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Fog of rhetoric

A lot has been written about Errol Morris's award-winning documentary, The Fog of War. Subtitled Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, the film certainly provides a lot to think about. But are they the right lessons?

Well, towards the end of the film I drew a lesson drawn by neither Morris nor McNamara. Morris asks the aging Cold Warrior a pointed question: When you talk about the responsibility for something like the Vietnam war, who's responsibility is it?

MacNamara answers: It's the president's responsibility.

Nowhere does McNamara talk about Congress's Constitutional responsibility to decide matters of war and peace. For McNamara, as for nearly every other major player since the end of World War II, war is the president's bailiwick alone, and Congress just an obstacle. According to the Constitution, on the other hand, the policy is supposed to be firmly in Congressional grip.

Moments before, in the film, McNamara says that One of the lessons I learned early on: Never say never ... and secondly, never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It's a very good rule.

Well, it's good if you are trying to manipulate public opinion and steer an ignorant Congress.

It's bad if you want to get back to the Constitution and limited government.

This latter depends on a certain amount of forthrightness. And until we demand that and expect that — of representatives or executives or flunkies — we'll only get unconstitutional government and war after war after war.

And an eternal fog of words.

Designations   |   October 2, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   FilmFlam

Kerry won, but at what cost?

I listened to a few minutes of right-wing talk radio last night, and heard the usual partisan yammerings about last Thursday's debate. They say Bush won. Nonsense. Now, I loathe both Kerry and Bush, so perhaps I'll be allowed to qualify as an unbiased observer. So take my word for it: Bush did not win. Though he did come off with two off-the-cuff endearing lines, the rest of what he said — and how he said it — made him look like a C-average student up against the valedictorian. Kerry only once came off like the a-hole he is (talking about how to treat one's daughters); for the most part, he seemed in command of the facts and of his own point of view (which you'd think would be easy; but no, his campaign, up until this point, has reeled from his own self-induced confusions). For the first time he sounded like, yes, he was not a flip-flopper; he's been consistent all along!

But at what cost? I noticed something very odd, and soon after the debates sent my evaluation to my friends at ThinkingMatters:

[T]he real story — that is, the most important story we learned from this debate, something we weren't certain of before but which we know now without a doubt — is [that] John Kerry is, on foreign policy, pretty much like Bush & Co., except a bit more cautious and far more intelligent.
He not only supported the idea of a pre-emptive war, he said that all presidents have supported this. Nonsense. Utter bilge. The Constitution does not even give the president a right to declare a war. It's true that, early on, presidents have played the major part in pushing towards war (Madison) or preventing war from taking place (Adams — see his tombstone*). But the idea of a pre-emptive war? This is something that is new. We've always pretended that we were defending ourselves or some innocent nation, after an attack. Now the pretense is dropped. George H.W. Bush was the first president, I think, to advance the idea, with the attack on Panama, to remove a former ally from office. Clinton seemed to blanch from the idea. Now George W. has carried his father's doctrine to a real, full-flowered policy.
Now John Kerry has endorsed the policy. This does not bode well.
For that alone, I advise people worried about world peace to not vote for the guy. Yes, I'd rather he win than the doofus he debated against. But Bush didn't say he supported pre-emptive war when he ran for the Presidency. Now Kerry does. Why reward this? Novak may actually be right, and Bush is the more likely candidate to get out of Iraq. I suggest a vote for Badnarik or Nader as better signal to tyrants and warmongers everywhere.
Kerry made another point that I found odd. He argued that Bush should have used bilateral talks with North Korea, instead of working with China as an ally. But isn't this the kind of thing that Kerry himself insisted Bush do regarding Iraq? Work with allies! Use diplomacy!
I may have all this wrong. I have no idea, really, how to deal with North Korea. I've not given it much thought. But Kerry seemed like he was being inconsistent.
Bush, however, didn't bother to defend himself by attacking Kerry for inconsistency. My suspicion is that Bush is just too stupid to figure this out. But maybe he knows something that I don't. (He is, after all, the president.)
Oh, and does anyone really believe that Kerry as president would have halted the North Korean push to full nuclear capacity? He claimed so. I wasn't convinced that he could've. It sounded to me like an easy claim to make. He wasn't president, and thus this counter-factual is fantasy.
Still, of the two candidates, Kerry looks better. He's more intelligent. And he's more cautious.
But he's very mainstream. He's no real change from Bush. Just a minor improvement.

