Archive for May, 2004
I’m not really up on blues and country music, but I heard an interview with Doc Watson on NPR yesterday, and he played some songs too. I was astounded. I’ve just never heard anyone play guitar like that. He’s an old man now, and he first learned to play on a fretless banjo that his father made for him in the 1930s. I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to learn to play your first instrument when it’s fretless and you’re blind.
The funny thing is, the same day I heard the interview, my brother John gave me a CD-R he put together for me, and the first 4 tracks were Doc Watson songs.
Whatever your taste in music, I highly recommend you give a listen: Here’s the interview, along with some tracks, and here’s a good Doc Watson web site. He’s playing at the Newport Folk Festival this summer. I’ll have to make a point of heading home that weekend!
CD’s don’t have “sides” likes records, but if they did, this would be side 2:
10. VNV Nation - Legion: this band has been around for about 10 years, but they’re relatively new to me, and this song has become a favorite. This CD gets its title from this song, and it’s very much the heart of the CD.
11. Covenant - Leviathan: it was hard choosing a track for this spot on the disc - I almost went with a Front Line Assembly song. But Leviathan provided the right mood for transitioning from VNV Nation to Skinny Puppy. It’s really hard to find a decent lead-in to Skinny Puppy.
12. Skinny Puppy - Hardset Head: this track is from the final Skinny Puppy album. Unlike other Skinny Puppy fans I know, I think this album is their best. It was completed after the death of one of the band members, and it provides a very real sense of closure and finality for the band. As one of the most high-tech bands out there, I also think it was a brilliant move to give this album such a low-tech sound: lots of guitars, keyboards that sound like they’re from the early-80s, and even some actual singing.
13, Ralph Stanley - O Death: even harder than transitioning to a Skinny Puppy song, is transitioning away from one. With this track I went with something thematically similiar, but musically as different as possible. This is a voice-only song that always sends chills down my spine. It’s from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack
14. They Might Be Giants - She’s Actual Size: this was runner-up for my choice of a song to sing at my wedding reception. But my voice wasn’t nearly good enough to pull this one off, so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t choose it.
15. Tuscadero - Nancy Drew: continuing with the tone of silliness laid down by TMBG, we go in a more punkish direction. Ater lambasting her parents for throwing out all her childhood memorabilia, including her collection of Nancy Drew books, the singer frets “I had never forgotten about them / how will I get along without them / I feel so unsteady / oh Nancy, I miss you already.” So it’s a goofy, sentimental song. I guess I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.
16. Man or Astroman? - The Sound Waves Reversing: this instrumental track is just a short b-side from a 7″, but I love its energy. I’m not as crazy about this band as some other folks: the 50s sci fi/outer space/surf guitar theme is a cool idea, but after a number of albums all in the same vein, it gets old.
17. Jawbreaker - Jinx Removing: these guys from San Francisco were the “it” punk band in the 90s. This track is buried towards the end of the great album “24 Hour Revenge Therapy,” and it’s a very cool little love song.
18. REM - These Days: it may seem odd to put an REM song in the middle of a punk set, but this actually fits right in. When assembling the track list for this disc, I had room for just one more, short song. After fretting for a while I picked this one. Like other 80s alternative bands that went big (U2, Depeche Mode), they did their best work before becoming mega-stars. By the time the “Document” album made REM huge, their best days as music writers were already behind them.
19. NoMeansNo - He Learned How to Bleed: this song was my mantra during grad school. It’s a song about coping, so I guess I found the work pretty grim. (Beware the many typos in the transcription of the lyrics that I’ve linked to).
20. Steven Jesse Bernstein - Party Balloon: I know I’ve put a lot of links in this post, but if you only read one of the linked pages, read this one. It’s the only adequate description I’ve found of Steven Jesse Bernstein’s work. The only thing lacking from that description is that it doesn’t mention his sense of humor. While there is plenty of sadness in the “Prison” album, there’s also a lot of humor, albeit of the bleak variety. It’s hard to explain why I closed the disc with this track. This poem is challenging and covers an awful lot of emotional ground, and I wouldn’t say it provides a sense of closure, but it does provide a sense of at least closing the door for the night.
I’m hard at work on Part II of my “Anachronistic & Impulsive” post (I saved a draft this time, so it won’t get lost again). In the meantime, here’s a message that I wrote in 1994. I came across it while doing the archiving work I described in an earlier post. It’s a description of a cross-country drive I did with my friend Jay. I’m just now realizing that the 10th anniversary of that drive is just a few weeks away…yikes! Anyway, when I went to college, I drove my 1968 Lincoln Continental from RI to CA, and Jay inherited it after I left CA for grad school in DC. But I missed my hot-rod Lincoln (I had put a hood scoop and racing stripes on it), and he was kind enough to give it back, so we drove it from CA to DC.
