Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don’t give you any choice
‘cause they think that it’s treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.

-- Elvis Costello, Radio, Radio

If you live in LA, you drive. No other option. Unless you work out of your home. But even then, unless you have livestock in the kitchen or a garden in the driveway, you gotta get in the car to stock the shelves. No other way to get around and get it all done. There is just too much space to traverse and too few locomotive options when picking up the coffee beans and bran muffins that get you going in the morning; the diet Dr. Pepper and donuts to get you over the afternoon hump; the pasta and salad stuff that fills you up in the evening; and the wine that brings you down, after the long day away.

Driving.

It’s like that R.E.M. song: about the constancy, the monotony, the inexorable crush of motion:

Maybe you did. maybe you walk.
Maybe you rock around the clock
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
Maybe I ride. maybe you walk.
Maybe I drive to get off, baby.

-- R.E.M., Drive

Over here, in L.A. maybe everyone drives to get off. Oh. Baby. 

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—tjmHolden

Over here, where my feet have taken roost, this is a day of celebration. One of the limited few marked on our calendars and installed in national practice. It began with a story lodged in local lore: of settlers enduring a severe winter and being confronted by likely death and indigenous people coming to their last-second rescue. From that brush with finality came the lesson of appreciation for others, a moral of helping one’s fellows, of caring for those less fortunate. A value still rooted somewhere in this nation’s collective psyche. The Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds, notwithstanding.

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—tjmHolden

It’s amazing the things one runs into in the neighborhood.

Wherever you are. Just open the door and step outside. Take a stroll, give it a little walkabout. You’re bound to run into something extraordinary.

And informative. If not life-changing.

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—tjmHolden

For a foreign visitor, the marvels of American society are many. So many that a year’s supply of blog entries are surely guaranteed.

Good news for me.

However, of the bushel of marvels waiting to be noted and singled out for attention, the most obvious is sports. And specifically, its 24-7, woven-into-the-daily fabric, nature. This is clear, of course, when one turns on talk radio and hears of political decisions that are “slam dunks” or economic strategists who get “blind-sided” by sudden shifts in global markets; there is talk by failing businesses, in times of desperation, of “throwing up a Hail Mary”, and there are unanticipated reversals of fortune that get labeled as “buzzer beaters”. “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” is a part of popular sporting lexicon, by way of opera. “Turn out the lights, the party’s over” was an expression that was first born in country music, but moved, via American football, into the societal mainstream.

I am sure you Yanks can think of others.

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—tjmHolden

Source	Source

In last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, there was an op-ed section on George Orwell.  Dubbed “Why Orwell Matters”, the section featured four writers weighing in on Orwell’s relevance to the events of today. Their main target was his “Politics and the English Language” – which was billed as ”the classic essay on the relationship between words, truth, propaganda and politics.”

That essay has been less consumed than Orwell’s subsequent dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. For those of us fortunate enough to have worked through it, (and assuming we have also kept our eyes open these past few years), we know how perceptive Orwell was concerning the manipulative machinations of those in power, especially via rhetoric and other dark arts of communication. Readers also appreciate how spot-on scary Orwell’s clairvoyance was. In the linguistic tricks of a totalitarian government like that of “Big Brother”, one not only discerns the voiceprints of Stalin or Mao, but also hears the ensuing echoes of Richard Nixon ("Peace with Honor"), Ronald Reagan ("The Evil Empire"), and especially this generation’s very own Dubya ("Compassionate Conservatism”, “The Axis of Evil”, “Weapons of Mass Destruction").

In fact, although I wish to observe that Orwellian “doublespeak” seems to have been more a tool of Republican administrations, historically speaking, it also seems hands-down the weapon of first and final recourse for the White House incumbent. Which is extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one wonders: “how could that possibly be . . . since Dubya hasn’t ever read a book in his life?”

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—tjmHolden

Source: The New Yorker

It’s a long story, but for various reasons—inhering in punishment and perfectability, alike—I am working with my son on his brain. Well, he has a considerable one, so there is not much heavy-lifting involved, but nonetheless, there are still—to paraphrase Robert Frost—miles to go before we sleep.

In the process we are both able to learn a little more about this strange land that we find ourselves co-travelers in.

The way we’re working on it is variable and varigated, depending on mood and available tools. It can take the form of playing guitars together, writing stories, reading newspapers and summarizing them, commenting on world events. And yesterday, I had him writing captions for cartoons from The New Yorker. This turned out to be the equivalent of pulling toenails with one’s teeth, but they say “the journey to the Realm of 1000 Wisdoms always begins with the first step”—or maybe that’s “by putting on the first sandal”—well, either way, what else can one do when one is adrift on a rudderless journey but put the paddle in the water and take the first stroke.

Not to mix metaphors, (but it is always good to keep all your “i"s dotted and cross all your “t"s).

So, there we are, me boy and me, sitting at the kitchen table at 10:30 p.m. Sunday night, MacBooks open, pecking out text on own keyboards, trying to fill in all the blanks. And what we came up with was . . . well . . . you’d better decide for yourselves.

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—tjmHolden