Frost!

It snuck up on me this year. It's not like I didn't know it was coming. Maybe I was just preoccupied with my own petty personal transitions, a trip out of town, back into the routine of work, classes, meetings, sleeping in my own bed. It must have been Friday night that the plants got zapped - the potted lilies that I should have brought inside, the tomatoes of course, a volunteer squash vine, and a couple of basil plants long gone to seed. I don't know why all 16 pepper plants went unscathed, or why nothing ever gets "scathed" if it takes a direct hit from some scathing death rays. Anyway.

It's getting colder, and not all of a sudden, although it seems that way. The trees are turning - all of a sudden. The maple tree across Plum Street from our house went from green to bright yellow in two days, or so my brain registered it. The white pines along the north side of our yard have shed a ton of pinestraw, which looks good beside the raised beds and stepping stones, just one more reason to love pine trees. And these surface changes made me glad to be back in my own garden after my visit to the MoreGardens! house in the Bronx last week. It felt cozily good to walk in the back gate and up the walk into the enclosed yard, which is still my favorite room in the house, before going in the back door. Home is where the freely falling mulch is.

I guess the time change has something to do with my sudden recognition of the obvious gradual changes, and the fact that it coincides with Halloween. It's colder, it's darker, the plants are either dying or going to sleep for six months. All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Day of the Dead, this is the dying time of year. Ghosts and skeletons walking every street (also pirates and princesses, but I'm ignoring whatever doesn't fit my thesis). It's all around us, people, and we should ponder the gravity of it all, as befits the prevailing darkness, cold, and deepening gloom!

Not necessarily. I saw a praying mantis yesterday lounging on the underside of a wheelbarrow in the late-afternoon sun. That's a good omen, right, mantises are friendly garden creatures? I saw a shooting star last night while walking the dog down by Alumni Creek. That should mean something too.

Jessi went up to Northeast Swingstate U. for the weekend to visit his sister, and they celebrated Halloween with Helga's friends and 20,000 other young people decked out in their ghoulish best. The streets of Cuyahogaburg were packed with costumed revelers, so apparently that campus has followed the lead of its sister school, Southeast Swingstate U. down in Hockingville, and turned Halloween into the major annual party. Just speculating here, but maybe the fall harvest coldsnap and festival of darkness is this culture's unofficial night of wild bacchanalian release, as Mardi Gras and Carnival are for our Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Brazilian partying brethren, but inverted for us northerners.

I see London, I see France

I'm getting strong, but still unofficial, signals from my dear, mysterious daughter, Helga Golly, that she is going to Europe for a two-week art history workshop over the holidays. Northeast Swingstate U. is offering a whirlwind museum and gallery study-tour of London and Paris starting the day after Christmas, with research and writing to follow. Kind of like The Twelve Days of Christmas abroad.

On the first day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me a whole day in the Louvre.
On the second day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me Notre Dame cathedral and a whole day in the Louvre.
On the third day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me Salisbury/Stonehenge, Notre Dame cathedral, and a whole day in the Louvre.
On the fourth day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me the National Gallery, Salisbury/Stonehenge, Notre Dame cathedral, and a whole day in the Louvre.
On the fifth day of Christmas my tour guide gave to me the Brit - ish Mus - eum! National Gallery, Salisbury/Stonehenge, Notre Dame cathedral, and a whole day in the Louvre.

That's not the whole itinerary, just a representative sample. It sounds like a great opportunity to travel, experience some amazing places, get a somewhat structured exposure to art objects and historical sites that are deemed "important" to academics, and get credit for it. I sound like a dad. Helga is excited about it, Gven is excited about it for her in a motherly way, and I am excited about it. Don't I sound excited? How excited am I? Let me count the dollars, I means the ways.

Some details are still tentative, but in general it looks good. I'll update this space when I know more and continue to vicariously live the dream.

To bling or not to bling?

That is the question the sporting sage of the airwaves brought before us humble listeners this morning. My timing was perfect. I tuned in just in time to hear the loud mouth of Frank DeFord quoting the loud mouth of Charles Barkley at the very end of the former's weekly pearl of wisdom, so I was lucky enough to miss the heaving bulk of his commentary on the weighty world issue of the day, the NBA dress code.

