Sheet Metal Mountain

obsessive, like you're inside one of your dreams and you can't wake up, and the giant metal monsters just keep ripping up the concrete, peeling the parking lot like a lemon, the white stripe dust is squirting in your eyes.

Yee Ha

We just got back from a day at the rodeo (my first and last ever). The Stars and Stripes nowadays don't have that far to go to catch up with the obnoxiousness of the Confederate flag. The flag was everywhere, and the announcers were going on and on with their "freedom isn't free" crap and the need to "eradicate" those people who "hate us for our freedoms". So much stupidity crammed into one dog and pony show! Is it true that flags are only for war?

Digi-Bionicle Lemon Wars

euphemism of the day

heard on the Stephanie Miller show on Air America - websites that contain falsehoods or other misinformation are not "lying", they are "poorly documented".

goes along with those web pages that ask you if you want to "skip this welcome screen". Welcome screen? it's a fucking ad!

castles made of sand

it has always seemed to me that grand theories that explain all of a thing are very very likely to be wrong. one such theory is the biological basis of language, the idea that the core structure of human languages is physically built-in to us. this is one of those academic items that create lots of room for discussions and dissertations but I'm not getting into any of that here. it puzzles me, as in ... "whatever".

here is an interesting article about computers sorting through the sounds of a language and just figuring it out. people make sounds. in groups, they come to some agreements on what these sounds "mean". they use those sounds every day. their kids learn those sounds. there is natural variety introduced over time as the sounds continually change. do the same bird species have song variations in different locales? would a blue jay in California understand a blue jay in Brazil?

I Just Called To Say I'm Thirsty

yes, now your houseplants can call you on the phone to tell you they need watering!

next thing you know, your carpet will call to tell you it just got peed on, and your "snitch-lamp" will call and tell you it was the dog who done it.

Nickelheads: Henrietta Martin

Henrietta Martin once paid far too much for a loaf of bread. It nearly drove her insane. For months she could be heard muttering about caraway seeds and crust.

La Honda, Mexico

La Honda, Zapatecas, Mexico

Leaky River, by I.T. Daily

So the VP of Whatever sends a company-wide email broadcast warning everyone against the use of project code names in public (meanwhile, they are handing out t-shirts with the project code name emblazoned all over it)

Cruising

Now don't be getting all synchronicity on me, but at the very time I was writing my recent novella, wherein (among a myriad other plot developments) a minor character dies of falling off a cruise ship, a local man was doing the exact same thing. coinky dinky? I certainly hope so.

The Lazy Screenplay

Not that I was expecting much from the Transformers movie (and didn't even consider seeing it a possibility, until I had my son on a rainy summer day so what the heck) but what was interesting was the lengths the movie went to, going through the motions mindlessly. The loser boy has to get the hot girl in the end, so there is a lot of setup for that, and practically zero payoff. Also, the war hero captain has to see his baby daughter for the first time ever, and he goes through a lot of explosions and surprise, makes it home in the end, but nobody gives a shit. It's really perfunctory. bla bla bla. The director (the "explosive" Michael Bay) obviously couldn't care less about such things.

The robots were great in action, and a couple of them even have personalities (more engaging than any of the humans) - I especially liked the one who can only communicate by tuning the car radio to some song lyrics that are expressing what he's trying to say at the moment. That was inventive. (Someone he's been cured of that in the last scene, out of the blue, and for no reason whatsoever - he speaks directly when another song could've done the trick just as easily - "the lazy screenplay" in action) Mostly there was lots of things blowing up, but no sense of personal danger ever. For one thing, nobody cared about the characters. For another, there were so many things blowing up all the time that you really couldn't keep track of who was who or who was where.

One of the most amusing bits was the presence of John Turturro as a half-crazed "man in black". You just feel sorry for him even being there.

Of course the holes in the plot were so vast you could drive an Optimus Prime big rig through them, but that's no matter. It's the art of the lazy screenplay.

La Honda, Mexico

Our woodsy hamlet seems to have a sister city. La Honda, Mexico is composed of Mennonites. They're dreadfully afraid they might get public schools (heavens!). In our California version, we live in fear that our public school will disappear for lack of funding. The Mexico La Honda abhors technology. The California version is rumored to be getting cellphone coverage someday.

Mexicans tend to view Mennonites with a mix of puzzlement and admiration. They are perhaps best known for their distinctive clothing: dark, floral dresses and bonnets for the women, overalls for the men.

The California version is best known as being the former home of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters - who were in their heyday also viewed with a mix of puzzlement and admiration.

Hanging in There

You get bonus points in this world for 'hanging tough', 'hanging in there', 'staying the course' and 'holding on', but there comes a day when you've held on too long and don't even recognize it.

