Peter Spencer: Pete's Blog

The "Songwriters' Conversation" show at the Jewel Box Theatre in Poulsbo got a front page writeup in the local where-to-go-what-to-do. I always feel I go on too long in interviews, but this writer seemed able to slice and dice my comments without losing too much of their meaning. Co-star Eric Miller said nice things about me and everything was fine, although I still don't like punning headlines. "Fingerpickin' good" indeed!

I suppose I'd have liked that one better if I was still allowed to eat fried chicken. Ever notice in those accounts of condemned criminals' last meals they never ask for a salad?

The show itself was fine, I thought. Eric's tunes are very charming and I tended toward my darker stuff as a contrast to his sweetness, so there was a balance there. And yet we have enough in common, especially in our playing, that when I finally ran out of things to say we were able to collaborate on a couple of numbers and that sounded pretty good.

We went completely PA-free and the clarity and intimacy of the sound, the lack of barrier between us and the audience, was truly liberating. I was able to play extremely quietly behind Eric, so as not to disturb him, and yet be heard perfectly well. In fact overall the music had a dynamic range that would have been impossible if we'd been miked.

I had a senior moment at the end when Eric suggested we finish with "'Coffee' and 'Cookies'." I had no idea what he was talking about but, of course, the duties of a host require at least the illusion of competency and understanding so I sat there with an imbecilic smile on my face until I realized he was referring to his song "Good Strong Coffee." Even then I didn't make the connection with "Cookies" until La Bopperue (accent grave over the e) called out "Delicious Cookies" from out of the darkness. Hooboy!

It's only my most requested tune, after all.

Jewel Box Artistic Director Todd Erler had some good notes afterwards and the next Songwriters' Conversation, with local hero Matt Price, should be even stronger. See you there!

Quite by accident, I came across a copy of Sing Out! magazine (summer, '09) at work today. And it had a story in it that I think is hilarious. It seems that before he became Bob Dylan young Bobby Zimmerman spent the summer he was 16 at a Zionist summer camp in Wisconsin. At least I assume it was a Zionist summer camp, since it was called Camp Herzl.

Anyway, the lady who kept the camp's archives needed money recently, so she offered through an auction house that specializes in rock memorabilia a page in Dylan's handwriting that young Bob had submitted to the camp's poetry contest. It was only after the piece was shown to prospective buyers this year that someone noticed that the words were, in fact, a more-or-less-exact crib from a song by Hank Snow. Until then nobody had known.

The news did not deter the lady. She still refers to the page in question (still awaiting sale, according to last summer's Sing Out!) as a "handwritten Bob Dylan lyric."

When the news came earlier this fall that there was to be a Bob Dylan Christmas album (called "Christmas in the Heart") it seemed like some sort of horrible joke. When in the past Dylan has surprised the world with his choice of genres - veering into rock music, then country, then gospel - I snickered at the pious horror coming from both Dylan purists and defenders of the forms themselves. To me the moves seemed perfectly precedented and justifiable at the time. And nobody seems to find them in the least odd nowadays.

But a Christmas album, even one whose proceeds are earmarked for charity, just seemed like jumping the shark, an attempt to use the odd juxtaposition of Dylan's feral croak and the sweetness of the Season to create an uneasy novelty and thus stick in the overburdened memories of consumers everywhere. Considering that for my money Dylan hasn't done much worth hearing in 25 years the whole thing sounded like a shuck and I wanted nothing to do with it.

It didn't change my mind when Eric Miller told me he had heard the album and thought it the worst thing he had ever heard. I should have listened to what he said next, however: "But I really liked it anyway."

Tonight I saw a video for one of the tracks, called "Must be Santa," and I have to say that it's probably the most excited I've been about new Dylan music since the "Infidels" album in 1984.

The song is hardly the hushed piece of ersatz reverence so many pop stars produce under record company urging at this time of year. A minor-key tune over a rollicking polka beat, using the same kind of cumulative repetitions found in "Green Grow the Rushes, O!" or "A Partridge in a Pear Tree," it could almost be called Klezmer-rock. And that's its great charm and value - it is a secular song for an increasingly secular holiday, and its overt Jewishness (Dylan is both a devout Christian and a devoted student of his Jewish heritage) is as revolutionary in its way as the rock, country, and gospel trails he blazed in the past. This solves the "Hanukkah problem." It is Christmas music for Jews, Christians, and the great mass who consider themselves neither.

