Hippies vs. Punks: John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls (2002)

This is the last Hippies vs. Punks post of the year. Next week I'll be out of town, and the week after is New Year's Day. Continuing with the December theme of quiet, I stumbled upon my few John Adams records this past weekend.

On the Transmigration of Souls (2002) is the choral work Adams composed to memorialize the 9/11 attacks. Commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic, it is the rare piece of contemporary classical music, clocking in at 25 minutes, that achieved not only broad critical acclaim, a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and multiple Grammy's in 2005, but some crossover success as well. For instance, I bought the album in my hipster neighborhood rocker record store a decade ago (back when more brick & mortar record stores existed).

On the Transmigration of Souls moves from sort of background noise musique concrete, to full on discordant earth-shattering sublimity, to harrowing emotional loss, to jarring diabolical ominous modernism.

What is effective about the record is that you can never really place yourself in a classical narrative structure or a minimalist loop. I have probably listened to On the Transmigration of Souls 20 times this past week, and each time I have difficulty locating myself within the sequence of the composition. This I believe to be Adams' intent, a sonic isomorphism of the transmigration process when the soul leaves the body to take up another form.

When I was still in the possession of my college stereo and its two big-woofered speakers and I would be listening to On the Transmigration of Souls, whenever the part where the loud pattering/splattering of the bodies that had jumped from the towers would commence, followed by a jarring/shearing thunderous collapse of the World Trade Center skyscrapers, I would become totally agitated. Since I like to take my sonic medicine, I would ride it out. But it was painful.

The fact is 9/11 really fucked things up. How badly it fucked things up is daily on display. It terrified people. We'll have to revisit this. Before signing off let's hear from the composer himself, who was quoted in The Guardian:

Adams went to Harvard in 1966, but abandoned his music studies for a factory job because he wanted to compose. His success was crowned following 9/11, when the New York Philharmonic invited him to compose an 'aural monument' to the victims of the terrorist attacks. His choral ode, On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered by the orchestra in 2002. 

However, Adams believes that the Republican administration manipulated the memory of the attacks. '9/11 was a very glamorous event,' he said. 'I'm using the term in a very ironic sense - 3,000 people being killed; it's a terrible tragedy, but in the scale of human tragedy it's very small. 

'I think Americans went into what the novelist Philip Roth called "an orgy of narcissism" as a result of 9/11 - we kept replaying those images and kept re-reminding ourselves of what an indignation and how horrible and terrible that event was. And then, of course, we struck out by invading the wrong country.'

Hippies vs. Punks: Richard & Linda Thompson's "Light(s)" Albums, Pt. 1, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight

"The way up and the way down is one and the same."

Heraclitus, Fragment 60, Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker

Each week on Friday I have a Hippies vs. Punks post. The idea is to take a band, usually an album from that band, immerse myself in it during the work week, and then report back at week's end. I have chosen the period from 1975 to 1979, the time the Hippies, the main motor of the '60s cultural revolution in the West, give up the ghost and slink off the center stage and the Punks take over. ("The king is gone but he's not forgotten/This is the story of Johnny Rotten.") Nineteen-seventy-five to 1979 is the main focus -- particularly the years 1977 and 1978 -- but I allow myself to roam free both before and after. For instance, a number of posts have dealt with 1970 -- bombing of Cambodia, Kent State nationwide campus riots, the Cincinnati Pop Festival.

In any Present Age there is more than one avant-garde, perhaps a counter avant-garde or contra-garde. As the Punks assumed the cultural vanguard in the middle 1970s and the Hippies split into miscellaneous camps -- hard rock, glam, prog rock, etc. -- some Hippies kept fighting the good fight. Richard Thompson, a co-founding member and lead guitarist for folk rock giants Fairport Convention, and his wife Linda were two of those Hippies.

No truer statement of the facts of life can be found than Richard & Linda Thompson's debut album, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. It is a rich sonic narcotic, easily one of the greatest albums of all time (though it only squeaks in at number 471 on Rollings Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list).

Recorded quickly and on the cheap in the spring of 1973, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight went unreleased until the following spring owing partly to Island Records executives' discomfort with the Thompsons' bleak existentialism and aversion to celebrity, but also due to a vinyl shortage resulting from the Arab oil embargo.

