There May Be Life On Mars – Let’s Hope They’re Smarter Than Us…

Three interesting news stories:
Here the BBC reports on an announcement by the American Association For The Advancement of Science that there are probably hundreds of planets arranged around sun-like stars in our solar system alone.
While here we hear about the nationalization of Northern Rock Bank. This is of particular interest to me because it is a close-up look at exactly what happens when banks fold up, something citizens of wealthy nations had almost forgotten about. Even more interesting is to see how it has played out in Britain, a country with no FDIC-equivalent.
And, last but not least, here we read about a meatpacking company that issued a recall, after being accused of animal cruelty and using ‘downer’ cattle. Their primary buyer? Schools. Awesome. This one’s been blogged pretty heavily, I think, and it’s a story that speaks for itself, so I’ll not comment.

In other news, I’m back in England, and I’ll be writing something more intersting soon.

Hmmm…

I’m going to have to start doing a Song of The Day with my posts. And a Youtube video of the moment. Yes….

Song Of The Day: Spoon’s ‘The Underdog’

1/14/08

Hoodoo philosophy, memoir of a part-time crackpot.
Memories are like ghosts, it seems to me. Haunting the places we were, sometimes letting us get close, sometimes even passing through us and taking us over and possessing us, for a moment, other times giving us only the briefest glimpse as they disappear around a corner. Sometimes following us, they call us to sit in the dark with them and listen to words that they speak on behalf of our hearts. Sometimes, becoming our specters and shadows, they follow us eternally yet refuse to ever show themselves but to the corners of our eyes.
For me Seattle is a haunted city. It was the first place I lived away from home, and my wants and desires, my old habits and fears and inadequacies, seem to saturate it’s ground. When I go back and see how it’s changing it is half a betrayal. “Hey! You can’t change this place! This geography is embedded on my heart, jackass! See? Right here! Embedded!” The buyers and sellers of condominiums don’t pay much attention to heart, though, so I just wander around and miss buses and stare at things that used to be, wondering why in the hell I couldn’t have payed more attention to it the first time around. As Kurt would have said, so it goes.
Some ghosts, though, stay gone. I thought I couldn’t ever forget how to work dough, but I was wrong. Let’s just say it was humbling to go back to the old bakery and get my slow, dough-tearing, tight-ness-failing-to-achieve-ing ass schooled. What feels strangest is to go back and see things, populated by ghosts as they are, but without the patina they had so long ago. Streaming past it on the bus, straining to catch a glimpse, the hobo camp is empty, a wet, dirty field. In the bakery, the mixers with their old steel bowls stand in beaten corners, against walls torn and stained. Without the urgency I felt about everything then coloring my whole world, things I thought I remembered, when I see them in the light, seem naked and barren.

Old emotions toss my little ship, old passions stoke my firebox with a heat I’d forgotten. At times like this I can only do what I came to do, on autopilot more or less, and sit back inside my head and just wonder, watching the mountainous waves that break themselves upon my face, my chest and shoulders and back.

Who knows what comes next. And I mean ‘who knows what’ as a noun-phrase. Who-knows-what comes next. Which makes it into a statement, not a question. At this point I don’t bother to articulate the question because I know I won’t get an answer, just the question, back at me again. Who-knows-what. That’s what comes next. Jackass.

Amazing?

In his wordpress blog, Biosingularity, this fellow mentions how scientists, by putting yeast on a calorie-controlled diet and tweaking two genes, have increased the lifespan of yeast by 10 times without any negative side-effects. The article goes on to talk about how the same genetic tweak occurs naturally in some people and about how it could lead to the development of an anti-aging drug.
The Blog in question…
I post this here not to summarize but to ask for discussion. This is amazing, but it is also scary, and raises many ethical questions in my mind. What would a world without aging look like? Who would get access to these anti-aging drugs? Does anybody else see a parallel with Robert Heinlein’s work here? Yikes. What about poor people? If aging were some day eliminated, who would ‘get’ to have children? Who would decide who ‘got to’? What about the creation of an underclass of people unable to afford this or other genetic ‘tweaks’ or special ’superpower’ drugs?
I know these are pretty random, not to mention entirely theoretical questions, but discoveries like this are to me amazing, yet they seem to be widely ignored. But what could their consequences be? To me it is a little scary…

As to the use of “Gift” – We’re hosed.

Let’s set this straight.
Gift is not a verb. It is a noun.

