Official State Weapons! An Idea Whose Time Has Come!

I savor recent reports from Utah and Arizona whose legislative bodies have established an official state gun. For Utah, the Browning M1911 pistol because Mr. Browning grew up in Utah and was the son of pioneers. For Arizona, the Colt revolver because it's made in Connecticut and was used to help settlers kill off the ancestors of Native Americans living in Arizona. That's my guess anyway.

NPR reports that the Florida legislature would bar doctors -- especially pesky pediatricians -- from asking their patients if they own guns, guns being a possible health hazard, especially to children if the parents are careless with the care of guns. Governor Scott says that asking this question of parents constitutes a violation of their Second Amendment rights. Perhaps Florida will honor the loaded-and-unlocked-and-negligently-stored-danger-to-my-child-and-other-children-but-goddammit-that's-my-Second-Amendment-right-and-I'll-give-it-up-when-you-pry-it-from-my-child's-cold-dead-fingers official state gun.

But why just firearms? Why not the official state weapon? Some creative states might designate the pox-infested woolen blanket as the official state weapon. Others, in the South perhaps, the rope! New Jersey might honor cement. And, of course, Nevada would trump everyone with its official state armament: the hydrogen bomb!

Yoko Ono Advises the Beatles from Bed

Took me three years, I think, at a couple of pages here and there now and again, but I just finished Bob Spitz's excellent 860 page biography "The Beatles." If you know me, you know I'm a Beatles fan. My tastes have shifted more toward John Beatles than Paul Beatles (and I've a very, very limited interest in post-Beatles Beatles) and I read the bio mostly for insight into their song creation and musicianship. Of course, there's much more than that including their personalities, the business end, the impact of adulation and millions of dollars, the drugs, the drugs, the drugs, and the drug-induced psychosis, especially in LSD-addled John Lennon who added heroin after deciding to throw in his lot with Yoko Ono.

I couldn't help but make the following assessment: Lennon and McCartney seem quite objectionable as mates, friends, or bandmembers. Yes, yes, yes . . . great music, but deeply unattractive people those two. McCartney was, perhaps is, egotistical, controlling, self-serving, pretentious, disingenuous, and unctuous in the extreme. Lennon was worse: violent, volcanically angry, homophobic, probably anti-semitic, deeply inconsiderate, and drug-addled.

George and Ringo? Princes. And perhaps Lennon outgrew his demons before he died. Hard to say.

But Yoko, with whom I've always tried to sympathize, may be the most comically objectionable of them all.

Consider the following episode from Spitz's biography (which, I'd have to say, is not sympathetic to Yoko):

After marrying John, Yoko had suffered another of her several miscarriages and to heal she and John visited Scotland on holiday. This was around the time of the "Abbey Road" recordings. John had never driven a car before, and though quite stoned, he insisted that he be given an Aston-Martin to drive around the treacherous Scottish backroads. No one says "no" to a Beatle and so off he went with four people in the car including his son Julian by his first marriage and, of course, he promptly crashed the car into a deep ditch to avoid an oncoming car. After a brief hospitalization for superficial wounds, John and Yoko returned to London where John intended to head back into the studio with the Beatles. By this time, Yoko had been attending recording sessions for about a year despite the deep resentment of the other Beatles. Here's Spitz:

"With John's reappearance in the studio came Yoko, back at his side, ever conspicuous as an intruder; however, this time, there was an even more offensive twist: Yoko was pregnant again, with strict orders from her doctor to remain in bed while recovering from the car crash. In a characteristically aggravating gesture, she had Harrods [London's Bloomingdale's] deliver a double bed to the studio and instructed a [studio] technician to suspend a microphone above her head that would adequately furnish her comments to the band."

Elsewhere, Spitz reports that upon attending recording sessions with John, Yoko would presume to advise the band on musical matters. She would cut into discussions with a forceful, "Beatles should . . . " followed by her expert recommendations.

