Morning In Beverly, Twilight In Thebes

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a-prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith wrote "She Stoops to Conquer," some lines of which have come to mind. The snap above is of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. This morning's Cheery Thought was inspired by a drive through FameLand with a gonzo-economist guide. I love L.A. The highway signs talk to you here. While stalking Julia Roberts who doesn't really even turn either of us on we couldn't help but notice how surprisingly few nice places there are to live amongst these mansions.

Freedom Writer

A Wayfarer's Notes, a blog by Vincent (also known as "Perpetual Labs" in the right margin) is appropriately dedicated to Basho, whose footsteps inform every post. Some writers can can soak up details of people and things and absolutely bathe them in mindful observation, holding those long enough in mind to transduce into text, for enjoyment by others. Vincent can find spiritual peace and slow down time when walking to buy a reading lamp and a memory card for his wife. A recent post was "Metaphors," and a line in it about the clarity of early-childhood memories especially resonated:

I don’t think we can exactly choose our mood, despite what some say, any more than we can blow into the sails to make our boat go forward. What we can do is be sensitive to the breeze and trim our sails to take advantage of every zephyr that could possibly take us where we need to go: need, not want.

Being a savage, and not a whit ashamed of it, I’m neurologically wired to a sense of place. The whole visible, smellable universe is redolent with associations; thus something happened in this spot, or reminds me of something that happened somewhere else; the scent of the resin from pine, laurel or holly evokes this or that. I cannot pass a certain telegraph pole in the street without its weather-worn tarred surface reminding me of Australia, a land I left sixty-two years ago.

Many things remind me of the ocean journey that brought me to England, with its smell of fresh paint, diesel oil, sewage and salt spray. Memory provides its own kind of presence, one sense invoking the other, so now I feel the constant shuddering of the ship’s decks and bulkheads, the warm exhalations from the ventilator cowls, the daily adventure of getting lost and feeling quite safe, for on board everyone knew me, almost all were women, war brides predominantly. I suppose I used to feel on that ship as a rock star must feel when he dives into the audience and they combine to hold him aloft. Leaving Australia was an exile and loss, but the shipboard journey was a consoling interregnum. I was only four at the time, but all the same I could feel, as I feel now. It astonishes me when I hear a person confess to nothing but vague memories before the age of eight, when up till that age mine are at their most clear and poignant.

This house, too, reminds me of a ship, an imaginary one, not the one in which I sailed from Fremantle to Tilbury. It’s cosy and narrow: a 12-foot-wide slice in a row of similar houses all joined together. But from front to back—I just ran a steel tape measure between the two—is 38 foot. The rooms are furnished simply, and though they are rather dark, the furniture and doors are of real wood, whose glow is derived from the sun’s fecundating rays. Where I sit now, which we call the middle room, for it leads to a smaller room at the back, has an arrangement of five washing lines strung across the room, where in winter drying sheets hang slackly like the sails of a becalmed schooner.

Someon has proven the best travel writers don't even need to travel.

2008 Holiday Retro-Prospective

Schools closed in Seattle on Wednesday, December 17th because of predicted snow. None fell until the morning of the 18th, and by that evening accumulation began to close the airport. I drove my delayed-arrived mother-in-law home through a welcome slide-o-matic. Snowstorms here are an excuse for ataraxy because we are ill-prepared, and they usually pass quickly. But it kept snowing, snowing for days straight, and the holidays became compulsory. Lord Running Boy got a birth-cousin on the 20th, so we housed the newling's two brothers, aged 1 and 4, for 76 hours. At one point 14 snow-bound souls were in the house, and I contemplated fleeing to a Motel 7. Schools were closed for 16 days, and Santa's other reindeer, FedEx and UPS, first started delivering on New Year's Eve; and the packages are still straggling in.

As a city and a nation, circumstances dictate what we don't really don't want to face. By common and unspoken consent, we were determined to have one last great holiday season, and reined things in as little as possible. Let us not consider the foreboding vagaries of Christmas Futures, but revel in our rituals, our instinctive motions, and perpetuate the myths of beneficence from a North Pole. I had to explain multiple times to the #1 son that such a destination is impossibly remote, impossible to drive to with our car. That no runways for a plane exist there, even a helicopter lacks a fuel payload to reach it, and besides, it's a secret place, with casual visitors, particularly the fathers of strong-willed yearning boys, forbidden. He's still ruminating on letters of introduction and the journey's mechanical means.

Weird weather here. At one point, a wind gust picked my 20-foot aluminum extension ladder clear off its hooks on the fence and threw it down by the side porch, sheared a neighbor's tree limb off and cast it 30 feet east to shatter over the stones of the back patio, and blew the firewood clear off the porch. It must've been near a hundred miles per hour, and it knocked the power out to a few thousand homes and businesses, but we stayed lucky. Even more strangely, 'It's a Wonderful Life' was nowhere to be seen on cable on Christmas Eve; given that its plot centers on financial ruin and the contemplated suicide of a well-meaning banker, you'd think it would've been topical this year, but it had been supplanted by the more glib, BB-gun focused 'A Christmas Story,' which ran for 24 hours on TBS. (Jimmy Stewart's legacy was on nationally, according to Time magazine, but was out-rated by CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.) Perhaps an age has passed, I thought while pressing through the channel menu, hopefully not mine.

