Sam’s Place

I just finished reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography — one of two he’s written, I think — In the Arena. Unlike some of my friends, I don’t mind his guns rights work nor his anti-Ice T Cop Killer agitation. I wanted to know more about two of my favorite dystopian movies, Planet of the Apes & Soylent Green. Why did a right-wing hawk make an antiwar film (based on a French sci-fi novel) during the Vietnam War? I also liked Touch of Evil. Turns out Heston was in a bunch of other movies that I haven’t seen, & some plays. He marched for civil rights but hates affirmative action racial preferences.

In my unscientific sample, Heston’s book is better than sleeping pills when recited to very pregnant person.

Heston was stationed in Alaska during WWII & just when he was about to go help invade Japan, the nukes fell, & Heston got to go home. So it’s sorta understandable that he would be in favor the mass destruction. It saved a million Japanese lives, blah blah blah. Fine. But then he comes back to it chapters later & it’s rah-rah-rah for Enola Gay. Here’s the real deal on Hiroshima, a p.o.v. that Heston doesn’t even mention: http://antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=9443. Regardless, Heston’s ends-justify-the-means enthusiastic support for the destruction of cities full of civilians is terroristic.

So that was enough reading of every word for me. I skipped forward to the parts I was interested in. And he never did explain the whole Apes thing.

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Frame Dependence http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/30/overconfidence-frame-dependence/

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Mirrored at Antiwar.blog http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2006/08/30/you-maniacs-you-blew-it-up/

So, getting back to the 80s, that X song counterpoised the trendy, technology-adopting Brits with the Minutemen, Flesheaters, D.O.A., Big Boys and Black Flag — American bass, guitar, and drums reactionaries. The 80s was a Cambrian explosion of back-to-basic bands — punk, ska, rockabilly, even heavy metal (influenced by the NWOBHM), all masking the rise of the machine. Hiphop & electronic dance music, of course, but also the ultimate expression of the lessons of the 80s counter-revolution, 1991’s Nevermind by Nirvana, produced by Butch Vig, who led rock music into the Pro Tools nation. Recording technology changed from a medium that replayed actual musical events to one that enhanced those events to one that created events that never occurred. With click-tracks, sampling, and computer editing, music became more and more mathematically precise & listeners’ expectations ratcheted up. Now music is ubiquitous and mechanical — cell phone rings, call-waiting, video game & video music, ipods earplugs, & tasteful shoppers’ Muzak. The most sensible choice is to turn it all off and sit quietly — maybe read a book.

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More antiwar letters: http://www.antiwar.com/letters/?articleid=9620

And investor overconfidence: http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/29/overconfidence/

So we went to a childbirth prep class, & the doula (when did that become a word in English?) asked the class how many were planning a “natural” childbirth, & no-one raised her/his hand. The doula said that that would make her cry, & went on to “encourage” childbirth sans epidermal anesthesia by showing disturbing videos of it, including the birth of a premie covered in monkey fur. A few thoughts on so-called natural childbirth:

- What’s Going on in There? says that, while plenty of American women give birth without epidermals, so few have completely drug-free births that there’re no reliable statistics.

- People are unnatural. Our stomachs, for example, are designed to digest meat processed with heating technology. Our heads are freakishly large and blunt-shaped. I haven’t researched this, but it seems likely that since other mammals have smaller and more streamlined heads, their baby vs birth canal ratio is smaller, & thus their childbirth pain is less. From that point of view, lessening human childbirth pain with drugs returns humans to the natural world’s norm.

- Epidermals today are a lot “lighter” than a few decades ago. Moms can now feel the contractions, just not the pain.

- Alot of the childbirth exercises involved squatting. Do cultures that use hole-in-floor squat toilets, no chairs, etc. have less painful pregnancies?

The doula said that women in many other countries don’t experience childbirth as painful, since they aren’t as afraid of it, due to cultural differences; for example women in poor countries haven’t watched movies that portray childbirth as being painful. But women in most rich countries do use painkillers during birth, & childbirth in poor countries is much more dangerous. Why would women where childbirth is safe be afraid of it, while women where it’s not be unafraid? And as for pregnancy pain being a modern phenomenon, what about pre-modern (to say the least) Eve and, “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”?

