Mencken's Ghost

Christopher Hitchens: 1949-2011

2011-12-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

In an age of pygmies, those who appreciate intellectual giants acutely feel the loss of an incendiary icon of ratiocination and righteous, forthright, blunt truthfulness. Christopher Hitchens succumbed to esophagal cancer on Thursday at the age of sixty-two.
     A fixture of public discourse and punditry for decades (particularly the last one), Hitch, as his friends and admirers tended to call him, had no peer in this intellectual and journalistic wasteland some of us call the Endarkenment. A masterful prose stylist and author of several books and countless articles in such publications as Slate and Vanity Fair, the outspoken atheist and idiosyncratic, non-partisan politico approached celebrity status with frequent television appearances and controversial bestsellers (no small feat in a rotten age where celebrities are primarily "reality" television stars; lip-synching automatons; "authors" of ghost-written memoirs of unremarkable, meaningless lives; and other vacuous, vapid dilettantes who would be scraping chewing gum from school childrens' desks for a living in a halfway reasonable culture). He was an erudite essayist; learned literary critic, sparkling with abundant allusions that would put most professors next door to shame; strident, nonpareil polemicist fearlessly striking down the sanctimonious with the pugilistic verbal parries he christened "Hitchslaps;" and breezy, entertaining wit that could disarm both friend and foe, momentarily leavening the gravitas of the most serious debate. A colorful personality and three-dimensional character (in the best sense of the term), he shattered the one-dimensional stereotype of the stodgy, monotonous, academic stuffed shirt ("You are always entertaining, Christopher!" gushed Bill Maher once) as well as he shattered the death carrier that is the one-dimensional Endarkenment political dichotomy of leftism versus conservatism (more on that below).
     Besides his idiosyncratic, multifaceted philosophic outlook (I stop short of calling it a philosophy), he is perhaps best remembered for intolerant identification of insidious nonsense (ethical, political, and religious) and calling it by its proper names. In an age of Judeo-Christian forgiveness and egalitarian, non-judgmental "respect" for all viewpoints, he had none of it:
     --in The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, he properly castigated the putative saint for "being a friend of poverty, not the poor" and taking--and squandering--money from the crookedest, most tyrannical swine on Earth;
     --in No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, he excoriated a spineless, cynical sitting President, chronicling his war crimes, political pandering, and complete absence of personal character, credibly accusing him of the rape or attempted rape of at least three women, and humorously describing the 1970's appearance of a ridiculous man who could only come to prominence in ridiculous times as that of a contestant in a Bee Gees lookalike contest;
   --shortly after Jerry Falwell's death, he told Falwell's friends Ralph Reed and Sean Hannity, "If you gave Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox.";
     --on European admiration for Michael Moore: "But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they‘ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."
... and numerous others, far too numerous to exhaustively recount, from "that bad actor and worse director" Mel Gibson and his antisemitism to the Dalai Lama's prohibition of masturbation and qualified endorsement of prostitution. (Cf. Wikipedia's entry "Christopher Hitchens's critiques of public figures.") (Anything but a curmudgeon or misanthrope, he was respectful and kind to anyone he deemed basically honest and decent. He debated his friend Marvin Olasky on the existence of God with a comity he extended to all who were sincere and ingenuous.)
     Furthermore, Hitchens's probative, active mind, continually refining, reconfirming, and, when necessary, recasting his views, was virtually unheard of in the milieu of hidebound, unregenerate, incorrigible pundits several decades into their adult lives. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff has commented that he has never seen anyone over the age of thirty change a fundamental view, but Hitchens was in his fifties when he cast off his life-long Marxism and stunned his colleagues on the left by supporting George W. Bush and his ostensibly hawkish foreign policy.
     Hitch was not perfect (perhaps he was living proof when he regurgitated the platitude that nobody is). He never completely repudiated his Marxism, continuing to self-identify as a "Trotskyite." His thought was sprinkled with dubious, trendy fallacies and non sequiturs ("Ayn Rand was crazy," "The gold standard is a festish," etc.). If it is possible to take one's rejecting of the left/conservative dichotomy too far, he did, joining Gene Simmons as one of the few "celebrities" to support both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Fellow freethinker Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History, not incredibly accused him of plagiarism when she reviewed his seminal work god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in Free Inquiry.
     As in all great men, however, his virtues obliterated his vices. In a dark, dumbed down epoch of homogeneous, predictable, simplistic, diffident, interchangeable public "intellectuals", Christopher Hitchens was as unlikely as he was necessary.
     If we are to get through this Endarkenment, others must fill his void.

Writer's Block

2011-12-06T13:12:00.001-08:00

"H.L. would be in his element, now. On second thought, he might be more like Tom Lehrer, totally helpless before the satire that is current American political reality."

Ernest Brown, via Billy Beck's Facebook feed

One would think that an enterprising weblogger channeling the Sage of Baltimore would be having a metaphorical field day when surveying the grotesque phantasmagoria of modern culture (including its superficial offshoot and bastard second cousin, modern politics). However, the culture is so warped (and it has such a demoralizing effect on the psyche) that it can be difficult to cogently comment on any of it, much less in any fashion that would not drive the writer into despair and/or insanity.
     In 1908, in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, H.L. Mencken referred to the then-current political landscape as "our present paternalism." This was before the Federal Reserve System, the Harrison Narcotics Act (and the subsequent "War On Drugs"), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (and the rest of the alphabet agencies), the New Deal, the Square Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, most of the current cabinet departments (culminating in the Department of Homeland Security), et. al., etc., ad infinitum, not to mention generations conditioned to accept TARP bailouts, Patriot Acts, no-knock raids, and bans on clove cigarettes as acceptable political acts in the "land of the free."
     Mencken chided early-twentieth-century Americans for embracing the likes of Chaplin, Keaton, Griffith, and Dreyer as great artists to be feted if not beatified. Compare them to their counterparts (such as they are) today. (I was in the process of doing so but removed part one of the essay from this weblog. There is only so much cultural decay a man can contemplate and still face the day.) He referred to jazz as "jungle music." What would he say about Static-X and The Notorious BIG? He ridiculed "Harding, jabbering of normalcy." Today? The mind reels.
     So where do I go from here? As I've remarked, I still find soul-nourishing value in the twenty-first century (even, occasionally, among twenty-first century works, and certainly among twenty-first century people). That goes a long way. Since I find that most people (however much their critical faculties have been stunted and malformed by progressive education, Childrens' Television Workshop, and eMpTyV Networks) have vestiges of human ratiocination along with their free will, I still have a modicum of hope that some of this cultural catastrophe can be turned around. I plan to continue skewering the mindless while praising the mindful. To my handful of readers: please bear with me. I promised to revive this space, and I intend to (or start a new, similar, one). Thank you for reading.

For the Children: Part II

2011-08-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

When last I left off, I reported on a New Zealand law (which, as far as I know, has not yet crossed the Pacific Ocean to infect these shores) that would outlaw "unusual" names for babies. It was putatively inspired by the concern that children of celebrities and others that are saddled with "unusual" names have "issues" that their counterparts (such as they are) with more conventional names do not share, and that these issues induce unfathomable burdens and behaviors.
     I promised to relay the stories of three boys who grew (not necessarily "up") to be three men with contrasting names and contrasting fates.
     Boy number one is named Jeff.
     Boy number two is named Dweezil.
     Boy number three is named Christian.
     Two of the boys are sons of "celebrities." That slur is not applicable to Jeff's parents. (Neither of Dweezil's deserves it, either.)
     Jeff, by most accounts, has a "normal" first name. Unfortunately, his last name (the one that always seems to be left out of fatuous arguments like those that precipitate asinine legislation) is similar to a common Anglo-Saxon epithet thoroughly dissected by George Carlin in "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television". Accordingly, Jeff was ridiculed for years on playgrounds, in schools, and elsewhere (even among ostensible friends) with such monikers as "Jeff Fuck" and such sloganeering as, "You're out of your falkin' mind!" Somehow, he has managed to get through life without becoming a criminal (any more than anyone else is in this Endarkenment) or joining the welfare rolls. And, despite obstacles that would have stopped a lesser individual dead in his tracks, his prospects in this Endarkenment are brighter than they seem at first glance (even to himself sometimes).
     Dweezil is the son of a late, great composer whose recognition is fading as the attention span, intelligence, gentility, and taste of the average American wanes to the level of a Limp Bizkit fan. But, in his prime, he was well known (if for little more than being a "weirdo" and giving his children funny names). As he liked to comment (and his fan Jeff can understand), "No matter what names I gave my children, it was the last name that was going to get them in trouble." As the story goes, both parents wanted to name their son Dweezil, and they indicated that to the powers that be. Unfortunately, the functionary in charge of such records reacted in a way similar to that of the sponsor of the New Zealand law: in a petulant, hortatory swivet, refusing to enter the name Dweezil into the record. As the father recounted (I paraphrase), "I couldn't see the point of having my wife suffer through labor pains because of this woman's stubbornness," so he officially entered the son's name as Ian, which the functionary accepted. The parents called their son Dweezil anyway. One day, several years later, Dweezil happened to discover his birth certificate. Realizing in horror that his name was not officially Dweezil, he confronted his parents, demanding that his name be legally changed. The parents helped the young boy change his name. He has since matured into a man who is by all appearances happy, productive, peaceful, and reasonably successful. I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance once. He doesn't seem to regret legally changing his name at such a young age (assuming the story is true, which is father confirmed in his book).
     Christian is the son of a late actor (who, ironically considering his atheism, named his son Christian). As a young man, he shot his sister's boyfriend and was convicted of manslaughter. His famous father waddled his adipose frame onto the witness stand in Los Angeles County Superior Court and, when asked what could have led to his son's behavior, replied, "I think that perhaps I failed as a father."
     Boy number one, Jeff, is I.
     Boy number two, Dweezil, is the son of Frank Zappa.
     Boy number three, Christian, is the son of Marlon Brando.
     Who will share their stories when this latest assault on reason, freedom, sense, and parental discretion is foisted on the United States or any of its fifty regional administrative satellites?

For the Children: Part I

2011-08-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, I am unable to share the video that inspired the following. I will try to describe it adequately.

Some television or Internet program of nattering female quasicelebrities and one token smart woman (I'll get to her soon) called The Talk (or some similar fatuous moniker) randomly came to my attention. It seemed to attempt to fill the void caused my Oprah Winfrey's lamented departure by entertaining suburban housewives in the hours before Prancing with the Schmucks comes on the air.

The hens were cackling about a law recently passed overseas. To prove that the Endarkenment is global and not local (and that nations that are likely freer than the United States now also pass asinine legislation), take a look at this article, which describes said law: New Zealand Bans Weird Baby Names.

The ladies were discussing the propriety of the aforementioned law and whether similar ones should be passed in this once-free country. One of them responded in the affirmative. Most of them seemed to concur. They stressed that children of celebrities--the ones with "unusual" names--have "issues" related to them. At least one of them also remarked on the penchant for a few racist numbskulls (exhibiting the same kind of non-thinking as sponsors of such laws to a different degree and in a different direction) to give their children names like "Adolf Hitler" and "Aryan Nation."

There was an objection on the panel of approximately six women. I do not know if it was a token objection or if her presence was merely for "balance," but actress Sara Gilbert replied that those were extreme aberrations and that, in general, she thought that parents should be free to name their children what they wanted. She reminded the "stars" around her that the kids could always change the names if they did not like them. She went on that she almost wished that her parents had given her an "unusual" name because every third person she meets is also named Sara or Sarah.

Now I understand why I never missed an episode of Roseanne when I was a lad because of a then-ineffable crush on Miss Gilbert (among other reasons). The intelligence and awareness she evinced in the character of Darlene Conner was no act. Lesbian or not, I think she is, as they used to say, a major babe, and she is likely making some lucky woman immeasurably happy.

Her comments were perspicacious (particularly considering the setting and context) and reminded me of the stories of three different boys with three different names and the men they became, as well as the various "issues" (or lack thereof) they had with their names, the lives they led, and the lives they are leading.

I will tell you their stories in the follow-up to this post. Right now, I have a screening to attend.

"Pictures of Rome"*

2011-07-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

Since I do not have the time at present to remark at the length this subject deserves, I will simply let the headlines speak for themselves again. I did not intend to repeat this exercise, but when even I am struck dumb by the Drudge Report's headlines (and on a day when I am in a good mood), the world is in serious trouble.

The following is a selection of headlines on the Drudge Report at 5:00PM Pacific Daylight Time on Friday, July 29, 2011. It is not exhaustive:

SWEAT CEILING: HOUSE APPROVES DEBT BILL

NO! 22 REPUBLICANS WHO BUCKED BOEHNER

RACING AGAINST CLOCK

EGYPT ISLAMISTS RALLY IN A SHOW OF STRENGTH, CLASHES IN SINAI

OBAMACARE TAX: MEDICAL DEVICE MAKER TO ELIMINATE 1,200 JOBS

HIR ING IN CHINA

ILLEGAL ALIENS HEAD SOUTH TO MEXICO IN SEARCH OF "AMERICAN DREAM"

4.9% UNEMPLOYMENT IN MEXICO VS. 9.4% IN U.S.

TSA READYING NEW "BEHAVIOR" DETECTION

TOWN TRACKS EVERY CAR WITH POLICE CAMS

COP PULLING DARE TRAILER CHARGED WITH DUI

MAN'S BURNING BODY FOUND IN LA ALLEY

Is there good news? Undeniably.

I will get to that, as well, soon enough.

My unsolicited advice is to do what I plan to do this evening (instead of spend too much time at a computer). Enjoy modern technology and what's left of the vestiges of modern culture, and enjoy the company of friends, while you still can. Because, contrary to the headlines, most people, however misguided and ignorant, are decent, and enjoyable enough. I would not be writing this (and you would not be reading this) if that were not the case. Also, people have free will. They can change. So we're not quite doomed yet.

I have serious work to do in the near future, but I'm not going to cancel my plans this weekend. There's still light in this culture, and I'm going to experience some of it.

I'll be seeing you.

*I regret feeling the impulse to steal from someone who does this better than I yet again, but when someone says something better than you did (even when he's not paraphrasing Deep Purple), there's not much reason not to quote him.

Another Sign of the Times

2011-06-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

"Typically, an increase in shoplifting is believed to be an indicator of tough economic times. But a recent study by the National Retail Federation, which found that retail theft by employees is on the rise, says the recent spike in stealing could very well mean the economy is on the upswing. ...

"When the economy hit its lowest point, employees were primarily consumed with keeping their jobs, said Richard Hollinger, a criminology professor at the University of Florida and author of the security survey. Workers were deterred from stealing simply because even minimum-wage jobs in retail were scarce. 'They were so worried about their future, their families and paying the mortgage, they realized this is what is keeping their family afloat,' Hollinger said. ...

"As employees feel more secure in their positions, they may be more inclined to take some risks, [Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Associate Professor of finance Jim] Angel said."

Jessica Dickler: "Shoplifting on the rise: A sign of recovery?" [all emphases mine]

http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/23/pf/shoplifting/index.htm?eref=mrss_igoogle_business

If I can see the problem here, I am sure my handful (-at-best) of readers can see it, too.

I do not hold the professional authorized journalist Jessica Dickler accountable, here, because she is only reporting. (In fact, she does it better than a significant portion of her peers, these days. She did, after all, include the question mark at the end of the title. If anything, I would hold her editors accountable first--who, come to think of it, may be the ones responsible for the question mark.)

These learned, erudite, credentialed, professional professors are using the perceptions and feelings of shoplifters (influenced, undoubtedly, by reports from the mainstream media, which is about as credible as a hypothetical Eliot Spitzer School of Professional and Political Ethics) as serious, realistic, sensible, confident economic indicators. They think (and I use the term loosely) that the perceptions and feelings of the Eloi (if H.G. Wells had contributed nothing else to civilization, he will always be held in my highest esteem), based on reports from sources like money.cnn.com, have the slightest connection to reality. And they base their economic forecasts on them.

