General Bird Observes

Impassion

2007-09-16T02:18:00.000+02:00

She is always a stranger in that moment before you love her. But that strangeness is so hard to recall when the love is long made clear.

Hold on, baby, Hold Steady

2007-02-12T21:40:00.000+01:00

The Hold Steady, they’re like a loosed soul riding the rails to Salvation, steaming through the great plains, big cities and burned-out towns along the way. Check out their music if you haven’t heard it.

And holy fucking shit, do they play a show. You should have been there, and as proof I present R, who flew in from Oregon for the day – and I mean the day, landing in the morning and back to the airport at 4 am to catch his flight out at 7. Which return flight, by the way, doesn’t merely end in the northwest corner of the US, since he’ll be promptly catching another flight down to Oklahoma. He’s a working man who knows how to travel, and he, my lady friend and I wound up hanging out after the show ‘til he had to get to his return flight, cause the Hold Steady brings people together like that. A solid guy, R – and just a fan who'd been to a couple shows before and thought what the hell, so the lead singer, Craig, gave him, R, a personal shout from the stage (consider this a second). Which we were pretty much on top of, the stage.

The venue was Paradiso's Kleine Zaal, an intimate little upstairs space in that grand old church of a rock institution. Sold out, so I’ve got to think two or three hundred people. We made our way to the front before the show, where R overheard me and the lady friend and we all got to talking. Then the show started and the lady friend and I got to dancing, danced through the whole damn show and it was awesome. The band noticed, which had more than a little to do with the fact that though the crowd warmed nicely to the band, they just don't dance much here (Calvinists are not Baptists). At one point Craig, the lead singer, says thanks for being here, I yell out thanks for coming, and the bass player, Galen, looks over and mouths thanks back. Good people. Speaking of which, the keyboard player, Franz, comes out after the show to talk with the lady and me and R, probably to flirt with the lady, but ostensibly in appreciation of our energy. Sure I sweated it: his mustache is cooler than mine and he shows some damn sharp moves up on the stage. But we’re all adults here, so we chatted. And it was good. A good guy.

How outstanding is it that Craig carries his own duct tape, and they all open their own beers? Or at least the drummer does the opening for everyone else with his kit. For everyone except Franz who drinks wine from the bottle all night long. And for all his unique vocal stylings, I had no idea how much rap movement there would be in Craig’s stage manner. He was like a cross between Phife of Tribe Called Quest and Andy Kaufman. All the crazy energy in hand signals, head movements, and boozy, woozy antics. Not to mention all the things he yelled and sang that no one will ever hear, because he didn’t do it into the mic, because he just couldn’t help himself. Tad pulled a classic 360 guitar swing early on. Nice. Have I mentioned how much he rocks? Even while resorting to general goofiness with Craig. And man, we could reach out and touch that stage and it was awesome.

The music. Opened up with Stuck Between Stations. Closed the encore with Killer Parties. They played a lot from Separation Sunday in between. First was Cattle and the Creeping Things. Dear lord did it rock. I mean sweet child of everlasting grace, that was religion. Others from that album, off the top of my head, Your Little Hoodrat Friend, Multitude of Casualties, Banging Camp. I don’t know what they didn’t play off Boys and Girls in America. But everything they played – when those guitars get churning, and the beat is driving, the keyboard comes in like the apocalypse will be harmonized and Craig’s singing and screaming like he was born in Conviction and he’s been trying to get back to the light ever since – what do you say when you hear something like that?

They razed the room to ashes and dust.

Mea culpa

2007-02-12T21:34:00.000+01:00

It's been a while folks, but I'm back. It may be sporadic for a bit, but I wax with the sun. So stick with me, if you haven't got anything better to do.

To do, undone

2006-11-04T02:02:00.000+01:00

Tonight I did not go to hear Cat Power play live. I did not get to the show early to grab a good spot on the balcony and read a book or whatever while waiting for her to open. Which means I did not get to hear and perhaps even dance or at least sort of move in place to a rejuvenated and happy-to-perform Chan Marshall channeling the music she has written or covered.

And while I was not hearing her music, Chan Marshall did not have the opportunity to make meaningful eye contact with me -- an impressive feat, this eye contact she did not make, given that I was neither sitting nor standing all the way up on the balcony -- anyway, not having made eye contact with me, Ms. Marshall also did not have the opportunity to invite me backstage, where we did not discuss music and the most important things in life.

I would have liked to have discussed music and the most important things in life with Chan Marshall. As it is, I had a similar conversation with a friend, R. For all I know, the conversation I had was as good or better than the one I did not have with Chan Marshall. But still.

Not having gone backstage after the Cat Power show, I also did not get to hang out with the backing band, the Memphis Rhythm Band. Not having gone to the show at all, of course, I likewise did not get to hear the band, which is too bad because they have a pretty rocking lineup, including steel guitar, violin and sax. I'd have liked to have heard that lineup behind Cat Power. And needless to say, thinking about backstage again, where I wasn't, I didn't get to pick up any steel guitar or sax tips. Jammer, as they say here in the Netherlands.

