Monday, May 30, 2005

Ray, Monk, Elvis

On May 30, 2005, at 7:11 PM, bkmarcus wrote:Are you going to blog this?bk was referring to a series of emails I'd jotted to him while watching 2004's Ray. Sure, bk. Good idea. First I'll just copy in the most recent of the emails preceding that response:I know I recommended Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser to you as highly as I could, Clint production, '89, and told you some things about it.
Seeing Ray a time and 2/3, about to see more, is triggering two things in my head, one not surprising, the other totally unexpected.

In the '50s I knew Monk, the name and the music, and saw him several times, more off stage than on: riding the subway, etc.
I respected him more in theory than in fact. I bought his records but didn't listen to them that much, or that closely. I heard Bird and Diz, the rest was background, not noticed in detail.
When my friends went around saying Monk is the greatest genius of all time, I took it with the same grain of salt as when they said that Ornette Coleman was the greatest genius of all time. I even took my own similar pronouncements with at least some salt, no matter who the statement was canonizing.

Of course in those days my taste was forming. I swallowed much on recommendation, felt lots more reservations than I admitted to: didn't always like Bird's tone, or harmony, thought I heard mistakes. Same even with Miles.

Now though I can't find ANY of those supposed "mistakes." Whether my taste was in the right direction or not, it hadn't matured, wasn't seasoned. I wasn't experienced enough to "understand" all parts.
And of course I'm still not: no one ever is.

But by the time I saw the '89 Monk, in the '90s sometime, I was seeing and hearing and understanding much more than in the '50s.
And of course now if I don't like something (from any of those guys) I also don't mind thinking it's them, not me; but also don't mean it to be infallible.

Anyway Clint's movie emphatically makes the true point that I'm not surprised to recall in relation to Ray: Monk was the first (to get anywhere into the public light) to be 100% black and to refuse 100% to be anything but 100% black. A hero.
If we didn't like it, fuck us. If he starved, so be it.

Ray too. But I'll come back to that.

Now did Monk try a little extra hard? go a few steps out of his way? IMAGINE what "black" was and widen the envelope? Of course. It's not that any part of any such thing is objective or complete. 100% mental constructs. Connected however to actual living beings and real physical events and things.
Ray too. Anybody. (Woody Guthrie must have a little bit invented what an Oakie was.) (Forster is imagining Englishmen BEYOND his experience of them.)
In penetrating to the essence of blues and gospel, did Ray add anything? I don't say it as a fact, but I bet. Even just combining, so both essences show (related anyhow), is an adding.

More on any of that coming or not, here's the surprising thing: Hearing Ray in my head, I was suddenly also hearing Elvis!

(Not at all surprising, I was also hearing Billie!!! and Edith Piaf!) All three had utterly their own timbre, their own texture, and all three had supreme mastery of the gargled dying note.)

I emphasize a correlation there that you may know but which may not be obvious: Ray and Elvis were around in the '50s but Elvis didn't jump into the world light till TV, and Ray didn't jump into, well, national light until '57 or '58.
Elvis was on TV. Sure I saw that he was good, unique, had a real voice. Still I shrugged: I had my priorities set by then and important things didn't come to me via TV. or radio, juke boxes.
And that's the very thing about Ray: I heard him on the juke box in the West End. Count Basie / Joe Williams Roll 'Em Pete was also on the West End juke box. THAT I listened to when it came on, but that I already knew: inside / out. When Ray came on, guy's would say, Hey, listen to that. And I'd shrug, and agree: lukewarm.
You see it didn't come to me through Birdland: where I would have paid better attention.

So as Ray's hits followed, one after another, I was still always just hearing them on juke boxes and not really paying attention. Even when you lent me that CD I was at least partly listening to it as pre-labeled "pop."

Tina Turner's What's Love Got to Do with It is a great movie that shows what was happening grassroots in the '50s into the '60s. Ray does the same. (With the difference that I'd heard ALL of Ray's things and had heard almost none of hers) (that River Deep thing she did with Phil Specter excepted.)

Elvis' stuff I heard – in the background. It's only now I'm beginning to realize that he was really good.

