Busting Up the Place

"Busting up the place" originated, way way back, with people who were being persecuted without anyone giving a damn, and who had no other channel for protesting their plight.

That's a far cry from busting up the place when the entire society knows about the persecution, and the majority's sympathetic, and you enjoy a rich and diverse set of communication channels. "Busting-up" is not a strategy to keep handy in one's social action toolkit.

Busting up the place is a last resort, not a strategy for advancing an argument. If you'd insist that your justifiable anger makes such action righteous, then I invite you to enjoy the gunfire on election day when Trump's angry followers bust up the place*. This is one of many excesses that can and will come back to bite you.

Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?


* - If, that is, he doesn't cannily use recent events to convince a few thousand people in key electoral college counties of the need for an authoritarian leader amid the chaos, thereby barely eking out reelection.

The Segregating Outcome of Selective Attention

I've managed, finally (I'm slow!) to connect two insights familiar to Slog readers.

I've spent all these years trying to tie frizzy strands of comprehension - errant corn chunks studding my brain's excreta - into a coherent unifying conclusion. Perceptual framing (which I finally latched on to in January, 2018 after frustrating decades spent dancing with a conceptual ghost) appears to be it. As I note here, it explains disparate mysteries, finding a common basis for art, creativity, spirituality, hypnosis, insanity, depression, and self-destructive behavior; offers a fresh and credible theology and cosmology; and accounts for the most elusive phenomena in the human experience: inspiration. But glimpsing a unified end point doesn’t instantly resolve the myriad frazzled strands into coherence. One still needs to put in the work. So I'll get to work....


In "Giving Misanthropy Its Due", I wrote:

We study the Other...and we don't like what we see. Men rue the cruelty of women; women rue the cruelty of men. Both are quite correct, really.

Racism, sexism, classism, etc. are nothing more than the incomplete registration of a perfectly appropriate misanthropy.

We notice the flaws to which we're all heir much more precisely in The Other, whom we instinctively observe with great care. Me and my tribe receive a blurrier, more forgiving appraisal, due not to vanity but to familiarity. We're less instinctively alert to the familiar, because it's innately safer.

So let's make the easy connection to the observation that people who notice stupidity always think it makes them smart, and noticing craziness makes them sane. That’s wrong. It just means you're observant. You’d need to direct those observational skills back at yourself for the complete, and far less flattering, picture. Why do we decline to do so? Not so much vanity as familiarity. We are adapted to scan the unfamiliar. And nothing's more familiar than Me.


This also explains why our albatrosses are red herrings (which in turn explains lots of other things). There are profound discrepancies between our view of Me/Us and of You/Them, and the disjoint is (per above) perceptual - baked into our innate framing - not moral, as we've long imagined.

A Centrist View of Police Violence and Race

A few years ago I made a case that there's actually not much gap between mainstream left and mainstream right positions on guns and abortion. But I was referencing private positions, not public ones. Big difference! If only each side would talk straight with the other - rather than posture and lie in reaction to extremists on the opposite side - these issues wouldn't be so intractable.

The hot topic of police racist violence offers similar common ground. The problem, as always, is that amid all the heat, few are willing to stipulate, out loud, truths they well know to be true. Anger inhibits the ability to access extenuating truth. Just as we learn to steer into skids, we must aim to remain deliberately connected to our full corpus of knowledge and rationality when it conflicts with our emotional momentum.

I will stipulate below some points most people might privately concede, but would never say out loud at moments like this. The first is an exception. It's a crucial point that not everyone knows, and is crucial to bear in mind.

1. Police in America, at their worst, can be shockingly and systematically racist. It's far worse than white people realize, though we're beginning to see it now thanks to cell phone cameras. I once travelled to LA with a black band, and while none of my colleagues were meek, they not only refused to jay walk at deserted intersections, they throbbed with fear at the suggestion. LA cops were notorious, at least among black people. White people, however - including white Angelenos - had no idea. This wide gap of experience helps account for the profound disjoint between black and white reactions to the OJ Simpson acquittal.

2. Policing is dangerous. Cops run toward gunfire, and that requires a certain type. It's a high-testosterone job, and while we expect them to act fully professional - to switch off their adrenalin and physicality when the bad guy's caught, downshifting immediately into calm administrative dweebs - human beings don't always work like that. You don't work like that! Society needs  thousands of law enforcement officers, so we don't have the luxury of selecting only freaks of immaculate emotional control, which means there will always be imperfect control of police violence. If we want police, and we do, we must accept this (while finding ways to vigilantly watch the watchmen).