There are a number of other things I did not get to today. Maybe I'll get another chance tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that.

Lights out

2006-10-22T23:29:00.000+02:00

The days are getting very, very short again. I'm amazed, as ever, at the way this city comes into itself in the early night.

Candles burn small and silent behind the windows of close brick buildings, buildings that lean against each other in the dark, lean over narrow streets and wide canals, lean into the glow of electric light to shrug off the late year's rain.

The raindrops bring the black canals to life and together with the cold and dark shroud bikers on back streets in mystery as they hurry past, the purposeful bikers, their lamps glowing weakly above their tires, disappearing down an empty lane.

And at my stamkroeg, my regular bar, as the days grow cold and short I can sit by the openhaard, the fireplace, and watch the shadows dance along the walls and windows, windows that look out on a huddled brick street where most of the other people in the bar grew up.

Still for the most part I do not like all this darkness. It comes down like a lid, closes us in, and no lit bridge, with arched stone or wood slats, can carry you across it. The people here endure the long night well, and with reason. But it remains a challenge.

A fantastic conversation

2006-10-15T23:31:00.000+02:00

Amazing what you can hear from a table over on a terrace on a fine fall day.

They had been speaking like this for a while.

"In the evening," she said, "we're all reduced to shadows. Shadows by moonlight, and all quick like silver, like that. But in the morning," and here she set down her dark beer, probably sweet, "we're brought back by the sun, by the sunlight."

"What," he asked, his fork held up between his face and his plate, "are you suggesting?"

"That," she stammered a little, "that at night I know a different truth. A different truth," she repeated herself. "What does that mean?"

When he didn't speak she went on. "It's like a dream. I can't escape its logic while I'm within it. But in the morning it makes no sense. The daytime is so much more sure, so certain. Surer. Surer? But still, whatever, it's not like that means anything at night." She inhaled audibly, perhaps for dramatic effect. "Isn't that scary?"

"What about the dawn?" he asked, not answering. "I always feel different at dawn." Then he added, "not that I'm awake then all that often, I mean at least not sober."

She was drinking her beer again. "Oh I don't know. The dawn's nice I guess."

Of course I had to madlib the words I didn't catch.

Take the baton

2006-10-09T00:37:00.000+02:00

Consider this another effort to elicit comment from my reticent readers. I'm looking for nominations for today's spirits kindred, for better or worse, to Évariste Galois. If you don't know his story, or don't mind a refresher, read on.

Galois was a sort of republican dauphin (if it's acceptable to say such a thing). Born in 1811 in a village south of Paris to the son of a politically involved republican, and schooled as a young child in Latin and classic texts by his mother, he became interested in mathematics as a teenager. He twice failed the test to enter the École Polytechnique, the latter occasion occurring two days after his father committed suicide following a politically charged run-in with the local priest.

Évariste also failed repeatedly to see his discoveries in the theory of polynomial equations published, the reasons for which are unclear, but he did publish three papers in 1830, laying the foundation for what came to be known as Galois Theory. The full articulation of Galois Theory, linking field theory and group theory in abstract algebra, was published posthumously – not entirely surprising, as he wrote much of its explication only two days before his untimely death.

Politically active, Galois was expelled from the school he did get into, the École Normale, for republican political agitation. He used his extra time to join the Republican Artillery Unit of the National Guard. The unit was dissolved to prevent it from destabilizing the government, with nineteen officers from the unit arrested on conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy. During the party following their acquittal, Galois toasted the king holding a dagger over his cup, and was promptly arrested – though ultimately acquitted – for threatening the king's life. He was later arrested and convicted, however, for showing up to a Bastille Day celebration armed to the teeth and wearing his old uniform.

While in jail, Galois saw another paper on the theory of equations rejected. Then his jail term ended early when he was transferred to a clinic with other prisoners as a precaution taken against a raging cholera epidemic. At the clinic, he fell madly in love with Stéphanie, daughter of Jean-Louis Poterin-Dumotel, one of the doctors. She, too, rejected him.

Within weeks Galois was fighting a duel he knew he would lose. Legend has it the duel was a royalist conspiracy to get him out of the way, but that legend's been long disregarded, and is possibly a fabrication that began with Galois himself. He stayed awake the entire night before the duel, writing his republican friends. Between scribbling "Je n'ai pas le temps" (I don't have time) over and over, and conveying other thoughts in other letters, he made clear his extraordinary mathematics in a letter to his friend Chevalier.

He was shot in the abdomen and dead the following day. His last words to his brother were: "Ne pleure pas, Alfred – j'ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans." (Don't cry, Alfred – I need all my courage to die at twenty.)

Among the barbarians

2006-09-29T02:22:00.000+02:00

Just back from the latest opera from Philip Glass, Waiting for the Barbarians, based on J.M. Coetzee's novel, libretto by Christopher Hampton. A striking, troubling piece of work.

