5/31/04

On the surface we look simple
skin and hair and blush and dimple
inside it's a solid mass of bone and muscle, blood and gut
in the cell's secluded chasm
membranes circle cytoplasm
nucleus and mitochondria put in place by who knows what

But we are more than the sum of our parts
the sum of our parts
the sum of our parts...

Watching Sandahbeth's passage through the hallowed halls of allopathy seems a restless vision of neutral-shaded beds bearing her retreating down endless long white corridors into distances obscured by fluffy forests of starched clean sheets and towels embroidered with hospital names instead of hotels, the vague smack of alcohol wipes and invisible acrid disinfectants lingering in the air like the aroma of alien flowers. Bearing up bravely under the endless torrent of insults to her less and less resilient flesh, she seems a sacrificial victim in the throes of particularly heinous ceremonial immolation as the doctors leisurely and excruciatingly whittle away at her.

Not. I'm fully aware that while the green-robed medical priesthood may not have quite the godlike grasp of human health that their advertising tries to imply, they're not slouching towards Bethlehem either, and they really do have some idea of what they're up to. What we're dealing with here is just bad luck and lousy genes and there's not a lot to be done beyond what's already being.

But amidst the whole slo-mo train wreck, I've taken time to thank whatever gods may be and a few that aren't for my own general level of robustness, as well as gladly and extremely promptly remitting the State of Washington monthly for their unnervingly progressive Basic Health program, medical insurance for the low-income self-employed. As a man of A Certain Age and a witness to said railroad mishap, I'm mindful of the need for periodic inspection and maintenance of my own personal carriage in the face of the warranty long since being expired. Such diligence, of course, can lead to unexpected consequences, which in my case amounted recently to a ticket for my own turn on the Sooper Gurney Fun Ride for a colonoscopy.

I'm a reasonable man (shaddap back there) not given to many irrational phobias, and the prospect of technicians exploring my nether quarters with gun and camera didn't particularly phase me. I myself was somewhat curious to see what exotic beasts or monuments of ancient civilizations might be lurking up there. So, when our gloriously maternal GP Doctor Maura suggested at my last general checkup that I'd reached the mileage for said expedition to be perpetrated, I was sanguine and fully cooperative.

A few days later I received the preliminary instructions, a regimen of increasingly stringent dietary restrictions and bowel cleansings that would do a health spa or an Eastern yoga cult proud. As the the big date approached I dutifully stocked up on medicinal drain cleaner and started the process of ramping my nutritional input and output down to clear liquids. Yummy num!

At about this point I did a plumbing job (appropriate) for a couple ladies of A Certain Age, and when I noted that I needed to get home to "take medication" for a "medical procedure", they both gleefully busted my ambiguity, experienced creatures that they were. "Don't worry, the setup's the hard part." "You won't get any sleep tonight, dear!" "But just wait til they give you the drugs -- you'll be telling the nurse how wonderful she is!" Tease tease tease the poor ol' handyman. Laugh while you can, gals -- just wait til you try to take a shower.

Day of the circus I boarded the big shiny bus and let somebody else handle the transpo for me, knowing I would be, uh, incapacitated afterwards. i had been told over the phone that I could take a bus home if nobody was there to drive me, but at the clinic a very nice and exceedingly stubborn nurse informed me that I could either be put in cab or be rescheduled. I acquiesced, reasoning that I could always jump out two blocks away and grab transit if I was up to it. Besides, I was already down to socks and backless gown and I wasn't about to go through the Amazing Clear Liquids Diet again if I could help it.

After installing an IV needle the size of a water main in my arm, the nurse left me to contemplate my sins. It's notable that the view from the gurney is a lot more tense than from the waiting room. Sandwiched in crispy sheets, I anticipated the coming mild insult, for which I'd signed papers promising not to sue if I was maimed or rendered imbecilic, and began to get a taste of just what S has been going through these last deargodinheaven ten years, not just once but over and over.

A nervous time later, the attendants arrived to wheel me into the pristine and disturbingly sterile den of iniquity. Showtime. I chatted sophisticated small talk with the doctor, a facade of bravado that was shattered, or rather rendered irrelevant, when they hit me up with the valium and fentanyl cocktail. After that I was perfectly happy with whatever they wanted to do, cheerfully enjoying the fascinating movies on the thoughtfully provided viewscreen. I kinda wish I hadn't started singing in the middle of it all, but apart from that it was fine, just fine. I fell blissfully asleep for a few minutes in the recovery room but managed to dress myself. They handed me a sheet of photos of my insides and a form advising me not to drive or sign legal papers for the rest of the day and sent me home. In a taxi.

