Jens Lekman at The Earl, Atlanta, January 30, 2018

I can state right up front with quite a bit of confidence that I'm not likely to go to a happier, more cheerful show in all of 2018 than Jens Lekman's performance last night at The Earl.

Opener Peter Oren certainly didn't give Jens any competition in the cheeriness category. 

Oren's songs are deliberately dark and somber, down-tempo tunes for end-of-the-world times.  He's what we used to call a folk musician, even though he doesn't perform any traditional folk songs.  Today, he's what's more accurately called an acoustic singer-songwriter, and his music is spare and quiet and by his own admittance something of a downer.  The amazing thing is, though, that with his deep voice and the sheer gravitas of his stage presence, he commanded the room.  The Earl is renown for its often exuberant and noisy audiences, and it seems that there's always a rowdy group near the bar at the back of the venue that seem oblivious to the fact that they're sharing the room with a live performance as they talk loudly and freely among themselves even as a musician is struggling to make himself heard on the stage.  Not so last night - despite the size of the audience (the show sold out), everyone in the room was quiet and rapt and attentive, a trait that Oren even noted from the stage and for which he expressed his profound appreciation. You could have heard a pin drop; you could have heard a heart break.

Here's Oren's end-of-times song about, well, it's called Anthropocene and I'll let him explain what it's about. 

Jens Lekman couldn't have been more different.  He also took the stage solo with only an acoustic guitar, but during the course of his 60-minutes-plus set, he took the set from folk (okay, acoustic singer-songwriter stuff) to upbeat rock to pop and eventually to disco, at one point even giving up on singing and guitar playing altogether to just dance around on stage to a disco beat while playing a  tambourine.  Odd as it sounds, the audience loved that part as he channelled a younger, more Euro-centric Jonathan Richman.

Jens is from Gothenburg, Sweden, the home of a startling number of excellent bands including The Knife, Little Dragon, Junip and El Perro del Mar.  I don't know what it is about Gothenburg or what's in their drinking water, but I want to go there.  Anyway, Jens comes off as very European - cool, sophisticated, tolerant, and friendly - and like most modern Europeans, is fluent in English and its vernacular.  Many of his songs start with spoken word stories about the song's origins and background, and it's amusing how the lyrics assume deeper meanings based on the context he just provided.

Anyway, it was fun, it was funny, it was charming, and it was just what Atlanta needed on this late January evening.  And to fully illustrate the contrast between opener Peter Oren and headliner Jens Lekman, while Oren's Anthropocene is about the end of times, Lekman's How We Met starts at the beginning, the very beginning (it's The Long Version).   

The Grammys

Australian rocker Courtney Barnett, wearing a shirt for Seattle all-woman punk band Chastity Belt

In response to questions about why so few women were awarded Grammy's at last Sunday's ceremony, and why the only woman (Lorde) even nominated for Album of the Year was the only nominee not allowed to perform her song, Recording Academy president Neil Portnow suggested that perhaps women needed to "step up" to be recognized.

I don't know what world Portnow lives in, but musically it sure isn't mine.  Full disclosure - I don't own a single Bruno Mars record (he swept all the major categories at the awards) and most likely never will, so maybe I'm the one in the alternative universe.  Anyway, my point is that the majority of music I listen to, mostly post-punk, folk rock, psych-rock, and indie, is performed either by female-fronted bands, all-female bands, or bands with at least one or more women in them.  As a rule of thumb, I tend to not even trust a band that doesn't have at least one woman in it.

Some favorites that immediately spring to mind are auteurs like Annie Clark (St. Vincent) and Merrill Garbus (Tune-Yards).  All-woman bands like L.A.'s Warpaint and Madrid's Hinds.  Female-fronted bands like Alicia Bognanno's Bully, Sadie Dupuis' Speedy Ortiz, Ellen Kempner's Palehound, and Brittney Howard's Alabama Shakes.  There's Alexis Krauss and Sleigh Bells, and Alice Glass' now-defunct Crystal Castles. Husband-and-wife bands like Low and Yo La Tengo.  Folk rock bands with at least one (sometimes more) charismatic, multi-instrumentalist women, like The Decemberists, Blind Pilot, Typhoon, and even The Barr Brothers.  Not to mention pop divas like Beyonce, Rhianna and Taylor Swift. I personally don't listen to the latter bunch, but I can't deny their influence on pop culture.  