League management (franchise/capital/property owners) is requiring their workers (players/labor/means of production) to dress in "business casual" attire when appearing in public as a member (employee/human resource) of the team (company/plantation), i.e. traveling, hotels, promotional events. No more sideways caps, headphones, vintage jerseys, warmups, tee-shirts, no mo baggy hip-hop pants, no mo gaudy gold jewelry. Yo, no more loud expressive stylin' individuality. Will it be the end of Western civilization as we know it? Has that already happened? If so, is that a bad thing? Why does anybody care?

The league cares because they have a product to sell, and the suits are worried about their numbers. Players care because they have careers and endorsements to protect, and they're worried about the numbers. Older and white fans care because they're offended by black gangsta players. (Note to self: When someone says something is wrong because it offends them, they have no argument.) Younger and black fans care because they like the way Allen Iverson swaggers and talks back to the man. The rest of us have tuned out the NBA (NFL, NHL, MLB, BFD) as it increasingly resembles the World Wrestling Federation or whatever they call that other road show.

If Commissioner David Stern and the other impresarios think treating their performers like children - in order to make them look like adults - will help them maintain market share, go for it. See if the grown-ups get their way by acting like children themselves. If the bad-boy players comply, I can't wait to see what the unintended consequences will be. The fact that Mr. Expert Frank DeFord and I are even talking about it proves that it's working, because, as Mr. Steinbrenner knows, any publicity is good publicity.

Buckeye in Big Apple

(Sung to the tune of Merle Haggard's immortal "Okie from Muscogee")

I'm proud to be a buckeye in the Big Apple,
A place where even squares can have a ball...

I love that line "where even squares can have a ball." As I write this, I'm back in the Heart of it All and into the recovery phase of a weekend trip to New York. Jess and I got home last night after a trouble-free nine hours on the road, making good time driving through rainy western and clear eastern Pennsylvania, talking most of the way about this and that. The folks at More Gardens! gave us a nice send-off yesterday morning with homemade biscuits and strong coffee and a ritual smudge on the sidewalk on east 162nd street in the Bronx. It was bittersweet, as leaving sometimes is, but his plan is to return next spring.

Sunday night there was a campfire in Courtland Garden, where Jess and his friends do most of their gardening and where the summer camp for kids took place (see More Gardens! post). Alex, Gabby, Night, Aresh, Trey, and I spent most of the afternoon moving a big pile of 4x8 timbers from a corner of the Courtland garden to the Alvarez garden a few blocks away, while Jess and Luis finished the roof of the casita in another corner of the garden. It gave me a chance to help out a little in the work and to put the truck to use. It took three trips and it was fun loading, unloading, and solving the minor problems that come up in a project like that. I was impressed with their ability to work through the small glitches and get it done in good spirits. Afterwards, Jess and I took off for the Lower East Side and found a good, cheap Indian restaurant and enjoyed a kick-ass meal.

Saturday night was the big going-away party for Jessi. Someone in the house was cooking all day long while Jess and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so there was lots of great food and beer. Quesadillas, pasta, a yummy eggplant dish, a squash dish, something with tofu, cakes, brownies, and quarts of Ballantine Ale. Despite the cool, rainy weather, lots of people came over from Brooklyn and around town. Joe, an old friend from Oberlin, Ellie, and Jess all played a lot of songs on the guitar, and some of them are still going through my head, like Leonard Cohen's "Halleluja" and Joe's Yiddish version of "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." It was a gas just to sit on my rolled-up sleeping bag and eavesdrop or take part in the flow of multiple conversations. One of the hot topics - and the best metaphor of the entire evening - was a book called Wild Fermentation about various ways of preserving food from different cultures. Check it out if you ever want to make pickles, cheese, wine, beer, or sourdough bread.

