the monthly pundit

I had something political to say this morning, so I posted it on the "other" blog, catboxx.blogspot.com.

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bliss

I've been finding this occurring more and more in yoga classes I'm taking, and it doesn't seem to matter too much who the teacher is, as long as he or she has deep teaching skills. It doesn't happen so much when I do my own asana practice at home.

As movement begins, the mind begins to seek the inside of the body. The mental self sinks down ever deeper into the physical self as the movement deepens and intensifies. Mental contact with the outside world becomes tenuous, and asana becomes a form of meditation. At the conclusion, I'm barely aware of the transition between movement and rest, and only at the end of Savasana, the rest period, do I become aware that I've entered into a state of profound bliss, which immediately begins to dissipate at the resumption of normal activity. However, a residue of that state of mind remains throughout the rest of the day, and it's great.

In my own practice, that state doesn't occur during movement, possibly because I'm functioning as both teacher and participant (and it never happens when I'm teaching a class, which involves thinking). But then I usually fall down a similar rabbit hole during pranayama (controlled breathing) and, especially, during meditation.

I never thought about asana as a form of meditation before, but now find it to be that (among other things) when I have the opportunity to turn off the front part of the brain, follow simple and familiar instructions, and sink like a stone into the depths of my own muscles, sinews, and quietly but ceaselessly moving organic life -- blissed out and loving it.

--30--

the word

The greatest news story of the week was provided by an antique book expert who stumbled across a bona fide copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle in Sandy, Utah.

The Chronicle's owner inherited it from a great-uncle many years ago and it's been gathering dust in his attic for decades. Ken Sanders realized what he was looking at as soon as the owner pulled it out of its sack. The binding of the 1493 volume is literally falling apart, but the pages are still white, as the paper is made from rags rather than wood pulp. The words applied to the pages by letterpress are as sharp and vivid today as when they were pressed, and nearly every page is full of black-line woodblock illustrations.

The Nuremberg Chronicle was intended to serve the need for a comprehensive history of creation. It was published by Anton Koberger about 60 years after Johannes Gutenberg perfected the letter-press in the city of Mainz, and has an original Latin text by Hartmann Schedel.

However Ken Sanders, now displaying his find at his rare book shop in Salt Lake, knows that what he's got, while astonishing, isn't worth a lot of money. He doesn't really have the book, but only about a third of its pages, and there are several hundred known copies of the work, many in much better condition. But "Just the opportunity to handle something from the very beginning of the printed word and the book itself, especially, ironically, in the 21st century with all this talk of the death of the book, and here we have a book that's survived 500-plus years," Sanders said. "It's just exciting ... The value of an artifact like this to me is the least interesting part of it all."

Before the printed word there was no history for ordinary people, there was only myth and legend, and the study of history was reserved for those who had access to books and other written records After printing started, it became impossible for church or government authorities to suppress and extirpate any idea whose time had come, because they could never find and burn every last copy.

Print is speech frozen in time, and speech is a god-like power. Consider the first verse of the Gospel John, as seen here on a page letterpressed at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz in 1986. The text following the blue capital reads "In principio etat verbu," -- In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Click twice on the photo of the Gutenberg page to see the image in real size.

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tarot de besançon

I bought these cards about 10 years ago from a private dealer in the Netherlands, but this is the first time I've used them for a reading, and possibly the first time anybody has.

The Renault Deck was made the old-fashioned way in Besançon, France nearly 200 years ago, printed from wood blocks and then hand colored by the artisan using four large stencils, then cut from the large sheets they were printed on into 78 approximately 4-1/2-inch by 2-1/2-inch cards. Their heavily-thumbed backs and the smell of strong tobacco that still lingers in the deck tell me they were used primarily for playing the game of tarot during most of their long life. All 78 cards remain in reasonably good condition considering their age and hard usage.

