I Yam What I Yam

In the cafeteria at work this afternoon, I passed a display case in which stood a wholesome selection of Southern delicacies (the Food Theme this week, for some unfathomable reason).

In a warming tray stood a gelatinous light-brown mass, its exposed parts busily developing a darker-brown sugary crust. I wouldn't have given it a second look, but for the sign that stood next to it:

Candid Yams.

The typo gave me a slight giggle, and, with mild indignation at the sad state of proofreading among immigrant cafeteria workers these days, I cast my lunchtime thoughts elsewhere. But as I hobbled away from the case, a small voice stopped me in my tracks.

"Looks like you've put on a little weight, there, Cap'n!"

I shook my head, blinked once or twice, and turned around.

"You gonna go with that beard? Please don't tell me you're gonna go with that beard. You look like Grizzly Adams, fer crissakes."

Flabbergasted, I made my way back to the display case. I bent down to where the voice seemed to be coming from.

"Dude, that shirt! Nineteen-fifty-six baby-puke yellow? What are you, Cosmo Kramer? Can't you afford anything better? Oops, that's right -- you haven't climbed quite as high on the Corporate Ladder as you'd originally envisioned, so you're probably pinching pennies in the wardrobe area. That's all right, there are plenty of other losers whose shoulders you can cry on. There goes one now."

I glanced to my side. A dear friend passed by, carrying a tray of food.

"Tell you a little secret, there, chum: No matter what she says to the contrary, the Little Woman's probably getting a mite sick of going Tourist Class, if you know what I mean. Guys like you lose gals like that. And another thing --"

I pulled myself up to my full height, stiffened my spine, and tried to assume my haughtiest demeanor.

"I'll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself, sir."

"Oh, yeah? Eat me!"

Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say, but you wouldn't know it by me. I don't mind it lukewarm either. Lukewarm and sweet.

A Meditation on Corporate Strategy Development

By Al Swearengen

Greetin's, friend! If you're looking for Ned, he's in Room Four working out a serious case of the writer's block with a ball of dope and the two new girls in from fuckin' Chicago. To judge from the screeching comin' out of there, the fuckin' dam is being breached admirably, and the cocksucker'll be back to his old ways, haranguing the citizenry in the public fuckin' thoroughfare, in a trice.

Before he retired to ease his tribulation and rest his worried mind, he pulled out his magic-lantern contraption and showed me a missive he'd received from something pleased to call itself the fuckin' Lockheed Martin Corporation, which he referred to as "the guns-and-bombs-and-rockets crowd." Cocksuckers were trying to poach his loyalty to his current employers, painting castles in the air, raising hosannahs to the riches and pelf he'd gain by switching fuckin' loyalties. Having once long ago toiled for a Govvie contractor, Ned allowed Lockheed a puking Chinaman's chance of a successful recruitment, laughing till he choked at the thought of once again working in a place where TQM, the last refuge of the charlatan, holds management in thrall.

He called particular attention to the first sentence of the job posting, which he said made him like to eruct boiling bile on the Gem's spotless floor:

Lockheed Martin's vision is to be the world's best systems integrator in aerospace, defense and technology services; to be the company our nation and its allies trust most to integrate their largest, most complex, most important advanced technology systems.

Vision. Lockheed Martin's got a cocksuckin' vision. In my part of space and time, a vision is what you get when you smoke a fuckin' ball of dope and spend a useful day on a mountaintop contemplating your fuckin' man-giblets, but apparently the meaning of the word has mutated a bit since I had it beaten into me at the fuckin' orphanage.

Was there ever a thing so stupefyingly nauseating as a Corporate Vision Statement? Did ever anything reek more of bad faith, of howling fatuity? Was there ever a greater insult to the English fuckin' language?

You're a fuckin' corporation. You make fuckin' money. End of story. How you go about making the fuckin' money, by fair means or foul, by manufacturing (excuse me: "integrating") Weapons (oh, sorry again: "Systems") of Mass Destruction or otherwise grifting the hoopleheads, is between you and your own soul, but to try to convince the Great Unwashed -- and, perhaps more importantly, yourself -- that your motivations are anything but purely fuckin' avaricious is to paint a great cochineal smile on Wu's pig.

That's the great unspoken truth about us, isn't it. We clothe order, routine, law, in the comforting veil of great ideals and beautiful words and Eternal Fuckin' Verities -- but you strip away the fuckin' gilding and gimcrackery and Corporate Vision Statements and you're left with the One True Freedom that is cherished above all others: the freedom of the Few to strip power from the Many. The only question that remains after that is how long the fuckin' Many will stand for it -- and, if experience is any guide, the cocksuckers'll stand it for a very long time indeed.

We mark in passing this day the departure from this life of fuckin' Ken Lay, the George Hearst of his day (you'll want to follow that link if you're interested in my life and times). We note further that Enron's fuckin' Mission Statement read in part, "We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here."

I rest my fuckin' case.

Happy Froth of July!

Philadelphia, 1786

"The New Religion had crested better than twenty years before," the Rev^d Cherrycoke explains, "--by the 'sixties we were well into a Descent, that grew more vertiginous with the days, ever toward some great Trough whose terrible Depth no one knew."

"Or, 'yet knows.'" The intermittently gloomy Ethelmer. As so often, the Rev^d finds himself looking for Tenebrae's reactions to the thoughts of her Cousin the University man. "All respect, Sir, wouldn't the scientifick thing have been to keep note, through the years after, of those claiming rebirth in Christ? To see how they did,-- how long the certainty lasted? To see who was telling the truth, and how much of it?"

"Oh, there were scoundrels about, to be sure," says the Rev^d, "claiming falsely for purposes of Commerce, an Awakening they would not have recogniz'd had it shouted to them by Name. But enough people had shar'd the experience, that Charlatans were easily expos'd. That was the curious thing. So many, having been thro' it together.

