Epilog

Steve at the ever-reliable No More Mr. Nice Blog has for awhile listed my blog as "on hiatus," so I thought I'd jump in here for one encore post ("We love you, Portland! Good night!") to say that I doubt very much I'll be hanging around these parts again. Like many cyberheads of the day, I have a new love: the Facebook Wall.

Facebook, for me at least, is full of new interactive & aesthetic & intellectual possibilities, even though I know the FB powers care not a whit about anything I've posted, and could at any time delete the contents of my FB Wall. As long as I'm following the Terms and Conditions and FB's financial bottom line is being met, I could be posting emoticons all day and it wouldn't matter to them.

And in the words of the hopefully soon-to-be junior US Senator from Minnesota, that's...okay. Lemonade out of lemons, always. If you're interested, check it out at www.facebook.com/people/Greg-T-Hough.

Also, just to show I haven't been comatose since my last post here in 2007, I thought I'd wrap it up with a slightly revamped version of one of my first Facebook notes, written in February '09:

In the final post of my 2003-07 blog Wrapped Around The Present, I wrote: "much of what I've said about the world scene can be boiled down to three words: We're basically fucked."

Now, if you've read some of my political-related comments at No More Mr. Nice Blog over the past year or so, you know that I was pretty impressed with Barack Obama's performance as a candidate in 2008, and was left with some hope that he could be a decent president.

But "we're basically fucked" still applies, I think -- particularly if I amend "we're" to primarily address the mature middle-aged adults of this generation (ages 35-60, one might say.) Because in my view the damage done to the body politic and the social & economic fabric in the post-WWII years, largely due to increased corporatism plus embrace of right-wing talking points from Joe McCarthy's to George W. Bush's, is something that will now take decades to adequately fix. And we of middle age are stuck with at least a good portion of the damaged state until we die.

Obama, in the best-case scenario, will be a transformational figure who not only makes some progress himself, but more importantly enables a movement where future leaders will continue to clean up the twin messes of gross economic inequality and crass, arrogant hypocrisy that has taken the US down a dark path, particularly in the last 30 years. Then, maybe, our children and grandchildren will have a truly promising world to live in again.

But in the more likely scenario, he'll be at least a partial victim of something he can't really protect himself from. A relentless corporatist media, a new Republican golden boy or girl (David Petraeus? Jeb Bush? Mark Sanford? Sarah effing Palin?)...or, in the darkest scenario, an assassin's bullet, quite possibly arising from the right-wing culture of hate, enabled every stinkin' day by AM talk radio.

Signing off, over and out.

Closing Time

The Last Laugh For Tonight

I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

This is my last post before what I'll officially call an indefinite hiatus. Which could be simply be code for goodbye, but I do want to leave open the possibility for a return, should I get a year or two (or five) down the line and miss blogging enough to want to give it another go.

For now, I've said everything I want to say here. And that gives me a peaceful feeling to leave with, even if much of what I've said about the world scene can be boiled down to three words: We're basically fucked.

There'll be more than enough to keep me busy for awhile, what with the kids and housework and all. I've lots of sorting of personal mementos to get to, a task long put off in favor of my Internet indulgences. And as ever, there'll be plenty of reading books & articles and listening to music.

I've been lucky to have a loving family and a decent job over the course of this troublesome decade, and knock on wood I hope and pray that will continue.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Code Link

One more set of adjustments to the Mr. Peabody Award-winning WATP list o' links:

*The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. A collection of Thoreau's journal writings. The magic of the Intertubes is clear.

*Lawyers, Guns and Money. Yet another fine lefty political blog. Wish I'd discovered it earlier, but there are so many good ones that it's not easy to get to them all.

*The Ludic Log: Greatest Hits. No intrepid blogger has contributed more to the quality of the WATP list o' links than one Leonard Pierce, Esq. His blogs "Clown Central Station" and "The Ludic Log," plus his LiveJournal site "...Skullbucket" and his writings for The High Hat, The Screengrab and Sadly, No! have been much appreciated by WATP management for their ruthless humor and intelligence. Kudos to the energetic and rising talent Mister Pierce...and see if you can support a poor brutha as he gallantly makes fun of deserving wingnuts.

*For Portlanders Only. Maybe not much of interest to folks outside the 503 area code, but non-Oregonians might want to search for some (regrettably brief) shots of Bill O'Reilly as a Portland TV newsman in 1984. Stay classy, Rose City.

***

*One more time in Tube mode, this is one of the creepiest TV commercials I've encountered in my 16,631 days. Sadly though, I'm such a fast-food junkie that it'll take stronger negative neuro-associative programming than even a dumpy pedophile Ronald McDonald to get me to give up McDonald's hamburgers for good.

*To date, I've collected 1123 YouTube video clips in my three Favorites files, with links available for your perusal near the top of the WATP blogroll. It's an eclectic, progressive, Boomer-y mix of clips, and one I'll keep adding to for awhile yet. I'll also keep adding to my linked Flickr files of Greg-related photos & images.

Hum and Bug

Hark the angels come, and also here comes my brother Chris (aka C The Shocker) with a holiday message for our times:

A Christmas Carol, politically speaking

Does/should a conservative Republican look at Scrooge as a man whose
attitudes should be emulated? Let's analyze:

1. Scrooge was a money man. He embodied the true spirit of Capitalism: take
no prisoners, it's them or you, and accumulate the most amount of wealth in
the most efficient way possible, but is well known as an honest businessman
with professional ethics.

2. Scrooge was thrifty. He knew the value of a Pound and avoided frivolous
spending. He saved his money, apparently in a bank, since, although his
actual profession was never revealed, as a banker or a money lender, he knew
the value of savings. That money was then redistributed through loans to the
population, encouraging civic growth.

3. He views the social aspect of Christmas to be one of materialism and
unchecked welfare. The concept of "something for nothing" is against his
every fibre. He apparently has nothing against the remembrance of the birth
of Jesus Christ, but believes that it's spiraled into a bastardization of
the true spirit of what Christ stood for.

4. Scrooge DOES give to charitable organizations: he donates funds to the
local workhouses, where the poor of Victorian-era England are expected to go
for housing and food, in exchange for work (although brutal, but the world
is a harsh place, and you should be expected to work for your survival). He
refuses to support nor give credence to organizations that simply provide
food and shelter to the poor, as they are setting a poor precedent to the
people that they are helping that, if you hold your hand out long enough,
someone will give you what you need.

5. Regardless of his upbringing, with a neglectful father and apparently no
mother, he still went on to forge himself to be a success in the business
world, proving that your background and environment in youth years should
not and cannot be used as an excuse for not excelling in whatever profession
you choose in adult life. Those that do are simply lying to themselves and
are a burden to society.

In conclusion, it's clear that today's conservative should look upon Scrooge
as a man with integrity and moral convictions, who believed in pulling
oneself (n IZ THIZ ON) up by the bootstraps to make it in this world, and to
look down upon anyone without the same drive and convictions.

C The Shocker
11/17/05

Court Intrigue (The Neverending Story)

I think Beltway Dems really believe that the only way to beat Republicans anymore is to give the GOP enough rope to hang itself with, and not seriously fight for anything -- unless perhaps if all Democrats have their back, as with Social Security. It worked in '06 and it almost worked in '04; I'm not saying it's the best way to go necessarily, but I can see where the suits who run things look to '04 and '06 as evidence that supports staying the DLC course.

It's going to take a little while to develop Dems who've come of age in this recent "netroots" area, people who are not as tainted by Dem losses of the past as the current group of Dem power brokers. Unfortunately if we keep electing authoritarian Republican types, there'll be corporate counterforces that may well keep the "new progressives" from ever realizing their potential.

Dems seem overly cautious about running hard at the GOP, even though Dear Leader is at 25-30%, because the MSM doesn't treat Bush as if he's at that level of unpopularity. (It doesn't quite treat him like it's 2002 or 2004 either, but it cuts him way more slack than it did Carter or Nixon in their lowest days.)

Beltway Democrats remain afraid of the MSM's power to create a reality (Big Rudy! Big Karl! Bitchy Hillary! Warrior Emeritus Dubya!) that will make people discount their dislike of Bush and vote Republican anyway. So they compromise and/or wimp out, fearing the wrath of the media.

I know this fear doesn't make as much sense, in these days of exciting Internet counternarrative possibilities, as it did in 2002, but Beltway Dems of course are generally slow on the uptake, being insular and pampered by Village culture.

***

There were increases in the youth vote, in both 2004 and 2006, and young adults voted large for Kerry in '04. That's a hopeful sign that, with competent GOTV, continued increases might help the Dem nominee. I think Hillary does connect to this bloc in a kind of effective PTA President Mom kind of way, and Obama and Edwards also can connect well with young adults.

Young adults, as well as women, remember that bad economic things seemed so competently avoided in the Clintons' day.

The oldest of the 18-24 group graduated from high school in 2001 or so, and spent their entire teenage years in Clintonland. So while they may have been distracted, they weren't blind to the big picture of societal prosperity.

***

Dems might win in '08, but I'm more aware than I was as a younger man as to what limited amount will have been won. Because I suspect that the most impactful difference anymore between Dems and Repubs is that Democrats represent a slow descent into virtual serfdom for the have-nots, and Republicans (if they get their way) represent a quick descent.

If this is indeed true, then as a man without a third party and one who can no longer trust the Dem leadership to have my back over the long haul, then of course I prefer the slow descent -- which hopefully features enough petit bourgeois distractions and painkillers that I can look back and say I at least tasted some pleasure along the way.

Perhaps the only thing I can wager on as a "free progressive" anymore, is that corporations may support me in my desire for slow descent, keeping the pendulum from swinging too far Republican during my lifetime, as long as I remain a useful consumer, supporting the larger power game with my tax dollars and material purchases and my lack of any real resistance.

All The Others

This song blew my mind when I was 12, and it still entertains me today:

"Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)" - Reunion

Kudos to abmcw at YouTube for a great homemade video.

Vive le Tube!

Counting Presents, Pt. 5

Pt. 1
Pt. 2
Pt. 3
Pt. 4

Last in a series of blogtastic flashbacks:

1/12/06

Americans of all stripes can be quite pathological with the "they're all crooks" dodge. For sure it reflects a bad McMedia diet among mainstreamers, but I think there's also some veiled cowardice and laziness at work -- if a person chooses sides, why, he or she might actually feel obligated to think & study harder and risk being seen as a rabid partisan in polite company. Easier just to fall back on the "they're all crooks" meme while you watch Jay Leno and eat your Doritos.

***

1/27/06

I

Newman takes on nothing less than the doomed nature of economic utopianism, and damned if he doesn't illuminate the issue with lyric & melody like Raymond Carver illuminated subtleties of the human condition with his short stories. While he's in his irony-tinged realm, you don't question Newman having his song protagonist (a successful capitalist, rife with unfair privilege) feel emboldened enough to tell Karl Marx himself that the world is not fair. You welcome it, because Newman's that accomplished an artist.

II

Vicktoria has always been, by pretty much universal decree, one of those sparkplug individuals: someone who combines charm, smarts, affection and enthusiasm in a way that raises the spirits of those around her. Not that she doesn't have sullen or bitchy moments; it's just that those moments don't define who she is.

***

2/12/06

The film features "David Strathairn as your dad," as Leonard Pierce put it in his LiveJournal. The Oscar-nominated Strathairn seems to nail Murrow cold, nuance and all, portraying the CBS icon as a heroic figure challenging McCarthy's prolonged Communist witchhunt of the early 1950s, although director/screenwriter George Clooney (who also plays Murrow's producer Fred Friendly) doesn't exactly put the halo on ol' Ed's head.

***

2/18/06

I remember a day or two after 9/11, when the initial shock was beginning to wear off a little and I'd taken in all the TV drama I could stand, I told my brother: When we all wake up tomorrow, each of us will decide whether to put on a Bruce Willis mask or a Susan Sarandon mask, and that's how we'll get past this.

*

I've already changed registration once in my life from D to I, before changing it back to D again in 2001. But it remains very tough to ponder "What next?" when giving up on the Democratic Party. Because there just isn't a viable third party, and building one will arguably be as tough or tougher than rebuilding the Dems from within. So one is left in a state of apathetic anarchism, waiting for the end of the world and/or indulging in creature comforts without a thought for social policy. Maybe it won't be long before that will have to be the way to go (one or two more fascist GOP prezdints oughta do the trick), but for now if there's any way to salvage some of the liberal edifice built up over the decades and centuries, that's where the focus still needs to be.


***

6/1/06

I once imagined starting a band called "Camelot Babes." The first album cover would be a photo of our group in a Lincoln convertible, going down Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, and we're all toasting each other with glasses of champagne. Everyone is smiling except me, who looks a bit unnerved by something that seems to be coming from our right.

***

6/18/06

Lennon challenged him to come up with a style that could demonstrate a similar level of authority as John's; what Paul came up with rivals the best of Ray Davies and Mick Jagger as the purest musical reflection of Swinging London hipster effervescence. Macca was no profound visionary or wit -- he was simply Mr. Cool, and that was enough. He also could sing his ass off, which especially helped when called upon to rock out.

Later, minus John and plus fellow hardcore stoner Linda, he indulged in an aesthetic that Robert Christgau called pop for potheads. Sloppier by design than The Beatles, and more hit and miss without a George Martin to rein in the counterproductive excess, but often a whole lot of fun, and his melodic mojo remained strong.

***

6/29/06

One wonders how much more deeply programmed to "Don't Worry, Be Happy" mode the corporations can make people, before Katrina-like events become annual. Because I do think the targeted endgame is, to make the poor plebes useful and optimistic in their newfound shit surroundings.

***

9/1/06

I suppose in this PC day and age it was just a matter of time before Highlights magazine blurred the classic distinction between Goofus' scary coldness and Gallant's bland politeness. To my mind, this distinction served the G & G comic very effectively for decades, making it closer to a slice of real life than much of what has passed for kiddie infotainment. Now they're like two sides of the same "cute and lovable" coin -- the new Goofus seems more like a confused, cheerful puppy dog than a would-be Machiavellian.

***

9/10/06

There they were again on the front page of this morning's Oregonian, those two burning towers. They've burned a bigger hole into our collective memory than perhaps any other filmed event. Five years of having our noses rubbed in 9/11 has gone way beyond mere media overkill, into an extreme, manipulative, masturbatory zone of fear and hate porn. And thus, when the nose rubbing began again this morning, I could barely look at the O's front page.

***


9/29/06

Neoconservatives and Republicans in general are propagandists and con men first, thinkers and statesmen second. Motivated by fear of the liberal boogeymen they've formulated in their heads, they have no problem with manufacturing a faux reality and then packaging that reality for public consumption, if it keeps liberals at bay. And in our uber-corporate, media-drenched post-9/11 world, that passion for propaganda fits the poisonous zeitgeist like a glove.

***

10/12/06

This is a man on record saying he'll stay the course even if only his wife and dog support him. In his dry-drunk mind, the sick fuck still thinks he's God's President, and he comforts himself with the thought that he's like other stalwart souls who were unpopular during their lifetimes, but were ultimately proven right because of their loyalty to his Personal Jesus.

***

11/08/06

The mainstream media lives the "we create our own reality" mantra every day, more than BushCo could ever hope to do, and for quite a bit longer than BushCo has been in power.

The MSM remains, in my view, probably the most corrosive force in America. They generally enable the corporatist thugs -- although with the Mark Foleys and Tom DeLays of the world shooting themselves in the foot, it was hard to do this time -- and they exploit and brainwash most of the rest.

They'll come back with a new and improved group of puppets, that much we can count on.

***

11/10/06

I call today's young adults the Clinton Generation. People who formed worldviews and/or gained political consciousness during the '90s. A time marked by peace, prosperity and multiculturalism. A time of huge breakthroughs in communication, with the rise of the Internet. Also, a time of mostly Democratic rule in the White House and the Senate (and up until 1995, the House.)

It certainly wasn't a time without flaw or vulnerability, but I'm not surprised that kids who grew up then have a lingering affinity for the ideas of the political party that was in power then.

***

11/17/06

Dr. Ellsworth was quite the character -- he'd say things in class like "Hitler was no worse" than other despots through history, or a tongue-in-cheek "You should be shot!" when someone said something he disagreed with -- and he seemed to like me as a student, in his own dry, detached, bemused way.

We had lunch two or three times in the campus lunchroom, and mostly talked Existentialism 101. He said a key to living smartly was being aware of one's illusions, one's being drunk in the face of the empty, meaningless reality of things.

***

11/20/06

Her latest performance, which I saw last Friday, shows her continuing to grow as an actor and a singer. Not just someone who can belt out the tunes on key, plus enunciate the lines correctly and with proper volume. But someone who is beginning to master inflection and nuance, and really creating a bond with an audience. That's the mark of an artist, and she is one.

***

1/2/07

I

(I)f the powers that be couldn't abide Clinton-era prosperity ("Where are my well-deserved tax cuts?", they bellowed.), then it's hard to imagine how any Obama, Gore or Hillary-era recovery would cause any of 'em to abandon their cutthroat Randian ways.

In short, triangulation at best only delays the inevitable return to power of a new and improved Corporate Fascist. Something more is required: a skilled (and likely difficult) blend of uncommon nerve and rhetoric.

*

II

The role of macho ego as a prime inspiration for star players shouldn't be underestimated. Shaq and Wilt did the personal calculus, and figured that looking "like a sissy" would threaten their confidence in ways beyond the free-throw line. Better to risk missing a few (or more than a few) FTs than risk messing with the total mojo, I guess. The career stats and championships won by both Shaq and Wilt seem to back their decisions, but one wishes athletes didn't so desperately rely on the macho shit to bolster their egos.

***

3/2/07

I know I really love music and all, but might not some of that mindspace time be better filled with something more practical and less dreamlike?

I'm not sure, and of course that begs the difficult question: Why can't I live a life where dreaming of music all the time is practical, is of the "real" world.

***

3/13/07

“Action" and "acceptance" are just words most of the time, ideals out of reach. But occasionally I grasp moments of being in a state of action, where fear is not paralyzing; and in a state of acceptance, where misfortune is simply part of a unindictable larger process.

These are moments that keep me going, and keep me looking for more of that. I don't know if in this lifetime I'll break through to the peace and composure that Cohen, now in his 70s, seems to radiate with, in the years after his stay in a Buddhist monastery.

***

4/3/07

To an agnostic and an aesthete like myself, used to seeing lazy or bizarre creative choices by those in modern organized religion, it seemed like this fellow might be making a mistake. I could respect the passion of his piety; admire how his faith hadn’t come at the cost of cultural savvy. But I had doubts about his career judgment.

I see now that my judgment was too harsh. Certainly I could’ve been more open to the idea that he could transform his church in a refreshing and constructive way, with his creative talents. I dearly love the secular realm of art and artists, but I wonder if I love it a little too much sometimes.

***

4/12/07

The thing about his writings is, I don't remember the storylines so much as the consistent tone (measured, wise, imaginative, darkly humorous) that made Vonnegut's books so appealing to me. If that's a triumph of style over substance, and may reflect the biggest knock that critics have on him, then count me as a sucker for it. His writing is supposedly a teenage crush that one outgrows, but my appreciation for him came primarily in my adult years.

***

4/28/07

People want the candidate most likely of giving them a magical Hollywood ending, which they've been programmed to believe is America's birthright. In such an environment, getting the corporate media to have your back is crucial, because their news images of "reality" can be made to approximate the familiar Hollywood archetypes.

Quip and Quake

In the interest of reviving the Fairness Doctrine, abolished 20 years ago by Ronald Reagan's administration, I offer some equal time, with a peek at my '80s view of Saint Ronnie:

Praise be to the transcendent Minutemen.

Below is the last of my year-long look at the 2007 Ronald Reagan Calendar my friend Maitland Jones got me last Christmas. With quotes provided, ever so wittily, by Maitland as a bonus.