William Safire makes some of these points more coherently in his recent column, Kerry, Newest Neocon. He attacked Kerry for his pre-emptive war nonsense, and that's important.

Of course, Safire is one of the Get Tough guys — even when getting tough is the wrong answer, and Getting Out the right one. So his attitude towards Kerry flopping into the neocon camp is a carefully concealed lip-smacking glee.

Mine's disgust.

I like his last line about Kerry's supporters, though: His abandoned antiwar supporters celebrate the Kerry personality makeover. They shut their eyes to Kerry's hard-line, right-wing, unilateral, pre-election policy epiphany.

Designations   |   October 4, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Liar theory

Why blog under the moniker Designated Semiotician? Why, in other words, emphasize semiotics?

Because signs are everywhere. We think using signs. We speak using signs (the definition being very broad, and not limited to the Stop and Yield signage by the roadway). We accomplish almost nothing without signs. We approach the truth through signs. And, just as importantly, we mislead with signs:

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything [sic — read: anything] which can be taken as significantly substituted for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or be actually somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.

Thus wrote Umberto Eco (A Theory of Semiotics, p. 7).

I may have chuckled as I designated myself as a semiotician. But I am asserting something, in all seriousness. Not an academic position in the rarefied discipline known as semiotics. What, then? An ability to discern honest speech and action from lying.

Hence my take on contemporary politics. And advertising. And history. And myth. And . . . and . . . and . . .

Designations   |   October 5, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Pinning Nabokov's jape to the wall

I was pleased to learn from Robert Pyle today that my analysis of the Lolita cryptomnesia scandal has made its way into the scholarly community. My blog entry had convinced Bob that Nabokov had indeed intended to steal from the author of the original short story Lolita, and it was part of an elaborate jape. So Bob presented it in a question-and-answer period at a Nabokov conference that he attended recently in Wyoming.

Bob is co-editor with Brian Boyd of Nabokov's Butterflies, a collection of the Great Russian-American writer's uncollected writings on his scientific interest. Robert Pyle is one of the world's leading experts on butterflies, with numerous books and articles to his credit. His book Wintergreen deals with the area I live in, the wet, green hills of Willapa.

But I understand the appeal of the Cryptomnesia Theory. Every writer has probably experienced the forgetting-and-quasi-remembering that this word, cryptomnesia, designates. Once, when writing about Lolita, I offered a deliberately absurd theory that I thought came from my own noggin, as Athena from the brow of Zeus. But no. It turns out that Nabokov had pilloried that very same theory in the very edition of his book that I had read! I had completely forgotten the origin of the theory, and gleefully repeated it. Too bad it had been introduced decades before, and that the author himself had trounced upon it. (Actually, the fact that the author mocked it does not mean that the theory made no sense; authors are notorious misinterpreters of their own work! Or so we who read and criticize like to think.)

Designations   |   October 6, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ReadingMatters

Random passage

Idea from Kitabkhana:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here's mine:

He looked sternly from one brother to the other.
Paul Patoff, F. Marion Crawford, p.23.

Well, no great shakes, I guess, though the sentence does indicate a major theme of the book, sibling rivalry.

Designations   |   October 6, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Cliche watch: Like Never Before, man

The phrase like never before is so over-used it makes me cringe in every instance. You hear it in advertising all the time. Every innovation — and, more often than not, every minor differentiation — seems to justify the phrase.

But it's so rarely justified. Now, even when nearly appropriate, I shudder. Take this example, not from advertising, but journalism:

The glacier — at two decades a mere infant in geologic terms — does not yet bear an official name, although scientists have been calling it Crater Glacier. Since Mount St. Helens started rumbling again two weeks ago, it has come under scrutiny like never before.

Like, wow, man. Of course, with a twenty-year-old glacier, the fact that a new study might be, well, new, and never before done, makes the statement a little empty. Less emphasis on the newness really would have made more stylistic sense in this case. The emphasis given by the cliche was, simply, a species of hype.