The woodblocks the cards were printed from weren't carved by the cardmaker Renault, but by an earlier artist, Jean Jerger, also of Besançon, in about 1800. Renault purchased them a few years later, but made his own stencils. The coloring of the Jerger deck was much more thoroughly and carefully done than that of the Renault cards, which appear somewhat slapdash in execution -- one of the reasons I love their unmistakable folk-art quality.

The Tarot de Besançon is based on but not identical to the Tarot de Marseilles. The cardmakers of this southern French city opted for a regional variation, made to placate the clerical authorities, and replaced the II - Female Pope and V - Pope cards with images of the Roman gods Juno and Jupiter. For card players the change was insignificant, since what matters in gaming is the value of each card rather than the symbolic meaning of its image. For card readers, however, the switch weakens the integrity of the tarot sequence.

So even though I've had this deck for 10 years, I hesitated to read with it. What I finally decided was that if Juno or Jupiter showed up in the spread, it would void the reading, and I went ahead with the result pictured here.

The Reading

Three cards read left-to-right (no Fool card this month). The three cups signifies indecision, hesitation, or confusion in matters of love. The female person in the center is the "Valet de Baatons" (sic), whom I conceptualize as what might be called "the Jill of clubs," is the individual referenced in the the three of cups.

The trump card on the right, designated "Capucin" (with a backward "N") in this deck, and called "the Hermit" in most modern tarots, was originally called either "Time" or "the Old Man" in the oldest decks, and was meant to be associated with the Greek god Cronos (Roman Saturn). His lantern was originally an hourglass, and he means to remind us that the passage of time is relentless and irreversible. Yes, it's true that I'm not getting any younger, but there's still plenty of life left in me, and I'm ready to meet that special someone who will confuse me, and cause me to hesitate and have hard time deciding.

Click on the image for a larger view; click twice for actual size.

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life/death

The discussion was about gambling, but the larger question arose, "Is this a free country or not?

To which I replied, "Yes, it is, Gail, yes it is."

"We are all perfectly free to eat Cheez Doodles™ and drink beer until we weigh 400 lbs., to sit on a couch and watch American Idolatry until we're lobotomized, to gamble in casinos until we're a million dollars in debt to VISA, to repeat fascist excuses for wholesale larceny and making war on all Muslims and vote Republican, to become addicted to tobacco and smoke it till we cough our lungs out, and to be fat, dumb, and happy.

"Or we're free to choose, as I have, to do none of those things. Some people say this is far-left radicalism and political correctness, but I call it self-preservation.

"And it really comes down to that simple question, would you rather live or die?"

--30--

bible movie!

The disc player on my computer is busted, so I bought a little portable dvd player to watch movies on. Up first is a 1997 made for tv biopic of the life of king solo-man.

A coupla guys in leather hats are drag racing their two-horse chariots in the desert east of bakersfield, and old solo-man wins when his brother A Donija crashes.

Then there's a line of extras carrying spears marching single file in the foothills up by Garlock, CA, and a line of fellows on horses, with very horrorshow like swelling of martial music with cymbal crashes.

Solo-man, son of king david, talks with a very upper-crust Anglo accent. In fact, the old testimony sounds like shake spear in this movie. King David is totally starry, lying under a pile of blankets.

Too weird. These chellovecks are prancing around on horseback in leather jerkins and conical leather hats talking like lards and borons.

Then, a sudden shift of ambulance, and we focus in on solo-man's mom, bath sheba, and she was very stiff and proud and haughty. This is like the old testimony if Jane Austen had wrote it.

Lines of priest guys in brown hoodies carrying candles in a castle or church, and some of em don't like solo-man. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, some good-looking Latina is playing a little lap harp in Israel as David, who sounds an awful lot like the late John Huston, is getting ready to croak.

Now the children of israel are having a barbecue by those pink sandstone pillars that line the wild rose canyon road entrance to death valley. This is a really lo-budget movie where I recognize lots of the holy land locations, the only set seems to be an abandon bldg, and the director likes having people in lines.

No real skillful segues here. The music changes abruptly, and now we're getting a montage of some sort. Uh oh, trompettes! Must be a war! A Donija vs solo-man again.