And they get pay and respect for it.

Neil Peart, who, like H.L. Mencken, was spared the intellectual humiliations of a college education (and, unlike Mencken, doesn't even have a high school diploma), exuded ratciocination uncommon for the times when he wrote (and Geddy Lee sang): "You can twist perception; reality won't budge." It is a good thing I paid at least as much attention to Rush in college as I did to my professors.

Who in the hell knows why these countless individuals are shoplifting now? Having never stolen anything in my life, I cannot honestly say I can empathize or "put myself into their shoes" (not that I would have much in common with them, or anyone else in times like these, if I had), but I will posit that the myriad, individual reasons, in many if not most cases, have little or nothing to do with their perceptions of the soundness (or regeneration) of the economy. Of course, even if that were not the case, and these professors have a point, that does not mean that the shoplifting employees are CORRECT that they are more secure in their jobs and have less to lose from stealing from their employers (you know--they're joining their government in stealing from the entity responsible for the fact that they have a job right now, which fact alone might cause someone to question their basic appraisal of reality, to say nothing of a more complex, recondite concept like current prospects for economic recovery).

None of this should be surprising when an entire culture, from the ivory towers on down--or, more properly speaking, on up--to the retail employees believes that "their perception is their reality." They're all wrong, and it occurs to me that someone in this unserious culture of proud ignorance might be reading this between commercial breaks of Prancing with the Schmucks and say something between giggles like, "Lighten up: who cares?" which is almost as wrong.

As I once remarked to a towering intellect and non pareil blogger: every morning I wake up, I am amazed another day and night have gone by without civilization-collapsing crisis.

On days like this, I just want to go back to bed. As the economy (and more) will likely continue to implode, in defiance of the perceptions and feelings of all the retail shoplifters and university professors on Earth.

But I just might have more to say on a related issue or two instead, whether it's worth the effort or not.

I have a feeling (as well as a few thoughts, which, of course, predicate it) that it is going to be a long Endarkenment, and I will not even come close to seeing the end of it.

Clarence Clemons: 1942-2011

2011-06-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

Clarence Clemons was sui generis.

The best way I can illustrate that quality is with a personal anecdote. Sometime in the mid1980s, I heard Aretha Franklin's "Freeway of Love" on the radio for the first time. The track featured a soulful, direct, and articulate (if simple) saxophone solo. I would never have any reason to think of Bruce Springsteen or his saxophone player, Clarence Clemons, when listening to an Aretha Franklin song. I was unaware that Clarence ever played with other artists.

But I knew that sound, and I knew that style.

I thought to myself something like: How about that: Clarence is freelancing. (I was, approximately, eight years old ... so I may not have been familiar with the term yet. You get the idea, however.)

It would be impossible to single out one irreplaceable focal point of the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen's famous backing band, but Clarence would certainly make the short list. The Big Man joined the band (to borrow a line from "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out") in 1972, and his soulful saxophone stylings, his stage presence, and his inimitable personality were salient aspects of every concert Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed (they lasted, off and on, to this day--often while Clarence suffered through debilitating pain and hampered movements to perform shows that often approached or exceeded three hours in length). On record, his solos colored every song in which they appeared, from the uncharacteristic relative speed and range of "Born to Run" (perhaps the most famous achievement of both Springsteen and Clemons) to the passionate resilience of "Ramrod" (the sound and spirit of finding light in life's darkest corners--critic and Springsteen biographer Robert Hilburn referred to the song as "a more optimistic 'Racing in the Street,'" referring to a song of resigning ennui, and without Clarence and his solo, there would have been far less optimism).

Granted, Clarence was no virtuoso. His style could be so simple as to border on the simplistic (but never quite get there), and, indeed, it was savagely parodied by at least one player of a more virtuosic approach. But his palpable passion and his seemingly intuitive ability to adapt to the demanding vicissitudes of one of the most extemporaneous frontmen in arena rock more than made up for it.

In a 1990 interview that I am unable to directly quote, Mike Appel, Springsteen's first manager, remarked on Clarence's almost preternatural ability to adeptly and expertly respond to any musical situation, whether caused by equipment failure, absent personnel, or his boss's whims. "More than anyone else in the band, Clarence always knew the cues." His versatility helped give Springsteen freedom to transcend the strictures of arena rock and present live performances that were always fresh, spontaneous, and in-the-moment; that could surprise the most seasoned fan one minute and the Boss himself the next; and that could present virtually any song, original or cover, at any moment. (Indeed: a long time ago, a musician friend of my uncle's experienced Clarence's versatility, spontaneity, efficaciousness, and encyclopedic knowledge of popular music history first-hand. But that is a story for another time.)

The popular music of today is missing much of that versatility, spontaneity, efficaciousness, and passion. One of its most notable exemplars is gone. He suffered a serious stroke at his home in Florida last week, and, despite some promising signs of recovery, he died earlier today at the age of sixty-nine. But we can still enjoy what he left behind: some of the sweetest sounds of a better time and culture that may yet inspire a better one in the future.

(The above video clip represents "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", the end of the second set of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's July 8, 1978 concert at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona: one of the greatest performances of one of the greatest songs in one of the greatest concerts of what was perhaps the greatest tour in rock history.)

The Last to Die

2011-05-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

"We don't measure the blood we've drawn anymore;
"we just stack the bodies outside the door.

"Who'll be the last to die for a mistake,
"the last to die for a mistake,
"whose blood will spill, whose heart will break,
"who'll be the last to die ... for a mistake."

Bruce Springsteen, "Last to Die" (Magic, Columbia, 2007)

Take it from someone whose only ingestion of any illegal drug was an involuntary "contact high" at a Megadeth concert: the "war on drugs" is not about junkies and pushers, and it never was.

And the widespread public indifference to its abuses could only have inexorably led to abuses in areas that affect "normal people". (If you only follow one of these links, follow that one, because, as usual, Billy Beck said it much better than I can right now.)

"First they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not speak up."

Barnum and Mencken Were Right

2011-05-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

"The following lines probably say something unflattering about America, but I'd rather not think about it too much:

"Pirates of the Caribbean: 36% positive reviews, about 4200 theaters.

"Midnight in Paris: 88% positive reviews, 6 theaters."

Greg "Uncle Scoopy" Wroblewski, othercrap.com, May 19, 2011

Disregarding the critical consensuses, at least for the moment: this means that even Woody Allen cannot get his new film on more than six screens nationwide. (Let me guess: even Chicago is missing it for the time being.) This is not some obscure avant garde experimentalist or nascent indie film parvenu. This is an Academy Award winner and household name who is relatively commercial, reasonably entertaining, and enormously successful. Six screens. (Perhaps there are tentative plans to expand depending on the box office performance.)

Perhaps a better illustration of this unattractive truth, for reasons beyond the auteur's neuroses and scandals, is seminal Long Island progressive rock band Dream Theater, perhaps my favorite band (if there is just one). (I have written about them extensively and may even publish some of the writing here even though their fans do not seem interested.) They are largely unknown to their "fellow Americans," but, if they are known at all, they are recognized for virtuosic musicianship and operatic vocals in what is still a rock and metal context. For years, I have been researching and cataloging the band's live performances. I do not have attendance figures, but, for years, the band has consistently headlined arenas on most other continents, especially Europe and Asia. (In Europe, they headline the same arenas that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band headline.) This likely translates to average attendance figures of at least ten thousand people per night. In their home country, they average roughly two thousand people per night. (That is in the parts of the country where they have opportunities to play; promoters in some areas of the country refuse to book them.) The band has considerable fan support in the parts of the country where promoters shrug, but those promoters require a certain amount of airplay and chart action, regardless of album sales or fan base size. Meanwhile, those fans are constantly bombarded with advertisements (including concert advertisements) for tuneless dilettantes like the billboard that glowered at me over Sunset Boulevard last week. (This billboard advertised a tragically successful and popular act that I plan to satirize in the near future.)

None of this has much to do with Woody Allen or Dream Theater, though I am glad I had the opportunity to see a double feature of the overrated Annie Hall and the underrated Manhattan at Los Angeles's New Beverly Cinema recently. I am thankful for the opportunity to see Midnight in Paris as early as 12:01 AM Friday, though I may not see it at all. And I will never forget Dream Theater headlining (though not selling out) the Greek Theatre in August 2009. (They have a somewhat larger following around here, and Dweezil Zappa's Zappa Plays Zappa opened.) Such opportunities are among the reasons why I tolerate "blue states," particularly New York and California.

This has to do with the fact that the toll of a century of progressive education, three decades of eMpTyV, and, perhaps and to a lesser extent, four decades of Children's Television Workshop, have solidified what was already a latent tendency in America, going back to the literature of Washington Irving at least. In an age of false alternatives (including mind versus body, art versus entertainment, and art versus business), this country necessarily and consistently abandoned mind and art.

I am surrounded by philistines, and I am completely at odds with virtually every trend in my country, cultural and political.

"Another War, Another Wasteland, Another Lost Generation": Another Day at the Endarkenment

2011-04-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

My apologies to Neil Peart.

The following is an incomplete, mercifully restrained collection of headlines culled from various websites (drudgereport.com, injusticeeverywhere.com, wendymcelroy.com, theagitator.com, and othercrap.com) within the last several minutes (with spelling, punctuation, and syntax reproduced as they originally appeared).

PUMP PRICES JUMP ON TIGHTENING SUPPLIES

WHITE HOUSE CRACKS DOWN ON PRESS

1 MILLION THRONG LONDON FOR ROYAL WEDDING

95 MOVIE SEQUELS CURRENTLY IN THE WORKS

US FBI, EAST HANOVER NJ, AND UNION COUNTY NJ SUED BY MAN WHO WAS 16 WHEN COPS TOSSED HIM DOWN STAIRS DURING WRONG DOOR RAID

NORMAN OK SETTLES SUIT FOR $40K TO MAN SHOT BY COP ... AND $174K TO COP THAT SHOT HIM & APPEALED BEING FIRED FOR IT

JARRETT: OBAMA NOT RELEASING COLLEGE RECORDS

FEDS CRACK DOWN ON AMISH FARMERS--FOR SELLING MILK

ELECTED OFFICIAL: I WORK THREE DAYS A WEEK

75,000 APPLIED FOR 2000 CHICAGO MCJOBS

MORE DEMS THREATEN TO VOTE AGAINST RAISING BORROWING LIMIT

STAY-AT-HOME KIDS: A WORLDWIDE PHENOMENON

An essentially free, essentially prosperous, essentially rational, essentially culturally dynamic America and western civilization must have been quite an exhilarating place in which to live and work. I wish I could have experienced it as an adult, but I was not born until 1978.

Atlas Shrugged Part I : The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2011-02-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

Last night, I attended an advanced screening of Atlas Shrugged Part I at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California. The film is scheduled for "wide" release on April 15.
     Prior to the screening, the film's producers, Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro, explained that, about a year ago, their eighteen-year option for the rights to produce a cinematic adaptation of Ayn Rand's unique, polarizing, and perennially successful novel (yearly sales peaked in 2009, the latest year figures are available, at 500,000 copies) were about to expire. With no script and funding that was, to be magnanimous, inadequate, the producers scurried to begin principal photography, commencing two days before their rights were about to expire.
     The filmic results are what one would expect from such a predicament.
     The resultant film is not completely without merit, and the producers and filmmakers doubtless labored with the best of intentions. But this desperate world needs a better adaptation of this timelier-than-ever dithyramb to reason and exaltation of man, or none. It does not need this.

The Good:
     First: there is no denying or ignoring the source material. It, contrary to its countless conventional critics, is unimpeachable. At its best moments, seeing these characters and dramatic events reified onscreen can only be empowering to any fan of the novel, especially those who are also enthusiasts of cinema. There is unquestionably a paucity of romanticism (not to mention liberty and capitalism) in today's screen, and what romanticism exists is of the superficial, modern detective story variety. Few, if any, besides Ayn Rand have created characters like Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, and those screenwriters of our day who are compelled to are not likely to get past the pitch meeting stage. And it is not easy to produce a film with this core story completely devoid of merit. However, the excellence of the novel is a blessing and a curse as it sets a higher bar, and more demanding objectives (if you'll pardon the pun), for its adapters. Atlas Shrugged Part I is an illustrative example of that fact. Considering that problem, though, an admirer of the novel (or anyone adrift in this culture, ravenous for romanticism in general) may well tolerate the film's shortcomings to experience intransigent, independent characters like Ellis Wyatt and scenes like the triumphant opening of the John Galt Line onscreen for fleeting moments.
   Secondly, the cinematography is, at times, rather impressive, particularly during the scenes set (and shot) in Colorado. The agrestic, intrinsic beauty of the Rockies comes to ironic life in a hymn to the triumph of humanity (to use the politically correct, gender-neutral term of the Endarkenment). (And, if director Paul Johansson deserves any praise, he keeps modernistic jump cutting, dutch angles, and endless, vertiginous tracking shots to a minimum: at times his film almost comes across as a 1940s film noir, in the best and worst senses of the term.)
     If there is anything else to compliment, it is this: much of the film's advance criticism is accurate, but the screenwriters (Brian Patrick O'Toole and Aglialoro) address (if somewhat inadequately) why the inhabitants of a United States set in modern times rely on railways rather than airlines for transcontinental travel.
   Otherwise, there is not much laudatory to say about Atlas Shrugged Part I. Those who want to avoid disappointment should perhaps focus their attention at some of the fulsome praise on the film's official website.

The Bad:
     This film was poorly cast (and, consequently, often poorly acted).
     During the development phase, Hollywood stars (e.g., Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe) were noted as potential cast members. (Jolie had delivered a letter of intent to star in the film.)
     For whatever reason(s) (budgetary, logistic, or otherwise), the cast eventually assembled are all virtual unknowns. That is not necessarily a bad thing, and it can even be a positive development as long as the cast members are well-selected and efficacious.
     That did not happen here.
     For the role of Dagny Taggart, the poised, elegant, mature, and astute businesswoman, the producers acquired twenty-six-year-old parvenu Taylor Schilling. Schilling is far too youthful and callow for such a role, and she does not exude the profound incisiveness of her legendary character. She comes across more like a sorority sister at a Florida party school.
     For the role of her brother, grasping, evasive, and evading villain James Taggart, Matthew Marsden is also far too youthful. The fifty-ish, irascible altruist is too young, too calm, just a bit too contemplative, and too much the conventional villain in this film. Ayn Rand villains are as unique as Ayn Rand heroes, at least on the page. This one, as evidenced by this film, is not quite.
     For the incomparable role of Hugh Akston, the genius philosopher and professor who resigns his post at the fictitious Patrick Henry University to become a short-order cook (personifying America's disdain for the intellect and the shrinking of philosophy's stature), the tall, affable, benevolent literary character is now a surly, physically unassuming curmudgeon in one of the film's most puzzling performances.
     The above list is not exhaustive but is only some of the more salient casting blunders.
     In addition to the poor casting, the urban locations (as distinct from the on-location Colorado exteriors) reinforce the film's modest budget. Downtown Los Angeles is an obvious (and poor) substitute for New York and Philadelphia. The distinctive Los Angeles street signs and lush foliage are glaring reminders that railroad giant Taggart Transcontinental's headquarters, wherever they are set, were filmed three thousand miles away. In one scene set in Philadelphia (the location of Hank Rearden's Rearden Metal), the seal of the City of Los Angeles is conspicuous on the glass doors of a building. These obvious gaffes, coupled with a somewhat amateurish production design (one observer correctly observed that the film has the look of a 1970s television movie, and the art deco, neo-noir urban street scenes remind me of a vintage, Sam Spade private eye B Movie) are a disservice to this literary work, which demands a higher level of professionalism and realism (its creator, after all, was a romantic realist who worked with the professional likes of Cecil B. DeMille, Hal Wallis, and King Vidor). (The post production was so amateurish there were glaring, and uncommon, misspellings in the closing credits.)

