allaboutjazz

Some long time ago, I downloaded somewhere a free song titled “Circle Dance,” by a group called Conference Call. The album is Live at the Outpost Performance Space. This is great stuff, a little on the edgy, free jazz side that I tend to like.

But not too edgy, as I say in my profile.

I wanted to hear and maybe buy more, but I could never locate it. If I searched “Conference Call” at places like Amazon, I got a lot of telephone accessories. I couldn’t get any hits by artist, album or song on Napster or any of the other download sites I hang around at.

I finally connected by going to http://www.allaboutjazz.com/, where I found that the album title should be Live at the Outpost, and now I’ve ordered it from Amazon. The tenor player I like so well is one Gebhard Ullmann, a German musician who’s been around a long time. You can read his bio at www.gebhard-ullmann.com/frame.htm.

All of this interest in jazz is rekindled in part by the current Portland Jazz Festival, which I’m missing because I decided I couldn’t afford it, not even just a weekend of the ten-day affair. Also, I’m working two days a week, and I can’t just take off. Also, my repaired hernias still hurt, and I’m not thinking a lot about getting out of town yet. Also, I don’t know anybody to go with.

So I was wondering, do I really want to cram in say three days of intensive jazz concerts and then sit around trying to digest all that and not have anybody to talk it through with?
Well, yes.

What a lineup! It’s an ambitious and risk-taking series of concerts set in a mix of venues ranging from smallish clubs to the 2700-seat Schnitzer auditorium. Most performers have to be considered big names in jazz circles, but we’re talking small circles here. Gary Burton has been around forever and is always accessible if not easy-listening. I’d book him in the Schnitz. And jazz aficionados know that Branford is the right Marsalis to invite.

But one of my favorite pianists, Geri Allen, isn’t that big a name, and Don Byron and Dave Douglas may have a very high critical regard, but how big a draw could they count on? These guys fill clubs, not auditoriums. Their music can be difficult, though both Allen and Byron are about as exciting and creative as anybody who’s come along in the last few decades. Douglas for me, not so much.

For truly new voices, I’ll track down tenor saxophonist Sophie Faught, 19, who reportedly held her own with the likes of some of the above.

My friend Broschat will be interested to know that singer Gretta Matassa led a late-night jam. As I recall, he was trying to get people to pay attention to her some years ago when she was playing the Seattle club scene but hadn’t made a name yet. He gifted me a CD by her which I’ll have to sift out from my ramble of a collection.

Next year I’m going. Cross my heart.

I'm Back!

Hey, I need to log back in. It’s been a month. I’m better now, though I have to say my surgery and recovery have not been a breeze.

Just let me say this and get it off my chest: “The horror!!”

I’m not a John Wayne kind of guy. You’ll never hear me say, “It’s only a scratch.” I got sick from the pain meds and ended up in the emergency room. After that, it just hurt a lot. I was on drugs, and unlike, say, Hunter S. Thompson, I don’t do my best work when I’m loaded. I didn’t work at all, as a matter of fact. I just laid around and complained.

Still, it was a time to reconnect with my inner wimp and watch a lot of videos. I got the PBS complete history of England in about 20 DVDs. Here’s a summary: War! Unimaginable savagery! I’m only up to about 1300, disc three or four. I take this in small doses.

Also, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Wonderful, but I’m not tracking all that well. Also in small doses.

Friends have been dear. Thank you all for the visits, the phone calls, and the chocolate. (Psss: I’m getting low on chocolate.)

Now, it’s time to get on with it, to merge with the traffic, give my students lots of homework so they’ll start complaining again, and take note of the important developments in the world around me: Astronauts are running amok. Berserking even. Anna Nicole is dead.

I’m back, though barely. My groin hurts.

Ice cream!

I support our president

Tonight, the President is going to surprise us all with his new plan for victory in Iraq. This major war policy address will probably run to twenty minutes or so, though with all the pre-released details, he could probably get by with announcing “What he said.” We’d all know pretty much what he meant.

I’m not sure I’ll watch the speech. I have to say watching George Bush speak has the same effect on me as listening to someone clip their fingernails. Granted, he’s made a lot of progress on the sneer. I’m sure he’s retained the best facial-expression coaches available. But still, his tone about drives me nuts, a mix of strained patience and condescending sermonizing that may have contributed to the twins’ decision to spend more time in Argentina.

