Will The Circle Be Unbroken

Charlie will willingly admit that one of the first things he noticed about me was my record collection. I had quite an impressive array of Rock'n'Roll, including Beatles albums, as well as cult favorites such as Love and the Byrds. Charlie was a dedicated folkie, but I had already passed through that phase a few years before we first met.

In 1968, after Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" was released, Charlie and I drove to Los Angeles to see him at the Troubador. It was fun! Arlo's 18-minute talking blues stretched out to over a half-hour satiric riff on Thanksgiving dinner, his arrest and the Vietnam war.

It was our first shared music and one of the first of many concerts we have enjoyed together. From blues and folk, to jazz and punk, to new wave and rock we've developed quite a breadth of taste. We've always been thrilled by what's current, as well as moved by traditional music.

Arlo was steeped in many of those traditions, and, in fact, probably learned talking blues by osmosis from his father. He inherited the Guthrie voice in every sense of the word. Not only does he have his father's flat nasal sound, but he picked up the outlook, too. Woody Guthrie was a social commentator as much as he was a songwriter. His guitar might have proclaimed "this machine kills fascists," but his songs went after social injustice. From hard-hearted bankers to dust bowl devastation, from union workers to migrants, from vigilantes to working class heroes, Woody had a song for them all. He spread the news about hardships and injustice. He could just as easily be heartfelt and serious as he could be ironic. That's where Arlo gets his wry humor.

And "Alice's Restaurant" was a natural outgrowth. The song was a phenomenon, and unlike anything else of its era, it looks backwards and forwards at the same time. The cut took up the entire side of the album and was in regular radio rotation on college stations and alternative FM. It tells how Arlo tried to clean up the mess after a communal Thanksgiving dinner, but finding the local dump locked, he tossed the garbage by the roadside, was arrested, sentenced and fined for littering. The criminal record later precluded him from the draft. He was unfit to go to Vietnam and kill communists because he was a litterbug. This musical story took all the anti-war anger, outrage and shouting and converted it to deadpan absurdity. We loved it. The tune was catchy—I can still hear it and hum it after nearly 40 years—the refrain easy to sing, the narrative funny and it was scathingly anti-war. It was the graveyard laugh we all needed at the time.

Arlo went on to record other songs, and sing with other musicians, most notably, his father's friend Pete Seeger. Both of them lived east of the Hudson River, and spent plenty of time in each other's musical company. Just last fall when we were poking around an antique store in Beacon, New York, Pete's hometown, Charlie noticed a flier taped to a window advertising an Arlo and Pete concert at a local school that coming Saturday night. We thought we might be able to get back there in a couple of days, but it was just wishful thinking.

I have been reminded of all these people and all that great music, as well as the course of our musical tastes, these last few weeks as we have avidly followed the lastest twist in Bruce Springsteen's life. Pete has been on Bruce's mind lately, too. Out on tour now with the Seeger Sessions band, who backed him on an album full of songs made famous by Pete Seeger, he stopped by LA earlier this month. I couldn't help but think back on that first concert Charlie and I went to, and how much has changed in our lives, and how many things are the same all over again. Bruce's album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" and the show are chocked full of both overt and subtle protest songs. Sitting there in the Greek Theatre I was overcome by a mixture of moods and feelings. Bruce takes us back.

Back in the late 60's we were angry and anxious about a war halfway around the globe, that was increasingly deadly and unwinable. The casualties were mounting and the atrocities were just beginning to surface. It would be nearly a decade before the government would accept the mood of the nation and the inevitable futility of the war and decide to pull out after wasting over 58,000 lives. Once we pulled out of Vietnam, we had plenty of reconciliation work to do right here in the U.S. It was a brutal lesson, but we thought America wouldn't be bringing that grief on ourselves again very soon. Surely Vietnam had taught us not to be so cocksure that the American way was the only way, and not to put young lives on the line in a foreign land for some selfish cause.

But here we are in 2006, floundering in the chaos of Iraq for "the gleam in some fool's eyes." And all those old songs sound new and right again. Bruce is just as indignant at social inequalities and wartime jingoism as Arlo, Woody and Pete. The major social issues of the 60's—war and civil rights—are still with us. When Bruce sings "Pay me My Money Down" its dance tempo energizes us to belt out the message of a fair and living wage for hard work, and "We Shall Overcome," and "Eyes on the Prize," long standards of the 60's civil rights movement, could just as easily be adopted by the marchers at any current immigration rally. But the tunes that are the most chillingly relevant are two anti-war tunes. "Mrs. McGrath," an anti-recruiting Irish jig is over two centuries old, and the original Pete Seeger composition, "Bring 'Em Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)" was written in 1965 specifically as an anti-Vietnam war song. In concert, "Mrs. McGrath" is pointed commentary, that Bruce has updated with the verse where the mother bewails her maimed son, crying:
"All foreign wars I do proclaim
live on blood and a mother's pain
I'd rather have my son as he used to be
Than the King of America and his whole navy!"

I appreciate its history and its relevance, but I'm not gripped by it. However Bruce's updated version of Pete Seeger's "Bring 'Em Home" is passionate, poignant and simply soars, like the best Springsteen anthem. In concert, Bruce begins the song solo, a single voice filled with longing.
If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Now we'll give no more brave young lives
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
For the gleam in someone's eyes
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

But when the band joins him, the song swells with the power, urgency and determination of a whole chorus of voices. Bruce—and anyone who marched in those anti-war rallies—knows what it will take to "bring 'em home." Consistent, unified and massive resistance to the politicians.

The men will cheer and the boys will shout
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah and we will all turn out
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

The church bells will ring with joy
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
To welcome our darling girls and boys
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

We know what we're in for. It's going to take a rising tide of public sentiment, massive marches and a change of administration before we admit Iraq is a quagmire. We know the gantlet we will have to endure. Politicians will denounce war protesters as traitors, lie to the public and erode civil liberties. But we've been here before. While Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld dodged the Vietnam war as only scions of the rich can do, many of us marched, shouted and sang.

We will lift our voice in song
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah, when Johnny comes marching home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

We join voices with Bruce on this hymn in hope, determination and pride. It is a song filled with optimism and love and lifts our spirits with the best sort of patriotism. At the same time I'm filled with a deep and weary melancholy, that after all these decades we have only come round to the same place again. How much our lives have changed since 1968, and yet how little; forty years on Charlie and I are still sitting at a concert listening to anti-war songs. We deserve and wish for better in our leaders than that they simply blunder back into our worst American tragedy. I just want to find out what price we have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.

Stimulation

Our juice of late is coming from the week we spent in the midwest in May and a couple recent trips to L.A. here in June. Not that Santa Barbara lacks for points and events of interest at this time of year, but festivals and parades don't always do the trick of lighting up the circuits for our peculiar passions.

Earlier in the spring, when we would mention to acquaintances that we were about to head for Milwaukee, we earned some very blank expressions and the inevitable question, "Why? You got family there?" No, not family, but friends--ones who we normally see only when they come west--and Frank Lloyd Wright. No one questions our good friends Julie and Jim, who've lived in Holland, Michigan and Racine, Wisconsin as well as Grafton (20 miles out of Milwaukee towards Green Bay), when they take the obvious holiday in Santa Barbara every few years, but we need the excuse of pursuing the work of the world's greatest architect to explain a trip in the opposite direction.

It turns out that Milwaukee is a very attractive city of an ideal size and scale, but for us the main gig is its centrality to so many important Wright structures that we wanted to visit and absorb. Wright began his career in architecture in Chicago and opened his first private practice in the suburb of Oak Park. So we made the two-hour drive and spent three days taking in the beginnings of truly modern architecture, not just in America, but in the world: Wright's turn-of-the-century home and studio, the soulful Unity Temple, and a couple dozen early commissions that essentially defined the Prairie Style--all within the modest boundaries of Oak Park, IL. And a short drive onward to South Chicago brought us to the landmark Robie House that's still yielding its secrets as restoration progresses.

Once personal scandal had driven Wright out of not only Oak Park, but also out of the country in 1909, he eventually settled his practice back into familiar territory in Spring Green, WI, a bit west of Madison, in a complex of buildings he called Taliesin. So we spent a day taking that in and trying to comprehend how the succession of structures there corresponded to the triumphs and tragedies of his very lengthy career. On the drive back to Milwaukee we stopped off at the awesomely situated new convention center he designed for Madison in the 1930s--something that wasn't built until the start of the 21st century.

Milwaukee happens to also be within a stone's throw of probably the most important building of the 20th century--the Johnson's Wax administration building in Racine. Though the Fridays-only tour schedule and the robotic tour guides provided by the company feel a bit airless, one cannot walk into that "Great Workroom" and not feel exhilarated and stimulated in a very profound way. This is why we traipse off to odd corners of the country--simply to walk into these brilliantly planned spaces, whether it's the elegant spread of a Prairie house, the curiously intimate public meeting hall of Unity Temple, or the soaring cathedral of commerce that is the Johnson building. The human spirit is always honored in the most simple and logical ways. The visitor is repeatedly taught what modernity can mean in its best sense.

This past Sunday, though, we found ourselves equally charged by an architectural vision of a very different sort: Simon Rodia's towers in Watts. Unlike Wright, Rodia clearly never planned a bit of his assemblage of iron, concrete, and wire. He had only basic hand tools, and employed the most elementary of building techniques. He simply built...and built some more as the spirit moved him. But there is an exuberance in the sheer gutsiness of these towers and arches and walls. We see the joy of building and a brazen courage to pursue an unconventional passion.

