3/28/05

Truthfully, while it takes a somewhat expansive overview to completely appreciate the mindblowing morray pattern created by the confluence of pagan Eostre and Judaic Pasach in a light messiantic sauce, it's not for the mere journalist to joke about what constitutes the core belief of more or less a third of the world's population. For one thing, you can get beat up real bad that way. For another, such creole holidays are standard features of almost every religion that isn't the product of one fevered shaman's imagination and performed by a handful of shivering followers under an animal hide in the depths of nowhere. Whenever acolytes of a faith recruit new devotees, they inherit all the leftover traditions those devotees may have hanging around their necks or other quarters. In such cases, all you can do is go with the flow. It's hardly something to neener at.

This year, the festivities have had a few peculiar notes. The Pope, ailing more and more in recent years, has become increasingly isolated from his duties, unable to verbally issue the blessing to his many followers. Many fundamentalists have waxed firmer still in denouncing what they perceive as ungodly influences on the holiday, like the aforementioned colored eggs and chocolate bunnies. And then there's the Schiavo case.

Good golly is there ever.

In strict accordance with such previous practitioners of the art as Mel Gibson, the good citizens of Florida are putting on their very own Passion play. This time, the unfortunate cast in the role of the Lamb to the Slaughter is conveniently unable to discuss the matter, making her a still more useful instrument in their medley of variations on the drama queen two-step. The hay being made off the event, on both sides of just about every aisle from the scientific to the religious to the political to the ethical to -- who knows? -- maybe offtrack betting, is enough to set off allergies in any disinterested soul fool enough to wander within 50 feet of an operating television or newsstand.

It's difficult to pick a particularly powerful stinker in this fart-fest of vultures, tearing at the carcass of a turmoil that any society with the decency of a pair of clean boxer shorts would pluck its own eyes out before bathing in the incinerating kliegs of media attention. But one pattern emerging Creature-like from the Black Lagoon holds some interest, in the Chinese sense anyway. That's the tendency of asshats right, left, center and shortstop to attempt to pin some kind of outcome on the eventual disposal of the hapless meatpuppet.

Like so many ham Shakespeareans declaiming from Julius Caesar, o're her wounds do now they prophesy, calling down doom, gloom and ingrown nails on their own personal enemies. So many different pundits and preachers have sounded off on What Will Come To Pass that it's beginning to sound like a precognition convention. Yo, guys, if you're so smart, any idea what the stock market'll do? Throw me a bone, people.

Really, though, what we're seeing here is a pack of thoroughly modern witch doctors who smell a blood ritual in the offing and want a piece of the manna. It's a slam dunk. Here's an innocent living critter on the verge of supervised discorporation, attendants in various ritual garb standing at the fore, subject to an unprecedented amount of reverent and dismayed attention by seemingly everyone on earth. And all right in the middle of the prime deathtrip season, too! Talk about all your ducks in a row. This is gonna be one mother of a blowoff, kids. And somebody's gonna get the payoff, some group or cult or party -- someone's gonna pay, or get paid. That's what sacrifice is for, right?

The problem with our culture of rationality is that we no longer seriously study those arts and bodies of knowledge that our priests of the white lab coats declare beyond the purview of reason. Even if magic doesn't work, it's not the results that occupy magicians, it's the trying, the actions of ritual and spell-casting themselves. As the engineering branch of religion, magic is as utilitarian as the stone axe, forever thrusting itself into civilized behavior out of sheer self-interest on the parts of those involved. After all, if it doesn't work there's nothing lost but a little time and dignity, right? No blood, no foul. Whether you're raising the souls of the dead or just praying for rain, the self-evidence of the process is ever-seductive.

Shrink though we may from such uncivilized behavior, magical thought, magical longing is ready and willing to dictate your actions, even when you yourself are cloaking your naked desire in a whole wardrobe of plausible excuses. This is the real devil's bargain, the point at which the practice of the infernal arts goes from parlor game to soul-devouring vice, when the sheer voluptuous power of the ceremony overwhelms common sense and the tinkering sorcerer is transformed into a howling primitive bent on justifying his ends by any mumbo-jumbo explanation that the crowd will hold still for. Abandon all discourse, ye who enter here: this is the realm of warring voodoo. Kinda like the last election.

