a fool in the forest

L'art du l'Aventure

On our weekend gallivant into the wine country of Paso Robles, my fellow boondogglers and I paid a call to L'Aventure, where Stephan Asseo produces some of the very finest wines now emerging from California. (Oh, if only they weren't priced in proportion to their quality . . . .)

The winery/tasting room building now sports a mural by French artist Erwin Dazelle, in the graffiti-influenced street art style so beloved of contemporary sophisticates such as C-Monster (whose many photos of such things can be seen here).

Four of this fool's photos follow:

 

 

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Drive-In Saturday: All You Need is Lovecraft

A Modest Late October Suggestion to Our President

Dear Mr. Obama:

Have you noticed, as I have, that Halloween stores have popped up like slithy toad stools to occupy every empty retail space in These United States?  

Of course you have. Your eyes are everywhere, after all, particularly since you declined to roll back that millstone on civil liberties that is the PATRIOT Act.  

But never mind that: we were talking about commercial real estate. Mervynses and Circuit Cities may come and go, but the Eve of All Hallows lingers on.

In the interest of the care and feeding of our Great Recovery, permit me to suggest that your course is plain.  You must immediately propound an Executive Order declaring that the last day of every month shall hereafter be celebrated as Halloween, and that the spirit of Giving Back necessarily compels every Good Citizen to participate with Gusto in the Celebration of All That is Dank and Nasty, every thirty days or so.  In consequence of this prudent and judicious edict, all of these smilingly entrepreneurial Mom & Pop-up stores will never close, the grand engine of consumer purchase will idle no more, jollity will rollick 'cross the land, and all manner of things shall be well.  

In anticipation of your prompt endorsement of this wise and obviously beneficent policy, I remain

Yr. humble servant, 

G. Wallace

~~~

Phooey!  And gooey, and p'tui!

Truth be told, I lost most of my interest in Hallowe'en once I figured out that the adults and beer companies had taken it over. 

Still, it's a perfectly good excuse to post this video, in which San Diego's own Eben Brooks pays poppish tribute to the Greatest and Oldest of the Great Old Ones.  If the President embraces my petition -- with all eight arms, of course -- you'll be hearing this one on the radio all the year 'round.

Extra tentacles, please!

~~~

Photo: "Mystic Caverns, Shoggoth?" by Flickr user Clinton Steeds used under Creative Commons license.

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Are French Electric?

It has been HOT in southern California, and has been so for days and days.  Early Autumn always seems more roasty and toasty than late Summer around here.  Just to make us crazy, this year's October heat has been intermixed with days that have been seriously COOL, including a few days of earlier than usual WET weather.  And tonight, it will be WINDY and COLD before the days return to being HOT one last time.

In keeping with the climate, we need something COOL, by which I actually mean something HOT -- Le Jazz Hot, to be precise, as originally exemplified by the famous house band of Le Hot Club of Paris, featuring the "manouche" or gypsy jazz stylings of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli.  The style was revived to excellent effect in Benoit Charest's score for 2003's The Triplets of Belleville.  Here, a rather Freudian video for "Belleville Rendezvous" from that film:

Better still, consider getting your manouche on with Caravan Palace, a French band updating the style with all manner of contemporary tricks: sampling. looping, processing, and electrical vigor.  Three programmers, doubling on bass, guitar, and violin, with the addition of clarinet, percussion, and the vocalistics of Mamzelle Colotis Zoé, emulating, as one French publication has it, the fashion sense of "les pré-pré-punks de l'Occupation".  

Eh bien, some video.  Here, with the help of some Braque-style collage, the band reveals How Your Gramophone Really Works: 

Here, a dreamy extraterrestrial automaton comes exploring, picks up some local pointers, and goes on to spread musical peace across the galaxy.  Klaatu barada django ...

