perfidy

As has become a holiday tradition since the arrival of my son, my wife and I are eagerly planning for maximally efficient use of the time that we will be able to foist our beloved offspring off on relatives and go do something by ourselves. This time is especially precious, since it involves free day care. When you have paid babysitters, you don't really relax, and you certainly can't take your time. A better situation is using friends as babysitters - more confidence in the outcome and a much lower cost. Of course, you can't dip into that well too often, or it will go dry. And even then, you don't dawdle much while out and about.

Leaving the spawn with grandma, however, is ideal. Grandma would likely kill for the opportunity to spend time with her only grandchild. Grandma is upset when we take the boy back. So time constraints are no concern. And grandma probably takes better - or at least more attentive - care of the boy than we do. For these reasons, holidays are special.

Mrs. Buckethead and I both love movies. And not just the part where reflected photons representing ordered patterns of information enter our brains through the mediation of our retinas. That, we can experience in the comfort of our living room. We love going to the movies. We love the big screen, and the speakers set to eleven (twelve during the previews), and the black juju beans stuck to our feet, and the tacky feel of the floor thanks to geological layers of spilled sody-pop and rancid popcorn butter, and the shriveled up hot dogs, stale nachos, flat fountain drinks and highly ergonomic yet mysteriously uncomfortable seating. We love old theaters with ratty curtains and antediluvian movie posters, and we love the new ones with stadium seating and torus screens. We love watching previews, and the wonderful sense of possibility and wonder that only one in a thousand movies ever deliver.

Therefore, every holiday we drive out to Ohio, spend some time with the family, inhale some turkey, and bolt for the nearest cinema.

So there I was, trolling the internet, reading movie reviews and contemplating the ideal mix of movies to take in. Kong is certainly at the top of the list. We will probably have the opportunity to see one, and possibly two, additional movies. Which to choose? Narnia has been on the radar screen for quite a while now, and so I was checking out what people thought of it. Generally positive, I found. Most reviewers felt that the director did an admirable job of representing the Christian themes of the book without descending into preachiness.

Then I ran across this. A review in the (surprise!) UK Guardian entitled, "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion." I can see that those who are not religious, or at least not Christian, would not be 'for' the Christian allegory that is central to the novel, and therefore the movie. Well enough. Christian themes abound in many great works of literature, and most people who aren't disposed by faith toward those themes learn to get along, just as Christian readers by and large learn to cope with the non-Christian themes that can be found damn near everywhere else.

But this is a rather strong reaction:

Narnia is a strange blend of magic, myth and Christianity, some of it brilliantly fantastical and richly imaginative, some (the clunking allegory) toe-curlingly, cringingly awful.

...Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.

...Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, "There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory." Well, here's my huff.

Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life." ...So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

The fact that a movie that is, more than anything else, a children's fantasy, woudl provoke this sort of vitriol kind of amazes me. Especially in light of the fact that the writer also acknowledges that

Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus in the lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn't say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what "agony in the garden", "deposition", "transfiguration" or "ascension" mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers.

This hatred of Christianity is ironic, too considering that most of the left, and in all likelihood the author of this review, would condemn any who criticised, say, Islam in even the mildest terms. And even more ironic when that Islam, in its extreme form, has resulted in much death and violence - actions antithetical to the Christianity she attacks.

Remarkable.

Because you can starve, you slacker.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the gubmint can seize a person's social security benefits to pay off defaulted federal student loans. Sorry, brother- it's dog food and the Goodwill dumpster for you until those loans are settled.*

There is no mention though of being able to opt in to a social security payoff plan. I figure it like this: I don't believe I'm getting one red centavo of social security to begin with. Either the whole program will be defunct, or the retirement age will be like 104 before I can apply. So I would welcome an opportunity to affirm, today, that I authorize the US Department of Education to take the x-thousand I owe you out of my social security benefits.

Please?

Let me keep the coupla hundred I pay you monthly and you can have everything I've paid in so far. That'll about even us right up, and if it doesn't, help yourself to the difference when it's my time to collect.

*Apropos of an earlier post, the man in this suit worked at the post office yet was carrying $77k in student loans. To paraphrase Bluto Blutarski, "Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the fucking post office."

As the other Ministers are aware, I'm running about 0-30 on trying to get a new, better job. A job so new and better it would allow me to leave both my crappy part-time gig and my somewhat OK full-time position far, far behind.

But after so many interviews, so many resumes, and so much bullshit all 'round I'm just tired. Bone tired. I'm tired of working so much, I'm tired of getting nowhere, and I'm tired of being desperate for something to shake loose. I'm of a mindset now such that when the ad for the New England Tractor Trailer School comes on tv, and the burly fella asks, "How do 18 wheels of adventure sound?", I say to myself, "Wwwwelll...he's probably asking rhetorically, but still...not so very bad, maybe."

Don't misunderstand: I have nothing against people who actually work for a living. Truck drivers, heavy equipment operators, soldiers, and anyone else who has a bona fide reason to be tired at the end of the day has my respect. But what I'm thinking now is that it's utterly contrary to everything I was taught: the less capable took the vocational courses, went to the voke high school, and ended up driving trucks all their lives. The talented kids took the college prep curriculum, with advanced-placement everything, and went to "college". That was when "college" meant a single, mysterious place of enlightenment and fun and learning, not at all what it actually was. Is.