The Met was a trip and a half. I love the fact that anyone can go there for next to nothing, and the admission prices are suggested donations. In general, I have an love-hate relationship with museums, and the great museums of the world - the Prado, the Louvre, Chicago, Cleveland, the Metropolitan - just intensify that ambivalence. But that's another story. I had a great time in a small exhibit of artists influenced by van Gogh, especially a couple of drawings by Paul Klee, and a larger exhibit of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava that was tai chi writ large. It was cool to see his sketches of legs, wings, torsos, and heads alongside kinetic sculptures of rib-like structures moving up and down in continuous waves, alongside scale models and video of the buildings he designed for the Athens Olympics, a theater in Seville, and the new train station under the World Trade Center. After a few hours there, we were pretty drained, so we walked through the shi-shi neighborhood until we found a suitable place for coffee, where the gruff proprietor made us sit at the counter because we weren't ordering enough for a table with a tablecloth.

Friday night, my first night in the city, we went to a Greenpeace benefit on an old boat called the Frying Pan down at Chelsea Pier on the west side. It was a warm, clear night, and it felt good to be outside after driving all day. A klezmer/gypsy band from Brooklyn, Athens, and Yellow Springs called the Luminescent Orchestrae played an amazing set: three violins, guitar, and a large bass-like stringed instrument. Then a Latino/ska/punk band followed, and the dancing got a little more raucous. It was a lot of fun to meet some of Jessi's friends from the gardening scene and the music scene and the political scene, all of which overlap a great deal. They were all, without exception, completely welcoming and friendly. I'll try to write more when I come down.

We're all living in Guantanamo

What year was it? Around 1974? There was a prison riot at the New York state prison at Attica, NY, which state law enforcement officers ended by the very efficient means of killing all of the participants. John and Yoko recorded a simple little chant on their next, quickly produced album. If memory serves me, this was during their Elephant's Memory period when their art was all political and John was fighting deportation. Anyway, the words of that song sometimes echo in my time-warped mind:

Attica State, Attica State, we're all living in Attica State.

The point being that, just like the Enabling Act that the National Socialist Party pushed through the Reichstag in 1933, our own Patriot Act, with the blessing of the running-scared Congress, gives legal sanction to deviating from the Constitution and its protections from state power. Without citing chapter and verse, all I'm going to say is that police authority is now openly allowed to extend beyond the limits established by law and formerly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Let's observe how both military and civil personnel use this carte blanche permission to ignore the law on suspects arrested without being charged, held without access to an attorney, detained at Guantanamo or another part of the gulag archipelago, and tortured or coerced into giving information they may or may not have. Who was it that said we are only as free as the least free among us?

Guantanamo, Guantanamo, we're all living in Guantanamo.

fall fund drive(s)

Tis the season for the begathon, fa la la la lah. Every worthy cause and struggling nonprofit is asking for your support. I don't begrudge their need - or my obligation - to put my money where my brain, heart, belly, balls, butt, and mouth are. But it does raise some hackles and some questions.

When I pick up the phone and pledge my support for public radio, it seems like I'm endorsing a degraded product. Although I realize they did it to cut costs, the recent programming changes at W Large State University are a step in the wrong direction. I miss the voices and musical selections of the familiar local classical disc jockeys, and the canned voices and lowest-common-denominator programming are a poor substitute. Monica somebody and Steve whatshisface in LA (or a studio in an undisclosed location) play a mishmash of classical lite. Some genius in the accounting department at NPR said it fits the cross-sectional tastes of a national audience, so that's what we get. (See also On Monoculture, Sept. 15 in this space.) In fairness, Christopher Purdy and Boyce Lancaster are great, and the addition of Bill McLaughlin in the evening helps make up for the loss of the inimitable Karl Haas.

Over at the oh-so-edgy W True Alternative, they're on an even leaner budget, and they bust their buns to keep a little blues, jazz, world beat, afro-pop, and roots stuff on the air. Like many news-hungry people, I am hooked on "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," although the differences between their coverage and everybody else's are diminishing. Again, not their fault, but there it is. Yet what would we do without the silken voice of Terri Gross, the wide-ranging tastes of David Dye, and the ferociously funny Harry Shearer? So what am I complaining about? The best I can say is that it's the best we've got locally, so I'll have to write my check and keep listening, or else start my own station.