The Ugly:
     If I am no judge of the acting (as distinct from the casting), I suspect it is far less than stellar in many cases (both cited above and otherwise), and I am on stronger ground regarding the writing.
     This film's screenplay is atrocious.
     In all fairness, adapting Atlas Shrugged is a herculean task. But it should not be undertaken lightly. Out of respect to it, one should decline such an undertaking if one is not ready, or, if the results are dire, abandon it. Due to its birth and development amidst the aesthetic chaos of the twentieth century, cinema never rose to its full potential, and a 2011 film could never match the 1957 novel's quality, but there are still reasonable standards to apply which were not met.
     Trisecting this story into three feature films was an obvious choice; over one thousand pages of tight plotting and essentials (Ayn Rand was a ruthless champion of literary economy, the length of Atlas Shrugged notwithstanding) cannot be done justice in a single feature (as the producers apparently intended at one point, when they were wooing stars). As this film demonstrates, it is almost equally difficult to reproduce this novel in cinematic fashion in three parts.
     O'Toole and Aglialoro condensed 310 pages of text (in the tiny font of the 1992 Signet paperback edition) into a script that, when the dust settled, clocked in at an hour and forty-two minutes onscreen. Those pages are fairly light on characterization (if not as light as this film), but they are teeming with events and, more important, their philosophic, economic, and political implications.
     There are reasons why I have been reticent in discussing the philosophical and (especially) economic themes of Atlas Shrugged thus far. The novel is a nonpareil integration of literature and philosophy (including politics). The film could not be much more disappointing in that aspect, and the abstruse motifs of ratiocinative epistemology and laissez-faire economics are largely lost in the slapdash, inadequate translation from script to screen. There is not much intellectualism in this adaptation of this intellectual novel. And the plot of the film is, at times, elusive even for those who are familiar with the novel. Atlas Shrugged Part I is likely unintelligible for those who are unfamiliar with the novel. The three-part, six-hour teleplay to a proposed miniseries, written by Ayn Rand herself and the criminally unsung Stirling Silliphant (a favorite of hers), could likely have been shot as a screenplay with minimal alterations. Why not transmute it into three feature films?
     The writers and director depicted encroaching societal collapse (and explained the reemergence of rail travel) well enough, but the novel's crucial connection of technology and material progress to the unfettered human mind and free economy is given short shrift. Even if they plan to expound at length in the proposed sequels, they could have increased the running time by the better part of an hour, fleshing out plot points and thematic material. While air travel has imploded, the world of the film is otherwise little different from 2011 America: cellular towers are intact and plasma televisions are ubiquitous. (The novel, published in 1957 and plotted a decade earlier, dramatizes a world in which radio is still the dominant medium of communication, and the writers could have done for television what they did for aviation with minimal extra effort.) The fairly robust technology of the film, which seems to include the Internet, is rather inconsistent and confusing.
   But those shortcomings pale in comparison to the dialogue.
     Ayn Rand would almost certainly not approve of this script. The dialogue is hackneyed, and the grammar is dumbed down to modern standards (or lack thereof). English was Ayn Rand's third language, and the Latin alphabet was her second alphabet. The eloquence of her prose put many native-born writers and speakers to shame, and she was a romantic realist. Endarkenment or not, there are people who still speak eloquently, and they would include her heroes. Henry Rearden would never say, "It is us who move the world, and it is us who will save it," and the screenwriters should not have written that. The grammatical solecisms are far less forgivable than mundane considerations like the film's coarser language (Ayn Rand disapproved of obscenities and her characters generally eschewed them, but the writers snuck a "bullshit" and a few other crudities into the film). (While the "bad" language was magnified, the novel's sexual content was tamed. The innocuous, implied, and understated sex in the film is a thin depiction of the roiling, sensuous passion the author took great pains to dramatize in the book. The PG-13 rating would be puzzling if any consistency could be reasonably expected from the Motion Picture Association of America at this point.)
   Finally, the screenwriters chose to adumbrate too much of the ending. The latent, clandestine maneuverings of the protagonist in the book can probably be ascertained to a large extent by an astute reader, but they are skillfully and suspensefully hidden by the author. The end of this film has an excessive spoiler that exposes too much. For that reason alone, those who have never read the book should avoid the film, notwithstanding the fact that it is "only" part one.
     When the poor grammar and trite, prosaic dialogue are merged with insufficient plot and exposition, the result is a screenplay that is, to say the least, inadequate for any project (much less this one).
     This novel, if it is to be adapted at all, needs and deserves a painstaking, laborious, articulate, enlightening screenplay. If the project included one, the problematic production values and abysmal casting could be tolerable, even negligible. In the absence of one, the contemporary counterparts of David Lean and Alec Guinness themselves (assuming they exist) could not have salvaged it. This novel has managed to not only survive, but thrive (sales ineluctably increase with every passing year) without a concomitant film. And anyone can turn on network and cable news, read the Drudge Report (and the local newspaper), or simply walk out the front door to see a sobering and harrowing depiction of the Endarkenment. (The fact that it will elude the notice of most of them underscores the novel's timelier-than-ever status and the imperative of a convincing, intelligible, illuminating adaptation, or none at all, and this film will not crystallize anything for them.) Other than the opportunity to see some reproduction, any reproduction of Atlas Shrugged in this medium, I see little other good reason for this film to exist.

Public Education and the Punitive State, Then and Now

2011-01-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

In 1984, I entered the first grade in a relatively decent public school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley country, and if you are not familiar with both of those venerable personages, you should look them up instanter). This particular school was in a district that was about as good as public education got at the time; then Secretary of Education, future Drug Czar and perennial hypocritical windbag William Bennett gave it an award for Excellence in Education around that time (possibly that very year). Over the years, my mind and I survived its pedagogy, somehow. When I left the district in 1996, I not only read (along with a small minority of "gifted" students) works of romantic, western heroism like Cyrano de Bergerac, Shane, and Arthurian legend to counterbalance the likes of Death of a Salesman and Things Fall Apart (those who were not labeled "gifted" were only assigned the leftist and multiculturalist literature): I was actually told (along with some of the brighter non-"gifted" people) that the U.S. Constitution was illegal and that the 1876 Presidential election was rigged. Today, I wonder just what those poor students are "taught."
Anyway, in 1984, before I knew anything about Rostand, Schaefer, Malory, the Articles of Confederation, and Samuel Tilden, I did know a little bit about two girls in my first grade class. This was before I experienced the unattractive truths of the cliques and subdivisions of middle school and high school dolefully described in song by Rush. They did not exist in this first grade class so I actually had friends. Two of my best friends were these girls, Keisha and LaToya. They were black. Their race is relevant only because it was one of the first indications to this sheltered, suburban white boy that, as Wolfman Jack (himself) told Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) in American Graffiti, "There's a great big world out there." I didn't really know that yet, but I was on my way to learning all about it. I was also learning that I could, at least potentially, get along with people just about anybody, not just the other suburban white boys down the street from my house. I fondly recall the blithe comity of our interactions and wonder what kind of women Keisha and LaToya are now.
I probably sensed it at the time, but years later I learned that at least a few students in my elementary school were not supposed to be there. Indeed, they were not suburban at all. They were residents of a notorious capital city in a neighboring state that was a five-minute drive away from our school (so close yet so far). Their parents illegally enrolled them in our school for reasons that are obvious enough. The parents of Keisha and LaToya (who were not related at all, if I recall correctly) were very likely among that small group of parents. They were breaking the law. (Just like the masterminds of the Constitutional Convention.) And I am glad they did, because they not only enriched their childrens' school experience, but they enriched mine as well. In 1984, it was a technical violation of the law, but it was unusual enough that the law did not crack down on those parents, at least not at first. And when they finally did (if they did), the associated penalties for mulcting taxpayers in a neighboring community (as if that did not already frequently occur legally) did not yet completely resemble the sentences for serious crimes. The punitive state was just getting started at the time, after all.
Eight years later, in 1992, I entered the ninth grade at a school in the same district. The subdivisions (doleful, baneful, and even baleful) were alive and (un)well. I did not have any friends, regardless of gender or race. Until Monday, October 12, 1992.
I know the date because of what happened over the weekend. On Friday, October 9, a new student arrived in one of my classes. The student who normally sat next to me was absent, so he took that empty seat. The teacher asked him a few amiable questions, but this young man was obviously in no mood to talk about the school he had just left. The teacher promptly changed the subject. I exchanged no words with this new student that day.
The following evening, I brooded and babysat while KISS performed at the (barely one quarter full) Spectrum in Philadelphia on their ill-fated Revenge Tour. I certainly could not get to the Spectrum myself, and I knew no one who wanted to go. My parents were unwilling to drop off and pick up my fourteen-year-old self without a companion. (I am almost certain they would have been. Perhaps I should have asked. As events transpired, my first KISS concert was the July 28, 1996 Madison Square Garden concert, but that was a demonstratively different event.)
On Monday, I returned to the aforementioned classroom and saw the new student approaching. He was wearing a T-shirt he had obviously purchased at the Spectrum on Saturday night.
It did not happen quite in time to enable me to attend the concert, but at least I had a friend--a friend who was a KISS fan. The band was experiencing a nadir in popularity (a nadir not ameliorated until they assuaged the notoriously fickle and nostalgic American public with a reunion tour and a return to makeup) so KISS fans, especially my age, were rare. Consequently, when I saw the shirt, it galvanized notoriously reticent me to introduce myself and talk to the new student. I subsequently learned, among other things, that Sean, after a serious altercation in his former school, "moved in with his grandmother" (not really, although I am sure he spent some time there during the week) so that he could attend a better school. For at least the second time in my life, I had a friend I needed, all because of the law-defying mendacity of the friend's parents. When I am on the east coast, I still see Sean from time to time (though it has been years).
A few years after that, in 1995, I contributed an article to my high school newspaper. It was a review of the Halloween broadcast of KISS's appearance on MTV Unplugged. (A lengthier portion of the KISS set was subsequently released on CD and home video.) One parent, whose amount of free time was inversely proportional to her mental capacity, called the school and complained that her tax dollars were subsidizing such an article. It was the first time I was a controversial writer, and it would not be the last. My once-removed interlocutor had a point, in spite of herself, and I could have told her that if I had an opportunity to talk to her. (I heard that she complained that "KISS and MTV," not normally an associative pair to anyone who knows what they are talking about, were associated with "drugs." I could have informed the she-ape in woman's clothing that KISS, especially as constituted at that time, had a long history of anti-drug activism, while The Breeders, who were the subject of an article in the newspaper's previous issue and that she had not mentioned, had a member who was one of the latest victims of the encroaching punitive state, having been arrested for drug possession, if I recall correctly.) I could have told her that she should have been advocating for the abolition of public education (as I was already doing), not the better allocation of her tax dollars, like a spendthrift with a decades-long, one-hundred-dollar-a-day lottery budget who complains when her husband makes a lump sum purchase on a sports car for thousands below sticker price. However, "you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" is a cliche for a reason, and Billy Beck has much more effective, perspicacious, and perspicuous words for this woman and her spiritual brethren than I could possibly produce right now. You should read all of them.
These days, much has changed. I am (among other things) co-authoring a book about KISS's live performances. (Perhaps less has changed than I thought.) The last I heard, Sean was a cameraman somewhere in the northeast. Public education, based on the reports I receive (and the ineluctable results I can infer), is far worse than it was in 1992, certainly in general if not everywhere, including Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley Country. And the punitive state?
Take it away, Radley Balko.
The punitive state was well on its way by 1992, certainly far more so than it was in 1984, but I doubt Sean's parents (or mine, or any of us) could have foreseen this in our wildest dreams.
However bereft, isolated, and oppressed my childhood was, it was a shangri-la of camaraderie, companionship, and freedom compared those of my counterparts today. And, while I have a reputation (undeserved, as most of them are) for lacking empathy, no one is more empathic for today's children and their parents than I.
I am so glad that I am not a parent, today.
And, since an entire nation does not seem to be willing to reason itself out of a position it did not reason itself into, children (and their parents) will continue to have their conceptual faculties arrested and their minds (such as they are) shoveled with propaganda while their parents (and their children) will continue to be imprisoned for petty (or non-) offenses.
And America, as progressively fewer and fewer of us ever knew it, will continue to be vitiated.
And the last rays of the Enlightenment will continue to fade.
Unless the people of this country rediscover reason, individualism, and capitalism, vitiate (among other things) Thomas Jefferson's only serious mistake and one of the first (of many) variants of socialism to infiltrate this once free nation, and reason themselves out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
Perhaps they and their children can be saved at that point.

Come Back, Sylvester Stallone: All Is Forgiven

2011-01-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

Note: I wrote this on August 19, 2010, but decided not to publish it at the time. After viewing George Lucas's American Graffiti last evening, I decided that he has partially redeemed himself in the few decades since Return of the Jedi in much the same way I anticipate for Sylvester Stallone. For this and other reasons, I share this, now.

Much has happened since 1976, when a struggling, unknown actor/writer bequeathed Rocky, one of the last afterglows of romanticism and Hollywood's mythic (and sometimes existent) Golden Age. (Frank Capra loved it.)

One event of detrimental but monumental importance in the ensuing thirty-four years was the rise of eMpTyV (the once-accurately named "Music Television"). Among its many unfortunate influences: the proliferation of jump cuts in visual media in a culture that was already tragically McLuhanesque.

The Expendables (Columbia), the latest from the quasi-auteur who wrote and starred in Rocky, is one of several of his films that should be known as "the objectionables." It is a one-hundred-and-three minute, overly (and overtly) violent music video. And that is just one of its many problems.

Another is the script (such as it is). Stallone is a quasi-auteur (at least this time) because he is not the principal writer. The writing credits proclaim: "Story by Dave Callaham--Screenplay by Dave Callaham and Sylvester Stallone." Perhaps that is to his credit, as this episodic gore-fest was not his idea or "plot" (if only it deserved such a compliment). He did select the material, however, and he was in charge. Rocky is a nuanced story, humane and uplifting (in the best sense of those terms). It is universal--the "action" (boxing) is in the background except for the very beginning and very end, and even then it is subordinate to a deeper theme. Rocky Balboa has an extraordinary soul to match his extraordinary physical prowess. While it does not have a plot, per se (at least in the first half or so), it does have a logical progression of events (even in the first half or so) that lead to an inexorable conclusion, driven by the character and his beliefs, goals, and values. (The standard Hollywood tags "plot-driven" and "character-driven" are yet another Endarkenment false dichotomy.) In The Expendables, Stallone's Barney Ross is more amoral, cynical mercenary than principled, valiant warrior, in it for the kicks, literal and figurative (to the extent that the screenplay reveals much between its unrelenting, mind-numbing decapitations, amputations, and explosions). This time, the "action" is what the film is "about," if it can be said to be about anything. (What story and characterization exist are perfunctory window dressing. There is a skeleton of a conflict, but it is lost and essentially indecipherable amidst the visual and auditory bedlam, and neither side is particularly sympathetic or unsympathetic.) Dialogue is offensively and painfully banal. In 1976, the lonely Rocky poignantly said to his girlfriend-- who was lamenting that her brother had thrown Thanksgiving dinner into the Philadelphia snow--"Yeah, to you it's Thanksgiving, but to me it's Thursday." Now, Stallone's idea of arresting dialogue involves one of the indistinguishable "good guys" (as mentioned above, none are essentially good), unexpectedly rescuing the others in a hail of expended blood, brains, and machine-gun fire, offering the cavalier jape: "You all better remember this at Christmas."