Bring on the bunnies, I say. Bring on the decorated ovums, the baby chicks, all the petrified remnants of fertility rites gone by. But while we're busy bearing baskets, let's have a little patient exposition of just exactly what we're up to, just to keep the spirit of inquiry uppermost in our minds. Hey, the civilization you save might be your own.

And Terry Schiavo? Requiescat in pace.

3/21/05

The fun started with a leisurely Sunday drive down to Puyallup, ostensibly car hunting but mostly enjoying the mild weather and rolling along together. That evening our pal China from Portland came by, fresh from a stint demonstrating at a natural food fair, with a basket of leftover goodies. I'm not sure which of us is grandma and which the wolf, but the role of Red Riding Hood was definitely cast. There was soy kefir and meatless chops and hemp seed cookies cleverly disguised as trail bars, barely-edible wheatless bread and infinitely delectable Tofu Palace pate, a cornucopia of new age victuals to gnaw through. We packed the treat fairy off with a thermos full of thermonuclear coffix and our most sincere thanks.

Monday S went off to the gym (she's trying to swim a mile three times a week and succeeding) and I put the second coat of mud on the sheetrock in her jewelry studio, which is finally getting the remod it deserved seven years ago when we moved in. Then in the afternoon I experimented with the novelty of recording acoustic guitar in stereo, which is the difference between a guitar sounding [wimpy wimpy wimpy] and [hefty hefty hefty], and should impart said difference to Amber Tide's next album, in theory being produced this spring.

Tuesday I bid an outside job (ooh, it's money! shiny pretty!), and a recording client was over in the afternoon working on mastering for his next album and further padding my steadily-improving exchequer. And that evening, the angelic being to be known here only as Circus Girl (you know who you are...) took us out for a glorious dinner date at the best music club in town to see Dr. John, the kind of high life we pretty much have never afforded ourselves unless we were hired. The Good Doctor was in fine form, funkifying everything from gospel hymns to Goodnight Irene., fellow trombonist CG and I were barely restraining ourselves from air slide-work, and S bopped quite effectively from the waist up.

Now that was pretty much enough for a good week all by itself. But wait! There's more!

Wednesday I instituted a new regime of a half-hour walk every morning (more or less), put the last of the second coat on the studio and spent a couple hours growling at and ultimately triumphing over a broken monitor amp, saving myself hundreds of dollars for a new one. Mister Fixit strikes again. Then S and I went out and played a St Paddy's Day party at an adult care home for some of the sweetest funny-looking people you ever met. One of them was so taken by S that she wanted her to come live there. We politely declined. We did, however, inspire them to measurable revelry, capped off with a ten-minute medley of 60's rock n roll that had residents and attendants all boogying and one at least on the floor.

Ah, but even the laziest dog has to dig in sometime. Thursday I was up and at 'em on a deck-building job, slaving away for a solid three and a half hours before i ran outta steam and coincidentally had to get home to clean up, grab S and head for Tacoma for yet another Paddy party, dolled up in tux and evening gown as audio exhibits at the Museum of Glass. It was a freebie booked by our old friend Serni, whom we reckoned we've known for 20 years now, and who showed up himself and jammed jazz and a little Irish with us on flute and a squonky toy Casio keyboard. During the intermission we persuaded him to come outside and shoot some pictures of us in the last afternoon glow. Afterwards he took us out to a local Mexican restaurant and hired us for a church gig the following Sunday, so pleased was he with our classy new look. Could you follow all that?

So-o-o, this brings us to Friday. S and I went down to good ol' Pike Place Market and carried buckets of flowers uptown to give away as PR to the bemused pedestrians. Guerrilla marketing at its finest. Responses ranged from denial to delight, with a goodly percentage unsure as to whether we were soliciting donations or not. "They're free!" we proclaimed. "Free flowers! Good deal! Happy spring from Pike Place Market!" Leftover flowers came home with us to reek up the house splendidly. Then later that afternoon I finally got around to finishing a handyman job bought and paid for two months ago and lost in limbo between phone tag and missed appointments since, which was laudable for closure and also got two 8 foot custom blinds off my porch and into the windows they'd been ordered for.

Saturday was just another laid back day. Had to save up some energy for church tomorrow, Palm Sunday and Equinox. But it also brought welcome respite from the long drought we've suffered here in the Northwest this winter, a loud, wet blast of a pineapple express to reassure us that our neck of the woods isn't entirely doomed to desertification.