The story goes something like this: an administrator of a frontier town watches with increasing horror while agents of the state, sent from the capital, torture and kill in the name of the truth and in the service of defending country and empire against a feared barbarian advance. The administrator, a man who enjoys his pleasures as well as his peace, develops an ambiguous, perhaps redeeming affair with one of the captured and tortured barbarians.

He endures a difficult journey with the barbarian to deliver her back to her people, for which he is branded a traitor, imprisoned and tortured like the barbarians before him. Before he is apprehended, though, while he is still journeying with the woman, his lover now, it is conceivable that she might yet return with him, live with him in his frontier town. But the treatment she has received makes that impossible, despite the hope of the administrator.

Back in the town, the citizens, first pliant in the name of state security, then complicit in the name of empire, turn against the administrator, returned from his journey a convict. But when the army fails in their attack on the barbarians, when the aggression brings only more hardship and not less, the town turns back to the administrator, finally, and away from the ongoing, debased warmongering of the state. The townspeople throw away the shades given them by the state – yes, sunglasses, which from the start of the performance mark the choice to observe a different truth, dark and distorted.

Now's an appropriate time to say that there is nothing subtle about the drama in this opera. It is entirely a product of its times, and that is what makes it effective, particularly disturbing. Philip Glass, I should mention, writes of "a bold allegorical approach," and states that "[t]o reduce the opera to a single historical circumstance or a particular political regime misses the point." While I agree there's some heavy allegory here, I insist on missing the point. I saw precious little in the way of narrative arc or character development or dramatic tension or drive: just some very bad people, a witness, a mob and some other, innocent people. Six years ago this would not have offered much. I hope that in fifty years it offers nothing more. But this opera is very powerful now, and precisely because such obvious, unsubtle horror is happening so obviously and unsubtly in the world.

The voice in my head is saying I'm the one that's guilty of oversimplifying. But what I'm saying is narrowly intended: I'm not referring to a drama that's considering the fog of war, the quest for beauty, the burden of empire, the will to power. Philip Glass writes that his opera concerns "confrontation, crisis and redemption." The confrontation and crisis are of the clearest sort, so over-the-top it's absurd: it's Waiting for Godot turned into an address from the War President. That we must recognize this for precisely what it purports to be is shattering.

I left the theater feeling that the greatest hope this opera offers, in the clarity of its absurdity, is that it will in time be reduced to a historical footnote for its simplicity. My companion, however, was not so optimistic. I don't believe Mr. Glass is, either. The characters, for instance, spend as much time lying on the ground as standing, as though they just don't have the strength to make it through an entire scene upright. All of them, every character, except the two highest ranking, most rotten state agents, who stand through nearly every scene they're in. Our protagonist, the administrator who fights for rightness and redemption, he ends the opera on a low note – literally: his last note is perhaps his lowest of the night – and he's lying down again, forced down as the ceiling of the sky descends on him, slowly.

And he is confused, the administrator, at the end of the play. In his confusion, the drama achieves its most complex insight. It's as damning as all the rest. The administrator still recognizes something good in his city, but knows the worst now. Yet having witnessed and been subjected to the worst, he cannot understand it. It stares him in the face, he says, but he can't see it. Not seeing, what can he do? He can go on, follow a road that might lead nowhere, he says, as he's forced to his belly again.

Something is terribly wrong. It's clear and horrible, it's all around and everyone's part of it. That's the confrontation and crisis. Redemption? Perhaps, but first the administrator has to understand the nature of what's gone wrong, why and how, then get a better idea where he might be headed.

At last I can mention the music and sets. Because in acknowledging open questions I've finally got around to admitting depth to this opera, and with depth, artistry. The orchestral and choir work is rich and haunting, and there are dream sequences that are all orchestra and choir. Classic Glass, all shifting rhythms and lowly changing textures, with drive and beauty as well as tension. And the set is a stunning thing of flowing screens and changing lights.

With the dreams, their music and the luminous world, we have something more, something that the corrupted world of state and burgher cannot entirely efface. Something that promises redemption after all, if we're strong enough to endure what we're part of, overcome what we've created, understand, perhaps, what we might be.

Three beginnings

2006-09-28T00:01:00.000+02:00

Why am I still plagued by stupid things I've done that are now long over and past? How is it that I still cringe, sometimes vocalize uncontrollably when I recall some dumb thing I did, what, two weeks ago, two years, even ten or more? In front of friends or strangers, doesn't matter, though the one group has obviously gotten over it, and the other likely never cared, or at least I shouldn't.

A cat with whom I'm on fairly familiar terms has invested a lot of energy in making clear to me and certain others that life is little more than alternation between physical satisfaction and spiritual indignation. Where one is present, the other will not be. Much of this philosophy, it's plainly obvious, has to do with not being able to reach doorknobs. Still, the cat may be on to something.

It's a werewolf's moon tonight. Well, not exactly, I mean it's not full, but it's large and glowing white, with thick ropes of cloud passing across it. There's a sharpness to its light, as if you can see more deeply into the shadows and darkened sky. And now there's a chill to the air, too, so that the day was a dream of summer heat, but the night is wakeful with cold communion.

Feel free to finish these or whatever in the comments.