"You should have seen this place the time Whitefield came. All Philadelphia, delirious with Psalms. People standing up on Ladders at the church windows, Torch-light bright as Midday. Direct experience of Christ, hitherto the painfully earn'd privilege of Hermits in the desert, was in the Instant, amid the best farmland on Earth, freely being given to a town by Burghers and Churchfolk.-- They need only accept. How could a world have remained right-side-up after days like those? 'Twas the Holy Ghost, conducting its own Settlement of America. George the Third might claim it, but 'twas the Ghost that rul'd, and rules yet, even in Deistic times."

"Say." DePugh considering. "No wonder there was a Revolution."

"Hmph. Some Revolution," remarks Euphrenia.

"Why, Euph!" cries her sister.

"How not?" protests Ethelmer. "Excuse me, Ma'am,-- but as you must appreciate how even your sort of Musick is changing, recall what Plato said in his 'Republick',-- 'When the forms of Musick change, 'tis a promise of civil Disorder.'"

"I believe his Quarrel was with the Dithyrambists," the Rev^d smoothly puts in, "--who were not changing the Forms of Song, he felt, so much as mixing one up with another, or abandoning them altogether, as their madness might dictate."

"Just what I keep listening for, 'Thelmer," Euphrenia nods, "in the songs and hymns of your own American day, yet do I seek in vain after madness, and Rapture,-- hearing but a careful attending to the same Forms, the same Interests, as of old,-- and have you noticed the way that ev'rything, suddenly, has begun to gravitate toward B-flat major? That's a sign of trouble ahead. Marches and Anthems, for Triumphs that have not yet been made real. Already 'tis possible to walk the streets of New-York, passing among Buskers and Mongers, from one street-air to the next, and whistle along, and never have to change Key from B-flat major."

"Ah. And yet... If I may?" The young man seats himself at the Clavier, and arpeggiates a few major chords. "In C, if ye like,-- here is something that the fellows sing at University, when we are off being merry,-- 'To Anacreon in Heaven''s its name,-- I'll spare you the words, lest the Innocence of any Ear in the Room be assaulted." Tenebrae has invented and refin'd a way of rolling her eyes, undetectable to any save her Target, upon whom the effect is said to be devastating. Ethelmer's reaction is not easy to detect, save that he is blinking rapidly, and forgets, for a moment, where Middle C is.

The Air he plays to them would be martial in all but its Tempo, being more of a Minuet,-- thirty-two measures in all,-- which by its end has feet tapping and necks a-sway. "Here, I say, is the New Form in its Essence,-- Four Stanzas,-- sentimentally speaking, a 'Sandwich," with the third eight 'Bars' as the Filling,-- that Phrase," playing it, "ascending like a Sky-Rocket, its appeal to the Emotions primitive as an experienced in the Act of--"

"Cousin?--"

"--of, of, Eating, that's all I was going to say...," hands spread in gawky appeal.

She shakes her Finger at him, tho' as the Rev^d can easily see, in nought but Play.

"And this is the sort of thing you lads are up to," he avuncularly rumbles, "out there over Delaware? Anatomizing your own drinking songs, till you be questioning earthly, nay Heavenly, Powers?

*****

"...South Philadelphia Ballad-singers," Ethelmer has meanwhile been instructing the room, "generally Tenors, who are said, in their Succession, to constitute a Chapter in the secret History of a Musick yet to be, if not the Modal change Plato fear'd, then one he did not foresee."

"Not even he." His mathematickal cousin DePugh is disquieted.

"My point exactly!" cries Ethelmer, who has been edging toward the Spirits, mindful that at some point he shall have to edge past his Cousin Tenebrae. "'Tis ever the sign of Revolutionary times, that Street-Airs become Hymns, and Roist'ring-Songs Anthems,-- just as Plato fear'd,-- hast heard the Negro Musick, the flatted Fifths, the vocal portamenti,-- 'tis there sings your Revolution. These late ten American years were but Slaughter of this sort and that. Now begins your true Inversion of the World."

"Don't know, Coz. Much of your Faith seems invested in the novel Musick,--"

"Where better?" asks young Ethelmer confidently. "Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, the Clamor of the Mills, the Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the Drums in the night, why if one wish'd to give it a Name.--"

"Surf Music!" DePugh cries.

"Percussion," Brae, sweet as a Pie.

"Very well to both of ye,-- nonetheless,-- as you, DePugh, shall, one full Moon not too distant, be foung haggling in the Alleys with Caribbean Negroes, over the price of a Guitar upon which to strum this very Musick, so shall you, Miss, be dancing to it, at your Wedding."

--Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Jurisprudence, Redux

I have to confess myself a tad frustrated. A sad case of writer's block, no doubt vitiated by the pounds of Vicodin on which I've been chowing down following surgery, has gummed up the creative juices to the point of viscosity. I've got two lovely posts -- an appreciation of unsung Guitar God Peter "Ollie" Halsall (complete with killer primary-source quotes from Andy Partridge) and an Al Swearengen Guest Post on the intellectual vacuity of that most pointless waste of human effort, the Corporate Mission Statement -- festering incomplete, leering and taunting, in my Drafts folder.

All of which goes to explain my gratitude for the email I received from the tireless xtcfan this morning. The message provided a followup to a post that appeared in the Friendly Confines this January, in which I speculated on the stream of consciousness of an Oklahoma judge who stood accused of using a penis-pump on himself and shaving his nutsack while seated on the bench during criminal proceedings.

If this sucker doesn't write itself, then the phrase has no meaning.

When last we visited the distinguished juror, the Formerly Honorable Creek County (OK) District Judge Donald Thompson, he stood accused on four counts of indecent exposure. The Probable Cause Report in the case is a cornucopia of exquisite imagery and thought-provoking euphemism:

Juror Rhonda Blansett's expected testimony will be that during the Vomberg Trial she observed Judge Donald D. Thompson's facial expression changing in conjunction with the air noises [caused by the pump] and the movement of the judge's right arm....

Juror Sharaan Ronish's expected testimony will be that during the Vomberg Trial she heard an air pumping noise... Ms. Ronish will also testify that when she heard the air pumping noise she saw Judge Thompson's right arm tighten and flex repeatedly. Ms. Ronish described the pace of the pumping noise as starting out slow and then becoming more rapid....

