Thursday, December 22, 2005

Two chances to see me live before 2006!

 <--- At First Night 2005

Hey, kids! Don't forget to mark your calendars! I'll be playing Thursday, Dec. 29, from 8 to 10 p.m. at the Moon & River Cafe, 115 S. Ferry Street, Schenectady. The place is small, artsy and perfect for a couple of sets of acoustic tomfoolery. They have an extensive menu of vegetarian meals as well as coffees, teas and desserts.

And the big hometown gig will be New Year's Eve. Don't forget to buy your Fulton County First Night buttons! I'll be playing from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Drumm House, at the corner of North William and Green streets (just down the hill from the post office) in Johnstown. Last year the place was packed (it's small) with familiar faces, all stuffing themselves with the cookies, brownies, cider and coffee provided. Bundle up the kids! Bring out neighbors! Leave the pets at home! See you there.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

A Well-Earned Rest

I've wrapped up my academic work for the semester and am starting to relax and rest up in preparation for the monsterous one that will start in January. I'm excited to report that I've accepted an assistantship at UAlbany for the spring, which means free tuition and a position tutoring in the Writing Center. I will be leaving the Daily Gazette in early January.
In related good news, I've been offered a teaching gig for the summer semester, which means I won't be (completely) unemployed after my assitantship is over.

At any rate, what follows is the last piece I wrote for my workshop in non-fiction prose. It was difficult stuff to write about, but I'm more or less pleased with how it came out.


Note: I’m thinking of this as the second or third “chapter” in a memoir about my experiences in Jamaica. Certain things (such as what AFS is, who the Lowes are, etc.) will have been explained prior to this section. For a previous Jamaica story, click this link.


