Indulge Us

Could it be? Could the rain be on hiatus? Are my knees, encircled with an inscrutable pain my doctor can only raise her eyebrow at and suggest yet another doctor whose phone rings and rings and nobody ever picks up, be ready for the ride? I fear not but let’s see.

Should I take a moment to glow and gloat in the fact that we’ve come into 55 inches of surround sound television? That’s how fortuitous things have been of late. Once I was in a long tunnel that was, like most tunnels, dark and musty and seemingly without exit and suddenly I’m manic with contingencies despite dragging my heels around the outskirts of even more options. Like- do I want to return to the syllabus and if so, what in the world do I want to chew on? How long will this question be around? It’s in my back pocket- little notes that Cathy takes out before doing the laundry. It’s scattered and congealed and melted down and poured and weighed on scales and offers this then that. It’s on the burner then it’s off. My friends in the rarified world of grad school are remiss to offer definitives as to just what exactly they’ll be doing with their public policy degrees when they’re done. They’re just hungry to have a better grasp on how to mop up what the fuck up and his crew are currently sloshing about. They want to pick up the baton that somebody fumbled years ago, if ever. I kick that one around. I kick around teaching those kids whose struggles with their paralyzing bundles of hyper self-awareness and academic “deficiencies” reflect too brightly in my eyes. I mix in a lot of pragmatism ‘cause I don’t want to spend 2 years immersed in the amorphous. Nope. I Gotta have tangibles at this point. Something that travels well and ages gracefully. How long can I get away with a sigh and a “We’ll see?” If the window is currently open, I’m not entirely sure how or if I even want to go through it.

For now, however, there’s my bike and the lake trail and the sun. For now there is the interstice. I’ve unpacked most of the rocks and sand and I feel sweetness and light returning and I need more time to explore the rooms I had to seal off. Did you know (because I had forgotten) that there are all sorts of ways to recover and share the prospects? I’m always conjuring and hoping. I tell myself the most brilliant stories. I keep the grandeur of it all to myself but I want to share. I’m the most extroverted introvert I know.

But is it me or is just the caffeine? Is it me or is it just the Bill Evans Trio? Silly. It’s all of that and then some. My bike beckons. I hope to see you on the trail. Come on knees!

Jazz By Citrinella Light

Everything else may slow down, but the octogenarian fingers on display last night at Ravinia were in fine form.

Dave Brubeck is 83 and Marian McPartland (to whom the adjective saucy can be applied liberally) is 86 but when they played they cast off the mortal coil. Ramsey Lewis was the youthful upstart of the evening at 69. After the sun had set and the wine filled my glass the third or fourth time, I happily reclined in my collapsible chair and savored the buzz. The weathermen had been overzealous in their predictions for evening thunderstorms as not a cloud was in the sky to obscure the dusting of stars introduced throughout the evening.

Your Silent Face

One of my all-time favorite songs, New Order’s sublimely evocitive Your Silent Face still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up each time I hear it. Hundreds of butterflies beat their wings against my stomach and the world seems to slow down. It’s terribly dramatic and coolly elegant, this song, and it along with so much of New Order’s catalog has had a huge and entirely positive influence on me.

Recently I have been absolutely overwhelmed by their 1991 (or is it 2001?) Radio One version of the song. It’s a couple things. First there’s the big new sub-bass that comes in at 1:03 and ads a gloriously funky propulsion to the track. More importantly is what happens at 4:04, when Morris’s drums suddenly crash the song and OH MY GOD! Sumner and Hook weave their garlands and for two minutes I am completely lost in June, July and August’s past and present and to come. I feel the blood coursing through my veins and the wind through my hair and the drama of it all makes me ache and swoon and it’s almost bursting with too muchness.

I want to cry.

More Sugar With Your Ending?

Have you seen Nancy Meyers’s Somethings Gotta Give? It’s a decent enough little romantic film, certainly an improvement over her last one, What Women Want, where Mel Gibson got to prance around in stockings and listen to women’s thoughts before he moved on to his good works and made his snuf film for the faithful.

What was nice about the film was seeing Diane Keaton acting her ass off. She’s superbly multifarious. She’s loopy, sexy, wary, bitter, hopeful, sad, haunted- there’s even a scene where she encompasses all of this in a matter of seconds and it practically knocks the wind out of you. And she looks fantastic. She and Nicholson spar with loose aplomb and they’re amusing as hell to watch together. And not surprisingly, they take even the daftest of Meyers dialogue, polish it, and offer something that sparkles. It’s the gift of supremely talented actors- the intuitive alchemy of turning shit into gold.

But what I would have given had the movie ended with Nicholson’s Harry on the Pont-Neuf just after his run in with Keaton and her younger man (a muted Keanu Reeves) saying, “Look who gets to be the girl.” Oh, if the only the screen had faded out and that tidal wave of high fructose hadn’t arrived so perfectly on cue. Oh, well.

Lost In Sudan

This is my new wife for President Bush. May God grant him many fertile women with firm bodies and an election victory without problems in Florida.

-As quoted in a recent Economist by a young warrior (only his first name, Thuapon, is given) in southern Sudan, where George Bush is seen, according to The Economist, as the primary architect of peace between the battling factions of the north and the south . I’m humbled by how little I know about Sudan, Africa’s largest country. Even more distressing is what little I do now know about the country has come by way of the current humanitarian crisis (see Samantha Powers’ excellent New York Times op-ed piece here) currently ravaging the country, where over a million black Africans have been displaced or trapped (without basic resources) and over 30,000 slaughtered in the region of Dafar. It’s pretty complex and, as the Economist article points out, little understood given the countries inaccessibility and intense poverty. And the current slaughter in Sudan is one of “two separate but related civil wars” pitting Arabs against Christians (hence America’s interest) and pagans in one war and Muslim against Muslim in the other.

But the real question is this: What does it mean now that I am informed with this information? The simple answer, though one that leaves me feeling somewhat helpless, is to write my representatives and echo some of the things Powers offers in her piece. Seems like as good as place as any to start.

May God grant George Bush an election landslide defeat the likes of which this country has never seen. May CNN gain access to that list of 47,000 felons who are to be purged from voter roles in Florida, too.

Lyrics Like Crickets and Elis Regina

So Dennis and I brainstormed over a bottle of some wine Cathy picked up from Sams while out on her “12 Bottles Under $10 Tour.” Equally revelatory,Dennis decided that slow motion could potentially be used to depict Taylor smiling. I had asked him something like, “If you were going to make a video essay about your life and wanted it to be like 45 minutes or so and thought that using slow motion a couple times during that time had the potential to really be, well, you know, moving…what scene would you choose?” Taylor smiling, he had responded.

The wine, we both decided, was excellent.

I thank Dennis’s patient ears for listening to so much tonight. Fresh ears for my corn and fountains of crazy-ass ideas are welcome. We occasionally broke out into song this evening.

My album is tentatively titled Cool It On the Boom Booms. There must be singing in abundance and we won't exactly be rejoicing except on the rarest of occasions. Or maybe not. A lyric tonight involved the woes of George Tenet, but we both walked away feeling feeling like it was probably too creepy. There is no rejoicing in the woes of George Tenet.

Lyrics have yet to make sense. I’d rather it the other way, though. I’d like to come into some finely tuned lyrics that evoke thunderstorms and the cool wet feel of a Grape Shasta just pulled from a Styrofoam cooler after a Cub Scout softball game. I want lyrics that conjure up waking up to the smell of freshly cut grass from some weekday July afternoon from long ago when the day awaiting me involved, for the most part, the building of violent spaceships out of oversized Tinker Toys, numerous and tremendously satisfying games of Uno and exploratory sleepovers where me and a buddy challenged the earth’s early morning hours hopped up on candy bar nougat and 2 liters of Cola that we attempted to drink in their entireties.

Cathy is in Boston. We give thanks to Kevin for his tremendous efforts over the years in the often times late night nether zones of family airport retrieval.

Tomorrow I clean. There are boxes to be broken down and horribly neglected miscellaneous crap to be sorted, filed and pushed to the side. For one, I'll be cleaning out the muffin tins Cathy used to bake her astounding feats of zucchiniliciousness.

That being said, we bid you goodnight.

Bike

Me and my trusty old bike are so incredibly happy of late to be spending so many of our mornings, afternoons and evenings gliding along the lakefront path. We’re happy to share it with mom’s (or are they Gold Coast nannies?) and their strollers, walkers, joggers (some of their expressions are priceless!), rollerbladers, police cars, tourists (in those damn bike “cars” they rent from somewhere at Navy Pier, where four people can peddle at once and always get me to imagining that they must be fun for roughly 10 minutes or so before over 75% of the renters think, “Gee, this isn’t as fun as I imagined it would be”), vendors, lollygaggers, sunbathers, etc. Cathy’s heard it’s the most used bike path in the US. I doubt Burnhamwas thinking, “Bike paths, yes, we must have bike paths!” but sir, I bless your crazy ass audacity and grand success!

As I made my exit from the path this afternoon (there’s a pedestrian exit just past Foster ) a man was out walking his buddy, a fat ‘ol wiener dog that quivered out of some path lining underbrush- and I’ll tell you what, it was a Gary Larson-like scene of joyous proportions! We even share the lake front path with fat ‘ol wiener dogs.

It’s my knees that suck. Grrrr, knees. Where exactly did these bad knees come from? I thought this only happened to football players, you know? What did my last doctor call it? Sunburn of the knee? Of course there was a more formal name for it and whatever that was- it’s hampering my style! How am I ever going to be able to cut loose when that testosterone really hits and pace myself with all those Lance Armstrong bike short ‘n shirt wearin’ wannabees?

