PARSING THE PARTISANS

PARSING THE PARTISANS

Karl Straub Logical Fallacy Project. 

What is a logical fallacy? Here is a partial explanation, taken from the book  “Nonsense: A Handbook Of Logical Fallacies,”  by Robert J. Gula. 

“A fallacy is an error in thinking or reasoning. Strictly speaking, it is not an error in fact or belief. It involves thought process, therefore, it pertains to conclusions, not to the statements that form those conclusions. Furthermore, the word fallacy usually applies to conclusions that appear sound and that are often convincing but are, in fact, incorrect.” 

I’m more interested in collecting arguments that are fallacious even though they are proceeding from premises that are wholly or partially accurate. I’m less interested in arguments that are fallacious because they proceed from premises that are themselves suspect. 

EXAMPLES. 

Fallacious argument proceeding from accurate premise. This is what I’m looking for. 

1. Brett Kavanaugh was really angry in his testimony. Thus, he’s innocent. 

2. Brett Kavanaugh was really angry in his testimony. Thus, he’s guilty. 

I’ve heard both of these arguments. The initial premise (Kavanaugh was angry) is a fact, disputed by nobody. The two conclusions assume you can determine a person’s guilt or innocence by his emotional reaction to allegations. You can’t. (And it’s damn lucky for lawyers that you can’t.)

OLD WHITE GUYS, AND THE SMOKE THEY HAVE BLOWN

  A restaurant in Maine has been blowing marijuana smoke in lobsters’ faces, in an effort to minimize their pain when they get boiled alive. Local officials have stepped in to put a stop to the practice, and though I have no evidence of this, it seems to me this latest outbreak of schoolmarmism has “old white guys” written all over it. 

  Americans who follow the news may be aware of just how many crevices the tentacles of old white guys reach into, and how many arteries of freedom the old white guys are apt to clog. 

  There’s a psychological phenomenon at work here. I’m on the cusp of being an old white guy myself, but a very long time ago, I was a young white guy. So, I was riddled with white privilege. Back then, white privilege meant your family rode around in a Ford Country Squire, and your dad owned a CB radio, and when you became aware that there was a thing in the world called a Fender Stratocaster, your parents could buy one for you. 

  It also meant that you lived in a neighborhood where if a black person showed up, they were either a maid, or a mailman, or a suspicious character. 

I SELF-IDENTIFY AS A TOOL

  I’m a left-winger.

  I have a friend who makes a living because he understands the ways Americans think about politics. Every once in a while, I sit with him at an oyster bar and he tells me about how this stuff works. He says what I’m doing here is called “self-identifying.” 

  This means it feels important to me to say out loud that I’m a leftist. And that’s true, it does. 

  But while I am a leftist, or at least I self-identify as one, that doesn’t mean I’m a rube. By which, I don’t think that I’m right and the other side is wrong. 

  My political thoughts and feelings are important to me, but they are nothing compared to the rest of me. 

  I’m a writer (songs, prose, fiction, lists of crap to pack for a trip, whatever I have time for), and I’m also a child of addiction, a fan of Dylan and Lou Reed and William Burroughs, and a lot more besides.  

  This all means that I’m fascinated by the way people think. It started out with me mostly hating people for it. Then- over time- it grew into a grudging admiration, and infatuation, and now love. 

  I was once in a car with Eugene Chadbourne for eight straight hours without stopping. At the end of the eight hours, I glanced casually at the gas gauge and I saw that red dot that pops up for people too stupid to take the “E” seriously. There was no more gas in this car at all. We were rolling downhill, luckily, and I steered the car into a gas station and it died right next to a tank. Another win!

FACEBOOK SHOULD BE PUT ON A RAFT, SET ON FIRE, AND PUSHED DOWNRIVER TOWARD VALHALLA

(Author’s note: I’m begging you to read this entire piece before getting angry at me. If you’d prefer not to commit to that, I ask you to please just not read it.) 

As far as I can tell, everyone agrees that Facebook is awful. I’ve never seen anyone praise or defend Facebook. This consensus exists, despite the vast hordes of people who are on Facebook every day. I’m speaking anecdotally, but I have just looked up the statistics, and let’s just say that you probably know more people who aren’t on Facebook than you know people who have been struck by lightning, but it’s not a blowout. 

  This reminds me of the period in the late 70s/early 80s when I couldn’t find anyone who would admit to having been a Bee Gees fan. This despite the Saturday NightFever album having gone 16x platinum, a sales figure so high there isn’t even a name for it. 

  For my part, I see Facebook as a wonderful and convenient resource, when I want to reconnect with people I haven’t seen for a while so they can get pissed off at me.

“OK, HERE’S THE PLAN,” VIDEO

Valerie Gregory-Woolsey just told me she desperately needed some lyrics. I’ve heard that some people think of me as a “words guy,” even though my real medium is dancing, so here is a video of my song, “OK, Here’s The Plan.” The song is from the upcoming Karl Straub album, Tsunami of Crumbs. It’s about a group of darkly-clad women planning a nefarious break-in. 

The video went over budget by approximately 1.5 million dollars (Australian), because it took several days to get the cat to lick himself on the beat. (Or herself. How would I know? I’m a words guy/dancer, not a cat wrangler.) 

  Music and video directed and produced by Jeff Lang, in the living room of Jeff and Alison Ferrier.

With Danny McKenna, drums, Ben Franz, sneaky bass, and Karl and Jeff on guitars. Karl sings and wrote the song, “OK, Here’s The Plan,” copyright 2018, Karl Straub.

