Category: Uncategorized

Chomsky Responds To Truthers

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I recently made a comment in an online forum that listening to Noam Chomsky for me was an act of self-torture. Not that his contribution to political discourse isn’t incredibly valuable in terms of presenting an alternative point of view than that of the mainstream. Chomsky approaches the world in a relentlessly rational manner that allows for very little in the way of levity or even creativity so that his dry recitation of facts from the perch of academic authority usually leaves me feeling exhausted rather than inspired. In my opinion this approach leads too inevitably into a constraining vice of political correctness and away from the kind of flexible response to events needed in our to approach to the complexities of perception. 

 
That said, after watching the following video of Chomsky responding to a question from a 911 ‘Truther’ I came away with a new appreciation for the disciplined and hard-boiled approach of truly scientific thinking to the evaluation of facts and conclusions. As anyone who knows me soon discovers I have very little patience (none) with so-called “Truthers” and with those who indulge in and promote conspiracy theories of any kind. I believe that their approach to ‘facts’ echoes that of the average Bible thumping evangelist who wants to convince me that dinosaurs lived with human beings six thousand years ago. This stuff should be confined to the shelves of occult bookstores (with the ravings of Alex Jones and David Icke) and is entirely corrosive to true political discourse. Parading in the costumes of intellectual rigor these writers and ranters are only dedicated to making a buck by getting people to substitute their predigested dogma for any effort at real thinking. 
 
 
Thanks to Open Culture for unearthing this video.  
 

Defending Us From Healthcare

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Unlike our Calvinist brethren and most of the members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce I believe that healthcare is a basic human right. I actually believe that the way healthcare is practiced in the United States qualifies almost as a criminal enterprise. Certainly I’m not happy with many of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act as passed, particularly the concessions made to the insurance industry. Yet, I wonder if any bill could have gotten through, given the track record of any effort to advance socially mandated healthcare over the past 40 years, unless attempts were made to indulge conservatives by adopting something like their own successful program enacted in Massachusetts. The ACA isn’t what I would have liked, but the accomplishment of actually having passed a law addressing healthcare as a “right” is a major accomplishment. It goes to the heart of everything dividing Americans into what appears to be irreconcilable factions. In fact it brings about nothing less than the first faint cracks in the walls of prejudice that have been used as tools for control almost as long as we’ve been in existence, and most effectively since the cold war.
 
I would like to have seen a better law, but this is better than no law at all, and it’s a start. As with Social Security and Medicare, it’s inspired resistance from the same political factions using identical rhetoric. Both programs, after all, entail a redistribution of wealth and thus evoke a visceral response in a country that has been programmed by it’s religious leaders, backed conveniently by the rulers of industry, to believe we are all self-sufficient individuals responsible only before God. Both programs continue to be revised and improved over time to address problems and inefficiencies. Obamacare is not only a crack in the dam of the absolute power of the wealthy, it is in fact another challenge to the concept of white Protestant supremacy. Particularly irksome is the fact that it was passed by a black man and even carries his suspiciously Islamic sounding name (ironically it’s the Republicans who made this possible). You may think this an irrelevant diversion, but I believe it’s one of the issues that most effectively fuels the fires of the trained pack of attack dogs that the Right calls it’s ‘base.’ (I also believe that America is still essentially a racist culture that, having built much of its wealth through slavery and genocide, is still mostly in denial of this fact.)
 
Indeed, the Affordable Care Act is certainly subversive to the American Way as we’ve practiced it for far too long, and it’s a form of subversion that I heartily endorse.   
 

The resistance to any sort of publicly mandated healthcare goes back at least as far as president Truman, and before that to the time of Roosevelt and the labor struggles before and during the Great Depression. It’s that ol’ bugaboo socialism, a word that’s been relentlessly programmed into American business culture in order to evoke a Pavlovian response whenever any expansion of government influence threatens to interfere with the ‘orderly’ process of accumulating capital. 

 
Yes, I’ve heard all of the rhetoric about exceptions and fairness and delays. I just listened to a Representative from Tennessee run all of this out on the news. Pretty obscure and pretty desperate I thought. Undoubtedly these talking points get pounded out everyday on the Rupert Murdock Network. What I hear is the game of politics, to erect as many straw men as one can in order to obfuscate the real issues behind sound bites that hopefully confuse the unlearned masses. I don’t think it’ll work this time. The Democrats actually appear to be united around some kind of solid backbone on this, while the Republicans are all over the place. 
 
You may object, “Straw Dogs you say!!” Just like the stuff about the NSA and the military, which are trotted out whenever either side disagrees with those who we’ve elected to defend us from our own screw ups. (Why don’t we defund these instead of making business pay for our healthcare?) Ironically, The very same people who are fighting tooth and claw to prevent the expansion of government are the ones who benefit most from military contracts in their districts. As for our foreign policy, it’s the very same fear of the socialist menace that has gotten us involved in all this hot water in the first place. We are the ones, after all, that overthrew the first democracy in Iran and financed the Taliban, both actions taken in order to stop the spread of socialism. It’s we who’ve reaped the whirlwind that has resulted in an explosion of extremist Islamic factions on a kill spree all over the world. Americans who think we can just wash our hands of all this and take our military forces and just walk away and let ‘them’ work it out, without considerable blowback, are deluding themselves as far as our complicity and responsibility. 
 
So, as the forces of reaction have chosen siege warfare as their tactic, I say let the siege begin… 

 

Walter Hits the Mirror

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Intensely blue skies
seen through sunglasses
high maintenance life
in the desert
diseases of the mind
deep lines in the landscape
of that face
criminal behaviors
lies for the best of reasons
stronger than love
the keys to power
in the reflection
of faces
lines across the desert
wrong movements
sky and earth
too late to retrace
dark trails through the grasses
what is the name
on that face
white man in mirror
mister white
chain maker
living in that house
manufactured out of lies
you can’t undo
you can’t retrace
the power in these chains
come to the edges of death
where you see clearly
on that face
the chains you’ve forged
pulling you on
washing those hands
that brought you here
never to be saved
you are the puppet in the mirror
leaving deep marks
of rage
the blood on your knuckles
the face distorted
only trapped
agent of oppression
servant of the damned
loneliness absolute
going forward.

