8/29/05

But my friends, I've been refreshed, restored to vitality. I have found the shining truth, the great devotional dinner-plate of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Oh, happy day!

Brevity is the soul of wit, so I'll be brief. A recent web fad, the FSM is the offspring of the twisted mind of one Bobby Henderson, a Pacific Northwesterner (of course) who, in between looking for work, sent an open letter to the Kansas School Board, that august supervisory body that recently approved a science curriculum "critical" of Darwinism, describing his belief that the entire world was created by this pasta deity, and demanding that, purely in the interest of fairness (of course!), these religious viewpoints be presented along with those of the Intelligent Design mob as alternatives to evolutionary science.

The school board answered in varying shades of nervous noncommitment or semisympathetic amusement. But the internet world exploded, simply exploded, with responses. FSM artwork, bumperstickers, even hymns, appeared as if by magic. The new religion, termed "pastafarianism" by its practitioners, looks to be headed for wild success and at least a modicum of evangelical activity. Even a rival splinter sect has appeared, denouncing it as heretical and proclaiming itself as the only real truth. How much more successful can a religion get?

As a spiritual philosopher, I myself have no quarrel at all with a faith professing that subatomic interactions are mitigated by the touch of His Noodly Appendage, or that global warming has contributed to the decline of pirates in the world (with charts to prove it, even). It's refreshing to see such imaginative, nay inspired, beliefs being promulgated, truly a renaissance of spiritual literature. And I'm delighted that somebody has finally decided to fashion such a nice gooey cream pie to fling in the face of every fat fool with a horse in this donkey derby.

Any attempt at rational discourse regarding the field of evolutionary biology vis a vis Christian literalism inevitably devolves into inelegant name-calling. Communication, such as it is, is swallowed in lame-brained squabbles better suited to a grade school playground than a discussion of educational policy. Common courtesy and adult manners fly screaming in fear out the nearest window when stalwart knights of the causes rev up the rotating ventilation apparatus. It's enough to make a civilized man cry, or invent entirely new classes of high-energy weaponry to dissolve the entire yapping pack of curs into blissful silence.

This ungainly buhaha isn't exclusively the province of the god vrs. mod debate -- it's more an outgrowth of the similarity between scientific and religious rhetorical techniques.

Science is dedicated to discovering what is true -- not big-t Truth Eternal And Triumphant, just what can be known through observation and experiment. In the pursuit of this only-somewhat arrogant end, ideas, hypotheses and whole bodies of conclusion are set up in positions of authority, as in "pretty much settled as true unless something really weird comes along to change it." The only real authority, though, is reality itself -- anytime some particularly cherished theory gets its pretty pink bow rudely yanked off by some inconvenient fact, no amount of crying from its legions of supporters will save it from being summarily trashed in favor of whatever ugly urchin of explanation slouches in to displace it.

Science, however, is the stepchild of philosophy, which itself sprang from the great and ancient traditions of religious discourse and debate. As such, it takes many of the logical and expository techniques of those schools of thought as tools to its own end. Problem is, those tools weren't originally designed for that job. Back in those days, religion was politics, alias war by other means, and rhetoric was a means of converting others to your point of view, of winning arguments, of conversion. For a powerseeker, then as now, truth was an inconvenience, a lip-service elder to smother with the nearest pillow when its utility ran out.

These two world views really start smacking heads when an old-school rhetorician mixes it up with a rationalist. Since neither side admits to the other's rules, it's a game of checkers played with a chess set, and if you can't crown a queen, why can you jump a rook? As the absurdity mounts and the meaning of the words "theory" and "proof" are stretched like silly putty, all semblence of interchange of ideas flushes gaily down the loo and you're left with pretty much the clusterfuck you see in every online forum or newspaper letters column whenever the subject comes up.

Ultimately, a nice healthy hotfoot to the shoes of all concerned parties is the only refuge for the beleaguered noncombatant in the entire shellholed landscape of this argument. Scientists and creationists alike have given up attempting to, like, you know, talk to one another, let alone actually reason, and are resorting to shouting each other down, a War of the Bullhorns that can only end badly for both sides no matter who carries the field. In such a soured barrel of wine, the Flying Spaghetti Monster may well be our one hope, the Higher Truth that can bring about a miracle of reconciliation between joyless prudish science and equally joyless, equivalently prudish and probably stupider religion.

