SUV love affair no more?

Apparently Sport Utility Vehicles sales aren't doing so well and I couldn't be happier about it. In today's Washington Post:

Gas prices have fallen in recent weeks, but U.S. consumers are still avoiding big sport-utility vehicles in favor of passenger cars, forcing domestic automakers to slow truck production...

Industry-wide, passenger cars gained market share from light trucks in November. Toyota's U.S. sales rose 13 percent, and Honda reported an 8 percent increase. Nissan Motor Co. trailed its larger Japanese rivals in the United States; sales fell 4 percent.

The sales spiral of the Ford Explorer demonstrates consumers' shifting tastes. It was once one of the nation's most popular vehicles, but Ford sold fewer than 12,000 last month, a 52 percent drop from November 2004.

At the height of the SUV boom in 2002, Ford routinely sold 25,000 to 40,000 Explorers a
month.

Ford is looking to offset the weakness in trucks with more sales of passenger cars, including the Ford Fusion and Lincoln Zephyr.

GM also felt the SUV crunch. In November, sales of the Chevrolet Suburban and Cadillac Escalade dropped 46 percent and 48 percent, respectively, from November 2004.

Analysts have blamed slumping SUV demand in part for the automakers' deteriorating financial condition. The automakers blame high labor costs, including health care costs and payments for pensions, and inflexible union rules.

U.S. consumers remain skittish about buying sport-utility vehicles after the fuel-price volatility during this year's hurricane season, said Robert H. Schnorbus, chief economist at J.D. Power and Associates. "Even though prices are down from their peaks, I think there is still a big concern or big issue in buyers' minds," he said.

It was really only a question of when such ridiculousness would finally come to an end. $3 a gallon gasoline is something Americans are going to have to get used to.

Ah Shakespeare

Back when I was working on the Fascination, the Carnival Cruise ship I was on from January through May of this year, I made a pretty incredible find in a book shop in Key West, Florida (our every Tuesday morning stop on the way from Miami to Cozumel): a hard cover edition of the complete works of Shakespear (including the sonnets) for $3.50 American! (I later also found in the same place a hard cover edition of the complete writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson for a whole $5.) Since then I've been reading a lot of the Bard. So much great writing. Here's a quote from Richard III:

"But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture, tell them that God bids us do good for evil. And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odds and ends stol'n forth of Holy writ and seem a saint when most I play the devil."

By no means do I mean to imply anything self-descriptive by me posting this, but what a perfect description of the pure (though apparently historically inaccurate; the demonizing of Richard being a production of the later Tudor kings that succeeded the York dynasty that Richard had been the last King of England from; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_of_England) evil that Shakespeare charaacterized so brilliantly in that play. Ian McKellen's (of Lord of the Rings Gandalf fame) film version is well worth seeing if you're at all interested.

Something to say

Yet again I find myself having written little on here of late, though that's mostly the result of being busy working on other writings; specifically an article for a foreigners magazine here in Taiwan who's deadline for submissions was yesterday. I got it in; we'll see what they think. They're looking for "New Journalism" kind of pieces, a la Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and this was my first extended, at least somewhat serious, experiment in that kind of style. Who knows, maybe they'll even publish it.

Otherwise, I've been working at my new job for three weeks now. Washington America Elementary School is the name and I'm teaching Reading and Social Studies to Grades 1 and 2, and Conversation/Listening to Grades 4 and 5. It's pretty relaxed and being an elementary school and not one of the plethora of "bushibans" or cram-schools that are also everywhere I only work Monday to Fridays. I was offered jobs before this one, but I really wanted to have my weekends off and eventually I found work where I did. I'm only working 17 hours a week though so given that I am here to make money after all, I've been looking for more work to fill in my time and it seems like I may have found some. A school emailed me about evening work 3 times a week so I'm hopefully going to meet with them today and see if it will work. I do like my free time, but after doing very little for my first two months here I need to start getting out of the hole of debt I've dug for myself.

Quote for today

From Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner:

"Because who...has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief all is done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse - the hats and pants and shows which you drag through the world - and retreat since the gods condone and practice these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trammeling and harried instant, the: was-not: is: was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return."

Words

While I was in Taiwan these last two months I was reading, when I was reading which wasn't that often actually, Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!; a hell of an interesting book by a truly great writer. I'd tried to read Faulkner before (The Sound and the Fury), but it was too much for me at the time; I was too young and inexperienced a reader. He's a writer who you have to work at to read; fight with almost at least at first until you begin to grasp the poetics of his language that once suitably immersed come to possess you with its intensity of expression. I'm still not finished, but I decided that I could use a break from it and that for this short trip to Thailand I should bring something else along so that I wouldn't run out while I was here. Spadework by Timothy Findley was the book thus chosen to accompany me; one I'd been curious about having read others by him (The Wars and Not Wanted On the Voyage) and having it sit in front of me on the coffee table where I've been living these last two months. My roommate Caitlin had got it from an ex-Canadian boyfriend but had yet to read it so I thought I'd give it a try.