Some kind of religious ceremony -- david up on his feet wearing his crownaronie, making a speech and all, and rappin down to solo-man how he's gonna build the grate temple.

king david is taking his time, and waxing philosophical. This is turning out a very slow, boring, and tedious experience cinematique. OK now it looks like the funeral, then solo-man gets topped with the brass hat as his useless and despicable brother plotzes.

this is an on-the-fly so-cal production with a bunch of professional english stage actors sitting on thrones and making speeches, and this particular one is about how A Donija will sleep with the fishes. After comes an interlude that looks like it was shot in a nevada ghost town like rhyolite. I must say, though, the mojave in late spring can be very green and pretty.

Ah, now comes the dirty business with nathan and his (coff coff) egyptian wife. I think the stories of solo-man and david are getting mixed. God, this flick is a yawner. I think i'll turn it off and go fix somethin to eat. Guess I'll miss solo-man's temple, which I understand was on the side of his head.

--30--

the mighty morgan

The US silver dollar pictured here, designed by George T. Morgan and struck in the millions but intermittently by the US Treasury between 1878 and 1904 and again in 1921, is what people used to call "hard money." It's easy today to forget that when it was minted in 1895, the Morgan's value was universally accepted as one dollar, even though the silver in it -- a little more than 3/4 of an ounce or 90 percent of the coin's weight -- would trade for less than that.

But now, with silver futures trading at over $43 an ounce, the deeply conservative impulse of which hard money preferences are so much a part resonates with renewed vigor. One web pundit educated in such matters wrote that "Clueless central bankers seem incapable of understanding why printing billions of pieces of colorful paper (currency) might affect the price of gold," an observation that underscores the popular conviction that the money the Federal Reserve creates simply by declaring that it exists isn't real money.

It's still real enough that we can exchange it for the goods and services we need and want, but the erosion of the American greenback's value has accelerated dramatically since the end-of-decade economic calamity and the corresponding flood of fiat money meant to stanch that calamity. Today we see that erosion in hard-edged relief, as if backlit, and awaken from our dream of fiat money to see essential commodities such as food and gasoline on the one hand and the US dollar on the other, at opposite ends of a gigantic see-saw.

Some point to the Hunt brothers' cornering of the silver market several decades ago, which caused the price to bubble out to $50 before it precipitously collapsed in 1980, or the sudden spike in gas prices to five bucks in the summer of '08, to argue that today's run-up in commodities prices is the result of speculative manipulations rather than the dollar's erosion. But they're wrong.

Hundred-dollar oil, three-dollar avocados, five-dollar bread, 1500-dollar gold, and forty-dollar silver are here to stay, and it will only get worse from now on, or if you're one of the lucky ones in possession of some hard money, better. And if you're looking to acquire some, you couldn't do better than the Morgan.

Both the Morgan and its successor, the Peace Dollar, are viable currency because of their uniformity and ease of authentication. They are also universally acknowledged to be worth many times their face value -- $33.55 at this precise moment -- such is the effect of fiat money. In addition, they're easily negotiable, unlike gold which is now so valuable that it's impractical as a medium of exchange except for very large purchases.

The Morgan, is far and away the sexiest US coin in semi-circulation today. Many if not most were hoarded in Treasury Department vaults for decades, because the government feared the inevitable easy-money inflation that would have resulted from circulating all of them when they were minted. Sold off in huge lots to eager and rich collectors in the early '60's, many still have the deep mirror-like luster of uncirculated money. If oil is the king of commodities, the Morgan Dollar is the queen of currency.

If this topic interests you, there's an interesting article here on how the JP Morgan banking firm might be attempting to keep silver prices artificially low, and how their ability to do so may be at an end.

El Gato Negro
--30--

the long way home

Yesterday after my longtime friend Ron and I along with his roommate Aaron had been held captive by the hugga-wugga monster for several hours (not an unwelcome imprisonment, but real nonetheless), I realized I had to drive home from Capitol Hill before darkness fell. I can't drive after nightfall any longer because the fading eyesight of advancing age causes me to become too easily confused.

