Tinny Speaker

Mosquitos are out in force tonight. Blood is being shed as I try to focus and get something down. At the end of my blood splotched arm sits my cell phone. Lying there on the glass table top the black rounded rectangle is playing the Lucy Kaplansky station on Pandora.  Of course I could play the very same station on the tiny stereo speakers on my laptop but that would be too complicated right now.  Far enough away from the house the Wi-Fi gets kind of dicey. I still have unlimited data so I am going to use the 4G. I want to make sure I get uninterrupted sound right now.  Buffering is a mood breaker.

Hearing the monaural mix playing out of the tiny iPhone speaker brings me back to a different time.  If I close my eyes I am in such a different place.  Suddenly eight year old myopic me is heading down south to visit my grandmother.  With that car nearly flying we were headed to Horry County. Bouncing in shorts in the front of an old American boat of a car I am listening to the radio. Funny the delivery of sound then and at this moment have certain similarities.

Sometimes I remember riding in the middle of the front seat of a Ford Galaxy 500 travelling down U.S. 301.  Some distance south of the Mason-Dixon Line the telephone poles with their faint green glass insulators fly by.  The old man might be talking about safety, he hated old three lane highways and railroad crossing without warning lights. My brother and sister might be squabbling.  It might have been 1963, the car might have been a Galaxie and I might have been seven but we were rolling.  One thing was sure my brother was longing for some serious southern fireworks.

But I am not really remembering anyone else in the car. Also it not so much the sights of the green world flying by I remember.  What I have pulled from storage because this little speaker is playing beside me is a dashboard image. I am looking at the chrome knobs and buttons of that a.m. radio that sat dead ahead of me when I rode in the center spot.

Through a tiny speaker on the dash came my favorite songs, the sing along tunes that would be played repeatedly on Top 40 stations until we got down below Richmond.  Songs like Puff the Magic Dragon and I’m Henry the VIII would come on. At the first strum I would know the song and then I got to sing at the top of my lungs much to the chagrin of my much older siblings in the car.  Sometimes Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction would come on and the old man would twist the dial and change the station. Damn commie music. There are some other phrases that might have flown out right then but I shall opt not to remember those now.

It was important to get as much of this music as I could early on in the trip. Once you got south of Richmond all you got were farm reports, the price of tobacco and the like or serious twang. Today that hard old country twang, think George Jones singing White Lightning or anything in the Jim Reeves catalog would be music to my ears, not so much then. Sometimes on that tinny speaker the further down you went there were trading shows.  In a thick old time North Carolina accent can’t you just hear Bob in Wilson (home of Parker’s Barbeque) who has a set of barely used white walls asking if anybody would want to trade for a full sized bed and a chest of drawers?

But what I remember is the music or the news came out of that centered little speaker. No matter what else happened in that car we all had one ear open and focused on what the radio waves were bringing us. The windows were down and the air was hot.  In 1964 the old man wasn’t ready to pop for air conditioning even if it might have been an option. The people in the back seat wanted the sound turned up because of the roar of the air going by on that old U.S. highway drowned out the radio if it was set too low.  The people in the front seat, the more senior members in the car were not of like mind. 

,

Was it there my radio ear was created? I spent the next several decades listening for the next cool song, the next thing that would spark my aural imagination.  I don’t know but I remember begging whoever was sitting next to me in the passenger seat to turn the knob to see if we could catch one of those songs I loved before it was too late.

The Reflection Isn’t Real or Is It?

Walking upon the face of this earth we see many things. But that verb “See” is a tricky word. See’s primary definition in my word processor’s dictionary is “to perceive with the eye”. Eyes are fallible but most people give them great credit and trust. On a good day my eyes are at 20/40 or 20/50. On a bad day who knows. Anyone who works in the criminal justice system will tell you that eyewitness testimony in very unreliable over time. See’s second definition is to understand. Why do we see things the way we do?