My list could go on and on and on - the only question is where to stop.  At almost every show I go to, there's usually at least one woman on the stage, and not just as a backup singer or eye candy but usually in a pivotal role.

Women have already stepped up and practically dominate some circles of rock music today.  It's not at all surprising to see one or more women on the stage even for male-fronted bands.  What is surprising is that someone like (elderly white male) Neil Portnow is so out of the loop that he doesn't even realize it, and thinks that musicians like Bruno Mars are the current rage (pro tip: he's not).  Women don't need to step up - Portnow needs to wake up, because the women have already stepped past his irrelevant, self-serving awards show.

Ironically, I'm going to a show tonight by a male performer (Jens Lekman).  I have no idea if he'll be performing solo or with a band, but in the past, he's had women provide his backing sounds.

Thought of the Day

Obstinance is the last resort of the uninformed.

Hygge

The theme for the weekend ending this evening has been hygge.  Hygge (“hoo-guh")  is a Scandinavian term that loosely translates to "comfy" and has been more specifically defined (OED) as “a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being." 

Outside, the weather's been rainy and cool (Southern cool, meaning in the low 50s).  Inside, I was warm and dry and spent the weekend engaged in domestic chores, mostly slowly and methodically cleaning house, not with the goal of getting everything spit-polish clean by the end of the weekend, but just a deliberate and leisurely-paced process of appreciating and maintaining the house on a room-by-room basis.  I never broke a sweat and to be honest, I didn't get much past the master bedroom, bath and kitchen, but that's alright - it was the process, not the result, that made it all hygge.

When it was all done, I was able to snuggle among clean sheets, fluffy blankets and pillows, and cats, and completed the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle in bed in a little over one  hour.  

I also allowed myself ample time to play video games and wrapped up just about everything there is to do in Fallout: New Vegas.  It'll be on to the next game soon.

Boring?  Only if you need constant distraction and over-stimulation to avoid ennui.  Lonely? I was by myself all weekend, but I've long ago noticed that I'm never lonely when I'm alone - I only experience loneliness in public settings.    

I actually look forward to another weekend like this one.  It was nice, and I'm better for it.

The other day, I said that understanding Turkish time signatures requires a degree in advanced mathematics.  Here are two videos that patiently describe two such rhythms - the nine-beat karsilama and the seven-beat dawr hindi.  Both start off simply enough, that is until the musicians begin to take off.  

Great stuff, and where is this balcony?  I want to be there!   

Dreaming of the Masters

Many of the early entries in this Old School Friday series of posts about music I used to listen to back in the 1970s had strong spiritual themes and Middle Eastern influences, from Abdullah Ibraham's Ishmael to Pharoah Sanders' Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah to Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda.  Few musicians went deeper into the Middle East, though, than John Handy.

Handy had a fairly popular song in the mid-late 70's, a jazz-funk tune called Hard Work based on a repeated call-and-response blues riff.  It got some radio play, and my girlfriend, who generally hated jazz, loved the song Hard Work, and agreed to go to the Village Vanguard with me one night to see Handy play.  He performed Hard Work and the other fusion-ish songs off his popular album of the same name, which is what the audience wanted and which is what made him some money.  Nothing wrong with that - a man's got to make a living.  

Here's the amazing part, though - Handy apparently recognized us from the stage as ardent fans of his music, and came to our table between sets, and sat down and talked with us.  He was a terrific, kind man, and he answered my question by telling me that of his many recordings (he once played in Charles Mingus' band and had led his own quintet in a set at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival), the one he was most proud of was his collaboration with Ali Akbar Khan called Karuna Supreme (karuna, I later learned, is Sanskrit for "compassion').   I finally bought a copy a few years later (obscure jazz albums were hard to come by in those days before the internet).

