Priorities

The shortest answer to the question, “What is existence?” for humans anyway, must be “prioritizing.” Our priorities affect every action, sense, belief and decision in our life. A cursory glance at this blog reveals much about my priorities. A quick comparison of blogs on this site will demonstrate how priorities vastly differ between people.

Recently, I have been asking people “What is one movie you think everyone should see, and why?” I am curious to infer how their answers reflect their priorities. I have mostly given up on any notion that the movies recommended are actually worth seeing, especially since the first one mentioned was Waking Life, which turns out to be an absolutely terrible movie in which, for the most part, a bunch of stoners talk gibberish. Actually, I do want to see Brain Donors, which apparently stars John Turturro whom I love. Someone dared say The Passion of the Christ, to which I am proud so say I responded with only a (fake) smile.

Recurring factors pop up in determining the movie to choose. The most common are the genre-defining movie, the lesson movie, the favorite movie and the pop-culture reference movie.

My must-see movie choices usually fall within the genre-defining category. My guess is that this tends to signify someone whose primary interest is in the medium of movie making itself. My answer to the question was Raging Bull, mostly because it is the most perfect movie I have ever seen. The action, acting, dialogue, screenplay, choreography, cinematography, sound, directing and editing are all unsurpassed. The only other movie I can think of which contains all these qualities is Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Initially, my claim was going to be that I’m not a person who necessarily values a lesson movie. Those people tend to prioritize things like truth and right and wrong; ideas that, according to my perception, tend to be exaggerated social control mechanisms, so I don’t give them much credence. But interestingly, both movies I just named are about integrity and trust/mistrust, things I contemplate and esteem above most other things, so perhaps I am bullshitting myself.

The genre-defining people (and others, actually) generally follow up my initial question with “In what genre?” I think this is a valid question. The one comedy I think everyone should see is Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. This is a movie pop-culture reference lovers will name. People that choose movies for this reason are trendy, social, extroverted creatures. Since I am not what you’d call sociable and have never been hip to the whole pop culture thing, that is not my reason for choosing it. In my opinion, Holy Grail is the movie by which all other comedies must be judged. It literally redefined the genre, as nothing like it came before it (except of course the greatest television show of all time, Monty Python’s Flying Circus). It contains every style of humor, culls a laugh at least every 30 seconds and only gets funnier upon repeated viewings. Sure, Monty Python’s Life of Brian has the most bizarre animated interruption and greatest ending of any movie ever made, but the pacing isn’t quite as good. Besides, it’s the sequel that would have never happened if it weren’t for the success of Holy Grail.

That said, Holy Grail is my second favorite comedy. My favorite comedy is The Big Lebowski. But my opinion is that many other factors must be taken into consideration besides it being your favorite. There’s something shallow about wanting all others to see your favorite movie. It’s fun to share things you like with others, but is it really that important or essential? I encourage my friends to see my favorite movies, but they’re not for everybody. I include Tombstone and the Lone Wolf and Cub series as personal favorite movies, and I can give no reason why anyone else should see them.

My sister’s choice was Life Is Beautiful. This is a very interesting choice. It is my sister’s favorite movie, and a unique blend of comedy, tragedy, fantasy and reality. It’s a lesson movie, ultimately about the protective role of delusion in providing hope and meaning to an otherwise unbearable existence. It’s a movie appropriate for all people of all ages. God damn, I think my sister has given me the best answer so far, but I would love to hear others.


Incidentally, a similar question, “What is one song you think everyone should hear, and why?” could be asked, but the answer is so obvious (Koko, by Charlie Parker, because it’s incredible and it single-handedly changed American music) that I dare not ask the question because the ludicrous answers of others and the inevitable question “Who’s Charlie Parker?” would only strengthen my hatred of humanity.

Justice

“Friend” is an idea that cannot be properly defined. I suppose I consider the people I care about and want to spend time with to be my friends. I don’t know why I care about them or want to spend time with them. Some friends I’ve known for years, and others I’ve known for hours. Truth be told, I can give no reason whatsoever for liking these people. Somehow, it is much easier to reconcile liking someone else for no reason than it is to accept that another likes me for no reason.

About a year ago, my friend Phillip Greenlief scolded me for being overly-concerned with whether others like me. Sometimes I do struggle with the fear that nobody likes me, but more than that, I struggle with accepting the reality that there is no justice in this world. The crux for me is not so much that I care about other’s opinions of me but the fact that if others don’t value my opinions, there can be no justice. For what is justice if not having the world behave according to our opinions?

Besides being an extremely likeable guy, Phillip is possibly the greatest saxophone player alive today. (You can find more about him and his music at his website at www.evandermusic.com.) If there were any justice in the world, Brittany Spears would be an unemployed stripper living on the streets and whoring herself out to support her drug addiction and Phillip would be rich and famous. But alas, there is no justice as my opinions are essentially inconsequential.

I am a self-reliant person. That means I don’t put a lot of stock in other’s opinions. I’m the kind of person that can never cheat on a test because if I don’t know the answer I sure as hell don’t think the idiot sitting next to me is going to know it either. I’d much rather make a mistake on my own terms than do something right on another’s. In order to maintain integrity, I feel it is very important to speak and act only according to my opinions without allowing myself to be unjustifiably swayed by the opinions of others.

My opinion, regardless of its validity, is important because it is mine. It is what makes me unique. Opinions can be altered and changed by others and myself, but they are the only means by which I can identify myself. (Memory and perception both fall under the category of “opinion.”) Opinions are the only thing I truly own. I am the sum total of my opinions. Ergo, the only way in which I can share myself with others is by expressing my opinion. How I express my opinions is called my personality or style, depending on the context. I am continually obsessed with attempting to express myself in a way which will allow others to successfully understand my opinions. That is why I spent so many years playing music, and that’s why I have this blog now.

Because I am my opinions, it seems reasonable that others must value my opinions if they are to like me. In reality, valuing my opinion would not bring about friendship but could enable my conception of justice to be realized. There are many people who continually support and value me regardless of my opinions. In fact, they apparently like me for no reason whatsoever. I am more honored and humbled to get a note from someone reminding me that they are my friend than I am frustrated and chagrined at failing to be understood. Others value my opinions because they like me, and not the other way around. My opinions and how I express them have an influence on whether I am liked, but there is a gestalt at work, whereby I am greater than the sum of them, at least in the eyes of my friends. That’s pretty awesome, but until my opinions are valued, there will never be justice, and that blows. I have no power to coerce another into valuing my opinions. Nor would I want to; that would imply that another could do the same to me. All I am empowered to do is value my own opinions and attempt to express them.

Enough of me and my existential tangents. To truly enjoy reading this post, every time I wrote “opinion,” change it to “onion.” By the way, this post began as an attempt to write about my friend Kris. Oops.

Friends

My friends and immediate family are the only things in this existence that I value. But whereas my parents, brother and sister are pretty much stuck with having to like me, my friends have willingly chosen to do so. This might not seem a big deal to many people, but it is all-important to me.

I’m not the kind of person whom others generally go out of their way to hang out with. Hell, even my friends rarely call me- I have to call them. I’m never the center of attention or the leader of a group. I am not good at being cheery and appropriate. I’m not affable. I loathe small-talk. I’m not going to pretend to like you. Let’s face it- I’m not an easy friend. I’m fiercely independent, overly-opinionated, bizarrely passionate (I recently broke into tears while futilely trying to convince a friend that Yoko Ono is a brilliant singer), inappropriately hyper, stingingly critical, annoyingly honest, offensively perverse, incredibly incredulous, frustratingly logical and undeniably selfish.

And yet, occasionally, someone chooses to befriend me.

Understandably, I’ve never been a person with a lot of friends. I went to an elementary school with 18 kids in my class, but none of them would have qualified as anything other than acquaintances. Growing up, my friends were imaginary and my sister. It wasn’t until I moved after sixth grade that I first starting hanging out with peers. Throughout junior high, Bryan, Erik and I were inseparable- well except that Erik and I became jealous of each other because we both wanted to be Bryan’s “best” friend. But after the beginning of tenth grade, when Bryan got himself expelled, I spent most of high school alone and confused. I’ve often dwelled on the fact that I had no friends then, but in truth, I did know a couple of great people and even had a girlfriend. It’s only recently that I’ve realized that during that time I consciously avoided associating with the majority of my peers in order to protect myself from being “corrupted” by them.

It wasn’t until the second semester of my sophomore year in college that, for the first time in my life, I met a group who let me into their clique and seemed to enjoy me just being me. A few years after that, I met another group of people with whom I became extremely close. Around 2000, much of my surprisingly large web of friends and I decided to leave Iowa behind. I spent six years in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I hardly made any friends. Were it not for that experience, I might have never realized that living in a great place and pursuing one’s dreams were not nearly as important as having friends nearby.

I moved to Portland to be close to old friends, and upon moving here I immediately made new ones. I feel blessed to be surrounded by friends. In two days, I will be spending Thanksgiving with a few of the people I am most thankful for.

In the coming weeks, I plan on using this blog to try to show my appreciation by sharing my thoughts on and stories about my closest friends. Don’t worry- I won’t use last names.

Myths

I’ve been reading a lot of Greek mythology lately. I first got into Greek myths when I was in fifth grade, but my parents demanded that I stop reading them so as not to be corrupted by their pagan messages. In my upbringing, everything that was not my parent’s particular brand of Christianity was WRONG. As a result, I wasted a lot of my life believing a lot of bullshit. There’s a very good reason why I have such a strong dislike for religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Followers of a religion do not have to think. In fact, they should not think. All the answers to everything in existence are given to them by their religion. Everything told them by their religion is unquestionably true. Any part of a religion which seems untrue, contradictory or does not make sense must be believed anyway on what Christians call “faith.” Faith is the noun form of the adjective “gullible.”

Faith is an evolutionary survival adaptation. Humans have been wired to believe every optimistic story they hear and convince themselves that life is worthwhile. Without faith, we would all delve into hopelessness and despair and our species wouldn’t last very long. I guess my lack of faith is evidenced in that I am the only person I know who thinks that all humans should stop procreating so that we will die off and return balance and stability to the planet.