I very much enjoyed reading about John and Yoko's record, the "Wedding Album," in which one whole side of the vinyl album consists of John and Yoko screaming each other's name. Imagine!

Getting a Second Mortgage at an ATM

Went to my bank last week to withdraw funds from one of the two ATMs. I took my place off to side and a polite distance away from two women using the machines. A young man was already there waiting ahead of me on the other side of the women.

So I'm standing off to the side and I can't really see what either woman's doing. Occasionally, I see a hand reach in and back again, then in, then back. A hip or foot shifts compelling the young man and me to look up in anticipation of our turn. He and I make brief eye contact and look away like people waiting for a restroom at a popular restaurant. But the women at the ATMs continue their transactions.

After a while the line on either side of the women had increased to include several people including a mom with two small children who were running around, marring the banking decorum which exists even in this parking lot.

The women at the ATMs continued their business. We all looked furtively as the hands at the ATMs went in, out, in, out.

And then it suddenly occurred to me: Banks, like other businesses, work to cut down on labor costs -- after all, who goes to a teller anymore? -- so maybe these banks found a way to help people with more complex banking transactions . . . at ATMs!

I mean, what were these women doing at these ATMs? Getting a second mortgage? Setting up trust funds for their children? What?!!?

Does everyone now do all their banking on ATMs?

Does the Federal Reserve make money supply adjustments on an ATM?

Finally, after the women had apparently started a hedge fund at the ATMs, I stepped up to transact my humble banking -- a simple withdrawal of walking around money which made me feel like a beggar by comparison or, at best, a child bringing his piggie bank to the counter. But by the time I'd done so, I calculated that inflation, modest as it is, had eaten away 4% of the value of my earnings!

Groceries? Yes. Cappucino? No.

Spaniards Do Random

As you probably know, there are some sayings in other languages that, when translated literally, lose their intended meaning.

Here, in the USA, when we are confronted by some irrelevant piece of info in the midst of a discussion, those of us middle-aged and older might ask, "Dude, what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?" Those who are younger might insist, "Dude, that is soooo random."

In some Spanish-speaking countries, people respond to irrelevant info with, "Yo tengo una tía que toca la guitarra."

It literally translates as, "I have an aunt who plays the guitar."

But what is means is, "Dude, you want random? I got random."


(You may feel, if you've read this far, that this blog entry seems random to you. Well, it is an eclectic mix of things here, right? The eclectics of the world do seem distracted by tangents.)

Greatest Music Video Ever

I am going to post videos I've come across. Here's the first. It's from Japan. Lovely.

Etymology of "Genius"

Genius -- Comes from the Latin word of the same spelling for the deity which watches over each person from birth. This spirit gives one "wit and talent." The root of this is in the Latin word "gignere" which means "to produce" and that comes from the proto-Indo-European foundational word "gen" which means "to produce," too. So you can see how the word "genes" fits in here.

Going back to the idea of a deity which watches over each person from birth, consider the word "genie" which shares an origin with "genius." A genie guards over you and makes you look smart.


Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Impact of Ayn Rand on Tea Party Folks

Maureen Dowd on the impact of Ayn Rand on the Tea Party folks in Congress like Paul Ryan:

"Indeed, Congressman Ryan has said the reason he got involved in public service was 'by and large' because of Rand, and he has encouraged his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged.

You’d think that our fiscal meltdown would have shown the flaw in Rand’s philosophy. She thought we could derive morals from the markets. But we derived immorality from the markets.

She wrote about Nietzschean superheroes who made things. She died before capitalism evolved into a vampire casino where you could bet against investments you sold to your clients, and make money off something you didn’t own or that existed only on paper."

Guy Kawasaki, on the iPhone

"$188 worth of parts, manufactured in a plant where workers tend to commit suicide, hitched to America’s worst cell phone network. But this is not how Steve Jobs pitches it"

Talking Money

This was presented to my students after they read and wrote about The Great Gatsby:

Many of you have a problem with “money.” You don't trust it; don't want to be too involved with it. You find it . . . vulgar. At the very least, you don't want to be defined by how much you have or how you use it.

