033008

I must say, if you haven't enjoyed the skillet-fried chicken at Francis on Alberta (between 23rd and 24th), you're missing out. You can partake of this any time of day; I had it for breakfast this morning. Get the skillet-fried grits too (the real deal). The fried chicken (very much the real deal) is smothered in sausage gravy. Yum! I remain amazed that we have a restaurant of Francis' caliber right here in our neck of the woods. Check it out. They also offer an array of really good vegan and gluten-free delicacies. The oatmeal brulee is out of sight.

*Grammar*

A brief note from your in-house grammar snob: please, please, please don't use outdated and inappropriate words like "amongst" and "amidst." Among and amid are only correct. And they are reflective of the modern day, of the fact we live in the 21st century, as opposed to reminiscent of Levitical times the way amongst is--it's downright Biblical. Would you like to be known for speaking with Biblical turns of phrase? If you're inclined to use a word like amongst, be sure also to say "betwixt" instead of "between." That is, if you want to keep all your ducks in a row. But of course I'm joking. Please do us all a favor: do _not_ say betwixt.

*ErosAromatics*

From Greenpeace:

"Perfume--An investigation of chemicals in 36 eaux des toilettes and eaux des parfums.

"Wearing perfume exposes us to chemicals that can enter the body, aren't easily broken down and may have unwanted health effects. The goal of this investigation was to quantify the use of two groups of chemicals--phthalates and synthetic musks--in a random selection of perfume brands. Greenpeace commissioned a laboratory to test 36 brands of eau de toilette and eau de parfum for levels of the two chemical groups. The results confirm that some synthetic musks, most notably the polycyclic musks galaxolide (HHCB) and tonalide (AHTN), and some phthalates, especially diethyl phthalate (DEP), are widely used by the perfume industry. This suggests that regular use of perfumes could substantially contribute to individualsÕ daily exposure to these chemicals, some of which have already been recorded as contaminants in blood and breast milk. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence of potential endocrine-disrupting properties for certain musk compounds. In this context, these results reinforce the need for legislation that will drive the replacement of hazardous substances with safer alternatives. The current development of new EU legislation on the manufacture and use of chemicals, known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), provides the opportunity to set out requirements for such substitution as a vital contribution to protecting the public from exposure to hazardous chemicals."

More reason than ever to stop using mainstream, synthetic perfumes and switch to natural perfumes. It's no quaint little obsession; choosing natural perfumes instead of mainstream, synthetic ones is equivalent to choosing life over death (my tongue is only lightly pressed into my cheek). I see two aspects to the idea that mainstream perfumes stand for death: 1) they're full of toxic chemicals proven to be harmful to our health, and 2) a Kirlian photograph of a synthetic fragrance chemical is blank, proving that fragrance chemicals have no life force (which Kirlian photography captures); they are for all intents and purposes dead. It is my own conviction that this lack of life force is what makes mainstream perfumes smell "cold" to my nose. If you don't know, it's a fascinating fact: if you rip a fresh leaf in half then use Kirlian photography on it, the photo shows the outline of the entire, unripped leaf.

_____

This week I made a fourth attempt at The Keeper. I asked about chypres on the natural-perfumers list and a French perfumer responded in particular. She said chypres are her favorite, and advised me that I could perfectly well use an amber base alongside the oakmoss. A classic amber is benzoin, labdanum, and vanilla; I used Tonka bean instead of vanilla and the brew holds a great deal of promise. Tonka-bean absolute smells like a rich combination of vanilla and almond with a little bit of cinnamon, so it should serve well in its place. Apparently Tonka bean is used sometimes as a replacement for vanilla (I'm not crazy after all). It contains coumarin, lethal in high-enough doses, so it is no longer used in flavoring; however, in perfumery, it's glorious. These base ingredients will bring a heaviness to the mix, much needed if one is to get the "heavy, clinging" part of the equation for this scent type. First whiff makes me think it's too ambery, but given a week or two, the heart and top notes (rose and grapefruit among them) should come into play more. After two full days, it is developing a unique sweetness; I can't quite put my finger on it, but it reminds me of some long-ago time and place. Ah, the wonders of this art, this final frontier! I smell this potion and my mind is immediately swimming with faces and occasions which scarcely seem a part of this same life.

*PoeminProgress*

Spilling the Beans

Once when I was a boy,
on my most beloved summer
trip to Maine, I got to
play Capture the Flag
with the grown-up kids
also staying at our small
inn. I felt all grown up
myself, but only for about
five minutes. No sooner
had I gotten used to
the idea I was allowed into
this, this inner sanctum of
childhood, when I promptly
made a grave mistake.
I remember how as clear as
if it were yesterday:
the game had begun and we
were all running around
that old property in the dark,
finding places to hide among
the antique out buildings,
cottages, and barns. I took
two steps to find a spot
and was horrified to hear
someone yell, "He spilled
the beans!" It took a few
minutes before I realized
just what was meant and
that I had been banished.
The part that hurts the most,
in retrospect, is that I
have spent my life spilling
the beans; I haven't ever
returned from my banishment.
I am what one might call
a bean-spiller extraordinaire.

*Politics*

From the BBC:

"...The most common modern sense of "misspeak" is in the US, where it has developed two meanings since the late 19th Century--to speak unclearly or to fail to tell the whole truth, says Mr Simpson. And it crossed the Atlantic in the mid 20th Century. Fiona Douglas, a lecturer in English language at the University of Leeds, says the origins of the modern meanings go back to before 1393, when poet John Gower penned Confessio Amantis. "The modern senses all have to do with unclear speaking and incorrect or misleading communication.

""The citations suggest that this 'misspeaking' can be deliberate or unintentional, conscious or unconscious--hence it's quite interesting to speculate exactly what Hillary Clinton's use of the word actually meant." US politicians have used it before to correct themselves. In 2004, President George W Bush accidentally said: "They [our enemies] never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people--and neither do we." White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded by saying: "Even the most straightforward and plain-spoken people misspeak."

"There are also references by Ronald Reagan's staff using it and recently John McCain admitted "misspeaking" after mistakenly saying Iran was arming al-Qaeda. It's no accident that politicians have grasped for this phrase, says Cormac McKeown, one of the editors of Collins English Dictionary. They often do so when they don't want to say they told a deliberate untruth. "It can mean to fluff one's lines, like an actor would, but it can also mean to speak erroneously or hastily without thinking, without giving it proper thought, so Clinton is relying on this ambiguity between the two meanings because then she can't really be proved wrong.

""But it's a stretch of the imagination that it was a slip of the tongue because it was quite a long and involved story that went on for about five minutes. So if pressed she might say she was referring to the second meaning but she's hoping the first meaning carries through in people's minds." Choosing this word is a terrible mistake, says lexicographer Tony Thorne. "She's in danger of doing what Bill Clinton did in redefining sexual relations.

""She's redefining telling the truth because 'misspeaking' is a euphemism for not telling the truth. It's the language of bamboozling, which US politicians and the US military love and get away with." The word does fill a lexical gap, says Mr Thorne, because alternative ways of saying it are so long-winded, like "I made a mistake, I got it wrong" or "I used the wrong word", but don't expect to hear it in the streets any time soon. "She's chosen a short, sharp soundbite word but like 'known unknown' it will probably only be used ironically or mockingly.""

*OPP*

I feel that the following is one of the very best modern poems. It is inevitable and inimitable in that Dobyns already wrote it; to attempt something similar would be a waste of everyone's time. By Stephen Dobyns (1987):

The Gardener

After the first astronauts reached heaven
the only god discovered in residence
retired to a little brick cottage
in the vicinity of Venus. He was not
unduly surprised. He had seen it coming
since Luther. Besides, what with the imminence
of nuclear war, his job was nearly over.
As soon as the fantastic had become
a commonplace, bus tours were organized,
and once or twice a day the old fellow
would be trotted out from his reading of Dante
and asked to do a few tricks--lightning bolts,
water spouting from a rock, blood from a turnip.
A few of the remaining cherubim
would fly in figure eights and afterward
sell apples from the famous orchard.
In the evening, the retired god would sometimes
receive a visit from his old friend the Devil.
They would smoke their pipes before the fire.
The Devil would stroke his whiskers and cover
his paws with his long furry tail. The mistake,
he was fond of saying, was to make them in
your image instead of mine. Possibly, said
the ex-deity. He hated arguing. The mistake,
he had often thought, was to experiment
with animal life in the first place when
his particular talent was as a gardener.
How pleasant Eden had been in those early days
with its neat rows of cabbages and beets,
flowering quince, a hundred varieties of rose.
But of course he had needed insects, and then
he made the birds, the red ones which he loved,
later came his experiments with smaller mammals--
squirrels and moles, a rabbit or two. When
the temptation had struck him to make something
really big, he had first conceived of it
as a kind of scarecrow to stand in the middle
of the garden and frighten off predators. What
voice had he listened to that convinced him
to give the creature his own face? No voice
but his own. It had amused him to make
a kind of living mirror, a little homunculus
that could learn a few of his lesser tricks.
And he had imagined sitting in the evening
with his friend the Devil watching the small
human creatures frolic in the grass. They would
be like children, good-natured and always singing.
When had he realized his mistake? Perhaps
when he smiled down at the first and it
didn't smile back; when he reached down to help
it to its feet and it shrugged his hand aside.
Standing up, it hadn't walked on the paths marked
with white stones but on the flowers themselves.
It's lonely, God had said. So he made it a mate,
and watched them feed on each other's bodies,
bicker and fight and trample through his garden,
dissatisfied with everything and wanting to escape.
Naturally, he hadn't objected. Kicked out,
kicked out, who had spread such lies? Shaking
and banging the bars of the great gate, they had
begged him for the chance to make it on their own.

*21*

From Blackjack for Blood: The Card-Counter's Bible by Bryce Carlson (1992):

"Why you may ask would the casinos be foolish enough as to bank a game that can be beaten with skillful play? That's a fair question. The primary reason is that when the game was first introduced in the casinos, during the early 1930s, no one imagined it was vulnerable to defeat. The casinos knew the basis for the house advantage lay in the fact that if the player busted he lost his wager, even if the dealer, in playing out his hand, were also bust. In fact this "double bust" rule was so strong for the house, it was necessary to offer the player a number of bonuses and playing options just to reduce the house advantage to a level the players would tolerate. The most important of the bonuses, the 3 to 2 payoff on untied player blackjacks, reduced the house advantage by 2.3%. The double-down and pair-splitting options, _with typical play_, took about another 1.2% off the casino edge.... And still, in spite of all this, the casino win consistently amounted to about 20% of the players' total buy-ins, suggesting the players as a whole were losing at a rate of between two and three percent of their action!

