Side roads in Death Valley.

I’m not much of an adventurer. My notion of a good hike is to drive to a scenic spot not far from civilisation and walk in a big circle so that I’m never more than a few miles from the car. Though I’m too lazy and timid to really head out into the wild, I hate running into people when I’m on a hike. It’s especially awkward to meet a stranger in a remote spot, because you’re pretty much obliged to stop and make conversation, even if your hatband is dark with sweat and you’re breathing hard like a phone pervert.

National parks are perfect for my level of adventurousness, because without too much driving you can usually find side roads that are untraversed by tour buses and yet offer good opportunities for private exploration. Some of my favourite hiking experiences have been in Death Valley, less than a twenty-minute drive from the main visitor centre at Furnace Creek.

For instance, here I am in a little canyon I discovered off the Artist’s Drive. A couple miles into the one-way road there are two big signs announcing a DIP in the road where it crosses a wash. After the second dip I parked the car and wandered up the wash. This involved a little rudimentary rock climbing every fifty yards or so as I followed the channel from the desert floor up into the mountains. Here I am pointing the camera back toward the entrance:

Near the mouth of the canyon, looking west.

(Please note, and admire, my new Tilley hat.)

And here I am a half hour into the canyon at its narrowest point, maybe ten feet across, with the sheer walls towering up hundreds of feet on either side:

The canyon at its narrowest point.

I don’t even know if this canyon has a name. I suppose it does, and I could acquire a topographic map of the park and find out. But I’d rather imagine that I’m the first person who ever thought to park his car by that particular dip in the road and clamber over the inviting pile of pink rocks on the right.

If you’re in Death Valley I would also recommend driving out to Beatty, Nevada, and taking the one-way Titus Canyon road over the mountains and back into the park. I did it alone in a budget rental car, which was probably spectacularly stupid – if the car had broken down, or bottomed out on a large rock, it would have cost a fortune to coax a tow truck driver onto that narrow alpine track to retrieve me. (I believe there’s a sign at the entrance saying that high-clearance vehicles are recommended.) So drive cautiously. But the views from the top are worth it, as is emerging at last onto the sandy floor of the canyon among surprised pedestrians who’ve entered from the park side.

M.

The lost “Sea Captain” video.

This Sunday I’m heading down to California for a few weeks of barely-earned vacation, which means – sorry, rock-n-roll history enthusiasts – it’ll be at least a month before I get the video from our performance at the Mendel onto YouTube.

Meanwhile, here’s something else you can watch. On a visit to Vancouver back in 2008 I spent a couple days hanging out with an old friend, artist Ray Statham. I should also mention that at the time, I had a beard that I was thinking of shaving off. Naturally we thought – let’s shave Michael and make a music video!

So I spent a couple days peg-legging around the North Shore while Ray followed me with a camera, chortling. I returned to Saskatoon; time passed; enough for me to grow an entirely new and even handsomer beard. Meanwhile I thought the video had been lost forever. But not long ago Ray turned up a copy and mailed it my way…

More about that Mendel gig.

Panic time! We’re just two weeks away from our performance at the Mendel Art Gallery and we’re frantically assembling our set.

Here’s what’s happening. On January 16 a bunch of musicians, dancers, actors, and other flaky characters (under the non-flaky leadership of Carrie Catherine) will be taking over the Mendel for a pageant of wonder and whatzitry which we’re calling (for reasons still mysterious) LUGO.

It will be a jumble. Each performer will bring his or her own drum, metaphorical or in some cases literal, and at 8:30 PM we’ll all start banging away at once. At times it will be a riot of spontaneous creative expression. At other times it will get quiet and everyone will be encouraged to focus their attention on one thing for a few minutes at a time.

The band known as Sea Water Bliss will occupy one of those quiet interludes. We’ll be performing our Song of Syracuse, the story of the Athenian siege of Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War. As some context is necessary, we’ll be using reversible cardboard panels and cutouts (manipulated by longtime Sea Water Bliss associates Troy Mamer and Steve Barss) to help move the story along. We’ll try our damnedest to keep the whole shebang down to eight or nine minutes.