And the video itself is hilarious. In the middle of a raucous party, filled with all sorts, races, and ages of people drinking and dancing with each other, Dylan is nearly unrecognizable in a Santa hat and long blond wig - the same wig he wore for his recent return to the Newport Folk Festival? He dances (!) with the women and drinks with the men until suddenly two younger men begin chasing a third up and down the stairs. The reason for this is never explained and finally their quarry escapes by crashing through a plate glass window, leaving Dylan and Santa to exchange an eloquent shrug. None of Dylan's previous videos have been worth a second look but I'm heading back to YouTube right now to see it again. Merry Christmas and L'chaim!

I'm going to hate myself in the morning, but I have a couple of thoughts about the recent Tiger Woods imbroglio.

First off, isn't it against the law to physically attack one's spouse? We can all be pretty sure that if it was HE going after SHE with the 9-iron that HE would be in jail right now. But instead of Mrs. Woods answering questions at the station house there she is on the cover of People magazine, the chic, heartbroken victim of her man's wicked, wicked ways.

To which I have two words in reply: "Oh" and "Please." Did this fetching martyr have no idea the number of women throwing themselves at the greatest golfer in the world before they were married and after? None? It came as a horrible shock? Note the two words referenced above. It's a safe bet that in their courtship she went for him just as brazenly as all the others. It's just that she won - her looks put her higher on the food chain, high enough that she got the paper, the one that says if you ever, EVER respond in the slightest to ANY of the hundreds of women who are available to you on any particular day, no matter if I've been an utter bitch to you for months, no matter if you are thousands of miles away, no matter if our physical life together is fraught, frigid, or nonexistent, then you will lose everything. Everything.

And they say marriage is an institution whereby men oppress women.

Small, dark, and well-dressed, she spoke to me as I walked past her in the corridors of the Kitsap Mall. I could not understand what she said. Her thick accent sounded Israeli to my ears. I kept walking. She planted herself in my way and spoke again.

"I'm sorry," I replied, "I can't understand you," then made to move around her. She shifted as quickly as any NBA guard and put out her hand for me to shake. The other hand held an open jar.

"Do you know Dead Sea?" she asked. What answer could I make? To say "No" would be absurd. To turn and walk quickly in the other direction would be rude. And she would not let me pass. Her hand was still out, moving up and down in an unmistakeable shaking motion. "Do you know Dead Sea?" she asked again, admitting no escape. God help me, I took her hand.

Instead of introducing herself or saying "How do you do?" at this point, she instead grasped my hand in a grip of iron and pulled me toward a small kiosk, speaking again a mostly incomprehensible spiel of which I caught, from time to time, phrases like, "Dead Sea salt" and "Give me five minutes."

Abandoning myself to fate, I allowed her to rub a large-grained paste into my right hand while she repeated, perhaps four times in all, "Don't use on face, okay?"

Finished, she rinsed off my hand in a small basin and said, with great pride, "How do you feel?"

I wanted to say, "greasy," which was, in fact, the way my hand felt. But for the first time in several minutes she had relinquished physical possession of me, and I thought I should take advantage of the opportunity for escape. I said, in as formally final a way as I could, "Thank you very much." She gave me a look, more easily understood than any of the words she had spoken so far, which told me that if she had had a knife at that moment I would be a dead man.

Gary Steiner, a professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University, was given most of the New York Times' Op-Ed page over the weekend to call us all murderers for eating turkey on Thanksgiving. It was the usual litany of dietary self-righteousness we have become used to, but toward the end of the piece professor Steiner exposed the true heart of his argument more recklessly than most of his cohorts.

"These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are." Yes, professor, sometimes it's a curse being able to see things so much more clearly than the rest of us slobs. If only we all had your "critical distance"!

"People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value."

My cat is an "organic toy," a creature whose purpose is to provide me relaxation and diversion, not because she is not as smart as I am (there is some debate on this) but because, to put it plainly, I feed her. In the bargain we have struck, she and I, her "purpose" is to relax and divert me, in exchange for a lifetime of ease and comfort.

"We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires." This is another way of saying that since the dawn of time humans have dominated the Earth and its creatures. There is nothing wrong with this. Cows dominate the grass they eat. Quite a few animal species would dominate us if they could. Some can and do.

Like everyone who makes the moral argument against eating meat, wearing leather, using products tested on animals, etc., professor Steiner seems more concerned with some species than others. He does not, for instance, decry man's persecution of the AIDS virus and other micro-organisms who, if they were granted full rights to their beinghood, full scope to achieve their purpose, would kill us all. Professor Steiner claims to be concerned with all living beings on this planet, but really his concern is with those that give him the opportunity to tell the rest of us how ethically superior he is. The only species he really wants to save are the cute ones.

