1/27/03

I hate it even more when the times start barfing up a zeitgeist of their own that I don't especially fancy. You can take the Reaganomic Eighties and shove em up your opinion poll. And I remember hearing the first reports of the 1998 Clinton Follies on NPR and thinking, "I'm gonna be really tired of the name Monica Lowinsky before this is over." Right now we're faced with times of miracles and wonders and monsters coming out of the closet and demanding equal rights, doing their best to congeal into a horrid cold pudding of cynicism and mass murder and crony-capitalist profiteering, as if the transubstantiated subconscious of Al Capone were a virus infecting the Big Predestination Machine.

A lot of my own perceptions along these lines are colored by my personal version of what my pal Hobbit calls "the difference between Drug Real and Real Real." On a good day, I'm breezily indifferent to the Drama Du Jour; on a bad day, I watch the sky falling and count the chunks. This leaves me in a position similar to middle management: I have all of the responsibility to edit what I'm imagining for accuracy and none of the power to change what's really going on.

Empowered or not, I actually do feel an obligation to make the world conform to my expectations. Hey, this is a quantum continuum, and I'm the observer here. This is my universe. It's the classic magickal mindscape, I s'pose, and as a practicing wonderworker I come by it honestly enough. But in true complimentary fashion (the physics kind, not like in Emily Post), I view the world in doublethink -- at times I recognize the ineffectuality of Will alone to prevent a raw egg from smashing on a concrete floor, at others I invoke the gods and all their cousins to push the odds in my favor. I'm a superstitious kind of guy is what it is, and in a supernatural world I'm not about to let my guard down.

I had a bad time of it when the Challenger went up. A week before it happened, I had a premonition of it so strong that I almost wrote it down and sent it in a letter to myself. Then after it occured I was stung by the thought, How could I let this happen? A foolish notion, and one conducive to personal mental disfunction, which I proceeded to exhibit for about six weeks. Thereafter, I concocted a prayer or mantra that I invoked whenever I started getting too imaginative for my own good: Not in my universe.

I had a thing or two to say about this persistent little delusion back in November, talking about the messiantic implications of klezmer music. But what I'm facing now is different. It's not a question of ancient myths in the light of today, it's the light of today itself mutating into the visage of a loathesome realtime Jurassic Park, the beautiful terrors of yore reconstructed and ready to rock. It's time to play Back! To! The! CRUSADES!!!! Andhere'syourhost RICHARD THE LION HEARTED!!!! (clapclapclapclapclap)...

If only. Or maybe in truth -- the kings and sultans of the Middle Ages were lesser men in many ways, bereft of the modifying spark of the Enlightenment and unreflectively set on the fleshy goals of blood, pillage and booty that their religions decried but never quite refuted. Men of the two-edged sword of certainty, heedless of their followers and sure of their sovereignty, capable of no legacy greater than tragic self-destruction. Exactly the kind of guys we have absolutely no need of in this age of worldwide interdependence and weapons of mass destruction, but exactly still the kind we've got leaping out of the woodwork and grabbing the steering wheel of civilization. C'mon boys, there's big bucks to be made! If we don't do it, somebody else will! Immanentize that thar Eschaton! Yaaah hooo!

The US of A is suffering seriously from growing pains. For the past century we've been the stranger who rides in off the prairie and breaks up fights between locals and gets flack from both sides for it, along with a lot of vague impugning threats from The Bully Of The Town, but who eventually wins the Good People to his side and gets the girl. Since the end of the Cold War, though, there hasn't been a Bully, and we're still trying to figure out if we want the job ourselves. When you're the outsider, it's easy to throw in with the underdog and look like a hero. But now all the dogs look the same, and none of them are especially well-groomed. And no matter who we're helping, we're riding someone else down.

There are a million and one factors complicating this Big Overly-Simplistic Metaphor, but the one conclusion I can draw is that as a country we're facing what in an individual would be a moral test: Can we be the biggest kid on the block without devolving (and it would be devolution, no matter what the radicals say) into beating everybody else up for their lunch money, just because we can?