Fortunately we've reached the season when twilight doesn't begin until after eight p.m. It was Friday evening, when the insanity of our car-dependent culture is at its most intense, and the congestion of the week's-end commute is compounded by everyone's wanting to get home as quickly as possible. What I found, though, is that if you just wait it out, even on a Friday night the thundering herd disappears as quickly as it materializes between three and four in the afternoon, and yesterday by 6:45 it was gone completely.

So in very light traffic, moving at a relaxed and moderate 30 miles an hour most of the way, I took the long way home as daylight began to wane. Descending Capitol Hill, I was impressed by the number and size of the trees there in the heart of this lovely city, only a mile or so from downtown, then motored slowly past the University of Washington and through its densely populated student ghetto. Rather than getting on the freeway, dreaded I-5 from there, I turned left at 70th Street and drove along the margin of Green Lake.

The lake is a jewel, the inescapable geographical feature of the urb's northern half, sitting between and adjacent to the two busiest roads in the state. Yesterday evening its water was smooth and still as a sheet of silver reflecting the setting sun, its calmness mirrored in turn by my own mental tranquility. I directed the gently purring engine of my decade-old VW Beetle onto the Green Lake cutoff, pulled into traffic on Highway 99 for one block, then turned left again to ascend Phinney Ridge, aiming toward the gentle declivity on the other side and Greenwood Ave.

And there I was back in my own neighborhood. Piece of cake, even on a Friday evening.

Photo by Ionna Dodu of Bucharest, Romania

D.B.
--30--

hero needed

When the dragon came among us no one dared to oppose it. "Let it do what it wants," they said, "and it will leave us alone."

But then the dragon ate the sun, and all life on earth began to die. Still, nobody made a move against it. Paralyzed by fear and despair, they counted the days until the end, or would have if there had been any more days and nights. But with the sun gone there was nothing left but perpetual darkness.

Where is the hero who will save us? We need a hero willing to seize the day, attack the dragon in his lair, split him from head to tail, and recover the sun, if it's recoverable. If there's no hero, then a band of brave men can do the job. In either case, we can't simply sit waiting for the same people who have allowed this intolerable situation to develop to help us.

Watercolor by Carl Gustav Jung, leaf 119 of "The Red Book." Click on the image for a larger view.

El Gato
--30--

bright shining star

So Carl, who manages the medical cooperative where I fill one of my prescriptions, asked how my medication was treating me.

"It's great," I said, "It completely gets rid of the Parkinson's tremor and the anxiety that goes with it. The only thing is it makes me feel heavy, almost like I'm paralyzed sometimes."

When I told him the specific type of remedy I've been using, he said "You might want to steer more toward the Sativa types of medicine," as opposed the Indica varieties, which tend toward more physical effects.

I later found out that this was something I should have known already, because it's an essential diagnostic element in effectively prescribing marijuana for treating specific illnesses. In short and fairly accurately, Sativa strains are mostly cerebral, Indica strains mostly physical, and the shiny "Sativa Star" I got today seems like the perfect treatment to relieve my symptoms without side effects.

The reason I'd never thought about these things before is because the idea of having a choice of what kind of cannabis to get is new for me, and something I'm not used to, but I have to say I like it. Plus, the people at Seattle Medical, once you establish your legitimacy as a patient, are friendly, helpful, and always knowledgeable. Today was a perfect example.

It's great having the laws that allow this. I spent many of my 66 years buying what was available without giving a thought to what variety it might be -- it was that kind of transaction, I'd be in sad shape if I had to do that now. So it's nice to be able to treat my illness with legitimate medicine, without having to feel like a criminal, and it's great having a place like Seattle Medical, who provide a much-needed service to the public in the spirit of the law.

Dave B
--30--

skeletons updated

Further researches into my great-grandfather's history (see the post directly below this one) have turned up new information as well as a couple of discrepancies in my initial understanding, and these make clear why no serious historian ever relies on a single source.