A Milestone in May Pen
  
The night my youngest sister celebrated her eighteenth birthday, I wasn't able to attend the party. The whole family gathered for dinner at a swanky restaurant in Saratoga Springs, while I sat staring at copy on a flickering, monochromatic computer screen (almost as old as Kate herself) deep in the bowels of the Daily Gazette’s Schenectady newsroom. I don't think Kate was surprised at my absence, because I don't have a strong record of showing up for the significant moments in her life.
 The distance between us has been mainly a matter of age. Kate was born when I was 15 years old, a sophomore in high school. My sister Nancy was 12 when she was thrust into the dreaded position of "middle child" with the new arrival. Kate was barely talking and still in diapers when I graduated from high school and promptly left home to spend a year as an exchange student in the Caribbean.  That’s where I celebrated my eighteenth birthday – in May Pen, Jamaica, in the company of strangers, thousands of miles from home.
 Just before the start of the school year in September, the AFS staff made arrangements for me to leave the Lowes’ home and move across town, where I would spend the remainder of the year with another couple, the Higginses. Oddly, their names were also Noel and Phyllis, though (odder still)  they called each other by a set of pet names. “Bunny” was a successful land surveyor, a long-limbed, big-bellied man whose permanent gap-toothed grin and easygoing nature contrasted with his wife’s matter-of-fact propriety. “Pixie” was a diminutive, almost cherubic homemaker who maintained a dense green jungle of a garden behind the house. She directed the household servants – a live-in garden boy and a part-time laundress and house cleaner – with shrill commands and tense body language that unmistakably said: “Slackness will not be tolerated.” At six feet tall, Bunny towered over her four feet, four inches, but they had similar East Indian features and were similarly round in the middle. They had three grown children who lived together in a Kingston flat that Bunny had leased for them. Kevin, the youngest at nineteen years old, was an engineering student at the University of the West Indes. Roger, in his mid-twenties, was a doctor in residency at the university hospital. Sandra, perhaps twenty-eight years old, was an advertising executive with a Kingston agency.
 At the time my birthday rolled around, in October, I had heard all about the Higgins children – especially the doctor; he had studied in London – but I hadn’t met them in person. On the morning of my birthday, Pixie served me a special breakfast: A bowl of corn flakes, a ripe mango and a tough, charred little hamburger patty on a plate. She’d heard somewhere, perhaps from friends or from television, that Americans love their burgers. I could not muster the cold frankness it would have taken to explain to her that Americans don’t often eat hamburgers for breakfast, especially when they are bone-dry and overloaded with cumin, coriander and rosemary. She stood in her apron, spatula in hand, watching for signs of my appreciation. I ate slowly and deliberately, forcing a smile and struggling to keep my eyes from watering. The situation was made even crueler by the fact that she hadn’t offered me juice, milk or water, so I had to choke down the arid beef with nothing but saliva and willpower. I popped the final bite into my mouth and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Pixie half-hummed, half-sang to herself as she turned and waddled back to her not-quite-white-tile kitchen, quite pleased to have fulfilled her role as host mother.
 Looking back on it years later, I realized that that ordeal of a morning meal was the first in a series of interactions with Pixie in which our sincere attempts to understand and appreciate each other went down in flames because of cultural differences and a mutual desire to avoid overt conflict at any cost. After breakfast, we stood in the kitchen and drank tea, chatting about the significance of turning eighteen.
 “Now that you’re eighteen, that means you can get license to drive car in the U.S., no?”
 I told her I already had a license and had been driving for about a year. I declined to mention that the state of New York had suspended it. On the day I was supposed to appear in court to answer for a 113 mile-per-hour Prom Night indiscretion on the Thruway, I was in Jamaica.
 “But now you can vote for the president and go around and drink beer and things like a big man when you go home, eh?” she teased.
 Yes, I’d be able to vote, I said, but I wouldn’t be able to drink beer legally until I turned twenty-one. “But I’m going to drink as much Red Stripe as I can while I’m here,” I teased back.
 “Mind you don’t let it drunk ya and cause scandal,” she said. She took a sip of lukewarm tea, and her expression grew gradually more anxious. I imagined she was visualizing her young white charge being thrown out of a rum shop on the other side of town. Or worse, being thrown out of a rum shop, beaten, robbed and left for dead in a dirty gully. Or worse still, being thrown out of a local rum shop for making amorous advances on a black girl, then beaten, robbed, etc.
 Our intimate tea-talk had soured. She told me her plans for the rest of the day.
 “We’re going to drive to Kingston,” she said. “Roger will be receiving a University certificate at a banquet, and all the children will be there. We’ve been looking forward to having dinner with them all, so it should be a very pleasant evening.”
 I couldn’t tell  whether she meant I was expected to accompany her and Bunny to a family function, or if I was being told politely that I would have to fend for myself while they went off to Kingston. Perhaps I was being offered a choice; it was my birthday, after all. The point seemed moot, in any event, because I had already made plans with Kris Koch to go to a big  football match in another part of the parish. That certainly seemed like more fun than a long drive to Kingston, and sitting dejectedly through a tedious awards banquet for strangers, at which spicy desiccated hamburger would no doubt be the featured entree.  I told Pixie I was going to see the football match and my ride was already on the way to pick me up. From the hardness of the look she gave, I could tell she was disappointed, perhaps even frustrated and angry. But she told me to “go, enjoy the sport,” and she’d see me when they returned. It would be quite late.
 A few minutes later, Kris and his host sister arrived in a pickup, and the sound of the truck’s horn riled the Higgins’s bad dogs. There are three categories of dogs in Jamaica: bad dogs, which are what Americans call “guard dogs”; skin-and-bones strays; and good dogs, which are mere pets and much rarer than the other two types. The Higginses had two big Rottweilers, both mean as hell. If the dogs had names, the Higginses never used them; they were part of the household’s security infrastructure and decidedly not pets. They slept in the garage, at the foot of the young gardener’s grubby cot. Hearing the pickup arrive, they flew up the driveway, snarling and yapping, threatening to leap over the gate and attack the rusted old Nissan like lions on a wounded gazelle.
 This sort of ruckus was the standard greeting for every caller at the Higgins residence, and I’d heard it before, so I knew what would follow: “Lascelles!” “Lascelles!” Bunny and Pixie, hollering from opposite ends of the house – his voice booming and hers keening almost a perfect octave higher – for the gardener to calm the frenzied dogs. Tending the dogs was his most important duty, and Lascelles relished it because besides Bunny he was the only person capable of keeping those Rottweilers in line. I watched from the garden gate as he padded barefoot up the drive, shooing the mutts and slapping their backsides with the flat of his machete blade. With a mumble and a wink, he waved me on – it was safe now to walk past the dogs, hop over the rusted iron gate and climb into the bed of the idling pickup.
 I gave Lascelles a curt wave as we pulled away from the gate, and I exhaled with a shudder. Kris handed me a warm bottle of Guinness and a bag of peanuts. I was breathing hard, and my pulse throbbed in my neck, face and hands. I didn’t realize just how tightly I had been wound that morning until I was in the truck, riding out of May Pen, putting some distance between myself and the Higgins house. I was exhilarated at the thought of having a day away from these strange stand-ins for parents, especially the tiny, perplexing matron and her many expectations.
 But there was also something about the wink Lascelles gave me as he dealt with the dogs. I recalled that I once heard Bunny order him around by the name “Mephistopheles.” It seemed a playful, if somewhat cruel, way to tease the gardener, whom I understood to be an oprhan who’d been employed by the Higginses for some years. He was a short, muscular, coffee-skinned man of African descent. His curly hair glinted red in the sun. He was roughly my age, but he could have been as many as five years younger or older. He seemed incapable of speaking in anything other than guttural mumbles. After a few months on the island, I had a passable grasp of  Jamaican patois, but Lascelles was completely undecipherable. Even his employers had difficulty communicating with him.  Perhaps he had a speech defect. Or perhaps he was mentally disabled and spoke his own language. He talked to himself often, and sometimes snickered or crowed like a rooster for no apparent reason. Only the bad dogs understood him.
 - - -
 It was after dark when the pickup turned into Heath Close and stopped to let me out at the Higginses’ house. Zombified by Guinness, Red Stripe, and the bumpy hour-long ride home from the football match, I said good-bye to my friends in a poor attempt at patois and approached the front gate. Bunny’s sturdy old mint-green Volvo was not in the driveway. They had not yet returned from Kingston.
 “Hello,” I said at moderate volume, not wanting to disturb neighbors or set the dogs off. There was no response, and the house was dark. “Hello! Anybody home? Lascelles?”
 No reply.
 I swung one leg over the gate and was about to drop down onto the driveway when I heard the scrape of dogs’ nails on blacktop at its far end. I kept awkwardly still, straddling the gate, and listened. A quiet rasp of animal breathing.  I flung my leg back and jumped down outside the gate, suddenly sober but far from steady.
 Should I yell again for Lascelles? He must be here. He wouldn’t sneak off into town and leave the place unattended; he’d be fired for that. He must be asleep on his cot and didn’t hear me the first time.
 But perhaps he did hear me. Perhaps he’s standing in the shadow of the garage, watching me, silently amused at my skittishness. With that machete in his hand.
 I backed away from the gate and considered my options. I could wait there in the road for Bunny and Pixie to come home. Could be minutes, could be hours. I could walk downtown, about three miles away, and have a few beers at one of the bars, acting as inconspicuous as a white teenager possibly could in a working-class town far from any tourist area. I’d done that before, and with the invincibility of youth, I certainly didn’t feel like I was in any danger. But on this night that long path into town seemed sinister. Instead I walked up Heath Close, deeper into the Higgins’s quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood. White stucco and electric-blue awnings of houses glowed in the moonlight, and intermittent street lamps splashed yellow pools onto the pavement. Frogs peeped and insects chittered, but no cars, no people. In this neighborhood, all were tucked away behind gates and palm trees and hedges and bad dogs. 
 At the top of a hill just a few blocks from the Higginses’, I was surprised to see a familiar place. One evening three months earlier, when I had just arrived in Jamaica and was still living with the Lowes, a group of Australians invited me to play tennis with them at the local country club. On the way there, we’d stopped to pick up another player – at this house. She was also Australian, about 40 years old, the wife of a powerful businessman in the local bauxite mining industry. The tennis outing had been friendly and casual, and I recalled that over drinks after the match, she made a point of inviting me to visit her home. I hadn’t realized that I had moved into the same neighborhood. Suddenly I found myself ringing her doorbell. It seemed as good a time as any to accept her invitation.
 A maid answered the door and wasn’t sure how to react to a strange white youth who came calling after dark. She took a step back, and Mrs. Petersen appeared in the doorway. She took a moment to remember my name and how we’d met, and then invited me in. Sitting at her kitchen table were David and Nadia, the other Aussies with whom we’d played doubles at the club. Joining them, I explained that I was now living in the neighborhood, and rather than tell the situation in all its complexity, I lied that I was locked out of the house. At the time itdidn’t seem important to mention that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It’s obvious to me now that these three must have assumed that I showed up at Christine’s door because they were the only white people I knew in the neighborhood.
 The awkwardness of my sudden arrival was quickly defused by David’s off-color humor and liberal quantities of beer and rum punch. He and his fiancee were spending the winter as guests of the Petersens. In the spring, the couple said, they’d launch David’s boat, continuing the round-the-world sail he’d begun that year. It was not his first. He’d acquired Nadia as a crew member somewhere between Sydney and Kingston. They were both blonde and sunburned, in their late thirties, and even in shorts and T-shirts, they had the air of tropical aristocrats. Christine was glad to have their company because her husband, the aluminium magnate, was in Baltimore for the winter, recovering from some serious heart surgery. After some small talk about how it wasn’t quite right for a young white foreigner to be left to his own devices at night in May Pen, David began telling a series of bawdy sailing stories and ribald tennis tales. Both these otherwise healthy activities seemed to involve a great deal of liquor for Australians, so much so that even the telling and hearing of stories about them called for heavy consumption. After three or four of David’s yarns and as many bottles of beer, Nadia asked me about my family back home. I told her that Dad was an engineer and mom was a teacher, and that I had two younger sisters, one just a toddler who might not even remember me after my year abroad.
 “How old are, you, Bill?” Nadia asked.
 “Seventeen – no, eighteen,” I said. “In fact, today’s my eighteenth birthday.”
 The ladies smiled and cooed congratulations, and David slammed both palms onto the tabletop, making empty Red Stripe bottles rattle and causing one full one to foam and spill.
 “Eighteenth birthday?” he bellowed. “God, man, what are you doing here chatting up us old folks on your birthday?  You should be painting the town with a girl on either arm!”
 “The least we can do is have a proper toast,” Christine said. “What can I get you, Bill? Rum? Vodka? Whiskey?” 
 Rum was too Jamaican, vodka too Siberian. I agreed to whiskey, the poison that sounded most like home to me. I was disappointed when she returned with a bottle of Scotch. It was of very good quality considering how far we were from Glasgow, but I’d been hoping for smokey American bourbon. I drank the Johnny Walker, though, and David went on with the spinning of his sailor’s yarns. When my glass was empty, it took a great deal of effort to stand up from the table and announce thickly that I had to be leaving. My head felt heavier than it should, and the force of gravity itself seemed to be drawing me out the door, down the street and toward the Higginses’ gate. When I got there, the Volvo was in the driveway. Too drunk this time to be concerned about the neighbors, I clumsily climbed over the gate and shouted, “Hello!” The greeting was directed at Lascelles, the bad dogs, and Bunny and Pixie collectively, even though they’d surely all be sleeping at this hour. “Bring them on,” I thought. “Bring them all on.”
 The dogs gave a few muffled woofs, and a moment later, Lascelles emerged from the gloom of the garage to open the gate. No machete.
 “Come, sah,” he said, and grunted something about the dogs.
 “Sorry to wake you,” I said. “I was out celebrating my birthday.”
 “Yes, sah.” He looked me in the eye then for the first time that day, and he was grinning.  Then he said something unintelligible.
 “What?”
 Lascelles shrugged and pointed to the house, then put an index finger to his lips.
 “Ah, they’re asleep in there, huh?” I wasn’t sure if he meant the dogs or the Higginses.
 He nodded and escorted me quietly through the garden and into the kitchen. I thanked him and said good night, and he turned back toward the garage. A few minutes later, I was still in the kitchen, drinking a cold glass of water and steadying myself with one hand on the counter. Lascelles poked his head in through the doorway and asked a question. Again, I couldn’t make out the words.
 “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” I said. “Ask me again tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to clear my head.” He seemed equally unsure about what I’d said. We were startled then by a frightening, anguished  moan coming from the kitchen hall. Lascelles and I exchanged a glance, and suddenly Pixie’s mother shambled into our midst. Granny was a sad and horrible sight. Elderly, blind and exceedingly frail, hobbling toward us with her cane in one gnarled fist and saliva streaming from both corners of her toothless mouth. Wrinkled, mottled skin hung off her small, fragile, bony frame. The words “Alzheimer’s disease” were not inmy vocabulary then, but I’m now sure she must have been in its advanced stages. She had wet her nightgown and was desperately calling out names that were not familiar to me, perhaps the names of long dead loved-ones.
 Lascelles tried to take Granny by the arm and help her back to her bedroom, but she struck him a viscious blow with her wooden cane. He staggered back and tenderly pressed fingers against the welt that formed on his forehead. He looked at me and shrugged. Should we wake Bunny and Pixie?
 I approached Granny from a safer angle and wrapped both my arms around hers, partly to comfort her and partly to keep that blunt instrument out of play. I picked her up like a parent would a sleepwalking child – she weighed almost nothing, like a bundle of straw – and I carried her down the hall toward her bedroom. As I walked past the master bedroom, the door flew open and Pixie took in the scene with obvious alarm.
 “What in heaven’s –?” she gasped. Here was a boozy American teenager carrying her infirm mother through the darkened house, trailed by the dirty, mentally impaired garden boy.  Granny was whimpering now, a bit calmer. Behind me, Lascelles mumbled something.
 “Put her down on her bed,” Pixie told me. “And put yourself down in your own.”
 I arose late the next morning to a breakfast identical to the previous day’s, but cold. Bunny was standing in the kitchen in boxer shorts and a ratty T-shirt, with fuzzy, blue slippers on his feet.
 “Your breakfast been there long time, Bill,” he told me. “Pixie cook it before she go shopping in town. She soon come back.”
 I poured myself a tall glass of water and prepared to dive into another spicy jerkyburger.
 Bunny hollered for Lascelles, who came sprinting up to the kitchen door.
 “Pixie tell me you both help Granny last night.” Looking at me, Bunny said, “I doan tink she mad at you anymore. But me never know wid Pixie. ”
 I nodded my pounding head and chewed a mouthful of mango. Not sure what to say about Pixie, I changed the subject.
 “Hey, Mr. Higgins, Lascelles asked me a question last night and I couldn’t understand him. Could you find out what it was?”
 Bunny spoke to Lascelles, who grinned a bit sheepishly and avoided looking in my direction as he gave a long reply.
 Bunny chuckled as he translated: “He says he want to invite you to worship at his church on Sunday. He say you look last night like you need religion, like you got a little devil in you.”    