But that's just the tip of the transmitter. It's time for the church pledge drive too, aka annual guilt trip. See how much time, energy, and cold cash the really dedicated leaders/pillars of the church give? I shrink down into the pew just a little whenever I hear that refrain. And the Red Cross is in dire need of your dollars and your blood. And Gulf Coast hurricane victims need your help. Pakistani earthquake victims need your help. Your alma mater needs your help to maintain programs, offer scholarships, and build that new science building. The ACLU needs more cash to fight the good fight against a government that thinks civil liberties are the enemies of freedom. Every conscientious environmental group out there REALLY DOES need money to counteract the corporate war on wildlife, woods, and watersheds. And even the benevolent corporate employer is offering to match my contributions dollar-for-dollar to a 501(c)(3) status nonprofit charitable organization, so you bet I'm giving my little bit.

Maybe it's better that they all hit me up at this time of year, so I can write the check, write this venting post, and get on with it.

Bartleby the Citizen

You know the line from Melville: "I would prefer not to." As Bartleby the Scrivener sinks further and further into the condition (depression? ennui? fatalism? nihilism?), he applies that response to more and more potential actions. In the burgers-and-circuses state of imperial Amerika, a creepily similar attitude toward making choices seems to be gaining popularity. A consumer culture addicted to limitless choices of products is lapsing into a condition of preferring not to.

I'm game for a good conspiracy theory. I think it has something to do with the dangers of real choices in a real democracy. Not just more choices among brands of shampoo, shoes, steaks, shakes, and shinola. I'm talking about choices of how to get to work in the morning, who to come home to at night, what your tax dollars pay for, when and how to end your life, not to mention if and when to produce more little citizens. Lots of people seem to be against it. Isn't that what we have experts for? To decide what's good for us?

These consumers don't want to choose, and they don't want anybody else to choose. Choice is bad. Witness the worst bumper sticker ever, which keeps showing up on highways right here in Central Swing State: "It's a Child, Not a Choice." I can only infer that having children is not a life-decision to carefully consider, but something that kind of happens to people. I remember hearing a Lutheran minister back in my birthplace of Norsk Ridge, Minnesota, preach on the topic. He was all for doing the right thing by following Commandments and obeying God's Will, but he was staunchly against ordinary people making choices. Choice is bad.

The irony is that making choices is such an unpopular thing to do in our so-called democratic society. But you've already heard enough lies about how freedom is on the march. There is a widespread belief that ordinary folks aren't really capable of making decisions, and there are plenty of other folks who are only too glad to make their decisions for them. Remember when campaign fundraising was classified as a form of free speech? To wit: poor people clearly aren't capable of making policy decisions, so rich people owe it to the poor people to make policy on their behalf. Therefore those with money are capable of free speech, and those without are not. Sort of narrows down the debate in our free, democratic society.

Then there are those who opt out. Don't wanna make decisions, no thanks, not cool. A few years ago, I asked my Wednesday night discussion group at what point in their lives they achieved autonomy. When did their education, growth, and development reached a level of independence where they could make their own decisions? Two out of eight turned it around and said their personal growth led them to NOT be autonomous. I was shocked, but maybe I shouldn't be. Is being part of a group-identity or community so wonderful that it overrides the capacity or desire to choose for oneself?

The language man George Lakoff might be onto something. Although I'm suspicious of any all-purpose Theory That Explains Everything, one of his assertions in the little book Don't Think of an Elephant really does explain a lot. Briefly, in explaining the success of right-wing ideologues in manipulating voters by manipulating language, Lakoff draws the conclusion that "conservative" slogans appeal to the desire among many people for a government as Authoritarian Father, while "progressive" slogans appeal to a contrary desire for a government as Nurturing Parent.

What does an authoritarian father do? He makes the decisions for the family, of course, that's how ignorant, originally sinning, essentially wild and primitive beasts - like children, women, ethnic minorities, poor people, and other lower creatures - learn the difference between right and wrong. The all-knowing father figure has to tell them. What do nurturing parents do? They present choices for their offspring to make, because that's how differently gifted, buddha-natured, noble-spririted children - and even some adults of the nonwhitemale variety - learn to intelligently distinguish helpful consequences from harmful ones.