The extent of the power of faith is frankly amazing. As demonstrated by the Placebo Effect, faith does work. The Placebo Effect is a phenomenon in which a sick person will be healed about 33% of the time if they simply believe they will be healed. Therefore, if you give a person a tic-tac and tell them it will cure them and they believe it, there’s a 33% chance that the tic-tac actually will cure them. That is why so many healers can make so much money doing stupid stuff like pretending to pull maladies through the skin of gullible people. The self-fulfilling prophecy is another case of faith in action. Faith increases as it proves itself effective, adding fuel to its powers. The degree to which a person with faith will believe the most absurd statement or scenario is without compare. One can point out the most obvious flaws, inconsistencies and impossibilities of a religion ad naseum and a person with faith in that religion will be absolutely unable to even perceive those failings. Beyond refusing to understand anything contrary to their religion, faith actually renders them incapable of understanding.


Let me demonstrate:

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is a story of a great flood which covers the earth. This story was largely plagiarized from the Assyro-Babylonian epic of Atrahasis. According to calculations I made about 15 years ago using the genealogies listed in the book of Genesis, this occurred 930 years after God created Adam: the same year that Adam died (the Islam version of the story varies somewhat but I’m not familiar with it). (Because much of the goal of the Old Testament was to unite various nomadic tribes by giving them a common history and religion, its genealogy is so precise that the only unknown time period in it is how long the Jewish people were supposedly enslaved by the Egyptians. Unsurprisingly, the beginning of the earth according to the Old Testament coincides with the invention of writing.) Assuming a “cubit” (the length from the tip of your finger to your elbow) equals 18 inches, the Hebrew Ark was approximately 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet tall (almost half as long as the Titanic). It was made with a wood frame which was covered with reeds and then coated with tar. Then it was filled with 8 people (Noah was a spry 500 years old), at least 2 of every bird and animal plus extras for food and doused by rain for 40 days, 24 hours a day.

Supposedly enough rain fell to cover the entire planet. But since God apparently didn’t know about most of the planet when the story was written, I’ll grant that only the entire Middle East, which is a desert, needed to be underwater. After floating around for 150 days after the rain stopped, the Ark landed on Mt. Ararat, in Turkey. Mt. Ararat is 16,854 feet high today, but since it is a volcano, it may have been taller of shorter 930 years after the earth and everything in it was created. Irregardless, Mt. Ararat was a tall mountain.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine Mt. Ararat was 15,500 feet high (I use that number because there is a point at that height where many say the Ark landed). At that height, it would have had to have rained almost 400 feet per day, which is about 17 feet an hour or about 3 inches a minute.

According to the internet, Guinness’ book of World Records says that the heaviest recorded rainfall occurred in Guadeloupe in 2005, where 1.5 inches fell in one minute, and the most rain that has ever been recorded falling over a 24 hour period was 6 feet in La Reunion Island. In order to raise the water level of the entire Middle East 3 inches a minute, basically another ocean from outer-space would have had to have landed on it. This would obviously have crushed not only the Ark, but everything else in the region.

Despite the fact that nothing in the entire biblical flood story is remotely believable, millions if not billions of people not only believe it, they insist that it really happened. And because of the phenomenon of “faith,” any attempt to dissuade them from believing such blatant hogwash will largely fall on deaf ears....

Cartoons, etc.

When I was a kid, the purpose of my existence was threefold: to watch cartoons, pretend I was a superhero and play with my G.I. Joe action figures. Everything else in life was incidental. I woke up at 5:00 am every Saturday for my weekly cartoon marathon, but my two favorite cartoons, Transformers and G.I. Joe, were on after school five days a week. Every day at 3:30, school would get out, and mine was the second bus stop (after Shelby Green). The bus would drop me off at my driveway at approximately 3:46 every day, whereupon my sister and I would run down the drive, into the house, up the stairs and into my parents’ bedroom. At the foot of their bed is where the black and white 13” television was. As quickly as possible, I’d turn the set on and rotate the top knob to “U.” The bottom knob always stayed on 17, which was Fox, the only UHF station we got.

If we had made good time, there would still be a commercial or two before the show that had started at 3:30 came back on. We were resigned to always miss the first half of that program, which was fine in the early days, because it was either The Addam’s Family or Thundercats, neither of which I particularly liked. My two favorite shows took up the 4:00 and 4:30 timeslots.

It can be said without question that Transformers was the better show. A fundamental problem with G.I. Joe was that, since they couldn’t show blood, basically nobody could aim. Since Transformers didn’t bleed and if they got shot they could just get fixed by the mechanic, Transformers had a lot more violent action. Transformers also had weird electronic voices, which were mostly cool but occasionally annoying. The major flaw of Transformers, I thought, was Bumblebee, an annoying yellow Volkswagon who talked incessantly. Almost as annoying was Starscream, the airplane with the chalkboard voice that was always messing up the bad guys’ plans my trying to mutiny.

In both the G.I. Joe and Transformers universes, the bad guys were decidedly more interesting than the good guys. All the Autobots, the good Transformers, transformed into vehicles, whereas the Decepticons, the bad Transformers, turned into all kinds of interesting stuff- my favorite being Soundwave, who turned into what we used to call a “Ghetto Blaster” and contained four cassette tapes which turned into a robot, two Pterodactyls and a dog. The leader of the Decepticons, Megatron, turned into an awesome gun, while the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, turned into a lame semi.

G.I. Joe tried very hard to make all of their characters annoying. Both the good guys and the bad guys consisted of a bunch of bumbling idiots. The plots usually consisted of the bad guys, who were terrorists, messing up their own plans due to their extreme incompetence. The best good guy on the cartoon was Lowlife, and both he and I had a crush on Zartan’s sister Zarana. Watching G.I. Joe was often frustrating because I came up with way better plots and dialogue with my toys in my bedroom than they did on the show.

G.I. Joe action figures and vehicles were easily my favorite toys. Except for my birthday and Christmas, I had to buy my G.I. Joes myself. I studiously saved my $2 a week allowance and the “flag points” from the G.I. Joe boxes, which you could send in for mail-order special offers. I spent countless hours devising plots, drawing maps, choreographing fight scenes and creating dialogue for my G.I. Joes. I wanted to be just like the ninja Stormshadow, and later, Zartan’s brother Zandar, when I grew up. Stormshadow was bloodbrothers with Snake Eyes, who was one of the few cool good guy Joes. On the cartoon, Snake Eyes didn’t talk, but he did in the comic books. When I played with the toys I always reconfigured which were the bad guys and which were the good guys to put more of the cool characters on the winning side (keeping the twins Tomax and Xamot as bad guys so as to give the bad guys a chance), although they did eventually make this easier for me to justify by making Storm Shadow a good guy in the comics and toys. I also beefed up both sides by adding my Star Wars action figures to the G.I. Joe universe. Around fifth grade, after my brother’s friend Steve made me aware of what really happens in war, I completely abandoned the intended premise of G.I. Joe, and in my world Beach Head, Snake Eyes, Stormshadow, Main Frame, Zandar and Zarana were a team of spies who gathered information on every other action figure I had, only killing when necessary.

I didn’t have very many Transformer toys, but I did spend a lot of time making Transformers out of Legos. When the idiots who ran FOX decided to switch the line-up so that Transformers came on at 3:30, I was extremely upset. At my mom’s suggestion, I wrote a letter of complaint to the station, but to no avail. From then on, I could only watch half of Transformers during the school year, and I was forced to sit through a half-hour of Thundercats, in which every character was a complete moron. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of staying at a friend J.J.’s house in fifth grade and seeing, for the first time, Transformers on a color television. I was absolutely blown away by how much cooler they looked in color. Imagine my confusion when J.J. wasn’t even interested in watching the show! Another time, I got in trouble for something and had to choose my own punishment. Thinking of the worst thing I could possibly endure, I chose to not be able to watch G.I. Joe for a week. But when I relayed this horrible punishment to my classmates, they scoffed at such a feeble and silly penalty.

Me, in a word

Others opinions of me are inescapably linked with who I am, so it is essential to understand how others view me (and to understand how I assume others view me) in order to attempt to understand myself. Every once in a while, someone imposes a concise summary of me, and I’m always intrigued by these.

In high school English class, we had to learn the spellings and definitions of twenty-five words every week. The teacher would have us partner up to quiz each other on these words. One week, my senior year circa 1993, one of the words was “dogmatic.” My study partner, who happened to be my girlfriend at the time, quickly joked that that word would be easy to remember because it perfectly described me. I was not surprised by her statement; but interested, I asked her what she meant by it. She retorted that not only did I always arrogantly insist that my opinion was right, I was also a “dog,” by which of course she was referring to my dictionary’s fifth definition; “a despicable person.” Actually, she wasn't joking. I took this statement to heart, and over the next several years made a genuine effort to recognize and curb my own dogmatic behavior by attempting to at least consider possibilities other than the opinions I adamantly took as fact.

Almost exactly three years later, while in college, my good friend Brad off-handedly remarked I could be summarized by one word: strong-willed. I don’t remember the context, but I immediately considered “strong-willed” relative to “dogmatic.” Whereas the words have very similar meanings, their connotations are very different. They both describe an obstinate or stubborn person. “Dogmatic” simultaneously implies a refusal to consider another’s point of view and the demand that the other agrees with your point of view. “Strong-willed” has a much more positive connotation. Although it suggests a refusal to cave to the demands of another, it does not eliminate the possibility of listening to and considering the other’s point of view. It also implies a motivated and self-controlled individual. I took Brad’s remark as a hopeful sign that I had learned to express my personality tendencies more productively since my high school days.

