Musical Intimacy (or High Fidelity)

I think I’ve already said that I think humans turn to literature to get ourselves through challenging times.  Since the Bible seems to have lost its footing as the go-to literary consolation in most segments of society, and no one reads poetry anymore (she says as she scribbles fragments that may eventually turn into poems) we’re left with what poetry can be found in lyrics.

What gets me is how intimate music is.  If I found six poems and copied them into an e-mail or letter and sent them to a friend, it might be a little self-serious, but it wouldn’t be personal in the same way that making a cd of a bunch of songs is personal.  I’ve got a friend who is very far away.  I have sent him some music already and am adding songs together in my head to see if they make sense.

But of all of the times we’ve talked about personal stuff, or hugged before lunch, or exchanged e-mail, this sharing of Music business seems the most fraught with potential blurred lines and muddy intent.  I don’t know why this is.  I’ve shared movies and books before and none of it adds up to “I want to see you naked.”  The music doesn’t either, but somehow that seems like it needs saying, whereas  with lunch and inside jokes, I never felt the need to say “look, this little bit of shared irony is not an indication that I think we need to try on each other’s skin, just to see if it fits.  I see that there might be potential for that were the circumstances other than what they are, but as things stand, I’m just showing you the mood I’m in and, ok, perhaps flirting a little, but with no real intent.”

Why is it that music-sharing and mix-making are so much more personal than any of the other ways a friend might let you know that you’re thinking of them?

The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.

Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing. 

 – from High Fidelity

Proportion

Earthquake?  Check.

Hurricane?  Check.

Annoyance that you still haven’t called?  Check.

Let’s figure out which of these is the most aggravating, shall we?

My Official Declaration…

This is now officially pet peeve week.

1) New age practitioners with websites that are overflowing with unnecessary capitalization. We got over that crap with the Victorians. Proper nouns are capitalized. The beginnings of sentences are capitalized. Nothing else gets capitalized. Ignore this rule and risk annoying the shit out of your (apparently) less enlightened audience.

Also: please spare me enlightenment that destroys my ability to write lucid prose. Is that wrong of me?

you might as well laugh

because your other option is crying… 

Did I mention absurd?

Where does a meme go to die?

Anyone else wonder whatever happened to “she’s a flight risk”?

Underrated Authors: L.M.Montgomery

Her descriptors, while indicative of the era in their number, are incredibly inventive:  A leprous roof, for example. 

Think about that for a minute.  A writer today might call it a swiss-cheese roof, but how much more effective is leprous?  Leprous is visceral and evocative.  Why doesn’t anyone write like this anymore?  She ignores all kinds of “rules” that govern modern fiction – there are pages lined up that don’t move the story forward, for example – but I’m never disappointed when I pick up The Blue Castle.  It is everything a romance should be, minus the sex to make it trashy.  You have a heroine who is overlooked and underrated by everyone around her.  A roguish hero with some mystery, a secret, a misunderstanding, and a happy ending.  Honestly, I’m not reading to save the world here.  I just want to be engrossed in a story for a few hours. 

Her books aren’t complicated.  They aren’t a thousand pages long (I’m looking at you, Ms. Rowling).  But before there was Harry Potter, there was Anne of Green Gables, and every girl I grew up with had read all of the books, most of us several times over. 

Also: Re-reading L.M. Montgomery is giving me a hint of the origins of my writing habit of layering remembrance upon reminiscing.

On Politics

I was listening to NPR this morning while I put on my makeup.  They had two Marks on, both strategists, one for the Dems and one for the Republicans.  Both sides, equally, just don’t get it.  Seriously.  When the words fall out of their mouths, do they believe them?  Are the Dems convinced that the GOP looks “hard and uncompromising” to the whole freaking nation?  Is the GOP certain that the Dems are perceived as … whatever they say they are perceived as? 

As a nation, are we truly confused by the rhetoric that makes it sound like we are talking about two different things?  My day job is in communications, a profession which seems more and more dismal as my fellow communications professionals spin up messaging with all the substance of cotton candy and the political parties stand by that message as if it had the weight-bearing capacity of concrete.  For the love of all that is good and tangible, why can’t we just talk about what is real using plain language, not slippery political speak designed to be wiggled out of later? 

And who bears the responsibility?  Are our politicians more cowardly than they used to be?  Is the public less educated or more apathetic?  Are the issues just that much more complex?  Do we make them more complex than they are?  Are we responsible for hiring the prom king when we really need the nerd with the pocket protector?  Do the handlers pay more attention to the polls than makes sense?  Does no one realize that a poll is only as good as the way the questions are worded, and that if you word a question correctly, you can drive the answers in whatever direction you want?  Has our media failed us? 

Yes. 

What is the answer?  A thing which we do not seem capable of unless all other choices are removed: reject the hypocrisy and hyperbole, hire people who can make hard choices that hurt in the short-term but mean long-term health and stability for the country, turn off the talking heads that incite fear in order to cloud the issues and drive us to a preordained conclusion, and ban business from lobbying Congress for anything. 

