Aggressively Wrong-Headed

"Everyone's such a tryhard in this business. God help 'em, they just won't rest until they've outdone themselves in bringin' you some quality entertainment." -something I said this morning on the 'AV Club'.

So true. Let us pour out a 40 for Jay Reatard, who was a pretty damn talented musician, who happened to give himself a deeply stupid name. Of all the people in the neo-Garage scene, he truly was a person who stood out, musically. Also, he decided to call himself 'Jay Reatard'.

This led to a scene in which someone among those who called him a friend actually had to deliver the line, "It is with great sadness that we report the passing of our good friend Jay Reatard."

Hardly the dumbest thing I've seen in my life, though. As you can tell, I've been a little obsessed lately with the different varieties of stupidity.
Like that last post? I wanted to go somewhere completely different with that. I was going to remind congressional majorities exactly how one goes about exercising power. More on that later.

Letters To Phillipa (1937), by Dorothea Brande, is one of the books I found in a bag on the sidewalk. They were all books that had recently been withdrawn from the library at Marylhurst, a local Catholic college.
In it, an older conservative woman writes to her Goddaughter about those things to avoid in life, and that which to seek out. It is telling that most of the really great literature of the day is sternly thrown onto the Avoid pile. There is this ongoing flintiness and overwhelming sense of someone being Put In Their Place that makes the book a hilarious read.

But although I am fond of making fun of it in my finest Awful Old Lady voice: "It is a wicked book, and you must not read it. You must do as I say," actually it differs from similar screeds of the present day in that Brande actually makes an intellectual case for her dislikes. I may not agree with her, but she felt the need to make her case well, in case someone was paying attention.
In short, learning was not shunned as being inherently evil, even among those whose husbands proudly described themselves as "fascist". Now, you need to go a long ways to find someone who will try to make their case at all.


Another example of gloriously well-researched and relatively reasonably stated lunacy resides in the works of John Lilly, M.D. I read The Center of the Cyclone (1972) a long time ago, when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about psychedelics. In the years that followed, I apparently also bought Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer and Simulations of God, and forgot about them.
Go long enough in this world, and you will find a lot more people than you expected that literally believe in angels. Even odder than that though: there's a pretty large subset of them that will tell you with absolute certainty what colors and fragrances are pleasing to angels, and what their houses look like.

Now Lilly didn't do that. But he made a mistake I've seen lots of people make: your experience will be exactly like mine. This is a huge problem with those who write about spiritual and/or psychedelic experiences (Carlos Castaneda is notorious for it), because your trip ain't like mine, and the wise will already know that.
So where Castaneda will do the whole "now after you take the jimson weed, you will be flying. You will see a house. When you go inside, you will see a green woman..." John Lilly was more interested in formulating a large scientific framework with which to understand the oft-confusing and contradictory nature of what he was exploring.

And his central premise -that the human brain is basically like a computer, in that it all depends on what input it receives- is pretty sound. Almost immediately afterward, he falls off. Using words like "adultly", and phrases like "goodness of fit with the real universe", he goes further into the idea's natural next step: so if "mind" is computer, then one may install new programs/realities. And while this is -within limits- true, once it turns into a belief system, you have problems.
Before long, it turns into a mishmash of what is clearly just what he got out of it. What things became clear to him due to the filters through which he viewed them. Like any good scientist, he tried to make a workable formula out of it. Like most people, he set aside a place within his cosmology for a god.

What it ended up looking like (in excerpt) was this:
C*, [+]*, [-]*, L*, Z*, the five energies, the five sources.

and:
Plus star, [+]*, pure positive energy seeking, always seeking, the positive, the orgiastic, the orgasm, the fucking of the universe fucking itself, always doing the fucking.

(Have I, at times, tried to do my own version of Unified Field Theory? Of course I have. And Lilly is still to be admired for his work with dolphins.)


Check this out:

The great thing about Robert Gibbs in this clip is that out of all the things he could have said (all the way from "unfortunate" to "evil"), he picked "stupid," which is exactly the right word. Robertson says shit like this all the time (about 9/11, about Hurricane Katrina), and is only ever briefly made to feel like shit about it.
No doubt that it will be Gibbs who is made to apologize. And he will, since he is a press secretary, and not some rich bastard who lies to stupid people for a living*.

The point I didn't make last time was that there are people still alive now who remember how to push through highly unpopular legislation, from the perspective of the party in power.

One: go ahead and let a shitty version of your bill pass. I think something along these lines is already happening with the health care bill. Once you've got the legislative framework in place, and it gets a budget, and staffers, you have created something that will never go away, for better and for worse. The flawed product opens to door to the improved product replacing it later.
Case in point? The Civil Rights Act went through several much lesser permutations -that all failed- before finally becoming law in 1964.

Two: act like a majority while you have one. So, all those senators and representatives in 1964 who didn't want to pass the Civil Rights Act? You know; most of them? So what got them to change their vote? Withholding federal subsidies on wheat, cotton, and tobacco until it passed.
I mean, some horse-trading was done, but this was the kind of thing where the gentlemanly art of politics had been largely thrown aside, in favor of the bloody artlessness of ancestral hatred. Strom Thurmond tried to strangle Ralph Yarborough, to prevent him from voting 'yes'.
So yeah, the Dems played dirty. And rightfully so.

Three: be okay without those people you could do without. And when the '64 bill passed, Lyndon Johnson signed it, saying that his party had lost the South, for a generation at least, if not forever. Yep, and at times that has really hurt the Democrats.
I have said that the Democrats need to stop thinking that they're ever going to get the evangelical vote in this country, and far more importantly need to stop degrading themselves in trying to get it? Well, I hold it to be true, and at times it will bring pain, but shit: be reasonable. Not only will you not get them, you don't really want them, so be okay without them.

You know, unless you want to be the Unreasonable Jeebus Party. But that's just it: there already is one, and you, my friend, are not it. Not yet.




