RARWRITER PUBLISHING GROUP PRESENTS

CREATIVE CULTURE JOURNAL

at www.RARWRITER.com

--------------------"The best source on the web for what's real in arts and entertainment" ---------------------------

Volume 1-2016

MUSIC BOOKS FINE ARTS FILM THE WORLD

ARTIST NEWS THIS EDITION ABOUT MUSIC MUSIC REVIEWS BOOKS CINEMA FASHION FINE ARTS FEATURES SERIES MEDIA ESSAY RESOURCES WRITTEN ARTS POETRY CONTACT ARCHIVES MUSIC LINKS

RARWRITER for your MOBILE DEVICE

JOIN THE LIST

Use this link to add your email address to the RARWRITER Publishing Group mailing list for updates on activities associated with the Creative Culture and Revolution Culture journals, and other RARWRITER Publishing Group interests.

ABOUT RAR: For those of you new to this site, "RAR" is Rick Alan Rice, the publisher of the RARWRITER Publishing Group websites. Use this link to visit the RAR music page, which features original music compositions and other.

Use this link to visit Rick Alan Rice's publications page, which features excerpts from novels and other.

RARADIO

(Click here)

Currently on RARadio:

"On to the Next One" by Jacqueline Van Bierk

"I See You Tiger" by Via Tania

"Lost the Plot" by Amoureux"

Bright Eyes, Black Soul" by The Lovers Key

"Cool Thing" by Sassparilla

"These Halls I Dwell" by Michael Butler

"St. Francis"by Tom Russell & Gretchen Peters, performance by Gretchen Peters and Barry Walsh;

"Who Do You Love?"by Elizabeth Kay;

"Rebirth"by Caterpillars;

"Monica's Frock" by Signel-Z;

"Natural Disasters" by Corey Landis;

"1,000 Leather Tassels" by The Blank Tapes;

"We Are All Stone" and "Those Machines" by Outer Minds;

"Another Dream" by MMOSS; "Susannah" by Woolen Kits;

Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and other dead celebrities / news by A SECRET PARTY;

"I Miss the Day" by My Secret Island,

"Carriers of Light" by Brendan James;

"The Last Time" by Model Stranger;

"Last Call" by Jay;

"Darkness" by Leonard Cohen;

"Sweetbread" by Simian Mobile Disco and "Keep You" fromActress off the Chronicle movie soundtrack;

"Goodbye to Love" from October Dawn;

Trouble in Mind 2011 label sampler;

Black Box Revelation Live on Minnesota Public Radio;

Apteka "Striking Violet";

Mikal Cronin's "Apathy" and "Get Along";

Dana deChaby's progressive rock

_______

MUSIC LINKS

"Music Hot Spots"

LOS ANGELES

SAN FRANCISCO

NEW YORK CITY

NASHVILLE

CHICAGO

AUSTIN

DENVER-BOULDER

MINNESOTA

SEATTLE

NEW ORLEANS

PHILADELPHIA

BOSTON

PORTLAND

DETROIT

MEMPHIS

PACIFIC NORTHWEST

FLORIDA

ARIZONA

INTERNATIONAL LINKS

UNITED KINGDOM

EUROPE

JAPAN

SCANDANAVIA

AUSTRALIA

CANADA

ASIA

Rick Alan Rice (RAR) Literature Page

ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance" -AVAILABLE NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM AMAZON.COM. Use this link.

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects the building of America in a trilogy of novels collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores the development of the American West through the lens of public policy, land planning, municipal development, and governance as it played out in one of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious and cultural traditions that imbued the American Midwest with a special character that continues to have a profound effect on American politics to this day. Book One creates an understanding about America's cultural foundations that is further explored in books two and three that further trace the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as an icon in the development of a certain brand of American character. That's the serious stuff viewed from high altitude. The story itself gets down and dirty with the supernatural, which in ATWOOD - A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the monumental to the sublime. The book features the epic poem "The Toiler" as well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

I am offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal property of individuals whose assets have been inventoried in advance and distributed through a vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of creative works being produced in 1950, when the story is set. Richard Padilla has done his usually brilliant work in capturing the look and feel of a certain type of crime fiction being produced in that era. The whole thing has the feel of those black & white films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard, whose earliest works were westerns. Use this link.

EXPLORE THE KINDLE BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You will find classic literature there, as well as tons of privately published books of every kind. A lot of it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published books are awful, but some are truly classics. You can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works for two bucks.

You do not need to buy a Kindle to take advantage of this low-cost library. Use this link to go to an Amazon.com page from which you can download for free a Kindle App for your computer, tablet, or phone.

Amazon is the largest, but far from the only digital publisher. You can find similar treasure troves atNOOK Press (the Barnes & Noble site), Lulu, and others.

Essays

The RARWRITER essay pages have been one of the most vibrant aspects of this site, to the point where we have archived previous pieces to manage the volume. Below is the current stuff. Read and weep. Comments are welcome. - RAR

Performing Rights Organizations: PRO’s - LEGAL WOLVES in the FLOCK of SMALL MUSIC

Alice Hill is a short story writer, restaurant and venue operator, mother and Kansas farm wife.

Al Petteway and Amy White brought their magic to our little farming town. They are good at magic.
In 2005 they graciously traveled from North Carolina to Atwood, KS to support the 1907 Shirley Opera House Project (restoration/rehabilitation) with a fundraising concert. Their music mesmerized the audience and began a new life for the old building.

The Shirley Opera House holds that indefinable energy that flows from musician to listener and back. Built from locally kilned bricks in 1907 it was recognized for its authentic character by the Kansas and National Registers of Historic Places as it turned 100 years old. As a member of the Boulder Acoustic Society exclaimed “there’s music in the walls”.

Since that first event, many others have followed. I call it our Monthly Music Fix and encourage people to view a night at the Opera as better than drugs. Anti-depressants, that is. Now, six years later I am depressed, angry, frustrated and outraged. .

READ POST - COMMENT

___________________

Phillip Rauls Shares News of the Passing of a Legend to Music Industry Insiders - Poe Kat

Phillip Rauls - Photographer; Four Decade-long Atlantic, STAX Records A&R

This is truly the end of an era.... We are saddened to pass along the news that legendary tipsheet publisher Bobby Poe, whose annual radio and record industry conventions were equally legendary, passed away Saturday, Jan. 22 of complications from a blood clot. He was 77 and had been battling throat cancer for the past two years. Poe's son, Bobby Jr., posted the news on Facebook on Sunday. Poe, a.k.a. "The Poe Kat," is best known and loved as the publisher of his iconic Pop Music Survey, an influential weekly music tipsheet that was sent to Top 40 radio stations and record labels..

READ POST - COMMENT

Click on the links below to go to bookmarked entries on this page.

Conspiracy!
Thoughts On Our Confusion Over Value and Riches
Should A Guy Get A Gun - The World Is Coming to an End!
Oh Vagina
Your Daughter Dresses Like a "Ho"...Should I Be Concerned?
Should You Walk Away From Your Mortgage?
An Immodest Proposal - Spoked Bratwurst
Finger Style Guitar
My Most Sincere Apologies, Mr. Jeter
The "Greatest" Meets the "Me" Generation
Michael Jackson - The Undeniable Heaviness of Mendacious Demise
Do The Jeter! Major League Baseball's Reluctance to Innovate
On A Busy Artist's Time
Oh Kaiser! The Sorry State of U.S. Healthcare Personified
Design-Build with Dufus and Gomer
The Renewed Spirit of Meanness

___________________

Posted September 16, 2010

___________________

Posted April 26, 2010

___________________

Posted January 13, 2010

___________________

Posted January 10, 2010

___________________

Posted November 5, 2009

___________________

Posted November 4, 2009

___________________

Posted October 22, 2009

___________________

Posted October 7, 2009

Finger Style

For reasons unplanned, RARWRITER.com's Artist News home page is currently filled with pieces on solo acoustic guitarists who, by necessity if they choose to be interesting, use the "Finger Style" of playing. This is a genre of music that has been a particular focus at RARWRITER.com since Douglas Strobel became a regular contributor to the site. He is a Finger Style guitarist and is devoted to documenting and sustaining the tradition of the style, particularly as it relates to the performance of "Country Blues", as epitomized by "Jelly Roll" Morton.

The term "Finger Style" guitar is obviously tortured, as there are no legitimate alternatives to the use of one's fingers to play guitar or any other instrument that isn't driven by a pedal.

Just for the sake of considering this subject, the guitar is an instrument that produces sounds by making tightly drawn steel and/or nylon strings vibrate, and there are several ways to "attack" the strings to set them in to that motion. One may use a plectrum, a "pick", to snag and release ("pluck") single strings, or drag across a number of strings to produce a "strum" sound. One may "tap" strings, striking a string against the fret board (along the neck of the guitar) to set it in motion at a specific pitch. These aspects of producing sound on a guitar are largely "dominant" or "strong" hand things, meaning "right-hand" activities for a right-handed player, "left-hand" activities for a "lefty".

