Saving Us From the Shootout

For the past few years, the UEFA Champions League final – the Super Bowl of European club soccer and, some would argue, the highest level competition in the world – has been played on Saturday, rather than the traditional midweek date for European fixtures. That’s mean good mid afternoon time slot and Fox has therefore run the match on the main Fox network (over the air, as it were) rather than one of its cable outlets. So more Americans get to feast their eyes on the final.

And what a final this year, huh? English club Chelsea’s improbable run ran into Germany power Bayern Munich, who had the benefit of playing the final in their home stadium (as with the Super Bowl, the site of the final is determined years in advance). The two teams slugged it out for more than an hour, before Bayern grabbed a late goal that surely looked like the winner. However, given the script, Chelsea struck back with an even later goal of their own, leaving the two sides tied 1-1 after regulation.

Which meant it all went pear shaped after that. Thirty minutes of overtime produced nothing but insomnia, before the inevitable – penalty kicks. Yes, it was dramatic. Certainly, if you were a Chelsea fan, it must have been sweet (Chelsea prevailed 4-3, with the kicks taken in front of the end of the stadium where Bayern’s fans were seated). But for a neutral or, gods forbid, someone who wasn’t a soccer fan looking in with curiosity, it was an anticlimax.

If you’re a fan of the game, you know that shootouts as means to determine a winner aren’t all that popular. If you’re not a fan, you might rightly wonder what is the point of crowning a champion based on a small part of the game, equivalent to a home run derby in baseball. Maybe that’s why Sepp Blatter, the enigmatic chief of FIFA, the game’s global governing body, is searching for an alternative. Maybe.

It was not always so that penalty kicks were a part of the game:

I was in River Plate stadium (before it was known as Estadio Monumental Antonio Vespuci), Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 25, 1978, when three goals were scored in extra time and the hosts defeated the Netherlands to win the World Cup.

No golden goal. No penalty kick shootout lurking in the minds of players and fans. In fact, I believe that was the last World Cup final that would have actually been replayed, two days later, before the major domos at FIFA realized that each and every final must come to a resolution. Travel plans. The demands of television. Not to mention the strain on the players.

Replays these days in such major tournaments aren’t really feasible, for those reasons (although the F.A. Cup manages to deal with them in most rounds, IIRC). So what’s the solution? In my opinion, the problem isn’t so much PKs themselves as a tie breaker (although I think the old MLS version was more interesting), it’s that the teams involved know that, if they hold out long enough, the game will change into whatever the tie breaker is.

So here’s my solution – let them play. In games where there must be a winner and loser (so the vast majority of matches aren’t impacted), tell the teams going in that they’re going to play until there’s a winner. I’m open to suggestions about allowing extra subs or what the overtime periods should look like (I’ve got no real problem with sudden death, or “Golden Goal” as FIFA dubbed it), but at the end of the day, the winner should score more goals that the other team.

Having watched lots of games that ended in PKs, the sense I get is that once teams get into extra time the goal becomes not winning the game, but avoiding losing it, because the PK scenario greatly equalizes the two teams’ chances. In other words, for large chunks of that half hour, it’s a slow speed kick around section, not a competitive match worthy of a major final. My theory is that, without the safety net of PKs hanging out there, teams would be forced to play to win and would, therefore, score goals.

Granted, there could be games that go on for hours and hours, as some Stanley Cup playoff games are famous for, but I think that would be really rare. After all, since a draw is meaningless neither side has a reason to play for one, right? It would be truly exceptional for two teams to be so well matched (or so astoundingly unable to score) that games would drag on and on as a regular exercise. And when they did stretch on to epic lengths, they would be truly epic. What’s the problem with that?

That being said, I don’t expect anything to change real soon. For one thing, PK shootouts only pop up in knockout matches which, even in tournaments like the World Cup or Champions League, are really rare. Easier just to hope the problem doesn’t pop up this year than worry about dealing with it. And, for all its flaws, the shootout does make things easy on the TV programmers, which more and more runs the sports world.

In other words, we’re presented with a long-term deadlock that nobody can seem to break. Hmm, which end do I want to take the penalties in?

Friday Review: Palimpsest

At the core of Palimpsest is an intriguing idea: people enter a truly weird otherworldly city (called Palimpsest, naturally) by having sex with others who share the same mark – something like a tattoo, but that is actually a map of one particular part of the city. Whom you plook determines where you go in Palimpsest.

But that’s not quite right. That’s sort of like saying that the core of Tommy is a story about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who loves pinball or that at the core of Brave is a story about a mute girl wandering on a bridge. Since those are both concept albums, the real core of them is the music. The stories (such as they are) are secondary.

Palimpsest is kind of like that. It’s about words – lots of words – more than it is about the characters and what happens to them. It’s not surprising that Valente, in addition to writing a lot of fantasy and sci-fi prose, also writes a great deal of poetry. Palimpsest is, from beginning to end, a feast of words, of descriptions of the bizarre city and the people who are traveling there (not to mention how they’re getting there).

Language is clearly Palimpsest’s strength. Unfortunately, it’s also its biggest weakness, at least for me. Valente gets so wrapped up in descriptions and baroque prose that it’s easy to get lost in the words and skimp on meaning. As a result, character development suffers, as does any kind of real plot momentum, which greatly ramps up with about 1/3rd of the book left, as if Valente suddenly realized she had to actually do something other than have the characters wander around Palimpsest.

Which is understandable, because Palimpsest itself is an easy place to get lost in. Think of the most bizarre kind of world ever visited by Doctor Who, multiplied by a few levels of magnitude, and then given form by animator Hayao Miyazaki. Seriously, it is completely weird in the best sense of the word. For readers, anyway. For the residents there – including a cadre of mute wounded veterans of a war that may or may not be over – and our visiting main characters, the city tends to have some pretty rough edges. When the four characters decide they want to stay in Palimpsest forever, it doesn’t seem like a natural consequence of their nature, but rather a necessary engine to drive the plot.

Ultimately, what left me most unfulfilled about Palimpsest is the questions that I had about the world Valente created, both as it applies to our “real” world and the fictional city. Valente calls Palimpsest a “sexually transmitted city,” but is it the most communicable STD of all time (all four characters begin the book without the mark, sleep with one other person, then have it – a 100% transmission ratio)? Or is there some kind of volition involved in giving it to someone else? What is it about sex that opens the door to Palimpsest? What happens if the person with the section of the city on their body where you want or need to go isn’t attractive to you? What if you’re straight and that person is of the same gender? Three of the four characters are conveniently bisexual, which removes a potential area that would have been interesting to explore. Why do all four have to agree to go permanently for any of them to do so (another quartet had a member die and is permanently shut out)? And how exactly does Palimpsest work, anyway, with its combination of purely magical mythology and steampunk mechanics?

In the end, the word that jumps most to mind when thinking about Palimpsest is one that gets thrown at things like Brave and Tommy, too – pretentious. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing – I love Tommy and Brave, after all. But I suspect how much one enjoys Palimpsest will come down to how enamored they are of Valente’s verbose style. It keeps me from being truly wrapped up in the book. But there are enough interesting ideas and audacious imagery that it made me think a bit. And that’s never a bad thing.

A final note on something I don’t comment about much when it comes to books. As with lots of books I “read,” I actually listened to Palimpsest via Audible. I’ve never really gotten thrown off by the reader/narrator, but this one really had some issues. Particularly when it came to one character who is Italian, whom she gave an outrageous “that’s a spicy a meataballa” accent (until, near the end, he thankfully lost his tongue). From a quick search in Amazon’s “look inside” feature, the dialogue doesn’t appear to be written that way. If that’s correct, it was a horrible off-putting choice on the reader’s part.

The Details
------------------------
Palimpsest
By Catherynne M. Valente
Published 2009
Nominee, Best Novel – 2010 Hugo Awards
Winner, SF/Fantasy/Horror – 2009 Lambda Literary Awards

Does Genre Matter? Sould It?

Let me tell you about a movie I watched recently . . .

It’s about a 17-year old girl, A, who is on the verge of big things, about to go off to a very prestigious college. She makes a grave mistake, driving drunk and causing a car wreck that leaves a man, B, in a coma and kills his wife and young son. A few years later, after A is released from prison, she seeks out B in order to atone or apologize or . . . well, maybe she doesn’t quite know herself. B, a shell of his former self due to the accident, doesn’t know who she is (juvenile records are sealed, remember). Predictably, yet improbably, they bond, until the awful truth is revealed. A makes one last gesture seeking forgiveness. The end.

If I asked you what genre that film would fit in, what would you say? Drama, broadly, and possibly tragedy, in the classic Greek sense. It’s also a small indie film, of the kind that focuses on only a few characters and their relationships with each other. So far, so good.