And one way that he was really good he has absolutely in common with Ray (and with Leadbelly, and Woody ...): he could suit the English to his rhythm every which way without EVER stretching it, fucking it up, going for lame "rimes." (That's a metaphor; I don't mean he rimed anything, and though he did, that's still not what I mean.) There was never an artificial microsecond.

Even Billie had artificial microseconds, when you could tell she was stretching, pronouncing a word the way she thought it should be pronounced instead of the way she pronounced it. Very few, but not zero.

Neither Monk nor Ray ever had an artificial moment. That I heard.

But the real thing that Ray and Monk have in common: multiple rhythms, multiple voices: coming out of one man.

Macroinformation generators.
Some stuff from the earlier emails on Ray Charles and his outstanding movie/bio may also find its way here: en route to my jazz section at Knatz.com.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

The Reincarnation of Sacred Cows

I remember driving up the thruway to the Catskills to go skiing, anxious to be in a more oblique landscape after years of the horizontal/vertical of Manhattan. First glimpses of the Shawangunks got my blood going. Many times I'd noticed a particular mountain, the entire top visible from the road. I said to Hilary, "My next incarnation will be that mountain."

I was joking, of course. My background was Christian. Christians only have one reincarnation: first there's life, then there's resurrection. Pushed, the way Clarence Darrow is supposed to have pushed William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial, I think many a Christian would concede that perhaps the soul existed before the human was born. From two, if you admit three, why not keep counting? (How about life after resurrection?)

Even a day-to-day American knows that Hindus have sacred cows. Apparently in their scheme of things, cows are a spiritual stage further advanced than humans. You're born as a bug, you do well, obey bug laws, and you come back as a mouse; do well as a mouse, come back as a monkey ... Do bad as an untouchable and you come back as Hitler: or Bush. Anyone can see that I'm winging this, making up the particulars; I haven't researched any particular Hindu hierarchical taxonomy. Nevertheless, notice: there are traces of complementary thinking in Judaic tradition: God is perfect, angels are good, man is mixed, snakes are evil ... But mainly notice that Christians like things in twos: good and evil, God and Satan: no grays.

So: there's me, the mortal, then there will be me, the immortal: saved or damned.
There are Americans – goodand Muslim terrorists – bad.

Anyway, I never seriously bought reincarnation: till just now. Now I've had yet another rebirth. Now I'm certain that reincarnation is true religion. I don't know if I could become that old mountain, but maybe, if I'm good, I could become a cow.
All I had to realize is – what the physicists have been telling us – that there are infinite universes. See, if this universe is all there is (and if souls exist before they're born), then where's God getting the new souls from? A million years ago let's say there were a million people, maybe ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand. Now, there's what? six billion of us? about to be twenty billion of us? Do a million of us have souls and the rest not?
Of course if we're using graduated insect souls, and insects use graduated bacteria souls (and snakes use souls that got left back), then maybe it would work out: there are lots of bacteria to keep us supplied, lots of insects. But put that arithmetic aside for the moment so I can get to my point.
See, if the universe is a closed system, then nothing can come from outside that closed system. But if universes are infinite, then, ignoring transportation problems for the moment, the supply of whatever you need must also be infinite.
Point is, if universes are infinite then God could be having Judgment Day every day.
Here's how I now see it: and I'm certain I'm right: this time.
With infinite universes an infinite God can have infinite heavens and hells and earths. And with existence as it is, so famously, an illusion, any hell, heaven, or earth can be mislabelled: especially when it's the occupants doing the labeling.
Thus we say we live on earth. Wrong-O. We live in a hell. We've already lived elsewhere, elsewhen. And we've been judged. And damned. God had us reborn here: a hell in which illusion is the rule, in which choice is illusion, communication is illusion. We had our choices, elsewhere, elsewhen: and we made the wrong choices.

Still that model needs modification. If this is a hell, mislabeled an earth, then how come for some, for me, sometimes, it's a heaven? If everyone here is damned, then where did Jesus come from? Do we have that wrong too? Was Jesus also damned? An illusion? An illusionist?
Where did Ivan Illich come from? I'm not sure about Jesus, but I know that Illich was a saint: wasn't illusion, was capable of communication (at least some of the time).
And where did I come from? What am I doing here? Surely I can't be damned too!

