It has been my honor to host these weekly Wednesday gatherings for nearly a year.

I arrived at S&R with a simple goal – I just wanted you to look. You all rose to the task every week with imagination, curiosity and humor.

You made my job easy.

These weekly photos explored the daily objects in my world. I revolve in a very small piece of this amazing planet and there is so much more to explore. After considerable thought I have decided to step aside in hopes that someone else may take up this banner. Art evolves because of the artist and I really want you to keep looking!

Thank you for sharing your Wednesdays with me. So rather than say farewell – I’ll just catch you all somewhere down the road… Dawn

In Independence Day (1996), the writer/director had aliens raze the world’s major cities. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), he flooded then froze the northern hemisphere. (By those standards, Emmerich’s destruction of New York City in Godzilla (1998) seems like such small potatoes.)

In his latest big-screen apocalyptic spectacle, 2012, Emmerich breaks apart the earth’s crust, rending the very continents themselves. But while Emmerich offers plenty of eye candy, his movie lacks any real “wow” moments. The end of the world never looked so cartoonish.

But it’s a wicked cool cartoon, full of destruction on a massive, massive scale. As the continents die, billions of people die with them—and moviegoers will no doubt find it all so very awesome to behold even if it isn’t especially suspenseful or emotionally engaging.

In place of engagement, Emmerich relies on his usual emotional shortcuts: Good guys win or, if they lose, they do so with a moment of slap-dash poignancy: bad guys/cretins/jerks/annoying people get their just desserts in almost-clever ways. Those little old ladies who drive too slowly on the highway and refuse to get out of your way? Yeah, even people like them get the kibosh.

Emmerich builds his premise on the kind of inflated pseudoscience that froze the world in The Day After Tomorrow. In that movie, Emmerich took global warming theories and exaggerated and extrapolated them into doomsday. In 2012, neutrinos shot at earth by the largest solar flares ever trigger a physical reaction inside the earth that causes the crust to shift.

The earth’s breakup just happens to happen in the year 2012, the same year the ancient Mayan calendar ends. Some fans of the end-of-days have interpreted that to mean the Mayans pegged 12/21/2012 as Doomsday. (Believe it or not, the Mayan calendar ends because the Mayans actually just ran out of numbers.) Still, because the Mayan theory has caught on in popular culture, 2012 will no doubt have its gloomy believers the same way Y2K did.

Emmerich doesn’t seem to really care whether the predictions about the Mayan calendar are true or not. In fact, he hardly even mentions the Mayans. Emmerich just wants an excuse to blow things up, and the Mayans provided a convenient excuse. Otherwise, Emmerich couldn’t give a crap. He’s just interested in big, big, big—as in “California slides into the ocean” kind of big. Who cares about Mayans when you have tidal waves taller than the Himalayas?

Emmerich doesn’t sweat the small stuff, like when the lead character, played by John Cusack, grudgingly brings his kids home days early from a camping trip at his ex-wife’s request yet still has to rush off because he’s late for work. Audiences aren’t supposed to wonder, either, how Cusack can drive a rickety old RV faster than a supersonic ash cloud blasted from the world’s largest supervolcano.

In fact, the real point of the movie might not be that the world is ending but rather than John Cusack can apparently out-drive anything, including ash clouds, earthquakes, and collapsing buildings. Cusack’s frantic driving gets to be ridiculously over-the-top, but it’s also meant to be crazy fun, too.

After a while, though, it all just gets to be a bit much. In the end, there’s no reason to care about the end. There’s no emotional heft, no existential weight, no substance to the spectacle. There’s plenty of bang, yet it elicits hardly a whimper. The end of the world is just old hat, and even Emmerich seems a little bored.

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

Yes, there are gangs in real life, and there is some level of underworld in our major cities. But our movies would lead you to the conclusion that every street corner is a drug marketplace, every precinct is infested by corrupt cops, in every alley lurks an assassin, every bar is a spontaneous kung fu fight waiting to happen and every nightclub is a potential gang warfare site.  Around every corner a secret agent lays in wait for another secret agent. Domestic abuse is rampant and a serial killer lurks in your closet waiting to decapitate you.  Some zombie wants to eat your brains.

The real world does offer some of these adventures (the supernatural notwithstanding) but, again, the point of the story is to provide an escape for the viewer.  One thing to remember, though: violence always has a victim. Very few chainsaw murders are consensual.

Sex in the movies is also plentiful. It’s in our ads and our magazines, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere.  But there are rules. Flash a single breast or hint at a risque sex scene and your movie gets an R rating.  Show anything more and you’re stuck with an X rating – if you get a rating at all.  Movies with gratuitous nudity get R ratings, while others flirt with “the line” and get away with a PG13. In general, the idea is to offer various levels of nudity and sexuality for the sake of appealing to various levels of horny viewers (mostly men) and to make a buck in the process. It’s easy to view this brand of escapism as more positive than violence, mayhem and death.

Then there are more artistically inclined movies, usually independent, that ask us to think about real life.  In these stories, people who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies might get together and do the things that normal people do.  Some breastfeed in public.  Some have non-erotic showers.  Some change clothes.  Some kiss.  Some have sex.  They might show some skin but almost every human is nude at least once a day, right? Skin happens.

If these stories are told effectively we will relate to the characters as they tap into experiences that we all share.  They show reality, or some plausible fictionalized version of it.  Sometimes there are heated arguments and even violence, but they spare us the fx. No blood spatter analysis, nobody shot at point blank range, no body parts flying at us in 3D.

With this in mind, let’s think about the Moral Majority and its neo-puritan descendants.  Which movies seem to catch their attention?  What is it that gets under their skin and ruffles their feathers?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question.

While I respect the rights of people to choose what they see, let’s consider some numbers. Last year, depending on your source, between 15k and 20k Americans were murdered.  This adds up to about six people in 100,000.  Each of these murders, by definition, put an unnatural end to someone’s life.  Friends and family mourned, and in many cases incurred physical and emotional burdens that they will never shed.  The suck factor for homicide is 100%.

Last year approximately a quarter billion Americans had consensual sex.  (Okay, I’m making this statistic up but it can’t be far off.)  If the number is close, this comes to about 70,000 people in 100,000.  Each of these instances (by definition) involved two (or more) people coming together and enjoying the company of another for a time.  Whereas being a murder victim is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, many of these people will choose to have repeat episodes with the same person.  In general, then, it’s safe to assert that most of these victims of consensual sex leave better than they arrived.  The suck factor for sex is not zero but it’s a lot closer to zero than it is to 100%. (Obviously I emphasize “consensual” for a reason – non-consensual sex, sex with a victim, is not sex – it’s violence.)

