Only Connect--Assuming You Have Signal

I've been thinking about connection and disconnection, nearness and distance, a lot lately. Maybe it's just end-of-year-stock-taking, maybe it's part of the aging process, maybe I'm just  seeing the world becoming increasingly fragmented in spite-- or maybe because-- of our personal technological and communication devices and the "advances" they provide.

Only Connect is the title of a book about connecting reading and writing, written by a former professor and colleague of mine at UNH, Tom Newkirk, about those connections and about how connection in general is essential to being human.  The title is lifted from a passage in E.M. Forster's novel Howards End:  "Only connect!  That was the whole of her sermon.  Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.  Live in fragments no longer.  Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."  I'm always struck, when I quote real and accomplished writers, how ballsy it is for me to throw my little onanistic bits out there; I can't help but suffer by comparison, and yet there it is....

Humans are a social species, as, I guess, what species isn't?  But given our constantly shifting and developing ever-more-sophisticated means of communication, isn't it ironic that we actually have less and less personal communication, about less and less essential stuff?  It's easy to discover what someone had for breakfast or what they're doing at any given moment, 'cause we tell each other those things way too readily.  How much of the real, important, soul-searching-and-connecting stuff gets out there, though?  I'm afraid that it's less and less, and maybe because we're so inundated by the trivial that we don't even know what's important anymore.  Connection kills the beast and the monk(!), socializes us, and lets us know how alike we really are.  Some of you who read this may be stunned that I think this way, but I guess sometimes--or often--perception is reality.

Saw a Louis C.K. special recently on HBO, I think.  I don't love some of his stuff, as it's too crassly and gratuitously vulgar for me (shocking, eh?  I do have some standards, though), but he can be a pretty brilliant and incisive social commentator.  One of his bits concerned an experience he had at his daughter's dance recital; as the performance began, suddenly every parent in the audience held up cell phones to take photos or video of their darlings' every movement.  The cameras, of course, were directly in front of the parents' faces; effectively, they were blocking the real, the here-and-now, in order to record the event to be viewed later, maybe--do people really look at that stuff after it's happened, after it's recorded?  Or do they just post it to MyFace for friends, relatives and strangers to ignore?-- and in inferior aural and visual quality.  As C.K. put it, the resolution's way better in real life.  I was thinking of that when I commented on people camping out for days over Thanksgiving in order to stock up for Christmas, choosing the one event over another or, in this case, reality for a technologically reproduced facsimile.  The actual is sacrificed for a virtual representation at one remove, at least, from reality.  How can that be good?

Another sign of the coming apocalypse, or maybe just another indication of fragmentation and disconnection in society, is the practice of people foregoing land phone lines for cell-only.  Now, I get the rationale economically, and it may be a really minor point, but back in the olden days, when you'd call a phone number, there was an air of mystery or uncertainty involved.  Who was gonna answer?  Were you going to speak with  the person you were intent on calling, or with their spouse, or a kid, or babysitter, aunt, uncle, grandmother--who?  It was nice sometimes to talk, even briefly, with someone other than the ultimate object of your call.  How else would you get to chat with a kid, to learn about what was happening in someone else's life, get different news or info?  Now, we call a personal phone, know exactly to whom we'll speak, and that's that.  It may be more efficient, but it feels like something's lost in that efficiency, that some sort of societal connection is lost in the name of putatively more efficient personal communication.

It will be interesting to see, if we have time enough left for much further adaptation on this planet, what effect the fractured communication and connection modes we're embarking on will have on us.

The preceding was written on Sunday, and I fully intended to polish it, finish it, publish it, maybe even ish-ish (whatever that means--I just realized there were lots of "ishes" in that lisht) it, and play all of the "connection" and "together" songs I had but, alas, as if to illustrate fragmentation and distance, it ain't gonna be.  So, as of Monday:  no end-of-year show, no well written, cogent, coherent blog post:  just stuff.  At any rate, Happy New Year to all, and may we all get what we wish for, and not necessarily what we deserve....  Hope to see you all back here next week, but the future's so hard to predict, innit?

So This Is Christmas....

Well, then, let's try this again, shan't we?  Seems like only a year ago that I had this ginormous show planned; Xmas was on a Tuesday (my show day), we didn't have huge plans, I'd missed tons o' shows 'cause of work, and so I was gonna do a 4 hr. marathon.  Well, life got in the way, what with illness and hospitals and all that lovely stuff, so lo, it did not come to pass.

