sadness

i am one of those people who walk among us all daily who owns a profound sense of sadness. i picked it up at an early age like a christmas shopper purchasing a piece of luggage. things began happening and my boyhood was interrupted and a darkness settled into my being and now it is simply how i travel. i carry this sadness with me, like a suitcase, everywhere i go.

it colors not only my life but everything i see. where some see bliss, i see ignorance. where some see pomp and circumstance, i see corruption. where some see god, i see the devil.

it is heavy, too, like a designer bag with a fancy ‘s,’ on it to indicate the authenticity of my sadness. as such it is a burden i am ever trying to relieve.

i read to overcome sadness, but it does not help at all. i take in art to overcome my feelings of despondency but the joy of humanity wraps itself in my sadness and becomes a jewel of depression, a lovely and sophisticated complexity and a sadness all the same.

i drink to overcome my sadness. i smoke. i have sex. i masturbate. i thrill seek. i connect with people. i place my trust in morality and act as if karma were as real and tangible as my luggage. i try to be direct. i speak to people openly and honestly and try hard to avoid subterfuge, adhering to the desiderata like a lost sailor on the high sea hugging an inadequate buoy. still, my sadness persists like a blood condition, coursing through me always, coloring my every thought, emotion, activity, and conveying itself out to the world through me not so much as a sadness but as another creation, the product of human and sadness.

it is not that i cannot see happiness or be happiness. it is not that i do not have moments of utter joy or pure ecstasy. it is just that those things exist in a prism called michael. and i am not particularly unique. there are many like me.

some of us do not know we are sad. some express sadness as anger. some of us cannot move. some of us turn the sadness into a great, open space or a maze or a gauzy area, and we get lost in it and we never, ever return.

i suppose the sad are like a fraternity. we move around like everyone else, dealing with what we can as we can. we love like everyone else and we need to be loved. we make mistakes sometimes and we hope for the best always.

armenian remembrance day

armenian remembrance day is dedicated to remembering the victims of the 20th century's first genocide. the campaign of mass murder was committed by the ottoman empire against the armenian people from 1915 to 1918 and longer.

15 years ago i was the editor-in-chief of a small college magazine called logos and i wrote a story about the armenian genocide. i had an armenian friend whose family had escaped the genocide to lebanon, eventually coming to america shortly after her birth in the 1970s. when my friend told me of these horrific events, it was the first i had heard of the armenian genocide.

it was a wake up call in many ways. i suppose i was late blooming, growing up and awaking to many truths in 1994, which had been formerly hidden to me.

for my article i approached this genocide as a fact-finding mission. i interviewed several armenian-americans including: larry zarian, (former mayor of glendale, california, a city with the 2nd largest concentration of armenian people in the world,) and dr. avedis k. sanjian, ucla professor of near eastern studies, who sadly died within a year of of my interview at the age of 74.

the people i interviewed for that story were remarkably generous. one person, a music teacher at usc, played the armenian oud for me, (a small guitar,) and treated me to the works of the great armenian poets as well as some of the foods of the culture.

another person i interviewed, a survivor of this holocaust who was then in her 90s, hayastan terzian, of pasadena, invited me into her home and told me chilling stories of seeing bodies on the banks of a river which seemed to be covered in a sort of grease and which smelled so distinctly horrible she said she could never forget that odor and in fact, any faint resemblance to that odor conjured memories of death and terror for her.

i did try to get the opposing view of the events by contacting the turkish consulate in los angeles. within two days i received three books, essentially propaganda downplaying the idea of any preconceived or planned genocide on the part of the ottoman empire. i was also contacted by a man named david erbas-white, who had married a turkish woman and become something of a spokesman for turkey on the subject of this genocide the turks continue to deny to this day.

the primary argument the turks, (and erbas-white,) presented was to suggest that one of the young turk leaders of the day, a pasha named talaat, had somehow been misquoted. he is reported to have said he had a solution to the armenian question, after which he sent boxcars filled with armenians into the desert to die, and invited the invading russians to kill the armenians who he used as a buffer between the russian and ottoman troops. could talaat pasha have been misquoted or misunderstood? perhaps but it always seemed like revisionist history to me.

