Pride in the Name of Love

When I was 13, I walked from school along route 140 up to the train-tracks, turning down them behind a handful of nearly bankrupt businesses and those working class houses, cramped together and separated by only chain-link.

We'd sold a car to one of the auto-body shops there once, and my father paced anxiously for a week because he'd left a house key tucked behind the dome light. He always thought we were going to be burgled. We lived in the depths of the woods, 6 miles from town, and had 2 dogs. I remember once, when my mother had french doors installed in the back of the house, he told me how a good criminal would just kick them in the center where neither supported the other enough to stop a decent impact. They'd just walk around the house, drop-kick the doors in, and walk off with all of our things. I can't imagine what they've had taken, but still here we were, trying to explain to him that a bunch of mechanics at some podunk Mineke weren't bothered to come out here and try and take a TV they probably had in their own home.

Walking the tracks one day I'd seen the car sitting there in the back of the parking lot, peering over the hill. I'd snuck up to the lot and heard a few folks in the bay, quickly grabbed the key and headed out. Later that night I'd told him of what I'd done and produced the key.

He was an odd man anyway. Once, I got screamed at for a good 3 hours for leaving beard trimmings in the sink in the same week my brother was picked up by the police in the town over for several violations, one of which was trespassing. I've made the deans list, been promoted, made successful career changes, worked on successful political campaigns, and completed triathlons and marathons.

Nothing has yet to top that god damned house key.

A Review of Tom Wait's Bone Machine

Released September 8, 1992
Recorded Prairie Sun Recording, Cotati, California
Genre: Rock, Experimental
Length: 53:30
Label: Island
Producer: Tom Waits

In some ways, Waits is like Dickens or Shakespeare in that his catalogue is long enough, and large enough to have phases, style changes, and growth. In the burgeoning subcultures of artist-followings that wax and wane with the tumult of generational changes; the slothing off of the old and the induction of the new, and the cultural changes that form the prism through which we view things, albums, novels, plays, and films often see their own peaks and valleys over the coarse of time. Certain works age well, some don’t. There are innumerate factors as to why something falls out of fashion and why it comes back into favor but nothing is better than the debates about the value of these albums among the faithful. This leads me to Bone Machine.

Bone Machine is what many regard as the 1992 masterpiece of Waits, often cited as inspiration by acts (though without expression in their music) and heralded as a top 3 in the overall timeline. It also happened to be an album I never quite understood. Why its critical acclaim was so high, especially in hindsight, never jived with me. Its not to say that Bone Machine isn’t good, but, well lets start from the top…

If you’re standing at the bottom of 2010, reflecting back on a careers worth of music from Tom Waits, its hard to see how Bone Machine trumps his Big 3; The Heart of Saturday Night, Raindogs, and Mule Variations. That isn’t my opinion, that’s generally the critical worlds analysis save for those few institutions that pay their bills on contrarian’s smugness.

For one thing, its got one of the stronger consistencies of any album. The deviations on Bone Machine appear at the end, and you need to check back in with reality to make sure you haven’t immersed yourself too deeply in the album. One finds the difference of songs on albums like Bone Machine to be akin to that of the difference between bands in some tiny, “underderground” movement of a subgenre that enjoys its glory in the mouths of social renegades only to be relegated to the barging bins of ailing records stores in the far reaches of a nation, where big commercialism has yet to strangle the last vestiges of small business from the region. In short, only when it becomes all you listen to can you accurately sparse A from B.

Bone Machine also has the distinction of being a transitional record. Like Swordfishtrombones, Bone Machine stands on the cusp of an ethos redraft from the euro-centric vaudeville of the 80’s albums to the bitter and ragged Americana that came to embody the new century.

And forgetting all of this, it plays like the demo version of Mule Variations before it got cleaned up, rewritten, and had its plotlines revisited and sharpened.

At this point it probably looks like I hate the album, and think it sucks. Its understandable, but understand this is a preliminary vision, and if anything, a warning against approaching the album incorrectly. As I said at the top, albums are often reborn with new cultural understanding.

What Bone Machine does very well, and is its strongest attribute, is that it builds a world for its listener. Earlier I cited Dickens and Shakespeare, but for Bone Machine it might be more appropriate to cite Faulkner. Waits albums are often full of a cast of characters sprawling across the world; Raindogs has Sailors in Singapore, Soldiers in World War 2, and a bunch of guys hanging out in Union Square (presumably New York’s US). Heart of Saturday Night finds people in Wisconsin, San Diego, and the Moon. But Bone Machine is Faulkner because these characters are all in the same little town, if not in words, than certainly in musical accompaniment.

Where it is can be hard to tell, but as critics are want to do, we can look at the first track, “The Earth Died Screaming”, and surmise that towns might be irrelevant in the post-apocalyptic universe that these characters inhabit. And in this world, the music is lower than backwoods, in many ways its scrap yard. I use that word to help us understand, but to the characters, music might have to come from what you find laying in the rubble, organized scrap yards might be a thing of the past.

The music is coarser and darker than anything prior, and even Mule Variations only matched it in moments. The only album able to match wits (or scraping metal as it were) with Bone Machine is Real Gone, and at least that album has a map associated with it. The lumbering stomp of In the Coliseum and the coconut trot of Earth Died Screaming seem to approach the idea of on coming doom with the slow torture of wait in different capacities. It suggest that it may come on us as a mob of society agreeing we should all be slaughtered for enjoyment, or that it will greet us at our lowest, when the world seems desolate, and for no one to find our corpse.