Fast forward a couple years to 1998: while working at a gas station in Cedar Falls, Iowa, my co-workers and I passed one afternoon asking the question, “If Hollywood was making a movie about your life, which actor would you want to play you?” Thinking of his roles in Dead Poet’s Society and Reality Bites, my reply was Ethan Hawke. In both movies, he plays a dogmatic, strong-willed, daring, rebellious individual who ultimately makes self-destructive choices. A co-worker, Tom, immediately rejected my suggestion, and stated that I should unquestionably be played by Steve Buscemi. My other co-workers immediately and excitedly agreed with Tom’s apparently spot-on observation. This was extremely flattering, because Steve Buscemi was (and is) one of my favorite actors. But what was to be discerned from Tom’s assessment? First, I was chagrined that nobody else seemed to see the Ethan Hawke in me. In retrospect it should not have been surprising that instead of a cocky sex icon I would be compared to a nervous, quirky, awkward little man. As opposed to the clichéd angsty artist tragic/heroic archetypes played by Ethan Hawke, Steve Buscemi portrays tragic, unique characters with subtly complex, endearing yet aggravating personalities. Perhaps this was a sign that I was no longer stubbornly holding onto my opinions and attempting to “be” someone so much as just naturally being whoever came out.

A couple years later, after I had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, my sister got me a framed postcard for either Christmas or my birthday. It shows a picture of a pencil sharpened all the way to the eraser with the caption underneath, “PERSISTENCE: Now that we’ve exhausted all possibilities…let’s get started.” I propped it in the basement next to my drumset, and spent many hours considering not only its implications, but why my sister had sent it to me, while practicing my drums. Granted, it’s simply an inspirational message, but obviously my sister was reminded of me in reading it. Persistent: another word synonymous with stubborn, but with a constructive connotation. The word cannot help but remind me of Edison’s axiom the genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And then the tag underneath “persistence” on the postcard: a reflection of how I tend to critique, analyze and dissect all that is around me combined with poignant advice. As I arduously played my drums in that basement over the next several years striving to become a professional drummer, I was glad to have this constant motivation to continuously learn and hone my craft; avoiding the rut of painstakingly practicing only for the sake of acquiring skill, but instead working (or should I say playing?) toward the ultimate goal of making music.

Last year, my current girlfriend met up with an old friend she had not seen in many years. When prompted to describe me, the first words out of her mouth were, “He’s kind of an asshole- but in a good way.” Gee, thanks. Perhaps not much has changed about me over the years, after all.

A few years back I exhausted the possibility of being a professional drummer, and started seeking how I could be most happy in my existence. I put a picture of my older niece (my sister’s daughter) in the frame over the “PERSISTENCE” postcard my sister had given me. Today I took the picture out (I need an updated one with both nieces in it anyway) to uncover the postcard again. Sometimes it’s good to have a reminder of who you are, which cannot be separated not only from how others perceive you and how you perceive them perceiving you, but how you perceive yourself and who you aspire to be.

Inland Empire

After watching David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), I immediately wanted to re-watch Hamlet, but they only had a crappy-looking modernized version of it at the video store. Meanwhile, every copy of Inland Empire, newly released, sat on the shelf unchecked out. So I watched Inland Empire again. And again. Perhaps I had to make up for the fact that I had anxiously awaited its arrival for almost a year, because when it was first released in theatres in Portland, it played for exactly a week and then inexplicably vanished before I had gotten a chance to see it.

Inland Empire is about unspeakable atrocities, and the fear, obsession, confusion, regret, desire and guilt which accompany them. These are things Americans tend to try to ignore and avoid, preferring to be distracted from intolerable behavior, destructive actions and the physical and emotional results of these things on the victims (and the perpetrators). But ignored problems only grow, and ignored emotions inevitably surface inappropriately. Mass entertainment begs to be used not just to distract us from reality, but to reveal reality, a reality that can only be discovered by asking questions which usually do not provide answers so much as reveal dark paths and doors opening to new questions and possibilities. At best, these doors open to eerie, diffused lamps exposing the darkest parts of humanity. Anyway, that’s how David Lynch sees it.

Despite the claim of many critics, Inland Empire has a storyline; it just doesn’t play like a narrative. Truth be told, it has several storylines which seem separate until they disturbingly and illogically interrupt each other. The title of the movie refers to a Polish underground market whose business is buying girls, brainwashing them and selling them as wives in America. Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, whose acting is brilliant throughout) is one of these women. As a result of her brainwashing and in order to cope with her unhappy existence, Nikki lives in a confusing fantasy world. Her various fear and angst-filled fantasies of who she might be demonstrates the extent of this (very real) underground “business.” Sometimes she’s a prostitute. Sometimes she is having a slumber party with the other girls. Sometimes she’s the miserable wife of Piotrek (Peter Lucas), who joins the Polish circus (in reality, he’s part of the Inland Empire, if only a pawn being used by them) after she births an illegitimate child. In her favorite but most delusional fantasy, she’s a successful actress, and Piotrek is her dominating husband. In this fantasy, she stars in a movie with Devon (Justin Theroux). This movie is yet another fantasy with a story line running parallel to her other fantasies. All these fantasies inevitably become entangled with each other, and she (like the audience) has little idea which is which is which. The fact that Nikki’s life is representative of many, many women who have been sold as slaves is, in part, demonstrated by a girl who tearfully watches her own life and/or Nikki’s unfold through a television screen (reminiscent of The Truman Show). Perhaps this girl and/or Nikki’s real family is a group of rabbits, one of whom sold her and two whom live in denial about it.

David Lynch is the mastermind behind every aspect of Inland Empire. His vision is a remarkable one which truly sets him apart from the rest of Hollywood. To borrow from DC Comics terminology, Lynch is Bizarro Quentin Tarantino. If you desire for art to candidly explore and express the vilest of human events and emotions, you will agree that Inland Empire is one of the greatest movies ever created. If not, don’t bother.

Eric Dolphy

I first heard Eric Dolphy while I was going through my Tony Williams stage. The album was Point of Departure, by Andrew Hill. The first song, “Refuge,” has an entrancingly subtle complexity of harmony. All of the instruments weave around and through each other. Williams is astounding, mostly laying out at the head to keep the melody suspended, and then pushing and pulling the tempo like a mad scientist as Hill takes a piano solo. Hill stays close to the melody line for awhile before breaking free, but then seemingly has nowhere to go until an alto sax screams through the speakers like an F-14 Tomcat and blasts the song back into action.

After the alto sax solo, I just kept hitting rewind for awhile. That was my introduction to Eric Dolphy, quite possibly the greatest musician who ever lived, equally adept at the alto sax, the bass clarinet and the flute.

All of the songs on Point of Departure are brilliantly composed by Hill, but whereas the other musicians seem to struggle to live up to the limitless possibilities provided by the imaginative heads, Williams and Dolphy thrive. During his first solo on the third song, “Spectrum,” Dolphy plays the bass clarinet, bending and twisting the notes as if he’s tying the instrument in knots. Although I first heard it around 1994, Point of Departure was recorded on March 31, 1964, when Dolphy was 35. Almost exactly 3 months later, Dolphy would be dead, leaving us with only 4 years worth of recordings.

The next day after hearing Point of Departure, I went out and bought a Dolphy album, Outward Bound (1960). This album proved very frustrating, as apparently they forgot to plug in the microphone Dolphy was using except for on the ballad where he plays flute, and I’ve never been into ballads. I momentarily forgot about Dolphy in my rush to find out what other amazing musicians were out there (and “out there”) that I’d never heard. Inevitably, I discovered John Coltrane. I believe I was a freshman in college when I bought the 4 CD set of Coltrane’s Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings. I began contentedly listening along to Coltrane’s now familiar Impulse-era style; simultaneously melodic, ferocious, technical and emotional, when all of a sudden this bass clarinetist interjects, playing a completely different style; more blatant, more tortured. Half annoyed, half intrigued by this player, I grab the album booklet and am surprised to be once again confronted by Eric Dolphy.

Dolphy was a huge influence on Coltrane. Like Coltrane, Dolphy’s playing always dripped with a unique personality. Dolphy was an absolute master of his instrument, able to play seemingly any note, at any time, interval and tempo, including those above and below the normal registers of his instrument, with ease or with pain, depending on the mood of the moment. Coltrane redefined the term “technical mastery,” and his prowess is to this day unparalleled, but while Coltrane thrilled us by continually searching and grasping into new territory, Dolphy was already there, calmly performing technical feats while expressing bone-chilling tones with a confidence Coltrane (perhaps thankfully) never had. Also unlike Coltrane, whose work as a sideman with great composers such as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis often sounded like soulless technical exercises, Dolphy as a sideman could always inject music written by others with his personality and make it work.

In the early 1960’s seemingly every great American composer lived in New York City, with the exception of the AACM crew, who stayed in Chicago. I believe John Cage was still there; George Maciunas’ Fluxus community was being born; Duke Ellington was still there supporting the younger generation; Sun Ra moved there from Chicago in ’61; Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, Gil Evans, Andrew Hill, Dizzy Gillespie and countless others were all in New York City. Eric Dolphy, originally from LA, moved to New York City in 1959, and his talent was immediately recognized. It is no coincidence then that Dolphy played with the greatest composers of his era. Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (1963) and Mingus at Antibes (1960) both contain Dolphy with Mingus playing some of the greatest music you will ever hear. Dolphy was also part of Ornette Coleman’s world-changing and genre-naming album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960), Oliver Nelson’s admittedly overrated classic Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961), George Russell’s opus Ezz-thetics (1961) and Max Roach’s Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961).

As a leader, Dolphy thankfully recorded a lot of albums between 1960 and 1964, although many of them are out of print. His best known is the mind-numbingly good Out To Lunch (1964), but my favorites are both live performances: The Illinois Concert (1963) and Live! At The Five Spot Vols. 1-2 (1961). I feel a very personal connection to the latter because it was through listening to it that I first truly understood the concept of group dynamics. Everyone supports everyone else in such a profound way- not by playing timidly or humbly but by playing confidently and respectfully. Everyone is playing at the top of their game without trying to imitate, compete with or outplay any of the others. How rare it is when the main motivation of a group of musicians is not to play better than the others in the group. Unfortunately the trumpet player of the group, Booker Little, Jr., died of kidney failure at age 23 shortly after the Five Spot sessions.