Right now Troy and Steve and I are deep in cutting-and-pasting mode. Steve’s basement looks like a bomb went off in a box factory, and between us we’ve inhaled several tumours worth of spray adhesive. Meanwhile Andrew and I are figuring out how to shift smoothly between 4/4 and 3/4 time. Luckily I’m taking the next couple weeks off, so I expect I’ll have time to get everything wrapped up, and maybe finally get my hair cut, too.

Anyway, if you’re in Saskatoon on the 16th, you should come to the show. If Thucydides isn’t your bag there’ll be lots of other entertainment on display, some of it bound to suit you. Seeya at the Mendel, art goons and history nerds!

PS. Get your tickets here.

Truth at 0.25 frames per second.

Here’s the recipe. You film a bunch of footage of your band playing a song. Then you edit that footage into a music video – actually, several overlapping music videos. Convert the videos to a series of still images (3500 in all), print them, and collect them in a dozen binders.

Cajole a bunch of your friends into driving to a bar in a nearby small town for a “birthday party”. Prop the binders up in front of a camera and, with some help from your friends, flip through the pages at the steady rate of four seconds per page. This will take approximately two hours and forty minutes, assuming everything goes perfectly; if it doesn’t, more like four hours. (After a couple hours, most of your friends will leave.)

Speed up the video and synch it to the song. Voila! You’ve got…well, uh, something like…

People who write in the margins of books.

Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia carries the subtitle Notes In The Margin Of My Time. Scribbling in the margins is a metaphor that recurs throughout the book, and I’m not sure metaphor is the right word because it seems to be literally true that James has built these essays around passages he has marked, and comments he has pencilled into the margins, of his prodigious library over a half century of reading.* For instance, in his essay on Egon Friedell he writes:

I own three copies of the handsome, single-volume post-war edition put out by Beck. My intention was to use one of them as a workbench, and put into its endpapers the notes that have gone into this book. But I ended up defacing my beautiful Phaidon edition, perhaps guessing in advance that my graffiti would be labours of love.

I have just received a vivid lesson in the benefits of writing in the margins, as I spent most of an evening hunting through the 851 pages of Cultural Amnesia for a half-remembered line about (to paraphrase) a lengthy book made still longer by all the notes the reader inevitably finds himself making in the endpapers. I couldn’t find it.

I never write in books, and I detest those who do. In another essay – I won’t try and search for it – James attempts to extrapolate, from notes in the margins, the politics of the previous owner of a certain German-language book he has acquired secondhand. The only thing I’ve ever gleaned from a marginal note is that the previous owner was too lazy to reach for a bookmark. But perhaps James frequents used bookshops with a more erudite clientele.

If you must write in the margins, you might as well do all your note-taking there; once the text has been violated, no amount of gentlemanly self-restraint can restore it to innocence. The lowest form of book-defacer is the one who marks a single passage in a book, then stops; this mark can easily be missed by the future browser as he riffles the pages prior to purchasing.

I own two books like this. One is Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful Of Dust. In an otherwise virgin copy, some fool has used a pen to bracket this paragraph, in which a character passes the time with a game of solitaire – “patience”, as the Brits call it:

Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated.

I assume the defacer was an English student; this passage is pregnant with symbolic possibilities, containing as it does the actual word “symbols”. But its significance to the larger story is obscure. Mrs. Rattery is a minor character, a bluff American aviatrix who wanders in at a vital juncture in the plot, then soon wanders out again. Her elaborate game of patience has no bearing on her relationship to the other characters; she’s not a schemer or an organizer. Nor is “order [growing] out of chaos” a theme of A Handful Of Dust – quite the opposite; like most of Waugh’s novels, it’s about the breakdown of the old social hierarchies. Perhaps my hypothetical English student intended to use Mrs. Rattery and her game of patience as a metaphor for Waugh-as-writer, although that would make for a rather generic essay; all writers, except the bad ones, establish “sequence and precedence”.

