Permission to play

I notice as I get older that the weekend just ain't what it used to be. I'm more inclined to stooge around the house doing nothing much. Or I'm more likely to let work flow over into the once-sacrosanct space of recreation. I find I need a little encouragement to leave the week behind, to disengage from the opinion machine driven by downbeat talking heads. I need permission to relax, kick back, and do something fun.

Which has me a little excited about our new Friday night music line-up. A good weekend needs a good warm-up act and a high-energy soundtrack. If you've had a chance to hear Jonathan Brown sitting in for other music hosts, you should enjoy his new rootsy smorgasbord, Cutaway. Then two hours of the program that has been telling you the news is done for the day--it's time to come out and play--World Café. Then an hour of The Latin Alternative, to remind you that even though you may be bundled up in your parka, you could still be doing the rumba. And then taking you up to midnight, some of the most joyful noise anywhere, Afropop Worldwide with Georges Collinet.

After midnight? Well--I'll probably be in bed. But I won't be grinding my teeth in my sleep, and I expect to get up Saturday ready for a proper weekend.

Where's the Wowser?

Americans used to love American technology. In the '50 and '60s, the rollout of the new Detroit car models topped the news programs. We were excited to have a new car, or even to see one for the first time. They touched our fantasy life, as well as our family life, and we could hardly wait for what comes next. Americans mostly hate their cars now, settling for anything with a wheel on each corner that will get them down the road with regularity and reliability.

The last vestige of that old familiar feeling probably goes to boutique electric carmaker Tesla, whose slam-you-back-in-your-seat roadster arouses a tech-lust that few have the depth of pocket to indulge.

We build little of what we once did--cars, appliances, gadgets, ships, consumer electronics. We travel to the International Space Station in a 1970s model space shuttle--having gone from "live TV from the surface of the moon" to "your father's Oldsmobile" in a single generation. What little we do design and/or build doesn't stand out from our world competitors in any way that elicits the "Wowsers!" response.

The only US company that seems to consistently have the old magic is Apple Computer. The unveiling yesterday of their new tablet computer, the iPad, had all the sizzle you could want. Ever since the introduction of the first Macintosh during the Super Bowl in 1984, new Apple products have lit up the "Hot Donuts Now!" light in American brains. The Mac, the iPod and the iPhone were transformative technologies--not because they were the first of their kind, but because they were the first to get it right-- to combine function with usability, sleek design with smart, even hip, marketing. They make you want it--and heaven help me--I do.

In a Name

When Shunryu Suzuki (one of the earliest teachers to bring Zen Buddhism to the US) came to California his English was very poor. He asked a passerby in a San Francisco park the question in my poem below. The straightforward reply encouraged him that here was fertile ground for Zen.

Suzuki Roshi Discovers America

What do
you call
that black
bird there?

Blackbird.

Most of the names of NCPR programs follow a similar pattern: The Eight O'Clock Hour, Music for a Monday Afternoon, FM in the Morning, etc. I could say it was due to our advanced spiritual state, but no, we just can't come to consensus on anything clever and exciting. Coming up with good names is hard. No doubt Eve vetoed many of Adam's "best" ideas, when he legendarily named the animals. "Platypus? Really?"

NCPR has a new program in the works, and rather than settle on some pedestrian in-house pick, we have decided to reach out for suggestions. Jonathan Brown, known to most of you as our All Before Five host and news reporter, will be launching a new hour-long music program leading into the weekend. Regarding format, Jonathan says, "I'll play rock, folk, blues, R&B, soul, alt-country and roots from the '60s to new stuff. Each set will mix more well-known (and probably older) tracks with newer songs that listeners may not be familiar with."

So, what do you suggest, besides The Rock, Folk, Blues, R&B, Soul, alt-Country and Roots Hour? While you're at it, feel free to suggest alternatives (by preference non-scatological) to any of our other generic program names.

Going Vogue

As a high-tech web kind of guy, you might suppose that I was down with all the latest gadgets. For example, if you saw me pacing in the hall, waving my hands and apparently ranting into the air, you might think I was having a lively discussion over the blue-tooth headset tucked into my other ear. But no, sometimes I just go off like that. In fact, I use the cell phone in my pocket more often as a worry-stone than as a communications device, and I'd be just as happy if it had a rotary dial and plugged into the wall. I text frequently--but I do it at my desk with an extended keyboard. It's called email, I believe.

Nine years after the introduction of the iPod, and five years after I started podcasting NCPR programs and stories, my first personal iPod was under the Christmas tree this year. What finally put me over the edge was the latest feature they built into it--an fm radio. I sure have missed my old Panasonic pocket transistor from the '60s. In honor of that antique mobile device, I have loaded my iPod Nano up with Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, the Beatles, the Byrds and Bob Dylan.

But time does move on, and even if I don't adjust too nimbly myself, the rest of the world is going mobile. NCPR needs to go along for the ride. This week, we finally worked out most of the kinks to get NCPR's broadcast stream, newscast and podcast news audio onto the NPR mobile platform, which makes it available to users of iPhones, Nokia phones, Android and other mobile computing devices. If you are so en vogue as to possess one, you can find us in your mobile device browser at this address: http://m.npr.org/stations/show/WSLU

Buzzing

 Each year brings a new crop of buzz words that so saturate public speech, one is tempted to have a New Year's resolution not to invent any new ones during the coming year. Place your right hand on the thesaurus and repeat after me…. Grant Barrett, co-host of A Way With Words, submits the following from 2009: "aporkalypse" (undue worry in response to swine flu), "death panel" (doctors and/or bureaucrats who would decide which patients receive treatment, ostensibly leaving the rest to die), "gay-marry" (to marry someone of the same sex), "tea party" (an organized gathering of antitax, antigovernment and/or anti-Obama protestors), and "wise Latina woman" (a term used by Judge Sonia Sotomayor in a speech before she was a Supreme Court justice).

At Lake Superior University, they have compiled their 35th annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." Among this year's candidates are shovel-ready, czar, friend (used as a verb), teachable moment, toxic assets, too big to fail, and bromance. The Houston Chronicle begs to include funemployed, tramp stamp, recessionista, new normal and deficit neutrality.

IMHO, we should have a crackdown and drain the swamp of such locutions. That's my mantra. This post can be taken as the run-up to that crackdown.

Blue Moon

The stars conjoin to make this an auspicious New Year's Eve. As the second full moon in December, this makes tonight a "blue" moon, a rarity. The last New Year's Eve blue moon was in 1990. It will appear bigger than usual (about 7%)--the moon is at its closest to earth on January 1--and brighter than usual (earth and moon are closest to the sun on January 2). If only the overcast will clear, it will make a pretty show to usher out an unpretty decade.

A decade of 911, a decade of war and fear, a decade of diminishing fortunes and natural calamities. Its cultural highlight was the rise of the oxymoronic phenomenon "reality TV." The national discourse has gone deeply awry, and the institutions that support it are losing revenue and readers faster than the Arctic is losing sea ice. We have made an unencouraging beginning on Millennium 3.

Unless, of course, you shake off your (my) curmudgeonly inclinations and look at the other things that have been going on. Brian Mann gives his good news of the year in this In Box post. I have my own geeky and mildly-lefty list, and I encourage you to share your own take on the decade's blessings in a comment below.

Play nicely tonight--the police and ER personnel hate full moon nights. After a full moon brawl some years ago that brought fifty rowdies to woe in the streets of Gouverneur, the police chief quipped "We're hoping for a half moon tomorrow night."

Anticipation

It's more than an ad for ketchup—anticipation. It's the subtext of the whole holiday season. If one is supposed to live in the moment, today—Christmas Eve—must be the least zen day of the year. Christians have spent the last four weeks in the waiting time of Advent. Children (and many adults) are anticipating what might be under the tree tomorrow.

I confess to looking forward myself: to singing Joy to the World tonight with a couple hundred candle-bearing neighbors. And while I have already had some pretty good chocolate today, I anticipate more and better chocolate tomorrow. And I have to wonder just what's in that large oddly-shaped package the Senate placed beneath the tree this morning. I look forward to the family Christmas Eve meal of chicken cutlets with "straw and hay," and tomorrow's dinner of Cuban pork with mojo criollo and black beans and rice.

Anticipation adds a little savor to the good things, just as it adds a little sting to the bad. May all sentient beings have a savory holiday, and anticipate an auspicious New Year.

When instant gratification isn't quick enough

If you've dropped by the NCPR news page in the last couple of days, you may have noticed the new way we are handling audio--providing an embedded "zipper" to play our news features. Greater geeks than I maintain that the online audience has, on average, the patience of a piranha and the attention span of a Labrador pup. While I am not one inclined to compare the ncpr.org audience to any kind of animal, I take from this that quicker and easier is better. In the past, our audio links launched an outside player, which took time to load, then more time to get started. By then, many of you were three websites down the road, shopping for Etruscan nose flutes on eBay, twittering about Facebook, or whatever it is you do when not camped out on our website.

Now you can get to the story much quicker, and much easier. Which part of "right now" don't we understand? No part. Please let us know how this works for you, and anything else we can do to make gangway for your power surfing experience.

The public cheese

While the personal security of leaders has been a concern at least since the days when Julius Caesar went to visit the Roman Senate for a little high-level arm-twisting, today's presidential security regime has grown up over a century and a half, well-watered by violent disasters. That makes the recent crashing of a White House state dinner by uninvited "performance artists" an almost unbelievable lapse on the part of White House staff and the Secret Service. No doubt, there will be pink slips in a number of Christmas stockings.
But the White House has a much more open, if equally disastrous, history. Jefferson was gifted with a mammoth wheel of cheese (1200-1600 pounds), that stood as public provender for two years until replaced by an equally mammoth, but less smelly, loaf of bread. 15 years after being burned down by uninvited British guests, the White House was ransacked by a crowd of 20,000 who followed Andy Jackson home from his inauguration. In order to recapture the people's house, his aides dragged washtubs full of whiskey screwdriver out onto the grounds. Not having learned his lesson, Jackson also favored the monster cheese--with 1400 pounds being consumed by the public in two hours at one party. Lincoln bemoaned the number of job seekers hanging around outside the office while he was trying to work. Still, the White House remained open to the general public up until 1885, open to public holiday receptions until the 1930s, and open to casual guided tourism up until 9/11.
Having wandered DC as a tourist, food is now very hard to come by in the government parts of town. I've been tempted to drop by the White House for a little gnosh myself.

Observing the holiday

All of our major secular holidays seem to involve giving thanks in one way or another: for our founding generation, for the service of veterans, for those sacrificed in war, for leaders, both political and moral. The same is true for religious holidays, when Christians give thanks for the life of Jesus, or Passover, when Jews are grateful for the sparing and liberation of the tribes of Israel. Even the so-called minor holidays: when we give thanks in February for our sweetie-pies, or for moms in May and dads in June, or when we give thanks in April for the planet that sustains us. We may not be as grateful as if we had the day off, but are grateful, nonetheless.


Thanksgiving is a different kind of holiday in this sense: It has no specific honoree. It celebrates a quality of mind, gratitude, without respect to subject. It may be unique among national holidays everywhere for that reason. It did not begin that way. The first national day of Thanksgiving was an expression of gratitude for the passing of the ruinous turmoil of the Civil War. But as that trauma passed from the memories of the living, the holiday remained, leaving each succeeding generation to identify its own reasons for giving thanks.

The success of Thanksgiving suggests that we might consider national celebrations of other virtues: compassion, modesty, moderation, generosity, diligence, mercy, or selflessness, to give a few examples. A national day of diligence, alas, would not be one you could take off from work.