Authenticity vs. Sincerity

The Godfather of Soul is dead. Hard to believe but there you have it. As John D. MacDonald wrote, the sandbar starts to get pretty narrow. Egads! Just look at what we're left with!

Will Brown be remembered only for his music? I hope not. His music belonged to the now yet his vibe echoed loudly into Afro-Futurism. Brown gave no less than Miles Davis, the ultimate space brotha, new energy and new direction coming out of the sixties. Bootsy Collins tutored under Brown for years and brought his learning to bear on George Clinton and his myriad of funk satellites.

Brown was a man who didn't just preach civil rights; he lived it. He was a black man self-made in America and he was mindful of his life every day and every night. Brown was authentic because he lived free on his own terms. And in living that life, he inspired millions.

This morning, the great Orlando Patterson, in a NY Times guest column that should be made permanent, discusses the difference between the quixotic quest for authenticity in the United States and the dearth of sincerity in public life. Patterson notes that people who go looking for "authenticity" often end in deep doo doo. Stephen Colbert calls the same thing "truthiness" - feeling over reason, no matter what. That's why Bush is in the White House and fans of James Frey have yet to abandon him. Their stories just seem "right".

Patterson though was discussing how people deal with bigotry in America. If, as he suggests, we're all bigots deep inside, then we have to figure out how to behave in public. Patterson is what can only be called an existential sociologist; he believes people are responsible for their life and we need to study how people make choices in life. He quotes Shakespeare to put forth a dramaturgical model of life: "All the world's a stage." If you act civil, you will be civil, no matter what you're thinking. Everyone takes on roles everyday which require different kinds of face paint. Rather than trying to find some sort of simple, unified, true identity (cue the psychoanalysts) that is static no matter what, Patterson suggests we make and re-make ourselves in the artful and tasteful navigation of the complexity of life in a modern society. Find the fat repulsive? Think Blacks are vulgar? Keep your thoughts to yourself and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If the action is sincere, that's enough.

This to me is where the next Civil Rights movement, if it's going to happen, has to begin.

Post Christian Christmas

After I got tired of watching yet another special year-end wrapup on "Countdown", I flicked the dial to Fox where Billy-O was once again carrying on about how Christmas is under siege and what the devil can be done about it.

Lordamercy. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I'm hoping that this past election not only put paid to Bush's wet (with blood) dream of spreading democracy through the Middle East but has given pause to the Christian fundamentalists who thought they were going ride on Karl Rove's coat-tails all the way to a hundred year scolding of America's mores or lack thereof. Christmas is a lightening rod for their project and it seems that this year, in comparison to last, the tempest really is in a teapot.

I keep reading stories that many people, including students, are becoming more religious but they are less interested in questioning their religion. Erich Fromm noted that man finds all kinds of escapes from freedom and as the world reveals itself to be more and more maddeningly complex and absurd, sanctuary is hard to find. I'm sure more than a few of the leaders of the Christian right wished the judge in the Dover "Intelligence Design" trial had merely issued a quick and dirty yea or nay rather than a 100+ page document that puts the wood to Intelligent Design and Creationism. Those are their hole cards and they can't afford any more public ridicule. And, if a recent NYTimes story is to believed, a whopping 90% of teenagers who grow up in fundamentalist Christian homes turn away from the religion.

At the same time, I can hardly say that I am enthusiastic about evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and, (of course with us mired in a savage civil war that is eating our soldiers alive), Mr. Amputee.

The most exciting news of the past year is that students in Tehran are once again rebelling, this time against the mullahs. Indeed, was the original Iranian Revolution really for a theocratic state (and a cult of personality) or against a corrupt secular one? Tehran 2006 is awash in junkies and whores and grifters and various other kinds of malcontents who are testament to the elemental fact that theocracy and the human animal are incompatible. People need room to think, to doubt, to live, to get it on and to have a job where they can nurse their hangover.

