Trivial Pursuits

3:30 am

the quiet, still city

softly luminescent

in the fabric of the wee hour.

will of the wisps,

cooing to me,

twenty-six stories high,

sounding in the deep.

the fastness bears no shadow,

night's wave lapping gently at my door;

the city, a fitful babe,

soft and

warm and

dark,

a quilt of stillness in the wee hour.

Wandering Star

I've always loved Portishead, and have maintained for some time that Dummy is one of the best albums of the 1990s. Beth Gibbons' ethereal, almost ghostly incantations are understated and "quietly devastating." I just love her voice.

Just put the album on the iPod Mini, and have been unable to stop listening to it.

My favorite song by them is "Wandering Star," which, I maintain, has one of the best beats I have ever heard on any trip-hop or hip-hop song. I'd love to see a quality rapper, maybe Common or Tip or Buckshot freestlye on that song. Wonder if anyone has done so? P, know of anyone who has?

In any case, not only is the bass line incredibly, but it so completely mirrors the misanthropic mood of the lyrics, it's almost perfect. Heavy, undulating, blistering, combined with the keening supplication and wail of Gibbons' voice and lyrics. So. Freaking. Good. Here are the lyrics, for your 'pleasure.' Bear in mind, they reflect a particular mood. I certainly cannot always relate (thank god, b/c it's a pretty devastating song), but the song definitely touches a part of me. It always has.

Please could you stay awhile to share my grief For its such a lovely day To have to always feel this way And the time that I will suffer less Is when I never have to wake

Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever
Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever

... Those who have seen the needles eye, now tread
Like a husk, from which all that was, now has fled
And the masks, that the monsters wear
To feed, upon their prey

Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever
Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever

[INSTRUMENTAL]

(always) doubled up inside
Take awhile to shed my grief
(always) doubled up inside
Taunted, cruel.... ...

Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever
Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever

I particularly love the second verse: the imagery is so evocative: "needle's eye," "husk," "monsters,"
"masks," and "prey." Being squeezed, flattened, stretched, threaded through the eye of a needle, used for piercing. A husk, an empty shell, being pursued by monsters who wear masks, endlessly searching out their prey. A wandering star, shimmering in the emptiness of dark matter, hurtling along.

Murakami, one of TP's all-time favorite authors, evokes a like image in his latest fiction novel, Sputnik Sweetheart. Loneliness, a constant theme in Murakami's work, is evoked in this work by the use of Laika, the dog that was sent up in orbit with the very first satellite (Sputnik). The satellite had no way of returning home, so it was a one-way ticket for Laika, who died in space a week after the launch. I find that a terribly sad image:

Ever since that day, Sumire's private name for Miu was Sputnik Sweetheart. Sumire loved the sound of it. It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?

This website has a lot of excellent information about Laika. Excerpts:

It is believed that Laika suffered no ill-effects during the ascent and insertion into orbit since the electrodes attached to her recorded normal vital signs. While weightless, she was able to take food and water from the onboard dispenser, bark and move around...although her movements were restricted by the harness she was wearing.

The site discusses possible times and precise causes of death for Laika, but includes a January 2, 2003 update which reads,

"It now seems certain, in light of more recent Russian sources, that Laika actually survived in orbit for four days . . . expiring when her cabin overheated."

Sputnik-2 (Laika's space vessel) continued to circle the earth for 163 days. During that time, it completed 2,370 orbits and traveled approximately 100 million kilometers. On April 14, 1958, the spacecraft...carrying the body of its valiant little pioneer...fell out of orbit and burned up during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Since there was no recovery procedure for true orbital flights in 1957, Laika is the only creature knowingly sent into space to die.

The end of this is what really tears me up:

In November of 1997, a plaque commemorating the contributions of Laika and other animals which were studied in the space program was unveiled at the Institute for Aviation and Space Medicine at Star City, just outside Moscow. The monument itself pays tribute to the fallen Russian cosmonauts, but in a corner is the image of a small mongrel dog...ears standing straight. A year later, one of the former lead scientists who had worked on the Soviet "animals-in-space" program expressed his deep regrets regarding Laika:

"The more time passes, the more I'm sorry....
We shouldn't have done it....
We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog."

Laika, the Wandering Star.

That should be quite enough sadness and dark things for your day. Carry on.

Required Reading: Hitler's Jews

I offer the good users of TP some brief respite from the heady fog of constitutional debate, with an article that ought to be required reading, IMO, and from a Houston newspaper, no less! (Alright, it was originally printed in the Dallas Observer).

The article is the story of Bryan Mark Rigg, an adjunct professor at SMU, a student at Yale and then at Cambridge. Here are the first few paragraphs, to whet your appetite:

Rigg had moved to Germany in 1994 to learn the language and research his senior essay. But the Arlington student's journey meant much more than a grade: He'd become obsessed with tracking down veterans of the Wehrmacht, Hitler's armed forces. And the 23-year-old student wasn't looking for just any old veterans. He was searching for the Mischlinge, men who'd survived "in the mouth of the wolf," as one soldier put it. The word, meaning half-breeds or mongrels and first applied to the offspring of white Germans and black Africans in the colonies, referred to a group of soldiers who'd straddled a chasm of contradiction: They were deemed part-Jewish by Nazi racial laws but had fought on the Führer's side.

Historians knew such men had served in Hitler's forces. But Rigg's professors at Yale told him he was wasting his time, that there were so few they were of little historical significance.

Rigg believed these eminent scholars were wrong.

Werner Goldberg, a blond-haired, blue-eyed half-Jew once held up by the Nazis as "the ideal German soldier," had told him about Stahlberg, who'd served as adjutant to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Some suspected Manstein was a Mischling himself, even though he'd given a notorious order calling for "the destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik system." Rigg knew he had to act immediately. The veterans of World War II were dying off; he couldn't let anything get in the way of his quest to capture the stories of the remaining Mischlinge.

Wow. A Jew named Goldberg who fought for the Nazis. The article is extremely well-written, because it manages to weave together the story of Rigg's life and his passion for the project (I don't want to give the article away, but Rigg discovers something quite amazing about his own geneology in pursuing his quest) with the research itself. A well-written article, an amazing story, a must-read article (and, I think, a must-read book). Certainly TP For Your Bunghole, in any case.

A Poem For Lawyers

The Unknown Citizen

W.H. Auden

(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every
way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it
cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war,
he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.