Music Review: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales; Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, & the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes; Of Whales in Paint

I have recently completed a three-movement sonata for solo marimba entitled “Three Chapters from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; Or, The Whale”, which was composed at the behest of Mr Jonathan Shapiro. It was conceived whilst on the California Zephyr train, slowly descending out of the Rocky Mountains along the Colorado river, earlier this month. In the beginning of January, I sat awake for twenty-two of the twenty-five non-stop hours of the annual Moby Dick reading at the whaling museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, so located because that’s where the book begins (except it actually begins penniless in a noisy New York City). Hearing this bizarre book out loud, without a pause, with over a hundred readers ranging from the eloquent to the stuttering, whale bones hanging abovehead, was quite an experience. As any familiar to the book will know, after about a hundred pages (four hours), & the ambiguous narrator is aboard the Pequod, the plot simultaneously heightens & disintegrates. There are long rambling chapters about the grace of whaling, the majesty of whales, written in a parodic sublime, which is both tongue-in-cheek & massive – I mean, both ironic & not – I mean, both a joking pseudo-academic blabber, & language with a Shakespearean grandeur & Miltonic range of allusion.

I think the three chapters about images of whales – chapters LV thru LVII – come at a pivitol point in this narrative disintegration. Melville has completely outlined the basic dramatic structure, & ruminated on the deepest mysteries inherent in the boredom of a three-year voyage, & now that that boredom has set in, eleven hours into a non-stop reading, he wields his long sentences to attack all those who can’t illustrate a whale correctly, the dorsal fin is in the wrong place, &c. I can’t help pitying those who are forced to read this in high school, weary after hours of algebra, physics, & whatever-else homework, & Melville is still ambling on about bones. I cannot imagine very few readers approaching these chapters with a proper mind to appreciate them. But when you come at them with a maturity, a postmodern distance, & perhaps that majestic tedium that being on a changeless ocean, or a train, or lying awake in a whaling museum non-stop on a cold tile floor, I think these chapters are really fucking funny.

But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
-ch. LV, “Of the Mountrous Pictures of Whales”

On the train, with the cud-chewing & gentle rocking thru the Rockies, I thought of the post-Minimalist music I’ve been writing, inspired by the Bang-on-a-Canners, New York hipsters, a lot of it (both their’s & mine) quite boring, indifferently, with a lot of imprecise repetitions, a consistent texture, with the whole of notated Western music (along with popular & world musics) to draw from in reference, often ironically & in dense combination, but the pretension fully cohesive, destined to promote eye-rollings if the audience can actually pay attention. Well, at least the loose rhythms, (a lot of vague 2s & 3s to create a rhythmless, improvisatory atmosphere, like in David Lang’s Little Eye), feel somewhat aquatic, rocking, like a road-trip movie. The modernists found Melville relevant, & fully revived him in the ’20s, & there he’s sat at both the foundation & margins of American art; & then the postmodernists re-found him, & I’m sure I’m not the first to find a relation between the marginalized 21st-century hipster-ass classical music (which is a sort of genre-less post-postmodernism, often self-aware at its own self-awareness), & the deepest ambiguities in Melville’s narrative voice. I gave my piece a dose of the Americana harmonies, reminiscent of Copland & Ives, kept the rhythms in those swaying 2s & 3s of David Lang, but the voice is Melville’s.

O it was lost: Translated!

Now announcing! This weblog - translated!

¡O fue perdido para siempre! y lo encontramos no

O il a été perdu pour jamais ! et nous l'avons trouvé pas

O war es für überhaupt verloren! und wir fanden es nicht

O è stato perso per mai! e lo abbiamo trovato non

O werd het ooit verloren voor! en wij vonden het niet

O foi perdido para sempre! e nós encontramo-lo não

Το ο αυτό χάθηκε για πάντα! και το βρήκαμε όχ

О оно было потеряно для всегда! и мы нашли его не

List: Famous Non-Drivers

I’m beginning to compile a list of famous people throughout history who did not own a car.
(Feel free to add on!)

