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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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November 22, 2002
Top 10 Voices I Hear in My Head
You know how in the movies folks always have an angel and a devil pop up on each shoulder with advice? Well, for me it's not that simple. I hear a myriad number of voices in my head (uh, strictly metaphorically) giving me advice, or explaining what I'm seeing.
Here for your consideration are the Top 10 Voices in Al's Head:
1) Ayn Rand She is the top stern father figure. "A is A." The towering castle of your life must be built on the strictest foundations of adherence to reason and truth, for castles made of sand fall in the sea. She brooks no foolishness. I hear her voice frequently while watching news of the war on terror. For example, her classic description of evil as "the hatred of the good for being the good" rings in her harsh Russian accent every time I hear of another Palestenian suicide bombing.
2) Robert Anton Wilson is the permissive mother character in this lineup. He is the yang to Ayn Rand's yin in my worldview. He wrote a play called "Reality Is What You Can Get Away With." This represents exactly the opposite outlook from "A is A." He emphasizes careful analysis of the limitations of absolute knowledge, based on the limitations of our biology. His psychological insights build on an eight level model of human consciousness that is really useful in understanding my own thinking, for starters. I see his funny face as I start firing up on a lower level mammalian territorial circuit, and relax. I think of his favorite maxim "The map is not the territory" when my own BS (Belief Systems) seem to start diverging from the facts on the ground in front of me, and start re-examining my premises. [Funny how this comes all the way back around to Ayn.]
3) Robert Heinlein was a top of the line model of the freethinking, but tough-minded American. Stranger in a Strange Land turned the classic Protestant religious models of my youth up on their head and pulled them inside out and plunked them right back down. The logic of his religious mega-orgies seems perfectly reasonable- at least in theory. Yet his vision of the price of freedom in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress demands the strictest of honor and sacrifice.
4) HL Mencken provides the eloquent voice of pure joyous youthful iconoclasm. His wicked grin and fine cigars are the most highly educated and thoughtful form of the naughty schoolboy. He was the bane of all cheap morality and self-important blatherers, from the downscale preachers to the great scheming politicians with plans to save the world- at taxpayer expense. He hooked the defendant in the Scopes Monkey Trial up with his attorney, and then rushed in to cover the trial as a newspaper reporter. Ha! We're having some fun now. He had a perfect combination of recognizing human failing without excuse or quarter, combined with a good-hearted acceptance of human fallibility that largely eliminated any sense of malice or misanthropy. I often have his cigar-chomping grin looking over my shoulder as I'm writing some scathing mockery of the buncombe of the day.
4) Elvis Costello keeps the emotional politics real. Besides just being one of the best hook-writing composers in modern popular music, he has a unique clarity of vision for the political machinations of human relations. He shines a light on all the ways of emotional manipulation and vulnerability, and how all those wires get crossed. You could spend a few hours in the maze of "I Want You," separating the strands of stubborn obsession, unhealthy desire, masochism, and...love? As a corollary, much of the impacted emotional content comes encoded in the deep keyboard neuroses of Steve Nieve; sometimes it's him that I'm hearing in a moment of heartbreak, crisis, or indecision.
5) Stanley Kubrick had a great way of reducing animal psychology to a perfect chess game. The pure logical inevitability of Dr. Strangelove has made a lasting impression. It has to be possible under the combination of high technology of the weakness of our mammalian psychology, and under enough possibilities seems inevitable that we will eventually in fact have nuclear bombs flying because some general couldn't get it up, or some similar wounded ego scenario. How many times in some uncertain moment with a female have I heard General Ripper's explanation, "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence."
6) Matt Groening Often, life seems like one big continuing episode of The Simpsons- only usually not as funny. As often as not, Homer's sloth and disregard for social norms seem to be the most practical strategy. Even the evil Monty Burns caustic contempt for his fellow man has the strong ring of truth. I veer between Lisa's dismayed idealism and Bart's cheerful cynicism. Indeed, the first words out of my mouth are often, "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything."
7) Kyle Broslofski Other times though, life seems like one big continuing episode of South Park, which may be funnier, but severely more dysfunctional. They capture the real oppression of the society, and the pure lemming nature better than any other art going. The recent "Death Camp of Tolerance" [search kazaa for "south park 614"] captures amazingly well a great deal of the fake nature of modern "tolerance." Tread lightly on publicly expressing reservations about the liberal social orthodoxy.