SOME WORDS ABOUT ANGER

I’m angry right now. I’m angry that the GOP cheated us out of our president’s Supreme Court pick, and angry that they are (presumably) preparing to claim that it’s different now, and this approaching election does NOT mean that they should be treated the same way. I’m angry about various other things, too, the same as many of you. I’m angry that so many Americans are comfortable with the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration, and angry that many Americans continue to claim that a Hillary Clinton administration would have been worse. I’m angry about the irrational demonization of people who want to live here but don’t want to make their families wait years for it to happen legally. I’m angry that “family values” aren’t valued when they drive the actions of desperate non-white parents. I’m angry that so many white Americans have such difficulty seeing non-white people as their equals. I’m angry that so many white Americans feel that “whiteness” is being threatened somehow, or that heterosexuality is likewise under siege, or that masculinity is a thing that should never have to accept criticism. I’m angry about all of this, and much more. But I’m also painfully aware of all the times anger has let me down.

"THEY DANCE REAL CLOSE THERE," STUDIO RUN-THROUGH, VIDEO EXCERPT, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Video of Karl in the studio, guitar break during run-through of "They Dance Real Close There." Danny McKenna, drums, Ben Franz, bass. Producer Jeff Lang caught a brief excerpt on his phone, showing Danny and Ben playing. I'm outside of the shot, in the vocal booth. I asked Ben and Danny to make me sound like I wasn't just noodling, and they figured out a way to do this. The final version has a long improvised guitar solo, and the one shown here is slightly different. Ben overdubbed a beautiful pedal steel guitar track on the final, so this excerpt is different in that respect as well. It's just guitar, bass, and drums. Jeff had played me a Richard Thompson live cut a day or two earlier, with a super long guitar break that just kept building and building. This was my attempt to do something similar. (from the upcoming Karl Straub album, "Tsunami of Crumbs," engineered and produced by Jeff Lang at the Enclave Recording Facility in Melbourne, Australia.)

NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: “NO MORE ENGAGEMENT”

New Straubinical Facebook policy: 

I have no plans to unfriend anyone, but I’ve recently seen some friends online making it clear that they don’t have a problem with the whole “America puts children in cages now” thing, and they’re more outraged about the continued non-locking-up of Hillary Clinton, and it seems to me that this is a good time to start implementing my new policy. 

  From now on, I have no intention of engaging with people politically on Facebook. To my conservative friends: I have no problem with you commenting on my threads, and you should feel free to be honest, for those times when the hypocrisy of liberals makes you angry in a way that caged children don’t, but I’ll be letting your comments stand without intervention from me. 

  To my liberal friends: I’ll still be posting from time to time about my continuing view that public shaming and lecturing of conservatives and/or racists is counterproductive, but I assume that many of you will continue to believe that it’s the most productive way to improve our country, and I’ll be content to let your comments to that effect stand without argument from me. 

  I’m going to do my best to post stuff I write, and let people weigh in as they see fit, and I appreciate very much when people read my blather, but at this point I see myself as a writer and not as a person who argues with everybody in the public square. 

  Final note: it’s quite possible that I’ll forget what I’ve just said, maybe repeatedly, but you should assume that’s due to the Australian jet lag I plan to be suffering from at least through the end of the Trump era.

TSUNAMI OF CRUMBS

The Karl Straub album I just recorded in Australia is a ways from being completed, but that’s because mastering needs to happen, as well as CD pressing, and a few more songs need to be mixed by Jeff before any of that can begin. I’ll also need to do some research amongst Karl Straub fans and friends to see how many people will want CDs, how many will be happy with a download, etc. 

In the meantime— here’s some background information on the project, and a checklist that will serve as a teaser while you wait for the album to surface. Once the album is out, people can use this checklist to enhance the Straubinical experience. 

In the past, I’ve done a lousy job of promoting my work, and (following the early Graverobbers days, where I recorded fairly regularly) a lousy job of documenting it as well. I hope this album, packed with 19 songs, will make up for some of that. 

In 2001 or thereabouts, I met Australian songwriter and guitarist Jeff Lang. I’d heard about him from the fellows in Last Train Home, and when I met him I was subbing on guitar at an LTH gig. We hit it off right away, following the exchange of a few smartass remarks that afternoon, and me mocking him briefly from the stage later that night. (He’d turned up in a sharp looking outfit, and I told him he looked like Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Monkey Trials. He wasn’t familiar with the reference, although I learned later that he and I are both connoisseurs of idiocy, whether historical or contemporary.) 

  At some point later, he was in town for a while and I got to know him a little better. I was impressed by him recognizing that I’d been playing guitar in the DC Telecaster tradition, or trying to. This intrigued me, as I was well aware that most of the people I went to high school with in Alexandria knew nothing of this local tradition, while Jeff was an Australian and had obsessively studied Roy Buchanan in his youth. Buchanan’s influence on me was more indirect at first, since I never saw him play, but I had spent many hours soaking up the work of Evan Johns and Danny Gatton. From Evan, I’d learned that rock and roll lead guitar could be squalid, trebly, and lyrical. From Danny, I’d learned that you could mix as many American guitar styles as you wanted in every guitar break.

CECIL TAYLOR: NEFERTITI, THE BEAUTIFUL ONE, HAS GONE

  There’s a Twilight Zone episode, based on a short story by Richard Matheson, where a little girl gets lost in the fourth dimension. Her parents do what any of us would do in this situation; they call up a physicist, who immediately comes over wearing the classic Physics Emergency Ensemble (pajamas and overcoat). One thing leads to another, and the girl’s father has to be sent into the fourth dimension to rescue her. And the physicist has to hold onto the dad’s legs the whole time, to make sure he doesn’t get sucked permanently into the 4D universe.

  It’s a race against time, incidentally, because the dad has to rescue the girl before the episode is over, and Rod Serling comes back to encourage us to smoke the brand of cigarettes he smokes while churning out scripts. And this kind of TV advertising was itself a race against time, because celebrity tobacco pitchmen only have a few years before their looks go. 