Isn’t this odd?  Movies portray violence on an exaggerated, unrealistic scale. Violence has a very high suck factor. And nobody bats an eye.  Other movies depict natural sexuality (or maybe unrealistic, but harmless sexuality). And sex is an act that almost every adult in the country takes part in on a semi-regular basis (or they’d like to). The suck factor is very small. And this is what gets conservative panties in a bunch.

So to sum up: in art it’s fine to kill, maim and destroy but it’s not okay to portray a satisfying natural encounter or to take a picture of said encounter.

When you think about it, this bizarre dynamic extends well beyond the arts.  The Right has no problem advocating and rushing into real wars, wars that leave a lot of innocents dead along with the baddies we’re supposedly liberating them from. But sensuality, in all cases outside of married Christian sex, is considered bad (and even that isn’t to be depicted or talked about).  A major irony here is that when we consider all of the political sex scandals from the past few years Republicans seem to comprise a large majority of the perpetrators.  They profess to frown upon nudity, upon cleavage, upon homosexuality, upon sensuality of any type.  But behind closed doors this is exactly what everyone seems to seek.  Even some of the loudest proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act have been caught in hypocritical, compromising sexual situations.  Amusing, or perhaps tragic, is the fact that morality police like David Vitter and Larry Craig snuck behind the backs of their spouses for sexual fulfillment, betraying personal as well as public trusts.  Couples who simply acknowledge the realities if normal human sexuality, on the other hand, can explore their curiosities and desires with the full support, blessing and (optional) involvement of their life partners.

Damn, America has it backwards.

Europeans are a lot more comfortable with their bodies than Americans.  Their magazines feature topless women and there are far more topless beaches.  They have movies with unabashed sexuality (you even find live sex acts in respectable theatre presentations).  We always seem to portray Brits as stuffy but in this respect it is us that are the stuffy ones.

I imagine that with most S&R readers I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll say it anyway.  Sex is natural and it’s healthy to explore. It should be celebrated instead of demonized.

Disclosure: I take artistic pictures of people in edgy sensual circumstances and participate in activities that those offended by this article would certainly frown upon.  I am tired of having the reactionary moral positions of others thrust upon my art, my life and my friends when all of those participating are benefiting from their involvement.  I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say this but…. Make love, not war!

Geoffrey Becker’s short stories in Black Elvis have a tendency to leave me scratching my head—but that’s just the point. Becker’s characters are frequently left scratching their heads, too.

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Black Elvis collects a dozen of Becker’s stories into a collection that could best be described as a handbook for people trying to find themselves. It’s no “How-To” guide, though; consider it more of a “misery loves company” companion because Becker’s characters find themselves as lost at the end of each story as they were at the beginning.

In the title story, for instance, a blues guitarist who goes by the stage name “Black Elvis” suddenly finds himself supplanted at the local club’s open mic night. Already strumming his way through an ungrounded existence, the guitarist suddenly wonders what the future holds for him. “Have I gotten it wrong all this time?” he asks the man who replaced him. “Should I be doing something else?”

The book is filled with musicians and artists, discontents all. The musicians don’t quite have perfect rhythm, and the artists must paint in other people’s styles. In “The Naked Man,” the artist can’t bring herself to part with her paintings and so confounds her own ability to make a living doing what she loves to do.

Many of Becker’s protagonists are traveling. Some are on vacation, some are on business trips, some are escaping from the real world, and some are wandering across Europe, guitar cases in hand. All seem to be on uninspired quests of their own, trying to find their places in the world or their reasons for being.

Even Lenny, the protagonist in “Iowa Winter,” is displaced from his own home because of his drinking. He’s a solid guy, still married, still stopping by to see his wife who still lives in their old house. She makes him dinner that he can take home with him, and he fixes things around the old homestead. “I had drunk myself out of this marriage ten years ago, but it didn’t mean we weren’t in love,” he says.

The characters inevitably come to minor epiphanies about themselves, but they never find The Big Thing missing from their lives. Some of them don’t even know what Big Thing they’re looking to find. They just have a general uneasiness that all is not right in their lives, a vague forlornness that nips at their hearts. U2 could be standing in the background throughout, playing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

That feeling of incompleteness is best exemplified in the way Becker’s stories end—usually in an awkward spot of some sort, in the middle of an action that doesn’t really relate to the main plot. In “Santorini,” for instance, the protagonist finds herself overrun by feral cats after she makes the mistake of feeding one on the balcony of her Greek villa. In “Man Under,” the protagonist’s musings on a subway car are interrupted when the subway accidentally hits someone. Such actions have nothing to do with the actual story, which can leave a reader wondering what the point might be.

Still, the stories are poignant and humorous, infused with an undercurrent of melancholy. They are also imminently relatable. Life seldom has neat, tidy endings, and neither do Becker’s stories. Instead, like his own characters, Becker leaves his readers scratching their heads—and with plenty to consider.

This first picture is of one of my friends shooting pool.  Look for the words: Light, Shadow, Rob, Shirt, Cueball, Cue, Table and Background.

This second shot is another done from the “Dia de los Muertos” art outing we went to, thus the phrase inspiration for this piece.

Reference photo shot on the phone and all work done “in phone” using “Type Drawing”.  Yeah baby….

I hardly give the Jefferson Memorial a second glance. I see it, like a glowing turtle that has crawled onto the bank, on the far side of the basin. Beneath the memorial’s domed ceiling—modeled after the ceiling of Jefferson’s home, Monticello—Jefferson calls, “What about me?”

It reminds me of that great little scene from “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” from season three of The Simpsons. After seeking advice and inspiration from Abraham Lincoln, who’s inundated with advice-seekers, Lisa seeks out Jefferson for advice instead. The place is deserted. “No one ever comes to see me,” a bitter Jefferson laments. “I don’t blame them. I never did anything important. Just the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the dumbwaiter….”

Lisa, her patience already frayed, leaves him. “Wait!” Jefferson calls. “Please don’t go. I get so lonely….”

The scene always delights me—in part because of what may be an irrational grudge I hold toward Jefferson. The guy has been dead since 1826, passing away within hours of fellow Founder John Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. (It’s one of the best true stories of American history.)

So why should I hold a grudge against a guy long-dead?

I’m a John Adams man, through and through. History has proven Adams right about so many things—the need for a strong executive, the supremacy of federal over state government, the dangers of a passionate but uneducated electorate—but Adams knew at the time that history would forget him because he wasn’t flashy and because he had the unfortunate habit of calling things as he saw them.

