6/28/04

While I didn't know anybody really, my reputation apparently preceded me and I was asked to play "some of that swing stuff." I obliged. One request was for Ain't Misbehavin', and when I finished someone complimented the arrangement. "Thirty years of practice can do wonders," I replied. In the same breath I wondered Thirty years? Is that right?

I went fishing in the remainders bin of my memory and came up with Mark, the guitar player from the vintage jazz group I played with in college, showing me a xeroxed leadsheet of the song in the living room of his beachside rental out on Cooper Point Road in Olympia back in, yep rock, 1974, the riotous height of my TESC phase. He shared the house with two roommates and his commensals, a sulky fat black tom cat named Miles and a genius aussie shephard/dingo mix, Mayall. The next summer I housesat the place and Mayall, bless his hairy heart, did his best to reassure me that the race of dog wasn't solely represented by the crabby weimereiner up the street when I was a kid, who'd done his own best to put fang to my heel when I made the mistake of shortcutting across his turf while he was off the leash.

Mark was also the noble soul who shared some local horticulture and then, with the introduction "Are you ready for the king of rebop?" slipped some early Savoy Bird sides on the turntable and turned my mind to meatloaf. He was an aficionado of the Real Deal, though as a former student at the Ali Akbar Khan school of Indian music he had some adventurous notions of rhythm which crept into his guitar work with The Old Coast Highway Orchestra and Tattoo Parlor, the aforementioned swing act.

I'm still under the impression that I left school about five years ago, so all this time travel was a trifle unnerving. It's difficult to fathom that I even have thirty years of experience, let alone at playing guitar (and I don't -- it's more like forty). At the same time, the blowing sands of chronology have drifted over much of what I used to have a firm grasp of in my personal history, and from whatever combination of neglect, regret and simply moving on, I no longer clearly visualize what I or life was like in those days. Few artifacts of that period are still with me, and the more pertinent of those, like my bass trombone, don't carry much information.

Two days after the party I opened my post office box and discovered a package from, yep rock, Mark -- wonderful CD transcriptions of old tapes of the OCHO/TP. They were addressed to "Amber Tide," and the note inside, scribed in a precise hand on Savoy of London hotel stationery, read in part, "Due to some serendipitous searching on the internet, it has come to my attention that you may either be related to or know the whereabouts of one of the performers on these discs. If this is so, would you kindly pass them on to said party."

Why the ambiguity? Who would possibly misinterpret or doubt my written-in-a-million-letters self-representation online? What could possibly create such confusion?

We-e-ll, there is one thing, one teensy little detail that could prevent Riders of the Purple Modem from tracking me down, even if I do advertise myself like an all-night motel. You see, um, I sorta changed my name.

I did it for love, I hasten to add, not to cover my tracks or try to unmake myself. It was part of my wedding vows -- why should girls have all the fun? And in the face of changing our last names, we figured why not go all the way and replace the first ones too? When you're young and juicy and getting the best you ever had from your One True Love there's no telling what you're liable to do. And if you don't believe me, just ask my sweetie. Just don't ask her what her old name was.

But whether pour le amour or pour le sport, my having bollixed up my moniker has put a spike in more than one cart wheel. I'm routinely informed that people inquire politely if I'm related to that guy they used to know years ago, y'know, name kinda similar? Contrariwise, some of the folks who knew us then had a hard time getting used to the new Us'n. Some of them are still having a hard time. We tried to make it clear that, while we weren't offended at being confused with somebodies with the same DNA but different identities, we did expect to be addressed in our designated Thoroughly Modern fashion.

Another amusing side-effect is the number of folks expressing amazement at my relation to my sister Pat, she a substantial member of the Puget Sound musical scene, after having first met her as a relative of my old self. Wait a second -- that even confused me.

In the end, though, this visitation from the Ghost of Bands Past demonstrates that the time has come for me to reveal my little secret identity, however reluctantly. In this age of Google-the-verb it's become imperative to be traceable, at least on the internet, if you want to have any hope at all of being contacted about that twenty million bucks from the estate of your distant cousin Bill Gates or whatever. So, for love or money or chachacha, here 'tis:

Carl Spaeth.

Got that, search engines? Good. Because I ain't repeating it.

6/21/04

Ancient astronomers, anxious to find meaning in anything available, appropriated coincidence and invented time, duration, metered moments of existence resolved down to the microsecond and beyond. And probably not long after the first year was duly noted, the first anniversary squalled its way into being as well.

