Summmertime In Flint, And The Livin' Is Sheezy

#39 of the 100 best albums ever: Underworld - Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1994)

Underworld were always going to be different. In an era (early 90s) when most dance acts had the lifespan of a mayfly and about the same charisma, Underworld had far more wide-reaching ambitions. Their inspirations included the electronic innovations of New Order, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno on one hand and the flexibility and improvisation of reggae sound systems and Miles Davis on the other - Filter Mag

I've had reservations about putting techno records on this list, because good techno, and for that matter d&b, two-step, all 3,000 slants of house etc., isn't really made to be listened to on a cd or mp3 player. It's made to be chopped up with other mixes from other producers and spit out onto the dancefloor, hopefully to be soaked up by hordes of teens and 20-somethings who all know that they'll never die. 98% of my best brushes with dance music happened during the late-80s and the 90s up in loft parties, Trax DC, Fever, Spundae, and, well, you get the gist, provided by some cat who bleeds one kinda groove or another, who spends most of his waking hours and all his extra coin on finding the right music for his next 2-hour set. By and large, if dance music sounds better alone or in your headphones, than you're prolly fixated on a Kruder & Dorfmeister vibe, who are, by the way, simply Enya for a newer generation.

Anyway Dubnobasswithmyhead was one of the first techno records that sounds like a cohesive whole from start to finish, yet devilishly variant between the opening and closing hooks. It's club music's Paul's Boutique. Next to Screamadelica and Orbital II (The Brown Album), which were released in 1991 and 1993 respectively, Dubnobasswithmyhead was the album that let heads know for sure that electronic music was going to take over the world, not just Europe and Tokyo. It inspired the ravers, wannabe idm rockers, and goth kids in equal parts to change things up. Dubnobasswithmyhead is one-third banging, one-third mid-range, and one-third mellow. Meaning it is a complete album. Within the cannon of 90s club music, this album never gets as crazy as some of the house, big beat, jungle, and whatnot that was digging into the culture then. On the dancefloor, Dubnobasswithmyhead was pure 4am. At home, it was the album a generation of Trainspotters boffed to. Like all timeless records, Dubnobasswithmyhead covers all the bases, and for those of us who remember where we were the first time we tweaked and turned to the holy-f**k Cowgirl on a sweaty strobe-laced dancefloor or frolicked in a candlelit apartment in the big city with your best girl in glee and in emotional contrast to Karl wailing and i got phone sex to see me through the emptiness in my 501s. freeze-dried with a new religion. and my teeth stuffed back in my head towards the end of the Floyd-as-dance Dirty Epic, this album's classic standing requires no persuassion.

Underworld the group is British, but Underworld the sound on Dubnobasswithmyheadman - 3 years before they conquered the world with Born Slippery via the Trainspotting Soundtrack - is a sound that's darkly German. Never mind playing spot the influence for a moment and listen to the opening chops of Dark and Long: The low-scale keyboard stabs as percussion, the quiet synth sweeps, and the marchy funk like New Order discovering E. It sounds like music to launch an invasion by, something played during that part of a film when mechanized divisions piloted by androids rides over the ridge and across the border to clear out some space for settlers...all with a slight regret somewhere in the back of the architect's mind. This is morally ambivalent dance music...not your gay cousin's Daft Punk.

Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You brings congos and ever darker ruminations into the mix-- European dance acts in 1994 were not within a mile of this vibe, and up until this point vocals on club tracks were universally whack. Karl Hyde changed that by adhering to the priceless rule of vocalizing anything...keep it short: I see porn dogs sniffing the wind. sniffing the wind for something new. Porn dogs sniffing the wind for something violent they can do...I see Elvis! Dang Karl, that must be good shit.

Then on Surfboy, Underworld lets us know they could chop drums as well as anyone if that's what mattered to them. Goa trance all up in us, with layers upon layers of toms, and congas, and djembes, and those crazy keyboard as percussion as a metronome which when put together sounds beautiful and aggressive. It takes a lot of skill to make something sinister yet soothing, and again, Underworld were not the first to pull it off, but the sweep of what they incorperate into the mix was without peer. Surfboy is first of four songs on Dubnobasswithmyheadman that European DJ's went about remixing and chopping in earnest so it would sound all their own when they played it at during the peaking hour at Cream.

Spoonman is almost industrial in its aggressiveness, and we can listen it now and hear the obvious origins of the mega mega white thing chant on Born Slippery. All the components are turned up to 10. Future hardstep wizards scribbled furiously in their notebooks. Tonque then slows it down with guitar and and some snare and cymbal. The skittering cut-n-paste beats predicts The Books. It's the perfect number for a late drive back home after a senseless and heated argument with someone you realize deserves maybe more respect than you give. I found it surprising back in 94 that a club act could compose music that invited such introspection. Towards the end of this song you're almost ready to turn off the lights and call it a night, vowing to do better tomorrow. Then Dirty Epic starts up and you're being dragged back into the fray.

