text:
Zut, zut, zut, zut.
– Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
Sostène Zanzibar was not feeling himself that day; someone else was. A journalist from an English paper. Name of Phyllidia. Or possibly Petronella. Something along those lines. The interview had gone remarkably well. Such probing questions. Very stimulating, very in-depth. There was no denying that Sienna – or possibly Serena – was thoroughly a young woman. Hang on, cross that out. Was a thorough young woman. Very thorough indeed.
In a bid to impress her host, she had taken up gesticulation with all the fervour of a new convert. It was a joy to behold. Her impeccably-manicured hands would suddenly flutter away from the warmth of her lap, describing graceful ellipses as if trying to conjure up words that could not possibly exist. Ever. In any language. Even French.
When the ink ran out of her biro, Zanzibar produced a pencil from his inside pocket with a little flourish. 'Men,' he said, 'alwez ave two penceuls.' He almost winked, but thought better of it. 'Women,' she said a little later, sitting on his face, wearing nothing but her high-heeled boots, 'always have two pairs of lips.' She almost added Try these on for size, big boy, but thought better of it too.
Allegra – or possibly Anushka – had struggled to fully comprehend the answers to some (if not most) of her questions. The fact that the former usually bore little (if any) relation to the latter did not help. Neither did Zanzibar's scattergun delivery nor his baffling habit of peppering his sentences with arcane references to Heidegger and Blanchot. Whenever he switched to pigeon English, he sounded like Jacques Derrida dubbed by Inspector Clouseau, which proved an even greater source of confusion. Of course, now that she was grinding her crotch against his salient features, that his nose kept popping in and out of her prize orifices, Zanzibar's discourse was largely inaudible anyway. This was as it should be. She wanted to move beyond surface meaning, to experience his words at a more physical – and yet more spiritual – level. That of muffled stubble-mumbles. Warm, moist exhalations. Visceral verbal vibrations. Epic poems licked on to her clitoris, one labial consonant at a time.
Candida – or possibly Chlamydia – tried in vain to decipher the text that was presently being lapped on to her nether regions. She had long removed her horn-rimmed glasses (just before shaking her hair loose), squinting was unbecoming, the letters were upside down, Zanzibar's tonguewriting — famously dismissed as 'chicken-scratch squiggles' by a one-night-stand graphologist – was indeed diabolical and, frankly, the spelling mistakes were doing her head in. It began to dawn on her that, although patently the recipient of this work in progress, she may not be its target audience. In fact, she was now convinced that she was not. Oh no. She was a mouthpiece. A conduit. An instrument. A sounding-board. A relay point. A mediator between the General Reading Public (GRP) and some obscure creative power within Zanzibar that was now being channelled through her. She felt frightfully oracular – a proper little Pythia – and more than a little empowered by the impulses her firm, nubile body was adding in to the mix. These impulses were barely perceptible, but they were definitely there amid all the crosstalk, crackle, static, dribble and thermal noise distorting the transmitted data. She closed her eyes and pictured dozens of snails leaving letter-shaped trails – crinkly slivers of silver – all over her cunt, like so many miniature calligraphers. Now the snails were topsy-turvy, à la bourguignonne, a bubbling mixture of parsley and breadcrumbs oozing from their exposed buttery apertures. Now the snails had morphed into winkles, clustered around her labia minora, in homage to Zanzibar's controversial debut.
Published in late 1986, Je suis la Femme Bigorneau was a succès de scandale which took the literary establishment by storm; a cause célèbre that turned Zanzibar overnight into the enfant terrible of French letters. Like Leos Carax's film Mauvais Sang, also released at the end of that year, it seemed to capture the zeitgeist and polarise opinion along a generational fault line. Louis Pauwels, editor of Le Figaro Magazine, claimed the novella was a perfect illustration of the 'mental AIDS' afflicting the nation's youth. 'Makes Schopenhauer sound positively chipper,' wrote Josyanne Savigneau in her full-page rave review for Le Monde. 'The kind of book that exists on the slippery cusp between pure genius and utter rubbish,' wrote a critic at Le Matin de Paris. 'Bof!' Philippe Sollers is reported to have said, when sounded on the subject, mid-pied de porc farci grillé, at Brasserie Lipp. Zanzibar was all over the gossip columns too. He dated Béatrice Dalle (who had recently starred in Betty Blue), wrote a song for Etienne Daho, appeared in a video with Les Rita Mitsouko (playing the glockenspiel), spent his nights at the ultra chic Bains Douches nightclub and was head butted by Jean d'Ormesson during Apostrophes, the highly influential TV show. His parents – René and Monique – told Actuel that they had always known, deep down, that Sostène was special. 'On sentait bien qu'il allait devenir artiste ou écrivain', said his mum. 'C'était vraiment un chieur', his father concurred. They confided that they had done their level best to make him as miserable as possible throughout his childhood so as to provide him with a lifetime of neuroses that would feed his future creative endeavours. 'N'empêche qu'on a drôlement bien réussi notre coup', said René, beaming with paternal pride: it was the gift that keeps giving. Zanzibar, however, was overwhelmed by his new-found notoriety. Béatrice Dalle soon left him and he started dabbling in too many drugs. Rumour has it that he could drink the likes of Serge Gainsbourg, Antoine Blondin or Alain Pacadis under the table — literally in the latter's case. His next three books were minor bestsellers, and one of them was even turned into a film with Juliette Binoche (La Bonniche, 1991), but Zanzibar was never able to replicate the impact of Bigorneau, which he always likened to his seminal first orgasm (1979). Each new novel resembled an increasingly faded photocopy of the original blueprint, giving rise to what Sam Jordison recently described in The Guardian as 'a sense of perpetual déjà vu on a dimmer switch'. Bref, his work seemed condemned to a gradual, but irreversible, running down; a depletion of vital energy that implied a dismal future of erectile dysfunction, hair loss and growing inertia.
Angela – or possibly Nigella – glanced at the twit beneath her twat. She recalled how her heart had sunk upon entering the spacious study where the interview would take place. The fabled author was standing at the far end of the room admiring a framed photomontage of a lady with a Morphy Richards iron in lieu of a head. His cat – Schrödinger – was rubbing himself against his calves in the most wanton fashion. A rebours, Zanzibar's rampant alopecia made him look like Kojak with a beard growing on the wrong side of his face. To be honest, she would have been hard pressed to say which of these visions was most unsettling. It was as if she had been shown the gates of Paradise only to be denied entrance by some burly bouncer with a gold medallion, a Brummie accent, a bad case of halitosis and a mullet. Covered in dandruff.
The journalist's black Moleskin notebook lay open, face down, on the coffee table. After an hour or so, weighty topics had been dropped in favour of increasingly flirtatious small talk. Zanzibar got up to refill her glass and, instinctively, she got up too and now they were kissing, deep and slow, their tongues going round and round like the ground bass number in the background, and he slowly lifted up her summer frock as the melody soared over the looping bassline, and their bodies were grinding, their tongues intertwining, her head spinning and she found herself reclining – à la bourguignonne – in a Le Corbusier-style chaise longue. 'J'aime quand ça s'incarne', she whispered, drawing him into her buttery aperture with her long legs that he wore over his shoulders in the manner of a sweater casually knotted around a Continental neck. Leaning on her forearms, she tilted her head back, closed her eyes and bit her lip. A slow intake of breath – like a deep drag on a cigarette – subsided into a faint, low-pitched moan, not dissimilar to the sound a puppy makes when kicked.
Suddenly, Zanzibar was all at sea in an endless desert of snow. The ghostly whiteness of her teeth – which he instantly interpreted as Melvillian with Malevichian overtones – sent shivers down his spine, as though the absence it seemed to materialise mirrored his own. Her whole body, he now sensed with each new caress, was designed to frame the void, which, otherwise, would remain invisible – white on white.
His heart was pounding; he was perspiring profusely and his penis had shrivelled up like a salted snail. In order to get his bearings, he endeavoured to recall the journalist's bloody name once and for all. It could have been Gemma. Or even Emma, for all he knew. Unless, of course, it was Linda. Or Belinda – he would not have put it past her, the little minx. Luella rang a bell – as did Annabella. Not to mention Tamsin and Tamara; Imogen and Iphgenia. It was on the tip of his tongue… Got it! Tippi. Ah, Tippi, Tippi, Tippi. Ze tip of ze tongue taking a trip of two steps down ze palate… Or was it Trixie? Calliope? Suki, Sadie – Parthenope?…
When he was toing, her face appeared blank and featureless: totally inscrutable. When he was froing, it seemed to run the emotional gamut from mild surprise to utter boredom in quick succession. There was either too little or too much information to process. Worlds, he felt, were splitting. Splitting all the time.
All you could hear now was a serving spoon squelching its way through a bowl of pasta. Whatsherface had long stopped biting her lip and her body had grown so limp that he began wondering if she was not asleep, in a coma, or even dead. The thought did cross his mind. Then, she started convulsing and screaming as though she were being torn asunder: 'Sostène, where are you? Where are you, Sostène? Reviens! Reviens, Sostène! Sostène, reviens! SOSTEEEENE! SOSTEEEEEEEENE!'
'Thanks,' she said, upon leaving. Zanzibar stared at the outstretched hand last seen clasping his erect penis. 'For having me?' she added by way of explanation, but the high-rising terminal transformed her statement into a question. A final probing question that she left dangling like one of Pat Evans's earrings as she departed with a toss of hair and a rustle of chiffon. She was marching past the cat who, curled up on a beanbag, did not even bother to look up. She was making her way down the transparent spiral staircase that seemed – like her – to be wound around nothing. Zanzibar just stood there, in the doorway, buffeted by the fragrant breeze she had generated. With closed eyes, he breathed in a lungful of her absence and just stood there. He just stood there, caught in her slipstream. Winded, he just stood there. He just stood there. 'Putain!' he muttered and finally closed the door.