*(the author is unclear on whether or not he was being ironic there)

Fog and Drums

Robert McNamara, subject of the Simon and Garfunkel song "A Simple Desultory Phillipic, or How I was McNamara'd into Submission"*, is dead. He also, in his time, was head of the World Bank, president of Ford Motor Company, and Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson.

On the Fourth of July, I was listening to an old mix I made, years and years ago. It had The Clash's "Sean Flynn" on it, which may very well be my favorite song by them. The song is about the son of Errol Flynn, who went to Vietnam during the war, and was last seen riding his motorcycle toward enemy lines. Whatever became of him remains unclear to this day.
A nice metaphor for the confusion and general psychedelic hell the whole enterprise seems to have been. The song itself sounds like a memory: all dub guitar wandering away into oblivion, echoing eternally. It sounds like something or someone that you're forgetting, with its repeated refrain of "The past is always a closing door..."

And:
"You know he heard the drums of war/ each man knows what he's looking for..."

Did we maybe go there seeking oblivion? Knowing damn well we were seeking it? No: we were entirely rational and mathematical about it, only to realize later that maybe our entire thing was going away.
Or as Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon put it: "If the Twentieth Century has taught us anything, it's that the white man is through in Asia."

I've compared McNamara to William Tecumseh Sherman before. Both were businessmen who were called to duty specifically to quickly finish a war. Sherman responded by going the absurdly reductive route: he destroyed and burned everything in his path until he hit the sea. Then he went back and did it all over again.
McNamara was a little different. He wanted to inject a lot more in the way of calm, cool analysis into the entire war thing, and thought that there was no reason why science couldn't conquer a guerrilla force. The generals who reported to him would have preferred a Sherman-like option, and soon learned that lying to the Secretary was the easiest way to go.

That was McNamara's excuse for the rest of his life: they lied to me. But if he was so damn smart, why does he seem to have suddenly lost his objectivity and incisiveness on this one subject? If you're very, very good at examining all angles of a problem, you also can tell who isn't being straight with you.
And indeed, he did have an adversarial relationship with the Pentagon. Pretty much a weird mirror image of what Donald Rumsfeld had going on later, except that Rumsfeld was the one that wasn't thinking clearly, and the generals have sort of proved themselves to be the sane ones lately.

And he made the entirely valid point that morality takes on a rather different face in wartime. If killing is traditionally viewed as wrong, but war and conquest are the rule rather than the exception in history, you have yourself a sticky philosophical dilemma right out of the gate. The same holds true for the doctrine of killing as many people as possible to effect a quick end to the killing.
So now you have a question for your fine, fine mind: how to kill as many people as possible, but quickly, so as to lessen the general horror for humanity at large?
And there's that other piece of history coming back to intrude: McNamara's relationship with General Curtis LeMay.

LeMay was McNamara's superior in World War Two. LeMay was also concerned with ending a war quickly. He felt that the easiest way to achieve this was by more or less making it impossible to be alive in Japan until such time as they surrendered. Endless amounts of incendiary bombs on all the major population centers. Constant fire from above on a society largely built out of wood. It worked.
Now, later on, LeMay had the same idea for Vietnam. McNamara thought it a bad idea. Ultimately, LeMay left, and later tried to become Vice-President. He also is often quoted as saying that had the U.S. lost WWII, he and his staff would have been prosecuted as war criminals.

But they weren't, because they won. The U.S., strangely, was not winning in Vietnam. They just kept shovelling more and more troops at it, but to no avail. There was a creeping surrealism: how could this happen? The further into the thing they all got, the less it made sense, and the more the military establishment and especially the military contractors wanted total war. The nature of the mission became unclear to the point of incoherence.

The Clash, again:
"Rain on the leaves and the soldiers sing
you never ever hear anything..."

This became McNamara's nightmare as it became everybody else's. He later came to see that whole Domino Theory was idiotic, but by then the whole thing had taken on a life of its own. He knew the thing was wrong, and knew it was un-winnable. He said nothing, was soon to be gone.
Later on, he saw the same thing happening with Iraq. He said nothing publicly, though was candid about it to some interviewers, off the record.

The "Surge" in Iraq was a fantastic shadow of "Vietnamization", in that it was widely credited with winning a war that had not yet been won. The generals -in the case of the Surge- had quietly decided that while military objectives were still important, all that "hearts and minds" shit might just be more important. That building a working relationship with what community remains is the true job of those who are forced to go kill by silly goddamn theorists and politicians who know that the only thing their polity asks for is more blood.

So maybe there's hope. Maybe people do actually learn from history. Not like I've seen much evidence of it, but...

In any case, "The Fog of War" still stands as the final word on this. Watch Robert McNamara crumbling, physically, as he belatedly says what he really thinks. Hell, check this:




As he crumbled, toward the end of his life, he saw what remained of the edifice of his self-delusion crumbling, too. Not just the things he knew were bullshit but he couldn't contradict; but the things he had told himself, to keep himself sane. People always apologize too late.






*(The S&G song is actually making fun of Bob Dylan, and all who would make lame stabs at being political while also being under-informed. Doesn't really have shit to do with Bob McNamara at all.)

On Dyin', not 'Dyin'

Here's a pretty good shot of Terry Toedtemeier, who apparently died yesterday, in Hood River. He was 61.
Out of all the curators I worked with in my time at the art museum, he was easily the most human of them. He still had that mad spark that really honestly is the 'art' part of "art". He was nice, too.

Recently he had published a book called Wild Beauty, which was a historic overview of photography involving the Columbia Gorge from its earliest practitioners to present day. He was giving a lecture about it yesterday and had a heart attack immediately afterward.

Terry obviously loved the Gorge as much as I do. I once found a wide-format shot he did on his desk: it was of what is sometimes called Community Arch, and it lies on a not-exactly-trail that goes off and up the side of the mountain above Horsetail Falls. This trail will lead your ass right out into the middle o' nowhere, and oddly, some wag who came before affixed a sign to a tree high, high up that reads "Mystery Trail".
Point is, either Terry stumbled upon the arch like I did, entirely by accident, or spent just as much time as me and my friends examining every possible route, slide and gully. This takes years, but is entirely worth it.