And here, just the band doing what bands do:

The Caravan Palace album is difficult to come by in physical format on this side of the Atlantic, but no one actually buys CDs anymore so . . . c'est ça va.  You can obtain it by download via Amazon, and I think you should. 

~~~

Illustration: "Electro-Vox" Poster, via Flickr user phonogalerie.com, used under Creative Commons license.

Caravan Palace came to my attention via the monthly survey of the world's best [bloggable] music at swedesplease.

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Les Regles de LA Metro

When I need to make a court appearance in downtown Los Angeles, I generally hop on Los Angeles' Metro Rail light rail system. There is a station convenient to my office, and another downtown convenient to the county courthouse, and the roundtrip fare is much less than the cost of parking.

As with most any other public facility, Metro Rail stations come equipped with helpful signs to alert passengers to the Do's and Don't's of Good Transit Citizenry.  

Here is an example, posted on a pillar in the station near my office:

So many rules, so much good advice, and all conveyed in the three official languages of California Public Spaces: English, Spanish, and Pan-Global Semiotic.

You don't have to be a Harvard Symbologist, or literate in English or Spanish, to appreciate the elegance and clarity with which this sign conveys its Helpful Hints on good Metro Rail behavior.  Just one look, that's all it took, to interpret these universal signifiers:

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"We Warned You It Was Sticky"

 

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"Forward and Lateral Passing Only"

 

~~~

"Okay, Okay,
the Dinosaur Footies
Are Kinda Cool"

 

~~~

[Posted on the advice of the Brussels Transit Authority.]

"No Cussing, Tintin!"

~~~

The Inanity of Being Earnest

I am irritated, therefore I blog.

You probably recall, or have heard, "Beds Are Burning," the whomping thwomping 1987 number from the whomping thwomping politically-engaged Australian band, Midnight Oil.

To refresh your recollection, we'll go to the tape:

Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning

I call that a more than serviceable tune.  And it comes with a clearly articulated political agenda: the Oils leave no doubt that they are in favor of wholesale restitution of ancestral lands to the indigenous peoples of Australia.  This is a song you can bob your head to whatever your views concerning restitutionary land rights.  It has a beat, it has a cause, you can dance to it: what more can you want?

The late 1980's had their drawbacks, but a political tune was a political tune in those days, a thing that made particularized demands and had no interest in just wallowing about moanin' about the injustice of it all.

Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.

On the weekend, it came to my attention that this brawling, bawling Oils tune has been remade by an all-star crew of contemporary musical lights in the name of Fighting Climate Change and, particularly, in the cause of Demanding Action at the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference.  The new version of the song is circulating for free download at most of the established music sites.  Here is the official video:

I hesitated a bit before embedding the awful, self-important thing because it is, regardless of anyone's views on anthropocentric climate change, Deeply Awful and Self-Important.  Anything that begins, as this does, with Kofi Annan intoning "tick tick tick" in the most portentous fashion is doomed from the outset, and the ensuing arrangement and rewritten lyrics are so totally deracinated and spineless that it is hard to stay awake through it all, let alone become Fired Up and Ready to Go in support of its chosen Cause.

And qu'est-ce que c'est, cette Cause?  Hard to say, let alone qu'est-ce que c'est.

The whole thing is the product of an organization calling itself Time for Climate Justice, but you can search from one end of that site to the other without being able to figure out who or what is sponsoring this project. More damningly, you can search from one end to the other of that site without finding a single concrete statement of . . . what exactly you should be calling upon the delegates to the Copenhagen conference to -- dare we say it? -- do to move toward a solution to the ostensible problem at hand. 

Oh, if you roam around the site you can buy stuff if that's your inclination: ticking ticking dog tags for instance. "They are all individually numbered," we are assured, "although we can’t tell you to whom all the highly prized [sic] first 1,000 went to."  (I am inclined to believe that excessive and unnecessary prepositions cause more global warming than they eliminate, given that we breathe carbon dioxide into the world with each spoken syllable -- but I could be wrong.)  Kofi Annan, they'll tell you, is Number One, though the other 999 remain secure in their anonymity. (Et tu, Bishop Tutu?)  

Dog tags not your style?  Perhaps you would prefer the inevitable Armstrongesque wristband.  Those, too, are on offer. 

Where go the proceeds from all these tchotchkes?  Alternative fuel bunnies, perhaps? You'll never know, nor can I find anything to suggest that even one carbon dioxide molecule will ever be beaten into submission and sequestered where it can do us no further harm as a result of this organization's efforts.  I am not reassured, for instance, by Mr. Annan's call, early on in the video, for a "robust post-climate agreement."  If we ever become truly "post-climate" on this planet, we will by definition be worrying about these issues from the afterlife, or not at all.

