Xark!

Trumpet of the Living Dead

While I have more than a passing knowledge of most of the jazz canon from the 1950s to the 1980s, I never became much of a Chet Baker fan.  While I listened to his work with Gerry Mulligan, there was something about the . . . well . . . the lyricism of much of his playing that didn’t appeal to me.  Indeed, I always had something of an unearned snotty attitude about west coast jazz.  Nonetheless, it was with some excitement that I went to see the “revival” of Let’s Get Lost, the 1988 Bruce Weber documentary.  Evidently, in anticipation of a new print going to DVD for the first time this year, the film is making its rounds at art film houses, and it arrived in Nashville just this week.

My reactions to the film were wildly different than I had expected.  I had read that the film provided a poignant portrait of Baker, counterposing images of Baker as a young James Dean with a trumpet with contemporary (1987) images of an older Baker, ragged from a lifetime overuse of speedballs and alcohol.  While some question the veracity of the film’s narrative (i.e., the film makes it seem as if Baker’s life was in complete decline while, according to some accounts, his career was on something of a late upswing in the mid 80s), the accuracy of the narrative—hell, Baker himself--was the least of my concerns as I sat in the theater shaken by the awful physical transformation one sees between the young and older versions of him.

The Downside of Pleasure

I have recently been relearning a lesson about the complicity of pleasures, as well as the difficulties of resisting it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a strong supporter of public education.  In brief, my stance is that the more all of us are dedicated to our public school systems, the better we will collectively make them.  Rather than thinking about what is “good for us” as individuals, we owe it to each other to make the collective as good and strong as possible.  In this post, I want to bracket the question of whether my position is right or wrong (if you want to debate that question, you can go to the original post where I’ll be more than happy to engage you).  Instead, I want to focus here on the ways in which my reaction to my son’s recent decision to attend an “elite” private school for his university education points to the seductiveness of prevailing common sense, even when we are dedicated to resisting it.

Personal Politics and the Unwritten Future

Julien Temple's documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, about the career/life of Clash and Mescaleros’ frontman Joe Strummer is, to be generous, an engaging collection of sometimes rare video clips and new interviews that offers an adequate introduction to the singer and irritatingly dogmatic politico.  To be more frank, it—like The Filth and The Fury, Temple’s Sex Pistols’ documentary—is something of a cobbled together mess of new and vintage clips that leaves someone like me—a Clash fan from jump--fairly bored.  Not that I can’t find a way to talk about it; I can always do that; it’s more that I wouldn’t want to encourage you to go see it. 

About the documentary itself:  while it is no doubt a nice pleasure to watch documentary clips of the Clash throughout their career (nothing warms a middle aged heart more than mass mediated self-absorption), and while it was both informative and charming to learn (and see) Joe’s early life and upbringing as well as his life post-Clash (about which I knew little), the composition of the story telling was baffling. 

Temple tells Strummer’s story by interposing archive footage of Strummer with interview clips of a variety of unnamed friends sitting around campfires in different global locations. When you know the person being interviewed, and understand their connection to Strummer, this is charming.  When you don’t know the person and/or don’t know their connection, this is distracting and irritating (“Who is that bearded guy?” “Why is Johnny Depp being interviewed?”)

The Brilliant Pass at Large

Over at the Rosewater Chronicles, my friend Joshua Gunn authored an interesting essay that has haunted my thinking over the last week.  While the issue he raises is specific in his account to the academy and areas of academic expertise, it’s a question worthy of all groups of “specialists,” whether they be journalists, health care professionals, waiters, football players . . . hell, it’s worthy of your attention regardless of what you do.

In his post, Gunn questions the ways in which groups of academics often offer what he calls “the brilliant pass” to those who are most successful at their area of expertise.  Without naming names, Gunn points to a number of people in rhetorical and communication studies who are viewed as “brilliant” by others but who also have some decidedly reprehensible moral and ethical characteristics; they can be rude, liars, sexual predators, mean drunks, and so forth.  (Mind you, Gunn is not saying that all brilliant types are also unethical, only that we give a “pass” to the brilliant ones who are).  The problem, then, is that the larger group of admirers are all too willing to forgive misbehavior if we think the person committing it is “brilliant.”  To the degree that we as individuals help provide the brilliant pass, we are also complicit in their behavior. 

Too Easy

Heh.

In other news, Owen Wilson called his recent suicide attempt a "near death experience," and Brittney Spears reportedly called a glass of water she was given during a deposition, "wetty."

Glad to hear everyone's doing okay out there.

Being Number One at Peace

Last Tuesday night, my cousin invited me up to the beautiful Earlham College campus to attend a talk by Arn Chorn-Pond, a human rights leader and musician.  Chorn-Pond, the subject of the documentary The Flute Player, was speaking as part of a lecture series sponsored in part by a lecture series endowed by my cousin in honor of his mother.  I attended out of family obligation, then, but I left with a sense of humility and a need for reflection. 