3. Cops need to be able to shoot and even kill people entirely by accident once in a while. We offer this latitude because we expect them to run toward the gunfire, and they have wives and kids, and they deserve to stay alive just as you and I do. Their service is heroic, and we owe it to heros to tolerate rare mistakes or overreaction.

4. A mistakenly shot/killed civilian nationwide every few weeks isn't an abomination. In a nation of 330 million, with 700,000 law enforcement officers, it's a statistical likelihood. In fact, I'd say they're doing tremendously well.

5. Racist and corrupt policemen shamefully use #3 and #4 as a shield to justify bad-faith acts and flagrant atrocities up to and including murder. We need to get as close to zero tolerance as possible...while recognizing that they're a slim minority.

6. The rest of the police are conditioned to look the other way, due to a culture of solidarity that serves useful supportive purposes but makes it damnably hard to detect and expunge bad cops.

Fighting this institutional issue will require fresh solutions (outrage just tightens the blue line). For one thing, I'd like to see a channel for anonymous dialog with everyday cops-on-the-beat, most of whom are true public servants. Not a tattle line, but a way to hear their candid suggestions for improving the system (they aren't loving this, either).

7. When you turn on the TV and hear that "another" black civilian was hurt or killed by police, and you immediately draw conclusions, you are doing the same stereotyping and pre-judgement you're condemning. WE ALL KNOW WHAT THOSE GODDAMN COPS ARE CAPABLE OF. The antidote to a pattern of harsh pre-judgement isn't reciprocal harsh pre-judgement. It's calm, smart, competent action.

---

The excesses of the anti-cop mob - reflexive condemnation of every cop who gets it wrong and agitation for punishment before facts are known - are maddeningly similar (though thankfully less lethal) to the excesses of police violence itself. If we destroy a good cop because we mistake him for a bad one due to our predisposition about cops, haven't we committed the same injustice we oppose? Should our visceral feelings toward police affect our responsibility to be fair-minded? If we demand punishment before the wheels of justice have fully turned, aren't we favoring gut-level summary judgement and extrajudicial punishment?


Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?

Unnameable Breakfast

I don't even know what to call this. It's a breakfast bowl that built itself via unconscious direction.

I entered my kitchen.

I poured some yogurt into a bowl.

I added blueberries and banana slices.

I plopped in a couple tablespoons of chunky/crunchy raw almond butter.

I stirred lightly - to swirl, not mix.

I toasted, intentionally nearly burnt, some leftover fluffy whole wheat pita, ripped it into tatters, and threw them on top.

Good.

The Awesome Humble Stranger

You know the scene in the movie where the humble stranger's true identity comes to light, and it's awesome?

Has anyone, in the hundred years of cinema (and the centuries of literature before that) ever considered that guy's lot in life for the eternity before the big reveal? And, for that matter, what about awesome humble strangers who go to their graves without revelation?

Put yourself in their shoes. Do you internally giggle whenever you're underestimated...for decades? That amused mega-confidence may persist for a few months, but at some point you'll accept the external world's view of you. We're wired to self-calibrate from social appraisal. When evidence conflicts with what we believe to be the truth, we either bend or we break, depending on how tightly we hold on to the so-called truth.

Insanity is the inability to reframe despite clear environmental cues. Perpetually ignoring every social cue while stubbornly maintaining a certain framing is the essence of cray-cray. Even if you're right.

The awesome humble stranger will either have gone crazy, or would long ago have let go of any notion of awesomeness. Either way, the truth comes to feel like a distant daydream, so, by the time the reveal happens, he'll have nothing left. He'll be as confused as anyone else. He won't accept the mission, or the crown, or the acclaim. Rather, he'll grab his bowl and head back out to the street to continue his begging, because dinnertime's coming. Not because he's crazy, but because he's sane.


We become who we pretend to be ("fake it till you make it"), and we pretend to be the person we frame ourselves as being, and that framing is a blend of social feedback, overall general temperament, and, incidentally, actuality.

This is loosely part two in the "Explaining Demented Old Coots" series. The previous explained why people lost in the desert won't eat your foie gras.

Face Masks: The Centrist Result

I abhor both extremes and try to find a sane middle path. This makes me a Centrist. So it's only to be expected that I've got a Centrist viewpoint re: masks.

