It first happened with Pink Floyd. I attended the Roger Waters concert last year--Dark Side of the Moon played front to back, pot-smoking fathers, and an inflatable pig--and the first song in was "In the Flesh" which I happen to think is brilliant. I was feeling good. But as the night wore on, an awful and powerful conclusion was being crystallised: I don't really like Pink Floyd.

The truth is, I found most of the gig pompous and boring. There were magical exceptions (aforementioned song; "Wish You Were Here"), but by the end of the night I had developed quite the fury towards the lead guitarist, who looked like Tarzan but with a larger ego, and who stood, I thought, as a powerful cautionary tale to misspent masculine energies.

Anyway, something similar happened last night at Air. By the end of the gig I realised this: I didn't like them anywhere near as much as I thought I did. Not even close. With Floyd and Air conventional wisdom and my own breezy self-denial had forged an opinion of these two groups that was nowhere near how I really felt. So here it is. The unvarnished truth:

a) The Waters gig was as tacky and inflated as the giant pig that was sent--dangerously--off into the night sky. Apparently its airless carcass landed in a backyard pool in Stirling. I might add that the pig's skin served as a canvas for fluffy, ineffectual and misspelt pronouncements on the state of habeas corpus in the Western world. With half the stadium stoned out of their fucking minds, I was doubtful of the appropriateness of lectures on constitutional complacency, &

b) Air left me flat. It has something to do with the fact that they don't have a heart. And shame on me for not realising that earlier. Also, their new stuff is embarrassing. There's no other word. You know how Phoenix have put out two great songs, and the rest is execrable garbage? This new Air business sounds like the absolute worst of Phoenix. Shame.

That's about it, folks. And I also didn't purchase any new music. So shame on me.

"...music, like colour, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent--it just is. The chord, the simplest building-block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing...

I don't want to read inane books, but books are built from words, our only instruments of thought; all I ask of music is that it sounds good. Despite its crudity and simplicity, "Twist and Shout" sounds good--in fact, any attempt to sophisticate it would make it sound much worse--and I fundamentally, profoundly disagree with anyone who equates musical complication and intelligence with superiority."

--Nick Hornby, 31 Songs.

"Echos Myron" is playing now, and I have no idea what it's about. It's by Guided by Voices, and, when it's finished, I'll hit "play" again, and be as happily ignorant of the lyrics as before. I'm sure that'll change, but for now the song's more than enough to provide that happy/wistful vacuum of harmless self-absorption.

Obviously, there are grim forms of self-absorption, but this is a period of down-time and shameless ponderousness. And why not? If you're half doing your job on this planet then you have things to worry about; some cruel and unusual, but most simple, banal, and necessary, and it's refreshing to listen to Robert Pollard's 2.5 minute pop-miracles and be reminded of the giddier elements of experience.

We can of course find plenty of those elements elsewhere in life--my cup brimmeth at the moment--but the sheer concentration of mirth in Pollard's best songs (and there's a lot of junk) is gold.

It may be that pop--or the fine consequences of listening to it--is neglected by contemporary criticism or popular wisdom. Edginess and politics and danger often wins out in the perceived importance stakes.* Put the preference down to middle-class guilt, or, as Hornby has it, the result of "peacetime and prosperity and over-education" which may be the same thing. Or disregard the idea completely as just so many words, words, words. Music criticism--or at least my counterfeits of it--must surely rank as one of the more superfluous pursuits of our culture.

But all that said, I still ask myself, what does pop--The Byrds, Big Star, The Posies, REM, Teenage Fanclub--mean?

If we consider our existence important--not important like Churchill's, but important because it is valuable, because it simply is, and is predicated on potential--then pop, for this guy, anyway, is a sweet tonic to that existence. A spur, a hug, a smile, an injection of badly needed vitamins.

Pop can be a small holiday; a feeling differently when whatever recipe of modern responsibilities is temporarily relieved. And it can be a drinking partner; a wildly sympathetic source of confirmation of freshly discovered love, or anything else wonderful.

Christ knows that when you deal with madness in this life, both abstract and the appallingly concrete, pop is a partner you should happily walk down the aisle to. That hackneyed metaphor deserves a song to replace Mendelssohn's "The Wedding March": insert your own.

*Sure, Bragg was political, but his self-deprecation never made him dangerous. What he did for me was to light up certain experiences from a fresh angle. And The Pistols? They were no more a threat to the British Government than the Argentinean forces would be a few years later, and far more a danger to themselves, their lovers, and music journos who dared to be snotty-nosed enough to exist. Fuck them.

Records/songs bought:

Guided by Voices Human Amusements at Hourly Rates (Best of GBV)
The Wannadies Bagsy Me and Be a Girl
Yo la Tengo Painful
The Jesus and Mary Chain "You Trip Me Up"

"And even after all my logic and my theory,
I add a motherfucker so you ignorant niggers hear me."

--The Fugees "Zealots" (1996)

Back in 2000, when George W. Bush was just a presidential candidate, Oprah invited him for a sit-down, and began grilling him on the issues. "What's your favourite sandwich?"
"Peanut butter and jelly."
"On white bread, or whole wheat?"
"White."

There were harder questions, sort of, and one came with a response that may now be hard to reconcile with Bush's long and infamous history of verbal stuff-ups. Oprah began by asking Bush what he had done in his life which required forgiveness.
"When my heart turns dark; when I'm jealous or when I am spiteful."
"But I'm looking for specifics."
"I know you are, but I'm running for president."
Boo-ya.

