Big Table

Top Five Reasons to Put Sweat Equity into a Rental Property

2011-12-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

5. Exercise, or choosing "Chop Wood Carry Water" work outside in the yard over the tedium of weight rooms and exercise machines. Void in case of heart attack.

4. Economics, or living beyond our means on a special acre of Santa Barbara canyon land by keeping the landlord happy.

3. Space, or getting away from the wife into the yard where I make the decisions. Most of the decisions.

2. Place, or living here, enjoying the beautiful landscape, and contemplating the ecological metaphor of renting.

1. Joy, or indulging my working class fetish that grunt work on a beautiful and unique property is satisfying.

Morality According to Wall Street

2011-10-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

In a couple articles in The Times about Occupy Wall Street, David Brooks gives a moderate version of the same moral argument heard from the hysterical right. He too blames the losers, though the moderate version is more of an invitation to “responsible” adults to condemn the protesters as irresponsible whiners scapegoating the rich for their own problems.

According to Brooks, those of us left behind by the Wall Street coup on our economy and our democracy should shut up about profits and class and corruption. Instead we should look to our own lives and solve our own problems by working harder and harder and harder in order to consume without debt. Meanwhile we should leave the distribution of the wealth we create through our hard work to moderate Wall Street and Washington types who, like father, know best.

The one moral claim protesters want heard remains out of bounds: The system of money and power is unfair.

Reading Habermas

2011-10-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Robin spends her days zooming around town picking up linens and dropping off used flower vases, She meets with anxiously beautiful brides and their beautifully anxious moms. She helps them make decisions about flowers, photographers, caterers, musicians, and so on—incredibly detailed decisions that involve things like coordinating the color of the flowers and food and linens and so on with the color of the bride’s eyes. Then she comes home to her office to call florists and photographers and caterers and so on, and to keep track of it all on papers organized in files according to date and the color of the bride’s eyes. When she walks in the door exhausted and in a hurry to get to work and meet a deadline, she sees me sitting on my ass reading philosophy. Been there all day. Day after day. For weeks. Good thing I did the dishes.

For the first time since graduate school, I’m reading a lot of philosophy; and for the first time in my life, I’ve set myself a program of reading a large chunk of a philosopher’s oeuvre, four and a half books approaching 2,000 pages so far. To support my position that sitting on my ass all day is not vacation, I’ll say that 1) reading Habermas is hard work, and worth some hard work for its insights into everyday life. Reading Habermas also 2) takes me back to what could have been a brilliant intellectual career if I’d read Habermas twenty years ago. Finally and most significant for my defense, 3) it’s opened up new writing ambitions.

(1)

Proof that reading Habermas is hard: I’m constantly stopping to use the internet, not only to take a break from holding all those philosophical balls in the air at the same time, but also to check up on some half-forgotten or half-learned philosophical term, or research one of the many thinkers I never read like Weber or Durkheim or barely even heard of like G.H. Mead or Talcott Parsons. I’m sure learning a lot, not only about Habermas but about the history of philosophy. Habermas draws upon everything that has ever been written, and he aims to explain every aspect of our species from the combined perspectives of philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, art history, literary analysis, and etcetera.

It’s hard but it’s worth it, especially since his basic concepts are very practical and recognizable in people’s everyday lives. His main purpose is to rescue us all from the dominance of thinking about money and power, and instead celebrate more human and moral ways of thinking. He calls it “system” versus “life world.” Think Wall Street versus Occupy Wall Street. I might even argue at some point that Habermas’s theory of communication is a theory of love.

(2)

Reading Habermas brings back the ambition of the old days, back when I thought I might make a more significant contribution to scholarship. I lost that ambition back in the painful 90s, as I slowly awakened to the reality that trying to get a job as a scholar was like banging my head against the wall. It felt much better to stop, yet I didn’t know how. I was that guy in the old joke:

A young man runs away with the circus because he wanted to be in show business. Years later, his brother catches up with him, witnesses his job cleaning up after the elephants, and exclaims, “You spend all day knee deep in elephant shit. You don’t have to do this. Quit!”

The guy responds, “What! And leave show business?!”

Despite the bitter delight in such irony, my professional woes continued for a long time. Even after I landed in Santa Barbara and got my personal life back together, I couldn’t live with myself as a second-class academic, a poorly paid teacher rather than a respected scholar. So I left academe altogether.

It wasn’t six months before I wanted my old job back. Took me five years to get it, and five years more to return to philosophy.

In retrospect, I’m feeling that—with my blue-collar pedigree, my preference for spending time with family and friends, my satisfaction with woodworking and gardening projects, my taste for the bitters, and my increasingly principled aversion to spending 18 hours a day sitting on my ass reading everything that’s ever been written—I’ve done about as well as I have a right to expect. I love my job these days. I’ve become a damned good teacher, and I relish the six weeks it allows me to sit around reading Habermas.

(3)

I’ve embarked on some concrete writing projects that reading Habermas enables.

(a) I came to Habermas first from my scholarly frustration with genre theory in American composition studies. I hoped to gain the conceptual ammunition to launch a comprehensive attack on genre theory, American Pragmatism, and Composition Studies as a discipline that fails to distinguish between practical and instrumental reason, remains blind to the systemic sources of power and hegemony in our society, and thus fails to satisfy its own liberatory aims. I also hoped to gain from Habermas a communicative practice that doesn’t make me sound like an asshole, always a problem.

(b) I also came to Habermas hoping to explicate the failure of the environmental movement to initiate the changes it clamors for. Habermas might help at least to explain the problem as life-world versus system. Accordingly, the eco-problem is not simply a matter of convincing people to do the eco-right thing. As an idea, sustainability has already achieved consensus; no one really wants to trash the planet. In the life-world, environmentalism rules. Yet the economic and political system continues to trash the planet. In short, from Habermas’s perspective, the environmental movement becomes part of the larger effort to make the system more responsive to human concerns. I could elaborate this somehow in relation to environmental texts like Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption. But what I’m really hoping is that I will discover among Habermas’s later essays one that deals directly with environmental issues. That way I can simply read it and save myself the trouble of original thought, even of the derivative, secondary literature, apply-some-really-major-thinker’s-ideas way.

(c) I’m also thinking that perhaps my real destiny is in articulating how academic theory offers insight into everyday life. Last year I spent a good part of my six weeks of concentrated writing and research working on a project that aimed to make literary analysis relevant to a non-academic audience. I focused on a little artsy film called Get Low and planned to work up a series of interpretive readings from different theoretical perspectives, each one more ambitious than the one before—pop-cultural, moral, political, socio-economic, philosophical, and so on. The idea was to treat the non-academic audience as smart and wisely grounded in life, though with no time to waste on academic specializations, and to treat academics like me as ass-sitting arrogant windbags, too specialized and professionalized and focused on mental masturbation—in short, too unwisely ungrounded in life—to realize that we were saying some pretty profound stuff. I wrote two interpretations and posted them on my blog as parts 1 and 2 of “The Low Down on Get Low.” I’m pretty sure no one read the posts.

Undaunted—or unintelligent—I’ve been thinking of taking up the project again in light of reading Habermas. His thinking opens up whole new possibilities. I figure that I could incorporate Habermas’s really smart way of looking at everything into my own brand of blarney (or McHughing), focus it all on popular culture texts or phenomena like Occupy Wall Street, address it to an intelligent public audience, and ramble on about whatever I feel like, movies and morality, the environment and the market, love and happiness. I could spout all kinds of world-healing wisdom.

Whether I’ll have any actual readers for any of these writing projects is entirely another question.

Blarney in "The Guard"

2011-09-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

The new Irish film, The Guard, opens with a horrific car accident on a narrow stone bridge west of Galway, the very same bridge we drove across last March when we were a bit lost, a long quarter-mile bridge barely wide enough for one car. We crossed in the wrong direction without incident, but on the way back we faced disaster: a car coming in the opposite direction, moving fast, not about to stop or slow down or even care. I remember how we all collectively drew deep breaths to make the car smaller and closed our eyes to summon the Bridge Fairie, and thereby squeezed by unscathed. Great times.

The movie too is a great time, hilarious as blarney. The fat Irish cop, Boyle, is constantly messing with the expectations of everyone else in the film, especially the American FBI cop played by Don Cheadle. Boyle feigns veracity or sincerity or ignorance just for fun, acting the racist to get a rise out of the black cop, or claiming to have finished fourth in an Olympic swim meet. Rather than just saying the truth, Boyle plays around with it, leaving the Cheadle character guessing. “I can’t tell if you’re incredibly fucking stupid or incredibly fucking smart,” he says, showing that he understands blarney perfectly. It ensures that neither truth nor the self be taken too seriously. Boyle’s performance of blarney reminds us that we’re all full of it.

Just as Boyle presents himself to the American, The Guard presents itself to its audience as pure blarney. It features a surprisingly flawed and likeably human hero: Boyle is a clown cop with the heart of gold who delights in whores, trips on LSD, runs guns to the IRA, and gets the bad guy. It also features surprisingly intellectual and self-aware and thus human bad guys. The cold-blooded professional killer yearns to settle down with one woman; the socio-path quotes Nietzsche on command. Kind of like The Commitments meets Pulp Fiction, the film plays around with the action/suspense genre even as it fulfills its moral/emotional demands. In this mocking performance of its genre, it calls attention to its own artifice, its blarney, and it invites the audience to see that the genre as a whole is blarney, and maybe film and culture and life in general are blarney, which is either incredibly fucking stupid or incredibly fucking smart.

The tourist books say, “Blarney is the attempt to deceive without causing harm.” Habermas might say that blarney works by intentionally disrupting the assumptions normally necessary for communication. The resulting humor, once the audience gets it, and I’m not sure Habermas would get it, results in even deeper mutual understanding, because it demonstrates that the assumptions and expectations grounding everyday conversation might be wrong. In short, blarney communicates a deeper mutual understanding by evoking the fallibility of human communication and understanding. We all get along better when we know that our truths are blarney.

In this way, Irish humor evokes the poststructural distrust of language evident in Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. Language is the medium of meaning, where truth and desire, the objective world and other people, conscious and unconscious experiences become symbolically structured. Poststuctural French thinkers explore the limits of language, where symbolic structures break down, the gap between language and whatever it attempts to structure symbolically, the idea that language cannot fully articulate truth or desire or the world or experience or the other. There arises the supplement, the excess, the remainder escaping symbolic structure, rendering meaning forever uncertain. Thus, both blarney and French philosophy evoke the fallibility of human communication and understanding.

The difference between blarney and French philosophy is that blarney joyfully understands this fallibility from the beginning, while the French eventually find joy in the end. The French are teleological, concerned with the ultimate end; or rather, they are anti-teleological, concerned to show that language, meaning, desire never reaches its end, always remains incomplete, uncertain, unsatisfied. They typically locate the possibility of jouissance in the gap/remainder at the end, the far limit of language and meaning and desire, realizing only at the end that the gap/remainder that was always there always will be there. By contrast, blarney takes impish delight in knowing itself as blarney from the beginning. As the speaker knows and the audience laughingly discovers, blarney is always already blarney; that’s why it’s fun.

My friend Bob says this difference can be explained historically. The French were European powers, colonists, who discovered only at the end of the colonial process that their imperialist way of thinking was bankrupt at best, a violence toward the other, the world, and the self. The Irish, of course, were themselves colonized and knew from the beginning that empire and its ideology were shite.

For his part, Habermas has more faith in language, or more precisely faith in communication, coming to mutual understanding through rational communicative action. His style is to read everything that’s ever been written and integrate it all into his argument, as if everything that has ever been written amounted to one great conversation that comes together in his own model. Fortunately, he is sure to admit from the beginning that he is constructing a model. He knows it’s all blarney, but he’s giving it a go anyway, because that’s what we do; we try to understand and to communicate. Habermas also implicitly invites the reader to join in the blarney and help construct or reconstruct the model. All we have to do is read everything that’s ever been written. In this sense, German scholarship may be more reliable, but not as much fun.

The Lowdown on Get Low, Part 2

2010-10-13T00:04:00.000-07:00

I Profess: Christianity for Sinners and Secularists

Get Low presents Christian morality as a mature reflection on innocence, which is a vision of happiness a non-believing literary academic like me can embrace.

Loss of Innocence

Get Low begins with FIRE!

We see a two-story house, isolated like a farmhouse, fully engulfed in flame, the fires of hell raging against dark heavens.

We see a figure distinguish itself from the flame, stumbling out of the inferno, flames rising from its flailing arms. A man?

The figure falls, disappears. Damned?

We watch forty seconds of hell-fire consuming hearth and home and who knows what else? Has the man in flames perished in the fire?

Finally someone appears out of the darkness much further from the house, running away. The same man? Did he save himself?

The mystery behind this fire drives viewers’ interest in the film. Unlike most good Hollywood films, this mystery has a moral.

Get Low re-tells a Southern Gothic fable usually meant for innocents—children or young adults. It’s a brimstone fable about the loss of innocence, a lurid Southern Gothic tale about sex and violence in all its passion and humanity. Someone learns a hard lesson the hard way: the guilt of hurting people, the shame of behaving badly, the wrath of God. It’s a lesson innocents must learn about how people get hurt, how sex and violence are often involved in the worst cases of human moral failure.

Get Low is not this story, not a story for innocents. By putting the fire at the beginning of the film and forty years before the main action, Get Low retells this fable as one for sinners, those Christians for whom the loss of innocence has already happened, in other words a fable for adults.

Get Low tells the story of an old man, Felix Bush, facing death. To find redemption, Bush needs to disspell:

1) the comfortable lie he tells the community about himself

2) the comfortable half-truth about the past he holds

3) the comfortable misunderstanding he holds about Christianity

Being honest sounds easy in the fable for innocents, but it took Bush took 40 years of damnation to tell the truth.