8) Tom T Hall set a great model as a humble thinking country boy. He may be the most accomplished country songwriter ever, certainly in the top half dozen. He's never gone on like he was some big shot, but he knows that he's done some quality work. He has a certain way of careful observance of the people around him, an awareness and quiet empathy -without cheap sob sister display- that I aspire to on a good day.
9) Richard Pryor gives the voice to many of my frustrations, and gives voice to my feelings of oppression, which are fairly universal. He's my idea of an everyman. Sometimes it's fury at being screwed or simply disrespected by The Man. Ultimately, though, black and white, rich and poor, we end up facing many of the same indignities and fears. "Whether or not you can survive death- that's the ultimate test for your ass, ain't it? So far don't nobody we know has PASSED the ultimate test." Ultimately, we're all niggers up in this bitch.
10) Jesus Christ of Nazareth I'm not a Christian; I don't believe in the resurrection. Nonetheless, the general thrust of the teachings of Jesus, of loving thy neighbor as thyself, seems to have great value. His words and ideas often seem to be the most practical and even the most satisfying advice I can offer. For being an atheist, I don't know how many times I've started trying to advise someone by asking "What would Jesus do?"
Of course, the words of Jesus often are directly in conflict with Ayn Rand back up on top of the list, which ends up with one of them on each shoulder going at it. And on it goes...Labels: south_park
posted by Al at 11/22/2002 06:36:00 AM
November 21, 2002
Rush Limbaugh, terrifying moderate mainstream fuzzball
Wow, that Rush Limbaugh wields some serious power. He's not just the most popular radio talk show host in America, but a direct physical threat to the very lives of his enemies. Just ask Tom Daschle, who told reporters, "What happens when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren't satisfied just to listen. They want to act because they get emotionally invested. And so, you know, the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that's very disconcerting."
Holy right wing fascists, Batman, it get scarier! "You know, we see it in foreign countries, and we think, 'Well, my God, how can this religious fundamentalism become so violent?' Well, it's that same shrill rhetoric, it's that same shrill power that motivates. You know, somebody says something, and then it becomes a little more shrill the next time, and then more shrill the next time, and pretty soon it's a foment that becomes physical in addition to just verbal. And that's happening in this country. And I worry about where, over the course of the next decade, this is all going to go."
GO HERE for web buddy Mike Hendrix' hilarious military fantasy version of this story at Cold Fury, giving some meat to Daschle's delusions.
Rush ought to send Daschle some flowers, or autographed books or something. You could not BUY this kind of prestige. The majority leader of the US senate fears for his very life, trembling at Limbaugh's awesome power! I am SO jealous of Rush right now.
Now, you could quite reasonably take offense at Daschle's remarks on the grounds that they constitute attempted intimidation of Limbaugh, and conservatives in general. If you are significantly critical of Daschle et al, you are asking to be labeled a terrorist.
On the other hand, Daschle looks SO utterly ridiculous as to mitigate any possible idea of intimidation. His big career is pretty well shot. He's going down like a $2 Tijuana whore. Laughter -ridicule, really- seems a much more reasonable response.
Daschle's really giving Rush a lot more credit than he's earned, though, in painting him as a right wing extremist. He's just a "harmless, lovable fuzzball" to use his own phrase. In truth, Rush very much is, as he himself claims, a moderate. I fault him for not being any kind of radical, actually. He makes hay with the most extreme liberal foolishness, but seems willing to accept a lot more foolishness than he should. Limbaugh's okay, but I would dig him a lot more if he were out arguing on principle for the elimination of the income tax, for example.
He's already villified as an ayatollah, might as well go for something a bit more radical.
posted by Al at 11/21/2002 03:32:00 PM
That's awfully magnanimous of him
Lunching with a Washington Post reporter some days ago, regarding his loss in the presidential election Al Gore said "It wasn't a piece of cake. I decided I was going to accept the rule of law."
Ah, so he decided to change course, try something different- once it got to the point where he had absolutely no choice in the matter, as the Supreme Court had spoken, and there was no longer any way to get around the controlling legal authority.
posted by Al at 11/21/2002 01:05:00 PM
It's a free-for-all!
Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court has been raising much hell by his insistence on having a two and a half ton monument in the rotunda of the judicial building with the Ten Commandments engraved. He refuses to have the thing removed, despite an order from a federal judge.
This makes great theater. It might well result in Attorney General John Ashcroft -Mr. Christian Right- having to send federal agents in to bodily remove the silly hunk of rock. It'd make for a fun diversion from war and terrorists and such.
By rights though, I think Judge Moore's opponents should take another tact. Many good libertarians seem to get their panties all up in a bunch about any expression of religious ideas anywhere near a government function. I tend to support freedom of expression, even in public places. If he and others really want a copy of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse or out on the lawn, fine.
The First Ammendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If Judge Moore starts using the Bible as actual LAW, then we've got a problem. A statue or a plaque is not a law, however, and saying that this display violates the constitution really seems overly sensitive. The freedom for people, and even judges, to say what they want seems like a more important issue than the freedom not to be offended- which I don't find anywhere in the constitution. I may be looking at an out of date copy, though.
If this simple display hurts your itty bitty feelings, get over it. Tolerating speech that you don't like is a basic tenet of the country. THAT is the American way.
Of course, everyone else has EQUAL rights to express their beliefs- that is also a basic American tenet: I'll invoke the 14th Ammendment and equal protection under the law. Therefore, the Christians will have no valid complaint when some Wiccans insist on sponsoring a plaque on the walls with their special beliefs. And of course some clever college boys with an interest in the tenets of Anton Levey's Satanist movement will want to put up a little statue with THEIR tenets.
If Judge Moore will accept these other equal expressions as they come up, I say let him have his little monument.
posted by Al at 11/21/2002 01:42:00 AM
I is a dumb Kentuckian
People seem to be easily impressed by experts from afar, as Robert Ringer called them. Specifically, spiritual experts from foreign lands with hard to pronounce names who act like they are something special must be onto something.
My best friend has been studying the thinking of some guy named Jiddu Krishnamurti. Now, I'm not condemning Mr. Krishnamurti, mostly on the basis that I'm not motivated enough to spend as much time studying him as I would need to in order to make an informed judgment. I'm just skeptical based on my cursory glance that he sounds like another run of the mill Eastern mystic going on about losing our egos.
One big thing that these anti-ego types miss is that it is precisely our egos that motivate us to improve the world, both for ourselves and others. Wanting to make money to buy that mansion on the hill, or to prove that I personally can invent a cure for cancer that will alleviate the suffering of millions, or just a desire to impress the girls and get some uptown coochie causes people to actually DO things. Perhaps this has some explanatory power as to why egotistical American cowboys build and run the world and Eastern mystics do not.
My main purpose here, though, is to run by you this Aesop's fable that was sent to my friend by a Krishnamurti person to illustrate the need of overcoming our egos.
The Bundle of Sticks:
An old man on the point of death summoned his sons around him to give them some parting advice. He ordered his servants to bring in a faggot of sticks, and said to his eldest son: "Break it." The son strained and strained, but with all his efforts was unable to break the Bundle. The other sons also tried, but none of them was successful. "Untie the faggots," said the father, "and each of you take a stick." When they had done so, he called out to them: "Now, break," and each stick was easily broken. "You see my meaning," said their father. Union gives strength.
Puh-lease. See, you present something as a Profound Lesson from a dying man, and it sounds like you're really onto something.
If what you actually wanted was some reflection of reality though, the boy didn't need some tribal committee or the help of a Democratic congressmen- he just needed to think for about half a second. He could have more easily untied the sticks and broken them one at a time by himself -crack, crack, crack, crack, crack- and had the job done quicker than he could gather everyone around and explain what he was trying to accomplish.
But that's just me. My people are from Kentucky, so maybe I don't get the finer points of Deep Philosophy. In our defense, however, we do not require a village just to break up some frickin' kindling.
Also, my friend is studying a bit of Ayn Rand alongside the Eastern stuff for comparison, so I ain't too worried about her joining an Ashram anytime soon, or offing herself to catch a ride on the Hale Bopp comet or some such.
POST SCRIPT: Did I speak too soon with the last sentence? My friend just joined the Hemlock Society. Hmm.
posted by Al at 11/21/2002 12:25:00 AM
November 20, 2002
Walt Disney and the memory hole
Disney has been around since the 1920s. The mighty Disney corporation started out in a very different time. They could hardly be held liable for the sin of having failed to anticipate the social attitudes and norms that would come a half century later.
