Ocean Orchestra’s blog

Dieting

nobody@vox.com(Ocean Orchestra) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:51:17 -0700

Of late I've been spending my mornings and early afternoons at the little diamond of a restaurant here to the left. No, I haven't spent all my money there and become the tavern's personal mascot -- rather I've become the cook! Yes, that's right, I'm the newest cook among the idiosyncratic crew of Flabby's Tavern in Schnitzelburg, one of the old, authentic and not yet gentrified neighborhoods of Louisville. I'm pretty psyched about the gig. Not only do I get to spend many a waking hour at what I determined to be one of the best and most Austrian-like pubs in the city I call home once again, but I'm also learning to cook and prepare all sorts of unhealthy foods! On a daily basis I get to prepare meatloaf, mashed potatoes, schnitzel, buffalo wings, a number of dishes involving oysters, burgers, fries, onion rings, german potato salad and bratwurst! Just about all of it's deep-fried.
Now, mind you, I know better than to eat much of this very delicious food, lest I grow too flabby to fit into my apron, but my number one recommendation would definitely be the pretzels. I honestly don't think a better pretzel exists.
Much of today was devoted to slicing up whole chickens for the weekend special, which includes half a chicken, two veggies, and let's not forget the oyster shooter! A raw oyster shot with Worcestershire and bloody mary sauce. As Flabby's puts it, it's the original aphrodisiac.

So if anyone's hungry come lunch time next week, I'll be serving it up right at Flabby's every day of the week. Come out and taste my cooking!

Skip The Rope

Half-Handed Cloud

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Visions of America

nobody@vox.com(Ocean Orchestra) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:16:32 -0700

I'd like to take a moment to feature some of the better -- or more interesting, at least -- photos I took a couple weeks back on tour. Foxhole and Interstates went out together on the road for about 10 days -- by no means grand for a tour, but it was really saying something for us. It was our best tour yet, and I think the added friendship we had already established in Interstates made it all the more fun. I was pulling a double shift every night by playing bass for both Foxhole and Interstates, and a few nights I felt like my back was going to cave in on me. My bass is rather old and heavy. But in the end I think my back was stronger, or at least less given to complaint.

Without further ado...

Show 2: Bowling Green @ the Capitol Theatre w/ Heartwarmer

Prom was happening in Bowling Green.

I saw Heartwarmer's last hometown BG show

I saw Wes and Brandon there

I saw Adam play bass for the 1st time

I thought of Fugazi

Hometown Heroes' Last Stand

Show 3: Jackson, MS @ One to One Studio w/ just us.

Stage at 1-2-1 Studio

Daniel on the Quetsch'n

Show 4: Houston, TX @ Notsuoh w/ B. & Elaine Greer

Overshadowing Notsuoh

Art and Music

B. was mighty loud and raucous

All was much more tranquil the next morning

Room with chairs

We had lunch at Chuy's

Chuy's ceiling

Aged Tree Climbed We

Near

Show 6: Abilene, TX w/ Ethan Durelle and Quiet Company

At the Country Kitchen Along Highway 91

Watching Screaming Ghosts

Ethan Durelle spurred me to dancing.

Spoke Late Into the Abilene Night

Toward Show 7: Tulsa, OK w/ No Ghost

Joe knows Kung-Fu

Swamp Goats in Oke

Masque

Show 8: Kansas City, MO @ Main St. Cafe w/ many bands.

Main St. Cafe - Kansas City, MO

Homeward Insomnia

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Memory Lapse: Hillary and the Popular Vote

nobody@vox.com(Ocean Orchestra) — Wed, 28 May 2008 06:13:07 -0700

by Hendrik Hertzberg, via the New Yorker

Cause of the Month

The precise origins of Memorial Day are a little fuzzy. According to one version, it was first celebrated in 1865, a few weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant; freed slaves and black and white Union soldiers marched to the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Charleston, South Carolina, for some hearty hymn-singing and picnicking. Others place its beginnings in Waterloo, New York, a year later, while still others date it to 1868 and a proclamation by the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Northern veterans’ organization. What no one disputes is that the holiday’s founding purpose was to honor the Civil War’s fallen.

This year, thanks to HBO, the remembrances of the Memorial Day weekend encompassed another American civil war, happily less lethal to its combatants but far from trivial in its consequences: the election of 2000. HBO’s movie “Recount” has fewer shrinks than “The Sopranos” and fewer laughs than “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but its over-all factual accuracy has been attested to by close observers of the events it portrays. It reminds us of some essential truths about the election and its aborted recount: that more Floridians went to their polling places to vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush; that a full and fair count would have confirmed the voters’ preference; that the White House was awarded to Bush, the half-million-vote loser across the nation, by a 5-4 Supreme Court diktat. The injustice of Bush v. Gore was obvious at the time; its sequel has proved it to be a tragedy.

The stock defense of Justice Antonin Scalia is a three-word sneer: “Get over it.” Many people find themselves unable to take this bracing advice. The wound to the country’s civic health remains fresh, though of course it is active, committed Democrats who feel it most keenly.

In the current Presidential primary campaign, as in the Electoral College, the “popular vote” has no official significance. According to the Party’s rules, the nomination will go to whoever can garner a majority of the delegates at the Convention in Denver, regardless of how many voters or caucus-goers sent them there, or didn’t. (The so-called superdelegates, who make up a fifth of the Convention, represent voters only in the highly attenuated sense of having earlier won public or party office.) Yet the popular vote, however juridically meaningless, carries immense moral and political weight with Democrats, for whom the 2000 travesty is a station of the cross and vote-counting a kind of sacrament. The superdelegates understand this. That’s why it has been clear all along that if one of the candidates is able to claim an indisputable majority of actual flesh-and-blood Democrats it will be difficult to deny him—or her—the nomination. But what if the majority is highly disputable, and everybody has one?

