I lived next door to Murray Bookchin on the third floor of the Vermont House in downtown Burlington in 1997.

Odum writes up a very good synopsis of Bookchin’s influence…

Love him, hate him, or (sadly) don’t know him, it is impossible to dispute that Bookchin was one of the few truly original thinkers of the last century. Having grown to political maturity in the trenches of class conflict in the early 20th Century, Bookchin became rightfully disenchanted with the authoritarian Statism of the radical left and came to embrace the left-libertarianism associated with Social Anarchism (although he became concerned in his later years with the viabiity of the term “anarchism,” co-opted as it had become by seeming ethic-less, slash-and-burn activism). Bookchin’s utopian vision was far more appealing than the frighteningly authoritarian vision of the Marxists, but as communism and socialism occupied places on the active political spectrum, alternative communitarian visions that were based on true individual freedom and diversity (and were rightfully as leery of unchecked governmental power as they were of corporate power) fell by the academic and cultural wayside, much to the diminishment of political theory and discussion. There is no question that, in my opinion, Bookchin should be a far more recognizable name than the likes of the largely discredited Marx and Engels.

While I was aware of how influential Bookchin’s philosophy was, sadly, I never got to have any conversation with him, though I’m sure it would have been fascinating.

But, the vibe he generated in the halls of the Vermont House was that of a deeply disappointed misanthrope, so conversation was not really an option.

Then again, the Vermont House was by far the most unfriendly place I’ve ever lived.

So, I suppose I don’t hold it against Bookchin…

Or Peter Welch who had an apartment there at the same time (oops, did I say that out loud?) and was not the most gregarious person, either…

I just wish the beautiful views of Lake Champlain at sunset, that seemed to occur almost every night there, would have provided the other tenants with the same delirious intoxication it did for me.

Remember, some civil servants are just like your loved ones…

Don’t Worry About the Government

I see the clouds that move across the sky
I see the wind that moves the clouds away
It moves the clouds over by the building
I pick the building that I want to live in

I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods
I see the pinecones that fall by the highway
That’s the highway that goes to the building
I pick the building that I want to live in

It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax alone with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building,
take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

Don’t you worry ’bout me
I wouldn’t worry about me

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I’m a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

I wouldn’t worry about me
Don’t you worry ’bout me

- From Talking Heads: 77

My old pal, Andy Cotton, just sent me a link to listen to the album he just finished called “dutch.”

The first track is named after the incredibly influential and groundbreaking rap fusion band that, along with three others, Andy and I formed in the early 90s in Burlington…

Click the image below to listen to the Fela-esque sounds of the song “Rina Bijou” and six other tracks…

A google search of “Rina Bijou” can get you to some info (which at one time revealed the fun fact that it had become the brand name of some Asian junk jewelry. Interesting how ideas circle the globe, eh?).

I found an old interview with Andy from the now defunct Good Citizen magazine done by Max Owre, who along with T.J. Stacy, Oliver Carling, and me, made up the colossus that was Rina Bijou.

I particulaly like the sound of this quote from one-time Windham Hill recording artist Sean Harkness, though…

Zero Gravity and Rina Bijou would regularly jam with members of Phish and the Aquarium Rescue Unit (whose members are now with Phil Lesh and the Allmans, etc..).

Wasn’t quite as exciting as that would indicate, but, hey… I appreciate the hyperbole.

And read here to learn that Oliver once won the Sunday puzzle on NPR.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out Fela and… um… ah… Jethro Tull?

Seriously. (via The Editors)

Notre Dame - Paris, France - March 2006

Maybe it’s a bit pathetic, but I’m really fascinated by the way ideas or names (OK, references to me that I see from Site Meter stats) travel through the Web.

Like, this entry from the “In the News” section on the Media Matters Press/Bloggers page…

July 22, 2006

• Left in the West: A Couple Late Night Musings
• What’s the point?: Netritus: Jamison Foser Edition
• Atrios: Wanker of the Day
• The Carpetbagger: Fox News never gives up

Not bad company, but how did “What’s the Point?” find its way there?

