Texas Road Trip, Day 3: Enough of fracking

Woke up this morning in San Antonio. Weather was utterly dreary: thick fog and drizzle, just a complete mess. I found my way to a cafe with wi-fi and camped out for about an hour and a half, until morning rush hour was over and I had a plan for the day.

I had a choice of going west to Carrizo Springs to see more drilling, trucks, pipelines, RVs camped in a pasture, etc. etc. -- but aside from a slight change in the landscape (it would have been drier and more desert-y), I didn't expect to see much that I hadn't seen during the first two days. I realized there was only one thing I really wanted to see in the state of Texas: the Rothko Chapel in Houston which, despite having lived in Texas for ten years, I had never seen. So I drove to Houston.

As I drove west, the murk cleared up and the day became hot and cloudy/sunny -- pretty much a typical summer day. That it is mid-October doesn't matter a bit. The clouds were light and fluffy and the air was hot and humid. OK, it was only 90 degrees, not 103 like it was during the summer.

In Columbus, I stopped and drove around a little, because that was a spot I drove through on the way from Houston to Austin back in the 70s. I found a couple of miles of the old highway that runs through and out of the town before it meets the new freeway that has erased the rest of the old road.

Houston is pretty amazing. Imagine Las Vegas in the way it over-does everything possible. Now multiply its size by about 10. That's Houston, with 12-lane freeways decorated with gigantic stars, and futuristic skyscrapers not just downtown but in concentrations of office buildings at various places along the roads leading into town. I was listening to a sports radio station and heard consecutive commercials as follows: 1) An anti-Obama commercial sponsored by the gun lobby, saying if Obama was re-elected he would take away not only "our" Second Amendment rights, but also threaten the First Amendment; 2) A commercial by the natural gas lobby saying how wonderful it was; and 3) A commercial by a local gun dealer that was so over-the-top it sounded like it was produced by the Firesign Theater. That was on a sports station, which was the only one I could listen to without encountering Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or some other right-wing beanbag.

I won't even mention how heavy the traffic was, despite all the multi-lane freeways. In fact, they aren't happy with the existing Interstate Highway System; they are busy opening parallel freeways that are toll roads. There's one that bypasses Austin, another that partially circles Houston.

After all that, the Rothko Chapel was quite a relief.

Rothko Chapel

Then I found a cheap motel and settled in to watch baseball. We're in a rain delay.

Limo driver and performance artist 'found her voice' on 'This American Life'

This story about a memoirist seems to me representative of several odd strains in our culture.

Writer-performance artist Jeanne Darst wrote lots of stories about her dysfunctional family, which she "performed in one-woman shows she performed in her living room to help pay the rent," according to the story. Reading this, I thought, Oh right. This is the same world Miranda July lives in. You make yourself into a twee storyteller in the David Sedaris mode, and sure enough: "This American Life" is "where Darst began to find her voice as a memoirist." This led directly to a book contract.

Well, that's nice! You get to find your voice on the premiere radio show for memoir, really? Take a giant step, eh?

Just sour grapes on my part. I think it was that bit, which the journalist wrote, not something that came from her, suggesting "This American Life" is like a stepping stone rather than being what it is right now, which is a pinnacle. She's just someone doing exactly what 10,000 other writers are doing, only doing it better, and oh by the way, being an attractive slender woman who lives in L.A. You go!

The first of November

Gawker helpfully brings everyone up to date on the official word from EOTW prophet Harold Camping, whose radio station has stopped talking about the EOTW (which didn't happen per his prediction) but also has not said anything about it not happening.

Having finished reading "Infinite Jest," I'm now going to finish reading a Simenon novel, "Strangers in the House," and then get to "The Death of the Adversary" by Hans Keilson.

Bank of America followed the lead of other banks and reversed its proposed fee of $5 monthly just to just its debit card. The fee, announced last month, generated loads of anger at banks in general and B of A in particular and led to a movement to transfer accounts from banks to credit unions. "Bank Transfer Day" is still Nov. 5.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 5

Last night I read the section from page 193 to 210 which introduces Ennet House and its surroundings and denizens. Yes, we've seen some of them before, but in this section the author does a very head-on description of the place -- its surroundings, including with respect to the tennis academy which has dominated the first two hundred pages, plus a long section on the things "you learn" in rehab there. After several pages of this (for example, you learn "that no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that," and "that the metro Boston street term for not having any money is sporting lint"), the narration shifts to several pages about the various tattoos of Ennet House denizens.

The information on tattoos is presented as the fruit of an obsessive interest by one of the residents, Ewell, but the passage struck me as the first part of the book which is truly dated. When the author wrote the book in the early 1990s, tattoos were still largely limited to the kinds of people described here -- prisoners, gang members, and the more outre members of the drug or queer community. Tattoos are depicted as disfiguring, as one of the stupid and "permanent" consequences of the poor judgement that results from doing drugs. As large as the author's imagination clearly is, he obviously never imagined that tattooing would become so mainstream that it's now unusual for a youth in his or her 20s or 30s not to have one.