Even when Bone Machine does manage to dust itself off and make itself presentable to polite society, it busies itself by foraging in the dark recesses behind closed doors where culture is gone, and people are the real, raw monsters that hide behind corsets and makeup, suits and toupees. On Murder in the Red Barn, Waits visits the silence of rural inclusiveness, even in the face of unspeakable horror and goes so far to relate its culture to being numb to such trivialities (“there’s nothing strange about an axe with blood stains in the barn, there’s always some killin’ you got to do around the farm”). On Going out West, it would seem our protagonist was headed for LA, but given the album, we might wonder if his overall delusions allow him to believe there was an LA left.

In each, the production is expertly woven into the plot. Every piano bench creek, blown-out speaker, and missed noted remains in, giving the album all the character flaws that come with humanity, to the elements those instruments represent.

Bone Machine, in the end, is a strong album, albeit alien in concept to the overall discography and certainly to the albums preceding it. I can’t say where I rank, in fact, many consider my ranking outright backward to begin with, but lists are for the simple-minded. If we cannot explore each element, down to the note and see how it balances with the world around it, we will lose sight of what truly matters, that we are few things more than the world we place ourselves in, and the characteristics the world places on us.

To that end, maybe we shouldn’t review Bone Machine as an album in time, but a soliloquy in an act, within a play, describing not the person but an ethos on the creation of how Waits makes his overall albums. One dark and murky rant through a rusted out megaphone, about how if we don’t all pay attention, the oceans going to swallow us up whole. Then again, there are days where that’s a blessing, and sometimes the ocean doesn’t want you that day.

Unmarked Gravestone

Kate's really into her Irish roots. I didn't really know how to take that because I've got a long history of dealing with my "Irish-ness" thats a mixed bag. Primarily, I never flaunt it too heavily for two reasons:

1. When I was a child, maybe 9, I asked my dad what my nationalities were.

"Irish, Spanish, and English"

"Yeah but we're more Irish right?"

I had yet to figure out that what I was wasn't necessarily what my parents were, or in this case specifically what my father was. To call a spade a spade, at 9 I was displaying an ignorance that surfaced as unintentional racism. What I knew of being "Spanish" was kids in separate classrooms who couldn't speak English well, and who I, not knowing any other Spanish people in my classes, wanted to distance myself from. I knew some Irish kids, they were my friends. The Spanish kids were weird, and I wanted nothing to do with them. I can still remember being in the cab of my fathers pick up and hearing the hurt in his voice.

2. The other point is identity-less assholes who find a large population here in Boston and hop on the Irish bandwagon as if it was a conversation piece. Even if it is, people here who wear it on their sleeve and tell you about it through a megaphone know very little about their heritage and it ends up being a conversation something like this...

"you irish?"

"yeah well my mom's 75% ir..."

"Fuck yeah man! me too!"

"...cool"

So for these reason and a few other minor ones, its something I've carried as an issue of pride and pain. Maybe that's the Catholic in me.

But as I've grown up and read more, I've refined who I was and moreover what I was interested in and what I should be proud of. I'll never escape the fact that I've got a name and a face like a pale, paddy fuck. Going home once in 3rd grade I remember a teacher asking if I was Irish. She told me I looked more Irish than Paddy Murphy's pig.

But in the end I'm not Irish, and I never will be. My last name isn't and neither is my father. I'd never really squared with being "American" for much of my life until recently either. For one thing, I'd never really left the country (Montreal sorta counts) and therefore I was always surrounded my other Americans. The other reason is that I always saw people touting their American heritage as a token of elitism. You know the routine. Somehow America was better than other countries because we loved freedom or something like that. I always saw America's praise-singers as people who always tried to make it worse.

But as I've grown up and had my share of debate from each side of the political spectrum, I've realized that both the Left and Right are correct: America is a deeply flawed country with a not so honorable past, and yet we're still the only place I'd ever want to be.

For whatever it is, the horrors of America are why its great. They aren't to be ignored or admonished as the aisles would tell you, but to be embraced as a true and honest heritage that all groups must journey through when they come here. They came for a dream, existed in a nightmare, and their offspring came to be born in the fire that was the United States. I saw a shirt recently that probably didn't intend to be this deep, but it summed up my feelings very succinctly.

I was in Urban Outfitters and I saw this t-shirt with a Notorious B.I.G. picture on it. It was white with a screened on photo of the man as a child, sitting in a folding chair on this fallow patch of dirt somewhere in New York (most likely Brooklyn) and all it said, scrawled over the photo, was "it was all a dream." Lord knows how that was intended but as Ian has told me countless times, authors intent was irrelevant.

I took it as the very thing I've come to experience in my time of growing in America. That this country cares very little for its new groups, and its poor and maligned. For all we compared the Soviet Union to Sparta, and the U.S. to Athens, we're still a very Spartan nation. If America teaches anyone anything its that one must pry not only his wants, but his needs from the death grip of its ruling class. Failure to unify, to move together and dream will only be met with more of the brutal same.

I wrote awhile back in Immigrant Waves about how the current immigration debate mirrors the debates we've had since the country started. I think we should recall the point where our grandfathers came to America in search of gold roads and raining money and found collapsing tenements and an infant mortality rate of nearly 20% for people of their ancestry. But for the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, Jews, and Middle Easterners, the Nation has come to be far more welcoming. Need not Apply Signs, Sacco & Vanzetti, Phrenology, and even Jim Crow are now a memory we've crushed beneath the bootheels of progress on the March.