Now, let me add a little twist.

The story of A and B play out against the backdrop of a superbly improbable event – the appearance in the sky of a second Earth that, by all accounts, is just like ours (down to having the same people on it). And the last act of forgiveness A does for B is to give up her spot on a spaceship to the other Earth to B, so that he might find his alternate wife and son there.

OK, now what kind of genre are we talking about? It sounds like science fiction, except that the movie almost goes out of its away to avoid any “science,” ignoring the real world calamities that might arise if another planet suddenly appeared very near to ours. Fantasy then, maybe? Or maybe just the general rubric of “speculative fiction” – a simple “what if?” story, without any grander world building ambitions?

The film I’m talking about is Another Earth, a low-budget indie that took Sundance by storm a couple of years ago. It’s very good – the slow dance of the two main characters, although fairly predictable, is very well done – but I’ve seen more than one person up in arms that it dares to call itself sci-fi. Not just in a “this isn’t marketed the right way” sense, but in a “this isn’t sci-fi, therefore it’s crap” sense. As if they feel they’ve been duped. Does that make any sense?

In one way it might. If something is presented to a reader/viewer/listener as “science fiction” or “progressive rock” (to use another genre with hotly contested boundaries) that triggers some particular expectations in their mind. If those expectations aren’t met, they’re disappointed. I understand that. I’ve got albums in my collection that came out of the prog world but don’t really fit the genre, if we’re honest. It took me a little while to let go the “but they’ve got the wrong label!” observation and just get down to the music.

Similarly, while Another Earth is sold as sci-fi (by some, at any rate), it’s pretty clear early on that it isn’t really interested in any of the scientific ideas or problems raised by the sudden appearance of the additional Earth. It’s more of a big blue metaphor, hanging in the sky promising a second chance for our characters. I could understand the frustration if they had tried to deal with the scientific stuff and did it badly, but where that is so clearly not the focus of things, why get hung up on it?

At the end of the day, however, a movie, book, or album stands or falls on its own merits, not how its described, packaged, or sold. To say negative things about a movie because it doesn’t conform to your preconceptions of what you thought it was going to be is awfully closed minded. That doesn’t mean you have to like it – art is subjective, after all, and what moves some people will seem pointless to others. Fair enough. But unless you reach that conclusion with the blinders removed, it doesn’t really count.

At best, genre labels and descriptions are signposts that might guide you to art you would like. If you’ve seen movies X, Y, and Z and they fall under the heading “film noir,” you might want to explore other movies with the same label. But that label doesn’t guarantee quality. Sturgeon was right (or perhaps too generous) – 90% of everything is crap – even within your own pet genres.

I’ve written before about how frustrating it is when writers from outside the genre dip their toes into the speculative fiction pool but furiously deny that’s what they’re doing. It suggests that they have negative preconceptions of what science fiction or fantasy is – pulpy, poorly written, simple escapism, etc. – that they don’t want linked to their work. It’s unseemly and reeks of snobbery. Readers or viewers who do the same thing, and link genre purity with quality, aren’t any better.

Friday Review: Destination Moon

In his penultimate column for FilmCritic.com, John Scalzi laid out nine sci-fi flicks “you should see that you probably haven’t.” I was pleasantly surprised to have either seen all of them or have them in the Netflix queue, with one exception. I knew the name Destination Moon, but had no idea it was a George Pal production and was co-written by Robert Heinlein. With that kind of pedigree, I immediately hit Netlfix and put it at the front of the line. So, was it a journey worth taking?

I think so, although more for archaeological purposes than sheer entertainment. Made in 1950, Destination Moon has a hilariously overwrought “American industry, fuck yeah!” setup that makes you wonder if Ayn Rand, in addition to Heinlein, had a hand in the script. After a governmental rocket program is scuttled by sabotage (done, probably, given the times, by filthy commies!), private industry takes over. A rocket is built to take a crew to the moon (the mechanics of which are explained by Woody Woodpecker). Meddlesome bureaucrats try to stop the launch (due to concerns over its nuclear propulsion system), which proceeds just steps ahead of a court injunction. Really.

Once the rocket launches, things really get off the ground, so to speak. From there on out, Destination Moon is a solid piece of 1950s hard sci-fi, complete with mathematical calculations and legitimate concerns about the safety of the whole enterprise. Of course, some of what is on screen we know now is wrong – laughably so, in some cases – but given where we were at the time, it’s pretty solid.

Unfortunately, the focus on hard science makes for a somewhat dry dramatic arc. Our heroes reach the moon, but this isn’t the moon of Georges Méliès or H.G. Wells?. There are no natives who take our heroes hostage. Not even any man-bats or what have you. Only rocks, dust, and a spectacular view of the Earth. Supreme credit to Pal and his crew for not trying to create excitement at the expense of accuracy. Shame it makes things a little bloodless.

More to the point, it forces us to focus on the heroes themselves who are, to put it mildly, barely defined at all. The notable exception is the second-string radio operator, the walking stereotype of a Brooklyn dimwit, who becomes the audience surrogate when things need explained, in spite of the fact that we all saw the damned cartoon not too long before. He’s hammered in as comic relief that just doesn’t work.

Thus, when drama finally arrives on the Moon, in the form of a variant on “The Cold Equations,” it’s really hard to care that one of the four crew members might have to get left behind to die, especially if it’s the annoying guy from Brooklyn. In perhaps the only real sop to story ahead of realism, the crew has a “Eureka!” moment and figures out a way to leave the Moon safely. So nothing’s really lost, for all that.

If only they would actually get home. It’s ironic that Destination Moon ends with the rocket on its return journey to Earth, but before reentry. We know from Woody that the rocket will deploy a series of parachutes to slow its descent before landing. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have addressed the problem of reentry temperatures and, thus, it seems that our heroes are destined to escape from the Moon only to burn up upon return to the Earth (or die in a fiery crash). Again, it’s likely they didn’t know any better at the time, but still.

While Destination Moon lacks quite a bit as a film, one thing going for it are its exquisite visuals (it won an Oscar for visual effects). It’s clearly dated to 21st Century eyes, but they do a fantastic job of servicing the story and providing some unique views of places nobody had ever been before.

Destination Moon is a odd one. It’s got a cheesy 1950s B-movie sentimentality, but it’s visually impressive and scientifically rigorous (given the times). We rarely see that in modern sci-fi. So maybe it’s more impressive than I give it credit for.

The Details
------------------------
Destination Moon
Released 1950
Directed by Irving Pichel
Written by James O'Hanlon, Robert Heinlein, Rip Van Ronkel
Starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, et. al.

The Virtual Sky Is Falling! Or Maybe Not

I’m all for good stories about media-fueled inflated panics. Y2K. The Rapture. The world coming to an end according to the Mayans. Good stuff, all. But there comes a point where it’s hard to tut-tut the media for feeding a public frenzy when there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that’s what’s going on. Sort of an inflated panic about inflated panics, as it were.

Did you know there’s going to be an Internet “apocalypse” on July 9? Me neither. But according to this article at Salon:

The apocalyptic story line was once reserved for truly apocalyptic events. Nuclear war. The return of Christ. Environmental or economic collapse. But it’s 2012, and the apocalypse has become the basis for everything from Super Bowl commercials to summer romantic comedies . . . Just read coverage of the so-called Internet Doomsday virus, which will supposedly strike and shut down the Web on July 9.

Here’s the thing – the Salon piece doesn’t cite, link to, or quote any of that coverage. If it’s so pervasive, I figured a quick Google search would provide a cascade of it. Alas, all I found was a few techy articles and links back to the Salon piece. This article at TechRepublic about the underlying problem (and how to fix it), too, begins:

If one were to believe some headlines, there’s an Internet apocalypse coming on July 9, 2012, when hundreds of thousands of computers will be unable to access the Internet because of actions by the FBI.

Again, however, there are not quotes, cites, or links to these pervasive headlines. I’m pretty plugged into the news cycle, especially when it comes to Net-related stuff and I’ve never heard of this impending doom. Given the roots of the alleged panic (the FBI is involved, after all), you’d think that it would have spawned some good conspiracy theories, at least. I haven’t found any. The actual details of the criminal investigation are kind of interesting, though, and are set out in the Salon piece.

Don’t get me wrong – the media frequently latches onto some small problem and blows it entirely out of proportion. Like this:

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or this:



So it’s good to hold them accountable when they do. But I’m not sure that’s happening in this case. If you’re going to get into a panic about a bullshit panic, at least provide some evidence of the panic in the first place, all right?