Reflections on ‘Blue Jasmine’

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Amid all of the vampire flicks and light comedies in the popular sphere a rising vogue in the blockbuster circuit is for movies about class division and conflicts writ large portrayed in mostly epic terms (Hunger Games, Elysium, Les Miserables). Most of these create a comfortable distance from an admittedly uncomfortable subject by placing the narrative in a fanciful past or a speculative future. By contrast one exceptional film that’s totally apart from the realm of high tech spectacle manages to address the subject by painting a sensitive and tragic portrait of a single individual’s descent from the heights of the social register to the depths of alienation and despair. The film is Blue Jasmine, a brilliant collaboration between one of America’s greatest living storytellers and one of the world’s best actresses. All through his career as writer and director, Woody Allen’s subjects have revolved around the delusional nature of middle class life. His main characters wander through their days in bewilderment, somewhat aware of their disconnect from the reality of their situations, trying valiantly to maintain an appearance of normality. Their general failure in this regard is, in a majority of his films the source for comedy. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp these characters navigate a very fine line that divides farce from tragedy. As the Tramp in The Gold Rush is forced to eat his shoes and acts as if he is dining on fine cuisine, Allen’s creatures stumble through their lives amusing us with a seeming obliviousness to the true nature of their condition.
 
In Blue Jasmine Allen teases us repeatedly with the expectations of farce, setting up situations that are ripe for expression as conventional comedy. His character Jasmine, married to a wealthy investment banker (think Bernard Madoff) who has been prosecuted and jailed for fraud, has fallen from the highest levels of New York Society and is now penniless. She moves in with her adopted sister Ginger in San Francisco to find a way to make an honest living. She finds herself in a world that’s entirely foreign to her, one in which people have to struggle with paying the bills and one in which the skills that served her in high society are totally useless and even counter productive. Along the way she’s forced to confront not only the consequences of her own actions on other people’s lives but the ordinary situations faced by working women every day (like sexual harassment and having to learn computer skills). The narrative is interjected with a series of flashbacks that reveal in successive stages, like the peeling of an onion, the depths and the consequences of her self-deception. 
 
Although the situation is ripe for comedy, here Woody Allen chooses to bring us face to face with the ramifications of our own social blindness. Through these characters he shows us the deep gulf between a world of arrogant wealth and the hard edged realities faced by the working class. Along the way he tempts us with the fairytale promise of unrealistic expectations and then he brings us home to the realities of both love and betrayal. With deep familiarity and sensitivity he shows us both sides of the world, and this places Blue Jasmine in a class with some of the most penetrating literature of class and culture. I’m thinking of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Woody Allen’s films are essentially novels and in Blue Jasmine I think he’s achieved the maturity of an enduring classic that fully represents the anxieties and polarities of the time in which we presently live.   
 
Cate Blanchett is cast in the role of Jasmine and displays an extraordinary range of tone and expression as she veers from one state to another in her journey from riches to rags. This is perhaps the most deeply realized and complex characters in a Woody Allen film and few could have carried it off as convincingly and even sympathetically as Ms. Blanchett. In terms of understanding the class and culture divide at the center of the narrative I was reminded of the segment ‘Cousins’ she performs in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, where she plays two characters in an uncomfortable conversation, one a successful actress and socialite, the other an envious underachiever. It could have been an audition for the role either of Jasmine or Ginger. The cast includes Sally Hawkins as Ginger, Alec Baldwin as Jasmine’s conman husband, Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger’s first husband and Bobby Cannavale as her current boyfriend Chili. All are excellent foils for the emotional gyrations of Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine which deserves recognition as one of cinema’s great performances. 

Can Fast Food Cure Obesity?

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The following article is featured in the current issue of The Atlantic. 
 
 
Here’s the summary: Demonizing processed food may be dooming many to obesity and disease. Could embracing the drive-thru make us all healthier?

 

Since I’m a grocer and one of those whom the author refers to as a “Pollanite” (a fan of the work and point of view put forth by Michael Pollan in books like The Omnivores Dilemma), I felt that I should pass the article on with a few comments of my own.
 
The argument that the author presents is one of expediency, and is directed at what he sees as the number one health problem in the United States, that of obesity. He makes a case that the food ethic presented by the natural food business in trendy upscale stores like Whole Foods is not only unrealistic when applied to the general population but actually counter productive. He goes on to cite several examples comparing the nutritional value of the so called ‘healthy’ snacks offered in the elite markets to common examples of mainstream fast food. In these examples he finds that the ‘healthy’ alternatives often contain considerably more of the ingredients (sugar, fat) that contribute to obesity than the cheaper (by a considerable margin) and fast alternatives. 
 
This argument presents a much deserved ‘shot across the bow’ to an industry that I’ve watched or been a part of since 1973. The ‘Natural Food’ biz has grown from a fringe movement into one of the most profitable growth industries in the nation. In the process it’s thrown overboard a great deal of the ethical ‘baggage’ that provided its original raison d’etre. Once upon a time the idea was to provide an alternative to the heavily processed gunk produced in laboratories and offered in conventional grocery stores. Among other things it represented a return to a deeper engagement with the food we eat (cooking). Nowadays the business offers hundreds of new items every month that respond mostly to media fads and advertising campaigns that cater to the very same ethic of processed ‘convenience’ that has driven the American food business since way before the first tofu burger was ever thought of.
 
Nevertheless, the author’s critique of the industry that supports and hypes ‘healthy’ eating, much of which I agree with, represents a serious misreading of the work of Michael Pollan. If the writer had truly read a book like The Omnivores Dilemma he would have noted that Pollan’s take on the Whole Foods mentality in many ways echoes his own. Pollan notes that the key to profitability in the natural foods industry has for decades been that more money can be made by processing food than by growing it, and this has led the industry down some very questionable trails. 
 
Statistically the problem of obesity is greater in poorer communities where elite foods are simply not available. Even if they were, the author asks, would lower income people want to switch from the kind of food choices they are used to more ‘healthy’ alternatives? Wouldn’t we do much better against the scourge of obesity if the fast food industry actually changed its formulas so that the poor and ignorant masses can still eat at MacDonalds but get less that will make them fat? Since nobody has time to cook anyway, given the rat race involved in mere survival, can’t we just program the whole fast food business for less carbohydrates?
 