One example is the crowd of 'climate-change-skeptics'. It could still turn out that they'll be able to claim that they were right, that one way or another the current human impact on the climate won't turn out to be exactly global warming as predicted, but for the most part, everyone agrees that all these carbon emissions are bad and we ought to do something about it. So they've held on and hung tough but their day is rapidly receding.

The same thing is occurring on the other side of the issue. For years now, once or twice a year our house receives a visit from a hippie out with pamphlets trying to sign us up for Action on the environment. Just ten dollars a month can save the Planet from imminent destruction, because it will help them pay for lobbyists and more pamphlets. This year's pamphlet features all the legislation that Schwarzenegger is going to sign anyway; if The Terminator is the one proposing these laws, don't you think the hippies might as well stop pestering us?

It's over, children. You won. Go home.

Completion

The first draft of my suspense novella "Squatter with a Lexus" is now completed. It was a race to the finish (had to hurry and be done with it before I got bored - if anything, I'm the Anti-Proust). Sometimes it's really a nuisance having such a short attention span, but you have to work with what you've got!

It's really easy reading and comes highly recommended by me! Give it a try if you like things that are fun and easy to read. it's more or less in the "mystery" genre, give or take a few licenses. (now also available in pdf on request via email, or in paperback from my bookstore)

Spanish Trilogy

In the past week or so I got to see 3 Spanish movies: Volver, Pan's Labyrinth, and Spirit of the Beehive. While I enjoyed all three, the one that most stood out for me was Pan's Labyrinth - perhaps because of its intensity.

There was one moment in 'Spirit of the Beehive' that was supremely intense (when the official is inspecting the stopwatch) - at that moment you know that under conditions such as Fascism, the slightest mistake could cost you everything. In a sense, that moment captured everything political underlying Pan's Labyrinth, in a much more subtle and indirect way. Also, the portrayals of the young girls in both of those movies are quite compelling.

Volver also had its moment (the moment of truth about the mother) but as a whole the film seemed trivial in comparison with these others. In one way, that is a kind of relief, that when you are not living under extreme political conditions, it's okay to have a superficial little story about everyday people. Nothing is really at stake and that's good.

Random acts of terror (of the Al-Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh variety) don't hold nearly the menace of the concerted powerful form of terror that can be wielded by a government. They are more like the fear of contracting cancer someday. You don't have to watch every step that you take.

I'm Sorry But

I am so fucking sick and tired of hearing about Lady Bird Johnson and those fucking flowers along the highways.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Thank you and good night

The Magic Of Failure

As a kid growing up in the Philadelphia area, I never dreamed that my own home team, the Phillies, would become the first team in the history of the world to lose 10,000 games. You don't do THAT every day!

("Brutal" is the most uttered two-syllable word in Philadelphia.)

Benchmarks On The Ground

"benchmarks" and "commanders on the ground". these are two more magic tricks of the media age.

we hear that the decision to "retreat" or "surrender" should be left to the "commanders on the ground", but any commander on the ground who made such a recommendation would be fired.

we hear that politicians shouldn't decide how to conduct a war, but apparently it's okay for them to start them. I guess that as soon as they start one they're supposed to step aside and let the pros handle it. This is like turning on your radio really loud and then when the neighbors complain, tell them to wait for a quieter song.

we hear that of 18 "iraqi" benchmarks, 8 have been met. The percentages are not so bad! this is similar to a serial killer admitting that while he has not stopped murdering people, he has at least cleaned his room.

progress is being made

Abbreviated Fiction

My current work-in-progress is an example of a genre I like to call "abbreviated fiction" or "fiction by inference". I first came across this kind of thing in the Maigret detective novels by Simenon. Simenon liked writing a lot, but he didn't like writing a lot of unnecessary words. He would skip over tons of details. If it was a nice day, he wouldn't tell you exactly what he meant by that. If someone was in a park he would describe it as "rocks, trees, grass, etc ..." . Of course, I exagerrate.

Each of the little chapters in my little novel could be three to five times longer. Some of them read more like an outline of a chapter than actually a chapter. A "full-length" novel is at least sixty thousand words, and I'm always lucky just to reach twenty (it's around fifteen, currently, and rocketing towards the exciting conclusion). I hate to lose momentum, and if I stop to fill in all the details, I get bored, and when I get bored, I stop. More is not always better. In this case, more is less. I just hope to cover all the bases, tie up all the loose ends, and feel good about it when I'm done.

Narratives

Speaking of pre-determined narratives and the media, this post by Los Angelista had me thinking about that again. The policy of the media giants (Newsweek is owned by MSNBC, which is owned by Time Warner which also owns Time, vs. Fox which owns another third, vs.Viacom which owns the rest) seems to be to make the news fit their pre-determined narratives. I wouldn't be surprised if you researched their history of African-American stories and found they all revolve around some poll differences where "blacks think A" and "whites think B". It seems to be their whole story (see? we ARE different after all!). So, why bother with anything that actually happens, when you have a perfectly good story to add on to like sequels? Which of the following does not fit this mold?