Buzkashi, get it?

2006-09-18T16:32:00.000+02:00

Some time back, I asked what sport could be more impressive than fierljeppen. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you buzkashi. What you see above appears to be the very beginning of a competition.

Popular in Afghanistan, Buzkashi translates roughly as 'goat taking.' But don't be fooled: you use a calf. The field of play is variable, about the size of a town, small city or large village. Play can go on for days and occurs entirely on horseback. The riders use short whips to spur their horses or attack other players. The whips no longer include balls of lead at the tips; likewise, use of knives is now discouraged.

Before the game, the calf is beheaded and disemboweled, its legs are cut off at the knees, and the carcass is soaked in cold water for twenty-four hours to toughen it sufficiently to withstand the violent use it will see in the course of the competition. If the calf is undersized, the carcass may be filled with sand to add weight.

The action of the game consists in getting ahold of the calf carcass, carrying it away from the other players and around a flag at the edge of the playing area, then throwing the carcass into a scoring circle, or 'Circle of Justice.' There are not many rules as to how to go about doing this or preventing it from being done. You're not supposed to tie the calf carcass to yourself or your horse, and you're not supposed to hit the person carrying the calf carcass on the hand. Just about anything else will do, and vigorous play often leads to broken bones and copious bloodletting. Most players will attempt to play through any injury, except the ones who are drowned, but that is not so common anymore.

The horses are highly trained. Well-trained horses will stop on a dime and wait once their rider has been thrown. The best trained horses will accelerate to a hard gallop the instant their rider secures the calf carcass. Uniforms for the riders include high leather boots with sturdy heels, padded jackets over heavy robes, and fur hats made of fox or wolf.

The game winner is accorded great respect and given a wide berth wherever he goes.

Hello humility

2006-09-12T23:24:00.000+02:00

I played basketball yesterday in an organized, team setting for the first time since maybe elementary school. Which made for a fairly ridiculous evening.

For starters I had to explain to a bunch of practice-loving children of the Protestant Revolution that no, I couldn't remember a real practice, but yes, I had played basketball, and no, I wasn't a streetballer.

Then we began the period of interminable exercises. Trouble hits when I can't follow a simple pass and weave routine that's all the more complicated because this lazy guy cheats up to start a half court ahead of the rest of our line, but when everything goes to hell everyone wants to give the American helpful tips on how he can practice better. Thank you Team U.S.A.

I was surprised when we moved on to the two-handed chest pass practice. It's not like we've got all day in the gym. We need to use our time for that? But I was even more surprised to realize that I really don't throw my two-handed chest pass with two hands, and it might be helpful if I did.

After that came the array of arcane pass and shoot exercises along with an exercise that reputedly pertained to zone defense but in effect had more to do with a bunch of us standing in concentric circles and yelling.

Finally we got to play an actual game and I realized that, in addition to the two-handed chest pass, there were a couple other things I ought to work on that might be useful, like making shots and not running into people. It didn't help, however, that everyone wanted to show the American what real coaching is -- thanks again Team U.S.A. -- so they'd call out whatever came into their heads the second I touched the ball, and they'd do it in Dutch, and I didn't feel as though I had the option of just shutting them out since I was trying to convince them to let me play on their team, and it all got rather confusing and not conducive to making any more shots, or seeing the passing lanes, or dribbling.

So I was feeling less than confident when play stopped. Fortunately, this is Amsterdam, so I got a beer with a few of the players at the bar along the far wall. It turns out that liking beer was my best move of the night. That and already being friends with the really tall guy who's the top player on the team earned me at least another week.

I can't wait to show them what I've really got.

Traveling reflections 4: Get off the curb

2006-09-11T00:18:00.000+02:00

Why is it so hard to wait on a curb in New York City? It's just not easy there to resist the urge to stand in the street while waiting to cross it.

The sightlines are not appreciably worse in New York than elsewhere. Those couple steps don't offer even the plausible illusion of getting anywhere faster. And those who wait in the street in New York wait on the curb in the cities to which they travel or return.

The crowds? There're more people off the curb than on, everyone wedged into a small margin of gutter closely policed by yellow cabs. Still you have to do it, it gets in the bones. An expression of the New Yorker's impatience? Sounds closer to the truth, but doesn't account for tourists; and by this explanation I'd expect more street standing in Mediterranean or Asian cities, sun and Buddha notwithstanding. Whatever draws people into this curb-defying culture when in New York binds this culture to New York, so that it makes no sense, has no appeal elsewhere.

What is this ethos, where does it come from? How can such distinct behavior at once be so place-specific and so automatic, so pointless and so insistent, so mundane and so irresistible?

Traveling reflections 3: Reminiscing on the road

2006-09-08T23:32:00.000+02:00

In my rearview mirror there's a motorcycle, pretty far out, so that bike and rider are shadows shimmering in the heat coming off the highway. Standing out from the shadow, front and center, the bike's headlamp is a pearl above the blacktop. The cycle rides dead center of the three lanes, and behind, directly and to either side, come the cars silently pouring over the hill, and I think to myself, looking forward to the sky opening over the road ahead then back again to the rearview mirror, I don't remember this exactly, but I feel like I do, maybe I saw something like it in a movie.

