Sharp-Dressed Man

When I closed my eyes last night, I thought we had all agreed to play nice(er) in the course of the campaign to be elected the next President. Like you, I suspect, I looked at the job for myself, in terms of benefits and potential and concluded hearing 'Hail to the Chief' played every time I would show up someplace would get a little old (I'm more of a Louie, Louie guy myself).

Then there's the haberdashery and men's' furnishings situation.
From what I've observed, the President of the US is propping up the suit manufacturers as I rarely see him, or anyone in national politics, have anything like a Casual Friday. Perhaps there's a rule that says you cannot create a cost-efficient and effective health care delivery system for 50 million uninsured while wearing a rugby shirt (we sure don't have one and I'm hoping that's why we don't). Maybe it's a law that you have to be in a three piece suit to declare that "the liberation of the Iraqi people has begun". (Come to think of it, Ari Fleischer was in a three piece suit. Hmmmm...)

So, and do the math with me here: if the President declares, in a sweatsuit, that we're NOT in a recession, are we? Is the message what's inappropriate or the packaging? This may become more than my problem as I look at who's left standing in the demolition derby we use to identify those MOST interested in becoming President.

On one side of the aisle we have a person who, while I was going through Rutgers, was a prisoner of war in (then) North Vietnam. I was taking "World Political Trends" (with Professor Muir, haven't thought about her in thirty years or more) as a three credit elective my sophomore year and this man was shackled to a wall, subjected, on a routine basis, to the type of interrogation many Americans feel is inhumane if our forces do it in Guantanamo. Many of those same people have no knowledge of the 'War in Vietnam' or an appreciation of what it was about or why it was waged. As we're figuring out, there may not be much difference between Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia, except for the rice paddies vice the sand dunes. What we are now is what we were when and experience is what you get when you didn't get what you want.

On the other side we have two well-dressed and well-spoken people who are relentless in their criticism of one another on everything. They rarely leave a good hair on the other one so perhaps it's just as well they're both impeccably outfitted. And in recent days, or just me, they've taken to having surrogates shred the other one so they can appear to be something they obviously aren't, human. So much promise and so little performance.

And one of these three folks will be Lesser of Two Evils whom we elect in November. Did our politics change since the Founding of the Republic or have we? Have we concluded the Lord gave us two hands to better help ourselves and two pockets to put it all in or are we just taking a break, ethically, spiritually, philosophically and soon we'll have our second wind? We were so relentless a half decade ago in pursuing a regime change halfway across the globe. Are we really going to have one here in November and what will we look like then, not just to the rest of the world but to ourselves (assuming we can look ourselves in the eye in the mirror-that has been a bit problematic lately hasn't it?).

We've become a pluralistic culture that's at least as bi-polar as as it is bi-coastal and more and more of us look at one another and are concerned that even though we have shared words and grammar we don't seem to speak the same language. Stumbled across James McMurty the other day and suspect I'm about to be addicted especially when, in something ancient like Out Here in the Middle, he captures my dilemma so effortlessly in a postcard from an America Gone Away as The Other One Went Awry:

"We got tractor pulls and Red Man chew/Corporate relo refugees that need love, too. We ain't seen Elvis in a year or two.

We got justification for wealth and greed/Amber waves of grain and bathtub speed
We even got Starbucks. What else you need?"
-bill kenny

I Guess it's "Day Two." Has Anything Changed?

I'm enjoying Amerika in the 21st Century. We talk AT each other constantly, rarely speaking TO one another, and little of what we say do we mean and that's okay because even less of it is ever heard.

Here on Airstrip One, founded in part by the efforts of one George and brought nearly to its knees by the attitude and efforts of another George, we are suspending civil rights while proclaiming we are protecting them. The Patriot Act (actually the 'improved' Patriot Act signed this time two years ago. 'Improved' is one of those weasel words that can and often does mean, many things to many people) does, if you take the time to read it, almost exactly the opposite of what you or I might think you'd do to foster patriotism, assuming patriotism is a 'good thing' ("Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." George Bernard Shaw). It has, in essence, the same relationship to good citizenship that Bradbury's firemen had to public safety in Fahrenheit 451.

We changed out leadership in the legislative branch of our national government seventeen months ago. I don't know about you but I'm still waiting for the changes I was told would be made, to get made. Unless by 'changes', somebody meant 'hold hearings on Major League Baseball and steroids instead of Michael Vick operating a dog-fighting operation.' Somehow, I missed the nuance on that-I feel so foolish.