Eric Dolphy went on a European tour with Charles Mingus in early 1964, and when Mingus returned to America, Dolphy stayed behind. Apparently, Dolphy forgot to tell anybody in Europe he was diabetic, and when he fell into a diabetic coma on June 28, 1964, doctors assumed he had overdosed on heroin (after all, he was a jazz musician with needles) and shut him in a room to recover. He never came out of the coma and died the next day. At the time of his death, Dolphy had scheduled an album with an up-and-coming tenor sax player and Cecil Taylor alum named Albert Ayler, who would prove to be another genius and would also hugely influence Coltrane. We are left to ponder the possibilities….

Powell's

Truth be told, Portland is a pretty lame town. I don’t mean this in a bad way- I consider myself a pretty lame person. Portland’s lameness can be immediately demonstrated by asking any native Portlander what to do there. Eight out of ten times, the first thing out of their mouth will be “Have you been to Powell’s?”

Powell’s is a big book store. Actually, it’s a Portland chain, and there are a ton of them strewn all over town. I almost dare not mention that Powell’s originated in Chicago, lest some Portlander reads that fact and kills himself over the lie he’s been living. But THE Powell’s is on Burnside. Actually, the entrance is on Couch, which is stupidly pronounced Cooch. There’s nowhere to park near the store. They have a parking garage but it is always full.

I have no idea why anybody thinks Powell’s is a good tourist destination. Powell’s specializes in selling new and used easy-to-find still-in-print books. It is not like one of those used book stores on Telegraph in Berkeley, where you can spend hours happily stumbling across intriguing out-of-print titles you’d never heard of but wish you had time to read. Instead, you spend hours miserably stumbling over people trying to find the exit. Perhaps the fascinating lure of the store is that it was apparently designed by Daedalus, the architect most famous for creating the labyrinth that held the Minotaur in Greek mythology. Also, if you’re one of those people who likes going to carnivals but doesn’t ride the rides, Powell’s might be right up your alley.

In order to find a book, first you have to find a computer. In order to find a computer, you must randomly squeeze through narrow aisles past hundreds of people intentionally pretending to not notice they are in your way until you come across a line of people. Make sure it’s not the line for selling used books, the checkout counter or coffee shop. And not the long line: that is the line for the bathroom.

Before I continue, let me just pause to point out one fact about Powell’s. It contains 68,000 square feet of floor space and ONE BATHROOM. I am not kidding.

Okay, so you must stand in line for several minutes until a computer becomes available. Incidentally, computers are usually found near “information” booths, which are either empty or contain some cocky frat jock with a computer of his own in which he does the exact same thing you would do if you could just use the damn computer yourself, only slower and including superfluous questions about the book you are looking for. So just get to an empty computer, type in the book or subject you want. If you’re lucky, you won’t get a “Please Try Again” request or 255 listings to sift through but a correct title with a color and number under it. Write these down: you will not be able to remember them by the time you find what they correlate with in the store.

Every room is inexplicably assigned a color. I have no idea what these colors mean or how they relate to anything. I only know that to find a colored room, you must once again randomly squeeze through aisles, hoping to come across doorways and stairs, until you find the color you are looking for. Once you’re in the correct colored room, you must find the correct aisle number. Every aisle is numbered, but these numbers are not sequentially ordered or always easy to see. If you decide you want to purchase a book, then you’ll have to find the line to the checkout counter and be herded through it like bovine. Good luck!

An important word of caution: NEVER go into Powell’s with anybody you ever want to see again if you do not both have your cell phones on you. Never mind the fact that the person next to you is using their cell phone to loudly read every title to whoever’s on the other end. If you want to prevent spending the rest of your life in jail for what any fair court would deem “justifiable homicide,” leave all weapons at home.

Camping Journal

Many years ago, my friend Risa got a camping journal in which you were supposed to record the details of your camping trips. It had lines for what the campsite was like, what food you ate, etc. Risa took the idea one step further, and when we (along with groups of Iowans and occasional un-Iowan friends now living on the west coast) used to get together once a year for our “Great Iowan Campout,” we would use the journal to write down every clever, witty or (especially) perverted thing that was said. The journal got passed around so over time everyone ended up contributing whatever they heard and deemed suitable for the journal. Read back later, the fact that our hastily recorded ramblings made little sense made them only funnier. My personal favorite lines are the ones that were perfectly innocent originally but sound really perverse read back out of context.

Naturally I stole the idea. A couple weeks ago, a group of us (6 Iowans, 2 “others”) spent the weekend in a cabin on the Oregon coast. Here’s what happened according to the journal:

It can be over…
Jenga!
He’s like the white guy Eminem…
Gopher Gruel, Urine Luck
Do you know why I fucked up that breakfast so badly? Because you’re a fuckup.
There’s a lot of shit going on in Guatemala right now…oh wait, you’re not talking about that are you?
It tastes like…what was that flavor I just had? Chunk of rainbow! Franzia! It’s a bagel that tastes like box wine.
Set your asses free
I thought she was cute but apparently I had my shit glasses on.
It’s very suspicious when someone walks into a bathroom and says “It smells good in here.”
She was wearing potpourri underwear.
It’s gonna be the best grumper later.
Carl’s making a pretty pile right now.
That one had a little extra JengaLubeâ on it.
Can I touch your yarn?
I love how you feel like you can breathe fire.
Andrew has a big wooden tower between his legs
Hos go home!
I’d definitely blow my head off.
Today I’m going to snap.
I think he just blew a wad of jizz through his horn.
Everything was fine until Carl entered the kitchen and dropped his sausage in the pan.
Those birds don’t like boxed wine.
Look at this little dickey thing you have coming out.
Have you guys ever been to Lake Iowa? This looks just like Lake Iowa.
Andrew’s for rent. I don’t think you guys can afford me.
I will fashion a rope of your hair…your back hair.
It’s Patrick…with flippers and a beer.
Oh it’s Ken Kesey in bird form…or, that’s not Ken Kesey, it’s a bird.
My hand is cleaner than Andrew’s weiner
My left breast has been hanging out for half the day.
Who isn’t cute playing the mandolin? Manson?
She had her shit goggles on a lot.
You wouldn’t know it now but she was super hot back then.
You look beautiful tonight…these are very special moments…I wish you were wearing lingerie…If I were a lonely cowboy….(Carl to Andrew)
I’m expressing myself right now.
How many nipples does a soybean have?
He’s a tick magnet. Yeah, ticks dig me, man!
Lactating men are bad.
Her specialty is imitating the sound of broken glass- MBWEEE!!!
I smell citrus. Did you shit?
I’m gonna cry my blues away (Robert Johnson)
Completely my favorite. Much better. Sucky.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before- What the fuck is wrong with this starfish?
I didn’t pass out! Was I snoring?
Bruccuchaa, toochi. da poodieaman; techacheet o-muchie-arriba! Brubiega-ha ma chu ta.
I lost my tongue on a tetherball pole.
The eternal dusk of gerbils in Carl’s anus
It’s a man nipple- It’s a mipple.
Just yank it out there
Everybody else is getting blueberry I’m getting dinglebery
Ann “Makes the sun want to stay in bed” Steffen
He has a very girly thing going on
If it was fake it would be…bigger
Sandy touched your work
Look- I have a hole in my crotch. Well that’s going in the book! I have a knot in mine.
He just made a bicycle out of chewing gum, a rubber band and a tampon.
Who does it to Enya? Who what to Enya?
This is like Ray Charles playing Jenga
Sweet hair tattoo!
I’m a lucky girl. Why, because your husband has huge pancakes?
Are you sitting down? No, I’m just going to pass some gas.
Might have been a uniball
When he told you how his dick got crooked it was like ahh!
That’s not the showerhead screaming right now. That’s Jeremy. It’s like a dental drill in there.
I smell what you’re stepping in.
She was hoping for a Sandy Sandwich
Tornado Jenga. Avant-garde Jenga. Jenga-style Kung Fu. Thanks comma jerkoff. White belt Jenga.
Use the magnifying glass much? Only in the shower.
The Way of the Jenga.
Imagine two young men out in the middle of summer
Jake’s playing Jenga with notecards.
When what you’re throwing is bigger than the target there’s a problem.
Are you putting my pen in your toes?
I’ve got some sweet Jenga moves. It’s pretty much my favorite game.
You’re hairy- I like it.
What is Carl doing right now? Getting squished by two hot chicks.
That went on for about 30 seconds too long.
It’s amazing that spider can hold on with such strong winds! He just talks! Did you see the spider though?
One word sums it up. I think I just peed my pants a little bit. Your lap is super absorbent. Sitting on your lap is like wearing a diaper.
Jesus is pretty much my favorite baby.
You look like a late, fat Elvis. I meant your weiner! It’s a pen!
You just made me fart! Would you rather I gave you a tweety twister? Tweety twister? I just made that up, but I was going for a titty twister and you pushed my hand lower.
You’re getting bigger- in some respects.
My penis is more like a vagina on a stick
You’re poop. Oh yeah, well you’re an asshole and that’s where poop comes from.
The conversation’s going south in a hurry.
I hope Jeremy’s still alive. Me too. I don’t really care.
Someone just needs to push him off the cliff and we’ll all be happier.
Now he’s dancing? Is that what you call that?
Up, up- a little to the right- now turn it- oh yeah oh yeah my cracker! I got so excited….
My penis is really, really small. I know…that’s too bad….
They’re talking to the birds now. They really were talking to the birds!
I found out today that I’m a pelican trapped inside a man’s body.
I gave up trying to figure out what they’re talking about. It’s just kept making less and less sense.
Vagina Bowl 2007- I don’t think I played in that one.
I can’t believe you’re not annoyed by yourself…It’s okay, I’m used to it.
As I recall, Rachel has been nothing but a nuisance.
I had to get jumped in the afternoon. I felt pretty stupid.
That Janine she’s a chatterbox.
Carl’s a humper.
I can be anything I want to be, and I want to be a pelican.
What’s that in the road, a seat cushion? It’s Carl!
If they’re gonna be neutral they should be the Swiss.
We totally got slaughtered by the Milk Chocolates last night.
What’s with the “Watch For Children” sign? What are you supposed to do if you see one? Is there a Child Watching Station?