• OJ (blacks for, whites against)
  
• Rodney King
  
• Rap Music
  
• Barry Bonds (yeah, even trivial things)
  
• Barack Obama
  

Surprise! It all fits! Everything having to do with race in America always will fit!
70 percent versus 12 percent. 88 percent versus 9 percent. 60 percent versus 36 percent. They love their little polls.

Eerie

This movie -to-be about the Erie, PA, collar-bomb caper is American pulp non-fiction at its very best.

On Heritage and Values

What does your heritage mean when you don't know where you come from? I've been thinking about this lately from several perspectives:

1) What if Barack Obama had been adopted and no one knew anything about his father? How would that effect perceptions? Would there still be people saying he isn't "black enough", or "isn't really black", because of the quantity if melanin in his skin? I doubt it.

2) My wife - who was adopted - discovered her own Jewish heritage only in her twenties, when she found out about her birth father. Now she is trying to find the place for that heritage in her own life (she was raised California Protestant but is now Bay Area Agnostic). She finds that her most important values (education, community, family) are also strong values of the Jewish tradition. These values are certainly not exclusive to her or to Jewishness - does it matter which labels you put on these values?

3) I was somehow sure that my grandparents on my mother's side were from Bohemia or Austria - and I discovered only as a grown man that they were in fact from Poland. What is my Polish heritage, and what happens to the Bohemian heritage I thought I had? I know nothing, really, about Polish culture, but then again I knew almost nothing about Czech or Austrian culture either. I feel no heritage at all in relation to these nation-states or ethnicities. My other half is German Jewish and I feel the same way about that. What I do feel is that I am a 21st Century Northern Californian American.

4) My father is a self-proclaimed "fanatical atheist", but in his life's work, as a compassionate therapist, author and social worker, his values are very close to the 'Theology of Liberation' developed by radical priests in Latin America. He is - in his teachings - remarkably close to the Jesus they worship in theirs. It is the values that matter, not the names that go on them. The Jesus of loving, of giving, of sharing, of affirming and welcoming all, is a good enough Jesus for any fanatical atheist to accept a human being worth honoring. (The gay-bashing, woman-hating, damnation-threatening, nasty Jesus according to St. Paul, on the other hand, is basically a jerk).

I am not a big fan of the concepts of nations and races and ethnicities and tribes. On the one hand, people like to celebrate their commonalities, their traditions, their music and clothing and food, but on the other hand - we all know the ugly side of that stuff. Will it ever be possible to have the one without the other? 21st Century Northern Californian America is as close as I will probably ever see it. Which is why I am proud of that heritage.

Chestnut Trees

Chestnut trees at the Jas de Bouffan - Paul Cezanne

As a child, my parent's house had a chestnut tree hanging over the driveway, and every autumn we would collect the chestnuts, slit them open and roast them in the over or sometimes in a metal basket in the fireplace.
There were hardly any trees of that kind left, due to a famous blight which had destroyed nearly all of them. I loved that tree, and the smell of it, but my father and mother would only complain about the mess its droppings made, and eventually they took it down.

Fitting the Mold

Radical Islamists are holed up in a Mosque in Pakistan, besieged by federal troops; a bloodbath is portended. All of this conjures up typical images so it was surprising to me to read that this situation is far from typical, but involves a sect of radical islamic women

Most of the stories I've read so far read like this: More than 1,200 people, mainly students from the mosque's two Islamic schools, have since fled the complex. The students are led by clerics seeking to impose Islamic law, or Shariah, in the capital. They have been running an anti-vice campaign for months, abducting alleged prostitutes and attacking police.

None of these stories I've read until now have mentioned this:
Burqah-clad women have been engaged in a vigilante reign of terror that included kidnapping several people from what they said was a brothel

You'd think that would be interesting, but the media tends to fit every story into the mold it has already prepared. How many of these "militants" are women? The media doesn't say. "Radical clerics" is all they need to know. File this one under "the war on terror" as opposed to "what the hell is really going on in these societies?"

FlipACoin.com

I thought it would be funny to think of a web site where you could go and flip a coin when you want to make an important decision and you don't have a coin handy. Turns out, there is such a page.

Now I need a page to help me decide whether I should go to the flip-a-coin page or not!

Guess Where

A popular restaurant in _____ has been temporarily closed down after several complaints that people with darker skin were refused entry.

