Jeremy Wade and friend

I never understood hunters. Yes, I practiced vegeterianism for years, but returned to a well-rounded palette in order to learn cooking. I just never grasped the notion of leisurely destroying another living thing for pleasure and bragging rights, especially when one announced before hand: “She’s a beauty!” Personally, I’d like to know if wives of hunters worry when they are told they are beautiful.

Survival is something altogether different. I watch all of Discovery / Animal Planet survival shows with great anticipation. I wouldn’t necessarily drink pachydermal fecal water or sleep inside a dead camel’s carcass, but….it’s good to know. One wonders how victims of Katrina would have fared if they knew all they needed was bleach and fire (perhaps for boiling or to make charcoal for filtration) to sanitize and make storm water drinkable. Potassium Permanganate (from Hardware stores like Lowes, or pet / fish stores) + Glycerin (pharmacies) – instant fire. Catching a wild animal, gutting it properly, and consuming it…all necessities in emergency situations. I still think all meat eaters should kill each type of animal they eat with their own hands once in their lifetime. Just to understand what you are doing. I hate to say this, but human beings – in survival situations- can’t possibly lie down and perish, surrendering our position on the food chain purely out of humane reasons. In not flattering ourselves above the wild kingdom, we become a small part of the larger picture. Animals would eat us if they had to survive. In our anthropomorphic delirium, we fancy them noble.

That’s simply because we don’t know what they are thinking, since animals can’t blog.

Watching all these survivalist shows reminds me of my late father, a wild country bumpkin who rode motorcycles all around, outrunning the police on their Triumphs with his Nortons. He was a great fan of the Welsh / Scottish Outward Bound schools. Though he later became a teacher, he escaped – in his youth- into the dense rainforest for weeks during the Japanese occupation, refusing to suffer an invaded country or kill to defend it. After weeks, he returned, but the government denied him schooling, and he was subsequently raised by Irish Catholic monks.

As a result of surviving in the wild, my dad had a real feel of staying in touch with the grittier side our civilization has trained us to forget. Of all the fathers in my mom’s extended, posh family, my dad was the only one who took their kids out hunting in the tropical rainforest, wading through bogs, swamps, and rivers, and emerging with soiled rifles and bodies covered with bloodsucking leeches and a wild boar at the end of the day. It’s amusing to see some of my affluent cousins grow up to be men who turned their noses up at a life of luxury, choosing instead to go off into the wild to fish and rough it out in the jungle. They are really my father’s sons in that sense.

Of all the guys on Discovery, Jeremy Wade of River Monsters (originally from Animal Planet) is my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, just because I love survival shows, doesn’t mean I can go longer than 12 hours without taking a hot shower. Rivers and oceans frighten the heck out of me. If I wade in the seashore and my feet touches a seaweed, I will get a heart attack and die instantly on the spot (it’s happened many times before) I get icky just feeling sticky skin against cotton fabric on a hot summer day. But I LOVE Jeremy Wade’s scary show, which I watch, bulwarked behind a wall of stuffed animals. He is a blend of humane, erudite, inquisitive, tough guy, and teacher: all qualities I saw in my dad.

Some may say Wade is a handsome guy. But men are attractive to me by what they have accomplished, what they know, their fearlessness, and how they behave. You could look like the handsomest guy in the world, you can be physically attractive, you can have a gorgeous face, you can be well-endowed, you can be built, tall, gym-strong, you can know good wine, and use fancy words….but the internal engine, the soul that makes you tick, drives you to acquire (not manufactured products, but wisdom), defines you as a human being….THAT, is what enamors me to a man.

One of the tv moments I often think about is Married With Children’s 1989 Season 4 episode “Dead Men Don’t Do Aerobics.” I’ve often said that the writers of the show are more well-researched than they appear to be. The art of good satire is to make humor that appeals both to serious concepts and casual laughs. Here is the fragment from the original script:

Al Bundy: C’mon, everybody, family meeting. [they all sit] Now, Peg, I know you think you’re responsible for killing Jim. And yet you have no guilt of squashing the life out of me, but that’s another meeting. Anyway, what I’m saying is, you didn’t kill Jim. Good health killed Jim. See, he purified his body so completely, that when finally called on to do so, he couldn’t handle the grease and sugar and toxic waste that we call food. He rendered himself extinct. See, healthy people are like dinosaurs. They’re not fit to survive. Jim’s body couldn’t handle the burgers and bonbons and pastry suckin’s like real Americans. You see, Peg, WE are the truly strong.

PEGGY: You really think so, Al?

AL: Absolutely. See that cockroach over there?

PEGGY: [points] That one?

AL: [points] No, that one. Well, any one of them. You don’t see them carrying of a can of Wheat Germ, do you?