The Watts Towers, though, are not all about irrationality and goofy dreams of grandeur. There is a keen, if naive, aesthetic sense at work here that rewards detail examination. The expanses of broken tile, crockery, bottles, and seashells dazzle the eye and tap into a basic feel of what Southern California has always been--cheerful, spacious, and free.

Our motive for visiting the Watts Towers was that we had tickets that evening for performance artist Roger Guernveur Smith's one-person "show" called "The Watts Towers Project" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. In it, Smith assembles a loose personal narrative as chaotic, emotive, and seemingly random as Simon Rodia's towers, but Smith keeps circling around that neighborhood landmark of his youth and building toward personal identification with the mysterious Italian artisan he calls that "multi-lingual illiterate." Having just been to see the towers that afternoon, and experiencing the ambient surface of Watts, we had no trouble catching Smith's allusions to Marco Polo, helicopters, barbecue, and fireworks.

The excursion to Watts came less than a week after the Springsteen concert at the Greek Theatre--in a very different neighborhood of L.A. The treat here was less visual, though equally invigorating. Springsteen is touring the material on his recent Seeger Sessions disc with a band of over twice the size of his E-Street compatriots, working together as a string band, a brass ensemble, and gospel choir all in one.

If it takes Bruce to get America listening once again to American folk, spiritual, and political protest, then we're in good hands, and the music is well represented when he takes it abroad in front of audiences that are apparently even more enthusiastic than at home. He's also reworking several of his rock standards into jazz, big band, and swing formats, just to celebrate all the modes of great indigenous music beyond the borders of rock 'n' roll. And Bruce hasn't missed several opportunities to update older music by seamlessly blending new and timely lyrics with the received text (see the blog post below this one for two wonderful examples).

Stimulated? Hell, best keep the defibrillator handy.

A Better National Anthem?

Here's the link to two bracing examples of what audiences are hearing at Springsteen shows these days besides those superb readings of the American folk classics on his Seeger Sessions disc and the total re-workings of some of Bruce's own songs. These gems should be all over the radio, and if the anti-war movement doesn't make "Bring 'Em Home" into a new National Anthem...well, they're missing the obvious gift of a way to crystalize their message into a phrase and a tune that will inspire more people than a thousand speeches or petitions. And "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" comes here in a much better performance than elicited by the Leno show setting. Check them both out here:
Bruce Springsteen News: brucespringsteen.net

It's a Small World Afterall

After Tony Soprano was shot in the season six opener by Uncle Junior, he lapsed into a two-episode coma. Over the past seasons, Tony's dreams would have given his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, much to interpret, as he conferred with whacked family members on the deteriorating Asbury Park boardwalk and went driving with dead mistresses. And the coma was a rich vein of material to assess Tony's character.

But hovering at the comatose edge of his own death, Tony was first robbed of his own identity then found his wallet and suitcase full of the evidence of someone else's life. His driver's license and credit cards said he was Kevin Finnerty. He looked like Kevin Finnerty; even the Buddhist monks whose monastery Finnerty had outfitted with a shoddy heating system recognized him. They were ready to sue Tony, er Kevin, for the crappy work he had stiffed them with. He was even invited to the Finnerty family reunion, and the fellow who greeted him out front knew him. Of course the guy just happened to look like the cousin Tony had blown away at the end of season five. On the threshold of infinity, Tony/Kevin doesn't take that final walk up the steps to reunion mansion. He wakes up, heeding the bedside calls of Carmela and Meadow.

Kevin Finnerty seems to be an alternative Tony, the ordinary guy he might have been if he had gone into the heating and cooling business instead of the family business. Finnerty, too, is successful and maybe just as ruthless as Tony Soprano; he's a shrewd businessman in his own right. He seems well off, and probably lives in a nice suburb with his own family; maybe he has a boy like AJ who is a bit of a ne'er-do-well. And like Tony he's probably sent him to a good school and would bail him out of trouble, if it came to that.

As a matter of fact, he's about to do just that.

As coincidence would have it, this week's papers carried the news of three Duke University La Crosse players arrested for the rape of a black stripper. When two of the Duke players turned themselves in and sat soberly at their court arraignment, I couldn't help but notice that one of the two, Collin H. Finnerty, was accompanied by his dad, Kevin Finnerty. Collin isn't so far from AJ. Both are just teetering there at the edge of serious criminality. AJ has been in trouble for petty crimes, including vandalizing his school, and has just been caught by the "family " buying a handgun to use on Uncle Junior. As for Collin, the rape charges mark the second legal trouble for him in the past six months. A man in Washington, D.C. said he was punched repeatedly by Finnerty and two of his high school lacrosse teammates as they spouted anti-gay insults.

Kevin sits next to his son in court, looking stunned, wishing he were somewhere else, maybe even someone else. Maybe he's wishing it were all a dream. Come to think of it, this all seems to be the American Dream gone bad. The dad has made a success of himself, at least in a monetary way, and can afford private school, and the sort of lifestyle where young white boys play la crosse on wide lawns, and develop a keen sense of privilege and prejudice. It is not an isolated incident. The trio of white college boys from Alabama who torched ten rural churches this past year would feel right at home with Collin Finnerty.

Do you think David Chase knows Kevin Finnerty? Maybe not. But he certainly knows the difficulties and rot at the center of the American family and the American Dream.

The Sopranos is an unfolding great American novel. It's fiction, but fact as well. Art and real life.

Law and Order

As our nation's gut churns with a sort of cultural indigestion over the issue of immigration, I can't help referencing the discussion to a Springsteen song, "Matamoras Banks," from his 2005 solo acoustic album Devils and Dust. Matamoras is a town in Mexico just across the river from Brownsville, TX, and the song, which Bruce did in all but one of the 71 shows of the D&D tour last year, is about a border crosser's harrowing experience and his devotion to a woman back home. It starts with this grim image of the character's dead body and works backward from there:

For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound
Past the playgrounds and empty switching yards
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars

Each night, from April through November, Bruce would introduce the song with a simple declaration that what this country desperately needs is a "humane immigration policy." It took another four months to show up on cable news and in the morning papers, but the discussion over just what such a policy should entail has finally arrived. And almost everyone--regardless of political stance--feels it's about time.

Great masses have taken to the streets with nothing specific in way of policy provisions, but rather a desire for recognition and respect. Without clumping together so visibly, but perhaps in even greater numbers, constituents of heartland districts across mid-America have made it known that for them strict enforcement of immigration laws trumps sympathy and economic reality. Naturally, the folks we pay to thrash these matters out in Congress are deadlocked.

Will it be pursuit and punishment or amnesty and atonement? Walls or Welcomes? Will we sort out the problem into three tiers under a system that regards recent transgressions as more heinous than ancient ones-- or to view it more pragmatically, a sort of union seniority among scofflaws? It looks like there may be substantial fines and back taxes to be collected, lessons in language and civics to be mastered, and even then years of penance to be endured in a vast Immigration and Naturalization purgatory. Then again, there may simply be truckloads of invited guests who are time-stamped on entry, employed for specific jobs, but never allowed to move into the neighborhood.

Right now it's impossible to tell how things will shake out, but no doubt they'll work something out that makes no one happy, yet allows everyone to go back to business as usual. And there's where the sincerity of Bruce's wonderful song is eclipsed by the reality of the situation: no matter what policies are forged from this national debate, no matter what rules are written or laws enacted, no matter what compromises struck, no matter which side claims victory, the poor and desperate from Mexico and Central America will continue flooding across the border at exactly the same clip as ever.

Whether we build more fences or just levy fines, the problem will persist without significant change, because it is a matter--almost like gravity itself--of physics and mathematics. The pressure of inestimable numbers of poor but determined humans on one side of this very permeable membrane called the Mexican border will surely tend toward equalizing into the land of relative opportunity and privilege where there isn't quite sufficient numbers to fuel the economic machinery.

We've got the demand; they've got the supply. The price is right and the bargain is struck 250,000 times a day in just Southern California alone. How can any piece of legislation break apart two consenting parties interested in maintaining or bettering their circumstances of existence? If a society that wants to spend minimally on the necessities of life--such as meals in trendy restaurants, such as neatly manicured Arcadian landscapes, or reliable housecleaning and childcare--can find a willing workforce prepared to face even death to provide those services, what criminal code has the power to stay the transaction?

But it's not just raw economic forces at work here. We all have to be honest with ourselves, whichever side of the border we originate on, whatever our political sympathies; there are decided issues of national character to be reckoned with. Our culture here in the states is by nature and tradition one attuned to (if not obsessed with) rules and regulations. When we say "we are a nation of laws," we are making a statement of profound self-recognition. American culture has always regarded the rule of law and the principle of fair play as supreme values.

The British, French, German, and Scandinavian ancestry in this country has created a population that treats legal codes and constitutions--written or not--as the foundation of a workable society. The laws may need judicial interpretation and are frequently revised or abandoned to the point that criminal, civil, and tax codes fill law libraries to bursting. And for better or worse we are by tradition the most litigious society on Earth.

In this setting the term "illegal immigrant" is a precise and potent description, but the word that rankles and alarms is not, as protesters would have us believe, the noun "immigrant," but rather the adjective "illegal." When they use the term, generally, Americans are not questioning the legitimacy of a person's humanity, but rather of their immigration status. There is a difference.