  My forays into the fourth dimension of the avant-garde (20th century composers like Bartók, the noise of the Velvet Underground, the Sheffield surrealism of guitarist Derek Bailey, etc.) have always involved somebody holding onto my legs, also, like the dad in “Little Girl Lost.” Unlike some artistic explorers, who tell the physicist in pajamas to let go of their legs already, I’ve never wanted to leave my roots behind. I didn’t stop listening to Phil Spector just because  my pop sensibility was recalibrated by “Pet Sounds,” and my interest in Brian Wilson didn’t go onto the high shelf in the closet just because I got interested in scabrous guitar noise. (Lou Reed’s didn’t either, a key reason why Reed has always been one of my favorite rock and roll artists.) 

  Likewise, I haven’t renounced my dedication to the music of Bob Wills or Louis Armstrong just because of my enthusiasm for Eric Dolphy. 

  My reluctance to choose sides has hurt my music career, I think. People in DC (and perhaps elsewhere too) like to be reassured that your music can be explained at bumper-sticker length, and mine can’t. I prefer that people discover my music accidentally, because they were just drinking or eating somewhere and suddenly this weird Karl Straub guy got on stage and started yammering. I prefer to not answer questions about my influences, because they include an ark of polarizing names and genres that instantly turn off the uninformed. I know how they feel; when I’m told that a get-together will include karaoke, or whitewater rafting, or clowns, it’s hard for me to retain an open mind in the aftermath of such revelations. (For the record, if you’re trying to convince me to go to a party, mention fondue.)

HIS DEATH DIMINISHES ME, BABY!

  In the first place, I haven’t read much Tom Wolfe. I only really read one of his books all the way through, but that’s sort of like saying you’ve only participated in one full-scale riot. 

  I have profoundly mixed feelings about his work, which is why I’ve avoided most of it, but if you care about American writing, you can’t reasonably ignore him any more than you can blow off Melville or Hawthorne.

   Wolfe is tough to explain away with brevity, unless you’re satisfied with superficial, glib putdowns. Wolfe certainly wasn’t. I’m struck by how often in his early work (I refer to the “new journalism” pieces he wrote which made him famous, collected in Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) he seems to make fun of some American’s outré behavior, only to get so caught up in the subject’s language, clothes, hair, pace, and obsessions that it doesn’t seem to matter anymore what his “take” on it may be. The one thing that’s always clear is that he’s EXCITED about it. He’s excited by what he’s seeing and hearing, excited by what it represents in our culture, and excited to bring you into it. He’s like a host who can’t wait for you to sit down with your drink so he can tell you what he saw on his vacation. 

  The question of whether Wolfe was conservative or liberal (and I don’t mean in the political sense) is moot, I think. Where Jack Kerouac used a new kind of writing to capture something he felt was coming to life in our country, but for all his official status as a bohemian outsider, was shot through with a kind of midwestern naive reverence about the new America he chronicled, Wolfe “goes native” without ever completely losing himself in the oddball world he’s writing about. He never stops reminding you that he has a Ph.D from Yale, in SOMETHING, but he also never stops paying attention to all the craziness around him, generally perpetrated by eccentrics who care more about their custom cars, or drugs, than any book learning.

YARD SALE OF THE APOCALYPSE

  It’s yard sale day! 

  Excitement is running high here at StraubCorp (a proud subsidiary of controversial parent company Strauby Lobby), because this yard sale has been imagined, mooted, and hashed out over many months. (At one point, there was even a Netflix “re-imagining” of it, starring Hugh Jackman.) I’m not sure what the exact gestation period was for this momentous event, which in my official capacity as Head Officer-In-Charge, I fought with every ounce of my remaining strength. It quickly joined the long list of family decisions where my veto was overridden by a 2/3 majority, as required by our Constitution. (As an aside, if you have a kid who spends all his time sitting on the couch, the most effective remedy for this time-honored American tradition is another time-honored American tradition- buy him a pet. The purchase of a goldfish, for example, with its damnably specific daily requirements for feeding, cleaning, and burying, will magically change your child from Inert Holy Man Who’s Made a Vow of Silence to a footloose boulevardier who spends more time out of doors than most surveyors. You won’t see him again, except at mealtimes, and even then, you might miss him if you turn your back just long enough to take care of some quick chore like tying your shoes, or scooping a dead fish out of a bowl.)  Following a sequence of events too labyrinthine and numinous to detail here (if you’ve ever seen a Nicolas Cage film, you don’t need it spelled out for you), it was determined that I was the only person in the administration who would be available on the appointed day to actually sit outside with the junk and deal with the public. 

I HATE POP MUSIC

  I hate pop music.

  I have many outré viewpoints about many societal shibboleths, but nothing I ever say out loud bugs people more. I see it on their face first (unless I’m driving, because I try to keep my eyes on the road), and they immediately start objecting to it. In my experience, knocking religion or sports isn’t nearly as likely to set people off. 

  And I always regret saying it, because it always sets up a 45 minute clarification exercise, which they constantly interrupt with further objections. This process is tiring, and usually fails, despite my many years of practice. 

  So this is my attempt to plunk it into the public record, so I don’t have to keep explaining my position. Of course, I realize that this won’t work either. It will be long, for one thing; I can see that already. And people won’t read it. (Here’s a good place to put my annoyance about THAT. “TL/DR,” one of the many irritating anti-intellectual toadstools that have sprung up in the internet era, means “too lazy/didn’t read,” and I’m happy to say that no-one’s ever typed that in a comment on my posts, but I have occasionally seen “I was going to read this but then I saw how LONG it was.” I wonder how many of these people have had the patience to take one of those intel-gathering Facebook quizzes about which Smurf they are, or whatever. Or the patience to wait in line to get into a dance club, or to see a prop comic. If you are waiting in line to see Carrot Top or Gallagher, you need to re-examine your life.)