If you want to say that something was passed from one person to another, the English language has the word Give. It is a verb, and was created just to do exactly that for which today’s feel-good hippies have co-opted it’s brother-noun, ‘gift’ (something that is given) to do.
It’s a losing battle. Hippie reads like Ode and Utne Reader have been using ‘gift’ as a verb practically since day one. I had hoped this particular bastardization would stay so confined, yet it has not. Apple says ‘Gift This Song’ on Itunes and Amazon lists ‘Most Gifted Books’. Editors at major magazines let it slip through every day. Essentially, we’re f*cked.
Maybe people are confused by ‘gifted’, the adjective form of ‘gift’ (“john is a gifted writer”), which could sound, to the ignorant, like a past-tense verb. I don’t know. I do know, though, like I said, that it’s a losing battle. Oprah says it. Presidential candidates say it. It’s in advertisements everywhere. But I also know it’s stupid and wrong, another slip in the long slide toward an English used more for writing text messages than books and more for sound-bites than poems, and that I have to say something about it.

It’s Stupid. It’s Wrong. It sounds Dumb.
There, I said it.

For an exploration of the possible roots of this particular mis-usage check out the page linked in this blog’s frame. For a more vitriolic version, check out this old Myspace blog.

The OED, the American Heritage Dictionary, and The Wall Street Journal all agree: if you want to specify that it wasn’t just a transfer but the giving of a gift, you have to actually specify it with additional words.
Panned in The Wall Street Journal…
Dissed in the Lynch Guide To Grammar And Style…
Scorned by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage…
Devalued by the American Heritage Dictionary…

Heather Rose Jones’ exciting, accessible survey of this particular neologism across the last twenty-plus years…
Feh-muh-nist…

Old Crow Medicine Show and why I love them.

I know that this blog is spotty at best, and that no one really reads it, but I’m trying to change that, or at least the first part. One thing this means is that I’m going to have to fight my own perfectionism a little harder, posting shorter posts that might be less expansive and less fancy, but that actually get put up, as opposed to my ideal, page-long, carefully edited posts that take so long to put together that I never actually get around to it.

This post, then, is the first in that vein. It’s about a group I’ve really been digging, The Old Crow Medicine Show. I’ve embedded a video of them playing an old Dylan tune, Wagon Wheel, at the bottom of this post. These guys are awesome! I love their unpolished string-band sound, and their harmonies are awesome. If the lead singer’s fiddle playing lacks something, he makes up for it by being handsome and stylish in a way that is downright admirable, at least in this music video, and by having a voice and delivery style that I only wish I could imitate.
Maybe I’ll look back and decide that half the reason I liked these guys so much was their style. If that ends up being the case, so be it, I guess. Like I said, I do think they’ve got a cool style – they all look weird in a way that is really ‘cool’ to me, especially the banjo player. How much looks influence and re-form our perception of things is an interesting question. I almost always start out just hearing a given group’s work, only later searching them out online and seeing their visual style. But when I see a band or an individual and their visual presentation really resonates with me I often find that it makes me appreciate them on a whole new level, so that when I listen to their music I think of their visual style too. Since I’ve already got this image inside of me of them up onstage or strutting around in a video, rather than their music having to build a picture or a feeling in my head from scratch it just inhabits and filsl and grows upon the images that are already there.
Such is experience, I guess.

Interestingly, as I said, this tune is an old Dylan number that he wrote for one of his films. The only existing recording is apparently a bootleg of him teaching it to the band he played with for the movie. Apparently some part of it didn’t go well, because they ultimately decided not to use it. According to some web sources, Dylan later played it at one or more concerts with The Band, but dropped it due to unenthusiastic crowd response. Unfortunately some of the verses in the bootleg version are not discernible, so the Old Crow Medicine Show guys filled in the blanks for the version I’ve posted here, which seems to be the popularly accepted/played version.
In any event, I love this song. To me it’s an example of the best kind of folk/country music, with a simple, emotive chorus delivered with a beautiful, slightly edgy harmony and set to music that is layered and complex but still catchy and definitely approachable.

The link is to a lyrics page with the video embedded. I linked to this page, rather than straight to the YouTube video because the embedded box has a neat menu (if you click the ‘menu’ button) that lets you watch other OCMS videos, including another version of the song, and has links to a few people playing the song. There’s one cover that I really like, a direct link to which I also included, by a young kid, maybe 18 or 19. I don’t like how he changes the chorus a bit, but his delivery is rough and great in it’s own way and the guitar he puts it to is, in my opinion, as good to listen to on its own as the whole OCMS band.

Video of OCMS playing Wagon Wheel by Bob Dylan.

Video of random fellow (Ben Baker, I think) playing same song.

Brain Drain: Bob Dylan/HST immitators get a life!