I can easily imagine a continued declared national policy of international coercion and unilateralism, even if it could be sustained without bankrupting the country, leading to an armed-camp society, every citizen a soldier, every leader a general, regimented, repressed, joyless, hopeless and ramrod stiff, surrounded by a howling circle of enemies ready to rip it to shreds if it relaxes vigilance for an instant, and likely as not devoured from within by kleptarchs behind the curtains of secrecy and militarism.

No thanks. Not in my universe.

1/20/03

There's a standard cliche I can insert here without fear of contradiction: Twenty five years is a long time. In the words of the prophet: duh!

It's one thing to read about twenty five years and another to be dragging it around in your wake like a bridal train or Marley's chains (take your pick). Twenty five years may reduce to a compressed archive in literature or popular celebration, but in the back of your head it's rather more. Much rather. Bearing the momentum of emotional and motivational impulse, it's an iceberg, ponderous and luminous and stealthy all at the same time. Or times. It propels, it brakes, it regulates -- heck, it slices and dices and makes mounds of julienne potatoes.

In a sense, both Sandahbeth and I are the detainees of this overbearing institution we've established, mere experimental subjects of the Spae Foundation, dedicated to furthering knowledge of the art of getting along in spite of everything. And the longest and most consistent theme of Us Incorporated has always been just that -- getting along, making a marriage of our virtues and keeping our vices in check.

There's been a lotta PC bad-mouthing of marriage in recent times, everything from feminist deconstruction of the etymology of the terms "husband" and "wife" (synonyms: "master" and "slave") to the touchyfeely crowd's viewing-with-alarm of "enmeshment" (how to say "togetherness" negatively). The advertising quarter brings pressure to bear with emphasis on tidy, economically granulated youthful consumer units, typically pictured reveling in the ideal lifestyle of unbridled carnal release with exquisite strangers and lone-wolf highway cruising in newly fabricated and surprisingly affordable vehicles gleaming in the artificial sunlight of cgi landscapes.

Then on the other side of the aisle we find the breeder crowd, dandling infants like trophies while the parents atrophy into domesticated parasitic hosts and talkshow experts drone hypnotically of "family values" and "traditional morals," all not very well embedded code for "Shut up and procreate, we need the workers."

Caught as we are between the Baby Brigade and Singles Eternal, S and I have rarely felt the commonality of our shared enterprise, apart from the lip service everyone gives a longterm couple, even an odd one. Once the "Awww"s subside, there's that moment of tension while the other party sizes you up -- Kids? Job? Nice clothes? Are these cute weirdos okay? Then it's ducking and weaving time, parry and check and doubletalk and point at the airplane and change the subject. Enough about us -- let's hear about your grandchildren, eh? How's your new car? When pressed, we give the Short Version of our own artistic raison d'etre: you supply the hardware, we'll provide the software. Hey, works for Microsoft, dunnit?

When S and I first crashed headlong into each other, fresh and dewy in the warm spring morning of the Carter Administration, our mutual attraction was founded on two factors: 1) Woo Hoo! and 2) Hey there baby, you and me could make a swell little lounge act. In as much as it was possible in those first few "It'll calm down presently, go ahead on" months, we forged our partnership in professional terms: between the two of us, we're three people and one of 'em's a frickin' genius -- let's work with this. That relationship -- best friends and comrades in arms who also (how convenient!) get it on -- has been potent glue sticking us together throughout our frequently unsettled funride of a life. More than once the centrifugal forces of contrary goals and bullheaded temperament have been mitigated by the realization that we're a lot better off, emotionally and monetarily, with each other than separate.