Ken Burns

When I took American History in high school, we watched Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. I liked it for three reasons: (1) Since he wasn’t lecturing while it was on, Mr. Taylor was less likely to suddenly ask you a question because he could see you weren’t paying attention, (2) I have always been very interested in the Civil War and (3) it had lots of cool photographs (I think it’s funny that every Civil War picture is attributed to Matthew Brady), even if it did keep showing the same ones over and over again.

When many years later in 2001, Ken Burns came out with a documentary called Jazz, I was very excited. Jazz was my “thing.” I worked at a recording studio at the time, and my co-workers, who were largely unfamiliar with the style but intrigued by my “strange” tastes in music, all made it a point to watch the miniseries. Imagine my profound disappointment when the documentary turned out to be revisionist history propaganda legitimizing only commercial pop as relevant jazz and all but entirely dismissing the socially conscious, revolutionary music that I held so dearly.

Wynton Marsalis seems the major consultant for Ken Burns’ Jazz. Consulting Wynton Marsalis on jazz is like consulting Drew Barrymore on television acting. I hold him largely responsible for the trite bullshit you hear at contemporary jazz clubs, on jazz radio and at Barnes and Noble. I’m going to try to hold back the disdain I have for this man in this blog, but I hope he suffocates from his head being shoved so far up his own pompous ass.

I like Louis Armstrong as much as the next guy. His work with King Oliver was revolutionary, and his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings absolutely essential. But after the twenties, he spent most of his career singing the blues and pop show tunes for a white audience, albeit with a singular voice. The song he is best known for, “What a Wonderful World,” is either highly satirical or highly embarrassing, but poignantly demonstrates that he was what we now call a “sellout.” Why, then, does the documentary spend at least 50% of the ten episodes obsessed with Louis Armstrong?

The first time I heard a Charlie “Bird” Parker recording, in 1993, it was by far the most “out there” thing I had ever heard. It took me several listens before I realized that he was playing a song with a melody and not just moving his fingers as fast as he could and blowing. His jagged rhythms, blazing melodic lines and ingenious use of harmony created be-bop, but for all of its uncompromising complexity, Parker’s compositions are entirely catchy, and I find myself humming them all the time.

Charlie Parker was a revolutionary and a genius who expressed the innermost expressions of himself and his race. But instead of playing the great bebop tunes penned by arguably the greatest musician of all time, Ken Burns completely misrepresented Bird by focusing on him covering ballads. My jaw dropped in disbelief as I watched them kill my hero on PBS. When, the next day, the owner of the recording studio (my boss) remarked that it was interesting that Bird was considered revolutionary at the time, but that his playing was tame and mellow by today’s standards, my heart almost broke.

I dejectedly watched the next couple episodes, curious to see how they would destroy my other heroes, most of whom came into their own in the late fifties and early sixties. The answer was clear- they’d do it by hardly mentioning them, discrediting them and by not playing their best work. Episode nine, the second to last episode, ended at the end of the fifties, leaving my favorite era of jazz, the sixties, untouched. I didn’t watch episode ten.

Band Camp

Upon graduating from high school, I made up my mind to give up on continuing to play the drums. Bottom line; I wasn’t very good. Then my drum instructor talked me into trying out for the marching band at the university I was headed to in the fall. He said all I needed to do was learn the rudiments.

I spent the summer learning the rudiments. They consist of 40 (actually less since many of them are redundant) basic sticking combinations from which modern drum playing is derived. They have nifty names, many of which are onomatopoeic, like paradiddle, flam and ratamacue.

Auditions for the marching band drum line were held the Monday before school started. If you passed the audition, you got to stay for the week and rehearse. When I got there, we were quickly reassured that everyone would most likely pass, and that the audition was mainly to determine which instrument you would play. I only wanted to play the snare drum. Not only does it play the most prominent role in the drum line, it is also the lightest instrument, except for the cymbals, which is an important consideration since you have to march around with them for hours at a time. Of the twenty-two people auditioning, approximately fifteen wanted to play the snare drum. I know because I took an informal poll. There were six snare drums.

The two guys who would be auditioning us quickly established that they were intimidatingly incredible drummers and veterans of drum corps, a highly competitive marching organization. Eric, a Ken doll look-alike who would be our drum instructor for the semester, auditioned us one at a time while his friend taught the rest of us cadences (highly syncopated drum parts). I auditioned early. Alone in a room with Eric and a snare drum, he asked me to play paradiddles, which I did. He then named off a bunch of other rudiments and I played them all. That was it. I was relieved and elated. Upon returning to the fold, Eric’s friend played a rhythmic pattern and asked if anyone could play it back. I confidently raised my hand and proceeded to play something that was not even remotely similar to what he had played. Some cringed, others guffawed- I wanted to die.

While the auditions continued, Eric’s friend had us switch between the instruments, which included six snares, five or six basses, three quints (five small toms) and four cymbals. By the time the auditions were over, I was holding the cymbals. The only thing lower than the cymbals was the pit, which is where they threw the mallet players (who didn’t need to audition at all since there were only two of them) and the percussive sound effects.

Eric conferred only briefly with his friend before announcing the results: I made the snare line.

I was the only freshman in the snare line; the other five had been in the snare line the previous year or longer. They immediately decided that we were going to hold the sticks traditional grip. I didn’t know how to play traditional grip. They told me I’d better figure it out fast. We began by sight-reading some sloppily hand-written parts we were to learn. They could sight-read the parts in real time. I could barely read the parts at all. I assumed the others already knew the parts, having played them the year prior. When I asked one of them if this was the case, he scoffed and shared my ignorance with the others so they could have a good laugh.

The whole premise of drum corps style drumming is that you combine all the rudiments in the most difficult ways possible and play them as loud as you can just to prove your playing prowess. In addition, drum corps players have invented all kinds of new sticking combinations, called contemporary rudiments. The snare heads are made of Kevlar, the same material used to make bullet-proof vests, and are tuned to sound like amplified table tops. It’s a very macho and masochistic way of playing the drums. Unfortunately, Eric and the rest of the snare line balanced this by sadistically making my existence as painful as possible. They ridiculed my lack of skills. Eric apologized to the others in front of me for letting me play the snare, explaining that he had let me in only because I knew the names of the rudiments. He would often ask me to stop playing with the others so he could hear how it was supposed to sound, and when I did play he’d shake his head in disappointment in the exact same manner that my junior high basketball coach had shook his head at me.

I suspect they wanted to intimidate me into quitting. Instead, I became singularly determined. The week consisted of at least eight hours of group practice every day. The drum line remained mostly segregated from the rest of the band, and we practiced longer than they did. The drum line usually divided up into sections, and the snare line scheduled extra practices in addition to the drum line practices. In the evenings, while the rest of the marching band went to parties in which they got drunk and tried to figure out how to get in each other’s pants, I went back to my dorm room and practiced some more. I bought a pack of band-aids to put over the blisters.

Roy Bailey, a veteran quint player, took me under his arm. He encouraged me, putting things in perspective by telling me to always ignore opposition and reminding me that drumming was supposed to be fun. Roy had a bunch of videos of Buddy Rich playing the drums using traditional grip, and I taught myself how to play traditional grip by watching those videos. One night Roy, a couple bass drum players and I got together and I learned how to play the card game Spades. Little did I know that much of my first year of college would be spent with Roy; drumming, playing Spades and listening to jazz.

The week mercifully came to an end. I called my mom, and when she answered the phone a terrible thing happened: I started crying uncontrollably. How embarrassing. I realized that a new chapter in my life had begun, and I’d better buck up if I were to survive it.

Zebraman

Japanese film director Takashi Miike gets it. The attraction of the concept of the superhero is the premise that you can become someone else, and that that alter ego is way cooler than you are in real life. Well, hopefully. If your superhero secret identity is Zebraman, you might be hard-pressed to believe that you can be less of a loser than your public self.

Zebraman (2004 but only now being released in the US) is probably the greatest superhero movie ever made. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the subject, having spent my childhood creating super powers for myself, my sister and my imaginary friends and enemies while devouring Marvel comic books.

Zebraman is a satire, but it’s also legitimate or deadpan or whatever the antonym of satire is. It is not like Batman: The Movie (1966), where intentionally bad acting is combined with intentionally bad special effects and an intentionally horrible plot to successfully amuse us. It is also not like Batman Begins (2005), a dark and sober but gripping epic about a man on a mission to become a superhero. It is kind of an indescribable gestalt of both ideas minus Bruce Wayne, thankfully. Instead of a rich and talented businessman and ladykiller, Shin’ichi (Sho Aikawa) is an inept schoolteacher disrespected not only by his students, but also by his wife and children. Alone at night, Shin’ichi sews himself a costume unimaginatively modeled after his favorite childhood television show, a flop that was cancelled after seven episodes. Realizing the absurdity of an adult dressing up like a Zebra, Shin’ichi almost gives up on his dream, but then is encouraged by Asano (?), a new student who has discovered the Zebraman television show on the web. Meanwhile, aliens have landed in Shin’ichi’s town, and Zebraman just might be the only one who can save the world from being taken over by them….

Zebraman is far from the most impressive superhero ever conceived, but he has two things going for him: heart and Zebranurse (Kyoka Suzuki), who is quite probably the most advantageous sidekick of all time, even if she does only appear in a dream sequence.

Aztecs and Optimistic Fear

The Aztecs believed that if they didn’t strengthen Huitzilopochtli, their god of sun and war, by nourishing him with human blood, the world would end after a 52 year cycle. The prospect of the world coming to an end is a frightening one; scary enough to prevent the Aztecs from testing this theory, which they could have easily done by testing their gods and doing away with human sacrifices to see what happened. It took the destruction of Aztec culture at the hands of Spanish warriors led by Cortez to end their religious practices. This occurred in 1521, exactly at the end of a 52 year cycle according to the Aztec calendar.