The discrepancies and omissions are connected to the one important issue of the day, especially for a young southern male of that faraway time: establishing one's manhood and full citizenship in the crucible of the Civil War.

My great-grandfather, 23-year-old Timothy Brice and his brother, my great-uncle David, one year older, volunteered for service together in the 50th Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Company "K" (Brooks County) on March 4, 1862. But when the regiment marched out of Savannah four and a half months later, traveling north where it would be attached to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia , only David marched with them. He went on to participate in some of the bitterest fighting of the war, eventually meeting his death on the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness, May 6, 1864, not at Gettysburg a year earlier as I previously wrote.

Timothy was left behind. He was discharged from the army on July 17, 1862, the same day the regiment marched from Savannah, and presumably returned home to Brooks County, where he later married, fathered 10 children, and lived out his days. Why he was discharged and under what circumstances I have not a clue.

It would take a very serious flaw in one's constitution or character to be unconditionally discharged from an armed force as desperate for manpower as the Confederacy's was. Perhaps my great-grandfather was gravely ill, or maybe he was painfully unfit for soldiering and warfare. In any case, Timothy Brice had a very short interlude in service and did no fighting for the C.S.A.

This story will be updated and completed some time in the future. Four of the five questions every historian and every reporter always asks (What, where, when, how, and why) are answered, but the final and most important one remains elusive. For now.

What little information that survives about my patrilineal ancestors demonstrates that for the American generation coming into maturity in the 1860's, exactly as it was for my father's generation 80 years later, the great and earth-shaking wars of modern times are the central and defining events which order their lives.

DB
--30--

skeletons

My grandfather, Sam Brice -- that's him sitting in the foreground with his feet tucked under -- was born in 1889, and looks to have been slightly less than 10 years old when this family picture was taken, dating it to shortly before 1900.

His father, Timothy Brice, is seated at center beside his dour-looking wife Mary, surrounded by their ten children and, on the other side of the white picket fence holding the clan's first and at this date only grandchild, the inevitable "Aunt" Ellen. This was, after all, Brooks County in Southern Georgia.

I've never known any but the barest facts about my great-grandfather, that he was born in 1838 and looked a lot like me. He probably fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War like his brother David, who was one year older and was killed at Gettysburg in 1863, but I have no hard evidence of that. A bigger question has to do with inheritance. Why did Timothy's father, Francis Brice, choose to pass over his three older surviving sons at his death in 1878 and bestow the inheritance on his youngest boy, Mitchell?

Timothy's family looks moderately prosperous, but Mitchell, after inheriting his father's plantation in 1878, became a local baron of the type for which the south is famous. He added to the lands he inherited, and in time also augmented his empire with a large sawmill and general store. Slavery was gone by the time Tallokas Plantations fell to him, but black labor was governed by peculiarly southern laws and rules which historian Douglas Blackmon calls "Slavery by Another Name."

He became rich, acquired extensive holdings in local banks, and became a director of at least one of them. He was Chairman of the Board of Brooks County Commissioners and developed an English gentleman's habits, acquring a taste for fine horses which he raised on his property and raced successfully in Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Louis, and New York as well is in local venues.

How did this extended family come to be what they were, and where did the opportunity for them to develop lands and businesses originate? The answers lie in some of American history's greatest high crimes and misdemeanors.

Timothy Brice's grandfather, my great-great-great grandfather Joseph Brice and wife Martha emigrated from England shortly before the turn of the 19th century, settled initially in Pennsylvania, then moved to southern North Carolina, where Francis was born in 1804. In 1833 Francis and his wife made the overland trek to southern Georgia in a covered wagon, and there he acquired the land that would become the family seat and source of great fortune.

From whom he acquired it, or under what terms I have no idea. But I do know that this happened two years after President Andrew Jackson began enforcing the Indian Removal Act, forcing the former Cherokee owners of that area to move west, to present-day Oklahoma. In doing so, he ignored a Supreme Court decision declaring the act illegal.