the story i wrote was not well written. i did good research but i was a novice to say the least and my aim was to write something like what i might have seen in time magazine. i wanted it to be an authoritative expose on events 75-80 years bygone. instead the piece was meandering and my position was unclear. still, school is about learning and for a student writer to be able to choose such an expansive topic and to be able to get interviews with notable subjects and to have the freedom to explore and to collate and to write as i would, was of my greatest learning experiences ever.

recently this topic of the armenian genocide, specifically the united states' acknowledgement of these events as genocide, has received congressional consideration. in october of '07 the bill was essentially killed at the last minute as pressure from turkey was stepped up through the implication that turkey's cooperation with our military efforts in iraq could be jeopardized. a century after the fact, the descendants of the young turks who ruled the ottoman empire fiercely oppose being characterized as the descendants of the perpetrators of the murder of up to 1.5 million armenians.

by contrast, armenians and armenian-americans seem to covet the world's acknowledgement of their plight. serj tankian of the rock band 'system of a down,' has been one of the most vocal proponents of u.s. recognition of this genocide. (www.axisofjustice.com, an activist website founded by tankian and tom morello has also supported the cause of u.s. recognition.)

i remember hayastan terzian wiping tears from her eyes that were not there. she felt those tears and she reached up to blot them but at 95-years-old, it was as if her body could not cry anymore. i remember sitting in the office of a 40-year-old real estate agent who shared stories of how the subject of the genocide would come up at home when he was a kid and the entire house would go quiet, after which arguments would ensue over the most trivial matters then later he would hear his parents crying together in their bedroom over recollections of their lost parents and relatives. his tears made up for hayastan, (which happens to mean "armenia," in the armenian language,) terzian's lost tears as they rolled down his face and knocked his spectacles right off it.

at a famous cathedral in yerevan today armenians remember. here in southern california at a monument in a park in montebello, armenians remember. the armenians have a saying which is, "wherever two armenians or more gather, there is armenia." a saying like this makes perfect sense coming from a people who have survived a diaspora, a people who were swallowed whole by the soviet union, a people who lived isolated as the only christians in a muslim part of the world, not to mention the enclaves of armenians who lived in iran, iraq, lebanon, russia, france, canada or the united states.

i will never forget these things, these people, this story, but i seem to remember them all more clearly every year on april 24th; armenian remembrance day.

April 23rd

Happy Birthday, Michael Moore. Thanks for all you do.

how to think about things

i have considered the possibility of writing a business/self help book about my experience working. it's a passing fancy, really, but sometimes i really think it could be a compelling read. you see, i am one of the thinkers and doubters in the work place.

i have heard my personality described as being naturally negative. in a group setting it is supposed to be good to have me around because i am a natural troubleshooter who will find holes in plans. in fact, i have long had some serious authority issues. this is where all my doubting begins and it is also where my propensity for questioning the nature of business and my place in the work world is rooted.

in the 90s i began channeling my rage, my contempt and my dissatisfaction with society at large into my daily life. i started writing my frustration in poems nightly, in columns in the college newspaper biweekly, in an annual magazine, in journal entries sporadically and emails nearly hourly. at work i sought to analyze the machine from the inside out.

i was of the people and i tended to the people like a shepherd to his flock. i looked out for their best interests with a quiet dignity, all the while learning my own lessons as i went.

from my earliest days in any work place i had something of a superiority complex. i treated the work place as i treated the ball fields and courts i had grown up playing on. i strove for success by defining the objective for myself and devising a strategy to compete. this was not as fail-proof a plan as you might have guessed.

i saw the work place as somehow democratic. i thought the stated rules as one would find them in the constitution of the united states of america right on down to the company handbook of the average corporation, represented the only requirements. it sounded like i did not have to kiss ass, like i did not have to be friends with anyone if i chose not to, and like all that mattered was how well i did the job. in a call center answering phone calls all day long i excelled. i took more and more calls than anyone around me, employed the skills of empathy and sales artfully, and i navigated the computer system as if i had written the code. my early advancement was guaranteed.

it got trickier later, however. many lessons i had to learn the hard way. as i moved up some, the competitors became more fierce. now in addition to doing a job well, i was asked to discern the nature of people and act politically. that which i came to love about academic life, the ability to be my own man and to wear my heart and brain on my sleeve, was gone.

i spoke to people i believed to be friends about my honest opinions of others, (honest if unfavorable,) and found my trust had been betrayed. i had a friendly disagreement with a friend once over whether it was what you knew or who you knew that helped you advance in the work place. as i watched her climb right by me on the corporate ladder it occurred to me i did not even know how to do the who you know thing. i was handicapped.

