog has been brought down, whether by DNS attacks or something less nefarious I don't know, and Amanda has seen the need to publish a redirect page (hard link here) on which she reproduces and comments on some of the lovely, lovely mail she's been getting since Bill Donohoe, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, set her in his sights.

For bigotry, I'll remind you. Donohoe accused Amanda of bigotry. Please bear that in mind as you read what Donohoe's flying monkeys hurl at her.

Here, then, is the main body of Amanda's redirect page. I'd urge my bloggy friends to show your support for her right to speech -- and, for that matter, for John Edwards' right to employ her -- by reproducing this. They can't shut us all down.

---

[Amanda's words full measure; her interloctors are indented.]

Granted, I don't think criticizing the church for policies that hurt families and even get people killed is a "sin", but my letter writers do. But I thought I'd bring up this story for two reasons. One, I've always been impressed by the subtext of the story. I suspect, strongly, that this story is part of the reason that Christianity was so attractive to women in its early days, because this sort of random misogynist scapegoating is all too real in a patriarchy, and this story must have touched a lot of women at the time, who would be impressed with Jesus' unwillingness to play into such misogyny. In fact, from everything I understand, much of the history of Christian misogyny is one 2,000 year long backlash against early female power in the church.

I'm also impressed by how so many people who claim to follow Jesus have basic reading comprehension problems when they regard this story. (Not all---for instance, some fellow Pandagonians take their faith seriously enough to read the Bible and try to follow its precepts.) From my mailbag:

I pray that I had some small part to play in your "resigning" from the Edwards campaign you libelous fraud!

That's from a Vivian Thomas, who also wants me to know that I'm a worthless hag.

Catholics are concerned about killing unborn children, you stupid bitch. Chop away if it suits you, but we don't have to accept that as moral. That's why it's called a religion. Look into it.

Frankly, if I were a churchy person, this "Look into it" thing would insult me, since R.R. from Tallahassee, FL is all but saying that religion is his excuse to declare his misogyny "moral" so he doesn't actually have to think and decide what his morality is for himself.

Amanda,
after reading your vile screed against Catholics and the Holy Spirit, I just had to see what you looked like. (I envisioned you eyebrow-less, with no visible pupils, and a blank, dead stare.) I see I was correct about the blank, dead stare, but other than that you're not too bad. I then thought maybe you were mad at God (and by proxy Catholics) for making you ugly, but now I'm figuring you're just mad at him for making you a woman.

Never Too Late

Blue Girl and the Skimmer put a lot of work into this video, but owing to some tragic last-minute sna-foo-age, it didn't get posted during her Grammy Live-Blog last night. But, dammit, it's a mighty fine vid, and you should watch it now. Twice.

I Hate the Fuckin' Grammys...

...More than you could possibly know.

The idea of forcing myself to watch the spectacle of an entire industry as worm-eaten, mold-encrusted and pus-riddled as Big Music sucking its own vile, boil-strewn cock fills me with an unimaginable nausea. To even add one two-zillionth of a Nielsen point to such an exercise in rank, naked cynicism is a moral failing of Rumsfeldian proportion.

So, naturally, I'll be kibitzing along with Blue Girl's live-blog of this disgusting, death-affirming Nuremberg Rally for everything that is wrong with humanity -- that's tomorrow evening at NewCritics, starting at 7:30.

Plus, there's the Police Reunion. That should be amusing. Oh -- and the traditional segment in the third hour when they throw an actual, live human baby into a cage full of starved pit-bulls. I always enjoy that.

I just hope BlueGirl and the gang don't mind a brief quote or two from the Book of Revelation -- just to keep their feet on the ground, y'unnerstan'....

Get a Message to Trieste!

I'm trying to get down last night's dream -- easily the most spectacular, detailed, realistic opium-dream I've ever experienced -- before the Person from Porlock (in the form of my Physical Therapy nurse) gets here...

I knew I was in for a wild night when, turning off the bedside light, I closed my eyes and began to watch a series of pictures that appeared in my mind, images that I could manipulate and morph in any way I pleased. Velazquez' Las Meninas as drawn by Ralph Steadman. In the style of Goya's Los Caprichos. As imagined by Roz Chast.... No, I don't mind the occasional Vicodin at all, thanks very much...


A visitor to my house shows me a device, made possible by a new branch of information science called Telluric Information Analysis (can I get a giggle, Chumps?). It has now become possible to map the real-time flow of information, from person to person, over a geographical area. The device resembles a notebook computer. On the screen is a grid, five units high by nine wide. He centers the grid over my part of Virginia. He maneuvers the map so that my house is at 0,0. The map extends past the Potomac, just into Maryland. Then he explains that he's going to enter concept x at my house, and equal-and-opposite concept z at coordinates 5,9. Opposite ideas at opposite corners of the map. He clicks "Start."

Concept y spreads from my house outward toward Maryland. Concept z spreads in the opposite direction, toward my house. "Now watch, as they meet..."