The "weak" hand - and these designations of "strong" and "weak" have more to do with orientation than physical strength - is the one used to form chord shapes and press strings against the fret board to play specific notes.

In Finger Style guitar, the strings are "plucked" in two ways. The thumb of the "strong" hand is typically used to pluck "down" on the lower strings of the instrument, the 6th, 5th and 4th strings. "Finger Style" players often wear a "thumb pick", a plastic wrap-around pick that fits onto the thumb and gives some reach into the strings. Other players choose to let their thumbnail grow long to become a natural pick.

The four fingers of the "strong" hand also pluck the strings, but typically by drawing upwards in opposition to the motion of the thumb. In a highly developed "Finger Style" player, each of the four fingers will be used to pluck strings for producing the sounds of single notes, duads, triads and whole chords. In some techniques, fingers may be temporarily assigned to certain strings, and reassigned with the change of a chord. Or, rapid bursts of 16th notes may be achieved by plucking single strings in a succession of notes that could only be achieved by using more than one finger to pluck out the series. That is an advancement only found in top-flight classicists, usually for playing Spanish or Latin styles of music. The thumb may also have a role in producing rapid note sequences, but never at the expense of the rhythmic bass line.

You get a range of attacks from fully developed "Finger Style" players, including strumming and bashing, but the one thing that is constant is the bass drone produced by the thumb.

A metronomic sense of time is required to play "Finger Style" because the technique is developed to allow guitarists to play arrangements in their entirety, both melody and bass lines, along with rich grace notes and well-considered accents and runs.

That metronomic timing thing is extraordinarily powerful, because it undergirds one's commitment to a piece. Once you start playing a song and establish that beat and feel, you are committed. Anything less than performing the song through to completion with its timing intact and its melody fully expressed is failure. "Finger Style" is a real leap into the fire, an attention-drawing high-wire act that cannot be said to "work" unless it portrays the composition in a uniquely powerful way. One must become the vehicle that transports the listener to the place the composer envisioned without breaking the spell by missing a beat or blowing a note.

Mastering "Finger Style" technique is no small feat, which is what makes listening to and watching players like 12-year old South Korean prodigy Sungha Jung so awe inspiring. This style is not really something every player would or could aspire to, but is rather a "player's-player style". People who love the guitar, and particularly the acoustic guitar, may find their musical worlds hugely expanded by pursuing this line of study. After one has grown bored with playing "rhythm guitar" to classic rock tunes, or copying the solo sections of classic recordings, or even holding down one of these roles in a bar band, new fascination in the instrument may be found in the considerable time it takes to develop into a "Finger Style" player.

"Finger Style", more than any other guitar style (it encompasses so much and so many musical styles, from Latin to Country), may seem simultaneously to be so much more and so much less than what it appears to be. It tends to bring out the richness in simple compositions, the subtle shadings and tonalities that make up the heart of a piece. It also adds great depth and complexity to compositions and can often fool the ear. A case in point is the music of Robert Johnson, which on first listen may sound extraordinarily primitive, more "rustic charm" than "music", but on subsequent listens it grows more and more complex and full. Guitarists sitting down to learn Robert Johnson tunes quickly become confronted with a world beyond immediate perception, and this is part of why hard-core musicians often fall in love with the blues, which has this mystery at its foundation and core. It isn't all just about SRV hammering out "Cold Shot", wonderful as that is.

"Finger Style" is also why so many musicians become acoustic guitar fanatics as they grow older. At some point, some may lose interest in the electronic effects that drove the songs of their youth and opt for rich wooden sounds that land more gently on their aging ears. That is not as sad as it sounds.

"Finger Style" technique is the final fulfillment of many a guitar player's ambition, which is to be taken seriously as a musician.

I remember my father asking me, when I was kid and first learning the rudiments of playing the guitar, how and when I would start to work the melody lines of the songs I was learning into the chords I was strumming. He had seen and heard this and watching me struggle just to make chords, and not being a guitar player himself, he wondered how it could all ever come together. At the time, when roles in bands tended to be simplified and assigned in terms of "Rhythm" and "Lead" guitar, I simply had no idea. It really never occurred to me to literally play the arrangements in the sheet music that was available to me, beyond strumming the chords and changing at the appropriate intervals. I don't know what I thought all those notes on the page were there for; pianists, I guess. I would just learn the odd solo parts from songs by "copying" from records, which were more or less useless played out of context, at least after you had impressed your young friends with your new licks once or twice. And, mostly, I would bang away at chord changes for the purpose of accompanying my own pained vocals.

There is a limit to what a kid can do with that.

"Finger Style" is the "piano approach" to guitar, the Full Monty of player development. It is the door that opens and transitions an aspirant from "Player" to "Guitarist", in the process gifting that musician with a satisfaction that is reborn with each new piece of music found there to be interpreted. - RAR

___________________

Posted September 10, 2009

My Most Sincere Apologies, Mr. Jeter

Back in June, writing as a disgruntled Yankee fan, I suggested that the Yankees, supposedly unable to field ground balls to the standard of a major league team, position themselves more as would a "10-man" girls softball team. I suggested they "do the Jeter", which just struck me as funny, but obviously implied that our captain, as great as he has been, had lost a step over the years and was now, on some level, "laughing stock".

Since writing that - and I am not suggesting that doing so had anything to do with anything - our man Derek Jeter has gone on, at age 35, to have something like the greatest year of his career.

OFFENSE: Check these 2009 stats (after 141 games) vs. his Projected 2009 totals vs. his career averages for a 162 game season:

Derek Jeter	PA	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	CS	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
2009 - 141 games	632	564	97	186	26	1	17	62	25	5	60	77	.330	.397	.470	.867
Projected 2009	763	649	112	214	30	1	20	71	29	5	69	89	.330	.397	.470	.867
162 Game Avg	743	657	120	208	33	4	17	81	23	6	67	111	.317	.387	.459	.846

This season, Derek Jeter is improving on his career averages in Plate Appearances, Hits, Homeruns, Stolen Bases, Bases on Balls, Strikeouts, Batting Average, On Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, and On Base Plus Slugging Average.

In fact, Derek Jeter is having the kind of year in 2009 that Carl Yaztremski had in his MVP year of 1967 with the Boston Red Sox; a year that cemented him in the minds of baseball fans everywhere as one of the all-time greats.

Carl Yastrzemski	PA	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	CS	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
1967 - 161 games	680	579	112	189	31	4	44	121	10	8	91	69	.326	.418	.622	1.040

Comparing the two is apples to oranges in that Yaz was a power hitter who rarely struck out and drew the kind of walk totals that long ball hitters do. Still, Yaz was not playing baseball's most challenging position, shortstop, as Jeter does.

Jeter has been so consistent on offense over the course of his career that it is easy to take him for granted. He is a first ballot Hall of Fame player based on 15 years of offensive excellence. He has batted in the leadoff spot all of this year, where over his career he has primarily been a #2 hitter, and some stats (e.g., RBI) may reflect that, but overall Jeter seems to have gotten and given the Yankees a boost from his elevation to the #1 slot.

DEFENSE: Jeter has not gotten younger and quicker - on average, he gets to fewer balls than the average major league shortstop (4.35 put outs and assists per 9 innings vs. the league average for shortstops of 4.56), but Jeter has cut his average number of errors per 162 game season by about half. He is fielding the balls he reaches in 2009 at a .986 success level, compared to the league average for shortstops of .976. His number of chances may be reduced by the change this season in the profile of the Yankees pitching staff, now including starters C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Joba Chamberlain, who strike out a great number of hitters and tend to yield a lot of fly ball outs. Yankee fielders, overall, have fielded at a .985 vs. a .984 MLB average. The Yankees have, on average, gotten a few less chances per game than the MLB team average (36.7 vs. 37.4).

MEA CULPA: Overall, when someone is performing at the level of excellence that Derek Jeter is in 2009 (and throughout his career), he shouldn't be taunted with accusations that he be deployed more as might a roving shortstop on a girl's softball team. I am sorry for that. If the Yankees go on to win the World Series, as they may well, then perhaps Derek Jeter should get the AL Most Valuable Player honor, which he richly deserves (Joe Mauer's extraordinary season not withstanding). And perhaps I will need to withdraw my application to take over Joe Girardi's slot as Yankee Manager. - RAR

_______________________

Posted September 8, 2009

Weird Healthfellows

The "Greatest" Meets the "Me" Generation

Watching the turnout for the public meetings being held by elected officials to discuss the health care initiative, one can’t help but be struck by the plurality of right-wing dufus types (see the NPR picture at right) and senior citizens at these “rallies”. Is anyone else showing up? These gatherings appear to be septuagenarian support groups for aging aunts and uncles chaperoned by NRA card holders. And, of course, grandma and grandpa are there, if only in spirit, having gotten the word that supporters of “the public option” want them all to just die.

Some of us may also be struck by the disproportionate representation of Republicans at these public meetings. Conservative Republicanism and old age go together, an observation supported recently by metrics showing that the core audience for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and the Fox News Channel is 67 years of age. Perhaps it should be no surprise, as these "dinosaurs" approach the edges of their personal tar pits, that they are susceptible to the fear mongering that is the standard fare of right wing demagoguery.