Now, let’s stipulate that while some of us in this room may have considerably more family money than others, it is nonetheless the case that by comparison with most of the rest of the world, now and certainly throughout history, we are all filthy rich. So your high rise may be 20 floors taller than mine, but both of them tower over the shanty towns of the rest of the world.

And yet . . . we distrust money. I believe that the distrust of money is a luxury only the rich can afford because we can’t really imagine how we will ever go hungry or cold and by that I mean hungry and with no knowledge of when or from where the next meal or meals will come come. We take money for granted because we can. Remember, in this context, we’re all rich. Remember also, someone has ponied up $34K to have you go to this school when there are free schools all over the city. That $34K is more than most people will see in a lifetime. This is not meant to make you feel guilty . . . just responsible for knowing what’s up.

Money is not the problem. The problem is the stupid ideas we all too often have about money. The two – money and stupid ideas about money – are separable.

Some of you express a distaste for what is expected of you: go to college, get a job, make bank, raise a family, and the young ‘uns start it all over again.

Here’s another way to look at that process: Develop your intellectual talents because your brain likes a challenge otherwise you never would have learned to speak; apply your intellectual talents to an attractive occupation and trade those talents for the talents of others. I teach. I trade teaching for, say, dentistry.

Money is just a tool that allows us to trade skills efficiently. With money, I don’t have to find a parent of one my students to do the dentistry in exchange for my teaching. That would be an inefficient use of my time. I couldn’t teach as much and the dentist, in search of teachers, couldn’t . . . dent as much.

Developing your talents because it brings you joy is fine. Developing your talents so that you can apply them to the most profitable occupation available, is deeply dangerous. You run the risk of a lifetime, your only lifetime, consumed by boredom and little fulfillment.

I can’t imagine being a dentist. I’d maybe make more money, but I’d be bored to the point of depression after 10 years or less. I hope my dentist loves dentistry. If she’s doing it just for the money, I hope she learns to love dentistry. If she doesn’t love it or learn to love it, I pity her.

Now, also, don’t be too unrealistic about money. Some people say, “Do what you want and the money will follow?” That’s ridiculous. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

More accurately: “Do what you want and the money won’t matter as much . . . unless you’re also responsible for the lives of others . . . like your children . . . in which case you can either sacrifice the ‘what you want’ self-indulgence and maybe attend to your kids or you can work hard to convince your kids that money doesn’t matter.” So . . . let’s get real about money. And let’s not denigrate the man and woman who didn’t have the opportunity to develop their intellectual talents and must now work some soul-deadening jobs to give kids a chance to develop their talents and live a fulfilling life.

So give money a break. It’s the messenger. Not the message.

The Fulfillment Curve from treehugger.com.

What I'm Reading: Purple, the Color, Its Origin . . .

From Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky:

"When the Romans took over the Phoenician salt trade, they discovered how to make a purple dye. A logical byproduct of fish salting, the dye was produced by salting murex, a Mediterranean mollusk . . . . The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power. Julius Caesar decreed that only he and his household could wear purple-trimmed togas. The high priests of Judaism, the Cohanim, dyed the fringes of their prayer shawls purple. Cleopatra dyed the sails of her warship purple. . . . Pliny wrote that men were slaves to 'luxury . . . inasmuch as men scour . . . all the rocks of [North Africa] for the murex and for purple.'"

Photo by Patrick Hamilton.

What I'm Reading: Impact of Cameras, Records, etc.