I'm in the back seat, in the car with three other people. Music plays through the small speakers recessed in the doors. Each of us in the car knows the song, something epic with screaming guitars and a chorus to sing along to, loudly, and the sound of it fills the afternoon strip mall landscape as it goes rushing by. We pull into a parking lot, stop the engine and the music with it, get out of the car, hear the sounds of other traffic and parking cars, walk across the lot to go ask for donuts and coffee under fluorescent light that outshines the sun. Then it's back to the car with the music that picks up right where we left off, so that it's hard to imagine that we ever left this little space, though we've got the donuts and coffee to prove it. Still the memory is dubious.

We take a long train ride, pass along the coast, see the ocean stretch away, pass harbors here and there and small towns. We get to our destination, a bigger town, and we're met by friends in a car who take us to pick up a couple things, like bread. But there's no bakery in this town. We drive through the center, one or two streets with bars and performing arts spaces and brick buildings but no bakery. We drive a long way out on the state route, and across from the mall there's a bunch of stores and one of them, in a building that looks like a big plastic house or a place that sells carpets, is the bakery. We drive the same way back almost to the train station, because that's where the apartment is, where it's been the whole time, and I see a bakery across the street but it's gone out of business. I think to myself I don't ever remember a town without a bakery.

Traveling reflections 2: The man who was not Ray M.

2006-09-05T22:41:00.000+02:00

One very pleasant evening of the trip was spent in Dorchester, outside of Boston, with an old friend and his wife. The night was a slow progression of food and drink out on their balcony, lined with willow sticks, trimmed with blue sky then a handful of stars, until the very small hours of the morning.

This friend is, among many other things, a wine enthusiast. And he is as generous in his enthusiasm as he is subtle in taste. We had a lot to drink, and it was good.

Less good, however, was the long ride the following afternoon to our next destination. I woke in rough shape. I couldn't feel my extremities, and only managed to thank my friend with a series of weak invocations and unsightly spasms. Had there been an iota of hydration left available in my body, I would have wept.

Instead I drove to Connecticut. Near the end of our journey, pulling into a pharmacy for supplies, I thought I recognized another friend, Ray M., going even further back. The guy was approaching his car and I was still in mine as I yelled "Ray!" at him through the passenger window. He looked around before getting into his car, so I yelled "Ray M.!" and pulled up next to him. He looked back through his window and I yelled my name. Opening his eyes wide, he got out of his car.

As I turned off the radio and got out of my car, he introduced himself to my traveling companion. By the time I was around the car, my traveling companion was inside shopping, and Ray was waiting for me.

"How long's it been?" he asked. "Ten years?"

"Must be," I said. But to hear him speak, it felt even longer.

He'd been on hard times. His car was a wreck, he had kids but no job, was recently married and couldn't afford his cigarettes. His voice even sounded different. The cadence troubled me, or the new intonation of mean struggle and failure. I asked about the rest of his family. He spoke of his mother, but didn't mention his brother or sister.

Still, he looked glad to talk, share what he could. We talked for almost five minutes. Five minutes is longer than two days when you're covering more than ten years. Then we shook hands, clasped arms, wished each other all the luck in the world, hoped it wouldn't be ten years until the next time.

And he wasn't the friend I thought I knew, I've no idea who he might have been.

Traveling reflections 1: The in-flight movie

2006-09-03T23:48:00.000+02:00

Fresh back, still jet lagged, where better to begin than the end? The entertainment for our flight included, among other things, Hollywood's take on America's increasingly agonized political engagement, in the form of X-Men 3: Revenge of the Political Scientists, or something like that.

Before I go any further, there are two coincidences I feel obliged to mention. First, I have now seen all three X-Men films, all of them in airplanes. Second, I read a little review of this film in the New Yorker, which is odd because I don't often have my hands on the New Yorker, and when I do I mostly only read it for the cartoons, a particular article or the occassional poem, but rarely the little reviews. At any rate, the reviewer found this latest X-Men installment vastly inferior to the prior two releases. If I remember correctly, however, I thought those first two sucked, while I found this latest to be something else entirely.

So be it; about the film -- consider it by the following key: Charles Xavier, refined, kingly on his throne, is Europe; Logan, the loner and leader, man of action and few words who believes in a preeminent right to personal choice, is America; Magneto, gathering his brotherhood in the cities and forests, is The Reactionary; the guy who is responsible for the cure is Religion; the President, naturally enough, is Representative Democracy; Hank McCoy is Enlightened Government; and Phoenix is The Football.

Every character in this film is flawed and does something wrong, with the possible exception of Hank McCoy. No character is pure evil, though some resort more obviously to evil and censurable actions. The ending is ambiguous.

Logan, lacking the insight of Xavier's philosophic and aristocratic tradition, defies Xavier's wishes, leading to very bad consequences which Logan must correct at great cost.