Friday, December 9, 2005

Attention, fellow washed-up rugby players!

My friend Pete "Pike" Moody of Ballston Spa has informed me that he and a group of other Saratoga Springs-area rugby players will be forming a new club that will start playing in the spring. It is tentatively called the Saratoga Stampede Rugby Football Club, and membership is open to any men 18 or older, with any level of experience in the game (even none). For more information, e-mail Chuck Tempest at clusteruk1@yahoo.com.

Yes, I'm going to try to drag my ancient carcass out there to play. We'll see how the old lungs hold out.

UPDATE 1/14/06: The club will be having an informational/social meeting for prospective players at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 16, at the Parting Glass, 20 Lake Ave., Saratoga Springs. Look for the crowd of thugs in the dart hall.

The club also has a new website: www.saratogarugby.com

 

 

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Interested in Photography? (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)

My newspaper colleague David Brickman has a new Web site featuring selections from his impressive body of work in photography. Check it out at:

 http://brickmanphoto.com/home.htm

 

Monday, December 5, 2005

A Holiday Ditty

With the Victorian Stroll gig coming up on Friday night, I've been trying to learn some Christmas songs in a hurry. Somehow I was struck by the notion to write my own. I love folk/blues tunes like this because they almost write themselves. Just throw a few couplets together with ironic references to other holiday songs and tales, add some vaguely suggestive images, and voila! (Or "viola!" if you prefer ...) Hopefully folks will find it mildly entertaining. Perhaps I'll record it so as to convey the full effect, such as it is.  

Christmas Rag
Lyrics by Bill Ackerbauer
December 2005
(Tune similar to Blind Willie McTell's "Georgia Rag")

Sing me a song about a Salty Dog,
And sit yourself down by the ol' yule log
We'll do that rag, do the Christmas Rag.

Down at the mall on santa's knee,
All the boys and the girls you see
Want to do that rag ...

The Christmas Goose will not get fat
If he don't stop shakin' his tail like that,
He's doin' the rag ...

The Ghosts of Christmas Future and Past
Are drinkin' egg nog and havin' a blast,
They're doing that rag ...

Mama said Papa, you move to slow
To catch me under that mistletoe,
You gotta do that rag ...

Mrs. Claus is mighty slick
Cuttin' a rug with old Saint Nick
They love to do that rag ...

In their workshop, Santa's elves
Put their toys up on the shelves
They want to do that rag ...

Santa says I do believe
I won't stop dancin' till New Year's Eve,
I'll do that rag ...

Friday, December 2, 2005

Gig Update

I just got word that I will play “unplugged” at Castiglione Gem Jewelers from 6 to 8 p.m. next Friday, Dec. 9, during the Downtown Gloversville Victorian Stroll. I may have some surprise guest musicians sitting in with me.

Other attractions featured in the Stroll will include:.

The Short Circuit Band at Great Rentals

Wizzie the Clown at the Gloversville Sport Shop

Do No Harm Celtic Band at Peck’s Flowers

Brass & Ivory at Fulton Computer

The Sentimentalist at the Open Window

Face Painting at Double Eagle Coin Shop

Flame at the Chamber

Sons Of Glory Christian Barbershop at the First Presbyterian Church

A Country Christmas at the Glove Theatre beginning at 7:30 pm

Horse and Carriage Rides

Reindeer

And of course….Santa

Carter's New Ax

My son Carter just turned 1 year old, and we celebrated his birthday in style. One of his presents was a new ukulele. He'll be playing "Tiny Bubbles" in no time, I'm sure.

His Uncle Chris took the pictures - thanks, Chris.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Gloversville Gig

I've been asked to perform during the inaugural Victiorian Stroll in downtown Gloversville, which will be from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 9. I will be holding forth at one of the businesses sponsoring the event. I'll post the exact location when I find out.

I'm in an awkward position for this pre-Chistmas gig: I have almost zero holiday-related material in my repertoire, and with school work piling up now, I will have little time to learn new songs. I suppose I will just try to cram the lyrics of a few easy ones such as "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and perhaps "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer," which is a classic. I used to be able to play a fingerstyle arrangement of "I Saw Three Ships," but it's been a few years ... Unfortunately, most of my songbooks and CDs are packed away in storage, so I will have to rely on the Internet for my new material.

Any suggestions on how I can Yule-up my act in a hurry? E-mail me at smokinbill@aol.com or post a comment here.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Poetry Spam

I was checking my e-mail on Thursday, after Thanksgiving dinner, and I received a spam message inviting me to submit a poem for a contest. I didn't want to waste a "real  poem" (something I spent time creating) on some stupid corporate promotion, so I fired off the following nonsense extemporaneously:

Shrugging off leaden grogginess
and another wave of indigestion,
I am full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes,
cranberry gel shaped like a tin can
and apple pie with extra whipped cream.

The house is full of Mom's piano
spilling half-remembered carols
while another inch of dirty sleet
shells the cars in the driveway.

The dog is full of table scraps.
He gives noisy thanks,
curls up
at Papa's feet and dreams of fat rabbits.

 

Stay tuned for an upcoming post in which I will reflect on a poetry reading that took place last weekend at the Johnstown Public Library ...

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Our Lady of Perpetual Overpopulation

We give a lot of credit these days to the American soccer mom, that domestic multitasker extraordinaire, but on Sunday the Roman Catholic Church recognized a woman who raised a family so large it could have made up a whole soccer team by itself. The Vatican praised Eurosia Fabris as "a dazzling model of holiness" and beatified her, making her a candidate for sainthood. It seems well deserved. In my book, any parent who can successfully bring up 11 children without using cages or a tranquilizer gun is absolutely saint material. And "Mamma Rosa," as she was known, did her parenting in late 19th century northern Italy, so she worked her motherly magic without the benefit of Sesame Street, Ritalin or a Toyota mini-van. 

The ceremony surrounding her beatification was deeply disturbing, however, because it took place in the context of a Vatican campaign to encourage more people to have large families. The virtues of Mamma Rosa notwithstanding, the world needs more large families like the pope needs a hole in the head. And considering what Benedict XVI has said on the subject, I wonder if there is already a hole or some other defect in the papal cranium. His holiness has declared "there is no future without children," which is either patently obvious or simply false depending on one’s ontological viewpoint. Either way it is not a helpful remark because it obtusely fails to address the dire facts that threaten the long-term future of the human race: The world’s population is 6.47 billion and rising, our resources are limited, and more than half of us live in abject poverty.

As isolated as he is from the brutal realities of overpopulation, it’s easy enough for Benedict to call for bigger and bigger broods of children. There’s no danger of famine or drought striking Vatican City, and all those vows of celibacy must tend to keep the infant mortality rate low in the pontiff’s gilded enclave. But the influence of the Vatican extends far and wide, and Benedict’s voice is especially powerful in the struggling nations where people rely on Catholic missionaries for assistance with food, health care and education. The message broadcast from St. Peter’s Square on Sunday was that God wants people to continue to have lots and lots of children. Two of Mamma Rosa’s eleven kids were adopted, but the Vatican intentionallyblurred the distinction, as if to suggest the ability to make babies and the ability to nurture them are equally virtuous. This is one of the weakest links in the logic chain of Catholic ideology: Superabundant human reproduction and the betterment of the human condition are mutually contradictory goals.

Few will argue with the general assertion that human life is sacred. The difficulty arises when society attempts to reach a consensus on specific questions. Does life begin at conception? At the end of the first trimester? At birth? The church’s position is that the very idea of life is sacred – not only is it wrong to end a life in the process of developing in the womb (aborting a fetus), but it is wrong to prevent a life from being conceived in the first place. The clash of the idea of abundant life and the reality of overpopulation is plain to see in places such as Uganda, where 97 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day, the income level defined by the World Bank as the poverty line. We’re all aware of the myriad social problems that go hand in hand with poverty of that magnitude: Malnutrition, lack of potable water, illiteracy, health threats such as HIV/AIDS, economic exploitation of laborers and the suppression of women’s rights are just a few near the top of the list. Ninety-eight percent of the world’s population growth takes place in the developing world, and rampant human reproduction is arguably the most significant obstacle to solving to the developing world’s greatest difficulties.