And look, I’ve positively got to keep riding my bike. It’s so great. This morning a nerdy woman (and I mean that in the most endearing and non-condescending of ways) passed by me with a smile and a hearty “Good morning!” Oh, if you could have seen how her legs were pumping! Like an extra in one of those old Keystone Cop shorts, moving at 16 frames per second. “Good morning!,” I called back. Thank you for being so kind and weird!

It’s the heady fusion of movement, sweat and those magical endorphins that cause my senses to burn like flares. It’s the Annie Dillard effect- where you’re overwhelmed by the poetic grandeur of minutia. The waddle of that wiener dog.

In other news, why didn’t anybody tell me just how good Modest Mouse could be? Kinda reminds me at times of XTC, the Pixies, Mercury Rev and Wilco run through the blender and nicely cracked in all the right places. Not bad at all.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Or really angry ones! The past couple weeks of weather here in Chicago have been ferocious reminders of just how atmospherically volatile this time of year can be in the Midwest. Numerous tornado touchdowns, wind gusts of over 50 mph, hail (on Friday, chiclet-sized tidbits of hail battered my work window). The kind of volatile where one day it’s 55 with a cold north-eastern wind blowing across Lake Michigan and the next day it’s 85 and humid. I forgot about that humidity and its murkiness. And thunderstorms. We experienced one, maybe two a year in the Bay area and the next day everybody was talking about it, excitedly asking, "Hear that thunder last night?" These past two weeks have been all about thunder and lightning, the ensuing deluge that we’ve all agreed to call “buckets of rain,” the fallen tree limbs and twigs- the violent quickness of it all. We’ve enjoyed all of this tempestuousness and more over these past couple of weeks.

Weather aside, I plan on launching my Summer video project sometime today. Still not entirely sure what the end result is going to be, but I’m leaning toward making some kind of video essay. I’m hoping to explore a few things- community, home, nostalgia and, most importantly, Summer. All in roughly 30 to 45 minutes. It's all terribly hazy, but I'm excited nevertheless. Mostly I’m just looking for a way to have fun with a video camera and iMovie. Back in high school and early college we created a fairly hefty collection of goofy video skits. Our running joke was that someday we’d edit these together into something cleaner, less sprawling and more thematic then the unwieldy collage we then had. But we never did seeing as for a long time the only editing tools we had to work with would have been a couple VHS players. But now over a decade has passed and suddenly there’s this easy to use technology on our computer and it can make all these half-assed ideas I’ve harbored into something tangible. I like the idea of incorporating other media into this project too- clips of those goofy high school skits, for example, and old family super 8 footage, scanned photographs, interviews with family and friends. I don’t know, it’s pretty wide open right now and I’m a little giddy with the possibility. The trick with this sort of thing is to make sure and keep the reigns pulled tight so as to only do what I can realistically hope to accomplish. A big step in the right direction is to begin using the tripod we own to steady most of the shots.

Massachusetts Wedding Bells On My Birthday

It’s a great day. Not because it’s my birthday, though that’s undoubtedly cause for greatness (33 years old and all!) but because of what is taking place in Massachusetts today. There's no overstatement in saying that it's simply barbaric that it took this country until now (and it's still only a single state) to welcome the gay community into what is fundamentally an egalitarian institution. I was literally moved to tears this afternoon as I listened to couples exchanging their vows on NPR. It's about time.

When Cathy and I married a few years back, we made it abundantly clear just how much we were upset by the fact that we were entering into a club, one endowed with over 1200 special rights, that was egregiously exclusive, barring as it did an entire population of stable, loving people access to the instituion because of cruel and misguided prejudices.

There is obviously a long way to go and anti-gay marriage groups are highly organized, well funded and incredibly threatened by these events. They're working each day to smear the gay community as harbingers of the destruction of the family (hell, they can't bring children into the world, and surely even those children they are raising are worse off then children raised by all those hetero couples and their 50% divorce rates, right?)and man on dog couplings. They're mobilizing to pass amendments banning gay marriage in those states that haven't already passed such legislation and George Bush is tossing them red meat by calling for ammending the Constituion to ban it across the nation. Take that, fags! ("Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.")But according to a New York Times article in yesterday's paper, attempts to organize congregations against the threat of gay marriage has been met, for the most part, with indifference. Folks, it seems, are more concerned about finding or keeping their jobs, raising their kids, the increasingly grim situation in Iraq and simply putting food on the table instead of imagining the Sodom and Gomorrah of gay marriage. I hope this inertia only continues to build up steam!

In any case, let the wedding bells ring! Welcome to the club! There's plenty of room for all.

Almost Home

I’m looking forward to having more time to write and post very soon. As it stands, I’ve begun a new (old) job at Northwestern, moved into a new place and been busy with all the extra-curricular consuming activities being a new homeowner obligates one to.

We’re incredibly happy with where we are. Yesterday Cathy and I walked up to Clark Street to marvel at Taste of Heaven’s new and dangerously close location. We ended up at Charlie’s Ale House, deliriously happy to be enjoying a couple Bells Amber’s next to open windows and warm, soft breezes.

It’s good to be back.

The moving truck comes tomorrow!

John Adams in the 21st Century

I can’t recommend David McCullough’s John Adams enough. Really a wonderful vindication of popular sentiment what with 1.6 millions copies of it being sold in hardback. (This according to an article I recently read in The Wall Street Journal.) This bodes well, even if such exemplary reading on such a wide scale is an aberration. It’s a rare merging of fiercely intelligent writing that combines an understanding of its subjects particular place in the giddy history of the United States along with ample illustrations of the subjects particularities (of all the founding fathers, Adams seems the most human), familiar attachments (Abigail Adams, it should be noted, is the subtitle to any biography on John Adams, and McCullough brings her vividly to life) and friendships.

McCullough is near pitch-perfect throughout, but he really soars in the last 100 or so pages, where he details Adams’s long life after his Presidency, when he lived into his 90’s, dying on the same day as one of his closest friends, Thomas Jefferson- July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the founding of the country they both played such central roles in.

Thump the Box

Unless somebody else has been flying way under my radar, the best and most interesting producer of house music over the last 5 or so years has been Matthew Herbert, whose been releasing a steady stream of some of most sensually constructed house music I’ve ever heard. He’s a master of texture, with an understanding of house music drama that rivals any of the so-called giants of house. I can’t think of anybody working today who uses samples with more creativity and success. He builds most of his rhythms out of borrowed or personally made field recordings. A bass drum might be the thumping of a large delivery box or the hood of his father’s old MG Midget, while the whirr of assorted kitchen cutlery acts in place of cymbals.

His partner Dani Siciliano has sung on every release since 1998’s Around the House. I find her voice tremendously appealing, relaxed and smoky as any torch singer. Herbert often deftly rearranges snippets of her vocals, taking everything from Siciliano inhaling to the popping and wooshing sounds of a melodic fragment she’s previously sung. Atop all that delivery box thumping and kitchen cutlery whirring there’s usually a lovely weave of Siciliano’s voice accompanying it. She also plays a mean clarinet.

Swamp the Glurp: Villalobos’s Boggy Sound

The Villalobos sound is swampy. His rhythms are wet with detritus- they glurp and build and constantly shift. There are always surprises, too. Grooves appear out of the mist and quiver with intensity- but it’s always surprisingly loose and smooth like David Byrne in that oversized suit. Rhythms are continuously being submerged into something murky. Bubbles of swamp gas constantly ooze up and pop into the mix.

It’s also crisp. The snare in Easy Lee is all snap and treble riding over a gently smudged bass drum. Beats that begin without edges suddenly come into spiky focus. At the 2:15 mark some watery percussion arrives and firmly establishes a groove. There are
always those surprises- splashes of rhythm, smudges of groove that seem to teeter between the randomized and the deliberate. Seemingly random sounds sputter, spit up and unobtrusively clang and twang. At times it sounds as though Villalobos actually sampled or carefully cut and pasted fragments of percussive elements created by using some brand of randomizing software and deliberately scattered them throughout the master mix.

There are subtle moments of dub.

His debut, Alcachofa, is by no means instantaneously gratifying. It reminds me of the first time I heard LFO’s Frequencies and was, at first, hugely disappointed that the remainder of the album wasn’t as immediately catchy as its title song, a huge club hit jacked up on the king of all bleep grooves and a devastating sub-bass. It’s what known as “a grower.” Despite those initial negative reactions you keep finding yourself drawn back to the album for another listen, another assessment. Eventually it becomes a classic.

Lo-Fi Wistfullness

One of my favorite batches of music this year is Jon Brion’s score for Michel Gondry’s lovely Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like suspended fragments of ache- and best of all is a reoccurring theme of plucked acoustic guitars swathed in lo-fi vinyl hiss and pop (capitalizing on the seemingly inherent nostalgia and authenticity of vinyl culture and outdated media) and a soulful piano fragment that wistfully surges up into an anthem for the film’s lovers. (I’m thinking in particular of one of the films last scenes, where Joel and Clem briefly walk down the beach, just prior to entering the beach house- one of the most romantic, touching and triumphant to hit the mainstream screens in some time.) Brion’s score is the powerful undercurrent to Gondry’s gracefully phantasmal montage. The whole thing packs quite a wallop.

Wait, Where Was I Again?

When GPS implants become available I’d like to be first in line. I say this after making a series of disastrous directional miscalculations the other evening when I walked to the Music Box for a showing of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrella’s of Cherbourg. Cathy and I had made plans to meet in front of the Music Box on Southport at 6:15, but due to my highly erratic path I didn’t arrive until about 6:50.

Here is what’s great about Umbrellas:

The colors
The soundtrack
Its sly moments of humor
Catherine Deneuve's lovely embodiment of the swooning histrionics of first love
Every line is sung!
Sugar and Spice, Boy Meets Girl mixed with The Algerian war, premarital sex and ensuing child out of wedlock, an ambiguous marriage to a wealthy jeweler, a dying aunt and an ending that crushes the absolutes of the aforementioned first love in the gentlest snow to ever fall on an Esso station in France.

