7 Songs

Heath tagged me with a blog meme that's been making the rounds. You're to list 7 songs you're currently enjoying, though I'm probably not alone in thinking it's more fun to follow the thread backward a ways, if only a few degrees of separation. Case in point-- beginning with Heath and working back I came across a 7-year old whose top 7 includes REM's cover of The Clique's Superman. I thought, "Excellent taste, little man, excellent taste!" before feeling peculiar and somewhat ill at ease to be reading a 7-year olds blog, a child who had himself been tagged by none other then his mother. So, you see, following such currents, hoping from hyperlink to hyperlink, blog to blog (ideally reaching its origin) allows for not only a healthy dose of serendipity but odd moments of slightly unseemly voyeurism.

Here are the next 7 songs to be played on the tower's shuffle play:

Little Heart: Harold Budd (Wandering ghost chords, occasional rumbles, chimes...I hope to spend a lot more of life wading in and out of this sort of thing)
Below: Philip Jeck (Jeck works with a modest sampler, mixer, a couple old turntables and 7-inch vinyl. On this cut he loops static, a wobbly sitar -I'm imagining the source vinyl was itself warped- and other unidentifiable sound detritus to create something as sonically cluttered as the present state of our Abby upended living room.
You've Got To Crawl to Me: Johnny Davis (Another one of these Numero Group crate-digger soul reissues, this one focusing on cuts from the Chicago based Bandit label)
Things That Scare Me: Neko Case (Shuffle, with its mysterious shuffle algorithms, sure loves itself some Neko Case. And that's just fine. Blacklisted, from which this songs comes, is drenched in a luxurious reverb, anchored by Case's amazing voice)
Don't Feel Right: The Roots (This song worked well at around the 18-minute mark on a recent treadmill workout...I was ever so slightly inclined, walking a healthy pace with my heartbeat fluxing between 155 to 160 bpm while my endorphin rush mingled, ever so nicely, with ?ueslove's tough strut)
Brond: Mikkel Metal (For which I can think of nothing to say)
Mashed Potatoes: Nat Kendricks and the Swans (From the always welcome Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974 collection, a mostly instrumental with a great breakdown into silence before a grinding sax comes roaring in to serenade a warm, buttery mass of mashed potatoes. Trust me, you'd want to shimmy all around the house in your sox to this one.

Songs: Best of 2006

The Ruling Class: Loose Fur
Chinese Translation: M. Ward
Shade And Honey : Sparklehorse
Big Star Baby: Mojave 3
Young Folks: Peter Bjorn And John
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives: Voxtrot
One Time Too Many: Phoenix
Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken: Camera Obscura
Soldier Jane: Beck
The First Song: Band Of Horses
We Are The Sleepyheads: Belle & Sebastian
Outdoor Miner: Wire
Meteor Beach: Tom Verlaine
Trinidad: Willie Bobo
Lament 1 "Bird's Lament": Moondog
Blue Bayou: Roy Orbison
Everything About It Is A Love Song: Paul Simon
Spiders House: Califone
Grey Days : The Concretes
Bandits: Midlake
One Fine Summer Morning: Evie Sands
Mansfield and Cyclops: Espers
Comfort Of Strangers: Beth Orton
Song About Traveling: The Innocence Mission
Topanga Canyon: John Phillips
Something On Your Mind: Karen Dalton
Little Brother: Grizzly Bear
Isi: NEU!
Prepared [2]: Lambchop
That's The Way Love Goes: Willie Nelson
Jessica: Kaki King
Childhood: Beach House
Fallin' In Love: American Spring
So Glad To See You: Hot Chip
Andalucia: John Cale
Helpless: Buffy Sainte-Marie
London, London: Veloso, Caetano
Bokme: Momo Wandel Soumah
Let My People Go: Darondo
I'm Just Like You: 6ix
A Part Of Being With You: The Professionals
Willie : Cat Power
Kabassele In Memoriam: Franco And Rochereau
The Sleeping Lady and the Giant Who Watches Over Her: Duke Ellington
Bad News, Bad Times: Marion Williams
L-O-V-E (Love): Al Green
Lily Express: Gwigwi Mrwebi
I Am Controlled by Your Love: Helene Smith
Yolanda: Ambrose Campbell
Maindusa : Les Mangalepa
Feel The Need In Me: The Detroit Emeralds
Long Time Boy: Nadia Cattouse
Ti Tong Ti Tong: Les Vikings
Flop Eared Mule: Gid Tanner & His Skillet-Lickers
Black Rose: Waylon Jennings
Little Glass Of Wine: Paul Burch
Let Me In Your Life: Bill Withers
A Woman Like You: Bert Jansch
Compared To What: Roberta Flack
O Yes My Lord: Voices Of Conquest
Who Knows: Marion Black
Better Thee Than Me: Sly & The Family Stone
Wah Wah Man: Young-Holt Unlimited
Pernambuco : Bonfa, Luiz
Margaret vs. Pauline: Neko Case
The Eraser: Thom Yorke
So This Is Goodbye: Junior Boys
Twentieth Century : Pet Shop Boys
Wasting A Fall: Lawrence
Grey Skies To Blue: Köntrast
New day (Dub): Round Two Featuring Andy Caine
Landing: Matt John
Eleventh Hour: My My
Robag's Bobb Für F. : Robag Wruhme
Silent Shout: The Knife
Do Not Break: Ellen Allien
Batine Acid: AFX
Take me into your skin: Trentemøller
Over The Ice: FIELDS
Skamel: Kalabrese
Body Language / Interpretation : Booka Shade
Another Station: Lindstrøm
When She Said Goodbye: ScSI 9
Like You (Supermayer Remix): Gui Boratto
Harmonise: Herbert
Theme from Sprite: Squarepusher
For Dan: The Rice Twins
Sleazy Bee: Isolée
Dancingbox: Modeselektor
Fly Guy Rap: Fly Guys
Follow The Leader: Eric B. & Rakim
All For U : Aceyalone
Long Time: The Roots Feat. Peedi Peedi & Bunny Sigler
Underwater: Ghostface Killah
Type Inventory: Farben
A Moment To Myself: Alex Smoke
Kaluga: Mikkel Metal
Sowiesoso: Cluster
Gollum: Harmonia
Delius (Song Of Summer): Kate Bush
Naa Er Druene Paa Sitt Beste: Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas
ABERMORGEN: DORAU & KOEHNCKE
É Com Esse Que Eu Vou: Elis Regina
Come Rain Or Come Shine: Jimmy Giuffre 3
Re: Person I Knew: Bill Evans
Zarabanda: Anouar Brahem
A Falling Leaf : Assif Tsahar/Cooper Moore/Hamid Drake
Mamma: Gilberto Gil
I Feel Like Going Home: Yo La Tengo
Autumn Music 1: Max Richter
Flies: Brian Eno
Nocturne 4 : Boxhead Ensemble
The Glass House: Chicago Underground Duo
Please Gamelan Again: Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique
Portrait Of Light: Frequency
The Toy Garden: Helios
Eins: Gas
Sheets: Mountains
Chinook: Loscil
Verlust Der Motorik: Klimek
From a solid to a liquid: Biosphere
Next To The Field : Thomas Fehlmann
Chimeras: Tim Hecker
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Susanna And The Magical Orchestra
Gymnopédies No. 3: Reinbert de Leeuw
Solo Guitar With Tin Foil: Brian Eno & David Byrne
Imagine : Vijay Iyer
Jock O' Hazeldean: Dick Gaughan