Sunday's service was indeed splendid -- unhurried, tuneful, well-dressed and well-received. And afterwards we came home and had the roundly and soundly deserved Church Snoozie, while outside the belated, prayed-for rain percussed the deck and the storm gusts set the cedars in white-noise motion.

Maybe it's just St John's wort and regular exercise. Maybe it's the stars. But maybe, just maybe, things are really getting better. Why not?

3/14/05

This guy was my best friend in high school, the last time I ever had a best friend (I'm married now, which is an entirely different thing). We bonded chiefly over the mutual ability to pose ideas to one another that nobody else had the screwed up vision to notice. I owe much of the vastly-diminished screwed up vision I may still possess to this relationship.

Once I went away and began sucking up the koolaid of Kollege Knollege, our interactions became more discordant. I was quick to succumb to that delusional state for which the term "sophomore" was coined. At one point on a visit home, my chum presented me with an economic theory, The Conservation of Money, which in my infinite (not) wisdom, fresh out of Econ 101, I dismissed as bad economics masquerading as mediocre physics.

More the fool I, but with good excuse. The Dismal Science, more than any other branch of the social studies, is a morass of weird malaprop metaphors dragged in from anywhere and everywhere, revved up with opaque mathematics and set into clockwork motion to spark the controversy du jour amongst policy and financial wonks. In paraphrase of one of the derivatives of Murphy's Law, every economist seems to have a way of predicting the market that doesn't work. It's easier to dismiss any given theory out of hand and wait twenty years to see if you were wrong.

But this isn't to say that econ is either inpenetrable or arbitrary. Quite the contrary: money obeys rules, as one guy I heard on the radio once put it, that are more like the laws of physics than they are like social customs. Even though value, like god, is an idea we all whipped up together and agreed to take seriously, it still displays rigorous behaviors. Anyone who's ever watched an acquaintance run through an inheritance (or, heaven forfend, done it themself) can testify to the terrifyingly pitiless effect of simple arithmetic on bank. Perhaps Dicken's Mr. Micawber said it best: "'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.'"

I used to think that the American Way Of Overdraw was influenced by the greater difficulty of subtraction over addition (ie, it's easier to spend what you think you have than it is to calculate what you've got left). Nowadays it looks more like simple imitation of the government -- citizen see, citizen do. And unlike governments, people have a finite life expectancy built in, which coupled with the rising number of childless marriages can lead to a leveraged-for-life strategy. If you die in debt, without heirs, who owns the zebra?

So it turns out the Conservation of Money wasn't a nifty sophistry, nor original. There seems to be a running joke in economics positing such a principle: "Money cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in nature." The joke is that, unlike matter or energy or spin or momentum or time or space or any of the other subjects of conservation laws, money has no absolutes associated with it. A gram of matter or an erg of energy are pretty much defined items, the same wherever the laws of physics hold. But a dollar or a Euro or a yen bounce against one another like yoyos. Even if you retreat into some commodity-based currency definition like gold, the value of the thing is still only the price the thing will bring, and when you run out of bread, gold is a mighty thin substitute.

Just a step outside the realm of mere specie, things become a lot clearer, as well as less facetious. While the price of a thing might only be the amount of colorful paper you can exchange for it, its physical value can actually be calculated in the energy and resources required to produce it, the blood, toil, tears and molybdenum. Such ingredients are relatively easily metered down to the hemidemideciliter. Within the purview of the entire closed system of human existence, earth, sea, sky and the whole shootin' match, it's clear that physical values always even out. As certainly as entropy rises and rocks fall, the effort and materials necessary to get hold of or construct an item equal its subsequent value -- because that's what its physical replacement cost is. All money represents is the estimated replacement cost for all the stuff that it serves as proxy for, just a guess as to what it's really worth.

Ultimately this idea leads to some pretty peculiar and resoundingly uncapitalistic conclusions. F'rinstance, every time a natural resource is converted into a trade good, the value of the region in which the resource started out loses value -- the scales always balance. While it's convenient for manufacturers to consider only the harvest cost of a resource, this implies that resource supply is unlimited, which of course it isn't. And unlike greenbacks, once a resource gets prohibitively scarce, you can't just run down to Money R Us for a payday loan -- it's gone.

We're only now beginning to find out just how expensive all that cheap oil we've been burning for the last hundred years really was. Like the overspending goompfs they were, the World of Yesterday passed the buck, or rather the IOU, on to the World of Tomorrow, which is rapidly becoming the World of Right Now. And all too soon we're going to find out just whose striped donkey this is.