"This is how big the footballs were when I went to college, I think."

























"Print up thousands of these. Send 'em to the Japanese and the Iranians, and all those other people."
























"Let's feed these old popcorn strands to our dog. He'll eat anything."


Reagan Calendar Pt. 1
Reagan Calendar Pt. 2
Reagan Calendar Pt. 3

Wonderful World

Happy birthday to my beloved son Andrew, turning age 12 today. He may end his teen years taller than me, hitting six feet or more.



Greg and Andrew at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 2-07. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Short people are just the same as you and I.

Counting Presents, Pt. 4

Pt. 1
Pt. 2
Pt. 3

Moving on through 2005 now. Curiously there's only one short post on Hurricane Katrina, and that one is mostly a "what he said" about comments by the late, great Steve Gilliard. A combination of burnout and depression and shock (plus the fact that many people were saying what I could've said, better) kept me from much online opining about that particular disaster.

***

2/25/05

I think the general timeframe in his head was pretty much worked out. A combination of increasing aches and pains due to advanced age, coupled with a belief (likely well-founded, looking at it with cold objectivity) that he had said everything worth saying about George W. Bush, Richard M. Nixon, professional sports and a hundred other subjects dear to his heart. I think he believed that his reason for living rested in the freak power of passion plus aesthetic, and when human limitations started threatening that magic equation, he reasoned that it was time to go.

***

3/16/05

Note to self: Son values peace, freedom and new technology. Wants full education without having to go to school. Enjoys idea of schools being demolished. Probably not alone in this.

***

3/18/05

The saga of George W. Bush is very much in line with the eternal shit sandwich that the elites feed the rabble -- century upon century of the corrupt leading the clueless.

What FDR and the Warren Court accomplished for the common man were historical anomalies. The Average Joe was emboldened by the geopolitical fluke of two world wars glorifying his "sacrifice for freedom," coupled with the "boy in the bubble" fluke of US economic dominance.

*

As Bush told his Harvard Business School prof in 1973, "the poor are that way because they're lazy." And as he told a GOP congressman in 2003 who said he'd come to Washington to cut entitlements, "So did I, pal."

Prescott Bush hated FDR, and his loyal heirs have acted on that hatred ever since.

*

The modern world has reacted to new technologies and population explosion pretty much with the combined wisdom of a barrel of monkeys. The masses freak out at the complications & vulgarities & alienation, and resort to dangerous games of denial and manipulation.

We are fucked. But the corporate overlords might yet grant us some temporary relief. They know that any Final Solution of economic feudalism must come in long-term steps, steps that will likely include periods of throwing bones to the masses, lest the so-called "Hate Left" tendency start to mess with the bottom line. Next bone thrown might well be Hillary '08.

***

3/21/05

I'm afraid that what is often really meant by "Support Our Troops" is "unleash the eager young studs so they can conquer the infidel race on our behalf."

It's dehumanization at its most vulgar. The troops are seen as programmed killers who aren't "supported" unless they're allowed to do what they are programmed to do. And if Central Casting sends us a really juicy set of bad guys, exploiting our basest fears and prejudices, then all the more reason to allow our "attack dogs" to do the dirty work of "preserving freedom." Restraint is for pussies.

*

Bush purposely stroked America's collective reptile brain with visions of manly Empire conquest against an evil infidel race, and as a result many let his transgressions slide. Clinton carelessly stoked a still-powerful repulsion toward sexual deviancy in the public arena, and therefore many continue to hold his transgressions as the epitome of corruption.

Mass mental illness was revealed in both cases, but Bush the ruthless politician wins (for now) the PR battle over Clinton by having been purposeful in his corruption rather than careless.

In short: Clinton exposing his penis = bad. Bush exposing his "penis" = good.

***

3/24/05

The religious/conservative zealots are asserting that as long as Terri Schiavo has any kind of life, God in his magnificent wonderfulness could always defy all science and bring her back from the brink.

That's their stand. With God, all things are possible. Let Terri die without doing everything to keep her from total flatline, and you're not giving God every chance to do His magic.

It reflects a deep resentment toward modern science's lack of need for a God figure. And it reflects a deep psychological craving to make sense out of a confusing world by resorting to vain and defensive rationalizations.

***

3/28/05

Before I could vent and bond on the internets, before I found a new family to enjoy and be responsible for; before I (finally) settled into a job situation that was reasonably sound, before I finished climbing the treacherous mountain that was college, there was a lot of pain and struggle and alienation, and somehow the dark lyrics of Morrissey and the jangly guitars of Johnny Marr were just the tonic.

"Ask" is actually one of the relatively upbeat Smiths tunes, although it does ominously warn that we've got one choice to bring us all together: either love or the bomb.

***

3/31/05

I

"Let both sides have their say (sorta) and leave it at that."

"Make sure the packaging is state-of-the-art and acceptable on a corporate level."

"I fought hard for my comfy place in the mediawhore universe, and I'm not going to let any donut-eating blogger geek from San Jose steal my thunder."

II

As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, the Christian faith is ideally a fighting religion that creates useful distinctions between good and evil, and to me that is something very much in tune with how the human psyche, for better and worse, actually exists in the world.

In my view, humans just aren't easily and generally programmed to be accepting of "evil" as part of a universal order -- even though in cold stark reality, a Creator's acceptance of evil (or indifference to it) could well be closer to the truth than anything the Apostle Paul came up with. Hence, the psychological usefulness of belief systems that provide prudent lines in the sand between what we love and what we despise.

***

4/9/05

I

Each SCTV actor fascinates me in their own way. Even people from the syndicated, pre-NBC years of the show, like Robin Duke and Tony Rosato and a young Harold Ramis, have moments of advanced comic flair you don't often see in TV land.

II

Had Bush really taken in McCullough's work, he might've been inspired by Adams' strong commitments to integrity, intellect, and the noblest aims of humankind. He might've been touched by the sincere and time-tested love between Adams and his wife Abigail (by the standards of the day practically a feminist), and between the Adamses and their children. He might even have found Adams' New England-style passion for work and purpose and public service inspiring, in a John Kerry sorta way.

But apparently Bush digested the book only enough to get that his family and the Adams family share one important historical feature: they both feature a father and son who reached the highest office in the land. They are the only two families in American history who can say such a thing, and with Bush's dry-drunk passion for vainglory this fact must've appealed to him greatly.

***

4/28/05

I think it's clear that these faith-based fellows are, at the least, thinking "impure thoughts" on a regular basis. They're so in love with power built on macho fantasies, so emotionally involved with the mostly male posses who enable their power -- and so tempted to cross over to the "dark side" once in awhile, just because they can -- that any latent bisexual or homosexual tendencies are bound to show up in their speech and gestures, if not their bedrooms.

Mike Malloy was pondering on his show this week, only half-jokingly, over whether we have our first homosexual president in office right now. He didn't mention Abe Lincoln or the other possibles, but he didn't have to.

*

I don't think conserva-pundits like Krugman's colleague at the New York Times, David Brooks, have much skill anymore (if they ever did) in forwarding logical argument. What they do, what their brethren in the GOP propaganda machine do, is state what has the best chance of being believed by the most demographically advantageous of voters/consumers.

Color the bullshit upbeat, angry, professoral, moralistic...it all plays like market-tested opiates for the gullible. Corporations do the same thing with their advertising campaigns, and is it any wonder most corporations feel such a kinship with the master BS artists that the post-Reagan Repugs have become?

When you think GOP apologist, think of someone not unlike Philip Morris, which got away with decade after decade of selling to young people a known and proven killer.

***

5/27/05

For about the first two weeks of the trip, which lasted through our visits to Boston and Philly and NYC and D.C., it was pretty much magical. Great weather, and a remarkable list of places seen: Niagra Falls (again), Freedom Hall, the Gettysburg battlefield, the Liberty Bell monument, the Lake Placid arena where the U.S. won the 1980 Olympic hockey gold medal, the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame, the Smithsonian museums, the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, Plymouth Rock, the Capitol Building, Arlington National Cemetery (JFK and RFK and the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier), the Lincoln Memorial, The White House (just the outside), the World Trade Center (I stood on the observation deck, enjoying a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline), the Empire State Building, Central Park, Times Square, and the Statue of Liberty (back when you could still climb the inside steps to the top.) At the Boston-area RV park we stayed in Foxboro, near the old Patriots football stadium, we showed off our sample of Mount St. Helens ash, while people near our RV came round to take a look.

***

6/2/05

Bottom line is, O.J. Simpson is one lucky SOB to not be in a jail cell right now. His celebrity and his zip code, as much as his skin color, allowed him to get away with murder. Darden, like Toobin before him, effectively debunks the notion that Fuhrman or any other cop could've planted the infamous "bloody glove" that Simpson tried on at trial. It would've had to involve a huge premediated conspiracy, one the defense presented not one iota of solid evidence for. Darden also makes a good case that when Simpson tried on the glove found at the murder scene, that the glove seemed not to fit was likely a combination of shrinkage caused by moisture and blood, and Simpson's acting skills -- he had been coached by the defense team on how to "present" to the jury his trying on the glove.

***

6/3/05

A vast majority of Republicans (89 percent in one recent poll) still approve of Bush's performance. Inexplicable? Hardly. The Al Davis "Just win, baby" attitude exists in even many of the supposed moderates. They've bought into the "Republicans are victims of liberal elites" meme every bit as much as the wingiest wingnuts. And they've been programmed not just to hate Democrats, but to fear for their very lives when Dems are in power. So in this context, they'll always cut a "winner" like Bush an ungodly amount of slack.

***

6/9/05

By 1985, the media I grew up with had lost any pretension of being anything other than a brainwashing tool, designed to promote and support arrogant, utterly corporatized attitudes & desires. For someone who indulged on '60s and '70s media and remembered some credence (however lame) still given to concepts like spontaniety & egalitarianism & gentlemanly conduct, this quasi-fascistic new order of ultra-slick spin doctoring and Social Darwinist hero mythology shook me to the bone. The message was clear: Get with the program, or else.

We're 20 years into the new order now, and it's safe to say there'll be no going back, at least not while an infrastructure dependent on plentiful gas, electricity and water still stands. (They sold us a chimp, didn't they? Twice. That's power.)

***

7/21/05

For the most part, Bush has masterfully ridden the wave of wartime media propaganda -- he is truly the world's first fully-formed Orwellian leader. There's really no precedent: Hitler and Mussolini lived during the mass media's infancy; Reagan still had the remnants of pre-Reagan "liberal (read: milquetoast centrist) media" to deal with, not to mention the opposition of Tip O'Neill. The closest historical parallels to Bush As Big Brother would be Stalin and Mao...but they were isolated powers, lacking the influence Bush has on the world stage.

***

9/16/05

Our backyard is on the edge of a small town, next to a large field, so it's nice and quiet, and ideal for contemplating the vastness and mystery of a summer night sky. When I look at stars, I often think of something I heard Carl Sagan say on his Cosmos TV series. He was talking about Einstein's views on space and time, and he said that when one looks out into space, one is essentially looking out into time.

I note with wonder that the starlight I'm seeing is many millions of years old, and that any distant creature who might see the light from our sun won't see it until long after we're gone. It brings to mind a passage from Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, where one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters was trying in vain to apprehend, via a drug experience, a pure and unfiltered perception of the world, separate from the distance between object and perception that time creates. He couldn't do it and neither can I, for all perception has an element of illusion built in.

***

11/18/05

I

1996-97: Andrew was at that age, between one and two, where children can talk but they haven't quite mastered sentence structure yet. So it was unexpected when we were hanging out, he and I, and all of a sudden he grabs my head and pulls his face next to mine and starts singing me a song: Pretty...today. Pretty...today. Perhaps you had to be there, but his sudden command of expressive songwriting just blew me away, like where did that come from?

2005: Just this month, in fact. I got into one of my depressive funks, where I go away and lay on the floor in the dark somewhere, because I can't handle being with anyone. Andrew came into where I was laying down, and with a great combo of warmth, tact and intelligence talked me through it so I could get up and hang out with the family again. I don't think there's anyone I know who could've done it better. Again, perhaps you had to be there, but I was impressed. If the artist thing doesn't work out, perhaps a career in therapy might work for him.

II

I wouldn't bet Bush will suffer a dramatic Nixonian fall from power, however. His life dynamic is largely about avoiding the hard edge of accountability, and in that regard, his presidency is no different a situation than his past failures, when he was always rescued by family and friends. Someone will cover for his ass, always.

Bush will get less of a smackdown than he deserves...but those around him won't avoid smelling the stench of his failure, as that is a big part of his life dynamic as well. Arrogance and sloth will define him to the end.

***

12/23/05

CRUSH: Dude! Vivacious Vicktoria! Nice to meet you. What's your question?

VICKTORIA: What's the meaning of life?

Crush's eyes widen. He looks a bit surprised and spooked by the question. He pauses for a few seconds, and some giggles rise from the audience.

CRUSH: Whoaaa. Duuude. That's totally deep, okay?

Well, I don't know, it might be a little different with you humans, but I can speak for the turtle.

Dude, meaning of life...is live every day like it's your last. You know I'm sayin', dude? Carpe Diem, okay? Seize the day. I've been around for 150 years for a reason, dude. Cha. Not a bitter bone in my body. Excellent.

Sanford and Sumner

















STING: That rug is a classic design, a collector's item. I've got to have it.

FRED: Uh, quite the eye for quality, my good sir. And because of your, uh, celebrity, I would be happy to offer it to you for, let's say, three thousand dollas.

< Sting turns away to inspect the rug further >

LAMONT: But pop, that's just one of mom's old rugs that she kept in the attic.

FRED: Shut up, you dummy.

Young Dude Speaks

Country in your eyes:

How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it's a lie. People claim they want to be free. Everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that's bullshit! People are terrified to be set free. They hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security. How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?

Jim Morrison (1943-71)

And now, on with the countdown.

Apocalypse Then

More Greg T. writing, fresh off the presses of a major metropolitan newspaper:

Vietnam vets help Canby students prepare for play

Helmstetter, a retired registered nurse, spoke frankly about her wartime experiences. She said that she, like several other Vietnam vets, have dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder; in her case, she said, the condition took nearly 25 years to fully come to light and be properly diagnosed.

"I got to work in a fully equipped, air-conditioned hospital, so I was fortunate compared to some of the primitive conditions many of the (soldiers) had to endure," Helmstetter said.

But, she said, while working six days a week as a nurse and tending to the serious wounds of thousands of American and Vietnamese soldiers, she "had to see, smell, hear and touch the devastation that is the true reality of war."

Computer Generated

Fall DVD releases:

Ratatouille
Nov. 6

Just goes to show, you can't always judge a movie on its trailer. I saw the first Ratatouille trailer last year, before Pixar's previous movie, the 2006 Cars, and it didn't look particularly strong compared to the other Pixar efforts. Plus, I'd seen what I thought was a quality decline (if slight) in each Pixar effort since 2001's Monsters Inc.

I needn't have worried. The movie was directed by Brad Bird, who's done top notch work directing The Iron Giant and Pixar's The Incredibles, as well as years of work on The Simpsons during its '90s golden era. And his latest, I think, is about equal with Monsters Inc and the original Toy Story as the best Pixar film so far.

Bird's work on Ratatouille is so visually assured, so classically comical in the best traditions of Chaplin, Keaton and Looney Tunes, that you wonder if he or Pixar can do any wrong. The plot, about an anthropomorphic rat wanting to be a top-notch French chef, may seem a bit slight, and not particularly ground-breaking as cartoon scenarios go. Also, what message there is (don't let your bias against the artist blind you to the value of his creation) seems practically avant-garde by Disney/Pixar standards. But Pixar is simply money in the bank, folks: it has never devolved into anything like hackwork (although Cars came close at points), and after several years of box-office success, that counts as plenty special.

Also featured is a speech late in the movie by Peter O'Toole's food critic character, about the value (or lack of it) of critics, that is a mini-masterpiece of writing and delivery. It sets the tone for a feel-good ending that engages the brain as well as the heart, and helped prompt the theater audience where I saw the film to give Ratatouille a round of applause.


The Simpsons Movie
Nov. 26

I haven't regularly watched The Simpsons TV series for 10 years now, and what I have seen hasn't really matched the consistently high level of satire that the series provided in its first six or seven seasons. But still, the more recent episodes I've seen were usually not bad compared to most of the swill that's out there in TV land. So I had some hope that the movie would transcend the level of cliche that, due to nearly 20 years of prime-time repetition, has infected the all-too-familiar Simpsons archetypes, particularly those of Homer and Bart.

Well, I laughed, and fairly often. Ned Flanders remains a hoot (using his kind of okily-dokily descriptive language here), and the Simpsons' trek to Alaska -- escaping to there after becoming pariahs in Springfield -- had some of the movie's best bits, including a government employee welcoming the family to the state by giving them a thousand dollars, so that residents will "let us destroy the environment.” The way Harry Shearer's character said Here's a thousand dollars just made me crack up. Government buying off the rubes -- now that's the kind of subversive entertainment I love about The Simpsons at its best.

The movie centers around the US government (led by President Arnold Schwarzenegger, natch) putting the town of Springfield (with an environment contaminated due Homer's carelessness, natch) under a huge protective bubble that puts the town's residents under permanent quarantine. Watching The Simpsons over the years, one notices over time that, eventually, everything happens in Springfield: all the big events and big playas make a stop there. So making Springfield its own hermetically-sealed world has a certain in-joke irony that I suppose the creators of the film were aware of.

The trouble with the quarantine idea is, it reminded me why The Simpsons isn't must-see TV for me anymore. The claustrophobia one feels in quarantined Springfield is similar to the one I generally feel watching the TV show these days, as the whole "world as Springfield" idea has devolved into cliche. In addition, the grand satiric idea of The Simpsons -- comically exposing the absurdities and ironies of a land of rubes -- has a certain datedness to it as well. The stupidity of America has had some disastrous consequences in this new millennium, and I just don't find teh stupid as funny a topic as it used to be.

The talent and focus of its creators give The Simpsons Movie enough funny bits to make it worth watching; unfortunately, those bits don't form much of a whole, and haven't made the movie stay with me as anything more than a curious footnote. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie in that way.


Transformers
Oct. 16

All summer I heard how this movie kicked pants. How it was one of the greatest movies that Greg Oden has ever seen. And even though the whole Transformers cartoon mania from the '80s came after I'd long left that sort of thing behind, having children aged 11 and 18 can bring out the "ooh, big CGI robots -- cool!" in me. So I was willing to give Transformers a chance. Maybe the CGI would impress me so much that I'd let the sappy/silly kiddie plot devices slide.

Uh, no. Again, I should've taken into account the film's director. In this case, one Michael Bay, director of the steaming piles of crap Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. This MST3K parody of Armageddon showcases what I hate about Bay's style (if you could call it that): he makes movies like directors of 30-second commercials make ads, with everything annoyingly broad and cartoon-like, and designed for maximum pandering.

With Transformers, Bay takes the vast majority of the big robot scenes and waits until the movie is nearly two-thirds over to show them. And what do we get while we're waiting? A lot of stupid subplot and backstory surrounding Shia La Boeuf's "teenage outcast" character and Jon Voight's Secretary of Defense, who apparently is the real pants in the government, while the Decider he works under is reduced to a Ho Ho-loving cartoon who appears only in a brief cameo voiced off-camera. (Oh, that George W. is sure dumb! How funny!)

When the robots finally get to strut their stuff, the CGI, while competent, isn't knock-your-socks off enough to justify the travesty of Bay's painfully hacky plot games. It made me feel like a fool for getting sucked in by the hype. I won't get fooled again by this director, I can tell you that.