Rocky was directed by John G. Avildsen (Joe, The Karate Kid, et. al.), and he did an admirable job. He was not averse to stationary, lengthy shots, despite the fact that cinematographer James Crabe was using the then-new invention, the steadicam). Of course, Avildsen was already a middle-aged man from earlier, halcyon days. But is not Stallone as well? Did he learn anything from John G. Avildsen? He obviously did. The results were evident as recently as Rocky Balboa (2006), which Stallone directed (and which also has an exemplary screenplay, written entirely by Stallone). Unfortunately, he forgot or never learned that there is a limit to versatility. Stallone's direction in The Expendables is a series of jump cuts, disconcerting dutch angles, vertiginous tracking shots, rapid-fire pans and tilts, obsession with rack focus, and general frenzied, frenetic mayhem. The violence is so gratuitous and meaningless that its effect is analogous to that of the most gruesome slasher films. It consistently drives home the point that this film is all "style" (such as it is) and no substance, all action and no thought, but consistent is not always better. Stallone was born in 1946. He recently gave us Rocky Balboa. He co-wrote Over the Top with the late, unsung Hollywood romanticist Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night). And what happened to Poe, the oft-discussed biopic of the titular writer in which Stallone was to stay behind the camera, let others act, and leave the "action" behind (in favor of more elusive, satisfying, true action)? The sometimes satisfying (and beyond) writer/director/actor/producer, who preceded the eMpTyV/Sesame Street generation, is pandering to the worst aspects of its epistemology and culture. Again.

All of this might be acceptable if the results were entertaining and appropriate, with the right kind of characters, story, and restraint, and if the erstwhile auteur had been anyone else. Action (and horror) films have their place, and the best of them (Die Hard comes to mind) are not only entertaining and appropriate but enjoyable (and if they strain credulity, they do so far less than this film, which almost makes Ghostbusters--another much better and more appropriate film--seem like a paradigm of verisimilitude). But if Edmond Rostand spent the rest of his career after Cyrano de Bergerac writing cheap, cynical pulp stories--should he have been forgiven?

Well, yes. If he had reversed course and left the cynical, amoral, and anti-conceptual to other (usually lesser) writers. Mickey Spillane did just that. After starting his career with the romanticism and class of Mike Hammer, he is said to have degenerated into the sensationalistic and pornographic, value-free world of his next "hero," Tiger Mann. (I must add that I have yet to read the Tiger Mann novels--they are hard to find--but what little I know of them tends to support such a characterization.) By the end of his life, he was writing tight, suspenseful, clean (in the best sense of the term) novels, with and without Mike Hammer. (The fact that his conversion to Jehovah's Witnesses may have had something to do with this is irrelevant, here.)

Human beings have freewill. Human beings are capable of redemption. And Sylvester Stallone, who is in many ways a cinematic Mickey Spillane, can redeem himself, too. His recent career is very much indicative of a cinematic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If he casts aside the Edward Hyde of Rambo and The Expendables and fully embraces the Henry Jekyll of Rocky, Over the Top, and Rocky Balboa (and Poe?), he will once again be a much-need beacon of human dignity and greatness in this Endarkenment.

New Year, Old Crises

2011-01-21T10:56:00.000-08:00

It has been a while.
     I had taken a break from this weblog, in part because I thought I was repeating myself and in part because I thought no one was reading. I also believed that I had not lived up to the title, tone, and purpose I had set in the mission statement of the first post. It turns out I was (unusually) wrong, or at least exaggerating, on all counts. I am not much for New Year's resolutions, but there is no time like the present to start writing again. I have no idea how much more time any of us have, because, as I have been pointing out (and as others have been pointing out better than I), western civilization is in deep trouble.
   Twenty-one days into the new year, the Endarkenment--that is the anti-reason counterrevolution on its way to subverting all of the achievements (intellectual and technological) of the Enlightenment--inexorably rages, as it would have to because the intellectual and political climate is not changing, regardless of the results of last November's elections. Indeed: the present behavior of the latest class of Republicans in congress indicates that they will be even worse than the last (their fearless leader is already promising to soften budget cuts, and neither government spending nor the powerful public employee unions is being significantly challenged). Some report that the US dollar, long ago removed from the gold standard and now at the mercy of the whims and caprices of the Federal Reserve board, is on the verge of collapse. The once-great state of California--my birth state and the only one in which I've ever felt close to "at home"--continues its descent into the morass of its budget and public employee union woes. Another madman recently committed another horrifying atrocity, and many respond with calls for more of the "gun control" that not only did not stop the madman but may have precluded others from stopping him. And little, if anything, is changing for the better, because the wrong ideas are driving the culture (that is why it is the Endarkenment), and most individuals, victims of mind-stultifying progressive education and modern media, are not even fully aware that there is a serious problem, much less what it is or what to do about it. (Many of those who do vaguely sense that something is seriously wrong are running to religious fundamentalism and other forms of mysticism, which is also part of the problem.)
   The horrors are unrelenting, and sometimes it's difficult to say anything about any of them, or to do anything at all but drink up and watch civilization crumble into smoldering ruins.
     But I have things to say, and I will try to say them, even if I am the only one with the sense to pay attention.

A Sign of the Times

2010-11-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

During one of my recent periodic peregrinations around the neighborhood, I was struck by a contrast all too indicative of the Endarkenment.
Shuffling down the once-prosperous main thoroughfare a few blocks to my south, immortalized in song as a vortex of affluence and vitality (however frivolous or aimless), I notice that the pedestrian traffic (other than mine) is shrinking in direct proportion to the number of occupied buildings. More "vacancy" and "for rent" signs appear in the windows of ex-shops and ex-offices with every passing week. The quantity is becoming alarming, if not quite for this jaundiced and resigned observer, then for his normal neighbors.
On my way home, however, I noticed one sign in one yard, about a block north of the commercial district, that was intact; the building it advertised was open for business. It read something like: "Psychic Spirituality."
Priorities.
As I contemplatively continued home, I considered the implications of that enterprise being one of the relatively few to survive in such hostile economic times and locales.
I realized that the same cultural milieu that brought us such hostile economic times and locales would necessarily succor such an enterprise, producing customers who would support it in lieu of productive, rational services. The economic statists and the peddlers of flimflam (from the ivory towers to the corner store) have a symbiotic relationship, which is one reason why the latter almost invariably support the former.
Look around you. Whether quietly doing business around the corner or bellowing from the rooftops, pulpits, newspapers (such as remain), magazines (see above), and Internet, unreason is everywhere.

The Times That Try Men's (and Women's) Souls

2010-10-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

A "friend" on facebook shared a link to a story recounting a Texas cheerleader who was expelled from her cheerleading squad for refusing to enthusiastically shout the first name of the athlete who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her. She remarked, "This is completely ridiculous and is just one more reason why 'According to the 1999 United States National Crime Victimization Survey, only 39% of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to law enforcement officials." Here is the comment I almost left:

Unfortunately, the actual percentage is likely to be even lower. Sources such as the "United States National Crime Victimization Survey" have approximately the same degree of accuracy as census figures, unemployment statistics (especially lately), and album sales & concert attendance figures reported to the music industry. Regarding the ousted cheerleader (assuming the veracity of that story): that is the kind of thing that happens, on countless occasions every single day, in a culture of unreason. It is nothing new, but you should not be surprised to hear about many more analogous outrages in the future.

Why I Am Not a Journalist

2010-08-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school (roughly a decade-and-a-half ago), a civics teacher of mine remarked on a disquieting trend that I had already noticed: group journalism. This teacher's evaluation of the trend was the opposite of mine, however (and I disagreed with him about virtually everything else, as well). He described the then-recent development of groups of journalists reporting and writing as a team in glowing tones, observing that it was a consequence of American culture's retreat from its once-sacred ideal of "rugged individualism." (He described it more as a reevaluation, stipulating that, sometimes, such individualism was still appropriate.) While I think his lip service to rugged individualism more disingenuous now than I did then, I still essentially agree with his estimation and its cause. Where I disagree is that I identify it as a negative trend.

No matter what a culture's implicit foundation and traditions, it cannot survive a constant, explicit battering from antipodal ideas when that foundation was never fully understood by most of its supporters and its traditions were merely understood as traditions, nothing more. So it was with America and its culture of "rugged individualism," and so it had to be with journalism. In high school, I saw how saturated the field of journalism had become with unreason, collectivism, consensus, political correctness, etc. I knew that it had been an ineluctable outcome. The once-great profession of Mencken and Pulitzer had been hijacked by the likes of Duranty and Rather. The few O'Rourkes and Stossels who had managed to gain a foothold, the true journalistic giants who would have been its premiere representatives in a rational culture, were seen as tolerable "balance" at best, adrift in a sea of Weisbergs, Gladwells, and Friedmanns. An aspiring writer (among other things), I knew I was at least a few decades late to have any place in contemporary journalism.

A few days ago, blogger Mike Soja illuminated its inexorable present state in the first sentence of his post:

"It took four people at ABC News to write six sentences."

The rest of his post excoriates the quality (or lack thereof) of the group's sentences: their mangled syntax, lack of relative facts, inaccuracy in regard to other facts, and general unprofessional (and worse) "professionalism."

No wonder so many discerning minds (to the extent that they still exist) are abandoning the likes of ABC News for the non-professionals in the blogosphere. The current government-engineered depression is not even the primary reason for the financial woes of the media (in fact, both phenomena can be traced to the same root cause: a global abandonment of reason).

It is getting to the point where technology and business are the only feasible career opportunities for the rational. Law, where Thomas Jefferson once made his living, has degenerated--with increasingly rare exceptions--into a haven for opportunistic, amoral pragmatists, including but not limited to litigious ambulance chasers and predatory, rights-abrogating prosecutors (to be completely nonpartisan, each exists on the left and right). If Obamacare is not repealed--and future analogous legislation is not stopped--the medical profession will be turned into a holistic bureaucracy, a department of motor vehicles for the health of the nation's people. In the arts and letters, the situation is even more dire, pushing Edward Cline and Radley Balko to obscurity while making household names of the mediocre, conventional, and statist (to the extent that any writer is a household name any more).

Perhaps it is appropriate that I share these observations on Ray Bradbury's ninetieth birthday. Bradbury is a creative artist who devotes most of his energies to dreaming of better worlds and showing us the unavoidable outcome of the worst aspects of this one (the prescient Fahrenheit 451, contrary to popular belief, is more about the deleterious effects of mass media on intelligence and awareness than government censorship). He leaves the reporting and editorializing to others.

Someone must pick up the journalistic--and, more important, philosophical--slack, however (or help increase awareness of those who are doing it right). Fiction alone will not save us.

"I Still Cling to Hope": Rush in the 21st Century (and Before and After)

2010-08-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

"I don't have faith in faith;
"I don't believe in belief.
"You can call me faithless;
"you can call me faithless.
"But I still cling to hope,
"and I believe in love.
"And that's faith enough for me."

"Faithless"
Words by Neil Peart; Music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson
from Snakes and Arrows (Atlantic, 2007)

"Faithless" is the best song from Rush's most recent album, which made the song's complete absence on the album's accompanying tour in 2007 and 2008 all the more acute. It is also one of the timeliest and most topical in the band's four-decade career, without losing any of the timeless, intellectual quality of drummer/lyricist Peart's far-sighted eye.

The critically-ignored, publicly-embraced, unclassifiable band ("I guess we're sort of leftovers from the progressive rock era" was the best Lee could do in a 1993 interview) is rectifying the aforementioned absence this summer in its most thematically and musically satisfying tour, the Time Machine Tour--a retrospective of their (distant and recent) past, present, and future (two songs from their work-in-progress next album are featured). Last night, Lee addressed a teeming, overflowing Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, California: "On the last tour we did a number of songs from Snakes and Arrows. There was one that we didn't do for some reason, although we wanted to." The trio executed a masterful performance. The quickening, arresting aural wash of FM member Ben Mink's string arrangement was replicated via triggers and synthesizer pedals (to appropriate and necessary effect), but the subtle reinterpretation was otherwise sparse and organic, forsaking the instrumental layers and multitracked vocals of the studio recording to a stripped-down sound of three musicians playing in the moment. Geddy Lee's lone, unadorned, immediate voice sang the chorus, underscoring the differences between the technological cocoon of the recording studio and the intimacy and immediacy of the stage as well as this band's newfound inroads in regard to the ladder.

The song, equally illustrative of the band's thematic and creative direction as writers and ongoing reinvention as performers, was easily the show's highlight.

As writers, the three individual members, always known for the bookish, ratiocinative lyrics of their drummer and the lengthy (some would say prolix), meandering, complex instrumental noodlings of their guitarist (Lifeson) and bassist/keyboardist/vocalist (Lee), have gradually ratcheted up the former while tempering the latter over the course of the latter stages of their partnership. No doubt due to a confluence of factors--their advancing age, Peart's personal tragedies (he lost his teenage daughter and his wife a year later in the 1990's), and a changing world--the band's lyrics became, in some ways, even more contemplative and reflective as the energy of youth evolved into the guile and wisdom of middle age. In the wake of his own tragedies and the one's he shared with humanity in a post-9/11 global depression (economic, psychological, and political), Peart became more outspoken and controversial. A longtime self-proclaimed agnostic, his long-downplayed freethought (quite possibly shared by his bandmates--Lifeson can be seen reading Christopher Hitchens's god is Not Great in the brand-new documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage) came to the forefront as the wordsmith confronted a world of diminished confidence in reason (in general) and the rise of evangelical religion (in particular) when said world, which always needed just the opposite, needed it more desperately than ever. Musically, Lee and Lifeson scaled back their compositional and instrumental scope, shaping the music into more concise songs showcasing some of their more heterogeneous influences (folk, British Invasion, et. al.) while retaining the overall sweep and grandeur of their art-rock, jazz, and classical influences.

Last night, when Lee, the conduit of his bandmate's pen, sang, "Like a flower in the desert that only blooms at night, I will quietly resist," the manifold meanings were likely lost on most of the six-thousand-plus, standing-room-only audience. But they were apparent if one listened carefully and knew this band's history. In a rock (and wider cultural) landscape where artists and other "celebrities"--rarely known for their clear-headed, rational approach to anything--continually embrace the fads and perennial stalwarts of unreason, from Scientology to the Kaballah, from New Age to Old Testament, from the trendy, credulous "Hope and Change" of the Obamaton and his automatons to the musty, dusty Communist Manifesto, one band quietly resists, shedding some of the rambunctiousness, raucous abandon of their youth while they gracefully cement their position as the learned sages and bards in a culture increasingly hostile to such anachronism. And the raw, unadorned, not-quite-so-lone voice in the wilderness, uncluttered by his previously typical echo and voice effects, evinced another welcome trend in this more-welcome-than-ever band's ongoing development.

Rush previously relied on copious synthesizers, electronic triggers, and other technological trickery to reproduce their dense, layered pieces onstage. (One could not really blame them; there is a limit to what even these three humans can reproduce without mechanical assistance.) A perceptive, knowledgeable observer could not help but notice their retrenchment on this latest outing. Geddy Lee did not touch his synthesizer setup until the tenth song (the long-unheard and welcomed "Marathon"), and Alex Lifeson could be seen playing a temporary keyboard during "Time Stand Still" (an apposite and ironic selection for the Time Machine Tour) while Geddy's hands were full. In lieu of Geddy's usual ocean of pre-recorded voices, Alex now sings background vocals on virtually every song. Some of the triggers and tracks were palpably present, but they were used to more restrained and appropriate effect. It is as if these three, after thirty-six years together, finally learned what "live" means, and how to play that way. This unprecedented commitment to change and challenge was also evident in two other areas. The heavy rearrangement of sections of the familiar old favorites "Working Man," "Closer to the Heart," and "La Villa Strangiato" spotlighted a tenacious refusal to allow them to become embalmed into museum pieces. And parts of several songs clearly had a more improvisational flair. Geddy's extemporaneous, trebly noodlings were always present, but he is now taking them to an even less subtle and more extensive level. (Even Neil Peart--one of the least improvisational musicians in modern music--has commented on recently ratcheting up his level of spontaneity in his nightly drum solos.)