If you're still reading this rambling polemical hodge-podge, your open-mindedness is exceeded only by your patience. I'm having trouble keeping track of it myself. I think what worries me is the two-edged sword of signing over authority to others, especially the Official Others who keep saying I can trust them, which tells me I can't. I'm relieved of responsibility for my own well-being, and someone else has taken on a regal prerogative over what's best for me. No thank you. Not the physician or the priest or the police or the president.

Epilog: I wouldn't be going on about this if I didn't have some ambivalence myself. I have trouble choosing which cheese to put on my burrito, and I confess to having a heavy streak of Harsh Father in me, which Jessi and Helga can confirm. So this multi-draft post is just an attempt to sort through some of those mixed messages.

Harold Pinter, Wilfred Owen, Nobel

Good news, bad news. The good news is that the international Nobel people have recognized Harold Pinter for his literary contributions. The other good news is that the Anglo-Amerikan partnership for world domination has not silenced all voices of dissent, not that they haven't tried. What a strange pair of bedfellows they are, Mr. Smooth Talking Brit and Mr. Duh Party Hearty, ideal running mates on the global PR ticket. But rather than spill my own bile, let me pass on some remarks a friend passed to me, then we can all get back to our junk food and circuses and entertain ourselves to death.

Pinter: Torture and misery in name of freedom

By Harold Pinter

Adapted by Harold Pinter from a speech he delivered on winning the Wilfred Owen Award earlier this year
Published: 14 October 2005

The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.

But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral authority and a moral passion condoned by someone called God. Some people may find this difficult to comprehend but Osama Bin Laden finds it easy.

What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves) - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

An independent and totally objective account of the Iraqi civilian dead in the medical magazine The Lancet estimates that the figure approaches 100,000. But neither the US or the UK bother to count the Iraqi dead. As General Tommy Franks of US Central Command memorably said: "We don't do body counts".

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it" bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East". But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation". I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

What do Bush and Blair actually see when they look at themselves in the mirror?

I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments.

Would Frank Deford please shut the #>(& up?

Most of the time I'm fortunate enough to miss the Wednesday morning elitist diatribe in the name of that old-time sports religion, but my timing was off today. I happened to be listening when the bloviating of Frank Deford, the voice of wealth and privilege and self-satisfied liberalism, was beamed across Amerika from the NPR affiliate in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was too slow to change the station to the classical morning favorite on WOSU, so I perversely listened to the old fart from that bourgeois bastion of western civilization Sports Illustrated pontificate on the evils of baseball players' pants.

Is nothing sacred? Those disrespectful youngsters wear their knickers too long! And if they're not too long, they're too short, and if they're not too baggy, they're too tight! Don't these youngsters know that they should dress exactly as Mickey Mantle dressed in 1956? Why? Because Frank Deford had a peak experience in 1956 that defined for all time the Nature of the Game. According to whom? According to NPR Commentator and former senior editor at Sports Illustrated Frank Deford, who gets to use big words like contemplate and asinine, that's who.

While I have a counter-conniption in the driver's seat of my Ford Ranger, I realize that it's just another old coot paid to talk on the radio so that other old coots can slug down their morning coffee and say "Damn right, whipper-snappers got no respect," or alternatively in my case, "Who the #>(& do you think you are, Mr. Rich Connecticut Blowhard?" So the programming decision to keep airing the comments of the former senior editor every Wednesday accomplished its purpose of provoking a reaction in another sentimental old jock somewhere west of the Hudson River.

If I was really paying attention, I would listen only on the days when John Feinstein, who actually has something to say, talks on the radio. And I'm nostalgic myself for the days when Bob Edwards, himself now purged from the airwaves, had a weekly conversation with Ron Rapoport, a real reporter, of the Chicago Sun-Times, a real newspaper. Spare us the condescending commentary, it only snowballs into other old farts ranting in their trucks and blogs about the idiot who gets paid for ranting on the radio.

Vicarious Life

Everyone knows you're not supposed to do it. I don't care.

I just talked to my dear daughter Helga Golly on the phone from her dorm at Northeast Ohio (NEO) University, and what can I say, I am filled with the warm, nurturing energy of - spring semester registration. Credit hours earned, requirements fulfilled, progress toward the degree - all the things that give the illusion of "covering" the material, "completing" the curriculum, and "knowing" the discipline - things that have weight and substance in the Mind of Dad.

