MRSy!

Several weeks ago I lamented the difficulties of getting new health care coverage, even though I was perfectly healthy. "Can't Get Coverage" was the title of my little screed.

Okay, I got coverage. But wait, it gets better.

My appeal to the underwriters was successful, coverage was instated, all that remained was to set up the HSA side of the equation. (HSA = Health Savings Account. Handy little things whereby you put money into an account, accruing both interest and tax advantages, then pay for treatment with a debit card that draws on that account. In other words, you own a good portion of your own health-care money rather than just paying it to the insurance company where it disappears into pockets that aren't your own.) I patiently waited a couple weeks for the insurance company to send me info on their HSA program.

Nothing arrived. I called, got their info, comparison-shopped with a couple other programs, decided which one I wanted, sent in my application. Picked the 20th of each month for money to be auto-debited from my checking account and put into the HSA's coffers. So it would only be a couple more weeks, till November 20th, when the process would finally be complete. Full coverage, money at hand, all right with the world and the sleep of the untroubled once again.

In the meantime...

... a rash appeared. A pesky, itchy thing that slowly spread itself all over the place. It appeared during exactly that period when my HSA was not yet in place, and I didn't want to spend unbudgeted, non-tax-advantaged money when all I had to do was wait a few more (itchy) days.

The 20th came. The 21st came. No money in the HSA. I called, and was told "Oh yes, that first debit takes about thirty days, so if you'll just please wait till December 20th, that would be nifty for us."

Oh, hell no. But there was another option: fill out this form, fax it in, and make a one-time transfer into the HSA. I filled it out and faxed it immediately, then called my doctor's office to set an appointment.

"Oh, Dr. F__________ doesn't accept PPO insurance."

Now bear in mind: when arranging for coverage, the one thing I insisted on, over and over again, was that my first priority was keeping Dr. F______________. He's a fantastic doctor, and I was very clear that any plan I adopted must have him on its rolls. "No problem," they said, as they helped me arrange coverage that would absolutely not include Dr. F_____________ in its rolls. (He hasn't accepted PPO coverage for a decade, so it's not like it's a new thing.)

Dr. F__________'s office, rather than setting up an appointment for a general checkup, simply referred me to a dermatologist, one who most definitely does accept my PPO insurance, and I decided that for the time being, I'd simply have to deal with the immediate (itchy) problem and worry about the General Practitioner problem later. I made an appointment for Monday the 24th.

Money finally hit my HSA. And of course, it was both deductions: the regularly scheduled one that I'd been told wouldn't happen till December, plus the one-time deduction I'd made to cover the immediate need. Which of course wrecks my budget for December, thanks a bunch.

Doctor visits followed. Cultures were taken. Dr. B______________, the dermatologist (a former Bulwer-Lytton contest winner, no fooling, with the annoying habit of dropping word-puzzles in front of me and, when I don't come up with immediate solutions, saying "You're embarrassing yourself"), prescribed this and that, and the rash immediately responded.

But didn't completely go away. It seems to be stubbornly hanging on. Very annoying.

Results of the cultures finally came in today. Group B strep, plus MRSA, the evil antibiotic-resistant staph infection. A bacteria cocktail.

Eighteen months. I had wonderful coverage through COBRA for eighteen months with no medical issues whatsoever. During that exact period when I was working and waiting, arranging for new coverage, what happens? A bacteria cocktail. And how many days did those bacteria have to flourish while I waited and waited for bad bureaucracy to do its job badly?

On the other hand--the bacteria are delighted. At least some organism is happy.

The Content of His Character

When the moment came, it surprised me.

Not the outcome. I had been cautiously optimistic for several days that Senator Obama would win. But "caution" is the key word--there was a great deal of optimism, whole barrels-full of hope, that had been bottled up because, frankly, we've seen voting shenanigans before. (And there were some--emails sent to Democrats declaring that because of long lines at polling places, it was perfectly okay for them to come and vote on Wednesday. But this sort of thing only really works when the race is close. It wasn't.)

And this is the sort of history that isn't made easily. I am the descendant of a Southern slave-owning family, and I've seen these changes in my own family. I knew very well my great-grandmother, born in 1896, who would openly talk about "those little pickaninnies" playing on the corner. As the child of a hippie, liberal to the core, now living on the "left coast," I was an Obama fan since about a third of the way into his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention--but had the rest of the country made these changes along with me and my family? (Bear in mind my own Californians' appalling decision on Proposition 8, in this same election.)

And it's been so bad for the last eight years. Way back in 1994, when the Republicans were sweeping into Congress, there was another result that disheartened me even more: George W. Bush defeated Ann Richards to become governor of Texas. I watched him at the podium, making his victory speech, and I was filled with dread. I could see so clearly what was coming; but still, when it came, it was so much worse than I had ever feared it might be. For the past eight years, this has not been my America. It has not been generous, it has not sought peace, it has not led by example. My nation has done things that filled me with horror: spiriting innocent people away in broad daylight, sending them to nations where unspeakable things could be done to them, any idea of individual rights stripped away at will. It has been so bad, and the idea that this ship could ever be righted again seemed to drift farther and farther away.

So when the moment came, when Obama's victory was declared right at 8:00 p.m. local time, I could tell the moment was coming--the electoral math was such that California's preordained result would put him over the top--but when it actually happened, when I saw the words blaze across my TV screen, it genuinely took me by surprise.

Because I had not expected to be so moved. I had not expected that the optimism, pushed down and bottled up, might erupt as vehemently as it did. I had not expected the sense of relief to be as enormous as it was. And when CNN cut to footage of the celebration at Ebenezer Baptist Church, I had not expected it, and tears just kept rolling for a good five or ten minutes.

It may not be the Promised Land, not quite yet. But we're a lot closer than we were, and damn if that isn't just about the greatest thing I've seen in a long long time.

Perks!

Lest you doubted that doing a thing purely for the love of it leads to the greatest rewards, a few notes:

Our Michael Palin for President video, now viewed 660,000+ times on YouTube alone, has also been embedded in hundreds of other people's blogs, and was picked up by other sites like Will Ferrell's funnyordie.com. News reports popped up a few Sundays ago in all the major London papers talking about the video, even reporting that unnamed Republicans were complaining that the video was clearly the work of Democratic operatives running a smear campaign on Sarah Palin.

We were even contacted by an enterprising CNN reporter, although she did warn us that the producers at CNN are notoriously lacking in a sense of humor. Having seen the "Picture of the Day" spot that runs on AC360, I believe her. Nothing about our video ever appeared on CNN.

But the people who were watching the video, and visiting the website, started contacting us. They demanded buttons and bumper stickers, so we uploaded some designs to CafePress and started selling buttons and bumper stickers. (Plus thongs, because you just have to.) It's not the sort of thing that'll make any of us rich, but it'll certainly pay for the domain name registrations and the website hosting for the next several months. (Although I'm still waiting for the moment when I see someone with a Palin bumper sticker out in the wild....)

Some very well-meaning folks simply missed the joke. A very nice, very earnest woman in Atlanta wrote to Michael Palin care of us, begging Michael not to run for President because he might split off too many votes from Barack Obama. Which does raise the startling possibility that there might actually be a few people, here and there, who actually do write in Michael's name. I seriously doubt there would be as many as a thousand, spread across the country, but you never know. Someday, Marc and I might be reviled in the same way Ralph Nader is.

And just today, I was handed a copy of The Complete Monty Python Collectors Edition Megaset, a massive DVD box set containing the entire TV series, the live performances, the "Personal Best" discs, and two new documentaries I'd never seen. It's currently deeply discounted on Amazon at just over a hundred bucks, but the merchandising company that created the set found our site and, for promotional purposes, offered us three free sets to give to our newsletter subscribers. (They even handled the shipping, all we had to do was pick three people, get addresses, and forward them on.) Then they sent over a couple extra sets so that we too could enjoy them, thus leading to a happy Saturday afternoon as I watched both documentaries.

We made the video because it amused us. We had no expectation of anything, we just did it to have some fun and geek out a little. And from it, all this has come. Pure intentions, without expectation, has indeed yielded these great rewards.

I say all this because Thereby is done. I've excerpted it before, and I've always known it was massively uncommercial, the sort of thing I did for the love of doing it, largely to amuse myself. But watching the documentary about how the Pythons conquered America, none of them ever believed that the show would have any impact in America; it took Cleese years to believe it really had caught on. I have now written and rewritten my mad little novel to the point that I'm ready to start sending it out to real publishing people. (Actually, a friend of mine from high school knows a publisher, so I've already started there.)

A novel of pure intention, written without expectation. Is it hubris to think that maybe there's a place for it in the world after all?

Can't Get Coverage

Some background: when I left the dayjob last year (o happy day!), I decided to stay on their small-group health coverage through COBRA. But COBRA has an 18-month limit, and I hit the end of that period on September 30th. So in mid-September I started looking for new coverage, knowing full well that as an individual, not a member of any kind of organization, I wouldn't be able to get the same level of excellent coverage.

