Parallel Lines On A Slow Decline
Now Playing: Tyrannosaurus Rex--"King of the Rumbling Spires"
"Tolstoy would have us believe that every happy family is happy in the same way. I for one don't buy it. It's impossible to imagine a family happy having learned their father will be released from his ten-year imprisonment in a gulag sharing the identical emotion with the family that has just won a meal for six at Pearson's Big Steer Restaurant. Tolstoy's an idiot for even suggesting it. Does he really expect us to believe that the happiness shared by the Marx Brothers, having just pummeled Margaret Dumont with their body blows, is the same as that shared by the Howard brothers, Moe, Curly, and Shemp, having just extracted their dear friend Larry's head from a tight mine shaft? Tolstoy's starting to look like more and more of a jackass with each fresh example."

--Michael J. Nelson, in "The Baldwins" from Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

Things are finally starting to cool up (?) in Michigan. We had (so far as I know) the year's first snow on November 2. The skies are more generally overcast and the stars seem brighter and more distant when perceived from Wurster Park on a clear night while en route to a friend's house to watch old Brian Clemens Thriller episodes from 1973.

My life's been relatively staid recently; Gloria moved back to Spain and we haven't gotten a "replacement housemate" yet. Gloria was fun, but there's a silver lining in her departure in that I won't be tempted to watch Grey's Anatomy anymore. The always excellent combo of Starling Electric and Great Lakes Myth Society gave a terrific show at the Blind Pig last weekend, after which the former gave a party at their house, one at which I promised myself not to be too outlandish. This promise worked out as well as any of them, as it did when a bunch of us met at Leopold's two nights later to celebrate Amy's birthday.

Guided By Voices are generally terrific, as I got to discover last weekend. I've somehow managed to slip out of the general American musical continuum in my love for most things local in the past year and a half, and am usually only able to keep up with new stuff through the spotty 107.1 FM. After hearing stuff from Beck's new album, The Information, I'm going to try and try and make more of an effort.

I've fallen into a writing slump, mainly due to all the reading I've been doing--Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915, Jan Morris' Fifty Years of Europe, Eric Rauchway's excellent Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (a splendid microhistory of the "Major's" 1901 assassination by Leon Czolgosz, and what I think would make a fantastic American Experience documentary), Neil Christopher's story "Cerberus Rising", and I'm about to start on George Packer's Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq.

"There was the Bush/Rove/DeLay revolution, a brilliant perpetual plan for winning elections, raising money and concentrating power. Even if they were never verbalized, everyone implicitly understood the revolution's prime directives: support the president blindly, demonize the opposition and never break ranks. It wasn't hard to be this kind of Republican. If you could read at a fourth-grade level, pray to Jesus and exhibit genuine terror before photos of men holding hands, you could ride the revolution all the way to Washington with a ten-point cushion."

--Matt Taibbi, in "Ohio Burning" from Rolling Stone, 16 Nov. 2006.

There's voting everywhere in the country, as far as I know, on Tuesday. Don't forget to vote!* I think there's a good chance things will go better than they did two years ago. Of course, that's also what I thought two years ago.

So... not much going on, really. Again.

*Although I don't think it's a good idea to assume a snotty know-it-all attitude towards those perceived to be relatively uninterested in voting, as some did when putting up flyers in downtown Ann Arbor reminding "those stupid kids" of the midterms in needlessly arch and condescending terms--"maybe you can 'Google' it!" I suspect their civic virtue would have had more effect had they correctly identified Election Day as November 7 instead of November 5. I usually refrain from defacing other people's flyers, but this was sort of a moral imperative.