realizations like this usually led to some sort of learning moment. if i took longer to get it, i usually only "got it," all the better. from my days training hundreds of people yearly to managing teams, i have been effective at conveying these things i have learned to others.

once upon a time i happened into a drawer of my boss's, (at his request,) and i stumbled on to the review of an under performing peer of mine. (under performing is truly an understatement,) but this peer had a longstanding relationship with my boss. hence, the sterling review i discovered. i had a mentor in the company at that time whose counsel i sought. he explained a lesson to me i have since shared with probably 10 different people who needed to learn it and who seemed to do just that.

in the work place, one cannot derive their happiness from some notion of comparatively fair wages. rather, one must decide if the wage they are making is fair independent of any knowledge of any other pay rates whatsoever. one must self inquire, "am i happy doing this at this wage?" that alone should be the criteria for one's contentment regarding wages.

having gained a certain sense of comfort and familiarity with the political aspects of the work place, i have been able to share certain truths with some who suffer from false notions and blind spots i once shared.

the overarching principle of mastering the political aspect of business or thriving in the work place is the simple idea that it is part of the job to manage the perceptions of others. this is to say, one must always be aware of the perceptions of others and seek to influence them positively, especially as it regards perceptions about that person.

it is a platitude to remark on the ever-present nature of change and yet, i have counseled employees not only on the idea that it will always be happening throughout their work lives, but also that their adaptability will mark their mental and emotional well being in their personal lives.

i know i still have much to learn. so much. at the same time, many of the lessons i have learned thus far have not been readily available to me. i have learned them many times only after erring first, (usually to my detriment.) while there are a host of business or self help or success/motivational books out there, most of them seem to be written in a language unfamiliar to the masses. if they don't sound like harvard mba's, they usually sound like some sort of dr. phil meets miss cleo character who has written a book "to pump you up."

the reality is, i will not write this book. on the other hand, i did write this blog and with pushing in a righteous and positive direction of my most basic values, i feel pretty good about that.

old news

i can believe the news today. newspapers as we know them, as pulp-grade paper with smudgy ink, bulky and cumbersome, are going the way of the dodo.

the world is infinitely smaller than it was in the heyday of newspapers. people are getting their news from the most democratic of all sources, the internet. on the internet a click gets you a story. rolling your mouse over the story lets you see the source if you want to know that before clicking. you can read the story on your screen in what amounts to a positive environmental trade-off. it makes all the sense in the world.

it is important not to confuse journalism, or even the press, (the fourth estate,) with newspapers. the watchdog role journalism plays in our society is of the utmost importance. i might even go so far as to say the fifth estate, the alternative media, is every bit as important as the mainstream media, which has proven too easy to sully.

as the slow death of newspapers continues we should seriously consider a state run newspaper. such an entity would need to have an unprecedented autonomy for its role and a charter that defines and guides its action, which would at its heart be nothing more than textbook journalism. beyond this one sponsored journalistic endeavor, undertaken by a wise old society who understands the importance of the role of watchdog, nothing else would be necessary. from there capitalism can take over. let better news outlets do their best to compete and let americans know that their one, tax funded and governed by the people news organization is accountable to them and exists simply to play the role of watchdog.

the state sponsored news organization can neglect sports and entertainment "news." those things are not newsworthy. as it was, many published newspapers were not being read anyway.

i am not bothered that newspapers are going away. what does bother me is corruption. i am hopeful the function of watchdog, so necessary in society, survives all this.

tears

my brother and i were chatting over a bare knuckles stout recently when he suggested i should write more about my childhood, about all the shit we went through when we were kids and i know why he asks this. i think the glimpses of my writing about those things he has seen have spoken to him. these are things he knows about and my perspective as the brother who was five years older is probably important to him.

what he doesn't know is that from the time i was 25 until i was 35 that shit was all i wrote about. i wrote about it. i cried about it. i read what i wrote and cried some more. i stayed up late talking to girlfriends about it in cars at night in parking lots of book stores and supermarkets. these things that happened, the events themselves, spilled out of me constantly like the pus of an infection. it was constantly, constantly oozing forth like a tide unstemmed.

