So I picked the book up.  It turns out exactly one paragraph in its 215 pages directly addresses those phenomena.  But that's ok because the rest is quite interesting.  Park takes the reader on a particularly winding journey (get an editor, dude) through contemporary struggles between religion and science, referring frequently to the fundamentals of natural selection as a way to explain our prediliction toward superstition. 

I found it to be a page turner, filled with comfortable support for things I already think, and packed with interesting thoughts (e.g. "Homo sapiens have been around for 160,000 years, yet most of what we know about the universe has been learned within the lifetime of people who are still alive." - p 195.)  But advertised as a skeptic, Park only appears to apply skepticism to the people, events and studies with which he disagrees.  This has happened to me before; when reading an author with whom I generally agree, I can grow defensive of the other side of the argument if I feel s/he's not giving them a fair shake.  That happened to me a number of times reading this book.

Park only ever mentions the potential hazards and human fallacies that can be part of the scientific method when discussing outcomes he doesn't like.  Never does he mention that the same problems exist in the background of all scientific work.  

Nevertheless, in the manner of Richard Dawkins Park takes joy in whithering attacks on nonsense, and it's fun to go along for the ride.

I have known Lee Dazey for maybe 8 or 9 years now.  I have played music with her and performed in front of audiences with her, and I've heard her play almost every other Friday for the last four years or so as a co-host of Poetry Peace and Music (an open mic she and Kim Elise and I co-host at Dreamer's coffeeshop in downtown Reno.) 

But tonight was something special. 

It's not unusual that the chatter in the coffeehouse dies down when Lee starts to sing, because her voice is really something special, and she has developed her talent to a remarkable degree.   But tonight she sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow with Jim Eaglesmith behind her on guitar, and she hit that sweet spot.

Every so often a performer is at the top of her form.  Every so often an audience is exactly at the right spot to hear what a performer has to say.  Tonight those two combined.  Lee poured herself into the song, Jim provided a strong steady base from which she could fly, and she took the whole restaurant with her up over the rainbow.

It's a cliche, but in this case it's the gospel truth that there wasn't a dry eye in the house when she was done - including her own.  Everyone present knew that something special had happened, and we gave her and Jim a standing ovation lasting some minutes - probably about as long as the performance lasted.

While she sang I thought damn, it's too bad we don't have a tape recorder rolling, or that nobody seems to have a movie camera.  But on later reflection, none of those media could have put a person in the room (and my writing is not good enough to do it.)

Nevertheless, I witnessed and participated in something extraordinary tonight; a heartfelt performance that reflected the honing of talent and skills Lee has perfected (and of course her own bare emotion), and a room full of maybe 30 people who recognized it for what it was and were in a place where we could not only acknowledge what was happening on stage, but participate in it. 

Music can move you at the core of yourself.  If that hasn't happened to you in some time, please be assured that it's still true.

"The Clash" by the Clash is a coffee table book with beautiful full-size photos and reproductions of posters, fliers, album covers, even doodles from the career of arguably the best band that ever existed.  The text is first person memories by the band members themselves, going over the germination, birth pangs, explosive debut, growth in popularity, benign control of the musical landscape, and ultimately the drug-and-ego-fused implosion of the "only band that mattered."

Please indulge me in some personal recollection.  Somewhere during my freshman year in high school ('80-'81), my friend who went to a different school had me over to his house to hear some records his older brother had.  He put the Clash's first record on the turntable and my world changed.  Unlike the Beatles (my obession to that point) the lyrics were indecipherable, but the music was unlike anything I'd heard before.  Grating guitars sounded like a broken chainsaw, the beat was impossibly fast (25 years later I say heh) and the energy was infectious.  Something was going on, man.  The record itself said it was "punk rockers." 

I bought the record as soon as I'd collected enough paper route money to do so.  Upon a little investigation into this phenomenon it was no wonder those punks were slamming into eachother on dance floors and getting arrested - just listen to that music!

It was only a year later that I was slamming around on dance floors, and getting ridiculed at school for the music on my boombox cassette tapes.  (The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Damned, Generation X, Gang of Four, Dead Kennedys, X, Fear, Germs all ensued in my record collection - but the Clash started it all for me.)   The Shakespeare teacher at my high school told me my 11-years-older-brother was the first to wear long hair to that school, and I was the first to wear it short and spiked.   

Some years later in college, when I related these experiences to a pop-music-encyclopedia friend, he said, "oh, you were one of those who thought Joe Strummer would save the world."  I suppose I was.

So the book is a wonderful dance back through all those years, and provides insight I've never had into the makings of my beloved records and the stuff going on behind the scenes.  This is a new permanent entry in my small collection of coffee table books (they're all kept on a shelf in the music room - away from literature loving dogs.)