Here's the title cut of Karuna Supreme, with Zakir Hussain's complex and incredible tabla and the near telepathic interplay of Handy's alto and Ali Akbar Khan's sarod.

Vincent van Gogh knew a thing or two about being Dutch; you can say that Vincent van Gogh is the epitome of Dutchness (Dutchicity?).  So it's worth noting that van Gogh had little use for normality and would have disapproved of the Dutch maxim “doe gewoon normaal” (“just be normal”).

The way of the artist is to reject the ordinary, the so-called order of things. "What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?," van Gogh once asked.  "If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced."

The path of the artist is to reject normality, to find the flowers out where it's not as comfortable to walk.  Van Gogh once said, "I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day." 

The tao of the artist is rooted in love.  "I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic," van Gogh again, "than to love people."

So practice niksen, or don't.  Be normaal, at least until you don't want to anymore. In the end, it doesn't really matter and I'll love you just the same.  

Normaal

According to Olga Mecking, there's  a popular Dutch proverb  that goes “niksen is niks,” meaning “doing nothing is good for nothing.”   This is meant to discourage idleness, to discourage niksen, but from my point of view, it connotes just the opposite.  "Nothing" is the perfect space, the sweet spot, between one extreme and the other.  Neither this nor that.  It's where potential is most abundant.  To do nothing, to practice niksen, is to be balanced, equipoised, between any two sets of extremes.  Nikseen is niks should be the mantra on every over-worked, distracted, hyper-stimulated denizen of these modern times. 

Another popular Dutch saying is, “doe gewoon normaal,” or “just be normal.”  Mecking states that to the Dutch, this is a suggestion to stay busy, but not too busy; to rest, but not too much. Above all, it means don’t be lazy. Be productive. Contribute.  Be ordinary, but in the root sense of the word from the Latin ordinalis, meaning one's place in the order or sequence of things. 

But in Zen, "ordinary" is not a matter of conformity or nonconformity, and an ordinary mind is beyond knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is confusion. Normaal is a balanced state not unlike niksen.  When one has really reached normaal, when one is "ordinary," one might find it as vast and boundless as all of space.  

Niksen

Writing in Wooly Magazine, Olga Mecking discusses the Dutch concept of niksen.  Niksen means doing nothing or, more specifically, doing something without a purpose, like staring out a window, hanging out, or listening to music.  Niksen is being touted in the Netherlands as the new, better mindfulness.  

As Mecking points out, "the central tenet of mindfulness — staying in the moment — strikes me as a daunting task. I’m just not sure every moment is worth being present for. But, as I see it, moments of nothing are almost always worthwhile. It’s during these moments, for instance, that I come up with my best story ideas."  Trying to stay in the moment, I think, is the very thing most likely to interfere with actually appreciating the present moment. Trying to practice "mindfulness" is the biggest impediment to mindfulness. 

The niksen concept is not the same thing as laziness. As Mecking puts it, it’s a “thorough enjoyment of life’s pauses.”  Consider wild animals: most animals spend two-thirds of their time doing nothing.  They yawn, look around, sit and wait until a little snack comes by. By comparison, niksen seems a natural state of being.

The analogy I draw is to the Zen concept of shikantaza, or "just sitting." Not sitting in meditation with the intention of gaining enlightenment, or developing concentration and mindfulness, or any other form of self improvement.  Not sitting because someone told you to or because someone told you not to.  Just sitting without anything added.  As soon as something is added, a purpose, a goal, a motivation, anything, it is no longer shikantaza.  And yet shikantaza it is said is more than just the most direct path to enlightenment - it is enlightenment itself. 

The world can use some more niksen.  As one contemporary Zen teacher stated, "Just don't do something, sit there!"

Big In Turkey

I almost never look at my blog statistics, but I dared to take a peek today and saw to my surprise that I have almost as many page views coming from Turkey as I do the United States.