What do I care though? I'm an existentialist who drifted into Hinduism, perhaps the least doctrinaire of all the major religions. But I am also a father and I wonder how I will convey my cosmology to my son without closing his mind and his heart to other paths. People are closing down at the very moment history demands we open up.

Dog Day Dream

Do you ever get lonely for something you know you can't have? I do.

The other night, the missus and me were canoodling on the couch and musing on how nice it would be to have a dog. Alas, all three of us are highly allergic to dust and dander. Popping Sudafed all day every day is not an option. A pooch will not hunt in our house.

One can dream. This clip from Chris Marker's film, Sans Soleil, illustrates beautifully why dogs are so great to have around.You take them to the beach and they frolick in the surf while you stroll. Easy living.

Every year, I teach at least one American lit survey course. Death in the Woods by Sherwood Anderson is a classic story about...what? An old lady who lived a hard life? No, it's about the wonder of dogs and their connection to us. As the old girl lies dying in the snow, the dogs engage in a primal dance in the moonlight, calling her out of her slumber to keep them from returning to the wolf of their ancestors. After she dies, the dogs take the food she's carried on her back and leave her in the snow. They don't mean anything by it.

I hope that medicine cooks up something real good for those of us who want a dog but our sinuses won't allow it.

Man Is Born Free...

...but everywhere he is on the phone.

To Cingular after the screen on my cellphone went blank. I spent the weekend on the road with only the landline at my mate's house to keep me in touch. The missus was not pleased.

I arrive expecting to breeze in to the back of the shop where they have a company junkman who tends all the discarded and broken-down gadgets. Many a time, he's produced from his heap a replacement back or front for a phone.

Not anymore. The junkman is gone. Now you are greeted at the door by a customer service rep whose function seems to be sussing out your complaint or scam. The place was packed with a motley crew of folk, waiting for their turn to take on sales rep. All around the room you could hear the murmurs of pleading, wheedling and jiving. "I'm already on overdraft at the bank. You gots to give me more time. I need this phone." or "I told her to keep her minutes down but that girl she can talk!"

I noticed that the people waiting, almost all black, were either talking on their phone or fondling it, as if it were some strange, magical oracle who would reveal all at any moment. I find my students doing the same thing. More than once, I've caught students text messaging in class, second only in audacity to instant messaging on a laptop while I'm preaching the gospel of Joyce Carol Oates and her gothic take on Amercian womanhood.

In his book, Speaking Into the Air, John D. Peters suggests that we should never assume, no matter how advanced and how prevalent the technology, that our message is going to get through to our intended receiver. We have faith "you can hear me now" but it is sorely tested at many different levels, not the least of which involves the Almighty and the dead. Yet we are more and more obsessed with making some sort, any sort of connection, if only with a gizmo that has plenty of expensive add-on features to kill the time or the distance. The phone companies know this and price accordingly.

If the FCC hadn't allowed for so many rapacious fees and tariffs, having a landline in the crazy age of the cell would be a dream come true. Can you hear me now? No? Good.

Tatoo You. Not Me.

On January 1,2007, all visual advertisement - billboards, neon signs, flyers - will be banned in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

If only the same legislation was possible for tatoos. I can't think of anything more boring and often more unappealing than exposed tatoos. There are so many and so many bad ones on display. Today at the gym I noticed a guy covered in tats that looked like they belonged on the cover of a fifth rate hip-hop album. What was he thinking? What does he think I'll think? Or some chick? Or some square? Yawns all around.

Do people really believe these eyesores signify edge? Edge is over, baby. Everything gets co-opted so fast, the only way to keep your revolution alive is to keep it in your head until you're ready to act. When the sociologist Clinton Sanders was making his career writing about tatoos, they were still the domain of the sailors, bikers and various demi-mondes. Not any more. The searchlight of commerce finds all nooks and crannies. Indeed, the minute you start broadcasting your "stance", your intentions or your biography, it's for sale on the open market. Any good Marxist will tell you capitalism produces a limited number of life stories anyways. You may think you're living a unique life but are you really? Watch the people that show up for consultations on these tatoo reality shows. How different are their motives? How different are their stories? Not very.