"As tables were full, and profits were excellent, with no players winning consistently, it is little wonder the casinos assumed the game was completely secure and would go on "getting the money" indefinitely. But this is where the plots begin to thicken. For, about this time, a small team of mathematicians, headed by Roger Baldwin and Wilbert Cantey, working at the Army's research laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, began to grow weary of developing ever-more efficient ways of blasting large rocks into very small rocks and started looking around for new worlds to conquer. Since both Baldwin and Cantey had been bitten by the blackjack bug and had been consistently picked clean on their infrequent sojourns into casinoland, it seemed natural that a deeper look into this intriguing little game was in order.

"When they began their analysis, the Baldwin team reasoned that proper use of the playing options afforded the player, such as when to hit and when to stand, when to double down, and when to split a pair, should decrease the overall house advantage significantly. They had no idea by how much, but it was obvious the average player, who lost at a rate of between two and three percent, was not using these options anywhere near optimally. Unfortunately, computers were not yet in general use, even in government think tanks, so Baldwin & Co had to use desk calculators. This unpleasant fact turned a tough job into mission improbable, and our heroes labored for months and months, hovering over their calculators for endless hours, far into the night, in dimly lit little rooms, until finally one night Baldwin looked up from his labors and croaked, "I've got it!" ... For the first time, the proper playing strategy for casino Twenty-One had been discovered! This strategy has come to be called the Basic Strategy, and it provides the player with the correct play for any possible hand, when the only information he considers is the dealer's up card, and the cards that comprise his own hand.

"When they published their results in the September 1956 issue of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Baldwin team claimed their strategy reduced the house advantage to a meager .62%. Further research, using high-speed digital computers, has shown that with the rules assumed in the Baldwin study the actual advantage was .1% _for the players_! In other words, when you are playing Basic Strategy on the Las-Vegas strip, in a single-deck game, the house has no advantage whatsoever. For all practical purposes the game is dead even. This result has been verified countless times in major research laboratories around the world. IBM, General Dynamics, Sperry Rand, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Atomic-Energy Commission are among the highly respected laboratories that have verified the power and accuracy of Basic Strategy."

*Lyrics*

From the Best-of mixes:

Leave a message and your number please.
Tie 'em up, all my old fantasies.
Put 'em in a big red bow and send 'em
care of me.
[Falsetto] I'm takin' a chance on the wind.
I'm packin' up all my bags.
Makin' a mistake I've got to make,
oh, then I am glory bound.
--Martin Sexton

Our courtship was brief and magnetic.
I was singin' at the corner bar.
And we both felt so romantic;
we tool a walk with the moon
down to the train yard.
Well, it was too much for me.
My gypsy heart was inflamed.
Put me at the head of you list
and don't forget to call my name.
Well, I fell love with a boy who
has a real live romance with a train.
--Jolie Holland

The trouble with poets is they talk too much.
They tell us it hurts them a little more.
We cannot tell if they make this up.
We've never stood in their shoes,
in their skins, in their heads,
on their shores.
--Peter Mulvey

I'm not too big on parties.
Never know what to say,
and everywhere I stand
I seem to be in somebody's way.
--Ron Sexsmith

Chickens don't fly
but they have got the wings.
No matter how hard they try
they bump into things.
They're all runnin' around
with their heads on the ground.
They got a wishbone
where their backbone should have grown.
--Beth Orton

*PoeminProgress*

Making Up Ground

I was in love once, honestly.
One afternoon we stood in each other's
embrace and I remember I was
overcome with terror at the thought
we would one day be forced to
separate, through the vagaries
of time, the complications of
old age, the necessary finality of
death. We would be torn apart,
this much I knew for certain.
What I don't know with any certainty
at all is how love fled from her
so completely, when it escaped,
why the loss of it, in its
intangibility, was, in the end,
the catalyst for our division.
Not wrinkles or clogged arteries
or dementia. Loss of a certain spark
was all it took to bring down
the artificial edifice of our
marriage. Most folks have fond
memories of their wedding days.
Mine are not particularly fond;
I remember her saying, "Fuck you."
And all the rest that came with
that sentiment. Why we decided
to go ahead anyway remains
a mystery. I woke up one day
irreversibly altered. If such a spark
as left us leaves you in turn,
take heed. Without it, there's
an awful lot of ground to make up.
If you don't start today
you'll never get there.

*Nonfiction*

From The Big Con by David Maurer (1999):

"The grift has a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the verdant sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, and especially from the 'heavy-rackets.' It never employs violence to separate the mark from his money. Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat.

"Although the confidence man is sometimes classed with professional thieves, pickpockets, and gamblers, he is really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands. It is a point of pride with him that he does not have to steal.

"Confidence men are not 'crooks' in the ordinary sense of the word. They are suave, slick, and capable. Their depredations are very much on the genteel side. Because of their high intelligence, their solid organization, the widespread connivance of the law, and the fact that the victim must virtually admit criminal intentions himself if he wishes to prosecute, society has been neither willing nor able to avenge itself effectively. Relatively few good con men are ever brought to trial; of those who are tried, few are convicted; of those who are convicted, even fewer ever serve out their full sentences. Many successful operators have never a day in prison to pay for their merry and lucrative lives spent in fleecing willing marks on the big-con games.

"A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim. First, he inspires a firm belief in his own integrity. Second, he brings into play powerful and well-nigh irresistible forces to excite the cupidity of the mark. Then he allows the victim to make large sums of money by means which are explained to him as being dishonest--and hence a 'sure thing.' As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: 'You can't cheat an honest man.'"

*Quotations*

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. --Henry Louis Mencken

No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. --Abraham Lincoln

A half truth is a whole lie. --Yiddish proverb

With lies you may get ahead in the world--but you can never go back. --Russian proverb

Slander cannot destroy an honest man--when the flood recedes the rock is there. --Chinese proverb

What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own. --Goethe

Every act of dishonesty has at least two victims: the one we think of as the victim, and the perpetrator as well. Each little dishonesty makes another little rotten spot somewhere in the perpetrator's psyche. --Lesley Conger

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people. --Spencer Johnson

The elegance of honesty needs no adornment. --Merry Browne

No legacy is so rich as honesty. --Shakespeare

Peace, love, and All That Otha Mutha jazz

032308

I am becoming proactive about being an editor. I can be a great editor, with my wide array of both language experiences and personal knowledge of the world in various areas. I am very opinionated about the ways language is used and misused. I am able to assess a stack of information quickly, to simplify and summarize it. I have been working as a copy writer (as part of graphic design) for years. I am able to edit most any copy you might throw at me, from legal documents (scouring law books was a part-time job when I was in college) to business proposals to essays and articles to fiction to poetry. If you know anyone who needs an editor, for anything, please send me their way.

I've added 18 poems to adamgottschalk.net, in addition to Top Ten poems on the poems page (it's actually a list of 12). Also, the new blog is accessible from http://adamgottschalk.net/blog.html; it used to be blog.adamgottschalk.net. The old one is still up, but all new posts (taken from this mailing list) go on the new one.

My father and I played a game of chess this week that went 75 moves and ended in a draw. I was left with only my king, he with only his king and a rook. No pawns on either side. It would have been impossible for him to checkmate me, so we threw in the towel. We ended in a place where if he had checked me with his rook, he would have lost his rook, and the game would have ended automatically as all games do when (if) it gets down to king on king. Neither one of us had a move we actually wanted to make. An interesting little factor in the endgame: a king may not move within one space of another king because a king may not move into check.

*PoeminProgress*

Tracy

Tracy was a cool cat.
Lived with a bunch of
junkies on the north
side of town, in a low-rent,
pay-by-the-hour hotel room.
I was always stunned that
he came to work each morning
on time and sober. I was a
lowly dishwasher; he was a
chef, the boss's right-hand
man. To me, for some reason,
he was like James Dean,
strapping, cooler than words,
never in an awkward position.
I never understood why every
day when the sun went down
he too slipped off, like
a secret planet, to
somewhere unseen, unknown,
untouchable. At night,
he was the ghost of himself.
Now that I have 20 years more
life under my belt, I am
clearer about why it was he fled:
so he could avoid all awkward
positions, and always remain
cooler than words. If gone,
how could he go wrong?

*ErosAromatics*

While the second try at The Keeper is nice, and receives Jetta's approval, I made yet another attempt. This time I removed the osmanthus (it still smelled dominant to me, with only 2 drops out of 60), replacing it with frangipani, and I added more citrus notes to the top, including lime and mandarin. I like the third iteration, five days into it, though it's hard to say which is better, the second or the third. I'll give Jetta whiff on Tuesday and see what she thinks. This latest one has, to my nose, the right balance of floral and citrus notes, but I think it's still not heavy and clinging enough. I'll continue refining the recipe.

We in natural perfume are gleeful to be around at the dawn of the rebirth of the art. "Natural" is the hottest thing in perfume and cosmetics. Our foremost practitioner, Mandy Aftel, is regularly featured in major periodicals like W and The New York Times, on the TV news and radio, in newspapers, etc. All of the many perfume blogs (such as The Perfume Bee, Now Smell This, The Scented Salamander, etc.), once dedicated only to mainstream synthetic perfumes, now regularly feature reviews of natural perfumes, and highlight new releases from natural perfumers. One of the main sites on the web for perfume lovers is basenotes.net; they're so big they have the attention of huge perfume houses. They just added a new feature: a monthly article on natural perfume from my acquaintance Anya McCoy.