Called by some the best doin-the-nasty tune of all time, Dirty Epic has it's place in the club, but it always felt wrong for some reason to hear that tune and move to it while everyone watched. Sure, it bangs a little, with swirls of Tubular Bells, and a beat that recalls Kraftwerk's Europe Endless, 70s Talking Heads, and Karl's dark as hell lines about phone sex, jealousy, possession, ropes and handcuffs. This is exactly the music Depeche Mode would have made if they were funkier and twice as innovative. I never understood how this tune never made it into a Batman movie. Seriously, it's the one dance song on the album that's not really a dance song because it's absolutely impossible to be gleeful and carefree while hearing this, unless you're so wasted that you'd mess up spelling your own name with a gun to your skull. I'll confess though, I've been guilty of playing Dirty Epic and Cowgirl back to back...some 17 straight minutes of Underworld as I wondered from the booth, or under the booth and behaved like a beast for a bit. No one seemed to mind, now I think about it...maybe they were too bent to read into them deep meanings.

There's really no higher hills to climb after Cowgirl-- a freakout of warbling hyper-synth notes, string samples, 3,000 layers of drums and Karl's frightening cold lush and immediate: i wanna give you everything, you energy, a good thing, you everything... I've seen a thousand heads lifted together and moving inside Trax during a sweltering night in 1995 to Cowgirl like no one ever moved to anything else. The peak of Cowgirl hits from every possible angle. You hear it in your head, feel it in your chest. People still play this track in nice clubs and it's 10 years old. When Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1972 about the mid-60s sense of riding the height of a tall beautiful wave, this was what he meant. Alas, the 60's ended badly and the 90's really ended with 9/11.

March of 2000: After a numbing yet superficially rewarding week doing the dot-com thing, a few weeks before the bottom fell away from that nonsense, a few friends and I made a move from Zeitgeist to Liquid on 17th and Van Ness. Is was a Thursday, prolly the best night to hit Liquid back then, and when we walked in somewhere around 10 and cursed a little because the cue around the bar for drinks was 10-minutes long, and then smiled and told ourselves it was okay because we were already pretty twisted. Early 2000: remember the vibe if you can. It was five years ago but might as well be 50. We were selfish greedy and petty, on the grand social scale, but in our heads we were doing well in life and doing well in a vacant memory-clipped way. Whatever our big picture was, it certainly didn't include people trying to kill us, and it didn't involved the ramifications of roosting birds...returning after a 10-year holiday. In sum, we were children, but we were children making money, with friends and lovers, and damn it was nice to act childish with access to adult toys and no worries at all about repercussions.

The DJ's that night were all across the map. The girl playing when we walked in was doing hard drum-n-bass, which didn't stir up protests, but the dancefloor wasn't packed either. Of course it was before midnight and hardly anyone in San Francisco ever gets tweaked enough to dance before midnight. Later a trancier DJ took over the wheels and played the shit-of-the-minute: bliss, art-of-trance, albion etc., and rolling between 1 and 2am it was definitely working, remember, very cuddly happy childish times. Then this hipster played Cowgirl, not even a remix but the album version, and gosh there I was back in DC, more energy, even fewer worries, and I could look around and see the same look of recognition on the DJ's face and everyone inside Liquid between the ages of 27 and 33. Even the kids who had never heard Cowgirl before and had not known its classic status couldn't keep themselves from moving to it. Such was the power of Underworld.

After that, Dubnobasswithmyheadman descends during it's last two tracks to make sure everyone gets home safely.

After the down-tempo and dubby River of Bass, which by the way is an idea that made German producers a ton of money...yes K&D, I'm talking about you, M.E. wraps up the album. It's a coda that sounds like Brand New Heavies meets Pet Shop Boys, very warm, very engaging. It's a wonderful way to end a night, an event, tryst, make-up session, you name it. Dance music can be deep...who woulda thunk it?

There will be folks from across the pond who read this and they'll break their necks nodding until they look at the number: 39. 39?! You rank the greatest dance album of all bloody time number thirty-fookin-nine? What are ya, daft in ya noggin? Well, lists are lists, and this is one boy's opinion. Anyway, given the canon of great music released in my lifetime, it's safe to say that everything on my list is either flawless or damn close to it. Everything else is a matter of taste...which is of course another can of worms entirely.

- k

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25july05

When Something Smells Funny

A rabbit falls away from me, I guess I'll crawl...

Oh how many times can you play on the Alice In Wonderland vibe? We all spend our moments down the rabbit hole, or in the K hole, or beneath other trap-doors most of us never find the cajones to explore. The rabbit line of Alice descent I quote above comes from a Dinosaur Jr. song, released back in the late 80s on their mindblowing You're Living All Over Me. Pavement never happens without that record.

Funny how evolution works: musical, social, or the biological. We start from a particular point, a singularity, and with the aid of time, the singularity blooms and divides and veers off into incalculable combinations, always in debt to the original, but eventually looking nothing like the original. I mean, Katie Holmes doesn't look like a single-cell amoeba, though she may soon think like one if she keeps swinging with Tommy's L.Ron Scien-zombie crowd, and I can't hear one friggin' note of Robert Johnson in Dinosaur Jr's distorted melodic freakout Little Furry Things, but the lineage is there. Another aspect of evolution is that once we are finished with something, once it has outlived its usefulness, it goes away, dies. Very strange indeed, but those are the rules we play by. Originality, while a nice concept, is really quite impossible to achieve. Like perfection, originality is an ideal that will always be beyond our actual achievements. Everything is derivative of something that came before it, or as many a snarky music critic has said, nothing springs forth from the ether fully formed...or maybe that was Kesey. Warrants mentioning.