In Defense of Janus

In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of doorways, with two faces – one looking towards the future, the other two the past. In a column over at The Guardian, Bernard Harcourt invokes Janus in pondering what he sees as the “two-faced liberalism” of the United States (via) :

This tension, when it gets acute, gives rise to what I would call ‘two-faced’ or ‘Janus-faced liberalism’. Over the last 40 years, during a period characterized by increased faith in free markets, in deregulation, and in privatization, America's Janus-faced liberalism has worsened and fueled the uniquely American paradox of laissez-faire and mass incarceration. In the country that has done the most to promote the idea of a hands-off government, our government runs, paradoxically, the single largest prison system in the whole world.

As a kind of case study for his argument, Harcourt highlights two apparently contradictory recent bits of Supreme Court news – the oral arguments about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the Court’s decision in Florence v County of Burlington, in which the Court upheld the policy of a pair of local jails in New Jersey to strip search everyone who comes into their possession, without any need for suspicion that they are dangerous or in possession of contraband. In particular, he notes that Justice Kennedy (ever the swing vote in close cases) appeared to have real difficulty with the ACA mandate during oral argument, but authored the opinion upholding the searches in Florence.

I saw a lot of similar comments on the web in the wake of Florence – it came out the week after the ACA arguments, which were still being dissect ad nauseum in the press. While I sympathize with them, I think they reflect a layperson’s misunderstanding of how courts work. Harcourt has his own theory about where the Janus stuff comes from in modern America, but he, too, overlooks the practicalities of court decisions.

Hard as this is to imagine, when lawyers go to court and ask a court to do something – or to stop someone else from doing something – the winning argument is not going to be “because it’s wrong.” Or “because it violates ideals of liberty.” Although those kinds of generic sentiments might come up in the rhetoric around an issue, when you drill down into things, courts deal with laws on the books and prior precedent, not first principles.

As an example, a lot of the populist outrage over the ACA comes from the “gubmint can’t make me do that!” standpoint, regardless of what gubmint it is we’re talking about. The actual legal case against the ACA mandate, on the other hand, is rooted in a much more technical and (usually) boring question – does the Constitution give the federal government the power to regulate this activity? Yes, “liberty” in the generic sense plays a role in the debate, but it’s really more about the Commerce Clause and the cases interpreting it.

By contrast, Florence isn’t about a grant of power to the federal government, but about limits on that power and the power of the states (via the Fourteenth Amendment). Again, the question isn’t whether a blanket strip search policy violates generic ideals of “liberty.” It’s whether the Fourth Amendment, and the cases interpreting it, prohibits the state from having such a policy. Whether such a policy is necessary* is not as important as whether it’s permissible. Like it or not, the Fourth Circuit is pretty much dead on its feet for civilians, much less inmates. Courts have to deal with that baggage when resolving new questions in that area.

When viewed in light of those realities, Kennedy’s position in both cases makes a bit more sense, mainly because it’s clear he’s not dispensing opinions based on generic concepts of “liberty” or what have you. He (and the rest of the Supremes and every other judge in the country) decide individual cases that raise discrete issues, not big picture questions of political philosophy. His views on those sorts of questions probably inform his decisions in some way, but they are hardly the only concern.

Popular reaction to court decisions, Supreme Court decisions in particular, tend to break down into either “good” or “bad,” and rarely go beyond that. To the extent that they do, reactions most often arise from a particular person’s political or philosophical positions, not the law that actually controlled the decision. I understand why such folks can find the Court to be two-faced in some areas, and maybe it really is. More likely, it is as I have said many times before, much more complicated than that.

* As Harcourt points out, none of the federal agencies responsible for dealing with prisoners use a blanket strip search policy and rely on individualized determinations of risk. Nonetheless, the Obama administration argued in favor of the decision the Court ultimately made. Another swing and a miss.

Friday Review: ROSFest 2012

For the second year running, I made the pilgrimage to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, last weekend for the Rites of Spring Festival, aka ROSFest. As I wrote in my review last year, Gettysburg seems like an odd choice for a prog festival, since it’s not exactly a huge population center. But between the venue and the small town amenities nearby, it’s probably the perfect place for such a thing. So how did this year’s fest measure up? Pretty damned well.

First up for the Friday night double header was British neo-proggers DeeExpus, who you may remember from a recent Friday Review. They led off with the killer title track epic from The King of Number 33, which was quite a bold choice. It’s always difficult to start off a set with 25 minutes worth a music, after all. Unfortunately for me, that choice meant that once that track was over, the rest of the set was downhill, as it’s by far my favorite of theirs. The rest of their set was enjoyable, but never hit the heights of their opener.

Friday night’s headliner was Sweden’s Karmakanic, one of numerous bands with links back to The Flower Kings that were part of this year’s ROSFest. Karmakanic is the project of bassist extraordinaire Jonas Reingold and owes more to his years with The Tangent that with The Flower Kings, bringing it more fusion and jazz elements. That being said, the almost annoyingly upbeat vibe of The Flower Kings pops up a lot, particularly in the lyrics. Their set was noteworthy for several lengthy jams that let Reingold, guitarist Krister Johnson (another alum of The Tangent), and keyboardist Lalle Larson to stretch out. Given ROSFest’s reputation for catering to the “safer” side of the prog spectrum, that may be as far out as any band’s been on that stage. They closed with a killer rendition of “Send a Message from the Heart” and an unexpected Genesis cover (“Undertow” from . . . and Then There Were Three – not exactly their proggiest moment). A highlight of the fest for me.

Opening up Saturday morning was the Aaron English Band, which I knew very little about, having only listened to a few samples here and there on the Web. My impression, confirmed by their set, was that they would be a good case study for the endless “what is prog?” debates, as their stuff sounded is more like well crafted grown up rock and roll than “prog” proper. In that way, their material reminded me a bit of Kevin Gilbert, whose stuff resides in that same region of progginess. Which has nothing to do with quality, of course. I enjoyed their set quite a bit and picked up a couple albums afterwards. They did several interesting covers (like this one) that really take the original and change it up in clever ways. A good opening to the day.

I picked up Resistor’s Rise prior to ROSFest, to get familiar with the band. It’s anchor is a whimsical 35-minute epic called “The Land of No Groove,” about four musicians who journey the world in search of real music. Not surprisingly, Resistor is a four-piece band (although the names have been changed to protect the innocent, I imagine)! Also, not surprisingly, their set led to a full presentation of “The Land of No Groove.” Resistor would be equally comfortable in the jam band camp, I think, with long instrumental excursions fueled by twin guitars (and, occasionally, flute or violin) and a loose, laid back feel. I enjoyed their set a bunch and will have to track down some more of their albums.

Hasse Froberg’s Musical Companion – HFMC – is the clunky moniker for the side project of Hasse Froberg, lead vocalist and secondary guitarist for The Flower Kings (see, there they are again). I hadn’t heard note one from them going into their set. On the heels of their just released second album, HFMC blasted through an energetic set of prog-tinged classic rock. They went over well, but I’ll admit they didn’t really do anything for me. I don’t think it’s a “not prog enough” situation (see above), there just wasn’t anything that jumped out to me about their set. It could also be that, on a late Saturday afternoon and five bands in, I was aurally drained.

Saturday’s headliner was IQ, one of the first bands I discovered when I plunged into the prog world back in college. I saw them at the late 3 Rivers Progressive Rock Festival outside Pittsburgh a few years ago and was stoked when they were announced for ROSFest. I was more stoked when they announced they would do their 1997 concept album Subterranea in its entirety. When they did, in its manifold multimedia entirety. Unfortunately, travel snafus got the band on late (killing planned encores) and things got a little rough in spots (Peter Nichols’s voice was going by the end), but those couldn’t take away from the epic sweep of the performance (aided, in one point, by Resistor main man Steve Unruh on violin). Great capper to a solid day of good music.

First up Sunday morning was British quartet Sanguine Hum, which would otherwise be the winner in the “best name” competition for the weekend if the previous version of the band hadn’t been called Antique Seeking Nuns. No kidding. This was another band I went into the festival without knowing anything about and was pleasantly surprised. Their keyboard player rocked a real Rhodes for their set, which set them off sonically in a different direction than anybody else. They were also the least epic of the bunch, which was a nice change of pace. If anything, they were a bit too laid back for the Church of Prog slot, but that’s hardly their fault.

IOEarth (also British) was the final blank slate for me this year. They went over like a house of fire and, no doubt, laid down a set full of energy, scorching guitar work, and powerful female vocals. Alas, their charms are mostly lost on me. I had the same reaction to the band in this slot last year – District 97 – which was also a minority viewpoint. They’re just too heavy, too riffy for my tastes. I was also put off by a lot of canned backing tracks early in the set. Having said that, it was an enjoyable enough set (the guitarist had a great rapport with the crowd). I just won’t be buying their back catalog.