Tatoos, particularly those such as the one here, testify to a) the banality of edge and b) the growing fetish of exhibitionism. As the theologian Lincoln Swain noted in his great book, Dare to Defy, when everything and everyone is under surveillance, exhibitionism is the panic response. People may want recognition, they may want fame but more than that, they want to be seen on their own terms, no matter what. Stop looking at me. Look at me.

Someone asked me if I was going to put my boy's birthday on my arm. No thanks. I'll put a candle on his cake but that's it.

Shortcut

After too many years of planning and too many months of construction, a new exit has gone into I-696, the highway that cuts across the top of Detroit, the new faultline between Detroit and its older inner suburbs and Oakland and its exurbian McMansions. The new exit feeds into Franklin Road, an old and picturesque road that leads to many of the more tony and tasteful neighbourhoods of Oakland County. For those of us who live south of I-696 but between Telegraph and Orchard Lake Road, the new exit saves plenty of time.

The catch? You have to make a shortcut through the back gates of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. During the week, the back door is always open but on weekends, the guards get sneeky and shut it at arbitrary times, no doubt to keep the likes of me off balance and hence off the premises.

Nonetheless, I use this shortcut whenever I can. And the more I use it, the more I am enchanted by this well-kept and well-populated necropolis. As someone who has drifted from evangelical existential agnoticism into evangelical existential hinduism via marriage, I don't have much use for the intended purpose of this place. When my corpus packs it in, the kinfolk will send me to the flames and then send my ashes up the river.

And yet, as I crawl (and crawl you must with 15mph posted limits and the occasional Southfiled police car lurking in the bushes) through the winding "streets," I notice that the city belongs to living as much as the dead. There is always someone taking flowers or a wreath to a grave. Or someone standing over a grave, looking down at the marker or up at the trees. Nature has been pruned and primped to act as a suitable, tasteful backdrop that screams the dead are not alone. They are not forgotten. They are not wholely dead yet or ever will be.

Who hasn't been in cemeteries left untended? Just as nature takes over an abandoned lot, it takes over an abandoned graveyard. Who let the place slide, you wonder? Did the illusion, the hope finally dissipate?

It's an old cliche, utterly most famously by Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack, that the two biggest wastes of land are golf courses and cemeteries. As an avid duffer, I must protest the former. As an inveterate lover of city life, I must protest the latter. Not only does this cemetery host some of Detroit's luminaries of the past, it is a special space that offers us, the living, a chance to contemplate the finitude and finality of our life and the lives of others. It is part of the neighbourhood, part of the collective narrative of the neighbourhood and the city at large.

A friend of mine is working an academic article about computers and death. Life ever after on the web, whether you want it or not. But the web is not a place. Its materiality is always suspect and provisional. In his fantastic short novel, Everyman, Phillip Roth has his sadsack protagonist visit the grave of his parents. "Your boy's 71," he intones, brooding down at the marker. A moment later, he happens upon that oldie but goodie, the rueful, knowing gravedigger. Unaware that he will be shuffling off this mortal coil in no time, the protagonist asks the labourer how one digs a grave. The low temperature Negro obliges, detailing the process as the protagonist listens on with grim bemusement. Everyman has made false starts into and clumsy exits from the crucial stages of life. In death, with his few friends and fewer friendly family members standing around his grave, our hero becomes a place, a physical place, where those left behind can try to make sense of what came before with him and what is yet to come without him. Can you do that on-line?

Classical II: Ralph Gomberg Is Dead

The world of classical music has lost a legend. Ralph Gomberg is dead. Gomberg was the principal oboist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra for some 35 years between 1950 and 1987 when he retired. He was a master of his instrument but even more importantly, he was a consumate team player who understood that an orchestra is much greater than the sum of its very talented parts.