I don't know why.  I love Turkey, especially their music. It has both exhilarating and meditative modes, and you need a degree in advanced mathematics to understand their time signatures (I think they compose in quadratic equations).  But other than that, and what I imagine to be their national fondness for coffee, I don't know anything about them or have any idea why I get so many page views from there.  Of course, readership of this blog is so miniscule that it might be due to one bored reader in Istanbul who for some unknown reason hits this page about 20 times a day.

I would have imagined that my readership, such as it is, would have been proportional to the size of English-speaking countries, e.g., U.S., followed by Canada and then the U.K.  But I'm delighted to see Turkey's along for the ride, too!  Merhaba arkadaşlar! 

Meanwhile, In Washington . . .

While up in New England, the Patriots just won the AFC Championship and their 10th appearance in the Super Bowl.  

Not complaining, but it's been a frigid cold week.  Snow hit on Tuesday night and I was iced in all day Wednesday and Thursday, just me and my cats and an old pal.  

I worked from the home office, but it seemed like no one else was was working from their homes and I got no replies to anything until I got back to the office office on Friday, and then I had to cram a whole week's worth of work into one day.

I'm glad it's the weekend.  I'm relaxing by zapping radscorpions and battling Caesar's Legionaries in Fallout: New Vegas.  Also, the winter doldrums will be ending soon and live music will be returning to Atlanta, so there's that to look forward to.  

Dreaming of the Masters

Last week, Rahsaan Roland Kirk introduced us to the miracle of circular breathing, but he wasn't the only one who mastered this technique, although he did use it to greater effect than most others.

Pharoah Sanders wasn't going to be left out of the loop (so to speak) and incorporated circular breathing into his performance as well.  Here he is playing his lovely, meditative composition Kazuko (Peace Child), for some reason in an abandoned tunnel near the Golden Gate Bridge because why not?  I don't need to tell you where in this video the circular breathing begins and ends (there are two passages) as even the most casual of listenings will immediately pick out those parts.

Anyway, kids, this is why you should go in abandoned tunnels - you might come across old jazz masters practicing circular breathing there. 

The Throat of Winter

It snowed last night in Georgia!  

It happens almost every year, yet every time the good people of the Peach State act as if it's some sort of miracle - schools close, businesses shut down, and everybody hunkers down in their various homes, refuges, and safe places and waits it out, both trembling in fear and rejoicing in delight at the spectacle of snowfall.  This happening two days after the M.L. King holiday that many of us didn't get off, there's a joke in there somewhere about this being the white-out version of the day, but that joke's probably racist and not funny anyway, so I won't make it (plus I can't quite come up with it).

Chilly scenes of winter: It's currently 19 degrees outside, and the forecast high for the day is only 27. The roads and my driveway are just a frozen sheet of white, and it may be days before it melts and the streets are drivable again.

One of these days (not today!), I've really got to cut that ivy down off the barn!

Chilly Scenes of Winter, of course, is a 1976 novel by Ann Beattie, but since it snows so rarely down here I don't have any frames of reference other than the past rare snow days in Atlanta and some literary, if dated, allusions.  Speaking of the latter, every time I'm snowed in on one of these rare winter days here in Georgia, somewhere in my mind I'm hearing this song from 1969 which both evokes the chill of winter while simultaneously reminding me of warmer, misspent days of my youth, smoking marijuana and making out in a boathouse on Lake Mohawk.

Since on first listen the lyrics are so hard to comprehend (I didn't even think they were in English when first I heard this album), here they are:

O the throat of winter is upon us.

The barren barley fields refuse to sway

Before the husky hag of early winter in her

Hoods of snowy grey.

Lo the frozen blue birds in the belfries.

The bluebells in their hearts are surely prey

Unto the grasping bat's wing of the winter pincer

Hoods of snowy grey.

Winter, winter, winter,

Are you but a servant of the bad one?

Animals I've Seen Today:

1. Humans (lots of them - they're everywhere!)
2. Dogs (guiding humans via leash system)
3. Cats (two)
4. Birds (didn't count)
5. Chickens (technically birds, but somehow seem different)
6. Cockroaches (I live in the city - don't pass judgement)
7. Squirrels (cold day but still scurrying around)
8. Goats (always make a day brighter)
9. Alpaca (two, and both adorable)
10. Burro or donkey (what's the difference?) 