Some further background: a couple years ago I was having trouble with my right shoulder. Turned out to be a little tendonitis and a wee bone spur. Couldn't raise my arm above my shoulder without a lot of, you know, screaming. So I went to my doctor, who sent me to a specialist, who sent me for an MRI. The MRI revealed that I didn't need surgery, and that the problem would most likely find a way to resolve itself. (Sloooowly.) The specialist gave me some specialized exercises, I did them, and the problem did in fact resolve itself. (Sloooooooooooooowly.) It's quite gone now, and I can raise my arm above my shoulder, all the way to the ceiling, easily. Yay, me.

I first applied for a health-care plan tailored to young people. They saw the MRI, laughed in my face, and turned me down. So I started over again, and ended up applying for a plan linked to an HSA, thus allowing me to actually own a substantial portion of my own health-care money rather than simply send it to the Aetnas of the world and maybe never see it again. The application was just about the meanest, nastiest application I've ever completed, and it took a good ninety minutes to complete it and get it submitted.

There was, obviously, a great deal more detail requested. And when I filled out the section about that MRI, since I don't have the actual medical records, only the claim forms, I tried very hard to remember what specifically happened then, and when the application essentially defaulted to a choice of "Rheumatoid Arthritis," I figured that was probably pretty close to what had happened, and selected that.

Ninety minutes to complete the form. Ninety seconds to get turned down again.

Bear in mind, there's a section in the application where you can write an explanation of whatever you wish, so I described exactly what happened with the MRI, how it successfully ruled out a costly operation, and how I am now entirely trouble-free. But of course the computer making the decisions doesn't bother with that, it was "Rheumatoid Arthritis" and that was it, end of story.

I had to visit the specialist's office, get copies of the medical records, and send them in with a letter requesting a review. That was ten days ago, and still no word on a decision. In the meantime, I haven't had health-care coverage all month, and am rightfully worried about what would happen if something should happen to me. Because you know--if something should happen while they're still reviewing my file, it's an ironclad guarantee that they'll find some other reason to turn me down.

All this while I am, in fact, completely healthy. Nothing wrong with me. Look at that shoulder, what a terrific shoulder.

This has, of course, given me some perspective on the health-care debate going on between the candidates. There are two proposals, and boiled down (thanks to an analysis by some guys at Bank of America), they are:

McCAIN: Eliminate deductibility of employer-sponsored insurance and replace with refundable credit of $2500 for individuals and $5000 for families.
OBAMA: Universal health care with affordable health coverage and benefits similar to those available to Members of Congress ... Creation of National Health Insurance Exchange for people without access to employer insurance or public programs...

Okay. So McCain would provide me with a $2,500 tax credit to spend on health care however I wish. (The plan I applied for would cost around $4,000, including money put into the HSA.) But here's what caught my attention: if I were still employed at the law firm, the incentive for that law firm to provide health insurance, namely the tax deduction, would disappear. That means it's pretty much a sure thing that the firm would discontinue the program, and everyone would have to obtain coverage as individuals rather than members of a group.

Having gone through exactly that process, I can tell you: plenty of people would be declined, particularly people with any kind of preexisting condition, and everyone would end up spending more, more, more on their coverage, no matter how big the tax allowance provided for by Mr. McCain.

The real winners? The insurance companies. If they get to charge everyone individual rates for the same (or worse) coverage those folks were getting as employees at group rates, the insurers will rake in the cash.

Ask me if I'm surprised.

Stop Using Your Credit Cards

It's Our Fault

No one buys a house at the bottom of their price range.

We are deep in the realm of human nature. If you've got a price range of, let's say, $500,000 to $700,000 for a house, it's because on a certain day you sat down with the family, looked at your income and your expenses, and went through a laborious process to determine how much you could possibly afford to spend on a new house.

A new house. The fundamental component of The American Dream. This is what we dream of. And after that laborious process, knowing that your lives will be far easier if you buy a house for $500,000 rather than $700,000, inevitably you end up buying a house that costs $710,000. Because it's the American Dream, it's our dream, our big dream, and on this we want as much as we can possibly get. This is, has been, and will always be true.

And it is one of the keys to understanding why we're in the economic fix we're in. We bought houses at the top of our range, and a whole lot of us bought houses slightly above what we could afford, and when the bills, the reality of the bills rather than our optimistic guess at what those bills would be, finally hit, we discovered that we couldn't make it work.

Discovered this as we sat in our new houses, firmly committed and with no way out. Exactly this has happened, by the thousands, all across the nation. That's why all the foreclosures, that's why the weakness at the heart of the credit system, that's why commercial banks and investment banks are failing left and right.

It's Their Fault

Fully understanding that buying a house is the fundamental component of The American Dream, mortgage lenders decided to cheat you.

It's as simple as that. There was a story on CNN about a week ago, typically made little of, in which two Bank of America employees talked about how they were required to sell as much debt as possible to people who called in for any reason. This sort of thing was going on all over.

But balloon mortgage payments are the chief culprit in the foreclosures mess. We are what we are, and if we're presented an offer for a 30-year mortgage at 10% that balloons to 20% in two years, all we're going to see is the 10%. That's what we'll run our numbers on, only that. And surprise surprise, when we run the numbers, it's not so bad. "Things'll be a little tight, but I'll probably get a raise and then another raise, so it'll get easier." And when we think about the 20% at all, we tell ourselves something like "Okay, well I'll just refinance before that happens, and I'll be fine."

But a little recession starts to happen. Your daughter decides she has to go to a very expensive school, and you're damned proud of her so she goes. Your raise isn't as big as you'd hoped. The cost of gas and food goes up, and there's a lot more squeeze being applied to your expenses than you ever anticipated. But still, you're managing, you're getting the bills paid, barely, and you're managing to make it all work.

Then one month, you get the bill for the mortgage, and it's twice what it was. And when you try to refinance, you discover that because of all those other people who've already defaulted, no one's interested in lending to you anymore, and you can't refinance.

For now, we won't even talk about the commoditization of those mortgages into securities bought and sold on the investment market. That made the whole problem worse, a lot worse, in fact it was like a magnifying glass that took a smoldering problem and set it aflame. But for now, let's just concern ourselves with this process, this balloon mortgage problem, that sits at the heart of everything else.

Your lender understood your nature better than you do. They sold you a mortgage with full knowledge that in a couple years you would be deeply burdened, and they didn't care. They saw two years of lovely profits, several months of really lovely profits, and if you defaulted, well now they would be able to take possession of your lovely new house for not much money, which they would be able to resell for a nice fat profit.

You're homeless, but big deal, they've got what they want.

Did your mortgage lender ever stop for a moment to wonder what might happen when thousands of people defaulted, more or less at the same time? Probably not, any more than you stopped to consider the consequences of what a balloon mortgage could, in the long run, do to your finances.

It's your fault, it's their fault, we're all in this together.

But wait, it gets worse.

The Bigger Problem Hasn't Hit Yet

Just as a guess, I'd say that for every homeowner, there are ten people who rent somewhere. And both the homeowner and the renter have multiple credit cards.

And the credit card companies are doing exactly what the mortgage lenders have been doing.

Ever taken advantage of one of those deals? Zero percent for twelve months!

It's exactly the same. Zero percent for twelve months, but after that it's 15.99% for forever, and it's a variable rate. Meaning that if the prime rate rises, so does your rate. You spend a year buying stuff, living the miniature version of The American Dream that basically consists of acquiring shiny new things, and for those twelve months you're being very responsible. You pay a little more than the minimum, and you don't quite reach your credit limit. For twelve months the bills come in and the payment isn't bad because there's no finance charge. Then one month a bill comes in, and it's different. Massively different.

It's their fault, too. Because they understood your nature better than you do, and sold you that variable-rate, twelve-month zero-percent credit card knowing that you wouldn't fully appreciate what it would mean in that distant day when it got expensive.

But then they also decided to have some extra fun with you: on your bills, they set a minimum payment due of $0.00. "You owe nothing at all now," they said, and you accordingly complied. The principal just sat there. Thus completely negating the whole idea of having twelve months to pay it all off before the rate ballooned.

The credit card problem, it is at heart exactly the same as the mortgage problem. And the worst news of all? It hasn't hit the economy yet.

The Looming Catastrophe

Credit card companies have, as I understand it, put aside about a trillion dollars in cash to deal with people defaulting on their credit cards, so they have a much bigger cushion against shortfalls, they can ride out the problem a lot longer before it becomes a strain on their bottom lines. In other words, they can allow the problem to get really, really big before it ever becomes apparent to their stockholders and the rest of the marketplace.

Then there's this scary note from Andrew Leonard's "How the World Works" economic column this morning:

Americans are increasingly turning to their credit cards to pay for consumption, while credit card companies are jacking up interest rates. . . .

Because here's the thing no one ever tells you: at any time, even if you've got a fixed rate credit card, your good friends at CitiBank or Capital One or wherever have reserved the right to raise your rate anyway. So even if you've been completely responsible, never signed up for a variable-rate card, never bought into that whole zero-percent nonsense, they can still raise your rate at any time, and do to you exactly what they've been doing to everyone else.

The American Dream = debt, and lots of it. On the housing side, that has led to the near-collapse of the American economy (which could most definitely still happen). But the credit card problem, when it happens, will be much bigger and much worse, and if we're already weak from the existing crisis, then good night Irene.