Nonetheless, they have at least a couple of classic movies specifically with racial issues that are an embarassment to the modern company, most notably the 1946 film Song of the South. Uncle Walt wasn't trying to be offensive- hey, he's making family films. He certainly intended to be promoting racial understanding, and all that nice stuff. Ol' Uncle Remus provides the comfort and words of wisdom as the little white boy tries to deal with the breakup of his parents.
The basic problem was that the film is telling Uncle Remus stories, glossing right over the issues with black folks right happy to be down on the plantation. There's just no getting around the issues in modern America, and the movie simply isn't available here. They'd just as soon forget it. It is apparently available by an import on Amazon through German sources, though. It is also available for downloading on the net.
The problem comes out in the part that they can't even try to suppress: the hit single. "Zip a Dee Doo Dah" is one of the half dozen most popular songs in the history of Disney films. It won the Oscar for best song in a motion picture- and quite deservedly so.
The basic problematic happy negroes down on the plantation theme comes popping out of the narration before the singing even starts:
It was one of them zip-a-dee-doo-dah days,
The kind of a day where you can't hardly open your mouth without a song falling right out of it!
Well, there you go. Racist stereotypes of black folks with that natural rhythm. Nothing else can possibly redeem this, not the humanity of Uncle Remus, not the trusting bond with little Johnny holding hands with the surrogate father figure.  That image alone must have constituted radical commie race mixing to many folks in 1946. What do you want? No explanation can be offered once someone has determined that they have been offended. File this under "this is what you get for trying to be nice."
Perhaps Disney would get less grief at this point to put the damned thing out than they do for suppressing it. I find it difficult to believe that most black folks would seriously be offended by the actual content of this, despite the bleeting of the NAACP. How offensive would kindly Uncle Remus be to kids raised on Richard Pryor records- much less gangster rap? Clue up, people. There's great historical value in this film.
Another little entry in the Disney racial sweepstakes comes in the classic 1940 Fantasia. This one is just a small bit, and surely not maliciously intended, but lacking the distinctly noble tint of the Song of the South. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating bit of Disney trivia.
Basically, the questionable part amounts to a few seconds of a black centaur acting as servant to the white centaurs in the "Pastoral Symphony" segment, shining their hooves. The trivia page for the movie on the IMDB has fascinating details about how the film has been quietly edited and re-edited since the segment was deemed inappropriate in the 1960s. The good folks at The Memory Hole website have a still image of the offensive scene, along with more details.
Something comes across to me as just slightly Orwellian about this re-writing of history. Even the lauded 60th anniversary "uncut" restored DVD does not in fact have this original bit. It's a minor point, I know, but the film was what it was. It is a historical document. Just put the thing out as it was, and shut up about it. This corporate dishonesty should bother you more than the very minor racial offenses.
This all also amounts to another argument for re-claiming classic copyright limitations. These films both should have long since passed into the public domain, to be circulated by people with no vested interest in promoting the modern Disney corporate image.
posted by Al at 11/20/2002 12:48:00 AM
November 18, 2002
Jewel has a sense of humor?
In a classic Saturday Night Live sketch, Jon Lovitz was all excited about winning a contest with the prize of a week alone in a mountain cabin with Jewel. HOT! But he was highly disappointed when it turned out she wanted to make him spend the whole time listening to her whiny ass soft rock complaints rather than having ANY interest in doing the wild thing.
However, it appears that perhaps Jewel does have a little more red blood flowing through her veins than you might think- and even a sense of humor. She is quoted telling an audience at a New York concert recently: "I was summoned to his dressing room and obviously Bob Dylan is gay if he's not interested in me. I mean, look at me. Who would have guessed Dylan was a faggot?"
Ho, ho! You've got to give her the point. Who'da thunk she was that saucy? That's just damned funny.
On top of that, there are cheesed off Dylan fans. Best of all the drama queens at GLAAD are all indignant.
Be still my beating heart.
posted by Al at 11/18/2002 04:16:00 AM
Mickey Mouse corporate welfare aka Free the Mouse!