Practice makes perfect in more than just music, and a woowoo friend once gave me an apocryphal esoteric proverb: "If you can't get a guru, get married." Soulmates (as opposed to progeny factories) have an esteemed place in systems from Tantra to Karezza, where they are touted as manifestations of the highest spirituality. Only external observation (got any?) could tell whether or not that's the case with us (ie, don't blinkin' ask me), but it does seem that the aforementioned Little Tin Sainthood is considerably influenced by the way we've exercised our License to Practice Marriage (signed by a genuine ordained minister of the Universal Life Church) through the years. We've put so much effort into staying hitched that, in the end, the hitching itself holds us as strongly as anything else.

For better or worse, that was exactly what we banked on. In the first weeks of our Grand Unification Theory, blind with hormones and besotted with nookie, we encountered an older couple celebrating their 40th anniversary. Highly impressed, we asked them their secret. Moving closer together and smiling a little, they replied, "Just don't break up. Whatever happens, don't quit. Stay together."

So we did.

1/13/03

Yes, even rugged individualist independent contractors carving their destiny out of the untamed wilderness of the 21st century can use a little good advice now and then, and so can I. I've been getting my soul's solace through the good offices of the Department for Vocational Rehabilitation, mostly on the strength of S's disability. Joan, my doughty and enormously empowering worker (has to be to take me on), does the rather remarkable trick of getting me off my ass with praise and encouragement without just hosing me down with stroke. She's smart, dedicated and undoubtedly rare as hitting an inside straight. The Lady is obviously looking out for me on this one.

But, Tedious, uh, Thaddeus! you cry. Are you copping out? Throwing in the grease rag? Quitting the Big Program? Will the last of the redhot self-made artistic weirdos get a ((((shudder!!!)))) good paying job? Relax, my overtaxed and underpaid patrons and matrons. I'm just trying to bring my income up a little here. Cost of living, y'know? Learning some new tricks never harmed an old dog. And a whole lotta job-hunting skills, like informational interviewing and career focusing, are just as relevant to the multitudinously autoemployed as they are to any office wart or hard-charging professional.

Most of the real work needs to go on between my ears. I've been aware for a while that I need a little coaching to make peace with the world of gainful employment, on my own or otherwise, and Joan's been urging me to sort through the various stories I tell myself about the work environment as an exercise.

Stories -- I guess that's one of those terms of art they throw around in therapy, like "boundries" or "codependence" or "issues." My own useage would be "BS", but I guess "stories" sounds a little more charitable.

And I've gotta million of 'em. The "Work is for chumps" story. The "Employers are all bloodsucking monsters" story. The "I'm too sensitive to be a mere worker" story. The "All HR people look for in a resume is a checkable employment history" story. And hey, let's all gather around the ol' victrola and sing along to that swell old favorite, the "Everyone else gets a better job than me because they went to school with the son of the president of the company and now they all sit up in the board room and laugh their sharkskin suited rears off at me" story. Oh wait a minute, that one's true.

I'm all too good at stories. But that's not surprising, really. Up between those aforementioned (and formidable!) ears of mine, I've got an organ that's been evolving for millions of years with the sole purpose of telling tales out of school. The higher brain is an organic computer that spends all of its time inputting data and correlating it into causal patterns. This may well be one of the few things that really does set us specialized hominids apart from the rest of the ambulant protoplasm hereabouts. Homo narratus. Or something like that -- I do Latin like a hippo does ballet.

One of the main stories we tell is the one that begins, "I..." A reviewer once described Gary Trudeau's basic expositional technique in his strip Doonesbury as a comic replication of the ubiquitous interior monologue of human existence: "Here's the Good Husband dragging himself outta bed..." "Here's the Sensitive Artist staring deeply into the ether..." Snoopy did it first, but Trudeau did it to everyone. If self-awareness is the essence of the soul, then storytelling is surely the substrate in which it resides. We live our whole lives in story, events that unfold a day at a time constantly finessed by the CNS into an intricate, interwoven narrative, be it soap opera, situation comedy or epic tragedy.