Bearing a striking resemblance to Ursula Andress (had she been immortalised by Botticelli), the presidential candidate emerged from the sea to spontaneous cries of 'Vive la République!'. She was naked save for a tricolor sash – 'Un rien m'habille' – that bisected the perkiest pair of Delacrucian tits to have ever stalked Le Touquet Plage. 'Tu vois, là,' said a young father to his son, 'ce sont les deux mammelles de la France.' As he pointed, tears welled up in his grateful eyes. Everything would be all right now. Everything. The crowd parted and Mme Royal glided by. Majestically. Regally. Eponymously… Photographers had a field day, fireworks were let off, babies were brandished, a brass band struck up the national anthem and, just when he was about to get an eyeful, Zanzibar found himself back home in his bathroom. He was standing in front of the mirror, trying to remove his contact lenses, which (as he would discover after plucking out an eyeball) he had forgotten to put in. The eye he was now staring at, and that stared back at him intermittently as he rolled it around in the palm of his hand, resembled a large white egg with a black dot inside – or rather the drawing of a white egg. The black dot alone contained more atoms than all the penceuls in the world.
Zanzibar was seated at one of the little round tables dotting the semicircle of cobbled stones outside the Théâtre de l'Europe. He had opted for the last row, furthest away from the road, with the steps leading up to the theatre right behind him. He was the only one there now, a couple of German tourists having just departed. The sun was shining; birds were chirping in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens: summer was in the air. A waiter – as stylish as he was young – brought over an espresso and a glass of water, which he placed gingerly beside Zanzibar's copy of Le Monde. They had devoted a whole page to 'l'affaire Zanzibar'. It was all over the papers, the blogs, the social networks, the news bulletins — both radio and television, local and national. There was no escaping it, and that was precisely why he was seated at one of the little round tables dotting the semicircle of cobbled stones outside the Théâtre de l'Europe.
A 58 bus turned into Rue de l'Odéon. Zanzibar followed its slow progress past the clothes shop where the original Shakespeare and Company used to stand. It stopped outside the pharmacy at the other end, on the other side, where an attractive woman he vaguely recognised — but could not quite place – alighted and started walking back in his general direction. As she crossed the road, he identified her as a celebrity graphologist who had publicly pooh-poohed his legendary lovemaking technique a few months back. Name of Amélie. Or possibly Emilie. Something along those lines. It was she too, he now realised, who had played the part of the presidential candidate in that strange dream that was still haunting him. Thankfully, she had not noticed Zanzibar and picked a table in the second row, next to an olive tree in a square metal pot. With an uncanny sense of apropos, she ordered a kir royal. No sooner had the waiter scuttled away than she proceeded to hitch up her maxi dress until vast swathes of toned thigh were exposed to the warm rays. She completed this pre-prandial routine by crossing her legs and lowering, visor-style, the designer sunglasses that had been sitting pretty on her head, like a tiara. Zanzibar's beady eyes darted from the rear view of the graphologist to the restaurant facing him on the left, back to the graphologist's signature legs, and on to the Flammarion building facing him on the right. He repeated this circuit many times with meticulous, almost obsessive, care until the person he was waiting for finally emerged from the building.
Théodule Meuniaire was a thirtysomething publishing whizz-kid with rock star good looks, who – it was an open secret – was largely responsible for reviving Zanzibar's flagging career. He lingered for a few minutes outside Flammarion, talking to someone on his mobile, apparently in a foreign language (probably English), then walked over to his car (a grey Porsche) that was parked only a few metres away. He opened the door, removed his jacket and hung it on a hook inside. Before closing the door, he hooted twice in brief succession while looking over at the pavement café. He waved. Zanzibar quickly unfolded his paper and hid behind it. Peering over his crumpled copy of Le Monde, he saw the graphologist lift up her sunglasses with one hand and wave back with the other. A broad smile had now lit up her face. She sprinkled a few coins on the table and skipped across the road to join her date. They kissed like models in a Doisneau picture and walked, hand in hand, to La Méditerranée, the plush restaurant with its blue exterior and Cocteau decorations. Once they had disappeared from view, Zanzibar called the waiter and whispered something in his ear. 'Bien sûr, Monsieur, au-cun problème,' he said. Zanzibar got up and ran over to examine the grey Porsche. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses taunted him from the leather dashboard where they had been conspicuously displayed. With closed eyes, he breathed in a lungful of absence and just stood there. He just stood there, in front of the grey Porsche with the horn-rimmed glasses on the leather dashboard. For a minute or so, he just stood there. He just stood there. 'Putain!' he muttered, before making his way back.
The waiter smiled at him and Zanzibar felt obliged to order another espresso. He checked his emails on his iPhone, then glanced at the latest tweets, most of which revolved around 'l'Affaire'. He ordered yet another smile-induced coffee and started reading again. After a brief recap, the article focused on the prime-time television show, to be broadcast live that very evening, during which a confrontation between Meuniaire and himself was to take place. Whether it would or not was a moot point, not least because the programme consisted of a series of announcements for nominally forthcoming – but, in reality, constantly deferred – features, followed by lengthy commercial breaks, themselves followed by further announcements, and so on until the closing credits. Although quite taken with the concept of a show that was for ever in the process of becoming, Zanzibar had no intention whatsoever of being party to this masquerade. He was equally determined to ensure his rival did not make it to the studio either, and that was – more precisely – why he was seated at one of the little round tables dotting the semicircle of cobbled stones outside the Théâtre de l'Europe.
He looked up, squinting into the sun as the waiter returned, just in time to see Meuniaire and the graphologist glide past in the grey Porsche with the horn-rimmed glasses on the leather dashboard.
In 1992, having finally acknowledged that there was little lead in his penceul left, Sostène Zanzibar embarked on an ill-fated prequel to Genesis. Although this grandiose project would occupy him for the best part of two decades, we have precious little to show for it. A few meagre excerpts appeared at irregular intervals in obscure style magazines whose prohibitive cover prices were inversely proportional to their confidential circulations. The rest of this 'work in regress,' as he liked to describe it, was destroyed. One night, in November 2008, the author deleted the computer files containing the typescript and burned all the print-outs he had archived over the years. According to legend, he then took a taxi to Denfert-Rochereau, uncovered a manhole and disappeared down the catacombs where he spent the following fortnight listening to the same album over and over again on a battered old ghetto blaster believed to have once belonged to Don Letts.
Franco-Swiss all-girl band Les Péronelles (think Shangri-Las meet Slits) always maintained that they had rounded off their first (and last) album (Trois fois rien, 1983) with a hidden track. 'L'Arlésienne' was so well hidden, however, that no one had ever found it. With time, it became the Holy Grail of Franco-Swiss rock criticism. An early issue of Les Inrockuptibles contained a six-page feature ('A l'écoute de l'inouï') devoted to this unheard melody. It included interviews with the producer and sound engineer as well as cultural luminaries such as Gérard Genette, Jean Baudrillard, John Cage and assorted roadies.
Listening to this ten-minute stretch of silence over and over again was a Zen-like experience at first. Soon, though, Zanzibar was able to recognise, and even anticipate, every hum, hiss and crackle on the track: its teeny tiny tinny tinnitus quality. The song had to be concealed behind, or perhaps even within, this silence that was not quite silence. It had to. He even thought he could sense its presence in the same, almost physical, way one is always aware of being observed. It was just out of earshot; a mere whisper away.
By the middle of the second week, a melody had emerged from the static and wormed itself into his eardrums. It was the sound of music leaking from a commuter's headphones on public transport. It was the sound of a distant party carried on the wind of time, ebbing and flowing. It was the sound of mythical monsters plumbing the murky depths of ancient oceans. It was the sound of half a dozen rashers sizzling away like nobody's business in a big fuck-off frying pan. Above all, it was the sound of a wannabe troglodyte slowly going out of his mind.
By the end of the second week, the melody had disappeared. It had never been there in the first place; not really. Zanzibar, now at his wit's end, had a rare eureka moment. The ghost track was not concealed behind, or even within, the silence — it was that silence itself. He had been listening to it all along, or rather he had not: all along, he had been listening into it for something else. There was, however, nothing else: no behind or within; no depth or beyond. Zanzibar had finally acceded to a heightened sense of hearing. He was now firmly convinced that this recording of real silence – silence that was not quite silence – constituted, en soi, some kind of irreducible message. Communication stripped back to its bare essentials; atomised – degré zéro.
The author's discovery could not but chime with his long-standing interest in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Whenever he wrestled with the blank page and the blank page won, Zanzibar would shrug it off as being of little import since it meant, ipso facto, that another version of himself was scribbling away in some parallel universe. Although this explanation was offered in jest, the author started thinking of his alter ego – hard at work on the Great Novel (GN) he was not working on – with increasing regularity. Some would say that these thoughts even blossomed into a beautiful, full-blown obsession.
In the early days, Zanzibar had tried his hand at creatio ex nihilo. Did not work. He then had a go at recreating the world within a whopping great Gesammtkuntswerk. This proved equally unfruitful. The words he used to conjure things up simply recorded their absence, instead of preserving them for all eternity: Evanescence, ou la naissance d'Eva (1992) expressed nothing but itself – if that. Writing something, as opposed to writing about something, seemed to be the way forward – or rather backward, as it implied rediscovering some prelapsarian language that merged with the reality of things. Chemin faisant, as he strived to bridge the gap between signifier and signified, Zanzibar also hoped to recapture some of that old magic which had inspired Bigorneau back in the day: a soupçon of oomph; un peu de welly. In the event, he did neither. Every single volume he ever published had thus been an approximate translation – and ultimately a failed instantiation – of the ideal book in his head. Were his novels, then, simply intimations or imitations of his other self's works: dim echoes, pale copies? Were they inferior versions of the masterpieces his doppelgänger could come up with given half the chance? Zanzibar thought long and hard about all this, finally electing to stop writing in order to let his more talented likeness – whom he pictured as slightly better-endowed and -looking than himself – get on with it.
