Rambling at Midnight

He seemed pretty adamant about it, as he insisted that religion was the root of all the evil in the world.

I almost had to laugh. I wondered what it was about kids that age, not that I can call myself an elder in society, that there is no room for moderation. From what I remember of him, he was a student in college, and not necessarily a very bright one at that. Said at some point that he worked handing out towels at the campus gym, not that there's anything wrong with that. A job is a job, but at the same time, there were times when he'd refer to the money he spent on cigarettes and other non-educational expenses he was accruing, and I seriously wondered just how deeply he thought about things.

I remember he posted on the boards some completely unsupported assertion about whether tribalism was indeed a phase of civilization. He cited an unnamed instructor, probably in an intro course. Fond memories, there. I remember leaving high school, and being exposed to an entirely new universe in the first few freshman-level classes I attended. Everything I'd ever learned before that was turned upside down, and now I was truly enlightened, and I very nearly said, "I've learned all I need to know, hang those upper-division classes."

It was about the same with nearly everyone I knew in college... "this guy KNOWS his stuff..." we mused. As we pressed on, however, new classes required more exposure to different sources, other points of view. Now the answers weren't so clear, and that intro class barely scratched the surface; in fact, in a lot of cases, they turned out to be more or less pulpits for certain instructors to preach their thesis to a new, unsuspected wave of students.

I remember one of my junior years, the year of the "affair," I was confronted, not in a hostile manner, but another of my friends sort of laughed at me. Not in a patronizing, malicious, or condescending way, but they kind of laughed at their little brother who was unaware of what he was about to encounter in life.

Mostly, that absolutes in life are rare, and almost always invalid. Don't get me wrong, I do believe there is an absolute standard to which we should all strive to attain, I just do not completely believe we are all necessarily... well, for one, on the same road to the same destination, and for two, I'm not necessarily sure we need to be on a road to anywhere to get to where we're going.

I don't know that being a Lutheran has always been important to me. I've felt that of all the Christian denominations, we're probably the closest to the "correct" path, but as the Church trudges on and on, it seems more pre-occupied with the notion that we do not in fact hold the monopoly on the truth. What's the point, then?

Well, "organized religion" has its place. It does have a purpose. To me, it provides an infrastructure of support for like-minded believers on their journey. The Church, however, is not the end-all in seeking the Kingdom of God. Indeed, it is necessary for the believers to hold together, to build each other up, but the work at hand, being the presence of Christ in the world does not require every one hole up in the sanctuary and associate only with card-carrying members of the denomination.

It's just the opposite, really. The work of Christ requires us to leave the fold, if only for a time to return again, and to actually mix with the people outside the circle. In the same way the Gospel has been translated into many languages, often employing different idioms to get the point across, witnesses to the Gospel might have to adapt themselves somewhat, and witness more in deed than in word.

Jesus himself sharply criticized the hypocrites of the day for observing the laws of piety in the society, but never doing what God would have us do, and what God has done for us, repeatedly. Lower ourselves to feed the poor, and heal the sick, even if it sometimes means breaking the ceremonial law once in a while. Jesus was a veritable fount of situational ethics, often asking, "Which is more important..." The prophet Amos similarly attacked the hypocrites of his day, observing that while the temple was well-kept and there were routine sacrifices, there were people being dealt with unjustly in iniquity.

Often, like my laughing friend in college taught me, the answers are not always that clear. Sometimes holding fast to the rules of one's sect will do more harm than good. Sometimes, maybe, it's better to give the lamb to the beggar, rather than offer it to be a burnt offering. Sometimes, it is better to be one with the "sinners" and the "unbelievers" to affect justice and mercy in an otherwise hopeless society than it is to "stay with one's own."

I wish all the best to my younger friend. I look forward to a day when we can sit down to supper and break bread, and plan a new world together.

Thoughts before going to bed.

About as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to be in show business of some kind.But why?

As Bill Maher once remarked, Americans long for attention. Maybe that's it, but I won't blame being American for it.

When I was about five or six, my father was majoring in Journalism in college. In a fairly short time, he landed an internship with KTVB 7 in Boise, so there were months when I was lucky to see him once a month in Pocatello. Then, I don't know if he just got lucky or if the Idaho Falls-Pocatello market was just starved for new blood, but he landed his first paying gig with KIFI in Idaho Falls. It was just 50 miles from Pocatello, and the way Dad drived, he could make shuttle run between Poky and IF in, I don't know, an hour and a half, maybe an hour if his radar detector was working, and he'd kept up on the maintenance on first, that Barracuda, then second, that Vega.