Thompson had become reacquainted with Linda Peters, a session singer, while the two worked on his solo debut, the fantastic and underappreciated Henry the Human Fly (1972). That album took a brutal and undeserved hazing from the music press which no doubt instilled some bitterness and self-doubt in Thompson, a guy who was already shy. After Thompson marries Linda (October of 1972) and the two become a duo, she becomes the frontman. Her beauty is electric.

While I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight received some decent reviews, mostly it was ignored when finally released by Island in 1974. By then Richard and Linda had become Sufis, the esoteric branch of Islam that is the polar opposite of the Salafi movement that is having such a violent, transformative effect on the Middle East today. Their next two albums, Hokey Pokey (1975) and Pour Down Like Silver (1975), are both recorded while the Thompsons are living in a Sufi commune in East Anglia; following Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver, they retire from the music industry for several years; they return with First Light (1978), which will be the subject of next week's Hippies vs. Punks post.

So I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight really stands by itself. Even though Hokey Pokey shares some similarities and is a great album, it doesn't hang together, it doesn't resonate as an organic unity like Bright Lights. Bright Lights is a masterpiece, plain and simple. It is a profound Hippie assessment of the world after the last rays of light from the Summer of Love have disappeared. It is a winter's album. Cold, dark, harrowing. It is a tribute to secularism and existentialism. The stories are of work and suffering. No greater tandem of songs to end an album can be found than "The End of the Rainbow," which Thompson wrote for his newborn daughter! and "The Great Valerio":

I embraced this album when I left the university and moved to New York City with my wife so she could attend medical school (a period I regularly explore with the "The Colt 45 Chronicle" posts). We played Bright Lights a lot, introduced it to friends who went out and got copies for themselves. It spoke to all of us because we were about the same age as the Thompsons -- early to mid-twenties -- when they recorded it, and we were confronting the same bleak themes. The reality of what life looks like in your middle twenties when you're just starting to travel the long road of work, marriage, survival is crushing. It says something that a beautiful young Hippie couple could create an aural document more devastating and stark than anything the Punks ever came up with.

Do yourself a favor. Get the album. "The Calvary Cross" is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll songs of all time. And if you get a chance, check out the compact documentary the BBC did on Richard Thompson, Solitary Life:

Yesterday morning at work sitting at my desk I came across this video of Thompson performing "The Calvary Cross" with a young band, Dawes, about whom I know little. Looking up from where I sit, through one of the windows, I can see the Comfort Inn next door. In the window of the Comfort Inn I saw, barely, the form of a cleaning lady making a bed, and I wondered if it was the pretty young Latina who I ride the bus with in the morning and who works at the Comfort Inn and who I suspect is undocumented since she will never cross against the light even if there is no traffic for as far as the eye can see. Then I thought about the time when I worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center, a time when I survived on a steady diet of Richard and Linda Thompson, a time when I broke up with my wife. I thought about the brilliant blue sky and looking up at the towers of the World Trade Center from the courtyard below and how I entered the building and began my shift.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #35

This letter, written to a good friend with whom I went to college and who at the time was working as an English teacher in Madrid, captures the spirit of the last few months I spent as a married man. My wife had already given up on the sacred bonds of matrimony and was planning a new, swinging lifestyle around Morningside Heights. I was working as many hours as I could get as a proofreader in the reports department of Deloitte Touche located near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. I worked evenings. Every night the company provided a livery cab home. I didn't drink during the week, probably for the first time in five years, and then would binge on the weekends (an example of which you'll find below). I saved a good deal of money in a short amount of time, around four months. This provided me the nest egg I needed to escape from New York and relocate for half a year in the Emerald City before returning in the fall to try to salvage a marriage that had foundered.

Reading the letter just now I get some satisfaction in realizing that I hit all the points in the timeline laid out in the second-to-last paragraph. Also, I wish I could say after almost 25 years that I had it wrong, that I was just suffering from a depression brought about by an impending separation from my wife. But when I read the last line I think my assessment of adult life, as bleak as it is, is right on the money.

