Sometimes a song, an album, or even a whole band gets tied up in your head with a particular place or event, so that you’ll never be able to think of the one without the other again. The Pernice Brothers will always take me back to a bitterly cold afternoon at Common Grounds not long after the place opened. This was before it became a neighborhood fixture and long before the free wi-fi, so there were only a handful of people there. Brad, one of the managers at the time, put on the Pernice Brothers’ first album, Overcome by Happiness and we the patrons experienced what, thanks to High Fidelity, is now known as a Beta Band moment. Everyone sort of stopped what they were doing and listened for a bit. An exquisite sad sweetness filled us from the toes up. When I headed up to the counter for a refill, Brad grabbed me by the shoulders and, after a deep sigh, declaimed the lines from “All I Know”: “All your friends may go / And your luck may go / But you’ll never feel as bad / As when she goes.”

Brad was a little odd, even as coffee shop managers go.

Anyway, with the CG crew boosting them on one hand and my buddy Joe declaring them “the world’s best power pop band” on the other, I got my hands on their music and quickly became a fan. I lack the critical acumen to describe bands without falling back on concepts like ‘peppy,’ ‘sad,’ or ‘cool,’ but if you scan reviews of their albums, you’ll see the recurring words ‘orchestration,’ ‘lush arrangements,’ ‘vocal harmonies,’ ‘layered,’ and ‘awash.’ A Rolling Stone review gets it about right with this: ”[their albums are] as spiffy and catchy as they are timid and wicked.”

The Pernice Brothers frequently visit the DC area; they played at the Black Cat last Thursday night. Sadly, the backing vocals were mixed so low as to be practically inaudible—I didn’t realize what a crucial element they were to so many of the songs until they were gone. Apparently there were numerous other sound-related issues that irritated Joe but got past me. Still, hearing material live from their most recent album, “Yours, Mine and Ours,” raised my estimation of it considerably—it had been taking a while for it to grow on me at home. (“The World Won’t End,” their second, is still their best, and the best place to start.)

I have a fun game that I like to play whenever I see the band: it’s called “Watch Peyton Pinkerton’s Cigarette.” This fine guitarist smokes up a storm while he plays, but his lips cover no more than a millimeter of his cigarette’s filter. No matter how he bobs and sways while he plays, it rarely gets dislodged. Once, when I saw Peyton and Joe Pernice playing at Iota, it did fall: Peyton was sitting, and before the cigarette had cleared the plane of his seat, he grabbed it in midair and gracefully put it back in his mouth. Since then I’ve longed to witness a similar feat, but just speculating about what cartoon laws of physics apply to Peyton’s cigarettes is pretty fun, too.

A Message for the Patrons of the DC Music Scene:

Dadgummit, shake your asses a little more! Maybe it’s easier to look cool when you’re standing still, but physically responding to the music that you hear is part of human nature. I realize that you’re largely a bunch of program managers and policy analysts who haven’t cut loose since your undergrad days at Stanford or Georgetown or William & Mary or wherever, and that many of you are in bands yourselves and thus for reasons of pride try to avoid liking the band on stage too much, but it’s not like I’m asking you to mosh—just give yourselves over bodily to the music a little more than you are. I promise that the band that’s playing will be much happier if you do—they’re not telepaths, and so the way they know they’re getting through to you is by seeing you do something. As an added bonus, if you and the people around you put on your groove thang when appropriate, the band will get your vibe, and play better as a result. And if you have a good excuse for not shakin’ it, like a bum knee or a heart condition, then at the very least don’t look scornfully at those who are. We’re only doing what comes naturally.

On Lehrer the other night they had a piece on “Alhurra”:http://www.alhurra.com/, the Springfield-based, U.S.-funded, Arabic language, 24-hour satellite TV channel broadcasting in the Middle East. Depending on who you ask, Alhurra is either an attempt to provide an objective alternate to Al Jazeera, or a bit o’ the ol’ propaganda.

But either way, can somebody explain this? Italics are mine:

There are hourlong news broadcasts twice a day, news updates on the hour, and a daily discussion show along with a magazine show, and features on fashion and cuisine. The network’s rundown also includes Arabic subtitled versions of Frontline _and Inside the Actors’ Studio_.

Whose cockamamie idea was it to export “James Lipton”:http://www.bravotv.com/Inside_the_Actors_Studio/?! I can’t really see why Arab viewers would need or want to see American actors get their egos massaged by a stuffy guy spewing sycophantic drivel. As propaganda it’s just confusing, and as an honest attempt to expose new audiences to our culture, it’s just a really dumb choice. Maybe the producers could buy it for cheap. Maybe all those blue notecards can deliver subliminal messages through the camera. Otherwise, I’m stumped.