Magnificent Creepiness

Tonight's technicolor musical accompaniment is being provided by Frank Sinatra's The Wee Small Hours of the Night. My first memories of Sinatra, of being vaguely aware of his iconic status and appeal, were formed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida sometime in the mid-70's. My Grandma lived there then, in a gated community where the speed limit was 10 mph and every few blocks there was a swimming pool with shuffle board courts. And Grandma dug Frank. It took me another 20 years- but that's when I first enjoyed the magnificent creepiness of the paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate and came to dig Frank for myself through his work on the big screen playing a troubled soldier who's slowly awakening to the fact that he's been brainwashed by Chinese and Russian agents. No crooning or nothing, not even so much as a Theme Song From The Manchurian Candidate. Just a couple hours of perfectly pitched anti-Communist hysteria with a knowing wink.

Film: Best of 2006

In no particular order.

-A Prairie Home Companion: Robert Altman, 2005
-L'Enfant: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005
-Cache: Michael Haneke, 2005
-The Departed: Martin Scorsese, 2005
-The Death of Mr. Lazauescu: Cristu Puiu, 2005
-Three Times: Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005 (especially for the second time)
-Time Indefinite: Ross McElwee, 1994
-The Long Goodbye: Robert Altman, 1973
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Terry Gilliam, 1998
-The Shop Around the Corner: Ernst Lubitsch, 1940

The above image is a still from Victor Erice's beautiful film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), one of my favorites and previously only available on an anemic VHS transfer drained of color but revelatory nonetheless. A new, stunning high-definition transfer was created for Criterion last year and played at the Music Box where I was lucky enough to catch it this past summer. One of those film experiences where I exited the theater stunned, just a little off balance and seriously punch drunk on celluloid. A perfectly haunted evocation of the intersect between childhood and imagination.

Vaguely Laurie Andersonish.

As I write this, I'm exactly 30 minutes away from losing an hour. I'm half expecting a worm hole to open and Jean-Luc Picard to appear. I'd ask him about installing a holodek in our basement.

Crocus Expectations

Spring Break has shed its grace upon us grateful Dominican students, and while I’d love to be telling you that early this morning Cathy, Abby and I piled into the Prius destined for sunnier, warmer climes, it's not without a small measure of regret that I'm now telling you it's simply not the case. For now. At the end of this month we'll be flying with Abby on our laps to Tampa, Florida and from there by car to my parents place in nearby Tarpon Springs, home to an abundance of Greek sponge divers and weighing in with an average yearly temperature of 74.8. I'm definitely wanting myself some 70's just about now!

When we get back it'll be April here in our great city. Crocus's will have already offered some purple exclamations of relief from the drab monotony of the urban winter landscape and, ideally, we'll have had a teaser day or two where warm, moist southerly winds stirred up months of grit and caused an unfortunate percentage among us to reveal their translucent white thighs hauntingly starved of sun. We don't mind, though. That's cool. We all understand the need to ditch the winter coats and expose a little skin to warmth that isn't bone dry forced heat.

It's this time of year that I miss Berkeley the most. Berkeley, home to "one of the world's most moderate climates" and where winter is the green season.

Buoyantly Sneaky Pete

Oh, I'm never taking an on-line class again! Sigh. All this Blackboard posting nonsense (one post by this date, then two by this date in response to what your classmates said before, then start over again and don't pass go) keeps passing me unaware. I'm hard pressed to say why exactly. Like I have some unconscious blinders up-- take them off and I might startle and kick up some dust. I'm haunted by the little note on my syllabus regarding late postings and point deductions. As if it reveals something fundamental about my character. Nonsense, man, pure nonsense, but that's how I churn. I shouldn't care but I do. Way too much. Never used to. Third time is the charm though, I figure. I won't let another get by me. I'll know what's due and when from miles out. For now, we'll just have to sop up our petty sorrows and total possible point obsessiveness and move on. We'll curl up in Garcia's buoyantly Sneaky Pete Kleinow-like pedal steel guitar on Dire Wolf to linger and repose for a while. Really, I've just listened to it three times and I'm now totally ready to get into bed and read about Joy Division. Talk about a double bill!

Taking the Woodpecker Seriously, Not Literally

A few weeks back my parents checked out what my Dad referred to as the "Florida Chautauqua" located in the Panhandle and where, for a few days at least, one can pay as little as $7 to attend seminars on "Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally," or "Why Can't I Wear Pajamas to the Supermarket? And Other Pressing Questions About Fashion" among others. My parents enjoyed a Victorian Tea session as hosted by Ellen Mayfield and The Tea Ladies and were randomly seated alongside a couple in search of the iconic ivory-billed woodpecker, which, according to a recent National Geographic, was thought by most ornithologists to have been extinct since the 1940s. That is, extinct until the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, based on "seven fleeting glimpses and four seconds of fuzzy video," announced in April of 2005 that they had "confirmed the existence of an ivory-billed woodpecker flitting elusively through the tupelos along a small Arkansas stream called Bayou DeView." That's it. But it's enough, according to the article, and as my parents witnessed in the couple they sipped tea with, to inspire hundreds of ivorybill searchers (often funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to wallow deep into the birds suitable habitats all through the south in hopes that they too might catch a fleeting glance or, better, a definitive snapshot or video of the illusive little pecker.

Marty's Year

I'll be watching the Oscars tomorrow and not expecting much. I willl be drinking Murphy's Irish Stout, however. There will be the typically awkward pre-telecast interviews on the red carpet bluntly attempting to precipitate viewer enthusiasm for the fun to come. In that first hour on the carpet we're to believe that the earnest, self-congratulatory pap that the Oscars telecast will unavoidably descend into will be equal to the suspense and intensity ("Who will take home the Oscar?") of any one of the Governor of California's Cameron-helmed ("I'll be back") films. And while I like Ellen DeGeneres's mellow, gently subversive vibe as much as the next stay at home Dad or retiree, I'm also sad to see the producers deciding that after Rock and Stewart, mildly seditious hosts at best, it was time to return to something cozier and less potentially threatening to the excess of industry glorification on parade.

I'm lucky or cursed by the fact that there are innumerable things that ultimately make the show bearable and, actually, fascinating- but a host willing to take the stuffing out of the gushing grandeur of it all (Letterman's "Oprah....Uma....Uma....Oprah," from several years back comes to mind) helps to lesson the chances of later regretting having spent four hours just to see something as bombastic and saccharine as Crash win for Best Picture. Thankfully it's finally Marty's year, long overdue and all but that's just fine. He gets both Director and Picture this year for The Departed. I don't think anybody thinks it's his best but then, so what- when I saw it at the theater it was the most fun I had at any film last year.