Swirling colors show the opposite ideas flowing from person to person, meeting, conflicting, conjoining, swirling into anarchy, becoming new ideas, canceling each other out, new wrinkles raiding into the map and changing the whole landscape... But then finally, after a wonderful light-show, stasis. The whole map is a uniform blue.

"My God..."

"Yes. It never changes again after that."

"But this means --"

"Yes. That's when it ends."

Cut to the the campus of Kenyon College, summer of 2007. It's the 25th Reunion of the Class of '82. A music festival is in progress, many colorfully dressed musical acts are performing on many small stages. The atmosphere is closer to Burning Man than some stodgy Establishment college reunion -- arty, self-indulgent, decidedly highbrow. I'm watching the Orchestra of the College (which, parenthetically, doesn't exist), dressed in fanciful Victorian military uniforms, playing pieces by Hindemith, Schoenberg, Webern. I'm plotting with the Musical Director to borrow a couple of clarinets, an oboe, a bass, some brass, to play an arrangement of "Sgt. Pepper" that I've worked up but never heard live musicians play. I've commandeered an empty stage for the purpose, made signs, passed out flyers...

Someone runs by in a panic, holding a Telluric Information Analysis device. It is glowing bright blue. Everyone understands exactly what it means. I turn to a friend: "Keep a weather eye out for squalls, amigo. See you in Trieste."

(Here's the Person from Porlock. Dammit. Woof -- she put me through the wringer... Ouch!)

The weather report is dire. Epic electrical storms, unlike any human has ever seen -- although perhaps a familiar sight during the Cretaceous Period -- are expected in the next 24 hours. Word goes out: The desperate object of survival is to get to Trieste, where the New Human Race will hunker down and eventually emerge, blinking, into the new sunlight. Anyone who doesn't make it to Trieste, is, well, a goner.

(Why Trieste? Search me. But Trieste it is...)

A mad automobile ride across a panicked American suburban landscape. I am in a Mercedes with two Egyptians, agents on God-knows-what recondite mission. They are headed for Washington, there to join with the unseen, unknowable forces arranging, sub rosa, passages to Trieste. We careen down suburban roads, where families are milling on their lawns, in a state of complete panic. One of the agents screams at the other, who's behind the wheel: "Do not slow down! For anything, do you understand?"

A child wanders into the road. Goes under our wheels. I look back out the rear window: Dead. Smashed. Parents, already in a state of madness, shriek their rage at us as they recede into the distance. I think, Yes. That's what it's come to. There's no going back now. In the far distance, enormous storm clouds, purple, flashing with lightning, bigger than anything anyone has ever seen, gather and begin their march toward civilization.

The Egyptians are now in Fairfax, VA, still careening madly through snarled and angry traffic, still leaving the broken bodies of incautious pedestrians in their wake. Panic is general. Gunfire. Arson. Looting. We take a cloverleaf turn too fast (Route 50 at Gallows Road, if you're keeping score) and the car smashes through a guardrail and plunges...

(I watch the concrete wall approach. I see the cruelly hard imperfections in the concrete.)

plunges...

(The road has yellow stripes painted on it. Why?)

plunges...

Two hundred feet to the highway below. The impact throws me from the vehicle, safely onto a grass embankment. I inspect the car. The Egyptians are nothing but charred bone. Too bad, you leadfooted bastards. I'll try to get your message through, but I'm making no guarantees.

A short walk from the accident scene, I come across a stationery store. I recognize arcane signifiers in the signage: It's a safe-house. I go in, and find many of the same Kenyon crowd, along with some people from my current life, co-workers, friends, are milling around. The leadership is trying to get though to those same forces arranging passages to Trieste, but current conditions make it impossible. Some of the folks in the room are embracing, saying their goodbyes. Hopelessness pervades. It's too late.

I leave the shop, to scout conditions. I look into the distance. The storm clouds are upon us, it's an utterly spellbinding sight: Buildings are exploding, entire roads are being ripped to shreds by lightning, debris is flying everywhere, human body parts are beginning to land at my feet.

I go back into the shop: "Did anybody make it to Trieste?"

"I don't know. God, I hope so..."

Home Again, I Can Groan, Scratch, and Talk to Myself

Wounded animals crawl away to find a comfortable place to die. When confronted with a deteriorating hip-joint (a condition that would have no doubt meant a slow and painful death in hunter-gatherer days, and a fractious and drunken premature senescence in the days of unscientific medicine), I too crawled into something of a protective shell.

Chores that I used to approach with something approaching joy, or at least enthusiasm -- walking to the mailbox, fetching the morning paper, mowing the lawn, walking the dogs -- became something to be avoided, or, worse, left undone completely. This avoidance-of-enjoyable-things has a terrible psychological effect; one can easily see other, even more vital tasks, like bathing or eating, dropping off the list. The inevitable outcome of this process is death. I'm terribly grateful that I live when I do, where I do, under the economic circumstances I enjoy, and with the people who love me and help me and protect me. In another time and another place, this bad hip could easily have killed me, slowly and painfully.

