There’s terror going on in the world and we need hard men, the right men. Men with Heckler & Koch MP5s, silencers and holographic sights. Men who know how to wear a balaclava and fingerless gloves. Above all, we need men aware that the only thing protecting us from the be-bombed madmen of the world is the judicious application of extreme violence and a little enhanced interrogation. At least, that’s what Tom Clancy taught me.

But Clancy’s takes on terrorists and on terror were backwards at best and are what makes us morons on the subject at worst. Despite being 16 years into the War on Terror, the U.S. is still bumbling around as if the causes of extremism and ideological violence were unknowable, and as if the only tools to fight them belonged to the Pentagon; as if Patriot Games and The Sum of All Fears were our operating manuals. Every new attack meets with fervent calls for more action, more military response. Terrorists are enigmatic figures waiting in the wings of Clancy’s books, but in the real world, terrorism arises from causes that are always political and knowable.

Image: Dave Parker via Flickr

11/16 8:25 ET At Pittsburgh -7 Tennessee

Hot breath on windows
French fries in hot sandwiches
Gravy on the side

PICK: STEELERS

11/19 1:00 ET Detroit -3 At Chicago

There are unseen things
Floating upon the corners
Of everything blue

PICK: LIONS

11/19 1:00 ET Kansas City -10.5 At NY Giants

Answer the door bell.
It’s a different you who just
Forgot their house keys

PICK: CHIEFS

Eternity

           Landscape Painting

It is as if I can almost still remember.
As if I once perhaps belonged here.

The mountains a deep heavy green, and
The rocky steep drop to the waters below.

The peaked roofs, the white-plastered
Brick. A clothesline in a neighbor’s yard

Made of sticks. The stone path skimming
The ridge. A ladder asleep against a house.

What is the soul allowed to keep? Every
Birth, every small gift, every ache? I know

I have knelt just here, torn apart by loss. Lazed
On this grass, counting joys like trees: cypress,

Blue fir, dogwood, cherry. Ageless, constant,
Growing down into earth and up into history.

           ______

           Yong’An Temple

It was a shock to be allowed in, for once
Not held back by a painted iron fence.

And to take it in with just my eyes (No Photos
Signs were discreet, yet emphatic). Coins,

Bills on a tray. Two women and then a man
Bowed before a statue to pray.  Outside

Above the gates, a sprung balloon
And three kites swam east on a high fast

Current. And something about a bird
Flapping hard as it crossed my line of sight—

The bliss it seemed to make and ride without
Ever once gliding or slowing—the picture of it

Meant, suddenly, youth, and I couldn’t help it,
I had to look away.

Wait, Thanksgiving is a week from today? What the fuck, Time? I thought the deal was you would drag ass at a pace so glacial it would barely be perceptible and we would spend all those endless hours wishing we were dead. Now’s when you decide to pick it up? Fuck you! Anyway, here’s music. Enjoy.

★★★ The light had dulled after a bright and promising beginning, but north of the zenith the sky was an attractive tangle of white wisps on blue. Sunward, things were bleached and smeary. Half-strength shadows pointed up the sidewalk, then faded away entirely. It was too hot indoors for the right amount of clothing. The distance between the buildings and the contours of the clouds was just close enough for the eye to measure them against each other, making the city feel stubby and squashed.  No matter what the sun seemed to be doing, it was always about to do something else.

I collect folk songs about shipwrecks and other maritime disasters, so it was with great excitement that I queued up my playlist of 64 songs about shipwrecks and drove from Los Angeles to San Diego, for the 25^th Annual Sea Chantey Festival at the Maritime Museum. There are several sea chantey conventions held annually throughout the United States, but this is the only one on the west coast. The convention was held aboard the Star of India, a massive iron merchant vessel and the world’s oldest sailing ship still in active use, now docked in San Diego Harbor. I boarded  just as the small audience of folk music enthusiasts was launching into the chorus of “Maggie May”: “Oh Maggie, Maggie May, They have taken her away,” about a seductive thief who robs sailors on leave.

A pop-up sun shade had been erected near the mainmast, with a small stage underneath and rows of folding chairs on deck. Throughout the day, a rotating cast of folk musicians would take the stage in 40-minute blocks, performing a mix of traditional and contemporary songs loosely themed around sailing. Members of the Jackstraws and The Chanteymen dedicated the first set to four fellow chantey singers who’d died in the last year, a sad consequence of the hobby’s aging male fan base. They performed each man’s favorite song: “Maggie May,” “The Whaler’s Tale” (with the delightfully singable chorus, “for I tell you, sir, those fish can think as well as you or me!”), “Fiddler’s Green,” and “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” which they described as “the pop hit of the chantey set.” It was a mostly white, male, middle-aged crowd, and half the audience was composed of other chantey singers waiting their turn at the stage. Curious tourists wandered on and off the ship, anchored beside a replica Spanish galleon and a salvaged Soviet submarine. A contingent of the singers’ wives sat knitting in time with the beat, some wearing matching band shirts.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

It’s that magical time of year again. You know it, I know it, let’s all say it together: I’m reading a giant composer biography that’s going to take me five weeks to finish. If I remember correctly, people were absolutely wild for my Brahms columns. I still get, on average, 20 emails per week of people asking me to read another 600-word book about Johannes Brahms, but no!! We have to move on, together, from our glory days of the column.

The extremely long biography I’m reading right now is Harlow Robinson’s Sergei Prokofiev about, uh, Sergei Prokofiev. Prokofiev’s made an appearance in this column before, and I had always been interested in his time spent in the United States during his career. The biography is nice to read: not too dense, interesting, funny. Here’s an anecdote: at one point during his youth, Prokofiev got really into stilts. You read that correctly. Stilts. Like from the circus. And his parents had a freaking meltdown about it because they thought he would break his hands and no longer be able to play piano. Kooky boy!

Are you in the mood for some “grinding, heavily-stepped UK-blended razor techno” this morning? Well it’s not always about you. I am in the mood for some “grinding, heavily-stepped UK-blended razor techno” this morning and by gum that’s just what we’re all going to sit and listen to now. So enjoy.

★ There was nothing outside that anyone wanted to wake up for. The best that could be said for the rain was that it too minor to do anything about, and the puddles on the way to school were avoidable. The end of it was a negligible improvement: The sky stayed gray and the ground stayed wet. Gingko leaves had given up and fallen without changing color, to be ground to a green paste underfoot. The light never got any better but the breeze sharped and finally did dry things out. A paper plate blew away from the pizza place toward where other plates lay already drowned in a puddle.