Flammarion ruthlessly exploited Zanzibar's disappearance by encouraging the hypothesis of a suicide. Meuniaire claimed on television that this, après tout, would only be in keeping with his 'fundamentally nihilistic outlook.' Arthur Cravan and Jacques Rigaut were frequently invoked by literary journalists in support of this argument. As a result, Zanzibar's back catalogue flew off the shelves, with Bigorneau topping the bestseller lists once again. Of course, the second stage of this cunning marketing strategy – i.e. cashing in on Zanzibar's miraculous reappearance by bringing out a new book asap – was jeopardised by the author's decision to down penceuls. Meuniaire was promptly dispatched to resolve this delicate problem. As expected, Zanzibar adopted a hardline position ('C'est une question de principe, un point c'est tout!') but proved far more amenable as soon as Flammarion threatened to sue his sorry ass. A compromise was finally thrashed out between the two parties, down at Les Deux Magots, where many a bottle of Perrier-Jouët was downed almost cul sec. Zanzibar, who had always tried and failed to convey the inadequacy of words with words, came up with the concept of a novel printed with disappearing ink. Once read, each word would vanish for ever, the full text living on in people's minds – retold, reinterpreted, reinvented… 'There's no such thing as original fiction,' he said, a little worse for wear, 'Novels can't be set in stone.' He climbed on the table and began chanting, 'Li-bé-rez le texte! Li-bé-rez le texte!' After a few phone calls, Meuniaire put a damper on proceedings: the project was too complex to pull off from a technical point of view, and would be far too expensive anyway. So it was back to the drawing board: 'Une autre bouteille, s'il vous plaît!' They finally decided that Zanzibar would write an entire novel in longhand, using disappearing ink, and that Flammarion would publish a facsimile of the manuscript — blank page after blank page: 'Garçon, une autre bouteille!' What better way to say something without saying it? 'Allez hop, on fête ça, une autre bouteille!' What better way to express the idea that the writer has nothing to express? 'Vous nous remettrez la même chose.' In between hiccups, Zanzibar explained that his blank book would bear no relation whatsoever to any of the blank books that had ever been published in the past. It would not be a gimmick, a joke, a provocation, a protest or even an artistic gesture – although there would be an element of all those things. His 'post-literary' blank pages would not be identical to your 'non- or pre-literary' common-or-garden, run-of-the-mill blank pages of the bog-standard variety: they would somehow retain traces of the novel that had once graced them. He then spoke confusedly of palimpsests and the tradition of erasure in contemporary poetry; the word biffure was used thrice. When he started claiming that the absent text would be a kind of manifestation, en creux, of the Great Novel (GN) his other self was composing in a parallel universe, Meuniaire decided to call it a day. It was probably that night, as he was walking home to clear his head that he resolved to publish Le Roman invisible under his own name. Two grown men – intellectuals! French ones, at that! – claiming rights to a blank book was bound to make the front pages. It also made Meuniaire shitloads of money as Le Roman invisible became the must-have accessory of that rentrée littéraire. Suddenly, it was incontournable and, paradoxically, everywhere to be seen. The fact that it doubled up as a handy memo pad turned it into a top seller in the run-up to Christmas too. With the royalties, Meuniaire treated himself to a luxury yacht worthy of a Russian oligarch. He called it Authorship (en anglais dans le texte).
A laundry van stopped outside the Michelet Odéon hotel. The words Maison Binger were painted on the side in quaint curlicue letters. A young man in a crisp beige uniform jumped out, leaving the door wide open. Zanzibar made a wild dash for it. The keys were in the ignition; the driver was talking to a pretty receptionist: the race was on.
The van picked up speed, crushing the asphalt beneath its burning wheels, like a shirt-collar under a Morphy Richards. Meuniaire's grey Porsche was still only a dot in the distance, but it was growing bigger by the second. It contained more atoms than all the penceuls in the world. Soon, those atoms would be spilled all over the leather dashboard and horn-rimmed glasses like chicken-scratch squiggles. Zanzibar was already living in the future. He could see it all, now, with blinding clarity. The shattered glass. The chromium twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings. The gory action painting on the tarmac. The charred corpses in their chariot of fire. He was hunched over the steering wheel, headbutting the windshield, laughing manically, whooping and hollering, with the wind in his combover and imaginary music blaring away in his ears. Four cars now separated him from his prey. He was closing in.
Just as he was about to go for the kill, the grey Porsche lurched into the outside lane. A sudden but steady – and, indeed, uninterrupted – flow of traffic prevented Zanzibar from giving chase. This being Paris, no one saw fit to let him go: steaming ahead was a woman's prerogative and a man's virility test. To make matters worse, the cars in his lane had now ground to a halt in what seemed like the mother of all tailbacks. Those on the left-hand side, however, continued to race past as if taking part in a dry run for Le Mans. Watching them whizz by made him a little drowsy after a while. Feeling his eyes glaze over, he stretched, and noticed two large white eggs with black dots inside. The eyes belonged to the Michelin Man who was towering above him benignly from a billboard. Zanzibar fell asleep and was transported back to the tiny village in Bourgogne where he spent his summer holidays as a child. His grandparents' house with the dark-green shutters and, across the road, the plot of land where his grandfather grew tomatoes and carrots and beans. Halfway up the hill, there was a water pump that looked like an obscene squat robot with a chunky, phallic-looking spout. It said POMPES LEMAIRE and TOURNEZ LENTEMENT (although there was no water in it) and it was green, but a lighter shade than the shutters. On the same side, further up, when you had almost reached the top, there was a little convenience store – the only one for miles. People used to go there to give and receive telephone calls. At the other end of the village, there was a big barn, and on the door of this barn there was an advertisement with the Michelin Man. It was already old and faded by the early 70s. Going back there, he thought, now waking up and rubbing his eyes, would be a little like visiting the setting of his past following the detonation of a neutron bomb. Zanzibar looked up at the billboard again, and it was at this juncture that he realised that there was no driver in the car in front. And none in the one in front of that. And so on. All along, he had been stuck behind a line of fucking parked cars.
Night was beginning to fall. He wondered how long it would take to drive back to the past, and if the Michelin Man would still be waiting for him there.


text:
James Kiona stands on a rocky ledge overlooking Lyle Falls where the water froths and rushes through steep canyon walls just before merging with the Columbia River. His silvery ponytail flutters in the wind, and a string of eagle claws adorns his neck.
Kiona has fished for Chinook salmon for decades on his family's scaffold at the edge of the falls, using a dip net suspended from a 33-foot pole — like his father did before him, and his son will after.
"Fishing is an art and a spiritual practice," says Kiona, a Yakama Nation elder. "You feel exhilaration in your body when you dip that net in the water and feel the fish. Then, you're fighting the fish. The fish is fighting you, tearing holes in the net, jerking you off the scaffold."
He finds strength, sanctity, even salvation in that struggle. The river saved Kiona when he returned from the war in Vietnam. As he battled addiction, depression and trauma, the river gave him therapy no hospital could.
When he lies on the rocks by the rushing river and closes his eyes, he hears the songs and the voices of his ancestors. The water, he says, holds the history of the land and his people.
"It heals you."
From its headwaters in British Columbia where the Rocky Mountains crest, the Columbia River flows south into Washington state and then westward and into the Pacific Ocean at its mouth near Astoria, Oregon. Just below the confluence with the Snake River, the Columbia's largest tributary, the river turns through the Cascade Mountain Range, carving out the Columbia River Gorge.
It's a spectacular canyon, 80 miles long and up to 4,000 feet deep, with cliffs, ridges, streams and waterfalls. The landscape and colors change dramatically from the brown hills, shrubs and sagebrush at lower elevations to the lush greens of ponderosa pines, fir and larch trees higher up. Eagles and ospreys nest all along the river.
For thousands of years, Native tribes in this area have relied on Nch'i-Wána, or "the great river," for its salmon and steelhead trout, and its surrounding areas for the fields bearing edible roots, medicinal herbs and berry bushes as well as the deer and elk whose meat and hides are used for food and ritual. That reliance transcends the material realm into the spiritual, as the acts of gathering, consuming and respecting those foods are inextricably linked to the tribes' religious practice.
Yet the river is under threat. Warming waters linked to climate change endanger the salmon, which need cooler temperatures to survive. Hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and its tributaries have curtailed the river's flow, further imperiling salmon's migration from the Pacific upstream to their freshwater spawning grounds. Industrial pollution are also threats; testing by the Columbia Riverkeeper, a nonprofit that aims to protect water quality, shows that fish caught in the area are contaminated with flame retardants; polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs; and heavy metals.
Pollution and climate change are not only threatening the health of the river and its habitat, but also the millennia-old spiritual traditions that hold Native communities together.
"We are the salmon people or river people," says Aja DeCoteau, executive director of the Portland-based Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which represents the interests of the four Columbia River treaty tribes — Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Nez Perce — in policy, advocacy and management of the basin. "Without water there are no fish, plants or herbs."
Each year the tribes honor the salmon, roots, berries, deer and elk — which they believe were originally placed in the land for their sustenance — with what are known as "first food ceremonies." When children catch fish, dig roots or pick berries for the first time, they are stood up before their elders in the longhouse and recognized as food gatherers.
Elders speak of how streams flow from the mountains sanctified by the prayers of ancestors who went there to commune with the spirits. These rivulets then flow down and merge with the Columbia. If Nch'i-Wána is the main artery of the land, those streams are like the veins that feed it. So even the smallest creek is vital and sacred.
At communal meals, tribe members typically begin and end with water — "You take a drink of water to purify yourself before you eat and you end the meal with water to show respect for what you've eaten," DeCouteau says.
Tribes also use the river's water and rocks for rituals such as sweat lodge purification ceremonies, held in low, dome-shaped structures where river rocks are heated along with herbal medicine.
"After you sweat and pray, there is also the practice of jumping in the river to cleanse yourself," DeCouteau says. "It's hard to continue practicing these rituals when the river is so contaminated."
Whether the day is 100 degrees or nine below zero, Terrie Brigham takes her fishing boat out every day before the crack of dawn. Her family, members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, owns Brigham Fish Market in Cascade Locks, a bucolic riverbank town of some 1,500 residents about an hour's drive east of Portland. Her grandfather erected the family's scaffolds in the 1950s.