Song Syrup

Some of us explored the International Children's Digital Library for my Collection Development class recently. I'd known about it for a while now but had regrettably never gotten around to checking it out. I'm glad I finally did, since it's lovely and so, so very right. Its mission is simple, noble and the kind of thing that's anathema to an influential branch of the Republican Party that equates diversity with racism and tolerance as capitulation to sin. Still, I'm a fan.

The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world's children to become members of the global community – children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online.

A classmate brought up an interesting point concerning children and their tactile relationship with books, the sheer joy they experience by being able to hold and manipulate a tangible object. Something, it turns out, adults like to do quite a bit as well. In the digital realm, this gets tricky. ISDL, however, targets children age 3 and up, an age when tactile concerns aren't nearly so potent and commanding. And besides, a lot of today's kids make, I'd hazard to guess, few distinctions between digital and organic text if any. Hidden behind the mission for ISDL you discover that its also acting as a research platform to study and gain a keener understanding of how kids interact with information. This is an equally noble endeavor, and I wondered if it wasn't mentioned in the mission because it's not nearly as wholesome and innocent as inspiring tolerance and respect for our global community. But to their great credit, ISDL encouraged children to create ways to search for books in the Library that were most relevant and exciting to them. That meant being able to search for books with specific character types, books with kids or imaginary creature characters, books with red covers, yellow covers or short books and long books and make believe or true ones. I like that.

The awesome accompanying illustration is by Ali Reza Goldouzian and is taken from the children's book, The Beautiful Pond which was first published in Iran. The accompanying summary for the book reads:

Speckled Frog used to sing differently so the other frogs poured a "song syrup" into her mouth that made her silent. A little fish discovered a flute at the bottom of the pond and brought it to her and asked her to play. Speckled Frog played very well, and everyone in the pond enjoyed her music.

Sigh. If only the Iranians would give up their song syrup and play nice with the rest the world!

A Day In The Life of Abigail Ruby Breitenbach

With any luck, this will be the first in a series of Abby related video exploits. Next up: Abby's Intredpid Adventures With Hans and Bonjour!

Abby's Ferberization

While implausibly adorable to those who know best, Abby's not without features that make her, at times, onerous. Take sleep for instance. Recently Abby hasn't been embracing it with quite the fervency we'd like, waking up sometimes a dozen times or more a night and letting loose a primal, unforgiving howl. I don't know if there's ever been a sound that's made me feel more hollow and wretched. Before this she had been sleeping for the past 6 months reasonably well, from 7:00 pm 'til 4:30 or 5:00 am. Not perfect, but acceptable. About a month ago that all changed. Her molars started to come in (bone pressing up against and attempting to part gums isn't, as you might expect, comforting) and she's excitingly close to taking some cautious first steps on her own. We had no idea, but according to our pediatrician, when toddlers are on the cusp of such a momentous gross motor skill advances as walking they'll sometimes experience near ungovernable urges to stand. At 2 am in the morning. At 3 am. 4 am.

Of course, none of us can take a peak into that little noggin and discern just what's really going on. Night terrors? Separation anxiety? Mischievous sprites? We talked to our pediatrician and one of her peers in addition to weathered folks who've travelled this groggy nighttime road before and concluded it was time to deploy the heralded and controversial Ferber method on her. There are dozens of sleep training books out there and even more theories and expert opinions with ostensibly no distinguishable consensus champion rising from the heap. As a parent, it's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of choices. After some hand wringing, testy parental debate (guess who was the ass?) and the good opinions of others we decided Ferber was good as any. We're deep into the third night and I'm taking the night watch. One rough patch from 9:30 to 10:45 but otherwise not bad. Here's hoping.

Wind Chill: -8

When the Prius just went and glided right on through the stop sign on Bryn Mawr and when I accepted that the road had more control of the car then I did, I resignedly turned around and went back home. It was the first class time I missed a class since returning to school. I had been hoping for a perfect attendance certificate lavish with gaudy calligraphy, a gold star or two, and signed with a flourish by the Dean. I would have framed it and hung it near Abby's changing table.

According to the Tribune:

There were scores—possibly hundreds—of accidents, from spinouts and fender benders to a 20- to 30-vehicle pileup that closed parts of the Tri-State Tollway for hours.

And this:

"There are crashes all over the place," said Illinois State Police Master Sgt. Dave Furjanic. Well before the evening rush had started, police were checking into more than 100 possible accidents throughout the state's tollway system, he said.

Which no longer makes me feel like I had been too meek and yielding before the elements. Winters been putting up a good fight these past couple weeks.

Emulsified

Both Abby's Great-Grandma and I have a weakness for Keebler's
Fudge Shoppe Fudge Sticks. It's all about wafers and creme, or at least obscene Keebler approximations thereof. For yesterday's soggy Superbowl Cathy and I each allowed ourselves one junk food indulgence. Half a bag of Fudge Sticks later and I found I hardly cared about what was going on in Miami. I had so little invested in the Bears this year (and I can't honestly say I've enjoyed a sustained curiosity in the NFL or any of its franchises in general since the Kardiac Kids lost AFC Divisional Playoff game to the Raiders in 1980) that I hardly cared that Rex was so unequivocally sucking. I liked the rain, though. I liked that it poured the entire game. I liked watching Billy Joel singing the National Anthem while sitting at a grand piano in the pouring rain. I was afraid Billy was going to get zapped, the smell of fried Joel wafting up through the downpour. I liked seeing Prince perform Purple Rain and caress his purple guitar in the pouring rain. I liked how they thought the rain was going to let up by halftime but that it kept coming down. I liked how it kept pouring and how after half a package of Fudge Sticks I was completely emulsified.

Grrr, Hillary, Grrr!

I think, for the most part, that I have a pretty good understanding of the fierce, divisive strains of partisanship running through our countries Democratic and Republican parties. I can understand how somebody might find fleeting if vicarious solace via a Limbaugh diatribe or a choir preaching Nation editorial from Katrina Vanden Heuvel. I can understand the Hillary hatred on the right and the Bush loathing on the left. What I don't understand, however, is how anybody can get revved up about reading an upcoming book like Liberal Fascism: the Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton or even begin to actually take it seriously. I find myself wondering, is the author Jonah Goldberg really, honestly making a go of equating the two? Or is this so self-evidently bombastic, so completely over the top that it'd be silly to see if as anything but ironic, Goldberg's tongue planted firmly in cheek?

Speaking of Hillary-hatred, I'm still not sure what to make of her run for president. I know one of the most common concerns on the left regarding her electability is the catalyzing powers of that Hillary-hatred. Just think of all the money the right will raise...think of those commercials that will air reminding us of her cock-sucking husband (and what will his role be in a Hillary White House--are we still getting two for one?) and the fact that she's an uppity woman who thinks she knows everything. I also know that she's made huge inroads toward defusing this animosity, reaching across the aisles and co-sponsoring legislation with notable conservatives and positioning herself as one of the leading hawks in the Senate. I know that she's had everything flung at her and is still standing. She can tap into a giant fundraising infrastructure and impressive brain trust. But a lot of that Hillary-hatred, as Goldberg's book is good evidence of, is knee jerk. It's so embedded amongst certain Republicans with deep pockets and influence that it'll launch every Swiftboat money can buy.