A rite of passage, in a way. I am now officially middle aged instead of only feeling that way every now and again -- as opposed to my usual state of feeling about 27 going on 15. But I'll take the deal -- wrinkles are a lot easier to handle than acne ever was.

5/24/04

Appropriately, the disagreement is contingent on the basis of Capital-Arr!-Reality: is there anything out there, beyond the reports of our senses, or do we just make it all up? Raging for however many thousands of years you're willing to grant the Vedic historians as well as in the West, this fundamental dispute has financed an entire industry to manage waste paper (and probably papyrus and clay tablets too) consumed by endless arguments for and against variations on the theme of Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily Life Is But A Dream (no it's not!!!) .

In a way, it's the Magickians vrs the Technicians: some believe, superstitiously or otherwise, that since the world is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, it can be reordered by the power of Will alone, while others maintain that only physical means can produce physical ends. In their endless struggle, the techs have developed WMDs (yes, that's not the correct plural and no, I don't give a hoot) to strengthen their case, while the magi resort to throwing curses, the most reliable of which being "You're going to die!" (works every time). While the uneven character of this fight seems presumptive of the techs' position, the magi hold on against all odds.

But they may both be missing the point. A recent article on NPR covering what psychologists call the binding problem showed how that wizened old noncombatant scientific research can pull the rug out from under even the most dedicated battle royal. The story dealt with a recently developed optical illusion that illustrated how the human brain breaks up experiential information into separate chunks of perception for storage purposes, stowing color here, motion there, shape over yonder behind the sofa where junior can't get at it and so forth. The binding problem concerns how the different pieces get put back together again so we actually experience them as a whole and not a jigsaw puzzle.

I was fascinated to discover this direction in brain research, as I'd sniffed at a similar thesis during my brief detour into neuropsych at ever-popular Reed College in the early 70's, about the same time I was getting buried in printouts twelve hours a day learning to program their pet IBM 1130 down in the computer lab. Before I fled screaming from the hallowed halls of rational inquiry and rat torture, I managed with many a groan to cough out a research paper detailing what I could uncover concerning the decades long search for that holy grail of brain anatomists, the engram, the actual physical location of a memory. As I recall, a researcher named Karl Lashley spent thirty years of his valuable life stalking the wily critter and never caught sight of it once. He concluded that the engram didn't reside anywhere in the cortex, which led others to speculate that memory was in fact distributed, using the analogy of the then-contemporary and sexy hologram, an image which can be divided into innumerable parts and still contain the whole. I myself speculated idly, the only way I knew how at the time (or still do, come to think of it), that memories might be reconstructed out of various separate nuts and bolts and tinkertoys of sensation, which could reduce redundancy in what I wasn't prescient enough to think of as the brain's operating system. And then I dropped out and became a wandering minstral, which is what I'd really wanted all along.

Me and all those psychout guys and gals aren't the first people to get interested in this, though. A couple millenia back a guy name of Plato founded a whole school of philosophy on a similar insight. He of course was a philosopher, trying to scrape the essence of that aforementioned Everything off the scungy surface of superficial life. Plato came up with the peculiar notion of ideal objects: he argued (and argued and argued) that any given chair was only a single instance of a perfect Chair, an archetypical, ultimate chair-est of chairs that could never be reduced to mere dross material existence. This led him to construct an entire Otherwhere of existence, a place where the ideals live, where Ultimate Chair is sat on by Ultimate Cat while Ultimate Dog noses about in the Ultimate Catbox. Plato was barely cold in his all-too-unideal grave before a slew of other wiseguys went on to form a whole cosmology, durn near a religion, off this seeming hierarchy of existences. As Neo-Platonism it lives to bedevil the minds of stern, self-reliant realists still. And serves 'em right.

But lookie -- stripped of its mystical cache, those woowoo archetypes reduce rather too nicely to exactly the kind of nonconscious info-fragments that I envisioned at Reed and real shrinks map with MRI. Plato was lucky or rigorous enough to nail a physical brain structure through internal observation alone. Not bad for 400 BC. A little hard on the mystics, though.

All this points up something that neither side of the war of the world(s) seems to get: that any discussion of the ultimate nature of reality is necessarily limited by that gooey little strainer we examine everything with, our own personal cranial wetware, a kilo or so of extremely complicated cottage cheese that projects itself on top of the whole shootin match and maybe calls itself god or buddha or atman or the one or any of a godzillion other alias. You can claim it's hard reality or soft chewy spiritual fabric, but all we ever actually perceive is the inside of our own heads, and the view is limited and peculiar at best.

