You see, I met this Samoyed named after Jackson Pollock.

I never cared much for dogs and I never cared much for Jackson Pollock. But I met this Samoyed, a pure white northern breed, this bristling mass of fur designed to keep Eskimo kids warm on long winter nights.

So, this is about a dog.

Of course, dog is our term for him. He doesn’t call himself that. He doesn’t perceive himself as a special species, separate from humans and antelopes and flukeworms. I don’t think he does, anyway. Who knows what he knows?

But maybe that is the attraction. Billions of people feel this crazy hypnotic love for dogs. And that’s just the women in Manhattan. It comes down to the purity of a lack of self-perception. The guileless devotion opening up a deep sluice for love to flow through. A helpless un-self consciousness mixed with superhuman powers of smell and hearing mixed with devotion unbounded by limits. It slays. The same is true for babies, of course, but that one has the benefit of a million-year biological imperative driving it.

Anyway, I never succumbed to the hypnotic love for dogs. In fact, I found the barking of dogs profoundly unsettling, as if the shrieks from dogs’ throats conjured past life memories of some concentration camp demise. And I couldn’t fathom those who actually took the time to write or wax starry-eyed about a dog. But I met this Samoyed named after Jackson Pollock. He high jumps all over you when you show up, his excitement for you is so dizzying. And he lumbers next to you, a royal mountain of white hair that causes gasps as you walk down the street.

He still barks, it should be noted, especially at inopportune times, but the bark has lost its bite. And he is a thoroughly non-marketing creature. He lives in a reality either before or beyond language and meanings, so he is immune to the symbolic manipulation of meanings. Unlike us in the sponsored world, we of the separate species who give names to everyone and everything.

So he will never read this. Nor will his friends at the dog run email this to him. I’ll just give him a biscuit next time I see him. After he calms down.

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Digital changes brains.
 
We know that.
 
The online tools that allow you to read this essay while you track your emails while you monitor Charlie Sheen all at the same time are altering your brain circuits. You’re welcome.
 
Just as violinists have been found to possess larger cortical areas devoted to processing hand signals and London cab drivers have larger posterior hippocampuses where spatial representations are stored, digital tools have become a worldwide web of mind-altering drug. Is the alteration for the better? 
 
The evolution of media seems to be an evolution in how we outsource memory. Socrates warned that the invention of writing would lead to the atrophy of human memory.  Meaning the worry over the deleterious effects of new media on the brain has a long and delusional history.   
 
And yet, digital seems different.
 
We know that reading a book gives the mind discipline as it follow a line of argument or takes a journey of narrative across printed pages. You end up more contemplative, more reflective and more imaginative.
 
But the digital frenzy inflicts on our minds a condition that writer and digital doubter Nicholas Carr has called “an industrial model of hedonic efficiency.” Speed trumps depth. Pensive stillness gives way to a phantasmagoria of inputs and sensation. Carr notes that while the Internet affords powerful tools for finding information and conversing with others, it also turns us into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

On the other hand, knowledge is increasing exponentially and human brain power and waking hours are not. So how can we possibly keep up with humanity’s ballooning intellectual output without digital tools?
 
What do you think, oh lab rats of the Digital Age? Oh, I just lost you. Your friend from third grade just Facebooked you.

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“The English are all degenerate,” she said. “Everyone knows that. They’re inbred on that little island.”

She was an otherwise highly-sophisticated French businesswoman, inspired by the eternal guerre between the Gauls and the Anglo Saxons to an analysis of Britain somewhat left of rational. An entire civilized people degenerate?

To me, a simple American boy, born and bred a skinny river away from Manhattan, England is the Beatles. It’s Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Charlotte Rampling and Laurence Olivier. It’s Christmas Carol and Brideshead Revisited. It’s all those splendid accents, all those actors, all those skinny rockers with hair like Rod Stewart from the Do ya think I’m sexy period. Degenerate?

And yet.

Peruse with me, if you will, these actual personals ads from the august and venerated London Review of Books. In the rear pages of this ultra highbrow literary tabloid, you will be thrust into a land of romantic advertisement far removed from the “I like roller skating, walks in the rain, and have a really great sense of humor” self-promotion of dewy-eyed, hope-addicted, childlike American relationship seekers, who in the face of all evidence are convinced true love is just around the corner.

What do we make of this ad from the London Review of Books?

To some, I am a world of temptation. To others, I’m just another cross-dressing pharmacist. Male, 41.

Or this:

This ad is about as close as I come to meaningful interaction with other adults. Woman, 51. Not good at parties but tremendous breasts. Box no. 54326

Or this:

I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out, and covered in too much tahini. Before long I’ll have discarded you on the pavement of life, but until then you’re the perfect complement to a perfect evening. Man, 32.

Or this:

Bald, fat, short, and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.

Or this:

Blah blah, whatever. Indifferent woman. Go ahead and write. Box no. 3253. Like I care.