1. Bush’s Lie

As a mean old hermit, Bush lives a decidedly unchristian life. Rather than loving his neighbors, he’s been waging a decades-long war against them.

We meet him first as the target of a boy’s dare: to throw a stone at the mean old man’s window. With hair to his waist and a beard to match, Bush appears shooting a rifle, scaring the poor kid out of his lunch and off the farm.

Later he goes to town, braving Depression-era cars and modern ways with his mule-drawn cart and hand-made clothes. In the street, a young man (the boy who threw the stone and grew up?) yells at the old bastard about his evil ways. Bush proves the young man’s point by beating him brutally with a stick.

Later still, another young man, Buddy (another boy who threw a stone and learned the Christian lesson of compassion?) arrives at the farm to help Bush get his funeral party; Bush greets him with a rifle shot past his ear.

Bush is a mean, violent, despicable human being, a physical and moral menace. Rumors swirl through the community to explain him by some unknown and horrific sin involving murder likely, certainly involving ruination for those around him and damnation for himself. To his Tennessee neighbors, Bush is an evil character straight out of Southern Gothic.

As we learn, Bush may be a character but he ain’t evil.

Buddy, a good-hearted young guy who works as the moral filter of the film, figures out pretty quick that he’s not really a menace to society; he just wants people to believe that lie so they’ll leave him alone. He’s been living that lie for forty years.

Then he gets a visit from a man he doesn’t shoot: the preacher. Bush listens, though he never stops chopping wood and never says a word. He’s gonna die and needs to make his peace, the preacher tells him.

Bush thinks it over and agrees with the preacher, after his own fashion. He wants to have a funeral party that he himself attends. “I’ll pay,” he tells the preacher.

But the good man of the cloth can’t make the man’s request fit with the good book. Gathering his neighbors to damn him publicly is just not the Christian thing to do.

Buddy and his boss, the funeral home director Frank Quinn, will, however, take Bush’s money.

The funeral party is on! Pretty soon, he’s a phenomenon, an instant legend in rural Tennessee: The old bastard paying big money for everyone including most of all himself to go his own fucking funeral.

Why’s he doing it? To have a hoot before he dies? To kill the neighbors who hate him? To have his day of reckoning? No one knows, and Bush isn’t saying.

“Maybe he won’t say.”

“Maybe he can’t say.”

Bush’s lie thus becomes a mystery. When we find out what’s behind his lie, will we find out the truth of the fire?

2. Bush’s Half-Truth

Get Low is a love story. Turns out Bush loves in a deep and abiding and honorable way.

He keeps a photo of a woman’s face by his bed. Before lying down to bed every night, he kisses her. Has Bush shut himself up for forty years with grief over a lost love?

He runs into Buddy’s Aunt Mattie outside church, and she remembers him fondly. Even after Bush leaves without uttering a word, Mattie speaks of a handsome and suave young man, a fine catch in her day. The old hermit was a hunk?

After cutting his hair and beard, he spends time with Mattie, showing himself to be a gentle, charming, tea-serving man. Where’d he come from?

Bush tells Buddy and Quinn that he and Mattie “had a go.” Had a go! She can’t be the woman in the picture, can she?

A human heart beats, pumps blood, and animates the soul of Felix Bush. Who knew? Why’d he keep it hidden behind his misery and meanness?

The answer comes from Mattie. While enjoying Bush’s tea and charming company, she suddenly runs out, flustered and probably angry. She saw the picture by Bush’s bed, we later learn. It’s not Mattie; it’s her sister, her married-to-someone-else sister, who died long ago. She confronts Bush. Why does he have her picture? What does he know about her death? Was he involved?

We can be pretty sure about what we suspected all along: Bush is the man saving himself from the fire in the film’s first scene. But we don’t know the whole story. Half the truth is that he loved a woman and lost her. That’s the good half, about a good man. The other half is ugly: she was married; she died in the fire; he ran away.

Along with intense human grief, we see that Bush also has lived all these years with intense human guilt and shame, hellfire and damnation.

The mystery thickens. Did he kill the woman he loved? Abandon her?

Bush isn’t saying.

"Maybe he won't say."

“Maybe he can’t say.”

3. Bush’s Misunderstanding of Christianity

In Get Low, the Christian story of redemption is for Bush the way, the truth, and the life. It begins with Bush coming to an honest reckoning of his own loves, his acts, and his failures; it ends in him telling his story: confession. Bush takes a long time to get there because a) he misunderstands the role of the church; and b) he misunderstands the meaning of the Bible.

a) Bush wants the church to tell his story for him.

He offers the preacher a wad of cash not only for the funeral party he wants to attend but also for a funeral oration about himself. He gets neither, and the preacher doesn’t know Bush and couldn’t speak the truth of his life anyway.

He dangles the wad of cash in front of the funeral home people and gets a funeral he can attend, but he doesn’t get anyone to tell his story. All the funeral can promise are the neighbors’ lies about him.

So Bush goes back to the church, a particular church a long drive away, from Tennessee to Illinois. There he looks up Reverend Jackson. The two go way back.

Bush built the church’s beautiful sanctuary, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, a gift of devotion, a prayer for forgiveness.

Jackson knows what happened at the fire. Bush made his confession to him decades earlier.

Bush asks Reverend Jackson—he actually gets the words out—to come to his funeral and tell the truth about him, his love, his sin, his years of repentance.

Jackson refuses adamantly, almost angrily. “Did you tell her?” he demands to know. Bush doesn’t say, but this time without mystery: he has not told Mattie about her sister’s death; has not told her about his role in it; has not apologized to her.

The more Bush wants the church to tell his story, the more he learns what he’s known all along: The church wants him to tell his own story.

Bush returns to Tennessee. His faith shaken, he announces to Buddy and Quinn that the funeral is off. Has he rejected the church and its teachings? Rejected his Christian duty?

b) Bush is left where’s he’s been most of his life, thrown back into his personal relation to the Lord. The film spends little time developing this personal (non-dramatic and non-visual) relation, at least not directly.

We know that Bush is no church-going man; yet he’s been feeling remorseful for forty years, punishing himself in his own hermetic prison of grief and guilt and shame. He also seeks Christian redemption before he dies.

We see him apparently at the grave of his dearly departed beloved. He’s silent, possibly in prayer. Is he asking the Lord’s forgiveness?

He breaks off and utters perhaps the most intelligent words of his life. “Ain’t no use asking Jesus to forgive me. I didn’t do nothin’ to him.”

Bush finally learns his Christian lesson. Faith and worship and the teachings of Christ require much more than faith and worship and Bible study. Like Christ himself, Bush must make the word of God live on earth, not by praying to Jesus but by living a Christian life. The leap of faith is the leap from the Word into life.

On the strength of Bush’s religious epiphany and moral courage, the funeral is back on!

Bush’s Loss of Innocence

Telling the story of the fire is Bush’s triumph and redemption. By the time we hear the story, the details are important, but we already know their meaning: Bush is a good man who erred.

He fell in love with a married woman. He didn’t mean to. He’s asked himself for forty years and still doesn’t know if a man can choose the person he loves, or if love chooses him.

He visited the house of his beloved to find her husband, who is in the know about the two lovers and in a jealous homicidal rage. Bush fights him off. Perhaps he’s killed him?

Rushing upstairs, Bush sees the bloody hammer on the steps.

He finds his beloved in a pool of blood—but alive.

Next thing he remembers, he’s knocked violently against the wall by the husband, not yet dead but intent on death and destruction. He’s set the house on fire.

Again the husband attacks Bush. Again Bush fights him off. Dead?

Bush discovers he’s on fire.

He goes to save his beloved, but ends up flying, outside the second-story window. Was he pushed? Did he fall? Did he jump?

The only thing Bush can say for sure is that, if he left his beloved to die, everything he knows about himself is a lie.

Here is the Southern Gothic tale in all its lurid sex and violence and loss of innocence, except, in Get Low, it is not a cautionary tale told to scare innocents, but an exculpatory tale told at the day of reckoning. The fire at the beginning of Get Low is indeed about sin, the loss of innocence, the fall into humanity. But rather than the childish morality of brimstone and damnation and the fires of hell for those wickedly human enough to stray from the path of righteousness, the story of Felix Bush shows the much more difficult adult path of salvation.

Bush helped cause the fire; he was torched by the flame of human passion and sin; and he suffered forty years of hell. But in the end, just as he escaped the burning house, he escapes the fires of hell by being honest with himself and by loving his neighbors enough to be honest with them. Bush earns forgiveness from Mattie and all concerned not because he’s completely innocent, but because he’s human, and because he told the truth of his human story.

A Literary View of the Christian Story

Biblical stories are moral. They mean to show us how to live our lives and be happy. Yes, happy. Morality has always meant the wisdom that leads to happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? What does the Bible show about the human condition? What wisdom does it relate that might help make us happy?

Get Low presents biblical wisdom that requires no belief in God or the afterlife, yet remains deeply moral, deeply concerned with human happiness.

Felix Bush becomes self-aware, dispelling lies, half-truths, and misunderstandings to get closer and closer to the truth about himself. That is exactly the path of secular thought in the west since at least Socrates: Know thyself. Bush reflects upon his passions and actions and, especially, their consequences for others. Who doesn’t want neighbors who are self-aware like this? Who doesn’t want to be self-aware?

Bush finds the meaning of biblical words not in the Book but in life. He learns that morality isn’t bookish, but finds its truth in living relation to other people. Who thinks happiness is in books and not in life?

Bush is not perfect; he’s made a human mistake and played a role in others’ pain and death. Most of us are more fortunate; our human mistakes only rarely cause death and such profound pain and suffering; few of us live with such guilt and shame. But who among us is perfectly innocent?

Bush find peaceful redemption. Through self-awareness, love, and a leap into life, Bush is reconciled with his community, himself, and his God. He does this ultimately by telling his own story; by fessing up, he earns eternal happiness. Who doesn’t think that being honest with the people you love is a good thing? An act of love? A means to intimacy?

Bush knows love. He knows the passionate love for a woman he wants to possess, the love that can be as compelling and ecstatic as it is blind and destructive. He also learns a more mature, self-aware, and selfless love for his neighbors, the human community. “God is love” is a perfectly secular formulation. Who doesn’t believe in love? the passionate kind? the selfless kind?

Morality is compelling for us secular types not because we’ll be punished or rewarded after death, but because we want happiness in this life. Why wait like Bush to find self-awareness and peace and love just before death? Why not mature early—and often—and pursue happiness in this life?

I Confess: The Story of a Literary Analyst

The biblical story of happiness is as difficult in secular terms as it is in sacred. Like Bush, we find it hard to be aware of ourselves, hard to understand that we are not perfect, hard to process the pain we cause. Above all, like Bush, we find it hard to confess.

To Be Continued…

The Lowdown on "Get Low"

2010-09-02T22:21:00.000-07:00

My wife tells me I think of movies in a more literary way than most people, looking not for fun and entertainment, not even for a chance to think about life and emotions and people. I get passionate about deep literary and philosophical meanings. After seeing the new movie Get Low, I started thinking all kinds of cool stuff about Character and Christianity and Capital. Perhaps I give the film more credit than it deserves, imbuing it with literary and cultural value it doesn’t merit. But I’ll give it this: it made me think.

So, as my friends and family, especially my wife, would no doubt be quick to say: Watch out! I’m going into thinking mode, indulging literary interpretation, speaking Ph.D. mumbo jumbo, which invariably makes me not only verbose—have you seen how long this is—but, even worse than boring, I become an insufferable know-it-all.

Actually, I’m going to try to curb my tendency to make people feel stupid and wrong, or at least I’ll try to explain why I think in literary terms, why it’s important to me, and why I think—insufferably—literature should be important to you. But, alas, I make no guarantees. You may feel the need to hit me, which would be the usual response. I only hope you hit me with words.

Before I get to literary interpretation, however, let me introduce Get Low with my take on the Industry view.

The Industry View of Get Low

Get Low is what Hollywood calls a small movie, an epithet in the industry that doesn’t quite reach an insult.

Avatar and Inception and Slumdog Millionaire, to take three high quality, Oscar caliber examples, enjoy big budgets and produce big entertainment value. They typically sport exotic, international or alien locales, exceptional and heroic characters usually played by beloved stars, and epic plot lines that place history, governments, even civilizations in the balance. They are especially distinguished by cinematic virtuosity, first-rate cinematography, sound, costumes, special effects, and the rest of what Hollywood does so well, movie-making talent that sweeps audiences into an intense visual and visceral experience. Big films require lots of capital, receive lots of marketing, and are expected to make huge profits.

At the other end of the Industry, small films have small budgets and thus no access to the full arsenal of cinematic virtuosity. This can be a good thing. Released from the capital demands of cinematic virtuosity and not expected to make blockbuster profits, small movies entertain with traditional literary and artistic techniques like a good story and strong acting performances. As such, they tend to attract small, educated, older audiences, often, as with Get Low, at theatres specializing in artsy films. In the Industry view, small movies have limited entertainment value and limited audiences, but they often feature quality, character-driven stories with Oscar-caliber writing and acting.

As a small film, Get Low gets mixed reviews, a good, not a great film. It’s story is a simple moral fable, good as far as it goes, moving, even thought-provoking for some, but not likely to garner Oscar consideration. Its real strength is in its performances. Robert Duvall carries the film in the lead role, an impassioned and flawed old country curmudgeon, a Duvall role perfectly cast, which is sure to enter him in the Oscar conversation, though not all reviewers were convinced. On the other hand, Bill Murray is universally acclaimed, virtually a lock for an Oscar nomination if the reviewers are right. He plays a supporting role as a man struggling against his weakness for money, which is a Murray role perfectly cast. Overall, then, with some reservations, the reviewers point to plenty that makes the film worth seeing.