STRAUBINICAL PARENTING, EXTRACT

(Dialogue from 2015)

Son: Dad, at the paintball party, I'm going to make a paintball trap.
Dad: What's that?
Son: I'm going to fill a can with paint and throw it at someone.
Dad: Isn't that against the rules?
Son: Dad, it's a redneck paintball place.
Dad: What, rednecks don't have to follow rules?
Son: I don't know.
Dad: So-- if they have "redneck" paintball places, does that mean they have the opposite end of the scale? Do they have a Noel Coward/Cole Porter type of paintball place?
Son: Dad, I'm going outside.

BLACK MUSIC, WHITE WEIRDNESS

  My relationship with black music is complicated. For years, I avoided using any rhythms that could be characterized as “funky,” but not because I didn't love all that stuff. It was precisely because I loved it so much that I didn’t want to see it bungled and defiled by my ineptitude. My band, the Karl Straub Combo, has a rhythm section made up of white guys who aren’t shy about playing black music idioms. They’re damn good at it, too, and it’s inspiring to hear these fellows and play with them. They used to taunt me at rehearsals, when I brought in my country-oriented material, saying things like, Come on, Karl, let some black influences into your music!

  Sometimes they would just grab the reins, and turn a honky tonk song into a partying New Orleans funk number. I loved the concept, so how could I complain? But I always felt a little awkward playing that way, like a guy who puts on a ball gown in order to get into a lifeboat. “Yes, yes, women and children first. Entirely appropriate. Pleased to meet you, despite the circumstances. My name is- er-  Persephone Jenkins.”

SOCIAL MEDIA, THE MAGICAL TOOL THAT I CAN’T STOP USING, THAT WILL SOMEDAY MAKE ME MONEY

Reverbnation, one of the many social media platforms available to musicians looking to keep their bank account static while wasting tons of their time, contacted me the other day. 

  This, in itself, was unsurprising. I get emails from them every week, helpfully reminding me that even in Arlington, there are hundreds of Reverbnation artists who get more traffic than I do. Years ago, my old band (which I referred to then as “my band”) had a big local following that was eager to go see us play whenever and wherever we performed, as long as we appeared within a proscribed three hundred foot area of Wilson Boulevard, and it wasn’t raining. Back then, I had incurred a tiny level of fame which entitled me to stalkers (two), people approaching me to talk about my music when I was eating at a restaurant with my parents (seventeen)  and even sometimes strangers asking me questions about songwriting at bus stops. (I mean the strangers were at bus stops, and when I walked by the bus stops on the way to my car, parked roughly where the Apple Store is now, that day’s stranger would ask me a question about songwriting. “What do you think about bridges?”, I was once asked, by a man wearing a windbreaker although it wasn’t windy. 

  All of this was achieved mostly through word of mouth. This means that people who liked my songs would tell their friends about them (I assume they were their friends. I don’t like to pry), and then those people would go to a show or buy a CD at one of the many record stores in the area. We were terrible at self-promotion, but this whole word of mouth thing helped offset that. We used to pack a small club in Arlington past the point of fire safety, and this situation continued for a while. After years of this, I negotiated a new agreement with the venue, as follows: 

  If I was in the mood to book a gig, it was mutually understood that I was to email the venue no less than ten times with no response. I also had the option of calling on the phone, if I wanted realtime confirmation that the booker wasn’t there. The next phase of the process involved me getting into a vehicle of some sort and driving to the venue in order to be told face to face that the booker had a new direct line, making it possible for VIPs like me to cut out the middleman and find out more quickly that the booker wasn’t there. 

  Once I got into the swing of things with the new system, it provided a healthy element of stability in an otherwise perapatetic existence. For a while, when things were flush, I hired an assistant to help me not book shows, and this made it possible to expand our base of non-operations. My band began to not book gigs all over the area, even occasionally not booking a show in Richmond, or Charlottesville. At one point, a local booking guy who had been not booking me for years in DC moved to New York City, and thus it became possible for me to not book gigs there too. 

  As I got older, I started to realize that the pace was getting to me. Not playing gigs out of town had been fun for a while, and we’d even begun to not break into the festival scene, not booking gigs at some pret-ty prestigious venues where tastemakers and record company people would fail to see us perform. But I came to realize that I was most comfortable not booking gigs locally, where the hometown crowd could get their fix of not seeing us onstage. 

  It was a little scary for a minute, when the economy went south, and the gigs I wasn’t getting started paying less, but although the recovery has been slower than I’d like, I can report that in recent years, venues have been much more generous regarding the amounts they aren’t paying me. Sometimes this means I don’t get paid with a check, and while I prefer to not get paid in cash, I’m flexible. You have to be. 

  These days, I rarely have time to not book gigs, and most of the gigs I don’t play involve a booker contacting me initially, before not responding to my attempts to  follow up. It’s nice to not have to do so much legwork before a gig falls through.

  This brings me back to reverbnation. They tell me that for the first time since I began neglecting my web presence, I’m actually ranked in Arlington’s top forty. As I’ve barely played out under my own name at all in recent years, I’m baffled by this. Is it possible that my new approach to self promotion is actually paying off? 

  My new method, which I’ve turned to with the goal of negotiating a changing music business landscape, is my own invention. I call it the “Reminding People That I’m Alive” method. When I go out to a venue now, like Gypsy Sally’s, people see me and say, ah, he’s evidently still alive. When I get on stage at a jam session, especially Neel Singh’s at Villain and Saint,  I generally plug into a big amp and crank it up. The result? Immediate clarity regarding my existence. As René Descartes once said, “Is he not? No he is not not. Does that mean he is not? It does not. Or, wait a minute. Maybe it does.”   

