9/27/04

Gaga weather seems to be the norm rather than the exception the past few years, with floods and droughts and great hulking storms running a major circus act all over the world. Global warming? The wrath of the gods? Who knows? Around these parts, the weirdness has taken the form of altogether too much clear weather, were this possible. Four years ago emigrants from the sunny southland were commenting how the local precipitation pattern was beginning to resemble San Francisco more than the cold water rainforest they'd been led to expect. My comment was that it was bad enough that the Californians were moving in on us without them bringing their weather too.

The fun began when the plum trees in the back yard started blooming in April, a month or so early. I don't set my calendar by them, but my usual take is to start looking for the blossoms around the first of May, a local celebration of International Worker's Day or possibly Beltain. This time we were seeing International Fool's Day instead. Having exactly spit for orcharding craft or canny, despite having babysat five Italian prune trees lo these seven years, I watched the pomological erotic display in my yard with vague distress, even though I couldn't imagine any negative impact short of a late frost, which seemed about as likely as a diminutive emerald emissary from Area 51 landing on my roof and demanding audience with Dubya.

Quite the contrary, as it turned out: while meteorological Californication may be disconcerting, they don't call the retarded giant on our southern doorstep the Land of Fruits and Nuts for nothing. Our last couple years had seen a severe falling-off in yield, but I'd been assured by more than one informant that prunes have a tendency to take vacations now and again. From all indications, the Duchess and her cohort were back from the Bahamas, tanned, rested and ready to rumble. By June, myriad tiny green fruitlings graced the limbs of the trees like so many Xmas ornaments, and even if a bunch dropped off (self-thinning fruit trees -- it's a good thing) during the hot dry summer, there were still plenty left to ripen up. I was actually forced to take the extreme measure of irrigation. Irrigation? In the Pacific Northwest? What is this, Yakima?

And it's not like I have any particular love for the usual timing. 9/11, along with starting the 21st century out with a decidedly unpleasant bang, put a big crimp into my enjoyment of plum containment. I'd been revving up for a run that day, pulling out jars and the big canning pot and checking the ground for volunteers. Then bright and early AOL trumpeted the happy happy details of our imminent national downfall. Bummer, man. I went through the motions of preservation in the face of the yawning grave on the evening news. Still, even the terrorists couldn't keep me from the momentary satisfaction of hearing a lid tink down on a pint of Chickadee Glen's finest.

So while the weirdly jolly weather may have been a subject of concern, there was also a bright side: the crop came in a good three weeks early, well ahead of National Drama Queen Day. As it happened, it coincided with the busiest week of my summer performing schedule, and I was timesharing between various musical monkeyshines and a seemingly endless supply of purple rain (just shake and stand back). It was days out honking trombone and tinkling banjo-uke and nights at the sink splitting and pitting, grinding and cooking and sterilizing and water bathing. I broke down and bought a second huge stainless steel bowl to handle the rendering load, and the house was redolent with the aroma of baking plum.

And of course, there was the part I like the most: naming and designing the labels for the various batches. The first, Nuthatch Blend, wasn't strictly all our own plums, enhanced as it was with donated fruit from S's caregiver. Then came Sunny Skies Plum Butter in two batches, blue and yellow -- good sturdy bulk compote, slightly tart from the earliness of the season. Once the harvest began in earnest there were Chickadee Select and The Noble Plums of Chickadee Glen, both mature vintages of progressively greater sweetness. At the last came XX, celebrating twenty years of plum butter making, slow-cooked, thick, dark and redolent of fruity essence. And after the major canning was over, a lingering few plums went into two jars of Happy Trails butter.

We got so excited that we even put up a few jars of Farmer's Market Peach Blissout, capable of causing instant temporary satori upon ingestion. And now that apples are in, we'll be hunting down windfalls for some Equinox Applesauce, perhaps from the prolific tree of our favorite instrument repairperson.

Bringing in these particular sheaves has become an important part of our autumn routine, partly out of traditions from our families and our marriage, but largely because the stuff tastes so darn good. It sure isn't economical -- I've calculated that between the jars I inevitably purchase and time I put into it, I'd be ahead getting store-bought. But even white grape juice enriched guaranteed organic commercial doesn't have the cache of purity ours has, nor the simplicity of being the fruit, the whole fruit and nothing but the fruit so help me chickadee. In this case, at least, we can take to heart the advice of our esteemed pal the Emergency Folksinger, who proclaims "Don't chew it/ less you grew it/ or you know the boys that did." Words to live by.