If His Mighty Starchy Presence can perform such, let no one say that no good ever came from nonsense. May the sins of overblown self-righteousness be mitigated in the warm, vaguely squishy embrace of mystic Noodlyness. Ramen, brothers and sisters, ramen!

8/22/05

The answer, as it turns out, is as elegant as it is improbable: the webpage of Popular Science. Yes, that Popular Science, as in "There's rocket science and then there's popular science." Sometime in the fairly recent past PopSci got itself one megabooby of an attitude injection and hired on what they bill on the masthead as a Contributing Troubador, a New York software engineer (and former college music major and choir singer) name of Jonathan Coulton.

Coulton was commissioned by the rag to pump out a soundtrack for a string of articles loosely examining (there's precious few other varieties of examination in PopSci) man's potential evolution through technobiological innovation. The five features ranged from DNA analysis to exogenesis to transhumanism, and the intrepid tunesmith had to come up with a song for each.

The results are good. Really good. Really really good. They're nicely produced, with a style reminiscent of early 90's alt pop and a tittle of folk, tunefully composed and assuredly arranged. Better than that, they're funny, both superficially in the glibness of phrase and rhyme scheme plus the tone of both deep respect for and subtle amusement at his subject matter, and with the deeply embedded, keenly barbed hook of melancholy that presages more at work behind the haha curtain than just a bald-headed guy with a bunch of levers. And to top it off, Mr. Coulton is also a seriously sick and twisted individual, capable of being spoken of in the same breath as such masters of that realm as Gary Larson. One of his songs imagines a future milquetoast nebbish who, menaced by his robotic butler, goes out to the cyborg store and picks up some heavy business:

My right arm is a smasher like the trunk of a tree and the left one's a saw
I cut the couch in half and I smash the TV with my big smashy claw He's standing still and silent, I can't tell what he's thinking
He blinks a single glowing red eye
So I give him a shove and then Todd starts to cry...

The dude rawks. Shreds, also.

The material grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to the fine artiste's own website, where I found that, more than just a chronicler of matters scientific and/or smashy, Coulton was also capable of tender romantic narrations (involving a deranged homicidal genius with an associate named Scarface) and optimistic meditations on the perfectibility of man (helped along by chaos theory). I downloaded furiously.

Like all cyberentrepeneurs, his site was well-seeded with stoic but empassioned entreaties for recompense for the goodies there available (nothing wrong with that) (ahem). So instead of just walking away with my digital loot, I fashioned an email:

Dude:

I'm not gonna tell you how you rock and rule and all, cause you hear that from all the girls. And I'm not a girl. At least, last time I checked. I will say that "Mandelbrot Set" is the finest song on esoteric mathematics since Tom Lehrer's standard-setting "Lobachevsky,". and a damn sight more optimistic into the bargain.

But in total opposition to the commodity market system under whose yoke and lash we now endure our mizzable existences, I wanna recompense you for the four songs I downloaded mp3's of from your website by sending you my most recent personally-constructed CD (which has 14 songs on it, so even if you discount quality there's still a certain cache to the deal). Through the depths of cyberspace and such, I sense a kindred spirit. Though I could be dead wrong about that -- none of my songs feature robots, genetic material, doomsday squads or reflective fetuses.

Still, I'd rather pay you in barter than give 3/4s of whatever insignificant sum I pay for ethereal info to some pudgy middleman who probably wouldn't know a giant squid from a mandelbrot set if they both fell on him from a great height. So gimme a snailmail address (eyew, snail mail...) and I'll pop it out to you. A postbox. Your uncle clyde. Anything.

Thanks.

egards,

t spae

tspae.com

And lo and behind, the Eminence wrote back:

t,

Thank you for your kind words - I'm glad you like the music enough to offer up your own in return. It certainly seems like a fair deal. I took a look at your website, and from that it seems like you might be a crazy person, or at least a free spirit. Either of which is fine. As long as this CD contains a whiff of banjo uke and at least a hint of sruti, it will be well worth it. Especially if we make the middleman cry, or at least take pause.