I'm unsurprised to note that his first love was geology. The Gorge is like a museum entirely dedicated to that particular study. I've taken lots of pictures out there too, and they often rely on the intricacy of the rock formations. For anyone with a mind that likes wandering down long, endless roads, this is the place.

On the other hand, George did not die. He was nearly felled by Fresca, of all things, a couple days ago. I'll let him tell that one.

UPDATE: So Josh Westhaver is dead, as well. Here is how I found out. The fact that two of the nicer people I have worked with have died in the run-up to my birthday is kinda fucking me up.

As I have said before, it's not like death is some alien concept to me, but it's still the kind of thing that will trip one up, especially when said person was always very nice to you, and despite a huge propensity for accidents, should have lived many more years than they did.
I'm pretty sure Josh was younger than me. I've never been sure. He did have a huge propensity for accidents. If someone was going to plunge a blade into his palm, that'd be Josh. I first met him three years ago, during the first show I did for PICA, and I recall him being one of the few sane voices around there.

I recall at the after-party, which ran until dawn (partially because we worked until two...or four?), Josh and I were sitting there -shitfaced- talking to some guy who had shown up. I don't recall how we got to this juncture in the conversation, but the guy who had shown up was looking at me incredulously, saying, "So you're saying that things don't change?"
And I said, "No, I'm saying that change is the nature of the universe!" Josh started laughing and clapping.

This morning was given over to awkward emails to people I don't often speak to. One of them was ultimately answered by an old pal of mine who, it turns out, has moved to New Orleans but is coming back for the memorial.
This too: I have so severely limited my social contact in the last two years, I can't be said to be close to many people at all. This also leaves me feeling strange about two people that I liked and cared about dying, as I don't feel that I could honestly attend their memorial services as a friend. I'd be a stranger.

Ah shit: there's Apollo again. You Must Change Your Life; yeah, I know buddy. I know.

You can read what other people had to say about him here and here.

Six Degrees of Chuck

Wow. Mitch Mitchell, the little tiny degenerate-looking drummer from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, has chosen a room in the Benson Hotel in Portland as the place to die. He was here as part of what is called the Experience Hendrix Tour, I believe: a show lots of folks were looking forward to working/seeing, but I didn't get called to.

His drumming on the song 'Fire' was the first time I ever consciously noticed that there was something more to rhythm than good ol' boom-chick. Imagine if they ever played 'Manic Depression' on classic rock radio.
And he was the last member of the Experience to die. I note, via a quick check on www.deadoralive.info that Noel Redding died, quite without my notice, five years ago.

This follows closely on the heels of Miriam Makeba and Yma Sumac dying, of course. I am not sure what the Law of Threes would say on this one, since those two would seem to paired with Studs Terkel -who was not a musician- and Mitch Mitchell who didn't sing. Perhaps Levi Stubbs (of The Temptations) was an early number one of three, and the cycle is over.

But Yma Sumac, I learned from the New York Times crossword puzzle, was in a movie called "Secret of the Incas" with Charlton Heston. I can sort of imagine it (well, the movie isn't obtainable on DVD, so I have to imagine it): Chuck looking like Indiana Jones, replete with whip, stumbles into a clearing high in the mountains of Peru, only to find Yma Sumac, no doubt fronting a sizable band, already deep into the mambo.

Actually, what IMDB has to say about it is that Heston's character, an adventurer named Harry Steele,
"...teams up with Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey), an Iron Curtain refugee fleeing from the MKVD. Is there a chance they will end up in a bickering love-hate relationship?...Is there a chance that Yma Sumac (billed third on the posters and ads and special billed in the film), who can't act but can sing, will sing a few songs?...Is there a chance that these trite-sounding questions will develop into a film that is far from trite and vastly entertaining? Dang right, there is."

The fact that Chuck's character is named a short, simple, blunt & decisive homophone for 'hairy steel' is no accident. He seems to have spent his entire career inhabiting characters similarly named. Indeed, his first film, a 1941 adaptation of "Peer Gynt" had him in the lead role. And after that we have him as:
Boake Tackman in "Ruby Gentry" (1952)
The same year, he appears as Brad Braden (someone was working overtime on that one), circus manager extraordinaire, in "The Greatest Show on Earth", which was an Oscar winner for best picture and best writing. It's still a fucking hilarious movie in all the ways that were not intended. Any time Chuck opens his mouth, it's funny, in the same way that Walter Brennan, Andy Devine and Gabby Hayes always are, except they never told themselves they were Great Actors, I suspect.
(Oh, and every stagehand should see this, if only for the extensive rigging-with-nothin'-but-lotsa-ropes sequences.)

Ed Bannon in "Arrowhead" (1953)

In the Netflix description for "The Naked Jungle" (1954), he isn't named, but is described as 'a rugged, self-made man'. The title is hilarious because I believe it to be a conflation of both "The Naked City" and "The Asphalt Jungle", which had both done pretty well right before this.

Capt. Colt Saunders in the imaginatively named "Three Violent People" (1957)
Steve Leech in "The Big Country" (1958)
Hank O'Hara in "Skyjacked" (1972)
Detective Robert Thorn in "Soylent Green" (1973)
Alan Murdock in "Airport 1975" (1974)
Sam Burgard in "The Last Hard Men" (1976)
Lee Cahill in "The Nairobi Affair" (1984)
and 'Good Actor' in "Wayne's World Two" (1993).

At various points in his life, Chuck got to portray Moses, God, Andrew Jackson, Marc Antony (on at least two occasions), Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII, Michealangelo, John the Baptist, Thomas Jefferson (on several occasions), El Cid, Lt. William Clark (of, you know, 'Lewis and...' fame), Buffalo Bill Cody, and MacBeth (on television, as is the case with most of these roles).

So he was already known as one of the biggest scenery-chewers in the bizness, and yet continued falling higher and higher (from Moses in "The Ten Commandments" to God in "The Greatest Story Ever Told"?). He was not a good actor at all, but I could watch the guy read a phone book. Of course, it figures that he'd spend his golden years making weird religious documentaries.