The song selection could scarcely have been better, especially considering the nostalgic overtones of the tour's name and the relative lack of new material. Their most popular and acclaimed album--1981's Moving Pictures--was performed in its entirety at the beginning of the second set. But this was no oldies show. Similar to Peter Gabriel's recent excursion, the band's latest completed album was represented by three songs (the aforementioned, previously unplayed "Faithless" and the last tour's staples "Far Cry" and "Workin' them Angels"). The two completed new songs, both of them already released as a double-sided single (remember those?), were present and accounted for. The protean "Caravan"--with its stubborn mantra "I can't stop thinking big"--is a reminder (if one were needed) that these rockers do not apologize for their seemingly incongruous philosophizing. More homogeneous and proto-metal, "BU2B"--the characteristically humorous and ironic title is "text-speak" for "Brought Up to Believe"--continues Peart's ruminations on religion in the Endarkenment. Of the older songs, a welcome addition was "Presto," the twenty-one-year-old title track from the inaugural offering to Atlantic, their current record label (remember those?). An ancestor and harbinger to "Faithless," it too was never performed live before this year. Like "Faithless," it is a secular prayer. "I'm not one to believe in magic, but I sometimes have a second sight--if I could wave my magic wand, I'd make everything all right." Even in 1989, Neil proved that one need not be a mystic to be a dreamer--in the best sense of the term.

The tour's name is thematically apropos. Unable to tour without some kind of a theme, the band expediently found one without being too nostalgic. Indeed, "time" refers to the present and the future as well as the past, and there was not a little attention paid to those as well. The relevance of time is clearly on the minds of the band members--"We have to take a short break on account of our advanced age," Geddy explained right before the intermission. The relativity of time was clearly evident as well--the new twelve-string acoustic intro and modified end section of "Closer to the Heart" almost made it pass for a new song, and the band similarly breathed new life in other ancient songs. The only room for significant criticism (other than the sophomoric--and soporific--intro and outro videos) relates to the rigid, static setlist, apparently unchanged since opening night. With a catalog as vast as theirs, one might think they would allow more fluidity in the nightly song selection, for themselves as well as their itinerant fans. Perhaps there are only so many new tricks that can be taught to an old dog. And the singular setlist they are using could hardly be better.

Unable to stop thinking big, brought up to believe but predisposed to think first, and clinging to hope in a seemingly hopeless world, Rush and their secular idea of the sacred are more indispensable than ever, required listening (if there is such a thing) to any thoughtful rock fan (and there is such a thing). Their continued thriving in the Endarkenment is a welcome reminder that their grounded, forlorn optimism and tenacity is not entirely misplaced.

Rush
Gibson Amphitheatre
Universal City, California
Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Time Machine Tour

first set:
The Spirit of Radio
Time Stand Still
Presto
Stick It out
Workin' them Angels
Leave That Thing Alone
Faithless
BU2B
Freewill
Marathon
Subdivisions

second set:
Tom Sawyer
Red Barchetta
Yyz
Limelight
The Camera Eye
Witch Hunt
Vital Signs
Caravan
drum solo
Closer to the Heart
2112 (I. Overture/II. The Temples of Syrinx)
Far Cry

encore:
La Villa Strangiato
Working Man

Patricia Neal: 1926-2010

2010-08-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

"All the world's a stage,
"And all the men and women merely players;
"They have their exits and their entrances,
"And one man in his time plays many parts,
"His acts being seven ages."

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, vii.

The sentiment was already a cliche when Shakespeare wrote it circa 1600, so whether it was his sentiment or just that of his character Jacques is not the point. The point is that it is a cliche and, contrary to Shakespeare's implied determinism, some men and women are anything but "merely players."

Actress Patricia Neal, who succumbed to lung cancer yesterday at her Martha's Vineyard home, was living proof, on stage, on screen, and beyond.

The poised, elegant leading lady brought much of the same onscreen elan to the turmoil of her often troubled personal life. Thanks to the work she left behind, she will continue to be a beacon of heroism in these troubled times, in which people are starving for such a thing more than ever.

It is appropriate that the first major role to introduce the world to her raspy voice and classical pulchritude was Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead (1949), the flawed, egregiously inadequate adaptation of Ayn Rand's then-recent bestseller and future modern classic. Her performance, opposite the miscast Gary Cooper, is one of the few reasons to watch the film aside from Ayn Rand's screenplay. Some of Ayn Rand's most fascinating, complex characters are her bitter, malevolent heroes--Rand once described Dominique, a character only she herself could have created, as herself "in a bad mood"--and it is unlikely anyone could have personified the unique heroine's transformation from the pessimistic value-seeker and spiritual mercy-killer to the happy, joyous, triumphant woman at story's end. If that does not make much sense, it is nearly impossible to adequately explicate here--read the book. I would recommend the film, but if ever there was a case in which one should read the book first, this is it. With the exceptions of Ayn Rand and Patricia Neal, virtually everything else went wrong with the production, but the latter's performance cemented her status as a first-rate actress immediately.

First, watch her performance two years later in The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which her character, with calm, confident (if nervous) aplomb, saves the entire planet from impending doom. Compare and contrast it with other analogous roles and actresses in similar films of the era. In the 1950's, a typical female role in a world-on-the-brink science fiction film might call for feckless screaming (if not caterwauling histrionics). The producers needed something else, and sought Patricia Neal. (Who else but the only American actress who had attempted--let alone succeeded--at portraying an Ayn Rand heroine?)

Her career and private life continued to thrive. She starred in several more films and married writer Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Then, tragedy.

First, she lost a daughter to measles in 1962. Proving that some cliches are often true and that nothing can keep a good woman down, she won the Best Actress Oscar for Hud the following year. But the tragedy would not abate.

She was hardly a stranger to it. So it must have seemed relatively benign to her (if few others) when she suffered a series of strokes in 1965, at the age of thirty-nine.

Neal went through extensive rehabilitation just to relearn to walk and talk. And, despite continued, extensive memory problems, she returned to her profession with understated self-confidence, garnering another Academy Award nomination (for The Subject was Roses) within three years. (In 1978, The Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center was founded in her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee; it has helped stroke and paralysis victims to this day.

Her life and career continued, and she soldiered on through similar peaks and valleys (she divorced Dahl in the early 1990's when she discovered his adultery). While decades passed and many forgot her pioneering work (and a generation of philistines raised on Sesame Street and MTV--including, to some extent, this writer, it must be admitted--largely never discovered it), those who loved cinema and bold, efficacious heroines never did. As Brenda Daverin of gather.com writes in an exemplary, superlative, exhaustive obituary that is entirely worthy of its subject:

"Patricia Neal will be remembered for her husky voice, her powerful presence, and the dedication she had to everything she did. Her movie roles provided many girls and young women with the image of how a woman could be, not what society taught they should be. Her impact in that area as well as what she has done for stroke survivors cannot be measured."

If you have a daughter (or even a son), you could do much worse than to temper their diet of modern, neurotic trash culture and its celebrity wastrels and trollops with the sunlit romanticism of Patricia Neal. The heroism she brought to this world, onscreen and off, will never be forgotten.

Milton Friedman Takes a Young Michael Moore to Task?

2010-07-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

I have never been much interested in Milton Friedman, but this is fascinating. This is purported to be the future flabby filmmaker. My first impression was that he was too thin and human to be the Moore in question, but then I remembered what happened to Mike Love. And the visage certainly looks familiar. (I am not familiar enough with the voice.)

The Cordoba House Mosque: An Endarkenment Conundrum

2010-07-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

This will be necessarily brief, for a few reasons.
I have been following the debate, particularly among Objectivists, on the proposed Muslim mosque near the World Trade Center site in New York with great interest. Similar to their recent debates concerning practical voting tactics (and for similar reasons), Objectivists (even those in the "official" part of the movement who allegedly usually agree) are split on whether the government (municipal, state, or federal) has a legitimate power to stop its construction. One side views the fact that the United States is at war with militant, theocratic Islamism (whether or not its government and most of its citizens recognize that fact) as sufficient reason for the suspension of property rights on the part of the mosque's financiers and builders. The other views property rights as sacrosanct as a matter of principle.
This issue, like the death penalty, homosexual marriage, illegal immigration, and few others, is one in which there are good, reasonable, rational arguments on both sides. The circumstances and issues surrounding the first two have nothing to do with contemporary society and would apply in a rational one as well. The exigencies related to illegal immigration, voting in twenty-first century "America," and the latest Muslim effrontery are unique to the Endarkenment.
Which is one reason why I refuse to give any of them too much thought.
So why am I discussing this conflict here? Because it is indicative of the harrowing, desperate times in which we live.
It is true that, in general, most immigration (with very few exceptions) should be encouraged (or, at the very least, not impeded). However, when a massive, still relatively-prosperous welfare state encourages masses of foreign people, directly or indirectly, to siphon off its largess and pelf, there may be legitimate reasons to curtail some "illegal immigration" as a short-term, emergency measure, if the majority and those purported to represent it are unwilling or unable to roll back the welfare state quickly enough. That, however, is merely an argument against the welfare state, not immigration. In a world in which reason, individualism, and liberty were paramount, such a problem would never arise, and human intellectual effort would not be wasted on such a taxing diversion (if you'll pardon the pun).
Similarly, property and freedom of religion, in general, are inalienable in any society which purports to be even semi-free. However, in a state of war between a semi-free nation and a coercive cabal in which the semi-free nation has waged a half-hearted, inconsistent, ineffectual battle riddled with appeasement against an enemy that is explicitly religious (regardless of the anointed intelligentsia's vociferous, vehement denial of that fact), self-defense is the number-one priority (and the enemy has forfeited their rights--which, in this case, they do not recognize--anyway). There are legitimate reasons to curtail the ostensible rights of those associated with them, particularly in a location of immense symbolic significance. That, however, is merely an argument against a (semi-)free nation waging a half-hearted, inconsistent, ineffectual battle riddled with appeasement, not rights of property and religion (no matter the popularity or propriety of those exercising them).
Government action should not apply when force or fraud is not involved. The question in the above examples involves whether (and by whom) force or fraud is involved.
In the first example, force is clearly involved; wealth is forcibly redistributed in a welfare state from those who have earned it to those who have not. If it can be determined that barring immigration temporarily is the only way to prevent the plunder of precious assets, it is hardly an outrage. It is about the least outrageous act a welfare state could take.
In the second example, force (and fraud) is also clearly involved, and the proposed government solution illuminates an even less outrageous act of a teetering, perilous, mixed-economy, appeasing welfare state.
In general, one should err on the side of caution involving issues of government power. Warfare, with its associated imminent danger, is an exception. Consequently, I tend to support lax immigration policies while regarding the halting of the Cordoba House's construction as one of the very few aggressive governmental acts that I could support. [Unlike many libertarians, I realize that the government is not the only significant, pervasive threat to my life, liberty, and property (to the extent that I still have the latter two), and I am not a pacifist.]
But I (unusually) am open to counter arguments on both sides. Thankfully, I am not a policy maker (and the best potential policy makers are nowhere to be found, these days). Principles are more important than byzantine, complex concrete applications, and I know the right principles. If the right principles were dominant in this culture, problems like these (and others) would never arise.

What Is Left to Celebrate?

2010-07-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

This will be brief.
Around two-hundred-and-thirty-four years ago today (it was actually two or three days earlier), about fifty-six warriors, some intellectual, all political, committed one of the most acute, influential, monumental acts in human history, pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for the most fragile (and only correct) political ideal. They were not entirely consistent, and the most egregious fault of some of them, slavery, was soon eradicated by the consistent application of those Enlightenment ideals, but their commitment was the catalyst for that, too. At last, the sometimes-explicit, usually-implicit political ideas of Enlightenment philosophy came to temporal, efficacious fruition.
Five years later, a philosopher from Europe (appropriately enough) by the name of Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, and the intellectual counterrevolution began. The seeds of the Endarkenment were sown.
Thanks to the culmination of centuries of encroaching cognitive dissonance (implied and described to some extent in my last post), we now have a nation of people--a nation that its founders would not recognize--enthusiastically celebrating something, the meaning of which they know little and seem to care less.
This day is still called Independence Day, but independence--whether general, intellectual, financial, or psychological--is continuously vanishing from American life. And the government that most contemporary Americans seem to support--or, at the very least, tolerate--is more destructive and tyrannical than the one that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Gouverneur Morris, et. al. led their countrymen (that includes women--I anachronistically use the gender neutral sense) in overthrowing.
"These are the times that try mens' souls," wrote one of the greatest writers in American history. (Incidentally, he was a proto-feminist who also used the term in its gender neutral sense, and he seems to have named his beloved adopted country.) What would Thomas Paine say if he could pick up a newspaper today?
I am not sure, as he was not entirely consistent himself, but I think that he would find these times, in some ways, even more trying.
Nonetheless, I will still celebrate today, in a way. As I watch the fireworks display emanating from CBS studios (which, at least, may be privately-funded), I will celebrate the past, and I will celebrate human potential, and I will celebrate the lives, fortunes, and sacred honor of the giants who made whatever freedom and prosperity we still have possible. Now I will turn this computer off and call one of those people, for it is my World War II veteran and prosperous inventor/engineer grandfather's birthday, too.
Happy birthday.