Read the rest of this entry »
I was most of the way through writing my post for Part II of “Anachronistic & Implusive” when my browser crashed. Grrr. I’m almost out of time now, so I’ll have to try it again later.
I’ve been doing the single-parent thing since Maria left for Japan, so my posts here have become more infrequent. But that’s only temporary.
My brother John arrived yesterday, and he’ll be helping me with Kai until Maria comes back at the end of the week. I’m glad he’s here! I don’t know how single parents do it: even doing something seemingly as simple as taking a shower can be a challenge when there’s no one else to keep the boy busy (Kai’s actually good at keeping himself occupied - it’s more that I can’t really keep an eye on him - so I guess it’s more of a worrying parent thing). And you can definitely forget about doing certain things, like mowing the lawn.
Rather than driving straight here from Arizona, John actually drove home to RI first. He and a friend of his made it across the country in about 48 hours. What a couple of nutcases.
Last night John and Kai were looking through Kai’s infant photo album. John pointed to a picture of me holding Kai the first day we brought him home, and said to Kai “that was your Daddy when he was 16″ (for those who might not know, I was 30, but I guess I didn’t look it). So apparently the past few years have aged me!
I haven’t written much of anything about music since starting this blog. Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I was once an avid music fan. But over the past several years, between other, overwhelming demands on my time, and an increasingly jaded music sensibility (I think it just comes with age), I haven’t been listening to much that’s new.
Maria just bought herself an iBook, and it turns out I got an early birthday present at the same time: an iPod. I’ve occasionally gone online to search for new music, but listening while at my computer isn’t practical for any length of time, and converting tracks and burning CDs is possible, but a real chore with my antiquated equipment (gasp, it must be 7 years old!). So maybe the ease-of-use the iPod is known for will get me listening to new music again.
Before receiving the iPod, for the first time in years I burned a music CD of favorite tracks. The key to a successful mixed CD isn’t just coming up with good songs, it’s putting them in the right order: to build a mood or a certain energy, and then (usually) slowly or (sometimes) quickly transform it to something else as you go on. To me, the goal is to take the listener on a journey through a variety of musical genres and emotional states. I named this one “Anachronistic & Impulsive”:
1. Big Country - The Sailor: I sang this at my wedding reception, so how could it not be the first track on the disc? A song about ending your wanderings, love, timelessness, and commitment.
2. Peter Murphy - Crystal Wrists: breaking free, understanding yourself, and seeing the beauty in the world
3. NoMeansNo - Lifelike: as usual with NoMeansno, a song with a double-meaning: a celebration of life, with overtones of duplicity. Unlike usual NoMeansNo however, this track is neither bass-heavy nor guitar heavy; it instead features some kind of whacky-sounding keyboard instrument (I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not a piano) that lends a circus-like atmosphere to the song.
4. Ed’s Redeeming Qualities - How Come No One’s Dancing: a song about lost love, and not being able to let go, but not letting it get you down either. ERQ is no longer together, but their sound has been described like this: “Imagine Jonathan Richman and They Might Be Giants hanging out together at the Newport Folk Festival.”
5. Ed’s Redeeming Qualities - Driving on 9 (live): a sad but quirky song about a man driving to visit his about-to-be remarried ex-wife and a daughter he hasn’t seen in years. The song ends with the lines: “turn off your headlights, this is just like stage fright, coming back home.” This song was later covered by the Breeders.
6. Tarnation - Do You Fancy Me: a quiet, twangy tune about a woman afraid to leave her lover (who won’t make a commitment), and then finds the strength to walk away from him. Tarnation’s music is hard to describe - at first it seems like country music, but then you encounter a bunch of psychedelic and punk influences that leave you scratching your head (I like music that does that to me).
7. Big Country - Ships: a grim but beautiful song about being abandonded by your friends in a time of need. This song is remarkable in a few respects: it’s one of the only good songs on the otherwise lousy Big Country album “No Place Like Home” (which never got a US release); it’s the only song the band ever recorded with just piano and voice; it’s one of the only songs the band ever re-recorded for a later album, and in doing so they managed to horribly butcher their own song (in the Buffalo Skinners version, they removed most of the piano arrangement and turned it into a lame country tune). But this original version is quite moving.
8. Bob Mould - Wishing Well: I’ve seen Bob Mould in concert at least half a dozen times over the past dozen years, and he always opens with this song. So I think he knows it’s the best song he ever recorded. I saw a picture in a magazine which captured the one and only time Bob Mould, Jello Biafra, and Johnny Rotten all met. The caption simply read: “Rotten Jello Mould”
9. And Also the Trees - The Oblivious: a cool little 50s noir-sounding track with very psychedelic lyrics delivered in a spoken word style (my favorite line is “they tell me that all that they know is the obvious, and if I stay with them for a while, maybe I can learn it too”). The AATT career has had an interesting arc: from sonic minimalism, to gothic, to their current 1950s jazz/coffee house sound.