America dances with a double-edged sword. Our freedom and fear of Tyranny makes anything here possible. That's part of the "it was all a dream" portion of the t-shirt. But in our insistence, we often leaves those who are new to fend for themselves. In some respects, its a hazing ritual that would be barbaric if we were more selective in its application. In others its the realization that the dream is pragmatic, and like so many scholars before us, we realized that a Utopia is not a lack of need but a lack of must. Where options prevail, where freedom is always hunted, progress cannot be stopped. I think when people show up here, and move past the idea that we're the promised land, it becomes everything they ever wanted, if not everything they ever dreamed.

To all our new brothers still chasing the Fairytales of America, I hope that you come to find America everything we've all found here eventually ourselves.

God Bless,
The Brow

Never go to D.C. before you’re elected.

As someone who sits a good 6 to 8 hours outside of the beltway, I listen to some of the gut-check predictions taking place down there, and I can’t help but wonder how much their all drinking down there.

Today’s politico is reporting that the Democratic Majority in the House, and possibly the Senate, is toast. Where? By what force? I get the idea that insiders have allowed their own instincts to congeal into facts, but just because the politically savvy believe the Tea Party Movement is Republican support, doesn’t mean they actually are. Like all internal movements, they are fully prepared to depose their own “leaders” for corruption. Big Government Spending is part of the narrative for Democrats, the Tea Party feels it has become so too for the Republicans – this is what they are looking to change.

Say what you will about optics but here’s how the Mid-Terms should be scored.

Republicans are on the comeback trail, or at least on course correction, if the following happens:

1. Michele Bachman keeps her seat.
2. Rubio wins Florida’s Senate seat.
3. Angle takes Nevada.
4. Boxer loses California (this is not a high hurdle)
5. Ensign/Vitter manages to hold on.

Everything else can boil down to normality outside of the Presidential Fervor. The Democrats were lucky to grab some of the seats they did in 2008. We can’t assume, for an example, that many of these states and seats will go blue forever.

Can Republicans unseat Democratic Leadership? Its looking like a tough sell in the Senate and only in the House if they pick up 39 seats. (I don’t think anyone assumes they can unseat Pelosi).

If you want my political 45 cents, Obama is letting the Congress hang out to dry. Show them as a do-nothing group and retake 2012. He keeps citing Reagan, but this is a move straight out of the Tip O’Neill playbook. Allow the economy to be the Republican’s again and savage them for a second time. It’s a big gamble, we’ll see how it turns out.

Pop

I’ve been told that my musical taste is eclectic bordering on indiscriminate. In seemingly unrelated news, I’ve also been told I’m very hard to watch movies, television shows, or listen to the radio with. The inference in tone and fits proximity to my own statements suggest its because I’m highly critical of most everything to do with art. I refute nothing.

Having said that it might be slightly vexing to know that I not only listen to pop music, but enjoy it to a large degree and will often prefer it to music I generally own. This audience isn’t something I’ve procured through romantic entanglement or occupational hazard.

I’d once known a man who claimed that Xanax was like a “reset button” for life. Similarly, I find pop music a sort of respite for a critical mind, which is no disparaging commentary but rather a compliment to its clear philosophical vision; The veritable post-wine cracker at the tasting. Where many make the mistake of seeing compliment become insult is in believing that there is no virtue in striving for simple goals (which much of pop most certainly does) and that without risk, music can’t simply be worth the listen.

While a good deal of the flack is given for the genres fan base, this is more of a lesson in psychology and sociology which no one has neither the time to listen, nor the patience to put up with my lecturing. While its certainly a large and valid topic, for the purposes of explaining myself, lets suffice with the idea that any disgruntled attitude toward anyone who listens to the music has no bearing on, nor should be calculated into the worth of the genre.

But just as in life where we cannot all be chemical engineers, neither, too, can all music push the very bounds of what is collective commonplace in the world of Western Popular Music. The tiny gears of the world are as vital to the machine as the engine or the fuel, and any value found in one or the other is nothing more than rationalization created to suit ones own vision of the economy of things.

At this point it might be hard to discern how this is a favorable comment (or how it was intended to be) at all. It has to do with, I suppose, my own vision of how things ought to be. Do we view music as a finished masterpiece to be reviewed plainly without the assumption changes were possible? A sort of divined and unwavering truth that was born in tact? Or do we conclude what I believe most would have found themselves bereft of the linguitical baggage that would come with this topic and conversation, that music is an ever-flowing muse, created to inspire rather than to be evaluated? The suppression fire that allows advancement; the felled tree that fertilizes the fallow earth?

President Kennedy once said, “Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.” I find pop music to occupy that same position. Just a simple machine, whose operations learned in youth allow the complications of the adult world to be dismissed to the subconscious where all brilliance springs from, while the conscious mind unravels and heals from all the vexing bulwarks of a life with responsibilities.
In short: without simplicity now and again, there is no hope for the complexity that would satisfy our more critical thirst.

This position and its logic are obviously not airtight. Room for interpretation is till to soil. But the alternatives should always be presented if only to strengthen the opposition through the questioning that comes with debate. While many who relish the higher register complexities of progressive pieces might begrudgingly give pop its place, those willing to move in new directions will always be ready to start back at the bottom. Even if it means relearning those lessons of youth, as basic as they are, as frustrating as it might be to have to learn them again.