Cheer Them On

Portland band The Decemberists, from strange days indeed:

The video was filmed at Portland's Cleveland High School, not too long ago the workplace of my father-in-law, a janitor for the city school district. (He's still employed by the district today, at age 73.) A popular, down-to-earth figure on any campus he's worked at, he may well've cleaned the very rooms and hallways you see above.

Duck Season

I think it was the stadium that first hooked me in, as a child in Oregon in the early '70s, and made me a Duck football fan.

Autzen Stadium has never really been an NFL-caliber stadium in its 40-year history (although it's close now, after some renovations), but compared to other sports venues in the state, it looked the most like one. At least until Paul Allen built the Rose Garden arena for his Trail Blazers in the '90s, Autzen reflected the closest that little ol' Oregon came to a big-time look in sports architecture. I liked and respected that.

As I grew up, however, the Duck football program was usually something of a joke. Consistently outspent and outrecruited by bigger programs, the Ducks endured several losing seasons, flirted with a breakthrough in the late '70s and early '80s, and then fell off the cliff again, to the point when, during my first term as a University of Oregon student in 1983, the Ducks and in-state rivals Oregon State (also long woebegone) played to a pathetic 0-0 tie.

I dropped out of college soon after, as my first term at the University was too often as pathetic as a 0-0 tie. Yet four years later I would return, having felt that other options were exhausted, and pledged to this time stick it out and graduate, which I finally did in 1989. For me personally, those latter years weren't all that much better than before -- but again, I felt I'd exhausted all the options of being a college dropout. Ah, the '80s.

Watching Duck football, however, remained something fun to do. And in the four years I was out of school, something shifted in the Ducks' fortunes, and they were able now to attract enough quality recruits that they could be truly competitive. But they had yet to demonstrate it on the field, until my first term back on campus. That 1987 season was really the first time when it seemed possible that the Ducks could soon break through to the Pac-10 elite.

The USC game in '87 was the first game I ever saw at Autzen. There was a buzz all fall that this might be the first Duck team to go to a bowl since 1963. Didn't happen that year (due to inexperience) or the next (due to injuries), but finally it happened in 1989 with an Independence Bowl bid, during my last term at UO. The Ducks have mostly been on a high-level ride ever since.

That ride has included a Rose Bowl appearance in 1995 and a Fiesta Bowl win and #2 national ranking in 2002. But this year is, so far, taking the cake. The Ducks are ranked #3 in the country, are in first place in the Pac-10, and are largely in control of their own destiny, as they try to win their last three games strongly enough to win a spot in the BCS Championship Game. They may need a little help from the football gods, to allow #1 Ohio State and/or #2 LSU to stumble, but there is hope. And QB Dennis Dixon has a good chance to win the Heisman Trophy.

In the world of Oregon sports teams, a fan is conditioned to fear chokes in crunch time. It's happened a lot over the years, and one must conclude that the Oregon sports psyche is generally a fragile thing. But Nike founder Phil Knight, a Duck alum, has pumped millions of support into UO athletics, and that's helped transform the state's sports mentality somewhat, at least on the collegiate level. It's been refreshing to see.

Cell Images

More from my cell phone photo file. Click on images to enlarge:


Work cube, Beaverton OR.



Nick Lowe show from front row, Portland OR, October 2007. Pic and B&W alteration by Greg T.



Nick Fresco. Pic by Greg T.; alteration by Maitland Jones.


I considered posting a shot from my wife's work party last New Year's Eve, of the drunk guy wearing nothing but women's undergarments, but I decided the image would be best left to your imagination, if you dare.

Counting Presents, Pt. 3

Pt. 1
Pt. 2

Through the 2004 presidential election year (oh joy) we go:

4/3/04

If Air America constituted a clear threat to plutocratic interests, don't you think there would've been a more organized smear campaign against it, in the mainstream media? Such a campaign might yet happen, particularly if the ratings and subsequent poll numbers show AA being any kind of threat to the media big boys' tax cuts, deregulation and permanent war coverage.

Air America is a promising first step toward reclaiming some true balance in a media marketplace dominated by timid sellouts and corporate shills. But I think the listeners of AA must realize (and the on-air talent should remind them) that it won't be a good thing if the net effect is nothing but liberal listeners feeling good about their pre-held beliefs and opinions. Ultimately some dent must be made in the 45 percent of America who currently reside in the Ned Flanders Twilight Zone, and among those few who control the corporate wealth, or else the radical conservatism espoused by Reagan, Gingrich and Bush will continue to thrive in the political arena.

***

6/7/04

He was Bob Dobbs' head personified, and Robin Williams was only half-joking when calling him Walt Disney's last and ultimate automotron: "Fuck it, we'll make a president."

He came to power, first in California and later in Washington D.C., at two moments (1966 and 1980) when there was heightened doubt and confusion about the post-New Deal welfare state and security state. Ma and Pa America started to wonder whether government notions of charity and containment remained viable, in a world where enemies foreign (Communists) and domestic (counterculture) were skillfully being demonized by the media. I'd say that this crisis of confidence arose less from inherent flaws in the government system, and more from the trauma-filled trifecta of assassination, war and scandal, but the "anti-government" Reagan and his handlers had the knack of seizing upon our moments of weakness with ruthless political aplomb.

Reagan wasn't as much a Great Communicator as a Great Exploiter, capitalizing on the breakdowns of his era not with sober analysis, but with Disneyfied fantasies about the utter sanctity of America, where God and General Motors share a shining city on the hill. And part of what made him politically successful was that he really believed in those Disneyfied fantasies.

***

6/30/04

The hopeless arrogance, the sour sarcasm, the tone-deaf rhetoric...why, Ralph Nader is positively Bush-like!

Even if you agree with a good portion of the man's ideas, and even if you agree that there's more similiarity between Democrats and Republicans than you'd like, it's crystal clear to me that he's not the one to take a progressive cause to a higher level.

As a matter of fact, there's ample evidence that he's running for president this year more to punish Democrats for not adopting more of his policies, than to help kick the incompetent, corrupt, plutocratic and warmongering GOP from power. Against the advice of supporters like Michael Moore in 2000, he campaigned in swing states (including the decisive state of Florida) just before the election; in this Village Voice article, a close aide to Nader is quoted as saying they would not campaign in "safe states" only, because "we want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them."

A person who'll vote for Nader in November must have such levels of willful ignorance and/or arrogant denial as to need their head examined. One can make a reasoned argument that the difference between the parties has significantly increased since Bush took office, and Molly Ivins' fine book Bushwhacked is one place that points out evidence of this. But even small differences in policy -- on healthcare, the environment, reproductive rights or dozens of other areas -- can still directly effect many thousands or even millions of people. Focusing too much on the macro in politics (not enough difference between parties) can cause one to lose sight of the micro (the actual differences), and I don't think a truly aware and compassionate person would abandon the people affected by said differences, just because both major parties don't meet his or her personal standards.

***

8/21/04

Local theater is typically a mixed bag of the professional and amateurish -- flashes of brilliance mixed with awkward moments that wouldn't be out of place in Christopher Guest's mockumentary Waiting For Guffman. But for the hundreds of people who've showed up for the performances, the thrill is primarily seeing the locals do their best to strut their stuff. Slack is cut, and kudos are distributed generously.

***

9/5/04

"When his (Dylan's) first book of lyrics came out -- 'Writings and Drawings' -- it was dedicated to Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. To an Oklahoman white protest singer and a black Delta bluesman. And one of the things I've wanted to study for years is, what happens when black arts and white arts come together in this country? Dylan gives you just a remarkable place to study that happening."

***

10/28/04

I

My point (and I do have one) is that we're truly at the dawning of a new era here, one way or another. If Bush is able to hold onto power, it's a clear signal that a large bloc of voters are willing to accept a quasi-fascist state, and that's different from the 1968-2004 GOP era. In 2000, Bush voters though they were getting no more than a genial hybrid of Poppy Bush and Dutch Reagan. Not now: a majority of Bush voters are okaying the possibility, if not probability, of a violent Pax Americana in the Middle East and strident one-party rule at home.

II

1932-68 was the age of FDR and Kennedy. 1968-2004 was the age of Nixon and Reagan/Bush. Now we're on the brink of a new decades-long period: either of Democratic advantage and a long, hard slog to recovering some sense of progressive reality; or a "New American Fascism" era of The World At War meets Monty Python's Flying Circus, with plutocratic & theocratic Republicans dominating, and perhaps with Dems occasionally offering a more marketable package of cloaked corruption and Orwellian militarism.

***

11/03/04

You'd think that with the Iraq quagmire, Osama still at large, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, the 9/11 Commission report and the worst jobs performance since Herbert Hoover, enough citizens would wake up and vote the "miserable failure" of an incumbent out. Particularly with Fahrenheit 9/11 and Air America out there, and three solid debate performances by Kerry.

But noooooo. Kerry supposedly didn't have enough "moral clarity" on issues like gay marriage, abortion and fighting terrorism. And so, 59 million idiots Americans went with "the devil they know." Most likely they, plus the rest of the world, will pay dearly for it.

***

11-4-04

I

I mean, out of 115 million votes cast, it will be 136,000 votes in Ohio that separate John Kerry winning the White House from George W. Bush re-winning (or re-stealing, if you must) the White House. From a hope, possibly slight but undeniably real, of creating a new momentum to protect Enlightenment and New Deal values, and the fragile balance of the earth's environment, to a nearly inexorable decline into unnecessary chaos, pain, absurdity and, finally, the extinction of the human species -- most likely, as T.S. Eliot foretold, not with a bang but a whimper.

This is a cruel fate that could've been written by the devil hisself. (Why, it even goes beyond Game 6 for the '86 Red Sox, or Game 7 for the 2000 Trail Blazers.) And we, as a species, need some miracles and we need them fast -- and I don't believe there is a God who guarantees such miracles. We, as citizens of the planet, must help ourselves, before the possibility of avoiding future madness and death becomes so faint as to be practically non-existent.

II

Commander Codpiece after 9/11 and the fall of the Taliban was going to be tough to beat no matter how you look at it, particularly since he had the whore media in his pocket pretty much to the end. Kerry wasn't perfect -- he could've fought back a bit harder on Swift Boat (just a well-placed 527 ad or two would've likely done the trick); and as Digby said, he by nature isn't the kind of telegenic everyman that Bush is able to fake -- but he did wonderfully in the debates, at the convention, and for the most part on the stump. He raised a lot of money, chose a decent running mate (although in retrospect Wesley Clark may've been better) and came within 136,000 votes and some rigged voting machines of winning the thing.

***

11/6/04

And as one realizes by the end of the film, how Carrey and Winslet's characters have, with love and bonding and perhaps a little luck, been able to transcend the obstacles and limitations of their mysterious and even darkly magical minds, one attains a deeper understanding of why they belong together.

A great film can make you believe the magical is possible, and this one does. It's way more out there than Sofia Coppola's fine Lost In Translation, but the two movies do share a couple of important qualities: the human vulnerabilities displayed by the glamorous Hollywood leads end up making said glamour beside the point; and the bonding between the leads (Carrey and Winslet; Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson) has a magical component that nevertheless makes some real-world sense.

Is it surprising, after all, that Murray's Bob and Johannson's Charlotte have their "chance" and fortuitous get-together on the streets of Tokyo at film's end? Not really, because the bonding between the characters makes it seem inevitable. And so it is with Carrey's Joel and Winslet's Clementine -- by the end, we just know their relationship was meant to be.

***

11/26/04

As for where I'm personally at on the issue of this year's presidential election and its alleged chicanery, author Mark Crispin Miller puts it well:

"To nod agreement that this was indeed an honest win is to forget how Bush was shoehorned into office in the first place; to ignore the ease with which electronic totals can be changed without a trace; to suppress the fact that Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S-the major manufacturers of touch screen voting machines and central tabulators-are owned and run by Bush Republicans, who have made no secret of their partisan intentions; to deny the value of the exit polls, which turn out to have been “mistaken” only in the swing states; to downplay the weird inflation of the Bush vote in county after county, where the number of votes for president was somehow higher than the number of voters who turned out; to ignore the bald chicanery of the Bush supporters who ran the central polling station in Ohio’s Warren County and forced out the press and poll monitors so they could count the vote in secret; to forget the numerous accounts of vote fraud coast to coast throughout the prior weeks of early voting; to overlook the fact that every single “glitch” or “error” that has been reported favors Bush; to ignore the countless instances of ballots-absentee, provisional-thrown away or left uncounted; to forget that the civilian vote abroad (some four million Americans) was being mishandled by the Pentagon (which had somehow become responsible for doing the State Department’s job); and to ignore the many dirty tricks reported-the polling places quickly relocated at the last minute, the fake voter-registration drives, the thousands of Americans who found themselves not on the rolls, the police road-blocks, the bullying pro-Bush poll workers, the machines that kept translating votes for Kerry into votes for Bush. And so on."

Hail to the thief, again.

***

12/10/04

All this press to fascism is just another way for the weak multitudes to say "I can't handle life without some kind of reality-altering drug." You see their fear, and see their stupid banality, and what dominates is not their desire to transcend, but their desire to deny. The anesthetizing allure of denial, and the overwhelming waves of power that result, is perhaps (more than the love of money) the root of all evil.

In the end, the Ministry of Silly Walks will probably tie us all to Slim Pickens' atomic bomb. But for awhile yet, some of us can still have a little fun with our fleeting psycho-delic time stamps.

***

12/20/04

Mitchell invites couples who are unhappy in long-term relationships to question whether they are as unhappy as they think they are. He, like the other two authors reviewed here (Joshua Coleman and Phil McGraw), is wary of any "grass is greener" thinking among those in marital crisis. Better first, Mitchell says, to explore the possibilities of what one already has, seeking to discover (or rediscover) something essential and transformative. To give up without fully exploring those possibilities, he says, leaves one vulnerable to repeating similar self-defeating mindtraps with future mates.

Exploring the transformational possibilities of one's stuck marriage, Mitchell writes, takes at the least an understanding of the creative aspect of a relationship. He says that marriage ideally is a "sandcastle built for two," with the notion of "objective reality" accepted as a "construction" that can be molded and remolded.

***

1/24/05

I had a nice buzz on and I had to check in on the weirdly compelling pomp and circumstance of the inaugural parade on C-SPAN. I find the live feeds of political events from C-SPAN often fascinating, one of the few glimpses behind the facade of soundbites and BS that viewers ever get.

I watched live as George W. Bush gave the Texas Longhorn marching band the "Hook 'em Horns" sign during the parade. I saw that he might not have done it, were it not for his daughter Jenna flashing the sign first. It was a moment of small controversy, as that sign has long been taken in some circles as something obscene and devilish. Bush himself looked a bit embarrassed after he flashed the sign; to cover for it, as he has in other uncomfortable public moments over the years, he made a slightly goofy gesture for the omnipresent TV camera, with self-deprecating body language that seemed borrowed from (or aligned with) a master of the art, the late Johnny Carson.

I was pleased when James Wolcott noticed the Carson/Dubya connection in an early blog entry of his -- I sometimes need affirmation that my crazy-ass media notions (and there are several) aren't completely off the charts.

This Year's Model

Elvis Costello shows who he's supporting for president in '08:

I'm still leaning toward voting for someone not named Hillary in Oregon's Democratic primary, though. For all the difference it'll make, as the primary won't happen until May, likely long after Hill or whomever has already wrapped up the nomination.

Following a tip from Digby's blog, I took this test and found the candidates who are supposedly closest to my views. Here are the top four:

Chris Dodd
Score: 49
Agree: Iraq, Taxes, Stem-Cell Research, Abortion, Social Security, Line-Item Veto, Energy, Marriage, Death Penalty. Disagree: Immigration, Health Care.

Dennis Kucinich
Score: 47
Agree: Immigration, Taxes, Stem-Cell Research, Abortion, Social Security, Line-Item Veto, Energy, Marriage, Death Penalty. Disagree: Iraq, Health Care.

John Edwards
Score: 46
Agree: Iraq, Immigration, Taxes, Stem-Cell Research, Abortion, Social Security, Energy, Marriage. Disagree: Health Care, Line-Item Veto, Death Penalty.

Hillary Clinton
Score: 44
Agree: Iraq, Taxes, Stem-Cell Research, Abortion, Social Security, Line-Item Veto, Energy, Marriage. Disagree: Immigration, Health Care, Death Penalty.

Barack Obama fifth. Surprising.

Samples

Hey grandpa, what's for supper?

Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins - "Rise Up With Fists"


Hee Haw salutes my hometown of Donald, Orygone. Population 895.

Sa-LOOT!

Link Responsibly

Added to the wunnerful WATP list o' links:

*Light reading, author/scholar Jenny Davidson's blog of book reviews and other insightful commentary.

*My friend Maitland Jones' new blog Pictures of Thoughts, something that will hopefully become a regular glance into the life of a vibrant mind.

Other things I've recently come across on these internets:

*From New York Magazine online, The Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews. Fortunately for us, his best lyrics (of which there are many) are plenty comprehensible.

*Lance Mannion on faith, imagination and the "people are better off for having faith" meme.

Believing in God isn't an act of imagination. It's often a willful closing of a mental door against imagination, because if you can imagine that God exists, you can also imagine that He doesn't. You can imagine that He's not a he. You can imagine that the He that's not he or the she that is not He is in fact a They or an It or a something other than the figure the preachers and priests and mullahs want you to believe in.

*And from the Greg T. YouTube Favorites archives: Sheriff Andy Taylor talks some sense; and Bill Murray's Lost In Translation whisper is revealed at last.

Nick In The Hat

High Hat #9 is here at last, with plenty of good stuff as usual, and my Nick Lowe career review included:

Peace, Lowe and Understanding

And he tried — how he tried — to write hits. But only one, the 1979 “Cruel to Be Kind,” riding the zenith of the New Wave commercial boomlet, made the US Top 40. And ever since, as he transitioned from consciously trying to create followup commercial successes to simply trying to stake out journeyman territory, he has drawn upon his vast musical influences to elongate a career that is hard to top in the rock and roll era for consistent quality over a lengthy period of time.

There's only a passing mention of Lowe's band Rockpile in my article, as I focused primarily on his solo career. This Rockpile song, with Lowe on lead vocals and Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner on guitar, was one that really should've been a bigger hit back in the day:

Artful Dodgers

It's World Serious time again, and in honor of the Fall Classic, let's play some old-school Lego ball with Maury Wills, Orlando Cepeda and Danny Kaye:

When I worked at a radio station in Eugene in the late '80s, there was a tape of the last section of "The Dodgers Song" that was in the studio archives of one of the announcers. During a late-night shift I dubbed it onto a cassette, and it's been a favorite ever since, but I'd never heard the entire song until I saw the above video.

The song is based on the 1962 LA Dodgers, the subject of one of the first sports stories my dad shared with me when I was a kid. He remembered following the team when we lived in SoCal at the time (me being born during that season) and seeing the Dodgers choke away a big lead at the end of the year, before losing a three-game playoff to the SF Giants for the National League pennant. A game-by-game record of the final two weeks of the season (courtesy of baseballlibrary.com) seems to confirm this:

Sunday, September 16: Lost to Cubs
Monday, September 17: Lost to Braves
Tuesday, September 18: Lost to Braves
Wednesday, September 19: Defeated Braves
Friday, September 21: Lost to Cardinals
Saturday, September 22: Defeated Cardinals
Sunday, September 23: Lost to Cardinals
Tuesday, September 25: Lost to Astros
Wednesday, September 26: Defeated Astros
Thursday, September 27: Lost to Astros
Friday, September 28: Lost to Cardinals
Saturday, September 29: Lost to Cardinals
Sunday, September 30: Lost to Cardinals

Losing 10 of the last 13 to blow the NL pennant. Maybe not quite at the level of the 2007 Mets or 1964 Phillies. But a mighty disappointing way to end an otherwise stellar 102-win season.