These argument make sense only when the focus is on obesity as the number one health problem in America. This extremely simplistic view excludes factors like our attitude toward the land, our over-amped and over-extended lifestyles and our largely dysfunctional relationship toward the systems that keep us alive and breathing. The contention that poor people would prefer MacDonalds over healthy food, even if it were made available to them, I find to be incredibly elitist. The people who raised me were poor and grew up in an era before ‘fast food.’ They made due with the basics and they cooked their own meals and they were healthier for it. To assert that the problem of obesity can be solved technologically with a little bit of progressive laboratory engineering, while a typically American approach, is laughable and a little bit frightening, as it calls up an image of the ultimately perfect lab manufactured food source for the masses: it’s called “Soylent Green.”

We Have Been Assimilated

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Summary: Two artifacts of mass media, launched one after another more than four decades gone: Star Trek in 1967 and The Night of the Living Dead in 1968, enjoy continued popularity in this summer’s blockbuster roster. They embody two contradictory poles in America’s current and ongoing psychic dilemma. On one hand is our love affair with technology (and progress) and our earnest desire to merge ourselves with it. On the other is a mortal fear that we will lose our individuality and identity to the vast machinery of the faceless collective. 

 

“…in fact, science fiction in this sense is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere…”   – Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”  – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

 ***

Americans are famous for talking and arguing about something they call freedom. What we actually mean most of the time is control. We have this obsessive need to be in control of our lives all the way to the moment of death and hopefully beyond and this we manage, at least in a virtual sense, through our fetishistic approach to technology. Oddly, the concept of control and that of freedom are opposing functions in the real world, and our obsession with technology has lead us to a world where the human animal is trained to serve the machine rather than the other way around.  

I’m a dweller in cities, as most of us are. Cities are the human container. While the ‘natural’ realm functions as a place of refuge and renewal, much like an elaborately predictable theme park, the real wilderness is a function of cities, where defined boundaries and limited visibility foster an environment filled with mystery. There the human animal, aware that control is nothing but illusion, continually strains against the limits of the maze with unpredictable explosions of novelty. 

Marshall McLuhan coined the term ‘global village’ to describe the environment created by electronic telecommunication that would render physical distance less relevant to our interactions than tribal affinity. What has evolved isn’t really a village at all, anymore than Los Angeles or New York or Tokyo are villages. The Internet is an urban space, differentiated into diverse neighborhoods, each with their respective gangs, territories and exclusive languages. 

The political dialogue going on these days amounts to a gang fight between factions defending opposing versions of the past. We hear overheated rhetoric espousing theoretical positions over hypothetical circumstances while little effective action is taken in the present. Most of us aren’t asked to contribute to solutions, only to take sides. While politics becomes a spectator sport an ongoing revolutions takes place in realms of culture, design and the arts. 

When we step away from the political chatter we see that nothing remains static and everything evolves. While we point accusing fingers at one another every new idea and innovation alters our environment and the way we live. While we fight wars over race and religion the definition of what it means to be human is undergoing constant change. When we address our problems in terms of left and right, Democrat and Republican, conservative and liberal, we confuse symptoms with the disease. While we grow more and more enmeshed in a world where every human interaction is mediated through machines, a deep sense of unease infects the whole world. Our greatest fear is that what defines us as individuals with a sense of purpose is being threatened by something outside of ourselves. All of our tradition, religion, and moral and ethical behavior is called into question by the requirements of advancing technologies. In the name of progress we reduce our world to chaotic wreckage made up of conflicting slogans and unsubstantiated beliefs.

Among these voices and artifacts we roam like refugees in a junkyard of found objects. When we look with eyes wide open we find that the most pressing existential questions are addressed in the mediums in which we most urgently look for escape. In unguarded moments, when listening to music or viewing movies and television we are opened to novel possibilities. In the fanciful stories we tell to one another we find the most accurate reflection of the truth about where we are and where we may be heading. Our lives, after all, are made of stories.   

Like archeologists or anthropologists we dig to discover the truth in threads that weave through our fictions. In the dreamworld we step back from the dense layers of event and information constantly swirling around us in our waking life. There we may discover the designs of our future before bringing them to the light of day.

***

“…and now the machines are flying us.” – Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise

 

On the screen a group of actors sit in comfy looking chairs or stand facing a screen on which images of things taking place in the universe outside the room are projected. We journey with these characters through a series of moral and ethical dilemmas encountered as adventures that take place in virtual space. The boundaries of the “Final Frontier” extend beyond the screen we are watching to include the space in which we are watching it.

This is perfect television.  

It doesn’t matter that the sets and costumes are cheesy or obviously made of plywood and cardboard against painted backdrops, no more than it mattered to us as children playing with sticks in our own backyards. When the onscreen fantasy ends and we leave the room to continue in our lives we become the ‘away team’ proceeding on a mission into alien worlds. 

Those of us who’d grown up in big cities were accustomed to watching heroes sort out good and evil in the exotic landscapes of the western or the familiar perky environments of sitcoms. The heroes went up against the bad guys and those comedic moms and dads were almost always wise and good natured and calmly protective. While it was entertaining and provided models we could measure our own lives against, these still felt like somebody else’s lives and someone else’s adventures. 

Star Trek made us feel like we were part of the crew of the Enterprise, along for the ride. The show spoke in an imaginative language that dreamers could readily understand. Most important, it provided us with an organizing center from which we made sense of the confusing age we grew up in, where change came so fast that the world appeared always perched on the verge of chaos.    

The show made its initial run in 1967 and was cancelled after only one season. It was about ten years ahead of its time and couldn’t find a ready fit among the era’s cowboy dramas and family sitcoms. Of course, we who were ready for the future wouldn’t let it die, so we pounded on the studio doors until it was eventually brought back, again and again. Over forty years later the books, movies, comics and television series still feed a subculture that thrives across at least three generations. 