To take a line from Caddyshack: “The world always needs ditch-diggers too.”

Immigrant Waves

Is history repeating itself on the other side of the country?

In 1845, about 15 years prior to the Civil War, a potato famine hit Ireland so badly that anyone who had the ability left for greener shores. In many, many cases that meant New York and Boston.

The civil war had yet to be fought, so there were no immigration laws, the radical republicans had not yet taken the Congress, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments weren’t proposed yet. For all intents and purposes they’d become Americans by showing up here, but the WASP Ascendancy barely recognized them. They were not considered white; their Infant Mortality Rate was astronomical leading one Census worker to comment, “The Irish were literally born to die.” Signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” were regularly hung, and they lived, in most cases, in tenement housing; cramped, poorly built, structurally dangerous, and lacked maintenance.

But that was 165 years ago. Today we don’t question any man of Irish decendency as to whether or not he’s white. This may or may not have to do with an influx of other, darker races, but probably has more to do with how wide spread they’ve become. Today, give or take a few thousand, roughly 36 million Americans can trace their heritage back to Ireland.

And while they clung to their own cultural identity, they embraced with open arms (politically if not literally) the other immigrants waves of Italians and Eastern Europeans to form a permanent political majority for their political party. I am purposely not saying “Democrats” there because history shows their choice was less platform and more reaction. The Protestant Establishment in the former colonies was fierce, ruthless, and apathetic to the plight of the new immigrant classes. They forged themselves with a then dormant party and used it like a shield to take up the problems and struggles of the class. They did so then because the Republican Party then gave them no options to join their ranks.

In a seemingly “bizarre-o” world turn of events, Phoenix is the new Boston.

Ignore the conditions listed before. I don’t know that its wise to try and compare how the Irish lived then (two centuries ago) and how Latino’s live today. The Country is different, the regulations on housing, medical care, the social programs are, well first of all they exist. There was no such philosophy let alone law in the 1840’s that dictated how anything really had to be done. But politics isn’t figures on a spreadsheet, its perception.

The growing perception is, through talk of walls, mandated English, “anchor babies”, and SB1070 – as well as Amending the 14th Amendment – that the Republican Party are the WASPs to the Latino’s Irish.

If you’re following this furor, then I’m sure you’ve heard about the numbers. Fastest growing demographic, a birthrate that’s set to dislodge white people as being larger than all other minorities combined. (Note: Whites will still be a majority, they just won’t beat, as a group, all other races combined). But those are logic-tactics. You can almost hear, in a very avuncular tone, the father figure saying, “you’d better be careful now.”

The problem is not votes; the problem is dignity. And it isn’t American, its global and historical. Nations and peoples can be defeated, but if they are humiliated, they will tell their children of the vicious opression that faced them as they came to America, passed down like camp-fire horror stories that become a cemented reality unified with cultural identity.

Ask any eastern Frenchmen about the Nazi’s. As any Jewish Immigrant for that matter. Ask Southerners how they feel about General Sherman, or Iranians how they felt about the Shah. Civility and Diplomacy cannot be measured in the safety it provides the future.

Last night I watched Charlie Wilson’s War. If you haven’t seen it, you should do yourself the favor. But in it, the Afghani’s make a point to tell the Western World that they do not want food, or medicine. They want weapons. They want to defeat the Imperial Soviets and they want their land back. Its hard to imagine a better illustration of what dignity is than to mention a people who have almost nothing, living in rocks, and tribal villages and showing how all they want is to be left to their own devices. It’s saddening on a level one can’t imagine to have so little and be deprived of it still.

The Latino Community, prior to the dust up over SB1070, had two major concerns when it came to politics; Jobs and Education. Say what you will but those could go to either party, and it suggests that they came here not for themselves but for their children. Marco Rubio was on television two days ago echoing that sentiment when he responded to the recent moronic comments by Sen. Harry Reid.

The Latino community wants to be here, and they want to be American. The Irish still have their parades, the Italians, Polish, and the Portuguese their festivals. They still hand their language down to children. Mexican’s, Guatemalans, Cubans, et. al are doing nothing no less different than what the immigrant classes of the past have done, and unfortunately for them, that means engaging in the same struggles and legislative battles of every class before them.

Attoning for Sin

I guess I'm an attention whore. I was thinking the other day as I walked around that I hadn't been writing much because I had no focus anymore. I mean I guess I did, I love writing about politics, but the truth is I don't because I really like comments, and no one comments on the snooze-fest that is my electoral prognostication.

But in this confession I think I'm going back. Because I'd rather write than not, and I'd rather have no one following, and have all my comments be ads for male enhancement than hope I have an audience. Its a shameful thing to realize you're a shill, but at least the healing can being.

Who?

I feel awkward talking about my intent to pursue a political career someday. It sounds childish to me; equivalent to wanting to be a famous dancer or movie star. Not that I think either are necessarily comparable in obligation, but they seem to share an arrogance. I cringe a little when I hear myself say it because I know subconsciously I'm thinking "who do you think you are?"

Thankfully, at the end of the day I don't need to think I'm good enough. I think for me its good enough to say at the day's end that I went at it with the best intentions. To that end, I read this quote the other day and it struck me fairly hard...

