33 rebellions per minute
"Show us how you got this award of being alive"
1999
Yes, THE LADDER
"An extract of hemp, boosted with RNA, the 'learning molecule', A.U.M. also had small traces of the 'Frisco Speedball' -- heroin, cocaine, and LSD. The effect seemed to be that heroin stilled anxiety, the RNA stimulated creativity, the hemp and acid opened the mind to joy, and the cocaine was there to fit the Law Of Fives. The delicate balance created no hallucinations, no sense of high: just a sudden spurt in what Hagbard Celine liked to call 'constructive gullibility'" -- from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's novel The Illuminatus! Trilogy
This week, having abandoned Interview With A Vampire midway because I apparently prefer novels with at least a few characters who aren't dead, I started two new books, both at the requests of people I love. One, recommended to me by Cortney (whom I converted to Loud-fan status just in time for her to gush to me about the Boston stop of the Loud Family's ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE tour, and whom I therefore trust implicitly), is Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy. The other, recommended by T., the girl I've been recently courting, is The Book of Mormon. Both books purport to explain the workings of the universe; I hope I'll avoid getting the two mixed up.
I'm not, obviously, ready to review the books yet, but my impression so far is that Illuminatus, an acknowledged key influence on the Church of the SubGenius, races madly (and impishly) about designing a conspiracy of numerology, pyramid power, human sacrifice, the Kennedy assassination, extraterrestials, time-travel, crystals, the New York Police Department, 23 layers of hidden identity, and cosmic evil; and that Mormon proposes that the universe was consciously designed by a benign all-knowing God and that life can be a great blessing if one lives it properly and co-operates with one's fellow man. It was, of course, Cortney (the Wilson fan) who used the word "kook", as politely as possible, to describe T. (the Mormon)'s beliefs. We'll have to see whether I can learn to become indignant.
It's not that I have any trouble with believing in God. I think the God theory makes perfect sense, actually. The universe acts a lot like one of those fascinating Artificial Life experiments I would spend my life happily creating if I had any computer talent. I could never play Pursue The Pennant or Sid Meier's Civilization for more than a month without starting to develop far richer rules to play under; rules that, while just as streamlined, would be far more flexible yet far more realistic. The universe, on both a macrophysics level and a life/evolution level, strikes me as the most realistic set of game rules ever devised, and spectacularly flexible; it is, in other words, exactly the sort of thing I would create over lunch break if I happened to be an omnipotent deity. How condescending is it to suggest that _real_ omnipotent deities are less clever than I am? Ahem.
I can also accept, at least in theory, that God would intervene on human behalf once in a while. I mean, think about it: if you were checking in on a planet that, after a few billion years, had turned out astonishingly interesting, and some schnook organism called "President Kennedy" or "Premiere Khrushchev" decided to blow the whole ecosystem up because of some missiles in "Cuba", would you just sit back and accept it? Or would you call up the last Save point and restart things, and restart again if necessary until things went proper? It doesn't matter what you would do, actually, since you're not God. Or if You are, would You mind setting me up with a regular column in Rolling Stone? I could use the money, and Anton Barbeau's new CD could use the publicity. Thank You.
Where my would-be faith breaks down is in all the boring usual places. Y'know, the places where innocent children are condemned to work 100-hour weeks in 100-degree weather; where Lieutenant Calleys mow down entire villages, terrorist and pacifist and baby equally shot; where total morons are paid huge sums of money to first sign a commercially implausible TV show called Freaks and Geeks (whose characters look like the description warns, instead of like Matthew Perry on a bad-hair day) and then make sure it actually airs in only five of its first 22 weeks before shifting to another night in an attempt to win over, for a show conspicuously set in 1980, the audience born in 1985, when any random starving crack baby could've made better business decisions. God's interest in humanity, regardless of whether He saves us from self-destruction, doesn't seem to extend otherwise beyond a completely amoral curiosity in how everything'll come out. Fairness? Kindness? Those are as entertaining as anything else, maybe, but that's it. That I can see.
Perhaps, very likely, that's my final take on the matter. What I've realized is that it's not a very useful take, or necessarily a desireable one. Partly, sure, this is T.'s fault. Someone smart, pretty, curious, impudent, fond of Jane Siberry and fonder of wordplay, someone with the preternatural maturity to conduct serious conversations for exactly as long as they are useful and then break into dramatic readings from Dr. Seuss, decides that conceivably she'd be interested in marrying me, sometime, if I just tossed aside a core of secular humanist beliefs I've spent years perfecting. I nod and say "I suppose I could research the issue". Yeah, yeah.