I haven’t had a chance to absorb much information about Bush’s support for Sharon’s current plans for the peace process. The media coverage left me with a good deal of puzzlement: Is this a major shift in American policy toward Israel, or not?

As if in answer to my unspoken plea, Jonathan Edelstein steps up and “dishes out the clues”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/024274.html.

Everybody’s a Firefly fan these days, but I was there at the beginning, watching the show on Friday nights when most people, thanks to the barren time slot and abysmal marketing, didn’t even know it existed. The first episode that aired—not the pilot, yet another gaffe on Fox’s part—was just OK, but after the third one, “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” it was clear that Joss Whedon had outdone himself. I was hooked. Each new episode was like a little gem in a box waiting to be opened. Not since the second season of Buffy had television been that good, and—yep, I’ll come out and say it—Firefly was even better than Buffy.

But its whole existence was a struggle, and when Fox canceled the show after only airing eleven episodes, it wasn’t too much of a surprise. Firefly has only grown in popularity since—a movie is in the works, and over on Amazon the DVDs of the TV episodes is ranked #32 in sales, and has a solid five-star rating out of 811 reviews.

I managed to stretch out the experience of watching the DVDs over two months, instead of burning through all the episodes in one sitting, as some are wont to do. I did this by only turning it on while I was giving Ella a bottle, and forcing myself to turn it off at the first commercial break after she was done. I tried to savor every moment, especially those of the three unaired episodes, which I was seeing for the first time. It was a glorious, sad experience. Such a wonderful show. So much potential wasted. The movie might be good, but the setting, the characters, everything about it was designed for a long-term, ongoing tale; the movie can’t hope to capture what was best about the show.

You’d certainly never get what was best about the show by reading a summary. A western in space?? A rusty spaceship hauling cattle between planets?? Laser pistols and western twang? What saves it from being a mere gimmicky genre-mash is the care Whedon took to draft a coherent, detailed, authentic world—er, universe, or in this case, solar system full of terraformed planets. The circumstances that make it possible for there to be a western frontier dynamic in deep space simultaneously reinforce a believeable history. This is nowhere more evident than in the language everyone speaks. On one level, Fireflyspeak is another wacky, mannered dialect along the lines of Buffyspeak or WestWingspeak. But it also fits neatly into the setting, like the way that an Earth dominated by Chinese culture leads to a language sprinkled with expressions in Mandarin. In a sense, though, all this is just icing on the cake. Take away the slang and the spaceships and the special effects and you still have the golden heart of the show: a perfect ensemble cast.

(A brief confession, here: I have taken to using the Firefly expression “shiny” in everyday life. Consciously trying to emulate the language of a short-lived, defunct sci-fi television show probably elevates me to a yet higher plane of geekdom, if that’s possible.)

I thought maybe I’d use this entry to explain Firefly for those who haven’t seen it, but there’s too much to say, and most folks already know the deal. Go see it if you haven’t; what follows is just a fanboy list.

Best Episode: “Serenity,” “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” and “Out of Gas” are the main contenders here, with “Objects in Space” a clear fourth. OMR is definitely the most tightly written and funniest, but OOG and OIS win in the emotional-impact department. The pilot should win some sort of award for “Most Elegant and Seamless Introduction of a Complicated and Bizarre Setting and Tone While Simulatenously Telling a Fine Tale.”

Worse Episode: “Safe,” despite some lovely scenes in the beginning, because of the whole “she’s a witch!” routine at the end. It’s as flat as the show ever got.

Best of the Unaired Episodes: “Trash,” though they’re all good.

Favorite Character: Jayne. Duh!

Character That You Identify With Most Even If You’d Rather Not Admit It: Wash. Duh!

Best All-Around Scene In Any Episode: Last scene of “Ariel,” where Jayne’s trapped in the airlock and says “Don’t tell them what I done. Make something up,” and that’s what convinces Mal to let him live.

Cool Scene That You Know Would Have Been In the Show If Only It Had Continued: Jayne redeeming himself and saving River by totally kicking the shit out of one of those freaky hands-of-blue dudes.

Pet Theory: How about this: Inara’s pregnant, and that’s why she’s leaving the ship. The thing that tipped me off is Early’s line in “Objects in Space” as he and Simon are leaving Inara’s shuttle: “Man is stronger by far than woman, but only woman can create a child—does that seem right to you?” I wish I could think of a River line that hints at the same thing, because that would cinch it.

Coolest Firefly Site I Didn’t Already Know About: The Firefly Chinese Pinyinary, listing and explaining all the Chinese dialogue in the show.

Best News So Far About the Movie: That all the original cast members are signed on. The ensemble is complete.

Rumor About the Movie That Will Please Some But Makes Me Queasy: That David Boreanaz will be in it too.

Question for Gary Farber : Weren’t you, like, totally geeked when you saw “Ariel” and Simon talked about how they removed River’s amygdala?

I realize that by gushing this way about Firefly I’m only jumping on an already-full bandwagon. But it’s a fine wagon to be on. Shiny, even.

Overheard in front of the coffee shop:

A scruffy but ebullient guy walks up to two young women who are smoking. “Hey! Might I trouble one of you for a cigarette?” he says.

“Sure,” says one of them.

He takes it and lights it in one smooth motion. After he’s savored it for a drag, he says to them: “I don’t suppose I could stay at your place tonight, could I?”

They decline, but far from freaking them out, he actually ends up charming them for a few minutes by conducting his side of the conversation in spontaneous rhyme. After they leave he sits down and keeps the rhymes up in monologue.

For all I know he’s rhyming still . . .

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was “burning through”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000119.html Neal Stephenson’s last 900-page novel. But the second part of the Baroque Cycle, “The Confusion”:amazon:confusion+stephenson, is hitting the shelves tomorrow. Mine’s on order, so I’ll be getting it a few days later — but that’s just as well since I’m finally close to finishing _The Book of the New Sun_, which I’ve been chipping away at for “way too long now”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000171.html.

I never did get around to doing any further blogging about _Quicksilver_ after my initial review. I’ll save my thoughts for a big, spoiler-heavy post after I finish _The Confusion_. And a review before that, naturally. This book definitely snuck up on me, which is a very fine and unexpected thing; usually I get impatient watching the calendar for the arrival of the objects of my fanboy affections.

“Bums, on Waking” by James Dickey

Bums, on waking,
Do not always find themselves
In gutters with water running over their legs
And the pillow of the curbstone
Turning hard as sleep drains from it.
Mostly, they do not know

But hope for where they shall come to.
The opening of the eye is precious,

And the shape of the body also,
Lying as it has fallen,
Disdainfully crumpling earthward
Out of alcohol.
Drunken under their eyelids
Like children sleeping toward Christmas,

They wait for the light to shine
Wherever it may decide.

Often it brings them staring
Through glass in the rich part of town,
Where the forms of humanized wax
Are arrested in midstride
With their heads turned, and dressed
By force. This is ordinary, and has come

To be disappointing.
They expect and hope for

Something totally other:
That while they staggered last night
For hours, they got clear,
Somehow, of the city; that they
Burst through a hedge, and are lying
In a trampled rose garden,
Pillowed on a bulldog’s side,
A watchdog’s, whose breathing

Is like the earth’s, unforced —
Or that they may, once a year
(Any dawn now), awaken
In church, not on the coffin boards
Of a back pew, or on furnace-room rags,
But on the steps of the altar

Where candles are opening their eyes
With all-seeing light

And the green stained-glass of the windows
Falls on them like sanctified leaves.
Who else has quite the same
Commitment to not being sure
What he shall behold, come from sleep —
A child, a policeman, an effigy?

Who else has died and thus risen?
Never knowing how they have got there,

They might just as well have walked
On water, through walls, out of graves,
Through potter’s fields and through barns,
Through slums where their stony pillows
Refused to harden, because of
Their hope for this morning’s first light,

With water moving over their legs
More like living cover than it is.

Jim wrestles with the “anger, frustration, bitterness and guilt” he feels about the situation in Iraq, and in the process “speaks for many of us”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_04_11.html#005238. Certainly for me.

I’ll leave the punditry to the proper authorities, but I did notice something interesting about Condi Rice’s testimony today before the 9/11 commission. I listened to most of it on NPR as it was happening, but also saw TV excerpts on Lehrer this evening. And she came off way worse on camera than she did audio-only. Mainly it was her smile, which tried to say “I’m just a congenial bureaucrat trying to be helpful, here,” but seemed forced and often insincere — especially since it broadened when she was the most stressed-out. That stress was much more evident on the screen, too. On the radio none of that was evident, and she sounded fine. Oh, plus there was the whole shellac hairdo thing, but it’s hardly fair to single her out on that count. Certainly not in this town.

Symbols—the ones that we wear, or put on our bumpers, or hang in our windows, or sear onto our flesh—are slippery things. My mistaken assumption that the nail necklace originated with the movie The Passion of the Christ got me thinking about such symbols, but before I get to that let’s start with the American flag.

The flag still serves as a unified symbol when it adorns public institutions, but as a personal expression of patriotism, it has long been fractured. In the Vietnam era, displaying the flag was associated not simply with support or enthusiasm for one’s country, but with support for the current government and especially its policy on the war. War protesters and draft dodgers didn’t fly flags—sometimes they burned them, a clear indication that they associated the symbol not with America-in-general but with an establishment they felt estranged from. (Of course some protesters no doubt did wave flags, but not with a subtext of ‘Well, duh, why wouldn’t I be flying a flag?’ but rather ‘Hey! This is my symbol too!’) UPDATE: See Patrick’s comment in the comments on this point. (I’m very curious about the pre-Vietnam history of the flag-as-symbol—anybody know anything about it?) Resentment and anger are bound to erupt whenever different groups look at the same symbol and see different things.

For a brief moment immediately after 9/11, the American flag moved toward achieving a unified meaning. When tears streamed down my cheeks watching a huge flag unfurl down the side of the Pentagon, it wasn’t because I had had a sudden change of heart about the current Administration; it was because what that flag meant at that moment had nothing to do with government, even for a habitual non-flag-waver like me. A couple weeks later, I was annoyed to hear someone complaining about how everyone had started displaying flags. “Don’t you get it?” I wanted to say to him, “It doesn’t mean what it used to.” Sadly, the meaning has drifted again, and now the flag does mean pretty much what it used to, thanks in large part to the polarization of public opinion over the Iraq war. Much as we talk about the flag as an abstract symbol of liberty and patriotism, there seems to be a strong force pulling it toward association with our government and its policies at any given moment in time.

The Christian cross is a far older, clearer symbol than the flag. Look at someone wearing a cross around her neck—now, or at any point in the past several centuries—and you don’t have to worry about semantic drift or speculate as to what exactly what they mean by wearing it. They mean to say that they’re a Christian. As statements go, though, that’s awfully broad. A cross conveys the basics of their religious outlook, but given the vast number of Christians in the world, and the dizzying diversity of their cultures, theologies, and political persuasions, it doesn’t really tell you their tribe.

And that’s what a lot of symbol-wearing comes down to: identifying your tribe. A cross does this to an extent, but a Celtic cross, an Ethiopian cross, a St. George icon, or a WWJD bracelet clarifies even more. When I go to Gencon I have to decide if I’m going to wear my Over the Edge t-shirt, my MECCG t-shirt, or just a regular old t-shirt (which at Gencon is itself a sort of tribal identification). Nose rings, Nascar jackets, and plenty of things between serve a similar purpose. Even the American flag, in the more narrow meaning I described above, identifies one’s tribe.

But I digress. Another thing about the cross is that the horrific event it literally represents is often forgotten precisely because the symbol is so old and well-established. That’s why Ana wore a nail necklace, as she described in the comments of my earlier entry:

I wore mine that Lent, I think it must have been either ‘95 or ‘96.
It is a more raw symbol than a cross, just because we have seen the Cross as symbol of Christ’s death for so long, that it stops being something shocking. Sometimes when we walk around as Christians for years we forget what it means.

This act of finding a new symbol in order to recover a sense of shock reminds me of Tolkien’s notion of “recovery,” which I’ve mentioned before, though never in its proper context, which is refering to fantasy stories. It works quite well as a general notion, though: very often in our lives, symbols, perspectives, even modes of behavior get calcified. We think of them as boring, even, when what really need it to reclaim a new view of them. Maybe what I’m really after here is Chesterton’s word “mooreeffoc,” which Tolkien cited in his discussion of recovery:

Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

We could all do with a bit more mooreeffoc in our lives. Re-energizing symbols is only one of its cool powers. Sadly, whatever’s going on with the movie tie-in nail necklaces is the very opposite of mooreeffoc. It’s taking a symbol that may have some fresh potency and making it bland through mass production and crass marketing. Or trying to—whether it succeeds or not is something we won’t know for a while. The happy ending will be if, upon seeing someone on the street with a nail necklace, one doesn’t immediately think “Ah, yes, it’s that thing from that Passion movie,” but rather, “Why the heck does that person have a nail around their neck?!”