This week marks the centenary of the date that inspired the only known holiday based upon a literary work: Bloomsday, June 16, 1904, marked and immortalized in that thorniest of written crowns, James Joyce's Ulysses. A peculiar menagerie of intellectuals, philosophs, culture vultures and hangers-on around the world celebrated with readings, cryptic jokes, and a zillion beers. All in the cause of a book that perishingly few have started and even fewer completed, and that almost noone really understands. Not bad for an Irishman.

In honor of the occasion and in homage to my own brainiac pretensions, I disco'd out to the local library and scored the sole available copy of the relentless high-culture brick, suitable for reading, stopping doors or swatting the unwary fly. It was a tossup whether the branch scored big props for actually having one or if the hood got the big diss for its availability a day before the Propitious Event. Still and all, home it came with me.

I plowed through the jangling jungle of Steve and Poldy's Excellent Dublin Adventure about thirty years ago when I was still in school and could afford the time. It was one of the most arduous perusals I'd ever attempted, and all I carried away from the experience was the sigh of relief I exhaled upon closing the cover and the sensation of having climbed, if not Mount Everest, at least one of its foothills. I'm relatively certain that I won't try to make it to the top this time, with or without bottled oxygen -- the library won't let me keep the book long enough.

Joyce's prose is the written equivalent of an exquisitely baked fruitcake that weighs about two and a half tons. It's not exactly a page-turner -- like fabulously expensive wine, it needs to be sipped delicately and savored. But if you care a figgy pudding about the background of our current exalted state of drown-in-the-rain postmodernism, Ulysses is not just a recommended read, it's number one on the list, assisted ascent or no.

But while it's a great book, it's not a particularly good novel. Joyce forswore the usual constructive tenets of the writer of fiction in favor of feverdream detail, hallucinogenic character study, roulette wheel stylistics and funhouse plot development, all coordinated via a scheme of mythological and historical reference so bizarrely convoluted and self-violating as to approach surreality from a scholastic side instead of an artistic. He himself admitted that he deliberately spiked his learned punch with a hip flask or two of ambiguities and cryptic puzzles, all to ensure his immortality via endless critical examination and debate.

All well and good if you like that sort of thing, of course, but not exactly the stuff of which beach books are made. Probably the most widely-known passage in the work, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, or more accurately the phone sex part of it at the end, is likely widely-known because it was included in a dopey little comedy sketch on a Firesign Theater album. My own rejoicing in Joyce blooms more in spite of his writing than because of it, out of the details and implications of his so-called real life.

First and foremost, JJ was the original tragically hip artist in the classic 20th century mold: a drunken spendthrift reprobate, an exile in a half dozen exotic cities, his work banned on every continent with the possible exception of Antarctica, universally despised by popular critics and praised by a select few cognoscenti with muscular enough forebrains to detect what he was up to, a battering ram in the struggle against censorship in the arts, and even tuned enough to his chosen archetype to live his entire life in poverty and debilitation, going almost blind at the end. Hey, what's not to love?

On top of that, for a woowoo monger like me, Joyce is a delicious blend of killer intellect and mystical vision. Even embedding the perambulations of a Jewish advertising salesman in turn of the century Dublin within the mythic bounds of Homer's epic, however subversively, is one bowser of a magickal working. Immerse yourself in his reality and you find yourself a shadow-figure, miles high, tracing the inscrutable dance of destiny and divine influence, even as you go about frying kidneys and stalking schoolgirls on the beach. Besides, who else had the combination of classical education and dipsomania needed to reconstitute Guinness Stout as the elixir of eternal life? Nobody, that's who.

But I think my greatest attraction to Bloomsday is a most fundamental one: its origin. June 16, 1904 was not a pivotal moment in world history, not even Irish history. No skies fell, no kings exploded, no gray eminences issued decrees reconstructing subatomic structure. Nope, 6/16/04 was in fact the date on which Joyce first scored a date with a little hotel chambermaid hottie, Nora Barnacle (was there ever a better name?), the woman with whom he shared the rest of his brilliant tragic hipster trickster wastrel life and eventually even had the grace to marry. Awwwww.

Call me mushy. Call me matrimonially conceited. Go ahead. I'll wait. Finished? Good. As far as I'm concerned, a voluntary holiday inspired by a written work of unsurpassed controversy and ingenuity, celebrated by wise guys and sly drunkards the world over, and ultimately based on the day the author got lucky with his main squeeze, has got to be the Most. Romantic. Day. Ever. Okay, make that Day Off.