On a cold June morning, Brigham watches proudly at the scaffolds as her 23-year-old nephew, Brigham Campbell, fights a large Chinook salmon thrashing about in his dip net. He secures the fish and holds it up with smile, and she lets out a loud whoop and captures the moment on her cellphone.
Fishing has been the family's life and livelihood for generations, but it's also a big part of her spiritual identity. Brigham speaks of her scaffold as if it were a temple, and her boat an altar.
"To me, the river is sacred. The water is sacred. The fish are sacred."
Each year when Brigham catches the first fish of the season, she utters, "Thank you, Creator." Then she puts a rope around its mouth so it can be used in the longhouse as part of the ceremony to welcome the fish back, known as the First Salmon Feast.
That first fish is always shared with others in the community, even if each person might get just a single bite.
Bill Yallup Jr. was 6 when Celilo Falls "drowned," as he puts it.
Known as Wyam to Native people, the thundering cascade was a sacred place where for 15,000 years Indigenous tribes netted salmon as the fish jumped upstream. It was also their economic nerve center, with the salmon trading for all manner of goods from feathers to copper to wampum, beads crafted from shells.
Yallup's family came to Celilo Falls from Toppenish, Washington, when he was an infant.
"My mom cooked with water from the river," he says. "You could hear those falls for miles. It was sacred sound."
The falls fell silent in 1957 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected The Dalles Dam, flooding the area and creating the Celilo Lake reservoir. His father brought him to Lyle, Washington, when he was 17. He learned to fish there.
As a young man, Yallup dreamed of a career in Hollywood as a writer and actor. He played a tribal elder in the show "Northern Exposure," a 1990s CBS comedy-drama series about quirky residents of a fictional small town in Alaska that ran for five seasons.
But, the mighty river has an unfathomable pull, and it drew him back. It reminds him of who he really is, Yallup says: "I'm a fisherman."
In his deep baritone, he enjoys telling stories of the river that have been handed down over generations.
A tale he has told hundreds of times narrates how Coyote, one of the most important characters in tribal mythology, brought the salmon back to the big river. The fish had left after a legendary battle between Mount Hood and Mount Adams, both portrayed as women in the story, caused the salmon to drain into the ocean. The fish told Coyote they would come back, but only if they were respected.
Young salmon, or smolts, swim down the Columbia to the ocean, where they grow for between one and five years. Then they migrate back upstream to spawn. Some are caught and become a source of sustenance for the people, and others die and become one with the environment. The cycle repeats over and over.
"The sacredness of this river," Yallup says, "lies in the sacrifice the salmon make each time they fulfill their promise to come back."
The Whitefoots are a large family spread across the West Coast. The best-known member of the clan, Patricia "Patsy" Whitefoot, is an advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous women. A member of the Yakama Nation, she often travels along the river meeting family members and attending traditional tribal gatherings.
Her activism is as much a part of her Native identity as her religious practice is.
"If you are Indian, you'll be political all your life," she says.
On a recent afternoon, she visits cousins Debra and Sandy Whitefoot, who live near the Bonneville Dam in an "in-lieu fishing site," lands set aside by Congress to compensate tribes whose villages were inundated by dams.
Many families here live in trailers without restrooms, lights or drains, and Debra, as executive director of the nonprofit Nch'i-Wána Housing, works to provide homes for Native people living along the river.
"My mom saw the world go by at Celilo," she says, wiping away tears. "We have lost so much. We're experiencing intergenerational trauma. My hope is I can make a village or a few villages for my people so we can heal and move forward."
Sandy is smoking freshly caught salmon. She arranges the cleaned and cut-up pieces in trays and places them in a wooden smoking shed by the river. She has a job in a sandwich shop, but this, Sandy says, is "what I do."
The first fish she ever caught was a steelhead off her father's scaffold.
"It was one of the most exciting moments in my life," she says.
Debra's son, Aaron Paul, and his partner, Betty Jean Sutterlict, live by the river as well. When their son, Bennie, finished high school last year, he had his graduation photo taken on the scaffold wearing a vest embroidered with an eagle carrying a salmon. He now attends Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana, and hopes to major in fisheries and wildlife.
Debra is proud of young people like her grandson, who grew up by the river doing homework under a streetlight, and are now going to college to learn about protecting their natural resources.
"They give me hope."
It was worries over the spring salmon's disappearance from the river that inspired Elaine Harvey to get her bachelor's degree in aquatic and fishery science. She is also concerned for species like the Pacific lamprey, which has "been around since the dinosaurs" but today faces possible extinction.
Now a fish biologist for Yakama Fisheries, Harvey says what keeps her up at night is what she calls a "race to harness green energy" that has brought multinational corporations to the Columbia.
"Wind turbines and solar farms are impacting our archeological sites, cultural resource sites, wildlife and fish," she says, pointing to a sacred mountain near the John Day Dam that the Native people call Push-pum. "Our root fields are on that mountain. We could lose access to our food."
The tribes are also focused on preserving areas in tributaries such as the Klickitat and White Salmon, two glacial rivers that provide cold water for migrating salmon.
Harvey hopes to impart this knowledge and sense of stewardship to her children and grandchildren.
"We travel with kids to fishing stations, hunting grounds and root fields," she says. "We give them the experience of camping on our lands."
She connects to the land by sleeping on the ground and cooking on an open fire, just as her ancestors did when they were traveling these lands on horseback and by foot.
Harvey says she will never leave the river because that's what she was taught by her elders.
"We have a real, deep connection to all these places. Our blood line is here."
Harvey's cousin, Bronsco Jim Jr., was appointed mid-Columbia River chief when he was 21 and in that capacity performs longhouse services, first food ceremonies and funerals. He knows many sacred songs, one of which talks about the birth of the first salmon at a spot in the Columbia River.
"God's authoritative word comes down upon (the salmon's) body," Jim says. "He jumps out of the water in a circular movement, and in that one revolution, he was given life."
Sunlight streams into the longhouse during a recent ceremonial meal with elders at historic Celilo Village. Supported by tall wooden beams, the building has at its center the altar, a rectangle of earth that Jim cleanses with water before the service begins.
Jim is wearing shell earrings and a beaded necklace with the pendant of a horse's silhouette honoring his ancestors who rode them. His soft, measured speaking voice rises into song, echoing throughout the room. It has no words but is a deep, visceral, prayerful sound capable of evoking goosebumps or tears.
Tribal members seated around a table bearing the first foods — in order, salmon, roots, berries — join in softly, waving their right hands away from their bodies and then inward toward their chests. The gesture harnesses the light and energy around them and delivers it to their hearts, Jim explains. Tribal beliefs forbid capturing these solemn services in video or photographs because that would freeze the prayers in time and prevent their transmission to the Creator.
In Native families that inhabit the Columbia Basin, education about first foods begins at home and continues in these longhouses, accompanied by teaching and ceremony. Deeply held beliefs also dictate the rules of food gathering.
"You can't just casually go out to gather food," Jim says.
The ceremony for each of the foods is performed at a different time of year depending on when they become available. The salmon are the first to appear in the spring. The roots are ready to be dug in the summer and different berries are picked in the summer and the fall.
Community members are required to wait for that first feast to honor each food before they head out to harvest it. In the longhouse and out in the mountains, the food-gathering is accompanied by song.
"These songs and ceremonies are part of everything we do," Jim says. "We need the river and these foods in our lives."
Losing these irreplaceable foods and their sources could cost them their spiritual identity, he says.
"They feed our body and soul."
—Deepa Bharath, The Associated Press
RELATED: First Nations, governments agree to bring salmon back to Upper Columbia River
RELATED: Commercial fishers and wild salmon advocates cheer large returns to B.C. waters
RELATED: Pacific salmon recovery report gives 32 recommendations to reverse salmon declines

subset: commoncrawl


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Paul Chen's Practical broadswords are all based on authentically styled swords in our collection but they are tailored to meet the needs of re-enactment and stage combat. These very popular and affordable weapons feature authentic hilt styling, with fully tempered un-edged and un-pointed blades. They are designed to withstand rugged use while providing the level of safety required by many of today's re-enactment societies. The blades are crafted from 1065 high-carbon steel, hardened to 50HRC, which restricts edge-notching to acceptable levels while providing resilience and protection against brittleness. While the blades are substantial, they are fullered to provide balance and good handling characteristics. They feature 1/16" wide edges and rounded tips for safety. The tangs are also substantial, with radiused corners at the blade shoulders and no welds. The end of the tang is riveted over the pommel, which both eliminates any possibility of inadvertent disassembly. The hardwood grips are leather-covered. The scabbards are fabricated in glass-filled resin, to eliminate swelling and to minimize blade corrosion problems, with belt rings that adjust to allow vertical or horizontal carry. The wood-grain finish is attractive, but most re-enactors will decorate the scabbard to match their persona. The Practical Viking sword is based on our Godfred sword, whose design originated in 9th century Scandinavia. The lobate pommel and down-turned guard are typical of Viking swords of the period, as is the broad blade with its deep, full-length fullers. The sword is well-balanced and, with a weight slightly over 2 lbs., it is very quick.
Key Features:
- Made for the re-enactor
- Authentic look and feel
- Complies with safety requirements
- Overall Length: 33 1/2″
- Handle Length: 5 3/4″
- Blade Length: 28″
- Weight: 2lb 13oz
- Blade Steel: 1566
- Made in China by Paul Chen / Hanwei.


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Customize your reseller storefront branding
Step 3 of the Basic and Pro Reseller get started series
All Reseller accounts come with pre-built, fully functional storefronts. But, with a little customization, yours can stand out. Choose your favorite color palette and font and use your own logo to strengthen your branding.
Change your mind… or just want to change things up? You can always come back and redesign your look whenever you'd like.
- Select Edit & Publish. This opens a new Branding tab where you can start designing your look.
Note: To customize your storefront outside of the reseller storefront setup wizard, go to Reseller Control Center then Storefront, and then Branding.
- Adjust your color and font to personalize the look of your storefront. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a preview of how your palettes will look together.