So what, you say, some geezer who tooted a stick for other geezers has bit the dust. What else is new? They're dying off in droves. Obit today, gone tomorrow.

Ah but as old orchestra players die off, their audience goes with them. Who will fill the seats in Orchestra Hall? For the first time in two years, my teaching schedule will allow me to attend the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Friday morning concert series. Usually, the ratio of the very young to the very old is very disheartening. For every school bus idling outside The Max, there are a dozen towncars from which emerge legions of frail dames and their withered swains. As much as I look forward to taking my boy to the symphony on a regular basis, I wonder how many of his fellow tots will be in on the experience. What sort of community will there be for young classical musical enthusiasts, save for taking music lessons and progressing into the ranks of the prodigy? The DSO has a great youth outreach program but is it enough?

Classical music is a treasure. Like no other music, it brings to the fore the primal and essential relationship between math and music, between human physiology and sound. There are now research organizations that for a pretty penny will run pop songs through a black box capable of predicting whether said song will be a hit. How will it know? Because the alogorithms are programmed to dissect elements of harmonic and melodic felicity and compare those results to other songs. Nora Jones' first album had the thing smoking: 9 of the 13 songs scored very high on positive elements.

But who, pray tell, destroyed this little toy? Mozart. That's right. Wolfie was the guy who really did write the songs.

We know from history and anthropology that music is more than entertainment. The sad state of current music trends in the Western world suggests perhaps that people don't want to engage music on a profound level because they don't have time or patience or courage to take it on. Pity. At its best, classical music is a gateway into the mystical, fascinating, frightening order of the planet and the universe. Ralph Gomberg was one of the great emissaries and now he's gone.

Radio as It was Meant to Be

Classical radio is back on the air in Detroit and not a moment too soon. Almost a decade ago, WQRS, Detroit's only commercial classical station, switched formats. Out with Mozart and snobby ads for Jaguar and Park West Gallery; in with bubblegum rubbish.

Then in August 2005, the Detroit Public School radio station, WRCJ, jettisoned its old format - a tiresome, shambling mishmash of rap, soul, reggae and warmed-over PTA meets Black Panther talk - and embraced classical music by day, jazz by night. Not only do you get fantastic music, including a lot of new and old Detroit Symphony recordings, the hosts (Dave Wagner and Chris Felcyn in particular) offer charming erudite commentary on the music.

It is a magical combination that may seem antique considering the prevaling fetish for all things digital. Satellite radio stinks. It's the sonic equivalent of bowling alone. A robot spits out a play list that is beamed into space and then down to earth where millions click onto a channel that puts them into direct contact with... a robot thousands of mile away. This is luxury? This is convenience? This is cutting edge?

There is nothing quite like driving home in autumnal twilight listening to the slow movement from Ravel's Piano Concerto in G with the tot slumbering in the back seat. A traffic report comes on and you realize that you are part of a network of fellow travellers feeling the same luscious vibrations as we move through different parts of the city.

I'm not just talking about the suburbs. I can't help but think that the format change is part of a larger project by the Detroit Public School system to remake their education model beyond the rote testing and "tough love" of No Child Left Behind. Getting kids into the middle class headspace that education experts suggest is essential to academic success can't be limited to the classroom. WRCJ creates a sonic environment that challenges the lazy yet overloaded ears of many young people locked into iPod playlists dictated by peers and peddlers.

And what about their parents? Baby Einstein CD's sell so well because Americans are so clueless about classical and jazz music yet they read in various parenting magazines that it can benefit their children. The American Medical Association recommends no television in the first three years. What to do, what to do? Turn on the radio. A week after my boy was born, I scurried to Meijer and bought a cheap transistor radio. WRCJ just went on the air a month before. It is with great fondness that I remember the hours just sitting listening to Ravel and Jobim as the tiny bundle of joy reclined in my lap. The music may be good for the kid; it'll work wonders for you. McLuhan was absolutely right - all mediums are not created equal.