Sending more troops to Iraq shouldn’t sound like cutting back my cell phone plan, but when the President speaks, my eyes do the involuntary roll thing that usually only a teenager can pull off.

More surprising to me than any details of the new plan is that I sort-of support the idea. I mean, isn’t this the plan we should have had in place before we invaded four years ago? Our goal, of course, is complete victory against the terrorists in Iraq, or at least a government that can sustain itself, defend itself, and, uh, amuse itself.

I’m not sure on that last point, but we all get the idea.

There are an easy dozen reasons why a troop surge won’t work and might make things worse, but I keep going back to Colin Powell’s pottery store doctrine: “You break it, you own it.” We broke it in Iraq. Pulling out will unquestionably make things worse. Staying the course won’t change anything. The only thing left to try is an escalation of troops, a new general with a Ph.D., and a few months of heavy pressure on the Iraqis themselves to knock it off with the bombs and bullets and electric drills long enough to at least get the electricity back up and running.

And this time we really mean it.

I give the whole thing a snowball’s chance in Baghdad, but I think we owe it to the Iraqis to make one last, great push to leave them with a little security. A mom should be able to send Ahmed to the grocery for some figs without all the time worrying about a call to get a box and come pick up her kid. This is fundamental.

How long? Six months. Benchmarks for success? A big drop in civilian casualties and a big drop in the number of insurgent-initiated attacks.

Everything else is bullshit, and bullshit walks.

Bipartisanship

Nancy Pelosi was sworn in today as the Democratic Speaker of the House, the first woman to hold that position. It’s a great day to be a Democrat. Let the hearings begin!

After the ceremony, Republican John Boehner (that’s pronounced “bayner,” not “boner”) called on the Democrats to embrace bipartisanship.

Now, I’m as bipartisan as the next guy, but it was Boehner who, a few weeks before the November election, said in a speech to the House, “I’m beginning to think Democrats care more about terrorists than they care about Americans.” I thought these comments made a good case for bringing caning back to House proceedings.

So my bipartisan reply to Mr. Boehner is, “Go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.”

This is far more polite than, say, Vice-President Cheney’s remark on the floor of the Senate to Patrick Leahy of Vermont when Cheney said “Go fuck yourself.”

But then we Democrats are more polite by disposition.

State of Denial

One advantage to a couple of good hernias is that they make you spend lots of time lounging around the house. For me, this means lots or reading and, lately, watching videos and even some TV.

One thing I finally did was read a book on the Bush administration. I hadn’t read any up to now because it seems like every week, some new catastrophe makes obsolete even the latest books in print. I routinely read the Oregonian, a reasonably good daily newspaper. I also read a lot of the Washington Post online. Most months, I enjoy a motorcycle trip over to Ashland and hit the bookstores for the magazines: favorites include The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harpers.

I consider myself rather well-informed.

But with all the extra lounge time on my hands, I picked up Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, and I have to say I found it scandalous. I’m not easily shocked by much that happens around Washington, and especially not by the Bush administration, but there’s a lot of depth that just doesn’t get covered in newspapers or magazines.

The biggest insight gained from Woodward was the total lack of planning for Iraq after we won the war. Despite warnings from individuals and agencies before the invasion, the administration really did seem to believe we’d be welcomed as liberators. They had zero plans for what to do if we were not. Is it possible to imagine a more colossal mistake?

Donald Rumsfeld comes across as the biggest villain in Woodward’s book, though the two biggest mistakes—short of the invasion itself—go to Paul Bremer. Bremer was Rumsfield’s man, and he replaced Lieutenant General Jay Garner as the head of postwar operations in Iraq. While Garner was still in Iraq, and over his strong objections, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and purged all Baathists from government positions.

The result of the first error was that tens of thousands of officers and enlisted men who would have stayed in place and eventually taken over security operations were sent home mad as hell at the Americans, not to mention still heavily armed. They quickly became the heart of the Sunni insurgency.