If memory serves, we had to jump out of that car a few times on long trips for fear it would literally blow up.

But his main assignment was actually in Pocatello, covering whatever news happened there, film it, and get the film to Idaho Falls in time to be developed and edited for the next available newscast. Most of the time, the news was a city council meeting, which probably got a big "Hoo Hah!" from views in I.F., but I imagine they were courting audiences in Poky, competing with KPVI for the news ratings.

A lot of the time, the story was a big fire somewhere, usually out on the Arco Desert. Dad kept the Bearcat scanner on whenever he was at home so he'd get the jump on whatever was happening. There were a number of emergency calls just south of Pocatello near or beyond the Porteneuf Gap, and since we lived on South 4th, which was the main artery on the old highway out of town, yeah, we were the first to know about all those.

Sometimes Dad had to pick me and/or my sister up from school or daycare, then quickly dash to where a story was breaking. I can't count all the brush fires we saw on the Fort Hall reservation. A few times we were in... at least a marginal amount of danger. There was the time I was just sitting in the car, waiting for him to get back from getting enough footage of the fire, watching the fire creep closer and closer in the grass toward the car. Nothing became of that, but there was a range fire where Dad took my little sister along.

The way he tells the story, he took the car out to the fire, and before long, the fire was getting close to the car (deja vu). So, he got his footage, loaded Chris into the car, and... it wouldn't start. Fire closer. Car dead. Damned GM cars, I think he said. Fortunately, a big BLM truck rolled up, and the crew onboard told him to get in. He reached into the car, and pulled Chris out, which surprised the fire crew on the truck. They just weren't expecting him to be packing his kid along.

So they were rescued, and I guess he asked the fire dispatcher to relay a message to his boss in I.F. that they were caught up in the fire, the car was a likely loss, and they'd probably be late getting the film in. Somehow the message got back to the boss that he was caught IN the fire... word got back to Mom, and SHE panicked. I didn't know what was going on.

Needless to say, people were a bit miffed at him when he straightened out the story. Mom was mad because he'd taken Chris with him, although I think Chris was pleasantly clueless, as well at the time.

Because Dad was always on the News, he was a local celebrity. That in turn made us sort of celebrities as well, and many of our friends and classmates in school. Whenever Dad had to do some kind of story about school funding, teacher strikes, daycare, what have you, he'd always turn up to our classrooms with camera in hand to get a few shots. I don't know how badly the teachers minded this, but it was a good thing he didn't have a whole crew with the camera, the satellite uplink, and sound dude...

Generally, all he needed were pictures. Something relevant to the story, and there didn't need to be sound in it, so he always had a cache of 16 mm film on hand at home in the vegetable crisper of our refrigerator. The voice-over for the story he did on cassette tapes that he'd package with the film for shipment.

Yes, this was long before the present practice of stationing a reporter in front of the crime scene hours after the place is cleaned up for a live remote, and it was even before video tape got to be more prevalent.

I decided when I was six or so that I wanted to be either a stand-up comic like David Brenner, or a television weatherman like another local celebrity, Lloyd Lindsay Young. He was your classic very outgoing personality that... alright, you either loved him or you thought he was profoundly annoying. Since I was six, he was a giant both physically and as a genuine legendary figure. He was funny, which I believe weathermen often had to be. At least have SOME kind of personality because, face it, this guy was getting paid to talk about the weather.

So when I didn't want to be a news man like my Dad, I wanted to do stand up or be a weatherman. Sounds like "entertainer" to me. Just to be funny and make people laugh like Lloyd did every time he explained the cold front coming in, or David with his short tales of when he was a kid my age.

I mention David Brenner because he was the first stand-up comic I really became aware of. We got cable television when I was in first grade, which got us HBO, and a bunch of regular stations out of Salt Lake. There were other comics featured on HBO that first month we got it, but they had some kind of rating system, or at least a parental advisory that told the folks to send me and my sister to our room when someone like Rodney Dangerfield or Steve Martin came on.

Also in that first month of HBO when it was young, I discovered Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yes, at the tender young age of six, maybe seven, tops, I exposed myself to the Pythons in a rather concentrated dose. I saw Holy Grail probably about seven times in one month. My friends who were good LDS suddenly had their cable cut off. How bad could it be? I was rolling on the floor, laughing so hard I got hiccups.

I also got to see all of the Pippi Longstocking movies, and I developed a hopeless crush on Inger Nilsson. I didn't know just how hopeless the crush was until I found out the Pippi movies were all Swedish. Needless to say, I didn't even know there was a place called Sweden at the time, let alone that it was a place FAR far away... Come to think of it, I never noticed that bad lip-synch until fairly recently.