Still, if the writer insisted on some emphasis of the novelty, the editor could accommodate. How would I rewrite?

The glacier — at two decades a mere infant in geologic terms — does not yet bear an official name, although scientists have been calling it Crater Glacier. Since Mount St. Helens started rumbling again two weeks ago, it has been probed and poked and peered at like a baby with a persistent cough.

For some reason I don't wince at alliteration. But, for print, I'd get rid of that last p-word too. Change a persistent to an ominous.

Designations   |   October 7, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The significance of dishonesty

Honesty about warfare is a republican tradition. Honored not at all, of course, by America's Republican Party. Or its Democratic opposition.

The unwillingness of our Congress to make an out-and-out declaration war is a good example of the endemic dishonesty. How so? The importance of a full declaration of war was made clear by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of all people:

Declarations of war are intimations less to powers than to their subjects. The foreigner, whether king, individual, or people, who robs, kills or detains the subjects, without declaring war on the prince, is not an enemy, but a brigand.

The U.S. Constitution specifies that it is the power and duty of Congress to declare war. The permission that Congress gave President Bush fell short of a declaration for at least one simple reason: it did not address the people of Iraq. With a full declaration, and the appropriate, humble attitude, the U.S. government might have been able to win the peace; without it, we have the morass Americans are in today. And by avoiding their full responsibility, the members of Congress condemned the U.S. to something like brigandage. Is it any wonder that so many Iraqis revolt against their occupiers?

Today, on Instead of a Blog, I devote quite a few words (more than a mere blog should permit) to demonstrate the dishonesty of both Bush and Kerry. Both remain committed to not owning up to their past errors, and both conceal the real issues the American government obviously had against Saddam Hussein's regime.

I took their own words, from their latest debate, as my texts. This essay, Knave vs. Fool? is archived for most readers here, and for unfortunate users of the terrible Explorer for Windows browser, here.

Designations   |   October 11, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The evolutionary theory of money

Money is not like other institutions in markets; its value is not nearly so obvious. Why is this piece of paper here, or that chunk of metal there, treated as money?

One of the dominant theories of the nature and origin of money has been the State Theory, explaining (ostensibly) money's origin in the planning and workings of the state. Like the God Theory of the origins of life, the universe and everything, its explanation is a sort of hand-waving, not really explaining much, just saying just so. Why were gold and silver chosen, in most cases, to be money? The wisdom of the sovereign. Where did that wisdom come from? No answer. (Similarly: Why is The Creator so obsessed with sex and death? The wisdom of the Sovereign. Why is this ubiquity of sex and death considered wise? Because it's there. Because God must be wise. Because . . . no answer.)

Against such theories are the evolutionary theories. In biology and cosmology, Epicurean teaching in ancient times contradicted the various creationist theories trotted out, numbly, as explanations. In modern times, men like Lamarck, Lyell and Darwin advanced theories that did not require Grand Teleology, an over-arching Design, as its prime component. This spooked the Spook-Obsessed, but pretty quickly won out in scientific circles; it so much better explained the evidence.

In economics, the evolutionary theory of money stood in stark contrast to the State Theory. It's primary proponent seems to have been Carl Menger, the founder of what became to be known as the Austrian School of economics. In his first book he advanced the theory that money arose from barter, and in a later essay, On the Origin of Money, he argued the point again, with more precision.

Ludwig von Mises, in his great work The Theory of Money and Credit, focused more exhaustively on money's value, and argued quite vehemently against all remnants of the State Theory.

So it is quite common to read, at mises.org, that money can only have arisen through barter, and not through any state machination.

I've long thought this to be an over-statement. It seems obvious that money can indeed be introduced into a society by the state. And so some of the dogmatic statements to the contrary, by, say, Ron Paul or Jeffrey Tucker, all associated with the Mises Institute, strike me as wrong. But it was interesting yesterday to read that Menger took my position, not the putatively Misesian one:

It is not impossible for media of exchange, serving as they do the commonweal in the most emphatic sense of the word, to be instituted also by way of legislation, like other social institutions. But this is neither the only, nor the primary mode in which money has taken its origin. This is much more to be traced in the process depicted above, notwithstanding the nature of that process would be but very incompletely explained if we were to call it 'organic' or denote money as something 'primordial', or 'primaeval growth', and so forth. Putting aside assumptions which are historically unsound, we can only come fully to understand the origin of money by learning to view the establishment of the social procedure, with which we are dealing, as the spontaneous outcome, the unpremeditated resultant, of particular, individual efforts of the members of a society, who have little by little worked their way to a discrimination of the different degrees of saleableness in commodities.