To its credit, the Catholic Church has a long, noble tradition of sponsoring orphanages and other humanitarian services, but its stance against birth control makes it more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. The church’s principle of affirming the idea of life at all costs, like many principles of many religions, is based on an outdated worldview. When the words "be fruitful and multiply" were written so many millennia ago, human multiplication was a good thing. Men wanted as many children – especially sons – as their wives could bear. A large family was (and still is, in many cultures) a status symbol, a source of labor and a guarantee of security in old age. But even before the world’s population started to spike with advances in medicine in the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th, division (of power and resources) was as much a part of the human social fabric as multiplication.And now, when the global population has tripled in less than a century, we must seriously address the dangers of dwindling resources and promote safe, inexpensive birth control worldwide.

The cynic in me wonders if the Vatican’s promotion of "fruitfulness" is truly based on the Gospel or if it is motivated by the church’s desire to ensure a steady flow of faithful in the developing world. The Vatican’s influence has waned in most of Europe and much of the developed world, and in the last two hundred years we’ve seen its influence grow in impoverished nations. The Catholic spiritual mission flourishes best in places where its humanitarian mission is needed – in societies where the enlightenment of secular education has yet to kill God. The needs for food and clean water always trump the desire for intellectual emancipation.

One of the most common arguments against birth control and abortion is that when a pregnancy is prevented or terminated, one cannot know if it means the loss of a potential person who could one day make great contributions to the world; Albert Einstein is the most frequently cited individual. In 1879, the year Einstein was born, the world’s population was only 1.5 billion. By the logic of this argument, in the present world of four times that many individuals, we should expect four times as many characters of Einstein’s caliber in the world. More births means more chances for greatness, n’cest pas? Unfortunately, no. That’s not the case because population growth is slowest in nations that can best afford to produce and cultivate brilliant minds. It is exploding in countries that can barely afford to feed, clothe or shelter their citizens.

There is some good news. Despite the ongoing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Paris and Schenectady, humanitarian groups have reported that overall warfare seems to be on the decrease worldwide. And some statisticians predict world population growth will slow and reach a plateau sometime in the next hundred years, capping the total number of living persons at around 8 or 9 billion. But we must ponder all the hunger, pain and suffering that will be experienced in those years leading up to the magical point of Zero Population Growth.

Pope Benedict has said large families like Mamma Rosa’s are instrumental to fostering "faith, courage and optimism" in society. World leaders need all three of these qualities to avoid looking the truth in the eye. Unless the Catholic Church is prepared to show us some amazing tricks with loaves and fishes – not to mention fuels, medicines, building materials, etc. – it should encourage the meekto use birth control. There’s only so much inheritable earth to go around.

Fan Mail

The first-graders at Warren Street Elementary wrote me and Liam some very nice thank-yous for our performance last week.

Friday, November 4, 2005

Regrettable Pants

This is funny stuff, well worth the time it takes you to read it, especially if you are a man who has ever considered buying leather pants (which I am emphatically not):

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8335653541

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Just Some Cutesy Photos

I just scanned some photos that Jen and I took over the last several months with our 35mm using black-and-white film. Some were taken at Adirondack Animal Land in Broadalbin.

Curiouser and Curiouser

 

I've been doing some research and thinking about a paper due this week for my Literature and Empire course, and today I stumbled upon something interesting: A hidden layer of meaning in the Curious George stories.

 I used to love those books when I was a kid, and I still have my Curious George doll, though he's in rough shape, buttons for eyes and barely held together with patches. Liam has a newer version of the same doll, whom he calls "Monkey George."

What follows is an excerpt from a 1996 lecture on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" by Candice Bradley, an anthropology professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin:

I am going to begin my discussion of Heart of Darkness with Curious George. As you all know, Curious George was a little monkey who was found  in the jungle by the man with the yellow hat, and brought to America where he had many adventures. Curious George, we are told, is "a good little monkey." He is a good little monkey with no tail who walks upright and rides bicycles. Those of you who have taken paleoanthropology, however, already know that Curious George is no monkey. He does not have a tail. Maybe he is a chimp -- except chimps walk on their knuckles and generally don't deliver papers, paint walls, and make phone calls.
As we all know, George has a problem. He is a good little monkey, but he is "too curious." He is so curious that he causes problems for the man in the yellow hat. The man in the yellow hat dresses like a colonial officer, wearing a bright yellow safari suit.
In Curious George Takes a Job, George is in the zoo. He steals the keys to the cages from the zookeeper, and frees all the African animals. George, now newly liberated himself, takes a series of menial jobs. At one point, George breaks into an apartment and paints African animals all over the walls. At the end of the story he stars in a Hollywood movie.
Curious George is a two layered story. On one level it's a dumb but beloved children's story. On another, it is a postcolonial parable in which George stands for Africa, and the zookeeper and man with the yellow hat for benevolent colonizers. George stealing the keys and liberating the animals is a parable for the decolonization of Africa. From the middle of this century onward, the African took the keys fromthe white manand let himself out of the cage.
One day I read some of Curious George Takes a Job to my students. One student, an African woman raised biculturally, was shocked. "My parents read me this story," she said. "This is horrible! Did the author know what he was doing? Was he a racist? Or did he write this postcolonial plot into the book with full consciousness?" Unfortunately there is little written about the author, so I cannot tell you whether he was an enlightened man who hid the symbolism in there on purpose, or if he did it unconsciously.

Wild stuff, eh? Anyone interested in reading the rest of the lecture on "Heart of Darkness" is invited to follow this link: AFRICA  AND  AFRICANS  IN CONRAD´S  HEART  OF  DARKNESS

Friday, October 28, 2005

Wailing at Warren Street

Today, Liam and I went to entertain the first-graders at Warren Street School. Most of the songs went over pretty well, especially the song I call "The Greenberry Tree," which I learned from a Pete Seeger recording, and my own tune "Stinky Feet Blues." One of these days I'll record that one and put it on the blog. I played "Turkey in the Straw" and "Keep on the Sunnyside" on the mandolin, which was challenging because Liam decided to help me by "tuning" it before I played. He only tweaked one string; I figure 7 out of 8 is close enough for first-graders.

It's funny that the school district's Web site identifies Liam and me as a "father-son guitar and vocalist team." All Liam had to do was sit there and look cute! Here's the link to the district's slide show of Fall Festival photos.

Toddler Time

Liam, our 3-year-old, has been making a lot of progress in some key areas lately, especially speech and using the potty. I'm sure the two skills are closely linked on some Freudian level.

At any rate, fans of one of my first posts, The Scottish Pornographers, will appreciate this one. Liam was up at Jen's folks' house one night this week and watched the classic boy-and-his-horse movie Black Beauty. His early attempts to pronounce the name of the film were somewhat comic in their political incorrectness.

Click here to hear the clip

   

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Hokey Pokey update

A follow-up to yesterday's Hokey Pokey post:

All I have for ya on this subject is the following link, which explains more than you ever wanted to know about this song.

HOKEY POKEY

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Train Songs, a Head Wound and The Old Spanish Tavern

Here's my latest bit of narrative non-fiction, as promised. Keep in mind this is a draft ... (For information on John Fahey, visit http://www.johnfahey.com/)


   The first time I sat down to carefully listen to a John Fahey album, I made sure the lights were low and the door to my room was locked. I didn't want any distractions.
I lit a pipe of sweet, dark Virginia tobacco, let a few puffs fill the room with a blue haze, and pressed PLAY on the stereo. A good smoke did not distract from my listening experience; in fact it was a positive requirement for the commencement of my quasi-meditative Sunday-night relaxation ritual. Relaxation was the thing I did best that winter term of my fourth year of college, which was my second junior year or my first senior year, depending on how to look at it.
   I kicked back in a natty green recliner that had graced that room in my fraternity house for at least two decades. It was sturdy, smelly, and quite comfortable. From the first track, "Frisco Leaving Birmingham," I knew I was going to enjoy that evening's musical selection. The disc was "Railroad," an album of ten train-themed acoustic guitar instrumentals produced on the Shanachie record label. Although John Fahey enjoys legendary status among fingerstyle guitar aficionados, he isn't exactly a household name for the general population, and "Railroad" is one of his hard-to-find, out-of-print albums. One of the guys in the fraternity house who shared my obsession with acoustic music recommended I check out Fahey, whose name I'd heard in the context of Leo Kottke and Stefan Grossman – two other players who have rivaled (or, arguably, exceeded) his achievements. But Fahey was the pioneer. In the late 1950s, he started composing and recording fingerstyle instrumental pieces on steel-stringed flat-tops, paving the way for a generation of solo guitar virtuosos. His original pieces and arrangements of traditional tunes have a spooky vibe, a distillation of the old-time country and blues, jazz, spirituals and Indian ragas that were his main influences.
   Fahey had released at least 30 albums by the time I heard "Railroad" in 1995, but that CD was my first exposure to his music and it remains my favorite. His ability to wordlessly evoke the essence of the train song is uncanny. A thumb thumps away on the bass strings, echoing the rumble-rattle of a freight train, while fingers pluck out the melody of a steam whistle's wail or the dissonant screech of air brakes on a white-knuckle mountain grade. The titles of the tunes are as rich and intricate as their sounds: "Enigmas and Perplexities of the Norfolk and Western," "Delta Dog Through the Book of Revelation," "Steve Talbot on the Keddie Wye."
   I noted these titles on the back of the CD case, squinting to make out the words by the light of a single votive candle and the orange glow of the stereo display. I saw the second track was "Oneonta." I thought, "Oneonta? I've been there. A few times. Why would he name a tune after a rundown college town like Oneonta?" I paused to let a drag of warm pipe smoke stream out my nostrils before I cracked open the jewel case to look over the liner notes. They're simple, a paragraph of expository material on each track, written by Fahey. Here's what he wrote about "Oneonta:" 