No. That's exactly it. That's the whole point. This "Earth" isn't an earth, it's a hell, with some glimpses of heavens. But it isn't a permanent hell. It's a further testing ground: just how damned are we?
God sends a Jesus into this hell: to see what the semi-damned will do with him. Even we know the answer there. Jesus being here didn't prove that he was damned. Maybe devils can't get into a heaven, but angels can certainly get into a hell: temporarily: the way the lab demi puts a blue dye into the clear liquid: to see what happens to it in that specific environment. (It's seldom the dye that's being tested; it's the environment that's being charted.)
Maybe the saint is being tested. Maybe God isn't quite sure how much of a saint he is. Put him among devils for thirty years, forty years, sixty years: see what he does. (Like Hollywood script writers: take a guy, kick him in the balls, see what he does.)

Out of an infinity, out of an infinity of infinities, God took an earth: nice atmosphere, nice oceans, nice forests, nice diversity of species ... Then he seeded it with the damned from some other earths, making it a hell. Then he poured in more damned, watched the air go bad, the oceans fill with garbage, the forests fall down, get chopped. One proof that the population is damned is that while this is happening, the damned publish newspapers, fill the electro-magnetic spectrum with self-advertisement, tell lie after lie, and give themselves sterling marks: IQ tests, Academy Awards, Nobel Prizes ...
But each saint who appears, however human, however flawed, gets the same treatment: and it doesn't include any prizes.This post will eventually be placed at Knatz.com, in the Society section, probably along with other Judgment Day pieces. This first draft did not put things in an ideal order, and certainly didn't include all my thoughts: not even just yesterday's. But it's a start. I'll work on it more here before even more serious work begins there.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Celestial Trial

My favorite example of human justice attempting objectivity is the Indonesian Celestial Trial. Where secular justice fails to satisfy a disputant a celestial trail may be appealed for. Of two, both disputants must agree. The secular courts must also agree that they're out of their depth. The dispute repairs to a pair of towers. Each tower has a hut at its top. Each hut has a hole in its floor, pierced by a runged ladder from the ground. Each disputant climbs his separate tower, each in hailing distance of the other. Families may gather on the ground.
The huts are constructed so that an adult Indonesian has no room to stand erect or lie at length. The "floor" is too narrow to sit at one's ease. Any sitting position must be constantly shifted: to distribute the stresses elsewhere. One may stand erect only by standing on the ladder, one's trunk thrust up into the hut, the rungs biting the soles of one's feet. Via a rope one's support group may send up beverages of one's choosing. What foods may ascend are monitored.
Thus the towers are like crosses that one is not nailed to and that both disputants may survive.
Both disputants have the right to descend from his tower at any time: but descent means that you lose: heaven is declaring the other guy in the right.

My description reflects my memory of Piers Anthony's presentation of the system in one of his Geodyssey novels (Shame of Man, I believe). (He's careful in his research; I'm trusting my memory, hoping you at least get the basic idea.)

Knatz.com refers to the Celestial Trial in a couple of places. In particular Knatz.com issues pk's challenge to any and all social institutions. You say you serve this or that ideal? I say you don't. Ascend the towers with me, and we'll see who gives up first.

Any visitor who's spent more than a few minutes at IonaArc may well know that typically I use it to sketch a quick draft of something for Knatz.com: just as my other blogs sketch drafts for my other domains. Here the theme is already establish at Knatz.com; I add an IonaArc post to signal my intention of developing the Celestial Trial further, giving it its own section at Knatz.com/Society/.

Monday, May 23, 2005

As Quiet as the Woods

The city slicker walks into the woods. What does he hear? Nothing! What does he see? Not much.
Trees. The trees are rooted, can't hide.
The wood dweller walks through the woods. What does he hear? Why, everything: except for a local envelope of silence which moves with him. If he's still, the envelope shrinks to just beyond his skin.
Bwana goes tramping into Africa? Even the lions shut up for the moment.
But once the city slicker has gotten back into his car, roared off, once the wood dweller is still, or, in his own niche where the critters know his habits, normal wood-life carries on.

Oh, it isn't just a man that will shut things up temporarily. The gallinules, the coots, squawk away: until they see a big alligator sneaking up on them. The shadow of the hawk will silence the song birds.
And it isn't just woods: plunge your head into tall grass, cannonball into the water ... For a moment, not a cricket will chirp, the fish go invisible.

