7/28/02

If I had a tombstone, I'd want it to be as flamboyant as possible, filigreed and curlygewed to the max, maybe with lil angels and such, built in vases for fresh cut flowers, neon lights, perhaps a porta-potty, certainly with as many religious symbols as could be located, from swastikas (right handed, please) to mogan davids, wheels to crosses, incomprehensible squiggles to inconceivable mathematical formulas (the Maxwell Field Equations, say).

And right in the middle, in the most rococco font imaginable, my epigram, the absolute pinnicle of my fell and dread wisdom, The Thaddeus Principle: "The More You Know, The Less You Know."

And right next to it, another tombstone: Here lies understanding; died: circa 1998; age: just about 10,000; cause of death: drowned.

It's been said by more than one historian that Leonardo DaVinci was the last man to live who was reasonably acquainted with everything that was known in his time. Indeed, the appellation "Renaissance man" has exactly this connotation. Even Leonardo, though, couldn't have been but so knowledgable about, say, politics of Silk Road trade disputes or the inner mechanations of the Church (which Church? Duh, there was only one).

Human minds, even extraordinary ones, have limits. And those limits, while enormous from our point of view (remember the clothes you wore on your first day of school?), are nothing compared to the information hanging out in say, the blackberry bush in the vacant lot down the street -- if you get down to even the cellular, let alone the atomic, level.

Intelligence isn't measured by sheer info content, thank the Lady -- it's downright mortifying to be told you aren't even as smart as the local briar patch. The way the info hooks up in the processing system is the real vinegar in the sponge. And while the blackberry bush is just gushing over with facts, their interconnections are relatively static -- just enough stuff moving around to make the bush bush. Shoot, we do that and talk too!

The real Everests of our information landscapes are those structures within our hideously complicated societies which are themselves repositories and manipulators of ideas. Even a couple guys arguing in a bar constitutes a frame of reference considerably larger than either of the two individually. Add a kibitser and things get completely out of hand. Put it on the Internet with millions joining in and you've got a system so energetic and complex that it serves as its own most succinct description. In other words, the briar may not be smarter than you, but the Web is.

This is nothing new. People have been feeling outsmarted by their machines for years, though most of the time it's an illusion -- a car that won't start isn't any smarter than a rock that seems to grow bigger the farther you dig under it, just more complicated -- but now and then it's true. Your computer really is smarter than you are, some ways -- mostly stupid ways, but you can't deny that something that can multiply two 16 digit numbers whilst you blink has to have something on the ball. But that's no surprise when you consider how many really really smart people were involved in making that computer. And despite any indications to the contrary, people still hold trump -- they can always pull the plug.

It is, however, much more difficult to pull the plug on, say, Microsoft -- just ask them gov't regulators. Corporations, networks, systems of organized point of view, all have that quality of intermingling with their environments that Gregory Bateson identified in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. TV shows don't end where your mind begins, and when you turn off the news, you're being turned off too.

We are in fact becoming the subsets of huge intelligent entities entirely beyond our comprehension or control, critters both vitally important to our jacked-up way of life and insanely prone to violently antihumane actions (sixpack of Pinto anybody?) Despite the fact that we ourselves gave birth to these humongosauruses, they've evolved past our understanding, swallowed us whole and gone on their merry way.

But in these same megafauna, many experts say, lies the last best hope of our eventually regaining some measure of control or even understanding of the infoworld we've spawned so offhandedly. If our own meat machines aren't able to do the job, maybe we can build one that is. A few more iterations of Moore's Law, a touch of 21st century mathematics and hey presto: Jack the Giant Killer 1.0.

That's the optimistic view. The pessimistic view holds that above a certain level of complexity, intelligent systems simply cannot be predicted or controlled at all. After all, consider: how well could you second guess your mother? And that's a mere schmere mortal. If that's the case, the only news you can use is what the captain told you that time: We are encountering an area of turbulence. Please fasten your seatbelts.


7/18/02

"I went to the animal fair/the birds and the beasts were there..."

Hully gully, we went to the Oregon Country Fair, and the beasties were indeed manifest and varied. Fairs are as old as humankind, o'course, probly right back to the Big Cro-Magnon/Neaderthal Trade Shows of yore's yore. But OCF is to your garden variety Mayfair County Exhibition as an all night rave in the south seas is to Auntie Clothida's tea party.

