And Cialis is a Personal Erectoral Assistant

I hear a ringing in my left ear all the time. We all do, but my ringing is pretty loud. My affliction is called tinnitus. Sometimes it’s so loud, I get vertigo attacks. Luckily, it rarely happens these days. Only in times of extreme stress do I get dizzy. But I don’t hear very well. In a crowded place, I have a hard time hearing conversation. Thank God, I hang out with loud people.

Going to so many rock and roll shows didn’t help, even though I was wearing ear plugs since high school. I was in rock bands for a long time. Usually the guitarists had what I called guitar wars, whose weapons were the volume knobs of the amplifiers. Needless to say, my poor ears didn’t have a chance.

Plus, it’s in my genes. My grandmother is stone deaf. She has a hearing aid, but it mostly gives off a ghastly whine due to feedback issues. My mother is hard of hearing, too, although she’ll deny it. But watching television with her is aural attack on the senses.

According to a statistic from this article, “just 149.6 of every 1,000 adults who have diminished hearing, whether from aging, disease or injury, use a hearing aid.” That’s a great many “what?” going on. And who is this .6 person? The lack of hearing aids points to vanity and denial. If I don’t have a hearing aid people won’t know I’m aging. New hearing aids adjust to this vanity by making themselves look like Bluetooths or iPods with stylish colors like Shy Violet, Pure Passion and Crème Brûlée. And they’re not called hearing aids but Personal Communication Assistants.

I think another reason people don’t use hearing aids is the comfort of being deaf. Whenever a noise is keeping me awake at night, I just turn over and let my deaf ear block out all the sounds. People cut themselves off from the world all the time. Look at all the iPod users. People love music, but they love cutting off the world more. Why do you think iPod users have that glazed look of a catatonic? It’s the bliss of being separate.

The article also blames noisy restaurants as a source of frustration for the deafened. In the nineties, there was a popular deconstructed look in restaurants. Everything was exposed: vents, steel girders, bricks. Old factories were made into restaurants and artist’s lofts that real artists could never afford, so that fueled the look. Since nothing soaked in the sound, noise bopped all over the place, making them extremely noisy. Thankfully, that look has passed out of fashion, but it’s almost impossible for me to carry on a conversation in a noisy restaurant and bar.

Of course being deaf has its amusing moments. You can never be jilted or fired from a job.

“You’re fired.”

“Wired? Well that last cup of coffee was a bit strong.”

“No, you’re fired.”

“Tired? No, the coffee is keeping me awake.”

“You’re…oh forget it.”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

Starring Zack Braff as King Lear

I felt confusion and then pique when Scatman Crothers received an axe to his stomach. As a preteen in the theater watching The Shining, I thought I knew the story. I read a whole lotta Stephen King as a kid and when Scatman gets offed by Jack Nicholson, I was offended that Stanley Kubrick decided to kill off one of the heroes of the book. What I didn’t understand then was this was a Kubrick film and not a King book.

Richard Schickel writes about Hollywood adapting movies from books in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. You can read it here, but let me summarize: Hollywood improves low culture books, ruins high culture books and tries to capture middle brow books like Harry Potter and Gone with the Wind. He also thinks movies are closest to Victorian literature, in that they are narrative-driven.

Although he doesn’t say it, I assume he meant standard-fare movies, movies for unwashed masses at the multiplex. There are lots of movies out there that are not narrative-driven. Besides famous foreign art films like Breathless and La Doche Vita, there are American films like Waking Life, Magnolia, and perhaps the entire oeuvre of Robert Altman.

Unlike in my pre-teen years, I now believe novels and movies to be apples and oranges. Charlie Kaufman certainly proved that with his film, Adaptation, which has zip to do about orchid thieves. I prefer to movies to change the book, otherwise I might as well stay home. Silence of the Lambs was so thoroughly like the book that I was bored. They should carry the spirit of the book. The movie Troy was a complete stranger to Homer’s Iliad, but it certainly nailed the hubris and pointlessness of the battle. I could have done without the prerequisite “NOooooooo” scene, in which the hero cries out when he sees a friend about to be hurt, but petulant Pitt seemed as narcissistic as Achilles ever could be.