Stop using your credit cards. Do whatever you have to. Do it now.

About That Bailout...

I try very hard to be a fair-minded person, and I won’t just sign on to (or reject) a particular idea simply because that idea was generated by, for instance, one political party or another. So when, yesterday, I watched in fascination as a near-to-completion deal on the Wall Street bailout got scuttled by House Republicans eager to float a plan of their own, I didn’t get too worked up about it. After all, I don’t like the idea of $700 billion being just handed over, any more than anyone else does. It’s a rotten solution to a rotten problem that only has rotten solutions. So if the House Republicans had a better idea, then hell yes, let’s slow down that train and give their idea a fair hearing.

Trouble is, details are very sketchy and all I ever learned about their plan is that it involves, essentially, insuring the Wall Street financial firms against their losses from at-risk mortgages, rather than the government simply buying those mortgages from them in toto. It sounds like it would be a variant on the FDIC structure, which has worked spectacularly well since the Depression.

Case in point: the failure of Washington Mutual, the nation’s sixth largest bank, today--before the FDIC, the rumors of WaMu’s impending demise would have, without question, led to a run on that bank by thousands of its depositors. But with the FDIC, people felt secure that their money wouldn’t vanish, so they kept their cool and although the bank has failed, the awful consequences of a bank run were avoided. A very good thing.

On the surface, then, this idea of a new insurance program sounds pretty good. With government-backed insurance standing behind all those mortgages, Wall Street firms would feel they are on firmer ground, and could begin extending credit again, which is of course the engine that fuels the rest of the economy. It sounds fantastic, actually—the government doesn’t just hand over money willy-nilly, money is only spent when an individual account fails, thus spreading out over years, probably, any government responsibility for these bad mortgages.

But think about it a little harder, and suddenly it becomes clear that this is in fact a terrible deal, and here’s why: it rewards Wall Street for its bad behavior, fails to curb the shenanigans that got us into this mess in the first place, and in the end still costs the government unknown billions of dollars with no chance of recouping any of that money.

See, the FDIC isn’t actually a good example because it isn’t an analogous situation. The FDIC insures depositors, not the banks themselves, and as I understand it, House Republicans would like to insure the Wall Street firms against their losses, not the individual families whose mortgages are at risk. Thus, Wall Street is rewarded for doing awful things to our economy, and with no penalty, there’s no reason for them to stop doing those awful things to our economy. Sure, the government wouldn’t be handing out a $700 million blank check, which sounds great to irate taxpayers, but the thing that people are really angry about--the manipulation of the system on Wall Street and the idea of rewards to the very people doing the manipulating—would be ignored.

And since the government would be insuring rather than buying those mortgages, there would be no ownership of anything. Wall Street gets to keep the profits from those mortgages that are successfully paid off, while government incurs the expenses of the mortgages that fail. And with no way to tell how much money would have to be spent to insure all those mortgages, in the end it could be $70 billion or $700 billion or even more, with no eventual upside to taxpayers at all.

Plus, and worst of all: one of the attractions of the idea of the government acquiring those at-risk mortgages is that the government can afford to be more patient with mortgage-holders. In other words, they won’t be in the same kind of quarter-to-quarter rush to show profits, and can work with mortgage-holders to try and ensure that they don’t get kicked out of their homes. Keeping thousands of people from being shoved to the curb, and allowing them to perhaps pay their mortgages a little more slowly, for a little less money per month, means fewer defaults, therefore much less loss for the system to absorb--not to mention fewer homeless people who used to be productive homeowners.

Spectacular profits for the Wall Street robber barons. Uncountable billions of dollars in added debt for the federal government. No help whatsoever to struggling homeowners, and a giant sucking black hole in our economy that never gets fixed. The very definition of a bad deal and, once again, we see that politicians claiming to represent the desires of their angry constituents are in fact working very hard to make sure that those constituents get royally screwed.

Going Viral

Not quite six days ago, Marc Rosenbush and I put a video up on YouTube, and launched a companion website. The video was of course the one embedded a couple posts below, about the entirely mythical candidacy of Michael Palin for President, and the website is of course called Michael Palin for President.

Last time I looked, our silly little satire has been viewed 103,000 times. And counting.

This is, I suspect, fueled chiefly by two things: (1) we brought the funny, mostly thanks to selecting good clips of Michael Palin being funny, although I think the fact that there is a point being made doesn't hurt; and (2) the more I learn about Sarah Palin, the less I like her, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

Comments (over a hundred of them) have been about 90% positive, which could mean that the video really works well, or that the people bothering to comment are mostly members of the choir. Endless variations of comments like "The only Palin I'd vote for! Vote for the other one and we WILL get the Spanish Inquisition!" But of course there has been the other side heard from as well. Examplars of considered political discourse such as "If you have a child, I hope he dies in a car fire!" (That, by the way, was the only part I could repeat here without violating FCC decency standards.)

I have to say, it's been a lot of fun. Making an actual movie is such a long process, months and years of effort. But Marc and I put this video together in eleven hours last Monday, and over a hundred thousand people have seen it since. That's almost certainly people more people than saw me in my entire theatrical career, over the course of years.

At the same time, I'm starting to feel a certain sense of responsibility. I mean sure, the Constitution bars a British citizen like Michael Palin from becoming President of the United States, but enforcement of the Constitution has been a bit slippery for a while now, so maybe this little joke is something I should take a bit more seriously.

Because, as one YouTube commenter put it, "His cabinet would no doubt be an interesting bunch." And I don't think that, as a general rule, we need new government departments--but a Ministry of Silly Walks would be an admirable use of taxpayer money.

Who's with me?

P.S. Just found out that the Pythons' official website is now featuring our video. Speaking as a lifelong Python geek, that is just too cool.

Second Verse, Same as the First

Sure, I’ll admit it: I fell asleep during Senator McCain’s speech last night.

I mean I tried, I really did. I would pause the TiVo, get up and check e-mail, grab a drink, then sit back down, and a couple minutes later there I’d be, nodding off again. Pause, stand, calisthenics, acupuncture, walking across hot coals, sit, and sleep.

Which doesn’t mean it was a bad speech; but if he wanted to contrast his style with Obama’s, he definitely accomplished his goal.

Still. I heard enough to get a decent impression of what he was on about, plus of course there has been plenty of summarization and analysis since then. So with the Republican National Convention now over (and the hundreds arrested soon to be released, we hope), a few thoughts.

Almost without exception, every speech I heard was obsessed with the notion of character, specifically John McCain’s character. We heard the Hanoi Hilton story every single time; we heard the line “I’d rather lose an election than a war” every single time, including from McCain himself. McCain, everyone insisted, has been tested in ways few other Americans have ever been tested, and he stood his ground, passed that most horrific of tests without blinking.

(By the way, the New York Times had a startling portrait of Senator McCain on yesterday’s front page, which you should be able to find here.)

The Republicans love to do this, they love to make elections entirely about character. “McCain has already been tested, we know he has the character to be President.” But eight years ago, that election too was about character, according to the Republicans: “George W. Bush is a man of upright moral character who will restore dignity to the White House.”

And you know, I am still favorably impressed with President Bush’s upright moral character. (Sure he lied us into a war and has an unfortunate fondness for torture and other outright betrayals of civil rights; but as a family man he’s terrrrrific!) But in the end, Mr. Bush was incompetent, and we have all suffered the innumerable consequences of his incompetence. Now Bill Clinton, he definitely suffered (and suffers) some character flaws--but you can't really say that he was incompetent. The results of his stewardship of the nation are too plain.

So I just can’t bring myself to care too much about McCain’s candidacy if he bases his qualifications on his character. Certainly I admire his character, enormously--I don’t for a second imagine that I’d have measured up half as well under those conditions in Hanoi. But competence does matter, and judgment. Now you can’t win an election purely on competence, as Michael Dukakis proved years ago. But judgment matters too, and about the only time any Republicans spoke about McCain’s judgment was when they talked about the surge.

(I have a question about the surge. Is there any possibility that the insurgents, and the rebels, and the Sunni thises and Shi’a thatses, have realized that if they just lie low for a while, the Americans will go away and then they can fight it out unimpaired? I mean, that’s what I would do.)

But here’s the thing. “I would rather lose an election than a war.” Upright, forthright, unbendable, unbowed John McCain. But I would submit that the selection of the person who will be, as the phrase has it, a heartbeat away from the presidency, that matters just as much as the war question. Particularly when you’ve got a 72 year old candidate who’s been through hell and back, and has this recurring cancer problem.

And when he made that selection, reports agree that he really wanted either Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge. Both of whom are experienced men with qualifications up the wahoo, and while I have political issues with both, I don’t doubt their essential fitness to do the job. If the question of who might succeed the President bears any weight, either of those would have been admirable choices. Plus they were the two closest to McCain’s heart, the guys he really truly wanted for the job.

But neither of them was acceptable to the hardcore right-wingers who have recently succeeded in shaping a rather frightening party platform (a PDF is available here), and so McCain went with Governor Palin, whose fitness to be President I am not alone in doubting. In short: when tested on a crucial question, McCain went with the political choice rather than stand his ground.