Educated Ignorance

2010-06-25T23:57:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I attended the Carson, California stop of the Vans Warped Tour. (I attended to see the second live performance of the stupendous band HaSkaLA; I have extensively recounted their first elsewhere and may subsequently recount this one as well.) Among the crowd, I noticed a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I recently saw the same slogan on a picket sign in New Jersey, brandished by a protester objecting to Governor Chris Christie's recent budget cuts.
Immediately upon reading this platitude yet again, I thought of innumerable, conspicuous examples of the horrifying dearth of knowledge among educated people in the Endarkenment (occasionally including my own). I thought of David McCullough's shock when not a single student in a college-level honors history course recognized George Marshall's name, among other gaps in knowledge. ("It is impossible to love a country one doesn't know," McCullough remarked.) I recalled hearing of religious conservative Sean Hannity's radio antics, sending staff members on the streets of New York, finding that an alarming number of well-dressed, reasonably articulate New Yorkers and commuters could not answer simple questions of history and civics. I recalled the friend, himself a substitute teacher, who recounted the story of a co-worker, about to become an English teacher, who had no idea about Oedipus (either Sophocles' fictional character or Freud's dubious psychological complex). I'll never forget the twenty-five year-old college graduate who thought eggs were manufactured by the grocery companies. I could go on.
Some of my dearest friends are public educators. They are superlative teachers, and they are not the problem (any more than the rest of the culture, anyway). It is no fault of theirs that they have few options in today's society if they desire to teach, other than government schools.
The idea that "education" and ignorance are mutually exclusive is as absurd as the idea that this country is still "free" because Francis Scott Key's words have not yet been changed in the national anthem. It is akin to saying that gorging on Jack in the Box daily is equivalent to nutrition or that joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers and indulging in copious groupie activity in your hotel room every night is synonymous with intimacy and romance.
Look around you. Talk to those you encounter. Many of them are educated. (In the context of the aforementioned T-shirt and sign, virtually all of them are.) "Ignorance" is impossible to avoid in twenty-first century America, regardless of the framed pieces of paper that hang on the walls of homes and offices. (Ignorance is not stupidity. Most of these people are reasonably smart, which makes modern cultural ignorance truly disgraceful.)
It is often a proud ignorance. Not only do the booboisie and Eloi have little interest in anything besides Lady Gaga and Iron Man 2 (which might even be legitimate interests, particularly the latter): they act as if such awareness and integrated knowledge were an affront to their suave, urbane coolness; physical prowess; and good looks. (This misconception is not new on this continent; it goes back to the beginning of American culture in Washington Irving's classic characterization of the mind-body dichotomy in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," with the rivalry of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones, each ineluctably consigned to one side in Irving's universe. Clever, wily Tom Sawyer, like Brom Bones, may have had no time for "book larnin'," but, like Brom Bones, he was anything but stupid. This misconception is not new, but it is gaining frightening momentum and traction in the Endarkenment.)
In my own experience, I have noticed that I must explain the meanings of fairly prosaic words (e.g., "pejorative" and "imperious") to reasonably intelligent college graduates among my family and friends. And a cursory glance at the Internet ruminations and bleatings of typical modern Americans (most of them "educated" to at least the extent meant in the aforementioned platitude) reveals appalling deficiencies in basic grammar, syntax, and spelling.
(Many literary classics, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's novels, were originally conceived and written for children. Many--most?--of today's adults would have trouble understanding them. That is assuming they could be bothered to try.)
If the existence and popularity of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? is any indication, the "average" American adult (to say nothing of the below average American adult) could not tell you which element is most prominent in the Earth's atmosphere, or who was the first Secretary of the Treasury, or whether or not a pulley is a simple machine. (As George Carlin pointed out: as dumb as the average American is, half of them are dumber than that. While that may not be literally, technically true, it is close enough, and humor is more truthful than factual anyway. Indeed, the fact is that many of them, like their fictional archetypes Brom Bones and Tom Sawyer, are not dumb.)
Yet most of these people are "educated" in the sense that the modern public school activist insists is an antidote to "ignorance."
This is why many (most?) of them certainly do not know the difference between Great Britain and the United Kingdom. It is also why even some Objectivists are unfamiliar with the term "jury nullification."
(I do not exempt myself from these observations. I am well aware that, thanks to my education and cultural surroundings, I know and understand far less than I would, and should, have.)
Billy Beck, as usual, is correct. This is deliberate. It was by design. "Education" is a euphemism for the true intent of the architects (Horace Mann, John Dewey, and their countless forgotten spawn) of public education. "A nation of imbeciles can never be free." It worked exactly as planned.
What to do about it?
P.J. O'Rourke, like a good "conservative" (he is one of the few left), has the correct answer but for the wrong reasons. When even the best (and, incidentally, funniest) self-proclaimed conservative concedes every moral premise of the left (and even concedes that public education "served its purpose" and was a good idea at the time, restricting his criticisms to fiscal analysis and practical arguments), it is no wonder the left keeps winning. Read his article anyway. You'll laugh. And understand (if you did not already) the true cost of the educated ignorance advanced by teacher's unions (and at least one Vans Warped Tour attendee), and I am not referring exclusively to money. O'Rourke, the Cato Institute's H.L. Mencken Research Fellow, would be the more famous Mencken's Ghost if he would only go deeper and also reject religion.
That leaves me. I must commence honing my snark blade.
And, after following P.J. O'Rourke's practical advice, then, and only then, can a sufficient number of Americans attain a status of mental acumen approaching the potential sitting between their ears. Then, and only then, could most Americans possibly exude the proper integration of mind and body. Only then could the "average" comely lass at the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert be at least as interested in John Frusciante's minor ninth chords and phrygian modes as she is in the non-musical instruments on stage. Then, and only then, would other nanny state false alternatives, such as that of abstemious hyper-fitness and gluttonous overindulgence, shrink from prominence. Then, and only then, could a majority of Americans (they could be Americans again at that point) consistently admire and understand Francis Scott Key's words (and Thomas Jefferson's, and Patrick Henry's, and Ethan Allen's).
Not a moment sooner.

HaSkaLA: Untethered & Undone (Danceable Bliss Discs)

2010-06-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

It could be worse.

The morose and down-hearted among us (or those who, while satisfied in their personal lives, remind their eternally cheerful acquaintances that they live in a fallen society) frequently hear such a riposte, whether intended out of encouragement or out of disgust that some actually reject the optimism of Leibniz and do not settle for injustice and mediocrity. Of course, they are technically correct.

Sometimes they are essentially, more completely correct as well.

A band called HaSkaLA has released their debut disc, Untethered & Undone (Danceable Bliss Discs). It is a stark, vital reminder—if one were needed (and, these days, one often is)—that some of the last rays of the Enlightenment have yet to be extinguished.

Which is appropriate enough, because the band’s name is a Hebrew word that refers to the Enlightenment.

HaSkaLA is a self-proclaimed “ska” band, but one cursory listen at their first album (an essentially complete recording of their first—only, as of this writing—show, on April 15 of this year at Molly Malone’s in Fairfax Village, Los Angeles) reveals a diverse, if not protean, ensemble (lead vocals etc., two guitars, keyboards, trumpet, saxophone, trombone, bass guitar, and drums) that refuses to be pigeon-holed with any label: perhaps not even “rock” or “pop.”

With trademark, understated, free-market political awareness, lyricist/frontman Steven Schub starts the festivities (which, in an atavistically defiant manner, is exactly what the performance is) with a romp-through of The Beatles’ “Taxman” (note the occasion), the three horns coloring HaSkaLA’s arrangement to good effect. Dave Mastas’ guitar solo has echoes of composer George Harrison, but it is more homage than mimicry, being equal parts early American rock & roll and blues.

The band’s title song follows. “HaSkaLA” is a mid-tempo mission statement and a reminder that, no matter how cerebral and ideological Schub’s reputation (he fronts an equally impressive ska band called The Fenwicks), he is equally known for rousing, entertaining, joyous, physical anthems. It sounds like a re-writing (unconscious or subconscious, apparently) of The Clash’s “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” It is unusually tight, melodic, soulful, and energetic for a new band playing their first original song for the first time in times like the present. It is completely, refreshingly satisfying.

And it is easily the least important song on Untethered & Undone. That is how essential Untehered & Undone is.

By the time “Obscene Love-Machine Supreme” enters the listener’s cerebrum, it is apparent that HaSkaLA has dispensed will all contemporary rules and expectations. The band is “too big,” they are “too flamboyant,” they are “too intellectual” (more on that below), they are (paradoxically, not incongruously) “too emotional” (but not histrionic), they are “too ‘libertarian’ [Objectivists, please excuse the term],” and, writing of paradoxes, they are too insistent on being happy-go-lucky and serious simultaneously.

All of the above reasons, and more, make them essential to anyone starved for that elusive amalgam of melody, passion, thought, feeling, skill, and (rational) ideas in modern music. If you thought, like this writer, that such a phenomenon was impossible in the twenty-first century, then you have been proven wrong.

“Obscene Love-Machine Supreme” is the first of a roller coaster of original songs showcasing Schub’s supple voice and the band’s focused, integrated sound. Integrated is perhaps the most apposite adjective for the whole presentation, as such an effortless, seamless blend of lyrics and music, with such stunning thematic effect, was unusual before, as well (perhaps the themes of reason, individualism, and capitalism, so rare in a “rock” context, underscore the effectiveness). Like some of the others, the aforementioned song has a plaintive undercurrent, but (like said others) its resilience overpowers any plaintiveness. The rhythm section stands out on this one: drummer Tony Pagano delivers a performance equal parts jazz and metal with speedy (double-bass?) pedal work, and bassist Julie Gibbs provides a lithe anchor for the other instruments. Tangentially, Schub’s vocal foil Curtis Politt, a biped with one foot in the rhythm section, contributes distinguishing rhythm upstrokes on his Telecaster.

The raucous “More Is More” offers more uncharacteristic metal overtones, with slight, uncharacteristic dissonance from the horn section. Surprisingly, the slight dissonance is perfect in this context.

“Woke-Up. Wake-Up!” is the most serious (certainly the most intellectually serious) song on the album. A galvanizing, impassioned rallying cry for the once-great United States and its citizens to reverse a century’s worth of steadily (and, lately, exponentially) increasing assaults on economic and personal freedom, it is the band’s own more essential, integrated, and philosophical “Taxman.” More than any other HaSkaLA song, it is a jackhammer blasting away at the culture-wide notion that reason and emotion are antagonistic.

“Cyrano’s Nose,” like its title, is an oddity, an entertaining if slightly unsettling mix of recondite, allusive lyrics and simple, frivolous music. One almost wishes they married those lyrics to more transcendent music, but this band challenges their listeners as well as themselves and traverses nearly every mood and style.

Such as show tunes, if the delightful (and tense) “Our Love (is a Car Crash)” is any indication.

Then, the originals are rounded out with “Neither Her (Nor There),” which may be the finest track overall on a disc teeming with fineness. Like many of HaSkaLA’s songs (in contrast to Schub's Fenwicks lyrics), it is more focused on emotion than reason, though neither is ever completely absent when this wordsmith is at work. It is to failed- or unrequited-love songs what “Woke-Up. Wake-Up!” is to culture and politics. All of these songs transcend genre labels, but such labels are often helpful, and this one can reasonably be described as borrowing from 1980’s new wave. Brad Watson’s plangent organ chords compliment the palpable longing in the words (one can forgive the paraphrasing of Gertrude Stein given the lyricist’s otherwise impeccable taste), but this is not, fundamentally, a sad song. It is, in some ways, a more effective answer song to “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” than Sammy Hagar’s “I’ll Fall In Love Again.” At least as much as every other song present, this one exudes (if only by implication) subtle yet stubborn resilience and perseverance. Mastas' unrelenting, agressive fusillade of a solo cannot be missed.

The disc ends with a (literal and figurative) encore, a medley of Rolling Stones songs. The listener can almost see Schub jumping and prancing across the Molly Malone’s stage in one of his trademark ostentatious outfits during “Happy,” exhorting the audience to defy the darkness outside in Fairfax Village and the world beyond and do whatever it takes to ensure that the sentiment in the Jagger/Richards song becomes a reality. The horns—trombonist Christine Cheung, saxophonist Matt Thompson, and trumpet player Danny Kay—are the understated stars of this one, too.

Untethered & Undone is available at cdbaby.com and iTunes. You need it.

And HaSkaLA will be appearing at the following California stops of the Vans Warped Tour: Carson (Los Angeles), June 25; Mountain View (San Francisco), June 26; Ventura, June 27; and Chula Vista (San Diego), August 10.

If you need to be reminded—or informed for the first time—what live music used to be like, you need to see them.

Especially if, like this writer, you also need a constant reminder that it could be worse.

Brief Blog Roundup (with Comments)

2010-06-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

Allow me to share the work of two incomparable writers.

The inimitable, inestimable Billy Beck on the current state of "higher education:"

"You can see it every day, all around you. We are culturing the Eloi in our colleges. If H.G. Wells could see it, he'd jump off a bridge. (He would deserve that end, too, but that's a different matter.)"

http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php?id=P4958

(Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. He even quotes Aerosmith from the era when they were still worth quoting.)

My first reaction to the quoted paragraph (after laughing out loud at the parenthetical quip) was that it was the most perspicacious, perspicuous, and hilarious formulation I'd likely read all month. After further, sober reflection, I realize that he not only was not intending humor, but that his ostensible quip was far more horrifying than humorous. However, I was right about one thing from the start: the fact that few people could begin to comprehend any of it is proof that he is right. [If you are reading this and you do not understand any of it, please do some brief research. You'll be glad you did. It is not your fault that your education (higher or otherwise) was, and your culture is, terrible.]

Unlike Billy, I dragged myself through the degradation of college (and I was one of the relatively few there who actually wanted to learn). I have learned far more educating myself in the years since. I noted at the time that the idea of obligatory college as a "rite of passage" or lifestyle diversion was contributing to the destruction of both "higher education" and, consequently, the culture at large.

And here is Jason Roth, proclaiming, "Johnny Depp, Here I Come:"

"Today is the first day it occurred to me that there could conceivably come a day when I would consider moving to Europe, because the United States is too liberal."

http://savethehumans.com/culture-bashing/johnny-depp-here-i-come/#comment-8241

If you follow the link (you should), you'll see that he links to an article in Capitalism Magazine called "The Phantom Recovery" by one Peter Schiff. It appears that, at least lately, the United States is indeed more "liberal" (i.e., collectivist) than even Europe.

Here is the comment I attempted to post:

"After reading the linked article and comparing the intellectual and cultural state of Europe to that of North America (Tony Banks of Genesis recently commented that they can’t play as many progressive and instrumental compositions on tour in the U.S. because of American attention spans, to cite just one example), Europe is starting to look more and more attractive.
If I had one 'nitpick,' it is that I still refuse to accept that those on the Left are 'liberals' (many of them apparently no longer accept the term, anyway, which pleases me, because I’d like it back)."

Jason and his blog are also an inestimable value to me. He does intend humor, and, without it (and the reassurance that minds like those of Billy's and Jason's still exist), I would surely go insane.

Rampant Cultural Delusions

2010-05-28T12:06:00.001-07:00

According to the Capitol [Records] Vaults facebook page, Gibson Guitars has ranked Keith Richards third in their list of "World's Greatest Guitarists."

Keith Richards is a decent enough guitarist for his style and aesthetic sensibilities, so, leaving aside the questionable nature of all such lists (especially those that involve music), this is not the equivalent of a list of "World's Greatest Writers" that ranks Gertrude Stein number three.

But when are people (guitar manufacturers in this case, no less) going to get a proper sense of perspective? I am not ashamed to admit that I am a fan of Poison (one of the reasons I "liked" the Capitol Vaults page). (I am not ashamed to admit that I am a fan of anything; I decry the phrase "guilty pleasure" almost as much as I decry the phrase "necessary evil.") I am certain, however, that they are not the third greatest "hair band."

But, if one were to fecklessly attempt to compile a list of "World's Greatest Guitarists," it would be at least as reasonable (if I can employ that term here) to rank C.C. Deville third.

I enjoy "whodunits" (Mencken forgive me), but not one "mystery author" since Wilkie Collins (who?) belongs on a list of "World's Greatest Writers" (a more advisable list with a greater chance of a semblance of objectivity).

National Lampoon's Vacation is a well-crafted, enjoyable filmic experience, but it isn't His Girl Friday, and everyone with a brain in his (or even her--this politically incorrect troglodyte can behave himself sometimes) knows it--presumably including director Harold Ramis and writer John Hughes (when he was alive) themselves. (Chevy Chase is not one of those aforementioned people.)

And Bill Clinton may be destined to be the best President of my lifetime, unless Reagan counts. (Just typing that statement permeates my mind with despair--even Reagan and Clinton were seriously, unacceptably flawed Presidents, and the latter is a contemptible man.) But William Jefferson Clinton is not Thomas Jefferson (or even Warren Gamaliel Harding), contrary to the views of an otherwise reasonable former boss of mine, who compared Jefferson's sometimes regrettable but often exaggerated duplicity with Clinton's. (I recommend my fellow Jefferson admirer Christopher Hitchens' inestimable book No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family
to anyone who has any doubt about that. That a venerated professional journalist who was then a leftist could publish such a book in recent times is the kind of fact that forestalls complete despair.)

I am able to think and put things in perspective. If the staff of Gibson Guitars is unable to do that about their ostensible forte (that is pronounced "fort" if one is speaking English, by the way), then culture has fallen at least as far as I continually insist it has.

