I cannot honestly recommend you listen to Jandek, but it's impossible not to be fascinated by the fact that he has put out albums of this stuff without letup for the past 30 years -- I believe there are 52 of them. And you can only get them by mail from the man himself.

Alternative rockers and other artsy types like to mythologize him, and his reclusiveness adds to the mystique.

Search 'Jandek' on Youtube to get a taste of the guy. Theories, of course, abound. I did a little Googling and heard an extremely rare audio interview with the guy (who, I read elsewhere, is probably named Sterling R. Smith) and now I have a theory.

He sounds very lucid and very normal. He also sounds very concrete, and not overtly interested in his own music or whether anyone listens to it. So, as much as it's tempting and titillating to think of him as a psychopath with a tape recorder, or a misunderstood avant garde genius, my theory is something more prosaic...

The following is my theory, by me: so here it is; a theory about Jandek that's my own, created by me...about Jandek. It's not someone else's theory, or based on someone else's theory, but one of my own, totally by me, about Jandek. It is, and by "it" I'm referring to my theory, the one about Jandek, the one that is my theory, by me alone, as follows (hat tip: John Cleese):

I'm going to guess that he is an intelligent guy with a mild mental illness, or someone on the very mild end of the autistic spectrum. I think he has a strong and enduring drive to make poetry and music but lacks the organization and creativity to learn an instrument or to develop ideas in a structured way.

His drive to create won't go away, however, so he indulges it. His mental deficits won't allow him to get past the initial brainstorming phase, so he records that and releases these recordings semi-publicly, thereby giving substance and force to what would otherwise be something like meditation, or exercises in therapeutic daydreaming.

His guitar playing is deliberate, but completely devoid of any externally defined or even internally premeditated musical technique or structure.

I'd call it the musical equivalent of playing with food. This brings me to another observation I've made, which is that anything becomes artistically interesting when collected in large quantity, or focused in on. I realized this one day when I saw a photography studio whose storefront window was filled with hundreds of empty black plastic 35mm film containers. This was a joy to behold. I suspect, similarly, that if you made thousands of hours of film of yourself playing with peas and mashed potatoes on your plate, the artistic world would have to take notice.

This is not to say that Jandek has no poetic talent (though I'm not sure he has any musical talent), but what's interesting about his recordings is the apparent lack of any attempt to impose any structure or development to his output. It's just a very large collection of recorded manifestations of a brain's creative impulses. It gives him some kind of solace to feel the artistic cortex of his brain firing its synapses, and releasing records enhances this process. And his fans find a similar satisfaction in experiencing this kind of abstract induction of electro-chemical activity within similar synapses.

Personally, I'd rather spend my time doing other things. But I think I get it now.

UPDATE: His release of one of his songs with a somewhat crafted lyric, and sung by a woman who can actually sing, strikes me as strongly supporting my theory; what I get from this is that he has no objection to his work being turned into something recognizable as music or poetry, so he's not really devoted to surrealism or atonal music, nor does he have an axe to grind with the conventional world. The distinction is simply not meaningful or relevant to him.

The story turns out, you see, to be a shockingly cruel tease. To the heartbroken, a wanton metaphor is as good as a sharp stick in the eye. No one, except maybe Glenn Reynolds, understands her pain.

Still, sounds kinda cool. It should be a bit easier to create plugins for Mozilla Firefox.

Michael is, as ever, a great guy to hang out with, despite his ever increasing stature as a globe trekking journalist. He just does not carry the arrogance gene, unlike many other writers and journalists. Which is nice.

And it was great to see Judith again. She has been single-handedly keeping the liberal hawks of the greater New York Metropolitan area Keshered up for years now, and we're grateful she keeps us in the loop.

We had not previously met any of the others present, but they were all great company too. Here are a few highlights:

Michael, prompted to tell us about his travels with Hitchens, told us he'd never been more afraid he was going to die than when being attacked by Syrian fascists after Hitchens wrote an obscenity on one of their (already obscene) posters in Lebanon. They evidently had decided to simply make a gesture of brutality by beating Hitchens down. Had Michael and Hitchens been anonymous Lebanese citizens, rather than western journalists, it would probably have been a much more bloody encounter.