I also have a copy of Graham Greene’s The Ministry Of Fear in which someone has singled out this observation:

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of the nose and mouth, and yet we protest: This isn’t me…

The mark was made in pencil, so I might attempt to erase it, though I’m sure a shadow will remain. Oddly enough, half-erased marginal jottings play a part in the story of The Ministry Of Fear. The hero, who stumbles into a Nazi espionage plot, spends some time in an asylum run by a pacifist doctor. On a bookshelf the hero finds a book of Tolstoy’s, and notices some rubbed-out pencil marks beside the following sentiment:

Remembering all I have done, suffered, and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one’s country…

The “ignoble” attempt to erase his approving checkmarks is enough to make the doctor a suspect: “This was an opinion to be held openly if at all,” thinks the hero. I wonder if some future owner of my copy of The Ministry Of Fear will think I’ve ignobly repudiated my opinion on the inaccuracy of police photographs?

M.

* This is an awkwardly constructed sentence which I’ve chosen not to rewrite. Let it serve as an inside joke for those who’ve enjoyed James’ riff on Edward Gibbon, where he excoriates that learned figure for sentences even more awkward than this one.

Flipapalooza & LUGO.

Here’s what’s happening with the band. A few days ago Andrew and I filmed some footage for our upcoming time-lapse binder video shoot. I’m in the process of breaking the video into thousands of still black-and-white images like the one on the left, which will be printed and assembled into binders. This Saturday we’ll prop the binders in front of a camera and flip through the pages at the rate of four seconds per page. Then when the video is sped up, if I’ve done my math correctly, the flipping pages will synch up with our song Clowns.

The flipapalooza will kick off at around 8 PM on Saturday Nov. 28th in the back room at Sig’s Place in Vonda, forty minutes east of Saskatoon. If you’re in the area, please feel free to drop by. If you ask nicely we might even let you flip a binder for us.

LUGO! (…whatever that means.)

I’ve also signed us up for an “arts happening” in January at the Mendel Art Gallery. Local folksy girl Carrie Catherine is organizing this shindig, which is called LUGO. (As of Wednesday morning the website wasn’t up yet, but it should be soon.)

The provenance of the word “lugo” has not been explained to us, but it seems to summon images of an Italian street festival, which isn’t too far off the mark. In addition to music, Lugo will include video, drama, dance, and all things artsy and fartsy. I’m not sure yet exactly what kind of casserole Andrew and I will be bringing to this pot-luck, but you can be sure that it will be lumpy.

M.

Dream journal: The vending machine.

I’m wandering through a shopping mall with Bender, the robot from Futurama, who at some point changes without explanation into my friend Stu, currently residing in Austria. Bender-Stu spies a vending machine that dispenses toy battleships and decides he wants one. The machine has four chunky buttons depicting four progressively more elaborate and expensive models of battleship. Bender-Stu chooses the most expensive one, priced at forty-two dollars. He feeds three twenty-dollar bills into the machine.

The machine whirs and trembles and a toy battleship clatters down into the dispensing tray, along with eighteen bucks of change in loonies and toonies. The battleship is about a foot long, made of cast iron and die-molded plastic, with googly eyes glued on either side of the bridge. Before we can remove it from the tray, a strange man walks up, reaches between us, grabs the battleship, and bolts.

Bender-Stu, who by this time has morphed permanently into Stu, takes off after the thief. I hesitate. Should I join the chase? There’s still eighteen bucks sitting in the vending machine, and I don’t want to abandon it. Moreover I don’t really expect Stu to catch the guy. Still, I have a niggling sense of cowardice as I scrape the coins one by one from the shallow dispensing tray.

Another stranger approaches. “Your friend is asking for you,” he says, pointing. Coins clinking in my jacket pockets, I jog through the mall in the direction of the chase. Stu is lying in the middle of the corridor. “You bailed on me,” he says, as I pull him to his feet. He has no injuries but he’s been roughed up.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I wasn’t sure what to do.” There’s no point trying to explain. I scoop a handful of coins from my left and then my right pocket into his cupped hands.

M.

–

Previous dream journals have featured Barnaby Rudge, Tom Cruise, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Catch-22: Not as great as remembered.

If any time in the last fifteen years you’d asked my opinion of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, I would have replied without reservation that it was a great book. Fifteen years is how long it’s been since I read Catch-22 as a teenager.