Is it real, or is it Memorex? No. But it is kinda cool.

5/16/04

Much of what passes for culture in our oh-so-civil society is more like a lifetime of taking out the trash -- mindless, dutiful chores performed endlessly to no particular end or result. As our daily routines grow more and more mundane, we demand greater and greater extremity from our entertainment in compensation. Inevitably, real life get judged by the standards of Ah-nuld and his ilk's bulked-up blockbusters, and real life comes off second.

But there's a more subtle and insidious trend, one that doesn't make it into the papers or the pundits' earnest speeches to the cameras. It's the inclination to accept television and movies as representative of real life, to imagine that social interactions or behaviors or events on the screen or the tube are actually true. This one predates the television era, going right back to those golden days of radio and the movies. Certainly the War of the Worlds panic is a clear indicator of how fine the line between truth and media had gotten even by 1939, and Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo barely exceeds being a documentary of the inside of a lot of Depression-era fangirls' heads. And before that there was Madam Bovary and her addled subscription to the romance novels of her time.

Intellectually, most people are aware that Doctor Mark on ER was really an actor who'd never seen the inside of a medical school, let alone an emergency room. Oh, and he didn't really die. The artificiality of TV is ridiculed every day, especially on TV. But despite this self-innoculation, there is still a relentless unconscious ooze towards belief in the veracity of media images.

A recent internet article drew attention to what it called the "CSI Syndrome," a tendency for the narrative pace of crime TV to blur the intensity and tediousness of police work. More and more civilians are under the impression that because Grissom and his posse can wrap up two or three cases in 45 minutes plus commercials, forensic investigation can't be that complicated a process. Can't you just come up with some DNA or something? The fact that many criminal cases go unsolved in the real world is lost on them, and they get downright shirty when nobody comes bounding in out of a lab, indisputable damning evidence delicately clutched in their latex-gloved hand.

Even worse, media conflation has gotten into politics as well. Back in the roaring 90's we had Bubba Newt Gengrich justifying his draconian policies by citing that sober, reasoned investigation of the American capitalist system It's a Wonderful Life. Some of our presidents seem to get their worldviews directly from old cowboy movies. Some of them were in old cowboy movies. And all of them from FDR on have used mass communications as a tool of persuasion and, inevitably, verification for their goals, to the point where now, if the President sez it on TV, people have a hard time disbelieving it.

Ah, but just for once, people, we're in luck. These two trends, the preference for entertaining fiction over boring reality and the inability to tell the difference, are coming together to wreck forever the illusion of media credibility. And as with so many other things, we have Star Wars to thank.

Back in the 70's, Luke Skywalker almost single-handedly saved Hollywood from the same kind of product that nearly swallowed Chrysler -- bloated, overpriced, underpowered dogs that just didn't pull their weight. With the aid of shamelessly derivative storytelling and eye-blistering, newly-computerized special effects, SWs tore the pants off every other action movie of the period, ran them up the flag pole and shouted "Now try something!" Within a few years, cyberanimation had become the new arms race in the movie industry, and starting around the time of Jurassic Park, began entering an elite (1337?) realm where, thanks to massive number-munching power and obsessive modeling techniques, trick shots were no longer easily distinguishable from the real deal.

The trouble is, where do you go from there? I mean, once you've seen one forty foot prehistoric critter waltzing down Balboa Boulevard, you've seen em all. And George Lucas, mensch that he was, was ready with the answer: Episode I. When in doubt, do it all over again, only twice as big. And right behind him came the roaring hordes with wave after wave of thunderous overblown spectacle, armies and asteroids smashing against the cineplex audiences like thirty foot breakers on a Malibu beach, until you want to scream like Maximus "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED???"

So here we are, digesting slowly in the belly of what is arguably the Golden Age of CGI, beset on all sides by impossible heroics, impossible love scenes, impossible car commercials. The Red Queen's Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast begins to sound like the Slimfast diet. But this particular regimen-in-reverse is also teaching us our last lesson in Postmodern Deconstruction 101. With visuals this bizarre, the whole province of media is receiving a fine exterior spraypainting of That Which Is Not So, inclusive of any and all nether quarters, from NPR to the State of the Union address and all stations in between.

It's just barely possible that the vast majority of people will stop believing anything they read, hear or see in the media. While that's liable to be a burden for us effete civilized types who believe in poofty highfalutin notions like the rule of law or media arts, it could be preferable to the lockstep ONE MIND ONE WILL ONE MEDIA future we seem all too probably careening into right now.

