Well, what do you know? When VP Cheney met with the energy industry execs to discuss the policy needs of the energy industry, they spent a bunch of time talking about Iraq.

Why do you think that might be?

Thanks to the Freedom Of Information Act, and despite years and years of red tape from the administration, we find that when VP Cheney met with energy industry officials, they discussed Iraq in great detail.

From JudicialWatch, who filed the FOIA request:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org.

Just had my first listen-through of Damien Rice‘s ‘O.’ It’s some serious shit.

I have this theory, whereby music has a psychic content. I measure whether I like music by weighing its psychic content against everything else that makes it whole. Music that isn’t whole is automatically discounted.

Once upon a time, I had a dream, in which B.B. King was playing a Chapman Stick. Don’t ask me why he was, but he was. He was in a blue suit, sitting on a stool alone on a stage. The stage was small, and the curtains behind him were the same color as his suit. The lights were low and a spotlight was on him.

(FYI: A Chapman Stick is like a big 10-string electric guitar that’s got no body. You play it by tapping the strings. You wear it strapped to your frontside.)

He played the Stick for a while. He was singing along in a small voice, just sort of humming along, really. The tune was something he was making up on the spot. It was soulful and low-key and dignified. His eyes were closed, and it was almost as if he were a sleeping baby, dreaming of being a virtuoso. The beam of the spotlight tightened around him, and what I’ll call the camera view zoomed in, very slowly.

As the spot and zoom grew closer and tighter, parts of Mr. King evaporated, or fell away. Bits of him just went away. His legs fell off, his arm, the fingers playing the instrument. But the music kept going. His face melted from his skull, and his bones turned to dust, but the instrument was there. His body was replaced by a light, like the brightest, most focused flickering candle ever to exist. The music continued, the spotlight focused to an infinitely small spot, and I woke up.

Music has what I’ll call a psychic element. It exists outside of the performer and is something that is coaxed around only through sheer hard work and effort. And Damien Rice’s album made me think of that dream, because if you take away all the music and all the singing and the lyrics, Something is still present.

The production emphasises this. It’s mostly just guitar and vocals, with forays into orchestration. But not a big orchestra; a chamber ensemble maintains the intimacy. Every element is underplayed, delicate, barely even present.

The lyrics that stand out most for me are these:

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it’s not hard to fall
When you float like a cannonball

From the White House web site:

“Working at his desk in the Oval Office, President Bush reviews the State of the Union address line-by-line and word-by-word.”

Went into town today, and realized how much I’ve changed since I’d been there.

I was thinking about how I used to enjoy the combination of excitement and anonymity. Anonymity has always been appealing to me, because it meant a finite, controllable social risk. The excitement was something I thought I had to learn to like, because in order to succeed in life I’d have to get a job or a career in some downtown hi-rise. And besides, millions of people all over the world put themselves in that situation every day. Surely there must be value in it… This is an example of a hyperliteral understanding of the world.

I do enjoy surfing the social downtown, as a sort of Aspie version of extreme sports, but ultimately I have no place to go. I’m destinationless in such a setting. The purpose evaporates quickly, and I’m left wandering around for no real reason.

Today, I decided to drive downtown, even though it would be more expensive, because there would be less opportunity for overwhelm.

On the way to the court building, I realized that everyone there was joyless. This isn’t some poetic grand gesture statement, it’s literal. No one was smiling. No one looked like they were enjoying themselves. This was 5th Ave., between the Westlake intersection, and James St., which is pretty much all of downtown Seattle. 5th Ave. was a Joy-Free Zone today, apparently. (Note: the irony of that last statement is that the same area was declared a No-Protest Zone by the mayor in 1999, during the WTO protests.)

I didn’t get overwhelmed. However, I did arouse the ire of fellow pedestrians for stopping and watching some artists who were sandblasting designs into the steps of the new court building. That is, I was walking along and I slowed down to observe, and the guy behind me bumped into me and looked at me as if I were insane for slowing down. This is a story as old as time: The unobservant deriding those who are paying attention.

