Manual Google

Are you looking through a broken pair of eyes? Are you ill-equipped to hear me?"

"Are you one of the cogs

Too busy probing the pleasure centres of dogs to get near me?

- Kevin Godley, Lol Creme| Random Brainwave, 1979

What happens when human curiosity is reduced to an engineering exercise?

Some major efficiencies happen like instant road maps and opt-in spell checkers. Who would ever want to predate a world devoid of "did you mean...?" But whether we meant to or not Google has assigned a demand-side value to the answers it provides and the way it provides them. That is a powerful and compromising brokerage.

Our passions and concerns are channeled into a need for certainty that only seems to increase with the lack of closure. We are not just hard-coded for self-containing narratives of a self-concluding nature. We will skip ahead and miss the good bits because we'll be too stressed out to appreciate them if it all turns out for naught. Such behaviors turn out well for Google. We're addicted to answers. Google is not a vehicle. It is the verb. It does not own the road. It stores the potholes below the crevices of its membranes. To deny that is to take away free advertising for a search media giant and our own self-expression in the same bated breath.

The problem is not that Google and the self-proclaimed 'beauty' of its new privacy policy is big brother in a barely disguisable ruse: "[A] simple, intuitive user experience across Google." If anything Google is big bystander. Google doesn't want to crawl inside our heads and decode our inner confessionals -- that last veil of hesitation that tells us not to visit our untested assumptions on inscrutable Google. They want to bucket our articulations: (1) First into IP addresses, and then, (2) into groupings of indulgences and shadowings of flash-points. Just the very products of our experience that cause us to take notice and give money. They don't call us users for nothing:

Google: "We never sell personal information."
Subtext: "We always sell impersonal information."

Okay, you're thinking. So I'm a consumer. They package me up and send me off as a nameless aggregate into the awaiting clutches of their material witnesses: The Procters and Gambles, the seasonal influenza indices, the local pizzerias ... all riding on the outcome of my reflexive back and forth with Google. I got my toppings, and my meds, and my brand name discount. Just pay the man and move on, right?

Less Why for the Ware

The problem is not spyware but literally why-ware -- the analytical nature of motivation. These are temperments, not transactions. These are the understandings reached through interconnecting events, inwardly wired impulses, and group + personal dynamics that factor into our actions and rationale for the outcomes they deliver. There is no GPS on God's green Google Earth that reconciles these complexities with our circumstances, decisions, and their consequences.

Google would be the first search media giant to tell you they are not in the business of telling us what to do. But what they trademark behind that steel trap of engineers and lawyers is the newly franchisable power of suggestion. That means that a post millennial tween who straps on her Google glasses will be free to experience that mediated tunnel of contraption-induced toolbars and pulldown menus that jog along-side the shoulders of these driverless thoroughfares. She will have no need for prior knowledge or personal experience or the need to remember her impressions or with whom she chooses to share them. As the latest FAQ on Google's new privacy policy intones:

Google: "We can treat you as a single user across all our products."

Yes, that is intended to be a consoling message to us memory-challenged users. Perhaps the real threat would have been to caveat that emptor:

Subtext: "We can treat you as a multiple product across all our customer segments."

Birth of a Pathology

The biggest eyebrow raising to date is that Google's bid at reality augmentation is what stoners in the seventies used to say about their sober counterparts:

1975: "Reality is for people who can't face drugs."
2015: "Hiding publicly behind an interface is like viewing the world through Google-colored glasses."  

Us ivory-towered elites can't have that. We retreat to our own 20th century safety zones. We condemn this intervention! It is a container devoid of serendipitous discovery! It is way too interesting for our kids to tune us back in again. We are so gone.

It is also the shortest distance between points she'll no longer be capable of making -- mostly why did she climb in her Google car and where did it drop her? That's assuming the passenger will have the curbside capacity to reboot the override.

Will they resume the itinerary on the driver's side? That's assuming they can drive a manual as well as read one. That's insinuating she can trick the Google car into telling her what she need to know and not what the car is programmed to disclose. That will be a hard truth from our user and a soft landing disclosed by Google. That's assuming one can take this all in. They seem to be talking over one another.

And down will come civilization, cradle and all.

The Big 5-0

"My life is not that interesting ... The work ... is a fascination." - Janis Ian

I turned fifty today.

I'm not ashamed and I'm not proud. But I sure am grateful.

And I'm an open-faced baby book. I'm vulnerable enough to be scammed by the velvet-skinned Ukrainian at the tawdry mall in Tampa. She sells me dead sea cream for my parched and soapy crows feet on the correct assumption that I look "42." That's her unaided answer. And it's topped off with the credible validation that "my eyes look older." That qualifier kicked in once she was trying to sell me the eye treatment on top of the skin lotion. I paid for one performance and she tossed in the catsup-like ointment samples with the limited time discount card.

Like I said, sure am grateful.

I can drive a mile of happiness around the same city block of my daily business. I don't covet more stuff or more love. I don't engender a love of stuff. I'm not hurting for novelty. And I still welcome new experience -- especially ones that fight the insatiable hunger that consumes most mortals exposed to the advertising of a Western-style deity. That's the life cut short routine based on too much salt, smoke, sucrose, sun and bodily fluids for which no tonic can chase them out or flush them down.