He and Jefferson had been great friends in their early careers, although they made an unlikely pair: Adams was short and rotund and balding, Jefferson tall and thin and red-haired; Adams was a farmer-turned-lawyer, Jefferson a lawyer-turned-farmer; Adams was a self-made man from Massachusetts, Jefferson a member of the Virginia aristocracy.

Yet they saw themselves as comrades in a great struggle. Adams was the voice of the Revolution while Jefferson served as its pen. In fact, Adams was the one who suggested that Jefferson draft the Declaration. After the Revolution, serving together as ministers in Europe, Jefferson was close with the Adams family—so much so that the eldest Adams son, John Quincy, spent countless hours with the Virginia. “He seemed as much your son as mine,” the elder Adams told Jefferson.

But back in America, Adams and Jefferson found themselves on opposite sides of the political battles then waging in the early Republic. For Adams, historian Joseph Ellis has said, friendship trumped politics; for Jefferson, the opposite held true. Jefferson ultimately betrayed Adams, and the wound cut Adams deeply.

Adams eventually forgave his old friend. After twelve icy years of silence between them, and they had both retired to their homesteads, the two former presidents struck up a correspondence that has become one of the most remarkable exchanges in American history. Adams went so far to claim, somewhat disingenuously, that “there has never been the smallest interruption of the personal friendship between Mr. Jefferson that I know of.”

So if Adams could forgive Jefferson, why can’t I?

After all, despite my grudge, I do admire Jefferson, albeit grudgingly. I’ve gotta love a guy who once said, “I have sworn on the altar of god eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He wrote that in a letter to a friend, and it’s not inscribed along the interior of the memorial’s dome.

A perfect child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a deep and profound thinker. Historian David McCullough likened him to “a university unto himself.” Jefferson had so many books that, after the British burned the Library of Congress in the War of 1812, the government reestablished the library by buying Jefferson’s. “I cannot live without books,” Jefferson wrote to Adams. I feel like Jefferson and I are kindred spirits in that regard; I could have his quote tattooed on my forehead.

But I’m also deeply bothered by Jefferson’s inability to face the many, many contradictions in his public and personal lives. He was always in debt, yet he spent extravagantly. He pretended to be above the political fray, yet his maneuverings would’ve taken Machiavelli to school. He opposed a strong executive, yet he unilaterally agreed to the Louisiana Purchase.

“The Jefferson style was to evade, maintain pretenses, then convince himself all was well,” Ellis has said.

And, of course, I am bothered by the fact that Jefferson, the slaveholder, had the audacity to write “All men are created equal.” Jefferson even admitted slavery was wrong, but he thought it would be up to the next generation, not his, to do something about it.

Well, it took a couple generations—four score and five years after Jefferson penned his words—but finally a whole bunch of someones did do something about it, and it cost more than 600,000 American lives.

So maybe, in some sad, terrible way, I have myself convinced that Jefferson’s words and Jefferson’s lack of moral courage led to America’s greatest tragedy.

Maybe not directly, and certainly not intentionally. But as the old saying goes, all it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing. Jefferson ultimately chose to sit on his mountaintop perch and occupy himself with anything and everything except the one great question of his day.

For that reason, I suspect it would be virtually impossible to construct a Jefferson Memorial today. FDR proposed the memorial in 1934 at a time when America didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it checkered history of race relations. The memorial opened nine years later, on April 13th, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birthday.

It’s a beautiful location, and lit up as it is on the edge of the tidal basin, the memorial stands as one of Washington’s most distinctive pieces of architecture—which is saying something considering the fact that the capital city is full of distinctive architecture.

But it’s lonely over there, too. Jefferson is in a kind of exile, and the pillars that hold up the dome could also be great marble prison bars that hold Jefferson in place.

I’ll visit him at some point. I always do. But tonight, I’m feeling the Adams grudge. After all, my man calls out, too, from across the years: “What about me?”

Cass of the Dead

Dan of the Dead

It’s 7:00 p.m. The last trickle of the evening commute has drained from the capital, and the busloads of school groups haven’t yet arrived from dinner. It’s the perfect time to visit. It’s me and the insects and perhaps ten other visitors. Three Muslim women walk past me, their heads covered with scarves so brightly colored I can see them in the dark.

And there’s the president—a bronze, life-sized statue of FDR in a wheelchair that sits near the entrance to the memorial. Writer Christopher Buckley once said the statue looked “exactly like James Joyce on the toilet,” an image I can now never shake from my mind. What a way to dethrone one of the Twentieth Century’s towering figures.

I walk the granite grounds of the memorial, laid out like sprawling, open-air rooms—four areas to represent each of FDR’s terms in office. Bronze sculptures and bas-relief panels depict scenes from the Great Depression, Fireside Chats, the CCC and the TVA, and even FDR’s funeral procession.

Everywhere there’s water rushing, gurgling, pooling, spouting, splashing, roaring, whispering, frothing, splattering, and spraying. Fountains abound throughout the memorial, and even the jets overhead in their landing patterns can’t drown their sound.

The third room, the room that represents Roosevelt’s war years, is mostly dark except for the muffled glow of a floodlight in the nearby bushes. The fountain is off. And empty. The massive statue of FDR, flanked by his Scottish terrier, Fala, sits in shadow.

However, the words on a wall nearby still illuminate even if they’re unilluminated: “There came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.”

Sure, it’s a reference to World War Two. But the journalism professor in me can’t help but think the quote could serve as a mission statement for newspapers and other media outlets—at least those that still take their public service missions seriously and haven’t fallen slave to corporate beancounters.

That’s a new reflection for me. My visits to the memorials always give me new and sometimes surprising things to think about. I’ll be able to chew on that particular tidbit for a while.

I’ve been visiting the memorials in D.C. ever since I was a kid. Now, as an adult, I still find great enjoyment when I visit these great American shrines. When I have my choice, I come at night because the crowds are smaller and it’s easier to reflect on my experience. I also like to visit at night because the subdued lighting brings out the memorials’ sublime beauty.

I still have the place mostly to myself. I come around a corner to find park ranger shining his flashlight against a granite wall, twisting the lens to adjust the width of the beam. Satisfied, he turns it off and resumes his rounds. Another jet roars overhead; they come every minute and a half or so.

I make it a point to walk to far end of the FDR Memorial. There, on the wall past the small amphitheater, are inscribed Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear.

Years ago, when my son was five, my wife and I brought him to the FDR Memorial one afternoon. The fountains fascinated him, and he spent a lot of time looking at the sculptures. When we got to the end, we showed him the wall with the Four Freedoms, which he read to himself.

“Yes!” he yelled. “Yes! I have my Four Freedoms! Yes!”

He started to jump around, throwing his hands into the air, whirling almost dervishlike. He was absolutely serious about it, too. He was thrilled to have his Four Freedoms.