Monday I entered the hospital in a state of terrible emotional turmoil. I was terrified, frankly, by the thought of what was going to be done to my body. (It was a grave mistake, of course, visiting that Edheads site and watching the process of the surgery. I should, in retrospect, have never looked it up at all; it only added to my terror -- those stupid Flash cartoons haunted my dreams, they did -- without giving me any useful information.)

The operation was, as many of you who've experienced it assured me, quite unremarkable. I was completely unaware of anything being done to me -- all my Jacob's Ladder nightmares had been unnecessary. They put you out, zip, zam, zowie, you're awake again. Only now you're in quite a lot of pain.

I never want to go through those first 24 hours again. The hospital pre-op support staff make a great buzz over a device they give you to "control your pain": Essentially, you are given a handheld device that allows you to administer yourself a minuscule dose of morphine every six minutes. I can understand how the idea of this device gives comfort to someone about to undergo major surgery, but now with the experience on the rearview mirror, I call it a fraud. The device gives you no immediate feedback whether the dose was administered or not; you click the button, and something goes buzz. Nothing else happens. It gives you no timer, no visual confirmation that you've waited the proper six minutes. In a state of narcotic alteration, time is extremely subjective, and unless one watches a clock for six minutes -- a ridiculous task to ask of a narcotized person -- one has no idea when a dose has actually been successfully given. If you fall asleep and can't push the button (family members are prohibited from pushing it for you), you're SOL. When you wake up again, predictably in agony, as the morphine has worn off, you have to accurately self-administer three times -- over 18 minutes, during which you can't fall asleep again or pay the same penalty -- to get yourself back to painlessness. I lay for hours, drifting in and out of sleep, grinding my teeth at the knowledge that I was caught in a trap of user-hostile design. (Designers of medical devices, call me. You'll find my consultancy fees amazingly low for your industry.)

During this time, I came to heartily detest another device, this one attached to my feet. It is supposed to massage your feet to prevent blood-clots -- an entirely laudable task, I suppose, but in practice an inflating bladder squeezes one foot and then the other, each time emitting a thunderous popping noise. After a few hours, this became profoundly irritating; it's like being poked at with a stick every time you begin to find health-restoring sleep.

Narcotics being what they are, another problem went quickly from mild irritation to deep agony: I lost the ability to control my urinating muscles. I didn't become incontinent; quite the opposite. I lost the ability to pull the trigger, if you follow. I strained and strained, concentrating as hard as I could, bathroom taps going full autosuggestive blast, and produced -- nothing. I first pointed this out to the nurse on duty at about 4PM on the day of surgery; by midnight I was in exquisite agony. I had the temerity to ask this officious nurse -- a person I will not remember in my will -- for a urinary catheter; you'd have thought I'd asked for a tracheotomy kit to play with. I was informed that a catheter was quite out of the question -- imagine that! A patient trying to direct his own medical care! Who does he think he is, Ben Casey? When finally the dam broke somewhere deep in the lobster shift, I filled one and a half 1000-cc. urinal bottles. The relief was indescribably delicious. Sexual doesn't even come close.

About 24 hours into the stay, my physical capabilities began to improve drastically. During the morning physical-therapy session, if the PT nurse asked for 10 reps of thigh-lifts, I gave her 20. Asked to walk 150 feet, I did 300.

You see, two bits of information had made themselves known to me. First, I'd cottoned on to the hospital's criteria for the release of patients from the Total Joint Center: Once you can do so many reps of the exercises and have walked so many feet (and you aren't running a death-fever from some flesh-eating streptococcal infection and haven't ripped your own sutures out), you are free to go.

The second piece of intelligence became abundantly clear when the first tray of food was set in front of me. It consisted of a dreadfully watery "soup" with some disintegrating gray vegetable matter sloshing about in it; some deeply nauseating tuna-and-diet-mayo lolling about on a bed of wilted lettuce, and a chunk of bread with the consistency of a well chewed piece of Juicy Fruit but with none of the flavorful appeal, accompanied with approximately three molecules of generic margarine. No salt. One package of three-year-old ground pepper. I'll freely grant that my appetite was pretty well shot by the dope, but even if I'd just come in out of the snow after chopping a cord of wood and raising a new barn for the Clodfelters, this grub would have had me throwing my plastic spork across the room and looking up the Suicide Hotline.

Clearly, they were trying to starve me out. So with each painful leg-lift, each abduction/adduction stretch, each heel-slide, I whispered to myself, Chicken Korma. T-bone steak. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. And with each ten yards I managed to hobble on the walker (Jesus Christ, was there ever a more humiliating device?) I essayed images of Afghan flat-bread straight from the Tandoori oven, of basil-rich lasagna with a rough Chianti, a loaf of San Francisco sourdough bread... So crusty.... Soooo crusty....

My stratagem seems to have worked. I got out 24 hours early.