Juror Ralph Jones' expected testimony will be that he observed [Thompson] looking down a lot and that he and the other jurors couldn't figure out what he was doing. Mr. Jones thought perhaps the judge was tying fishing lures, or something like that.

Yes. Or something like that. In the gigantic corpus of slang expressions for flogging the bishop, "tying fishing lures" might not be absolutely the most memorable, but perhaps in rural Oklahoma, where fly-fishing is a secular religion, it may carry more resonance.

Now Judge Thompson's trial is under way, and I'm quietly pleased to see that the affair continues to provide details that are both delectable and mortifying. One's sense of propriety and respect for decency are sorely tested by the testimony; I find it shamefully impossible to read the following without blasting a noseful of Mountain Dew all over my keyboard:

Foster further testified that during a 2002 trial, she heard the pump "during the emotional testimony of a murdered toddler's grandfather." She continued: "The grandfather was getting real teary-eyed, and the judge was up there pumping on that pump. It was sickening."

Most interestingly, I never drink Mountain Dew.

CYA

The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

-- From "The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light," a review of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine by Barton Gellman, in the Washington Post

We are not (yet) privileged to know what happened immediately after this demonstration of bovine stupidity and bullying churlishness toward the hired help -- so utterly in keeping with what we already know of Bush's lifelong sense of patrician entitlement and contempt (born of incapacity) for hard mental labor. The mind's eye can't help but conjure up that smirk, that shoulder-shaking little chortle, the abruptly turned back, the quick return to the game of pool that the hapless briefer had so rudely interrupted with his importuning that the President of the United States, deep in the cloudy comfort of his Crawford vacation, actually move himself to fulfill the duties he had been elected appointed to perform.

It's also not particularly difficult to imagine a CIA briefer leaving the scene of his humiliation, vowing to bring down the revoltingly stupid little bully-boy by whatever means presented themselves. Ron Suskind has provided an admirable opportunity.

Bush's pissy insult stands like the pile of puppy-shit on the living-room carpet in which History will rub his stubby little nose for a thousand thousand years. In the fullness of time, "All right. You've covered your ass, now," will be branded on his forehead, and on the forehead of every vizier, camp follower and sycophant that hitched a wagon to his blank, moribund, lightless star.

The Truth Will Out

Pumping gas this morning. The pump opposite mine is being used by a man whose very cute little son, perhaps four years old, is taking the opportunity get into the sorts of things with which four-year-olds have bedeviled their fathers since the Dawn of Time: picking up cigarette butts, groveling in a mud-puddle, investigating the contents of the trash bucket. Dad upbraids the boy when he seems headed for a nice wallow in a pool of oily water: "Hey! Leave that alone!"

I'm leaning on my crutches as I wait for my tank to fill. The boy sees me, is suddenly fascinated by my evident cripplehood. "Hey, Dad!" he enthuses, "That guy's got crutches, just like Grandpa when he hurt his leg!"

"Yes," replies Dad, wishing the topic hadn't come up quite so clearly within earshot of its subject. "Maybe he hurt his leg too, like Grandpa."

"Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he just got a little old..."

From the mouths of babes. I laughed uproariously, and told the kid he was exactly right. I didn't hurt my leg. I just got a little old.

I'd have bought him a Slurpee if that sort of thing were still done. Honesty is a virtue affordable only to the very young -- and, of course, to the very old.

Shake Out Your Shoes

Snakes, Bugs and Spiders Week continues here at Jingo Acres, with the news that the father of one of my son's friends was bitten a few days ago by a Brown Recluse spider.

Common knowledge informs us that the bite of the Brown Recluse is a one-way ticket to horror, devastation, plague and pestilence, with emailed photos circulating of the most lunch-unsettling variety. However, cooler heads inform us that the horrifying necrosis of the skin that the spider's bite is reputed to cause is actually quite rare, and most victims of the little beastie get off with a little red mark that heals without event.

In my son's friend's father's case, he was working in an enclosed area, felt a little tickle on the elbow, and brushed it away without more thought. He sensed a mild stinging that resolved to a whitening of a rather large area on the elbow. He reported to a local clinic, where they diagnosed the spider-bite, put him on oral antibiotics and sent him home. A day or two later, he spiked a fever and the bitten area worsened. I don't know if he's done it yet, but his loved ones were urging him to go to the hospital, where the expected treatment will be intravenous antibiotics.

He is fully expected to live. About the worst he can expect is a nasty scar, but the fact that he's receiving competent treatment will go a long way to preventing even that.

Oh -- and I saw another baby snake in the garage last night, this one unambiguously a Northern Ringneck, a completely harmless -- cute, even -- hunter of "insects, earthworms, small snakes, small lizards, salamanders and frogs. It usually swallows its prey whole, but may also use partial constriction." My kinda guy.

Nineteenth-Century Cool

I have every intention of dying at Jingo Acres.

This thought is not intended as morbid; by it I simply mean that I wish never to move to any other house. I love the place, I love the way it combines hoary rusticity with lovely understated contemporary flair. I love the grounds, I love performing the upkeep on it, I love the garden, the orchard, the breezy screened porch and its wraparound view of a cathedral of green, the songbirds, the butterflies.

So unless something terribly untoward happens, I will cling to the place as long as I can possibly keep it up. If all goes as planned, then, it will never fall to me to have to sell it; with any luck, that task will go to the executors of my estate.

It will not be my problem, then, that the one, single Tragic Flaw of Jingo Acres will appreciably lessen its resale value. For you see, for all its amenties, its wonderfully well designed kitchen, its plantings of native Virginia fauna flora [oy! Vicodin!] in the front beds, its honey-colored bare-wood mouldings and windowframes, its ample closet and attic space -- Jingo Acres lacks central air-conditioning.

In all but the worst heat of the summer, an attic fan, combined with ceiling fans in most of the rooms, cools the house as well as any heat-pump you could wish for. Wisely planted trees shade the southern exposure, keeping the sun's heat off the roof. Only in the last few days of this waning June, as the really hot weeks come on, have we needed to resort to the window-units we keep in reserve.