As the first television generation we rode a gigantic wave of innovation that began more than a century earlier, when the first photographic image was burned into a metal plate and our relationship to time and space was forever warped by the image. Or maybe the wave actually begins in the 13th century when the first factory looms were constructed, or maybe even earlier, when the first books were reproduced with moveable print. From those times machinery became increasingly the vehicle for our imaginations. We drew our dreams out of our heads and reproduced them to be cast out into the world.

Ever since there were storytellers we’ve used fiction to make sense of the waking world. Fiction takes a stream of events and gives them continuity in the form of narrative or plot. The fiction of Star Trek organized itself around our fondest dreams of progress in a time of raging conflict. In its fanciful world the issues of civil rights and foreign intervention were all located in the distant past. The crew of the Enterprise functioned seamlessly, like a hive of bees, totally self-contained in the belly of a huge machine. St. Augustine’s trinitarian scheme of memory, intellect and will was embodied in McCoy, Spock and Kirk. Their authority was unquestioned by the creator, Gene Rodenberry’s decree that there be no significant dissension amongst the crew. Like the branches of government the principal actors balanced one another and everyone knew their place and function (displayed by color coded uniforms) and problem solving capabilities. 

It now appears strange that a generation swept up in so much resistance to authority would accept and even embrace such a militaristic model of the perfect society. Perhaps it was our longing for order in a time of disorder. Still, it was a prophetic foreshadowing of the world in which we’ve come to live, where almost every activity is mediated through technology and the dictates of the machine reshapes every aspect of our lives. One almost has to wonder if it was the machine itself that was dreaming.

While Star Trek embodied our living room love affair with technology, another parallel genre emerged at the same moment in the dark chthonic realm of the midnight drive-in. It concretized our deepest dread of a dystopian future, and like Star Trek it spawned a genre has continued to thrive over the decades.  

George Romero’s movie about a zombie apocalypse, Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 and spawned numberless spinoffs and reincarnations that proliferate with ever greater frequency as we continue to plunge into the technological future.

Where Rodenberry’s universe envisioned a life of perfect harmony encapsulated within highly regimented machine culture, Romero’s nightmare is one in which the machinery of social order is rendered useless, and humans themselves loose all sense of aspiration and affection, becoming machinelike incarnations of pure appetite. Successive portrayals of the Zombie Fear have incorporated environmental collapse, worldwide epidemic, the fall of the social order. 

I believe that beneath all of these is a deeper fear, that of being absorbed by the collective itself. In the latest contribution to the genre based on the bestselling novel by Max Brooks, World War Z, initial ‘zombie fear’ of humans being transformed into mindless automatons of appetite has been upgraded to a merging of the automatons into a singular collective nightmare.  

To traditional cultures, bound by history, ritual, human affection and common belief the implacable advance of technological civilization appears like a plague, threatening to destroy all that gives life purpose. From a different perspective the technocratic mind fears most of all a collapse of rational order and an abandonment of the social compact to the demands of selfish individuals. The zombie fear manages to incorporate both extremes in a common terror of being swept up into nihilistic oblivion.   

Here is the real World War Z, where a hopeful vision of a universe run by benevolent uniformed geeks or one determined by the rhythmic rituals and cycles based in tradition and relationship to the natural world are both obliterated by the needs of the machinery we’ve created. 

The majority of humanity now lives in cities where life is no longer governed by the sun and the moon and the passage of the seasons. The dissonance between lives we live in manmade environments governed by the clock and the demands of our bodies as parts of nature continue to generate dreams and nightmares. Thus our summers are increasingly filled with apocalyptic scenarios that depict a world beset by zombies, robots, aliens and supernatural beings. In our collective fantasies the earth erupts or is bombarded by objects from space. Epidemics rage across the globe. Our imaginations are alight with fascination with our own impending doom, but within our nightmares are the seeds of resistance.  

The zombies of World War Z are modeled on the behavior of ants, a suitable representation for the fear on both sides of the political divide that we are being overrun by  something less than human, like a virus, driven by a mindless will. We certainly can’t change the world or redraw the bargains we’ve made when lost in a world of dreams, but maybe in our dreams can summon a possibility of change.

In the meanwhile the zombies will return again and again, the monsters will continue to rise from the deep, cosmic villainy will prevail and the world will appear to hang on the brink. Godlike heroes will manifest to save the day. Maybe one day we’ll come to conscious terms with our creations and the Star Trek vision of benevolent and compassionate societies dedicated to exploration and service will come to be. After all, our actions and designs for living are first born in the imagination and even in our most vivid nightmares we plant the seeds of possibility.   

 

Zombie Nation

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The other night I was sitting having a beer in a friend’s house trailer, making conversation about the fate of the world, occasionally casting a glance at the flat screen television mounted near the ceiling. Not being a regular television watcher, the idea of having the image factory going constantly, even with the sound off is a bit disconcerting. I couldn’t bring myself to ignore the cavalcade of images that drew my attention as we talked.

The screen was tuned to the Discovery Channel and the program being broadcast was a two hour special called “Zombie Apocalypse.” This is apparently a guide to survival at the end of civilization. The documentary footage features grade B actors playing survivalists, ER physicians, college professors and various “experts” in the defense against attacking zombies. In past decades this would’ve been considered a satirical “mockumentary” approach to an obviously fictional scenario, but in the hallucinogenic culture of today I’m convinced that a large part of the population can no longer distinguish fantasy from truth.

In our America the true is no longer woven out of facts. The truth is merely a matter of belief. One can believe in virtually anything and make it real, turn it into a subculture, a reality show, or a political movement.

A couple of weeks ago in a great circling of the wagons that took place in Houston, Texas, somewhere around 70,000 people gathered for the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. The complexion and makeup of those who gathered most likely resembled those seen at a Republican National Convention, including a large contingent of conspiracy theorists, militia enthusiasts and (I’m sure) zombie fighters . The motto of this year’s convention was “Stand and Fight.”

An obvious question is, “Fight who?”

The answer no doubt includes criminals, liberals, the government, immigrants, zombies and all that the media so successfully markets as objects to fear. A recent poll found that 44% of Americans think that we are headed for an “armed rebellion.” Mostly folks wrapped in a belief that “freedom” is somehow synonymous with the right to arm themselves against all others.

