It’s complicated

Baseball and I have had a complicated relationship these past few years. At first it was the Mariners — I was so fed up with the franchise and its stupid decisions that I decided to stop investing financial and emotional resources in them. The former was easy; the latter wasn’t. I tried to quit them cold turkey and start watching other teams, but there was no passion. I didn’t need to see the games, didn’t need to be involved in its rhythms and patterns — didn’t even really pay attention to the playoffs and certainly didn’t care about the World Series, except inasmuch as I wanted the Yankees (and, more recently, the Red Sox) to lose.

It’s sometimes said that one can be a baseball fan, in the sense that one is a fan of baseball, but I’m starting to think that you need to have a single team to root for — something that anchors you within the context of the sport. You might know how to appreciate a good ball game, and even enjoy watching teams you have no vested interest in for the sake of watching the game (minor league ball is a lot like this for me), but the joy isn’t there if it’s not a team you care about. Maybe other people are capable of caring like that. Probably other people are capable. I’m not. Without the Mariners in my daily life, I came unmoored from baseball: vaguely aware of what was going on, and what had happened over the past week or so, but not engaged and involved in it. I stopped reading Baseball Prospectus, stopped reading the box scores, stopped reading game summaries. If only because the commentary is so thoroughly excellent I still paid attention to USS Mariner and Dave Cameron; the Mariner-specific stuff served only to enrage me further and remind me of why I wasn’t investing any energy in caring.

Don’t play, can’t lose. Don’t care, can’t get hurt.

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The Proxy Marriage

Maile Meloy has a new short in the May 21st issue of the New Yorker, called “The Proxy Marriage.” New Yorker fiction is often ambivalent, emotionally stunted, or downright bleak. (I’m looking at you, Annie Proulx’s “Tits-up In A Ditch.”) So it was a bit of a surprise to find a short story that is so unequivocal, clear, and leaves you feeling rather refreshed at the end. I cannot guarantee that it will make your heart melt to any real degree, but I loved it, and I suspect you’ll like it, too.

Urban legends

As Dave Barry says, “I am not making this up.”

There’s this story on Snopes about finding money hidden inside a Gideon Bible. It’s new to me. I’d never heard about it, never even thought to go looking to see if it was true, despite the inordinate number of hotel rooms I’ve been in over the past few years. The story is weirdly appealing, and I can see the way the legend got started, and the tenacity with which it lives on despite the total absence of objective proof. A legend’s not a legend that doesn’t die, right?

Last week, I was in Kihei having an argument with myself about the precise wording of John 11:25-26. (Don’t ask.) And I thought, “Hey, I have a Bible right here. I can use one of these old-fashioned books to do my research; no need to fire up Google!” The Gideon was sitting in its desk drawer as if it had waited years for this moment: someone, a guest, was reaching in for an Answer. But something was wrong — it was lying strangely, as though a bookmark had been left inside. I let the Bible open on its own. There was a bookmark: a $1 bill.

This was clearly something that required Google, so off to the search engine we went, whereupon I discovered the aforementioned Snopes page and its dismissal of this urban legend as “indeterminate.” Fair enough, yet here I was staring a real-life counterexample. I could have bought the argument that the bill had been left in the Bible for safekeeping — if it had been a $20. But a buck? Who’s going to try to hide that? Then I looked more carefully at where the Bible had opened. It was the Gospel of John. I’ll bet you can guess which part.

This was obviously well into urban legend territory. Nobody was going to leave a $1 in a Bible of safekeeping; this was deliberate. I tried to imagine the mindset of a person who would mark those particular pages with a dollar bill, in the hopes that someone would find the bill, take the time to read the entirety of both pages and then recognize the significance of a dozen words in one verse of one book. (Note to that person if you’re reading: a highlighter might have helped here. Just saying.) Or maybe it was left as a talisman for someone else to find, a kind of “A Follower of Christ Slept Here” marker. I liked the idea of someone trying to reach out through time to communicate this message to another person, in such a specific way, while using a clumsy and blunt instrument like this. (Note to that person: maybe stick the bill out of the Bible too? So it’s obvious? With a highlighter?) Then I wondered whether it might just be someone familiar with the legend who was fucking with me and the future. Then I gave up thinking about it, because I couldn’t decide which scenario I liked more. Still can’t, actually.

