If you’ve seen the series, this is a wonderful trip back through some classic moments and themes. (Lots of foul language, a couple gunshots.)
If you haven’t seen the series, this likely doesn’t translate — though some of the themes shine through. There’s not a person I know who I wouldn’t recommend “The Wire” to. Its conclusions can be a bit oppressive, but it’s such a fantastic five-act (one act per season) rendition of urban life at the turn of the 21st century, that it should really go down as one of the great works mankind has produced. Beautifully written, acted, shot and edited, unlike a classic piece of literature, it required the collaboration of hundreds of people over an extended time.
Just posting this for my own memoirs, as it reflects the foulest side of politics (i.e. absolute intellectual dishonesty) and points to how, just when we need frank conversation and debate about policy, we instead get Palin scare tactics. Plus, it’s a pet peeve of mine when people don’t like death so they avoid all conversation and forethought that might relate to it. As my mom says, “Everybody dies! Deal with it.“
Articles followed about how Republicans themselves had supported such provisions. Sites like PolitiFact and Factcheck.org as well as national organizations like the AARP pushed back on the lies.
It didn’t matter. The “death panel” episode shows how the news media, after aiding and abetting falsehood, were unable to perform their traditional role of reporting the facts. By lavishing uncritical attention on the most exaggerated claims and extreme behavior, they unleashed something that the truth could not dispel.
There was a troubling new dynamic: People like Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, were now parroting these falsehoods in their town meetings and letting it drive their policy decisions. (Mr. Grassley: “We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on Grandma.”) When the most extreme elements peddling false information can cow senior members of Congress into embracing their claims, it does not bode well for either policymaking or for the Republican Party.
It was all from that familiar playbook: We don’t like a bill or provision, so we make some shit up, and play on idiots’ worst fears. In the process, smear an idea that was actually founded in good intentions.
That idea, as described in the same Op/Ed:
I am much more interested in extending coverage to the uninsured and moving away from “fee for service” Medicare, which rewards volume over value.
In this context, I found it perverse that Medicare would pay for almost any medical procedure, yet not reimburse doctors for having a thoughtful conversation to prepare patients and families for the delicate, complex and emotionally demanding decisions surrounding the end of life. So when I was working on the health care bill, I included language directing Medicare to cover a voluntary discussion with a doctor once every five years about living wills, power of attorney and end-of-life treatment preferences.
… so you’re saying you want to KILL GRANDMA?!?!?!?!
Usually when Google’s auotcomplete function works for me, I’m searching to verify a song lyric before I post it on my blog and accidentally write, “I want a mad monster, and a king-sized kid.”
So these collected autocompletes … damn, I sure hope they’re song lyrics or comedy routines, and I’d love to know what songs/routines they’re from. (Yes, I know that would be a simple Google search itself.)
I’m standing there raking and mulching and towing, the monotonous seasonal work that comes with having three leaf-showering trees each twice the size of your house … When the thought of my dad comes to mind. (Ironic, as I’m doing a chore I can’t imagine him ever doing.)
No specific thought in particular; just a flash reminder: HE’S GONE. Almost a confirmation, mixed with a tabloid-y dose of cranial shock.
A few days prior, I’d thought of him while eating sardines, because who in the hell else do I know that ever ate sardines? I don’t even like them. But as with bananas for charlie horses, I force them down for the supposed health benefit. Good fats and all that, perhaps as mercury-free as any fish in our mercurized millennium. (He used to prepare sardines on buttered bread for me, and I suppose a certain kind of son sort of hangs on to any act of love he can catch.)
But this is what was weird: Later in the evening after raking, I’m nodding off on the couch and I get this weird semi-conscious, semi-dream thought of, “Wait! He is gone … isn’t he?” Like my brain is rebooting and confirming more recent information.
It’s been 13 months since his death, and we had the initial round of reactions, then we had the visit abroad to his home and friends this past summer. And I guess I’m realizing that in the final years there was a sort of rhythm to my interactions with him. With his health in and out and he not wanting us to see him in a bad state, nor to hear him on the phone in a weakened state, it could be months in between phone calls or correspondence (unless, of course, he needed me to do some shit with his taxes).