I like to think my boy is growing up in Detroit by being in Detroit - seeing it, tasting it, hearing it. Quality broadcast radio offers him the experience, the shared experience, of art alive in a vibrant metropolis unlike any other.

Ode To A Dump. My Dump

A friend of mine used to housesit for a super-annuated professor of comparative lit at University of Michigan. The house was one of those rambling affairs that had been renovated and extended every time a promotion came through. In the very back room was a massive library. Not that you'd want to read any of the books, mind you. To a one, they came from presses like Duke and Minnesota and Routledge and god knows what other satanic mills of academic publishing. I was reminded of the scene from "The Barbarian Hordes" by Denys Arcand. The moll of the dying professor steps into his library, filled with books and more books and we are supposed to be comforted knowing that even though he's gone off to the Great MLA in the sky, his dedication to the pillars of scholarship and social justice remains.

Ugh. I remember rummaging through that library with a mix of awe and revulsion. Here were so many academic careers made on such flimsy and boring grounds. Multiculturalism, hybridity, interdisciplinary studies, postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism etc. ad nauseum ad infinitum. All the usual suspects: Spivak, Bhabha, Lacan, and that jolly joker, Baudrilliard.

The only concept out of that whole "publish or perish" frenzy of the 80's and 90's that ever resonated with me was something from the 70's: Raymond Williams' savvy idea of the "lifeworld" - how people live where they live with what they have to live. Exhibit A: Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Before I moved across the river five years ago, I lived large in a spacious cryto-Dickensian apartment not far from downtown Windsor. I could walk to Via Italia where I often ate my lunch and/or dinner in the kitchen of friends' restaurants. Every other night, the phone would ring around 1am and I'd walk downtown to meet someone for a nightcap. Drunken American youth would be running amok from bar to bar until they fell down on top of one another.

And as you walked around the city, you realized that the diversity of the city was completely without planning or self-consciousness. Windsor is the synapse at the end of a number of different frayed nerves. It's where you come to look across the river and dream about America or the place you come to get away from the rest of Canada. The local is the cosmopolitan through sheer tidal flow. People come, people go. Refugees from the four tattered corners of the world idle, waiting for their papers. Drifters bide their time and their troubles. There's a dingy casino. There's a dingy racetrack that now has slot-machines. Before the slots, the track was a low-end gambler's Tower of Babel. You heard a hundred tongues cursing a hundred deadbeat horses. In the bar, the hostess brought in home-baked pies so you could enjoy your free pour rye with a slice of apple cobbler.

It always makes me laugh when I hear and read academics going on and on about abstract borders and border culture and postcolonialism blah blah blah. Friends, come to Windsor and see it all on the ground - the XXX video shop next to a mosque next to a flophouse next to a halal butcher shop. The winos doing battle in the street as women in burqas look on. Nobody really thinks about it too hard. Or should they. It just is. And becomes. Every minute of every day. Bloody lovely.

The Horror, The Horror

Off to Windsor this afternoon to pay bills and mail letters. The DHS loves it when Canadians working in the US keep a Canadian address, just in case our visa gets pulled and we can be sent packing as soon as possible. Suits me. One of the things I'm mailing off is the tot's application for a Canadian passport. The application allows you to NOT list "place of birth", very handy considering he was born in the United States. When push comes to shove years down the road as he is backpacking through Europe, he can creatively fill in the blank, depending on circumstances.

Alas, there's no getting around the fact he is a US citizen as well. Rep. Charles Rangel is advocating a return to the draft, a noble albeit farfetched suggestion that cuts right to the heart of Iraq fiasco - chickenhawk presidents and their acolytes might be less trigger happy if they know their kin and kind could find themselves on the front line. And those of us who have tried to turn a blind eye to the daily carnage and skullduggery might be more inclined to take to the streets in protest.