Of course the State can introduce money into a money-less society. But the origin of money in most societies was evolutionary, not contrived, and the state's job of fixing the value of monetary units — a job it too often does poorly, in brazen attempts to cheat people out of the value of their money, through debasement of the coinage and other forms of induced inflation — is not crucial, in a sense, to the discover and nature of money.

State-worshipers cannot praise their deity for creative acts. Barter alone can explain the nature and value of money. Even when the state has, historically, introduced money into new territory, it has done so by imitation of market processes. And most of the time, the state's self-imposed duty to regulate (fix) the value of money has been an exercise in theft and incompetence.

Designations   |   October 12, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The lingering Mugwumps

A lot of people don't really believe that there are many undecided voters out there. Oh, they believe there are lots of people who are undecided about voting — that's easy, and that's probably the most important sector of the populace for the candidates to reach, before the election. But undecided about whom to support, if one bothers to vote? How could that be?

Well, if one doesn't buy Bush campaign spin, or Kerry's strange attempt to be anti-war by being more pro-war-than-thou, how's one to decide? If that same person is skeptical of the different radicalisms at the heart of the Libertarian and Green parties, and wouldn't trust Nader to prepare a sandwich, well, what then?

John Walston, of the amusing Buzzwhack site, remains skeptical that such people as described above could exist. So he came up with a droll poll:

Which kind of Undecided voter are you?
 a. I'm actually voting for Bush, but don't want anyone to know
 b. I'm actually voting for Kerry, but don't want anyone to know
 c. I'm totally clueless, don't really intend to vote at all and I don't want anyone to know
 d. I'm just one of those folks who can't make up their mind about anything until the last possible minute. And I always regret my decisions later.
To make your choice, go to:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=74779667613

Now, I'm not a Mugwump. My allegiances are always for liberty, and as long as the Libertarian Party keeps on putting out half-way decent candidates (no matter how hopeless their efforts are), I'll continue to vote for them; I've voted for every one, save Andre Marrou. But I can see why someone might remain, at this late day, undecided. Sure, Kerry and Bush may be very different, but their differences don't necessarily make it obvious which is the lesser of two demonstrable evils. Indeed, if there were not a Libertarian candidate running, I would not vote for either of these two turkeys. Yes, I'd leave my ballot blank.

Why vote, then, if the lesser of two evils can hardly be determined? Well, how about tell me? Perhaps there are reasons to vote for Kerry or Bush that don't get much play. Here's a poll along those lines:

I must say, that last reason is probably the best reason to vote for Bush. A vote for Bush is a vote for the Lesser of Two Speakers. And I believe Bush would deliver on this promise: being such an uncomfortable speaker, and with no re-election to push for, he'd speak less. Thus we'd hear less. In this way he's the Inner Peace candidate, though he be for never-ending warfare. Mugwumps, what do you think?

Designations   |   October 13, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Compromise with the Devil?

One day each year, kids get to do what governments do every day: threaten innocent people to get what they want.

With governments, it's called taxation.

When children do it, it's Trick-or-Treat.

It's an awful lot cuter when kids do it.

Taxation is said to be necessary, serious business. But let's not take Halloween too seriously. I doubt if children really learn that it's OK to get what they want through intimidation. The tricks are not supposed to be damaging, and the treats are supposed to be . . . small. It's really about fun and fantasy. It's a playful reversing of social norms that is as likely to re-inforce those norms as it is to encourage exploitation and other forms of bad behavior.

Well, in many Southern states, this year's Halloween is a bigger scare than usual. You see, it falls on Sunday. Many communities are outlawing Trick-or-Treating on the day many people call the Sabbath. They want it done on Saturday, a day that some other people call the Sabbath.