But whatever, I think what concerns me most is the Bush/Clinton dynasty, two families ruling the White House since 1988. If Clinton wins, these two families and their cronies will have ruled the presidential wing and its bully pulpit for over a quarter century. And as Bush II so unfortunately demonstrates, there are dangers to remaining ambivalent toward granting power through heredity.

Ethanol Will Cure Us!

Here's an interesting graph from the latest issue of the Economist. Republican states, as of the 2004 elections, consumed more electricity then Democratic states. And California consumed the least per person.

Speaking of the environment, one of the many encouraging, throw up your hands and dare to hope again phenomenons to happen when the Senate shifted to the Dems favor was Barbara Boxer taking over the chairmanship of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works from James Inhofe. Inhofe, as you probably already know, believes global warming to be "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." So-called environmentalists, according to Inhofe, are nothing but a bunch of extremists who eschew science in favor of a kind of religious fervor and fear mongering. Unfortunately, evidence accumulated by "serious scientists committed to the principles of sound science," according to Inhofe, is being suppressed or ignored due to the considerable racket being made by the extremists and their radical Hollywood agenda. Just look, for example, at how Dr. Michael Crichton's pulpy book, State of Fear, a work of fiction with copious non-fiction footnotes that sought to prove the scientific delusion behind global warming, was treated. Had it garnered more positive reviews and had our liberal media gatekeepers permitted it a seat at the table of our national debate on global warming, well, you better believe we'd have been stunned by how "environmental organizations are more focused on raising money, principally by scaring potential contributors with bogus scientific claims and predictions of global apocalypse than with 'saving the environment.'" Indeed. But is Michael Crichton really the best he can offer? It's like making Erik Estrada a police officer in Muncie, Indiana based on his experience on CHIP's.

This is the (Imhofe, not Estrada!) man who promises to filibuster any attempt by the Senate to pass a bill involving mandatory caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. And he will do it. Just today his office posted the following press release: New ACNielsen Poll: 50% of Those Polled Don't Believe Global Warming Caused by Human Activity. But Nielsen also reveals that over 30 million of us tune in to watch American Idol each Tuesday and Wednesday night.

The subtext to all of this, as Inhofe's opening statement to the Committee's hearing today titled "Senator's Perspectives on Global Warming" is unfettered capitalism and an ideological aversion to regulating industry.

While I look forward to a vigorous debate this Congress I also look forward to vigorously pointing out the lack of scientific consensus, the real economic impact, and the effects of unilateral disarmament of our economy if we enact mandatory carbon reductions in the U.S., while the rest of the world is failing to meet their goals.

Lastly, how long are folks like Inhofe going to get away with the "lack of scientific consensus" argument? I know about the folks out there who decry this idea that there's consensus on the human cause of global warming, but you usually only find them on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal or on the payroll of Exxon or BP.

Iran In Ascendance

From Anthony Shadid’s article today in the Washington Post on the ascendance of Iran, some key quotes:

"The United States is the first to be blamed for the rise of Iranian influence in the Middle East," said Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi writer and academic. "There is one thing important about the ascendance of Iran here. It does not reflect a real change in Iranian capabilities, economic or political. It's more a reflection of the failures on the part of the U.S. and its Arab allies in the region."

Added Eyal Zisser, head of the Middle Eastern and African Studies Department at Tel Aviv University in Israel: "After the whole investment in democracy in the region, the West is losing, and Iran is winning."

And this:

Iran has found itself strengthened almost by default, first with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to Iran's east, which ousted the Taliban rulers against whom it almost went to war in the 1990s, and then to its west, with the American ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, against whom it fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.

And this:

"It's very bleak and it's very dangerous," said Dakhil, the Saudi writer. "We have a sectarian civil war in Iraq now and this is drawing sectarian lines through the region. This is the most important, the most dangerous ramification of the American war in Iraq."

Finding A Better Solution

Sometimes I think I’ve got to stay away from articles like this one. Like anybody with an ounce of empathy, the reality of situations like this are incredibly troubling but since becoming a Dad I'm so sensitive to it that this kind of stuff literally tears me up.

In the largely unregulated world of international adoptions, these programs often lead to happily-ever-after, but sometimes end painfully. Ukraine and Russia place formidable obstacles in the path of parents, among them inaccurate information about children’s availability and health status. Multiple families can wind up competing for the same child. And children themselves know they are auditioning for what the industry calls their “forever families.” Then there is an entrenched system of favors — requests for cash or gifts from facilitators, translators, judges and others who handle the mechanics of adoption overseas.

Conditions in both countries have grown so unsettled, some agencies have suspended hosting programs, and the debate is growing about the ratio of risk to reward. Do the many success stories for older orphans make up for the heartbreak when adoption is thwarted?

The Prozzos had been deceived before by an intermediary who showed them a photograph of an adorable child they later learned was not available. So their guard was up before Alona’s visit in December.

“We won’t let this child call us ‘mama’ or ‘papa’ because we aren’t,” Mr. Prozzo said. But Alona’s visit had barely begun when she jumped into his outstretched arms and called him “papa.”

“Now what?” Mr. Prozzo said, melting. “Now what?”

Prejudice Probably

I’m pretty sure the latest film adaptation of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice didn’t really have all the magic it seemed to cast on me when I watched it a few nights ago- more likely that I was, for whatever reason, nicely primed to receive its goods, no matter how warmed over. Definitely, having Donald Sutherland as the doting, misty-eyed Bennet patriarch was perfect. And I’m more then happy to admit to being smitten by the flakes of occasional thespian-like radiance Kiera Knightly has been sprinkling around since Bend it Like Beckham, but I ‘dunno. There was the occasional glide of the camera. The opening ball-sequence especially, where Bennets meet Bingley and where Elizabeth first meets Darcy. For most of this roughly 10-minute sequence the camera is completely inconspicuous, dutifully framing the narrative without fuss. But then, the narrative tensions nicely coaxed into motion, it cuts loose with a great montage of blooming allegorical swoons and striking angles blatant enough to draw you out of the picture and into its technique before the camera catches itself and shuffles back into hiding behind the story. At least that’s how it felt seeing it the first time and I doubt I’ll feel compelled to check it out again. But its funny how these little moments, especially one so early on, can wake you up to a films possibilities. Additionally, Deborah Moggach’s screenplay offers numerous bouquets of finely tuned and turned phrases that gain the additional advantage of being spoken with English accents, at least two of which (Sutherlands and Jena Malone) are faked. So there's a lot to like about the film, for sure. What I can't untangle is whether it's my prejudice or my pride that's keeping me from entirely giving myself over to the warm gush of its charms.

