Tuesday, September 11, 2001 -- Ten Years On

What I remember most is the blue.

The empty blue, and the quiet, of a sky with no jets, undivided by crisscrossing contrails, no engine noise of aircraft going and coming from Midway and O'Hare.

Nancy and I had been married only five months. We lived on the Northwest Side of Chicago just off Irving Park, under the O'Hare flight path. We might as well have been living a century earlier, for all the evidence of the skies.

I had just turned right off Irving Park onto the Kennedy Expressway onramp when the report of the first hit on the World Trade Center came on the radio. I do not have a note on this, but I surely was listening, as I did every morning, to sports-talk radio station WSCR The Score. My recollection is also a little dim on what I listened to the rest of the way downtown, although I think The Score switched its feed to an affiliated news-radio channel, or perhaps even TV audio. If not, then I surely switched over to NewsRadio WBBM 780. For some reason, even in spite of the earliest erroneous reports that it was a small plane or maybe a DC-3 that hit the first tower, I never thought it was an accident. Can’t tell you why, just a feeling.

I was driving south on the Kennedy and toward downtown when the second plane hit.

My eyes went immediately upward – to the Sears Tower, as it was then known, already visible in the distance. The Sears was at 233 South Wacker Drive. My office was in 300 South Wacker -- kitty-cornered from it. It stood with what seems, in retrospect, like a kind of innocence.

Nancy was the principal of an elementary school in a near-northern suburb, with charge of 600 children. I called her from the car and got her out of a meeting. It was the first notice to her school. She recalls that the day proceeded with great professionalism on the part of her staff. The children were not told; Nancy thought it best that the news be presented first by their parents. The most interesting datum: Only one parent asked to take her child out of the school that day.

I had the only TV in our office, a little JVC portable with rabbit ears that had awful reception in the Wacker Drive canyon. Attorneys and staff drifted in and out for updates, disbelieving and understanding at the same time.

I didn't get any work done that day. Out my window I looked directly across the street at the looming Sears. Of course, no one knew how many more symbols of American strength and success the enemy had targeted. Building management didn't mess around. They closed the place and shooed us all out of the place by late morning.

I was struck by how normal everything seemed on the street when I left the building. No obvious evacuations, even from the Sears, no crowds gathering, what seemed like normal traffic and people just walking about as one would see on any other normal workday. The wonder was dispelled when I arrived at the parking garage to find it nearly empty.

*    *    *

With nothing to do, with wanting to do nothing, but watch TV, I began to write. When I began, President Bush was located just a few miles from my childhood home in Bellevue, Nebraska, at the Strategic Air command Underground at Offutt Air Force Base, across the barbed-wire fence from my backyard. (I think SAC had actually been deactivated as a command by that time, but the Underground -- did you see Dr. Strangelove, or that original Star Trek where they had to go back in time and infiltrate the Air Force Base in "Omaha"? – remained a central and highly-secure command center.)

I've gone back for the first time in ten years to what I wrote on that day and in the day or two following. A lot of it was political, and I don’t want to spoil this essay with too much of that. Here’s a sample:

-- The first word that came to mind about the attacks was not "cowardly," it was "pathetic."   I thought the attacks were a spasm -- that was the word I used -- unlikely to be repeated in any form for quite some time.

-- I was prepared to believe that it was Osama bin Laden's cadres, but I also remembered Oklahoma City -- everyone assumed that was a foreign attack, but it turned out to be some white loser. What persuaded me in the short run that the rush to judgment was probably in the right direction was that the dozen-or-so attackers lost their own lives. Not your typical Western strategy.

-- I assumed that I would know some of the victims. I went to law school in New York City. Many of my friends went to work in the Financial District, and my first boss at Kirkland & Ellis had become a senior executive at Morgan Stanley in the WTC. After contacting my New York City friends, I was relieved that I was unable to identify any acquaintance who died in New York.

-- This will sound cold: I wasn't sad or horrified or excited. My primary thought was that we know much more about the world than we knew the day before. It was a supremely clarifying set of actions. “Barbarism will face challenges that it has avoided to date,” I wrote. “This is a good thing.”   (I was surprised then as now that there were some of the political class who found no instruction in 9/11 at all.)
-- “Afghanistan,” I wrote. “The 51st State.”

-- I remarked on the composure of Americans There was no public demand for immediate retaliation.

-- Hundreds of movies were instantly dated. Their New York panoramas included the World Trade Center.

-- As we are moved by the memorials this weekend, we forget – I forgot, anyway – how much brainless crap we had to endure from much of the international (and even some of the American) Left in the days following 9/11. There were those who truly thought that America deserved what it got. They’re still around, and not all of them are beyond our borders.

-- I understood the concern over “destabilization” of Middle Eastern regimes if we made war against the terrorist-sponsoring governments of Araby. But what ended up on the page was: “Well, who with any sense feels invested in the stability of their particular brand of evil?”

-- Something prompted me to write: “I am not ashamed to say that I have not the slightest interest in what teenagers have to say about this conflict.” Also: “I am reasonably certain that pop culture celebrities (Madonna holding forth today, I read, that ‘violence begets violence’) should shut their pieholes for the duration.”

-- I fretted over the Problem of Islam. On the one hand, our large Muslim population was not and had never been a threat. Just as obviously, worldwide (and now domestic) terror was authored almost exclusively by Islamofascists claiming authority through the religion itself.  I could only hope that extreme moral relativism took a hit that day – not all philosophies are created equal, and some of them should die.

*    *     *

My final memory is not a 9/11 memory at all.

It starts in September 1958 in Bellevue, Nebraska.

Nowadays when kids get to first grade, a lot of them can read. Back then, only I and one other kid had this skill when we arrived in Mrs. Duvall’s classroom at Belleaire Elementary School. We could read, if not understand, almost anything you put in front of us. Let me amend that – I’m sure I didn’t understand a lot of what I read, but the other kid – his name was Bryan Jack – probably did. Mrs. Duvall gave us a stack of books and sent us off to the corner to read them while she brought the other kids along. (Our classmates were divided into groups – the Redbirds, the Bluebirds, some Other-Color-birds. Bryan and I, for some reason, were the Snowbirds.)

Bryan was a true prodigy, brilliant even as a skinny little kid. High-strung but quite apparently a “brain,” as we called gifted kids back then. His family lived just a few doors down from us. Thrown together because we could read, we became best friends. His father, like the fathers of many of my friends, was in the Air Force, and after three or four years the Air Force transferred the Jacks to Texas and I had to say goodbye to my supersmart friend.