Suckers!

I'm back at home, "resting comfortably," as the kids say nowadays. I spent all day today luxuriating on my bed, desultorily answering emails, catching up on the blogs, deliriously lifting my leg and letting it fall again. I have a home-care nurse who comes in and checks for those death-fevers and unripped sutures, and another who gently leads me through PT exercises meant for someone twenty-five years my senior. I am, in short, a pig in shit.

I've weathered it, baby! Officious nurses, burst bladders, being poked at with a stick when I try to sleep, and food that would have been scorned on an eighteenth-century whaler two years from port.

And most gloriously of all, I have a future. I can contemplate anything again. I'm planning this summer's garden. I'm talking up a ski vacation next spring, a walking tour of Europe, a bicycle trip across the Andes, kite-surfing from Jedda to Calcutta and back again. No, most of these won't happen, here's the important part: I can pretend that they will!

In My Room

It's the waiting that's the hard part, isn't it...

The time before my hip-replacement surgery has been passing with a weird combination of glacial slowness and the inexorability of a supertanker. Just a week ago, I had a whole week to wait, and now I have a whole thirteen hours to kill. It feels like both an eternity and an instant.

Narcotics add immeasurably to the strangeness. Yesterday I was reading in bed, and closed my eyes for a few minutes, and began to have incredibly vivid and bizarre imaginings, dreamlike but not a dream. Since I was completely awake, I could control the images that were roiling in my head: Now think about sex, I told myself, and zoom up came these hyper-real pornographic eyelid movies. Now think about flying. Now think about going to work but forgetting to get dressed.

I really understand junkies.

In order to make the time pass this weekend, I whipped up this little number in the studio. I think it sums up my emotional state pretty nicely.

Play "In My Room" (pops).

For no particularly good reason, I wanted to use every electric guitar I own in this piece. Maybe I just wanted to feel them all in my hands one last time, I don't know. I'm playing the lead part on my beautiful blonde Epiphone Sheraton (my favorite guitar, I think, when all is said and done -- it looks a lot like the guitar John Lennon played during the rooftop concert in "Let It Be"). The second lead (the Carl Wilson voice, if you like) is my Epiphone Les Paul, a sunburst-finish beast. I don't know why I don't use this axe more often; it's just that the Sheraton is such a playable, seductive thing that I always reach for it when starting a recording. The tremelo doo-wop arpeggios are supplied by my Japanese Stratocaster, which I've given Fender Noiseless pickups and a much better pickup switch than the piece of junk it came with. I don't play this one much because the Floyd Rose whammy bar it came with makes it a major pain in the ass to tune, and my picking style often pulls it sharp.

I'm particularly fond of the double-stop bends in the second phrase of each verse ("I can go and..."). That's one guitar, no overdubs, man. I bend the A string a whole step, and the D string only a half-step. Your astonished applause humbles me. Thank you. Thank you very much.

All right. Twelve hours, now, before I depart for the hospital. Needless to say, no bloggage will be forthcoming until at least Wednesday, but I'll be taking copious notes when I'm not being flensed or hammered at or stretched or lectured to. Morphine drip. Morphine drip. Morphine drip....

Now think about walking without a cane...

Kodak in the Autoclave

Hey, here's a little suggestion...

Are you bored at work? Feeling underutilized, not contributing your fair share down at the ol' Jay Oh Bee? Feel the need to take on a little extra labor, put in a few more hours, firmly affix the old schnozz to the grindstone?

Here's what to do:

Tell your employer you're planning to go on short-term disability for a month.

You know all that work that won't get done in your absence? Hey! I, your employer, have got a corking good idea! Do it all now, instead!

The only reason I haven't climbed a water-tower with an RPG launcher this week is that I'm so hammered on Percocet that I couldn't find a water-tower. I wonder -- entirely as a goofball exercise, and not with any actual concern for accuracy -- just what a quality expert would say about the Passion for Excellence my output has exhibited this week.

In other news, I've decided I'm going to bring my camera along to the operating theater Monday. I'm gonna slip it to a nurse or the anesthesiologist or somebody : Psst! When they get the femur dislocated, mind taking a few snapshots for the old Flickr page? Come on! It's reasonably sterile!

Not because I particularly want the photos, mind you. I just want to see what they say.

The Parlous State of Our Nation's Highways: An Update

Perhaps there is some hope for our Great Democratic Experiment after all.

I came home from work this afternoon to find a handwritten note in the mailbox, on the stationery of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. It was from Supervisor Sally Kurtz, who represents the Catoctin District on the board.

It was, of course, in response to my vengeful screed from a few weeks ago, in which I spoke bitterness about the awful design and dreadfully vague and inadequate signage
surrounding a newly reconfigured intersection in my town -- an intersection that I and several others unthinkingly blasted through on the morning of its unveiling, to the consternation of the local gendarme.