Birthday Cupcake

This is as obligatory as it is necessary.

Happy New Year!

1

Happy Birthday, Abby! As if everything beautiful I had ever experienced in my life was simply a prelude to you. We love you madly.

Merry Christmas, James

A sad way to start our Christmas morning. Truly the Godfather of Soul and the Master of Funk. When I bought my first James Brown album the man working the counter of the record store rang a special funk bell that chimed throughout the store. "Gotta ring the funk bell," he told me.

ATLANTA -- James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured "Godfather of Soul," whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died early Monday, his agent said. He was 73.

Christmas Wrapping

I’m envious of the Amazon gifts that arrived the other day. They’re so perfectly wrapped- so taut and crisp. And inspiring. I want to wrap like that. But I wrap like a 5 year old. My folds start convincingly enough only to lose their delicate symmetry when I bring them together. Tape is amply employed but this seems only to make matters worse. The end result looks rumpled and hungover.

We’re off to Naperville to spend Christmas with Cathy’s family. 48 people coming over tomorrow and more then a third of them under the age of 7 with at least two of them younger then Abby. Here’s a picture of the peanut decked out in Santa garb picked out my her Grammy Lou and looking typically impish. Merry Christmas!

Libraries Are Doing It For Themselves

This past semester I was happy to read about an exciting, nascent movement afoot in the library world called Library 2.0. There isn’t a succinct definition for it (it’s been called a “collective of ideas”) but as Michael Stephens, who writes about Library 2.0 issues on his blog, TametheWeb, nicely put it:

Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. Examples of where to start include blogs, gaming nights for teens, and collaborative photo sites. The basic drive is to get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives…to make the library a destination and not an afterthought.

So, given the caveat that Library 2.0 is a nebulous term and that I only first came to know about it in September, I've come to understand it as a set of tools, most of them revolving around social technologies, that bring libraries into a much needed alignment with the kinds of Web applications and services most of its patrons are already using and benefiting from everyday. Of course, those advocating for Library 2.0 the most are always quick to jump in and say that it’s about more then just technology, that it’s an attitude or readjustment in the library world, one that’s attempting to move the profession away from stagnant traditionalist ways of thinking and toward fresh new ideas. That relevancy thing-- it's something that creeps up in all my classes, right after we discuss how libraries are in crisis.

One of the impediments to integrating these new attitudes according to Library 2.0 advocates, especially at the technological level, are library vendors, those companies who provide stuff like the databases and on-line subscription services. John Blyberg, probably my favorite of the small, committed band of Library 2.0 apostles, wrote that these vendors “literally determine what we can and cannot do with our systems.” Vendors and their services are, according to Blyberg, too slow, too patronizing and too prohibitive. They don’t make it easy for libraries to get into the guts of their systems, screw around with them and adopt them to their current needs. Instead, too many libraries sit around waiting and hoping that the vendors will eventually respond.

That being said, some libraries, frustrated by the limitations and high costs of commercial vendors, are taking matters into their own hands.

About three years ago, the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) looked for a new integrated library system (ILS) to serve its large consortial group of libraries across the state and found its needs frustrated by the commercial ILS market. This September 5, it debuted a new library system and catalog. Evergreen was developed by a small in-house team using open source technologies, at significantly lower cost than the commercial options that were available. This strategy has proven dramatically more flexible in meeting the needs of GPLS, and the new system has been welcomed by librarians and patrons alike.

But best of all, this:

Among Evergreen’s characteristics is spell-checking of search terms with suggested alternates, much like Google’s suggestions when you misspell a word.

Catalog spell-checking, where have you been all my life?

(Thanks to Joe for the link to the Library Journal article.)

Cassa Dei Bambini

My siblings and I were all products of Montessori schooling. At least for a year or two before beginning kindergarten. I don’t remember much about my own Montessori experience other then performing “I’m a Little Teapot” (I particularly recall the joy of singing and pantomiming “tip me over and pour me out!”) and “Frere Jacques” with great verve. I was reminded of all this tonight when a guest in my library management class told us that she believed the way she learns was hardwired by her own early childhood Montessori experience. The Montessori method has been around for a while though I know little about it other then the basics that it eschews the more traditional measurements of achievement in favor of allowing children to explore and learn individually at their own speed. The teachers are there, I suppose, to watch, learn and accommodate each child’s separate learning/exploring path. Right? Oh, I wish I had more time to read. Surely modern educators have studied the Montessori method and come up with some interesting findings concerning its validity, no?

The semester is almost over. One more assignment due next Wednesday that will have me under its cloud most of this weekend. After that we can concentrate on ‘o tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. This will probably include Baileys on the rocks. It definitely will. Oh, yes. It’s been a very busy time for both Cathy and I over the last few months and we’re both looking forward to slowing things down and enjoying Abby’s last couple weeks of nought.

Troy Smith Just Won the Heisman

I was not a fair-weather fan this season. This afternoon made it all worth it. Very nice.

Kicked to the Curb

As one of the 13.3 percent of the city that actually participates in the city’s crummy blue bag recycling program (if only out of principle), it’s great news to hear that Daley is finally considering throwing in the towel and moving to curbside bins. Of course, there’s always this:

Late Tuesday, the mayor's office again sought to insert some wiggle room, saying through a spokesman that officials will review the pilot program before determining whether to roll the blue carts out citywide. But the mayor's comments just hours earlier showed he was finally giving up on a program he had so ardently defended.

This pilot program that will be under review is actually an expansion of an existing program in the Beverly ward, where participation rates were 80 percent. The city will now try curbside pickup in seven wards and continue to review, one supposes, how much better it works.

Anyway, particularly exciting is the fact that the curbside pick up is single-stream, meaning all recyclables will go into a single container. With the current blue bag program you have to separate paper from plastic and glass which, for some reason, Cathy and I continue to observe though both bags will, inevitably, be torn apart by the sweep and slide compactors found on most garbage trucks.

Just Like Mom Made

Cathy and I thought this is a great idea:

If you’re already having pumpkin-pie nightmares and sweet-potato panic attacks, hand dessert duty over to Flourish Bakery’s Family Traditions Recipe Support. Though you could order right off their menu (the carrot cake is delish), they are also happy to make your Grandma Ebbie’s chocolate pudding cake or Mom’s famous lemon bars. All you have to do is provide Flourish with thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe recipe (or a rough approximation if you can’t read Nana’s handwriting). Their pastry chefs do the rest.

I'm still holding out for Flourish to really wow me, but this is a very cool-- I hope people actually do bring in archaic recipes for their consideration.

Old Content

I know, it's time for a new video, but bare with me as I test this new fangled Youtube/Blogger synergy.