You will notice that professor Steiner is given a large, prominent space in which to vent his self-love. Rebuttals will be found, if at all, as one-paragraph edits in the paper's "Letters" column.

Rod MacDonald (a good friend who was an eminence on the Greenwich Village scene when I was a rookie) once described me as "an overwhelming performer." I took it, as I take most things in life, as praise. But, while it's not an unkind thing to say by any means, typical of sly Rod, it's very much a nuanced remark, and certainly more useful and instructive for it.

It's true. My approach as a performer has always been, if not to "overwhelm" exactly, at the very least to impress. I've talked a lot over the years, in this space and others, about great artists "stretching our sense of what's possible" and that's all well and good. I've always wanted people to respond to my playing, singing, and writing with a certain amount of awe, not just for the sake of my ego but because at its very best it awes me, too. I can't really claim it as my own. I find myself saying, and hoping audiences say, too, "I didn't think you could do that."

But there's something else people want in a performance, especially one that features the written word. They want a sense that you're saying what they're thinking, that this experience ratifies their own sensibilities. Woody Guthrie (not my favorite songwriter or even one of my Top Twenty - but hey) called himself "the guy that tells you what you already know" and, despite the potential for abuse that statement implies, I still think that in my quest to be the best player, singer, and writer I could imagine I left that element out.

I can impress people, but can I move them? It's not that it never happens, but among the compliments I get from listeners fewer than a third say they were touched or inspired. Perhaps twice that say they were knocked out at how "good" it was. I'd like to reverse that ratio. My friend Eric Miller - Seattle's best young songwriter, it says here - told me about listening to Bob Dylan's recent Christmas album, a set of seasonal standards complete with carollers and jingle bells. "It was the worst thing I ever heard," he told me. "But I liked it." Dylan's semi-competence has always been part of his charm, and while I may not ever sing with that tuneless croak or write that many self-consciously primitive non sequitors, I wouldn't mind writing something, someday, that transcends my ability. That would be sweet.

One of my favorite songwriters wrote me today in defense of Sarah Palin, citing the need for "divided government" as a deterrent to liberal group-think, an example of which he cited as its malign influence on music and which writers should be canonized among folkies. Here is my reply.

Dear Steve,
Thanks for writing. I expect that I am more conservative than you on some issues, and I'm sure my career has suffered for it. We can talk that out when when we get together next. My problem with Sarah Palin is that she seems stupid; and instead of trying to educate herself for the national stage she has suddenly found herself on she appears to be selling herself as someone who is "just like us," who "shares our values," and "understands the problems of ordinary people." I don't want a President who is just like me. I want a President who is smarter than me, because this country is in deep trouble. We're getting our lunch eaten by countries whose governments are a lot less divided than ours is even now. I voted for Obama not because I'm a Democrat (I'm a Republican) but because he seemed the more intelligent and thoughtful of the two candidates. Eight years of incompetence was enough for me. And I fear that the Cheney/Palin wing of the GOP will do to conservatism what the hippies did to the New Left, which is to say render it irrelevant, at best a joke, more likely a dangerous mob of undefined and unmanageable resentments. If Sarah Palin were talking about energy independence, consumer debt, and the crisis in our educational/cultural establishment I would be all ears. If she sticks with abortion, death panels, and winning in Afghanistan then the Ron Paul sign stays up in my front yard. I hope this finds you well. warm regards, pete

Last night, when I told Ian Turner how much I appreciated his drumming after our short set at the BritFest songwriters' tribute at Island Music Center, he said, "Oh, it's easy when you've got a good bass-player." Taking nothing away from Ian's good wrists and thorough knowledge of his instrument, I can see the point.

Unlike the soloists on a group's front line, the bass and drums need to work as a unit. That's why it's called a "rhythm section." And one of the innovations British rock bands brought over with them is the primacy of the bass/drums unit. Think Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones (would the Stones be the World's Greatest Rock Band without them? I doubt it) or John McVie and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, whose arrangement of Duster Bennett's "Jumpin' at Shadows" was our set-closer last night.

It remains to be seen whether Mike Wittekind and Ian Turner turn into another of those legendary units (after last night's success, though, I expect they'll want to try) but already you could see Mike giving Ian what he needed, which is to say time that was both rock-solid and breathing, and a subtle complexity of melody and phrasing that gave the drums plenty to pulse against.

Before my previous bassist Liam Graham left for Nashville he found Mike for me. I don't know if he actually auditioned him but the gesture was still well above and beyond: one excellent bassist making sure his substitute was up to the high standard that had been set. I think about it every time I play with Mike, just as I think about Mike every time I play with Liam in Nashville, or every time I see those videos we made in Paducah, Kentucky a year ago.

