King Crimson

Well I was going to try and be more diligent and/or ambitious about posting this year but winter in B'ham is a time for hibernation, despite the record warmth. What's this got to do with King Crimson you say? Who knows, other than I've been enjoying this phase of the band (Discipline, Beat) lately. Also Sara Tavares. Yum.

Happy New Year!

It's been a bit of a hiatus, but good to be back in the saddle. I'm working on a brief review of John LeCarre's newest novel "A Most Wanted Man," that may appear here soon, but in the meantime just wanted to share a line or two. I was at a pre-Christmas party of very mixed company (young/old; liberal/conservative), my favorite kind of party actually, and someone mentioned that they had read Palin's book and thought it very "elegantly" written. Of course the book was ghostwritten so that credit (if it's true -- haven't read the book and won't) would go to the ghostwriter. But diving once again into "I Claudius" I came across this very appropriate line on the first page: "My readers must not therefore be surprised at my practised writing style: it is indeed Claudius himself who is writing this book, and no mere secretary of his, and not one of those official annalists either, to whom public men are in the habit of communicating their recollections, in the hope that elegant writing will eke out the meagerness of subject matter and flattery soften vices."

To that, in the context of Sarah Palin I will raise my glass. And also to a year that will hopefully forget her.

A Universal History of Infamy

After browsing my home book shelves this morning and slipping out a thin volume entitled "A Universal History of Infamy" by Borges I began paging through it. While everywhere there were depictions of scoundrels and murderers, I was never able to re-locate the page I had just read, a device that Borges himself used in his story "A Book of Sand." I suddenly realized that the only way such a slim volume could actually hold a Universal history of infamy, which I took to include past and future, would be if the volume contained a near infinite number of pages, which would make for a very unwieldy book indeed. Borges solved this problem by allowing pages to appear and disappear at random, thus allowing a near infinite coverage while keeping the volume slim. Just another of his great fictional devices.

Riff off Tanikawa

One hundred black coots
bobbing on silver water this morning

and i hear the sound of blood in my ears.
Tanikawa says poetry is none other than blood;

blood then is nothing but wind, and wind
our lost voices returning.

One hundred black coots bobbing
on silver water and the sound of wind

in my ears.

Nicolas Cage's Movie Choices

There is a reason the talented actor Nicolas Cage has taken such stupid roles in such stupid movies over the past few years. Apparently he's broke. According to CNN: "Nicolas Cage brought about his own financial ruin with a spending spree that included two castles, 15 palatial homes, a flotilla of yachts and a squadron of Rolls Royces." Poor baby.

Siegal/Schwall Memories

When I was growing up in Chicago and Oak Park one of the most popular blues bands was the Siegal/Schwall band, a band we lived out many high school concerts with. Corky Siegal of course went on to some notoriety while Jim Schwall, who played a beautiful miked acoustic Gibson, disappeared. It was with great pleasure that I found this re-union at one of our neighborhood clubs, Fitzgeralds, also featuring the great Sammy Lay (luv those glasses!). Enjoy.

Or, Well, What?

I still find myself intrigued and disturbed by 1984, and have dog-eared so many pages (it's a library book - my bad!) that I'm going to buy a copy. The text has cast a filter on my news consumption (and even sports viewing!) lately, and in light of the apparent continuation of our "little" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq I'll share this quote:

"Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this is by continual warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence in the long run, too intelligent. (I'm not sure about that -- fat and complacent might be more like it.) Even when weapons are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed." Are we on the path of continuous warfare? And let's not forget that we are the largest weapons producing nation in the world, a fact that should make any sane person a subversive. Along with this continual warfare is all the pomp and jingoism and choreographed mourning for the killed soldiers, who gave their lives for their country. Don't bother asking why the f*ck we're over there anyway.

The other insight I picked up from 1984 was how the populace needs to be kept joyless. Anger, pain, cynicism, bullying, violence and fear are all legitimate emotions or psychological states because of their ease of manipulation. The prevalence of these negative energies, or the condition of cynicism, which is so prevalent in most media, has caused the poet Robert Hass (and many others in different ways) to state that merely "Feeling human is a useful form of political subversion."