I came across a television interview with Seattle's mayor and Grand Jowl Master, Greg Nickels, who gave his own road maintenance efforts a "B." Hmmm. To my knowledge he has yet to be assassinated, true, but if the faculty of a law school had been tasked with keeping roads open while debating the environmental impact of snow-plowing and graded each other's performance on a curve, it would've been progress. Seattle's 13 snow plows (Portland, to the south and nearer to the Pacific, has 50) use rubber plow-blades which compacted the flakes down into icing 3-6 inches high, enshrining tire-ruts for the duration. They spread sand on top, spewed an ineffective salt-free de-icer, never cleared side streets, and simply gave up after a few 12-hour shifts.

Therefore, the conditions were absolutely perfect for four-year olds waiting for Santa, for youths butt-surfing on garbage can lids down the steep streets near our house, for the way purple, green, blue, red and yellow lights shine in the dark above the illuminated crisp and crunch, and for playing with the inflowed largesse of elves when you have nowhere to go for days. With the aid of tire chains, rally-style driving, egg nog and extra liquor, a great Christmas was achieved. It was fun, it was infuriating, it was memorable. Due to the needs of high-energy boys cooped up in palaces of Ganesh, to fatherhood, the feeding of people and building of diaper pyramids, it was the near-death of blogging for me.

They picked up the garbage can today for the first time in three weeks. The streets are clear. The stacked cardboard, the bags of gift wrapping, and the mounds of recycling tentatively sidle up to a New Year. Welcome, 2009, and we are wary. Hail Mary, full of grace: help us win this stock-car race.

There's No Place Like Rome...There's No Place Like Rome

Davo over at Wombat's Waffles (link at right) put up the picture of the Catholic leader, perfectly accessorized with bold red Prada shoes. Nothing against gayness, pontiff, but Nathan Lane's outfits in the American remake of La Cage aux Folles weren't as flaming as those goddamned shoes:

"Why, what are you insinuating, my son? Straight non-pedophiles wear shoes just like these all the time! And nothing supernatural whatsoever occurs when I click the heels together. Now kiss the ring before I spank you."

Seems the pope, whose online screen name is PBXVI, was visiting Oz this week because around 40 active Catholics live there. To paraphrase the guy in Sling Blade, "Some folks just need drillin,' hrrmmm." If I have offended any Catholics, god be with you, and please feel free to comically eviscerate what is technically still my religion. Mormonism.

The Brighter Side Of Waterboarding

The original headline said, "Senate votes to ban waterboarding," but is a Congressional bill ever that simple?

The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.

So the clause was nestled into a much larger bill. Bush may veto it, given that he has sworn not to constrain intelligence from the full array of techniques. Twenty or so years ago, waterboarding didn't exist (to my knowledge) as a term of art. It was accurately enough called "water torture" since you actually drown or suffocate to death when it's done to you.

Torture has been used by everybody, including the United States, even when it was officially banned. It's not something that needs any encouragement, and people who decide to employ it should at least be desperate enough to put themselves on the wrong side of the law. It'll be really cool for a lot of people when this finally does get banned again, and it'll benefit all of us regular Amis, especially those of us who travel overseas.

Tom Waits: Downtown Train

The above song was a #1 hit for Rod Stewart, and my grandmother worked overtime, supervising the night shift making cassettes along with the last vinyl cut records ever mass-produced. At Decca Records, just as she was about to retire. Somewhat surprisingly to me, she became a big fan of Rod Stewart. I was fondly bemused, and had hopes she was recovering from the death of my grandfather. But she never did, and Rod Stewart didn't write that song. We all thought he did at the time but he just sang it like so many others. Nobody saw the man behind the lyrical curtain, a misshapen unforgiven dwarf who whittled patterns many other voices would take into fashion.

The dwarf's voice is a rock crusher. It makes gravel out of washboards, asphalt, and car parts floating in on tides of bourbon. As a child, he taught himself to play on a neighbor's piano, where he took refuge while his schoolteacher parents were acrimoniously divorcing in Pomona, California when he was 8 and 9. His father was named Frank, his mother Alma, and it was 1958 or '57, depending on how you calculate prodigy. He later played in an R&B band in high school, but his heart wasn't in it. You can almost hear a music teacher saying, "Class...please pay attention, and excuse Tom."

While the 60s revolutions raged, he listened to Bing Crosby to figure out his timing. He studied Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Hoagy Carmichael, Marty Robbins, and Raymond Chandler. He started playing lounges and strip clubs in San Diego when he was 18, and he was so good that word got out--Martha and the Vandellas, Charlie Rich, and Frank Zappa asked him to tour with them. He strove to make art with words and eventually mused a magnum opus on his father's absence in an album called Frank's Wild Years. While he steadily closed in on genius as a pauper, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, and Bruce Springsteen made millions of dollars singing his songs as their own.

