Waiting for the Firesigns

So, the recent passing of Phil Austin, one of the four members of Firesign Theatre, prompted me to write a couple of blog posts featuring their second, and most popular album. Just on the off chance that you missed those posts, or are in need of a review, the first was A Nick in Time for Firesign, and the second was Of Flip Sides and Firesigns.

Well, now I'd like to turn to their first album, Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him, released in 1968. Like side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which features "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," side 1 of Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him includes some of their more accessible, mainstream material, relatively speaking.

In fact, side 1 consists of 3 short pieces, again relatively speaking, as opposed to "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which takes up an entire side of the album, and as opposed to side 1 of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which, while listed as several separate pieces, is really one long journey through an insane, hallucinogenic landscape, and mediascape.

So, let's start with the first track of side 1, which is given the name, "Temporarily Humboldt County" for reasons I could not fathom. A quick hop over to the wikipedia entry for the album, however, reveals that, "the group had been told by friends in Humboldt County, California, that the local Indians added 'Temporarily' to the county's name as a way of saying no one could really own the land."

"Temporarily Humboldt County" is a parody of narratives that tell the story of the discovery of the New World, colonization, westward expansion, and our treatment of Native Americans. It's just over 9 minutes long, so here, take a listen:






As I recall, some time ago I was speaking to someone who was teaching a class on audio production, and he used this particular track as an example of what can be done with an acoustic medium and a radioplay format. No doubt, he also used it because it is relatively straightforward as a narrative.

Clearly, this recording also reflects the understanding, still not all that widely held in the 60s, about how Europeans treated the "Indians" (as they are are still officially referred to by the US government), and satirizes not only mainstream, but also the counterculture mythologies. Coming out of California, the Firesigns would have been much more attuned to both the stories of the wild west, and of the Spanish conquest, than us northeasterners.

Waiting seems to be a theme here, whether it's for the electrician referred to by the album title, or someone like him, or the "true white brother" the Indians are waiting for in "Temporarily Humboldt County" (and disappointed to discover it wasn't us). 

Perhaps the connection can be traced back to Waiting for Godot? Certainly, Firesign Theatre can be seen as heir to playwright Samuel Beckett's absurdism, creating sonic environments that place the listener at the center of the play, immersed in the action, spatially rather than sequentially in medias res. Orson Welles referred to radioplays as theater on the air, and the Firesigns also are part of that lineage, creating an acoustic theater of the absurd.

Waiting... what a concept! As much as we live in a temporal environment measured by nanoseconds, even picoseconds, as much as we eschew delayed gratification, as much as we want everything to be available on demand, it seems that waiting is as much a part of our lives as ever, and in some ways, due in large part to all of our technological innovations, more so than ever. It's like sports journalist Tim McCarver used to say when he was calling the New York Mets baseball games, nothing slows the game down more than speed.

Boston Globe Sox

I know it's been a while, I apologize for being a bad blogger lately, it's not that I haven't been writing, it's just been that a bunch of other writing commitments have kept me occupied. I'll fill you in on some of that later on, but for now let me start to play catch up.

So, back in August, August 6 to be specific, I was quoted in the International Business Times, in an article entitled Red Sox Owner Buys Boston Globe Newspaper: Five Things You Should Know, written by Palash Ghosh.

Here's how the piece begins:

John W. Henry, the private equity billionaire businessman and principal owner of The Boston Red Sox baseball club, has agreed to purchase the Boston Globe newspaper (as well as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and some other assets) for $70 million.

Here are some things you should know about this deal:

And this is where the five things you should know come up.  Number one:

*John Henry Bought In Very, Very Cheap

Henry purchased the venerable 141-year-old newspaper (which has won 21 Pulitzer Prizes) at a bargain basement price. Twenty years ago, the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) bought the Globe from the Taylor family for whopping $1.1 billion (or about $1.78 billion in 2013 dollars). That amounts to a 96 percent discount. Lou Ureneck, a Boston University journalism professor, told Reuters that Henry paid more for his second baseman (Dustin Pedroia who recently signed a contract extension valued at a minimum of $100 million) than he did for the Globe.

And number two (no pun intended here):

*The Globe Is In Deep Trouble

Like most newspapers, the Globe is facing serious issues -- overall revenues are declining by 7 percent annually, while revenues from print advertising plunged by 10 percent every year. “Newspapers are bleeding, losing much of their advertising revenue,” Dr. Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies at Fordham University, told IB Times. “At this point, the most valuable thing about the Globe is its distinctive brand, more so that the publication itself. Every newspaper is struggling in making the transition to the internet.”

Strate suggested that he’s not even sure the Globe is worth $70 million price tag, but added that Boston is more of a print-oriented city than most. “The Globe does have a distinctive image that most newspapers lack, so I think it may turn out to be a good deal for Henry,” he added.

And yes, there was my two cents about the seventy million dollars, quite the bargain, don't you think? Well, let's hear from someone else on thing number three:

*This Deal Raises Some Serious Conflicts of Interest

John Henry’s acquisition of the region’s biggest paper could raise some serious issues with conflicts of interest and journalistic integrity. If the boss of the newspaper owns the baseball team that its sportswriters are supposed to cover, will they be forced to limit their criticism of the team, its players, its coaches and, particularly, its front office? Keep in mind, Henry also owns a majority share in local sports television network, New England Sports Network, which broadcasts Red Sox games.

Bob Ryan, the Globe’s most well known sports columnist, told the New York Times: “This was the last circumstance anyone would want. It’s nothing anyone would wish. It’s scary, to say the least, for all involved.” The Globe’s sports editor Joe Sullivan similarly groused: “We don’t know what the new situation is going to be in terms of hierarchy, but I would hope to be able to continue to cover the Red Sox the way we always have.” Sullivan conceded that the mere appearance of conflicts of interest will be hard to deal with. “It will be there, hanging in the air,” he said.

The Globe's most prominent baseball voice, Dan Shaughnessy, finds himself in a particularly uncomfortable position since he had criticized Henry in his columns over the years. “There’s an inherent conflict of interest which no one can do anything about,” Shaughnessy said. “All we can hope for is that everyone is allowed to do his job professionally and that we are able to keep our independence.”

And back to me to straighten things out (no pun intended here either) for number four:

*But This Has Happened Before

Indeed, The Globe’s former parent, New York Times Co., once held as much as an 18 percent stake in the parent corporation of the Red Sox club, which it finally sold off in 2012 after ten years of ownership. Other pro sports clubs in Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles and elseshere have owned shares in local newspaper as well, so the Globe-Red Sox deal is hardly unprecedented. Indeed, between 1964 and 1972, the most storied franchise in all of baseball (and Red Sox rival), the New York Yankees, were owned by the CBS television network. Similarly, the Chicago Cubs baseball club was once owned by the Tribune Company.

Strate noted that television stations used to cover the games independently, with sportscasters who were calling the games employed by the station, not the team itself. “Now they tend to be employed by the team, and this changes the nature of the coverage significantly,” he said, “What once was sports journalism becomes sports public relations instead.”

And one more thing, which makes for thing number five:

*Boston Globe Has Strong Brand, Reputation

Strate also said that in the past, news organizations have had sufficient journalistic integrity to be able to report objectively despite being owned by the same individuals or companies. “Whether that is still the case, given the overall decline in professional journalism remains to be seen, but the Boston Globe, like many major newspapers, has a solid tradition of professionalism to fall back on,” he said. Nowadays blogs and social media outlets will call out any appearance of conflict of interest, another motivation for keeping to the straight and narrow.”

Nice to be given the last word here. And one thing I'd add to this report is that one of the main attractions of the Boston Globe is its sports coverage, both in paper form, and especially online, which makes the paper an especially attractive addition for a professional sports organization.

And finally, I just want to say that, speaking as a Mets fan, please note that I did not make any reference to 1986 and Bill Buckner in this discussion relating to Red Sox baseball. Really, I would never stoop so low as to remind my Bostonian friends of such a painful moment in their sports history, no matter how much pleasure the memory brings me...

Meir Ribalow Memorial at The Players

Last night, I attended a memorial, or rather a celebration of the life of Meir Ribalow at The Players in New York City, a club that Meir loved dearly, and was very active in. You may remember that I included information about this event in my previous post, In Memory of Meir Ribalow, where I also provided some extensive comments about this extraordinary individual.

The program included multimedia presentations, a performance of Meir's favorite compositions on piano by the composer, Byron Janis, a sing-along of "Amazing Grace," and short talks by about 20 individuals, ranging across his family, youthful friends, colleagues, collaborators, lovers, and protégés.  There were many references to Meir's affection for westerns, his strong sense of self and code of conduct, his creativity—especially his sonnets, and most of all his caring and compassion for others.

The participants included Alec Baldwin, who worked with Meir on the Creative Coalition (and I have to say it was pretty cool to have been inches away from him and hear him speak from the heart about a friend of mine), and Maria Cooper Janis, the daughter of Gary Cooper, who I've met before through Meir, along with some incredibly talented people.  And me. I was there to speak on behalf of Fordham University, and NeoPoiesis Press, and I was told I'd have 4 minutes to do so. So I wrote out some comments, and timed it out at about 5 1/2 minutes, reading fast, so I think I probably slowed down a bit when I spoke last night, but happily there were no complaints.

So, let I would very much like to share my remarks about Meir here now, with the understanding that 40 minutes would not have been enough time to say all I'd want to say about him.

Meir Ribalow Memorial, The Players, November 10, 2012

Meir Ribalow was my colleague at Fordham University, where he taught for over two decades, and was an Artist-in-Residence. But more than that, Meir was my friend, and it was both a privilege and a pleasure to have known him.

Meir was a talented individual who selflessly gave of himself to encourage and develop the talents of others. In other words, he was an educator. I know they say, those who can't do, teach, but that's a cynical view of education, and Meir gave the lie to that old saw. He was a can-do kind of guy, and a can-do kind of teacher, and he brought out the best in others, at Fordham and everywhere else he went. Meir took pride in his achievements, but always with modesty and humility. And he was not jealous or fearful of the accomplishments of others, but rather shared in the joy of their triumphs.

I want to say there's no me in Meir... And I want to say there's no I in Meir...  But what I can say is that Meir is a Hebrew name, and the Hebrew words for me and I aren't in there.  And the meaning of his name in Hebrew is one who shines, or bringer of light. And how very appropriate for one who shone so very brightly, and who shared his light with so many others. 

And how appropriate for someone who taught courses about the movies, who studied them, admired them, and loved them so very much. Every semester, Meir taught two sections of a course named Movies and the American Experience, and they were among the most popular courses in all of Fordham University. And how very fitting that he taught a course about movies; not film as some obscure and elitist exercise in theorizing and throwing around jargon and French language. But movies, as a genuine American, popular, democratic medium that mixes together the vulgar and the sublime, art and entertainment, industry and inspiration. Meir instilled in his students an appreciation for the art of the moving image and the theatrical performance; an understanding of the craft of movie-making; and the aesthetic sense to tell the difference between quality and crap, and between crap that's good, and crap that's just crap.

As a colleague at Fordham University, I feel obliged to mention that in our department meetings, he was always a voice of reason, and if you know anything about academia, you know how rare a quality that is.

I treasure all of the conversations we had about movies and television, science fiction and superheroes, politics and baseball, and religion, by which I mean Judaism and the New York Mets.

I loved the sense of connection and devotion he had to his father, and his father's work, including updating and coauthoring his father's books on The Jew in American Sports, and Jewish Baseball Stars, both surprisingly thick volumes. Six years ago, when I took over the adult education program for my small Reform Jewish congregation in Leonia, New Jersey, Congregation Adas Emuno, and was given no budget whatsoever, I turned to was Meir, and he generously drove across the Hudson to give a talk about Jewish athletes that folks still refer to to this day.

Meir participated in a number of academic and intellectual events that I organized, and he helped to bring in talented participants, such as his close friend Leslie Carroll, who participated on several roundtables featuring celebrated authors. And there was an extraordinary panel about movie heroes that we put together, that was held here at the Players, and that included, in addition to Meir and myself, Susan McGregor, Maria Cooper Janis, Lee Pfeiffer, and Victor Slezak. But what stands out in my mind from all of that was how truly amazing Meir was as a moderator. Panelists were often shocked at how well prepared he was, how well he researched them and understood their work, how appropriate and insightful were the questions he asked, and how much in control he was of the panel discussion. He was an extraordinary moderator and interviewer because of his integrity as an individual, and his empathy for others. For Meir, it was the relationship that counts.

Several years ago, when I told Meir how I helped to start a little publishing group called NeoPoiesis Press, he mentioned that he had written and published quite a lot of poetry, and I asked him if we could put out a book of his work. Last year we published Chasing Ghosts, and this year we followed that up with his book of sonnets, The Time We Have Misspent, and his novel, Redheaded Blues. And I want to share with you that our editor-in-chief, Dale Winslow, made a heroic effort to rush those two volumes into print this past spring, and set up a book party here at the Players where Meir did a book signing, gave a reading, and enjoyed a thunderous standing ovation. This is the kind of devotion and love that Meir inspired in all who knew him. And it has been an honor for us to play a small role in helping to preserve something of Meir's mind, his wit, his words, and make it available for others to share in.

Speaking on behalf of my colleagues at Fordham University, and NeoPoiesis Press, I want to conclude by saying that Meir's life was truly a blessing, we miss him terribly, but we are thankful for the time we had together, thankful for the bright light that he shined, the light he shared with all of us.

Fordham Flips for Baseball

My thanks to my friend Ben Hauck for bring this to my attention.

Back when I was a graduate student, I used to enjoy talking baseball with my mentor, Neil Postman, and he remarked on more than one occasion that no matter how much you watch the game, you can always see something new.  Well, he certainly would have repeated that comment were he still around, and I know he would have loved this play, which has made its way around the internet and TV sports shows and local news programs:




Over on youtube, this April 21st video is called Fordham Baseball Player Goes Airborn, and the description reads

It's not often that one play would overshadow an incredible team effort comeback from a 9-1 deficit, but Fordham's Brian Kownacki tried. His leap over Iona catcher James Beck to score on Chris Walker's go-ahead hit in the bottom of the eighth inning highlighted a nine-run rally to give Fordham a 12-9 victory over the Iona College Gaels at Houlihan Park.

The play is narrated by WFUV's Gregg Caserta.

 
What can I say, but, Go Rams!


And while Fordham is not a baseball powerhouse these days, did you know that we hold the record for most games won by a college team?  You don't have to take my word for it, it was reported in the New York Times last year, in a story by Jack Curry dated April 9, 2009, entitled For 150 Years, Fordham Baseball’s Tradition of Winning.  Here's how it goes:

The team with the most victories in college baseball history practiced energetically Thursday. Players ran from behind the batting cage to the plate to take their swings, outfielders dashed after fly balls and infielders vacuumed up grounders. The practice had a nice rhythm.

This scene did not occur in California, Florida or Texas, places where college baseball is in the spotlight. It occurred on a cool afternoon in the Bronx, six subway stops away from Yankee Stadium. It happened at Fordham University, the humble home of the team that surprisingly has the most wins of any N.C.A.A. Division I baseball program. 

And it is not close. Fordham has 4,010 wins; Texas is second with 3,117. Of course, Fordham had a huge head start since it began playing baseball 150 years ago, which was 36 seasons before Texas did and more than half a century before many other teams. Still, Fordham proudly relishes having more victories than elite programs like Stanford and Miami.

A bit further into the article, they get into some of the famous baseball players who came from Fordham:

The roll call starts with Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash, who held the program’s single-season stolen base record for 67 years, played 19 seasons in the major leagues and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
No one can outdo Frisch’s alliterative nickname, but Jack Coffey, who played and coached at Fordham, has his own neat distinction as the only player to be a teammate of Babe Ruth’s and Ty Cobb’s in the same season. Then there is Gil McDougald, a former Yankees All-Star who coached at Fordham; Esteban Bellan, who was the first Cuban and the first Latin American to play professional baseball; and Vin Scully, an outfielder who wound up doing more with his silky voice than with his arm or legs.

In an interview on Fordham’s Web site, Scully recalled how he hit one home run in his “inglorious career.” Scully said he swung left-handed and was quick to explain that “I didn’t say I hit left-handed.” In a game against Yale, Scully competed against George H.W. Bush. When Scully played golf with the former President Bush decades later, he reminded him that they each went 0 for 3. 

“I loved every minute of it,” Scully said in the interview. “I loved my teammates. We had so much fun, and it was definitely a good portion of my memory bank in those wonderful years on the Fordham campus.”

And a bit further on in this article from last year, there's some interesting bits of trivia:

Fordham is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its initial game, but this is the university’s 149th season. Play was suspended for World War II in 1944. In the first 148 seasons, Fordham had 19 losing records. There have been 56 players from Fordham to appear in the majors, but only four in the last 45 years.

And again, a little further on:

When St. John’s College, Fordham’s original name, opposed St. Francis Xavier College a few months later, they played the first college game featuring nine-man teams. The Rose Hills, as Fordham was known, won, 33-11.

And if this leaves you wanting more, check out the multimedia files on our own website:  150 Years of Fordham Baseball.   And as for Brian Kownacki, sign that kid up!  For the Mets, if you please!

Back in the Land of Baseball

So, I just got back from a week in India, where cricket is all the rage, as their national team was doing well against Australia.  I watched a little bit of it, having no idea of what was going on, and I have to say that it is good to be back in the land of baseball, even though this was a disastrous season for my New York Mets.

I'm not a Yankee hater, I just hate how the local media fawns over them and doesn't give my team equal coverage, even when they're doing well.  But I do think the Mets need a change in their minayacal front office.  Without really good pitching, in what sense is this a New York Mets team?

Ah, but no one wants to hear about the Mets right now.  I'd wish the Yankees luck, but I don't think they need it.

So instead, I want to refer you to a blog post by Ted Walker, who is a co-blogist of the blog called pitchers & poets.  The blog post is entitled Watching the Hero Walk Alone, Together: Ritual, Community, Power, and Baseball, and it's a nice meditation on the sport, it's intellectual qualities, and it's individualism.  And I say this not only because Ted makes reference to, and says nice things about my essay, "The Medium of Baseball," which was published in Take Me Out to the Ball Game: Communicating Baseball,; edited by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 37-70).

So, if you like baseball, go read Watching the Hero Walk Alone, Together: Ritual, Community, Power, and Baseball, leave a comment if you care to, and tell Ted that I sent you!

Play Ball!

I can't believe baseball season is starting up again, already! Being a NY Mets fan, I have mixed feelings, hope coupled with a lingering sense of dread after the last few disastrous season enders. Ah well, hope springs eternal, and I look forward to getting a look at the new stadium at some point this summer. I have many fond memories of Shea Stadium, but I won't miss it, it really was not well-designed for watching baseball games.

Anyway, in celebration of this new beginning, I thought I'd include this little poem I wrote on the subject:

Myths of Baseball

Abner Doubleday, double, double day!
Invented baseball, so they double say!
Did he do it? No double way!
It’s a bit of fakelore, O double kay?

James Fenimore Cooper, coo coo cooper!
Wrote no baseball rulebook, wasn’t sue sue super!
That’s a mistake, a blue blue blooper!
I’m sorry to have to be a party poo poo pooper!

But the first recorded game was at Ho Hoboken!
That’s where baseball first was spo spo spoken!
By two New York clubs, no joe joe jokin’!
With every play new records were bro bro broken!

And as an added bonus, here's one of the funniest comedy routines every devised, and one that, in it's own way, is pure poetry, at least in my opinion:

Abbott and Costello, they may not have been as brilliant as the Marx Brothers, as original as Laurel and Hardy, or as over-the-top as The Three Stooges, but they were up there with those other comedy acts,, and Jerry Seinfeld speaks highly of them as a major source of inspiration for his own comedy.

Speaking of which, here's a classic moment from the TV series:

Loogie or not, there's always a bit of magic in the air when baseball is being played:

A great movie, yes, but I also recommend the novel that it's based on, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, a marvelous excercise in baseball rendered via magic realism, and even more so his amazing companion novel, The Iowa Baseball Conspiracy. They are great reads, even if you're not a baseball fan!

And now, let's PLAY BALL!

Loose Connections

In a previous post, Who Wants to Be a Supermensch?, I wrote about the Jewish superhero Mr. Mitzvah, aka Ivan Wilzig, in the SciFi Channel reality show, Who Wants to Be a Superhero? Well, for those of you not watching, Friday he was eliminated. And I have to say that I feel a degree of discomfort about it all. It seems that he did not mix well with the other contestants, went off on his own a lot, did not volunteer much about his background to the others, and this was a source of friction for some of them. They even had a meeting to talk about him behind his back. Sure, this could happen with any mix of people, its a common phenomenon in group dynamics, but here we are dealing with symbols and stereotypes, and the producers need to tread carefully.

On this last episode, he did finally explain to the others that he came from a wealthy background, and I can understand how he'd be reluctant to reveal that because people get weird around the rich and famous. He did not reveal, at least on the episode, that his father, who he referred to as a financial genius, was a Holocaust survivor, and that this was behind his whole MO as a superhero. I was disappointed that this never came up on the program. The main reason he was eliminated, though, according to Stan "The Man" Lee, who serves as the show's deus ex machina, was that he failed to face his fears two weeks in a row, first by being the only one to cover his eyes when trapped with hundreds of bees, and second by not being willing to ride a really intense rollercoaster in order to find clues needed to solve a puzzle they were given. And when confronted with this criticism, his response was, well, stiff necked is the best way to describe it.

Mr. Mitzvah was part of a double elimination along with Ms. Limelight, and there's an interview of the two of them by last year's winner, Feedback, which can be accessed from the Aftershow 3 video file on the program's website. And it seems like the guy's pretty personable, all in all. And I knew he wasn't going to win, with his money he doesn't need to come out on top to make a comic or even movie for his character. But I did hope he'd do a little bit better.

And while we're on the subject, or off it, or simply to make a loose connection, I really am disappointed with Shawn Green's performance on the Mets this year, a strong start but steady decline. Where have you gone, Art Shamsky?

So, okay, next on the list, it's come to my attention that the URL I used in my previous post here entitled The Ten Commandments, which was supposed to take you to my MySpace blog entry by the same name was bad. Anyone who has any experience with MySpace knows that things over there can be a little screwy. Well, I have gone back to that earlier post and corrected the URL, so the link works correctly now. But, just in case you don't feel like going back to that page just to get to the MySpace page, here it is too: The Ten Commandments.

And speaking of the Decalogue, or at least going back to the Second Commandment's prohibition against graven images, we had an interesting discussion last Friday night during services at Congregation Adas Emuno, in response to the week's Torah portion, Re'eh. Cantor Shapiro chose to focus on just two lines from the portion, Deuteronomy 14:1-2, which read:

1. You are children of the Lord, your God. You shall neither cut yourselves nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead. 2. For you are a holy people to the Lord, your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a treasured people for Him, out of all the nations that are upon the earth.

On the basis of this passage, as I understand it, comes the more generalized prohibition against tattoos or other forms of bodily mutilation such as piercings. As I have always heard it, the argument is that we are made in God's image (according to Genesis), and therefore it is not right for us to deface ourselves in any way. This also connects to the traditional belief that when the messiah comes, he will resurrect the dead, so you need to keep your body whole--this makes autopsy a violation of Orthodox Judaism, which obviously can present some problems.

But, the question that I had not considered until then is, if we venerate the body in this way, why do we also have a tradition of modesty, as opposed to one in which the body is celebrated? Why did we follow a path diametrically opposed to that of the Greeks, for example. I should note that Hellenic culture posed an enormous challenge for the Jews in the ancient world, as here was a people who were highly literate, in many ways following lines of development that paralleled that of ancient Israel. But they embraced the body, and sexual freedom, while our people struggled to keep these things under control.

I know this could all be linked to gender politics, but the Greeks were just as patriarchal in their own way. Sexual politics are another story, but I think the real significance lies elsewhere. Cantor Shapiro explained that the prohibition against mutilating the body was also connected to the Second Commandment, tattoos especially being a kind of graven image. In general, all this attention given to the body, whether altering it, displaying it, or reproducing it in some art form, constitutes a kind of idolatry. It's not just a problem of worshiping other gods, or worshiping beasts, bodies of water, mountains, trees, and the like. It's narcissism, worship of the self, of our own physicality, especially of physical beauty.

It also seems to be part of a complex media ecology that heavy use of imagery, and concomitant idolatry, goes hand in hand with body worship and ritual practices involving sexuality (e.g., sacred prostitution), and sometimes human sacrifice as well. But the intimate relations between art, sex, and religion associated with what has been known as paganism, has been an important theme in Camille Paglia's work, especially Sexual Personae. And her argument is that it was never completely eliminated by Christianity, but remained an important undercurrent in western culture. And this is particularly apparent in Roman Catholic iconography.

So, the Second Commandment prohibition against idolatry served to counter these tendencies. replacing exhibitionist body-worship and open sexuality with an ethos in which veneration of the body required modesty and restraint, if not repression. We are made in God's image, but God is invisible, and the body too must be kept hidden. Literacy leads to abstract thinking, which makes monotheism possible, the abstraction of a single deity who is almighty, omnipresent, and yet unseen, and literacy therefore leads to a more abstract view of the human person as a mind, and spirit, rather than a body. Descartes was inevitable.

Marshall McLuhan opened a seminar at Brandeis University by saying that, of course it is difficult to learn how to read and write if you're naked--my source for this is a taped interview of John Culkin, the former Jesuit priest who brought McLuhan to Fordham University for the 1967-1968 school year--the tape was provided by another McLuhan associate, media producer Tony Schwartz, for the McLuhan Symposium I organized at Fordham in 1998. According to Culkin, McLuhan then went onto another subject and never returned to the naked guy, typical McLuhan nonlinearity at work. But the point, as Culkin explained, is that, if you're naked, all of your sensory energy is involved with the total exposure to your environment, leaving you with too little for the activity of reading. Clothing is an extension of the skin, and as a prosthetic device, it numbs the skin, numbs the body in its relation to its environment, allowing the mind to move inward, which is what literacy is all about.

Literacy is about control, suppression and repression. Both McLuhan and Ong noted the parallel between Sigmund Freud's stages of psychosexual development and the evolution of media environments, the oral stage going along with oral culture, and the anal stage, which is all about control, mastery, and closure, going along with literate/print culture (and let's not get into the similarities in use of writing surfaces such as paper, shall we?). This makes our present electronic culture line up with the genital stage. Surprise, surprise, we are in an era of explosive sexuality.

I don't mean to come off like a prude or a Puritan. I'm a part of this culture, after all, and came of age in the wake of the sexual revolution. It was lots of fun. But I also remember a lecture Lewis Mumford gave in 1980, at the in-house media ecology conferences that Neil Postman and his colleagues used to organize for their graduate students. It was my first, in fact, and Mumford, a devout atheist I might add, warned that the sexual revolution was resulting in new forms of venereal disease that would pose a major threat to our society. This was a year before the first cases of AIDS were identified! Clearly, what we have here is an extreme example of what Postman would later refer to as amusing ourselves to death, or maybe it should be abusing ourselves to death?

In ritual practice, behavior that is otherwise taboo may be carried out under divine aegis. And this is true of one form of bodily mutilation, the circumcision. It is intended as a mark of identification in a tribal sense, also as a seal marking the covenant between the Jewish people and God (having been circumcised in a ritual manner, I am in effect under contract with God to carry out all of his commandments, a contract that is all but impossible to revoke, and God, if you're reading this, sorry I'm doing such a lousy job at fulfilling my end of the deal). Circumcision, thinking about it, is also a powerful symbol of control and mastery over our sexuality. And surprise, surprise, medical research has shown that it lowers the chances of contracting venereal disease, including AIDS. But what is also highly significant is that circumcision, unlike many types of piercings, cuttings, and tattoos, is a form of mutilation that remains hidden, out of sight, and therefore does not in any way violate the Second Commandment.

So, what does it take to solve the problems posed by today's image society, to find a way to gain some control over our collective pursuit of pleasure, to figure out how to deal with our own sexuality and that of others, to find a healthy balance between body and mind, to find a way out of these cultural conundrums?

I don't know. I don't know if anyone really knows. I think that maybe, we need some kind of...

...superhero?

Let's Go Mets!

At the NY Mets game with my son, this past September (box seats were a birthday present for both of us). We're looking forward to the new season, and (hopefully) a World Series victory this fall.