Discipline is a band I’ve got a weird history with. Their 1997 release Unfolded Like Staircase was hailed as a classic (best album of the 1990s, I’ve read more than once), which meant that, by the time I got a hold of it, it was so dipped in hype that I was prejudiced against it. I’ve softened over the years, but I still wouldn’t call myself a huge fan. That being said, I wondered how they would come off live. Turns out, they came off really fucking well, by far the most intense set of the fest. Even with the guitar player having a decidedly off night (I heard someone say his hands were cramping), they were excellent. Whatever misgivings I’ve had in the past, I’m firmly a fan of Discipline now. Note the capital “D,” please!

Wrapping things up on Sunday night was Agents of Mercy, another Swedish offshoot of The Flower Kings, in this case including the King himself, Roine Stolt. Along for the ride are Jonas Reingold and Lalle Larson of Karmacanic. Agents is a little grittier and heavier than The Flower Kings, but otherwise you can see Stolt’s DNA woven throughout their symphonic prog. Confession time – I’ve never been a huge fan of The Flower Kings. They remind me of chicken soup for the progger’s soul, more than anything else. Not bad, mind you, but not particularly enthralling, either. So while I enjoyed Agents’ set, it wasn’t the high point of the festival.

What was a high point for a lot of people was the Agents encore, which became a kind of Flower Kings reunion, with Hasse Froberg joining Stolt and Reingold (among others). Neat to see and hear, if only for its uniqueness.

Some of these blurbs make it sound like I was less than enthused with ROSFest this year. That’s not really true. Fact is, none of the bands this year were “bad” in the sense that I thought of walking out and doing something else. And some of them were brilliant. In addition, I think there was a good deal of variety this year, within the bounds of the more melodic branch of prog that the fest caters to. You can’t ask for much more than that, can you?

Pulling the Monkey Wrench Out of the Machinery of Death

Last year I wrote about an interesting dispute playing out in New England about a man named Jason Pleau. To recap, Pleau, who is serving 18 years in prison in Rhode Island, has been indicted on several federal charges (including robbery and murder) that could expose him to the death penalty. When the feds invoked the Interstate Agreement on Detainers to have Pleau transferred to federal custody to be prosecuted, Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee invoked a little known provision of the IAD to deny the request, on the grounds that Rhode Island doesn’t have the death penalty and the feds shouldn’t step in and use it there. Undaunted, the feds filed a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum to obtain Pleau. Rhode Island again said no, arguing that it’s denial under the IAD controlled.

The case went to federal court and, to the surprise of lots of observers (including me!), the First Circuit Court of Appeals held (2-1) that the feds had no right to Pleau. Once the feds used the IAD procedure, they were bound by its outcome. Last week, the entire First Circuit, sitting en banc, vacated that decision and held (over two dissents) that the IAD provisions don’t trump the good old fashioned Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, meaning that the feds get what they want.

The en banc decision produced a dissent that I find fairly compelling. If nothing else, the court’s ruling makes the IAD almost superfluous in this area, if the writ can be used anytime there’s a hang up. But I suspect the case will die here. It’s an interesting legal issue, but incredibly fact specific and unlikely to recur with any kind of frequency, which means the Supreme Court is unlikely to take the case. But, as you can see, I’ve been wrong before.

What will really be interesting to see is whether the feds, after fighting this battle, will be inclined to do anything other than seek the death penalty. Pleau offered to plead guilty in Rhode Island to the underlying offenses and take life. It would be too easy if the feds made the same offer and were done with it, right?

Friday Review: Slavery by Another Name

You’ve heard of the “banality of evil,” the theory that great evils aren’t perpetrated by supervillains or the criminally insane, but by ordinary folks who think they’re doing the right thing. I’d like to add a corollary to that – the “redundancy of evil” – in that when unjust attitudes and policies are enshrined in law, the evil wrought by them is so repetitive and so mind-numbingly predictable that it tends to become second nature. At the very least, it loses some of its sting in the retelling.

That’s the only real fault of Slavery by Another Name, an exhaustive survey of one of the country’s overlooked indignities. It focuses on a period where, although slavery had technically been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, it nonetheless continued to exist in de facto fashion in many southern states. Many states had convict labor programs, in which prisoners serving criminal sentences were leased out to private industries. More specifically, someone would be arrested for a minor crime, sentenced to pay a fine and court fees (which escalated the more one insisted on his innocence – shades of Brazil), and then, when he was unable to pay it all, sign a “contract” with a private concern who would pay the fine/fees in return for a period of labor.

As Blackmon demonstrates, this system was used to hoover countless black men into the system on, at best, minor charges that were unevenly enforced and, at worst, completely fabricated charges (many records, he reports, don’t even note the actual charge for which someone was later convicted and sentenced). Unable to pay the fines and fees, they essentially became chattel, bartered and traded from state officials (local sheriffs, mostly) and private concerns. They were sent to cotton plantation, mines, and other concerns that fueled the industrial development of the South after the Civil War.

To call conditions brutal would be an understatement. As Blackmon explains, in mind numbing detail, work conditions were little better than they were during antebellum slavery and, in some cases, even worse. A slave owner, after all, at least had a motivation to protect the investment he made in a particular slave. An industrialist leasing convicts, however, had no such motive. When one died (and they did, in scores), he’d simply order up some new ones.

As I said, sometimes Blackmon gets bogged down in the atrocities he uncovered, which is only natural. Maybe that’s why the middle section of the book, which details the federal government’s attempts to prosecute the perpetrators in the early years of the 20th Century was the most interesting portion of the book for me. Essentially, Teddy Roosevelt tried a bipartisan reach out that would make Obama proud – appealing to “reasonable” southern Democrats in order to create a bipartisan (and bigeographic) solution.

Of course, it didn’t work. For one thing, while the Thirteenth Amendment eliminated legal slavery, Congress had not at that point actually made engaging in slavery a crime. That left federal prosecutors (‘cause the local ones sure as shit weren’t doing anything) tied to a statute originally enacted to deal with peonage in former Mexican territories. In the end, although lots of guilty pleas were generated, the sentences were mostly small fines that went unpaid. One person (if I’m remembering correctly) actually went to prison. Some of those who otherwise pleaded guilty went right back to business afterwards.

The other problem, of course, is that these were not simple criminal prosecutions. They struck directly at the heart of the post-war South’s conception of itself and the role of freed blacks in it. Woven through the tales of torture and death in work camps are asides about lynchings, race riots, and virulent white supremacy (not all confined to the South, of course). Potential witnesses feared for their lives, as did some law enforcement officers. It’s no surprise that the system perservered during those years.

In fact, after that initial Roosevelt attempt to curtail the practice, things ran smoothly until the beginning of World War II, when the federal government stepped in again. Not based on any great principles of justice or racial equality, mind you, but because they recognized the propaganda value of the practice to the Nazis and Imperial Japanese (one prosecution in Texas is praised in the local paper solely for denying the Japanese a means to appeal to our own disaffected minorities). By that time, some other demographic shifts made it possible to squash the industrial slavery system once and for all.

Understandibly (given the title), Blackmon’s focus in the book is on how the slave labor system was used to keep nominally free blacks in a state of subservience. But two other things jumped out at me throughout the book that I think speak to other aspects of the system.

For one thing, the entire scheme was designed to use the law, or the patina of the law, to keep blacks in their place. The men who sent convicts into industrial hells were sheriffs, judges (usually of the low level magistrate types), and other officials. They weren’t working outside the law, they were using the law for their own ends. It was the gloss of legality that allowed them to perpetuate the scheme on a populace that was largely ignorant (and kept intentionally so) of how such things work. Not to go all Godwin, but there’s a frightening similarity to the horrors of the Third Reich, many of which were written into the statutes to make them “legal.”

For another, the entire system is an example of the sickening synergy of a public trust (the treatment of prisoners) and unregulated free enterprise. Presented with a vast supply of nearly free labor, with no recourse to and legal protections for abuse and mistreatment, industrialists did what they tend to do – push ethics and morality to one side and do what’s best for the bottom line. It’s a cautionary tale for a country where one major political party still thinks the solution to any problem is less regulation and getting out of the way of “job creators.” History shows what happens when that’s taken to an extreme.