Aztec religion was polytheistic, and they recognized many gods that they discovered from other cultures. The existence of anything is impossible to prove, but especially the existence of a god, which exists in a dimension or reality apart from our own. The Aztecs understood this, so they hedged their bets by worshipping (seemingly) every god they came across, including the gods and saints of Catholicism. There are thousands of gods in hundreds of cultures, and any one of them, including Huitzilopochtli, could truly exist as far as any human knows. The logic of believing in every god from every culture far surpasses the short-sightedness of Pascal’s wager, which does not consider the possibility that a god other than the god of Christianity can exist.

Pascal’s wager does demonstrate that the fear of the existence of a god is a major incentive to do whatever that god asks to avoid being punished by it. The success of a religion relies on its ability to inflict fear deep enough to prevent humans from opposing it. The all-powerful premise of monotheism has a built-in intimidation factor of literally infinite proportions. The Jewish god condones genocide and the annihilation of all who disobey his orders. The Christian god goes even further, torturing for eternity all who refuse to acknowledge his existence. Islam, building on the ideas of Judaism and Christianity, is unabashed in regard to the fierceness of god. The vivid depictions of punishment in hell in the Qu’ran surpass the more flippant references found in the Christian New Testament.

The promise of a reward for obedience seems weak in comparison to punishment. Let’s face it, the Christian promise of living for eternity in some sterile environment telling some megalomaniac how great he is isn’t anything most people are going to go out of their way to attain. However, it is demonstrable that rewarding behavior at random unpredictable intervals is extremely effective. A fundamental aspect of animal flourishment seems to be its inbuilt fascination but fundamental misunderstanding of the laws of probability. We’re so impressed with the fact that something perceived as good happens every so often, it completely eludes us that the occurrence is inevitable. Thus, miracles, or unexplained phenomena perceived as being positive or beneficial, are a major aspect of every religion. Many Christians laughably but optimistically claim they prefer Christianity to other religions because the god of Christianity is so loving, despite all his atrocities. Our illogical elation at the fact that one person survives a disaster despite the fact that many others were killed by it, for instance, is an instinctual trait attributing to our continued existence. If we were to succumb to the hopelessness and absurdity of existence, our depression would prevent us from having any reason to continue to struggle to survive. The will to live is fundamental to continued life; any being not possessing it would quickly become extinct. In other words, delusion (a.k.a. hope and blind faith) is a coping mechanism essential to our continued being.

It turns out, then, that optimism coupled with fear is the ultimate motivator. Extreme logic seems dangerous to humanity’s very existence, since it eschews desire. (Take that, Plato!) Therefore, given my pessimistic view of gods and my fear of wasting my life away trying to appease them, I will be perfectly content in deluding myself with the belief that they do not exist.

Stranger Than Paradise

Must entertainment be a distraction from reality? Can entertainment be found in reality? These are the questions posed by Stranger Than Paradise (1984), written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. The movie begins in a claustrophobic apartment in New York City, where Willie (John Lurie), a small-time gambler seemingly annoyed by existence itself, finds out his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) has to stay with him for ten days. His family is from Hungary, and his real name is Bela, a fact Willie has presumably spent a long time trying to forget.

Eva is a cute, clever and aware girl with a mischievous undertone. Willie, like the movie itself, goes to great pains to make sure that it’s understood that life in America is as miserable as he is. Just when Willie and Eva start getting used to each other (“It’s really too formal to say you want to vacuum the floor…” “Oh, what do you say?” “Well you say, um, ‘I want to choke the alligator...’”), the ten days come to an end and Eva goes to stay with Aunt Lotte (Cecillia Stark) in Cleveland.

Willie and Eddie (Richard Edson), probably his only friend although Willie might not even concede that much, grift some money and decide to borrow a car and, for lack of a better place to go, drive to Cleveland. There, they find Eva restlessly working at a burger joint. It turns out Cleveland sucks as much as New York City (“While we’re in Cleveland, Willie, why don’t we see the Cavaliers?” “Oh, they have a terrible team.”). Willie, Eddie and Eva take off to Florida (“Florida? It’s beautiful…They got pelicans down there and flamingos- all those weird birds.” “You been there?” “No…”).

While the boys spend their days at the racetrack, all Eva sees of Florida is a cramped motel (“This looks familiar.”). Then Eva lucks into what, to echo the satirical tone of this movie, is probably one of the more likely ways to get rich in this country. The movie ends as Willie’s worst nightmare is about to come true….

The cinematography and dialogue are both outstanding, not for any technical wizardry but for their stark believability. The clever humor is rooted deep in interpersonal verbal and non-verbal communication. Especially poignant is the scene where Willie and Eddie sit between Eva and her date Billy (Danny Rosen) as they watch a kung-fu movie. They seem to find the movie they are watching a bore, daring us to think the same about the movie they are in. Speaking of which, I’m going to have to go get the Criterion Collection DVD, as it has a bonus disc containing Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch’s first movie.

Slavery

If you were to walk from Northern Europe south to the Equator, taking pictures of native populations as you went, you would find, upon lining up the pictures, that skin complexion would generally gradually move from pale to dark. There would be no obvious break where skin tone suddenly jumped from lighter to darker. That there are white people and black people is totally a myth. You cannot reduce people to white and black any more than you can reduce the rainbow to red and violet.

Slavery has been around on every continent since the beginning of human history. Slavery in the United States was abolished, at least on paper, in 1865. Importing of slaves to America was banned in 1808. Before that time, most slaves came from Africa, followed by Ireland (Irish Catholics) and Scotland (Highlanders). Native Americans were kept as slaves in California until 1967, but were generally exported as slaves to other countries instead of being kept as slaves here. Native Americans were undesirable as slaves mostly because so many of them died from illnesses introduced from Europe.

In the beginning, American slaves came mostly from Africa not because of their skin tone, but because the African slave trade was already so well established; slaves having been a major commodity throughout Africa for centuries. Here is how people typically got to America from Africa: Coastal African tribes and kingdoms such as Yoruba and Dahomey raided other African tribes living further inland, capturing anybody they could and taking them back to the coast. There, the captives were traded to mostly British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and, later, Brazilian traders, who took them to America, where they were sold into slavery. During this same time, Europeans, mostly those living along the Mediterranean in Italy, Spain and Portugal but also from France, England, the Netherlands, Ireland and even Iceland and North America, were being captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery, largely in Algeria, Morocco and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Males and females were bought in equal numbers by Americans in order for the slaves to be a “self-reproducing labor force.” Lighter-skinned slaves were generally treated better and given less physical jobs than darker-skinned slaves.


“If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from.” – Bob Marley, a Jamaican whose father was of English descent and whose mother was of African descent.

Competition

While playing tennis with my girlfriend last weekend, a man and his approximately 7 year old son arrived and went to the court next to us. For the next hour or so, the father competed against the kid, trying to defeat him both physically and emotionally.

When they arrived, the dad told the kid where to stand and how to hold and swing the racket. Then he went to the other side of the net and smashed a forehand past the kid, who tried in vain to hit it. The dad corrected the angle of the kid’s racket and explained to him what he had done wrong before knocking another one past him. The kid fetched the ball and tried for about ten swings to hit it over the net before the dad advised him to just throw it over.

The dad eased up and gave the kid some slow volleys, but every third shot or so he’d hit a winner or put some crazy spin on the ball. Eventually, the dad decided to try some serves, again telling the kid where to stand before smacking the ball for an ace.

….

I remembered how much fun I used to have playing football with my peers at recess. I considered myself a pretty good receiver, an average runner and a horrible quarterback. I was comfortable with that. Catching the ball was the most fun part anyway. Then one day, in fifth or sixth grade, the PE teacher joined us. He was the quarterback. The ball was hiked. I ran to the end zone and stood there all alone. He saw me but threw to someone else. I went back to the huddle and exclaimed that I had been wide open. He told me that I couldn’t just stand there- I had to move around. I knew he was lying and that really he just didn’t want to throw to me because he didn’t think I could catch.

Around that same time, I went to a basketball camp. I had never played basketball in my life- I had never tried to dribble, had never tried to shoot and had no idea what the rules were. The first day, the teacher tried to show me how to dribble. Soon, he was shaking his head and mocking me, telling me his daughter could dribble better than that when she was six.

Baseball was the sport I liked most. My dad taught me how to pitch (although he was incorrect in showing me how to grip the ball), and I spent hours practicing at a target he had painted. Unfortunately, I had no idea what the rules to baseball were. I was in Little League for three years, and nobody ever bothered to tell me what they were. Nobody told me where the ball should make contact with the bat, how to bunt or what the heck they were talking about when they yelled “Force at every base!”

In Junior High, I learned how bad I was at sports. In football, I was the guy who ran the plays out to the quarterback from the sidelines. We always ran the same play, the one that took the ball furthest away from wherever I was, and we always lost. In basketball, I was the kid who, every time I got the ball, everyone in the stands would yell “shoot” and laugh. I quit playing sports. I quit watching sports. I didn’t like anybody who liked sports, except for Charlie Husack, the most affable teammate I’ve ever met.

It wasn’t until I got out of high school that I realized not only did I like sports, I wasn’t really that bad at most of them compared to a lot of other people. It hadn’t occurred to me that bad coaching, going through puberty, jeering crowds and always wearing over-sized uniforms and shoes were major factors in my poor performance.

….

I got really annoyed by the dad and his boy. I hoped the kid noticed that my girlfriend and I weren’t competing; that we were just playing for fun. But I wasn’t having any fun. I wanted to switch places with the kid so the dad could compete against someone more his age. Even if I couldn’t beat him, which I wanted very much to do, at least I’d make him have to earn it.

I asked my girlfriend why she thought the dad had to prove he was better than the son. She retorted by asking me why I thought I was better than the dad. I suddenly remembered a time a few years back, playing tennis with an ex who had rarely played before, when a gentleman on the sidelines advised me to stop trying to hit the ball so hard to give us both a better chance of playing longer volleys and having a more enjoyable time. Although slightly chagrined, I had followed his advice- and he was right.

