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Bards of Mythville | Phoenix, AZ | Alternative / alt-country / post-punk topical techno poesy | Music, Lyrics, Songs, and Videos | ReverbNation


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23 Roads to Mythville
An apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life. Read more






Ipswich at War
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."
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Glasnost Lost
As an act of defiance after the botched election of 2000, experiential author launched himself into a journey into the underworld of American life, or, what he calls: The Science of Descent. Read more







Godz, Cars & Cannon
Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches drives into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
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Many Moons the Mythville: The Collected Road Poems
Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.
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Human Search Engine

The journey continues as the quest for myth in an age of information overload leads to online life as an editor for Access Internet Magazine. A story about all human search engines as they chase the ghost in the machine.
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William Blake in Cyberspace

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel takes on the visionary art and poetry of William Blake, comparing an otherworldly worldview to that revolutionary, romantic era to our own wild, wired, mythic world.
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The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
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The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.
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It’s after Christmas, a Tuesday, and Depoe Bay is a roiling sea as gray whales bound about in the distance, mostly behind behemoth waves driven by an oncoming winter storm.
Along the seawall people are everywhere in their jackets and other warming gear, with cameras or binoculars, hypnotized as the waves pound away. The stormy sea sends great white splashes into the air that generate applause.
It’s as if Depoe Bay were a vast stage without actors – or very shy performers, if you count the gray whales off in the distance – and the churning of the water is part of an amazingly on-schedule performance (considering this is the holiday Whale Watch Week rush).
During the week, many of the same people had been shopping during the busiest day of the holiday season. That night, maybe as they luxuriated in a local hotel room with waves from big winds pounding out-side their big picture windows, the watched anniversary shows on last year’s tsunami disaster in the Indian ocean. Now they are enthralled with waves powered by a storm way out by Hawaii heading this way, coming fast as 30 to 40 mph wind gusts whip away, and the power of the water is the attraction.
The whales? They are hidden behind, zooming in and out of a white-washed curtain out there ... riding high ... riding low ... .
Mark Spaulding, who has come from Vancouver, Wash., to see this, instead points his fancy camcorder down into the Depoe Bay spouting horn. Others stand closely nearby, hoping to catch a bit of the spray. There is no logic to the way the waves break, no apparent system, no pattern, no order, no way to predict which wave will be the one to send the water shooting through the spout and into the air. Finally, we have a hit. Spray goes into the air, onto the sidewalk, onto vehicles parked along the seawall.
He exclaims. “I got one!” That is, his camera did, his highly sensitive lens doused by the salty sea of the Pacific.
Meanwhile, in the “Whale Watching Spoken Here” interpretive center, a woman is toting two restless grandchildren onto the second deck of the building perched on the southern end of the seawall. The picture windows for the room in-the-round are steamy from the day’s crowds. One of the boys climbs onto a for-pay viewmaster. “I want a quarter!” the boy shouts. But the grandmother says, “Why, there’s nothing to see out there. If there was anything to see, we could do it.” Then, she says, “Did your mother ever tell you about the time we saw a whale go right under the boat in Mexico?”
Actually, the whales are going right under her nose again.
At precisely that same time, one deck below in the interpretive center, there is, in fact, something to see out there. A whole room of people lean into the window with their binoculars as Morris Grover, lead interpretive ranger for the Oregon State Park service’s whale watch center, keeps people in the room posted. “There’s one going by the buoy,” he shouts. With swells of 20 feet or more, it has been a hard day to see whales, he said. On this day, he only sees six or seven. The next day, with calmer seas with only 12-foot swells, he will see 20 whales. But on this day the payoffs are few and far between as the giant curtain of waves steals the show.
“Well, there’s one of the 1,800 whales out there,” he says to the crowd.
Leaning toward the sea is a natural tendency. When you go to the beach on a sunny day in say, Florida or Southern California, we are all children at heart: We want to go in.
But this kind of sea is different. We are drawn to the sea, but in cases such as these, with it crashing and roiling and churning, to try to get close is unwise.
There are signs all over. Such as the sign at the Rocky Creek outlook off of Highway 101, just south of Depoe Bay, which states: “Warning. Area beyond this point subject to high dangerous waves. Even though ocean appears calm large waves may sweep over rocks at any time. Do not go beyond this sign.”
So, just as people are poking their cameras into the Depoe Bay spouting horns a few miles away, people who can (probably) read have crossed the line. Rocky Creek is peculiar in this way. Its access to a very close look at the sea is easier, due to the erosion of where a fence should be. Three men are past the warning sign. The sea doesn’t appear to be calm. Indeed, high dangerous waves are apparent. Just beneath their noses. High dangerous waves are almost at eye level for anyone daring enough to scramble down just a few feet of rain-slick black rock. The tide is coming in. They are getting a face full.
Such is also the case at Cape Perpetua, just south of Yachats. There is a huge spouting horn at a place called the Devil’s Churn. This should be a clue. Well-built stairs in the trail lead down to where the spouting horn sends white-water blasts into the air.
A young couple goes down and disappears around the bend to where the very front edge of the horn should be.
The tide is coming in.
Next time they are seen, at the top of the Cape Perpetua trail, they are soaking wet. They get into their car, head north up Highway 101, to zoom up and down, maybe happy, maybe shivering, in and out of a series of coastal areas with blue signs indicating tsunami danger zones.

Official website of writer Joey Robert Parks

To Bidi, Or Not to Bidi:
What Was the Question?

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

He quit smoking right after the war. One day he was tooling around, heading toward a casino on the other side of the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, Arizona, and he came to a dock and the dock led to a loading ramp onto a ferry that would carry him to his dicey destination. But then he remembered, shit, he didn`t have any cigarrettes. He thought about turning around. As a thoughtful guy, heading back down the ramp, he started to do some math. He calculated, probably as he was also thinking about the money he needed for gambling, that if he stopped smoking for 10 years he would have saved himself about $40,000. With that, he turned around. He never smoked again. However, he still gambles.

To bidi, or not to bidi? That is the question.

For a little more than eight years, I have been smoking a little Indian cigarette called a bidi. In many respects it has changed my life, not all for the better, mind you. After all, setting fire to one's lungs defies logic and contradicts the proclivity of human nature toward longevity (i.e., smoking too much of anything of any kind will eventually kill participants, willing or unwilling, myself included). I was not really a smoker before I started inhaling them. Some kind of existential dilemma, however, induced by a knock-down drag-out divorce, as well as the untethering from the old modes of behavior that such an event implies, led me to an era of unmonitored experimentation. Whatever the case, the pleasing aura of the smoke and its surprising effects made my life a lot more interesting.

What are bidis? Well, they are basically peasant cigarettes from India. A eucalyptus leaf wrapped around tobacco.

Various brands are available. Multi-flavored Darshan-brand bidis are dominating the market these days. Small Shivsagar Bidis are shaped like a hand-rolled cigarette, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's only accoutrement.

A larger version by Sher Bidis are longer and fatter than an ordinary cigarette and much more powerful, quite capable of making even an initiated smoker sick to his stomach. Indeed, when first smoked, a bidi can have a profound effect on the senses.

It's not the shape nor the smell but the almost narcotic sensation brought on by the leaf. A kick in the head, basically. Perhaps that is the reason why some smoke shops in the United States had trouble keeping up with the demand for the little buggers when they hit a trendy flashpoint two or so years ago.

I have always thought of this peasant's solace as a type of marijuana substitute since the two share many characteristics, except for the THC, which is too bad. Hell, it could be hay wrapped in a maple leaf, for all it matters. It's the skanky, sweet- smelling smoke from the eucalyptus tree that delivers a powerful feeling. For a hyper, overemotional sort like myself, it really takes me down a notch. Its slight, twisted body, too small to hold like an ordinary cigarette, needs to be held between your thumb and index finger. To enable you to take in the bidi's last offering, you can unravel the little threads at its base like a roach clip. Just one of several reasons why this organic device resonates with thoughts toward its illegal associate.

Sound kinda scary? Well, don't get too excited. They are novelty smokes in the truest sense, like cloves or quirky cigarillos. And though they will probably always remain a cult item, bidis have changed my life.