My girlfriend's apartment complex, which used to be a swank highrise for yuppies, has over the years morphed into a weigh station for new Americans looking to get their feet wet in our midwestern cultural soup, sometimes at densities between 8 and 10 folks per apartment. This is reflected in the reeking elevator shafts and common passageways. Hordes of Russians have taken over blocks of Miss K's residential tower, and the place smells more and more like cabbage and stink-sweat every day. With the weather lately in the low 90s and quite humid, I must agree with her. This morning, when I went to the pool to get my laps in, I found that my eyes were watering on the 15-floor journey down to the lobby. The elevator smelled like a gaggle of filthy bums soaked in cheap perfume had just pulled off an orgy atop a compost heap. Either this complex plays host to some of the stinkiest bastards this side of Moscow or maintenance has opted not to clean the elevators unless they get a pay raise.

Miss K says that the elevators and hallways used to smell just fine, in fact, clean with notes of mid-grade carpet cleaner. Sounds nice, but the way we do things here is often not how they do it over yonder...wherever that yonder may be.

The Old Country, no matter what that country was, was probably a land of scarcity and misery. Most people need to be in a world of shit before they'll pull up stakes and move half way around the globe to a narcissistic land of empty stares and recreational firearm nuts. Many immigrants come here with a mind for serious conservation: Bathe once a week to conserve precious water and heating fuel, kill what you eat and vice versa, make and mend your clothes, etc. Sounds crazy to us pampered Yanks, but having spent a fair amount of time overseas, I understand that's just how it is. Now, some cultures are more lax on body odor than others. I've also noticed that us folks of European descent tend to smell worse after a few days stewing in their juices than Asians, especially East Asians. There has to be an evolutionary reason for that, something that has to do with a higher population density, and propensity for warmer weather in East Asia versus the wild temp swings and until a few hundred years ago, relative open spaces across European lands. Both India and China have just under and just over three times the population of Europe in its entirety. It's been that way for thousands of years.

There's also a couple bio-evolutionary angles: musky body odor was supposed to arouse the loins of the opposite sex, and when our kind first picked up social behaviors, we identified others and whether or not they belonged in our tribe by how they smell. We've moved beyond that, though. Personally I couldn't get within 15 feet of a hot chick who smelled like sweaty ass-- I've been to jamband shows so I know this for a fact, but supposedly my ancestors thought quite differently. Us modern metrosexual-leaning fragile American clean-freak types want any and all smells to come from a bottle of subtle and overpriced perfume. It was the Indians, of the subcontinent variety, by the way, who started using perfumes and incense in abundance to ameliorate the funk of b.o. in a sub-tropical climate. Water was scarce but they still wanted to smell better than the beasts they tended to.

Ambient smell was one reason I scaled back on my concert-going a few years back, well that and advancement into my mid-30s. When I was 20, thrashing about with several hundred sweating drunken stoned college kids in front of a wailing J Mascis and band was just about the funnest thing I could imagine doing that didn't involve a threesome with Aimee Mann and Susanna Hoffs-- and back then those two could have smelled any damn way they pleased.

I'm not sure if age has honed my sniffer, or simply made me less tolerant towards unappealing aspects of otherwise appealing stuff, but I don't go against my whims. Last time I took in a Neurosis show, I had to relocate twice: Once to veer away from a sudden and violent churning moshpit, and the second time to get beyond olfactory range from a pack of dreadlocked white folks who neither showered, used incense or perfume, or for that matter, changed their clothes. That's just rude when you're packed into a small theater-sized space that's guaranteed to heat up beyond 90° before the opening band's half finished with their set. These smelly Burning Man drones thought in some way they were staking out territory in a tribal fashion, and most everyone around them just thought they were jerks for forcing themselves on the crowd.

Evolution is moving beyond the willfully stinky. Advanced cultures all over the world place a premium on hygiene, and for good reason. A nasty smell is nature's way of telling us that something is not quite right. Sure there are still large swaths of humanity both here and overseas who have no problem smelling like a rotting carcass, but you're not likely to find such a person sitting in a boardroom, or for that matter washing dishes in a mediocre restaurant. I think Miss K should post flyers throughout her complex, in English, Russian, and a few other mother tongues that say, in effect, that smelling like ass is rude and unnecessary. Soap is cheap, use it. One should smell better, generally, than the little furry things they shoot and cook.

- k

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Balls

Haven't written much about baseball this year, but I have taken in a few ballgames-- both at Comerica and at The Jake in Cleveland. The Indians are racing back into respectability, leapfrogging the Tigers-- what a surprise-- in the process. Cleveland plays hard, holds onto leads, and when they lose leads, they tend to rally. Their young centerfielder and leadoff guy, Grady Sizemore, is a joy to watch in person. He's slick in the field and always seems to get on base when it matters. The kid's prolly got 10 All-Star appearances ahead of him.

The Washington Nationals are a great story of how relocation can conjure reinvention. Frank Robinson deserves a ring as skipper before he retires and his boys play hard, almost manically so. That's the kind of mindset that'll keep a team out of long slumps. It helps that the NL East is such a basket case of overpaid incompetence and impotence that a spirited team with average talent has a great shot of finding their way into the playoffs. Better the Nationals than the reeking Mets or Phillies.

Not too much talk about folks smacking 60 to 70-something home runs a year anymore. Pitchers are rejoicing, no doubt. A few players are noticeably more slight in person and in their attack on the baseball itself. It's said that athletes lose a little when the rules come forth and stop them from jamming a liter of growth hormone into their asses every day before warmups. On a related note, I'm happy that Jason Giambi has re-invented himself as slap hitter with a nice on-base-percentage. It's tough to land that kind of quality, especially a 1st baseman with a lead glove, for $13.5 mil a year. If only I could hit a curve ball.

