Viva Amadeus! (And aw, shut up, Norman.)

Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The world is celebrating, as well it should be.

I've just finished listening, over the Internet, to a live concert from Salzburg commemorating the event. Stellar names making great music: Mitsuko Uchida. Riccardo Muti. Gidon Kremer. Yuri Bashmet. Cecilia Bartoli. The Vienna Philharmonic. The program included the "Haffner" Symphony, (where I came in) Exsaltate, Jubilate (Cecilia thrilling in her trilling), a couple of selections from Figaro and Don Giovanni. It ended with the Wiener Singverein giving a rousing, thrill-you-to-your toenails rendition of the closing chorus from The Magic Flute.

But every celebration, particularly if its object is a figure as universally-beloved as Mozart, has to have a Grinch lurking around somewhere, and sure enough, the Mozart jubilee's nay-saying little gremlin is Norman Lebrecht, a critic in the U.K. whose grumpy, sour-note editorial putting down Mozart's music as overrated, make-ya-feel-good highbrow Muzak has been floating around the Internet for weeks now. I'd like to see it go float down the nearest sewer.

Lebrecht tells us, at the close of his screed, that we should forget Mozart and go listen to music that really matters, such as the Shostakovich "Leningrad" Symphony.

Okay, you can find famous Mozart-haters out there. Counting Lebrecht, I think we have three, the other two being Noel Coward, who once described Mozart opera as sounding like "piddling on flannel," and Glenn Gould, who had little use for harmonic structures that emphasised melodic line: he preferred music that put counterpoint first, melody second (if not third.)

There's also been some speculation that he may have suffered from a form of autism. But I'm a Gould fan, so I won't carp. And I do share Gould's affection for Bach and Orlando Gibbons.

But hey, listen up, Norman: even Gould described the Shostakovich "Leningrad" symphony as a "motoric monstrosity."

Again, I didn't sit down here to bash Shostakovich. I like his music. But to imply, nay to state, that he's a worthier composer than Mozart? Here's a guy (Lebrecht) whom I wouldn't be surprised to learn thinks Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a better novelist than Tolstoy.

There are also some extremely-distinguished Mozart lovers out there, including a few who distingushed themselves in other areas than music.

Does E=mc2 ring a bell? http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31essa.html?incamp=article_popular

Lebrecht should find himself another line of work. If they come up with a medicinal treatment for tin ear, he should (1) Undergo it, and then (2) Go out and peddle it, as a penance for sounding like a complete jackass.

Of course, every time the public is unanimous in its claim that something is red, there's going to be someone out there claiming it's green. And it did occur to me, after reading Lebrecht's little down-with-Mozart essay the first time, that he may have been simply playing Devil's advocate, having a bit of ironic fun with all those millions of people out there whose lives have been immeasurably enriched by Mozart's music, and who are virtually unanimous in wanting to celebrate the round-number anniversary of one who, miraculously, gave the world so much joy, laughter, delight and profound beauty.

In other words, maybe he didn't mean it. In that case, I apologize for this screed-in-response.

Then again, maybe he did mean it, in which case I ain't apologizing for anything. You have a tin ear, Norman. TIN. Go take a long walk off a short pier.

The first piece of Mozart's music I ever heard was the Rondo alla Turca from the Piano Sonata K. 311. I was six years old. I heard it in a chamber-music arrangement for a small number of instruments, and it enchanted my child's ear. I played it over and over on the record player in the family living room.

Fast forward to age 29, when I went to see the somewhat-regrettable film Amadeus. (Regrettable because woefully unhistoric.) Still, the music that accompanied the film's closing credits was the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor K. 466. I don't usually sit through the sometimes-endless unwinding of credits at the end of films, but that day I sat riveted until the very end. It struck me as the best choice of music for a film moment since Francis Ford Coppola decided to use the Doors' The End for the opening of Apocalypse Now, or indeed since Stanley Kubrick mainstreamed for all time the opening bars of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Go listen to this slow movement sometime. Just put on your headphones and let Mozart make love to your soul for 12 minutes.

This is "Muzak?" Not hardly, as we used to say.

I have often remarked to my friends that, when it comes my time to leave this world, the ability to hear Mozart's music is one of the things I will most regret having to give up. There are plenty of other composers, from Beethoven to Stravinsky, whose music I love, but I can make that statement only about Mozart's music.

And I don't like having my noblest feelings "dissed," Norman.

Arthur Rubinstein, in his memoirs, called music "the dear companion of all my emotions, who can stir us to fight, who can inflame us with love and passion, and who can soothe our pains and bring peace to our hearts." Had he been speaking specifically of Mozart's music, he could have been speaking for me.

So I join the world in celebrating the anniversary of this miraculous birth. And Norman, while the rest of us drink a toast and give our recordings of the "Paris" and "Jupiter" symphonies a celebratory spin, why don't you go put on the "Leningrad" symphony, stick your head between the speakers, and turn up the volume until your neighbors call the cops? Sure, you may go legally deaf from the experience, but it'll be a small loss. You're already tone-deaf.

And the junk mail raged on

Way back before there was any such thing as the Internet, mass marketers were already in the perfidious business of buying and selling lists of addresses.

You subscribe to a magazine or send a donation to a particular charity or organization, and the next thing you know, your mailbox is filling up with begging letters from like-minded outfits and subscription offers from similar publications.

It was, and is, a very low-tech version of what Amazon.com does in a high-tech way today: you buy a book at Amazon.com having to do, say, with chess, gardening or kinky sex, and the next time you log on, you're going to face a screen filled with "suggested" titles on chess strategy, mulching and shoe fetishism. In other words, your purchases are tracked, with an eye to selling you more of the same.

The older, snail-mail version of this does have great possibilities in the tit-for-tat department. Many years ago I got into a heated political discussion with my Uncle Pete. The subject was (incredibly) the future of the Soviet Union. (The discussion took place in 1985, the year Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in Moscow.) Now, I tend to be politically conservative myself, but my Uncle Pete made me look like Michael Moore channeling Barbra Streisand: he was a flag-waving zealot who saw Communist conspiracy against the free world everywhere he looked except under the refrigerator, which was where he saw atheist conspiracy.

Uncle Pete was convinced that we were losing the cold war, that the Russians were going to conquer the world and there was little or nothing we could do about it. They had so many more missiles, so many more tanks, so many more nuclear submarines. "I don't see how we can win," he said. I counter-argued that it was precisely the missiles, tanks and nuclear submarines that were going to be the Soviets' downfall. "A country just can't go on spending 55 percent of its Gross National Product on military hardware forever," I told him, pointing out that the USSR's satellite states were just waiting for a moment of weakness in which to revolt. "Let's say you're holding a gun on me," I said. "So you have the gun. Sooner or later you're going to fall asleep, and then you may have a problem."

I convinced him of nothing. Like most zealots, he didn't want to be convinced. He wanted to be right.

Of course Uncle Pete was on a lot of right-wing mailing lists, one of the most shrill being something called "The Christian Anti-Communist Crusade."

Some months after our little kitchen debate, I discovered, to my horror, that Uncle Pete had put me on the mailing list for this group. I was getting their borderline-nutty paranoiac's newsletter in my own mail.

I quickly sat down and wrote them a letter, unsubscribing. But I also wanted to "mess back" with Uncle Pete a little bit, give him a taste of his own, so to speak.

It didn't take me long to come up with a cool idea: I wrote a check for $25 to the American Civil Liberties Union, mailed it off to them and said it was a donation in his name. I also included his address.

Uncle Pete never said anything to me about this. Perhaps he never even suspected that I was the culprit. But, although I had a certain amount of admiration for President Reagan myself, I would have loved to have been there the day Uncle Pete opened up his mailbox and found mass mailing material from some left-wing political group asking for a donation to an "Impeach Reagan" fund. The scream would have been heard all the way across California's central coast, where Uncle Pete lived.

But of course they had my return address too. It was on my check. Soon I myself was receiving junk mail from every left-wing group in the country, including some that really get my hackles up, such as N.O.W.

I happen to subscribe to both the National Review, a conservative publication, and The New Republic, its liberal counterpart. As you can imagine, I am now getting junk mail from both ends of the political spectrum: on Monday I might get an invitation from some conservative Washington think-tank to subscribe to its new free-minds-and-free-markets magazine, with the added inducement that if I subscribe now, for a mere $500 more I can attend a banquet next November at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan, honoring Norman Podhoretz, at which William F. Buckley Jr. will be the guest speaker. Then, on Tuesday, I'll get a piece of junk mail with Sen. Edward Kennedy's name in the return-address spot, inviting me to contribute to a fund dedicated to electing more Democrats.

And of course this sort of thing is by no means restricted to the world of politics and opinion. I subscribed to a magazine about surfing--soon I was being courted through the mail to subscribe to two more. I subscribed to IndyCar magazine (I never miss the Indianapolis 500). Someone out there decided I'd also be interested in Nascar (I'm not.) I subscribed to a quarterly of verse, The American Poetry Review. Pretty soon I was getting mail inviting me to enter one (rigged) poet's competition after another, or (I love this one) being urged to submit my own poems for a projected poetry anthology...which I would then have the opportunity to buy.

And don't get me started on the book clubs. Join one, and soon you're hearing from all of them. I've belonged to three or four different book clubs since college: Book-of-the-Month Club, History Book Club, Reader's Subscription, Heritage Club to name just a few. I swear, every time someone somewhere starts a new book club, sooner or later there's something in my mailbox inviting me to join.

With all of this going on, we're suddenly in a tizzy about the government tapping a few Al Qaeda phone calls without a warrant? Wake up and smell the coffee, people. Even if Big Brother does happen to be watching me, I'm grateful that he isn't trying to sell me magazine subscriptions. When it comes to keeping track of you and what you buy, the forces of marketing make the government look like a bunch of off-key drunks on karaoke night.

I heard this story years ago. I'm sure it's apocryphal; such stories almost always are. (See if you find this story on Snopes.com. I'll look too.) The tale is told about the guy living somewhere up in Frozen Nosehole, North Dakota who decided to put the forces of mass-mailing to work to his advantage. The way the story goes, he deliberately went out and got himself on every junk mail list he could possibly find: every magazine, organization, charity, nut group and local shopper he could lay hands on. Soon his mailbox was overflowing, every day, with more and more and more junk mail.