There’s still 11 more tracks to describe….stay tuned for Part II.
On Thursday Maria leaves for Japan. She’ll be gone for 9 days. She’s been preparing meals and stockpiling food for Kai and I, as if we were going to be abandoned in the Alaskan tundra. But I shouldn’t tease - she’s not far off the mark in assuming that we’d otherwise subsist on pizza and canned soup. So I’m actually quite grateful!
A few days after she leaves, my brother John will arrive, and stay with Kai and I until Maria returns. He’s driving cross-country (he’s moving from Arizona to Rhode Island) and he’s driving some old truck he got for a few hundred bucks, so we’ll see if he arrives on schedule :-). Assuming he makes it, he’ll be a huge help - without him it would be difficult for me to go in to work without keeping Kai in daycare for an excessive number of hours each day.
Maria’s trip is a business trip. She has a number of interviews lined up with some Japanese government officials and executives from a variety of Japanese banks. She’ll be there with her friend Jen. Jen is a professor at Penn, and the two of them are doing a research project together (Maria’s “thing” is the Japanese financial system).
Maria previously envisioned going for an entire month, and taking Kai with her for the whole time. I would’ve been with them for a couple weeks, and then her mother would’ve gone for a couple weeks. But after Kai and Maria’s trip to Denver a couple months ago - when he was in a state of perpetual meltdown since he only had one parent with him - we decided to not go forward with that plan. Instead, Maria’s making this trip by herself, and then all three of us are going for two weeks in June. Maria will be in a conference for the first few days, and then she’ll join Kai and I in vacation mode.
The only thing I’m not looking forward to is the time change - it’s a 13 hour difference - essentially a complete reversal of night and day. My main concern is how Kai will deal with it, as he’s never been all that keen on sleeping to begin with. I’m thinking we might try to adjust only part way - maybe 6 or 7 hours. That way we could all stay up late every night, and then sleep late. I’m sure Kai would love night-time visits to places like Akihabara.
I think Thomas Friedman at the New York Times is reading my blog ;-). His column yesterday makes several of the same points as my last post, but is more scathing (especially since it’s coming from someone who supported the Bush administration’s Iraq policy until recently). I usually find him insufferable, but he was good yesterday - here’s the link: Dancing Alone.
Bill Moyers (who I also usually find insufferable, even though I usually agree with him) gave a good interview on NPR yesterday. He made an interesting point about the politics of budgeting for the war (something I criticized Bush for in my last post). Moyers worked for President Johnson during the Vietnam war, and Johnson was caught in a similar political bind in budgeting for that war. He didn’t want to share with the public or with Congress what the long-run cost of the war might be, as he didn’t want to risk it disrupting his domestic political agenda, and he didn’t want to risk losing support for the war. Moyers pointed out that it’s an inevitable bind we face when the leaders of a democracy embark on a “war of choice” (as opposed to a “war of necessity”) - the leaders are motivated to pursue undemocratic means (such as sharing as little information as possible on costs) in order to minimize the risk of losing already shaky political support. For example, it was reported just this morning that the Senate has expressed furstration with the Pentagon’s new $25 billion Iraq “stop gap” budget request (I believe the actual term for it was “contingent supplemental,” meaning that it’s intended to tide the Pentagon over until the next “real” request for money), as it contains no information on how the money even might be spent. So rather than ascribing the behavior of the Bush administration on this point solely to their well-known tendency towards maximizing secrecy, one can also point to the nature of the political circumstance in which they find themselves.
Lastly, yesterday’s CSM has the best article I’ve seen so far on understanding the “chain of command” concerns as they relate to Abu Ghraib: The chain of command under fire.
I said I’d follow up on an earlier post about Abu Ghraib, but there’s been such a firestorm in the media, you probably don’t want to hear too much more about it. So I’ll use it as a segue: an aspect that’s been mentioned in the press, but not emphasized, is that just about everyone involved - from the reservist MPs, reservist officers, to the contract interrogators - lacked any significant experience in managing prisoners and prisons. So this isn’t so much about the actions of some depraved individuals as it about the failure to commit the necessary resources to get well-trained, responsible people running the place.
It’s part of the larger problem that has brought us to where we are in Iraq: trying to run an occupation and perform nation building on the cheap. Setting aside for the moment my belief that we shouldn’t have invaded in the first place, once you’re in, you’ve got to bring in soldiers and money by the boatload.