For the first time, Helga is registering as a senior, which means everything in the course catalog is open, no classes are closed, and she has first dibs at the courses she wants. Like Existentialism, Philosophy and Art in the Modern Era, Early Twentieth Century Art, Italian Renaissance Art, and French. I write down the course titles and repeat the words to myself, linking them with the Picasso course she has now, the late modern art and images of women in Rome classes she had last year, the connections linking everything to something else.

So in spite of horrible sinus congestion after seven hours in the metal studio breathing metal dust, riveting and filing her almost-finished metalworking project, she sounded positively buoyant! Almost as buoyant as her dad on the receiving end of the call.

She has an appointment this afternoon with her unofficial advisor, who is helping her add a second minor, for which she needs one more philosophy class - either American or German/critical. Good move, Hel, now while you still have time to make changes. And she wants to see if she can "throw in" a ceramics class. If it were me...but no, I won't go there, not out loud anyway.

I am as excited about her schedule as Helga is. I love the connections between her major and minor courses. I love the combination of history and theory and studio art. I love the way her curriculum just kind of evolved from photojournalism or photo-illustration into art history and women's studies and now philosophy. I love how glass and metal and ceramics balance out the reading and writing-intensive classes, and how she's going in-depth into things I have only passing familiarity with, and vice versa. This makes for great conversation during breaks.

The Long Goodbye

I don't often write reviews. To paraphrase the cookbook author Ed Brown, the world needs more books, not more critics. So when I came home from the library with the first title I recognized by Raymond Chandler, I didn't know what a ride I was in for.

I quickly found out they call the genre noir for a reason. Maybe it's because every paragraph begins with a pithy observation delivered head-on in the first-person singular. Maybe it's something else, like the way every time something is revealed, something else is concealed. Maybe it's the strange juxtaposition of cool, continental French set in the stifling hot California sun. Or maybe it's just the negativity that oozes from every page, along with the smells of gin, sweat, and hibiscus. Search me, I'm just another small-timer in a big-time racket.

Whatever it is, I was drawn into the web of events faster than a Mexican houseboy can pull a switchblade on an unwanted visitor. The author's voice soon became indistinguishable from the protagonist's, and I began to eye each new character suspiciously, knowing that genuine human kindness is about as rare as an honest cop or an innocent hooker. I started another chapter as I lingered over dinner, and I nursed my rum and tonic as if it was an expertly made gimlet, hold the bitters.

It's hard to explain how a guy gets drawn into imaginary events that were written fifty years ago and imitated thousands of times by lesser talents. Writing that's a little racist, a lot sexist, more than a little angry and jaded, and probably what you'd call mysanthropic if you had a dictionary handy. And irresistible, despite the countless attempts to steal its magic. Is it "literary fiction"? Ask somebody who cares. But this guy Chandler knows his way around a paragraph, and his characters are a kick in the kisser.

Invert Now!

This is an example of a hypothetical imperative, meaning you ought to do it only if you want to enjoy the results of the activity in question, as opposed to a categorical imperative, which everyone ought to do under any circumstances. Hey, what's that sound? Oh, that's just Immanuel Kant turning over in his grave. In this case, the activity in question is inverting.

It makes the blood flow out of your stagnant, sluggish legs where it's been pooling all day, and into your tired, undernourished brain that by 3:00 in the afternoon has been drained of its creative juices. It reverses the pull of gravity on your flaccid, aging flesh and draws the skin a little firmer and tighter around all your muscles, bones, and joints. It gently churns your internal organs like a blender set on 'stir' and forces oxygen into cells that haven't had a good hit of fresh air all day, causing them to jump up and down with youthful excitement.

Invert, I say, invert! You know, turn yourself upside down, flip your numerator and your denominator, make your south pole north and your north pole south. But how? What are the means by which to perpetrate this alchemy?

My personal favorite is the handstand, which gives the added benefit of much-needed upper-body strength. Serious yogis seem to like the headstand, and the semi-serious do the ever-popular shoulderstand. You probably want to work up to those with qualified instruction to safeguard your neck.