The Tigers are exactly where they were last year, hovering around .500, and that prolly means that Alan Trammell will be somewhere else next year. Detroit's situational hitting is ugly, as is most of their small-ball attributes. More disturbingly, they still have a tough time holding on to late leads. Last night they were choking off the rolling White Sox on the South Side 4 -1 when suddenly the 7th inning and Detroit's bullpen, in the form of Chris 'Butterfly Slider' Spurling, arrives at the same time and next thing I know Paul Konerko, Joe Crede, and formerly 0 for 23 Juan Uribe play realtime batting practice to the tune of three jacks. That act is getting old. Then some fireballing boob names German (pronounced Herrman) comes in to relieve Spurling and promptly give up a shot to Frank Thomas that prolly thumped some poor dude sleeping off his buzz in a Will County cornfield. This is not all on Trammell, who doesn't hit, field, or pitch anymore, but it's the leader of a group who takes a fall for the failed expectations of the group.

While we are chewing on expectations:

Contract buyout negotiations are proceeding with cold-eyed haste for Vagabond Coach Larry Brown. Or if you prefer: Soon To Be ex-Pistons' Coach Larry Brown. Or, hows about: Future Knicks Coach Larry Brown. Wait, I like: Coach of the 2004 Olympic Bronze Medal Mens Basketball.... Okay that last one was a bit of a cheap shot. I can't really rail against a decent man and genius coach with a terrific work ethic who brought one title, and very nearly two, to my hometown b-ball team. Bottom line, Larry Brown is a drama queen, and Piston's owner Bill Davidson hates drama queens. That's about all there is to that. The Freep's Mitch Albom captures it perfectly:

For what it's worth, here's my pocket Sigmund Freud. Larry Brown is a good friend to his friends and endears himself to certain media types because those people can do for him the thing he most needs: tell him they love him. Tell him he's great. Tell him over and over. Tell him like they mean it -- because they do.

With management types -- and with certain players -- Larry has more difficulty, because those folks rarely love any coach all the time and they certainly don't love him forever. So, inevitably, Brown wears out his welcome and he gets a bit antsy and he hears the siren call of someone else wooing him, telling him he's wonderful, and he follows it. And he can. Because he's a terrific coach, and he usually leaves the money on the table and doggone it, some people really do love him.

But others can't take him. They can't take his moods. They can't take his endless need for reinforcement. Players respect Brown for his marvelous basketball knowledge, but, after a point, he can lose them. They see through his self-absorption. Some of them stop listening. The Pistons have a recent history of splitting with coaches before that affliction gets too serious. They did so again Monday.

Mitch forgot to mention that under a new coaching regime, er, under Flip Saunders, we'll get to see Darko during real game moments. This fall either Darko loses his Human Victory Cigar moniker or he's going to go down as the dumbest draft choice since Kwame Brown, or possibly Sam Bowie. Saunders is great at developing young players, and he's also an innovative offensive mind. People give Saunders some poo because his Timberwolves were booted from the 1st round of the Western Conference playoffs seven years straight (either at the hands of the Spurs or the Kobe-Shaq Lakers), but hell, the roster usually consisted of Kevin Garnett and a pack of mediocraties. Detroit's roster is far superior, and they will play hard for Flip, because of Flip's new boss, Joe D., is that rare NBA executive that Players respect, seriously respect. It makes a difference...it's what has kept Rasheed in line. Indeed the Pistons will be fine, and soon Brown will have his dream job, coaching the New York Knicks-- who have more talent-holes and head-cases than a gonzo porn flick, but that's not my concern. Bon voyage dude, thanks for the ring.

- k

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It's Better To Create Than To Make Boom

Been looking at lipsync solutions for my current animation project. Making a cartoon talk by hand, frame by frame, is tedious at best. Imagine changing mouth-shapes a few thousand times for a five minute flick. Imagine doing that for several characters. No wonder why the old-school Disney bunch were renowned boozers...but only after work, there was no way they could afford to hit the sauce while on the clock. To pull off something like Snow White or Bambi, Disney had to have a 100 animators on the same page, lockstep, everything individual contribution fitting perfectly as a piece or component of the whole. Screw ups were costly because you couldn't hop onto a computer and change things around. Use a three-point stroke for your character when the specs called for all characters in the film to have a one-point stroke and that's your ass. Mess up the measurements of a scenery piece and you might get shot by Uncle Walt in front of your workgroup. These folks operated with a precision we just don't see these days without, you know, the help of a computer. Whenever I see an old-school Disney toon I have to remind myself that folks did all of that by hand. It's tough to keep two people on the same page these days through a lunch meeting. The worst bit for manual animators must have been synching mouth-movements with the soundtrack. Must've been hell for a 5-minute Donald Duck short. Cinderella prolly drove a few folks insane.

Eventually, digital animation came along, and programmers figured out a couple ways to make lip-synching semi-automatic. These methods measure amplitude-- the mouth-shape as dictated by the loudness and pitch of the sound, or use phonemes or visemes-- the shape our mouths make when we pronounce certain words, to automate the process. Either way, you need to create the mouth-shapes, and assign a value to each. Most talking cartoons you watch on the tele have between 10 and 20 shapes. The best animation-programmers / creators combine the attributes of amplitude and phonetic interpretations.