Right now the news of the day is filled with tales of an airliner brought down by a missile. Everything I see tells me Russian soldiers carried out the horrific act. A rocket traveling a mile a second killed some of the preeminent virologists in the world. The dead were people who knew the ins and outs of AIDS and its genesis. Crowded in what would become their aluminum airborne coffin were the people who were working with passion to defeat the plague. Enroute to a conference on the health crisis their talented lives were abruptly brought to an end. In a flash of light and a horrific explosion their chance for future contributions at ending the disease were ended.

What I see when I watch the television are talking heads who say the Russians have moved the weaponry that perpetrated this dastardly act back into their own country. What I see are images of “rebels” trying to remove any evidence from the scene that might actually prove who shot the plane down. What I see are nations fighting over spheres of influence who in the end will shrug and do nothing. In the end does it matter what valuable knowledge we have lost because Russia wants to be the Russia of old and we on the other hand want cheap labor and goods?

On another channel I see a war with people dying in a land considered by three faiths to be holy. It is an unholy war that has been waged in many forms for centuries or even millennia. Dead is dead be it from a land mine or a head severed and then mounted on a pike. Barbarism in the name of God old style or new style is what I see. And nobody is to blame and everybody is to blame.

But what I see of this gruesome battle is fed to me by people with bias. My eyes see what other eyes have seen and then have edited. There is a narrative that gets created and whether it is reality is something else is a different question altogether. It is not just the current flare up that gets distilled and edited it is also the fate of the plane and if any turmoil or insurgency or assassination. It is all open to question as to what has been seen.

Buddhist though on seeing the ultimate nature vary:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass. Dogen

It is as though you have an eye That sees all forms But does not see itself. This is how your mind is. Its light penetrates everywhere And engulfs everything, So why does it not know itself? Foyan

I distrust the narrative in these events of conflict. I distrust my interpretations of these events because what I get to see is something tainted by human predilections. Human being want things, power and they want to render others subservient. In order to legitimize our claims of right (whatever that really means) we look at an event through the lenses of our desires. This is not seeing. I distrust the narratives of our hearts; we want things to be a certain way the tendrils of that desire wrap themselves around how we see and then warp it.

See and realize what you are seeing and why you are seeing it. The Moon and the universe is there in the dewdrop if you can find it. The eye is what shares the world with us but it is limited. Let our hearts see what is really going on.

The Magic Box

On Facebook yesterday I spewed out pieces of my life.  Four years of high school IDs, an article on my mother’s retirement after years of teaching, some graduation cars and more got captured in images and spread across the web for internet vermin and NSA techs to tease apart to either steal from me who I am or determine if I am a threat.

To accomplish this I spent an hour yesterday looking through a box of old letters.  Well, it was not just a box of old letters it was a box of addresses.  Really my friends it was a just a box of stuff.  

A folded newspaper resided in the box. A poster from the Attic Theatre in downtown Detroit from 1981 is there. A jar with sand and a seashell is in there.  A self-developed photograph of a cat named Mao is in there. The big waxed former produce bulk shipment box probably contains a roach or two.  Most likely the ticket stubs I was looking for are in there too.  I wanted to see if I still had the 1974 CSN&Y ticket stub from the Atlantic City Raceway.  Next time I look maybe I will find them. 

Over the years I have left that box alone.  For one reason or another I didn’t want to open it up.  But when I wrote the piece on stuff I still have to talk about I decided it might be the time.  Within that rectangle well might be some of the aqua vita remaining from the days of yore.  It does and it doesn’t. Yesterday as I went through that box I did it in only in a cursory manner. 

What I found was that I have always wanted to write albeit I foundered about a great deal when I was younger.  Having come through the American system of schooling I knew I was abysmal at grammar. My biggest fear was that what I put down on paper would be ridiculed.  

As years have passed software has helped with some of the issues.  Commas, periods and other faux pas now correct themselves.  Spelling too.  However you have to at least have some sense of the word you are trying to use for that function to work well.