Yogis and non-yogis alike enjoy skinning a cat, where you hold onto an overhead bar and hoist your legs up, passing your legs back between your arms and over your head, then back through the way you came, kind of inside-out, hence the name. To gymnasts, I'm told, this is like breathing, no big deal. For the rest of us, it's a good test of the strength-to-weight ratio, flexibility, and a touch of vertigo, since being upside-down and tipping backward can be scary.

If you're ape-like enough or young enough to climb trees or monkeybars, inverting is right there in front of you. Hang from your knees and see the world in a different way. Feel gravity pull on your legs and make you longer. Be careful not to bump your head!

Handel:Bach::theater:church

Something hit me during the recorder interlude Sunday morning. This is the part of the service after the bellsound and call to worship, a piece of piano music, a short reading, and a hymn. There were a few announcements, and someone read a story for the children who clustered in front. Everybody had settled in, and Marlene's recorder playing was just loud enough to fill the little wooden building. A sweet moment.

Sometimes church is a lot like theater, and different churches clearly have their own brand and style of production. Big churches provide BIG experiences, and small churches stage less ambitious productions; their respective congregations seem to like it that way. Aside from big/small differences, there is the old high-church/low-church distinction, the recent traditional/megachurch conflict, and myriad other differences here in the mobile, multicultural land of religious entrepreneurism.

The aesthetic qualities of ancient rituals involving incense, stained glass, Latin language, and the special handling of bread, wine, and water create a distinct visual, aural, olfactory, and emotional experience. A thousand people packed into a modern auditorium with big sound and light systems makes for different production values and, not coincidentally, looks better on TV. So we have the old-school, high-church, mainline religious experience, and we have the new-school, low-church experience. Suit yourself. The options are out there, and some are more out-there than others.

I've tried different styles and had various levels of discomfort with most of them. There is a certain beauty, however, when it "works" - when the production values are polished enough to provoke a response. It's not unlike a good movie that causes a suspension of disbelief long enough to forget that you're watching actors speak their lines in front of a camera. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with theological beliefs, although, like a really good movie, ideas can enhance the experience. More often, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message.

The way it felt on Sunday was that, just for a moment, a bunch of people were fused. It was just as much 'art' as 'religion', but who said anything is separate from anything else, especially for unitarians. I bet most of us have had 'religious' experiences in museums, concert halls, libraries, gymnasiums, forests, mountains, or beaches, so I should just forget the distinction.

On the way home, I was still wondering about this phenomenon, not that it can ever be explained. "Let the mystery be," as Iris de Ment (or someone) put it. But the analogy of great composers came to mind. Bach wrote music for the church in Leipzig, and the rest of the world made it into concert music. Handel wrote music for the opera house, and mainstream Christianity adopted one of his oratorios (or something) for their main religious celebration. I guess my arguement, if I have one, is that every church IS a theater; maybe then every theater is a church.

technology

I can only assume that machines do not have the capacity for moral agency, but computer use is clearly getting to me. I had this dream last night, and I think it's best to try to process it. Yes, "process" it, as in word processing, food processing, information processing, it's what we do in this day and age. Anyway, in my dream...

I'm deeply engaged in a writing project, and I'm actually making some progress, getting stuff done, and feeling some satisfaction. The key to this sense of accomplishment is the ability of the program I'm using to get two related things done at once that used to take two separate operations, a lot more effort, and at least twice the time. It must have been a new upgrade of 'Word' that illustrates each sentence as I write it. It was pretty cool to see the graphic depiction alongside the verbal description in real time.

I suppose it's possible to compile a large but finite set of images in a graphic database that somehow corresponds to an equally large but finite database of verbal statements. It's a little like the Chinese language; you can build a large number of complex statements if you start with a sufficiently large (but comparatively small) number of radicals and combine them in two dimensional configurations - pictograms. I guess some genius in Redmond, Washington, wrote a program that would allow one-dimensional users like me to write/draw the words/pictures that tell/show the story. In my dream, that is.

The punchline was good too, if little sitcom-esque. After I'd written this substantial piece of work, I was ready to show it to someone on a video hook-up, but I couldn't open the document because I couldn't find the remote. That's how the dream ended, with me fumbling around looking for the simple means of opening up this complex work. Helpdesk!