Of course 'the government' lies and is incompetent. We hear this truism so often, everywhere, it must be true. Except, each of us knows someone who works for 'government' at some level and he or she doesn't lie and works very hard and means well and.....y'know what? When you do this stuff in the abstract, 'the government' as opposed to the specific, 'Tom, my neighbor, the state's attorney', it is a lot easier to disparage what the institutions we created are doing.

Humans are imperfect and so the systems and relationships we build are imperfect. It's part of who we are, like these big brains and these really nifty thumbs. We struggle and sometimes we get it right, for a moment, and the clouds part and the heavens smile. And other times, as happened yesterday in New York, the Governor of the state gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, metaphorically speaking. There are reports his name and credit card showed up in an investigation of a prostitution ring and that he paid for a professional woman (genteel enough term for all of us, I hope) to travel from Washington DC to New York for (I guess) a consultation.

The news stories ponder the implications on his political future and wonder if this means the NY Lieutenant Governor, who is black as every paper has noted (so this must be important, right?), may become the Governor if the philandering incumbent resigns. No one seems to be wondering what any of this has done to his wife or to any of his three teenage daughters, all of whom, until yesterday, had lives. Today, they still have them but they are no longer filled with quiet desperation. A husband, a father, a man who ran as the 'Eliot Ness of Wall Street' (as former prosecutor who jailed Wall Streeters who were ethically impaired) elected Governor and announced at his inauguration, "This is Day One. Everything changes." Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you?
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
-bill kenny

Sons and Daughters, Daughters and Sons.

Ian Hunter will never win prizes for musical achievement or record sales. He is an acquired taste, both within Mott the Hoople, a band from way back when, through a solo career that finds him releasing albums on a more sporadic basis as the years go by, on smaller and smaller labels with fewer and fewer copies sold. Doesn't seem to bother him so I guess it shouldn't bother me.
I used to get angry, genuinely angry, that people like a Britney Spears or a Spice Girls or a Hansen would outsell musicians I like, such as Warren Zevon, Ray Davies and Ian Hunter. Then I had the BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious), So what?

Hunter's "Sons and Daughters" purports to be autobiographic, and at first glance and listen, you can say that it is. And then like "Ships in the Night", a huge, hit for, of all people, Barry Manilow, who claimed he'd fallen in love with the song the first time he heard it, you realize there's someone else in the room and in the lyric, and that the someone else is you.

I think both songs underscore the always-in-motion nature of the relationship we have with our own children, and they with us. They, in fairness, are too busy just being to be 'too busy' or 'too inconsiderate' or any of the other shortcomings we project onto them. I was lucky to marry a person whose talents and abilities are so numerous and multiple they can effectively camouflage my dearth of skills from everyone to include the children I helped make and whom I claim to have helped raise. She did all the heavy lifting while I, 'the man', went out into the world to 'provide for my family'. I did such a great job of that we ended up here in Norwich CT, a lovely small town in SE New England, pretty broken and battered from a transatlantic rout over a decade and a half ago.

To our credit, neither of us can claim to have spoiled our two kids, mainly because we didn't have the money to do that with. We did the 'we shall scrimp and save' and still never really were able to afford for them the things we wanted to buy them. We were fortunate in that they never really seemed to want those things, anyway. That which we could give them, our time, was, ironically, the very thing we had and we gave it as best and as freely as we could.
Despite the handicap of having an emotional cripple for a father, both of our children turned out well and seem to be happy, which as I remember from Dad School was how you were supposed to figure out if you'd been a successful parent. Never had a chance to check my experience against that of my own father who died before my wife was pregnant with our son and who, in a way, was the best argument for, and against, children I could have ever made. Luckily, I share my life with someone whose hopes and dreams are bigger than my fears.
'Then that nightmare returns like a ghost haunting me.'
-bill kenny

If It's too loud, you're too old

That was a lapel button that Ted Nugent offered to concert goers when he toured Western Europe in the early 80's. Brilliant marketing ploy, I think. The Motor City Madman, the Master of Gonzo Rock (and about a half-dozen other self-created nicknames) pretty much turned the amps up to eleven and told us to do the math. If you were troubled at the sight of your own blood flowing like a river from your nose or out your ears by decibel levels closer to what a 767 generates at take-off, you were too old and outside the tribe. I suspect had the tour happened in the winter and there had been enough organization, many of us would have been set adrift on ice floes in the Main or Donau rivers.