In short, it seems that a Perfectly Good Political Pop Song has here been slaughtered in vain, accomplishing nothing beyond ithe care and feeding of the self-image of its celebrity killers.  

Fight the Power.  Don't Believe the Hype.  Close Cover Before Striking. Rotate Your Tires.  Amen.

~~~

Siegfried: To Be Young, Gifted, and Blue

As with Harry Potter books, so with the Ring cycle of Richard Wagner: as the story unfolds, each part goes on far longer than the part that preceded it. 

The Nibelung's Ring Episode III: A New Hope -- better known as Siegfried -- clocks in at roughly five hours, and the endurance required of the tenor in the title role is the stuff of legend, especially given that the most challenging singing is required of him in the final thirty minutes.  On Saturday evening, in the closing performance of Los Angeles Opera's new production of Siegfried, John Treleaven frayed noticeably in those final pushes to the vocal heights.  Treleaven's unfortunate, if understandable, exhaustion was one of the few drawbacks to this installment of Achim Freyer's staging of the saga.

The Freyer Ring continues to astonish and impress, with its constantly shifting perspectives, its multiple points of view, and its deployment of theatrical tricks and trumpery old and new.  Siegfried was not so immediately "wow"-filled nor so readily embraced as Rheingold and Walküre, but the fault lies as much with Wagner as with Freyer.  Siegfried as a character has less inner life than most any other hero in literature. He performs some remarkable deeds -- slays a fearsome [sic] dragon, smashes the staff and ends the power of the reigning god, walks through and extinguishes a sea of magic fire, wins the hand of the most desirable maiden in the world -- without the slightest idea that those deeds are remarkable and without the slightest reflection on the consequences of his actions, which come freighted with all manner of personal and cosmic significance.  In Freyer's conception, Siegfried is a sort of Incredible Blue Hulk, musclebound, clownish, with a head of hair seemingly borrowed from Harpo Marx.  He is a lunk and a dolt, a lumbering Wagnerian McGuffin whose real purpose is, unwittingly of course, to place Brünnhilde in position to purge and renew the world at the still-distant end of Götterdämmerung.

Even more so than in previous installments, the principal characters in this Siegfried are surrounded by a tireless silent ensemble, sometimes "invisible" in black, sometimes doubling or tripling the characters on stage or events referred to in Wagner's recurrent recaps of what has gone before.  There seems always to be one or more silent figures stepping slowly, slowly from stage right to left, usually bearing one or more significant objects, so that the story takes place as if awash in a stream of shifting, drifting symbols.  (Achim Freyer is at least as fond of slow, meticulous crosswise movements as is Robert Wilson.)  

Sadly, Siegfried marks the last appearance in the Ring of Wotan, here in his guise as the slouch-hatted Wanderer.  Vitalij Kowaljow has sung the part in all three productions thus far, and has only gotten better as he has gone along.  He brings all the necessary gravitas and sadness to the god who, having sought to preserve his power and the reign of the gods by possessing the ring, has only triggered the gods' inevitable downfall. He is last seen trudging slowly, slowly away, the symbol of his power shattered by his own heedless grandchild.

Siegfried has been raised for the task of slaying Fafnir, the giant who possesses the Rhine gold, the powerful ring, and the Tarnhelm, the magic helmet -- here a magic golden top hat -- that grants its wearer the power of invisibility and transformation.  The better to guard his hoard, Fafnir has long ago transformed himself into a dragon, and every production of Siegfried must answer the question: how do we bring this dragon on stage to be slain?  Freyer does it with strings attached.  Dragon-Fafnir is, until he transforms back into a giant after receiving the mortal blow, a marionette about four feet tall and wearing that golden top hat. Siegfried's core character trait is that he is literally without fear, and I am inclined to accept the going theory that this most unfearsome critter is meant to evoke just how trivial the task of dragon-slaying must seem to such an oblivious hero.  You can see and not be scared by Mr. Dragon at 2:29 in the official promotional video below:

Each of the two prior productions in the cycle worked well as a stand-alone piece.  Siegfried counts as a success in terms of moving the drama forward using the stylistic grammar that Freyer has established in those previous installments, although I suspect that a viewer thrown into Freyer's Ring-world for the first time with Siegfried could easily get lost trying to "learn the language" and to figure out how that world works. Los Angeles goes without the Ring until April, when the cycle concludes with Götterdämmerung, a tawdry domestic melodrama that incidentally brings about the end of the world.  Despite knowing how it all comes out, I wouldn't miss it.