1) Charlotte Perkins Gilman (feminist, writer)
2) Muhammad (prophet)
3) C.P.E. Bach (composer, son)
4) George Sands (novelist, lover)
5) Marie Antoinette (Austrian)
6) Cheng I Sao (history’s most successful pirate, woman)
7) Ben Johnson (playwright)
8) William Brodie (respected Scotsman, murderer)
9) Confucius (famous bearded bureaucrat, brown-noser)
10) Robert E. Lee (warrior)
11) Friedrich Engels (bearded intellectual)
12) Ragnhild (Finnish Queen, philatelist)
13) Cosima Wagner (diarist, groupie)
14) William H. Bonney (The boy bandit kid, who lived as he died)
15) Gustavus III (happy at last)
16) Czar Nikolas II (father of a hemophiliac)
17) Harriett Tubman (slave, ex-slave)
18) Michaelangelo (epileptic, sculptor)
19) Edgar Allen Poe (epileptic, poet)
20) Socrates (bare-foot epileptic)
21) Niccolo Paganini (virtuosic violinist, epileptic)
22) Amerigo Vespucci (cartographer)
23) Pope Sixtus V (pope, mutilator of young boys)
24) Sayf ben Dhi Yazan (probably from Yemen)
25) Duke of Zhou (uncle, defeated the Shang at the Battle of Muye)

As you can see, quite a variety!

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S. Sandrigon - Prophecy and Doggerel 2009

Quotes: The Permanent War Economy

“Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life.”
–Tom Lehrer, An Evening Wasted


"Recently, more establishment evangelical groups, especially the National Association of Evangelicals, also began to speak up on the issue of creation care. Leading the way was Rich Cizik, NAE Vice President for Governmental Affairs, who, on issues like environmental concern and global poverty reduction, began to sound like the biblical prophet Amos. Cizik and NAE President Ted Haggard, a megachurch pastor in Colorado Springs, were attending critical seminars on the environment and climate change in particular and describing their experiences of epiphany and conversion on the issue. Cizik was quoted by The New York Times as saying, 'I don't think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created.' In 2004, the NAE adopted a new policy statement, 'For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility,' which included a principle titled 'We labor to protect God's creation'."
-Jim Wallis, “The Religious Right is Losing Control”, Sojourners, March 22nd, 2006


“You hear this constant refrain from our critics that Democrats don’t stand for anything. That’s really unfair. We do stand for anything.”
-Barack Obama, D-Ill.


“You know, a man came up to me the other day & said, Doodles, your hair is getting thin.
And I said to him, Well, who wants fat hair!?”
-Doodles Weaver, "The Man on the Flying Trapese"


“With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death.”
-George Orwell, prophetically in 1984 (1949), II.ix


“Hold on for a second, please. Excuse me. Excuse me. No president wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true.”
-George Bush, 21 March, 2006 (at a press conference, being interrupted by Helen Thomas)


“Yo momma's got a wooden leg with a real foot.”
–Garrison Keillor

Music Review: "In C" by Terry Riley

On Monday Night, students & faculty at CalArts performed at Disney Concert Hall in L.A., as part of their Minimalist Jukebox. This is what Mark Sweed, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote about it:

Terry Riley's "In C," written in 1964 and the piece that launched the movement, followed after intermission and was played big. It looked as if the entire student body and faculty of CalArts' music department was on stage. In case the Guinness Book of Records is interested, there were 124 performers: five pianos, 11 clarinets and 11 guitars (acoustic and electric), seven trombones among the large brass contingent, 20 singers, a small string section and too much percussion to count.

David Rosenboom, the violist on the historic first recording of the piece, conducted. With him were two more "In C" veterans. Stuart Dempster was trombone on the recording and in the San Francisco premiere. Pianist Katrina Krimsky (then known as Margaret Hassell) played the pulse on the recording and again Monday night, knocking out steady Cs as surely as she had nearly four decades ago.

"In C," in which 53 short phrases in or around C major are freely repeated over the pulse, is usually a small ensemble jam. Here, Rosenboom more carefully molded it, indicating when sections should begin changing figures lest so large an orchestra seem chaotic.

Lost in the grand scheme and grand sound was a bit of the detail that can make "In C" so fascinating. But gained from this 800-pound-gorilla version was an incomparable sense of grandeur, with Rosenboom turning the score into a 21st century concerto for orchestra while nonetheless maintaining a strong sense of authenticity.