Xavier's own course of action, an attempt to impose restraint where another man, younger in appearance and temperament, saw illegitimate control, was likewise flawed and led to his own demise.

Magneto is the new wave in violent ascendance. He is the oppressed come to power and the science of the future made immediate, without the patience of Xavier's wisdom. Deeply tied to Xavier, Magneto runs amok without him.

The President is weak though well-intentioned. The guy responsible for the cure falls back foolishly on a retrograde faith. Hank McCoy -- troubled, brave, the most visionary character in the film -- is nonetheless dependent on the powers that be around him. And speaking of the powers that be, there's the Phoenix.

What is the Phoenix? She's a nod to adolescent ticket buyers for one thing, which is too bad for the purposes of this post because I could use a little more clarity and less vapid, PG sex zombie stuff here. But she's most explicitly a higher power. Of what nature, I'm not sure. The people roused, human potential unchained? I don't think so. Truth? Perhaps, but the ultimate statement is awfully cynical. In the absence of better information, why not stay close to the literal? She is Power, and Logan loves her. I'll leave it there -- blame me or blame the film -- but plug in your own choice for the concluding thought, immediately below.

America, says X-Men, has made a mistake, and to make right, to take the world forward, America must destroy the Power to which it is devoted, once it has dispensed with the Reactionaries.

I should note that the film, in the context of this timeless dilemma, makes more or less overt references to present day political actors. Hank McCoy, I suggest, is not one of them, and the hope he represents at the end of the film is not vested in any one actor on the political stage today.

I would now like to switch gears, however, and mention that I noticed a lot of copies of In Cold Blood lying around a lot of bureaus all along the northeastern corridor of the U.S. I expect this coincidence has at least something to do with the film Capote. I wonder whether anyone in the near future will be picking up a copy of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, or Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution, or perhaps something still more contemporarily inclined to go alongside a few vintage X-Men pamphlets.

How many, two?

2006-08-21T05:19:00.000+02:00

Walking from the village to the lower east side relatively early this morning, I saw a few people standing around a blue post box, staring at cakes in a window. They were waiting for a bakery to open up. The cakes looked very good. Walking back along the same street this evening, I saw a still larger group of people, lined up along the same window, backing up all the way around the corner of the block. A young man wearing a smock and pastry chef's hat stood at the door with a cell phone in his hand, directing people inside as other customers left. This is the first bakery I've seen with a door policy.

Not long ago, by contrast, I found myself eating meals with a rail-thin New Yorker, a well-intentioned person, though hardly unusually socially conscious. He has, however, seen movies such as Super Size Me, and is painfully aware of America's reputation for, among other things, excess and wastefulness. Consequently, he prefers not to eat anything made with any amount of fat, grease or oil. Likewise, any culinary effort at manipulation or artistry is unacceptable for its overtones of decadence, the stuff of empire. As a result, his diet consists, for the most part, of raw grains.

I couldn't help but think of him as I passed back by the bakery this evening.

A brief interruption

2006-08-19T01:06:00.000+02:00

Dear Reader,

For the next two weeks, I'll be in the air and on the road. Come September I'll be all the way back, but in the meantime things may get dicey.

If you're new to the site, please enjoy the previous posts, below.

With great fondness,
General Bird

Clock of ages

2006-08-18T00:24:00.000+02:00

I met a friend yesterday, hadn't seen him in five years. A handful of emails in all that time. He hasn't changed a bit. I said, "You haven't changed a bit." He said, "Of course not."

Five years: many long hours, or five quick turns through four short seasons. I can barely recall who I was five years ago. I can hardly believe it's been more than a month since last I saw him.

So I'm wondering again at the instability of my sense of time. Someone recently told me he didn't believe in time. He expressed this in the course of denying fiction, because, he said, to write fiction is to chronicle fact, since the writer describes a corresponding action that likely occurs in the future. Make of the comments what you will. I heard in his words the warring specters of Newton and Einstein.

It has been asked before: what is the nature of our time, what do we know of ourselves by our relationship to it?

Consider the importance of the clock to our culture. In the religious Islamic world, the muezzin divides the day at five points according to physical phenomena. What can we say about the west in relation to other cultures by reference to its units of time?

Can the secular west be defined by its devotion to the division of each day into twenty-four hours, into fourteen-hundred-forty minutes? Are we able to return to a day organized by events discernible with the senses -- sunrise, sundown, high noon -- or, conversely, are we approaching something new, something still more radical? In the authority of the clock, do we have, among other possibilities, an expression of man's ingenuity and will triumphant, or an example of man's folly?

If, before going to sleep, I am sufficiently conscious of a time at which I must wake up, I can do so, without an alarm, to within minutes of that time. I believe this to be a common ability. So I wonder whether our units of clocktime actually find correspondence with the rhythms of our bodies. Alternatively, perhaps the sleeping mind superimposes natural sleep cycles against the hours assigned to the night. Or have we internalized an abstract fabrication to a remarkably intimate degree?

Of course, at two in the morning, once again, maybe I'm just a little tired.