Mickey Mouse made his public debut on this day in history, November 18, 1928 in "Steamboat Willie." That makes him a 74 year old mouse- older than Mr. Jingles, the unnaturally long lived mouse from The Green Mile.
The idea of copyright really is not the simple fact of nature that we often take it for these days. Ownership of an idea is an odd abstraction when you pull back from the idea mentally. An idea isn't, after all, a THING, like a blanket or a car. Ownership of ideas was not common before the US came along.
America's founding fathers wanted to incentivize writing and composing. They also recognized that granting of exclusivity in ideas was a great limitation on the traditional freedoms of other people using pieces of things in the public domain as building blocks for new ideas and variations. Here then is the entirety of authorization for congress to create copyright law in the US Constitution (from Article I) "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
In practice, until the last century "limited times" meant an exclusive copyright for 14 years, which could be renewed for another 14, giving a total maximum exclusive window of 28 years. Hey, if 28 years of exclusive rights isn't enough incentive for you to write a book or a song, screw it. You can go make your living driving a truck.
Of course, copyright law has been hijacked and turned into pure doubloon looting and pillaging piracy by the entertainment industry in recent years. These SOBs don't plan on ever letting anything slide into the public domain. If Hollywood and their bought and paid for congressmen had their way, every local playhouse in the world would be paying some great-great-great-great-monkeys-grand-nephew of Shakespeare every time they perform Hamlet.
Let see, then. Twenty eight years from 1928 would be 1956. That's when Mickey should have become a public domain figure. That's putting the Disney corporation now every bit of 44 years into corporate welfare with this government enforced monopoly.
It's long past time to FREE THE MOUSE!
posted by Al at 11/18/2002 02:35:00 AM
Graham Parker pours it all out
Graham Parker was born November 18, 1950. Happy #52! Most commonly he has been grouped as one of three classic original new wave "angry young men" along with Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello. On the one hand, that's damned fine company. On the other hand, it hardly does any of them justice musically, and a lot of the comparison is simply that they are all English and came out within a couple of years of one another.
Stylistically, you would probably do better musically to describe Graham Parker as a pissed off Bruce Springsteen. He writes more directly than most of the new wave crowd. He didn't nearly so much construct a personnae as Joe Jackson or Elvis Costello [as his animated self says on the Simpsons after his ugly glasses get knocked off "Oh, my image!"]. Actually, Graham Parker is in a sense more Springsteen than Springsteen. That is, he comes on more direct in what he does, with less image manipulation or self-mythologizing. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Parker, however, comes across with a very pleasing lack of affectation.
He came with the most straightforward rock attack as he understood things at the time of his first album in 1976. This does not mean that he was any kind of generic, or lacking personality. It's just that he was, per his classic song title, "pourin' it all out."
His most popular and perhaps best album was the 1979 classic Squeezing Out Sparks. His one proper American Top 40 single was the outstanding tough guy love ballad "Wake Up." Really though, his first four studio albums are indispensable:
Howlin' Wind
Heat Treatment
Stick to Me (highly underrated)
Squeezin' Out Sparks
Also, he made a one-man-and-acoustic-guitar album Live Alone in America that may be the best one such album I've heard. The two CD Rhino anthology Passion Is No Ordinary Word would be an outstanding starter record.
If you wanted to start sampling a few songs, you might begin with:
"Don't Ask Me Questions" (an angry reggae powered demand made of G-d Himself)
"Nothing's Gonna Pull Us Apart"
"Lady Doctor"
"Pourin' It All Out"
"Stick to Me"
"I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down"
"Wake Up"
"Discovering Japan"
"Local Girls"
"The Three Martini Lunch" (from Live Alone in America)
Any y'all wanting to learn to play some of his songs might GO HERE.
Every last drop will go into this, now I don't want to miss now
I don't know when to stop, I just pump and pump till that's all there is
You better stick to me, just like glue now
You better stick to me, that's what to do now
posted by Al at 11/18/2002 12:45:00 AM
November 17, 2002
Getting your priorities straight
By way of explaining her opposition to the 1991 Gulf War, Nancy Pelosi said "While we are gravely concerned about the loss of life from combat in the Persian Gulf War, the environmental consequences of the war are as important to the people there as the air they breathe and the water they drink.''
Oh, yeah, I'm going to really enjoy having her for the face of the Democrat party.
posted by Al at 11/17/2002 11:06:00 PM
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