He was no saint. Win or lose, there would be no canonization of Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. In a lifetime in politics he'd gouged eyes, thrown elbows, bent the law and befriended rogues and thieves. He could be mean and small-minded. But at his core there lay a magnificence of spirit, deep compassion and a rock-hard set of beliefs. He had a sense of duty that he refused to abandon for those whom Heaven's grace forgot - and he would sooner die on the floor of the House, or watch his party be vanquished and dispersed, than desert them. "You know you're right?" Millie would ask him, as he adjusted his tie at the door in the morning. "Yes," he would say, and he knew it -knew it- knew it like he knew the streets of Cambridge, the liturgy of Sunday Mass or how to stack a conference committee. "then do your best," she would say, and off he would go.

- Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century...

We've all read that quote or passage or something where a confluence of ideas we've had become clear, like the forged grains of our own constitution. For me, this passage might have summed up my political intentions and in those political intentions, a lifetime's worth of feelings, philosophies, and visions. We're never the product our grand ideals would call for us to be, but its good to know that great men before have achieved that greatness while falling short as well.

I don't need to make it a sap's story here, but I've been on the losing side of plenty of battles in my lifetime. Too poor, too ugly, too late, too unaware, or too bad - you sit there awake at night sometimes and wonder what you did to make something that shitty happen to you. I'm lucky enough to be able to bounce back, but I still burn up when I see it happen to someone else. That socially awkward kid who just wants someone to talk to them, or that poor son of a bitch who just can't seem to get some momentum going.

I didn't really get into politics until I was 17. Before that it was just my mother and my uncle reciting diametrically opposed platform planks while we went to get pizza, or for Christmas shopping. But politics to me is a cause you know before you understand it can be addressed in politics. So maybe I have my flawed days where I can be small-minded. God knows I can be vain and lazy. But for every moment I cringe at some social function when I tell people what I'd like to do, there are countless other times where I come around to find someone down and out, needing a job or struggling to get help moving out of their place and I remember that its a pretty shitty place out there sometimes. I can't say if I'll be a pol some day, and if I am what sort I'll be but I do know I've seen the face of Alzheimer's, and of single-motherhood and I know that I can at least do my best for those Heaven's grace forgot.

That justice is done, that mercy prevails. - Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.

And again I tried to explain distance

Writers attempt to express emotions in innovative ways we've all felt before. If I die tomorrow, it could be said that I spent my life trying to express distance but never really could. Like all writers, trying to has been the most fun I've had with a pen.

What I think most of us strive to do is draw from memories that we've come to obsess over. I've been there when I was furious and starving and devastated and used up. Those times you don't have a choice but to focus on your emotions like a hawk on a field mouse. There’s nothing pleasant about it. As those instance fade, there’s a warmness to them that you never see up close. They're badges and hallmarks of the road you've been on. The distance from those memories softens the blow, enhances the worth, and strengthens bond. But this is a distance of time. We can't help but end up there.

I mean to speak about the distance of emotion, that proverb that says it makes the heart grow fonder. Bobby Kennedy was fond of quoting Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." And that’s where I mean to be. Not describe the action, which the ancient Greek did well, but what stirs in the soul and mind when that happens. When the bodys pain becomes the souls wisdom, there isn't another time I can think of when that happens; a perfect marriage of the animal and the spirit.

In distance the hurt is not erased, but the wisdom of the entire providence shows us why there was pain to begin with. It is an overly articulate emotion that I've never been able to express. it might be the some emotions are inexplicable with the tools of English. It might be that in that pain, we still find a lack of wisdom and I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

In the past there was color, and a goal. Things seemed virtuous because our emotions were clear and raw. We could drive toward the end without concern about the small things. There was no responsibility or duty there, it was a satisfaction for the id of two people and when emotions can be legally satisfied, there is an intoxicated effect unattainable in chemistry.

Somehow, in all the distance of emotion, there seems to be a magnified distance of everything. The world has seemed distant, and there were no dead ends. The world seemed like it went on forever.

I have, in my mind, an imagine of what seems like a merging of multiple places. the rotten-wood fences that divide dune from grass on those Cape Cod beaches that always seem abandoned come 3 pm on an August afternoon. And as you drive out along that dying peninsula, the world seems to climb, and the entangling growth of some berry bush covers the land in the girl doodled swirls of overgrowth that tells you you're alone; no one comes here and no one cares enough to clean it out. And the wind is always singing and it makes it hard to breath and on the best days it still rains with ocean mist. In the distance, someone’s created a camp fire in their own world, and the flames lash out of a makeshift pit and the seagulls cling to stay in flight.

Every now and again I'm there, inadvertently, the world just throws one at me and I'm there. Its not scene perfect as I've seen it before, but I can't help but thinking about everyone I've lost. Those winds, on the beaches and the highways at 3 am, they close in around me and my emotions become remote, there in front of me to explore in fine detail like an ape searching for insects on the back of another. Meticulous and with an intensity of hunger, and survival, and love.

And then its all gone again. We've moved on, or it was a passing scene on the horizon or someone calls me back to reality and I'm in the here and the now. I can feel things again as they are, and the cold clammy distance is gone. I'll never catch what I see there again, just as I'll never explain distance as acutely as I see it, and feel it. Its as defined by what I feel as what I can't feel when I'm there. There are no smells in a fading memory, I can't tell when you touch my arm. There’s just the numb sensation that two objects have collided into one another. Unable to breath. Off in a place the worlds forgotten.

I wrote this off the cuff in a deabte we were having on MusicBanter. Theres a link at the bottom if you want more context but I thought I'd just put it here and see if there were any other Tools out there who enjoy them as much as I do...