Senior Benefit

Happy birthday to my mother, Barbara Santora of Fontana CA, who turns the big 65 this week.

Married more than 25 years now to her second husband Jerry, the Santoras are apartment managers in Fontana, not far from the Kaiser hospital where my brother Mike was born and where I got my tonsils out.

For what it's worth, she has the same birthday (10/26) as Hillary Clinton, who is five years her junior.

YouTube has a clip of a Tonight Show taping that me, mom and my brother Mike attended in September 1982, about a year and a half after my parents divorced. The clip features Johnny Carson introducing the Manhattan Transfer, who were guests that day along with Richard Benjamin.

The day we saw the Carson show was also the day we saw a taping of Glen Campbell's short-lived syndicated music series from the early '80s. The guest star that day was Johnny Mathis. Couldn't find a YouTube clip of that show to e-mail mom, but as she is a Johnny Mathis fan from the '50s on, I'm sure she'll enjoy seeing this again:

Quick Snap

I finally figured out how to transfer pics from my cell phone to my computer. Below is a shot, enhanced by HP Image Zone, from this year's Oregon Shakespearian Festival. This was my view at the outdoor Elizabethan Theater in August, while I was waiting for The Tempest to begin:





















Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

W. Shakespeare, The Tempest

Just Visiting

Another Oregonian article, my 16th bylined piece since returning to the paper as a freelancer last year:

2 teachers from Spain teach in Canby schools

Baez said the program started about 20 years ago in California as a way for Spanish teachers to learn and share about different methods of teaching, as well as provide quality bilingual education in U.S. schools. This is the second year the program has been available to Oregon public schools, she said.

Velasco and Maroto, who taught elementary school in Spain, said they've already discovered some distinct differences between the American and Spanish educational systems. It's rare, they said, for parents to help out in the classroom in Spain, whereas it's fairly common in the United States, particularly at the lower grade levels.

And they both think the U.S. education system is, as Velasco puts it, "too focused on testing and not enough on just teaching."

Formidable

Hail Britannia, and hail the good Bush:

Counting Presents, Pt. 2

Pt. 1

Back through the mists of blogtime we go, for another look at past Greg T. posts:

7/27/03

It was ultimately a C-section birth, though it wasn't planned that way. To my surprise the HMO doctor asked me to help with the birth by keeping one of my wife's legs up. She pushed and pushed, and I felt such empathy for what females go through with childbirth...but the boy just wouldn't come through the birth canal. When his vital signs started looking a little shaky, the doctor chose to remove him from the womb via C-section.

My self-image went all over the map that night, from giddy lottery winner to insecure dorkburger. I've a habit, for better and worse, of trying to sum up "profound" moments with a clever word or two. But that moment was just too darned big. I remembered Jack Nicholson calling his little son "my man Ray" and feeling the love behind that comment; when Andrew came out, I blurted out "my man!" and felt typically incongruous. But soon my boy calmly rested in my arms, and I carried him out of the delivery room toward the nursery. It was magic.

***

9/11/03

I remember the numbness and darkness in the voice of, of all people, Katie Couric, as she spoke while the second tower fell. The testimonials from people near Ground Zero that day were alternately heartbreaking, scary and heroic, and always poignant. The pictures, from both New York and Washington (where the Pentagon had also been attacked) were unforgettable.

I work at a horse-racing wagering establishment, and was sent home early that day, as all the tracks cancelled their races. The TV network that carries the races (TVG) was replaced by Fox News (oh joy!), so I saw those towers falling over and over on my cubicle TV monitor. I remembered the magnificent view of Manhattan that I had from the top of the WTC, when I visited New York in June 1980.

***

9/13/03

Throughout the '80s, Late Night With David Letterman was my favorite TV show. It struck a comic pose that seemed so ballsy and innovative in the context of the Reagan '80s, where yuppification and sellout abounded, that it was like a cool swim in the middle of a desert. I got rather obsessed about it, as did many thousands of other fans. That level of fandom undoubtedly inspired a skit the show did: a commercial announcing the release of two Bible-like books of Dave jokes and sayings: What Dave Said and More Dave.

Watching Late Night on NBC in the '80s (up to 1987 or thereabouts) was often a giddy and uplifting experience for me, but it was also a bit of a package deal. On the upside, Letterman had a stubborn and obvious commitment to making his show a quality package, an edgy step up from the dated panderfest that Carson's show had become. With writers and performers like Chris Elliott and Gerry Mulligan aboard, the show was daring, innovative and refreshing. But the other side of the coin was that on the air, Dave wore his inner control freak on his sleeve, practically all the time. Anyone who deviated one iota from the Master Plan of Brilliant Comedy got it good from the General, one way or another.

***

9/18/03

He lived hard, he lived strong, he lived with much integrity. He was, in the words of one Internet compadre, a splendid human being. If his Christianity sometimes seemed a little over the top; if too much of his recorded output between the late '70s and early '90s seemed unfocused and even schlocky, it all pales next to the amazing body of work the man left us, and the resonance of that voice, one that will vibrantly speak to people over future decades and centuries.

***

9/18/03

What's the difference between right and wrong?

I'm not a professional philosopher, so I can only give a gut reaction. My gut tells me that true love is never in vain, is always right in some way. And experience tells me that commitment, integrity, passion and humor are virtues that are very powerful and very useful.

So, for me, a life with love, commitment, passion, integrity and humor is the right life to pursue. Lacking any one of these virtues would be the wrong way to go.

***

10/16/03

Name something you've done to undo, subvert or neutralize the Battle of the Sexes.

All I can tell you is what I've tried to do. The jury's out on whether I've ever succeeded. I've always tried to avoid the predator mentality with women, yet lust and whimsy and desperation have more than once made me too pushy. I married a woman whose passion and sense of humor I love, yet we argue too damn much.

I respect women, and I don't believe there's anything a man can achieve in society that a woman can't. If anything, I hope I've communicated that I am not a male chauvinist.

Here are two dispatches from the battlefield that have stuck with me:

"We make her paint her face and dance." - John Lennon

"We hate them. They hate us. They're smarter. They're stronger." - Jack Nicholson

***

11/14/03

Having smoked pot since I was 18 years old, and having taken acid a few times, I couldn't in good conscience throw a blanket "drugs are evil" gauntlet down on him. On the other hand, I have a strong opinion that underagers play an especially dangerous kind of Russian Roulette by taking drugs, and the chances are good that neither their minds or bodies are ready to handle either the upsides or downsides of it.

So I simply said to my son: "Drugs are dangerous, and kids really shouldn't be doing them at all." What I'll likely add in the future is: Adults need to decide for themselves, and take full responsibility for what they decide. If he's open to it, I'll probably someday go into my standard diatribe about how stupidly unfair and hypocritical the U.S. drug laws are, but that won't be for awhile.

***

11/24/03

It's been a sad spectacle indeed, watching someone with Michael's great singing, songwriting and dancing talents become an utter freak show over the past two decades. My theory is that the mega-success of his album Thriller in 1982-84 was too much for the already fragile MJ to handle, and when it coincided with unresolved personal issues with sexuality, religion and childhood, the man just snapped, and he fully devolved into a creature of repulsive vanity and denial.

It was first evident during the summer of '84, the summer of The Jacksons' Victory album and tour, that MJ had developed a dysfunctional relationship with the media hype, which by then regularly put him in the same category as Elvis and The Beatles. (This would culminate in 1991, when he declared himself "King of Pop".) Perhaps in his mind, it was the only thing that could liberate him from the inner demons. In any event, his aura of self-importance became suffocating, and certainly that adversely affected his art.

***

1/7/04

If you check the Madison Avenue commercials and the mainstream TV, you don't see a lot of anger reflected there. What you see is: America, the land of plenty, kicks ass. And the heartland is exposed to that message, day after day after day. Even an event like 9/11 is ultimately portrayed with heroic, reassuring strings.

The media seems to have an inbred resistance to angry rhetoric. Anger can be niche marketed in selected doses of comedy and commentary, but generally it doesn't jibe with the in-house research -- data that says the mainstream audience is primarily apolitical and wants to be pacified.

***

1/13/04

...while it's important for Democrats to be armed with damning evidence about George W. Bush, unless they have developed enough spine, compassion, discipline and rhetorical savvy to sell themselves as trustworthy vessels of information, they probably won't get far with swing voters & non-voters who remain uncommitted to candidate or party. These are people who are quite capable of logic and common sense, but for various reasons are a generally apolitical lot, not prone to the wonkish research and analysis required to properly critique (and often debunk) the mainstream media's spin on the news. What they're fed is a series of manipulated images and soundbites that make them feel reassured about America and their potential as Americans.

When they see a Dem calling BS on the whole corporate propaganda racket, and how it conceals hideous GOP policies adversely affecting the economy, environment and world community, many want to know, first and foremost, if said Dem can provide a replacement for that comforting feeling they get from the "America kicks ass" meme, sold daily via TV shows, commercials and newscasts.

I'm afraid that simply articulating one's logic and evidence on the matter is generally not going to win the hearts of the uncommitteds. There needs to be something extra added: a demonstration that one is empowered by thinking the way they do, in a way that is inspirational to others. That could manifest in different ways for different people, but in most cases it would involve noticeable increases in energy, focus, discipline and compassion, coupled with a certain joy for living that shines through even when one is angry.

***

1/25/04

Around Christmas of 1944, Hellemn was assigned to join Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army, near the German border in France.

"After being there for about four days, our division joined in the Battle of The Bulge," Hellemn said. "Our division was to replace two divisions that had suffered heavy casualties."

Below-zero temperatures and hilly terrain faced Hellemn and his fellow soldiers as they left for Verdun on the German border.

"The roads were all ice," Hellemn said, "and the truck wouldn't go up hills. We had to get out in the cold and push them up over the hills."

There, the soldiers found their "K rations" of food being used up within a couple of days, with no imminent replacements.

Risking punishment for going AWOL, Hellemn joined a group of soldiers who went to a French cafe in town, and were able to trade two cigarettes (very valuable in Europe at that time, he said) for a big bowl of potato soup.

***

2/6/04

His rifle made useless, Hellemn headed back toward Tetingen to get another one, braving more fire. He encountered his squad leader, still badly hurt and not moving, on the way back.

"I wanted to get Harry," he said. "In Tetingen there was a captured German medic who could speak a little English, and he said he'd go with me.

"We were able to pick up Harry and get him back to town, and somehow we didn't get hit."

Hellemn said they didn't settle for rescuing only the squad leader: "We decided at that point to get other people who were down."

Still avoiding being hit by fire, they were able to rescue about 10 others. They loaded all the wounded in an old abandoned American medical jeep (risking that the jeep might've been boobytrapped by the Germans) and made four trips to an AID station 10 miles away.

***

3/19/04

*Oct. 26, 1965: The Selective Service declares that married men without children, who were previously exempted from the draft, will now be called up. Married men with children remain exempt.

Turns out Cheney's "other priorities" centered around getting his wife Lynne pregnant.

What's interesting, for me, is discovering that 10/26/65 was an important day in my life as well. My father was 24 at the time, and still draftable -- but he already had two kids, my brother Mike and myself. And 10/26 is not only my mother's birthday, it's also Hillary Clinton's.

I love the smell of synchronicity in the morning.

Uncle Albert



Cheers to Al Gore for winning a piece of the Peace Prize. And huzzah for The Rude Pundit, who once again sums things up beautifully (and rudely.)

Gore v. Bush

Gore's not gonna run. Give that up. To go from speaking out about melting icecaps to being asked what he thinks about, say, a flag-burning amendment would be a degradation of what he's worked for the last six years. And had that statewide recount in Florida happened and Gore had become president, Republicans would have simply worked night and day trying to destroy him, and his causes would have been washed away in a tide of worthless investigations of Buddhist monk phone calls and worse. And let's not even get into how Republicans would have exploded in berserk, ape-like rage over 9/11 if it had happened under a Gore presidency.

It's not that we're not worthy or that he's too good for us or any of that hyperbolic nonsense. We got the president we deserved, twice, and we realized too late that we didn't get the president we needed.


I'd guess that Gore's Nobel win puts him in a close race with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for TIME's Man of The Year as well. An Oscar, a Nobel and a Man of The Year, all in 12 months, would be quite the trifecta.

I'm sure it's all a leftist conspiracy funded by ChiComm money. < /sarcasm >

It's sad, because in a sane country, one not dominated by corporate, conservative-enabling news media and corrupt and/or spineless politicians, Gore's honors would make it more likely for him to win the presidency. But we don't live in such a country, and I think Gore -- who's talked in recent years about no longer having the stomach for the extreme rough and tumble of electoral politics -- knows this.

Time to choose between Hillary (Clinton 2.0?), Edwards (Carter 2.0?) and Obama (Kennedy 3.0?) So far, all three remind me more of failed past idealism than the promise of future accomplishment. But at least they're not crazy rat-bastard Republicans, and avoiding Republicans as long as it's allowed is the only real choice voters have left these days.

Pure Pop

One advantage to being in the front row of a Nick Lowe show, in a relatively intimate setting like Portland's Aladdin Theater, is that you can see beyond the modest facade of an aging rocker with gray hair and a wrinkle or two, and witness a musical vibrancy that doesn't really show much ware for age. In short, at age 58 the man can still flat-out sing, and better than ever I think. And he looks fighting trim, like he could still do tours for another 10 years at least, if he wanted to.

The Lowe show I saw last night was almost all acoustic; one of the encore songs was performed with electric guitar and keyboard backing by Bill Kirchen and Austin deLone, the former Commander Cody band members who opened for Lowe. Kirchen and deLone didn't do "Hot Rod Lincoln" last night, but Kirchen especially wowed the audience with some fine classic Telecaster playing.

Lowe did just about all my favorites -- including "What's Shakin' On The Hill," "The Beast In Me," "Without Love," "Man That I've Become," "Heart," "Shelley My Love" and "All Men Are Liars" -- and several songs from his new CD At My Age. He also sang what you might call his signature songs: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," "I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock and Roll)" and "Cruel To Be Kind" (a performance that really showcased his improvement as a singer.) He left out "Raining, Raining" and "Freezing," but the dude didn't have all night.

He said his visit to the "beautiful and dramatic Pacific Northwest" was coming near the end of a grueling US tour to promote the new CD. He said he only had a couple shows left after this, before going back to his home in England. He complimented the Aladdin, "despite its unsavory past" (it once was an X-rated movie theater that ran Deep Throat for years), for being a favorite of touring musicians, comparable to theaters in New York, San Francisco...and Boise, Idaho.

His shadow reflected beautifully off the theater walls as he performed. Sometimes I'd turn my head and watch the shadow sing.

He had a charming conversational tone with the audience, talking about how he used to have a home in Cornwall in south of England. He said that normally this would be the time of the show where a map would come down behind him, and he could point to Cornwall on the map, but "the truck" wasn't able to get the map to the show. His Cornwall place, he said, was originally intended as a hideout to write songs at. He said he ended up not writing many songs there, but having plenty of good times getting drunk with his friends.

Now that he has a wife and kid, he told the audience, things like the house in Cornwall and "the Mercedes-Benz" have gone away. He had the audience in the palm of his hand at this point, and he gave a wistful sigh of remembrance for all the past wild times. He said he likes to do one of those sighs per show.

He talked about taking four hours to drive to London from Cornwall, and writing in his head during the trip his "folk song" called "Indian Queens." He said along the way he stopped for petrol and a sandwich.

He plugged his new CD, and when the crowd reaction seemed to indicate that most of the several hundred there already had a copy, he said it "looks like sales might be a bit weak in the lobby."

Lowe got multiple standing ovations at the end of the show, from what he called a great crowd.

After the show my friend Maitland and I went to the theater back door to see if we could say hello and thanks. Nobody was back there, and if there was any kind of tour bus, it was hidden away. We figured it wasn't meant to be, and headed to our cars. And really, it's probably just as well -- I get kind of embarrassed these days when I can't help but whoop and clap loud at a rock concert, and let my Inner Fanboy show. At my age, and with my eternally geeky looks, I feel like it must look sillier than ever. But when the music grabs me, it's hard not to go wild a bit.

***

Which reminds me of a story that proves once again that I am George Costanza West.

In August I took my kids to see the All-American Rejects at the Oregon State Fair. I like some of the songs I've heard from them -- stylistically, they seem somewhat in the Cheap Trick mold. The lead singer was born in 1984, around the time Greg T. was actually working on a musical project, and Nick Lowe was already considered something of a has-been. So AAR is definitely my kids' generation, not mine.

My original plan was to go hide up in the nosebleed seats, and let my kids (staying together, just to be safe) get closer to the stage and fully enjoy the show. Turns out there was festival seating in front of the stage, with lots of teenagers and young adults bunched together like sardines as they stood and waited through the setup and soundcheck and opening act. The kids and I decided that the spot we secured up in the stands, which looked down onto the stage from the right, was a better place to view the concert.

The kids, having memorized the lyrics to many of the AAR songs, whooped and sang along as the rockers rocked. It was great to watch them have so much fun.

Then, about two-thirds into the show, as lead singer Tyson Ritter spoke to the audience, he looked up at our section and noticed that not all of us had "gotten up off our asses." So he took his hand-held mike, walked behind the stage, and then went directly to our section. He walked past my daughter Vicktoria (who, in awe, got out her cell phone and took some pics) and went up near the railing next to our section to address the audience, as the spotlights shone down on us all. He was standing right next to my son Andrew and me.

Surreal, no? I was laughing enthusiastically (and I'm sure, geekily) at the surrealness of it -- and then, feeling that I was in a position to be part of the show, I reached out and gently patted him on the back, as if to say both "Good show, mate" and "You are real, aren't you? You're not a hologram of some kind?"

Turns out I was the only one who dared touch him. He didn't seem to mind, but in the moment it seemed like maybe I broke some unspoken rule between performer and audience, and made myself look foolish. Possibly just my paranoia, but as what happened sunk in after the show, it did seem more and more like a Costanza Moment.

I love rock and roll, but rarely if ever have I mastered the art of rock and roll cool.

Done Dirt Cheap

Trying to get a new job that saves me gas by being closer to home, I recently applied for two customer service positions that I felt very qualified for. My qualifications were clearly laid out in my resumé, and yet I didn't even get an interview for either job. Earlier this year, I applied for a general reporter position at a nearby daily newspaper, hoping my Oregonian clips would at least get my foot in the door. Didn't get an interview for that, either.

This does have me a bit worried, as I consider what might happen should I lose my current job. Is the competition for jobs so great now that many who apply are very qualified? Or is it something else, like my, shall we say, advanced age compared to other applicants? Or my lack of upward mobility in past jobs -- do they judge me on not having supervisory experience, even if the position itself is not a supervisor job?

It's the not knowing, the forced guesswork, that bugs me the most. If I at least got an interview, I might get a better clue as to what they want and what I might lack.

All I can say is, as annoying as my current customer service job can be, it may well be as good as I'm going to get in that field. Someday I may be forced to get a job in another field -- maybe even requiring job training -- and that would not be easy. In future jobs I may ultimately have to accept a pay cut, or worse.

Ugh. And meanwhile, there'll always be people who say, just bring out that Inner Salesman, Greg! Sell, sell, sell! Smile, smile, smile! Coffee's for closers!

I made decisions back in the day, I know, that made this state of peril more likely. Not looking for available media jobs right after graduating from college. Not going for a two-year media degree instead of a four-year one, which ended up taking 10 arduous years to complete. Now I've budgeted myself out of all or most entry-level media jobs, and may face more silent age discrimination in future positions (in media and elsewhere) that I apply for.

Oh well. One advantage to having life experience, is that I know over time the unexpected can happen, and the tides can turn.

Seeds Of Success

My latest Oregonian article appeared today:

Students, residents and businesses dig in to create community garden

Baker Prairie principal Lou Bailey said more than 30 Baker Prairie students were chosen to help Team Depot on Sept. 27 with upgrade work for the garden, a 300-foot-by-100-foot space west of the school building on Southeast Township Road.