~~~

Disclaimer: The Star Wars reference in my second paragraph above is not an endorsement of the lazy "sci-fi Ring" description adopted by Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times.  That mistaken view, with other offenses, recently earned Tommasini the scorn of Out West Arts as "the most ridiculously out of touch writer working for a major media outlet today".

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All photos by Monika Rittershaus, via Los Angeles Opera.

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Rot's Opera, Doc?

Quotable:

[Opera is] one of those giant whale corpses that the government drops in the water so fishes have a home.  But this rotting corpse can have a whole ecosystem surrounding it.

Composer Nico Muhly, answering a question on "what opera is and where it fits into modern music," posed by Alex Ross during the New Yorker Festival's "Radical Opera" panel.

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Photo: Under construction, the enormous death mask of Richard Wagner that served as part of the set for Hans Jürgen Syberberg's film of Parsifal, via Dasein Design.

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A Venezuelan Werewolf in Los Angeles

Join us now as we ask the musical question . . . .

Gustavo Dudamel: 

PASIÓN?

 

OR LYCANTHROPY?

~~~

Photos:
Maestro Dudamel in mid-transformation via Culture Monster.
American Werewolf in London via Unreality.

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Drive-In Saturday: Siegfried Season

Los Angeles Opera's new Achim Freyer production of Wagner's Siegfried opens this afternoon.  I won't be seeing it until the closing performance of this run, on October 17, but favorable reports (and rumors of an amusing toy dragon) have already emerged from the dress rehearsal via Out West Arts and Alan Rich's happily returned SoI'veHeard. (Alan's post also discloses that the promised live recording of the LA Philharmonic's world premiere of Arvo Pärt’s Fourth Symphony ("Los Angeles") from this past January will finally see release via iTunes next month).

LAO has not released any video thus far from its Siegfried, so I will fill the gap with two prior tellings of the tale.  First up, Siegfried defeats a thirsty dragon -- not a transformed Fafnir, since this version is adapted by Thea von Harbau from the Nibelungenlied rather than from Wagner -- in Fritz Lang's 1924 Siegfrieds Tod.
   

By way of contrast with Lang's impressive-for-their-day physical effects, this next video shows off a 2008 production of Wagner's Siegfried staged in Valencia, Spain, by director Carlus Padrissa and the Catalan theatrical group La Fura del Baus, with hyper-elaborate video projections by Franc Aleu.  Zubin Mehta conducts.  It is difficult to say whether this production ultimately tromped on or deferred to Wagner -- the former is probable, given its apparent Mad Scientist overtones -- but as sheer eye-poppery (in conjunction with That Music) it does not fail to impress:
 

This is best appreciated at full size and in high definition on Vimeo, here, where it was posted by Martin Inda, who handled video post-production on the project.  Oooo, sparkly.

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Illustration: a conventional sort of a Siegfried in Opera Stories from Wagner by Florence Akin (1915).

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Drive-In Saturday: Got a Dance?

The Institute of Contemporary Art, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has just opened Dance with Camera,

an exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera.  The exhibition features art works in film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. Screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films.

In conjunction, UBUWEB has posted a collection of solos danced for the camera selected by the exhibition's curator, Jenelle Porter, covering more than a century of filmed dance and dancing film, from the Lumière Brothers in 1896 to Flora Wiegmann dancing beside an LA freeway in 2007.  Here are two of those ten films, one deadly serious, one utterly frivolous.  

I've elected not to post Fred Astaire's "Bojangles of Harlem" number from Swing Time because the niftiness of Astaire's dancing and the sincerity of his tribute to Bill Robinson are both undercut by his doing the number in blackface.  Instead, as a penance of sorts, here is "A Study in Choreography for Camera" (1945) by avant-film legend Maya Deren, anticipating many of the speed and editing tricks that would eventually become de rigeur in a thousand music videos:

Having mentioned music videos I cannot resist the only example of that form included in this group, the smooth but quirky Broadway strut of Christopher Walken in and around and above the lobby of the former Sheraton Grande in downtown Los Angeles in Spike Jonze's rendition of Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" (2001):

For extra credit: Do not miss the Flash-animated Stick Figure version of "Weapon of Choice," which I called "a Roy Lichtenstein fever dream" when I first linked to it on the original Blogspot version of this weblog six long years ago.