Spring 1990

Mark,

Got your letter Saturday night, the 24th, as I was on my way out and downtown for what would turn out to be an evening of too much drink -- bourbon, malt liquor, cognac -- and smoke that left me stumbling€ around between Broadway and Amsterdam in the vicinity of 110th Street unable to find the subway, unable to see the concrete mole's burrow that signals the presence of the subway in the inebriate's brain. Finally, after seriously considering grabbing a few winks in an abandoned doorway, I realized that I wasn't that far away from Gary and Eleni's apartment. After another 20 minutes of woeful stumbling, I located their place and amazingly remembered the apartment number, 1W. I rang the buzzer a few times and no one answered. So I turned back down the street, forlorn and truly tired, hoping that I'd find the mole's hole this time around; but half way down 109th towards Broadway I realized that there was no way I was going to make it. I went back and rang the buzzer one or two more times; Eleni pulled back the drapes -- they have an apartment on the ground level that faces the street -- saw that it was me and let me in. I apologized, said that I was too drunk to find my way home; explained that I was so drunk because I didn't really drink anymore but that when I did drink I drank quantity-wise as much as I used to when I drank 5 nights out of 7 days; all of this was muttered slurred crazy and earnest through a heavy jaw and rubbery lips. Eleni was slightly frightened because she'd been jolted out of bed at 3 in the morning and Gary wasn't home. He was down in Washington D.C. on his spring break visiting an old college buddy and attending some kind of physician's conference. (Ashley was in Guatemala with an old high school girlfriend staying with Colum and Terri.) The street that Gary and Eleni live on in is an honest to goodness drug dealing death zone.Gary called last night, Sunday night, the night after the Saturday evening I'm describing, and told me -- he's fresh back from Penn Station and Washington -- that two guys had just been shot outside his front door. Anyway, I apologized to Eleni and told her I could leave if she didn't feel comfortable with me being there. She said no, of course not, and unfurled a blanket on the couch. I climbed in; -- that was it, snores and lights out. In the morning Eleni got up at 8 o'clock because she had to go to work. She's working part-time at Macy's now and taking training courses to teach Berlitz, or something like that. I felt like death, breathing that heavy mournful sigh that drives all the way up from the center of the earth and shoots into your body through the soles of your feet, nestling in the belly, clawing into the lungs, and from there passing through the voice box and out of your mouth into the morning light of Sunday -- a new work week begins, ugh.

Anyway, first things first. The reason why I've been such a mute so & so is that I've been working like a dog since the first week of February. I'm doing 40-plus-hour weeks every week working as a proofreader for a huge accounting firm conglomerate in the World Trade Center. And while working long hours hasn't stopped me from writing before, what fucks me up in this case is the shift -- a 2nd shift, from 5 PM to 1 AM, which is usually more like 2 AM. When I get home its 2:30ish and Ashley is asleep and I can't make noise; either that or Ashley is waiting up for me with a nice little meal prepared and expects me to go to bed with her as soon as I've finished eating. Although I realize now since Ashley's been in Guatemala this last week that I'm too hungry and burned out when I get home to do anything more than rustle up some grub and switch on the TV for a few looks. This means that all my letter writing has to be done in the bright light of high noon and, more important than that, fully sober, something I haven't had a lot of practice at. Which brings up another substantial shift this job has created in my personal existential diddledeedoo -- I hardly drink anymore, at the most, twice a week on the weekends. When you're working nights, you just don't have the opportunities to get fucked up. And anyway, like I said, they've got me working like a dog at this place. It's crunch time, tax season, and they've got to get their annual reports off to their multi-million dollar clients. I decided not to be wasting what little energy I do have pissing in the toilet.

The reason why I'm working this job (after having vowed. never to return to office work) is so that I can save money for the big Seattle plan. The plan is that I'll be out in California by May, moving my way up I-5 to Oregon by middle to late May, and settling in Seattle by June. We're going to sublet the place here and Ashley is going to move down to the Morningside Heights-Columbia campus area. This is all being done with a strict sense of gloom and skepticism: more gloom -- but an optimistic gloom, a hopeful sorrow -- on my part, and more skepticism -- a joyful skepticism, a gleeful denigration -- on Ashley's part. Ashley's ready to throw in the towel on the relationship while I'm forever an adherent to the philosophy that everything'll get worked out in time. Oh, well. We'll see how it fares. I sure love her though, and always will.