The two moved to music, and Bush told Oprah that he didn't mind some of the Beatles' earlier records, but he switched off on their later stuff "when they started to get weird". This was 2000, before the weirdness of September 11, and the national exhaustion his administration would inspire. In 2000, things were simpler, and a man who nominated the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie" as his favourite song--but stated a general preference for country music--took the White House.

And now, and now. Bush is all but gone, and Oprah's thrown her weight behind Obama, who, on his Myspace, nominates John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Bach (the cello suites) and, gasp!, The Fugees as being his favourite artists. There's some politicking here, no doubt, but I'm thrilled--nearly delirious--at the thought of trying to reconcile The Fugees with a potential US President.

Not only did the Fugees rock--clever, creative, devastatingly articulate--but 1996's The Score is one of my favourite records, and contains what may be my favourite lyric of all time, delivered by Lauryn Hill, and included at the top of this article. The lyric is admittedly rivalled by Paul Simon's "'Kathy, I'm lost,' I said, though I knew she was sleeping" and Naughty by Nature's "Naughty's back, like vertebrae". Still, when Lauryn fronts, you listen.

What the hell is there to take from these men's musical preferences? A whole vague swag-bag of romantic attachment and hopes. That's fine. That's sometimes the stuff of change. And that's certainly the stuff of Obama's momentum. And if nothing else, it's fun to play in the palace of speculation, drawing fun but probably erroneous lines between musical preferences and personal, or presidential failings. But I like to think there's something real there, as there is when one reads that John McCain's favourite book is Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Mitt Romney's is Battleship Earth. For the record, Obama nominates Moby Dick, amongst others, and you can be sure that he won't be adding any "motherfuckers" on the campaign trail. He's got enough people listening.

Records/songs bought:

Mojave 3 Puzzles Like You
Slowdive Souvlaki
Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Dinosaur Jr. Where You Been

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them, but they were only satellites.
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care.

--Billy Bragg, "A New England"

Bragg wrote this in 1985, after Thatcher had reclaimed the Falklands and settled as PM, Reagan had secured a second term across the Atlantic, and the Space Race had settled on the song's protagonist's romantic eye like a fleck of dust. Or shit. This may be what Bragg does best--dovetailing the political and the personal.

For Bragg's character, the heavy atmosphere of the Cold War (literally/figuratively) becomes the strange bedfellow of his love-sickness, and he has his doubts about its appropriateness, but he goes ahead anyway and pins his humble hopes to the orbiting metal. I guess in that there's some sad and lonely emancipation. What else is there to do? ''I'm not looking for a new England, just looking for another girl''.

It's hoped that for Bragg's man a new girl may be his heated chalet--a warm escape from England's urban decay, and the associated disassociation. Bragg himself was more ambitious. He did long for a new England, and railed articulately and humorously against the Iron Lady. When John Major moved into 10 Downing Street, Bragg could still move wonderfully from the political to the personal, but listening to his best of-- Must I Paint You a Picture --one gets the feeling that the Thatcher years inspired his best work.

For Bragg, politics was the personal--your health and home, your security in the great market place, and your position spiritually and emotionally amongst the shuffling masses. Bragg had one eye on Thatcher, and another on a young man crying alone in Brixton.

This was Bragg's balance, enabled by a healthy self-deprecation, and sparkling sense of humour. Not for Bragg the choking narratives of doom-saying and political conspiracies, or the overweening earnestness of those with more piercings, but far less to say. When you see Bragg live you get a warm wise-arse, a raconteur, and an improviser. You get solid banter and the spine-stiffening crackle of authenticity. You get a decent and talented human being. And just who the hell hasn't been, or wanted to be, or wanted to receive, Bragg's milkman of human kindness?

If you're lonely, I will call
If you're poorly, I will send poetry
I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint.

Ahh, to discover something strong about yourself through love, through giving, which recalls a line that's been killing me for weeks: "Everything I give is everything I keep". That's from Scandinavian group Seabear's "Seashell", and may god bless your Hammers, Billy.

Records/songs bought:

Destroyer Thief
The Go-Betweens Bellavista Avenue (the Best Of the Go-Betweens)
Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained. I think of Buddha's smile and Einstein's halo of hair. I think of birthday parties. I think of common politeness, and the breathtaking attempt to imagine what someone else is feeling. I think of spirit lamps.

--John Updike

I watched Bush's final State of the Union address yesterday. It was a mistake. I had just purchased Bruce Springsteen's Storytelling concert DVD, released just a little while back to coincide with his Devils and Dust album, and it lay on my desk unwatched. The lame duck President's 45 minute address took sorry precedence.

$2billion was pledged to combat global warming, and Pelosi rose to her feet far quicker than Cheney to applaud Bush's comment that the US would not accept genocide in Sudan. The other 40 minutes were spent examining Cheney's face for signs of life, and waiting for cut-shots to Obama, who was proudly standing next to his most recent endorsee Ted Kennedy.

How much sparkle and light will Camelot beam onto Obama? As much as the American people want it to, and these have been some dark times indeed. I'm betting that Americans will incline to recall Jack's youth, vitality, and his sole inaugural speech over that national nightmare in November and Chappaquiddick. Let's see. Super Tuesday is less than a week away.