prior to 25 i had no feelings whatsoever. nothing made me cry. i didn't even think i was capable of crying. when dog's died or relatives, i found myself greeting well wishers in lines at funerals with hundreds of guests offering up their support as i feigned tears, as i worked up an earnest tear or two. i felt abnormal in those days. i was damaged and i was worried i was deranged.

i used to ask myself how people cried so easily. i wondered if everyone was faking and it was just a device to connect with people or win support for this thing or that thing. i saw moviegoers emerging from films crying in those days and could not even imagine those tears were genuine. i thought they were the product of an overwrought, cry-baby emoting public trained like hounds to feel, to feel so deeply, to feel and to emote and to hurt and to be joyful all in extravagant ways and in public places and as if they owned these emotions. fuck, i hated these people, these emoters.

then it happened. i stopped writing poetry in iambic pentameter as i had been taught in some classroom or another and started writing some prose about my life and i started to believe i had some talent for writing. at the very least, i found i enjoyed reading what i had written, which was new by comparison to the crap-ass journal i had kept when i was in basic training for the air force or any other writing i did pre-25. that stuff was a joke and an embarrassment but suddenly when i began writing about my life and my mother and my brother and the things i went through as a child and how i felt about those things, about a crazy relationship between heroin-addicted parents trying to raise children practically on the streets of downtown los angeles, of late night car chases stretching from los angeles to san bernardino in the dark, still, 2am traffic less night on the 10, of cockroaches on the floor of the apartment, of sammy's small brown hand on my mom's white ass on the sofa in the middle of the night when i awoke from a nightmare, of dog's thrown from 2nd story windows, of strange friends who provided refuge to an 8-year-old kid when his stepdad was raging around an apartment like a maniac, well, i began crying.

i cried a fucking river. i cried for 10 years with only brief pauses of dryness. i washed my heart with my tears. i scrubbed it good, crying often when i wrote and experiencing a catharsis that must be a common experience among men. i conjured the events of my childhood, of visiting my mother in prisons all over the united states, of violence against myself or my brother or my mother by her codependent fuck of a loser-lover-husband, of moving in with my fundamentalist christian aunt and uncle before i was 11 and spending teen years in church with people speaking in tongues and anointing one another with olive oil and all other manner of hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo, bullshit feel-good beliefs and practices, in tomes nightly scrawled in low light on notepads purchased from drugstores or typed into an ms-dos computer sold to me by a girlfriend's dad for $100 in 1994, which i never paid him for.

near the end of those 10 wet years my writing changed and i began to move away from my "autobiographical fiction," as i was prone to call it in flattery of an idol of mine named henry miller. in fact it was miller who spoke so glowingly of the writers who seemed to lack any sense of style but wrote rather like robots, distilling language out of the equation and conveying instead pure thoughts unadulterated by colloquialism or the flavor of region. (i may have missed something since miller was renowned as much for his brooklyn vernacular as anything else.)

still, i cried. i cried at movies, at the drop of a hat. everything touched me-i was like a sieve. the human experience was vast and i was a complex, sophisticated human being, who knew the poignancy of life, the sensitive and rough-gentle vulnerable side of humanity and who identified with every fucking character ever written for the big screen by an independent film maker or some obscure artist of a writer. i remember crying the night i read the bridges of madison county in under three hours. i soothed any cheap feelings i may have had by telling myself it was about me not the pop fiction that lay in front of me on the floor of a living room in an apartment in san dimas in a small puddle of salty tears. lost love was something i knew something about. i had loved my childhood and i had lost it as it spun out of control in a world filled with adults smitten by ignorance like so many victims of the plague in a camus novel awaiting certain death in a walled-in city.

i cried goblet-sized tears the afternoon i watched central station in an art house theatre in pasadena, identifying with young josue as if i was watching super 8 films of my own tortured childhood dreaming of reunification with a biological father i would never, ever know.

and just about then, as if a faucet was turned righty-tighty to the off position, i stopped crying again. and i stopped writing about my childhood excepting a rare occasion when i found a topic from that time that allowed me the distance i needed. (that or i wrote in such a way i brushed over topics as in this little essay, without delving to a level which might give rise to emotions i had set aside for a season.)

i chalked this change up to growth. i had needed the rainy season. it was representative of me dealing with things that had affected me. but in moving beyond them i felt a sense of maturity. i felt like the crying was over, like i understood the random nature of my existence and had quit choosing to be so unshakably injured. it felt good to stop crying and it felt better to not feel like i needed to write about these events that had heretofore defined me if only in my own mind.