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Photo: "Dancing Camera Girl" by Flickr user geishaboy500, used under Creative Commons License.

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The Angels' Share - 091009

Time again for dribs and drabs of this and that that I have accumulated all magpie-like in my wanderings of the Internet.  I term this feature The Angels' Share, as explained in the original edition back in July. 

On this occasion, the angel in question is the Archangel Uriel, seen above armed with an attractive flintlock.  The painting is Peruvian, and that incongruous firearm drew a delighted chuckle from me when I discovered it last month while visiting, for the first time, the Denver Art Museum and its remarkable collection of Spanish Colonial art.  

Uriel does not receive the same prominence in art as some of his fellow archangels, though he is the heavenly emissary Leonardo Da Vinci included in his Virgin of the Rocks.  

  

John Dee, seeker after wisdom and astrologer to Elizabeth I, claimed to have had personal communications from this particular Archangel.

According to his diary on May 25, 1581 Dee first saw spirits while crystal gazing, and during the following year, he saw a vision of the angel Uriel, who gave him a convex piece of crystal that would allow communication with the spirit world.

Armed not with crystals but with flatscreen and mouse, let us look at this miscellaneous collection of links and trinkets:

• Via Ron Silliman: Allen Ginsberg versus Bob Dylan [video]
• Alex Ross explores the files: The FBI versus Leonard Bernstein.
• All your radical self-expression are belong to us: The Electronic Frontier Foundation versus Burning Man.
• Radiohead [15 Step] versus Dave Brubeck [Take Five]:

• Daniel Pi versus himself versus Britney Spears, in "How to Write a Fugue":

• Finnegan's Wake - The Motion Picture.  Really.  That's exactly what it is.  (via)
• The virtues, and the limitations, of libertarianism explained by quotations from Monty Python sketches.
• Not the premise for a Monty Python sketch: 25 million Britons injured by their biscuits.
• Baby you can groove my spleen: Charles Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du Mal versus Yvette Mimieux and Ali Akbar Khan.
• Sequenza21 reports from the big Minimalism Conference in Kansas City, and embeds a performance of Tom Johnson's composition Narayana's Cows.  If Tom Lehrer had been as serious a composer as he was a mathematician, but still funny, he might have produced something like this:

Narayana's Cows - Tom Johnson

• Cecilia Bartoli's record label versus good taste: Worst CD cover, October ‘09.

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Illustrations: 

Uriel (with firearm) via The Shrine of the Holy Whapping.

Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre version) via Wikimedia commons.

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Important Postscript/Update:

I have shared this with my Facebook connections some weeks ago, but I nearly forgot to include it here.  

Pure, sweet pleasure of the most purely sweet and pleasurable sort. A little line from The Importance of Being Earnest (Act II) set in exquisite Renaissance counterpoint, achieving bliss of a high order:

And so, we have done.

Healthy, Wealthy, Wise: Pick One

plan:

2 a : a method for achieving an end 

    * * *

c : a detailed formulation of a program of action

--  Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

On Election Day last November I wrote, in explaining why I'd not be casting a ballot for any of the presidential candidates, that

Senator Obama has been sufficiently forthright for me to know I cannot vote for him because I disagree strongly with many of his central policies, but I will shed no tears when he is elected, as seems inevitable.  I wish him well in office, and I feel more than a little sympathy for his supporters: anyone investing that much Hope is bound to be disappointed in a world that sadly, campaign rhetoric aside, does not in fact operate on wishes, good feeling and pixie dust.

And I was right, I think.

Tonight's big health care speech was President Obama doing some of what he does best.  He is a very smart man, a politician even more canny than Bill Clinton (which is saying something), and -- teleprompter be damned -- that rare contemporary figure who can give a canned and pre-rehearsed speech without it actually sounding canned and pre-rehearsed. This last counts for a lot with me: I speak publicly whenever I can on legal and insurance topics or anything else anyone wants to hear about, and I would just curl up and die if the presentation wasn't alive as it's being delivered.  When he's on his game, as he certainly was tonight, the President can be restrained and controlled while remaining alive and connected throughout.  As a performance, it gets an entirely unironic A. 

Still, I remain unconvinced that anything really worthwhile in the long term can or will be accomplished by our Congress when it comes to health care reform.

My fundamental problem with tonight's speech comes down to the definition quoted above.  From beginning to end, the President told us that, on this night of all nights, he was going to offer and describe his "plan" for reform.  If you parse the speech through, however, no such plan ever appears.  There is plenty of talk about what the President wants to achieve -- genuinely desirable ends not far removed from the well-intentioned rash of Facebook status posts last week, on the lines of