The college bound were to look forward to big salaries doing...something, presumably garnering absurd salaries simply by virtue of being educated, while the vocationally-minded could look forward to soulless drudgery, finally ending up as morsels for Moloch. And every person, written tract, or other signal from broader society reinforced that attitude. Shit, even the stupid board game Life, remember that? Remember how you had very little hope of making the big $$ and "winning" unless you went to college? Even the little kids playing that game got it.

Only problem is that none of it is true.

Do you know who, in your neighborhood- yes *your* neighborhood- is most likely to have a net worth of $1 million? It's the plumber. Do you know how much CDL drivers are making? About 1/3 less than I do, but I've been in my current position for five years, and I was in school for six before that. CDL drivers have been earning in that 11(!) year span.

So with all this stuff floating around in my head- the sense of failure, the frustration of not being able to improve my lot- I also ran headlong into the deeply rooted idea that I'm supposed to be rewarded with the big money and fabulous prizes by virtue of my education. Real life since commencement, however, ought to have dug up, peeled, boiled, and devoured that deeply rooted idea by now, but there it was.

And that got me thinking, again, for the thousandth time, whether all that education was really worth it. Yes it was cool to learn and all, but I could have read all those books for nothing had I been that eager to learn. And what did I really learn? In all that time, I could have been earning. At the very least, I could've cut my losses with a BA and found work; as it was, I had to have a master's, so started my working life at the age of 28(!) with decent student loans.

So I want to ask you, all seven Ministry readers: was college, either undergraduate or grad school, worth it for you? Do you regret going? Would you have been better off now if you had then been earning instead of learning?

I had a fascinating conversation at a party this weekend with a linguist (an, of course, cunning linguist) about the unrecoverability of the meaning of words as used in the past. These days policy wonks encounter that problem when fighting over Constitutional originalism or the like... for example, in asking what did "liberty" mean to that document's drafters? Given that historians can point to perhaps a dozen mutually distinct meanings of "liberty" as currently or then-recently used circa 1787, this is an important question. Unfortunately, that wisdom does and forever will remain, unrecoverable. This is, of course, a problem.

The problem gets worse when dealing with "Old English," which the aforementioned linguist maintains isn't English at all. (He is, by the way, a medieval literature scholar too, if that matters). The precise meanings of any word more complicated than "hill" or "tree" cannot ever be discerned, and who is to know whether "tree" didn't carry some tactit freight that the slender documentary evidence cannot reveal? As an example of how alien, how unEnglishlike Old English is, he pointed to the first word of Beowulf. The word is "Hwæt!," meaning "Pay attention! Listen up!" Today, it is meaningless except insofar as it reminds us of our own "what?" and related interjections.

I don't know whether "hwæt" is a cognate or a false cognate of our modern "what," but I do know one thing. That rap guy Li'l John is a canny deployer of anachronism.

Consider. In his productions, Li'l John frequently makes use of the interjection, "What!" At first blush, this and his other trademarks "Yeah!" and "Okay!" (as so ably parodied by Comedy Central's Dave Chapelle), seem to be pure solipsism, nonsensical sounds valuable for their noise and rhythmic utility only. Not so. In truth, every time Li'l John says "What!" he is really saying "hwæt!" in the finest bardic tradition, urging us the listeners to stop and pay attention to the story he has to tell. "Hwæt!" is the hook, demanding our attention. "Okay" and "yeah" are similiarly weighted, not merely noises but coming as they do on the heels of the grab for our attention, they become epistemiological affirmations of the mores of the replendently hedonic life Li'l Jon leads. Not for him, the 9-to-5, the retirement account, and the ten o'clock bedtime, and in the face of this powerful refutation of how most of us structure our lives, we cannot help but feel those lives a little poorer for the comparison.

Seen in this light, Li'l Jon's simple rhymes about women and clubs and skeeting transcend kitch and pop and slip across the transom of meaning into a dialectical relationship with Strunk & White linguistic proscriptivism. "Hwæt!," he says, "pay attention! For we of Atlanta have arrived and are determined to leave our lasting imprint on the culture and folkways of this great land!"

Walking the line between ludic and ludicrous, hysteria and history, metaphysics and mondegreen, Li'l John has ridden our unwitting and slippery relationship with our own unrecoverable linguistic history to the top of the charts, entreating our respectful attention with every "hwæt!" and grunt. Hats off to Li'l John, bard of the moment. In guttural interjections, he speaks for us all.

Please, take a moment to savor the interplay of sense and nonsense, the rich imagery, the complicated rhythms and rhyme scheme, and oh! those kennings!, in the Li'l John & The Eastside Boyz classic, "Get Low:"

3,6,9 damn she's fine give it to me sock it to me 1 mo time
Get low, Get low, Get Low, Get Low, Get Low, Get Low,Get Low
To the window(To the window), to the wall, (to dat wall)
To the sweat drop down my balls (MY BALLS)
To all you bitches crawl (crawl)
To all skeet skeet motherfuckers (motherfucker!) to all skeet skeet got dam (Got dam)
To all skeet skeet motherfuckers (motherfucker!) to all skeet skeet got dam (Got dam)

Shorty crunk so fresh so clean
can she fuck that question been harassing me, in the mind
this bitch is fine
I done came to the club about 50-11 times
now can I play with yo panty line
the club owner said I need to calm down
security guard go to sweating me now
nigga drunk then a motherfucker threaten me now

And then more like that, except profoundly unprintable. "Hwæt!," indeed.

