Broodings from Bear - 2000

Broodings from Barry
02/02/2000 | 02/23/2000 | 03/05/2000 | 03/27/2000
04/14/2000 | 05/07/2000 | 05/13/2000 | 05/27/2000
06/24/2000 | 08/05/2000 | 08/29/2000 | 10/26/2000
11/05/2000 | 11/14/2000 | 12/23/2000

12/23/2000 - Am I the only one who finds this confusing?

Someone up there must have been listening when I suggested that politics and WWF wrestling should meld into one seamless, vastly entertaining humbuggery. I feel like I spent five weeks or so watching a witless verbal smackdown, with all the fake kicks, punches, grunts and bodyslams coming from a bunch of overcoiffed, mouthy suits. The only difference is that in WWF land, the audience actively wants to be lied to. Me, I'm bloody tired of it. If there had been so much as a kernel of rare, refreshing truth in the embarrassing parade of partisan prevarication, I might have been revived, my faith renewed. But no, it was a long peregrination in a desert of pontification, name-calling, grade-school infighting and bone-deep, crushing stupidity. Of course, the day after the dust began to settle, both sides predictably rolled out their "now we must unite after all the terrible partisan warring" speeches. Bipartisanship is a very small, leaky ship, and the rougher the weather, the more hapless fools get tossed overboard. Mouthing formula spin doesn't heal the wounds created by so much calculating, inflammatory lying. Sometimes I feel like our nation is suffering from multiple personality disorder. Yesterday we were bitter, irreconcilable ideological foes. Today we are best buddies, shedding our tough shells of partisan armor and embracing. Am I the only one who finds this confusing?

I already know the answer to that one. Yesterday I passed by a soup kitchen on the lower West Side, and I counted at least a dozen freshly out of work media pundits standing in line, clutching their spoons. They looked sadly addled, as if they couldn't figure out how they'd gone from the spotlight to the breadline in a few short hours. Their new status hadn't caught up with some of them, who were still arguing the finer points of dimples and perforations and punching the air with their little wooden bowls. I felt sorry for these folks, who had the nation's eyes and ears 24/7, and now were thrust cruelly back in the obscurity from which they were temporarily exhumed. I thought, 'Golly, what ever shall we do without the pundits to analyze every crepitation and tell us what to think of all this?' I will miss the rich Schwarzwalderkirschtorte these wheezing idiots served up, mit schlag, saturating the airwaves with their rich emulsion of conjecture and crap. Whoa. No I won't. See - once the lying starts, it's hard to stop it. Deep force of habit. Hey, I learned it from our Leaders...speaking of which, I can now put on my fuzzy slippers, kick back and, as we all must, settle for the evil of two lessers. I think what bugs me the most is that all this hooha was over two such remarkably inferior specimens. I keep wondering if anyone actually liked either of them.

Now for the Truth part. I'll try not to make it too raw. Feeding people truth after a long, strict regimen of lies is a risky proposition. Their systems aren't used to it, and they tend to reject the unrefined truth as too harsh, preferring the smooth, predigested pabulum to which they've become accustomed. Don't worry. It's not political. I'm not that dumb.

I like to do year-end thankyou's, and I usually list all the people who've helped us limp through another year in a tough business. I thank our menagerie of managers, agents, schleppers, tweakers, supporters, fans and amigos. They certainly deserve great thanks. But this year I'd like to thank the guys that make our music possible - my bandmates.

Jeff, Scott, El, Kev - I can't say enough good stuff about you guys. There's the part everyone sees: sublime singers making wonderful music together. The joy I feel being part of the wonderful sound we make I owe to y'all. I know that when we're out on stage, every one of us is trying his utmost to make a beautiful noise with his whole soul. Each one of you is specially gifted in a unique way, and you bring these gifts to our every performance, even when you're weary, sick, and worn out. You guys are pros in the truest sense.

Then there's the part that most people never get to see. Hanging together through the tough times. Laughing at movies, cracking jokes and pulling pranks before shows. Helping to schlep gear, spending long hours lost in strange places, sharing the collective uncertainty over missed connections, family crises, clothing angst. Delight over the growing collection of Rockapellets, holding hope for the future.

I have had the great blessing of being able to join my voice with yours, and make wonderful music time and time again. My work is my play is my joy, and you fine gents make it possible. Thanks.
bear

11/14/2000 - Oops

Hey Darlin's;

I am laughing. Hoo-boy, am I laughing. If you thought I was laughing last month, that was nuthin'. Nuthin', I tells ya. All those smug, down-our-noses condescending nods we gave to all those bungled elections in all those fledgling democracies, well hoo hoo ha ha hee hee ho ho ho HA! What were we thinking? I know what we were thinking. "It can't happen here". Oops.

I think we've done ourselves a big favor as a nation. We've given ourselves a neon sign so enormous that you could see it from deep space. We've shown ourselves in the most tangible, irrefutable way how deeply and neatly we're divided, how completely we are polarized. Could it be any more obvious, any more perfect? What puzzles a lot of the rest of the supposedly civilized world is how acrimonious the polarization seems to be.

When I was living in Italy, it was common for best friends to have extremely controversial and opposite political views, and they enjoyed the lively discourse that arose from their controversy. I would watch them covertly, waving their arms and getting red in the face, and then they'd laugh and sit down to a nice bottle of vino. I envied them that their political convictions didn't seem to impinge on their friendship. Here, we form many of our important affiliations and relationships along party lines, and literally vilify, dehumanize and illegitimately categorize our opposites. Most of the world finds that more than a little puzzling. Aren't we all Americans, they ask? Don't we all stand under the same flag and pledge our allegiance?

We have succeeded in generating the most miserable emotional climate this side of Camarillo, and we all know that, with a country so completely and practically evenly divided, absolutely nothing of any importance is going to get done no matter who eventually ascends to the throne. But natural law defies even the concept of stasis, so nothing will stay the same either. As Lily Tomlin says, things are going to get worse before they get worse. How are we ever going to get anything constructive done if we're at each other's throats all the damn time?

I'm not suggesting anything so radical as seeing the opposition as human, or their interests as legitimate. Let's go on vilifying and categorizing and generalizing about the Other Half; maybe we'll be constructive by accident. Maybe something good will happen on a fluke, but I don't believe in flukes.

In a sad way, we've become the victims of our own voracious appetite for hype. We've come to expect nay demand it of our media. It's part of what passes for excitement in our lives. We get all whipped up over the election, and both sides scream, 'Follow US, for THEY will lead us straight into Hell'. OK. Then it's over, kinda sorta, and we have to live with this huge rift we've created with our own unrelenting, short-sighted formulaic lying. Normally on the day after both sides break out the white flags, friendly smiles, 'just business' shrugs and photo op's, and make kissy-kissy for the still-enflamed and panting rank and file.

But this is all just so MESSY. It's not going like it usually goes. It's not over, and the partisan weenies are charring on the dirty, smoking grill of our media machine. The inevitable post-election-day appeals for unity and conciliation and 'pulling together as one great nation' can't be made in their usual deadpan catatonia. We have to live with our mess, and we're not used to it. Doesn't feel very good, does it?

New Danger Discovered: I've discovered a far more insidious suburban blight than people forgetting bags o' votes locked in their trunks or manically aggressive topiary. Guys in minivans. Big problem. Here's how it works. Single guy=sporty two seater. Family guy=sedan. Car pool=minivan. See, some guys driving minivans think they have to prove that they're not wusses or soccer moms, and some of those minvans are really trucks with retooled bodies and big, fuel-injected engines, and they have more juice than you'd think just looking at them. Put a guy with a whip at his back and a chip on his shoulder behind the wheel of one of these big bombs, and you gotta watch out. The only thing more dangerous is an actual soccer mom at the wheel, trying to prove that inside that soccer mom is a Nascar jockey.

This Just In: Peace nearly broke out in a remote corner of the globe last week. It was a tenuous moment for humankind, but the threatening peace was averted at the last moment by a military coup, 'for the good of the country', the coup's leaders claimed. "Peace would ruin our financial future", they said in a statement to the world press, "and our prime directive is to maintain the profitability of our multinational connections". The 'Peaceniks' were rounded up by squads of infantry and put to work in a factory that produces land mines and baby formula.

Luv,
Bear

11/05/2000 - Is That Just Too Radical?

Hey Darlin's;

After a month of bouncing around the globe, my passport is beginning to resemble a chewed up stamp collection and the bags under my eyes are nearly as impressive as the big overstuffed green duffel that follows me like a loyal gangrenous mongrel. I'll tell ya one thing fer sher: there's nothing like going away, far away, to get some perspective. It's also been a blessed relief to have missed most of the anacrucial smarmy slugfest between RoboDork and Bratman. I did get some of the witty, amused commentaries from Euro tv, and evidently our politics and politicians are quite the laughingstock of the world. So, by the way, are the rest of us albeit for somewhat different reasons, but I'll get around to that.

I know that sounds kinda harsh, but I had to sit and listen to the guffaws of a number of cultured, intelligent, multilingual internationally savvy types as they dissected what we, in our myopic, moronic hyperflatulent press trumpeted as 'presidential debates'. Now listen, I was on a debating team in high school. Anyone with more than a fifth-grade education knows what constitutes a debate, and yet, following each of those disgraceful infomercial charades, we were besieged by a battalion of pudgy, owlish, tweedy media pundits, shamelessly giving us straight-faced 'analyses' of those tortured elliptical histrionics as if they actually contained anything resembling intelligent discourse, let alone actual debate. After the last of those mordent debacles, one of my cynically insightful colleagues had tears of mirth streaming down his face as he said, 'Ach, you Americans are so funny! I haven't laughed so hard since George Sr. threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister.'

So much for Realpolitik. The Austrians, at least, hold us in near total contempt for another, and I confess hitherto unsuspected reason; our veneration of Arnold Schwarzenegger. When I asked about him, since of course I had to make a pilgrimage to the gym in his home town, I got a particularly Teutonic sneer, accompanied by, 'Ahnold is SUCH a loser. Here he vas just a dumkopf, but you, you kitsch Americans - vat a bunch of simpletons. You LOFF him.' OK. Guilty as charged. But it gets worse.

Evidently we were all scammed by another piece of deconstructed Hollywood glitz, and they get a big jackbooted kick out of it. One of the locals made a point of showing me the exact spot where the Von Trapps went waltzing over the mountains at the end of 'The Sound of Music', and between liter tankards of 12% Trappist beer he wheezingly told me that if the Von Trapps had really gone in that direction they would have been walking straight back into the arms of the Nazis. Personally, I think it's just sour grapes. The ubermensch was still pissed that we grounded his Fokker.

Coming home and reading American newspapers again gave me something of a shock, the sort of 'aha' that comes from being temporarily jerked out of one's usual milieu and then dumped back in, slightly skewed and very sleep-deprived. There's a certain giddy clarity that comes from not knowing what time zone you're in for weeks at a time. According to our priapically engorged and prurient press, even when we are at peace, we are always at war with something. We wage war against damn near everything; war on poverty, war on drugs, war on crime, war on homelessness, war on hate, war on cancer, war on hunger, war on prejudice, war on unemployment, war on pollution, war on really bad sitcoms. And we're flat out losing on all fronts. Every single one. It seems like our only paradigm for dealing with all our various problems is to have a war. No, not just 'have a war'. That sounds kinda passive, like 'have a party'. We make wars, we wage wars, we invert our attempts at finding constructive solutions to large, complex social issues into wars.

Wars are simple. There's us, and there's the enemy. Everything becomes neatly polarized, objectified, and we don't really have to deal with the problems themselves anymore. Hey, we've got a war here folks! Here at Ground Zero we're at Defcon Four and there's no room for anything as traitorous as rational, constructive thought. Throw more money and more troops at the enemy, and maybe we'll win. But the fact remains, even with the fuzziest math and the most hopelessly tortured rhetoric, we don't win. All these problems are getting worse, not better. Gee whiz. Uh oh. Maybe war doesn't work.

But what happens if we stop waging these various wars? Won't we be overpowered by the forces of Evil? Overrun, sacked and ravaged like the Sabines? I know I'm wading into deep water here, and I may be unwittingly stepping on many toes buried in the morass of our moribund fascination with conflict resolution through the use of brute force powered by the agenda of accumulating wealth at the expense of a great chunk of humanity. But what if - and this is admittedly a big but - what if our paradigm shifted, if ever so slightly, toward sharing instead of hoarding, giving instead of taking, understanding instead of judging and condemning, helping instead of hurting? What if we actually tried to (gasp) tell the truth instead of habitually lying, and then lying about lying. I mean, what if we waged peace as aggressively as we take to the battlefield?

That means, like, not waiting for the next person to do something before you get your butt off the couch and do something yourself. Lately we've been doing these benefit concerts for food banks, and the saddest thing is that these food banks even need to exist. There really is enough food around to feed everyone on the entire planet, but the fact is that one out of every three people on our planet still goes to bed hungry every day. Whussup widat? What if everyone took one can of food a week and gave it to a local food bank? One lousy can? Would you miss it? Would you go hungry? I don't think so. What if you went through your closet and took out one garment you hadn't worn in a year or two and gave it to the Salvation Army? How big a deal is that? Aren't you tired of seeing photos of starving people in rags and thinking there's nothing you can do about it? Giving money to humanitarian organizations works sometimes, but the word I get from my usual dependable sources inside Unicef is that most of the money and the food gets funneled into the military organizations of the countries receiving aid, and the people, mostly women, children and the elderly, still starve. As a species, we've been using food as an economic bludgeon for ten thousand years. Doncha think that's long enough? Don't enough people starve to death needlessly every bloody day, or do we need to wait for more of our fellow creatures to wither and die for lack of simple nutrition?

I think America spends more money on diet products than some countries spend on feeding their entire populations. We throw away enough food every day to feed an entire country. Doesn't that creep you out, even a little bit? Just turn around and feed someone, give them that sweater you haven't worn in ages but wouldn't be caught dead in. You'll feel better. And you'll be waging peace. What a concept. Or is it just too much of a bother, too inconvenient? Hell, you could even roll down the window of your ASS-U-V and just chuck a can out the window as you roll by the local food drive collection station. Sure, I understand. The more you have, the more you can impress your similarly competitive, bloated buddies. And when you die, surrounded by your huge pile of stuff, everyone will remember how great you were because you were such a selfish paragon of patriotic consumerism. That seems to be how we measure greatness - by the size of your pile. How about measuring your wealth in terms of what you can afford to give away? Or is that just too radical? Am I just using my little bully pulpit to indulge my own Grinchy nature? And speaking of?..

Hope y'all like the Christmas album?.
Luv,
Bear

10/26/2000 - Then I Discovered the Gym

[This piece, along with many photos, was originally published in Rockapella Centerbeat, the great newsletter that goes out to all the tenants in Rockapella Center, Rockapella's incomparable fan club. Join Rockapella Center and you too can get in on other wonderful goodies like this.]

I discovered endorphins and gyms at the same time. Not having been a particularly graceful, coordinated or athletic kid, the gym let me be very physical and produce all the endorphins my scrawny little frame could handle without the humiliation that inevitably came along with my participation in team sports. I was the little dweeby loser who was always picked last and benched first; the one who never knew the rules, couldn't run, jump, shoot, dribble, throw, catch, bat, pass, receive, tackle, block - and then I discovered the gym.
There I was a puny, mouthy, soft seventh-grader, in a P.E. class full of big, scary seniors. One in particular scared me the most; a big, strong, stupid mean kid whose principal delight was to walk up behind me, hoist me by the throat and dangle me, laughing with his buddies while I flailed and choked. Then he'd drop me on the asphalt and walk away. One day I passed out during this good-natured jesting, so when Stupid dropped me, I just lay there, looking dead. I slowly opened my eyes to a ring of anxious faces, among them the gym teacher. Just the day before, we had been running laps in a line, with the last guy in the line having to run to the front of the line when the coach blew his whistle. I lasted about one lap before I rolled over on the grass and blew lunch on my sneakers.
So the gym teacher took pity on me. He saw that if I stayed in the regular gym class, I'd probably leave junior high in a body bag. He put me in a remedial P.E. class with the other dweebs, scrubs, frails and dims who couldn't hack the real thing. One kid in the class was so fragile he'd broken his leg playing shuffleboard. Another one could run like a deer but couldn't say his own name. And there were weights, lots of weights, and even though the teacher didn't know squat about lifting, he showed me enough to get me pumped. I discovered endorphins. After a while I wasn't getting whupped on anymore. It was nice.
My colleagues are all gifted athletes, and they work out merely to keep the scalpel-like edge on their games and their abs. I'm just addicted to the dope my brain makes when I spend an hour or two sweating like a cartoon dog. Nothing gets rid of that ucky bad flight bad air bad food no sleep feeling quicker than a workout. Especially when you don't feel like it. Thus we find ourselves in gyms all over the planet, amazed at what sometimes passes for a gym/health spa/fitness center. It's like nobody ever really defined it carefully, but I'm still a little disappointed when I ask an oh-so-chipper desk clerk for the way to the fitness center touted in the guest guide, and it turns out to be an airless, windowless closet with one broken treadmill. This is a gym. So is a tiny, drafty space next to a heavily chlorinated indoor pool and dominated by a broken, rusting tinkertoy exercise machine which is guaranteed to injure you. A spa can be a 'hot tub', two degrees warmer than the adjacent pool, with water so viscous that you feel like you're sitting in a tub of tepid jello.
That's the seedy, depressing end of the gym continuum. The other end, when we're lucky, are the marble temples to physical culture, with enough weights, exotic equipment and amenities to gladden even Elliott after a long, hard road trip. I especially like the ones that have really hot hot tubs that look like Roman grottos, shiny 'pump you up' machines that work, and steamrooms the size of Cleveland, staffed by guys who bring you pineapple juice and big fluffy warm towels while you're watching the big-screen tv in the lounge.
In the middle are all the plain old gyms, big steel quonset huts full of mostly plain old weights and a few ratty old exercise bikes, smelling of plain old socks, sweat and macho. There are lots of those, and they make me feel right at home. Gym culture is it's own thing. Simple etiquette, simple rules, simple folks. Everybody chilled out, doing their routines. But sometimes things can get a little strange.

The Skanky Osaka gym:
Most of the 'gyms' in Japan are polite, maniacally clean little spaces, with the heaviest hand weights about fifteen pounds, or thereabouts in metric. There may be a few spotless aerobic gizmos and some mats on the floor. Everyone works out in their clean white socks, and nobody sweats. This place is a notable exception. I don't know it's name, but I know how to get there. It's down a little street, up five flights of stairs, across a roof and up another couple stairs. There's a little sign of a cartoon strong guy hanging outside the door. The gym is one room, crammed with serious hard-core lifter gear, old plates, bars and benches, and running around all four walls are photos of the glitterati who have worked out there. Michael Douglas pumped it up there while filming 'Black Rain'. Arnold himself worked out there. I nearly died there.
It was cold. I was trying to get as far away from the kerosene jet heater sitting next to the two exercise bikes in the corner as I could and still be warm enough to move. I was sitting on the small parcel of vacant floor, doing my ritual pre-grunt stretching, trying to push my largish limbs into positions they weren't meant to assume, when this little, cheery guy plops down right in front of me, wedges his feet up against my ankles so my legs are now in a wide, fibrillating vee, grabs my arms, and starts to pull. My hips feel like they are slowly dislocating. I'm begging the guy to stop, politely of course, and he's chattering on and smiling and I'm getting desperate. He yanks again, I hear something snap, and decide that the language gap is unbridgeable in time and I'll have to paste this joker or he'll shortly dismember me.
The owner, watching the whole thing, sees the look of dumb desperation in my eyes. He hurries to my side as I deliberate whether a blow to the nose or a quick ear-cuff will stop the pain faster. He leans over and whispers in my ear, "karate sensei", meaning this guy who is torturing me is a very tough cookie; a bigtime martial arts teacher, and whatever I am thinking about doing I should forget about fast because this guy would mop the tiny floor with me, so I should just let him take me apart because it's the only alternative I might walk away from. So I did. I just hobbled for a few days.

The World-Famous Miami Hotel Spa;
One of those world-class marble and glass jobs, with deluxe everything and an ocean view, where I was looking forward to spending a happy afternoon sweating, soaking, and steaming, getting high on endorphins and the wonderful sybaritic spa. I was about halfway through a leisurely workout when this dreamcreature entered the gym. She was a giant golden Barbie in an aqua spandex skin, sent to earth from the perfect babe factory in heaven to taunt us in our brute imperfection. She just stood in the doorway and sucked all the air right out of the room. There were a few other guys in the gym, so I looked around and there was not a weight moving, no one even breathing. Every Joe in the place was paralyzed. She undulated thrillingly in her strange little vacuum for about twenty minutes, while we tonked around a little, pretending to do sets and trying uselessly to look anywhere else. When she floated out, the whole room let go with an involuntary moan of grief.

Soap World;
There's a place about an hour outside of Tokyo that isn't really a gym. It's a multistory indoor playland, dedicated to hot baths, massages, food and karaoke. It's a family place, with the men's and women's bathing areas on different floors. After everyone gets all nice and pruney, they congregate and eat, drink, sing, get rubbed and pass out in long rows of barcaloungers. One of the unique features of the place is that, after all the soaking but before wandering around the rest of the place, everyone puts on this bizarre, pseudo Hawaiian clothing. The men all wear shorts and loud shirts, and the women wear uniform muumuus. It looks like a bunch of extras from Blue Hawaii who got lost in a Japanese happy happy fantasy.
In the middle of this delightful sensorium, an Important Cultural Difference made itself known to me. The Japanese think nothing of having female locker room attendants in the men's locker room. True, they are wizened, round, and dentally challenged, but when you're not used to it, it does come as something of a shock. It started to dawn on me between soaks while I was visiting the loo, when I glanced over my shoulder and realized that a woman was scrubbing the floor right behind me. I affected nonchalance, but I'm sure that all of me turned red. This was an invaluable first encounter, and sort of prepared me for what happened next.
We had all poached ourselves into a blithe coma, and it was time to suit up and meet our muumuu'd counterparts. Well, there's this platoon of crones issuing the uniforms in the locker room. The other guys get fitted, no problem. All of them wear a Japanese XXL. Then it's my turn. The septuagenarian crew looks me up and down, frown, look at each other, and bust out laughing. I don't have to speak Japanese to know what they're all saying; no effin way are we gonna stuff this gaijin into a Don Ho suit. Then they huddle. There's a lot of talking and pointing and head shaking. One of them bows and runs out of the locker room. I'm wishing I had at least a towel, and I'm starting to shiver. The one who ran out returns, triumphally waving a pair of boxers that must have been left by some Sumo dude. A few safety pins later I'm just another Hawaiian, and I can still hear the locker room ladies cackling all the way down the corridor.
I'm having the eerie feeling that I wrote about this place before, but somehow forgot about it while I was busy living, and I am repeating myself. If I am, I hope that this is a better telling of it. (Hey, the experience really left a mark on me.) If I didn't, well, good for me, and whip me up a gingko biloba smoothie.

There's one thing that's happened to me in every gym I've ever been in anywhere around the world. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that no matter how large the locker room, if there are only two guys in it, their lockers will be right next to each other. The place could be huge, and the one other jock in the whole place is trying to open the locker next to you, dripping on you and apologizing while you try to shove your stuff out of the puddle he's making on the floor. This happens to me all the time. No matter where I sit, some lone dork is going to drip on me and my stuff. Even supposing that it isn't just me, and since I don't believe in accidents, this would tend to indicate that the Universe operates at an even higher rate of irony than I had previously supposed. And that troubles me.
So: the official release date for Rockapella Christmas 2000 is October 24th! I am so jazzed. We will be in Japan. Oh well. That's the high rate of irony at work.

Luv,
bear