Just go to the "Videos" page.

The BritFest set was great fun. I don't play the electric as often as I did a year or two ago. For one thing, long sets playing rock music can be exhausting to a 58-year-old such as myself, however well-preserved. But last night's three songs, while new, offered a good range of effects. We opened with "Tired of Waiting," a song by Ray Davies that was a moderate hit in 1965 for his group the Kinks. It's a short, punchy little number and, without a guitar solo, makes a good mid-tempo opener for a trio.

Then we played Richard Thompson's "For Shame of Doing Wrong" and I got to throw in lots of Thompson quotes in the two guitar solos. Naturally, only the other musicians got them - to everyone else I probably sounded more like Clarence White, a great hero of mine. Someone compared my singing in this key to Barry White, a first but I'll take it. Then we finished with "Jumping at Shadows," a tribute to the great guitarist Peter Green, of whom BB King once said, speaking of that whole generation of British blues guitarists, "He's the only one who gave me chills." It's a very understated chart with lots of room for dynamics and Mike and Ian followed me beautifully. A good rhythm section is hard to find. Let's see what happens with this one.

This Dumb Little Town
Cupertino
Hard Times
Casanova's Waltz
Belle Virginie
Honeymoon In Mississippi
Down the River
Delicious Cookies
Dark by the Rain
Sweet Dreams

From the Island
With Bierce in Mexico
It's Supposed to Snow at Christmas
Allegheny River
The Little Death Rag
Mirror
Turn to Me

Bassist Mike Wittekind played especially well, I thought. My favorite numbers were With Bierce in Mexico and Dark by the Rain, where we got to stretch out a bit instrumentally. Also It's Supposed to Snow at Christmas, the evening's only blues.

I hope we brought in enough people to please the management. The place was pretty much full. I worried that we were too loud, although we had no complaints. I just always think we're too loud. I'd like to play there with no PA at all, actually. My guitar would reach - I'm sure of it. We sold some CDs, including the Christmas one I'm glad to say. 'Tis the season, at least in retail terms.

The new songs held up well, I thought, especially Belle Virginie and Allegheny River. The whole purpose of the non-blues setlist was to give space to the new things I've written this year. I missed having blues to sing, though. It relaxes me as a singer. This was the first time in 25 years or more I did not do Restless Youth in Chinatown in a full show. Other longtime A-listers did well, including Mirror, Casanova's Waltz, and Down the River.

My one complaint was the preponderance of jokey songs, especially in the first set. I can't help it - I write 'em, after all - but last night showed how the oddball material doesn't set off the serious songs that well. I could have trusted a little more that my tunes are distinct from each other and don't need comic relief.

There were several students in the house last night. I hope I gave them enough guitar-playing. Each set had at least one extended instrumental passage but without blues it doesn't really tell the tale guitar-wise. I hope that holds them for a while.

Yesterday I closed out a singers' jam at Dusty Strings with "Amazing Grace," mostly because nobody knows how to sing "Down in the Valley to Pray" anymore since "O! Brother, Where Art Thou" came out. Afterwards, someone took issue with the use of the word "wretch" in the lyrics. She said I could have sung "...saved a 'soul' like me" instead.

"I don't like all that sin talk," she said (I'm paraphrasing). "I believe I'm a wonderful, perfect being filled with God's energy. I'm not a wretch."

Typically, I couldn't think what to say. I mumbled something about the hymn's author John Newton, a slave trader who renounced his former calling and spent the rest of his life in atonement. These piecemeal remarks achieved nothing in the face of the cast-iron self-regard this new (?) and growing (at least on the West Coast) theology tends to breed in its adherents.

So now, 24 hours too late, I've finally come up with what I'd like to have said. It begins with this. When I view God's creation and all His works, it does not make me want to worship myself. Yes, I am one of God's creatures but this does not automatically make me perfect. We work toward perfection. It isn't our birthright anymore than a field mouse deserves to be invisible to an owl.

If God wanted to create a perfect world I have no doubt he could have done so. But he didn't, and there has to be a reason for that even if we cannot apprehend it. Otherwise why cling to the redemption offered by Jesus Christ? He's a saviour, not a motivational speaker. He is here to uplift the meek and lowly, and if, as I believe, the last shall be first when He comes into His kingdom then I want to be among the meek and lowly.