Clogged Courts

2010-05-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

While conducting ongoing research for a short story (also titled, not incidentally, "Mencken's Ghost"), I visited the official website of the Orange County, California court system to get information on the system, its courthouses, and its procedures. My story is set in Orange County, and I figured that the courts in the less populated, less crime-plagued, suburban county would be easier to navigate and observe even if the research material would be less quantitative and less lurid to substantial degrees.
I really should have known better. (I knew there was a problem, but an endless list like that reified it in a palpable way in which even I was not prepared.)
After submitting an automated request for a list of criminal cases scheduled in the county starting today (May 26), I was inundated with scores of pages (screens) of countless criminal cases. Since it was already far too late in the day for these particular cases to be of use to me, I plowed through the interminable list of cases on the docket, thinking that May 27 could not be all that far off.
Again: how could I not know?
By the time I got to page forty, with no end in sight to one day's worth of Orange County criminal court cases, I decided to start a new search, with nothing but cases scheduled for May 27.
The result: 130 pages iterating 1981 "items" (i.e., criminal defendants), all for one single day: Thursday, May 27. (The events included, but were not limited to, arraignments, motions, "pre-trial," jury trials, sentencing, and probation violations.)
And I was worried about a possible paucity of suitable research material at even one of the individual county courthouses.
Even if all of the laws these 1981 defendants have been accused of violating were valid (and many, if not most, of them are not)--and even if all of those who are accused of violating the better laws are guilty (some, if not many, are undoubtedly not)--these numbers would likely evince far more concern on the countenances of a populace that is not ignorant, intellectually disarmed, and/or needlessly distracted (in other words, a populace that could not be described, alternately, as the booboisie or Eloi).
Such a populace might ask itself why it is a fact that the "land of the free" now has a higher per capita prison population than most, if not all, other nations; why that is a fact; and what should be done about that fact. (Even otherwise reasonable people seem to ignore or downplay such concerns, as if they are of significantly less importance than other political crises.)
Considering the current legal industry, coupled with ever-exploding (and ever-multiplying) entitlement programs, it is a wonder that private sector income has not plummeted even lower than forty percent of total income.
There are already high prices to pay for this looming debacle, but, if the tide is not reversed, the future may make the present look idyllic by comparison.

HaSkaLA: "Untethered & Undone!"- Movie Trailer

2010-05-24T21:16:00.000-07:00

Here is the trailer to HaSkaLA's upcoming concert film. Thank you to HaSkaLA and director Don Adams for mentioning this weblog and including its review of HaSkaLA's debut show (which was the source of the film). HaSkaLA will be joining part of the Vans Warped Tour in June.

At Least One Mind Left

2010-05-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

The one and only Billy Beck is back, taking a confused leftist (or do I repeat myself?) to task on the self-righteous vitriol directed toward Rand Paul and his (correct) view that government has no legitimate business forcibly stopping private businesses from discriminating.

If you disagree, perhaps you can learn. If you agree, you can be reassured that, in a sea of collectivism, a rare buoy of individualism manages to stay afloat amongst the currents and crashing waves.

Either way, you really should read the entire thing.

Jury Nullification

2010-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Due to the ongoing perpetual indoctrination project known as "public education" (Thomas Jefferson's only serious mistake)--not to mention a watchdog press that is now more of a lapdog press--the term "jury nullification" is probably unknown to most of the booboisie (to use the Sage of Baltimore's term), or Eloi (if you prefer Herbert George Wells'), even more than the third verse to the "Star Spangled Banner" and KISS' short-lived art rock period. (Even George Carlin seemed to be unaware of the national anthem's third verse as he mocked those who knew the words to the second.) If it were known half as well as Kim Kardashian's dining habits, Martha Stewart probably would never have gone to jail.
Jury nullification is the act of acquitting a defendant whom the jury believes committed the crime of which he was accused. It is used when informed jurors disagree with a particular law or its application in a given context. It has long been part of British and American legal traditions, at least since the seventeenth century, when a jury acquitted William Penn for the "crime" of preaching Quakerism. There was no dispute that he did indeed do that. (Perhaps his beliefs were questionable, but if such a thing should have been a crime, the seventeenth-century British prison population would have been even larger its twenty-first century counterpart in "the land of the free.") My expression of awareness of it--and my intention to use it--got me tossed from a federal jury in Philadelphia. The sanctimonious scowls from the glorified law student behind the bench and his tag team of Andrey Vyshinsky epigones when I refused to "follow the law" are a cherished memory.
The recent arrests of activists distributing jury nullification literature in the vicinities of courthouses have made some headlines (at least in the blogosphere), but I expect such reports to largely elude, as they almost always do, the booboisie, who are too busy reading tabloids and watching "reality television" (usually about as realistic as an airbrushed centerfold of a model with more silicone than a tire factory) to concern themselves with such trifling trivialities. The statist shenanigans of sending glorified security guards to harass and detain members of the Fully Informed Jury Association remind me of the Lincoln and Wilson Administrations (statists par excellance) and their persecution of anti-draft activists who were allegedly "violating our war effort," and I imagine the "reasoning" behind them is similar. Most of these activists are "libertarians" (a sometimes-honorific term, to me if not my Objectivist friends) and anarchists (and I don't necessarily repeat myself). Ideas like this tend to imbue everyone else, especially proponents of "law and order," with fear and trembling that would surprise Kierkegaard himself. (I myself reconsidered anarchism recently due to the stunning and ubiquitous reports of police and prosecutorial misconduct by my favorite self-proclaimed "libertarian," Radley Balko, and my favorite anarchists, Billy Beck and Wendy McElroy. My own experiences with police officers, many of whom seem to have intelligence quotients comparable to heavy metal drummers, also led me to consider if the anarchists had a point, and they often make good points. However, I still believe that a properly constrained government limited to the retaliation against the initiation of force or fraud can not only be just and necessary, but possible in a rational society. Which of course excludes this one. I am also unconvinced, unlike Billy Beck, that any and all governments must necessarily constitute authority over the human mind.)
Ironically, despite our current schoolmasters' disdain for it, jury nullification is enshrined in several state constitutions and was endorsed by several founding fathers, including John Adams. And, to give credit where it is due, even Sarah Palin signed some kind of Jury Nullification Awareness legislation into law in Alaska recently (however, since Alaska's population is approximately equal to the number of Ecuadoran hockey players, it is unlikely to be effective). If that oft invoked "rule of law" actually exists, it is sure to be a part of it, despite the protestations of lawmongers who claim that it undermines it.
In the off chance that I ever sit on a jury (most judges and prosecutors would sooner announce their intention to return to sensible drunk driving laws than tolerate me, and most other "libertarians"--if there is a difference between them and me, the average lawyer cannot tell--are weeded out during voir dire), I will refuse to vote to convict anyone who did not violate the individual rights of another.
And I, and not the Morlocks behind the prosecutors' table, will have the last laugh.

Their Voices Will Live as Long as There Are Listeners to Hear Them

2010-05-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

As you probably know, Lena Horne died a few days ago. You may not have known that Ronnie James Dio died today. You may not have known who he was (or you may have known of him only from Tenacious D's mockery). (If you are one of the young philistines who are public education's and modern culture's latest victims, you may not know who Horne was, either.)
Since I had not developed much of a taste for jazz vocalists until very recently (and was a teenage metal fan), I am not that familiar with Horne, so most of my comments will be reserved for Dio. However, the fact that I took notice of Horne's voice the few times I heard it even when my interest in jazz was confined to instrumental pieces is a testament to her greatness.
Dio, along with Rob Halford, ushered in a refreshing trend in metal and hard rock of attention to technique and range to what had been a genre of primarily unschooled (and, often, unskilled) singers who paid little attention to "quality vocals" and merely sang from the heart (many of them to superlative effect, it must be added). Whether true or not, it has been said that Luciano Pavarotti once remarked that Halford was one of the greatest vocalists on earth, but that statement was probably at least as true for Dio.
During my teenage years, Black Sabbath was one of my favorite bands (as they were, and are, for many disaffected teenage male outsiders), and Dio's work with the band was among my favorite of theirs. I never listened to his various other bands, including his namesake one, much, but I always respected his integrity and perseverance through the ups and downs in his intermittently commercially successful career, in one of the most hair-raising industries known to humanity. Over the years, my listening habits gravitated away from the often malevolent Black Sabbath, but I have returned to them recently as I came to understand how dark the world is, and has been for longer than Black Sabbath's music has existed. Dio's lyrics were sometimes fatuous (wishing wells, rainbows, and the like seemed to be an obsession of his), but when he wrote about people, he could be rather effective. His namesake band's "Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Ghost" addressed the psychological harm religious imagery can sear into the minds of children, and Black Sabbath's uncharacteristically upbeat "Walk Away" is one of the more senselessly underrated songs in rock history, by the band Chuck Klosterman described, probably accurately, as the most underrated band in rock history. (The song is underrated by the band's own fans, and the band itself, judging by the fact that they never performed it live.) "Letters from Earth" was his empathetic response to fan mail he received from prisoners, most of them probably incarcerated for consensual, victimless crimes. And below is a recent live performance of Sabbath's "Falling Off the Edge of the World," a song for the endarkenment. Ignore the hokey "metal horns" (one of his legacies that is unfortunate) and take note of the message, as well as the frontman's poignant remarks before the performance. The song was released in 1981, and virtually everything has gone precipitously, exponentially downhill since then.
I will seek out Lena Horne's more sanguine work, and I will always listen to and appreciate Ronnie James Dio's thoughtful, often recondite gloom (I've often regarded Black Sabbath as the Fyodor Dostoyevskys of popular music, particularly when Geezer Butler, presumably a Christian, was writing their lyrics). Anachronistic in the age of Pro Tools and pitch correction, throwbacks to the era before technology eclipsed art (the technology of the soul), they were both masters of the musical instrument that is the human voice.

They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

2010-05-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

There are advantages to Los Angeles. In addition to its climate, the cultural attractions are even more advantageous. When it comes to cinema (especially classic cinema), not even New York can compete.
The New Beverly Cinema is just one old-fashioned screening room that caters to vintage and cult cinema enthusiasts in the metropolitan area. Last night, they presented a double feature of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 films Rear Window and The Trouble With Harry (imdb.com lists the latter as a 1955 film, but, if memory serves, the onscreen copyright information identifies it as a 1954 release).
Before I discuss the films (and contrast them with the mindless pablum and McLuhaneseque smashfests of today's Hollywood), let me point out for those in the area that the "New Bev"'s value and cinematic experience cannot be overstated: they screen quality, restored (if available) prints with vintage trailers of classics and obscurities (e.g., Death Race 2000 and The Long Riders) among their upcoming screenings. Last night's double feature cost seven dollars.
And the seven dollars could not have been better spent at the multiplexes, even if one could find a double feature there, or even a single film at that price, as these two relics represent something largely absent from mainstream culture (and, given the budgetary constraints and collaborative nature of motion pictures, most all cinema) today.
Rear Window and The Trouble With Harry were released in the middle of what Robert A. Harris (author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock) tagged as "The Technicolor, Vistavision, and 3-D Years" (indeed, the Vistavision logo appeared at the beginning of The Trouble With Harry). Formulaic, circumscribed television shows, with their uniform (and short) length and commercial interruption, were repelling Americans from the cinema (and the motion picture industry never recovered), and, before color and long before widescreen innovations came to television sets, motion picture studios blandished entertainment seekers with gimmickry they could not yet find on their idiot boxes. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff once noted that, when color arrived, viewers of discerning taste avoided any color film because they knew that all of the budget went into the cinematography and none of it went to the screenplay. "And now," he added, "they're all made in color, so draw your own conclusions."
While I do not think Peikoff's statement was entirely, literally true, there is more than a little truth to it. Hitchcock's color oeuvre was certainly an exception, but I suspect that by 1954, Hitchcock, already an oldtimer, represented an atavistic, rearguard revolt, or counterrevolution, of the cinematic values of his youth and was not particularly representative of his peers and the nascent parvenus following in their footsteps. Hitchcock's roots, going back to the 1920's, coincided with the last vestiges of literary romanticism that still pervaded in the both London and Hollywood at that time. Three decades later, they were still on display in the master's work.
The Trouble With Harry is a much lesser film, and, apart from the lush, agrestic Vermont exteriors, is largely forgettable in the context of the director's other work (its variety of black humor and cavalier attitude to death don't sit well with this reporter), but it does, to a lesser extent, illustrate many of the following points.
John Michael Hayes was responsible for both screenplays, and the witty, focused, integrated dialogue, present in both films, is a refreshing contrast to the disconnected shards of one-liners present in today's blockbusters.
Visually, the mise-en-scene is above all stylized. A careful study of the frames is all that is necessary to determine that every prop and every actor was meticulously fussed over; nothing on the screen is there by accident.
And, in the case of Rear Window, at least, all of this stylization coexists with a logically-interconnected, suspenseful plot. There was no dichotomy, to this director, dividing art and commerce. A professor of mine once remarked that Alfred Hitchcock was very much interested in box office returns and crowded theaters from coast to coast. However, he was equally interested in esoteric, thematically complex, aesthetically demanding works of art. (Subthemes of voyeurism and the inquisitive nature of photography pervade Rear Window.) At one time, at least, art and entertainment could coexist in mainstream American culture. (I realize that there are contemporary examples, but did they have Hitchcock's stature and box office power?)
While quality acting is not in short supply today, the quality roles available to them are. While undistinguished antiheroes are the norm today (thanks to the influence of Marxism and twentieth-century serious literature), the already antiquated Hitchcock, Hayes, and James Stewart gave us an efficacious, human hero in L.B. Jeffries, with a verisimilitude lacking in the comic book heroes of today. (All of the above types of characters may have their place, but this kind is sorely lacking these days.)
Moreover, James Stewart's L.B. Jeffries is certain of what he sees. He is certain that something is amiss in his neighbor's apartment, despite the initial skepticism of his companions, including a professional homicide detective (a cop who shows remarkable restraint and respect for rights, Constitutional and otherwise, compared to his real-life counterparts today, I might add--I was reminded of similar issues while attending a recent screening of Dennis Hopper's 1969 film Easy Rider). This kind of confident certainty is not the kind of theme one is likely to find at the multiplex today, unless it is the self-refuting certainty that absolute knowledge is impossible or that capitalism and America are undesirable and evil.
I encourage anyone with the opportunity to attend cinematic screenings of classic films like this, the way they were intended to be seen, with celluloid projected onto an oversized screen in a dark room over the heads of like-minded potential companions. This aesthetic experience is disappearing with the quality of classic films, and they remind us, some of whom may never have known, of what America and its culture used to be, and perhaps could be again.

The Worst of Both Worlds

2010-05-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

The inestimable Radley Balko explains how the Obamaton's latest Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, "fits Washington's definition of a centrist:" one who takes the side of more government power in both civil liberties and regulatory affairs.

What else would one expect from a Manhattan-raised, Harvard-educated United States Solicitor General in 2010? Someone with a healthy skepticism of government power? Someone to challenge the myth, drilled into the (often numb-)skulls of every public school student, that the government can do no wrong?

Not in this century, I'm afraid.