The Lefty Frizzell anthology I picked up a couple years ago has turned out to be one of my favorites. Besides being my introduction to Frizzell’s unimpeachable style of honky-tonk, it also serves as one of the best reasons yet for my headlong crush on country music. One of the great lateral pleasures to come out of my Lefty love was the discovery that Willie Nelson recorded a tribute to Frizzell back in 1975. Nelson cut an album of Frizzell covers just months before Frizzell’s unlucky passing (he was 47, died of a stroke) that same year. Not wanting to look like he was taking advantage of his death, Nelson held off from releasing the album until 1977. Frizzell’s own sublime barroom swing and twang is beautifully distilled into Willie’s own sweet-tempered saunter. I’ve listened to it twice tonight—its mellow mood a perfect accompaniment to my own. Even better, it’s mood has subtly altered own. Perfect mid-October music.

The Language of Flowers

Ed Valauskas, the curator of rare books at the Chicago Botanic Gardens and current holder of the Follett Chair at Dominican, gave a great talk in my Digital Libraries class this morning. It lagely focused on how the Garden went about digitizing and marketing their many rare volumes, one of which was a small book that described the language of flowers. In Victorian Europe it was very popular to send a message in the form of a flower bouquet. Upon receiving your boquet you'd fetch your language of flowers book and decode it. Here's an extensive decoder.

Why not send the love of your life some Syrian Mallow and your mom a handful of moss? If you're with enemy, don't hesitate to send them a Wild Licorice and Tansy smackdown!

But I Don't Want To Write A Paper

Oh, the hilarity! You know you want to make one.

Musings

I’m glad Cat Power sobered up. The song that quite possibly has meant the most to me so far this year is The Greatest, the first cut on her album of the same name. I first heard it late last December, just before Abby was born. It surprised me, the first time I heard it, lush with Moon River strings and cottony smooth Teenie Hodges soul.

Abby is talking. Or mimicking. Probably both. Words are coming out of her mouth anyway. “Daddy” last Monday. “Dora” last Wednesday. “Grandpa” on Thursday. Then nothing quite so crisp and intelligible for the past week. She's letting her teeth grow. And she’s moving. Insatiable needs to climb legs, roll, tumble and climb again. She sees many things that she must, absolutely must, get a hold of and she zeroes in on them with great singular purpose if not an accompanying patience. And she’s dancing now, too-- with an excited wiggle whenever the rhythm catches her.

If I were to write an autobiography, this particular chapter of my life would be titled: “Crushed Cheerios Underfoot.”

In one of her New Yorker reviews Pauline Kael called a film (and I can't seem to find or recall just what film this was) "pleasantly bananas.” That’s exactly what I thought of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz when when I managed to check it out (Comcast On Demand, under “Free Movies,” offers a healthy dose of old classics, crap and Hollywood curiosities such as this one) a couple weeks ago during Abby’s morning and afternoon naps. It was completely, pleasantly bananas. It ends with its protagonist (Roy Schneider, just a few years post-Jaws) performing a deathbed musical with Ben Vereen (just a few years post-Roots) as the MC. Hollywood didn’t make another musical as completely and pleasantly bananas until Moulin Rouge 20 years later.

I adore a lot of vocalists who’ve multi-tracked their voices. But none of them has so consistently emotionally walloped me over the years like Marvin Gaye’s multi-tracked vocal masterpiece, What’s Goin’ On. It’s my favorite vocal performance of all time. In fact, when the Motown marketers or the Gaye estate are planning the next reissue it should be requisite that an a cappella version of the entire album be included. This way we can luxuriate in his heartbroken doo-wop meditation. I think the party chatter that begins the album is still one of the coziest, funkiest and downright coolest slices of introductory ambience ever committed to magnetic tape.

It’s hard not to care when Ohio State finally has a great quarterback in Troy Smith. And is ranked #1. I usually don’t care at all this early in the season. I am truly a fare weathered Buckeye fan. While reading for school last Saturday I found myself moving incrementally—from checking in on the score via Yahoo to feverishly watching most of the third and then all of the fourth quarter on TV. At the beginning of the fourth quarter Troy Smith had one of those plays that cause excitable, tension prone viewers like myself to spontaneously uncoil from our chairs and leap into the air while manically pumping fists in the air and shouting boasts and brags. Here’s how Joe Drape described it in last Sundays NYT’s:

Smith, who came into the game as the nation’s third-most efficient passer and had not thrown an interception in 152 attempts, was struggling as the Nittany Lions’ defensive backs consistently bumped Ginn and company out of their routes.

Two minutes into the fourth quarter, on second down and 9 on the Penn State 37-yard line, Smith dropped back to pass and immediately felt pressure. He rolled right, and then did what Ohio State Coach Jim Tressel tells him never to do: he reversed field.

Suddenly, Smith was on his own 47-yard line.

“The first read wasn’t there,” he said. “I tried to come back and look to the other side of the field, but it was kind of clogged and crowded, and I just tried to improvise and keep things going. The Penn State defender was making ground on me.”

Robiskie, a sophomore and the least heralded member of the Buckeyes’ receiving corps, had run a hitch route to the sideline and recognized Smith was in trouble.

“I just wanted to work to get open because I know he can always make a play,” Robiskie said of Smith.

As Robiskie angled to the middle of the field, Smith launched a rocket. The ball split Penn State defensive backs Tony Davis and Anthony Scirrotto, hit Robiskie in the shoulder pads and carried him into the end zone.

“Smith made a super play,” Paterno said. “You can’t give up big plays in a game like this.”

Troy Smith, who was 5 years old when I was a Buckeye freshman.

Digital Libraries

One of the benefits of taking a class in a computer lab is that I can toss interesting links my professor shares with us into my blog to take a gander at later. My understanding of digitizing issues, especially as they apply to libraries, is minimal at best, so any chance to expand my understanding is a good thing. Maybe you're interested too?

Sensemaking

Center For the Study of Digial Libraries

Scrolling Forward

Information Ecologies

Open Content Alliance

Boogie Music Time, 11:57

I’ve been slowly dilly-dallying and tidying about on the follow up to my last self-released album, Bomba Charger, for almost 5 years now. I never intended on it taking so long. It’s been recorded in dollops, a scattering of evenings here, a sad Sunday afternoon there. I did it the Quaker way and recorded only when the spirit moved me, an animating force that I reckon would look a lot like this.

I began recording new tracks for it in January of 2002, back when Cathy and I had been living in Berkeley for about 5 months and we used some holiday financial largesse to purchase Pro Tools in the form of a Digi 002. Pro Tools, for those who don’t know, is one of the most popular and widely used pieces of music production gear around. Chances are that any music you’re hearing these days has been recorded, edited and/or mixed using Pro Tools. I have one of their home versions. So, in any case, by the time we moved back to Chicago in February of 2004 I had accumulated roughly 45 songs in various states of maximalist disarray, most constructed using the sounds found on my trusty Yamaha CS1x, or sounds I fed to my equally steadfast Akai S20 sampler. Most were in need of some heavy tailoring.

And I’m close to finishing it now. But there’s still editing aplenty- and I’m still hoping to rope Dennis into a few more vocal bull-sessions- and then there's the frequently distracting addition of Reason to my arsenal-in addition to school, Abby and other bits of deliciousness vying for my time- all of which means that, realistically, I’ll probably have the whole thing completed and in folks hands by late Winter, early Spring of next year. Really.