Among these are "Mysterious Origins of Man" (1999), which Netflix describes thusly: "Among its more provocative assertions is that humans actually lived with dinosaurs, a conclusion based on evidence recovered from Peruvian grave robbers and other evidence that has long been locked away in museum storage."
Um, so after Indiana Jones leaves Yma Sumac mambo-ing high atop Macchu Picchu, he enters into more or less open war with those damn bureaucrats and ivory tower pointy-headed intellectuals who want to take our guns and hide all the evidence of...Several different crackpot theories coming strangely together?
The synopsis also notes "The program originally aired on NBC amid a considerable cloud of controversy in 1996." NBC? Really? The Liberal Media?

After that, he tackles the hard facts on "The Garden of Eden" (2003), "Jonah and the Whale" (also 2003), "Samson and Delilah" (these are all from 2003), "Sodom and Gomorrah", "David and Goliath", "Joshua and the Battle of Jericho", "Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors", "Daniel and the Lion's Den" and "The Last Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection". These are all described as "colorfully animated", although by the time we get to the crucifixion, it is demoted to "in an animated fashion (emphasis mine)".
So yeah; they're all for kids. Although I believe I've seen live-action Chuck in the Holy Land, explaining the Bible times, too. After this, he records a salute to Ed Sullivan and moves on to something called "America Home of the Brave" (2004), in which
"An all-star lineup of Hollywood celebrities -- including Charlton Heston, Chuck Norris and Tom Selleck -- pay tribute to the patriotic past of the United States with musings about the Old West, the Civil War and a trove of national treasures. Other stars of epic films... weigh in on the importance of honoring America's history."

Well, that sounds great...His last project was a Vietnam retrospective, which I've not seen...
Really though, there are just those people who on some level deep down -against all evidence to the contrary- you suspect will never die. Chuck Heston was one of them, as he seemed to spring from the Earth Itself, and was carved out of solid oak. Or granite. Mike Granite! Self made, grizzled, determined man!

And a full-on jackass, in so many ways. Another one of the many examples of how professional pains-in-the-ass just keep on keepin' on, largely because the rest of us believe that if we humor them long enough, maybe they'll go away. They never do, and ultimately leave the stage only when God (as portrayed by Charlton Heston?) commands them to do so.

So we bid farewell to Yma Sumac, who had a five-octave range, went out of her way to obscure her origins (including the strong possibility that she was really a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn named Amy Camus, not a Peruvian priestess at all), and seems to have lived by her own terms, which I think we'd all like.
Farewell also to Mitch Mitchell, a really good drummer who thrived, despite being only three feet tall. Nah, but really though: all the great ones are leaving the stage, as is the case, of course, with us all. It's just strange to note it.

Actually, that wasn't my point; I just wanted to write something about Charlton Heston because he amused me so much.

A Moment

I come not to praise William F. Buckley, but to bury him.



Like now, you call them Nazis, they call you queer.

I suppose that it bears noting that in those days you were expected to be eloquent, and at least somewhat expected to listen. In this sense, I suppose that I'm supposed to say nice things about Buckley because he represents a comparative politeness and civility.
But in a 1989 interview on NPR that I heard today, he trotted out that argument I most hate from yer average right-wing bedwetter: that to fail to label one argument as 'bad' and another as 'good' is to be somehow morally inadequate. This is why I may gladly and openly view them as morons.

Whenever some liberal well-meaner says that being judgmental is the worst thing one might do, I of course counter that this is something that every human does, and it may very well define us as beings. We make delineations; the more immature among us will describe them as 'good and evil'.
The difference is that we, as individuals, don't disenfranchise large groups of people by our delineations. Nations and movements do.
This is why this twinky little bastard Buckley is consigned to the nastiest studio apartment in nonexistent Hell, to my mind.

Check how both Vidal and Buckley have what Tom Wolfe would call the 'mid-Atlantic' accent. Once upon a time, many Americans did: we sounded English because a great many of us were only a generation or two removed from being from the United Kingdom.
By the time this debate was filmed, the people who would have had this accent were like Gore and Bill: born in the 1920's, raised in private schools and taught that Europe still had the culture we should attempt to emulate. America? Well, there's time, I suppose...

Thing is, Buckley was one of those guys who did a very good job of being eloquent and even sort of gentlemanly while espousing viewpoints that were basically childish: There is a demonstrable right and wrong, and those who say otherwise are immoral, as are all who oppose our political agenda. Or, I don't want to pay taxes, so those who say that I should are immoral.
Now, is there a difference between them calling me immoral and me calling them stupid? I believe there is. 'Stupid' is provable, and better still, changable. But 'immoral' is something that you either are or are not, and therefore gives a silly and irreducible superiority to the arguments of those who make them. This is why they don't receive my respect.

And that's why I must merely say, Bill Buckley is dead. Largely famous for his televised debates with my man Gore Vidal, he will be remembered, if at all, for giving rise to a generation of pseudo-pundits who would never consider being as courtly as he was, as that might appear faggy, or something. Indeed, it's even weird to note how awfully effete the guy was, despite making a pretty lengthy career of queer-baiting others.
He differs from other conservatives of his time only in that he wasn't a complete thug like Pat Buchanan or Joe McCarthy...In terms of appearance, anyway. But this is also the man who fired David Brooks from National Review for being Jewish, friends, and no amount of weepy testimonials from the likes of George F. Will can change that. There will be a few more days, no doubt, of bullshit stories about how elegant and refined Buckley was, with no mention made of the ugly bigotry and hatred it only barely disguised.

In a wonderful irony of history, after giving Brooks the heave-ho, Rich Lowry took over at the Review. The pasty-faced, eternally whining Rich Lowry that so neatly sums up the ethic of the true children of Reagan. He represents the Neo-Cons, and Bill Buckley hated them.
Not so much because of an ideological disagreement* , but because he seems to have personally despised most of those guys. This would cause him to withdraw his support for the war in Iraq.