“I have my Four Freedoms! Yes!”

Now, as I stand there in the cool October evening, I read those same words and relive my son’s excitement.

I know some cynics who scoff at the idea of building great memorials to great men, but that’s hardly the point for me. Certainly FDR, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt all deserve their memorials in D.C., but I try to think about what those men represent. To me, those great men embody great ideas, which their memorials enshrine.

The Four Freedoms, for instance, represent everything America is supposed to be. We often fail to live up to the responsibilities those Four Freedoms require of us, but likewise, those Four Freedoms help us aspire to achieve wonderful, beautiful things. Those Four Freedoms mean that my son can stand there once upon a time and read those words for himself and express his unbridled joy at what they meant to him.

Another jets rumbles over, breaking my reverie. I realize I’d better get a move on if I want to hit the other memorials. Already, I see a pair of busses have pulled up. One of them disgorges a crowd of people chattering in German. The other disgorges a school group.

From one of the walls, I take a final FDR thought with me: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

Yes. Let us move forward. Yes.

“Wendell Berry is the Sargeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s-land of ecology. Conveying the same limber innocence of young Gary Cooper, Wendell advances on the current crop of Krauts armed with naught but his pen and his mythic ridgerunner righteousness. One after the other he picks them off, from the flying bridges of their pleasure boats as they roar through his native Kentucky rivers, from beneath the hard hats in the Hazard county strip mines, from the swivel chairs in the Pentagon where they weigh the various ways to wage war on all forms of enemy life beyond the end of their own friendly chin. He’s a crackshot essayist and, for those given to capture, a genial and captivating poet. He boasts a formidable arsenal of novels, speeches, articles, stories and poems from his outpost in one of the world’s most ravaged battlefields where he writes the good fight and tends his family and his honeybees. Consider him an ally.”

The thing is, Kesey said this in 1971.

That was nearly forty years ago. And I realized, after reading another Berry essay collection a couple of weeks ago (in this case, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays), that Berry has been pounding away at the same themes for at least that long. And nothing that he has expressed concerns, not to mention deep dismay, about—the increasing power of agribusiness, our increased disconnection from the land, the abandonment of local economies and communities, our collective disregard of the concept of stewardship—has gotten better. In fact, one could argue that everything of concern to Berry has gotten worse. And this is tragic, because current trends, particularly in agriculture, but also in the relentless suburbanization of American life, where no one actually really knows how to do anything, are probably unsustainable. The result will be, well, who knows what, but it might not be pleasant. And who will have the kind of wisdom and local knowledge that is central to Berry’s worldview then?

Berry is fond of throwing out nuggets like the following:

Nobody has a right to destroy anything, and everybody has an obligation to defend as much as he or she possibly can. But sooner or later you’ll have to choose. You can’t defend everything, even though everybody has an obligation to be as aware as possible, and as effective as possible, in preserving the things that need to be preserved everywhere. But I’ve argued over and over again that the fullest responsibility has to be exercised at home, where you have some chance to come to a competent and just understanding of what’s involved, and where you have some chance of being really effective.

And:

Rome destroyed itself by undervaluing the country people, too.

And:

My approach to education would be like my approach to everything else. I’d change the standard. I would make the standard that of community health rather than the career of the student. You see, if you make the standard the health of the community, that would change everything. Once you begin to ask what would be the best thing for our community, what’s the best thing that we can do here for our community, you can’t rule out any kind of knowledge. You need to know everything you possibly can know. So, once you raise that standard of the health of the community, all the departmental walls fall down, because you can no longer feel that it’s safe not to know something. And then you begin to see that these supposedly discreet and separate disciplines, these “specializations,” aren’t separate at all, but are connected. And of course our mistakes, over and over again, show us what the connections are, or show us that connections exist.

And:

There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven’t produced stable communities well adapted to their places.

What I’m talking about in my work is the hope that it might be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities in America, even though we haven’t done it. The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you’re a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can’t operate without it.

Berry is the philosopher of the local and what, specifically, being local entails. America has inflicted a number of wounds on itself the past several decades in the name of “free markets,” still clinging to the myth that there is actually such a thing. Berry isn’t much of a fan of these, actually. What he is a fan of is the dignity of work (remember that?), and the notion that we should take care of ourselves, particularly how we care for the land that supports us. And that we should have local knowledge–about the land, of course, but also about how to do the things we need to do to occupy the land–how to maintain and sustain it in particular. Well, at a time when externalities are catching up with us rapidly in any number of areas (global warming being the most obvious), we really need to pay more attention to what Berry is saying. And that means a return to the local. Berry has a number of mantras—the most recent is “Eat responsibly.” And by this means not just know what your food is, and whether it’s good for you or not—but where it comes from, how it was produced, under what conditions, and subsidized by whom? Sounds easy, but in modern America, and increasingly here in the UK, this is getting harder and harder to do.

I’ve been reading Berry for decades now, and his place in modern American thought is still a bit of a mystery. He’s written one of the best American novels of the century (A Place on Earth) and a number of volumes of pretty good poetry (particularly Farming: A Hand Book). He honed his craft at the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where he hung out with Kesey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurtry. Most importantly, he has produced a series of essays over the years that stand as a testament to sound judgment. In many ways, conservative judgment as well—because Berry wants to conserve things.

This has led to many fun and enlightening exchanges within the conservative and libertarian blogging community. When did Berry, the arch-Luddite opponent of modern agribusiness, militarism and word processors, become a crunchy-conservative icon? Pretty recently, judging by some of the commentary I see occasionally on blogs like the ones cited above. And hardly a week goes by over at Front Porch Republic that someone doesn’t make a specific reference to Berry. I think this is great.

And where are the liberals on Berry? Generally, not to be found, which is a pity. Have liberals become so entwined on the wrong side of the globalization debate that they’ve lost all perspective? I’m way over-generalizing here, of course, but still, I seldom see anyone on the Democratic side speaking up for localism. Instead, we get Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, and Obama, for all his many virtues, still behaving like a farm state senator. But if liberals really want to pursue a more just society, the place to do it as at the local level. The far right understands this better than the left—hence the attacks on ACORN, which is essentially local political action. Look, you want better schools? Run for the school board. You want better food? Get on the planning board and make sure that the last local farmland isn’t being ploughed under for yet another housing development. You want better communities? Run for the city council, or whatever it is you’ve got. That Think Globally, Act Locally bumper sticker that we seldom see any more had it about right.