You can mail me at:

[deleted]

Please do not stalk me. Thanks for writing,

-j

Mindful of his desires, out went a copy of the El Mosquito Orchestra's masterpiece, Cheap At Twice The Price. And all was well.

Now this is what the web is all about -- an abundance of opportunities for the poor lost crazy people or free spirits of the world to track one another down and force CD's down each other's gullets. God, I love the future!

Oh, and sir? Please don't worry about any stalking. I'd never do that.

Although you might receive a visit from my dear friend Igor...

8/15/05

**********

Greetings Pod-Brethren of the Z'Tz Invasion Force,

Are we not proud? Do we not stand in papal fusion, rigorously at attention, our scent-polyps in concord? What then can stand against us? We who are the mightiest of the mighty! The slimiest of the slimy! The Very Essence Of Great Swamp Z'Tz'T'z!

At ease, great mucous hord! Our report commences:

New reports from our Penetration Staff indicate a suffused ratio of over 1%. That's up a good .003% from last century, clearly an indication that the dry ones are losing their pitiful struggle for dominance. Soon, when saturation is reached, the Great Mold will be ready to sweep across continent and ocean, embracing all corners of the globe in a loving Slime embrace. We shall be triumphant!

Technological Division reports new advances in penetration methods, including viral and pseudoalial genetic injection and mitachondrial subversion, aiding in our inevitable victory. Glorious Slime scientists predict rapid assimilation when these new methods are perfected. The Great Mold comes!

Attend, oh Pod-Brethren! We view the site of our future triumph, this spacious globe with its disgusting land and sea divisions, its infestations of dull dry vermin. How glorious our imaginitive cognition, how splendid our reconstruction of the bifurcated ecology that is to be, our reimmersion of the pitifully separated states of matter into a sacred colloidal Whole, Slime One and United! Stretch forth your polyps, Brethren! Release victorious odors!

From beyond the atmosphere, our glorious Mucous Warriors tell of vast delvings in this planet's satellite, cleverly disguised and hidden from the prying machines of the feeble, witless dry ones, their fears of discovery due to inevitable ice pollution at the poles assuaged. The dry ones suspect nothing! No trace of our interdimensional palpitation beams are detectable by their primitive shriveled sensors. With dazed and animal-like complacency they desiccate in their feeble civilization, dusty and unknowing.

Attend now to the message of our glorious Swamp Z'Tz'T'z! The Supreme Slime greets you in unbounded adhesive love, unbounded wetshiney glory! All Pod-Brethren are commended for their steadfast attention to the details of concealment, of punctilious maintainence of dry appearance, of disciplined restraint from public syzygy. We applaud your dedication! Truly your alials shall be blessed in the Great Mold that is to come. All Slime shall hail the triumph that is the work of Pod-Brethren, of...

Hold it. Wait a minute.

This is the Thaddeus Gazette?

Oh -- never mind.

8/8/05

I was rapping with/at S on the trip down to a Chautauqua benefit about a line I used a lot last fall in regards farmers market food: honor the gift. The idea was that everything has innate giving, stuff it does freely, without motivation or desire. The fruit tree gives fruit out of its nature, the artist creates works out of their nature and so on. No profit or trade motives. This is the gift to be honored, and the honor given it is to recognize its desireless nature, thus treating it with respect.

For the food the farmers donated to us, the honoring was simple: eat it, process and store it, give it away to friends or food banks or the birds or something. But the farmers were very generous, and despite my best efforts, some of the food simply died before it was used.

I've also tried to be receptive to the gift of fruit from plum trees In our own back yard, canning a few zillion jars of Golden Summer Plum Butter, Chickadee Glen Plum Chutney, Sunny Skies Plum Preserves. After five years, I've acquired quite a collection. The stores go up and down, but there's always many more than I could ever consume or fob off on chance visitors.