[Name of honorable and decent person] thinks that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.  If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

-- but hardly anything practical concerning how we are going to get there. The proper word for the what is not "plan," but "goal," and we can stipulate that the goals outlined this evening are devoutly to be wished. But it is the how that constitutes a "plan" properly speaking and, apart from a slew of "make it so" diktats, there was a rather glaring dearth of hows to be had tonight.

Just take a look at the official cheat sheet for the self-effacingly named "Obama Plan for Stability & Security for All Americans" [Official White House PDF].  At the outset it promises to

• End[] discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.

and to 

• Cap[] out-of pocket expenses so people don’t go broke when they get sick

Good things both, I think we can agree, and certainly features I would like to see in my own insurance plan.  While we are about it, the Plan also promises that we will get essentially unlimited diagnostic and preventive care -- mammograms and flu shots and diabetes tests and the like -- at no "extra charge," i.e., included in whatever premium we (or our employer if we are lucky) are paying.  

But at the same time as the Plan promises to do all these desirable things, it simultaneously promises that we are all going to have access to "quality, affordable" coverage -- which we have to assume is a phase meant to describe coverage that costs no more than, and possibly much less than, what we are paying now.  In fact, the Plan apparently promises that those who are defined as "high risk", i.e., those with preexisting conditions who we know going in are most likely to require expensive future care, will have access not merely to "affordable" coverage, but to "new, low-cost coverage" through the mysterious and only-vaguely-described "Exchange." 

What, in the most basic terms, is wrong with this picture?  

It seems to me that any Plan that mandates that insurers must take on greater risk -- i.e., that they must provide near-unlimited coverage for people that they know from the outset will be needing an extra-high level of payouts for benefits in order to obtain the care that they are entitled to under the Plan -- but that simultaneously implies that those insurers will not be permitted to price their product in proportion to that risk is side-stepping a fundamental problem.  No insurer, public or private, can be expected to pay out more than it takes in.  The doctors, the hospitals, the folks who clean out the bedpans, they all rightly expect to be paid for providing those services.  If the people who need those services the most are the ones to whom we promise "low cost" coverage, some part of the actual cost needs to be borne by others -- and how that doesn't mean an increased cost for those who already have insurance, or for the taxpaying polity as a whole, I just don't see.  If there is enough "waste and inefficiency" already existing in our Medicare programs that its elimination will cover these costs, as the President implied there is, then it is high time we start the show trials of the entire generation of government functionaries who allowed it to happen.  (He said, facetiously.)  

Now I would be the first to admit that I don't know it all, particularly on an issue this complicated.  And I am prepared to believe that the President actually has answers to these practical objections, and to others with which I won't bore us here.  But I certainly did not hear those answers tonight.  I did not hear the how.  I heard talk about a Plan, but the Plan itself went missing.

These are not impossible questions, or so we are told, but they are undeniably very difficult questions. And I regret to say that I am convinced in my heart of hearts that there is no government on Earth, here or elsewhere, now or ever, of this party or that party or any other party, that is actually qualified to produce a credible answer to them.  Matters as they currently stand are bad enough -- I have been paying my family's health insurance from my own pocket for fifteen-plus years, keeping premiums as low as I can via high deductibles and the good fortune of having needed very little in the way of covered care, and the cost is still too high -- but no plan that I have seen coming out of the Congress to date, and nothing that I heard from the President tonight, appears to hold any practical promise of improving the situation for most Americans. The involuntarily uninsured are likely to benefit, I suppose, but the currently insured (especially those who already pay for it themselves) and those who are willingly, or willfully, uninsured -- those who will be subject to the "individual mandate" to which I recall Candidate Obama being ostentatiously opposed -- seem unlikely to come out ahead.

I would very much like to be wrong about this.  Anyone care to convince me that wrong is what I am?