"It's one of those projects that schools love to do, and don't often get a chance to do," Bailey said. "It brings in kids, it brings in parents, it brings in business partnership. And it gives students a chance to have an outdoor classroom."

***

I've noticed that the Oregon Live website keeps my stories up for about six months at most. As past links go away, I will replace them with links to scans of the print articles. Because of course, that's why you come to this blog, to read about doings in Clackamas County.

Still waiting for my Nick Lowe article to appear in High Hat #9, by the way. I'm told the article has been edited and is ready to go when the new issue itself is.

My friend Maitland was kind enough to purchase me a ticket to Nick's show in Portland next week. If all works out, I'll post a review here.

Counting Presents, Pt. 1

I flew out of the blocks in 2003 with this blog, blending new material with edited versions of previous posts I'd done in Internet forums over the year prior to becoming a blogger. Here are what I think are some notable excerpts from the first few months:

3/31/03

Lacking a true smoking gun, there's no way a majority of Americans would think the Bush Administration let 9/11 happen. It simply Does Not Compute with a dominant meme, that Americans are generally the good guys. And as interesting and suspicious as the timeline & behavior of Bushco is, re: 9/11, I still don't think (trying to look at it as rigidly as a lawyer would) that the smoking gun is yet there. Perhaps one would appear, were Congress to get serious about investigating it all, but that's highly unlikely. For one thing, I don't think a lot of congressfolk, whether Repub or Dem, want to fuck with that powerful "we're the good guys" meme. Bad for business, donchaknow.

***

4/1/03

I

The liberal welfare state, post-New Deal, has been historically disempowered by a lack of pragmatism, and by promising more than it can deliver. As a result, conservatism too often seems the result of disappointment with liberal promises, and ignorance (via corporate propaganda) to the effects of an unpoliced free market.

Liberalism in general remains scarred by the effects of idealism set forth in the '60s and '70s, a kind of rhetorical flourish (think LBJ on poverty, RFK & MLK on the war, Carter on energy policy...and later, Clinton on health care) that underestimated the power of right-wing and corporate resistance.

II

As you go higher up the power chain, there has long been a concerted attack on marijuana use. And while companies have legitimate concerns about drug addiction threatening workplace production, the biggest reason pot gets tagged as "demon weed" is the enlightened detachment -- the awareness that a workplace really isn't as valuable or important as it thinks it is -- that pot use can cause among what one might still call the prolétariat.

***

The question of "Do you make your own luck?" is a fascinating one, and not open to easy answers. But I notice that many societal achievers tend to turn off critical thinking on the matter, settling for ego-driven belief in a hero narrative, with each of them as the hero. Some use the "God is my co-pilot" addendum to this narrative, which may have an even more corrosive societal effect.

I think there's a long tradition of propaganda that greatly emphasizes a Horatio Alger hero narrative vis-à-vis economic accomplishment, and that downgrades the factors of luck and providence. In such an environment, it's no wonder that a good number of those who've "made it" believe that by putting themselves on a pedestal as examples of having the right stuff, they've already done all they really need to do.

On one hand, you can write it off as a kind of terminal immaturity -- simple folk who fell hook, line and sinker for the Big Lie. (Been goin' on since at least the Roman Empire, I suppose.) But when there is a grossly disproprotionate valuing of the wealthy, the insular hero narrative becomes, I think, a luxury we can no longer afford to let rich people have.

III

The Naderite view of "It has to get worse before it gets better," no matter how much a heartless abandonment of those affected by differences between Dem or Repub, is still in a long-term sense perhaps the only real hope that progressives have.

Doesn't mean I'll ever vote Green again, but I fear we are on the brink of a truly New World Order here, where my country is fully transformed into an imperialist plutocracy that's immune to change via the ballot box.

US presidential elections now function in a kind of postmodern, small-d democracy, a voting process ironically similar to that used by the United Nations.

There remains a vote -- and the concept of American democratic government remains, if anything, a potent marketing tool -- but a shadowy coalition of corporate, religious and military interests have developed a de facto veto power over the democratic process, if the will of the voters do not serve those interests. And the Republican base, for whatever it may lack in voting numbers and demographic potential, makes up for it by being an effective servant of that "shadow coalition," more so than Democrats.

IV

A majority of Americans buy the media line on Bush, primarily due to what I call Uncle Walter Syndrome. Too many Americans have a deep need, to the point of absurdity, to generally believe what they're being told by the mainstream talking heads.

Not only has there been a long-term residual effect from long-gone TV journalists like Cronkite and Howard K. Smith, who actually did possess some impressive credibility, but also the corporate media has for years forcefully advertised itself as upholding the Murrow/Cronkite/Smith tradition of fairness and balance.

This bloated self-promotion, for most thinking people, has clearly become a bald-faced lie. But for those who still need to believe their TVs -- be it from insularity, laziness or plain ol' stupidity -- the media hype is something they are all too willing to buy into.

V

How very much the dry drunk is Bush, getting his rocks off on bourgeois Christianity and Hollywood war mythology.

I suppose when the Orwellian clusterfuck is so pervasive, it even messes with the leaders' sense of reality, then there's hope the leaders will eventually break down and/or overreach, leaving a vacuum that more responsible leaders can fill. But of course the crucial question is, "At what cost?"

VI

George W. Bush channels a hybrid of Andy Griffith & John Wayne as successfully as Clinton channeled a mix of Elvis and JFK, and finds himself tailor-made for playing a protector figure, despite his "dyslexicon" and shady past. Just as long as he never strays too far from the Rove script.

***

4/12/03

The images of Iraqi civilians killed or maimed by errant bombs and gunfire really got to me. And while I realize there's an upside to rooting out the evildoer Saddam's regime, I am distraught (though hardly surprised) that the mainstream focus is not on the grotesque price in innocent life that is being paid, nor on the failed diplomacy that preceded this war, but rather on maintaining a "pizza and fairy tales" narrative about the always righteous, always altruistic American liberators.

***

4/19/03

Television has long made a persuasive case for Andy Warhol's dictum "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." And even at age eight I could detect how TV propped the Everyday People up into the spotlight, side by side with the rich and glamorous. What I didn't know then, is that this was more about deceptive marketing than authentic egalitarianism. But for quite awhile afterwards, it seemed natural to believe that I could be a TV star too.

***

5/11/03

When the egg hatches, it's a great moment of release. Just as it seems that the mother will take back the egg after Horton does all the work, the unexpected creature that hatches is a cute flying elephant, one that is very fond of its longtime protector, Horton. Both Horton and his new "son" have bonded, and his mother remains a stranger to her child.

As a parent of two bright children, I have plenty of happy, even joyful, moments. But also, I have a decent number of Horton "loyalty test" moments, where the hope of ultimate payoff remains just that, a hope. Misunderstanding, personal weakness, feeling tied down...all must be worked through with a strong sense of loyalty and commitment to the children. One dreams that someday, when the eggs are fully hatched and the children fully grown, the satisfaction will come close to that which Horton felt at the end of the cartoon.

***

6/3/03

Many journalists, most through little fault of their own, are stymied by a world where "news" is processed as an economic and political tool. Data is manipulated to serve the interests of the media owners, and only secondly (if at all) is it used to adequately inform the public.

The majority of journalists take what they produce with a grain of salt, figuring that the partial truth exposed is better than none at all. Others who form an increasing minority not only are aware of the lies and half-truths, but also actively encourage them, in order to curry favor with their bosses. In a third category are those who fall for the "We are the sacred scribes" hype that surrounds the media, and thus overestimate both their information sources and their journalistic acumen.

***

6/9/03

...the seminar dream keeps recurring. In it, I'm visiting an est/Landmark seminar, intrigued by the goings on, drawn in by the enthusiasm and discipline that accompany the group's trademark brand of personalized philosophical inquiry. And, by the promise of a victorious "transformation," in which the outside world seems powerfully affected by one's commitments and languaging.

Thing is, in the dream I'm always there as an anonymous bystander. Seen and not seen. Taking it all in until...the "hard sell" begins. When the group gauntlet comes down, and one gets the message that transformation isn't primarily reflected in philosophical epiphanies or personal accomplishments outside the seminar. It is, rather, a matter of being able to successfully "enroll" others into the est/Landmark courses. All transformation, in essence, flows from supporting the established enrollment strategies, which typically are aggressive and even confrontational, not to mention very white collar-centric.

(In my recent dream, I happened upon a personal memo to the seminar leader from someone higher up in the organization. The first sentence read: "Work the room, hold stories.")

It's at the "hard sell" point of the seminar dream that I typically start to bail --which is something easier said than done in a real-life seminar, where they'll go the extra mile trying to coax or shame you into staying. Sometimes I'll fly or float away; other times I will sneak out the door. And just about always, there's a tinge of regret as I leave, that I've been wishy-washy and duplicitous.

***

6/26/03

Some hard-drivin' workers, through bad luck or bad timing, are bound to come up short. But hey, the bootstrappers have an answer for that, too: for those tough times, there's always Christianity.

What a wonderfully diverse life the social Darwinists offer us. All roads lead to Sunday School and the Men's Wearhouse.

***

7/1/03

For all its bombast, Greenwood's anthem has, in spots, enough skilled subtlety to be the envy of any GOP political spinmeister. Anti-PC notions are offered in somewhat ambiguous code; shades of problematic meaning turn almost imperceptibly on a single word or phrase. And as usual, the warm fuzzy blanket of Old Glory, sewn by a loving and just God, is a sturdy and transcendent mythology.

Love it or leave it, "God Bless The USA" is an awesome reflection of the perennial nationalistic impulse to whitewash and obfuscate. Not just in America, but anywhere. All done in the name of the homeland...or, in this case, "her."

My Old School

Earlier this year, the Portland School District tore down the building that housed my high school, Adams High, from 1969-81. The building also housed Whitaker Middle School for 20 years, from 1981-2001, before being evacuated by the district due to concerns about radon and toxic mold that had built up in the 1960s-era facility.

Fortunately for Adams alumni, images of the school survive online, in at least two YouTube videos. One is the trailer to Gus Van Sant's 2003 film Elephant, which was filmed on the Adams/Whitaker campus. Imagine a teenage Greg walking the halls of the school building, full of youthful vim and vigah. Or, okay, don't.

Below is what's so far the only appearance of my image on YouTube, in a video tribute to the school done by an Adams grad. (There are some shots of the building demolition in there as well.) I'm at 2:59, in a picture with the speech team. A shot of my 16-year-old self is not the pic I'd have chosen to present to the YouTube world, but I don't have much control in the matter.

Adams was a high school borne of 1960s intellectual adventurism. It was an open and liberal-minded campus, with "schools within a school" that served the individual education needs of students.

During the school's early years there were problems in integrating with the community, and in seeming too politically radical to both Portland school adminstrators and parents in the Adams neighborhood. When I arrived there as a freshman in 1976-77, a lot of the sense of liberal experimentalism had died down, but there was still enough there for me to personally find refreshing. If you came to learn responsibly, they treated you pretty much like an adult, and gave you a solid base of knowledge to work from.

There's not been a school before or since where I flourished more, and I even got to be a central figure in what was probably the school's last politically radical moment, in 1979: I wrote an editorial in the school newspaper wondering why the Portland Rose Festival, to that point, had never chosen a black Rose Festival queen.

The editorial drew written condemnation from the Festival, but the Adams staff voted to stand by what I wrote. The controversy made The Oregonian and the local TV news in June '79...and the next year, the city's first African-American Rose Festival queen was chosen. It was tempting to take some credit, but really I'll never be able to say for sure how much influence that I, or the then-emerging "Black United Front" activist movement in the city, had on the choice. In any event, those were heady times.

Due to problems with redistricting and the lingering effects of bad feeling from the early years, the school's enrollment dwindled to the point where, when I graduated in 1980, it had one of the lowest enrollments of any "big" high school in Oregon. Adams closed in 1981, not long after being the subject of a Newsweek story with the headline: "The School That Flunked."

I'm grateful to Gus Van Sant for filming Elephant there, and think it apropos that a building which began as a part of the educational avant garde ended in what you might call the cinema avant garde. Particularly because of the film's subject matter: what lurks in the mysterious souls of students, prior to a Columbine-like massacre on campus. That's a topic the original braintrust who formed Adams (some who were Harvard-trained educators) would likely find fascinating. And maybe a bit depressing, in that the '60s utopian vision of a progressive curriculum didn't make enough of a difference to keep high school culture from drifting toward moments of violent chaos.

Celebrity Bowling

One more trip, before hiatus, on Greg's Dreamland Express™.

***

I'm at the Oregon History Museum in, uh, Vancouver WA. On one wall of the museum is a big display about a musical about Oregon history that Danny Kaye was working on before he died. He only finished five songs, and the song titles are listed on the wall in big letters. One of the them is called "Oregon Song."

The musical was planned to be called Muddy Water or Muddy River (I can't recall which), and the wall has a big screen which is showing a video made by the museum of what appears to be a muddy river, with Kaye's demo of the song "Muddy Water/River" in the background. There are also blowup prints of lyric sheets that Kaye was working on for the musical.

Most of the time in the dream, it's understood that Kaye has passed away. However, at some earlier point, I understand him to be an "Artist in Residence" at the museum, and even see him (or his ghost?) walking on one of the staircases in the museum building.

***

After leaving the set of Iron Chef, having helped cook fish and hotdogs, I go to buy several books, including two biographies of Bob Hope.

Then I become a WWE bad guy, who has just left the arena after being banished for "punishment." This is happening at a mall (where I purchased the books, perhaps), and one of my fellow WWE wrestlers says I'm going to get roughed up a bit. Maybe this was all being filmed for the show.

The wrestler grabs my arm and puts a needle through my hand. I ask if it's morphine or heroin, and he says quietly, "It's just something to get rid of the pain."

The wrestlers there start beating up on me, but the drugs make me so happy that I'm pleasant to be around, so pleasant that no one wants to beat me up anymore. The wrestlers let me walk happily around the mall...and then my son, when he was one or two and still had some baby fat, looks at me like he doesn't recognize me and turns away. I'm reminded of this.

But I'm still happy, dammit! Happy enough to blend in with a yuppie couple who are joking with each other as they walk out the mall door. And happy enough to lift myself off the ground and do one of my favorite things, dream flying. Sadly, this time, I find it hard to keep the gravity from pulling me down.

No flying over Portland this time. Any kind of dream flying, actually, is getting rarer as I age.

Still, once grounded in this dream, I remain happy enough to roll down a hilly road like a roller coaster.

***

It's 1962 Day here in Holodeck Land.

I see Perry Mason's apartment, where he lived in 1962, in the Park Blocks near Portland State University.

Portland's KPTV Channel 12 (now Fox 12) has shown Perry Mason episodes at noon ever since 1969, and the channel has sent a film crew to the Park Blocks to film a new black-and-white ending credits sequence for the B&W episodes of the 1957-66 series. The letters forming the names of the cast and crew are placed on different sides of Perry's apartment building.

I go into a meeting room at the apartment complex, and I see Phyllis Diller appearing at an autograph show. I tell her I saw her cameo in the film The Aristocrats. It seems like maybe she hardly remembers it.

Near the large meeting room is a "holodeck ride" that my brother Mike and I decide to go on. We ride a motorcycle/skateboard ramp down into a narrow crevice where the holodeck signal is centered.

After the ride, back in the meeting room, I sing a karaoke version of Joey Dee and the Starliters' "Peppermint Twist." As I'm singing, I hear the Joey Dee version in my head, and it creates the illusion that I'm singing just like him. As I look around at the diminishing enthusiasm of the audience, I remember that I am not Joey Dee.

One young blonde turned middle-aged redhead becomes like my groupie. We go to a nearby room, get sopping wet, and then we kiss and embrace. A big red spot on her ribs is pulling my ribs in against her like a magnet. I'm enjoying the kissing, but thinking to myself, "If this is the new kink, then I'm not crazy about it."

The redhead says that this is a new kind of sex, and "people today are having more sex than ever." I reply, "I think people have had the same amount of sex as today, over the last 20 years. They just had to be careful about AIDS." I notice that the more I talk, the drier and less engaged she seems.

The dream ends with a production number in the meeting room, and Phyllis Diller gets the last line, followed by her trademark laugh.

I wake up and start laughing myself.

Beer Buddy

Lately, when I want to wallow in pain, I find it useful to focus on George W. Bush's words to his friends earlier this year:

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”

He's Emperor Bush and you're not. And he's still got enough enablers in the media and on Capitol Hill, that you're not going to take his precious war away from him while he's still the Decider, polls be damned.

So we wait for him to leave, and hope and pray that it doesn't get much worse in the next 16 months. If we luck into getting a Democratic president in '09, then maybe just maybe we can insert some needed maturity into the national discussion about Iraq.

I remember getting into a mini-debate online with the late great blogger Steve Gilliard, about how the Biden/Kerry/Clinton ideas of limited troop drawdown in Iraq, based on specific benchmarks tied to new efforts at building an international coalition to address the Iraq quagmire, were preferable to just pulling our forces out of there.

I respected Steve's view that it's too late for the US to achieve some measure of victory or securing of the peace in Iraq -- if, really, any kind of positive outcome was ever possible, given the reckless and corrupt nature of the Bush/Cheney White House. I also figured that the value of a troop pullout increases in direct proportion to the collective resignation people feel about the Iraq war ever getting out of the hands of murderous Republican neocon thugs. But I maintained that the US still has a moral obligation to at least try to broker a solution to the Iraq problem, even if any attempted solution (including pulling out, and certainly including the Bush plan of "staying the course") has a significant chance of failure.

I continue to hold this view, and also acknowledge that each day we stay in Iraq with leaders like Bush in charge decreases the chances of any solution working, even a draft. Put someone like Rudolph Giuliani in charge in '09 (a distinct possibility), and who knows how the hell long we'll be stuck there.

If Dems catch a break in '08 with Hillary/Obama/Edwards, or maybe in '12 or '16 with someone like Jim Webb, then at some point a Democratic president will likely try to forge a new path and broker a compromise. One could be thankful for at least that, although if the unavoidable longshot plan for stability doesn't work, guess who'll be blamed for "losing Iraq"? Hint: It won't be the guys who started the needless mess in the first place.

Center of Attention

















Even though I've started to go almost completely into nostalgia mode here as we wind things down toward hiatus, focusing on past posts and completing past ongoing features -- kind of ironic for a blog called "Wrapped Around The Present," eh? -- I couldn't let today's news about Greg Oden go uncommented on, since you'll notice if you scroll down a bit that I've made more than one comment about how he's my home team's Great Hope for the future.

To be a longtime Portland Trail Blazer fan is to know several moments of deep disappointment, over a lengthy period that started during a Blazer game in Portland I attended almost 30 years ago, in February 1978, when MVP center Bill Walton went down with an injury which ended his regular season. As dispiriting as Oden's season-ending microfracture surgery is, as Blazer misfortunes go it's actually down the list a bit, at least so far. And there are silver linings: he's still quite young (19); he seems to have a good head and heart; the specific repair on his knee, as these microfracture procedures go, was relatively minor, and could well prevent a worse injury in the future (Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard said today that Oden likely could've played this year, but at significant long-term risk); and the Blazers without Oden at center still have enough decent players to play respectably in a tough conference.

They'll likely be scrappy and competitive enough to avoid being a joke, but probably not good enough to be a Western Conference playoff team, and missing the playoffs again would put them in a position to perhaps get another quality rookie in next year's NBA draft. So the team and Oden remain headed in the right direction I think, and Oden's surgery could end up being a blessing in disguise, although it's clearly possible that this ultimately changes Oden from a potential Hall of Famer to another good-but-unspectacular big man, as Arvydas Sabonis and Kevin Duckworth mostly were during their Blazer years.