Some new insights from the book: 

-If you've ever wondered just what it is about "Brand New Cadillac" on the London Calling record that makes it so .., so.., oh I don't know, among the perfect rock and roll songs?  It's that it was done live in the studio in one take.

-Topper Headon, late-comer and early-goer drummer for the band, says that the rat-a-tat-tat drum intro to Tommy Gun was his first contribution to a Clash song, although by that point he'd been a member of the band for a couple years.

There are others.  You'll just have to get the book to find 'em yourself.

Joe Strummer, RIP.

Representative Duncan Hunter (R - can you believe it?!, CA) here gives Obama credit for having good teeth.

And here's part of a description of an 1859 slave auction in Georgia:

"For these preliminary days their shed was constantly visited by speculators. The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound; and in addition to all this treatment, asking them scores of questions relative to their qualifications and accomplishments.



I guess Obama passes.  He's got good teeth.

At the October 2 VP debate, Sarah Palin apparently thought she was quoting Ronald Reagan when she referred to the shining "city on a hill."  As even Reagan knew and said at the time, he was referring to a sermon by John Winthrop from 1630.  The sermon was delivered upon the ship Arbella, shortly before it landed at the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Winthrop told his puritan passengers the colony they would inhabit should be seen by the world as a model for Christian civilization.

Those puritan roots are important to understanding U.S. society.  Even Reagan understood that.

Those of us who lived through the Reagan years never thought we'd compare him favorably to later politicians in terms of intellectual honesty.

Like in his other novels, he places singular characters in infeasible situations and lets them wreak havoc by being themselves.  The book jacket for this one will tell you that here the U.S. President, after having been frustrated by the Senate Judicial Committee in trying to name a new Associate Justice to the Supreme Court, throws them a curve by nominating a popular daytime tv court judge.  What the jacket doesn't say is the story continues past confirmation into uncharted legal territory and a constitutional crisis with guess who as the tie breaking justice. 

The big case at the end is bizarre, and the book suffers from it being illogical, but by that point I was having too much fun to care about poking holes in the already absurd plot. 

The butts of Buckley's satire are egomaniacal politicians and the omnipresent artifice of modern day national politics.  He's a very funny writer who sometimes asks for too much indulgence from his readers, but I continue to be happy to give it to him because the laughs are worth it.  Again I drew attention from strangers by laughing out loud as I read in the coffee shop. 

The danger of the neighbor pulling his diesel truck out of his driveway at 4:00 a.m., as he has done every weeknight for the last year and a half.

And as you have done during this time, you barked and jumped on the bed to alert us that it has happened again.

Without your vigilance and quick-thinking action, we may have otherwise slept on, unaware that he leaves for work at that early hour.

The premise is the clash between Boomers and their kids, and I can relate.  While I am the progeny of the WWII generation, I came late, and have long resented the fact that I will hear Donovan on the radio until the day I die, while the Clash will never get their due. 

The book pits the under-30s against the greediest generation as the latter sucks up the federal budget through social security and the former must be lulled from saying "whatever" to voting for someone who will support a solution - one that involves state-subsidized suicide.

Very funny, sort of uneven.  I recommend it as a summer read.  But it's clear that this book was written by a boomer.  I look forward to new related material written by actual generation X-ers.

In this review I will criticize Frey for being trite and unoriginal, so I will refrain from an initial reference to the memoir that made him famous (all other reviewers seem to begin their assessments with references thereto.)

This book is Frey's love letter to L.A.  It's interesting for a non-west-coaster like me to read a full embrace of a city cognizant of all its faults and disappointments.  The book tells us that LA wouldn't be itself, the object of the writer's affection, without those faults and disappointments.  It's a collection of vignettes and essays with four sets of recurring characters, and a lot of characters that don't come back.  The fictional bits are interspersed with "fun facts" and other data about LA.  It's an attempt to draw a portrait of the city in a mosaic fashion, acknowledging that LA is so huge and polymorphus that these characters only occupy small niches.

It's compelling in parts, and it's effective in drawing an attractive portrait of the city.  But by the end I really was not going to be able to take one more breathless account of young idealism coming to LA to die in the Sodom of the cut-throat entertainment industry.  Without spoilers, those four recurrent story-lines are:  1.)  The mega supermovie star who is secretly gay; 2.)  the hard-working Latina maid serving a cold-hearted bitch millionaire boss; 3.) the deeply-in-love young couple who ran to LA from the mid-west and 4.)  the homeless man with a heart of gold. 

Can it get any more canned than that? 

If Frey wasn't already famous, I don't think this book would have been more than a blip on the mainstream radar.  But reading it I had visions of stock characters throughout LA reading it and wondering what the big deal is.  That was my reaction - why is Tery Gross interviewing the author ... and asking him respectful questions?  Did she actually read this stuff first?

So I don't recommend this book, except as an illustration of what you can get away with once you're already famous.