Here Comes A Tenor

Cathy and I stood around a piano a few weeks ago and sang Down to the River and Pray, the old spiritual made famous from the Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? Soundtrack. They’re called The Singing Bullfrogs and their a nice group of mostly 40 and 50 and 60-somethings who get together a couple times a month and sing songs. For the fun of it! There are sopranos, altos and a highly unified posse of basses. They lacked only tenors, those brave and often male adventurers undeterred by the oftentimes fearfully feminized heights they’re so frequently asked to scale.

“I guess I can sing tenor,” I replied to the woman who was taking us through our parts and had asked, “Are there any tenors in the room?” I was the only one.

Nobody likes to be the single tenor in a room of strangers. Cathy, my heroic wife, bravely stepped forward and announced, “I can sing tenor!” So did her former boss. And then so did the dude playing the piano! We clustered together, a swelling of tenors, suddenly 4 strong and ready to play our role in the song’s harmony.

At the end of the night Cathy’s former boss said, “Let’s sing something we’ve already learned so those who here for the first time can hear.” It was a song that seemed vaguely, naggingly familiar, 3 or 4 overlapping parts singing, “Yes we do marvelous….marvelous….we do marvelous things.” Something along those lines. It began in a ramshackle sort of way, with folks casually sipping from their drinks or grabbing some cheese and crackers from the table as they nonchalantly sung their parts before it suddenly began to congeal and soar. For a couple minutes it all came brilliantly and irresistibly together. Everything felt briefly and giddily transformed.

“Oh,” I thought, “that was really great.”

Oh, But I Could Never Live Somewhere That Didn’t Have A Change
of Seasons

Never really gave much thought to the weather when we were living in Berkeley other then the intermittent outburst occasioned by its magnificence. Friends of our living in Los Angeles wryly described the weather down there as being “relentlessly pleasant,” a description that could just as easily be applied to Berkeley and the Bay Area in general. There was a heartening consistency to the weather there, a contenting guarantee of wind, rain, sun, fog, warmth and cold in near perfect degrees of moderation.

Just the other night Cathy and I were having dinner with some old friends, one of whom remarked that she didn’t care for such meteorological consistency, that she rather enjoyed the change of the seasons, especially now, as the long Midwestern winter slowly gave itself up to the hard fought blooms of crocus’s and daffodils. And I’ve gotta admit, I share those sentiments as well, but not unequivocally. After living in Berkeley and enjoying its winters for 3 years, I came to view the much-heralded “But I love the change of the seasons” mantra as bunk. Because while the sight of those first crocus’s popping their psychedelically purple little heads up from wooly gardens on the cusp of bursting back onto the scene is always worthy of my attention and applause, it’s also not worth wading through nearly 6 months of winter just to magnify the intensity of their beauty.

I like the romance of the “I love the change of seasons,” camp. I don’t begrudge the sentiment either- it’s a hard fought one, made up of tolerance, grit and tough love. For 6 months of every year Chicago is a near tundra. Most of the Midwest is like this. A settlement of grey, the boney brittle of trees, windy malice and the continual irony of freshly fallen snow inevitably debased into the sleaziest of gingerbread slush’s. And the cold! The tripartite comedic attack of January through March topped off with the punch-line of April. Cold hands, the sting in the cheeks, the unrelenting pierce of the wind. I’ll muster whatever it takes to tolerate it, but I don’t know that I’m ever going to appreciate it with the same kind of ardor and skill that others manage.

Tom Skilling commands and disperses daily regiments of Chicago based meteorological gossip from the back page of the Chicago Tribune’s Metro section. Over the last month he’s been reminding readers that what we’re really seeing is a great battle for supremacy. Skilling is my daily porthole into the great and enduring mythological drama of the weather. With the entire back page of the Metro section as his canvas, Skilling has, with great assurance and zest, demonstrated the tactics of those sworn enemies, the Canadian Arctic and Gulf Stream winds. It’s a fight the Arctic can’t win (for now), but the fierceness of its resistance makes a mockery out of a seemingly disproportionate percentage of our Aprils.

April in the Midwest is a risk. Sometimes it’s the perfect balm, while in others it acts as winter’s cruel addendum. It’s here in April that you’ll sometimes find winter lingering in Skilling’s statistical announcements of “15 to 20 degrees below the average for this time of year!” and “unseasonably cold!” Each morning I lean forward over a spoonful of my current favorite cereal, Barbara’s Peanut Butter Puffins, and brace myself for what might be revealed, what stratagems uncovered.

The other day, walking through the Loop around 2:00 p.m., a bank thermometer read 34 degrees Fahrenheit and I felt winter’s stubbornness for the first time in 3 years and thought, “Oh, this is an unfortunate familiar!” It was, as I heard a woman remark to her husband on the Metra platform out in Naperville earlier in the day, “more like early March weather then early April weather.” But my 29 years of Midwestern winters are now factored into 3 years of Berkeley’s, and while I find that the condidtions we’re currently experiencing in Chicago to be ultimately tolerable (and offset by the many truly wonderful things this city has to offer) I don’t know if I can fully adhere to the claim of it all being worth it due solely to the idea that somehow it offers more by way of variety via its particular changes of season then another place might. There are, for example, just as many things “happening” in Berkeley by way of seasonal change then there are in Chicago. I mean, isn’t the argument that more diversity between the seasons offers more by way of natural beauty (and that’s what we’re really getting down to, isn’t it- how our environments effect our sense of well-being?) really just one of extremes? If you find more by way of natural splendor through having weathered the extremes of highs over a hundred and lows in the negatives, more power to you. If you’re afraid that you’ll grow to take relentlessly pleasant days for granted, or not fully appreciate the majesty of Spring and Summer and Fall without the knowledge that their sweet-spots will be fleeting, then go for it! I don’t buy it anymore. I didn’t need those extremes or fleeting beauty to feel fully compelled and overjoyed when I experience Magnolias blooming in January, the teeming green glow of rolling hills in March, plucking tomatoes from the garden until December or hiking Mt. Tam in a t-shirt on a February afternoon. What’s not to appreciate about that? What’s to be taken for granted? I’d argue that there’s just as much variety and splendor in the change of seasons in Berkeley, coupled with the benefit that it and the surrounding area are far more geographically diverse. All that consistency in the weather is necessary to fully appreciate it. Cathy and I managed to take a great many hikes, year-round, through some of the most idyllic landscapes (and what constitutes an “idyllic landscape” is quite an interesting can of worms) we’d ever experienced.

There are no nagging regrets about returning here to Chicago except for having left Berkeley’s weather behind.

When Glass Meets Shoe

I’ve had a great track record with my glasses. Since I first owned a pair, going back 8 years now, I’ve never lost or broken any of them. Until today.

Of course I was surprised to find them under my shoe. Don’t ask how they got there. Is there any moment more heartbreaking then when you first register that- yes, uh-huh, no doubt about it- that soft squish and snap was indeed your glasses giving way to the pressure of your size 12 shoe.

And the shock wasn’t, “Oh, shit, I just destroyed my glasses!” Instead the shock was, “Oh, that really didn’t have to happen!” And yet.

But look. It was time for a new pair anyway. I gathered up the ruins, mended them as best I could, and wondered about how I’d frame my eyes anew.

Abigail's Serious Can of Whip-Ass

According to Joe Ellis, not many people tried to bite Thomas Jefferson’s head off. But Abigail Adams sure as hell tried, swallowing it whole before spitting it out. See, when Adams and Jefferson were running against each other for president, (this is, after Washington decided two terms was enough and any more ran the risk of appearing as monarchial) Jefferson had commissioned the scandalmonger James Callender to, in Ellis’s words, “write libelous attacks on Adams.” While they didn’t help Jefferson to win the presidency they did help to precipitate the fouling of his friendship with Abigail and John. (Interestingly enough, Callender was later to discover and first report on Jefferson’s sexual liaisons with Sally Hemmings.)

In any case, juicy snippets of Abigail’s smack upside Jefferson’s head are copiously quoted from in Ellis’s crisp and rewarding book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Definitely recommended for those looking for something more substantial then the trivializing myths that make up the bulk (at least my own) of our understanding of these folks.

When David McCullough’s biography of Adams, John Adams, first came out, much was made of the fact that Adams had long been lost to us, his own presidency squished between those of Washington and Jefferson. In fact, poor Adams knew he was doomed to suffer the “dramatic distortions” of Washington’s chopping of the cherry tree and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Ellis writes:

Adams realized that the act of transforming the American Revolution into history placed a premium on selecting events and heroes hat fit neatly into a dramatic formula, thereby distorting the more tangled and incoherent experience that participants actually making the history felt at the time.

I don’t know enough about current historical trends, but it would seem that there is a popular (both Ellis and McCullough’s books won Pulitzers) Adams rehabilitation afoot. Ellis does a remarkable job in persuading the reader of Adam’s historical vivaciousness. It accomplished what I want out of any good history- a desire to know more. I’ve only just begun McCullough’s bio, but I’ve enjoyed the first 100 pages quite a bit.

Notes From the Underground

I’ve spent more time in this basement then anybody else! And it’s not a bad basement by any means- not the dank root cellar variety smelling of something musty and vaguely ominous- no, not that at all. This particular basement is new, completely done up with a pool table, large screen television, fully stocked bar, a jukebox, our G5, a bathroom w/shower and adjoining bedroom with a queen size bed. Oh, and there’s an exercise room down here, too. I just got off the treadmill where I was dancing (you should see me shake it!) and walking at the same time. I am this basements overseer. Should a pillow stray from off the couch, I’ll pick it up and refold the afghans while I’m at it.