In regard to the force level, I recently came across the RAND study America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq that backs up this point. In reviewing our nation building experiences, the study concludes “The highest levels of casualties have occurred in the operations with the lowest levels of U.S. troops, suggesting an inverse ratio between force levels and the level of risk.” A subsequent NY Times interview with the author states: “In his book, Mr. Dobbins cites a rough strategic rule of thumb from the Balkans. It takes about 20 peacekeepers for each 1,000 civilians to safeguard the peace. Applying that rule to Iraq would yield a peacekeeping force of more than 450,000 in Iraq, a far cry from the 155,000 or so [troops currently in Iraq].” The Bush administration used post-WWII Japan and Germany as their reconstruction models (countries that had been economically advanced, were thoroughly defeated, and were relatively free of ethnic strife) when 1996 Yugoslavia was a much closer parallel (hence the Balkans comparison). This isn’t just ex post facto armchair quarterbacking: this RAND study was released in July 2003, and back in Feb 2003 when the Army Chief of Staff testified that we would need “several hundred thousand soldiers” in Iraq, Rumsfeld dismissed his estimate as “far off the mark.” (Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size)
In regard to the expenses of the war, as columnist Mark Shields has often pointed out, the message of the Bush administration to the wealthiest Americans is: “you will pay no price, you will bear no burden.” Traditionally, war is a time when sacrifice is asked of all Americans. Many of our soldiers have sacrified their lives and limbs, while domestically, the economic debate focuses on who should get the biggest tax cut. Meanwhile, the cost of the war is incremently loaded onto the national debt via piecemeal supplementary budget requests, so that the overall price tag is less apparent.
Why has the Bush administration gone done this path? I think there are a variety of reasons:
- As with the decision-making on the Iraq invasion itself, there was a highly selective use of information to reach the desired conclusions (i.e. that Iraq could be rebuilt and democratized quickly and cheaply, and that Iraqi oil would cover the expenses). It also seems there was a general lack of knowledge in the Bush administration regarding what the domestic situation was really like in Iraq (see my previous post Going Into Iraq)
- Rumsfeld’s desire to transform our military forces into smaller, lightweight, highly mobile units (using Iraq as the testing ground for his theories)
- A belief that heavy reliance on private contractors would engender significant cost savings and not entail any significant risks (with Iraq again serving as a very large playground for this untested approach)
- Disdain for Clinton, and any lessons that could be drawn from events that occured on his watch (i.e. the Balkans)
- A willingness to continue to draw on the political capital afforded them by 9/11. Even after it became clear that the occupation wouldn’t be a cakewalk, the Bush administration has not frankly discussed with the public just how much sacrifice of blood and money is going to be required to see this through. I guess rather than take the political risk of starting such a discussion, they’re just holding out, hoping that some lucky breaks might turn things around.
The latter point assumes you’re willing to believe a positive outcome is possible at this point. I do not. Even if the occupation was run perfectly, achieving the goals desired by the Bush administration would have been a very difficult task. At this point, too many mistakes have been made, there are too many bells that cannot be unrung, to turn this around. My feelings are the same as those voiced by Retired General William Odom (Reagan’s head of the National Security Agency) in this Wall Street Journal article (this link goes to a reprint).
Sunday morning, when Kai got up, he asked me what the words on his pajamas said. He was wearing his Old Navy pajamas that have cool drawings of toy cars all over them. I told him the words said “Old Navy.” To which he responded, “no Daddy, look: O-L-D N-A-V-Y. It says ‘Hot Wheels’.”
And Kai has a girlfriend now: Emme. She’s the same age, and lives a couple blocks down the street from us. They like to go for rides in Emme’s wagon, and they have conversations like they’re 35 years old. They talk about the work their parents are doing on their houses, they compliment each others clothes, etc. I know Kai really likes her because he’s always on his best behavior around her, and he goes into total showoff mode. We’ll see what happens when they’re teenagers…
This is probably my geekiest post ever: the other day I finally got my Commodore 64 up and running with Contiki and RR-Net. It took some doing to get it talking to my router, but I finally succeeded. I have to hand it the the folks who developed the hardware and software for this, considering that the electronics in a C64 are less sophisticated than what you’d find in your average gas pump these days.
The web browser is text-only; it’s similar to Lynx. I haven’t used a text-only browser in years, and I found it amazing how few sites support them now. Google was the only major site I found that didn’t look like a big undecipherable mess.
For the fun of it, I’m going to try to make my C64 available on the web for a while, using the Contiki web server (my ISP doesn’t allow you to run a web server, but maybe I can sneak it through with some port switching - we’ll see). For security reasons, I’d normally never consider running a web server from my personal computer, but I figure there are probably zero “known exploits” for a C64 web server!
Here are some pictures:
