Sunshine

date unknown

Woke up in the jungle bag, sun filtering past poorly hung curtains. Frosted flakes and seven-up for breakfast and somebody doing a bad Charlie Parker. Bear rose and had breakfast. Went out to work on his bike. Robbie took off downtown. I stayed.

It's weird, sitting here warm and snug. Hard to remember Edey's off in some unknown country called "Alberta". Keep expecting him to crawl out of the shower and start tuning guitars.

The Michael Jackson Post

Life ain't so bad at all, if you live it off the wall.

Michael Jackson, 1979

I was shaving to Billie Jean - a dangerous thing to do - this morning when I decided to write this post.

Michael was a couple of grades ahead of me, but I still felt like he was growing up along with me. It wasn't just that the Jackson 5 - who admittedly lived in a different country and tax bracket - were there, on my transistor radio and floor model tv, all through the bell-bottom years. As my music tastes and sense of the world changed, so did his music and presentation.

Michael wasn't a monster star in white bread Atlantic Canada in the 70s. I'm not sure we had monster stars apart from Hollywood. As Motown morphed into disco, his voice was nearly lost. I graduated to the sound of Off The Wall, but what I remember talking about was that horrid Punk we pretended to like.

Then Thriller came along. Wow. The music, the videos, the dance steps.... Some cultural historian will write a properly learned paper about the synergy between Jackson performance style and the emergence of music video as popular music's dominant medium. All I can say is that we were mightily impressed.

And then it was over.

Yes, the Thriller videos played on. Yes, I remember the video of Dirty Diana getting some play. But mostly I remember the resurgence of classic rock, sometimes disguised as Seattle Grunge or "New Country", sometimes packaged in a kick-ass soundtrack or a reunion tour. In either case, Michael's music slid away from us.

At the same time, so did Michael.

Maybe if he'd stopped by the apartment, or come up to the house, things could have been different. Probably not. But in any case, Jackson began acting crazy and, too soon, became the Weird Al version of himself. By the mid-90s, he was tabloid fare, and not much else.

Of course, in a few years, the mp3 / ipod zaniness was upon us and, like the music industry, us 70s kids lost track of most popular music. Like Will Smith's character in I, Robot we might wake up to Stevie or Michael (and fall asleep to Dionne or Gladys), but those were memories - comfort food for when crazy George Bush was at us again.

In any case, young Michael was long gone. This new guy didn't even look like the little sparkplug who used to front the Jacksons or the funster who gave us Thriller. Sometimes the voice was the same. Sometimes, you could close your eyes and remember....

When Jackson died a little while back, the rightwing shock jocks and tabloids (a.k.a., the mainstream media) shouted the same shit they always shout. Left-leaning cultural critics, especially from the Black community, struggled to find a narrative of oppression or suppression or racism in his story. But, mostly, the news was about the news: for a day and a half, the internet was wall-to-wall wacko-jacko.

Off the wall, and long ago, there was another Michael Jackson. I remember him with the same fondness I remember so much of the 70s. (Sentimental mis-remembering is a foolishness old men are prone to.)

Which is why, when the news came out, I didn't know what to write or say or think. Every death is a loss, a waste. I'm sorry we drive our most talented people crazy. I guess I'm sorry Michael won't be here for 2010.

But, you know, it felt like he was already 10 years gone.

Readings

Igor Merfert's been keeping me up at night with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Tales of Terror and Mystery - by way of Librivox.

Most recently, I listened to his reading of a story set underground called "The Terror Of The Blue John Gap".

Of Snowstorms and Earthrise

Okay. My last "storm" post.

Here's a morning after pictures from uptown. Actually, they were taken mid-day.

Snow removal was a bit of a challenge, as you can see. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with a city councilor's weekend comments about cutting city workers' pay. In any case, it made for few people at the mall, and a little less craziness in the parking lots. I was able to get almost all my Christmas shopping done in relative peace.



In other news, 40 years ago today the Apollo 8 spacecraft was on it's second day out from Earth, and about half-way to the moon.


On December 21st 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell (of Apollo 13 fame) and William Anders were lifted off the Earth's surface by the mighty Saturn 5 rocket. Three days later, on Christmas Eve, they passed behind the moon, orbiting about 125 km above it's surface.

And sent back our first pictures of "Earthrise."



Has anything been the same since?

Climate Wars

I'm just about finished reading Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer. It's a disturbing book - frightening and depressing. An interview he gave with an Australian network (ABC News) catches the flavour:

In a large belt around the equator, he says, there will be "huge falls in the amount of crops that you can grow because there isn't the rain and it's too hot."

That will apply particularly to the Mediterranean... and so not just the north African countries, but also the ones on the northern side of the Mediterranean.

The ones in the European Union like Spain and Italy and Greece and the Balkans and Turkey are going to be suffering huge losses in their ability to support their populations.

It may mean the collapse in the global trade of food because while some countries still have enough, there is still a global food shortage.

If you can't buy food internationally and you can't raise enough at home, what do you do? You move. So refugee pressures - huge ones - are one of the things that drives these security considerations.

India and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed countries. All of the agriculture in Pakistan and all of the agriculture in northern India depend on glacier-fed rivers that come off the Himalayas from the Tibetan plateau. Those glaciers are melting... at 7 per cent a year, which means they're half gone in 10 years.

India has a problem with this. Pakistan faces an absolutely lethal emergency because Pakistan is basically a desert with a braid of rivers running through it.

Those rivers all start with one exception in Indian-controlled territory and there's a complex series of deals between the two countries about who gets to take so much water out of the river. Those deals break down when there's not that much water in the rivers.

[Once] you go past 2 degrees - and you could get past 2 degrees by the 2040s without too much effort - things start getting out of control. The ocean starts giving back to the atmosphere the carbon dioxide it absorbed. That world is a world where crop failures are normal.

Where, for example, Australia does not export food any more, it is hanging on to what it can still grow to feed its own people but that is about all that it is going to be able to do, and many countries can't even do that.

The book, of course, is a lot more detailed and reasoned. Dyer builds his argument with facts, interviews and narrative scenarios.

Gwynne Dyer's not a crackpot. He's not even a hard-line lefty. He's a military analyst and author who has served in three navies and held academic posts at the both Royal Military College at Sandhurst and Oxford University. He's also writes regular current-events columns for about 175 English-language newspapers (except in Canada where he's mostly banned).

I enjoy his writing not least because of the "calm-down, it's not as bad as you think" tone that much of his work conveys. This perspective comes from comparing recent wars and upheavals to that absolute disaster called World War Two (where, for weeks on end, 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers and civilians died in each day's fighting).

But now he's not saying "calm down." He's saying, "I'm worried." He's saying, we have to stop producing more airborne carbon each year, and we need to have moved completely away from carbon and fossil fuels by 2050.

So, you can imagine my dismay at living in a city and province that absolutely celebrates (and pours tax money into) the building of a new oil refinery. My neighbours all want us to invest heavily in the future and long-term production of airborne carbons. As one Saint Johner put it, "Even if there's a little bit of flooding, I mean, people can always move."

Not, I think, far enough.

November

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
when the gales of November came early.

There are few November songs more chilling than Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (Quality fan site here.) It is, I think, chiefly the empty sound, the slight echo behind the electric guitar, the rattle of the drum-kit, that gives the song it's atmosphere. Not that the lyrics don't count: they certainly do. But this is a long song, and the surprise is that we don't tire of it more quickly.

By the way, the photo above is indeed of a "laker" - a freighter on one of the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, I no longer know where it's from (I think some one emailed it to me years ago).

The music player below is from Grooveshark - hosting a legal and free way to use music on the web through their own agreements with artists and major labels (song and lyric copyright G. Lightfoot, etc.).

Murder on the the Accra / Kumasi Express

I've come into some information. I'm not sure what to do with it.

According to an email received last Spring by a third party, a certain Mr.Andy Runyon, his wife and their only son perished in a car accident. The fatal crash happened in southern Ghana, along the Accra / Kumasi express road, on 21 April 2002. The family's lawyer is Barrister Paul Adams. Mr Adams has, since the crash, been looking for a relative to settle the unhappy family's estate. What size estate? A cool 10.4 million, US, plus substantial property.

Sad, but not remarkable, you say? Well, here the plot thickens. I have, this very day, received this communication:

I am Barrister Paul Adams a Solicitor. I am the Personal Attorney to Mr.Andy Dryden, who is a national of your country.... On the 21st of April 2004, my client, his wife and their only son were involved in a car accident along Accra / Kumasi express road. Unfortunately they all lost their lives....

Coincidence? I think not! Especially since Mr. Dryden also had a bank account holding millions of US dollars. Most chilling, Mr. Adams, working with his chamber of commerce, has proposed to share this money:

...55% to me and 40% to you, while 5% should be for expenses or tax as your government may require. I have all necessary legal documents that can be used to backup the claim.

Anyone can believe in a stretch of bad highway. It may be that expatriates share the same lawyer. Ghana is not a large country. But how are we to account for the deceased both being extremely rich men?

Who is this mysterious Paul Adams? What is his relationship with local government officials? What significance does April 21st hold in the murky sub-culture of Ghana? What really happened on that lonely stretch of the Accra / Kumasi Express?

I'll tell you what happened. Murder! Murder most foul!




stay safe. thks.