The story stars Duvall as a good-hearted old coot, a hermit, who fosters for forty years the idea among four counties of locals that he is a mean evil son of a bitch. We first see him shooting at a boy for throwing a rock through his window, a typical dare among eleven year olds, a kind of local rite of passage as we later learn, braving the old bastard’s wrath. But of course the old bastard, Felix Bush by name, shoots not at the boy, but into the air, aiming not to harm but to scare. Bush further shows his heart when he traps the boy in a barn, frightens him out of his lunch, and then invites him to run away, scared but unharmed. Clearly, all he wants is to be left alone.

The premise of the story, apparently taken from a true Tennessee legend, is that Bush decides to throw himself a funeral party. He wants everyone from four counties to attend and tell a story about him, the mean old hermit bastard. The kicker is that Bush wants to be there alive at his own funeral, so he can listen to the stories. Bill Murray’s character, a funeral home director who smells profit even without a corpse, gets involved, and the funeral party is on. Bush surprises everyone by showing a talent for living, like the time he announces on air and out of the blue the offer to raffle off his own 40 acres of timber, instant riches for any local with five dollars and a story to tell. It quickly becomes a huge deal involving real money, and the party promises to be a legendary hoot.

As Bush comes out from the backwoods and out from behind his beard, preparing for the funeral party, the farcical premise turns into a moral fable. Through his surprisingly savvy interactions with Murray, we learn not only that he’s no fool, he’s probably playing Murray for a fool. Inevitably, of course, we learn that Bush is not a mean old bastard, but quite human, quite admirably likeable. Through his talks with an old flame, played by Sissy Spacek, we learn much more about the human tragedy that drove him to live like a hermit for forty years. We eventually learn that the funeral party is Bush’s chance for redemption.

Get Low then is a Christian moral fable of a man who withdraws from the world for forty years with the shame of a grievous but all too human moral failing; he seeks redemption before he dies. It works for most reviewers. While some critics call it simple, a bit too thin for a feature-length film, they stop short of saying it’s trite or not worth telling. Some like me applaud its moving moral significance. The general consensus is that Get Low tells a thought-provoking character-driven story that earns the audience’s affection for its interesting, honorable, and flawed characters.

In the Industry view of a character-driven story, Get Low is worth seeing because the performances by the actors bring the characters to life. Duvall as Felix Bush is always compelling on screen, deeply sympathetic; we feel for him, we like him, we need him to succeed. His performance is Oscar-caliber, especially in making what could easily have dissolved into a hoaky backwoods stereotype into a believable human character, and thus saving the film’s moral fable from a hoaky fate. In particular, Duvall’s soliloquy at the end, when he finally tells his story, is, as the reviewers say, worth the price of admission.

But Duvall’s performance is not pitch perfect. His transformation from a mean, ashamed, and guilty bastard into lovable old codger who wants redemption is too easy, as if a shave and a haircut could instantly turn 40 years of hermetic misanthropy into the suave charm of a man who serves tea to a sophisticated old flame. Duvall plays Bush, or perhaps he is directed to play Bush, in a heroic way that does not match the story. In the story, he is supposed to be so shaken by shame that no one knows whether he will actually walk the path of redemption, least of all himself, but we see precious little shame in Duvall’s performance. Mostly we see a Hollywood hero controlling events, influencing people to do his bidding, and doggedly pursuing his quest to right the wrong he created.

This perfectly played imperfect performance may be why some reviewers get downright cynical and nasty about Duvall’s performance, all but calling it a tainted and unseemly quest for an Oscar. Duvall's heroism is virtuoso, but it runs roughshod over the story.

From another cynical Industry perspective, that of the filmakers, perhaps Bush’s unheroic shame is best left buried beneath the surface of his moral courage, since no one wants to watch on screen an uncertain, hesitant, fearful Hamlet of a hero, even if it is a better story. Shame just doesn’t play.

Bill Murray’s lesser role is more perfectly performed. He encounters Bush first and foremost as an opportunity for profit, death and morality be damned; and he aims to make Bush’s funeral party a huge financial success. When Bush surprises him by taking control of events, maybe playing him for a fool, Murray’s character faces his own moral conflict between money and morality. He is betting big-time that he can have money and be moral too, but he might not be able to make it happen, since Bush is in control. Murray brings us into his well-written character’s inner conflict subtly and humorously and completely.

So, Get Low is a small movie, featuring a good story and excellent performances, all reason enough to see the film. It also boasts high production values, meeting or exceeding Hollywood’s estimable standards, especially given the challenges of a period piece on a low budget. The costumes, the shooting locations, the musical score, the camera work, all of it first rate as far as I could tell. I especially enjoyed the theme song sung by Allison Krause and written by Aife O’Donovan (lead singer for Crooked Still, a Boston band that recently played a great set at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara).

The film is currently playing Santa Barbara at the Riviera. I hope it does well enough to move to the main theaters, but it’s not likely. So don’t wait to see it.

The Literary View of Get Low

Literary analysis discusses exactly what Industry analysis cannot discuss: the meaning of the story. Movie reviewers, really anyone connected to the Industry and writing publicly, can only evaluate the story and say, for example, that Get Low is thought-provoking or simple. They can also say what the story is about, that Get Low is about a man’s sin and shame and redemption. But rarely if ever does an Industry writer interpret the meaning of the story, never elaborate an interpretive thesis, never write, for example, Get Low is a Christian fable that elaborates a profound critique of Christianity, and then go on to explain what that thesis means by providing examples from the story.

No Industry writer interprets because interpretation gives too much away, and spoils the viewers’ pleasure. No one likes to be told the end of the story, and everyone likes to think about movies on their own terms, because thinking is part of the pleasure. No readers want so-called experts to tell them what to think and feel about movies.

Those of us who engage in literary analysis, especially those of us who do it for a living, have no trouble spoiling movies for audiences, no problem giving away the ending, no hesitation to tell people what to think and feel about movies. We--I should say I--have no trouble playing the role of an insufferable know-it-all.

But let me confess my sins later, first allow me to profess. I'll try and watch my professorial mumbo jumbo.

I Profess About Get Low

Get Low tells a story of a man who fucked up, knows he fucked up, not just by social standards of moral conduct, nor just God's standards, but his own admirably high standards. Felix Bush fucked up, he hurt people, and he knows he's to blame. He feels his shame so deeply that he punishes himself by living in self-imposed imprisonment for forty years, beoming the mean old bastard hermit, in order to atone for his sin, and perhaps find peace with his conscience. That's the past, the back story. The future is Bush's death. Thus it's a common, possibly universal human story. Who hasn’t fucked up and hurt people? Who hasn’t felt such shame? Who doesn't want to die in peace? The movie chronicles how Bush finds redemption before he dies, and so becomes a model for us all.

It's a simple Christian fable, deceptively simple, since, through a simple literary twist to the story, the Christian moral fable becomes a critique of Christianity, a Christian self-correction. The moral of the fable in Get Low is about shame and redemption, not only for Felix Bush, not only for us, but also for Christianity.

To be continued.

My Pickup Truck

2010-02-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

I've been hankering for a truck for a while, even before I cracked up the Honda. It took me 31/2 months from the accident to let the financial dust settle, a month to get past Robin's mid-life crisis jibes, and fully three weeks after the test drive to buy a 2000 Mazda B2500, 4 cylinder 5 speed, with a little bigger cab and a lumber rack. All of it perfect for Big Table Designs (and my mid-life crisis). Pretty cheap too (especailly for a mid-life crisis).

The Gender Gap in Environmental Practices

2009-10-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

Women tend to be tidier than men, at least the women in my life--mother, girlfriend, wife--have all been able to see dirt before I do, feel disgust before I do, and act to clean up before I do. Not to say I'm a slob, not anymore at least. Growing up with all brothers started me off deficient in hygiene (among other deficiencies), which I've worked to mitigate with the more or less constant, um, encouragement of mother, girlfriend, wife. This gendered relation to hygiene is certainly far from universal. Indeed, my daughters tend to take after dear old dad in this regard; as one daughter famously articulated the problem when she was three and facing the task of cleaning her room: "It's so uneasy for me." Nevertheless, I don't believe I'm wrong to say that women are tidier than men--by nature, nurture, or both.

Normally I'm inclined to defend my relative slovenliness--cautiously, in very limited contexts. For example, order for the sake of obsessive orderliness is certainly unhealthy to individual minds and interpersonal relationships. Plus I think that science will prove, if it hasn't already, that exposure to pathogens is healthy for the immune system and thus longterm health. Why else would kids eat a peck of dirt? In short, I argue, cautiously and in limited contexts, cleanliness is not always next to godliness.

I am, thus, abashed to consider the issue of gendered relations to hygiene in the face of environmental issues that are essentially issues of housekeeping, such as recycling, pollution, conservation of resources, which is to say, those issues that individuals typically can control. This occasion to think about gendered environmentalism came from my students. I asked a class this summer to do little research projects focused on environmental behavior. Among many interesting projects and results, several student projects found clear correlations to gender.

One student counted the number of people at a grocery store using canvas or other re-usable shopping bags. She discovered to her surprise that the overwhelming majority of them were women. She even interviewed a male friend who insisted that carrying recyclable bags cramped his style, which involved hitting on women in grocery stores.
Another student found that his fraternity not only recycled nothing, but a survey of his housemates revealed they had zero interest in changing their behavior. Apparently, they had enough trouble getting all the trash into the dumpster every once in a while.
Another studied the amount of water usage. He hypothesized that women used more than men--they're cleaner after all, longer showers, more washing dishes and floors, etc. The subjects of his survey, evenly split between male and female, agreed with his hypothesis, as did the entire class when he asked them--mostly women--at the beginning of his oral presentation. In fact he discovered that, despite the universal belief that women used more water, actual usage, as measured by water bills, showed that men used more water; indeed, the lowest man's bill was higher than any of the women's. (One women in the class suggested that this unexpected result might point to the fact that women more often sleep at their boyfriends' place than the reverse.)

Abashed, but also intrigued, I did a quick search for publications in the area of gender and environmental behavior and found exactly one. A Canadian study of people actively committed to cleaning up the environment found that, even in this group, women were more apt to participate in environmental organizations and more apt to perform environmental acts in their personal life--recycle, compost waste, use alternative transportation. While more research is clearly needed, I suspect it will overwhelmingly confirm the inevitable: Women are better environmentalists than men--by nature, nurture, or both.

These days, the maternal superego originates with Mother Nature.

The Outdoor Room

2009-10-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

We love our outdoor room, to hang out, to eat, to use as the main entrance to the house. Even now when it's getting California cool, the room beckons us into the air, encouraging us to be hale and hardy at home. Plus Robin's touch looks great, no?

Soapbox brow

2009-09-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

George's blog features an epigraph extolling the combination of high and low brow cultures to the exclusion of middle brow. I tend to agree. I'll happily leave the middle brow to, for example, the Average Man 's proud tv-holic obsession with quality programming.

Yet it may be I enjoy higher highs and lower lows than George. To his low brow tendency toward esoteric punk, for example, not at all in itself a bad tendency, I prefer something more on the lines of this bar band called Soapbox I rocked to recently on my trip to Florida, whose broad appeal may not sink quite so low as tractor pulls, but defintely pleases the same impulse.

First, you have to imagine the band much later in the Bud Light night than in the (deilightfully homemade) clip below, at the point when the lead dude with his raspy silk voice and beer belly screams Hank Williams Junior's questions to the crowd, which the crowd lustily answers:

Why do you drink? To get drunk.
Why do you roll smoke? To get high.
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote? To get laid.

Second you have to realize that this band has a pretty boy fronting a couple of ridden-hard and put-away-wet female musicians fully looking the part of rockers who stay up late and party hardy, biker chicks who've chosen to ride their own electric guitars, and do it as well as the next good ol' boy. They covered everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Nirvanna to The Beatles and The Stones to Van Morrison and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, as well as, of course, Lynard Skynard and Marshall Tucker.

I felt I got a taste of Southern fun. Along with everyone else (except my mother, who got a little too much fun), I had a blast.

I'll leave my argument for higher cultural highs for another post.

The Park

2009-09-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

To commemorate signing the lease for another two years at our place in Sycamore Canyon, I'm posting (with the enabling assistance of my first digital camera) a series of pictures, especially as an enticement for those friends and family who have not yet visited. The first series is of the most distintive part of the spread, the party part: The Park (as dubbed by the friends who moved us in, though we found out the previous residents also called it The Park), which is accross Coyote Creek from the rest of the property.

Agribusiness and the Obama health plan

2009-09-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollan wrote in the NYT about the "elephant in the room" of the health care debate: American obesity, which is the prime driver of higher health care costs. He sees the uncontested provision in the Obama health care plan that insurance companies will no longer be able to exclude sick people from coverage as the beginning of the end of agribusiness as we know it.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

I like not only his unimpeachable insight into the food industry but also his political savvy. He understands how corporate money runs this country--and how laws might be manipulated to get the money on the good side.

The Clarity of Robert Reich

2009-09-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

Most everyone I know has been disheartened--make that sickened--by the healthcare debate. Robert Reich explains why in The Guns of August, and Why the Republican Right Was So Adept at Using Them on Health Care .

Big Table Designs

2009-09-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

Check out the blog for my furniture: Big Table Designs.

UnAmerican Savings

2009-06-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

I drove up to Buellton last week to buy a table saw, and took Robin's Pathfinder to haul it back. A few miles on the return trip, it broke down (or as Robin says, I broke it). It's a fried clutch. A cool $1,000 for a new one. I'd wince, except that repairing Robin's 1993 car reminds me how little, comparatively, I've spent on cars in my life. I added up the purchase prices since 1977: six cars, $21,000. My brother says in that period he's spent in the neighborhood of $200,000. That difference represents years of salary working just for a car. I'll take the years.