Perhaps while we’re here, we should enjoy each other instead of trying to worry about who’s better than who. It’s a lesson I’m far from learning. It’s great to push ourselves to be the best we can be, but who we are cannot be judged by or in comparison to anybody else. Perhaps maybe someday I’ll pick up a basketball again….

Bourbon

Bourbon is an American whiskey that is made from at least 51% corn, and usually includes wheat and/or rye and malted barley. Most bourbon is “straight,” which means it has been aged for at least two years, but probably longer. Kentucky is regarded as “the place” for bourbon to come from.

Bourbon is generally smoother than Irish whiskey and not smoky like Scotch whisky (The Scots drop the “e”). I opine that bourbon is best appreciated neat (straight), on the rocks or in hot water or herbal tea. Drink bourbon like wine: sniff it, sip it, savor it, swallow it. Don’t throw it down your throat. My understanding of the characteristics of bourbon has greatly benefited from having participated in several blind bourbon taste tests. Below are some observations on various bourbon brands (prices are more or less current for fifths in Oregon):

Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s are horrible. Jack actually gives me an instant headache. If these are the only bourbons you’ve ever tried, you have no idea what bourbon is supposed to taste like. Another undrinkable bourbon is Elijah Craig.

My guess is that the biggest bourbon distillery is Jim Beam. Knob Creek is medium shelf Jim Beam. It is not that good, always scoring very poor in blind tests, and certainly overpriced at $35 a bottle. Booker’s, Baker’s and Basil Hayden’s are all top shelf Jim Beam. I’ve only had Basil Hayden’s, and it is an interesting blend of smooth yet strong, but not worth the hefty $45 price tag. Jim Beam also makes Old Crow, Old Taylor, Jacob’s Well and Old Grand-Dad. Of these, I’ve only tried Old Grand-Dad, which isn't very good.

Evan Williams is the “well” bourbon in a lot of bars. Just kinda blah. The cheapest bourbon I have found that I like is W.L. Weller Special Reserve. It is slightly harsh and a little thin, but is a great deal at 17 bucks. It is certainly better than other bourbons I have tried in its price range, which includes Rebel Yell, Old Forester, Dickel and Ezra Brooks. I have not had Old Charter, but my girlfriend could not differentiate it from Maker’s Mark in a blind test.

Called “Dirty Bird” on the street, the “classic” Wild Turkey is 101 Proof (50.5% alcohol), whereas most bourbons are around 90 Proof (45% alcohol). It has a surprisingly good, woody flavor. Wild Turkey makes several varieties of bourbon, but they all taste very similar. On a side-note, their over-proof rye whiskey (whiskey that is at least 51% rye, although Canadian whiskey is also often confusingly called rye whiskey) is just as good at the same price, although my favorite rye whiskey is easily Sazerac, with a very distinctive rye flavor that makes it worth the $30 price tag.

The best bourbon for its price is Buffalo Trace. At just over $20 a bottle, this is the bourbon I generally buy. It is very smooth, with a great flavor (perhaps a little thin) and no bitter after-taste. Blind tests have continuously demonstrated that Buffalo Trace could be the best bourbon for under $40 a bottle.

Maker’s Mark, which runs $25 a bottle, is very popular these days, and rightfully so. It has a very full flavor, with a slightly harsh aftertaste. Maker’s sets the bar for bourbon, and no blind test should be without it, but participants are always surprised that it’s actually not as smooth as they think. Maker’s with hot water, a lemon slice, some cloves and grated ginger is a great hot beverage. Or just have it with Peppermint or Ginger tea. There’s a restaurant/bar called Savoy’s by my house that makes a killer Maker’s Manhattan. (Purists will tell you a Manhattan is supposed to use rye whiskey, not bourbon, as well as sweet vermouth, Angostura bitters and a cherry.) I’ve tried making Manhattans but with only limited success.

I have tried several $25-$35 bourbons, but it’s hard to justify the price. At $35, Woodford Reserve is too sweet for me. At $27, Corner Creek and Rip Van Winkle are average. At $30, Eagle Rare is delicious, full and smooth, perhaps more like what people think Maker’s tastes like (although I’ve never compared the two side by side). The fad $25 bourbon (at least in Oregon) right now is Bulleit. Don’t believe the hype. It is super-sweet, like brandy (distilled wine), and thin. If I am looking for a sweet after-dinner style drink, I’d much rather drink Hennessy, a Cognac (which is what brandy is called when it’s made in the Cognac region of France).

The greatest bourbon ever made is possibly Blanton’s. It is over $40 a bottle, so I can only afford to buy it once a year. For some reason, I keep an empty bottle on display in my bedroom. Smooooooth. Don’t insult this drink by adding anything to it, other than one ice cube if you must.

Walden

Henry David Thoreau conducted a two year experiment on Walden Pond. The goal of the experiment was not to live in isolation, as most believe, but to attempt to determine the difference between the necessary and the desired, and how much he could get from how little. He wanted to whittle life down to its simplest form. He wanted to find out what he was and wasn’t capable of. He wanted to know how much material he could get for how little pay, how much beauty he could find in the most mundane, how much knowledge he could gain from the most trivial, how much enjoyment he could get from the most tedious.

Solitude was part of the experiment, and Thoreau found much wisdom and enjoyment in solitude. But Thoreau also found much in his fellow man. Thoreau did not live in isolation; he walked into town almost every day and had frequent visitors. He sought a balance between solitude and the company of others, and a comfortable distance between himself and the opinions of others.

Although I know the idea of actually reading a book instead of spewing your thoughts about it is pretty outlandish, for a much more thorough understanding of this topic I recommend reading Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

Education

What is the goal of the American free public education system? It is certainly not to help children become healthy, competent and capable adults. Rather, it is to teach us to respect authority, conformity, follow instructions and take direction.

Why? Because the corporations that rose during the Great Depression and have run this country since World War II rely on our ignorance and dependence. If we were taught basic survival skills such as sewing, carpentry, metalworking, plant and mineral identification, food preparation, combat, first aid, agriculture and livestock raising, not only would we not need to rely on corporations to provide us with these services, we would also not need to work for those corporations doing menial tasks for just enough pay to buy those services from them. If we were taught basic history such as government, actual world history, religious origins, fine arts history, philosophy and anthropology we would be able to recognize we live in a feudal system where money (and God) is a tool designed solely to confuse us into volunteer slavery, with bonuses proportional to the amount of stress we allow them to inflict, while being placated by a lottery which promises the possibility of escape. And if we were taught basic social skills such as politics, logic and reasoning, accounting, rhetoric, and foreign languages we would have the means to overthrow these powers that own us.

One advantage of our country having been founded by Protestants is that we are taught to read. Before Martin Luther, the ruling Catholic Church only taught the clergy how to read, guaranteeing no possibility of being self-informed. Unfortunately, most are too unmotivated to become self-informed, especially while being worn down by long work hours and then distracted by the mass media and entertainment owned by the corporations, which unsurprisingly have the frequent theme of reminding us that it is possible to win the lottery- while never giving us the odds. The few that do learn how this country operates and demonstrate effectiveness in attempting to do something about it are simply assassinated.

I am aware of accounts that have been shut down after making postings like these….

Drums Unlimited

Max Roach: January 10, 1924- August 16, 2007

It was 1993. My drum instructor, Woody Smith, had been pestering me to go out and buy some jazz albums. I didn’t understand why. I had been playing in the school jazz band since I was in seventh grade. I knew the swing ride cymbal pattern (splang, splang-a-lang) and could consistently close the hi-hat on the 2 and 4. What else was there?

One day I found myself in a store with a small tape section and bought two cassettes out of the “Jazz” section that had pictures of drummers on the cover. I played the first tape during the drive home from the store. It was a 1970’s recording of Buddy Rich. I had actually heard of Buddy Rich. The music was exactly what I had expected to hear. Pompous noodling. I felt vindicated.

I played the second tape when I got home. It was all marbled and muddy and slow. I quickly pushed the eject button but was relieved to find the tape was not being eaten. Then I was confused. Was it supposed to sound like that? It did sound pretty cool, like a slow motion freight train. I listened to all of one side. I liked it, but surely something was wrong with the cassette.

After a couple weeks, I got around to returning the cassette. I told the clerk the tape sounded weird. He asked whether the music was weird or if the tape was actually broken. I kind of stammered for a bit, honestly not knowing the answer. Finally, he put it on and instantly recognized it had been demagnetized. I was relieved. I really just wanted a refund but the clerk preferred for me to exchange it with another copy of the same tape so I did. That night I put the new copy into the tape player and lay down on my bed.

Boom, chak-a-chak-a boom chick, boom chick. Boom, chaka-a-chak-a boom chick. I was excited that the tape began with a drum solo. Then, blup-a-blup-a-diddle-diddle-ba-ba- what was that? I grabbed the tape case as I continued listening. “The Drum Also Waltzes.” This didn’t sound like what I knew as jazz or a waltz, and I had definitely never heard a drummer like this before. I had figured a tape titled Drums Unlimited sounded promising, but this guy Max Roach was amazing. By the end of the song I had tears in my eyes. By the end of side one, I was overcome with shame and embarrassment for having pretended to know how to drum. By the end of side two, I had realized the idea that only religious music could be sacred was completely untrue. I flipped the tape over and started it again….

I consider hearing Max Roach’s Drums Unlimited the most pivotal moment of my life.

Like it or not

On her first day of work, my co-worker mentioned that she loves Captain America, while showing me her Captain America belt buckle. This was exciting for me, as I am a huge Marvel Comics nerd. I went into a long schpeil about Silver Surfer, the comic I’ve been reading lately. When I stopped to take a breath, she interrupted, “Well, I’ve never actually read any comic books.”

This is very confusing for me. How can you say you like a comic book character and not have read their comic? It instantly reminded me of another co-worker who said he liked jazz. I asked, “Oh, yeah, like who?” He replied, “Well, I don’t know any of their names but my grandpa used to play old jazz records when I was a kid and I really liked those.”