The brain is a marvelous product of the gem-polisher of evolution, shaped by chance and honed to a mirror patina by the exigencies of survival. But its intricacy is extensive enough to bring us to perceive a story of doubt: how closely do the stories of the mind correlate with Real Reality Really? Within our minds we carry brave and stupendous structures formed of the tiny fragments of What Is that our pitifully inadequate senses are able to grasp, structures that seem proud and fair but probably have only limited resemblance to anything composed of matter and energy beyond the confines of the skull. Or even in it -- I find myself frequently trying to sort my internal conceptions of some field of human knowledge from its "real" nature, separating, say, my intuitive understanding (or misunderstanding) of quantum mechanics from the rigorous and intensely complex system I stumble through simplified accounts of in layman's literature. But all the while, both of those perceived systems are local to my own mind -- internal, subjective and inevitably mistaken.

In truth (as much as we know of it), there's no physical evidence that the universe around us tells any stories at all. Einstein questioned the assumption of classical physics that physical laws derived by scientists had any validity outside their understanding of them. The more mathematically consistent a theory is, he said, the less likely it is to correspond to reality. It has become a tenet of modern epistemology that theories are invented, not discovered. While the rationale of scientific examination and methodology is to discover truth, all we can really do is invent our human perceptions of it, rigorous or otherwise. Truth itself is forever hidden.

In this, as in so many other things, religious and scientific thought converge. A basic teaching of Vedantism, Buddhism and other eastern systems is of the untrustworthy nature of the world of the senses. Maya, the Hindus call it. Illusion.

So here I am in this dream within a dream, telling stories about stories about stories, engaged in this useless and meaningless little activity I like to call my life, wobbling along between zygote and wormfood and expending neurochemistry along the way. Just tryin' to make the mortgage, folks, ain't it grand?

Well sure it is! In the absence of any other justification for walking around in a body, stories do nicely. True or not, they keep us from jumping off the nearest cliff in despair or sinking into beastial mindlessness. Self-consistent internal narrations are absolutely vital to thinking, self-aware creatures. One might even call them a survival adaptation.

Which, of course, is why art is so vital to the survival of the species.

Not to mention artists.

But just try to explain that to your DVR worker the next time they tell you to get a job.

1/6/03

If a New Years Eve gig was a date, she'd be the flashy chick from trig class that eyed you for three months from under entirely false lashes, dressed tarty for the dance, got drunk in the jakes and went off to make out with a football player after casually impugning your manhood in front of six of your classmates.

At least, that's been our experience in the past. S and I have played Noo Yeer's gigs so dreary as to nearly make us forswear performance altogether. I said nearly. The details don't matter as much as the general tone of the whole thing. The turning of the calendar seems to be a time guaranteed to bring out the beast in all of us, but particularly in partygoers.

In reaction to this universal principle is the emerging tradition of First Night, a loose affiliation of community groups around the country working to reconstruct the Ball Fall as a family-friendly, alcohol-deficient party in a closed-to-traffic downtown featuring music and hearty fellowship in lieu of gropery and toxic disconcertedness. A noble and challenging goal indeed, and for Amber Tide a date with the shy smart girl with the wirerims from honors English who wears contacts for the night and you stay up with til 3 am laughing. First Night Tacoma comes close to changing our minds about New Years Eve gigs. I said close.

We've had a spotty history even with them, though. Several years back we were introduced to the festival by a pal of ours, a student activities director from a local private university who's booked us for years and plays himself. He got us into a quartet spot that included him and a horn player, and we dutifully churned out somewhat straightahead jazz for a rather more straightahead audience that couldn't understand why we kept talking so much. Then a couple years ago we had to cancel our first appearance as a duo because S had landed in the hospital with temporary quadraplegia. Disconcertingly but hearteningly, the entire staff of the festival signed a get-well card.

Last year, we were so intent on performing as planned that we purchased a used wheel chair van for the expressed purpose of getting to the gig on time, no matter what. Despite misgivings over our lack of preparation, we played two good honest sets of our usual motley foolery for a full and enthusiastic house and had an exceedingly pleasant evening. I remarked at the time that I'd been reminded of exactly why I've stuck with Amber Tide for so long: it was, and remains, my favorite way of spending time, clothed in public at least. We were given the Funky Drawing Award by an artist in the audience, and we carried the colored-pencil rendering around in the harmonica case for months afterwards, as a reminder that yes, Virginia, there is a decent New Year's job.