Last night I sat and watched TV in the den, basking in the coolness of the room. The day had been one of the first truly miserable scorchers of the summer, the sort of weather in which the legendary Washingtonian humidity causes a body to come out in a muck-sweat that never dries. Toenail-fungus weather. Crotch-rot weather. Heat that only an anaerobic microbe could love. I wore only pyjama-pants and a t-shirt, all deliciously loose, air-flowing cotton. Bare feet. A glass of cold wheat-beer, its own sweat soaking the coaster-napkin to the point of disintegration, sat on the table.

I stepped out onto the porch to look at the night before going to bed. The glass door from the cabin was nearly opaque from the hundreds of country moths that battered against it, begging to come in and dash their brains out against the one light left burning inside.

The coolness of the night was a revelation. Yes, it was still humid and muck-sweaty, but the air, now at eleven in the evening, had cooled -- and this coolness was so much more alive than the dry, modern, silent coolness I'd just left. This coolness was alive with night-sounds, night-smells, the redolence of mud and mold and falling dew, with the muted racket of insects and frogs and birds. Breezes stirred the leaves of the walnut over my head, brought wafting in other, more distant night-noises: a dog barking a mile away, a car crunching on the gravel road, an owl far off up the mountain.

This, it struck me, was exactly the coolness that, years ago, was a grateful reward for a day's labor in stifling and relentless heat, in starchy clothing, in dusty fields and smoky forges and deafening manufactories and muddy stockyards and windowless, dark, choking work-spaces. The sort of respite that was longed for during the workday: Lord, please let this day be over. Please, God, bring on the night.

This was what city-people worked so hard for in the days before air conditioning, what laborers strove to earn: just enough scratched-out recompense, just enough extra whipout, to buy a ticket to the mountains, to the breezy beach in July, so as to enjoy the very thing I now consider utterly routine, a birthright: a little bit of coolness at night. In tenements packed to the rafters with workers, mattresses were spread on every fire-escape on every street in every city in the world, entire families in their night-clothes spread-eagled in the humid dark hoping for the blessing of a whisper of a breeze, dreaming, when they could dream, of a day when they could afford surcease from the heat.

Billions of us still operate under this calculus of cool. Billions still long for sundown when the evening zephyrs begin to promise a temporary respite from the daylight's cruelty. Billions still spread bedclothes on rooftops and porches and verandas, to catch a breeze in which to sleep. I have no real wish to join them -- my air-conditioned privilege, my rigidly controlled little 72-degree pleasure-dome, is far too comfortable to give up voluntarily. But here in this box, this tightly sealed, antiseptic ecosystem, I can't help feeling that I've unlearned a hard lesson that my ancestors knew only too well, and for this I am mightily sorry.

That Crawleth Upon the Ground

While bustling about this morning (as much as one can bustle on crutches) I happened to cast a glance at my sandal lying on the floor of the foyer. Lying athwart the shoe was what I first interpreted as a loose shoelace. My interpretation, however, had to be rapidly revised when the shoelace gave a little writhe, and a tiny little forked tongue darted out its front end:



I darted for my camera, which I happened to have handy, and then called the rest of the family to come admire our visitor, which was about the girth of a standard pencil, though about twice as long. It occurred to me that the little beastie looked an awful lot like a tiny little copperhead (a quite venomous local hazard), so I warned the children back, telling them to hold the dogs, and hobbled over to the laptop in the kitchen. It took me no time to determine that our guest was not a copperhead after all, but an infant Eastern Milk Snake, a harmless -- indeed, beneficial -- hunter of small rodents and insects. As I came back into the foyer, I found that Wonder Woman, who is utterly fearless with bugs and spiders, had gently scooped up the serpent, cooing endearments to it the while, and taken it outdoors and deposited it in a shady place in the front beds.

Glad she waited until it was, you know, safe.

Us and Them

I got my dark sunglasses,
I got for good luck my black tooth.
I got my dark sunglasses,
I'm carryin' for good luck my black tooth.
Don't ask me nothin' about nothin',
I just might tell you the truth.
--Bob Dylan, Outlaw Blues

I want to publicly thank The Viscount for two things.

First, to help me through my convalescence he very kindly sent me a copy of John Lennon: Imagine, the 1988 film directed by Andrew Solt. Peace on you, brother.

And second, watching that film just now has presented me the Royal Road to explore something that's been on my mind for some time now. Back in late May, the NRO posted a list of what they were pleased to call "The Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs of All Time." The list was quite risible, ripping songs quite out of context, taking as literal lines obviously intended ironically, and declaring sentiments expressed in the lyrics conservative on the most laughably absurd pretexts.

This list made me (and quite a few others) guffaw uproariously (and attracted Pete Townshend to come slumming in Lower Left Blogovia, to judge from comments he left with Blue Girl, Tom Watson and Lance Mannion). But it also set my brain a-ponderin': How can the right-wing mind be so utterly unconscious of irony as to lay claim to large swathes of music that is in every detail of its makeup patently, avowedly, and dedicatedly contrary to their world view, and shake their tightly clenched fannies to it?

That's not your music, the mind shrieks. Get your goddamned meathooks off it.

Partly, of course, the violence that's been done to Our Music by corporate cooptation has drained much of its original force. (That this cooptation has been done largely with in cahoots with the original artists is only more depressing.) I remember staring in mute horror at a television screen sometime in the late Eighties as the Beatles' single version of "Revolution" was employed to engender positive feelings toward Nike footwear in my lizard-brain. The daily insults to meaning in the "repurposing" of rock songs in commercials have the cumulative effect of deadening the listener's mind to any sort of passion this music may once have lit. If a sun-splashed Caribbean Cruise spot can be edited to the rhythms of "Lust for Life," Iggy Pop's anthem to kicking heroin, then fuck it. Nothing means anything anymore.

But it once meant something. And that something is what we reflexively spring to defend when NRO stakes its grotesque claim.

And what was that something?