Anyway, I don't have the skillz to write a lipsync program based on phonics, though give me a few months and a barren schedule and I could prolly figure it out: it's all about assigning values to either certain points in the sound spectrum or a set of phonemes and mapping those values to predefined mouth-shapes that represent either sound and pitch values, or, how th, l, uw, b etc. come out of said character's mouth. Then I'd need to figure a way to synch all that with whatever frame-rates I'd use to make the cartoon. Annosoft makes the high-grade phonemes-type solutions with amplitude controls. FlashAmp makes a simpler and cheaper amplitude-based solution, and I like what it does. There is another firm called Lipsync MX, that despite the 'MX' label is not a part of Macromedia nor is it compatible with vector graphics. But they'll take your money for the tedious pleasure of using their watered-down Annosoft-esque solution.

This is all part of a growing business. Animation is the new black. Corporate America loves the idea of virtual people taking over marketing and admin responsibilities, and to those of you who scoff at this, remember a few of things. One, the requisite AI is almost here. Two, given the curve of technological progress, everyone is replaceable, either now or later, and three, animated personal do exactly what you say and they never get sick. It's about controlling our environment, and CEO's are pretty big on that. That's just a business angle, though, and animation has sexier applications that most of us enjoy all the time, and by sexy I mean visually pleasing, not some Cowboy Bebop-esque Bukakke flick from the land of the rising....you know what I mean.

I guess in a larger sense my joy with this stuff relates to the high of building something, as opposed to tearing it down. I used to have a kink for minor vandalism and early-morning shenanigans that a warden might frown on but which the rest of us might enjoy...like switching around the lawn furniture for three neighboring houses between 2 and 4 in the a.m. Where I grew up it was tough to find three adjoining yards with lawn furniture and without dogs. I managed, only because it was that important to me and my friends. If you get to combine fitness and pranks together in a nice package, not to mention exposure to fresh air and the dangerous air of doing something that would piss someone off, then I think you have to pursue that option. Especially if you're 15.

And that was about as crazy as I ever got with other people's property. If my elderly neighbor was willing to let me test out a few M-80s inside a toaster oven he was kicking to the curb, that's one thing. At least I was invited, and nothing but the toaster oven, which was rusted, pathetic, and had clearly outlived its usefullness, was injured in the explosion. Though I've had some powerfully angry moments in my youth, it never occurred to me to strap on a bomb-belt and run under a loaded fuel tanker in a busy Iraqi neighborhood just to thin the place of Shiites. Nor has it ever occurred to me to vent frustration shouting Death To Everyone who doesn't buy into what I'M selling, or carrying it a step further and shoot and stab and headsaw a Dutch filmmaker who had the audacity to say that maybe Radical Islamists treated women poorly. Full disclosure here: The terrorists perpetrating Iraq's suicide-bombing campaign or blowing up British subways, from the supporters to the planners to the Jihadist-go-boom grunts-- these creatures are something less than human. Anyone who worships death in such a way does not in the least get what humanity is about.

Regarding Iraq's horrific violence, which indicates to me that their insugency is many miles from its 'last throes (quoting Dick 'Head' Cheney)', there's only so long that this lunacy can continue before a rebutting kill'em all faction rises in force against the Jihadists-- taking down even more grips of innocents in the process. It's happened before. In Columbia, you had your Paramilitary response to the Marxist FARC-- hundred's of thousands have died in the process. In China, Mao's Red Army was a response to the brutal rule of the Kuomintang-- millions dead. The Soviet Red Army were faced with a kill'em all kinda of freakjob (the Nazis), and consequently half of Europe was turned into dust as two major powers fought for four year in a war of extermination-- tens of millions dead. Newton's third law crosses a lot of territory and if Iraq continues to be this incredibly violent, the half-life before we see a normal state is just pushed further out into the future. In the meantime, they drift ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature. At any rate, considering that over 10k Iraqis have already been killed by sectarian violence, I'd say the long-anticipated civil war is already under way. Of course our administration won't tell you that, because it was supposed to be so freakin' easy, pourous border be damned. Bush knows easy. Grew up easy. Went from partying to all-is-forgiven easy.

And Newton's third law prolly has something to saw about that too.

- k

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Dunkin' the Noggin'

I've never been in space, rather, Space-- the great zero-gravity out-there. Unless you have 50 mil or so to buy a Russian flight or the aptitude to be an astronaut, spaceflight is not going to happen, not to me, and most very likely, not to you. Even if you can afford to be a space tourist, at this point, you're only up in the heavens for a few days, and let's face it, they're are not yet too many places for us mouth-breathers to visit away from the Earth-womb. Funny then that floating and flying have always appealed to us. We float in our dreams, in airplanes, under the influence of strong meds and other variant methods that I'll not detail here.

Lately, around dusk, after several hours of writing and animation follies, I'll get into my swim trunks and head out back to the pool. I go to the deep end, take in a nice breath, exhale, and do a running cannonball into the 78° water with my eyes open. I don't move till I've been sitting on the bottom for a few seconds. After I come up for air I stretch out and float on my back and stare at the cloud formations. Only my face is above the waterline. I'm weightless. And I can convince myself, if only for a few moments, that I'm not bound by gravity or my body. All blissful moments are by necessity brief. So eventually I'll start thrashing about and do laps for 30 minutes or so. Towards the end I'm winded and relaxed. Swimming and floating about outside during the summertime is better than yoga for clearing the mind. Cause sometimes I tend to jam a lot of stuff into it, my mind that is.