Other than using more than my share of butane from Michael's souvenir Portland, Oregon lighter to get my cigar lit evenly, I think I can say I was a much less costly smoking buddy. Enjoying a tobacco break across the street from ground zero, however, made small talk unrelated to war an impossibility.

Also present were:

A very nice and witty guy named Evan, who we eventually realized was this Evan. Evan advised us that one's left wing friends will tolerate one's conservative films but only until those conservative films become popular.

Kejda charmed and entertained us all with insights and anecdotes related to her childhood in Albania and her work as an editor at Commentary. She is, among other things, a self-proclaimed bidet evangelist. Mention any subject to her and, along with an erudite opinion, she will reach into her purse and produce a picture (and yes, that includes the topic of Albania's superior toileting hardware).

Another new friend of ours is kejda's husband Michael, a database guru whose company will one day make it possible to use the internet to find out where your brother-in-law left his car keys, and whose definition of a blowout sale on hard drives is when the price dips below a hundred and eighty thousand dollars for 500 gigs.

We also befriended an evil Zionist college professor (or at least that's what some of her students would call her, on account of her defending the right of Israel to exist). I suck at remembering names unless people send me their URLs via their mysterious pocket gadgets. Cara remembers her name but is at work at the moment. Sorry about that.

I had a nice chat with Steve, who tours the internet in search of discourse and tries to avoid venues where ranting and spewing prevail.

And there were other worthy attendees who I am less able to name, praise, or caricature, but whose presence I enjoyed.

Mini golf in Belchertown would have been fun too, or attending the world's largest pancake breakfast, but I'm glad we went down to the big city instead.

There's a fragmented line in Happiness is a Warm Gun: "...a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust." If "donating to the National Trust" is not a witty metaphor for going to the bathroom, then it should be. And eating soap, I have been told, is something soldiers have sometimes done to get a day off from combat. But I'm digressing in a particularly icky way here.

My point is this: if a person could be inspired to use his blog as a place to put the products of his healthy and creative self, and thereby offer nice things to nice people, then that might be better. Use the blog as a kitchen, in other words, not so much as the aforementioned plumbing nexus. Maybe I've done that in spite of myself from time to time, but why not make it a feature instead of a bug. So let's go ahead and make that a manifesto.

This morning I have not been able to check my email, read past emails, can't get to Google news...

And it's rather disconcerting that my first effort to find out if it was a problem on my end was to do a Google search to find sites with live updates on Google's status. That didn't work out too well. But I found a couple of ways to find out if other people are having Google trouble and so I thought I'd share them with you:

I found this blog post: No Google for You!

And realized that I can, in future, search that site for posts tagged 'Google' or 'Gmail' when this sort of thing occurs.

Searching for Google got me this info:

In the States, I've heard from users in NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco. They all report that Google searches were running at historically low speeds. I've heard similar reports from users Europe and Australia.

In addition, Google services like Google News and Gmail are completely failing. The Internet Storm Center is saying that it's received multiple "reports of a total fail of Google Applications. Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps. etc."

So that's another highly valuable resource: The Internet Storm Center.

Summary: Google is down, Whoknew.us is up.

Disclosure: I can't say for sure that I have never conjured mental images of other bloggers while I was in the shower. But I think that's more socially benign.

But this thing of noticing that the quotidian world (I never use the word 'quotidian' usually) is peppered with clues for us about competing epistemologies regarding human society and stuff (honestly, I dropped out of a masters program in English Lit. so I wouldn't have to use phrases like that anymore, but the brain damage is apparently irreversible) made me decide to blog about one such thing that just happened to me this evening, while I was shopping online for air conditioner parts in my pajamas (though how those air conditioner parts got in my pajamas...)

Our Saturn needs a new a/c receiver/drier/accumulator thingy. I found the one pictured below; see if you can find what's wrong with this picture, and why it reminds me, just as Norm's shower experience reminded him, that totalitarianism is like crazy wrong, even stupid wrong:

The title of this post gives it away. For some reason I now have the musical phrase "change your sausage" in my head (I can't find a link, but for those of you who may be culturally deprived, I'm referring to an old TV commercial for a frozen sausage product in which "change your sausage" was sung to the tune of the word "Hallelujah" from Handel's Messiah. And if that's not a clue as to the superiority of American capitalism to other forms of society, then...I don't even know what.)

