The Weak In Rock

I was browsing Boing Boing today and ran across this piece about a security consultant who had invented an effective auditory teenager repellent and my first thought was, “someone nominate this man for the Nobel Prize.”

Ten, maybe even five years ago my first thought would have been something like, “that’s outrageous, you can’t do that!” Oh how age changes us. Not only do I not find the idea of a sonic teenager barrier troublesome in the least, I think that there are wide applications for such brilliant technology:

• Movie theaters - place the devices in the front ten rows of the theater to reserve those seats for people who are actually there to watch the movie.
• During the holidays you could install them in department stores in the sections where the adults are trying to shop and the young hoodlums are just loitering around looking for opportunities to shoplift.
• Near benches and bollards outside of buildings. Instead of putting up those awful, unattractive barriers on things intended for use as seats so that skateboarders won’t rip them to shreds by using them for skating tricks you could install several of these devices.
• In coffee houses. Kids shouldn’t be drinking coffee in the first place. This will get rid of them so that we grown-ups can enjoy our frapuchinos in peace. This has the added side benefit of rendering employment in such establishments less attractive to kids which will generally improve the level of service we receive when we frequent them.
• On buses and commuter trains. Use them in the front of the bus and on select cars on the train so that we don’t have to deal with tomfoolery and shenanigans while commuting

This is, I’m sure, only the beginning. You could scale the device for a home version that would ensure that the kids stay out of dad’s den or workshop. A handheld version would also come in very handy.

Since the future ain’t what it used to be and we’re not going to be getting personal jetpacks or vacations on the moon any time soon, may as well use the technology we’ve got for something useful.

Last week as I was on my way home from work I tuned into NPR’s All Things Considered, like I do most of the time on my drive home. It’s a pretty good news show, but last week they aired an audio documentary called “My Lobotomy” put together by a man named Howard Dully for Sound Portraits. This program was one of the most jarring things I’ve ever heard on the radio.

I’ve always thought radio was a much more powerful medium than TV. Sure, TV can show you things, but because of all that showing and the focus on the visual it’s easy to miss important things said by the folks on camera or to not notice the nuances of emotion in someone’s voice. Not so on the radio. In this case the effect was staggering.

Mr. Dully is now 56 years old. When he was 12 his step-mother coerced his father into agreeing to let Dr. Walter Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy on him. Her hope was to turn him into a vegetable so that he would have to be institutionalized and she would be rid of this step-child she not only did not love but did not want around her home at all. The operation didn’t turn Howard into a vegetable, and to listen to him speak it’s hard to notice anything wrong with him at all, but he makes it clear that since the operation he has never felt normal and that it has caused him great pain and trouble throughout his life.

Dully made My Lobotomy in an effort to understand why this was done to him and to try to learn about how society could even allow such a thing to be done to anyone, let alone a 12 year old boy. I admonish you to listen to this documentary. It will give you a peek into the world of psychotheraputics that I think most people are lacking. It will also most likely make you weep. It did me.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the links.

Ok, it’s not surprising that Dubya keeps an extensive enemies list. Nope, not surprising at all. But it is disturbing.

Will the parallels with the Nixon Administration never end? I still maintain that Dubya fell off the wagon last year prior to the election, thus explaining his feeble performance in the first two debates with Kerry and his continued inability to speak without slurring or stumbling over his words, even in the most controlled and non-stressful environments, such as his little town-hall with the troops last month.

Today’s NY Times posits that the problems being focused on now, Karl Rove, Cheney’s obsession flaunting the Geneva Conventions, the Libby leak, etc. are all just symptoms of the problem. The problem is Bush himself. Cenk Uygur at the Huffington Post claims we’re all in a big heap o’ trouble because there’s 3 years and 2 months left to go on this Administration’s clock and all the gas has been let out of the bag and there’s no way Bush is smart enough to refill the bag.