In the Imagine film, we are given a fascinating interchange between Lennon and Yoko (and a claque of admirers) and the liberal-turned-Silent-Majority-spokesman cartoonist Al Capp, at the Lennons' Montreal Bed-In in June of 1969. (Click to watch in a new window.) Both sides are quite obviously intensely aware that they are actors playing to ubiquitous and intrusive cameras in a staged media event, as they present their chosen roles in a set-piece that recapitulates the passionate intensity of the times.

I won't defend Lennon in this clip. He comes off as petulant and defensive, and seems a bit surprised when Capp attempts to score cheap points off vulnerabilities that a more prepared and thick-skinned public figure would have had easy (and funny) ripostes for.

But even less defensible are those cheap shots on Capp's part. Capp made his living not only as a cartoonist at the time but also as a radio commentator and campus speaker railing against the antiwar movement, portraying them as unkempt dangers to suburban workadaddy values, flouters of the eternal verities of home and hearth, hairy and disgusting trolls whose interest was not in ending a war but in the wholesale destruction of a treasured way of life. Watch Capp with this notion in mind, and his motivations become clear: His flaunting of the nude photos from the cover of Two Virgins is not an attempt at exposing some inconsistency in Lennon's antiwar argument, but simply to tar John and Yoko as sexual perverts, and render them thus ipso facto dismissable. (The fact that Capp was charged with the attempted rape of a female student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a year later, with similar allegations from at least four other campuses, makes this innuendo on his part even more nauseating.)

Does any of Capp's scapegoating sound familiar? Let's see how the GLBT folks, undocumented workers, flag-burners -- and, naturally, their defenders, feel about it!

Lennon, in a time when artists and activists reached for the Dada values of shock and black humor in the service of awakening bourgeois apathy -- a time, that is, when levitating the Pentagon and other deliberately insane acts seemed to make perfect sense in a war-hungry country gone mad -- made a conscious decision to play the public Holy Fool to promote an unarguably laudable cause. Whatever you may think of Lennon's public antics at the time (and some of them, let's be honest, were downright embarrassing -- "imagine no possessions" coming from one of the world's richest men!) you can't argue with their sincerity.

But Lennon's Holy Foolery didn't just spring fully formed from his forehead one day in 1968. To play the Holy Fool to inspire human liberation is to embody absolutely the single founding principle of rock-and-roll. To stand in front of an audience with a weird haircut and a loud guitar, wiggle your hips and go WAAAAAAAAH! into a microphone: how does that differ in any material way from trying to levitate the Pentagon? The two acts may differ in quality but they communicate exactly the same message: free yourself! The man who sat in bed in Montreal and allowed himself to be called a pervert by a neanderthal rapist is exactly the same man who, some three years before, stood in front of a screaming crowd of teenyboppers in Shea Stadium playing electric organ with his elbows, laughing to the point of tears at the glorious absurdity of the situation.

(Seriously. Watch it, especially Lennon. Best Beatles Live Performance Ever.)

This, then, is what we rush to defend as our own. This is what they must never be allowed to take away: Rock and roll frees your ass. To attempt to enlist the Holy Fool, the jibbering maniac with the guitar and the haircut, in the service of a cramped and crabbed and ugly ideology shows that you don't understand rock and roll. What's more, you will never understand it.

You might hear the beat, you might tap your toes -- but there is a jagged, bleeding hole in your mind. Go back with Al Capp, where you belong, and equate John and Yoko's Holy-Fool honesty -- their nudity, if you must -- with turpitude. You know you will, in the end. You always do.

Matt's Back!

Matt at The Tattered Coat is back from his scholarly hiatus. While we're thrilled to have his voice back in the mix, he seems to be operating under the insane apprehension that Argentina is going to take the World Cup. We'll indulge his sweet little pipe-dream for the nonce; as they say in Russian-lit circles, it doesn't matter until Pushkin comes to Shovkin.

Enger-land owe John Terry a peerage or something.

The Footie

Spain's taking the whole tortilla.

All that choking talk is pretty old, and the team I watched today taking a 4-0 drubbing to Ukraine was quite capable of administering a whuppin' on Germany, Brazil, or any other powerhouse you care to name. Spain's third goal, on the controversial red-card award in the penalty box, was patent bullshit, but the fourth was as nice a football lesson as you could hope the youngsters to witness.

I'll defend this thesis to the death (or until the Spaniards choke like dogs).

Germany-Poland. Jesus. Two direct shots on goal in one second bounce off the crossbar. Heart attacks in the streets of Danzig. Looks like Poland has (have?) dodged a Howitzer shell, and then in the 90th minute -- boom. I don't know what the streets of Dortmund look like tonight, but it can't be pretty.

Missed the Saudi-Tunisia game (a recuperatin' fella has to nod off, Jimmy-Stewart-style, for a couple hours sometime during the long, hot afternoon of the soul) but I'm sorry I did.

And I get to do it all over again tomorrow: Ecuador-Costa Rica; England- Trindad & Tobago; Sweden-Paraguay. Timed that surgery just right, I did.

It's Over

OK. So there's that done!

Those of you who said the hip surgery would be far worse in the anticipation than in the actual event were absolutely right.

I was given a spinal anesthesia along with the twilight general, and waking up a paraplegic was mighty weird indeed. In the recovery room, soon after the general wore off, I felt around on my lifeless lower half to assess the damage. I was mildly interested to note that the surgeons had left some kind of sponge, or perhaps a bundle of surgical gauze, in my lap. Not until a while later, having fumbled around with it for a bit trying to remove it to throw it away did I realize that it was attached to me -- it was my once-mighty Package.

Sensation did return to it, and the rest of my lower half, an hour later, but having that utterly dead hunk of gristle affixed to my loins was pretty unpleasant.

I'm home now, trussed and iced to the gills, in the bosom of my family, crutches and painkillers at the ready. I do have a dull, persistent ache on my left side, but it's nothing my excellent friend Vicodin and I can't handle. It feels no worse at the moment than a very bad sprain. The surgeon pronounced himself quite pleased with the procedure, saying that it shows every sign of success in the early stages.