Even so, we approached this year's First Night with continued apprehension. Try though we might, we'd been unable to play nearly as much as we usually wanted to to maintain our woohoo, and S was yet again in recovery from surgery. Not only that, but the economy's down (gee, you think?) and it was an open question if the event would come off with any verve. We actually went to the extreme of (gasp!) practicing and (double gasp!) writing a setlist.

We were scheduled in the same space we played last time, a funky antique store on the edge of the festival zone. By happy accident we followed The Filucies, one of the outside musical projects I contribute to. And they had a plan. As old folkies and veterans of the last of the Vietnam protests of the early 70's, they were eager to put forth the message of peace. True believers that they were, they wanted to make an onstage public statement on the matter, subject of course to the restrictions of a family-oriented novelty roots music group.

Normally I don't act out much politically. It seems too much like protesting against entropy, or trying to teach a pig to whistle. But the whole Iraq thing has, to put it simply, rankled my ass. I was given a No Iraq War poster by a neighbor, and in true pirate DIY spirit I photographed it and turned the image into buttons which I gave away to selected friends, including my bandmates. I wore my own pinned to a breastpocket teddy S gave me, reasoning that a robohawk ready to impale me on the stern protrusion of Republican rhetoric would have a more difficult time critiquing the politics of a stuffed toy, or at least in getting any satisfactory argument going. I was getting perilously close to actually caring.

So this evening, loaded for and with bear, I conspired to take a yet more active role in the ongoing debate. I brought half a dozen of the buttons, and during the course of our performance we took a break to announce a Free Giveaway of a button for correctly answering the question: "Why is it exactly that we want to invade Iraq?" ("?") "NOBODY KNOWS!! THAT'S RIGHT!! YOU ALL WIN!!" (Fling buttons into waiting hands). Response from the somewhat sparse but enthusiastic audience was very positive, and I wished I'd brought more buttons.

Having functioned as my own warmup act, I took the stage with S. We delivered a first set that the fluffy young sound volunteer pronounced "awesome," which was either a big compliment or a synonym for "good" (I can never tell). Jazz and swing, harmonica blues and trombone duets, it was vintage AT at its finest. After an intervening belly dancer, we returned for a second show.

Maybe it's the nature of folk music to be contrarian (how many conservative folk singers can you think of?) Or maybe it's just us. By the end of the night we had the whole crowd singing along to "Down By the Riverside" and "If I had a Hammer," like 60's deja vu all over again. S made an impassioned plea for people to speak out, in the name of all the 18-year-olds she'd watched grow up, now in danger of conscription, and I realized that we'd managed to hang around this muddy old world long enough for our early experiences to be relevant again. Nostalgic peacemongering! It's coming back!

Afterwards, we were too wired on fun and applause, not to mention deli coffee, to just go home, and we ended up at a late night redneck steak house when the Zero Hour came. S had been a little concerned about flashing the slogan, but the waitress spotted S's favorite beanie baby bearing (hehe) its own button and indicated that she was a Buddhist and agreed with the sentiment, whereupon the stuffle generously donated it to her. We Are Everywhere.

Trust me on this -- I have no illusions that Shrub sits in the Oval Office shivering in his skivvies over reports of folksinger activists in darkest Tacoma. That's not what we're doing this for. Late that night, snug in bed with the rain tapping against the window and the cedars rustling outside, I explained to S that we're functioning within a process akin to a playground seesaw. Without opposite viewpoints, the political system cannot function. And it's our duty, I said, burrowing into this metaphor as I stole the covers, to keep the teetertotter balanced, to prevent our national process from miring in the sandbox of futility, to secure the blessings of the Playground Superintendent...

"Shut up and go to sleep," said S.

Happy New Year, all.