This year, conditions and events are somewhat similar:  I'm in the midst of building a house and so have missed a few shows; illness, injury and strife elbow their way into our lives; Xmas Eve, not Xmas, falls on Tuesday this year, but, hey, close enough for jazz, right?  So I'm gonna condense last year's playlist into a 3 hour show, and see what happens.  The fates may yet have other plans, but I'm'a act as though I can pull this one off.

There was a little piece in this Sunday's Times about how radio stations' going to an all Christmas format in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas was, as the article put it, "rocket fuel for ratings;"  stations see their listenership skyrocket when they provide a steady diet of holiday-cheerful songs.  Jesus (so to speak), I'd open a vein if I had to play (or listen to) nothing but that stuff for a month.  For a few hours, though, I might pull it off, although my playlist is hardly traditional or even (surprise, surprise) Christ-centered.  One wrinkle I've added is to combine two or three (or four!) song titles which have, on their own, nothing to do with Christmas, into a medley that, borrowing a portion of each song's title, combines to form a traditional Christmas song title.  F'rinstance, The Rolling Stones' "You Got The Silver"  played back-to-back with Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" yields, in someone's twisted mind (hello!) "Silver Bells."  Doc and Merle Watson's "Frosty Morn" and John Prine's "Humidity Built The Snowman" give..., well, you probly get the idea.  So here's a playlist:

Christmas Must Be Tonight                                                       The Band
It's Christmas Time                                                                    James Brown
Kung Fu Christmas                                                                    Christopher Guest/Nat'l Lampoon
Merry Christmas,Baby                                                               Lou Rawls
Friend Of Jesus                                                                          John Stewart
Bach: Cantata #22, Jesus nahm....                                              Yo-Yo Ma, et al
Jesus Christ                                                                                 Arlo Guthrie
Christmas With Jesus                                                                  Josh Rouse
Jesus Was A Capricorn                                                               Darrell Scott
Jesus Was A Cross Maker                                                           Judee Sill
Jesus Just Left Chicago                                                               ZZ Top
Jesus Is Just Alright                                                                     Doobies
Christmas Time (Is Here Again)                                                 Fabs
On Christmas Eve                                                                       John Hartford
Christmas Time Blues                                                                 John Lee Hooker
Christmas Time Is Here                                                              Bela Fleck & The Flecktones
Christmas Time                                                                           Ray Charles
Christmas Ain't Christmas                                                          The O'Jays

Father Christmas                                                                          The Kinks
Getting Ready For Christmas Day                                               Paul Simon
Variations On The Kanon By Pachelbel                                      George Winston
The Rebel Jesus                                                                            Jackson Browne
Trip With Jesus                                                                             The Union Underground
Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis                         Tom Waits
Christmas In Kyoto                                                                       Michael Franks
Christmas In Prison                                                                      John Prine
Christmas Morning                                                                       Lyle Lovett
Christmas Morning                                                                       Loudon Wainwright III
Christmas Wish                                                                             NRBQ
Jesus, Etc.                                                                                     Wilco
Tell Me What Kind Of Man Jesus Was                                         Big Bill Broonzy
Jesus Wrote A Blank Check                                                          Cake
C'mon Jesus                                                                                   Firesign Theatre
Come On Down Jesus                                                                    John Kongos
River                                                                                               Joni Mitchell
Birthday                                                                                          Fabs

Silent Eyes                                                                                      Paul Simon
Night                                                                                               Bruce Springsteen

You Got The Silver                                                                         Stones
Ring Them Bells                                                                             Dylan

Frosty Morn                                                                                    Doc & Merle Watson
Humidity Built The Snowman                                                        John Prine

I'm Walkin'                                                                                       Rick Nelson
Winter                                                                                              Stones
Wonderland                                                                                      Michael Franks

Little Big-Time Man                                                                        Dirk Hamilton
Heavy Metal Drummer                                                                    Wilco
Boy                                                                                                   Darden Smith

We                                                                                                     The Roches
Wish You Were Here                                                                        Pink Floyd
You                                                                                                    George Harrison
Merry Go Round                                                                               The Replacements
Christmas                                                                                           The Who

Oh, come on, give the no-singer some, to contra-indicate Jim Morrison.  Anyway, I hope my too-clever-by-half-self-indulgence doesn't stop you from listening, or at least enjoying vicariously.  Happy Xmas. (War Will Never Be Over).

Tubercular Bells

Okay, so this title is obscure and convoluted even for me, and thus, I fear, needs explanation, although I know that dissecting anything kills it.