You’ve got to wonder, as Tim Grieve over at Salon.com has, if Dubya’s approval rating really is down at around 35%, even if you give him a 5% benefit of the doubt on the sample, that means that 60% of folks in this country think he’s doing a dreadful job. Where were these people on election day last year? If they voted, they mostly voted for Dubya. Why is it they thought he was worth re-electing a year ago but today think he’s crap? To my reckoning not a heck of a lot has changed. We’re still hip-deep in mess in Iraq, Osama and Co. are still on the loose, the economy is basically in the same condition it was 12 months ago and Dubya still cannot pronounce the word nuclear correctly (but he’s still apparently certain that we needed to invade Iraq to stop them from lobbing some “nookyooler” bombs they didn’t ever have at us, while simultaneously having no real passion for dealing with North Korea and Iran who almost certainly do have their own WMDs and the will to use them).

Could it be as simple as a few hurricanes? Seems to me that’s really the only thing that’s substantially different 12 months hence. While news junkies and Presidential history buffs like me are all afroth over the Libby indictment and the potential that Rove or even Cheney might get taken down as well, my bet is the average American doesn’t give a shit. Scandals are part of the standard narrative of all Presidencies, especially those that run into overtime. Clinton had it, Reagan had it, Nixon had it, Johnson had it, Kennedy had it, Eisenhower even had it. As a nation we expect our President, or at least some of his underlings, to screw the pooch, ethically speaking, at least once or twice while in office. Big deal. Some people get fired or resign, a few go to jail, and the lawyers get richer.

On the other hand, when a natural disaster hits we expect our government to respond. We expect them to pull out all the stops and show us what we’re all paying for. We expect them to justify the patience and deference we give to our elected officials the rest of the time while they’re lining their pockets, feeding pork to their constiuents at home and screwing an intern here and there. Ultimately we don’t care much what the government does most of the time because, frankly, most of it is too wonkish and difficult to follow and if you’ve been alive for more than a couple of decades you’ve noticed that most of what they do makes fuck-all of a difference from one year to the next. We tolerate their bullshit because we need them when a big ol’ storm flattens a city. We need them to send in the troops, the relief workers and the big buckets of cash to make it all better. This is what we pay them for because it’s one of the few things that we cannot do for ourselves and cannot rely on private entities to take care of either.

Likewise warfare. Regardless of whether you agree of disagree with the choice to go to war in Iraq no one can look at that trainwreck over there and say, “wow, we’re really doing a good job.” This is a big difference between this George Bush and his father. No matter how much you loathed George the First and his policies, no matter how opposed to the first Gulf War you were, when all was said and done you had to look at the execution of that war and say, “holy crap, now that’s what I call a war.” Bush the First knew what he was getting into, he considered his options and he executed a plan. He also knew he couldn’t do it properly without help, so he built a coalition of partners that, again regardless of your opinion of the war itself, has to go down in history as one of the most successful marshallings of allies in the history of the planet.

So I think some of the distaste in the mouths of folks who re-elected this dumbass in-chief to office last year has to be due to things in Iraq not looking a whole lot different from the way they looked a year ago. This along with the constant warnings from the Pentagon that our troops are likely stuck there for at least 10 years has really soured the milk.

The real question then is, now what? Regardless of how incompetant and feeble the Administration is, we’re stuck with them for another 3 years and 2 months. What can possibly be done to mitigate any further damage both domestically and abroad? Lots of Democrat boosters will say we need to turn control over the House and Senate back over to them in 2006. I call massive bullshit on that claim.

At the moment the Democrats are beyond pathetic as a Party. They have no policy vision and no clear idea of what they’d do with the reins if you did hand them over to them. Their only coherent statement is, “we’re not Republicans.” I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough.

That having been said, I do think we need to give our representatives in Congress the bum’s rush. My view is that a campaign must begin to convince the voters to toss out the incumbants, regardless of which party affiliation they have. The folks in the legislature are either unethical crooks, liars or morons. Send ‘em all packing and see if a new crop can get a fresh start.

Or maybe a massive tax revolt - we won’t pay you until you get your shit together. They can’t throw us all in jail.

Every once in awhile I read something or hear something that resonates with me in a profound way. Often it comes from a very odd source, like Bill Simmons‘ column for Page 2 at ESPN.com.