A few details for people who value legal specifications: The last major change in U.S. immigration policy occurred with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. That law replaced a quota system based on national origins with a system of preferences to determine who would gain entry. The most important preference was given to relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens. Preferences were also given to professionals, scientists, artists, and workers in short supply. Total immigration from Eastern Hemisphere countries was limited to 170,000 with no more than 20,000 individuals from any single country.

For the first time the law also limited the number of immigrants from Western Hemisphere countries, with the original overall quota set at 120,000. Actually, neither quota is binding because immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, such as spouses, parents, and minor children, are exempt from the quota, and the U.S. has admitted large numbers of refugees at different times from Vietnam, Cuba, and other countries. Finally, many individuals enter the United States on student visas, enroll in colleges and universities, and eventually get companies to sponsor them for a work visa. Thus, the total number of legal immigrants to the United States since 1965 has always been larger than the combined quotas. And then there's also the Diversity Visa lottery program, mandated by Congress in 1990, which makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Of course, Mexico and Guatamala, to name a couple, are not on that list at this time.

If rules and regulations matter to you, the best place to check them is at the State Department web site

On the other hand, can we admit that Mexican, Central American, and South American cultures are NOT noted for being particularly obsessed with legal exactitude? These are societies that--I'll try to be polite here--function more on a practical recognition of individual interests and a looser rein of authority than we are used to in this country. Not that Americans are paragons of virtue and obedience to the law, but there is a level of official corruption and widespread cutting of corners that goes on south of the U.S. border that would just feel, shall we say, alien to us here. We are far more prone to find underhanded, sneaky, conniving means of evading the laws. But we know those laws have teeth, and we fear the repercussions. This is not a universal truth in the Western Hemisphere.

The point is...I don't think the people who disregarded the rules about applying for a visa or legal residency, who instead paid their life savings to a coyote to sneak them across the border, risking life and limb to get here, are now suddenly going to queue up as if for the #19 bus up Shaftsbury Ave. for their INS paperwork and lectures on the three branches of the federal government. Nor will the hordes amassing tonight along the Rio Grande really care what sort of compromise is struck in Congress to satisfy the folks back home in Indiana and Oklahoma. Some people will pursue their compulsion to make regulations and others will blithely continue to indulge their inclination to ignore such falderal.

Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks

Why worry?

"Deep greens and blues
Are the colors I choose..."

Late winter is the best time for my garden. The rain has awakened the flowers—not ones I have slaved to pull out of pony packs and plant throughout the garden beds; I gave up that routine years ago. These are flowers I can count on to be faithful beauties when the calendar says summer is still far away. Trailing periwinkle with its blue stars are the under-painting, along with blue-daisyed brachycome and magenta geranium and a wide swath of blue chalk stick. The grey arctotis blooms its fuschia flowers first, and then come purple and gold freesias, followed by blue Dutch iris.

Less than a decade ago, it dawned on me that I should luxuriate in the blues and grays of native foliage, and in a single stroke one afternoon the bed of a dozen roses was razed. Since then my "silver garden" has grown, more or less, like Topsy. I plant, prune and pull things that thrive or don't. During winter and spring the garden tends to itself with a verdant display sprinkled with blues and purples.

Our patio, framed by our exterior decorating, is driven by my plant and pottery collection. (If you have more than one of a thing you are on your way to being a collector.) And I am well on my way to a collection of blue pottery, with a larger oriental oil jar hidden in the dark green clivia, and two herb pots, one ultramarine and another pale-blue violet. Last fall I reclaimed a bench from our basement, completely restored it and gave it a coat of turquoise paint. I like the blues being at the far edge of the spectrum to the natural colors. Right now the blues are bright touches, later in summertime the silvers with be cool and restful.

Can life be any better?

Decadence

The word gets used loosely these days--often lightly or humorously, and even admiringly. But I think the term is becoming more and more relevant, worrisome, and applicable to contemporary American culture, which is to say--in acknowledging our global influence--nearly everywhere. We live our daily lives amidst all the signs and symbols of a society in decay. No point in denying it. It happens to the best; why assume it can't happen here?

It must be apparent to all who've read even a smidgen of history that all great cultures thrive and then decline in an arc that spans lifetimes, but allows appraisal from within for those who notice the details. Our nation's rise was marked and steady for about 350 years. That its fruitful fields were cleared by genocide and its crops propagated through involuntary servitude, that it suffered seismic economic shocks and close calls with extinction does not diminish its ultimate triumph among nations in the modern world. During and after World War II the United States became what it is today: an economic colossus and supreme cultural model.

Now, well, isn't it clear we are gleefully embracing the backward slide? The economic engine continues to fire with enough horsepower to create the illusion of progress, but the wheels are falling off the vehicle, and the venerable road atlas has been exchanged for a pirate's treasure map. Serious rust has set in on the undercarriage while we polish the cup holders, and like decay of all sorts, it starts small and nearly invisibly. But let's look at some of those insidious bits that, because our culture thinks them appealing or accepts them as inevitable, aren't likely to be reversed

• "Reality" Television: Where do we start? Perhaps the Survivor gambit has crested, but American Idol has reached new heights of popularity by encouraging greater acrimony among contestants, and recently treating its audience to the show's first genuine injury, as C-list actress Kristy Swanson got her chin slammed against the ice while being twirled by her partner. And wasn't it truly entertaining to see Barry Bonds in drag as Paula Abdul? And then there's Fear Factor. Can the thrill of watching people eat buffalo testicles be topped by busty Playboy Playmates eating bug-covered strawberries? The genre is limitless and my guess is that we ain't seen nothin' yet.

• "Premium" Jeans: What harm is there, you may say, in paying $250 and up for a pair of blue jeans if you have the funds to do so? Here's where semiotics comes in: What does it signify when sturdy, utilitarian blue denim pants are subjected to industrial strength bleaches and other chemicals, abraded with gravel, and essentially torn to shreds with grinders and sanders to create a trendy "distressed" appearance--much as if they'd been worn and worked in for years--so as to merit a price tag that could be ten times that of a pair of new Levis and be discarded the next season for another pair of slightly different pocket design or with fewer (or more) belt loops?

To me it signifies an economy that generates paper profits rather than substantial wealth and a culture that believes in the principle of hard work but prefers not to do any. We are so removed from actual labor and so confused about the difference between authentic and simulated achievements in our day-to-day lives, that fashion must be forged with irony and status purchased with a debased currency.

• "Pre-emptive" Wars: Let's face it, we are mired in an unwholesome, failing military enterprise in the Middle East because our leaders thought we as a nation needed to vent our rage over recent humiliations at home. We figured that every once in a while we should pick up some smaller, poorer nation and slap it silly, just to bolster our street cred that we are not to be messed with. We knew quite well that Iraq had no means to threaten us in any way, that its leader was a contained regional menace, and that he had no connection whatsoever to the real threats to our security.

But the Bush inner circle felt confident that Iraq was "do-able" and would serve as an example to nations we didn't really want to tangle with, such as Iran or North Korea. Besides, W likes to see himself as a "war president" leading the unbaptized world to the salvation of western democratic capitalism. That his vanity becomes our nation's policy, says a lot about our sense and well-being. Given a choice, this seems to be what we prefer--arrogance, stupidity, stubbornness, and naiveté.

• Self-inflicted Malaise: Oddly, as our nation becomes more and more concerned about common health issues and talks endlessly about nutrition, fitness, and the need for exercise, we become more and more afflicted with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Medical science and pharmaceutical companies offer better and better surgical techniques and patented medications to combat these ailments, but the fact is our society is tremendously over-fed and poorly nourished, that we bring metabolic diseases on ourselves in ever greater numbers, and have poisoned our environment so thoroughly that cancer of one sort or the other has become an odds-on bet for the average citizen, regardless of family history. How could that be?

Decadence is rooted in the ironic curse of abundance. We over-eat because there is so much food--most of it highly processed and adulterated with chemicals meant to preserve what should be consumed fresh and to enhance the flavors sacrificed in the processing plant. It's circular, it's unhealthy, but profitable and convenient for producers and consumers alike. It is the new economics of plenty.

The demands of our daily occupations squeeze out the time we previously allowed to meals, so we make do with huge quantities of "fast food" that is both over-priced and relatively inexpensive at the same time. Have you tried Hardee's Monster Thickburger--1,420 calories and 107 grams of fat? That's two one-third-pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame seed bun. The sandwich alone sells for $5.49 or $7.09 with medium fries (520 calories) and soda (about 400 calories). And that's just lunch!

Is all this logically connected? Perhaps not, but then why wait for Dan Brown to put it all together into a singular conspiracy theory when Englophool has a perfectly reasonable theory of atrophy and decay?

Back to Work, sort of

Though we've had no complaints whatsoever about retirement, we've recently rejoined the working world for a couple months here in the mid-winter, and it certainly is a trip. About a year and a half ago when we were embarking on full-time leisure, we picked up definite vibrations from colleagues and the media that people in our position would, of course, be looking for ways to continue "working." The assumption was that we'd be bored and restless, and, naturally, want--if not need--additional income to supplement two teachers' pensions.