Trump Protest, Atlanta, November 2016

" .. We have known humiliation, we have known abusive language, we have been plunged into the abyss of oppression, and we decided to rise up only with the weapon of protest. It is one of the greatest glories of America that we have the right of protest. 

"If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. we must use the weapon of love.  We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight; we are always on the threshold of a new dawn." 

- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1956, Montgomery, Alabama

It took a year to set in, but it's finally happened - I've lost my sense of shock about our so-called President's behavior, and my outrage has been depleted.  There's nothing left - I can't get angry anymore.

Oh look, in a blatantly racist outburst, he just referred to Haiti and some African nations as "shithole countries."

Oh look, new allegations that he paid a porn star $130,000 not to discolose whatever it was she had been set to disclose.  Two other porn stars are now implicated in the growing scandal as well.

A best-selling book paints him as mentally unstable and paranoid, out of touch with his own Administration if not reality itself.  In response, he called himself a "stable genius."

Politically, he's holding the Dreamers (children of illegal immigrants) hostage over his demands to fund an unnecessary and pointless border wall, even though he campaigned on the claim that Mexico for some reason was going to pay for that wall.

I could go on and on (Russia, emoluments, climate denial, etc.) but you know what?  I'm not even mad anymore.  I would be mad if I had expected anything better from him, but for the past year, every time I've lowered my expectations, this so-called President has sunk even lower.  I don't care.  I have no outrage left; I'm all burned out.  

Whatevs.

Even though absolutely no one is wondering, I'll announce the game I've decided to take up after I've nearly (but still not completely) exhausted Witcher 3.  

I've decided to return to the Fallout franchise, not by re-playing Fallout 4 for the third time through, but by going back to the previous installment of the franchise and playing Fallout: New Vegas.

New Vegas was released in 2010, and seven years is an eternity in video game time.  The game plays fine on Windows 10, but after Fallout 4, some aspects of the game's technique and style feel a little antiquated and even quaint, but my fondness for the sequel allows me to tolerate the perceived shortcomings of the predecessor. 

As the title suggests, New Vegas is set in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, and while playing Fallout 4 in a nuclear annihilated Boston held more emotional resonance for me personally, the amalgam of science fiction and classic western motifs in New Vegas is amusing. 

Also, there's a LOT of content to New Vegas, and it's probably even less linear and more open-world that Fallout 4.  In other words, despite it's technical "limitations" (limits being defined here merely by innovations that came later), the game has the full potential to be the time-consuming, all-encompassing diversion I was looking for.  

I'll put it this way:  I just downloaded it last Tuesday night, and I've already played for 29 hours, while still  working at a full-time job in my so-called "real life."  

Dreaming of the Masters

Of the 60s and 70s giants of jazz, there were probably none that I saw perform live more times than Rahsaan Roland Kirk (with the probable exception of Sun Ra).  The man always put on a mesmerizing, jaw-dropping show, and I was never once disappointed.

Listen to his cover of the old Rodgers and Hammerstein song If I Loved You (from the play Carousel).  Not only does he rescue it from the campy trappings of show tunes, but he resurrects it into a positively heartfelt soul ballad.  But to grasp the sheer audacity of this performance, try singing or humming along with his saxophone lines - the man does not pause for breath.  No breaks, no stops, just continuous hot-and-cold running streams of music.

It's hard to imagine how this is even humanly possible until you've see him perform live and witness for yourself how circular breathing works - he breathes in through his nose while simultaneously breathing out off his mouth.  Just try it yourself for a moment on a line or two, and then imagine not only doing it for an 8-minute-plus song, but for an intense and soulful eight minutes.  In other words, it's not just technique that made Rahsaan stand out, it was content, too.

Rahsaan passed away in 1977 at the heartbreakingly young age of 42.  He still had so much more to continue, and we lost a unique American treasure.