It's not really something that can be put down in words. I've attended roughly ten Fairs in the last twenty eight or so years and words continue to be irrelevant to the experience. So-o-o, let's roll those pictures!

*******

Ho kay, honey, just dim those lights. No dear, it's the one by the fridge, you know that. Ha ha! Well folks, it's showtime! We've got the slides and the projector and the screen, and by golly, now there's an audience too! Don't try the back door, Jimbo, it's locked. Just sit right down now... Lotsa beer in the fridge, chips and dips are right here. Just settle back and enjoy. Okay, maybe enjoy is too strong a word...

Here we are, all packed up and ready to go. It's vacation time, and we're just rarin' to go. Now I'd show you the slides from the first drive, but they all came out dark. We drove all night, yup, and here's S arriving in Klamath Falls Oregon.

Had just the loveliest time performing down at the Mood Swing -- sorry, all those pictures are dark too. But Ron and Pam down there treated us just swell and the audience laughed at all the jokes, even the weird ones. This in a town where the radio stations play both kinds of music, which here means country and Christian, ha ha! Hot, too -- it was so hot the air conditioner froze. I guess you had to be there...

So then we went rolling back up through the Central Oregon State Blast Furnace Area to Eugene, where the signs of the infamous Oregon Country Fair were already in evidence. Out to the fair site in beautiful Veneta, a town where the signage tells it like it is,



got all our passes in order -- scary, huh? They say the camera never lies...

More signs of encroaching hippies coming out of the hills and vales to gather and do all the simple, peaceful things they love to do like take drugs and hump in the bushes. Just kidding! Why, didn't you know that OCF is officially a drug free, family friendly event? Says so right in their literature.



So, what do you see at Country Fair? Why, people, o' course! Ooops, wrong slide. There we go, people! Lots and lots of em! Ooodles and gobs and heaps and piles!




And not just human people, either -- there's friendly mythological critters, too! Oh, and crafts, mustn't forget the crafts. Lifeblood of the fair, that and hairweavers.









And entertainment! Boy do they have entertainment, not even counting us! Famous acts and stuff! I hear tell this guy makes his living playing kitchen utensils. Beat that! So to speak...

Now with all this excitement going on, you might want to find a quiet corner, or even take a leetle snooze.









But snooze and you lose, y'know! They've got a big show going on! With a band and everything! Don't aks me what it's about, something about cowboy lips and ay-rabs (I think that's canuck for Arab) and a silent movie that's a musical and a director who can't speak American and a producer who's trying to lose money and, oh heck, I think maybe the guy who wrote it was just a little spangled, if you take my meaning.

So there's heros trying to rescue distressed damsels and lotta jokes I didn't get and no matter how hard you pray it just keeps going on to the big finale when everyone sings about how cowboys and Arabs should be friends, which is about the goofiest thing I ever heard except for that march they all played when they came in.

And then we -- what the heck? Honey, get the lights. Shoot, the projector's overheated again. Stop applauding, Jimbo, or I'll make you walk the dog. I mean it, boy!

*******

Oh yeah, we were there too.

I'll probably have something more reflective and literary for you later, but I'm still blitzed by my relaxing vacation...


7/8/02

"Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!"
--The Books of Bokonon, 1:1
(foma: harmless lies)

Song ideas are where you find them. But sometimes even good ones are better off left unwritten. I recently had the inspiration to do a musical version of the wisdom of Bokonon, Kurt Vonnegut's cynical guru from Cat's Cradle, and his "useful religion ... founded on lies." After all, Bokonon "invites us to sing along with him," and I've been having a run of semi-cynical, semi-hopeful material of late, mostly in the form of subversive kid's tunes. I'd come up with a great little calypso chorus, "Sing along/with Bo-ko-non/you'll always be happy if you sing his song."

But upon cracking the book for the first time in years to check the accuracy of my verses, I was dissuaded. Vonnegut wasn't content with just inventing a religion, he had to blow up the world with it. I remember being fourteen and pimply and horribly self-conscious and walking around in a soul-twisted funk for weeks after reading the description of the "Great Ah-Whoom" of ice-9's application to, um, that would be everything.