Well, enough of that. New Orleans, huh? When would you do that? When the fuck are you coming home? Write and tell me precisely what your time frame is. I'm sorry I haven't been writing, and I'm sorry this letter is so harried and lifeless. I'm rushing it before going down to midtown to expedite errands prior to work. It's all so lonely and sad -- the horror of adult life; the ubiquity of the grave; and on top of it all, stronger than anything, bigger and more present than anything else, is the aloneness, the blankness and loneliness that is everything, everybody. Ouch.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #17

Tresca was the girlfriend of a buddy of mine who I idolized. He was a big guy, 6'3" or 6'4", athletic, a few years older than I, a drywaller, a witty West Coaster. Greg is the reason I ended up in the Emerald City. Greg ran work in the Bay Area for a drywall company that his cousin owned. He lined up work for me as a laborer during the summer when school was out. The cousin's company was, and still is, based in Seattle. When I made my escape from New York and a floundering marriage, that's where I ended up.

Letter number 17 contains a description of a pre-9/11, pre-1993 basement bombing World Trade Center where (I worked the winter of 1990) as well as a narrative of a trip I made often at this time -- the A train down to West 4th and then a walk through Washington Square Park to St. Mark's Place. I still dream about those blue-painted wooden boxes hidden beneath the stairways on the subway platforms.

I'm not sure if I ever saw Tresca again. She and Greg broke up around the time of this letter.

Winter 1990

Monday night, a quarter past Eight, the telephone tweeters, Ashley picks up, and who should it be? -- Tresca!

I'd almost forgot what the two of you sound like (I lie). It was only after I got off the phone that I realized that your call was something of an anniversary: it's been one year, almost to the day, since I've seen you guys.
Those were some mighty fine days. Somebody ought to write a story about 'em. It'd probably have to be a play though since all the action took place indoors at the mythic #25 Derby. Shit, I'm just glad that I was around at the time. To be honest with you, when I got back to New York last February I was completely clueless, goalless, aimless, hopeless -- history had ended for me; subsequently, I felt very free (excepting financial burdens,which I shirked for as long as was humanly possible), but even though I felt like I had all that freedom the only thing I was capable of was lying in bed and imagining long stretches of sky filling up with cottony clouds -- I was history, a living corpse, my mind blank, and my heart too. (Ashley and I had. moved East in the summer, and the whole autumn I spent daydreaming in my 5th Avenue office cubicle about ways to get back to the West; so once I'd. got back to the Bay Area, that was it -- I was there. Unfortunately, I was still alive, and heaven's for the dead . . . and I got homesick for my wife, and I couldn't keep milking the hospitality of others. I should have died. then. But, like I said, I returned to good old skinned New York and was without plans for the future: I hadn't planned for the future: I had no desire for the future: I was shiftless vacant skinny and my eyes were hallow -- give me the time of day and I would've mumbled back something about the lie of my bones.) Anyway, all this is just a way of saying that those January days the three of us spent together last year were something else -- they were an end to end all my days.

I finally got some work, proofreading at an accounting firm in the World Trade Center. I had been in the World Trade Center before, but never up top. There are 107 floors in that sucker, at least that's how many there are in the north tower, which is the one I work in. the World Trade Center is a huge sprawling commercial mecca on the southwestern tip of Manhattan (you probably know all of this already, but I'm going to belch it out just the same in case you don't); it's made up of a bunch of these squat black ten-story metal malls (they look like big bloated ticks), and then the two towers, one north and one south, that the malls huddle around (the towers are some of largest skyscrapers in the United States, and they're reverentially referred to by New Yorkers as the "Twin Towers"). Anyway, the place I was working, the offices of DELOITTE TOUCHE, is on the 99th floor. When I took my dinner break the other night (I work 2nd shift -- 5 PM to l AM) I went into the cafeteria and looked out the window. Ninety-nine stories up and glancing uptown everything seemed miniature meek and fallible: a landscape sculpted out of wet toilet paper -- even the Empire State Building, shit, it was no better than a toy house. I looked down and saw Broadway; it was broad, sure enough, but its street lights were like little camel-hair pinpricks. I looked up -- straining eyes -- and saw a thin string of lights stretched across the Hudson way to the north and I figured pretty much that it had to be the George Washington Bridge right next to where I live all the way up in Washington Heights, the northern reaches of  Manhattan. I sat back down and finished my turkey, bacon,lettuce and tomato sandwich, grabbing an extra hag of chips from the vending machine. I threw my trash away and went and washed my hands in the cafeteria sink. Aw shit, back to work.