At times, the majesty of the music was astonishing. When the longest and most harmonically complex figure (No. 35) dominated, Rosenboom emphasized the brass, and the score sounded like the end of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" writ large and Postmodern. I particularly loved the timpani, which grounded the sound. The only thing missing was the Disney organ.

Monday's audience — just as encouragingly mixed if not quite as affectedly hipster as the Orb crowd — was alert, open-eared and excited, the Philharmonic's future.

________________________________________________________________

Date:	Thu, 23 Mar 2006 13:53:44 -0800 (PST)
From:	"Jonathan Shapiro" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: Fwd: Look what the LATimes thought of CalArts' Performance at Disney
To:	"James Welsch" <________@yahoo.com>

People should really stop doing In C with as many
people as possible.  Ironically I am performing in one
of those on April 3rd.  I am sure it will suck.

__________________________________________________________________

Date:	Fri, 24 Mar 2006 08:29:24 -0800 (PST)
From:	"Jonathan Shapiro" <_______@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: Fwd: Look what the LATimes thought of CalArts' Performance at Disney
To:	"James Welsch" <_______@yahoo.com>

Since when do you trust music critics?  Well organized
or not, I feel the oversize version of that piece
takes away a lot from it.  1st movement of whale music
is awesome, I'm working on it, I'll let you know about
weird things.  Can't wait to see more.
Love
J
______________________________________________________________________________________

With Mr Shapiro, I have performed (as opposed to just 'played') In C twice, both with what apparently were medium-sized ensembles. Two of the most famous recordings, the genus (with CalArts' David Rosenboom on Viola, mentioned above), & Bang on a Can's trendy one from a few years ago, overdub their ensembles to create the effect of hugeness. The real innovation with

Bang on a Can's, I thought, was subtlety. The genus one sounds like a lot of hippies blasting saxophones. Bang on a Can takes the 53 fragments & really molds them into an atmosphere. Of course, when a master post-minimalist (maximalist?) orchestrator like John Adams is writing for a 100 piece orchestra, most of the individuals are playing at something subtle, to add up to the fuller texture. It sounds to me like Rosenboom was using the two-page score of In C as a ready-made hour-long 100-piece work for postminimalist grandeur. By having some sort of conductor's dictatorship, he can loosely organize the shape of something with an instrumentation so massive, that it would take Adams months to notate to a score.

___________________________________________________________________

Date:	Sun, 26 Mar 2006 13:07:27 -0800 (PST)
From:	"Melinda Rice" <____________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: O it was lost for ever! and we found it not: Music Review: "In C" by Terry Riley
To:	"James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>

Rosenboom's arrangement of IN C was met with enjoyment for a few reasons. One is the piece's ability to support many conceptions of itself. Another us because it was a spectacle, in the style of old World Fairs and such, We were amazingly large, for a group playing with some freedom, and a unified pulse.

The performance of the piece also stirred up some dissent because Terry Riley asks that each player take responsibility for making decisions about the direction of the music. In a performance of IN C following these instructions, no one really knows what it is going to sound like from a harmonic or rhythmic standpoint. What you can count on is the trancelike feeling of the piece. Riley created a little maze, and musicians travel through it exploring their own sounds within the group as much as the cells Riley wrote.

Movie Reviews: Movies about Artists

Date:	Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:34:37 -0800 (PST)
From:	"Melinda Rice" <_____________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Walk the Line
To:	"j welsch" <____________@yahoo.com>, "Rebekah Goldstein" <_________@yahoo.com>

In the new movie, Walk the Line, Reece Witherspoon plays June Carter, and Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny Cash. It's a tale of youth pursued through adulthood (Cash), and Joaquin Phoenix sings as Cash throughout the movie (Reece Witherspoon sings as Carter, too, with a southern drawl).

The Carter family is portrayed as level-headed in the few scenes they enter, in contrast with the fire between Cash & his father. In one memorable scene, after a Thanksgiving dinner gone sour at Johnny's new home, as Johnny Cash fumbles angrily in the mud with his new tractor, and June says: I don't know what will happen if I go down there, her father memorably replies: Honey, you already are down there.