As Bill Kauffman has noted, “Among the tragedies of contemporary politics is that Wendell Berry, as a man of place, has no place in a national political discussion that is framed by Gannett and Clear Channel.” This may be changing. For one thing, Berry is still writing, and more and more people keep reading. I don’t think there’s a single book in his back catalogue that has ever gone out of print—pretty impressive for a writing career than spans over four decades. For another, Berry, bless his heart, just won’t shut up. Here’s Berry and long time co-author Wes Jackson in The New York Times earlier this year:

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

And then the kicker—we don’t get a bunch of starry-eyed idealism, but a bunch of necessary, practical and achievable measures to take to redress these problems:

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

No wonder most Reagan conservatives can’t stand the guy. A 50-year farm bill? But that may be how long it takes to re-capture the kind of localism that will provide us with a sustainable agricultural system. But Russell Kirk would probably take a look around at the mess we’ve made, and agree.

Did I mention Berry is a poet as well? The Mad Farmer poems in particular are worth a look. Let’s close with “The Farmer and the Sea” (initially published in Farming: A Hand Book):

The sea always arriving,
hissing in pebbles, is breaking
its edge where the landsman
squats on his rock. The dark
of the earth is familiar to him,
close mystery of his source
and end, always flowering
in the light and always
fading. But the dark of the sea
is perfect and strange, the absence of any place, immensity on the loose.
Still, he sees it as another
keeper of he land, caretaker
shaking the earth, breaking it, clicking the pieces, but somewhere
holding deep fields yet to rise,
shedding its richness on them
silently as snow, keeper and maker
of places wholly dark. And in him
Something dark applauds.

To learn more, this is a pretty good place to start.

if legitimate news only gives you the blues
and to cogitate causes distress
if crazed peroration fills you with elation
and bile never fails to impress

if your pupils dilate during civil debate
as you long for a rushian screed
and the times and the post and the bleeding heart host
are far too much trouble to read

no need to be glum, simply wriggle your thumb
as you point at the idiot box
let the clicking device transport you in a trice
to the magical land of the fox

where a mad hatter shrewd comes adroitly unglued
(though he’s trapped in falafel fixation)
while a sweaty white rabbit of opioid habit
weeps loud at the fate of the nation

where a grin and good hair keep a cat on the air
long after his claws have worn thin
where evangelic glee plus a jesus degree
will soothe your election chagrin

ah, that land of ideals where the women wear heels
and no one that you know is gay
and the problems you face disappear without trace
if to the right godhead you pray

so be of good cheer, have a (domestic) beer
as polemic lulls worry away
for the evil and lazy and thriftless and crazy
must be kept well in hand and at bay

your job may be shaky, your pulse a bit quaky
your child to the left might still stray
but if you take care to sound like papa bear
you are not one of them.

for today.

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

People who are familiar with the state of climate science will not read much new in the first section of Last Chance. It briefly recounts key moments in the history of climate science – the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it’s four Assessment Reports, the discovery of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) by Scripps Scientist Charles Keeling, the concern over climate “tipping points.” As a result of global warming, Schweiger points out that we are likely facing an irrecoverable loss in Arctic sea ice, the potential for massive methane hydrate releases, and the loss of millions of acres of forests to insects like the pine beetle and to massive drought-induced forest fires. Furthermore, Schweiger points out that the increasing global temperatures are causing massive losses in Greenland ice and, as a result, raising the global sea level.

And Schweiger supports all his claims with references to peer-reviewed papers, sections of the NASA, NOAA, and EPA websites, and media reports.

In recounting the devastation that has already happened, and thus is representative of what will likely happen in the future, Schweiger focuses on invasive species in Lake Erie and the political machinations that polar bear supporters have endured in the process of trying to get the bears listed as an Endangered Species. And he calls out to the outdoorsmen in all of us with his descriptions of changes in the life cycles of horseshoe crab, sea turtles, and pronghorn antelope, all of which are seriously threatened by global warming.

But he doesn’t stop there. Schweiger fingers journalists and the mainstream news media as being complicit in the world’s unwillingness to address global warming. He believes that advertising dollars and short-term-profit hungry media companies are making editorial decisions about what stories to run based on perceptions of whether the ensuing controversy is worth the loss of advertising revenue. In addition, Schweiger suggests that newsroom cuts to experienced journalists and expensive investigative reporters are coupling with a loss of “public interest” reporting to essentially dumb down media just as global warming is heating up to a level that calls out for experienced communicators.

Schweiger wraps up his book with a detailed call to action. Support electric cars powered over a smart grid from renewable sources of electricity. Make your homes and workplaces as energy efficient as possible. And support those politicians who act on these issues with money and your vote. Schweiger also condemns industrial farming as being destructive to the topsoil and recommends that people support local, small and mid-size farms that farm using sustainable agricultural practices that keep soil nutritious and alive. And finally, he calls for the reader to educate themselves and those around them – family, friends, coworkers, media sources, even political representatives – about the real dangers of global warming.

Last Chance isn’t a catastrophe tale, even though Schweiger makes it clear that catastrophe will very likely be in our future if we don’t address global warming. Instead, it’s a call to action for those readers who recognize how much global warming will change their lives and the lives of their descendants for many generations to come. And Schweiger provides recommended action plans to ease implementing the various recommendations that he makes throughout Last Chance.

All in all, Last Chance is a good book for those readers who are already convinced of the seriousness of global warming, want to have their understanding reinforced, and who want to take more action but don’t know how. But it’s not a book to convince anyone to do something they weren’t already inclined to do.

Crystal as “Heaven”

Tilt-shifted Raver Yeti

Eddie Van Gogh

El Noro

Mar as Jesus on a Dinosaur (reference link)

Matt of the Dead

The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson
by Chris Mackowski* and Kristopher D. White
Thomas Publications

*S&R’s very own Chris Mackowski

Reading The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson is like poring over a treasure chest of family relics as a wise uncle explains the contents. The wise uncles are the authors Chris and Kristopher. These two historians and writers have taken an amazing number of primary and secondary sources and woven a fascinating tale of the last week in the life of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, accidentally shot by his own men at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. They report documented events with insights and an obvious love and respect for the topic.

This accessible volume can be read in a single sitting, but don’t, you’ll be rewarded by savoring the details. The story is told in words, selected art, maps, quotes and historic and modern photos. Each is selected to enhance important points in the storyline. The authors excel at filling in the small details that bring the story to life. The reader knows the weather, feels the confusion of battle, senses the fear when Stonewall is shot, and importantly the authors give us closure in knowing the calm certainty Stonewall Jackson felt in his final moments.

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” – The last words of Stonewell Jackson.

The story has moments as diverse as learning Stonewall Jackson’s arm was buried separately from his body (it was amputated in the aftermath of his shooting, but some days before Jackson succumbed to complications of pneumonia) to a touching passage retelling the moment Jackson met his daughter Julia. There are handy timelines included and an appendix listing the fate of all the characters in this drama. When you finish the final chapter you will be very glad you opened that treasure chest.