Chorn-Pond, whom I am embarrassed to admit I did not know of prior to the lecture, is a Cambodian who, as a child, was separated from his family and put in a work camp with hundreds of other children.  After having been forced to take part in a number of killings (including those of family members), Arn was chosen, along with six other children, to learn to play revolutionary songs on the flute.  The Khmer Rouge soldiers brought in an older musician to teach the children; after one week, they determined that the children had learned enough, so they killed the old man and some of the other students.  Arn learned enough to play for the soldiers and, as a result, was one of fifty children to have survived the work camp.

Arn later escaped the soldiers and found his way to a refugee camp.  He was eventually adopted by an American family, and moved to the United States.  As an adult, he became a crusader for world peace and children's rights.   In addition, upon returning to Cambodia, he discovered that 90% of the "traditional" musicians of his generation had been killed, and he began a project to gather and record the remaining musicians.

Look at Me!

Faith Hill still doesn't get it.  Neither does the Tennessean.

As anyone with any interest in country music will remember, at the 2006 Country Music Association Awards, Faith Hill fumbled.  If you didn't see it, youtube did.  Here's the situation:  as the audience waited for the announcement of the winner of the Female Vocalist of the Year Award, cameras focused on all five of the finalists.  When the name "Carrie Underwood" was read, Faith Hill looked at the camera, mouthed the word "What!" and looked as if she were storming away from the camera. 

Over the next several days, while she was being condemned on-line and elsewhere, a number of people rushed to her defense, noting that Faith was clearly joking, that she had a wacky sense of humor in general.  While I initially thought she may have been serious,  I took her at her word that it was joke.  As far as I have seen from my seat in fandom, Faith Hill is a nice enough person with a good number of friends who speak highly of her ethics and behavior.  So, I do indeed trust that she was joking.

iWhiners

As I'm sure many of you have seen, there has been quite a bit of controversy in the iWorld over Apple's recent announcement that they were dropping the iPhone's price. Although it is true that this price cut comes not too long after the iPhone's debut, I'm also having trouble believing that people didn't "expect" a price cut. Yet, to read some of the reactions to the news, you'd think Apple had pulled off the biggest swindle since Springfield bought a Monorail.

After initially taking a hard line against the iWhiners, Apple has since loosened up a bit and offered to try to make things "right." I find myself agreeing with Steve Job's views that, while it is important to be considerate of one's existing customers, the technology game is played fast and being an early adopter of technology should not be for those with weak stomachs, small wallets, and giant tear ducts.

So, while I think that Jobs and Co. devised a brilliant apology package (store credit instead of a rebate) that shows why Apple is still at the top of their game, I believe the early adopter iWhiners should still be ashamed of themselves, and take a moment to think about the impact of their complaining.

All This, And Nothing More

Like the song, the watercooler debate about The Sopranos finale seems to be going on, and on, and on.... And not everyone appears to be happy -- either with the show's ending or the degree of debate itself. While HBO is encouraging active discussion, Wikipedia has suspended general editing on their Soprano's page (wonder why!). Everyone I've talked with seems to have a strong opinion about both the meaning of the fade-to-black ending and an even stronger opinion about whether or not it was a "good" ending. Judging by people's apparent investment in these questions alone, I think one would have to call the show's finale a success. Or not.

The Pleasures of Struggle

In the past several weeks, I have twice been involved in conversations with “church attending” friends. Both of these conversations took the same turn—a turn I’ve become very familiar with and a turn that leaves me feeling slightly irritated.  In both cases, I’ve held my tongue because I wasn’t sure that my irritation was warranted, and I wanted to process the ways in which these conversations may work as an indictment of my behavior. 

So, here’s how the conversation goes:  Somehow, the topic of spirituality or worship or church attendance will arise.  Either before or after I observe that I attend Mass on a regular basis, my partner in conversation says something akin to this: “Oh, I’ve joined a fill-in-the-blank-liberal church because they believe in all the same things that I believe in” (e.g., gay marriage, reproductive choice, female clergy).  It may be because I am Catholic and have beliefs which tend to run counter to standard Catholicim (and I am hence being defensive), but there’s something about this response that bothers me. It’s not that I think people shouldn’t be able to join any church for any reason—hell, of course, they should be able to believe whatever they wish and join or not join any group of their desire—it’s more that I don’t like the fact that the position my friends take assumes that it is morally superior to choose a church based on one’s politics.  Let me restate:  choose or don’t choose your form of worship based on your politics, but don’t act like its an obviously better moral position to make your choice on that basis; don’t make an assumption that would posit my own attendance at Mass as a morally inferior position, because I would argue that my position, while no better, is both spiritually and politically useful.