Lots of Americans have skeletons in their closets, and many of these, perhaps most of them, are non-caucasian. It's difficult to notice this after a while, however, because when the skin comes off and the flesh falls away, we all tend to look the same.

Eram quod es; Eris quod sum.

See also geneologytrails.com, and scroll down to "Brice."

Click on the image for a larger view.

DB
--30--

Restoration

A friend took me to see The Adventures of Prince Ahmed last night, and I have to admit I'd barely heard of it before. Big oversight.

This is not just an unusual and innovative filmwork from mid-1920's Germany, but also the earliest surviving animated feature (two earlier ones from Argentina by Quirino Cristiani are lost). Using scissors, paper, cardboard, and sometimes very thin lead sheets, artist and filmmaker Lotte Reininger, along with her husband, two assistants, and half a dozen avant-garde artists and animators, spent three years (1923-26) cutting the film's human and inhuman characters and backgrounds, while cinematographer Carl Koch painstakingly photographed them frame by frame, in the manner of modern claymation.

The results of Reininger's scissorwork and artistic conception alone demonstrate amazing skill and patience. Look, for example, at the elaborated featherwork on the prince's costume, and the lace trailing from Princess Pari Banu's headdress.

Adapted loosely from several stories in The 1,001 Nights of Scheherazade, the plot includes elements of Prince Ahmed's story as well as the famous Aladdin story, has the inevitable evil sorcerer, a sympathetic witch, and a flying horse. It's pure fairytale and all archetypes.

No original nitrate copy of Ahmed has survived. For a while only black-and-white prints were available (the original was hand-tinted). Using one of those black-and-white prints and a highly-technical, complex process, British and German archivists restored the movie in its original colors in 1998/99.

One more thing made this event memorable: the movie's soundtrack, and yes, silent movies need to have them, or lose a lot of atmosphere and mood. Last night's soundtrack was by David Keenan and Nova Karina Devonie, Seattle composers and performers, playing the score for Ahmed they were commissioned to write in 2008, on accordian, guitar, banjo, glockenspiel, viola, percussion, and slide whistle. They've performed this work extensively since '08, all over the world, from Australia to Waterloo (Iowa), and complement the film immeasurably.



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SS and 71st*

Today I will write about the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen, a topic suggested to me by a random blog topic generator. As it turns out, my young father crossed paths with these 9th SS Panzers Hohenstaufen when that command surrendered near Steyr, Austria in May of '45. Dad was with the 71st Infantry, the "farthest east" US division, which reached Steyr at the same time as units of the Russian Red Army advancing from the east.

The 9th SS Panzers was moved around a lot during the short history of its active role in combat. They first saw action in Poland in the spring of '44, but were quickly moved to Normandy and from there took part in the general retreat inland which occupied most of the next year.

The pictures from my dad's wartime divisional chronicle don't show the Panzers, but they do show American and Russian troops meeting up and eating together, along with the obligatory group portrait of the high generals on the scene, Inset at the bottom of the page is a destroyed German #88 anti-aircraft gun near Steyr.

History from the troop's eye level -- that certainly gives a different kind of view. At the troop's eye level you see the individual nuts and bolts on the machines that drive modern war along, Nowadays, killing mechanisms are more dependent on electronics and less mechanical than in the past, still nothing has changed much since gunpowder came along.

Klick on pic to make it big, then klick again for actual size.

*Clinger, Johnson, Mazel, and Nichols, The History of the 71st Infantry Division (1946, Augsburg, Bavaria: 71st Infantry Division (self-Published).

Manuel Delorez
--30--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

peace & freedom

Graffitied wall decoration, the John Lennon wall in Prague.

Peace and freedom. In the days to come we'll need to remember that peace and freedom is what we want.

People all the world over are longing for peace and freedom, craving it, starving for it, At the same time there are powerful evil forces loose in the world, institutions that have fortunes staked on rupturing the peace and suppressing freedom.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that the answer to violence is not to oppose it with more violence, just as an adequate response to hatred can't be hateful.