KELLY: Gurm, Dad.

AL: Thank you, Pumpkin. Anyhow, Peg, let’s follow the example of our friend the cockroach. They were before man, they’ll be here after man. You know why? They eat crap. And I say, if it’s good enough for the cockroach, then it’s good enough for my family!

Poliomyelitis (or Polio) came about because of overcleanliness. Because of modern sanitary conditions, infants were no longer exposed to the open sewers. As a result, their natural immunity to the polio virus weakened. It wasn’t until Jonas Salk created a vaccine (one that contained the virus itself – albeit inactivated through a combination of three strains) and injected it into human beings to develop immunity that the epidemic was eradicated.

I feel that way about allergy medication. The more you take, the less antibodies your immune system will develop. It may soothe you now, but medicated America is quickly becoming a weak society, overprotected (over-coddled) and underimmunized. The recent study that peanut allergy cases have tripled in the last decade is good evidence to support my views. Squeaky clean living conditions are nice, but it also leads to a weak race of people, ill-equipped to handle the deluge of germs out in the real world. What happens if you decide to up and go to Marrakech or Mexico tomorrow? So how does one stay clean and strong?

I say take the advice of Al Bundy. Eat a burger. Better yet, eat a White Castle Burger. Nobody exactly knows what kind of meat it is (my theory is that it’s space aliens killed with five shots of laser beams), but it should be no small irony that the franchise was originally developed as an answer to Upton Sinclair’s novel (The Jungle) about poor sanitary conditions in the meat industry. Next time you reach for a box of Alavert or Claritin, think about the next generation and have a burger with fries and shake instead.

Do it for the kids.

Re: modern civilization, one of the greatest concerns I have is the ever decreasing level of returns we are willing to put up with when it comes to Quality vs technology.

The advent of the mp3 / wmv format of music is a perfect illustration of this. I’m happy to hear that music enthusiasts are returning to vinyl to a certain extent. I’m not sure how much of this is a striving for analog nuance and not just a retro fetish for a whimsical past. After all, blind lab tests show that most people can’t differentiate a 320k mp3 from an analog recording.

The incriminating evidence is a little bit more involved than wave forms and social phenomenon. In order to understand the way we have been trained to make do with less, you have to first understand the limitations of digital audio. Hailing from a structure of 0 and 1 binary bits, digital audio – when magnified – generates perpendicular steps in their wave forms, when it should, ideally be smooth analog curves. Imagine yourself on a rollercoaster ride, and instead of smooth steel tracks, or rickety wooden ones, you are bumping down stairs on a painful pair of redden buttocks. It’s like a Sir George Solti recording through the ears of Jackass’s Steve-O.

It was arguable whether an average person’s ears were discriminating enough to pick up on this microscopic detail. Vague words like full and warm have often been used to describe a rich analog recording. When new wave music, with its banks of midi sequencers and synthesizers came along in the 80s generating square waves with digital bits, the compact disc generation found a match made in heaven. I can’t say I didn’t welcome the CD format with open arms. There’s nothing more annoying than hearing pops and clicks during a solo piano performance, but most of you today may not remember the howl of protest over the “cold,” “metallic” range of cd’s. This is an era when people still had Studer Revoxes in their home entertainment centers, and Infinity built their Reference Speaker set (pictured above).

We didn’t think audio quality could get any lower than cd’s. If anything, we thought it would improve. There was the SACD (Super Audio Compact Discs) and XRCD (Extended Resolution Compact Discs). And with Mobile Fidelity still around, there was at least still a chance for discerning audiophiles. But then the computer generation took over, with it’s small PC speakers, mp3, wmv, RA, and ogg formats. (Does anyone even know what FLAC format is?) In order to accommodate these tiny speakers, music started to be “Remastered” in reissues of many classic recordings. At first, I thought “remastering” meant a general clean-up of old recordings, the removal of unwanted artifacts with newer technology, much like the remastering of the original Wizard of Oz movie or Decca Records’ remastering of their Legends series. But what Remastering eventually became, was an overcompression of a recording. This meant that the quiet passages were boosted while the loud passages got reduced. A quiet Mozart Lieder now sounded as as close to a no longer thunderous Mahler symphony. The result was a mid-level drone that never let up. The nuances were gone, but everything came through better when “ripped” to mp3. People reported being inexplicably exhausted by the end of listening to their favorite remastered album. Why did they do this? It was to suit the limited dynamic range of the reduced output devices, namely mp3 players, IPODS, computer speakers, and online streaming music. Music with reduced dynamic range would sound peachy when played through devices with reduced dynamic range. Everyone goes home happy.