When I heard Rod Stewart singing Downtown Train, I heard a tom-cat reasonably asking for free sex. Later, when I first heard Tom Waits singing his own creation, I heard someone describing people traveling into Manhattan, girls who hung from the straps on the downtown lines, also the people who came in preserved from New Jersey, people I worked alongside with thick accents and frank assessments. So I knew how fully he shook their essence down like a perfumer who bottled souls. Once an old guard on the exchange laughed long at me one morning when I first wore a new blue Italian silk pinstripe suit my mentor had given me, and I asked what was the matter. He said--"You look like a million bucks," and I said right back to him, his name was Jesse, "I'm shinin' like a new dime!"

Once you hear Tom Waits sing his own creations, Rod Stewart and everybody else scatters like crows.

The lyrics to Downtown Train:

Outside another yellow moon
punched a hole in the nighttime, yes
I climb through the window and down the street
I'm shining like a new dime
the downtown trains are full--with all those Brooklyn girls
they try so hard to break out of their little worlds

You wave your hand, and they scatter like crows
they have nothing that will ever capture your heart
they're just thorns without the rose
be careful of them in the dark
oh if I was the one!
you chose to be your only one
oh baby, can't you hear me now

Will I see you tonight?
on a downtown train
every night, every night is just the same
you leave me lonely now

I know your window, and I know it's late
I know your stairs and your doorway
I walk down your street and past your gate
I stand by the light at the four way

You watch them as they fall
and baby they all have heart attacks
they stay at the carnival,
but they'll never win you back!

Chorus

Will I see you tonight?
On a downtown train...
where every night is just the same
(you leave me lonely)
will I see you tonight?
On a downtown train...
all of my dreams just fall like rain
ooh baby on a downtown train

The "Tribal Belt"

My friend Still Life Living alerted me to analysts on NPR who kept referring, in the kind of catchy-code from which surges are spun, to a "tribal belt" in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Perhaps by that phrasing we are meant to believe that pesky tribes, though poorer than Africans, are the problem. (Oops. Pardon me. Hang on a sec while I spray my office with Rant-B-Gone.....ok, it seems to be helping. Aaaah. Blood flow, good. Air, check. Al-righty, then.)

It would probably be best to simply look at a few maps. This is the most volatile border in the world, territory where our past sins, unknown as they may be, are manifold; clicking on any of the maps shows closer views. The conflict locus:


The tribe probably targeted most by the "tribal belt" descriptor, which is but one of more than thirty others in 'Afghakistan:'


The Federally Administrated (Unaided, Uncontrolled) Tribal Areas:

Pakistan is unwilling to let the tribal areas inside its borders go because of a deep love for denuded, arid mountains, increasingly hostile refugees, dust, and a bracing climate. (All maps courtesy of the helpful Jesus del Norte.)

Immigration Officials Detaining And Deporting US Citizens

First, they came for the people with funny names...

Marisa Taylor, McClatchy News - Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.

On Thursday, Warziniack was told he would be released. Immigration authorities were finally able to verify his citizenship.

The story of how immigration officials decided that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent was an illegal Russian immigrant illustrates how the federal government mistakenly detains and sometimes deports American citizens.

Read More...

The Face Of A Terrorist

Cute women from Iceland want to destroy our Homeland.

Erla Osk Lilliendahl, pictured above, flew first-class to New York City with her girlfriends before Christmas, "to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." Sure, lady...sure. Just like Mohammad Atta went to a strip club and ordered champagne with his co-terrorists the night before 9/11.

Back in 1995, Erla came to the US and went undercover, out-staying her visa by three weeks, then coming back the next year to case the joint further. But this time Homeland Security caught the fugitive potential murderer at passport entry in JFK. After babbling incoherent lies about those fateful missing weeks 12 years prior, she was taken away, handcuffed, chained to a wall, interrogated, and left in detention to cool off for awhile. Later, she was marched through the airport in chains, driven to a shit-hole jail cell in New Jersey, shaken or shouted awake when she tried to sleep, and given no food or water. That'll teach her!

She took a longer vacation than was allowed by law, and that required justice. But you see, some of these foreign terrorist women are uppity. After being held for a mere 24 hours and deported back to Iceland, a.k.a. The Axis of Evil Farm Team, Lilliendahl wrote a blog post about her Big Apple caper and called it "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected." She then complained to the Icelandic Foreign Minister, who met with some minor U.S. ambassador to demand an apology.

The DHS was forced to announce a fictional investigation to "review its work procedures" and to express "regrets." Now, why did she have to go and do that? What a spoil-sport! And she wasn't even tortured. Maybe next time.

Air-Mobile Blogging

The young luggage carrier zipping through the airport above is the biggest worry in my world, and will probably continue to be for some time. He is known in these parts as Lord Running Boy. But there are a lot of things to worry about. For example, I'm very anxiety-prone when it comes to racial differences, gays, and lesbians, these issues occupying spots on Page 27 of my single-spaced list of worries, right after my entry for "Do Koreans eat too much damned garlic?"