Or this:

While you’re reading this, I’m taking a photograph of you from outside your window. Later today, I’ll put it in the scrapbook I’m compiling of our love. The heading will be ‘Day 1′. M, 46

Or this:

This is how I wanted to seduce you – using meaningless words in a column of fools before a a theater of idiots. Write immediately and be upon me. F, 58

The ads go on in this vein, issue after issue. Of course, maybe it’s all a joke. Maybe the nation of Chaucer, Dickens and the Bard have simply invented a new, witty literary art form spun from the lonely hearts heavings of singles in search of company. Maybe it’s ingenious, not degenerate.

Either way, here’s some really good advice:

Attention male London Review of Books readers: ‘Greetings, earthling — I have come to infest your puny body with legions of my spawn’ is no way to begin a reply. Female, 36 — suspicious of any men declaring themselves to be in possession of a ‘great sense of humor.’

Oh by the way, I like roller skating, walks in the rain and have a really great sense of humor.

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End of the world predictions have notoriously under-performed. In fact, across the tundra of history, global apocalypse prophesy has earned an impressive 100% inaccuracy rating.

Unless, of course, I’m mistaken and I write to you from within the vapors of some posthumous hallucination, the world having ended some time ago, embarrassingly unbeknownst to me, and here I sit, suspended in my mind, imagining readers out there when in fact, there is no one out there.

Of course, many systems of truth hold this to be precisely the case anyway, without the “world” needing to end. But I digress.
“The End Of The World” is an excellent product, fitting neatly into an explanation of life I call The Threat To Survival Theory. According to this explanation of existence, life is the struggle of the ego to survive (Actually, the continuous and arduous propping up of an illusion.) What people are up to, the theory goes, unconsciously and perversely, is the continual re-creation of earlier experiences of real or imagined threats to survival that were successfully survived. Hence the popularity of horror movies and relationships.

This theory explains the current fascination, the groaning shelves of books, and the major motion picture all devoted to a single year that hasn’t even come yet: 2012. The portents of doom surrounding 2012 involve a whole set of real or imagined cosmic and ecological events, but the main driver for the tang of apocalypse is the Mayan calendar. The Mayans were incredibly advanced mathematicians and astronomers, considering that when they weren’t computing, they were ripping out human hearts and laying them on slabs to propitiate the gods. The famous Long Count Mayan calendar outlines the history of the world from beginning to end. And the end is on December 21, 2012.

One noted astrophysicist said: “The Mayans were 13.7 billion years off in their estimation of the beginning of the world. Why would they be accurate about the end of it?” But with the final chapter of the Mayan Book of Life so near upon us, it can’t help but give us pause. And thus I paused recently at the base of the Kukulcan Pyramid at Chichen Itza, the chief Mayan site on the Yucatan peninsula. The pyramid is an astronomical instrument carved in stone. During the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, at precisely 3 P.M., sunlight bathes the snake-shaped balustrade of the main stairway and forms seven isosceles triangles along the body, eerily simulating the plumed serpent, Kukulcan.

Another fact: if you add up 91 steps on each of four sides and then add the platform at the pinnacle of the temple, you get 365, the days of a year.

Fascinating stuff, but nothing about 2012. Not a single intimation of a world ending seemed legible in the ruins. Like everywhere on this sponsored planet, commerce was the major key. The site had become a vast marketplace, and all things Mayan were available in stone, wood, fabric or T-shirt. Even the Long Count Calendar, silently urging the sellers to hurry, they’d be closing in three years. The sellers were small and almond-eyed, remnants of the Asiatic peoples who crossed the land bridge into the Americas eons ago, remnants of the Indians butchered by the Spanish in the name of God centuries ago.

Two days earlier, New Years Day 2010 had come, but I was elsewhere: on a beach in Playa del Carmen, an hour down the coast from Cancun. In the presence of a handsome 16-year old named Cameron Wolfe, we watched the year turn with sand beneath our feet and fireworks above our heads. It was hard not to recall the Dylan line: “To dance beneath a diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea…”

Maybe we’ll return one day. Maybe on New Year’s Day 2013.

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Les Paul and Paul Wolfe

Les Paul, who died Thursday at the age of 94, had the unique distinction of creating a guitar so iconic, millions thought “Les Paul” the name of a guitar, not a man.

This was dramatized in a Coors TV commercial I wrote and created for Les Paul in 1997.  A swaggering young guitar player noodles a blues riff when he is approached by an older man asking to see the guitar. With contempt, the guitar player asks: “You play?”  “I’ve been known to,” is the old man’s sweet reply, and taking up the guitar, he proceeds to unleash a dazzling flurry of notes. The stunned young man nods in admiration and asks his name. “It’s on your guitar,” replies the older man, and the camera freezes on the Les Paul logo. Then the shock of recognition on the face of the guitar player.

Les thought this commercial resurrected his career, but that was totally untrue. He gave out guitar picks that said on one side: “What’s my name?” and on the other: “It’s on your guitar.” He said of it from the stage (because he was an old time comedian as much as he was a guitar wizard): “That commercial didn’t sell much beer, but it sure sold a hell of a lot of guitars.” This was much closer to the truth.