UPDATE: I said I can't find a link! Get it?! A link!

But I'm always intrigued when it comes to Photoshop subterfuge. There are two photos, both of which appear genuine, but one of which must be faked. Here they are with a particular section I have highlighted for analysis:

My first impression was that this is a first rate job of Photoshopping. And I found a number of areas in the photos that offer clues as to which is the fake, but I share with you one that looks suspicious in both photos (until you really zoom in close).

If you notice the boundary between the coat sleeve and the background in the lower picture, it looks suspiciously foggy, or blurry at the edge. So this could have been a sign of manipulation, whereas the same boundary in the upper photo is nice and crisp.

If you've tried to create fake photos (just for fun, I hope) you'll know that it's really difficult to select a person, paste them onto a background, and make it look genuine. It's the border between the two that can suck away hours of your life as you blend, smooth, soften, apply the healing brush, paint single pixels, etc. To do this perfectly, so that it's completely undetectable, is a major project on the order of restoring a painting. It would have to be that important to you. So you can almost always find evidence of that point in the process at which the perpetrator realized that life was too short to spend another 3 hours getting every pixel in place.

The links below are to screen captures of the above selections from each picture. Note that I didn't enlarge the pictures, since that would have caused the pixels to be resampled. Instead, I cropped down to the selections and then zoomed the view up to 1600%, then took screen captures of the zoomed views. I saved the screen captures as .tif images with lossless compression. It would be annoying, if even possible, to paste them into this post, so you can open or download them per the links below:

Exhibit A (parade photo)

Exhibit B (cityscape photo)

I made some crude arrows to show the points of interest. What I found was that the apparent fog around the boundary in the photo with the cityscape background looks like distortion from jpg compression. In the version with the parade in the background, what you begin to see are examples of bits of color from the background swapped with bits of color from the foreground. And on the lower right, about 5 pixels to the right of my vertical arrow, you can see a section where these blended pixel colors follow a rigid vertical line, which is not typical of jpg distortion, but very typical of human manipulation.

I found a number of other clues, but this was one of the more interesting ones.

So my conclusion is that the photo with the parade in the background is the fake. This makes sense. Disregarding the character or sympathies of the subjects, that particular stiff smiling pose just doesn't seem natural in front of an angry parade of protestors; it looks exactly like a posed publicity shot in front of a pleasant but meaningless backdrop. So if I went into this with prejudice, it went only as deep as that.

I will continue playing with fire and have some more posts for Monday morning. Just in case you're noticing.

Today he looks like a hardcore flip-flopper:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay as early as his first week in office to show a break from the Bush administration's approach to the war on terror, according to two officials close to the transition.

[...]

Such a move would reassure those concerned after Obama's recent public comments suggested he may not immediately shut the prison down.

Either he believes it's imperative to shut it down immediately or he believes it would be a bad idea to do so too precipitously. In neither case is it honorable to do such a thing merely as a gesture of reassurance (or any other kind of gesture).

I hope this is not an indication of Clintonian fecklessness to come
[note: I'm not a big user of the word 'feckless,' but for some reason that was the word that immediately popped into my head as I typed 'Clintonian.']

First he's going see about fixing this Iran problem everyone's talking about. All that's needed is...

“a third party that everybody has confidence, wants to see a fair and just outcome. And I think that an Obama administration, if we do it right, can provide that.” Still, he emphasized certain stances that he said were not negotiable.

Asked about the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Mr. Obama acknowledged that “it is more difficult than I think a lot of people realized.”

He said it would “take some time” to work out a system that respects law and solves the nettlesome problem of where to send potentially dangerous detainees.

But, Mr. Obama added: “I don’t want to be ambiguous about this: We are going to close Guantanamo.”

Soon we will learn that a diplomatic solution to the Iran problem will also turn out to be more difficult than a lot of people realized. And so the journey from hope to reality will move another step forward.

What I suppose Obama means by saying he's going to build a nice new relationship with Iranian fascists is that he has to go through the motions before he can earn the diplomatic clearance to say what he knows must be said about that regime.