So now, perhaps, I’ve reached the period where the memo has finally circulated to all my levels of consciousness, and some of them are noticing that this rhythm is askew, so they’re pinging back to confirm: “This is for real, isn’t it, and we can move this file to the archives? Please advise.”
Let It Be
Then you have the weird sister — because everyone has the weird sister — who didn’t have much use for him while he was alive (that’s not the weird part, trust me), but now in his death she has sightings or dreams or apparitions where she “knows” he’s been freed or is doing well or is watching or yada yada, playing music and freed from the factors that complicated his terrestrial life.
Which is somewhat offensive to me — if not in its actuality then in its presentation: No one “owns” the authoritative memory of a person, or their history, but it is unsettling to possess one version of my dad while he was actually alive, then have a still-living person, who’d not held much stock in him while alive, give me an authoritative version of who my dad is in the afterlife.
It’s like this: Believe what you believe, if you must (personally, I don’t believe much, thanks to a preponderance of missing evidence), but don’t tell me your version of an unobservable reality as if it’s fact, because you dreamed it or meditated it or shat it out with some hallucinogens. She doesn’t quite mean it that way, I know, but still: I wouldn’t tell you your dead friend I knew is sitting on a cloud playing a harp, trading chess moves with Hockey Jesus, and I’d figure that’s just common courtesy.
Then again, that stance may be why for me, religion didn’t take.
“Handouts, they got me down
I had to regain my confidence
So I got into camouflage
The girls, they love to see you shoot.”
>>I Love a Man in a Uniform, Gang of Four
Pretty amazing, intense photo set following a teenage soldier for 2.25 years from recruitment, to enlistment, to deployment and the challenges of life going back and forth from training/combat to home. The full multimedia feature (videos and articles, etc.) is here.
Hail to the Internet. Even if this were the longest of feature stories back in the print age, they’d use at most — what, 10? 15? of these photos with a print feature in the weekend paper? Now none of the photos and legwork go to waste.
For some reason, the rotation of girlfriends (and two engagements, and the girls gazing with hope) struck me most. Humans at this age seldom have a grasp of what’s going on or what they’ll face in life. Which makes them the most malleable, of course, and combined with their athletic resilience makes them ideal raw material for strategic combat. That’s always an interesting context for me, and the innocent search for a spouse as “the one” just adds to it.
Now accepting all suggestions for new (or old) music…
With a new vehicle (pronounced “vee-hickle” around these here parts) came a free 3-month teaser of XM Radio. In the absence of new Killing Joke or Radiohead material, a teaser of XM meant I make one last, futile attempt at exposing myself to “what’s new?” music before my tastes — like the closet of every man (according to the Seinfeld riff) — permanently freeze to reflect the best years of my life*.
*not sure if those were defined by when a man was most young and hip, when his body had no quarrel with daily aches and pains, or simply when casual sex was most attainable for the least amount of effort.
There Are Problems with This Approach
First, make no mistake: The XM experience is quite fun. There are “decades” stations like “’70s on [channel] 7,” ’80s on 8, etc. Those are a memory trip. But for those, the decade in question is literally the only criteria. So you can have The Cure bookended by Pat Benatar and Michael Jackson. Or Stone Temple Pilots sandwiched between TLC (“Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls”) and Erasure. I don’t care what your tastes are, that combination is like a twisted psychological experiment.
What at first is a novelty quickly becomes a jolting, fucked up memory trip. It’s a reminder of what was on back then, but it’s also a reminder of what I hated back then. I need a very quick trigger finger lest Creed invade my head.
What’s worse — but interesting in a Musicophilia kind of way? With this experiment going on, I don’t need to hear a song at all to have it stuck in my head. I’ll hear part of one song I didn’t like then (or now), and then half an hour later I’ll be on the hockey bench realizing that some other song from that era is now rattling around in my head. It’s haunting. How do our synapses do that?