Often when we look at history, especially the history of atrocities committed in our own past, we do so with a modern perspective of moral superiority. Such barbarity wouldn’t happen again, surely. We’re better people now, right? Evidence suggests otherwise. For-profit prisons are all the rage, to the point where one company offered to buy several states’ prisons (in return for a guarantee of occupancy, of course). Such privatization of public obligations have led to scandals like the one in Pennsylvania where two judges got kickbacks from a private prison company for sending them juveniles to lock up. Or situations like this, in which a private prison company simply packs up and moves out of state when a federal judge calls its juvenile facility a “cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions”. And did I mention that debtor’s prisons are making a comeback?

Blackmon has made a great contribution to our understanding of our own history. It would be a shame if people see it only as that, tut tut about how evil the olde days were, and shuffle it down the memory hole.

The Details
-----------------
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon
Published 2009
Winner, 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction

Life Beats Death, Hope Beats Both

Last week I wrote about how the voters of California will have a chance this fall to repeal that state’s death penalty via the initiative process. If the initiatives passes, those currently on California’s death row will have their sentences reduced to life without the possibility of parole (“LWOP”). That would be a step in the right direction?

Not so fast, says David Dow, writing at The Daily Beast. He argues that it would simply be replacing one form of barbarity for another:

On the plus side, LWOP saves lives, but that’s about it. In every other way it’s a nightmare: It gives up on everyone, regardless of whether they exhibit any capacity for growth and change; it robs people of hope; it exaggerates the risk to society of releasing convicted murderers; and it turns prisons into geriatric wards, with inmates rolling around in taxpayer-funded wheelchairs carrying oxygen canisters in their laps.

I don’t actually disagree with Dow about the cruelty of LWOP. Back when I was first really cementing my position against capital punishment, I relied on LWOP as a bright line that could still be drawn, a way to deal with the really evil people in society. I didn’t really give it much thought until I started doing appellate work in the local public defender office and actually began representing clients doing West Virginia’s version of LWOP.* Two things became clear.

First, the decision about whether to lock someone up forever or provide them some hope of future release is about as random as the decision about whether that person gets the death penalty or not. I had a client doing LWOP who had shot a guy in the back who was beating up his brother. My client (mistakenly) thought the guy had a weapon. But I also had a client who burned down an apartment building with four people inside. He got life with a chance of parole. How can anyone justify a system that produces such random results?

Second, telling someone they will die in prison is both a poor way to try and achieve any kind or rehabilitation and run a prison. Yesterday I was in a hearing for a client who is currently doing life in prison for drug offenses. Under the 2011 amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines he could have his sentence reduced to 30 years. The judge recognized that when you take a 22 year old and tell him he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison that it makes him unlikely to worry about finishing his GED or behaving well towards other inmates and guards. After all, what does he have to lose?

As Dow points out, in spite of the popular conception of murderer as unredeemable killers, most actually aren’t. The problem with LWOP, then, is that it prevents an individualized determination as to whether someone has truly reformed and is remorseful. Furthermore, it gives that someone a motivation to not give a shit about whether he does or not – he’s got no chance of getting out. And make no mistake, that’s all I’m talking about – a chance. Some killers are beyond redemption or rehabilitation and should, rightly, never see the light of day again. But it’s impossible to know who they are at the front end of a sentence that is going to last for decades.

So I actually agree with Dow about what LWOP is, but I still think his conclusion about the California initiative is misguided. He writes off the fact that LWOP, compared to the death penalty, at least allows the state to correct a mistake when it convicts an innocent person (as happened yet again recently). Granted, it’s not perfect, but death is far more permanent and irreversible. I think he also overlooks the fact that any criminal justice reform is an incremental process. Voters may not ditch the death penalty in California. Asking them to go a step further and eliminate LWOP at the same time would pretty much guarantee nothing gets accomplished.

I’m not a religious person, so I don’t really believe in “redemption” in a spiritual sense. But I do think that people change and they can change if given the proper motivation. Hope of release one day could provide that motivation for some. It’s better in the long run to give it to them and see what they do with it. Giving up on people won’t get us very far.

* In West Virginia, defendants in “capital” cases – first degree murder and kidnapping with injury – can receive sentences of either life with or without the possibility of parole, a decision made by a jury. If a defendant gets “life with,” he serves 15 years before being eligible for release.

Friday Review: King of Number 33

Since I went to my first prog fest outside Pittsburgh a few years ago, I’ve gone back and forth about whether to try and get up to speed on bands playing at a festival before I actually go. I’ve both gone in completely cold and completely prepared and both approaches have their plusses and minuses. What I’ve settled into is looking at how deep a particular band’s catalog is and, if they’ve got more than a couple of albums, pick one up ahead of time to try and get my feet wet (aurally speaking, of course).

So why, you might ask, did I pick up the new album from this year’s ROSFest lead off hitters DeeExpus (don’t ask what the name means – I have no clue), given that it’s only the band’s second? A good question with an easy two-word answer: Mark Kelly. As a long-time Marillion fan and keyboard player Kelly’s one of my musical heroes (and a nice bloke, to boot). I thought it would be interesting to hear him back in the overtly neo-proggy widdly-twiddly keyboard role.

That being said, the main man behind DeeExpus is Andy Ditchfield ,who made a brief appearance at ROSFest last year during Tinyfish’s excellent Friday night set. Ditchfield is the main writer for the band, in addition to handling guitar, vocals, and keyboards on most tracks. Kelly throws in on a few of tracks, most notably the 25-minute title track. Regardless of who’s playing what at any given time, the tracks hum with strong melodic bits that define neo-prog (for better or worse).

They also reflect a trend in recent years of neo band leaning more and more on hard-rock style riffing. “Me and My Downfall,” the lead off track here shows that particularly well. I don’t know if this is just a natural progression or a change that’s been brought about by the success of heavier prog bands like Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, and Opeth (that’s my guess). Regardless, DeeExpus never slips over into too much balls ‘n chunk, which I appreciate.

As I mentioned, the centerpiece of the album is the epic “King of Number 33,” which is the best long-form prog tune I’ve heard since The Tangent’s “In Earnest” back in the last decade. In this case, the song tells the story (inspired by actual events, I believe) in which “Number 33” is a bus and the “King” is a mentally ill man who, after years of being a mostly harmless oddity, explodes into some kind of violence (just what is left quite vague). Maybe it’s because I have a particular affection for epics about lost souls (“In Earnest” certainly qualifies as well), but the lyrics really grab me in a way that lots of others don’t. Regardless, it’ll be brilliant to get it live in all of its glory in Gettysburg next week!

Details
------------
King of Number 33, by DeeExpus
Released 2011

Tracks:
1. Me and My Downfall (7:09)
2. Maybe September (7:39)
3. Marty and the Magic Moose (4:41)
4. The King of Number 33 (26:47)
   i - Pauper's Parade
   ii - Accession
   iii - The Physician and the Traitor
   iv - The Hunt
   v - Never Ending Elysium
   vi - Rex Mortuus Est
5. Memo (7:28)

Players:
Tony Wright (vocals)
Andy Ditchfield (guitars, keyboards, bass, vocals)
Steve Wright (guitar, vocals)
John Dawson (bass)
Henry Rogers (drums)
Mark Kelly (keyboards)
Mark Joliffe (keyboards)
Gregg Pullen (cello)
Nik Kershaw (vocals)
Ainsley Wells (guitar)

An Interesting Test Case

For years, the running meme when it came to the death penalty was that it had a majority of popular support (if not an overwhelming majority), but that support becomes a lot less solid once the possibility of life without parole is put on the table. This fall, we’ll get some idea of whether that dynamic really exists, at least in California, where there will be an initiative on the ballot this fall to repeal the death penalty and commute the sentences of the state’s current death row residents to life without the possibility of parole.

Although this is, to my knowledge, the first time the issue is going directly to voters, there has been a growing legislative trend in favor of repeal:

During the last five years, four states have replaced the death penalty and Connecticut is soon to follow.

Connecticut’s repeal is particularly interesting, because it is crafted to keep current death row inmates on schedule for death and only apply the ban prospectively. I’m not sure the courts will let that fly, but I guess we’ll see.

California’s death penalty is not the most robust in the world – it ain’t Texas, after all – but a repeal by initiative would be an important step in the ongoing tussle over capital punishment. Why now? Not because liberal do-gooders like me are growing in influence:

Backing the new measure are Ron Briggs, who ran the 1978 campaign for a successful ballot initiative that expanded the reach of California's death penalty; Donald J. Heller, an ex-prosecutor who wrote the 1978 initiative; Jeanne Woodford, a former warden of San Quentin State Prison who oversaw four executions; and former L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who said his experience as D.A. helped change his mind about the fairness of the system.

Although their views on the proposition are unknown, former California Chef Justice Ronald M. George and current Chief Tani Cantil-Sakauye, both Republican former prosecutors, have stated publicly that the death penalty system is not working.

