Idiot American

This is more like it: Plenty of information about the designer, Chris Bilheimer,
who has made his mark in a wide array of rock visuals in the last couple of
decades. Usually the part about graphic design is hidden away, as if the
musicians either don't want listeners to know, or want to imply that maybe
the musicians created the art too. This design not only evokes Saul Bass, but
feels like two iterations before the final art, shapes just a tad too awkward
and close together. I would have fussed with it more. But what do I know?

My apologies for submitting the tardiest music review ever.

I like "American Idiot" by Green Day.

(Wait, wasn't that, like, last century?)

OK, you know what? Let's call it a music appreciation instead. I think that's what it's called when no one really wants your opinion of the arts, or when every story has already been written about a recently deceased celebrity, but you write something anyway.

Because I'm not writing this to say you should like it too.

A hater of music reviews, I'm not about to do unto you what I wouldn't want done to me.

Music has to be the most subjective subject there is, rendering music reviews useless to me. No muscle of a writer's description is going to make me buy music, because the writer can't quite qualify why the music appeals.

It could be, and usually is, nothing to do with beat or structure or the front man's voice. It could have everything to do, and usually does, with my geographical and psychological place when I encounter the music.

Music love is an accidental thing. It is snuck upon you while you're doing other things. So it was when I first heard Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" in the days when if you wanted to watch TV, you had to watch what your parents wanted to watch. They wanted to watch something that showcased Copland, and after that I wanted to hear everything else he wrote.

Tom Waits sang my angst over long frustrating winter nights researching a project when I was a newspaper reporter. He always brings me back to those nights.

Caught up in The Colbert Report's final goodbye, I got caught up in "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel (album cover art also by Chris Bilheimer), and the possible reason Stephen Colbert chose it as the last sounds we heard.

"Sweet Disposition" by The Temper Trap is a song I never would have come by, except for its use as the soundtrack for the video of a swim in which I got to take part, and the music is ingrained in me.

No music review imploring me to listen to those pieces would have succeeded.

I also understand the irony in linking these songs here, because your music tastes are scattershot, defy reason, and may even be embarrassing, like mine, and you prefer not to be spoon-fed but have the music find you accidentally. But what the heck; the link function is easy and available, so why not use it, am I right?

Our son bought American Idiot when he was in high school. He bought it electronically as a good olf-fashioned CD 11 years ago, from iTunes™® I'm sure. I bought mine 11 years later as I always have, browsing the bins at a used-records store.

I didn't know much about Green Day at the time, but trusted his exploration. I teased that Green Day was part of UBT (Unified Band Theory), my idea that all the music he was listening to came from one band, relabeled and packaged for a different audience, the only tell being the lead singer with the odd Valley-Boy-slightly-Australian pronunciation of certain words.

I'm not Green Day's audience, nowhere close. Even when I fit the demographic long ago, I wasn't into sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I didn't, and wouldn't, go to concerts.

And yet …

I appreciate what Green Day is saying and playing here. Call it punk-pop (here is where I betray my weakness as a music reviewer, because I don't know what I'm talking about), powerful guitar and explosive drums but with simple, infectious melody.

I appreciate the rage displayed in American Idiot, the anger and pain of suburban kids trying to get through their screwed-up world. The video made for the suite "Jesus of Suburbia,"  (NSFW I guess) doesn't feel like actors playing confused and untethered teenagers, but like real kids opening the dented door to their messed up lives.

I feel their pain, and attach the sound to my own frustrations, however different.

I appreciate the energy with which Green Day delivers its message. YouTube®™ has put me close to the concert stage I wouldn't get near in person, and I get to see the manic drive as Green Day performs, all rockstar poses, windmill arms and ridiculously wide stances and twisted faces. I couldn't tell you whether lead guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre´ Cool are personas or their real selves, or some of both, but they don't hold anything back. You paid your ticket, they're going to give you a show.

American Idiot is written like a rock opera, its songs tracing a story thread of young people in the time of George W. Bush and Iraq War II and the toppling economy, all of its dislocation and anger and hopelessness and redemption and resignation.

Which may be why it's still being performed as an actual rock opera, Green Day having turned its collection into a Broadway musical (where the actors do feel like actors, play-acting as disaffected young people).

The song-story suits me at the moment. The CD rests in my car stereo, ready to blare when National Public Radio recycles a story for the third time, or sports talk radio waxes eloquent about the 3-4 defense. Or when I just want to swing the windmill arms of my mind.

It'll be there until something new accidentally comes along.

Morally straitened

Trouble brews at the Boy Scouts.

Bring it.

And bring your hip waders. The irony and hypocrisy flow thickly.

Boy Scouts of America's governing board last week delayed until its annual May meeting a decision whether to include gay Scouts and Scout leaders.