I tried them for the first time in a bar called the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon in Telluride, Colorado. Located in the dank basement of an old mining town building, the Moon is one of the more sultry nightspots in all of the Colorado Rockies' ski towns. One reason is because of Deejay Harry, a bleach blonde rastafarian who could turn"Trash Disco" Thursday nights into orgies of sampling at 100 beats per minute. The voodoo king of trance music, a kind of local celebrity, would induce his crowd into aerobic states of glee, turning the Yups into rhythm-possessed Yorubans.

The stage set, the mood was conveniently in place for the two young men. As they began to unwrap and pull slow drags of their strawberry scented Kailas Bidis, perhaps the most popular brand at the time, I watched as an amazing situation developed for the pair. Several women were immediately drawn, as if some animal magnetism were at work. The women ventured toward the illicit aroma and the increasingly enigmatic, though otherwise unremarkable, men. Obviously questioning, and soon requesting to sample the wares of the two young rich hipsters, nicknamed locally as"trustafarians" because they were most likely living at that elevations with the support of a trust fund. It wasn't long after that these strangers were dancing in a swirling rhythm of the young, the beautiful and over-exercised.

The next night I awoke savoring the previous night's indelible image. I was determined to conduct my own experiment with the little wonders.

Not that I have ever had any trouble meeting people, but the temptation to have an instant "in" with total strangers was too great to resist further investigation. I began to question whether it was the cigarettes or something about the combination of the mood in the bar, maybe the vibe in the room, that was intoxicating enough to bring such good fortune on these men. Curious if I would fare equally, I located the town's cigar shop (which has since closed), walked in, and stocked up on ammunition.

That night, I smoked bidis in bars from one end of town to the other, a stretch of about a half-mile. And yes, perhaps I did smoke a little too violently, but the results were amazing. I continued to move from one bar to another, wary of my initial findings and impressions, just as much as any good John Lilly of the West might try (remember"Altered States"?). Sure enough, everywhere I went people were asking"What is that?" ,"Where did you get it?" and, of course,"Can I try one?"

When I returned to my home at the time in Phoenix, Arizona, I was assured that I was carrying some kind of socializing magnet in my shirt pocket. The results were much the same in the urbane confines of mall-dressed Scottsdale. It was my experience that people, especially women, would invariably stop to inquire and eventually ask for one. Even if they didn't smoke! A couple of hours into a night I would reach for one only to discover that I was left with an empty pack, being able to account for less than half of them myself. They were the ultimate first line."They are Kailas Bidis," I would say with a certain jaded, half-closed right eyelid squint. As I said it, blowing out smoke to accent my exotic qualities, I'd add, enigmatically,"They are from Indjeeaaaaa."

Now fast forward: A year had passed since I first tried the cigarettes in Telluride. I had been working from my rented room the rural Massachusetts, trying to scrape out a living as a freelance writer after working for a year at the Robb Report, a magazine for rich bastards that was decidedly anti-peasant. I was climbing the walls of this sleepy surbuban hovel, Acton, maybe 20 miles west of Boston, and I was needing my smokes just a bit too badly.

The problem: You just can't buy bidis in rural New England, thus making my addiction to them a total nuisance. I didn't feel like quitting, because, after all, being a freelance writer meant being anxious about just about everything, and I had two choices in order to obtain more.

I could drive an hour and a half north to a New Hampshire mall, which was the last place I found bidis in ample supply, or, I could take a train to Boston, where there were sure to be plenty of bohemians about who could point me in the right direction to a cigar shop that carried them.

So I end up at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very crowded place bustling with its famous mix of chic retail franchises, coffee galore, lots of stuff to read, very old stone and brick and smarty pants liberalism for a select elite of people who can afford to be so. I looked down and saw half a spent bidi discarded on the street. I felt that I was on the right track.

I found them easily, in stock at the David P. Ehrlich Company on Tremont Street, which has been supplying generations of tokers with smokes since 1868, a considerable legacy of suffering for more than a century's worth of hacking and general git stupidity. I bought a carton for $27, which I could not really afford since I was a starving writer. But hey, I figured, the smokes would at least kill my appetite. The carton contained 10 red packs, a flavor called strawberry and that really means sweet, the first of which I peeled open practically before I was out of the cigar shop. I quickly found a seat on the patio of a Harvard Square pastry store, lit up, and watched the grey-templed professorial sorts and pretty people dressed in dot-com black passing by.

Cambridge was fairly unimpressed by the bidis smoky blue essence wafting between the tables by the pastry store. The guys playing chess didn't even look up when a cloud as big as a bus fart polluted their pawns. Worldly places like Harvard Square know bidis all too well.

A week before in Miami, my experience was very different, but still it wasn't the novelty that caught people's noses toward my smoking, it was the familiarity.

A woman from Spain sat near me at a bar in South Beach and wanted to talk about her experiences with bidis. A Haitian cab driver on the way to the airport recognized the smell as I let the smoke drift out the window as we listened to an angry political commercial broadcast into his car's radio from Haiti. The heavy accented voice ranted as I took another puff of my peasant's pleasure. A South African lawyer in the airport bar recognized it and wanted one. While waiting for the plane outside the entry to the terminal, where everybody tends to smoke in a nervous, frenzied way, a couple of people came up to me, saying,"Oh, I recognize that smell," recalling "I haven't smoked one of those since I was in Paris," or" May I have one?"
Lest I not forget the wary looks on the faces of the luggage staff who looked on in disbelief; wondering whether they should call security or not.

Indeed, it's always a good idea to keep the original packaging around in case somebody thinks you are smoking a joint.

Once, at a U2 concert, a security guy grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the aisle, accusing me of smoking pot. He grabbed the lit cigarette, the last one I had, and in the darkened gloom of Foxboro Stadium it certainly looked like a joint. He was ready to lead me away as I fumbled in my pocket for the crumpled red packaging with the surgeon general's warning crudely stuck onto it. Fortunately, a half-dozen U2 fans sitting nearby saw what was going on, had seen me smoking for most of the show, and came to my rescue."He's just smoking those bidis," they all said. Even though I was set free, I felt like a criminal.

Three days after my trip to Harvard Square, I had seven packs left, so I was on a pack a day rate. At the time, I had a female visitor to share my fascination with, and she became so enamoured we got married. Though she claims she doesn't smoke, she has done her part in depleting the reserves. I was a little tired, strung out from smoking too many of the unfiltered tiny demons. I had this heavy feeling in my lungs, but I ignored the symptoms, as though bidis had lit my soul on fire and turned the self-awareness switch to"off."

Regardless of their obviously damaging effects they had seemed to have become an invaluable ice breaker, which had opened many new faces to me. They were a mask and a crutch and an everyday thing, like orange juice or bills in the mail. Payment due? Maybe 20 years, I'd say.

----

Postscript: In the time since these experiences were first recorded, about two years, I guess, I have stopped smoking, and then started again, then stopped again.

Right now I'm lighting one up, joylessly though, but I'm pretty sure these flavorful little flame sticks have passed their prime as novelty items. Arizona legislators were so incensed about their incense scent that they made bidis illegal to sell in that state (ck), known worldwide as a hovel of reactionary Americans. Too many kids thought they were candy, due to all of the cute flavors, and lately I've noticed that the cigar store salespeople are looking at me like some kind of 40-year-old juvenile. Once again, I think about quitting, and this mental exercise seems soul inflicting to me. But then, I keep going back to what a Cherokee shaman in Telluride once told me about smoking the peace pipe. He proclaimed the social importance of a good smoke, and said when you exhale, it's like sending out a prayer. That's the funny thing about this smoke: It's the shortest distance between you, me and big deep dark oblivion.

He quit smoking right after the war. One day he was tooling around, heading toward a casino on the other side of the Colorado River at Lake Havasu, Arizona, and he came to a dock and the dock led to a loading ramp onto a ferry that would carry him to his dicey destination. But then he remembered, shit, he didn`t have any cigarrettes. He thought about turning around. As a thoughtful guy, heading back down the ramp, he started to do some math. He calculated, probably as he was also thinking about the money he needed for gambling, that if he stopped smoking for 10 years he would have saved himself about $40,000. With that, he turned around. He never smoked again. However, he still gambles.

