Confronting the Guitar Gods in My Basement

I've been playing the guitar for over 20 years. On and off. Sometimes highly motivated and sometimes not.

Lately, I responded to an ad on Craigslist and joined a band with a great bunch of guys.

We play a lot of classic and hard rock: Rolling Stones, Judas Priest, Stone Temple Pilots, Ramones, Tom Petty, etc. As we work up a set list of 30 songs, and prepare to play out live, I've never wanted to practice more. It makes a huge difference to have people around with similar passion, driving you forward as an "artist."

So, of late, I'm down in my basement, at all hours of the night, using a Korg Pandora PX4 to rock out into headphones without waking the family. It's an awesome device, with lots of effects, modeled speaker cabinets, drums and bass to accompany, in different keys and tempos if you want.

Now, I'm studying and playing the chord changes, and the solos of many great players. Mountain's "Mississippi Queen" has been assigned to me for the solo. I've got most of it down now. I don't care that some little kid on YouTube can play it already. Or, that there are fifty other kids there showcasing their Van Halen chops. I'm on my own journey.

I'm somewhere I've desperately wanted to be for many years. I played as a teenager and it was a great time. After that it was hard to meet normal human beings to practice with. So, I just listened intently for many years, and stared at all my transcription books, the jazz standards, the stack of lesson tapes with my old teacher who loved Larry Carlton and Sonny Rollins, and wondered.

I'd pick it up from time to time, but if you want to rock, you need a band. Finally, I made a move.

Now, I'm not only learning the songs, I'm also re-learning the brilliance of my beloved artists from a new point of view, that of technique. The subtlety of their musical phrases, the fingerings of the strings to get just the right sound - so easy to screw up! -- just adds to my appreciation of music I already love. And I want to keep learning until I'm 100.

Because of this, and because the band mates are a great group, all of my problems seem so much smaller. I leave every rehearsal feeling great. It's the kind of thing I read about in Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way." Doing "creative" stuff, and being in a "creative community" is just something you have to do. And I've not done enough of it these many years.

I'm not going to let time pass like that any more, and I don't care if it leads me to perform in nursing homes and jails. That's not the point.

Many people who know me, my wife included, laugh somewhat incredulously at my enthusiasm. To look at me is not to think "rock and roll."

But, when I am alone, staring at the transcriptions, and noticing for example, how Leslie West takes a simple blues lick and turns it into an exquisitely fat, emotional guitar wail, and then I duplicate it, that knowledge is now deeply a part of me. And I know who I really am, and I don't care what anyone else thinks.

Photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Tres.

The Wall Street Journal Destroys Its Hard Won Credibility

For years I have read and applauded the Wall Street Journal's editorial page for warning of the dangers inherent in Fannie and Freddie, and the looming crisis. Events have proven their analysis of a politicized market for mortgages correct.

How ironic, and sad then, that these same editors should now double down their hard won credibility on Henry Paulson's massive attempt to re-politicize the marketplace for mortgages. We're not talking a modified Paulson plan. We're talking first ballot Paulson.

By all other responsible reporting in the free-market media, we know that a) every official in Washington is saying privately this "emergency measure" is a piece of garbage legislation, and b) they have no idea if it will work.

But hey, the Journal reasons, we need to "calm" the markets.

The "markets" are made up of moral agents; people, who now want to be bailed out for their recklessness. Whether or not it was encouraged by the government, that is the bottom line. If they can't "calm" themselves, perhaps they should find other lines of work.

The Journal, in my mind at least, has destroyed all of the credibility it has created over the years when it warned against Fannie and Freddie -- so badly is it now in the tank for, one can only reason, one of their own, Henry Paulson.

PATHETIC.

From Class: The Greeks' Ultimate Reality and the Abyss

The closing thoughts of last night's Dowling College class bear repeating.

When the Greek philosopher Anaximander posited the existence of an Apeiron, (the ageless, boundless and indeterminate ultimate reality) he looked past the whirlwind and "injustice" of change and sought something more.

Heraclitus despaired of the passage of time, with poetic reflections on life and death. And yet, he insisted, behind it all, had to be some "Logos." A fire that changed everything, but itself remained unchanged.

Parmenides used relentless logic to reason his way to the "One" ultimate reality - even if he destroyed motion and change in the process. Transcendent only by destruction, perhaps?

Aristotle looked beyond his own "common sense" philosophy of material things to talk about pure Form, the source of movement in the universe and pure "thought thinking itself," which all other forms at different levels of the natural order sought to imitate as best as their own natures would allow.

Contrast these thoughts with Nietzsche. Who, confronted with the whirlwind of change and contingency, embraced it by itself, in all its disorder. He looked into the abyss and saw nothing. God was not hiding behind change hoping we would notice. He was never there. Hence, Nietzsche elevated himself to the ultimate arbiter of truth in the universe. He became the One that "explains" the Many.

While I still think the Greek approach is superior and inevitable, and that Nietzsche's view is built on contradiction, I understand Nietzsche's sense of subjective isolation, and bring it up more in class.

Even if we too claim to see the Apeiron, the Logos, the One or the pure Form, we have to ask ourselves "How?" And, what follows from touching it with our minds? Even in a world in which there are millions of competing answers (including the suffocating comforts of divine revelation - more on that in a future post), attempting to draw our own conclusions leaves us very lonely.