Sure, the everybody's-already-perfect crowd have a point about finding the Grace within, but there's a note of moral superiority there that makes me queasy. Because on the other side of EAP theology is the disturbing notion that, since there is no evil in the world, bad things happen only to those people who have not yet attained the enlightenment being proclaimed. When Stalin killed 10 million people in the forced collectivization of the Ukraine was it THEIR fault? When my friend Warner Bacon died of brain cancer in his early 50s was it HIS fault?

Look. Honey. The world is a place of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary cruelty. We humans, on the evidence, are the only species that conceives of Creation and a Creator. That's what it means to be "made in His image." We have that beauty and that cruelty within us. My struggle to promote the one and defeat the other begins inside me, when I get down on my knees and pray for forgiveness. This is not guilt-mongering or morbidity. It's an active engagement with those forces in the world I would love to ignore as blithely as you do.

They seem to have come out of nowhere, shouting about socialism and repeating the most absurd lies as Gospel truth. They are being egged on by a cynical communications empire and headline-hungry politicians, but the real question is: Who are they? How can anyone be that stupid, that gullible, so blindly, unthinkingly hostile that they are willing - happy! - to vote against their own best interest and that of the country they love. What rock did they climb out from under? On what planet, to paraphrase Congressman Frank, do they spend most of their time?

However little they seem to have in common with our idea of thinking adults, they've always been here. But up until this generation there have always been more of Us than of Them. Now I'm not so sure. Stupid people seem to have reached a kind of Critical Mass. And they've done it the old-fashioned way.

Fucking.

Sarah Palin has what? five children? And her 17-year-old daughter has begun work on the next generation already. Stupid people are breeding because their ideology gives them no choice. And what, in the meantime, of smart people?

My mother, who took a backseat to nobody in brains or ambition, had four children between 1951 and 1959. This was considered perfectly ordinary among women of her class at that time, but in my generation and subsequent generations any graduate of Smith College with that many children is considered not so much an exception as an apostate. Intelligent, ambitious women are supposed to have better things to do than bear children. They have careers to pursue, freedom to exult in, selves to burnish.

Today's man deserves just as much blame as today's woman. The sacrifice of college-educated wives having four children in 8 years was matched, in the mythology of mid-century marriage, by husbands going to work, giving up their dreams of indolence or creativity, and dedicating their lives to the support of their families. How many male writers made fortunes limning the despair of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit? Certainly my college friends were having none of it. We had guitars to strum, drugs to take, highways to drive, girls to seduce. At a reunion of my college class any man with four children would be looked on as a freak, a polygamist, a glutton for punishment.

We see the result in the news every day: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people whose eyes are a little too close together, carrying misspelled protest signs, chanting gibberish. And these slopes are going to rob us of our healthcare. This is what happens when intelligent, ambitious people won't reproduce.

When I was a child in the late 1950s there were, I think, five grade schools in my school district and field trips often included all five, students riding in their own buses from their own schools. Only one of the five schools had any black students, as I recall. So on these trips, especially in the times when we all milled about waiting for our buses, they tended to stand out.

Except "stand out" isn't really the term. I remember, as probably everyone does, that these trips gave the tough kids an opportunity to act out, especially sitting on the bus where they could call out insults without being seen. Girls were insulted, and weaker boys, but when the black kids from Tracy School came into view something changed.

"Hey! Black babies! Hey! Chocolate!"I remember being shouted out the windows of the bus. (This was before "black" was the correct term.) It was not the usual catcalling - there was an electric edge to it, a pathology that I recognized but did not understand. What made these particular kids so much worse than the stuck-up girls and sissified boys that were these bullies' normal target? They didn't dress or act any differently than the rest of us, it seemed to me then. Why did these boys react like wild animals at bay?

As the years went by the Civil Rights movement came and prospered. I got used to being alternately amused and put off by the excesses of our racial politics, the parade of self-serving demagogues claiming the mantle of Martin Luther King, the tortuous logic used to justify manifestly silly positions, the constant invocation of racism to nullify any criticism, however restrained and respectful. It got to the point, for me, that racism had been claimed so often and so speciously that the word didn't have any real meaning left.

But in recent months the mindless hysteria among critics of President Obama has given the word its definition back. The pious horror at the thought of the President of the United States addressing schoolchildren on closed-circuit television isn't about any policy disagreement. It's the same pathology that made my grade-school bullies react as if they had been touched by a cattle prod, a rabid, fearful, snarling, attack on The Other. It's a pathology I had come to think didn't exist. But it's there. It needs to be faced. It needs to be named.

On Saturday Congressman Jay Inslee held a Town Hall meeting at North Kitsap High School to discuss health care reform. Emily Groff, one of my favorite singers, shamed me into going by saying it was my patriotic duty and, considering what I've seen of the healthcare debate so far (and what I know about North Kitsap County) I expect she was right.