To bidi, or not to bidi? That is the question.

For a little more than eight years, I have been smoking a little Indian cigarette called a bidi. In many respects it has changed my life, not all for the better, mind you. After all, setting fire to one's lungs defies logic and contradicts the proclivity of human nature toward longevity (i.e., smoking too much of anything of any kind will eventually kill participants, willing or unwilling, myself included). I was not really a smoker before I started inhaling them. Some kind of existential dilemma, however, induced by a knock-down drag-out divorce, as well as the untethering from the old modes of behavior that such an event implies, led me to an era of unmonitored experimentation. Whatever the case, the pleasing aura of the smoke and its surprising effects made my life a lot more interesting.

Douglas McDaniel Photo of Doug McDaniel.
What are bidis? Well, they are basically peasant cigarettes from India. A eucalyptus leaf wrapped around tobacco.

Various brands are available. Multi-flavored Darshan-brand bidis are dominating the market these days. Small Shivsagar Bidis are shaped like a hand-rolled cigarette, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's only accoutrement.

A larger version by Sher Bidis are longer and fatter than an ordinary cigarette and much more powerful, quite capable of making even an initiated smoker sick to his stomach. Indeed, when first smoked, a bidi can have a profound effect on the senses.

It's not the shape nor the smell but the almost narcotic sensation brought on by the leaf. A kick in the head, basically. Perhaps that is the reason why some smoke shops in the United States had trouble keeping up with the demand for the little buggers when they hit a trendy flashpoint two or so years ago.

I have always thought of this peasant's solace as a type of marijuana substitute since the two share many characteristics, except for the THC, which is too bad. Hell, it could be hay wrapped in a maple leaf, for all it matters. It's the skanky, sweet- smelling smoke from the eucalyptus tree that delivers a powerful feeling. For a hyper, overemotional sort like myself, it really takes me down a notch. Its slight, twisted body, too small to hold like an ordinary cigarette, needs to be held between your thumb and index finger. To enable you to take in the bidi's last offering, you can unravel the little threads at its base like a roach clip. Just one of several reasons why this organic device resonates with thoughts toward its illegal associate.

Sound kinda scary? Well, don't get too excited. They are novelty smokes in the truest sense, like cloves or quirky cigarillos. And though they will probably always remain a cult item, bidis have changed my life.

I tried them for the first time in a bar called the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon in Telluride, Colorado. Located in the dank basement of an old mining town building, the Moon is one of the more sultry nightspots in all of the Colorado Rockies' ski towns. One reason is because of Deejay Harry, a bleach blonde rastafarian who could turn"Trash Disco" Thursday nights into orgies of sampling at 100 beats per minute. The voodoo king of trance music, a kind of local celebrity, would induce his crowd into aerobic states of glee, turning the Yups into rhythm-possessed Yorubans.

The stage set, the mood was conveniently in place for the two young men. As they began to unwrap and pull slow drags of their strawberry scented Kailas Bidis, perhaps the most popular brand at the time, I watched as an amazing situation developed for the pair. Several women were immediately drawn, as if some animal magnetism were at work. The women ventured toward the illicit aroma and the increasingly enigmatic, though otherwise unremarkable, men. Obviously questioning, and soon requesting to sample the wares of the two young rich hipsters, nicknamed locally as"trustafarians" because they were most likely living at that elevations with the support of a trust fund. It wasn't long after that these strangers were dancing in a swirling rhythm of the young, the beautiful and over-exercised.

The next night I awoke savoring the previous night's indelible image. I was determined to conduct my own experiment with the little wonders.

Not that I have ever had any trouble meeting people, but the temptation to have an instant "in" with total strangers was too great to resist further investigation. I began to question whether it was the cigarettes or something about the combination of the mood in the bar, maybe the vibe in the room, that was intoxicating enough to bring such good fortune on these men. Curious if I would fare equally, I located the town's cigar shop (which has since closed), walked in, and stocked up on ammunition.

That night, I smoked bidis in bars from one end of town to the other, a stretch of about a half-mile. And yes, perhaps I did smoke a little too violently, but the results were amazing. I continued to move from one bar to another, wary of my initial findings and impressions, just as much as any good John Lilly of the West might try (remember"Altered States"?). Sure enough, everywhere I went people were asking"What is that?" ,"Where did you get it?" and, of course,"Can I try one?"

When I returned to my home at the time in Phoenix, Arizona, I was assured that I was carrying some kind of socializing magnet in my shirt pocket. The results were much the same in the urbane confines of mall-dressed Scottsdale. It was my experience that people, especially women, would invariably stop to inquire and eventually ask for one. Even if they didn't smoke! A couple of hours into a night I would reach for one only to discover that I was left with an empty pack, being able to account for less than half of them myself. They were the ultimate first line."They are Kailas Bidis," I would say with a certain jaded, half-closed right eyelid squint. As I said it, blowing out smoke to accent my exotic qualities, I'd add, enigmatically,"They are from Indjeeaaaaa."

Now fast forward: A year had passed since I first tried the cigarettes in Telluride. I had been working from my rented room the rural Massachusetts, trying to scrape out a living as a freelance writer after working for a year at the Robb Report, a magazine for rich bastards that was decidedly anti-peasant. I was climbing the walls of this sleepy surbuban hovel, Acton, maybe 20 miles west of Boston, and I was needing my smokes just a bit too badly.

The problem: You just can't buy bidis in rural New England, thus making my addiction to them a total nuisance. I didn't feel like quitting, because, after all, being a freelance writer meant being anxious about just about everything, and I had two choices in order to obtain more.

I could drive an hour and a half north to a New Hampshire mall, which was the last place I found bidis in ample supply, or, I could take a train to Boston, where there were sure to be plenty of bohemians about who could point me in the right direction to a cigar shop that carried them.

So I end up at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very crowded place bustling with its famous mix of chic retail franchises, coffee galore, lots of stuff to read, very old stone and brick and smarty pants liberalism for a select elite of people who can afford to be so. I looked down and saw half a spent bidi discarded on the street. I felt that I was on the right track.

I found them easily, in stock at the David P. Ehrlich Company on Tremont Street, which has been supplying generations of tokers with smokes since 1868, a considerable legacy of suffering for more than a century's worth of hacking and general git stupidity. I bought a carton for $27, which I could not really afford since I was a starving writer. But hey, I figured, the smokes would at least kill my appetite. The carton contained 10 red packs, a flavor called strawberry and that really means sweet, the first of which I peeled open practically before I was out of the cigar shop. I quickly found a seat on the patio of a Harvard Square pastry store, lit up, and watched the grey-templed professorial sorts and pretty people dressed in dot-com black passing by.

Cambridge was fairly unimpressed by the bidis smoky blue essence wafting between the tables by the pastry store. The guys playing chess didn't even look up when a cloud as big as a bus fart polluted their pawns. Worldly places like Harvard Square know bidis all too well.

A week before in Miami, my experience was very different, but still it wasn't the novelty that caught people's noses toward my smoking, it was the familiarity.

A woman from Spain sat near me at a bar in South Beach and wanted to talk about her experiences with bidis. A Haitian cab driver on the way to the airport recognized the smell as I let the smoke drift out the window as we listened to an angry political commercial broadcast into his car's radio from Haiti. The heavy accented voice ranted as I took another puff of my peasant's pleasure. A South African lawyer in the airport bar recognized it and wanted one. While waiting for the plane outside the entry to the terminal, where everybody tends to smoke in a nervous, frenzied way, a couple of people came up to me, saying,"Oh, I recognize that smell," recalling "I haven't smoked one of those since I was in Paris," or" May I have one?"
Lest I not forget the wary looks on the faces of the luggage staff who looked on in disbelief; wondering whether they should call security or not.

Indeed, it's always a good idea to keep the original packaging around in case somebody thinks you are smoking a joint.