The Carnival of the Recipes #69 is up, an appetizers bonanza. I also missed last week's edition, which had the theme of spicy foods. It burns, burns, burns, that ring of fire. Check them out!

I'm spending this week working up a version of my usual sourdough with blue cheese and walnuts, based on one in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice... I'll surely report on how that went. I also need to work on tweaking my wild-yeast sourdough recipe for flavor and consistency. I need to figure out how to balance acetic and lactic acids better to achieve a more rounded flavor, and I'm thiiiis close to adding some commercial yeast into the final dough build in order to promote a faster rise and a more vigorous oven spring. Since I don't have a half million dollars to blow on a giant professional oven with steam injectors, and the oven I do have is halfway for crap, I guess I am reduced to cheating to produce consistent results that are better than acceptable to the eye and tongue. Also, my starter has been sluggish recently, taking hours and hours to raise feebly even when fed up to full strength vigor. It's probably just the weather, or cosmic rays, or the trilateral commission meddling again, but whatever it is things just ain't hitting it right now. Hence the desparate thoughts of cheating.

Watch this space, because I'm sure that by February I will retract every sentence of the above and reaffirm my loyalty to the wonders and ineffable magic of wild yeasts and bacteria in all their perfection. I'm a caviller. I cavil. And waver. And vacillate. Not to mention hedge, snipe, kvetch, whinge, and bellyache, and dither, scruple, flip-flop and shilly-shally.

NDR tagged me, so here I go. 

Seven things to do before I die

• Own a bakery. Successful bakery.
• Learn to read and speak some form of Chinese.
• Visit China and Mongolia.
• Buy and enjoy the living shit out of a cabin in a remote area of coastal New England or Eastern Canada.
• Have kids and raise them to be impossible.
• Write and publish a book.
• Do a wanderjahr starting in Alsace and proceeding in a giant circle through central and southern Europe, through the Caucasus region into Turkey and the Caspian states, into Asia probably skipping Iran, on through to Afghanistan and Pakistan and back again through the -stans into Russia, Poland, and Germany and finally ending with one gigantic crazy party in Amsterdam. Johno isn't messing around.

Seven things I cannot do

• fix a car
• laundry
• balance a checkbook
• play baseball
• write dialogue
• water ski
• be a salesman for my living

Seven things that attract me to my best friend

• She's fiery and wickedly intelligent and calls me on my bullshit.
• Have you seen her? She's hot!
• Hot, I tell you!
• She is willing to let me do the things that she doesn't understand.
• She appreciates wine, food, books, music and films in different ways than I do, and likes to share her experiences.
• Her loyalty to her friends.
• Our deep mutual appreciation of Neil Young. 

Seven things I say most often

• "Hey, man"
• "Marginally acceptable"
• "I swear to God"
• "That's just how I roll"
• "Does whiskey count as beer?"
• "Fuckin' A!"
• "I could make this."

Seven books (or series) I love

• "The Long Goodbye," Raymond Chandler
• The Lord of the Rings
• "Le Gout du Pain" (A Taste of Bread), Professor Raymond Calvel
• "Maus," Art Spiegelman
• "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck
• "Lake Wobegon Days," Garrison Keillor
• The "letters" sections of "The Atlantic Monthly," "The Economist," and "Penthouse."

Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would watch over and over if I had the time)

• The Godfather
• Young Frankenstein
• Clerks
• The Big Lebowski
• P.C.U.
• Them there Lord of the Rings movies
• Good Will Hunting

Seven people I want to join in, too 

Sleepy, Sneezy, Doc, Happy, Bashful, Grumpy, Sleazy (no really... I'll update this with real people when I have a moment...)

If there is one hip-hop group that sorely needs a catch-all beginner's guide, it is Philadelphia natives The Roots. For fifteen years they have been putting out challenging, often cerebral albums in a wide variety of styles to great critical but limited commercial success. But, sort of like the catalogs of other challenging artists, say Bob Dylan or Frank Zappa, it helps to have a roadmap before you dive in. Is John Wesley Harding or Blood on The Tracks right for me? Hot Rats or The Yellow Shark? If you start in the wrong place, you might end up turned off to the whole enterprise and your life will be just a shade poorer for the lack of it.

To this end, the band have just released Home Grown! The Beginners Guide To Understanding The Roots, Vol. 1 & 2. The two volumes of Home Grown! don't manage to do the one thing that any introduction to the Roots needs to do: sum up the group's main accomplishments in a way that is easily accessible and at least somewhat logical. Instead, the group have given us a brilliant mess of mostly rarities, b-sides, live tracks and alternate takes that takes repeated listens to warm up to.

There is a lot to admire about The Roots. Their single-minded devotion to doing things their own way means that they don't have a single Ma$e moment in their catalog - no point at which their scene tips over from vitality into clumsy and cartoonish self-parody. Coming from Philadelphia, long considered a hip-hop hick town, they have had to create and nurture their own scene and keep their own career alive. If for no other reason than still being around making records after fifteen years, the group deserves a nod. But if integrity is all it takes then Jimmy Carter would have been our greatest President. Luckily, they have far more than that to recommend them (though if one of them had a brother to name a beer after, that'd be cool too).

