Billy Bob on the Bard

Having already a very low estimation of Billy Bob, it came as something of a surprise when I happened to catch him on The Tonight Show last week and one of the talking points they had prepared was his belief that Shakespeare is overrated. His brilliant argument essentially consisted of two points: 1. the plays are really just soap operas, and 2. all the 'flowery' language is a ruse. The most hilarious part of this is that if there is one person who is not overrated, it is fucking Shakespeare. Furthermore, does this witless idiot realize that he is claiming that a worldwide conspiracy that spans centuries is his real claim? Or does he think that all those people just repeated what they were told and it took Billy Bob's bravery to break the yoke?

Now here is the kicker: he was on to pitch a new sports movie about high school football and the clip they showed had him delivering a pan-faced speech to a bunch of 15 year olds about 'being in the moment' and 'living from joy.' It's no wonder he has it out for Shakespeare when he's part of a cabal who are doing the typical Hollywood trope of taking a downhome story and recasting it with pseudo buddhist nonsense. Congratulations. When Billy Bob's career goes down the tubes, maybe he can play the fool in a rendition of one of Bill's plays, though he's more suited to a syphillitic, drooling idiot.

The Obesity Network

60 Minutes did a great piece recently about the auto industry's crack addiction to trucks. The lobotomized wonk who spoke on behalf of the car/truckmakers of course blamed the situation on the consumer, saying, in effect 'we don't want to hog up all the resources and melt the polar ice caps, our customers demand more and more power.' Well, there is an element of bread and circus I will grant them, but come on, this frothing piggery is not just the manifestation of some unencouraged human instinct.

A similar thing seems to have happend on the Food Network of late: it's become the obesity network. First, the Barefoot Contessa showed up. Whose great idea was it to bring on a mutated cross between HR Puffenstuff and Suzy Homemaker and have her make mountains of meat and sweets? The show itself is hysterical on a number of fronts. They never just shoot her standing there making food, they always have shots of her running in and out of her stores and then back to the reactor where she 'works' on her next explosion. Just saw an episode of a new 'home cooking' show with another mountain-sized sow adorning a serving for a giant with a huge additional scoop of ice cream, cooing so much it was more like auto-erotic food porn.

As forensic detectives, we are a sorry lot. We wait until things blow up and then we just prepare our defenses. The only thing that is funnier than the fact that auto executives were able to sell a truck for every car in the US, is the fact that no one riding this wave could see that there is nowhere good for it to go. We don't live in a state of the sound and reasonable on one side being led astray (as the wonk would have it), but a case of two crack addicts, unclear about their addiction, the treatment or the recovery. This is the wildcatter, the prospector: the key is to light the fire then make your killing, on the burn or the extinguishers, who cares.

Fat pigs rushing around in their trucks, emptying the oceans, filling the rivers with crap is in a way a unifying vision of America in which metaphor has reached a new level of clarity, but it is also posits a bizarre diagnosis about the forces driving this latest phase of mania. Did we give up on our narcissistic notions of holding a deed on immortality? No, we have convinced ourselves that we can be complete pigs and if something of consequence blocks our going forward, a cost-free bypass or angioplasty will be provided. A mere detour.

Detectives: Gone Without a Trace

I kind of like Anthony LaPaglia. I happened to see an episode of his new show recently. It was hysterical. First of all, his voice is over the top silly. I kept thinking I was watching Mighty Mouse; his gruff, whispery kind of gangster talk is clearly an attempt to make a cop figure sympathetic by making him seem like, well, a Godfather. How fucking sick is that? What was most hilarious (and disturbing) about the show, however, was that there is no 'detection' to speak of (making it closer to reality than most shows). But this one is positioned, not in the Twilight Zone, but in the 1984 zone: the whole process of busting people revolved around marshalling the tremendous surveillance assets. At every turn, as they are getting more suspicious, a new piece of information turns up, but it's not something the police had to figure out. It's an ATM charge or a surveillance camera. Which makes the tough guy nonsense at the center of the show all the more laughable. Used to be the cops would just stay at the station and wait for someone to solve the crime for them (and if that doesn't pan out, pick a weak second and force a confession). Now, they can just poke into every aspect of the person's life until they find something. Why don't the writers do an episode where the cops turn people's lives upside down and then it turns out they had the wrong guy? While they are still following the Arthurian model, that would spoil the show. Leave that to the reality shows (which are much better anyway).