But it got me thinking: John 3:16 is probably the most famous verse in the entirety of the Bible. It’s the Gospel In A Nutshell. It is the distillation of the essence of Christianity — put a gun to your head and tell you to explain that whole religion in 10 seconds or less, it’s probably the single best choice to save your life. I get this. (I also get it is a cultural cliche, but never mind that. I’m talking theology here.)

As has become more common these days, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai had been to my hotel on Maui, and left their own contribution to the hotel room night stand religious conversation: The Teaching of Buddha. I’m highly familiar with this book, though I won’t lie — it’s hard to read and it is not what I’d choose if someone asked me to provide a non-denominational introduction to Buddhist thought. Staring at it, lying in the drawer, it occurred to me: what is the Buddhist equivalent of John 3:16? Gun to my head, how do I explain the essence of Buddhist thought in 10 seconds or less?

“God loves you; Jesus saves.” That’s the short message of Christianity. What would work as the Buddhist version of this? The core message of Buddhism, independent of school or sect, is that the world is full of causes and conditions and that our failure to understand and see those causes and conditions for what they are leads us to desire things, and those desires cause suffering; to alleviate that suffering, you need to — oh, I don’t need to spell it out. You’re smart. You know what it means. It’s a pretty simple message — see the world for what it is, stop pretending it’s something it isn’t, and you’ll feel better — but you can’t print that on the bottom of a take-out cup. It’s too nuanced, too dependent on explanation. So what else is out there?

(Sadly, the single best and most succinct explanation I’ve come up with isn’t from “The Teaching of Buddha” and it isn’t from any recognized authority on Buddhism. It’s also incredibly flippant: “Life sucks. Get a helmet.” But Leary wasn’t far off the mark, and despite the obnoxiousness it actually kind of works.)

Eventually, I settled on the first line of Chapter 1 on causation: “The world is full of suffering.” I figured that if the unknown Christian traveler had counted on me reading all the way through two pages of John to find what he or she really meant, I could get someone else to read about the Fourfold Noble Truth. It wasn’t an evangelical act or anything like that — it was more of a thought experiment, a way of paying the notion of religious messaging forward; someone left me a Christian message, so I’ll try leaving someone a Buddhist one.

Maybe the next time I check in to a Marriott I’ll find someone has left me a message in the Book of Mormon. Who knows?

afowueu0fawnladsclmksk’jf

I am hoping that the events of the past week or so have finally demonstrated exactly how unhinged elements of the conservative universe are. And one would hope beyond hope that Rush Limbaugh will finally, finally, finally be banished from polite society (and, one might also hope, impolite society as well). I’m not holding my breath, though; we’ve been down this road before, and I wouldn’t bet that in a month we’re not going to be referring to this as a new normal. If nothing else, I hope this episode helps to reinforce what people like Melissa McEwan have been saying for a long, long time — there’s a war on, the war is on women, and the wrong side is winning.

This matters to everybody. It’s not just about women’s health care, though that matters a great deal. It is, fundamentally, about the notion that we have no obligation towards each other, and that anyone who feels differently is a leach, a parasite, a drag on society, who must be denigrated at all costs and cast out as the evil degenerate she is. That this two-minutes-hate currently involves women is doubly offensive, but it does illustrate exactly how much misogyny is really out there, and how the functional control of women, and in particular the control of women’s reproductive health, is the real driving factor. Make no mistake, this isn’t about public health or insurance coverage requirements or anything of the sort: this is about ensuring the continuing subjugation of women. Consider, for the moment, that since this controversy is really about private insurance plans covering contraception, not tax dollars — it takes a willful disregard of the blatantly obvious facts (like, who is paying for this — to say nothing of the fucking biology involved here) to turn this into a public policy issue, but even if it was the willingness of the American right to casually refer to women who take hormonal contraceptives as sluts and whores is shocking. Do you not know any women at all? is what goes through my head; I’m guessing they do, but they don’t care, because they have no souls.

