But the national sport of New Zealand is rugby, and the Super Bowl is not an event that many locals make bowls of guacamole and invite friends over for. It sounds like football fans in Kiwi land could be hard-pressed to find venues showing the match. In the seaside town of Kaikoura, one bartender told me he didn’t air the game and said I probably was the only person in town looking to watch the Super Bowl. The bar manager at Strawberry Tree, a worn and salty old watering hole on Kaikoura’s main and only drag, said that American football is too slow-paced to watch on TV.

“Rugby is 80 minutes nonstop,” said Stephen Horton, who also plays lock and open-side on Kaikoura’s regional team. “And in football, you have two lines of players that switch at every play, right?”

Right — defense and offense. So, what are you saying, I asked Stephen — that football players are padded, coddled softies? Do you think they’re less durable than rugby players?

“Oh, yeah!” he laughed. “Those guys wouldn’t last 80 minutes in a rugby match!”

Andrew and I raised our beers to that, noting to Stephen that the big-bellied beasts called linemen who may, by some stroke of chance, find the ball in their hands and run it in for an 80-yard touchdown can require oxygen masks in order to recover. This got Stephen and another Kiwi at the bar laughing — and certainly didn’t win toughness points for American footballers.

And so our conversation quickly took the form of one of the endless topics in sports talk: Are rugby players as tough as football players? Consider this quote I found recently on an online discussion: “NFL players are bigger, stonger (sic), faster. Almost all of them have college educations. The average NFL player could pick up the average Super 14 player, turn him upside down, and shake him like a piggy bank.”

But Stephen, like many New Zealanders, feels otherwise. “I definitely think rugby is harder,” he said, “but football looks more fun. You wear all that padding and can hit each other as hard as you want. You get hurt in rugby. I’ve had three broken collar bones and been knocked out three times.”

Rugby players are trained gentlemen, too. In New Zealand, they start playing at as young as four years of age, and even in adult leagues, swearing is forbidden during practice and “joking around,” Stephen explained, is curtailed by the coaches. Nor do players perform sometimes classless celebrations after scores or victories, as we see in the NFL.

Later in the week, in Blenheim, I stopped at the Moa Brewing Company for a beer — and to egg on more conversation. Here I met Michael Miller, an American living in New Zealand and working with the brewery. In eight months here Michael has picked up on the subtleties of rugby that American football lacks. “I don’t mean to be derogatory toward anyone, but rugby is more intellectual,” he said, explaining that, since they lack protective gear, the players must combat each other with exceptional technique. He likens the sport to “guerrilla warfare,” whereas the face-off-and-charge approach of the NFL is more “like Civil War” battle style. “Rugby can also be quite brutal,” Michael said, “but it’s also more beautiful and elegant.” He noted that rugby players must be skilled in tackling, running and handling the ball — all aspects of the game — whereas football players are specialized to certain techniques, making them less rounded as tactical athletes.

Having seen both games up close, Michael also feels that American football, much more than rugby, “has been evolved for commercialization and television.” Which explains the three-hour games, endless breaks and timeouts and the huge advertising campaigns that climax on Super Bowl day.

Congratulations to Coach John Toohey and his team. They finished second in the league standings by a heartbeat to a fine Point Arena team. The highest awards went to the champs, the fog eaters. MVP Defense: linebacker Dylan Johnson; MVP Offense: running back Harlan Bailey.

Coach Toohey’s Panther team had the best passing attack I have seen in the league in a long time. Mezzanatto was an excellent passer and all ‘round quarterback, but the top players are all “saying goodbye” senior players.

But, Pop Warner Coach Tony Pardini is doing a fine job coaching the local Pop Warner kids. He not only teaches his new players the basics of playing football, but also to enjoy the game, so it will be fun to see the Panthers in the 2012 Season.

NFL 49ers & MVP Awards. 

SF 49er’s Head Coach Jim Harbaugh won the Coach of the Year in his first season in the NFL. Quarterback Alex Smith accepted the award for him February 4th in Indianapolis and said in part, “Coach would say he doesn’t deserve this award. But, I have had one or two of them (coaches) and I can tell you he does deserve it” — to applause and knowing laughter in the audience.

Harbaugh clearly deserved the award. He turned a dispirited team that lacked confidence into the fastest all ‘round team in the NFL with the best defense and the finest special teams in pro football. Plus, they are young and will become younger still in the upcoming draft of college players. I hope they draft a top wide receiver and also bring in a wide receiver as a free agent.

The NFL is no longer loaded with super teams. They are all flawed. Witness the Sunday Super Bowl game won by the New York Giants over the New England Patriots 21-17.

It was a good game, but, both teams were very vulnerable in the defensive backfield and in tackling.

Aaron Rogers, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, won the MVP of the NFL. Rogers is from Chico, California, and went to the NFL after playing quarterback at Cal Berkeley.

Added note: I am old enough to recall when the late Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders was great. Now, I believe that his son Mark Davis will give Raider fans hope because he hired Reggie Mackenzie from the Packers to run the on-field play and player acquisitions for the Raiders.

A photo exhibit by Charles Givens of seven historical railroad logging operations, along with text panels and accompanying memorabilia, is now on display at the Mendocino County Museum in Willits. It offers a rich glimpse into the “movers and shakers,” both mechanical and human, that formed the stories, highways and byways of Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt Counties. The exhibit is part of the Redwood Empire Railroad History Project, a collaboration between the Mendocino County Museum and Roots of Motive Power, Inc. Roots of Motive Power, a volunteer organization devoted to steam power and logging history, has a rich collection of train and timber equipment large and small, including tools, models, and photographs.

Our era is not the only one that has undergone rapid technological and cultural change. The invention of the steam engine in the early 18th century ushered in forces of radical transformation throughout the land, as railroads crisscrossed the country and people and goods began to move about more rapidly. The logging trade and the railroads that arose to transport the downed trees to lumber mills were an essential part of the economy and history of rural Northern California. The show documents a near-bygone era when steam trains chuffed up the Willits Grade with the aid of helper engines, steam blew out of ingeniously designed whistles, crossing signals clanked, and passengers warmed their hands over pungent coal stoves.

Charles Givens had his eye on this catalyst of change from a young age. Born in San Jose, he took his first photo of a steam train in 1947 and quickly became an aficionado. After a long stint working at a San Jose paper, he went on to publish model railroad magazines and run a hobby shop, all the time traveling extensively throughout California and the Northwest to document the railroads that fascinated him. Givens photographed seven logging railroad operations in Mendocino, Humboldt and Lake Counties: the Bear Harbor & Eel River Railroad, the California Western Railroad (also known as the Skunk Train), the Caspar, South Fork & Eastern Railroad, the L. E. White Lumber Company (in the Elk/Greenwood area), the Mendocino Lumber Company, the Pacific Lumber Company, and Lake County Lumber and Box (the only railroad ever to operate in Lake County).

Givens’ photos, in both color and black and white, manage to be artistic and educational at the same time. Along with the text panels, one for each of the seven railroad companies, an informative view is offered into a crucial arc of history, roughly spanning the mid-19th through the entire 20th century. This era saw extensive logging of redwoods and other forests as well as expanded European settlement and economic development. The railroads carried these changes as surely as they carried lumber and human passengers. Many of the highways and byways that we presently travel were initiated by railroad logging operations, including Route 20 that presently runs between Willits and Fort Bragg.

The Caspar Lumber Company operated from 1861 to 1955, except for the Great Depression years of 1931-34. Givens’ photos of the mill it operated are among his most evocative, even giving rise to comparisons to Dutch painters. Gears gleam, wooden surfaces take on a burnished glow and machine wheels seem to turn before our eyes. A 1956 photo taken just after the mill’s closure, “South Fork and Eastern Locomotive #4 a Week Before Scrapping,” captures the poignancy of decline: a detached rail car sits in a yard among wood scraps, tarnished yet still somehow proud.

Northwestern Pacific Railroad, an amalgamation of as many as 60 different railroad companies, operated from 1907 to 2007. The railroad extended from Larkspur in Marin County all the way up to Eureka and employed several different types of narrow gauge lines in addition to standard gauge. Trains initially were steam-powered, assisted sometimes by mules and oxen, until the 1950s when the company switched to diesel electric propulsion. Helper locomotives were employed to lug trains over the Ridge Summit between Ukiah and Willits. The latter was a transfer point where crews changed. With the decline of the logging business, the company sold the north end of the railroad in 1984 to Eureka Southern Railroad. Passenger service ended in 1971 with the advent of Amtrak, although short passenger routes have remained in scenic areas such as the Eel River Canyon.

The Skunk Train, also known as California Western Railroad, transported its first redwood logs from Fort Bragg to Willits on July 4, 1912. Its name was derived from the fulsome emissions emanating from gas outlets used to run the train, as well as from coal stoves passengers used to keep warm. As redwood freight declined in the 1980s, the company shifted to providing passenger service. The only railroad of the seven still in operation, it traverses 40 miles, crosses 30 bridges, and burrows through two mountain tunnels as it connects the coast and the county’s interior.

A number of artifacts from railroad days gone by round out the exhibit. They include a yellowed railroad schedule, a lovingly preserved conductor’s shirt and cap, and a gleaming, table-lamp-size copper whistle. Whistles operated by forcing steam through a constricted orifice and passing it by a sharp edge. Fashioned of various shapes and sizes, whistles were used to issue warnings, mark time, and send out orders.

The most user-friendly artifact is no doubt the “magnetic wig-wag,” an electric crossing signal that will ring bells, literally, for those of a certain age. Consisting of a swinging black and white circle with a red dot in the middle mounted on a steel crane, it once was a common sight at railroad crossings. Today fewer than 90 are still in use. Visitors are able to push a button and set the mechanism in motion, initiating a satisfying clanking that echoes through the museum.

In this era it seems that rapid change is our only constant. It is good, then, to look back at another time when the natural and cultural landscape was equally transformed by our human invention, before we uncover where we can travel next.

Kyle Williams and Michael Crabtree of the 49ers were horrid in the win over the New Orleans Saints in the first playoff win. The 49ers won despite their bad play when those receivers were the focal point of the play. Kyle Williams fumbled a surprise end around play behind the line of scrimmage because he was looking for a place to run rather than catching the lateral from Smith and then finding a gap to run through, while Michael Crabtree dropped the first three balls when the football was passed to him for easy receptions. Clearly, the moment was too big for them to be competent. Yet, both of them blocked well in the game.

In the NFC Championship game Michael Crabtree had one reception on a third down and five yards to go for a first down. Crabtree went three yards and turned for the reception and was tackled two yards short of the first down marker. Crabtree was given a big cushion by his defender so he could have gone the full five yards before he turned for the reception to make the first down.

Kyle Williams, of course, muffed a punt in which the football bounced into his knee. Rather than trying to recover the muffed punt, he pretended not to realize the football touched his knee. And, later in overtime, Williams was stripped of a punt reception deep into Giant’s territory. The Giants kicked an easy 31 yard field goal to win the game 20-17.

The 49ers were better than the Giants in every aspect of a football team except wide receiver and quarterback. If Smith were throwing to Giant wide-outs Hakeem Nicks and Victor Cruz, and Manning was throwing to Williams and Crabtree, the team with Nicks and Hernandez would have won.

The 49ers’ spirit, camaraderie and effort was beautiful this season. Defensive end Justin Smith, at 34, had an engine that never stopped. Ray McDonald at the other defensive end got stronger as the season went on. At nose guard, Isaac Sopoaga made us forget about the release of Aubrayo Franklin.

At linebacker, Patrick Willis and second year linebacker Navarro Bowman helped to form the fastest and toughest linebacking crew in the NFL.

Strong Safety Whitner teamed with Free Safety Dashon Goldson to form a tough. sure tackling duo. Carlos Rogers was a good cornerback during the regular season. But they could use more depth at cornerback.

The Offensive line was beautiful all season. Frank Gore started slow but picked up steam in the last half of the season. Gore is a quiet, strong leader on the team. And, over the years, Alex Smith has gotten some “gravel in his gizzard” and is a leader too.

Smith’s quarterback rating when throwing to Vernon Davis is a huge l51%. Vernon’s talent is undeniable but his personality is too erratic to be a true leader.

The 49er coaching staff led by Jim Harbaugh was excellent.

I could nitpick about their play selection in overtime when they got the ball on the 49ers’ end of the gridiron. I thought they would work their way down the field and use a pass at an unexpected time. But, they threw long bombs to Vernon Davis and the Giants were all over him.

Still, this season’s surge deep into the playoffs was a success for this team. They now need to get a fast, sure-handed receiver in the draft or via a trade and add depth at key positions.

And, remember Ted Guinn is always going to be injured. They should use first-year running back Michael Hunter (a real talent) as the punt returner.

I am looking forward to the NFL draft of college players this April. Remember that next year’s USC Trojans will be the #1 college team in the football rankings at the end of next season’s bowl games.

Drug abuse has been called the United States’ worst public health problem, and our government has waged a “war on drugs” for decades with decidedly mixed results. Drugs, especially tobacco and alcohol, sicken and kill millions of Americans, and the list of illegal drugs is long, with drug users filling our prisons.

What might it mean, then, when one of the world’s most renowned religious scholars writes in his new book, “Cleansing the Doors of Perception,” that some select illegal drugs hold the potential for humans to realize their highest spiritual potential, and that use of these drugs might even be part of the very origin of man’s greatest aspirations and faiths?

Longtime Berkeley resident Huston Smith is no dope fiend. He’s not even another Timothy Leary, thank goodness. Like Leary, Smith has taught at some of the nation’s leading universities, but he’s never left one in disgrace nor become a would-be “guru”, preaching turning on or dropping out or whatever. He holds 11 honorary degrees and has authored 11 books, including “The World’s Religions,” the most widely used text on comparative religion, selling over 2 million copies in the past 40 years. He has produced a number of television series and was himself the subject of a Bill Moyers PBS series, titled “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith.”

With his book “Cleansing the Door of Perception”, Smith “came out” about his drug experimentation and what it all might mean. While teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, Smith encountered a small circle of already or soon-to-be (in)famous scholars who were looking into the psychological and spiritual potential of drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and LSD. Famed English author Aldous Huxley was visiting MIT and had already “come out” as a self- experimenter in his classic “The Doors of Perception.” Across town, Leary and Richard Alpert (who renamed himself Ram Dass) were embarking on the “research” that would get them fired from Harvard and put them in the public eye as both gurus and scourges.

Smith, however, took a much quieter route. “I am more philosopher than activist,” he notes. And thus he tried various drugs only a few times and for a short period, expressly with the purpose of exploring “drug-induced religious experiences on the grounds that they come up with the same basic claims about reality that religions always do.”

His book is a collection of essays on that question, including updated versions of papers published in academic journals decades ago but still absorbing and timely today. The only real shortcoming of these landmark writings is that a broader range of mind-altering chemicals, either manufactured ones such as MDMA, known as Ecstasy, or indigenous concoctions such as ayahuasca from the Amazonian basin, have become increasingly common in recent years, with attendant risks and potentials.

Smith holds that true seekers do not use entheogens, which he defines as “virtually nonaddictive drugs that seem to harbor spiritual potentials,” just for kicks. “Emotionally the drug experience can be like having forty-foot waves crash over you for several hours while you cling desperately to a life raft which may be swept from under you at any moment,” he reports. In other words, for a seeker, entheogens are likely to be more challenging than thrilling, but with the potential to make “epochal” changes in one’s view of the meaning of life.

As for any connection of drugs with authentic religion, Smith laments that “it is next to impossible to speak of it in the West today without being misunderstood.”-In other words, without being labeled “pro-drug.” But he feels so strongly that the a link exists that he likens our cultural denial of it to earlier refusals to accept that the Earth rotates around the sun. “When drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible,” he notes hopefully, “discussion will move to the more difficult question of how this fact is to be interpreted.”

Ever scholarly, Smith’s admittedly tentative attempts at this interpretation are replete with fascinating historical references and quotes from thinkers ranging from Plato to Jung to William James. He looks back at ancient India, where entire sects used psychoactive mushrooms until the “quality” of religiously based drug use declined: “Three thousand years in advance of our times, India may have found herself on the brink of a psychedelic mess like the one America created in the 1960s.”

The resulting repression of drug use by the ruling class may have resulted in more of the kind of sloppy illicit drug use (and abuse), where “it is impossible to determine whether sattva (illumination) or tamas (sloth) predominates.” In other words, some things don’t change, or, as Smith puts it, “One man’s meaning is another man’s mush.”

There are also fascinating quotes from American Indians who have long used peyote as “medicine” to commune with their spirits and, ironically, to “cure” themselves of alcoholism. The use of drugs for spiritual purposes is really nothing new, and Smith even raises the possibility that some religious traditions have in fact developed out of primal drug experiences long forgotten in history.

Seemingly aware of the risks of overstating his case, Smith notes that drug-induced “theophanies,” or religious revelations, are often not lasting, and that “[o]pening the gates of heaven at the start, there comes a time — I can attest to this myself — when they begin to open either onto less and less or onto the demonic.” The dreaded bad trip, then, is a hazard for the true seeker.

Among the often-startling footnotes here is the revelation that Bill Wilson, revered founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, told Smith that he had tried LSD and “counted his entheogen experience as equal in the conviction it engendered to the conversion exper-ience that led him to his founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Equally startling to many will be the mention of experiments with cancer and other severely ill patients who had their pain, both physical and emo-tional, greatly helped with the use of entheogenic drugs.

Smith’s language and thinking do venture into arcane regions. But after all its deep inquiry into matters metaphysical and pharmacological, “Cleansing the Doors of Perception” closes with a crucial real-world policy question: “Can a way be found to legitimize, as the Greeks did, the constructive, life-giving use of entheogenic heaven-and-hell drugs without aggravating our serious drug problem?”

Smith does not propose to answer that riddle. What he does do in this brilliant, challenging, warmly written and courageous book is provide the strongest case yet for why that very question might be so important.

Such big numbers are an abstraction, but every person has a life story. Lisa Gray-Garcia recounts hers in her memoir “Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America,” and how we react to it may tell more about the reader than the author.

Born the daughter of a successful but “very odd” surfer-psychiatrist who abandons his family in Los Angeles when she is four years old, Gray-Garcia recalls this period as the end of a “mini-chapter of privilege, comfort and security” for her mother, whose own mother struggled with a lifetime of poverty, and writes that “at four years old I wasn’t really sure what happened, I just wanted my mama to stop crying.”

Thus begins their saga of scrabbling to keep any kind of home, moving to Fresno, Mexico, back to Los Angeles and then up to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s. Lisa and her mother attempt businesses such as making and selling clothes, to stores and on the street, with marginal success but are beset by constant setbacks from borderline slumlords, overdue bills, police, broken cars, illness without health insurance and various human predators, “crisis building upon crisis,” as she summarizes the vicious circle.

Lisa skips a whole year of school to bring in money, resorts to shoplifting and gets busted, and learns many ways of hustling for survival short of actual prostitution. In fact, she avoids any sort of entanglements with men. Hearing the voices of schoolgirls, she recalls longing “to worry about my clothes, homework, boys. … The desperate bone-aching desire to be normal, to go back to school, to have friends, and to not have to worry about money ever again.”

Instead, she keeps working at selling T-shirts (illegally), eventually on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where she again gets arrested for overdue parking and “fix-it” tickets, or DWP — “driving while poor.” She dreams of suicide and violence, and, when she is called “trash” by a landlord, “I just cringed, agreeing with his assessment as most beaten down people do, loathing myself and my mother for our poverty even more than he did.”

After yet another eviction, one she calls illegal, Lisa and her mother decided to move into places “without paying any money at all. I later found out this was called ‘squatting,’ and it had been done successfully by other very low-income families and later transformed through several forms of resistance into something called ‘homesteading.’ “

From her now-politicized language, this might be seen as a turning point for Lisa. Although she has always worked hard to support her dysfunctional mother, they both begin to see their struggle in a broader context, via courses they visit at local colleges and “personal-as-political” art projects they mount in their storefront living spaces. Financial survival remains a constant strain, but a chance meeting with a sympathetic public-interest attorney allows her to write her way out of some community service and of her “trash” self-image. “Without Osha Neumann’s innovative advocacy, I would never have had the privilege to write, to think, my vocation as a writer would never have occurred to me; and this is why I always refer to his help as the first intervention, or in some circles, the first miracle.”

Encouraged, radicalized, emboldened, Lisa has some of her essays published, founds the innovative San Francisco magazine Poor, obtains grant funding for projects, teaches others about poverty issues and achieves a degree of renown as an activist and example of perseverance. Not that this resolves her financial problems. She is still poor, she must lie to get her aching teeth treated at UCSF, her mother’s physical and mental health declines, and “nothing had really changed and yet everything had changed” as she continues to sell T-shirts on the street to keep them housed in a Tenderloin apartment.

Gray-Garcia tells her multigenerational story of poverty in unpolished prose, but it all rings even truer for that. Her nascent political analysis of why she and so many others become homeless might seem shallow and replete with stock slogans too some, but that isn’t the point. Some readers might agree with an editor who rejected one of Gray-Garcia’s stories because of “too much misery”; her book conveys a sense of hopelessness. As a San Francisco friend admitted with some shame after yet another encounter with a homeless person, “my compassion ran out years ago.” The problem is just too big, and usually, impersonal. But every person has a story, and this one is ample evidence that not all, or even most, homeless people somehow earned their fate via drinking, drugs, or sloth.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has admitted that “class warfare” does exist in the United States but that “it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Here’s one story from the losing side. Contrary to some enduring American mythologies, Gray-Garcia shows that it is possible to be smart, work hard, avoid the perils of addiction, violence, HIV and so many other afflictions that beset the poor, and still get stuck in a lifetime of poverty.

Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America by Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, CITY LIGHTS; 287 Pages; $15.95 paperback.

Still, what sweet redemption for the 49ers and particularly Alex Smith, the beleaguered 49er quarterback. Jim Harbaugh, a 15-year NFL quarterback who played for four NFL teams, then won two championships coaching San Diego State and moved on to Stanford propelling that fine University’s football program to national recognition.

Now, Coach Harbaugh and his staff have made the 49ers into a fine team with playoff expectations in future years, always in the Superbowl hunt.

The 49ers needed a head coach with compassion and emotional intelligence to get rid of the smell of coaches Mike Nolan and Mike Singletary who always deflected blame for their own failures onto the team or QB Smith.

I was really happy that Alex Smith stayed with the 49ers so he could play for coaches who would give him intelligent offensive schemes and treat him fairly. Coach Harbaugh gave Smith a fair shot at winning NFL football games and didn’t massacre him publicly if the team lost. To me, in prior years, it was like Alex Smith was a rookie rather than a six year pro. He will only be 28 years old next season, so he has at least five or six prime years left in his body. But he has to learn when to get out of the pocket and run for yardage rather than allowing himself to drown beneath the up-the-middle pass rush.

Smith threw the football well in the first game against the Giants in the tenth week of the season in a 27-20 win in San Francisco last year. And he threw freely with a pronated wrist and a flick to spiral that pigskin where he wanted it to go.

In the playoff game against the New Orleans Saints the 49er coaches and Smith were at the top of their games. The team was at third down and eight years to go for a must have drive. Offensive coordinator Greg Roman believed that Smith should run the ball on a naked roll-out. Harbaugh was unsure but Smith talked him into the important call. Harbaugh listened to his quarterback and okayed the play call. Smith ran for 28 yards and a touchdown behind beautiful cut blocks by slot receiver Kyle Williams and left tackle Joe Staley.

Soon after that running touchdown by Smith he threw a long and spot-on touchdown pass to Vernon Davis, taking the team to last Sunday’s NFC championship game with the winning New York Giants.

Aldon Smith, the 49ers extraordinary pass rusher, was a great pick out of the 2011 draft. Donte Whitner was also a great acquisition. Justin Smith and Navarro Bowman were great all year, as were Patrick Willis and Frank Gore who have been great players for years.

To have a Superbowl team next year, the 49ers need an excellent wide receiver who is fast and has good hands with acute moves to get clear of defenders for long yardage gains. Their current wide receiver Crabtree is a position receiver who has disappointed in the playoffs.

But like San Francisco’s baseball Giants of two seasons ago, the 49ers made me wish the next season would hurry up and start. This year’s 49ers made me hope that the 2012 regular season would start quickly because the team and their audience know their coaching staff will give them a real opportunity to win.

“American classical music audiences are half asleep,” the unusual prodigy said in a recent interview, adding that it is the performer’s obligation to wake them up.

From the time Hahn-bin dramatically threw off the black silk veil which concealed his face as he advanced toward the stage, there were no naps to be had.

Half geisha, half mime, half Mick Jagger, half Vladimir Horowitz, tiny Hahn-bin’s enormous stage persona consumed the room.

That adds up to four halves, which is about right.

The test of a classical musician, to me, is his or her ability to suppress the hacks and wheezes of audience members in the late stages of tuberculosis who drag themselves to the concert hoping to be healed.

Hahn-bin waved his bow like a wand over the January crowd and healed the sick. As he stretched thin the most quiet, yearning phrases, not a creature stirred, not even the uncomprehending infants brought by doting parents to absorb Hahn-bin’s genius by osmosis.

Classical concerts in this country are stiff, high-church affairs. People forget that 200 years ago, classical music was the rock music and audiences came to have a good time.

A common source of discomfort for all present is the constant anxiety over when it is appropriate to applaud.

No matter how stirring a movement, according to etiquette you aren’t supposed to clap until the third movement has concluded.

But at many concerts, some hick from the sticks who somehow made it through the screening process feels moved by the first movement and innocently starts to clap.

Other rubes follow, and soon a smattering of applause threatens to shatter the dignity of the occasion.

The snoots, who are too busy being snoots to actually hear the music, glare at the the rubes and stare them into silence. Snoots live for such delicious moments of superiority.

It is class warfare, and it has divided our country for decades.

Well, Hahn-bin had an announcement made before the event: The right time to applaud is when you feel like it.

You could sense the relief in the room, at least amongst we rubes.

But the stress level soon rose again as Hahn-bin’s pianist approached the stage dressed head-to-toe in black leather and sporting a theatrical feather mask.

It got higher as the be-veiled Hahn-bin himself swooped in with an exaggerated sense of drama.

Good grief, I thought. He’s going to have to be pretty good to pull this off.

But pull it off he did.

First, Hahn-bin pulled off his veil, revealing stunning theatrical make-up that made the audience gasp.

Then he pulled it off with energetic and inspired playing that turbo-charged the difficult but familiar classical pieces on the program.

My suspicion that Hahn-bin took inspiration from Mick Jagger was confirmed when his second costume change featured a shirt printed with dozens of Rolling Stones logos.

Sometimes Hahn-bin laid on the floor. Other times he stomped on the floor to accent a phrase. Sometimes he sat in a cushy chair. And one time he ended up standing atop the piano.

I checked the piano afterwards. Hahn-bin’s big boots made tiny scratches in the finish. You don’t stand on a piano without making scratches, I discovered once in my own home after some dinner guests left.

But Hahn-bin probably will be allowed to leave scratches wherever he wishes. Maybe they’ll have him autograph the scratches with permanent marker.

Classical music concerts can be trying. Usually, given the difficulty hearing unamplified instruments from a distance, it is best just to stay home and listen to a recording.

But at the old wooden museum, Hahn-bin’s rich tone flowed over the small but capacity crowd like melted butter.

Hahn-bin is only starting his career. He recently debuted at Carnegie Hall and showed up on the Today Show.

The chance to hear his talents in a small venue will soon vanish.

Hahn-bin’s next trip through Grand Forks will probably bring him to the big auditorium with cushy, sound-absorbent chairs where I once strained to hear his great teacher, Itzhak Perlman play.

More seats, more money, less reward.

Those of us in the crowd last Sunday were lucky indeed. We saw a rising star up, close and more personal than we would have at Carnegie Hall.

Welcome to the mob.

When I picked up my press credential at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire for the ABC News Republican Primary Debate on a clear Saturday night in January, I expected to be steered to a press gallery close to the stage in a musky debate hall. But there were more than 600 journalists on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 2012. So we were stationed in a nearby basketball gym, in long rows of tables facing two large projection screens showing the television broadcast. We would be watching the debate the same way most baseball broadcasters watch the ballgame nowadays, on television. But the real-time color commentary would be via twitter, and our press box felt as big as an airport hangar. I grabbed a folding chair on the side between a Norwegian journalist and a nattily dressed Romney national finance chair whom had escaped the packed green room to enjoy the relative roominess of our cavernous press lounge, and because “the food is better.”

I shouldn’t have expected anything less than a sprawling media corps, but the image of a salty fraternity of wise-cracking journos in fedoras dies hard I guess, as do all sentimental tropes of American culture. Shoot, there are upstreamers to accommodate now. Guys like Phil Anderson, a cheery, red-cheeked student and Occupy affiliate up from Boston. He roamed the press hangar in a black peacoat, holding a flip video camera and camping headlamp rigged to a tripod pole by an L bracket and Velcro. He was narrating the proceedings to 15 or 20 people watching his live stream online, pointing his camera at whatever they asked him to via the onscreen chat feed. If that sounds a little technical, just picture a college student walking around with a phone-sized camera strapped to a pole seemingly talking to himself like a schizophrenic, but possibly representing the future of media.

It was an exceptionally punchless debate, full of eye-rolling platitudes and few direct attacks on Mitt Romney, the frontrunner. A local TV cameraman explained that the League of Women voters used to run the debates, but when ABC News took over, it changed from “a news event covered by the news to an entertainment event produced by Disney (ABC’s parent company).” The press stars were there too of course, and mostly bored: Mark Shields, the Washington Post columnist and liberal commentator, shuffling around the food table and hawing in his Boston accent, “No more cookies?” Don Gonyea, NPR’s chief political correspondent, tut-tutting and oohing over such wondrous statements like Rick Santorum’s disdainful retort that, “there are no classes in America.”

When the debate mercifully ended, we all scuttled to a smaller gym next door that served as the official spin room. Amid half a dozen constantly forming and disintegrating press scrums you could make out craggy veteran politicians making a play for a possible cabinet post down the road by talking up the talking points of the candidate they’d chosen to latch onto. Hello Tom Ridge, former homeland security chief, coming out of the woodworks to do a little spin service for Jon Huntsman. Hello Nikki Haley, late Tea-Party sweetheart turned embattled South Carolina governor, stumping and preening for Mitt Romney in a long fringe silver dress. There were the candidates’ spokespeople as well, gamely running out their best lines. Take R.C. Hammond, Newt Gingrich’s spokesperson: “Gingrich walked like a president, talked like a president, must be a president.”

As always, there were the oddballs that our national political carnival attracts, such as Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis, who’d flown out from California to challenge President Obama in the Democratic primary. He handed me about 30 photocopied documents including the official Democratic ballot and a newspaper article about a lawsuit he had won against the Democrat Party in Southern California. I told him to call me if he had an official campaign event, but I later realized that I had probably unknowingly participated in the only type he could afford.

Over the next couple days, I attended the campaign events of all five candidates actively campaigning in New Hampshire. In many ways they are homey events, in rustic town halls, small manufacturing plants, conference rooms of woodsy resort hotels. They range from the booster-club pageantry of bunting, pom-poms, and confetti guns at a Jon Huntsman pep rally to the long-winded bloviations of a Newt Gingrich lecture in a hot and steamy high school gymnasium. They can seem dingy, or at least provincial at the time. But when you watch the clips on television news or see the photos in the paper, they gain an aura of authority.

Ron Paul’s events are the most fun in the aggregate, as you can’t avoid appreciating this wiley, frumpy, 76 year old doctor from southeast Texas who has inspired young people across the country to become constitution-waving enthusiasts. They feel the media constantly portrays them as being crazy, which they are not. They just quote policy specifics with a Star Trek convention-goer’s fluidity, and possess the zeal of a true believer, and so your average non-believer never knows quite where to file them. Barbara, 50, a paraprofessional from Meredith, NH, who didn’t want to give her last name, was unwavering in her support for Paul’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, even though she might lose her job in education. “If that would happen, I’d find jobs elsewhere,” said the former Democrat turned Republican.

The Ron Paul organization that garnered an impressive 23% of New Hamphire’s vote seemed a winning mix of rollicking misfit party bus and cagey professionalism. My humble Red Roof Inn in Loudon, NH, was the home to 90 Youth for Ron Paul volunteers who’d come from out of town, and whenever I came home at night they’d be roaming the hallways like a college dorm. One night they had set up chairs in a circle in the lobby of the hotel and three black jean and jacket rockers were jamming on acoustic guitars. The next morning I found myself making coffee in the hotel breakfast nook next to a young man wearing a suit with a piece of duct tape on the back that said “Statistician.” I asked him if he was the statistician for Ron Paul, and could I get a quote, and he shot me a look: How did I know? When I explained, he was still reluctant to give anything more than the perfunctory “it was a great experience.” James Padilioni, 25, a student from Westchester, PA who was filling out a grad school application on a laptop plastered with stickers for various causes (“Yes We Cannabis,” “SchoolsNotPrisons.com,” “Students for Liberty”) stopped himself when I asked him to describe his election day activities. “Our organization is our secret weapon, nobody else has what we have,” he said. “Why give away your secret recipe?”

Barring political catastrophe, Romney will be the Republican nominee, and his campaign clearly boasts the top talent and money. His events are by far the best produced and tightly scripted, with former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty serving as the curtain-raiser hypeman, and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” accompanying his entrances and exits. (Sample lyric: “free, like an untamed stallion.”) Romney’s desire to be liked has an earnest, almost frantic quality. After introducing his wife and splendid family (the best advertisement for the Mormon church in America right now has to be the gorgeous tableaus of the Romney and Huntsman families), he moved to the side of the stage, and stood with his hands tucked in his pockets, stock-still, seemingly determined to never stop smiling. He fools few people with lines like, “A chance to run for President, wow, I never thought I’d do it,” or the Obama-esque riff, “I was just a high school kid with skinny legs.” Left out is that his father was Governor of Michigan and served in the Nixon administration when he was loping around on his skinny legs.

His ad-libs are pricelessly awkward, such as this opening line at the Rochester Opera House, “I can feel the warmth in this room, not just temperature-wise but emotional-wise.” And his stump speech seems written by an algorithm devised to appeal to all parts of a skeptical Republican base. He has a moment where he asks, “Are there any veterans here? Please raise your hands… thank you,” leading to sustained applause. He admits that his father was born in Mexico, hastily adding, “to American parents living there,” as if to snuff out any potential Birther elements, even though it’s only his father. He closes by quoting from “America the Beautiful,” joking, “I said in Iowa that corn counts as amber waves of grain.” He makes no mention of his Mormon heritage and religion, though his campaign slogan “Believe in America” seems a sly reference to his hope that voters will see past his much maligned religion.

There was short-lived hope among reporters on the trail that Huntsman might make it a close race in New Hampshire. The horse race approach to campaign coverage is, for better or worse, what people want to read about most. Why get bogged down in policy comparisons when politics can become a thrilling sporting event? And at the Jon Huntsman voting night party at The Black Brimmer bar in downtown Manchester, the place was packed with the sort of unlikely supporters reminiscent of Obama’s insurgent 2008 campaign. Jon C. Hopwood, 52, a boisterous progressive who’d previously never voted Republican in his life, had battled through the physical sickness he felt when he was given the Republican ballot at the polling place and cast for Jon Huntsman. “How could he be more conservative than Obama?” Hopwood asked, “Obama cut my mom’s food stamps, he cut my home heating oil. I voted for Obama ‘cause my friends told me he was a progressive, but we got a center-right Republican. Maybe with Huntsman we’ll get an Earl Warren.” Elisabeth Langby, 54, a writer and academic of Swedish birth said, “Huntsman is the best presidential candidate since I became a citizen in 1990.”

But even though Romney is a French-speaking millionaire from liberal Massachusetts, he has run the best campaign so far, and, perhaps by process of elimination, seems to have won the blessing of the Republican establishment as the best chance to defeat Obama in a general election. The parallels to Sen. John Kerry are striking, though he never served in the military, so he will not be swiftboated the way Kerry was in 2004.

The journalists on the trail even seemed ready for Romney to secure a win in South Carolina and deliver what would seem a knockout blow to the rest of the field. All the press photographers I talked to admitted they were addicted to the adrenaline rush of campaign reporting, no matter how brutal the press scrum, and how long the days. But as they pulled out their laptops to download their pictures and send them to their editors around the world, the fatigue was evident. One veteran CNN cameraman talked about how the explosion of independent media has made for press scrums with more amateurs who block shots without getting good ones of their own. But generally the press are a welcoming tribe, willing to share a joke or a cigarette with whoever happens to be with them in the trenches that day.

There is an inevitable insularity on the campaign trail, as journalists spend 16 hours a day covering events, tweeting and writing stories, and reading each other’s coverage of the campaign. As most journalists must file immediately for the digital edition, and instantly on twitter, sometimes they can’t even see the candidate when he gives his stump speech, but just hear him through the speakers and are ready to tweet and then file a story about any flub he makes. It seems a bizarre world, until you join it. Then it’s hard to pull yourself away. Thus I found myself watching Jon Huntsman’s speech at 2am in my hotel room, the same speech I had seen live several hours earlier. I had to talk myself into turning off the television, and even then the images of American flags, of perfectly coiffed candidate hair, of the crush and click of hundreds of camera-laden photographers swirled in my head.

Jim won’t be there but Ray and Robbie will be. Manzarek and Krieger, of the Doors. Jim won’t be and neither will drummer John Densmore.

I sided with John Densmore — his lawsuit against Ray and Robbie: no, you cannot use the name Doors, not without Jim’s permission. We agreed. John Densmore wouldn’t let them and they finally had to give in on appeal to the tune of, well, we will leave that to them.

To the tune of “LA Woman” on the dash CD, I’m heading south from Sacramento to finally bend, to finally see Ray and Robbie. To hear them live. I never have. It’s the 40th anniversary of LA woman. One of America’s classics, and not just in rock ‘n roll.

Got to go. Who knows? Pacific amphitheater, Costa Mesa, California.

Having never seen them, even having grown up with them, but one night on VH1 without Jim I finally heard them, John Densmore still on drums. Holy fuckin’ shit! I had no fuckin’ idea how great they were. I’ve written at length. To sum up here, I made it out to the Badlands of Dakota to listen, to make sure. I recently met John Densmore in LA after his world jazz group performed in a small club on Sunset.

Down there to LA is 99 South again. And not during LA’s Carmageddon (which of course never happened, like Y2K).

“Driving down your freeways/midnight alleys roam…”

It’s August, everything sunburned to a brown crisp. At least there can be everything on 99. I-5 South is Lawrence of Dullrabia.

Expecting to stop in Keene. Cesar Chavez is buried there. And agriculture is to the Central Valley as theatre is to Manhattan. A rather scathing article about Chavez by a Catalin Flanagan in the Atlantic, a first, got my attention. For some reason now I need to stop.

“Cops in cars/the topless bars…”

99 South is local bars, used cars, take out and local clubs, cows, railyards, funeral homes, vegetables, crop dusters, dust, trestles, silos, water towers. If 99 was 66. If six was nine — as Jimi Hendrix said.

“I see your hair is burning/hills are filled with fire/if they say I never loved you/you know they are a liar…”

Can’t say America loves 99 the way it does 66, but the north-south fix of six hours works some magic.

A few hours in, coming up on Livingston, California. Headquarters of Foster’s Farms chicken. Hot and dry, time for breakfast. A close friend from Livingston, her family, but just now just the off-ramp to a sparkling clean McDonald’s. Sausage and egg biscuit breakfast. Hustle down the road breakfast, reserved just for the hustling. And what, Salinas and Steinbeck, do you know, an art gallery to the athletic Wolves of Livingston High School, hung on the walls of the McDonald’s like family portraits, young and immaculate, ladies and gentlemen, golf, baseball and cheering, football, etc.

It’s all very touching, touching me where it counts, in small town America amounts, Salinas and Steinbeck.

99 South amounts to patience and sports talk radio and Rush Limbaugh — Comedy Central.

South past Wasco where once again, once every trip, Route 46 takes James Dean to legendary death. Like magic.

Three hours in and about three hours left.

Stopping for road lunch (did you know that it’s legal to eat roadkill in West Virginia?) At the base of the “Grapevine” at a gourmet Jack in the Box. I forgot Cesar Chavez. Must have been Rush Limbaugh.

Ultimate cheeseburgers and flotilla coke. Just on the road, mind you. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

El Tejon Pass,where you can look back on the green brown desert, orange air pollution and the dust of long-haul bedouins on I-5.

These hills are alive with the 40th reunion of Buffalo Springfield. They’re wonderful, Stephen and Richie and Neil, even though they sound a bit 45 rpm when it should be 78.

Burnt brown all around. We cut through the hills and mountains, no problem. Nothing can stand its ground against us.

The spines of towers and roller coasters like stranded bones of dinosaurs. Six Flags over California. Why, when there is a beach at Santa Monica?

405 South to Santa Monica is fine, always partially bumper-to-bumper, with no remnants of carmageddon.

Turning off above the Getty Center for the Skirball Museum. A Wal-Mart daughter, worth about $29 billion, is building a new Museum of American Art, the Bridges Museum, in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart and Senator Thomas Hart Benton of a past America that the New Yorker says takes something from the Skirball.

The Skirball is too much concrete in a dappled setting. That said, in and out of the parking lot and onto Santa Monica.

Santa Monica Blvd leads to the ocean, all the way from the beaches of Long Island, my homestead.

I’ve actually found a parking meter to feed for two hours.

It’s a summer Thursday so the beach is populated but not crowded, the world’s least expensive shrink.

Sounds from the jaunty peer, lifeguard whistles, and the cold surf, the couch in the shrink’s.

Riding the waves, hot, dusty inland doesn’t seem possible, stretched out in the Brian Wilson sun, even a slight tan for this Celtic visitor seems possible.

Just a day at the beach before the remnant of The Doors tomorrow. My usual motel in the Fairfax district, Jewish being the vibe like life around New York City’s now former Ratner’s?

Canter’s Jewish Deli here still very much in business, chicken soup for the soul, corned beef, pastrami on rye, mustard splattered. I’m from Long Island so I’m technically Jewish. You know what Lenny Bruce says: “If you’re from the five boroughs and you are not Jewish, you are. But if you are from Utica and you are Jewish, you’re not.”

Ahh, contented. Now to ruin the evening. Cowboys and Aliens, but at the Arclight on Hollywood and Vine. Fifteen bucks with validated parking. A Disney ride for the 10 minutes the movie was worth it. Then all garbage. Keep ‘em coming, I guess. Pay for the independent banquet.

Sleep, sunburn and sand and surf, Kramer’s fragrance taking over.

The sun never sets in California. In the morning a short jaunt down 405 somewhat almost near the coast, past Anaheim, after Howard Hughes and so forth, Jennifer Aniston, almost totally naked, on a giant billboard for $10 water. Somebody help me! With the recent sale of her $45 million homestead.

Glimpses of the Ocean, about 90 degrees in the later morning.

South to 55 South to Costa Mesa/Newport, California.

Can’t check in at the Motel 6 — $100 until 2pm. So let’s see, the beach at Newport Beach, California. Sunburn browning in so, of course, let’s go down through the stores and shops, sort of a surfing Cape Cod, California.

Hoping for a ham and egger near the beach and sure enough (I can’t remember the name) tables with omelettes and scrambled outside along the sidewalk, sort of Carmely nearby, but the breakfast and a sensuous servers were, “dude, awesome.”

It’s real quiet compared to Santa Monica, smaller, with a short pier, just as cold in the surf, the waves far out, got to swim out to reach them.

Nothing to do but soak up the environment. Palos Verdes cliffs, I guess, down the sand like bookends to a SoCal journal.

Sun and soak, my freckles like a freckle army — armada.

What to do for a few hours? I’ve got it. Why not try the US Open surfing championship in Huntington Beach, California?

Correctamundo. Wrongamundo, taking the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway for those of you who don’t watch Two and a Half Men). Bumper to Mercedes, to Land Rover, to VW van in a crawl, the wide open expanse of Huntington’s beaches, preserved wetland marshes, red lights and honking horns, asking two young girls crawling along beside me if I’m headed to the US Open surfing championship. Without looking up from their texting, they answer in the affirmative. “Main Street,” they tell me.

Slowly, slowly, always surf alongside, when slowly but surely the light beer banners, bleachers and murals of the pro-surfers appear. There’s no way I’m going in. Traffic, crowds, traffic, as the beach bathing beauties start to appear in the dozens, the hundreds, and at the Main Street crossing in the thousands.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. The sun tan beauty so overwhelming, high schools and colleges are emptied. Bless the two-piece anatomy.

I have never seen a rodeo of such luscious, gorgeous, so out of reach proportions. I can’t stop. I can’t get out. I have to roll along slowly and absorb it. You can’t imagine. It’s like Gidget on Steroids. Girls Gone Wild with some of their clothes on. I am forever overwhelmed by such a gathering of so much beauty in one location. Woodstock of the Surf, I guess. But really there is nothing to compare it to.

Finally an illegal U-turn with about 12 other cars, traffic at ease on the other side heading back to Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Running the gauntlet of statutory hands-off-ness, but good God almighty girls. This is America in recession? Not too shabby.

Okay, I’ve made it back to find the fairgrounds, the Pacific amphitheater for the remains of the band originally from Venice Beach, California.

Got some time for a little Costa Mesa Public Library, checking a roadmap. I’m thinking about doing Death Valley on the way back from San Diego.

Back at the 6, nappy time, with some home-grown that made even Cowboys and Aliens.

Ferris wheel permanent fairgrounds, vast parking. Now remember where you parked with a toke of the homey bowl full.

Folks strolling up, Jim’s famous face in evidence on t-shirts, handbags and other vestments.

I’m in for $45. Nothing special, a sloping outdoor theater with a lawn up above, stage below, ageless rock ‘n roll.

I’m ready to not care at all. Just give me Ray and Robbie solos.

Crowd flies in, young and mostly older, young Chicano/Latinos in the seats in front of me.

Some local legend DJ, skinny, black jacket, leather, thinning orange-tinged hair thrown over his head in Tom Wolfe’s “George McGovern alpine rope throw.” Who cares?

On with the show! Uh-oh! A Christ image appears on a back screen. I’m ready to leave. The image remains as the band comes on stage in the concert darkness.

It begins with Ray Manzarek asking Orange County, “Are you ready to rock ‘n roll?” I’m ready to leave. “Republican base camp, are you ready to rock ‘n roll?”

I think they start in with “Back Door Man,” the singer, John Brock? Doing a real good not-Jim, almost looking the part, hair and dark clothes, no leather pants, moving in a Mo Jo.

That Christ image finally disappears. Everyone stands up. Not me. So I’m peeking in between bodies to get my first, yes, live look at Robby Krieger.

He’s effortless on guitar, the sounds of The Doors from days gone by. With his gray hair and skinny little body he looks a bit like John McEnroe. Doesn’t Johnny Mac wish?

I’d stand up if Jim was here.

Ray’s got the glasses. He is again yelling, “Orange County are you ready?” Agent Orange County maybe. I’m ready to leave again but the songs from the great LA Woman begin.

They do “Hyasenth House” from LA woman. It’s so rare a song Jim’s almost not missing.

And on it goes, in and out of LA and the songbook, the original group so American, so us, so able to go off where they wanted to, needed to, all this so what, with moments to cherish, almost.

Almost worth it as the encore, of course, is Ray and Robbie and their solos on “Light My Fire.”

So I can close the book and introduce my one-man show: Jim — get him out of Paris and bring him on home.

Home to the 6, after not being able to find my car until I realized it wasn’t where I was searching. “Before you slipped into unconsciousness.”

It’s sunny and 80 degrees again in the morning and now a stretch on old US 1, Dana Point and Doheny, the Coastliner train swooshing by, the Pacific stretching out to China.

Stopping at Mission San Juan Capistrano, just to circle the swallows, the miniature downtown around the Spanish and brick and adobe like a stagecoach stop from One-Eyed Jacks.

Back on I-5 to zoom into San Diego, Pendleton, Oceanside, Torrey Pines, La Jolla, brown hills awaiting vacaros, compact skyline, old town San Diego, the ocean, the ocean, Myrtle Avenue stop.

Big brunch at the Big Kitchen, one of the great ham and eggers, well worn in, earthy and authentic.

Cocktails on Nancy’s back porch, San Diego in silence.

Brew pub in an old Wonder Bread brick downtown building near the baseball stadium, San Diego, the patron saint of cities beside an ocean.

Big burgers at Ho-Dad’s inland from their ocean beach location, comrades, former New Yorkers, wisecracks and laughter in extra large proportions.

Sleep like an air mattress afloat on the calm sea.

Breakfast in a local, again, well used, simple yet stylish, out at a sidewalk table, the San Diego so few will ever visit.

On to the Mission Beach Boardwalk without any boards, cement, roller coaster, corn dog on a stick, sun, surf, sand — but we wanted that wooden walk.

And the highlights of a Sunday in Balboa Park, Spanish art, Dali to El Greco, and the overwhelming surprise of Spaniard Sorello. Who the hell was he, letting in all that light? So unlike his famous predecessors.

Up and around the golf course and it’s well rubbed in clubhouse and restaurant with the course and the park and the city beyond basked in its one and only glow.

Then in the evening a crab shack bar against the beach, Ocean Beach, California, cold beer and dep fried shrimp in a seaside town that is “Hair,” still, if you could afford a production of such on your own.

All in all, just might be paradise on earth but surely not the long haul home, minus Death Valley but a 99 north of sorts.

Turns out, showing a person the sole of your shoe and making the “it’s-all-good” sign (which was originally coined as sign language by SCUBA divers) are both grave insults in Turkey. It’s a miracle I wasn’t thrown to the bears. It was only weeks later that I learned what a klutz I’d been. I was reviewing a website on faux pas commonly made by travelers, and idle amusement quickly turned to mortification as I recognized descriptions of my own misdeeds. There is nothing to do now but laugh at how many blunders I’ve unknowingly committed through years of visiting strange lands. Anyway, as global travel increasingly links cultures around the world, people everywhere may be growing more accepting of know-nothing travelers like me — and perhaps today the idea of the clueless foreigner is more charmingly comic than it is gravely offensive.

Nonetheless, there are a few things best not to do when traveling — and this list is a start:

1) In Japan, accepting a business card from a Japanese person without using two hands or acting like you are sublimely honored. Because a Japanese person isn’t fooling when he or she hands you a business card. In addition to receiving it with two hands, one is supposed to bow deferentially. Forbes.com addressed precisely this matter, with no intention of parody, in a 2005 article on etiquette pointers for the traveling businessperson. It makes that scene from American Psycho seem not so ludicrous after all.

2) In Georgia, drinking at the table while another is making a toast. Toasts in this former Soviet nation come many times per meal and may last as long as five or 10 minutes. They are sometimes almost hilariously theatrical until one realizes that Georgians are totally serious when they raise their wine glasses and begin speaking. If a guest is present, especially, the melodrama gets thick as the speaker praises the two represented nations, the honor of playing host to a foreigner, the guest’s good fortune as he or she continues their journey, ancestors, God and so on and so forth — though not always in a single toast. I spent some time in Georgia in 2010. Even at such informal sites as the side of the road, men drinking wine sometimes called me over, filled me a glass and embarked on lengthy verbal voyages. It’s a wonder, looking back, that we ever managed to squeeze in a drink.

3) In most of the Middle and Far East, walking into a home with one’s shoes on. Been there, done that — and with gunky fig jam caked to the soles of my cycling shoes, to boot. Yes, I was a walking disaster in Turkey, day after day committing insults so dreadful it’s fortunate I didn’t make the old ladies faint — or the young men call for their weapons.

4) In the Hindu and Muslim world, greeting a person or eating with your left hand. I cannot begin to imagine how many times I have absentmindedly done this in Turkey. Locals, it turns out, traditionally wipe themselves with the left hand. A tad bit presumptuous, isn’t it, for them to assume that I do, too?

5) Also in the Muslim world, eating during daylight hours during the holy month of Ramadan. Being the old hand at social blunders that I am, I’ve committed this crime many times. I was in Turkey during Ramadan in August 2010, and when I caught myself and sheepishly apologized, the folks around me said I had done nothing wrong. I have never known if they were simply being polite. Because in Dubai, anyway, foreigners seen eating during the Ramadan fasting hours can face jail time.

6) In Hawaii, refusing a lei. Don’t feel like wearing a rosary of tropical blossoms round your neck? Tough luck. Put the lei over your head, offer a generous hug in return and consider yourself formally welcomed to the islands. If you really can’t stand the thing, Hawaiian culture considers it acceptable for one to re-gift the lei to one’s spouse — but not, heaven forbid, if she’s a pregnant woman! Tread carefully. Stay vigilant.

7) In Russia, refusing vodka when offered, and sipping it once your glass is filled. Instead, you must gregariously chug your shot glass of Eurasia’s favorite booze. What’s more, having three drinks is sometimes obligatory at an event for one to demonstrate a baseline level of friendliness and social prowess. Meanwhile, women in Russia might do wisely, as custom sometimes demands, to leave the vodka to the men and drink wine instead.

And this one may come as a surprise: In Germany, discussing sports. So I read in this Vagabondish post from Amy Baker, who says German people may think someone “uneducated” if he or she is heard discussing a sporting match.

9) In the United Kingdom, holding up your index and middle finger with the back of your hand facing outward. Britons: Please don’t laugh. Because in America, most people are unaware that this is the equivalent of giving someone the middle finger — and please understand that it’s a mistake if someone makes this sign while ordering two beers across a noisy pub.

10) Finally, in the United States, relieving oneself in public. That’s right, all you gentlemen from France, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic: Turning your back on a person or a crowd and emptying your bladder may be business as usual where you come from, but in my culture, many people consider it dirty and disrespectful. Why, I have friends and relatives who would keel over dead if they saw such an act in public. Me? I’ll forgive you.

***

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In 1965, when I was 16 and deeply unhappy, I went to the Guild Theater in Menlo Park, California, to see the movie Zorba the Greek, starring Anthony Quinn, Irene Papas, Lila Kedrova, and the not-yet-widely-known Alan Bates. I knew little about the film and nothing about the novel the film was based on. I went because I loved Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia and because I preferred foreign films to American movies. And the moment that fabulous Greek music began to play and those gorgeous black and white images took hold of the big screen, I was shocked out of my psychic lethargy into a whole new state of awareness.

The next day I went to Kepler’s Books, just around the corner from the Guild Theater, and bought a copy of Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. I devoured that novel three times in the next four days and then went to see the movie again. Thereafter, in quick order, I bought and read every Nikos Kazantzakis book published in English, save for The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, an 800-page epic poem that took me two years to read. I consumed a page every day, reading each line twice so I would not skim, and when I finished that monumental tome in the summer following my second year of college, I gazed up at the depthless sky and recited the last line aloud — today I have seen my loved one vanish like a dwindling thought — and decided to quit school and wander, as Van Morrison sang, into the mystic.

Not having seen Zorba the Greek in 20 years, Marcia and I watched the film a few nights ago, and I was surprised to find I no longer resonated with the male characters, but identified entirely with the woman portrayed by Irene Papas, a defiant widow forced to subsume her strength and intelligence in deference to a society controlled by violent and emotionally vapid men.

At 16, I strongly identified with the Bates character, a bookish fellow longing to experience a more sensual and romantic life; and I wanted to be Zorba, a charming minstrel wandering roads less traveled in pursuit of love and inspiration. At 62, I thought the Bates character cowardly and grossly unimaginative; and Quinn’s Zorba reminded me of every narcissistic sociopath I’ve had the misfortune to know. Only Irene Papas lifted the movie into greatness, proclaiming with her every glance and gesture, “Better to die than allow them to crush your spirit.”

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at 18 and 48.” — Ezra Pound 

By the time I was 22, I had written several dozen short stories and hundreds of poems, none much good, but all excellent practice. I thought that before I wrote a novel I should be able to write a decent short story, which would mean I could write serviceable sentences and paragraphs, as well as plausible dialogue. Most writers of mine and earlier generations felt similarly about a writer needing an apprenticeship of rigorous practice, which is why I stand in awe and bewilderment at the legions of people in America today who think they can write novels without ever having written a short story. But I digress.

Learning to write, for me, involved developing stamina as well as refining my technique. Writing a good sentence was a sprint, constructing a viable paragraph was running a mile, and finishing a short story was the completion of a marathon — and those were just the rough drafts. That I might write a novel on the scale of Kazantzakis, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, was incomprehensible to me for the first several years of my writing practice.

Then someone gave me Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which only took me an hour or so to read. I wanted to like Slaughterhouse-Five because Vonnegut’s prose was fluid and friendly, but I found the story flimsy, the characters cartoons, and the alien interventions annoyingly adolescent. But I liked the book well enough to get Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle; and that book literally changed my life.

I am a moderately fast reader, so Cat’s Cradle took me less than an hour to read. When I put the book down, I did not think, “What a great little book.” No, I thought, “I can write a book like this. No sweat. One and two-page chapters. A hundred or so pages. Cartoon characters. Comic dialogue. Riches and fame, here I come.”

Of course it was folly to think I could easily write a novel as clever and unique as Cat’s Cradle, but the form and the scale of the book were not daunting to me. Thus I was emboldened to write my first novel, a modest tome entitled The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg, a youthful tale of love and sex and hilarious (to me) emotional turmoil. In those pre-computer, pre-photocopy days, I hunkered down in a hovel in Ashland, Oregon for the winter and wrote and rewrote three drafts long-hand, then typed three more drafts, the last made with painstaking slowness to avoid typographical errors while creating multiple copies using layers of carbon paper and manuscript paper.

From start to finish, my first novel took four months to write; and then I packed the blessed thing up and sent it to Kurt Vonnegut’s publisher in New York. Where else? In my cover letter I informed the editors of Harcourt, Brace, & Whomever that I would be heading east soon, Manhattan my goal, and I would be checking in periodically to see how things were progressing with my book. Yes, I was so naïve about the publishing world I thought someone at Harcourt, Brace & Whomever would actually read The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg, offer me a grandiloquent advance, and make me, you know, the next big thing.

When I finally got to New York some months later, having had no word from my publisher, I called their offices and spoke to a receptionist who asked, “Which editor did you submit your work to?”

“Um…I just…not to anyone in particular, but…”

She put me on hold. A few minutes later, a woman named Jill came on the line. She sounded very young, no older than thirteen. She took my name and phone number and said she would look into things and get back to me. “As a rule,” she added politely, “we don’t consider unsolicited manuscripts.”

“How does one get solicited?” I asked, perplexed by such a seemingly silly rule. “By Harcourt, Brace & Whomever?”

“Oh…um…” she said, clearing her throat. “That would be arranged by your literary agent. If you had a literary agent. But since you came all the way across the country we’ll have someone examine your manuscript.”

“You mean read it?” I asked, troubled by the word examine.

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Someone will give it a read.”

Two weeks later, Jill called (I was crashing on a broken sofa in a roach-infested apartment in Harlem) and invited me to come down to their offices where she would meet me at the receptionist’s desk. Riding the subway from the squalor of Harlem to the opulence of midtown Manhattan, I imagined being greeted by a gorgeous gal and led into an inner sanctum where a host of editors and famous writers had gathered to meet the author of “this truly remarkable first novel.”

The elevator opened onto the ultra-plush reception lounge of Harcourt, Brace & Whomever, and the receptionist, a statuesque blonde dressed like Zsa Zsa Gabor on a hot date, informed Jill that I had arrived. A long moment passed, and then Jill appeared, a rosy-cheeked girl who didn’t look a day over thirteen, wearing a Sarah Lawrence sweatshirt, my manuscript in her arms, for it was Jill who had examined my novel.

She handed me my precious creation, wished me safe travels, and disappeared. I fled the ultra-plush lounge for the hard planks of a bus bench where I sat and wept as I read the note Jill had placed atop my manuscript, her girlish handwriting plagued by o’s much larger than the other letters so her sentences seemed punctuated by balloons.

Dear Todd,

I thoroughly enjoyed The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg (a real page turner) and thought it a wonderful picaresque romp. However, we do not as a rule accept unsolicited manuscripts. Good luck with your writing. Jill Somebody, associate editor.

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” Kurt Vonnegut from Slaughterhouse-Five

In 1977, five years after being rejected by Harcourt, Brace & Whomever, I was living in Seattle and down to my last few dollars. Since that shattering moment in Manhattan, I had roamed around North America for a couple years before alighting in various towns in California and Oregon — never ceasing to write. Through a series of astonishing events (some might call them miracles, others might call them karmic results) I had secured the services of the late, great, and incomparable literary agent named Dorothy Pittman, and she had managed to sell a few of my short stories to national magazines while trying to sell the three novels I had written since breaking my cherry, so to speak, with The Apprenticeship of Abraham Steinberg.

One drizzly day, lost as I often was in downtown Seattle, I came upon a hole-in-the-wall newspaper and magazine stall wherein a balding guy with a red beard stood behind a counter piled high with cartons of cigarettes and candy bars. On the wall behind him was a two-shelf rack, three-feet-wide. On the top shelf were new paperback editions of all Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, and on the bottom shelf were new paperback editions of all Hermann Hesse’s novels.

“Hesse and Vonnegut,” I said to the guy. “Are those the only books you carry?”

“Yep,” he said, nodding. “All I got room for. Newspapers and magazines out front, racy stuff and cigarettes in here.”

“Are Vonnegut and Hesse your favorite authors, or…”

“No. I only read murder mysteries.”

“So then why Kurt and Hermann?”

“Because I sell hundreds and hundreds of copies of their books every month.” He turned to look at the rack. “People come in to buy a magazine or cigarettes, and they see those books and their eyes light up and…bingo. I tried some other authors, but these guys are the only ones that sell and sell and sell. I have no idea why.”

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

I don’t know what all the fuss is about. “Awesome” is the most phenomenally iconic word ever. Actually I buried and mourned it long ago, interred it with a host of other cheapened, diluted, inflated, and perverted superlatives, though not without some serious regret and resentment.

I’m a word guy and I will delve into the archaic, the arcane, or other languages to find the mot juste. If necessary I will create a new word to fit a definition lacking one. Hubris? Hell yes; I’m lousy with it.

So for years I actively resisted the cheapening of awesome. “Really? That cappuccino is ‘awesome’?” I’d say. “Because you’re not acting like it. You’re drinking it. Shouldn’t you be gaping or genuflecting or averting your eyes or something?”

To which the offender would reply: “Huh?”

My resistance, which would eventually be completely eroded, focused on awesome’s singularity — there really is no replacement for it. The conditions associated with awe — fear, amazement, reverence, wonder — you will find grouped in no other definition. Therefore, when one finds oneself in a truly awe-inspiring situation: the aurora borealis, a nuclear explosion, a supernova, what have you: you may as well just say “cool,” ‘cuz awesome don’t mean shit.

“Phenomenal” I’m puzzled by. It’s sort of like awesome in reverse. I don’t have a dictionary handy, but as near as I can recall a phenomenon is an observable occurrence; something that happens. No qualification or values inherent. So when dipshit #1 says to dipshit #2 on Dancing With the Stars: “That Paso Doble was absolutely phenomenal!,” what he’s saying is: that Paso Doble just happened. Which I guess is pretty awesome.

Iconic, another burr under my saddle, is almost not worth mentioning because the people who (improperly) use it sound so stupid that I feel sorry for them. An icon is a representation that stands for something else. A person achieves iconic status when they are so thoroughly associated with something that you cannot think of one without the other coming to mind. Michael Jordan is for sure a basketball icon. Madonna is definitely an 80s icon. Leighton Meester’s performance on “Gossip Girl” is in no way iconic.

Yours in awesomeness,

Lynn Washburne

San Quentin

For many people, December is the most neurotic month; and Christmas marks the apogee of shame, jealousy, disappointment, and self-loathing. Indeed, most psychotherapists aver that Christmas in America might as well be called Crisismas. One can theorize endlessly about why Christmas/Hanukah (and the attendant mass gift buying) inflame the dominant neuroses of so many people, but the picture that sums it up for me is of a child surrounded by dozens of presents she has just frantically unwrapped, not one of which satisfies her craving to be loved.

“The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

When I embarked on my first experience of formal psychotherapy, I knew my parents had abused me, but I could not clearly elucidate the rules of behavior instilled in me by their abuse. My therapist suggested I try to write down the basic rules governing my behavior so I might gain a more objective view of how those rules impacted my life.

One of the most deeply entrenched rules I uncovered was: Nothing I do is good enough. Sound familiar? I ask because I subsequently learned that this rule runs many people’s lives. And though I doubt our parents ever came right out and said, “Nothing you do is good enough,” I know that in myriad other ways they repeated that message thousands and thousands of times; and repetition accomplished the entrenching.

For instance, my mother used “Yes, but…” responses to everything I did or said. “Yes, but…” responses are characterized by positive (though insincere) opening statements followed by the word but, followed by subtle or emphatic derogatory proclamations. Here are a few examples of the thousands of “Yes, but…” responses I received from my mother over the course of my life.

Following my performance in a high school play, my mother said, “You were very good, but…you’re not going to be in another play, are you?”

Upon hearing about my very first sale of a short story, my mother said, “Well, that’s good news, but…they didn’t give you very much money, did they?”

And after meeting my girlfriend(s) for the first time, my mother opined, “Well, she seems nice, but…maybe just a little cuckoo/not too bright/might have a weight problem/might be anorexic/seems rather young for you/seems rather old for you/never finished college/works in a restaurant/rides a motorcycle/do you think she takes drugs?/she sure can drink/she wears an awful lot of makeup/why no makeup?”

Children who are constantly bombarded with “Yes, but…” responses grow into adults incapable of hearing or believing positive responses from anyone. If such a bombarded person sings a song and a friend responds, “That was beautiful,” the bombarded person will assume the compliment is false because in their experience honest responses (which are always negative) only come after the word but. Indeed, a statement not followed by but and a negative comment has no meaning at all to a person programmed to believe Nothing I Do Is Good Enough.

Some people grow up with “Yes, but…” fathers and non-“Yes, but…” mothers, or vice-versa; and these people tend to have mixed views of themselves as partly good enough and partly not good enough. Their versions of the Nothing I Do Is Good Enough rule are Nothing I Do Is Good Enough for Dad (men) or Nothing I Do Is Good Enough for Mom (women). However, if both parents employ “Yes, but…” responses to everything a child does or says, then that child will become an adult with serious trust and intimacy issues; and he or she will almost certainly fear and loathe Christmas because no matter what he or she buys for anyone, it, the present, won’t be good enough. How could the stupid thing be good enough? Consider the source!

Most of my father’s responses to me began with, “You know what you really should do?” followed by a lecture about what I should be doing as opposed to what I was already doing. In this way he re-enforced the Nothing I Do Is Good Enough rule with the I’m Never Doing What I Should Be Doing rule.

“At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another — generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.” –Barbara Ehrenreich

I vividly remember the day before Christmas when I was twenty-two, a scruffy lad hitchhiking to my parents’ house for our annual festival of neuroses starring my brother and sisters and parents and moi. This was during the vagabond phase of my life — a cold and rainy day in California, the oak trees rife with mistletoe. I was standing on the western edge of Highway One, about ten miles south of San Francisco, the rain drumming on my gray plastic poncho, my backpack and guitar sheltered under a silver tarp, my soggy cardboard sign reading Half Moon Bay Or Bust. I was dreaming of a hot shower and a good meal and a warm bed, and trying not to think about the de rigueur verbal abuse that would accompany such parental hospitality, when a tie-dyed Volkswagen van stopped for me.

The driver was a loquacious fellow named Larry from Galveston, Texas, his coach reeking of tobacco and marijuana, his voice warm and comforting. After a few minutes of back and forth, he said, “Hey, man, I like you. Why don’t you come to our house for Christmas? Stay a couple days? We live right down here in San Gregorio. Kind of a commune, you know? My wife Suse is cooking a big turkey, my sister Clara’s making yams. Bunch of artists and musicians.” He bounced his eyebrows. “Lots of pretty women. You’ll dig it, man. There’s plenty of room to spread your kit.” Then he grinned enormously and added, “It’ll beat the shit out of mom and dad, guaranteed.”

As the child of two alpha “Yes, but…” parents, I was certain there was an unspoken but attached to Larry’s generous invitation — a problem or multiple problems. Larry’s wife might become violent after her third glass of wine, and the wine would probably be cheap and give me a headache. Their dog would bite me or give me fleas. Suse’s turkey would be overcooked, Clara’s yams inedible, and I’d become constipated or get the runs. I would hate the music Larry and his friends played, and Larry and his friends would hate my music. The women would not be pretty and the whole affair would be a disaster.

“The thing is,” I replied, hating myself for turning him down, “I promised my mother I’d come home for Christmas, and…she worries about me. I haven’t seen her in a year, so…”

“I hear you,” said Larry, nodding sympathetically. “But listen, man…if it sucks, you know where to find us. We’d love to have you.”

We parted ways at the San Gregorio general store and I hitched the last thirty miles to the festival of neuroses at my folks’ house. And that festival did, indeed, totally suck. So the next day, Christmas, despite the howling wind and torrential rain, I hitched back to San Gregorio, found the dirt road to Larry’s and Suse’s place, and arrived at their little farmhouse to find Suse storming around in the wreckage of her kitchen and raging on the phone at her mother in Los Angeles — Larry sitting in his van with his five-year-old son Lance, Buffalo Springfield on the stereo singing, “Listen to my bluebird laugh, she can’t tell you why. Deep within her heart, you see, she knows only crying. Just crying.”

“Hey,” said Larry, rolling down his window and smiling at me. “You came. Right on.”

“Is it still okay if I stay here tonight?”

“Absolutely,” he said, turning to his son. “Hey, Lance, this is Tom.”

“Todd,” I said softly. “Merry Christmas, Lance.”

“I got four books and a ball and crayons,” said Lance, nodding seriously. “What did you get?”

“Fifty dollars,” I said, thinking of my unhappy mother slipping me the money under the table so my dad wouldn’t see, and how, despite her disapproval of everything I chose to do, she loved me; if only I would be someone else.

“Suse is seriously bummed,” said Larry, shaking his head. “Bullshit with her mom. You don’t want to know. So…I think maybe you better sleep in my van tonight. Should be better in the morning.”

“I think I’ll just come back another time,” I said, taking a hit from the proffered joint. “But I thank you for the invitation.”

“Oh, stay, man,” he said, nodding encouragement. “This, too, shall pass. Besides, we need you to help us eat all the leftovers. Right, Lance?”

“Right,” said Lance, nodding emphatically. “There’s tons.”

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

At its best, dusting off music that was composed a long time ago, say nearly three centuries ago in the case with Wednesday night’s thrilling performance of heroic Handel arias by the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky with the Freiburger Barockorchester in Berlin’s Philharmonie, leads to an enrichment of the present through creative engagement with the past. Reclaiming earlier works can also spawn a sense of profound difference with earlier musicians and their music.

No difference is greater than that between the voices and bodies of present male sopranists and the male castrati of the 18th-century opera stage — those same heroes for whom Handel wrote hundreds of arias. That the voice of the Musical Enlightenment should have been achieved by the barbarous means of castrating tens of thousands of young boys in hopes that a few would become great singers, was a paradox not lost on commentators of the period. Yet princes and patricians could not wean themselves of the addiction, even as it emptied their pockets. In the 18th century the budgets for singers dwarfed that allocated to composers and librettists, and these outlays bankrupted countless opera concerns, two of them led by Handel himself.

The voice that resulted from castration can only be guessed at since, with one interesting but feeble exception, it went extinct before the advent of recorded sound. But according to surviving accounts, the great castrato voices had huge power and dynamic range. They were trained from an early age not only technically, but also in performance, especially in the crucial art of ornamentation that ran from the refined and slight to the gloriously flamboyant, even excessive. These singers were the Euro-idols of their age: Senesino, Carestini, and above all Farinelli.

Senesino premiered many of Handel’s titanic roles before jumping ship from Handel’s listing Royal Academy for its rival Opera of the Nobility, then paddling away from both behemoths as they went down thanks to the holes his mammoth fees had made in both their hulls. The haughty Italian then sailed home with more than enough gold to build his own villa whose motto was to be read over the entrance: “This house was built on the folly of the English.”

Jaroussky’s voice does not have the heroic power one assumes emanated from Senesino’s large chest, overgrown as it was due to the effects of the hypogonadism from which so many castrati suffered, and which often made them fleshy, tall, and disproportionately top-heavy.

Jaroussky is tall and a bit gangly, but slender. He has an open face and a bright enthusiasm. When he plants himself in front of the twenty-piece Freiburger band his height and solidity recall something of the 18th-century physical presence of his theatrical forbears. Where Senesino was praised as a great singing actor, Jaroussky is rather awkward with his arms and posture: his main pose is elbows out and thumbs up, adopting a slight crouch when he’s tackling the trickiest of Handelian scales, arpeggios, and trills.

As for the sound that comes out of Jaroussky’s throat, it is angelic and pure rather than charged with the sensual and timbral complexity that descriptions of Farinelli and Senesino evoke. It’s a kind of perfection that the Baroque specialist Jaroussky has deployed in his recent recording of the Fauré Requiem and heard to full effect in his spotless account, as if perched on a cumulus cloud, of the oft-trampled Pie Jesu.

I’d guess that Jaroussky can sing as fast and as precisely as Handel’s Italian stars, but his lightning-quick virtuosity lacks the necessary voltage. The penultimate of the evening’s three encores, greeted with rapture by the nearly sold-out hall, was a blinding rendition of Venti turbini clocking in at what could well have been a world record. It comes from Handel’s first London opera, Rinaldo, of 1711, and is both a show-stopping aria and a concerto for violin and bassoon. The Freiburg ensemble’s first violinist and director Petra Müllejans bolted out at blinding speed and the other instrumental soloist, the phenomenal Eyal Street followed her with shocking ease and blazing fire on the much more unwieldy bassoon. After the blistering ritornello Jaroussky sped along with the pair, and when things began flagging ever-so-slightly in the midst of the race, Müllejans pushed things ahead again. It is impressive and entertaining, but Jaroussky racing in front of the Freiburg Express is a bit like watching fireworks in brilliant sunny daylight — his voice at maximum velocity is not strong enough to shine through this dazzling band.

Part of the problem has to do with another of the big differences between then and now: the venues Senesino sang in were smaller than the Berlin Philharmonie which, in spite of its celebrated acoustic, here joins forces with the German orchestra against the French countertenor. I was sitting little more than half way up, and I’m sure that closer to the stage the pyrotechnics carried much more firepower.

For all his up-tempo technical accomplishment, it is in the slow movements that Jaroussky becomes truly compelling. In the 18th century, slow, affecting arias were the true test of musicianship and the essential forum for moving listeners, even to tears. Jaroussky’s vocal purity, with the careful application of vibrato on long notes, may well be very different from the 18th-century’s, but he has a unique ability to find the absolute center of a long-held note and then swell with the most subtle gradations. In spite of his lack of 18th-century power, Jaroussky would have been justly rewarded for his mastery of the crucial adagio by the princes of yore: his heart-rending manipulation of single tones and his creative and tasteful ornaments on the obligatory repeat of the open section of these arias serve the vital function of intensifying the emotional state — the pathos — often of a brooding melancholy, filled with sighs of loss and whispered promises of vengeance.

The breathtakingly long note, shed even of the encumbrances of any accompanimental underpinning, was a specialty of the great castratos, showing how they could hold the orchestra at bay and draw attention haughtily or pathetically — or, more often, both at the same time — to the essence of their sound, and therefore their appeal and wealth. It is a conceit that Jaroussky exploits with theatrical verve and true expressive power, not only in slow movements but even more dramatically in ripping arias like Venti turbini and at several other moments across the evening, where massed musical momentum was suddenly stopped in its track by a single tone.

It is at such intimate turns that Jaroussky is at his most persuasive and elevates himself to a world-class musical phenomenon that has to be heard to be believed; he more than made up for any lack of strength at maximum velocity with the touching simplicity of his last encore, perhaps Handel’s most famous aria, Ombra mai fu and even more affectingly in the first encore Alto Giove  by Farinelli’s singing master and Handel’s London rival, Nicola Porpora. This is a piece that confirms a truth known to the best 18th-century musicians and largely forgotten by the “masterpiece” mentality of the 19th century: that the best vehicle for moving an audience often looks unpromising on paper. But paper isn’t music.

Organic Turkeys

My Thanksgiving offering commemorating the first expatriate Thanksgiving in London in 1863 contained a passing reference to “George Bush’s plastic turkey.” Ever-vigilant defenders of Bush’s culinary and presidential honor were duly notified by Google alerts at this apparent misstep, and then, thinking I had accepted the New York Times’ myth about the bird, I began storming my digital embassy. I was at the time gorging on a Brandenburg Bio-Bird in the countryside outside Berlin, far from my internet connection and three-Hummer garage. That part of Brandenburg reminds me of North Dakota, where my Norwegian ancestors settled in the late 19th century after the state was stolen from the Sioux.

Like the Great Plains of North America, Brandenburg’s Oberprignitz offers endless views, not over Indian lands but over the former collective farms of the GDR; wheat, corn, and cattle are raised, and there are a few trees, to which are fixed hunting blinds and perches. The already sparsely inhabited area will soon have lost a quarter of the population it had at German Reunification, and will also have to sustain a 60% decrease in people under the age of 20.

One of the ways some of the locals try to attract money from booming Berlin is through eco-tourism: convince the overstressed city folks to spend a weekend on a broken-down farmstead eating only organic foods and traipsing over the sandy ground while admiring the clumps of rural junk that run from vintage socialist farm machinery to ancient organic kid’s toys. Organic? you ask. Some might call it “plastic” garbage, but I have recommended that in the rebranding of Brandenburg — its reBrandenburging — from socialist dystopia to ecotopian paradise, this rural statuary be referred to as “organic.” The substance generally known as “plastic” is an organic compound. The equation works in both directions. What I meant in my “plastic turkey” remark was “organic” since I know Bush would never serve a bird pumped with hormones and antibiotics to American soldiers. Military health is a matter of national security. I can personally testify that I feel a thousand times more fit after enjoying Brandenburg’s finest plastic turkey.

David Yearsley s a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Bach’s Feet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.

Combatively anti-labor, reflecting the director’s prejudices, Hoover’s “G-men” also tried stemming the 1930s union upsurge, in which both my parents were vocal rank-and-filers, by threatening militants and their sympathizers and feeding dirt to employer groups and anti-union newspapers. During the Second World War, the FBI split their energies between tracking down the few Nazi spies and much greater number of home-grown radicals and union redhots — no real difference between them Hoover could see except that the Bolshevik menace was always uppermost in his mind. My mother, cousins and favorite uncle all became fodder for Hoover’s extraordinary card-index system.

From the time I was 16, and later during the cold war, the FBI was on me for 15 solid years, even — illegally snooping — when I emigrated to England. How could I make these fedora-wearing, smartly-suited snoops understand that, influenced by a James Cagney movie, I had been a Junior G-Man myself by sending in Quaker Oats boxtops? I proudly wore my tin badge and pinned to my wall J Edgar Hoover’s commendation letter.

It’s all coming back to me because I’ve just seen Clint Eastwood’s draggy, so-darkly-lit-it’s-hard-to-follow, superficially detailed but essentially untruthful case for the defense of America’s Himmler as a homosexually repressed mama’s boy. I’m a fan of Leonardo di Caprio but, hey, come on, you don’t send a boy to do a very, very weird man’s job, even with the best makeup artists in the world. The script, by Dustin Lance Black, who did such a great job with Milk, is an obscurantist mess of voice-over and backtracks and flash-forwards, where everything but the kitchen sink is dragged in — Emma Goldman! The Lindbergh baby! — but dramatic and even factual truth is left out.

The FBI got into my personal life when I was still in high school — I was a “comsub(versive)” on their 3×5 file cards, until decades later — a blow to my ego — I was demoted merely to a “comsymp(athizer)”. Along the way, I was tagged as the lisping, lefthanded (in other words, gay) ringleader of “The Cell With No Name”, which in reality was a small group of poker-playing guys who met on Friday nights to dream up anti-Senator McCarthy leaflets and — big mistake, this prank — pretending on my tapped phone to be spies named Iranoff, Buljanov and Kopalski. (Leave it to these then-predominantly Mormon agents never to have seen the Lubitsch comedy Ninotchka.)

If you were young and single, as I was, you could always skip town or else try verbally fencing with the agents in a vain attempt to pry open their secrets, even as they tried getting you to inform on others. Ratting on friends was the sine qua non of J Edgar’s obsession with compiling lists.

In a Los Angeles ruled by informers, and popular fear of a nuclear third world war, with the city encircled by Nike missiles, the FBI’s aim wasn’t really to ferret out national security threats so much as to create an atmosphere of fear, shame, degradation and humiliation. You got the Nation magazine or IF Stone’s Weekly mailed to you in a plain brown wrapper (almost always ripped open before you saw it), and, ipso facto, you were a Soviet spy or were handled as if you were. “Come on in, Clancy. Help us clean up our files. Eugene and Lois did. Don’t be a party-pooper.”

The minds of ordinary FBI agents reflected its director’s Manichean brain fever. On the doorstep, they were always courteous (except when they tried to ram your car and drive it off a beach road); absolutely lacking the humor gene; meticulous about tiny details like license plate numbers; and hayseed-ignorant of “context” or of anything much beyond J Edgar’s emotional horizon.

Eastwood’s movie portrays Hoover as a hard-driving patriotic bureaucrat, a file-card prodigy, his heart bloated by sexual repression and poisoned by dreams of revenge against both the (potentially rebellious) lower class and the (potentially traitorous) upper class.

Not portrayed is the gut-aching fear that Hoover’s fantasies, instilled in hundreds of thousands of Amer-icans — a real terror at the time — and the injuries he and his agents dealt to so many lives. Among my friends, intense FBI pressure created suicides, heart attacks, miscarriages, divorces, broken careers and, betrayals.

What do you say about a man who masterminded the persecution of Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King and, reportedly anxious abut his own racial ancestry, threw roadblocks in the way of the civil rights movement, and invented Cointelpro to foment assassination and violence on the left and among black groups?

The movie does show that presidents from FDR to Nixon were terrified of Hoover’s “confidential files” (raw gossip) mainly about their sexual deviations. (One of Eastwood’s more effective scenes has Nixon delivering a eulogy at Hoover’s death while his henchmen frantically search bureau files for incriminating data.)

Hoover, who loved socializing with movie stars, was a little skittish about being seen to investigate Hollywood, instead funneling his unsubstantiated files (on Jean Seberg, Charlie Chaplin, etc) to lower orders of snoop, such as Senator Joe McCarthy, to whom he was a mentor, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, to which he secretly gave incriminating documents.

I was lucky and irresponsible. My own assigned agents, “Mutt and Jeff” (I never knew their real names, no calling cards then), made me feel temporarily important at a time when nobody but Mr Hoover and his elves paid attention to the American left. For reasons too involved to go into, Jeff and I “double-dated”, each of us trying his best to “turn” the other. Socially, a disaster for both of us.

Inheritors of the FBI director’s strange tics — he fired or sent into exile chauffeur-agents, driving his bullet-proof Cadillac, who made roadway left turns — the FBI was, and is, an ossified bureaucracy where, today, whistleblowers are punished and whose most recent speciality is entrapping stupid, Jihad-infatuated Muslim youth with the use of agent-provocateurs and then, with a true J Edgar flair for self-promotion, announcing that yet another “terror threat” has been trounced.

Incidentally, I take it back about the FBI being detail-oriented, like its founder. I’m not lefthanded.

Clancy Sigal is a novelist and screenwriter in Los Angeles. He can be reached at clancy@jsasoc.com.

As a kid I listened on the radio to “The FBI in Peace and War.” My parents had listened during the mid 1930s to “G-Men.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover helped produce those programs and, in Clint Eastwood’s new biopic film, “J. Edgar,” we learn that Hoover orchestrated several other radio and TV shows to portray the FBI’s arrests of “dangerous criminals” and its “monitoring” of “subversive communists” as the product of a team approach, which he personally inculcated.

The grammar of entertainment, however, calls for individual heroes and Hoover didn’t want courageous field agents — like Mel Purvis who killed John Dillinger — to steal glory from him and, as the movie instructs us, he dumped him. Hoover’s ideal FBI consisted of look-alikes, with similar suits and haircuts — dictated by their boss. In the film, the young Hoover (Leonardo di Caprio) fires an agent with a mustache. Hoover didn’t approve of facial hair.

At age 10 I knew Hoover from all the radio talk as the leader of a police force that always got its man. My communist Uncle Max sneered. “Hoover’s a rotten phony. He dances in a tutu in his living room with his wife Clyde Tolson.”

I sputtered with indignation at such slander. I knew better because I listened to Gang Busters, which I even saw at the movies in the weekly serials. By the 1960s, I came to agree with Uncle Max. Under Hoover’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), FBI informers penetrated civil rights and anti-war groups, agents provocateurs proliferated and the FBI committed criminal acts. Hoover destroyed people’s lives, which he justified with his trite anti-commie rhetoric.

In 1974, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I received 1,000 plus pages of my own file, half of them blacked out. The Bureau had tapped my phone. Page after page recounts conversations I had with my father — nothing even remotely political — and plans I had to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit him. The FBI had planted an informant at the TV station where I worked, so that they had my air travel plans.

In the early 1970s, the Bureau revealed, under court order, that it had planted some 70 informants at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) where I worked. A federal judge made the Bureau pay all legal and court costs and enjoined them from repeating their activities.

In September 1976, the FBI began investigating the Washington DC assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier by car bombing, which also took the life of Ronni Moffitt, an IPS colleague who sat next to him as the explosion ripped through his car. Honest FBI investigators solved the case and named the head of Chilean intelligence and other secret police officials along with five right-wing Cuban exiles as the perpetrators.

Hoover’s political police did little to stop the Mafia or corporate crime, but did collect files on millions of Americans. Hoover’s librarian instincts?

I deduce from Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” that my radio show portrait, Uncle Max’s ridicule and my own experiences with the FBI omitted one item: Hoover also had a soul. DiCaprio plays a tortured, closet homosexual with a dominatrix mother (Judi Dench) who didn’t want “to have a daffodil for a son.”

When she died, Hoover put on her dress and necklace and wept. Eastwood and scriptwriter Dustin Lance Black (of the film “Milk”) show that the powerful and controlling head of the country’s largest police agency also experienced deep emotional pain.

We see intelligence and ambition in his rise from librarian to keeper of the files. President John F. Kennedy slept with an East German spy, Hoover tells Bobby Kennedy to make it clear that he shouldn’t even think about firing him.

DiCaprio grasps Hoover’s prurient disorientation, almost drooling, when he listens to a tape from a bug planted by Bureau agents in Marin Luther King’s hotel room — with a woman. He gloats while reading Eleanor Roosevelt’s mail, “discovering” a supposed lesbian relationship with a woman reporter.

After Hoover died in 1972, we see Nixon immediately dispatch a squad to destroy Hoover’s secret files — some of them on Nixon. Hoover’s secretary-gatekeeper, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), had tried to limit J. Edgar’s overboard actions, and even in death she protects Hoover’s public image, which he equated with that of the Bureau. The film shows her shredding those files before Nixon’s destruction squad reaches Hoover’s office.

Eastwood portrays Hoover’s defenselessness in a lovers’ or married couple’s quarrel when he and his partner Tolson (Armie Hammer) — to whom he left all his possessions — punch, wrestle and then kiss. Hoover loved him, but the film doesn’t show or even suggest sexual consummation. The audience must judge this emotional, distressed, authoritarian control freak, this intelligent but vulnerable man, who gets embarrassed at a congressional hearing because of his self-promoting activities.

In the film old Hoover dictates his story to young Special Agents, but Hoover doesn’t tell the truth; rather he promotes himself by distorting the facts to reflect that he has single-handedly protected the country from ruthless killers, kidnappers (the Lindberg kidnapping occupies much film space) and all things that smack of communism, anarchism or pinko-leftism.

Hoover spews patriotism and hatred of communism, but the film leads us to suspect Hoover hated himself. Unable to control his most loathsome impulse — his mother hated “daffodils” — he tries to achieve power over people and institutions. The film subtly suggests Hoover became his own internal enemy; his mother subverted him by not allowing his sexuality (identity) to emerge. His career stained, not marked, decades of US history and many people paid a heavy price for his psychic dynamics.

Saul Landau’s latest film is ‘Will The Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?

The only writing I’ve done regarding Fela Kuti was the following book review, about the still-definitive biography and critical study by Micheal Veal published five years after his death. It might provide some good context for those interested in the play and in Fela’s music. Fela’s sons Femi and Seun continue in his tradition, updating it with their own bands and recordings, which are also highly recommended — they’ve both appeared in Northern California more than once and will likely be back.

The Life & Times of a Musical Icon

I remember where I was when I heard that Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had died. It was August 3, 1997, and the veteran Nigerian singer Sonny Okosuns was onstage at the Reggae on the River festival in Northern California; his expected energetic live set seemed subdued. At one point he apparently could no longer keep his feelings hidden, stepped to the microphone, and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to have to say this, but just today we have learned that Fela Kuti has died. I do not want to believe this is true but I feel I have to tell you now.” There were tears on his cheeks as he turned from the microphone.

I also remember the days I learned that Bob Marley, John Lennon, and Jimi Hendrix died. And I mention those names only to reinforce just how important a musical figure Fela Kuti was. Perhaps only the Congolese guitarist and singer Franco obtained similar stature as a true Pan-African icon, but nobody — anywhere in the world — has ever matched Fela in terms of presenting a singular, controversial, uncompromising body of work — with a life story to match.

Fela’s life story and music have been the subject of a couple of books published while he was still living, but those works were not only hard to find, but generally judged to be not up to the weighty task of presenting all that their topic warranted. Now the definitive book on Fela has arrived.

Michael Veal is uniquely qualified to tell Fela’s story. A Yale ethnomusicologist, he not only has the intellectual and research skills to present a comprehensive biography, anchored throughout in the chaotic sociopolitical context of West Africa in recent decades, but — get this — actually played saxophone with Fela’s band when they toured the United States. He also visited Fela in Lagos to see him working and playing in his home element. Veal knows his subject as well as anyone could, with a proper mix of objectivity and passion for the music that makes his book both analytically challenging, even dense at times (it originated as a Master’s thesis), and compelling reading.

In 260 packed and large pages, Veal tells Fela’s unique and already legendary life story, drawing on over 500 publications, many interviews, and a deep and wide familiarity with Fela’s work as reflected in his own musical experience and an exhaustive discography. Given Fela’s continual involvement with the political and musical forces of his times, the book also becomes a de facto history of modern Nigeria and African music, centered around an enigmatic and powerful — and ultimately tragic — figure.

Even for readers already familiar with Fela’s work and life, Veal’s exploration is full of surprises and ironies. Veal begins this retelling (following a vivid opening recollection of a night at Fela’s legendary Lagos club The Shrine) before Fela’s birth in 1938 to second-generation Christian parents. His father, an Anglican pastor, was also a union activist. His mother was a well-known women’s rights activist when that was still very rare. This respected upper middle-class extended family produced prominent doctors and other professionals (including Fela’s cousin, Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka). Fela’s childhood friends, Veal notes, recall him as a “well-mannered, respectful young man with a mischievous, playful streak.” That streak, combined with his family’s stern and strict standards, earned him “systematic ass-kickings.” Nobody could know then that such mischief and beatings would be dominant factors throughout Fela’s life.

Exposed to a heady intellectual upbringing, Veal notes that Fela’s ideological foundations were (Ghana’s first president Kwame) “Nkrumah’s…Marxist rhetoric and the proto-pan-Africanism of Jamaican Marcus Garvey.” Musically, Fela began developing as a young man in the 1950′s “Golden Age” of Nigerian highlife sounds and left for London in 1958 to study music at elite Trinity College. There he became steeped in Afro-American jazz and formed his first band, leading the “Koola Lobitos” (roughly, “young wolves”) as a trumpet player, recording some singles and citing Louis Armstrong as a formative influence. Returning to Lagos in 1963, he began a musical career in earnest as both a bandleader and radio producer, but lost his job due to his focus on his own band’s efforts to present “highlife, jazz, the Twist, the Madison, and what-have-you.”

A trip to the United States in the late 1960s proved revelatory. The band’s planned tour was an organizational nightmare but Fela discovered both funk music and radical politics. He read Malcolm X, listened to James Brown, met African-American activists, and recorded his first unmistakably Fela-esque music in Los Angeles in 1969 — a prototype of the “afrobeat” he invented and would forever epitomize. “Fela returned to Nigeria a changed man,” Veal notes.

That changed man was the Fela who became notorious worldwide even before he ever ventured out of Africa again. Starting with a small group (whose fan club was at one point sponsored by a skin-lightening cream company!), during the 1970s Fela’s band, ego, image, following, recording catalog, worldview, and conflicts expanded exponentially. “The man turned Nigeria completely upside down” then, as Veal quotes a fan. “He had the whole country in his hand…Fela at that time was a law unto himself and did whatever he pleased in Nigeria, until he met an equally lawless group- the army.”

“Whatever he pleased” included Fela’s renowned penchant for women, including many wives, and for openly smoking illegal herbs (even though early on he strictly prohibited his band members from doing so), and for baiting his enemies in both the music industry and the government verbally, musically, and in writing in his “Chief Priest” column which ran for years in a major newspaper. The consequences included numerous raids on his homes and clubs, beatings and even death among his family and followers, and much jail time. To his credit, Veal covers all of this extensively but nonsensationally. Charges of Fela’s sexism, exploitation of women and musicians (his greatest drummer, Tony Allen, called Fela a “slave driver”), and inconsistent pronouncements are fully explored.

At each step of Fela’s development, Veal presents just enough of the political context to give a real picture of what Fela was up against — and how much of his problems might have been avoided or escaped had Fela been willing to compromise even on seemingly inconsequential points. But lack of any willingness or even ability to do so brought Fela fame and some fortune at first, and then increased arrests and beatings, criticism even among former followers, something close to poverty, and even, it may be argued, death from AIDS. Veal walks a fine line in presenting various perspectives on this decline and fall, without unduly judging a man who is obviously a musical idol.

On Fela’s music, Veal is analytical and admiring without being blinded. “In musical terms, the afrobeat Fela developed between 1969 and 1972 was his major achievement,” Veal argues. “It clearly drew upon highlife, jazz, and rhythm-and-blues, but Africanized the foreign jazz and soul elements while it deconstructed dance-band highlife, and grafted them all onto a traditional West African rhythmic template.” While I will probably never quite grasp what “deconstruction” is supposed to connote, this is as good a basic description of afrobeat as you’ll find, as is Veal’s view of Fela on stage: “Fela combines the autocratic bandleading style and dancing agility of James Brown, the mystical inclinations of Sun Ra, the polemicism of Malcolm X, and the harsh, insightful satire of Richard Pryor.”

Through the 1970′s and 1980′s, this larger-than-life figure recorded almost seventy albums of extended songs (fully listed chronologically here, with lyrical excerpts and descriptive critical commentary for many), and was arrested, beaten, harassed and jailed too many times to count (although Veal tries, estimating that Fela was arrested around 200 times). His provocations led some to feel he had a death wish, or at least felt himself immune to mortality. He made ventures overseas and was received with anything from ecstasy to derision, and plenty of confusion: “Those who expected a performance of traditional music experienced an electric, Western-influenced popular style. Those who expected virtuosic African jazz experienced instead a social, communal dance music in which virtuosity in the Western sense was not a prime consideration. Those who expected a progressive, leftist ideologue experienced instead an authoritarian, nontraditional polygamist presenting a stage show almost bordering on the burlesque.” And so on; Fela confounded everyone at some point.

Thus even the temporary overseas fame found by a few African musicians such as his compatriot Sunny Ade and South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela eluded Fela, and even though he said that did not matter, some of the quotes and information Veal includes indicate that Fela was in fact disappointed. “When I went to America in 1969 I knew Africa had the music to go around the world but I thought it was going to be quicker,” he said in 1983. “I have been waiting for this a long time.” He was to be kept waiting.

By the 1990s Fela’s behavior, never sedate, was increasingly bizarre and unpredictable, alienating even many of his followers. Formerly unmatched as a prolific composer and recorder, he released little music even by other bands’ standards. He had a controversial personal “guru” named Professor Hindu who performed supposed live executions and revitalizations (exposed as fraudulent here), and made ever-more scabrous and sometimes absurd pronouncements about many topics, including the disease which claimed his life at age 58. He likely exposed many others to HIV, a consequence never fully documented. Reading his life story, it’s actually surprising he lived as long as he did. He had been jailed, in a “skeletal” state, one more time just a few months before he died.

However far Fela had fallen, though, his funeral drew not only “dignitaries, politicians, students and diplomats” but over a million Nigerians who saw him a virtual deity. For, Veal concludes, “Despite the strongly divided opinions of Fela, the public reaction to his death was virtually unanimous. While his lifestyle was universally condemned, Fela had never wavered from his self-appointed role of calling attention to the sufferings of the common people….At the heart of his chaotic, contentious, and contradictory lifestyle was an authentic search for an African cultural revitalization, a refusal to submit to mindless authority mindlessly, and one of the most irrepressible and profusely creative African spirits of the late twentieth century.” His music, much of it now reissued and enjoying a posthumous surge in popularity, remains as evidence of all Veal claims for it.

“Fela” fully presents Fela, warts, glories, struggles and all. Veal’s “more than ten years of critical and recreational listening, musical performance, academic research, traveling, and collecting” invested in this book have paid off in a landmark work. This is, and almost certainly will remain, the ultimate book on Fela Kuti. In this life story, truth is indeed stranger — and stronger — than fiction.

Fela: The Life And Times Of An African Musical Icon, By Michael E. Veal. Temple University Press, Philadelphia; 2003.

For more than 30 years my 1979-model British beauty served me, going everywhere I wanted it to go, drawing approving glances and remarks from pedestrians and other drivers. It was, as one Spanish-speaking admirer exclaimed, “mucho car!”

The Spitfire also gave me the chance to spend lots of time with John, an extremely able, pleasant and sympathetic mechanic. Not to mention the tow truck drivers I often called on to get the car to John’s place of business for fixing.

It also won me the acquaintance of Anthony, the attendant in the garage of the radio station where I regularly recorded commentaries. Whenever I drove in, his eyes lit up. And on those frequent occasions when the Spitfire was being cared for by John, and I arrived in my wife’s humble Toyota sedan, Anthony was clearly disappointed and concerned. He sincerely wanted to know right away whether something bad had happened to “the little car?”

But the Spitfire and I have both become too old to remain together — though the car’s looks don’t reveal its advanced age. My wife Gerry and I were reminded of that recently by two teenage boys who were walking by on the street adjacent to where we had just parked and were sitting with the car’s vinyl top pulled back.

“What,” one boy loudly asked, “is that funny old couple doing in that slick-ass car?”

So now we have parted for good. The memories, however, remain.

It seems not everyone is familiar with Triumph Spitfires, which don’t have brand name labels affixed to their bodies like most other cars. The rarity of the unlabeled Spitfires became frighteningly evident soon after we began our long relationship. My wife Gerry and I were purring along, a mild summer breeze flowing gently around us, brilliant sky above, and not a highway patrolman in sight. Sixty, seventy…

Suddenly, a car roared up behind us and then pulled alongside. The driver waved and shouted. What was he saying? “Flat? Flat?”

My God, and we were going close to 80! Gerry didn’t panic. She never does. But me, well… “Look! Look! Which tire! Find it! Watch out! Hang on!”

The car next to us slowed as we slowed, and the driver repeated his message. Only now I could see that he was smiling — and I could hear that he was not saying “flat” at all. The word was “Fiat” as in, “Is that a Fiat, or what?”

And there were those kids staring intently from the rear of cars in front of us on freeways, demanding to know what they were looking at. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on the road with two, three, maybe four kids mugging and waving and pointing as we rolled full tilt down the road.

Coming upon suspicious characters hovering about the car in darkened parking lots and alongside the curb on dark city streets was exciting, too. They always said things like, “Just trying to figure what make car you got here, mister.” But life in the big city being what it is, I was never sure about that.

Yet it was quite nice to be approached in garages and parking lots by young women anxious to learn the identity of “that great looking car.”

Some people didn’t even bother asking. One day, for instance, there was a couple crossing the street in front of us, eyeing my magnificent unlabeled machine.

“What?” asked the man, smirking most knowledgably. “A Fiat, of course.” Imagine. My unlabeled British gem being taken again for an Italian.

Then there was the time after I came out of a building in which I had been transacting some important business, quite aware the time had expired on the parking meter. A meter maid in no-nonsense navy blue was slowly circling my unlabeled Spitfire, peering quizzically at the front, side and rear.

“Ah,” said I. “Just in time.”

“No,” said she. “Ticket’s written up. Just looking to see what make to put on it.”

“Oh, ho. And what happens if I don’t tell you?”

“Nothing. I’ll just write it up, ‘Make unknown.’ Actually, you know, it doesn’t really matter to me what it is.”

The final insult to the Spitfire came on its very last day in my possession. It was in one of its frequent non-operating moods, so I yet one more time called AAA for a tow. Out came a truck in four hours — four hours! — a truck equipped to carry, not a beautiful sports car, but a mere motorcycle. The dispatcher had assumed that my Triumph Spitfire was — you guessed it — a Triumph-brand motorcycle.

I tried to drive the car out of the garage and onto the flatbed tow truck’s ramp. Click! Click! Click! Over and over I turned the key and pumped the gas pedal, expecting the usual roar. But the car refused to start. I could only conclude that my beloved Spitfire didn’t want to leave me after all our years together. Finally, the reluctant car was pushed up and onto the truck.

What a humiliating way to go for the Spitfire. For me, too. At least I was able to send the car off to a very good home — John the mechanic’s garage, where it will be on display with a half-dozen other bright, shiny, aged and I assume happy classic British sports cars.

I’ll miss the excitement and feeling of adventure that came with driving what I freely to concede was a highly undependable auto. Despite the fondness I now feel for the departed car, I can’t quite forget the feelings of genuine panic it too often caused me. Too many times, I’d be driving along happily, when, suddenly, the engine would fail me. “Sputter! Sputter! Sputter!” I panicked as I searched desperately for a safe place to park my temperamental machine.

The greatest adventure was my last. I was driving up a very steep San Francisco hill, cars moving in a steady stream in both directions. Then, suddenly, no brakes! Down I plunged, backwards, at ever-accelerating speed, until, finally, I smashed into a neighbor’s parked car. I had no other choice.

I also had no choice but to spend lots to get the brakes replaced. I was used to that, however. I calculate that over the 32 years of our life together, I spent more than $14,000 on repairs for the car that I bought new for $6200.

It’s taken lots of very hard thinking, but I’m finally reconciled to losing what has been my attractive daily companion for three decades. That’s all there is to it. It’s gone. Gone!

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based former sports car driver. His website is www.dickmeister.com.

“Manson’s shadow is everywhere,” recalls Greil Marcus in his new book about The Doors’ rapid rise and fall. And that too was not usually a positive thing. In the summer of 1969, Manson (and the Altamont concert a few months later) came to stand for the darkest side of the 1960s and the end of any dreams thereof. But in fact few knew about crazed cult leader and mastermind of murder before then, and The Doors burst into the American pop mainstream in 1967 with their debut self-titled and best album with creepiness and threat already fully intact. The LP concluded with the extended opus “The End,” wherein the singer/narrator acted out an oedipal murder/sex fantasy that was about as far from the imagined flowery Summer of Love that year as the Manson murders proved to be two years later, in the same week as the fabled peace-and-love Woodstock festival.

But Marcus is writing there about “LA Woman,” the title song of The Doors fifth and last real album, and about Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice, set in Los Angeles in 1970 where and when that LP was recorded. It’s one of the few Doors songs Marcus seems to like (although he adores the original “Light My Fire”). But their music sure seems to have stuck with him, ever since he saw them perform multiple times. His new book is subtitled “A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” and his take on the Doors discography seems to be that their sophomore LP, Strange Days, still held some power; the second and third records “were terrible jokes, regardless of who the joke was on,” and the fourth and fifth had their moments and even more embarrassments. But then in 1971 Jim Morrison died in Paris under somewhat mysterious but mainly pathetic circumstances. He was a great blues singer at a minimum who had rapidly devolved from being the sexiest rocker since Elvis — “He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead,” as the famed Rolling Stone 1981 cover had it, or as Marcus puts it, “He had Elvis’s Greek God looks, his seductive vampire’s hooded eyes; like Elvis he communicated the disdain of the beautiful for the ordinary world — into a fat bearded self-parody with a “gross, slobbery voice.”

Around that time, my mom was driving me to the clothes store for some “back to school” duds, and “Light my Fire” came on the radio, as it did constantly back then. “I recognize this song,” she said, although her tastes ran more to opera. I did too. You couldn’t really avoid it. A junior high elementary music teacher, trying to be hip, played “Strange Days” for us, trying to break down the title song’s structure. I wondered what Mom might think about the lyrics to “The End,” or to the later hit “Riders on the Storm”: “There’s a killer on the road/his brain is squirming like a toad/ take a long holiday/ let the children play/ if you give this man a ride/ sweet family will die…” etc. It wasn’t exactly The Monkees.

It’s always struck me as strange that Mr. Manson seized upon the sunny music of the Beach Boys and Beatles for his psychotic projections. He seems to have never mentioned The Doors, who not only fit his persona, but were from LA to boot. “In 1968, dread was the currency,” recalls Marcus, mentioning the RFK and MLK assassinations, along with Vietnam, Camus, and much much more, including seemingly random associations, as is his wont. But by then Morrison and The Doors had already moved into trying to sell more records, with “hits” such as “Hello I Love You” or “Touch Me” — songs Marcus easily labels as garbage akin to Elvis’ reviled movie music. And by then the band was “a band at war with its audience” with “contempt on both sides.” Marcus references many bootleg concert recordings, some online, but most listeners won’t have the patience to watch and listen to those. The Doors’ “official” recordings offer plenty of evidence of the decline Marcus describes.

Morrison once reflected about “The End” that “I didn’t realize people took songs so seriously and it made me wonder whether I ought to consider the consequences….” So it seems he was lucky that Manson and his “family” did not seem to be big fans or the “consequences” might have been even worse than they were.

But Morrison did seem to take his own lyrics seriously, wanting very much to be a poet taken seriously by all comers. Marcus, writes that The Doors “saw themselves as much in the tradition of fine art… the stream of art maudit that carried Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Jarry, Buneul, Artaud, and Celine to their doorsteps — as in the tradition of rock n’ roll itself…” That’s a lot of name-dropping, but rings true in that those are some of the same literary figures Patti Smith reveres in her very fine memoir Just Friends. As the five years rolled quickly on, The Doors attempted extended overblown “suites” such as “The Soft Parade,” Celebration of the Lizard,” and “Rock is Dead” — which all had their moments, and deserved high marks for ambition at a minimum.

Jim Morrison took the revering a bit too far and died from it, in the process giving the term “Dionysian” a higher profile but not a good one. One could argue they took themselves a bit too seriously. Marcus relates how, in one of those unintentionally hilarious grandiosities of pop and film stars, how at least some of The Doors envisioned themselves occupying the White House at some point. Drummer John Densmore wrote in his memoir that “He imagined himself [it’s hard to tell whether ‘he’ here is Jim Morrison or keyboardist Ray Manzarek] as Secretary of State. Sounded like fantasy time to me, but I think a part of Ray thought it would really happen. I thought Jim was too crazy to be as popular as he was already!”

Indeed. Like, say, Manson, Morrison seemed obsessed with some sort of apocalypse, personal or otherwise. “The future’s uncertain but the end is always near,” he advised in the great “Roadhouse Blues.” He would never have guessed that just last year he’d be issued a formal “pardon” from Miami officials for “indecent exposure, public obscenity, and inciting to riot” onstage there 40 years earlier. The surviving Doors rejected the pardon, stating that “Four decades after the fact, with Jim an icon for multiple generations — and those who railed against him now a laughingstock — Florida has seen fit to issue a pardon… We don’t feel Jim needs to be pardoned for anything… His performance in Miami that night was certainly provocative, and entirely in the insurrectionary spirit of The Doors’ music and message. The charges against him were largely an opportunity for grandstanding by ambitious politicians — not to mention an affront to free speech and a massive waste of time and taxpayer dollars.”

So there we have it — Dionysian visions devolving into tea party-like arguments about governmental waste. Whatever one might think about Morrison’s music and persona, the fact that legal arguments linger on, books are still written about him, and mostly, that his music plays on and on via all manner of media — but not used commercially, thanks to an agreement the band made before he died that any sellout had to be unanimous — means that even though he joined the “Forever 27 Club” and died young albeit already past his prime, he triumphed in at least some ways, living on in our ears. Which can be kind of scary.

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, Greil Marcus Public Affairs Books; 210 pages; $21.99.