- Color Palette: Choose your color scheme from the examples in the drop-down menu. Each palette displays 4 complementary colors. Select colors that are close to your company brand, or just a color scheme that speaks to you.
- Font Palette: Choose a font from the drop-down menu. We offer an easy-to-read, yet diverse selection of fonts to provide a unique look for your Reseller Storefront. (Visitors from certain markets will see a fallback font to ensure character availability.)
- Upload a Desktop Logo, Mobile Logo and/or a Hero image to your storefront. These aren't required, but they're a good idea. Your logo is your company signature – and your status as a reseller for GoDaddy is an important step for your business.
- Compatible file formats: SVG, PNG, JPEG or GIF
- Size limits: 250 KB (Mobile), 500 KB (Desktop), 2 MB (Hero)
- Review the Storefront, and then Branding page for additional image requirements and information.
Note: Don't have a logo yet? No problem – you can leave this blank for now and the logo area will just display your company name. If you need some help, we can work with you to create a logo that matches your preferences, business and style.
- When you're happy with your design, select Save. Close the Branding window to return to the setup wizard.


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Texas executes Mexican killer amid international protests
By Reed Johnson
Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2008
Mexico City — Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican national convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of two Texas girls, was executed Tuesday night in Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a reprieve.
'I'm sorry my actions caused you pain. I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate,' Medellin, 33, told those gathered to watch him die. He was pronounced dead at 9:57 p.m. local time.
Demonstrations had been held in Mexico in anticipation of the execution. The controversy surrounding his execution, as well as concern here over the fate of 50 other Mexican citizens on U.S. death rows, appears likely to continue.
'It is striking the difference of perspective between the United States and many other countries,' said David Fathi, U.S. program director for the group Human Rights Watch, which had opposed the execution.
'I think that [this] illustrates the widening gap.'
Medellin was 18 when he and five fellow gang members raped Elizabeth Pena, 16, and Jennifer Ertman, 14, then beat and strangled them. Medellin later boasted to friends about the deed.
The buildup to Tuesday's execution drew worldwide attention and involved a host of players and institutions beyond the United States and Mexico.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague sided in 2004 with the Mexican government's argument that the United States had violated the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by failing to inform the arrested Mexican nationals of their right to seek help from the Mexican Consulate.
Mexico has asked that all 51 convictions be reviewed, creating the possibility for new trials or outright dismissals. The Hague court had ordered the United States not to execute any of five men on death row in Texas while the court reviewed their cases.
But the court, a branch of the United Nations, has no power to enforce its rulings. A spokesman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, has said that 'the world court has no standing in Texas.'
The Bush administration had intervened in support of the Mexican government, urging Texas prosecutors to reopen the death row cases.
But in March, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the administration's arguments, ruling 6-3 that under the Constitution, the president did not have the 'unilateral authority' to compel state officials to comply with an international treaty.
The issue of capital punishment for Mexicans convicted of crimes in the United States is extremely sensitive here, driven by the perception that Mexicans convicted of capital crimes north of the border are more likely than U.S. citizens to face the death penalty.
Capital punishment was abolished in Mexico in 2005 during the Vicente Fox presidency.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International contend that executing foreign citizens in opposition to the court order could put U.S. citizens abroad at risk of being convicted and even executed for crimes without having access to U.S. consulates or embassies.
In a Monday opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow expressed that same view.
The heated debate in both countries over immigration policy probably has contributed to the controversy surrounding the execution.
'I think because of the politics around immigration more broadly, the fact that Mr. Medellin is Mexican rather than Swedish, does make a difference,' said Fathi, of Human Rights Watch.
'It certainly does play into a bigger debate and bigger fears that many people have about immigration from Mexico.'


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wineserver (1) - Linux Manuals
wineserver: the Wine server
wineserver - the Wine server
wineserver [options]DESCRIPTION
wineserver is a daemon process that provides to Wine roughly the same services that the Windows kernel provides on Windows.wineserver is normally launched automatically when starting wine(1), so you shouldn't have to worry about it. In some cases however, it can be useful to start wineserver explicitly with different options, as explained below.
- -d[n], --debug[=n]
- Set the debug level to n. 0 means no debugging information, 1 is the normal level, and 2 is for extra verbose debugging. If n is not specified, the default is 1. The debug output will be sent to stderr. wine(1) will automatically enable normal level debugging when starting wineserver if the +server option is set in the WINEDEBUG variable.
- -f, --foreground
- Make the server remain in the foreground for easier debugging, for instance when running it under a debugger.
- -h, --help
- Display a help message.
- -k[n], --kill[=n]
- Kill the currently running wineserver, optionally by sending signal n. If no signal is specified, sends a SIGINT first and then a SIGKILL. The instance of wineserver that is killed is selected based on the WINEPREFIX environment variable.
- -p[n], --persistent[=n]
- Specify the wineserver persistence delay, i.e. the amount of time that the server will keep running when all client processes have terminated. This avoids the cost of shutting down and starting again when programs are launched in quick succession. The timeout n is in seconds, the default value is 0 seconds. If n is not specified, the server stays around forever.
- -v, --version
- Display version information and exit.
- -w, --wait
- Wait until the currently running wineserver terminates.
- If set, the content of this variable is taken as the name of the directory where wineserver stores its data (the default is $HOME/.wine). All wine processes using the same wineserver (i.e.: same user) share certain things like registry, shared memory and kernel objects. By setting WINEPREFIX to different values for different Wine processes, it is possible to run a number of truly independent Wine sessions.
- Specifies the path and name of the wineserver binary that will be launched automatically by wine. If not set, wine will try to load /usr/lib/wine/wineserver, and if this doesn't exist it will then look for a file named wineserver in the path and in a few other likely locations.
- ~/.wine
- Directory containing user specific data managed by wine.
- /tmp/.wine-uid
- Directory containing the server Unix socket and the lock file. These files are created in a subdirectory generated from the WINEPREFIX directory device and inode numbers.


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Best Business Books 2003: Corporate Scandals
No Simple Tales of Thievery
Many executives at Enron and other companies that ran aground in the recent wave of corporate scandals were fervent evangelists for the power of markets. It turns out that even their failure has created a market — one for business-scandal books. These have begun arriving in bookstores, and there are a lot of them. Whether the marketplace embraces these books, and whether it justifies the publication of so many, remains to be seen.
But a more interesting question should be asked in the context of the marketplace of ideas: Do these books go beyond simply rehashing the past to teach lessons that readers can put to use in the future? A valuable scandal book would offer a plausible explanation of why the scandal happened. Even now, this is not so easy to do.
Happily, a couple of this year's offerings do have real value, drawing memorable insights from a period in business history that many would prefer to forget.
Speaking broadly, the recent scandal books offer three theories for what went wrong. The simplest (and the one that's been the most widely embraced) might be referred to as Villain Theory: A handful of very bad people willfully perverted the system. Another could be called Wicked Synergy: Larger and more diverse companies were sucked into, and corrupted by, the failures and problems of unsound upstarts in the wider business world. Finally, there is a theory that could be summarized as Deadly Rationality. This suggests that certain individuals, or even entire company cultures, came to behave in ways they believed, by logic or by rationale, would lead to legitimate success — but instead ended in radical failure. This is the most subtle, but also the most useful, theory. Its central lesson is, in a sense, a warning.
Snake Oil
Villain Theory drives Om Malik's Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), a spunky, noisy, and self-righteous book about the collapse of the telecom sector, filled with phrases like "Ponzi scheme," "snake oil salesman," and "partner in slime." The organizing device is the rogues gallery, one chapter per disgraced company or fallen guru, which, if nothing else, makes the book a handy overview — and a test case for the utility of chalking up the scandal era to a handful of consistently bad actors.
To distinguish his story from an earlier clutch of books about the dot-com bubble, Malik tells us that the telecom bubble was much bigger — the biggest "in the history of the modern world." In truth, the two were fundamentally intertwined. Malik, a former writer for Red Herring and now a writer for Business 2.0, points to the "myth," widely circulated in the late 1990s, that Internet traffic was "doubling every 100 days" — a supposed trend that sparked the creation of what is today a massive oversupply of data-transporting "pipes." Of the 105 million miles of optical fiber in the United States installed from 1980 through 2001, more than 80 million miles were built after 1995.
Time and again, the moment of reckoning comes when a firm realizes that demand is slowing and quarterly projections will not be met. Time and again, the problem is solved in the accounting department. Most of the time, Malik seems to believe that the "broadbandits" knew their promise was false but hyped their firms to drive up share prices. Gary Winnick, for instance, signed on as the CEO of Global Crossing not long before it went public in mid-1998. At the time, "demand for bandwidth had grown at breakneck speed," Malik concedes, but would soon show signs of a glut; the firm forged ahead with an 85,000-mile fiber network that is today "largely unused," and filed for bankruptcy protection in early 2002. Winnick had by then sold $735 million worth of stock. Variations of this tale play out in chapters on Qwest, WorldCom, and so on.
Malik's zeal for slamming the bad guys often leads to contradictions that are never resolved. In his section on Enron, he first calls the company "clueless" and then asserts that it was perpetrating a "scam." Which is it? Elsewhere, he quotes the former head of a company that sold out to Qwest, whose own CEO, Joe Nacchio, is one of the book's villains. The seller claims that he knew the bandwidth market would crumble, and that Qwest was on a losing path, so he "knew it was time to get out," Malik says with apparent approval. But who is the "bandit" in this scenario, and who is the rube?
The biggest of the telecom disasters was WorldCom; the most recent estimate for the amount by which it overstated its earnings is $9 billion. That company's collapse is the subject of Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), by Lynne W. Jeter, a business journalist and native Mississippian. Like Malik's book, it is mostly based on previously published information. Jeter makes more of an effort to be evenhanded, ultimately shrugging at the question of what motivated WorldCom's chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan, and how much CEO Bernie Ebbers knew about the situation. Also like Broadbandits, Jeter's book seems to have been written in a great hurry. It often feels padded, and occasionally confused. At one point she tells us that Sullivan is accused of trying to "artificially boost revenues by reducing expenses," which is obviously impossible (she means "boost profits").