We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars.

Recently there’s been a change in tone. There have been some new people showing up behind the desk, and they’re all chirpy. They ask questions, like “Did you find everything you need?”, stuff like that. They chat up the fact that, oh look, you have this book out, and that one too. Personally, I find this a bit irritating. I like my librarians on the reserved side, and not to be salesmen. Fortunately, this has not been a regular occurrence, but it makes me nervous. And it turns out that it may be part of a general plot to change the character of libraries in the area entirely. Well, maybe not a plot–it may not be nearly as well thought out as a plot would be.

The Heath Library, as it’s called, is part of the Borough of Camden library system. And the Borough of Camden has been trying to figure out how to cut its budget. Just like everyplace else in Britain, and the US, and any number of other places around the world these days. So Camden has decided to make some adjustments to how library services are provided in the borough. As the Camden New Journal reports this week:

CONTROVERSIAL plans to make a £2million cut to the library budget by reducing staff and introducing self-service machines were finally signed off at the Town Hall last night (Wednesday).

I can’t wait to see what self-service machines are all about. Self-service for what? Ah, checking out books. What could possibly go wrong here?

Liberal Democrat culture chief Councillor Flick Rea resisted pressure for a rethink and agreed to proposals mapped out in the council’s library reform programme, known as Growing Your Library and developed by council officials and consultants over several months.

Rea said the only way libraries would survive for future generations in its current £8.2million budget. “Otherwise the service will not survive in the tooth and claw climate of modern local government finance,” she said.

The cuts will be made over four years.

The plan here seems to be Growing Your Library by Cutting Its Funds.

Before making her decision, Councillor Rea heard deputations from library users who criticised the programme, including one from John Richardson of the Camden History Society who accused her of allowing it to be “pushed through without democratic process”.

She said the time saved by putting in self-issuing machines – and thus “freeing up” librarians to help readers – would be cancelled out by the staffing cuts.

“There is no evidence that the library service will improve as a result of the changes,” she added.

In addition to the 15 posts that have already been axed, more cuts, including some compulsory redundancies, are expected.

I hope someone eventually will explain to me why there never actually seems to be any money for saving the things that are worth saving. And why we can’t just hire more librarians “to help readers,” whatever that means. Finding books? Learning how to use the catalog? Finding stuff on the internet? People need help with these things?

How did the Borough of Camden come up with these plans? Well, for all its concern about saving money, the Borough doesn’t appear to mind spending a bit of money itself. As the Camden New Journal reports in a separate article:

CONSULTANTS hired to help redesign Camden’s library service were paid more than £2,000 a day over the summer.

American firm IDEO was paid £47,000 for 23 days work on the Growing Your Library (GYL) project, according to information released following a request by the New Journal under the Freedom of Information Act.

The work was part of a major overhaul of the library service in Camden, which will see some staff jobs cut and machines introduced.

Look, those machines again.

Reports suggested consultants visited a series of businesses, including the glamorous Apple Store in Regent Street, to see what ideas could be transferred to council-run libraries.

Well, I can certainly see how hitting the Apple Store would be useful in trying to redesign library services.

On its website IDEO describes itself as an “innovation and design” company. It lists some of its better known clients, a roll call of American multi-billion-pound organisations, including the Bank of America, food giant Nestlé and the charity set up by billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft owner Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Actually, the Ideo website is a hoot. Where do these people come from? Oh, Palo Alto, as it turns out. It’s like a William Gibson novel, one of the recent ones—everything is symbolic, and of the moment, or something. Someone named Ted Brown seems to be the design guru of the company, and you can hear him drone on in a video the site helpfully provides. And there are lots of references to design—Climate Change and design, how design got small and then big again, that sort of thing. Now, I don’t doubt that design is important, Climate Change being a pretty good example of how better design can help us out quite a lot, but it’s still not obvious to me how this is the group to talk to in order to determine how your library services can be “improved.”

So what did they actually do for Camden for two grand a day? It’s not actually clear, because Camden won’t release the report that they spent £47,000 on.

Freedom of Information officers at the Town Hall refused to reveal what the council got out of the deal and a request to see a draft of the ideas supplied to the leisure department was refused on the grounds that they have not been introduced yet.

Although officers accepted it was in the public interest to reveal what the money was spent on for “accountability and transparency” reasons, they ruled that to “prematurely” disclose the findings would result in “partial or inaccurate information being released” and would not allow Camden time to discuss with staff how the plans might affect them.

Officials insisted it was in the “public interest” not to release any more information.

We certainly wouldn’t want to release anything prematurely, to give the wrong impression. Just as well, because I imagine the discussion of the following probably needs some sharpening up:

Discussions held during a five-day workshop involving IDEO and library staff – described as a “deep-dive” brainstorming event – have been posted on the internal Camden intranet.

Details of some of the suggestions put forward by IDEO consultants have been criticised by staff, who contacted the New Journal to say the public would be “horrified” and “amused” at the “absurdity” of the week-long session and “the way their council tax money has been spent”.

The firm visited six businesses in London, including City Farm in Islington, the Apple Store in Regent Street and Jamie Oliver’s cook shop Recipease in Clapham.

City Farm? Where the cows and chickens are? That should help.

Consultants spent time at three Camden libraries – Regent’s Park, Kentish Town and Swiss Cottage – where they held meetings with library users and observed staff “to find out how they actually provided and used services”, but staff have queried their decision not to visit any celebrated libraries outside the borough.

Or any of the uncelebrated ones within the borough other than those three, for that matter.

The firm’s main specification was to come up with innovative ideas about what libraries and librarians could offer in the future, when Camden launches the second phase of its library reform programme next year.

This must be where the “self-service machines” thing comes from. Funnily enough, try as I might, I can’t find a single reference to anything about libraries on the Ideo website other than a link to an article in American Libraries magazine about “Design Thinking” in Libraries, by Stephen Bell, who may or may not be connected to Ideo. The article and comments are great—about “human-centered” somethingorother, and–here’s the kicker–providing a “memorable library experience.” There’s the Apple connection, all right. So it’s obvious why Camden chose Ideo to come up with some visionary thinking on how libraries can be improved at the same time their budgets are being hacked to death.

A council spokeswoman said: “The council approached a number of specialists to bid for work on the Growing Your Library project. IDEO, an international company whose UK headquarters are in Camden, was chosen in competition with a number of other agencies, as they offered the best combination of experience, capacity and proven track record in the field.”