Now all that said, the other side of this situation is equally absurd. The current missing persons case where the husband was out buying a mattress 20m before calling 911 is laughably stupid and insane. Having access to information that can bust a case is not a bad thing. Mixing it with the old detective archetypes is totally silly. The new detectives are researchers. Of course, the other reality of this is that in the past, there were plenty of ways to dig up more evidence, and good cops did that, but lazy ones made up their minds right away and went into the mode of just beating on their chosen target until they could get a confession. In one piece I saw earlier this year, a kid was totally railroaded and went to jail for 17 years, only to be exonerated later. He had confessed. On the show, they said in cases where someone is exonerated, one third of the people had confessed!!

More Than Happy

Preposterous exchange this morning between George Will and Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria is a likeable sort for a lot of predictable reasons, the main one being that he seems to be the type of critic that achieves acceptance, namely a member of the tribe that espouses revolutions that improve, don't alter, the status quo. Zakaria claimed that Americans are casualty averse, and in a stunningly silly retort, Will invoked the Civil War and then referred, nebulously, to much other brutality that we had endured.

In a survey class called 'War and American Culture 1870-1920," in college, we were talking about World War I and the professor made reference to the many catastrophes and blood baths, and made it sound as though the US bore an equal share. I raised my hand and said 'at the Somme, a million men died in three days, the total US battle deaths for the whole war were 115,000.' He looked at me stunned and then just said 'no way.' After class, I went to the library, copied the page from the world atlas and slipped it under his office door. Germans and Russians lost 40M in WWII!! US lost 292K on both fronts! Of course, the other reason Will's comments were absurd is because the Civil War was attended by repeated draft riots. Furthermore, the commission of the war was very crude on the Union side, many attending bloodbaths were totally unnecessary.

Zakaria jumped back in and said 'what I was saying is that if the public feels that the war is not worth fighting (and 57% of the population feels that way about Iraq), then they tend to be casualty averse. If the war is one that has to be fought, like the Civil War, they are more than happy to take casualties.'

Does that phrase even make any sense? This is a case of obiter dicta, where the speaker has lost the reasonable point of reference and is speaking only from his rhetorical position, not realizing how offensive the statement is. One of the most interesting things about this statement is the implied frames of reference: the idea that there are people somewhere that are more than happy to see others die, beckons to the oft noted notion of the silent majority, the huge mass of Americans who supported Vietnam from beginning to end (another numbers thing that most people fail to recognize: support for that war never dropped below 50%!). The other frame of reference that is equally absurd is that of the journalist is simply, humbly reporting the will of the majority. This is how democracy works, the loser of the vote, even if attended a tremendous injustice, is asked to just refer to the established count. This is one of the reasons the justice system is so screwed up: the jury can be a crop of complete idiots who totally disregard the evidence, and we call that justice. Voting is not, by itself, the road to anything just and open, but we are such simpletonian reductionists, we fail to be able to see past that. We have regressed. The founders had a far more sophisticated view of voting than we do (even though their means of dealing with scope was discriminatory, it was a case of wrong discrimination: we need to institute a system of discrimination against the real enemy: stupidity (and its first cousin, ignorance)).

Retro Repro Thinking

Been thinking for a while about the idea of making a documentary about why people continue to procreate. Would certainly lend itself to a Socratic sendup; quite often when the question is posed, nary another word need be said, people will come up with the damnedest reasons, most end up sounding selfish. Today, it occurred to me that the real function of reproduction these days is to continue a virtual property line. The Americans constitute a small portion of the world's population, but consume a majority of its resources. Consumption is itself an example of a property right, but one where only continued use keeps it alive. We call it our way of life. Wouldn't require reproduction except for the fact that we all want a good 30 years of paid retirement these days. Saw a mind-blowing statistic last week: in 1955, the average male died 1.5 years after retirement.

How can it be that all of human life has been lived as though there were no limits, and now, suddenly, we seem to be up against the wall in every direction: the ocean on its way to being empty, unsustainable food practices, oil, transportation. It's hard enough to imagine how we remained completely oblivious, but harder to imagine is how people can remain in the same modes of behavior after. Game theorists recognize this as an archetype, typified by an electricity shortage: announcements are made that there is not enough for everyone to have their air conditioner on. Most of the players end up using their air conditioner as they would have, figuring that their abstention will not make much difference.