What won't be so easily forgotten by Black Americans will be the gunning down of its leaders in the time after Camelot. Things really do fall apart. Between JFK's assassination in 1963, and Bobby's five years later, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were gunned down in cold blood. In 1969 Black Panther leader Fred Hampton would suffer the same fate. So how safe is Obama? I listened to an interview with Reverend Jesse Jackson on NPR a few days ago--a former presidential hopeful himself--and he said that America had ''turned a corner'' on the matter of race. Perhaps. But a lunatic fringe is a lunatic fringe, and the jangly historic overtures that hang heavy over the coupling of Obama and the younger brother of Jack and Bobby Kennedy must be keeping a few people up at night (in the good ol' US of A).

In 2004 Bruce worked his home state of New Jersey, which showed to be surprisingly marginal (Kerry took it in the end), and helped add substantially to Kerry's coffers, and it helps that he's still putting out great music, evidenced by his last three studio releases. Classics? No. But they're solid and often moving and tracks like ''Jesus was an Only Son'' from the acoustic album Devils and Dust recalls for me some of the finer moments of Nebraska.

Like Updike, and like you, I think of a whole bunch of things when I think of ''spirituality''. I think of Bobby Kennedy's uncanny strength and drive after the murder of his brother, and of the wise and intuitively calming--not to mention improvised-- speech he gave to hundreds (thousands?) in inner Indianapolis when news of Martin Luther King's assassination came through. Riots broke out in 60 cities when the news broke, and more than 40 people lost their lives, but there were no riots in Indianapolis that night. One wonders.

I also think of the shared feeling of loss and, because of that sharing, the bright and freshened connections with those close to me as we drive outta town listening to Springsteen. The Boss has accompanied me on many a road trip, and it always seems perfect. There's your spirituality--sharing/feeling the harmonious and electric cramping of nerves and melancholy and the need to keep on going in songs like ''Blinded by the Light'' and ''The River''. We're tired and jaded, but baby, we're gonna keep on driving through the night. Hey--it might even be fun.

Records/songs bought:

Feist The Reminder
Pete Rock & CL Smooth The Main Ingredient
Caribou (Manitoba) Up in Flames
Thurston Moore Trees Outside the Academy
Buddy Holly Best Of
Iggy Pop Best Of
Everything But the Girl The Platinum Collection
Don McLean ''Orphans of Wealth''
Warren Zevon ''Excitable Boy''

Smif-n-Wessun ''Wreckonize'' (remix) (1995): This song has proven tough to find. Originally appearing as the b-side to the New Yorker's ''Sound Bwoy Bureill'', I first heard this non-LP version as a Youtube video two years ago.

The song is much different to the version which appeared on the group's first album Dah Shinin', and, I think, superior. Remixed with Bill Withers'/Grover Washington's ''Just the Two of Us'' the two rappers also altered all of the lyrics to the song's verses; they now stand as an earnest ''rising up/staying strong'' plea for self-awareness. At least, I think so:

Early to rise, so wake/
wake before day break/
Meditating on the steps I take/
I realise there's a lot at stake.

Last week, I found the CD single on Amazon for a cool US$100. Then I discovered the track on the iTunes store for US$1.69. My lesson? The iTunes store is awesome.

OST Juno (2008): Belle and Sebastian, Mott the Hoople, Velvet Underground, Buddy Holly, and a score by Kimya Dawson and her old band the Moldy Peaches--what could be better? For me this week, very little else.

The Buddy Holly song, ''Dearest'' sent me rocketing back to the ol' days when Dad would play him incessantly. I learnt the story pretty well--you know, ''the Day the Music Died''--when Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly perished when their small aircraft crashed into an Iowan field on February 3, 1959. Buddy was just 22, and yet had already carved a musical career so vivid and exciting that two teenagers called Lennon and McCartney were taking note on the other side of the Atlantic.

My father played a lot of Don McLean also, and so McLean's famous 1971 eulogy of the crash marked out a special place for me, too. Having now witnessed 1,001 pub-band covers of ''American Pie'', and seen Madonna chew it up into a pulpy mess, I may have had enough.

The soundtrack's final song is of the film's two leads--Ellen Page and Michael Cera--covering the Moldy Peaches' ''Anyone Else But You''. At the close of the film, the two teen lovers stoop it with their guitars, each taking turns at singing the verses. The tone of the scene is perfect. So is the song:

Here is the church and here is the steeple
We sure are cute for two ugly people
I don't see what anyone can see, in anyone else
...But you.

The soundtrack's clever and warm, just like the film it's nestled in (other artists featured include: Cat Power, Sonic Youth, The Kinks, and children's artist Barry Louis Polisar).

Van Morrison It's All Right (2004?): After multiple listens of Astral Weeks, I wondered if anyone could ever sound so bloody haunting as the original existentialist mystic, or whatever the hell Van the Man became when he started putting lyrics and tunes to our psychic stench. Maybe not--but on this record (a random collection of songs, not an album proper) I discovered ''T.B. Sheets'', a ''monstrously powerful'' blues track that stretches creepily for ten-minutes and induces claustrophobia. I'm serious. ''T.B.'' here means tuberculosis, and the raw, bluesy vehicle carries Van's tortured remembrance of being bedside to a lover dying of the disease.

I recalled the track from the opening of Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead (Marty loves Van) where the song provides the scene with the death-and-ghosts-are-everywhere otherness which would more or less remain as the film's defining phantasmata. The kicker--with the film and with the song--is that we once knew the ghosts before they were dead.