We Boomers think we invented rock and roll and elevated it from a form of music to lifestyle. I don't think the first part is true (I've looked at artifacts like the Brill Building and the stables of songwriters and musicians that worked in almost factory-like conditions writing songs for photogenic/telegenic 'pin-up' young women and men to offer as white pop music (natural selection would have kept people like Frankie Avalon or Fabian from ever escaping the old neighborhood) but the second part is all us.

Once folks like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and others (you figured I was gonna mention The Kinks,right? You were correct.) started writing their own songs and having hits, the flood gates opened and music 'by kids and for kids' built to tidal wave strength (that 'the kids' making this music were on average 10 to 12 years older than the 'kids' buying it wasn't mentioned very often) and washed away almost all of the 'pop' tune smiths in the music industry. It may have actually peaked the unveiling on New Year's Day 1966 of a billboard atop a structure in Times Square, NYC, which was the cover art for the Stones' December's Children (and everybody elses') LP that said, simply, "The Rolling Stones. The band your parents love to hate."

It didn't take us long to expand that sentiment to 'rock and roll, the music your parents love to hate.' From there it wasn't even a leap to endorsing behavior that a generation earlier would have resulted in jail terms. Our parents' generation fought a world war against fascism (and we're angry about the lies the current administration supposedly told us about Iraq? Take a look at a history book and spot all the fascists of World War II and see who is on who's side. Hint: Dylan to the contrary, The Lord did Not intervene. Basketball free throws, yes; blessing our arms, not so much.) Our parents' generation gave us Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine, the Space program and the Civil Rights movement.

We in turn, invented sexual freedom that became chaos, cars that went fast and burned fossil fuels like there was an unlimited supply, buying on margin, the politics of pollution, the Gospel of Greed and something worse than any STD, we actually perfected a means of killing ourselves with sex, AIDS. Yeah, this rock and roll lifestyle is/was quite the Great Leap Forward.

And now look at us, 2008 and many of us have adult children and, in some instances, they have children and we are grandparents. I don't feel like that guy, but the calendar says I am. And when I have to have my son or daughter explain to me how to work my cell phone, or what a message on my computer screen means or what the light on the car dashboard is saying, I'm in awe of a world I've created that I no longer comprehend. It turns out I'm not alone. In this morning's NY Times, U R 2 Old, it's obvious we are about to surrender this world to our children, the 'digirati' the article calls them (children of the digital age), who will brush us aside with no more thought than we had when we did it to our folks.

What was it Peter Townsend wrote and Roger Daltrey sang about in My Generation?
-bill kenny

Constant Companion

I was in the office earlier today, catching up on some housekeeping (I meant to move a piece of furniture I keep walking into and finally got around to it today) and to set the clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time that actually begins tomorrow morning at 0200. I've never really understood DST and EST and all this 'spring ahead' and 'fall back' memnotic nonsense since when we're all done playing with the clock's innards, the time is what the time is.

Aside from the rabbit Alice saw in Through the Looking Glass, we're the only species on the planet who arbitrarily divides the day into smaller and smaller increments to the point that neither mind nor the eye can comprehend the difference between 0.001 seconds and 0.0001 seconds. Having been raised a Catholic, I'm used to believing in things I cannot see, but the advantages of 'more' or 'less' daylight have always eluded me. It's dark when I get up and drive to work and it's dark when I come home. I'm lucky in that my current office has a window. I've had jobs where I was not so lucky and would come home and ask my wife probing, intimate questions like 'what was it like outside today?'

Speaking of which, one of those jobs for many years was working in radio and television both on the air and as a producer, writer, editor, videographer, audio grip etc. No business like show business unless you're a landscaper and then it's no business like snow business I suppose.
In putting a paperclip back in the center drawer of my work desk this morning, I saw my old audio splicing block. I've had it all my life, or just about. I got it when I was twelve in a downtown music store in New Brunswick, NJ that disappeared I have no idea how many decades ago. Until just now I hadn't thought about it for many years and for a moment, I forgot its name but I have it now, "Varsity Music."