Malik seems to have more of a handle on the material, despite his repetitiveness and a weakness for inexplicable exclamation points, which are distracting! But ultimately both of the books teach us little beyond the most basic facts. Villain Theory is too one-dimensional to satisfy.
Merger Fallout
Because these scandals unfolded in the age of "synergy," it was inevitable that the fallout would spread in unexpected directions — touching both the most-discussed merger of the 21st century and the largest financial institution in the world.
Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (Simon & Schuster, 2003), by Washington Post reporter Alec Klein, tells of AOL's now-infamous purchase of Time Warner and the messy aftermath. Klein wrote a series of stories in the Post on AOL's accounting, which is his book's most compelling material. Again, quarterly projections turned out to be overly optimistic, and questionable steps were taken to make the problem go away. To make its numbers — which Klein says were weakening even before the company began its courtship of Time Warner — AOL resorted to such measures as converting the winnings from a lawsuit into advertising revenue and booking esoteric barter deals as though they involved cash.
Klein's focus is tight, making his book mostly of interest to those who are interested in AOL in particular rather than business culture in general, but a couple of broadly applicable points emerge. One is that a lot of the questionable decision making seemed to be rooted deeper in the company, although this doesn't let the executive suite off the hook. It was pressure from the top to make optimistic (and finally unrealistic) stretch goals that led to desperate tactics below. Also, AOL, the 800-pound gorilla of the Internet boom, extracted enormous sums from dot-coms desperate for advertising deals. "The bruising techniques and negotiations left a string of financially hobbled dot-coms that eventually couldn't pay their bills," writes Klein. "Many would soon die." This points to two more valuable lessons in an endlessly interlinked business world. One is that negotiating one's revenue sources out of existence is, in the long term, an extremely bad idea. The second is that it is not enough to look for positive synergies: In the modern economy, it is crucial to understand how quickly a bubble contagion can spread.
Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World … and Then Nearly Lost It All (Simon & Schuster, 2003), a lengthy account of the career of Sandy Weill by Wall Street Journal writer Monica Langley, is largely a tale of the by-the-bootstraps rise of the "pudgy deal maker" to the top of Citigroup. But the book opens with an evening of triumph — someone was anointing Weill "CEO of the year" — besmirched by scandal. Jack Grubman, star telecom analyst for Citigroup unit Salomon Smith Barney, has just spent the day testifying before a Congressional committee that was raising a ruckus about WorldCom, and the highlight reel is dominating the financial news.
Nearly 400 pages later (filled with all the details you could ever want about Weill's deal-by-deal ascension), we come back around to the Grubman disaster. Salomon, Langley writes, was a "closed shop" within the Citigroup empire, and Weill called in powerhouse lawyer Marty Lipton to "find out how we are running our business." Lipton later reports, in a scene Langley recounts, that it's not that bad: "There have been industry excesses in which the firm participated." Another executive questions him: "You're saying Salomon Smith Barney did what the securities industry had been doing for years — that the problems are the product of an industrywide disease?" Lipton nods. Citigroup eventually pitches in $300 million ("only a week's worth of profits") to a global settlement with the New York attorney general's office, which soon announces there will be no charges against Weill, who promptly gets back to work.
Tearing Down the Walls has value as a record of one remarkable business figure, but its message about the scandal era that nearly pulled Weill into its wake is ambivalent. Does it make sense to excuse Salomon's behavior because "industry excesses" were widespread? Langley never quite says, and the reader is left feeling that perhaps Weill just dodged a bullet. Which is presumably not a strategy that the rest of us want to pursue.
Deadly Rationality
Enron had a kind of first-mover advantage in the scandal frenzy, making it the subject of more books than any other company. One of the earliest, Enron: The Rise and Fall (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), by journalist Loren Fox, covers the basics in workmanlike fashion: Enron was a transporter of natural gas that aimed to take advantage of deregulation by reinventing itself as a trader of natural gas. Then it sought to reinvent itself again as a trader of other kinds of energy, and, in the long run, of practically anything you could think of. But a reputation for innovation masked deep and fundamental problems.
Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron (Doubleday, 2003), one of the two truly worthwhile books on the scandal period, is written by Mimi Swartz "with Sherron Watkins." That billing suggests that the story will largely be told through the eyes of Watkins, the Enron auditor who became famous for her memo to CEO Kenneth Lay warning that the company could be dragged down in an accounting scandal. In fact, Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, has a wider narrative to offer, and Watkins pops up only on occasion. (Which is just as well, because the sections about her tend to be dull.)
What Swartz shows is that many of the characteristics that eventually got Enron in trouble were the same ones that led to its early success — namely a penchant for daringly bending the rules. "If the regulators didn't expressly prohibit a transaction, Lay saw it through," she writes. The company's use of "mark to market" accounting, which allowed it to immediately recognize the profits from long-term energy contracts at current-market prices, dated back to the early 1990s. Its use of off-balance-sheet "special purpose entities" (SPEs) went back just about that far, too. These tactics were aggressive, but not illegal — and since they worked out, they also probably seemed clever and bold.
Enron's office culture is described as cutthroat, smug, and ultimately mercenary. As those "special purpose entities" grew increasingly exotic and opaque, they saved Enron's share price — but they also were gradually structured in ways that rewarded CFO Andrew Fastow and his cronies with fantastic payouts for conjuring the magic they seemed to work on the bottom line. Even when Sherron Watkins had her epiphany about the accounting problems in Enron's SPEs, her first thought was neither to alert the authorities nor to save the firm, but rather: "I've got to get out of here."
The other valuable scandal book is The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (Portfolio, 2003), by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind of Fortune. (And here I should disclose my bias, which is that both are former colleagues of mine.) They are forthright in arguing that the Enron story is no simple tale of thievery. They even concede that the company was smart — "in many ways, too smart, as it turned out" — and that its story is partly one of "smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster — and who couldn't admit they were wrong."
Their account is extremely detailed and offers a barrage of specifics on Enron's accounting acrobatics that can be overwhelming at times. But of course the real lessons of Enron are not in the mechanics of the SPEs — you don't have to know much about them to know that whoever concocted them was concerned with something other than giving outsiders a clear picture of the company's numbers.
The book's most compelling broader point has nothing to do with numbers, but rather with bad management. The authors paint Ken Lay as a man who simply refused to confront negative situations. This is a terrible trait in a leader, but it was exacerbated by the management style of Lay's protégé and successor, Jeffrey Skilling: He was a believer in hiring smart people and giving them a huge amount of latitude. This method of managing — or no-managing — is often praised for the creativity it unlocks. But in this case, running unchecked, it unlocked those mercenary tendencies and let them run amok. If your company is made up of ferociously smart and competitive people, that may be good; but if they care about themselves more than the company, you're in trouble.
One other book, Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider (Carroll & Graf, 2002), describes Enron's meltdown from the point of view of a rank-and-file employee, Brian Cruver. Cruver is billed as "an Enron insider," which is both true and misleading (sort of like some balance sheets). The 29-year-old was a new hire in a fledgling division designed to buy and sell "credit risk as a commodity." He had no interaction with Enron's key players and knows no more about their motivations than anyone reading the newspaper might.
Still, his perspective holds some interest because from the moment he arrived, Enron's bets were starting to go bad. He describes walking into the company headquarters in downtown Houston on his first day, in March 2001, and thinking, "This place is badass!" Within months, he writes, he had learned enough about certain Enron practices to "feel sick." Cruver is definitely a Villain Theorist, placing blame squarely at the top. And yet he tells how, as Enron spiraled into bankruptcy, one group tried to make off with proprietary trading data, and adds that he procured a free laptop, racked up overseas calls on his Enron cell phone, and kept quiet when a clerical error kept his paychecks coming for several weeks after he was laid off. "Justification for accepting the payments was easy — 'Enron owes me!'" There is an irony here that Cruver seems unaware of: Precisely this attitude pervaded the company, top to bottom, and probably did a lot to bring it down.
In Power Failure and The Smartest Guys in the Room, Skilling, Lay, and Fastow emerge as human beings rather than as cartoon characters — and this is a strength. Because in the end it's hard to believe that any of these executives went to the trouble of knowingly erecting a Ponzi scheme in the form of a gigantic company. And the alternative — that seemingly right-thinking citizens can end up wreaking great havoc without ever actually believing that they've done wrong — is in some ways more troubling. It calls to mind something that the author John Brooks once wrote about Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1930s, who had an impeccable public reputation until he was caught embezzling. "Whitney did not think of himself as a thief," Brooks wrote in Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938 (John Wiley & Sons, 1999, originally published in 1969). "Rather, he thought of himself as one who would not be a thief no matter what he did; that is, as a moral superman."
It's both amusing and somewhat sad that an insight so useful to understanding the recent past should appear in a book published nearly 35 years ago about events that had taken place 30 to 50 years earlier. But Once in Golconda is still worth reading — and it might have been truly valuable to have read it five years ago before the recent bubble burst. But nobody was pushing books about scandals back then. After all, there wasn't much of a market for them.
Rob Walker (www.robwalker.com) is a freelance journalist, a columnist for Slate, and a contributing writer for Inc. He has worked as an editor for the New York Times Magazine, Money, and American Lawyer.


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VICTORY: Utility Companies Pay the Bill for Their Mistakes
After utilities companies botched repairs at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, California, the plant closed. Unbelievably, the utilities companies demanded that their customers pick up the tab for the repairs—to the tune of $500 million. So California ratepayer John Mattes started a MoveOn Petition to San Diego Mayor Bob Filner and other city officials, asking them to intervene on customers' behalf.


