At the end

We want to believe that age brings wisdom, some sense of how everything fits together. Or failing that, equanimity, grace. Maybe just mellowness.

Beyond the guard who was killed too young and for no good reason, that's the nastiest shock in the Holocaust Museum Shooting. James von Brunn has lived 88 years. He's seen the horrors of war and probably some acts of heroism that transcend it. He's lived through Depression before and seen the country rebound from it. And from his life's experiences, all he's taken away is a list of targets.

Age can bring wisdom, of course. But finding it takes effort, and it requires you to reach out. The attacker of the Holocaust Museum is a worst case scemario of the kind of ingrown hate that can result from the failure to do that.

What indeed?

I just learned about this song recently.

As the graphic on this not-quite-video clip shows, there does seem to be some Syd Barrett/early Floyd influence. John never flipped for real the way Syd did, but there must have been times he felt like he was.

This song was apparently dropped from the White Album at the last minute. My guess is that he pushed his vote to the limit getting "Revolution 9" on and couldn't swing this one as well. Did they make the right call? I could see an argument either way.

Defenses natural and otherwise

This is an excerpt from Sue Savage Rumbaugh's Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. I've just started reading the book and already it's proven inpirational.

This book really began the day the first joint of my right index finger was severed by an ape I didn't even see. Up from the bowels of a dimly lit cage she raged and parted me from the first joint of my finger. Wsa she angry at me? She didn't even know me, nor I her. I had just come to the Oklahoma "Chimp Farm" to learn about the signing apes, the ones that were supposed to talk to you with their hands. Little did I know that most adult chimps living in social groups are not kindly disposed to strangers, viewing them as something of a thread to be dealt with immediately. This was long before Jane Goodall had learned that apes kill members of other groups in the wild.
I had begun to study apes only a few months before this bite, but already, within three days of meeting them, I knew that the rest of my life would be spent studying apes. So like us they are, and yet so distinctly different in some ways.

Most of us like to think we have persistence, that we keep goals in sight when there are obstacles in the way. I know I'd like to think this. Based on personal experience, however, a bad turnaround is enough to shut us down. So hearing about a woman who commits to a career direction at the exact same moment that it costs her a digit, well, that definitely puts things in perspective. (She doesn't say whether the finger joint was reattached, but either way it would send most people screaming in the other direction.)

There's also a story of her being surrounded by wild dogs in a Portuguese forest. As she realizes she's being hunted, and there's no help within screaming distance, she takes a rock and chucks it at one of the dogs. It hits and she raises another rock to show them she can do it again. The pack retreats. There's a lesson here for those who aren't accustomed to being aggressive.

I know I've said this before, but I think I'll be talking more about this book.

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Again I have to skip Friday Random Ten. Well, I am skipping it because after Apple's most recent brilliant update I can't sync iTunes to the iPod. I will lick this thing but I'm not sure how yet.

Wait, that needs an "as God is my witness" doesn't it?

Dyslexicon

As nouveau portmanteau terms go, I kind of doubt that "funemplyment" will have legs as long as "funderage drinking."

New old stuff

I guess this performance is about 20yo now, but it still seems pretty fresh. Brian Eno used to pimp these guys back in the day, and I can kind of see why.

No I don't know why she went on stage wearing 3-4 dresses. But I commend the audience for not hitting her with the tired "take it off" catcalls.

Cranky Hanky

:It will not be a happy trip.:

Monday's Benjamen Walker program on WFMU features an interview concerning Golden Age comic book artist Fletcher Hanks, no relation to Tom as far as I know. He is an interesting character to study, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, he was born in 1879. If you do the math, that means that when he was writing and drawing the adventures of Stardust and Phantoma--among others--he was around the start of his sixties. Now there is an honored class of oldster comic book artists: John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Richard Corben, in the mainstream comics. In the late thirties/early forties, comics were a young man's game. A game for young men who could live on almost no money. This was because it was a brand new medium. The only other comics artist of note who was in late middle age was Wonder Woman co-creator Harry G. Peter, who had considerably more history as an illustrator than did Hanks.

Hanks is also fascinating in the crossed frameworks of art and pathology. To put it plainly he was a nasty piece of work. In his private life, we know that he committed some vicious acts of child abuse against son Fletcher Jr., and his wife probably got the same or worse. In his stories, villains are established as evil so that the hero can spend a goodly amount of time killing and torturing them. It's ctuel and crude. What it isn't is calculated. While he was a fairly rough artist, you see occasional flashes of visual brilliance. You also see the id at work on the page, unconscious of how it looks.

Then you'll probably need a stiff drink.