The credits are the first time that Cash and Carter's actual voices are heard, and they make it clear what the viewer has been missing all along in the movie. Joaquin Phoenix and Reece Witherspoon are good actors, and do a valiant job at singing like their characters (Phoenix has a darn low voice), but they just don't have the patience in their voices.

_________________________________________________________________

Date:	Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:14:53 -0800 (PST)
From:	"James Welsch" <___________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Ray
To:	"Melinda Rice" <___________@yahoo.com>

Hey man,

Have you seen Howl's Moving Castle. It's the last Miyazaki film.

I was tired of rock-star / biopics after Ray. It seemed to me there was more to his life than watching him do drugs & his wife yelling at him. It was essentially the same movie as Pollack, The Doors, Kurt Weill: A Biopic, Frida, Amadeus, & That One about the Black Painter. They're all about artists doing a lot of drugs, their wives yelling at them, & an occasional shot of someone singing & an audience digging it, or a successful art opening. Ray ended triumphantly with him quitting heroin, as if that was his crowning achievement, thirty years before his death.

James

Chili Recipe!

Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:13:33 -0800 (PST)
From: "James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject: Chili!
To: "Tomorrow Jenny" <_______@yahoo.com>

Sautee/fry very hot in oil in big pot:
Onions / leeks / garlic
Green peppers, spicy peppers, whatever peppers, other vegetables?
Until the onions are translucent

Add delicious fake meat next (I like the "Smart Ground" brand),
for a minute, then turn the temperature way down.

Then add:
at least 2 cans of stewed tomatoes (keep juice)
At least three cans of beans (be creative! There’s lots of kinds of beans! drain juice!)
At least a tablespoon of brown sugar
At least a tablespoon of vinegar (try mixing whatever vinegars are around – white wine, apple cider, &c.)
Four to eight tablespoons of chili powder, or more?
Sometimes I add cock sauce to make it spicier.
That time we added a can of corn was good.
Oregano, Thyme, Cilantro (fresh, cut up without stems), Parsley, Pepper, Salt, & other fun spices, to taste.
Then let it simmer for 2-12 hours.

Book Review: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez

This book is as much about solitude & isolation as it is about society & family. On one side are the extremes of depravity & life-long virginity, on the other side is passion & sexual obsession. Starvation, asceticism, & scholarship are beside a mindless gourmandizing. The book is about a family which founds a remote town in the middle of the Caribbean jungle, & the town begins & ends with the family. We follow six generations, from the patriarch to the termination of the line; but it is not a simple rise & fall, or rags-to-riches-&-back-again-in-six-generations. Blake's poetry took the fall of man & the salvation & apocalypse, & shuffled the deck; for all happens in every moment depending on mental perspective. The Buendía family has tendency towards extremes, but they are alway occurring at once, mixed up in their progressions. For instance, the two repeating male names - José Arcadio & Aureliano - represent a sort of Mary/Martha divide of the extremes. The family keeps naming their next offspring one of these two names, & the men suffer the implied sins, despite how much bastard blood dilutes the initial incest. The Aurelianos are prone to a retired study - in particular, being destined to interpret certain coded texts hidden away in the chamberpot room - but their restraint unleashes itself into intense Liberal military actions, union organizing, & heartless visiting-of-prostitutes. They eventually get over it, confused with what it all meant, & spend the rest of their lives in a total, useless seclusion. The José Arcadios tend to be big, bawdy, social, dumb & full of love. At one point, of course, a pair of identical twins have the two names, & they switch themselves for their entire adulthood. Only the matriarch Úrsula suspects the confusion, & when they die, their coffins are accidentally switched. The twins with the reversed names carry out the destinies of what their names should have been. In the beginning, all of the antipodes are contained in the patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, but I think it's the potential of the godhead, or the questions, which drive him mad. When the line diminishes, they funnel again to one man, Aureliano, who is able to combine the Love with the Study, the passion with the focus, & when the repression & lisense meet in one, the rapture finalizes the decay.