All those people, and their meaningless agendas, chasing the money around town. It’s the kind of story that’s taboo to tell; it exposes how crazy the situation really is. And again, one is derided for being attentive if you tell it.

There’s a book I have. I forget the title, but it’s something like Forgotten Seattle or Lost Seattle. I’d look it up, but it’s in storage. It’s a graphic novel. It came out just before the dot.com boom really pushed into full swing. In it, images of urban Seattle are superimposed with scenes from native life before the place was settled by white people. For instance, we see the I-5 culvert that goes through downtown, and, among the car traffic, there are native americans paddling their canoe down it, as if it were a river.

When I first got that comic, I thought to myself, this is the Seattle I moved here to find. Of course, it isn’t the Seattle I got. It’s just another damn city, even though it’s the most beautiful one I’ve been to. The fact that there’s a ‘liberal’ factor in local politics is heartening, but it’s still a damn city, where we tear down landmarks and build more condos.

I really can’t imagine myself living in another city. I’m sitting here in my landlord’s house, gazing past the roses that intrude on the rectangle of the window, out to the back yard, where evergreens point upward, and I’m comfortable.

Tonight’s movie: ‘Punch-Drunk Love,’ which, I must say, rules.

It’s the tremendously quirky tale of a very strange businessman who manufactures decorated toilet plungers, who is very likely autistic, or has some spectrum disorder. The movie is in his perspective, so people talk very fast, things flash by quickly, the orchestration is distracting. The frequent scene changes are signalled by bright, abstract flashes of color, perhaps hinting at synasthaesia.

Our hero is the poster child for lonely alienation, so he calls a phone sex service. They take advantage of him and start harassing him, extorting him for money. Meanwhile, one of his sisters sort of hooks him up with a friend, and a romance starts to develop.

As the threat from the phone sex crooks builds, so does the romance, until the two collide.

What I like most about ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ is the cinematography, with the way the camera is locked into a rythm of strange motion… For instance, the phone sex scene, where the camera movements echo the repetitive pacing of the main character. There’s a certain restrained quality to the shots and angles; things which aren’t in the nearground are way out of focus, and frequently the shots will hug a wall or a railing or give a reassuring closeness to the scene, exactly what an autistic person would tend to do.

The music is also wonderful. It’s playful and creepy and confusing and light, all at the same time.

It’s strange, surreal, skewed, and I loved it.

1.

Singing Horses

2.

Yes, Babalon, I have a PDD/AS diagnosis.

3.

There is no number three.

4.

The rose bushes are putting out hips now, and I’m torn between cutting them off for more blooms, and letting them ripen, even though they’re obviously infested with larval bugs, because I’ve never seen a ripe rose hip before. I suppose the ‘larval bug’ aspect should answer the question for me, but I had hoped to make rose hip tea. Maybe they’d just be a little extra protein.

5.

I have to go downtown tomorrow. I haven’t been downtown in at least 8 months, except to the SoDo area, which is South of Downtown anyway. To get from here to there by bus requires at least one transfer, and I really don’t want to spend the money on parking since I don’t know how long I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll drive to the old house, since I need to pick up some mail anyway, and catch the #15 express from there.

6.

It’s 4:20. D000D.

7.

Went grocery shopping yesterday, and got a bunch of stuff I needed, but NONE of the stuff I went there to get. Furthermore, I watched a lady struggle with the coffee grinder in the store, and got so involved in helping her with it that I dumped my coffee into it when she was done. And then I felt really stupid, because I grind mine at home, just before brewing. Nothing to do but grind it there, so I did.

I’m reading a really interesting book, called ‘The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time,’ by Mark Haddon.

It’s a sort of murder mystery, but it’s really about the perspective of the first-person hero of the book, 15-year-old Christopher, who’s autistic.