There's a railroad yard there. It's part of the Delaware and Hudson R.R. Corp. I saw this line in 1948 as I was leaving Secret Caverns at Howe's Cave, New York, I love the D & H logo, and there's something eerie about that valley it runs through along the Susquehanna from Albany to Binghamton. Valley of desolation. Something frightening about that road. The sunsets around there are pure pantheism. Grandma Moses, Hudson River School and books by William Kennedy. I go through there every summer. I have to.

   I've always felt more at ease in dim light. More relaxed. With fewer visual distractions, I am freer to think more clearly. I certainly felt a rare kind of clarity that evening ten years ago in the solitude of my candlelit room as I listened to John Fahey play "Oneonta" and read his odd, unsettling remarks on the place.
   Many have written about the powerful emotional connection between memory and the sense of smell. Poets write about it, scientists have studied it. It occurs to me now, thinking back to my first listening of that striking album of railroad dirges, that memory can be stirred by stimuli of many varieties. Sometimes a single stimulus (be it olfactory, musical or geographical) can unleash a chain of memories. To this day, a few bars of John Fahey or a whiff of a certain blend of Virginia pipe tobaccocan bring me backto Oneonta. 
  

   - - -

   John Fahey was a troubled guy. He was overweight, a heavy smoker, and he had serious issues with women and whiskey, true to the "Blind Joe Death" bluesman archetype his early works referenced. For all his genius as a composer and guitar player, he was a challenging personality, not an easy person to like. I've read that he once gave an interview while relieving himself, insisting the reporter join him in a toilet stall at a concert venue. And once in the mid-1970s, he put down his guitar in the middle of a performance, lit up a cigarette and told the audience all about his "dissolute, horrible, disgusting" life, and suggested, "Let's all go out back and commit suicide. Every one of us." Then he finished his smoke and went back to playing the guitar.

- - -

   I made my second visit to Oneonta in the company of the Union College Rugby Football Club. We were scheduled to play Hartwick, which was one of just a few clubs in upstate NewYork whose record was worse than ours that season. It was spring 1996, and I had been listening to that John Fahey album over and over for three months. Not compulsively or exclusively, mind you, but enough for it to have made an impression. Riding in the van to the match that Saturday morning, my teammates discussed scrum and line-out strategies and traded stories about the previous night's party hi-jinks. I was half asleep and not in the mood for talk. I stared out the window of the van with the clanging riffs of "Railroad" in my head, expecting glimpses of D & H logos and Grandma Moses scenery. Something frightening about that road. Valley of desolation.
   Our team had a poor showing that day. We were only able to field 15players, which meant we'd have no substitutes available in the event of injuries or disqualifications. Hartwick's situation was worse. With only 14 experienced players, the club had to press into service a football player who had never before set foot on a rugby pitch. Hartwick was seriously outmatched, and Union was having a rare good day. Plays that had never worked before started coming together, our normally timid outside center started making bone-crunching tackles, and by the start of the second half, we had racked up a respectable lead of several tries and goals. We were drunk with the exhilaration of the winning team in a landslide when I suffered an injury that is still talked about at alumni reunion events. The football player, who was clearly frustrated and only guessing at the rules of rugby, zeroed in on me as I ran the ball upfield in his direction. I braced for a standard wrapping tackle around the waist, but he hit me with an illegal NFL-style block, elbows up. That sort of thing is to be expected on the gridiron, where players enjoy the protection of helmets and copious padding. In proper rugby football, however, such moves result in serious bodily harm. His right elbow connected with the top of my skull. I fell to the ground, a little stunned, but in a few seconds I was on my feet and ready to proceed. I could tell something was wrong because the play had stopped, and everyone on the pitch and along the sidelines was looking at me. All eyes (and a few mouths) were open wide. I suddenly became aware of a hot, wet sensation, and my vision took on a ruddy tint.
   The offending elbow had ripped a two-inch gash in my scalp, and it was quite a spectacle, according to accounts shared later over cold beverages. The Hartwick captain described "gouts" of blood visible from fifty yards away. The "crimson fountain" even rated a mention in the following week's edition of the Union newspaper.
   Now, a gushing head wound will generally disqualify a player from continuing, but our stalwart coach knew a technique for staunching the flow long enough to let me back into the match. I did not want to sit on the sidelines without a substitute player available, so the coach doused my head with ice water, blotted up the blood, sweat and ice chips with a towel, and sealed the gash with a liberal handful of Vaseline. I'm not sure why the referee found it acceptable – I was grotesque, like a freshly reanimated zombie – but I was able to continue and scored a try in the final minutes of play.
   On the way out of town after the match, we stopped at a convenience store for refreshments. I walked up to the counter with a Foster's oil can, a bag of pretzels and a bag of ice, and the clerk wasn't sure what to make of me. Does one ask to see the ID of a dirty, disheveled customer with a well-lubricated head wound? He rang up the purchase, and as he handed me my change, he asked:
   "Are you all right?"
   "Yeah, I'm fine."
   "You sure?"
   "Probably not."
   "OK."
   "Yeah, thanks."
   I left Oneonta with mutilated head held high. As we drove back toward Schenectady through that valley of desolation, I basked in the rustic majesty of the Grandma Moses scenery, and I felt pretty good, considering.

---

To hear a sample of "Oneonta," click here: ONEONTA CLIP

Hokey Pokey Funeral: Fact or Fiction?

This from my uncle Pete:


With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed last week. Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey," died peacefully at age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.

They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started ...

Funny stuff, but I started wondering whether there really was such a dude and whether he really did write that song. I think I remember reading somewhere that "The Hokey Pokey" is actually an ancient play-party song motif that goes back at least to medieval England. The excellent urban legends debunkers at Snopes seem to think it's purely made up... I'll check it out and follow up this post later.

If you have any inside information on this, leave a comment and illuminate us.

Friday, October 21, 2005

A new gig lined up

Just an announcement: I will be playing at the Moon & River Cafe, 115 S. Ferry St., Schenectady (in the Stockade), at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 29. I figure it will be a good warm-up for the First Night gig that Saturday here in Johnstown. The tip jar will be on the counter awaiting the pecuniary manifestations of your kind patronage.

I've been taking a break from gigging as I get sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex of this semster's academic work. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post on the interconnectedness of memory, geography, a John Fahey guitar instrumental, a gushing head wound and a visit to the Novelty Lounge in Oneonta, N.Y.

 

Monday, October 17, 2005

Back from the Bright, Sunny South

We're back from visiting Jen's sister in Florida. The weather was hot and sunny all week, which seemed even sweeter because we kept hearing about the nonstop cold and rain in the Northeast. We took a lot of photos.

For best viewing results, click on "View Larger" at left, and then select "View As Guest." Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

Musical non-sequitur: The whole time we were down there, I had two songs in alternating rotation in my head.  They were "St. Petersburg, Fla., Blues" by Ray Charles and "Goin' Back to Tampa" by Roy Bookbinder. (Who needs an i-Pod when you've got blues on the brain?)

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

One Thousand Glorious Hits, Ha-Ha-Ha!

This humble slice of the blogosphere just recorded its 1,000th hit ... and there was much rejoicing.

 

(Thanks for reading.)

 

Saturday, October 8, 2005

Hey, Joe, where you goin' with that pen in your hand?

A flier came in the mail today announcing the upcoming release of a poetry collection called The Book of Faces by Joseph Campana, who has apparently ascended from humble origins in Johnstown to the rarified realms of the literary elite.

 Back in high school, Joe and I traveled in the same misfit circles, contributing to such noble enterprises as The Bugle newspaper (which I understand is sadly no longer being published), the International Club (Je me souviens les fromages de Quebec!) and the dramatic tour-de-farce "The Happiest Days of Our Lives." If I remember correctly, Joe was also one of the conspirators in the great FUBC-scandal-censorship-protest movement of June 1989. (Although he did not do time in detention for his involvement, unlike yours truly and another blogger who shall remain nameless.)

Jen asked if I'm jealous of his having published, and of course the answer is yes. It's an impressive accomplishment, and I look forward to reading the autographed copy I will demand from him in exchange for not posting here a photo of him circa his freshman year of high school.