Last week's was supposed to be a private board discussion, just a consideration of the possibility of lifting its ban, The New York Times reports, until news of it leaked and the planned discussion took on the public weight of an imminent decision.

Foes and friends of the policy flooded BSA with consternation after the leak. Now all sides stake positions for the next three months.

I predict BSA will ultimately hold fast — for now. But change is gonna come, sooner now. Be prepared. It has to.

As a private organization, BSA has a right to decide who its members are, and the Supreme Court has affirmed it. So, no homosexuals in the ranks. Pedophiles yes, it turns out tragically, and BSA is moving grudgingly and glacially to eradicate that horror, but no homosexuals.

But Scouting wants it both ways. It wants to be America's citizenship laboratory, but just for some boys. It positions itself as the foundation for America's future leaders, but only for heterosexual leaders. As it helps to mold men for an American society that becomes daily more complex, it is only molding some, preparing them partway for what they'll face. Like banks we deem too big to fail, Boy Scouts of America fancies itself too American to mess with.

In upholding BSA's policy, Gov. Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout, unwittingly gives credence to change.

"Scouting is not a place where sexuality should be the intersection of," Perry told reporters before addressing Texas Scouts visiting the State legislature. "Scouting is about teaching a substantial amount of life lessons. Sexuality is not one of them. It never has been. Doesn't need to be."

He's right: Scouting is not about sexuality. Nevermind the old gay-bait card Perry seems to toss, that if you let gays in, the banners and pamphlets come out and recruitment ensues. Scouting is about the great and wonderful outdoors, the laboratory in which those life lessons play out. Lessons in self-reliance, preparedness, stewardship, and working with other people.

Sexuality wasn't an issue when I was a Scout leader. Once in a while it came up: Adult leaders talk of high school Scouts being overcome by fumes — perfumes and car fumes — during the long climb to Eagle rank. And once in a while an adult leader might talk with Scouts casually about prom or events in Scouts' lives. Other than that, we didn't raise the issue; it never seemed germain to our mission.

[These are the observations of one dad/Scoutmaster/former kid who wishes he had been a Scout. Beware the narrow view and lack of perspective. Pick from the bones what you will.]

And there's the Scout oath, in which Scouts pledge to keep themselves "physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight." Time has bent "morally straight" into an unintended connotation. 

I'm not so naive to discount that sex talk goes on among Scouts away from leaders' hearing, the kind of wildly erroneous talk that kids talk.

It reminds me of when Bill José told the other kids on our block a dirty joke. When he got squints and stares and not the laughs he expected (I was in fourth grade, maybe), he tried to salvage the joke by explaining the mechanics of sex and the existence of pubic hair. When we told Bill that was the most outrageous and unbelievable lie we had ever heard, rendering his joke inert, he gave up telling us dirty jokes.

I've heard Scouts throw around "gay" as an adjective to mean "lame," and I'd tell them it's not cool. Scouting is indeed a reflection of society, and left to their own devices — at recess, on a campout — kids carry out their own varyingly cruel versions of "Lord of the Flies."

Scouting is not about sexuality. It's about character, a wholly independent trait.

By barring gays from Scouting, its governors — and we involved at the grass roots — are saying gays are not worthy as people, that their contributions — as people — are unworthy.

Maybe we could declare that publicly over a music backdrop of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," arguably the most "American" of musical pieces. Aaron Copland, by the way, was gay.

Maybe Scouting can explain to Native Americans why, since BSA's early days as a merger of the Woodcraft Indians, it has picked and chosen elements of Indian culture and left out others. It isn't long before a Scout encounters BSA's version of Indian lore: Our Troop's favorite summer camp included membership in a "tribe" that bore no relation to native Californians that inhabited the site — and still an active community nearby — but more of a Disney-fied long-feathered-headdress-breechcloth-and-pidgin-English-noble-savage version.

One of the elements omitted from the vast diversity of Native American cultures is that some tribes had special roles for members who were homosexual, including as spirit messengers.

The BSA's aborted discussion was to touch on the trial idea of letting chartering organizations decide whether to admit gays.

The Troop my son and I belonged to, 328, is charted to a Catholic Parish. The Catholic Church finds homosexuality a sin, with a "hate the sin, love the sinner" policy.  I imagine the practical effect of a decentralized decision on gay membership would be:

• The Troop would have to look elsewhere for a chartering organization and places to meet and stow their gear … of which the parish has been generous — the most likely scenario

• The Troop might dissolve over dissension on this issue; 

• All parties will decide it's no big deal, and life will go on;

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known also as the Mormons, would have major problems with a new policy. Boy Scouts is a kind of extended ministry for boys in the church, and operates with marked differences from most other Scouting units, including large gatherings among its own units.

On the other hand, public schools and civic groups with anti-discrimination policies would again open its facilities for meetings and events and equipment storage.

When — not if — the change comes, the fallout will be wild. Scout units will dissolve, others will move … private chartering organizations will be outraged, while others embrace the change. Recriminations and kudos alike will erupt all the way to the president's office and the steps of the Supreme Court.

Over time, Scouting in tatters, people will want an organization like Scouting, the nation's greatest steward of public lands. People will realize Scouting's potential for shaping citizens and leaders, and learning to work and live together.

They'll reinvent Scouting — truly too American to mess up.

Unfinished business

A work in regress …

Monday marked John Steinbeck's 110th birthday, churning up bittersweet memories.

The unfinished illustration at left, which would have been for self-promotion, represents a wave of wistfulness that crested over the weekend when I read a backhanded celebration of Steinbeck's life and work.

Posting the unfinished work breaks an internal cardinal rule of my blog, but feeds another purpose, which is from time to time to open a vein and bleed a bit.

John Steinbeck remains my favorite writer, since a high school English teacher first made me read him. I'd love to say I've traveled the world of literature page by page, from the hooves of Chaucer's horse to Cormac McCarthy's road laid waste (just two disparate examples), and returned to Steinbeck even after such a considered journey.

The uneasy truth is I don't read much. Aside from Kurt Vonnegut or William Saroyan or J.R.R. Tolkien or Garrison Keillor, I have not pursued writers through their collections.

I read anymore for need, not want, corralling and consuming the small and weak snippets of information that have eluded me all these years. Even so, reading is a chore, a fight against a Pavlovian predilection to fall asleep. 

Still, what a time reading Steinbeck! Good readers often say words transport them, and so Steinbeck did for me. He took me to the nearby Salinas Valley north of my hometown, to a place that no longer exists if it ever did, a romantic and worn-smooth place. He took me to the steep and hot and unforgiving canyons above Big Sur, (a Steinbeck style affectation I stole, replacing commas with "and" between items in a series) to the quiet gurgling bends of the Salinas River, perfumed with sycamores, to a miserable sodden rail car, full of miserable people going nowhere.

He made me want to try a beer milkshake, as Doc did in Cannery Row, in Santa Maria, a half hour from my hometown; or taste the regular irregular concoction Eddie made when he poured unfinished drinks from La Ida Cafe into a jug and took it back to share with Mack and the boys at the boiler-strewn lot known as the Palace Flophouse.

Steinbeck informed my thinking, to which these editorial cartoons attest. It set up awkward moments when I twice met Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union, and he regarded me as a member of the hostile press.

I felt like I was living — and truly living — in Steinbeck's books, which is probably any writer's desire. I'd fall short describing that tingle, that sense of the earth falling suddenly away, when a college friend and I drove up to Cannery Row early one morning and I saw for the first time many of the places Steinbeck described. Until that moment, I thought them purely made up.

On rare occasion a piece by Aaron Copland will pop up on the radio, and suddenly I'll be flying noiselessly over the golden foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a source for many Steinbeck stories. It'd be small surprise that Copland is my favorite composer, so tied was he to Steinbeck's work and era. Though Copland wrote scores for movie versions of The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men, even his signature pieces — especially Appalachian Spring — take me straightaway to the settings of Steinbeck's stories.

I remember how reading Steinbeck describe the chapparal vibrating with insects on a hot afternoon, or hearing Copland's The Red Pony quickly sweep into the joyful gallop of a boy and horse, and I'd catch my breath, lost in reverie. It was magic that doesn't happen very often anymore, and I wonder why; my guess is age has rubbed off many of the edges.

At one time I was on fire to complete the portrait of Steinbeck above, itself inspired by a photographic portrait. I was building Steinbeck with symbols of him; his shoulders the furrows of the farmland that figured into so many of his stories; assorted splotches and lines suggested a map of his characters' journeys; the curve of nose and plane of shadow on his right check somehow to comprise the Route 66, the path of his Joad family from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the poisoned bounty in California. Probably in the struggle of getting the sign to become the nose, I stopped, and never returned.

I post it now as a Post-It® note to self: Get moving on all the good stuff left unfinished. Succumb to the magic more often.

Whenever I read about Steinbeck anymore, someone is trying to punch him in his dead nose. He was a lightweight West Coaster, shoulda never won the Nobel, let alone a Pulitzer. That kinda stuff. Even a fan such as Joe Livernois, former executive editor of the Monterey Herald, used his Sunday essay of celebration to call two of my favorite Steinbeck books "stinkers" — singling out In Dubious Battle as maybe "the greatest disappointment to ever smudge a printed page."

Let critics talk, and jump on Steinbeck's bones. He will always remind me the good stuff is not entirely lost.