Out here on the left coast, we are well aware that everyone is fascinated by essential oils (hippies and their love of patchouli immediately come to mind); as more people make the connection between their desires for "natural" things and natural perfume, this field will only get hotter. My brother reminded me that I once spoke of "master" perfumers; no such thing. One can however receive the title of "professional perfumer" from the Natural Perfumers Guild; this is by way of an arduous application process (submit three perfumes, one in finalized packaging, and the board, which is made up of the best natural perfumers on the planet, reviews them and either approves you or not). At the corporate perfume houses, perfumers are nothing more than chemists. Here are the names of a few established professional natural perfumers, folks who set the mark:

Mandy Aftel, aftelier.com
Anya McCoy, anyasgarden.com
Lisa Fong, artemisiaperfume.com
JoAnne Bassett, joannebassett.com
Paula Moreschi, passionflowerperfume.com

This is just a small sample; you can see a longer list at the web site of the Natural Perfumers Guild (naturalperfumersguild.com). If you peruse these sites above and other sites you will see that the going price for 1/4 oz of natural perfume is at least $150; to make that clearer, 1/4 oz is a half of a tablespoon, or one and a half teaspoons--we're talking mere drops. The marketing networks are already in place. People are already madly talking about us; the big guys are even feeling the pressure, with more and more mainstream perfume houses claiming to offer natural this and natural that. Mostly, they're lying; a synth is a synth. We who have integrity and a dedication to purity are in an excellent place indeed, and in positions to make ourselves a tidy income, though I'm certain that none of us would say making money is our main goal.

Natural perfumery is generally talked of as a "niche" market. Department stores now regularly have a certain amount of money alloted to niche perfumers, so this is one of the ways we're making inroads. Another is by way of custom perfumes. Ms Aftel makes custom perfumes for the stars; literally, Madonna is one of her custom-perfume clients. Making custom perfumes has never appealed to me, but, seeing as there's an awful lot of money to be made in it, I may have to reconsider. In the same way that I've always been averse to much input from the client as far as graphic design goes, I don't think my creative instincts would be satisfied at all with the custom-perfume process. But then, if all I really have to do is put on a believable show, I think I can handle it. For example, say someone wants a custom perfume; they really like vanilla, lavender, and rose. Well, I think I could create something which highlighted those; in fact, I might come to see custom perfumery as the ultimate challenge.

There was discussion this week of the proper pronunciation for the word "sillage;" it's see-yahz. The only sense in which we find this word in English is to connote that which fills a silo (and there it's "sigh-ledge"). In French however it means "wake," like the wake of a boat. This concept is somewhat alien to natural perfumers; with synthetic perfumes there is indeed the infamous wake of a perfume wearer that leaves people choking and cursing. Natural perfumes stay much closer to the skin; the experience of natural perfume is, as it should be, an intimate one. You run no risk of offending anyone with the voluminousness of your perfume. It is only those close to you who will ever be close enough to catch a whiff. We natural perfumers feel strongly that that's the way it should be.

*Sustainability*

While I was in Seattle, going to Seattle Central Community College, I worked for an organization called Sustainable Seattle. I was in charge of outreach in South Seattle, largely because I speak Mandarin Chinese. South Seattle is one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country. My job was to bring local residents and organizations together to talk about sustainability; I was in touch with everyone from the Chamber of Commerce to the Neighborhood Council to members of a long-time latino community group, along with many others. All under the umbrella of "sustainability," with which next to no one was familiar. It was an uphill battle. I often brought people together, of different races, who lived only a few houses from each other but had never crossed paths. And I brought people of color to the same table with their white counterparts, often for the first time.

There was a Laotian man in particular that I befriended. He worked for the Department of Neighborhoods and was _the_ go-to guy for interacting with recent Laotian immigrants. He told me that he liked my company, and agreed to come to meetings for something he wasn't really too sure about, because I was the fist white person he'd met who didn't act like I couldn't understand what he was saying. All of his white colleagues preferred not to be bothered with his thick accent. While at Sustainable Seattle I helped translate the document "Seven Steps to Sustainability" into Mandarin. After a time, I began to feel the document fell far short of the mark (as I remember it didn't even include considerations of energy use or recycling). When I raised my objections, I was told, in effect, to shut up; needless to say, I didn't last much longer.

I was very sorry to go, and my phone was ringing for months; people I'd worked with called to express their dismay at my abandoning them, and their strong dislike for whatever people were sent to replace me. Folks from all walks of life called to tell me such things. Unfortunately, I knew that if I let myself be distracted, I would never finish school. One of the most profound experiences I had during my time with the group came when I met with a local high-school headmaster. His school was torn apart by gang violence; shootings were a regular thing, with Dominicans retaliating against Mexicans, Jamaicans against black Americans, Cambodians against Chinese, and on and on.

I asked what step he felt had made the biggest difference in counteracting the violence. Without skipping a beat he said there was no question at all: it was putting in a greenhouse and starting a garden. He hadn't ever seen anything like it, but when he required a gang banger to care for a plant, the kid laid down his ammunition and took great pride in his duty. This happened time and time again. The principal told me that in many cases, this was the first time these kids had been responsible for anything, let alone something actually living. Knowing that if a pretty flower died it was his fault kept many a young would-be miscreant in line. I've never forgotten it, taking it to be one of the deepest lessons I've ever learned.

*OPP*

By Teddy Roethke:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

*Fiction&Nonfiction*

The Meaning of Night is a stupendous work. It is the story of one of the original con games. One goes along right up to about the 600th page thinking the book will be a delightful little story about a 19th-century romance--and then bam! suddenly the reader is taken up in a devious twist that screams of "original scam." I've begun to read another book called Players which is a collection of essays about con artists through the ages, and related topics. One of the first few essays is about an Englishman in about 1802 who pulled an outrageous scam of pretending to be a nobleman he wasn't, and, at the time, few were willing to believe that there could be such deviousness, and blind credulity, in men to enable the con man to pull off his scams. The Meaning of Night is set in the mid 1800s so to assert that it is about one of the original con games is to assert a certain truth.

One of the fictional stories in Players is Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would be King. It's about two Englishmen who decide to set themselves up in an area northeast of India (Kipling was born in Bombay) called Kafiristan as deities. They are emperors for a time, until they're run out of the country; folks eventually figure out that they are not in fact gods. The film from 1975 starred Sean Connery and Michael Caine; I'm quite certain I have memories of seeing the movie when I was a boy. While Kipling's legacy is somewhat controversial, and his misgivings, his confusion, about race and colonialism come out in his writing, this is a captivating story nevertheless. Indeed, an ultimate con game in the late 1800s: to dupe a nation of people into believing you to be gods, if only for a time. This story was written in 1888; it comes off as if it could have been written yesterday. I'd say this has been an inspiration for no small number of modern tales. Kipling apparently was renowned for being an innovator with short stories.

I concur with the quote below: con men are as American as apple pie. What are we if not a country of players, every one? From the teacher who gains a job by alleging credentials she doesn't have to the business man who makes a million selling swill as ambrosia, we are all scamming somebody. Most of us wouldn't admit it, but the vast majority of us have lied on resumes and in order to get work. We writers are eternally pretending to be people we're not, and as I've mentioned here before, the art of perfumery is nothing if not the art of aggrandizing and creating mystery where there isn't any. Anya McCoy told me that people aren't interested at all in a perfumer's use of some exotic material (except as it pertains to The Mystery); if you can convince a person that their allure will be greatly enhanced with the addition of your potion, you've got a sale. Con men are we all. Chris at The Perfume House is premier among us in his spinning of intricate fictions in order to sell little bundles of petrochemicals.

Chris told me once that a certain perfume (Le Vainquer) was from the same original vat made for Napoleon in 1805 (how could your average person verify this? Your average person (like me) wouldn't ever even think there was a need to); he said supplies were limited and that when they got down to a certain point, only those who'd bought the perfume before would be allowed to buy more. My goodness, I couldn't have created a better back story myself. My mother read me a similar excerpt from W magazine; a company who gets $5-10,000 per bottle for their perfume claimed that some of the ingredients are so rare, the perfumes will only be available for a limited time, and once they're gone they're gone. Maybe I'm not privy to certain proprietary knowledge, but I'd imagine when one batch of osmanthus is finished, you find a different source; it's all about The Mystery, and if you can make folks believe one batch of benzoin absolute (especially the synthetic kind) is so rarified as to warrant extreme prices, well, then, more power to you. Chris got me on this con with the infamous snow-rose story. I have a strong feeling that this lesson in the art of grifting is one of the very first to be taught at the corporate perfumery schools.

*Quotations*

I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't. --John Lithgow

This is the ultimate con game--I'm having fun and people pay me to do it. --Adam Osborne

I've always loved movies about con men. I think con men are as American as apple pie. --Bill Paxton

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent. --Sinatra

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are. --Gore Vidal

Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening. --Herbert Gold

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes. --Mickey Spillane

Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark Inside. --William S Burroughs

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. --Harry S Truman

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. --Thomas Henry Huxley

*Politics*

When you hear Bush falsely touting the success of the war in Iraq, keep in mind these facts:

Number of Weapons of Mass Destruction found: 0

Number of connections discovered between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein or Iraq: 0

Estimated number of ADDITIONAL Iraqi civilians killed (people who wouldn't have died without our military action) since the invasion: 650,000

Degree to which we are safer now: We are not safer; we are in fact more hated and more vulnerable than ever.

Have the invasion and occupation been successes, by any measures at all? Categorically NO

The Bush family had a long-standing animosity to Hussein, and W was just finishing up a task his father started but couldn't accomplish. The only success of this $3-trillion war is that Bush's and Cheney's friends are astronomically richer now. We, the people, have lost on all counts in this bloodiest and most unjust of wars. Generations of American citizens have been irreparably harmed, in ways we can't even recognize yet, in addition to horrific bloodshed all around, and our reputation as champions of fairness and truth may now be irretrievably undermined.

_____

By Matt Frei for the BBC:

"The Freis hardly ever go to church but, five years ago, shortly after we had moved to Washington, I took three of my children to a Baptist church on a Sunday morning to listen to gospel music. The church was no more than a mile from the White House, in a neighbourhood that had recently been caressed by the gentrification of a still-booming real estate market. I thought we had crashed a wedding. The men and boys all wore suits, the women hats. But there was no bride and this was no wedding. It was just a regular Sunday service.

"We were politely ushered to a pew near the front. As we sat down, every head was turned towards us, the preacher welcomed us and there was a round of applause. My son was tugging my sleeve, as if to say, why are they clapping? I looked round. Every single face, apart from ours, was black. I was reminded of the scene when Senator Barack Obama said in his speech in Philadelphia that "the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning".

"When it comes to race, religion and even class, America, the great melting pot, is still an archipelago of hundreds of tribes living largely separate lives in their own communities. Perhaps it is one of the luxuries of space in a vast country. Perhaps it is proof of prejudice. It certainly undermines real efforts to understand each other, to mingle, to melt in the same pot.