Sunday, October 2, 2005

Worth A Few Chuckles

I've started reading Dave Barry's Blog pretty regularly. He doesn't do so much writing as linking to amusing corners of the Web. And readers of my blog will appreciate that he is also perpetually seeking out new and better band names.

My latest great name for a rock band: The Hardly Mums. (Inspired by my wife's frost-resistant flowers on the back porch.)

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Uke Gotta See This

Liam and I finished painting his "guitar" yesterday. It's actually a baritone ukulele. Here's a picture of the finished product:

Unfortunately, Liam didn't want to pose for a photo with it. But here's a very short recording I made last night of me playing a wee instrumental piece on the uke. It's an old parlor guitar tune called Spanish Fandango. (You may want to turn up your volume slightly as it's not a loud instrument.) Musicians may be interested to know I have the uke tuned to open G, so it's sort of like a nylon-string banjo without the drone string.

Here's a photo of Liam with the uke before the paint job, about a year and a half ago. It's the cover of the miniature CD of songs I recorded for Liam and his buddies:

Want more ukulele stuff? Here's a Robert Johnson song that I recorded using this same instrument: Love in Vain

And finally, here's a link to my favorite ukulele site on the Web: The Fourth Peg

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Mixing it Up

I recently read an article in the New York Times marking the 50th anniversary of Vladmir Nabokov's "Lolita." The piece mentioned that he included a character in the novel named Vivian Darkbloom, which is an anagram of his own name.

This struck me as a cool idea, so I tried to figure out any good anagrams of my own name. Here are a few that I came up with for BILL ACKERBAUER:

Caleb Uke Briar

Buba Race Killer (ominous!)

Blu Balicker (that's just wrong)

Today I found a Web site that will automatically generate anagrams of any word, over at wordsmith.org. Here are some of the better ones it came up with for my name (strangely, they all seem appropriate):

A BABE LICK LURER

LIABLE RARE BUCK

A CLUBABLE KERR I

A KEBAB CURL LIER

A RABBLE LUCKIER

A RABBI ULCER ELK

CUBA BEAR KILLER

BAR ALK BE ULCER I

BAR LARK BLUE ICE

I'm tempted to try typing in GEORGE W BUSH ...






 

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

To Spank or Not to Spank

A war has been raging in my household of late, and in brazen defiance of all logic and probability, the larger, stronger, savvier, more experienced of the combatants is nearly always the loser.

I end up feeling like a loser, at least, every time I spank my three-year-old son.

Liam is an adorable, funny, playful, bright and loving kid, so it’s painful to describe our relationship in harsh terms, but lately he’s adopted pushing daddy over the edge as his favorite pastime. Some days it’s like having our own little Iraq insurgency right here at 9 Maplewood Avenue. The calm of each new day is shattered before 8 a.m. over such incendiary questions as whether Liam wants peanut butter or jelly on his toast. He is a master of the improvised explosive rhetorical device. It is crude but effective. A typical conversation:

"Liam, would you like toast for breakfast?"

"No toast. Cereal."

"Okay, how about Cheerios?"

"No Cheerios. Toast."

"Do you want peanut butter or jelly? Or both?"

"Peanut butter."

"Okay, it’ll be ready in a mi—"

"Jelly. Jelly. I want jelly jelly jelly want jelly … No jelly. Ice cream."

"Arrrrrggggg!!!"

All this before daddy has managed to slurp down his first cup of coffee. But before you take me for a short-fused brute who uses corporal punishment in response to typical finicky toddler behavior, let me assure you I set the bar much higher on offenses that call for spanking. While we are no Mr. and Mrs. Ghandi, my wife and I think of ourselves as fairly patient and progressive parents. We agree that spanking is the discipline of last resort, and we reserve it for times when Liam has or is about to put himself in danger (such as running into the street after being told not to), or when his behavior threatens another person’s safety. Unfortunately, he has little interest in safe, quiet or peaceful activities.

One day this week, for example, he attempted to find out how hard he could bite his baby brother’s finger before it came off, and he probably would have found out if I hadn’t been there to unclamp his jaws and deliver a whollop to his posterior. The next day he tried for a toe, but again he was pried loose and punished. This sort of thing happens a lot, but baby Carter is resilient, as all second children must be if they intend to survive to adulthood.

I feel obliged to acknowledge that there are echoes of my own childhood in Liam’s alarming and destructive exploits. The reign of terror I waged on my younger sister Nancy, circa 1975-1988, included an experiment in which I tested the hypothesis that I could keep her quiet for at least five minutes by sealing her lips together with Krazy Glue. The adhesive proved alarmingly effective, and Dad had to apply several substances before he found one capable of unsticking her lips. (I’ve since toyed with the idea of claiming trademark rights for a product I would call "Sanity Solvent," which I would market specifically to the two demographic groups most prone to trouble with Krazy Glue: construction workers and the parents of preadolescent boys.)

For my scientific endeavor I was punished not merely with standard spanking but with a vigorous paddling with the heftiest wooden spoon in Mom’s kitchen. Other offenses that earned me a painful tenderizing with it included shooting my sister with a BB gun. (The fact that it was a ricochet rather than a direct hit was not considered a mitigating factor because the object that deflected the BB was Dad’s car.) The spoon itself was the sort of long-handled utensil one imagines an old-world grandmother twirling inside a steaming pot of mouth-watering goodness of a Sunday afternoon. But that particular spoon and I had a long and bitter relationship, which I ended at age 11 by secretly burying it in the back yard.

Beating a child with a wooden spoon might seem a draconian punishment by today’s elevated standards, but growing up I was often reminded that the instruments of corporal punishment had been even crueler for previous generations. Behind the door to Dad’s office there used to hang a leather strap that his father had used to keep razors sharp and his four children in line. It was a weathered and obviously well-used piece of brown cowhide, about three inches wide and three feet long. Dad only had to explain its history to me once, and he never had to take it off its hook. From that point on he would merely arch an eyebrow and nod his head in the general direction of its resting place behind the office door.

Seeing that vicious strap of the ’40s and ’50s often made me wonder if the decision to use the spoon in the ’70s and ’80s was a natural progression toward gentler methods of discipline. If so, I’ve often wondered, what sort of medieval bludgeons must the pre-strap generations have been punished with? Burlap sacks filled with lead shot? Red-hot pokers? My ancestors were either verywell-behaved or deft at dodging blows, else I wouldn’t be around to speculate about them today.

In light of the weaponry employed by earlier generations, my empty-handed paddling of Liam's bottom seems a quantum leap forward in tolerant parenting. But the experts tell me I am not tolerant enough. One of the more popular reference volumes on the subject is What to Expect: The Toddler Years, which warns that "Spanking is humiliating and demeaning to both the parent and the child, often shattering self-esteem and morale." Most of the other books in the How To Be a Less Imperfect Parent section at Barnes & Noble seem to take the same position, offering such advice as "Consider a time-out," and "Let your child suffer the natural consequences of the crime." I have already established that spanking my toddler has a negative effect on my own self-esteem: I feel bad about it after I’ve done it, even when I can’t see any better means of preventing an injury or calling his attention to the fact that his behavior is dangerous. On the other hand, I’m pretty certain that being flattened by a truck in the middle of the street would also tend to put a damper on his self-esteem, not to mention the morale of the entire family.

I imagine these books are intended for an audience of parents from another species, let’s call them Homo Angelicus. They never lose their cool or suffer paralyzing pangs of terror upon seeing their children in life-threatening situations. They all raise confident, well-adjusted children with healthy attitudes and few insecurities. Their kids never need to be spanked and their morale is always sky-high, although some of the younger ones are missing a few fingers and toes.

Some Passing Thoughts

When I launched this blog back in May, I told myself I wouldn't let it get too bogged down in politics. I intended to limit the subject matter to items of a cultural, personal or creative nature. (Click here to read my first post on this blog.)

Lately, as you can tell from recent posts, I've started to stray from that apolitical path. One reason is that I've been writing a lot of essays and commentary for a course I'm taking at Albany, and the mental juices have been flowing more copiously than usual of late. Another reason is that quality writing requires quality thinking, and it's impossible to think too hard about the state of the world today and not start seeing the places where political and ideological matters intersect with the cultural and the personal.

But the problem with blogging more about politics is that it will tend to homogenize your audience: People who agree with your views will tend to keep reading for that happy carrot of positive reinforcement you provide, and if you're lucky you'll attract some new readers. People who disagree will drift away, though, toward some other reading material less offensive to their sensibilities.

I'm not promising that I will keep this blog absolutely ideology-free, because I have strong, informed views and they make up an essential part of who I am as a citizen, a parent, a student, a musician and a writer. But I want this blog to to be a big tent, as the saying goes, with room for all sorts of readers. I don't want to preach to the choir; I don't want to preach at all. I want this blog to be more like a traveling carnival or a vaudeville theatre than a soap-box.

Send in the juggling clowns and the fire-breathing poodles!

Losing our Religion

"According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems."