From Wisconsin to Waziristan, we all want the same thing. It's really simple, but getting it is not, as that will involve a lot of imagination and creativity. John Lennon knew this.

Photo by DiAnne Grieser, March, 2009.

DB
--30--

waiting for bad weather

I've been waiting for nearly 40 years for Seattle to become Hollywood's favorite shooting location, due to the city's low-key photogenic qualities combined with its constant overcast, which lends a brooding quality to anything shot outdoors here. In 1974 the city starred with John Wayne in "McQ," a boilerplate crime drama about an aging Seattle detective who drives around in a Pontiac Trans-Am "Green Hornet" model looking for gratuitous car chases to get involved in. It was his role as McQ that prompted film critic Pauline Kael to observe that Wayne looked like one of those stone heads from Easter Island when filmed sitting behind the wheel of his trendy ride.

But "McQ" didn't set off a large-scale migration of directors and cinematographers to Seattle. "Frazier" helped in the '80's, but the TV show was shot almost entirely indoors, and at most viewers caught a glimpse of the Space Needle through a window once in a while.

In the '90's it was another televised offering with an entirely different kind of director that brought attention to the area in David Lynch's strange and at times surreal murder-mystery "Twin Peaks." It was shot about 50 miles from here, mostly in the town of North Bend and its nearby scenic location, Snoqualmie Falls. The show's opening credits ran against a backdrop of fog-enshrouded Mt. Si -- a sight that can't help leave an impression on anyone who's ever seen it close up -- and the stunning beauty of the Cascade Range was as much a part of the series as its convoluted plot.

And now comes "The Killing," a 13-part series debuting April 3 on AMC, which unabashedly and openly appropriates "Twin Peaks" gloomy Northwestern cloud cover to underscore the melancholy events of the narrative. Actually, the makers of "The Killing" cite a Danish TV series as their inspiration, the Danish work having derived from "Twin Peaks."

As we enter the era of political and economic doom and gloom, one bright spot for those of us here is that our home town might at last achieve the cachet it deserves.

Gato Triste
--30--

materialism

Moloch was an ancient semitic god worshipped by Canaanites, early Hebrews, and especially the Phoenicians. Archaeological and documentary evidence of him is spotty, but from what we know he seems to have been a god who demanded sacrifices of live victims, including children.

In our own time the name of Moloch often refers to something which requires costly sacrifices, and in Allen Ginsberg's classic poem of the mid-1950's, "Howl," Moloch has become the worship of material, which in the poet's view has led us to the ultimate sacrifice -- loss of self. After opening the poem with a long description of how he "saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," Ginsberg begins the second part with the question "what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Even though most inhabitants of our modern industrialized world might express an attachment to one or another of the traditional religions, most of them actually worship material. In doing so they worship not just a false god, but a cruel one. Materialism urges us to spend our lives working ceaselessly toward a vaguely-defined goal which, even when achieved, will leave us feeling empty, for it's at that point we will realize that we have sacrificed our souls, as Faust did, exchanging them for a heap of lifeless objects.

D.B.
--30--

a jealous god

The history of modern belly dance is incomplete and spotty, but even without tangible evidence we know that the sensuous and sexually provocative movements of this gorgeous dance form go back a long, long way. The dance is, in fact, older than history itself.

How do we know this? Because the movements of belly dance, the hip locks, shimmies, belly rolls, chest pushes, and sinuous arm movements, and the male responses to them express instincts embedded in every human psyche. They're hard to perfect, but at the same time as natural as breathing.

In ancient times, when gods and goddesses ruled the earth from their temples and sacred groves, before the one male god arose to drive out the old deities and impose his jealous paternalism, ritual marriage and its sexual fulfillment were integral components of goddess worship. Priestesses taking the part of Inanna in Sumer, Sekhmet in Egypt, and Ishtar in Babylon married and bedded their annual consorts, and it might be reasonable to assume the dance was an essential prelude to the event. The ancient temples of the goddess of fertility, love, and war might also have been centers of the sacred dance, where both ensemble and solo performances of the art occurred, and where candidates for priestesshood were trained and rehearsed.