Essentially, what the doula did was un-empower the couples in the class & encouraged us to feel that we need — surprise! — a doula. I’m not saying that this was the doula’s overt aim, just that self-interest is powerful — that’s why judges recuse themselves, and why we shouldn’t elect a military industry CEO to a position where he can start wars.

So Peebo & I went to see a free movie preview, Zen Noir. Zen could mean just-so Taoism crossed w/ riddle-me-this, & noir can be good, & mashups are trendy, & free is good, & the movie won awards, so odds were good that it would be worthwhile. But high expectations can be deadly to movie-going fun (see “Just Like Heaven” below for the opposite phenomenon). And it doesn’t help when a wide-shouldered LotR-type troll in dirty pants sits next to one (me), & shoulders over the armrest, or when a white-haired, Michael Jackson plastic jacket-wearing lech creepily tries to hit on one (Peebo) — a sortof movie audience nightmare sandwich. A friend of mine said that this is why she’s all but stopped going to the movies.

And the movie was terrible as art and even worse since it was religious sect/ philosophical propaganda.

Something Zen I liked was Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality. Warner was a punk rock bassist & later a neo-psych recording artist, & then a living-in-Japan Zen priest. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember not liking the 1st chapter, then liking the rest of it, so give it a chance.

Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center tells the story of abuse of power at SFZC. Roshi Richard Baker’s shenanigans (see “Richard Baker and the Myth of the Zen Roshi“) are pretty well-known but his successor Reb Anderson had his own experiment in wackiness, being caught waving a gun that he claimed to have found near corpse in Golden Gate Park. He’d taken the gun from the crime-scene, never reported the corpse, & carried the gun around with him for years. The police eventually “lost” their records regarding the politically-connected sect’s leader’s gun-brandishing.

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki is a biography of the guy who founded the SFZC (and wrote the influential Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). The author, David Chadwick, was a follower and admirer of Suzuki, but he’s honest enought in his portrayal that the reader may not share Chadwick’s admiration. And you can see how America changed a Japanese Zen master’s import.

Zen at War ties up the whole Zen feet-of-clay reading list.

“Pigs in Zen” by Jane’s Addiction:

Pig’s in the mud
When he tires
Pig’s in zen
Pig’s in zen
Pig is nude
Unashamed
Pig’s in zen
Pig’s in zen

Talking bout the pig
The pig
The pig – uh
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pig
Goddamned pig …

The pig is led to the slaughter
Pig is led to the slaughter
This he says
Is the price some pay
For a simple life
How he feels
Thats proof for him
Pig’s in zen

Talkin bout the pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
Goddamned pig
The pig – uh
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pig

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And on ProgressDaily we have “Porkers United.”

The murder rate big picture — at least in England and Scandinavia:

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And nonlinear forecasting:

http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/25/nonlinear-forecasting/

From Annalee Newitz’s ”Snakes in Vain“:

Back in the early ’80s we’d go visit my grandparents in New Jersey, & I’d take the commuter train into Manhattan, & once or twice I drove down w/ friends in the mid-80s, & back then it was scuzzy and crime-ridden. The subway was a spraypainted rattling cattle car with scary beggars wandering through the cars. There were heaps of trash & once I saw someone get up from sleeping in a pile. The squeegy men muddied your windshield & expected to paid for it. Rather than give the crime stats, since this isn’t my science blog, here’s Fear’s “New York’s Alright” from 1982:

New York’s alright if you like drunks in your doorway!
New York’s alright if you wanna freeze to death!
New York’s alright if you wanna get mugged or murdered!
New York’s alright if you like saxophones!