Down here I’m mourning the losses of Spalding Gray (he seemed too avuncular to ever even contemplate suicide) and Spain, reading Joseph J. Ellis’s eloquently succinct Founding Brothers, thinking about country music and spending way too much time on LimeWire hoping to score Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer B-Side, Don’t Break This Rhythm. There are occasional trips upstairs to eat oranges.

It’s cold down here because despite the many amenities there’s only one heating duct in the large room where I spend most of my waking hours. That is, when I’m not in the city searching through over priced properties for hints of home or browsing the local Barnes and Noble while narcissistically admiring my fancy for both graphic novels and the complete short fiction works of Nabokov.

What I want is a job. I want a copy of Iron and Wine’s forthcoming sophomore release Our Endless Numbered Days, for gays to have the right to marry, for George Bush to take a flying leap, to talk to my Dad again about old movies and pragmatism, to sing vapid lyrics with complete conviction, to eat turkey-loaf by candlelight with my wife, to go back in a time machine and see Marvin Gaye in concert, to read faster and more and retain multitudes and lastly, to remove my presence from this basement. We’ve had enough each other.

So it goes.

Belated Best Of’s: 2003

Best Films (in no particular order, with a few from 2002 that I missed at the theater)

-The 25th Hour: Spike Lee
-Mostly Martha: Sandra Nettelbeck
-The Son: Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
-The Russian Ark: Alexander Sokurov
-Divine Intervention: Elia Soleimon
-Lilya 4-Ever: Lukas Moodyson
-Bend It Like Beckam: Gurinder Chadha
-The Good Thief: Neil Jordan
-8 Women: Francois Ozon
-Femme Fatal: Brian De Palma
-Bloody Sunday: Paul Greengrass
-Raising Victor Vargas: Peter Sollett
-Master and Commander: Peter Weir
-Lost In Translation: Sofia Coppola
-The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Peter Jackson

Best Old Films (i.e., films I saw for the first time in 2003 and were released before 2002)

-Ordet: Carl Theodore Dryer (1955)
-Sweet Smell of Success: Alexader Machendrick (1957)
-The Piano Teacher: Michael Haneke (2001)
-Les Bonnes Femmes: Claude Chabrol (1960)
-Les Cousins: Claude Chabrol (1959)
-Close Up: Abbas Kiarostami (1990)
-Where Is the Friends House: Abbas Kiarostami (1987)
-Bob Le Flambeur: Jean-Pierre Melville (1955)
-Cleo From 5 to 7: Agnes Varda (1962
-Vagabond: Agnes Varda (1985)
-The Gleaners and I: Agnes Varda (2001)
-Hearts and Minds: Stephen Whittaker (1974)
-L’Aventura: Michelangelo Antonioni (1960)
-The Golden Coach: Jean Renoir (1952)
-Funny Games: Michael Haneke (1997)
-The Puppetmaster: Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1993)
-Les Enfantes Du Paradis: Marcel Carne (1945)
-Claire’s Knee: Eric Rohmer (1970)
-Meet Me In St. Louis: Vincente Minelli (1944)
-The Singing Detective: Dennis Potter/John Amiel (1986)

Best Books (any year, because books take time and the really good ones are rare)

-Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley: Peter Guralnick
-Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World: Ruy Castro
-Atonement: A Novel: Ian McEwan
-Angle of Repose: Wallace Stegner
-American Tabloid: James Elroy
-Ghost Light: Frank Rich
-Theodore Rex: Edmund Morris

Best Music to come…

The Basement Tapes Presents: Prom '89!

Back in May of 1989 (May 10th, as a matter of fact) we made a mix tape (Maxell UR90) to be played at our senior prom whenever the hire-a-band took a break. I remember that I left before we started the second side so I could hurry on home to watch an episode of the bloated mini-series War and Remembrance (a sequel to Winds of War). I am, however, pleased to see the inclusion of Big Audio Dynamite’s Just Play Music! on the second side. Of course, we only got through 7 or 8 of the songs on side I. I remember all of them going over quite well, especially Melt With You, which cleared the chairs. I remember Greg Dostal (with whom, I recall, I shared the bond of the Jan Michael Vincent/Earnest Borgnine vehicle, Airwolf ) being particularly peevish about Blue Monday ’88: “You can’t dance to this,” he yelled at me as we all jumped about in our ridiculous tuxes and dresses.

Here’s the mix:

Prom Weekend: DANCE!

Side I:

Melt With You: Modern English
Rock The Casbah: The Clash
Blue Monday ’88: New Order
Can’t Hardly Wait: The Replacements
Linus and Lucy: Vince Guaraldi
Burning Down The House: Talking Heads
Face The Face: Pete Townshend
Charlie Dance: James
Whisper To A Scream: Icicle Works
Mr. Moto: Agent Orange
Boys Don’t Cry: The Cure
Tainted Love: Soft Cell
Bike: Love And Rockets

Side II:

Let’s Dance: David Bowie
Sultans Of Swing: Dire Straits
Could You Be Loved: Bob Marley
Ain’t Too Proud To Beg: The Temptations
Ask: The Smiths
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Joy Division
Dreamworld: Midnight Oil
Shock The Monkey: Peter Gabriel
Black Light Trap: Shriekback
Just Play Music: Big Audio Dynamite

Liner Notes: Prom Weekend: DANCE!” was carefully contrived and concocted one rainy May night (5/10/89) in order to leave No Excuse For Not Dancing at Prom!

Up is Down Rebutted

From today's New York Times:

Last month, the Republican-controlled Virginia House of Delegates passed a resolution, 98 to 1, urging Congress to exempt Virginia from the law. (No Child Left Behind.) That vote came after Rod Paige, the education secretary, and other administration officials met with Virginia lawmakers, said James H. Dillard II, chairman of the House Education Committee.

"Six of us met with Paige," Mr. Dillard, a Republican, said. "He looked us in the eye and said, 'It's fully funded.' We looked him back in the eye and said, 'We don't think so.'"

"We got platitudes and stonewalls, but no corrective action," he said.

Riding the Rails

Each Amtrak sleeping car has its own attendant, kind of like flight attendants. For the first leg of our trip Cathy and I were on sleeping car 631, room 8, and Curtis was our designated attendant. The Zephyr line launches from Emeryville, about 2 miles from where we happily lived in Berkeley, so we were the first lucky folks to check into a sleeping car. As we walked towards the train car we asked the attendant standing outside the entrance if it was the right car. He smiled and said, “It sure is, and you must be Cathy and Chris!”

It was our man, Curtis, of course!

He took us to our room, a cozy, incredibly compact space and gave us the low down:

This is the call button. Pull it if you should need anything.
There’s water and juice always available down at the end of the hall. I keep the coffee going from 5 am until 11 pm. If you need any before 5 am, go ahead and make it yourself.
Let me know when you’re going to dinner and I’ll come by and turn your beds down for you.
There are 3 bathrooms in the lower level of this car. There is one upstairs and I usually ask people to try and avoid using that one because…well, the downstairs bathrooms have vents and the upstairs one, which is right next to my car, doesn’t…so you can imagine…
That’s a closet, there’s another light and here’s a place to hang your coats.

Compared to the salty old dogs who worked the dining car, Curtis was genuinely easy-going, attentive and fully apprized of the abundant riches offered to us on our train.

The train pulled out of Emeryville about 20 minutes after we had boarded. Cathy and I pressed our noses up against the begrimed windows of our cubbyhole and watched Berkeley pass by. Mostly we saw the backside of buildings, almost all of them tagged. This last fleeting glimpse of Berkeley was like a fresh batch of bittersweet. It was a beautiful day, in the mid-60’s, and here we were, suddenly and surreally, riding on the California Zephyr back to Chicago. We made the right decision, right? I felt terribly maudlin, saying goodbye to the back of Cody’s Books on 4th street.

We took the train to feel the distance. Airplanes, we both decided, are too unforgiving when it comes to letting go of community- to saying goodbye to the intimacies of the geography surrounding the place you had only just begun to call home. It’s too instantaneous and disorienting to leave one home and abruptly arrive 4 hours later to the prospects of a new one. Berkeley, sometime over the last 6 months, had finally come to feel like our home. Leaving it didn’t come easy. We wanted stillness and the chance to connect to the great expanse that lies between Berkeley and Chicago. We wanted to see the Sierra’s and the Rockies up close and to ride through those endless cornfields of Iowa while they lay enshrouded in a heavy crust of February snow. We hoped it might reveal something we both wanted- some affirmation and solace.

On the first night I awoke somewhere a few hours outside of Salt Lake City. It was a full moon, so I could make out most of the terrain, which sprawled out in prostration to a horizon superfluous with mountains. We were in that folksy terrain known as the middle of nowhere, big empty spaces infused with a poetic brand of absence. At what looked to be 5 or so miles away, I thought I saw a line of fires. Who’s out there? Not fires, but lights- placed in a straight line, one after another every few miles or so. The military? The train was long enough and our sleeping car placed far enough in the rear of the train, that when the track curved I could see the engine headlights permeating into the darkness. I didn’t want to go back to sleep. I kept thinking I should be listening to the new Harold Budd CD I had brought along with me. Those wide open ghost chords that Budd plays, with all their lovely thunder and heartache, would have fit this landscape perfectly. But I was too groggy, feeling small and displaced, and soon that initial jolt of awe was worn back down to sleep. I awoke briefly in Salt Lake City. I thought I saw the temple. “Fry sauce, it’s a Mormon thing,” I remember thinking.

We also took the Zephyr because, like many, we had long coveted the desire to take the train cross-country. This is known as the romance of the train. But trains take time, and unless you have a lot of it, traveling by such means is going to take a big bite out of your vacation. Nobody but the hardcore train enthusiast is looking to make travel by train the entirety of their vacation. We, however, had time. We wanted time. We wanted time to be slow and offer up majestic landscapes and to act as a balm on our wistfulness. We brought books, magazines, CD’s, DVD’s, paints, pens and a bottle of wine. We wanted to feel all that time intertwined with all that space.