Several hundred people filled the High School gym, but organizers had been pretty careful with their planning. You had to give your ZIP code to get in, which may not have kept out every outside agitator but at least forced people to think about this as a local event for citizens of Kitsap County. Anyone who wanted to ask a question had to write their name on a card and put it in a box marked, "Pro," "Con," or "Undecided." Cards were chosen at random from each box in sequence, so no one view could predominate.

People carried signs, roughly half in favor, half opposed, although more of those opposed looked commercially printed. There were a few shouts and taunts early on, but these were met by shouts and taunts of our own and died down pretty quickly. The questions themselves (regardless of perspective) were voiced with thoughtfulness and civility.

Inslee was a composed and sympathetic figure throughout the two-hour meeting and I'll bet he prepared himself pretty thoroughly beforehand. At the start he brought out the High School's cheerleading squad to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance and then asked for a moment of silence for a Kitsap boy killed in Afghanistan last week. In fact, he talked a lot about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both to celebrate the troops and remind us where the current budget deficit came from.

The crowd seemed evenly split between left and right, with some interesting differences of style between the two camps. In their questions the righties tended to concentrate on the constitutionality of government-run health care and the fact that the government had never made a profit in anything it had tried in the past. (Inslee parried this fairly easily by pointing out that leaving heathcare to profit-making organizations had gotten us in this fix in the first place - that "rationing healthcare" and "faceless bureaucrats making decisions about grandma" were toxic features of the current system.) Applause from the right tended to be sharp, loud, full of cheers and whistles, but short. Those on the left tended to talk about personal experience with the health bureaucracy and won applause that was quieter but more frequent and longer-lasting.

Toward the end a few of the more professional-looking hecklers seemed to realize that their opportunity was slipping away and increased their catcalls. Then a woman stood up (since the hecklers couldn't tell who was for-'em and who was agin-'em until the question was out, they had no choice but to listen) and said she had been a VA nurse for 22 years and the care in THOSE government hospitals was excellent. Then she said that she appreciated the opposite viewpoint but wished people would stop "playing politics" with it, which got sustained, building applause, people standing one by one until roughly half the room was on its feet. If the folks who had come to disrupt the meeting had had the ability to feel shame, they would have felt it then.

I still haven't gotten used to the normalcy pursued by so many gay people these days. I came of age at a time when to be gay, especially for a man, was to be extravagantly flamboyant, almost obnoxiously obvious, and often as promiscuous as it is physically possible for mammals to be.

Part of this was the tenor of the times, of course: the rise of identity politics and the violent, militant, anti-intellectual edge brought to political discourse by the Black Power Movement among others. And part of it was a convulsive casting-off of centuries-old taboos. It was a heady time, a time without perspective. And most of those guys are dead now.

Dead too young. Badly dead.

So, in the words of one magazine cover I saw a few years ago, "When did Gay people get so straight?" It could almost be argued that, in their quest for "marriage equality" and a more general embrace of "family values," there's a certain me-tooism at work. Still, somebody has to do it, I suppose, what with all the conservative Republicans who seem to be cheating on their wives right now.

Speaking of wives, I went to the wedding of two men a couple of years ago, in Victoria, British Columbia, and except for both parties wearing trousers it was the most traditional wedding I'd ever seen. They even read the long-abandoned vow from the Biblical story of Judith: "Whither thou goest I will go and whither thou lodgest I will lodge and thy people shall be my people." When was the last time you heard a college-educated woman get up in front of all her friends from work and say that?

Some of you might remember a column I wrote here about "No Country for Old Men," the Coen Brothers flick that won the Best Picture Oscar last year or the year before. Anyway, I didn't like it. I may have called it "the worst film I have ever seen" although there are other recipients of that honor, including "Dazed and Confused," "Getting Straight," and that Woody Allen flick where everybody floats around on invisible wires next to the Seine.

Anyway, I saw the latest Coen Brothers outing "Burn After Reading" last night and, while it's no "Seven Samurai," it was not insulting, pretentious or stupid - really quite entertaining, in fact. And it made me think of others of their films, especially "The Big Lebowski" which has become something of a cult favorite.

Both "Burn After Reading" and "The Big Lebowski" show the Coens as masters of the MacGuffin, a term used in mystery fiction for the ostensible reason the protagonists get involved in the caper at hand, but which over time becomes increasingly irrelevant as the larger picture comes gradually into focus. For instance, in "Chinatown" a private investigator named Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) uncovers a huge fraud while searching for the husband of a woman named Evelyn Mulwray. The search for Mr. Mulwray is the MacGuffin.