Sad to Confirm, New Music Modern Rock Often Sucks
But the decades stations are just land mines of last resort. There are a couple of stations that are pretty decade-specific, but much more up my alley. “Lithium” focuses more on my kind of ’90s, while “First Wave” hits my kind of ’80s, which are happily Michael Jackson-, Bon Jovi- and Pat Benatar-free.
Then there is a “modern alternative” station that I counted on to be my introduction to What I’ve Been Missing. Now, Mrs. Fall of Because calls me a “music snob” — but I’m hardly informed enough to claim such a title. What I do have is pretty specific tastes across multiple genres, so if something doesn’t strike me in multiple areas of melody or bass or tempo and certainly lyrically, my patience wanes. I’m not a snob, it’s all subjective at its root; I just want music to smack me in the head and the gut, and knock my knees out — or else I’ll turn back to old standbys that do.
So there’s a lot of Mute Math or Sun-something-Pickup or Muse or Killers or Kings of What-Not … more names than I can remember. They’re trying to incorporate multiple eras and influence — while recognizing the synthesizer is not to be feared — all intentions I applaud. The songs grab me a little bit at first, then kind of plateau. I’m not feeling it. Now I’m hearing the same songs cycled through the rotation again, and I’m recognizing them, and they’re still not grabbing me, and I’m feeling a bit hopeless. Even the singles that grab me, I can tell from other material it won’t be an album’s worth (and by god, I’m still going to clamor for the full album that grabs me).
I need to (nervously) check out the Headlights’ latest album, because some how their “Kill Them With Kindness” album resonated with me. Based on the lone single I’ve heard, though I fear disappointment there, too.
The Tipping Point
But you know what really killed it for me? Some outfit called Airborn Toxic Event has a song “Sometime around Midnight” that sounds to my ears like a close (and worse) rip-off of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” Structure, pace (slowed down for dramatic effect), lyrical rhythm: The first time I heard it, I thought somebody was just making up new words and instruments to the same song, a song I rather dig. Maybe a tribute? No, not so.
They’re not at all the same, yet they’re the same. Also hindering my appreciation: The lyrics of the former are whining about a girl, treading the wrong side of that line (for my money) between sincerely sentimental and just melodramatic. Yuck.
Finally, a song that I’ve heard multiple weeks in a row from whatever radio feed is used at our Saturday morning hockey: Some bastard decided to cover Pearl Jam’s “Black” — a pretty classic song, Pearl Jam-wise — by doing nothing but slowing it down even further and even dragging out the lyrics to truly oversaturate the drama. The original “Black” was already quite slow and already tread that line between moving slow song and over-the-top. So this cover is like some tool in his dorm room saying, “No, that song means so much to me, I need to slow it down, drag it out and make it mean more.”
So yeah, I guess I’m a snob, I’m being overly negative, and I need some serious help in the ol’ music catalog department. But this cover makes me vomit. And makes me want to dig back through some Butthole Surfers to exorcise the damage it inflicted. At least they knew how to do a cover (of “Hurdy Gurdy Man“) to hilarious effect.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a fierce critic of all things related to the European Union, is the only thing standing between Europe’s élite club and its mighty future. Until he signs the Lisbon Treaty — the Czech Republic is the last holdout among E.U. members — the E.U.’s grand reform plan remains in limbo. While politicians across the continent have spent weeks wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to compel Klaus to sign the document, the majority of Czechs are standing behind their leader. “I actually like him. He is an intelligent man who knows what he is talking about,” says Anna Hrubesova, a 17-year-old student…
Vaclav Klaus is a populist — not to be confused with Vaclav Havel, the dissident poet who was jailed under the Communist regime and became president in the modern democratic era. Part of Klaus’s stalling tactic has involved stoking fears that Germans who were ousted after WWII could reclaim their land via EU courts.
As the article later explains:
Havel has blasted the President’s [Klaus] holdout position as “irresponsible and dangerous.” Author Jaroslav Rudis, who has written about the expelled Germans, also questioned Klaus’ motives. “Every time I hear someone play this card I feel like the war has never ended,” he tells TIME. “It’s like it’s from a different planet.”
Different planet? Oh, I can relate. This is the part where I share the Czech/EU experience of my dad — an accomplished political scientist, a Czech expat (and later re-pat), a fervent anti-Communist and general fan of democracy.