9/20/04

Well, isn't that just American as sperm-tainted apple pie? (Look, don't jump salty at my choice of metaphors -- that was a major studio release, mkay?) It's always the people who grind the gears of industry that make the big buckadingos while we weenie artistes grovel in dust-encrusted basements, barely able to rub two microwaves together. Let us now praise the nobility of the weenie artistes. Okay, that's enough..

So yes, I play guitar and yes, I'm not the latest finalist on Make A Jillion Dollars By Knowing The Capital Of Latvia. But rejoice, oh ye worshipful masses kowtowing at the altar of creativity, because as of this month I'm stinkin' rich in instruments. Yes! Even I, freckle-faced coot from Chickadee Glen, am rolling in stringed things. And why, you might ask? You might. It's all because of the trade deficit.

Now, we all know just how heinous our balance of trade with foreign nations is. Why, on the face of it, the nation's life's blood, its treasure, its very essence, is hemorrhaging, gushing in a mighty flood, away across the seven seas and six continents, fattening the pockets of whiplash dictators and ripping away job after good-paying widget-assembly job from the hapless inhabitants of this our native (except for all those funny-colored immigrants) land . It's an outrage! it's a plot, I say!

Well, yes, it is a plot, a sinister conspiracy on the part of countries barely able to rub two microwaves together to level the parking lot just a titch. Countries that actually took the notion of development seriously, who, instead of exporting raw materials to other countries only to buy them back as manufactured goods, have the temerity to actually bang out and sell the manufactured goods themselves. At really competitive prices, one might add. Which leaves America the Too Cool with the option of exporting the only raw material it has left: dollars.

This is just terrible for the gear-grinders, the movers and shakers, the jolly boys and girls who take a bite out of every transaction they can get their teeth around, the 0wnerz. Somebody else is eating their lunch. Let us now pity the po' po' pitiful gear-grinders. Okay, that's enough. But for the mob of exgrinders and neverwasgrinders and neverparticularlywanted tobegrinders, it's not nearly so bleak.

Take me, for example. Please (I had to say that). I've lamented before about the grotesque pricing associated with commodity guitars and described my own efforts to hotrod a cheap beater to do a dim-light impression of a vintage archtop. While I did succeed in that endeavor, I was still stuck with the vision thing: a cheap strat ripoff just doesn't look jazzy. And like a drummer I met at my last klezmer gig said, "People only hear what they see." It's a sad truth, but presentation can trump execution in playing out. Let's not even go into the whole chick-singer-with-her-cakes-in-your-face controversy -- Madonna's turned that trick into an entire industry. However subtle or subliminal it may be, the type of instrument you play implies both your style of music and, unfairly but inevitably, your ability therein.

What's a po' boy to do? Po' po' po' boy. I'll tell you what the po' boy to do's: he buys impo'ted. I'd been socking money away in the guitar jar, biding my time and messing with various astronomically-priced hunks of vintage wood, when one day a catalog from Musician's Friend, aptly named company, arrived in my mailbox. Right in the front, in the superfancyspecial deals section, was an unlikely item: brand wankin' new ES335 clones in five different colors, hot outta some sweatshop in the darkest depths of the Orient, for a hundred and fifty dollars.

A 335 isn't a fat jazz box -- it's a solid body with delusions of grandeur and matching F holes. But thanks to a zillion very hip blues guys led by the redoubtable BB King, it's a guitar with cred. Stand up on stage with a 335-clone and play just about anything and people will buy it. It's the ultimate show biz chameleon. I should know -- I played a Epiphone Sheridon through half the 80's and never got one senile tomato up my nose. These particular inscrutable Easterners were definitely on the right track.

M's F has an online customer comments section, which I immediately shook out of my browser and tracked to the item. Typically, guitars averaged a half dozen comments, on the level of "Well, I guess it's okay, sure. I wanted pink." and the like. But on this little cookie, there were a solid fifty or more, and they all rang variations on "OMG THIS THING ROCKS!!!!!" One satisfied buyer expressed his intention to get one for every room in the house. The consensus seemed to be that for the price, this wasn't just a steal, it was downright subversive.

It wasn't a Super 400 with gold hardware -- heck, it wasn't even a real 335 -- but it would pull the plow til the real thang comes along, provided the winning lottery ticket shows up about the same time. Tongue properly configured in cheek, I dubbed the purchase a "costume guitar" and webbed its ass right then and there.

Sure, a $150 guitar is gonna have its limitations -- it came festooned with the cheesy headstock signature "Delta King." Still, I've already had the opportunity to use it at a gig, and not only does it look okay, it even plays and sounds good into the bargain. And at the price...