Man and couch

2006-08-16T00:24:00.000+02:00

What is the attraction of man to couch? How many men wouldn't rather just fall asleep on the couch? Who has not gone crashing through the supergravity of sleep interrupted, belatedly finding his way to a mattress in the small hours of the morning?

It seems to have little to do with lifetime. And even less to do with whether someone's waiting in the guy's bed or not, unless that person is only freshly acquainted with the bed. Laziness?

There's something imperative about that couch. Something that seems so much more right than going to bed. Going to bed is subordinate, it's unmanly.

What is man, then, as he rides drifting on the couch past bonds of wakeful responsibility? Is he the hunter-gatherer at play in the fields of his subsistence? The laboring man, exhausted, still trying to produce, perform? Or bourgeois man, futilely fighting the infantilization he has embraced?

I'll be going to sleep now. Good night and god bless.

Pants in Waterland

2006-08-13T23:55:00.000+02:00

Went biking today outside of Amsterdam. Outside of Amsterdam, geologically speaking, is where the sea should be, but they filled it in long ago. Filling in the sea is a lot of work; there's only so much you can do. You can't, for example, make dry, hilly wine country. But you can make an unremmittingly flat and green expanse of good farmland. And when the sun rides high and bright, and clouds like fantastical airships drift at the edge of the sky, it's beautiful.

If you ride along the dyke that keeps the water out, you can see all of it as it goes on and on, and you can also see the villages, each one of them a café next to a church, surrounded by low brick and wood houses along narrow streets. And if you ride far enough you will come to Pants in Waterland. That's the name of one of the villages. Actually that's a translation, but it's accurate. I have no idea why they call it Pants in Waterland.

I do know that as you're riding away from Pants in Waterland, if you look back over your shoulder, moving away at speed, craning around in a position that is disorienting and hard to hold, the sun dazzling back at you as it nears the horizon, it's like looking across memory itself into timelessness.

What we know about each other

2006-08-12T01:52:00.000+02:00

What can I tell you about the guy who sells Z magazines outside the supermarket across the street? I can tell you he's a nice guy. I know this because he's usually smiling and often says hello. This is what the Z salesmen do, and I buy it from this guy. He's unassuming, but his presence is not negligible. He pantomimes exaggerated amusement when he sees me leave the liquor store next to the supermarket with two arms full of wine. I see him walking around the neighborhood sometimes. He has a pleasant gait. Says hello then, too. He's not Dutch, his complexion is ruddy-dark, he likes jumpsuits, and there's a light in his eye that reveals depth and confusion in equal measure.

I wonder what he can tell you about me.

The high-low revisited

2006-08-09T23:26:00.000+02:00

We have embraced the understanding that we can learn about the highest things by celebrating the lowest. What credence do we now give to the possibility that we understand the least by reference to the greatest?

What do I know about the driver who would run a red to attach me to his fender, and shatter my eardrums with his horn for the privilege -- how do I understand this man, the decisions he makes, the way he helps shape the government that I share -- by reference to, say, Søren Kierkegaard? Ok, take a less over-the-top example of incomprehensible behavior, but keep Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard looked into the light of his times and saw calamity, so he defied everything that he understood himself to be and plunged into the darkness instead. Or another: Nietzsche embraced the fellowship of man, but in the face of man's most comprehensive effort to provide for universal fellowship, he foresaw failure and turned inwards for salvation.

Of course, Kierkegaard's darkness and Nietzsche's isolation were both alleviated by a different sort of shared presence: the ideas of others who lived in different times and places. Neither was entirely alone; they were joined in a community of thought. In that thought, that community, they found relief from the disappointment of the decisions of a people they would embrace, people they understood too well and described with great artistry.

What are we able to know about ourselves, the world around us, its frustrations, the occassions of our impotence, when we contemplate that art, when we look to the select few who have considered most closely and addressed with the most care precisely who we are, who we might be?

And it's not just a negative thing. I shouldn't wait until late to write these entries. Because what from all this can we learn about our enthusiasms, about the ways we love, the persistence of goodness?

Fierljeppen: catch the fever

2006-08-07T22:39:00.000+02:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you fierljeppen (pronounced: fear-l-yeppen), a traditional Dutch sport, precursor to pole vaulting. I learned about this sport the other day, when someone set simultaneous records for distance jumped and self-punishment. The two go hand in hand in this sport, but more on that below.

The origin of fierljeppen, like most forms of Calvinist recreation, is functional. The Netherlands, or lowlands, being formerly underwater -- except for the series of natural dykes (like small island chains) on which really stubborn, geographically challenged farmers originally set up shop -- it was pretty hard to get around. And you couldn't drag your boat everywhere any more than you could own enough boats to have them handy all around the farm. (Farms on water-logged dykes allow for only so much excess wealth.) So, refusing to do anything reasonable like move to France, you walked around with a long stick and threw yourself over the water, from highground to highground, as it were.

Today, people in the north of the country, where it all started, continue to throw themselves over the water. They're no longer doing this, for the most part, on farms, so they appear to have opted to land in sandlots, instead. The result being: the better you are, the greater the height from which you are falling onto a rural driveway.