From The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa by NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman:

"Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers had learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph records, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home [sheet music was bought instead or records], playing the piano and singing in the parlor. Cameras made the task of keeping a record of people and things simpler and more widely available,and in the process reduced the care and intensity with which people needed to look at the things they wanted to remember well, because pressing a button required less concentration and effort than composing a precise and comely drawing. During the last century, the history of amateurism in American, whether it entailed snapping photographs or painting pictures or tickling the ivories, like so many other aspects of life, increasingly centered on labor-saving strategies to placate our inherent laziness and to guarantee our satisfaction, a promise, if you think about it, that should be antithetical to the premise of making art, which presumes effort and risk."

I Know the She's

Was rockin' my dark blue tee with the reindeer that loves the She's today and the barrista making my cappucino says, "Oh, man, the She's ROCK!"

I asked her if I rock, too, since I'm wearing the She's tee.

She hesitated and then said, "Uh, yeah-uh!"

But the hesitation spoke the truth and it said, "Sadly . . . no."

So I said, "Your hesitation spoke volumes and it said, 'Sadly, no, you do not rock. Nothing could make YOU rock.'"

"No, REALLY!" she insisted. "You rock."

"No way I rock," I said, steadfast in my understanding of the communication of hesitation.

She looked at me the way people look when they've been caught . . . in a terrible lie!!!!!!!!

So I pulled out my secret weapon: I said, "I know Sami and Sinclair."

She showed no recognition.

"They're just the bassist/singer and drummer for the She's," I informed her, " . . . and I know them really well. Really, really well. We have a small club. Meets Wednesdays at lunch. You can't be in it."

She tilted her head slightly and looked away.

"Now who rocks?" I queried as I took my cappucino and walked away.

Just When You Think . . .

Without Tits There Is No Paradise is a very popular televised soap opera in Colombia.

The USA tends to be a bit more prudish about television. More prudish, in fact, than most of the world. Perhaps now I'm more grateful for that.

I sometimes grit my teeth as I consider some of the more vulgar, stupid examples of USA culture polluting other lands like an imperial invasion of junk. I give you the most popular American television program abroad: Bay Watch. Or consider the McDonald's on the same piazza as the 2200-year-old Pantheon in Rome. However, these folks elsewhere do ask for this junk. And, of course, upon going abroad, I quickly find examples of home-grown nastiness that competes with anything we here in the US send over.

Still, if what I read in the current Atlantic Monthly is true, Colombia wins the junk wars. In the Atlantic Monthly it's reported that "one of Colombia's most popular television show [is] Without Tits There Is No Paradise." It's apparently the continuing saga of a "flat-chested" and impoverished teenager "who wants to sell her virginity for a pair of implants."

I decided not to post visuals for this entry.

This Teacher's Nightmares!!!

There ought to be a word for nightmares that aren't nightmares like Tina gets (she's being chased and her screams come across the pillow as moans born of horror and agony which awaken me, quickly, and so I heroically awaken her and am then assured by her still-asleep and breathless "thank you" which makes me wonder if I entered her dream and thoroughly kicked some assailant's ass (which I can't even do in my dreams so I'm grateful for the possibility of doing it in hers) or . . . did I just obliterate the nightmare altogether by awakening her?. No. No drama in mine like that. Mine are just annoying visitations based upon my own insecurity about what I fear is a presumptuousness going on 20 years, i.e., what business do I have in a classroom full of bright, disciplined kids? I get these two dreams, each is annoying and each attempts to put me in my place about once every six months or so:

I'm scheduled to play a piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony. I know, but it becomes clear to me that no one else seems to know -- or maybe they do! and they certainly should! -- that I don't play anywhere near well enough to play classical music much less classical music with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra! I don't play classical! I don't sight read very well at all. I have very limited technical fluency or facility on the keyboard so that anything beyond a ballad's tempo or any run up or down the keyboard or any contrapuntal activity requiring a left hand that does anything more than pound chords on the 1 and 3 is wholly beyond me. How did I qualify for this gig? And why do people seem to look forward to my playing? And at what point did I think I could perform with aplomb, fooling everyone? Or did I just go along with whatever ill-founded confidence the music world extended to me? These questions come to me after I awaken, but in the dream they are the inchoate miasma which makes for whatever nightmarish quality the dream imposes upon me.