As I say. The Republicans have made this character argument before, George W. Bush being their most recent example, and now they’re following exactly the same playbook all over again. It was also fascinating to watch on Tuesday, when President Bush spoke and was roundly praised and applauded; then only a short while later, other speakers got up to talk about how things have been going badly for the last eight years and how McCain will set the ship right again, and the delegates applauded and cheered that, too. And have you seen Lieberman’s 2006 speech in fulsome praise of, yes, Barack Obama?

To hell with character. Give me somebody who can do the damn job, paired with a running mate who can also do the job. Is it so much to ask?

The Wrong Palin

For your viewing pleasure:

Crawling Back to Normal

Time passes, and it does what it does, and slowly I have managed to crawl back to something that feels like normal. In no order whatsoever:

Casino Roulette

My first trip to Vegas produced the not-at-all surprising revelation that one casino is just like every other casino. Went wandering around one in the morning the first night there, thinking it would be cooler at night (ha!), left the nice air-conditioned MGM Grand to wander the Strip, got as far as the Luxor and needed to get back into air conditioning again. Where I found that the casino there looked almost exactly the same as the one at the MGM Grand. Then I took the walkways back again, making interior crossings from building to building as long as possible, thus leading me through whatever that weird “medieval castle” place is, and discovering again that their casino seemed awfully familiar. Well of course it is—the science of separating you (willingly!) from your money is just that, a science, and a science that is about as refined and well-practiced as any you’ll ever find. Casinos all look alike because that look makes you give them money, and lots of it.

I never gambled, by the way, but I watched friends gamble. And even with a well-practiced (online) blackjack system, nothing online prepares you for the subtle shift that happens when your dealer gets swapped out in the middle of a good run of cards, or when the pit boss leans in to see how things are going. Suddenly, money starts going away, very fast.

One more thing: the purpose of chips is to make your money abstract. If you were gambling with real hundreds or thousands or higher, you would definitely feel it more than when your money has been abstracted to colorful little chips. And once your money has been abstracted, it goes away faster. A science, thoroughly perfected.

Cleaning House

The process of going through someone’s house, cleaning up their life, is difficult for all sorts of reasons. (And a toolshed in Florida in August adds a whole new layer of difficulty.) My grandfather was one of the most unsentimental people I’ve ever known—he would sell off pretty much anything, without a qualm; but he still managed to accumulate mountains of stuff. And so, of course, as I helped with the awful process of working through it all, the following inevitable logic chain went through my head:

1) Man, he had a lot of crap
2) Man, people in general have a lot of crap
3) Man, I’ve got a lot of crap

Leaving me thoroughly resolved to do some house-cleaning of my own when I got home. But of course, once I actually did get home...

Bleah

The second the plane touched down, that’s when all my resolution vanished. I’d been solid and strong for days; now I was something else. Mostly petulant and lazy. God did I get lazy. Watched endless hours of the Olympics, not because I actually enjoyed watching table tennis but because it was on. Took days to crawl my way back to my normal routine. So if I owe someone an email or a phone call, my apologies, and I should get to it soon.

Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Obama

I had one of those birthday-things, and celebrated the awful occasion by going to a screening of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, one of my favorite movies. It was sponsored by Generation Obama as a fundraiser for the campaign, and afterward there was a panel discussion that included Aaron Sorkin, one of favorite screenwriters and of course the creator of The West Wing.

(And because my mom has mad skillz as a gift-giver, the very day I went to this function, she sent me a birthday box containing a DVD of Charlie Wilson’s War, which was written by Aaron Sorkin. She bought it a month ago, long before I knew this event was going to be held; she also had no idea that that particular movie was written by Mr. Sorkin, she just thought I’d like it. Yep.)

The panelists were under some constraint to keep their remarks focused more on Obama than on the movie we’d just watched, which was mildly disappointing. The question I didn’t get to ask was this: Mr. Smith is clearly a fantasy, because in it, Jefferson Smith is clearly defeated, and only obtains victory because one of the bad guys suffers an attack of conscience and confesses. And as we all know, in the real world, that simply never happens. So, while the movie’s portrait of naiveté versus idealism (Jeff Smith suffers because he is naïve; he wins because he holds firm to his idealism) is definitely relevant to this campaign, ultimately the movie probably offers a hopeful vision that won’t much resemble what happens in the real world.

Although after Michelle Obama’s marvelous speech last night, I don’t know, I’m suddenly feeling delightfully naïve all over again...

For Gil

A photo of my grandfather and my mother, taken a couple years ago. Posted tonight because my grandfather died today, and because eventually we are all transformed to memory. And because I am now fresh out of grandparents.

Yay Triple-A

If you're going to run out of gas, you might as well really complete the experience: run out of gas in the middle of Death Valley.

Okay, fine, technically we weren't in Death Valley, just a part of the Mojave Desert. But the story's better with something like "Death Valley" in it, so let's just run with it, shall we?

Just made my first visit to Las Vegas for a Lightwheel company retreat, during which we spent a full day planning strategy, saw two shows (one of them brilliant), and further enriched the casino at the MGM Grand. I'm sure I'll tell more stories about this in the next few days. But on the way back, we had our opportunities to get gas. In Vegas itself, and a couple times along the road. But of course we had the thought that everyone has: "Ah, no problem, we can get to the next rest stop easy."

But as the miles rolled on, there was a conspicuous absence of gas stations. And the needle kept dipping lower. We tried to pull off at places that looked like they might just have hidden gas stations, like the Ron Paul Truck Stop (no, really), but they didn't. And about 8 miles northeast of Yermo, California, the car started to chug and shudder. Then the engine went quiet and we coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the I-15.

The Mojave Desert. Just past 1:00 in the afternoon. Hot high clear sun, driving away our former air conditioning in about a minute flat. Outside temperature somewhere above 100. And in the car, Buffie, whose body is not terribly good at regulating heat.

But one thing we did have: cellphones. And AAA cards. Buffie had one, I had one. And before we'd even coasted to a full stop, I already had my new iPhone out and was withdrawing my AAA card to look up the number. The whole thing worked exactly like it's supposed to: they picked up promptly, asked the right questions, and dispatched the call to a towing service in Barstow almost immediately. Barely two minutes after I hung up, someone from Barstow was calling back to point out to me that I'd said we were east of Yermo but the I-15 does not travel east-west but north-south, and which way had we really been driving?

We had a 45-minute wait, and it's nice to point out that there were other options: a call box only a few feet back, and after we'd been there for half an hour we received a visit from a California State trooper, who wanted to be sure we were being taken care of. So really, all we had to do was sit and wait. As Buffie slowly turned redder and redder.

But hey, the guy from AAA got there exactly when they'd said he would, he poured in ten bucks' gas (about a thimble-full), I paid him $20 because I didn't have anything smaller and by gum, saving our lives was worth the tip, and then we were on our merry way again. Half an hour later we were in Yermo, freshly gassed-up and enjoying a nice lunch at Peggy Sue's 50's Diner.

I only became a AAA member a few months ago, after a friend of mine got a flat tire just a couple weeks after he'd allowed his own AAA membership to lapse. And now, this soon, it has paid for itself a dozen times over. Let's hear it for the happy ending.

Shakety Shake

Yep, that was a big earthquake. A whopping 5.4 on the old Richter scale, although that's still not the biggest one I've ever been through. (That, according to Mom, would be an Alaska quake of 5.6 when I was but a wee baby boy, and I don't remember it at all.)

I was in a Lightwheel meeting with Marc and Buffie, and I'm sure we all went through the same set of thoughts at the same time: is that just a vibration of the building, or is that--?; whoa, yeah, that's a--!; um, this is a lot stronger than the ones before...; should I be getting under a doorway?; no, nothing's falling off any shelves, I should be okay; man, this thing's going on for forever....

It only lasted for about thirty seconds, actually, though of course it felt as though it took a whole lot longer than that. And there seemed to be a lot going on during that time--a little bit of rolling from side to side, a little bit of bumping up and down, plus of course a whole lot of just general vibration. As the above-linked USGS page states in its summary, none of this is a surprise: this particular quake had characteristics of both kinds of major faults: a strike-slip fault that would produce a sudden jump, and a "reverse fault" that moves from here to there.

And yet as strong as this one felt (Buffie reached out, startled, and grabbed both our arms), nothing fell off any shelves, I saw no damage at all when I got home, and news reports tell me there were no injuries and no real damage to speak of, citywide. Which is both reassuring and worrying at the same time.

Reassuring because the local construction standards seem to have held up very well indeed during what was, from my limited experience, a hell of an event. But worrying because the official agencies have all dubbed this a "moderate" quake, and I can't help thinking--if that was moderate, jeez, do I even want to know what a strong quake is like?

Astonishingly, within five minutes of the earthquake we could find information about it on the USGS's website (which I have bookmarked because, you know, I live here). The local news had gone all-earthquake instantly, but since there really wasn't anything to report yet, it was just more of the usual saturation-news blather. So we three either called or e-mailed our families to let them know not to worry, then got back to work.

Still. Damn, that was something...