In fact, the Roots are a top-shelf assembly of talent. Never forget- this is the band that insists on playing everything live. They have in the past taken this to extremes - the liner notes to Home Grown! tell how how for one early track a member repeated the phrase "RockinonthemicrophoneIdothiswell" more than a hundred times into a microphone rather than sample it once. And although this might seem absurd on the face of it, those years spent trying to sound like a machine have resulted in a crew who are tighter than tight. Listen to those old Herb Alpert recordings and try to count the horns. You can't! They sound like one horn. Then listen to The Roots and try to catch them slipping the groove.

Drummer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson has a mile-deep groove and a metronomic sense of time, and the rhythms he lays down with bassist Leonard "Hub" Hubbard are chewy and satisfying. (For my money, they too frequently undermine their funk by keeping their albums bone dry - if they'd see fit to turn Hub up a little and lay some room sound on ?uestlove's kit, it would all be for the better.) Special mention should go also to keyboardist Scott Storch (AKA Kamal) and human beatbox Rhazel, underrated contributors to the group's sound who get their own on the live tracks included on Home Grown!. Finally, frontmen Black Thought and Malik B have grown from fairly limited MCs into masters, riding or pushing the beat with tangled and forceful bunches of thoughtful rhymes.

Generations of critics have already done the live-hip-hop-band angle to death, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention how The Roots' live show is reputed to be among the best around. Indeed, the few live tracks scattered across Homegrown! hit hard, with rhymes and beats locked together under a groove like they were the lords of Funkadelphia.

However, the focus on live playing and jamming means that as their sound evolves, each Roots LP ends up very different from the last. Their debut, 1993's Organix, was a loose assembly of tracks that captured the band before they figured out quite who they wanted to be. 1995's Do You Want More?!!!??! tightened up their sound, managing to sound at once acid-jazz and old-school as the band unfurled long jams, and Illadelphia Half-Life refined that sound further. 1999's Things Fall Apart is a carefully constructed, conceptually tight and angry record full of close spaces, loopy tracks, and confrontational and hard-hitting rhymes. That same year the band also released The Roots Come Alive, which finally captured on disc some of their legendary live show. On Phrenology the group experimented with genre and structure, delving into rock, hardcore and sound collage while also adding hooks to their songs. Last year's The Tipping Point honed those advances into a new version of their original jamming, just thicker, deeper, and more organic.

So far, the results have been generally good to great, with Things Fall Apart and Phrenology standing as two legitimate classics of hip hop and all the other albums having moments of excellence.

If Home Grown! is the band's attempt to provide a single graceful point into this wildly diverse and often daunting catalog, it's a dud. So much of a dud, in fact, that the first two drafts of this review were arguments that the Roots are wildly overrated. It's a good thing I changed my mind, but that it took a music geek like me who has been a fan of the band for twelve years nearly a dozen runs through the collection to figure out what was really going on suggests that some opportunities to reach out have been missed.

What's wrong with it? Let's begin with the packaging. The two volumes of Homegrown! contain between them thirty tracks that count down from 29 to zero over the course of the two discs, which are only available for purchase separately. This is puzzling; either the two discs are intended to stand together as a unit or they are not. If they are, fine. But why charge buyers $28 to complete a two-disc set, when Volume 1 complements Volume 2? Musically the two volumes are not meaningfully distinct, which further blurs the reason for separating them.

The track selection itself doesn't make very much sense either. LP tracks are interspersed with b-sides, unreleased tracks, live performances, and rarities in a way that sounds, well, okay enough, but that jumps confusingly from era to era without much of a discernable plot. Is Home Grown! an introduction, or a fans-only love letter? If the former, why all the emphasis on alternate versions, remixes, and unreleased jams? If the latter, why the title?

The Roots’ main fault is a tendency to navel-gaze. Case in point: the liner notes to Home Grown! run to twenty pages per volume, which for that length ought to include an exhaustive detailing of how each songs came to be. This is true to a point. The notes for "Essaywhuman?!!!!! (Organix version)" tell the story of how the Roots got started, and the notes to the Eve/Jill Scott version of "You Got Me" (the Things Fall Apartalbum cut featured Erykah Badu) are a hilarious story about how Eve now hates the band.

But the notes also include loads of in-jokes and shout-outs and "too much has already been said abouts," enough to make newcomers (and some twelve-year fans) wonder what they aren’t getting. Moreover, at no point in the twenty pages does either set of notes get around to listing what track came from where. Anyone but hardcore fans will need to consult the internet to decide whether a given track is old, new, unreleased, or what, which is a drag. So much of the music is very fine, and so many of the rarities are worth having, that it's a shame that the way they are presented doesn't make any sense.

The music, which is and ought to be the centerpiece of this project, suffers from the same weaknesses. Though it's strange to say considering the wealth of amazing tracks collected, Home Grown! Volume 1 stumbles right out of the gate. After the blurry pleasures of the opening track, the acid-jazzy "Proceed 2" from Do You Want More?!!!?! the disc ambles from track to track aimlessly. When the hook to "Star" (from The Tipping Point) came along the first time, I wondered tiredly if the Roots had run out of ideas and were recycling Sly Stone hooks like the Beasties did with "Shadrach" way back in 1989!