The result of the second error was that government services such as water, sewer systems, and electricity collapsed. The Interior Ministry, which controlled all these vital services, lost all of its upper and mid-level functionaries, and there was no one to take their place.

Also interesting in the Woodward book is that Colin Powell actually had two doctrines: the first is the well-known doctrine of overwhelming force, which was not followed in our invasion. The second is what Powell called the “pottery store rule: 'You break it, you own it.'”

There’s no question that we own Iraq now. We sure would love to give it back, but we’ll still be making payments long after my little blog has fallen silent.

Even if you know a lot about how we got into Iraq and how we lost it, Woodward’s book is a compelling read.

"The Dark Side"

Along with reading, I’ve also been watching videos and television. Last night, Mary and I watched a rerun of a PBS Frontline program originally aired last June. Entitled “The Dark Side,” it’s a documentary made up of over forty interviews with high-level officials from the CIA, the State Department, and members of the Bush Administration. I can’t imagine a sixty-minute program which could be more riveting or more damning.

“The Dark Side” once and for all answers the question of whether the Bush administration cooked the intelligence on Saddam’s alleged WMD and ties to al-Qaeda or if it made an honest mistake. Rather surprisingly to me, the program paints Bush himself as being initially skeptical of any links. At one point, he asked “Is that all there is?” It was a good question, and the same one that Colin Powell asked before he went before the UN.

The villain is Dick Cheney. It’s clear in the film that Cheney leaned hard on the CIA to come up with support for the conclusions he’d already reached about Iraq. Worse, working with Rumsfeld, he effectively sidelined the CIA, which had got it right and “kicked ass” in Afghanistan, and brought intelligence gathering into the Defense Department and ultimately the White House itself. Even when the CIA warned him off of bad intelligence, he continued to make the rounds saying the case for WMD was a “slam dunk” and that Saddam had ties to terrorists. If we hesitated, even for a few months, he would hit the United States.

I reacted to these kinds of high-pressure tactics the same way I react to a car salesman who tells me I have to act today. I don’t believe a word of it.

It’s amazing to me that the release of these interviews hasn’t dominated the news, both print and television, for the last year. Again, I think ongoing news trumps even recent history, and image trumps text every time. When there’s lots of good footage of today’s suicide bomber, it’s hard to get air time for interviews that were given months ago.

The death and multiple funerals of Gerald Ford have taken the spotlight off Bush and the war for a few weeks, but for me they also bring back vivid memories of listening to the Watergate Hearings on the radio. Watergate was, as has often been said, a bungled third-rate burglary, but it brought down a president and sent a dozen of his top advisors to prison. I say let the hearings begin on Iraq.

You can order the DVD of “The Dark Side” or even stream the program live here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/

I think if you watch the first minute, you’ll watch it to the end. There are also further interviews and ongoing online discussions.

Five Things No One Knows About Me

My friend Broschat has tagged me to play along with a bloggers’ game of revealing five things nobody knows about me. This confirms my growing realization that Broschat has become a nerd. In high school, he was the coolest guy I knew, but years of working with computers have taken their toll.

I should get out of this blog business while I still can, but for now I’ll play along.

Since this exercise could lead to humiliation, I’m tempted to write witty but obviously untrue items: “Abandonded by my parents in childhood, I was raised by wild rabbits.”

The truth about my parents is that they were notoriously cheap and overprotective, and even into my early teens, they made me go with them to square dances. I lived in fear that someone would find out my parents were square dancers.

Notice the curly blond hair in my blog photo? My Aunt Katie nicknamed me Rossie Tossie Cottontail. I still kind of like the name.

I comment on Broscat’s blog that I was once nearly arrested in France for public urination. That’s true. I actually got roughed up by a gendarme. In France at the time, public urination was as common as spitting on the sidewalk, so I won’t say any more about why I was singled out for attention. I do know I was very drunk.

I like to think I am fast on a motorcycle.

I was a poor trumpet player in the high school dance band. However, I once sang a scat solo to “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” at a parents’ night concert. I was good enough that the band director had me take two extra choruses. At home, though, my parents said they didn’t understand what I was singing.

I’m the only guy I know who lost his virginity while—oh, wait!—that was five.