“We’re winning the popular vote,” Hillary Clinton said last week, after prevailing in the Kentucky primary by a margin bigger than that by which she lost in Oregon. “More people have voted for me than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination.” These statements must be read with the sort of close grammatical and definitional care that used to inform her husband’s descriptions of his personal entanglements. They are not quite true in the normal sense, but if made under oath they would not be prosecutable for perjury, either.

In a nominating process, especially this one, the “popular vote” is an elusive phenomenon. RealClearPolitics.com, an independent Web site whose numbers political reporters and operatives tend to trust, maintains six separate tallies. At the moment, Obama leads in four of them. With or without participants in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington (i.e., states where voters’ preferences were expressed by gathering in corners and the like, and whose numbers can be estimated but are not pinpointed), and with the totals for both Florida (whose primary was unsanctioned by the Democratic Party, with the consent of all the candidates, and where no one campaigned) and Michigan (also unsanctioned, and where Obama’s name was not even on the ballot), Clinton’s claim that more people have “voted” for her is factual. But her claim to be “ahead” depends entirely on a tally for the Michigan primary that is distinctly North Korean: Clinton, 328,309; Obama, 0. However, if the bulk of the 238,168 Michiganders who voted “uncommitted” are assumed to have been Obama supporters—a reasonable assumption—then Obama leads by every possible reckoning. And if only Florida is included, then Obama leads whether or not those four caucuses are counted.

Next week, after the three remaining primaries—Clinton is expected to sweep the largest of them, Puerto Rico’s—the likelihood is that each candidate will be able to point to “metrics” showing that he or she is the people’s choice. Obama will almost certainly have the better case, especially in view of opinion polls showing that his national lead among Democrats has been growing, but the reality is that the two have been almost equally strong. Obama will remain the leader in the delegate count, owing largely to a more astute strategy, and he will be the nominee. If there is a loftier lesson, it is that the nominating “system”—and not just in the Democratic Party—is an irrational mess. But that’s not how Hillary Clinton sees it.

Last Wednesday, Clinton described the Democrats’ long-standing reluctance to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations in their entirety, a reluctance that she shared back when she saw her nomination as inevitable, in these words: “We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe.” In a speech in Florida, she invoked the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed,” the abolition of slavery, “our most fundamental values,” the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s-suffrage convention, the sacrifice of soldiers, the tear gas at Selma, “equal justice under the law,” and the Voting Rights Act. Worse, she invaded the Democratic sacristy, picked up the chalice, and flourished it like a club, saying that right here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner. The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear. If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people is not realized and our democracy is diminished.

Well, that depends on what the meaning of “count” is, doesn’t it? Florida’s (and Michigan’s) votes in January’s rogue primaries were indeed counted, and everyone understood well in advance that the question of how they would be translated into delegates was, at best, problematic.

In an eerie echo of the “Brooks Brothers riot” depicted in the HBO movie, when shouting Bush operatives and Republican congressional staffers who had been dispatched to Florida managed to shut down the Miami-Dade County recount, CNN reported on Thursday that Clinton supporters “are planning to swarm the capital in a little over a week to pressure Democratic Party leaders as they gather to decide the fate of the Florida and Michigan delegations.” In 2000, the candidate most willing to deploy principles and trash them, according to the tactical needs of the moment, was awarded the prize. In 2008, maybe not. ♦

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Sermon Notes: May 25, 2008

nobody@vox.com(Ocean Orchestra) — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:36:29 -0700

Today at the sojourn service, the sermon spoke to me somehow better and clearer than ever. I generally have had trouble following or drawing much from the teaching there, but this morning was different. Here are some notes I made, and thoughts I had while making them:

Romans 6:15-23
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We cannot "simply" believe. I've struggled with this lately -- seeing my faith produce works. While we are saved by God's grace alone, to live the same as we did under law demonstrates nothing of the faith that grace bore. "Even the demons believe...and shudder"

Freedom in grace is freedom to follow and serve the Father -- the new creation in us seeks above all the pleasure of its Creator.

Of course, we are inclined (especially today) to think of freedom wholly in terms of arbitrary or pathetic volition, a potency made actual every time one chooses a particular course of action out from a variety of other possibilities. And obviously, for finite intellects and wills, this is the minimal form that liberty must assume; but it is also, just as obviously, a form of subordination and confinement. All possible choices are external to the will that chooses; they shape it from without, defining it even before it has chosen. Moreover, these possibilities are exclusive of one another: one makes a possible course of action real by rendering other courses of action impossible. And, as we all know, one can choose foolishly, or maliciously, or with a divided will. Freedom, so understood, would consist in no more than a certain kind of largely vacuous and limited potentiality dependent upon other limited and limiting potentialities.
A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness. The will that chooses poorly, then -- through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire -- has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression. And it is this richer understanding of human freedom that provides us some analogy to the freedom of God. For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice" -- as among possibilities that somehow exceed his "present" actuality -- would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be "capable" of evil -- to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it -- would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will in his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is free. (David B. Hart, from The Doors of the Sea)

As fledglings in the divine nature, imputed in us by the law of God's grace, we no longer are mastered by the law of sin. We are no longer leashed by pride, the measure of our own glory, the limitations of our intellect and our physiology, the permeation of ennui, and the lust to dominate. We are no longer bound by that which has held us fast in sludge and mire, in listlessness, and has darkened our minds by the illusion of our own grandeur. Instead, we are freed to exult in One who is greater in every measure, who relieves us of aspirations which had hitherto been whetted upon our own dull luster, and could be gaged only by the reach of our libidos. Now we are freed to acknowledge the Other, God in Christ, whose glory is all and in all.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Colossians 2:13-15

Read and post comments | Send to a friend