1.)  'Tis the season of bells, of various sorts: jingle, silver, sleigh, and cash register (yeah, yeah, that's a "beep" now, but you know what I mean).  Even that most iconic of Christmas movies, It's A Wonderful Life, albeit in its dark middle section, has a scene wherein Nick the bartender repeatedly opens the register drawer and gleefully says "Dig me--I'm giving out wings" after Clarence has informed him that "every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings," and of course the movie concludes with Zuzu echoing that line.

2.) The cash registers' ring has become the most holy of bells in current American Xmas (Christ is definitely gone from this view) celebrations, as we literally trample (sometimes to death) and tase our fellow "humans" in an effort to beat them to deals on merchandise we and they often don't need or want.  Xmas has become a sort of secular Confession; in the Catholic orthodoxy (and I may be oversimplifying a bit), one sins and sins, then receives absolution from those sins by confessing them to a priest and doing a minor penance--a couple of "Our Father"s, a few "Hail Mary"s.  In our American Xmas celebrations, people can apparently treat others--up to and including their children and other family members--like shit all year and then be cleansed by showering them with lavish gifts 1/365th of the time.  And in order to be able to buy those gifts at the cheapest prices possible (we want some form of absolution, but not at full retail, for Christ's sake), we have caused stores to open on Thanksgiving day, promising fabulous savings.  People camp out in front of their chosen store for days, eagerly awaiting the possibility of somehow saving money, while ignoring the holiday right in front of them, Thanksgiving.  Store clerks have to work on Thanksgiving now or risk being fired, people somehow feel pressured into joining the herds, throngs, packs or risk missing out on something apparently important to someone. We have traded one holiday for another; giving thanks for what we have has been superseded by giving gifts to expiate the guilt for what we have not (done). Consumed by guilt, perhaps, we are driven to consume gilt.

3.)  Wendell Berry (essayist, novelist, environmentalist, poet, former tobacco farmer from Kentucky--hey, nobody's perfect)  has noted that when Tuberculosis was prevalent, into the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was often called "consumption," and known as "the wasting disease" because one of its effects was significant weight loss--sufferers wasted away.  Berry made the connection between the wasting of that form of consumption, and the effects on our lives and on our very planet of our culture's ravenous and insatiable consumption and waste of goods and resources.  Waste is waste. Ain't it ironic that our destructive consumption reaches its feverish apogee annually when we are ostensibly celebrating the birth of an ascetic savior whose major teachings concern caring for the poor and afflicted.

4.)  In 1972, William Friedkin directed a movie called The Exorcist (full disclosure: I'm the person from my generation who has never seen the film).  I trust that you all know its basic premise; if not, you can Google it. Basically, it deals with demonic possession of the body and soul of a young girl, and two priests' attempts to exorcise the Devil.  The main theme song to the film was "Tubular Bells," by Mike Oldfield. 

So there you have it:  the bells, consumption in a couple of senses, the impression that far, far too many Americans become possessed by possessing at this time of year, and the theme music for it all. 

Whew.  It's enough to make your head spin.

Some songs, then:

Caravan                                                                                   Van Morrison
Black Friday                                                                            Steely Dan
Maximum Consumption                                                          The Kinks
Shopping Trolley                                                                     Beth Orton
Trick Bag (Shoppin' For My Tombstone)                               John Lee Hooker
Mannequin Shop                                                                      Paul Westerberg
Last Of The Big Time Spenders                                              Billy Joel
Window Shopping                                                                   Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
Time To Spend                                                                         Chris Smither
Can't Buy Me Love                                                                  Fabs
The Busy Girl Buys Beauty                                                     Billy Bragg
Try Some Buy Some                                                                George Harrison
Buy For Me The Rain                                                              Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Somebody Buy Me A Drink                                                    David Johansen
Buy It In A Bottle                                                                    Richard Ashcroft

I'll Buy                                                                                     The Replacements
You Can't Buy My Love                                                          Robert Plant
Ain't There Something Money Can't Buy?                              Young-Holt Unlimited
Ring Them Bells                                                                      Bob Dylan
Painted Bells                                                                            Boz Scaggs
Tollin' Bells                                                                              Butterfield Blues Band
The Bells                                                                                  Laura Nyro
Bells                                                                                         Monty Python
Junk                                                                                          Paul McCartney
Singalong Junk                                                                        Paul McCartney
Junk                                                                                          Victoria Williams
The Gift                                                                                    Bruce Cockburn
Gifts                                                                                          Bruce Cockburn
The Sweetest Gift                                                                     Sade
The Gift                                                                                    David "Fathead" Newman
The Greatest Gift                                                                      Robert Plant
Tubular Bells                                                                            Mike Oldfield

See you Tuesday, noon till two, wool.fm, "tollin' like the tongue of doom."                                                                                

"...Writers Wrote Books, Thinkers Thought About It..."

