February 2005

I think it was December
She couldn’t ever sing any better
And lies in the meadow with her hands tied behind her back

Don’t you feel like breaking out
If you want to fly, push your doubts aside
I will follow you into the sun
That is all that I can do
Like I’m talking through the wires of a telephone

But I’ve known many who would gladly swim to get to where you are
To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you
I am sorry to tell you it never gets better or worse*

It’ll come clear
But his brain was in his ass
In the drunk tank
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes

*the second line of, yes, This Is Hell by Elvis Costello. This song is stalking me.

I’m not a big fan of unreleased music–bootlegged concerts, demos, etc. Most of it has, at best, more historical/novelty value than musical value. Production values are often spotty, and songs are sometimes incompletely arranged or even unfinished.

Even with Rhino’s great reissues of Elvis Costello’s records, all of which contain copious bonus materials, the results are uneven. Some tracks show Costello’s brilliant songs bubbling up from his imagination, and some are otherwise enjoyable tracks that simply didn’t fit the original record thematically. But many are scratchy demos or live cuts that sound really bad. I usually listen only once and then delete them from my iPod.

But I just found the unreleased Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash sessions, recorded in 1969 for a Columbia studio album that was never finished. Only one track, “Girl from the North Country,” saw the light of day, on Dylan’s excellent Nashville Skyline album.

These tracks, largely, aren’t great. The mp3.com page I’ve linked to is accurate in saying that Cash does better work here than Dylan, who is off-key and out of time. (Although as I type this, “Ring of Fire” is playing, with John and Bob alternating vocals, and Dylan’s voice is in good form, so it’s not all bad.)

But, man, with guitar work by Carl Perkins, it’s fun to think about what this record could have been.

Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he’ll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet — especially those persons — and that is forever.

–Bob Dylan, on Johnny Cash

“When a young man and a young woman give in to Satan, when they strip down like animals in the wild and prepare themselves for a lusty round of heavy petting and full-blown sex, what better reminder for them to buck up than a WWJD condom with the image of our Lord and Savior right there on the package, and then, as a fail safe measure, also on the prophylactic itself?”

[via The Revealer]

“[Ryan] Haddon once stabbed [husband Christian] Slater with a broken wineglass and also flew into a rage two years ago when he was caught in the couple’s Vancouver rental home getting his back shaved by topless strippers.”

New York Post Online Edition: gossip

I made a couple more tweaks today. At JOSH’s behest, I changed my RSS feeds so that they’ll provide the full text of my entries, rather than just small summaries. I changed not only this blog, but my book blog as well.

I’ve also added geographic metadata to the main page of this site. It looks like this:

I used the information for Bushwick provided by the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. As far as I can tell, those coordinates actually put you in Bed-Stuy rather than Bushwick, but to most of the world, it’s all the same anyway.

Finally, I cleaned up a few in-site navigation links that were broken.

Over at Carbongeek, Tom writes: “Apparently having solved all problems with crime and education, New York City spends $21 Million on lots of big, orange banners.”

Set aside for now the fact that NYC didn’t pay for the Gates. (Christo did, by raising the money himself. He’s even paying for the cops who are protecting the project.)

Tom seems to think this $21 million is a waste of money–that no matter who raised it, it should have gone instead to solve problems of crime and education.

I disagree with this on a couple of counts: First, problems crime and education will always need more funding than governments are willing to give. The War on Poverty and the War on Drugs and the War on Illiteracy and the War on Obesity and the War on Other Unpleasant Stuff are just as unwinnable as the War on Terrorism.

Throw ALL your money at them, and you’ll never win those wars. That’s not to say we shouldn’t generously fund education, antidrug programs, welfare, and so on. But to say, We can’t build new parks, or We can’t go back to the moon, or We can’t fund the arts, because we still have hungry people…

Well, we’ll always have hungry people. Throw all of NASA’s budget into food programs and nutrition education, and we’ll still have hungry people. Wait to fund art until you’ve “solved hunger,” and you’ll never have art.