So here on the couch will I stay for the next few days. I've hobbled about a bit, testing the limits on my mobility with crutches. I've realized that after six weeks of keeping every tiny bit of weight off my left leg, my right leg is going to become a tower of muscular power. Perhaps I'll rent it out for the World Cup.

My deepest thanks again to everybody who dropped in with words of encouragement. I hope that in a very short time I will be able to get my mind off my body and thinking about other more amusing and instructive stuff that I can share with you.

Right now: Typing hurts. I will stop for now.

A Barrel of Monkeys

Posting is going to get light over the next week or so.

The hip surgery I had been afraid of is scheduled for Monday morning. It approaches with the inexorability of a freight train. Because of this, Medical Science took me off the anti-inflammatory drug that was relieving the swelling in my hip-joint, as it has the side-effect of hampering the coagulation of the blood.

I took my last pill yesterday morning, with the result that the swelling and inflammation returned with a bullet today, rendering me a whimpering puppy by this afternoon. Med. Sci., buttonholed in his office, phoned in a Vicodin scrip for me. Now I sit in an inarticulate, unfocused fog in front of the TV. Narcotics, I've observed before, don't make you stop hurting so much as they make you stop caring that you're hurting, which is really not the same thing at all.

Folks, I don't mind telling you, this one scares me a bit. The last five years have been a run of spectacularly bad medical luck, running the gamut from kidney stones (three lithotripsies and one stent emplacement), to ass cancer (three fistulotomies and one procedure that's so new and experimental I don't even know the name of it) to a pilonidal cyst (one cystectomy -- unnecessary, it later became apparent) to a torn rotator cuff (two arthroscopies). None of them gave me the shrieking fantods as badly as this one has.

I'm always nervous before medical procedures -- who isn't? -- but this one's really pretty horrifying. No sane person would actually volunteer to let someone take what basically amounts to a Black & Decker drill with a sterilized half-inch bit and bung it four inches into their thigh and up into their femoral ball. But that's pretty much what I've done, to try to save my hip-joint. I've had plenty of time to think about it, and I've talked myself into a pretty bad place. I keep fingering the place where the incision will be made, and... Thinking.

Watching back-to-back TiVo'd episodes of House certainly didn't help matters.

Some days back, Wonder Woman roasted a chicken. If usually falls to me to carve the thing, and I began by the usual method of separating the drumstick from the thigh, and then the thigh from whatever passes for a pelvis in a bird. As the tip of my knife found the hip-joint, I gave it a twist to separate the bones. As they came apart with a little snap I'm afraid I freaked a little. Nausea. Sweat. Irrationality. Tears.

A chicken on a roasting-pan. That's what age makes you.

Boy, I'm more fun than a fuckin' narcotized barrel of monkeys, ain't I? I better get myself to bed & settle down for some kaleidoscopic eyelid movies and some Jacob's Ladder-quality nightmares. I'll feel much better in the morning.

Hey! They got Zarqawi!

06/06/06

Holy shit, where'd all the Christians go?

Oh. Never mind. They were just taking a leak.

Slingin' the 'Barb

Mrs Jorgensen poses with the stalk
with which I broke the World Record in 1921.
They don't make rhubarb -- or women --
like that anymore.

From the Winona (Minnesota) Daily News:

LANESBORO, Minn. — There are hundreds of ways to cook rhubarb but only one way to throw it: awkwardly.

“You’ll want a little arch and a straight release,” Jeff Kamm said as Ashley Solsrud stepped to the line, stalk in hand. “Give it all you’ve got.”

Solsrud, of Holmen, Wis., flung the floppy stalk, which stayed aloft for about 10 feet. Line judge Dave Sefton proclaimed it “a solid two” -- about half the distance of the day’s record toss.

"Only one way to throw it: awkwardly..." Pish-tosh! I weep for the lost arts of yesteryear!

In another day, at another time far back in the dusty corridors of dimming memory, I, Hugh Jorgensen, captain of the vaunted Brainerd High School Rhubarb-Tossing Team -- the Fightin' Loons, we were styled -- made strong men tremble and beautiful women swoon with the mighty arcs of my doughty heaves of the stringy stalks of family Polygonaceae, genus Rheus.

Far they flew, and long. Far, too, and wide, did tales of my godlike prowess run. Newspapers from such far-flung climes as Bemidji and Saint Cloud vied like tomcats for nacreous mots from my cupid's-bow lips. Into the shell-like ear of a young Grantland Rice, then a cub scribe for the Detroit Lakes Aftonbladet, did fall a breathless account of my exploits contra the hated crosstown Tech team. He was moved to limn it thus:

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Jorgensen, Olesson, Malmqvist and Soderberg. But the greatest of these, the most feared, is Jorgensen, for it is he whose miraculous heaves send slung stalk skywards in slow spiral, disappearing out of sight into the lowering clouds, there to mock the Gods themselves....

I carry the clipping, now crumbling with age, with me still.

We played in moleskin and leather in those days. Real men to the core, we eschewed the helmets and sissifying pads that have ruined the Glorious Game for succeeding generations -- those softened and denatured descendants of the hardy North Woods pioneers who imported the game from their native Småland. I scoff at modesty, and proudly point out that ours was the Dead-Stalk Era, when the equipment suppliers of the day would let their freshly harvested rhubarb stalks hang for three weeks in their barns, acquiring an inimitable elasticity and heft. We had a saying in those days: "Hang your 'barb for three weeks/Sling like the Greeks." (It was a bit puzzling, this saying of ours, as nobody in Crow-Wing County had ever seen a Grecian 'barb-slinger, but it was taken as read that they must have flung their rhubarb a good long way.)

Oh, how I pine for the gamey odor of well-hung rhubarb, and of the neat's-foot oil with which we softened our throwing palms! The players of today, spoiled by fresh, unhung rhubarb stalks -- we oldtimers dismiss them as "jackrabbit stalks" -- have no appreciation for it. They might as well be slinging celery-shaped sticks of frozen butter, for all they know of the ways of rhubarb!

How the grand sport has become a cruel parody of itself, an exhibition put on by hoodlums and mountebanks for yokels and rubes at country fairs and carnival midways! Scorn! Scorn! Scorn! And fiddle-faddle!