But skip away from this, and buried down the bottom of the disc is a live recording of ''Chick-a-boom''--a Latino stomper with a monster riff and Van's inspired wauling can, this time, have some fun:

A-hey, girl,
I'm goin' away,
but I'm comin' back
with a ginger cat.
What ya' think a' that?

I must have listened to this a dozen times on the first day I heard it. It's a classic to walk to, and an absolute relief to hear Van having some fun. At least, I hope he is.

Fact: Van Morrison was 22--or 23--years-old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralysed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim.... Maybe what it boils down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict the hurt.

--Lester Bangs on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

I had a nightmare a few nights back. I was standing in a crowded paddock, the central part of a community fair. It was dusk, and the dream atmosphere was creaking with the toxic portent found in the Coen Brothers' vision of Texas.

A squadron of planes flew high overhead, offloading hundreds of parachutists. Some carried banners listing the thanks of the fair's organisers. The darkening sky quickly filled with bodies and flags, and the crowd's pulse quickened a little. It all unravelled quickly.

Discernible was a pocket of 50 or so jumpers whose 'chutes had not opened, and they fell like black sheet rain, pushed at an obscene angle by the wind. I scanned the area of the paddock where I judged they would fall--about 300 metres away--and watched in horror. As the men crashed to earth they flattened tens of onlookers. The body count would be high.

With a few others, I began to sprint over to the crash site. I got half way before I thought: "What will I do when I get there? I'm not skilled to help these people, and so is it worth absorbing this horror scene, which will live with me for the rest of my life?" As I slowed I noticed a young, blonde newsreader lying on the ground, wrestling with what appeared to be the demonically possessed leads of her microphone and recording equipment. They snaked around her neck, and as I ran over to her I noticed the blind panic on her pale face.

As I began to loosen the cords, I realised that in fact there was nothing demonic here; rather it was her own wrestling and writhing with the wires that encouraged their death grip. As I loosened the leads, and attempted to calm her, they came away easily. She was saved--she had just needed to control her fear. And I had done something, after all. I woke dripping wet, showered, and went to work.

The crash came later, after I had said goodbye to the couple--the shock of recognition, the proximity of death, the physiological break-up that comes post-adrenalin rush. Help came in the way of an American football match, bagels and companionship, but I eventually had to make the long cross-town journey back home. It was a lonely and miserable time.

The next week a friend with a big mouth mentioned my story to a US Army Ranger. The Ranger said some nice things, I told him I didn't want to talk about it, and asked him instead about Middle-Eastern operations. "I can't even talk to my wife about these things," he said. We departed. Once you see anguish--I mean really see it--it stretches forever and inspires vertigo. It ain't up for conversation.

A few weeks back, between Christmas and New Year's, that time when, around these parts at least, the psychic pollution stinks to heaven, I saw two guys duking it out in the carpark of the local KFC. No biggie. I was carrying booze home to assist with the imminent heartbreaking departure--my best friend and lover and I would, if luck prevailed, reminisce warmly, and then, not so luckily, make our final, very wet goodbyes. And so I kept walking, keeping my eye on the two, when the big guy fell to the ground. And then the boots came down. I switched my iPod off--I would love to tell you what I was listening to, but I can't remember--and ran down to the scene where I gently touched the aggressor's chest and told him that I meant no disrespect, but that perhaps the fight was over.

Rage can have a narrowing effect, that is it effectively arrests your peripheral vision and induces a sort of myopia--you have eyes only for your prey. The guy barely registered my presence.

The police came, the guy with the injuries flipped, and was tasered. And that was that. The cops thanked me and I was back off to my porch to have the most difficult conversation of my life. Selah.

The truth is, I knew the guy in green, the guy that brought the boots down. I mean that he was a stranger, but that I recognised his rage. That was the shock of recognition. The guy in green had been assaulted with a chair in the restaurant (I didn't know this before my intervention) and had kicked back. When I was beaten unrecognisable by four thugs in Northbridge years ago, I stalked back into Northbridge after I had washed my face at home, and spoken to the police. Ostensibly--this is what I told housemates--I was purchasing cigarettes. I wasn't. I wanted vengeance. I was looking for them, and God knows what would have happened if I had found them.

The shock of recognition is sickening. It rattles the teeth. It is barbarism and civilisation circling each other like opposing vultures. It's the space between them that's the bastard.

If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. How much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about?

--Lester Bangs on Astral Weeks

I've never cried on a bus before. That's still the case, but only just after yesterday. I was thinking about Erich Fromm's qualities of mature love--care, responsibility, knowledge, and respect--and how wonderfully (preposterously?) close we had achieved those fine things. And yet it was not enough. Which might be to say that they weren't there in the right amounts. The artist in my ears rapped away and I choked back tears, just because I thought that perhaps anguish may bring us closer to rapture, if we're willing to avoid self-medication and sit down with it. Or--and here's the rub--perhaps I was just bogging down into infantile solipsism.

I got home and put on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks--I'm listening to it now--which may be one of those damned brave/stupid/masochistic searches. It is a difficult album to discuss--Lester had trouble, or, at least, he thought so--because it positively radiates the raw, beautiful energy of a genius attempting to transmit the shocks and tremors that come with a sensitivity to pain--his pain, but mostly others'. It is a deeply compassionate record, and deeply harrowing, as when Van sings about witnessing Madame George, a lonely transvestite who is exploited by the young boys he entertains to keep away the wolves. The important verb there is "witnessing"--it is not just the anguish that exists, but the small death that comes in spectating it and walking away.

Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a person (a lucky person), so it's no wonder that Morrison's protagonist turned away from Madame George, fled to the train station, trying to run as far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get him. And no wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo Honey and even Hard Nose the Highway with its entire side of songs about falling leaves.

There was a funeral today for a TV personality. I clicked on the story online, hoping for a photo of it--a snap of the congregation of mourners, each stricken and holding onto each other. Fucked, eh? And so I listened to Astral Weeks, which said much, much more:

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

--Van Morrison "Astral Weeks" (title song)

And what else is there to say? I love you? Come back? Be strong? Be proud of your strength? Know that it'll lead to more? All of the above? I do not care to ponder on the fact that my mother would listen to this record during extended periods of clinical despair. A line must be drawn somewhere.

On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks. They're just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to.

Old Lester ends his review of Astral Weeks with a poem to juxtapose with the above lyrics. It's quite something:

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than those seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

--Federico Garcia Lorca ("Stranded", 1979)

Make that a water pistol and a cricket bat, and, Lord, we might have a deal.

When Chris McCandless set out--with ''characteristic immoderation''--for America, his head buzzing with Thoreau's and Tolstoy's writings, he did so not as those men did--looking back and looking forward, but as a young man who had only a grim gut-feeling about his future. In other words, unlike his two heroes, Chris had yet to live a life from which to dislocate himself.

Looking around at his WASPish hive--NASA father, squabbling parents, the prospect of Harvard law and evergreens--Chris summoned an inexhaustible disgust at the spiritual barrenness of it all, and relinquished it. Many of us may have felt similarly, but never had the depth of his righteousness, nor the strength of his will, to do anything about it.

Chris ditched his car, donated his life savings (a cool $16,000) to charity, and dropped his family. He even traded his name in favour of the vaguely heroic, certainly self-aggrandising, Alexander Supertramp. Armed with his books, a tireless self-righteousness, and Herculean will, Alex made the road his spiritual mistress, and conquered the Colorado rapids, wild mountains, and wilder hearts along the way. ''Are you Jesus?'' one travelling hippy asked him, only half-joking. It's a comparison not discouraged by Penn.

The result was mixed. Chris discovered much, learned little, and died, alone, in the Alaskan wilderness at the age of 24. But his adventure was spectacular: in geographic scope, in danger and in determination. Without money or transport, Chris cut across the Wild West trading off his smarts, charm and will. And, for the most part, it worked.

A popular reading of Chris' journey may be to install him as a modern martyr, a shaggy Jesus Christ/Woody Guthrie figure who abandons modern hypocrisy and superficiality for the road. But all the evidence points to Jesus being darn happy with his folks, and Guthrie went on to write a pretty good autobiography and to inspire one of the largest artists of the last century. Chris' legacy is not so assured.

Penn may hate the fact that his great subject should fall beneath the unsteady knife of amateurish psycho-analysis. So be it. Chris' life is such a strange study in desire and denial that I'm unsure of any other option.

The evidence we have is of a young man repulsed by what he considered to be his parents' hollowness and cruelty. Scarred by visions of domestic violence--played out against plush sofas and certificates of professional achievement--Chris was internalising it all and developing a philosophical identity intent on rejection. That he managed to do so secretly for so long is testament to his strength of will.

But the time came to enact his philosophy, and when he did he made the mistake of nominating Thoreau and Tolstoy as its authors, rather than his parents. It's now weeks after having seen the film, and I'm convinced that Chris' journey may be one of the longest and most heroic ''fuck you'' to parents in history--all I did was get my ear pierced. Still, it's not much to hang a life on. Chris may not have wished to contemplate that his grand narratives were inspired by his parents, but until he did, he was on the run.

And his running nearly killed his parents. When you choose to leave a life, in whichever way, you sever deep emotional arteries, and you ain't around to mop up the blood. As an extreme idealist, Chris had worked the ugly trick of transcending himself above the despair he wrought back home. It is as if in turning his back on the WASP milieu he turned his back also on the universally human properties of pain and anguish contained within it. In other words, he was a selfish bastard.

And he fled from others. Continually. Driven by Alaska, Chris turned his back on whirlwind intimacies, leaving in his wake a trail of gooey hearts and wet eyes all over America's West. In perhaps the film's most poignant sequence, Chris meets Ron Franz (played wonderfully by Hal Holbrook), a sad, stoic widower living on the edge of the desert. Ron's life is quiet, defined by discipline and regiment--set meals and times, and a workshop where he works diligently on leather engraving. The quiet dignity of the man is humbling, as is the halo of grief and loneliness that he wears unknowingly.

Chris penetrates the man's heart, opens him up a little, and they share some genuinely warm moments. But the pull of Alaska is always there, and Chris attempts to steal away in the middle of the night. He's stopped by Ron, who offers to drive him some distance north, and which will allow him the opportunity to say goodbye properly.

And so the car stops, as it must, and the old man contemplates resuming his life of loneliness. Choking back tears, he tells Chris that when he dies, so does his name. In that you've rejected your parents, he asks, would you consider allowing me to adopt you?
''Can we talk about this when I get back?'' Chris asks. The old man swallows and nods his approval. It is at that moment that I was convinced that the totality of the world's pain was contained within that small cabin. And, of course, Chris never comes back.