  The same goes for my blog, where I write stuff of the sort you’re reading now. Or The Hot Plate Show, where I’m writing and recording music and blather. All of this is supposed to lead to monetization somehow. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess I am gathering and collating data on people who are burdened with impeccable taste and discernment. If that sounds like you, to you, then I can promise that in the future, I’ll be using a combination of cutting edge technology and a human brain (a brain that was lousy at this even when the brain was current, and this brain sometimes develops bugs following updates) in order to sell merchandise to you. This merchandise may take many forms, but it will all be Karl Straub merchandise. Could be music recordings— although that will require some older brains to learn about downloading. Could be a book— perhaps written on my phone and turned into a paperweight through the efforts of one of the many vanity presses in the USA. Could be some sort of cap. I can guarantee you of one thing, though— it won’t be ceramic-erotic tschotzkes. 

  

  

RULE BRITTANYA!

  I’ve been checking out some of these apps where you can “cut the cord” and watch a bunch of shows and movies on your pocket size Telescreen. They are a mixed bag, I must say, but the most curious one so far is the Pluto app. This app gives me access to countless channels broadcasting films I managed to avoid when they were fresh, featuring actors I wish I’d never heard of, as well as many programs with cryptic and intriguing titles. In many cases, the nature of the channel is entirely baffling. One is called the Gorilla Channel, and it seems to be much like CNN, except that instead of 24 hours a day of newslike material, it’s 24 hours a day of rubes and their kids staring at gorillas through a bay window. The rubes will talk to the apes, as one might talk to fish in a tank, saying things like, “go get him,” and “what’s that big one doing?” I’ve always been perplexed by why people like to say “go get him” so much. I’m not really an animal lover, but apparently part of the appeal is watching one animal run after another one, and then playfully knock him into a coma. 

  Because I am a parent, and always looking for tips on nurturing, I was drawn to a show called Bikini Day Care. Perhaps the nurturing part was coming up after the commercial break, but the segment I caught featured some rock singer who felt the need to wear both a bandanna and a cap at the same time, while chatting with a size six young lady in a size five shirt about how another young lady had poured a bunch of salsa into her Samsonite luggage. In a voiceover, the rock star allowed as how he was attracted to Kayla, or Britnee, or someone, and she was hot, but the last thing he needed now was drama. It’s the danger of consorting with hot women, I learned, that with hotness comes drama. You have to watch your step when you’re choosing among hot women that were supplied by a TV producer. Here at our house, we sometimes buy salsa, but mostly we put it on eggs and nachos and things, because after a long day of nurturing, we’re too tired to pour it into each other’s suitcases. 

  The One Foot in the Grave Channel runs vintage programs for people with vintage prostates. I was able to catch an episode of Peter Gunn, which is a show dating back to the Classic TV period, when two of the best minutes of music ever recorded would run over the credits of a program that turned out to be rife with jawdropping idiocy. The handsome titular character walked around in a nightclub milieu packed with white people who either played jazz or listened to it, while gorgeous women nursed highballs. It sounds pretty good, but once you’re watching, it’s hard to ignore the wooden clunk of the hip dialogue, which mercifully is sometimes drowned out by Mancini flutes. As with the Bikini Nurturing, I guess the gunplay was coming up after the commercial break. 

  Some channels I gave a miss and never looked back. Here’s an example of the elitism I’m known for— when I see that a channel called The Cat Channel has a show called Cats, Cats, Cats, it strikes me as lazy. And I’m unwilling to watch any show about Bigfoot, especially if it’s two hours long, since I read that there are people who believe that Bigfoot can’t be killed by a bullet because he is able to travel between dimensions. I have a dim memory of once hearing someone claim the same thing about Bea Arthur. 

  As I clicked around in search of watchable content, I occasionally checked back in to see where they were at with the scantily-clad nurturing, and was appalled to discover that the show features a kind of busty Star Chamber, where ladies who’d previously dallied with the star of the show sat in a tribunal judging the current crop of croptops. A lot of high level amateur psychoanalysing was going on, with most of the women being described as having “issues,” and one poor gal with the portmanteau-bimbeaux name of Brittanya coming in for a great deal of abuse. Nobody liked her, or her cowboy hat, and they weren’t inclined to mince words on the subject. My guess would be that they probably voted her off Bikini Island not long afterward. 

  

  

  

TEN OF SWORDS

Please watch this space for my upcoming posts about albums and books that have affected me.
I’m in the process of posting these things on Facebook, following challenges from friends to do so. But it’s taking me forever. When I get all of it written, I’ll post it here for archival purposes. So, if you’re having trouble waiting to hear what I have to say about James Brown Live at the Apollo, or Ring Lardner’s short stories, sit tight! They’ll go on Facebook as I pop them out, and eventually I’ll put all of it here on the blog for perusal by the faithful.

MAILER BUBBLE

  Right upfront I need to warn you about something.

  I’ve been reading essays by Norman Mailer. And I can’t shake the feeling that his style is creeping into mine. Style does this. 

  Those of you old enough to recall the days when writers could be celebrities are probably already working up the smartass comments, along the lines of, “Does this mean you’re going to start punching bloggers at cocktail parties, stabbing your current wife, and so forth?” 

  I can put all that to rest. No. If there are cocktail parties where bloggers cluster, I doubt I’ll be invited to them. And if I were in the mood to punch a blogger, a cocktail party wouldn’t be the right place to do it. First of all, I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m at a cocktail party, I never have both hands free. I’m lucky if even one is available— I’m nearly always carrying a drink, because a wife or husband of somebody is always asking me what I’m drinking, and they rattle off a long list of the fluids they have available, and to avoid having to stand there looking interested while they go through the specials, I generally just pick something quick. (I hate that “telling you about the specials” ritual in restaurants, too. It always makes me feel like I have to react as if it’s amazing that these specials exist. “We sauté the fish in a reduction of this that and the other and then garnish it with this other thing.” “You do all that, eh? It’s encouraging to hear that in this lickety-split modern age, YOU take the time to apply heat to the food and dump a bunch of junk on top of it before whisking it to the table with a great deal of pomp and peppermill brandishing.”) 