The nice thing about Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs is that they can be counted upon to openly break any and all agreements the U. N. or the U. S. might make with them. Obama probably feels he needs to get in line and score one of these famous slaps in the face before he can openly announce what he must already know -- that you can't trust or negotiate with fascists and international crime organizations such as they are.

Think of it this way; a peaceful arrangement with the current regime in Iran would mean getting them to recognize Israel's right to exist, the right of the Iranian people to live in the free society they obviously want, etc, etc. If we want to respect where the Mullahs are coming from, then we have to embrace the fact that they find such requirements loathsome in the extreme. So if Ahmadinejad agrees to stop violently interfering with Israel or Iraq or with the pro-democratic movement in Iran, he's already lying. There is by definition nothing to negotiate.

So we're just waiting, I think, for Obama to tell us that no one could have anticipated the recalcitrance and dishonesty of the Iranian regime.

And I suppose he'll pretend to have similar revelations about many other problems around the world. Do I think Obama can make it all the way to a full acceptance of the reality of his new job? Yes he can.

Israel Rebuffs Peace Efforts, Driving Deeper Into Gaza

The leaders of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, which all have diplomatic relations with Israel, condemned the attacks as disproportionate and called for them to end.

This reminds me of how one can no longer find anyone, since the start of the war in Iraq, who ever opposed the war in Afghanistan. Which is weird, because it makes me wonder why some of my friends and relatives seemed so angry at me back in 2001 when I told them I supported that war. There must have been something else they were pissed at me for. One such person told me that she didn't think killing 3 thousand civilians in revenge for 9/11 was morally right. I had the feeling at the time that we were having two completely different arguments. But I didn't know the half of it.

Could it be that she would look at Israel's attacks on Hamas as an act of revenge? Do the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority see it that way too? If so, then they think it's a disproportionate amount of revenge? So they'd be cool with a smaller amount of revenge? I doubt it -- I'm just blue skying here.

Please forgive my confusion in these matters. I'm just suggesting that people be clear in delineating the boundaries of right and wrong in world affairs, rather than simply drawing (and redrawing) a line in the sand 200 yards behind wherever the U. S. and Israel happen to be at any given time.

Hamas' goal is to expel all Jews from Israel and establish a hard line Islamist theocracy, with or without the consent of the 'governed.' They, like other Islamist terrorist groups, are primarily angry about the secularization of Muslims, and they would like the world to be in a state of endless war until all the secular evils (we fat Americans sometimes mistakenly call these freedoms) are finally purged from the earth and all will live under the cleansing perfection of an international Islamist police state (and note for the record that I'm saying this about Hamas, not about true religious or cultural Muslims; i.e., Hamas is a fascist organization).

See if you think I'm reading too much into these passages from the Hamas charter. Also, it might be fun to pretend you have been appointed by Annie Lennox to study the Hamas charter in order to propose a peace deal between Hamas and the Israeli government -- see what you can come up with:

Hamas finds itself at a period of time when Islam has waned away from the reality of life. For this reason, the checks and balances have been upset, concepts have become confused, and values have been transformed; evil has prevailed, oppression and obscurity have reigned; cowards have turned tigers, homelands have been usurped, people have been uprooted and are wandering all over the globe. The state of truth has disappeared and was replaced by the state of evil. Nothing has remained in its right place, for when Islam is removed from the scene, everything changes. These are the motives. As to the objectives: discarding the evil, crushing it and defeating it, so that truth may prevail, homelands revert [to their owners], calls for prayer be heard from their mosques, announcing the reinstitution of the Muslim state. Thus, people and things will revert to their true place.

But surely they mean to achieve the 'reinstitution of the Muslim state' through peaceful, nonviolent means?

Article Thirteen: Peaceful Solutions, [Peace] Initiatives and International Conferences [Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad...

It might not make us feel warm and tingly about human nature, but I think this guy writing in the Washington Post is a bit more in touch with reality than some:

Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel, not because they embraced the ideas of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, but because they concluded that the effort to destroy the Jewish state had failed and that refusing to come to terms with it was harmful to their national interests. Ultimately, peace will be possible only if most Palestinians and their leaders become convinced that terrorism and violence are a dead end and that they cannot under any circumstances prevail over Israel through the use of force. If today's conflict leaves a seriously weakened and politically damaged Hamas, that result is more likely to enhance the prospects for peace than to weaken them.