"And it has posed a particular challenge for Mr Obama, who is more racially-melded than any other presidential candidate has ever been. With a black father from Kenya and a white Christian mother from rural Kansas, he is literally African-American. Mr Obama's whole appeal has been based on a message of unity and hope, underpinned by his mixed racial origins. The first time I saw him speak was at a book signing in New Hampshire. His was the only black face in the audience. But the length and bitterness of the campaign, and the brutal need to harvest votes and delegates, has curdled the issue of race for Mr Obama.

"Increasingly, he has relied on black voters, while Hillary Clinton has gained a stronger footing among white Americans. Some argue that these tribal differences have been deliberately and cleverly teased out by the Clinton campaign. Others charge that it is the Obama campaign which has subtly tried to make the Clintons, once black America's favourite political couple, look like they are playing racial politics.

"Barack Obama has probably given one of the best speeches of the campaign, genuinely reaching out to resentful whites and blacks, dousing the usual allegorical and oblique debate about race in a huge dose of honesty. It was a great speech. A black and a white colleague both called it the best speech on race since Martin Luther King spoke about his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That's one hell of a compliment. But there is a difference. King had a dream. Obama also has an election to win.

"And yet, this was the only speech he could have given. As someone of mixed race he was the only candidate who could have given it with any integrity. I have swum in those waters, as he likes to say. But will it actually translate into votes, which was after all its ultimate purpose? I don't know. Its heart-wrenching honesty and nuance of guilt and responsibility may have re-inspired Mr Obama's flagging supporters. It may also have frightened his detractors even more. Election campaigns don't do subtle.

"And every time that speech is replayed, so will be the rasping comments of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright that forced it to be made: the inflammatory remarks about America being damned, about 9/11 being revenge for America's nuclear policy, about the threat from Zionist Israel. Mr Obama said he disagreed with the comments made by the pastor who christened his children and married him to his wife. But he did not denounce the man, "who has been like family to me". It was an honourable omission. But it may have killed his campaign."

*Philosophy*

In trying to understand the world around you, when you find yourself more than ready to see connections between events, causal relationships, deep ramifications, that is when you should be most wary of your assumptions. The instinct to move away from assumptions is the same instinct which tells us to place little trust in the existence of coincidences. It may not seem that these two phenomena are related, but a little intellectual investigation tells us they assuredly are. Scientific examination eschews assumptions (the vast majority anyway) in favor of incontrovertible proof. Similarly, there is no coincidence in science; to all things there is a reason. If a given reason happens to seem uncanny in its familiarity, such is life.

*Music*

I've made dozens of Citizen Mixes. The time has come for a Best of compilation, in two volumes. I started assembling them--and it's a daunting prospect, so many artists, so many songs to choose from. A few of them are no-brainers, to me anyway. Josh Rouse, The Decemberists, and Iron & Wine are particularly difficult to work with--there's just so much to them. What I tried to do was pick out the songs from each mix that really got me going, that made me want to turn up the volume. In going over the mixes, I am returning to memories, of where I was at the time I put it together, what I was thinking, what I was hoping. It's a gas. If anyone out there wants a copy, it could easily be arranged. Found here are the best of the best contemporary singer-songwriters and alternative artists (which latter term is very widely ranging; I mean it in the sense of _not_ mainstream pop, alternative pop if you will).

As they stand now:

Best of Citizen Mixes, Vol 1--

1. Going Places, Paul Weller
2. Lost in Space, Glenn Tilbrook
3. Dressed Up Like Nebraska, Josh Rouse
4. Comes Love (Brown/Stept/Tobias), Peter Mulvey with Erin McKeown
5. Why Do They Leave?, Ryan Adams
6. 16 Maybe Less, Iron & Wine
7. After the Bombs, The Decemberists
8. Troubled Soul, Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter
9. Black Box, Jann Klose
10. Worms, Beth Orton
11. Let Me Go, Sonya Kitchell
12. Magic Trick, M Ward
13. We're All in This Together, Ben Lee
14. One Day, The J Band
15. One, Tina Dico
16. Save Me (live), Aimee Mann
17. Walk Away, Tom Waits
18. Woke Up New, The Mountain Goats
19. My Impossible Love, Jenifer Jackson
20. Disappearing World, David Gray

Vol 2--

1. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Bob Dylan), Madeleine Peyroux
2. Soda Water, Jess Klein
3. Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well, Mike Doughty
4. Sky Full of Clover, Beth Hart
5. Memphis, Cassandra Wilson
6. Glory Bound, Martin Sexton
7. Sascha, Jolie Holland
8. The Trouble with Poets, Peter Mulvey
9. I Don't Need No Doctor (Armstead/Ashford/Simpson), John Scofield with Dr John
10. So Much Time, Jesse Harris and the Ferdinandos
11. Something's Got Me, Lori Carson
12. Last to Know, Neil Finn
13. Gravity, John Mayer
14. Not Too Big, Ron Sexsmith
15. Oceanside, The Decemberists
16. Across the Universe (Beatles), Rufus Wainwright
17. Heartbeats, Jose Gonzalez
18. Sometimes (live), Daniel Lanois
19. His Majesty Rides, Josh Rouse
20. Cinder and Smoke, Iron & Wine

_____

There's a particular song from Rickie Lee Jones (the final song on my latest mix, March Triumphant) called I Was There (from Sermon on Exposition Boulevard) which is a latter-day piece-de-resistance for her I think. For people who grew up on her eponymous debut from the '70s, this track is painful to listen to. Her voice is in a bad place, stuffed up and gravelly, and she might be drunk or under the influence. It is raw and all heart. I'm not exactly sure what she's talking about, but she means it from the bottom of her soul:

"Take my advice and go throw it away. It's gonna do you no good until you blow for good. 'Cause you are there, man, you are there. Don't you know? You are there where Jesus walked. Every generation, yeah, yeah, the princes of their nation. Well, I'm ugly, too. No, no, no, you're not beautiful, no, you're ugly too. 'Cause you've been travelling in so many universes and you manifest here. It's difficult to see who you are. Brother, I didn't realize that you were talking to me until you broke that bread and I saw that you were. Where have you been that you don't know what's been going on here in Jerusalem?"

*PoeminProgress*

To Know Love

Would it surprise you to learn
that all I ever wanted, from
my life, from this world,
from time itself, was to be
in love and to know that
the love I receive knows
no bounds and no terminus?
I suppose that such desires
are as common as air, but
I mean this to the exclusion
of all other comforts.
I assure you I would only be
happy to sleep on cold, wet
streets if the woman I love
were with me. It is not
wealth, nor esteem, nor
high station in life that
has driven me in my pursuits.
It is love, plain and simple,
which has actuated my every move,
given light to my every hope,
made sense of my every dream.
How unfortunate, then, that love
could never be a simple matter.

Peace, love, and ATOM jazz

031608

There's a television advertisement about getting Rhapsody on your TV. A fine prospect in itself, but the hook in the advert is that you can get whatever kind of music you're in the mood for at any time. So they show a young guy in his living room listening to one insipid pop creation, and he gleefully switches over to a supposedly different song--that happens to sound exactly the same as the one he just had been listening to! I don't know if it's just I who senses this clear and obvious sameness. It's so stark, the commercial makes me laugh when I see it.

*Errata*

I've noticed for some time now that every issue of Adam's World has various errors in it, grammatical or otherwise. This new section will expose my mistakes--in effort to keep me from being misunderstood.

1. "I put some distilled fir cones on top." Should have been: I put essence of fir cones in the top chord of the perfume. That sentence made me laugh out loud when I read it back; I could just picture myself carefully stacking fir cones on top of a shed or something.

2. "...a book by Henry Mayhew called London Labour and the London Poor, which was written by a sometime reporter in the 1800s...." A book by Henry Mayhew...written by THE sometime reporter....

*ErosAromatics*

The perfume I made last week with birch tar is a failure. Jetta and I smelled it and I said, "Vicks?" She said she was glad _I_ was the one who said it. Birch tar, it seems, will be a tough essence to find the right compatriots for. I have a strong suspicion that it will like to be with peppery things like, well, black or pink pepper, which, to my nose, smell a bit like heat. The amber perfume (Adam's Amber, Eros No. 567) continues to delight me. I will play around with it and see if I can come up with something for both men and women (though I'm determined to keep the lines rather blurry).

The above is my "amber" perfume. I also intend make attempts at compositions in each of the various categories of scent. The next type I'll try my hand at is "chypre" (pronounced "heep-re"). Chypre scents are based on oakmoss, vetiver, patchouli, and sandalwood. Apparently chypres are heavy and clinging, and often flowery; that means flowery essences must be added to the heart (and top, though not so much). I whipped up a potion, which, on first whiff, seems promising, but I forgot that there's supposed to be bergamot and other citrus on top. I'll have to try again. Also, it appears that osmanthus wants to be a dominant element; I don't really mind, but I think I added too much to this which, in its finalized form, I'll call The Keeper, Eros No. 566.

I did make a second attempt which, on first whiff, might be closer to the mark. I cut down on the osmanthus, and I added bergamot and tangerine to the top chord. In classical French perfumery, it is said that something called tagetes can balance citrus notes (tagetes is in the daisy family, asteraceae, and is native to the southwest US, Mexico, and South America, called generally marigold; it must be a relatively recent, New-World addition to the perfumer's palette). Tagetes is an odd sort of essence, one I strongly dislike; it's not that it's rank or foul (I can stand the rank and foul), but it has a certain character on its own that gets under my skin. My limited experience with it is that it does indeed impact citrus notes well.

Indeed, my second try at The Keeper is quite nice. It is a heavy floral scent, with the sharpness of citrus on top. I put only 2 drops (out of 60) of osmanthus in it; the osmanthus still defines the perfume. The bergamot, tangerine, and tagetes do work to add lift. This perfume has a long way to go, but it's shaping up quite nicely. I'm surprised that more of the base notes don't come through; the vetiver and patchouli in particular have high odor intensities. I cannot detect them at all after first application; osmanthus and bergamot dominate. This of course is in keeping with the idea that one perceives first the top notes, then the middle, then, slowly, the base. Over a period of time, it warms up, becomes more woody (revealing the sandalwood and oakmoss in the base).