Fear was an LA band, & the joke is that LA now has a much higher crime rate than NY — LA’s murder rate is almost double NY’s, and NY is one of the safest cities in the country. Alot of people assume that NY’s crime drop was due to Mayor Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” policy — subway graffiti & fare evasion were particularly cracked down on. The current (August 17) Economist (”Murder Most Common“) surprised me by stating this as fact — in an article that notes that the policy isn’t working in other cities. In the ’90s crime fell in cities all over the US. San Francisco decreased policing of minor crimes, yet SF’s murder rate fell even more than NY’s.

Steven Levitt crunched the numbers, in Freakonomics, & concluded that abortion legalization in the ’70s and increased incarceration rates caused the drop:

One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country.

In New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, a woman had been able to obtain a legal abortion for at least two years before Roe v. Wade. And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall earlier than the other forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Between 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the early legalizing states fell 13 percent compared to the other states; between 1994 and 1997, their murder rates fell 23 percent more than those of the other states.

But what if those early legalizers simply got lucky? What else might we look for in the data to establish an abortion-crime link? One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state’s abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. (This correlation exists even when controlling for a variety of factors that influence crime: a state’s level of incarceration, number of police, and its economic situation.) Since 1985, states with high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in crime relative to low-abortion states. (New York City had high abortion rates and lay within an early-legalizing state, a pair of facts that further dampen the claim that innovative policing caused the crime drop.) Moreover, there was no link between a given state’s abortion rate and its crime rate before the late 1980s-when the first cohort affected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime-which is yet another indication that Roe v. Wade was indeed the event that tipped the crime scale.

Speaking of which, in the new Pew survey 46% said that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, & 41% opposed the over-the-counter sale of “morning after” abortion pills. Which means what? That 1 in 20 Americans simultaneously oppose legal abortion and think that abortion pills should be sold without a prescription?

Re incarceration: the national crime rate has fallen since the ’80s but lots more Americans are in jail:

Though the Hispanic arrest rate has fallen some recently:

“they wont even dance” by paris hilton

people go crazy
they love it
everyones like
who is this?
i dont tell
because I dont want someone putting their phone up and recording it and making a ring tone off of it
i think when people dont know its me
they wont judge it
but if they know its me
then theyll be like
ugh
they wont even dance

“black holes may not exist” by ian sample

they swallow everything that comes their way
black holes
celestial menaces

might not exist at all

a universe liberally sprinkled with invisible
black holes
replaced with strange 
magnetic balls of plasma floating
black holes may not exist

the death knell for black hole theory
a quasar
lurking nine billion light years from earth
quasars have black holes at their centres
the gentle flickering
black holes may not exist

a gaping hole in a disc of material surrounding the centre of the quasar
as wide as 4000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun
the hole
a vast ejection of material propelled by a strong magnetic field
black holes do not have magnetic fields
black holes may not exist

the quasar must be powered by a dense ball of plasma called a meco
magnetospheric eternally collapsing object
the mecos existence precludes the possibility of black holes
the whole black hole paradigm is incorrect
black holes may not exist

a black hole at the centre of our galaxy
the milky way
its a minority view
its almost certainly wrong
black holes may not exist

Of course “haircutty” (see below) isn’t a word, & most of the bands weren’t considered New Romantics. X’s 1983 song “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”:

I hear the radio’s finally gonna play “new music”
You know, the “British Invasion”
But what about the Minutemen, Flesheaters, D.O.A.,
Big Boys and the Black Flag
Will the last American band to get played on the radio
Please bring the Flag, please bring the Flag
Glitter-disco-synthesizer-night-school
All this noble savage drum drum drum
Astronauts go back in time to hang out with the ape people
It’s about time, it’s about space
It’s about some people in the strangest places
Woody Guthrie sang about B-E-E-T-S not B-E-A-T-S

The noble savage drum might refer to Malcolm McLaren’s study of African beats, which brought tom-tom emphasis to London, via bands he managed, Adam & the Ants & Bow Wow Wow. You can see Adam Ant’s drummer playing his 3 toms in this video.

