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Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

August 21, 2013 13 Comments

People do get good at things.

It’s more than interesting to get a peek at someone at the top of their game — no matter what their game is — it’s fun. We watch men in pajamas fight over a leather bag with a bladder in it on a striped lawn. Enjoying watching a man fillet some fish isn’t that strange.

The best kind of reality shows simply point a camera at the unseen parts of quotidian life. How It’s Made isn’t the best show on television. It’s the best show that’s ever been on television. Whenever I hear a politician or pundit talk about a modern economy like they understand it well enough to run it, I want to burst out laughing, or cry, or both. If you can’t even keep pictures of your dick off the Intertunnel during an election cycle, I imagine being Emperor of the Economic and Social Universe is probably well above your abilities. Politicians have to take tours of factories because to them, everything and everybody in a factory might as well be alchemy performed by men from Jupiter.

There’s a disconnect between love of work and the workplace right now. Most employees don’t like where they work, or what they do all day, or where they live, but the enormous weight of regulatory, legal and financial inertia that employment and daily life is freighted with keeps them in settings they detest, working with and for people they resent. Most of even the best drag their feet to get a feeling of control over their situation. Many actively sabotage their workplace to achieve a feeling of self-possession.

The employers react to the ambivalence or malice of the workers by attempting to micromanage their activities, and by occasionally changing out the workforce like a dirty diaper instead of a group of fellow humans. One set of politicians says that management is evil; the other set says the employees are lazy and stupid, and each makes their appeals to one tribe by promising to hurt the other. Every once in a while they both decide that the American population would be more useful to them if they were all foreigners, who will do what they’re told and say thank you for a slap in the face for at least one generation before they get uppity.

The dirty secret is that there is no difference between labor and management. People are people. The general tenor of life is not dictated by the eloi or the morlocks. The general view of other humans by individuals is expressed by everyone, and the manifestation of that general view winnows people into recognizable roles that can be demagogued, but we’re all fish from the same fry, and swim in the same tepid, dirty water. Most humans just don’t have a high regard for their fellow humans any more, and they don’t really care what they’re doing at work, and don’t take much pride in themselves. And people in management have the same attitude about their employees, not because they’re unlike them, but because they’re exactly like them. Everyone thinks everyone else can go to hell, and tries to get away with everything they can that won’t result in prison or the cable TV being shut off. It’s not a recipe for workplace harmony, or excellence.

When I was young I was taught by a dead society that dignity was internal; that a man that filleted salmon for a living could be noble by dint of his effort, comportment, and his value to his fellow man; that all men were created equal, but that their worth could (and should) be judged by how they behaved in this world, especially when they thought no one was looking. I was not taught that goldbricking and featherbedding and tossing a sabot in the gears was a road to dignity. I was not taught that lording over disposable underlings was a path to greatness.

But I’m talking to a wall. And there’s nothing but writing on it.

So You Want To Start A Metal Band…

August 20, 2013 4 Comments

Back when I played music, the various bands I was in all developed shorthand for explaining in a thumbnail what was going on in any particular song.

My older brother was, and is, really good at this. I’ve only performed with him once for money. He got me a job playing in a bad blues band (is there another kind?), and the guitar player and the bandleader (they were brothers) had a fight over who busted mom’s lamp or some shite, and the resultant falling out left us guitarless. I’d been playing the bass for two weeks at that point. My brother, who was a bass player, swallowed his pride and agreed to be seen in public with us making musical noise. He played the guitar and sang half the tunes. I still remember him standing in front of me, singing, playing an ES330 that would feed back if he turned his shoulder, and at every chord milepost he’d hold up the fingers on one hand in sort-of gang sign shapes to let the rest of us know what chord was coming next. Index and middle finger pointing down in an inverted “V”, with your thumb poking through like a winkie, is an “A” chord. Try it, it’s fun. My brother didn’t have to worry about whether the chord was major or minor just then, because the keyboard player didn’t know what the black keys were for, and I wouldn’t play the third note of any scale if you put a pistol to my head at that point.

Coincidentally, I have had a pistol put to my head in a barroom, but whether the third note of the scale was flatted or not didn’t enter into it. But I digress.