I hear the talk about the team being cursed, and certainly understand why Blazer fans would feel spooked. I recall that Walton, who helped lead the team to its only NBA title in 1977, played only once more in a Blazer uniform after the game I attended. He played in Portland's first game of the 1978 playoffs, and was injured again, this time for the rest of the playoffs and the entire next season. The '78 team, only a couple months earlier touted as perhaps one of the best ever, was decimated by injuries to Walton and other players and lost in the first round to Seattle; by the end of that next season, Walton had expressed his desire to quit the Blazers over how they treated his injuries, and he signed with another NBA team.

The team's quest for a quality center to complete what was, most seasons, a solid nucleus of players, led them to take a chance in the 1984 draft and choose center Sam Bowie over guard Michael Jordan. As I've mentioned before, people don't really get when they mention how foolish Portland supposedly was to pass on Jordan in favor of Bowie, that even if the Blazers had drafted MJ, he wouldn't have been nearly as good a fit in Portland with that team (featuring Clyde Drexler, who Jordan might've battled for the mantle of team leader) and that coach (Jack Ramsay, who might've dared to -- gasp! -- not right away make Jordan the center of the offense) as he was with Chicago. With Da Bulls he could be Da Man fairly soon, and he played on what for him must've been a more appealing big-city stage. He'd have likely given Portland three or four seasons at most, then would've been off to a bigger market and fatter contract.

Two years after drafting Bowie, the team knew quality when it saw it and drafted Sabonis from the USSR, at a time when scouts were calling him one of the most talented centers (particularly as a passer) they'd ever seen. Eventually Sabonis, bound behind the Iron Curtain for too long, did play for the Blazers from 1995-2003, but he'd had a major injury by that point and was past his prime. Had he played for the Blazers from 1990-92, the likelihood of that Drexler-led team, and not the Jordan Bulls, being the dominant team of that period would've increased. And when the Blazers did go to the conference finals during the Sabonis years, in 1999 and 2000, he performed admirably but didn't have quite enough juice left to overcome stiff competition in the paint like Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan and David Robinson. This wouldn't have meant nearly as much had the team not gone ice cold (and encountered some bad officiating) in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference Finals, a game they were well on the way to winning...but I don't really want to talk much about that, as it's still uncomfortable to think about and frankly I'm tired of writing any more about the "cursed" Blazers at this time.

Mad Ag Skillz

Here's my latest Oregonian article, which appeared today:

Canby students plan trip to FFA convention

Stoddard came to Canby after working as a teacher and FFA adviser in Sebastopol, Calif., and has participated in FFA since she was in high school.

"You can't ask for a better organization to teach leadership skills," Stoddard said. "It's developed a kind of unfair reputation as a 'hick' organization, but it's become primarily a leadership organization in recent years; it's also an activity that is good at helping students with their public-speaking skills."

Blowed Up Real Good

1970s-era stadiums demolished, courtesy of YouTube:

Three Rivers Stadium
Veterans Stadium
Cinergy Field (Riverfront Stadium)
The Kingdome

I'm old enough to remember when these stadiums had the shine of the new and cutting-edge. I also recall when it was considered commonplace for cities to keep home stadiums for at least 40-60 years.

I suppose each of the replacement stadiums in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Seattle are improvements, but still it feels weird how sports architecture in my lifetime has become so relatively disposable.

Get off my astroturf, you damn kids.

Brother Magpie





















With the blog heading toward indefinite hiatus starting in January, it's time to wrap up four years of contributions from the one and only Chester Magpie, underground pundit. And today Chester ends on what is, for him, a hopeful note:

"The newest media is possibly a Don Juan moment for a mere 200-and-something year-old country of immigrants. Propaganda? Hell yes! But in a way -- and yes it's a John Wayne afterthought -- the complete U.S. broadcast is also an internal education. Love him or hate him, Forrest Gump still has a funny way of spreading democracy.

Also in a way, I thank the 'g' for 9/12 and beyond. I mean it put Will Smith and Phil Jackson in their places, and eventually gave birth to a 'this is not my beautiful house' generation, which I think will be better equipped to deal with all the foul Cheney energy, inevitable since the time of Nixon. It's our destiny."

***

That was the 22nd Magpie dispatch. Here are dispatches 1-21:

05-19-07: White Album
10-30-06: This Time
04-15-06: Tomb Town
01-23-06: Bush/Kill
09-26-05: Chop Chop
05-13-05: USA For Oprah
04-19-05: Laughing All Day Long
03-19-05: Crude
11-17-04: A Really Big Shoe
11-06-04: What A Steal
10-20-04: Presence
07-10-04: Now Watch This Post
05-15-04: Terror-ific
03-23-04: That's The Way It Is
01-24-04: Rebel Yell
12-01-03: Hit & Run
10-22-03: Meat Market
09-11-03: Crumbling Down Over And Over
08-04-03: American Idol 1, God 0
06-26-03: Welcome To The Working Week
04-01-03: Not That Innocent

Revolution

Not long before John Lennon was killed, he predicted during a radio interview that the new president-elect, Ronald "Reegan" (as John pronounced the name), would find that he couldn't possibly satisfy the dreams and hopes of the right wing, just like Carter or Kennedy could not satisfy the dreams of the left wing.

"It's too much for one man, one group, and I don't believe in it," Lennon said.

And yet here we are 27 years later, when a Republican president and vice-president, despite dismal approval ratings, can pretty much get away with blatant lawbreaking, trashing the Constitution and bypassing Congress, largely because of support from the New Corporate World Order ("we don't need no stinkin' democracy") that Ronald Reagan played a big role in helping create.

The right wing worships at the altar of Saint Ronnie...and "Imagine" was banned from a lot of radio playlists after 9/11. I'm afraid Reagan and his cronies made a difference in ways ol' John couldn't have anticipated, even as he wrote of strange days indeed in one of his last songs.

The images and memories live on of the man who harnessed a powerful hybrid of Disneyland and Bob Dobbs energy in a way that no politician may ever do again. And as much as I despised his policies, I had to respect him for his creativity. (Would that our current crass asshole had half the polish.)

Tom Carson put it well, in 2004:


At his funeral, there will no doubt be buckets of false poetry, grievously misrepresenting the man—yes, even if Peggy Noonan shows up, doing her best to be Walt Whitman to his Abe: "When Star Wars Last in Gorbachev's Dooryard Bloom'd." Real poetry is something else again, and you'd be horribly mistaken to think the following suggestion is sarcastic. Please understand I love the place; my proposal is made in a sincere spirit of tribute to an enemy. I think that Reagan, like no other American, deserves the honor of being the first person ever embalmed at Disneyland.

In the true capital of his America, one-upping Lenin in death as he did in life, he could lie in a glass box before Sleeping Beauty's castle—midway between Frontierland and Tomorrowland, right where Main Street debouches onto Carnation™ Plaza. (Oh, you bet: I know my way around Walt's kingdom, and why don't you? Are you some kind of commie?) Picture his sleep. Can Napoléon at the Invalides top this? A hundred years from now, that famously hawk-nosed profile is illuminated by the Electric Parade. Tomorrow's children gaze in awe as Tinkerbell slides down to kiss it, understanding that here lies the man who saved them from the rest of the world's great, killing Something-or-Other: doubt.


This concludes the nicest post I'll ever write about Ronald "At Least He's Not GW Bush" Reagan.

Now back to the snark lite, with the next three months of pics and captions from the 2007 Reagan calendar given me by my friend Maitland Jones:























"I bet Brezhnev didn't get one of these."























"Hey, this is nothin'. Shultz, bring my horse in."























"See, Dutch, he ate his salad. You eat yours and I'll bring us some Kool-Aid."


Reagan Calendar Pt. 1
Reagan Calendar Pt. 2

Police Story

My latest Oregonian piece, hot off the presses:

Ideas for police, court building in the works

"This needs to be done right the first time," Adcock said, "so that we don't have to go back to the voters and say we undershot it. It has to be a balancing act between what voters are willing to spend and having a facility that doesn't soon become obsolete and maintains a professional representation of the city police."

***

And speaking of The Oregonian, my kids were in the paper last week, along with other Seussical cast members. Vicktoria and Andrew are up front, wearing hats:



















Click on photo to enlarge.

Who Tube

Thurl Ravenscroft sings of Mr. Grinch:

The Zax, introduced by Allan Sherman as the Cat, and read by Hans Conried:

And I'll let the Doctor himself have the last word:

West Beast East Beast
from Oh Say Can You Say?
© 1979 by Dr. Seuss and A.S. Geisel

Upon an island hard to reach,
the East Beast sits upon his beach.
Upon the west beach sits the West Beast.
Each beach beast thinks he's the best beast.

Which beast is best? ... Well, I thought at first
that the East was best and the West was worst.
Then I looked again from the west to the east
And I liked the beast on the east beach least.

Doctor In The House





















I wasn't allowed to take flash photos in the theater today, while watching my kids perform in Seussical, but I was able to get a passable pic of them together (aided by HP Image Zone) from the video I shot.

My goodness it's a lovely thing when both your kids sing wonderfully and happily and often. And they can act, too.

Here are their bios printed in the play program, plus my wife's "director's note" to the audience:

The Cat In The Hat - Vicktoria Hough: Vicktoria is making her seventh appeareance in an MCT show, including starring as Sgt. Sarah Brown in last year's performance of Guys and Dolls. She also just graduated from North Marion High School where she acted in all their theater productions. She will be attending WOU this fall and plans to continue being active in theater there.

JoJo - Andrew Hough: Andrew has been a member of MCT for the last five years. A sightseer, a pickpocket, a slave, a waiter and a gambler. You can always count on Andrew to make the scene. Following in his mom and sister's footsteps, Andrew takes center stage as JoJo in this year's production.

***

A Note From The Director: Three years ago when I heard the CD for Seussical and then talked with Amy (the production's choreographer), we knew we had to do the show.

This cast is amazing, from the first read through to opening night, they have always put their best foot forward. I just love listening to them sing.

I took a different approach with the story, no show girls or glitz. We set the Jungle of Nool in a high school setting with cheerleaders, bullies, smarties, outcasts and the like. Whoville wobbles as you would on a planet blowing through space. I took the liberty of adding a young cat, to be the co-narrator with the Cat in the Hat; once you see her, you will know why.

I am happy to say this cast is full of stars. Each person shines as bright as the next.

I want to thank my directing team of Amy and Alvin. From our first meeting though auditions to opening night, we have been of one mind and I think it shows.

So, sit back and enjoy the adventure. I hope you have as wonderful a time experiencing the show as we have had creating it.

Enjoy,

Pamela

Big Boss Man





















"What a bummer," said the local Portland DJ (now dead himself) to the breaking news that Elvis Presley had died. I was in my bedroom when I heard this, 30 years ago this month, and I remember it was near 100 degrees outside. Then "Boogie Nights" started playing, and in a minor state of shock I went to go tell my mom the news.

I remembered reading a story in Rolling Stone about three months earlier, as a writer compared what would be Presley's last tour to the sad last days of Judy Garland. Elvis was that out of it by then, yet I still liked what I'd heard from him recently -- the singles "Moody Blue" and "Way Down" -- and it remained hard to imagine him checking out right away, at only age 42.

As I say, I liked the guy's music, but he'd begun a serious (and ultimately final) downward spiral just as I started regularly listening to the Top 40, and I think this helped keep me from fully appreciating his body of work until years later, when I bought the The Top Ten Hits compilation. Just couldn't get enough of that -- overall it's still the best Elvis comp that's been released, although the 2000s-era CDs 30 #1 Hits and 2nd to None together cover more quality ground.

I've collected some of my favorite Elvis songs in my YouTube Favorites lists, and here they are:

Jailhouse Rock
Return To Sender
Viva Las Vegas
Suspicious Minds
If You Talk In Your Sleep
Guitar Man
A Little Less Conversation

Also, here's part one of the Elvis: One Night With You special (which leads to links to other parts of the show.) It was recorded at the NBC Studios in Burbank in June 1968 for Elvis' Comeback Special shown later that year.

And from near the end, here's backstage footage from before a June 1977 concert in South Dakota, a little of which was used in the CBS special Elvis in Concert.

Fly Away

Here's my latest Oregonian article, which was posted and printed today:

Pilots offer free rides to disabled and ill kids

An unforgettable thrill awaits more than 120 physically challenged and seriously ill children who are invited to take free airplane rides during "Challenge Air for Kids and Friends" Aug. 18 at the Aurora State Airport, 22785 Airport Road.

The event, hosted by Aurora Aviation, will also be a special occasion for the more than 20 area pilots, some of whom are physically challenged, who will be contributing their planes and flight time.

Lance Pennington, general manager of Aurora Aviation, said the event is one of several across the country by Challenge Air, an organization based in Dallas, Texas, and Los Angeles founded by the late Rick Amber.

Amber, who was injured in a landing accident during the Vietnam War, created Challenge Air in 1993. Since then, more than 20,000 children in 21 states have participated.

***

Also, I wrote a press release and sent it to the local papers to promote a new production of Seussical at Molalla Community Theater, which my wife is directing and my two kids have prominent roles in. (Andrew is Jojo, and Vicktoria is the Cat in the Hat -- who said the Cat had to be a boy?)

I didn't write the article (unfortunately print-only as yet) that appears this week in the Molalla and Canby local papers about the production, although some of my press release was borrowed from. Abby Sewell did a good job adding her own quotes and observations to make the article her own. Here's an excerpt, featuring basic info about the show which opens this week:


Based on the books of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, "Seussical" made its debut on Broadway in 2000. The play, co-written by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, comes to Molalla's stage under the direction of theater veteran and first-time MCT director Pam Hough, with a talent local cast ranging in age from six to 50.

...

"The play kind of talks about the things you learn in life and that you want to teach your kids," Hough said. "Be a friend, keep your promises, follow your heart and believe in yourself."

Hough added some touches of her own to the script, writing in a young Cat to accompany the Cat in the Hat who narrates the story, and changing the setting of the play to mirror a high school.

"I've decided to make the Jungle of Nool (the setting of a prominent scene in the show) like a high school, with cheerleaders, bullies, brats and brainy misfits like Horton the elephant," she said.

...

The show runs August 10, 11, 12, 16, 17 and 18 at the Molalla River Civic Auditorium, 357 Frances St., on the Molalla High School Campus.

Rudy Can Fail

Thanks to PlusDistance and phleabo at No More Mr. Nice Blog for their sublime snark.

Rudolph Guiliani? The guy who, says phleabo, bravely climbed to the top of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and personally batted away no less than 10 hijacked planes with his BARE HANDS?

The guy who, in the words of PlusDistance, ATE the planes and crapped out perfect Guantanamo-sized metal cells, with a terrorist in each one?

Uh, no. A new article in Harpers Magazine by Kevin Baker (so far, print-only) sets the record straight:


Giuliani himself was fortunate to still be there. Against the advice of numerous security experts, he had insisted on situating a lavish, $61 million emergency "command bunker" on the twenty-third floor of the forty-seven-story 7 World Trade Center tower. The tower contained no fewer than sixteen different emergency generators and sat over 109,000 gallons of oil in a Con Ed substation; the comman bunker added another, unprotected, 6,000-gallon fuel tank suspended above the mezzanine. When burning debris from the twin towers fell on 7 World Trade, it went up like "a blow torch," in the words of investigative reporters Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, who note in Grand Illusion, The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 that Giuliani's defenseless fuel tank acted as a giant fuse.

The Office of Emergency Management that Giuliani created failed utterly to coordinate rescue efforts between the city's Police and Fire Departments. Even worse, it also failed to ensure that the New York Fire Department had an effective system for communicating with itself -- a deficiency that had been exposed by the original 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and one that led eight years later to hundreds of firefighters' being cut off in the towers, without any way of receiving word that the buildings were about to collapse. Guiliani, on site throughout the disaster, made no attempt to devise any other means to keep the firefighters informed. In 2004, as New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn make clear in their book 102 Minutes, Giuliani lied against the memory of these men, falsely testifying before a fawning 9/11 Commission that they had refused orders to evacuate.

In the days and weeks after the attack, Giuliani failed to ensure that the workers digging out Ground Zero had adequate protection against hazardous waste, an oversight that that it now seems may have led to serious, long-term health consequences for thousands; proposed that his term in office be arbitrarily extended for an indefinite period in order to deal with the recovery from the attack; and placed his mistress and future wife, Judith Nathan, on the board of a charitable fund for families of the attack's victims.


Read the whole thing, if you can. I've seen Steve at No More Mr. Nice Blog effectively rag on Giuliani (and warn about the serious and underrated possibility of Rudy being elected) for many months, but this article has become for now the definitive first place to go for a look at Nightmare Rudy, the new Dark Lord, a potential American Mussolini. The perfect guy for Republicans who think Bush doesn't go far enough in being an asshole to liberals and foreigners.

He's also been known to enjoy wearing women's clothing. Not that his GOP brownshirt brigade will care:

Still Life

I go to the doctor for my yearly checkup tomorrow, my third since I was told in 2004 that my blood pressure and cholesterol were at dangerously high levels.

Blood pressure meds have kept my BP good since then, and altered diet plus enough exercise gave me acceptable cholesterol levels in the 2005 and 2006 checkups. But this year so far the pressure of a busy schedule has cut down my exercise time and led me to too many moments like this:

I don't expect a passable cholesterol level this time, although body chemistry can be an unpredictable thing. In any event, maybe watching Andy eat over and over will help me (and you?) cut down on the Dollar Menus.

Horse Sh*t

I now give you, my half-a-dozen dear readers, my final list of Interesting Horse Names:

Mudder In Law
Hollywood Left
Superman Too
Scatmandu
The Soup Nazi
Stays In Vegas
Lady Likes Threes
Pot Limit
Ornery By Chance
Miss Kitty's Bar Bet
Galloping Gourmet
Mr. Ethanol
Bogart's Cat
Mint Slewlep
Wayne Manor
Ink A Dink A Dink
Pee Em Ess
If Nine Was Six
Sister Disco
Tony Montana
Show Me The Monet
Spooky Girlfriend
Mr. Bigglesworth
Crazy Catlady
Mr. Grumpy Stripes
Always A Virgin
Ask For Probation

No, I'm not (as far as I know) on my way out at the horseracing wagering call center where I've worked for the last eight years. I'm one of only three people left who were working there on the very first day of the center in August 1999, and the only one still regularly answering customer calls (the other two are now supervisors.) Sometimes it seems like I'll be working there until I retire or drop dead, whichever comes first.

But with the blog going on indefinite hiatus after the first of the year, it's time to start winding down, and this is a first step. Hopefully on each list there aren't any repeats from previous lists, but if I discover a few, I'll eventually edit them out. Anal retentive to the end here at WATP.

Here are links to the fourteen (count 'em, 14) previous editions of Interesting Horse Names. Giddy the hell up:

5/8/07
1/7/07
10/11/06
9/1/06
6/25/06
5/23/06
2/2/06
10/28/05
5/19/05
3/3/05
5/25/04
3/23/04
2/14/04
12/30/03


Moving like a tremendous machine.

Expressive Lines
























Click on photo to enlarge.

Just before the T. family headed back to Oregon after a week in Northern California last month, we made a visit to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. Open for five years now, it's a modest and tasteful place, presenting exhibits with a keen eye for telling details about Schulz's body of work and creative process. Here's a video featuring some of the permanent exhibits there.

The above artwork I posed by is on display in the museum atrium. It's a collection of Schulz's Peanuts comic strips which together form one of the great iconic images in popular art: a determined and hopeful Charlie Brown heading for another inevitably futile attempt to kick the football that Lucy is holding for him. Near there I met Schulz's widow Jean, who happened to drop by the atrium when I was present.