In her note, Ms. Kurtz supplied her home phone number -- her home phone number, folks! -- and asked me to please give her a call at my convenience. And so, with a few samples of my freshly acquired collection of early 21st-century Percocets beginning to make their life-sustaining ministration to my ravaged and grateful central nervous system, that is what I did.

Ms Kurtz, a funny and very amiable person, clearly has had her patience with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) tested to the breaking point. This county -- for the last ten years and until the recent housing bust consistently rated one of the fastest-growing in the country -- has had its fair share of nightmarishly snarled traffic. She informed me that she has set up a meeting with our local VDOT District Engineer to discuss not only the intersection that brought me into conflict with the Heat, but also several other cases of inconsistent and vague signage -- including one in which some people were killed in an accident some miles from here. My letter, she said, would feature prominently in that conversation.

Supervisor Sally Kurtz: My Kinda Politician.

Fascinatingly, the mail brought another letter, this one from the Office of the Governor of Virginia, over the signature of the Secretary of Transportation. The nub of the thing was that VDOT had reviewed the design of the intersection -- created, apparently, by a local developer and not by VDOT itself -- and had concluded that it was "of a quality acceptable to VDOT." Apparently, the safety of the intersection had already been brought to VDOT's attention, and "as a result, additional signs were installed, pavement markings were modified, and a variable message board was added." (The variable message board, the Secretary did not go on to say, was removed after a couple of weeks.)

"These changes," the doughty Secretary concludes, "should eliminate any safety concerns."

I love the wording of that. The changes may or may not improve the actual safety of the intersection -- only time will tell if they do -- but boy howdy do they eliminate my concerns.

The Secretary concludes, "It is a difficult balance to provide motorists with information about a traffic pattern change and keep it concise enough to be understood as traffic moves at various speeds along a highway." I would like to engrave these words on a brushed-aluminum plaque and post it prominently at the entrance to every reputable industrial-design school in the world. It's a wretched surrender, an abject admission of defeat, to a simple problem of design. A second-year student of Human Factors Engineering could find a way to advise motorists, in clear and absolutely unambiguous visual language, of traffic changes ahead. It is a despicable capitulation, a rank failure of imagination.

Pain

In exactly one week plus a few hours, my body is going to be disassembled.

Oh, they'll put it back together again, no doubt, perhaps even in the right configuration. But in place of a failing left hip, I will have a titanium femoral ball connected to a long spike driven deep into the barrel of my femur. The ball will rest in a metal cup that's screwed into my pelvis, which will have been routed out to accept it.

In order to get at this peccant part of my anatomy, the leg will have to be -- there's no delicate way to put it -- taken off. Disconnected. Dissected. A large incision, some eight to ten inches long, will be made in my ass and thigh, muscles will be parted from their moorings, tendons and ligaments snipped, and the leg dislocated in a mighty heave that no doubt will require the amassed strength of every man-jack in the operating theater.

I picture my anesthetized body lying supine on the operating table, my leg cocked off at some bizarre and unnatural angle that it was never meant to describe, the ball-end of the femur exposed to air it's never met before, and to the surgeons' carpentry tools. Like a well-roasted chicken, I imagine, the drumstick-bone poking out through lacerated dark meat.

That I have agreed to allow this drawing-and-quartering of my body, and this sawing and chiseling of my skeleton, is a measure of what I'm willing to do to make pain go away. I had an operation back in June to try to save the hip, and since August I've taken two Voltarens a day to keep the inflammation down. For the most part, the drug had its effect, allowing me to function in a more or less normal way, as long as I took it easy and walked with a cane. Every once in a while I'd forget to take a pill, and the returning inflammation would remind me, like taking a rolled-up newspaper to a naughty puppy, just how thin is the line of chemistry that stands between me and serious agony.

Now, with surgery a week off, the doctor has ordered me to stop taking any sort of analgesic that might interfere with coagulation, and once again the pain is returning like a freight train. Sitting, standing, lying, walking, each presents its own unique little punishments. Through a stupid series of miscommunications, I wasn't able to get a prescription for Vicodin this weekend, and right at the moment I'm one sore naughty puppy.

Pain makes you withdraw from the world, and I'm very angry at it for that. I'd have loved to have gone to the antiwar demo down at the Mall this weekend, but even a leisurely walk around the Capitol with some like-minded enthusiasts would have felled me like an ox. I don't walk the dogs. I don't roller-blade, my once and (D.V.) future favorite pastime. I don't hike my mountain. Many things have been taken from me by pain.

I want them back. God damn it.

Bang & Olufsen?!?!?

I barely know him!

NewCritics

Over at NewCritics (which I've added to the ol' Blogroll, along with a link to the John Crowe Ransom MySpace page) I've posted an appreciation -- a way of avoiding saying "a good long wallow in amateur humor-analysis" -- of a B. Kliban cartoon that nearly caused me to wet trou in that halcyon year 1975.