Except for the dude sitting at home with his all-tube Macintosh preamp, Crown power amps, and a set of Klipschorn speakers.

Once technology used to serve mankind, but now, we are slowly readjusting our standards to accommodate the limitations of computers. We are lowering our expectations to serve computers. This turn of events is called “The Loudness War.”

I recently wanted to celebrate the rite of Spring with the beloved Bill Evans recording You Must Believe In Spring. I bought my first copy in a vinyl LP format in the early 80s, when still a teen. I fell in love with it immediately. So I thought I’d have an updated copy with a “Remastered” version from Rhino. What I got was a compressed recording that had the acoustic bass pumped up almost to the level of the Evans’s piano, competing with it for attention. It’s not to the point of “clipping,” but it definitely lost the nuance of the performance, especially for a recording noted for its quiet, meditative and ruminative selections.

All that would be even tolerable, IF the parties responsible did not overlook a truncated note from the opening of “The Peacocks.” How, you ask, could this have happened? My theory is that the mastering compression plug-in was set with a level “gate” that reduced anything below a certain level to silence. And since the opening note is very quiet, lone piano note, it got zapped. I am shocked people at Rhino would have missed that. I put it on my remastering software and reverse-engineered the note to be prepended to the head of the song.

Science fiction writers have long prophesied a time when machine would win the battle against man. I tend to think it will happen not in that flamboyant Hollywood way, with the Terminator and Skynet bringing about the end of the world in a gigantic explosion, followed by skull-crushing laser-shooting tanks. I see that as a metaphor for what is really happening. If anything, it will be more along the lines of the frog in a pot of cold water that is slowly being brought to a boil. Look around you: people are physically interacting with strangers less (they are too focused on “tweeting” about their walk across a dangerous intersection in real time); people go out less often, we no longer care about acting, but concentrate more on Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and Wow! graphics with deafening volume levels in our movies; printed matter,once revisable with Orwellian burn markers, are now deletable with ebooks and Kindle books, we can’t even find our way to a new place without the aid of google maps, mapquest, dashboard GPS, and all our credit banking personal information are slowly being surrendered migrated online, controlled by switches, routers, web servers, and frame relays.

This may sound a little like Luddite paranoia, but my point is that we’re literally handing our lives over to a technocentric system. And along with that surrender, we’ve also lowered our expectations in regards to quality.

I am finding that the older I get, the more empathy I have for just how little each person’s world is. Whether an individual’s solace lies in a warm cup of coffee or a glass of gin to a fancy luxury car, a trophy wife, or a ph’D. They are all equal in terms of smallness and inconsequence. Don’t get me wrong. This is not a statement made in arrogance. Friends of mine will tell you that my world is probably the smallest one of them all. Make-belief villages in a glass snow globe will probably think themselves urbane compared to my very limited world. I guess that’s why I can sympathize.

The upshot of this is that once I “see” these important things as surface acquisitions, I begin to ask, “what isn’t superficial?” And THAT, is where the journey begins. Personally, I think that which isn’t cosmetic, is, by definition, invisible. Off the bat, I can think of a few things. The search for quality is one. Striving for quality is putting the concept of evolution to good use. Do we complacently accept the comfortable status quo around us, or do we advance the generation by a notch, and do things better than the way our ancestors did them?

The search for love is another. Sure, skeptics will wonder, in a post-structural question mark, whether we love using the definition of love, love what attracted our eyes first, or “make do” simply because we have ran out of choices and are too embarrassed to admit it, so we heighten that choice to the lofty reaches of this abstract emotion. In defense of love, I have come across many variations of love – some merely between brother and sister, mother and daughter, or boy and pet. There are really no “choices” involved there.

I am uncomfortable with the fact that each of our personal universes are so small, but I also think that in knowing our vast limitations, we begin to question the notion of how happiness is created.

I used to think that many musicians in the ’60s who went multi-ethnic and non-Western kicks were just hopping on the bandwagon of Indian yogis and mystics who preached “contributions-over-mind”, but looking back, I think the ones who were serious, actually did see a burning bush of world music, a vast ocean of rhythms and microtonal syntax. When they came back, somehow, those 12 notes and the 4/4 beat didn’t seem adequate anymore: It was the equivalent of going traveling outside of your country, then coming back, and saying “How was I able to be content – all these years- with just these simple cravings for the latest and greatest toys that television and a peer of friends and neighbors have created in me?”

I groan out loud whenever people think they are paying me a compliment when they tell me I am intelligent. This is not false humility or fake modesty: I honestly believe that the more you know, the more you realize just how little you know. I am, hands down, the least intelligent person I know. I am always fascinated at the information friends are in possession of. I don’t wish I know what they know….that’s why I befriended them in the first place: less reading ahead.