Heck, it might even get people out to hear music again. Given it isn't a DJ, o'course.

5/9/04

We in America are certainly no exception -- our rahrah has worldwide brand recognition, if not acceptance. We've spent the last however many years parading our trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent asses in front of anyone in line of sight, usually contiguous with ruthless assaults on their natural resources. To hear the most diligent cheerleaders tell it, the US of A is the sole arbiter of freedom and clean government in the world, the flashpoint of all great ideas and liberating movements, the breadbasket of starving millions and the light that gives hope to the suffering. We also take stains out of carpets and taste great on a soda cracker.

I've always been an anti-flag-salute kind of guy, tending to cast a jaundiced eye or gangrenous extremity on conveniently self-serving patriotic tripe. Still, I do tend to swallow at least a modicum of the stuff, a peril of environmental exposure to the toxic waste of Amurkin politics. I even agree (a little) with (some of) the notions expressed about our side as a force for good, even a wellspring of progressive ideas. And it's easy to get complacently self-congratulatory about a country that tries as hard as we do to be right, even if we're not. We're anal enough to actually care about stuff like consistency and truthfulness and setting a good example and taking responsibility for our actions.

Okay, stop laughing. Let's settle down, class.

Certainly such a view of our country is naive, even if you discount the really hardcore crap that been pulled in our name during the odd police action or rogue op. No country can exist for long without an intimate knowledge of lying, thieving, back-stabbing, belly-kicking, dry-gulching and similar skullduggery -- it goes with the territory. Still, countering that seriously ruth-deficient view is a whole halftime show of good works and random acts of kindness, trumpets and trombones and tubas and pompom girls and all. In a few highly-nuanced ways, we almost manage to live up to our hype. Almost.

Or so I told myself, anyway.

This week's gallery of shame, though, this nightmare frat-party sadist spectacle of the photos from Abu Ghraib prison, has given me one doozy of a wake-up smack upside the head, both with how thoroughly the soothing music of our masters' voices has cozened me and how brazenly the actuality of the situation has devolved from all those empty-minded and -hearted platitudes they used to get us into this mess in the first place.

I've been through this terrain before. It's not like it's the first time my bitch-goddess motherland has turned up down on the corner enticing the sailors. But there comes the point when the camel's vertebrae are stressed to the breaking point and the only rational choice is to divest oneself of the entire load. Whether this particular infamy corresponds with that point is hard to say, for me or anyone else, but I'm sho nuff feeling a certain crackling sensation somewhere north of my thorax, and I'm certain that others are as well, those that haven't already turned in their LL Bean polos for a backbrace and a Kevlar flack jacket.

When I dialed up AOL that bright sunny morning of September 11th and was confronted with the Scary Movie For Real of the fall of the towers, my first and reflexive response was, "Couldn't happen to a nicer country." That was followed almost immediately by a black and humble remorse in the face of the emerging enormity of the event, the ghastly inequity of the punishment meted out on innocent bystanders by faith-crazed berzerkers giving a whole new meaning to the concept of extremist. In the months that followed I found myself imbued with a patriotism far more immediate and personal than the milquetoast version from civics class, one that bordered on lockstep partisan conformity. While I dispised the entire tack the neocon chicken hawks took on the myriad issues raised by the WTC attack, my own personal ass was convinced that it was half past high time to close ranks and do something.

It may have been just that conflict between my mind and my behind that left me so deeply depressed by the invasion of Iraq. The perfidy of the administration's dick-in-your-face manipulation of the public, the press and congress in the runup to the war had a quality of school-yard bully haha that rivaled the Nazi's well-oiled propoganda machine for stupid, gleeful malice. The only bright spot, or so I thought, was the apparent professionalism and restraint shown by, of all people, the US military. Say what you will about the aftermath, the actual reduction of Iraqi resistance was performed with a maximum of efficiency and a historic minimum of bloodshed and destruction. And the most obvious shortcoming of that phase of the operation, the failure to check the widespread looting that followed, can be laid at the feet of the guys who planned the whole circus, those aforementioned poultry raptors in the White House and State Department.

Now, however, with the military irrevocably mired in a cesspool of its own making, even that paltry solace has been taken from me, and I'm beginning to entertain the notion that we as a nation really did get what was coming to us on 9/11, that in some deep, unspeakable way the entire process of our civilization is off the rails and headed for the abyss. We've become the people our parents warned us about, if in fact we weren't them already.

God bless America. And God help us.