The Wanting of Toys: The Inevitable Sequel

Okay, I’ll admit it: the iPhone is kind of great. (Come on, you knew this one was coming.)

Bear in mind, I never owned a Blackberry, so this whole notion of being able to check email on my phone is new to me, and I’m enjoying it like crazy--particularly since I’ve been away from home a lot recently, and it’s nice to know things I wouldn’t ordinarily know unless I was at home--how well Zen Noir is selling today, for instance. And when our composer, the estimable Steve Chesne, sends an email with a question, I can respond right away.

Plus, you know. It’s a toy, and toys are good. Didja know you can download this free application that’ll make your iPhone sound like a lightsaber? That’s awesome! And the “More Cowbell” application is so silly it’s sublime.

The question is, was it worth standing in line for three hours? (Particularly after my little diatribe several days ago.) Well, see, here’s the thing: those lines are deceptive. No, really. I happened to be in Century City last week, so I wandered by the Apple Store. There were fewer than ten people waiting outside and I didn’t have to be anywhere so I figured, What the hell? Got in line, the line soon edged forward a little, so it wasn’t moving fast but it was moving. Enough time had passed since the chaotic launch of the phone, surely the wait wouldn’t be so bad these several days later.

Of course, there were about thirty people already inside the store. (The window advertising pretty well obscured what was going on inside.) Then something happened, with the servers or whatever, and suddenly the line wasn’t moving at all, for an astonishingly long time. (The Apple employees blamed AT&T, and AT&T put out a press release that essentially said it was all Apple’s fault.) Now, by this point I’d already been there for a while and was invested in the time. It felt like an even worse crime to discard the hour I’d already spent waiting, so I waited yet longer. At least there were some entertaining folks in the line around me, and by the time we were done we’d all gotten to know each other reasonably well. And of course we were all questioning our sanity by then, but hey, at least we all got iPhones.

And as I say, it’s a pretty incredible little object. The secret key is also joining MobileMe, Apple’s online service. I don’t need their me.com email address and haven’t given it to anyone, but MobileMe is what allows my email to find me on the phone without actually syncing the phone with the computer. It does the same with my contacts and calendar items as well, so that I can add something to my calendar on the iPhone and it’ll automatically add itself to my desktop computer’s calendar as well, and vice versa. As things get busier, this alone will become invaluable. Plus there’s the GPS-in-a-phone thing, which will help when I get lost and am not in the car where I’ve already got GPS. I get lost easily, see. My sense of direction is permanently discombobulated now that I live on the west coast and the ocean is on the wrong side.

Plus, the toys. Eight gigs of music that now come with a phone, web browsing at will, the whole deal. I make no secret of being a bit of a gadget freak (yes, the Engadget site is bookmarked), and this one is I think up there with the TiVo in terms of general terrificness. Does the iPhone fit anywhere on the chart of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Of course not. But still. Toys!

The Wanting of Toys

So the brand-new whoa-golly iPhone 3G was set free into the world on Friday, and the world accordingly said Gimme! And because hype works, people said Gimme! in mind-boggling numbers.

I was completely able to resist the iPhone mass madness the first time around (only one short year ago), but this time it's got more of the stuff I'd want, plus my needs have changed and it would be a nice thing to have. So on Friday, since I happened to be nearby, I figured what the hell and wandered over to the Apple Store in Century City.

And was surprised to find that it really wasn't so bad. I'd heard all the stories about activation problems and "bricked" phones and delays delays delays, and figured that would mean that hundreds of people would still be lined up outside. Turns out there were only about fifteen people waiting, in a line that barely reached to the entrance of the store next door. "Well then," thought I, "maybe I'll just go ahead and get one." I got in line. Five minutes passed. A couple other people got in line behind me. One woman said she'd come by a few hours before and there'd been people herded in an improvised holding area at the opposite corner of the mall, so she was amazed that the line was now so short.

We were just beginning to speculate on why that might be when the security guard approached. "Are you on the list?" he asked. "What list?" we asked.

Yep, the cowpen was still active. Six hundred-plus people on the list (representing the whole day--they had moved through about five hundred of them already). So I got out of what was not in fact a proper line outside the store and, knowing that I would not be buying an iPhone today, decided to walk over to see the line. And was rewarded with a string of hot, weary people who looked pretty thoroughly bored and miserable, and you just had to wonder: why on earth?

I mean sure, it's fun to be the first on your block with a whatever, but when thousands of people line up across the city, you have to admit you're just not gonna be first. So, then, what's so awful about being second? Or 10,000th? Shouldn't the thing itself, the iPhone, be more important than the over-hyped aura surrounding it?

The activation troubles reveal the truth.

Apple made a colossal mistake: they tried to do three major things at once. Four, actually. They tried to launch the iPhone, they tried to launch a new 2.0 software update that would work on the original iPhones as well, and they tried to roll out a major upgrade of their online service .mac, which is now called MobileMe. They also made a catastrophic decision to try and force people to activate their new phones in the store rather than at home as they did last year. What this meant was a massive load on their servers that affected every single one of these initiatives, drastically. The MobileMe rollout was supposed to take six hours; it took well over 24, and the service still isn't working terribly well. Trying to active the phones in-store when the activation servers had gone phfft! meant that it took forever to process each customer, until finally they just started sending people home and telling them to active the phones at home, whenever they could. And people trying to download the new 2.0 software ended up leaving their phones useless, only able to make emergency calls, for several hours on a Friday afternoon.

People howled online, because that's what people do online. The freedom to howl, oh joy. "I've got a business to run and now I don't have a phone!" several of them shrieked. But really, you've got to wonder: if their business is so important, why did they download the new software at the first possible moment, early in the morning on a weekday? If you've got business to do, hang out for a day, do your stuff, maybe check online to see how the software is working out, then download it Saturday, or Sunday morning, sometime that isn't nearly so critical.

"I've got a business to run" is, of course, the excuse they use. The real truth is simple: "I want my toy and I want it now!" The infantilism of America reached yet another crybaby threshhold on Friday, and probably some hapless project manager at Apple will get fired for it.

Me? Nope, no iPhone yet. The lines were certain to be long again this weekend, all those frustrated Friday people, and why bother? I just don't need the thing that badly, I can wait a few days. I'll be back in Century City later this week, and I'll probably run by the store, and if there's not a line I'll probably stop in. Get a phone, set it up, and get on with my life.

I say all this not because I'm so wonderful, so immune to the hype (yeah, sure, I'd like a toy, too), but because--because I feel the desire, I do, I remember going into a store and running to the aisle with the toys and that kid is still inside saying "Gimme!" But sometimes, I mean come on, if we're going to be adults let's be adults, shall we?

George Carlin

And then right after finishing the last entry, I went to my homepage and saw that George Carlin just died. Crap.

Carlin was the first comedian I ever loved. Back in the Laugh-In days, he did a routine called The Hippie Dippy Weatherman, featuring such gems as

...and the forecast for tonight is dark, with scattered light toward morning...

He had an absurdist's sensibility, but he was just as sharp about politics and culture, as we all know. (His routine about the differences between football and baseball is simply spectacular--brilliantly written and funny as hell.) And as a wordsmith, he used language better than any comedian since Twain. (No surprise that just Tuesday it was announced that Carlin would be given this year's Twain Award.)

Heart attack, just this afternoon, just down the road in Santa Monica. I say again: crap.

MyLastGoodTwitterFaceFlickrReadsBook

As a person of a certain age, the whole "social networking" thing, i.e. using the isolation of a computer to connect with other equally isolated people, seemed just a bit off. Over the years, though, various attempts have been made, some more successful than others, and I've slowly found myself drawn into these little devils. In no particular order, here are some of the places where I can be found:

MySpace - Probably the paradigm of the social networking space, and I can be found here in a few places--both as myself, and as someone named "Incorporation for Artists," plus of course "Zen Noir" can be found here as well. Not to mention Sergei from "Outta Sync," a character I played in a movie. (Distressingly, Sergei has more friends than I do!) The thing that bugs me about MySpace, though, is how busy it is. Sure it's nice that you can skin the appearance of your profile page, but those skins can get so involved--not to mention all the YouTube videos and music tracks that autoload and all the rest of it--that the page takes forever to load. My own sister's page has so much stuff on it that it (a) loads verrrry slowly, and (b) scrolls even morrrrre slowly, so that I almost never go there anymore because it's just too annoying.

Facebook - I resisted Facebook for ages because I'd already been on MySpace for about two years and couldn't for the life of me see any reason to be on two sites that accomplish nearly identical things. But a couple months ago I relented, and was rewarded with a fantastic immediate dividend: a great friend of mine from high school, Shannon Chamberlain (nee Walker), happened to search for my name just a few days after I signed onto Facebook. We reconnected after way too long, and as it happened I was about to go for a visit to Miami, so we were able to get together almost immediately. And, of course, it was one of those things where the years fell away and we almost instantly dropped into the same old delightful groove. This immediately made me into a huge Facebook fan. Since then I've found a bunch of people from college as well, and it just seems to work better for finding and connecting with people. Plus, the profile pages aren't skinnable, so the pages load much faster (my sister's page pops right up). On the other hand, those thousands of mini-apps can get seriously overwhelming--I'm constantly being sent "flairs" (little virtual buttons with pithy little aphorisms), or internet hugs or karma, or being invited to become someone's virtual feudal vassal, or being invited to take a quiz to find out which Shakespeare play I am. I drew the line at a vampire game where a friend of mine virtually bit me. Sorry, vamps are right out. Me no likee vampires. They scary.