As the story goes, he piled it up behind his house, compacted it into "logs" with a machine, and used it to heat his house all winter.

I like that story. My only problem is, I live in southern California and heating my house all winter isn't such a problem as it would be if I lived in North Dakota.

I wonder if there's a way mashed junk mail could be used to run my house's air-conditioning system in the summertime.

Take that, Hewlett-Packard

I read recently that by 2020, computers will be able to process information just as the human brain does.

By 2020? I'll bet you thought they were already there.

No. Despite their ubiquitous presence these days, and our utter reliance on them, computers are still those little buggers who, in the words of one computer-maven I know, "Do stupid things incredibly fast." Make no mistake: artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. Computers may seem to be "smart," but all they really are is quick. High-speed morons, in other words. IBM can build a computer that will beat Garry Kasparov at chess, but that's only because chess is a semi-mathematical activity. So is music, and we're far from building a computer that can compose a symphony.

I'd like to hear a symphony composed by a computer. I'll bet it would sound like P.D.Q. Bach.

I have a short list of words that I truly hate, and one of them is "nuanced." Journalists, who love to imitate each other, created this word, and for some reason, probably because they think it makes them sound educated, they're now using it as often as they can come up with excuses to. God, how sick I am of picking up a newspaper and reading about how some novelist's or essayist's style, or some politician's speech, was "nuanced." It's stupid, like all words that journalists make fetishes of. ("Empathize" and "resonate" are also on my list of fingernails-on-chalkboard words.)

But when I contemplate how far computers have to go before they truly mount a challenge to the human brain, before we are absolutely and without any doubt in danger of a situation such as that depicted in the 1971 film Colossus: The Forbin Project, wherein a computer armed with nuclear weapons seizes control of the world, "nuance" is a word that comes to mind.

The human brain is, at least for now, capable of nuance, in terms of data recovery, far beyond anything a computer can do. Or if you want to get sniffy, "heuristic incremental capability" is what we still have more of than the chips and wires do. (That for my sniffy pal in Moscow, Russia who provided me with the term. Thanks, Vasily.)

Shaking your head? Don't think so? Okay, Mr. or Ms. Smarty-Pants, read on.

I had an experience just this morning, a quiet, seconds-only experience, which gave me an insight into the gymnastics of which the human brain is capable. Even mine, if you can believe that.

We've all had the experience of trying to remember a name, a book title or a place, and, unable to think of it, we've simply gone about our business, only to have the name, book title or place pop into our heads minutes or hours later. Yes, our brains are just like computers in that respect: (actually, it's the other way around--this is no chicken-and-egg conundrum; the brain came first) they can and do conduct file searches even while we're otherwise occupied.

But let me see a computer pull a piece of data-retrieving sleight-of-hand like the one my own sleep-bedraggled brain, just getting jump-started on a cup of Folgers for the day ahead, pulled this morning.

Over my coffee, I was reading in a book entitled Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Study of his Life and Writings, by F.C. Green. (Cambridge University Press, 1955.) My interest in Rousseau was piqued by my having just finished Roger Pearson's new book Voltaire Almighty, which of course touched upon the prickly relationship between these two eighteenth-century thinkers.

Green relates a conversation between Rousseau and his father, when Rousseau was a little boy. "Jean-Jacques, parlon de ta mere," the father is supposed to have said, whereupon the boy replied, "He bien, mon pere, nous allons donc pleurer."

No, I don't speak French. I had to go to the footnote to see what this exchange meant. (For my fellow non-Francophones out there, it's something like "Let's talk about your mother." "Okay, Dad, then we're going to cry.")

Prepare to witness a truly amazing piece of epistemological terpsichore. (Yeah, that was deliberate.)

As I looked at the page, I focused on the world "pleurer," meaning "to cry." "Pleurer" obviously has the same lexical root as the English word "pleurisy," which describes an upper-respiratory disease.

When I was 12 years old, in the summer of 1968, my family moved from Chula Vista, California to Spokane, Washington. My sisters and I were all anticipating (with dread, in my case) starting school that fall in new schools where we would not know anyone and would be the "new kids in class." It was probably just that anticipation that made the last few, precious moments of carefree summer vacation burn themselves into my memory like polaroids. But whatever the cause, I have carried in my head these many years a mental snapshot of what might have been my last Sunday night of vacation that particular summer.

Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was a Sunday-night staple in my family in those days. We kids seldom missed it. It was an hour-long television program, and would often broadcast Disney feature films over two Sundays. Animal films were a favorite, and on this particular late-summer Sunday evening, Disney was offering up its 1962 animal comedy Sammy, The Way-Out Seal, starring Robert Culp and Patricia Barry, with Billy Mumy (pre-Lost In Space) in the kid role.

I also remember that night's supper. No doubt because we had just moved, and my parents were probably busy unpacking and putting things away, Dad decided to spare Mom the chore of cooking that night. He ordered chicken dinners for the family from Chicken Delight, a company which has long since vanished, but was something of a pioneer in the fast-food business. In the 1960s, Chicken Delight became one of the very first companies ever to advertise delivery of a full hot meal right to your doorstep. I remember their advertising jingle: "Don't cook tonight, call Chicken Delight." That night, that's exactly what my folks did.

There's a scene in Sammy, The Way-Out Seal in which Robert Culp, having just been ignominiously dunked in the water in a mishap caused (of course) by Sammy the seal, is standing in front of the bathroom mirror informing his wife that he now expects to get "pleurisy."

Because I was 12, it might be that this was the first time I had ever heard the word "pleurisy." Apparently it had an odd sound to my young ear, because I remembered it. But in any case, this morning as I sat over my coffee and came across the French word "pleurer" in reading about Rousseau, I focused on it for just a second or two, and like a rock skipping across a pond, my mind made a series of incredible leaps: "Pleurer; pleurisy; Disney; Robert Culp; Sunday night; summer vacation, 1968; Spokane, Washington; Chicken Delight; junior high school."

A vivid mental snippet of that Sunday evening in my childhood played itself back in my mind, clear as DVD, complete with what we had for dinner, and all because I focused for just a brief moment on a French word, encountered in a book 38 years later.

Think a computer can do that? Not yet.

And by the way, I think Rousseau would have been fascinated by all of this, as interested as he was in the mysteries of consciousness and memory.

Check back with me in 2020, H-P.

It's The Grim Reaper on Line 2

A few years ago Bill Cosby published a book about getting old, Time Flies. Somewhere in this book, he noted his shock at looking down one morning in the bathroom and noticing his first gray pubic hair. That was Ol' Coz' first solid intimation of mortality. (And a damn fine one, I might add.)

I'm a baby-boomer. (Attention fellow Boomers: have you noticed how little respect we get? There was yet another trash-the-Boomers article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine this week.) We are supposedly the first generation in absolute, total denial of old age. We're even trying to come up with a new name for it. Apparently we have rejected "senior citizen" just as surely as we rejected the station wagons of our parents' generation, forcing Detroit to come up with the minivan and the SUV, kid-friendly vehicles that we would buy and drive, because they didn't look like anything Mom and Dad had driven.

And then there's all this "50 is the new 30" stuff. In the movie The Lion In Winter, King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) is wrapping up his affairs, which for a British monarch in the 12th century meant deciding which son was going to inherit what, because he, old King Henry, had just turned 50. In 1183, far from being the "new 30," 50 was the "old 80," the age at which you started lacing up your sneakers for the walk to the boneyard. He seemed quite insouciant about it all, but then of course he had Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) to keep his mind on other things (knock-down-drag-out fighting) besides dancing with death. As far as I'm concerned, 50-as-the-new-30 only means that these days we expect to die a few years later than our parents did. As swiftly as the years pass the older you get, what kind of comfort is that?

I haven't seen the first gray pubic hair yet, but I can tell you with a great degree of accuracy when I first felt the upward pressure of the younger generation shoving mine out of the way. Or at least of showing itself indifferent to our experience, which amounts to the same thing. Remember how your Dad would tell you that he used to walk five miles to school, and it was uphill both ways? Remember how you tuned him out? This was my moment of that.

It was the week immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In those first days after the attacks, everyone was rushing out to donate blood. It was largely an exercise in what-else-can-we-do, since there were so few actual survivors of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and none at all in Shanksville, PA. But Americans collectively felt that they had to make some gesture of solidarity with the victims, some symbolic expression of union in adversity, and local blood banks were swamped with donors.

The company I was working for at the time was as enthusiastically involved in this push as anyone else. A company-wide blood drive was announced, and as a writer working in the marketing department, I was asked to draft an in-house e-mail message to all employees, encouraging them to step up and give blood.

I sat down at the old laptop, cracked my knuckles and got to work.

"September 11, 2001 has now joined December 7, 1941 and November 22, 1963 as one of those dates that will remain burned into our national consciousness for generations to come," I wrote in context. In all, I cranked out about 400 words, encouraging everyone in the company to do their bit. My boss looked my effort over, gave it the imprimatur, and I hit the "send" button. Out went my patriotic message to 200 employees (most of whom, by the way, were younger than I, and I was 45 at the time.)

Now, in fairness to the under-35 crowd, this was a technology company I worked for, e.g. a company that employed software engineers. Well, software engineers ("propellor heads" in uncharitable parlance) are famous for knowing all about HTML, SQL Server, C++...and damned little else. That's why the company called its monthly high-tech pow-wows over pizza "Dork Nights." You could get one of these guys going for hours about Visual Basic, but ask one of them to find Washington, D.C. or London on a map and you might have a problem.

Still, imagine my shock when, moments after sending out this e-mail to the company, a reply e-mail popped into my in-box from one of the code-writing crowd.

"What happened on November 22, 1963?" The e-mail asked.

I fancy that I made a sound somewhat like air escaping from a bicycle tire.

The seminal event of my generation, the one of which everyone can remember exactly where he or she was and what they were doing when it happened, was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 11/22/63. And that goes for everyone, not just people who admired him. My parents were Republicans who voted for Nixon against Kennedy in 1960, but when I came home from school that day, they were in every bit as much a shocked daze as the most ardent of Kennedy partisans. The whole country was in standing-eight-count mode that day, which just goes to show how radically things have changed in the past 42 years.