The music store, like PJ Arnold's, like the George Street Playhouse, like Macarones' Town House Restaurant, were businesses struggling to survive, huddled together, perhaps for warmth, near the railroad station (first, the Pennsylvania Railroad, then Penn-Central as two bankrupt operations, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central joined forces to, together, NOT make a profit even larger and faster than each had done individually, then Amtrak and then after a reorganization that took six inches off the front of the blanket and put it on the back but insisted it had made the blanket a foot longer, Conrail) had singles, 45 rpm one-song per side pieces of vinyl, posters, albums, musical instruments and supporting equipment, blank reels (but only the five inch kind on the plastic hubs, ugh!) of audio tape, and grease pencils (fancy folks called them 'china markers') and splicing blocks and splicing tape.

I smiled as I touched the neglected block sitting in the compartment where you could store pens and pencil (it's an old desk, for an old man in an old building) back when you used those, and paper, to do jobs instead of the keyboard, mouse and computer workstation now sharing space in the office. We each have favorite songs, or TV shows, foods and movies and have memories of events associated with specific moments in our lives and as I realized this morning, a lot of mine are tied to that splicing block and to a life and lifestyle that's not only in the past but would be historical if it were not already obsolete.

I tried some time back on more than one occasion to explain to each of my now grown children what it was I did for a living when I met their mom. Children are always curious about this, I'm told, though I never remember asking my parents how they met (but I do recall my stunned surprise when I found out). Radio has changed so much, in corporate structure and in how it's actually created, that NONE of the skills I learned in the course of decades working in it have survived.

I can remember dubbing an interview to open reel that had been done with the late John Lennon. I was supposed to fly to New York to do an interview, based on the question areas I'd created for the European record company (who were amazed that 'you didn't ask any questions about the Beatles?', no I said: 'do they play on his record?') but then, on active duty in the USAF, I had a military requirement that prevented me from flying to New York to do the interview and the record label agreed to have a staffer ask all of my questions, and embargo the use of the answers for 48 hours after the interview so I could use them first. Great plan and real coup except Mark David Chapman murdered Lennon the following day making the interview a very valuable item indeed. And all I could hear as I transferred the entire conversation to open reel so as to better edit it was the sound of what could and should have been. Never to be.

Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box, they tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.
-bill kenny

Sucking for a Bruise

My Mom used to say that to us when we were being 'too proud'. As a matter of fact, all the neighborhood moms said that and not just to their own kids, but to each other's as well.

Being an early Baby Boomer, I had the benefit of parents who'd grown up in the aftermath of The Great Depression (Grampy, who was a licensed electrician and wound up being one of the founding members of the IBEW, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, would tell of selling apples on a street corner) as well as the post-World War II Beginnings of The American Century. Having twice glimpsed the near-end of their world as they knew it, they had 'perspective.' So much of what we have now simply didn't exist when our parents were our age and the world they, and we, created is barely recognizable to those whose grandparents are still alive.

Change can be evolutionary or revolutionary (ask the Romanovs about the latter and Erich Honecker and the East Germans about the former) but it's always inevitable. Everything that exists changes, as a result of being here and as a function of the interactions while on the planet.

We have had some nice days here in Southeast Connecticut, weather wise, for the first week in March (actually, temperature wise, for the first week in April, but that's fine) and I'm almost hopeful that the dark days of winter for this year are behind me (us codgers don't like the changing seasons to get too turbulent. My idea of a 'scorcher' now is mid-70's, low humidity and for winter, I like a small temperature drop into the low thirties with a side salad of snow totals of less than six inches). I have quietly enjoyed the low fifties, and light breezes we've had-emphasis is on the word, quietly.

Driving home yesterday, I passed a guy with a VW Cabriolet, with the top down. Way to go, bozo. Talk about giving God The Bird. Obviously, the driver was NOT raised a Catholic, and most certainly not raised by nuns. I plead guilty to both.

Catholic school children are EXACTLY like 'you and me (sorry for the larceny, again, F. Scott), because we are. As a Catholic kid, I have been conditioned to experience pleasure and happiness, followed immediately if not ruthlessly, by pangs of guilt for having those feelings. Try as I might to disown that part of me, it's like pretending my left thumb isn't there. There is a Catholicism embodied by the Pope, and on a good day (maybe) the College of Cardinals and the Bishops; there is a Catholic church that your local priests are operating and then there's the real Catholic Church, the one practiced by the nuns. (You disagree? If you didn't go to parochial school, you have no standing or basis to offer an opinion, sorry.)