I kept in touch with Bryan for awhile, but adolescent boys are not good mail correspondents, and the relationship faded. Fortunately, my mother stayed in touch with his mother, so I always knew a little about what Bryan was up to.

He ended up at CalTech and Stanford with multiple degrees and a doctorate.

Eventually, I learned, he went to work at the Pentagon.

As the decades passed, I seldom thought of him.

Oddly, like me, he married for the first time very shortly before 9/11. His wife was New York City artist Barbara Rachko. On her website, she displays a striking, even startling painting of the two of them titled “Us and Them.” (Reproduction is without permission – Barbara, apologies and hoping for your pardon.)

If Bryan had been sitting in his chair at the Pentagon on 9/11, he would have lived through it. He wasn’t.

He was in the plane that hit it.

MOVIE REVIEW: "The Help"

At first I did not care to see "The Help."  It was, I assumed, a "relationship movie," being a movie that doesn't have much comedy or killing or special effects or monsters or Western gunfighters. But my impression was that this one was all relationships, and all-female ones at that, with not much good to say about men.

In fact, I liked the movie. I can recommend it with almost no reservations. Relationships, after all, are important.

The movie is set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962-63. It explores the relationship between white Junior Leaguers and the black maids who raised them, and who now work for them -- a pattern that had held for generations but upon which the civil rights struggles of the Sixties were placing new and unaccustomed strains.

Emma Stone plays Skeeter Phelan, a young woman who aspires to a journalism career, and who was largely raised by a black maid (Constantine, played by Cicely Tyson in a small but memorable turn). She has the idea of writing a book (which becomes "The Help") about these relationships from the standpoint of the maids. She enlists her fellow Junior Leaguers' maids, the submissive but perceptive Aibileen (Viola Daivs) and, eventually, the much less pliable Minny (Octavia Spencer) to tell her their stories.  Skeeter's growing interest in the maids' stories places her in conflict with Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard's daughter), the head of the Junior League, a woman dedicated to The Way Things Have Always Been between Southern whites and their servants.   Hilly fires Minny and blackballs her from getting any other maid positions among the society whites, but Minny eventually catches on with a cheerful wealthy outcast (Celia, played by Jessica Chastain) who does not have the proper Jackson pedigree, but who has had the good fortune to have married well and who seems to have very little racial consciousness in enlisting Minny to assist her (without her husband's knowledge) in managing the large estate that (until the end, unseen) husband has entrusted to her care.


Viola Davis

Skeeter's interest in the maids' histories is not entirely altruistic.  I mentioned her ambitions -- she wants to be published, and this motive is not glossed over in the movie.  Skeeter is in constant touch with a New York publisher (Jane Alexander).   As the film progresses, however, she identifies more closely with these tough, gifted women.  It is to the movie's credit that it does not focus overmuch on this transformation; yet we feel it through Ms. Stone's fine performance. 



Octavia Spencer

The movie is ultimately satisfying for reasons I cannot relate without spoiling it for you.  Suffice it to say that the ending, while not entirely satisfying, is far from tragic.  Hey, I cry for the neglected old toys in "Toy Story" -- I wasn't similarly moved at the conclusion of "The Help," and I got the same feeling from the attendees at the show I saw, but I count that as a good thing.  The movie doesn't overtly manipulate; it tells a story that makes sense on its own terms, with goodness being only ambiguously rewarded. 
The strength of this show is its performances.  Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are extraordinary, and Emma Stone holds her own with these two powerful black actresses.  Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly is a formidable foil, alternately hateful and comic; her black, close-set eyes blaze with racial righteousness.  Sissy Spacek, as her mother, has too few moments onscreen, but enough to remind us that we don't see enough of this wonderful actress.  Allison Janney is also marvelous as Skeeter's mother, caught between her own social ambitions and the welfare of the woman who had served her household for decades.

Emma Stone

Bryce Dallas Howard

Go see it, especially if you lived through those times, and especially if you didn't.

I mentioned some reservations.

I agree with David Denby in his favorable review in The New Yorker that the flaws in the movie really don't seem to matter much, fading as the movie progresses.  I think this is because of the intrinsic drama of the material.  I also think the viewer may also be distracted by the thought that to some degree, the frictions that were life-and-death in the Sixties continue to linger, in a far less poisonous but uneasy social dialogue between monied people and those who mow their lawns, fix their media centers, and, yes, assist them with raising their children and maintaining their households.

So my reservations are mainly quibbles.  I did not entirely buy in to the shallowness of the Junior Leaguers or the sometimes unvarnished villainy of Hilly, although goodness knows there are villains abroad when a change that needs to happen is resisted by those whom the status quo favors.  And I thought that the maids' reactions when faced with the ladies' slights were more revealing than your average Southern maid would have exhibited.

Given the dramatic subject matter and the historical fulcrum upon which both the book and the movie balance, it is somewhat surprising that both are regarded as of interest primarily to women.  It must be because the men in the movie are almost invisible, mostly afterthoughts.  The show tries to gin up a romantic story for Skeeter, but it's slight and unconvincing.  Hilly's husband is like Hilly, bad.  Celia's husband, turns out, is good.  While the period clothing and hairstyles (worth the price of admission for those of us who lived through them) serve to highlight the individuality of the women, they tend to make the men unmemorable. 

Hey, I'm glad it wasn't a movie about the way men treated The Help.

Check it out, guys.

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That would be:

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Great Thoughts that are perhaps not great enough for a formal airing on this site.  Probably lots of gags and ad hominem attacks.

I'll tweet links all new articles.

Hope to see you there.

My thanks.

County Road 26, July 23, 2011

On my old Schwinn trail bike
Mercury near the century
On County Road 26, gravel
Shooting out from under
My fat tires and the
Washboard road bouncing
My disgraceful love handles,
I steered off to the roadside
Into the smoother smashed-
Down brush and suddenly
Before me rose up dozens,
Hundreds of grasshoppers
Startled from their torpor
By my offroad detour.
They flew off before me
To the left and right and
As I split the frothy spray of 
Panicked flying yellow Orthoptera,
I felt like Leo DiCaprio
On the bow of the Titanic
Except that the phrase
I'm the king of the gravel roadside
Somehow lacked for grandness,
But at least I didn't drown
In the bitter North Atlantic
And was not required to appear
In "Shutter Island."