It was surprisingly cheap to take the much beleaguered Amtrak. Comparable to flying, albeit much longer. The food was better and you can see more, though most of the windows on the train were filthy. This was unfortunate given that quite a few of the people taking the Zephyr are on it to enjoy the natural beauty of its route. It would have taken all of a hour or two for one person to have properly cleaned the windows, but as it was, they were dimly coated in grime at the start of the line in Emeryville. Can we include window washers in that next budget? The sleeping rooms, as I said, were small and hadn’t been remodeled in over 20 years. They had a funky charm, however. There was a lounge car made explicitly for viewing, with large windows on its sides and overhead. On the first leg of our trip a docent boarded the train at Sacramento and offered us occasional deep fried nuggets of history. All meals served in the dining car are communal, meaning they’ll seat you next to strangers who might be Amish. There were a lot of Amish riding the rails. We sat with 4 different couples, none of who were Amish. Here are a few of the things we talked about or listened to others talk about:

Scuba diving (the first couple was really into scuba, and it’s all the dude wanted to talk about. The subject would change but he’d always bring it back to scuba)
Trains
The latest film version of Freaky Friday
Kansas City
Grandchildren
Moving
The Da Vinci Code

Who rides the Zephyr? Lot’s of old-timer’s and those aforemtioned train enthusiasts who will tell you that Amtrak is a nice way to travel but doesn’t hold a candle to those European trains. Those aforementioned Amish take it too. And people afraid to fly. The couple who won tickets at a holiday dinner party raffle, they took it too. Us.

Last Post From Berkeley

Well, the place is completely packed up and we board the train for Chicago in a little more then a hour. We're both feeling a little on the bittersweet side, though we're sure we made the right decision. Still, we're going to miss it here more then either of us could have imagined. Sigh.

I'm looking forward to these next couple days of train travel. To be still and look out the window as all that distance we originally travelled over 2 1/2 years ago is reclaimed.

It's time to go.

Next Stop, the Former Hog Butcher For the World

It’s pouring, the place is packed up and the movers should be here any second. The dogwoods bloomed last week, the hills are turning green and we said our farewell to the Pacific from atop Mount Tam on Saturday.

Five Hours and Five Stitches Later

“Don’t worry, everything is okay. Cathy cut her hand and I had to take her to the emergency room.”

So began the phone conversation I had yesterday afternoon with my landlord’s wife. I was attending a meeting (my last one) with the youth development organization I had been interning with for the past several months when one of the students approached me and whispered, “You’re neighbor is on the phone and says it’s an emergency.”

Here’s immediately what went through my mind: “Emergency? Christ! What happened to Cathy? Boxes? Did some boxes fall on her?” (We’re in the throes of moving and the boxes are piled mighty high throughout our place. Some could have fallen on her. They could have done some damage.)

In retrospect, I find it odd that the best I could do when confronted with this most dreadful of contexts (“…says it’s an emergency!”) was to envision Cathy trapped under an avalanche of component boxes. It could have been any number of calamities! Clearly, the move was on my mind. And sheesh, if you could see the state our place is in right now!

Anyway, turns out Cathy had accidentally stabbed herself while attempting to clean out an old candle-holder. Don’t ask. It was a hopelessly unavoidable accident (even if hindsight nagged her all day) but it left a nasty gouge in the palm of her left hand. Our landlord’s wife was upstairs and was kind enough to drive Cathy to the Alta Bates emergency room here in Berkeley. I arrived about 45 minutes later and found Cathy in the waiting room. Cedric the Entertainer was on the TV hanging from the corner of the room. The TV was up way too loud.

This is the second time in the past few years that Cathy and I have spent time in an emergency room. (The other time being when I nearly broke my arm a few days before our wedding in July of 2001.) Both times we spent roughly 5 hours from check in to check out. We also caught a sobering glimpse of the deplorable state of our countries healthcare system, namely the fact that those without insurance (43 million and counting) oftentimes have no other choice but to take advantage of emergency room treatment services. These are the folks for whom access to the high quality health care we have available in this country is not a given.

Most of the people joining us in the waiting room were sick (by no means calamitously so) and waiting to see an emergency room physician in order to receive some basic care, the kind most of us would get by making an appointment with our physician. We overheard a few folks discussing when the best time to use the emergency room would be, with the winner being kickoff time on Super Bowl Sunday. Who would ever be in an emergency room at kick off time on the Super Bowl? Maybe, they thought, it would be better to come back then? A mildly schizophrenic woman spent over an hour begging us all for quarters, pens and paper as she spoke to various people on the pay phone about getting her heart fixed. She had been there since early morning. (Later, after we had moved to an examining room, we heard her screaming that somebody was touching her.)

One of the only magazines in the waiting room was a copy of O Magazine, Oprah’s monthly syllabus for her minions. It included an article about Oprah retiring to her Indiana farmhouse with some of her gal pals for a silent weekend retreat. For 2 1/2 days she and her buddies would do yoga, meditate and enjoy chef Art’s turkey burgers and sweet potato pies without uttering a word! Oprah writes, “I first extend lovingkindness to myself, then to my family and friends. I’ve done the lovingkindness exercise many times before on my own, but it’s still a reminder for me to open my heart.”

Such flapdoodle aside, what really got me (beyond the fact that Oprah extends lovingkindness to herself first) was the awful disparity of the article, with all its sense of privilege and oozing warm glow, and the reality of the emergency room waiting area, where some of the same people who were there when we arrived, were still waiting when we left over 5 hours later.

Why can’t we come up with a practical, workable model in this country that ensures that everybody is properly insured and has access to equitable healthcare? I know there’s no simple answer to this one, but I also know that we can do far better.

Here is a summary provided by The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of each of the candidates’ proposals for expanding health insurance coverage.

Room 112

This past Friday was my last day as a volunteer in the special ed room I had been helping out in since September. There were about 12 kids in the class, most in 4th or 5th grade and all struggling with mild to moderate language deficits- namely the ability to read or (once they’ve mastered some basic phonics) comprehend what it was they’ve read. A healthy amount of my time was spent in a catcher’s crouch and with my thumb covering up half a word while I said things like, “Hey, we saw those two letters just a second ago…do you remember what sound they made? Was it…(here I would point to where we had originally seen those two letters)…shhhh? Was that the sound? It’s from the shhhh family!” (They have a lot of power, the shhhh family, right up there with the ing’s.)

I originally came to volunteer for a couple reasons- the first of which was purely selfish while the second was tethered to some half-assed ideals about community, namely that I wanted to give something back. (And I guess there’s nothing half-assed about getting up of your ass and making positive connections/contributions.) Additionally, most, if not all, of the teacher credential programs in the state of California make prior classroom experience (at least 40 hours) a prerequisite to the application process. In other words, if you’re applying to a credential program, you must give proof (a letter from the teacher whose classroom you worked in works best) that you’ve already spent at least 40 hours getting a feel for the area you wish to get a credential in. So that’s what I did.

The Berkeley Public Schools have a superb volunteer program. It’s incredibly efficient and effective, too. Each week there’s a volunteer orientation (and since it’s Berkeley, all who attend have read their Robert Coles and Jonathan Kozol and all are curdled with outrage at the monstrous injustices perpetuated in our public schools) and anybody can show up to and get the low down on helping out in the schools. After an hour and a half of the ins and outs of volunteering, you fill out an application where you express your areas of interest, provide a couple references and presto, about a week later you get a volunteer badge in the mail and, should you choose to accept it, your assignment!

But back to Friday…

There was a substitute teacher there that day, some young guy (I’d hazard late 20’s) who, probably despite his ideal, disciplined through the occasional outburst. One young boy, for example, a 5th grader who has a particular knack for pushing against the boundaries of patience, slyly refused the substitute’s request to “put that drink away.” The boy, we’ll call him Tony, likes his snacks, but there’s a time and place for them and he shouldn’t have had the drink when he did. It’s one of the golden rules: no food or drink in the classroom. (Unless it’s one of those refreshing soft-drink’s whose kind contract dollars are paying for our otherwise unfunded extra-curricular programs!) Instead of doing what would have been reasonable, that is, quickly depositing the drink in the locker area, Tony instead attempted to put the drink in his pocket, where it clearly wouldn’t fit. There were giggles. Then there came the substitute’s yawp.

The substitute shouted, and I’m paraphrasing while simultaneously sparing you the ALL CAPS: Tony! Don’t do that. I’m not having that today! Don’t act stupid! I’m sick and tired of people acting stupid in this room! You’re not stupid, so cut it out! There are too many of you in this classroom who pretend to be stupid and I know it’s not true! Get up and put the drink away and stop acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about!” Which was all more or less true. The kid was pushing the sub’s buttons. Tony has a gift for that. He finally got up and put the drink (some high fructose concoction in a day-glow plastic bottle) away. But was that the right way to ask him to do it?

I guess one thing I’ve learned while volunteering is that there’s a right way and wrong way to discipline. Of course there is. And if you’re thinking of entering into this profession, it’s good to know that you’re going to be shoveling a lot of discipline. Kids are going to be getting up out of their seats to wonder over to stare glassy-eyed out of windows and you’re going to have to interrupt the siren call of all that stimuli and navigate them back to their seats. A few minutes later they’re going to be back at the window. They’re going to tap their pencils relentlessly and mumble to themselves and push each other and copy from each other. Sometimes they’re going to act like kids and that can be a real pain in the ass. But most of all, what seems to happen most of time, is that they’re going to have tremendous difficulty staying on task. Most LD kids, studies show, are on task 40% of the time. The other 60% is devoted to white noise. You’ve got to learn how to be gentle but firm in keeping them focused. You have to be consistent and hover about and coax and cheerlead and get those little engines up and over the mountain crest. There is a healthy balance of rewards and consequences. “I think I can” too often erodes into “I know I can’t.” Those little egos are teetering up against a yawning gap. Yelling at them probably doesn’t help things much. It’s more white noise.