Jon Steward is typically excellent on this one (Canadian link, more practically useful American link) and you should watch the segment appropriately entitled “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Gross.” The nail, as it were, that Stewart hit:

I’m just saying to the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: welcome to the fucking club. Everyone pays for shit they don’t want to all the time. You know what? Reimburse me for the Iraq war and the oil subsidies, and guess what, then diaphragms are on me. No — prophylactics are on the house. (You should rent Goodfellas, I think you’ll like that scene.)

It’s called society. These fuckers are trying to undo all of it. Don’t let them.

“Hitting Zero”

I saw this Darlene Lim short on an Air Canada flight back in 2006 and have spent the last six years looking for a readily-accessible copy to watch. It is just as good as I remember it being at the time. Do you remember the anxieties of being in your early-to-mid twenties, trying to figure out how the world worked and why your (objectively insignificant) problems seemed so huge? Of course you do.

Share and enjoy.

Sic transit gloria E-6

Kodak is getting out of the slide film business.

There are a bunch of reasons why: the general decline in popularity of film, the fact that Kodak has been losing money like mad, that they’re in bankruptcy now and trying to get rid of unprofitable business units, the even-more-extreme niche that slide film occupies… these are all true. And I never loved the Kodak E-6 film the way I did Fuji’s slide film, or some of Kodak’s black and white emulsions, so it’s not like this is a loss on the scale of, say, Verichrome or, as a more direct comparison, Kodachrome (which I also never really liked).

But this is another sad development in the long goodbye for traditional photography processes. Kodak will apparently continue to manufacture the chemistry needed to process E-6, and there’s enough stock for 6-9 months of sales, but that’s it from them. It’s now all up to Fuji.

Making Sparks

About five years ago, I bought an album called “If You Were For Me” by Rose Cousins, on the basis of her performance on a CBC Radio 1 show I half-listened to while recovering from a night shift. It didn’t immediately gel with me — though I did love the title track right off the bat — but over the space of the next six months I realized I was listening to it more and more, and caught myself humming bits and pieces of it to myself. When we got married, I had a conversation with the guy we’d hired to do our music, in which he asked what kind of stuff we liked, and it was very difficult for me to not blurt out “Rose Cousins.”

“If You Were For Me” has since become one of my very favorite albums, right up there with Edie Carey’s “Another Kind of Fire,” Gaslight Anthem’s “The ’59 Sound,” and, of course, Sarah McLachlan’s “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.” I wrote a lengthy mash note to “Another Kind of Fire” back in 2008, where I talked a bit about Rose and the timelessness of her music. Re-reading it today, I’m not sure I did it justice.

This is all preamble to the real reason I’m writing this post: Rose Cousins has a new album out. And it is deeply, deeply good. If you’ve liked her previous stuff, you’ll like this new record a lot more. Listening through it the first time, this morning, I realized that it was pretty much exactly what I had been hoping for out of a new Rose Cousins album: you can clearly see how her work has evolved over the years, and how it has become deeper, more textured, more serious. Which isn’t to denigrate either “If You Were For Me” or “The Send Off” — they’re both excellent albums in their own right. But “We Have Made A Spark” is better. Much, much better.

Thematically, this is a dark album; there are recurrent images of loneliness, isolation, and unhappy relationships. Several tracks (“Go First,” “This Light,” “One Way,” “The Shell”) make for outstanding Sad Bastard music, but it isn’t just the same kind of complaint over and over again. Much like Sarah Harmer’s “Basement Apartment” captured a very specific kind of angst about mid-to-late-20s existence, Rose’s lyrics on some of these tracks are about a particular place and time in one’s life, the sort of desperation and sorrow that comes with a failing relationship, the desire to escape for something better and yet lacking the strength to do so:

I want you to go first
It’s only getting worse
Either way it’s gonna hurt
But I want you to go first
I need you to leave There’s no room to breathe
I need you to leave
I could hold you all night
And it wouldn’t make it right
I have held you all day
It doesn’t go away
And it’s when I hold you close
That’s when it hurts the most