Free to Roam

I’ve been trying to keep a good attitude about my temporary disability, but the truth is I was getting cranky. I know it’s supposed to be comforting that I have it way better than some Sudanese farmer watching the Janjahweed ride into town, but this is my Winter Vacation and I’ve been pretty much confined to quarters. It hurts to walk and it hurts just to stand up for more than a few minutes.

As usual, the practical and emotional solution to the problem lies in getting some new wheels. Candy-apple red!

At last, I’m free again to go shopping and hang around in video arcades. Now all I need is some competition.

Also, I haven’t found the motor on this thing yet, but I know there has to be one.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

The poor little electric car never had a chance. GM made only one mistake. When the California Air Resources Board (CARB) told automakers in the mid-1990s that they had to make ten percent of their fleet “zero pollution at the tailpipe” by 2002, GM turned the project over to its Saturn Division, which actually thought its job was to build a great electric car. Before GM realized its mistake, Saturn had done just that and leased several hundred of them to drivers in Southern California.

Within a few years, hundreds of fully electric EV-ls were in use on the roads and freeways of SoCal. What’s amazing is not so much that GM recalled the cars from loyal owners and buried the project, but that they did such a good job of burying the story.

It took a few years in the late 1990s for the automakers and oil companies to stack CARB with their sycophants and get the new standards eliminated. Once they did, they began to call in the leases on the EV-ls. By 2004, GM had recalled all their electric cars and actually crushed them in wrecking yards. Today, there is only one known EV-1 in an auto museum, and it’s just a shell. The motor, batteries, and drive train have been removed.

The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? tells the story through interviews with owners, engineers, Saturn executives, and former CARB board members, as well as lots of footage of the cars on the road. The film can be rather depressing, as these David and Goliath stories usually are (only in the Bible did David win), but it’s a fascinating study and it ends with two hopeful notes: one, hybrid electrics aren’t as good as a totally electric car, but the automakers are willing to produce them; and, two, with a Democratic majority in Congress, we might still see more on the electric car.

And if you thought you already hated the Bush administration, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I highly recommend Who Killed the Electric Car, available through Netflix and your local video store.

The Care and Feeding of Your Hernia

I initially took the news of my hernia rather hard, (“Why me, God!? The horror!”) but I’m actually adjusting to the enforced confinement rather well.

True, I’m impatient to get the operation done and get back to my good old self, however good my old self might be. I was even going to call some local surgeons and see if I could get put on standby. Maybe they lose a patient on the table early in a procedure and they're all scrubbed already, it's a shame to waste all those gowns and latex gloves. What do they do for the next four hours, play canasta?

But probably I'll just lounge around like Cleopatra for another five or six weeks. Frankly, I don’t want to do anything that might rush or confuse folks up at the local hospital. They only recently stopped advertising “Now, with anesthetic!” And “cutting edge” is not a comforting hospital slogan.

Despite the enforced confinement, it cheers me up to make a list of things I can’t do and can do. Basically, I can’t do anything that involves lifting or being on my feet for more than about two minutes. This would include all the labors of Hercules, plus such lowly chores as

Help Mary unload and stack two tons of hay for Woody
Shovel snow
Wash the dishes
Vacuum and dust
Clean up dog poop

Things I can do include

Feed myself
Move from one chair to another
Watch DVDs
Play video games
Read
Write letters to the editor about what an idiot the president is
Start an ant farm
Go to bed

I can also watch television, which I’m finding has an occasional fun program. I get four or five stations with my rabbit ears. (I have free television; think about it!) I’m becoming a fan of Ellen Degeneris, who has an afternoon show. I think she’s funny, and I like the idea of a self-deprecating lesbian comic who doesn’t do attack comedy or gross potty-mouth humor.

All in all, this is a life some might call perfect. People a little over-stressed from work who can’t afford a month off in the Caribbean might opt for an elective hernia. I’m comfortable as long as I stay seated or reclining. Mary is always cheerful if I ask her to fluff my pillow or bring me a mint.

Not My Job Award

My Christmas Vacation

I don’t know what the rest of you dudes are getting for Christmas, but I got a hernia.

This was not one of the items on the list I text-messaged to Santa last June so he’d have time to get it right before the advent of the chaotic holiday season, now generally acknowledged to begin the day after Labor Day (renamed by the Bush administration National Right to Work in America Day).