Air travel comes early on Page 2 of my List of Worries, whereas it used to be high on Page 1 of my List of Sinful Pleasures. In my younger days there as a word for people like me: "jet-setter." Air travel still held vestiges of glamor, adventure, and mystique. Now I'm not sure what connotations it should carry when a nation is deliberately and sadistically torturing a generation of travelers in the name of security.

Heard of "waterboarding?" Yeah. Victims call it dying, sure, but it's mercifully quick (as long as they don't revive you and repeat the process 5 times a day--then it's very annoying). By contrast, there is no end to "airboarding," a training process intended to induce cow-like obedience and placid paranoia, the abbatoir-queued tableau punctured only occasionally by the insane screams of travelers as they're tazered to death. This might be less disturbing to the seasoned, thick-skinned traveler if the entire world weren't being turned into one giant Airport Arrival Centre. ("Your Honor, there was reason to believe the subject might have had explosive charges/guns/knives/nuclear device/et cetera hidden in his shoes/pocket/jacket/trunk/et cetera, so I had no choice but to shoot.")

But allow me to share my reveries. Once upon a time, I was coddled by Icelandic stewardesses. Yes, that was the proper word, and every one of them would've looked at home in the pages of a men's magazine; they would touch your arm, and I assume were trained if not encouraged to pleasantly violate your personal space by resting their hand on the back of your neck while asking if you needed anything else besides the entire bottle of champagne at your disposal. One of my most delicious meals ever was a rib-eye steak with red wine glaze in the lonely Aer Lingus first class on a Christmas eve. Once upon a time, before Homeland Security, immigration-check guards greeted me with a welcome and a smile, showing what, for lack of a better word, seemed like respect.

Respect was all well and fine, but what about the glamor? You want glamor?? Glamor is when you're waiting in line for the bathroom on a 747 and a girl people pay money to take pictures of taps you on the shoulder and gives you her phone number. She doesn't care if you have to pee like a race horse. You're on a 747, flying to Tokyo, so you must be interesting. You might even be somebody. Over the ice caps of Greenland in the middle of the night, over Siberia, Sakhalin, the Mediterranean, and Formosa, I've imbibed umbrella drinks and smoked cigarettes while standing in the back of the plane with ten other people, having parties. Remember the Mile High Club? It existed.

Now, if people attempt to have sex on a plane, obscure fines and charges are levied and levelled at and against them. Sex on a plane is a crime against humanity, the hapless participants are pilloried in the press as perverted fools, and governments practically come out and say "Ewww!" I suppose it's a security threat of some sort, and potentially inconsiderate, but sex on planes was generally once considered a Good Thing. Or at least an acceptable thing which individual humans might discreetly do, as individuals, against better private judgement. Even for me, it's hard to believe it ever was so, hard to track the dots of change which led us to this place in which a stewardess does not caress my neck but has morphed into a flight attendant and looks at me like she wants to spray me with disinfectant or bug killer and says, "Fill out your arrival form." I ask, "Could I borrow a pen?" She's Dutch, on KLM, and coolly remarks, "You must be an American." This was in business class, and I assumed one could ask for a pen without being directly insulted. "Ah, yes," I reply..."and you must be a German." Then she makes the facial expression for I Will Have You Killed.

The cliche says that all good things have to come to an end. I had hoped it didn't encompass air travel. It was so grand not having to undress, get x-rayed, take off your shoes, squeeze out your toothpaste tube, have your leatherman confiscated, your baby woken up, held on a runway without heat, food, drink, or the freedom to leave your seat to use the bathroom for 6 hours, and it was lovely to never hear a woman burst into sobbing tears of angry frustration and her husband say, "Oh now that's just great! That's all we needed!" It was wonderful not being officiously treated like a perpetrator, a bother to disregard, a malefactor in waiting. It was the best, and I miss it so. Maybe if you work hard enough in the Ownership Society to own your private jet, it gets better.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Heading away for a blog absence this weekend to Port Townsend, a.k.a. The City the Railroads Forgot. Other than being a good harbor and the once and future-planned capitol of Washington State, it doesn't really have a good excuse for existing. So the iconoclastic sorts who stayed there, and now move there, made a bunch of reasons up, like kinetic sculpture races, theatre, artist collectives, jazz and wooden boat festivals, restaurants people (literally) fly to, topped off with Victorian architecture made with the best and most plentiful timber of the late 1800s. From Wikipedia:

Originally named 'Port Townshend' by Captain George Vancouver (for his friend the Marquis of Townshend) in 1792, Port Townsend was immediately recognized as a good, safe harbor, which it remains to this day. The official settlement of the city took place on the 24th of April, 1851. American Indian tribes located in what is now Jefferson County in the mid-19th century included the Chemakum (or Chimacum), Hoh (a group of the Quileute), Klallam (or Clallam), Quinault and Twana (the Kilcid band — Anglicized: Quilcene).