Here's a good stopping place.

Peace be with you.

They Call It, "Nostalgia"

I went to download some stuff from iTunes, and somehow I came across a number of selections that lead me on a superficial trip back about 20 years...

I thought it was funny, reading some of the reviews of such bands as Wang Chung. I love the way the present generation, or perhaps it was a fellow Child of the '80's who generally labeled music from that time as "cheesy."

I'm not about to defend it from subjective perceptions like that. I can't. Of course it was cheesy, at least the pop stuff was. Sure, every generation, every decade, has a handful of truly talented composers and lyricists that do wonders to capture the essence of a particular time. Sometimes they define it, sometimes they're just exceptions to the usual glut of gooey sentimentality and clones of a handful of other popular acts. The point is, they are few and far between, and they are often the "redeemers" of a generation from the merciless attacks of the new young 'uns.

No. Like every other decade of pop, the 1980's didn't have just one sound. Even in specific genres, there was no ONE sound, although it seemed as though if one could stop time, a taxonomist could do a doctoral thesis on trying to classify certain genres, sub-genres, and movements within genres... all somehow unique from the others.

Well, there was a certain sound quality in bands like Wang Chung, and the occasional riff from Duran Duran that suggested a certain... loneliness. "Dance Hall Days" just had this echoing quality that felt like it was being played in an empty, dilapidated hall, much like the way the accompanying video suggested. "Rio" by Duran Duran had a wailing saxophone solo that felt the same way. It is at once eerie, and a bit lonely. It seemed to ironically express a certain alienation that even the bands that specialized in angst couldn't quite convey.

That's about how I remember the 1980's. Sure, it was a time of celebration, but it was a celebration that really didn't have a lot of cause. I think as a country, America was just finally sick of feeling bad, after Watergate, Vietnam, the Energy Crisis, and the U.S. Embassy siege in Tehran. Like almost every other country or civilization that was down in the dumps, we elected a President who promised everything was going to be just fine, again.

Did they get better? They seemed to, and we seemed to believe many of our worries had just melted away. There were, however a number of problems we seemed to be sweeping under the rug, though, and they did seem to be creeping in, even as we were partying like it was 1999.

There was this problem with the homeless. There were a lot of vets who felt they didn't get the respect they felt was due them (for the most part, at least as a culture, we seemed to have addressed that, finally giving Vietnam vets at least a "welcome home," and a number of cultural tokens to cheer them up for coming back from an unpopular war that amounted to naught. But I digress); AIDS was becoming a serious health issue, although when we first heard about it, it seemed like it was just a "gay" disease, and drug use was starting to get to be more of a problem, despite our First Lady's "just say 'No'" campaign. Oh, yes. AND we had a President who seemed fanatical (and/or senile) enough to press the dreaded "red button" that would annihilate life on earth...

Maybe that was part of it, then? Despite this cheery, "let's just party" attitude, perhaps we did have a sense that all was not necessarily well, and like the indestructible homicidal maniac with the collection of mundane objects-turned-lethal-weapons, these problems were just outside the perimeter, waiting to strike.

Under the cocaine highs (this is a broad generalization. I never did coke. For one thing, I never had the money or the connections.), and just beneath the surface of the impeccable (but sometimes gaudy) fashions and the perfectly coiffed hair, in the undertones of the catchy dance beats, there might have been the slightest sense that something was wrong, like a collective depression. That would certainly explain the 1990's with all the grunge and the angry girl bands... a party that long is going to have a helluva hang-over.

In another way, we never really lost sight of it either, though. Taking dramas like "Miami Vice," and To Live and Die in L.A., that depicted a growing drug problem, and the Columbian cartels were getting stronger, and most cops who mattered were all on the take, yes, actually, we were aware of this, despite the glamorization of he situation. It seemed the soundtracks of these hopeless-feeling scenarios were reminders that, hey, this is a problem. Sure, Sonny Crockett drives a speed boat on the job, dresses in cutting-edge Armani (with the black t-shirt underneath), and looks great, sporting that eternal three-day growth of beard, but this guy is always one step away from being screwed, big time.

Sooner or later, we had to crash. We could only drown out the outside noise and numb the ache for so long before we realize we could stand to try to address these issues. Rap and Grunge began emerging right about when I should have graduated college in the first place. Well, rap had been around a while, with all that breakdancing we thought was going to save inner-city youths from violent gang wars. As for grunge, it was a new reformation of pop music. There were only so many hair band ballads and emotionless dance tunes meant to be heart-felt love songs (we also deluded ourselves into believing "Disco" was dead and buried) the half-generation behind me could take before saying, "This does not jibe with the world view I'm being fed." So, I guess, instead of further ignoring the angst like we did, the new kids chose to wallow in it, wearing it like we wore collar-up polo shirts with our 501's and penny loafers.