Thanks to Hank Fox for the following link to this London Times story that by an odd coincidence is on a topic related to my last post:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html

 

Monday, September 26, 2005

Here We Go With Those Stone Tablets Again

I received a disturbing e-mail message today. You know, one of those mass-mailing, "pass it on" jobs. Here's an excerpt to give you an idea of what it was like:  

It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, it is very hard to understand why there is such a mess about having the Ten Commandments on display or "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the other 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!  

 My response:  

 Hey, why don't we carve the Ten Commandments on every public building? And make school prayer mandatory, too! All those non-believers who think they're real Americans aren't feeling alienated enough already.  

While we're at it, why don't we go back to the good old days and make slavery legal? Heck, we could take away women's right to vote, too. We could start taking the commandments literally, and lock up all the Jews, Muslims, pagans and atheists. We could even arrest people for swearing!  

What makes the Constitution a great foundation for our country is not that it is based on the religious principles of the people who happened to establish it. It is great because it protects the rights of the minority to have a dissenting opinion and a voice, so that people with different views can express them without fear of being persecuted. It is great because it established a court system that is supposed to protect the rights of any citizen who comes before it seeking justice, regardless of his or her political and religious beliefs. It is great because the law can evolve along with the society it holds together.  

Love your neighbor, don't kill, don't steal, don't cheat on your spouse. Those are solid principles, and appropriate pillars of our system of government. But they are not exclusively Judeo-Christian principles. I don't know of any religion that isn't pure nonsense that doesn't hold them to be of central importance. But the world is too complicated a place to fit all the rules on two stone tablets, and they are not the law of this nation.  

Telling people to "sit down and shut up" is not going to make this country a better place. That's fascism, and it's ugly.  

By the way, I don't know why Andy Rooney's name and picture are on that message, because I've read that, like me, he is an agnostic. He did write the following, however (and you can look it up): "I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural."  

I wish more people would focus on our current problems here and worldwide (wars, overpopulation, gross disparity in wealth, human rights abuses, limited resources going to waste) instead of railing against anything that challenges what certain powerful people wrote down as gospel or law 2,000 or 200 years ago. Think about all the things you thought you knew when you were a child or a teenager. Do you still believe them all? Don't you think it's possible that as a civilization it's time for us to grow up a little, too?  

Bill Ackerbauer

Johnstown, NY  

Follow-Up: Here is a link to an excellent analysis of the truth and lies contained in that e-mail message (the original text, not the plagiarized and fanaticized version falsely attributed to Andy Rooney):

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/capital.asp

Thursday, September 22, 2005

A Haiku for My Wife on Her Birthday (which is today)

 

First day of Autumn

Sweetest of the year, plum-ripe

Savor it, hold on

Two New Recordings

This morning I recorded a couple of things. One is an original fiddle tune I named after Col. Elias Peissner, a German national who became a professor at Union College and a member of the Sigma Phi Society, which I joined about a century and a half later. He died at the head of the 119th New York Volunteers in the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Peissner's March to Glory (.mp3)

Elias Peissner

The other thing I managed to get recorded is a song I wrote last year. The melody is from an old song that Uncle Dave Macon and others have recorded. The lyrics, obviously, are autobiographical. Thanks to Sam Schneider for pointing out that I should explain what "The Line" is. Folks around here refer to the east-west rail/highway corridor that follows the Mohawk Valley as "The Line." So if you're headed from here toward Albany or Schenectady, you're going "down the line." I plan to dub a fiddle solo and maybe some other instrumental noodling to add some texture, but this is a raw take with just guitar and vocal. (Warning: this one is a 3.9MB download, so it will take several minutes via a dial-up connection.)

Workin' Down the Line (.mp3)  

Uncle Dave Macon

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Familiar Topic Redux

This is an essay on the same subject as the one in the previous post. This one takes a more deliberate tack:

 

A Pamphlet That May or May Not Be Left
on the Windshield of a Patriotic Pickup

By Bill Ackerbauer      Sept. 20, 2005

   Howdy, neighbor. If you can spare a moment, I'd like to discuss the messages on the back of your vehicle. I understand you might get a chuckle out of that "Terrorist Hunting Permit" bumper-sticker, and your "Support Our Troops" magnet fills your heart with pride and purpose. But perhaps it hasn't occurred to you that these messages have an entirely different effect on many of the people who will see them as you drive around town. 

  I must concede the "Terrorist Hunting Permit," with its handgun logo, official-looking typography and semisubtle reference to the 9/11 attacks, is somewhat funny. The first time I saw it, I smiled at its cleverness before I realized the full range of its possible implications. Humor can hurt. "The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow," Mark Twain once wrote. I wouldn't put such a sticker on my car for the same reason I wouldn't tell a joke that plays off crude ethnic or sexual stereotypes. You might argue that the butt of your sticker's joke is some nameless, faceless jihadist, or perhaps Osama bin Laden himself, but other people — people who are not deserving of insult or disrespect —  will see your sticker and feel the painful twinge of alienation. 

   I'm reminded of a local Palestinian-American businessman who shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, was the victim of a brutal rumor that he had voiced sympathy with the perpetrators of the terrible attacks of that day. The xenophobic idiot who started that rumor, and nearly launched a boycott of the man's business before the word got out that the allegation was false, no doubt thought of himself on some level as a "terrorist hunter."   

   There is also the matter of your bumper sticker's indirect insult to the real terrorist hunters, the military personnel and other government operatives who have risked and lost their lives in the caves of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq.

   Whether or not we agree theirmissions are righteous, we must acknowledge that thousands of Americans have killed and died motivated by the belief that they are defending your right to say whatever you believe, on the bumper of your pickup truck or anywhere else.

   This brings me to the subject of supporting our troops. The overwhelming majority of Americans do indeed support and respect the efforts and sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors and airmen, myself included. Although I share the basic sentiment, "Support Our Troops," I do not emblazon my car with the yellow ribbon because I do not agree with its subtext. For many people, the assumed tacit meaning of "Support Our Troops" is "Support the War in Iraq" or "Support Our President's Foreign Policy." Funny, you don't see those slogans on many people's cars and trucks.

   What does it say about our society that so many nowadays are expressing their fervent patriotism in the form of temporary magnets? Are motorists more concerned about their cars' trade-in values than voicing their own moral and cultural values? Are magnets preferred in case one has to make a quick change  in the event of a shift in general public opinion? With stickers, at least, one makes a minor commitment.

   As a progressive Democrat and an objector to the Iraq war, I feel like an outsider, and I feel marginalized by the slogans on your car. And I'm lucky. People can't tell where I come from or what I think just by looking at me or hearing my last name. I can't imagine how much more deeply the sting is felt by a person whose appearance or last name makes him stand out in this jingoistic crowd as a person who might harbor dissenting opinions. 

   Don't dismiss me as a member of some phantom liberal elite. I didn't swoop into your conservative-majority community from some far-away socialist republic like Vermont. I am proud to be a liberal; I am a progressive, tolerant, socially conscious, open-minded individual who thinks wars should not be waged for political or economic exploitation. My views put me slightly to the left of the country's mainstream on many issues, but I'm not a stranger. You and I live on the same street, we buy our groceries at the same store, and our kids attend the same schools.

   Sorry to take up so much of your time with this bit of commentary. My ideology cannot be summarized on a bumper sticker.

Monday, September 19, 2005

A Familiar Topic

My regular readers may recall that I wrote a blog entry on this subject back in August, but I've fleshed it out (it went from two paragraphs to two pages), so that now it's stronger, not merely an odd thought jotted down in a hurry ... 

A Terror-Free Neighborhood

By Bill Ackerbauer  Sept. 19, 2005

Folks around these parts take the security of their homeland very seriously. I am able to sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that my wife and children are safe from evildoers, thanks to the impressive qualifications of certain rock-solid citizens who inhabit our neighborhood. Why, on this block alone, we have three licensed terrorist hunters, one of whom is quite proud to be Protected by Smith & Wesson, and two employees of a Jewish carpenter. And it goes without saying that everyone is Proud to Support Our Troops. It says so right on the back of their gargantuan Suburban Uh-ssault Vehicles.

The guy next door is as generous as he is vigilant. In addition to being one of our local anti-terror permit-holders (not Mr. Smith & Wesson), he must have included me in his will, because apparently I have permission to take his firearm in the event of his death. One never knows when one will be called on to take up the Colt M4A1 semi-automatic carbine and enter the fray — for home protection and what have you.

The third terrorist hunter on my block must use non-lethal methods such as nets or tranquilizer darts, because his Humvee doesn’t mention the Second Amendment or Charlton Heston. I suppose a few enemy combatants have to be kept alive for questioning.

The homeland can never be too secure, and lately I’ve been thinking it couldn’t hurt for us to have one more person who’s trained and duly empowered to patrol our block, to keep an eye out for any unsavory or suspicious characters. So tomorrow I'll head down to city hall and see about getting myself a permit. I imagine the background check is fairly exhaustive, but I’ve never been to Afghanistan or Iraq or France or any of those other dicey places, and I don’t think they are constitutionally permitted to hold it against me that I went to a liberalarts college. I’m not sure what sort of prerequisites they havefor official terrorist hunters, other than an unflagging love of Freedom and a set of wheels to stick the permit on, but if I pass muster you can be sure the honor will be mentioned prominently on my resume, which I intend to circulate widely just as soon as the economy picks up.