The assistant manager of my local supermarket goes maskless, standing inches away from cashiers (who don't dare complain) while waiting to switch out cash drawers. I try to stay clear while he swaggers down the middle of aisles. Spotting me, with my mask (always worn indoors), recoiling from his passage, he probably thinks "liberal pussy".

Outdoors, I walk with a neighbor up our sleepy lane. We maintain the required distance, but do not wear masks. Sometimes we pass tremulous neighbors in enormous masks and astronaut gloves, clearly terrified/furious at the transgressive MAGA brutes despite the extra space we politely give them.

Stamps: Economics Judo

As I worked through my Boxes, I stumbled upon my dad's childhood stamp collection from the early 1940s. I was dimly aware that the stamp market had fallen apart (perception of scarcity -> myriad collectors -> flooded market -> no value), but, wow. Afer a couple of solid hours researching his 19th century Imperial Russian stamps, his obscenely inflated Weimar Republic stamps (denominations of 50 million, uh, Weimarbucks?), and other beaucoup-seeming items, I was kind of hoping some would be worth more than five dollars. But nyuh-uh.

I also unearthed first-day-of-issue stamps from my childhood, sent by various friends and relatives of my parents to fund a nest egg for me. But I remain eggless. You see, everyone on Earth figured these things would appreciate into treasure, so everyone on Earth saved them, so they're less rare than toilet paper (for those clicking in from the future, that's a little pandemic humor). It seems strange that everyone missed the obvious economic fallacy, but flocking is a thing. #flockingisathing.

It's all worthless. All these stamps are heartbreakingly worthless:

Sorry, Li'l Leonard....

And all these sets are worthless, too:

All for naught, alas.


The easiest and most productive route of mental re framing (aka flip of perspective) is to turn things inside-out/upside-down. Simply flip it. I once wrote about the eureka that taught me this trick:

When I was shipped off to college, I was given a strange and foreign object: an iron. And since they don't come with instruction manuals, I had no choice but to teach myself to use it. It wasn't long before I discovered the first rule of ironing: you can't iron away a crease. You can reduce it some, but the fabric will always have an inclination to bend there, and there's no changing that, even with the brutest force.

This for some reason fascinated me. I spent time rolling it around my mind. And, eventually, I had an insight, realizing that there is, after all, one - and only one - way to eliminate a crease: flip the garment and then iron to create an opposite crease.

I realized I'd hit upon an essential truth, and have applied it all my life. For example, if you're plagued by nightmares full of scary monsters, the trick is to love the monsters (this was surely the original intent behind giving children teddy bears).

So how did I flip the sad result of Stamp Bummer? Think about it! Take a minute!

I bought some stamps! For pennies! It's a buyers market...so I became a buyer!

Sure, I could have simply enjoyed the ones I'm drowning in, here, but they don't do much for me, aesthetically. But check out what I scored (average price, including shipping: $4):

China PRC 1988 Sc. #2157 110th Anniversary of Stamps

China PRC 1987 MNH 1985 T106 Giant Pandas

China PRC 2377 MNH 1991 T167 Outlaws of the Marsh

China PRC 1997-21 Outlaws of the Marsh (there are apparently lots of marsh outlaws stamps)

China PRC 3005 MNH 2000 Spring Festival

Scott 2869 Legends Of The West

I bought these all in "very fine" condition - below the unnecessarily fussy (and marginally more expensive) highest level, but more than good enough for my purposes.

I haven't figured out how I'll display them yet. I certainly won't keep them in a book. They'll go up on a wall, in a cluster. That's why I bought "souvenir sheets", a larger and more showy format, rather than nerdy little individual stamps.

Obviously, I like the Chinese ones. But, for only $7, I also sprung, what the hell, for the Wild West set at bottom. These are impulse-buy prices, and I can always use these to mail stuff - a $5.80 value! This is why American stamps cost a tad more on eBay. Their intrinsic values elevates them slightly from utter miserable worthlessness.

One can afford to be casually extravagant. Were there ever stamps that you liked to use for mailing? Like in the last 150 years? For example, perhaps these Jimi Hendrix ones?

If so, eBay is your oyster. Hundreds of stamp nerds will glumly sell you sheet after perfectly preserved sheet for a nominal premium (even ones you'd assume to be expensive, like Star Wars themes), and then you can thumb your nose at beleaguered philatelists by using them, like a Phyllis Stein, to just, like mail stuff. Too bad for you, suckers!