Of course it would take a director with balls as big as church bells to do something drastically different to the Harry Potter franchise. The Potter books and movies are fine entertainment, but I giggle like a little girl thinking of what a maverick director like Kubrick or a visual artist like Mathew Barney, or a whackjob like Alejandro Jodorowsky could do to a Potter film.

But people are comforted by predictability. Even French movies are easy to predict—a main character will die. Our lives governed by enough chaos as is, a little celluloid familiarity is a good thing I suppose. So Harry Potter will do exactly as the book has plotted him to do. But I recommend only reading books that can’t possibly be turned into movies. Gertrude Stein, anyone?

Deaf Dumb and Blind and They Suck at Pinball

Let’s get the obvious out of the way—the Bush administration has been one of the top worst administrations our young country has lived through. Nixon, at least, improved relations with China. The Bush administration has put its religious right-wing ideology before truth, before logic, and before the needs of the American public. Every day, the news tells us another story of how these imbeciles have made our country worse off.

The latest is another attack on science by these chunderheads. Let’s let the lede tell the story:

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

I didn’t blink when I read this. No surprise really. They have their own version of reality and have no qualms on forcing it on the rest of us, facts be damned. The usual topics were verboten by the cursed Bushies: stem cells, contraception, sex education, second-hand smoke, global warming. And, as usual, there are moments of mirth at the audacity of the dimwits:

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.

I hope Carmona added Bush’s name as a non sequitur at the end of every page to show how retarded the order is: “So, in conclusion, Americans need to have less trans-fat in their diet…oh yes and Bush Bush Bush.”

Here is another jaw dropper:

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name…“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The prominent family is the Kennedy family. You couldn’t make the Bush administration look worse if you tried. Don’t help the handicapped; the Kennedys help them, and we hate the Kennedys. So much for Christian values. So much for compassionate conservatism. But those titles were all oxymorons anyway.

The Whitehouse hack has to say something, so they do their usual doublespeak:

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said…“It’s disappointing to us,” Ms. Lawrimore said, “if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation.”

He failed? He failed to stand up to you I guess. How do these hacks sleep at night? I don’t know which is worse, that they have to lie publicly or they believe in the disinformation they try so desperately to spin.

The Surgeon General is a tough job. Former SGs testified that both Democratic and Republican administrations tried to influence them. I soured on Clinton when he fired Joycelyn Elders for stating that masturbation could be useful way to prevent risky sexual behaviors. Elders was simply agreeing with a statement and she was correct anyway; it is a good way. But right-wingers and religious fanatics screamed bloody murder. Clinton wussed out and asked for her resignation.

What’s most disturbing is the Bushies have no understanding of science at all:

[Carmona] described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said…“And I said to myself, ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science,’ ” he said. “I was never invited back.”

Once the science was explained to them and it didn’t back up their narrow beliefs, they just ignored their top doctor. And the litany of bone-headed manipulations goes on and on. Here’s their stupidity on tobacco:

Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government’s nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. Dr. Carmona testified anyway.

On stem cells:

“I was told to stand down and not speak about it,” he said. “It was removed from my speeches.”

On contraceptives:

“However there was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to preach abstinence only, but I felt that was scientifically incorrect,” he said.

On prison health care:

Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said…“For us, the science was pretty easy,” he said. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them.” He added, “This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”

But the Busies don’t care about the public. They are like Freud’s Id; they only see what will gratify their ideological needs. So very pathetic. The man the Bushies want to replace Carmona with is Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., a religious right-winger, who will tow the line on any issue the administration wants. God save us.

I’m usually wrong about America’s voting habits, but I’ll be very surprised if the Republicans are not kicked out en masse in the next elections. If not, then all the surgeon generals in the world couldn’t help us.