But here was the first loud click-clack of the steel wheels on the steel rails carrying me and mine out to pasture...and to whatever lies beyond pasture: the sudden realization that, for those not yet born when it happened, the assassination of JFK is as remote in history as the assassination of William McKinley is to me. And by the way, the majority of Americans now alive were not yet born on November 22, 1963.

That was in 2001. Then there's the past year. When I was in college, I was part of a more-or-less trio of characters who hung out together whenever we all happened to be in town. We called ourselves "warriors of the arts." Charles Berigan, Jesus R. Araiza and myself. Charlie and "Ray," as he called himself in those days, had met in high school. I'd graduated ahead of both of them, but we formed what Ray's father jokingly called a "triumvirate:" Charlie was the pianist, Ray the composer, and I the poet. We were going to set the world on fire. A trash fire was about as far as we got, but that's beside the point.

We're all middle-aged guys now, and in the past 12 months, all three of us have lost our fathers. JRA's father died in January, 2005; mine died on September 27 of the same year, and Charlie lost his Dad in January, 2006. 12 months, three fathers. If I didn't feel the broom sweeping me toward Forest Lawn before, I sure as hell do now.

The late Leonard Bernstein remarked in one of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard that as we get older, the measure of our maturity is the degree to which we come to accept our mortality. When I was a child, and in my early teens, I used to stay awake at night worrying about death. Was there an afterlife? Or not? The idea of eternal oblivion gave me an ice-cold nausea that went right to the core. My parents weren't especially religious (well, my mother was into spiritualism and table-rapping, but I suspect that was because she was every bit as terrified of the blank and silent cosmos as I was) so I was never given the kind of religious grounding as a child that often spares children (if not adults) from this existential horror. Now that I'm well past Dante's Mezzo del cammino di nostra vita (I noted its passing on October 12th, 1990, my 35th birthday) I have found that the sheer noise of life, not to mention the multiplying of questions and answers that destroys youth, has taken the edge off the fear of death, if not banished it. I don't suppose anyone but the most zealous believer in a monotheistic god, or the calmest zen Buddhist, quietly determined to get off the wheel of karma, ever escapes the shadow of the fear of death entirely.

My ex-wife turned 60 this month. I sent birthday congratulations, and she e-mailed me back that she hadn't even really noticed the date, having been on vacation with her son and his girlfriend when it came around. She said she feels all right, but of course the round-number leaves her with the gnawing feeling that time is running out. Will she have 20 more years? 25? This much I know for certain: they will go quickly, however many she has. As will however many I have. I sometimes wonder how octogenarians deal with knowing how short their days are, but I'll find out soon enough myself, if I live that long. My own father died at 91, and in his last days seemed eager to get it over with.

My advice to my fellow baby-boomers: why don't we all quit trying to outwit old age by changing its name, having cosmetic surgery and clinging to the illusion that diet and exercise will somehow make death go away? I read recently about great strides that are expected in the next decades with regard to slowing down the aging process. Perhaps our great-great grandchildren will routinely live to be 140 years old. That just means they'll have to find something to do for an extra 50 or 60 years. And by the way, can you imagine how a 75 year-old whippersnapper will respond to tales about how hard life was for his 130-year-old father?

Back to the movies: George C. Scott as General George S. Patton, fielding questions from reporters while riding around on horseback. One of them asks him about the future of warfare. The next war, he says, is expected to be a push-button war. A push-button war? Patton darkly frowns. War in which nothing is proven, nothing affirmed? No heroes? No cowards? No generals? Only those who survive...and those who don't.

"I'm glad I won't live to see it," he said.

Say amen, somebody.

Stop, thief! (and don't change the station!)

My car was stolen last Friday afternoon.

In the wake of this outrage, I picked up some fun facts from the police department community volunteer who came to take the report.

For one, I found that I probably had at least a dozen fellow passengers in that particular canoe. In Chula Vista, 10-15 cars are stolen every day.

For another, I learned that my car is among the most-stolen models. I drive a Saturn. A 1995 Saturn, the absolute acme of a nondescript car. "Who would steal a SATURN?" I wondered aloud.

Well, The same community volunteer told me that there are a lot of Saturn "pass keys" floating around, making Saturns especially easy to steal. The only cars stolen more often than Saturns are Hondas and Toyotas. (I think the Toyota Celica is the most-stolen car in America.)

I suspected my car might be headed for a chop shop in Tijuana; Mexico is after all only about eight miles south of here. But no, the community volunteer (her name was "Valerie," same as my wife's) said it's usually old pickup trucks that end up in Mexico. Saturns and such are quite often stolen merely for joyriding. Sometimes the stereo gets ripped out, but sometimes there isn't even that much damage.

In fact, she said the police department has a 50 percent recovery rate for such cars. On that happy note, Valerie gave us a lift home.

Here's what had happened: my wife Valerie and I went to have lunch with my old friend Charlie, whom I've known since high school. We went to Ernie's Diner, my favorite Chula Vista hangout. (The waitresses all know me there, and there's an outside patio where you can sit when the weather is nice, which it usually is here.) Parking around Ernie's is dicey on Thursdays, as they have a Farmer's Market and the streets are closed. But we were there on Friday, with no restrictions on two-hour parking. I parked the car in front of the First Southern Baptist Church, just down at the end of the block.

We lingered over our late lunch for one hour, coming out of the restaurant about 3:15. The sun was shining. It was as broad daylight as daylight can be.

And my car, parked in front of a church no less, had vanished. At first I thought it might have been towed away. But why? I was parked in a two-hour zone and had only been there one hour. A quick call to the police department cleared that away; they had no record of my car's having been towed. That left only thing: it had been stolen.

I always thought that I would feel more personally violated by the theft of a car. Victims of theft and robbery often come away with a feeling of having been somehow raped, or at least with an uncomfortable feeling that this was a personal act directed at their personal self, as opposed to all of the anonymous criminal acts directed at other people which we read about in the papers every day. For the record, I did feel personally violated by the vandalism of another car, many years ago. But I had good reason that time. That time, it was personal. I was working in a convenience store, and had pissed off some local teenage pukes by refusing to sell them beer. When I locked up one night to go home and found one of my car's windows smashed, I knew who had done it and why.

But my reaction this time surprised me, and my wife told me later that it also surprised her. I sometimes have a short fuse, and she said she would have expected me to cut loose like a crazed orangutang at having my wheels stolen.

No. I called the police, then called for a cab. I did get a little impatient when it took the police 25 minutes to get there, but I'm just an impatient kind of guy. My wife has her own car, so I knew we wouldn't be completely stranded. And after all is said and done, I guess one just doesn't especially develop an emotional relationship with a 1995 Saturn. Had my car been a cobalt-blue 2006 BMW with leather upholstery, walnut steering wheel, GPS positioning system and a $5,000 Bose music system with XM Radio, I might have felt differently. But for a ten year-old Saturn with manual windows, doughnut spare tire and an old factory-issue cassette tape player, whose weather stripping is coming loose, by the way, you don't have a seizure. I called the insurance company when we got home and just sat back to wait.

Oh, yes, and I also had to take my wife's car, go to Hollywood Video and explain to them what happened to their VHS tape of Night And The City, starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, which had been lying on the seat of the car. I had intended to return it after lunch. They were gracious. No, I wouldn't have to pay for it, not if it were in a car that had been stolen.

As the weekend went by, I began to wonder what I would do if the car were in fact, not recovered. My conclusion: no biggie. I'd been driving that car for two and a half years. My wife and I are thinking about buying a bed-and-breakfast in Washington state, and I had mentioned that a small pickup might be a good thing to have. Should the car not be found, I could use the insurance to make a down payment on such a pickup.

On Sunday morning, shortly before eight O'clock, I got a phone call from the police department. They had found my car. It was about three miles from the curbside where it had been taken, abandoned in the parking lot of the South County Public Library on Orange Avenue in Chula Vista.

I was given 15 minutes to get over there and pick it up, or they'd have it towed to a garage. I threw a jacket over my sleeping sweat togs, pulled on the old Adidas, told my wife to do the same, and we got into her Chrysler and fire-chased across town (getting lost on the way, and I've lived in this city much of my life) to the library. The irony of my car's having been stolen in front of a church and abandoned at the library wasn't lost on me. This thief, whoever he was, had a liking for sedate places. Who knows? Maybe he went in and checked out the latest Stephen King before leaving my car there.

The cop was waiting for us. He had opened both doors of the car. I glanced into the car as we pulled up: the radio and tape deck were untouched. And Stephen King notwithstanding, the thief was obviously not a fan of Night And The City: he hadn't even bothered stealing the videotape. Well, if he was under 25, which is likely, chances are he wouldn't bother with VHS--it's Sooo last year. (Year BEFORE last, actually.)

He had even cleaned the trash out of the back seat, which gave me an uneasy moment, actually: Valerie the police volunteer had asked me if there were anything in the car with identifying information on it, such as my social security number. I wasn't sure. I had tossed some opened envelopes and other detritus into the back seat, intending to clean it out later. Now the car thief had done it for me. Here's hoping identity theft isn't next on my calendar of surprises for this year.

It felt good to slide back into the old driver's seat again, I'll admit. The thief was obviously a little squirt: I had to readjust not only the seat, but the steering wheel, back to my height. I looked around. No sign of vandalism; in fact it looked like the vinyl around the stereo had been buffed up nice and shiny, (from his carefully wiping away his fingerprints) although the dashboard was still covered with dust.

In fact, the closest thing to vandalism I found when my car was recovered was something I discovered only when I started up the engine and prepared to pull out of the parking lot and drive it back home.

The radio began blasting out Dr. Dre or some such rubbish. Tidy or not, the little pustule-head had tuned MY car radio to a hip-hop station! Outrageous! I quickly reached over and punched it back to its customary spot, XLNC-1, which at that moment was offering Beethoven's Appassionata as played by Alfred Brendel.

Then it was home to get the Los Angeles Times out of the driveway and read about all those other people out there who had had similar, if not worse, indignities visited upon them during this sunny California weekend.

Okay, so I found out that I'm not exactly in love with my car. I was glad enough to have it back. With the vinyl around the stereo polished, I'll have to dust off the dashboard. Oh, what the hell? It's overdue for a wash.

Let's Get Busy Out There

It's too late in the month to be making New Year's resolutions. If I had bothered to make any this year, I would already have broken them by now. Admit it: any resolutions you made on Dec. 31st are already in the recycle bin, waiting to see if you have more willpower next year than you had last year.