The lyrics capture something meaningful, but the richness of the music (there’s a string quintet that plays through here) is something else entirely. This album was recorded and produced by a group of musicians in Boston, and the competence on display here is shocking. Without drawing too many comparisons to Sarah Harmer here, I was reminded of how “Oh Little Fire” was almost a virtuoso display of a group of musicians who were very good at what they do and enjoy their work immensely — It’s the same sort of thing here. Rose has very clearly found a great bunch of collaborators. Go through the list of people who worked on the album, and names start to pop out: Edie Carey’s here; so is Charlie Rose, Rose Polenzani, and Jennifer Kimball. The collaboration is impressive, but to my mind one of the strongest tracks, “This Light,” is just Rose Cousins and a piano, a format that allows her talent to shine. (I confess that when I heard about the concept behind this album, I was a bit paranoid that the essential “Rose-ness” would be diluted, but while there are a good number of people involved in making this record, it is unquestionably Rose Cousins. Paranoia unfounded.)

There are also a few bonuses: a very nifty cover of Springsteen’s “If I Should Fall Behind,” and two do-overs of tracks from “The Send Off”: “All The Time It Takes to Wait” and “White Daisies.” I’m not a big fan of the latter, but the former is done much more in the style that she has apparently been performing the song live — see this version with Royal Wood as an example — and it is so much better than the original. I admit that the live version has ruined other album versions of that song more or less forever, so it’s nice that “We Have Made A Spark” has something close.

It’s a great album. Go run out and buy a copy, ok?

Did you know about this? (the CBC radio edition)

So I was driving home this afternoon, after today’s aeronautical adventures (check-out in a new-to-me airplane), listening as one does to CBC Radio out of Vancouver. There was something weirdly familiar about the voices on the radio, and I couldn’t quite place them; I knew they were voices I hadn’t heard in a really long time, and the format was unlike anything I’d heard on any radio station in about as long, so I started paying closer attention, and then I realized what was going on: four people were talking about the inappropriateness of Lucien Bouchard advocating for Quebec as a member of the Prime Minister’s cabinet, and what this might mean for Meech Lake.

Around the point where I felt like I needed to make sure the year on my iPhone was in fact correct, Michael Enright showed up to point out that this was “Rewind,” CBC’s way of digging into its archives and pulling out interesting bits from the vault. Today’s show was a look back at the Morningside political panel featuring Eric Kierans, Dalton Camp, and Stephen Lewis, and that was the point where it all snapped into focus for me, why I knew the voices, and why the fourth voice was so familiar and yet managed to evoke some kind of weird longing in my brain — it was, of course, Peter Gzowski’s.

(As an aside, I really miss listening to Gzowski.)

I played the entire show through when I got home, and I was struck by how the conversation between Camp, Kierans and Lewis was so civilized — I mean, they started quoting Edmond Burke at one point! But it also felt like a relic from a bygone era; we can’t have this kind of thing anymore, because the world that spawned it doesn’t exist anymore. And maybe that’s a good thing; I’m not totally sure. People like me would complain that they represented the establishment view of Canadian politics, and that they were themselves too fungible, running the gamut from Red Toryism to Blue New Democrat (if you’re not from here, this is roughly like the distance between, say, the various candidates for the Republican Party nomination — it’s not a really meaningful difference, it’s more one of degree, except with less crazy). I probably would have also complained that the panel was too Triangle-centric, but I complain about that all the time. There’s not a lot of range there, and with a Parliament as divided as the one we have today, I’m not sure you could get away with such a narrow range of opinions. CBC’s still got political panels, but they are primarily journalists or political strategists now, and everyone’s got a partisan agenda they’re pushing, when they’re not looking at the inside-baseball stuff.

Regardless of whether this kind of thing would work today, it was a nice trip down memory lane. And did you know that CBC’s put a whole lot of archival stuff on-line for free? They did, and it’s fantastic. Got childhood memories of listening to stuff on the radio? Here it is. Go explore.