But I've also had occasion, in years past, to consider if I wanted to risk having Scientologist children, or no children at all; I've steered my interests elsewhere. Mormon, odd though it seems, intrigued me already. It was hard not to read Orson Scott Card's the Lost Boys, his semi-autobiographical novel, and not envy the activities of the Mormon church, welcoming newcomers to town and structuring a community that, in everything perhaps except the nature of its core beliefs, is sane and deeply nurturing. It was hard not to raise eyebrows at Louise Plummer's essay collection Thoughts of a Grasshopper. Plummer is a delightful and on-balance happy woman. She sings and tap dances and makes faces in elevators, then puts on her best flat elevator stare when the door opens. She can't take down Christmas ornaments without wearing them all over the vampy red dress she reserves for that annual task. In shyness-emboldened chutzpah, she wrote her audition to a chorus on paper ("First, I shall sing in my lower range beginning at middle C and ending with low B, beyond which I just grunt. Here goes: La La La La La La La La La. Now for my upper range, beginning at middle C and moving up: La La. As you can see, I have the range of Nancy Sinatra...") and got in! She also declares her faith in Jesus's resurrection and in the goodness and kindness of her fellow churchgoers-thus-friends, buoyed by faith extending beyond this life and her knowledge of God's infallibility. Never mind that such a passage followed as harrowing, disturbingly honest an account of the dark side of parenthood as I've ever read. Never mind that I'd have been no more goggle-eyed if she'd launched, with equally visible earnestness, into an epic melange of anti-FBI paranoia, recipes for spinach dressing, and the more bizarre sections of Finnegan's Wake. If Ms. Plummer can make a life I so wholeheartedly approve, using superstitious garbage as a tool, who am I to insist her tools stink?
It's hard not to notice that a disproportionate share of good-deed-doing, in the community activist way I approve of, has been done by churches; that the Methodist, Baptist, and Catholic churches of America all approve platforms that would put them well on the political left even in Sweden; that the most morally effective opposition to the World Trade Organization has been led by church groups. It is hard not to notice that it seems to be much easier to do good deeds, rather than merely propose them, if you think -- however much supralogical mindwork this requires -- that Good is destined to win; and if you have a community who will agree with you, not break out in skeptical half-laughter, if you suggest your life might have purpose.
Yes, whatever else one might say about them, believe that Good will win. Yes are not a Mormon band; their references to heaven aside, their spirituality seems like a cocktail of Christianity, New Age, and Bill Bryson's Reasons To Be Happy (that 1, you have the astonishing good fortune to be alive, out of all possible genetic combos who could've taken your place; that 2, you have the astonishing good luck, after 10 billion years of being dead, to be alive _now_; that 3, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree" will never top the charts again). But as they faded away from being the greatest band of the dizzyingly ambitious music era of Progressive Rock (my essays on FRAGILE and CLOSE TO THE EDGE were destroyed, alas, by some Geocities computer bug), their dominant trait, increasingly, became their increasingly easy-to-mock choirboy optimism. It is, on the whole, a bad thing that their spiritually simplistic cure-alls got simpler just as their music did; of their post-progressive, 1983+ era, albums, several (90125, TALK, OPEN YOUR EYES) slid neatly into the shiny, polished dullness of "just as long as you hold the fire from the inside" and "through the eyes of a child, through the song of songs", of "God talk, Now talk" and "the power of love can open up every heart in everyone". THE LADDER got my attention because glenn mcdonald, a Loud-fan very high on the list of people whose musical opinions I respect, credited it as maybe the best record of their career, recapitulating their old ambitions in their new terms; and because he agrees with me that much of their recent material blows.
