Cerebral Flatulence

Yes, it’s all over the air, a tune you’ve heard somewhere, one from an old American original, that first Great Revival:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

– Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, 1848

2008 was a tough, tough year for me personally and for my community. Major fires, a flurry of deaths, evacuations, and financial disruptions piled on to the stack of mundane concerns that are part of every life. The hardships produced a response often experienced, yet curiously hard to remember during the blues — a creative eruption of energy, ideas and action.

Here in Big Sur the locals dove in to recovery mode even as government agencies dithered and blithered. The Coast Property Owners’ Association rapidly organized a relief effort that led to real money and processed paperwork for dozens and dozens of residents. My landlord Jali Morgenrath and his son Tevye went to town on the property; before they were through they and their crew built reinforced concrete bunkers, hung steel shutters, piled earth berms and stacked 40-foot containers like so many Legos, on their own time and nickel, to prepare for potentially catastrophic landslides. (I live literally on Ground Zero; my apartment sits next to flood-prone Pheneger Creek, on the site of a building blown away by a post-fire slide in the late 1970’s.)

Fact: I’ve yet to receive a dime from the governments I pay for, for two weeks evacuation and loss of business and income. The Bush Administration never declared California’s worst-ever fire season a federal disaster, and the nincompoops in Sacramento have no money or interest for the rest of us anyway. NOTE: The government scientists and surveyors have been on the ball and full-throated in their response, including advanced slide and flood prediction from the USGS and a portable Doppler unit from NOAA, to help us through the winter without our forests and shrubs.

In my own affairs, I responded to the discomfort and disruption of last year by returning to some pleasures of childhood with a man’s spirit and focus. I rediscovered the stimulation of tactile crafts, of sanding and filling and carving and painting scale models; and I reconnected with a world of popular culture, of pulp magazines from the 30’s and 40’s, of sci-fi paperbacks from the 60’s and 70’s, of classic American films from the past century. And I did all this through the Medium of our time, the Internet. In our era we, the aficionados of whatever, can find each other across the developed world and convene in online communities to rub our enthusiasms together and foster growth in our chosen passions. Who knew, for example, that so many other people besides me are enthralled by Clark Ashton Smith? Or stop-motion animation? Or retro tales about Mars? Or highly-detailed model kits of fossil spacecraft?

In the process of feeding my head I reconnected with my own Muse, and transfused an old project with fresh life and spirit. Look for a five-minute trailer at ComicCon 2009 in San Diego this July.

Thank you, Mr. President, for a class act as a start to your watch. Keep going; we’re right behind you.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, photographed by Annie Liebovitz (who somehow managed to capture Vermeer’s light on film — mysterious wonder!) in the autumn of her long, remarkable reign.

Many great authors have flowered or continued to illuminate this Second Elizabethan Age. Coward, Maugham, Greene, Fleming, Pinter, Shaffer, Burgess, Brunner, Moorcock, Rice & Lloyd Webber, Merchant & Ivory, and, of course, Rowling have graced her nation, and the world, with British storytelling and notions for nearly as long as Dickens, Tennyson, Stevenson, Kipling and Conan Doyle graced Victoria’s.

Elizabeth II has had to reign over a painful and vexing era in British history, that of the dismantling of the British Empire and the rise of the Commonwealth. The Empire required a Sovereign; The Commonwealth and the monarchy are awkwardly exploring the role of Nobility in our times. On the whole the British footprint had as much cushioned sole as hobnails. Colonialism’s blighted legacy is nowhere good, and the Boer War, Amritsar, the Mau Mau, and Malaya were only the worst imperial terrors, but in general (in my opinion) the British sought to do well for their subjects after the shouting.

They still do a great deal to of good, as Oxfam and many other British humanitarian organizations demonstrate in their ongoing efforts. In a poetic way, rather as Gondor preserved of the best of Numenor, so the modern UK preserves the best of the Empire’s impulses.

Her Majesty’s style was recently remarked upon by Simon Doonan; he recounted an exchange with The Queen’s wardrobe designer. The gentleman sharply brushed aside suggestions for making Her Majesty’s style more chic, replying that Her Majesty must always appear kind and welcoming. Chic was unkind, he said, implying (I think) that high fashion emphasizes the competitive in women.