I can actually understand their motivations and perhaps even sympathize with their fears, knowing that underneath all the various projections and fantasies of “the enemy” is the growing certainty of an entire culture being overcome and vanishing, as surely as have all the extinct tribes that have gone before. The pathetic irony is that nothing threatening this culture’s survival can be defended against with armaments, no matter how lethal or quickly loaded.

The foundations of what we once called “freedom” are vanishing as quickly as pond ice on a warm spring day. What remains of the American Dream of individual autonomy is confined to images cooked up in the fantasy world of theme parks and television. Nearly every community and every city, large and small, has turned itself into an artificial construct, where identity is constructed out of slogans and corporate logos. We are what we watch. New York and Paris and Shanghai are rapidly becoming collections of interchangeable parts as each city replicates a well oiled machine interface that balances a shrinking quotient of local novelty with the familiarity of recognizable brands. What we look for as we travel is the nearest Wi-Fi connection at Starbucks or MacDonalds.

I remember a time when I was very young and it appeared that civilization had a direction and my country had a sense of common purpose. I now realize that this perceived reality was a manufactured illusion, but now even that level of commonly accepted artifice is gone away. It went to Las Vegas, where all traces of human purpose are absorbed by our continual response to the demands of automated mechanisms of reward.

A recent statistic indicates that suicides among middle aged males has risen by 48% since 2010. Most of the gun deaths in this country are the result of suicide. Could it be that the relationship of the gun owner to his or her gun resembles that of the bulemic to food? In both cases the object of obsession is perceived as a shield from despair. In either case beneath the shield is a hidden death wish and it brings one ever closer to the very thing feared. Is it any surprise that the zombies we fight in our fantasy scenarios are the reanimated corpses of the very people with whom we are familiar?

Thus we have this sad gathering of the paranoid deep in Texas defending what no longer exists in any meaningful way; the “American Dream” of “the home of the brave and the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all.” What in our era do any of these words mean? What freedoms do we have beyond the freedom to shop? We can choose the 30 round magazine over the 15 round magazine or the 42 inch television over the 36 inch. We can navigate to our favorite web site to stoke our preconceptions or paranoid daydreams. We can decide who to cheer for or who to blame. We can switch channels, but we’ve given up almost every freedom but the freedom to be entertained.

“Daily skirmishes were now being fought, no longer for territory or commodities but for electro-magnetic information, in an international race to measure and map most accurately the field-coefficients at each point of that mysterious mathematical lattice-work which was by then known to surround the Earth. As the Era of Sail had depended upon the mapping of seas and sea coasts of the globe and winds of the wind-rose, so upon the measurement of newer variables would depend the history that was to pass up here, among reefs of magnetic anomaly, channels of least impedance, storms of rays yet unnamed lashing out of the sun.”

– Against The Day by Thomas Pynchon
I don’t want to leave us with a feeling of despair. Despair doesn’t do anyone any good. Although nostalgia for the “loss” of individual freedoms can perhaps justify our desperate response, we may also consider that aspects of our loss may be part of a necessary evolutionary advance.

In 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. At the beginning of the last century that number had grown to 14% and by 1950 it was 30%. It is now projected that by 2050 more than 70% of the global population will live in urban areas. The population of the world’s cities is growing at the rate of a million and a half people every week. Can anyone realistically project that the values by which we navigated the past will not have to change substantially as we enter the future? (Sources: United Nations and Geoffrey West)
I once studied the ideas and architecture of Paolo Soleri, who proposed that humanity must structurally adapt in order to survive, just as life has always adapted to changing conditions and environmental pressures. As our population increases our lives have entered a new stage of complexity in which we must evolve a more flexible organism, one that is more compact and efficient and requires less energy to maintain. As the age of dinosaurs gave way to the age of mammals, so our sprawling urban landscapes must find ways to consolidate services and resources so that more people can inhabit less space while generating less waste. Soleri (who died on April 9th of this year) proposed a radical redesign of the urban environment that envisioned densely populated cities as single structures, called Arcologies, which functioned as integrated and tightly managed outgrowths of the natural landscape.

His view is controversial, because in order to conceive of such a project one has to envision a humanity as radically altered from what it is now as are mammals a radical departure from the life of giant lizards. How do we get from a world filled with religious warfare and ethnic hatred to one where diverse populations can live in ever closer quarters without civilization self-destructing?

That appears to be what we are seeing right now, as institutions appear to collapse under their own weight and complexity. Having left a century dominated by massive world wars we appear to have entered one where regional warfare is almost constant, waged within cultures even more than between them. Our politics are shaped by the struggles of rural versus urban, tradition versus technology, global versus national and a shrinking population of the privileged versus a growing culture of poverty.

Meanwhile the movies and television and the Internet fill with imagined apocalyptic scenarios of government conspiracies, environmental extinction, alien invasions, wars against machines and zombie attacks. I’ve come to realize that these are the nightmares of a culture that in fact faces very real extinction. And so it must, as a prelude to what Arthur C. Clarke would have called “Childhood’s End.” The new human being is being born at the same time that the old perishes. Rather than mourning what is passing I choose to search for indications of what’s to come.

(to be continued…)

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You Can’t Stop The Signal

Roger and Me

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I never knew Roger Ebert although I was at a party with him once, in 1983 at the Telluride Film Festival. He seemed to be a nice, unpretentious guy ready to have a good time with others, bathing in the world he loved the best, the movies. At the time I was busy scurrying around trying to get situated, setting up my living situation for the event. That was the festival where I met the famous Russian director, Andrey Tarkovsky, who was a featured guest that year, and his wife on my way up the mountain. The two of them were picking wildflowers and they gave me a very pleasant greeting as I passed them on the trail. I’d been waiting in a film line to go into the dark when I was irresistibly pulled away by the view of those towering peaks over Telluride under the influence of a beautiful fall day. 

Another influence that day, a small cache of psychedelic mushrooms stored in my jacket pocket, were ingested as I climbed. Unfortunately, as the day progressed my disconnect from the world of time and space led me to misread the trail map. I ended up in a cul-de-sac as day turned into night and a stormy sky rolled in to drop the temperature about twenty degrees and cover the moon, making darkness almost absolute as I crawled my way along cliff sides trying to find a way down. In the end I fell off of a ledge into a blind gully, breaking my wrist and a few teeth, and had to climb out the next morning after a shivering night and stumble my way to the trail below. I was rescued by a local emergency crew and taken to the county hospital in nearby Montrose, spending the duration of the festival there. I only made it to the final, then traditional, polka dance that closed the festivities. I danced with my head bandaged and my arm in a sling and gained short lived notoriety as the “guy who fell of the cliff at Telluride.” 