Interesting it was. Set entirely in Stratford, Ontario of all places. Not exactly a difficult read anyways; I finished it in all of two days. An All's Well That Ends Well kind of book taking place as it does among the theatre gliterrati of Stratford's annual Shakespeare Festival. Happy family with underlying conflicts, crisis brought on by same conflicts, eventual resolution - hardly original plot structuring. But of course, what novels these days are in anyway original. Not too many. Instead, the characters are what's important and in this book, as in the others I've read by him, Findley does a pretty good job of telling us their story and thereby convincing us of their reality. Certainly not a great book, but rather a pretty good one.

One thing that bothered me about this book in which nearly every character smoked cigarettes at least a little, if not a lot, was his consistent usage of "lighted" as in "She lighted a cigarette as...". I know it's grammatically correct, but it sounds so stilted and awkward compared to the equally sensical and much more flowing "lit"; "she lit a cigarette..." sounds so much better don't you think?

And while on the topic of word usage, when did the indefinite article "an" become usable in front of words that don't start with vowels? Having finished Spadework I went out last night to find something new to read and at one of the many used bookstores scattered around Khao Sarn Rd. found The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History by Phillip Bobbitt. A very good read so far, but he consistently writes (not a quote since I don't have the book with me, but a similar example): "It happened in terms of an historical event not previously seen..." Huh? Since when has this been deemed grammatically correct? As I've been trying to teach my students in Taiwan, one of the vagaries of the English language is the different usages of the indefinite articles: "a" in front of words that begin with a consonant, and "an" in front of any word that begins with a vowel (a,e,i,o,u). Yet a Professor of Constitutionl Studies at a major American university with a PhD from Oxford apparently thinks differently and somehow managed to get his editors and publisher to go along with him. Can anyone explain this one?

Get me out!

It's been a long time since I've been punched in the face, but, as if I could find any less reason to want to be in Bangkok, I had such a thing happen to be a short while ago. As I was walking down a street shared by pedestrians and motor vehicles, a taxi pulled up in front of me and just as I walked by the back door of the side I was on opened just as I happened to be walking by it nearly smashing my knee if I hadn't jumped out of the way. Not sure the exact words that came out of my mouth, but an expletive of some sort it was as I kept walking. Perhaps ten seconds later I hear a voice behind me and am pushed in the back. Turning around I find myself confronted with an enraged Thai guy screaming at me, throwing punches (most of which I block, but one of them lands on my left cheek) and kicking. I, of course, try to reason with the guy (I guess I somehow insulted him though he was the one who nearly hit my leg with the taxi door), but whether he just couldn't understand English, just wanted to fight, was flipped out on speed (leading to not very calm personalities; a very common problem here depsite the government's anti-drug crackdown of recent years) or a combination of all three all I could do was block his repeated attacks and try to talk some sense into him. Thankfully his friend came and pulled him away though he continued to scream at me for my apparent indiscretion. Thank god I have only one more night in this city...

Bangkok blues

Sartre's dictum that (translated from the French of course) hell is other people has never been an opinion I've wished to grant my aquiesance to, but after another day spent in the environs of Khao Sarn Rd. in Bangkok I'm prone to agree. I'm only in Thailand to renew my visa that was going to run out in a few more days and so this whole trip, far from being a desirable escape/vacation from Taiwan is rather an expensive annoyance I wished I could have avoided. So I find myself yet again in this traveller ghetto of ghettos. Sick of these masses of middle/upper class western humanity strutting their usually drunken selves down these streets of casual cavortment; all attempting to impress with their so hip, yet completely conventional relative to everyone else fashion sense. Yes, this is sadly the future right now...

My apologies...

For not having written anything of late; a couple weeks even. Lazyness undoubtedly has something to do with it, but I also have been feeling pretty lousy the last week and a half due to a cold/flu leaving me not very inspired to put words to thoughts. Has been relatively eventful though. About a month ago now I went and checked out a live music club called Grooveyard that's been open since May or so of this year and who should I find behind the soundboard when I walked in, but a guy named Patrick from Edmonton who used to play in a band called Wide Awake and Dreaming with two friends of mine Ross and Jacob. I never really knew him back home, but I recognized him though I hadn't seen him in probably 5 or 6 years. He runs the place with an Aussie guy named Roger, plays (tenor and soprano sax) around Taiwan and does booking and managing for some bands on the side. To make a long story short I soon started playing with him and Roger in their jazz group and given that the Taichung Jazz Festival's going on, we played this last Sunday to a fair sized crowd. I bought an acoustic guitar here, but for playing with a band a guy I met that I'm in the process of starting a country band with lent me his surprisingly good Aria Pro II electric, a Les Paulish thing that actually plays and sounds quite good. He also lent me his delay and volume pedal for the gig; definite treats for one who loves effects like me. The people seemed to like it anyways, even being asked to have my picture taken with a woman. The $3000 NT (about a $110 Canadian) was certainly nice as well...