Iowa Passage

2009-05-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

Amy forwarded to me a plea for info from local columnist Starshine Rochelle, who was writing a piece on California marriage laws being less friendly to gays than Iowa's, except she had never been to Iowa and needed inside info. So I wrote this paragraph up in a few minutes and, since George has set the preening precedent for posting pieces he has both written and liked, I decided to follow suit. Besides, I'm on a memoir blogging roll.

I lived in Ames, Iowa for seven years. Home to Iowa State, it was one of two oases (along with Iowa City, a truly great college town) in the vast landscape of corn, soybeans, and agri-business. Still, it was a great place to raise a family--houses twice the size for a quarter of the price, no underclass or upperclass to speak of (since anyone who struck it rich moved immediately), and great, cheap pork chops. In my case, I also had a lot of guy friends to play basketball and poker. Plus, one could live in the small city full of trees and not realize it was Iowa until a trip into the vast surrounding flatness. I spent seven years surprising myself every time I took a drive.

Pressing History

2009-05-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

I went to Boston.com for my regular dose of Red Sox news and found a piece of history, mine and my family's. Of course, finding it online also underscores the more general history, the digital age heralding the end of news on paper.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/05/23/feeling_pressed/

For me, this story of the end of days for pressmen recalls the beginning of days for my adult life. I worked at the Globe's pressroom from age 16 through college. My dad was there for 35 years. My three brothers all worked there, DJ for over 20 years. The guy in the Boston.com video (very well done, no? great accents!) who says he's the last of ten or twelve is my cousin, Bill McHugh, also featured in the article.

As the article conveys, the ink was inescapable, suspended in the air, coating the presses, the walls, the floor, the plate glass windows looking out on Morrisey Boulevard so that they seemed from outside to be tinted against the sun, but it was ink, in our hair, under our fingernails, up noses and ears, in our very pores. Even the locker room, the tiles in the showers were covered in ink. Some guys, my brother Brian among them, never got used to it. For the rest of us, it sucked, but it was just part of the uniqueness of the place.

The noise, too, was inescapable. The presses were each three stories tall and 30 yards long. The pressroom at the Globe had ten presses when I was there, and I think they since added one or two. When they were cranking out thousands of papers an hour for a Sunday paper run of 750,000, the drone was so loud we would have to yell into each other's ear to be heard. I remember lying in bed at 7 am and the roar still droning in my ears. Some guys wore ear plugs, and the Globe began testing our ears in my last years there, but, in fact, I know of no one who developed hearing problems. These thunderous machines simply defined the place, the atmosphere, the industrial rumble of the proletarian world faintly audible as white noise in the business and editorial offices.

The work itself was miserable, tedious, and, at my low-man status, exceedingly easy. Up the union ladder, the work got progressively more interesting and challenging, paper handler, apprentice, journeyman. Learning to be a journeyman pressman took years. As lowly "plate boys," our main job was to pick up the inky paper off the pressroom floor and bale it for recycling. It required about ten or fifteen minutes of actual work an hour, at most, but we had to hang around to clean up if a press "broke down," which meant lots of paper on the floor.

The hours weren't attractive either, at least for most folks, though I didn't mind the 10:30 pm to 4:00 or 5:00 or whenever the run was done in the morning. It felt special to be working while everyone else slept. But most of the work was weekends, especially Saturday nights printing the big Sunday paper. That was certainly a drag, and I dreaded getting THE CALL (I was a "sub" and so on call) to work a Saturday night.

The people were equally singular. Or I should say the organizational culture was singular. We were all guys, of course, in itself a mark of a blue collar. We were also over two hundred, from 16 to 65, probably two thirds of us Boston Irish (I was watching an Irish movie with DJ once, and when the credits rolled he quipped that they read like a Globe payroll report), lots of Italians, one black guy, and, as the video captures, lots of family groups. I hung out with guys like me, with fathers or uncles in the place, working our way through college, though some were lured by the money and security and became "regulars," lifers. I never saw any of them outside of work, but I liked a lot of them, and we had some fun. I remember one time, the only time I ever left for a lunch break, about 2:00am, four of us piled into someone's car. We still wore our inky clothes, so we brought newspapers to protect the seats and rugs. We drove into the combat zone, where the cops chased the hookers from corner to corner. Whoever was driving stopped where a couple of ladies were waving at us. One of them reached into the passenger seat window and grabbed Jay Geninino's crotch. We all howled with laughter when driving away, as the hapless hooker discovered that her hand was covered in ink. (Jay is the guy in the video talking about being devastated if the Globe closes. That is, I think it's the same guy.)

Though I couldn't wait to get out, though my dad wanted nothing more for me than something better than the Globe, the job clearly worked in my favor. The best was the summer between sophomore and junior years. I lived with friends in Brighton and would take the T to work at 7:30 on Saturday morning, work until 6:00 or 7:00 Sunday morning, making more money in that long day than my friends working five and six days a week at Ho Jo's or wherever. I spent the rest of my days that summer playing ball, exploring the city, and reading. It was a blast. That was the Globe for us. It enabled our lives.

When we were young and driving into the city to visit relatives, we'd pass right by the Globe on the Southeast Expressway. My dad would always say, "Bless yourselves, we're passing the Globe." I thought he was serious, and avidly made the sign of the cross. As a teenager working at the Globe, I was certain my dad had always been making fun of the Globe (and us) in the working man's spirit of "take this job and shove it." Now I'm pretty sure it was both.

Fire Escape

2008-11-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

The map of the Tea Fire shows our home (at the intersection of Stanwood Drive and Sycamore Canyon Road) surrounded. In every direction, the fire raged, flames up to two hundred feet, winds up to 70 mph.

The fire claimed 210 houses. Ours is less than 100 feet from the power lines in this photo. But it survived. I can stand in my driveway and see destroyed homes, hillsides scorched, burnt brush as close as across the street. But not a single leaf on our property was damaged.

We benefited from the firefighters' expertise and courage, from being low in the canyon so that the wind wasn't as bad, from the neighbors who cleared brush, and from pure luck.

That's not to say it's been fun. It hasn't. Still isn't. Robin has suffered, is suffering the brunt of it. She was working downtown, saw the fire in the hills, and rushed home. Good thing. If she hesitated a few minutes, she would never have made it through to pick up the cats and a few odd treasures. She was there for half an hour of Armageddon, the wind whipping embers through night sky above her, emergency vehicles in full siren mode, the cats freaked out, and her own flight instinct working in high gear.

I was teaching. I heard the phone buzz in silent mode a couple of times, but didn't answer it, keeping to my policy when teaching even though Robin had called me before she went home. Bad decision on my part. When class was over, I listened to the messages. In one, she said in a stern voice to call her immediately. In the second, which she later told me came after twenty attempts that all failed since so many were using the system, she screamed in panic and frustration: "PATRICK, PICK UP THE PHONE." I had to call several times before I could get through to her, just as she was leaving.

We met at George and Amy's house (though they were at--where else would they be?--a wine dinner). Hugs. Deep sighs. Relief. Safety. Though our ordeal had hardly begun, the worst was over, at least for us. I looked up at the hills and I could see the towering flames seven or eight miles away, advancing a hundred yards in thirty seconds.

We spent the night at Larry and Sue's, whose house, among the many offerings of help from our great friends, had the best situation for the cats. They gave us food and drink as we watched the fire coverage on tv and constantly checked Edhat for the latest local perspective. We went to bed that night with those images in our minds, not knowing whether anything we owned would survive.

I was optimistic. In fact, I said to Robin as we went to sleep that night that I was 75% sure our house would survive. She wasn't particularly reassured. She didn't sleep much and by 7AM was on the phone with the landlord, who had talked with "crazy Tom," a neighbor who stayed to fight the fire. That's how we learned that the house survived.

I went to K-Mart to buy some underwear and toothbrushes and then on campus to work for a while. I got back about 2:00. Robin had spent the time mostly on the phone, seeking more information and reassuring family and friends that we were relatively, remarkably unscathed. She was overwhelmed by the emotional support, frazzled by the anxiety, and exhausted beyond her limits. It was all over her drawn face, her slowed speech, even her unsure movement. Somehow we managed to grab some borrowed t-shirts, the cats, and head over to the empty condo of Jim and Martha, who were back east for a death in the family. I put Robin to bed about 3:00 and, except for an hour or so in the evening, she slept until Saturday morning.

During a long walk on the Elwood bluffs and beach with my old friend Pete, the Golden Retriever, I decided I'd try to get to the house on bicycle. So I borrowed one from George, parked the car near the Five Points circle, and pedaled up toward Sycamore Canyon Road, which is closed to traffic between Five Points and our house due to a landslide a few years ago (ah, California), but normally passable on a bike. I approached the cop at the roadblock and asked if I could go up and see if my house was still there. He said, "Go for it."

Bicycling up Sycamore Canyon Road, I saw the fire-damaged hillsides on both sides, especially the west side up toward the Riviera, which was mostly toast. But dozens of houses saved, many with scorching all around. One man I met said he lost half his orchard, but not his house. "Fair trade," I said. He agreed.

Closer to our house, starting about fifty yards from our driveway, along Conejo Road and its side streets, folks were not so lucky as us.

We returned to our house on Sunday afternoon. Since then, we've been cleaning up the ash and suffering the poor air quality inside and outside the house, again Robin bearing the brunt of it since I'm apparently too insensitive to be be affected much. Plus the neighbor hood has been swarming with heavy vehicles, utility companies, refuse collection, public works, you name it. Chain saws fill the air. Helicopters still frequent overhead. No doubt the construction companies will soon follow in mass numbers. We'll be ground zero for months.

That's how we know we're lucky.

Dolphins Blowing Air Rings

2008-10-02T13:24:00.001-07:00

This video is of dolphins playing with rings they compose out of their own breath. It isn't known how they learn this, or if they're born with the ability. It's a lot like McQing, the talent among males in my family to demonstrate excellence in reasoning with or without possession of actual knowledge.

One, ahem, explanation involves "air-core vortex rings." With the tip of its dorsal fin when it is moving rapidly and turning, a dolphin creates invisible, spinning vortexes in the water. The higher velocity fluid around the core of the vortex is at a lower pressure than the fluid circulating farther away. Dolphins take advantage of this difference in pressure and inject air into the rings through their blow hole. The energy of the water vortex is enough to keep the bubbles from rising for a few seconds of play time.

But the main thing is that creating rings of air to play with is a lot more fun than simple transparency.

The Other Side of the Celtics' Victory

2008-06-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a Celtic fan, but I live in Santa Barbara and have many friends who are Laker fans. I sympathize with them. They are uniformly disappointed, frustrated, even disgusted with the Lakers for the way they lost the finals. If I were a Laker fan, I'd feel the same, and I'd be particularly upset with the lack of team play.

Witness game four, the key to the series, in which the Lakers surrendered a 24 point lead, a "Collapse for the Ages" according to the LA Times headline. The Lakers dominated the Celtics in the first half, even though Kobe, the regular season MVP and by all accounts the most gifted player in the league, had missed all his shots save for three free throws. Some--Laker fans, members of the media, even Celtic fans--saw that scenario as a good thing for the Lakers: They were up big and Kobe hadn't even got going yet. But the Celtics had a different thought: Kobe would come out in the second half looking to get his.

The Lakers' predictability and Kobe's predictable selfishness keyed Boston's historic comeback. Knowing what was coming, Paul Pierce asked to guard Kobe, and he did a fantastic job of contesting Kobe's jump shots. In one particularly memorable play in the middle of the Celtics' big 21-3 run, Pierce blocked Kobe's shot, retrieved the carom, and ignited a Boston fast break.

Pierce's defense was just part of the overall team effort to stop Kobe. Pierce and Kobe both knew that, if Kobe drove past Pierce, the Celtics were all waiting to swarm Kobe, swallow him up, not allow a decent pass let alone a shot close to the basket. As it was the entire series, if Kobe were to get his, it would be through jump shots, which he kept jacking up over the taller Pierce. The rest of the Lakers stood around and watched as the Celtics took the third quarter, the game, and the Lakers' heart.

The next day, Jackson pointedly said that Bryant would be motivated by something Boston's Kevin Garnett said. When asked to elaborate, Jackson said, check the transcripts.

If you've paid attention to them (the Lakers) all year, usually the first half is team ball, second half is usually Kobe takes over the games. They weren't nearly as aggressive as they were the first half. It just looks like they wanted to get the ball to Kobe and him sort of finish it off.... We were giving Kobe every look we've got in the book, from different matchups to trapping him, to a guy on the bottom. We were just making other guys make plays.

Garnett's words certainly struck a chord with the coach, and Kobe's play down the stretch in game five suggests that he also heard them and heeded them. He deferred to Gasol, even directing the ball away from himself to Gasol, since that is where the Celtics' defense was weakest.

The Lakers managed to win game five, but not convincingly. With Kobe out of the offense except to draw defenders away from the basket and give room for Gasol to operate, the Lakers looked and acted strange, out of character, desperate. Without a dynamic Kobe, the team was lost. Only the most die-hard Laker fans expected them to win even one game of the final two in Boston. A rout in game six was hardly surprising.

The problem isn't so much Kobe's need to be the star; the problem is that the Lakers are built around Kobe's need to be the star. It's one thing to make Kobe's unsurpassed talent the center of a team; it's another to make Kobe's narrative of greatness the center of the team. It's a Hollywood formula, eagerly embraced by the NBA and the media: Kobe's the hero on a quest to carry a team to a championship and everyone else is the supporting cast. This formula has informed the Lakers' organizational strategy for the last four or five years. Every organizational decision fits this overall formula.

In contrast to the Celtics' corny and profound but nonetheless appealing--and victorious--"ubuntu" ethos, "I am what I am because of who we all are," the Lakers are what they are because of who Kobe is. His scolding and scowling at his teammates and at his coach tell the tale of what "team" means to the Lakers. They don't have the opportunity to do things for the benefit of the team; they do things for the benefit of Kobe.