It would be easy to make fun of the Southerners. The brouhaha treats a kids' lark as a theological trick. According to one fine Georgia woman, Sunday is Christ's day. You go to church on Sunday, you don't go out and celebrate the devil.

Well, I bet few of even the worst pranksters look at Halloween as devil worship.

In most places, of course, common sense will prevail. I like the compromise many communities are promoting. They are asking parents not to take their kids to houses that do not have their porch lights on. People who do not want to celebrate Halloween on a Sunday won't have to. Hey! That might even be called a private property solution.

People taking Halloween too seriously is not a new thing. I wrote about an even more idiotic religious take on Halloween years ago. Let it not be said that Christian fundamentalists are the only ones who can make fools of themselves. Not by a long shot.

Designations   |   October 17, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Grassroots IRV

Krist Novoselic supports Instant Run-off Voting (IRV). He wrote a book, called Of Grunge and Government, in large part to promote the idea, and allied notions such as proportional representation.

I've been a supporter of proportional representation for some time, and in exactly the way he advances it in his book: as the method of electing one house of a bicameral legislature, in the several states if not at the federal level.

Of IRV I'm a bit less enthusiastic, since I prefer a weighted voting system. It turns out that this was first advocated by Jane-Charles de Borda, an 18th century French thinker. I didn't get the idea from him. Or from the contemporary public choice and group choice theorists, of whom Donald G. Saari seems to be making the most waves today. Nope. I got it from Robert Heinlein, another American of Finnish descent (as is Saari, as am I). Heinlein, a science fiction writer, advanced the notion as a way to reward citizens for accepting more group responsibility (by joining the military, say) or to punish citizens (for avoiding group responsibility, or for committing crimes). I became interested in the idea because it seemed a better way than one-man/one-vote to express individual preferences in group situations. There are many permutations to weighted voting, including a simple Borda count, but all have one feature in common: the Supreme Court would find them unconstitutional. IRV, being constitutional, would have it easier — and I prefer it to the current one-voter/one-vote primary/general election plurality system.

So, at a book signing in Skamokawa today, I asked Novoselic the big question: How do you expect to get from here to there? We have entrenched politicians with a very large stake in the status quo, and are extremely unlikely to change the system for us. Do you support initiative at the Constitution level to get this measure through?

His basic answer? A surprising No. He said that there is a petition circulation to bring IRV to the state. But he's kind of hoping it fails to collect the requisite signatures. Why? Not because what's required would be a Constitutional amendment (Washington state currently does have I&R, but not for Constitutional issues), which is not available for Washington citizens, but because he thinks it's too soon to push for it.

Not enough people know what IRV is, so if given the chance, they'd probably (and responsibly) vote against it.

Novoselic instead argues that local groups, such as the Grange he belongs to, and local governments, would switch to IRV. If people at the grassroots level began using IRV, it would naturally be adopted as it proved itself.

This strikes me as eminently reasonable. Good ideas should be able to start small and prove themselves. This is actually the Deweyian approach to reform updated with a Popperian twist. It's the very opposite of how reform goes on in legislatures, where something is decided on, usually in a hurry with few reading the new law over, and then everyone becoming adamantly opposed to repeal or reform afterwards. The Democratic and Republican parties, in their behavior in Washington, D.C., are light-years away from this attitude. But perhaps at the grassroots level we can teach them a thing or two.

Designations   |   October 23, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Yada yada'd sex?

I just realized how great a joke The Yada Yada episode of Seinfeld contains. In it, a woman who uses the phrase yada yada to elide uncomfortable or inconvenient or uninteresting elements of a story, does so in a way that alarms George Costanza, and puzzles Jerry Seinfeld:

George: Listen to this. Marcy comes up and she tells me her ex-boyfriend was over late last night, and "yada yada yada, I'm really tired today." You don't think she yada yada'd sex.
Elaine: (Raising hand) I've yada yada'd sex.
George: Really?
Elaine: Yeah. I met this lawyer, we went out to dinner, I had the lobster bisk, we went back to my place, yada yada yada, I never heard from him again.
Jerry: But you yada yada'd over the best part.
Elaine: No, I mentioned the bisk.