"A project like [the satellites] Tom and Jerry demonstrates all the strengths of American science: technological sophistication, restless curiosity, & monumental budgets. But, at the same time, it points to the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to produce such an elegant set of measurements only to ignore them? With knowledge comes responsibility, & so it is that we turn from the knowledge we have gone to such lengths to acquire."
-Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, March 20th, 2006

I read this book cover to cover on Amtrak's California Zephyr train, which I picked up in Chicago on Monday afternoon, & deboarded in Reno on Wednesday morning. For those who are addicted to air travel & roadtrips, forgive me for doing a bit of advertising, because I believe these particular tracks should be a mandatory right-of-passage for all Americans. If you take it eastward from Emeryville, California, Day One is spent crossing the Sierra Nevadas, the sun setting in the beautiful Nevada Desert. Day Two follows the Colorado River for 268 miles, the longest an American train follows a river, over the Rockies. Then you sleep thru Nebraska. Day Three is in Iowa, crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois & ending in Chicago. Many countries, of course, insist on a triple system of transportation: roads, rail, & air. In America, once the land of trains, the government is cruelly biased against Amtrak, believing it shouldn't be running at a deficit, & continually cutting its support. Of course, it's nothing like the price it pays to build highways, subsidize gas prices, & rescue the airlines from their endless losses. Also, in Europe, trains are timed by the minute. Amtrak takes you out of the 21st century, to a time when West-bound trains misinformed the clocks, & train time tends to be four hours late, especially when commercial transport always has the right-of-way. After taking the Zephyr & other Amtrak trains many times now, my pet peeve has become those few riders who walk up & down the aisle bitching about the train's tardiness, not knowing what they got themselves into. There's a few on every train, & they're always frowning fat women with big glasses. I explained to one once that traffic jams are no better; & as opposed to airports, the train conductors will actually explain to you why the train is late, rather than keep you waiting, tied in your seats, with cold ambiguous announcements. Really, our country has got some extreme transportation issues. Imagine if the funds annually flagellated into the Military-Industrial complex were spend on transport reform. (But I don't want to litter my literary 'blog with political rants.)

Think about highway travel. You're surrounded by other members of your civilization, but you only ever catch fleeting glances of them. Americans have, at this point, almost entirely replaced our centers of social contact - city streets, public theaters, public transportation - with bubbles we share with a few family members - cars, television, & more cars. No wonder America puts such a strong emphasis on family. This makes train travel especially shocking for someone who grew up in a middle-class mansion in the mountains. The Chicano teenage girl in front of me asks me if she's on the right train. Try asking your neighbor on the freeway what exit you need to take. In Sacramento, as I walked fifteen blocks to work, people would constantly roll down their windows & ask me for directions, being the only pedestrian in sight. It was practically my responsibility to understand in which direction I-80 was.

Greyhound busses, interestingly, are almost entirely occupied by the lower-income riders, with the occasional middle-class vagabond with his guitar. Amtrak often contains an incredible cross-section of American society, racially & economically. If anything, it over-emphasizes the eccentrics & the margins: there are certainly more crazy old men eager to start a converation, there are more Mennonites, more retards, more whatevers. In our country of diversity, do we have to either move to New York or pay $200 for a train ticket to have this kind of social experience?

Of course, I don't take the train to meet strangers or have interesting conversations. I tend to answer the inquiries of my neighbors with short, to-the-point answers. I look forward to the solitude, to looking out the window at mountains for 76 hours, to reading a good book from cover to cover. On Wednesday morning, I finished Gabriel García Márquez's book about loneliness & the extremes of social contact, how they somehow define a civilization.

Twenty Questions for David Mamet

Post Road Magazine has a competition asking for Twenty Questions, which will be sent to whoever is that issue's interviewee. Here are my questions for David Mamet, which he will almost certainly never answer:

I. Why?

II. Tom Stoppard said, if he could, he would learn Russian so he could read Pushkin, & Ancient Greek so he could figure out why the comedies of Aristophanes are "so damned unfunny." Who could you imagine wanting to learn English to read your work?

III. If Victorian Lesbians lived today, would they drink bottled water?

IV. What music is currently in your car stereo? (No cheating.)

V. Some subscribe to the theory that the plays of William Shakespeare were actually written by another man, also named William Shakespeare. What do you suppose that first man was like?