I'm reading a novel about Gustave Flaubert, even though I've never really read his stuff. I got about eight pages into Madam Bovary and realized that I'd be better off sticking to my 20th Century Anglo-Yankee stuff. However, the author of this book on Flaubert, Jullian Barns, is a fantastic writer, drawn equally to western history and a rarely explored tangent of it, etymology. Most of what I learn about language comes from the books I read and how authors explain words. Steven Pinker does this with his cognitive psych books, Chomsky did it in his groundbreaking linguistic screeds before he veered off into insane politics. Jullian Barns does it in the context of the novel, and while 99.8 percent of everyone could not give a rats ass, it works for me.

Barns wrote a particularly nice chapter called the Flaubert Bestiary, essentially based on the animals that Flaubert and those close to him felt he resembled. It's a long list, but the most careful attention is paid to bears. Flaubert was a big bear of a man, reclusive, and was adept at both working madly and doing nothing for long stretches. French for bear is 'ours' and in Flaubert's day there were many slang terms that stemmed from it. Simply 'ours' could mean a jail cell, un ours mal leche applied to scary misanthopic slobs, and un ours meant a play that was turned down many times before finding a house-- a term, according to Barnes, that Flaubert used all the time.

Bears were a huge part of western culture during the 19th century. From an 1885 French book on remedies and potions:

When the Yakuts, a Siberian people, meet a bear, they doff their caps, greet him, call him master, old man or grandfather, and promise not to attack him or even speak ill of him. But if he looks as though he may pounce on them, they shoot at him, and if they kill him, they cut him to pieces and roast him and regale themselves, repeating all the while, 'It is the Russians who are eating you, not us.'

There used to be a bear under every rock in Russia. The black ones were coachable. They were taught dancing moves, and if they did well, they joined up with circuses and freakshows. They got to see Europe free and if the circuses made enough money, the dancing bears had the luxury of food. If a bear showed a poor aptitude for dancing then it was parsed into meat and rugs. No one tried to make the polar bear dance though. Polar bears don't screw around for a second. You run into one, chances are that one of you is going to be a warm meal. Polar bears rarely ventured into human-heavy lands, but we whacked most of them anyway. Not that many bears in and around Russia anymore, and anywhere else for that matter, cept for Yellowstone and your nearest zoo.

These days the most common slang term for bear has to do with furry gay men. The inference is more towards the teddy bear than an arctic behemoth with the temper and the skills to slice a man into six pieces with a swipe of the paw. Bears can still do that, of course, but they very rarely do. If you happen to venture along the Castro, chances are nearly nil that you'll get maimed, that is, unless you beg for it.

Back to the pool to float and stare at the sky. I can think again about being in space. It's still wild out there, and it'll be one hell of a long time before we can tame it, but knowing our species, we'll give it a good go. Maybe a 1,000 years from now, kids will read, telepathically of course, about dangerous and forbidding exploits to the edges of our galaxy and they will think, laconically, what's the big deal....

- k

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Mesopotamian Flypaper

We keep a killin'em, and they keep refillin' the ranks. Much as I hate to disagree with someone as benevolent and plugged in as Dick-my-heart-aint-yet-mechanical-Cheney, I must say that the insurgency does not appear to be in it's last throes. Maybe the Baathist insurgency is about to go poof. However, looking at the meat-rain of carnage across Iraq this past weekend, I'm not sure if the foreign-Jihadist insurgency has even peaked yet. There are/were multiple insurgencies going down in Iraq: There's Sadr's Shia militias, ex-Baathists, and the Jihadists-- the latter are blowing up democratic-thinking Iraqis and us Yanks at a pretty nasty clip. Sadr's people have fallen in line, and it appears as though the Baathist's will too. With those two groups, there is a sense of nationalism and the need to rebuild Iraq, even if it isn't the Iraq they want. Looking at previous home-grown insurgencies in Nicaragua and El Salvador will tell you that things eventually settle down. Unfortunately for Iraq, and us, that's only the half of it.

That leaves Zarqawi (who can boast of nearly 1,000,000 Google hits.. oh the irony. see, you can't escape modernity) and the Jihadists for elimination. These are the interlopers who specialize in bad teeth, black tracksuits, and suicide. They want us dead, and by 'us' I mean anyone who doesn't agree lock-n-barrel with an uber old-school branch of extreme-Islam. Iraqi citizens, who pine more deeply for security every bloody day, are tired of these dangerous fools blowing up their children and property. In the last 24 hours alone, almost 50 Iraqis have been shredded by bombs and bullets in the name of Al Queda's angry-Allah, even though blasting unarmed and pious civilians is supposed to be an affront to Islam, and is most certainly an affront to 90-something percent of Islam's practitioners.

Just about everyone agrees that Zarqawi and his humorless headchopping packs of psychos need to be sent to hell post-haste. Yet the foriegn-led Jihadist aspect of the insurgency shows no sign of abetting. Could this be because the Jihadists are being constantly reinforced from places like, oh I don't know, Syria? We are killing insurgents right and left, and more keep cropping up. This points to two big things: That the Syrian border is currently too porous to effectively cut off men and material from Zarqawi's Islamothugs, and that the foreign Jihadists are receiving suckle from some Iraqi citizens. Prolly safe to say that many Iraqis are playing both sides of the fence.