In the quick scan of that box I have one regret.  Oh how I rue that there isn’t more in that box.  So many chances I have wasted it life through trepidation and a timid nature.  I wish there were unused stamps from the orient in there.  God if only I had a visa or two for studies in Australia or England.  Maybe a soundboard tape from some obscure band I was following.  I am not ashamed of what is in that box I am saddened by what is not in the box.

When I first sat down to write this I wanted an idyll away from the house, the TV, the bass practice and the chores.  But what I found was a fountain that needed cleaning.  Now it is gurgling and the birds are singing.  I took a road to get this place and I am not sad to be here.  I am sad I didn’t take a few more hairpin curves.

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well. –R. Siken

Often I go out to Brainy Quote or Good Reads and look for a quote to match the feeling I am trying to convey.  Most of the time if it isn’t some Buddhist thing I don’t quite find any adroit turn of phrase that fully captures what I am trying to say.  This one about sums it up.

Fireflies flash in the green canopy.  A fountain flows.  Birds call back and forth. The night folds in up the remaining batter of day’s blend. Of all the things that I have and of all the things I have not the thing that I wish I would have spent more wisely was the moment when time was endless and hangovers were cured with aspirin and STDs were cured with penicillin. 

What Time Has Wrought

Go See Begin Again (and rent Once)

Go see Begin Again. It stars Mark Ruffalo and Kiera Knightley. It is a movie that pays off emotionally. You will leave the theatre satisfied. How often does that happen?

I am a guy. Guydom dictates a great number of the movies I go see. Often I want to see films where very large orange fireball explosions destroy large intricate articles like buildings, cars and bridges. Amidst the debris I like these movies to have a story flow that is intense. A good blow ‘em up will leave you breathless. If you are not afraid to go take that needed leak for fear of missing something the movie isn’t doing a good job.

The next group of movies that I watch have beautiful people wearing very expensive and pretty clothes. They drive Tesla cars or Lamborghinis. Pretty people and car genre movies usually require the hero and heroine to end up mostly naked at some point engaging in callisthenic style sex that nobody I know or have even known could keep up with in real life. The plot usually involves the transfer of financial valuable things (or some lifesaving talisman such as a rare medicine) and a double cross of some kind. The final plot twist is really, really important. Who was Keyer Soze, eh?

When I go to these movies I eat a bucket of popcorn and drink a gallon of pop. Most of the time by the point the indigestion from this gross mass ingestion has passed my memory of the movie has been deleted. I am older now and that purging is probably a good thing. Who needs that kind of useless glittering trash taking up long term mental storage?

But there is another kind of movie that I make it a point to go and see, the well told mature adult story. In other words even though I live in the Midwest the land of the multiplex I crave indie films. Some prime examples are Richard Jenkins in the Visitor, Peter O’Toole in Venus, the foreign language film from India called The Pool and a recent opus from a director named John Carney called Once starring Glen Hansard. Once was a sweet tale of a busker’s life in Ireland.

Oh yeah little quirky movies like Layer Cake and the Commitments also fit in here. I would however put Layer Cake in a triumvirate of films including The Usual Suspects and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. These movies are basically crime mysteries with an indie twisted twist. Guy Ritchie movies are even more of a sub-sub-genre of this style of film and a real guilty pleasure for me. Even Rock n Rolla works for me.

The joy of Once was that it starred two unknowns and it played off the audiences expectations of what big studio Hollywood formula movies would do with the characters. We all kind of know what Hollywood would do with a busker and a flower girl. Struggle would happen and then well-deserved success would shower down on them.

Once was different. Somehow something was there between these characters, you wanted the leads to end up a couple. You wanted the busker and the flower girl to become stars in some subgenre of folk pop. But the tale didn’t take you to those places. Instead it showed you two people with complex motivations and various strings of life complications pulling them in directions unexpected. Somehow what the duo accomplished shows growth and joy amidst the pain of living a real life and its compromises made for mere survival.