The thing that really hits me though, watching these televised debacles, is the abundance of irony represented by the resistance of seniors who don’t trust the government to run health care, though in so many ways so many of them owe their very lives to the government they apparently now disdain.

This, after all, is in part Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”, the people who saved the world from Adolph Hitler. These are the people, we are told, who sacrificed unselfishly so that we could have the America we know today.

But then that is part of the problem, isn’t it?

The America of today is a nation in decline following a successful decades-long campaign by right-wing economists and influential business leaders to remove government oversight from all aspects of our lives (through deregulation, including actions like the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act). This, not surprisingly, was accompanied by an overwhelming revolution in consumerism that washed the decks of public responsibility and gave the thumbs up to conspicuous consumption, even among the lower income groups (see Walmart).

The result is that progressive policy makers, and fewer and fewer even exist, are now confronted by the conservative wrath in force at the health care meetings today, which come in the form of a most confounding beast, a two-headed creature:

One, the senior population, that survived the inappropriately named "Great Depression" and then prospered largely due to progressive public policy (and world war) and now fear that the benefits they accrued will be taken from them, and
Two, the Baby Boomers who were nurtured at the teat of the aforementioned "Greatest Generation" and supplied with easy credit on which to build their "me empires" and now fear a reduction in their capacity for prospering under the weight of imposed public responsibility

THE GREATEST GENERATION: The generation that birthed the Baby Boomers was a humble and grateful lot, the original "Grateful Dead" in so many ways. Without the benefit of broad media and under the influence of monopolized political communications (like the Hearst publications syndicate), they appreciated the Works Projects Administration opportunities of the 1930s and they showed up ready to go when Uncle Sam told them they were needed for service to country abroad in World War II. Through their blood, sweat and tears, to borrow a cliché, they made history by turning back hostile international adversaries fore and aft and bringing about an industrial revolution here at home. It followed that they were molded into a generation that placed the greatest emphasis on shared sacrifice and compliance to social norms.

Here, as it happened, was the open wound that allowed the infection of "unenlightened politics" to establish itself and fester. Returning from the war abroad, Americans melded comfortably into the new "age of tomorrow", with its creature comforts and vast and ready resources. The GI Bill helped a generation of veterans gain educations that had previously been unimaginable for the working class, and it also allowed them to buy starter homes at low prices and at low interest rates, often for no money down. The accumulation of societal wealth that followed was “the American Century” made personal. And then it got better. Medicare took some basic health care burdens from the shoulders of people 65 and older, providing a guaranteed level of service to meet the needs of seniors who are by far the greatest users of health care. The Greatest Generation “sold out”, to use the jargon of their children’s generation; “sold their souls to the devil”. That was the smart bet, the expectation, the norm, and if you could fit in through employment with some mega-corporation, all the more impressive. The thing is, over time those norms and living denials became more and more corrosive to justice until corruption swelled throughout the U.S. economy and the U.S. way of doing business became more and more predatory. In the course of gathering our shells and protecting our gains, we ignored the ramifications of what was being created.

THE ME GENERATION: The generation that I belong to, the Baby Boomers, the "Me Generation", was always disconnected from government and at ironic odds with our parent's generation. This is part of what makes the current health care debate so convoluted, with its polarized parties and its convergence of seniors and right-leaning Baby Boomers.

My generation is one that has not developed much of a relationship with public or moral responsibility. The greatest societal events of our lives have largely been repugnantly negative, from the political assassinations of the '60s and the Viet Nam War, with its conscriptions and high body counts, through the corruptions in the Executive Branch of government associated with Watergate, through the dismally pain-indexed Carter Administration, and right on into the "greed is good" excesses of the Reagan years and beyond.

The steadily dissolving standards of American decency, and the watering down of American democracy through such things as media conglomeration, have rewarded the aggressively amoral among us until finally the U.S. has come to feel like a cage match, where the worst thugs prevail. The big winners are Ed Zander of Motorola, Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae, Gary Pruitt of McClatchy Co., Gerry Levin of Time Warner, Chuck Prince of CitiGroup, Bob Nardelli of Home Depot and Chrysler, Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Kerry Kellinger of Washington Mutual, Rick Wagoner of General Motors, Gary Forsee of Sprint Nextel Corporation, Ken Lay of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom, Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth, Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial, Al Dunlap of Sunbeam Corp, Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, John Sculley of Apple, Martin Sullivan of AIG, Larry Ellison of Oracle, John Chambers of Cisco Systems, and of course the redoubtable Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern, all figureheads of importantly errant money machines.

Down at the street level, all of that mendacity translates into an ethos that says "there is where I want to be so get the hell out of my way", because why not? The alternative is compliance with the new social norm, which is slavery to revolving credit and the financing of unredeemable debt. There is a better alternative, all one needs to do is keep the government out of one's pocket.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL DRAWBRIDGE: The "Get Out of Jail Free" pass for both of these polar opposites is the same, which is their avowed allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, a document that doubtless few have read. We Americans are an odd lot in that way. The other document that holds us safe from any point of view that might vary from our own is the Holy Bible, specifically the New Testament.

The point of view argued by many of those who don't wish for health care to become a universal right in the U.S. is that it is not provided for in the Constitution or any of its Amendments. That, of course, is open to interpretation as the documents we choose to cite usually are. The Preamble to the Constitution states specifically that the idea of the thing was "...to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...", which I think could be argued as grounds for almost anything, depending upon one's definitions of perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, blessed liberties and posterity.

One could, for instance, translate the pro health care position into this statement:

"So that I may feel more comfortable hanging out with my fellow Americans, I am going to provide just access to health care services as a matter of maintaining the quality of life in our neighborhoods, ensuring against civil unrest related to inadequate service delivery and establishing commitment to community as a standard to which future generations must be measured."

Or, one could use the same Preamble text to argue against universal health care, or gun control, or anything else that makes sense. To wit:

"So that I may feel more comfortable hanging out with fellow Americans who have earned our right to domestic tranquility and a perfect union, which excludes the right of any party to intrude upon my privilege of liberty, I am committed to seeing that justice is done to those who threaten our way of life, to providing a common defense against all adversaries, and to protecting our general welfare for the purpose of ensuring our continued existence."

It really just comes down to a matter of how mean you wish to be in the exploitation of our "sacred text". And by the way, the Constitution was not handed down to us by supreme beings, as the radically devoted may imagine. These are the same people, I suspect, who journey to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which presents exhibits based on a literal reading of The Book of Genesis mixed in with a healthy dollop of Hanna-Barbara.

The Constitution was a compromise document that roughly half of the Constitutional Congress, convened in 1787, didn't even want to bring into existence. They already had the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union in place, which had been more than sufficient in the eyes of those state leaders who, over the brief existence of the country, had carved out some wonderful kingdoms which they were prepared to rule into perpetuity.

You never hear these modern day devotees of the U.S. Constitution go on about the Articles of Confederation as if they were sacred text, though back in 1787 when the Congress convened they were under the impression that they were amending the Articles, not drafting a new foundation document. After all, the Articles had created a "Perpetual Union" with language that it could never be abrogated by any subsequent writing. But it was.

In fact, the framers of the "new" Constitution, primarily Virginians led by James Madison, were all about tossing out a flawed framework that gave way too much power to men who represented only a few (the Rhode Island leadership, for instance) and gave way too little power to states with large populations (i.e., Virginia). The long, hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 was a miserable exercise in the kind of politics that "democracy" has become noted for, which equates to obfuscation of ideas, demagoguery, purposeful delay, filibustering, threats of walkout and worse. The squabbling was so great that occasionally the leadership would have "the ancient" 81-year old Benjamin Franklin carried in on a chair to listen to the debate and act as a mediating influence, a wiser head. General George Washington, who was preordained to become the first President of the United States based on his leadership in the Revolutionary War, did not attend the day to day shouting matches, but showed up only on rare occasions to act as the adult in the room. Thomas Jefferson took the entire fiasco in from abroad, France to be specific. In the end, the document that the founders produced, the Constitution of the United States of America, was hardly more than a procedural manual that defined the branches of government, how elected officials would come to exist, and how the basic machinery of it all would work.

What it did not do was offer any specifics regarding the standard of our national character. The great statements of purpose are all marketing fluff useful only inasmuch as it fosters the kind of policy debates we still have going on today, 200-plus years later. The details started to be added through the Amendments, which themselves are among the most ambiguously worded codicils in the history of legalese (e.g., the much quoted 2nd Amendment, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." We are still trying to figure out what that historically awful sentence must have been intended to mean, and in the vacuum of clear direction we have granted to individuals the right to bear arms.) And, of course, the Amendments themselves have sometimes been devised to overrule previous amendments (the 18th and the 21st, regarding Prohibition).

The point is, the Constitution in all of its fuzziness is simply the draw bridge that is retracted when those of us who have assets to protect wish to insulate ourselves from the encroachments of those who don't as well as those government officials who may wish to engage an unwanted authority.