However, I live in the perpetual fear that I won’t absorb enough knowledge and wisdom, that I’ll pass away stupid and only less dumb then when I started out. Perhaps this may have something to do with the fact that I think intelligence is completely over-rated.

I watched a beautiful program today on documentary television. It is called Blindsight, a film about Erik Weihenmayer and Sabriye Tenberken’s efforts to bring blind Tibetan children to the summit of Mt Everest. Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg’s website is Braille Without Borders. To me, Blindsight is awe-inspiring in the same way the closing scenes of Werner Herzog’s movie Heart Of Glass is amazing, where a man stands on top of an island mountain looking out to the sea, day after day in a Caspar David Friedrich vista. He is the first one to doubt. One day four men on the island decide to set off on a boat, they wanted to reach the edge of the world to see if there really is an abyss. This was a defining moment in my experience and perception of my life and how it related to the world. It made me think: what is out there? Who among us is brave enough to go beyond the walls? How do we nurture this dissatisfaction with the complacency of what we know, and to risk going out into the unknown? That, to me, is the true spirit, of being alive.

I think Blindsight captures that sentiment accurately. Children who are blind are willing to risk their lives to go to a place they cannot see, and that there are blind people who believe it is important enough to want to show them the way. But what is even more important to me than the quest, is the humanity. Intelligence is nice, but nothing impresses me more than kindheartedness, compassion. You can have all the brains, beauty, and money in the world (in that order, and for me, by necessity and through impossibly abysmal stretches!), but what is it all worth, if you don’t have compassion for your fellow man and woman?

I’m not sure if this is even related, but my late father was fond of pulling me aside and saying, “never be arrogant on being human in relation to earth and animals, we humans have only been here for 200 thousand years. That’s a meaningless drop in the bucket in the timeline of earth and the cosmos. Before the next drop, we’ll be extinct.”

One of the things I always get intellectually reprimanded for is my willingness to inspect junk culture. Maybe that’s why I share such an affinity with Don Delillo’s character Murray Jay Siskind in White Noise. Here is a person who will read cereal boxes, transvestite magazines, talk to prostitutes, and analyze James Dean. Not necessarily in that order. I guess I feel that junk culture is responsible for subconsciously infiltrating many people’s opinions as much, if not more, than high culture. Of course, this ties in to the whole whine about media representation that symbiotic crybabies love to denounce. I’m willing to address junk culture as much as I am high culture. But when people from above ask me why I’m wasting time with trash, my only answer is that looking at trash may be no less ineffective as soapbox divas who preach to the choir. It’s one thing to discuss like-minded politics amongst your people, but to transgress the cultural line and dispose snobbery presents a greater chance of discovering hidden notions.

June 12, 2005

A friend from, ironically, Berlin, just told me about the existence of the McMansion. I have seen these abominations of space management in our neighborhood for years. Folks move into the neigborhood and buy up three old Cape Cod ranches, demolish them, and proceed to build a McMansion in its place, complete with on guard concrete lions flanking the driveway that stretchs approximately 12 feet to the front door.

Building a McMansion in our neighborhood, is equivalent to an undrafted Olympic sprinter going to an Old Ladies parchese club to compete against its members, and declaring himself the winner. If you want to impress me with that brand of gaudy affluence, then try, building one in Old Greenwich. Until you’ve pull that one off, let’s not talk about it.

Jorge-Luis Borges in his story The Aleph described an object so small yet so large in what one is able to see within. It was as if one were looking into a universe. I sometimes feel that way when I visit a quaint charming cottage with a bit of character and lots of pretty flowers in that small plot next to the front door. I think in many ways, we’ve lost touch with the charm of small things. In a frenzy to compete against the Joneses and win, people seem to be outdoing each other from burgers, to hummers, to houses, jawlines, eyes, collagen lips, bust sizes. Few are questioning what the actual aesthetic of the bigger is better mentality. When I worked with a small financial company, I visited the CEO’s McMansion out in Long Island. It was the opposite of the Borgesian Aleph:

It’s incredibly big. But there was nothing inside.

One of the things that fascinates me most about online communities is its potential to be a macrocosm for a society at large. I am intrigued, for example, by the interests and friends list on journals and blogs. How would people know you exist if you had no interests? Who would find you if you had no friends? Yet that is exactly the way we view strangers on the street. We know nothing about he or she, and yet in our minds we have managed to fill in all the blanks.

I think it is the intrepid spirit to transverse the boundaries of the unknown, and reach out to a stranger whom we know nothing about, that forms the backbone of society. It’s not as simple as “you’ve added me to your friend’s list, so I’m going to add you.” OR “We have the same interests, we can be friends.” That’s not a society.

Last time I checked, that was called a clique.