Picture my disillusionment when I picked it up again this week and came across writing like this:

The swarthy, middle-aged lieutenant colonel with the rimless, icy glasses and faceted, bald, domelike pate that he was always touching sensitively with the tips of his splayed fingers disliked the chaplain and was impolite to him frequently. He kept the chaplain in a constant state of terror with his curt, derisive tongue and his knowing, cynical eyes that the chaplain was never brave enough to meet for more than an accidental second.

Heller occasionally falls into this narcotizing pattern of adjective-adjective-noun, adjective-adjective-noun, which I assume signifies a lapse of his self-editing faculties. Why do we need faceted, bald, and domelike? Why curt and derisive, knowing and cynical? It’s not so much the redundancy – after all, none of these twinned or tripleted adjective are quite synonymous, although they’re often close enough to suggest a simple failure of decisiveness on the author’s part. The problem is the rhythm. Good writing modulates, syncopates, takes a pause then skips across the room. Too much of Heller’s prose just clops along like a three-legged horse.

Still, I can’t dismiss Catch-22. For every ungainly passage there are two inspired ones; the story of Major Major Major Major’s swift and humiliating rise through the ranks, for instance, or this description of the “soldier in white”, a plaster-encased mummy in the casualty ward:

Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar. A silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear, stoppered jar on the floor. When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty, and the two were simply switched quickly so that stuff could drip back into him.

Heller can’t help but use more than the necessary number of words (a silent zinc pipe?), but that’s okay. The soldier in white, a helpless conduit for the recycling of clear fluid, is the perfect emblem for a book of paradoxes, circular arguments, and self-negating statements. The term “catch-22″ is now used rather too vaguely to mean something like Hobson’s choice. The vagueness was inevitable; in the novel, the regulation is brought in whenever the author is in want of a bureaucratic absurdity, paradoxical or not. The elegant recursiveness of the term as it ought to be used is demonstrated in this  scene where Yossarian goes to his squadron’s flight surgeon to get his reckless tentmate grounded:

“Is Orr crazy?”

“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.

“Can you ground him?”

“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”

“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”

“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”

“That’s all he has to do?”

“That’s all. Let him ask me.”

“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.

“No. Then I can’t ground him.”

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

At its best, Catch-22 reads like the kind of bleak farce Kafka might’ve cooked up in collaboration with the Marx Brothers. At its worst it’s just frantic and amateurish (like the Marx Brothers at their worst). Here’s an example of Heller at his best and worst, just after Kid Sampson meets his messy end on a raft offshore:

Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They scampered for their things in a panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water were struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind. Kid Sampson had rained all over.

I’m not sure if a “biting wind” is a good metaphor for the resistance of the sea; wind pushes, it doesn’t pull. And once again Heller’s twinned adjectives (“gentle, knee-high”; “viscous, clinging”), tend to weaken rather than reinforce one another. But Heller catches the right details; the bathers cringing from the tainted waves, those in the ocean “forgetting in their haste to swim” as they lumber to shore, everyone fleeing yet unable to look away from the scene of the tragedy. Later the lower half of Kid Sampson’s body washes ashore “like a purple twisted wishbone”, and the men of the squadron, unwilling to touch it, creep down to the beach to peek at it through the bushes.

Overall, I still think Catch-22 is a pretty great book. I can grudgingly forgive its prolix, overlong, redundant excesses. But it’s a relief to escape at last from Joseph Heller’s world to one where the author has scrupulously considered each word and set it in its proper place in relation to the others; I’m now reading J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. Heller’s voice drifts too often to that prophetic pitch that appeals to intelligent eighteen-year-olds but wears the patience of grown-ups less certain of their intelligence. Give me an author with the humility to scratch out a line.

M.

The Sexy Mathematics origin story.

In 2006, my band recorded a CD. We spent the better part of a year and the price of a decent used car, and at the end of the tortuous process I took the six boxes of completed CDs and piled them up into a little pyramid in the middle of my living room floor. “Now what?” I said.

Three and a half of those boxes are still in my possession, tucked into a corner of my hall closet. The truth is, we never really thought about what we would do with the CDs once we’d finished making them. I guess we figured we’d sell them to somebody. But since the recording of our CD coincided with the effective end of our public performing career, it became increasingly difficult to find customers. If it weren’t for the popularity of a few animated cartoons I posted on YouTube, we wouldn’t have sold a single disc to anyone outside our immediate families and friends.