All of this threatens the martyrdom of Chris McCandless, but that isn't to say we aren't left with a courageous man. In all of this philosophising (his and mine) we may forget just how young he was.

And there was much to like about him. It's hard not to like a man who kayaks the rapids, sings ballads at a country hoe-down, operates wheat harvesters, shoots moose, reads the Russians, and talks openly and warmly to all he meets. Chris had a heart the size of King Kong's.

Chris McCandless was beaten, burnt, and blackened by the land and its more hostile inhabitants, and yet... he continued. To point out that there's a fine line between bravery and obsession is to perhaps point out a cliche that's beneath him.

But often-times bravery is simply dealing with what you've got. In not acting spitefully when you're in pain; in not being vengeful when you're betrayed. Admittedly these things lack the glow and heat of Chris' personal philosophy, but they are tough and defining things, and we should stand or fall by them. Chris may have taken all-comers on the road, but he did so because he couldn't take his home.

***

After the film I picked up Hemingway's complete short stories and thumbed my way to ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro''. In it, a writer lays on the mountain, dying of a gangrenous limb. Physically incapacitated, he drifts into painful autopsies of his failed life:

''But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all. The people he knew now were all much more comfortable when he did not work... They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body''.

The wife who attempts to comfort him does no such thing--she is one of those who were ''much more comfortable when he did not work''. He stacks on the soul pounds, and gradually ceases writing.

By Chris' own account, he died contentedly amongst the mountains, safe in the knowledge that he had kept his soul lean and hungry. His farewell note, written on the back of the last page of Louis L'Amour's memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, read: ''I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!''

Perhaps the cheeriness was delirium--it's believed that Chris starved to death--or the last defiant act of a stubborn man. It is difficult to think of your soul as lean when your exercise regime has nearly destroyed your family. Perhaps, though, he was content, and if so, it is further evidence of Chris' particularly alluring blend of bravery and obsession, and the discomfiting proximity of those two edges.

Lame Lit-Reference Band Names for College Kids Who Love Radiohead

The Long Exile of Oscar Wilde
The Winter of Our Discontent
Please Sir, Can I Have Some More?
Patrick White's Lament
Vonnegut's Lung
Frankenstein's Ghost
Narnia is Cold in Winter
Roald Dahl's Mistress

Angsty, Shit-hot Names for Woe-Is-Me, Jagged Haircut Types

Elvis' Bacon
I Broke My Arm, and Now I Can't See the Sun
Dress Like a Scarecrow
The Bermuda Triangles
Shut Your Face, I'm Smiling
Don't Call Me Maggie
My Dad is a Castle
The Metaphors
The Bad Metaphors
My Girlfriend Fell Down the Longdrop, and She's Still There
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Bread
The Taxman Took My Baby
Absinthe Fuck
Roll Me Over, I'm Bleeding
I Hate Your Sausage Roll

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Pelosi's Knickers
The Russian Navy
Snappy Dogs
The Frightened Tigers
Band of Moths
Kissing Hornets
Burmese Smack
The Salad Days

I'm not going to speculate... no, wait. I am going to speculate. Last Sunday, the talented cheeseball Ben Kweller rocked my fucking socks off, and I'm gonna try and work out just how he did it. I've sort of already got an idea: talent and sincerity. It's a charming combo.

I always thought Kweller's style-needle quivered perilously between seriously awesome pop and sappy muck, much like Matthew Sweet, who has a much worse hit ratio. And on Sunday night, here they all were: the songs I loved, the songs I loathed, and, dammit, I loved them all.

5 Points on Ben & the Gig

1. Kweller's passion for music is so obvious, so evident, that it's damn near palpable. And yet- and yet -it skirts earnestness. That's poise. I like to think of his personality as a dolphin.

2. Kweller and the band glided effortlessly between pub rock dirge, folk whimsy, piano ballads, 2.8 minute pop, and 10 minute blues solos. There was no implied claim to virtuosity here. The versatility had nothing other than the quality of being natural.

3. there's a college-educated (I don't know if Kweller ever did attend college) knowingness to his music that doesn't translate to wilful irony, which is a fucking boring quality, and gives license to talentless screamers. I think Ben Folds pulls this off, too, but I might be wrong.

4. Kweller is a serious fly-fisherman, and sings a song saluting fishermen all over the world.

5. lastly, he is a mystery. Christ knows I know nothing about the man, but his presence suggested to me a man instinctually--and not knowingly--comfortable. He is charming because he is balanced.

Oh, and the talent helps. Ben Kweller, I salute you.

The Federal election is upon us. It may be called today. Or tomorrow. Or Sunday. My money's on Sunday, when an announcement will receive the most attention. Over a weekend, people have better things to think about than politics, and the Sunday news bulletin is likely to attract the largest audience. If the election isn't called, Parliament resumes on Monday, and Rudd has already begun spinning the cost of resumption. Howard may fear this gaining traction, but regardless it would seem that the punters are getting tired of the Long Campaign. So any day now.

When called, a minimum 33-day campaign ensues, but a longer campaign is constitutional and would suit Howard. This makes a late November/very early December election date likely. So--are you registered? Voting from overseas is not compulsory, but you should have contacted the AEC before you left. Seeing as no human being ever contacts the AEC before they fly, you can confirm your enrolment at the AEC's Online Enrolment Verification Facility. From there you can also determine your electorate by entering your postcode.