It is only at track -20 (as it is numbered, actually track 10), the aforementioned alternate version of "You Got Me," that things come together. (Fascinatingly, Jill Scott's vocal doesn't sound all that much different from Erykah Badu's on the original version, though her backing ‘oohs’ round things out nicely.) Right after the warmth of “You Got Me” comes the rough "Clones" with guest rhymes by Philadelphia MCs MARS and Dice Raw, and a slamming version of "What You Want" which, to my knowledge, has only appeared as a single and in a live version so far.

After this, Volume 1 seems to catch fire, and the wild excursions between eras and genres start to work in the group’s favor. They even include - get this - a live alternate version of "It's Comin'," a song that has only ever before appeared on their 1993 European EP, From The Ground Up. Not that I noticed, particularly, even though that EP was my first introduction to the group. Nonetheless, it's a good version. For reasons like this, if not for that rough first ten, Volume I would be pure gold: just not for beginners.

Volume 2 fares better overall. In particular, it includes an incredible live medley of "The Seed/Melting Pot/Web" originally performed on Gilles Peterson's show on BBC Radio One that takes the band beyond hip-hop into JBs/Parliament/Miles Davis-circa-Live/Evil territory. As a testament to the band's abilities, you could not possibly do better than this medley. However again, if Home Grown! is an introduction to the group, the album version of "Seed 2.0" with Cody ChestnuTT would be nice to hear too.

Since less than half of the tracks on Volume 2 come in their present form from LPs it is in fact perfectly un-useful as a "Beginner's Guide." Considered as a rarities collection, on the other hand, Volume 2 is absolutely brilliant. ?uestlove turns in a furious mix of "Thought@Work" (originally on Phrenology) that bangs like Public Enemy, and alternate versions of some of their biggest hits are satisfying as well. Ferocious live versions of "Break You Off" (remixed into dub) and "Sacrifice" (both from Phrenology) could not be more different than the live "Essaywhuman?!!!!!" from Organix, which is a chronicle of a much groovier, jazzier Roots circa 1992.

In the end, for all the good music The Roots have put out over the past fifteen years, Home Grown! feels disappointingly like a wasted opportunity to put together a decent introduction to the band. Although most of the tracks selected for inclusion are brilliant, there is simply too much here for interested newcomers to get their head around. In the best case Home Grown! The Beginners Guide To Understanding The Roots, vol. 1 and 2 completely fails to live up to its title and goal. As a rarities collection though, it's pretty tight and totally worth having.

Every hip-hop and funk fan ought to have a little Roots in their life. My advice to beginners is to skip these compilations and ask a Roots fan about the best place for you to start.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org.

It's safe to say that Isaac Hayes is an icon. Ask anybody on the street and that's just what they'll say: Isaac Hayes? Why, he's an icon!" Strange, though, that his iconic status is really for one breakthrough hit.

The wocka-wocka guitar introduction to the "Theme from Shaft" (stream in Windows Media / Real Player) is an indelible part of Americana, evoking on its own the full weight of Nixon-era black America in a way that nothing else can. Everything is in those three minutes: Afro puffs, bell bottoms, leather jackets, giant Cadillacs, endless tracts of run-down housing, pimp chic, Black Power, the Jeffersons, civil rights, Watts, runaway inflation, the defiant and vital parallel popular culture that was coming into its own, the whole enchilada from good to bad. Not many pieces of music can lay claim to carrying the weight of that much history without breaking.

And the "Theme From Shaft," as overplayed as it might be, really does encapsulate some of what made Isaac Hayes so vastly important to American music in the 1970s and beyond. His influence on rap and on popular culture in general is pervasive even if his career hopes now reside entirely in a poorly drawn cartoon Chef.

But in the end, Isaac Hayes is so much more than that funky guitar and heavy orchestration. Trained to sing and play music in church, he did time in the 1960s in the Mar-Keys and became one of the shapers of the Memphis soul sound as a house player for the Stax label, playing sax on various sides and co-writing a flotilla of songs made famous by Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, and others. When he struck out on his own with his 1967 debut, Presenting Isaac Hayes, he combined his gospel training with soul, funk, rock, and even psychedelia to craft a new sound that moved far beyond the concise two-minute verse-chorus-verse exercises he turned out for others.

By 1971 Isaac Hayes was on top of the world, filling stadiums around the country and rising up the charts with "Shaft." The politics of the time were right up Hayes' alley: he commonly appeared on stage dressed in a vest of chains and in 1972 would dub himself Black Moses, balancing the gospel, seduction, and street themes his music explored. He would even go on to star in the blaxploitation flick "Truck Turner." But as the 1970s burned themselves out in a morass of stagflation, malaise, and diminishing returns, so did Hayes' career.

Splitting with Stax in 1975, he founded his own label and saw some success with LPs like Chocolate Chip. However, after seven years of playing psychedelirocksoulgospel his creative well seemed to be running dry. He tried a disco cash-in. He did duets with Dionne Warwick. He turned to Scientology. And ultimately he settled in as a second-tier has-been, releasing albums of varying quality to little fanfare or success.