so when tommy brings this subject up i find i am in no rush to revisit the scribblings of my mad self. and now that some time has passed i find no strong aversion either. this, to me, feels like balance, which is of my highest values.

the estate tax

rather than discussing the in and outs of the estate tax from a political perspective, i am truly only interested in the moral question it involves. is it wrong or right to levy an estate tax, (or, death tax?)

the argument on one side is based on a basic premise. that premise suggests that a person's earned money should be theirs to do with as they please.

the argument on the other side is a bit more nuanced. it involves several concepts and may be a bit difficult to grasp on the whole. first and foremost would be the idea that since everyone dies and cannot take any material with them when they pass, they should not have the ability to control funds after they leave.

piggy-backing on that idea would be the idea that every man should make his own way in the world without advantage. while members of the wealthy class may bristle at that idea, a substantial case can be built based on the evidence of the children of advantage. it seems the less people have to work in their lives, the less balanced people they make and the less real value they are to society. this idea will resonate with some people and it will not resonate with others. (i would defer to voltaire and born rich to make the point.)

also playing in this equation is the idea that individuals should be of some value to society. this is only true if there is a certain implicit agreement among countrymen. in the u.s. the laws would suggest this agreement does exist. doing business with others is encouraged. all forms of social interaction, too. a man can certainly go off and live a hermit's life but even then the laws check him l'est he show anti-social behaviors.

this issue, whether there should be an estate tax and/or how heavy a tax it should be, is essentially an example of class warfare.

in that way it can be boiled down to a few precise points.

• it takes money to make money.
• opposition to the estate tax is an attempt by those who have money to hold on to their money even through generations.
• upward mobility is at an all-time low in the u.s.
• americans have always agreed on the principle of majority rules, which essentially means that if the huge majority of people who are not wealthy agree in principle with the estate tax and the idea that transferring wealth across generations should be allowed on a limited basis.

as an alternative i would think capping the amount of money transferable down to the next generation at $3 million would be fair. that is a great start for one or more persons on their lives and any greater amount of wealth that would move into the tax base would be a boon to the country.

the estate tax is a complicated issue but it is worthy of any one's time to understand all that is involved and at stake. personally, i think support for the estate tax is simply the right thing to do.

spring comes undone

driving to work this morning i was thinking about spring and how it has definitely sprung, now. this week my tv has had baseball all over it. prior to last night’s angel’s and dodger’s games, i even watched some of the red sox-rays game and caught glimpses of the yankees-orioles and reds-mets while picking up a pizza.

david eckstein is a padre now. matt holliday is an a. manny’s hair is longer-he looks like a reggae sunsplash player more than a left fielder for the dodgers. all the old faces in new places, the new faces in old places; like jordan schafer who hit two dingers in the first few days of the season and emilio bonifacio who is hitting .600, has a homer, four rbi, four runs and three stolen bases already in this young season, the renewed outlooks even for perennial also-rans like the pirates who won on opening day and sat atop their division if only for a night, the fresh dirt on the uniforms, the sounds of bat on ball or the pop of the catcher’s and first baseman’s gloves, it is spring because it is baseball because it is spring, after all.

baseball is america’s pastime. i have grown up with this game and i love it in so many ways. i love vin scully’s voice and I used to love to hear mel allen on tv on saturday mornings talking about “the week in baseball.” the buzzing bees in the trees these days remind me of the pesky little hitters who wreak havoc on pitchers, guys like ichiro, ellsbury, figgins, kinsler and so on, or from the past guys like brett butler and rickey henderson, or freddie patek or bert campaneris. These are the infamous “swarm of gnats,” scully has referred to when a team gets beaten by a bunch of dinkers and dunkers.

i love baseball food, too. “peanuts!” “yeah, over here buddy but throw them from 12 rows down where you are right now. it feels more like baseball.” who can eat a hot dog any time of year without thinking of baseball? (that must be why we have dodger dogs and ball park franks, after all.)

my third wedding anniversary is in just a few weeks, the first week of may actually, and I am told a gift this year should involve leather. would it be wrong to get her a brand new rawlings glove with a full grain leather shell and deer tanned cowhide lining for that special, baseball feel? i mean, i know she won’t play with it but it would certainly be a gift of love.