How did the person who compiles that page come across that entry?

Technorati, probably…

But still, it’s really strange to me, in a way (and not just from the self-indulgence angle).

My cousin, Marc, got a really nice how-to piece on traveling with a family published in the online edition of Newsday recently.

He writes…

Several years ago my children and I ventured off an our first of many long-distance adventures across the country. Madeline, who loved Laura Ingalls Wilder and had read all of her books, was eight and Benjamin was five. We decided to visit Wilder’s home in Mansfield, MO, where she wrote her well-known series, and stop at Daniel Boone’s Missouri homestead for Ben. The entire trip took 10 days and covered nearly 2,500 miles. It wasn’t without challenges, but we enjoyed the experience enough to plan others. In fact, I highly recommend tying a trip to a literary or historical theme. This makes both richer in unimaginable ways. Early one morning we unexpectedly visited Wilder’s gravesite and placed a gift of a stone on the morning dew there. It was a connection my daughter will never forget.

I really couldn’t decide what to write about…

Should I highlight the delicious news that John McCain’s much-anticipated, much-desired (by some) appearance in Vermont - a robo-stop stump speech for Martha Rainville - had been dashed by inclement weather?

Or, the bizarre fact that one of the medical centers in Montreal is known by its acronym, C.H.U.M. (the Centre Hopital de l’Université de Montréal)?

I mean… Chum?!

I was in Montreal this weekend, and passed by a CHUM entrance sign on St. Denis, with its kinda cool, hip logo…

And I thought, c’mon, of all things you might choose to call a medical facility, I don’t think chum is the one I would have gone with!

And, hey… Montreal is a bilingual city, whether it wants to admit it or not… So language can’t fully explain this perverse, dark, macabre gallows humor, can it?

What, did they mean chum as in pal?

Please.

But, then I thought, John McCain is kinda like chum for the supposed “centrist” voter.

So, maybe I could combine the two things that inspired me this weekend…

You know, McCain as chum for the ones who thinks criticizing the President is ~just not appropriate during wartime,~ despite the fact that they disagree with virtually every decision he’s made…

You know, the Lieberman Democrats…

And the part of Barack Obama that makes some of us cringe, sometimes…

The ones who think The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Chris Mathews are above reproach…

The “swing” voters who actually voted for Bush in 2004, despite the fact that they disagreed with virtually every decision he made…

The ones who think the media-generated middle American worldview must be accepted, not re-shaped, regardless of what they themselves believe…

They eat the McCain chum with gusto.

And they voted for Douglas in 2004, too…

So how could I ignore the missed visit after hearing that Rich Tarrant was trying to muscle his way into the McCain appearance?

(Cuz, no matter what the personal tiff was between two political operatives, that’s what was going on here, I think. It’s just that McCain’s official staff would have handled it more graciously than did the hired hand.)

After all that - and after all the hope the Rainville camp must have had for the glow of McCain to reflect on Ms. Martha - the tempetuous weather (and the lame Rutland airport) conspired to thwart all their best intentions…

It may not be nice, but it was hard not to gloat just a little.

And, who knows, this may mean a trip by McCain in late October, when Martha Rainville might actually be able to benefit from it.

So CHUM or chum? Who could choose?

Who could choose between sick doctor humor and taking just a bit of time to shine a little light on what must feel like a tragic turn of events to those who so desperately wanted a piece of the McCain magic.

Not me.

But, remember, come late October, McCain may just end up being the chum that keeps on giving.

[Crossposted at Green Mountain Daily]

Just, do yourself a favor…

Read this latest Media Matters weekly column by Jamison Foser, and re-read it once a month until November 2008.

And make sure everyone you know reads it too. So they can understand exactly how the “liberal” Washington Post and New York Times were, in many ways, central to the defeat of Al Gore.

And why confronting the brutal facts about our current national discourse is absolutely crucial.