Unfortunately, my visa runs out next Monday so I have to leave the country to renew it. Hong Kong's the cheapest place to go, but they also therefore happen to be the stingiest when it comes to visa renewals. So back to Bangkok I must go being the next cheapest place. Though I finally have a job, I haven't been working long enough to make very much so I can ill afford it, but it's not like I have much choice in the matter; visa overstays get you into a mess of problems I have no desire to deal with. At least I'll have a time-out from Taiwan, though since I actually quite like it after only being here two months it's rather a waste, but hopefully I'll enjoy Bangkok more than my last time spent there when I spent far too many frustrating days waiting to get my first visa to Taiwan.

Maybe it's not so bad after all...

So the theory that the use of marijuana makes people stupid has suffered yet another setback. (Of course, one of the supposedly definitive proofs of said theory was an experiment undertaken in the 70's while Ronald Reagan was governor of California that involved force feeding pure marijuana smoke to monkeys - literally suffocating them - and then using the inevitable brain damage that resulted as "proof" of marijuana's toxicity. Could anyone imagine a more biased "scientific" experiment? Details here: http://www.sumeria.net/politics/noclo.html; and for some still needed for many marijuana de-mythologizing go to http://paranoia.lycaeum.org/marijuana/facts/mj-health-mythology.html) Recent studies at the University of Saskatchewan seem to indicate that substances found in marijuana actually promote brain cell growth.

Most "drugs of abuse" such as alcohol, heroin, cocaine and nicotine suppress growth of new brain cells. However, researchers found that cannabinoids promoted generation of new neurons in rats' hippocampuses.
Hippocampuses are the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory, and the study held true for either plant-derived or the synthetic version of cannabinoids.

"This is quite a surprise," said Xia Zhang, an associate professor with the Neuropsychiatry Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
"Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months," he added.
The research by Dr. Zhang and a team of international researchers is to be published in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, but their findings are on-line now.
The scientists also noticed that cannabinoids curbed depression and anxiety, which Dr. Zhang says, suggests a correlation between neurogenesis and mood swings. (Or, it at least partly explains the feelings of relaxation and euphoria of a pot-induced high.)

The rest of the article can be found here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051014.wxcanna1014/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/
And for a reminder of the insanity that is continued prohibition laws against marijuana (via http://www.andrewsullivan.com) go to http://www.mpp.org/releases/nr20051017.html.

About The Dead

You may or may not know of my love for the music of the Grateful Dead. Though I never had the opportunity to see them live being from western Canada where they hadn't played since the early 70's and only 18 when Jerry died in August of 1995 when I was just getting into their music I truly feel that they were one of the greatest musical groups ever. (I did see one show of the simply re-named The Dead's 2003 summer tour and three of their 2004 tour and though there was no Jerry, they were great shows played by a phenomenal group of musicians that I thoroughly enjoyed.) I actually even managed to tie them into my undergraduate honours thesis, which was entitled "A Critique of Adorno's Theory of Popular Music: On Improvisation, the Realization of Difference and the Grateful Dead" in which tried to work out of the possibility of a truly progressive "popular" music practice using the model of the Dead's live music ethos.

I'm working on an article that I'm going to try to get published in Bass Player or Musician discussing the bass playing of Phil Lesh, which is to me one of the fundamental innovations of the Dead's music and once it's done I'll post it here or link to it, but in the meantime I found this discussion of their uniqueness to be a worthwhile read so I thought I'd pass it along.

http://www.crecon.com/davidwomack/dead.html

Key quote:

...the Grateful Dead were perhaps the most artistically sublime of units, with band interaction that must be equated with genius given their unflagging devotion, prodigious output and unparalleled resourcefulness. The trick was in absorbing influences from absolutely every direction imaginable, from the "simple" forms of country, bluegrass, rural blues, pop and soul, to the esoteric realms of avant garde, classical, jazz, and cultural music from around the globe. Channellers with gates wide open, spirit, music and life flowed forth. Beatific and reverent, unplanned and contrived, sloppy and perfect, erratic (day to day) and consistent (ultimately), clumsiness only enhanced their high wire act. Analytical rigor mortis was held at bay by refusing to chart destinations; simplistic redundancy was eluded by big, complex, ideas. Communication was clear, if elliptical. The Grateful Dead were a stunning mixture of the hearts of simple music lovers with the minds of self-conscious, ambitious aesthetes.

In the words of Bill Graham, they weren't the best at what they did, they were the only ones who did what they did.