Let me show you how we did it. Gimme that stalk! You stand about three feet from the line, see, facing away, and -- hey! Where are you going! Get back here!

Honoring Kos

I want to call your attention to a temporary but important addition to the Friendly Confines: that handsome orange number over there in the left column over that Koufax Trophy I made for myself.

The progressive Drum Major think tank is awarding 2006 Drum Major for Justice Award to Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos next month in New York City. Also being honored are Anna Burger of the Change to Win Labor Federation and jazz cat Wynton Marsalis.

Moulitsas, coauthor of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, richly deserves the honor for having inspired countless pinko bloggers to stop whining and start pounding keyboards to effect change. Daily Kos is what I read with my coffee every day, and I bet the same's true for you.

Come on out on June 22 to help honor Kos. Details are here.

If you'd like to help spread the word, Tom Watson has the info.

Technorati tag: HonoringKos

What Is There Is a Prayer

You'd have to have been living under a rock this last week to have missed the blogspherical uproar over the publication of the list of "Top 50 Conservative Songs," compiled by John J. Miller at The National Review. Amanda, Lance, Blue Girl and Kevin have all posted amusingly on it, and there's no need to add my own loud braying to the collective horse-laugh -- save to say that there are peabrains in this world who wouldn't know irony if it came up and bit them on their beDockered asses.

Tom Watson has also commented on it, and from his post there comes this little gem: Pete Townshend got wind of this list, and the appearance of his "Won't Get Fooled Again" at the top of it, and responded with a lovely little treatise on the dangers inherent in the interpretation of songs:

I am just a song-writer. The actions I carry out are my own, and are usually private until some digger-after-dirt questions my methods. What I write is interpreted, first of all by Roger Daltrey. Won't Get Fooled Again - then - was a song that pleaded '….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….'. But when Roger Daltrey screamed as though his heart was being torn out in the closing moments of the song, it became something more to so many people. And I must live with that. In the film Summer of Sam the song is used to portray white-boy 'street' idiocy; a kind of fascist absurdity, men swinging their arms over air-guitars and smashing up furniture. Spike Lee told my manager that '…he deeply understood Who music….'. What he understood was what he himself - like so many others - had made it. He saw an outrage and frustration, even a judgment or empty indictment in the song that wasn't there. What is there is a prayer.

He Proves by Algebra

It is a shame that the world is so cruel to the penniless. This truism comes to mind because once early in my life I had the most inspiring, enjoyable and rewarding job that anyone ever had in all the world of space and time. But because I suffered the world's cold indifference to the penurious, I had to give it up for the comparatively princely paychecks on offer in the halls of paperback-book publishing.

The job, which, I liked to joke acidly, paid in the "high four figures" (this in New York City in the mid-Eighties -- not a fashionable time or place to be church-mouse-poor), was as a recording engineer for the Talking Books division of the American Foundation for the Blind. For four ninety-minute sessions a day, I would run a tape machine (marvelous old MCI mono jobs, quarter-inch tape) and follow along in the text as a narrator read a book aloud. In essence, I was the producer for the sessions, making sure no text was skipped, correcting pronunciation, researching foreign terminology, and offering only occasionally welcome advice on line-readings. To boil it down further, I was paid to read books all day. Not a half-bad gig.

The readers at AFB weren't your volunteers or your off-the-street hacks. The money AFB saved on paying their engineers was lavished opulently on them instead. Quite a few of them were among the top voiceover talents of their day, and even today I still hear their velvet pipes over commercials and films.

One such gifted reader was Patrick Horgan, a stage and television actor of amazingly wide experience -- he played a Nazi on an episode of Star Trek: TOS, had long-running roles on the soaps The Doctors and The Guiding Light, had a part in the original Thomas Crown Affair. If you've ever watched the great Woody Allen flick Zelig, for which he provided narration, you'll have experienced the wonderfulness of his plummy accent, so posh it verges on parody. A true Renaissance man, Horgan was also renowned in the world of James Joyce scholarship, and was considered quite a big noise among the devotees of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in particular -- he played Holmes onstage on numerous occasions and was a fixture in the world of Sherlockiana.

Horgan could be irascible with the hired help, if they slowed the session down by fumbling a tape or stopping the proceedings for some triviality. Because I was very good at my job, I think he enjoyed working with me. Once, owing to his expertise in Joyce, he was given both Finnegans Wake and Richard Ellman's magisterial Joyce biography to narrate, and as I enjoyed some seniority among the plebes, I leaned on the boss to slip me those sessions. Looking back on my life now, I can say that those months were unquestionably a high-water mark for me, even if I couldn't afford a new shirt.

Once during a break in those sessions, we chatted of this and that while I rewound a tape. He began to tell me of a research project he had embarked on, a "detective story" that he was unraveling to his enormous enjoyment. It was his contention that Arthur Conan Doyle, a known prankster who, it has been famously suggested, was the agent behind the Piltdown Man hoax, commited his greatest prank of all when he killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 and then resurrected him in 1903. Horgan's belief, which he based on evidence he'd found in the Holmes stories, novels and plays themelves, was that Doyle had always intended to kill off Holmes and resurrect him, and that he had planted clues as to this fact in the Holmes stories both before and after the Hiatus, as a hint to his readers, an invitation to use Holmes' "methods" to embark on a detective story of their own.

One of my life's great regrets is that I didn't immediately invite Horgan to a pub, buy him a beer or three, and prod him further on this audacious idea. In my stupid youthful shyness I didn't think Horgan would have accepted such an invitation from one so insignificant as I -- and besides, I couldn't afford a beer for myself, let alone a few for him.