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Harry Potter and "The Tempest": J.K. Rowling Says Good-Bye with a Nod to the Bard at the End of "Deathly Hallows"

[SPOILER ALERT:  This article reports on a brief moment near the  conclusion of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," currently in wide release.  It does not reveal any significant plot points along the way, but those who want to avoid any information about how the film ends should stop reading here.]

This is cool.

Here's an observation I haven't seen anywhere else -- I looked -- so I'm going to claim originality.  However, it is almost certainly not original, since I'll bet there are lots of others who noticed it.   If you know of anyone else who has published on this, please keep it to yourself.

I am not a profound scholar of Shakespeare, much less of the Harry Potter books or films.  However, I was struck by a moment at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," that the Memsahib and I saw in a nearly-empty theater in downtown Fort Worth last Saturday night.  I throw it out there for you fans of either Shakespeare or Rowling to see what you think.  If you find it of merit, please pass it along to any Shakespearean scholars, Potter scholars, major film critics of your acquaintance, or J.K. Rowling.

[Capsule review:  The Mem and I both liked it.  We had both disliked "Deathly Hallows Part 1," which we found dreary, angst-filled, slow, and incomprehensible.    We were able to figure out what was going on in Part 2, and there was plenty of action, good monsters, and some surprises that wound up a coherent plot.   The 3D was good -- these movies are kind of dark and murky to begin with, so the marginal murk you get with 3D didn't get in the way.]

[MINOR SPOILERS START HERE] 

Why did Harry break the Elder Wand?  Did this act have some special significance to the story?   Harry Potter fans probably have many better answers to these questions, but here's mine:

Near the end of the movie, after Lord Voldemort has been vanquished (who made him a lord, exactly?), Harry succeeds to physical possession of the Elder Wand.   He is standing facing Ron and Hermione on a bridge outside Hogwarts.  He is holding the wand.  I wish I had written down the exact dialogue, but it isn't terribly important -- no big speeches.  Ron makes the observation that Harry's possession of the wand makes him the most powerful wizard in the world.   Harry holds the wand as if to snap it in two, and as Ron and Hermione start to object, Harry says something like it's been more trouble than it's worth, or we don't need it anymore.  He breaks the wand in two pieces and throws it into the bottomless chasm beneath the bridge.


What All the Fuss Is About:  The Elder Wand

Now consider a scene in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The play is set on an island ruled by Prospero, a powerful magician.   After he has used his magic to bring things to a suitable conclusion, he makes this speech in the final scene of the play, which gives our language the phrase "this rough magic":

     .  .  .  I have bedimm'd
     The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
     And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
     Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
     Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
     With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
     Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
     The pine and cedar: graves at my command
     Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
     By my so potent art. But this rough magic
     I here abjure, and, when I have required
     Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
     To work mine end upon their senses that
     This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
     Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
     And deeper than did ever plummet sound
     I'll drown my book.

            -- Act V, Scene 1, ll. 41-57

Prospero breaks his own wand ("staff") and buries it, and also destroys ("drown") his book of spells.


Christopher Plummer as Prospero in The Tempest

That may not seem like much of a reference by Harry/Rowling to Prospero, but consider:  It is the consensus of scholars that The Tempest is Shakespeare's final play; he may have written parts of Henry VIII but "The Tempest" is considered to be his last fully-realized work.  Prospero's staff-breaking is widely regarded as Shakespeare saying farewell to his audience and his art.  Announcing his retirement, as it were.  (By the way, for you "Maltese Falcon" fans:  In the previous act, Prospero says:  "We are such stuff as dreams are made of.")

Deathly Hallows is the last of the Harry Potter movies and J.K. Rowling has said there will be no more Harry Potter books.

Both scenes are at the end of the story; both involve the breaking of a magic stick; both involve casting or burying the pieces deep within the earth; both involve a wizard voluntarily giving up magical powers.   Prospero destroys his magic book; Rowling has ended the Harry Potter series of magic-impacted books. 

Ms. Rowling did not write the screenplay but I understand something like this scene is in the book.  I think it is at least possible, perhaps even likely, that Ms. Rowling is borrowing this powerful scene from The Tempest to say:  This is the end and I really, really mean it.

*     *     *

Finally:  In what I concede is only oblique support of this thesis:   Prospero performs some of his magic through the spirit Ariel who serves him, and to whom Prospero has promised freedom if Ariel performs certain final magical tasks; in the end he does free Ariel.  Ariel frequently acts by creating deceptive images for mortals to react to.  This power was also practiced on Muggles by Dobby the house-elf -- who Harry freed from the Malfoys, and who thereafter faithfully served Harry until his death.  OK, it's a stretch, but it suggests that perhaps serious Potter scholars may want to have a closer look at The Tempest.



Dobby the Magical House-Elf (as Himself)



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"Super _________ 8": A Flashy Disappointment

[NO SPOILERS]

The Memsahib and I had a lovely dinner last night and then went to see "Super 8," written and directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg.   Kids.  An alien presence of some sort.  A middle-class family setting in a small Middle America town.  Sound familiar?  "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"; "E.T."; "Goonies" (Spielberg story and co-executive producer [no aliens but a menacing disfigured guy]); "Gremlins" (Spielberg produced).

Uh, this movie isn't like those.

It isn't necessary for a Spielberg-influenced film to be like earlier, beloved Spielberg-influenced films for it to be a good film.  A good film can be violent, lots more violent than those earlier films.  Lots more.  I like violent action movies where stuff gets blown up and the alien presence isn't a positive thing for the population.  And I liked this movie.  I didn't get bored.  There was a chuckle or two. 

But I didn't like it a lot, and neither did the Mem.   Tell me true:  When you turn on the TV and see that "Close Encounters" or "E.T." is on, don't you linger?  I can't imagine I will do so when I stumble over this one a few years from now. 

"Super 8" has received sensational reviews.  Part of this is Spielberg.  Part of it is J.J. Abrams being the flavor of the month.  Part of it is the charm of the child actors who carry the film.  The story, such as it is, moves along smartly.   The effects are terrific, if somewhat overdone (no train in the history of trainwrecks wrecks ever wrecked like this train wrecked, or for as long). 

But the movie has three problems:

First:  The plot was full, and I mean full all the way up to the chock, of holes.  Huge.  I can't tell you what they are without spoiling the film.  Drop me an email if you don't care about spoilers and I'll tick off a few.  When I say "plot holes" I don't mean things like "there's no such things as aliens"; I mean plot elements that don't make any sense even after you have suspended disbelief and are willing to listen to a story about kids tracking down some malignant presence in their town. 