What is a life well-lived?  What that we do is of value, and to whom, and for how long, and why?  I raised those sorts of questions last week in thinking about my friend Tom who died recently.  MA, PhD, immersed in music, literature, art, drama, traveler of the world: Tom lived a full and filled life, emptied by dementia long before actual death.  We all know on some level--however much we'll actually let the fact sink in--that we're gonna die, and that it's pretty unlikely that we'll carry memories of our lives, learning and experiences with us, any more than we'll bring cash or, if you're Egyptian royalty, cats.

Why then do so many of us take in as much as we can, immerse ourselves in the Arts or travel or mindless consumption (see next week's post for more on that, I think)?  Is it denial of death?  Is it a way to leave something of ourselves behind, some lasting monument that says "I was here once, goddammit!  Attention must be paid!"?  Denial of death becomes assertion of existence; I don't think that the two are necessarily the same.

Much to my family's chagrin, I am not a traveler, at least in outward realms.  I don't have a bucket list, a need to walk on the moors or loll about in Tuscany, or see Disneyland.  And yet books and music and art and even this stupid blog are of immense importance to me, as a way to experience the lives and thoughts and emotions of other humans, to connect, to draw from and perhaps even add to the enormous trove of the talents and thoughts humans have created and left behind.  But again, why?  If I am extremely fortunate I will have all of that within me, accessible, until I shuffle off.  But of course that's already not true and, given family history, a lifetime of actively ingesting corrosive substances and now being passively exposed to an incredibly vast array of body- and soul-destroying chemicals, it's increasingly likely that my mind and memory will journey to the elsewhere before my body does.

In her first book, Elemental, Alice B. Fogel wrote a poem based on a writing exercise I used to use in my classes which took the familiar phrase "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" and used it as the title and jumping-off point of an essay we'd all write.  I think some cool stuff came out of that, because it sort of forces one to be reflective, to think metaphorically, and to make connections that might not naturally occur to an 18 year old--or most 50 year olds, for that matter.  Here are a few lines from that poem, "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear:"

Meanwhile, we paint our self-
portraits on everything
imaginable, then hold
them up like mirrors.
Our mercurial brushes
grow longer, our skills
more acute.  Dust clouds
the vision, tinder
to the eye.  So we burn
trees to save the forests, burn
air to fly afar.  We do, we say.
We can....

Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Cat's Cradle, 

We do, doodely do, doodely do, doodely do,
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must;
Muddily do, Muddily do, Muddily do, Muddily do,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.

And maybe it's as simple as that:  we do things because we can, often don't consider whether we should, and the devil take the hindmost.  What an interesting group of organisms.

Here're some songs for this week's show, then, on Tuesday from noon til two on wool.fm:

Age of Reason                                                                    Wake Ooloo
There's A Reason                                                                 A. A. Bondy
There Is A Reason                                                               Alison Krauss & Union Station
Finally Found A Reason                                                      Art Garfunkel
Ain't No Reason                                                                  Brett Dennen
Reason To Believe                                                               Bruce Springsteen
Reasons                                                                               Earth Wind & Fire
Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3                                          Ian Dury & The Blockheads
All The Right Reasons                                                        The Jayhawks
Reasons For Waiting                                                            Jethro Tull
Two Good Reasons                                                              John Gorka
Reasons To Rise                                                                   John Stewart
Reason To Cry                                                                      Lucinda Williams
No Reason                                                                            Nick Lowe

Reason To Believe                                                                Rickie Lee Jones
Reason To Believe                                                                Rod Stewart
Any Reason                                                                           Tanita Tikaram
The Reason                                                                            Thunderclap Newman
Give Me One Reason                                                            Tracy Chapman
There Must Be A Reason                                                      War
Turning Point                                                                         David Lindley
The Point Of It                                                                       Yo La Tengo
Do You Realize?                                                                    Flaming Lips
Let The Slave                                                                         Van Morrison
Spark In The Dark (On The Moody Existentialist)                Alpha Band
Take It Where You Find It                                                     Van Morrison

That last, whence comes the title of this post, has become my favorite Van song and mantra.  Hope you'll listen and like.