Non-Emergent

Emergence is a subject that warps the mind and changes one's perspective on everything. It offers a valuable perspective on the sorry state of American politics. The founders were ahead of their times in countless ways (and of course, behind them in many). It's not hard to mount an argument that they were the first discoverers of an emergent process management model. The Reader's Digest version of Emergence is that it is a system in which complex things emerge from repeated iterations generated from a rather simple set of forms and rules. The element that often never gets enough attention is the role of locality. In reading the political scene from this perspective, that becomes the key, and the founders insistence that the rule in government should be to localize all issues except the ones that cannot be localized seems noble and sober.

So where are we now? There is no locality left. We have federalized everything. And even worse than that, we've instituted a system in which the whole representative system is now subservient to being overridden by this federal dependency (that was hard to foresee), as was seen repeatedly when referenda were passed that the feds did not approve of and they threatened withdrawal of funding for other programs. This process of the states having to go and beg for their own money back probably is best epitomized (probably did not start with but certainly went elliptical on) by the relationship between FDR and La Guardia. Of course, the winner is the one who puts two chips in the pot and is able to convince the pot handlers to give him three back. Begs a few questions: is it not just preposterous to argue that states rights has any meaning anymore? without states rights, can we be considered free in the same ways? are we not a soviet?

Some of the reasons this can lead nowhere good is:

a. Democracy (we know we don't have) and even a representative government, requires participation. We are at the Grand Inquisitor stage in that regard, having cast off our freedom, willfully, and we cannot blame the government for that. (They're coming for more than that next.) Without participation, how can we claim to be free? What we are is captive. Our real rulers simply craft 'concensus' in a rhetorical vacuum and then tag their results. (How often have you heard people in our free society say that if a vote goes the wrong way, it is because their message did not get through?)

b. Federalizations of issues fall in the class of problems illustrated by a scrambled egg: simple to do, impossible to undo.

Now, for the rather bizarre predictions: this is the source of the identity crisis in the two parties for the following reasons:

Republicans - Even the Reagan Revolution was based on defederalization. Nothing happened, moment is so passed, in short retrospect it looks like an artifact from the 1880s. The Republicans are sticking, beyond all reason, to the argument that the market can solve all problems (and yet, they are spending more money than the last two Democrat regimes). This formulation is an emergent notion, without the emergence; it is a headless, rudderless gambit that requires almost unfathomable denial (and/or ignorance). Energy, the ozone, drugs. These problems are not going to solve themselves. The Republicans are like the security people who were on the PA on 9/11 telling people to go back to their desks.

Democrats - Their argument has likewise reached a situation that could be flattered with the word intractable. The Clintonian, failed Gore follow-on argument is the 'we can manage these problems, and do it better, more efficiently.' Emergence tells us that this is almost as insane a position as the Republicans. The problems are too complex, the management abilities too feeble. As the Liberterians are fond of saying: fifty years of government agencies later (FDA, EPA, ATF, etc.) do we have cleaner water, safer food, less drugs?

Unfortunately, the Liberterians seem also a tad absurd. No government at any level, just let people be, they will solve their own problems. No, the market will not solve these problems and furthermore, the solutions to some of these problems are going to start to reach a state that looks to at least threaten terminal consequences.

Ultimately, patronage ends up looking more like an emergent and progressive approach to some of these intractable problems. The idea that the government should not patronize anything is appealing. But then localized patronage would have to emerge and it seems incredible that perhaps now that might happen. Certainly the conditions are there. A million serious patron projects could be spawned from the trash bin of this dysfunctional gorgon we call our government.

Pharmaceutical Trigger

Saw a piece on Glen Campbell's drunk driving arrest on Dateline. The first half looked like the typical piece on drinking: the history, the typical behaviors, the typical conclusions. But then, an amazing thing happened. They mentioned the fact that Campbell had had some kind of medical procedure and was then prescribed pain meds that produced anxiety attacks. That made him turn back to alcohol.