yesterday vin scully commented on the padres’ camouflage uniforms in honor of their “military night,” at the stadium, and mentioned how the town was abuzz with discussion of some of the military downsizing taking place these days and a certain airplane that has apparently lost its funding. he highlighted the fact that politicians are making these decisions and that people have strong feelings about whether those decisions are right or wrong, then he casually left it at that and i wondered what vin’s opinion is. i thought of emerson’s quote about not speaking speaking volumes but then thought vin is simply too classy to share his opinion publicly. in private he is probably an open and forthright person happy to share opinions and discuss things from a fairly informed perspective. who knows? what we can know is that he has not lost much as it relates to his status as the greatest baseball broadcaster of all time.

and today as my baseball infatuation is in full bloom i woke to the news of the death of nick adenhart, who died in an intersection five blocks down the street from my office. i was saddened because 12 hours earlier i admired adenhart as he escaped a bases loaded jam in the 6th to complete an outing of six scoreless. adenhart was 22 and had an especially bright future ahead of him in baseball. tragedy has struck baseball before. lyman bostock comes to mind. i heard adenhart's agent on the radio today and his voice cracked and the angels called off tonight's game and flowers assembled out front of angel stadium and the joy of spring cracked too, like a scratch on a record, and tomorrow the games will resume with all the requisite great plays and fantastic finishes.

i don't know though... when i started writing this little ode to baseball yesterday spring had sprung and all was glorious. right now, in the middle of the crack it feels like spring is broke. i can't hear the chirping birds or the buzzing bees. there is only a silence emanating from the mound at angel stadium where today nick adenhart's dad spent a moment beneath a sky full of clouds with his hand over his eyes.

bests and faves and lists

christy hardin smith has a fun post over at firedoglake this morning. (it is linked in the header.) as of now, 1.5 hours after she posted it there are nearly 200 comments. the fire puppies are having fun with this thread/stroll down memory lane. i thought i'd answer the questions right here. (christy's questions are in red. my answers in blue. would love to see some comments on this post if anyone happens to read it.)

Best concert you ever saw? Where, when, and who?

radiohead at the hollywood bowl in support of amnesiac, (i think?) this is a tough one because of course i want to say it was radiohead at the santa barbara bowl. i want to mention the night i saw tool, porno for pyros, fishbone, and alice in chains at the palladium. u2 at the san diego sports arena the night i shook bono's hand during the show was pretty awesome. (11th row?) pearl jam from the 3rd row at the fargo dome. i saw de la soul, the sugarcubes, pil and new order once at aztec stadium and it was perhaps the most sun-drenched, youthful day of my existence. u2 in denver with my brother was the bomb. i think we grooved more to the opening act, rage against the machine, than u2 that night on the pop mart tour. rage against the machine at the palladium, the democratic national convention or coachella was pretty awesome. tom morello at the el rey this past autumn was memorable. frank black at the glass house in pomona. the pixies at the universal amphitheatre when frank black went all psychedelic and had his guitar decked out in black lights and on a bungee cord so he could bounce it reverberating off the ground. the scorpions with bon jovi was a great show and a night that ended around 8am. the night chaka khan kissed me on the cheek was cool. in the 6th row in wisconsin for the tibetan freedom concert i got to see eddie vedder that day, along with run dmc, the beastie boys, rage, tracy chapman, blondie, the cult, the roots and others. i saw a cool benefit concert one night at the wiltern which featured mike ness, (solo,) eddie vedder, (all by himself,) and beck, who brought thom yorke out for a song.) u2 at the long beach civic auditorium from about the 30th row, standing on fold-up chairs the entire show to see over the heads of everyone in front of us in 1983, with bono waving that white flag around... ahh but alas, it is radiohead. it would be radiohead if i got to see them again tomorrow.

Best album EVAR?

i am going to go with u2's achtung baby.