Second, this is $21 million. That’s not a lot of money when you think about it, and as I noted before, it was funded privately. If George Lucas had funded hunger relief instead of Attack of the Clones, I kinda think the world would be a better place. Why is it cool for Steve and Tom to reimagine War of the Worlds, but it’s dumb to put up “big, orange banners”? To pick on someone other than Hollywood, how much did the Grammys spend to fête John Mayer and Bratney Spears last night?

Finally, if Christo’s priorities are screwed up, perhaps we should examine our own as well. We spend money on comic books, Maxim subscriptions, cigarettes, video games, DVDs. Perhaps all of that should go to the poor instead. Perhaps, instead of going out drinking, we should spend our time teaching people to read.

The Gates might not be your thing. That’s cool; many things aren’t my thing. But let’s please not make the Gates a moral issue. You spend your time on pop tunes and dumb popcorn films; I’ll spend mine among the banners.

15 shuffled songs from my iPod:

Cold, Cold Heart, Hank Williams
Hang Wire, Pixies
Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand, The Who
Turkish Song of the Damned, The Pogues
Metropolis, The Pogues
Arizona, The Constantines
Ride Me Down Easy, Waylon Jennings
I Remember Nothing, Joy Division
Honky Tonk Heroes, Waylon Jennings
Coming In From the Cold, The Delgados
Half As Much, Hank Williams
This Is Hell, Elvis Costello
It’s A Beautiful Day, Pizzicato Five
Martha, Tom Waits
A Singer of Songs, Johnny Cash

Couple thoughts: Who the hell are the Constantines? So that’s what the Delgados sound like. I think I’m one of the last people in New York to hear them. And, oh great, it’s the return of the “This Is Hell” mind virus. Sigh.

Lemme bang on about this some more. Ben Fulton, writing for the Salt Lake City Weekly, discusses the teaching of so-called intelligent design in public schools. He makes the same point that I’ve made: Shutting off scientific inquiry by saying God (or a god or gods or alien beings or pink unicorns) is harmful to the human mind. An excerpt:

Just imagine that, for every question you presented to someone in power, they answered with the words, “We don’t really know. It’s a mystery.” Now imagine if you or your child asked a question about the origin of the human species in a science class, only to have a learned instructor tell you, “We don’t really know. It’s a mystery.” Would anyone dare call that education?

Lest you think that Fulton’s “We don’t really know; it’s a mystery” is exaggerating the viewpoint of intelligent-design proponents, here’s a quote from the Newsweek article that Fulton references:

But I.D. has nothing to say on the identity of the designer or how he gets inside the cell to do his work. Does he create new species directly, or meddle with the DNA of living creatures? … Meyer’s view is simply that “we don’t know.” He declines even to offer an opinion on whether people are descended from apes, on the ground that it’s not his specialty. The diversity of life, in his view, is a “mystery” we may never solve.

“Meyer” is Stephen Meyer, director for the Center of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, an organization that funds the marketing, if you will, of intelligent design. So yes, Fulton is right. Intelligent design would teach kids that we don’t understand the diversity of life, and we may never understand it.

Let me reiterate a point I’ve made before, using my favorite analogy. Nicolas Copernicus demonstrated that Earth orbits the Sun, but it’s unlikely that Copernicus had much understanding of the nuclear forces that fuel stars such as our Sun. In the year 1500, it might have been reasonable to tell Nick that the source of the Sun’s energy was a mystery that we might never understand. But is that education?

However, this analogy is inaccurate, for it implies that we know little more, today, about the origins of life than Copernicus did, 500 years ago, about fusion reactions. This is untrue. Despite Meyer’s talk of “mysteries,” scientists today do understand the origins of the diversity of life. The unwillingness of IDers to accept Darwinian natural selection is no reason to deny students access to modern biology.

[via The Panda's Thumb]