Well, we haven't been bored, not for a second, and we haven't been cutting back on food or anything else, for that matter, that we have a taste for. But here we are now getting up at 5:45 a.m. five days a week, putting in eight hours a day out at the University--carrying a lunch bag most days--and shuffling all the household "business" to the weekends. Even our gym hours have had to be re-arranged.

We're working stiffs again, but with a difference: It's entirely a matter of choice, and though we're committed to the task--methodically reviewing and scoring admissions applications from candidates desiring to make up next year's freshman class at UCSB--we are not embroiled in it or consumed with it or left sleepless by it in the way that a good teacher always is with teaching. It's a job; we try to do it well, but we don't take it home, nor do we need to. There's no outside preparation necessary, and when we leave campus at the end of the day, the work stays behind--both physically and mentally. The evenings and weekends are entirely our own. And if one of us is sick, we stay home and recuperate. No need for lesson plans or substitutes.

And, perhaps best of all, we work with and for some very competent and interesting people. We have learned much from these people who have greater experience in the field, and we have come to respect their wisdom about what may be seen generally as a very murky process. As teachers we were headstrong individualists and skeptics, if not malcontents, but in our second career as application readers our goal is to be malleable and conform to pre-established norms, and, you know, it's kind of soothing.

What we do by the hour is peruse UC admission applications--each an 8-page document filed online and printed in what looks to be 8 or 9 point Microsoft Verdana--to evaluate the student's "academic promise" and assign each a number from one to nine. That number totes in with a couple other numbers based on objective computations that consider grades, SAT scores, and socio-economic status and leaves the individual student somewhere on a vast continuum of students. At some point later on--before acceptance letters go out in early March--a cut off line is established along that continuum. To a great extent these students' fates are in our hands, but like the soldiers in the firing squad, no one really knows which rifle chambers the live bullet--in this case, when the score we give is ultimately decisive. The kid's fate may have been determined entirely by the strength or weakness of grades, or by test scores, or even by the challenges of a family background that has made the very eligibility for UC an impressive accomplishment. Anyway, we also have no idea whether the applicant really wants to come to UCSB in the first place. Fewer than one out of four who UCSB offers to accept will ultimately enroll.

But we play it straight with each application and try to find as much as we can of the qualities that the UCSB faculty has identified for us as desirable. Ironically, we must give a number to the whole panoply of factors in a student's academic record and personal experience that have not otherwise been boiled down to numbers. We work from definite guidelines and scoring rubrics, but in the end it is subjective, and we must make a judgment call that could be decisive for a student's future. Everyone who has earned eligibility to UC in general can attend some campus within the nine-campus system, but UCSB has within the last decade earned the reputation that allows it to be selective, and it wants to make the best use of that privilege which it shares with the big boys at Berkeley and UCLA.

It's an intellectually engaging process, especially when we break the silence and converse with one or several of our colleagues about a specific issue that has arisen with a particular application. The discussions are lively and necessary to keep us together as a team. We work as individuals, but our standards are necessarily shared. Large-group norming sessions are a required weekly affair, but the small group in our particular room--usually about five of us--are continually norming ourselves throughout a typical day. And the sheer diversity of human stories captured in the three personal essays that each student writes is astounding even to jaded former English teachers.

The only drawback seems to be the totally sedentary nature of the work. We've never before experienced the complete inertia of office work, and our tail bones and muscular-skeletal systems are about to register complaints with Cal-OSHA. And God knows what the constant supply of junk food means for our blood glucose levels.

But we'll survive through February and celebrate retirement again with a renewed appreciation. Of course, there will also be a 2007 freshman class to assemble. That batch will include the last students we taught as ninth graders at Dos Pueblos. It seems to have been a very gradual process of bowing out for us. Perhaps we're not destined to ever quite leave school behind.

Striking Terror

If we were somehow actually fighting militant Islamic bogeymen in Iraq with our occupying army, I'd probably say, "Go to it, boys; I'm with you all the way." If Iraq had been a home base for terrorist plotters, I could see the sense in this senseless enterprise which is neither full-scale war nor legitimate nation-building, since there is very little direct engagement with anything resembling a military force, and we have pointedly stepped aside from Iraq's political arena.

I'm not the first to point out that Iraq, rather than being a terrorist breeding ground, was, in fact, one of the few countries in the region that refused to truck with Muslim fanatics and had the wherewithal to keep them at bay. It's safe to say that Iraq had fewer al-Qaeda operatives at work within its borders than--take your pick--New York, New Jersey, California, or Florida.

As the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate continues asserting that U.S. operations in Iraq are on a crucial mission to fight international terrorism, I'm thinking, "How clueless and short-sighted do you think we Americans are?" We aren't fighting terrorists there; we are their greatest, most effective supporters and enablers.

There WERE no terrorists in this location until we drew them in and gave them the biggest, juiciest targets they could possibly have ever imagined. They don't even have to fake passports, kill time in sleeper cells, or spend their lightly-laundered money on flight schools. They just drift over unguarded borders into welcoming neighborhoods and bingo! There's more defenseless targets than they can count. Imagine how difficult things would have been for these zealots after 9/11 if Bush hadn't worked so diligently to spin world sympathies around 180 degrees and make the U.S. the most hated nation again, and then bait the trap with 150,000 pieces of cheese.

If there were something akin--but antithetical to--the Nobel Peace Prize that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shared in 1978, it would be an Anti-Peace Prize shared by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and George W. Bush. Neither could do it alone, but together--why, they're dynamite. Literally.

So, now we're supposed to believe that Bushy has a "Plan for Victory." Of course, the plan is to keep on doing what we've been doing so successfully until. . .well, that's exactly what's not in the plan. Bush says we'll leave when the Iraqi security forces are ready to take over. And when will that be? The military brass are quick to explain that the Iraqis will be ready to take over by the time we leave. Exactly! Set your clock by it.

The misadventure of the Iraq invasion is a catastrophe of untold proportions and uncountable dimensions. Not only did the neo-con cabal distort intelligence so badly to "confirm" the existence of non-existent weaponry that our nation is smeared permanently with egg on its face, but in doing so they have undermined the effectiveness of our own intelligence gathering forces for perhaps decades, and tarnished the reputation of an extraordinary ex-soldier serving as an extraordinary diplomat. This same crew of Keystone Cowards have sent over 2,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians to their graves for the big lie (repeat it often enough and people believe it without proof) that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots.

This war on terrorism has so consumed us that we are expected willingly to trade liberty for security and look the other way as our leaders institutionalize torture and then lie straightfaced to us and the world to deny it.

I have to admit, I'm thoroughly terrified.

Bob Dylan and Me

"Me and you we've known each other
Ever since we were sixteen
I wished I would have known
I wished I could have called you
Just to say good-bye, Bobby Jean."
Bruce Springsteen, Bobby Jean

We were pals back in the early 60s, Bob and I, but then he went on without me. As Bruce says about his adolescent confidante Bobby Jean, "We liked the same music...we liked the same clothes," but then he plugged in that guitar and started singing about God knows what. I was left wearing my Bob Dylan uniform, strumming away on sanctimonious anthems of soaring ideals, secure in my pre-packaged condemnations of social injustice and certain that the times they were a-chanigin'-- just not too much. But he didn't need me anymore, and I had other friends anyway.

I'm reminded of this episode, of course, by the recent release of Martin Scorsese's brilliant film about Dylan's early career and first artistic metamorphosis No Direction Home. I'd watched the DVD and inhaled the soundtrack days before the PBS broadcast aired. It was absolutely riveting to see not only Dylan in that era but all the other important figures of my formative years--the teenage Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk ...

But I have been "assigned" to write about my own memories of the 1965-66 Dylan transition by a former student who always has had a great awareness of important music and a nose for a human story. I remember his asking ingenuously once or twice as a teenager for my take on the 60s as an important era of social turmoil. I always brushed him off, saying it wasn't that exciting to hear about. I did so not because the era wasn't pretty exciting or the music extraordinary, but because I didn't want to come off as stuck in the past when there was so much going on at the moment. But you asked, Jonathan, so here goes.

I got my first guitar for Christmas 1960. I hadn't even heard of Bob Dylan at the time, but I guess he'd gotten his first guitar a few years earlier because now we can hear his first recording--a low-fi tape made by a high school friend in 1959. He's moaning away on a solemn folk spiritual, "When I Got Troubles." Didn't we all.

I'd been working on my guitar chords for a year or so when I discovered the music I wanted to learn and duplicate. It came to me via an L.A. FM station, KRHM, and the d.j. was a very witty and knowledgeable host named Les Claypool. So it was folk music for an hour every weeknight at 9 p.m. and four hours on Saturdays, from 8 'til midnight. For the longest while, everything I knew about folk music was provided in recordings and commentary from Les Claypool. And as soon as Dylan's first album came out, it was on the air at KRHM.

It's hard to describe a first exposure to Bob Dylan. We folkies were used to musicians with the raw frankness of Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly. Many of the traditional balladeers and bluesmen even had quite melodious singing voices--think of Cisco Houston, Brownie McGee, or Bill Broonzy--yet we didn't expect everyone singing this stuff to sound like Glenn Yarborough or Joan Baez, but Dylan was something else. That twang was an uneasy mix of the Minnesota prairie and Oklahoma plains transplanted to Greenwich Village. He seemed to be intentionally abrasive, so rough around the edges that you had to take him or leave him alone, but could never ignore him or lump him together with others of his sort.