5/2/04

A short, rotund, droll little man who plays ukulele, harmonica and washboard amongst numerous other activities from leathercraft to web design, Howlin' Hobbit and I are street buddies from away back, and occasional picturesque open mike collaborators on uke and trombone under the moniker Snake Suspenders. He sees the pursuit of financial security the same way I do, as a series of fishhooks baited and plunked in various pools. With my honey in hospital and the Gentleman Handyman in underdemand, I need to get all the lines in the water I can, and Hobb persists in the desire to do skiffle and dixieland in my company. So, at his prodding, last Wednesday I took my huevos and $30 down to greasy cheesy Pike Place Market to line up, sign up and reenlist in th e Army of Open Air Entertainment, aka street meat.

For all that I've been doing this preposterous job for over 30 years, it's still a stretch of my nerve to actually stand around in public exposing my questionable artistry to passing strangers. For the last 25 or so I've been blessed with the partnership of a truly amazing vocalist and enormously sympathetic entertainer (that would be Sandahbeth), which shielded me from a variety of slings, arrows, clubs, battering rams, compact thermonuclear devices and puking winos of the street's outrageous fortune. Going out all by myself alone to do battle with the monster Mammon is a daunting proposal.

More than that, it's an internal struggle as well. In my helter-skelter bachelor busker days, I spent as much younger and greener energy overcoming my own intimidation as I did hollering at disinterested mobs. I was never certain of my own abilities and constantly challenged by the successful performers I saw raking in cash and wowing their audiences. With no better notion of how to proceed, I frequently imitated some of their least effective strategies, with predictable results. But I also stole enough of their more useful tricks to be capable of mounting an effective campaign once the big guns (or in S's case, pipes) arrived. Still, the moment I step out on my own, 25 years fall away as nothing and I emerge, pale and trembling, a wee(nie) timorous novice streetnik once more.

Thus, it was fortuitous and a blessing to have The Hairy Footed Fellow cajoling me into spreading my threadbare solo wings once more. But at first, the whole flight threatened to turn into a plane crash. Immediately upon paying up, Hobbit with rough bills and a roll of dimes, I with a check, and receiving our colorful identification badges that would do credit to any assistant presenter at a third-rate industry show, we sauntered out to the Zone of Totality for playing at the Market, the space under the Big Clock by the flying fish vendors. We waited our turn and set up, I with my comfortingly loud freshly strung 12-string plus a harp on a rack, he with a micro-washboard. Beset with performance anxiety, I wound myself up like a rubberband airplane and let fly with my most raucous blues/rock. In the next 45 minutes I broke two strings, blew out a perfectly good Hohner Special 20 and was politely asked to tone it down a notch by a representative of the local vendors, all for the princely sum of about two dollars. Not exactly the auspicious inception I'd anticipated. Hobbit, far more recently experienced than I in this particular venue, rubbed and scrubbed away and carefully refrained from comment.

Then, in the last ten minutes of our hour, belatedly realizing that I was essentially behaving like an ass, complete with the bray, I managed to throttle back enough to come up with something actually pleasant, "Jamaica Farewell" as I recall, and immediately our tips doubled. While not exactly a victory, it was an improvement, one which I took to heart when I came back on Friday, determined to climb back on the mange-infested nag that had just flipped me off onto a cowpie. This time I brought the smallest guitar in the house and bore in mind Hobbit's terse advice: "Relax." Results, while not conducive to ordering bottles of Dom Perignon at swank restaurants, were encouraging, and I actually enjoyed myself more being somewhat less Roger-Rabbit- On-Speed- like. We'll just have to see how it all works out.

I'm not nearly stupid enough anymore to believe that hawking my soul at the Market is going to get me anything besides what it has already, namely older, but I'm perceiving my current actions in a psychohistorical light: the me of today and the me of a quarter century ago are having a series of instructive conversations, and maybe me today can teach the ghost of my callow immaturity to grow up a little and smell the roses as well as the coffee. After all, despite any hauntings, I'm not devoid of further experience on the street. I know what works, I know what I'm good at, I know that I actually am good at some things, and over the years S and I played for enough dead crowds to get over the paralyzing belief that it had to be our fault when the fish wouldn't bite. In truth, sometimes the little buggers just aren't hungry for what you're putting on the hook.

It's kinda like healing my inner child, in this case my inner weird anxiety-riddled lone-wolf twenty-something, Generation X Before Generation X Was Cool. Hey, it's Street Performance Therapy, fokes -- I could write a book or something. Probly pay better than these tightass Seattle crowds do.