There is, in Liebovitz’s portrait, a sense of the Queen of the Hobbits in the picture; of the Matriarch, quietly determined to preserve all that is homely and good and nourishing about the Shire. The man who in times to come may be remembered as the greatest author of her reign, J.R.R. Tolkien, distilled so much that he loved about his country into that literary creation, which is why it still resonates so deeply in the public’s consciousness. I mean no disrespect to Her Majesty when I league her with Frodo and Bilbo, for Tolkien’s epic is truly about the virtue and value of those very British characters.

On this New Year’s Eve, it’s appropriate to remember the band most famously associated with the the Holiday — no, not Guy Lombardo and his Orchestra, that’s Dad’s era — I mean the Grateful Dead.
What began as a house band for Esalen fests and acid tests evolved into one of the great American phenomena. We hear how many scientists and engineers reached for the Moon with the inspiration of science fiction stories; less often you hear about how the Deadheads created the Internet that we enjoy today.

Think about it. The very first link in what became the Internet went live between UCLA and UC Berkeley in 1969. The Homebrew Computer Club, that petrie dish of the personal computer, met regularly on the Stanford campus in the mid 70’s to show off results from the garages around town. And it was there that the battle was joined over the Future: the Deadheads who shared software code for free, just as they recorded and swapped Dead show tapes for free, against an embryonic Microsoft whose CEO, a young Bill Gates, sent the Homebrew Computer Club an angry letter denouncing software sharing as theft. Gates and Paul Allen got rich, but despite a big ugly museum and a big, ugly corporation, they still don’t understand music or community.

What if the Internet had been invented in Seattle? Or Dallas? Or London or Beijing? I’m pretty sure it would’nt look anything like it does today. Despite every effort to turn a scientific paper publishing system into uber-TV, its communal, open-minded roots have (so far) kept it from becoming a censored, faux-filled, pay-for-play morass.

But long after Jerry Garcia’s passing and the band’s official demise, nuggets of wonder turn up from their glorious history. Here’s a quiet, special example.

“When I joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1973, I signed the loyalty oath that, 20 years earlier, the SAG Board of Directors had made a requirement for membership. I never stopped to consider what it was I was signing. It was one in a series of papers I needed to fill out, and I was so eager to join the Guild, I probably would have signed anything they put in front of me. And I did. That’s one of the most frightening legacies of the Blacklist Era: the institutionalization of fear and prejudice.

You see, the Guild Board had not yet removed the loyalty oath from our bylaws. In fact, no action was taken until some new members refused to sign it. Those new members were the rock group The Grateful Dead, and the year was 1967.

Only after The Grateful Dead refused to sign did the Board of Directors reconsider the necessity of a loyalty oath as a precondition for joining a union of artists.”

– SAG President Richard Masur at the Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist event

Aaron Copland’s music is the sound of Lincoln’s “angels of our better [American] natures”, the soundtrack of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, John Steinbeck and WPA murals, Grand Coulee Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge.

An Ansel Adams photograph, a Pixar cartoon, a Red Barber play-by-play, a Bernstein musical or pehaps one by Rodgers and Hammerstein or Gene Kelly, who asked his friend Ray Bradbury to adapt his stories into a spooky show, and who later got to adapt Herman Melville for John Huston and Gregory Peck.

On the brink of this new era in America, we should rediscover with wonder and delight the grand, funny, cruel, caring, big-shoulders and two-fisted American culture of our ancestors, who taught us how to weather tough times and build anew.

Cross-posted from DANGER ROOM (I do hold forth there somewhat , commenting on Somali piracy:

At the risk of being crude, what’s the squeamishness about addressing this matter? The big powers have no compunction about using force majeure and accepting civilian casualties, and who the heck backs Somalia? If century-old firms can be executed in the blink of an eye, and heavy collateral damage is a daily cost of policy, why stop at half measures?

Turn that country into a free-fire zone and weapons test range. Kill every living thing that moves. Load B-52’s with napalm and incinerate Mogadishu from Diego Garcia. The country can’t feed itself, sprays s**t and has no natural resources. A salutary dose of Schrecklichkeit (so much more satisfying a term than ’shock and awe’). Effing get it over with.

OR…decide that’s not who we want to become and get serious about real international development. Either kill the poor or lift them up, but don’t drift.