VI. Bill Clinton said his favorite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude. If you were president, what book would you lie & say was your favorite?

VII. Pygmalion or My Fair Lady?

VIII. If, on America’s standardized tests (like the so-called Scholastic Aptitude Test), there was a fifth section which gauged imagination & creativity, what format would it take?

IX. You have to create & produce a high-budget Broadway blockbuster, which, because it can take no risks, must be based on a feel-good movie that a vast middle-aged audience already loves. Then, you sell the rights back to Hollywood to re-make a re-make. Twenty years later, theater majors at a small liberal arts school, who grew up watching the movie & have a love-hate relationship with the cheesiness – for one thing, it had some small part in pushing them towards theater, but they’re totally embarrassed about it – they incorporate ironic references to the film into a subversive work with nudity & too many projections. As the original producer, how do you feel?

X. What next?

Last Two Holy Sonnets

Exchange this paradise for boundless concrete,

Exchange this wilderness for endless ghetto,

Put junkbone devastation on a meadow,

And want, where once creation was complete,

And waste, of all the finite sums of breath,

False balance of the soil’s promise, replete

And bounteous; or could the cock be free,

Or could the war be won without his death,

Or houses & books existing with forests intact,

Or could the love be full without the jealousy,

Or thirst or hunger slaked with immortality,

Our lives entire without the slightest impact.

Could we do well what still we will do well,

Or life or health or sacrifice for fuel?

On trains across the Rockies comes a man

Who knows the blue lakes as he knows the divine,

And next to obese theists, takes bread & wine,

He will profess since all the hours began,

Till those who pray to know the ample rapturings

Will concentrate on snowflakes in the sunshine,

Till those who preach of martial glory can

Enlist their zeal towards imaginary capturings;

And he will speak of glowings on the surface,

And he will rhyme in every holy language,

And he will find a seed whose roots will wage

The ephemeral crusade to sing in her space.

This consummation then he will consume

When gold & raining peace together bloom.

Music Review: Dolly Parton's "Those Were the Days" (2005)

This iconic country music star makes the bold move of releasing an album of classic hippie protest songs during a war, which, in general, country music stars aren’t supposed to do. They are, in general, supposed to take the views of Toby Keith, who sings:

"Now this nation that I love
Has fallen under attack
A mighty sucker punch came flying in
From somewhere in the back [sic]
Soon as we could see clearly
Through our big black eye
Man, we lit up your world
Like the 4th of July"
-Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue

She insists that it is a peace album not a "protest" album, & indeed, most of the songs she sings are both over-played & ambiguous, so as not to make any obvious statement. The pervading theme of the album is nostalgia. Here is the Track List:

1. Those Were The Days
2. Blowin’ In The Wind
3. Where Have All The Flowers Gone?
4. Twelfth Of Never
5. Where Do the Children Play?
6. Me & Bobby McGee
7. Crimson & Clover
8. The Cruel War
9. Turn, Turn, Turn
10. If I Were A Carpenter
11. Both Sides Now
12. Imagine

The most surreal aspect is her pervading smilingness, gleefully belting songs like Blowin’ in the Wind & Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, songs which don’t make sense unless sung sad.

Overall, tho, from this reviewer’s impecable tastes, the album is perfect & masterfully rendered. Well worth the three year wait. & in honor of her releasing it on my 24th Birthday - October 11th, 2005 - I will take this opportunity to announce the release of my cover album, doing all of these songs in the same order, since I not-so-coincidentally play almost all of them anyway, to be released on my 25th Birthday, staring Sam Amidon on Appalacian dulcimer, Danny Holt on Yamaha Carilon, & Musaf Islam on hippie drums.

Weight Watchers

I have been away from the Internet all week, following around Mrs Bonnie Anne Whiting Smith, of Indiana's Tales & Scales, as she performs contemporary classical music in elementary school assemblies (including a commisioned piece by Jerome Kitzke! with texts by Whitman & Langston Hughes!) I take the California Zephyr back to Tahoe first thing next week, at which point, loyal readers, keep an eye out for a review of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, & whatever else I happen to read on the train.