6/14/04

Evidence of this presented itself when I undertook to open up my first Macintosh all-in-one, a 512e with a screen glitch donated to the cause by the redoubtable Paul Black back in 1992 or abouts. Cracking the shell of one of those little Easter eggs was a tedious and time-devouring labor, involving faith in the gods of tinker and a really long #10 Torx tool. As a reward, there to greet me inside the case were the signatures of every person who'd contributed to the wondrous guts it contained. It was a redoubtable and intimidating roll call. Pondering that panoply of sheer brainpower dedicated to the pursuit of Insane Greatness, I remember thinking at the time, "No wonder this thing is smarter than me!"

It's probably a burden and a blow to the hopeful, faithful population of the Intelligent Design community that no similar action may be taken on the universe, no spreader or driver available to strip away the bland beige facade of being to reveal the signature of the Great Manufacturer beneath. But this morning, listening to a mildly engaging evolutionary historian being interviewed on public radio, I became aware that the ID people are actually on the right track. It's just their definitions that are a little off.

Science in its madness differs from other varieties of philosophy, the font whence it gushed forth, by requiring experimental verification of its ideas. In regular phil-soph, pretty much anything goes -- if you want to argue that the world is an orange tucked away in Father Christmas' sack and have a smooth line of blarney to back it up, more power to you. Loser. But in science, the all-important ingredient of external physical testing raises the cute story bar considerably.

The whole notion of confirmation, though, springs from a couple underlying assumptions that almost never get the press they deserve, though they're obvious enough on the surface. One is that the world reported by the senses actually exists. Duh. Okay, hindbrain sez duh, forebrain sez but wait! Dreams or no, what you see is what you got. The other is that certain basic aspects of that little place we like to call reality are invariant. They remain the same throughout everything. The fundamental things apply as time and space go by.

Science happily wiles away the day seining through innumerable facts and observations, trying to tease out those immortal snips, snails and puppy dog's tails, and then testing testing testing to see if they're really unchanging. Naughty bits that cut the custard glory in the title Laws of Nature, and it is the contention of the white lab coat brigade that these universal commonalities are solely responsible for the entirety of the big wide wonderful sloppy material world we see around us in all its endless variation.

Note that while many of these stalwarts are superficially simple (f=ma, e=mc^2), many are ridiculously complex (the writing out of Maxwell's field equations or the alphabet soup of quantum mechanics is left as an exercise for 999 monkeys with word processors) or even partially indeterminate, the willing slaves of probability. Probability itself, the only oracle with a 100% track record, is one of the most widespread Indomitable of them all. Throw complexity and chaos into the blender and you've got a magnificently lumpy smoothie on your hands (ewwww...). An unspoken understanding of *sigh* ence is that complicated shit on the ground can have complicated but consistent origins in the Realm of Physical Archetypes.

Arthur C. Clarke once observed, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A useful variant might be that any sufficiently complex natural process is indistinguishable from intelligent intent. After all, how do we know a smart person from a dumb one? In our ability to predict, or at least understand, their behavior. Any ordinary citizen can outthink the average dog. Cats are another matter. It's easy and convenient to ascribe malicious desires to inanimate but convoluted technoheaps sullenly refusing to behave as they ought -- the Loneliest Repairman In Town loves company. Anthropomorphism is the curse or blessing of human sensibility, depending on who you ask.

Enter (with sistrums and incense) the Intelligent Design guys. For all their long, witty and densely reasoned arguments, what they contend boils down to "If I can't understand it, it must be God," "God" meaning "Something that thinks like me, only more." But their assertion that the miraculously complex structures of life are far too integrated to be the results of "mere" chance is easily embraced by the most ardent Darwinist. After all, Darwin spent a goodly number of years and set a lot of quill to foolscap reasoning out the web of natural processes that contribute to the speciation of life, each process with its own set of contendable, disprovable principles of action within a rigid framework of probability. Hardly mere, this chance.

But -- design? The outcome of the evolutionary process, life in all its liveliness, is sho nuff multifarious, all right. In and of itself, that shows forth a buttload of organized information exchanged between innumerable nodes. Design, on the other hand, may be distinguished by its absence, and there are plenty of examples of inefficiency, waste and heedless cruelty (by our puny human standards) in the natural world to countermand any contentions of an actual Architect being involved. It is the very incomplete character of creation that lends the most credence to the evolutionary camp and the least to the God Did It I Believe It That Settles It side.

Or as the urologist told my mother (now there's a fat setup line...), "If I was God, I coulda designed a helluva better plumbing system!"

6/7/04

Wha? Good gollywogs, it must be three in the morning. What brings you here pounding on my door?

Madam Zuzu, something terrible is happening!

Nothing terrible is happening, young man, just relax already. C'mon, come in out of the hurricane. I'll fix you a nice cup tea.