Most of you will be enrolled in safe Labor seats, such as Perth. But let's assume you aren't. Let's assume you're enrolled in a key marginal seat, and the votes are such that Australia turns to the West late on election night for confirmation of our country's leader (the time difference means that if the election isn't the predicted landslide, eyes will expectantly turn to the traditionally conservative West later in the evening). Let me pique you further. The 4 key marginals in the West are Cowan, Swan, Stirling, and Hasluck. Here are the splits:

Cowan: ALP-held 0.8%
Hasluck: Lib-held 1.8%
Swan: ALP-held 0.1%
Stirling: Lib-held 2.0%

Swan 0.1%! how's that for running out the cheerleaders before the game to get the blood racing? The member for Swan, Kim Wilkie, defeated his Liberal opponent in the last Federal election 34,714 votes to 34,610 on two-party preferred. The Liberal candidate won on first preferences. Who knows what hair-raising, wafer-thin electoral splits might occur in your electorate? Jump online, and determine your electorate's dynamics if you haven't been ex-communicated already. Also, if you wanted to spread the good-word, a classy Kevin 07 t-shirt can be purchased for $7 here and may make a good conversation starter in your local pub, whether it's in London or Lisbon, Seoul or Tokyo. Plus, he really does look like Tintin.

Lastly, for those of you who spent the last election night on my porch, glued numbly to Kerry and the train-crash numbers, well, you'd remember also the heartbreak and general breakdown of manners, which made the porch look more like the island from Lord of the Flies. There was secession, Paddy smashed bottles on the road, and Jess passed out in the bath. And yes--I've omitted the more serious transgressions. But this year looks good, people. This year it can be done. Get your votes in and cheer from the sidelines.

Suzanna Hupp survived that day too. Like Sommer, she escaped through the broken window, securing a very different future to the beauty queen.

Hupp was a local chiropractor at the time of Hennard's collapse. On the 17th she had arranged to meet her parents, Ursula (67) and Al Gratia (71) for lunch, and, in accordance with Texan law prohibiting concealed handguns, left hers in her car's glove compartment before entering the cafe. Hupp knew another customer there that day--Sid Isdale, another local chiropractor, and the grandfather of Sommer.

When Hennard began his fatal walk around the cafe, Hupp's father attempted to wrestle him. It is unsure from where Al Gratia's strength came from, or if it was just a blinding impulse, but it is breathtaking to think on it: an unarmed 71-year-old rushing a homicidal psychotic. For that he was shot fatally in the chest. Suzanna reached instinctively for her gun that wasn't there, and so she watched helplessly as Hennard shot dead her mother, and, now an orphan, fled through the broken glass.

In 1995 Hupp ran as a Republican for District 54, in the Texas House of Reps. She won, despite the District being traditionally Democratic, and very quickly established herself as one of America's most vocal defenders of the Second Amendment. The same year, Hupp sponsored a concealed gun bill intended to overturn former Texan Governor Anne Richard's anti-gun law. The bill was successful, and was signed off by then Texan Governor George W. Bush. Texans could now carry concealed handguns.

As media copy, Hupp's story is a good one. It contains such a solid hook: "what would I/could I have done that day in Luby's?". But as a personal tragedy that hook is the very point on which Hupp's personal struggle, or potential collapse, are strung. As spectators, we are asked only to hypothetically locate ourselves in the situation, a kind of virtual reality for the water-cooler, but for Hupp, the awful uselessness of that self-reflection was potentially catastrophic. To her credit, Hupp didn't buckle. Rather, she responded to her impotence to stop Hennard that day by building a successful political career, eventually overturning the law Hupp believed prevented her from saving her parents. It seems to me that Hupp's struggle is not only understandable, but courageous. It is also flawed.

Sommer's publicity photos are all-American sexy--an airbrushed cheerleader, offering suggestions of both virility and innocence. For many male Americans, that very tension is the stuff of fantasy.

To look at Sommer is to appreciate a sweet and guileless apparition of America's sexual advances, or, as is the preferred view of one of those on the pageant's discussion board, a girl that simply "blows me away... she is breathtaking". Regardless, it is fortunate that Sommer even participated--the beauty queen is a survivor of the 1991 Luby's massacre, which was, prior to the recent Virginia Tech. shootings, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history: 24 dead, including the suicided gunman. Sommer was then three-months-old.

Born in Waco, Texas, Sommer's hometown would see its own mythic criminality two years later, when David Koresh fought it out with the ATF and the FBI, but Luby's was an all-together different tragedy.

Around lunchtime on October 17, 1991, George Hennard drove his 1987 Ford Ranger through the front window of the popular Luby's cafeteria, in Killeen, Texas. He climbed out of the cabin, crouched behind the vehicle, and began to unload his two semi-automatic pistols--a Glock-17 and a Ruger P-89--into the customers.

There were a few there. Hennard had picked National Bosses Day to go berserk, and so the restaurant was filled with about 80 customers, many of them employees who had taken out their bosses for lunch.
Hennard quickly abandoned his secured position and began roaming the restaurant. "He had tons of ammo on him," said one survivor, "and he was firing at anyone he could". Another witness, Lee Whitney, spoke later that evening of the gunman talking to his victims: "As he approached people, he would say, 'Was it all worth it?'".