That was last night. Today I went downtown to buy some albums and check out the bookstores. It was a great day, temperatures in the high 40s, low 50s -- unseasonably warm. I got off the A train at West 4th Street station and walked my way over to the East Village in the butter sunshine; on my way I stopped off at the public restroom in Washington Square Park (one of the only honest-to-goodness public park restrooms I know of in NYC, a dirty old pagoda of a pisser with a real sense of community and comradeship), and took myself a piss along with a dozen other guys, a packed house. Leaving the pagoda, cutting a diagonal line through the park south to east, I saw two skinny college kids -- no more than 18 or 19: pimply faces and wool topcoats -- sitting on a bench drinking quart bottles of Budweiser, pigeons circling the ground at their feet. Wow! What a nice sight. It made me think that there's still hope for an up-and-coming heroic quality in this country, one free of the all the blandness that go along with the small-mindedness and fearfulness of our pleasure-based technological time-blind war-machine commercialism, and whatever other gobbledeegook that that entails. Yep, they sure did look good sitting there -- one quart bottle already dusted and lying cinched up in a wrinkly brown bag among the pigeons that circled -- it made me wish that I was out there with them. But the clock was calling and the chores had to be expedited: records found; toothpaste, envelopes and oranges bought.

While in the East Village I stopped in at SAINT MARK'S BOOKS, the hipster intellectual's bookshop. The new VILLAGE VOICE was just out, and a young woman with spectacles and a crew cut leaned on the counter by the cash register reading aloud to her workmates certain choice lines from an article about a young NYC homosexual artist dying of AIDS. I listened and browsed the new philosophy releases. Another Georges Bataille book published -- they're pumping 'em out these days like a goat pumps out turds; fine by me though because I think he's A.O.K. Oh, the artsy fartsy intellectual underground! You've got to love it, and respect it, but at the same time you can't help thinking that all its cultish attempts at creativity are just so many tiny soupy little shits hidden away in the icebox for future recall and excessive appreciation. I don't know.

On my way home, waiting on the subway platform for the uptown A -- waiting to see that telltale shine on the shark-colored track made by the headlights of the train coning around the bend signifying that it's time to go home -- I come across a wooden box painted baby robin blue, about four feet in length, tucked away beneath a stairway that leads from the platform up to the street. It had to be old, very old; you could tell because it had 60 coats of paint, probably stretching all the way back to Eisenhower; but I couldn't figure out what it was used for -- whether to house garbage cans or for tools to work on the track, I don't know. Anyway, I wrote down on my left palm what was written in big fat black indelible felt tip on top of that old wooden baby robin blue empty ghost-town subway treasure chest, and it reads as follows:

CRAZY POSSIES INCORPORATED    PRIME ROMEO    HARMONY INDIA    OREO GUESS    BABY LUV    LOST BOYZ    ANGLE ENFORCER

(Do you think that what they meant to write was "Angel" instead of "Angle"? I do. But nonetheless, an "Angle Enforcer" is something pretty neat, mistake or no mistake!)

Well, Tresca, I didn't mean to chew your ear off like that. If I don't see you before you make your move to San Diego, stay in touch -- drop a line and get me your new address. At this stage of the game I'm kind of thinking that I'll be out West sometime in late May or early June depending on my means of transportation. I hope to see you then.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #11

I find it hard to believe that I mailed this letter, number 11 from a collection of New York City epistles that are arranged in no order (I'm taking them straight off the top). Addressed to my college friend Shale, who I doubt appreciated it, I was obviously very drunk. The first story referred to was a going-away night-on-the-town thrown for me by my supervisor at Deloitte Touche, which was then located on one of the top floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center (this was before the basement 1993 truck bombing). What I remember about that going-away night (I was leaving for the Emerald City) is that we stayed until the strip club shut down, and at that point all the men who were in there, besides a large bouncer, started wrestling with each other (hence, the "stupid homoerotic men").