MORAL GUIDELINES: What we don't really have in the U.S. is anything in the way of moral guidelines. We have nothing that really defines our national character, because discussing our differences as individuals has been too painful to ever yield anything in the way of a shared national way of thinking. If you ask most Americans what would best describe our "American character" it would not doubt be some individual characteristic, like rugged individualism, self reliance, or fierce independence. This is both beside the point and the point itself.

We may all be rough, rugged, fearless freedom fighters, and whatever self-puffery feels good to us in the way of self descriptions, but we are all still living together in a community in which resources are shared and expenses and burdens are interrelated.

Maybe we need an old man, like Benjamin Franklin, to be carried in on a chair to remind us all that we are eventually going to have to grow up and make some serious commitments to the continuance of our society, before the denials, the high-flown philosophical positions, and the demagoguery render us so sick that the nation's health cannot be sustained. - RAR

_____________________________________________________________________

Posted June 30, 2009

Inured No Longer

The Undeniable Heaviness of Mendacious Demise

I wasn't particularly affected when Michael Jackson died suddenly (unexpectedly?) last week. While an admirer of his talent, he wasn't really of my generation, though born in 1958, Michael was a "50s" child like myself. Let that sink in for a moment and you start to get a sense for the disconnections that characterized his claustrophobic, shortened existence. I think it is captured, to tragic effect, in the shot above (uncredited from shamelesshype.com). In many respects it is among the more flattering of the last photographs taken of Michael Jackson, and yet it makes me sad to look at it. Those are the eyes of an old man, a sad one, and it makes me feel empathy for the person whose soul they are windows into. That they are the eyes of a prematurely old individual brings into sharp contrast MIchael Jackson's fantastical worldview and his own experience with living. He seemed to me to be stark raving mad, in a largely, not completely, benign way, like "The Hatter" in Wonderland. It is the back story that makes it all unsettling, the probability that this weird, intensely talented person was created out of love and abuse, every step along the way.

Remember B.F. Skinner's "air crib"? When I was in college it was often called his "baby box". It was a chamber intended as a controlled environment to make the process of raising a baby cleaner and easier for the caretaker.

Michael Jackson was famously and figuratively raised in such a box, created by his driven, domineering father and his Jehovah's Witness mother. Like a controlled experiment, it met its objectives while producing unexpected outputs. I think you could consider establishing your children as a work unit an objective reached. The unexpected would be the level of fame that came to the Jackson 5, and then the hyperbolic levels it reached in the solo manifestation of Michael Jackson. The sweet little boy who grew up in isolation, denied the social interactions that tend to calibrate people to behavioral norms, was finally and irrevocably isolated by the fanatical devotions of strangers. Is it any wonder he was known, in the 1980s, to sleep in a hyperbaric chamber?

As investigations into Jackson's death reveal the role that AEG Live, the concert promoter for Jackson's planned 50-show run at London's 02 Arena, were playing in his life, one is struck by the patterns of abuse that are repeated in Michael Jackson's story. Handlers can rationalize a lot of things when the reasons all have to do with producing money. People get paid, families get fed. People holding contracts get rich. Michael Jackson was reported to have been nearly a half billion dollars in debt at the time of his death, but there was a plan for him. He would just have to rehearse every day to recapture the old magic, get and remain energized and healthy. He just had to stay focused on being the money machine that he had been since he was a child. He just had to disconnect from time and the reality of his own mortal limitations, and just be Michael Jackson 50 more times. Or maybe more. There was talk of extending the engagement into a worldwide tour, to just keep going, to just keep cashing checks.

It was going to be Michael Jackson's way out. - RAR

From May 9, 2009

From May 7, 2009

Making Things Remain Possible...

On A Busy Artist's Time

When I was a kid, I was gripped with fear at the prospect of committing to a "regular" job. Like those storied tribes of the Amazon rainforest who blanch at the idea of having their images taken from them by a camera, I suspected that life lived regular would steal what feels like the very essence of me, which is my artistic spirit. (Yeah, you laugh, but I feel that way.) I haven't really changed over the decades, which makes me sound like a vampire, but so be it. I have been fighting the good fight against what we in the '60s used to call "conformity" - a loaded descriptive - for 43 years. I count that from the first summer job my parents got for me, which was in a pit under a Kansas grain elevator, where I worked 48 hours a week in the sweltering summer of 1966, most in respirator mask and goggles, shoveling wheat into a broken, dust-belching auger. I got $1.25 an hour and a bad taste in my mouth regarding the mis-marriage of fruits and labor.

That lowly beginning was all it took to convince me that hard work was not only not its own reward, but was something that, left un-managed, could steal your enthusiasm for each new day. And so I have marshaled through the years, doing my best to exist at the fringes of commonality, but in a manner comfortable enough to accomodate my ironic need for the normalcy of domestic life, including family and mortgage.

Maybe my choices haven't exactly been strictly bohemian, as I might have preferred. I make my living doing technical writing projects on a "consultant" basis now, but in the past have worked in staff writing and editing positions at architecture and engineering, information technology, and training firms. I have worked as a writer on various weekly and daily publications. It has been pretty standard stuff, largely mundane, and I have been rigid about keeping it balanced, as best I've been able, with my off-the-clock interests.

Like most right-brained people, and I mean that in the technical rather than the judgmental sense, I was more or less convinced as a young person that my life would end if somehow I lost the time required to write my masterpieces - I have always been a plural thinker - and follow my bliss. I don't think I thought even then that there was some big reward coming my way in the end, I just felt strongly compelled to spew everything I could think of out onto the page. Why? Who knows. People sometimes demand explanations, particularly when it becomes apparent that few are those who give one twinky about one's produce.

What one discovers, after years of trying to explain one's self to others who will never understand, is that it is all a waste of gas. One's own creative output may be a waste, but certainly trying to defend one's approach to life is utterly hopeless. Speaking as a writer, if you can't inspire the interest of a reader, it is unlikely that you will personally inspire anyone's empathy with your woeful relationship to life's demands, barring an on-air session with Oprah, and the new-found admiration that comes with income, particularly in amounts obscene.

Offering a defense for one's artistic bent also misses the point. This life ultimately belongs to each of us personally and what is right for another may not be right for you; in fact, will almost certainly not be right for you. The answer is not in crafting clever and insurmountable defenses, but in letting it be. Amend that. Letting it be with these rules:

You must function as an independent person who causes no inconvenience to others
You must earn your independence through good works
You must do what you say you are going to do
You must produce works of authentic value

My Mother has always stated, somewhat maddeningly, that people find the time for the things they really want to do. I have found that to be true, now that I am old, and I wish I had absorbed this wisdom when I was younger, because it would have saved me a great deal of angst.

EFFICIENCY: I am sometimes amazed, these days, by my own efficiency. This feels weird because I don't think that people perceive me as a particularly efficient person, but I write constantly, roughly 7,500 to 10,000 words per day over a range of vehicles, some profit-earning, others not. I publish this website, which takes no small amount of production labor. I market my consultant business, which adds a good 10 hours of time to each "work" week. I grab moments to compose song lyrics and melodies and experiment with arrangements. I use my digital audio workstation to record parts and compose in midi instrumentation. I write fiction, essays and reviews. I research topics. I do the grocery shopping, take the kids to and from school, cook, read, travel to meetings around the Bay Area, play in the park. I catch a little television. I usually find myself in bed by 10:30 p.m. and often start my day between 3:30 and 4:30 a.m. My best hours are before 7 a.m., before the family wakes up, when I am electric by my own standards.

It has occurred to me that outside of the activities referenced in that paragraph, I don't have much of a life. I have no idea how to vacation and rarely attempt such. My social life is non-existent. I rarely "go out" to a movie or a restaurant. But I find time for the things I really want to do.

SHORT-CUTS: I have learned that part of using time efficiently is to get smart about the short paths from A to E, which is about as deep into the alphabet as I ever have time to go. Accepting what is do-able is a part of the maturation process. Knowing that you must make each stroke count tends to fine tune one's efforts and over time you get good at it, whatever it is you are doing. I do a lot of things and, quite apart from my earliest inclinations, I think that being busy helps.

In my writer's life, I have learned that the best way for me to work is to explode my thoughts onto paper before getting too crazy with thinking about what it should all be. Rule 1: move the project forward. Once you have something started you can make further progress by moving elements around and editing. This second phase of work often springs new ideas to my mind and I find myself creating yet another draft that will require further molding. Using this approach, I typically have developed something by the end of my available time. It may not be a finished something, but there is a tangible output that didn't exist before, and I always seem to learn something in the process, even if the product falls short of what I had hoped for it to be, as they most always do.