Exam Instructions

Apparently my current set of rules for exams is not thorough enough, guessing from the five exams out of 28  that I failed this weekend.  The instructions read:

Because this is a take-home exam, books may be used.  However, plagiarism rules still apply.  Should you copy phrases out of the book, you MUST put them within quotation marks and footnote the source.  The easier solution is simply to write everything in your own words – overusing quotations will be detrimental to your grade.  (I want to know you understand the material, not that you know where to find it in a book.) 

Answers must be in essay form.  (lists, flowcharts, interpretive dances, etc. will not be accepted)  You must tell me what questions you are answering, and you must answer the questions asked.  Please do not invent questions.

Plagiarism is, of course, defined in quite some detail in the syllabus.  But apparently not clearly enough.  So I propose the following rewriting:

Because this is a take-home exam, books may be used.  However, plagiarism rules still apply. 

1. Should you copy phrases out of the book, a magazine, the Internet, teh Internets, my lecture notes, another student's exam, or any other source of information, you MUST put them within quotation marks and cite the source. 
2. If you seriously footnote another student's exam, I will still fail you.
3. Invisible quotation marks do not count.
4. Citation must allow me to reference the quoted material
5. For a textbook, last name and page number is sufficient.
6. For other books, name, title, and page number are required.
7. For websites, you must give a specific web page address.  http://www.wikipedia.com is not sufficient.
8. Neither is "Google.com."
9. Under no circumstances is "Smith" an appropriate citation.
10. Extensive quoting will be detrimental to your grade.
11. Copying a webpage, putting quotes around it, and telling me where to find it will still be failed.
12. Copying the textbook section, putting quotes around it, and telling me where to find it will still be failed.
13. If you copy and paste text from a website and retain the formatting and/or internal links, don't ask how I figured it out.
14. Changing a couple words does not make it not a quote.
15. If you paraphrase a web page, you will fail. 
16. If you paraphrase a web page and manage to misrepresent its facts, you will be verbally slapped...and then failed.
17. "I didn't know where else to get my information" will not be accepted as an excuse.
18. Essay exams should be written like essays.
19. Exams must be written in a dialect of English that a 30-something year old, educated American can understand.  (Snoop Dog will fail my course.)
20. Answer the question asked. 
21. Do not answer questions from the review that are not on the exam.  You will fail.
22. Do not invent questions.  You will fail.
23. The Pirate Code does not apply to exams:  questions are NOT "more like guidelines than actual rules."  This means that when I ask about religious diversity in Colonial America, the essay should be primarily about religion, diversity (that means more than one), the colonial period (not the Civil War), and the geographic area of 1776 America (Canada is not in America.  Neither is Spain).
24. Do not proselytize through your exam.  You will be graded down for going off topic.
25. Do not accuse me of working black magic against the class in your exam.  You will be graded down for presenting opinion instead of fact.
26. Comparing your topic to an episode of Pinky and the Brain will not affect your grade one way or the other.
27. Confusing Pinky and Brain might.

Marshall on US attorneys

Joshua Micah Marshall, the guy out ahead of the mainstream media on reporting the US attorneys firing story:

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay.

Bruce Sterling: Dot-Green

Via William Gibson, here's Bruce Sterling writing in The WaPo on green economics for our "stricken world that bypassed the time for action":

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green. I preached that stuff for years. I don't have to preach it anymore, because it couldn't be any louder. Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away.

Could I return to my first paragraph for a second? That part about me and the crowd of Serbian radicals? Serbia may be the world's single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.

That's just how the world behaved with the climate crisis, too. The time for action isn't now. The time for action was 40 years ago. Today we live in a stricken world that bypassed its time for action. We have wreaked science-fiction levels of havoc on the unresisting carcass of Mother Nature. The real trouble is ahead of us.

So what's the good part? They never gave up around here. On the contrary: There's a certain vivid liveliness in the way they're scrambling and clawing their way out of yawning abyss. The food is great, the women dress to kill, and sometimes they even laugh and dance.

You don't have to predict the future when you live in it.

Oh, and FYI -- this is what's on Gibson's mind at the moment...

Of course, Gibson says this wasn't the vision he had. "Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial."

In a word: Eeeeeewww...

Here's a BBC headline that's sure to catch the eye, if only for the alternate ways it can be read: Victory In Dead Israeli Sperm Row.

So I read it, and it asks some interesting ethical questions, yada yada yada. But the truth is, I really can't get past the feeling that the whole situation is just vaguely... creepy. The science isn't really a big deal, but the human motivation behind using it makes my head hurt.

I mean, I'm old enough to understand the desire for grandchildren, but, uh... Hello, rabbi?