Begin Again is a great deal like Once for it was written and directed by John Carney, the person who had helmed Once. However this time the director went with known actors and celebrities, Mark Ruffalo, Kiera Knightley, Mos Def, Catherine Keener, Rob Morrow, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine playing the biggest asshole in the New York City. The casting works. Knightley as a talented principled song smith is very credible. Ruffalo as a creative was with a dubious future career arc and a penchant for bourbon plays his role in a way that shows an actor’s true ownership of the director’s vision of the character. Catherine Keener is great, just like she is every single time she enters into a movie’s flow no matter how crappy the film might be.

The narrative nature of the Once’s story starts out with an event in a hipster bar on an open mike night. Three versions of the event play out over about 12 or so minutes each narrative placing one of the central characters and all of their emotional baggage at a strategic position for the catalytic scene. Three times the scene plays out through very different perspectives each showing what the participants brought to the problem at hand.

The problem: a good songwriter who has nobody interested in her music mainly because she was too disengaged. Her distance from the moment and from life in general stops her from presenting a property finished product to an appropriate audience. Her not insubstantial talent, as the tale evolves, because of her tentative persona and somewhat naïve view of what the art form of publically performed music mandates is getting further and further buried. She is also in danger of disappearing under the growing strength and public explosion of her love interest’s personality and persona.

But a washed up alcoholic record exec hears (and sees) what a song can be. Through a delicate dance the duo brings a nuanced form out of the music that just grows into something organically beautiful. The songsmith’s tale of love that is one of the two main plot lines here is played well. Adam Levine plays a dick and he plays it well. Knightley takes on the metamorphosis from someone who is willing to stand in the shadows to someone willing to grab the spotlight and bend its rays in a credible and delightful way.

Ruffalo’s record producer has almost as his own 100 pounds of chain hanging off him from a marriage that has failed. The union produced a daughter played by Hailee Steinfield. Steinfield’s turn is a subtle tale of change that although a little too bright and filled with life is played to a tee. She will be seen again, her demeanor is so apt for this movie it tells the audience she has real acting chops.

The movie is not perfect. There are some story lines that resolve a little too cleanly but they are not enough of a distraction to hurt the film. It has been a long time since I have heard a film audience actually clap at the end of the movie. Last night when we had finished with the screening even here in megaplex popcorn land a solid round of applause was raised.

If you celebrate a good story go see Begin Again. Or rent Once.

And the night rushes in.

Digging While I Still Can

Staring at a blank screen I dig for images to focus on and write about.