Before tattoos, piercing was in vogue. In the 1990s, I got pierced. I never got tattooed. Now age 55, all my piercings are gone except one. Still don't have a tattoo.

I haven't mentioned, by the way, the section which precedes this, about Madame Psychosis' radio show. I enjoyed the section, and not because I expect or hope this radio show or its mysterious host to appear anywhere in the rest of the book except maybe in passing reference, but because I love weird radio that's on late at night and that almost no one listens to.

When recordings betray you

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old self-proclaimed "Bible teacher" (he never refers to himself as a "minister" or preacher, contrary to references in SF Gate.com and other reports), is being released from the hospital after treatment for a mild stroke which he suffered a few days ago. Camping is the head of Family Radio, an obscure but world-reaching Christian radio station which he used to disseminate a prediction that Christ would return on May 21 this year.

That prediction, its failure, and Camping's rescheduling of the apocalypse to Oct. 21, has been widely covered. In the meantime, what's Family Radio been doing with its main announcer and on-air presence down with a stroke?

Running recorded programs, that's what. And they don't do him any favors. There's no way of telling when the recorded versions of his daily "Open Forum" call-in show were recorded, but they give us a noticeably younger and more in-control Camping. His voice has always been gravelly and monotonous, but in the last year or two has been quivering with age. The recordings only point up the contrast to his present state.

Another program in which Camping has been going through the Old Testament book of Ruth seems to have been recorded even longer ago than the "Open Forum" recordings now running. He sounds positively middle-aged, his voice powerful and steady. All the sadder for this misguided man.

It's the end of the world but you don't know it

As everyone knows (but will, no doubt, very swiftly forget), a Bay Area preacher named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on Saturday. When it didn't, he professed to be "flabbergasted," and took a few days to do some thinking. This afternoon he more or less squarely faced a press conference and told the press and his radio audience that something "mystical" had taken place on Saturday and never fear, the end of the world will happen on October 21 "just as we have been predicting."

In fact, he has been preaching that the original May 21 date would be only the beginning of a five-month period of terror and that the real end of the world would come as the earth is consumed by fire on Oct. 21. Now he's saying never mind the terror part -- God is merciful! -- but he was right about everything else.

Play-by-play of the event is here, courtesy of a live-blogging HuffPost writer, but I thought the most interesting and telling part of Camping's spiel was when he was asked about the people who had sold their possessions and quit their jobs to advertise the May 21 date. Even if Camping was right about the Oct. 21 date, what did he advise those followers to do in the meantime? After all, Camping had answered a previous question as to whether he would be giving up his worldly possessions by saying in a mystified voice "But I still have to have a place to live... I still have to have a car to drive. Why would I do that?"

So what advice did he have for his followers who were now bereft of possessions? "Look," he said, his voice hardening. "We just went through a great recession. People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they had to move in with a cousin, perhaps, or cut back very much on spending. But they survived. People cope."

So, anybody who believed this old nutbag and did something stupid like stopped saving for their kids' college tuition or quit their job -- they're on their own for the next five months. Surely some of them will kick themselves, go out and get a new job, and work at not being bitter for the rest of their lives. But others will double down for the real EOTW in October. Those are the people we should be afraid of.

Today's fake: End of the world. So now what?

Okay, it's Saturday afternoon on the 21st, and since Asia is not yet in ruins I think we can assume that series of Christ-sponsored earthquakes, which was supposed to devastate the earth starting in New Zealand and traveling westward, is not happening. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a friend about this whole EOTW thing, when publicity about it was just starting to bubble to the mainstream. (I had been aware of the May 21 prediction for a year, because I have a morbid fascination with cult figures and frauds, and I have listened on and off to the Bay Area radio station of the Harold Camping cult for years, if for no other reason than his amazingly weird delivery.) My friend said, "How liberating! Wouldn't it be awesome if you really knew the end of the world was coming on a certain day? You could do anything!"

Because she's a shrink, I'm sure she didn't mean that in the "You could finally go out and murder that person on your list" way. She probably meant it in the self-actualizing way. Or she could have meant it the sort of dark-side way, because she also rolls that way. You should read her fiction. (You really should. She's in my writing group. In fact, she is my writing group.)

Right, then, back to work. Rain fell all day the day Sirenita died, but the next morning it cleared up, and since then it's been gorgeous. This is a splendid springtime Saturday, sunny and windy and cool, just perfect. I haven't yet been able to make myself go to my other writing friend's basement and work on my book. I think I'll do it from this nice cafe for a while.