I Taste Sour Apple, Tobbaco, and Hypocrisy

England has been a bit more tolerant of the human need to be inebriated. Consider this quotation from a book review on the Waugh literary legacy:

Alexander’s and Auberon’s books also give us a taste of London journalism, which in Auberon’s time was very gloves-off. Stabs in the back, vendettas, letter-writing campaigns, lawsuits: what drama! Writers called people piss pots, poltroons, dog sodomists—almost everything but drunks. (Drunkenness was not considered a vice.) English journalism is much the same today.

Drunkenness was not considered a vice. Today, England talks of the trouble of overdrinking, but they talk about it sensibly by changing their too-short pub hours of operation. America used to be very tolerant, too. Obviously some things should not be tolerated, such as drunk driving.

But drinking in America today has a whispering secret-society feeling about it today. I once had a teacher who told me if you drink to get drunk you are an alcoholic. This is illogical by any standard; the whole point of booze is to change your consciousness. Non-alcoholic beer and decaffeinated coffee are exercises in futility. As David Letterman referred to decaffeinated coffee, it’s what their drinking in hell.

I bring all this up because of an article in the New York Times about the battle between the slobs and the snobs in the wine country of New York. Evidently, people are getting drunk at wine tastings:

There also are reports of tastings gone wild involving intoxicated visitors who have tossed back full glasses of wine without regard to nose or body until they grabbed the brass spittoon for baser purposes…The latest additions to local lore include a story about members of an inebriated group at the Palmer Vineyards here who hopped off a hayride and began gallivanting naked through the vines. Then there were the drunken customers at the Pugliese Vineyards in Cutchogue who jumped into the shimmering lake next to the elegant outdoor tasting area. And the bachelorette parties that often culminate in tabletop dances, to the horror of nearby oenophiles sniffing or sipping the local chardonnays.

Okay, I have sympathy for the people trying to get into the whole wine experience and being annoyed by the drunken louts. But this lays bare the hypocrisy that has grown around wine. Just because there is great craft gone into winemaking and the prices are high and there is a whole oenophile (wine connoisseur) language, does not mean that you are free from the baser instincts that wine brings forth. In vino veritas indeed.

But what will the vineyards do to fight the deadly drunken mobs?

In response to the raucous behavior, more associated with that South Fork bastion known as the Hamptons, almost all of the wineries have ended free tastings and now generally charge $5 for a flight of carefully measured samples. (Palmer is one of the few still pouring without charge, if only for selected wines.) Many tasting rooms have banned bachelorette parties and tightened cutoff policies on serving the inebriated.

I have a feeling the charging is more about greed than dealing with drunks. And banning bachelorette parties? Don’t these people know you don’t fuck with the bacchanal? Don’t they remember what happened to Pentheus when he tried to end the Dionysian celebrations? He was pulled apart by the ecstatic women (including his own mother!) You can’t ban the bachelorette parties.

As the movie Sideways demonstrates, you can be an oenophile and still be a drunk. But even regulars at bar know there are certain rules. Number one rule: you should be polite. It’s not rocket science. Unfortunately, amateur drunks are not very good at that rule, so they have to be reminded. The article ends with quotations from a local wine mag:

The Long Island Wine Press, a local magazine, has begun printing wine tasting etiquette guidelines and rules of proper behavior, including the need to refrain from putting tips in the wine spittoon…Do not “shout that something’s disgusting because you don’t happen to like it,” the list says, and “don’t take the three-ounce pours of wine as if they were shots.”

Yeah, save that for the tequila.

We Need Quality! Send In the Nuge!

Rupert Murdoch, media mogul, evil genius, right-wing propagandist, is the highest bidder for Dow Jones and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is upset over this because of Murdoch’s meddling and obsequiousness towards China. They fear Murdoch will ruin one of the best newspapers in the world. And they are right. Murdoch has a history of turning his news outlets into propaganda machines. They spew faux-populist crap and call it fair and balanced. Murdoch also bends over backwards not to insult totalitarian China, killing book deals that criticize China’s repressive government all in the name of China’s currency: yuan.

Now the reporting of the WSJ is excellent. Their news section is one of the finest in the world. The opinion section is shite. Ayn Randian belief in unregulated markets and knee-jerk conservative values rule the opinion pages. While the supposedly liberal bastion New York Times has conservative pundits such as David Brooks, the WSJ opinion section has no such balance. And apparently they don’t care much about facts or logic. As long as you bleat their ideology, they will print your ravings.