Technology has done wonders for my musician's life, such as it is. Here again, I can't budget the time to develop an interest in the social side of my musical inclinations. I don't really want to go out and play with and for others. What I do budget time for is songwriting and the design of sonic expression, which I typically do in one of the following ways:

Develop a figure on the guitar that will become the musical center of an idea, one that I can quickly record and capture as something I can use as a "loop" around which to build (I use Cakewalk's Sonar Producer software on a PC); or,
Chart out chord changes that form a melodic infrastructure to be developed using import tracks and available midi technology

RISKY MEASURES: The revolution in digital recording and sampling and in midi instrumentation has gone through a curious arc. The advent of midi instrumentation launched Techno House music, which has been bane to some and life blood to others, and it was an immense presence in popular music in the 1980s and '90s. Then there came a push back, a desire to move back toward the sounds of real instruments, though the days of pure acoustics are largely a memory now at any (sampling) rate. Synthetic, digitally representative sounds have become omnipresent in music production, in part because they lower costs and afford extreme ranges of flexibility to the greatest number of users.

Among the earliest off the shelf software to aid with musical production was the Canadian import "Band-In-A-Box", which is a nifty concept that allows the user to apply a wide variety of musical styles to chord changes of one's own choosing. I was introduced to the product years ago by a top L.A. musician who suggested that "it would be perfect for you". I took that as an insult, at the time, but not so much after I became familiar with the product. BIAB, as the software is called to pejorative effect, recognizes that music is performed as a string of repetitive actions, the standardization of which produces a "style" of play. There are obviously styles by the truckload, taking into account the interpretations of individual players who come to stamp their particular brand on musical types. The clever folks who contribute interpretations of playing styles to BIAB are good at parsing the nuances of players known for their distinctive styles, so the off the shelf offerings are immense. BIAB also allows the user to design his or her own style sets, which requires a significant commitment of time, and a significant flexibility in one's thinking regarding musical notation. All BIAB styles are written in a single key, so your notation is indicating variations in steps, which become translated by the program into the chord changes you write for each of five instrument voices.

This section (left) shows a pattern to be played on the guitar in the "New Waltz" style, which works well with songs like Marty Robbins' "El Paso". The default key for BIAB is C, so while in the music for this song the first chords are written as "D", they appear in the patterns per the example at left, which shows the C, E and G notes of the C major triad. The key is the pattern, in which you (or with midi, the computer) play the 1st-5th-3rd-5th-3rd notes in the key as written. So in this song, the sounds you hear are D, F# and A, the notes of the D major triad.

This two-measure pattern is one of 162 patterns of play spread out over five instruments to create the complete arrangement for each of five instrument voices. This pattern is the first played by the guitar in the A section of the arrangement, highlighted in blue in the screenshot below. As shown in that screenshot, BIAB styles map out into A and B sections, with multiple subparts for each, including measures in various time signatures.

This next screenshot below shows the second two-measure guitar pattern of the A section, which offers subtle variations on the theme established with the first pattern. The quarter note on the third beat of the first measure is played as a "D" rather than an "E" as it is in the first pattern. In the second measure, the quarter note on the third beat is also played as a "D". Or, more precisely, it is played as flat thirds, or minor triads.

Professional musicians largely recoil at such breakdowns of musical performance, calibrated to be played by your "robot computer", their disparagements ranging from the shortcomings of midi sounds (largely dependent upon the quality of one's sound card) to the fact that they are not being produced through the blood, sweat and tears of real people.

While I am largely in agreement with those attitudes, I am also of the opinion that this BIAB program, and others like it, should be a part of every public school music program because they brilliantly deconstruct musical composition into comprehensible bites. There is much to be learned from this, which is my reason for guiding you through this tutorial. Optimize your possibilities by using the available options. Move your projects forward.

PROCESSING IDEAS: While I wouldn't argue that the midi revolution has helped the overall quality of sound - once you have attuned your ear to its characteristics, you realize that you hear it everywhere in the media, which must be deteriorating our sense of what pure acoustic sound is - it is an extraordinary boon to compositional creativity. It allows the average bloke, like myself, to create a demo version of a tune in a short amount of time that is light years better than could have been achieved a quarter century ago by a talented multi-instrumentalist with a home 4-track recorder.

BIAB has limitations that are too great for me to accept, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable. I sometimes use the software to capture a basic arrangement of a chord progression, with something close to the feel I hope to achieve. As clever as BIAB's style producers are, I can never quite fit their work to the feel I want for my own compositions. If it is a country, jazz or pop tune, I can usually come close enough that I can save a version as a midi file that I will then import into Cakewalk's Sonar Producer. Sonar allows me to edit all five tracks that are imported from the basic BIAB arrangement, and usually with some minor tweaks in the notation editor of Sonar I will get the song dialed in closer to how I want it. I often just use the bass, drum and piano tracks, saving the guitar work for myself to balance the midi instrumentation with "real" strings.

Sometimes there just aren't any short cuts one can take. I can't gain any benefit from BIAB with pure rock feels, which I typically build from scratch using Sonar's notation tools. Drums are always the hardest for me, as I am a non-drummer, and I never seem to find "canned" beats (which Sonar offers) that do what I want. I end up creating my own "loops", which takes me right back to the BIAB model shown above, i.e., set repetitions that add up to play the style of the song.

WORKING FAST: My whole point in starting this piece was that I am focused on efficient use of the little time I have available for any one of my multiple projects. This little intro to BIAB and Sonar Producer's midi notation capabilities is offered as one example of tools I use to make the best use of my time, though some may argue that I might find more valuable things to do.

Doubter voices aside, my focus with music production is on developing instrument parts quickly, and where the guitar parts are concerned, which I typically record "live", I have endeavored to become adequate to the task of quickly writing and recording a song at least well enough that I can stand to hear it back. I never consider my guitar parts more than "sketches". This may not seem a high standard to shoot for, but it is like I said earlier, I do what I can with the time I have. The toughest challenge for me is that I am usually recording my guitar parts the one and only time I will ever play most of them. That gives me kind of a rush, like a captured moment that one hopes is inspired. It isn't always, but working that way keeps projects moving forward.

I do the vocals the same way, doing most in not more than a few takes. Sometimes I'll keep a handful of full performances and then cut and snip the best parts and put them together in Sonar, which is where I do all my recording.

I usually don't put more than a few hours in to any of the originals I produce as demos, and yet they have gotten better over the years. Some weeks are tougher than others, but on average and using the available technology I write and record, to various degrees of completion, two or three new originals each week, year around. And yet it can't account for more than 10 percent of my waking hours.

I may not be great as an artist, but I have done the one thing that I never believed was possible back in my youth. I have learned, in large part, to master my own time. The hub-bub of life does not own me anymore, which means my spirit is still alive. And that remaining the case, anything remains possible. - RAR

From May 6, 2009

An Update: Plaudits for Kaiser Home Care

The story that follows is really hard on Kaiser Permanente, particularly their Emergency Room staff and practices, and the "care givers" in the Kaiser hospital. The depiction of the ER staff as uncaring and unresponsive is completely accurate from our family's experience with them, and feelings of bitter resentment will be slow to dissipate. That said, the "home care" specialists who have visited the Rice household repeatedly to provide post-surgical care have been nothing less than spectacular. They have been professional, thoughtful and extremely caring and if the entire U.S. health care system operated as they do, we wouldn't be writing articles about the U.S. health industry's lowly status, 37th among all nations according the World Health Organization. Kaiser home care has been exceptionally good and the Rice family wishes to thank them most sincerely. - RAR

From April 24, 2009

The Sorry State of U.S. Healthcare Personified

Oh Kaiser! You Are Killing Us!

In Michael Moore's documentary on the U.S. healthcare system, Sicko (click here to read a review on RARWRITER.com), there is a section in which President Richard M. Nixon is captured on one of the notorious Nixon White House tapes talking with his domestic advisor John Ehrlichman about how impressed he is with Henry J. Kaiser, the steel baron and founder of Kaiser Permanente, whom Nixon admires for finding a way to turn provision of health care into a profit-making enterprise. That audio clip itself is enough to make you sick, and most certainly it is the personification of the film's title.

Kaiser Permanente came into existence in 1952 as an extension of a health care model developed for Kaiser shipyard and steel workers in the 1930s and '40s, and which opened its enrollment to the public (non-Kaiser employees) in 1945. Today, Kaiser Permanente is, according to the company website, "a working partnership of two organizations: the not-for-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, and the Permanente Medical Groups."

Kaiser Permanente was the first of the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO). The Nixon administration championed the HMO concept as a fix to rising health care costs and the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 created a special, protected category of health services. The act established the HMO as a mechanism within which subscribers paid fees (premiums) to gain access to a network of doctors and hospital facilities. In return, the HMO received mandated market access and federal development funds (taxpayer money). The corporate welfare wasn't the only advantage afforded to the crafty Kaiser. Under the 1974 ERISA Act, Kaiser and his band of lawyers established a protection against state common law tort lawsuits, putting in place a Federal law that protected HMOs from malpractice litigation on the grounds that the decisions regarding patient care are administrative rather than medical in nature.