Desert sojourn, day 28

On my long drive yesterday -- about seven solid hours of driving, all the way from Joshua Tree to Laughlin, NV and back (click for map) -- I listened for a while to right-wing radio foamers. I usually can't stand listening to them for more than about 30 seconds, but I was kind of a captive audience -- I couldn't get anything else on the radio. Plus, it's material for my book, which in part involves characters who have adopted a paranoid view of the state of things. Man, it's all just fear, fear, fear. One guy repeated what he said he'd heard from some right-wingers in the U.K., some tall tale about Pakistani drug gangs and their enslavement of 13 and 14 year old English girls -- white English girls, of course. The American commentator repeated this blather not only without critique but as if it were an oracle of what was about to happen in the U.S. And it all comes from building mosques, he said.

Just an example. I won't waste my time even saying how stupid it is, or how classically xenophobic and racist. What struck me was not the paranoid fantasy, but the enthusiasm -- spoken in a voice trembling with fear and loathing -- with which it was repeated and the explicit prediction that this is where the U.S. is headed.

And I had to remind myself -- Obama isn't even up for re-election for another two years! What will it be like after another two years? How far can they ratchet up the hysteria? Then I realized: that's exactly why terrorists blow shit up, to stoke exactly this kind of hysteria. Thus the right-wing foamers' talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or at least that seems to be the only place it leads to.

Let me say one more time -- I never can stand to listen to this stuff. So it's really true that I've never heard it before, not full-force for a couple of hours. And the millions of people who thrill to this stuff listen for hours, all day every day. Kind of an astonishing moment in the history of the U.S. experiment with democracy, really. A real test of the question "How much free speech can we stand?" (Coincidentally, the Fred Phelps cult went before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday so the court could address just that question.)

Today in politics: fearing hoax, Florida congresswoman twice hangs up on Obama

The hoaxing of Sarah Palin no doubt still fresh in her mind, a Florida congresswoman twice hung up on President-Elect Barack Obama when he called to ask her help on coming legislation.

technorati: hoaxes, fakes

Humorous coda to 'Alice's Restaurant'

Last evening I was doing errands in the car when I happened to hear the 1995 live version of Arlo Guthrie performing "Alice's Restaurant."

As a coda on the 30th anniversary of the original events that inspired the song, he adds an anecdote in which Jimmy Carter's son Chip tells him of discovering, when the Carter family moved into the White House, the "Alice's Restaurant" album. The text of the anecdote is at the link above. Funny.

Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947, would have been only 18 in 1965 when the "massacree" transpired, 20 in 1967 when the original recording was made, and 22 when he appeared as himself in the Arthur Penn movie.

Yet he is now an old man. How do these things happen? Arlo Guthrie grown up, I can handle; middle-aged, okay. But not like this.

technorati: Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant, 1995

Rampant geekery

Min Jung Kim, one of the more luminous SF bloggers and definitely one of the most gorgeous, posted this week about having gotten engaged -- over instant messenger. While this will break the hearts of countless lurkers, stalkers, losers and twinkies, Ms. Kim has insisted for many years on her core geekery and it's only to be expected. Congrats, M.J. -- whom I've never met, but who saw me read once.

And I continue to be fascinated with the Radio Forum, an outpost of Bay Area radio geeks obsessed with format changes, announcers, programming and so on. In another life I would have been on of these guys -- and I'm sure they're all guys -- with jobs in and out of radio, and obsessing about it when I'm not working in it.

technorati: radio, Min Jung Kim, geeks

Focus on the Fundies: radio net going to 'unfit' minister

Quite a story in the LA Times about an aging fundamentalist preacher who is preparing to surrender his extensive radio network to a protegé considered unfit due to allegations of sexual hijinks.

And in Rolling Stone, a nice piece on Rick Santorum and other "evangelicals in exile."

technorati: Chuck Smith, fundies, Mike Kestler

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- drinking antifreeze edition

We begin with a cartoon:


See, the guys are Indian, get it. Courtesy Manish on Ultrabrown.

This story sounds like it goes beyond the usual "thousands of images found on a computer" (which usually just means some wanker didn't clear his cache) -- a man whose mother runs a day care center in the San Jose suburb of Newark was found to have lots of child pr0n including pix of a girl under his mother's care. He was caught at the airport trying to flee the country.

A man, now 28, pretended for 20 years to be retarded so his mother could receive benefits for his handicap.

Now that he has been found out, the man now has to resign from his job as host of a right-wing talk-show.

Valleywag offers a helpful guide for whistleblowers: How to leak information to the news media. Tip no. 1: Don't leak from work.

Headline of the week: The New York Post, for I Adore A Girl Without Spellcheck Or Panties.

Finally, a movie starring Charlize Theron is filming in Seattle this weekend and re-enacting the 1999 WTO protests that rocked the city's downtown. Best line's in the lede:

Seattle police say this weekend's filming of a movie based on the 1999 WTO riots will have "minimal" impact on commuters and shoppers. Of course, they said the same thing seven years ago before the anti-globalization protests erupted into full-scale, tear-gas-choked riots.

Of course, this time they won't use real tear gas. Maybe.