In "Burn After Reading" and "The Big Lebowski" the Coen Brothers don't let the MacGuffin slowly disperse into irrelevance. They doggedly keep at the story they've laid out from the beginning, so that it's only afterwards that you realize what the movie is really about. "The Big Lebowski" may follow a hippie slacker called The Dude through a complicated case of mistaken identity, but in the end the way the story resolves, or doesn't resolve, is less important or memorable than the way the Dude and his friend, a psychotic Vietnam veteran played by John Goodman, work through the differences between them. The film is an allegory of the reconciliation of two separate strands in our society.

In the same way "Burn After Reading" may be "about" the implausible chain of events set off by an incompetent group of blackmailers, but in the end the story doesn't so much resolve itself as end, and what we're left with is not so much the details of the caper to remember as the emotional truths behind the action.

"Burn After Reading" is about women. The film's two principal female characters, who never meet, represent opposite poles of modern femininity. The one (played by Frances McDormand) is a dim-witted chatterbox whose obsession with cosmetic surgery starts the caper rolling. The other (played by Tllda Swinton) is a brainy ice queen whose inability to cater to anyone but herself enables the caper to go spectacularly wrong. Both women, through their demands and self-centeredness, are toxic to the four men around them, three of whom end up dead. It's a masterful piece of indirection - in a way the whole plot is the MacGuffin and the audience is the detective, being pulled through the story to a conclusion that none of us expected.

I still think "No Country for Old Men" is junk, but maybe that's because the Coen Brothers script was an adaptation, not original. Maybe that film's murky motivations and meaningless celebration of violence is Cormac McCarthy's fault. I'd buy that, given the subtlety and humanity of "The Big Lebowski" and "Burn After Reading."

I'm tired of the misuse of the word "renown." If I see one more piece of flackery that describes someone as "world-renown" I'm gonna start slashing tires.

"Renown" is a noun. "Renowned" is an adjective. One is a "world-renowned" singer or author or ventriloquist if one has gained world-wide "renown" for his or her singing or writing or ventriloquism.

We can defeat this canard as long as we don't duck our responsibilities. Remember how you used to always hear radio announcers "wishing you a pleasant good morning"? Over the past twenty years this bit of linguistic flab has virtually disappeared from the airwaves. Granted, this disappearance was caused not so much by the complaints of angry grammarians as by the fact that hardly anything on the radio is pleasant anymore. The important thing is that it's gone.

So let's chip in and make this happen, everybody. As a reward I offer this "your mom" joke: Your Mom is so fat, she's taller sitting down.

Caleb and I drove into Erie, PA, my home town, the morning of Tuesday, August 4. I had not been there in 27 years. He had never been.

Erie boasts the finest natural harbour on the five Great Lakes, but in my day the lakefront was home to a few grain elevators, some railroad sidings, and little else. Today the city fathers seem to have finally realized the area's potential, with a museum of Lake Erie sailing and several other fine buildings. The north/south Interstate comes all the way into town now, instead of stopping arbitrarily at the innermost suburbs.

It was this road we took into town, and before we knew it we were through downtown entirely and over on the East Side, which remains the same down-at-heel neighborhood it was when I lived there with my first wife in 1978, with only a few more vacant lots than before. We found that house (on 11th and Wayne, if you're scoring at home) and then worked our way back into the city proper.

The area around Perry Square, a few blocks up the hill from the Lakefront and at the center of downtown, was spruced up but essentially unchanged. The three most impressive buildings are all still there: the Public Library (now part of the Federal Courthouse complex), the Erie Club, and the old Customs House.

This last has become home to the Erie Art Museum, and we parked and ducked in so I could see what had become of my old friend John Vanco, who had been the Museum's director when I last lived in town. As it happens, 30 years later John remains director of the Erie Art Museum and the architect of much of its current success. When I knew him he was, among other things, a serious record collector whose blues, jazz, and hillbilly 78s I often recorded for my own use. Some of those songs I still perform today. We talked for a few minutes, during which he gave me the sad news that my old friend Warner Bacon, Jr. had recently died of brain cancer.

The rest of the afternoon Caleb and I zigzagged around town looking for landmarks - some there, some gone: my great-uncle's house at 519 West 6th Street, now a B&B called The Spencer House with gaily-painted trim; the empty lot where Lakewood School used to stand; the house at 4018 Oxer Road, looking smaller than I remembered, also with painted trim; Asbury School and MacDowell High School; the hamburger stand my brother Charles worked at, then called Red Barn, now a Burger King; Dick Bulling's World of Music, much expanded (we saw no trace of Markham's Music or Oseicki Brothers) but still in the old neighborhood. Dick Bulling, a slightly sinister figure who once tried to persuade me that an Ovation roundback was a better investment than a D-28 because David Cassidy was on the cover of Life playing one that week, is no longer with us. But I bought a T-shirt with a picture of him playing the saxophone.