Tool has, for me, always been something of an anomaly. Because while every other shit band out there was writing the same old things with the same distorted power chords, TOOL was out on Mars. The topics might have been bumper sticker politics, but the lyrics were such a massive diversion from the same stupid "i'm going to be politically active by yelling angrily as a name-less 'you'." lets take Stinkfist for example:

Every band was warning us about oversaturation, about letting the television tell us what to do, how we're all just becoming whatever, and then Tool, who takes that concept and marries it with an even more meathead topic, anal sex, makes a masterpiece by never really mentioning either. I'm not going to call MJK a poet because I don't think thats what he does on albums (he may be privately, who knows) but he's got a poets eye for the world. This device that he uses in Stinkfist, take a character doing activity X and basically talking about Y (and X i guess) at the same time is exactly what Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath were doing while writing poetry.

Beyond this, while other bands were out there following a formula well treaded by everyone else, TOOL was trailblazing through uncharted territory, making music that was more identifiable by its erratic "mistakes" than its solos or riffs. Who doesn't always remember Sober's feedback at the beginning, or Eulogys highhat work around the end of the song (minute 5 maybe?). TOOL was strange as an entity back in 1996. The bridged the gap between Distrubed and Soundgarden, between Korn and Primus, Between Ozzfest and Lollapalooza and the art gallery opening down the street. TOOL's most major and underrated accomplishment to me was that the showed everyone what was really possible if you just did what you loved. Loved enough to really learn it, and put effort into it.

They followed no trend, and while they weren't an end point (I wouldn't say TOOL is the final stop on anyones musical progression) they certainly were a boarding pass to destinations previously seen as well beyond the reach of many young nu-metal heads. To leave them out of the best of the 90's is inexcusable and ignorant. its not a question of whether or not you like them, its a question of whether or not we need them, and if any act was the rope thrown to a man drowning in a well of fecal matter, TOOL is that rope.

Read more: http://www.musicbanter.com/rock-metal/43681-official-tool-thread-31.html#post871090#ixzz0orW0rAzG

I prefer my founding fathers to be elitist.

Is it me, or were politics more enjoyable before Joe Dipshit got involved? Now I have to listen to someone who gets his U.S. History from a cereal box and every would-be king cry about term limits. There are exactly two things you should know about Term Limits; they prevent you from voting for people, and no one who ever said they believed in term limits and would stopping running after 2 terms ever has...Lindsay Graham, Bob Bennett.

Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that everything is political. And the right co-opted the Lefties "The personal is political." It isn't. It never was. And when people try to make the personal political I have to listen to diatribes about the subversive adminstration, liberal media, and imperialism to rule an oil empire. If you've said any of this, for what its worth, I think you're an idiot. And I think you're an idiot empirically.

This country needs to start looking at policy like a math problem. Does it work? What doesn't work? What do we need to make this happen. There are, by and large, far too many emotions in politics and it turns everyone into a would be Jesus on the Mount. It should be said that I wouldn't outlaw sensititivties to plight. We have always operated on good moral principles. But if I seen another Presidential Candidate cry on stage, and I mean cry literally, about how they just love their country/religion/family/ et. all I promise to spread every filthy rumor about them and their families. Yes I think that makes me a horrible person. Yes, I think it would save lives. Watching a Kennedy documentry one time they said that before JFK, politicians were boring, sexless. They wore gray suits. I want that back. At least in part.

Having passions has even ruinined the way government works. With everyone a full-throated partisan, even deal making has become a dirty word. DEAL MAKING. How can everything get without making deals? When you condem deal making you essentially ask for a room full of grown men and woman screaming at one another until eletion time when maybe the otherside gets a majority. This is why I think you're an idiot. For the record, I like what Rush Limbaugh does, despite not agreeing with him ever. ever. The only thing I don't like about him is that he's so successful that he's spawned a bunhc of know-nothing morons who cry abotu family values.

You know what I think is a good family vlue? Basic cable 24 hour uncensored porn channel. It isn't liberal, its a parental litmus test. If you're such a god damn idiot that you can stop a 5 year old from watching television then you ought to have your children taken away from you. And not for a little bit, for good. I'm all for putting into place permits for breeding. Christ, yesterday we had a guy in Northhampton try to trade his child for beer.

And another thing. I know a lot of you went out and got liberal arts degrees, but somethings just are what they are. Like science. There isn't a liberal bias in science. You think that because you haven't met scientists. This is obviosuly a generalization but they aren't the most empathetic group. Unless by empathy you meant autistic. Rules matter. Physics matter. Just because Al Gore works for a party you don't like doesn't mean we can start challenging the laws of the universe. Admit that you got a C in chemistry abck in highschool, that you don't know shit about science, and that you just don't like certain people or policies.

And before you scream about jobs, let me remind you that its Economics that deals with that. Not Sociology...which is what your degree is.

Politics is a job. Like most jobs, it requires people to put in effort and thought. We don't let joe six pack up in a space shuttle, we shouldn't let him into the Senate either. it leads to terrible, terrible things. We had a Senator in our state, repping my district and he was the biggest scum bag you've ever met. So we voted him out against a guy with the political skills of a garden slug. And he cost us countless dollars in government funding because he spent his time saying and doing what he thought was popular. He passed out countless times on the chamber floor.