So: danger quiets things down (and we know of nothing more dangerous than man). (Always temporarily.)
But danger is merely the most familiar thing that will silence any species (and most whole ecologies, temporarily): any traumatic experience will do it. And trauma can issue from truth, from art, from revelation, as well as from danger.
After the Beethoven adagio the audience is silent: the more cultured, the more silent (and it isn't just convention).
At the Temple the priests babbled all the time. When Jesus spoke they went silent. Then they roared.

The bigger the truth, the longer the silence that will follow.

I intend to take the balance of this into more than one illustration, more than one type. I'll install a "permanent" module at Knatz.com, the Society section, and add examples as I like. I intend to offer examples from my own experience – pk speaks, the room goes silent; then, gradually, resumes its babble: about diapers, about prices, about the playoffs, the election ... For the moment though I'll conclude this launch with a classic example (important to pk's own work):Abelard, soon after the turn of the 12th Century, said that ordinary things were real: tables, spoons, you and me. Silence. Then Roar! Then he got his balls cut off for him.
By the 20th, 21st Century we think we agree. But that's because we don't really know how to think, can't address what's really at issue, are blind to how revolutionary the statement remains (and how moot!)
Exactly as we remain blind to what we quote from Jesus.
(Or Darwin, Frazer, Freud, Godel, Bateson ...)


The home for future versions of this one will be K/society/As Quiet as the Woods.

IonaArc Update

A blog is a handy way to draft and post something quickly, without much fuss. A domain is a much better permanent library. Do you want your library organized chronologically? Or thematically? Alphabetically? Blogs are chronological; domains can suit any organization.
One by one, a few by a few, I'll find a pk domain place for all but the most ephemeral of my blog entries. Most IonaArc posts belong at Knatz.com, IonaArc being the latter's adjunct.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Naming Cancers

Kylie Minogue apparently has breast cancer: so young, so cute.
For a few years now, especially during the Tour de France, we've been reminded that Lance Armstrong had testicular cancer: his recovery heroic.
So tell me: if Kylie has "breast cancer," how come Lance didn't have "testicle cancer"? And if Lance had "testicular cancer," how come Kylie doesn't have "breasticular cancer"?
Shouldn't these doctors have an English teacher take them over the knee?
And if the doctors should be spanked, how about the computer people?

And, since the English teachers did nothing of the kind, shouldn't someone take the English teachers over their knee?
No. Just don't hire them for anything serious. (Uh, pk, we already don't hire them for anything serious.)

Steroid Police

Now major market US sports want to police themselves: for steroid use. That's like Junior Johnson, while he's still a bootlegger, asking the judge to let him, from then on, watch his own speed over the Appalachian night roads: revenuers in terrified pursuit. Why, Junior: seems to us that that's what you've been doing all along: watching your own ass.
Not that pk trusts the judge, or the public, or the people: which doesn't mean I trust MLB to police itself better in the future than it did in the past.
And even if it does better this time, everyone watching differently from before, that doesn't mean that it deserves the chance. When the institution is caught cheating, that should be the end of the institution. People still want spectator sports? Fine. Let them rebuild them from the ground up.
I believe in evolution through extinction.
Which does not mean that I assume that generationX is better than generationW: or better than generationA.
I do think it would be better for all to commit suicide than for kleptocracy to prevail another single day.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Jocko Justice

Michael Jackson is on trial. Again. It's for messing with little boys. Again.
...

IonaArc posts tend to be first drafts of new Knatz.com modules. I've moved this post to my K. Society folder where development continues.

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Catch & Release

The last few weeks I've been once again fishing nearly every day, catching and mostly releasing a nice quantity of bass. I've kept a few. Yesterday I kept an eighteen-incher (for a neighbor) (having already released a couple of nineteen-inch or so fish. The other day, wading, deliberately having left my stringer in the car, a shellcracker took my #12 popper and fought so hard I though for sure I had a lunker bass. Having already released near a dozen nice bass during that wade, I decided to keep that dynamite shellcracker. Minus my stringer, I improvised a tether to my equipment belt via the long aluminum hook disgorger with monofilament lanyard my late tackle repairman and fishing buddy had given me. A good bass has a mouth you can reach your arm inside of; a good bluegill is much trickier going. But back at the beach both shellcracker and bluegill disgorger were gone. He worked himself loose from my belt. Good for him. But could he have shook free of the monofilament, alligator-chip, and 8" of aluminum? Sorry fish. Killing you to eat you is one thing; just killing you is murder.