Here’s why. Reason. Love it. Can’t wait to start jacking the beats, tweaking acid runs and dropping low frequency oscillations. And a bed of sequenced samples whispering in the breeze. It’s been my crush a long time now. Ever since Blue Monday on WMMS and my walkman. It’s time to boogie with the soul of the new machine.

Why Isn't the Pentagon Reporting The Good News?

From today's Washington Post:

Rising sectarian bloodshed has pushed violence in Iraq to its highest level in more than two years, and preventing civil war is now the most urgent mission of the growing contingent of 140,000 U.S. troops in the country, according to a new Pentagon report released yesterday.

But why aren't they reporting the good news?

No, wait! George is hot on the trail of some much better news! Things could be far worse, you know, and it's not really quite a civil war. Just bloody ups and downs. We just need to buck up and sacrifice more of that deficit spending and some soldiers lives before all will be made whole again. Otherwise Iraqi terrorists, who hate freedom, might kill your children.

One positive thing I've seen of late is that some polls are beginning to show, at long last, a slim majority of the public beginning to view Iraq as separate from the war on terror. Over the next two months, the administration and its lackies will be doing all they can to subdue that skepticism.

Back to school tomorrow. I went out and got all my supplies today. Very curious to see what we’ll be using all those Ziploc storage bags for!

One class will be held at the Harold Washington Library and the other will be at Dominican proper in River Forest. Like most things these days, heading back to school snuck up on me. My parents were here this weekend and I found myself having several conversations about Thanksgiving plans. We discussed turducken, which contrary to popular belief, wasn’t invented by the supremely avuncular John Madden. Where did August go? Where did the summer go? It seems only natural that having a child would cause time to pass with even greater rapidity. How is Abby already 8 months old tomorrow?

Mama

Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s current Minister of Culture, recorded his album 1971 that very year while living in exile in London. I’ve only given a couple close listens to the album (I wish I had more time for close listens. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate during commutes to and from River Forest for school are the opportunities they give me to closely listen to a couple albums) so I’m still connecting and familiarizing myself to the songs (his cover of Windwood’s Can’t Find My Way Home is nice standout) but I’m really enjoying the supremely relaxed feel of many of its cuts. The track, Mama, for example, is a gorgeously breezy ballad that, like the rest of the album, comes soaked in a warm bath of silky reverb and casually saunters barefoot under a late August moon while Gil strums his acoustic (accompanied by the subtle bass playing and backing vocals of Chris Bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifonett) and laments Mama’s (Brazils?) desire to hold him too close to her apron strings. How else to read lines like, “I wanna kiss your face again/Am gonna go my way, mamma/ Don’t worry, don’t cry, don’t complain/Don’t try to hold me down”?

I wish I knew more about the specifics of the anti-government hi-jinx Gil and Velosa were up to that originally got them thrown in jail and eventually led to their exile. What little I do know about the military’s rule of Brazil from 1964 to 1985 was that there were, at least in the late 60’s and early 70’s, many within the military, especially during the time of Brazil's enormous economic expansion, who believed they had to strongly curtail any cultural/populist sentiment that questioned their authority. This included torture, disappearing and indiscriminate arrests. I’m guessing that they saw in Gil and Velosa, already hugely popular Brazilian pop stars, a couple of cocky upstarts who were not so covertly looking to subvert the authoritarian rule they found themselves and their music living under.

You can listen to every single one of Gil’s albums here on his amazing website.

How Is It I Extract Strength From the Beef I Eat?

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself back when I first read it for a class I was taking in the mid-90’s. I’m currently reading Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems and it’s 17th. After each poem (Song of Myself, at 1,346 lines and 52 sections, is excerpted) Paglia offers clear and engaging insight into the poems meaning all but neutered of her patented Italian grade of high octane, exuberantly combative prose. There are no gems like “Women’s latent vampirism is not a social aberration but a development of her maternal function, for which nature has equipped her with tiresome thoroughness” or “In film, popular music, and commercials, we contemplate all the daemonic myths and sexual stereotypes of paganism that reform movements from Christianity to feminism have never been able to eradicate” as found in the archly playful introduction of her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In fact, there’s a refreshing pedagogic simplicity to her brief essays- they’re primers or refreshers (most of the 43 poems found here include numerous heavy hitters from the Western canon and, as such, have been anthologized out the wazoo) , introducing or reminding us of the poems merits. About Leaves of Grass she asserts that one of its central themes is “not war or moral struggle but expansion of consciousness. ‘I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass': like Wordsworth rejoicing in a field of wild daffodils, Whitman finds meaning in the random and commonplace.” And it’s in the poems many odes to the commonplace and its potential for consciousness raising that he gives us gems like this:

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stop for me,
I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good
time;
You should have been with us that day around the chowder-kettle.

or this physiological question,

Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

or this orgasmic couplet

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

The key words being “upward” and “juice.”

Photo taken from Walt Whitman Archive

American Movie: An American Folk Art

I’m just now beginning to edit together on iMovie some of the footage I took with our digital recorder last summer in Hilton (Yes, but does it have enough arch support?) Head. When my Mom turned 60 back in January of 2005 she had already made it known that what she wanted most was for all her children and their families to stay under one roof for a week on Hilton Head. My parents had owned a place there for over a decade, a cozy two floor condo with a late 70’s vibe and conveniently located across the street from the beach, before recently selling it and buying another, with a better view of the Atlantic, in the warmer climates of Tarpon Springs, Florida. Over those 10 years their condo in Hilton Head had served as the hub of numerous Breitenbach vacations, though the last time we had all been together, the last time we had all spent a week heading out to the beach or pool together for lazy afternoons and out to dinners in humidity swamped evenings was in the summer of 2002 when we all came together to celebrate my Dad’s own 60th.

So I filmed about 50 minutes of footage last summer- Cathy and I packing, my nieces and nephews playing in the pool, all of us singing Happy Birthday, a sunrise, sand castle building on the beach. I’m not too good at premeditating what I’m going to shoot or why, though I’d like to be. I’m still learning how to keep the camera near and how to reflexively take it up and begin filming. I’m learning about how cameras can steal the spirit of some and bring out the rascal in others. I’ve got a lot to learn. But mostly I’m still enthralled by how what ultimately is filmed, edited or not, can accumulate a kind of mythic resonance within families and become part of family folklore.

So, given that I’m prone to thinking about such things, I was especially excited to see that Joe had a link on his blog a couple months ago to Folkstreams.net, a site whose mission includes building a “national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures” and “to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet.” And not just that! When browsing through their catalog of subjects, under the heading "Arts and Crafts Traditional" I found a link to the 19 minute documentary “Home Movie: An American Folk Art,” made in 1975 for a Smithsonian Institute festival. The filmmakers (Ernst Edward Star and Steven Zeitlin, then graduate students) had put out a call to the public to send them their home movies and photographs with the goal of then studying and editing them into Home Movie. According to the documentaries accompanying blurb, after sifting through all these family movies and photographs, Star and Zeitlin “began to see that, just as certain categories of stories recur from family to family, certain kinds of images recur in home movie archives. Scenes of holiday celebrations, birthdays, picnics, and vacations dominate these collections, and children, from infancy through high school graduation, at the mercy of their parents, are favorite subjects for the home photographer.”