It's funny that he would be credited for the Reagan revolution, because there too was someone that was the anti-Buckley (friendly, anti-intellectual), and he began the interesting pattern among modern conservatives of racking up massive national debt. I suppose Buckley might have liked that-as long as you were racking up massive national debt in the pursuit of a moral cause- and of course, he was always quickly reassured that everything we do is moral by the thugs and used-car salesmen who are always in charge of us.

Sleep well, crybaby.


*( Perhaps the old saw about conservatives is apropos here: a true conservative is a person who feels that nothing should be done for the first time, and a Fifties- or Paleo- conservative being a person who says It Should Be Done, But Not Now. I suppose that the corollary to this is that Neo-Conservatives just want to destroy everything because life is a video game.)

A Veteran of the Psychic Wars

"Play the part of the leader. Either at home or in the outside world you can make a difference. Your inner wisdom and judgment is peaking, so assess long-term goals and objectives."-My Grandmother's horoscope for Sunday, January 14th, 2007
"Oh, happy day. Everyone seems cooperative and things run smoothly. You know just who you are and what brings you bliss. Contemplate important plans for the future."-My horoscope for the same day.

My maternal grandfather was a wife-abusing, child-molesting son-of-a-bitch who went back to ol' Virginny, after my Granny divorced him, and started up a whole other family. I never met him. His name was Ray, but they called him 'Buck'.
My paternal grandfather was known widely and liked by most who met him. He married his boss's daughter and started a dynasty of sorts, leaving behind a pretty large footprint in Oregon history. His name was Jesse, but they called him 'Bud'.
My maternal grandmother was perhaps the biggest influence on my young life. Her name was Ethel, but even people her own age called her 'Granny'. When she died, it was like the biggest tree on the property falling over, upending the better part of the pasture along with it.
The last surviving grandparent I had was named Eleanor, and even called herself that when speaking to me. She was known to me, at various times, as either Miz Ellie, or The Ice Queen.

She and I got in an argument in 1995 that painfully contorted our relationship for the rest of its time. Without going too far into it, she chose to begin this conversation by insulting my mother, which isn't a great way to begin any conversation, much less one where I honestly was trying to bury the damn hatchet. I ended it by verbally checkmating her in a way far meaner than I think I've been to anyone, much less an elderly woman.
She turned ninety years old last month, and we had a nice talk at her birthday. For the most part, as the years went by, we got back to at least respecting each other, if not exactly loving each other.

I pointed out to someone I loved once that in general, one does not necessarily love someone who is a member of my family, but you do respect them. I made it my mission, somewhat early on, to be someone that people loved, if not necessarily respected at all times.
I respected my grandmother for what she had done, but never overlooked the price it carried for her, or all the people in her life. She was too busy running a business to really love anyone, and lines, by necessity, were drawn.
She, for her part, had the Chief Pest In Charge thing going on, in that it was pretty well impossible to please her, and never let you forget it. Constant undermining with little comments was the order of the day, and my putting so much distance between myself and her irked her no doubt. It meant she couldn't give me as much shit as she wished, but also it genuinely perturbed her that I'd turned my back on the entire game of family.

My friends have always been my family, and it always makes me feel like shit on those occasions when genuine familial obligation takes me back to these people I'm related to, who spend their time doing for each other what my friends and I do for each other.
When the call came from my stepmom, two days ago, that my grandma had had a massive cerebral hemorrhage, I asked, "Are you alone?"
Nope. She was there with my cousin Susan (named after my paternal Great Grandmother, and Lieutenant Chief Pest In Charge), who was doing her best to be both histrionic and The Micromanager of You. She was in management mode, belied by her tears. Managing the relatives, managing the hospital staff, who were very indulgent. When she wasn't harrassing the staff, in fact, my aunt Brenda (current Chief Pest In Charge) or my cousin Kathryn (Chief Pest of My Generation, anyway) was on the phone, doing so. Again, the staff was very nice, but the fact remained the same: there was a mass of blood where a very important part of her brain had been, and she wouldn't be waking up again.

The ravages of time were especially cruel on my grandmother, who went blind about ten years ago. She loved to read, and the thought of spilling a bunch of food all down her front at a nice restaurant horrified her. She was always of an elegant cast of mind, and didn't wanna be no slob.
My dad, stepmom and I went to see "The Queen" yesterday. It's a pretty good movie about the current throne-holder of England, and how she dealt with the emotional outpouring following the death of the ex-Princess of Wales, Diana.
"Dealt", indeed, because emotion isn't Elizabeth's strong suit. She is England, you know, and considers it her duty to be Strong rather than Warm. "Did that sort of remind you of anyone?" my dad asked afterward.
Yes, my grandma (and her sister, the other Ice Twin) had the same sort of assumed superiority and generalized disapproval going on. Why this should be is a mystery for the ages. Elizabeth, it is shown in the movie, took the advice of the absurdly grinning Tony Blair and played England's Gramma, just long enough to show that they weren't complete monsters over there in Buckingham.

My grandma, I noted at several times did wish that she could have been warmer, but whenever she tried, it went badly. Also: she'd just been to the doctor last week, and after a CAT scan, said that she felt like she'd "lost three days". I imagine that this was a minor stroke she had, and the hemorrhage ultimately resulted from it.
We tend to keep our minds, in my family, until the day we die. This means that we get to be completely coherent as our bodies fall apart around us. Looking at her there in that bed, breathing in a highly labored manner, blood on her tongue where she'd clearly bit it, I felt glad that she was asleep. It would have mortified her to look that way.
Noting that vigils of the sort we were keeping were pointless, my stepmother suggested dinner. On the way out, I paused to say one last something to Miz Ellie.
"Well, we're going to get some dinner, and it sounds like they're going to be giving you morphine, so we probably won't get to talk again tonight. Know that I love you, and we'll continue this conversation on the other side."
Highly disingenuous of me: I don't believe in an other side, and I don't think she did either. Death brings out the sentiment in people though; the hardest part is watching other people grieving.