In Loving Memory

Since I've been soaking in all this death lately, I've been giving thought to preparations for my own demise. In particular, I've been pondering a good epitaph for my gravestone. For many years, I'd wanted "Little. Yellow. Different. Better." but it occurs that that might not age too well.

I think I've settled on a better one:

Here Lies
Neddie Jingo
1960 - 20XX

What the hell was all that about?

Off to revise my will...

Arlington

We buried CDR C. Chase Porter, USN (Ret., Greatest Generation) yesterday. Arlington National Cemetery. Military honors. He now lies next to his wife Dorothy, who died years ago.

It was an utterly lovely ceremony. They really lay the Nation's Heroes to rest in style. The funeral cortege was met by six sailors in impeccable peacoats and Dixie Cup caps. As we emerged from our cars, these men began the most amazingly formalized... I think dance would probably not be a word they'd approve, but that's the thing it most closely resembled to this civilian. Not a movement did they make that wasn't accompanied by some ornate flourish of hand or knee or ankle, motions of ceremonial, formalized theatricality, all of course in absolutely perfect martial unison. I was utterly transfixed by these flourishes -- which, I think, is their intended effect.

They formed two rows of three, crowhopped into formation an arm's length apart, surrounded Chase's coffin and, with glacial deliberation, carried it to the gravesite and laid it carefully, reverently, on the bier, suspended over the grave. They then began another stanza of the dance, this one centered on the flag that draped the coffin. Their hands and elbows began extremely slow, deliberate movements that were punctuated by snaps of sudden, violent motion, accompanied by more theatrical gesticulations. Military Kabuki.

They stood with the flag suspended between them over the coffin. The chaplain, a gentle, kind-looking soul, made a few tailored remarks, and recited the 23rd Psalm, which even to an old reprobate existentialist like myself is a mighty powerful bit of poetry: "...Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."

We stood for Military Honors. I noticed off in the distance, perhaps fifty yards off, a Naval detachment that I at first thought was on some other task. But no: "Aim! Fire!" Seven rifles reported. "Aim! Fire!" Seven more. "Aim! Fire!" The last cracks reverberated into the distance, and a bugler, a similar distance away in the other direction, played "Taps."

At this point, there wasn't a dry eye graveside -- my own certainly not excluded.

More Military Kabuki: The flag is folded into its triangular shape. The sailors look as though they're playing an incredibly ornate, formal game of Cat's Cradle, their arms interweaving in their martial, snapping dance. The flag, now in its tightly packed, lovingly folded bundle, is now presented to my sister-in-law -- and the dance is over.

We walked slowly back to our cars, in varying states of bewilderment, grief, relief. I looked at the graceful, rolling Arlington hills, covered with their precisely planted white rows of stones, thought about how many times, how many hundreds of thousands of times, this tightly scripted piece of theater had been played in this place, how much raw grief, like torn flesh, had spilled in this place. Ours was a mellow grief; Chase lived a long and full life after his military service, raised a family, enjoyed his grandchildren. But on our slow walk out, as I conversed lightly with the chaplain, he gestured toward another part of the graveyard not far off, nearer the river, only half filled with stones, and said simply, "The Iraq fallen are over there."

I can't even begin to imagine the anguish that ground has seen.

A History-Mystery!

Remember this thing?

David Mull's chimney-stack, built sometime between 1759 and 1775. It sits at the southeast corner of my lot. Part of my house was built with the logs that were taken from this one-room log cabin and moved uphill in the 1870s, perhaps when the stream it sat next to dried up, or when the ground became marshy:


Just to the southeast of that chimney-stack runs a stone wall, which I believe (from the will of Mull's son, also named David) dates to about 1812, when the younger David died and divided his land up among his sons and daughters. Here's part of it:



Now, if you follow that wall to the south, you come to the corner of my lot. (You'd better do it in January, because if you try it in July, the dense undergrowth will make you one sorry and scratched-up hombre.) When I first tried this, a couple of years ago, I was rather surprised to find a gate at the southeast corner.

I was surprised because, at first glance, there's absolutely no need for this gate to exist at all. None whatever. It doesn't open out to a road, and it would appear to the casual eye that it would have simply led one into an empty lot -- one that has never been developed, as far as my researches have shown.

Here's one of the gateposts. Wonder Woman is examining the other:



Now, it can't be that old: Unfinished wood just doesn't last that long out in the forest, unprotected from the elements. But look at it carefully: It doesn't look manufactured. I would guess that a modern, milled post wouldn't have open mortises that have to be closed by a clapped-to second piece of lumber; I would think that a gatepost like that, if modern, would have those mortises mechanically routed through the center of the main piece for strength and durability.

I think it's handmade, in other words. And older than -- well, certainly older than me.

And it's a tantalizing hint that there are ghost-roads around here that we can no longer see.

Here's a rough, not-to-scale map of the relevant section of my lot:



The road marked "Modern" in this map is actually very old indeed; we have indications that it might be Payne's Ferry Road, built in the 1740s. It leads down to the Potomac, and for some part of its life actually went all the way to Harpers Ferry. "Modern," in this case, means still in use.