• There is my high school heart throb Kathy, not my girlfriend just my heart throb. Kathy was the Kosmic Kid and how we would riff on the meaning of Grateful Dead lyrics. Oh yeah and there was that drunken stupor where while we were riding about with Jim Thomas and Bob Perlmutter searching for a Chanukah bush one mid December. It was the first  she let me touch her nipple.  I know its juvenile but the things that form us happen early on.
• There is an old chrome style diner my girlfriend (now wife of 29 years) and I discovered somewhere in the western mountains of Pennsylvania. It appeared on one of those not stop runs between South Jersey and Michigan to see family in the period when a weekend turnaround was possible.  The apparition that was this greasy spoon had giant model airplanes hanging from the ceiling; imagine eating a plate of eggs, bacon and hash browns served with hot steaming joe under a intricately detailed B-17. You ate this heart stopping plate of breakfast beneath an eight foot wingspan hanging four feet above your head.
• There is a night so clear in Teddy Roosevelt National Park (north-i.e. that is somewhere in North Dakota) where the stars were so brilliant that I felt I could touch the sky. On that night I lay out on the ground staring up for an hour before I crawled into the tent.  Looking far beyond the gravitational bounds of this finite and limited world I knew the immensity of the universe.
• There was that time I ate a pot stuffed brownie, went to a Jefferson Starship concert and woke up 700 miles away the next day. When you are chasing love while really, really high one tends to listen to the voices carried upon the cosmic wind. You follow your heart and do insane things.  I get the lyric from that old Guy Clark song about crying and drinking beer over the stupid stuff because living life means you do a great deal of stupid stuff.
• There was the time the car blew up. An engine needs oil.  If that oil lust is not fed your basic eight cylinders throw a rod. Yeah good ole Thunder Road gave up the ghost in Corvallis, WA and the towing company made us inventory all of that three door Chevrolet’s contents. We listed of course “miscellaneous sex toys” as part of the contents within the old behemoth, much to the amusement of the tow truck owner.
• There was my youngest son ripping an argument apart with ferocity at a debate match. He left his body and just became a logical, intensely focused voice. His shaking passion just irradiated the room around him and charged up his team.  It also pissed off the judge so much that he/she gave him a zero.  Despite the begging and pleading of the other judges the bastard refused to move off that nil point. The boy still won best debater for that day. Bite us judge, just bite us.
• There was the gentle soul who led me home when I wandered lost in the riverside garden captured by a verdant evening and unsure of my next step.
• There was my oldest son playing bass with perfect time and being congratulated by the judge of a regional music competition on his sight reading and skill. No one judged him because he was autistic. They judged him for his fucking talent. Years later I met his student teacher from the time and she told me how the head music teacher pulled her aside and pointed out the two bass players.  He asked her what she noticed.  Her response was that they were perfect time keepers.  It was only then that he told her that they both had Aspergers and that they were about the most passionate bass players he knew.
• There was staring into Victor Hugo’s apartment there in Paris on a three day stay. This was before I had read Les Miserables and viewing that room actually motivated me to wade into the waters of one of my greatest joys ever, reading his masterpiece in translation.
• There was making out with that sandy haired lass in the high sea grass that covered the sand dunes down at the end of the island while talking about the Jefferson Starship. I think there were mosquitoes but with a memory like that, I.e. cheap wine, Mexican pot and passionate kisses who cares about the mosquitoes?
• There was the high school performance of “Anything Goes” where on the last night of performance they put hard liquor in my prop liquor bottle instead of iced tea. This was the joy of being loved as part of a team not put together by arbitrary gym coaches. The energy level was so high I didn’t even notice the burn of that old Schenleys.
• There was calling my gym teacher a cocksucker in 1973, kicking open the gym doors and walking down the hall to the “Office” to await my punishment and then getting none.  Using the word cocksucker even in private cursing in 1973 was still not that far removed in impact from back in the mid-1960s when Lenny Bruce was jailed for saying it on stage.
• There was standing in the rain singing “Ohio” together with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the night that Nixon resigned. How much I thought had changed. How little it had.
• There was the absolute delight that attending the Olympics in Norway brought me. Reindeer is the other white meat, really. And the Swede-Canada gold medal game in hockey, well does it get much better than double overtime and a shoot out?
• There were so many people over the years that offered help, or guidance, or support in little ways. I have to especially note that guy in Oregon who saved me as I was hanging between a rock and a hard spot and then said, “I helped you, now you make sure to help someone else.”
• There was the wild hot steamy sex in the attic of a Cape Cod cottage. 
• There was the loneliness of standing on the shore of the old Outer Banks (the one that existed before the crowded summer metropolis it has now become) and staring at nothing but sand and Atlantic Ocean on a grey evening. I was alone as alone could be. I was empty both physically and spiritually.