No, I usually don't bother making New Year's resolutions. But I do, usually, come New Year's Eve, have a short list of things I'd like to see that great world of geniuses and propellor-heads out there provide us with in the coming year. I don't think that's unreasonable. If you consider the long list of things we have now that we didn't have when I was a kid, from personal computers to cell phones to cars that can actually tell you which way to go, there's practically nothing that could be invented anymore that would surprise anyone. There are things that I suspect will always remain pipe-dreams, such as time-travel, (except forward, which is theoretically possible in Einstein's universe--all you have to do is go fast enough) there are fewer and fewer things in our world that remain elusive for long.

With that in mind, here's my list of things that I'd like to see Bill Gates, GM, Lockheed, Major League Baseball or whoever out there come up with to improve my quality of life in the coming year:

10. An ice-making machine for my freezer that guarantees the ice cubes won't stick together and have to be hacked at with a sharp object.

9. A TV remote control that not only has a mute button for silencing commercials, but a feature which will allow me to leave the room and be informed when the commercials are over.

8. Technology which ensures that, any time I have to travel somewhere on an airplane, the entire flight will be 100 percent free of turbulence.

7. A gizmo that quickly and easily removes the 100 pounds of plastic and adhesive crap that compact discs come wrapped in, and disposes of it.

6. Some alternative to those idiotic stickers they put on pieces of fruit in the grocery store.

5. Powdered scotch whiskey. Just add water and voila! Cocktail time.

4. A piece of filtering software I can download into my computer which will prevent pictures of Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears or J-Lo from ever appearing on my video monitor again.

3. I've given up hope that baseball will ever get rid of the designated hitter rule. Too many washed-up ballplayers are able to squeeze a few more lucrative seasons out of their careers with it. But how about some way to restore the World Series to early October? November baseball is absurd.

2. A gizmo (I'm envisioning something similar to a stun-gun) which I can point at every idiot I see driving by me, steering his Humvee or his Ford Gargantua SUV with one hand while blabbering into a cell phone with the other, and send 10,000 volts of electricity through the hand holding the phone, forcing said idiot to shut up and drive.

1. A painless, quick, foolproof and cheap way of removing double chins from 50 year-old guys.

You thought that last one was going to be "world peace," didn't you? No, I'm afraid war is like the DH--we're always going to be stuck with it. I decided to set my wishes within the realm of the possible: you'll notice that I also did not include receiving a breathless e-mail from Reese Witherspoon, telling me that she'd stumbled across my blog, thought I was an astonishing genius and just couldn't get on with her life until we'd had lunch together.

Speaking of lunch, I have a lunch date in an hour with the guy who runs the gym where I work out. He's going to look at my plate and tell me that I eat all the wrong foods.

That's more in keeping with my level of expectations. 2006, bring 'em on.

To Jay, in the absence of Lennie...

Initially this was going to be an open letter to the ghost of Leonard Bernstein.

But I decided that if I'm going to write an open letter, I'd rather address it to a live guy than a dead one.

Bernstein died in October, 1990. He lives on in my music library, among my book collection and even among my videos (his 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard.) But he's stopped returning calls.

Jay Nordlinger, who lives in Manhattan (natch) is a columnist for the conservative website National Review Online. But he also writes classical-music reviews, and often links to them from NRO. And he's very much alive, thank you.

In other words, Jay, you and I share a love for great music. So dude, I'm talkin' in your direction...

By the way, don't you agree with me that it's a little unfair, after his having given the world so many sublime moments of music, that the one thing most people bother remembering about poor Lennie, if they remember him at all, is the moment he made a gigantic jackass of himself?

You know the moment I'm talking about: when he donned a Nehru jacket and threw a cocktail party for the Black Panthers. After which, Tom Wolfe, to borrow an image from T.S. Eliot, pinned Lennie "wriggling to the wall" in his essay Radical Chic for this public brain fart. It was subsequently burned into the public's memory of Bernstein.

I prefer to remember Lennie conducting Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes at the last concert he gave before he died. Really, this is one of the gems of my CD collection.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here's what I really want to talk about: I know we're well into the 21st century now (Year VII, if you want to count Year 0) and it's a bit late to be writing postmortems on the 20th century. But still, don't you agree that it's mighty fine to sit back, take a deep breath and enjoy the fact that that bloody century is over? I mean "bloody" in the cockney sense as well as the literal one: in addition to all of the will-to-power grotesqueries the 20th century gave us, the Hitler-Stalin-Mao-Pol Pot stuff, it also gave us the full flowerings of some ideas which, I'm happy to say, are now fading into disrepute.

Marxism is refusing to go quietly, for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that so many so-called "intellectuals," from Harvard to the Sorbonne, (not to mention Hollywood) mortgaged the farm to buy into it, and are reluctant to admit that they were flim-flammed.

Einstein's physics are still with us, until Stephen Hawking comes up with something better. But I have no problem with the theory of relativity, do you? Some have argued that it ultimately gave rise to the angst of "moral relativism," but I think that's a stretch at best. Yeah, OK, the first thing we did with Einstein's ideas was to build a bomb with them, but that's hardly his fault. He gave us a tool to measure our world with. Blessings on his head.

Here's one guy I'm glad to see ride off into the sunset: Freud. (Vladimir Nabokov, who no doubt resented the implication that there was something wrong with him because his childhood in St. Petersburg had been so happy, dismissed Freud as "The Viennese quack.") After exerting quasi-religious authority for most of the last century (and costing Woody Allen untold millions in bills to psychoanalysts) Freud is fading. PC might have something to do with this; all of Freud's dark stuff about infant sexuality, oedipal obsessions and the like do not run with the grain of today's "new puritanism," nor of feminist gender politics--Freud was, after all (shudders!) a man. But I think it's more a question of perspective. I mean, look at Woody Allen, for example. Does he look like an example of someone who's been cured? He's a perfect poster boy for consumers of psychoanalysis: spending to stand still. I wonder whether Freud ever did anything for anyone that a bartender couldn't do. Or even a priest. If Woody gets any less goofy in his old age, it's probably old age at work, not psychoanalysis.

And then there's serialism. Yeah, serialism. I finally got to my real point. I want to talk about 12-tone music. That's why I'm writing to you, Jay, and not to Jonah Goldberg or E.J. Dionne.

I'm not here necessarily to trash 12-tone music, just to say I'm glad to see it shuffling off to Buffalo, or wherever it is ideas whose time has past shuffle off to.

Not all of it was bad; a couple of weeks ago the Metropolitan Opera staged Berg's Wozzeck. I'm not going to pretend I listened to it, but I've heard parts of it and yes, it is an emotional battering ram. ("Du! du! Dein Mutter ist tot!" Geez.)

My problem with 12-tone music is that, looking back, it was music's version of Freudianism in the 20th century. Academia threw its arms around it, and therefore anyone who didn't get on the bandwagon was dismissed as a rube, or worse, a "reactionary." In that respect, serialism had as much in common with Marxism as with Freud, and it strikes me as so ironic that it was banned in the Soviet Union, where the real philistines were running the government. Glenn Gould, a great proponent of such composers as Schoenberg and Krenek, proudly let it be known that melody was relatively unimportant to him, and he spoke for much of academia: serialism was so cool partly because it appealed to such a small group. It was an aesthetic with a "priesthood." To be a proponent of 12-tone music made you "in the know," somehow more enlightened than those beyond-the-pale hicks who wanted only tunes they could hum.

I had my own response, cocked and ready for use any time someone accused me of arch-hickdom for preferring Mozart to Schoenberg (which is not to say I'm down on Schoenberg, but I'll get to that in a second.) I'm always ready to say to such people, "Look, I'm not necessarily asking you to give me something I can hum. But for God's sake, would you give me something I can remember?" I can't hum the opening movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, but I can't forget it either. Since 12-tone music dispenses with tonal relationships based on the harmonic series, and for that reason is bereft of almost anything the average ear would recognize as a "tune," it is therefore that much more incumbent upon the non-tonal composer to give the listener the sort of dramatic experience he or she can take away and remember. Alban Berg seems almost alone among the 12-tone crowd in having understood this.

In a way, it sort of gets us back to the old Wagner-vs.-Verdi argument: which is more important in opera, drama or song? Historian Will Durant summed it up this way: "May neither side win."

Fair enough. But 12-tone music itself arose in response to problems raised by Wagner. After Tristan und Isolde, what territory was left for chromaticism to cover, if contained within a tonal framework? Over the next thirty years, composers ranging from Debussy to Mahler wrestled with the problem in their various idiosyncratic ways. Finally Schoenberg came up with his solution, which, in the great teutonic tradition, must needs be a System. It's been said of the French that they can't do anything without a theory. Germans seem similarly addicted to systems.

At any rate, Schoenberg developed his serial technique over a period of about a decade as a way of giving the next generation of composers a workable, viable alternative to writing "in keys." And it seemed to answer the questions adequately enough: it was "progressive" (why do left-wing buzzwords keep working their way into a discussion of music?) in the sense that it led away from the old world and into the new--serial music was guaranteed not to sound like Beethoven or Strauss, no matter how badly you blundered--and it also seemed the logical continuation of the Austro-Germanic, romantic-chromatic tradition.

In other words, it seemed great on paper. Just like Freud. Unfortunately "seemed" is an operative word here. The quackings and squawkings of atonal composers may have sounded like music from outer space, but simply because they were following the great romantic-chromatic tradition, it could have been argued that it was they, and not the Stravinskys of the world who sought to save tonality by pumping new life into it, who were the true conservatives.

But I'll leave that argument for another day.

The 12-tone system did give the world some memorable music (although not very much.) I can think of only one 12-tone piece that I have listened to over and over, with pleasure, for years: Alban Berg's Violin Concerto. And anyone who knows this piece also knows that it bestrides the two worlds of tonal and non-. Its opening notes are those of the strings of an open violin. In its second movement it quotes a Bach chorale, note-for-note. It waltzes. It thrashes around in turbulent 20th-century waters, but also looks tenderly backward.

In other words, it's a great work of drama.