Once, at a U2 concert, a security guy grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the aisle, accusing me of smoking pot. He grabbed the lit cigarette, the last one I had, and in the darkened gloom of Foxboro Stadium it certainly looked like a joint. He was ready to lead me away as I fumbled in my pocket for the crumpled red packaging with the surgeon general's warning crudely stuck onto it. Fortunately, a half-dozen U2 fans sitting nearby saw what was going on, had seen me smoking for most of the show, and came to my rescue."He's just smoking those bidis," they all said. Even though I was set free, I felt like a criminal.

Three days after my trip to Harvard Square, I had seven packs left, so I was on a pack a day rate. At the time, I had a female visitor to share my fascination with, and she became so enamoured we got married. Though she claims she doesn't smoke, she has done her part in depleting the reserves. I was a little tired, strung out from smoking too many of the unfiltered tiny demons. I had this heavy feeling in my lungs, but I ignored the symptoms, as though bidis had lit my soul on fire and turned the self-awareness switch to"off."

Regardless of their obviously damaging effects they had seemed to have become an invaluable ice breaker, which had opened many new faces to me. They were a mask and a crutch and an everyday thing, like orange juice or bills in the mail. Payment due? Maybe 20 years, I'd say.

----

Postscript: In the time since these experiences were first recorded, about two years, I guess, I have stopped smoking, and then started again, then stopped again.

Right now I'm lighting one up, joylessly though, but I'm pretty sure these flavorful little flame sticks have passed their prime as novelty items. Arizona legislators were so incensed about their incense scent that they made bidis illegal to sell in that state (ck), known worldwide as a hovel of reactionary Americans. Too many kids thought they were candy, due to all of the cute flavors, and lately I've noticed that the cigar store salespeople are looking at me like some kind of 40-year-old juvenile. Once again, I think about quitting, and this mental exercise seems soul inflicting to me. But then, I keep going back to what a Cherokee shaman in Telluride once told me about smoking the peace pipe. He proclaimed the social importance of a good smoke, and said when you exhale, it's like sending out a prayer. That's the funny thing about this smoke: It's the shortest distance between you, me and big deep dark oblivion.

Google Search: Mythville

Richard Clarke's not-so-secret agent

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

When Richard Clarke testified before Congress last spring on his inside take on the events leading up to 9/11 and the White House's response to the disaster, an attendant chorus of attacks began in the media to undermine his message.

Here was this guy, this practical traitor, just another government exile, just another White House official turned into an opportunist. Look at this, some said: It's just all to sell a book.

In fact, it did sell. Mr. Clarke's best-selling book, "Against All Enemies," was released just before his apperance before Congress. And as a nation attempted to gauge his sincerity by reading the lines on his forehead and the eveness of his voice, the doubt was planted: This guy was making more money by promoting himself in a way that Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh could scarcely dream.

But the man who helped to put the deal together for Simon-Schuster, a counter-terrorism expert and author named Len Sherman, said that scenario was just another false story intended to undermine Clarke's message: That the administration botched the intelligence job before 9/11, and then took advantage of the opportunity to pursue the long-held goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

"I am not a full-time literary agent, I am a counter-terrorism writer," Scottsdale resident Sherman said over the crackling connection of a cell phone as he vacationed on a beach on the Atlantic. "I new him (Clarke) after a trip to Afghanistan before 9/11, and then I met with him after I had visited al Qaeda prisoners captured by the Northern Alliance. I gave Richard Clarke the intelligence (from the trip). I went to the White House and physically handed it to him.

"That was the start of our relationship," Mr. Sherman said. "That was when I told him you should write the book."

Mr. Clarke, according to Mr. Sherman, wasn't thinking about a book that would give the administation a month-long PR migraine. He was thinking about another fascinating, breaking plague upon the new century: Cybercrime. Infowar. Cyberterror.

Now the book, sent into motion by Free Press, a subordinate wing of Simon -Schuster began to turn it's economic wheel. As Mr. Clarke told Congress, in a rather funny moment during a dark time, the plan was to divulge all of this discord just in time for Christmas. A typical desire for a first-time author, and just as typical, Mr. Clarke told Congress he was actually frustrated with how long it took for the book to come out, missing the Christmas rush.

"At first they wanted to bring it out in December and parley it for the bottom line," Mr. Sherman said. But then Simon-Schuster slowed down the process, and Mr. Sherman, trying to put that frustrating period into words as the book stewed at the publishing house: "I think they were being ... we can hold this, so, we will."

In the meantime, Mr. Sherman said, the administration public response team gathered force.

"This administration is particularly spiteful and revengeful of its enemies," he said. "Simon-Schuster found out about the hearings and moved the release up a week. And then, of course, it just clicked. But of the conspiratorial views of this: None of it is true."

mythville@yahoo.com

Denial of Access

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville MetaMedia


The date is Dec. 13, 2000, and the Internet landscape is teetering on the brink of collapse. But we don’t know it yet. We are secure, successful, on top of the publishing world. Or so we believe. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding the presidential election for us. We are winners … or so we believe.

Gathered in a large enough quantity in a hotel meeting room, we, the full-time, well-paid employees of Access Internet Magazine, create a convincing air of confidence, of go-go e-business wiles, high on the Net-savvy narcotic of the zeitgeist vibe, a self-assurance and self-pleased demeanor that would be comic if it weren’t so tragic. Looking back at it now, that is. Sure, some of us worried rough times were ahead. At least I did. I’m a worrier, though. Yet, even considering my natural pessimism, it would be hard to imagine how quickly such things can end.

So many startups, as in new magazines, whole living cycles, forests of ink and paper at your doorstep, so many all come and gone. I’ve done them all now: multi-million dollar projects, national monthlies, regional rags covering sports and art, grass roots enviro’ ops out in the desert, entertainment weeklies, all gone. Killed by everything from the Gulf War to a Major League Baseball strike. And now, the dot-com bust. All due to a lack of ad lineage, paid for by e-commerce enterprises in a similar bind, due to the danger of having too much investment capital to burn. Due to publishers always believe they are capturing, the so-called crest of the wave. Until, that is, the wave, the demo, crashes on the shore.

The next wave is on the way. But it’s too late. Ink on paper just can’t adapt in these seas.

We are at the annual sales meeting for Access Media Inc., just before the lavish Christmas Party on the far end of town. Publisher Mike Veitch stands in front of the magazine’s blown up cover featuring then president Bill Clinton: who could likely barely work his e-mail. At least the cover shot of the stumped and befuddled president seemed to depict just that. As if he is looking into one of the impenetrable miracles of our time. Like he fit the demo of newbie readers to “America’s Guide to the Internet.”
Access staffers, mostly those on the advertising side, had come from all over the country after a remarkable year of growth and, apparently, breakthroughs in publishing. You might just wonder, with so much growth in circulation so fast, from 4 million to 10 million weekly within a little over a year, if we had a bigger audience than the president. Whole suburbs of newsreaders, gadget fanatics or, more likely, grandmas wanting to know how to receive photos by e-mail of their grandchildren, practical professionals wanting to know the latest investment site, moms looking for cooking sites and so on…a demo that was nothing less than a cookie-cutter composite of the whole country.
Access was riding the crest of the Internet wave, but it was trying to hit an impossible moving target. The first weekly publication of its time, it attempted to cover the crossover of the mainstream into the entire mélange of the fab electricities in the air. They were breaking up, captain. They would not keep still. It was like chasing a lightning bolt with a dinosaur.

Veitch was self-congratulating the rotunda roomful of attentive ears, maybe 150 people, for publishing Access on a weekly basis as the third largest weekly in the United States, a circulation of nearly 10 million, all distributed as an insert through newspapers across the country. The hotel was notable, from the outside, for huge radio tower landmarks, much older than the Web, that served as testament to the long history of Route 128’s silicon valley of telecommunications wizards, mass marketers, open sourcerers, dot-com rebels and computer-related trade ’zines out the ying yang. Huge glass towers they were all housed in, moving in for the kill.
So powerful and amazing is Access, Veitch tells the group, one Access expose once pointed out that some invasive America Online malfunction was fixed by the safe-surfing company because it had been first criticized by one of the Access columnists.