So . . . here I am, getting ready to go on stage (I guess we have, in fact, rehearsed even!!! and I somehow pulled it off!) in my tux to be greeted by hearty applause, the welcoming smile of MTT, and everyone's happy anticipation of a night of artistry! MTT lifts his baton, the symphony comes in and . . . I play. And sure, I'm a little anxious all the while that I'll be found out, but actually pretty confident, too, and . . . I pull it off! There's applause!

I get the hell off stage . . . .

And there the dream ends.

You might well ask, "Dude, what's wrong with that? That's no nightmare!"

But, of course, it is! Because I know I'm a fake who just succeeded with my fakery . . . and, worse, it will just encourage me to continue with my con and not ever really learn the craft of playing the piano (see "teaching") well. And one day, I will get caught. MTT will step off the podium, look at the music in front of me, look at me, and with both of us scandalized in that moment, he'll point to the f*******ing door.

Who am I to be teaching Shakespeare, Sophocles, Hurston, et al?!!?


And now, for a couple years or so, a new annoyance visits my sleep and in this dream . . . I do get caught:

I'm about to take a final exam in a class for which I have not only not done the work since about the first week of school, I even forgot this class was on my schedule . . . or conveniently forgot . . . up until this moment, the moment when all will become clear as I stare blankly at and leave blank my final exam. And I know that this will mean that I will fail the class; it will mean humiliation.

In this dream, there's no faking it . . . yet anyway. I always wake up, humiliated, before I have to take the final exam. Although I'm not confronted in the dream by any authority, it must be clear to all that I haven't been in class, just about ever, and that I cannot possibly be prepared for this test. I know I don't know and I know that everyone else must know that I don't know . . . anything.

But how is this different from playing with the Symphony? Perhaps one night I will take that final exam and bullshit my way through. I'll hand it in and hang around just long enough to gather my things while noticing the professor leaf through my pages. Yes, in this dream, I can't tell if I'm in high school or in law school (where I was negligent, but not that negligent), and I seem to be a younger man, but with the life experience of the 55 year old that I am. Seems that way anyway.

I wake up mildly disgusted with myself, but then I chuckle because I've escaped the reality, the Truth, represented in the dream and am back in the material world where my smoke and mirrors continue to work wonders.




There must be a name for these dreams. It's not stage fright. As the pianist, and despite my incredulity about being accepted as a classical pianist, in my dream I actually have some confidence that I can do this. Otherwise, I would have run to the nearest exit.

In the final exam dream, I have no intention of "performing" on stage.

I should note that Tina had a somewhat similar recurring dream years ago when she waited tables. She dreamt she had too many tables to wait on. But, you see, in this dream, she didn't create the problem. She's blameless and the injustice of it causes her to scream, a scream of agony that comes across the pillows as moans. So I wake her up. I'm good at that.

G-Gear: My New Clothing Line and Fashion House

Like my other creative friends, I've started my own clothing line, my own Fashion House, so let me hear you say "GREG IS IN HIS FASHION HOUSE!!!" I call it "G-Gear"!!! "G-Gear" . . . pronounced "Guh-Gear" not "Gee-Gear." Teeshirts and denim. Send me $100 for full ensemb.

Here, the highlights are kept under wraps before the Milan spring season show.

It just makes sense: My creativity is not restricted to my blogging even though my blog is eclectic. I am musical! I have painted. And sculpted. I sculpted detritus in my backyard long before Andy Goldsworthy, a little known sign painter when he and I first lunched amidst my "Eucalyptus Seizure" installation. And don't we all -- well, all of us of an artistic bent -- regard our bodies as canvasses or sculptural scaffolding upon which we struggle with the creations of others to express our inner nature sartorially.