Lots of fisherman, more and more, practice catch and release these days. It wasn't always so. Once upon a time if you could kill something, you killed it. Hungry? Drive a herd off the cliff. Cut yourself a nice filet, and the hell with the rest. Intelligence in mankind evolved so that women, once pregnancy became dangerous, could figure out where babies came from, and say No. (Thank you, Leonard Shlain.) Then males developed intelligence too: to figure out how to get laid. Our intelligence is related to seducing each other; not to any other form of survival. Everything else is a pose: a preposterous pose.
Ah, but we seem to be at a new crossroads: one in which we had damn well better develop other forms of intelligence. I don't give us good odds; I do grant that it's possible. So now we castigate those who just rip the hook out and throw the bloody fish back to list to one side and go brain dead: while we declare War on Terrorism, or any other kind of war we can dream up so we can continue to waste our unfair share of the world's energy.

Personally, I no longer care how many we kill: so long as I can spend another few years wading with my fly rod, with my bass rod, and feel something non-civilized at the other end of my line.

Now: my poor shellcracker. For one thing, if the bluegill-shaped sunfish can get themselves turned sideways, you think you've hooked Moby Dick. Or, my shellcracker was a virgin. A bass gets caught, he fights for his life. No one has made him go to school, to hold still for the doctor, to answer a draft notice, to halt when told to Halt. But once a bass has fought for his life, lost, and then found himself swimming around again, maybe with a sore mouth, but a sore than may heal eventually, maybe he won't fight quite so hard the next time he feels himself hooked.
The cow is herded here and here. One time she's prodded into a cattle car, then finds herself in another barn, another meadow ... Why should she imagine that one time she'll step up the ramp, and Wham! Right in the forehead.

So once upon a time you knew the size of the bass from the size of the fight: until he leapt, started his aerobatics. Then you could see him direct. If he was really really big, he was a she: only the females grow lunker-size. Now I'll sometimes get more fight from a twelve-incher than from a sixteen-incher. I've caught twenty-five inch bass that only gave me one good pull. Maybe she's old and tired. Maybe she's just spawned, and is weak. Or maybe she's been caught and released a dozen or two times. Maybe she's learned to be like the cow, expecting no worse than another new barn.

The cop rounds up the bloods, makes them stand against the wall. These guys have been rounded up before and before. Arrest one. He knows he'll be back on the street in hours: knows it like the cow knows it will just be another cattle car.
Ah, but not long ago no black would cooperate in holding still for any cop. Once upon a time no black was detained: and still retained the integrity of his body parts.
I say "black" 'cause it's familiar: even today. (For the longest time "cop" meant white cop.) But the same applied for Saxons detained by Normans, for Picts or Celts detained by Saxons ... for Tutsi detained by Hutu ... Would you obey orders if they came from 18,000 Muslims suddenly descended on Fairfield?

Once upon a time chances were better than even that you weren't about to be eaten alive among your fellow BigEnders. But what if you turned the path and there was a LittleEnder?

It's a funny film we're in. I wonder if we'll ever get to see much more than the Evening News worth of it.(PS What I said above reminds me of a trout I once brought near hand after less of a battle than I'd have liked. I was just slipping the net under his lip to guide him into sure captivity when he realized that the net wasn't something natural to the stream, that whatever little thing it was that was annoying him actually had him in mortal danger. That trout looked up. That trout saw me! That trout about-faced from the landing net, snapped my tippet like he had not yet begun to fight, and bolted for the darkest part of the deepest hole. That was the first time I ever realized that fish don't always realize that they're caught. They may not fight hard till they do.)

Saving Lives

Seat Belts Save Lives. Oh, goody.

See? They've got us again.

Living things are programmed to live. To replicate. To do whatever they can to go on living. That's given. Reason is irrelevant.