One truth of any religious practice is that spirituality has magickal ramifications -- and vice-versa, of course. Religion and Magick share a relationship not dissimilar to Science and Technology, with Religion thinking the high thoughts and working out the first principles and Magick scuttling about in the rear picking through the results for things that can be used for something.

Magickians are frequently more reverent than their religious brethren. They have to be. They've got more at stake. I've always been careful to keep a straight face and an open heart at anyone's ceremony. And Bokononism has a lot to be said for it -- it's witty, deep without being obnoxiously obscure, and just a little bit bratty. But venerating a religion intimately tied with a comic nightmare vision of the destruction of the biosphere by misplaced technology struck me as a bit like playing Russian roulette with a gun you picked up in the street. I quietly tabled the song, great little chorus and all. Rats.

This is a classic occupational hazard of spiritual engineering: magick really works, and it doesn't care what orthodoxy you use. You can make up a religion out of the clear blue sky and your grampa's storebought teeth and if you put the hoohoo into it, you'll get results. Magick is the result of the magickian, not the system. This leaves the conscientious G-dworker in the bind of having to take all kinds of crap seriously, even crap that refuses to take itself seriously, even crap that proclaims its own crappiness to the heavens and the earth, as Vonnegut's does. In truth, there's a whole tradition of Trickster spirituality (and magick) built around lying, cheating, joking, sneaky-ass deities. (Just in case You're listening, Coyote, I mean that in a good way).

Most people, it would seem, don't have this problem -- for them, magick is something that happens to someone else, not unlike muggings and traffic accidents and sex. For these folks, even broaching the notion of unseen forces directed by the focused will is enough to send them into a veritable grand mal seizure of hilarity. They're entitled to their opinion, and they're probably protected by it.

For the practitioner, however, burying your head in the sand is not an option. It only takes a few unexpected results of offhand remarks or a misplaced joke to rein in even the most irresponsible sorcerer -- if it doesn't spread him all over the landscape first. But responsibility also brings protection. If the magick is the product of the magickian, then it would be a safe assumption that what he says goes. So I do my part to decide on things, state them clearly and firmly, and just go on about my business from there.

I've begun to worry, however, that the accreted momentum of the system itself is big and bold enough to provide unexpected consequences to even the least of my decisions. Take, f'rinstance, my involvement with klezmer, the soundtrack of the Jewish diaspora. It's been in my ears in various roundabout ways since childhood, from folk music records and a misordered set of children's stories by the great Mickey Katz and any number of wacky cartoon bed tracks. When I was presented with the opportunity to play along with some real klezmorim, I jumped at it, discovering that klez was one of those most admirable things, a trombone-specific style. I learned a yiddish word, trombonick, a person who behaves like an itinerant musician, who perhaps eats and drinks to excess and is boisterous and blows his own horn a little too loud -- on your dime. Honey! I'm home!

But when you start playing cultural music, you're not just playing music. Not if you're a magickian, noooooo. John Cage, the post-everything 20th century composer, was keen on throwing the I Ching as a creative aid, but he gave it up. He said the danger of using the I Ching too much was that eventually it turned you into a Taoist. Klezmer is based in part on tunes and modes thousands of years old, sonic baggage that the Yiddish people carried right along with the Torah and the Talmud and the Kabbala. It reflects the society, the beliefs, the hopes and dreams of the scattered descendants of the Children of Israel. One of the songs the band I'm in does is an old lament hoping for the coming of the Meshiach bin Dovid -- the Messiah, the Son of David, the great king/hero who will free the Jews from bondage in foreign lands and bring back the Kingdom of Israel in all its ancient glory, who will judge the wicked and lift up the oppressed and rule the whole world from a throne of gold in the heart of Jerusalem. They've been waiting for this guy since the first time Israel was overrun and all the Jews driven into exile, long about 600 BC. That's right, the quaint old wive's tale that inspired that weird splinter sect, Christianity. Only one of the most influential and disruptive religious beliefs in history. And here's Thaddie the trombonick happily blatting along with this cryptopolitic frufru. Sheesh!