The plot is that he encounters the neighbor’s dog, which has been killed with a gardening fork, and he begins to perseverate on solving the crime of who killed the dog. But what’s fun here is the descriptions of what’s going through Christopher’s head. Whole chapters occur in between words of dialog. This is my favorite bit so far:

In the bus on the way to school next morning we passed 4 red cars in a row, which meant that it was a Good Day, so i decided not to be sad about Wellington.

Mr. Jeavens, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cards in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cards in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cards in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don’t speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don’t eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn’t very logical.

I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn’t have anything to do with wheather they had a good day or a bad day.

I can totally and absolutely relate.

How do you know it’s summer time?

Mint chocolate chip ice cream.

How do you know it’s summer time in Seattle?

Mint chocolate chip tofutti ‘ice cream’ sandwiches from the co-op.

More insomnia.

Watched ‘Grand Canyon,’ which I’d seen before. It’s pretty good.

If they had spent a little more money on the music, ‘Grand Canyon’ would be hailed as timeless. But it has that music, so it’s just a movie with a new-agey subtext from the early 90s, about the intertwining lives of a bunch of people who come to realize the connections between themselves.

The Grand Canyon figures into the movie as a place of great beauty and insight that’s only 9 hours away, but that none of the characters can break away from their busy lives to even consider. Simon, (Danny Glover) first brings it up as a place he went to a long time ago, where he could sit on the edge and feel small and insignificant and at peace. Another character talks about the city as having a hole in it, the size of the Grand Canyon, out of which explodes all kinds of horror.

I couldn’t help but think about Zen, and how meditation on emptiness is supposed to bring about enlightenment. The irony of the characters in the movie is that their lives are empty of emptiness. They haven’t yet made their own mythical 9-hour trip to their own mythical chasm of peaceful nothing. Since they, themselves, carry around the horror and desperation they fear, the stillness of the Grand Canyon is more than a little threatening.

In the end, however, after they find their connections with each other, and reaffirm their desire to live life as if it matters, they all find they have the resources to make the trek.

Thankfully, the movie isn’t 9 hours long, but I’m sure the director thought about it. It reminds me a lot of ‘Magnolia,’ except with characters that are a little more two-dimensional, but not fatally so. ‘Magnolia’ tried really hard to make the characters quirky, whereas ‘Grand Canyon’ is about more run-of-the-mill folk. And there’s no rain of frogs.

I like that ‘Grand Canyon’ contains a kind of tenderness not usually seen in movies. The characters that care about each other try and stretch beyond themselves to do everything the caring implies. It’s a credit to the screenwriters that this doesn’t come off as being about a sense of duty.

I also like that the movie transcends class and race. The rich white folk and the poor black folk all find their way to the Grand Canyon, despite all the hardships their stations provide.

Another thing is the helicopter. Throughout the movie, we see a helicopter circling overhead. Sometimes it’s a police copter, sometimes a news traffic copter, and sometimes it’s just some helicopter. The characters almost always look up at it, as if just hearing it isn’t enough.

The reversal of perspective finally comes when we get to the Grand Canyon; we get to zoom around inside the canyon on a helicopter-mounted camera. This is the kind of thing that might go by a lot of people, since it’s not overtly stated that the camera is on a helicopter. But there you go. The perspective the characters needed was right above their heads all along.

And finally, the thing I like most about ‘Grand Canyon’ is that it made the attempt.

Things I don’t like: I mentioned the music. I thought the characters were too philosophical, but I suppose if you’re trying to make a philosophical point, you’ll need some exposition. I wish we’d seen more change from the Steve Martin character, though he’s really a stand-in for the violence we do to our own mind with the stories we tell. As with the landlord in ‘Umberto D.,’ being saddled by representing a philosophical point which must remain constant for the purposes of the story leaves little room for the character to change.

Oh, and also this..

From Hollywood Jesus: “All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.”
-Steve Martin in Grand Canyon

A couple days ago, I got a notification that if I didn’t pay up on a ticket I thought I’d taken care of, my driver’s liscense would be revoked.

Doesn’t the court system have something better to do than keep track of how irresponsible I am? HUH???