So while the trade imbalance may be wrecking the national economy, for some of us at least it has its positive qualities. And as long as I'm gonna get paid like a Third Worlder, I might as well consume like one too.

9/13/04

A notion basic to Vedantism, Buddhism and generic Xtianity is that of the reciprocal nature of injury done another, and the need to avoid retaliation. "What goes around comes around." "Turn the other cheek." "Karma." The gist of the idea is that someone harming you is simply passing on negative energy that was inflicted on them, and the only way an enlightened person can help ease the suffering of the rest of the human world is to, in Buddhist terms, "stop the wheel," absorb the blow and not pass it on. Whether Jesus was party to this wisdom through some Tinker to Evers to Palestine information double play with India or came up with it on his own, some of his Sermon on the Mount bears a suspicious resemblance to it as well.

For a naturally peaceful person, stopping the wheel can be an attractive idea. We live in an age of atrocities picayune and gargantuan, aided rather than ameliorated by our much-vaunted technical civilization. Even putting aside any sense of personal guilt, the knowledge of just how bad things get for some is a crushing burden. Being able to set that load down is an immense and healing relief.

But that relief comes at a price. When you decide to practice stopping the wheel, it requires the sacrifice of the instinct of retaliation, the wired-in simian get-even impulse honed and refined by zillions of years of dog-eat-dog, amoeba-engulf-paramecium struggle for genetic continuity. In a profound sense, you must become indifferent to your own survival to truly bring a halt to the cycle of injury, at least around yourself. Perhaps this is one of the intentions of the teaching -- to force you into a mindset less rooted in the personal.

And that's just for starters. Not just gut feelings get the boot with this meditation, uh uh. Higher stuff gets on the bus too. Stuff like Justice.

As a whole, Western civilization has at its roots a bevy of basic traditions, sprung from the flowering deserts of the Middle East. And every bloody one of 'em has the notion of Law. From Hammurabi to Moses the Fourth -- Fourth -- Constipated Man (he took the Tablets), if you want numbered strictures, they got the most. And underlying it all is the notion of Justice, the ideal of the Law serving to correct imbalances in the affairs of men, to level the playing field and smooth the path of civil living.

Throughout the rise of our culture, the pursuit of justice has been taken as an axiom of proper governance, and children suck it in with their mother's milk and learn it with their ABC's. It is an irreducible component of the best and most admirable parts of our common life, and for many if not most of us it is an indivisible feature of our much-vaunted freedom -- "liberty and justice for all."

And yet, it is the very notion of justice that stands most in the way of proper execution of stopping the wheel. To prevent the wrong another does you from being passed on, you must also foreswear the right to pass it back. You must accept the wound, the slight, the smear, the robbery, the evil done, without judgement, without rancor, and without hope of recompense. Only then can you truly individually halt the endless round-robin of hits and cuts circling the globe like Oroboros perennially gnawing its own tail.

In achieving this, righteous indignation and the thirst for justice are simply obstacles, illusions to be overcome on the road to higher knowledge. Whether administered personally, by established government, or by pa-in-the-sky diety, whether in this life, the next life, the afterlife or whenever, justice in this analysis reduces to revenge -- petty, trivial, meaningless revenge. No matter how heinous the crime, how widespread the damage, take an even moderately cosmic view of the transgression and it shrinks to nothing, its perpetrator another atom of hapless consciousness adrift in a bootleg universe without a help line or user's manual in sight.

This, li'l buddies, is called enlightenment. Can you say "enlightenment?" (chorus of six year olds: "ENLIGHTENMENT????") I thought you couldn't. Nobody ever said the path of the bodhisatva was gonna be a picturesque stroll down East Easy Park Court Boulevard Southwest. You could even call it overrated, given this particular little twist. Probably a cardinal reason why there are so few Masters in the world -- and why the damned wheel spins so fast.

But even the most jaded, shaded and sated ex-existential post-compassionate spiritual burnout can take comfort, if such it is, in one fact. There is a punishment everyone is subject to, that makes no exceptions, hears no pleas for mercy, accepts no notes from Teacher or anyone else: Death. Sooner or later, we all die, victims and villains alike. Or, to quote that vastly unappreciated, direly obscure singer/songwriter T Spae:

The children may cry but their cries go unheeded
The lovers they laugh but their laugh is defeated
The old run to hide but their fate is repeated
Death makes mock of us all
And you in your pride in your arts and your letters
Praising your talents and cursing your fetters
Walk gently among all your lessors and betters
Death makes mock of us all 

The sands of time fall into the ocean
The leaves and the rain and the shadows fall
Felled by the hand of cruel dame fortune
Death makes mock of us all

9/6/04

Well, the show was a great success, but just as Thaddeus was starting to hat the crowd following the infamous blockbuster act, one of the innumerable street painters pushed his little cart of wares right into the middle of their pitch, climbed on top and began screaming incoherent rantings at their crowd, waving one of his paintings around. Thaddeus, hothead that he was, went over and kicked the cart hard to get the painter's attention. He succeeded. The paint swung his framed masterpiece at the street performer's head, smashing it to flinters on that hard, pointy protuberance and sending his 70's faux-retro wirerims flying across the pavement.