It took the off-the-wall proposition of voicing "Chef" on Comedy Central's South Park to return Isaac Hayes to the spotlight again starting in the late 1990s, advising four cartoon children in the ways of life and love and occasionally whipping out a song parodying his persona with titles like "Love Gravy" and "Chocolate Salty Balls." Then in 2000, he revisited his greatest success when he appeared in (and re-did the theme music for) a remake of Shaft. If he is not as ubiquitous as he was when a gallon of milk cost a buck, he at least seems to have returned from permanent obscurity.

Right about now would be a great time for a killer comp, a solid two discs with the high points from Isaac Hayes' iconic (yet ironically little known) career. Into the breach jumps Stax, now owned by the Concord Jazz label group, to release "The Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?" But is this that killer collection?

Well, yes and no. While it's undeniable that most of the high points one could wish for are here, a few strange choices and intrinsic flaws keep this one from being the world-beater I wish it could be.

Let's start with the good. Disc 1 of Can You Dig It is good; very good; incredible. It is also, in a word, weird. The set opens (predictably enough) with the "Theme from 'Shaft'" we all know and love so well, three minutes and change of iconic funk, a universal anthem from a film few have ever seen.

But from there, things get weird fast. The very next track, "Precious, Precious" from Hayes' 1967 debut, is a good song - even a great one - but it has nothing in common whatsoever with "Shaft." In fact "Precious, Precious" sounds almost more like an early side by free-jazz pioneer Sun Ra than Isaac Hayes as we know him. Instead of slickness and lush orchestration, we get blurry production, cardboard-box drums, meandering and sketchy piano fills, and Hayes' own vocals floating over the landscape as a disembodied obbligato hum resolving into the repeated moan, "Oooh, precious... ooooh, precious" like some dark chocolate Gollum. Not that there is anything wrong with wierd. Quite the contrary; it's cool as heck. But the sharp left turn from the well-trodden path of "Shaft" to the frankly strange "Precious, Precious" underscores one main theme of this set: Isaac Hayes was one weird cat.

The very next track - if you are counting, this is track number 3 - is "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic" (stream in Windows Media / Real Player) from 1969's monumental Hot Buttered Soul. "HBSSDM," as I will heretofore call it, is a frankly bizarre ten minute funk workout featuring a six-minute experimental piano solo. Make no mistake, "HBSSDM" is one of my favorite Isaac Hayes tracks and the piano solo is pure gold (astute listeners will recognize the central riff from Public Enemy's "Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos"), but it's definitely off the wall.

Fans of Nick Hornby will no doubt be gobsmacked and shouting, "That's no way to make a mix tape!" And it's not. There are loads of rules, and the first one is that you have to follow up a killer first track with two slightly more intense ones before backing it off a bit to make sure you don't blow your wad in the first ten minutes. But the One Big Hit followed by two frankly experimental sides: that's not in the manual!

It might not be in the manual, but it is hugely fun. "HBSSDM" gives way to a series of excellent covers - the Jackson Five's "Never Can Say Goodbye" (stream in Windows Media / Real Player) redone as a slow pleading jam, a plushy velour version of "The Look of Love"; and of course Isaac Hayes' monumental classic cover of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." On Hot Buttered Soul "Phoenix" was an eighteen-minute sermon in which Hayes told us the story of a man who fell in love with a woman only to find her in bed with another man. "Seven times! he left her... and seven times, he came back." Bit by bit, Hayes ratches up the tension and the pathos, all the time holding one dissonant chord on the organ, until finally he and the Bar-Kays dissolve into the lover's lament of the main song. Here, the running time is cut down to a more manageable 7:07, but the impact is only dulled a little.

The rest of the originals are mostly just as strong. The dirty funk of "Do Your Thing" and the gospel ghetto-news of "Soulsville" sit next to the Memphis-style soul of "Ain't That Lovin' You," testament to Isaac Hayes' reach across the entire span of black music in the 1970s.

But things do get a little rough. By the end of Disc 1 Hayes is already recycling material, in this case revisiting the confessional talking plus production number of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" as "I Stand Accused." The second time around the results are merely enjoyable, not transcendent.

For this reason, much of Disc 2 is heavy going. Hayes is best known as a deep-soul prophet, the smooth seducer, a Black Moses taking lovers on to the promised land. The second half of "The Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?" shows Hayes backing himself into a corner with this role, settling into a pleasant but numbing succession of heavily orchestrated gospel-tinged soul seductions replete with strings and backup singers. One or two are great; five in a row are less so, especially if they are only interrupted by such mildly interesting but definitely inessential additions as "Theme From 'The Men,'" and "Run Fay Run" from the soundtrack the film Tough Guys. Nonetheless, the live "If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don't Want To Be Right" (stream in Windows Media / Real Player) gives a clue to why he killed audiences in his heyday.

You can hear the change yourself. Disc 2 starts out with the towering and indispensible "Walk On By" (stream in Windows Media / Real Player) from Hot Buttered Soul, which on its own is amazing but in this post-Portishead world now sounds like God's own voice reading from Genesis I. It also includes the great "Joy" and "Chocolate Chip," (stream in Windows Media / Real Player) as well as the little heard but fun title theme from Tough Guys. But as the disc winds down we are treated to disappointments: two worn-out losers in "Disco Connection" and "Rock Me Easy Baby (Part 1)," and a live medley of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" and Aretha Franklin's "I Say A Little Prayer" that builds a parallel narrative of heartbreak and hope which promises to be great but which never quite catches fire.