The ‘accident’ led to a leave of absence which gave me an opportunity to work full time on the staff of one of the early Denver International Film Festivals. In the years that followed this stoked my passion for the movies and I got to meet people like Wim Wenders, Agnes Varda, Alan Rudolf, Robert Altman and many of the people behind the process that puts those images up on the screen. I began writing about the movies in outraged response to the largely negative critical reception to the movie “Blade Runner”, which I thought at the time was an absolute masterpiece. Like many people in the film audience I watched the early seasons of Siskel and Ebert on public television. I cheered and booed their thumbs up and thumbs down reviews and came to dislike the simplistic mode of praise or put down so many film critics began to emulate.

What came through with Roger Ebert was something more than this. Here was a writer with an obvious love of the medium and a sincere appreciation of all those who contributed to it. When you listened to him you learned something, whether you agreed with him or not. Unlike most critics whose job it is to watch hundreds of movies good and bad, he didn’t get trapped in predictable patterns of likes and dislikes, remaining open to new approaches that expanded the possibilities of storytelling. When you read his reviews you knew that he approached every film fairly, open to whatever the film maker might attempt, without his personal agenda getting in the way.

Hearing Voices (Revisited)

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In the fall of 2001, under a harvest moon on the last weekend of September, three weeks after the bombing of the World Trade Center, a group of musicians and artists of various sorts gathered in Rangely, Colorado for an extraordinary event. I drove up from Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the invitation of my friend Michael Stanwood to be initiated into what was then called “The Order of the Tank” The Tank was a large water tank built on a hillside just above the town, where a railroad had been planned but never completed. Never used for what was intended It had been abandoned for years, a destination for teenagers and their dates or a target for graffiti, until one of the teenagers introduced a visiting musician from Denver to the unique soundscape contained within. 

 The nation was still in a state of shock and it was the dawn of a new state of paranoia. On my approach to the site I stopped to take a photo and was interrogated by the local sheriff because of some public buildings that happened to be in the foreground of what I was shooting. On the way home I was stopped once more near the border of New Mexico for a reason so obscure I can’t even remember what it was, other than it had to do with “suspicious” driving conduct of some sort. 

 After talking my way past the sheriff and reaching the site I entered an entirely different dimension, where the burdens of the world, the fear and paranoia and the drumbeats for war had no reality or relevance. What follows in an account of that weekend. This was the first recording session in a project that became teh album Portal, produced by Michael Stanwood. Here is a slightly revised version of a piece that appeared originally in Volume 16 of Fish Drum Magazine.

 Hearing Voices (Revisited)

 I.

The approach to this small corner of western Colorado from the south, once you’ve accomplished the steep escarpment called Book Cliffs, is through Canyon Pintado, a long winding flat bottomed valley full of cows, ranchers and Indian petroglyphs. I needed to reach town by dark and didn’t really have time to stop for anything between dodging wandering herds of cattle and following the weaving dust of pickup trucks. But something caught me as I drove by a series of national park pull-offs; it was a sign reading “Kokopelli” and a pointer up toward some rock paintings just beneath a steep cliff face that overlooked the road. I resisted at first, driving on about a quarter mile. Something tugged me back, and I stopped and turned back. The hump backed flute player was too close to the theme of the journey for me not to stop and pay homage. 

Pulling off to the side I let another pickup truck pass and got out to climb the stone pathway up to an overhang. I could actually glimpse from the road a figure in red beneath the leaning stones, bent beneath the hump carried on his back, gazing back along the valley, the flute or didgeridoo he’s holding pointing along his gaze. I’d never seen this figure drawn so large or colored in such a deep red ochres. Below his feet was the inevitable spiral that traces a path from origin through migration and back to the center of the world. 

I’d traveled that day more than 400 miles, leaving a country of burning forests around Los Alamos, then up one of the most beautiful roads in north America, Route 84 through the Chama Valley. The evening before I stood with my ten year old son across from a gambling casino where we could watch the long dragon tail of the Cerro Grande fire as it wound it’s way through the canyons and over the slopes above the town of White Rock. The next morning I left behind the vanilla smell of burning yellow pine and the dangerous ghosts that emerged to haunt the birthplace of the atom bomb. I came up through Ghost Ranch country, past the red cliffs and standing rocks and natural amphitheaters by Canjilon Creek, turning west at Chama. Turning west, I entered Indian country, winding through the woods and canyons guarded by the Jicarilla Apache, passing the town of Dulce and then into the vast northern reaches of Navajo land. Across the Navajo Dam, it’s reservoir stretching off between the mesas, I crossed the border of Colorado, continuing through Durango and Creede following the white waters pouring through gorges. Leaving old mining towns transformed into tourist destinations I climbed out of the Navajo desert and onto the Colorado plateau and into the high northern country.

I gazed at this Kokopelli, placed here before the first Spaniard came looking for gold, looking back along the trails of natives and explorers, miners and gamblers, fluting his remembrance that once we emerged from a world destroyed by darkness. I remember thinking that we could easily lose our world to deadly darkness once again.  

At the end of that long canyon where the southern road joins the northern route that follows the White River is the town of Rangely. I had been told to look for a water tank, and the whole dry valley was full of water tanks. Here in a parched corner of Colorado I found myself in another high desert, more desolate than the desert from which I’d come. Rangely is an oasis among the gray mesas, a town filled with trees and trailer courts built all along the river and the encroaching bluffs. Once through the town another expanse of desolate hills begins and marches off to the horizons to the north and west. 