The fact that there isn't more protest, more outrage is evidence that a) Bush managed to keep the war off in the distance for the vast majority of the American public and b) the public has at long last taken a closer look at the mayhem but is so tired from the strain of 9/11 and Katrina and a thousand other indignities of incompetence that they have little energy left. Voting in the toothless Democrats hardly constitutes a radical move to protest.

Still some have gone mad. In "Apocalype Now", Colonel Kurtz went insane not because his methods were unsound but because the whole premise and the execution of the war were unsound. The toxic energy flowed fast and furious through him and he arrived at a dark place emblematic of the psychological nightmare that was the Vietnam War for the collective American psyche. Coppola was a genius to use The Doors' "The End" as a sonic representation of Kurtz's drift into the terminally unwell.

The Colonel Kurtz of this war is Cindy Sheehan. Her boy was killed. For what? Oil? WMD? Saddam's scalp? Revenge for Bush's daddy? An Emerald City in the pious dust of the Middle East? Who will answer for it? Like Banquo's ghost, she haunts Bush. If she is a pathetic figure that the left has adopted for its own advantage, as Christopher Hitchens and others have suggested, it's beside the point. She is pathetic because she's been driven mad by naive dreams all gotten up in messianic and jingoistic bunting. Her insanity is all-American and the halls of the asylum ring with her nattering and Kurtz's whispering. That's the song, the only song, that can do justice to Iraq.

Friends, climb aboard the Blue Bus, strap on the headphones and after a couple of stiff drinks, read The Iraq Report.

Remember This Face

Sam Kinison's first appearance on Letterman was perhaps his best performance ever: a perfect balance of his patented "madman son-of-a-preacher prophet" in-your-face comedy and 80's LA rock'n'roll excess. Four minutes in, he's absolutely on fire. "Is this the man who was prophesized to come out of the sea and roll the cities?...ar...argh??!!! No." Unbelievable stuff.

His take on men pushing a stroller through the mall with the look of someone "who envies the dead" is less a put-down than a warning. Wasn't that what George Romero was getting at in "Dawn of the Dead"? What happened to Spicoli after the "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" slowed down?

I take the kid with me all the time to the mall. I go, I do my business and get out, usually after we've stopped for a tipple. A necessary evil. What I don't do is let domesticity define who I am or who I am not. If you want to fetishize your lawn because you think you owe it to the neighbors or you owe it to the American Dream or your father or whatever, well, you very well could end up envying the dead. Mindfulness is most potent close to the ground.

Invisible Connections

To Target to pick up cleaning supplies. A quick dash through the aisles and then to check-out. Store is packed at 8:30am. Santa's there, not for the kiddies but for a group of little old ladies club having a latte party in the Starbucks/Pizza Hut food court, such as it is.

Order a double tall soy latte. Pathetic. This afternoon I'll do penance over in Windsor with a proper caffe coretto (the grappa corrects the coffee). Skim the New York Times. Notice an article about a quartet of hookers strangled and left to rot in a drainage ditch in Atlantic City. One of them was a housewife in Florida. On evidence, she got bored with suburban life, went to cooking school, fell in with the usual cast of dubious characters, started hitting the pipe and before she knew it, she was turning tricks by the ocean. Strangely enough, the Times article gives a hint of championing her decision to leave the suburbs and start living on the wild side.

Who isn't restless in this country? Who doesn't think of fleeing for the ocean and a midnight lifestyle? But can you keep it up? Can you stay alive?

Turn on the stereo in the car and the robot selects "For a Dancer" by Jackson Browne. I find myself tearing up for a hooker dead from living too free with no brakes.

Opening Salvo

You waited until forty to get married. You waited until forty to have kids. You cobble together sufficient income from a variety of disparate sources who pay you relatively well for a dodgy skill set you picked up over years of tinkering and mucking about. In your spare time, between the long lunches and afternoon tennis matches, you clean the house. You pick the tot up from daycare, spirit him home, put him to bed and then tipple a wine or two until the missus rolls in from her full-time, big money gig.

You are a chardaddy. And you dig it.