This depressing drama is, of course, not new to Lakers' fans, except that Kobe's selfishness was supposed to be a thing he'd outgrown in his transformation into a leader on and off the court, the heir to Michael Jordan's championship passion, demanding of his teammates only as much as he demanded of himself. The collapse in the second half of game four proved that to be all public relations, in the end a cruel fraud. The 2008 Lakers were about Kobe getting his. Or failing to get his.

The future holds some promise for Laker fans. Bynum will come back from injury to give the Lakers the toughness inside that they lacked in the finals. Bynum's presence also allows Gasol and Odom to play to their strengths, which are marvelous basketball skills (rather than vilified for their weakness, lack of physical strength). Vuyacic and Farmer will have more experience. Radmanovich will have more time on the bench. Kobe may even finally figure out how to lead a team.

If Kobe does mature, however, I still wouldn't root for him. Other petulant and selfish players who mature in the public eye are far more sympathetic. Paul Pierce's ghetto-to-Finals glory story, for example, includes overcoming genuine obstacles, like poverty and stab wounds and a career spent on the same bad team.

Kobe's story? On and off the court, he needs to overcome his sense of entitlement.

Rooting for Kobe is like rooting for the rich kid with all the tutors and advisers and insider legacy tracks, like rooting for corporate America, the Evil Empire, or George Steinbrenner.

I wouldn't want to be a Laker fan.

Discovering Place

2008-06-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

A friend gave us the “Best House Award” not really knowing what’s best about the house, because the best becomes apparent only while living here. It’s discovered; it’s the process of discovery. For example, the birds.

Robin gave me a great pair of binoculars and a whimsical book (first edition, she would have you know) by a local writer from the 1960s, Margaret Millar, who wrote about birding in Santa Barbara. It’s full of birding adventures, local color, prominently featuring the Natural History Museum, and perhaps too much whimsy for me; but I enjoyed it immensely because it inspired my bird watching. A new world has opened to me (or reopened).

This week’s hot weather, fortuitous because it arrived just when I’ve a got a break from teaching, has me sitting in the yard in the afternoon writing. For me, the writing process involves a lot of brooding with a pen and paper, which then gets cleaned up as I sit at the computer. I’ve been at the computer in the morning, but it’s too hot by afternoon, so I sit in the Adirondack chair in the yard under the oak tree and alternately write furiously and stare off into the sky. In short, I’ve given myself an excellent opportunity to watch birds. So I keep the binoculars close by and learn about what goes on around me in between Great Thoughts about Great Things.

Among the many birds I’ve learned to identify with the help of Whatbird.com and Google images (I’m still waiting for the bird identification book Kate’s getting me for my birthday) is the lesser goldfinch. I saw him one afternoon earlier this week, quite dapper in his breeding plumage—bright yellow coat and distinctive black cap. He impressed me with the way he hangs horizontally to the thinnest green branch or flower stem, bending it toward the flower or seed he wants. He especially liked the cosmos I planted, but also the grass gone to seed under the lemon tree.

The goldfinch came by again the next afternoon with a couple of paler companions, probably his mate and an offspring. They spent a few minutes flitting around the cosmos, then settled on the giant sunflower, which is still growing, not yet any flowers or seeds, and they proceeded to eat the leaves, peck away and eat them. Green stuff disappearing into their beaks. Big holes in the sunflower leaves. Birds eat greens? Who knew?

That evening sitting on the porch in one of the big Adirondack chairs, I identified the sound of the dark-eyed junco, a sparrow that wears a pronounced executioner’s hood, the only kind of sparrow I can distinguish, a feat of birding I accomplished the day before. So the little guy was foraging in the oak tree and would jump up to answer a call coming from across the canyon, his close call matching the distant one off to my left. The sound is like a circus whistle that starts out slow and vigorous, then gets faster and higher as it fades. Or maybe it’s like a high-speed high-pitched baby’s wail—waaaa-aaa-aa-aa-aa-a-a-a-a-a. Now I hear it all the time, distinct from all the other sounds. How cool. Do birders know all the sounds they hear in the back yard? How cool is that?

I’ve also identified a kestrel, a red-shouldered hawk, house finches galore, scrub jays, towhees California and spotted, a huge flock of cedar wax wings, and much more beyond the crows and pigeons. But rather than go too far down the nature boy path all at once, I’ll just reiterate that birding is part of the deeper pleasure of getting to know the place and its inhabitants. What’s better than discovering a great place, my great place, and its inhabitants?

As I said to Jenna yesterday, “It must be a great place if the worst thing about it is that the dishwasher leaves spots on the glasses.”

Meme member memorabilia memoir memorial memo

2008-05-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

Here are the rules to be broken:
A) The rules of the game get twisted at the beginning.
B) Each player questions the questions about himself or herself.
C) At the end of the post, the post ends

1) Ten years ago I was...
Searching for grit in paradise.

2) Five things on today's to-do list:
Sour some dough
Catch an express bus and then bike uphill all the way home, weeee
Remember that gophers eat too
Empty my head of planning details about an event next Tuesday
Fish, perhaps grilled or pan seared

3) Things I'd do if I were a billionaire:
Move to Mars
Buy a unicorn
Establish an ethos of equality on Wall Street

4) Three bad habits:
Breaking silly rules
Watching to much b-ball
Annoying Robin (by breaking silly rules and watching too much b-ball)

5) Four places I've lived on the 42nd parallel:
Boston Amherst Binghamton Ames, BABA, then, of course Santa Baba

6) Six jobs I've had in my life:
Husband father friend brother son and part-time drinker

Now That's a Great Speech

2008-03-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Obama speech responding to the first serious right-wing smear campaign against him is just brilliant, especially if you watch it, but even if you read it. It's extremely intelligent in providing, insisting really, on the historical context of the anger that gets expressed virulently, weirdly perhaps, in the black community. He dares speak the truth. Yet the speech is extremely savvy in speaking to the concerns of black and white communities, perfectly exemplifying his politics of reconciliation and hope. It's as if he and his campaign have been waiting for this opportunity to turn smear into inspiration.

I find it particularly emotional, I suspect, because I've been waiting way too many years for someone, anyone, on a national stage to speak the truth.

A Car That Runs on Air, Literally

2008-02-27T17:06:00.000-08:00

Why have I just heard about this news? The real green future in cars is not hybrid electrics or even electrics, but compressed air vehicles. The advantage: No batteries, no nasty battery acids or metals. Rather, energy storage is in the compression. Check out this longish (9 minute) clip for details.

Stars from Music of the Night

2008-02-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

Jenna Tico, Co-Director of the student production at Santa Barbara High School, "Music of the Night," brought the house down with Cole Patterson and their version of "Stud and a Babe."

Jenna also directed and sings in "Mama Who Bore Me," featuring Karlin Trexler and some passionate daughters.

Why Greening the Grid Comes First

2008-02-20T11:09:00.001-08:00

In the US, coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, provides 50% of electricity, with all fossil fuels fuels providing 72%. Globally, coal provides 40% and all fossil fuels around 66% of the world's electrical power.

This reality suggest that we should first green the grid, then plug into it for transportation and other energy needs.

(Click the image to go to the original website and see a clearer image. It is also, of course, a vivid record of population, wealth, and probably other distributions.)

Our New Place

2008-02-11T13:35:00.001-08:00

We leased a fabulous place in Mission Canyon: Craftsman styling with redwood everywhere, island and ocean views, huge yard with vegetable garden and chicken coop. It's a 2 bedroom, 2 bath, large kitchen, huge fire-placed living room, hardwood floors, well-kept funky place from the 1880s. Oh and a pool too.

We might even be able to afford it if we live off the chickens and vegetables.

The End of Economic Fetishism

2008-01-25T10:29:00.001-08:00

I laughed at Barbara Ehrenreich's comment on the bipartisan politicos' effort to stave off recession:

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris.... The immediate challenge...is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

The joke works, too, if the economy were a giant penis. Either way, politicians' desire to stimulate our economic lives is the politics of the pimp, a $1200 come-on from the Wall Street john. For most of us struggling in the middle classes, all this economic stimulation will produce at best fleeting pleasure, consumerist titillation, climaxed at the cash register, and usually ending there. To be sure, $1200 is not nothing, which is what we would otherwise get, what we usually get. But is that what we really want? Will such consumerist titillation change anyone's lives?

Even if this stimulation works and gets the economy throbbing again, the politicos' obsession with the consumerist fetish doesn't begin to address deeper questions:

Does economic growth really make us wealthier?
Does it make our world better?
Does it make us happier?

1) The much ballyhooed economic growth in recent decades serves mainly to create a huge and increasing gap between rich and the rest of us, who try to keep up by working too hard, 350 hours a year longer than Europeans or Japanese. Much of that enforced workaholism is economically ephemeral, except for those who own a home. No surprise, then, that the bursting housing market bubble is the reason the politicos decided to get together and throw a $1200 sop to us middle class saps. Santa Barbara is perhaps a great example of this class dynamic of comfortable wealth, invisible poor, and struggling, over-worked, middle class DINS (double-income no sex), except that the middle class in Santa Barbara hasn't been able to purchase a home since maybe 1998.

2) Even if our politicians won't connect the economy to the environment, many people, especially in places like Santa Barbara, are now beginning to realize that a stimulated, throbbing economy predicated largely on the dizzying production and consumption of stuff ain't natural. Global economic growth, especially in China and India, is stretching resources and stressing the planet. Choose your Armageddon: peak oil or global warming. Rather than addressing the question of sustainability, politicians can only think to provoke our consumerist fetish in order to stimulate unsustainable economic growth.

3) Finally, fortunately, is the question of happiness. As Bill McKibben argues with grace and hope, "the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own." He advocates sustainable, local economies, that value connections to people rather than wealth as the source of human happiness. Why work so hard for money if it doesn't make us happy? Why destroy the environment if there's no happiness in it? Why do we focus on our consumerist fetish when what we really want is so much bigger and more human?

I'm not advocating that our leaders do nothing to prevent recession or depression. I also have to struggle to feel the hope promised by local economies in some murky, idealistic, post-apocalyptic future. I'm not sure what the answers are. But I'm not turned on by stimulating economic growth or tricked by the john's promise of $1200.

Trailing Peter Pan

2007-12-11T11:04:00.001-08:00

Check out the trailers for Peter Pan, the DVD, from the young talents at Santa Barbara High School:

1. In a Time of War starring Jenna!

2. A Face at the Window

(Apparently Blogspot doesn't allow Adobe Flash videos.)

At the Corner of Ruin and Grace

2007-11-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to Santa Barbara, I was struck by how pretty everything looks all the time, too pretty for my east coast blue collar blood. The line from "Orange Juice Blues" kept haunting me: "I'm tired of everything being beautiful, beautiful." So I went on a mission to find grit in Santa Barbara.

I couldn't find any, at least not Anglo grit. I found sleaze, both working class and upper crust, but that ain't no authentic, dare to do the right thing, unconcerned by dirty finger nails, do the hard work of the world, grit. The closest thing I could find was stylized designer grit, created from the clean pretty drafting tables of clean pretty minds, whose rebellion from stucco walls and red-tile roofs created coffee shops, bars, or restaurants where graduate students and ex-graduate students like me could drink four-dollar coffees or five-dollar beers and feel the authenticity of bared brick and ductwork, pre-distressed furniture, and the atmosphere of antique Coke bottles and old license plates. Had I moved to a new state or a new state of being?

After a year or two in town, a bit slowly, really, I discovered the venerable concert series, Sings Like Hell. Producer Peggy Jones and her hellions have succeeded in introducing grit into the dreamy prettiness of Santa Barbara far better than most, certainly far better than I. Within the beautiful, beautiful Lobero opera house, they stage some of the best musical acts in town, specializing in the graduates of--and those still enrolled in--the school of non-commercial knocks. Heavily flavored by the Austin scene, Sings Like Hell offers singer-songwriters who are more familiar with loud bars a chance to perform for a sit-down audience in an acoustically designed venue. The tag line of the series is "The best music you've never heard," and indeed the best shows not starring Richard Thompson are the ones by unknown surprises. Anyone familiar with Sings Like Hell knows all this.

A couple weekends ago, a great example of grit in paradise came to Hell. Eliza Gilkyson was born in Hollywood to folk-singing DAR cultural elite, but she must have used her silverish spoon to feed on large doses of unrefined life. Her songs celebrate a scar-studded, mistake-wizened, regret-free history of seeking truth, heat, and marrow from the acid Sixties through the current era of consumerist delusions. Tall, thin, and still attractively hip, she wears a guitar as naturally as any grizzled rocker. Her voice reaches the ache of longing as readily as it belts Bush-bashing blues. ("I'm from Texas," she said in the intro to 'Man of God,' "and we're still missing our village idiot.")

The grittiest thing about her is that she keeps improving as a songwriter and performer even as she pushes 60. Five or six years ago she warmed up the audience in Hell, a performance memorable mostly for her stand-up comedy between likable songs. A headliner this time, Gilkyson's hit her confident stride. She regaled us plenty with her wit, but settled in the second half of her set into moving us with her artistry, her songwriting, her lyrics. I was especially impressed by glimpses of what I think are unreleased songs, including the great line for locating grit, at "the corner of ruin and grace."

Candidate of Choice

2007-11-15T12:54:00.001-08:00

Dale Francisco ran for Santa Barbara City Council as a pro-choice candidate; that is, he wants public policy to support private transportation. In short, he's a car guy, and he doesn't want Santa Barbara in the business of encouraging people to walk, bike, or ride public transit. People have chosen cars, he reasons, and government should respect that choice. Now that Francisco has beaten the odds and Brian Barnwell for a seat on the City Council, I'm compelled to make a few common-sense points to help ensure that his argument to support cars in the 21st century doesn't gain traction in Santa Barbara public policy.