Iraq is a very tribal place, meaning the people of Iraq have a damn good idea who belongs where. The fact that there are legions of foreign terrorists operating with near impunity means that there are collaborators...more collaborators than the Bush Administration likes to admit. That there are people who would support a Jihadists ideology before a democratic one leaves me almost speechless, but we're talking about humanity here and as Perry Ferrell said when writing a song about Ted Bundy, 'Nothing's shocking.' Still, I can't get my head around it. Millions of decent Iraqis who seek a good outcome to this. They've voted, they try to do the right thing, and many tip off Iraqi and US forces about various Jihadist shenanigans. Still, the foreign aspect of the insurgency might have died on the vine by now without local help because that would mean nowhere to hide, and it would have for sure died on the vine with zero local support and 100,000 troops standing with guns aimed west to keep those death-loving pricks from streaming across the Syrian border.

The supply of fresh Jihadists comes into Iraq mainly from Syria. Now, Bush and members of his executive claque have warned Syria time ad infinitum to seal their border or risk an asskicking. Syria shrugs every time and says it's doing what it can to seal the border. The Syrians are lying, we know this, but won't do anything about it. Reason is, supposedly, that Iraq is a terrorist flypaper zone-- a place where all the Jihadist loonies will come together to get their brains shot out in pursuit of 72 Virgins. I don't want to believe the Flypaper Theory because it's a very cold way to look at Operation Iraqi Freedom, and it also won't work. For one thing, if we let this flypaper thing play out, Iraq will remain a mess for at least another 10 years, and that doom the democracy mission...assuming that mattered to Bush in the first place.

Here's why: If US and Iraqi forces don't secure a good chokehold on the Jihadists, terrorized locals will eventually form militias everywhere to deal with security in a more personal manner. Armed bands of vigilantes will pop up like kettle corn, which would make Iraq eventually look like Somalia. The millions of Iraqis who have bought into democratic ideals will not wait forever for their security-- which is the bread and backbone of any successful government. At some point, they will take up arms.

Bush has said often that he's fighting the terrorists over there to keep from having to fight them over here. That's fine, but if he thinks this way, then he doesn't care that much about Iraq having a decent outcome. Saddam's statues were toppled 26 months ago, and there are still large swaths of Iraq under insurgent control. In many cases, security in Iraq is worse now than it was two years ago. We need to seal the freakin borders and give Iraqis a decent chance to build a decent country. You can't have a plan to attract every terrorist on the planet to Iraq and still build democratic institutions in Iraq. Let's give the Iraqis a little breathing space. If they are convinced that we are serious about sealing the borders and cutting down the insurgency, I think more Iraqis will get off the fence. Right now, they don't know how it's going to turn out, and frankly, neither do we.

The clock is ticking.

- k

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Much Love For England

Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about England. Between its long history, wry humor, and modern music, no other country outside of my own has brought so much cool stuff into my life. I'm jotting these notes down more for myself than in any attempt to sound a rallying cry to the Brits because those cats are on top of it, if you know what I mean. No one can make noise like the Brits:

The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Stones, Joy Division, Blur, Radiohead, Underworld, The Smiths, The Police, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Nick Drake, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Stereolab, The Clash, New Order....I could go on, for days, and so could you.

The English have been trained since the days of Roman conquests to keep a stiff upper lip. Keep the lip stiff while running through your enemy or writing a wry power ballad or neo-psychedelic dirge. Don't lose your temper unless your wasted, your football team loses a Cup game, or if some dingbat hits on your wife. Nope, you don't lose your temper if sub-human assholes blow up some transit vehicles in your City, because war requires the perfect mix of fury and cool thinking. Britain held off all of Nazi Germany for a year, beat down Napoleon when no one else could, and have won every war in the last 1000 years that they were serious about fighting. These cats rule when things get dicey.

Therefore, bombing London is proof positive, in case we needed more proof, that Al Queda and its offshoots are totally freaking daft. Maybe they're out of their gourds from genetic hiccups, lack of booze and sex, or maybe they're suffering dementia from bad infections due to poor dental hygiene. Ever notice how physically UGLY most of these terrorists tend to be? Is it a reflection of the soul? There are homely people out there who are still sexy because they know what beauty is, and they live accordingly. Not these bomb-strapping assholes. They hate womankind, which is a fine starting point to figuring out the pathology of your enemy. Jihadists hate women...what more is there to say! This is about envy, internalized. Brits have written great works about that subject:

Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Wolfe, Kinsley Amis, Martin Amis, Byron, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Ian McEwan, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Hitchens--

We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

Lemme just add this.

Dear Terrorists:

Now you've done it. You've totally pissed off both the craziest (US) and most stoically determined (UK) countries on the planet. Our societies will not close up, we will not stop using the Metro, or the Tube, or the Subway, or the freakin L. We'll work harder, party harder, make love better and like we mean it, and eradicate you sick bastards while helping to transform your homelands into healthy and modern countries-- places where Islam will again be scene as the religion of peace it is, instead of your perverted view of it.

I look forward to your extinction so we can get on with our future.

Toodles.