But most of us--and we were a vast, youthful army of folk freaks--loved him, loved the craggy voice, attended every word of the early songs, adopted the sneer for ourselves because we felt the same way about racism, poverty, and pointless war. We were relieved of the need to discover the world's rottenness and corruption because we had only to sign on to this visionary's articulation of the problems we faced. Learn the chords, learn the words, copy the intonation, wear the blue work shirt...and voilà, you were a serious, sensitive person also.

That (and the inspiration of several others like the Native American song-writer Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia, and an array of hot-picking bluegrass bands) got me nearly though my sophomore year of college. That year, though, was when Dylan took the first steps toward re-defining his place in the music world. He clearly needed to say more than he had been, play differently that he had been, and rattle the complacency he had inadvertently created.

He "came out" as a decisively rock artist in the summer of '65 at, of all places, the serene and scholarly Newport Folk Festival, but his fans were already dealing with the electric shock of half the tracks on Bringing It All Back Home. I remember discussing the "Dylan's new sound" with one or two friends of the folk faith. We were more amused than dismayed. Dylan seemed to be trying so hard to put people off, which in a way had always been his gig, so we refused to be as shocked as we were supposed to be.

Most of our major folk heroes, remember, were men and women much older than ourselves--the generation that was recording in the fifties, forties, and even the thirties. People like Pete Seeger or Jack Elliot were still youthful liaisons to an older group of icons--Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, the Rev. Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotton and others. Hell, some were even dead already. Dylan was one of us. Our age. He could change his groove any time he wanted, and we would just wait and see how it turned out. Nonetheless, I do remember doing an early form of Amazon mail order, sending a copy of Bringing It All Back Home to my brother for no reason or occasion other than to gross him out.

I was premature, though. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, soon to follow, were more outrageous and undeniably the work of genius. I wasn't aware at the time of the reaction he had gotten across England on his 1965 tour filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, but I don't think I would have been one of those creepy Dylan worshippers who shouted imprecations at him nightly as he tried to bring them something curious he'd just come up with, such as, say, "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Ballad of a Thin Man." I always liked the iconoclasts, the ass-kickers, the dare-devils of pop culture. Nothing kept me from going to clubs like the Ash Grove in Hollywood, the Ice House in Pasadena, or the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach just because Bob Dylan had stopped appearing at Gerde's Folk City in New York.

Dylan was at the height of his creative powers and naturally his music was controversial, not just because it was no longer folk or "protest" (whatever that is that something like "Desolation Row" isn't), but because he was breaking loose from literalism and sober metaphor into regions of wild subjectivity and free association. This, of course, is what painters and orchestral composers had been doing for over a half century, while "popular music" remained bound by the restraints of objective report. I wish I'd paid closer attention at the time, but a solo acoustic guitar player had fewer options if he lacked the amp, the Fender and a few mates to fill out a band--especially if he was working on something of importance that Dylan and other budding musicians, like the guy down the hall in my UCSB dorm, Robbie Krieger, weren't working on, a college degree.

So it wasn't until nearly a decade later--after I'd graduated, gotten married, and launched into a teaching career and Dylan had fully recovered from his motorcycle accident and regained interest in making new music--that we connected again. The album was Blood on the Tracks, and I was onboard again. It was not until this mid-seventies period that I would see him live for the first time, and then watch him wade through his born again phase. Now THAT was agonizing, especially when the music was so strong and the sentiment so sappy.

But we got through that together and moved on. Don't think twice, pal, it's all right.

Testing...testing

Ok, I guess it's best to accept the fact that the current educational panacea is testing and more testing. The high-stakes testing lifestyle seems to be unavoidable these days, though I also sense the mood of educators is starting to shift toward defiance now that it's clear where things are headed: inescapable, unmerited humiliation for all involved--students, schools, school districts, and whole communities.

While schools are doing better, more professional work than ever, solving more students' problems than ever, and tackling more of the obstacles society tosses in the way of their mission, along comes a legion of politicians--from both the federal and state levels--anxious to rap somebody's knuckles with punitive testing and (bend over, please!) "accountability" schemes.

A week or so ago the L.A. Times editorialized passionately against a bill currently kicking around in Sacramento that would offer a very limited number of students in the state to receive a high school diploma even though they'd been unable to pass the state's High School Exit Exam. These students will have fulfilled all their school districts' unit and course requirements, will have taken all possible remedial courses, and have failed the exit exam at least three times.

The Times was horrified that the legislature should even consider backing down on the newly established testing hurdle. Fact is, the State Department of Education backed off two years ago from their original plan to enforce the law for the class of 2004 and dodged the firestorm of protest and lawsuits sure to come their way from some 75,000 (mostly underprivileged minority) families of students denied diplomas at the eleventh hour of their pathetically underfunded, but free public education.

But now the ax is poised to fall and everyone--politicians and students alike--are going to have to live with their shortcomings. Or will they? Predictably, the politicians are looking for a way around the inevitable. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of their prehistoric brains, these people know what teachers everywhere learn in a couple semesters of service--that when you attempt to teach a challenging curriculum to the entire range of pupils and set reasonable expectations for achievement, you will inevitably still have students who don't succeed.

It's just how things are. It isn't a matter of how high or low the expectations for success are set, and it's not a matter of how skilled the teacher is or how much pressure is put on the school's principal. It just can't be avoided.

Let's go even further, though. Let's admit that it's not just that some students don't or won't work hard enough to meet expectations, but, in fact, in any school there are students who CAN'T meet our reasonable standards. There are more of them than we would care to acknowledge. They don't read because after years of trying, they still can't get beyond decoding some simple letter combinations, and words never come alive for them on a page, as they do for the rest of us. They never catch on to the magic of numbers and the power of symbolic logic because they just aren't wired that way.

They are the ones who belie our beautifully stated little mission statements that assert that all students can learn.

Well, all students can learn something, but the days of trying to evaluate what these unfortunate individuals can and can't accomplish individually have long since expired. Schools now exist in the realm of universal content standards and assessment goals. It's all measurable in terms of an Academic Performance Index and precise calculations of Adequate Yearly Progress,

Here's how one state's Web site summarizes it: No Child Left Behind requires each state to define adequate yearly progress for school districts and schools, within the parameters set by Title I. Each state begins by setting a "starting point" that is based on the performance of its lowest-achieving demographic group or of the lowest-achieving schools in the state, whichever is higher. The state then sets the bar--or level of student achievement--that a school must attain after two years in order to continue to show adequate yearly progress. Subsequent thresholds must be raised at least once every three years, until, at the end of 12 years, all students in the state are achieving at the proficient level on state assessments in reading/language arts and math.

As schools fall behind--as any statistician or Vegas bookie can tell you they all inexorably will--they are designated as PIS. The No Child Left Unscrewed folks tell us that's an acronym for Program Improvement School, but we all get the message. Obviously, the fatal ingredient in this witch's brew is the phrase, "until...all students in the state are achieving at the proficient level on state assessments..."

Now, if we can't bring ourselves to admit that's not going to happen, then at least we can acknowledge the consequences and stand behind our choices as resolutely as we launched into the scheme. For instance, the state legislature--and indeed the L.A. Times--should tell us how admirable it is that a high school diploma is beyond the reach of so many young people who have hung in there to the bitter end, how good it is for character building to face one's limitations and accept "no" for an answer. This is doubly ennobling when your experience with English is limited to just a few years and you go to a decaying, overcrowded school in an immigrant neighborhood where standard formal English is rarely heard except on school campuses.

If we aren't quite that cynical yet, then why shouldn't we make some effort to regard a pubic education as a win-win proposition for everyone. If we don't want to hand out diplomas to the undeserving, then let's hand out certificates of completion that testify to a student's motivation and perseverance. By all means, make a high school diploma stand as a credible academic degree, but perhaps we shouldn't push every child toward that degree when our society also needs people with non-academic skills. It's reasonable to assume that even the shiftless, the recalcitrant, and the learning disabled will eventually build on their rudimentary educations and pick up the skills of their trades--whatever they may be.

Let's face it, the extent of unameliorated poverty in this country, exposed by recent experiences with natural disasters, is not the result of faulty schools or languishing academic standards. It's the result of callous attitudes and perpetual neglect.

Would that there were standardized tests for those traits.

Death Be Not Proud

It's often occurred to me that religion is mislabeled poison. It parades as a cure, but is, in fact, a gruesomely destructive element in a culture. Most of the time we don't notice, because within a particular society everyone is partaking of the same concoction and enjoying the same sense of euphoria. It's when folks within a culture start breaking into coteries with different tastes in poisons that the chaos ignites--or when we stick our noses univited into someone else's Kool Aid binge.

But I hadn't thought much about how time and tide move us along past the sticking points that could make things even worse. That is, until I had a chance to see an exhibit of Rembrandt paintings at the Getty Center in L.A. this weekend. Grim insight into what's going on within the world of Islam may be a curious connection to make with the Dutch master's marvelous series of late religious portraits, but nonetheless, that's what popped up for me after looking at a roomful of saints, apostles, and sorrowful virgins created by arguably the greatest portrait painter since the Renaissance.

The exhibit, which ended yesterday, collected sixteen of Rembrandt's paintings from late in his life, when he suffered poverty and personal loss. The paintings, though apparently not consciously a suite or series, are consistent in subject, size, tone, and palette. They are, without variation, dark, somber, brooding, and focused on death. The painting of St. Bartholomew above is pretty typical: a deeply contemplative figure placed before us because of his commitment to his beliefs, symbolized both in the pose and facial expression, but also, just for good measure, in his obvious display of the tool of his own martyrdom--in this case a large knife.