Well, if this was the best of the lot, what did the other bidders look like? I’m reminded of that D.J. Taylor novel with a running subtext of the increasing rip-off of UK governments by management consultants running around a couple of decades ago in the country’s haste to privatize everything that moved. This sort of thing is the logical result—let’s have a firm of design consultants decide what libraries are for and how they should be used. After all, librarians wouldn’t necessarily have any idea of how to improve services, obviously, or anything above and beyond what you could extract in a day-long brainstorming session

Actually, given the apparently marginal state of libraries, we may as well have a design firm given an assessment of how to improve library usage. Libraries in the UK (and apparently in the US as well) are under pressure—over the past ten years over 100 libraries have been closed in England, visits per capita have been declining (marginally, but still), and expenditures per capita have been rising sharply. I can think of lots to fault the Labour government for, but increasing funds to libraries (until very recently) is not one of them. But, ultimately, libraries in the UK really depend on local council funding—and councils are currently hurting, so it’s not surprising that libraries make an easy target. It’s not as if anyone actually makes money from them. This is a familiar story, with a number of explanations—increasing access to the internet and other electronically-delivered information elsewhere, the increasing uneducatability of a number of children, and, perhaps, the possibility that people just read less—although I would need more convincing on this last point, in this country where not only is the major book award televised, but the bookmakers give odds on the potential winners.

So there are good reasons to get a broad range of inputs here. But it’s not clear to me that having librarians and library staff become the functional equivalents of the sales force at the Apple store is the right approach. Or brainstorming sessions, for that matter. What is needed, first of all, is a commitment to culture, and its preservation, and broad public access to it. In many respects, there is an admirable commitment to this notion here, or at least there was when times were good. But for a country with the literary heritage that this one has, even the closure of one library is a measure of our failure to meet this commitment

Anyone who’s seen Guillermo del Toro’s recent movies—Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies (and a two-part The Hobbit on the way)—probably expect anything spawned by that mind to be boldly imaginative. Del Toro takes risks and he paints large while paying attention to the most meticulous details.

So when del Toro teamed up with Chuck Hogan to write a vampire trilogy, fans understandably expected something crazy, crazy, crazy good.

With the first part of that trilogy, The Strain, fans do indeed get something good—but it lacks the crazy, crazy, crazy.

The book starts with the arrival a transcontinental jet at JFK. The plane stops dead on the tarmac. Air traffic controls and emergency responders can’t figure out what’s going on, so everyone goes into terrorist-response mode.

Enter Dr. Eph Goodweather and his assistant Nora Martinez of the CDC. They arrive as part of the response team in case of any biological threats. Goodweather is the first to realize, after a series of inexplicable events (of course), that what they face is an infection far worse than any mere virus.

Think “Vampire Apocalypse.”

Yeah, instead of a plague of zombies taking over the world, the premise del Toro and Hogan set up is that a vampire plague will take over the world.

Vampire plague aside, kudos go out to the authors for taking a radically different approach to vampirism. It’s so radically different, though, that die-hard vampire fans may have a tough time reconciling the authors’ take with their own thoughts about what a good, old-fashioned vampire is supposed to be.

Love their vision or hate it, del Toro and Hogan have at least one thing going for them: These are no mamby-pamby cute, sexy vampires who live tortured, tragic lives. The vampire lord of The Strain, Sardu, is nasty, calculating, and cruel. Whereas even Dracula had a little charm, Sardu comes across more like Max Shreck’s walking cadaver, Nosferatu—but bigger and meaner. And no sexiness.

Sardu has a backstory that might lay the seeds for sympathy in one of the subsequent volumes, but for now, he’s The Big Evil.

And therein lies one of the problems with The Strain. The book tries—not especially hard—to rise above genre fiction and be more of a mainstream thriller, but it just can’t quite break free of the trappings of horror. Sardu, for instance, remains a one-dimensional horror. The book’s central mystery bedevils everyone until a wise old man, Abraham Van Helsing–er, actually, Abraham Setrakian–shows up deus ex machinas-like with the answers. No one believes the hero until it’s too late.

Fortunately, the book avoids gratuitous depictions of graphic violence and focuses instead on mood and tone, which are big plusses (and del Toro trademarks), and the book is paced exceptionally well. But the imaginative firepower that one might expect from del Toro never really explodes with full force, and that keeps the book from becoming crazy, crazy, crazy good.

Is it fair to judge the book that way? I’d say, “No,” except splashed right across the top of the book is the phrase “From the creator of the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth.” If the publisher wants to pimp that out, then del Toro has to live and die by the plug.

But judged on its own merits and not by the del Toro baggage a reader might bring to the book, The Strain certainly provides lots of chills, some believable characters, and an interesting premise. Those things alone make it a worthwhile read. The Strain doesn’t have to be crazy, crazy, crazy good to still be good.

Will del Toro and Hogan’s vision of vampirism catch on? I still don’t know if I’m sold (although, I admit, I’m looking forward to the next installment of the trilogy, slated for 2010). But one thing’s for sure: it sure beats teen heartthrob vampirism. These guys make the undead terrifying, just they way they should be.

Horror of the “gothic” variety that occupied so much of the conversation between Byron and the Shelleys (these would be the conversations that ultimately gave rise to Frankenstein) has traditionally traded in some easily recognizable tropes. Among the most common are your haunted places. Swamps and moors are always a little scary. Graveyards and crypts, of course. Transylvania.

And then there’s haunted houses. Dark mansions, castles on top of hills. Abandoned homes where terrible things once happened. Subdivisions built on top of Indian burial grounds. And so on. All these are other places – places off the beaten path, away from the streetlights, places removed from the guaranteed security of the normal. The message is clear, whether spoken or not: stick to convention – in place, in dress, in action and deed – and all will be well. Stray from the well-lit path and bad things can happen.

Not all artists bent on scaring the shizizzle out of us see the world in quite those terms, though. In particular, Tim Burton seems to see the conventional as a threat to bore us to death, and he finds redemption and a powerful beauty in the darkness. David Lynch is equally suspicious of normalcy, only whereas Burton finds it mainly soulless and empty Lynch sees it as sinister, a locus of profound menace.

(Note: As I’m neither a film studies scholar nor a real expert on either auteur, feel free to jump in with insights, arguments or elaborations of your own.)

Burton’s most memorable assault on convention came early in his career with the woefully underappreciated (at the time) Edward Scissorhands. All the houses are the same in ways that the neighborhood’s vibrant pastel palette from Hell can’t quite disguise, and the action illustrates the mind-numbing homogeneity of life in the ‘burbs. This is Burton’s vision of normalcy, and while it’s shiny and orderly and clean and even pretty in its own way, it’s a life without depth or texture. The visual field, like the emotional and spiritual landscape, is perfectly flat and two-dimensional.