Lots of people know which note of a scale the coming chords are based on, and hold up fingers to let you know. In the key of C, C’s one, F is four, G is five, and so forth. You’re playing with fire here, of course, since you’re adding arithmetic to a drunken, drug-addled carpet installer-cum-guitar hero’s creative process. He’s got Chemistry down, it’s true; but Math can be a bear. Besides, most guitar players don’t even try to ascertain what key the rest of the band is playing in until the second eight bars of their solo.

My favorite thumbnail-producing bandmate, Stevie, could explain any song by telling you another song you knew that was just like it. He was always right; I always knew the song he referred to, and it was always close enough to what you were doing to play it. He always learned songs by rote, and understood nothing of music theory — and didn’t want to either. But what difference does it make why someone’s correct about something?  “Show your work” is for academics. “Give me the answer, right now,” is for the real world where beer bottles are thrown for not knowing requests. 

My only contribution to the world of musical shorthand was, interestingly enough, concerning metal music similar to the appended video. I was able to sum up the entire musical genre, with myriad sub-genres, with one sentence: It’s one of those,”This is how I go, when I go like this,” songs.

Regular Folks Aren’t Regular Any More

August 20, 2013 2 Comments

The Quoddy footwear factory in Lewiston, Maine.

Lewiston’s about forty-five minutes southeast of here. Maybe an hour. There’s no “hammer lane,” so if you get caught behind a log truck, you’re stuck.

Lewiston and Auburn are on opposite sides of the Androscoggin. People in Maine refer to them as “L.A.” If I want to go to a Home Depot, I have to drive to L. A. I rarely do. Auburn’s considered a very little tonier than Lewiston, for reasons that escape me.

Lewiston’s kinda ugly. What’s old is run down and what’s new is crummy. But everything’s relative, I guess. People are generally friendly and easy-going in Maine, wherever you go. Crime’s essentially non-existent in Maine. There’s mischief, if you’re interested.

People used to live in Lewiston because they worked in mills along the river. The mills closed down, and without work, people lose hope. Their job becomes to simply exist, and pull a lever for whoever promises to throw a few bucks their way. They fill up the schools with their fatherless children and the courts with their quotidian disputes. There’s no dignity in being a regular person anymore.

I like regular people. Or more to the point, I’ve always found regular people interesting. Not to talk to as much as to observe. The fellow in the video has a great sense of self-possession, and obvious pride in his work. He is skilled. A man who is skilled is respected — by his peers, at least. To a regular person, the respect of your peers is more important than the attention of the general public.

People develop a mordant sense of self-parody when things get bleak. Lewiston, without work, is just The Dirty Lew: (some foul language)

“She’s got more diseases than a New York pigeon.”  Awesome. 

No Pressure Is The Worst Kind

August 16, 2013 3 Comments

I remember soft June evenings.

The moon was still trying to get up the nerve to outshine the bully sun. The stars marched slowly toward your eye, coming into view over some horizon unseen. I had an idiot teacher in eighth grade who made a watercolor once with a sponge, smearing gaudy stripes of the wrong colors in shabby gradients across the swamp of a ruined rag of paper, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t appear in the sky just then. The last gasp of the sun tickles the tops of the tall pines while the purple of the evening rises from the ground around your feet like an incoming tide.

We’d coalesce on the dusty hillock where a house was meant to be built but never was. Take our bikes over the little hump and feel the thrill of being airborne over and over again. Later the real evening appeared unnoticed until the streetlights slanted across our faces. We shied away from the attention of even the dumb pole with its mute light, seeking refuge in the gloaming further back from the battered sidewalk, and the bad kids would bring cigarettes to illuminate our expressions like a flashlight with the batteries left too long in it. We were all the bad kids when the sun was full down.

Dad was murdered three decades in advance, and mom joined the seraglio that is kept but no one visits. We were abandoned to the world. It took us in and asked and offered nothing. The feeling that the world is a blank stare is a wonderful and terrible thing. A boy with whiskers just showing wants no pressure. No pressure is the worst kind.

Round Midnight

August 13, 2013 1 Comment

A kind of perfection, I think. Right time, right people, right material — firing on all cylinders.

It’s eminently accessible. Overlooked a bit for that. Jazz aficionados occasionally veer into audio habanera territory. Eventually you end up pretending to like some atonal pigpile because it seems more complex than something with a recognizable string running through it.

The smile at the end out of favor, too. It’s not cool to be happy, is it? 

Month: August 2013

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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