Let me point out that I was schooled by Sisters of Charity (there's a misnomer! (Saint) Elizabeth Ann Seton, what were you thinking?) but I've encountered enough emotional cripples in my life to conclude the flavor of nun is of little import. You learned very early in the Catholic Faith that Sister Thomas Anne, Sister Rose, Sister Mary Immaculata and Sister Jean had decided that God had no truck with comedians or with those who thought we were here to have ANY fun at all (You don't have to call me lieutenant, Rosie.)
As a matter of fact, made clear to me on more occasions than I care to remember, was the admonition to always confess to having fun while in the box with Father Costello or Monsignor Harding. From the silence on their side of the curtain after having given up that I had, indeed, had fun, I guess they never really got the memo on that prohibition since I can't ever recall having a decade of the Rosary added to my Penance because I made Neil S. laugh so hard at lunch that milk came out of his nose.

My point, Mr. Top-Down Look-at-Me Driving-My-Neat-Car-on-a-Beautiful-Day Guy (Esquire, I suspect): this is why we can't have nice things. If you get something nice, put it in your pocket and sneak a look at it late at night just before you go to sleep. If you find that special someone to love, the job in life that helps complete you, the joys of lasagna--whatever; keep it to yourself. While the Quality of Mercy is not Strained (btw, CofE is practically the same as RC), the nuns taught us that God works in mysterious but full-time ways to maintain a status quo in the Misery Index. So if you're having a Great Time, to balance it out, maybe I'm getting shat upon. And since I don't do that to you, I'd appreciate a little reciprocal consideration, okay?
And, yes, Virginia, I meant you when I said don't make me wait.
-bill kenny

Duplicate Prizes in the event of ties

I'm told 'clothes make the man.' And I've always been fond of Genesis' "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)", but I've never been on a first-name basis with apparel and, as my wife would attest, I have no clothing sense at all.

I'm the guy who, if left to dress himself, ends up looking like a TV test pattern in terms of clashing colors and don't get me started on styles. Does it help that I hate to shop for clothes (actually that I hate to shop, period)? Suspect not.

I knew I was getting old(er) when as my employment changed I spent less time wearing casual slacks (there's a term open to interpretation!) and open-necked shirts and more time wearing ties. It's like the last stop on the maturation railroad--and now I have a job where I wear a tie.

I thought about this earlier this morning while dressing for work in clothes that included a tie. I even have a little booklet on how to tie my ties in a variety of ways, mainly because I'm an idiot who's a glutton for punishment. Here in the Air Age of World Wide Connectivity, I'm clearly a fossil as I have a booklet when all I need to go is go online. I use one of two variants, both of which involve flipping the fat part over the skinny part a couple of times and hoping the knot is close to square and that the skinny part doesn't dangle down below the fat part. How far down the front of your shirt a tie should go remains on the great mysteries to me, along with what might have ever been the original point and purpose of a tie (to cover the buttons on the shirt? To serve as a directional indicator for your belt and Nether Parts?).

Doing all this morning with a blue tie that felt weird (don't know what else to say about it), I caught my own eye in the reflection in the mirror and realized while I think I'm a Young Turk (I prefer the first definition by the way as opposed to the disambiguation aspect), I'm actually a retread with color coordination issues. Why else would my wife have to, literally, pick out every piece of clothing I wear? She's been quietly smiling in recent weeks as I've opted to move away from my 'white socks uber alles' mindset of recent years. I didn't care if it was a sweatsuit or a tuxedo (hey! Me and Chris could go to Council meetings as the Doublemint Twins!), I always wore white socks, turned inside out so that the smooth, finished side was against my skin and not against the inside of my shoe.

Walking through the local successful mall last weekend, made me wish she'd pick out all the clothes for the Next Lost Generation. The teens and 'tweens with the multi-colored hair (and none of the colors found in nature) dressed in clothing that looks like the Goodwill Donation Dumpster threw up. (See? That's how I know I'm old, NOT mature, old). I look at these kids and forget what I and my cohort looked like to my parents and their friends, as I wonder, much like my Dad did, 'do your parents let you leave the house looking like this?' When no self-respecting mall anywhere doesn't have a Hot Topic store (I'd like to be in charge of making sure they're always directly across from the Abercrombie and Fitch store. Twin headstones for individual choice, you have to love the symmetry), we have issues that no one seeking the Presidency has even thought about addressing, but needs to. Oliver's Army, indeed. It takes some real coin to dress like that. Salvation a la mode, with a cup of tea.
At least I'm dressed for it. What time is the drawing?
-bill kenny