The paintings, which thoroughly blur the distinction between religious iconography and portraiture, are brilliant, moving work, but when I finished with the whole show, it struck me that Christianity has historically been absorbed with death and martyrdom as central to its sway over followers of the faith. In Rembrandt's day--some 350 years ago--Christianity made its most forceful pitch to the faithful by reminding them of inevitable death and the glory of self-sacrifice.

Since the Reformation, of course, the message has eased off the gloom and eventually moved toward more of a "praise the lord" and "born again" campaign that sells better to an upwardly mobile middle class demographic. Modern day Christians not only don't see any conflict between piety and plutocracy, but can't conceive that God should ask more of us than self-realization. Good Christians network and thrive to model for the world the benefits of divine grace.

But when you stare into the faces of those early Christian martyrs, you see faces that express a brooding sorrow for mankind and a need to live up to the logical demands of religious commitment. And then you realize that this is the religious mode that ticks us off so much when we encounter it today in our dealings with Muslim zealots. We are revolted that someone who follows a major religion of the world-- a religion that seems to promote tenets of peace and brotherhood--should have sects and ideologues who also praise and practice martyrdom and ultimate commitment to a deity.

The problem is not a conflict between Christianity and Islam--they are as consanguineous as cousins raised in different towns--but rather the tendency of a branch of modern Muslim thinkers to revere the past and detest what has become of their society in the course of time. But then, is that any different from the new breed of Christian fundamentalists who long for a return to an America of 150 years ago or so? What's the difference between an imam with his knickers in a twist over women who won't keep their faces hidden in public and a pastor who goes to a school board meeting to take a stand against teaching evolution?

Religion itself is an excuse to close your mind, indulge your prejudices, and act out your hostilities. Christ's sacrifice and the nobility of Christian martyrdom has a certain poetic and transcendent beauty because it's enshrined in a distant, sepia-toned past, while suicide bombers and paradise-bound jihadists turn our stomachs because they live in today's headlines and spread their message on the Internet. Beyond that, God is God, Allah is Allah, and Death is Death.

A Little Deal

With California gasoline prices boldly surging over $3.00 a gallon, and a barrel of sweet crude trading upwards of $65.00, can the gas crisis be far behind? But no one speaks of that. No one predicts shortages or long lines at the gas pumps. Sure scooter sales are up, but SUVs still dominate the road and consume more than their share of the gasoline supply. They are road hogs in more that one sense.

Yesterday a jaunty school-bus yellow Hummer sped past me on the freeway and it came to me. We could solve our gas problems and enlistment quotas at a swift and simultaneous stroke.

Here's the plan: Let's tell the guy who walks onto the showroom floor shopping for a shiny H2, that he can have a great price anytime he wants as long as he's willing to stop by the recruiter's desk conveniently located in the office. In fact, the ONLY way he is gong to get that boxy sex machine is to FIRST sign on the dotted line with the man in the uniform. If he wants the Hummer, he's gotta do the hitch.

Heck, he can get his wheels right away. He and his H2 can be on their way to streets of Baghdad within a matter of hours.

The plan is sooo beautiful and simple. The Hummer driver is the very one who is patrolling and protecting the very thing he has to have to keep his love alive--oil. He's the guy who's using up the gasoline, and he's the one out there making sure the petrol is in our pumps. Makes sense doesn't it? Who can argue with that? The military meets its quotas; the folks who use the most oil are those taking an active interest in securing it, and GM still sells cars.

America's taste in cars and policy in the Middle East are not one thing and another, they are hand in driving glove. As an English teacher I can read the symbols, and we need look no further than the SUVs clogging up the highways to see why we invaded Iraq. The globe is littered with brutally repressive dictators. Hell, many have been or still are our allies. But these are generally third-world agrarian fiefdoms. What's so vital about the freedom of Iraqis that we should care so deeply?

Let's face it, it's the oil, not the freedom, not the democracy, and certainly not the WMDs that put our boots on their ground. What kind of war are we in, when no general public sacrifice is required to support our efforts. The only sacrifices are those made by the two thousand families whose soldiers have died in a pointless war while the rest of America tools around on the nation's fine highways.

That guy in the yellow H2 could have gotten the same charge with a prescription for Viagra, and I'll bet filling up the gas tank on the HumVee cost about as much as a stop by his local pharmacy.

Listen to stuff happening

We've written recently about the play Stuff Happens that is currently on at the Taper in L.A. Finally, it's gotten the attention of NPR, and, of course, they've done a great presentation. Check out this link and listen to both their story and some additional audio clips from the production: NPR : 'Stuff Happens': The Iraq War as History Play

Once Around

For us the passing of a year was always measured by the cycles of the school year. The year began, not on January first, but on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and rolled by school holidays, winter vacation, spring break, and pushed over the hump of Memorial Day to the last school day in mid-June. Summer vacation was literally free time, before the year began again in the fall. For the first time since we both headed off to kindergarten back in the early 1950's, we have had an entire year off.

"How's retirement; what do you do?" friends ask. One former colleague, long retired, warned us that we would get bored, and need to go out and get jobs. So far, we haven't felt any burning desire to do anything like that. Retirement is great! And we do lots of different things.

Our weeks have found a rhythm. The structure of the week is anchored by the gym. Just like our high school students would build their schedules around particular classes, we, too, have picked out our favorite teachers and classes in the group fitness schedule. It is a balanced array of workouts--some weightlifting, lots of cardio and some yoga. Toward the end of the week we work in a mid-morning sit in the Starbucks nearest the gym. It's a little treat to talk books, plan menus and inevitably run into friends.

Our social calendar seems to be pretty full and delightfully flexible. We have long-time friends over for dinner, and we have a wide-open choice of days. And we have acquired a whole new circle of friends from the gym, people we really do have a lot in common with, whether they are our instructors or fellow students.

All in all, it's what can only be called "the good life" that is associated with that other clichéd ideal, "the golden years"--but if that metaphor is intended to imply sunsets and autumnal pursuits, it doesn't fit here yet. This is the good life that kicks in with the sun still over head, with high tide, with active appetites, and with peaches that have a little further to ripen before being picked.

So where did a whole year without academia go? What did we accomplish? It was not so much a matter of quantity or even quality, but rather timing and pacing. It was, in a word, sane. But for the record:

• We did a little traveling in the fall, covering some familiar territory but in a season that created a fresh experience. London theatre starts to get a bit more serious in the fall, and the bulk of American tourists thin out, improving the whole experience. The French countryside in October is at its best and, again, the Euro hordes have gone back to work. We helped harvest a wine grape vineyard one Saturday and enjoyed the most incredible rural déjeuner as a reward. We got into the last of the prehistoric polychrome cave painting sites open to the public with just a day's advance booking.

• In January we took ten days to show some of our favorite spots in the Southwest to our English friends who so often host us in London and the south of France.

• The garden gets near-daily attention now and is starting to show it. We've defined anew some portions of our modest backyard with rocks dug up on the property or scavenged from the neighborhood, brought plants to a once barren area in the center of things, re-engineered the irrigation system, and replaced two very aged orange trees with a couple youngsters, who we wish were as hardy as their predecessors.

• Perhaps most remarkable has been the chance to read fiction for pleasure, something previously restricted to summer and winter breaks. Just write to Englophool if you're interested in specific recommendations; we now have plenty!

• In February and March we had the pleasure of working with the cast of DP's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, helping a group of very sharp, eager, and talented students understand what can be discovered in the language of Shakespeare.

• Most days we can find an hour to do the crossword puzzle from the L.A. Times. We do it online in shifts, each lending his or her expertise, and thus try to keep both our minds limber.

• We're cooking and eating more creatively than ever, and also able to entertain friends much more frequently, even--gasp!--on weekday evenings or lunch.

• And we get up in the light.

Not on Television

Back in the 1970s the black jazz poet Gil Scott Heron was angry that the struggle for civil rights seemed to be deteriorating around the assassinations of black leaders. But his famous jazz song, "The Revolution will not be Televised" was seen by many as a metaphor for widespread disgust with government secrecy and insensitivity. It ominously predicted that those who had waited for truth and justice in America were fed up and were ready to make it happen. The soporific of television commercials and hollow politicians would not do. From Xerox to Richard Nixon, it was all going down when the people took to the streets. America was simmering with injustice and lies.

"You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out...
Because the revolution will not be televised."

There was a keen sense in the nation that our society was out of whack, and something must done.

Heron was right. The revolution was live in the streets. Poor Black neighborhoods went up in flames at some final indignity. Anti-war protesters took to the streets, in Chicago and on campuses across the nation, including Kent State Ohio where the National Guard shot into the crowd killing four students. And then the Nixon presidency collapsed in the wake of a clumsy break-in of the Democratic party offices in the Watergate office building. There was a revolution all across America in the streets, on the campuses and down the halls of power.

But Heron got it wrong, too; the revolution WAS televised. We saw all that and more on the nightly news. We sat stunned as the LAPD shot up and torched the house where members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were holed up. We watched the footage come back from Vietnam and took in weekly body counts on the network news. We sat glued to the TV hour after hour as the Watergate hearings unfolded daily in congress.