In musical terms, the easy part of the evaluation, I end up, to my absolute delight, agreeing with glenn. The production gloss is at least as high as ever, aided by producer Bruce Fairbairn, whose main claim to my respect had been producing astonishingly dignified, catchy, good albums from any number of trashy pomp-metal '80's bands (Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Poison, Rock + Hyde). The choruses are loud, emphatic, tuneful, and soaring. The various ethnic touches that Yes has been playing with all decade are incorporated, at last, into pop structures without striking me as at all forced: "It Will Be A Good Day"'s African flute and drums point the song slightly complex-ward of Sting; "Can I?" sounds like the Beatles, on a SGT PEPPER studio-gimmickry high, inventing their own tribe to crib from. "To Be Alive (Hep Yadda)" incorporates exactly one verse of African woodwind and talking drums into a structure that sounds like choirboys turning a Knack song into Don Henley's "Down At The Sunset Grill". "Nine Voices" is comfortably faux-ethnic in ways that, except for what seems to be a didgideroo, I can't identify. And if Paul Simon had had the pleasantly strident calypso/reggae/prog/pop "Lightning Strikes" ready to follow "You Can Call Me Al" as a single, I daresay the hype about GRACELAND would never have irritated me for a second.
The playing is also unassumingly amazing in ways that Yes had become increasingly shy about in the wake of the New Wave. "Homeworld (the Ladder)" races through changes and instrumental duels that would transcribe neatly onto Rush albums. The multi-segmented "New Language" opens with a dazzlingly glitzy organ solo that, along with an even more breathtaking interlude in "Interior Lulu" on the latest Marillion album, has me hoping that progressive rock is willing to readmit its rock-star heritage. A later segment of "...Language" shows most of the band ready, with 25 years to consider, to admit Steely Dan side-by-side with the rest of the pantheon, over which Chris Squire drapes, for the first time in years, a solo in his all-too-unique loud, fast, "really fucked-up amp" (his term) style. "Finally" swaggers, albeit with good-natured twerpishness, in 6/4 time like a collaboration between the Buggles and Def Leppard, before settling into two minutes of quite pretty noodling. "Face To Face" is something like Boston performing selections from WHO'S NEXT, and something like a synthesizer imitation of the Boston Philharmonic doing the same. Only "If Only You Knew" is something that any good band should be physically able to perform fairly eptly, but it manages the also remarkable feat of combining "Sister Christian" and "Wind Beneath My Wings" without being, to me, even slightly cloying. I like it a lot.
Moved by music that genuinely amazes me, I've also come to notice that, at least on this album, the Yes-men lyricists aren't nearly the dummkopfs I might assume.
"The Messenger" isn't a song of transcendalist propaganda, it's a defense of the _use_ of propaganda, the sacrifices one makes to teach optimism to one's literal and metaphorical children. "It Will..." celebrates nature and other people as sources of pleasure, but choruses about "learning to listen, learning to see... giving me good reason", understanding that the mad rush of progress and accumulation is simply another expression of a pleasure drive that has to be trained, of course, if it's ever going to be directed towards the appreciation of what already exists. "Show me how you got this award of being alive" fuses the optimist and moralist impulses well enough that I wish it was my line. As for "it's not so much what you know, or who you know that's coming/ It's what you do regardless"... well, that's kind of my dilemma, for now.
THE LADDER would, if I'd waited til now, May 2000, to make my Best Albums of 1999 list, have finished 2nd. It had to convince me that I could sing along even with generic lines about "touching my feelings, touching my spirit" without embarrassment, and it succeeded. The music is more uplifting to me than the words, by far, but I accept the package happily. Nothing in that prevents me from singing joyously along tomorrow, if I want to, with the Sex Pistols' "Bodies" and its immortal lines "fuck this and fuck that! Fuck it all the fuckers, fucking brat!". Yes, the band, might think I'm missing the point if I want to, but that's the lovely thing about albums: they don't demand exclusivity. I learn from them at my own chosen pace.
Women, I suspect, can be less co-operative. While I wouldn't write any of my love-life ponderings if I didn't think they might be interesting to a stranger -- or if I didn't have T.'s permission -- I'm probably also very open to unsolicited advice right about now. Gullibility can be constructive; cliches can acquire power for good if enough people aren't kidding when they mouth them; my belief that good is better than evil is enough to prove that I gave up being a rationalist long, long ago. But if my hypothetical future kids ever ask "Mommy, is Daddy going to go to hell for skipping church and reading me the orgy scenes in Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure?", I have been informed in clear terms that "Yes, he is, and he'll suffer in agony eternally, so go mow the lawn for him now, while he can enjoy the rest, okay sweetie?" is not going to be an acceptable answer. There are things I know that -- even if I could handle not passing them on -- I don't want to forget. But if none of those things got in each other's way, this question wouldn't have arisen.
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