Parable of the Day

I'm out walking my dog and bring my neighbor's 5-year old son along. We stop to visit some friends and have to pass by a house along the way that has a couple of herding dog puppies behind a fence. The pups start yelping and barking as soon as they see my dog. My dog ignores them. She is older now and isn't very interested in puppies. The boy, however, thinks the dogs are talking to him, so he answers back "Hi". The puppies do not stop barking. The boy begins to get annoyed, and after repeated greetings, he gets really angry and starts yelling at them - "I said hello so why don't you stop barking? What do you want from me?". I try to tell him that the dogs will stop barking once my dog is out of sight, but he doesn't listen to me. This is a boy who rarely listens to anyone anyway. Finally we do get far enough away, and the puppies quiet down. The boy runs up alongside me (he had fallen behind to yell at them) and says with genuine rage in his voice, "those are really some stupid dogs".

Prophecy for Beginners

This can work but it takes a little practice. First, you grab a nice dictionary. You don't want the very best one because that's bound to have a lot of big words you probably won't understand anyway - even the definitions will be too complicated. Remember, you are a beginner. So get a nice decent American Heritage Dictionary, for example, assuming you are a speaker of the English language, a dictionary which has got a lot of words but not too many, and it doesn't have to be the very latest. For our purposes we don't have to be exactly up to date. We won't be needing to know about "junk inside one's trunk", for example. Anything since let's say 1980 will be okay.

So, you have your dictionary and you are going to place it, closed, on a table in front of your seat. It can be any table, and you can sit on any kind of seat. Or you can put it on your lap. We're not being too particular here. There is no special wardrobe you have to wear. You just want to be comfortable and relaxed. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, think about a question you want an answer to, form the question clearly in your mind (don't say it out loud. Oh, heck, you can say it out loud if you want to. It's really not important). Now, open the dictionary to some random page and without opening your eyes place your index finger somewhere on that page. Now, open your eyes and find the word you are pointing to. Your index finger should still be touching the word, so if you can find your finger you can find the word.

Study the word for clues to the answer to your question. If you keep an open mind (and I mean really really wide open, so that almost any idea can lead to any other in a chain reaction of thoughts that can produce an approximation of something somehow related to your original question) you will be able to connect with the synchronous mystery of the underlying order of the universe, and the power of your mind will have led you to unravel its secrets, because all things are related at all times, and one thing leads to another, and the shortest distance between two points is sometimes a line and other times a sort of quantum leap across the space time continuum.

So, give it a try and tell me what you find. If my theory is correct (and I'm often wrong, but never in doubt (tm)), then no matter what the question, an answer can occasionally be found.

Revised

Latest version of Golden - The Movie has arrived at a blog near you (it's just a click away, it's just a click away ...) - I decided to make the main character a little more ornery, fixed some scene transitions, made the "Ubik effect" go back and gobble up some more of the past, and changed the ending to a happier one.

In the meantime, my new fiction (Squatter With a Lexus) is developing nicely, I think. Most of my writing energy is going there. It's a mystery story with many characters, each of whom has his or her own angle on the problem and each of whom is trying to solve it first. It's both a race and a treasure hunt and changing radically almost every day.

Dispatches

Someone awards a Thinking Man's Blog award - I would like to present a Reading Man's Blog Award to Dispatches From Zembla. This blog is my version of continuing education.

Today's post is a link to a New Yorker story about the Pirana people from the Amazon, whose culture is so completely focused on the present that they have no past, no history, no creation myths, no abstractions.

Much of the magazine article dwells on academic arguments about whose linguistic theory is right and whose is wrong (academia is sooo boring to me), but the parts about these people and how they live is really interesting.

Pee

Check out MizPee.com, to find out the toilet nearest you. For men, there is MisterPee dot com, which will show you the location of the nearest bush.

Filed Under "Did Not Want to Know That"

Yesterday I'm driving across the bay to take my little niece home, she's sleeping in the back and I suddenly notice the gas gauge is almost at E. This is a shock because I rely on my odometer to let me know when I need to fill up, so I rarely look at the gas gauge. Turns out the wife had reset the odometer for some obscure wifely reason. So, yikes, I don't want to run out of gas on the freeway so I pull off at the next exit. The neighborhood's pretty sketchy but I think, it's okay, I've gotten lost here before. It's true. I know this much - it's not the way to the Oakland Zoo, and the onramp back to the freeway is right, right, oh good, it's right there. I figure there'e bound to be a gas station nearby and sure enough there is one at the next light. I pull in and discover it's the first gas station I've seen in ages that does not take credit cards, so I have to leave my little sleeping angel in the car while I go to the booth to pay the man. Of course, there's a line. I wait. The guy in front of me says to the cashier (seated in his bullet-proof enclosure), "say, isn't this the place where that guy was shot and killed the other day?"

Did I want to know that?

No.

The cashier nods and the man turns around and asks me, "did you know that? There was a guy who was shot and killed right here just the other day!"

Did I want to hear that again?

My turn comes. I give the guy a twenty, even though I know this means I will have to stop and fill up again before I head home. I rush back, she's still asleep, I pump that gas all the time looking around for someone with a gun.