I was told that the tank was on the far edge of town and that it couldn’t be missed. After being the town’s main street, Route 64 turns to the north and just to the right one looks up and sees what appears like an enormous silver painted art deco spaceship overlooking the bottom land that lines a creek and a winding dirt road that slithers its way back between the hills. A rakish Rio Grande Railroad logo is painted in black letters up near the top and around the bottom up to a tall man’s height is a multi-colored ring of graffiti 

At the base of the bluff just across the dirt road sits a couple of dwellings built around a converted house trailer. I pulled up and parked, walking up to the porch door of the main house where my knocking stirred the interest of a couple of enthusiastic dogs, more interested in wrestling with each other than with bothering a stranger. An energetic woman in her 60’s appeared at the screen door, grabbed the dogs firmly by their collars and welcomed me loudly over their frantic yipping, “You must be Ralph from Santa Fe…your friends are already here. Come on in and have some food…you wanna beer?” 

The enormous front room was filled with knickknacks, a bar, a full size store dummy dressed like a rather effeminate looking cowboy, and the biggest television screen I’d ever seen. A game show is on and the image is so impressively huge that I’m temporarily transfixed in the glare of the faces, voices larger than life, diving for dollars across the virtual wall of phosphors. Rescue came with the sound of familiar voices and the smells of a feast issuing from the kitchen.   

Over the next hour or so I listened to country gossip: Chevron, the town’s biggest employer was set to move on and a good chunk of the male population would be out of work, the vacation business was growing, the black folk up at the Community College had started to wander into town. I heard an extended commentary on the vices and virtues of the nearest big towns of Craig and Vernal, where there was a new Walmart and a shopping center. We urban types got plenty of good-natured ribbing from the hostess and her husband, but it all came as a piece with their amazing generosity. 

After a while it was time for the four of us who’d arrived from the cities to climb up the hill to the tank and embark on the ceremony to which we’d been invited. 

Denver musicians had been coming up here for 14 years, ever since, on a Chataqua concert tour, one of them was turned on to the sounds of the Tank by a local teenager. Visits became increasingly regular over the years, attracting a growing circle of inspired sound explorers. In the early nineties recordings made inside the Tank became an album called Leaving Eden. It featured a host of instruments and voices, including hand drums, whirl tubes, autoharps, a viola, Synclavier and a child’s chorus.  

For a short time in the mid eighties the graffiti on the Tank took a turn toward rage and racism felt by teenagers who were being displaced, perhaps fueled by the climate of Reagan’s America. Eventually a heavy-duty lock was affixed to the outside hatch and most of the verbal ugliness got painted over. The Mormon businessman who’d assembled the Tank as part of an anticipated business venture turned ownership over to a musician who was willing to take on the property taxes. In this way a vessel that was moved here in the fifties from another state to hold water became instead a wonderfully unique temple to sound.  

As dusk approached Michael removed the padlock, and one by one we crawled in through the round bolted hatch about two and a half feet across, where a large pipe would have entered to conduct the flow of water in and out of the container. Now a long electrical cord climbed the hill from the house below and climbed into the opening. Grasping the bolted edge of the hatch we slid in feet first to find ourselves at first in total darkness. As our eyes gradually adjusted we first noticed a dim blue-green glow emanating from what appeared to be a mixing board set in a square metal case occupying the center of the floor. The space inside the Tank is about 45 feet across and 75 feet high. A faint circle of daylight leaks in around the circumference of the conical roof high above. A ladder goes up one side to a hatchway opening to the outside. A slim pipe near the ground bridges the middle of the floor from wall to wall, providing a place for sitting down. Several fat candles burned at either end and in the center. The walls of the Tank are black except for about 10 feet of white around the bottom and up along the sides of the ladder where there was once graffiti.

Immediately upon entering one realizes that this place is in love with sound. The smallest scuffle of footsteps or the sound of a dropped whisper are taken up and whirled around inside the container to be transformed into awesome and numinous voices. A single note launched by voice or instrument is sustained for up to 35 seconds. The Tank is a place of perfectly circular echoes, every sound transformed into pure ambient presence, unveiling its inner dynamics like the unfolding of a flower. This is a soundspace that can’t really be duplicated by electronic means. Like the world’s great cathedrals it attracts those who hunger to be in the middle of the sound, exploring it like the landscape of another planet. Entering the space one finds oneself immediately in a state of trance. 

For an interval our company drifted around the circle, making sounds, stopping to listen, adding overtones, shaping new notes, replying to our own voices vibrating in the air. A couple of wide PVC tubes were propped against the pipes with bundles of cloth stuffing one end and an extra large kitchen sponge resting near the other. I learned that these make an instrument of deep ethereal rhythm dubbed the “whirl tube”. When one claps the sponge against the open end of the tube a deep ethereal harmonic booming is created.  A row of didgeridoo are propped next to the entry hatch. Almost the entire floor is covered with blankets and the blankets are covered with musical instruments and noisemakers of every kind. Turning back toward the entrance, one glimpses the outside world through the circle of bolts that line the open hatchway. Another world out there that has been utterly left behind. 

 

 

II.

 

At the beginning of the evening a neighbor from down below brought her teenage daughter and we invited her to crawl inside and have a look. She was very young and quite shy among these strange older men, but she was fascinated and curious. The array of instrumentation spread over the blanketed floor was like nothing she’s ever seen. Jeremiah showed her how to get a sound from blowing into a conch shell and this inspired her to ask that her mother fetch from the van outside the French horn she played in her high school band. Tentatively she lifted it to her lips and blew a couple of clear brass notes that filled the space like the sound of trumpets in an angelic choir. We were all a bit overwhelmed at power and beauty of the sound. The girl, overcome by shyness and weirdness, retreated outside to her mother and they left. The memory of that excellent sound stays behind and is in some way resurrected in the sound of Michael blowing into conch and pipes, calling the proceeding into formal commencing. As the full moon rose above the tank no one doubted that spirits would be pulled out of the air and come down into this place to play and echo and improvise through the persons of all of us. 

As the evening proceeded each of us was merged with a collective voice, made up of every sound seamlessly woven into one in the magnificent chamber of air. As the sound was woven and blended and as it rose and fell I found myself joined in the chorus with a loud clear voice, a vocalization brought out of me as an improvised language made of pure sound, responding to every nuance in the ever evolving breath of the evening. I felt my whole body moving with the changing character of the sound, becoming part of a whirling dance gracefully moving  and swirling around the circumference; Jeremiah and Mark and I circling Michael with shakers and strings, pipes and drums.  