Twitter - Okay, this one I just don't get. It's like microblogging, where there's a fixed limit to how many characters you can type at any given time. I think it should be obvious to anyone who reads any of my blog entries--I am just not that sort of writer. I like to luxuriate in language, to set the words rolling and see where they go. (Marc Rosenbush, on the other hand, is a minimalist--this is why he and I are good collaborators when we write together, because our approaches to writing are perfectly complementary--and he gets the Twitter paradigm immediately.) But more importantly, almost no one I know Twitters at all, so there's next to nothing to draw me there on any sort of consistent basis. I've written a grand total of three entries since joining, always without any enthusiasm. The sort of self-involved navel-gazing that Twitter seems to promote just doesn't fit my personality--the only person on earth I can think of who might care to know what I've been doing twenty times a day is my mom. But she isn't on Twitter either, so why?

Flickr - Then there are the sites that focus on social networking built around one particular activity. Flickr, for instance, is about photographs. From time to time I take pictures off the computer and put them on Flickr. Sometimes I put them there in order to post them here, but it's also nice to invite family members so that they can check out pictures as well. Nothing spectacular, but I understand what it does and why, and it's simple to use.

Goodreads - This one is all about books, so naturally it's a little closer to my heart. The site is labor-intensive--you have to enter each book you own one by one, and in my case that's a boatload of books. I've only entered a little over a hundred, which make up just three shelves of one bookcase--and I've got eight bookcases. (Not to mention the books that are literally piled across the top shelves of my kitchen cabinets.) But the idea is that you enter your books, record when you read them and maybe write little reviews, your friends do the same, and that way you can all share stuff you liked or disliked. (For example, when my friend Melissa Klein was about to read Thomas Cahill's "Gifts of the Jews," I was able to tell her why that had been my least favorite of the Cahill books, then once she too had read it she told me why she agreed with my assessment.) For a book lover, the appeal is obvious--for someone who isn't, this one may seem like a waste of time. Fair enough.

Last.fm - Like Goodreads, except for music. The great thing is that this site isn't labor-intensive at all: I downloaded a little application that simply watches the songs I play and records them on the site. So I get stats about which artists I play most often, plus there's a handy internet radio station component--if I'm traveling and don't have my iPod, I can log onto Last.fm and play a station that already knows the kinds of music I like. (It's actually quite good about picking songs I legitimately enjoy.) Very cool.

Okay, that's it, I'm tired now and am going to go do something else. Like sleep, maybe. For which there are no social networking sites at all, and let's all be grateful for that.

Crosby Stills & Ecklie

I've been focusing on the fundamentals of the bass guitar. Bought a book of music theory specifically for the bass, and I'm trying to learn intervals and scales and whatnot. You know, the dull, boring part.

But one bit of advice that I found somewhere recommends that no matter how bad you are when you first pick up an instrument, one of the best things you can do is to start playing with other people. Those other people are almost certainly going to be better than you are, and your natural inclination not to look like an idiot means that you'll learn a lot faster than you would on your own.

My friend and compatriot Marc Rosenbush is of course the person who sorta kinda led to this whole guitar-playing thing in the first place, and as a director, he ain't never been afraid of criticizing someone's work. (As someone whose work is known for its rhythmic sense, he is particularly stringent about trying to get my own rhythms up to snuff.) I play with him fairly regularly, on specific material. But Marc also plays regularly with Marc Vann, and when those two got together the other night, after a couple hours I hauled my bass over and joined them.

(And of course Marc Vann has been in lots of movies and TV shows, but is best known for playing the hard-ass boss Conrad Ecklie on CSI--hence the working name of our band. Although I've also suggested, and am rather fond of, Government Work. As in "Close enough for...")

Marc and Marc had been rocking out on Jethro Tull stuff before I arrived, and were both reciting John Lennon's shout "I've got blisters on me fingers!" But I was able to join in on two Pink Floyd numbers, "Comfortably Numb" and (of all things) "Echoes," complete with spacey whalesong improvisations. And to close out the night, the real CSNY's "Find the Cost of Freedom," as we worried less about instrumentation and worked very hard on vocal harmonies.

And if you're enjoying the thought of Conrad Ecklie pickin' and singin', then you had almost as much fun as I did.

Metronome

I should've bought a metronome the same day I bought my first guitar.

Time is, of course, one of those annoying absolutes. In the music world, the tempo of a song is inescapable and always present. And when I first got the acoustic guitar, I pretty much ignored the whole question of tempo--I just wanted to learn where the notes were, how to make chords, etc. I'd worry about tempo later.

This despite the fact that I knew, from my singing days, that I do not have a natural sense of rhythm. My internal clock works great at getting me up at the right time in the morning, but it does not instinctively know how to count one-two-three one-two-three. Not accurately, anyway.

The good news: it's definitely learnable. There was an HBO program a few weeks ago where Dave Stewart interviewed Ringo Starr, and Ringo mentioned that when he first started drumming he really couldn't keep time at all. Say what you will about Ringo's drumming--he was always known as a rock-solid timekeeper. So this stuff can be learned. I just need to, you know, actually learn it.

As mentioned before, when I bought the bass I also bought a metronome. A couple weeks ago I finally reopened one of the learn-guitar books I bought months ago, before the bass, and decided to start again from page one--this time with the metronome. Turns out, it made a huge difference. When the ticker keeps ticking, you don't have the luxury of waiting till your fingers find the right note to play--you just have to soldier forward, and if it's wrong you either press on then try again later, or you stop and go back to the beginning.

Because a song is what it is, and the notes must be right, and the time signature must be observed. That's all there is to it. I would've been far better off if I'd observed this reality from the beginning.

And by the way, I'm picking things up on the bass far faster than on the guitar. I've already got one song pretty well down ("Comfortably Numb") and am learning another ("Come Together")--whereas on the guitar, I still don't have any songs all the way down, still struggling to put together "Here Comes the Sun." And as friend Buffie (the real musician of our little group) put it a couple weeks ago, after Marc and I successfully played "Comfortably Numb" start to finish, "Looks like you've found your first instrument." Yay. But still more, more, more to learn.

I'll tell you this, though--there was some sturm und drang this weekend, of the serious sort--and I suddenly discovered that having guitars around helped enormously. It was wonderful to just pick up the acoustic and noodle for a while, to take my mind off things. In this way, one falls in love with the instrument that little bit more.

Just one last question. Would a metrosexual gnome be called a metrognome? I'm just askin'.

(And anyone who thinks I wrote this whole entry just so I could tell that one joke, gold star for you!)

Link Closure

Busy bizzy buzzy bee. Just a couple quick things to note, mostly written by other people, oh joy! And thus closing some links I've been meaning to close:

On the subject of Senator Obama and the Rev. Wright, I have nothing to say about Part 2 of that saga that Bill Moyers didn't say much, much better. Just a taste:

We are often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this--this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers."

But the entirety of what he said is worth reading, and can be found here, right at the top.

One of the things that's bugged me recently about the rise in gas prices is that the oil companies have stopped even bothering to explain what's going on. Into the breach steps Andrew Leonard at Salon. He writes a regular column called "How the World Works" that I would say is required reading if only I read it regularly. It's dense, and complex, and it helps if you have an economics degree, which I most certainly don't. But the man certainly seems to know what he's talking about, and he has written an excellent explication of why we're paying so damn much at the pump. You can find it here.

A person should always investigate the facts before complaining about how we're being gouged by the oil companies. Read Mr. Leonard's article, get a sense of the astonishing complexity of these prices--then go back to complaining about the gas companies because, you know, that's just fun.

Links are closed. I go back to other things. Hi do ho, hi dee hi.

Louts

Went to see Joe Jackson last night, playing at the lovely Orpheum Theatre in downtown L.A. Great show. I'm a longtime Joe Jackson fan, and although I saw him once before, it was during his Night Music tour in late '94, and the show was, let's say, idiosyncratic. Last night's show was more straightforward, even with a stripped-down three-piece band (no electric guitar!), and with one roiling exception, I had a great time.

The louts behind me. Or let's go ahead and call them The Louts. Because of course they are entirely representative of their kind, so let's go ahead and generalize.

You know exactly who I'm talking about. Those two assaholics, two rows behind, for whom enjoying a concert means shouting out their stupidity to the world, top volume, from first moment to last. Because of course it's important that we all be made to realize just how stupid they really are.

No, my best guess is the obvious one: that these guys are convinced that they're The Greatest Joe Jackson Fans Of All Time, and that they must proclaim their superiority at every moment so that all we Lesser Fans (who barely deserve even that paltry title) will be made to feel our wretched inferiority. One of The Louts, during the show, did in fact shout out "YEAH, JOE! WAKE THESE PEOPLE UP!" Which made absolutely no sense, because the crowd was in fact on the rowdy side all the way through.