By the end of the second disc the innovations that were all over the first side; the raunchy funk grooves, the gigantic arrangements, the gospel moans and the bedroom cries, are played out in a way that sadly seems almost pedestrian. It is the same problem that plagues faithful retrospectives of James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone, and Parliament, too... their careers seem to burn much brighter if you avoid the last quarter or so, after all their big ideas have been done a couple times too many. Still, a rough third act doesn't dilute the greatness of the rest of the offerings here.

"The Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?" manages to achieve two goals; to educate newcomers as to what made Isaac Hayes great, and to underscore why his career needed resucitation through the unlikely aid of "South Park." While newcomers would probably do just as well by buying his two essential LPs, Hot Buttered Soul and Black Moses, with the Shaft soundtrack close behind, "The Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?" works fine as a broader overview of his career.

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The limited edition of "The Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?" includes a DVD of videos, including a live concert performance of "Shaft" and the "Chocolate Salty Balls" sequence from South Park. If you are an early bird, this is totally worth having.

Included hereafter: the official recipe for Chocolate Salty Balls. Put 'em in your mouth and suck 'em!

Homemade Chocolate Salty Balls

1 cup graham cracker crumbs
¼ cup corn syrup
1 cup milk chocolate chips
1/8 tea spoon salt
3 tablespoons confectioner?s sugar

In a medium bowl, combine the graham cracker crumbs and corn syrup and mix well.
Using a spoon or a melon baller, shape the mixture into balls.

In the top of a double boiler, slowly melt the chocolate chips. Dip the balls in
the chocolate and set the dipped balls on a wax paper to set.

On a plate, mix together the salt and sugar. When the chocolate balls are set,
roll in the salt and sugar and mixture to lightly coast.

---------

For the uninitiated, here are a generous sampling of some of Isaac Hayes' best
work in streaming audio:

Chocolate Chip
Windows Media
Real Player

Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic
Windows Media
Real Player

If loving you is Wrong (I Don't Want To Be Right)
Windows Media
Real Player

Never Can Say Goodbye
Windows Media
Real Player

Theme From "Shaft"
Windows Media
Real Player

Walk On By
Windows Media
Real Player

In what has become a holiday tradition, the unhappy hordes of clenched-lip grinches have released their lists of toys and games deemed unsuitable for the fragile minds of our youth. Unable or unwilling to feel joy, they seek to deny any glimmer of happiness in others. Thanks to their never-flagging and unholy efforts BB guns, cap guns, action figures with spring-loaded projectiles and riding bicycles without helmets are now part of the dead past. Challenging puzzles with small pieces were next. A vast array of inherently fun toys have been banished, tarred and feathered with the labels 'unsafe' and 'violent.'

We live in an unsafe and violent world. Evolutionary psychologists have learned that (as common sense had long held) that play is just nature's way of preparing our young for the vicitudes of adult life. What better education is there than a childhood filled with guns, knives and imaginary bloodshed?

But now, the grim advocates of pacificism and perfect safety have gone too far. They are even now attacking a time-hallowed and beloved, nay, essential part of American childhood. They are insisting that cannibalism has no place in the life of a mentally healthy child. Who among us has not joyfully and creatively relived in play the tragic story of the Donner party? And who has not played explorers and headhunters? Even small girls with their easy-bake ovens have traditionally joined in this wholesome fun, pretending to bake elaborate long pig quiches or presiding over tea and fingerbone parties with her dolls.

We need to preserve the last vestiges of this sacred tradition. The only place that cannibalism now remains, the only place that children can partake of this feast of joy is in modern console games like "F.E.A.R." and "Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse." These soul-sucking killjoys partake of ritual and symbolic cannibalism on a weekly basis. Don't let them take this from us. We must fight these hypocrites, fight them, tooth and nail so that we may enjoy our virtual cannibalism in peace.

Why do they hate our freedom?

I refuse to believe that I get $75 worth of "programming" on DirecTV each month. It's crap, I tell ya. Crap! So I get it into my head the past few days that I'm going to see what my alternatives are. I've noticed that the quality of shows on the "cable channels" has dropped, on a scale of 1 to 10 to around 1.5 or so. Getcher double-indian head collector's coin pressing here! I've also noticed that the only shows I enjoy watching are on the networks (stoopid shows like Surface and Invasion, which I like -- screw you).

It turns out that in the Washington DC area we're quite fortunate to be living in one of the best Newfangled Digital TV centers around. We get quite a long list of channels (and sub-channels) -- 2,4,5,7,9,11,13,20,43,45,50. Some of the channels are from Baltimore, but come in just fine. But how to get all this free digital goodness, given the need for the contained black magic of an ATSC tuner, which is not the same as your father's NTSC tuner?