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Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Gentle mistresses and most distinguished gentlemen, we have come upon the release of the DAVE'S PICKS VOLUME 37, from the Fifteenth of April in the year Nineteen Seventy-Eight, at ye olde College Of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Cast your waistcoats and your bonnets aside, the Grateful Dead are on steady gallop from the opening high-kick of "Mississippi Half-Step" into a where are we going? where have we been? "Passenger," followed by full-on versions of "Friend Of The Devil," "El Paso," "Brown-Eyed Women," and a double-barreled "Let It Grow>Deal." Catch your breath and straighten out your tricorne because the 2nd set shows no bounds with delightful takes ("Bertha>Good Lovin'," "One More Saturday Night") and introspection ("Candyman," "Playing In The Band"). Then - great fifes and drums - it's 15 minutes of "Rhythm Devils," with band and crew gathered round to amplify the merriment before delivering a rare incantation of "Not Fade Away>Morning Dew" that sets the soul alight. Pure jollification!
The town crier's addendum:
Three bags full! Lest you feel 4/15/78 beginneth and endeth too quickly, we've selected highlights from Civic Arena, Pittsburgh, PA, 4/18/78 to satisfy your fancy.
Limited to 25,000 numbered copies, DAVE'S PICKS VOLUME 37: WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA 4/15/78 was recorded by Betty Cantor-Jackson and has been mastered to HDCD specs by Jeffrey Norman. It is guaranteed to sell out - often within hours.
*2 per order. Very limited quantity available.
Regarding the posts on…
Regarding the posts on shipping issues for Dave's Picks, I was told my order shipped in January and here we are in March, stll no delivery. Informed overseas orders take longer, however I live in New York state, which last time I checked was still in the United States.
My advice, next time just order from Amazon (yes they sell Dave's Picks) you will have your merchandise in two days.
random comment
GD82 is good.
it's just that
so often
There is almost NO BASS.
Where'd ya go, Phil?
No showbiz
I have to chime in here on a current conversation. One of the things that struck me when I was first seeing the Dead was they were so low key, tuning up between songs, cracking jokes with the audience. No showbiz here, and it was very appealing to this 17 year old at the time.
What blew my 17 year old mind....
....was the fact that they didn't go onstage with a set list in mind. They flew by the seat of their pants. 🤯
What blew my mind at my first show
Was that it was way better than Pink Floyd (saw the trio in 87), and without the massive visual show.
GD not ShowBizzy!
I was once channel-surfing and stopped when I saw; The E Channel True Hollywood Story of Jerry Garcia replete with scandalous voice over. Of course I thought Jerry Garcia Hollywood???!!! The man was the antithesis of Hollywood.
6-17-91 vinyl
Sounds really nice.
On my first listen.
And to think, I got it from Uncle Bezos for less than from Rhino, and free shipping that only took 2 days and had tracking that worked.
If only Rhino valued its customers like Uncle Bezos does.
And let's not forget that WMG let our personal info be stolen.
3/1/69 vinyl?
Just recalled this anniversary just passed, made me recall it's still overdue for vinyl release. Not that it would be released smoothly and equitably. And, yes, foolhardy of me to even bother to ask about another release when there are still several of us who also passed the 4 month mark on no DaP 36, and my order for the glass and shirt and a la carte DaP 37 have yet to finish processing, but I really want that That's It For The Other One on vinyl. I remember downloading it at the library as a college freshman off the then lightning fast T3 connections. Whole show took 45 min to download while I knocked out a couple of papers. And then heard Bill Graham's, "The American version of the Japanese film, Magnificent Seven, the Grateful Dead." Needless to say the next 20 minutes left a smoking crater of my mind before my next class. That Cryptical Reprise is just ripping, and I do not know of one that powerful. There are better Other Ones by far, and better complete TIFTOOs, but I'd love to find a comparable Cryptical ending. And they opened the show with it!
There are those who will point out we need this vinyl like a hole in the head, but trepanning gets a bad rep. I definitely want this on vinyl more than I wanted the last few Dave's Picks and I already own this in the cd box set (thanks again Pierre!), but when they announced the vinyl releases of these I was more pumped because it meant down the line this show would be released on vinyl. So make with the brown vinyl box Dave. Pretty please.
there's a certain band I never connected with...
mostly because they were so...theater.
I always liked the GD being so in the moment. no jumping around, no pyrotechnics, no "ARE YOU READY FOR THIIIIISSS?"
to those singing the Shipping Blues...my sympathies. I hope I never win that Frustration Lottery.
some receive a ship-ment
some receive a shit-ment
Uncle Bezos...lol
back when the Viaduct still operated in Seattle, there was a section of tunnel. At the entrance, someone graffiti'd, "FUCK BEZOS".
What Blew My Mind About the GD
What blew my mind at my first show was how completely and effectively they destroyed my brain with their powerful brand of sonic sorcery, mind = blown, a full cranial Chernobyl. Then little by little after space it somehow magically rebuilt itself.. atom by atom, synapse by synapse starting with a calming and placid standout version of the wheel. Sometime right around dawn it was better, faster, stronger than it had ever been and all was fine with the world.
Or it could have been the acid. Hard to say. Let's call it a tie.
I Don't Know, Maybe It Was the Mushrooms
All I know I could not leave it there. The thing I remember most vividly about my first show was that, to my amazement, somewhere there in the second set, I started dancing, Me, who never danced, anywhere, to anything! And I didn't even realize I was doing it. Just dancing out of pure joy to (I think) a Scar>Fire. This was back before taping was really much of a Thing, so I'd never heard that particular segue before, didn't even know they ever did that.
Mind = blown. Body = dancing.
And then I had this flash of self-consciousness, like, dude, you are a tall geeky white man, and you cannot dance without embarrassing everyone within 100 micrograms, what the fudge do you think you're doing? And then I looked up, and all around, and I saw that EVERYBODY in the theatre was dancing, from front to back, top to bottom. And smiling. Smiling! And I thought, I have seen the Stones, I have seen Zeppelin, I have seen the Who, but I have never seen this. What is it about this band? They're just standing there and playing, how can they do that?
Still trying to figure that out.
We yearn for the beautiful, the unknown, and the mysterious.....
50 years ago today………………
March 5, 1971
Oakland Auditorium Arena
Black Panther Benefit.
Not a lot is known about this show---either how it came about, or what the Dead played that night. I have never seen published full set lists for the show, and I have never heard of (or even heard rumor of) circulating audience or soundboard recordings of this show. According to first hand accounts, "Midnight Hour" and "Lovelight" were played. The rest currently remains shrouded in the fog of time…….
An enigma wrapped in a mystery.
See: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/02/march-5-1971-oakland-auditoriu…
Rock on!!!
The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate
Lost Live Dead
Hey DOC, they say it's was a short show not even an hour long.
ps, also looks like they stuck to cover songs, could have only been five or six songs played.
what blew my mind was the records
Starting with Anthem of the Sun in 1976. I had no idea how they presented themselves on stage, or the fact that they changed the set list every night until the 1980s. When they came to London in March 1981, it never occurred to me to see them more than once - and it amazed me when I heard the live broadcast of the show from Essen Germany in March that year, and realised they played a different set to the one I had seen. Its very different, following the Dead if you don't live in America. The music that turned me on initially was the music they recorded in the 1960s, and had nothing to do with me seeing them live.
Alvarhanso...I agree with every word you said. 3/1/69...I'd rather have that on vinyl and not get the rest of what comes out this year than the other way round.
What Blew My Mind...
I like this game.
What blew my mind at my first show, July 16 1990, was the fact they opened the Second set with Sugar Magnolia, played the entire (awesome) set, they ended it with Sunshine Daydream. Not really having had too many tapes yet back then, I was totally unaware of the ubiquitousness of this sandwich technique which they had clearly pulled off god knows how many times before; however in my relative naiveté, I thought it was just the COOLEST thing ever...like, that whole set was JUST ONE GIANT SUGAR MAGNOLIA JAM!!!
The other thing that totally blew me away was just all of the friggin PEOPLE, all the the Deadheads EVERYWHERE. Like 100,000 of us. By far the biggest gathering I had ever been to in my existence at that point, and the sheer magnitude of the party was a true eye-opener. And everyone was just so god damn HAPPY.
I realized then, The Good Ole GD are Happiness Ambassadors.
The End.
Happy Friday DeadFreaks!
My mind was blown...
...By the LSD, a particularly heavy dose. But I was so focused on the women twirl dancing in the aisles & concourse that the music seemed like a separate event, though happening at the same time. One More Saturday Night, for some strange reason, really jumped out at me. Bobby's vocals can do that sometimes.
Blown mind addendum....
....the way they segued songs too! Prior to the Dead, the only other concerts I attended had been heavy metal or punk shows, so these guys were a complete 180 from anything I had witnessed prior. The music, especially in the second sets, never seemed to stop. Then I discovered Phish in 1993. My segue appreciation learning curve by that point made them easy to slide into.
Covid Vaccination Schedule for Deadheads
First show: Pigpen? You may come to the vaccination clinic any time. The show from 3/18/67 will be playing in the waiting area to help calm those with needle anxiety.
First show: Keith? You may come in beginning in April. The show from 4/25/77 will be playing.
First show: Brent? You are welcome beginning May 1st. You will hear the show from 5/6/81 playing.
First show: Vince? We hope to be able to vaccinate you at your local outdoor amphitheater in June, and 6/14/91 will be playing to soothe you.
Never saw the GD live? You likely have immunity because you contracted Covid while continuing to hear live music this past year, figuring you were young and invincible. Your nerves will eventually relax on their own as you hit middle age.
You saw Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions? We should have seen you in January, except you don't know how this Interweb thing works, so you missed your window. Stay home and hit the bowl to calm your nerves.
Not planning on getting vaccinated? We don't want to see you at any Dead & Co. shows once the rest of us get our shots. :)
My first taste of GD...
In 7th grade, our social studies teacher, Mr. Mariano, had an after-school "Rock & Soul Club," where we took turns playing our records. I already had Jimi's Smash Hits and "Red House" was my number, along with "Along the Watchtower." Someone else's older siblings were into this "Grateful Dead" band, so I borrowed Live/Dead to check them out. I put on "Dark Star" and couldn't understand what came out of the speakers. Basically, a super low volume series of notes that I just couldn't "get." Whatever that was, I recognized that I was not yet ready for it.