• There was the first time I heard Annie Haslam sing “Carpet of the Sun”. The hair stood upon my neck. Her voice was beautiful and stunning. Of course my apartment was scattered with beer bottles everywhere and also sleeping bodies I had to step over as I began the clean up from the first law school party I have ever held.
• There was the notoriety of high school expulsion.
• There was the puking my guts out in a motor hotel somewhere outside of Ann Arbor the night before I got to Michigan State.  As the sun went down that night I was realizing how far away from everyone I ever knew I was going to be.
• There was that person who sent me Snoopy card after Snoopy card as we danced a dance about what we really were.  Were we a we?  Were we just friends? She was a golden beauty in the summer sun of early life.
• There were the long silences in those calls where I got blown off and a relationship crashed and burned.
• There was the joy of being alive after a horrific accident. Two semis hit us and we lived.
• There was the gut wrenching call telling me my nephew was dead after he had left my home just a few hours earlier.
• There was the day the doctor confirmed we were pregnant.
• There was the day of the Aspergers diagnosis.
• There was the quiet of a lake in Northern Ontario on a group camping trip around Lake Huron. We were friends standing about in as dark a night as I can remember listening to loons on a lake drinking good cold beer.
• There was that out of the blue telephone call to my Dad the day before he died. For no reason I got the chance to say something I don’t remember saying before, “I love you Dad.”
• There was the moment we realized that the house was too small with two boys. A crib in the living room and the prospect of having to build a third bedroom was not appealing. There were those moments of staring down teachers both on my own behalf and then later on the behalf of my children.
• There was the joy of rocketing down a mountain on a luge in Norway.
• There was telling my best baristas Darrin and Jason about the filthiest true story I had ever amassed and realizing that friendships were being made. I have boundaries or I would share the rest.
• There was the moment I quit driving altogether.
• There was the first Grateful Dead show I ever attended in July 1975 at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia; and they played Wharf Rat.
• There was that first joint I smoked. Still funny to me how I got high and walked into a closest thinking it was the door out of the house and then I just couldn’t I mean I really couldn’t figure out what the malfunction was.
• There was that night of sex in the showers at the dorm. She was a grand woman of free spirit.
• There was the doctor’s disembodied voice on the telephone saying, “Mr. Todd, I am afraid it is cancer.”
• There was the plaster of Paris two of the guys on the floor at Mayo hall had applied under Doug Mason’s sheets. He was our resident assistant. When he came in drunk and flopped upon his now rock solid bed there was groaning. The mattress did not give him any quarter.
• There was the dinner at Goodrich’s before our wedding; shrimp and clams and picnic benches wrapped up in a wonderful fading night.
• There was the long fast drive to Peoria to say good bye to the good woman that was Lucy, my children’s surrogate grandmother.
• There were the late night calls to hear that there had been accidents and deaths. 
• There was Terry on my roof at 1 a.m. He was asking to come in because he didn’t realize how high the roof was for he was drunk. As good an idea as it seemed at the time to harass me from atop the shingles he now wanted down. But I was not alone. It took some explaining to my partially clothed date that things like this did not happen to me very often. I was lying of course.
• There were endless nights of long, long walks just to clear my head.
• There was winning an election. What a two edged sword that turned out to be.
• There was becoming Lutheran. Still can’t remember how to make the sign of the cross, probably because I keep my spare specs in a case in my purse and I wear my watch on the wrong wrist, when I wear a watch.
• There was the pastor dropping me in the baptismal pool back when I was a Baptist being baptized.
• There was the smoking dope in the church basement. Of course it filled the sanctuary. There was the joy of discovering Toronto for the first time.
• There was the year of loss with my mother, my nephew and my father in law passing all within 8 months.
• There was a sunset somewhere in Montana that seemed to be the best sunset ever. There were nights when I had to stare at a street light so my molecules would not come unstrung and float away into nothingness because we had decided to see if we could smoke a quarter pound of pot. Didn’t get anywhere close.
• There was the joy of love. And I have been loved and I have loved and I still love.
• There was the first real awareness that you don’t get out of this alive.
• There was the first real awareness that life is so much shorter than we ever imagined. There was the reading of the phrase “Be here, be now” in Aldous Huxley’s island and having it sink in and mean something.
• There was wonder of Chris Smither singing “Visions of Johanna” live.

Yeah I have written some of this stuff down already in prior post. Yes I will get around to some of the rest. Of course some of these things will be memorialized by nothing more than the lines in this post.
This is life my friend, sand and impermanence, a Buddhist Mandela just waiting to be shaken. Does it matter? Yes.