I work with a guy named Chris whose band, Sexy Mathematics, just finished recording their first EP. Unlike me, Chris isn’t willing to hang onto his boxes of CDs forever. He has a plan for unloading them. The first step of his plan was to come to me. “Hey, you’re in the marketing biz,” he said. “Would you write some promotional copy for our press kit?”

“Pshh, that sounds boring,” I said. “Why don’t I make you a promotional comic instead?”

So that’s what I did. Oddly, this is far more work than I ever undertook to promote my own band. It’s easier, somehow, to motivate myself to do things like this for other people than it is to do them for myself.

Perhaps someday I’ll create a promotional comic for the band known as Sea Water Bliss. But probably not. I hate repeating myself.

The Origin of Sexy Mathematics

George Orwell is not like you or me.

Here’s George Orwell’s description of Barcelona early in the Spanish Civil War:

Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal … Almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy … Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night … I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side.

Orwell goes on to say that “There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

It’s lucky Orwell is such a compelling storyteller, or I would have been obliged to stop reading Homage To Catalonia right there. This state of affairs, this chaotic, violent, graffiti-stained shambles, a half-wrecked city lorded over by Puritans with guns who’ve driven out (or worse) the priests and the “bourgeoisie” – this Orwell sees as “worth fighting for”? I understand that he was keen to fight fascism, and that in 1936 Spain was the one front where fascists could be fought. But who could blame an idealistic young leftist for arriving in Barcelona, taking a look around at the filth and the madness and the thuggish sloganeering, and concluding, “Not my fight”?

But this was the middle of the 1930s; one of those occasions when capitalism had managed to make itself look very bad – bad enough, perhaps, that it was possible for an intelligent person to convince himself that,

It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”. Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control.

(This is Orwell paraphrasing, semi-approvingly, the position of POUM, the Marxist faction whose militia he joined on arriving in Spain.)

Times were different. One clue is the business about the tips. (After being lectured for the sin of having tipped an elevator-boy, Orwell on his second visit to Barcelona months later, after the revolutionary fervor had faded, noticed that “[i]n a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back.”) Seventy years on, it’s hard to grasp a mindset where tipping is seen as a symbol of capitalist exploitation. I was raised to believe that in certain encounters, tipping was the correct thing to do; and I’ve always tipped waiters, taxi-drivers, and barbers, even when I was unemployed, even when, as has often been the case, the person receiving the tip was undoubtedly better off than I was. I recognise that the custom of tipping is nonsensical – why do we tip waiters in fancy restaurants but not the underpaid drones behind the counter at Wendy’s? But I can’t see how it would help the working poor if tipping were eliminated altogether; indeed, I doubt that unlucky elevator-boy at Orwell’s hotel was grateful for his manager’s intervention.

Similarly, when in my life waiters have failed to treat me as an equal, it has usually been because they saw me as beneath their station, not above it; and while many “shop-walkers” have introduced themselves to me by first name, I can’t think of any who’ve cringed before me, unless the empty politesse of greeting me with “Sir” is seen as a mark of subservience. I’m not crazy enough to say that class distinctions have disappeared, only that without benefit of revolution, we’ve reached a state in the development of our bourgeois democracy where class is far more fluid and complicated than Orwell and his contemporaries were capable of imagining.

So I’ve decided to cut Orwell some slack, as I finish off Homage To Catalonia. The world of 1936 was very different from our own, and it’s a testament to the vitality and immediacy of his writing that we can forget for a minute how very different Orwell is from us.

***

In May of 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona between pro-Communist policemen and their nominal allies in the Marxist POUM and the anarchist CNT. Orwell describes an American doctor running up to him on the street:

“Come on, we must get down to the Hotel Falcón … The POUM chaps will be meeting there. The trouble’s starting. We must hang together.”

On the evidence of these lines (“chaps”, “we must hang together”), one might conclude that Orwell had never actually conversed with a living American. At any rate he had no feeling for how Americans talked. I’m guessing he rarely went to the movies.

M.