Case in point: the Nuge. Ted Nugent, has-been rocker, famous for being drug free and his love of hunting, wrote an editorial slamming the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Why would the stuffy staff of the WSJ call upon the Nuge to write an editorial is beyond me. Perhaps they love all those paeans to pussy that Nugent wrote, such as “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.” And the Nuge delivers on the hysterical prose:

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

Actually I think they were turned off by the Vietnam war, the repression and unhappiness of their parents and what a complete lie the American Dream is, unless your Scooter Libby. He then bemoans the death of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin due to drugs. I can’t argue with that. And then he casually drops a lie:

Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

Morrison’s death remains a bit of a mystery because no autopsy was done on it. He certainly was no stranger to drugs, but more than likely, Morrison died due to his enormous drinking habit, and although alcohol is a drug, hippies for the most part rejected alcohol. Mama Cass died from a heart attack brought on by obesity, a true American, Midwest, American-Values problem. (No, she didn’t choke on a ham sandwich.) Also, the term liberal deniers make it sound like someone denying liberals, but clear grammar and logic is not the Nuge’s forte.

Then he gives a powerful description of what he went through in those turbulent times:

I literally had to step over stoned, drooling fans, band mates, concert promoters and staff to pursue my musical American Dream throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember. In utter frustration I was even forced to punch my way through violent dopers on occasion.

I love this image: Terrible Ted punching his way through a zombie force of drooling drugged out hippies. Say Ted, didn’t you sing “The stakes are high and so am I” in your song, “Free For All”? Oh I see, you can exploit drug use in your songs but you didn’t use them.

And it seems being stone cold sober means you get to print lies with the imprinteur of the WSJ:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

Did you get that, folks? Hippies smoking rag weed cause divorce, kids leaving school, drug use, abortion, STDs, crime, more government and taxes. Where are these statistics, Ted? I’m guessing he pulled them out of his ass. All these things have risen along with our population. Not to mention these things existed well before the 1960s. Why do conservatives look to the past with rose-colored glasses? I’d also like to point out we’ve had more conservative leadership since the 1960s then liberal, and I think the government has more power then the hippies of Haight Street.

He goes on:

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco--a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless--to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

Shopping carts to the homeless? Those crazy, Godless San Franciscans! Room temperature? You would think a hunter could come up with a better metaphor than that for death. God knows, he has caused a whole lot of death. Then Nugent ends his piece:

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.

If your clean and sober lifestyle lead to the formation of your shit-sucking band, Damn Yankees then pass the joint, Ted. And WSJ, don’t worry about Murdoch buying your paper. If the Nuge is your idea of high journalistic standards, Rupert can only make things better.

Apocalypse Pretty Soon

I have to admit there have been certain days when I prayed for the end of days. Most likely, it was because my head was throbbing or I was broken hearted or I was filled with corporate-work ennui. But I never really wanted the world to end, and certainly didn’t put an exact date on it. But through the centuries, religious groups have predicted the end of the world. In an article about the newest version of the apocalypse comes this paragraph:

Light and darkness—heavenly forces and a corrupted earth—are the twin engines of apocalyptic movements. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but can’t yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe—and we are always wrong.

Yup, always wrong. Such hubris, to think that one can know when the earth will flutter out. We might not make it, but the earth will be around. But insecurity is so strong that folks have to believe in it

…according to Paul S. Boyer, an authority on prophecy belief in American culture and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the apocalypse is an appealing idea because it promises salvation to a select group—all of whom share secret knowledge—and a world redeemed and delivered from evil. “The Utopian dream is a big part of the Western tradition,” Boyer told me, “both the religious and secular forms. But the wicked have to be destroyed and evil has to be overcome for the era of righteousness to dawn.”