Port Townsend is also called the "City of Dreams" because of the early speculation that the city would be the largest harbor on the west coast of the United States.

TSA Proposes Three-Day Notice For Air Travel

Insanity. It's what's for dinner. In hell. If implemented, the TSA proposal means all airline passengers will have to undergo security checks to get permission to travel. Boarding passes will be denied at whims, and it seems domestic travel is included. If so, this is how the Thing Which Can't Be Named will clamp down. Travel to the US is already down by 10% since 2001. Boy, I can really see this reversing the trend! Via the Register:

Under new rules proposed by the Transport Security Administration (TSA) (pdf), all airline passengers would need advance permission before flying into, through, or over the United States regardless of citizenship or the airline's national origin.

Currently, the Advanced Passenger Information System, operated by the Customs and Border Patrol, requires airlines to forward a list of passenger information no later than 15 minutes before flights from the US take off (international flights bound for the US have until 15 minutes after take-off). Planes are diverted if a passenger on board is on the no-fly list.

The new rules mean this information must be submitted 72 hours before departure. Only those given clearance will get a boarding pass. The TSA estimates that 90 to 93 per cent of all travel reservations are final by then.

The proposed rules require the following information for each passenger: full name, sex, date of birth, and redress number (assigned to passengers who use the Travel Redress Inquiry Program because they have been mistakenly placed on the no-fly list), and known traveller number (once there is a programme in place for registering known travellers whose backgrounds have been checked). Non-travellers entering secure areas, such as parents escorting children, will also need clearance.

The TSA held a public hearing in Washington DC on 20 September, which heard comments from both privacy advocates and airline industry representatives from Qantas, the Regional Airline Association, IATA, and the American Society of Travel Agents. The privacy advocates came from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Identity Project. All were negative.

The proposals should be withdrawn entirely, argued Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad and the leading expert on travel data privacy. "Obscured by the euphemistic language of 'screening' is the fact that travellers would be required to get permission before they can travel."

Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly, the central claim in John Gilmore's case against the US government over the requirement to show photo ID for domestic travel.

In addition, the TSA is required to study the impact of the proposals on small economic entities (such as sole traders). Finally, the TSA provides no way for individuals to tell whether their government-issued ID is actually required by law, opening the way for rampant identity theft.

ACLU's Barry Steinhardt quoted press reports of 500,000 to 750,000 people on the watch list (of which the no-fly list is a subset). "If there are that many terrorists in the US, we'd all be dead."

TSA representative Kip Hawley noted that the list has been carefully investigated and halved over the last year. "Half of grossly bloated is still bloated," Steinhardt replied.

The airline industry representatives' objections were largely logistical. They argued that the 60-day timeframe the TSA proposes to allow for implementation from the publication date of the final rules is much too short. They want a year to revamp many IT systems, especially, as the Qantas representative said, as no one will start until they're sure there will be no further changes.

In addition, many were concerned about the impact on new, convenient and cash-saving technologies, such as checking in at home, or storing a boarding pass in a PDA.

One additional point, also raised by Hasbrouck: the data the TSA requires will be collected by the airlines who presumably will keep it for their own purposes – a "government-coerced informational windfall", he called it.

The third parties who actually do much of the airline industry's data processing, the Global Distribution Systems and Computer Reservations Systems, were missing from the hearing.

Re-Tour

Back from Canada. To America. So much alike, so many contrasts. For example, did you ever hear the phrase, "Blame Canada first?" Well, you have now. I invented it. And as the comedian Lewis Black says, living in America is like "being on the Titanic every single day and being the only person who knows what's going to happen."

Victoria's English Inn & Resort failed to impart comparable angst. It was more like being part of the Swiss Family Robinson, with yummy extras like good books, a sumptuous dining room, cacophonous kitchen, and a highly efficient wait-staff. Very cool.

The border crossing into the US was just like Canada's, except there were not one but two of them, starting with the first check-point at the ferry terminal in Victoria harbor, where a sign states like some freakazoid Zen master: "You are now on U.S. soil." Hmm. (Technically, it was linoleum.) Yeah, and instead of providing any hint of welcome such as we received on entering the Great White North, US customs agents have been trained to assume you must be smuggling a couple bricks of blow and possibly have a bomb in your pants. (Heheh!)

The reception may be chilly but it's perfectly understandable, professional, and polite...if we're coming from a starting point of paranoid delusion. Which, it's quite obvious we are. Canada "gets it." On our way to the ferry terminal, we saw people laughing at something in a shop window, so we stopped to look. It was a T-shirt. It said:

Canadians are just like Americans
except they're un-armed
and get Health Care

Excused Blog Absence: Fleeing The Country

A spontaneous chance for a few days' vacation came up, and when assessing options, Lord Wife and I quickly came to the same conclusion: let's leave the country! It would provide a respite, at least until we return on Monday, from the culture of protective stupidity which reigns supreme and wraps us daily up in its sticky, chemically-treated gauze, as George Orwell expressed with such prescient exactitude in 1984:

A Party member...is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign
enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before
the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare,
unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such
devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly
induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early
acquired inner discipline...called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the
faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing
to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they
are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought
which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means
protective stupidity.