As we were preparing to continue our session, Horgan gave me one hint about the nature of the clues he was uncovering in the Holmes Canon. He pointed out that The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes begins with the story "Silver Blaze" and ends with "The Final Problem," in which Holmes and Professor Moriarty appear to fall to their doom in the Reichenbach Falls. In "Silver Blaze," the horse at the center of the tale wins the Wessex Cup. In "The Final Problem," Holmes and Moriarty engage in their death-match on "the lip" of the Falls -- a very unorthodox word for Doyle to choose. Horgan continued, "Now surely the pairing of 'cup' and 'lip' suggests to you the proverb that comes to us from the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, doesn't it?" I confessed my classical education was woefully inadequate to answer. "There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip!" he supplied triumphantly, clearly expecting some sort of lightbulb to appear over my head.

Completely flummoxed, all I could do was smile idiotically.

I have reread the Holmes Canon twice since those days -- I was a slavering devotee as a boy, read the stories incessantly -- but have never been able to discern any sort of pattern to the stories, any hint that Doyle was up to some sort of cosmic deviousness.

In a fit of nostalgia a few weeks ago, I Googled Horgan's name to see what he was up to these days. Not only was I able to find him immediately, but I also found that he'd written a book about his Holmes "detective story" project, titled The Detection of Sherlock Holmes. There appears to exist in print only an audio-book version of it, narrated by Horgan himself, but I ordered it immediately, with trembling fingers. It's not often that you're given the opportunity to clear up a twenty-year-old mystery, and I leaped at the chance.

Frankly, I think you should too.

When the CD arrived, I transferred it posthaste into my iPod, and spent a deliriously happy week and a half listening to it during my commute. My enjoyment was perhaps more nuanced than most peoples' might be, as it mingled the immediate pleasure of the detective story with a breathtaking plunge back into my mid-twenties in 1984, when the world was young and Wonder Woman and I were falling deeply in love. Once when I discerned a page rustling along about 3:55 into Chapter Eight, I had to fight the urge to reach to my right, stop the tape and start Horgan back at the top of the graf.

So what exactly had Horgan found in the Holmes stories that led him to believe that Doyle had killed Holmes and brought him back in the greatest literary prank ever pulled? Remember that I said that Horgan was a scholar -- a renowned one -- of both A. C. Doyle and James Joyce? What he did was to apply the sort of close textual analysis to Doyle that you might bring to the work of Joyce. Without revealing too much -- you should enjoy the "detective story" as much as I did -- Horgan has discerned Irish Bardic patterns in character- and place-names, found veiled references to highly specific incidents from English history, identified parallels between the Holmes stories and classical literature, and woven them all together in a series of diagrammatic summaries that are as fascinating as they are baffling.

To listen to Horgan's analysis is to swing violently between dismissiveness and grudging credulity. One moment you will find yourself pshaw-ing: "Oh, right! The housekeeper in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" is a stand-in for Helen of Troy!" But the next you find yourself wondering, "Now why the hell would Doyle have chosen exactly that word?"

The a-ha! moment for me was when Horgan brings up the pedigree of Professor Moriarty. Holmes says of him in "The Final Problem," "At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise on the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it, he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities...." What had never occurred to me before, but now smacks me across the face, is that the Binomial Theorem, by 1893 when this story takes place, had been locked down by Sir Isaac Newton! There hadn't been anything new to say about it for two hundred years! Doyle was a very erudite man, a doctor of medicine, and would have known this! This strongly suggests that Doyle wanted us to think of other meanings of the word binomial, and this leads us into -- well. Don't want to spoil the surprise.

Horgan's book is way-up-in-your-head, so-erudite-it's-just-stupid, HyperMegaUltraColossal Brainiac fun. Go for it.

For Goodness' Sake!

I got the hippy-hippy shake!
I got the shake!
The hippy-hippy shake!

You shake it at the bride
You shake it at the groom
Watch your newly severed leg
Go skitter 'cross the room!

Yes, well.

You remember all that bitching I was doing a few weeks ago about the bursitis in my hip?

Well!

It, er, wasn't bursitis.

The Gods of Comedy have decided in their infinite wisdom that Your Humble and Ob't wasn't saddled with quite the requisite amount of Uninvited Irony, and with that quiet insouciance that is their stock in trade have been squeezing the blood supply to the ball of my left femur, resulting in what the orthopedic surgeon I have just consulted calls Stage Two Avascular Necrosis. I prefer to think of it as Bo Jackson's Disease, and will henceforth refer to it thus, in an effort to rehabilitate an otherwise pretty fuckin' dreary little syndrome.

I have spent the last two weeks under the decidedly uncheerful prospect of total hip replacement, but now Doctor Subtilis thinks the joint can be saved. There has as yet been no collapse of the surface of the ball of the femur, and in this early stage the accepted practice, which has about a 70% success rate, is to drill about four inches into the bone starting at the hip pointer and going up into the ball, cleaning out the edema that is squeezing my veins, relieving pressure on the ball and (it is hoped) restoring blood supply to the joint. You can see an example of what I'm talking about in the x-ray image at the top of this post -- see the straight line through that poor bastard's hip-joint? That's gonna be me.

The drilled hole will be filled with a bone graft, which led to the following knee-slapping interchange:

Me: So where does the bone for the graft come from? [Thinking, maybe it's taken from my tibia or something)

Doctor Subtilis: Dead guy.

Me: Ah.

See how the Gods of Comedy work? I'll be carrying a piece of John Allen Muhammad's flippin' anklebone around in my hip for the rest of my life -- or less, if I fall into the unlucky 30% for whom this procedure doesn't work, in which case I will insist that the old dead hip come home with me in a jar of formaldehyde for proud display on my mantelpiece. A capital conversation-piece.

I don't know yet when this thing is going to happen -- I'd rather it be sooner than later -- but I'll be certain sure to live-blog it for you. I'll be on my back, making a pest of myself to Wonder Woman and abusing my post-op painkillers for a week or so, then on crutches for six weeks.

Oh, I'm gonna milk for all it's worth. Dahhhling, be a love and fetch me the TV remote -- it's there, on the floor at my feet... I'd lean over and reach for it myself, but I do ache so!

Doctor Subtilis, by the way, is Orthopedic Surgeon to the Washington Redskins. He's already had his hooks in me twice -- once for a broken collarbone and once for a torn rotator cuff, so I know and trust the guy. What I don't trust any more is my own worthless body.