So what? you say.  It's a sci-fi thing, it doesn't all have to make sense.  Oh, but it does, after a point:  Once you have the illogical menace (a nasty alien presence) established, everything else has to be dramatically consistent.  Reality has to be the stick in the ground that creates the tension when the menace comes up against it.  This movie violates this principle that I just made up time after time with the result that the ending is so dopey that Abrams has no idea what to do with it when it arrives.   The film just ends abruptly, as though the director is fearful that the whole thing would fall apart if anyone thought about the final scene too closely.  (It would.)  The upshot, for me, was that I felt kind of taken when the screen went dark at the end.  (I note that people in the theater just sat there, not stunned by the denouement, but thinking there had to be more.)

Is this just me being too persnickity and logical?   The nonsense of the plot doesn't seem to bother the critics.  Answer:  No.  More people should think like me.  Everyone, in fact.   Seriously, I was still able to enjoy the show even while shaking my head.   The point I want to make here is that this carelessness (and the next two points) are serious flaws that keep a pretty good movie from being a great one, or even a memorable one.

Second:   I mentioned the charm of the young actors.  They are charming and mostly skillful (standout:  Elle Fanning), and at the outset of the movie you think that you will come to care about them in the same way that you cared about Eliot in "E.T." and some of the characters in the other Spielberg products mentioned above.  But while this movie seems to feature interpersonal drama and feelings and stuff that should cause the audience to identify with these characters, Abrams's heart is not in it.   There are a couple of parent/child conflicts, and a family tragedy, but they seem pasted on to the roaring action and explosive, mass-destruction, ear-shattering effects that dominate the picture.  It's nice that they tried to make a special-effects blockbuster with a heart, but its beating is drowned out by heavy things crashing to earth after flying improbably through the air, incredibly destructive attacks, mass hysteria, and, yes, explosions.

Finally:   Twice now I've said that the kids are charming.  This is a credit to their personal charisma and their acting skills.  Unfortunately, Abrams seriously, seriously attacks their natural appeal by making them incredibly foul-mouthed.  These are supposed to be 14- and 15-year-old boys (and a 15-year-old girl) who are somewhat precocious.  The year is 1979.  I don't have the research on the speech habits of kids of that age at that time, but I had a hard time believing that these kids, who are ambitious and bright (although apparently not the best students), would speak with the casual vulgarity Abrams has assigned to them.   Whether or not kids like this spoke like this in 1979:   Irrespective of verisimilitude, the profanity transformed them from people we are attracted to into somewhat thuggish twerps.   Used skillfully, the rare instance of cuss words coming from the mouth of a child can be funny or dramatic; but here, the profanity was way overemployed and did absolutely nothing to establish a rooting interest of the audience in these teenagers.   When the film was over, a disapproving remark was the first thing out of the mouth of a parent sitting next to us who had brought her child (it's PG-13).

So if you plan to see "Super 8," leave the kids at home.  

And don't take the train.

*     *     *

Note on our filmgoing experience:  Among the unusual things that happen in the movie as the result of the escape of the alien presence is that the town's power flickers and sometimes goes out altogether.  When the Memsahib and I arrived home, our garage door would not open with the built-in opener, and we soon learned that our side of the street had been without power for close to four hours.   In the movie, a utility worker trying to fix a power line meets a predictable fate, but CoServ managed to hook our block back up without any of the local malignant presences taking notice.

[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]   In what can only be seen as an homage to the very first "Star Trek" teevee series, every black character in this movie with a speaking part is killed.   Even casual fans of that series know that on the rare occasions when a black crew member would appear (Lt. Uhura aside, probably spared because she was doing series creator/producer Gene Roddenberry), he was a goner.

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What a Long, Strange Loop It's Been

Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Some years ago, Douglas Hofstadter published a large book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It sold many, many copies. I have one. I am convinced that few people actually finished it, or even got far into it. It was unquestionably the product of a brilliant mind. But man, reading it was work, lots of little exercises to work through, lots of symbolic logic to learn, but worst, the goal of all that work was unclear. I like a challenging read, so I’m not proud to say I didn’t get far before I put it back on the shelf, where it reposes to this day. The fact is, I just didn’t get it, and I’ll bet not many people did.



I think I will win that bet, because no less an authority than Douglas Hofstadter himself has expressed his disappointment that not many people got it. I quote from Wikipedia: “In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition [of GEB], Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: ‘GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?’”


To remedy this, he says, he wrote I Am a Strange Loop – to make the point that apparently eluded readers of GEB. It was published in 2007. It had been sitting on my to-be-read shelf, in hardcover, since then. It is almost 450 pages long. I read it to the end.


Capsule review: Looks like he’s going to have to write another book.

Its goal is to – well, now there’s the first puzzle. Recall that he says he wants to explore “what is a self,” and there is a lot of talk about self-ness in the book. Also consciousness; also possession of a human soul; also what it is that distinguishes humans from other animals.  But there is next to no explanation of what he means by these concepts, which question (if any) he is trying to answer.  I am very tempted to say that he would say that these questions are all essentially the same thing, which launches us into a muddle right at the outset.   

Which is too bad.  I'm interested in these things, and Hofstadter is really a fine writer and a brilliant man with some interesting things to say, so this volume should have been right in my wheelhouse.   But I can tell you very succinctly why this is not a good book: Hofstadter not only doesn’t get to the point, his thesis is all but invisible. If you handed him the book and asked him to find a paragraph, or even a page or two, clearly describing (1) the question he is trying to resolve (i.e., “what is a self,” “what distinguishes humans from lower animals,” “what is the nature of consciousness” “what do we mean when we talk about having a soul” – am I close on any of those?), and (2) his resolution of it, he might be able to do it. Personally, I never stumbled across it. I can’t tell you how his belief that humans are like what he calls “strange loops” gets him much of anywhere.


Why is this? The cheap answer is “because he had a lazy editor, or maybe an intimidated one,” but the real answer is that Hofstadter just may not have a clear answer to any of these questions.  If he does, it gets lost among the analogies and metaphors and stories and personal anecdotes he loves.  Nothing wrong with those strategies.  But after (actually, before) one employs them, one must articulate the idea the technique is employed to illuminate. The book is so thick with explanatory symbol-filled vignettes that they crowd out a simple, clear statement of his belief respecting these issues (and what he believes those issues to be).