Fast forward to a year or so later and my older brother brings home Skull & Roses, then American Beauty and we wore out both spinning them over and over. About that time, I got to my first concert, The Chambers Brothers. My mom drove me, then picked me up afterwards!
A year later, I turn 15 in August, then catch the Dead 9-19-72 at Roosevelt Stadium, a hellhole if there ever was one. The crowd is the biggest I've ever been in. I have a chunk of hash. I am determined not to lose my brother and his friends who gave me a ride. I lose them inadvertently, immediately. The music is loud, the crowd is huge, the band doesn't sound exactly like the Skull & Roses album we had been spinning. No recognizable songs. No recognizable people. And, yet, I had no fear, no trepidation, as the band rocked the crowd of maybe 15,000. Every single thing totally unfamiliar, yet I enjoyed myself. Okay, after 2-3 hours I was a little tuckered out. No food, no water, nothing but a toke or two to keep going. After about 3 hours, I was kinda thinking, "WTF? Great show! Probably about time to wrap it up about now!" After the show I stationed myself by the exit by the entrance where we came in, and succeeded (thank the gods!) in snagging my ride home. You did not want to be 15, lost in Jersey City, NJ, at any time of day or night. Or at any age...
Basically, in a nutshell, I had no idea what I was involved in. Not sure I had tripped yet. That was probably spring '73. I did notice the funny look in a lot of people's eyes, yet everyone was friendly, cool, fun. And I wanted to know more about this weird circus. The ABB played Madison Square Garden in May '73 and I caught one night. So when the GD came back around that June for a double-bill with the ABB at RFK, we were on it like white on rice. Tripped heavily at my second show, 6-9-73 and went up front for China Cat > Rider, guided by a non-tripping friend. Then back to a seat in the stands for the ABB's late show, popped another half tab. Holy crap! A month and a half later, we're up front at Watkins Glen, on Jerry's side, catching the soundcheck while stretched out on our sleeping bags, passing around this, that and some other things. We were snagged, hook, line and sinker.
And here I am, 49 years later, sucking up the vault releases and tellin' stories.
*RE/ Boxset 2021 releases ?!
..I woke up this morning with 'three little birds' on my 'Doorstep'
* https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HNBCVM4KbUM
... they told me, June Boxset this year?! 2021
My brother and sisters I welcome Also it Looks like RSD 2021 #1 in June TWOo and more through out the year to come... 2021 is going to be a grateful year indeed! Nothen left to do but Smile Smile smile!
* this info came from a prankster so reader's beware... peace be with you all on this grateful Friday! I'm knee deep in '1968' the past two days so I'm taking a step forward this afternoon into 1971days & performances starting with the beautiful & soulful sound on 8/7/71 Dicks Picks #35
San Diego, at the 'Convention Hall' which this release includes a plethora of 1971 Bonus Songs/performances of 1971... A "5 star" release in my opinion. Rock On you beautiful people! 🙏❤💀🌹
PS - primo post Hendrixfreak, thanks for sharing as well! :)
*RE/ DOC & 71' Rock'n performances
Grateful post Doc, always a grateful day to read your posts! I'm very happy to know your ok during these trouble d times. Peace be with you doc and keep on truck'n into 1971! Ciao' 💀🌹
Covid vaccine
Luckily, thanks to my beloved, I got round two yesterday.
They didnt play any GD at the place, but I did hear Dowahdiddy. Twice.
DaP 37 USPS Shipping
My DaP 37 was stuck an hour and a half away waiting to be accepted by USPS for a month. I finally contacted USPS customer service through email and two days later it showed up. I am pretty sure it was my email to USPS that finally got ti delivered since it doesn't look like it went to through the normal channels to get it delivered. 7842/25000 found it's way home!
Hope that this may help others to get their DaP37.
ps. I have to say that I did tell them that it was a rare "limited edition numbered and that it was sold out."
Good News 4 winds..
and to the rest of you beyond frustrated souls who have yet to receive yours, hang in there!
This ones definitely worth the wait!
It's All Good
After observing (and participating a little on) this forum, it's interesting to see that we have our own kind of 'soap opera' going on here.
We consistently have a little bit of drama, a good bit of fun and humor, a little intrigue (what is the next box…?), deception (is this for real?), and camaraderie. We have our fair share of steadfast participants, 'snobs' (it's all good), die-hards and bystanders.
Sometimes I feel like a teenager trying to figure out what it all means. Like attempting to understand, interpret the labyrinthine posts by LMG (again, it's all good!), or trying to decipher the acronym of songs and albums. It seems like heiroglyphics, but I manage. It feels like learning a new language, or how to use SnapChat or Instagram. Wait. What?
Which means we all keep coming back for more.
Again. It's all good. Thanks for allowing anyone to get on the bus.
Hey HendrixFreak, I live in DTC. Grew up in Rye. Saw many shows in '71 at Capital Theatre in Port Chester but not the GD. Catching up now.
*RE/ road trips 2 2 full shows from November 5th & 6th 1979
Road Trips Download: Philadelphia, Nov 5, 1979
A download of the complete November 5, 1979 show from the Spectrum in Philadelphia.
Road Trips Download: Philadelphia, Nov 6, 1979
A download of the complete November 6, 1979 show from the Spectrum in Philadelphia.
Could anyone sell me a copy of these two performances from 1979, one of my favorite eras in band's history. I would be very grateful for anyone's help being able to provide CDs, I have no computer. Just internet on phone.
Can any one please help. I can pay money, or trade which ever you prefer. I'm hoping someone here can help this old DeadHead out. I never ask for anything on this website but I'm really looking forward to listening two these two performances & recordings on my home entertainment system.
Thank you for any help anyone... 🙏❤💀🌹
Singer from smashing pumpkins, Billy C.
Pretty grateful take! Rock on my brothers and sisters! God bless you all! 🙏❤💀🌹
A fox box would rox
Go to a lake to listen on the dox
Watch a shell of rowing jox
Eat bagels with cream cheese (no lox)
Then a raven nox
innoculated against smallpox
Fuzzy white sox
Dance around on Tic Tox
Do you hear the populi vox?
Thank you; I have a whole collection of such poetry at the publisher. Order your copy today! Only $59.99....
Dr. Seuss predicted it!....
Knox in box
Fox in socks
Knox on fox in socks in box
Socks on Knox and Knox in box
Fox in socks on box on Knox
Sorry Vguy, no dice
That's one of the Seuss books that got pulled.
Fortunately, the Seuss book Ark, Ark, Ark Box didn't get pulled.
Fox in socks....
....is not one of the Suess books that they are going to stop publishing. There are six, and I've only heard of one of them. They are relatively obscure.
Road Trips
Hi LMG
I'd be happy to send those shows. Please pm me.
Suess Books
Actually have a copy of Mulberry Street that my father was given in 1938!
Unfortunately it has a few pages that are ripped and the binding is held with tape...
I used to love that book when I was a wee lad.
It's getting pulled
Apparently the critics felt that the image of the fox too closely resembled the Clinton's White House cat Socks.
But, you can still watch Fox On The Run.
My initial copy of Dave's Picks 37 was defective in discs 2 and 3. I contacted Warner Bros./Rhino, who sent me replacement discs 2 & 3. Replacement disc 2 was defective in the same place. This is the 3rd or 4th defective discs I have received. After this, I will no longer buy cds from dead.net. If they don't care any more for their customers than to cut quality control and REPEATEDLY ship defective discs, then they are not going to get any more of my business.
Have you tried playing them in a different CD player?
What type of player do you have?
Some people have previously reported that high-end players are less forgiving with minor disc scratches and dust.
On the other hand, replacing defective discs with defective discs has happened before with 6-17-76 CD3. Eventually Rhino figured out the issue and manufactured discs that weren't defective.
The unpublished Seuss book to be published
Too risqué years ago, it's acceptable in 2021.
"The cat in the hat and the grinch get caught together in a bathroom stall at a highway rest area".
The Foxy Fox on the run...
...do you think all those super high notes were enhanced by the tightness of those jump suites?
EDIT: I think Bob coulda used one of them jump suits ; )
Jam > Alligator> Jam
Oh windy day! I doubled up on the wind screens.
Is it a defect or an "anomaly"?
I have noticed an "anomaly" at about the 6 minute mark of Not Fade Away. There is a sort of channel swapping. It's kind of hard to describe but it is more detectable when I'm listening on headphones. I never really considered complaining to Rhino about it though since it just seems like a random occurrence. Remember the "caveat emptors" on Dicks Picks? That's what I feel this falls under.......
Dire Wolf 1/31/70. New Orleans
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnyP3FKgzE. I say it's time for that big 1969/1970 box set to be released, 10 shows, c'mon Dave lets do it, it will be a knockout!
4/15/78 - Brown Eyed Women?
Love '78 Dead, in many ways more so than '77. I just have to comment about this version of Brown Eyed Women...What were the drummers listening to? They are playing off-beat, the wrong beat, and playing to an entirely different song during this song, lol. What a train wreck! Everything else sounds great so far....
Syncopation or Constipation?
There's a Jerry quote floating around there when he accosted the drummers on break or after a show somewhere and told them to get their act together, "you guys sound like a popcorn popper"
I like that they were adventurous and experimented. I like it more that with very few exceptions when the train jumped the tracks then knew it and either gently steered it back on course or abandoned ship.... (That whistle on 78-82 Truckin' and slide guitar mockery of cats in heat?) Gotta love the Good Ole Grateful Dead.
Jerry Guitars
A few months back, as I was enjoying the two new Port Chester releases (and revisiting Ladies & Gentlemen and Three From The Vault) I had asked if anyone knew what guitar Jerry played during that period. It was clearly a thicker sound than the Stratocasters he played later in '71 through '72, and definitely not as mid-rangey as the SG. All of the sites I had found on his guitars had large gaps, and I had not found anything on the Peanut (I think Jim and a couple of others knew about the short stint of the Peanut, and the riddle was solved for me).
I just came across the most comprehensive accounting of Garcias guitars as I've ever seen (with pictures):
Icecrmcnkd - I got a laugh out of your Dr. Seuss post. The irony...


text:
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