You've got a couple of options for high def TV. You can go with cable and get four or five locals in HD, paying about $80 a month, if you're lucky. You can go with DirecTV, pay $200 for your equipment and installation, then discover that what you're actually doing is getting the HD channels over the air. You can go with Dish and be in the same situation as DirecTV, although it's a bit cheaper overall. I'll also say that DirecTV really pissed me off two weeks ago. The new mpeg-4 compatible HD receivers arrived at Best Buy. These new receivers can use a 5-LNB dish to receive current and some future programming from DirecTV, which will include very shortly the local channels from this area in high def; they also have an ATSC OTA (digital over-the-air) tuner built-in. I picked one up for $200 and brought it home, then called DirecTV to inform them of the equipment change. The customer support person informed me that they couldn't activate the receiver unless I agreed to a 2-year commitment. Since I had just gone out and bought the receiver myself, I asked exactly what I was getting in return for the two year commitment. Dedicated phone person told me "Nothing!". That just didn't seem fair to me. I told her I was going to return the equipment and possibly cancel my service. "I'm sorry about that!" was her chirpy response. Ridiculous -- I've changed equipment before and not had a problem.

I guess I could have accepted the commitment. But you can also say "Screw the Man" to yourself, and see if there's a way to cut them out entirely. The catch, as always, is that your significant other really likes Tivo, and you'll die a terrible death if said "Now Playing" list goes missing.
Because of the waffling at the federal government level over the "broadcast flag" (which would make it illegal for an electronic device to make a copy of information that was so-flagged) there's been almost a complete lack of investment by companies in developing convergence hardware. Convergence in the media equipment realm is the notion that a single, fast general purpose computer can do it all -- it can play music, record television, show DVDs, interact with the internet...you name it. With the federal government repeatedly on the verge of declaring general computing to be illegal, companies don't spend money developing products that might be legislated out of existence.

Tivo is a kind of convergence box (lightweight), and there are others on the horizon. But your garden-variety (or slightly above garden-variety) PC has far more horsepower and far more capability than those consumer boxes do. Shouldn't it be able to do the job?

If you want Tivo-like capability for over-the-air without cable or satellite, your choices are minimal. Sony has an OTA tuner/hard drive recorder combination that sells for $500 for the base model. It can do the job. If you go the PC route, you can use a couple of different packages. The free Linux alternative is MythTV. I haven't set one up yet but I am going to give it a try. The limiter here is that very few TV tuner cards have Linux drivers. Apple has their new G5 system, where a media center TV function is built in. As far as I know it does not yet support HDTV. Microsoft has the Windows Media Center Edition, which as of the latest service packs supports HDTV. It's a somewhat expensive proposition to buy a media center PC at this time -- the cheapest you can get one is around $750. You'd need to add your own tuner card to that as well.

I ended up buying an ADS Technologies Instant HDTV PCI card and a Terk outdoor antenna. I had an older PC setup (AMD64, 200GB HD) that I wanted to start with. I could have gone the Linux route, but the capture card situation just didn't seem to be all that great. There are some significant financial advantages, though --

Linux -- free O/S, free TV software (MythTV), but you need to find the right capture card with Linux drivers, which is tough.

Windows -- XP Home ($90), decent software costs ($50 or so), good card and driver support. Total cost is about $300, assuming you already have decent hardware to run on. If you have hardware that has XP already, deduct that. I moved my XP installation to my new computer, so it was not available for the old one. You can run XP in trial mode for 30 days, though, which allows you to evaluate the quality of your eventual solution. If you like it, then buy the OS and you're good (one quick note -- an unauthenticated XP will not download certain patches. Use your activated XP machine to retrieve them, then copy them over to the test machine).

For Windows, the Instant HDTV comes with BeyondTV Express, a somewhat limited TV-watching program. BeyondTV offers an upgrade to their latest full version for $50. Alternatives include SageTV, which seemed to be a bit cruder and not speak HDTV quite as well. What I was surprised by was my discovery of Meedio -- a visual stunner that aims to be the true convergence app for PC hardware. Sadly, Meedio does not yet support the Instant HDTV card so I could not test its TV functionality. What I was amazed by was the clean UI, extensibility, and general polish of Meedio -- the way that Meedio looks, the way that you use it...it is very much what I thought a good convergence app ought to be like.

There are some instructions on the Meedio web site indicating how to configure an unsupported capture card, so I guess I'll try that next and see if Meedio does a good job with high def. If so, it'll probably be the best choice. I can't really say that I was looking forward to messing around with MythTV all that much. I can get an OEM Windows XP 2005 Media Center Edition for about $120 at a DIY shop around here, and I think it would be a good thing to have regardless.

There have been a few "weird" bits -- I had the system record "Surface" last night, and the encoding seemed to be messed up. I got an SD picture instead of SD -- considerably better than DirecTV's garbage, but far from HDTV. Each station's transmission is delivered in the MPEG-2 Transport Stream form, which can encode multiple channels of information. It can contain an SD program, an HD program, and additional channels (like weather). Part of what a TV app needs to do is select out the right subchannel and display that. The good news is that the raw data is still captured on my system, so I'll be able to experiment with it and find out if the HD content is really there, or if it's just plain missing!

I can't say that I'm ready to say "screw you" to the cable man just yet, but I'm getting close. I am hard pressed to name a channel other than SciFi that has any programming I am interested in -- and even there there's just one show (Battlestar Galactica, you nerd) that I actually want to watch.