It didn't help at all that mere months after I started playing it, 9/11 came along with that happy happy statement, "We are all Israelis now."

Out of the endless possible worlds of the Multiverse we come to reside and observe in the one we choose toward or happen upon. All our thoughts and actions, mild or wild, contribute to this. That's how Magick works -- not unlike the perception that in the presence of gravity, light goes straight and space bends, when a magickian goes to work to change the universe, he actually moves himself towards the universe in which his required result occurs. I like klez just fine, thanks. I'm enjoying learning some yiddish, too. But I have no innerest at all in winding up in the world line where the aspirations of messianic Jews becomes a driving force in world politics. Oops, too late -- I already have.

What to do? Give up an innocent and delightful passtime for the sake of my superstitious instincts, or ignore my core beliefs and risk becoming an unpaid extra in the Drama To End All Dramas?

Wa-a-a-ait a second! Who's in charge here, anyways? Am I gonna be run around Robin Hood's barn by a bunch of dusty old texts in some weird foreign language? Am I gonna let a minority belief from a dinky-ass religion tell me what to do? Me, the mighty mighty T Spae, Gazette and All? Next I'll be worrying that singing "Silent Night" is gonna bring on the Apocalypse of St. John. like my pal Joannie says, get a grip!

Okay, listen up, universe. This is Thaddeus talking! I'm gonna keep right on playing klezmer and enjoying it, and it's not going to make the whole world blow up. It's not, it's not, it's not. So there, too.

But I'm still not writing the Bokonon song.

"Live by the foma that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy." op. cit., 1:5


7/1/02

When people ask me what I do for a living, I generally start on my left little finger and work my way over. Musician, composer, songwriter, entertainer, graphic designer (shift to right) -- oh yeah, and I also do construction.

The sad truth is that I can make more money in four or five days of concentrated woodbutcher work than I can in two weeks playing a wonky hotel gig. And there's a lot more of it. While the profession of musician is rapidly being subsumed by the twin threshers of automation and commercial vertical monopoly, there's still no substitute for skilled labor when it comes to studding a wall or tearing out rain damaged sheetrock.

This past week has been a dreadful glory of wriggling through mucky crawlspaces to replace rotted out joists and shore up sagging beams, applying fell instruments of destruction to disintegrating siding, lifting oh-so-gently whole sides of a house with a bottle jack intended for mere automotive applications. What the heck, it pays the bills. It also gives me a sense of maleness that I often lack, a desire to smoke Camel straights and get something interesting tattooed on my shoulder. Not to mention a godzillion aches and pains to entertain me through the short dark nights of summer.

Moreover, if it wasn't for my construction experience, I'd never have the nerve to pull some of the wilder stuff I've done to my own dwelling. Usually it's the contractors house that needs the most repair, like the proverbial housekeeper's messy abode, but I manage to avoid honest labor enough that my punctuated descents into the depths of house deouching don't deprive me of my innate ambition to trick out my little West Seattle bungalow (read: cheesebox). In the nearly five years we've lived here, I've personally added a porch and awning, a fence, an arbor and a pile of interior remodeling.

It took me a bit of windup to start tearing out internal walls in my own house. One truth of any remodel is that you'll have to stop living in your old home to move into the new one, and habits are hard to break. It required removing enough of the familiar furnishings from the space to render it neutral to disarm the must-protect-cave reflex. I was mildly amazed at how hard I clung to the old inadequate floor plan, just because I was used to it.

Last week I was faced with the same caveman, with three of his buddies and a woolly mammoth at his back.

I embarked on another ambitious project this winter, a deck on the back of the house with a sliding glass door into the new improved bedroom suite. After some financial delays, I finished the deck last month and was ready to go find a door. This wasn't a new thing for me -- a couple years back I put a slider on Sandahbeth's garage studio, a nice little six footer I found in a scrap yard about twenty miles away. But this time I didn't have my sister's pickup truck to bring it home, and I was concerned about the distance I'd have to travel with a huge ungainly breakable strapped to the roof of my wee little Mazda hatchback.