I complimented her on the museum and the attention to detail in documenting her husband's work. Something about "attention to detail" must've led her to reply that Sparky (as his friends knew him) was a simple man, yet was a complex man as well.

Interesting analysis from one who should know. Unfortunately my reply seemed rather banal, about how great it was that Schulz's work often got beneath of the surface of things. This earned me a moment of potential dead-end in the conversation, as her eyes seemed to glass over a bit, but I recovered quickly. I told her where we were from (near Portland) and where we'd been staying that week (just up the road in Windsor.) She said that Jan Eliot, who does the Stone Soup comic, lives in Oregon.

While on the subject of newer comics, I noted another artwork near us in the museum atrium, a big reproduction of a 1999 Peanuts strip that paid tribute to Patrick McDonnell's Mutts, which Jean confirmed was a favorite of Sparky's in his final years.

The strip shows a gathering of Peanuts characters (including Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Rerun) in an art gallery. Chuck, Lucy and Linus are looking at what might be a Van Gogh or Matisse but was instead was Jean called a pastiche of classic art styles. Rerun, in contrast, is by himself looking at a drawing of Earl The Dog.










Peanuts © 1999 United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

Right away I got the symbolism of Schulz using Rerun, his "newest" major character (introduced as Linus and Lucy's baby brother in 1972-73, but not regularly shown until two decades later), to make a point about something new that he liked.

Flashing on how folks in the High Hat stable of writers have expressed a liking for Mutts, I went into geeky hyperbole mode and told Jean I was delighted that Schulz was a fan. She said that O'Donnell's work reminded her husband of the work of a comic artist who apparently helped inspire the young Schulz. She mentioned the name of the artist, a name I didn't recognize and didn't fully make out, and this was followed by another brief moment of glassy-eyed discomfort. It was time to wrap things up.

I introduced my daughter to her just before she said goodbye to other people she'd been with at the museum. She then turned around and made friendly eye contact with my wife before leaving the atrium.

On the way home, I wished I'd asked her about something I'd learned about Schulz that day that impressed me: his apparent love of classic country music. I found this out while upstairs at the museum, inspecting what is said to be a very accurate recreation of Sparky's work studio as it was when he announced his retirement in late 1999. It featured all the necessary art materials, plus a nice-sized library of collected books, numerous photos of family and friends, and an autographed basketball from Julius Erving underneath the big drawing board.

On a shelf near one corner of the recreated studio was a turntable and what must've been Sparky's workplace record collection. Along with some classical and jazz, he had records by Buck Owens and Lefty Frizzell, as well as the soundtrack to the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. In a 1995 documentary I saw part of in the museum theatre, he mentioned that he sometimes liked listening to Hank Williams Sr. records.

His book collection was interesting as well. As a probable glimpse of the inner man, here's a list of some of the books in Schulz's personal library:

Thurber Country by James Thurber
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Goebbels Diaries 1942-45
Dare To Be Great, Ms. Caucus by G.B. Trudeau
Faith of My Fathers by John McCain
Carl Sandburg's Lincoln
Broke Heart Blues by Joyce Carol Oates
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

The McCain book might've been the last Schulz ever read, as it came out in August 1999 and the century's greatest daily comic artist (for longevity, at the least, over contenders like Bill Watterson and Walt Kelly) died a little over five months later.

Lowe Note

One more collection of Nick Lowe song reviews, for what will probably be my final contribution to the High Hat. I'm looking to make some adjustments in what's become a grueling weekly schedule, and non-paying writing work (including blogging and comments/forum posting) will likely be diminished down to next to nothing by the end of the year.

As I mention in the first review, several tracks on his new CD are worthy of note, including "Hope For Us All, "The Club" and "Long Limbed Girl." If you like Pure Pop for Grownup People, you'll dig Nick's latest.

Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day (At My Age, 2007) Plenty of worthy candidates for review here from Lowe’s fine new CD, and this one gets a nod because as a produced track – featuring solid work from Nick Payne on sax and Bob Loveday on viola and violin, as wel as top-notch engineering from producers Lowe and Neil Brockbank – it’s arguably the most fully realized. Elsewhere on the CD we hear Lowe’s devilish side with the loose and almost conversational “I Trained Her To Love Me” (the inner life of a manipulative ass man: “If you think that it’s depraved and I should be ashamed…so what? / I’m only paying back womankind for all the grief I got”) and “Rome” shows a more appealing flip side of the same character. He has confidence and patience to make the object of his affection believe he’s her man, no matter how long the process might take. That kind of focused passion usually spells empowerment, whether you’re a twisted old rake or not, and the skilled, tight production compliments the projection of power in Lowe’s lyrics.

People Change (At My Age, 2007) Nick’s definitely changed over the years, although look who’s still available to come aboard the Good Ship Lowe: the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, whose first single (a cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing”) was produced nearly 30 years ago by Lowe, a man they nicknamed “Basher” for his brash production style back in the day. The voice of wisdom that Lowe has honed for most of these past three decades is in full force here (“Now you say those times you had were never that many / Just be thankful you had any”) and the presence of Hynde plus a people-pleasing hook and upbeat mix (complete with organ, piano and overdubbed sax) makes this the new CD’s most video-friendly track.

The Other Side Of The Coin (At My Age, 2007) In recent years, as Lowe has indulged more in classic country music stylings (an original on the new CD, “A Better Man,” one can easily imagine Ray Price or George Jones singing in their primes), he’s also expertly dabbled in the style of classic, classy Tin Pan Alley, and this track ranks as one of one of best slices of retro pop. As usual, the wistful and world-wise lyrics match the mellow mood: “Yes there’s much for which I could atone / But let him without sin cast the first stone.”

Off 101





















Click on photo to enlarge.

The T. clan was out of town the last week of last month, staying at a timeshare in Windsor, CA. It's in classic NoCal wine country, but unfortunately with kids and a set schedule we didn't do any wine tasting. Next time I guess.

Our first sightseeing venture was to check out the weird architecture of the Winchester Mystery House, a mansion built by an eccentric widow over a lengthy period from 1884 to 1922. The house was in the middle of nowhere when she built it; now it's surrounded by big-time development all around, a fact that probably would've appalled the woman.

Next day we went to Great America Amusement Park in Santa Clara. I've been there three times now, previously in 1980 and 1994. I think this will probably be the last time, as the new water park was something of a disappointment (too small, and not enough big water slides), and something snapped in me that day where I realized that theme-park thrill rides just don't do it for me like they used to. I'd rather do something more relaxing and easier on the stomach.

On the way home from Great America we took a wrong turn and soon found ourselves right in the heart of downtown San Francisco. I hadn't brought my SF map that day, and it took us awhile to figure out how to get back to the Golden Gate Bridge and back up Highway 101 toward our resort.

The next day was an off day at the resort, as was the first day we arrived. (I wish we had time and money for more off days -- I value "doing nothing" on vacations more and more as I get older.) My son and I did what's now become a regular routine at the pool: a splash fight like we're kung fu warriors. The people around us might've thought we're a bit odd. Well we are.

The next day was San Francisco, a city I came this close to moving to in 1985. (I've often second-guessed whether I made the right call in not doing so.) We first went to the very cool Exploratorium museum at the Palace of Fine Arts (the Palace was one of the places I visited during my epic "homeless month" in SF in August '85), and then went down to Fisherman's Wharf where one of the stores sells XXXXXL shirts (maybe I left out an X or two.) After eating at the Rainforest Cafe at the Wharf, I almost felt like wearing one of those shirts.

I'd wanted to meet with some of my online friends who contribute (as I do) to the High Hat online magazine; unfortunately they all were working or otherwise unavailable. I'd also wanted to attend a Giants game, but I was the only one who wanted to go and I decided to spend max time with the family since, with my daughter going to college, this may be one of the last vacations we spend as a foursome.

I had proposed meeting some of the HH colleagues for high tea in SF. After that fell through, the family and I had tea instead at a nice place in San Jose which happened to be just a few blocks from the Winchester House. After tea we went to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, where I learned about ancient Egyptian history and a board game called Senet that Egyptian families used to play. You can buy an updated version of Senet in the museum gift shop.

The next day, after packing and before heading home, we went to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, which I found fascinating. I took notes, and Schulz's widow Jean just happened to be there that day. More on the Schulz museum in another post soon.

For better or worse, we upgraded to a higher amount of credits in our timeshare, which we hope will give us the ability to visit New York City and Disney World over the next two years. (Orlando during Xmas break '08-'09 and New York in March or June of '09 is the tentative plan.) Dog help us keep our current pay level, and keep the Cheney Administration from raising gas prices too much too fast.

7even

The New 7 Wonders of The World were announced today in Portugal. They are:

Chichén Itzá, Mexico
Christ Redeemer, Brazil
The Great Wall, China
Machu Picchu, Peru
Petra, Jordan
The Roman Colosseum, Italy
The Taj Mahal, India


Here are the seven that the Greg T. family voted for, this past New Year's Eve:

Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
Great Wall of China
Stonehenge, United Kingdom
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Machu Piccu, Peru
Easter Island, Chile
Chichén Itzá, Mexico


Three of seven we got. Not a particularly lucky day for the T. clan. Maybe we coulda batted over .500 on this, if it weren't for those meddling kids for the late surge in voting for the Christ Redeemer statue. (This I know, for the media tells me so.)

The linked AP article also says:

The pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, were assured of retaining their status in addition to the new seven after indignant Egyptian officials said it was a disgrace they had to compete.

Word to your mother, indignant Egyptian officials.


Oh well, we'll always have Stonehenge...










In ancient times, hundreds of years before the
dawn of history.
There lived a strange race of people...the Druids.
No one knows who they were, or what they were doing...
but their legacy remains...
hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge...

Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge
Where a man is a man and the children dance to
the pipes of pan
Stonehenge
Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise
With a dragon's face
Stonehenge
Where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky
And you my love, won't you take my hand
We'll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow
I will take you there
I will show you how

Cowboy Up

While I continue my semi-hiatus from blogging that I typically take in the summer months, here are my two latest stories that appeared in The Oregonian:

21-year-old from Molalla wins TV cowboy title

Coleman, the son and brother of professional rodeo men and a competitor in his own right, credited his success in large part to "doing cowboying all my life."

The other six competitors on Country Music Television's reality television special last month were all older than Coleman, who is 21. But in five days of competition at CF Ranch near Alpine, Texas, the Molalla native proved more versatile.

Canby High's campus transformation begins

"For Canby proper, it'll be a very changed look," school Principal Pat Johnson said. "You'll now be able to see the school clearly from (Oregon) 99E, and we think it will reflect on the campus and the city well."

Johnson said closing Fourth Avenue and the creation of new separate roads for bus and parent pickup traffic in the new building area will create "a much safer environment."

McD-Link-T.

Fresh for '07, you suckas:

*More quality lefty commie pinko commentary for the blogroll: Lady Insignificant, Liberal Oasis and Sadly, No!.

*More blogroll-quality commentary on Things Entertaining: ScreenGrab and Broadway & Me.

*Waiting for Greg Oden (born in, er, 1988) to save us all: Blazers Blog and True Hoop join the blogroll, and True Hoop's Henry Abbott (ESPN.com analyst and Blazer fan, probably not in that order) links us to one more trip down memory lane.

(Memory lane clip may require clicking a "Launch Video Player" button. Check near the end of the clip, as Bill Walton is mobbed going to the stage. I was near that crowd of people, but after looking at the film a few times I think my image got lost in the sea of moptop heads. Oh well.)

*"Greg T.'s videos," the YouTube favorites file of groovezog88, also joins the WATP list o' links. More than 150 already saved, ranging from the sublime to the silly.

***

I saved the below clip, because not much says "1980s yuppie mindset" better than a spunky Jason Alexander with a head of hair, singing and dancing his way through a McDonald's commercial.

As for the sublime, I saved a YouTube compilation of 500 years of female portraits in Western Art, backed by the music of J.S. Bach. (Thanks to Tom and Barbara for the link.)

***

Here are some articles I've recently encountered on the intertubes that are worth noting:


*Beyond Hope by Derrick Jensen:

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.

People sometimes ask me, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.

Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.


*The case for imperial liquidation by Chalmers Johnson:

Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of the American republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of America's manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of America's decline.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we Americans face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic - becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

For the US, the decision to mount such a campaign of imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the US citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s.


*Some thoughts on journalists and the blogosphere by Kagro X:

Journalists are, I think, by the nature of their business, limited in their ability to bring a mass audience "the Truth" in doses sufficient for everyone. What I mean is that they're limited in several critical ways, most of which are beyond their control:

1. Personal knowledge/understanding/expertise in ever-changing subject matter -- they are, of necessity, generalists.

2. Space constraints -- even if they wanted to report on every intricacy, most traditional media don't have the time or space for it.

3. Deadline pressures -- even if they knew everything there was to know and had the time/space for it, they couldn't get it all done by 5pm.

This list, too, is a generalization. It's obviously not going to be true of all journalists. But it describes what I think are some of the key constraints of the trade which don't exist in the same form for bloggers, and which I think contributes to the ongoing tension between them. While bloggers are also often generalists, there are no commercial pressures requiring that they maintain a capacity for general subject matter. The other two restraints on traditional journalists simply don't exist at all for bloggers. There are no space limitations, and there are no deadlines. And as a result, bloggers can go into excruciating detail on their chosen subject matter (and it is their chosen subject matter -- no assignments from editors to unwanted stories), and keep after it forever. That can have the effect of turning them into experts, in the best cases, or extraordinarily verbose idiots, in the worst.


*Abortion: Is it Possible to be both “Pro-life” and “Pro-Choice”? by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan:

Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain--principally in the top layers of the convoluted "gray matter" called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn't begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy--the sixth month.

By placing harmless electrodes on a subject's head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy--near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this--however alive and active they may be--lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we've rejected the extremes of "always" and "never," and this puts us--like it or not--on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.

It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973--although for completely different reasons.


*Sucking in the '70s by Kate Sullivan:

Music today should suck so good. To wit (insert Kasem’s voice here): “On AT 40 this week, here’s the record that takes the biggest drop. It moves all the way from No. 11 down to No. 26! It’s Queen, and ‘We Are the Champions.’”

Real sucky, right? It’s only Queen. It’s just fucking “We Are the Fucking Champions,” falling to No. 26.

The story gets better. The No. 1 soul song during this random crappy week was called “Flashlight,” by a quirky li’l group named Parliament. Like I said: No big deal, right? I mean, it’s only deathless, trailblazing pop from outer space that would make possible everyone from Prince to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to OutKast.

...

All this music was the most commercialized crap the record industry could crank out. And most of it gets played on radios, stereos, iPods and jukeboxes every day, bringing pleasure to millions. But 1978 is even more impressive when you add to the equation what was happening off the Top 40 chart — in punk, new wave, metal, electronica, folk, reggae, rap. Pretty amazing, right? It’s difficult to imagine almost anything from the Top 40 of the past few years enduring for decades to come; sadly, the same goes for the indie scene.

So when record labels today blame illegal downloading for the death of record sales, I gotta raise an eyebrow. And yet I can’t blame record labels alone for sagging musical standards.

The late ’70s was the last moment when American radio was still, by and large, a mom-and-pop industry. Consultants and corporations were already part of the radio landscape, of course, but they couldn’t do nearly as much damage when they were limited to owning a handful of stations. But just a few years after our random, crappy-magical Saturday in ’78, Reagan would usher in the age of radio deregulation, which, in turn, ushered in the era of consolidation. The quality of Top 40 music would never be the same.

The Graduate
















































Vicktoria with Andrew, Greg and Pam, 6-8-07.

Click on photos to enlarge.

They Can Help

Thursday has become prime article-writing time for me, and it can take awhile in the morning to get mentally prepped. As I continue to net surf, drink coffee, and put off formulate the story I'm to write for a future issue (hopefully next Thursday) of The Oregonian, here's this week's piece, and I think it's a good one:

Visit to remote villages inspires couple to return to Mozambique

Lange and the Wilsons met and talked, and Lange invited the couple to visit her at her field location in Balama, in Mozambique's Cabo Delgado province. With their home and farm for sale, the Wilsons departed for Africa in August.

Will Wilson, a retired carpenter and construction worker, intended to help with a well extension. But the group was unable to get a drilling permit before the Wilsons left in November.

Regardless, they found plenty of other work to keep them busy.

In a big Nissan flatbed truck carrying nearly six tons of rice and beans, Will Wilson made regular delivery trips of 150 miles to help feed orphans and the families who've taken them in who live in the remote northern village of Meluco.

It's an area of the country where it's not uncommon to see baboons and lions roaming in the wild.

"Those roads ate the trucks up," Will Wilson said. "About 50 miles of the road was paved; the rest not."

"They make the forest roads on Mount Hood seem normal," Shirley Wilson said.

About To Set Sail



Vicktoria with Captain Jack Sparrow, 2007.

Click on photo to enlarge.

The week started with me and my family going out for my 45th birthday on Sunday, to tea and pizza downtown; picking up some video games for the kids and Fountains of Wayne's latest CD Traffic and Weather for myself, and catching an afternoon showing of the third Pirates of The Caribbean movie.

Near the end of the week, on Friday, my daughter Vicktoria will graduate from high school. It'll be outdoors on the grounds of the football field, and hopefully there won't be rain.

She's been accepted to attend Western Oregon University, and plans to major in Forensic Science and minor in Theater Arts. In the next couple months we will finish completing a plan on just how the hell we're going to pay for the next four years.

She is a bright light, with an upbeat personality and a stellar school record. College will require a step up in personal discipline for her, but I feel confident she will rise to the challenge.

***

Vicktoria's time in high school has nicely dovetailed with the timeline of the three Pirates movies: the first movie released just before she started freshman year; the third one coming just before she graduates. She loves her some Johnny Depp as many a teenage girl does, but so far it's mostly an infatuation with his portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow.

The new movie, At World's End, isn't quite as bad as I'd been led to believe by the majority of the reviews, although it's certainly as overlong and hard to follow as its critics claim. I thought Depp actually regained some acting mojo in the third film that he'd lost somewhat in the second, as other characters established themselves, for better or worse. Whether intentionally or not, the filmmakers allow Depp to indulge more of the surreal drug-influenced side of his persona that enabled him to portray his friend Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Message: Drugs are bad, kids, but Johnny Depp acid visions are money in the bank.)

Keith Richards plays the pirate father of Captain Jack, and his brief turn ends up being one of the film's more inspired moves. Much has been written about how Depp based his character's mannerisms on those of Richards, but one thing I noticed in the third movie is how much the Sparrow shtick might be influenced by another classic character: the young Bob Hope. Hope early on mastered the comic possibilities of what might be called ballsy cowardice, a committed chicken/weasel passionately following the dictates of his own selfishness. When Captain Jack says in this movie, we fight...so that we can run away, you can almost imagine Hope saying something similar in a Road picture.

***

The Fountains of Wayne CD is more hit-or-miss than the group's previous two or three CDs, and the hits (about half of the 14 tracks, including "Someone To Love," "Strapped For Cash" and "Yolanda Hayes") don't resonate for me as much as the highs on Utopia Parkway and Welcome Interstate Managers. I think part of the problem is that they've become more of a lyrics-reliant band, resting on what's become their calling card: savvy vignettes about young adults leading lives of quiet desperation. In the process, not only have they sometimes failed to back up the lyrics with solid-enough melody or arrangement or production, but the vignettes themselves at times are sounding tired and rote, like FoW is presenting more a kind of expected pop hackwork than something fresh.

They're too good when they're on to dismiss, but maybe from here on it's best to just look for the three or four classic tracks that will show up on the inevitable Best Of, rather than expect from FoW another studio album that stands on its own as a sustained piece of work.

Memento File

Last Friday my son Andrew had his last SFA reading class. SFA stands for "Success for All," and it's a grade-school reading program that's made a decided difference in the reading skills of both my kids. I'm grateful to our local school district for making it available to them.