That is worth repeating for emphasis: Under ERISA, HMOs like Kaiser Permanente were protected from malpractice litigation because decisions regarding patient care were defined as administrative rather than medical decisions. Here you have the smoking gun that for the last 35 years has taken decisions on your health out of the hands of your physician and put them in the lap of bean counters and faceless corporate administrators. This was the beginning of the end of quality health care in the United States, accounting for why the U.S. is now viewed as having the 37th best health care system in the world (according to the World Health Organization).

That's right, the "richest" nation on the planet delivers poorer health care to its citizens than do many eastern European, formerly Soviet-block underdeveloped nations.

The story below puts a face on what this means for real people, in this case the Rice Family of Benicia, California.

* * * * *

MANAGED CARE: Two weeks ago, my wife became ill and for days she stayed in bed at home, growing sicker and sicker. She felt poisoned. She couldn't go to the bathroom, couldn't eat. Then she started to vomit.

We contacted Kaiser to request an appointment with her doctor. That could not be arranged the day we called, but we were told a Nurse Practitioner - a strange locution - could see her, so an appointment was made for that. Joanne's color drained from her usual Olive complexion to a weird grey.

When we arrived for the appointment, we got right in but my wife was seen for less than 5 minutes and was sent away suggesting that she double the dose of over the counter stool softener that she was taking. Kaiser's pre-printed instruction called for the commercial product Dulcolax, which carries a warning label that the product not be used if the patient is experiencing nausea or fever. She returned home to bed.

EMERGENCY: On the following day, a Saturday, she began to run a fever and experienced sharp stomach pains. We rushed to the Emergency Room at Kaiser Vallejo (CA).

When we arrived, there were a handful of people in the waiting room. Joanne registered at the window, where a receptionist sat behind a thick glass partition and spoke to us through a little vent, instructing us to speak loudly so we could be heard. Security personnel were stationed in the waiting room, where we were instructed to wait until a physician could see her.

We sat there for 4 hours, during which time Joanne's condition grew worse. She doubled in pain and began to cry.

We repeatedly went to the protected reception area and pleaded for someone to see her, but were instructed to wait.

Eventually her pain became so great that I complained to the receptionist that we needed immediate attention. Apparently uncomfortable at the pressure we were putting on her, she disappeared from her station and remained absent, even while we stood at the window, unwilling and unable to simply sit any longer in the waiting room waiting for medical attention. When she finally returned to her station, I told her that it didn't feel to us like the ER staff was doing anything to respond to what was obviously an emergency situation.

She asked if I would like to speak with the Assignment Nurse, who soon enough came out to talk to us in the hallway. She told us there was nothing they could do because there was no bed available. I told her that we didn't need a bed, we needed a doctor! She replied that they had to get a bed for patients before a doctor could examine them. (Really? Doctors Without Borders examine people where they find them in Africa: in a hut, outside, lying on the ground, etc.)

I pleaded with the Assignment Nurse, asking if Joanne could be put on a gurney in the hallway - anything to get her seen by a doctor - but she said no.

I asked if we called an ambulance - there were two of them parked not more than 50 feet away from us, just outside the door to the ER - if we could be seen immediately. There were people being carted in from arriving ambulance units.

The Assignment Nurse seemed to find this funny and again refused us service.

I asked, in all sincerity, if she could tell us if there was some alternative to the Kaiser ER where we could get immediate help for this situation that was deteriorating rapidly and had been for more than 4 hours. I asked "Is there anyplace else we can go to get help?"

"You can go wherever you want," she replied with a smarmy, baited smile.

STUCK IN PURGATORY: The problem, of course, is that we can't go wherever we want, though there are other hospitals in the area. Our health coverage, through my wife's employment with the Benicia, California school district, is with Kaiser. It is, in fact, one of the primary reasons she works for the school district, outside of being in love with teaching. The amount of money taken from her pay to cover the Kaiser monthly premium takes all but $500 a month from her paycheck. (In the U.S., we don't value teachers much either.) Like many Americans, she works for almost no pay, just coverage.

And the Kaiser ER wouldn't provide service for the money we pay.

I reminded the smarmy Assignment Nurse - and I'll try to get her name for the benefit of us all, so she can be watched - that we were asking to receive services for which we pay dearly and routinely. This was not charity or a favor we were asking. We were needing the health care we had purchased with hard work. It didn't mean a thing to her.

"What if she dies in your waiting room?" I asked.

The Assignment Nurse just smiled, as if it was offered as a funny aside.

We refused to return to the waiting room, as instructed. We just stayed at the little window, staring in at the staff. People came and went and we waited, my wife crying, looking terrible and doubled over in pain.

It seemed we finally pressured our way in. They allowed Joanne to lay on a gurney in the hallway and I sat on a chair next to her, waiting for someone to help.

Suddenly the doors of the ER burst open and a woman, who apparently had experience with this ER, pushed a man in a wheel chair to another empty gurney next to us, and helped him up on the contraption. He was moaning loudly and doubled in pain. This woman, who was a civilian, maybe a wife, and certainly not a Kaiser employee, had apparently driven into the emergency, commandeered a wheel chair near the entrance, and simply blasted her way in without waiting for the rigmarole we experienced at the reception window. The nursing staff looked at them warily.

The Assignment Nurse was in the area, joking with co-workers. Eventually someone went to the man and checked his vital signs.

Some other hospital worker told us that we would be taken into a room as soon as it was readied. More than 4 hours into this nightmare, Joanne was wheeled away to someplace I wasn't allowed to follow.

FACE OF DEATH: Tests immediately revealed that Joanne had a blockage in her colon, an emergency situation that required "immediate surgery" - another 14 hours later. She was prepped and went into the surgical suite around 2 p.m. on Sunday, now 24 hours after we had arrived at the ER. She was in surgery for 6 hours as they removed a section of her colon that was badly distended. Just after 8 p.m. that night the surgeon spoke with me as I sat in the surgery waiting room, the only person there.

He told me that at the point her colon was blocked, the tissues were swelled to many times their natural size and he could see that the tissues had already started to rip open. She was experiencing an intestinal infarction (intestinal necrosis), a life threatening situation in which Peritonitis is a common outfall. She was not more than hours or possibly even minutes, from sepsis, a spread of infection to the blood stream.

* * * * *

PREVENTIVE CARE: Kaiser Permanente is big on preventive health care. Live Well and Thrive is the message that is broadcast constantly in television and radio ads in California as they spend huge money on advertising budgets to try to lure potential victims...I mean, patients...away from the rival Blue Cross/Blue Shield and other HMO providers.

Several months ago, our Kaiser general practitioner insisted that Joanne have a colonoscopy, advising that it was something that people over 50 years of age should have done to head off problems in the bowels before they develop. The procedure had not gone well. The doctor who performed the procedure was unable to complete the colonoscopy because he believed Joanne had a "twisted colon". They tried repeatedly, though Joanne experienced great pain and discomfort, to perform this procedure that has been promoted by the likes of CBS anchor woman Katie Couric, who had one done on herself for the benefit of television viewers. (Couric's husband died of colon cancer and she was on a crusade to promote the "life-saving" procedure.)

Most people do fine with a colonoscopy, but not Joanne (or, as it turns out, her brother, who also had the procedure and found it excruciatingly painful). Joanne was in bed sick for days following the colonoscopy, then for additional days as Kaiser doctors tried other less invasive means of examining her colon. They came away with nothing, but Joanne lost a week of work.

The surgeon who removed part of her colon in the emergency operation determined that the colonoscopy had aggravated a condition of diverticulitis.

diverticulitis: A common digestive disease particularly found in the colon (the large intestine). Diverticulitis develops from diverticulosis, which involves the formation of pouches (diverticula) on the outside of the colon. Diverticulitis results if one of these diverticula becomes inflamed or infected. The colon can become infected with craters of food stuck inside, which causes abdominal pain. In complicated diverticulitis, bacteria may subsequently infect the outside of the colon if an inflamed diverticulum bursts open. If the infection spreads to the lining of the abdominal cavity, (peritoneum), this can cause a potentially fatal peritonitis. Sometimes inflamed diverticula can cause narrowing of the bowel, leading to an obstruction. Also, the affected part of the colon could adhere to the bladder or other organ in the pelvic cavity, causing a fistula, or abnormal connection between an organ and adjacent structure or organ.

THRIVE MY ASS: As I write this, Joanne is in a "step-down unit" - halfway between an Intensive Care and a regular hospital unit - which she was moved to after spending a day in a regular hospital room. Supposedly she would get more attentive care in the step-down, where there are more nurses. At least that's what we were told, but I have seen no indication that they do anything more for her there than they did in the previous post-operative unit. The proximity of the nursing station to her room is much nearer than in a normal hospital unit, but that only seems to mean that the racket is louder and the nurses don't have to walk as far.

I have been caring for Joanne through the night. The nursing staff has provided two foot stools that I line up with a chair so I can lay down from time to time. Occasionally someone will come in and take her blood, usually flipping on the light in the room around 4 a.m.. Sometimes a nurse shows up to change an I-V bag or empty a bed pan, but it feels like most of the nursing is being done by me. I reposition her in the bed, help her go to the bathroom using a portable commode, refit the cuffs that keep the blood circulating in her legs, and fetch ice chips, which is all she can have. I empty bed pans myself when the staff isn't around, and there don't seem to be enough of them to pay much attention to the patients filling every room.