Then I found a used building materials place right down the hill, a place where lovely old antique and surplus house parts went to be reassigned. I scouted the prices and went back for Sandahbeth, my good right arm in all matters relating to design. She rolled about happily, admiring the ten foot tall church fixtures and such, until she found The Window.

The Window was a ten foot by seven foot sliding glass door/glass panel combination, double-paned, like new and used only enough to ensure that all the screw holes lined up, and on sale for about a seventh of its retail value. It was huge. It was gorgeous. S was in love. I was in mortal terror.

There was just barely (and we're talking centerfold here) room to geesh this benign giant into our lives, but it was obviously exactly what we wanted. The entirety of our back yard is a florid mass of red cedars flanked by douglas firs, and this window would in effect put our bedroom directly into the canopy. The only catch was that I had to CUT OPEN THE ENTIRE OUTER WALL OF MY BEDROOM. YARRGH!!

It took me three days to summon the nerve to commit to the project. I measured, remeasured, re-remeasured. I consulted books. I consulted experts. I consulted friends. I drew pictures. I sweated type A negative. And finally I went back to the yard and slapped plastic. It was clobbering time.

The Window turned out to be fairly easy to transport -- the one I purchased was broken down into convenient single panels that only weighed about two hundred pounds apiece. No problemo! The yard gal and I heaved them up on the roof rack my neighbor loaned me and I tenderly ferried them one by one the two miles back to my house, where I loaded them on a handtruck and dollied them around the side of the house to the bottom of the wheelchair ramp to the deck.

Then I pulled out the trusty saws-all (Mjolnir of the remodeler) and went to work. By the end of two days, the side of my bedroom was a gaping maw, my roof supported by an interior prop. Then I rigged the 10' 4x10 spanning beam. I had to build it in like a sandwich, a 2x10, then a slice of half-inch plywood, then another 2x10 -- it was the only way I could handle the lumber myself. After the beam was up and the prop was down, I mopped up the dust and debris and took a break.

The effect of having the entire side of the room gone was uncanny. It was like one of those cheap sci-fi movies from the fifties where they used rear-projection screens or cheesy matting to simulate the outside. "Captain! Look! We've landed on the Planet of the Giant Decorated Horned Toads!" "Yes, Lieutenant, I can see that!" "Growrr! Eyarr!" The vision of verdant foliage outside the room made no sense. Had we somehow landed on the Planet of the Cedar Trees? At least the natives were friendly.

Sonically, too, the Hole Where My Wall Disappeared was notable. A feature of our house is its proximity to a ravine with the Puget Creek riparian corridor (that's a streambed to you) at the bottom. This natural amphitheater creates 3D sound fields that a recording engineer would sell his soul to Danelectro to replicate, and our local songbird population does its best to take advantage of it. Now, with the puny transom window replaced by a 11' x 8' aperture, the dawn chorus was worth setting the alarm to catch -- not that you needed to.

It was an object lesson in fuzzy logic. By removing the barrier between Chickadee Glen and my bedroom, I'd managed to put the woods slightly inside the house, say 10% or so, and certainly aspects of it, like mosquitoes and bits of tree and bird calls, were even more invasive. Drawing the line between my domicile and the outdoors was a tad complicated, which is exactly the way I like it.

That effect has persisted with the final installation of the window itself, a process that required extra pairs of hands (thanks and a tip of the Thaddeo hat to Steve 'n' Kristi) to help boost the panels into the frame. With the dividing quality of the structure to enclose our room, the viziscreen nature of the opening is diminished -- oh, of course, that's a window, there's things outside. But the screen door is very effective at straining at gnats while admitting the sounds and smells of our vegetable neighborhood, so the ambiguous environment is still in evidence.

Needless to say, we love it. One of our comforts in the years we spent rambling and scrambling about in vans and trailers was the places our living quarters could go. "The room itself isn't so large," went the cliche,"but check out the back yard." Our bedroom window had looked out at towering redwoods, the free beach at Orick, the Grand Canyon, the Oregon Country Fair, even my mother-in-law's house. Since we acceded to the vagaries of society and put down such roots as we could, the view from the bed has been somewhat diminished. Now, however, there's enough sheer quantity of it, of a high enough quality, that we can once more claim bragging rights. And it's a great diversion from the television.