Downside-Up: Peter Gabriel at the Hollywood Bowl

2010-05-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

The Endarkenment didn’t matter Friday night.
The inanity and insanity of modern times—exponentially increasing with every passing day, lately—might as well have been an epoch away. One could almost forget the ubiquitous red flags of imminent danger: a largely semi-literate populace; economic malaise unseen for generations past; Red China’s propping up of United States currency; Iran’s inclusion in the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women; Philadelphia police "tasering" a harmless baseball fan; the latest legislative imbecility out of downtown Los Angeles, Sacramento, or Washington (“State Considering Ban On Aluminum Baseball Bats,” bellowed the Daily News screamline Friday morning—how did my generation ever survive Little League?); ad infinitum. The fading rays of the Enlightenment that have yet to be extinguished were channeled about a mile below the Cahuenga Pass.
Peter Gabriel was on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.
It is true that he had no new material (at least not his own), but it not true if it seemed, at first, to owe too much to unfortunate trends of nostalgia and covers that are destroying live music. Peter has a brand new album, and he played the entire thing. They are not his own songs, but he breathed fresh life into them, and to his own, later in the show—not a few of which were less than a decade old.
Peter’s commitment to art ensured that his latest venture into live performances would eschew drum sets and any electric instruments. While it may be difficult to imagine a Peter Gabriel show without the rumbling, intercultural rhythm section of Tony Levin and Manu Katche (and it will always be missed), variety, as William Cowper famously averred, is the spice of life.
And nostalgia, as Bob Dylan not so famously averred, is death.
Bob Dylan’s songbook was not represented in Peter’s first set (a complete run through of his new disc, Scratch My Back, twelve orchestral interpretations of others’ songs), but Dylan’s approach to stagecraft was, in the sense of constant rearranging and reinterpreting. It is a shame that the cost and logistics of touring with a full orchestra restricted Peter’s U.S. Tour to two cities. (Guess which ones. Yes, there is an advantage to living in blue states. Perhaps in a free economy, it would be affordable to bring a show like this to Des Moines and Birmingham.)
The artist called his backers the New Blood Orchestra, and the moniker is appropriate, as the musicians, plus a pianist and two vocalists (Ane Brun and Melanie Gabriel, Peter’s daughter) infused all of the songs with a freshness, vitality, and unfamiliarity missing from an American Idol karaoke broadcast or a conventional, jukebox concert by the likes of any number of Las Vegas-bound mediocrities.
Peter’s rock band may be missed, but strings and winds were a welcome relief from the familiar twenty-first century electronic, pop cacophony.
He understatedly and conversationally took the stage around dusk, casually informing the massive crowd of the show’s structure and nature as if he were on stage at the diminutive Roxy again and not the expansive, monolithic Bowl. The flag of the once-great United States flew right above his perch on stage right, the flag of the once-great State of California flew above stage left, the iconic hatch shell of the Hollywood Bowl enveloped him, the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign stood above, and all of those symbols stood for worthwhile, noble ideas again for the next one hundred eighty-two minutes.
Out, damned Endarkenment.
He introduced Ane Brun, and the Norwegian sang two of her own songs, in English, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. At first, her accent, or perhaps just her herky jerky, irregular phrasing, was off putting, but she is an acquired taste. By her second song, she had won the throngs over, displaying a mastery of songcraft and crisp, competent fingerpicking no longer particularly common, especially on stages this size.
After a five-minute break, an oblong front projection screen that doubled as a curtain rose downstage (it complimented a larger, more expansive rear projection screen throughout the evening), and the grizzled granduncle of progressive rock returned.
Do not be misled; he may literally be a graybeard now, but the encroaching decades have had absolutely no effect on that voice. While the instrumental sounds were not, the lead vocals could have come from Peter Gabriel Plays Live, or the first live Genesis album.
One thing that has changed, however, is Peter’s stage demeanor. No longer the dry, deadpan, droll young eccentric belting “Watcher of the Skies,” the grizzled granduncle of progressive rock is indeed avuncular, warm and affable. “That was an unaccompanied bass pedal solo by Mr. Michael Rutherford,” the eccentric monotonously and not-so-humorously droned in 1972 after a tuning session during a Genesis concert. “Tom Cawley on piano. Ane Brun on vocals. And you on handclaps!” he enthusiastically belted to the audience in palpable graciousness during a celebratory number last night.
David Bowie’s “Heroes” opens Scratch My Back, and it opened the Hollywood Bowl concert (and every other Gabriel concert this year), but the inimitable voice and lush, multifaceted arrangements of John Metcalfe guaranteed that no song would sound like a “cover.” And, yes, Peter and his associates created new works of art. As Peter asserted, Scratch My Back is an album, a thematically cohesive, emotionally linear whole that is more than the sum of its parts; it “tells a story.” From “Heroes” to the more recent Radiohead composition that closes the album and closed the first set, the listener got a sense of uniformity and consistency in the presentation, Ane and Melanie as youthful foils to the frontman’s erudite, done-it-all leadership, a vocal trio delivering a group of songs that they have made their own.
Sitting back and basking in the spectacle, the alternating, cascading washes of red and white light reflecting off the dome (a more diverse palette of colors would feature later, during the second set) and the dozens of players onstage, it was impossible to avoid appreciation for the amount of skilled individuals (musicians and crew) investing their effort into the production. A state-of-the-art “rock” show (if you’ll pardon the term) is a collaborative effort, and, while Metcalfe’s arrangements were a constant reminder that this was not a rock show, the lighting director’s dazzling work that complimented the images on the front and rear projection screens reminded the audience where Peter came from.
After a brief intermission, the second set began.
“San Jacinto” started things off predictably enough, given its obvious adaptability to pizzicato string accompaniment, but this was emphatically not a nostalgia show. The second set was well-balanced, with, despite one obvious and welcome exception, no 1970’s Peter Gabriel tunes (the Genesis repertoire having long ago been purged from Peter Gabriel concerts) and three from the last decade. The latter were particularly poignant, if a bit lost on the typically nostalgic Hollywood audience. (“You’ll know this one,” Peter ironically predicated before “Solsbury Hill,” after a flummoxed reception to the compelling “Darkness.”) “Downside-Up,” from 2000’s OVO, was a catchier sing-a-long, while “Signal to Noise,” from 2002’s Up, reflected on the positive implications of technology to change the world for the better. “Darkness,” Up’s opening track, brought tension to the atmosphere; a cousin to Rush’s “Witch Hunt,” Peter explained that it was about fear, and, more specifically, an old woman who lived near his childhood home whom the neighborhood children thought was a witch.
The heft and complexity of the orchestra would imply a rigid set structure, but it wasn’t necessarily the case. In the middle of the second set, Peter related how the show had evolved over the course of the brief, five-city tour. “This is a recent addition,” he said, before a jaw-dropping, fiery rendition of “Red Rain” that elicited exhilarating approval from many in the audience as soon as the title was announced.
One welcome revisit to prehistory, “Solsbury Hill,” closed the concert proper, Peter dancing merrily with his daughter and her friend while the orchestra played several bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
But, of course, the show was not over.
It being Los Angeles, a “surprise” guest appearance was not such a surprise at all, as violinist L. Shankar reprised his former role in Peter’s band during a spirited run-through of “In Your Eyes.”
Then came the highlight.
“Don’t Give Up” is a secular hymn, embodying everything great about religion that it co-opted and diluted with mysticism (as the malevolent, incandescent, oversized cross that shone on the hill above stage left reminded). The Count of Monte Cristo of modern popular music, a monument to the indomitable human spirit, it is one “oldie” that couldn’t have been left out in times like this. It is better listened to than written about, so go listen to it, but it should be pointed out that Ane Brun did a formidable job filling the shoes and the voices of Kate Bush and Paula Cole before her, the nurturing woman comforting the down-but-not-out man embodied by the composer.
Finally, the artist ended the show with a relatively recent, obscure instrumental, replacing Tom Cawley at the piano for OVO’s majestic “The Nest That Sailed the Sky.” The lights atop Mount Lee backlit the HOLLYWOOD sign, and for a few more minutes, it was still the Hollywood of Howard Hawks and Cary Grant and not of Michael Bay and Ben Affleck. The up--the warm, benevolent, dulcet, melodic, virtuosic, recondite defiance of the downside of Endarkenment--was over, and twenty-thousand people had to return to the twenty-first century.
Western civilization may be on the ropes—indeed, teetering—but, if such music is still possible—and appreciated by so many—don’t count it out yet.

Peter Gabriel
Hollywood Bowl
Hollywood
Friday, May 7, 2010
New Blood Tour (for Scratch My Back)

Pre-set [Ane Brun]:
The Puzzle
Changing of the Seasons

First Set [Scratch My Back]:
Heroes (David Bowie)
The Boy in the Bubble (Paul Simon)
Mirrorball (Elbow)
Flume (Bon Iver)
Listening Wind (Talking Heads)
The Power of the Heart (Lou Reed)
My Body Is a Cage (Arcade Fire)
The Book of Love (The Magnetic Fields)
I Think It's Going to Rain Today (Randy Newman)
Apres Moi (Regina Spektor)
Philadelphia (Neil Young)
Street Spirit (Fade Out) (Radiohead)

Second Set:
San Jacinto
Digging In the Dirt
Downside-Up
Signal to Noise
Mercy Street
The Rhythm of the Heat
Washing of the Water
Red Rain
Darkness
Solsbury Hill (including Ode to Joy)

encore:
In Your Eyes (with L. Shankar)
Don't Give Up
The Nest That Sailed The Sky

HaSkaLA: Steven Schub's Danceable Bliss

2010-05-09T22:05:00.000-07:00

The term “Renaissance man” may be trite and overused these days, but the phrase “Renaissance band” is not.
Steven Schub is a Renaissance man (in two senses of the term, at least) who has put together not one but two Renaissance bands.
The singer/lyricist and actor (you may have seen him on television—he has appeared on NYPD Blue, 24, and Sesame Street) has been the frontman of The Fenwicks, “the world’s greatest (albeit only) Afro-Celitc-Yiddish ska band” for “around 45,000 years” (as he said recently).
The Fenwicks is an East Coast band and have been in a state of semi hiatus while Schub has been living the actor’s life in Los Angeles (he has appeared in several indie films as well as the aforementioned television hits). While visiting the home of Vans Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman during Thanksgiving, the thespian/chanteur, in a bit of wishful thinking, waxed enthusiastic about the state of his new, West Coast ska band, HaSkaLA (Hebrew for “the Enlightenment”).
There was one problem. He left out the not-insignificant detail that the band only existed in his mind.
Which was a bit of a problem when he received an E-mail shortly thereafter listing HaSkaLA’s dates on the upcoming Vans Warped Tour.
Rising to the challenge, he rectified the problem with the help of some of Los Angeles’s best musicians and ska enthusiasts. HaSkaLA is a jovial, energetic nine-piece band that can bring a jolt to the heart, a tear to the eye, and a tap to the foot of any music fan, regardless of their affinity for ska or even rock.
For those wondering if there is a meaning behind the unusual name, Schub explains in the band’s promotional material that there are a few (beyond “The Enlightenment”): “Let’s see, ya got the sound of laughter—“Ha,” the word “ska snuck in there, and our home city of L.A. HaSkaLA is about all three—laughter, ska, and bringing joy, mirth & madness to the City of Angels.”
Those familiar with The Fenwicks who were fortunate enough to be in the audience at HaSkaLA’s first show, an explosive, fluid, and compact forty-six-minute set at the Los Angeles club Molly Malone’s on April 15, could note that, while some strong currents run through both of Schub’s bands (not the least of which are the singer’s eye-catching sartorial habits, which included a bright polka-dot getup and an American flag suit this time), HaSkaLA is undeniably unique.
At a Los Angeles restaurant recently, Steven recounted some of the differences (and commonalities) between his perennial band and his new one: “Everyone [in this band] is coming from the same place in terms of sense of life; there’s a lot of joy in this band, as in The Fenwicks. I think you can tell … onstage, you can see it and feel it.” Indeed, the new band is even more sanguine, rollicking, and benevolent than the happy-go-lucky Fenwicks. Expounding on this band’s differences, he notes, “These songs seem to be simpler, and in that way, possibly more initially accessible.” He also noted that, overall, HaSkaLA’s lyrics (at least to this point) deal more with emotional topics and relationships than The Fenwicks’, which can at times be heavily philosophical and political.
The original tunes debuted that night (Beatles and Rolling Stones covers bookended the set) included: a song called “HaSkaLA” (aurally reminiscent of The Clash’s “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais”); “Neither Her (Nor There),” a breakup song with a life-goes-on twist and Schub’s trademark wordplay; and “Our Love (is a Car Crash),” in which the wordsmith compares a relationship to the titular catastrophe. The lyricist, an admirer of Objectivist and pro-liberty novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, could not avoid more political (and topical) fare, however: “Woke-Up. Woke Up!” laments encroaching censorship and out-of-control taxation in a personal, close-to-home fashion: “I tried to read a book but the good ones had been banned/I tried to sing this song but my band has been banned.”
And then there’s “Cyrano’s Nose.”
Unique among recent (if not all) popular songs, it is a boisterous, breezy rallying cry for reason, liberty, and freethought replete with literary allusions (as the title suggests) that could only have come from one man’s pen.
"Like "Invictus" William Henley's poem- Master of my Fate, I'm Captain of my Soul
"'Cause my heart is bigger than Cyrano's nose, my rhymes are tighter than a Haiku poem
"Life is shorter than a garden gnome. Gonna milk it, 'till the cows come home
"Better than money- Better than fame
"Better than playing Society's game
"Better than ice cream, better than sex
"I'm talking 'bout life and a song like this
"If you ain't buying- you can't be bought or sold.
"If you ain't lying- than you'll never grow old.
"The only way out- is never opt in.
"You've got your guns- I have my my pen.
"Truth is on my side- let's see who wins. Who wins."
In fact, “Cyrano’s Nose” exemplifies the dichotomy-busting at the heart of both of Schub’s bands; it demonstrates that art and entertainment are anything but mutually exclusive.
The ensemble providing the compositional and performance artistry and entertainment behind Schub’s lyrics include two guitar players (the physically-and-musically muscular Dave Mastas and the physically-and-musically lean Curtis Politt) a Berklee College of Music alumna on bass (Julie Gibbs) a protean drummer (Tony Pagano), a sometime comedian on keys (Brad Watson), and a three-piece horn section (Matthew Thompson, Danny Kay, Christine Cheung). Such a potential cacophony actually results in a seamless blend, with punchy, puissant guitar upstrokes and articulate horn solos accentuating the ska undertones.
The band does not have an opportunity to enter the studio prior to their Vans Warped Tour appearances. Fortunately, the April 15 gig (which opened, appropriately enough, with the Beatles’ “Taxman”) was recorded and will form the source for their debut CD entitled: HaSkaLA: Untethered & Undone, with a release scheduled just in time for the tour. (The CD will be available on CDBaby.com by mid-June).
If the world’s current Endarkenment will ever transmute into another Renaissance and Enlightenment, then it will be in no small part due to Renaissance bands like HaSkaLA obliterating the false alternative of profoundness and fun with increasingly uncommon skill, melodic sensibility, and passion.

For more information on HaSkaLA, visit: http://www.haskalamusic.com.

Introducing Mencken's Ghost

2010-05-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

It's getting harder and harder to remain silent. And, since I'm not much of a speaker, I have chosen this as my medium (at least until a better one comes along).
For many years--as long as I can remember, in fact--I have been concerned about the state of my country, its culture, and the rest of the world. Despite continued, increasingly disingenuous lip service to it, human reason is being abandoned in favor of all varieties of unreason. Individualism and capitalism are considered anachronistic. Liberty, ostensibly still valued widely in the twenty-first century, is under constant assault. As a result, civilization is on the brink. The Enlightenment and its stellar political achievement, America, are in danger of extinction.
It need not be this way. Humans are generally, essentially noble beings, and they have free will. Each of them can help turn the tide, if they choose. This is my attempt to help.
The title of this blog comes from a short story I am working on. As an admirer of H.L. Mencken's humorous rational commentary who laments the fact that he is largely forgotten today, I thought it appropriate. I once remarked that this century needs a Mencken. "Ghost" is metaphorical and inspired by one of his own quotes; this writer does not believe in them (at least not as they are normally defined and understood). For my own sanity, I must remind myself that, above all, the irrational, the tyrannical, the collectivist, and the mind-numbingly hypocritical are ridiculous and should be ridiculed. While lightening the mood is necessary in these dark times, I think that humanity's present crises are serious matters. Channeling the metaphorical ghost of one of the nonpareil commentators of witty seriousness is as appropriate an approach as any.
Besides Mencken, some of my more notable intellectual and literary influences include Ayn Rand, P.J. O'Rourke, Victor Hugo, Thomas Paine, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Mark Twain, and Ray Bradbury. (Imminent plans include more careful study of philosophy--particularly Aristole--and economics.) I am also a music and, to some extent, cinema enthusiast. Since I believe that our cultural decline is as significant as (and closely related to) our political decline, I pay close attention to these issues as well.