And I really should get one of those yellow ribbon magnets to make it clear which side I’m on. Everybody knows that when al-Qaida is scouting locations to start a new cell, they pick a neighborhood that fails to conspicuously Support Our Troops.

Yes, by golly, it’s a good feeling, knowing that a guy can run down to the corner store for a six-pack and a can of bean dip without having to worry about suicide bombers or anthrax in the water supply, because the terrorist hunters are on the job.

Just checking in

Sunday's concert at the church was a moderate success. The crowd was small, but it was a paying gig and we raised a little dough for the Katrina relief effort. I donated $50 of my performance fee. If I find out how much else was raised through the church's bake sale, etc., I'll post the figure on my blog in case anyone is curious.

Now, onto other matters. I'm working on a couple of longish essays for one of my courses at Albany, and I hope to have them complete and up on the blog in a few days. One is about disciplining unruly children; the other is about my hometown's "cultural identity." (Don't snicker, it has one.) Stay tuned.

To keep you occupied, I'll direct your attention to the Web site of a poet/performance artist who has written an excellent piece of work on the condition of his own hometown, New Orleans. Check it out here: Chris Chandler Homepage He's a tragicomic genius.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Gig poster

I thought I'd throw this up on the blog in case any of my local readers are feeling ambitious enough to print out some posters and help publicize the concert I'll be doing on Sunday. (See last entry or the poster for details.)

I decided to donate all of my share of the free-will offering proceeds to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. The church will be throwing in money from a bake sale that will take place before, during (?) and after the concert. Please show up hungry and generous.

Friday, September 9, 2005

Upcoming gig in Fulton County

Just a reminder to all my hordes of screaming fans: I'll be playing next Sunday, Sept. 18, at St. James Lutheran Church on North Main Street in Gloversville. The show will be the first in the church's Fall 2005 concert series. It will start at 3 p.m., and I'll probably play two sets of 40 minutes apiece. There will be some sort of meet-Smokin' Bill tea-and-biscuits reception afterward.

I've been thinking about certain songs I could play in the context of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort that's so prominent in the public eye right now. I have ruled out "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?" even though I love that song. It won't do it because A) it has too many fancy jazz chords for me to learn in a week, and B) I'm sick of seeing Harry Connick Jr. et al perform it ad naseaum on TV. (Do I get a Scrabble bonus for using two Latinisms in one sentence?)

The tunes I am leaning toward adding to my repertoire in light of the disaster are "Biloxi," a simple but beautiful reflective song by Jesse Winchester, and "Deep Blue Sea," a traditional folk song about losing a loved one to drowning and hoping for his eventual return in the sweet by and by. Feel free to suggest others by posting a comment here or sending them to me at smokinbill@aol.com.

Also note I've made some small changes to my music Web site, Smokin' Bill's Digital Depot, including some new .mp3 files. Mostly I just made a few visual changes.

 

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

Readin', Writin' and Deconstructin' the Oppresive Framework of Western Civilization

The fall semester has started at UAlbany, and I'm already in the thick of my two courses: a non-fiction prose writing workshop and a seminar called "Literature and Empire."

The workshop, obviously, will entail a significant amount of writing on my part, and the other has a heavy load of reading, both novels and theory/criticism. (Last week I went to the campus bookstore and paid $130 for eight of the 11 books required for the course. The remaining three were not available yet, so now I suppose I'll have to spend another $130 on gasoline to make another trip to Albany once they're in stock. Seems that expensive lately ...)

At any rate, my coursework will certainly put a damper on my blog productivity, so I decided I'll post some of my writing from the non-fiction workshop here. The ravenous intellectual appetites of my devoted readers must be satiated at all costs.

So here's the first offering, a short essay that I fired off after the kids went to sleep (and revised slightly while they were watching Sesame Street):

                           The Ride to Port Antonio

   It was a remarkably well-behaved chicken. Plump and massive, it sat like a glossy-feathered black Buddha in the lap of its owner and watched me with one unblinking eye. The bird neither clucked nor fussed, content to be stroked occasionally by the old woman as we sat side by side on the crowded bus that would take 10 hours to reach the other side of Jamaica.

   I'd picked a bad weekend to visit friends on the North Coast. Mudslides from a recent tropical storm had made a mess of the main road across the mountains, so buses traveling from the south had to take the coastal route around St. Thomas Parish on the eastern tip of the island. From where I was staying, in May Pen, the trip to Port Antonio would have taken half the time if the road hadn't washed out. But I was an 18-year-old exchange student on a break from school, and there was nothing better to do than spend a day on a cramped, hot bus beside a woman with bloodshot eyes, a toothless smile and a very big chicken.

   It was 7 a.m. on a Friday when I left the house and walked down the dirt track and over the bridge into downtown May Pen, pausing to let a small but slightly menacing herd of goats trot across my path. I caught a mostly full bus to Kingston: Mostly full is better than empty, because the buses don't roll until the seats and every square inch of standing room are filled with passengers. Choose a seat on a mostly empty bus, and you're liable to wait an hour for it to start moving. A person in a hurry can always pick a bus that appears to be filled to capacity, or even jump onto one that has begun to move. The greedy thugs who wrangle passengers and collect the fares are always able to find room for one more, even if it means pulling a rider in through a window in a tangle of sweaty limbs. 

   That particular morning, I was lucky to get one of the last open seats on a bus that was filling up fast, as the ones bound for the capital usually do. It headed out of May Pen, past the bank and the post office, past the drugstore and the Kentucky Fried Chicken and on its way to Spanish Town and then Kingston. I got off at the chaotic  terminal near Trench Town, a desperate, flyblown section of the capital where a few months later I would witness a riot - from the safety of another bus -  whose purpose I never learned, but whose burning tires and screaming participants are indelibly etched into my memory. 

   The terminal was a slightly more peaceful place the day I jumped off the bus from May Pen and quickly spotted one headed around the big bend to Port Antonio. This vehicle, a baby-blue former school bus,  was nearly empty, so I grabbed a seat and settled in for some downtime. A man reached in through the open window next to my head and, like an angel of vice, promptly sold me a pack of Craven 'A' cigarettes and a surprisingly cold Red Stripe.

   The latter, combined with the long wait and the oppressive heat, must have lulled me to sleep, because when I awoke, the bus was bumping along a pot-holed stretch of country road. Sunlight was winking off the dirty pastel squares of houses and the corrugated metal roofs of the ramshackle rum shops.

   And to my left was the chicken.

   There's nothing so surreal, in my experience, as  waking up on a moving bus in a foreign country and being startled by the cold gaze of an animal less than a yard from your face. After a moment of shock, I looked up to see the face of the person carrying this strange cargo. Her smile was wide enough to reveal discolored gums, and her tongue clicked with amusement. I said hello, and she nodded and mumbled something I couldn't make out. 

   We sat together for what seemed an eternity, but there was no conversation. When the bus reached Port Antonio, and the passengers started to stir, I realized with some alarm that my legs had both gone totally numb from the long hours in a seated position. The chicken lady must have sensed my problem, because she sprang up from her seat with the chicken under one stringy arm and helped me stand with the other.
I thanked her as we climbed down off the bus, and she nodded, mumbling again.

   She carried her bird off toward the waterfront, and I stumbled up the hill toward the Bonnyview Hotel, shaking pins and needles out of my legs. 

Saturday, September 3, 2005

Ouch, that smarts!

I read with some amusement that rapper Kanye West went to town during a live telethon on NBC tonight. He ripped the government's response to the situation in New Orleans, and said "George Bush doesn't care about black people." You've got to love live television.

At any rate, one of the things he said that struck me as being unfounded was the last part of this remark:

"We already realized a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us."

This made me scratch my head. I hadn't heard about any government troops being given permission to shoot anyone. I figured perhaps West was overblowing the National Guard's attempt to get the looting and general chaos under control. Then I stumbled upon this item on the Army Times Web site, which uses remarkably bellicose language to describe what's supposed to be a relief operation:

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php

They describe the situation in the Big Easy as an "insurgency!" With relief like that, who needs hurricanes?

Thursday, September 1, 2005

Gas Pains

I saw today that the price of a gallon of regular 87 octane at the Stewart's was $3.59, 40 cents more that it was the day before, and about a buck more than it was a week ago. I thought the price of gas was bad enough a year ago, when I wrote my song "Workin' Down the Line." Here's an excerpt:

Gas is so expensive it hurts to fill the tank/

While the Arabs and the Texans are laughing to the bank/

It's draining the economy, it's messing up the skies/

But we need a way to get to work, so it's time we should get wise/

There's got to be a better way to make our engines run/

We could switch to hydrogen or power from the sun/

So tell those politicians we want alternatives to gas/

Because we're sick and tired of paying out the ..."