She died later that night, and I was sitting at the bar with th' Gringa and the Tulsa Kid. We raised our glasses, and I said, "To Eleanor: Gawd knows what you would have been if you'd been born in a different decade."
True enough. Women of her power, intellect and drive mostly didn't get to use it, in the decades that she was the business end of our newspaper dynasty. I can truly only wonder what she'd have been like if she was born in 1960, say.

Beyond here, it all gets ugly. The mellow side of the Bachelors, as represented by my dad, are tired of fighting with one another, and the other side, captained by my uncle, are grasping and acquisitive as ever. I removed myself from their shit long ago, as much to protect them as myself. Still though, insecure, rigid freaks like them don't rest easy, and I'm sure even worse plans are being hatched.
Besides, one way or the other, that's it for the upper tiers of my family. We're all getting older, and that's pretty much that. I didn't expect to not get old, and mortality and I have been acquainted for a good long while. You just sort of hope that people would get wiser, nicer, smarter, and that's not always the case.

You gotta give it up to Miz Ellie though: she taught me my first lessons in the use of words as weapons, and the specifics of psychic warfare, if only by example.

Everybody loves an Anachronism

"I dearly wish I had more articulate insights to offer. My thoughts, I am sure, will be greatly eclipsed by the remembrances of so many other bloggers who were Reagan Republicans from the outset."- Mark Maness, American blogger, circa yesterday.
Well, I wish you had some articulate insights to offer too, Mark. But you don't.
Like most of your postings, one could easily remove most of the words and insert "waah waah" and not change a damn bit of the informational content.
The posting I'm not bothering making a hyperlink for (the Liberal Media! What did I tell you?) was celebrating the career of one Ronald Wilson Reagan, known for some reason in his radio days as 'Dutch', a strange apellation for an Irishman.
The posting was in response to this genuinely deranged guy named Mike (who hosts a darkly hilarious little freak fest named 'Mike's America' in blogland). Mike is seeking the warm thoughts and recollections of good Americans concerning the years of the Mistah Raygun there.
Okay, quick one. The President has just been shot, and I'm in fourth grade in eastern Oregon. The lesson has been interrupted by the radio being broadcast over the school's P.A. system.
Perhaps they are seeking to have some sick atavistic moment remembered: most of the administration there has childhood or at least early-twenties memories of JFK going down in Dealy Plaza. Perhaps they want us all to remember "where we were when Dutch got his" or some shit. What they got instead was an overwhelming cheer.
My teacher actually went so far as to yell, "YOU'RE ALL HORRIBLE PEOPLE!" over the din, but the damage was done. And besides, maybe he was some sort of fool who immediately loves and respects authority (something I'm told that we all did around here before Nixon, or after Clinton, or something...), but Reagan's policies never did a damn thing for the farmers of Oregon, and it was reflected in the lust, of its children, for that senile old fucker's blood.
Oh hell, let's take it a little farther, yes? They weren't even his policies anyway, really, were they? No, he was just the happy, smiling, idiotic face that whoever was running the show at the moment decided to put on it. I don't think the man ever had an idea of his own.
He'd been making the same damn speech for years, for Westinghouse, originally, about the evils of Communism, which never had any chance whatsoever of making any dent in this nation, and those who say so are hucksters of the silliest sort. When a few of his fellow rich Southern Californians noticed that his speech never seemed to get old among the rich and paranoid, they decided to edit it more along the lines of The Evils of Big Government, and suddenly this professional liar had a second career.
On the few occasions that the Great Man To Be was allowed to wander off script, he (as Governor of California now, for some reason) said, "If they want a bloodbath, they'll get a bloodbath." The people he was referring to were peace marchers opposed to Vietnam, who I suspect weren't necessarily bloodbath-centered.
Ah, but I've read many an account from the MSM (that's Mainstream Media to you lucky souls who don't normally read right-wing blogs), and I've seen what these 'peace' protestors do! They riot, and they clog up traffic real bad! And when the whole thing with the tear-gassing is over, the media dutifully reports that a 'peaceful protest turned violent', always suggesting that it was elements of the movement of people-excercising their legal right-and not the police, who pretty much have the guns and the means to start the violence, and always do.
Mistah Dutch was very good at removing the whole Nixon stigma of even-Republicans-wouldn't-drink-with-this-guy. "There you go again," was this genius's greatest contribution to political science (and whaddya wanna bet that Peggy Noonan wrote that one, too?). Quite so, sir! How dare people ask questions of one so unimpeachibly...Nice Seeming as yourself? He just put people so nicely at ease that well...All they could do was make fun of how old he was, junior league, and find legal reasons why most of his cabinet needed to be removed from office, major league. We had a cute and cuddly grampa presiding over the genocide in Nicaragua, El Salvador....Oh, I must not be a spoilsport, I know. This will make me a Not Reagan, since I'm talking about actual things, and not some silly image only swallowed by the least-thoughtful. See? Not fun, and so not something we may think of!
He loved Jelly Bellies! He loved 'em so much! He loved those little...Uh, why should you fucking care? I dunno, but it was considered news during that period. Be a good American. Rename an airport.
And those who can't think so good give his ass credit for the fall of the Iron Curtain, or some such shit, swallowed by the least-thoughtful. Okay, without getting too far into it (a necessity, post-Reagan)...They destroyed their economy trying to keep up with our insane military proliferation, which we entered into based on inaccurate intelligence from ex-S.S. intelligence officers and various U.S. Senators who understood that we'd never be able to keep our economic good times going post W.W. II if we didn't have anything to be scared about, i.e. something new to potentially go to war with.
These wise fellows understood the conventional wisdom that war makes economies sound. On a short term basis, was the part they didn't notice, but god bless 'em, right? Anywho, the Russians, always a bunch of bellicose idiots themselves, took all our silly fucking saber-rattling pretty seriously, and ran their asses into the ditch trying to keep up with us.
These days, their nation is a fascinating and warm-hearted experiment in what happens when a large country with pourous borders is run by a lethal combination of organized crime and the remains of the secret police. Yeah? Well, at least they ain't Commies, right?
Okay, Dutch said "Tear down this wall..." Nope. Not even there. That wall wouldn't have even been there had Kennedy not been such a war-mongering piece of shit who made it clear to the Soviet of his day that he'd be glad to go to war over what remained of Germany. Cheap grandstanding. Typical. No wonder children like Mark and Mike love it. It's just like the movies.
Nope. Nothing to say about the guy, except that his handlers who were really running the show were far more evil. Mind you, if there really was a god like most of these crybabies think there is, that wouldn't be a good enough excuse. Hell, we even noticed it at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem: 'I was just following orders' may sound nice to you, but in the eyes of the world, and the eyes of this fictional god-thing the rest of you seem to like so much, It Is What It Is, that is to say, A Mewling, Whining, Inexcusable Lie.
Punishable by Death. And, the cute old lying fuck-ass smily murderer is dead, after many years entirely unclear on where he was at all. His fate is the same as any human's, and in fact, compared to many of them, he got off easy.
And now the American Chief Executive is not to be questioned, especially concerning War. I don't blame that on Reagan, but on Johnson (who was also surrounded by people who lied to him). Who do I blame? Oh, those nice people who live down the street who think that it is a far better thing to be sheep led to the slaughter than it is to ask a simple fucking question, every now and again. They've made a religion of it, casting doubt yet again upon that whole concept.