After all, this was a Joe Jackson show, and Joe came out of post-punk Britain along with Elvis Costello when they were both competing for the title Angriest Young Man. Listen to the crowd in Joe's 1980 live recordings and you can hear particularly well that he's used to a lively crowd. Even so, last night he had to say "Okay, calm down" at one point. So it's not like the rest of us were asleep. In fact, it may be true that the fact that it was a loud crowd just meant that The Louts had to be that much louder. After all, how were they to establish their superiority as Joe Jackson True Fans if they weren't, you know, louder than everyone else? That is how you establish your superiority, right? By being louder than the other guy? I mean, everybody understands that, right?

For a while, I tried to give The Louts the benefit of the doubt. I said to myself, "Maybe it's like they're in church and, you know, testifying." So I ignored it for a while, but it just kept going on. (Then at one point, when Joe began a slow, quiet song, they had the temerity to start shushing the rest of us.) Eventually, though, it started to reach absurd heights. They started whistling to songs. Loudly. And singing along, sometimes deliberately badly. And of course loudly. (Sometimes they actually sang reasonably well, which is why I can say they were deliberately singing badly. And loudly.)

As my friend Buffie said after the show, "Sometimes I just wish I had my own personal taser."

I wonder: are these guys just idiots, or is there yet another level of idiotic vanity at play? After all, this was the last stop on Joe Jackson's U.S. tour, so I suppose there was a fair chance the show was being recorded. Were these guys trying to get on the album? Is that why they consistently picked the quietest moments of the show to bellow the loudest? Are they those idiots who jump behind newscasters and cavort maniacally?

Listen, Louts of the world. There's a difference between enjoying a show, between whistling and cheering, and being an obnoxious lout. It's not a subtle difference, either, it's a big stinkin' difference that most adults understand perfectly well. But then, that's the operative word, isn't it? Last night's Louts, who were not young, are nonetheless children, whining for attention like any three year old. And as anyone should understand, you just don't bring three year olds to an indoor rock concert.

Let It Be on YouTube

O happy me. For years now, I've been patiently (no, impatiently, very impatiently) waiting for the Apple/EMI people to release Let It Be on DVD. This of course was the movie that The Beatles made, reluctantly and grumpily and almost disastrously, to document the recording of what would become the album of the same name. Not a one of them was happy with any part of the process, leading Paul to eventually release what he considers to be a superior recording (i.e., one with all of Phil Spector's production gimmicks stripped away) a couple years ago. (In the process, by also stripping away the little interstitial stuff, the bits of conversation and whatnot, Let It Be... Naked ended up feeling lifeless compared to the original.) During the course of production, George Harrison quit the group altogether for a few days, bringing the whole enterprise very nearly to a halt--and potentially denying the world both the Let It Be and Abbey Road albums.

The first time I saw the movie of Let It Be, I was probably five years old. Mom and some friends took me along to see it at a drive-through, and all I can really remember is lying on the hood of the car, enjoying some Road Runner cartoons that came before the movie and then being really bored by the movie itself. I saw it again in early 1981, when it was rereleased following John Lennon's murder, at which point I was still so shell-shocked that I just couldn't absorb any of it.

Since then, it's been hidden away. Paul McCartney hates it, Neil Aspinall hated it, and basically the movie simply disappeared after '81. There were a few expensive, poor-quality VHS tapes floating around, and that was it. I've been wanting to see it, really see it, for all these years. And the other day, it finally occurred to me to check on YouTube.

Sure enough, there it is. (The movie is broken down into nine parts; the link brings you to Part 1, then just follow with Parts 2, etc. via the links to the right.)

I won't say much about it--if you're interested, you're interested and will go check it out. If you're not interested, then you don't much care what I have to say about it. Really, as a movie it's lousy--dismal sound quality, you can almost never hear what anyone is saying because they're miked so badly, nothing ever develops, there's no through-line at all, it's just a mess. But--

But it's really the only footage of The Beatles in the recording studio, and so it is precious. Plus, after about fifty minutes of meandering, not terribly musical nonsense, The Beatles got up onto that rooftop, and suddenly it's all magical. Suddenly the jaw drops, and I find myself desperately wishing that I had been in the right part of London that particular day. (Plus, you know, not a toddler.)

So if you're a Beatles fanatic like I am (and if you are, you know you are), it's probably worth noting that these YouTube clips must be in gross violation of copyright, so I would suggest you hie yourself thither with all due despatch. And no matter how dreary it is, just remember that eventually they're going to emerge onto a rooftop and bring joy one last time.

Two Lodgings

Been doing a fair number of road trips lately. On a couple of occasions, in service of Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, Marc Rosenbush and I traveled to San Diego for a seminar (refining yet further our own internet marketing skills, as taught by the phenomenon that is Frank Kern), then a week later we went to a film festival in the charming desert town of Fallbrook, California, where Marc had been invited to give a presentation. We stayed in two very different kinds of places. The first of them was what I call...

Skank Central

The Hard Rock Hotel, San Diego. Very sleek, very high-tech. Right in the Gaslamp District, which is like a little ongoing Spring Break in the heart of town. And of course being part of the whole Hard Rock franchise, the hotel has a rock star vibe, although not a single actual rock star was sighted the whole time. (Unlike, say, the W hotel I once visited, where everyone in the lobby carefully scopes out everyone who walks in the front door because s/he could very well be Somebody.) The location was terrific, and we ended up having a series of fantastic meals. In the glossy room I had, a theme of guitar picks was emulated in every conceivable place, including being stitched on the pillows. But what would have been really cool--if they'd had a place where you could plug a guitar into the room's speakers, now that would have been awesome. No such luck.

And it must be admitted that the folks loitering outside the hotel mostly consisted of, well, skanks and hos.

Very young women, wearing not much at all, and never mind that it got cool at night. Slightly older young men, wearing more but intent only on the very young women and trying oh-so hard to be Ultra Cool. The hotel has a couple of clubs that cater to these folks, and I'm sure they make a pretty penny. People will, after all, spend just about anything to be seen as hip. Part of the In Crowd, which of course mostly consists of other people just like them, just as anxious to be part of the crowd that considers itself to be the In Crowd even though they're aren't actually.

If I sound hostile, I don't think it's just a function of age. I was never a club-hopper, I just don't have it in me--and the thing that has always offended me is that oppressive sense of entitlement. That whole "I'm beautiful, therefore the world belongs to me" thing that is shared by both men and women. They are lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin, and yet they're unshakably convinced that the rest of us should fall down and worship their plumped-up beauty.

I've known plenty of very gifted, industrious people who are also quite beautiful. But they weren't about their beauty, they weren't Beautiful, they were just--well, you know. Handsome folk doing what they do in the world and not making such a great fuss about it. But those folk don't typically hang out at Skank Central.

On the other hand, I must admit that I got a kick out of the hotel's collection of rock memorabilia. Including a scrap of paper on which Mal Evans wrote out (and George corrected) the lyrics to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." But in one display case, there was an outfit that Janis Joplin wore on her 1969-1970 tour.

Interlude: The Janis Story

Ages ago, Mom went to a lot of concerts, and sometimes she brought me along. That's why I can proudly boast that I saw both Jimi and Janis, not too long before they died in 1970. Janis was doing an outdoor concert on the campus of the University of Miami, and I was four years old at the time. People sat there, marveling, and of course the weed was being smoked with copious abandon. Smoke wafted. Janis sang. Janis did that unquantifiable thing that still makes her one of the greatest rock and roll/blues singers of all time (something about overtones, as I understand it).

I was, literally, entranced. (Put on "Ball and Chain" and I'm still entranced.) Mom turned away to say something to a friend of hers, and when she looked back, I was gone. I will cheerfully claim to be one of the first crowd-surfers, because what Mom saw was little four-year-old me, being passed from hand to hand, closer and closer to the stage. I was chanting to myself: "The lady. Got to get to the lady."

Now I don't think Janis was all that great with kids, and I don't she was too crazy about the idea of this kid being put on the stage with her. Alas, it didn't come to that. Mom shouted out "Send him back!" and they did, the hands turned me around and sent me back to her. Still chanting to myself. The lady. Never did get to the lady. Damn it all.

So when I saw that outfit, I read the placard, which said that Janis wore it on her 1969-1970 tour. Meaning that it's quite likely she was wearing it during that very show--perhaps was wearing it even as I moved closer and closer, murmuring to myself. I stood there staring at it for quite a long time, still wishing just as much as ever that I could have somehow gotten to the lady.

So okay, the Hard Rock ain't so bad after all. Still, I have to say that I preferred to be...

Out in the Desert

Not that I like deserts. As an ocean people, deserts are too much the other thing. But we stayed at a B&B in Fallbrook called The Santa Margarita Inn, and it was a lovely place. Nestled on a plateau deep in the canyons, with hiking and riding trails winding all around. A view beyond description of that area that has been shaped and reshaped by geologic activity for millions of years. The house is huge, with gigantic windows in all the appropriate places. And when we drove up, we saw it immediately: right there on the front gate, a big ol' cast-iron image of a guitar.