This is what we get when we elect your neighbor. Too often people think the Founders wanted every man to serve his time. This isn't Jury Duty, there is a great deal of long term responsibility. The founders assumed we'd pick from an upper crust until Andrew Jackson shattered that notion. And now Joe the Plumber, who embodies the worst of everything we have to offer, is an elected official. We congratulations Ohio. At least he doesn't need a permit he won't get for that job. If you ask me, we need to start tossing out every idiot with an agenda. You want to elect Farmers, fine, elect them. But only elect the ones who've never voted before because those are the only guys willing to listen to reason. The rest of these assholes are just waiting to be Majority Leader.

Going to Museums in Boston

its Sunday and with the power still being out, I somehow figured myself into going to a museum. I'm not sure what came over me, because if theres any city you shouldn't go to a museum in, its Boston, Massachusetts.

Some guy wrote in the paper once that he'd never go see a Woody Allen film in Cambridge because people can't laugh loud enough. It lets everyone know that they got the joke and that they thought it was a riot. Same goes for museums in Boston.

No one really laughs, but everyones so fascinated, and they all stand in positions that suggest that interest; arms folded with their hands on their chin, and an index finger running up the sides of their faces. They'd argue to hot hell that I was wrong, but all that feigned interst ruins it for everyone else.

The walk to the museum only drives this issue home. The city itself is one big posture. The walk along the Fenway is filled with females-only college and their high fences, telling me I'm excluded because my morale compass is questionable. I catch the patchwork conversations of the women on the front stoops as I pass by, sitting 10 steps up and conversing about god knows what, but they've all got a tone.

The problem with a city full of college kids is that they all think they've seen the light. They know the truth and the rest of us are ignorant. Theres a truth alright, and its sitting on the otherside of those cast-iron gothic fences. But what there isn't is a light. The reality of struggle exists out here, down off the steps and out on the bus route, and the freeways. I take a deep breath and tell myself they'll all come down from that cloud someday.

The Gardner museum is a collection of works from Isabella herself, mainly untouched since 1924. Years before the depression, and Roosevelt, when Boston was dominated by Brahmin Yankees. The ghosts of old aristrocacy still linger here, where all the mansions became galleries and historical societies. Their upper cicrcles of society never left, they just became more unattainable. These days everyones chasing them.

The reality here is that everyones lying about their station. The old money trust funds exist for very few, still too many people vacation in the south of france, and take in shows at Tremont - or at least claim to. I wouldn't bother me if I thought it was a few people, but this is what Bostons become. Theres no middle ground here. We're all still looking to rehash 1949, the upper crust against the waves of immigrants. Boston has become an affectation of reactionism. Everything is hammed up. Your diction is sharpened or dulled depending on which group you hate more.

A brief respite comes from a New York man who speaks loudly about something he likes, and laments its lack of lighting. You can almost hear the aghastment as people begin to rattle off how it would damage the work, or how gawdy it would be. You get the idea he hasn't said this about every piece in the museum and its refreshing to see, amongst the professors and the doctors, a middle class man on vacation, confident in his skin, apprecaiting something for its inherent value.

My fun is shattered when i come acorss a woman, speaking to a viola player who'd just performed in the concert hall, "it must be so intersting..." she says before I exit and she fades.

Right before the gift shop I come across a bust of John the Baptist. The wall says that prior to aquisition, the piece had been painted over more than once, and its vibrant colors are not reflective of its creation. In fact we can only be certain its john the baptist because he's wearing an animal pelt beneath his robes and his mouth is open to signify testification.

Such is Boston.

I grab a postcard of the garden and head for home, hoping the electricity is back together. The trolley darts out toward the leafy suburbs and I've had my fill of memories for the day.

I saw this; I thought I'd share

I saw this on Bronx Banter Blog. I hope you like it as much as I do.

From E.B. White’s Here is New York:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter–the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last–the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh yes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company. . . .

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now; in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest editions.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

Letters to my later years

I sometimes look back on the things I thought as a child, teen, or 20-something and I'm slightly embarassed. That being said I really wonder where a 35 year old version of myself will stand in relation to myself now. At 27 have I finally latched onto a respectable track?

Its not a grave concern, but I always try to take it a little slower. I watch most of my friends sacrafice time and socilization to go after master's degrees and doctorates. I don't know what they're thinking. Maybe its some sort of artists temperment, but I'm always watching life from the third person. And so now when I'm thinking of what life will look like now from 8 years on, everythings little specs in a sprawling city of bright lights. When I think back to my life as, say, a 23 year old, its from a distance, theres just people riding in train cars and busese. I can watch the successes and rejections from a lunar-distance and pretend it was all a story. I'm not the same person now as I was then, and maybe it helps to distance myself.

I seem to review everything floating high above the city, watching where I was and where the large picture was headed. What went on downtown that New Years Eve I spent making sure you didn't puke on the floor. When we watched bad netflix choices and ate leftovers that wouldn't upset your stomach. I never know who these women are, but I've got a bad feeling their all placeholders in a narritive I've written for myself. I'd guess I date the ones that come closest to fitting the mold, but like an old literary idol of mine, I'm still trying to close a West Egg gap that I can never find a bridge for.

Last night I couldn't sleep, and I thought of all the conversations I would have if I ever ran into the ex's of mine. Who would get the ire I'd promised when it was freshly ended, who I never really stopped thinking about and what i'd tell them. I'm less angry as an older man, and less paraoid; fewer things really bother me. I'm wondering if its all the narration I'm using when I watch the world these days. As a reactionary teen, everything was immediate. Post-grad I'm adjusting. At 35 will I be world apart?