“The simple and direct way we have helped people in their lives,” Veitch says, “is what journalism is about.”

Maybe a week later, in the red brick office park that was somewhat secluded on the Charles River in Needham, Veitch would be boasting how Access was conceived of, as a business plan, on a single sheet of paper, a metaphor for the integration of all media. By this time, Access Media is the typical cube farm of too many employees cramped into a honeycombed beehive. Basically, what you could get with $17 to $27 million venture capital investment, spent over a year and a half or so. “Access is the first fully integrated mass medium of the post-Internet era,” he said.

Considering the extent of its weekly circulation, maybe 20 million people in affluent suburbs across the nation who may have been actually looking at it at the same time, and the high-priced talent (USA Today online staffers, mainly) who were brought on to head up a new Web-page undertaking, one might have hoped that it could have accomplished more than the mere tweaking of your home computer’s keypad control. Considering all of the computerized wizardry of the place, it could have accomplished pretty much anything it wanted. For myself, I felt as if we were a kind of revolutionary force bringing the liberating Web to the masses. That is the kind of thing people like to hear, that is, until the limits of print----in this form, at this time----became apparent.

But forces much, much larger than a mere circulation of 10 million were at work, almost invisibly, that day. The big die off first sniffed out by Fuckedcompany.com was becoming apparent. First, Access Internet Magazine scaled back its online operations, laying off 21 employees shortly after the beginning of the year, mostly those who worked for accessmagazine.com, about 25 percent of Access Media’s payroll.

Veitch would be pastured into a role as an adviser to the company and board member. John Jay, president of Access Internet Magazine, and Larry Sanders, president of accessmagazine.com, left the company.

Sanders came from USA Today online wars to start up the Access Web site’s expansion during the gold rush heyday. They were predatory times. So he tried a sticky hit style, the “roach motel” approach, attempting to “drive them” like cattle. That was common nomenclature in Access executive culture: This whole idea that people, somehow lacking any choice in the matter, could be “driven” into its Web of multimedia ventures. For bizarre reasons, the site never drove huge numbers, and for a long time ended up with fewer hits than most alternative zines, especially considering the self-marketing possibilities of sending out 10 million flyers----that is, the magazine itself, with the Web site’s URLs at the top of each page and the banner. For whatever reason, readers felt little need to get the same thing at the Web site, too.

By the end of 2000, the company had been working on plans for a national online advertising network and new e-mail products, but scaled back as the Internet tide changed. A new investment from General Atlantic reportedly served as a blood transfusion of less than $1 million. Access had previously raised money in August 2000, when investors contributed $17 million. We were always told $27 million, but we know how quickly $10 million bucks can go up in smoke. Other venture investors in Access Media include Sequoia Capital, One Liberty Ventures, and Labrador Ventures. Individual investors included former Time Warner co-CEO N.J. Nicholas Jr. and E-Trade founder Bill Porter.

The cost of newsprint (about a half-million dollars per edition) and the decline of the Web as an item worthy of mass media interest, especially in terms of potential advertising dollars, were to blame.

It could have been, and very often was, a media project that exemplified the realm of possibility for its time. Access could be just about that, access to the new world of megamedia, to the palace of wisdom (at least as far as the Internet could provide), but at times it seemed just as willing to sift through so much web-based errata in the public interest, it became a tiny little hole indeed, even, at times, a limitation for depicting what was really out there on the Web. These days, let’s face it, if you are less outrageous than the FOX Network when dealing with Web topics, well, you get the picture …

Even as Florida presidential election embroglio roiled on, and angry e-mail bounced around in incredible viral swirls of angst, we, the editors of Access Internet Magazine, were debating whether or not to veto listing the URL of a short, but relatively dated, South Park film depicting a rumble between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, an animated fight between animated good and animated evil. The magazine had been advised by its endless surveys and focus groups to shoot right down the middle. And after so many surveys, believe me, it becomes corporate dogma to believe what demographic research tells us, even if it’s based on mere surface level things that fail to see the real complexities at work. During the staff meeting, it was decided the short film was just too riske’ for the supposed audience of Webizens they were trying to reach.
In fact, the Web is far, far weirder. Which may have been the problem: How do you show that to a mainstream audience, watering it down, so to speak, in print-time, without really becoming too tame and dated.

The real-time medium the magazine was about, the Internet, is certainly not that way.

But this time content was an irrelevant peon, as opposed to king. The magazine delivered, even in a less-is-more slimdown, more information than most people could handle. And that’s just it: Information overload is no longer the rage. A necessity, perhaps: But not the cultural phenomenon it used to be.
I have fond memories, though, of working with an incredibly gifted and experienced staff under the most unusual circumstances. Surrounded by other human search engines, in our own geometric cubes, scanning the World Wide Web all-a-de-day long, being an editorial staffer at Access was like being the subject of some unprecedented experiment in human behavior. Visitors to the office, especially journalists from other news rooms, thought the quiet to be creepy. Newsrooms, in general, are usually boisterous places. Considering how tightly we were packed in after growing from 24 or so to nearly 100 employees in less than a year, it was if nothing else an intimate situation. But it could be quiet as a library. We were more likely to interact from the computer, often by Yahoo’s instant messenger service, often without speaking to anyone, in person, all day. I don’t think that impression was unique for myself. We were literally paid to be hooked to machines and surf the Web. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of people in our lives. We weren’t disconnected humanity. In fact, I have never come in contact with so many people in my life. It seemed to work, until, for myself, I started to get close to 100 e-mail messages per day, many of them from struggling dot-coms in need of publicity for their shopping sites, especially before the Christmas push. Or from other editors, wondering why I hadn’t gotten back to them with missives about my doubt and fears about what was really happening in the Noosphere.

But, as it turned out, nobody really got the shot in the arm they were looking for. Access included. But maybe in some small way, the Noosphere moved just a little further along.

In a little more than six months after the beginning of the new year, Access has suspended publication. The following was posted on its Web site, at least as of July 10, 2001 at www.accessmagazine.com:

“Access Magazine has suspended publication, due to the continuing uncertainty in the economy.”

Apparently the business of producing a for-print mag announcing the dawn of a new media era is just a little too much like being a Trojan horse. In another example, the first newspaper to launch a free-standing technology section for general readers, The Toronto Star, also shut down that section. For seven years, the section covered the Internet, computers, software, wireless gadgets, anything related to high-tech. I guess once readers figure it out, they just don’t need ink on paper anymore.

On a nice, Indian summer November day, I happened to go by the old Access offices in Needham, right off the Charles River. I walked up to the second floor and happened to run into one of the old execs. He was on the way out. He had little time to chat. Everybody's unemployment was running out, he said. Everybody had to get a job. Some had, most had not.

For myself, I didn't feel like dancing, or, saying I told you so. Sadness, really, a bittersweet one, at that. Their servers are down. The office is a cluttered jumble of half-opened boxes and empty dreams. I got what I could save. A pile of old issues. Someday, hopefully soon, I will database it all.

Glasnost Lost

From the Suburban Jungle
to the Mountaintop at 10,000 feet:
Throwin' lightning
right back down the hill.
From the end of the world
to your town, basically ...

By Douglas McDaniel

There was that bulgy woman's face, my ex mother-in-law, screaming at me, "Heathen! Heathen! Why don't you read something good for you, like the Bible? Not those stupidheads you call heroes. They are all screwed up, all of them." Her face is big and red, blood-dimmed authoritarian swimming pool from God's forsaken lake a fire.

A flood of my life's decisions, mainly the bad ones, ping pong though my head. If I'd only done this, resisted my ego on that, had gotten real on the other. And now this, this fat face in a blond mop of over-the-hill hair, screaming at me about reading Salman Rushdie. Instead of the Bible. Well, let's see, I'd be in an entirely different place, for sure, if I'd been reading the Bible. In fact, I usually do, in one way or the other, from year to year, except maybe I'd use it like the I-Ching, let pages open themselves, in hopes they might speak to me. Maybe I'd be married still, in Phoenix, living in the suburbs, like a squirrel counting his nuts for the winter, and still listening to this blather from this charismatic miscreant, in my own home, no less.