Or how about this one, based on an actual conversation:
Them: “I’m a big St. Louis Cardinals fan.”
Me: “Oh, you must be excited- they are only two games back and have a chance to take the NL Central, especially since the Brewers have been playing so poorly lately.”
Them: Oh, I don’t actually follow baseball…”

If you like something, you are going to seek it out and learn as much as you can about it. Don’t tell me you love it if you don’t know anything about it. Maybe I’m just getting hung up on semantics; if she had said she “admired” or “appreciated” Captain America, I probably wouldn’t have found the statement so annoying.

I told my co-worker it sounded to me more like she liked the idea of Captain America. To demonstrate my point, I asked her which Captain America she liked. Predictably, she didn’t even know there was more than one. (Admittedly, Steve Rogers is the real Captain America, but there have been numerous others. Upon further consideration, I realize this may have been too much of a trick question and wish I had instead asked her what she thought about Bucky, which any Captain America fan would know is his sidekick.) I asked her how one can like something that they know nothing about. She abruptly ended the conversation by stating “That’s just how I am, you’ll have to get used to it.”

Shower

The shower is the greatest invention of all time. If I were on a deserted island and could only have one thing, it would be a shower with hot and cold purified water that never ran out of heat or water. It cleans, warms (in winter), cools (in summer) and hydrates. There are other things I’d probably want, such as fire, a knife, an axe, a blanket, some rope and toilet paper, but I could be perfectly content without those things. I wouldn’t even need a towel! If I found an isolated area with nothing but wilderness and a shower for miles around, I’d never come back.

Milestones

One time I took one of those email surveys that someone had forwarded to me. One of the questions was “If you could have written one song, which song would it be?” I had never pondered the question before and found it an interesting one. The first song to come to mind was “Straight, No Chaser,” by Thelonious Monk.

As a senior in high school, it was one of the first songs that I transcribed by listening to it over and over again and writing it out one note at a time. That and “Dr. Jekyll” by Jackie McLean, which I recorded into a mini recorder so I could play it back at half speed. And then I tried to figure out “Two Bass Hit” by John Lewis. I first heard all these songs on Miles Davis’ album Milestones, which was the third or fourth CD I ever bought. I consequently went out and bought more Miles (Nefertiti and Filles de Killamanjaro), as well as Monk’s Misterioso, McLean’s Destination Out and Lewis’ group The Modern Jazz Quartet’s Django.

The Modern Jazz Quartet was a bore, I didn’t know what to make of Destination Out, the drumming on Nefertiti was the best I’d ever heard and Monk’s compositions absolutely blew me away. Thus my self-education continued, as I bought albums by Miles’ drummer (Tony Williams’ Emergency) and more Monk (Thelonious In Action and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk).

Anyway, I decided not to put “Straight, No Chaser.” I reconsidered that a better answer would be something by my all-time favorite composer Charles Mingus, but I ended up putting “Black Dog,” by Led Zeppelin. I figured it would have been better to have written a song that actually made money.



Led Zeppelin “Black Dog”

Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move
Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.
Oh, oh, child, way you shake that thing
Gonna make you burn, gonna make you sting.
Hey, hey, baby, when you walk that way
Watch your honey drip, can’t keep away.

(chorus) ah yeah, ah yeah, ah, ah, ah. ah yeah, ah yeah, ah, ah, ah.

I gotta roll, can’t stand still,
Got a flame in my heart, can’t get my fill,
Eyes that shine burning red,
Dreams of you all through my head.
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah.

Hey, baby, oh, baby, pretty baby,
Tell me what you do me now.
(repeat)

Didn’t take too long fore I found out
What people mean my down and out.
Spent my money, took my car,
Started tellin’ her friends she wants to be a star.
I don’t know but I been told
A big legged woman ain’t got no soul.

(chorus) ah yeah, ah yeah, ah, ah, ah. ah yeah, ah yeah, ah, ah, ah.

All I ask for when I pray,
Steady rollin’ woman gonna come my way.
Need a woman gonna hold my hand
And tell me no lies, make me a happy man.

Brazil

Brazil, the movie by Terry Gilliam, made its debut in 1985. The first thing the movie draws your attention to are the omni-present ducts. These are an obvious metaphor for the Internet. Oh, wait, this movie was made in1985? The next thing the movie draws your attention to is a terrorist attack. This is an obvious reference to Bush’s War on Terrorism. Oh, wait, this movie was made in1985? All right, all right- you get the idea. Although I wish the explanation for how this film so perfectly relates to today was that Gilliam has first-hand experience of the time travel that is the topic of his12 Monkeys, unfortunately it is probably more accurate to say it is demonstrative of the fact the history tends to repeat itself.

I surmise that the movie is called Brazil either because it brings to mind a tropical paradise destroyed by human industry or because Gilliam just really wanted to use the creepily cheerful song, “Aquarela do Brasil”, that plays throughout the movie. It takes place in what I can only call the “retro-future.” Reminiscent of those 50’s sci-fi flicks in which the futuristic gadgets look suspiciously like they’re from the 50’s, in Brazil robots look like erector sets, computers are little more than typewriters and instruments of torture look like they come from a traveling doctor’s bag. It is a time when technology is so advanced only the savvy know how to use it, and so cutting edge it never quite works right. It is so depended upon that when a fly causes a type-o that causes an innocent man to be killed, nobody knows what to do except blame somebody else. The main concern of the majority is in saving face- figuratively and literally. There is no reality that anyone wants to accept.

The only escape that Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) has found is in his dreams. But then he actually sees the girl of his dreams, and for possibly the first time, his life is given purpose. Upon the realization that his dreams somehow reflect reality, he realizes he must deal with reality. His reality is that, as an employee of the highly bureaucratic agency assigned to eliminate subversives that might otherwise undermine this carefully regimented society, he is part of the problem. He hopes he can use his status as the son of a debutante to, if not change things from the inside, at least track down the woman in his dreams.

Brazil is an absolutely brilliant commentary on “modern civilization.” I didn’t even mention a great supporting cast, including Michael Palin and Robert De Niro, a subtly hilarious, fast-talking screenplay by Gilliam and Tom Stoppard and an amazing set design which combines Art Deco with low-income housing. Simply put, it is one of the greatest movies ever made.

OT VS. NT

I was going to write about the Gilliam movie Brazil today, but a brief conversation with a co-worker has prompted me to reflect on this topic instead, even though it is admittedly much less interesting than Brazil.

Following is a short list, written in about an hour’s span off the top of my head, comparing and contrasting the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament. This cannot be considered a comparison of the God of Judaism with the God of Christianity, because in both religions, the teachings of their religious texts are secondary to the teachings of their religious leaders (of course all religious leaders will slyly tell you otherwise).

OT: If you follow my commands, your life will be blessed.
NT: If you follow my commands, your life might suck but after you die you’ll be blessed.

OT: Fear me.
NT: Love me, which is incompatible with fear.

OT: If you disobey me, your enemies will defeat you.
NT: If you disobey me, I’ll let you be tortured for all of eternity.

OT: I have laid out very specific rituals and rules that you must follow. Rules include don’t eat dead pigs or wear clothes woven from more than one fabric.
NT: Skip those traditions and you can’t follow all those rules anyway so don’t worry about the less important ones too much (although they’re all equally important because if you break one it’s as if you’ve broken them all), especially if you have a dream which implies they are no longer relevant.

OT: I will forgive you if you kill a bunch of animals.
NT: I will forgive you because I let my son be killed.

OT: Women are not to be trusted.
NT: Women are not to be trusted.

OT: Jews are superior to all other races.
NT: All races are equal.

OT: A man can have as many wives as he wants. The man is in charge.
NT: A man can only have one wife. The man is in charge.

OT: The best way to deal with other races is to annihilate them.
NT: The best way to deal with other races is to convert them. I’ll even speak their languages through you so you can communicate with them.

OT: Sex with anyone other than your wives is frowned upon.
NT: Sex with anyone other than your wife is a sin.

OT: If you disobey me, I will punish you, your children and their children.
NT: If you deny that I exist, I will never forgive you, but it won’t reflect on your children.

OT: If you follow me, you will be rich.
NT: If you follow me, you won’t need money.

OT: Women are sexy!
NT: Do not be turned on by women.

OT: Getting drunk is okay, even if it causes you to sleep with your daughters or run around town naked.
NT: Don’t get drunk!

OT: Pay attention to Jews who talk gibberish about the future.
NT: Pay attention to followers of Jesus who talk gibberish about the future.

OT: Psychics from other religious are accurate but should not be consulted.
NT: Psychics from other religious are liars and should not be consulted.

OT: I am pretty damn powerful, but I need to rest occasionally.
NT: I am all-powerful and a human mortal all at the same time!

OT: I am just like you, but it is impossible for you to fathom me.
NT: I am way better than you, but I will reveal myself to you.

OT: I made man out dirt and woman out of man’s rib.
NT: I fed thousands of people with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread.

OT: I live in the Ark of the Covenant.
NT: I live in your heart.

OT: Obey me constantly!
NT: Think about me constantly!

OT: Listen to the teachings of no one but me.
NT: I am either God’s son or God himself or both so you should listen to my teachings.

OT: I reserve the right to ruin your life just to see how you’ll react.
NT: I love you so much I’d never ruin your life.

OT: War is usually the answer.
NT: Peace is always the answer.

OT: Most diseases are punishments from me. What’s a demon?
NT: Most diseases are caused by demons. Only I can heal you.

OT: I speak literally.
NT: I speak in metaphor.

OT: I am in all places at once, although my knowledge of geography is limited to the Mesopotamian region.
NT: I traveled thousands of miles on camel back before I was 2!

OT: The sun goes around the earth, and I can stop it if needed.
NT: I can walk on water and you can too if you stare at me long enough.

OT: I am an emotionally unstable nutcase.
NT: I am really good at being passive-aggressive, and only lose my temper occasionally.

OT: I am the same yesterday, today and forever.
NT: I am the same yesterday, today and forever.