I was also interested in how these children thought of themselves, especially their academic performance. By 5th grade most seem to be bluntly aware of their “otherness” status in the academic hierarchy. They’re old enough to have begun taking measure of their character and the consequences of their performance, both socially and academically.

From what little I know, the current trend is to keep most learning disabled children in the mainstream or regular classroom and have a “special resource” teacher come to those classrooms and offer the appropriate support to the special ed students. The school where I’ve been volunteering, however, adheres to the older (and increasingly rare?) delivery system that keeps the kids in an alternative instructional environment for all or nearly all of the school day. I don’t know enough about the research into either “delivery service” to know which one might be more beneficial to the student (there’s a ton of research about inclusion/mainstreaming, but I haven’t read much of it), but I do wonder if a student’s self-esteem doesn’t suffer from being excluded or occasionally separated from the experience of their peers. I say this based not only on my own experience as a LD child, but on my having witnessed the reactions and interactions of those students I worked with, many of whom were mainstreamed for a class or part of the day. They all seemed to intensely dislike this, I suspect because the students in those mainstream classes tended to look at them as their intellectual inferior, outcasts from that funky room of underachievers.

Then again, I have no idea. A concept like self-esteem is pretty slippery. It’s highly contextual. What I did hear almost everyday was some defeated kid mumbling to me that he was stupid. Sometimes such remarks are lame histrionic contrivances to get out of doing the work. More often than not it’s because of the sheer amount of failure they’ve already experienced. Nothing in their academic life has come easy. There’s always somebody telling them what’s wrong. The frustration that arises from not being able to comprehend a word problem or correctly spell a word is magnified by the mocking abundance of failure that’s come before. They’re sick and tired of being held captive by their deficits. Sometimes it’s easier to just submit to the impetuous undercurrent and that you’re too dumb to ever figure out what that word problem is asking you to solve.

These kids will break your heart if you’re not careful. Most of them are incredibly bright and capable. Most have assets that we need to pay more attention to and cultivate. But their momentum crashes unexpectedly, invisible thresholds are crossed and they shut down. “I’m not a good reader, Mr. Chris.” “I’ve been dumb since I was 8 years old.” “I’m too stupid.” When I first heard a child say this I didn’t know how to respond. I was too appalled and distressingly struck by their similarity to my own struggles with intellectual self-confidence and all the times I allowed academic challenges to be filtered or stalled by such apocryphal thoughts. I heard too many echo’s in my head when I said, “Look at me. I want to tell you something that I know is true. You’re a smart kid. You can do this.” Which is more or less true, it’s getting them to believe it that’s really tough.

So on Friday I said, “It’s been an honor coming in every morning and working with all of you. You may not know it, but I wasn’t just here teaching you. You were teaching me.” (Kids, at least the one’s I was working with, love to be told that they’ve taught you something. I’ve also found that you better be honest about whatever it is they’ve taught you, ‘cause they can smell your bullshit from a mile away.) I said, “You’ve all helped me to learn what kind of teacher I want to be.” They were all eating the brownies I had made for them and watching me with sugary intensity. I had my coat on and said, “I’ll keep in touch with you all by e-mail, and I expect to hear from each one of you.” Then they were all waving and I was walking out the door thinking the old volunteer cliché that they had given me more then I could have possibly ever given them. I know that’s entirely true.

Terror In Their Vitamins!?

This from David Sanger’s article, Bush to Seek More Money To Fight Terrorism at Home, in yesterdays NYT’s:

President Bush said today that he would ask Congress for another major increase in financing for domestic security, and, in a clear indication of the strategy his aides say he plans to pursue in his re-election campaign, he urged Americans against taking false comfort in the absence of terrorist attacks on American soil for more than two years.

And later we have:

One senior political adviser to Mr. Bush described the president’s strategy in the coming months as “a healthy mix of optimism and the fear factor,” tapping into what White House officials believe is a wariness among swing voters about putting the nation’s security into the hands of any of the Democratic aspirants.

And with the Pew Research Center finding that 65 percent of Americans believe that the war on Iraq was the “right decision,” you bet your bottom dollar that 9/11 will continue to be Bush’s mantra (followed closely by some utterance of Iraq and terror and tax cuts and terror and the sanctity of marriage and terror) until the November elections. The above senior political adviser says as much. The soccer moms and Nascar dads will be innodated with terror and the pressing need to make tax cuts permanent. And I fear that most will lap it right up.

This daunting 65 percent might be one of the reasons Dean’s support has eroded. Democrats are feeling far more pragmatic this year…there seems to be a lot of folks who are willing to get behind anybody who can “beat the president.” Dean’s spent the past year positioning himself up as the anti-war candidate, which works for about 35 percent of the population, while that other 65 percent, however, seems to be blissfully malleable to the Republican’s ultimate weapon: the Democrats are weak on defense