  So, I’m saddled with a drink in one hand, and in my other hand I’m carrying a little plate that can’t really accommodate my byzantine stockpile of Tiny Meat Wrapped in Flexible Meat, so I have to walk very carefully, lest I spill something saucy onto the carpet which was just vacuumed. There’s a perverse logic at work when you clean a carpet just before letting loose a bunch of drunks carrying shrimp. I’ve never been on a battlefield, but I recall from reading The Red Badge of Courage that even in a war that breeds romanticism, due to the great number of young people dying in it, they don’t really clean the battlefield first.

THE AMAZING POWER OF GENE

I was eating breakfast in public, a thing I do from time to time. Whenever I do this, I see others doing it too. To my left, to my right, and presumably behind me as well, Americans are eating breakfast with a bunch of other people around. I can’t help but think that there must be something “going on,” or something “behind” this. Whenever I’m in the mood for a little anthropological and socio-cultural analysis, I pick up a book about some rock album, because books of this nature are guaranteed to be packed with it. Unfortunately, in this particular area, they’ve let me down. I’ve read books about everybody from Toto to Sonic Youth, and rock writers are eerily silent on the subject. It can’t be because they’re embarrassed to discuss something they don’t know anything about— we have to get that out of the way immediately— so perhaps they just sense, with their quivering rock critic ganglia, that it’s not the right time to get into it. 

  But, in the absence of a rock writer’s “take” on this phenomenon, I find myself at a loss. Sure, I’ll speculate about it, but this leads nowhere. When my speculation peters out, it’s dangerous for me to overhear a conversation, because I’m more or less begging to be distracted. If a stranger is talking into a phone, I’m always drawn to it, as a moth to a flame. This is due to my constant amazement that the cell phone has made possible one of the most impressive breakthroughs of modern times— the newfound ability for a pair of blowhards to simultaneously annoy people in two different geographical locations. This was the main reason satellites were invented, in fact, and it was worth every penny. 

  In Olden Times, a group of blowhards of any size— be it two-top, trio, fourpiece, quintet, half dozen, giant muttering mob, what have you— was at the mercy of science’s grave limitations. Sometimes technology enabled blowhards to extend their zone of annoyance (I’m thinking of the bullhorn here), but it would still have been a stretch to describe even, say, the giant mud farm at Woodstock, as more than one location. People died there, and babies were born, and Sha-Na-Na played their history-making set with the forty-plus-minute version of “At The Hop,”

WORKINGMAN’S DEAD

(Excerpt from the 33 1/3 book about the Grateful Dead’s album, “Workingman’s Dead”)

  Ten days into the sessions, a crisis developed. The first few songs the band cut had an alarming lack of viscosity and clamminess, and rumors circulated that they were working on a final product that would be considered listenable. 

  Bill Kreutzmann was particularly hard hit by these allegations. He called a band meeting, asking his colleagues to gather at his new place in Laurel Canyon. When they arrived at the address he’d provided, they were puzzled to find a vacant lot with a tiny gingerbread house in the middle of it. It was covered with marshmallow frosting and gum drops, in many different colors. 

  Jerry Garcia, their leader, immediately spotted the problem. “That’s not even a real house, man.” 

  Phil Lesh, who played the instrument with the big fat strings and really long neck, said what they were all thinking. “If Bill was small enough to fit into that house, he wouldn’t be able to play the drums.” 

  “Not the kind of drums we use, anyways,” said Bob Weir. “Don’t we use regular drums, Pigpen?” he said, apparently addressing Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, although Weir was staring at a mailbox at the time. 

  

DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES

Ladies and germs, 

I’m in the process of modifying my approach to online discussion. I assume you’re all on pins and needles already, so I won’t keep you in suspense. 

  Here’s my system. If I have a problem with something someone says, I’ll try to find some common ground while making it clear to them how and why I object. I’ll spend serious time and effort reading what they wrote, and serious time making my point in a way that shows how much I understand the serious nature of telling someone online that they’re full of shit. 

  I’m fine, absolutely fine, with disagreement. I’m even fine with it if the other person is wrong. (All of us should be fine with that, and you may consider those two sentences to be a schoolmarmish lecture.) 

  What I’m not fine with is people not reading and paying attention to what I’m saying. If I make a point at length, and you respond with a lazy and glib reiteration of what you already said, that’s where I stop having time to engage with you. I’m cool with it if I don’t win you over, but if you’re not listening to me, you’re not worth my time or my respect. I try to give people my time and my respect when we don’t agree, and even that amount of civility strikes some people as an unacceptable coddling of the enemy. 

  So be it. But if you can’t listen the way I’m listening to you, then I’m out. I know listening is hard. It’s also vital. I tell my son that the main reason I’m smart is because I’ve always been a good listener. I’m actually interested in what other people have to say. And I learn from people even when we don’t agree. 

Everybody— I mean everybody— thinks they’ve arrived at the correct interpretation of reality through thoughtful, hard-won effort. So there’s no particular virtue in believing that you are correct. 

There is actual virtue involved in developing your ability to listen. If you’re a good listener, I admire you for that. Keep it up, and teach your kids to do it, and maybe we’ll find our way out of the mess we’re in. 

  

THE PENCIL CASE AS LARGE AS CHARLES BUKOWSKI’S LIVER

  I knew a kid in elementary school named Robert Riddell. According to schoolyard legend, he was related in some way to the Riddell company that made football helmets. This was the only cool thing about him. 

  Robert kept two amazing items at his desk. They were containers, one a metal lunchbox, and the other a zippered vinyl affair that was stuffed way beyond what it was designed to hold, and bulged like Bukowski’s liver. 

  What did he keep in these containers, you ask? Keep your shirts on, ladies and germs, I’m getting around to that. 