If my tone is not sufficiently obvious, I am no more advocating genocide in Somalia than Jonathan Swift advocated Irish cannibalism. I am simply sick and tired of public bombast and private calculation. Such is the way of the world, but that’s one reason why I write this blog — so I can say how much I don’t have to like it. As always, if you find my words nettlesome or offensive, please exercise your power of free will and jump to another website…

Paul Newman, 1925-2008.

Better men and women than I are writing encomia and obituaries for him now, who passed away over the weekend. Real movie stars have been rare throughout the medium’s history; few performers possess the magic mix of bankability, looks, talent, skill, focus, chutzpah and willingness to stay public. Newman chose roles with texture and sharp edges and created a vision of humane, adult American masculinity. He was most definitely a Have who paid a lot of attention to Have Nots; born to some means, he graduated from Yale without the need for a skull or bone, and his charitable works share the man’s effective celebrity. Everyone knows (and eats) Newman’s Own products and may know about the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang camps, but perhaps you don’t know about the Westport Country Playhouse, where generations of American actors walked the boards and honed their skills. Or his support for the 1st Amendment. Or gay rights.

Paul Newman was a great actor, though he personally didn’t rank acting highest amongst his accomplishments. However, the man informed every role with his character, and his corpus models a a strong, trustworthy, compassionate male authority figure. You know, the Dad we all want to have and who some of us were lucky enough to grow up with.

…

[Compare Paul Newman to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When these men and their retinue took over the American government it was snidely said, “Now the grown-ups are in charge.” My. Some grown-ups. There are terms for adults who bully, lie, kill, steal and avoid accountability. We call them sociopaths and criminals. Not grown-ups.]

I popped off about this astounding item noted on DANGER ROOM, WIRED Magazine’s fine blog on matters defensive. Russia is expanding its range of classic spacecraft available to the general (well-heeled) public! Joining the world-famous Soyuz, originally engineered for the Soviet Moon missions, is the first Soviet space station — Almaz!

Whoo-hoo!!! Un-fnorging believable.

Darn, but us and the Rooskies designed well back in the day, didn’t we? We really, really should have built the Manned Orbiting Lab and all that extra Apollo stuff — call it Classic Space and sell surplus hardware on eBay! Use the Skylab rescue layout to send 3 paying doofusses around the Moon! A Lunar Rover ought be worth at least as much as a 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible, huh?

Back to our regularly-scheduled serious commentary.

– cross-posted [with later edits] from DANGER ROOM

(I once sought to become Indiana Jones. Well, not quite; I did get a B.A. in anthropology and start a Ph.D. in the subject, and chose the Andes Mountains of South America as my region of interest. Picture a beach dig on the coast of Ecuador, or a hilltop survey overlooking Lake Titicaca — these were my summer field seasons, the glamorous part. Not seen in the movies are the months in the lab and library drawing potsherd profiles, crunching numbers and reading references. I learned that I’m not truly cut out for the life of the academy, but I also learned a heckuva lot along the way.)

So check this out…
At a 1992 brown-bag lunch jointly hosted by the Anthro and Geography Departments of UIUC, a visiting tropical-forest specialist forcefully disputed the common image of the Amazon as a pristine. primeval landscape. He pointed out that in 1542 Francisco de Orellana, the first European to sail all the way down the Amazon, described mile after of endless mile of populated riverbanks, a continuous jungle city stretching from Ecuador to the Atlantic. There were millions of townsmen and villagers living in the woods at the time of contact, and they’d been there since the Ice Age.

That was one kicker; his other one was that most of the Amazonian rainforest postdates the Ice Age. The tropics became drier when the ice sheets advanced, and there was much more savannah and open woodland than rank jungle for most of the last 12,000 years. When the rainforest expanded humans were a key component of its ecosystem. Now, everywhere people go they seem to make a habit of propagating cool and useful plants. (Just ask pot-eradication campaigners.) The geographer argued that the very texture of the rainforest that we see today is human-made, and that the emptiness and poverty of the modern jungle is an artifact of disaster. The American Collapse — the gutting of the Native American civilizations by disease and invasion — was far and away the greatest culling of humanity since the Big Thaw, and it has distorted our view of the Western Hemisphere’s history.