The Man Who Was No Longer There

It should be noted that Hank Oak is back in town. He walked into Miss Kitty's kitchen this eve, as I was makin' up some victuals, and I said that I was glad to see him, and: "Where the hell you been? Last time I checked, you were goin' to Tequila!"
"For four days," he responded. Tequila actually is the name of a village in Mejico, turns out, and although he'd planned to stay there a month, we hadn't heard from him for six. He had, in fact, only been there four days, and some explanation was certainly in order. I received it, by fits and by starts, over the course of the bi-weekly Tuesday night dinner thing.
Turns out that he has turned his back on his old career in tech support, and is now making pseudo-Indo food at this Tea/food joint up on Belmont favored by hippies and yuppies. Thing is; the guy knows more about food than I've even forgot, and he has never even worked in a kitchen, like me. Tha' don't matter. What matters is that we are making plans for a dinner party competition, and perhaps putting together a food magazine for actual people, and he wanted to know where to find me, so we could go downtown and make fun of the awful people on First Thursday. "Well, I live over the Troika," I says.
"Where?"
"Over the coffee shop? Across the street from where you used to live?"
"Ohhhh!" he said. "Hey, do you live in the apartment where the guy who died lived?"
"I live in his room," I said.
"AAAAHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!"
"Yeah, I know, 'take care'!"
It's true, though. That's where Quicksilver died. He had a congential heart defect, and it was gonna get him some day, and on one particular morning of his twenty-fifth (?) year, it happened. I remember, because I was walking into the Troika, where I worked, at the time.
I was greeted by this little poodle dude who was dating one of the upstairs ladies. He was in tears, and when I inquired why, he told me, and I immediately was no longer in the mood to work.
Quicksilver was the nicest one of the activists, by any stretch. "He reserved his anger for The Man," was how his girlfriend put it. She put it to me on the occasion of his being dead one month. She was also the one who had been jarred awake by the convulsions of his body, trying to live, even though the heart was dead, the brain soon to follow.
They called out the ambulance, and unfortunately, News Channel Eight just happened to be driving by (or some loser local affiliate; it scarcely matters which one), saw the commotion, and couldn't get anything clear out of everyone, as every person involved was either grieving or a emergency services professional. They determined that since the near-deceased was tatooed and twenty-something, that clearly drugs had been involved. Thanks, as always, to you fucking coke freaks who make too much money, and are qualified to eat lunch at best, who nonetheless report the news.
A week before, he had been on the news, when the Nice Mister Bush had been in town. A lot of people (including infants, I needn't remind you) showed up on the news that day, being pepper sprayed, but Quicksilver made the front page of the paper, and I believe CNN. I had stood in the middle of all of it, wearing a suit and shades, photographing it all, as people on either side were being beaten and gassed...
I'm straying from the point. Our friend was dead. The nice one. I spent the rest of that day at work having to break the news to people who had not yet heard, and playing mournful songs. But far worse than this was that I also wasn't going to lie to strangers, and that led to awful exchanges:
(The chick with bilateral myopia from across the street says) "Well you know; Death Is A Celebration!"
(To which I respond) "I understand your point. Your comment is ill-timed."
And later, I go back to Gringa Alta Prima's joint, and I finally get to have the good solid cry I'd been needing to have all day. All day long, I'd been inadvertantly playing these songs that I'd just brought with me, but seemed like farewells for the Quicksilver. "Hold To the Unchanging Hand of God" by Ry Cooder, "Uncloudy Day" by the Staple Singers, and that song by Takako Minekawa where she just keeps saying, "In the skyyy....In the skyyy..."
Then I make the mistake of goin' down to My Fuckin' Pal, where I encounter a drunk bunch of people I parenthetically know. One is this silly girl with whom I had once shot pool. I told her the story. She decides that the best way to deal with this information is to say-"Well, in Mex-ican cul-ture, death is a celebration!"
To which I could only respond, "I ain't Mexican!", when of course what I really meant was, ' you silly white fuck, could 'ya just shut up for half a second, and not turn everything into your anthro seminar?'
I went outside for half a minute, to gather my thoughts, and was pursued by her table-mate and acquaintance of mine, Zephry. He chooses to respond to my distress by drunkenly gripping my hand and saying, "But we're still alive. We're still alive!"
I agreed, thanked him, and went back inside.
I encountered another group of people with whom I was parenthetically acquainted. For some reason, I still couldn't keep how I was feeling inside sufficiently, and told them exactly what was on my mind at the moment. One of them said, "Well, you know what they say; Grief is for The Living."
"I've never heard it expressed otherwise. You know, maybe I shouldn't have brought it up."
The rest of them rushed to make up, but by that time, I was over this whole being in public thing. Wherever I went, people had the awful judgement of either trying to make this actual death of someone I liked and could no longer talk to into either some awful Grieving seminar that they'd learned in Counseling, or some Life Affirming bullshit, of which it was neither. I've been well acquainted with Death my entire life, and don't consider it to be something out of the ordinary. At the same time, I also feel that it's entirely okay to be bummed about it. The fact that the rest of these people couldn't see that is a monument to more than just their crap communication skills.
Pathetic as it may be, I chose to deal with this by making a mix tape. Probably this is the one I should have analyzed, in lieu of the last entry, but it's not. It was called 'The Man Who Was No Longer There'. Side A is titled 'Grief Is For The Living', and has a somber aspect to it, and side B is titled, 'But We're Still Alive', which has just the opposite aspect.
Even that has a story. The next day, a friend was driving me up to ( a cemetary, of all places, to look at the view), and I was telling him the story of the last couple days, including the mix tape part. He chose this as being an appropriate time to tell me about the inherent superiority of MP3 technology, as opposed to those silly old magnetic tape things. I chose to not throttle him, on that occasion.
I missed the ash-scattering ceremony out at the coast, as I was not invited, and had to work in any case. It turns out that Quicksilver's mom had the zinger that day. She thanked those assembled for coming, and pointed out that they all clearly had 'big hearts'..."Hopefully not as big as his was, but..."
And the wake was the following weekend. It was too damn full of silly Wobblies who showed up ostensibly to say farewell to a brother union member, but it quickly regressed into a stupid party, with too many damn strangers. It was disappointing, and still too damn sad.
The aforementioned girlfriend dragged The Reverend and I into the apartment where I curently live, and poured three shots of whiskey. We held them aloft, waiting for the words to come. They didn't.
"You know," I said.
"You know," the other two said, and we drank it down.