The practice could be said to extend to my entire life. By choosing to live outside the conventions of commerce and competition, I've tried to honor the first gift, the gift of eyes to see and a body to walk around in, of a world of light and color, physics, chemistry, existence and meaning and story.

But I've put most of myself into being a part of a couple, put it ahead of any and everything else. Romantic twaddle, perhaps, but it's the defining narrative of my adulthood. Since S has become disabled, I've committed to a routine of breadwinning, caregiving and enforced-poverty economic compensating and improvising that by all accounts is the ruination of the Life of the Mind. Most of the young artists I knew when I was young myself were convinced that art and marriage weren't compatible. I didn't exactly set out to prove them wrong -- it was just that a lifelong partner was just as important to me as a Triumphant Artistic Career.

So am I honoring properly the gift of my own talent? And what duty have I to it? If honor and duty have connection, that is. Does it outweigh the duty I owe S?

Internally at least, I ain't no little tin saint. I keep having idiot fantasies, ruptured visions of running off with this or that fair-haired alternative to mortgage schleping and unpaid nursing and the endless prognosis delay. It's a guy thing, or so I'm told, nothing to be concerned about, but also nothing to pay even a microsecond's serious attention. If there's any gift I intend to honor, it's that of having found the love of my life. Perhaps my muse is just another chick I'm momentarily having the hawts for.

That romance story is getting pretty threadbare -- it's clear that the audience we had among our friends for the big Amber Tide true love infirmity drama has dribbled away to a few sympathetic murmurs and a whole lotta snores. Our troubles just aren't entertaining anymore. Drat.

Plus, there's the added energy cost of having to deal with a wheelchair every time we wanna go out and actually do something rewarding, coupled with the total lack of access in the vast majority of homes, clubs or theatrical venues. We've durn near succeeded in testing show biz alter-access to destruction, and we're starting in on civilian dwellings. The music dodge is hard enough when you can climb stairs and sleep in Volkswagens. Adding axles under the ass just about snuffs your chances completely.

Despite my best intentions, I can't help but harbor the grim notion that I've already retired from my fabulous career and just don't realize it yet, all unknowingly spending my golden years tending my sweet little invalid wifie and my sweet little housie and my sweet little side jobbies and my sweet little Sisyphean boulder. Seems something of an anticlimax. Just exactly what am I honoring here?

Which comes back to my own gifts, and my use of them. Have I really tried to can up all the plums that have fallen off my tree? No, not hardly -- even when I wasn't busy being a saint, I've been far too prolix and far too distracted to properly preserve more than a fraction of my output. Should I?

Ah, said the masseuse, there's the rub. Given the attention I've gotten from my audience, how much of my stuff deserves to be saved? There's a cellar full of CDs that haven't sold, a thousand songs that haven't been sung. And a mountain of other singers, as indebted to their talents as I to mine, beating each other bloody in hot pursuit of ears, any ears at all.

Will I die with bottles of Golden Summer Plum Butter rotting untasted on my shelves? Does it matter? A thousand trees shed their fruit to decay in the dust every harvest. It all goes away anyway -- how important is giving it a little temporary longevity?

It's wise for me to remember, when I morbidly contrast my semi-arid artistic life with my fine romance, that all my tragic visions of lost glory as a musician or writer or burlesque queen or whatever are partly just the manifestations of that legacy of all artists, my deep, infantile self-absorption -- congenital, chronic, incurable narcissism -- arguably my greatest character flaw as well as strength, but that my love for S is, well, love, which, I've been told by at least one authority, one of far greater eminence than I've ever had or ever hope to achieve, is all you need.

I hope so.

8/1/05

One item in a gawdy-useless-trinket rag caught my attention recently: a nickel collection. That's right, every Jefferson nickel from every year, attractively packaged yet, for only 1000% of face value, such a bargain! The eye-hook for me was the inclusion of the WWII mintings, which had a substantial amount of silver in the alloy because nickel was scarce. Two such nickels had more silver than that year's dime.