Story number two refers to a Saturday morning that fIREHOUSE oddly played on the grass at the center of Columbia University's campus. Ed fROMOHIO, Watt and Hurley sounded great. I talked to both Watt and Hurley; I gave Hurley a sheet of paper for the set list. I ended up drinking three quarts of beer quickly. This impeded me in story three, going to see a Peter Greenaway film with my buddy Gary's wife, Eleni. The movie was so intense and I was so drunk I excused myself and hung out in the Men's Room for about 15 minutes.

Story four is an ancient complaint that a son has against his father. We watched Super Bowl XXIII together (Joe Montana to John Taylor with 34 seconds to go!) and had a great time. No drinking, no hostility. I was very relaxed, nursing wounds from a Saturday night fight on Haight Street. I don't know why I'm beefing about my father here in the context of Super Bowl XXIII. Maybe I'm figuring out that there's a familial connection to drunkenness and insanity.

Spring 1990

Shale, as they say in the sports page, here's the skinny.

I'm flying out of here the 1st. Ashley's got an apartment down at 116th and Morningside right next door to Columbia University (we're subletting our apartment through September).

Friday April 20th was my last day at the accounting firm. I celebrated by heading to a strip joint with my boss and this gay word processor from the Report Department where I work.

We dropped down 21 stories to the 78th floor, what's called the SKYLOBBY. Here's an explanation of drinking and writing: ecstasy is too easy; you've got to make a profession of it; and the key is to do it over and over again until you get used to it so you can capture the pith of it, the fiber of it; drinking and writing is done out of complete respect for the ecstatic -- the excrement of joy.

Four stories: 1) strip joint on the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place (ink wet black hyperbolic young stupid men old streets drizzling like a plague; the great visitation like an atom bomb nuclear nightmare; Hobbes' man as errant wolf bubonic leviathan, when push comes to shove, the soiled and skinned-ness and hate of stupid homoerotic men); 2) fIREHOUSE and the magic of time and the beauty of greatness, of heroism, and the simplicity and wholesomeness of the world, and the perfection of rain green grass and mud wrapped in clear thick plastic in the paradise of academy's pasture (and me, with a quart of Miller, the only one drinking), but more than anything, the greatness goodness the strength the magnanimity and wealth of decency that makes Mike Watt and George Hurley who they were and still abide to be to me and you (heroism can't be beat; it can beat time; that's the key ----- after all that's been said and done, that I should shake hands (me with bloodied cat-scratched palm) and talk with tongue to men that to me are my hope for life, brings philosophy to a standstill); 3) movie: THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER -- total and complete indulgence in violence and gratuity and excessiveness of life, that light is bound to shit and the black (they make the archangel gynecologist eat his transcendence and lightness (the feminine principle is in between, having to reconcile both forces, light and dark)) -- anyway, the perfectness of man and wife seeing this film together, not my wife, but another man's, and this my philosophy, my point of view, thoroughly represented, Bataille's world on screen without the obligatory optimism that always accompanies philosophical writing/representation, but the full-bellied nausea that is synonymous with overeating and the too much of life, the dark dream, the dark forces that you will always have to encounter no matter what; 4) my Dad is crazy and disrespectful (but that's what happens when you're a drunk and don't have anything else going on -- you look to enliven people at all costs -- interaction no holds barred), but  what does it mean to have a crazy father, a crazy castrator? It means you have total freedom to do whatever you want to do (and at the same time a complete burden), and that's rare. So I should really make the best of it, and do everything that's in my power to follow hardship's course, which means buying truck and working, writing and working labor, and when you're staid and sober -- read and read and read and write down your thoughts about the reading.

I started this story before I ever thought of it. Superbowl Sunday and I went into my father's bedroom in my grandmother's house and grabbed down out of the bookshelf one of my old books, Lucretius, and I kept it by me the whole game on a stand with a lamp (high five with my Dad's crippled hand) and it was a bad game until the 4th quarter (oh my god, the synchronicity, during the Christmas game Gary and I coming back uptown to this place and smoking our homegrown dope and watching the last game of the regular season, the Cincinnati Begals and Minnesota Vikings, Rick Fenney) and the 49ers came back and won thanks to the all-ness of Joe Montana (and once again I'm right) -- anyway, it's all wrapped up in ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, -- and what happened from there?