Also of note: Ms Grace Marlier has alerted me to a website containing historical Weight Watchers' Recipes. It is a cultural triumph; or, as the youngest Boudelaire sibling in the Lemony Snicket books points out, "Bushcheney!"

Holy Sonnet

Are Christians prattling sycophants to God?

A God who messed up sin & pain &amp;amp;amp; hate,

And memory & intellect & fate,

He screwed up nature, life & breath & growth,

And jealously expects no criticism,

He’ll nix a frog & then expect a nod,

Can millions suffer during a loyalty oath,

A vortex in a pyramidal prism,

And yet your coworker, whose gay facade

Emits approving smirks, drops to his knees

To show his boss how much he’d do to please,

Then, starting wars, expects Him to applaud.

If absolutely power corrupts, what fool

Would proudly worship an omnipotent rule?

Vodka Review: Ketel One

This fine vodka has been made in Schiedam, Holland, by the same patriarchal family since 1691 - & they have no intention of letting their drinkers forget this. The list of names on the bottle outstrips Jim Beam in its antiquity & knee-splitting hilarity: Joannes Nolet, Jacobus Nolet, Joannes Nolet, Joannes Nolet, Jacobus Nolet, Joannes Nolet, Jacobus Nolet, Joannes Nolet, Paulus Nolet (a controversial decision), & Carolus Nolet, who has run the family vodka business since 1941, although he is severely inbred & suffers from the down syndrome. James & I often wondered why Jim Beam is named Jim Beam, when James B. Beam does not appear in the chronicles until third or fourth. Did Jacob Beam name the company after his grandson? as William Van Duzer Lawrence named Sarah Lawrence College after his daughter, & Leland Stanford named his university after his son, who also happened to be named after him. Who would name a whiskey after their grandson ? or visa versa? James, of course, is the English New Testament version of Jacob. I believe that when the Vulgate Bible was written in Latin, the New Testament was translated from the Greek & the Old from the Hebrew, so the earliest English versions of the names were already long different by the time of the earliest English translations of Tyndale & Wyckliffe (Jesus is the NT version of Joshua.) Jacobus, I presume, is the Dutch Jacob. Does it make a difference in the quality of spirit, if control is carefully kept within a family with a Biblical genealogy, with as it appears Old Testament & New Testament eras. The makers of Ketel One proudly assure us that every batch is still tasted my a member of that illustrious dynasty - as if sensory memory stays in the family in the same way sins do. I recently had the pleasure of seeing the corporate tasting room for Budweiser in St. Louis, Missouri, where my older brother occasionally sits on the panel. There, also, the direct descendants of Eberhard Anheuser & Adolphus Busch, mostly named Augustus (when in Rome...), still perform the crucial quality assurances. (Eberhard gave Adolphus his brewery & daughter, & spent the rest of his life sober & alone on a small island in the Pacific.)

My drinking companions for this tasting of Dutch Vodka were Mr Darren Southworth (a material physicist currently studying at Cornell) & Miss P_____ K__________ (a Russian violinist at the Cleveland Institute). ‘P(olina)’, of course, like Paulus, is another derivative of St. Paul, the inventor as it were of the religion Christianity - Paul being the Greek & Roman version the Jewish Saul, when the literate apostle was converting the gentiles. Mr Southworth & Miss K__________ both ranked the vodka as being very fine, & many excellent jokes & anecdotes were exchanged, as much as one can wish from a $21 bottle of booze, & well worth the price of today's headache & fatigue. P______ told us that if one drinks only vodka, one neither gets drunk nor hungover, which turned out to be a fatulent Russian lie. I inquired the Russian present about a joke sent me from Jennie Richardson, whom I asked to send me Russian jokes while she was there. I quote it directly from the e-mail, dated Monday, 24 October, 2005:

There's a monkey who goes to the store every day and buys a bottle of vodka and three yogurts. Every day the same woman sells the things to him. Then one day she says, "I just have one question: I understand why you want the vodka, by what's with the yogurt?" The monkey says he'll show why. He opens the vodka and takes a swig, then opens the yogurt and pours it on his head, yelling "I'm drunk, I'm drunk, I'm drunk!" So maybe it's not funny, but in context anything has a great potential. This young Russian, who is the host of Tim from my group, told this joke in his best and not so great English. Emily and I couldn't stop lauging. The next day, Tim told it in his not-so-great and best Russian in class to our professor.