Santa usually totally blows my Christmas list. I ask for a Power Commander titanium slip-on muffler for my VFR, a muffler which will deliver to this fine motorcycle a guaranteed 3.2 percent increase in torque and horsepower and which will allow me to finally blast my zero-to-sixty times below the insufferable three-second barrier known as “The Great Wall of Inertia.”

Santa brings me a wool scarf and says “Hey, an elf checked ‘muffler.’”

Or I ask for a Street Sweeper semi-automatic combat assault shotgun plus a few dozen bowling pins and some watermelons, and Santa delivers unto me a holiday CD, Enya Sings The Sacred Celtic Hymns of the Winter Solstice. It sounds to me like bats on Qualudes.

This year I thought I’d try to lowball Santa and only asked for a new snorkel and three weeks in Belize. Instead, right after classes got out, I was catching up on my laying on the couch when I started to feel some discomfort and pain in what is commonly referred to as the groin and general pubical area. My tolerance for pain is less even than my tolerance for Enya.

Over the next few days, the discomfort grew worse, accompanied by swelling. Of course, my first thought was I have cancer. Cancer runs in my family like some families get frequent lice. If I have a toothache, I assume I have tooth cancer. Pretty much the slightest ache or pain and I go to an emotional DEF-CON 3 and start planning for hospice care.

My second thought was a hernia, maybe a malignant hernia. I wasn’t sure what a hernia actually was, but I had the notion that if you slightly underfill a water balloon and then squeeze it, a hernia would look a lot like that. This seemed like a good description of my groin, so I self-diagnosed probably a hernia

I called Old Doc Novak and made an emergency appointment because my groin was about to explode, and after a record-low three hours in the waiting room I was rushed to the inner-office where another of the interchangeable cute nurses who I had as students only a few years ago went to work measuring my blood pressure and checking my weight. (Am I here because I’m fat!!??)

Novak came in after a few rounds of golf and gave me his usual cheery greeting. “Take off your pants.”

And so, after just a few minutes of groping my balls and sticking his fingers in my butt, Novak diagnosed a bilateral hernia and told me to make an appointment with a good surgeon. I don’t happen to know any good surgeons offhand, so he gave me a few names. As I was leaving, he offered a cheerful parting observation, “This will lay you up for a few weeks.”

“And a happy religiously and ethnically appropriate winter holiday to you and yours as well!” I wished him and his.

I thought, well at least I’m on winter break and I can just pop into one of these surgeons’ offices and get this thing tied off or lasered or whatever they do these days. I’ll use my break time to be laid up and let Mary wait on me. But when I start calling around for a surgeon with a little slack in his calendar, I find the earliest appointment I can get is mid-January.

“What is this, Canada?” I ask my short-list of Professional Office Administrative Assistants Tasked With Scheduling. “Not! This is America! I have insurance!”

But to no avail. I have to spend my winter break nursing a swollen and painful groin, then when I go back to work in January, I have to get practically major surgery and limp back into the classroom within days to lecture on faulty parallelism and other venal sins.

Or maybe I could show a movie, but I’m just an adjunct now. I don’t have sick leave, and if you miss even one day of class they fire you and give all your remaining courses to one of the many Middle-East immigrants on expired work visas who have an Associate’s in General Studies and who will lecture for food.

Life is so unfair, but at least I’ll be getting a handicapped parking sticker. They’re good for a year and you can cut off fat people driving old Buicks and get the parking place right by the Fred Meyer front door. And maybe my insurance will pay for one of those electric wheel chairs to use during my long convalescence.

I want one with a Power Commander.

Introduction to Poetry

I’ve only recently begun to read poetry, a strange confession for someone who graduated with honors in literature some thirty years ago. But then I haven’t read Moby Dick yet, either, nor Don Quixote, never mind the whole dizzy slew of postmodernists like Pynchon.

(I feel compelled to point out I’ve read plenty of difficult stuff and even partially understood some of it. But my list of things I haven’t read will always be longer than things I have.)

Reading poetry, I sometimes feel angry at the author.