Why is it that when I'm stopped at a red light, the other, on-coming lane always gets the green first, and my lane has to wait until all the cars in the opposite turn lane pass by first before we get the light?  My lane never gets to go first while the other lane waits.

At work, the men's room is between my office and the break room (coffee).  Why is it that when I pass the men's room to get coffee, the door's always open and on one's in there, but when I need to use the men's room, there's always someone in there and the door's always closed? 

Just asking.

And the insurance companies basically run this country's health-care system (such as it is).  So I don't want to hear another Alex Jones conspiracy fantasist tell me that "the doctors" have the cure for cancer but aren't telling anyone so that they can keep making money.  Enough already.

I had a downtown meeting this afternoon, which justified working from the home office this morning, so for the second day this week I didn't have to commute out to my suburban office building and then fight traffic trying to get back home.  A fellow could get used to this.  I also got to pet a goat today (seriously), which is always therapeutic.

Pet more goats, drive less miles, be healthy.  Big Insurance wants you to live.

Well, my team lost yesterday.  The Georgia Bulldogs lost in OT to the Alabama Crimson Tide, 26-23.

Sure, I experienced disappointment.  That's human.  Sure, I wanted to blame someone, anyone - the refs, for example, or the play-calling.  Suffering is not getting what we want and I had wanted to win, and suffering gives rise to anger and I experienced that, too.

Then I remembered that if we always won every time, winning wouldn't feel so great.  Losing games defines the experience of winning every bit as much as winning games defines the experience of losing.

Philosophically, I should feel grateful to Alabama because they created the conditions that will make Georgia's future success feel so much sweeter. 

Also, why get angry?  Anger is just our way of punishing ourselves for the misdeeds of others.

Still wish Georgia would have won, though.  Philosophically, I'm okay with the loss, but we don't live our lives philosophically, we live them emotionally, and emotionally, I'm sad that Georgia lost.

The Apocalypse Will Be Televised

As I'm sure you know, the college football National Championship Game is being played tonight in Atlanta.  The game is at the Falcons' new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a mere 3 1/2 miles from my house. 

I realize that many people won't read this post until after the game is already over, so I won't make any predictions or place any bets (but Go Dogs!).  Instead, I want to talk about the impending traffic and transit implosion about to occur downtown.

Just like when Atlanta hosted the Super Bowl a couple years ago, we're under a winter weather advisory, and freezing rain is already glazing over the streets.  Atlanta public schools are out for the day due to the weather, and there have already been major accidents that have shut down parts of Interstate 75 both north and south of the City.

As if that weren't enough, The Orange One has announced his intention to attend the game, so some of those remaining roads still open despite the weather will be shut down for the police motorcade to escort The Cheeto to the stadium.

And of course, any visit by The Stable Genius will bring out protesters (good for them!), so on top of the NCAA game and their teams, their fans, and the media, and on top of the winter weather advisory, and on top of the police motorcade, we'll have protesters marching on the streets, tying up traffic and making things even worse.

But wait!  There's more!  The halftime entertainment will not be in the stadium itself, but will be held as a free concert in nearby Centennial Park featuring rapper and hip-hop artist extraordinaire Kendrick Lamar.  So on top of everything itemized above, we can add a free hip-hop show in arguably the Hip-Hop Capital of America.  I imagine more than a few people will show up just for that. 

By the way, I think the real reason they're holding Kendrick's half-time show outside of the stadium is because the organizers know better than giving him the chance to address The Donald face-to-face (even if from the distance of the stage to the Presidential viewing box).  That, and you can't expect Trump to sit in the audience watching something like this:

The Orange One would find it all so confusing, Mike Pence's mind would literally explode, and Jeff Sessions would send his lawyers to find out how this could somehow be banned.  Then Melania would start dancing, causing Donald's little hands to tremble with jealousy, and nothing good could come out of that situation.  Better to hold the concert outdoors and a half mile from the Stadium so the promoters can say "No old white people were harmed in the making of this performance."