Our short time here in re-visiting Canada has been delightfully free from the harsher effects of the US Curtain of Insecurity. People seem, rather they are, so outgoing and friendly because they aren't as afraid to speak to each other, exchange addresses, or refexively treat you as an individual instead of a threat. Crossing the border is quick and friendly. Refreshing.

Orwell wasn't really prescient, he just developed a finely granulated understanding of human nature through disillusionment, betrayal, survival, and their opposites. I think he would have liked Canada very much. Naj, we will have a latte' in your favorite cafe soon--I'm at the right latitude, just on the wrong coast!

How To Make Gravy

Paul Kelly. Odds are, you've never heard of him. I never had. He was a weird-looking, polite guy in a weird-looking polite hat who I met in the VIP lounge at a concert venue while the main attractions, friends of a former rock star who invited me back there, were tuning up and planning out their set. The polite guy, standing in the corner and planning nothing, aimed his uneven eyes at us, nodded his head and said in a thick accent, "Heya. You mates look like you could use a drink." He served us, we had a drink together, and that was about it with the man of few words. Then he picked up his guitar and left, and one of the younger guys in the room grabbed me and said, "Do you know who that was?? [I arched my eyebrows, and shook my head no.] It's Paul Kelly! He's a legend. You've gotta c'mon on down and hear him!"

Paul Kelly's set, before the main attractions played, knocked us for a loop. There were a lot of folks from Oz in the audience, and every time Paul Kelly sang, they went wild. He played 5 or 6 songs, maybe, and because it was before Christmas, he closed out the set with 'How to Make Gravy.' Here are the words to the last song Paul Kelly sang:

Hello Dan, it's Joe here, I hope you're keeping well
It's the 21st of December, and now they're ringing the last bells
If I get good behaviour, I'll be out of here by July
Won't you kiss my kids on Christmas Day, please don't let 'em cry for me
I guess the brothers are driving down from Queensland and Stella's flying in from the coast
They say it's gonna be a hundred degrees, even more maybe, but that won't stop the roast
Who's gonna make the gravy now? I bet it won't taste the same
Just add flour, salt, a little red wine and don't forget a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang
And give my love to Angus and to Frank and Dolly,
Tell 'em all I'm sorry I screwed up this time
And look after Rita, I'll be thinking of her early Christmas morning
When I'm standing in line

I hear Mary's got a new boyfriend, I hope he can hold his own
Do you remember the last one? What was his name again?
(Just a little too much cologne)
And Roger, you know I'm even gonna miss Roger
'Cause there's sure as hell no one in here I want to fight
Oh praise the Baby Jesus, have a Merry Christmas,
I'm really gonna miss it, all the treasure and the trash
And later in the evening, I can just imagine,
You'll put on Junior Murvin and push the tables back
And you'll dance with Rita, I know you really like her,
Just don't hold her too close, oh brother please don't stab me in the back
I didn't mean to say that, it's just my mind it plays up,
Multiplies each matter, turns imagination into fact
You know I love her badly, she's the one to save me,
I'm gonna make some gravy, I'm gonna taste the fat
Tell her that I'm sorry, yeah I love her badly, tell 'em all I'm sorry,
And kiss the sleepy children for me
You know one of these days, I'll be making gravy,
I'll be making plenty, I'm gonna pay 'em all back.

Lewis Black On Travel

(Note: I'm re-posting this. It originally went up on December 28th of '06. Someone from Canada (good day, ey?) googled through to this video clip. I was looking for some diversion myself, and this is the ticket. I was on vacation between Christmas and New Year's, so had time to have some fun writing. And now I see that the video is no longer available, nor can I find it on YouTube. We have not made it back to the Caribbean or to Italy. But here's hoping, and I'll leave this up anyway until I find a replacement.)

Lewis Black may be my favorite comedian, and here he's talking about travel. I originally went YouTubing looking for a Lewis Black monologue on the Holiday Season. I found a few, but I didn't want to send anyone over the edge, this time of year can be touchy. Not as touchy as having three kids running around a center fireplace, screaming and chasing a shell-shocked Jack Russell terrier and trying to take her temperature with a rectal thermometer (yes, that was the Christmas nativity scene at Casa Lord), but touchy nonetheless. And Lewis Black is for people who like their humor...black. Not just dark or a little off-color, but lovingly charred with a flamethrower, stuck on a spit and marinated in lighter fluid, then thrown into a magnesium barbecue and transmogrified into sooty carbon vapors.