In less time than it took for the U.S. Marines to find Noriega in Panama, I grabbed my soon-to-be-first-ex-mother in law by the arm and shoulder and wedged her out my front living room door. Once the lock was secured, as she tried to force her way back in, I went back to reading Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Or tried to as my hands shook from the adrenalin rush.

Really, it's a hilarious book.

And if I've reacted incorrectly, in this case, to the cruel joke that is that soon-to-be-former life as long as 10 years ago, well then, to leap from a burning train to roll on the hard, hard surface of this terrible terrain is no better or worse. I believe I'm much closer to the pool of the living, and much saner than those who are supposedly rational. What was that Barry Goldwater saying, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." The only freedom and liberty we ever really get in this world----and that's the way it's always been----is what we can hack for ourselves. Usually, if not always, at a considerable cost.

For example, just the other night----as I fast-forward my dear readers back to Telluride, Colorado----I met an incredible woman, many times more intellectually gifted than most of us could ever hope to be, who was incredible in the sense that she had managed to find a way out of the trap of her life's circumstances. Incredibly damaged, she was, the victim of a life-long pattern of sexual abuse since the age of 12 or 13.

"You know," she finally said, hmmm, maybe an hour after I'd wept when she listed all of the men who had sexually abused her: Her grandfather, her father, a priest, a high-school teacher, "I wouldn't walk down a back alley or a bad street at night, because they always teach you to be home and safe. But these were all people I was supposed to trust."

From the age of 13 on, each trusted male abused that very trust. A hell of eternal return she lived with each new family situation, which is the way we usually end up, whatever the reason, within our life cycles. The male of the species had a way of picking her out of a crowd, and then, let the perversity begin…

A lifting energy pulls through me like a tide. It's a weird sensation of apparent chaos revealing itself as truth. One must be very quiet, perfectly still almost, to begin to feel it, then see it. Freedom is there, beyond the desolation, in the blue smoke that rises from the ashes. If Glasnost Lost is paradise lost, then maybe the real paradise is found in the land of remembering.

Now I'm back in the desert, with my notes mean't for poems written in a green, nine-and-a-half by six-inch notebook. Perhaps if I'd left my thoughts unrecorded in that spring season, I would have never realized the unspeakable loneliness I felt in my marriage. My future X knew it, which is why she eventually burned the notebook in the backyard barbecue. She was, like her charismatic Christian mother, the living microcosm of an authoritarian regime. A real reactionary. A rage-a-holic.

In my college days at the University of Arizona, I believed that it was pointless to be a poet. A poet was no longer dangerous to any society. The highest compliment that could be paid to a writer was to be burned at the stake or censored or sent to the Gulag. His ideas would run against the prevailing current, and the government would have no choice but to try to silence him, thus martyring him for future readers, and thus, the world would be moved further along. But it was hard to see how it could be thus in a technological, democratic, pop-culture driven society. I couldn't make the connection. How could I know that the dissatisfaction as revealed in that notebook would, in fact, ignite a revolution in my small Web of life, and then set me free onto the road to Mythville?

What did I have to be dissatisfied about? I had a wife, three kids, a crazy dog, a professional career in journalism that basically kept us more than just afloat. Barely, yes, but floating all the same. The boom was over, after all. The prosperity my mother and father had enjoyed and striven for held little promise as we walked a slow march into a new century. On that spring day several years ago, it finally broke loose. I looked at the words in my notebook and wondered why they were so dark. My tone seemed to be that of a prisoner who lived in a state of constant contradiction against my very nature. The result: a secret self working beneath the autocratic empire in the bedroom.

I remember being afraid to go home. The long straight city streets leading through the scatterbrained signage of Phoenix hinted at an ugliness of the suburban southwest. Fast food joints, convenience stores, strips malls and every now and then rows of track homes crossed the eyes. At each stoplight, there was back pain, the endless shifting of the truck's gears, and the anxious pressure of being surrounded by the city, of what kind of moods awaited me at home.

I pulled into the driveway and sighed. There were a few boards piled on the front lawn that my son had fashioned into a jumping ramp for skateboards, and a few new dents in the garage door from the past weekend's tossing the baseball around. I opened the door and there was my son, twittering on the nobs of a video game while he lay on the couch. He barely moved and there was a small beeping sound from his hand-held machine. Not expecting a reaction from my arrival, I moved toward the entertainment center console, checking for any mail. There were a few bills, an ominous looking certified letter from the IRS, assorted junk mail, and a couple of packages, no doubt new compact disks to be to reviewed for the rock magazine. I opened the first package immediately, pulling out something post-punk, or, maybe retro. Immediately aware of its unsuitable nature for my censorious wife's scanning eyes, I threw it in the cabinet, putting it beneath a slew of other CDs that would get my attention later that night. I opened the other package, a jazz disc, which would be hard to say anything about since it wouldn't contain any offensive lyrics to hail as the new bad boys of rock. I threw it on top of the pile in the cabinet as well and gave a pause to Iggy Pop.

A decision was brewing inside, moving from the back of the mind to the front. All of those things I'd ever wished for myself had never actually been considered. I sleepwalked into my adult years, reacting to the merely formal expectations of finding a girl, making a marriage, the constant question of whether to have children. One would not call it an expectation, it seemed to happen naturally, as if I were an actor in a play in which the lines had been written from a dependable author who had the essence of life down to a biological science. Survival is everything, ya know, perpetuating the DNA, for what reason I know not why.

So that day in my mid 30s, the course I'd led found me drifting. I sat on the couch, twittered on some poetry, then reaching for the headphones for loud music. The music is by the seminal L.A. punk band, X, the sound of late century central city sprawl in flames. My eyes are closed as I lay on the couch, hoping to find a few moments of disengagement. I marvel at the dichotomy of the male and female voices from both heaven and hell. Then, I'm stunned back to the suburbs by my wife, who is poking me. Her expression has that stormy, bleary eye contact of someone who is ready for a fight. She began one of her usual discourses on my behavior, what she often refers to as Short Attention Span Theater.

"You seem so frantic," she says, her hands on her hips, looking down. "At one time you show up, start reading a book, and then I look up again, and you are on your way out the door, sneaking a joint. Now look at your lazy ass. I've got things to do around the house, you know. I need help."

She has her dishwater blond hair up in a Bam Bam bush on top of her head, wearing a jeans skirt and tennis shoes, very much in her work detachment mode. Soon she would be strutting around the house, slamming cabinet doors and making everyone sure it was busy time in that passive aggressive way. You know: the kind of gal who saw no problem with running the vacuum cleaner into the wee hours of the night.

"You're shifty. Your stuck in sand, sinking in sand, or maybe just trying to avoid sinking in sand," she says. "Look at this place," she thumbs one of the books he's left half opened on couch. "How many books can one person read at once, anyway?

"Sometimes you seem so quiet, and then you are talking so fast it's like you are some drug. Why can't you relax, why can't you stop worrying about where you will be next. You just want to hang out in bars and smoke. I mean, why go all of the way to a public place to spend your time alone, if that's what you are really doing?"

I could see where this was leading. I could see that look in her eye, the bulldog that couldn't let go of those ever-tightening categories of perpetual blame. Angrier words were exchanged, neither side listening, and somehow I managed to leave, though at some cost, her haven taken my notebook and holding it up, scouring, her face with a challenging smile, as if to indicate, "Ah ha, I've got it," as she took it and left the room.

Within a week I'd left her. The notebook had been read then fricasseed, and then an attempt had been made to restore the notebook for legal purposes. Then she tried to run me over with her car. Then, having taken to the streets of Phoenix in the need of disguising my locations, I bounced around like a wannabe TV show fugitive, trying to arrange lawyers, new living digs, dealing with a capably diabolical X, and, the possibility that my soon to be ex wife might try to find me and kill me. At work they called me "McGyver" because I was always looking for alternative exits to my surroundings. There were the urgings of my mother in law, who spoke in tongues and filibustered my future X into devious ways of attacking me. There were ugly late-night phone calls and cruel, teasing seductions. Before long, there would be the assault at the office, the restraining orders, the use of the children as hostages in the marriage, but more than anything else, my own descent into the maze of adulterated windows and doors in an exploration of my private novelty gene.