Thank you.

You're entirely welcome. Now what's troubling you, anyway?

Madam Zuzu, I read on the Internet that the world is coming to an end.

Really? News to me, junior. I been monitoring the deeps of time and the hubcaps of history and I ain't heard jack about any eschatonic events. Just the same old same old, millions for defense but not one cent for charity, y'know? So what did you see?

It was some Australian astronomer, he said we're about to enter a huge cosmic dustcloud and the Earth will be bombarded with millions of meteors and all life will be wiped out!

Calm down, calm down, here, lemme wipe your chin. You shouldn't be worried about that, dearie.

No?

En-oh. It's a hoax. Somebody just pulling everyone's chain to see who'd start biting the bars. I read it on the Internet. Besides, you got lots more important things to worry about.

Really.

Oh, absolutely. F'rinstance, you know those big supercolliders they're building in Europe? We ain't got any, we're too stingy. But some of the scientists working with them are worried that we could create some weird particle nobody's ever seen that would eat up the world like a little kid with an ice cream cone. Or else make a black hole -- same deal there. Or Nibiru -- you hip to Nibiru? Tenth planet, nobody's ever really seen it, super huge, real eccentric orbit. Observed by ancient Sumerians and stuff. Lotta people think it's overdue to come tearing through the solar system and mess us up but good, rip comets outta the Oort Cloud and send them crashing into everything.

Good -- God.

Oh, that's just rank speculation, there's stuff they're really sure of, like when a local star goes nova and puts out a gamma ray burst that fries every habitable planet within a hundred light years or so. Could have one of those anytime. Or the Dark Force. You know about the Dark Force?

No, and I don't want to.

I thought everybody knew about the Dark Force. See, the whole universe is getting torn apart by this --

Well, never mind that. Cosmic forces are beyond our control. At least people are trying to be more mindful of their own duties.

Dunno about that. You hear about the time the Russkies almost launched WW III? Back in '83. Height of the Cold War. They had a big mainframe, nothing to do but warn em about incoming threats. Starts putting out alarms bigtime, outta the air. Missile on the way. Then another. Then another. One lieutenant in their missile corps had it together, guy name of Petrov. He just refused to believe the computer, couldn't see an attack coming one missile at a time. Wouldn't push The Button. Turned out he was right of course, the computer was malfunctioning, just a glitch in the software. Funny thing was, he wasn't even supposed to be on duty that night.

So what happened to Petrov?

Superiors decided they couldn't trust him. He got demoted, career busted, ended up retired in poverty. I think the city of San Francisco gave him a medal and like a thousand dollars -- little thank you gift for saving the world, y'know? And don't think the US of A was any better -- we nearly launched once because a flock of geese overflew a radar station. Another time --

But there must be some progress being made. Science keeps making these advances all the time.

Science, schmience. Those guys are worse than rogue black holes. Take nanotech -- please. Little tiny machines all linked and working together, capable of building things from the basic atoms and molecules right on up. But imagine the trouble when something the size of a germ that can live on air and sunshine gets the notion to start chewing up concrete or dissolving petrochemicals back into carbon dioxide and water. Oh, self-replicating, too. Or maybe one of those supercolliders will punch a hole in the quantum vacuum and blow up the universe. Or they could come up with a mutated germ that'll kill us all but leave the rest of the ecosphere alone. That'd be nice.

I -- uh --

Cat gotcher tongue, dearie? Have some more tea. You know what, though? It's all moot. We got the biggest time bomb in history waiting right here in the American west. You know about caldera volcanoes? Make regular volcanoes look like roman candles beside a nuke. One theory going round is that was what did in the dinosaurs. Biggest one in the world is right in the middle of Yellowstone Park. It goes, the whole West is shredville. Then the climate change from all the gas and dust puts us into a new ice age and it's bye bye humanity, dude. And the best part? The geologists say Yellowstone goes off about every 600,000 years, and the last time it did its thing was 640,000 years ago. It's overdue.

You enjoy this, don't you?

Always give the customer what they want, that's my motto. Look, don't worry. Life is short but the days are long, y'know? You start to get really freaked out, go do a hundred situps. That'll take your mind off your troubles.

But what about the future? What do you see?

I see a definite buyer's market in used computers, sweetie. Stick the payment in the slot on your way out, will you? Nighty night.

(Note: the bulk of the Awful Possibilities mentioned herein come courtesy of the thoroughly delightful website Exit Mundi [http://www.xs4all.nl/~mke/exitmundi.htm] Take a visit and get really freaked out!)