Part of the swing comes from the increasing number of cases where people get off of death row years after their convictions thanks to scientific breakthroughs that shed light on unreliable witnesses, shady cops and prosecutors, or just wrong conclusions reached by jurors. Of course, there’s a financial component as well:

A three-year study by a judge and a law professor concluded last year that the death penalty in California costs $183 million more to administer than life without possibility of parole, and that California's 13 executions cost taxpayers $4 billion. The additional expense includes legal costs for expanded trials and appeals and for housing inmates in single cells.

I’m against the death penalty and have been for a long time. Aside from equal protection issues, however, I think it’s undoubtedly constitutional. So the only hope to get rid of it is through political action. And while I’d like to see a full-throated rejection of capital punishment on moral/philosophical grounds, if it comes down to financial reasons, I’ll take that. So, as much as also despise initiative setups like California’s, I hope this one turns out the right way.

Maybe, like so many other things, California will lead the rest of the nation where it needs to go.

The Reason (If Not Rhyme) of 26.2

If you’re like me, you probably thought that the length of the marathon – 26.2 miles (you’ve seen the stickers on the back of runners’ cars everywhere) – was that peculiar for history reasons. After all, the race commemorates the feat of Pheidippides, who ran the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to inform the citizenry of their victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. There were no gold medals for him, however – he dropped dead after delivering the good news.

Whatever actual truth might be buried in that legend, it would make sense if the length of the race run in honor of Pheidippides would be 25 miles long right?* In fact, it began that way in the 1896 Olympics in Athens, covering 24.85 miles. Likewise, the courses in Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904) covered roughly 25 miles. It wasn’t until the 1908 Olympics in London that the 26.2 mile length became set.

Why the change? As with most things odd and British, the royals played a part:

For the 1908 Olympic marathon, the Princess of Wales watched the start, which began near the window of the royal nursery [at Windsor Castle] so that her children could watch, according to David Miller’s history of the Olympics, ‘Athens to Athens.’ Thus, Miller wrote, the marathon distance ‘was determined in a bizarre manner.’

* * *

It was about 26 miles from Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium in West London at Shepherd’s Bush. The original plan had the runners coming into the stadium at the royal entrance and running about 585 yards, circling the track counterclockwise and finishing in front of the royal box, Davis said. But the royal entrance was deemed unsuitable; instead the runners entered at the opposite end of the stadium and, to enhance the view for the Queen and others, ran clockwise for 385 yards to the royal box.

Thus, 26.2 miles. Now, it’s not for certain why the race started at Windsor Castle, but it did. And the last run ‘round the stadium produced a controversial finish (and an American winner – although the Italian who was disqualified got a song written about him by Irving Berlin) so it all worked.

And it shows the distance of the marathon isn’t set in stone, which is perhaps why some of today’s top runners think it should be lengthened. Says the current world record holder:

‘People are used to running’ 26.2 miles, [Kenyan Patrick] Makau said. ‘They run it like it is a short distance. Longer would be better.’

Sounds like what lots of drivers say about endurance races like the 12 Hours of Sebring or the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Still, nobody suggests making those longer – the 14 Hours of Sebring just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Nor does 30 miles. It’s much too round a number, compared to 26.2. Besides, do you really want all those car decorations to be obsolete?

* Real tough guys run another race in honor of Pheidippides’s earlier feats before the Battle of Marathon – the Spartathlon, which covers the 153 miles between Athens and Sparta.

My Musical Philisophy

Hell, it's pretty much my general philosophy for just about anything:

More classic Bloom County goodness here.

Friday Review: Take Shelter

King Crimson’s sole full-length album in the double trio format, THRAK, is one of my favorites. But I don’t listen to it precisely as Fripp and friends intended. The album kicks off with the instrumental “VROOM” and returns, in the end to a reworking of its themes with “VROOM VROOM.” Somewhat oddly, for me at least, the album then proceeds to the short “VROOM VROOM: Coda,” which is completely superfluous. “VROOM VROOM” is a perfect summing up of things and a matching bookend to the opener. So, when I listen to THRAK, I just stop the CD after “VROOM VROOM.” Problem solved.

TRHAK and its ending popped into my head while I was thinking about Take Shelter and realized that they had a lot in common. The film, for nearly all of its (admittedly a little overstuffed) two hours, is a slow but fascinating character study of a decent man grappling with emerging mental illness. Then in the end . . . well, something happens that may or may not make all that meaningless. Whether it does or not might not even change your mind about the overall worth of the film, which is saying something.

Michael Shannon (who, between this, Shotgun Stories, and Boardwalk Empire really needs to be cast as the witty gay friend in a romantic comedy just so he won’t explode) plays Curtis, who appears to have a pretty good life. Solid job in construction, loving wife, cute daughter. But he’s also begun having seriously vivid apocalyptic dreams, from which he awakes in terror. They involve a huge storm rolling in, accompanied by rain that looks like fresh motor oil, and a host of other odd things. They never end well. Even worse, some of the bits of his dreams – unexplained sounds of thunder, for example – are starting to crop up in real life.

Curtis begins to suspect he’s going mad, and not without reason. His mother is schizophrenic, having been diagnosed during his youth. He is determined not to abandon his family the way she did and, so, while dealing the prospect of insanity, Curtis also builds an expensive storm shelter in the family’s back yard. In essence, he’s covering both his bases. Thus, the movie plays with you, playing it loose with the question of whether Curtis is really nuts or whether something supernatural is going on.

There is a storm, severe enough trigger the town’s tornado warning system, and the family does run for cover into the storm shelter. But it’s hardly apocalyptic. When Curtis’s wife finally convinces him to open the shelter and see what’s up, he sees like going on pretty much like normal. Neighbors are picking up downed limbs. The sun is shining. It seems to confirm that it’s all in Curtis’s head. He and the wife go to a psychiatrist and commit to some intensive treatment, just after a family vacation to the beach.

But that’s not where things end. The “VROOM VROOM: Coda,” if you will, happens at the beach where another storm shows up. This one is more like the ones in Curtis’s dreams, down to the oily rain. Except this time, there is no waking up, only the end credits (with only the sound of thunder for a soundtrack – very creepy). So, is this real? Is this another dream? If it’s real, does it ruin the whole damned movie? Those questions (and others) are hashed out ad nauseum over at IMDB.

Personally, I’m not sure it matters. As with THRAK, a little extra appendage at the end of an otherwise brilliant work doesn’t ruin the whole thing. Furthermore, I’ve convinced myself that it really was another dream (so he doesn’t wake up before the movie ends – you think Curtis exists only within the confines of the film’s run time?), one that shows how Curtis has accepted both his illness and the knowledge that his family is there to support him in dealing with it. Dare I say it, when looked at that way it kind of works as a happy ending. And I’m not one to go looking for those.

The Details

------------------------

Take Shelter

Released 2011

Directed & written by Jeff Nichols
Starring Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Shea Whigham, et. al.

The Iceberg Was Framed

There were no heroes, no villains . ... Instead, there were a lot of human beings trying to do their best in the situation as they saw it.

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and the death of more than 1500 of its passengers and crew. As one might expect when that kind of milestone rolls around, there’s lots of renewed talk about the wreck and what happened that night. Hey, if the occasion warrants a rollout of the 3D version of Cameron’s movie (which Jezebel watched again so you don’t have to) and a Blu-Ray version of A Night to Remember, we might as well try to better understand the actual event, right?

That better understanding comes in the form of two new theories about how Titanic came to be slashed by an iceberg. One, from a Brit named Tim Maltin (whose quote is set forth above), involving a cold air mirages:

Most people know mirages as natural phenomena caused when hot air near the Earth’s surface bends light rays upward. In a desert, the effect prompts lost travelers to mistake patches of blue sky for pools of water.

But another kind of mirage occurs when cold air bends light rays downward. In that case, observers can see objects and settings far over the horizon. The images often undergo quick distortions — not unlike the wavy reflections in a funhouse mirror.

* * *

Mr. Maltin’s book shows how mirages could have created false horizons that hid the iceberg from the Titanic’s lookouts. By this theory, the intersection of dark sea and starry sky would have looked blurry, reducing the contrast with the looming iceberg.

If the crew had understood the phenomenon, Maltin argues, the crew would have slowed the ship and been better able to deal with the ice.

As for the ice itself, researchers from a Texas university and Sky & Telescope magazine offered an additional complication:

The team discovered that Earth had come unusually close to the Sun and Moon that winter, enhancing their gravitational pulls on the ocean and producing record tides. The rare orbits took place between December 1911 and February 1912 — about two months before the disaster.