We were shocked by the carnage, heartened that we were learning the truth and galvanized to turn things around. The on-the-ground reporters in Vietnam brought the truth home, and we were reminded of the toll in human life every Thursday when the networks reported the casualties. The corrupt and insidious Nixon White House was exposed because journalists, notably Bernstein and Woodward at the Washington Post, got the story.

The media, both print and television, aggressively dug out the stories, and exposed the lies, corruption and downright ineptness of our leaders and policies.

"The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live."

We lived it, but we also read it and saw it. It gave us faith that the truth will out.

But what about nowadays? Now our reporters are "embedded" with invading troops in Iraq, and they don't go looking for the real story, but stay close to their unit, rooting them on. And when they do get a whiff of the truth, they are discredited by the Bush administration because a minor detail is "uncorroborated." Additionally, news stories are often supplied ready-packaged to stations with administration spokesmen delivering the story as if they were legitimate newscasters. The journalistic estate is widely dismissed as unreliable; I think they are running scared. And indeed reporters are not out digging up stories, but rather waiting for Washington to tell them what is news. They are learning to keep their heads down.

But worse yet, is the public apathy. No one is taking it to the streets. Or shouting in outrage. I don't know what it will take. But it is not the conniving and secrecy of planning a nation's energy policy behind closed doors, or passing a Patriot Act that makes checking out a library book suspect. Nor is it the arcane sham of a prescription drug plan that doesn't really save folks money, or the mean-spirited attack on Social Security. And the snake pit of Abu Ghraib, the humiliation of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the ingenious scheme of flying prisoners to third-party torture nations have not been enough to rouse the American public. Have we been lulled by the Soma of the Brave New World of reality-tv, special effects movies, outrageous crime stories and rapid-fire connections across cyberspace, so that real-life injustice and iniquity does not touch us?

Like Bruce, who nightly asks his audience the crucial question, I, too, want to know, "Is there anybody alive out there?"

Stuff is still happening, but who cares?

Very strange that the L.A. Times and the national media in general should give so little attention to the American premiere of David Hare's play Stuff Happens. It opened about a week ago at the Taper in L.A. and the Times gave it a very positive review, but minimal space at the bottom of the page in Calendar that devoted most of its real estate to some trendy designers of ridiculously decadent women's clothes. The reviewer was not even a Times staffer, but merely a stringer who had seen the play, as we have, in its original London production and could make knowledgeable comparisons about set design and performances, but was entirely disinclined to write about the play's themes, social significance, or central political debate.

This is a piece of high impact theatre that takes its audience directly to the heart of the issues most pressing on our national consciousness, and the Times, local television, CNN, NPR are giving it less coverage than they would a touring production of the Music Man. Admittedly, the play hasn't made an appearance in New York, so it naturally wouldn't pick up any of the Tony awards' media spotlight, which, of course, was so generously focused on Monty Python's latest silliness called Spamalot. But then serious theatre, not surprisingly, often skips Broadway. It's a definite honor that Hare's play should come first to Los Angeles, but logical and well-deserved for director Gordon Davidson's final project at the Center Theatre Group.

In case you don't know what the work is about, it is a history play that presents in brilliant detail the story of how the U.S. and Britain became bound together in the enterprise of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq for its own good and our own glory. The title comes from an early post-invasion press conference of Donald Rumsfeld's where he writes off the looting and chaos that followed "liberation" with his famously nonchalant "Hey, stuff happens..."

Hare depicts Rummy and all the other public figures--George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix, the whole array of French diplomats, and more--as characters in this huge tragedy of hubris and arrogance. Their lines are a blend of words on the public record and, when no record exists, those imagined by the author for meetings that actually took place.

It is an extremely provocative piece of theatre--especially for Americans seeing it in Britain a month before the U.S. presidential election--but not as slanted or one-sided as the summary above might lead us to assume. Hare's meticulous research and even-handed approach creates a very objective record of how it all unfolded in the period between the opening days of the Bush administration, when cabinet meetings focused on maps of Iraq and very little on issues of terrorism, through to the declared finish of "major combat." All sides of the issues are given voice and we are taken to the inside of the diplomacy and decision making process that got us where we are today.

It is a powerful story that seemed to affect the two audiences we've been a part of very differently. In London, at the National Theatre, the audience was thoroughly engrossed and clearly moved, but they allowed the whole work to be presented before taking the discussion onward to the lobby and beyond, but in the L.A. the audience was from the start prone to taking sides and expressing their disapproval or support for the figures on stage--through hissing, booing, whistling, applauding, talking back aloud to the actors--as if they were unaware of the difference between art and life. It was an experience we'd never had before in a professional commercial production and at one point brought an actress delivering a monologue as an anonymous Palestinian commentator to an abrupt halt while audience members alternately shouted, shushed, and wrangled over first what she was saying and then over how to behave in the theatre.

After nearly 40 years of active theatre going both here and in the UK, we have our opinions about what accounts for the difference in audience reaction, but the bigger issue is that this is a play that is timely and so well-crafted that it really wakes people up. So why is this being ignored? The Taper advertising seems rather minimal, and we got our tickets on a special discount deal that seemed to indicate little confidence in the play's power to attract audiences for its 6-week run.

The unfortunate fact is that what's going on in Iraq has dropped off this country's radar screen. Somehow we've realized the situation is a hopeless morass, but as opposed to the previous hopeless morass of Vietnam, we have lost the stomach for confronting the problem and lack the energy for protest. To have a nation actually discussing the facts that Hare brings back to our attention would be deeply disturbing, but would eventually ignite political reaction. We instead seem content to keep our heads buried in "reality" television and leave the dying and suffering to the relatively few who have volunteered for it.

But those are just the people who can't be expected to discontinue their investment in this failing enterprise. Once you've lost a son or daughter, an arm or a leg, you aren't likely to turn back and admit you've been sacrificed for someone else's folly. It's the rest of us, though, who can still be somewhat objective, who still have the luxury of reading discomforting analysis and not blinking, or of going to live theatre without blinding pre-judgments who must at least make enough commotion to get back into the headlines.

Stuff is still happening, and we're being told that if we just are patient and believe in the wisdom of our current policy makers, that eventually it will stop happening and we can go home again secure in the belief that democracy is rooted, nurtured and blossoming in the heart of the world's least reasonable, least cooperative territories.

The big problem is that our main purpose in "doing Iraq," as the neocons put it, was to showcase American power and efficiency--"shock and awe" they call it--as a shortcut to the hard work of international diplomacy. We figured that the real trouble spots in the Middle East and Asia were too chancy to engage with, but that we could slap around a petty brute like Saddam much more easily and effectively whether there was any real threat or not. Now that that approach has been exposed as a ruse and proven untenable anyway, we are left with a simple choice: either we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate without further provocation or justification to our enemy or we plod on, losing more soldiers and fueling the opposition for another six to ten years before we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate.

It's a rotten choice, but it appears to be all that we've got. We didn't want to face it in 1975 and we'd rather not face it now, but unless something counteracts the administration's ability to deny and deflect attention, the decision will be made by default and we'll just have to accept the defense that "Stuff happens."

Bruce is Back!

What with the new Devils & Dust CD/DVD just out, recent TV appearances, a solo acoustic tour just starting, some new DVDs of past concerts arriving in the house, we've been heavily into our Springsteen obsession of late, and are once again reminded that there is no more exciting time than when Bruce is on the road with a new "album" (he still calls them that, even though he knows it's an outdated term, so I will too).

One elemental truth about a Springsteen show is that he will start at a level of intensity that any other artist would strive for as a climax and then head for peaks well beyond anything you could imagine or hope for. I remember the first Springsteen concert I saw 25 years ago, just a few days after the release of The River. Until this point he had just four albums under his belt--two acknowledged masterpieces and two early efforts filled with remarkable songs known mostly to his eastern seaboard fan base. His toe-hold on stardom, such as it was at the time, was the album Born to Run and its title song. So instead of working up to his "hit" at the end of the show, he comes onstage and says to the band, "Let's go," and kicks right into "Born to Run." He had a double album of new songs to introduce (which most of us could already sing with him word-for-word) and the standards of his repertoire to work through, but he was starting on the top floor, intending to take us upward from there.

Four years later, when "Born in the U.S.A." made him a bigger name in the music business than he'd ever desired to be, he was still working the same way--starting a four-hour marathon with a gut-busting, ear-splitting performance of the hit single and then building the show's intensity from there. No one else works this way--not musicians, not actors, not authors, not athletes, and not the rest of us working stiffs who have to pace ourselves to reach payday in one piece. But Bruce is Bruce.

We saw him two nights ago at the beautiful and remarkably intimate Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, and he did something similar, this time in the context of an evolving set list crafted out of the character driven narratives of the new solo album and surprises from his monumentally varied songbook. Until this second night in L.A., he'd been starting the show with a very unusual rendition of "Reason to Believe," a seldom performed song from Nebraska, his first shot at stripped down solo recording from over 20 years ago.

But Tuesday night he comes out and sits himself down at a humble little pump organ that looks and sounds as if it came out of some country church that had been long since pulled down. And Bruce is dressed like one of the local workmen who might have been day-hired to work the demo job and had set aside the curious relic on a whim. A few chords in and we're not sure what he's going to spring on us, but we know whatever it is, it's the first time he's tried this on anybody. When he starts singing, though, we recognize the ethereal hymn, "My Beautiful Reward," that he used to close his Human Touch/Lucky Town shows with after the raucous road-housing had worn the audiences down enough to accept the fact that it was, perhaps, time to go home.