Then came the Hebrews with their one emphatically paternalistic God who could brook no competition, and they quickly realized that his most daunting challenge came from beautiful Ishtar and her irresistible dance. Some of the Hebrew people "would not hearken to their Iudges, but they went a-whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves down vnto them: they turned quickly out of the way, which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the Lord; but they did not so" (Judges 2:17). The beauty of the goddess had a hold on men which was not easily suppressed, and it took many generations and the advent of the Arab version of the one paternal God, Allah, to finally eliminate Ishtar in her many manifestations from the lands where she once ruled supreme.

But she could never be eliminated entirely because love of beauty and sexual desire are natural expressions of the most fundamental human traits, as well as expressions of the fact that we are bound to our animal bodies. And so she has returned in our own time, through the medium of the ancient dance.

I went to a celebration of Ishtar (modern form = Esther = "the star") this past Friday and watched the good, the indifferent, the unusual, and the spectacular versions of the ancient form enacted by living women (and one man!), including she who will not be named here, but is the living embodiment of Ishtar, the queen of heaven and the tribal dance.

D.B.
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sprung

Springtime in Seattle arrived uncharacteristically right on schedule this year, signaled by the vernal equinox which occurred overnight on March 20-21. Primavera's advent is usually on a two-month delay in this part of the world, but today it's fully here, with bright sunshine, gentle zephyrs, and pastel blossoms everywhere.

Robins chirp; frogs burp.

And it's intoxicating. The masses are out walking, biking, and driving, burning their $4 gas and enjoying the scenery, which includes Mt. Rainier looking like a colossal scoop of ice cream the deity (if you believe in that sort of thing) dropped from his cone.

Will it last? My magic eight ball says "Don't count on it," and Yahoo! Weather says the gloom and drip will re-commence tomorrow and last the rest of the month. So enjoy it while you can.

Maybe in April...

Gato Intoxicado
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numa numa

Yesterday the young guy who is my upstairs neighbor asked me as we rode the elevator whether the yellow VW bug with the "All your base are belong to us" license frame was mine.

"Yeah," says I, "that's me."

"That was back in the infancy of the net," he said. "Very cool."

"All your base and the Numa Numa Dance were the greatest things ever on the web," says I. "You're familiar with the Numa Numa Dance?"

"Unfortunately," he says.

OK, not everybody is a fan of Gary Brolsma, the shy, overweight New Jersey teen-ager who made the "Numa Numa" video in his parents' basement in December of 2004. But I'm with the critic who said "It's really a thing of beauty to see someone so committed to a lip-sync." Besides that, Brolsma has an instinct for choreographic composition, and his scrupulous attention to the fine details of performance helped the video to go viral upon release.

Numa Numa's success, however, was mainly propelled by the song Brolsma chose to lip-sync, a Romanian-language hit "Dragostea Din Tei" (in English, "Love from the Linden Trees"), recorded in the spring of 2004 by O-Zone, a pop group from Moldova. Why would anyone travel to Romania to seek fame and fortune? That's another story.

The fact is, this obscure-seeming tune was world famous when Brolsma discovered it. It was number 72 on the U.S. pop 100, and number one all over Europe and in Japan for many weeks in the summer of '04. What I'm saying is that millions of people all over the world really loved this song, and for good reason. It's pure dance music, like the Macarena, with a beat that makes your toes itch, and leadsinger Dan Balan hammers the nonsensical lyrics confidently, and with charisma,

So enjoy the video, even if my sometime fellow elevator passenger doesn't.

O-Zone broke up a month after the video came out. Gary Brolsma has followed up his debut effort with other video projects, but without the same spectacular success. Dan Balan continues working a lot in Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but none of his recent stuff hits my G-spot. In retrospect it seems the Numa Numa moment was one of those magical occurrences which happen only once, never again to be duplicated.

DB
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