In the video above, rather than seeing entirely traditional fierljeppers, we see evidence of fierljeppen's siren song, spreading the world over. The instructor lands, uncharacteristically, on his feet; the students do about as well as one could expect.

For some real fierljeppen, however, try the video links on this page. I commend your attention to the righteous, bearded spectator on the bench in the first video linked, top of the list. Is that Bruce Jenner?

Glory untold to the person who can name the sport that's even cooler than this one. Yes, it's out there.

Sweet inspiration

2006-08-05T22:08:00.000+02:00

The most incredibly sick thing happened today. I went out to this lake, right, this lake where it's all a little funny because I mean a lot of people haven't been going to the lake lately other than like newscasters and whatever because it's that these sheep and cows -- for real, sheeps and cows -- anyway they've all been kind of disappearing from around the lake, no joke. So me and some buddies went up there to check it out and maybe go swimming. Dude, bad call.

I lost my best friend, this hot chick that I only just met like when we first got to the lake, and half a case of beer. The cold half. You'll never guess how. I'm still in fucking shock, in case you couldn't tell.

To a fucking crocodile. This giant fucking crocodile, in the middle of the goddamn lake! Motherfucker. I was like Holy Fucking Shit! It totally came up out of the water and just started eating shit. I mean, when Brad thought he'd do his lumberjack thing but with real log rolling, it was like: good christ, No.

I think that's the movie I'm going to watch later. Boy am I excited.

Stamkroeg

2006-08-03T22:25:00.001+02:00

Still another question:

What is it to sit quietly at the quiet bar? Drink one beer and another in the company of people who share the same devotion to the middle distance: call them friends, decent people. So sometimes there's talk, certainly; there are observations like there are beer mats.

Because this is the bar where the regulars go. Not a wise-cracking place or a back-slapping place or a place where the almost lucky drink to sentimental oblivion. Noone doesn't make it home.

There's laughter, too, some comfort. But the silence shames them both in time -- it's no punishment, no unusually bitter flavor to the beer, it's just that time and modesty are in abundance here.

So who's to say what this is?

Sing auspex

2006-08-01T22:53:00.000+02:00

Alright, let's diversify. I say let's -- I imagine company. Who is with me here, now? But the diversification. Something at once more mystical and quotidian. Something like this:

Where do birds go to die? That's right, one more time: where do birds go to die? Or perhaps: Where do city birds go to die? (I'm not sure the distinction need be made -- I've lived outside of the city and not seen dead birds in any greater number; but while the number of dead birds remained roughly constant, at close to zero, the amount of space available to them was considerably greater.) At any rate, think about how many birds you see alive every day, and now think about how many you see dead. And of the relatively smaller number of dead birds, how many of them have not been roadkill?

Some birds, if not most, must be dying naturally somewhere. So where? They can't all be dying in their nests. Surely if that were the case I'd have seen at least one non-infant carcass in one nest by this point in my life, which I haven't. I also have neither seen nor heard of concentrations of dead birds in parks or other open spaces. And, of course, they're not just kicking off on streets and sidewalks without that fuel-injected nudge.

Tucked away in corners? Wouldn't someone have smelled that? Leaving the city to spend their last days in comfort? Unlikely. Plus, if both urban and non-urban birds were concentrating outside of the city to shed this mortal coil, then I'd expect to have seen more discarded avian coils than I did during my tenure outside of the metropolis.

Secret bird burial ground? Has anyone run a genetic comparison of bird and elephant dna? Are there any other behavioral similarities? Can birds even dig?

What if it's more sinister? What if they're not even really alive? Or, leaping past the implications of that last question, what if they're not alive as we know it?

This could be big. Surely someone has considered the question.

[I'm going to put some bird names here in the interest of attracting to the site people who might know something on point. Heron, humming bird, eagle, falcon, hawk, sparrow, albatross, owl, blue-throated warbler, nightingale, yellow-bellied pip, quail, robin, oriole, phoenix.]

first post, looking forward

2006-07-30T16:24:00.000+02:00

Here we are then. Another bit of sound in the echoing chamber. I approach this project with some ambivalence -- a terrible way to approach something one is about to do of one's own accord -- and I expect that I am not alone in this disposition. But I am inclined to say, in that vein, that what I most wish to explore here is the idea of being alone or not being alone today. How do you describe a mass of increasingly indistinct individuals?

I'll leave that there: I'm hoping more for feedback -- dialogue, ideally -- than a podium.

That said, if you feel you've already got enough to get the ball rolling, please do so. But while the question above is and will remain a guiding light, I hope to approach its illumination gradually. So I will offer a different question:

How coherent is history as a progression of ideas? That is, how well can we understand or describe the condition of a given people (I'm talking western, here, but feel free to apply your thoughts as and where you see fit) if we use as our point of reference its most refined statements of self-awareness? What do we know about the voting public of the United States, or Denmark, for that matter, by reference to Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Heidegger?

Take care, and good luck out there.