I've listened to tons of Schoenberg. I used to have an album of his complete piano music, played by Maurizio Pollini, which I wish I still had. Not because I loved it, but because I liked to listen to it now and then just to be hearing something different. The one Schoenberg piece that ever came close to gaining my affection was his Piano Concerto, and for what serialists would say was the wrong reason. Schoenberg has been called a "revolutionary conservative," and admitted himself that nostalgia for tonality haunted him every day of his life. Such nostalgia is on display in the Piano Concerto. After listening to it, I wrote to my pianist friend Charles Berigan that "except for having no key signature, it could be Brahms." Charlie agreed.

I have also listened to Webern. Boulez. Kirschner. Webern exploits certain timbres that prick up your ear, but is that music, or is it just "I hear an interesting sound?" Boulez absolutely puts me to sleep. I bought a copy of Pli selon Pli when I was about 23, and over the next two decades tried repeatedly to listen to it. I could never get past side one without dozing. I'm sure there's some professor of composition at the Curtis Institute who positively yanks his crank when he hears this stuff, but to me, (and I'm afraid I speak for millions of hicks and rubes who buy concert tickets) it has the same effect as chloroform. Leon Kirschner's 1963 Piano Concerto may be a masterfully-crafted work, but every time I hear it, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. And I don't mean that as a compliment. It's so forgettable that by the time I got around to playing it for the third time, I'd forgotten what it sounded like the first and second times.

It might be added that serialism was like certain kinds of wine--it didn't travel well. My friend Berigan observed that while Schoenberg's system was probably a perfect idea for its time and place, that time and place was fin-de-siecle Vienna. You can connect a series of logical dots from Schubert to Schoenberg without leaving town. By contrast, 12-tone music had little or nothing to do with the New World experience. It didn't find particularly fertile ground in the United States, and by the end of the 20th century, American composers from John Corigliano to Aaron Jay Kernis (a conservatory classmate in the '70s of my pal Charlie, by the way) were looking in directions other than dodecaphony.

In any case, non-tonal music has had 95 years to find itself an audience (Schoenberg's earliest experiments with atonality date from 1911) and it has failed to do so, except among what Tom Lehrer once called "Ivory-covered professors in ivory-covered halls." Jay, I think if anyone out there is still arguing spiritedly in favor of serialism, and likely to condemn me as a boob and a moron for these comments, I'd like to ask you a favor: sound the buzzer. Because I think this particular game is now in overtime.

And if you'll excuse me, I'm off now to re-experience a true 20th-century masterwork in a recording that I added to my collection just this week: Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony.

Somehow, I think Lennie would approve that choice. Don't you?

See ya later,

Kelley

Gran' Dio! A Spaghetti Dilemma!

Yes, I know Italians don't really say "Gran' Dio" except in Verdi operas.

But this is truly a "Gran' Dio!" moment. And what it boils down to is: getting old sucks. I mean, it sucks the big one.

This posting is dedicated to my childhood pal, Jim Provenza, who turns 51 next month. I turned 50 last October. Jim and I live about 600 miles apart, but each of us managed to make it to the other's 50th birthday party.

Jim suffers from a condition of the esophagus that makes him subject to killer heartburn. He has to take medication for it. I forgot to ask him if it had put a crimp in his eating habits, e.g. whether there are now things he can no longer eat at all. Jim's family roots are in Sicily, and he's been enjoying Italian food all his life. (As a side-note, Jim's wife Donna's family roots are also in Sicily--their children can boast of being fairly undiluted Italian-Americans.)

Be that as it may, I recently made a horrifying discovery that puts Jim and me in something of the same rowboat.

I can no longer eat pizza in the evening. (sigh.)

Once was a time, and it doesn't seem that long ago either, when my pals and I would wrap up a Friday-night bull session with a cruise across town to Filippi's, home of Chula Vista's best pizza. We'd tell them to lay on the toppings, dig into it with gusto, wash it down with beer or cold duck, then go home and sleep like babies.

Not any more. At least not me. Not long ago my wife and I ordered pizza delivery. I ate one slice, just one solitary slice. I suffered the tortures of the damned all night long. Heartburn from hell. I must have made three trips to the bathroom to chomp down more Rolaids.

I asked my friend Brett, who's a health-and-fitness expert, what might be going on.

"It's the tomato sauce," he announced, his tone brooking no appeals for clemency.

He was right. I can no longer eat anything with red sauce on it without suffering dire consequences. It's not just pizza, either: spaghetti, too, (another of my favorites) is on the enemies list, as are eggplant parmesan, meatball sandwiches or anything else that might come resplendant with Ragu, now for me something of a suicide substance.

I suppose I could go to the drug store and get something that would enable me to eat these foods without suffering. But somehow I just don't want to--if I can't eat pepperoni-mushroom-and-sausage on my own terms, if I have to ameliorate my meal with special medicine that enables me to enjoy it, well, dammit, that's...giving in to old age, that's what it is!

I'd just as soon do without.

My wife and I were travelling recently, and decided to order a pizza one evening. But we had to scour the take-out menus until we found a place that served so-called "European" pizza: it came with a white sauce on it rather than a red one. Cheese, something green (spinach perhaps?) big chunks of roasted garlic. Nothing red. Oh, it was tasty enough; I can't complain about that. I felt fine all night after eating it, too.

But felt somewhat gloomy the next morning, reflecting upon the fact that this appears to be the way it's going to be, from now on. Used to be, whenever I'd catch The Godfather on cable TV, and it got to the scene were Al Pacino is being shown how to make a batch of spaghetti for 15 guys, I'd suddenly get a craving for a good, tomato-soaked plateful of that yummy stuff, accompanied by a lovely cheap chianti. Now that craving will have to stay a craving. Oh, I can go chew on a hunk of pepperoni mashed between two slices of garlic bread, I suppose, but somehow it just ain't the same.

This is life after 50, everybody, and there's nothing for it but to adjust.

So I'll adjust. Last night we decided to have spaghetti, damn the torpedoes but leave the Paul Newman's in the cupboard. Since I do most of the cooking at our house, (Valerie's the business manager, I'm the cook, grocery-shopper and sommellier) it was up to me to figure out some way around this terrible, life-crippling dilemma.

I recently discovered a talent which it took me more than half a lifetime to uncover in myself: I'm not bad at making up recipes. I can rustle around in the fridge, pull out some leftovers and make you the best-tasting casserole or Bisquik-pie you ever tasted. With sauce (not red.) I have, in recent months, come up with two or three recipes of my own that I have gone so far as to write down. We're thinking of buying a bed-and-breakfast, Valerie and I, and since it seems fated that I'm going to be in charge of the galley, it behooves me to have a decent collection of dishes I can dish up to our guests.

So, I'm going to conclude this posting, for the first time since I began to blog, with a recipe. Cut-and-paste it, and bon appetit.

KELLEY'S NO-HEARTBURN (because not red) SPAGHETTI SAUCE:

Ingredients:

1 pound ground beef
1 cup diced onions
1 cup sliced mushrooms
1 package frozen spinach
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1 1/2 cups cream
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup marsala wine
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. dry mustard

Brown the ground beef, adding onions, mushrooms and spinach as the meat browns. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the mixture. Once the mixture is well-cooked, add the marsala wine. Season with salt, pepper and garlic powder to taste.

Mix the cream and sour cream in a separate bowl, season with dry mustard, add parmesan cheese, then stir into pan with the other ingredients. Cover and let simmer for ten minutes.

Dump over spaghetti pasta (preferably laced with olive oil) and dig in.

Requiem for Cyclops

There's a pale romance to the watchmaker God
Of Descartes and Paley; He drafted and installed
Us in the Apparatus. He loved to tinker;
But having perfected what he had to do,
Stood off shrouded in his loneliness.
--Robert Lowell


And so we continue the discussion of "the random crapshoot" vs. "Everything happens for a reason."

A few postings ago, I was discussing this thorny (and most likely, never-to-be-resolved) philosophic question with regard to the unexpected (and unlikely) reunion after 17 years of myself and the woman who recently became my second wife.

I began my earlier posting ("Omphalos Eve") with a reference to my old friend and former roommate, Jeff Bertolucci, who many years ago spoke out as a firm advocate of "the random crapshoot:" nothing, in this view, ever happens for a reason. It just happens. The random crapshoot seems to lead to one of three assumptions: (1) God is not responsible for what happens in this world or (2) God does not intervene directly in what happens in this world, or (3) There is no God, period.

Of course the random crapshoot addresses the age-old question that has been a thorn in the side of theologians for all those old ages: Why does evil exist in the world? Why do bad things happen to the innocent? The firmest of religious believers wrestle with this question. After 9/11, at the televised prayer service at Washington Cathedral for the victims of the terrorist attacks of that day, Billy Graham admitted that, although he had been preaching for 60 years or so, when people asked him that question, Why Do Evil And Suffering Exist In The World, even he didn't have an easy, facile answer.

Which brings us to the story of Cyclops the kitten: www.livescience.com/animalworld/060111_ap_cyclops_cat.html

Bloggers and e-mail swappers were going nuts this week over the story of Cyclops, the one-eyed kitten. Born December 28 in Portland, Oregon, the kitten was the subject of a series of bizarre digital photos posted on the Internet by his owner. They showed the tiny animal, who indeed appeared to have only one eye, wide-open in the middle of his head, like a blank, staring marble. He had no nose, just that one large eye. A lot of people assumed it was a hoax. Snopes.com, the website that debunks "urban legends," was immediately alerted.

But it turned out not to be a hoax after all. Little Cy, as he was called during his 24 hours of life (he died the day after he was born) did indeed have a rare condition whose gnarly name I'm not going to bother going and looking up again. Its result is one eye, usually where the nose is supposed to be. The condition has occurred, though very rarely, in other animals besides cats. (News reports didn't say whether there had ever been a human case reported.)

Cy's owner was a model of compassion. Rather than simply let the strange-looking little creature die, she tried to save him. She nursed him all night, feeding him milk with a tiny syringe, but to no avail. As so often happens with little ones severely deformed at birth, he died quickly.

But Cy's death presents us, in microcosm, with the very question we have seen addressed so many times in macrocosm. 1755: an earthquake in Lisbon, on a Sunday morning when everyone's in church, no less, kills over 50,000 people. Voltaire writes a satiric poem, using the occasion to take the optimists of the world to the woodshed. 1939-45: The Holocaust. Boxing Day, 2004: a tsunami in south Asia kills more than 100,000 people. Just last month: an earthquake in Indonesia decimates a village, even as its Muslim inhabitants are crying out "God is great!" (Jeff didn't let me miss that one.)