- k

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05july05

A Jurist Supreme

Looks like our esteemed Presidente Gee W Loco will get to replace 2 Supreme Court justices in short order. Sandra Day O'Connor turned in her resignation on Friday, and everyone knows that Chief Justice Rehnquist can't be far behind. In fact, Rehnquist's resignation has been expected for months, but he is as of this moment still the most powerful jurist in the world, and cancer be damned, he is working by his own clock. I like Rehnquist, even though he's to the right of my general tastes. There's much I plan to say about him, and the inevitable right-wing ideologue that'll replace him, and everyone knows that Rehnquist's replacement may be to the right of Robert Bork. That's all for another day, but it was worth mentioning because Rehnquist and Justice O'Connor are pretty tight-- both fair-minded, tough on idiots, and from wide-open Arizona.

Like Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor has turned out to be a historic jurist. Folks in the center and on the left side of politics hope that she'll be replaced by a like-minded center-right judge, even though it'd be impossible to actually replace her as a historical figure. She was at times a guiding light for our national conscience, if I may be so effusive, a conscience that was still healing from the nasty wounds of the 1970s. O'Connor was about the best thing to happen to the SCOTUS in a 100 years-- something that's been dawning on us all for a few years now. From the NYT:

She was sometimes called the most powerful person in America. That seems like a huge overbilling for a woman who toiled at legal writing in a modest office with a small staff, and whose vote was only one of nine. But on issue after crucial issue, it was her swing vote that decided what kind of nation America would be. Justice O'Connor's America is one that hews to conservative principles, but it is tempered by a compassion for individuals and an unwillingness to follow ideology blindly to unreasonable places.

'Toiled.' I like that word. It means tough work. It means that O'Connor worked very hard to be a top scholar-- a top Supreme Court Judge. Indeed, she toiled. When you are the first in anything of importance, you damn sure know about toil. And toil has the added benefit of conferring humility.

I was in junior high when then President Reagan submitted Sandra O'Connor's name for Senate conformation to the Supreme Court. I didn't know a damn thing about her-- regarding her super-outdoorsy upbringing an a 250sq mile ranch, graduating 3rd in her class at Stanford, her partisan leanings, dietary habits, temperament, etc. All I knew was that she was a woman, and that in itself seemed like a pretty big deal back then, and of course it was huge. Supreme Court justices are more powerful, individually, than US Senators, and collectively, they're damn near all-powerful. I'd done well enough in 6th-grade Civics to appreciate that.

I later came to appreciate O'Connor's interpretation of the Constitution as a living document. Jurists like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia hate that notion-- that we can divine things from the Constitution as time goes on. I'm fine with treating it as a living document. In a world of gradients, we need the flexibility to make changes, and if it turns out we were wrong, to change back. Justice's Thomas and Scalia, and to a lesser extent Rehnquist, would have us amend the Constitution for things such as abortion and affirmative action. Do y'all know how hard it is to amend the freaking Constitution? We've only pulled it off 26 times in over 200 years, and ~40% of that came with the Bill of Rights. There were even dogfights to ratify the 13th Amendment-- outlawing slavery! Some things are so out-front wrong that they need to be addressed without a super-majority blessing.

Rumor has it that Bush sees literal-minded Thomas and Scalia as judicial role models. A majority of literal-minded justices, those in the Scalia / Thomas mode, will overturn Roe v. Wade quicklike, and we'd never get three-forth's of America to back an Amendment allowing abortion. Our cultural divide is such that we can't convince 52% of the voting public that Gee-Dubb is a smirking yahoo with a messiah complex, cause half his base thinks that messiah complexes are cool, and maybe even ticket-bearers to the Pearly Gates of Rodeo, er Heaven. How the hell could a pro-choice lobby convince a woman in the first half of her pregnancy that she and she alone has the final say on the life inside her, and life it is, though that life is certainly not a viable human being. Justice O'Connor, while no fan of abortion, understood all this. The confirmation battle that frames the ascension of her replacement shall be worth watching.

So, yes, I've liked how O'Connor handled abortion and affirmative action cases. I've liked how she's supported damage limitations against businesses, because, seriously, even if the CEO of the multinational who makes porchlights hires some crackhead to shoot your porch up so you'll have to replace them lights ahead of schedule, it's not worth a $100 million from the vaults of that company, unless, UNLESS, that company, as company policy, participated in systemic damaging behavior, AS POLICY, towards its clients and their property, in the aforementioned scenario, your porch. In other words, unless we know otherwise, lets stick to individuals. Conversely, Big Tobacco certainly deserved to be relieved of a few billion ducats, but they are special in a way that ethics-types will need another 200 years to write about properly...that's how it is with subversive evil. Both sides of the ideological divide over-reach, all reasonable adults know this by know, which means 8 to 10 people know this right now, and they're all wasted on booze to kill the loneliness and pain of that higher knowledge, and no, I'm not even going to delete those last few lines.

I've also liked O'Connor's deference to state's rights. One of this country's greatest assets is our ability to float trial systems in states and cherry-pick the ones that work best. Welfare Reform got its start in Wisconsin, our current interpretation of Affirmative Action comes from Michigan. A recent case outta California, Ashcroft v. Raich was a referendum on both state's rights and the medical uses for cannabis. O'Connor, in dissent, said it was fine for California to prescribe the mary jane to ill patience, and further intimated that the Federal Government, i.e. Ashcroft, need not worry about such things. A clear-thinking pragmatist with compassion enough to ameliorate the roughest edges of Conservative Doctrine, Sandra Day O'Connor represented the best face of America, and she will be missed.

- k

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