Some people like to mock Bob Somerby for constantly harping on the treatment of Gore. But, that’s only because it is so easy to forget… Fading into the past, it seems harder and harder to believe.

Thankfully Foser provides excellent context for the recent misquoting of Hillary Clinton, and ties it into the important efforts of Bob Somerby.

He writes, in part…

So, in 2004, Ifill brought up Mary Cheney; Edwards responded by speaking very favorably of the Cheney family’s relationship and of the vice president’s comments about it. In 2006, Ifill misstated her own role in the exchange, falsely claiming that she hadn’t brought up the topic and that Edwards’s comments were “apropos of nothing.”

Once upon a time, Ifill obviously knew that wasn’t true. That’s how powerful these anti-Democrat, anti-progressive media narratives that have dominated public discourse for years are: Ifill told a tale that conformed to the storyline that Edwards and Sen. John Kerry somehow did something wrong in speaking of Mary Cheney — even though doing so required her to speak falsely about her own role in the matter!

When will it end? Alterman noted that the immediate online reaction to The New York Times‘ false Clinton story this week hastened a correction — a good sign, indeed.

But it’s worth remembering that when the Gore-Love Canal saga played out in 1999, there was contemporaneous online refutation of the bogus story. Throughout the mess, Somerby did the hard work, every day, of explaining in great detail and in real time how the media were getting it wrong — and yet the damage was done anyway.

Regular readers know where we’re going with this: It isn’t enough for Somerby and Alterman and Media Matters and Eschaton and Americablog and Daily Kos to keep a close eye on the media and insist that they get it right. Every progressive — every person who cares about the truth — has to do so.

Even though Clinton’s office asked for a correction the day the Kornblut story was published, even though bloggers posted the correct transcript the same day, and even though Media Matters posted the audio the next day — despite all that, The New York Times still took more than two days to correct the mistake.

With your help, the next time something like this happens — and it will, sooner rather than later — we can stop the false story more quickly. And speed is important: As the Love Canal incident reminds us, a mistake in The New York Times is one thing; a mistake in The New York Times that the rest of the media spends weeks repeating can change the course of history.

There’s been a very tiny drama circulating in the Vermont blogosphere recently, which began when Cathy Resmer wondered why the new Burlington Free Press blogs don’t link to anything…

She suggested that perhaps there might be a corporate policy against it.

But, to her credit, Terri Hallenbeck responded that, rather than it being a conspiracy, it was because they just weren’t tech savvy enough to figure out how to do it.

And she got a little snarky, too…

But, sure enough, to prove her point, she made a valiant attempt at linking to the offending 802 Online post, but missed it by that much - adding the extra “#comments” to the link, sending people down below Cathy’s post.

I bet she did that on purpose. (Kidding…)

Now, I think it’s hard to believe that every single person at the BFP is unable to figure out that link tool thingy. But, maybe they have some pretty lousy software.

(Figuring out how to use the blockquote tool would be a good idea, too. Since I can never tell if they’re writing something new for the blog, or just excerpting things that appeared somewhere else.)

Maybe the sense that technical difficulty is not the full story comes from the fact that neither the folks at vt.Buzz nor Darren Allen thought the Political BBQ at North Beach was newsworthy, despite the attendence of major state-wide candidates. And despite the fact that most, if not all, of the bloggers involved in the event link to their blogs.

But the further irony here, I think, is that Peter Freyne’s account of the BBQ, though included in the Web version, was dropped from the print version, denying John Odum’s Green Mountain Daily some good exposure.

And there was a little snark fest that erupted recently about Cathy’s characterization of Vermont bloggers’ reaction to the discredited Jason Leopold Rove indictment story.

So, the mainstream, conglomerate media has tensions with the establishment alternative media, which, in turn, has conficts with those wacky citizen pundits…

Seems kind of silly, doesn’t it? (And, of course, I’m not saying I don’t get dragged into it, too…)

So, is there really any substantial tension? Or is this all just hints and allegations?

Perhaps this old adage, often attributed to Napoleon, should always be within sight when writing a new blog post:

“Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.”