We must look in the mirror and address our own choices.  We must own that our whole freaking country has become sloppy and slovenly; we have gorged ourselves to death on calories and credit that we can ill afford; we have sold our futures for houses that won’t last, cars that rust, consumer goods that will be outdated the moment they are pulled from their packaging.  Meanwhile, we whine and moan about things that cost us but matter – educating our kids, taking care of our elderly, setting the conditions for people to be their best through consistent, available, and affordable health care.  No government did this to us.  No one put a gun to our head and said “instead of investing in American jobs by aiming our consumer dollars at American-made goods, you must buy cheaply from China and fund their economy instead of ours.”  Like all good tragedies, we did this to ourselves. 

And for as long as we buy into the system, as long as we don’t demand some commonsense measures (for example, the get business out of Government thing which might singlehandedly break free some major deadlock on big issues and allow our elected officials to make decisions based on what is good for the country, not what is good for the companies that will fund their re-election), as long as we insist that someone else should do all the sacrificing but not us, we will have exactly this.  And it will be the end of America as a shining beacon of what is right in democracy.

There Are Reasons Why It’s Messy

So we are on our way to a last-minute answer to the debt ceiling.  Yay for us.

Meanwhile, the real issues haven’t changed much.  Between the common sense call for each of the components to live within their means-from individuals to families to cities to counties to states to the country-and the harsh reality that certain expenses can quickly outpace our ability to earn, we are left with … a mess.

A mess that can’t be solved by voting in the prom king with the white smile and the promises of painless solutions.  A mess that finds no answers in party-line posturing.  And a mess that uncovers absolutely no latent interest in pragmatic solutions based on the real world. 

So.  Put me in charge of the world.  Here’s what I’d do.  Discipline by discipline, I’d wipe the books of laws and start from scratch.  Old laws will tell me what issues need to be addressed, but not what the right answer is. 

Taxes: wipe the tax code.  Identify a percentage of income that gets paid by people and by businesses and call it a day.  No loopholes, no exceptions, no exemptions.  Businesses couldn’t exist  without a stable government providing the infrastructure.  Where would Amazon be with no roads for them to deliver stuff on?  Get over it.  Taxes make it possible for you to run your business.  Let the Feds have 23% of everything, no exceptions, let the states have 7% of everything and make it work.  If you are going to incentivize anything, incentivize saving: let’s have a luxury tax.  If you want to live in a house with gold faucets, go ahead, but accept that you will pay a tax on your spending habits.  Meanwhile, give me some room in my taxes to dictate where I want the money spent – half of it goes to the general fund, the other half I can say I want you to spend 50% of it on Defense and 50% on the Environment.  It’s our country, let us have a say in where we want the money spent. 

Healthcare: socialize it already.  If you take into account that the biggest thing standing between most people and the entrepreneurial spirit is the fear of being without healthcare, socialized medicine could be a huge boon for small businesses everywhere.  No, none of the systems are perfect.  Yes, there may be waiting periods and other forms of bureaucracy, but damn.  It’s healthcare.  People get sick and there isn’t anything fun about it.  Of course it is going to be messy, and there is something fundamentally effed up about companies making a profit on the backs of people who can’t afford their blood pressure medicine.  People’s health is not something that should be considered a profit center. 

Education: Let the states figure it out.  This idea that you can impose a single solution that is going to work for Wyoming and Mississippi equally is ludicrous.  If the feds aren’t eating up a huge education budget maybe some of that money can go back to schools.  There is something asinine about failing to invest in the education of our own people. 

Mortgages: Get the hell out of it.  A home purchase isn’t the right answer for everyone – particularly not a highly mobile workforce that may not be in one city from one year to the next.  Particularly not when homes are becoming aspirational purchases built out of tyvek and tissue paper.  

Categorization of Entities: Businesses are not people.  They don’t get a vote.  End lobbying permanently.  Take some of the money saved in simplifying the books and add it to the Congressional budget for researchers and advisory boards that are not allowed to serve in a business capacity.  Can we please have a Government that does what is best for everyone instead of enacting laws that favor a business community at the expense of the Country’s greater good?  

Regulation & Enforcement: draw a thick boundary between the entities that are being regulated and those who are regulating so the regulators can make decisions that are for the good of the country, not for the good of business.  Let the government regulate things that cross state lines – finances, labor laws, monopolies, the environment, food quality, equality, etc – and let states manage the rest.  

Law Making: let the lawmakers make no law that doesn’t equally apply to itself.  

Defense:  For the love of Elvis, can we please take care of our soldiers?  Unless dying for someone you’ve never met is in your job description, stop whining about what it takes to feed and care for a Soldier.  If you think that we can go without Defense, you are nuts and clearly not living in the real world.  If there is socialized medicine then you take that off the table for the Defense budget, and then tell them they get x dollars and they can spend it on what makes sense.  

I’m sure there is more, but I’m out of time at the moment.

Ants

Complexity. I forget the historian / philosopher who said that a civilization grows so long as the complexity added to the system adds value.  As soon as the complexity starts costing more than it’s worth, you start to see the civilization collapse. 

And then you have the ants.  Or a traffic experiment in Europe that found that if you got rid of stop signs, traffic flowed more efficiently.  Also see the roundabout system, which orders itself.  What would happen if there were fewer layers of complex rules and more opportunities to do what needs to be done?

It’s True Love

And I don’t understand why everyone else in the whole world isn’t in love with Peter S. Beagle too.  I really don’t.  Just read the man’s quotes…  IMHO, he’s the best underrated author ever. 

That’s all.