BTW- Here's a remarkable documentary capturing the loneliness of Nietzsche. MC

Scientists: Earth May Be in a Special Place After All

Just when you've gotten used to the Copernican universe, they go and change back again to something anthropocentric. Sheesh!

A Bigger Bet on the Large Hadron Collider

Cribbing from the style of InstaPundit.com, I'm writing a short item here (rather than my usual long-winded ones) highlighting an interesting piece in First Things.

In it, physicist Stephen Barr suggests that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has to do more than discover the Higgs boson particle to be interesting. That's pretty much a given. Rather, it should also shed light on why the Higgs boson, in the Higgs wave, in the Higgs field, doesn't make life impossible. For Barr at least, to discover, via the LHC, some countervailing force to the Higgs stuff, if I may, provides support for an "anthropic" or human-life centered view of our little region of the multiverse. Hmm, can God be far behind?

P.S. To my students who might be visiting my blog. Please forgive yet another story about the LHC. I assure you I'm not a physics geek masquerading as a philosophy teacher.

The Comedian Who Died, Literally

Perhaps because the weather is getting cooler toward the end of summer, I find myself remembering my visit one cool evening to a small Christian coffee house in East Northport, N.Y., where, not long ago, I heard a comedian give witness to life after death.

Samantha's Li'l Bit of Heaven hosted my friend Lenny Horowitz, the only Jewish act on the bill on its regular comedy nights. He was the resident non-believer, and he got lots of mileage out of his outsider status. When he told jokes that challenged the audience's delicate sensibilities, they would shake their bags of pretzels in disapproval.

As I had done a few times before, I visited one evening for Comedy Night, to see Lenny perform, and decide whether or not I could overcome my stage fright and do 5 minutes.

I decided against it. Lenny did well. But he was not the closer that evening. Another comedian, named Mike, whom I also know well from the local circuit, stood up to do his act.

Mike did many of his old bits, sanitized from when he would perform them at Governor's Comedy Club in Levittown.

But the one thing I expected least was when Mike decided to close his act by testifying to this eminently receptive audience about the time he "died" and went to heaven. Mike's heart had stopped beating during a heart attack years before. How long it stopped I don't remember him recounting. But, as he said, he "died on the table" at the hospital.

During this time, he told the rapt audience, he experienced an incredibly friendly and peaceful presence. It showed him that his wife and all of his children would be healthy and happy. And that they would join him someday. Most interestingly to me, he also got a rather immediate explanation for all of the suffering in the world.

But, alas, he was revived. And he told the medical staff saving his life, "Let me go! Let me go!" because he wanted to be in heaven.

And from that day forward, he said, although he did not know why he was still here, he did not fear death, or anything else for that matter. He "knows" that he will be happy after death, and that all is well with the world.

Out of respect for the man's story, I should have simply remained silent. It was a deeply moving moment. But I couldn't resist the urge, once the show was over, to question him more.

I congratulated him on a great performance. And then, I asked, "You don't happen to remember the explanation for all that suffering, do you?"

"No," he said, shaking his head.

A few days later, the inspiration of his story faded.

Another One Page Refutation of Unbelief (Yawn)

I like the publication First Things. I respect the life's work of the theologian and philosopher Michael Novak. But, damn, and yawn, if I don't see simplistic, dismissive, curriculum vitae-padding arguments against unbelievers, like Novak's latest, too often in First Things and elsewhere on the Christian Right.

In a drive-by article, majestically titled "Atheism and Evil," Novak engages a friendly audience of First Things readers to quickly dismiss atheists and agnostics for their struggles with belief.

A good percentage of these unbelievers, according to a recent poll, have allowed the problem of evil to drive them away from the notion of a personal God. But, surprisingly, many of them cling to some notion of an ultimate force.

In the most insulting statement of the entire piece, Novak accuses all of them of possessing a "morose delectation" for the reality of evil. In other words, they should just get over their perverse hang-up with suffering. (Now break out the brandy.)

Novak reminds us, yawn, that Thomas Aquinas posited that evil was not a co-equal reality with good. Evil tends toward non-being rather than being. (Ah, how did millions of human beings miss that? It's all explained now!)

And, without the possibility of moral evil, the world could never reach its current heights of goodness.

Excuse me if I yawn, again. These arguments are repeated endlessly against modern unbelief like a Thomistic spell. And yet, unbelief doesn't seem to go away. Curious.

Of course, the reality of physical evil (hurricanes, cancers, etc.) is not addressed here. That would have required at least another page of strenuous quoting of the Church Fathers.

Or perhaps it is, encrusted within Novak's brief, metaphorical reference to the world as a "tapestry of human experience." Or in his sweeping notion that "[a]ll the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and 'blooming, buzzing profusion.'”

There you have it. The whole thing, from Krakatoa to Katrina, is just another "good story," and "blooming, buzzing profusion." What?

I know that Michael Novak means better. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens' delectations have gotten too much under his skin.

But I think that if one were actually concerned with these issues, in a spirit of genuine solidarity with non-First Things subscribers, it might help to acknowledge the serious concerns of "unbelievers" -- and perhaps more "believers" than one might care to acknowledge -- with moral evil, physical evil, and even metaphysical evil -- where one grinds daily against the limits of one's own being.

In a media-mad world in which human beings are buffeted daily by images of untold suffering and cruelty, and even levels of human success and honor that they will never achieve, it will require more than a series of dusty syllogisms to ease the suffering and dissension caused by the "immense crisscrossing" within the human spirit of the problems of moral, natural and metaphysical evil.