And now, the death of a one-eyed kitten. Why was Cyclops born a "cyclops?" Why was the little guy born with just one eye in the middle of his head, and doomed to die in 24 hours? Why are human babies sometimes born conjoined, or blind, or deaf, or missing limbs, or with Down's Syndrome? Why do chromosomes go crazy? People go crazy for all kinds of obvious reasons. The space shuttle broke up on re-entry, killing its entire crew, because of poor maintenance. But why does nature itself sometimes seem to jump the tracks?

Whatever the ultimate answer, the "watchmaker God" of Descartes and Paley (and Newton) was debunked long ago. The universe is a place of ellipses, not circles. Geometry is a manmade art: There are no squares or rectangles in nature. My father was born with a jaw too narrow to accommodate all of his teeth--his teeth came in crooked. I inherited this from him: my teeth also came in crooked. Nature did her duty, but perfection wasn't on her palette. I was also born missing one pectoral muscle. I'm an approximation, not an ideal. Most of us are. You might look at Pamela Anderson and think she's perfection, but just wait until she opens her mouth and starts blathering about the civil rights of chickens. Something missing there, obviously.

So poor little Cyclops was the victim of a universe that sometimes (actually, often) does things cockeyed. Sometimes a little cockeyed, (me) sometimes a lot cockeyed (a Sunday morning earthquake in a major urban center.) Of course when Voltaire wrote his poem, no one knew anything about plate tectonics. Now San Francisco lives in fear, not of a divine malign, but of the next fart geology might choose to issue forth.

Which raises yet another question: has science managed to make the universe any less frightening a place? The answer, up to a point, would be yes. Medical science in particular has made us a bit more comfortable in the cold cosmos. Once upon a time, and it wasn't that long ago, the word "Cancer" meant the same thing as "Death sentence." Now certain types of cancer are highly curable. We're living longer (though not necessarily enjoying it more.) Are we smarter? Some argue that our species is every bit as ghost-and-demon haunted as it was when our ancestors were painting cave walls and thought pregnancy was caused by the north wind. Freud was a devoted atheist, but his version of Blake's nether sky was as dark as any vision of St. Augustine: our inner lives are nothing but a swamp of fears and anxieties. Psychoanalysis is passing out of fashion, and after a century has cast very little light on anything (which may have contributed to its passing out of fashion.)

What we ultimately have to ask ourselves in the ongoing debate about the random crapshoot vs. everything-happens-for-a-reason, most lately on display in the form of the argument over intelligent design in nature (or its lack) is this: do we want to know? Atheists and believers have this in common: both think they have the answer. Christians believe that there is a God, and that nature has a purpose; atheists are just as convinced that there isn't a God, and that if nature appears to have a purpose, well, that can be explained away with Darwin and neuroscience. But if either side ever actually won this debate, what would the result be? In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, (whose progenitor, author Arthur C. Clarke, is a confirmed atheist, and who called the film, at the time it was made, the first multi-million dollar religious movie) scientists dig up an artifact on the moon which represents the first concrete, unassailable evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe than earth. Right away, it becomes a hush-hush affair. The natural affinity that government bureaucracies have for secrecy notwithstanding, the technocrats of 2001 recognized the tremendous potential for "cultural shock and disorientation" in the words of one of the film's characters, inherent in the discovery.

In other words, do we really want these big questions answered? What kind of value would life continue to have if God's existence, or non-existence, and the argument from design, or its opposite, were ever established in indisputable fact? In his silly song Imagine, the late John Lennon tells us that a world consisting solely of illusion-shorn atheists would be a happy playpen of brotherhood. Without God, we would have no alternative but to love, love love one another. Yeah, right. And Josif Stalin was the Best Friend of Soviet Children. Religion doesn't have a good track record for promoting global brotherhood either, but it's naive to think the atheists would run things any better. They'd just come up with different reasons for cracking your skull.

Literally. In North Korea people caught with Bibles have been known to have their heads crushed by steamrollers. Imagine that, John. In 1949 Max Erlich published a novel entitled (appropriately enough for our purposes here) The Big Eye. An astronomer discovers an asteroid on a collision course with earth. This baby is so humongous it's going to wipe us all out. We're toast. In a plot twist intended to force the point home, when the asteroid gets close enough to be viewed through the Palomar telescope, it turns out to resemble...a gigantic eye. The eye of death, staring straight at us! The astronomer puts out the word that this celestial object is going to destroy the earth in the hope that certain doom will force mankind to come together in the kind of existential group-hug that Lennon dreamed of in his ode to a world of atheistic socialism. Guess what? The opposite happens: instead of a brotherhood of death, The approach of The Big Eye touches off an orgy of riot, pillage, robbery, rape and general hell-raising.

So why are we still all here? Seems Erlich's astronomer lied to the world in the (misguided) name of peace--The Big Eye turned out to be a near-miss, not a hit. Why no other astronomer on the face of the entire planet thought to double-check his mathematics is never explained.

Nevertheless, I imagine that, for the forseeable future, the universe will go right on being capricious and appearing to pay us no never mind. The watchmaker god, shrouded in his loneliness, will seem as ineffectual, (perhaps indeed as helpless) as the ghosts shown to Scrooge on Christmas Eve, trying to intervene in human affairs for good, but unable to. Believers, whistling in the dark, will go on saying with a shrug that the ways of the Lord are mysterious. My friend Jeff will go right on touting the random crapshoot, and e-mailing me whenever some particularly grotesque example of nature-run-amuck flattens or drowns a village.

But, as Arthur C. Clarke himself said of the tale told in 2001, "the truth will be far stranger." Cyclops, rest in peace.

Cultural Crisis at Checkstand 8

Question of the day (or week, or month)...

Would somebody tell me why in the name of Zsa Zsa Gabor I'm supposed to give a rat's patoot about Paris Hilton?

There I was, standing in line at Albertson's (again) and saying to myself (again) that if I see one more picture of Jennifer Aniston or Britney Spears I'm going to toss my lunch.

And then I turn around and see, on the cover of some weekly fish-wrapper, the one that trumps them all, a pasty-faced, wasted little blonde who just happens to be named after a hotel. (Okay, it's vice-versa. Who cares??!!)

Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears make me sick to my stomach, both of them. But as sick-making as they are, at least each of them has some trade she has plied in order to get the public's attention. Britney, as I understand it, makes records (although you couldn't pay me to listen to one of them.) Jennifer...what, used to be engaged to Brad Pitt? Something like that. No, seriously, I understand she makes movies (ditto, you couldn't pay me to watch one of them) and she used to be in some TV show called Friends in which (as I understand it--I never watched Friends either) a group of young "friends" occupied a New York apartment that none of them could conceivably have ever actually afforded.

So Jennifer has some claim, anyway, to being an "actress," while Britney has some claim (however tenuous) to being a "recording artist." That's something, at least. But Paris Hilton? What has she ever done that anyone should care about, other than inheriting money? Donald Trump is famous for being rich, but at least there's some story there: he became rich largely through his own efforts. If he had just waited around for his father to die and gotten rich that way, would he be hosting a reality show? I don't think so.

Yes, we Americans have always been fascinated by wealth and the wealthy. Understandably: with the founding of the republic, we became the first society in the western world in which it was theoretically possible for nearly anyone to become rich, provided they were lucky enough, smart enough, unscrupulous enough or whatever. Ours is a fluid society in which material gain is king: of course we're fascinated by wealth.

But do we have to be fascinated by it even when it's boring?

Paris Hilton illustrates a creepy phenomenon which has come about just within the last generation: she's "famous for being famous." What is it with this? I don't know, but I do understand, now, why I mentioned Zsa Zsa Gabor at the beginning of this screed. In all of my experience, she's the closest example I can think of, from an earlier generation, of the kind of phenomenon Paris Hilton is for ours. Yeah, she appeared in a few films, but her sister Eva did a lot more in front of the cameras than she did (the immortal Green Acres comes to mind.) Zsa Zsa was famous simply for being one of the "Gabor sisters," those flamboyant imports from the old world. She was last seen around 1990, belting a traffic cop.

I'll bet if he were still alive, Andy Warhol would have a field day with this "famous for being famous" stuff. It's one thing to hoot and jeer at people whose own lives are so vapid that they live vicariously through those of celebrities, whether by watching soap operas or grabbing Hollywood Globe at the grocery store or just cruising the web sites of the glamorous.

It's another thing altogether to realize we've become so overwhelmed with the cheap glitz pouring at us from all directions that all someone has to do to get our attention is have a lot of money, and then maybe have word leak out that they posed in the nude somewhere.

Come on, folks. there are plenty of famous people out there who have darn good reason for being famous, and are much more worthy of attention than a spoiled heiress with no discernible talent for anything except getting snapped by paparazzi (and not much for that.) Case in point: I openly admit that Reese Witherspoon is one of my guilty pleasures. I haven't seen the new film in which she plays June Carter Cash yet, but she was irresistible in Sweet Home Alabama, even if it didn't have much of a script (ten minutes into the film I knew how it was going to end.) OK, so I'm old enough to be her father. Who cares? Reese is talented, beautiful and even (yes!) interesting. I read an interview with her in Reader's Digest a few months ago and she seemed like a very lovely, gracious person in conversation. She gives this old geezer some hope for the under-35 crowd, anyway.

But can there really be anyone out there for whom Paris Hilton is a guilty pleasure? Or for that matter, any kind of pleasure? Or is it just that those very paparazzi who won't stop snapping pictures of her, and the trashy tabloids that won't stop printing them, have foisted her off on us, in much the same way the television networks decide, for all of us, what's news and what isn't? If so, it's a case of marketing run amuck, a monster feeding on itself.

I have an idea. If the only thing Paris Hilton has to do to become a celebrity is inherit money, maybe we could start a new reality show: Secrets Of The World's Most Boring People. Contestants would compete to see who could come up with the most idiotic reason why they should be on the cover of People magazine.

And at the end of the show, there would be this disclaimer: "If you actually watched this, we recommend that you go stand in front of a mirror, take a good, deep breath and ask yourself WHY."

Call 911--And Tell 'Em To Bring Earplugs!

Now, don't get me wrong: in the age of rap and hip-hop, it does my heart good to see a group of teenagers who want to play rock n' roll.