Top 100

100: Episode 10 of the 4th season of The Sopranos. Christopher, in a heroin haze, accidentally sits on Adrianna's dog. Later, when Adrianna returns home and discovers the calamitously squashed mutt under Christopher’s ass, he stands and mumbles, “It must have crawled under there for warmth.” Hands down one of the funniest, most disturbing moments in the series so far.
099: Sitting outside and eating dinner on New Years Day in Miami Beach; excellent company, savory food, and exceptional beautiful people watching. Cathy and I shared some cannoli for dessert and my brother in law thought our waiter smelled quite nice. A thermometer near out table read 70 degrees.
098: I do hope to have my best of 2003 list done and up by the end of this month, covering the usual trinity of films, albums and books. Then again, maybe I won’t. Judy Blume anyone?
097: Sasha Frere-Jones's blog includes numerous admirable photos. December's are particularly nice.
096: On now: LFO- Sheath (nice!)
095: Sometimes, after consuming one too many Diet Cokes, my stomach up and rebels by turning sour and gassy, the result, no doubt, of all that carbonated phosphoric and citric acid. What else is this drink doing to my innards? I imagine the aspartame dangerously carving itself into my stomach lining, the caramel colors sanding down the enamel of my teeth and the potassium benzoate defiling my liver. Note to self: cut back on the freakin’ Diet Coke!
094: Is nostalgia a symptom of bitterness? More a matter sentimentality and wistfulness, I tend to think. Sure, maybe there’s a few dollops of remorse that can sour into bitterness if not properly cultivated and accepted for what they really represent. My nostalgia is of the golden-hour variety. It’s unabashedly idealized and wistfully romantic. It’s aural equivalent is a song sung by Joao Gilberto. It’s infused with saudade.
093: My new Oral-B toothbrush not only has special blue indicator bristles that will let me know when I need a new toothbrush, it also includes a comfort grip! The evolution of toothbrushes offers ample proof of invention being the mother of necessity. See what a little healthy capitalistic competition spawns? If comfort grips and tax cuts won’t keep the great unwashed sated, I ‘dunno what will!
092: Lately I’ve been thinking that I’m smart enough to imagine what it is I want and too stupid to get it. How to change this?
091: Let us praise LimeWire. I’m especially pleased to have finally scored a copy of the Prophecy Theme, the single Eno/Eno/Lanois contribution (recorded around the time of the Apollo soundtrack) to Lynch’s Dune soundtrack. The rest of the Dunesoundtrack was provided by Toto.
090: I recently bought CD’s for the first time since May of last year. I find it usually takes about 3 or 4 listens before I can really say how I feel about an album.
089: The Lloyd Cold and the Commotions album Easy Pieces, which was their second, is really just about as good as Rattlesnakes. Of all the old album’s of my teenage years that I’ve recently been reacquainting myself with, this is probably my favorite.
088: I need to see Return of the King again. The first time I saw it I came down with a splitting headache (is there any other kind of headache?) about 3/4 of the way through and simply wanted to lay down. At the end, when the credits were rolling, all the teenage girls in the audience cooed when Orlando Bloom appeared.
087: I’ve often thought George Winston leans more toward a brand of folksy piano plonkings then anything resembling new age. I mean, there’s no Tangerine Dream or Enya in his music, right? Maybe it’s that he performs live in thick wooly socks and has a beard. I don’t listen to him much these days, but his version of The Holly and the Ivy got a lot of play this past Christmas.
086: I never fall asleep right away.
085: My wife does.
084: Sometimes this makes me jealous. I wish I could fall asleep that fast.
083: Somebody needs to make a 6 CD set compiling the best of Ghanaian highlife. It could come packaged with some palm wine.
082: I have way too many CD’s with liner notes written in Japanese.
081: In the complicated world that we live in I find myself taking solace in the fact that Tiger Woods is fighting the good fight by questioning the PGA’s standards on drivers.
080: Have you ever been in one of those situations where you’re talking to a couple people who know each other well (they could be partners or they could just be a couple folks who share the same office space) and as you’re standing there saying whatever it is you’re going on about, you notice that these people are, every now and again, giving each other looks…looks that impart insider information to the other person based not only on what you’re currently saying, but information based on past conversations these people have had about you. These looks say, “see what I mean,” or “he’s/she’s doing it again,” or “can you believe this?” We need this to stop, or at least stop caring.
079: We are moving back to Chicago in less then three weeks. The current temperature in Chicago is 19 degrees. Here it’s 55. I’m going to miss the weather here something fierce.
078: I like random jottings.
077: Johnny Depp made a hilarious stinky pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean. Will those Oscar bastards please stand up and recognize his swashbuckling greatness here? Put him up along Sean Penn’s performance in Mystic River, damnit!
076: I am not used to having children giving me hugs.
075: I say this because some of the kids in the classroom where I’ve been helping out recently have been known to unanticipatedly come over and hug me as I’m about to leave. I usually hug them back with one arm, reaching over and around to reassuringly pat them on their backs before gently pulling them away.
074: In a year or two, I imagine, such behavior will come to seem excruciating uncool for them. For now, it’s purely uncalculated.
073: There are some nights when having to sleep disappoints me. Same thing with eating. All this sleeping and eating is taking up way too much valuable time. We do these things out of biological necessity, and most of the time (a healthy majority) I’m happy to comply with this bottom line, but that doesn’t mean I have to be appreciative.
072: I do really like pastries. Especially those found at Mike’s Bakery in Boston. Whenever the USDA launches the new food pyramid standards I hope they stress the importance of dough, custard and cream.
071: Cathy has done much to redeem the value of food and the eating experience in general. Just the other night she made some hella good risotto.
070: Inevitably there are those nights when I fight going to sleep. I’ll try and keep reading until I reach the end of chapter. But sleep always wins out of course. My eyes will fight the good fight- they’ll keep open and continue scanning the page, but the brain will grow weak, it recedes into its cubby so that when the words enter, anxious to be processed, they go ignored and unidentified. At this point I turn off the light and accept that it’s time drool onto my pillow.
069: Does Carl Craig still record under his 69 moniker?
068: They’ve been working on the new houses next door to us for over a year now. I think on some days it’s like one dude next door pounding nails into a random board.
067: Songs that I’ve recently been acquainted with (and in at least once instance, reacquainted with)
066: It’s Immaterial: Driving Away From Home- My brother Greg originally introduced me to this song. He used to bring home these great mix tapes from college, filled with snippets of his roommates’s record collections and various college radio shows. I first heard the Art of Noise, Elvis Costello and OMD (among others) on these tapes. I later found and bought the 12” of Driving Away From Home my senior year in high school. I believe it’s still slowly warping in my parent’s basement along with some killer New Order singles. Of course, I’m of the age now that my parents have every right to toss whatever of mine that might be still residing in their home provided they use some discernment and separate the wheat from the chaff.
065: Underground Resistance: Jupiter Jazz- Back in the early 90’s it seemed like a lot of folks were concerned about the interrelatedness of jazz and techno. I suppose it was an attempt to legitimize the music- to separate techno it from the mindless dance floor connotations and fuse it with the great American legacy of jazz. In any case, this is a brilliant slice of early 90’s techno that managed to rise above the bait and deliver. Not jazz and way too poppy to be techno, despite the name.
066: Badly Drawn Boy: Something To Talk About (Four-Tet Remix)- Been listening to a lot of great remixes lately. This one scores via the deft manipulation of twinkling guitar samples and some swinging snare grooves.
065: Brian Eno: The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh)- Rian Malan wrote a great history of this song for Rolling Stone (it’s also included in the 2001 edition of Da Capo’s Best Music Writing which is where I first read it) that’s definitely worth checking out if you ever get the chance. Eno’s version is one I’ll happily play for my future children. When that time comes I’m committed to compiling mixes of appropriate children’s songs from the likes of Penquin Orchestra Café, Nobukozu Takemura’s Childisc productions, Cocteau Twins, Plone, Poi Dog Pondering and Ringo’s Good Night off the White Album, a song that should be sung to all children everywhere, every night.
064: Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins: She Will Destroy You - - Was ever there a greater dream pop collaboration?
063: Depeche Mode: World In My Eyes: - May be my favorite Depeche Mode song, certainly my favorite album. Violater made up a big part of the soundtrack to my freshmen year in college at Ohio State. This was pre-Nirvana breakthrough, when Depeche Mode, The Cure, New Order and REM were all making appearances in the top-40 with songs like Personal Jesus, Just Like Heaven, True Faith and It’s the End of the World (And I Feel Fine). I remember hearing this album being played out of the windows between the two large dorms where I lived in the Spring of 1990, the sound turned murky with reverb as it bounced between the two buildings.
062: Dntel: (This is) the Dream of Evan and Chan (Superpitcher Remix)- I’ve never heard the original version of this song, but this remix takes a few basic materials (one of which includes a devastatingly effective bass line) and builds itself into a heartsick anthem.
061: I’m writing this with the door open on January 10. The high in New York City as of a few hours ago was 5 degrees. Such geographical differences in temperature fascinate me. Millions of people are freezing their asses off right now, scarves up around their noses, fingers curled into fist inside their gloves while I’m enjoying the breeze blowing through our open door as it tickles my cheek. Did I mention I’m going to miss the fine weather we have here? A couple of our friends who live in L.A. call it “relentless pleasentness.”
060: Electric Six (With Jack White): Danger! High Voltage - Returning to my days at Ohio State, I’m reminded each time I hear this song that there was a bar along High Street that played only ACDC and the Cult on Sunday Nights. This cut would have fit right in. Like the Cult, is production slick and macho and way over the top.
059: Frank Sinatra w/ Nancy Sinatra: Something Stupid- Technicolor pop.
058: Harold Budd: The Room (Fila Brazilla Mix)- Fila Brazilla is pretty hit or miss with their remixes. They’re never bad, just kinda middling at times. When they’re on, as is the case with this one (the first time I’ve ever heard Budd remixed) they manage to beat just about every other group or artist still exploring the down-tempo genre. It’s super chilled (the groove rides unobtrusively below the gauzy romance of Budd’s piano streams) and tinged with just the right shade of funk. A couple years ago they actually hooked up with Budd and recorded an EP’s worth of material that I’ve yet to come across, though if this is any indicator, I gotta catch up to it!
057: Captain and Tennille: Love Will Keep Us Together- They had a variety show once, right? I never did get to see Poi Dog Pondering when they were including covers of Love Will Tear Us Apart into Love will Keep Us Together in concerts back in the early 90’s, though I still think it was one of the most inspired couple songs I’ve ever heard of. Love Will Keep Us Together must have delighted a lot of folks who later went on to adore Kathy Lee Gifford.
056: Dianna Ross: I’m Coming Out- Because we all could do with more gay anthems in our collection. Nile Rodgers was just on fire in the early 80’s, producing other great disco fuelled tracks for Chic (his own band), Madonna, Sister Sledge and David Bowie.
055: Cameltoe: Fannypack- I missed out when this teenage novelty hit came out last year, but it was definitely a big hit with the family over the holidays. Our favorite line: “Is your crotch hungry girl, ‘cause it’s eatin’ your shorts!?” Fix yourself, girl.
054: The Whistle Song (Sound Factory 12” Mix) Frankie Knuckles- The aural equivalent of curtains billowing in an early summer breeze sometime after midnight.
053: John Barry: Out of Africa (Main Theme)- May be the last really great soundtrack work John Barry did. Nobody has ever captured sweeping epic grandeur better.
052: Johnny Cash: Sunday Morning Coming Down- Cash owns this song.
051: Junior Senior: Move Your Feat- This one is like a throwback to early 90’s pop rave, It’s deliriously cheesy.
050: Justin Timberlake: Rock Your Body- Unabashed update of Michael Jackson’s Off the Wallproduction that works. Best Neptunes production ever?
049: Killer Mike: Adidas- “All day I dreamed about…All day I dreamed about sex.” Flow like a mountain stream in spring.
048: That’s enough for now.
047: I very much enjoy drinking red wine from small jam jars.
046: One of the great joys of volunteering at the elementary school is overhearing some of songs the kids sing when jump roping. The other morning, on Martin Luther King’s birthday, I was getting my bike out of the racks when I overheard a group of three girls singing, “And before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave…” Nice.
045. I received a deck of Muppet Uno cards for Christmas. It’s pretty awesome.
044. I also received a pack of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans (jelly beans, actually), which includes such flavors as dirt, ear wax, and vomit. After tasting the disturbingly lifelike replication of sardine (I don’t even want to know what shit the flavor companies in Jersey are mixing together in their labs to achieve this!) I felt it best to skip the booger, spinach and black pepper.
043. The other morning I woke up, stumbled into the kitchen and managed to step on a mouse.
042. We’ve been having a mouse problem of late. I suppose that’s ‘cause our place is surrounded by a rather large garden.
041. I didn’t kill the mouse but I did manage to break its leg. At first I thought I had stepped on a sock. When I turned on the light (it was still dark out) I saw something out of the corner of my eye.
040. It was a terribly sad sight. The mouse was wildly shaking and dragging itself in circles.
039. With Cathy’s help we managed to scoop it into a trash bag. The bag shook. Cathy said, “We should probably put it out of its misery.”
038. We thought of just dumping it in the garden, but we imagined it would just die a slow, agonizing death.
038. I took it outside, placed the bag on our patio and dropped a flowerpot on it. Twice.
037. I felt awful.
036. Zadie Smith’s follow up to White Teeth, The Autograph Man, really ain’t all that. Too fussy is my consensus as of 100 pages in…and the insights of the characters seem distressingly hackneyed, no? This wouldn’t matter if the first two thirds of White Teeth hadn’t been so great- showed such potential…Sophomore slump?
035. Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah asks a lot of questions, but I like it, especially the constant shifts in time.
034. Somebody gave Cathy a calendar of outhouses for her 30th birthday. January, for example, features an old tilting outhouse that looks forlorn but usable in Bodie State Historic Park in Bodie, California, while August’s outhouse is a stunner, surrounded as it is by granite cliffs and pine trees somewhere in the Misty Fiords National Park in Alaska. What makes the calendar so great is that the maker’s of this calendar could have lazily mined a kitschy sensibility that I fear quite a few folks would have found appealingly hilarious- but instead of taking such a route, they’ve gone and offered 12 glossy shots of rustic outhouses that Martha Stewart would be proud to wipe her ass in. It’s refreshingly earnest I guess.
033. Lynn Ramsey’s follow up to Ratcatcher, Morvarn Caller, suffers the same problem as David Gorden Green’s All the Pretty Girls. It’s pretty nice to look at (some beautiful cinematography), but it’s ultimately so enamored by the epiphanies/transcendence of the mundane that it sinks itself in evanescence. Still, I like what she does with sound design a lot.
032. If all of Eastwood’s Mystic River could have been as evocative and peculiar as its final 10 minutes, then it might be entirely deserving of all the kudos it’s been getting. As it stands, you got some great performances (and accents!) and, in the very least, a mainstream film that, due to the status of its director, was allowed to end on a note of somber ambiguity.
031. Is Astor Piazzolla’s music histrionic enough? Ha!
030. Late last year the New York Times included an editorial lamenting the many difficulties endured over the past year by the state of California. Some of those unfortunates included wild fires, mudslides and, of course, the recall that put Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger in the office of governor. The Times editorial staff hoped that 2004 would be far kinder to the state, which was a nice enough sentiment when you consider that heaps of this country eye California with contempt- what with all those fake breasts, immigrants, new agers/hippies and natural disasters, we’re all just asking for it anyway- we get what we deserve, right? Sigh. Maybe I would have shared such a sentiment myself if I hadn’t spent 2 1/2 years living here. Which is to say, I’m gonna miss it here, fault lines and all.
029: We’re taking the Amtrak from Emeryville, California to Naperville, Illinois, with a two day lay over in Denver.
028: We’ll have our own sleeper car. We figure Amtrak must have recently been subsidized ‘cause the trip includes all meals and is relatively cheap. This is going to be a lot of fun!
027: I can’t wait to experience Chicago in spring. That first warm weekend day in April when the entire city awakes from its collective winter hibernation and heads outside.
026: Yeah, I finally found Fennesz’s remix of Junior Boy’s Last Exit!
025: Let’s hear it for the right album at the right time! Jeff Parker’s Like Coping got me sorted earlier this week. Nothing mind blowing, but so far as jazz guitar goes, I like Parker’s mellowness and Chad Taylor’s shade-like drumming. Thanks to Joe’s mighty jukebox for this one!
024. What’s really the take amongst mythologists on Joseph Campbell? Campbell’s legacy looms pretty large over the entire field, what with those Bill Moyer’s interviews running every few months on PBS and Star Wars fans and Deadheads still gathering together at the Shire to discuss the hero’s journey and the unleashing of their inner Dionysus. What do those in Shire of Humanities departments across the land think about the quality of Campbell’s research? Shoddy? Outdated? Right on? I made it through Primitive Mythology and about half of Oriental Mythology sometime back in the early 90’s when I was pretty riveted by such stuff. (I still am, but probably not with the same kind of fervor.) I picked up a copy of Creative Mythology for $3.95 at Powell’s Books in Portland a few years back, but I haven’t yet felt compelled to spend the time with it, but I’m hearing some distant rumbling.
023. I recently retired my old wallet. This was the same wallet I recurrently pretended to answer like a cell phone.
022. One of the greatest mornings in my life began with waking up in New Orleans.
021. I’d like to be quicker with my e-mail responses. I have immense respect for those with fast reply turn around times. I’m far more plodding then I’d like to be.
020. I’m really looking forward to making an ambient mix for my mom this afternoon. She just began taking Yoga classes and is hoping to do it at home in a relaxing environment. Probably more major chord ambient stuff, not the amorphous and without edges variety- more Spring into Summer than Autumn into Winter.
019. William Carlos Williams’s poem, This Is Just To Say, may be just about my favorite poem ever. I think what does it for me is the final stanza, the “Forgive me/ they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold.” The poem itself is as succulent, compact and deliciously fleeting as the plum it describes.
018. I still don’t have a title for my album.
017. One of the first jazz album’s I ever listened to was Dexter Gordan’s Dexter Calling.
016. I can remember seeing The Burning Infernoat a drive in theatre.
015. Trading Places was the first rated R film I ever saw at the theater.
014. The soundtrack to Ghost World is excellent. (13 more to go!)
013. I really need to fiddle around with digital video. I’ve been meaning to edit together something from all the footage I recorded over the Christmas’s of 2001 and 2002 for a while now. I know how it’ll start. The introduction will be of a New Years Day fireworks display Cathy and I saw (and recorded) off Navy Pier as we drove by on Lake Shore. Best Introduction Ever!
012. Aphorism corner: There’s not much that is worse then being inertia in the center of action.
011. There are millions of people who will be sad when Friends goes off the air. More than one newspaper headline will read, Farewell to Good Friends.
010. A few restaurants I’m looking forward to frequenting again once we move back to Chicago, beginning with Mia Francesca, which has expanded from like 2 restaurnts to a dozen in the time we’ve been gone. Their entrees are pretty rich, so I doubt we’ll eat there all that often, but it’s always been pretty damn good Italian fare.
009. The Lincoln, still the undisputed heavyweight omelet champion!
008. Café 28
007. The Bongo Room
006. Ethiopian Diamond
005. P.S. Bangkok- red chicken corn curry here I come!
004. Andies
003. Udupi Palace
002. Café Iberico
001. Resi’s Bierstube, especially during the Summer when you can sit outside and order the German