Maybe I'll just become one with nature like the Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong, fading into the landscape and all that crap. I never did like Jewett anyhow.

Where my dreams lay dead.

If you're looking to write there are a few go to sources that always help and one of those is Ranier Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." Its a fairly large piece of work, as instructionals go, but the one thing that struck me while reading it was this line (that I didn't memorize, I went back and dug it up):

And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?

He obviously couldn't go into every detail about how you ought to utalize you're memories, but for me it always works best when I meet those thoughts with the new, raw current reality of the situation.

Take for example: Caldor.

A buddy of mine I met back in college, who I should mention has a penchant for odd things, recently made his Facebook photo the old Caldor Rainbow (which had 3 of the ugliest colors you could think of put together; looked like Thanksgiving year round). I went to Google and poked around in the results for "caldor" and what I found was a little jarring.

If I had to make something up off of the top of my head, I'd imagine there are memories you have with prolonged traditions: Christmas at your Mothers house, The Town 4th of July Parade, friends backyard cookouts. And then there are memories you have because somethings gone like, say, old department stores, friends/family who've passed away, ect.

The thing about the latter is that you don't really conciously record that things are going away. Generally (as the topic here is Caldor) you wouldn't be shopping at a business right before its closing down(this is why its closing down). So generally, it has to come flooding back years later because something tripped that memory. Today I found tons of information on the chains successes and failures but the most striking were these photos.







Caldor wasn't the only game in town where I grew up, but it was the closets game to my house, and our end of the city so it held some fairly solid memories for me. It was always where my dad would take my brother and I for Valentines Day to get my mother earings, or perfume, or something foolish. I remember once I ran into my Little League coach doing the same thing there. That was the norm, everyone did that as far as I knew. Whenever my mother and my grandmother would go shopping, it was the best place because at least they had a toy section we could go play in while they shopped around.

When I look at these photos now I see two things: The first being a place that vanished overnight and came up too late, like a childhood friend you remember after reaing the obituary. The second is what that must feel like to towns and cities who haven't been as lucky. Taunton is pretty resiliant and financially strong. Where our Caldor was other businesses have opened up and its thriving. But to anyone who saw the 56 jobs a stroe held vanish only to be replaced by the wind-swept barron parkinglots full of nothing is a little heartbreaking.

I look at those photos and know that there are children out there in dying communities that don't get to buy cheap-o gifts for their families, and couldn't if the store was still there. Money's tight these days, and jobs are scare. I don't think I needed the cadavar of some long-lost memory to tell me that, but I can't help thinking about it when the crime scene shows up in the local paper.

Army of Wasps

I always wished i lived a wasp lifestyle. Not because I want to own a yatch or drink at lunch (though it would be nice) but because family was a lot tighter. And its tightness led to power.

In a discussion over a David Brooks article, I sent the above lines to my father. it was odd in a way because our family, comparitivly, has been fairly fractured.But family, regardless of bloodline, has always been a tremendous source of power by virtue of their indispensiblity. Which is not to say they're valuable, just unshakeable.

I'm about to finish up Kennedy & Nixion which, if you're into this sort of thing, is phenominal in its informational overload. But for all the money the Kennedy's had, and for all of their political connections, what served them best, longest was that there were 3 or 4 guys who always looked out for the best interests of the family. In a world where few can rely on much, having an expansive family drive toward the same mission might make you more successful than much else.

I think I respect the frugality of the WASP, too, because of the long term vision it held. If you read the Brooks article, he notes that company owners hadned businesses down to their blood. It lead to long term thinking. So too did the tightness of the wallet. Ensuring the financial independance of your own children, but instilling them with the hardened, Yankee-hillside discipline and social resolve meant they could drive like an arrow at intended goals with an alarming success rate.

I use to end journal entries with some form of closing position that today I feel gave it an overdramatic gravity I'm too aware of to use anymore. For my own dignity, and maybe another offspring of an old brahman dream i'm still waiting to realize.

Recession Fury

Let me be a bit selfish here. The economy is screwing me because I can't change jobs.

"But you're still getting an income?!?!?!"

Thats dandy but I'm also trapped in a hell hole. The only thing left to do is to try and get fired for the income and the stress reduction. Upper management could care less. HR thinks asking how you are in the hallway as you pass constitutes a "reiew of staff morale," and I'm still getting paid piss money wasting away in non-profit land.

The pay's the worst part, not because its low, but because the sit-on-their-ass failures that outrank me have their head int he clouds. Its a slap in the face. I'm forced to either clean up their overpaid messes for nothing, or quit and live on the streets.

Our's likes to think their overly progressive. On the cutting edge and the forefront of american small business. Its the most old school oligarchy save for its female rather than male networks, but trust me. In this regard there exists no disparity between the genders.

Why is it so hard to do something? Because we all want to pretend we're experts. Who gives a fuck about the GDP and the inflation rates and the...just fucking make things. Its not hard to make things people need. Not new. Not flashy. Not innovative.

For example, heres a list of things I need:
Car
House
Clothes
Food
Bicycle
Shoes
Jacket

No one can make this shit? And by the way, you can't cut costs and reap reward if you just built a train that went places. I wouldn't even need the car! I just don't get it America. Make jobs. I know people want them. I know people want to run them.

I don't care about much, just send in the choppers and the relief aid and airlift me out of this nightmare of a wrong decision that my life has become.

Thanks,
Brow