Given everything happening all at once downtown, and all under the worse of weather conditions, downtown traffic may not ever recover. Oh, and this just in - a few minutes ago, I heard on NPR that with thousands of tourists already downtown for the Big Game and the Big Concert, MARTA just decided to cancel streetcar service for the rest of the day because why not? Actually, their cited reason was weather conditions, but isn't it a better idea to get cars off the street than to do away with what little mass transit the City actually has?

But before I forgot the most important part of all, good luck to the Georgia Bulldogs and Beat 'Bama!

Meanwhile, in my alt-reality gaming life, I'm nearing the end of my Witcher phase.  I actually finished the story line and the DLCs for Witcher 3 - The Wild Hunt last month, but the open-world setting of the game is so compelling and fascinating that I've been hanging out in the game world, finishing off the odd quest or two that I missed on my first pass through and exploring the remaining undiscovered locations. 

You know that feeling when you've finished a really great book and even though just like all things in life it eventually had to end, you didn't want it to, and when you're done you re-read the back cover and copy on the cover sleeves and everything you can find on line just to keep the experience going a little bit longer? My recent Witcher experience was kind of like that - any additional experience in the Witcher world seems preferable to the mundane reality of daily life.

So now it's time to download a new game.  So far, in addition to Witcher 3, I've been through Fallout 4 (liked it, a lot), Skyrim (ditto), Far Cry 4 (pluses and minuses, and ultimately never finished it), and Wolfenstein II - The New Colossus (silly but entertaining).  People have offered me some suggestions as to what to play next, but as I was shopping around on line, I saw that the first DLC for Wolfenstein has been released, so I downloaded Freedom Chronicles - The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe.

The Wolfenstein series is based on a premise that Germany won World War II and Nazis occupy America, and you play as a revolutionary, underground-guerrilla freedom fighter.  Mostly, the game is you running through the streets of an occupied New York, New Orleans, Roswell, and assorted other towns (and the planet Venus, too, for some reason) shooting Nazis, Klansmen, fascists and thugs.  What I like about the game is that the good guys are ethnically varied and include Black Panthers, jewish intellectuals, radical feminists, and other groups Fox News viewers have been taught to hate.  However, the game never takes itself too seriously (which generally is more good than bad), and the plotlines are pretty threadbare (your assignment is to kill some Nazi commander, you shoot him and a lot of collateral enemies, end of story), but that seemed like just the cathartic mindlessness I needed after months of Witcher 3.

Freedom Chronicles - The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe is the story of Gunslinger Joe (duh), a former NFL quarterback who refused to throw a soccer game for the Reich and escaped to hunt down and exterminate the commander who captured him (and apparently his father, too).  The problem is that the whole DLC is just that one quest, no side-stories or alternative missions, and I played through the entire thing in just a couple of hours this afternoon.  At $9.99 for the download, it seemed far to brief.  There were some rousing gun battles to be sure, especially the climatic last fight, but the game takes over at the end and the actual death of the villain occurs "off-camera" - the player doesn't even get the satisfaction of pulling the final trigger after killing scores of nameless soldiers and robots to get to that point.

Really have to say a bit of a let down.  I was hoping for a little more comic-book-style shoot-'em-up to help make me forget Witcher 3.

Don't know yet what I'll download next, but I'll soon be talking about it here, I'm sure.        

Are UFOs real?  Have extraterrestrial visitors ever really been observed, detected, or recorded?   

What I wonder is why would they bother?  If a species were so super-intelligent (by our standards) as to solve the problems of speed-of-light travel, inter-dimensional transport, and defiance of gravity, why would they want to visit earth?  

Do we humans yearn to know what goes on inside an ant colony, and is our goal to someday be able to visit one of their subsoil nests? No, of course not, so why would aliens care to descend into our world?  It may be just our own hubris that assumes that any intelligent life-form would simply be dying to know what happens on our little blue marble. Why would they care?