Simmons is writing this week about Theo Epstein, the wunderkind who took over as GM of the Boston Red Sox at the tender age of 28 and helped them break their 86 year World Series drought. The Red Sox owners lowballed Theo in contract negotiations and then bad-mouthed him in their house organ the Boston Globe. He had enough and walked away from what he’d told everyone for several years was his dream job. Folks around Boston and fans of baseball are shocked. For Red Sox fans Theo Epstein was like the Messiah. He brought them the World Series. I’m in the camp that figures he’s pretty overrated, but still quite good at his job, but there’s no denying, even if it was merely coincidence, that he was there at the right place and the right time and several of the moves he made as GM were genius - chief among those would be signing Curt Schilling.

What caught my eye in Simmons’ column about Theo’s departure was one of his theories about why Epstein walked away from his dream job. Here’s one of the money quotes:

When you dream about doing something for a long time, and then it happens, it’s never actually as good as you think it would be. There’s almost a surreal letdown of sorts after the fact. And it’s impossible to explain unless it’s happened to you.

That smells familiar. Ten years ago I got to join my first fully functional working professional band and got to tour the US. It was an altogether brilliant ride and if I had the chance to do it over again there wouldn’t be so much as a heartbeat’s hesitation. And it was also one of my childhood dreams fulfilled. It also led me to the opportunity to fulfill a few other childhood dreams: to record an album (I’ve made six since then), to learn to engineer and record music (I’ve recorded a pile of stuff, most of which I’m pretty proud of) and to perform in front of crowds of enthusiastic fans on many occassions.

The thing is, at every single one of these turns of fortune living the dream took something away from me. A couple of years ago I found myself sitting in my living room asking “now what do I do? What do I strive for now that I’ve lived my dreams?” Ultimately my dreams weren’t all that impressive or lasting anyway, so finding other sources of inspiration wasn’t such a chore. I can only imagine how it feels to be Theo Epstein. He dreamed of running his favorite baseball team, got to do it and not only that, he took them to a World Series victory and broke the Curse of the Bambino. His “now what?” moment must have been crushing.

Good grief. You know, I like the idea of Hugo Chavez a lot more than I like the actual real-life Hugo Chavez. I like there to be balance in the world politically. Venezuela having an ardent Socialist as President appeals to me.

Unfortunately the real deal is a wingnut. He cautioned his people the other day to be careful of Halloween because it has “terrorist” roots. I thought Cheney and Dubya abused that word beyond all meaning but I guess I hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet.

The really bad thing about this is that when ass-hats like this spout off their wingnutty ideas it gives socialists a bad name (or rather a worse name than they’ve already had).

I find myself thinking about this fairly often: Real true art in this world we live in today comes from very strange sources. Most of the really striking images of the last 20 or 30 years have come to us from people who were simply trying to get our attention long enough to make a sales pitch. This is certainly true of advertising, but it’s more than just that.

All of the TV programs on all eleventy-billion networks on cable and satellite are really just there as bookends for advertising, therefore everything we watch on TV is really only there because someone wants to keep us still and focused on the TV long enough to try to make a sales pitch at us. It’s happend to music too. Almost all of the most compelling pop music made in the last 30 years has been turned into an advertising jingle by now. If your favorite song hasn’t been used to sell something yet just give it time. At first I got really riled up whenever a fave song of mine was heard blaring at me through an ad for a car or a cruiseline. Now I’m used to it. Even weirder, I’ve actually sought out music by artists I first heard on TV commercials now. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Somewhere, right now, some well-meaning (albeit thoroughly annoying) punk rock fan is ranting about the commodification of music and complaining about how some band or label has “sold out.” Yeah, well, kid you’re right. All the stuff that makes up our popular culture has sold out. It’s all been commodified and packaged and repackaged and sold to us in fifty different flavors.

But the thing is, even in the midst of all this crass commercialization really brilliant art does get made, and no matter what it’s being made for, it’s still beautiful. Case in point, this ad for a new LCD TV made by Sony. I could watch this thing for hours. It’s stunning. Have a look.

I’m sorry, but that’s art. Maybe we just need to find a new way to evaluate cultural value. The old benchmarks just don’t seem to work very well anymore. In fact, I think they’re getting in the way of most people noticing beauty when they find it where they find it.