If I could see any live performance past, present or future -- who would it be and why?

jeff buckley at the sin e coffe house in nyc. that one was easy. why? because i never saw him live and yet, because i have listened to every second of every live thing he recorded countless times. because i lived with jeff buckley for seasons metaphorically, times when life was hard and depression sunk in like a stone in water. jeff buckley's grace was with me in those times, perhaps feeding my feelings of despair but comforting me at the same time. there were weekend when i came home from work on friday and never came out of my house until i had to go to work on monday morning. in between i listened to jeff during all waking hours, wallowing in self-pity, desperate and alone. it's weird how you can miss a time like that all while hoping you never, ever end up in such a place again. jeff was an unbelievable talent and the fact he left the world early only increases that sense of wishing i had seen him perform live. and whether it would have been at sin e or the bataclan in paris, any of those early shows when he was working out who he would become as an artist, when he had the hat in front of him and played requests for cash to pay his rent, wow-i wish i had been there.

Song you've found yourself humming along to lately that you are embarrassed to admit you like?
hmm. if i like it i am usually not embarrased by it. there is this song...i don't know who sings it but the chorus she keeps singing is, 'i'm in trouble..." (just googled it. it's pink.)

Song that always gets stuck in your brain, no matter how much you loathe it?

haven't had one of these in a long time. i remember once upon a time when it was the nookie by limp bizkit.

Recording artist you'd most like to see struck with laryngitis?

kid rock.

Cover song you'd most like to see attempted?

i would love to hear radiohead slow down men at work's it's a mistake and radiohead it up a bit.

If you could put together your dream band, who would be in it?

eddie vedder crooning. jeff buckley on lead guitar. thom yorke on keyboards. dave grohl on drums. my friend dave lenci on bass.

Best vocals EVAR?

i guess i would say buckley on a live version of lover, you should've come over. still, thom yorke on you and whose army or bono on the live version of bad from wide awake in america is pretty hard to dismiss. that from the mars volta just wails, too.

Best guitar playing EVAR?

i'll go old school on this and say jimmy page on the song remains the same. there are moments when the photography of that day could not keep up with his fingers. i think page's guitar playing just killed about a decade of guitarists who simply quit because they knew they could never reach his plateau.

Best song in the history of music is _______?

black, by pj? nooooo... one, by u2? i am the walrus? what i got? rainy day woman? song 2? true love waits? blue monday? some girls? hey? come undone? haile sellase up your ass? no, i am going to go with famoous blue raincoat by leonard cohen. ahh, now that is sublime.

american idolatry

for the first several years of american idol i disdained the show on principle. it was not the idea of a talent show that bothered me. it was the idea that the masses would hold sway and somehow stamp a winner with some sort of seal of the masses as if the masses could possibly be right about anything much less something that involves taste.

i harbored a certain internal struggle over the whole thing. weekly at work in staff meetings i would listen to my boss and most if not all of my colleagues talk about these young singers i knew not one iota about. names like: kelly, justin, ruben, clay, fantasia and william and bo, were bandied about as my peers expressed their tastes and formed a club of inane troglodytes with nary a clue about music or sophistication or complexity, to say nothing of art.

one day a woman i worked with who was in her 50s came into the conference room and announced her devotion to american idol contestant bo bice. i had seen the guy on a talk show the night before. bice had pranced out onto the set of letterman or some night time talkie, in bare feet, confirming all of my suspicions that the american idols were a musical cast of neanderthals hell bent on taking every sniff of a 5-year-old trend from the clubs of west hollywood or the pages of la weekly or the airwaves of 'morning becomes eclectic,' to the streets of omaha and montgomery and cheyenne in some kind of bastard, milquetoast form. bare feet? seriously, bare feet? was this to make him seem an artist? was it to grant him cache with the uber-chic? was bare feet his street cred with the hippie crowd?

this woman i worked with raved on about how handsome this moron was, as if he might come through the conference room door at any moment to discover her singing his praises at which point he would glide up onto our conference room table and wiggle his bare and glistening toes in her adoring grill bestowing unknown blessings from a tribe of backwards, bare-footed, black holes of talent, buffoons bent on beating america over the head with the cheap, the mundane, the unoriginal and finally the unbearable. blech!?!

in these early years of american idol i did catch glimpses of these fabricated pop stars on the e channel, at awards shows, on conan or craig or at halftime of the pro bowl. i saw ruben and was non-plussed. for me he was just another r&b singer doing what all r&b singers seem to do, (save for the good few,) croon in soulful voices about love: lost love, hott love, love gone bad, cheap love, psychotic love, sexual love, angry love, love triangles, self love or taboo love. i saw kelly clarkson and thought she was very listenable even if i would never buy her record. i figured with an entire nation to audition it made sense the show, with its boffo ratings, had come up with some talent.