X wanted to hear American punk rock bands on the radio, but alot of the British Invasion bands were composed of ex-punks, more or less. So The Jam spun off Style Council; The Damned, Captain Sensible; The Clash, pop Clash, then Big Audio Dynamite; The Specials, Big Audio Dynamite; The (English) Beat, General Public & Fine Young Cannibals; The Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley; Joy Division, New Order, etc.

While the punks were complaining about Brits on the radio, the new medium MTV was getting flack in the press for ignoring African-American artists (hard to believe as it is today), other than Michael Jackson, whose Thriller was the top-selling album of 1983.

So here’s haircutty The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” video.

And Dinosaur Jr’s bass-guitar-and-drums parodic cover of “Just Like Heaven“, with Muppet-like American puppets watching a video of the song.

There’s a movie called “Just Like Heaven” that’s cheesy but not bad, with some funny acting by Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, & some nice shots of San Francisco, but with some bad music, including yet another cover of “Just Like Heaven,” this time by Taking Back Sunday. A weak version that went to the top of the British charts last year.

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Also:

Excerpt from 1491:

http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/19/new-world-agriculture/

And some good economic news:

http://www.progressdaily.com/2006/08/20/convergence/

Yeah, I promise, I’ll get over this 80s video kick shortly. But for now….

Haircut 100! Woo, “Favourite [Check out the UK spelling] Shirts — Boy Meets Girl.” This is cool cuz along with Flock of Seagulls (speaking of which: “I Ran,”), they gave these bands their group name/insult: Flock of Haircuts.

Tying it all together, I was in a band called The Sarnos. Circa 1990 we released a live acoustic 6-song 7″ vinyl record (which you can buy for 10 euros) which included our medley of Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right” and FoS’s “I Ran.” I was concerned that Joel’s annoying practice of singing his songs was detracting from appreciation of his poetics. So I recited (not really “rapped” cuz it wasn’t funky):

Friday night I crashed your party
Saturday I said I’m sorry
Sunday came and trashed me out again
I was only having fun
Wasn’t hurting anyone
And we all enjoyed the weekend for a change

I’ve been stranded in the combat zone
I walked through Bedford Stuy alone
Even rode my motorcycle in the rain
And you told me not to drive
But I made it home alive
So you said that only proves that I’m insane

You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for
Turn out the light
Don’t try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right

Remember how I found you there
Alone in your electric chair
I told you dirty jokes until you smiled
You were lonely for a man
I said take me as I am
‘Cause you might enjoy some madness for awhile

Now think of all the years you tried to
Find someone to satisfy you
I might be as crazy as you say
If I’m crazy then it’s true
That it’s all because of you
And you wouldn’t want me any other way

You had to be there, I guess.

And here’s Pigbag’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag.”

And Grace Jones’ “Pull Up to the Bumper.”

Yeah, the purists and puritans didn’t like the Flock of Haircut bands but like most things there wasn’t really a sharp delineation. The Undertones (”My Perfect Cousin“), for example, was a respectable (and great) Irish punk/power pop band, but their singer Feargal Sharkey was haircutty in The Assembly (”Never Never“).

That’s a pretty excellent ballad that didn’t do well in the US. I only heard of it cuz I bought this “survival sampler” (just found an unopened one on e-bay) — a military ration-looking can with a cassette tape in it featuring various UK haircutty artists — at Newbury Comics. They’d started as a single comic book store on Newbury St in Boston — much more fun than any of the blue collar urban north-of-Boston suburbs I lived in — then grew with the rise of “alternative” music into a regional music & cool merchandizer.

Aimee Mann worked there, when Til Tuesday (”Voices Carry” — I’m so happy the band’s doing well) was still unknown. I remember one day I was in the store & Mann was working & one of the guys from Gang Green was talking with her, & it was like he was the rock star. GG later covered “Voices Carry,” so there’s some sorta connection. I recognized Mann cuz my then-roommate Tess & I had seen Til Tuesday at some basement bar (Storyville, I think) in Kenmore Square, &, though it wasn’t really my kind of music — too listless –, I’d been impressed. They were clearly more ready for national semi-obscurity than any other local band I’d seen.