*PoeminProgress*

Last Lick from the East

I found myself in Seattle in
the mid '90s. Just like
a fish out of water I was,
searching for the right
cliques, the right bars,
or even just a friend or two.
And my quest for an apartment
was without end. I lived in
every sort of place you can
imagine. Some places you can't.
During the last quest I was
destined to make, I got
a little kick in the pants
from all the way home.
I found a room in what
appeared to be a building
filled to the brim with
hip kids, beautiful people
veritably oozing from
the walls. I really wanted
to count myself among those
"in" ranks, with a room there, seedy
as it was. I met with the manager;
she liked me, and everything
seemed like a go. But then
a routine credit check turned up
a report of bad credit
from a creditor in New York,
a utility I believe. The landlord
was very gracious when she
explained that her hands were
tied. I ended up living in
the 'hood until I left Seattle.
And I never did become any kind of
hip kid. So far as I know.

*Philosophy*

Going through our lives, we seldom stop to consider the moral implications of our lives. A reformed vegan, I take it with gravity that I eat meat. I'm well aware of the moral stakes and have made my decision about how I want to live. One issue always stood out to me, in my studies of moral philosophy: we take for granted that it is less of moral wrong to fish than to hunt. In fact, it is exactly opposite: seen properly, fishing is morally heinous compared to hunting, at least that brand of hunting in which the practitioners take pride and always consider, oddly enough, the well being of their victims. We all know the code: if a shot will not bring certain and instant death, it should not be taken. The goal is to minimize the suffering of the hunted.

With fishing, the whole idea is to bring about and bear witness to the maximum amount of suffering in the hunted/fished. It is considered an inferior fishing experience if a fish doesn't fight--in its last mortal throes, struggling to hold onto its life for a few more moments, and we want to be there to see it and feel oddly victorious. In hunting there is a clear code of conduct; in fishing any semblance of moral consideration is cast aside entirely. There is the mistaken notion that "fish don't feel pain." They most certainly do, as do any creatures with developed neurological systems. As with flesh foods in general, I partake of fish, but with some sorrow as to what I see fit to bring upon the world.

*Fiction&Nonfiction*

One of many vast areas I want to research is the beginnings of Australia. I have a friend named Will Chaffey who takes Australia as his second home. He spent time there after high school doing crocodile research in the outback. He wrote a book about that and his experiences at our prep school (Milton Academy) and at Harvard. He's recently found a publisher for his book. Anyway, he told me of a few titles to look for, in particular The Fatal Shore and The Other Side of the Frontier. The former is about the English penal-colony foundations of the modern nation; the latter is from the Aborigine perspective. Knowing only a little as of yet, it strikes me that in Australia you find a microcosmic reflection of global race relations.

I'm almost through The Meaning of Night. It's not a quick read. It really is fascinating; I never thought I could find myself so interested in early bibliophiles and the history of English peerage. I am taken up in it, and I think most people reading this book would be too. As mentioned, it starts with a murder and is leading up to, through many various contortions of fate, another more pressing one. I enjoy being lost in the 1850s, sensing what life was like back then; only a really good author can give a reader a satisfying and complete sense of place and times, and Michael Cox certainly hits the mark.

What thrills me most about this tale is that a great degree of suspense is built around seemingly harmless circumstances. You will find no serial killers here. Still, one finds oneself on the edge of one's seat through most of the book. How will it play out? How will the protagonist be victorious? How _can_ he ever win? From Mr Cox's deft narrative, one can smell the wet dirt on a country path, can walk knowingly in the shoes of people 150 years gone, can taste the lamb chops and gin. And Cox does a great job describing the beauty of the various regal ladies in the book. If you'd like to be taken away, from head to toe, in an older, more innocent time, this book will do the trick admirably well.

*Politics*

By Matt Frei for the BBC:

"...Dave, the septuagenarian retiree from upstate New York, was an Obama Republican. He had driven his ailing friend to the Cleveland Clinic Heart Center--one of the best on the planet--and he was spent. Suddenly, though, he stopped staring at the amber ice cubes, cleared his throat and recaptured the floor. "I know what could save Obama's candidacy," he intoned. "He should choose Prince Harry as his running mate. He knows about war. It would add soldierly grit to Obama's ticket." Our picture editor, Bill, chimed in: "And it would make Obama look older and wiser." The bar stools quaked with laughter. These days, no idea is off-limits....

"Rita, a staunch Clinton supporter who has worked at the General Electric lamp plant in Youngstown for 39 years, will be laid off in October because the factory is being dismantled and shipped to Hungary. She has even been asked to train the Hungarian who will inherit her job, adding insult to injury. "The only jobs available for us women here are pole-dancing and truck driving. If I slide down that pole and hit the floor, they're gonna have to lift me up with a crane," the effervescent 56-year-old told me.

"Rita was also hoping for closure in the primary race. But the road ahead is closed to closure. Mrs Clinton has vowed to go all the way. Ed Rendell, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, is looking forward to seven weeks of saturation media coverage of his state as the juggernaut ploughs on to 22 April.

"Mrs Clinton points out that her husband only clinched the nomination in 1992 on 2 June, so what's the big hurry? While she has inherited the compelling narrative of resurrection, Mr Obama is reduced to reassuring his supporters that she has barely eaten into his delegate lead. This is not exactly the audacious rhetoric of hope and change. It is tepid electoral accountancy.

"Tim Russert, the main anchor of US network NBC, reminded his audience in the middle of the night of a document leaked from or by Mr Obama's people--no-one is really sure--after Super Tuesday. With uncanny accuracy, it presaged almost all the victories and defeats of recent weeks and foresaw Mr Obama entering a dreaded "brokered convention" with a slim lead in delegates, even after losing Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico--yes, Puerto Rico--in June.

"The expectation on all sides now is that this marathon will go all the way to mid-August, that the Democratic Party's 796 super delegates will become more popular than chocolate liqueurs at a Betty Ford clinic, and that it is about to get really nasty. Meanwhile, John McCain has emerged from a chaotic and cantankerous field of fellow Republican candidates as the triumphant nominee. On Wednesday, he was endorsed by President George W Bush in the Rose Garden.

"And although the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is woefully unpopular, he has allowed Mr McCain to look presidential in the rental home of their dreams while his Democratic opponents are just limbering up for another food fight. Mrs McCain is measuring curtains. Mrs Obama is sharpening elbows and Bill Clinton, who some say had become his wife's biggest liability, is being measured for muzzles."

*Quotations*

I find one sentence above particularly succinct: "She has inherited the compelling narrative of resurrection." What a useful way to think of that notion.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection. --Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection. --Arthur Schopenhauer

The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead. --William Lloyd Garrison

Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul. --Victor Hugo

Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match. --Ingrid Bengis

It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection. --Voltaire

Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time. --Martin Luther

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. --Rachel Carson

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics--a rational ethics--as a precondition of rebirth. --Ayn Rand

Right now we're stading at a massive point of rebirth. --Lars Ulrich

*Science*

From MoveOn and Avaaz (avaaz.org) [Nine footnotes removed for brevity]:

"Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have enough food to eat. Food prices around the world are shooting up, sparking food riots from Mexico to Morocco. And the World Food Program warned last week that rapidly rising costs are endangering emergency food supplies for the world's worst-off. How are the wealthiest countries responding? They're burning food.

"Specifically, they're using more and more biofuels--alcohol made from plant products, used in place of petrol to fuel cars. Biofuels are billed as a way to slow down climate change. But in reality, because so much land is being cleared to grow them, most biofuels today are causing more global warming emissions than they prevent, even as they push the price of corn, wheat, and other foods out of reach for millions of people.

"Not all biofuels are bad--but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming. Click here to use our simple tool to send a message to your head of state before this weekend's global summit on climate change in Chiba, Japan, and help build a global call for biofuels regulation:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/11.php?cl=61537706

"Sometimes the trade-off is stark: filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year. But not all biofuels are bad; making ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is vastly more efficient than US-grown corn, for example, and green technology for making fuel from waste is improving rapidly.

"The problem is that the EU and the US have set targets for increasing the use of biofuels without sorting the good from the bad. As a result, rainforests are being cleared in Indonesia to grow palm oil for European biodiesel refineries, and global grain reserves are running dangerously low. Meanwhile, rich-country politicians can look "green" without asking their citizens to conserve energy, and agribusiness giants are cashing in. And if nothing changes, the situation will only get worse.

"What's needed are strong global standards that encourage better biofuels and shut down the trade in bad ones. Such standards are under development by a number of coalitions, but they will only become mandatory if there's a big enough public outcry. It's time to move: this Friday through Saturday, the twenty countries with the biggest economies, responsible for more than 75% of the world's carbon emissions, will meet in Chiba, Japan to begin the G8's climate change discussions. Before the summit, let's raise a global cry for change on biofuels:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/11.php?cl=61537706

"A call for change before this week's summit won't end the food crisis, or stop global warming. But it's a critical first step. By confronting false solutions and demanding real ones, we can show our leaders that we want to do the right thing, not the easy thing. As Kate, an Avaaz member in Colorado, wrote about biofuels, "Turning food into oil when people are already starving? My car isn't more important than someone's hungry child."

"It's time to put the life of our fellow people, and our planet, above the politics and profits that too often drive international decision-making. This will be a long fight. But it's one that we join eagerly--because the stakes are too high to do anything else."

*Music*

Citizen mix, March Triumphant 08:

1. One for Sorrow, Jeffrey Foucault
2. Fort Hood, Mike Doughty
3. How Come, Ray LaMontagne
4. The Old Holland, Rocky Votolato
5. Don't You Evah, Spoon
6. Make Love, Jess Klein
7. If Love is Not Enough, Peter Mulvey
8. Love is Enough, Joe Henry
9. Darkmatter, Andrew Bird
10. Truckload of Art, Cracker
11. Nectarine Part One, Mike Doughty
12. Shelter, Ray LaMontagne
13. Silver Trees, Rocky Votolato
14. Finer Feelings, Spoon
15. Shirt, Peter Mulvey
16. Wild Waste and Welter, Jeffrey Foucault
17. Alone, Jess Klein
18. I was There, Rickie Lee Jones

_____

I really like Cracker. They are, as the name implies, a bunch of silly, drunk white boys, cracking wise, irreverent to the end, but always showing high levels of musicianship. This band has its origins in the same forces that brought us Take the Skinheads Bowling way back when. The last album of theirs I downloaded is called Countrysides and is full of smirking covers of country numbers, and tunes well-known in alt-country circles. Their brand of humor is captured in the song Truckload of Art (Terry Allen):

"The truckload of Art from New York City
was haulin' a weighty load.
The driver was singin',
the sunset was pretty,
but the truck turned over
and it rolled off the road.
Oh, the truckload of art
is burnin' near the highway.
Precious objects are scattered
all over the ground.
It's a terrible sight,
if a person were to see it,
but there weren't nobody around."