By the time Thaddeus recovered his wits from the attack, several not-so-innocent bystanders had dragged the painter off his podium and pinned him to the ground, awaiting only approval before they finished him off. Thaddeus quickly checked his condition -- no torn out eyes, no gashes, glasses undamaged -- and realized that he had a golden opportunity: he could be merciful. "Stop! Don't hurt that poor unfortunate man!" In defiance of the advice of police and several interested lawyers, he refused to press charges, and the gendarmes had to be content with a severe scolding and numerous choice threats to the offending party.

Okay, let's get back to first person here: why did I do it? Well, for one thing, the cops in New Orleans are Teamsters and I wouldn't turn a dog over to their tender mercies. For another, I didn't need the grief, or the money. The hat was a good three times normal size -- a lot of the spectators thought the incident was part of our show.

But really, it was because of J. R. R. Tolkien.

As I believe I've mentioned, Unka John and I go way on back there, back to when I was a pimply high school sophomore simultaneous devouring the Ballantine Authorized Paperback Edition of LotR (third or fourth printing, I'd expect) whilst practicing fingerpicking on guitar, pinning the book on my knee under the waist of the instrument. I pored over the maps, yearned at the descriptions of elves, puzzled at the cryptic dereferenced annotations in the Appendices and even succumbed to that most questionable of vices, trying to write music for the lyrics. So when the big cheese movie version came out, Elbereth knows I was as rotten ready as any fanboy to go drop silver-clad copper and presidential engravings on Peter Jackson's kiwi epic. And in the wake of 9/11, any diversion was a good diversion.

Oddly enough, I found the visual translation of the mythos of Middle Earth relatively vigorous and satisfying -- there was the marvelous scene of the Fellowship boating past the Argonath, dwarfed by the uber-mighty feet of the two Egyptine statues of Isildur and Anarion, as well as the false-to-the-text but true-to-the-spirit museum-like display of the Sword That Was Broken in Rivendell. Let's all have a tall cold one for cgi.

But there was another vital aspect of the trilogy that the adaptation trashed, not because it had to but in fealty to the vision of the director: the quality of personal nobility. For instance, in the text, Aragorn is presented as the wise, mature, somewhat careworn and cautious but still utterly assured heir to the throne of the Kings of the West, a vastly regal and authoritative personality hid beneath the disguise of a wandering Ranger. In the movie, he's transliterated into an indecisive, diffident nebbish who mouths the words of the original but seems to have dismissed his own royalty as above him.

Jackson defended these and other changes in the books' characters by claiming that they improved and simplified the dramatic quality of the movie. Given that any accurate reproduction of the books would have cost ten times what New Line spent and taken a week to watch, simplification is a reasonable defense. But improve? Jackson argued that characters who are immune to the power of the Ring (Faramir, in the book) weaken the dramatic tension of its concept in the first place -- if the Ring is supposed to be so freaky-deeky powerful but some people could just walk by and ignore it, what's all the fuss about? And it's so much more compelling (yeah right) to have Aragorn be a modern, conflicted character full of self-doubt and confusion than a stolid, unexciting classic hero.

Well, fine. I suppose if you're going to get a rep for doing anything new you've got to break a few preconceptions. But Tolkien's depiction of, say, Aragorn was never without dramatic tension -- it's simply an attempt to portray something mythic, bigger than life, like the Argonath, with the super-spirit and the super-menaces to accompany it. Only a character as noble as Aragorn is depicted as being could hope to wed the hottest elf-babe alive. And whatever physical attractiveness ol tangle-haired Viggo Mortensen may have (and I'm told those of the feminine persuation find him quite fetching), the Aragorn he portrays doesn't come across as somebody an immortal being would give up eternal life for, not to me at least. Not even hardly.

It was the nobility of the books, their depiction of unsullied the-big-G-stands-for Good, that influenced me in my own forbearance toward that untoward Jackson Square dauber. "'Many who live deserve death. And many who are dead deserve life. Can you give it to them?'" Hey, I got a big ego-boost out of acting out one of my favorite stories in so-called real life. What more can you ask from literature?