Spencer was a crazy family dog, most definitely also the beholder of the novelty gene.

On the day the he first landed in the suburbs of Phoenix, when I was just a boy, maybe 15, the heat was 120 degrees and the back yard we'd put him was a one-acre field of white hot dust. The next day, hail stones the size of Hope diamonds pelted puffs of dust onto the white-hot ground as Spencer, despite the hellfire from the sky, chased around the yard, pouncing on each poof. I remember the steam rising on the sand. Next, a freak tornado tore through our neighborhood, and the only thing in its path, mainly, or house, was left intact.

Spencer was a runner, though. This was before he learned things about the neighborhood on mid-night sneak outs. Before he'd gone through the rancheria of back yards, golf courses, the river park basin, the very edges of the desert. Well before he'd caused a fight with the family across the street. Well before the subdivision was made safe from the last horny toad lizard, well before my father ran over that same neighbor's pet snake, which had escaped, in the driveway: Long before the paradisical and counter-intuitive creation dream of Phoenix, city of the great Sonoran Desert. As a mongrel beagle, Spencer couldn't be trained, thus keeping him the place of the long line of pets that drove my father to distraction.

"Her boy, her Spencer," he'd say. "Sit, roll, dammit, do something!"

I'd sit and watch this comedy, a young teen in the suburbs, up in a willow. I was always up in trees, come to think of it. Despite the call, all Spencer could do was run up and down the fence, occasionally poking his nose through holes in the ground beneath. Spencer was a barker, too, howling at all hours, never seeming to run out of energy. Spencer had the novelty gene. Or perhaps he'd just learned it from my family.

Spencer was a real bastard.

So Spencer and I had the novelty gene, and on the day the tornado came, I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, but I saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. I ran outside. I remember pinpricks of dust hitting my face and my mother screaming at me to get into the house. I leaned into the wind. The tornado high in my view, I saw it tear a roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, satisfied that my scouting report through the window was correct. We barricaded ourselves in the hallway. God knows what was running through my father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. God knows what's in a dog's mind when the sky had been turned upside down. All that I know is after the winds died down, after our new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up our back yard and deposited it somewhere west of our neighborhood, Spencer was gone.

We looked for him for a week. First we walked past the demolished homes in the area, marveling at their bombed-out look. As a 10-year-old boy, the inconvenience this caused to our neighbors was hardly a factor. It seemed fun out there, fun to be a searcher in bombed-out Phoenix, the subdivision seriously in decline due to the storm. Worst hit were the people down the street, who we had a running feud with because they were always the ones who called to get Spencer picked up by the animal control officer. Once, when we'd returned from a sailing trip to San Diego, Spencer was missing from the back yard. I knew immediately what had happened. I rushed across the street, being a hot-headed 15-year-old, and started yelling at the neighbor, Rosey McAllister, who was dead drunk when she answered the door. "You give my dog back," I shouted. "You have no right." They, of course, did have a right. Leash laws mandated by the homeowners' committee being fairly clear. When Spencer was recovered from the animal shelter, he continued to pursue his novelty exploits, eventually getting to the point that he could leap the height of our wood fence in the backyard. Had to be six feet. It was only a matter of time, at least he had the potential, to jump the fence. Then the storm came and we had to resolve ourselves to the image of Spencer spinning away into the clouds. These were happy days for my father.

A few days later I had my first psychic experience. It was during a baseball game. Bats and balls and the hopes of being a professional baseball player being my only real concern. That and the skinny blond girl who was watching the game in the bleachers. We were behind, maybe by a few runs. We were up to bat. I sat on the bench, and I had this feeling come over me, that heaviness from within. I thought that perhaps I was feeling ill. It was then thought I saw the whole thing before, one, two, three batters ahead -- I knew that each one would reach base and I visualized my bat hitting a line drive to right field and our team winning the game. That's exactly what happened. When it was my turn to bat, I half-consciously lined the ball to right, just as I pictured it, willed it, in my brain. I was buried by my teammates, and after the game that skinny blonde girl gave me my first kiss. My braces, unfortunately, cutting her lip pretty good.

When we came home, Spencer was at our doorstep. We could only wonder about the tales he could tell, flying over Phoenix and out into the desert.

For more chapters of the Ongoing Saga of Post-Democracy America, "Glasnost Lost," click away at the Mythville Project at G21, here. For the latest entries, go to Glasnost Lost.

The Taming of the Web

While many native Netizens are crying ‘Don’t fence me in,’
the Wild Wild Web is fast becoming a relic of a fabled past

By Douglas McDaniel

It’s a range war, a street fight, the season of conflict, the Net’s counter-cultural O.K. Corral. Each day, the diverse members of the global Web community slug it out like overactive children on an unsupervised playground. The issues flare up daily: privacy this, security that, threats to free speech, to decency, to copyright law and intellectual property claims, threats to tax e-commerce, threats of all kinds of legislation to regulate the Web, threats of wild-eyed Libertarian rhetoric promising to keep that from happening, threats to every brick-and-mortar truth that we once cherished to be trustworthy, orderly, efficient or real. And lawsuits, yes, lots and lots of lawsuits.

What’s more, the revolution in communications innovation has led a segment of the Net nation to curse across this anarchic, stormy digital sea with a capital “C,” as in the request to “Control this, please!” Upon seeing this in print or online or hearing it from our reeling leaders, the other part of the equation, the more experienced, Net-savvy geeks, immediately plea, “Don’t fence me in!”

Indeed, the Web-related news crosses our eyes like a video game called “History Repeats,” if only because the contestants resonate with such haunting familiarity. The terrain is populated with pioneers, with homesteaders, with cybersquatters, with megalomaniac innovators that we compare to either the robber barons of yesteryear, or, the persecuted visionaries of wannabe e-topia. We have restless natives, chattels of free and easy prostitution, unlocked “back doors” in operating system software for marauding outlaws, code-slinging ne’er do wells, a devious bogey folk all politely pointed out to us by reformed “hackavists,” who paint themselves as benevolent civil servants because they claim to the wear white----as opposed to black----10-gallon hats.

Just what is it about this evergreen myth about the Old West that many find so relevant, so hip, so instructive, so seductive? In the past, the image of the cowboy has sold everything from cars to cigarettes to movie tickets to presidents, and now it’s being used on the Web. But does it ring true, help the cause of liberty that it’s supposed to mythologize? If it’s a falsehood, is holding on to an oversimplification damaging to the very same virtues it’s supposed to espouse?

And if the Web is global, how does this Wild, Wild West fantasy play in London, Bejing or Bahrain … or even middle America, which abhors anarchy, smarty pants libertinism, doesn’t know a Harvard philosopher geek’s think tank from a hole-in-the-wall Web site offering electronic lotto, and never will?

Let us count the many, many ways that the metaphor can be applied as an aid to understanding the Web as a once-wild place that’s passing before our eyes, and how its center----due to the unique “nature” of the Web----cannot hold …

A Beaconing Bonanza
The e-commerce trading posts are well attuned to the power of myth.

For example, a radio commercial for Wells-Fargo connects the dots from the early days of the Pony Express and the stage coaches that linked the frontier’s far-flung outposts, and then brings us up to date on how their pioneer legacy continues by offering home loans online.

Certainly, the television commercials promoting the Internet sound like “repurposed” Horace Greeley, extorting, this time, “Go Web, young man.” But many potential consumers believe it’s still a jungle out there.

“I think consumer still feels like it’s a ‘Wild West ‘scene,” says Noah Eckhouse, CEO of TrailBreaker.com, a URL with a convenient westward twang that reviews and recommends shopping sites for consumers. “There are still some perilous trails,” he says, “sites that are shaky in terms of their navigability, pursuit of quality and breadth of service.”