So no holiday commentary from Mr. Black. But travel! Ah, travel. Me sooo trunky. I bought Lord Wife some 2007 calendars of Island Paradises, so she can put them up on her wall and long for them while slaving away on her keyboard editing documents like a washwoman over other people's torn, soiled, and hopelessly ugly clothing. The closest she's going to get to the Caribbean this winter is her corkboard, and hopefully we can set another all-time record for rainfall along about February. Like we just did in November. Me, I'd like to get to Italy. I long for Toscana and the topless beaches of La Spezia, the marble palaces cut out of the hill quarries of Enraux. "Fat chance, you imbecile," and some muttering under his breath was all I could get out of Santa when I brought up the subject. But Lewis Black, now, he made it to Italy:

"I got to Italy, I'd never been there, it's extraordinary. If you've not gone: unbelievable. I didn't know this--but Jesus Christ, he's, like...hoo-hoo, he's big there! Everywhere I turn there's Jesus! There's Jesus! There's Jesus! There's Jesus! He is like the Coca-Cola of Italy! And I'm Jewish, and I have to say, after three weeks there--I started to think he might be the Real Thing."

The inspiration for this blog, other than the need to go on the record about how messed up things are before I keel over and die like a canary huffing gas fumes while caged in a mineshaft, was how difficult air travel has become. (Our last family trip was during this summer's past Extreme Terrorist Scare.) I've lived in a bunch of places I remember with fondness, and like to talk about, and more that I don't but lived through ok, but you can say this about going Other Places: if the scales don't fall off your eyes pretty quick, you are one dumb and lost S.O.B.

Spinning In From The Cold

Karl Rove's dog ate 4 years worth of e-mails, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq sent a suicide bomber to detonate its share of
parliament, and our quiet downstairs tenants flew to a wedding in San Francisco. Leif the former rock star left to go back home, and our Mr. Butler went back to his sister's submarine base. We were all introduced, thanks to Michael, this week, to Regina Spektor. She was trained as a classical pianist in Russia, and grew up in Brighton Beach. It was about time to know Regina, and right now I might now be happier than I've ever been. That's the impact real art always has on me.

With the downstairs tenants gone tonight, we blared the stereo the loudest it's ever gone, the dial goes to 13 I think, and Lord Baby got into proper spirits and ran around the fireplace to dance with us in the living room. We tossed him up to our curved ceiling by his legs and by his head with all of us laughing and giggling until we got sweaty and tired. Then we threw him into the pillows on the couch and got sweatier and more tired. He would bounce down, laugh, bounce up and turn around again, point at the most rested one of us and say "Your turn!" Off we would go again, dancing in our windows, in full frontal view of our neighbors. We danced until a half an hour ago, with loud music, Indian war whoops, and no regrets. With lots of dizziness from the spins.

I thought of Japan today, and necessary deceptions. I thought of Germany and Austria, Switzerland, Rumania and the former Czechoslovakia, of blood matted thick in black hair in Korea. Of indulgences in Sweden and Denmark, of Norwegian tax fugitives and holidays in Verbier, of Finnish guts and losing a tooth north of Beijing, of getting harmlessly sick in the Yucatan, of spying for Mormons and the prisons in Yugoslavia, of the marble sculptures in La Spezia and the Mossad in Los Angeles.

I let two members of my team smoke hashish in Amsterdam. I woke up without alarm clocks in Provence and wondered about the wonderful things I would eat and drink that day. I think of never getting to see Bali/Sri Lanka. Of falling in love with my beautiful wife outside the Jimi Hendrix Museum before our first date, calling her a good girl/noble woman on our entrance to the Microsoft party, of stuffed squab and unpastuerized cheeses after swimming all day under the cliffs of the Calanques, of lawsuits and dinners with the money-men pushing airline TV. I think of a British Foreign Service agent and his Oxford cricket bat which cast no shadow, pouring amicable Sambucas into our relaxed and ice-filled glasses by his blue and private pool. The satellites passed above all our heads unobserved despite their precise schedules tonight, and our son looked up at the stars with us and fell finally asleep to one more blessed, stolen day of peace.

The automatic in my bookshelf does me no good. Truth be told it never did, and the tomahawk in my old tuxedo closet is just a hopeful heirloom. The secret to resistance isn't in your weakness, but in your temptation, and how to hide your sweetest downfalls. The consequences I delayed so long are called parenthood, the true adventure has arrived, and there are no defenses against the intrusions.

Lewis Black On Travel

Lewis Black may be my favorite comedian, and here he's talking about travel. I originally went YouTubing looking for a Lewis Black monologue on the Holiday Season. I found a few, but I didn't want to send anyone over the edge, this time of year can be touchy. Not as touchy as having three kids running around a center fireplace, screaming and chasing a shell-shocked Jack Russell terrier and trying to take her temperature with a rectal thermometer (yes, that was the Christmas nativity scene at Casa Lord), but touchy nonetheless. And Lewis Black is for people who like their humor...black. Not just dark or a little off-color, but lovingly charred with a flamethrower, stuck on a spit and marinated in lighter fluid, then thrown into a magnesium barbecue and transmogrified into sooty carbon vapors.