First, people's personal choices are defined by public choices. Calling the choice to own and drive a car simply a matter of "personal" choice ignores the public choice to invest enormous resources in roads and parking and suburban sprawl. The infrastructure is set up for cars. That I and nearly every adult in Santa Barbara chooses to own and drive a car is possible only because of tax-supported infrastructure. How many of us would invest tens of thousands of dollars in personal transportation if roads were unpaved and parking non-existent? How many would choose public transportation if enough money were invested in it to make it more convenient than cars?

Second, the public choice to invest in personal transportation has never been a simple matter of democracy in action, never a simple reflection of Americans love affair with the automobile. Powerful corporations with vast sums of money at stake, notably General Motors, pursued calculated policies to cripple public transportation, eliminate competition, and leave people with no other option but to purchase a car. Los Angeles is probably the most tragic result of this effort. Blessed in the first half of the twentieth century with the largest streetcar system in the world, boasting a per capita ridership exceeding current-day San Francisco and New York, LA now famously suffers from the horrors of auto-dystopia: asphalt jungles, traffic nightmares, vacant downtown, smog, endless commutes--and on and on.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the choice to invest public money in personal transportation, which may have made some sense in the first half of the twentieth century, makes no sense today. The Average Man has pointed out to Dale Francisco the green reasons for public transportation, which I think are obvious and I fully support. I'd also like to point to the, dare I say, emotional benefits of public transportation. For sure, cars can be fun and, perhaps more so than any other commodity, bring real pleasure. But maybe getting out of our cars and interacting with our neighbors is even more fun. As Francisco himself has said, "I originally came to Santa Barbara partly because this is one of the world's best places for biking and hiking, and because it has a walkable downtown. If I never had to drive a car, I'd be delighted." Well, then, why not support public policy that fosters the choice for such car-less joy?

Warner Warning

2007-09-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

The widely reported $120 margarita at the San Ysidro ranch got me thinking again about Ty Warner's effect on the quality of life in Santa Barbara. Walking by Ty Warner's various sea-front properties in Montecito last spring, I witnessed an army of laborers building, renovating, beautifying. Some might point out how many jobs "Ty" is creating, how much money he's pumping into the local economy (though I wonder how much of the reported hundreds of million actually stays in the local economy and how much goes to imported luxury items and materials). But to me, the significant fact is that so much capital and so much human labor, skilled and unskilled, lower class and lower middle class, is being devoted to the exclusive benefit of rich people.

Consider the local Warner properties, not including his multi-lot bluff-top estate, and not including the cost of actual purchase, only the renovation cost:

Biltmore Hotel, recently renovated for a cool $240 million (for 233 rooms). Rooms "start at $550" a night.
San Ysidro Ranch, recently renovated for $130 million (for 40 cottages and suites), plus an additional $25 million for the Stonehouse restaurant. Accommodations available for $800-$4,000 a night.
Coral Casino, currently completing a $35 million renovation. Enrollment fees more than $20,000, plus monthly and other fees.
Montecito Country Club, renovation plans in the works, with Jack Nicklaus designing the golf course. Membership, $10,000 plus fees.
Sandpiper Golf Course, $124-$144 for a round of golf.
Rancho San Marcos, currently a relative upper-middle-class bargain at $65-$85 for a round of golf, though changes are expected.

Apologists might point to the $1.5 million he donated to the Sea Center on Stearns Wharf or the $500,000 to renovate the path in front of his bluff-top estate. But I'm not impressed. He invests hundreds of millions of dollars, probably more than a billion dollars, in properties that benefit exclusively rich people and gives two local donations worth roughly.2% of his other local investments, just barely enough to get his highly visible name on a highly visible public building, plus, of course, the aesthetic satisfaction of beautifying the view from his estate (even changing the color of the Sea Center).

Ty Warner epitomizes the worst of contemporary capitalism. He makes a fortune selling frivolous beanie babies to kids and crazed collectors, then invests that fortune in luxurious playpens for the rich and super-rich. His idea of public spirit, his contribution to making the world a better place, begins with personal aesthetics and ends with public relations, little more than individual aggrandizement with an impoverished sense of larger purpose.

Fun Facts

2007-06-18T15:03:00.001-07:00

George has tagged me, kicked my can, captured my flag; and since I can neither hide nor dodge, I'll play. So, eight more or less fun facts about me. Allee alle incomefree.

1. My grandfather died in 1934 as the second most powerful man in Boston, the Mayor's chauffeur, through whom funnelled all the party patronage. His political acumen died with him, since the only political accomplishment that his twelve children and 66 grandchildren have been able to muster is to stay out of jail (mostly).

2. An example of staying out of jail, or the confession of an eco-terrorist: Back when I was fifteen (so the statute of limitation has long run out, me hopes), a couple of friends and I were pissed off that a developer was destroying the woods we had grown up playing in. He was a very modest developer, probably just a contractor with a hefty loan and small profit margin, a total project of maybe ten houses. But he and his minions were bulldozing the trees, building tract homes, paving paradise for profit. The kicker was that he was building among the standard seven-room capes a fifteen-room colonial for himself. It was like the Lord's house surrounded by his serf cottages.

We weren't going to let him get away with it. We sabotaged his bulldozer, cutting wires, pouring dirt into openings for gas and oil. We slit open bags of plaster and emptied them on the wet ground. We even left notes, expressing our ecological rage in words and letters cut from magazines. In those notes we called ourselves the Green Mountain Boys. On the second or third night-time raid, a couple of guys were waiting for us, and suddenly the blue lights of a cop car came around the corner. We ran like hell, through the paths in the woods we knew too well. They never caught us, but they did put an end to eco-acts of the Green Mountain Boys.

3. I used to dive off cliffs of the Red Rock sort, up to fifty feet and higher, until I got to be 18 and conscious enough to realize I should be scared. And so I was, and so I stopped. From then on I only bragged about my daring-do without daring to do.

4. I once screamed at a power hitter in Fenway Park to bunt. And he bunted.

5. I lived the first 40 years of my life on the 42nd parallel, from Boston to Amherst to Binghamton to Ames (B-A-B-A). Then I moved to Santa Baba.

6. I met Robin swing dancing. On the same date a year later, we got married. Robin wore the same dress.

7. I played on a pick-up basketball team in Robb Gym that won by a shut-out, 11-zip. With a collective experience of over a hundred years of playing pick-up ball and tens of thousands of games, none of us had ever witnessed it before.

8. The only things in life I like to be bitter are coffee, beer, and, in small doses, truth.

Peak Oil and Hope

2007-06-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Of all the cries of doom that shake the souls of environmentalists like me, peak oil is the most apocalyptic. It is inevitable and irrefutable. Someday, maybe someday soon, the supply of oil will no longer keep up with the demand. When that happens, it will begin the end of the world as we know it. The nightmare scenarios are frightening.

But the peak oil apocalypse is also--I'm coming to think, slowly, cautiously, after struggling through depression--full of hope. In fact, by writing this little piece I have convinced myself. Peak oil is our environmental salvation!

I first heard the words "peak oil" at a Community Environmental Council (CEC) event. Two guys were working the crowd like high-tech entrepreneurs in a room full of venture capitalists. Since I didn't really know anyone there, they found me an easy audience. They told me all about the likelihood of war, famine, global anarchy. They told me that the oil companies, see, know all about peak oil, and so do their political lackeys in the Bush administration. Why else would they go to war in the middle east? They told me that Wall Street wizards, see, know all about it and are in a panic to protect their wealth somehow, even profit from the catastrophe somehow. They wanted to know, see, what Santa Barbara was doing to prepare, where we would get our food, our water, our livelihoods. In short, these guys could have come straight from that oracle of peak oil, the rapturous web site for zealots (WAIT! DON'T CLICK THAT LINK unless you are prepared to be depressed for days. Are you ready? Can you handle the truth?) L.A.O.T.C.

I listened to these guys, but I was paying attention to other things, mostly to my unfamiliar surroundings. The event took place at a very nice estate, very pleasant, very understated. All the people were very nice, very well-meaning, very wealthy. Since I'm just a blue-collar boy with too much education, I couldn't help thinking, "I want me some of this elegance, this importance, this charm." I don't need no bluff-top estate. I don't need to be Founder, top donor, or President of the Board. But I want my stake, my claim, my place. In short, I promptly forgot about peak oil.

In this way I think I'm pretty typical. For most of us, our worldly desires, worthy or otherwise, cloud the apocalyptic realities. We can't be living everyday as a response to ecological alarm bells. As even evangelicals waiting in rapture for the Millennium profess: Prepare for the apocalypse, but live your life.

I have no illusions about this ostrich attitude. Forgetting about the realities of peak oil is not helpful, only necessary as a coping strategy. Equally necessary is lifting our heads out of the compelling sands of our lives and taking a look at the approach of doom. For this clear, heartless, rational vision, however, we need more than the tragedy of doom and forgetting. To face the realities of the future, we need more than reason. We need hope.

This need for hope is why the peak oil apocalypse is special. It portends an apocalypse in the precise religious and etymological sense of the word, that is, as a revelation. Peak oil reveals to us exactly what, as environmentalists, we most want: a world without oil. Instead of preventing global warming or preventing pollution or preventing the depletion of aquifers (etc. etc.), the peak oil apocalypse is a positive vision. It gives us, as inevitable and irrefutable, a world without oil. Amen.

Okay, so there's that transition period of war, famine, and global anarchy between now and then; our way of life will be destroyed, most of us will die, yaddah yaddah yaddah. Or maybe not. There are other, more gradual scenarios. As unlikely as it sounds, we may actually generate leadership that manages an orderly transition to the post-oil economy. We can work toward that goal. Solidify the grassroots! Ride your bike! Go solar! Eat slow and local! Exercise your entrepreneurial energy for innovative change. Support the CEC's Fossil Free by '33 initiative! Keep your eyes on the prize: A world without oil.

More specifically, peak oil heralds a world in which local, communal bonds will develop. Even James Howard Kunstler's Long Emergency allows for the hope of more human closeness. Bill McKibben says that, even as physical life gets harder, we'll be happier.

If I look at the politcal and economic situation rationally, I see no reason to believe that we can create an orderly transition to a post-oil economy. But hope isn't about reason. It's about faith.

Keep the faith! World without oil! Hallelujah!

Berkeley's Brainy Bums

2007-05-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

A homeless guy came up to me on Telegraph Street and said, "You look distinguished."

"Thanks," I said. "So do you."

"Yeah," he sighed. "But I fell asleep in the middle of it."

Revival

2007-05-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

I saw Paul Hawken last night. He led a revival meeting for those of us who believe in social justice and environmental sanity. He gave us a gently rousing sermon about the multitudes of the righteous across the globe who share our belief. He gave us hope that we, the meek and righteous, shall inherit the earth from the evil powers of oil, endless consumption, and Wall Street concentrations of wealth. He confirmed for us that our love for each other and for the planet is the way, the truth, and the life. He inspired us to keep the faith in our good works. We are legion; together, we shall overcome.

My mocking tone, here, fails to protect me from the truth of this insight: The many movements worldwide to save the planet and its people from the apocalypse amount to a religious movement. It springs from the same human spirit that inspires all the great religions: our purpose and salvation in a world going to hell is love, faith, hope, and community. We have new stories for our age, stories based in science and reason rather than myth and mysticism; we have replaced faith in an all-knowing god with our faith in the collective human knowledge and wisdom of science and reason. But our emotional and spiritual experience is, perhaps, much the same as with a religion.

In other words, we respond emotionally and spiritually to these stories in a variety of what could be called religious ways. We have the old-testament style fire and brimstone prophets of global and globalized doom, who inspire righteous indignation against the oil-loving infidels. We have the prophets of piety, who counsel that individual adherence to a set of environmental and social commandments (mostly amounting to ascetic practices of organic, solar-powered, and free trade consumption) will counter the momentum of oil-fueled globalized misery. And we have prophets of hope like Hawken and Bill McKibben, whose gospels spread the word of goodness in the world and its people.

Perhaps we shouldn't be scared of this characterization of the movements of social justice and environmentalism as religious in nature. We can give up archaic superstition in favor of reason, the Law of the Father in favor of reasoned debates, and concentrations of power in hierarchical institutions of established religion in favor of the diverse and decentralized practices of millions of people. But why should we give up the emotional and spiritual stuff of religion--the faith, the hope, the fear, the indignation, and, above all, the love? Humans do not live by reason alone. Indeed, faith, hope, fear, indignation, and love are far more powerful than reason, certainly historically, certainly personally, and certainly politically. Why abandon such power? Why cede it to those who believe in superstition, the laws of a long dead god, and blind obedience to centralized authority?

The name of Hawken's book is Blessed Unrest. Hallelujah! Amen.

Future Fridays: The End of Endless Growth?

2007-05-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

I have to recommend Bill McKibben's Deep Economy. I am surprised by how much I like it. It's perhaps not much different than a lot of environmental books, and it didn't tell me anything, beyond specific examples, that I haven't been thinking about since the 70s. But McKibben is fun for me because he rekindles my sense of the future as a project--not idealism or optimism or even hope, just local, green stuff to do because 1) local and green is the right way to go and 2) because, who knows, it might work. In other words, the book manages to take the alternative piety out of environmentalism--neither the fire and brimstone alarms of global warning prophets nor the sanctimonious saintliness of tree-hugging messiahs. Rather, the book lays out the basic framework of what's wrong and the pragmatic everyday things people around the world are doing to better their lives and communities.