~~~

Illustration by Karl R. Rittman of the 857th Engineer Aviation Battalion.

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"Books Invite All: They Constrain None"

I did a fair deal of walking about between courtrooms and meetings in downtown Los Angeles yesterday.  On my way from the vicinity of 7th and Figueroa to the Federal Courthouse, my path brought me to the lower rear entrance of the Main Library, where I snapped this photo.  My main target was the inscription above the door.  Here is a closer view:

A cursory search suggests that this is not a quotation from elsewhere, but original with whoever was responsible for selecting the language to be inscribed on the Library building.  (An attractive poster is available, featuring a watercolor of the building rather than the physical inscription itself.)

It is a fine sounding sentiment but it is not entirely true, is it?

We can grant to a book an overarching authority, as when we declare that it is not truly or merely the work of our fellow mortals but instead originates from some higher source, a source of such power and infallibility that its dictates as contained in the book must be adhered to at all times.  We can declare the book to be, in effect, the literal last word on any subject.  Those who willingly submit themselves to the book's authority may feel themselves freed, even empowered, by their submission.  When the willingly submissive conclude that the ultimate authority of the book obliges others to submit as well, constraint or worse necessarily follows.  

Literalist fundamentalism of any stripe turns our Library inscription on its head.  The linked instances above both involve Islam, but examples can equally well be found in any other rigorously Book-based belief system. Religion holds no monopoly here: the Terror of the French Revolution can arguably  be traced to overzealous, but strictly secular, interpretation of Rousseau and the cruelties of "godless Communism" have been built on careful exegesis of Marx or Mao.  Used in this fashion a book may invite us in, but only to bind us firmly to the less than comfy chair. 

Books.  Approach with caution. 

~~~

Photos of Los Angeles Public Library by the author.

~~~

Among School Children

The President is scheduled to address America's public school students on Tuesday, in advance of his Big Health Care Speech to a joint session of the Student Council Congress on Wednesday.  The former has turned into an overblown kerfuffle in which opponents of the administration, unfortunately and most loudly including the zany-maniac crowd of which I was complaining just the other day, shout that the speech is a sinister exercise in political indoctrination -- in which argument they were aided by the fabulously tin-eared lesson plan initially circulated by the Department of Education, since sheepishly withdrawn, urging students to reflect upon how they can "help the President."  

The prepared text has been released now and it is, as expected, not a sinister exercise in indoctrination.  It is aggravating all the same, even though it delivers little more than the standard time-worn and unobjectionable message that can be paraphrased as: 

"Kids, you ought to stay in [public] school and work hard to advance yourselves, and you'll thank me for telling you so someday."

This is another in the decades-long line of Presidential pronouncements raising the nagging question of why this President, or any other President, should get the idea that the job of being President necessarily includes taking time away from the work of actual governance for the sake of saying to students what is already being said, every blessed day, by a squizillion other blessed adults who are neither more nor less credible on the subject than is the aforementioned blessed President or any other President who has been or ever shall be.  The proper ground for objection to this sort of thing is not the risk that the young people will be led down the primrose path to Communism, but that these sorts of helpful lectures by public figures high and low rarely amount to anything more than displays of self-importance and sentimental tommyrot. 

When I went to the White House site this morning to look for the text of the speech, I was again astounded by the extent to which the Executive Branch has become one enormous advertising agency.  The Media Resources page relating to the speech, for example, features not only links to the hastily re-drawn "classroom engagement resources" but also embeddable banner ads to include on your blog or website (in the unlikely event your readers include K-12 public school students) and even a "coming attractions" video in which the President's message -- "Kids, you ought to stay in school and work hard to advance yourselves, and you'll thank me for telling you so someday." -- is pre-delivered for him by a collection of NASCAR drivers:
 

Though the NASCAR drivers don't go so far as the President does in laying a "don't let us down" guilt trip on the kids, this is still self-important, sentimental tommyrot.  On your nickel, too, and mine, since the care and feeding of the White House media apparatus is a taxpayer responsibility.  

Can we possibly arrange the appointment of a Healthy Skepticism Czar to teach the kids to test and to question most anything they hear from those who come clothed with authority of any stripe?  

Think for yourselves, kids, think for yourselves.

P.S., Your country is counting on you.

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Illustration: Custom Obamicon by the author.

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Let Them Eat Soup

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