Nevermind the fact that the line between legal and illegal drugs, like so many other things in this winded culture, has become arbitrary to the point of utter meaninglessness. But the really evil part is that there is a straw man out there, the patsy, the cliche, that covers for the new, unregulated money-makers that wreak far more havoc in a month than pot has in millions of years.

Does this argument seem disjointed? As though the connection is tenuous? But isn't all drug prosecution about explaining the source of behavior? In this case, the source is a first layer that drops into another. The absolute inculpability of legal drugs under any circumstances is one of the most damning indictments of the preposterous drug war.

Making of Martha

Ok, let's throw out the false dichotomy of nature and nurture for a minute. Nash's first paper on game theory was about equilibriums. Martha is a monster that shows just how sick our culture is: in the guise of the quaint, humble and helpful retro matron comes a dried and pitted monomaniac who makes one wonder if Napoleonic is still a usable adjective. Her bio-graphy is rather hilarious in that there was no secret where her caisson was headed: stock broker cum cookie baker? Oh, please. There is no journalism left, we just let people take the micro-phone, if they can pay for it. There is something great about that though, since they very often pour the water over their own heads and then give us the opportunity to watch them melt as they sing 'woe is me.' Martha's rendition has been insane, from her commercial on the courthouse steps to her comparison of herself to Nelson Mandela. Her books are a crock, her recipes don't work and everyone who has worked with her hates her.

But what Martha really shows us is how sick we are. As people retreat further from actually living, they become more prone to falling for a proxy, even a completely phony, money-grubbing one. Not so much a diva (she has NOTHING to say/sing), she is a priestess: mere middle-woman (midwife). Ultimately the pill she issues is the illusion of recapturing time: feeding a nation of people who have scarcely a minute to do anything that doesn't make them money (note the irony), Martha is serving up the illusion of having time to make gunnysack thread holders or doilies for your next garden party.

Son of Sam

Saw a great Dateline piece tonight about Son of Sam that pretty much convinced me that Berkowitz was not the lone killer. This after the central park wilding case is just more evidence that the NYPD is a complete joke. Another huge point that I found out for the first time: a witness told the police that the man she passed in the street took a ticket off his car. I had always heard it told that the police were dutifully trying to find anyway they could to discover who might have been in the area, making the matching of the ticket a brilliant turn. The reality conforms perfectly to Poe's Dupin depiction of the police, the one that is on display in all the real forensics shows like 'New Detectives': the cops don't figure out anything, they sit back and eat donuts until someone walks in the door and solves the case for them.

Real Genius

Ripped into Beethoven's Bagatelles for the first time in ages, and found that they are all awesome, but one in particular really bowled me over this time, and it turns out, it's in C minor (seems that a huge proportion of my favorite works are in Cm). Anyway, futher turns out that this work has a bizarre notation after it, rather than an opus number, it says WOo52 which stands for without opus, #52. Looked it up on the web, turns out it was composed in 1797. In case you wanna see the other WOos: http://home.swipnet.se/zabonk/cultur/ludwig/beewoo2.htm. Anyway, that got me all the more fired up because of the work's proximity to the first three piano sonatas. A long time ago, I'd listened to many of the sonatas, starting with the familiar ones (8, 14) and moving onto other familiar ones (17, 21, 31, 32), and happened upon a book one day in the library of letters of Arnold Shoenberg. Having no ability to listen to his music, why I even opened the book is somewhat of a mystery, but in there I found some really hilarious material. In particular, a letter in which AS was excoriating some poor concertmaster/conductor for a recent performance of one of his works, thanking him at the end for never considering one of his compositions again in the future (mark this spot as recurring theme for future visitation). But then I found a letter in which AS made a very interesting argument that Beethoven's Sonatas were wonderful and all, but the greatest ones were 1, 2, and 3. This fired my curiosity. I went to Tower Records in the Valley, where I knew one of the guys at the register. He wasn't there that night, but another would be composer took the box from my hands and rang it up as $15 (instead of $55). Just like my friend had done many times. I thanked my lucky stars and left. Turned out Schoenberg was right. I was completely obsessed with 1, 2, and 3 for months. But they also opened up a whole new vista on Beethoven, and genius for me. This new piece was written the next year. Shows that Beethoven, though he chided himself for his lack of lyricism, was a genius of turning the usual rounds of the classic period into hypnotic, almost shamanic fits of gyromancy.