Or whatever it is they call that racket.

And don't start telling me I've become my father, one of those hopeless Dinah Shore dinosaurs over whom we rolled our eyeballs in such paroxyms of despair at their response to our music. Remember? We would play the Beatles and the Stones, and they would roll their eyeballs while hastening to crank up Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw on the old General Electric console to try and drown our music out.

I'm not one of them. Honestly. Hey, I grew up listening to rock. I know what good rock n' roll sounds like.

The stuff coming out of my across-the-street neighbor's garage ain't it.

Yes, we have a garage band in our neighborhood. Oh lucky us. From what I'm able to see (and hear) from over here across the street, they have a guitar, a bass, a set of drums and about 12,000 amplifiers. They don't have a vocalist (yet), nor do they have a keyboard player. Nor do they have any talent. The only thing they have in abundance is volume.

These three kids get together three or four times a week, stand around making weird noises at the level of nuclear testing for about two hours, and then disperse. I've been listening to them for over two months now, and I'll give their lead guitarist credit for one thing: he's trying to learn how to play a song. So far I've heard "Happy Birthday" and something that sounded like Beethoven's "Fuer Elise" (no kidding!) But so far, as a "band," they have yet to play anything that sounds even remotely like a song. The noise comes in bursts, and seldom do the three of them even sound like they're trying to do the same thing. It's like someone just says "Go!" and everyone tries to make as much noise as they can for ten or fifteen seconds. Then silence, until the next barrage. The drummer truly marches to a different drummer--I can only charitably assume he's listening on headphones to someone other than his buddies. Good for him, it shows some taste anyway.

How bad are these kids? Most bands get better with more practice. The more these guys practice, the worse they get. But don't take my word for it, check with their public: when I was a kid, any time a garage band started playing, no matter how bad they may have been, a small crowd of neighborhood kids would gather around to stand in the driveway and listen, especially if it was during vacation time. We just came off Christmas vacation, (no, I'm not going to call it "Winter break," and you can't make me, you can't make me) and although these guys duly got together for their thrice-weekly noisefests right through the break, and although our neighborhood is located right between two schools, which presumably would assure plenty of kids to come around and gawk, I have yet to see one kid standing in that driveway listening. To quote one of my favorite showbiz legends, Daffy Duck, these guys couldn't draw flies if they were covered with sorghum.

I don't know what they call themselves, but Coldplay they definitely are not. They're much colder than that. Just for shorthand purposes, so I'll have something to alert my wife with when it's time to slam the windows shut, get out the headphones and hide behind something--anything--more euphonious, I've taken to calling them "The Electric Prunes." Remember The Electric Prunes? Well, if you don't, or you're too young, they were a one-hit phenom of the in-your-face (read: druggy) nineteen-sixties. Their only hit record that I ever heard was I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, a 1966 earsplitter that prompted any number of station-wagon-backseat panel discussions as to just what that hook line actually said. Was it "I had too much to dream last night?" Or was it "I had too much to DRINK last night?" I took part in at least one of these across-town debates in the back seat of the old Plymouth. (My poor mother.)

The original Prunes no doubt thought they were pulling the public's leg with that moniker, and indeed the mid-sixties were an age of aggressively off-the-wall band names (sure, with all that LSD flowing around.) One also recalls (hopefully not often) such groups as The Fugs, Harper's Bizarre, Strawberry Alarm Clock and Peanut Butter Conspiracy. But these neighborhood lads really deserve the name--anyone having their picture taken with this group playing in the background would be more likely to say "prunes" than "cheese," believe me.

Come to think of it, "cheesy" does come to mind.

Again, I don't want to discourage these kids. I'm glad they're spending their time with guitars and not methamphetamine. And atrocious as they are, forming a band is a more constructive activity for a bunch of 15 year-olds than sitting slack-jawed in front of a video monitor, playing games called Grand Theft Gang Rape IV and Captain Genocide.

But do yourselves and everybody else a favor, guys: go take some guitar lessons. And when you're practicing, leave the amplifiers off. Believe me, you're not ready for the Greek Theater yet. You're not even ready for J Street.

And you, the drummer: may I recommend an empty Quaker Oats box, just for now?

Who Do You Think You Are, The Kaiser?

There is a spot on Interstate 805, as you're driving south from San Diego's Mission Valley toward the south bay cities of Chula Vista and National City, where you come around a bend and the first thing that comes into view is the blue cupola dome that stands over Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery.

For a long time, starting in the late 1970s, whenever I would drive that stretch of 805 southbound, and the blue cupola of Holy Cross would come into view, a passage from the funeral march of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony would immediately make itself heard inside my head.

That was because a short time earlier, on July 1, 1977 to be exact, I had taken part in the funeral, at Holy Cross, of Randy Bendel, who had been my best friend in high school. Every time I came around that bend in the freeway, I'd be smacked in the face with the realization that my closest school friend was now buried up there, somewhere beyond that blue cupola dome.

Most of Randy's family has joined him there now. His brother Fred died in 1990 (of cirrhosis, at age 38) and was interred at Holy Cross; his mother Barbara joined the group following her death from cancer in 1997, and in March, 2004 his father Ron Bendel went into Holy Cross after his death, also from cancer.

But Randy went ahead of them, aged 22. He was born on April 30, 1955 and died 22 years and two months later, in a freak traffic accident in Salmon, Idaho.

Actually, Randy wasn't the first among his generation of the Bendel family to go. Tragically, his younger sister Robin had died several years ahead of him, of a brain hemorrhage. She was only 12 or 13 at the time, I think. Clearly this family had bad karma. But I only heard about Robin's death secondhand. It happened about ten months before Randy and I first met.

We met in (or actually, after) 10th grade English class at Chula Vista High School. It was the fall of 1970. What caught my attention about Randy was his babbling. I'm not kidding: he was a virtuoso babbler. But there was something precocious about his babbling: it was curiously in tune with popular culture and current events. If you're old enough to remember New York Mayor John Lindsay, you might remember that one of the running jokes about Lindsay was how often he was "out of town." This was actually the first thing I heard Randy babble: walking through the crowded high school corridor between classes, I heard him mutter something to the effect that "Mayor Lindsay was out of town." That a 15 year-old kid in southern California would be familiar with jokes about the mayor of New York struck me as...well, precocious. And I was only 15 myself at the time.

A mutual friend once attempted to explain how Randy's mind worked. "He sees and hears things on TV and in the movies. Then later, when his mind goes blank, a little switch in his head gets thrown, and he plays them back." This might make Randy sound a tad autistic, and it was meant with a touch of malice, but there was a bit of truth to it. Randy did not like to read, but he was a passionate moviegoer and watched as much television as anyone in our generation (plenty.) And he did have a gift for absorbing and repeating things that he had heard and seen.

And embellishing on them. In short, Randy Bendel was the funniest guy I ever knew.

He needed to be. Because the home he lived in was utter chaos.

Ron was actually Randy’s stepfather. His biological father, as I recall, was a truck driver by the name of Hutchinson. Randy’s mother was some kind of hot little number when she was young. All the truckers and sailors wanted to get into her pants.

This had not quite spent itself when Randy and I became friends, in 1970-71, as high school sophomores. Barbara was about 40 then, still quite attractive, and juggling the oddest domestic situation I ever saw. She was married to Ray Ferguson, but Ron Bendel, her ex-husband (later they remarried) refused to move out of the house, claiming it was “his” house. She let him stay because he paid the bills. Ron and Ray were both sailors at that time, and strangely, got along fine. Ray was cool about the whole thing, but Ron was neither cool nor especially bright, and I can remember listening in on some screaming sessions between Ron and Barbara, with him shouting, “I LOVE you, dammit!” (which Randy and I, in private, mercilessly ridiculed. I had a crush on Barbara myself in those days, and was jealous to the point where I wouldn’t let his mechanic father work on my car even when he offered to.)

Amidst all this domestic Sturm und Drang, Barbara remained true to her working-class roots and would often frequent The Oasis, a country-western bar which in those days stood at Third Avenue and Naples Street in Chula Vista, on Friday and Saturday nights. That of course meant more sailors coming around. The house was hot with sex in the early 1970s. Sex, frustration and rage. At age 16, Randy and I were witnesses to it all, and protected ourselves in the best way we knew: savage mockery. The hysterical doings of these sex-crazed adults were nothing but grist for our comedy mill. The Bendels, and the neighbors next door. Ha-ha-ha. How ridiculous they all were. And we laughed, and drew cartoons, and yukked it up.

But I think, somehow, even then, I had some sense of how much pain underlay Randy’s jolly mockery of them all. He had lost his beloved little sister when he was not quite 15, and then seen his home devolve into a grotesque hillbilly sex comedy. Some adolescents would have dealt with it via hostility, withdrawal, drugs. Randy’s defense was ridicule, and as he and I were joined at the hip so to speak, the very best of friends, so was mine. We were quite the pair of teenagers, Randy and me. We spared no one. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was sacred to us. Our mockery of those around us became cult-like, a secret joke-book of handshakes and giggles understood only by Randy and me. “No, I never quite penetrated your Brűderschaft, you two,” my "other" best high school friend, Charlie Berigan, said to me in 1978.

It was true. No one ever quite did.

Spent passion. Randy used to tell me of how horribly fat his maternal grandmother was. (“One of her legs was as big around as your waist,” he said.) In her later years, the once-hot Barbara Bendel—I think her maiden name was Forte—went that same way. Indolence, plus a heavy reliance on Pepsi-Cola, caused her to expand to whale-like proportions in the years after the deaths of her two sons. Her teeth fell out. She blamed Dilantin for that. The last time I saw her, in 1994, she was unrecognizable from the “hottie” of 1972, whom Ron had once compared with Sophia Loren. She must have weighed 300 pounds by then. Her breasts were the size of couch pillows; her stringy, thinning hair was pinned close to her head, and she had no front teeth. She had borne four children and lived to see three of them die. I suppose I should not have been surprised at her appearance, and in view of what Randy had told me years earlier about her genes, I guess I wasn’t.

I did attend Ron Bendel's funeral, which was with with “full military honors.” Ron was in the U.S. Navy for 22 years, and not as an officer and a gentleman either, but as a rip-snortin,’ beer-swillin,’ bell-bottom wearin’, brain-dead sailor boy. On one arm he had a tattoo of a woman having sex with a black panther. (Randy once told me that, in addition, his father also had a fly tattooed on the tip of his penis—that was a very drunken night.) After 30 years and more, dropping in on the Bendels had long since become a habit, so I stopped by at the funeral.