This reminds me of clubs that little kids make in which they exclude a gender just to feel special. And of course it’s not just the religious. New Agers have their own religion, but their myths and icons are all too similar:

“The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy,” Arguelles wrote me recently from New Zealand, where he has gone to prepare for the transition. Since 1993, when he claims to have received a new prophecy in Hawaii, he has been calling himself Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle. “We’ll be literally living in a new time,” Arguelles said, “by a 13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony with everything all the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic communication.” As for the many who “have not evolved spiritually enough to know that there are other dimensions of reality,” Arguelles predicts they will be taken away in “silver ships.”

Not interested in telepathic gardening? Oh well, get on the silver ship—destination unknown. Hard to believe that people buy into this, but then again, people buy into Jesus rising from the dead and Moses parting the Red Sea. According to the Mayaist (They believe the Mayans predicted the end of days), the end is either 2011 or 2012. Being that the idea of heaven bores me, and the New Ager idea of telepathic gardeners is even duller, I’ll go to hell on the silver ship.

What amazes me is the amount of work people put into this. They study ancient cultures and write books and even change their names, all in a quest that will end in disappointment once the end date passes to the next day. The sun will set and the sun will rise. I’ve seen this elsewhere. At a hippy reggae festival I had a pleasant woman at a booth try and convince me that the World Trade Center destruction was caused by controlled demolition. There were books and videos and here she was manning this booth, spending her free time and energy on this pointless mission. I tried to be polite, but I had to ask, isn’t more important to work against the right-wing demagoguery in this country rather then silly, paranoid conspiracy theories. But I misunderstood the powerful human emotion to fantasize rather than deal with cold, dull truth. Oh well, while you are on the mountain top waiting for the rapture, I’ll be in the bar, telling jokes.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: The Attic

On Saturday night, I saw a friend perform in a Hip Hop dance show. Hip Hop dance is fluid movements, punctuated with sharp stops symbolizing major attitude. You definitely do not want to get into these people’s grills. My friend is an excellent dancer, and his time on stage was woefully short. After the show, we retired to a bar a couple of storefronts away from the theater. I’ve never heard of The Attic, but San Francisco never ceases to surprise me.

The Attic resembles many hipster bars in the Mission. The interior is painted in black, and the paint job looks sloppy, as if the painters were hitting the hooch as they worked. The entrance is like a long narrow hallway with the bar on one side. In the back is a bigger room with booths and tables. Horror movie posters sporadically line the walls. A few peculiar paintings hang on the wall. One has a giant head of a conquistador floating above a harbor, very strange. We sat in a booth, whose seats seemed entirely covered in duct tape.

We sat and drank and made fun of the hipsters. As the title implies, hipsters try to stay hip by wearing unusual clothes. I knew one guy that wore women’s pants and clown shoes?!? I kept making fun of two guys wearing bright-red tuques, a knitted hat they wear in Canada because it’s so freaking cold there. I am way too lazy to dress hip. I look like a preppy that has gone to seed. A D.J. started spinning records of hard rock bands from the seventies and eighties. I complimented him on a Pat Travers choice; I haven’t heard Travers in a long time. He also played Saga, another band I haven’t heard in some time.

On going to the bathroom, I noticed a flyer for a drink special: Canada night, all Canadian whisky and beer discounted. Hmm, I thought, they have a Canadian night, how hipster-ish. When I returned to the booth, they handed out the words to “Oh Canada” in English and in Québécois French. Ah, the light bulb appeared over my head. Sunday must be Canada’s Independence Day or whatever they celebrate since they are still under England’s queen. That’s why people are wearing the tuques. That’s why the D.J. is playing Pat Travers, Saga, Rush, April Wine, and Triumph. Canada did put out some fine hard rock bands.

At midnight, we sang “Oh Canada” along with a recorded version by Céline Dion. I pounded my chest, just like the screecher from up North. With the exception of a friend who went to camp up north and knew the melody, we butchered the melody. Of course, this is a perfect example of hipster-ness, a mix of fascination, adulation and a huge dose of irony. They are making fun of Canada while worshipping it. While annoying as that is, it is also fun. It sure beats a normal night of drinking. And it is surely more fun then drinking in a Marina bar, watching the aging frat boys and sorority girls do the sad mating dance they do.