Occasionally Jeremiah would crouch over the digital console, face dimly lit by the green LEDs, concentrating on capturing whatever sonic messages he found circling in the air. Both images and abstractions became consigned to the nether darkness. We were like denizens of the ancient Lescaux caverns, finding refuge and ceremony to enter a world beyond dream. There were no words or images inside, for the sound in the Tank is more primordial than language itself. All sound blends and swirls and transforms like the waves and ripples washing over sand patterns at the bottom of a tide pool. Underneath the far off canopy of moonlight the candle flames flickered. Shadows were dimly discerned against the black walls. The sounds of voice, rhythm and breath beckoned the spirit toward ecstasy. Four clear male voices rose in chant and song. The deep booming of the Whirl Tubes echoed in unearthly rhythm while in counterpoint Michael strummed the delicate silver strings of an autoharp. Mark played runs on a guitar while chanting in tongues and Jeremiah marched around the circle to the beat of an African djambala. The dancing and singing and playing wove and pulsed in and out of the hours with an occasional silence as a cycle discovered its natural conclusion. Then another song began, and a new ceremony with another theme, another rhythm and a new harmonic. 

Once, as we sang and danced and played we heard the sound of a great booming descending upon us like the ghost of a passing train, or an earthquake. We are struck silent and then realize its the sound of a great evening desert wind, striking the sides of the Tank and rising against them like the herald of another angel of the air. The immense sound played on the sides of this tall metal ark as if in response to the exuberant voices rising from within.

After several hours we were exhausted, and the sounds of wind and voices declined with the descent of the moon. We crawled outside beneath an incredible star canopy and stood together wrapped in a blanket of absolute silence. Then the musicians scattered to their bunks and trailers and Jeremiah kept vigil in the tank until morning.  

*    *    *    *

 

III.

The next day I stood over the gray hills that sweep northward under the hot dusty breezes of the desert. The rising and plunging of oilrigs dotted the landscape like huge insects drawing sustenance out of the rocky soil. Farther north are dinosaur bones near the source of the Green River that soon merges with the Colorado in an impossible landscape just south of the Four Corners. There are the Canyonlands known by migrants, Navajos and Mormons. Golden angels trumpet from the tops of white churches and ancient carvings appear in the rocks. Still farther south is Monument Valley and a landscape that turns brick red and the twisted shapes of enormous gods that parade over the desert. At the end of a long spiral around this Indian Country are the Hopi villages where the dramas and contradictions of human life on earth are played out in the timeless costumes of a yearly round. In square stone structures built into the earth the ceremonies unfold, passed on through generations, going back to the emergence of the People out of the destruction of the fourth world 

As the morning grew late we began packing up the instruments and moving them outside. In one last sing before we emptied the place Michael vibrated a long droning breath through the didgeridoo. Again the sound builds and climbs and is sustained. I’m inspired to climb the 75-foot steel ladder hugging the side of the miraculous cylinder, to where the air grows hot in the presence of a sun climbing into another day. Hugging the rungs with one arm I turned around to gaze straight down on our magic circle. Michael set down his instrument and his strong clear voice poured over the rhythm of someone’s drum. On the other side of the circle Jeremiah once again attended the green glowing meters of the mixing board. Michael’s voice chanted through the intense vibrating tones of air while Mark was captured and taken by the rhythm of the tribal drum and I found myself calling out into the air suspended from above. The powers we summoned had been waiting through the night for our spirits to totally surrender and now, miraculously, they’ve caught us by surprise in the dark of the day.  

Finally our voices allowed themselves to fade into silence and in the middle of the silence Michael softly wept, overcome by the feeling his own clear singing called up in him. Then, each of us in turn laid our hands upon him, letting him know that we had all ridden the sound, and although we will never know, we all somehow understand.  

IV.

“There is sanity and madness, but the key to creativity and life lies precisely on the boundary between.” – R.D. Laing 

…and Orpheus falls…and the children dance…and no one can doubt that there are angels in the symmetry of these sounds…the grail that we seek is direct, unmediated experience.  

In the beginning we hear voices. After a time the voices shape themselves into words. The words then shape themselves into stories and the stories become our reality. These narratives help us form the web of wonders we call human society. By the tone and the colors of the words we discover an identity amidst the undifferentiated weave of what we see and hear and allow ourselves to perceive. 

We learn to make symbols for these sounds. We learn to scratch letters in the sand and find ourselves cast out of the garden and into our own heads. Comprehension becomes a matter of interpretation and we are well on our way to the burning times; a long adolescence that stretches from the 13th through the 19th centuries. From the invention of the printing press to the total segmentation of mind and god, logic and morals, science and religion, through seven centuries of war and struggle, suppression, revolution and atrocity, the adolescent makes war upon the world in order to differentiate from it. Culture tears itself from culture while philosophy battles with desire 

Then comes the photograph and humanity is transfixed in its own shadow like a beast on the highway frozen in the headlights. Blink…Blink…Click …the Civil War…Blink…Click…World War One…Blink…Click…the Second…Click…Flash…the photographic age transfigured into the nuclear age…the colonial age replaced by the digital age…the age of pirates is swept aside by the age of programmers… 

We are lost in images…hopelessly confused by them. We live in urban containers where all reference to anything other than ourselves has been excised. We can no longer tell what is spirit and what is mirrored shadow. We no longer particularly care. Unlike previous empires that fell to conquest, our own culture dissolves into the sea of its own chaotic artifice.  

There is a moment in the Caribbean religion of Santeria when the presence of the god comes down to the worshipper to ‘ride’ them like a horse, displacing personality and taking over form, moving voice and body like a divine puppeteer. Santeria is a religion descended from Africa, made of sound and rhythms and dancing. When we dig down through the layers of representation and meaning that fill our lives and we contact the body of the earth there is something we discover that’s beneath our personalities and that unites us with everything. This is what I came to the Tank to discover. This is the secret within the sound.  

Relevant texts:

 

Odland, Bruce. 

        Leaving Eden. Arcadian Recordings, 1991

Stanwood, Michael. 

        Arc of a Buzz. Babyjane Records, 1999

Stanwood, Michael

         Portal, Pansy Productions, 2001