The arthritis that would eventually ravage the golden hands and allow him but a note or two at a time, was already at work during the shooting of the commercial, and in post production it was decided Les’s solo was not clean enough for air. We looped in a guitar player from LA who imitated Les’s style and synchronized with his fingers. It fell to me to tell Les, and though he had become almost like a father to me, I approached the call like a man going to his doom.

“Les, the director and everyone think the solo isn’t working,” I told him, shifting the blame a bit. “We had to loop in another player on your part.”

There was silence on the line. Then his voice, ever bawdy, came booming through: “You saved my f——g ass!”

Over the years, I’d show up backstage at the Iridium where he played every Monday until he was 94, like a prodigal son returning to a father he had neglected. “Where the hell you been?” was his continual bark, but I think he was just being flattering. I’d sit beside him in the trashy dressing room that opened onto the toilet and help him brush his hair, arrange his hearing aids, or tell him when the band was onstage and it was time to go on. I’d also sit beside him for endless hours as the sea of humanity came to pay homage. They were septugenarians reminiscing of the Les Paul and Mary Ford hits of the early fifties that dominated the Eisenhower airwaves until rock n roll killed that world of music loudly and permanently. They were guitar players from Japan and Borneo and Pittsburgh and Sweden, all genuflecting at the altar of the man who once long ago said: “You can’t hear the goddamn guitar in the band. Let’s electrify it.”

Through all the years, I never saw Les fail to utter a kind word to any fan, or refuse any request for an autograph, not through all the arthritis and ailments and bypasses. In his words, he “made the show work” with humor, habit, and guests that were occasionally of star quality but more often reminders of the Amateur Hours of the forties and fifties. The show was the same set of jazz standards year after year, and the same jokes, over and over again. Flirting with the buxom but kittenish female bass player Nikki he would turn to the audience and say: “I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole.”

I dreamed of writing a book with Les. It would be called “Guitar Players. By Les Paul,” which I told him would be a little like a book called “Life. By God.” Les Paul knew, inspired and was inspired by every guitar player from Eddie Lang to Charlie Christian to Django Reinhardt to Jimi Hendrix to Joe Pass to Wes Montgomery to Jeff Beck. I saw this book as inevitable, mandatory, Les’ profile of every player: anecdotally, biographically and musically. We got many hours on tape, but I could never get him to focus. There were always museums to set up and Hall of Fame nights to celebrate and medical procedures and periods of retreat at home in Mahwah between the Monday night shows. And, perhaps, my own insufficient resolve.

In the car returning from the TV shoot in Colorado one night, a night whose like I knew would never quite come again, he spoke in one unbroken stream about his experiences with President Roosevelt, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Fred Waring, Paul McCartney, Count Basie, Judy Garland and Slash. He uttered a truly amazing statement about my lifelong idol Bob Dylan. “He can’t play the harmonica, but he’s a f—-g interesting guy.”

He had injured himself on the plane ride out to the shoot, and I went with him to a local hospital to get bandaged. He signed the paperwork with the name he never legally changed: Lester Polfuss, and to the nurse thought he was just an 81-year old man named Lester. And in a sense, that’s what he was.

“There are only two kinds of music,” he told me in the waiting room. “Good and bad.”

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It lasted about a thousandth of a second, the glimpse of this young Japanese girl racing past me on Fifth Avenue, probably 16 years old, smiling and chattering to her friends in Japanese. It was just a glimpse and then she was gone, but of such glimpses memories and blogs are made. Because just below her huge smile, her T-shirt proclaimed in even huger letters: SCREW YOU.

This we know. If you are a woman in Japan, you are not allowed to do business. Until recently, Western businesswomen presenting work to Japanese clients had to employ a male front to substitute for her, like the blacklisted artists during the McCarthy era who hired fronts to present their work. Japanese men would simply not talk to a woman.

We know that marriage means nothing in Japan and that women sit at home with the children while businessmen and white collar workers go to Girlie bars every night of the week to smoke and get blindingly drunk and receive some unfathomable service from geisha-type bar girls – mainly, I have come to believe, being talked to flatteringly. (I lived for years on a street near the UN lined with private geisha/girlie bars for Japanese businessmen. I never wanted to enter, and as a gaijin would never have been allowed to do so, so I never could fathom the precise nature of the services provided there, though again, I have come to believe the obvious was not necessarily the case.)

So here’s this sweet Japanese tourist proudly wearing her SCREW YOU T-shirt. Does she know what it means? Does she mean what it says? Would she have worn this shirt in Japan, where conformity is the mandate and women retreat into the background? In my recollections, the young women of Tokyo wear pussycat pictures and surgical masks on the streets. No text.

So she actually may not know exactly what SCREW YOU means. Or she means it ironically, because of course she harbors no anger or frustration at America, this place she almost undoubtedly finds fascinating with freedom.

Maybe the T-shirt is her perverse love song to a land of boundless entertainment, utter freedom for young girls, and fashions of every description available at an exchange rate extremely favorable to the yen.

Sayonara, young sweetheart of Japan. And screw you too.

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