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Lesser of Two Weevils

1. Russell Crowe, we love him. He’s been a ton of fun to watch on the big screen ever since his turn in L.A. Confidential. He oozes a sludgy undercurrent of Bryronic heroism in all of his films. And the guy simply has range. I mean, I thought Opie’s A Beautiful Mind was completely up to its ears in a dubious brand of schizophrenic, romantic schmaltz, but you could hardly find fault with what ‘ol Russell did with the slops! And hell, the guy carried Scott’s hyper-gauzy Gladiator, holding his head up high in a film that felt more like he was the spokesman in a series of ads for SUVs or a designer perfume, a criticism that I've seen crop up more then once in regards to the more recent stylistic choices (some might say bombardment) Scott deploys in his films. It’s that Bruckheimer super-sheen, I think, the dull bombast of highly refined images bathed in the coolest of earnest blues that ultimately satisfy the very same craving that comes with eating lunch while leafing through the latest junk-mail catalogue to get jammed in your mailbox courtesy of Sharper Image. Some of the product on display are kinda cool but most seems dumbly audacious, which is to say, trinkets. When you’re done, of course, it gets tossed in the recycling bin. Gladiator is a $100 million dollar trinket.

My sister, with whom I share an affinity for the tabloid wanderlust found in the pages of People or Vanity Fair, was once so smitten by Crowe that she found herself, suddenly, the owner of the debut CD by his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. (“But Russell, come on man, you have to be on the front cover!” “Ah, my Aussie friends…if I must.”) That’s why it is to her that I most strongly recommend a viewing of his newest, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The director, Peter Weir belongs to Hollywood’s set of glossy thinkers, (Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann. Philip Kaufmann) those directors who have managed to sneak some storytelling ambition into their Cineplex hack work. You get the THX, an A tiered star, the increasingly detailed special effects (here, there’s some wonderful dark and stormy night stuff), the stadium seating and, thankfully, enough lines of clever dialogue and commendable acting (the film has a number of surprisingly humorous moments) that you actually have a little something to savor when the credits are rolling.

And Crowe? His best on screen moment here involves a pun and a couple weevils. It’s a sly moment that catches you off guard. He also sings a number of sea-chanteys. He leaps with swords, looks through telescopes, plays the violin, and defeats the evil French, because it’s assumed that the French are the current enemy we can all agree on. (Note: somebody recently told me that had this film remained more true to the historical record, Crowe would have been chasing after an American ship and not a French.)

2. I’m currently reading and having more fun with Dennis Mcnally’s Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead then it probably deserves. In 1980 Mcnally was made the official historian for the band. (After Jerrry had read and been so impressed by Mcnally’s Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America and made it so.) I’m about half way through, and while there are the occasional dips into the excesses of band and roadie minutia, for the most part McNally's is cookin' with gas and tells the bands story well. He’s keenly aware that the most interesting story behind the Dead lies in their relation to the West Coast counter-culture scene of the 60’s, (more then half the book rightly focuses on those years alone) long before they went on to become the 90’s premier franchise for reliving the 60’s experiment. In those formative years the band was often surrounded and encouraged by the likes of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassidy, The Hells Angels, Owsley Acid, The Summer of Love, The Diggers and hundreds of other characters and episodes that gave that decade its lysergic texture.

3. I made a couple CD-R mixes with a group of teenagers last week that’ll eventually be played as the background music to a community open house for the youth development organization (The Home Project) I’ve been interning with. I had met with the teen’s a couple weeks before and told them to all bring in a mess of their favorite CD’s. These included Michael Jackson’s Bad , Missy Elliot’s Under Construction, OutKast’s, Speakerbboxxx/The Love Below and the soundtrack to Queen of the Damned. As we burned selections from those CD’s and others, I learned from my younger friends that Jessica Alba has DSL. It’s very naughty.

4. Why in the world is anybody going to see Cat in the Hat? How many years later will it be before the toddlers of today wake up and realize that Mike Myers is not the droid they're looking for? First the Grinch, and now that psychedelically inspired Cat! (In the early 90's rave scene, that zany, red and white and ever-so-slightly drooping cylinder of a hat was a staple alongside glow sticks and whistles.) Is any adult leaving the theater after sitting through Cat in the Hat with any genuine sense of satisfaction other then that of having kept the kids sated for 90 minutes? It’s a bit like spending an hour and a half confined to the underbelly of a cash registrar, isn’t it?

5. In honor of the upcoming final installment of Peter Jackson’s brilliant Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Return of the King, Cathy will be referring to our neighborhood as the Shire. I, on the other hand, will be known simply as Gandalf. I will treat little people with great tenderness and nobility. This will only last until the release date of December 17th, after which we'll both revert to our mundane little lives.