As it happens, I'd brought my guitar with me, for no particular reason. We were greeted by one of the owners, Arlene, a longtime musician with a whole collection of guitars, and when she saw me with mine, I think everyone pretty much knew straightaway that we were going to have a good time.

The B&B has only been operating for a short time, and Arlene isn't yet jaded about the whole experience, so she's still plenty proud of this house she's been building for the past twenty years, and she took great pleasure in showing it off to all of her guests. (There were some filmmakers from the festival, plus a terrific couple on their anniversary.) Arlene showed us her music room, a playground of sorts, stuffed with guitars, including a Marwin Star from the 1930s that is probably worth a bundle. Alas, we were only there for one night--we attended the opening night reception, Marc gave his presentation in the morning, and then we had to leave that afternoon. So there was never time to really wander the property, nor was there time for much of a jam session. (Although at one point Arlene did play a song she'd written that apparently Willie Nelson is taking a look at. The lyrics needed work, but musically it was pretty damn good.)

The place has only one drawback: Elvis.

Elvis is a Rottweiler. A huge Rottweiler. When I sat on the sofa, Elvis and I were eye-to-eye. And when owner Frank was around, Elvis is a softie, sprawled across an astonishing amount of floor space, docile as a kitten. But after the reception, Marc and I drove back in the black desert night, and Elvis was guarding the otherwise-empty house. Barking at that strange car he didn't yet recognize, driven by people he couldn't quite remember; and because the whole B&B thing is new, Elvis isn't yet accustomed to strangers walking into his house. So he put up a spirited defense, and believe me, it takes some fortitude to walk up a narrow exterior staircase that is guarded by a barking, snarling, utterly gigantic Rottweiler.

Marc, several feet in front of me, says he did his aikido misdirection thing. "Look at my hand, way over here," as he steadily and slowly walked, without stopping, to the front door. Elvis let him pass, then turned to look and bark and snarl at me. Me, I had no Jedi mind tricks, so all I could really do was say "Oh, now Elvis, come on. I'm too big a meal for you. Look at Marc over there. Much more bite-sized, don't you think?"

We made it into the house, closed the door, and started breathing again. Not too long afterward Arlene and Frank returned, Elvis trotted in, and he was docile and sweet all over again. He's not the sort who actually attacks, but he sure puts up a hell of a good show; and if we'd been, say, a couple of elderly folks just staying at the B&B, I can well imagine that Elvis might be something of a deal-breaker.

And yet--Elvis aside, I vastly preferred Santa Margarita to the Hard Rock. Give me homespun and warm, even when it comes with a snarling Rottweiler, over Skank Central any day.

The Guitar Goes Plural

I was definitely not going to buy a new guitar. Even though for the past couple days I’ve been roaming the internet, looking at prices and models of electric basses, it wasn’t because I was planning to buy one. When my birthday comes around in a few months, then, sure, a nice cheap starter bass would be a wonderful present for myself. But not now. Nope, definitely not now.

Oh why do we persist in lying to ourselves so?

I had just been to the post office, mailing off the last of the tax forms. (One drawback to being self-employed: paying estimated taxes every quarter. Blah.) After months of work, the whole tax thing was finally completely done. And as it happens, the nearest post office branch is quite close to the venerable West L.A. Music.

“Well,” said I to my lying self, feeling good about the end of the whole tax thing, “when I do get a bass, I’ll definitely need a metronome with which to practice. It is a rhythm instrument, after all. Maybe I should just go get a metronome now, so that I’ll have it when the time comes.” While trying to decide this I was walking home, in the opposite direction from the music store, so that I ended up making a long tortured loop to get back to the store. Where I was definitely going to only buy a metronome. And maybe a pickup for the acoustic guitar, but that was it, for sure.

And the guy behind the counter--who happened to be their bass guitar expert--had to enter some stuff in his computer, during which I just kinda looked around, around, drums, keyboards, guitars, basses, and . . . “Hey, I’m not gonna buy today, but do you think I could maybe try out a couple of your basses?” Just so I could get a feel for a model I might like. You know. When the time comes.

Now, I’ve never played so much as a single note on a bass. But it is, really, the instrument I’ve always been drawn to. When I listen to music, it’s the bass line that my ear always follows, the bass line I always find myself humming. It’s probably true that I only bought the acoustic in order to learn the rudiments of stringed instruments before getting a bass. And being such a rank beginner, I wasn’t even considering a fretless bass because, really, you need to be an expert to play one of those. But the guy at the store, he asked what kind of bass work I was likely to want to play, and, thinking of the ne plus ultra bass work in “Come Together,” I said that I probably wanted something with a really fluid sound.

He immediately picked up a fretless bass. But it turns out that Squier (the cheap division of Fender) makes a fretless bass where, and this is just brilliant, the fret lines are painted on the neck. All the sound of a fretless bass, but there are still guides for beginners like me to follow. Dead simple—and as soon as I hit a couple notes and ran my fingers up and down the neck, well hell, I was completely hooked.

But still, I said “This is great, I’m definitely gonna want one of these in a couple months.” The clever guy, he said maybe he could drop the price a little, and went off to check. At exactly this moment, my phone happened to ring with some very good news about a meeting Marc Rosenbush had just had that went really quite remarkably well. Suddenly I was feeling, oh that most horrible of things, optimistic.

Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a bass. And an amp too, of course. And a strap. Plus that bloody metronome.

The acoustic is a complex instrument--six strings, and lots of chord-playing in infinite variations. A bass has only four strings, and you can get away with a lot by just playing one string at a time. It just sorta works for me, it makes an immediate kind of sense, in a way that the guitar still doesn’t. After only one day of practice--mostly spent endlessly repeating the various notes along the E string, trying to drill them into my brain, and keeping time with the metronome--I still don’t know much at all. But I’m having a hell of a time.

(And now I have to go down to San Diego for the weekend, and leave the bass behind. Which suddenly seems like a very great sacrifice indeed.)

Not buying a bass. Yeah, right. Tell me another one.

In Which I Do My Bit for the Alumni Association

Went to an alumni event for Emerson College the other night, one that targeted people from the years when I attended. (1820 to 1743.) So it was fun to see some folks I had sorta-kinda known back in the day, and extra-fun to see someone I really truly did know (and acted with). Emerson, though a Boston school, has a good alumni group out here, in fact the motion picture industry sometimes refers to an “Emerson mafia” of grads spread throughout the biz, networking through events just like this one. And hey, who wouldn’t want to work his way into a mafia that doesn’t involve actually, you know, killing people? Executives from a couple of the major studios, fellow graduates, were in the room, and happy to talk to other alumni. That’s a good room to be in.

I was of course reminded of my halcyon schooldays, there in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay, right across from the Public Gardens and the Common. I went to the school sight-unseen--a friend of a friend had recommended it, and the more I heard, the more I knew that this kind of school was exactly what I wanted. Emerson has always been a hands-on place, which makes it, unfortunately, a rare commodity in the higher-ed world. I auditioned, for example, at Boston University, and was told that I couldn’t possibly expect to get into a mainstage show until my junior year. At Emerson, I was cast in a mainstage show, doing Shakespeare, before orientation week was done. Which meant that I spent all four years working like crazy, in every space they had, doing classics and new pieces, and discovering, among other things, Samuel Beckett, who became one of my theatre gods. (A thousand thanks to Ron Jenkins, who handed me a copy of “Krapp’s Last Tape” and said “Here, you should do this.”)

For the last many years, Emerson has run something called The L.A. Center out here, in rented space in Toluca Lake. This is of course ground zero for the Emerson mafia, but last week they announced that they’ve bought property in Hollywood (near the Sunset Gower Studios) in order to build a permanent facility with much greater capacity. Which means the Emerson mafia should only grow, and it gives my company a great resource for new interns. We alumni have been encouraged to submit our ideas for how the new space should be constituted, and I think I’m going to do exactly that--something about the idea of finding ways to mix students from the various disciplines has a lot of appeal to me.

See, back when I was a student, the theatre department was in a building on Brimmer Street (just around the corner from the Bull and Finch, the outside of which was seen every week on Cheers). The film people were part of the mass communications department, which was in a different building, and there really wasn’t much mingling. (And none of us ever saw the communications disorders people.) I had a couple friends who managed to bridge the various departments, but I was so theatre-centric that I rarely left what we called “Brimmer World.” And as I wandered around the room at that alumni event, I saw people who graduated my year who I had really never known. Since I’m a big believer that artists should have interests that are as broad as possible, the fact that I essentially sequestered myself for four years means that I probably missed out on a lot of interesting possibilities. (I only acted in one student film that whole time, f’r instance.)

So I think I will make that suggestion. And I’m thinking that maybe I should volunteer to talk to prospective students from time to time--after all, it was a dinner held by a South Florida alum when I was just a prospect that made me realize, finally, that this was the school I wanted. That’s a favor I would really enjoy returning. And given that the school is still just as hands-on as it ever was, I can still recommend it just as heartily as ever. So if you're interested in a communications field and you believe that the best way to learn something is to get your hands dirty, here you go, here's the place for you.

There you go. Does this mean I don't have to contribute cash now when they call?