It is a slow, almost mournful song about the insight we gain from discovering our own frailty:

"I was so high I was the lucky one
Then I came crashing down like a drunk on a barroom floor
Searching for my beautiful reward"

The song finishes, though, with a dreamlike vision of a soaring spirit:

"I'm flyin' high over gray fields, my feathers long and black
Down along the river's silent edge I soar
Searching for my beautiful reward"

This was the blessing he laid on his audience as if to say, no matter what we may go through, there will eventually be something transcendent in a life of passionate pursuit and humble acceptance. This was the note that the Lucky Town album ended with and the concert performance strove to arrive at. And it was, indeed, "beautiful."

Now, a dozen or so years later, he regards this as a starting point! In a creative tactic similar to his working backwards in time from the gruesome and tragic opening of "Matamoros Banks," he now works from the benediction back through an exploration of the peaks and valleys of human experience. The goal here is not to celebrate or protest, not to judge, exalt, or complain, and not even to understand or triumph over our condition, but to see and simply feel the complexity of humanity.

So with the pump organ notes fading, he steps out center stage and launches into the most stark and chilling performance any of us are ever likely to behold on a "concert" stage. He grabs a harmonica and a microphone that bluesmen like Paul Butterfield or "Sonny Boy" Williamson might have selected to squish and distort their harp notes for extra reediness. No guitar, no keyboard, no proper vocal mic. Just a 15-inch or so square plank sitting on the stage, mic'd so that he can stomp his foot ferociously to mark the rhythm of "Reason to Believe." He sings into the harp mic and his words comes out about 98% distortion. Under a dim amber light, Bruce alternately blows into the harmonica and sings into the same mic, looking mostly at the floor, belting out this one he's described as "a song about blind faith with tragic results...a song about believin' in ghosts." The words are all but indistinguishable from the fuzz and the boot stomping, but here's how it opens:

"Seen a man standin' over a dead dog
lyin' by the highway in a ditch
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled pokin'
that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open, he's
standin' out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough that
dog'd get up and run
Struck me kind funny, seem kinda
funny, sir, to me
Still at the end of every hard day people
find a reason to believe"

We seem to be transported back to the rural South of the Great Depression, witnessing some roadside performance on a truck bed with a cheap amp and portable speaker set up to draw in a few field hands as they file home. (Perhaps we notice John Lomax off to the side with his portable recording equipment.) His jeans are torn at the knee, the boots noticeably dusty, his plain dark shirt's sleeves rolled above the elbows, and the hair, longer and wilder than usual. Hang a cigarette from the man's lip and he's the image of Woody Guthrie.

But we are in fact in this elegant deco theatre at Hollywood and Vine watching Bruce Springsteen wail and stomp so hard that he rattles things across the stage on his piano, even seems to short out the leaded glass lamp he's borrowed from home for the bare set's centerpiece. (When it's all over and he notices the damage, he says, "Patti's going to kill me!") The drama, though, is as consummate as any piece of theatre I've experienced. This is Man crawling from the inchoate morass and defining himself as human through sheer will power and a raspy voice.

Where can Bruce go from here? Upward. He brings in the comparatively melodic "Devils & Dust" next, a new song about doubt, fear, and the loss of innocence that's as anthemic as they get on the new album. From this tale of an American G.I. serving in Iraq we move on, as if considering nominees for a geographical center for our national angst. Immediately we're back in the faded glory of rust belt "Youngstown," then in post-9/11 New York's "Empty Sky." Before long he's moved to his piano bench and in an impromptu moment pulling up his socks, reflecting that a man can't make music with his socks falling down around his shoes--a lesson, he says, his mother taught him long ago--and his mind is already absorbed with mothers and sons, a theme that comes back repeatedly throughout the evening, first in "Silver Palomino," then in "Jesus Was An Only Son" and "The Hitter," as well as remarks between songs.

Once we've contemplated death, devastation, and various dimensions of loss, only then are we allowed to mention love. The set piece introduction he'd been using of late about coming to write love songs comparatively late in his career and looking back to find them disguised in earlier work lulls us into anticipating "For You" or "Incident on 57th Street," which he's done the night before, but then he tells us he's never done this next one on the piano and he'd just have to hope for the best. And we get this lovely, more-haunting-than-ever version of "The River," followed right away, again at the piano, by "Tougher Than the Rest," and then we know for certain that this is going to be an extraordinary evening of powerful moments. The intense personal moments of the Devils & Dust material like "Reno" and "Leah" or the surprise appearance of the sad narrative of conflicted loyalties for an INS agent on "The Line" are in no way diluted by the satire of "Part Man, Part Monkey" or its introductory remarks about a President who, contrary to appearances, may actually believe in evolution while he merely "does what he has to do so he can do what he wants to do." (Karl Rove he's not as charitable to!)

This is the most significant popular music artist of our era at the pinnacle of his creative and performing powers. He is working without the support of his supremely talented back-up musicians, who have themselves refined their talents over years on stage with Bruce, but at this moment must stand aside while their leader delves even deeper into his art. He has set aside the lush sound and ensemble energy of the E Street Band, moved into much smaller venues, and asks for nothing more than quiet and attention in exchange for an exquisite performance of unbelievable complexity and emotional resonance.

And where does it end this time? The audience hasn't been dancing, jumping, waving their arms, or singing along all evening, and there isn't going to be any "Quarter to Three," "Detroit Medley," "Twist and Shout," or "Light of Day," no "Ramrod," and no rock & roll exorcism tonight to send us out the door with our spirits lifted but bodies exhausted. And we've already heard "My Beautiful Reward" two and a half hours ago.

After three encore numbers--"Johnny 99" back at the harp mic, "If I Should Fall Behind," and "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" (joined by Nils Lofgren on guitar and vocal harmony)--we get an intense blue light aimed right in our eyes, and we lose sight of Bruce, except for what's captured on the video screens left and right of the stage, while he returns to a rhythmic tapping on the guitar body and a simple patting of strings in an open tuning for a very slowed down, deliberate, almost spooky version of "The Promised Land." The light in our eyes blinds us, but forces us simply to listen, to become lost in space that his words guide us through in a mood that captures God's parental dismay at his creation and a promise of redemption:

"The dogs on Main Street howl
'Cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land"

It's been an evening's journey from the side of Highway 31 with an insane figure poking at a dead dog all the way to Main Street where we find a mature protagonist forged through hard times, still in possession of fundamental beliefs. If Bruce tells us we can pull through with our spirits intact, then perhaps it's true.

Dynamic Duo

I recall the first time Charlie and I went over to Ted and Judy's house. It was a Sunday evening in the fall, probably about thirty years ago now. I remember we were picking up one of Ted's watercolors—one of his big abstract map paintings, I think—and Judy had made a pie—apple pie to be precise. The tender flaky crust surrounded apples that were tart and buttery with all the flavor of a fall harvest. Judy's pie was what happens to apples when they go to heaven. We suspected we were in the presence of a pastry goddess.

But she is not alone in culinary heaven; Ted is a geni of the kitchen, too. Together Ted and Judy are simply the best cooks I know. Indeed they are ambitious, accomplished and dauntless. I am repeatedly bowled over by the fantastic and memorable meals at chez Villa. Only Ted would buy a paella pan that could hold dinner for twenty-four, and then, over an open fire in his backyard, make a masterpiece of rice, seafood, and saffron, preceded by an array of hors d'oeuvres that would do any mere mortal proud, and make the whole evening seem casual for the crowd lucky enough to enjoy that delicious meal. Besides his knowledge of Spanish wines, Ted prides himself on making cooking look effortless. Indeed he and Judy both make it all look easy.

The Villas are adventuresome and fearless in the kitchen. One Christmas they baked a savory Italian Crostada in pastry for the pseudo family of us who have gathered annually at their house. For Ted's fortieth birthday, Judy made a surprise dinner for him, and hid the entire meal, including the pies, until we partygoers who had assembled in a nearby park could ring the doorbell and shout, "Surprise!" Not long ago, Ted and Judy organized dinner guests into cooking teams to assemble and cook an awesome array of Spanish tapas.

Judy's desserts are legendary, from her chocolate roly-poly, to her frozen raspberry pie, to her absolutely perfect lemon meringue pie. But her soups, salads and imaginative hors d'oeuvres are always delicious and frequently fresh from her garden.

Ted likes to brag about his dishes, but he has every right. "I make the best crab cakes," he proclaims. I love crab cakes, and I am tempted by them every time I see them on a menu. And, although the chef may have a delicious sauce or aioli on the side, I am always measuring the cakes themselves against Ted's. So far his are "the best." His short ribs are pretty good, too. And then there's his posole.

On Saturday night we were at Ted and Judy's for his "frogified" posole. His cross-cultural stew was humble and elegant at the same time. Leftover barbecued ham, some hominy, a little sherry and a handful of rosemary—heaven in a bowl. Carrying on with the French theme, Judy had made chocolate-filled cream puffs and chocolate dipped strawberries for dessert, and served them with her own limoncello.

Dinner at the Villa's is an occasion; I am filled with anticipation and excitement all day when we are going there. They are inspiring. I know my cooking has been inspired and encouraged by Ted and Judy's example. And I know when I am going to be cooking for them, I had better be ready to step up to the plate.