So no holiday commentary from Mr. Black. But travel! Ah, travel. Me sooo trunky. I bought Lord Wife some 2007 calendars of Island Paradises, so she can put them up on her wall and long for them while slaving away on her keyboard editing documents like a washwoman over other people's torn, soiled, and hopelessly ugly clothing. The closest she's going to get to the Caribbean this winter is her corkboard, and hopefully we can set another all-time record for rainfall along about February. Like we just did in November. Me, I'd like to get to Italy. I long for Toscana and the topless beaches of La Spezia, the marble palaces cut out of the hill quarries of Enraux. "Fat chance, you imbecile," and some muttering under his breath was all I could get out of Santa when I brought up the subject. But Lewis Black, now, he made it to Italy:

"I got to Italy, I'd never been there, it's extraordinary. If you've not gone: unbelievable. I didn't know this--but Jesus Christ, he's, like...hoo-hoo, he's big there! Everywhere I turn there's Jesus! There's Jesus! There's Jesus! There's Jesus! He is like the Coca-Cola of Italy! And I'm Jewish, and I have to say, after three weeks there--I started to think he might be the Real Thing."

The inspiration for this blog, other than the need to go on the record about how messed up things are before I keel over and die like a canary huffing gas fumes while caged in a mineshaft, was how difficult air travel has become. (Our last family trip was during this summer's past Extreme Terrorist Scare.) I've lived in a bunch of places I remember with fondness, and like to talk about, and more that I don't but lived through ok, but you can say this about going Other Places: if the scales don't fall off your eyes pretty quick, you are one dumb and lost S.O.B.

Footnote #59: Nailing The Failing

I've been reading Rory Stewart's travelogue of his 2002 winter walk through Afghanistan, "The Places in Between." It's not just a dynamite book of its kind, it's the only book. In it he makes a point which should be ever-obvious about the Prozac Policies of this generation of Western governments, and comes close to nailing why we're failing. We want the benefits of colonies without the responsibilities, yet our systems deny the inclination, imagination, and the persistence required to understand the cultures underlying the regimes we've changed:

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers of the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued in the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny. Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or the stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression. Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

In reading his on-the-ground experiences while simply trying to make it across the country alive, the primary conflict in Afghanistan emerges naturally; a conflict not between Coalition Forces and insurgents but one between a social revolution sponsored by Iran (represented by Ismail Khan), and an ancient Islamic feudal system in the process of being co-opted by the Taliban (sponsored by oil-rich Sunni families). Both have widespread popular support and deep cultural sympathies, and both see Hamid Karzai as a clownish American puppet unworthy of annoyance. But Rory's wrong about one thing in his 59th Footnote above: the effects of failure in Afghanistan will be felt far beyond its borders. Today Pakistan announced the acceptance of a Taliban mini-state in Waziristan after a four-year war and several recent treaties have failed to mitigate its influence.

The Tourism Boom In Afghanistan

"You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," an Afghan Secret Service agent warned Rory Stewart, an avidly naive Scotsman, before he set out to walk across the country in 2002. "It is mid-winter - there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee."

So there's a promotional slogan from an erstwhile Ministry of Tourism for you: Don't come here. You will die. I had the good sense not to go to there as a tourist or otherwise, but, oh, to be in Kandahar, now that the sub-zero winter winds have come and buzkashi matches have begun. Buzkashi is the national pastime, kind of like basketball, except there are no teams and the players fight on horseback for the right to carry a dead goat. The objective is to carry a dead animal, preferably a 30-lb. goat but anything dead of similar size will do, through a distant goal, with anywhere from 10 to a few hundred other riders trying to stop you. There are no rules, the only weapons are fists, and killing your opponents through any means other than the trampling hooves of mischance is considered poor form. I suspect the game originated with the Mongols, passed into the region by Tamerlane, and the Afghan tribes loved it. In a nod to modernity, however, buzkashi is no longer played with a severed human head.

Rory Stewart calls his book "The Places in Between." I must have it, and was surprised to see it's at the #51 sales position on Amazon. Since the Silk Road trade routes and long before, Afghanistan has been known as The Place Which Must Be Crossed, a fact of which Stewart, a former journalist and Foreign Office staffer, is well aware. It was probably one of the first places on earth to be home to caravanserai (caravan palaces) and is one of the last still ruled by tribes. Stewart had already walked through Turkey and Iran, and before crossing he promised his mother it would be his last journey, that he would come home if he didn't get killed. He describes the people of Afghanistan as "greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant and cruel," yet praises them for never attempting "to kidnap or kill me" despite representing "a culture that many of them hated." He made it out alive, still wired for adventure, and later went on to write another book, "The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." The New York Times Book Review says of his his first work:

'The book is replete with fascinating, if fearfully context-dependent, travel tips. If you are forced to lie about being a Muslim, claim you're from Indonesia, a Muslim nation few non-Indonesian Muslims know much about. Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. If you're taking your donkey to high altitudes, slice open its nostrils to allow greater oxygen flow. Don't carry detailed maps, since they tend to suggest 007 affinities. If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. "The Places in Between" is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.'