I can't eliminate from my mind the question, Why does that gate exist? When did it stop being used? What was it used for? How was this land configured and used before it stopped being farmed? When, for that matter, did it stop being farmed?

For a hint on that last question, here's a photo looking back through the gate toward the cabin:



There are many extremely mature hardwoods directly in the path that connects the old cabin and the gate; they've got to be more than 100 years old. Another data-point: The stone wall is quite clearly finished on either side of that gate, meaning that the gate itself was always intended to be there, from the date of the erection of the wall.

My belief (I guess you'd call it a hypothesis) is that that gate was the main entrance for this homestead, and access to the house through what is marked on my map as the "modern driveway" began in the 1870s, when the original homesite was abandoned and the house moved uphill. The former "driveway" (for lack of a better word) went through that gate and along the east wall.

But that demands an answer for an extremely tantalizing question: Why there? Why would you build the main entrance to your homestead where there doesn't appear to ever have been a road?

The answer, of course, is that a road once was there! Some 100 yards or so from that gate is the old Ebenezer Church Road, which is still visible in spots where it goes up and over Short Hill. I'd bet any amount of money that the 1812 directions to what would eventually become Jingo Acres went, "Pass Jacob Virts' place, and hang a right when the road starts to go uphill."

Here's about where you'd have taken that right:


So: What I need to know is, How old are those fence-posts? Short of, I dunno, carbon-dating them, I have no scientific way of knowing. I know that different kinds of wood decay at different rates, and the fact that the posts have stood upright rather than lying horizontal may very well have contributed to their longevity. But the answer to that question would tell me a great deal about what I want to know about my home's shadowy past.

Later Edit: Some of you asked about the nails and other hardware holding the parts of the post together. Here's another view, taken from the outside angle, that shows the hardware a bit better:


The nails are round-headed, galvanized (? at least not rusted through) and pretty clearly modern. The wire is also still pretty robust, but interestingly, the staples holding the wire in place are very rusted and nearly crumbling.

The Bunny Man: Ned Ludd of the Exurbs

This morning a friend, citing my near-pathological loathing of the exurbs mushrooming in the farthest reaches of the Washington metro area, sent me a link to a truly strange and compelling story.

There exists among the schoolchildren of the Washington area the urban legend of The Bunny Man. It tells of a deranged killer who escaped long ago from a local mental institution; this person's particular mania manifested itself first as an obsession with rabbits -- locals reported finding hundreds of butchered and skinned rabbit carcasses -- and later with the adoption of a bunny-rabbit costume, worn while wreaking murderous havoc among, oh, you name it: lovers parked in cars, children lost in the woods, solitary motorists -- the usual urban-legend fare. His ghost is confidently reported to return every Halloween night to a certain bridge between Clifton and Fairfax Station his foul murders to perform -- making the bridge, naturally, a favorite "I-dare-you" spot for intrepid local teens.

I hadn't ever heard this legend -- though born on K Street, I grew up far from here and spent only brief periods here during my years of susceptibility to urban legends. However, this afternoon I mentioned this story to a young designer I work with, and he immediately knew what I was talking about: "Oh! That's the Bunny Man. Everybody who grew up here knows that one!"

A local librarian, Fairfax County Public Library Historian-Archivist Brian A. Conley, decided to investigate this legend and see if he couldn't find a source for it. The link my friend sent me this morning is the story of his investigation.

I'll spare you the details of the librarian's story (you can read the whole thing here -- and trust me, it's a fascinating one), save to say that he did trace the legend to a pair of reports that appeared in the Washington Post in October of 1970. In the first story, a man in a bunny costume appeared out of nowhere on Guinea Road in Fairfax, accused the car's occupants of trespass, and heaved a hatchet through the car window. No one was harmed. The second story states:

A man wearing a furry rabbit suit with two long ears appeared — again — on Guinea Road in Fairfax County Thursday night, police reported, this time wielding an ax and chopping away at a roof support on a new house....

Thursday night's rabbit, wearing a suit described as gray, black and white, was spotted a block away [from the location of the first incident] at 5307 Guinea Rd.

Paul Phillips, a private security guard for a construction company, said he saw the "rabbit" standing on the front porch of a new, but unoccupied house.

"I started talking to him," Phillips said, "and that's when he started chopping."

"All you people trespass around here," Phillips said the "Rabbit" told him as he whacked eight gashes in the pole. "If you don't get out of here, I'm going to bust you on the head."

Phillips said he walked back to his car to get to get his handgun, but the "Rabbit", carrying the long-handled ax, ran off into the woods.

And an Urban Legend is born...

While investigating these incidents, a county investigator was told that someone who worked at a development company had received an irate phone call from someone calling himself "the Axe Man." The Axe Man had said, "You have been messing up my property, by dumping tree stumps, limbs and brush, and other things on the property."