Many Americans are now feeling that pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization of financial loss and despair and many are facing financial ruin, only now the real Potter [she refers to the Capra villain] is a scumbag named Madoff whose greed and avarice is beyond words.

[...]

Less meat, more beans. Might be better for you anyway. Less indoor gym workouts and more walking, more park time, more family outdoor time.

I hate to offer up warmed over tins of the same stuff being served all over town, so I'll just give you my more eccentric insights, as is customary on this blog. And forgive me if I enumerate them in a schoolmarmish fashion:

1. Her writing is not at all good. I've read worse, but it reminds me of stuff I had to grade when I taught freshman composition. That is, it's remarkably unaccomplished and poorly conceived. Good writing, especially about big ideas, requires good thinking. Or at least hard thinking. I'm not seeing a lot of that stuff. It's a bit embarrassing.
2. Did you notice how the only named villain (aside from Bush) is Madoff? I puzzled over this briefly until it occurred to me that she singles him out because his victims include some big Hollywood people. If you give this some thought you'll perhaps see that this ain't exactly Charles Dickens or Sally Struthers caliber suffering. It's hard to avoid understanding her to say that working class and poor families should suck it up, but that we should weep for those for whom financial loss comes as more of a shock.

Does Curtis not intend these sinister inferences to be made? Did Mel Gibson not really mean it when he called a police officer 'Sugar Tits?' We cannot know the answers to these kinds of questions. And that is why it is better, often, to just keep the trap shut.

In a propaganda salvo by Al Qaeda aimed at undercutting the enthusiastic response of Muslims worldwide to the American election, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro” who would continue a campaign against Islam begun by President Bush.

And Zawahiri shows his profoundly naive misunderstanding of what motivates international hatred of America in the Middle East by repeating the slanderous assertion that a vote for Obama was a vote for surrender in Iraq:

The Qaeda leader described the victory by Mr. Obama, who has called for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, as the American people’s “admission of defeat in Iraq.”

Karl Rove must be behind this. And Ralph Nader.

Number one on the presidential agenda will be 'who do we blame?' As someone on Pajamas Media TV said this evening, Obama is not going to be able to deliver on his promise of pink unicorns for everyone. So whose fault will that be?

Why won't we have health insurance for every citizen? What evil conspiracy will have caused that?

And, most chillingly: why did the Republicans decide not to steal the election this time? What terrible Machiavellian scheme could be behind that? Those guys are brilliant.

But seriously, the next four years are going to be bad news indeed for the counter-culture industry. How do you raise money scaring people about a fascist takeover of America with Barack Obama and a Democratic Party majority in Congress? A hard rain's a'gonna fall, as it were.

It certainly is a good thing that we have reached that milestone in the progress of American democracy of having a black president. It has become, owing to the anaesthetizingly long campaign 'season,' almost hard to remember that this seemed like something that would never happen in my lifetime (now we can only say that there will never be a Jewish president in my lifetime). But there's a person behind that racial identification, and I don't think that person is going to be our greatest president.

I console myself with the belief that Obama does not have the guts to enact any of his most extreme policies. I think he's a bit of a Zelig. It was profitable to be a radical, a devout Christian, a community organizer...but those things won't fuel his career anymore. Now he's going to have to transform into the shape of a president. And that, more than anything else, is going to be astoundingly boring (think Carter, not Clinton...it'll be all 'turn down your thermostat' and 'check your tire pressure' and precious little cigar/intern juxtaposition). I think this is going to hurt Obama a lot worse than it'll hurt us.

So what is Obama's biggest fear now? Is it Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? North Korea? The economic crisis? Global Warming^TM? Russia? Pakistan? Israeli/Palestinian conflict? The Clintons? No, none of that stuff. His biggest fear is this.

Before I sign off, I should note that Obama is already backpedalling on the dream. In his victory speech he just warned us that all of the ills of society might not be fixed in one year, or even one term, but that (I kid you not) "we as a people will get there." To me this is taking Martin Luther King's words of courage and turning them into a request for an extension. I may not get this paper done by the due date. I may not get it done by the end of the semester...