I've flipped seller's catastrophe into buyer's zeal!

Fixed the Audio

The audio file in yesterday's posting wasn't playing in Chrome browser. I've fixed it. For your convenience, here it is:

I just found a note in one of my boxes, a message-in-a-bottle sent to my future self so he'd remember how kooky it was. In one month, I played with:

• A flamenco/carnatic/jazz trio in Madrid with Indian tabla drums and Spanish acoustic guitar. Here's a brief sample:

(if that doesn't work, click here) [etc., etc.]

Box Break for Music Career Note-in-a-Bottle

I've previously described how ridiculously promiscuous my music career was (setting the stage for my similar food writing career):

"At a certain point in my musical career, after a weekend spent running between a salsa gig in the South Bronx, a brass quintet gig in Midtown, and rehearsals for some weirdo avante-garde puppet thing Downtown, I was feeling satisfied at how differently I'd played in all these places (as I did in the dozens of wildly diverse scenes of which I was a recognized part). I acted differently, too. And talked differently. A typical freelance New York City musician, I was the ultimate chameleon (but I didn't think about this very often; I was too busy doing it).

"When my weekend was over, I hightailed it over to the Skylark Lounge out by JFK airport, a black bar where men wore hats with feathers, to sit in, just for kicks, with one of my all-time favorite jazz drummers (and friends) Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, who performed there with his trio. Around 2 a.m., while we took a break (and he practiced paradiddles on his practice pad in the back room), Walter asked me what I'd been up to. I recounted my weekend wryly, ala Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Walter listened, then looked up slyly. He asked me if this was just another stop on my ride. My eyes widened and I gasped in horror. "Walter, this is home!" I exclaimed.

And I meant it. However, I had to privately acknowledge that the South Bronx salsa gig was also home. As was the chamber music gig, and the avante garde thingamajib. There were many stops on my ride, none of them not "home". "I'm like a whore," I remember thinking to myself more than once in dark moods, "who really believes it."

I just found a note in one of my boxes, a message-in-a-bottle sent to my future self so he'd remember how kooky it was. In one month, I played with:

• A flamenco/carnatic/jazz trio in Madrid with Indian tabla drums and Spanish acoustic guitar. Here's a brief sample:

(if that doesn't work, click here)
• An (otherwise) all-woman samba band
• An Irish experimental folk-rock duo with a singer/songwriter
• A swing band led by a midget pianist (literally) old enough to have once rented a room from Scott Joplin's widow (Shorty Jackson; I'm just out of camera range in this shot)
• A latin pop gig led by a Brazilian midget heartthrob (Nelson Ned, a helluva nice guy).
• A rock band - also featuring a harp and cello - created by a Columbia PhD composer
• A gypsy wake
• A psychedelic New Orleans brass band (I think that was the week Bob Dorough travelled in from Delaware Water Gap just to sing "Conjunction Junction" with us).
• A stream-of-consciousness avant-garde duo (with acoustic bass) that deliberately annoyed patrons of an East Village cafe run by a misanthrope (we called the group "Rainbow Love")
• A group led by an internationally famous painter (Larry Rivers) who owned a saxophone

For a sense of my range (which enabled the promiscuousness), compare the sound sample above with this performance in the early 90s, around the same time as this kooky month.

The Boxes: Midterm Note

Previous posting
First posting in "The Boxes" series
All "The Boxes" postings in reverse chronological order


A quick observation before I pick up the narrative....

I'm just shy of halfway through the boxes, and something's flipped. It's subtle, but as a veteran reframer, I'm sensitive to mental flips of perspective (I've been working on it since college).

My possessions just became finite.

I don't expect that to mean much to you. It wouldn't have meant much to me an hour ago. But it's an extremely odd way to feel after decades of nebulous blobbiness. I'm now a person with finite possessions. What a relief!


With friends in the Third World, and having spent much of my adult life scraping the bottom American echelons, I am well-aware that downsizing joy is the second most disgustingly indulgent indulgence a Rich World person can flaunt. The top one, naturally, is celebrating having eaten less food and reduced one's weight. America's "working poor" fight perpetual battles against obesity and clutter....and somehow never question their delusions of poverty.

My next projects: wean myself from the unrelenting carnal desire of multitudes of lingerie models (NOT NOW, SABRINA, I'M *WRITING*!), trim down my Ferrari collection, and stay home for a weekend rather than take another time machine ride.