Social man has stacks of traditions where he who saves a life is respected for it. We have myths where he who saves beaucoup lives is worshipped: Jesus, to whit. Social man also hedges his bets: the Chinese hold that if you save someone's life you're thereafter responsible for them; Twain wrote a series of stories in which the savior rues the day.

Overall though, the savior is respected. Jesus is told to have told of the Good Samaritan. The story needs some translation, a few notes: it was like the union striker saved the scab.

So if a government goes around saving lives, that government must be good: No?

Whoever first thought of rigging some sort of restraining straps around the driver of a racing car was certainly trying to reduce the risk of injury to the driver. It was probably the driver himself, trying to save his own life – or the driver's mechanic (dependent, partner, employee), maybe the driver's sponsor ... I remember hearing I think it was Sterling Moss talk about feeling at one with the car. Hey: I'm a mystic too. I couldn't wait to drive a tuned car with all systems tight, strapped in. Just weld me to the frame. How many logics are bridged, how many of the bridges burned, when the government tells you to Buckle Up – or else?

I rode my first motorcycle around 1965, bought one soon after, made sure I bought a good helmet with it. But in 1965 it was up to me when I wore it, if I wore it. There were times where in my judgment I was safer without it. You hear less, see a great deal less, with one on. Within a year the state was telling me I must wear one; or not ride: wear one under all circumstances. (I loved Cycle Magazine's report of the guy who thereafter wore his helmet on his knee. The cop who stopped him didn't get it, made him switch.) (Later he fell and hurt his knee!)

R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii calculates that in the twentieth century alone, states murdered about 162,000,000 of their own subjects. This figure doesn’t include the tens of millions of foreigners they killed in war. In Vietnam the United States saved untold people by dropping napalm on them.

What's going on? To me the answer is clear. I want to emphasize two aspects of my answer.
  1. Predators' Stalking Blind
    When bigots want to kill niggers they dress as Christians, burn crosses. Their true purpose is disguised: to their prey, to themselves.
  2. Scared Shitless
    James Burke explained, traced patterns, like doctors' non-accountable authority, to the Napoleonic Wars.
    Napoleon took a census, counted so many million Frenchmen. The emperor of Austria, the kings of England, of Italy, had taken no census. They had no idea how many subjects they had. The question had never come up. Therefore, Napoleon's count, whatever the number, scared them all shitless. It was a number threatening a non-count. Thereafter, all states have tried to have as many citizens as they could manage: to scare the shit out of their competitors.
    No account need be taken of the population's health, viability ... just its sum.
    (Which doesn't mean that the same government won't kill the Cheyenne or the headhunters or the Jews or the anarchists by the carload if it's running a different program for the moment.)


PS bk responds with a few arguments that seat belts cost more lives than they save. Maybe he'll add those comments himself. If not, I'll do something parallel eventually. Meantime, know: just 'cause you hear it a million times don't mean it's so.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Time

Woody Allen was wrong. Time isn't so that everything doesn't happen at once; everything doesn't happen at once so that the magician can place his assistants intricately enough that once the illusion is orchestrated, no assistant will remember that he's in a trick, a mechanism in the illusion.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

The Faith of Churches

The Greek who wrote "Count no man happy till he's dead" was counted as wise. Wait till all the evidence is in. If the guy is happy the day before he dies he may still be unhappy by the time he dies. Apparently only the last condition counts.
This wisdom is not evenly applied throughout society. We are told that God is wise. How can we tell? We haven't seen his last act yet. Ditto loving. Ditto all possible attributes. Unless Nietzsche is right! IF God is dead, THEN maybe we could say something and have it be less ludicrous (IF we knew what the dead God had done).

Societies are based on faith, not evidence, that certain things are true. The church is based on a faith that members of the church can discern the sacred from the profane, god from devil, good from evil ... that there is a divine and that members of the church can know something of it ... that some ritual gives the members special abilities. Before, I didn't know shit from Shinola; ah, but now that I've eaten the body of Christ, drunk his blood ...

Little Einstein is sent to school. The school assigns Little Einstein a geometry teacher, a physics teacher. The society that made the school is confident that the geometry teacher and the physics teacher will be competent to understand what Little Einstein says. Wrong.Added:
Ah: then can they understand what little Betsy says? little Paul?
I don't believe anyone is competent to understand what anyone says.