Cracker in general is rock n' roll that brings a smile to your face and a chuckle to your lungs. The lead guitarist is one of the very best in the business (also cofounder, along with David Lowery, Johnny Hickman). Mr Hickman is a bad-ass mofo; his playing sounds to me like the essence of modern American rock guitar. Check out his in-the-pocket soloing in a song like Euro-trash Girl.

Peace, love, and ATOM jazz

030908

Sure enough, the day after my infusion this month I promptly beat my father in a game of chess. I have my brain back, for a week or two anyway. Now, the trick is to take this clarity I feel right after my infusion and hold onto it somehow all month long. It's as if I'm beginning to feel writing the problem off to MS is essentially an excuse. If I'm a good player, I will learn how always to be on top of my game. An idea which is not original to me is that there are two kinds of chess players in the world: those who play only to win, and those who play to experiment and try things which reflect philosophies one way or another (I fall into the latter category for certain). That the best defense is a good offense is a recurring theme in my games.

*PoeminProgress*

The Great Lottery in the Sky

The first time I ever played
a lottery ticket, I won.
I think it was $5, paid on
the spot (this was the 1970s
after all). And I couldn't
have been more than five myself,
downstairs around the corner
at the pharmacy for God knows what.
I haven't won a single thing
ever again. I'm eternally unlucky,
in bets, in love, in general
circumstance. In the great lottery
taking place in the heavens,
I've come up rather short.
I suppose I should be happy I
haven't landed myself in jail,
at least not permanently. But
even that fact doesn't really
bring a smile to my face.
And then I stop to think maybe
I should consider myself lucky
to be a college graduate.
I did indeed barely make it out
alive. In the end I always come
back to feeling lucky to be
a member of the first world,
to have potable water coming from
several taps in my house, not to
have bombs and madmen exploding
all around me, not to know that
half the children will die from
diarrhea this year. Aside from
this simple, original fact,
of my being born an American,
I can't say as I feel all that
lucky. I can only hope
a trip to Vegas might help
get my head screwed on straight
again (with the help of a few
card-counting tricks). That or
it'll have to be winning Lotto.

*ErosAromatics*

This week I acquired some more essences, some new to me, some familiar, some cheap (birch tar), some expensive (orange flower water absolute). Birch tar is an ingredient I have great hope for. It smells like smoke, sort of like a campfire. I mixed a complex brew (18 essences) together and we'll just see how it turns out. The first whiff is intriguing. I put some distilled fir cones on top; I could've used more birch tar I think. Experiments will continue. Another ingredient which might hold promise is choya nakh, which is an essential oil produced by destructive distillation of sea shells (meaning, they distill while a box of shells is burnt to a crisp). It smells to me like an electrical fire. What use could a perfumer possibly have for such a smell, you might ask? One can never be too sure what synergistic results this alchemical art of perfumery might achieve.

Adam's Amber, Eros No. 567, is turning out just the way I hoped it would. It has good lasting power for a natural. Jetta approves and suggested that I might make a version for ladies; she feels the one I have now is best for men (though not absolutely). I believe I know which parts a person might find particular to a sex. As it stands, it revolves around sweet resins and wood; Jetta said a female version might include even more vanilla (it already has a fair amount, to make up the "amber" note), and, I should think, more floral notes. I might try some burly florals like ylang ylang, a higher concentration of jasmine, and/or osmanthus.

There was discussion on the perfumers list about making so-called Bay-Rum hair tonic. There was a period in American and English history when every barber applied bay rum to the hair and face at the end on an appointment; the smell is indelibly associated with masculinity. Apparently it's supposed to include essential oils of west-Indian bay (pimenta racemosa), and possibly pimiento/allspice berry (pimenta diosca) along with citrus. I don't smell any citrus at all in the one Bay-Rum hair tonic I have (from Pashana). To my nose, pimenta racemosa is all one needs. I don't even think the rum is all that important, though one perfumer insists it is. I will make my own, with grape alcohol diluted to 80 proof, and see what I find (one fellow suggested I call the result Bay Brandy instead of Bay Rum). In my experience, liquor smells like liquor. My high-grade grape alcohol has by far the most appealing smell of any alcohol I've encountered.

I'm very pleased to say that natural perfume is now being thought of, rightly so, as an integral part of "green living." By Melissa Breyer for Care2:

"Perfume must be the most ironic of gifts: Perfect pretty little bottles with perfect pretty little names, filled with sweet smelling petrochemicals. Did you know that 95 percent of the chemicals used in perfume are derived from petroleum, many of them quite toxic? Ick. This year give a gift that triggers delight, not rashes and asthma. Read on for more about the synthetic ingredients commonly used in perfumes and see our picks for all-natural alternatives." Yes, we're picking up steam!

*BoobToob*

All of my favorite television shows cave rather quickly. The one I can think of that actually made it a few years is The Shield, but then that, by its nature, had a limited life span. The past couple of year saw the rise of two shows I thought were brilliant: Kojak (with Ving Rhames) and Raines (with Jeff Goldblum); neither lasted longer than a season. Two other shows I lost more recently are K-Ville and Life. And a show that I think is THE best TV show of the modern day, already some years old now, Boomtown, featuring Donnie Wahlberg, also got axed after only a season. The show was like a compelling miniature movie each week; it told the story of a crime from the differing perspectives of each person involved, from uniformed officers, to detectives, to the criminals themselves. It seems the suits and I are in complete disagreement as to what makes a good television show.

*Music*

Mike Doughty, Golden Delicious--Doughty's latest release, this record is a winner, as far as I'm concerned. I'd say it's the best recording I've heard yet from Doughty (admittedly, I don't have very many recordings). His lyrics are intelligent and sardonic; he has a voice that matches the words perfectly. I think of Doughty as the Aimee Mann of male singer/songwriters. Apparently, Doughty is former frontman for Soul Coughing, whom I know nothing about. He worked as a doorman at the Knitting Factory in New York, center of all hipness, and when Soul Coughing broke up in 2000, he launched his solo career. Haughty Melodic is the one I liked best before this release, though after more listens, Golden Delicious may just take the cake. No throw-away tracks, this is a succinct work with no filler.

Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga--If there were any doubt, Spoon is a gritty rock n' roll band. The drums, singing and guitar are the most noticeable in the mix. (I don't mean to dis Spoon's bass player or anything; indeed the founders are the singer/guitarist Britt Daniels and the drummer Jim Eno. They hail from Austin, Texas.) Found here are easily accessible pop/rock tunes. The lyrics tend toward the silly (in, for example, "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case"). The album is peppered with raunchy distorted guitar. This is music you'll want to turn up loud. Daniel's singing generally comes off as a snarl. At times Spoon reminds me of the Beatles, if the Beatles were punk rock. They've got a similar pop snap, if somewhat less variety to their sound. This is another winner from Spoon.

*Fiction&Nonfiction*

This week I found myself with no book. I had one lying around, Tenderwire by Claire Kilroy; I found within 25 pages that it just wasn't doing it for me. The fact that she's younger than I am came across clearly in the writing--the voice of someone with a paucity of life experience. I also tried Cadillac Orpheus by Solon Timothy Woodward; its subject matter, the poor black south, just didn't thrill me much. I finally settled on a book called The Meaning of Night: a Confession, by Michael Cox. The fact that it's set in the 1800s appeals to me; and it starts with a murder. It is becoming clear that it's something of an epic, in its 700 pages. It's fiction, rich with historical detail (replete with (fictional) footnotes on nearly every page, citing sources, historical figures, and mythology (some fictional, some not?)). Unlike the former two, this latter one had my attention within only a few pages.

It took me about 100 pages to figure the book out. There is an "editor's preface," which maintains that the book was found by chance, and that some of the names and places mentioned in the tome are factual and some are not. This editor, supposedly writing in 2005, calls himself, "Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction, University of Cambridge." If one is reading quickly, as I usually do, one might easily mistake those for credible credentials. I now see that the editor and editor's preface are all part of the fiction Mr Cox created. The book is critically acclaimed with comments such as this from the Library Journal, "This stunning first novel by Cox opens with a murder on a misty night in 1854 London. From the whorehouses, pubs, and opium dens of Victorian London to the ancient beauty of Tansor's ancestral estate, Cox creates a strong sense of place, a complex narrative full of unexpectedly wicked twists, and a well-drawn cast of supporting characters."

In my effort to understand better what has happened in our histories (I'm well acquainted with the last 75 years of history), I've started out my collection of historical books with two titles: Five Points: the 19th-century New York City neighborhood that invented tap dance, stole elections, and became the world's most notorious slum; and Players: Con Men, Hustlers, Gamblers, and Scam Artists. The latter is very promising; it's a collection of essays from writers through the ages such as: Jorge Luis Borges, Blaise Pascal, Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rudyard Kipling, Bertolt Brecht, Saul Bellow, Hunter Thompson, and David Mamet, among many others. I also have on order from Amazon a book by Henry Mayhew called London Labour and the London Poor, which was written by a sometime reporter in the 1800s and represents the precursor to the modern documentary; Louis Bayard, author of Mr Timothy, mentioned the importance of this work in his creating certain characters and scenarios in the book.

*PoeminProgress*

When God Came

When I was in the fifth grade
I had what I thought was a visit
from God. Every Wednesday morning
was mass before school. It was
a hot day in late Spring;
in Florida, that meant the air
was as thick as soup and had
its own weight to bear down on you.
A few minutes into the service,
sitting in my pew, I began to feel
extremely light headed. I saw
flashing colored lights; the edges
of my vision turned to static.
The next thing I knew I was
waking up in the nurse's office.
She looked very worried. When she
asked what happened I told her
I had been visited by the lord.
She pressed me a little further
then chuckled and said, "Sweetie,
you passed out. From the heat.
Have you been drinking your water?"
I dismissed her assertion, which
she found even more comical.
This was the same woman who had
told my class the month before
that men like women's breasts
because breasts remind them of
their mothers. I didn't know
what to think. It sounded to me
like she didn't believe God would
visit a boy such as myself.
I mean, all I really wanted,
in her eyes, was to be near
my mother's breasts; why would
God think to visit my lowliness?
Within a couple of years, in
thinking back on the event, I
was somewhat ashamed. Still I
wonder if he wouldn't come
because of the whole breast thing
or simply because there is no God.