Emotional, social and moral meaning enter this world only when the Frankenstein’s monster of the story – Edward, the freak from the haunted mansion on the hill, appropriately enough – finds his way to town. As it turns out, the construct/”monster” is creativity embodied, and for a time he brings the community novelty and joy. Then convention turns its ugly gaze on him, and the horror story begins a the thuggery of normalcy insists on driving out that which it does not recognize.

The world of darkness and death is a lot more interesting in films like The Corpse Bride. And who better to direct Batman Returns, a film where workaday Gotham is largely oblivious to the fact that its own dark spawn are waging a battle both for the soul of the city and for their own souls, which have been twisted by the city.

There is salvation in the oeuvre of Tim Burton. There is redemption. There is joy and happiness and beauty. But they’re not to be found in the places that most people look for them.

David Lynch’s cosmography is a little less hopeful. Whether examining a small town or a booming metropolis, he can’t help noticing that there’s always a seamy underbelly. Twin Peaks is an idyllic little town where you can always find friendly folks and a good cup of coffee (and hot). Fayetteville, NC (where Blue Velvet was set) may not be anybody’s idea of idyllic or beautiful, but it’s pretty “normal,” as America goes. And Big Tuna, Texas is apparently so pathetically dull that, in the estimation of one Wild at Heart character, the repulsive Bobby Peru is just about the most exciting thing to ever happen there.

But Twin Peaks has an evil spirit problem. The depiction of the debauchery loose after dark in Fayetteville was such that Lynch was allegedly encouraged never to come back. Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru is about as appalling a human being as you’re likely to see in a theater near you. And Lynch’s big cities are just about as uplifting as his small towns. The more normal and unassuming a place, the more likely it is to be haunted – either by the darkly supernatural (a frequent an element in these narratives) or by real people who are even worse.

To summarize, Lynch has a butt-ugly view of big towns, small towns, and one would presume everything in between. Hopeful types unwitting enough to wander into one of his films are rarely given anything to feel optimistic about (although I suppose you could argue that the vision at the end of Wild at Heart affords a bit of really confusing closure for Twin Peaks fans). At times it seems like he actually hates the people watching his work (that’s certainly the case in the scene that closes the final episode of the Twin Peaks television show), and at a minimum he has no qualms whatsoever about betraying the implicit trust between storyteller and audience that most American moviegoers take for granted.

In other words, normal Americans live in a horrorscape, and the best they can probably hope for is to live out their lives blissfully unaware of it, because ignorance is as close to happiness as they’re likely to get.

So, Happy Halloween to all of our normal, regular, happy American readers. As night falls on Samhain and the veil between our world and the world of the dead grows thin, perhaps you can take some secret pleasure in the idea that, in the estimation of two of our greatest filmmakers, your lives are as haunted as those who live in any village in any dark corner of Transylvania…

Tonight, tomorrow you will see people dressed up in their Halloween finest.  For your viewing pleasure I present others who are dressed up in their, well, regular party clothes.  But it might as well be for Halloween, right?

The following content is NSFP/W (what does NSFP mean?).  Click below for more….

Eden Muse in rainbow fashions!

Allen Faulkner.  And yes, those are hooks holding that metal contraption in place.

Ms. Easy sparks it up!

Quill the Clown as a barcode

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too.

For centuries, vampires used to serve that function. Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as the very best example, but vampires existed in folklore long before Stoker immortalized the legends on paper. Fewer things unnerve the living than the dead, which is also why fewer things have been more taboo.

Since Stoker’s 1888 novel, vampires have enjoyed a rich literary tradition (and the web is full of armchair essayists trying to sound erudite by expounding on that long literary tradition). But then along came Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat, a tragic, sultry, sexy fellow who broke nearly every vampire stereotype. Lestat made vampires sympathetic—which was a huge game-changer for the genre. As a result of that impact, Entertainment Weekly recently named Lestat as the greatest vampire ever. (The Bela Lagosi fan in me nearly choked since all vampires have ever been measured against the stereotype Lagosi established.)

Since Lestat, vampires have made a smooth transformation from being terrifying to being sexy. The fact that every teenage girl in America now wants to be Edward Cullen’s undead bride serves as perfect proof. (Guys aren’t immune, either. Check out Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies if you think female vampires aren’t hot.) I applaud Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan for trying to reverse that trend in their new novel, The Strain, which tries to make vampires creepy again—but I fear they’re fighting a losing battle.

And so, zombies have shambled in to take the place vampires once occupied in those dark, irrational corners of our psyches. Zombies now serve as that psychological boogeyman that vampires, through their own sheer attractiveness, can no longer serve as.

There’s one key distinction, though. Vampires represented a certain kind of calculating evil. They made conscious choices about who they preyed on and why, which seemed unnerving and sadistic. It’s evil of the nastiest kind.

Traditionally, we think of zombies as evil, too (Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is a perfect example)—but in fact, zombies are mindless engines of hunger-driven carnage. Sure, they’re bloody, gory, disfigured, disheveled messes, and they act with single-mindless purpose to wipe out people. But they do it because that’s what zombies are wired do, not because they make intentional choices about it. There’s no willful violation of moral codes because zombies have no will. They are essentially forces of nature. A zombie basically represents Jack London’s impassive hand of Nature writ large and ugly.

In that sense, then, is the zombie any different than the financial collapse or the random act of violence or climate change? You can’t reason with those things any more than you can reason with a zombie. And when people feel as though they have no control over a situation, it shakes them in ways few things can. A zombie represents that same feeling, amplified to the Nth degree.

That’s a feeling most people can relate to these days. Zombies are tapping into the cultural zeitgeist.

Pop culture has latched onto that the way a zombie latches onto flesh—and fans have been feasting on it, too. It takes something terrifying and makes it fun (even being scared at the movies, even being creeped out by a book, are still basically forms of fun). As the trend continues, zombies actually become “safer” because people become desensitized. Believe it or not, that’s another reason why pop culture latches onto something like zombies: The process serves as a sociological “coping method.”

Eventually, Zombies will lose the primal power they’ve had (the same way vampires have). Their popularity will diminish, too, although it’ll never go away.

Who knows what’s lurking under the bed to eventually take their place.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is my back deck. The actual measurement is 20 inches.

Some of the trees are having a hard time coping.

And our maple hadn’t gotten around to losing its leaves yet. It will probably lose some branches instead.

Another tree has lost its leaves and the snow on the branches is simply stunning.

Make a little birdhouse in your soul:

Even the trucks were having a tough time:

But the real trouble was that my minivan was parked in the driveway. It’s tall. I’m short. It was not fun to clear off.