The problem is illustrated right on the cover, which is a stylized representation of “video loop.”  Much of the first part of the book is devoted to a description of images Hofstadter created by pointing a video camera at a teevee that was displaying what the video camera was receiving – that is, displaying itself over and over and over.  Moving the camera distorts the image in interesting ways. You’ve seen the effect if you stand in front of a mirror with another mirror behind you – you see yourself receding into infinity. This is a purely mechanical phenomenon that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness, but Hofstadter goes on and on and on about it, even including a number of useless color plates of his teevee images, as though it tells us something profound about ourselves as human beings. It doesn’t, and if there is a useful analogy to the way humans perceive the world and re-transmit it, I missed it.


Of potentially greater interest might have been his analysis of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) and its undermining of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” (1910-13).  His explanation – which is very lengthy and punctuated with fictional dialogues and analogical fables – isn’t bad, but would it be asking too much for a simple statement, or even a complex or subtle statement, of what these abstract mathematical theories have to do with “I-ness,” or “soul,” or “consciousness,” or “self”?


Let’s return to his central simile. A “strange loop” is a self-referential system (that’s reductive but saying any more would not illuminate this discussion). I have called this Hofstadter’s simile, but I can’t even report that with any confidence – are we “strange loops” in the way that is understood in topology, logic, and mathematical systems, or is he only saying we’re like them in some way that is meaningful to his theory? I went in search of what other people think Hofstadter is trying to say when he says argues that human beings sorta have this characteristic and that it somehow relates to their essential humanity. What I discovered is that no one else knows, either, and those who purport to know sort of skip over what the hell they – and he – think any of this has to do with a unique human nature.


There’s a lesson here.  We see it around us every day, in government, in the workplace, on Wall Street, in the academy, in science:  Brains aren’t enough.  Learnedness isn’t enough.  Opinion leaders, all kinds of leaders, have an obligation to be clear.  Heck,we all have an obligation to be clear with one another.  I don’t care how complex the subject matter is – if you’re writing a nonfiction book for a general audience, especially one that purports to solve a problem or take a position, you have a sacred duty to state your position early and clearly. If you can’t or won’t, you probably haven’t really figured it out for yourself.


With over a thousand pages of closely-printed text sitting on my bookshelf, I don’t know if Douglas Hofstadter is a strange loop. I can say that he is damned near an endless one.

A One-Term President Because He Doesn’t Care All That Much about Two

And, more importantly, because it shows.

Yeah, recently he's taken to saying that he's "unstoppable," but his heart doesn't really seem to be in it. 

Back in May 2010, when my readers were in the mid-one figure, I wrote that I didn’t think President Obama much cared about a second term.   My theory was that the President is motivated primarily by academic theory, and he judges success not on whether anyone votes for him, or his party, but whether the theoreticians he admires in the academy (to which he’ll unquestionably return) approve of his policies.

A couple of weeks ago, the President said a couple of extraordinary things that got much less media play than they deserved. I won’t say they prove my point, but they trend that way. In an interview with ABC’s Ann Curry, he said:

“There are days where I say that one term is enough.”

He went on:

“Michelle and the kids are wonderful in that if I said, 'You know, guys, I want to do something different,' they'd be fine. They're not invested in daddy being president or my husband being president.”



How many terms does he want?



That may sound like an offhand expression of mid-term weariness, and it may have been that. But this isn’t a midterm. This is the beginning of his campaign for his second term. This is the beginning of his big fundraising push. Let me ask you: If you had just heard this and the President asked you to write a large check for his campaign, would you?

He’s said things like this before. In January 2010, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”

Mind you, I’m not being critical of this mindset. It is entirely proper to say “I will govern according to my principles, which I think are really great principles, even if it proves unpopular at the ballot box.”  But I think it says something very important about this puzzling historical figure.  

First, he says he sometimes thinks that “one term is enough.”

Enough because . . . he’s tired? No, couldn’t be. He couldn’t possibly be intending to convey the impression of fatigue to his supporters and financiers.

Enough because . . . that is all he will need to accomplish his goals? Well, we know about the economy and the prospects for recovery before November 2012, so he won’t have improved that over what he inherited. He sometimes talks about his accomplishments, but Obamacare is on the run in the courts, will probably not survive a single-term presidency. His accounts of other “achievements” are frequently misleading; recently, the Washington Post – yes, WaPo – said of his speech extolling the success of the auto industry bailouts “What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech.” He got bin Laden, that was good. Excellent, in fact. But compared with his own expectations and those of his voters, it’s pretty thin gruel for three years.  No, hardly anyone thinks he's accomplished much or expects him to accomplish a lot more by November 2012.  And I don't think he believes it, either.

Enough because . . . he knows he cannot enact his social theories into law, at least not for long, and well, OK, he tried, and that’s enough?

Or: Enough because . . . he’s bored?

I think it’s some combination of these last two. Listen to him claiming to make a point about Michelle and the girls, but really making a point about himself (surprise!), suggesting that he might say to them: “You know, you guys, I want to do something different.”

Now think about that for a minute, especially in light of the “one term is enough” suggestion. You’re the President of the United States. What “something different” might you want to do as the end of your first term approaches that would be – I don’t know, more helpful to mankind, more fulfilling, more prestigious?

Look at it another way: What different thing would be better to Barack Obama than being President from 2013 through 2017?  Really, what’s bad about being the American President when you are nothing but a politician?  (Yeah, he taught some law school, but come on.  Guy's done nothing but politics, and has done it pretty darned well.)   I can think of some things: Hard work. Compromising cherished theories to get legislation enacted. Never-ending judgment of your performance. Exposure to a public that is sometimes less than enthralled with who you are, who see you as something other than an extraordinary symbol.

Here’s what I take away from President Obama’s remarks: He views his service in office more as a hobby than a calling. In line with my earlier thoughts, it’s an academic exercise for him. Doesn’t work out, cuts into the golf, people mad at you all the time, middle class just doesn’t understand the theory – fine, I’ll go do something different.

But I think there’s something else. Can’t prove it. Just kind of feel it.

I think Barack Obama just doesn’t think it’s all that big a deal to be President of the United States.

I think he thinks this because he doesn’t think the United States is all that big a deal to be the President of. He seems to take pleasure in suggesting that the U.S. is just another country in a world full of them. He certainly rejects American exceptionalism. He does not have a high regard for the Constitution. (That’s not a Tea Party sentiment – that’s my personal conclusion from his utterances, including this one I noted (scroll down) and others I’ve noted from time to time.) He feels bad about America’s past international initiatives.  He shows absolute unconcern at its slipping status in the world -- along with much of the academy, he thinks it deserves it, and that it is historically inevitable to boot.  And borders -- when you're not much of a country, what difference does it make who lives there? 