Andrew's wrapping up 5th Grade and is headed to middle school next year, and his final SFA assignment was to prepare a report to read in front of the class about his early childhood years. We gathered a couple of his early drawings, and put our heads together to come up with the following childhood memories:

*He watched Toy Story, Space Jam and Hercules over and over and over, to the point where we memorized much of the dialogue in those movies and were regularly dropping lines from them into our conversations. (He also watched videos of Bananas In Pajamas over and over at one point, but didn't want to mention that.)

*He got a little basketball hoop one Christmas morning, and after seeing it he came into our bedroom and exclaimed, "Mom, look what Michael Jordan got me for Christmas!"

*He went to Hawaii and met a Samoan Chief and swam on Waikiki Beach. (He also had his picture taken with the "native" performers at a Luau show on Kauai, and he posed so well with them that the photo likely would've been a classic worth sharing. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out.)

This reminds me of another great Andrew moment in Hawaii: At an open-air mall on Kauai, we were watching a group of women and girls doing hula dances, followed by them placing leis on various spectators. The smallest dancer was a tiny girl about the same size as Andrew (who was 4-1/2 at the time) and she discovered she didn't have a lei. So she went back to the dressing room or wherever to get one; as she came out with the lei, she ran right into Andrew, and without a word put the lei around his neck. Cutest damn thing you ever saw.

Here's my personal favorite:

*On the Disney Magic cruise ship, Andrew was two months shy of his third birthday. He was walking along with his family, and all of a sudden he heard thumping dance music coming from an open door leading to a nearby dance floor. Without a word, he walked straight to the middle of the floor and started dancing with the other kids and adults there. His dad soon followed along, and together they danced under the disco strobe lights for the next several minutes.

***

Andrew said he got a good response from the class, apparently as good or better than any other student's presentation. Which made me feel good.

I asked Andrew if he still had the sheet with the presentation info that we put together, so I could save it in our memento file. He said he threw it away after he was done with it.

Oh well. Maybe when he has a child, he'll understand why I care about saving things like that sheet. And at least I have this blog to record sentimental memories with.

Too Damn Young To Go

Sad news that Steve Gilliard, one of the most popular and acclaimed bloggers around, died Saturday morning at the age of 42. His recent health problems were formidable, and yesterday's news couldn't really be called a surprise; still one hoped that the mental strength he demonstrated in presenting and defending his positions online might somehow help him beat back his physical ailments. But it was not to be, and many fine tributes have been posted this weekend, including this one from James Wolcott.

Steve was always so adamant that George W. Bush would end up resigning or impeached. The fact that Bush now seems likely to serve out his term may have something to do with the fact that there just aren't enough progressive voices as loud, strong and clear as Steve's was.

He maintained a healthy dialogue between himself and his readers in his comments sections, directly and passionately replying to issues raised. As the recipient of a few of those replies, I always greatly respected this aspect of his blogging, even when I didn't fully agree with his opinion. It was important to him that lefty blog commenters expose themselves to critical commentary; he must've known that the elitist, protective bubbles created by and for the odious MSM pundits are a big part of the problem today, and he didn't want Left Blogistan becoming nothing but a clique-y hangout for those reluctant to go beyond preaching to the choir.

Mommy Party

All the GOP presidential candidates want to follow in the footsteps of the great St. Ronnie.

Well, good luck to you, fellas. My 2007 Ronald Reagan calendar (a gift from my friend Maitland, who provided captions to accompany each month's photo) reminds us that those are some big-ass shoes to fill:






















"I'm not gonna eat this. Instead, today, I'll have ice cream for dinner."
























"That damn Hough fries my bacon. Who does he think he is?"























"Okay, that's a wrap. You go home now, dear."


Reagan Calendar Pt. 1

Red Hot

I'll spare the non-Portland readers any more indulgence for awhile after this. But I can't resist another Blazer post, as I've discovered a couple of great snapshots of Blazermania, 30 years apart:

Spring 1977

Spring 2007


It can't ever get as good as it was when I was 15 years old, can it? When a world championship won by the home team was followed by a surreally good celebration parade downtown, one I got to play hooky from school to participate in. Followed the next season by several months of absolutely impeccable basketball that Hall of Famer Rick Barry called as good as Russell's Celtics, the Sixers with Wilt, and the Lakers with Wilt (and he would know, since he played against all those teams.)

It can't ever get that good again, can it? Not after seeing the Walton team quickly disintegrate due to injuries; after years of being overshadowed by flashier, cockier big-market teams; after seeing another couple of championship contenders get no further than a series of heartbreaking close calls; after enduring all the jokes about the Jail Blazers and Bowie over Jordan (who, truth be told, would've likely been unhappy playing in a smaller market, and having to share the spotlight with Clyde Drexler, in Portland.) And certainly, for me, not after decades of adult disillusionment.

Right?

"Greg Oden will make you forget all about the Walton years," was a comment I read in the last couple days. We'll see. For me, it would take something of a dynasty to overshadow the magic of the Walton years and the heartbreak of all that came after. A tall order, but the team's sure off to a good start toward that pot o' gold.

Lowe Level

At left is the cover of Nick Lowe's new CD, due next month. He's becoming a psychedelic Bertrand Russell right before our eyes.

Down here in Palookaville, it's time for another excerpt from my (hopefully) coming article in The High Hat about his distinguished career:

The Beast In Me (The Impossible Bird, 1994) Vocal influences on the Lowe style include Cash, Lennon, Costello, Nat Cole and...Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edwards? Sure seems like he's listened to Ukelele Ike (or at least Jiminy Cricket) after hearing his wonderful vocalizations on this track. Lowe looks back knowingly on a young adulthood filled with sex, drugs and rock and roll; plus a painful divorce, alcoholism, and lowered commercial expectations. With, as always, an unusual willingness to face what his pal Elvis called the deep dark truthful mirror. Lowe has a knack for gazing at his inner demons in an illuminating and musically compelling way. Again with only vocals and guitar, he delivers a summation of his "Beast" with sublime eloquence: “Sometimes it tries to kid me that it’s just a teddy bear / Or even somehow manage to vanish in the air / And that is when I must beware.” Absolutely first-rate singing and songwriting, and perhaps he was never better.

Time I Took A Holiday (Dig My Mood, 1998) Later Lowe wants to sell us on the value of hard-earned and/or badly needed comfort. Of course, it must include some attention to his baby’s arms. This is feel-good music for grownups; pure pop for people who want to "go get cooked.” Nice piano playing and, as usual, skilled vocals.

Let’s Eat (Stiffs Live Stiff compilation, 1978) An early example of how Lowe could tear it up as a live performer. A good potential advert theme for a restaurant, although with Lowe’s history of sly lyrics, you can wonder if the desire to “chew chew chew chew” is a carnal as well as a culinary one. Released the same year as Talking Heads' classic LP More Songs About Buildings and Food, produced by Brian Eno, which brings an interesting thought to mind: as Eno looks down the shrinking list of performers he hasn’t yet produced, maybe he should consider Lowe.

Way In

My latest article, in today's Oregonian:

A contest at a health club gets people eating better and dropping pounds

Hodson said that before the contest, he found it easy to succumb of eating coffee cake or chocolate chip cookies on the run at his workplace. Aided by the discipline the contest provides, he said, it's "much easier to eat healthier now that I'm packing my own meals from home."

Hodson said the one-hour training sessions given by Club Fit were like a mini-boot camp; after one intensive session of stretches, exercises and work with free weights, he was "pretty much sore for three days."

Nothing But Net

John Canzano:

This city owns the NBA patent on outrageous and unbelievable. And now it owns the first pick in the draft, along with four second-round picks, and the sudden ability to dream big again. Which is why when it was revealed at 5:54 p.m. that Portland owned the pick of the college litter, I immediately didn't think of Paul Allen or Zach Randolph, but about all the suffering and carnage in the recent franchise past, and in turn, all the deserving fans who finally got a wonderful moment to call their own.

Game of Chance


























Two Lukes: Maurice Lucas and Luke Walton in Portland.

Today is Ping Pong Day in NBA, a chance for my home team, the Portland Trail Blazers, to make a big move back into the NBA elite.

Bill Simmons says the Blazers are the seventh-most deserving, karma-wise, of the big prizes in next month's draft, Greg Oden and Kevin Durant.

Sorry, but no. Maybe the Sonics are #1, as Simmons writes, but the Blazers should be no worse than #3 or #4, for the painful playoff losses of 1978, 1991 and 2000 alone.

Simmons seems to think that one long-ago championship and 25 years of being "competitive" make the Blazers less worthy than his beloved Celtics, who have suffered so much these past 20 years, after obtaining three lifetimes' worth of luck and glory from 1957-87. And woe to the poor fans of Boston, who've only had the Patriots and Red Sox to get excited about.

Shit. Portland can't get no 'spect. < / chip on shoulder >

Here's Bill's take:

7. BLAZERS
(No. 6 in the Ping-Pong order)

Bad Luck -- 4
Front Office Competency -- 4
Loyalty/History -- 7
Level of Devastation -- 4
Overdue Good Karma -- 4
Tanking Karma -- 8
Rigging Potential -- 5
Entertainment Value -- 7

Final karma score: 43

Comments: They've been all over the board this decade: They were the Oh-So-Close Blazers, then the Jail Blazers, then they were so desperate to rebuild around character guys that they passed up Chris Paul or Deron Williams for Martell Webster, then they built a likable young core around Zach Randolph and Darius Miles, which is like watching one of your buddies announce that he's quitting booze and cigarettes, switching to a Vegan diet and training for triathalons ... but he's going to keep snorting heroin. You figure it out. I certainly can't. But considering the Blazers were consistently competitive from 1976 to 2001, can you really argue that their fans have "suffered" that badly because they limped through a few bad seasons with some bad guys? Probably not.

(Note: Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I miss the Jail Blazers. When's the next time we'll see a team feature a registered sex offender who wasn't even one of the top three craziest guys on the team? They made the 2006 Bengals look like a bunch of prep school kids egging houses on Halloween.)

***

UPDATE (6:20 PM):

Aw hell yeah!

Here at the office with my supervisor, another big Blazers fan, and we lost our shit as the final envelope was opened with the Blazers' name on it.

Sign on the dotted line, Mr. Oden or Mr. Durant.

I guess one never knows for sure if a player's a sure thing until they get it done on the court, so I'll reserve a little "show me" skepticism here. But with a lot of promising young talent, a talented and tough coach (Nate McMillan) and a new, crafty, aggressive GM (Kevin Pritchard), plus a rich owner in Paul Allen, damn the Blazers are in good shape right now.

White Album

Haven't heard from him lately, but it appears he's been watching a lot of Tube. Welcome back Chester Magpie, underground pundit:

"If people get into her sense of YouTube humor here I think she is setting ground rules for the upcoming season. Or she'll get run over by the Bob Express and the Church Lady will go, '..snort, snort.'

And speaking of Bob (as in Dobbs and Forehead), I invite you to feel the pain and cry on your brass balls from Wally World.

I can't stop this truth. The bottom line, Alec, is that I am not an asshole. 'Do unto others...' and all those flowers in Cheney's gun.

(((((((((((((((STATIC)))))))))))))))))))

Voice of Bob: 'We interrupt this program to the sound of a bullet going thru Michael Hough's head.'"

Nearly Peerless Nick

More of getting mighty Lowe...

Basing Street (16 All-Time Lowes, 1984; b-side of single, 1979) The b-side of “Cracking Up” from Labour of Lust, "Basing" is a mini-play put to music, and strong evidence that from early on, Lowe was (like Elvis C.) too big a songwriting talent to stay only within the parameters of New Wave. He unflinchingly captures a dark urban scene here, and balances wrenching drama with detached perspective and an eye for subtlety. He understands that the truth of what might seem a throwaway gesture can at times speak louder than making a big Statement about this wicked world. (Note that when Lowe does go for the big statement, as in “What’s So Funny,” he typically tries to make sure it comes with a suitably clever conceptual twist.)

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding (b-side of single, 1994) On Lowe's box set The Doings there’s his rock-band version of this song, similar to the more well-known version on Elvis C.'s Armed Forces album. It’s a decent celebration of the song sentiment, but the playing is inferior to The Attractions' inspired work on the Costello cover. Better is this quieter version, released in 1994, and it's certainly more in keeping with later Lowe. It's an impressive interpretive performance -- just a man and his guitar, and Lowe's vocals simply soar as his classic lyrics do. ("So where are the strong? / And who are the trusted? / And where is the harmony?") For the mature Lowe, a song can thrive in the quiet moments when revolutions are born, as well as in the loud moments when revolutions expand.

Failed Christian (Dig My Mood, 1998) It's a quiet late-night chat over coffee and cigarettes, with a starkly confessional tone like John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero." Lowe remembers “tears when the choir sang in harmony," and says he is “a firm believer of spirit in music” who prays "with my soul." He's against the religious instruction he can’t understand, and can't abide the blood on the hands of the church.

Without Love (Labour of Lust, 1979) His connection to the Johnny Cash inner circle made by marrying June Carter’s daughter (and Johnny’s stepdaughter) Carlene, Nick was able to sell the Man In Black on this tune, enough for Cash to cover it. Lowe’s version further reveals his gift of musical versatility, his knack for catchy melody and a wise and soulful approach to lyric writing. With the Rockpile musicians backing him, the track sounds slick and spirited.

Hello Goodbye



















Greg with Mike at kindergarten graduation, June 1968.

Click on photo to enlarge.


9/17/04: Way Back
4/15/05: Me And The '63 Chevrolet
10/1/06: In Color


1967-68, Part Two

As I neared kindergarten, my parents kept up a solid day-to-day routine of making the family home organized, safe and clean. They paid the bills on time and kept my brother and I reasonably protected from the world's assorted boogiemen. There was time for fun, with toys and TV, music and movies, and plenty of goofing around. And there was time for getting down to business, with house rules that were fairly strictly (or sometimes more than fairly strictly) enforced.

There was also no pressure for my brother or I to believe in any religious faith, which helped lead me down a freethinker's path. I'm grateful to my folks for that.

My parents started out on a very tight budget when they got married (they had no health insurance when I was born, and my mom ate a lot of inexpensive meat and chicken pies when she was pregnant with me) and worked up to what was a decent middle-class existence by the time I started school in the fall of 1967.

Before my first day in kindergarten, I'd had some experience at a couple of nursery schools. I remember at the second one, we played "London Bridges" on the lawn outside the big revolving front door of what was either a church or community center. I remember a surreal experience when I walked through the revolving door, and time seemed to stop for a moment, and lights started to flash, psychedelic-like, while we were inside the doorway. Then we came out on the other end, and everyone acted like nothing unusual had happened.

Even with the nursery school experience, I still had plenty of anxiety (much of it suppressed) about going away to kindergarten, even for a half-day. I'd developed a jones for the joys of solitude by then -- one that persists to now -- and was wary of too much of the outside world infringing upon that. I think this wariness has negatively manifested itself in a lot of my relationships, and particularly did so during my grade school years.

Like an obedient little trouper child, trying to make lemonade out of lemons, I got on the bus my first day of kindergarten, and headed down the road to Poplar School in Fontana. I remember that first morning, noting that they served bags of popcorn on the sidewalk in front of the school. Another surreal memory: I wanted to buy a bag, but missplaced my nickel, and when I found it, it looked like it had been cut in half.

I remember as the year went on the importance of which tricycles one got at recess became important. Red was good, silver was bad. It was a Darwinian struggle to gain position in line to get the good tricycles. As I recall, I didn't get red as much as I did silver.

I brought Peanuts valentines to school, and found by the end of the day that most or all of them had been unopened. (Awwww...) I brought my "Flintstones meets Mary Poppins" record to school -- Alan Reed and Mel Blanc as Fred and Barney, with Fred deciding to become a songwriter and writing songs suspiciously like those in Mary Poppins -- and how I wish I had that record as a collector's item today.

I don't remember liking my teacher much, as she seemed a bit cold and harsh. One movie we were shown in class stuck with me: it was about a toy tin soldier and princess who ended up accidentally (?) burned in an oven. There was also some school play I was in, but I don't remember anything about it except the feeling of being on stage in a darkened auditorium, looking out at the audience. I also remember my next door neighbor Patricia (or "Punkin," as she was called) getting hurt in a (bicycle?) accident, but recovering in time to be in the kindergarten graduation ceremony with me.

***

At Punkin's house next door was a "Kennedy" sticker on the sliding glass door facing her backyard. Down the street was a old guy who one time I remember gave out Lorna Doone cookies to myself and Sara, a girl about my age who I had a crush on, and whose dad subconsciously reminded me of that Kennedy fellow I was vaguely aware of from the TV.

Around that time, I heard my dad say something like, "Is that how it is nowadays? If you don't like what someone has to say you just go out and shoot him?" And then I wandered around in a little-kid fog while the RFK funeral was on the TV, thinking I saw them open the coffin and a flash of bright light came out of it. The hit song "Honey" played on the radio that summer, and to me Bobby Goldsboro sounded like Bobby Kennedy.

***

My parents decided to move to Oregon around the time we took a trip to Portland for the first time in June 1968. Our friends the Lotts had moved there the year before, plus the Southern California smog was becoming an increasing annoyance to my parents. My brother Mike had a bad case of asthma when he was a little kid, often going to the hospital to deal with serious attacks, and it was thought that the cleaner Oregon air would be better for him.

The house was sold, and preparations were made to move north. But the actual move didn't take place until after 1st Grade started, and I ended up going to Poplar School for about one more week before we left. As I recall, I really liked my teacher, and seemed to get along with my classmates better than I did the previous year. When my mom came to pick me up from school on my last day, the teacher and the kids in the class waved goodbye to me at the door. (Awwww...)

***

So there it was, and there it went: my crucial formative years from age 0-6, spent in the sprawl of San Bernardino County.

Where we got our food from Stater Bros. in Fontana, and went to the doctor at the nearby Kaiser Hospital. Where we played "Mother May I?" in the backyard. Where I ate Regal Sour Lemons at one grandma's house, and Kraft Caramels at the other's. Where I fell asleep while watching The Reluctant Astronaut at the drive-in, and another time was spooked by a scene in a drive-in movie when an old prospector (?) seemed to fall off a cliff into a creek, and only his hat floated to the surface (which his donkey picked up downstream.)

In California began the legend of Tishy the cat (1964-76, and the greatest cat ever, still.) My brother and I had Woody Woodpecker and Porky Pig toys that we slept with, and played "Greg's Supermarket" in the den. We'd go to nearby Lytle Creek Park and visit the carnival there. For a time I'd smile with clenched teeth in photos for a time, because that somehow seemed like the right way to pose.

There were plenty of TV shows and long-player albums: Sheriff John, Roadrunner, Linus the Lion Hearted, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Wonderful World of Color features like "Kilroy" (Warren Berlinger!) and "The Horse Without a Head"; Hobo Kelly, Johnny Mathis, Truth or Consquences, Wes Montgomery, Ralph Story, Beany and Cecil, Shelley Berman, Mitch Miller, Allan Sherman, The Hollywood Squares and "Do You Know The Way To San Jose." Also, Show and Tell, a kids album that featured a song that stuck with me called "Relativity." (A train can move very fast, but can seem very slow...when you watch an airplane go.)

Toy M16 rifles. Creepy Crawlers. The little window my dad installed on the side of our Chevy panel truck. The cool backyard pool behind a house down the street. Dad saving me from walking into traffic when I was little. Praying for a dead bird and Punkin offering a popsicle as a sacrifice. The Jungle Book and trips to Disneyland. "World War I Flying Ace" Snoopy toys, with heads that came off. When they came off, my brother and I would parade the headless creatures around like they were zombies of death.

This was the whirlwind from which I came.