A few months before the massacre Hennard, 35, had sent a letter to his neighbours--Jana Jernigan, Jill Fritz, and their mother, Jane Bugg. The letter was posted from Henderson, Nevada, where his parents lived. The letter--rambling, poisonous--moved the recipients to make a copy, and to hand the original to the police. The copy was made available to the press when news of the massacre spread. A segment reads: "Please give me the satisfaction of some day laughing in the face of all those mostly white treacherous female vipers from those two towns who tried to destroy me and my family".

The evening after the slaughter Police Chief Roy Kneese denied that the police should have acted on that letter: "There was nothing we could file charges on him for. There was nothing in that letter. It seemed he had a crush on the girls".

Two doors down from Luby's was a hotel, where five law enforcement officials were holding a class for local police officers. On hearing the shooting they rushed to the cafeteria, and began exchanging shots with Hennard. It is believed Hennard was first wounded by police fire, before retreating to the back of the restaurant and ending it with a shot to the head.

Michael Cox, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, inspected the scene afterwards: "You have to push yourself and remind yourself that it's not a movie scene. There's that terrible stillness of death". There was very little stillness in that year's highest-grossing movie in the United States: Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Much like the format of Idol, the show's first few weeks document the logistically impressive process of auditions. The show travels through America's big cities--NY, LA, and Chicago--attracting thousands of hopefuls, some bad, some awful, and a few magnificent. All styles are on show: b-boys and girls mix it up with swing, Latin, contemporary, jazz and balletic dancers. For most, the stage is a revolving door, and the wannabes pack up their bags and head home.

I missed most of the auditioning process in season 1, enjoying instead the competitive stages proper. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it--I am hopelessly unmusical, and get headaches when I contemplate my shameless, drunken gyrations on dance floors past. But this show...for the first time I realised the power in perfectly toned bodies adjoining serious athleticism with art.*

And the show seemed as enthralled as I was--a refreshingly romantic format where the love for dance was everywhere, and judges (largely) held off gratuitously harmful remarks in favour of constructive criticism or, where appropriate, worship.

But, it seems, talent is not enough for television. Last night's episode chose instead to dedicate its 90 minutes to the cheapest, and most cynical form of voyeurism: the watching of hearts break. And it was shameful.

Derrick wasn't just passionate about dance--he was obsessed, and as I watched this goofy nice guy wax rapidly on the latest hip-hop moves, I thought "He better be good". It was just too sad to think otherwise.

Dancing Derrick, alas, does not dance. He jumps, and thrashes about, like a swordfish plucked from the ocean. At the end of his set he fell to his knees, exhausted. His body had given up. Worse was to come.
"I think we can strike 'endurance' off your resume," one judge said.
"Derrick, you didn't dance. You just jumped around," another said.
True enough, but it was clear to anyone involved with the show, or anyone watching, that things perhaps weren't so good with Derrick's head.
"You'll never stop me from dancing," he wheezed, doubled-over. The emotional collapse had set in, which will sound like gross hyperbole to anyone who did not watch the show. For those who did, you'll know exactly what I mean. And yes, worse was still to come. Cut to the lobby of the auditioning area: a paramedic stands over Derrick, who is by now wearing an oxygen mask, and the medic is sombrely telling us that he'll be okay, but that things were pretty bad earlier. I guess it's some small thing that the voyeurism did not extend to the respiratory drama itself, but instead focused upon the convalescence. Still.

The problem here is that we came to see all of this: a man's deep and problematic delusion leading him to, in stages, emotional, then respiratory breakdown, and, finally, public humiliation. We have no right to see this. And yet I did not turn the television off.**

There were others--a love-sick man dancing with his ex-girlfriend ("things aren't on that level anymore" she says), and suffering from--which would be clear to anyone who saw the show--some deep and ineffable demons. Needles to say, they danced poorly, and the man's obvious emotional vulnerability did not defend him against public excoriation.

To be fair, the judges would not come to see the performers as we do, through the pre-performance interviews conducted by the host, who is not a part of the judging panel. They are not involved in the process of emotionally contextualising the performances, and most judges are not responsible for determining what footage will be aired from the presumably hundreds of hours available (a few thousand auditioned in NY alone). The exception to this is Nigel Lythgoe, the British creator, executive producer, and judge. He was part of the decision, and the decision was this: to focus upon the emotionally frail and athletically weak, at the expense of some of (most of) the dancers who did make it through to the later stages. This is crucial: last night's show was not about dance.

Some will say that if you audition for such a show, you deserve what you get. In the words of Lythgoe "I am here to judge you". Which is true. But it is the producers' responsibility to judge things also. The dancers will be judged, yes, but certain things--the truly sad things--needn't be aired. Last night talent and warmth was traded for an opportunity to laugh at the weak. I may resume my viewing in a month's time, or so, when this spectacle of cruelty has finished, and the real show begins. Or I may never switch it back on, and make the world's stupidest stand but mean it.

*Frankly, I have no idea how to write about dance, or music for that matter, and it doesn't matter. Watching these dancers is enough. They know about things that I never will.

**There are other opinions. This from today's SMH online: "And Dancing Derrick, a good-humoured jester who nearly has a heart attack following his exuberant audition. These eccentrics provide the light relief between those who earnestly do their best. Precisely this mix of amazing and offbeat keeps the show compelling."