still, i could only mock these budding stars. i imagined their parents in orlando suburbs braggin to their friends about their child's success over a triple play sampler and cokes in the bar at chili's. i thought of their brooding siblings angrily traipsing out onto the set of tyra or jerry or ellen to tell their monstrous stories of stolen fame and siblings gone wacko. i saw malls full of children ipodding their way around hot topic to the tunes of clay, confusion brewing just beneath their artesian teen spirit. over beers with friends i coolly predicted the number of years before the idols i knew would dissipate from the public consciousness. (fantasia, two years tops. carrie underwood, five years. bo bice, six months.) bice was extra despicable because he seemed to be selling the genre of music i preferred but on closer inspection he was no better than and no worse than the crap-acts of the day such as creed or nickelback.

season five was my first year watching idol. i did not watch every episode or anything but i saw enough and even rooted for taylor hicks. hicks, the eventual winner of season five, looked like he was 40 and conveyed a genuine sense of joy when he sang on american idol. part of me thought his childlike behavior was phony but that part gave way to the part that believed and so i came to root for hicks to win the contest. well, that is until i noticed katharine mcphee. this girl sang like nobody's business and was super cute and so i switched my allegiance. other contestants included elliot yamin who seemed like a nice guy and who sang well. kelly pickler was good for a country singer. ace young was an interesting singer, too, but chris daughtry became the breakout star of the season. he has since sold millions of records to adoring fans of bland, electrified, 4/4, blues-based rock music with weak lyrics and zero imagination or originality. daughtry was every bit as bad as bo bice, even if he did seem a nice enough fellow when he was on the show. eh, two steps forward and one step backward for my american idol sensibility.

thanks to daughtry, (and his boring rendition of u2's 'sunday, bloody sunday,') i tuned into the following season sparingly. not even sanjaya captured my imagination, (though i could not figure out how his sister did not make it onto the show as well as another girl i had seen early on who was an opera singer and who confessed to being in trouble for even auditioning. Whatever happened to that girl?) the eventual winner was jordin sparks who is apparently having a great beginning to her career. blake lewis had a certain jamiroquai thing going on and seemed like someone who would have a career but by all accounts that has stalled.

i returned for season 7 and watched regularly. finally, the formula had penetrated my gruff exterior and i became yet another sycophant, glued to my television most tuesdays and wednesdays. jason castro sang buckley's version of hallelujah. brooke white betrayed all the conventions of the show and was not punished for doing so. michael johns was somehow despatched super early. (i thought he would be the winner for sure.) i gained a non-pervy, old-man crush on syesha mercado and near the end of the season cast my first ever vote on her behalf. i liked carly smithson and ramiele malubay as well, and had to admit david archuleta sang well, even if i despised his songs, his look, and his fans. as for the winner, david cook, he is a good singer with a nice sense of what he is doing. last week he appeared on season 8 and as usual, he was self-deprecating and humble in his success. his musical style is altogether palatable as well. i would not be surprised if he evolved into someone whose music i would pay for.

(michael johns)

and so i have come full circle. this season i do not think i have missed more than one episode. like everyone i know i fully expect adam lambert to win if only because he is like a seasoned pop star already. he sings like a cross between ronnie james dio and freddie mercury. his choices have been consistent with his broadway background in as much as they have been theatrical and inventive.

i'm sold. i am an avid viewer of american idol now. in part, it may be because there has been a shift in the show. it seems to me more coldplay and jeff buckley and chris cornell songs are making it into the show. i think one day a nuanced singer in the style of a tom waits or even bob dylan, (in other words, someone who does not necessarily sing so sweet you can get a cavity from listening to it,) could advance within the a.i. structure.

in a way it actually seems like america is evolving as seen through the prism that is american idol. the singers have not only gotten better they have become more interesting, more artistic and more polished.

some of my friends think i've gone looney. they think by watching american idol i betray leonard cohen and thom yorke and dylan and dengue fever and cordrazine. i think as the show and the talent therein evolve and improve it is just silly to remain opposed to the kids of american idol just for the sake of being opposed to them, just to remain somehow ultra-cool or sophisticated. a talent show is a talent show after all. it is as good as the talent therein and as evidenced by lambert, the contenders nowadays are as good and better than the established talents of the day, (if not the artists.)

(adam lambert)