I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHISH-Lawn Boy (1990).

For what I consider a guitar dominated band (Trey Anastasio is certainly the frontman), the early Phish albums have a lot of piano dominated tracks.  It’s not the guitar is absent but the piano is mixed quite loudly which gives these songs a slightly different emphasis than when they are played live.

Also was with many songs on Junta, “Reba” feels slower than the live versions.  It also has some funny backing vocals (a common occurrence with these early songs).  “My Sweet One” is a lot more honky tonk than the live versions, which often feel almost barbershoppy.  In “Split Open and Melt,” the vocals are done in a very funny mumbly way (with weird background vocals).  There’s also horns (crazy horns) and female vocals –giving it  vaguely R&B feel.

“The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony” (for origins of the phrase, check out this) is a live favorite that’s a fun and funky guitar solo (with a retro feel) and in this version there is much laughing and carrying on in the background).  “Bathtub Gin” opens with the crazy seemingly out of tune piano that they do live (although not as much).  There’s more funny voices on the chorus and crazy sound effects throughout.  Earlier Phish were a lot sillier than later Phish.

“Run Like an Antelope” also has crazy sound effects and it’s funny how I forget that the song is almost entirely introductory guitar solo wailing.  It’s not until 8 minutes that we get to the “rye rye rocco” section and the actual “run run run” part.   In this studio version, the “set your gear ship for the heart of your soul” section is spoken so quietly.  And the song is not quite ten minutes long.  “Lawn Boy” sounds clean and jazzy in ways that it doesn’t live.  And “Bouncing Round the Room” sounds a lot like the live version.  It’s a little slower, with a few more details thrown in.

Overall, Lawn Boy is a great early Phish album, with every song being a success.

[READ: October 3, 2013] “Life as a Terrorist”

William Vollmann was a suspect in the Unabomber case.  All because a “concerned citizen” alerted the FBI about his fiction.

This sounds utterly crazy, but it is true.

Vollmann has written about all kinds of things, both fiction and non-fiction.  For his non-fiction, he has traveled extensively, to Afghanistan and other places where terrorists reside.  So when he was detained upon reentering the United States from Yemen, he didn’t think too much of it.  But when he was detained a second time, years later–for seven hours and treated like a criminal–well, that got him mad.  And he used the Freedom of Information Act to see what the FBI had on him.

This is a sobering look at how the justice system in its zealotry to protect us can actually do far more harm than good, at least to innocent individuals. Vollmann uses this as the basis of his essay which looks at the omnipresent Unamericans: those who would attack without provocation and intimidate the weak.

Vollmann starts by talking about a book by John Steinbeck which I have never heard of. It is called America and Americans and it talks about the country that Steinbeck loves in sometimes glowing and sometimes not so glowing terms (“from the first we have treated our minorities abominably.”).

Vollmann points out that he is writing this because he values his freedom and the freedom of all Americans to do what they want within the law.  Which is, you know, the law.  His FOIA request garnered him 294 pages.  Which seems like a lot except that the original file is 785 pages.  But despite the heavily redacted fraction of his total file, he was able to get a sense for what the FBI had on him.

So why was Vollmann on the FBI’s radar in the first place?  Not from the concerned citizen but because Vollmann was affiliated with photographer Jock Sturgess whose house was raided on claims of child pornography.  Vollmann was writing an introduction to his new book.  Sturgess was ultimately cleared and Vollmann even went to the FBI to testify on his behalf.  All of this is clearly what opened a file on WTV.

No doubt, he thought that was why in 2002 when he returned from Yemen he was initially stopped.  But that 2005 stop was incredibly insulting.  And his reading about others, artists primarily, who have been stopped, raided and had personal property (and creative works) destroyed makes him incredibly angry.  (Just as the ability to criticize the government and to be able to use the FOIA makes him incredibly proud of America).

And so when WTV receives his file he learns that he was a Unabomber suspect.  This information came from “a citizen” whom Vollmann calls Ratfink.  It’s unclear if he knows who Ratfink is, but there are later episodes in which he either knows the people who talk about him or sometimes their named were not even redacted.

But as far as Ratfink is concerned, Vollmann refers to Steinbeck again: “The desire and the will to spy on, to denounce, to threaten and to punish, while not an American tendency, nevertheless inflames a goodly number of Americans.”  So why did Ratfink fink on him?  He doesn’t know, but the report says that Ratfink referred to a “antigrowth and anti-progress themes throughout” Vollman’s novels.  Vollmann cites his own book Fathers and Crows which is about the Iroquois and is set…before there was a United States and when the Iroquois were defending their land.

The Unamericans targeted his home (maybe even a car that was not his own), and even his former schools (Deep Springs and Cornell University) to look for dirt.  They even made (many erroneous) calculations about his studies and bomb making abilities.

The Unabomber was captured in April 1996.  Vollmann’s case was cleared in May of 1996.  Volmann has never felt harassed in his day to day life (except for those two detainings at the border), but he learned that when he was detained at the border (again, remember in 2002 and 2005), it was not because he was once on file as the Unabomber suspect.  He was now a suspect in the anthrax mailings. Because once you are a suspect you are never not a suspect.

This was a scary look at a system run amok.  It makes you wonder what the FBI has one you, but that you’d be afraid to file and FOIA request just to see what it turns up.

Vollmann also did an interview around the time of the publication, which you can hear on NPR.  It summarizes the article pretty well and lets you hear that Vollmann is actually a pretty normal guy.  Which makes the witch hunt just a little scarier.

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/22/214392632/writer-william-vollmann-uncovers-his-fbi-file