This is especially funny since the original, Hebrew meaning of yada is to know, and is used early on as a nuanced, polite way of indicating sexual intercourse: And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain. . . .

Yes, George, the Book of Genesis yada yadas sex!

Designations   |   October 24, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Corporate Republicans Rock the Vote

Outsourcing? Importing voters? I'm afraid I've no good caption for this jape.

Designations   |   October 27, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

I gear up to take part in democracy

Tocqueville worried about the tyranny of the majority. A problem in a democracy, he thought.

But real democracies — as opposed to the democracies of some wishful thinkers, and of the common definition — suffer from other problems. Folly can do quite as much harm as tyranny, and can be harder to be rid of, for example.

And to talk of majorities in America's imperial quasi-republic is almost beside the point. For in America a plurality of a minority can select an elite to direct a caste to tyrannize the majority.

Actual voters are a minority in the country. All it takes is a plurality of them to elect a candidate to office. While in office, the candidate spends much of his or her time trying to get re-elected as well as make connections to get wealthier. Some of that time is set on directing the bureaucracies and paid servants to do this or that. The bureaucracies amount to a permanent caste, with interests often completely at odds with the populace. (For instance, a program may not work as intended, but it at least satisfies those caste-members in its employ. So almost no legislation is ever repealed, and no program is ever, ever dismantled, no matter how poorly it works.) And the main task of government — taking money and distributing it — never stops, halts, or barely even hiccoughs.

For the life of me, I can't think of why anyone in their right mind would consider this a good situation.

But the solution is not just electoral reforms — such as IRV and proportional representation and term limits, which would increase participation in the process — but checks and balances on what is up for grabs by the political process itself. As long as there are no limits, even pure majority rule could be terrible. Tyranny could result. And folly remain endemic.

And face it, we live in a post-Constitutional age. Our government's traditional limits have been severely if not completely eroded. This ratcheting up of limit-free government has not only increased with recent administration — Bush, Clinton, Bush — it has also increased with each war, as demonstrated quite elegantly and definitively by Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan. Now that we are to be on a permanent war footing, fighting Islamic terrorism until Allah is euthanized like Jehovah was before Him, the ratchet racket will continue.

Of course, things aren't hopeless. Representative democracy's shifting alliances with their mutating agendas do alternate misrule enough to give a simulation of freedom to the populace. More freedom could result if we reformed the electoral process. Possibly. But the Constitutional framework itself needs revamping, limits need resetting, and the government itself needs building down.

How likely is that?

Makes you want to go vote, eh? Ha!

Designations   |   October 28, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Run the gamete

I hate typos. When I make them. But when others make them, they can be pure comedy:

Kari Henrik Juusela, a Finnish/American composer and cellist, is presently Dean of Professional Writing at the Berklee College of Music. His compositions have won numerous awards including the 1995 Vienna Intl. Full-Length Opera Composition Competition, the Schirmer 1995 Young American's Art-Song Competition, First Prize in the 1989 GASTA String Quartet Composition Competition, numerous awards from the Composer's Guild, and from ASCAP as well. In 1997, he was awarded the Stetson University Hand Award for Faculty Research and Creativity. His work Vorjot was chosen by the Jacksonville Symphony to be featured in its 2002 Fresh Ink Series. Night Calls, Kari's twelve cello ensemble composition was commissioned and premiered by Cellobration 2002. Professor Juusela's works span the gamete of works for instrumentalists and vocalists. His style is truly virtuosic and yet immediately accessible by today's audiences. Ensembles around the globe have premiered his music, including Quartetto Latinoamericano, The CORE Ensemble, the London Chamber Group, Florida's Electro-Acoustic Festival, SEAMUS, the Society of Composers Inc, and the Berklee College of Music, to name a few. Individual collaborators include violinist Beth Newdome, guitarist Stephen Robinson, organist Boyd Jones, cellist David Bjella, and santoorist virtuoso Nandkishor Muley. See his web site

I've been chuckling over span the gamete all morning.

Of course, that doesn't mean that Juusela's music ain't great. I haven't heard any of it yet. And hey: I can hardly wait. I might even run over a few gametes on my way to hear his work. Maybe a gamut of gametes.

Designations   |   October 29, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

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