Also, any species intelligent enough for interstellar voyages would also be intelligent enough to know how radio and television broadcasting works.  No alien researchers would ever need to visit Earth - we're already airing and beaming into the cosmos every conceivable bit of information and data about ourselves.  All an advanced species would need to do would be to monitor our broadcasts.  They could do this from the comfort of their own homes.  And if they did, then they'd know a) everything about our people, our politics, our character, our hopes and dreams, and our violent nature and warlike tendencies, and b) that they'd never, ever want to actually come here and meet us. 

Dreaming Of The Masters

It's still freezing cold here in the Deep South and New England's under some sort of post-apocalyptic Ice Age snowmass, so I'm using this week's Old School Friday to play something warm and tropical to heat us back up.  

I can't think of anything better for the task than Lester Bowie's Rios Negroes from his album The Great Pretender.  Not only does the song have a great Brazilian beat and feel to it, but Bowie's sound, especially toward the end, is as human and humane as any trumpet playing I've ever heard.

Warmer days ahead, y'all.

Holy mackerels, this is a big storm!  I've been so self-focused on the cold, sub-freezing temperatures here in Georgia, that I missed the fact that this "bomb-cyclone" super-storm has descended on the Northeast.

I've got family in the path of this storm - a sister, brother and mother - and I hope they and everyone in the region is safe, warm, and dry, or at least doing the very best that they can.

Nature's fury reminds us of how small and insignificant we really are in comparison to this planet on which we reside.

Folks, for Georgia, these are some pretty cold temperatures, and for longer than we're used to it being so cold.  It's everything my furnace can do, running full-tilt 24 hours a day, to keep my drafty old house up to 69 degrees (cooler in some of the more far-flung corners of the building).

Nothing in the news today about the traffic cop apparently hit by a car yesterday morning. Apparently, just another incident in the big city.

What is all over the news, though, besides the cold weather forecast, is Atlanta is hosting the College Football National Championship Game this year, featuring the Georgia Bulldogs and the Alabama Crimson Tide.  And as if we aren't suffering enough, what with the cold temperatures and fallen police officers, Donald Trump has just announced his intention of attending the game.  Sweet Jesus!  On top of everything else, now we're going to have to contend with the presidential motorcade travelling down Northside Drive, and that short-fingered vulgarian hogging all the air time when the cameras aren't on the game itself?  What an attention whore!  

If it weren't for the Georgia Bulldogs, I'd be tempted to not even watch the game now. 

I'm back!  

As I mentioned, I was out for a bit with some live-blogging responsibilities for the College Football bowl season, but now that that's all over with but for next week's final Championship Game, I'm back.

What do you want to do this year, huh?  What do you want to talk about?  Zen?  Music? Potential? What?  You name it.

Meanwhile, a quick story about patience:  Driving to work on this exceptionally cold morning, I was disappointed to encounter traffic on a side street between my home and the highway.  I've gotten used to traffic on the highway (this is Atlanta), but didn't expect to come to a full stop for several minutes next to our neighborhood hospital.

After a while, cars started to slowly inch forward, but it was still frustrating.  I couldn't see what was holding up the traffic ahead of me, and I speculated that it might be related to the on-going construction at the hospital.  Or maybe it was just the gross incompetence of the new traffic cop recently assigned to the hospital parking lot, who, unlike his predecessor, seemed more interested in immediately getting customers in and out of the parking lot without delay than in the flow of traffic on the street.  I was getting angry at both the cop and at the construction.

Then I got up to the blockage and saw what it was - the traffic cop was down on the ground, laying in front of a car that had apparently just hit him.  An extremely distraught woman was hovering over him (the driver?), and ironically, it being right in front of a hospital, first responders had not yet arrived on the scene.  Cars barely had enough room to squeeze between a telephone pole and the officer's outstretched legs, and even though it felt disrespectful to drive so close to the feet of an accident victim laying on the ground, I squeezed through out of sympathy to all the people who were now behind me in traffic.

It was all a reminder of some very old lessons - don't jump to conclusions, and things aren't always what they seem.  Don't get angry over what you don't understand.  And the job of a traffic cop is cold in the winter, hot in the summer, almost always unappreciated, and more dangerous than we think.  We should be kinder to them, and not get so caught up in our own predicament.