I imagine the nostalgia sets in when I realize the music today isn't mine. I'm not the target demographic the record execs are aiming for. Matter of fact, the record execs really don't know what to do with themselves, anymore. But instead of being able to retreat to these same sounds that were my shield from my parents way back when, and my cushion between me and my peers, and the insulation that filtered out news of the "Doomsday Clock," the music seems not to convey alienation, but it is now someone else's shield from me. It now alienates me, leaving me to wonder if and when I ever had a common thread with these people after me.

Nostalgia, however, is a dangerous drug. They retreat behind THEIR music, I slink behind mine, and before we know it, there are TWO walls between us. No wonder generations cannot relate.

I had a point to this, but I seem to have run out of steam.

Layers of Meaning

It is late at night, and I should be in bed, likely dreaming about what I am thinking.

I've been considering the fine art of communication, and dimensions of meaning in even the simplest media.

Years ago, when laser discs were still a pretty neat idea, I talked with a summer friend of mine who told me about the nearly infinite possibilities with laser media. For one, he said, they could one day take a two-dimensional disc, and instead, manufacture, say, a cube. Six sides of storage capacity, six times whatever a single side could hold.

This was interesting, to say the least, but he went on: current lasers in compact discs, he said, operate at a specific wavelength, or color. Suppose you had an emitter that could read more than one color? This meant that on a single side of a given medium, who knows how many visible light wavelengths could be stored? Same space, but if the disc were read with a red laser, the user might access an Encyclopaedia Britanica article on lemmings. Read that same disc with a blue or a green laser light, and the user could play the complete works of Twisted Sister. With yet another color, who knows?

Many different information, occupying the same space on a laser disc.

Well, times change, and now it appears the CD may be going the way of the 7" floppy disc and the 8-track cassette, so that concept will likely be forgotten entirely without ever seeing further research and development.

But the idea is still there. I do recall in the movie Contact there was a similar notion, wherein the extra-terrestrial intelligences contrived to transmit the data necessary to build a spaceship, as well as a "primer" to get humans up to speed on the necessary technology, layered in a segment of video intercepted from earth and sent back. Layers of information, seemingly impossibly occupying the same space, yet unlocked by different perspectives.

The written word, and even more so, the spoken word carries more information in it than what meets the eye.

Every word has a set of meanings. The evolution of the English language has all but guaranteed that every word has no fewer than two possible meanings, depending on the context. The context depends a lot on the arrangement of the words, as well as the "voice."

In spoken language, a basic idea is transmitted and received through a series of steps, each of which shades the meaning in one way or another: the transmitter forms an idea, then assigns words to express the idea. The transmitter then transmits the words carrying the idea via some medium, most likely voice. The voice, however, modifies the meaning somewhat, and is affected by a number of factors, including the transmitter's frame of mind, and its environment.

The idea is then received, which is again affected by how receptive the listener is. Through environmental factors, physiological limitations, and psychological considerations the idea is once again manipulated somewhat, sometimes distorted beyond the original intent, and sometimes taking on whole new additional meanings.

It has fascinated me, reading, performing, and observing performances of Shakespeare, how many levels of meaning I can glean from careful study of the text. Amazing still is the understanding that perhaps the meanings only go deeper beyond what I comprehend, or at least believe I comprehend, and have projected, based on my own unique experience and learning.

A basic understanding of any text, especially Shakespeare, is knowing and understanding the meaning of the selected verbage.

In understanding Shakespeare, one studies the context of the words to determine that much of the narratives are indeed poetry in the forms of analogy, metaphor, and allegory. It then becomes an issue to try to grasp the "whole picture" of a particular passage, to understand what the imagery of the literal text is supposed to convey.

Once the imagery is understood, themes are developed and interpreted. Abstract ideas emerge from patterns of closely associated images, leading the observer to begin to understand another meaning besides the literal action of the work. This too may depend on the unique experiences of the observer, as everyone has a different emotional attachment to the different images presented.

Beyond that becomes a venture into the quantum physics of literature, where psychology and spirituality become one, intermingled into a kind of unified field of thought. There is no distinction between events, or even ideas. All becomes one.

Would it be then that different writers might well be ultimately saying the same thing, even as one may describe the fall of a noble dynasty, while another describes the blossoming of a Morning Glory, and still another provides a recap of the day's traffic reports?