“Why does it have to be so difficult? Why can’t you just say what you mean?” Some poems seem to mean something on a literal level which I can’t quite penetrate. Others seem intended to resist any kind of literal paraphrase.

I find, though, that I’m often drawn more to poems which are hard to understand. I can often say I like it, I just don’t know what it means. (My friend Broschat makes the same observation about films over on his Montlake blog.)

Here’s a poem I think I understand, but I like it anyway. It says something about how I try to read poetry.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

Or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Oregon’s Republican Senator Gordon Smith has made his strongest remarks yet about the war in Iraq: “I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd.”

He used the word "criminal."

Smith said he’d like to see US troops withdrawn “quicker rather than later” and that he would not have voted for the war if he’d known the intelligence had not been accurate: “It was not accurate, but that is history.”

If Smith were a Democrat, people would be crying “cut and run” and calling him a “flip-flopper.” Since he’s a Republican, some are saying he’s just worried about his election in 2008. Granted, no United States Senator gives an opinion on so much as broccoli without thinking about the next election, but I think it takes courage to admit you were wrong and change your position.

I’m proud that all of Oregon’s Congressional Democrats—Senator Wyden and four Representatives—voted against the war. They were right from the start.

How To Save Iraq

The blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group has recommended a slow withdrawl of US troops from Iraq. Not a timed withdrawl exactly. More of a drawdown, but not a drawdown with any particular timetable. A phased redeployment maybe. Something time-released.

Even Donald Rumsfeld, it turns out, was thinking exactly the same thing just two days before he resigned as Secretary of Defense. He said pulling a few troops out would force the Iraqis to "pull up their socks."

I know this is good military strategy because I heard it first thing every morning in Army basic training (1967) when Drill Sergeant Johnson would turn on the lights and roar "Drop your cocks and pull up your socks!!" And by God we did, and just a few months later we were all in Vietnam, and everybody knows how that turned out.

Now, though, conservative pundits are pointing out correctly that if we leave Iraq, things will only get worse. Liberal pundits are correctly pointing out that we've been there going on four years and things have done nothing but get worse. You can see why the President needed a Blue Ribbon Study Group, but I have to say, I have some better ideas, and I didn't even get an expense account.

First, as others have been discussing on the Web, we could rehabilitate Saddam and bring him back.

Dust off the fedora. Give him back his gun.

He's just the kind of tough leader we need right now, and the fact that he's a criminal shouldn't stop us. After he was pardoned by President Ford, Richard Nixon was rehabilitated and was seen as a kind of elder statesmen. I think he even went to China a few times, and China is our friend now.

Still, lots of people would have a problem with that, which is why I did some more thinking and realized there's only one guy who can negotiate a settlement in Iraq.

Dr. Phil.

Dr. Phil is kind of a bully and he wouldn't have any problem telling the Shiite death squads they need to knock it off with the electric drills and all the time dumping bodies.

He would tell the Sunnis, "Saddam's gone! You're not it charge any more! Get over it! "

Like all good counselors, Dr. Phil speaks in exclamations.

These are just ideas, but Henry Kissinger has been hanging around the White House lately, and the last thing we need is to let him get involved. It took him years to get us out of Vietnam (Peace with Honor), and he already has a Nobel Peace Prize. Give somebody else a chance!

Celebrity Diplomats

When Captain Kangaroo died a few years back, millions of parents faced the tough decision of how to tell their kids. Most didn't want to say Captain Kangaroo was dead because kids that young don't understand death. Instead, many parents chose to say he had been "cancelled." Since then, a lot of kids have been hoping Captain Kangaroo would come back one day.

And now he has.

Turns out, the good Captain was hiding out as the US Ambassador to the United Nations under the assumed name of John Bolton.

Now he's resigned because of what President Bush called the "stubborn obstructionism" of the Senate, which refused to confirm him.

Others thought the Captain had some management issues. In an unprecedented public letter to the Senate, 64 former American ambassadors and diplomats wrote "On many occasions, [Captain Kangaroo's] hard core go-it-alone posture . . . alienated the bulk of the diplomatic community and cost the United States its leadership role with the U.N."

Oops.

The Captain, at least, can return to his role as the beloved host of his popular children's show. But who will the President nominate to be our next Ambassador?