So being President of that country, to him, is just one of many “different” things to which he might apply his considerable gifts.  And by no means necessarily the most important one at this stage of his life. So it’s good that Michelle and the kids are so understanding.

I have a feeling that unless the Republicans nominate a diseased marmot or Sarah Palin (of which they are eminently capable), Barack Obama is going to have the chance to do that different, better thing come January 2013. 

Put aside whether his policies are good or bad, or whether or not you like them. 

He's just not that into the gig.

BREITBART: I've Got Weiner's Colonoscopy, Genome

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) political and personal problems deepened today with reports that conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart has come into possession of Weiner’s recent colonoscopy and a complete chart of his entire genetic structure.  The images were transmitted via Twitter to several women with whom he was conducting online conversations.

Political observers are taking these latest reports seriously. Breitbart’s earlier claims that he possessed lewd photographs Weiner tweeted to young women proved correct when Weiner admitted they were photos of him, or parts of him, and that he had sent them to the young women in question.

Weiner, Cats

Since then, Breitbart has posted self-portraits of a shirtless Weiner and has displayed a photo said to be Weiner’s massively engorged johnson, also said to have been sent to a young woman via Twitter. The image of the fully turgid thunderstick appeared to be a cell phone photo of a photo displayed on a cell phone that was originally taken by a cell phone. Despite the degraded image, Rep. Weiner has not denied that the luridly gleaming tumescence is his, possibly because it favorably compares in shape and volume what appears to be an unopened tube of Family Size Sensodyne Iso-Active Multi-Action toothpaste that also appears in the photograph.


The reports of tweeted images of Rep. Weiner’s lower intestine and gene map will likely prove a challenge to efforts to rehabilitate his image. Weiner, whose marriage to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was performed by Bill Clinton, has been seeking advice from the former president on how to handle this crisis. However, the Weiners’ family dog, a Samoyed named “Schumie,” has denied taking the pictures or sending the offending tweets. His alibi -- that he was out of the country representing the U.S. at a tree-planting ceremony in Kenya with First Dog Bo and lacks opposable thumbs -- has been verified by Julian Assange’s dog, “Leaky.”



On his website (http://www.breitbart.com/), Breitbart speculates that Weiner’s relationship with the numerous young women began as what was intended to be merely a joking display of his furiously aroused wrinklebeast. But, Breitbart states, “as the exchanges became progressively more intimate, it seems that Weiner thought it important to convey ever more complete information on his reproductive allure and evolutionary suitability.”

The new images, which Breitbart is currently sharing only with upper level Justice Department officials and and wacky morning AM radio DJs, show that Weiner is enjoying robust alimentary health and does indeed have a set of recognizably human chromosomes.

Eventually, Breitbart speculates, Weiner became obsessed with digitizing and preserving for transmission every imageable part of his body, “in line with his public calls for full disclosure and transparency at the federal level.”

The images were reportedly sent to a Luby’s waitress in Dime Box, Texas; LeBron James's mother Gloria James; and Marilyn vos Savant.

*     *     *

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Revisiting Thoughts on the Future of Israel

    
Sorry for the partial rerun here.  On February 3, I wrote this:

===========

Not Too Early to Ask – How Do You Feel About Israel? Are You Willing to Go to War for It? Egypt. Jordan’s unstable. Yemen is about to go and is a snakepit of al Qaeda conspiracy. The Muslim Brotherhood is on record for Israel’s destruction and jihad against the U.S. We know about Iran. When we leave Iraq, Afghanistan . . . . If those governments become radicalized, how long will Saudi Arabia be able to hold out?

Israel has been a critical U.S. ally for decades. Such a critical ally, that some say it has had an influence on U.S. policy that is disproportionate to its importance. At least until recently, we have been pledged to its survival.


Israel has military expertise, but take a look at the real estate involved

But folks, it is not too early to say that the noose is tightening. It is not too early to imagine Israel with not one single surrounding country with which it is reliably at peace.  

I don’t need to remind you that Iran will soon be nuclear, and Pakistan already is.

And the Islamists -- and, I very strongly suspect, some percentage of Muslims who in other respects would call themselves moderate -- hate Israel and desire its destruction not because it is imperialist, not because it threatens Islam, not because its treatment of Palestinians, but because it is not Islam. And because its founding was midwifed by the victorious WW II allies and placed in their midst. I am not here to debate whether the creation of Israel in 1948 was a good idea or whether Arab perceptions are accurate. I am here to say that diplomacy is not going to change the growing Muslim fundamentalism that holds that Israel must go. I read today that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has repudiated the Camp David accords.

So when the missiles begin to fall – not next year, maybe not for the next five years, but maybe a decade from now, how will the U.S. respond?

Which begs the critical long-term question, really the only important question that is going to come out of this, the question for our grandsons: If the Middle East as a whole decides for Islamist primitivism, and makes Israel its first target, will the U.S. risk a world war with Islam – that is what it would be – to come to Israel’s defense?

========

President Obama today gave a strongly pro-Palestinian address and called for Israel to return to its 1967 borders.   It's an extraordinary position for an American politician to take, but it is utterly unsurprising that this president took it.

Sooner or later, what is happening in this "Arab Spring" is going to be more about Israel's survival, and less about anti-Western terror.  Looks like it is going to be sooner.

The Romance of the Sentence

I can’t draw. I can’t fix things. I can’t act. My singing talent, best described as “modest” – actually, that’s generous -- has been committed to CD. Don’t ask me to sculpt anything. The artistry of my photography is pretty much limited to bounce flash and primitive Photoshop 3 operations. If SEAL Team 6 broke in one night and said “your life or an engaging fictional plot,” I wouldn’t be here to write these lines.

But one thing I can do, is type. For this I have to thank my mother’s genes and Mrs. Humphrey’s eighth grade typing class, where I was the champ on a manual Remington with metal caps over the keys so you couldn't see the letters, even beating the kids who got the few IBM Selectrics, the iPads of their day.  (Fingernail polish hid the letters on the Selectric keys.)

You thought I was going to say, “One thing I can do, is write.” That is, of course, the animating conceit of this site and of much of my life, but when one’s public output is limited to blog entries, Christmas letters, and summary judgment briefs, one is reluctant to call oneself a “writer.”