No filters on these cancer-immunizing mo-fo's
When he moved back to the Czech Republic, he couldn’t get the filterless Commander, Chesterfield and Lucky Strike cigarettes he’d grown accustomed to in his post-war U.S. salad days.
[Moderate smoking of filterless cigarettes, my zealous and devout smoking father assured me, has "an immunizing effect" against lung cancer. Must be filterless, mind you; filters only filter out the protective stuff. "So I should start smoking them now then?" my 12-year-old self asked him. Him, quickly: "No."]
So my dad would have us buy cartons of these cigarettes — for some reason, they were plentiful at the Discount Smoke Shop — and ship them over to him in his village abode in the Czech hills. Until one year where the shipment was stopped. He got a notice from the postmaster that he would have to come to Prague (two hours away) to retrieve them and pay a duty, because he was importing essentially a small suitcase load of cigs. The limit was 50 (cigarettes or packs, I can’t remember).
His response? Probably send a relative with a doctor’s note to Prague to say he was physically incapable of retrieving the cigarettes, yet also in medical need of them. But beyond that: He asked us to send him one carton at a time, in different kinds of envelopes, with different handwriting on the address label. (Being something of a font/handwriting zealot myself, I took up the task once just for the fun of it, to see how much I could screw up Czech addresses in oblivious American handwriting.)
After he hatched this plan for us, though, he vented to me: “Now I really wish I’d never voted for joining the EU.”
BH and I can meet at any time, in any place and hit it off like two old friends that we are.
Except it’s not like old friends who only rehash old stories and old events — no, there was some connection made way back, some shared alignment or orientation with which we hurtle through the universe at complementary speeds.
If I had to trace it to a single moment (and I’m sure he, if he even agreed with my premise, would trace it to a different one), it would be the time in high school — very early in our friendship — when I spent an hour on the phone with him trying to get him to be a double-date to a Homecoming dance for me.
He wouldn’t budge. He could see the whole setup was a carwreck* coming from a mile away. But during the tangential wanderings of that conversation, I realized I’d encountered a human I didn’t ever want to let go.
*Some cute girl I knew only through a mutual older friend said she wanted to go to our dance; the catch was I had to get a date for her friend, too. (The reality, hilariously, was that the mutual friend — 10 years older than us — fancied the job of playing matchmaker; meanwhile, the cute girl only wanted to get into our school’s dance for reasons I, upon realizing this, didn’t care to investigate further, but involved other people at our school. The full story involves a lost jacket AND a speeding ticket for the poor sap I did get to go with me. I should probably write that tale down sometime.) Read the rest of this entry »
When the lack of blog maintenance eats away at me, I have to just push “Go” without pausing to think. For shame. But so it goes.
It was never much in doubt, but now I all too clearly understand the draw to the writer of having some isolated cabin by a lake. Writing takes way more time than it feels like it should, and procrastination is just another more definable task away.
My biggest problem lately is those more definable tasks: They’re all involving paid writing. Good for the income, not for the soul.
The second biggest problem is every time I think of something I want to write, I’m not at a keyboard, and then when I am at a keyboard, the definable tasks have pushed memory of those other wonderful topics away. (They are wonderful, I assure you.)
I’ve considered — too many times to count — using a digital voice recorder to avoid this idea loss, but that leads to problem number three: Most of these non-keyboard settings aren’t exactly ideal for such a tool.
The hot tub is not a welcoming place for an electrical device. My wife lying asleep next to me, I imagine, is not supportive of me spontaneously dictating ideas in the middle of the night. The throne, while a potential setting for brief contemplation, is not … yeah, you know, I don’t really want to go there. And public places, where I’m struck by the funniest quirks of human society, are not the spots where I want to be the odd guy dictating to himself about how odd everyone else is.
Sorry for (yet another) post for the sake of posting, but I did get a complaint, so this mechanical addition is my way of forwarding that kick in the ass up to the execs who can do something about it.
Posted by Dominik 
Posted by Dominik 
Posted by Dominik 