The researchers suggest that the high tides refloated masses of icebergs traditionally stuck along the coastlines of Labrador and Newfoundland and sent them adrift into the North Atlantic shipping lanes.

I lead off with the quote from Maltin because I think it gets to the heart of things, even if his particular theory doesn’t pan out. “Human error” is a broad heading under which falls everything from outright stupidity (maybe even malevolence) to errors made in good faith. There’s a world of difference in saying that someone did the wrong thing for understandable reasons versus simply fucking up. As I’ve said before, real life is rarely black and white.

Titanic calls Carpathia in the night
Through nothingness, through 57 miles
And the sparks still fly, down through history
And down through every walk of life

It’s also worth remembering, on this 100th anniversary, that of the 2200 people on board Titanic, about one-third actually survived the wreck. That’s largely due to the fact that Titanic was equipped with a state of the art wireless setup and Jack Phillips, the senior operator, stayed at his post until the ship went down:

Wireless was still a relatively young technology at the time of the Titanic's maiden voyage.

The Marconi company, the Edwardian equivalent of a top technology brand, had put its wireless operators on board some of the more prestigious ships.

The Titanic, as the showcase of an ambitious, optimistic era, had the biggest and best wireless equipment in the world.

At the time, the wireless was used more as a high-tech amusement for passengers (who sent news along to friends and loved ones during the voyage). Ships did share information, but the idea that the wireless was first and foremost a safety system hadn’t yet caught on.

It did after Titanic went down and Carpathia was called to rescue the survivors. It was, perhaps, an epoch defining moment. The theme off the last album by The Tangent, COMM, is (not surprisingly) communication. The highlight, for me at least, is “Titanic Calls Carpathia” (quoted above), in which lyricist/vocalist/keyboardist/prime mover Andy Tillison argues that the rescue of the Titanic survivors was really the dawn of the digital age. Without the ability to reach out “through nothingness, through 57 miles,” many (if not most) of those who survived the initial sinking of Titanic would not have survived.

We take that communication, and that connection, for granted today. Our first instincts when some kind of calamity occurs is to call 9-1-1 and record the event on video, which then gets uploaded for all the world to see. It wasn’t just a different time and place where Titanic went down, it was a different world. It’s worth remembering that on this 100th anniversary and marveling in the speed of progress.

Finally, a Growth Industry

It took a couple of economics classes in college, wherein I learned about how economic impacts of certain activities are measured. Ideally, simply creating a job isn’t enough. You want to create a job with some kind of multiplier, implying that it will lead to the creation of other jobs in related sectors. I’m pleased to see that, as long as we’re going to make an industry out of locking up more people than any other nation on the planet, there is at least some ancillary job creation going on as a result.

Saturday’s New York Times had an article about the booming industry of prison consultants:

The business — which entails advising people who are facing jail time on how to prepare for life on the inside, deal with medical issues, transfer to other prisons and even reduce their sentences — has been around for decades. It enjoys a burst of publicity when a boldface name like Bernie Madoff or Michael Vick hires a consultant.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a job you can get with a fancy degree. The only experience that matters is hard earned (although others, such as former prison guards and lawyers are in the field as well), but nobody knows just how much is enough to make someone an expert. The article talks about Larry Levine, a prison consultant who spent 10 years in (federal, apparently) prison and who laments the qualifications of new folks entering the market:

‘This industry’s exploding,’ mourned Mr. Levine, who operates two Web sites, American Prison Consultants and Wall Street Prison Consultants. He reached to a nearby coffee table and picked up a piece of paper listing the names of several dozen competitors and the length of their prison sentences. This is not a rap sheet, it’s market research.

The business, he said, is ‘becoming saturated with people who don’t know what they’re doing.’

He and his competitors (some of whom find his prison time equally unimpressive) walk a fine marketing line, bragging about an extensive criminal record to attract customers.

Another consulted explains how Levine is “like a used-car salesman” and that he “wouldn’t share a chow table” with Levine. Needless to say, there aren’t any regulations for this sort of thing, nor does there appear to be any professional organizations setting up standards that people can use to judge which consultant to hire, if any.

After all, do these guys really provide a valuable service? Maybe. The article asserts that people can find the relevant information themselves, but doesn’t offer any examples (or any expert to back that up). It does raise a good point, however:

‘You think a warden is going to change a decision based on advice from a former resident? That is just not going to happen,’ said Joel Sickler, who runs Justice Advocacy Group and has been a prison consultant for 30 years and, before that, a prison guard. He said his unblemished past would go over better with prison officials when he’s trying to petition for, say, a client transfer.

The ex-convicts in the business see things differently, arguing that relevant experience matters.

I can see both sides of that. Sickler is almost certainly right, but sort of dodges the question. Surely the role of folks like Levine isn’t to deal directly with the warden or other prison staff, but to provide his clients with the information needed to do it themselves. It also seems that what might be most worth knowing when going to prison is how things really work and how inmate life really operates, rather than the official rules and regulations that are honored more often in the breach than every day. Given that, a former inmate is could be a valuable source of expertise.

What’s really striking is that we’ve come to this as a nation. Incarceration shouldn’t be a business, but that’s what it is becoming more and more, from prison consultants to private companies running prisons (and seeking guarantees of occupancy). We, as a citizenry, should be righteously pissed off of this kind of stuff. That we’re not doesn’t speak well of us.

Tunes From the Road

When I travel on business these days, at least when I’m going to be gone more than a day or so, I’ve started taking my Korg Kaosilator with me. It’s a great bit of fun to carry around – battery powered, fits in the palm of your hand, and has lots of nifty sounds which can be looped and layered one upon another. The Kaosilator’s touchpad input scheme also unleashes creativity in a way that a traditional keyboard does not. For a diversion on the road, it’s hard to beat.

This song, “Suitcase Life,” started out in a hotel room in downtown Richmond a few weeks ago. In fact, the restatement of the main groove at the end of the song was recorded there, with my headphones sandwiched around the tiny mic on my MP3 player. Sounds like shit, but it’s a nice effect. Once I got home (and finally managed to incorporate the Kaosilator in my studio setup), I recreated that groove and used it as the basis for this song.

Aside from the drum and stab bass blurb, the rest of the song comes out of the Korg M50, Nord Rack 2X, and, in its Infinity Ranch debut, the Moog Minitaur. I don’t argue that it’s brilliant, but I had fun putting it together. Hope you enjoy it:



FWIW, the title (at least) draws inspiration from Thomas Dolby’s “I Live In a Suitcase”:

That’s Not How the Constitution Works

In a short speech yesterday, President Obama argued that the health care reform law that is his signature legislative accomplishment will survive scrutiny from the Supreme Court (and outlined some of the popular parts of it that will likely go down the tubes if it doesn’t). Along the way, he made a statement that is breathtakingly simpleminded, at least from a legal standpoint (via):

Ultimately I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected Congress.

I realize this is a political, not a legal, argument, and one made by both sides when it suits their purposes, but even with those caveats it’s pretty vacuous. In any other context would anyone – Democrat, Republican, whatever – agree that the fact that a law is passed by a properly elected Congress makes it immune from judicial review? I know that some folks, in a quest to avoid the obvious when it comes to allegations of “judicial activism,”* want to define that term with regards to whether a court strikes down legislation or not, but that’s sort of the point of judicial review, right?

Consider the most obviously egregious breach of the Constitution written into law by Congress. Let’s say, for example, that Congress passed legislation that not only repealed the Criminal Justice Act and did away with appointed counsel in criminal cases, but went further and required all criminal defendants to represent themselves at trial and banned lawyers from the courtroom. Assume it passes with the kind of broad bipartisan support that Obama only dreams the health care reform package had. Constitutional?

Of course not! Such a requirement would violate the Sixth Amendment, which provides:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall . . . have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

No statute or regulation, no matter how popular, can wipe that away. Would we want the Supreme Court to sit by idly and let it happen? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Furthermore, the whole idea that a Congressional mandate should be immune from judicial review assumes that those voting in favor of the legislation are actually concerned about whether it violates the Constitution or not.

Remember back in the 1990s, when Congress first ham-handedly tried to regulate the Internet via the Communications Decency Act? When it passed Congress and was signed by Clinton, civil libertarians loudly protested that it violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court eventually agreed and struck down the law.

Sometime around when that decision came down – just before or after, I can’t really remember – Nadine Strossen, then head of the ACLU, spoke at my law school. The focus of her speech was the CDA and the ACLU’s battle against it. She related a shameful anecdote from an unnamed (of course) member of Congress. When asked if he didn’t think the CDA had some First Amendment problems, he shrugged and said that the Supreme Court would take care of it. He could never be seen voting against “decency,” after all.