My grandparents' graves are easy to find on the hill at the southwest corner of the Erie Cemetary. Herbert (Sr.) and J.C. Spencer and their wives are the only ones of their generation buried with their father. Of the next generation neither of my two deceased uncles is there. Of my own there has been as yet no call. But there seems to be plenty of room.

We made it back to the lakefront in time to see the restored brig "Niagara," Perry's flagship at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, sail in to Erie harbour with flags flying. It was a stirring site, especially considering that my grandfather, who worked hard to get her raised from Misery Bay and restored, never got the chance to see her actually in the water.

A lot of the pleasure of being in Erie again came from just cruising around the streets on a sunny day, getting the feel of the place. It doesn't seem so much of a backwater as it did when I was young. The guys in the music store were reasonably hip, the office workers in Starbucks not at all dowdy or dull. The Army/Navy store where I bought my first peacoat has moved across State Street to a smaller location, but it's the same store. The neighborhood around 5450 Streamwood Drive is much glossier than when we lived there in the '60s, but the house looks good. As we idled in the driveway I told Caleb the story about Mom and the snake. Then we took the old bridge over an unchanged Walnut Creek and drove west out of town.

So I watched "The Wackness" tonight. It's a sweet, original coming-of-age story that I think they wanted to be funny but I didn't laugh. The things they think are funny don't usually make me laugh. Buster Keaton makes me laugh. Anyway, I watched it for an hour but then the sweet, goofy boy and the sharp, ironic girl went to bed and since there was at least another 30 minutes left in the movie I figured they would have to make up something that would humiliate him and I didn't want to see that (I'm easily embarrassed by movies) so I turned it off. Maybe I'll look up the plot summary in Wikipedia if I get curious.

Did you ever see a movie called "Something's Got to Give" with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson? For the first hour it's a very charming love story but then they realized that it had to be a half-hour longer so they put the man and woman through the ringer for no good reason and then tacked on a completely unbelievable reconciliation and happy ending, just so the film would be long enough. Bah!

At church this morning, as often happens in the summer, we had a first-year seminarian as guest preacher. My mother, who was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1974, takes a understandably keen interest in these rookie outings, and has never been short of sotto voce comment afterwards. She would have said this young woman was "smiley," which I always took to mean that the preacher in question, doubting his or her intellectual qualifications to address this congregation with what is, more or less by definition, the most important thing they will hear all week, falls back on charm as a substitute for scholarship. The effect is often that of the television game-show for a man, Tupperware party for a woman.

The young woman we heard today seemed quite nervous at first, her delivery suggesting a gushing teenager addressing friends at the mall, perhaps telling them about a movie she especially liked. But she settled down after a few minutes and, while the sermon as a whole was not exactly profound, she did eventually manage to slow down enough that we could understand most of what she was saying. She is doing her summer field work in the oncology ward at Swedish Hospital in Seattle and if I were a patient there I would be happy to see her because she is a cheerful and kind-hearted young person with a palpable desire to make things better for people.

In the pulpit, however, she wrestled with the question of authority, as many in her situation would, male or female. How is she to make herself an authoritative figure, without boring or hectoring the congregation. It reminded me of similar questions of authority raised over the rock bands of my teenaged years and their embrace of the Blues. Here, of course, the context of these criticisms was mostly racial, since my generation was the first to engage in a wholesale embrace of the blackest musical traditions available. This led to some terrible embarrassments both at the top (did somebody say the Doors?) and the bottom of the professional ranks - I remember trying my best Muddy Waters growl in Pittsburgh when I was 16 and the whole audience falling out laughing. The song was "I'm Ready." I wasn't.

But just as great female preachers like my mother gave Samuel Johnson the lie by being more female, not less; by finding a vocabulary of authority that was uniquely theirs, so did Mick Jagger turn his callow, adenoidal singing into a template for white singers that avoided the mannerism trap that swallowed Jim Morrison.

Because Mick Jagger knew that Muddy Waters did not want him to sing just like Muddy Waters. No great artist wants his art to be the product and province of a single community. Great artists want their work to be universal, which means that other artists from other communities are going to be inspired by it and practice it and take it in new directions. To prefer Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones is not to make a distinction between gold and dross. It is to prefer Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw.