May 30, 2003
An enumeration shall be made
The census, conducted every ten years, is so important that it's in the Constitution. The proportion of the House of Representatives allotted to each state is determined by the decennial census, which helps keep the Representatives representative. The nifty genealogical reseach that historic census data makes possible is merely an afterthought, but even so the American census is more pleasant than most censuses, which have historically been used to figure out the tax rolls. The census was known in Biblical times and makes its way into European history thanks to Servius Tullius, one of the last kings of Rome. The Roman practice continued for four hundred years, and the magistrates in charge of the census, the censors, were among the most important officials in pre-imperial Rome. The census enables taxation, taxation enables the state, and the state enables the census (whole bureacuracies spring up to support census-taking), so it's unsurprising that there has long been some opposition to census participation. George Washington noted, during the first American census, that
(more...)...our real numbers will exceed, greatly, the official returns of them; because the religious scruples of some, would not allow them to give their lists; the fears of others that it was intended as the foundation of a tax induced them to conceal or diminished theirs, and thro' the indolence of the people, and the negligence of many of the Officers numbers are omitted.
May 28, 2003
Overcoming the uniqueness of every reality
By definition, I've never heard of any truly successful forgers. The best forgery is one which is never detected. A close second, however, would have to be one which is detected and then celebrated it in its own right. Things don't work out nearly so well for most skilled forgers. Tom Keating, who forged over a thousand paintings, including more than a dozen spurious Samuel Palmer watercolors, was reduced to making videos. John Drew, who forged Giacomettis, is in jail. But the great forger of Vermeers, Han van Meegeren, found himself hailed as a national hero when, on trial for collaborating with the Nazis, he revealed that he had sold Göring a fake (and rather wooden) Christ and the Adultress. After being found out and serving a jail sentence, Elmyr de Hory, one of the twentieth century's most prolific great forgers (Modiglianis, Picassos, and Jackson Pollocks were among almost a thousand fakes he created over his lifetime), became famous in his own right. He was the central character of a biography by Clifford Irving and Orson Welles' F for Fake; today his fakes can command five figure prices. In the age of mechanical reproduction, when it can be impossible for a layman to distinguish a van Gogh from a Wacker or a Schuffenecker, why not just collect the forgery?
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May 22, 2003
God Angry Eye
The pop anthropologist Jared Diamond likes to use Easter Island as an example of how a human society can self-destruct. Over a few hundred years, a people that had once been prosperous enough to build the famous stone monoliths, the moai, crashed into extinction. The island was deforested, the societal structures fell apart, and by the time the Europeans arrived in the early eighteenth century, the once fecund island could barely support the Rapanui people; the Rapanui may even have turned to cannabalism. Diamond, in a lecture entitled "Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?", speculates that the Rapanui's religious beliefs -- particularly their continuing desire to build the moai -- prevented them from altering their behavior until it was too late. But no one knows for sure, because we can't read the Easter Islanders' written records.
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May 19, 2003
I gave my love and everything but you're still what you are
June Carter died last Thursday, and it's a great loss. I don't expect that Johnny will last the rest of a year without her. June's death also severs the last direct link to the original Carter Family, the group that basically invented recorded country music. A.P. Carter was a fiddler and traveling salesman with a fondness for the songs of the Appalachian hills; he met and married Sara Dougherty when she was 17, supposedly as she was sitting outside her family's house singing "Engine 143". Sara's cousin Maybelle (who married A.P.'s brother Ezra) joined them as a guitarist, and the Carter Family -- after proving its commercial viability with a few singles recorded in Bristol, Tennessee -- was born. The family was wildly successful before the Depression hit and sent A.P. wandering (collecting songs and looking for work). They recorded for the radio, including for Mexican pirate station XET, but the rest of the family largely stayed in Maces Spring, Virginia. Sara and A.P.'s marriage fell apart, but Maybelle -- whose method of picking on her extravagently expensive $125 Gibson L-5 guitar came to be known as "Carter style" and was the standard bluegrass sound for twenty years -- had decided that she liked show business, and with her daughters, June, Helen and Anita, began recording as Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters.
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May 17, 2003
Run for the border
Last week, the Texas legislature was brought to a halt by the flight of many of its Democratic members. Texan Charles Kuffner has been following the action. The fifty-odd Democrats holed up in Oklahoma, hanging out at a Denny's just over the state border. This is great, farcical political theater, from Oklahoma state officials refusing to assist the Texas Rangers and Texas Department of Public Safety officials drag the "Killer D's" back to Austin (the Texas Constitution gives the Legislature the power to compel attendance, following the lead of Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution) to use of federal law enforcement by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to find the Dems. The walkout -- scheduled to end tonight, after Texas' current legislative session ends -- has the feel of an old-fashioned political donnybrook.
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May 7, 2003
What could encourage you to fight with me?
The oral tradition may not be dead, but it's been buried in an academic journal. Nonetheless, as all-around smart guy Ray Davis noted in an email to me, if you squint right, the answer song looks like the latest -- possibly the last -- in a long line of forms taken by the oral tradition ancestors. Certainly Kool Herc, when he brought breakbeats and toasting to New York's black music scene, wasn't thinking about the praise songs of the West African griot. But I'm hardly the first to think that rap battles bear a significant resemblance to signifying or playing the dozens. But it's not surprising; what else is communication for, if not for talking trash about your enemies, bragging about your sexual prowess, and giving shoutouts to your friends? It probably dates back to Neanderthal days.
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May 1, 2003
Give me your answer do
The answer song is not a parody. Weird Al Yankovic writes those for a living. Some people see parody songs as the best way to spread the Word (that last is via Waxy and Defective Yeti), but mostly they just are or are not amusing the first time you hear them. For a Canadian 7", Billy Childish did a brilliant sendup of the unmistakable Kingsmen recording of "Louie Louie" with the tune he wrote for the Headcoats, "Louis Riel" ("The Metis and the Cree did agree to live on the plains peacefully / At the battle of Batoche, the dream was lost / And with their lives they paid the cost / Louis Riel, oh man, you're gonna hang / Hey-ah, hey-ah"), which would, in a better world, win him some kind of award, but the parody song is, for the most part, fodder for Dr. Demento.
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