*Quotations*

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.... --JG Ballard

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination. --Voltaire

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination. --Harry S Truman

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. --GB Shaw

Consider well this fact: As long as the German people does not arise and use force directed by its own will, the assassination of the people will continue. --Karl Liebknecht

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future. --Hitler

I'm proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. --Thomas Edison

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them. --Ed Howe

Assassination is not argument. --Emilio Castelar y Ripoli

Assassination makes only martyrs, not converts. --Alphonse de Lamartine

*Politics*

I had a most dire realization the other day: if Barack Obama is the JFK of my generation, won't the same forces that conspired to assassinate JFK do the same with Obama? A young politician, widely liked, a populist, with great aspirations for the nation, you can't _not_ make a comparison to JFK. The cosmos know I wish no harm on Mr Obama; I'm just thinking about what's likely to happen. This is a man once a civil-rights attorney who also fought against corporations in favor of the common man. You don't need to be a rocket scientist (not that, if you were, it would help) to know such a person will walk the earth with a target on his back, if he even makes it to commander in chief.

_____

Iraq by the Numbers (From WAND, wand.org):

3973: U.S. Deaths Confirmed By the DoD (March 3, 2008)

May 2, 2003: The day the President arrived on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared "Mission Accomplished."

64%: Percentage of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq

57%: Percentage of Iraqis who think it is acceptable to attack American soldiers. (Up from 51% in March and 17% back in February 2004.)

81,000 - >600,000: Estimates of number of civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq (Epidemiologists have estimated that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.)

49: Number of countries in the Coalition of the Willing when the invasion began in 2003

25: Current number of countries supplying 11,685 troops -- about 7% of the size of the U.S. forces.

>4 million: Number of displaced Iraqis: more than 2 million uprooted within Iraq, and as many have fled to neighboring countries.

$600 billion: Approved funds for the war ($499 billion spent as of today). President Bush has requested another $200 billion for 2008, which would bring the cumulative total to close to $800 billion.

$3 trillion: Estimate of true cost of war by Nobel Prize-winning economists

$270 million: Number of dollars the U.S. spends each day in Iraq

$390,000: Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq

$9 billion: Amount lost & unaccounted for in Iraq

$1.4 billion: Amount of Halliburton overcharges classified by the Pentagon as unreasonable and unsupported

$20 billion: Amount paid to KBR, a former Halliburton division, to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items

$3.2 billion: Portion of that $20 billion that Pentagon auditors deem "questionable"

75: Number of major U.S. bases in Iraq

166,895: Troops in Iraq: 157,000 from the U.S., 4,500 from the UK, 2,000 from Georgia, 900 from Poland, 650 from South Korea and 1,845 from all other nations

6,000: Iraqi troops trained and able to function independent of U.S. forces

27 to 60%: Iraqi unemployment rate (depending on where curfew is in effect)

28%: Iraqi children suffering from chronic malnutrition

40%: Professionals who have left Iraq since 2003

34,000: Iraqi physicians before 2003 invasion

12,000: Iraqi physicians who have left Iraq since 2005 invasion

2,000: Iraqi physicians murdered since 2003 invasion

10.9: Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity (May 2007)

5.6: Average Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity (May 2007)

16 to 24: Pre-War Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Had Electricity

70%: Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies (CNN.com, July 30, 2007)

22%: Water Treatment Plants Rehabilitated

0: Number of WMDs found in Iraq

0: Number of connections between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11

0: Number of convincing reasons for starting the war, and continuing the occupation

_____

From CARE:

"Meet Maria Ester Landa--jet engine welder, earthquake hero, and 2006's "Miss Micro-Entrepreneur" of Lima, Peru. As teenagers, Maria and her sister, Elvira, took a welding class offered by CARE and passed with flying colors. After spending several years working for others, Maria was inspired to start her own welding business. She applied for a traditional bank loan but was denied. Maria once more turned to CARE. We believed in Maria and granted her a loan through our micro-finance program. Maria repaid that loan in full in just one year and, today, she owns three successful businesses.

"When a devastating earthquake hit Peru last year and left 40,000 people homeless, CARE knew exactly whom to call. We contracted Maria and her sister to weld tent frames for earthquake survivors in need of shelter. At CARE, we've found one of the fastest ways to address poverty and bring about lasting change is to empower women. Thousands of people with a roof over their heads in Peru couldn't agree more!"

_____

Last week I talked of a teacher I had in college who was a war-tax resistor. I wrote that 50% of taxes go to the Pentagon. Actually, it's 43% (according to the latest word from FCNL), which is on orders of magnitude greater than any other area of government spending. If anyone talks to you about the supposed evils of big government, remind them that the most important reason any government is big is due to military spending. It's definitely not welfare or helping those in poverty (in this country, 50 million people live at or below the government-set poverty line, a staggering figure, a number and fact which no one likes to face), or what conservatives like to call "entitlement programs," which are to blame for our broken bank, definitely not. It's our warring proclivity, plain and simple. Big government may indeed be bad, but the worst part is that it's big because of wars, rather than because of any humanitarian efforts.

Peace, love, and ATOM jazz

030208

My worthless web-hosting company hoodwinked me. I had trouble making a new post on my blog, so they told me to upgrade the blog program (to version 2 of their own software). I did, and I still couldn't make a new post. They got back to me saying I'd have to delete the old blog and create a new one. No friggin' way in hell! They expect me to delete some three years worth of substantive posts? So I've created a workaround; it's a new blog just as a regular page on my site. It's slightly more difficult, but it works for now. My blog is the same as the posts to this mailing list, so to put them on the web, I have to add a bit of html code. Doesn't make me very happy, but it works.

*ErosAromatics*

My consulting call to Anya McCoy was eye-opening and extremely informative. One of many small questions she answered for me: yes, when making a batch of perfume for sale, make a large quantity of it, like one liter at a time. That necessity entails my switching over to recipes based on weight instead of drops (which are volumetric); first thing I need to do is get a scale that can measure hundredths of a gram. (Can you imagine trying carefully to measure out, say, 320 drops?) Then will come the simple but time-consuming process of looking at weights of a given number of drops of an essence and extrapolating to larger quantities. So, if, in a given recipe, there are 28 drops of a given essence in 60 milliliters of alcohol, those drops weigh (have a mass of) X grams, and to make a batch in 1 liter of alcohol, it will take XY grams of that essence; and so on for the rest of the essences in a recipe. Once I have weight-based recipes, life will be much easier when it comes to whipping up larger quantities of a perfume. Storage and dispensing from such larger quantities, however, is no simple prospect.

Anya emphasized that my market with natural perfumes is a high-end niche market, people with money to spare, so I should not be afraid to charge what the market will bear. How much time, she asked, have I spent on research and development of my perfumes already? Untold hours. How much is that alone worth? She warned me not to think of my friends and family as my market--I can cut all of them (you) deep discounts. And we discussed the need to get some buzz going when one releases a new perfume, on perfume blogs, by word of mouth, etc. Jetta and I have discussed the possibility of doing press releases and even possibly getting a small bit of TV or radio time.

Another interesting point we touched on: when it comes to cosmetic and body-care items, cleansing creams, moisturizers, etc., one uses what she calls "contract formulators." Such firms take your recipe, have their chemists look it over, and then give you a price for, say, 20 gallons. You send them the ingredients, jars, and labels, and they take care of everything, the sterility of the workflow, the packaging itself, any (natural) preservatives, everything. What a dream that is. And it makes terrific sense. Of course, dermatologists, who generally feature their own skin-care lines, use these very services to produce the items which make up these lines. Now I just need to find one that accepts quantities less than 5000 units per item (like, less than 5000 jars of moisturizer).

Cosmetic items have been used traditionally to allow easier access to a perfumer's products. A $250-300 price tag for an ounce of perfume will be too much for some, but they can enjoy similar scents in other forms, such as moisturizer. The key word is "similar;" once you've perfected a perfume, it's impossible simply to transfer it into another form (in fact, it is more easily done and is a regular occurrence in the world of synthetic fragrances). Instead, the perfumer aims to be close, removing certain unnecessary parts. So, I might offer a moisturizer called Oz; it will have the salient qualities of the perfume, but not all of it. The idea is that if you like that taste of Oz moisturizer, you might soon be willing to fork over more money for the perfume. Jetta (Anya as well) tells me this ploy has always worked extremely well in the mainstream cosmetic/fragrance world.

The amber perfume I made a week ago is turning into a fascinating potion. It does indeed have an ambery base, but one's nose can tell there's a whole lot more going on. It is familiar somehow while being exotic. It has a powdery element I like a great deal, with floral complexity hovering over the top. A very complicated scent, this is already nevertheless comforting, approachable, and immediately appealing. It will mature into an unqualified success. And this is the last recipe with which I will have used the dropper method; I will now convert it into a weight-based recipe. The fact that this perfume works is a thrill for me; as mentioned, I made it with 30 drops in the base chord, 10 in the middle, and 20 on top. It's not perfect but it works. So far, all the successful perfumes I've made have had equal amounts of essence in each part/chord; this is the first exception.

*Politics*

By Justin Webb for the BBC:

"Greetings now from another huge rally at a university in Cincinnati--a sports hall filled to the rafters. Thunderous support for an Obama speech which contained the interesting line that he is "a supporter of capitalism!" That's a relief--America's coming socialist revolution is on hold after all.

"BUT "If you are working in this country you should not be poor," is another line--and that idea, it seems to me, would be genuinely revolutionary if it caught on. America does not believe in entrenched poverty, class-based poverty. But this is a society in which, if things donÕt turn out right, you can fall very hard and land very low. Not that this nation is proud of poverty--but I have always thought there is a semi-willing acceptance of it as a corollary of the great emphasis given to wealth-creation here.

"If every working American was well off, the US would--as some have pointed out--look more like Canada or even Western Europe. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton keeps hammering away in her own inimitable style. And Bill Kristol likewise, though with rather more effect perhaps:

"'Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?' I read those words as thousands of joy-filled people let out an ear-splitting cheer at the end of his speech. Last words: "... and we will change the world!" No Baracklash here...."