It was raining, unusual for southern California. I took a moment and stopped by Randy’s grave. I hadn’t been there in over 25 years. And I saw Fred’s grave for the first time—I was in Brazil when he died. It’s just “south” of Randy’s. Randy was given a traditional burial back in ’77; his parents were both cremated, apparently so they could be interred side-by-side. I didn’t see Barbara’s grave; it was underneath the green tarmac we were all standing on, under the temporary shelter. Ron’s ashes were in a metal box with a crucifix on it, and I could see under the table the tiny white “coffin” into which they would place the ashes for interment after the service was over. There was a military honor guard; Ron had retired from the Navy in 1976 and spent the next 20 years riding around in a Wells Fargo armored car. They fired two salvos and “Taps” was played on a boombox.

I stood next to Randy's nephew Danny. When we were in high school, Randy and I, Danny was a toddler. He was only eight when Randy died, but said he did remember romping around with both of us. Danny surprised me with the news that, after finishing medical school and his residency, he had decided not to practice medicine after all, but came back to California and went into his stepfather’s business. Gus Abatzis, Debra’s husband and Danny and Mark’s stepdad for some 27 years now, was by then in some kind of construction business: when I asked Gus what he was doing these days, he said he was “building airports,” whatever that means.

Everyone was fatter than I remembered. No surprise there. I last saw Gus in 1977 and he had put on quite a bit of weight in the ensuing quarter-century. Knowing what I knew about her mother, it did not surprise me to find Debra quite plump in her 50s. Danny and Mark had both “beefed up” as well, although Mark is quite a handsome fellow at 34. Danny has a bit of a skin problem. They never did resemble each other at all, but of course they had different fathers.

I had my own problems with my own father in high school days, and spent a lot of time over at the Bendel house. Randy and I did indeed form a Bruederschaft of sorts. It was how we survived three years of shuttling back and forth between a high school atmosphere that we both found toxic, and home lives that could be turbulent. We took refuge in our "comedy cult," turning everyone around us into cartoon characters (although neither of us could draw worth a damn) and engineering our private triumph over them, and our world, through our rituals of merciless ridicule.

Of course the whole thing was aggressively, deliberately juvenile. It was our form of rebellion, our way of acknowledging that all the bromides and valedictories we were handed in school about how we were supposed to be adults now were, in fact, bullshit. The very organization and structure of high school are such that, no matter how "mature" the teachers, counselors and vice-principals tell you you're supposed to be, you are in fact still treated as a child. This was Randy's and my response: "If you're going to treat us like children, we're going to act like the most puerile children you ever saw."

It goes without saying that Randy was a gifted mimic. But his tape-recorder mind gave him a dazzling talent for what we would now call "sound bites." He could deliver a three-or-four-word imitation of someone, or something, that would invariably put me in stitches.

John Wayne: "Gee, ol' Dollar, yer the best horse a man ever had."

Stereotypical Hollywood Indian: "Hmmm. This MY land!"

"Radio Beijing:" Capitaleeestic....PEEGS!"

Stereotypical Hollywood "Mexican bandit:" "Djoo cannot kill a PRIEST! Do you want to go to HELL?"

The police dispatcher in a cheap Japanese monster flick: "Car 17! Report to Nakamura district and destroy...A MONS-TAH!"

His own father: "LOVE YOU, BARBARA! (imagine it barked, like a seal.)

My father: "Well, you got yer spics, yer wops, yer kikes, yer dagos," and so on.

As I said, nothing was sacred, and no opportunity was missed.

The star of our show was Randy's next-door neighbor, Armand Silva. Armand was about three years older than either of us. He had dropped out of high school and spent most of his time sitting in his father's basement reading science books from the public library. He refused to get a job, just stayed in the basement all the time. Later he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the last time I saw him (2004) he was a homeless person living on the street. But we knew none of that as kids. To us, Armand was a highly-eccentric and sometimes disagreeable character whose appearance invited caricature. He was very skinny, had long, shaggy black hair and a huge, and I mean huge, nose. Randy and I quickly turned Armand into a cartoon character, essentially a gigantic nose poking out from under a haystack. Then we put gigantic sneakers on him and taught him to march. Armand loved classical music, so to symbolize that, we gave him a violin and drew him waving it over his head as he marched down the street. "Marching Armand" was our standard: we drew him everywhere, the way some kids write "fuck" on walls.

In fact, Marching Armand was so ubiquitous, he almost became Randy's and my "brand." Around school people associated "Armand" with Randy and me. One afternoon when I left class early, I happened to walk by Randy's sixth-period drama class, taught in those days by a man named Bill Virchis, who later became a prominent figure in South Bay theater arts. Mr. Virchis was very cool. The door was open; I poked my head in and asked if I might sit in on the class. "Sure! Come on in!" Mr. Virchis said.

I swear, as I went to take a seat near Randy, I heard someone say, "Oh, no, Here comes the other one."

We created other cartoon characters as well, Randy and I, based on the rest of Armand's wacky Portuguese-American family, and his in-laws too.

We had special fun with Armand's Montana-redneck stepfather Bill, whom Armand despised and behind his back had already nicknamed "Idiot," and Armand's mother Anna. Bill was a loser who worked at K Mart when he wasn't fighting with his stepsons or defending the U.S. war effort in Vietnam; Anna was a mousy character who also happened to have the figure of a sack of oatmeal. Bill hated Armand as well; we quickly drew Bill as a huge, crew-cut wearing, superpatriotic screaming head with a tongue about six feet long. We loved to draw him screaming at Armand, who in turn would simply hold up a sign reading, "Idiot." Hysterical to us.

Improvisation was always in the air. One day Randy and I were standing in the kitchen and Randy happened to reach into the cupboard and pull out a sack of marshmallows.

Holding it up, he went into his "Anna" imitation voice:, "Oh Beel, look. It is just like your Anna. Soft and shapeless." We collapsed in hysterics.

We were walking down the street one day. A helicopter went by overhead. "Hmm. Bill's patrollin' for gooks, " Randy said. (In our cult-world, any and all of Bill's enemies, real or imagined, were "the gooks.") Hysterics again.

One of the most endearing things about Randy was that if something was funny, it was funny, and it didn't matter if he were on the losing end of it. He would laugh at himself just as cheerfully as he would at anyone else.

Randy was vain about his body. At 18 he was solid muscle, hardly any fat on him. One day I caught him shirtless, preening in front of a mirror. Embarrassed, he invited me to join in the fun. "Look at that magnificent body!" he said.

"Yeah, Reptilicus," I replied.

Ever the film buff, Randy of course remembered the cheesy 1961 sci-fi flick about the prehistoric lizard run amuck.

"Reptilicus!" He shrieked with delight. "Reptilicus!" All the rest of that afternoon, it was "Reptilicus" this and "Reptilicus" that. He loved it.

Probably the most detested teacher in our school was Mr. Hummelman, a big, beefy guy who wore a crewcut and who had obviously been off in the john or having a smoke when God was distributing "sense of humor." Randy had him for 11th grade social studies. One day he came around with a story that he couldn't wait to tell me.

"We had a test today, and Mr. Hummelman wanted to make sure nobody could cheat," Randy said. "So he tells us, 'Keep your hands on top of your desks at all times. I want to see what your hands are doing.' So I mutter under my breath, 'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it away from thee.' And Mr. Hummelman says, 'What was that, Bendel?' And I said, 'Nothin', Mr. Hummelman, just quotin' the Bible.' And then Hummelman says, 'I wasn't aware that you were capable of quoting anything!'

And he laughed. Funny was funny, even if it was at Randy's expense.

Randy even managed to be funny when he was angry. It was just the way things came out of his mouth. He got into a fight with his brother Fred one day. I don't even remember what it was about, but suddenly they were throwing punches at each other. Now, most other 16 year-olds would have shouted something in rage like "You asshole!" or "Fuck you!"

Randy's tape-recorder mind was capable of better stuff. Throwing a punch at Fred, he said contemptuously, "Who do you think you are, the Kaiser?"

They were fighting, but I started laughing. I couldn't help it.

After we graduated from high school, Randy and I gradually drifted apart. I started college locally, while he went off to Phoenix to study electronics. He only stayed a year and then moved back home, but then he started keeping company with a different crowd, drug users. His parents had moved from a house to an apartment, and while he still lived at home, he had even less privacy than before. We saw less and less of each other as he chose to spend his time with his druggy new friends. He enrolled at the local junior college, but rarely attended class. He got a part-time job at Sears through his father's connections, only to get laid off on Christmas Eve, 1976. He was 21 now, and going nowhere.

Nowhere was precisely where he ended up. Eager as ever to get away from the situation at home, he informed me early in the summer of 1977 that he was going to go off to Idaho for the summer with his group of new friends. One of them knew someone who had an RV park near the Idaho town of Salmon. They would all spend the summer working there, he said, and then in the fall he would return and transfer to San Diego State to continue his efforts at becoming an electrical engineer.

On the night of June 28, 1977 Randy and his new friends, now up in Idaho, decided to go swimming. I heard later that some PCP, ("angel dust") had been consumed. But on the way back to town, the young woman driving the car in which Randy and his friend Bill were passengers, somehow lost control of the vehicle. It went off the road, flipped over and landed upside-down in the Salmon River. Trapped in the back seat, Randy drowned in three feet of water. The girl managed to get out of the car, but Bill died too.

They held a rosary for Randy and I was asked to deliver a short eulogy. The next day I was one of his pallbearers.

I no longer hear Beethoven in my head when I drive past Holy Cross on I-805. But I do still hear the stupid songs Randy and I wrote together about people we knew, and every now and then I'll start doodling and find myself drawing "Marching Armand." Don't ask. But we laughed. Oh, boy did we laugh. And sometimes, while shaving or emptying the trash or starting the car, I'll find myself making up a new joke in the old tradition, reflecting wryly that I have now been at this longer than Randy was alive. He's been dead for coming up on 30 years now, and I sometimes feel like he just left the room, and that I can expect him back any minute.

And I know that if he did return, he'd enter laughing. Soon we would both be in stitches.

And no one would get the jokes but us.