In theory, the judicial branch is supposed to do precisely what Obama is urging the Supreme Court not to do – reign in the other branches when they overstep their authority. It doesn’t mean the courts should strike down legislation willy-nilly or that an act legitimately passed isn’t entitled to some level of deference, particularly in close cases. Maybe health care reform is one of those cases, I don’t know.

But in the end an appeal to popularity is just irrelevant to the Court’s job. Or, at least, it should be.

* It’s not that hard, really. “Judicial activism” is what a court does when it reaches a conclusion with which you disagree. It’s a political jeremiad, not a term of legal art.

Friday Review: Autobahn

It was inevitable when I started diving into electronic music a few years ago that I’d eventually wind my way to Kraftwerk. To lots of people the German pioneers are electronic music, at least of the accessible pop-flavored variety. No album is more responsible for that than Autobahn. It was, rather inexplicably, a hit in the United States and in Europe.

Autobahn is technically not the first Kraftwerk album, but it might as well be. In fact, main men Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter have essentially disowned the three albums that came before (they’ve never been released on CD, IIRC). From what little I’ve heard of those albums, there is some recognizable Kraftwerking going on, but they had not yet fully embraced electronics they way they did on Autobahn (and later, of course).

There’s also a conceptual rigor that starts to be flexed on Autobahn that would really bear fruit on the next several albums, at least when it comes to what was (back in the olde days) side one. The title track, an epic of proggy proportions, sprawls out across that side, conveying musically a car trip across Germany. Lyrics are sparse and in German, although the refrain of “fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn” has the effect of sounding like a Beach Boys reference (not intentional, from what I understand). The music is undeniably electronic, although Schneider’s flute still makes a couple of appearances.

The concept doesn’t hold over to side two, which appears to be kind of neglected by listeners as a result. Regardless, it contains the track that convinced me to keep digging in the Kraftwerk katalog. “Kometenmelodie” is another epic, split into two parts. The first part sounds like something I might come up with on a particularly inspired evening, which is maybe why I like it so much.

Autobahn isn’t my favorite Kraftwerk album from stem to stern. But it was the onramp, so to speak, for my discovery of the band. Apparently, it was the same for lots of other folks, too.

On a related note, if you’re interested in Kraftwerk and the German experimental music scene from which they sprang, I highly recommend the documentary Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution. It’s long (3 hours!), but it covers a lot of ground and provides some interesting insight into the whole milieu that was German music in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The film’s biggest flaw is that neither Schneider nor Hutter participated, although Karl Bartos (who joined just after Autobahn) provides some interesting insight.

Details
------------
Autobahn, by Kraftwerk
Released 1974

Tracks:
1. Autobahn (22:43)
2. Kometenmelodie 1 (6:26)
3. Kometenmelodie 2 (5:48)
4. Mitternacht (3:43)
5. Morgenspaziergang (4:04)

Players:
Ralf Hütter (voice, electronics, synthesizer, organ, piano, guitar, electronic drums)
Florian Schneider (voice, vocoder, electronics, synthesizer, flute, electronic drums)

with
Wolfgang Flür (electronic drums "Kometenmelodie 1–2")
Klaus Röder (electric violin "Mitternacht")

Leave the Dead Alone (the Living, Too)

I’ve written before about the bizarre Mormon practice of posthumous baptism, which is in the news again thanks to the persistence of Mitt Romney in the presidential race. That, plus, they keep doing it for high profile dead people, like Daniel Pearl, which tends to piss people off. Although it’s all woo and mystical hand waving to me, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for folks to get upset about it.

Which is to say I disagree with Ed at Dispatches (and Eugene Volokh, whose post Ed links to) about the whole mess. Per Volokh’s reasoning, either the Mormons are wrong about the impact of these things, in which case no harm no foul, or they’re right and they’re actually doing dead folks a great service. Or, as Ed puts it:

All these people are doing is wasting their time doing silly rituals that have no effect at all on anyone else. Some say that it’s arrogant or disrespectful, and they’re right, but why should anyone really care?

I think Ed and Eugene miss the point, in a couple of ways. Most obviously, they’re applying a rational analysis to what is, inherently, an emotional reaction. Presumably, most of the people who are upset about posthumous baptism believe is some form of afterlife and/or higher power and thus are particularly sensitive to things that mess with those beliefs. It’s awfully easy for atheists to sit on the sideline and say “what’s the big deal?” when we don’t believe a word of it.

Second, I think it overlooks the fact that, to a whole lot of people their religious beliefs aren’t simply a label to check off on a demographic form, but it truly informs who they are and how they live their lives. It is arrogant for somebody from another branch of woo to come along and provide a posthumous opportunity to “fix” something that person didn’t consider broken.

Finally, I think Ed and Eugene both overlook the particularly insensitive nature of the posthumous baptisms as they relate to people like Pearl or Holocaust victims. After all, those people were murdered in cold blood because of their religious identification. Holocaust victims in particular are a shitty target for post hoc salvation, given that one’s fate under the Nazi racial laws had less to do with actual belief than it did with ancestry.

So I can certainly see why some people – family members and co-religionists in particular – would be upset about the whole posthumous baptism thing. And while I agree that the whole process is a whole bunch of nothing, doing a whole bunch of nothing that pisses off grieving loved ones doesn’t rate highly in my book under the heading “nice things to do.” Mormons have the perfect right to do whatever they want, of course, and, at the very least, the whole thing gives me a wonderful idea for a story.

And, to the Mormons credit, at least they’re just messing with the dead. Other believers (not Catholics! This time, at least) are messing with real live kids:

A southeastern Pennsylvania church subjected members of a youth group to a mock kidnapping and interrogations without telling them it was staged, and the outraged mother of one 14-year-old girl has filed a complaint with police.

* * *

[Pastor John] Lanza [of the Glad Tidings Assembly of God] said there were about 17 students at the meeting and the mock kidnappers covered the students' heads, put them in a van and interrogated them. Neither the students nor their parents were told about the raid beforehand, he said, though it was discussed with the parents of one youth who might have health issues.

You read right. A church group decided to “mock” kidnap a bunch of kids. Putting aside the fact that, unless somebody consents to it a “mock” kidnapping is just old fashioned kidnapping (did nobody in the Glad Tidings brain trust think to consult a lawyer?), why on Earth would kids need to learn how to deal with that kind of situation? According to Lanza:

the intent was to prepare them for what they might encounter as missionaries.

Now, in spite of my lack of belief I am 100% in favor of people being able to get out there and preach whatever flavor of gospel they believe in. Violent reaction to that kind of stuff is both stupid and uncalled for. That being said, the vibe I get from “missionaries” is that it means going to other countries to try and recruit. In said countries, outsiders coming to try and sell their faith might not go over so well. In other words, if your missionary work is meeting with violent rejoinders, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Take a tip from the Mormons and stick to messing with dead folks. They’re less likely to fight back, you know.

Some Brief Health Care Thoughts

With the Supreme Court winding up its massive arguments about the Affordable Care Act, I thought I’d toss out a couple of things I haven’t seen others emphasized from yesterday’s session, which focused on the individual mandate. As to the fate of the mandate itself, I’m not going to argue with court watchers who suggest that it’s in “trouble” and the case may be closer than expected. They may be right. It’s always dangerous to read into questions asked at oral argument. I’ve had judges ask me questions during an argument that made me think, “shit, I’ve lost that one,” only to have them rule my way in the end.

But that’s not really what interests me. Let’s assume the mandate goes down in flames. I wonder, at the end of the day, if the folks challenging the law will be any happier. Consider several interesting things that came up during the argument (transcript here, recording here).

First, everybody – attorneys for both sides, the justices asking questions (meaning excluding Thomas) – agreed that the Feds can, in fact, force you to purchase medical insurance, if that happens when you actually seek medical care. So, rather than require purchase ahead of time (when it would be cheaper and broaden the risk pool), purchase could be required when you arrived at the ER with a bloody stump. It might look something like this:

Second, just about everybody (and maybe everybody – it was hard to tell) agreed that in order to tackle the problem addressed by the mandate – free riders – Congress could simply tax everybody to cover the short fall.

Third, again, just about everybody, agreed that Congress could simply bypass all the nonsense and setup a national health service, paid for by broad taxation.

Whether any of those alternatives are politically viable, I have no idea. But if the mandate and the rest of the ACA goes down in flames, we may find out, ‘cause the underlying mess that his our health care system isn’t going to magically get better. I can’t imagine those other options would be any more popular amongst the Tea Party folks and others who have most vocally assailed the ACA.

The irony of one of those solutions being the final outcome is that it may come about because the conservatives grabbed the torches and pitchforks and gunned down what was their own idea, after all.