stoned on the convention floor

Well, it finally happened, but not in the way I figured that it would. Hunter Stockton Thompson is dead. At age 30, he realized (literally; it's recorded in his letters) that either he would become a writer or starve. He was never going to be good at anything else, and even though he had already married someone and started making babies, he was a fucking loser. Mind you, that's most people.
They say that he shot himself. It's certainly possible; his lifelong love was firearms, and he loved to get so totally backwards on drugs and booze, that I am vaguely surprised that the most serious charge ever brought against him in his lifetime was grabbing an interviewer's boob. He was always a valuable voice against The Bullshit Engine, but he marginalized himself through his increasingly shitty writing, making himself sound like an idiot. When portrayed in movies (by Bill Murray and Johnny Depp), it was easy at first to think that the actors in question were overacting. Then you'd see actual interviews with Thompson, and realize that they'd gone easy. He was a living charicature, and was as fond, in his last years, of being The Doctor as he was of writing.
The 1972 presidential race was thick with good books being written about it. Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus", Norman Mailer's "Saint George and the Godfather", and better than any of them, Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" showed the whole sick mess for what it was. Perhaps more ominous than anything was the picture at the end (by a young David Kennerly, who would go on to be the offical photographer of the Ford administration, and would later be the loving documentor of many government figures, largely Republican), showing John and Martha Mitchell, going in to testify at the hearings that would eventually become Watergate. The caption is a quote from the book, as Martha, insane as always, screams at you: "This country is going so far to the right, you won't even recognize it."
And it did. With the exception of a few largely forgettable years in the '70's, we were already well on the way to the hideous simulacra of an empire that we are now. Arguably, a Democrat started it: Lyndon Johnson. He believed the lies that were told to him by a largely scattered and devious intelligence apparatus, and overruled the Senate War Powers Act, in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (the only two senators to argue against it were Ernest Gruening, of Alaska, and Wayne Morse of Oregon, who filibustered for at least twenty-four hours). Ever since then, our president has basically been a king, and when they go to congress to ask for the right to go to war, they do so largely as a formality, a way of being nice. "Hey hey LBJ, how many Iraqis y' kill today?"
When I met David Kennerly, years later, he said that he had no idea that his picture provided the coda for a book that he almost certainly wouldn't have approved of. He loved Nixon. I suppose that there's room here for some comment as to what happens to you when you work for some photo archive outlet; that is, you sell your content. But I digress.
Yeah, everything they used to just joke about back in the days of The Revolution have since come sickenly true. We're well on the way to embarrassing ourselves somewhere to the tune of the Fall of the Empire. And Hunter won't be here to see it. It's his fault. Mind you, it's not impossible that some bunch of black ops idiots from the Gubment did him in. He had, as I say, seen to it that no one had taken him seriously since "The Curse of Lono", ca.1982. But I have also noticed that the present administration isn't especially shy about offing people who disagree with them (Paul Wellstone? Anyone?). Thompson wasn't going to be leading any revolts against the present Nazi regime running the show, but he did write a really incoherent book making fun of it, and a bunch of really un-funny articles in Rolling Stone, too. Sigh.
I was drinking with a lady this evening who was trying to outline the difference between Alzheimer's disease and yer basic garden variety dementia. It would seem that Alzheimer's is a bit more gradual, but the point was how she described her grandmother's reaction to (whichever one of the two she had): how she hopped from reality to reality. It's not-'oh, this is real, and this is clearly a hallucination'. It is all happening to you, and therefore is happening. During the very brief blurb on the local Fox news affiliate here tonight, they pointed out that the Doctor's writing was "hallucinatory". But the world was suffering a case of creeping surrealism, and it continues to metastasize. It is also worth noting that he described his writings as 'fictional accounts of actual events'. How else can you do it? We're all just basically describing our hallucinations; what happens in that thirtieth of a second between what actually occurs and how your sensory apparatus chooses to interpret it.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he viewed the last four years as I do: that the pinnacle of Western civilization had finally fucked up so badly that it was all over for the species. Looked around, easily found a gun, and just did it. Or, as always, the incredibly inept intelligence apparatus hereabouts overreacted, and killed an old drunk man nobody paid any attention to, up on Woody Creek in Colorado.