Actually, I know a former kid's show host who's looking for work.

The Explodiness of the Whale

I'm proud to be an Oregonian. We may not read much Melville, but we know how to handle a beached whale. Moby Dick itself might have been a little more entertaining if Melville had thought to use dynamite.

Here's a link to an Oregon site which shares part of a Dave Barry column then takes you to a YouTube video of one of our prouder moments.

http://www.blueoregon.com/2006/11/oregons_explodi.html

Melville Revisited

In comments to an earlier entry, my friend Pat gently chides me (“Cretin! Philistine!”) for not fully appreciating the elegant prose of Melville. He’s right: I’ll have to take another look at Moby Dick. It’s on my reading list, which I’m now organizing based on how many more years I might reasonably expect to live and how essential it is that I finally read a certain book before I die.

But I might ask my friend Pat, “So, you say you’ve read Melville, but have you actually been there?! Non?!” Well, I have!

In 1999, I landed a job teaching summer school aboard the California Maritime Academy’s training ship The Golden Bear, a 500-foot former Navy sub chaser. More about that adventure another time, but one of our stops was Nuku Hiva, described below in an excerpt from the journal I kept at the time. I was reading Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania and comparing my impressions of these still mostly unspoiled Pacific islands to his. He called Nuku Hiva possibly the most beautiful island in the Pacific, and I couldn’t disagree with him.

In this excerpt, I’m taking a trip across the island on the only road—steep, muddy, and treacherous—with some CMA students and a native guide driving a Toyota pickup. I was reasonably sure we’d never get back to the Golden Bear alive:

****

We stopped a few times for pictures, then continued down a sharp canyon road into the village of Taipivai, the setting of Melville’s Typee. Although Melville only lived in the village a month, the experience led to his first and, during his lifetime, most popular novel. Theroux says it’s still the best account of village life in the Marquesas, excluding the few modern features like the bank and post office. I expect that statement is rather more inaccurate than less, but it does catch a little of the flavor of island life as I saw it.

We followed a road up out of the small village and stopped at the stone foundation of what was said to be Melville’s house, now overgrown by jungle. There was little to see or photograph, but I took a few pictures for the record. [This concludes my scholarly discourse on Melville.]

The road as it climbed the next steep ridge was even more harrowing than it had been, and the views at the top even more spectacular. We looked out over huge valleys of dense vegetation. At one time, when the islands had as many as 80,000 inhabitants, the bottoms of these valleys might have been inhabited, but now it seemed clear they had quickly been reclaimed by the jungle. It was as remote and dramatic a place as I’ve ever seen. Above the jungle valleys, the tops of mountains are in many places bare rock pinnacles. Theroux says “It is almost impossible to overstate the ruggedness of the islands—the almost unclimbable steepness of their heights or their empty valleys. At the head of every valley was a great gushing waterfall, some of them hundreds of feet high.” We stopped for pictures of one across the valley, a drop of what certainly seemed to be hundreds of feet over the bare rocks.

Then on to our next stop, the first of two archaeological sites. Our Marquesan guides, playful and personable guys, spoke reasonably good English and showed us around the ruins, stone foundations of what had been thatched huts for families and religious places. The site was being worked by one native and two French archaeologists, all of whom spoke English. They were mostly busy cutting back the jungle and had a large fire to burn the branches and vines they cut. From there they could then start to excavate and reconstruct the site. Much work had been done and the area we visited covered a few acres and had perhaps twenty separate structures uncovered.

According to Theroux and the guidebook I’m reading, all the Polynesian peoples practiced cannibalism, but none apparently with more relish than the Marquesans. (Oh, I am proud of that pun!) The best evidence was what we were told was a sacrificial altar site. At the center was a banyon tree, one of the most extraordinary living things I’ve ever seen: huge, but made up of what looked like not a single trunk but many separate trunks, each joining the total structure at the base or further up the tree. This structure, a giude explained, allows the tree to live in poor soil and also hold on in the hurricanes which might otherwise level trees of such size.

Next to the banyon was a stone slab where the victims were killed. We were told that their heads were put among the roots of the banyon. Most striking, though, was the “bone pit,” perhaps thirty feet deep, lined with stone, where the feasters tossed the bones of their dinner victims. Perhaps this was to fertilized the tree or somehow further consecrate the site.