Look at one detail of the second story: The house the Bunny Man chopped at was new but unoccupied. Before the Second World War, Fairfax County largely resembled where I live now: Rural, sleepy, bucolic. I remember seeing a 1930s photograph of Tysons Corner -- the intersection of Chain Bridge Road and Lee Highway -- and it was... a gas station. After WWII, developers began to make inroads into the county to build homes for the hundreds of thousands of government workers who served the newly exponentially larger postwar federal government and its attendant Military-Industrial Complex. Tysons Corner is now a gigantic, hideous miles-wide morass of concrete and glass, and is home to two of the world's largest shopping malls.

The investigating librarian concludes:

Who was the Bunny Man, and what was he trying to accomplish? Sadly, we will likely never know his identity. Likewise his true motivations are known only to himself, but there are a few clues contained in the foregoing sources. On October 18 the Bunny Man accused Robert Bennett of trespassing. On October 29 the Bunny Man told security guard Paul Phillips that "You all trespass around here," and on November 4, the self-styled "Axe Man" accused the unnamed representative of Kings Park West Subdivision of dumping debris on his property. If we assume that all three incidents involved the same individual, then it appears that this young man was disturbed by the development of the area. Said development was extensive in 1970, too....

Being forced to watch helplessly while the face of your community changes around you can elicit strange behavior in some people.

And how!

Anybody have a bunny costume lying around you're not using?

(Concise summary of the Bunny Man Legend at Wikipedia)

Ah, But I Was So Much Older Then

From The Rocking Vicar: The earliest known (1851) photo of Bob Dylan.

Bad Shit

On my most pessimistic days, I can't scotch the dread that Seriously Bad Shit's a-Comin'.

I used to be able to pooh-pooh myself out of the idea -- just the usual, residual Former Doper Paranoia -- but I admit that occasionally the whole Global Warming/Fundy Nutjob/Peak Oil/Protofascist Right Wing/Loony Jihadist/Incredibly Stupid President ball of wax just jumbles all together in my poor little head and I just can't avoid the fear that we're headed pell-mell for a long, slow-rolling Katrina that leaves us all foundering in shit.

Saturday's balmy 75-degree weather played on the evening news like it was the greatest midwinter gift anybody's ever had. People out biking and sunbathing and marveling at the budding blossoms fooled into emerging. Me, I was quaking in fear all day. Absolutely immobilized, horrified. Yeah, yeah, I know, El Niño, not Global Warming, blah blah. Didn't stop me from fantasizing the complete and utter destruction of the hardwood forest on Short Hill. Didn't stop me from picturing palm trees in Purcellville. Polar bears dying on melting ice blocks in the ocean. Maniac religious cults, maddened from hunger and boredom, roaming my road looking for people to either convert or kill-- doesn't make much difference to them.

It says something about the times we live in when an unusually warm day in January can trigger that kind of panic.

Then I go and read this interview with Chris Hedges, author of the newly published American Fascists. Hedges, the former NYT bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans, knows as well as anybody the warning signs of Bad Shit. And he's not afraid, not too polite, to call a Fascist a Fascist. He describes the interior emptiness that drives people to its dubious comforts:

For me, the engine of the [Christian Fascist] movement is deep economic and personal despair. A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that's in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again.

Jesus. There it is. Ashburn, Virginia. Mile after mile after mile of enormous, piss-elegant houses on a nightmare labyrinth of endlessly recursive streets, each one of them with three or four gargantuan flat-panel TVs spewing endless crap at the inhabitants.

I know that emptiness, dig? I fear that emptiness. I work hard to fill that emptiness with music and books and writing and loving and working. I understand how that yawning, unfilled nothing might lead you conclude that Jesus talks though your TV set, telling you to kill atheists, Muslims and fags. I've felt it. Driving through Ashburn, it shrieks at you from every phony brick facade, from every molecule of oil-depleting vinyl that wraps these thousands of hideous fuckboxes.

Just one economic bad patch, one big layoff at AOL or Verizon, one upward tweak of the interest rate on their jive-ass "creative" mortgages, one year of $10/gallon gas, one son or daughter killed in Iraq, one terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, one natural disaster -- and that's all she wrote. It's off to the MegaChurch, the only thing that provides any explanation that doesn't consist of "You bought that fuckin' huge house and those three SUVs and the jetski and the eight cellphones and the Sybian, asshole. Live with the consequences."

Hedges explains the appeal of Christofascism:

This is a world of magic and signs and miracles and wonders, and [on the other side] is the world you hate, the liberal society that has shunted you aside and thrust you into despair. The rage that is directed at those who go after the movement is the rage of those who fear deeply being pushed back into this despair, from which many of the people I interviewed feel they barely escaped. A lot of people talked about suicide attempts or thoughts of suicide -- these people really reached horrific levels of desperation. And now they believe that Jesus has a plan for them and intervenes in their life every day to protect them, and they can't give that up.

I'm getting that book.

Oh, and Jim Kunstler is a real cheerer-upper today, too.