3/7/05

Ever eager to participation in the ownership society, artists are quick to pick up on these trends, perhaps too quick. The standard scenario of the ten imitations of the Next Big Thing in music or its equivalent in other forms is all too familiar. When the movie of the week is the tortured crazy, all the wannabes are whacking off their ears. When it's youthful excess, they're all getting tattooed and ODing. The advent of consumer arts has only cranked this effect to eleven, beyond the point of diminishing returns and as close to the point of no return as the backers are willing to go.

But while much of this feedback frenzy is barely more than market-driven churn (Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist? It's now the Mash...), there are perennials, the little black dresses of their respective catwalks, the art fashions that never go out of fashion. In music sex, beauty, youth, prodigious athleticism and pleasant tone are always good for a laugh. And in all art, there is another persistent critic trap: complexity.

If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit. So sayeth the profit -- er, prophet. The common implementation of this particular cheat is the good ol' Surrealist Copout -- never mind trying to make some kind of story or statement in your song lyrics or novel or poetry, just hock up a nice big loogie of random imagery and leave it to your audience to mop up the significance of it. We can all thank Bob Dylan for this particular barbarity (and that term is quite literal -- the Greeks used it to describe people whose languages sounded like "bar-bar-bar" -- y'know, like the Beach Boys). When you're all done thanking Bob Dylan, we'll continue. Put down that gobbet of bloody flesh, Seymour.

While the perversion of the legacy of Andre Breton, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte has fueled the careers of countless kitty-litter purveyors, a less traveled path of the Baffle Dodge is mere complication. As the bearer of the heavy woolen mantle of Protestantism, mainstream America pays a disproportionate lip-service to dull dreary labor as a Good Thing In And Of Itself, and this carries over into the arts with the reification of The Great Work. Nothing like the product of twenty years of crushing toil, however stilted and concrete-footed, to excite critics of all stripes and timbres to roll on their backs and expose their tummies to be rubbed. After all, anybody can be inspired, but fifty foot tall photorealistic mosaics of tediously amateur snapshots found in thriftstores, that's something you don't see every day Chauncy. Just think of the work that went into that pile of gilt. It's inspiring, by gawd.

Time was when this trick actually had some legs. Back in the day, you couldn't whip out a 900 page treatise in MS Weird on your lunch break, you had to go slaughter some geese and cut quills, boy. Slowly but surely, though, mass production has crept into the Big Art biz, with the result that gigantism, that perfect illness of success, has reared its infinitely crenelated and intricately embossed head. Worse, it's mass-market gigantism, a whole assembly line of vast and trunkless legs of stone thudding down into the desert one after thunderous other, all commanding the same dedication of attention for thoughtful consumption that they used to take for production. And all at a time and place in civilization when true appreciation of even the classic repertory is a luxury only the rich and bored or poor and obsessed can afford, the Age of Cliff's Notes, when we're blessed or cursed with an obscenity of overproduction in the disposable art industry and not one spare minute to examine it.

Well. Given all that, is it any wonder that Big Art's faithful dwarf Pedro is minimalism? After all, what could be more current than bite-sized, fast-food art suitable for immediate digestion and excretion? Half an hour later you're soul-hungry again, but at least it doesn't slow you down. Now there's a trend that widgetmongering industry can really get behind. Only problem, of course is that like its culinary equivalent, pop cult MacArt runs pretty slim on the nutrients and can lead to major civil disorders if overindulged. And like its culinary equivalent, it's becoming the junk food of choice for a lotta busy consumers, from Survivor to Britney.

Art gets a bum rap in our society. Either it's given lip-service as a little tin god our ancestors seemed to put great store in, but for what reason we can't for the life of us discern, or it's badmouthed as trivial time-wasting by self-absorbed narcissists. In truth, art, whether pocket-sized or big as a house, serves to give us something to unravel the wacky world with, some beautiful or elegant pattern to map our way through the trackless swamp of human life.

Trivialize that function and you trivialize the whole of your existence. You're trading reality for reality tv. And reality tv isn't just ugly, it's a symptom of an even uglier future in which nothing is real unless it happens on the tube and everyone lives inside their own personal telescreen, internally colonized by Big Bubba. See how many steroid masterpieces you unload then, smartypants.