I haven't seen the surgeon since just after the surgery, though I leave messages for him to call.

Joanne's recovery is painful and slow. It may be par for such a difficult surgery - or "complicated" as the surgeon called it - but not being a medical practitioner myself, I don't know what to expect. No one tells us anything. As long as I am in the room, the Kaiser nursing staff seems happy to let me do the work. I am afraid to leave because I lack confidence that they would respond to her needs.

She has been largely incoherent since coming out of surgery, hallucinating and talking to dead relatives. One nurse asked me if she was always this way. No, not normally, I assure them.

I wish someone would assure us.

I am exhausted, as is my wife. She has been able to take liquids, including broth. She asked for milk yesterday. What they brought had gone bad and had to be thrown out, and no replacement was provided.

We don't know when this will end, but the expectation is a follow-up surgery in two months.

I have lost a full week of work without pay. We wonder what part of this medical expense will be picked up by our Kaiser coverage, and what humongous bill we will be left to pay out of pocket. We know that most people in the U.S. who go bankrupt do so because of overwhelming medical expenses. Such prospects don't help the healing process.

SICK OF US: Joanne was moved to a room one floor up, where she will receive a lower level of attention from nurses, were such possible. The nurse who processed her in to her new room noticed that her dressing had never been changed. It was filthy because her colostomy bag had not been emptied and had broken open.

I finally got a call from our primary doctor, who had been unaware of any of what was going on. Her response, as she read through her chart as we talked on the phone: "This sounds like a nightmare."

FINAL WORD: In this country, we citizens seem split on whether health care should be guaranteed universally, as it is in every other industrialized nation but ours, or whether it should be left to free market enterprise, as Henry Kaiser envisioned it. It is really only "Republicans" who look at it that way.

I am angry and sad. People argue that "socialized" medicine, like that in Canada and Britain, is a terrible thing because people have to wait for delivery of health care services. I personally know European natives who live and work in the United States but return to their home countries once a year to receive medical treatment, covered under their home countries' universal health care systems. None of them say anything about long waits for treatments and procedures.

Fair warning: the next person who, in my presence, says that they don't want the government running the health care system in the U.S. is going to experience such a beating... It will be interesting to see how well their health care system cares for their suffering.

Our "health care provider", Kaiser Permanente, doesn't seem to give a damn about ours. - RAR

Note on the Images in this article: From top - Kaiser Permanente logo, "Give to Kaiser" website, "Gold Is Money" website image, diverticulitis photo. The Internet is filled with hate for Kaiser Permanente. Some, see the "Gold Is Money" website, find Satanic images in Kaiser logos.

______________________________________________

From March 6, 2009

From the Annals of Home Ownership in a Small Town:

Design-Build with Dufus and Gomer

That photograph above captures part of the rustic appeal of the street on which my family lives in Benicia, California. In the old part of town, six blocks east of First Street, near the historic military warehouse district that is now the arts community, and near the pier where the new Saturns get driven on to outbound ships, our neighborhood lacks all the accoutrement of a modern development. We have sidewalks that lack the will to make the entire length of our block. We have a mixture of housing types, nice but small for the most part, because this is California where square footage remains dear: $210-$240 per in our neighborhood, depending upon the builder and the complexity of the project. We have a palm tree in our front yard with palms growing straight up, like a weed topping a humongous totem, cut weird to prevent the showers of electrical sparks that occur when the fronds are allowed to grow into the passing power lines. We have huge eucalyptus trees that are roosts to red-headed turkey vultures, and just a block to the north we have a trailer park where some of our best friends live. We have a neighbor with a wonderful chocolate lab named Boomer, and now a new puppy who is the mirror-image of Boomer, who plays merrily with anyone who will have him. His master blares blues music, when he's home, so the neighborhood has a "feel". But it's not blue at all. Are you kidding me? It's the best damned street in America, because it's our street!

When I say "our" street, I'm talking about "our" as meaning more than just my immediate family. This is a neighborhood and the street that is "ours" is also our neighbors'. It's not that we know all of our neighbors, though we know the ones near at hand, and they are all friendly folks who don't do a thing to get in anybody's business or personal way. Benicia is a small town that often puts me to mind of the setting of "To Kill A Mockingbird." We are out on the edge, not too far from Boo Radley's Mom's place, but it's all good.

But wait...

For the last many weeks we have had a new presence in the neighborhood. That is his portable potty, his sign (he paints far better than the smudges would indicate, but I wanted to give him the courtesy he would never give to us), and his trucks shown in the picture above. It is only some of the equipment he has on site.

He is a contractor by the name of Dufus Jones, and the proprietor of Dufus Construction (names changed to protect the guilty). He is a well-established Benicia builder who has a daughter who goes to school with mine, and she is by all reports a great kid, the product of strict parenting. My daughter has spent the night at the Dufus' home, and she speaks well of Dufus who helped her get down games so she and her friend could play. "He's really nice," she tells me, but then she says that about everybody.

My knowledge of Dufus and his construction outfit is that he is known for his ability to transform any dwelling into something resembling a Century 21 office. Don't be confused, this is residential construction, so his reputation as a "Design-Build" guy is narrowly defined. I don't happen to like Century 21 offices, for the most part, but I must say that Dufus is doing a nice job on the ramshackle property next door to our house. He replaced all the windows, the roof including rafters rotten with dry rot, the stucco exterior (which he painted the same color as our house), and he gutted and is redoing the entire interior. He built a large covered front porch, which seems almost a fourth the size of the entire house, which is small.

This aspect of having the portable potty parked on the street for the last 10 weeks has been well worth the discomfiting eyesore. Dufus is taking a "tear down" and turning it into a pleasant little property, or so was the thinking of us and our neighbors. Dufus is improving property values for us all.

Then, one day several weeks ago, the worm began to turn...

My wife, who is about as helplessly controlled by her innate curiosity as a domestic cat, but who is as controlling and territorial as a tiger in the wild, decided to ask the guy working next door just what was going on there. Was it being fixed to sell? Was it going to be a rental?

"I hope my boss is going to give it to me," the man told her. To which she replied, "Wow, you must have a nice boss!"

With that introduction, she took the next opportunity to meet the man himself, Dufus Jones.

There is something fishy about a guy who comes into a deeply routed neighborhood and plants his potty and starts tearing things down using little front loaders and power tools, but who never says boo to his new neighbors. That's just not the way its done in polite society. "Professionals" introduce themselves to the adjacent land owners and talk about what they hope to do with the property, and they take the appropriate steps to service the concerns of affected parties. They put up "site poles" to clearly indicate the height of what they intend to build, in case it interferes with any of the neighbors' view lines. None of this was happening next door. Under certain circumstances, the City Planning office should insist on such mechanics, but they may not be required in this case. We just don't know and no one is telling the neighbors anything.

My wife, who is pretty good at coaxing conversation, introduced herself to Dufus Jones and started making small talk, leading to questions about what he is building. "We are doing a facelift to the house," he said, and talked a bit about that. When she offered that she was always interested in knowing what was going on in the neighborhood, Dufus for some reason volunteered that he had experienced rough going with some previous neighbors. "I had one lady tell me that I was just a mean-spirited person," he told the wife, which struck her as an odd boast, almost threatening. Then Dufus mentioned the garage he was building out back.

Interesting that a guy would build a garage on a house that already has one. "How big?" the wife asked. "It will be 30' by 30' and 15' feet tall." Otherwise, a building at least as big as the house he is renovating. "And what are you going to put in there?" she asked. "A boat and a couple motorcycles," Dufus said.

Mrs. RAR, it should be said, is not stupid. Besides, it hardly took advanced intelligence to deduce that one could put a boat and two motorcycles in the existing garage.

Dufus picked up on her skepticism and, by her account, flared at her. "I'll put whatever the fuck I want to put in there!" he reportedly snapped. She read this as innate disdain for "questioning women".

Oh-oh. Boy, did he mess with the wrong person. I know, I've been messing with this "wrong person" for years.

She immediately called the Benicia City Planning Office to inquire about Dufus Jones and what he was building. In fact, he had requested and received permits to renovate the house and to build a garage on the property. He was granted the permits in December and had started demolition within days of receipt. "Oh, Dufus will probably move in there for a couple of years," said the planning office guy. "He does that." It seemed like our planning official, whom we will call Gomer, knew Dufus. The Planning official's response, when my wife voiced concern that Dufus was misrepresenting his intentions for the property was, "Well, one day if you want a permit to build I'll give you one."

It didn't take long to get a picture of what Dufus was up to. He had a dump truck, filled with the rubble from the demolition of the house, that had been parked out on the street in front of the construction site for weeks. It scared our kids to get into our car, parked behind it along the curb, because there were thin sheets of metal that flapped in the wind and threatened to fly off the pile like whirling heli-blades. Dufus obviously had no place to park this truck, any more than he had a place to park the mini-front loader sitting in the front yard, or the large box truck in the driveway, or any other of his vehicles. Dufus is clearly setting up to run Dufus Construction out of the 900 square foot building, complete with running water, that he is building off our alley. He even had the audacity to tell my wife he wanted to widen the alley - as if this city property were his - so he could "get my trucks in there."