  Riddell had packed these containers to the gills with pencils and pens. I know that kids exaggerate, and the years distort our memories even more, and between the telescope perception of a little boy and the tendency of middle-aged men to recollect everything from their youth as if it were the size of Paul Bunyan’s hat, my statement here will be questioned by some of you Doubting Thomases out there, but rest assured— Riddell carried around more pens and pencils during the week than the number of bearded youths who surrendered at Appomattox. 

  We sometimes speculated about how he had acquired such a vast empire of writing implements. Presumably he’d begun with a large number, supplied by the same people who’d purchased the containers for him. But that couldn’t possibly account for all of it. Like rubes staring at Rockefeller’s mansion, we jealously trafficked in slandering assumptions. A guy named Kevin told me that if you dropped a pencil or pen on the floor, you should pick it up right away, because anytime Riddell saw one on the floor he’d grab it, and it would get absorbed into his collection. It was as if our third grade classroom was a fish tank, and he was an algae eater.

TONS O’GUNS

  It feels like something’s shifted in our national debate on guns. I say “debate,” though I’m not sure that’s quite exactly what we have on our hands. As usual, I have a naive idealist’s notion of what a debate is— I think of debates as honorable situations where people are expected to avoid logical fallacies, rely upon facts and reason, etc. 

  Increasingly, the anti-gun control line feels like a chutney of “common sense” rationalizations, deflection, ignorance of the world outside America, and petulance. Helping keep all of this dubious rhetoric alive is a mountain of cash, the life’s blood of American democracy. 

  Thus, “debate” feels inapt. It’s more like a hostage standoff, where all of us outside the house have to tiptoe around, because while we might be correct, they have a gun. 

  Let us examine, casually, an argument we’ve enjoyed hearing in recent years. 

  “Gun control won’t stop these shootings.” 

This one, I fear, is one of the strongest, but not for the reasons generally implied. Our country already owns an appalling percentage of the world’s guns. Even if gun manufacture ended today, our stockpile of weapons would remain brobdingnagian for generations— for it is one of the few things in this world truly deserving of the adjective  “awesome.” Amazingly, our gun control debate hinges to a great extent on the notion that this unholy number, large enough that few living people can even process it, is not nearly high enough. It’s like a guy looking at the multitude of grains of sand on a beach, and getting his dander up because it’s only ONE multitude. This is the kind of weird anger that I associate with Billy Joel, a man who could look at an unfathomable integer representing his worldwide fan base, but still be frustrated that the number wasn’t even higher.

AS LONG AS I GAZE ON RAY DAVIES

  “They kinda chized,” said my son, cryptically. 

  “Hmmm?” I offered, looking up from my navel and stalling for time. 

  “They said, ‘I feel all right, from morning til the end of the day.’ Shoulda been night.” 

   I could make neither head nor tail of this baffling utterance, until it occurred to me he must be referring to the Kinks. Had a third party been present, perhaps crushed into the back seat where I store my used coffee stirrers and tax records, that individual would likely have cracked the case earlier than I did, as my car’s speakers were in fact blasting the quaint vintage rock and roll at that very moment. The obvious conclusion was briefly obscured to me, as I’d forgotten my son still possessed the ability to interact with culture from the long-ago days when waitresses smoked while they handed you a plate of gluten-packed waffles, and rowhomes and townhomes were called “rowhouses and townhouses.” Nowadays, waitresses know better, and I believe whorehouses prefer to be called “whorehomes.”

MURPHY BROWN REBOOT

  They’re putting Murphy Brown on the air again. 

  Try to imagine me saying this with a melancholy thespian lilt, a la Kate Hepburn’s immortal soliloquy “the calla lilies are in bloom again,” from the mostly magnificent film Stage Door. (That cross reference seems appropriate, as the movie  was an odd hybrid of wisecracking women and corny sentiment.) 

  And when I say they’re putting it on the air again, I’m not sure what that even means at this point. My television set, which to me appears large until I visit other people’s homes and walk past screens bigger than some I paid to stare at in art house theaters back when DC had art house theatergoers, is less and less like a TV and more and more like a big iPhone with only one app. And these days when I’m watching a TV show, it’s often on my actual phone, which reduces Citizen Kane and 2001 to the size of a Bazooka Joe comic. Among other concerns, I’m not sure what “channel” the reboot will be booted on, or even if channel is the correct word these days. Will they run it on the Stoner Network, and will Murphy’s assistant thus be portrayed by a bearded Baby Huey-esque rapper-slash-chef with a bong the size of Univac? Will Murphy weigh in hilariously on current events, allowing us the delicious pleasure of hearing Candice trying to mine the #metoo movement and Steve Bannon for yuks? Will Dan Quayle be stuntcast, grimly enduring potato jokes in order to crosspromote his new reality show, Epic Quayle? 

  Allow me to remind you— the 90s are a foreign country; they do things differently there.

DOG FREE PLAYGROUND

The posting of this photo somewhere on Facebook generated 799 comments. 

  Some of these were sane, which was nice to see, but many were the usual cocktail of self-righteous indignation and lack of self-awareness we see so often these days in America. At one time or another, I’ve owned dogs and children (that came out wrong but please don’t slow me down here), and I’ve always felt the iron grip of responsibility when taking either kind of dependent out into the world. It’s a terrible, oppressive feeling, this feeling of responsibility, which must be too much for many of our citizens to bear, judging from the circumstantial evidence. 

  Dog owners and child parents are, of course, the real reason for rules (and signs) like this, and not anti-dog or anti-child prejudice. 

  Reading over these words makes me feel something far worse than crushing responsibility; there’s no way for me to escape the realization that I sound very much like George Will here. So, lest anyone confuse me with that erudite romanticizer of conservative doctrine, I’ll just add the word “fuck” at the end.

THREE BILLBOARDS AND A BACKLASH

  I saw the Three Billboards movie. The decision to see it was entirely a matter of default; it was Christmas vacation, my sister-in-law had proposed that we all go to the movies, her vote was for the 18th Star Wars film, I was inclined to see something else, etc. 