I try to write well. My keyboard speedfingers are something of an enemy to this endeavor, as I’m able to dump pretty swiftly onto the page the contents of my head. The results frequently mirror the disorder of what is to be found there.

But once in awhile, I commit to binary code a nice sentence.

Writers are obsessed by sentences. Plots and ideas abound; words, easy. But assembling the latter to advance the former in a way that is pleasing and persuasive to the reader – brother, you gotta have sentences, and some of them gotta sing.

It didn’t start with the modern master, Hemingway, whose spare constructions are beautiful to the ear and nourishing to the inner eye. But his sentences brought the art to the attention of a larger public. Teachers of writing programs tear their hair out at the crummy sentences their charges urp out. Some of it is a lack of knowledge of syntax and punctuation. But a lot of it is simply the lack of an ear for the music of which the English language -- the palette of Shakespeare, the scribes of the King James Bible, Henry James, the Brontës, Austen, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler, and their descendants – is capable. I've written here of my admiration for Merrilil Gilfillan, whose sentences, both spare and flowing, are exquisite.

Stanley Fish, an extremely controversial literary critic and university administrator -- he is colorfully attacked by both the left and right, which probably means he’s on to something -- has written a very fine little book about sentences called How to Write a Sentence -- and How to Read One.  I think we can put his political notoriety aside; I did not detect an ideological agenda here.

The title is a little misleading. After you finish it, you will not have learned very much about how to write sentences. He makes a stab at taking the reader through a few simple exercises, but his heart isn’t in it. What he really wants to do is bring to the reader’s attention the importance of the sentence, to describe the different types of sentence, and to provide numerous examples of good ones from literature and non-fiction.

You will learn more about how to read one.  As I made my way through this slim volume, I recalled pleasures from my own reading. I recalled a crime novel by one of the better writers in that genre, T. Jefferson Parker, and encountering a paragraph stringing together some of finest sentences I have ever read – and their subject matter was probably rather lurid, given the subject matter. And there are those sentences like the first sentences of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation), that never quite leave you: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And I just now remembered another one; I had to go to my library to find it because I have long forgotten the novel and its author (although strangely, when I went to the stacks, I pulled it right out). It is the first sentence from a novel called Now You See It (1991) by Cornelia Nixon, and goes: “In the summer of 1949, in eastern Colorado, far from the nearest metric wrench, our car died and sunk in a sea of sheep.”

What is it about the sentence? Do we break up our communications in this way because it mirrors our need to take a breath during speech? Or is it something more fundamental – does it reflect the way we think, in discrete bundles of information and reasoning? As I composed this essay, it occurred to me that there may be no particular reason that thinking, and speech, and writing – which is to say, understanding and perception -- could not be seamless, freed from the tyranny of subject-verb-object. But it’s the way we’re put together, and the sentence is likely with us to stay. Even the extremely long sentence as practiced by the likes of Faulkner, James, the late David Foster Wallace must be broken up into separately comprehensible clauses to allow us to get from one end to t’other.

Here’s my formula for a great sentence: (1) It must stand on its own as pleasing to the inner ear, with pauses (or not), vocabulary, word choice (not the same thing), and grammar suitable to the nugget of information it is designed to communicate. (2) It must have some intrinsic interest. It need not be something surprising, as in the two examples above, but it should provoke at least some slight recognition that there is something different here to which heed must be paid. This second requirement is not found in every single sentence, because sometimes one has to advance the narrative without even a hint of razzle-dazzle: “He drove the boulevard looking for a McDonald’s.” Perhaps this is just another way of saying that not every sentence has to be great. Sometimes you just have to say something  simply and quickly to get to the more interesting stuff.

And (3), the fine sentence must be a part of the rhythm of the other sentences in the narrative. One great line does not make a great song, and the great line will sink if it is disharmonious with its fellows. (I think of Pauline Kael’s film reviews as examples of melodic writing.) Perhaps Professor Fish will favor us with a volume on “How to Write a Paragraph.”

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes about writing, from Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel, who was tortured and murdered in Stalin's Great Purge:

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

Isaac Babel, practicing what he preached.

We Learned More about the President from the Release of His Birth Certificate Than He May Have Intended

I was never a birther. Those newspaper announcements were pretty persuasive.

I am nevertheless very pleased that President Obama authorized the release of his Hawaiian birth certificate. I understand that the birther/truther/assassination/Roswell conspiracy crowd will continue to howl about this, and I understand some book is coming out that has some stuff in it that’s supposed to be pretty hot, but this controversy is just about dead. I’ve seen a convincing explanation of why the typed information on the online version released by the White House can be made to disappear. For the good public officials of the State of Hawaii to have been hornswoggled into releasing a fraudulent document would have required a conspiracy that would make some of the nutbag Kennedy murder theories look convincing – and would have had to have taken place under the eyes of public scrutiny of the Hawaiian archives that has not let up since the man became a presidential candidate. And the argument that he’s not a “citizen” because his birth and adoptive fathers were not – folks, it’s nuts.

Nope, the President was born here and possesses the technical qualifications to be President of These States United.

And he has performed perhaps the greatest public service of his presidency, which is to have utterly marginalized the odious vulgarian Donald Trump. Another punch-line presidential candidate sliding off the charts, thank Jah.



[Photo Credit:  CBS/Getty Iimages]

And yet, as we have seen with the Osama killing (I’ll favor you with my thoughts on this soon), the episode leaves us with an uneasy feeling about this gifted but perplexing man.

What Took Him So Long? The questions of the circumstances of his birth, while coming from a faction of the right given to hysterical accusations against leaders they don’t like, were not entirely unserious. There existed circumstances which gave rise to doubt which hovered close to the “reasonable” range. For him to have ignored – more, dismissed -- this black-and-white issue of his qualification to hold office was just plain weird. I’ll come back to this.

He Made His Supporters Look Foolish. We kept hearing from the President’s supporters that he had done all he could do, that the record was as complete as it could be, that nothing further was required or even possible. I found this odd, since it did appear that a simple request from him would have sprung that birth certificate. Turns out, there was something definitive he could have done, and at long last, he did it. His supporters are probably jubilant, but from here those sounds of triumph over the birthers seem to be coming from under that bus over there.

His Delay Fed the Impression of Dishonesty About His Personal Record. His peculiar silence on this topic of immense importance served to remind people about how they elected a guy they didn’t know a whole lot about; whose academic record remains in shadow; who almost certainly did not compose Dreams of My Father (I’m not a birther, but the case that he’s fibbing about his authorship is strong); and whose political associations over the years have tended more toward the radical than he has chosen to admit.