A quick check of the City of Benicia zoning map showed that Dufus is planning to do this on property zoned for residential use, not commercial. One might think the duped City Planners would want to know about this!

On a Friday, I fired off emails to the City offices and got a nice lady from Community Development that confirmed that Dufus could not legally pull this stunt, however willing the permitting office to allow Dufus' deceptions. She instructed that Dufus was allowed to park one vehicle in that 900 square foot garage, and that if he did more, and certainly if he used the building to run his business, that he would be out of compliance with city ordinances. As for the dump truck parked on the street, she set up a call for the truck to begin being ticketed on a daily basis starting on Monday. On Saturday, the truck disappeared. Was this just coincidence? Had Dufus just finally gotten around to getting rid of the rubble? Or had he been tipped off by someone in the city that tickets and fines were being prepared? I found the Dufus Construction truck by accident on that following Monday, parked in a vacant lot next to my son's karate dojo. The truck was still filled with the "dangerous" rubble. That rubble has finally been disposed of, but the dump truck is still sitting on that vacant lot, no doubt until the day it can be moved in doors over by our house. (I drove by the lot this week and saw a disgruntled looking fellow staring at Dufus' dump truck while talking in an agitated way on a cell phone, no doubt lodging a complaint to the City. The words Dufus Construction, along with a phone number, are prominently displayed on the doors of the heap. )

Benicia is a small town of only 28,000, and the old town community we live in comprises only a fourth of that population. It is the more "intimate" Benicia, different by nature from the bedroom community of commuters who live on the north side of I-780. People in "old Benicia" talk, and a torrent of stories have poured forth about Dufus and his operation. "He's part of the good old boys network with the City Planning office," one business associate told my wife. "My husband and I had a terrible time with him at another place we lived. We documented the whole thing. We had photographs, even video, of Dufus and the good old boys from the City drinking beers after work on the lawn next to our house. It didn't do us any good at all. He got away with whatever he wanted."

* * *

In a very real way, this story is representative of so many of the basic ills of our community life. It seems that at the root of every turmoil we experience is some Dufus who is determined to act in a self-interested way, reinforced by a corrupt system of public administration. That's the micro view of what has happened to the U.S. financial system, which was fraught with self-indulgent bullies screened by regulators who for some reason looked the other way. Dufus Construction and the City of Benicia Planning Department bring it down to a neighborhood level, where the biggest assets people hold are their homes. It is a quality of life issue on that plane. You would like to think that people would behave respectfully "in your home", but some don't. Some are Dufus's.

That house next door has vexed me since I spoke with our former neighbor last year and learned that he was having to sell his home, which he couldn't afford to maintain, to cover medical expenses left by his recently deceased mother. He and his sister - senior adult children - had lived there with her until she died, inheriting $60,000 in medical bills that insurance wouldn't pay.

But there it is. We can't commit to be careful with others. We allow people and property to be ruined, or debased, because there are Dufus's who will sweep in like those vultures who haunt the tall eucalyptus across the way, to take advantage. And our systems, riddled with the kind of good old boys that gave us "Brownie" and the systemic breakdowns along the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, don't really do to protect our communities what we would like to trust that they would. That's not a new development in this country, just one that eventually works against us all.- RAR

"It's the poor that get the blame..."

The Renewed Spirit of "Meanness"

It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor that get the blame,
It's the rich that get the pleasure,
Ain't it all a bloody shame.

The words of that old pub favorite kept coming back to me all week.

There is a rising sense of ill-feeling in the U.S. coming from those of us - myself not included - who are miffed at having to ante up taxpayer funds to bail-out new homeowners who took advantage of the liberal mortgage lending policies of this decade to buy houses that they would never be eligible to gain financing for in any other time or environment.

The pitch went like this: we will loan you money based on your stated income, no tax returns or financial statement required as long as you have a job and are reasonably honest in your claims of income. We will set you up with an interest-only, Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM). You will have five years to refinance into a regular fixed-rate mortgage, and you can begin that process at any time. This first ARM you are getting gets you into the game. You won't be paying on the principle of your loan under this interest-only arrangement, but even with a fixed-rate mortgage you wouldn't be paying on anything but the interest in the first five years anyway. Lenders always take their cut off the top.

To a population that has seen wages stagnate for better than three decades now, and who had begun to doubt that their "American Dream" - symbolized by home ownership - would ever come true, the offer was way too good to pass up. Especially in California, where the vast majority of working people make nowhere near enough money to buy a home at the inflated values the state saw for the past 25 years, the prospect of getting a piece of the pie was too good to pass up. Especially in California, where the class system is partitioned around who owns and who just rents. And especially in California, where everyone knew people for whom the purchase of real estate had been a huge financial boon. It just didn't make any sense to rent if there was any way you could "get in the game".

The aggressive lenders at Bank of America and Washington Mutual and other "local" institutions got into bidding wars with online brokers like Countryside to write ARMs that they then packaged and sold off to other financial institutions as mortgage-backed securities.

It all rolled along pretty well, like a Ponzi Scheme, until the ARMs started coming due and people found they couldn't refinance, as promised. And they couldn't afford the ballooning payments, so home foreclosures skyrocketed, dragging property values down all across the board, devaluing portfolios and rendering mortgage-backed securities as debits, weighing down bank balance sheets. That caused contraction in the lending markets, including the overnight swaps that keep the whole rickety banking system upright, and the dominoes began to fall.

Probably no statistic points out the frailty of the now defunct housing boom more tellingly than the fact that something like 85 percent of the people who are forfeiting on their mortgage loans never contact their lender to tell them they are having a problem and to ask for help. Why? Because they were scared and ashamed and probably completely uneducated to the process of dealing with such financial arrangements. They were first-time home buyers, inexperienced at dealing with banks. Some were speculators who were rolling the dice on flipping a property before it ate them alive, and those people who never intended to live in the homes they bought had little stomach for arguing their piracies to lenders. They just walked on the whole mess and took the loss.

A certain segment of our population - usually the people who are generally opposed to government entitlement programs - are sounding off about how the people who bought homes they couldn't afford are largely responsible for the mortgage crisis. The meanness of people who have had the good fortune to turn their hard work into honest money with which they made sound investments is understandable, but dispiriting.

We have reasonable people talking about the benefits of stable communities, arguing that helping those marginal buyers maintain their homes is a far better investment for everyone in the long run than is having houses lost to foreclosure and becoming vacant magnets for societies ills, as they tend to do, dragging down property values for everyone in the area.

Mean is mean though, and it never makes sense. - RAR

_________________________________________________

Essay Archives

Earlier RAR essays have been archived on a separate page. See the Table of Contents below. Click here to go to the Essay Archives

Previous Entries

Return of Cool Black
Sitting Out Obama
The True Life Case of the Haunted Derivative...
The "Say No to Paulson" / Community First Solution
The "Bad Bank"
2008 Election Rebus: Defining Nothingness
Sarah Barracuda
An Inconvenient Infection
The Bridge to Nowhere
Vomiting in Ketchikan
How Smart is Bill Maher?
The Protectionists' Dilemma
Riding the "S" Curve in the U.S.A.
The Corporate Tax Crunch: Where Is the Leadership of Either Candidate?
The Energy Crunch: Where Is the Leadership of Either Candidate?
Pulling Obama's Tale - Has the New York Times Profiled the Devil?
Barack Obama - President of the Subconscious World
John McCain's Wild Ride
Death of Turtle Boy
Making Fangs Work
CHRONICLES OF CHAOS: Is America's moment of elevation turning to glass?
What's Wrong With Hillary?
Sick of Obama Yet?
2008 Election Fields - RAR Picks
American Health Care and the 2008 Elections
General Betray Us, The Invasion of Iraq and Please MoveOn.Org
Oh Cisco! You Are A Villain?
The Nature of People
Where I Stand on the Gordian Knot of America
Guitars on Stands
The Ten Commandments - Gotcha!
Serious Doubts In the Ranks of the Color Guard
Give Willie His Pot Back!
The Secret Life of Hyperlinks
How Effective is Democracy in the U.S.?
What's So Great About History?
Why Can’t Democrats Exploit the Minimum Wage Issue?
Why We Never Talk About Public Policy
Democracy in Decline – The Death of Net Neutrality
The Soul of the Simpler Machine

GO TO: ARTIST NEWS •

YOU ARE ON AN ESSAYS PAGE AT RARWRITER.COM

ARTIST NEWS THIS EDITION ABOUT MUSIC MUSIC REVIEWS BOOKS CINEMA FASHION FINE ARTS FEATURES SERIES MEDIA ESSAY RESOURCES WRITTEN ARTS POETRY CONTACT ARCHIVES MUSIC LINKS