Oddly, it didn’t feel too eerie or horrific to be here, perhaps partly because the students were clamoring around being their usual goofball selves, partly maybe because the anthropologists were there to provide some scientific distance. In a sense, being there and talking to the Marquesan guides and scientists somehow reduced the sense of dread I’d had in the past when reading about such horrible things and places. Not that getting eaten by your enemies would be a fun way to go out, but these had been a fierce people, with each valley populated by a clan that would fight for its territory and food supply, which was more seasonal and uncertain here than in other tropical islands.

*****

Cannibals figure large in both Typee and The Happy Isles. Theroux’s theory is that Pacific Islanders love Spam because it tastes most like boiled human flesh. I’m not sure of the basis for this theory.

Typee was indeed Melville’s most popular book because it contained not only adventures among cannibals but highly suggestive intimations of free love among the beautiful young women of the islands.

I’m a little sorry we did make it back.

Speaking of Starbucks

I don’t spend that much on lattes, but when Starbucks went up to $3 for a grande, I kept track for a week or so, and it adds up. It seems a good part of what I’ve been saving on diesel fuel has gone into specialty coffee drinks. Another reason I’m not rich.

So I decided I’d buy my own espresso maker, one that would steam milk so I could froth up a good head of foam, which I like. The cheapest one I could find locally was $50, but it wasn’t hard to find a high-end steam engine for over a grand. In the end, I decided to stick with the occasional store-bought.

Then, a few weeks ago when I was shopping, I was in the coffee section and noticed the Melita one-cup coffee maker. I had an idea, so I bought one for two bucks, along with some paper filters and espresso beans.

Back home, I heater water in a kettle and ground enough beans to make a very strong shot. Meanwhile, I started heating milk on a hot stove, stirring gently with a wire whisk so it wouldn’t scald. When the water got hot, I poured a shot-full through the cone and into my Starbucks Tokyo mug, which I bought in Tokyo in 1998 when I was teaching English there for a semester.

While the shot was seeping through, I picked up the pace with the whisk. In a surprisingly short time, I had a nice head of foam. I poured the hot milk into the coffee and spooned a little peak of foam on top. It looked like the real thing. I let it cool a minute and took a sip. Delicioso!

I find that one- or two-percent milk works best for my tastes. Nonfat isn’t quite as sweet. Also, I can make a good mocha by just adding a shot of espresso to a cup of hot chocolate, then spurtzing whipped cream on top.

Yum.

Now I’m saving as much on coffee drinks as I am on commuting costs, with only a tiny investment up front.

Still, I’m not rich and will have to look again at the budget.

Mr. Starbuck!

Somewhere in my profile I joke that I never finished Moby Dick. Has anybody? Why?

Over on defective yeti, which is a funny blog, our poor blogger has set himself the task of somehow reading the whole book and reporting as he goes: Here's his report at the 1/4 mark:

Page reached: 140 of 522 (26.82%)
Status Report: Oh, man. Chapter 32. This is probably a strong contender for the title of Most Skimmed Chapter In Classic American Literature. I would have skipped it myself if I hadn't resolved to read this book in its entirety.
Thirteen pages long -- about three times the length of the average chapter -- "Cetology" has the narrator giving an impromptu lecture on the nature of the whale, grouping the beasts into fourteen categories and offering lengthy descriptions of each. Here, Melville uses a literary technique known as OMG BORING! In some other context I might have found this engrossing, but here it's like, "Dude, you got your marine biology lecture in my adventure story!"
I wonder how many people have quit reading Moby-Dick at "Cetology". I bet this chapter is a veritable Goodwin Sands, with a thousand shipwrecked readers littering its shore.
I could have been one of them, as Moby-Dick is perilously close to violating my One-Third Reading Policy, which states that I shall abandon any book that I am not enjoying when I am a third of the way through it. Unfortunately I am determined to finish this thing, so quitting on page 174 isn't an option. But Cetology has sapped my of all momentum. Chapter 32 is a disabled vehicle in the center lane of this book's narrative.

You can follow the fun at http://www.defectiveyeti.com/