*Society*

The United States has the largest number of people in prison of any country in the entire world, we're talking twice as many prisoners. It is FAR ahead of Russia, China, and Iran, for example. China! A country with more than an eighth of the population of earth has a fraction as many prisoners as we do (and we accuse _them_ of human-rights transgressions). In the general population between 20 and 34, 1 in 30 of us is incarcerated; among blacks, the figure is 1 in 9. These figures are shameful for a number of reasons:

1. The rise in the rate of incarceration is in NO WAY related to a rise in crime or our abilities to stop it.

2. The cost to states for these enormous prison populations averages $50 billion, up from $11 billion only 20 years ago. Oregon spends more than any other state in the nation.

3. That rate of increase is six times higher than for higher education.

4. The vast majority of those in jail are in for minor, non-violent crimes (like possession of marijuana).

5. Where prisons and jails all used to be public, the last 20 years has seen the rise of privately owned prisons. Privately run business endeavors, they certainly don't make any money by justice being served.

I had a cultural-anthropology teacher in college who changed my life. He was a radical, no doubt. He was a war-tax resistor, meaning he didn't pay taxes because 50% of tax money goes to the Pentagon. When the subject came up in class of human-rights abuses across the world, he fell suddenly quiet. Slowly and quietly he said, "You have no idea that in our own country, many millions of us have no rights, sit rotting behind bars for no good reason, or are locked up in solitary confinement which is a fate we wouldn't wish on dogs." The class was silent. We _didn't_ know anything about the subject, and we were quite astonished at our ignorance.

The state of things is horrific. I'm sure our forefathers are rolling over in their graves to know that 1 in every 99 citizens is behind bars--worse, they're in small concrete-block rooms with a locked door and no window. And to know that our prison stats tower above nations we love to hate. How can a huge would-be democracy such as ours ever work if more than 1% of our population has no rights at all? This is a matter of the gravest consequence. Talk to everyone you know about it.

*Quotations*

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. --Ben Hecht

ItÕs hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news. --John Kerry

News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising. --Lord Northcliffe

When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation. --Voltaire

Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day--23 minutes--and that's supposed to be enough. --Walter Cronkite

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing--the truly democratic thing about it--is that you don't even have to be a player to lose. --Barbara Ehrenreich

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered. --Dorothy Thompson

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. --Epictetus

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. --Napoleon

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. --Adlai Stevenson

*Punks&Bikers*

This week, a group of men tried to rob a bar in Sydney. They didn't realize that a gang of bikers was in the next room having a meeting. One of the bikers was quoted as saying the robbers must not have taken Robbery 101; who would be foolish enough to rob a place with a bunch of bikers inside, he wondered? While the robbers were apprehended before the police arrived, the whole thing struck me as comical. A person should live in fear of bikers? I think not. Your average biker is likely too fat, too slow, and too stupid to be much of a threat to anyone. But, no, we just assume: bar, bikers, danger. The thought makes me chuckle.

The same thing goes for punks. I proudly wear a t-shirt that reads "Punk Sucks." I've had people talk to me as if I'm taking chances with something like that; I guess the thinking is some angry punk might take me to task. Yeah right. There are people I fear in this world, but punks are not among them. I have no fear of any kind of retaliation from a punk rocker because of my t-shirt. This fact remains because the vast majority of punks are not violent, nor very threatening, but more to the point, my wearing the t-shirt is punk incarnate.

*Fiction*

This week I read Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard. It has many similarities to The Alienist by Caleb Carr. It's set in roughly the same era, albeit in London instead of New York. And it's about criminal activities involving adults taking advantage of disadvantaged children. I understand the author got the idea, "What if I make a story about Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol as a grown-up man?" That "triggering town" story has nothing to do with this one. One of the things I like best about it is that it is peppered with letters from Tim to his dead father. I have written many a letter/letter-poem to dead people.

The idea opens up the world of possibilities: a letter which could never be read by its addressee, a piece of writing in which matters of life and death naturally come out, poignant paragraphs in which the writer can be brutally honest. It's as if the writer is shielded from any backlash and so is better able to say exactly what's on his mind. While inherently fanciful, letters to dead folks can be, nevertheless, cutting, insightful, and hyper-meaningful.

I think of Richard Hugo's "Letter to Simic from Boulder;" Hugo was well known for his seminal letter-poems. While Charles Simic wasn't dead when the poem was written, it is moving and, to me, focused on the one line, "And the world comes clean in moments like that for survivors, clean as clouds in summer, the pure puffed white." A letter to someone dead sets up a number of fertile premises: that one has survived, that one has clarity in retrospect, that we might still have audiences in those who no longer walk the earth.

The book is touching and well written. It carefully builds momentum to a gripping climax which satisfies the reader on several fronts: a hateful pedophile gets his just desserts, orphans find homes, new families and new hopes are created. The only point, a small one, I can fault the book for is that the character of Gully is not explored enough (most likely after editing the book to a workable length) so that his murder doesn't quite affect the reader the way the death of a more-fully developed character might. Still, it is a great work, one which stays with you.

*Nonfiction*

The Multnomah County Jail

I've seen the other side of the fence and, let me tell you, it's not pretty, not pretty at all. One minute--it could happen to you--you're walking free and the next you're being hauled away in front of your neighbors with uncomfortable metal bracelets behind your back. Take the toilet. I assumed I was innocent until proven guilty. Not judging by the toilet I had to lie next to for several hours. A toilet which saw constant use, and which had no seat I might add. One had to sit on the toilet itself, on the leftovers and spill-overs of the worst the world has to offer. You wouldn't dare bend over to clean it, for reasons which are by now apparent. It housed the sink on its back as well, where normally there are the proper fixings of a toilet. Not here. This was where you brushed your teeth. God forbid you have to move your bowels--sitting on that metal throne looking out at your cellmate, only a few feet in front of you, well, that is a fate I wouldn't wish on my enemies. I can now say I've laid down in the scum of 10,000 dirty criminals. I even know quite a few of their names. Dan Levitt was there some time in '98; Jessi Jenkins was there in '01; and poor old Randy Scogs haunted the joint briefly in '04. Judging from the mad scratching next to the spot where I inscribed my own name and date, Randy wasn't long for jail life. He was a rat, and not just one miscreant thought so; there were numerous inscriptions concurring, "You can say that again," and, "He rats on his own moms." It was six hours of hell for me, to be sure. As I laid in my bunk, painfully lacking my prescription medications, which everyone assured me I would have access to (they lied), and talked to Raphael about the fact that I already made bail, as I heard him lament, "Damn! I wish I could get out, or at least talk to my family," as I gladly handed over the barbaric leftovers from dinner, which I didn't touch, to a deviously gleeful inmate (I did so as if it were the most natural thing in the world), the notion really took hold in me that freedom to roam as you please, where and when, is life itself. Jail is not living; it is simply absence. Things are tough for inmates in the age of cell phones; all of Raphael's friends and family have cell phones, which don't accept collect calls, especially not from correctional institutions. I lucked out because my dear mother is sort of stuck in the old days, as am I in many ways. Still, it took me at least an hour to realize I should call her. In my hour of need, I realized oh-so clearly why it is I've always had a viscerally negative relationship with cell phones: what if one of my friends ends up in the clink? What if he has no one to call, like Raphael? What if he's stuck in a small room, with a locked door, with another (allegedly guilty) person, an open toilet, and stagnant air? I shudder to think of the thousands in the system, on a permanent basis, who have my dizzying condition, or any one of 100 other conditions, without proper and humane care, or who can't speak English, or are feeble and defenseless. I mean I'm pretty defenseless, but I walk as if I'm ready to tear someone's head off. That look has gotten me by in the worst of circumstances. I did indeed notice no one so much as looked at me sideways. I got respect from the other inmates. Maybe it was the tattoos all over my arms. Can't be sure. Nah. It had to be the willingness to tear off heads. I did learn at least one important fact in jail: innocent until proven guilty is a complete and total fallacy. I was guilty from the moment they slapped the cuffs on me, from the time they led me away, disallowing me to re-enter my own home, to get a coat (this being midwinter) or my pills, or anything at all, the whole time they held me at the Multnomah County Jail, as they had me strip, turn around, bend over and cough, as they locked me in my cell, and right up to the moment they let me go. No one ever said to me, "Remember, you're innocent until we prove your guilt." This was all about putting a man assumed to be guilty away. Never mind the truth--it's much too messy.

*Music*

Ray LaMontagne, Trouble--I downloaded this record after I'd had only the title track for some time. It's a standout album. Mr LaMontagne sounds like a much more experienced man than he is; I hear he's in his 20s. The songs found here are wise beyond those years. This music is a cross between country-folk and soul. It reminds me of Ryan Adam's great record Heartbreaker. Every song is a winner, and there is a great variety of song types on the recording. The song Trouble is a simple number in 6/8; many of my favorite songs are in that time signature, and, indeed, it has timeless, anthem-like qualities that I crave in all my music. This album is very well liked, critically and popularly. It's his debut, a 2004 release. He has a couple of other recordings, also well liked, which I will plan to acquire.

*MS*

My eyesight has deteriorated very quickly. I tried to watch a foreign film on DVD recently--no use; I couldn't read the subtitles. Jetta had a hoot when the other day at my doctor's office she commented on the lovely roses in a vase just off to our left. I said, "I couldn't tell you those were roses." She didn't stop laughing for a full two minutes. Later, I emailed asking if she might be available the following day. She wrote back, "I'll have someone there at noon with a white cane for you." (The eminent comedienne.) Anyway, it's gotten pretty bad. My neurologist set up a couple of appointments for me, one with a regular eye doctor, and one for a test called a VNG, Visual Nystagma Gram.

The test had several parts. All were done with me wearing special goggles; there was a camera covering my left eye, filming my eye movements the whole time. The first part involved following, with my eye, a red blip on a screen which moved in various different ways. The last part was the least comfortable: first cold then warm water was run into each of my ears for about a minute, with the camera recording my eye movements the whole time. The water-in-the-ear thing makes a person dizzy. These tests, and their recording with a camera, help doctors understand more about what might be making a person dizzy. My increasingly poor vision may be dizziness-related double vision. We'll see.

Peace, love, and ATOM jazz