McKibben lays out quite readably and sanely the familiar basic problem:

Passing the peak of oil supplies means the end of the industrial economy as we've know it for two hundred years.
The global warming caused by the oil economy is coming and will change things, no one knows how much.
The globalization of the oil economy leads to vast inequities and an overworked and highly stressed population in this country, even more enormous social and ecological problems for countries developing on the U.S. model exported through the IMF and the World Bank, and points without question at the unsustainability of fossil fuel industrialization.

McKibben lightens the load of these interconnected disasters by looking beyond classical Adam Smith economics that emphasizes growth we cannot sustain, the kind of growth measured by the GNP and stock market prices, which must always go up, up, up or the economy is in trouble. In view of the "deep economy," however, we shouldn't even want to continue growth, because growth doesn't make us happy. Our relentless exhaustion of natural resources and human energies to produce ever more stuff for us to consume and throw away is not only ecological madness, not only social madness on a global scale, but also psychological madness. Frenetically producing and consuming stuff makes us less happy, so we should stop. Instead, we should focus on what would make us happy, what we don't have enough of, and what we are squandering fast: community.

McKibben's most prominent, most pressing, and most promising example is agriculture. Currently, we are ruining the planet with a "poisonous brew" of petroleum fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and heavy gas-powered machinery that produce monocultural crops to travel thousands of miles in the global economy. Industrial agriculture: 1) depends entirely on a dwindling supply of oil; 2) wreaks havoc on ecosystems, human health, and global temperatures; and continues to dislocate farmers from the land, disenfranchising them, and sending them to urban slums and shanty towns in search of work. To counter this historically brief two-hundred year trend, McKibben points to dozens of innovative, technically advanced, and above all local agricultural practices that people everywhere are turning to.

In the U.S, for example, where the process of industrializing agricultural is most complete, local farmers markets are nonetheless growing fast, making possible a livelihood from the land for increasing numbers of local farmers. It also strengthens community, as folks become more aware of each other and the sources of the food we eat. Who doesn't like the farmers market? It's way more fun than the generic grocery store. The food is better and healthier. And local agriculture is better for the community and better for the planet.
In other, developing countries, McKibben points to dozens of indigenous, local practices that tend toward the small, local, and sustainable. Often as innovative and technically marvelous as they are low-investment, practices like "biogas" heating or raising chickens in cages above fish ponds (so that the chicken shit fertilizes the water grass that the fish eat) may not even show up in the GNP, but they provide food and livelihoods for local folks. And the local folks are healthier and happier, working within their communities and in charge of their futures.

The best part is that McKibben never preaches. Even his description of his year of eating locally mentions his and his family's malaise over the endlessly boring meals, and he celebrates when the year is over the fact that he can drink a Guinness. He's just a guy redefining the good life in a way all of us, saints and sinners, can aspire to live.

Wall Street over Main Street

2007-05-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

Proof that current public policies favor the rich over the rest of us: An article in the Boston Globe reports, "Last spring, 20 of the 36 valedictorians from Boston's public high schools were confronted with the stark reality that, after all their hard work, they did not have the money to go to college. This year, the number stands to rise." The authors go on to note the disturbing trend in which financial aid is increasingly based on merit rather than need, thus sending more and more money to private school types who need it least.

Since 1993, the number of wealthy students (top quarter of incomes) receiving aid at private colleges has grown at more than five times the rate of the number of needy students (bottom quarter of income).

Hedge Hogs

2007-04-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

Robert Kuttner talks about the most visible and dangerous development in contemporary capitalism, the hedge fund, that unregulated engine of the rich to create outrageous personal wealth while endangering the economic lives of everyone else and, indeed, the entire financial system.

Beyond the risk of a crash, hedge funds and private equity operators are driving the wrong brand of capitalism. Theirs is a capitalism of windfall returns for financial engineers, and less security and income for workaday Americans. Hedge fund capitalism also signals that real entrepreneurship -- patiently nurturing a new idea and building a company of managers and employees -- is for suckers.

Même

2007-04-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

FOODOLOGY

Q. What is your salad dressing of choice?
A. Olive oil and balsamic (or, rather, faux balsamic, since I was told that true Balsamic vinegar from Modena in Italy is aged over 100 years and costs about that)

Q. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
A. Closed.

Q. What is your favorite sit-down restaurant?
A. I think about restaurants the way my dad used to think about food: it's all good, unless it's bad.

Q. On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
A. I shoot for 20%, but can't vouch for my math

Q. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick off of?
A. Give me each day my daily bread, just make it good

Q. What is your favorite type of gum?
A. Plaque-free

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A. Generic

Q. How many televisions are in your house?
A. Zip these days, and I don't miss it at all. Then again, the Sox will be playing the Yankees next weekend.

BIOLOGY

Q. What’s your best feature?
A. My gender.

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A. My hipness.

Q. Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
A. Touch.

Q. When was the last time you had a cavity?
A. Where?

Q. What is the heaviest item you lifted last?
A. My responsiblities.

Q. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
A. By the bottle.

BULLSHITOLOGY

Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
A. Absolutely not. Death's certainty yet unknowability is essential to the human condition.

Q. Is love for real?
A. Love is real, various, ubiquitous, rare, essential, God, all you need.... It's the human equivalent of the connection that makes a flock of doves change direction all in the same precise instant.

Q. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
A. Dunno

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
A. Black and white.

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
A. Only on purpose.

Q. Have you ever saved someone’s life?
A. Every time my daughters got near water before they could swim.

Q. Has someone ever saved yours?
A. When I was a twelve-year-old boy, I bounced a basketball from the sidewalk into a busy street and without thinking reached down to get it. This lady driving a red Pontiac slammed on her brakes, swerved to miss me, swerved back to avoid a head-on collision with cars coming the other way, saving my life, hers, and several others with some fancy-ass driving. Her car ended up broadside on the street and, like me, unscratched. My savior--pretty, dark hair, thirties--rolled down her window and said to me, "You asshole!"

DAREOLOGY

Q. Would you walk naked for a half mile down a public street for $100,000?
A. You wouldn't even need to bring clothes to my jail cell.

Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
A. Where?

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
A. I have a feeling the originator of this même is a twelve year old boy.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
A. Would I still get to complete mêmes?

Q. Would you pose nude in a magazine for $250,000?
A. This one seems a bigger dilemma for women. We boys have no problems, except imagining getting paid for it.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
A. Is this a même for measuring masochism?

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
A. Or sadism? It's an S/M même from the mind of a twelve-year old boy.

Q. Would you give up watching television for a year for $25,000?
A. For that kind of money, I could watch the Sox in a very posh pub.

Q. Give up MySpace forever for $30,000?
A. Do you mean, my space?

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket?
A. The usual.

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
A. I actually laughed.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
A. Yes.

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
A. I've sat through a rain shower, a baby shower, and a wedding shower, but generally stand for a meteor shower.

Q: Could you live with roommates?
A. Could they live with me?

Q: How many pairs of flip-flops do you own?
A. No pairs, only flip-flop, flip-flop

Q: Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
A. I have more of a drive-in history with cops.

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. Young again. A twelve year old boy.

LASTOLOGY

Q: Friend you talked to?
A. My best friend, Robin.

Q: Last person you called?
A. My older daughter.

RANDOMOLOGY

Q: First place you went this morning?
A. To pee.

Q: What can you not wait to do?
A. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

Q: What’s the last movie you saw?
A. Volver, perhaps as good as a movie can get when it has no remotely likeable male characters.

Q: Are you a friendly person?
A. I did this même, didn't I?

Warner Warning

2007-04-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

Walking by Ty Warner's various sea-front properties in Montecito last week, I witnessed an army of laborers building, renovating, beautifying. An economic apologist might piously point out how many jobs "Ty" is creating, how much money he's pumping into the local economy (though I wonder how much of the reported hundreds of million actually stays in the local economy and how much goes to imported luxuary items and materials). But to me, the significant fact is that so much capital and so much human labor, skilled and unskilled, lower class and lower middle class, is being devoted to the exclusive benefit of rich people.

Consider the Warner properties, not including his multi-lot bluff-top estate, and not including the cost of actual purchase:

Biltmore Hotel, recently renovated for a cool $240 million (for 233 rooms). Rooms "start at $550" a night.
San Ysidro Ranch, recently renovated for $130 million (for 40 cottages and suites), plus an additional $25 million for the Stonehouse restaurant. Accommodations available for $800-$4,000 a night.
Coral Casino, currently undergoing a $35 million renovation. Membership cost unavailable on the Internet.
Montecito Country Club, renovation plans in the works, with Jack Nicklaus designing the golf course. Membership, $10,000.
Sandpiper Golf Course, $124-$144 for a round of golf.
Rancho San Marcos, currently a relative upper-middle-class bargain at $65-$85 for a round of golf, though changes are expected.

Apologists might point to the $1.5 million he donated to the Sea Center on Stearns Wharf or the $40,000 to renovate the path in front of his bluff-top estate. Please! He invests hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps as much as a billion dollars, in properties that benefit exclusively rich people and gives two local donations worth a fraction of 1% of his other local investments, just barely enough to get his highly visible name on a highly visible public building, plus, of course, the aesthetic satisfaction of beatifying the view from his estate (even changing the color of the Sea Center).

Ty Warner epitomizes the worst of contemporary capitalism. He makes a fortune selling frivolous beanie babies to kids and crazed collectors, then invests that fortune in luxurious playpens for the rich and super-rich. His idea of public spirit, his contribution to making the world a better place, begins with personal aesthetics and ends with public relations. The saddest part is that he is typical, more successful than the run-of-the-mill millionaire, but still playing the same game of individual aggrandizement with little or no sense of larger purpose.

Digital Death

2007-04-05T16:35:00.000-07:00

Writing about art and immortality in his book, Ancient Mesopotamia, Stephen Bertman writes:

We labor under an illusion if we assume our present age will be better remembered than antiquity. The average life expectancy of magnetic tapes, audio or video, is only 10 years; of optical disks, 5o; of archival quality microfilm, but a 100. In fact, average-quality CD-ROMs become unreadable or unreliable after only five years. Advances in technology, moreover, make older computer hardware and software obsolete; and as they grow obsolete, their data becomes unintelligible. Meanwhile, the film that recorded the images of the past is already crumbling; according to UNESCO, "three-quarters of the films which were made worldwide before 1950 have already disappeared." Thus our so-called Age of Information may be known to the future as an age of missing information.

Building Mortality

2007-03-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

The great thing about construction projects, especially renovation projects, is that they strongly suggest mortality.

I've been rebuilding a bathroom over the last couple of weeks. Carpentry, plastering, tiling, painting, minor plumbing, and more than I 've wanted of industrial strength cleaning. I've scratched knuckles, raised blisters, plastered my hair, sanded joint compound dust into every crevice of myself and the place, lost the ability to smell paint, and felt the sting of industrial solvents in my nightmares.

And I've loved it. The bathroom looks great. I couldn't be prouder of myself, my skill, my capacity to improve the world. I want to show off my accomplishments to all family, friends, landlords, and anyone else willing to admire my work.

Yet renovation, by its very nature, is also humbling. With every hammer swing and brush stroke, I know that I am replacing the fruits of someone else's proud labor. Thus I know--even as I aspire for my work to last, to be a monument to my skill and labor and accomplishment--that my excellent work will fade, crumble, disappear.

Indeed, I'm inspired--in my tiny tiny way--by the great builders in history, most especially the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest by far of any of the ancient Wonders of the Mediterranean World and the only one surviving. Built by untold thousands of slaves over a period of twenty years, the pyramid must represent some astronomical percentage of Pharonic Egypt's GNP. I also wonder how many slaves died in its construction. Nevertheless, it is remarkable. Built with the most amazing mathematical and engineering skill, after 45 centuries it still less shows than 0.1% error in symmetrical dimensions, and the interior blocks of stone weighing several tons each are so perfectly placed that a playing card will still not fit between any two stones.

Yet even the Great Pyramid, the oldest and best monument to immortality in the history of the planet, is in fact a testament to mortality. Today it stands in defiance of time, but still shows the effects of time: it has lost its smooth stone exterior; ten feet of its tip has eroded away; its original purpose as a monument/tomb/symbol of religious and political power probably lasted centuries, perhaps millennia, but the place was thoroughly looted by the time Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the 4th century BC. Like the tortoise that lives for centuries compared to the insect that lives for hours, the pyramid has a much longer life span than any other building, but still a mortal lifespan.

Tones of tragedy thus accompany the doomed effort to create something that endures. Yet, if we accept this fact of life from the outset, then building something to last offers a challenge, plus the fun and satisfaction of meeting that challenge with all the skills we can muster, all our energy to do our best with the meagre tools and talents we have, to at least improve over what was there before, to create a better world. Embracing the tragedy of unavaoidable failure yet doing our best to refute it is the joy of mortality.

"Into Great Silence"

2007-03-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

Some part of my Irish Catholic soul must be attracted to the priesthood. Not that I'm religious, or a believer, or even particularly moral, God knows (if He exists). Still, I'm attracted by the practice of contemplating God, or rather its secular equivalent. If I can translate God from religion to secular philosophy according to the tenet that God is life, then contemplating God means contemplating life.

This attraction is probably the result of some foreign influence, since it is so un-American, against the cultural compulsion to DO: achieve, build, earn, consume. Or perhaps it's just a sickness, a brooding nature, an affinity for cloud nine (as my father used to tell me), in other words, a poor excuse for not DOING. Although, I must say, I DO plenty of building, achieving, consuming, never enough of course (especially earning), but plenty. Nevertheless, I'm better, happier, when I contemplate the purpose and meaning of being alive. I indulge those moments outside of everyday experience that nonetheless define everyday experience. Perhaps it's akin to a pursuit of grace.

No doubt this pursuit attracted me the other night to the west coast premier of Into Great Silence, a German film by Philip Grönig about a monastery in the French Alps famous for its monks' vow of silence. From the website:

Silence. Repetition. Rhythm. The film is an austere, next to silent meditation on monastic life in a very pure form. No music except the chants in the monastery, no interviews, no commentaries, no extra material.

Changing of time, seasons, and the ever repeated elements of the day, of the prayer. A film to become a monastery, rather than depict one. A film about awareness, absolute presence, and the life of men who devoted their lifetimes to god in the purest form. Contemplation. An object in time.

As advertised, the film, like life in the monastery, is remarkably spare, silent, almost completely uneventful: no musical score, virtually no dialogue; no plot, no drama, no climax. Indeed, in a three hour film, almost nothing happens. The film is one prolonged--two minutes or more--artsy camera shot after another, of the beautiful monastery and its alpine setting; of monks praying, ringing the bells to signal praying, or doing some simple daily chore like cutting celery; of monks passing each other in silence. The only structure is this cycle of daily life, repeated again and again, through the seasons, throughout the monk's life, from initiate to blind old age, minimizing doing and maximizing contemplation of God's meaning. Nothing changes or develops other than this unhurried, repetitive, distraction-less approach to God.

Not exactly a formula for a Hollywood blockbuster.

Yet the audience was maybe 500 in the college lecture hall and still well over 400 after three hours, most of us still awake, though quiet, subdued, perhaps transported, as was the film's intent, into the experience of the monastery, monastic life, contemplation. The three hours were not spellbinding. My attention wandered, settling at times on my "to do" consciousness, my plans for after the movie, my appetites. Still, I cycled back inexorably to the film and its silent, unhurried, inexorable pursuit of grace. By the end, I felt that this pursuit was also mine. The tiniest part of that grace mine.

I am certainly not apt to contemplate Christ as the path to God's grace, but rather to pursue grace by contemplating my own acts of doing and how they contribute or not to my purpose, meaning, and happiness in this pathless existence. Or perhaps I'll contemplate the meaning of the acts of human beings, today or in history. Maybe I'll contemplate a film or other work of art. Above all, I'll contemplate the people close to me, especially the uncanny, sometimes overwhelming presence of a loved one. I also struggle, forget, screw up, get lost in my projects and appetites and distractions. I'm no monk. When I return to the contemplation of life, however, I take to it as naturally as a monk to prayer.

Paradise Blues

2007-01-22T10:38:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to Santa Barbara, I was struck by how pretty everything looks all the time, which left me feeling like I had moved into a dream. It's a very pretty dream, but maybe, at least at first, at least for my east coast blue collar blood, maybe a little too pretty, too dreamy. The line from "Orange Juice Blues" kept haunting me: "I'm tired of everything being beautiful, beautiful." So I went on a mission to find grit in Santa Barbara.

I couldn't find any, at least not Anglo grit. I found sleaze, both working class and upper crust, but that ain't no authentic, dare to do the right thing, unconcerned by dirty finger nails, do the hard work of the world, grit. The closest thing I could find was stylized designer grit, created from the clean pretty drafting tables of clean pretty minds, whose rebellion from stucco walls and red-tile roofs created coffee shops, bars, or restaurants where graduate students and ex-graduate students like me could drink three-dollar coffees or four-dollar beers and feel the authenticity of bared brick and ductwork, pre-distressed furniture, and the atmosphere of antique Coke bottles and old license plates. Had I moved to a new state or a new state of being?

After a year or two in town, a bit slowly, really, I discovered the venerable concert series, Sings Like Hell. Producer Peggy Jones and her hellions have succeeded in introducing grit into the dreamy prettiness of Santa Barbara far better than most, certainly far better than I. Within the beautiful, beautiful Lobero opera house, they stage some of the best musical acts in town, specializing in the graduates of--and those still enrolled in--the school of non-commercial knocks. Heavily flavored by the Austin scene, Sings Like Hell offers singer-songwiters who are more familiar with loud bars a chance to perform for a sit-down audience in an acoustically designed venue. The tag line of the series is "The best music you've never heard," and indeed the best shows not starring Richard Thompson are the ones by unknown surprises. Anyone familiar with Sings Like Hell knows all this.

Last month, for example, Brett Dennen, unknown to me and everyone I know, debuted at Sings Like Hell as the headline act, even though he had been billed as the warm-up. Tall, baby-faced, vaguely androgynous, with a big mop of red hair, he came on stage, plugged in an acoustic guitar with a big peace sticker on it, and made himself comfortable by kicking off his flip-flops and propelling himself around stage with his toes. A distinct "what in hell" buzz went through the crowd. Then the music started, energetic, subtely sophisticated, smartly arranged. Then he started to sing, distinctive voice, raspy and melodic, pouring out passion and remarkably mature for a 26 year old lyrics about struggling for love and peace and meaning in our consumer culture. Singing like Hell in the Lobero. Grit in paradise. We loved it.

Car Talk/Car Walk (with apologies to Click and Clack)

2007-01-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

I bought a new car today, well, eight years old but new to me. A practical, four-cylinder, best-selling car in America, and nearly 100,000 miles into its life, but it's the nicest car I've ever owned--by far. Leather seats, keyless entry, power sun roof, smooth, so quiet I can actually hear the CD player, it feels downright luxurious. In fact, the car comes as close as I've ever known to giving me that well-advertised oh-what-a-feeling because I now drive a car that expresses my American roads identity.

Yet I still feel a lack. Is it the same disappointment I learned as a child when the toy's reality did not match its TV euphoria? Or would I feel more sated if it were brand new and featured a hybrid engine? or better yet, bio-diesel?

The Perils of Alternative Piety, or It's Not Easy Being Green

2007-01-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

Last week I attended a talk that came down to the same lament such talks by teachers seem always to produce: Students don't reason. They read a book, watch a television show, listen to music, but fail to analyze, synthesize, evaluate. It's an understandable lament for teachers, since our job is to teach students to reason. Still, it's an odd, self-serving, even kind of stupid lament. Students do not live by reason alone. Duh! Who does? Who wants to?

I've been thinking about the limits of reason in connection to issues discussed at Fuller and Fuller and some of the links on that site. These issues involve the struggle against consumer culture, global warming, corporate monoculture in agribusiness, sweatshop exploitation--in short, the good fight to live green and save the planet. The difficulty in being green is not only, as Queen Whackamole says, that "Awareness and education have a tough battle to fight against convenience," not only the tough practical struggle to live green in a world organized by very ungreen principles. But it's also difficult being green because being green means living by rational principles, and it is emotionally difficult to be so rational all the time.

For example, Queen Whackamole (and some good folks at Compact) struggles against shopping, because, even though stuff in stores is useless, excessive, ecologically ruinous, and functionally exploitative, shopping is not a rational experience, but an emotional one. It somehow brings comfort, relieves stress, or otherwise engages a non-rational part of ourselves. The same can be said for many of our most compelling or useless or destructive lifestyle choices--food, alcohol, sex, movies, sports, poker, cigarettes, drugs, screaming at the top of our lungs. What we do is often not rational, but rather connected to desire and the unconscious.

So what is the emotional tenor of acting rationally according to green principles? Unfortunately, too often we experience being green as what we should do, the rules of the super ego. We feel we are being good, a short step from pious, perilously close to self-righteous. And what is the greatest pleasure for many of us--especially, perhaps, for those of us who used to be altar boys--in this complex of rules for desire? Transgression, of course. And when the principles we are supposed to follow but instead transgress are green principles, well, reason and desire do not exactly come together to save the planet.

I can offer no solution to the perils of alternative piety. I want to save the world, too, but I don't believe saintliness is a viable model for psychic health or social change. What I like about Queen Whackamole's effort to look for an alternative to retail therapy is that she opens, and leaves open, the question about the emotional difficulty of being green.

Innocence Lost

2007-01-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

I've been memed, which feels like losing my blogging innocence. I was under the blissful fetal impression that blogging was all about me, my thoughts, my observations, my preferences, me me me. The meme, despite its name, commands me with the authority of Mt. Sinai: Thou Shallt Blog About These Seven Issues That Interest Others. It doesn't even help that the issues are all about my thoughts, observations, preferences, me me me. I'm devastated to learn that I have to write about what interests others, that I have to respond to others, even be responsible to others. Blogging isn't the Eden of solipsism I imagined.

Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies: I teach, so I inflict my bookish preferences upon others for a living. I've learned through much hardship to avoid inflictions upon friends and family. Occasionally my passion for a book blinds me to previous hardships, and I venture an infliction. I've had a few that were less than disastrous. For a long while, it was Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, because she thinks so profoundly through literature. More recently, I've been pressing Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, especially to those turned off by the fanfare he received when the book came out, which bears no relation to the smart, insightful, and fun romp through postmodern America. Lately it's been Robert Reich's books.
Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music: Once upon a time in Austria, I went to a beautiful Renaissance palace, to a small ornate, acoustically perfect room, for an intimate performance of Mozart music by a quartet of accomplished international classical musicians. The setting couldn't have been more ideal, and I couldn't keep my eyes open. 'Twas then I decided it was ok to dislike classical music, which has made it possible for me to like it more.
Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue: I thought it might be the Animaniacs' Who's on Stage routine, but I found the YouTube clip fatiguing. If "without fatigue" means every year or two, at the top of a long list (that prominently features Hitchcock) might be Scorcese's two comedies, After Hours and King of Comedy. They both play out Scorcese's exploration of class conflict in comic terms, and they hold up remarkably well.
Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief: I'm a sucker for suspension of disbelief, so it's easier to talk about performers who re-instate my disbelief. Somehow they all seem to make their way into my disbelief while I'm standing in supermarket checkout lines.
Name a work of art you'd like to live with: The Patricia Chidlaw nightscape hanging in my friends' living room.
Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life: For years people have been telling me that I look like a well-known actor. They mean it as a compliment and frequently tell me, when I scowl in response, that it's a good thing, that there are worse things in the world. I suppose so, but I've mainly found it embarassing, even kind of insulting. It doesn't help that the actor has made a career as the guy in a chick flick. So not only am I obscured by people's celebrity fantasies, I'm doubly obscured by the Hollywood fantasies of men packaged for female consumption. Yuch! At least my mother tells me, "you're much better looking."
Name a punch line that always makes you laugh: "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Beards, Barbers, and Santa Barbarians

2007-01-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

We share an inherited trait among the males in my family that enables us to extrapolate from the barest of facts to insights into great human truths. We call it McQing, though the women in the family have a less noble name for it. In our defence, my brother has pointed out to his girlfriend that McQing is far more interesting than saying the simple truth, which is, usually, "I dunno." The girlfriend wasn't convinced, which is to say, she is now the ex-girlfriend.

So, as I was shaving this morning, I thought I remembered reading somewhere that clean-shaven men were the mark of western civilization since the time of the Greeks. The others, the ones with beards and no barbers, were the barbarians. Thus, even in its inception, civilization was defined by men becoming more like women, that is, less hairy. This path led eventually to Paris, that most civilized and most feminine of places, where all wine and food are exquisite, love rules all relationships in and out of marriage, and all the gargoyles match.

In North America, where men tamed the west and women civilized western men, the most civilized place is 100 miles west of Los Angeles, in Santa Barbara, which is, in the same pattern as Paris, a most feminine place, where streets and beaches are clean, poverty is well-hidden, and mayors, newspaper mavens, and billionaires are all (or mostly) women. The city patron saint is also, of course, female, which makes us not barbarians but civilized Santa Barbarians.

After finishing my shave, I wondered whether these thoughts on beards and barbarians crossed that murky line from memory to McQing. And since the women in the family have actively encouraged this epistemic skepticism, I've learned to distrust my memory and its logical implications. I did some actual research on the history of shaving. Sure enough, the Greeks, notably Alexander the Great himself, popularized clean shaven faces to distinguish Greeks from barbarians. But he did so only because beards provide too easy a handle during hand-to-hand combat. A clean shaven face, it turns out, did figure in the advance of Western civilization, because it enabled a more effective form of brutality.

What does this say about the smooth-faced mayors and mavens of Santa Barbara? "I dunno."

Lil' Slow Food Cafe

2007-01-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

I only recently learned of the "slow food" movement, which advocates sanity in eating locally, organically, communally. Some quick research placed it as the spark of a wider, green, progressive, vaguely luddite "slow movement" aimed at the "time poverty" and attendant high stress of twenty-first century high-tech globalized capitalism. While I've long lamented the 350 more hours a year Americans work than Europeans or Japanese, and long avoided that path, I'm clearly a little slow in catching up to the slow movement, but grateful for a movement dedicated to allowing me to catch up. Or is it dedicated to slowing life down to catch up to me?

I've also been quite slow coming to the blogosphere. I started reading my friend George's blog and, after several slow months of contemplation, decided blogging might be a way to slow life down, wallow in its particularities, ponder their significance. After more slow months of procrastination, I started this effort to engage more fully in my own mortality before it expires. I even contemplated stealing a title I saw in Arizona: Lil' Slow Food Cafe.

I especially like the paradox, at least in my slow mind, of a slow blog. The blogosphere is all about instant opinions, extemporaneous keyboarding, hyperlinks at hyperspeed, minds as nimble and quick as a Gameboy joystick. But at its core, it's a movement of reading and writing, a rhythm also so slow.

Grand Canyon Tease

2007-01-03T21:28:00.000-08:00

Clothed in clouds and snow, the Canyon gave only fleeting glimpses on the first day, much more than on a postcard perfect day.

The snow and clouds were themselves so beautiful, and so different from all the postcards and stories, I wasn't even looking at the Canyon. And when I did, its mostly cloudy striptease revealed a distant misty butte, a switchback trail disappearing into the shrouded depths, a mirage triangle of white water far below. I was ready.

The next day, the sun shone brightly on the endless hues of red rock, and the shadows changed the view as I watched. Then the majesty, the outer space beauty, and, especially with all the slippery snow around, the vertiginous danger of the Grand Canyon played their chords in my chest. Awesome indeed.