The documentary itself is priceless. Not simply because the filmmakers interests helped to give my own inchoate fascinations with this subject some glimmers of coherence but because the documentary itself, now over 30 years old, has taken on and accumulated its own patina of funky nostalgia. Watching the documentaries first few minutes, where one of the filmmakers (Zeitlin, I’m guessing) appears sitting next to a projector dressed in what now radiates a kind of grad student geek chic and soulfully, earnestly pontificates (he seems to be reading directly from his thesis) about what lies at the heart of our need to record these moments, these holidays, birthdays and vacations, I was struck by how much it resembled a scene or an outtake from a Wes Anderson film. I thought, if Wes Anderson is one of the current masters of mining a very specific kind of Americana quirky, then this introduction was one of his templates. I also really liked what Zeitlin was saying. Speaking about what makes home movies a “unique folk art” he expounds that,

…where the art comes into it is in the act of selection. Why, for instance, did my parents film that particular scene? I figured out that I must have spent close to 150,000 hours at home before I went to college. How many of them could have been spent playing in the pool?

Clearly homes movies are not a random sample of our past but an idealization based on how we chose to preserve, remember and be remembered. From one perspective, home movies reflect the ideals of a particular family. For my parents, it was their home, their kids, their puppies, their little yellow pool with the 4 horses on it. It was what was distinctive and what was memorable about their own family that they sought to preserve on that sunny afternoon. I watched hundreds of home movies and saw hundreds of water sprinklers and planted pools. I began to realize that on another level, homes movies are an American tradition and as such they tell us something about American values and ideas. In that simple scene of youthful parents, happy children and a backyard swimming pool we catch a glimpse of an American dream.

What follows is a montage of scenes demonstrating this American dream—of children mostly-- children running through snow, jumping in leaves, playing on beaches, taking baths, newborns wrapped in swaddling, having birthday parties, enjoying Christmas morning, dancing-- all accompanied by a delicately mournful Eric Satie piece for piano. Theres a strong whiff of melancholy to it, these seemingly random moments that have been conferred a special kind of meaning simply because they were privileged with having been filmed. Soon our graduate friend Zeitlin returns to get all elysian and informs us that home movies are endowed with, in fact, a third and “universal level” of values depicted in home movies, the first two being the values “important to individual families” and “America as a whole. “ But what are these so-called universal values? Thankfully, Zeitlin throws it down for us:

By attempting to preserve that which is most beautiful to his life, the home movie maker might be seen as partaking in what seems to be a universal desire to create a golden age. From Shangri-La to Eden man has always needed visions of peace and harmony to guide him through the inevitable complexities of his present world. The home movie maker may be no more aware of the fact that he is filming a golden age then Adam and Eve were that they were living in paradise. But to an individual family, the world depicted in home movies might serve as their own golden age.

For the remainder of the documentary, Zeitlin and Star visit members of three of the families who had responded to their open call for footage and have them provide commentary as they watch their home movies together, a precursor to the director/actor commentary now found on so many DVDs. The filmmakers don’t ask too many questions that would support their thesis of home movies being conduits for a lost golden age, choosing instead to let the families randomly enthuse about how somebody always sits in the sun in just such a way, and how this or that uncle still has the same hairstyle 20 years later and how it hardly seems like a decade has passed since that wedding. birthday or graduation.

Now that simple editing software comes bundled with home computers, I’m interested in how many people are using these tools to construct narratives out of the more or less random footage they’ve taken. How do you create an additional layer of meaning or thematic structure to this footage and make it something more then a collection of disparate shots? How do you arrange it in such a way, edit it, so that it tells an engaging story? It's time for some new folklorists to step up and make a documentary about how children of the digital age and their parents have and will continue to create folk art by what they select to film and, more importantly, what and how they chose to edit.

My friend Julie told me yesterday afternoon that her daughters love to watch footage of themselves taken over the years. “It’s like a Disney movie for them,” she said, “you just put it on and their happy as can be.” And I find myself wondering how these movies and their repetitive viewings of them help (or hidner?) to shape memories and identities. How will they come to know themselves, their childhood, through these videos? How does video, as film critic Jonathan Romney once wrote, become a “prosthesis for human memory?” How rich and strange to think of the multitude of raw footage taken of their lives they’ll have to look back on when I compare it to my own archive of footage-- a fleeting 2 or so hours of super-8 my Dad filmed from roughly the late 60’s to the late 70’s. Footage, I might add, that languished for almost 20 years in various closets and attic crawl spaces before my Mom had them converted to DVD.

Ross McElwee, whose work I love, is probably the foremost purveyor of this personalized cinema verite I find myself so interested in. He’s certainly one of its most eloquent elucidators. A few years back when Cineaste interviewed him he had this to say:

McElwee: I think it’s going to be very interesting, by the way, to see what happens with this digital generation of parents who have recorded their kids’ every footstep. People were shooting a fair amount of super-8 film in the Sixties and Seventies. But it was expensive and difficult to load, and editing it was extremely time-consuming. Most people didn’t edit their footage; most footage was not viewed more than once. Digital video, or video in general enables parents to keep a constant record of a family as it grows up. So that very question you raised- “Am I remembering this correctly?”- needn’t be an issue. People can just go back to the data bank and see exactly how little Jimmy spooned his peas into his mouth at age four. There’ll be a record of it. And how strange is that?

How strange is that?

Cheney In Undisclosed Location Growling

This paragraph from an article in yesternays NYT's concerning Thursday's 5-3 Supreme Court ruling on tribunals caught my eye:

In the courtroom on Thursday, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year old Justice Stevens, winner of the Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer in World War II.

First, what a relief this ruling was. This was the last chance to reign in one of the more odious and inhumane elements of Cheney's runaway executive power grab and, thankfully, Kennedy swung with the more loveable bloc of justices because, obviously, you know where Roberts would have sat had he not recused himself because of his ruling in favor of the administration on the appellate panal last July. The above quote is one big old dollop of vicarious, well deserved comeuppance.

Second, Stevens is 86. He was born in 1920 (in Chicago) and if you're the praying kind I'd imagine you'd want to put in a request to the almighty, whoever that may be, to keep him blooming until there's a change in the political winds.

Thirdly, as if we didn't already know, Roberts and Alito will be joining Thomas and Scalia as card carrying members of the less lovable bloc of justices. Kennedy, more often then not, bears their stench and yet, partisan as this court is (and can we simply drop the pretense that the Supremes are or ever have been impartial arbiters of justice), his infrequent deviations may be the only favorable rulings we get for many years to come.

Lastly, yes, it really is 4:30 in the morning. Sleep training y'all. Sleep training, crying and adrenaline. Are there studies on this-- there's gotta be. That little peanut's cry affects me something fierce.