He Managed to Look Bad Doing It.  When he finally got around to authorizing the release of his birth certificate, he was – well, he was pissy about it.  He actually had the sand to be petulant, not so much that anyone was asking about where he was born but that anyone even thought it was important. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” he said. (And how much time, exactly, did it take him to authorize the release of his certificate? The only thing that kept this issue alive, it turns out, was his refusal to resolve it.  And what is "silly" about formal constitutional mandates?) Above I said he “waited too long,” but that’s not quite right. He wasn’t “waiting” – he believed that the entire topic was beneath his -- anyone's -- notice.

Barack Obama's inaction and attitude have a single explanation:  He does not regard the subject of whether he is constitutionally qualified to be president of any importance.

We have seen this in him before. Here's what I wrote back in August::

“He recently made a statement which summed up for me the reasons I have come to find the course of his Presidency so disturbing. At a speech at the American University School of International Service a couple of weeks ago, he reportedly said: 'Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.' Even allowing the President some rhetorical license here, it's a very revealing remark, and a silly one. Being an American has almost everything to do with birth. The very first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.'

“While the President knows this, he doesn't really feel its truth. He far prefers the comfort of the abstract thought that America is not a chunk of real estate with borders, but rather a bundle of concepts that have something to do with freedom and equality and abundance and other fine things everyone should experience. And if you value those things, if you have faith in those Americanish things, well, then you must be an American.

 “It is similar to what John F. Kennedy meant when he said 'Ich bin ein Berliner' -- that is, all people who love freedom are, in a sense, citizens of Berlin who had been confined by the Berlin Wall. President Kennedy was speaking conceptually, and in his hands it was a powerful metaphor and a signal moment of the Cold War.

 “But President Obama wasn't just offering an attractive metaphor like Kennedy was. He didn't just say that people who have faith in American values are Americans, a pleasant but not terribly helpful thought in the current border controversy. He said that being born here had nothing to do with being an American. Unlike President Kennedy's graceful formulation, President Obama's treats the metaphor as reality by expressly rejecting the fact that where you are born has anything to do with being an American.

 “This is how he thinks. Not troubled by rules, constitutions, statutes, traditions, voting.”

It is a very academic attitude. His conviction as to his historic inevitabilty -- and rightness -- proceeds from first principles of his own devising (rather, the devising of the academic social theorists he admires), and not from the principles of American constitutional government or even the evidence of history.

And it gives rise to an extraordinary irony:  An event that should have put to rest the issue of his qualification for the White House has only yielded more evidence that he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the place.

Happy Birthday, Jim Osterberg

Better known to the Cool Hot Center as Iggy Pop, one of the most astonishing musicians and performers of the rock era.  I'll save my written appreciation until his 65th birthday next year, if both of us make it.

An Immortal Passes

The world of music has lost one of its most polished artists, an innovator whose work has stunned you over and over again without you knowing his name. If you own the Steely Dan album "Countdown to Ecstasy," you have seen the most memorable image of him:


Back of the "Countdown to Ecstasy" cover: left to right:
Jim Hodder, Walter Becker, Denny Dias, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter,
Donald Fagen, and . . .

 Click on that image to enlarge it, or look more closely and you will see a disembodied hand reaching up to manipulate the faders on the mixer.

That's Roger Nichols.

Roger (the Immortal) Nichols.

Roger Nichols engineered every Steely Dan track you have ever heard, as well as much of Donald Fagen's solo work ("The Nightfly; "Kamakiriad"). Engineered them to absolute sonic perfection. He won Grammies for four of them, and one for his work with John Denver.

He died on April 9 at 66 of pancreatic cancer, destitute from medical expenses.

If you are a Steely Dan lover -- oh, there are some out there who aren't, but they're probably vegans or wiccans or fish whisperers or something -- you will know that on those albums, you can hear every instrument, perfectly balanced, clear as a bell.  You can hear what the singer is singing.  The albums are quiet when they're supposed to be quiet. Ironic: One of the most distinctive sonic features of those Steely/Fagen albums is what you don't hear.

Having produced a CD, I am here to tell you that the contributions of the technicians are not merely technical -- they are unavoidably musical. Nichols's contribution was particularly vivid; he invented devices and techniques designed to produce a perfect beat on the drum tracks. But his greatest gift was to be as exacting and patient as the two most notoriously demanding artists in modern popular music, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.  He supposedly got his nickname -- which appeared in the credits on the Steely Dan albums -- from his ability to survive their epic grueling recording sessions, in one case brushing off an jolting encounter with some improperly grounded equipment.

Put on "Aja."  If you have it on vinyl, even better.  Cue up "Black Cow."  Be startled by those pellucid opening figures.  And breathe in deep for Roger Nichols.

It Is Ever Thus

Every year I organize a trip to the Dallas Auto Show.  Attending when they can are Nancy's two sons, a son-in-law, and three of our grandsons.  (There are now four, but the fourth is four days old, and his dad wisely elected not to join us this year.)  The grandsons are all wonderful young chaps, much beloved of The Memsahib and me.

Our Auto Show Expedition has a steadfast rule -- NO GURLS ALLOUD.  

We were making our way among the exhibits, when I noticed that the three grandsons, ranging in age from 4 to 11, were standing at the Cadillac turntable.   It was near closing time -- they were the only ones there.  I caught the attention of their dad, who is very adroit with the camera on his smartphone, and pointed out this touching tableau:

Click on the photo for a dramatic enlargement.

Here was my Facebook description (I'm "Pops," by the way):

"At the Cadillac turntable at the Dallas Auto Show: Samuel, Jacob, and Caleb Smith admire the fine lines and sophisticated chassis, the expensive upgrades and premium materials. But boys, take it from your Pops, who's been around the block a few times -- that model's going to run you some major dinero."

Samuel seemed quite taken by the Detroit iron, as he considered (but admirably rejected) an act of naughtiness in climbing up for a closer look.  Jacob and Caleb seemed more interested in the oral presentation.

The speaker continued her spiel as though one of these lads might be inspired to visit a Cadillac showroom to pursue a purchase.

As we were walking away, I said to Caleb that the lady talking about the Cadillac was pretty cute.  He made a dreadful frowny-face and insisted that he was only interested in the car.

Their mother left a comment on the Facebook entry:  "This picture cracks me up (sort of)."

The eternal conflict of the mother of growing, changing boys.

Remember that motto?  We may have to consider some modifications come a half-dozen years or so.