Meanwhile, the emergent Internet institutions are making promises to the regular guy “settler” to hang in there, because help is on the way.
“Over the next few years, we’re going to be ‘settling’ cyberspace, making it more hospitable to normal folks,” announced the online brochure for PC Forum 2000, a conference of luminaries and e-business leaders that Wired has described as “The Sundance Film Festival of the Internet.” Speakers at the event last spring included Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer; Richard Bressler, chairman of Time-Warner Digital Media; and Kevin O’Connor, chairman and CEO of DoubleClick.

It sounded like a pretty contentious bunch. For example, in the same meeting halls were competitors for Microsoft’s slice of the Internet pie, people such as Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Novell, or enemies of the Gates’ estate such as Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a key expert for the U.S. government’s side in its anti-trust case against Microsoft.

Also present was another outright thorn in the side of America-the-Database, Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters.com, a consumer privacy watchdog. The group has been particularly watchful of DoubleClick, which recently backed off from a controversial plan for harvesting personal data on Net user habits without getting prior permission. Having the FTC investigate the matter didn’t hurt.

For a consumer out in the wild, the weapon of choice is no longer the Colt .45 or Winchester rifle, Catlett says. Instead, it’s anonymizing security and encryption software. “To maintain your privacy on the Wild Web,” he says, “you have to have a lot of very complicated weaponry.”

Calling in the Cavalry
Crossing the new frontier, homesteaders want protection from porn sites, hate sites, stalkers, from manipulators working the strings like programming puppeteers.
While the “normal folk” settlers on the frontier cry for safety from insidious raids and invasions of privacy by nefarious operators big and small, U.S. government officials raise (maybe even promote) concerns about how denial of service assaults and a drop in consumer confidence over the Web can stall the booming economy. In March, law enforcement agencies told a joint congressional panel that new sweeping powers were needed to locate and prosecute the black-hatted hackers, as well as to investigate this new field of crime in general.

Anonymity is public enemy No. 1, Eric Holder, deputy attorney general, told the panel, adding that the Clinton administration was discussing the introduction of “legal tools to locate, identify, and prosecute cyber criminals.”

Any response to this prospect depends on an individual’s tolerance level for government interference, and what they think Marshall McLuhan was thinking when he wrote, “Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.”

If lawmakers define their models for confinement and control in the benevolent terms of prudence, justice and public safety, Civil libertarians, with nearly fundamentalist faith in the anonymous browser on the wide-open frontier, blanch with abject paranoia.

“You must be careful to ensure,” James Dempsey, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the congressional panel, “that the recent Internet attacks do not serve as justification for legislation or other government mandates that will be harmful to civil liberties and the positive aspects of the openness and relative anonymity of the Internet.”

Indeed, it doesn’t soothe such concerns when the administration and congressional leaders, preaching privacy to the masses, are constantly looking for new opportunities to invade it. For example, signed to law by Congress in 1994, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) required the telecommunications industry to design systems that comply with FBI technical guidelines to facilitate electronic surveillance.

The Clinton administration’s intent on Internet regulation is as wild and wooly to navigate as anything the Web can offer. At times, there appears to be laissez faire approach: self-regulatory conduct is encouraged, as is public education on “cyberethics,” and voluntary cooperation between law enforcement and private industry. He even appointed a “privacy czar” to help sort it all out.

A year ago, President Clinton appointed Peter Swire as privacy sheriff (Chief Counselor for Privacy) to look after the Web settlers. But even as Clinton announced in his State of the Union address in January that “first and foremost, we have to safeguard our citizens’ privacy,” CBS’ “60 Minutes” was investigating the National Security Agency’s designed and operated (in cooperation with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) global surveillance network, Echelon, which monitors international phone calls, faxes and e-mail transmissions. A February report commissioned by the European Parliament accused the United States of using Echelon for commercial espionage. The NSA denies that it listens in on U.S. citizens (which would in fact be illegal), and the State Department will not comment on Echelon’s existence.
“The current administration has seemed to be pretty dangerous on privacy issues,” says Wayne Madsen, a senior fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center . “They haven’t sponsored any privacy legislation, but they have sponsored an awful lot of surveillance-oriented executive orders.”

The greatest danger to the Web as it exists today, he says, is the federal government’s effort to create partnerships with private industry, and then turn those relationships into “sources of intelligence.” As that occurs, he says, the Web morphs from a “free kiosk” of information for the consumer into an opportunity to monitor the Web user: You may be watching the Web, but it’s really watching you; and the only thing to really fear is fear itself.

“All of the hoopla about these denial of service attacks is going to have a chilling effect,” he says. “The government wants to create a more secure Web when they, in fact, don’t have an effective program for their own security.”

An example of the “program” includes a recent call from the president for a kind of Peace Corps of young computer geeks to help the government in its efforts to “protect” the Web from hackers. Which to Madsen, sounds less like the Wild West (except maybe the posse), and more like other dark chapters from the more recent century.

“The government has this agenda to monitor the Web,” he says, “but may be unintentionally or intentionally creating a network of cyberstazi agents.”

But one has to wonder if the public, in general, might be willing to invite the King’s troops into their homes. Polls show that privacy is the top concern of Internet users. A BusinessWeek and Harris Interactive poll found the majority of households believe the government “should pass laws now for how personal information can be collected and used on the Internet.” As more personal data is slung across the Net, along with reports of privacy blunders by Web giants like DoubleClick and RealNetworks, such concerns are unlikely to diminish soon.

Web sites routinely track, store, share and sell database profiles about your on-line habits. Direct marketers argue that the practice is a harmless but vital part of competing in the new economy. Privacy advocates such as Junkbusters say the practice is eerily invasive and that companies should allow consumers to decide if and what kinds of personal data is collected.

Under pressure from consumers and ignoring arguments that the industry should be allowed to police itself, lawmakers are gearing up to quell the unchecked flood of personal information online. Some 82 privacy bills are under consideration in 24 states along, with approximately 500 bills that relate to privacy both on and off-line, according to the Internet Alliance , an industry group.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission has assembled an advisory group on Internet privacy and there’s talk on Capitol
Hill of creating a Congressionally mandated commission to study the issue.

At least 15 privacy bills were floating around Congress this spring and more are expected to be introduced. One of the more controversial plans would require sites to ask users beforehand if they can “harvest” information. Another would require them to post opt-out boxes in a conspicuous place on the site.

Industry groups say privacy issues are best solved by market forces----not politicians----and that government interference will harm electronic commerce. But will sites properly police themselves and will technological curatives such as “anonymizing” software tackle the problem?

Whatever the answer, lawmakers are sure asking a lot of the same questions consumers are asking.

Call some place paradise …
To the old-timers and free-speech advocates, the threats of e-commerce far outweigh any invasive possibilities raised by the Feds, NSA spooks or whole brigades of hackers. To this group, the birth of the World Wide Web is as fondly romanticized as the birth of the Republic itself. Ah, those bygone days of egalitarianism, fraternity and liberty, to the promise of the New Jerusalem … Onward to the wild frontier, the virgin country, the uncharted expanse, served hot with an espresso at the cyber café.

But then came, so the elitist fable goes, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and every man and woman became an online Lewis and Clark. Suddenly, the chat room is full of Okkies. So free-thinker’s paradise is trampled, apparently, in the mad, mad rush to turn the enlightenment salon into a cash cow.

And who can argue? That’s what mankind does with space, after all, be it outer, inner, cyber or dirt-real. Property lines are plotted, fences are posted, whole glittering dot-cities of commerce rise on the prairie. Then somebody builds a better search engine, and there’s a gold rush, followed by another great migration.

Before you know it, virtual ghost towns and other old links clutter each Boolean search page, all of the wild meat is either trapped or on display at the Yahoo.com city zoo, and the once-fertile field of opportunity seems overcrowded. So-called “psychological space” seems to have been appropriated by Mammon himself. The end result is a medium that’s increasingly safe, sanitized and navigable. But it’s also as mundane as the rest of Mall America on every bleak, bland, pointless day of week.

“I wish we hadn’t moved so far away from our frontier roots,” says attorney Mark Boulding, of the American Bar Association’s Cyberspace Law Committee. “Instead of open range, we now have a collection of gated communities.”

Nov. 14, Part II of “The Taming of the Web”: Manifest Destinies

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“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”
---- Edward Abbey, novelist