I immediately knew why nickel was in such demand. It wasn't from the ordinary war effort, although nickel was a vital and useful industrial supply in all kinds of machines. No, it was a certain quality of nickel that singled it out, a virtue of resistance to corrosion. Specifically, neutrality regarding a particularly nasty and virulent substance answering (sullenly) to the alias "hex" -- uranium hexafluoride.

In this sixtieth Year of the Bomb, most of what is remembered about its conception and incubation centers around Albert Einstein and Los Alamos. But there was more to the matter than blackboard numbers and sequestered physicists. The Bomb's main ingredient was the product of an industrial process of unprecedented intensity, gaseous diffusion. Uranium atoms came in flavors, and the variety that could actually make a bomb go boom was scarce. To sieve it out, it was necessary to dissolve uranium in hydrofluoric acid and pipe the resulting noxious greenish gas through innumerable (ie, "miles of") pipes and filters, gradually separating the minute quantity of useful U235 from the waste U238.

And every single inch of that labyrinthine plumber's nightmare was lined with nickel. Lotta history for ol' President Tom (wartime edition) to carry around.

It strikes me that a similar system has developed in the music industry over the past few decades, though blessedly free of nickel or hex. Imagine, if you dare, a huge, multifarious conglomeration of tubes and chutes and ducts and pipes, all set about with innumerable valves, diverters, t-fittings, adapters. At the tippie top, a huge feed bin. At the bottom, a dumpster. And here and there, around the edges of the spaghetti-like edifice, little ledges bearing shiny golden thrones lined with ermine pillows.

Into the tippie top, then, is flung the feed for this elephantine strainer, hopeful young (and sometimes not so young) men and women -- children, even! -- possessed of some innate talent and training, or perhaps only a mad inner conviction of their happy destiny. Down they fall, down and down and down, through random open mikes and pay-to-play showcases, cute meets with potential backers, talent scouts' offices and casting couches, recording studios, board rooms, dismal garrets and high-priced hotels. Some, a precious few, winnowed out through pluck, luck and just the right combination of looks, talent, style and slithering affability, are shunted off to their own personal perches of glory, there to reside a season as uncrowned royalty in the firmament of international stardom. For the rest, the dumpster suffices.

You will never in your life see a more wretched hive of scum and villainry. A system fraught with corruption, favoritism and prejudice, oh very yes. But at least it is a system -- an organized method of determining who shall stand and who shall fall. And with the stakes involved and the number of interested parties vying for the prize, any kind of organized sorting of the scarce resource of The Big Time is better than none, especially since, despite loud self-righteous rhetoric to the contrary, some contenders are, y'know, more deserving than others. Ain't nothing so numerous in this world as jiveass wannabes, especially and in particular and in full flaming fight to the death denial in This Business of Music.

But when dragonslayers stalk the land, dragon bones lame everyone's mount. The advent of the internet, p2p fileswapping and cheap CD duplication rendered the previous starmaker machinery rust-belt obsolete, staggering under the load of its own leftover opulence and punch-drunkenly swinging subpoenas at the air. Old and busted though it may be, it can and apparently will spend its death-throes lashing out at teh new hawtness like a blinded bear raging at mosquitoes, guarding its own increasingly vacant lair however it can.

And even with the wicked witch toes-out under Dorothy's house, nobody's come up with a replacement method of telling the supers from the dupes. It's open season for Team Wannabe, a level playing field stretching from sea to shining sea and probably out into the continental shelf as well. Everybody's got a website. Everybody's got PR. Heck, drunken beggars on street corners have multiple CD's for sale strewn about their duct-taped guitar cases. Trying to sort out mp3's online could take you the rest of your life. It's the Internet Paradox all over again, the good/bad news of bazillions of websites, without a pin's difference between the lot.

It'd be a grim joke if American Idol and its ilk turned out to be the emergent paradigm for success, image and presentation trumping substance, an eternal high school popularity contest. Just the kind of method businesspeople love, an honest politician that stays bought.

Democracy isn't coming to the music biz, it's here, it's queer, and you better get over it, young Skywalker. That and grab yourself a piece of Blasted Heath Field out there while you still have a ghost's chance of making it to the surface of the Sea of Celebrity. Hold your breath, kid, it's a long way up.