To begin with, some brain-drain: The title of this blog is going to have to change; ‘work of or by the mad’ makes it sound like I think I’m mad and want to go around telling everyone about it. Which is dangerous ground. Ever since Hunter S Thompson (and probably before, if that Kerouac guy and that Rimbaud fellow are any standard..) there’s been this vogue around madness, where people directly or implicitly claim to ‘madly pen demented memoirs of purple-pen twisting alongside the demons calling me from across the room.’ Blech. Many of these angsty fellows accentuate their points by waving cigarettes held in cigarette-holders, like they are just SO passionate that they even have to express their angst via smoking accessories, which is of course a dead giveaway, since really crazy people are mostly too busy being crazy to futz with things like pants or not speaking gibberish, let alone cigarette holders.
It’s like sidling up to a woman in a bar and going, “hey, I am a really wild man. I mean crazy. I am definitely in-touch with my animal side. I am totally instinctual.”
Blech.
As to me being crazy: maybe I am, but I don’t think so. Mad people jump out of buildings and chop off their ears and write symphonies and create global empires. I haven’t done any of that, which makes me pretty sure I’m not mad, just whiny. The original intention was that this would be my blog about watching the ‘madwork’ of cites, which seem, from the outside in, like they are completely mad. Alas, ‘madwork’ just mkes me sound like I’m trying to claim insanity as a pedigree, which is just pretentious, so it’s going to have to go.

And you thought I’d never write…

I’m still in England, debating staying here for another month or two. My impressions of this country are quite mixed, to tell the truth. On the one hand people seem nice enough, and I am continually amazed by what seems to be the subtle but pervasive willingness to change, if grudgingly, on the part of the vast majority of londoners. It’s like, everyone is bitchy and cranky about it, but when some new thing comes along, like global warming or the idea of ‘food miles’ or a passel of bangladeshi immigrants invading the east end… People buckle down and deal with it, as opposed to forming violent militias like we would in the ’states. On the other hand, %90 of the population seems cranky %90 of the time, passive agressiveness seems to be the unofficial national pasttime, and everything is absurdly expensive. I also can’t help feeling like there’s some orwellian creepyness about an entire population so willing to accept change and direction. Confronted by the utilitarian architecture of the London undergound, so clearly designed for the subtle direction of vast numbers of people, I am consistently struck by the fine line between a tunnel directing people into a train going to work and a tunnel directing people into a train going to a concentration camp. Between larger pictures of the two there is an incredible difference, but functionally, structurally, they are almost identical and sometimes it creeps me out. What creeps me out even more is that after a month here I almost don’t see it any more.
The size of this place, and how it seems to speak to the nature of the soceity of which it is a pinnacle! It’s four times larger than metropolitan seattle; 15 times as many people as live on b.i. commute into The City every day. The idea of cameras everywhere, plexiglass panels seperating drivers from passengers, and not talking to one another on the street and bus and tube are nescessities for sanity and safety here is, I think, mostly beyond question. That said, and to say nothing of the acceptance of this state by the common person here, that we have made them so nescessary continues to be an object of wonder to me.
And I meant this to be a short letter…. As far as me goes, I found a bit of work making bread for a small, trendy restaraunt here, and a bit more tending bar and dealing cards in a somewhat dodgy east-end joint, but the former isn’t enough and the latter hasn’t started yet and the stress of feeling bored, illegal, poor and useless has me quite wary and weary of the whole penny-scavenging lot of it. I’m still living with Vicky, wondering at the possibilities for her migration. The weather continues to be grey, I continue to run around, figuratively and literally, and I can’t help but wonder at where the global finance markets are going, especially now that citi, stalwart of stalwarts, is beset, it’s thought-secure collateral debt obligation instruments now proving less-than. One surprising thing: these brits have their Nat. Health Service, but no FDIC equivalent – so a major bank here recently went tits-up and… its customers lost all their money. Dang.
Before I descend any further into rambling….

“The two rules for succeeding in journalism are never be afraid to use force and abuse your credit as much as possible.
Hunter S Thompson

News, news, and more news.

The plaaaaannnnnnsssss they are a-changin’….
Anyone catch the Bob Dylan reference? Anyone? Dang.

I skipped out on my flight home today, so it looks like I’m going to be in England a while longer. As intimated in earlier posts, things are going pretty well. I am working one job right now, and I’m about two start two more, which means that by the law of work averages, since I’ve got three that look like sure bets, at least one should actually work out. Yey.

A quickie.

It’s chilly, I’ve got Johnny cash on, and it’s another bright, crisp fall England day. This is going to be a very short post, compared to the last two; I don’t have a tremendous amount to say, but I’m trying to build some sense of continuity here.
The job search has been going pretty well, especially compared to that first day. There was this sense of being overwhelmed. Saying to myself, “you’re no good, you can’t do this, you’ll fail,” I drifted into a downward spiral of doubt and self-pity, allowing my fears, projected onto the faces of others, to speak for me. Awesome.
I went out again, though. The sun was shining, like today, which helped a lot. I just started talking to people, just sort of wandering around and asking folks that I met if they knew of any work, stopping in every place I came to and asking if they had any work. I had expected to meet a lot of resistance, but I actually didn’t. I don’t know how much of it was smoke being blown up my ass, since it’s three days later and I haven’t gotten any calls, but it seemed like lots of places were looking for people, and most places didn’t mind paying cash. I swear half of getting something is talking your way into it.