Miss K__________ assured me that most Russian jokes are funny, & we discussed how comedy is different in different cultures. Since learning it, I have told this joke dozens of times in America, & have yet to receive more than a polite chuckle. Sometimes people respond angrily to a joke they do not get, which could be the psychological root of xenophobia. General Jack D. Ripper, in Dr. Strangelove; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb, is paranoid about the communist conspiracy to flouridate his precious bodily fluids. Purity of Essence. He points out that Russians drink only vodka, which is why he only drinks rain water & grain alcohol. Would the Russians get this joke? Or is the root of humor somehow linked to xenophobia, as Jennie's joke was only funny when a Russian told it in fractured English or an American told it in fractured Russian?

I had also asked Miss Richardson while she was there to find out what ‘James’ was in Russian, because while James was there, they just pronounced ‘Djames’ badly & made dumb comments about James Bond, but I insisted there must be a James in Russian because there’s a Bible in Russian & ‘James’ is a biblical name! I charged her to find a Russian Bible, & tell me what it says it Acts 1:12, “When they entered the city, they went to the upper room where they were staying, Peter & John & James & Andrew, Philip & Thomas, Bartholomew & Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, & Judas son of James.” According to that passage, there were two apostles named James, & one second-generation, much like a family of brewers. Were any of Jesus’ disciples wine makers, or simply distributors of the blood of Christ? As Jesus himself allegedly said in the apocryphal Acts of James 3:21, “Verily I say unto thee, whosover drinketh the blood of the son of man, shall as finding water in a stone, bring forth the wine of my Father’s kingdom, & shall quench the thirst of all who seek the cup.” Note the emphasis on producing this sacred fluid. Combine it with the OT Jewish importance of Patriarchal Dynasty, & you have the jist of the theosophy of the Nolet, Busch, & Beam families. ‘James’ was the most common name for babies in America during the ’40s & ’50s, & continues to rank #17 today, but I have no idea if ‘Iakov’ remains a popular name in post-Communist Russia. (The best graph for American baby names is the Baby Names Voyager.)

At two o’clock in the morning, Mr Southworth concluded that a third of a bottle of vodka is “not enough to get anyone anywhere later,” so it was promptly finished. My compliments to the Ancient Blood of Schiedam!

Quotes: Broken Back

"...I would charitably refer that man to the history of Christendom for the last 1800 years; & ask him, whether, in spite of all the maxims of Christ, that history is not just as full of blood, violence, wrong, & iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the world's story?"
-Herman Melville, Plotinus Plinlimmon in Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852)

"Enitharmon slept,
Eighteen hundred years: Man was a Dream!
The night of Nature and their harps unstrung:
She slept in middle of her nightly song,
Eighteen hundred years, a female dream!"

-William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy

"I want to make sure I'm dancing and not shuffling."
-Dave Chappelle, on being a black comedian enjoyed by a large white audience

"I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them when I was middle-age, I liked them before I was president, and I like them during president, and I like them after president."
-George W. Bush, 2005

"At the age of ten, they had furnished an example of the truth, that the friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts & elegancies of life, sometimes, transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, & revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes. Nor is this boy-love without the occasional fillips & spicinesses, which at times, by an apparent abatement, enhance the permanent delights of those more advanced lovers who love beneath the cestus of Venus."
-Herman Melville, Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852)

"Nearly 60 years ago, Leslie Fiedler argued that the great American novels of the 19th century dramatize a love story between men, typically a white man and a man of color: Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Huck and Jim. He made his brilliant academic career on this startling thesis, which he went on to demonstrate in "Love and Death in the American Novel" in 1960. Now Fiedler's thesis seems to apply to Hollywood movies as well, but the thorough close-readings that have refined and broadened Fiedler's argument this time have been provided not by graduate students, but by online pranksters using little more than laptops, a broadband connection and Final Cut Pro. "
-Virginia Heffernan, on Internet "Brokeback Mountain" spoofs, in the March 2nd New York Times

"...even if it means taking a chubby, I will suck it up."
-Tobias Fünke, from Arrested Development