  I should clarify that I’m a film enthusiast, or “buff,” but I rarely see movies produced more recently than Kindergarten Cop. After a years-long movie drought, fatherhood brought me back into the theater for a string of works designed for children. Happily, this coincided with what now appears to have been Pixar’s period of early, funny films. 

  Somewhere along the line, I began hearing rumors that Hollywood was occasionally allowing a movie to slip through that did not feature wisecracking gunmen, ironjawed fellows who could fly through the air and smash stuff, or white women in imminent danger of marrying handsome underwritten characters. These rumors intrigued me, and I started going back to the octoplexes and enjoying the many stories about quirky young goofballs coming of age and quirky older goofballs forced to interact with youths that were now sassily bucking Hollywood trends. 

  Thus, when this family moviegoing plan was dangled in front of my eyes, I figured there would be several options available that did not include an actor propelled toward my face with a fireball behind him.

PLEASE DON'T SAY SHUT THE FUCK UP

I’ve spent an unholy amount of time in Facebook posting groups lately. 

I’m not inclined today to get into a lot of specific detail about what happens in these groups, because I’m not trying to shame them. But let me provide an overview. 

  Many groups operate within a robust and complicated set of rules. A common phrase you see in what might be generically described as the “safe space” world is “don’t be an asshole.” 

  This, of course, sounds entirely reasonable. How could anyone have a problem with that dictum, unless they’re an asshole? 

  “Being an asshole” is generally shorthand for using traditional bullying techniques such as name calling, resorting to crass ad hominem arguments, and the like. In short, attacking another group member in a personal way rather than discussing their position or statements on the merits. So far, I’m on board. 

  As with all utopias, though, there’s the danger of being distracted by your own Shangri-La righteousness. I’ve seen people gang up on rule-breakers, group-shaming them, and while it may feel like justice to the folks doing the ganging, to an outsider it looks ugly. I’ve never seen anyone banned from a group or even questioned for talking to a rule breaker this way. It amounts to a rule that you can break the rules, as long as your target is a rule breaker. 

  I’ve seen a group ban the use of the term “politically correct,” following an odd period where an argument about opera turned nasty. I should clarify that it was nasty in a genteel manner, which means the name calling was more Sesame Street than 42nd Street, and the aggrieved tone indignant, in the manner of wealthy philanthropists, or society grande dames in a Three Stooges short.

TEACHABLE MOMENT

This dialogue should be considered verbatim, although I don’t have a recording to back it up.


Son: At indoor recess, we were playing "Silent Speedball." I told the ref that (name withheld) cheated by using two hands. So, then I was out.
Dad. For talking?
Son: Yes.
Dad. What did you learn from this?
Son: People are idiots.

HAPPY ENDING

I know how much you all enjoy kerfuffles, fooferaws, and imbroglios. Or is it imbroglia? 

  Here’s a report from the front, in the aftermath of a recent fracas I attended. (So recent, in fact, that my ears are still ringing and my hand stamp hasn’t worn off yet.) 

  After joining a lot of what are called “Leftbook” groups, which are groups where the rules for posting are longer than the Apple agreements we all sign without reading, and choked with baffling jargon that everyone else but me seems to speak fluently, I figured I’d join some fun ones. 

  With a breezy optimism worthy of General Custer, I joined a few classical music groups. “This will be a nice respite from my normal life, where I’m reluctant to even mention my affection for Schoenberg, Cage, and other composers. I can’t wait to dive into the sophisticated threads that await me, in the magical land where philistines and provincials don’t care to go.” I actually said these things out loud, my eyes wet with unshed tears. Of joy. In case that wasn’t clear. 

  It went south almost immediately. A professor of philosophy, or physics, or one of the other academic areas that qualify you to lecture musicians, was gettin’ biz-zay explaining to the mob how science had proven that atonal music is bad. 

  I gave him my two cents (and when I say two cents, I’m thinking of the coins of ancient Sparta, which weighed so much that even the burliest citizens were unable to lift them. This was a culture where tipping was often deadly, and scratch-off lottery tickets were a three-man operation). He didn’t respond, and I moved on in search of additional jollity.  

  Things seemed to die down, after that, as they did for Captain Ahab between Moby Dick sightings. 

HOT PLATE! SWEEPS WEEK EPISODE-- DEATH STAR DAYCARE, FUZZTONE, TONTO-CON, THE TOT SPOT, AND MEMORIES OF HIGH SCHOOL IN THE REAGAN ERA

ATTENTION SLOW READERS-- STAR WARS CONTENT INCLUDED! 

After a long hiatus (a word that always makes me think of hernias), Hot Plate! The 120 Minute Radio Hour is back with its best episode yet. 

  The Sweeps Week Episode is packed with blue ribbon content, which will lay waste to the previously high standard we’ve established while previously high. 

  The centerpiece of the episode, functioning in the manner of a giant ice sculpture at a gathering of poobahs and muck-a-mucks, is my special guest Yael Ksander. Yael is known for her years as a host and interviewer on above ground radio, where her combination of erudition and effervescence (I think those are the words she insisted I use) has been a feather in the cap of one of the few states whose name begins with the letter I. 

  A little-known curriculum vitum of hers (I suspect she doesn’t even put it on her resume) is that she and I were classmates when we were young. We talked about many disparate things in our rambling discussion, but the excerpts of that talk the Hot Plate team culled for Sweeps Week mostly deal with our recollections of high school during the Reagan era. Our tete-a-tete covering many touchstones of a quainter far-off time turned into an impressionistic meditation on the mystery of human memory. (I say that to distinguish it from canine memory, fish memory, and so forth.) 

  Travel with us back through the mists to a world of overhead projectors and ditto machines, a world where students were distracted by handwritten notes rather than consumer electronics, and presidential prevarication was genteel and involved complete sentences.