Leaving a lifeless body on earth means leaving a lively body of work as well. That's where the fifty-plus birthday sizes flip the tables over on the inducements of our disease strains. Capturing the teaching of timeless lessons increases the shelf life of our outputs. More importantly, every striving towards each achievement is cheating on the indiscriminate death that looks us in the eye whether we choose to stare back or check our messages.

So hello fifty. Hello AARP discount card offers. Hello reading glasses, and lowering registers, and thinning toenails, and saturated bladders. The road home is shorter than the journey-defining ambitions that have risen to meet that road. And as I focus on the responsibility to my survival skills, I accept those birthday gifts with a vow to: (a) use them and, (b) not fixate on the sheet I'm throwing over on these changes -for-keeps.

I will maintain one version of the same story that I recount to strangers, ex-spouses, colleagues, and lasses working the kiosks of downscale malls. It is the key to a moral hygiene necessary to honor the ownership of the gift. It is not the fear of God but the light of wisdom that tells us straight:

Honesty -- no matter how self-evident - is not bland.

Diplomacy -- no matter how delicate -- is not a foreign tongue to the trained ear.

Being accountable for one's life experience is to gain fluency in a resurgent dialect we now call transparency. Some of us even see technology as a force for good in a network that regards control as a problem to work around.

Even in an offline state there is a lightness to the shedding of youth. This is the liberation of self-restraint. It is no more limiting to experience than buffering our impulses with forethought is a threat to self-expression. Past ages have chiseled notebooks to grapple with ashes and dust. We've gone digital to the cloud and immortality  is still about the ideas and the work -- not the vessels who burnish them into books.

Time and Space Curriculum

I was taking a walk through the old neighborhood and out spilled Jimm's bouquet of albums released between early October 1979 and early October 1980:

• David Bowie: Scary Monsters


• The B-52's: Wild Planet


• The Boomtown Rats: The Fine Art Of Surfacing


• The Clash: London Calling


• Elvis Costello: Get Happy | Taking Liberties (only the 9 songs not released prior to Oct. 1979)


• The English Beat: I Just Can't Stop It


• Marianne Faithful: Broken English


• The Police: Reggatta De Blanc | Zenyatta Mondatta


• The Pretenders: The Pretenders (first album)


• Paul Simon: One-Trick Pony (one of his best, though nobody but me thinks so)


• The Specials: The Specials (first album)


• Squeeze: Argybargy


• Talking Heads: Remain In Light


• X: Los Angeles (first album)


• XTC: Black Sea

This block party rocked with a resonance that made all the other musical enclaves wish they could move to this neighborhood. OK. At least bid up the price of the late nineties tribute album in some discovered exurban-gated-ghetto league.

This notion of a stroll around the time block rings more true than my first piece of direct AARP mail that came this week. The proximity of Jimm's dream list occupies the same cul-de-sac as a framework suggested to me by fellow Hampshirite Arthur Simons. The contextual underpinnings of Simons' theory lines: (1) his living room, (2) this post, and, (3) the brimming tidal pools of his flash brain floods.

Simons posits that a place visited in childhood lies between two locations. Our sense of adult place lies between the intersection of two or more memories. In essence the first path is commuter-induced bike, car, stroller, or transit travel. The other is memory-powered time travel whether your propulsion is via jet pack or propeller head.

A bunch of corollaries spring from this vantage:

1. "Tiny" playgrounds we remember as major theme parks --
   Is that because we're physically larger or because the memories  never shrank but continued to satiate on these spongy vibes?


2. The first legs of trips seeming to take twice as long as the returning trip --
   Is it that the certainty of the way back closes the perceived distance?


3. We're all too aware of the flash forward effect of middle age that lends our earliest imaginings their engulfing stature --
   i.e. the advent of the web until now captures fewer cultural shifts than say the heyday Beatles between haircuts.

I arrive at three conclusions from these time bubbles of musical release formulas:

1. The return trip is instantaneous while the slog up the '79-80 hill takes an eternity. ("It'll be alright.")


2. That proximity of inspirations is as much a "place" as any physical landmark, (i.e. we frequented the same musical neighborhoods as teens and that is a basis for endless conjecture and jousting).


3. Big memories take up lots of room -- the further the visitation distance, the bulkier they get.

The curbside appeal of clustering albums into timelines is boundless and reveals ...

• What our musical heroes were listening to at the time -- jamming frequencies factor


• What we were in the act of sweating through or celebrating at the time -- soundtrack of our lives appeal


• What about our childhoods has swelled to larger-than-life stature and what deserves to shrivel and die -- always a roll of the musical dice we are willing to rock

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Release Party Push back

Garo however, was having none of this -- at least the part about appropriating our back yard vanity checks as signifying any real inflections, cultural shifts, or accumulated post collective event wisdom:

"I admit that as much I love wallowing in the filth of my own past, I generally try to steer clear of such list-o-mania. An excellent period it was (particularly in the sceptr'd isle), but of course we'd all think that; it's when we were paying the most attention. We bought albums the moment they arrived in stores, and we knew what it was up against. (Or as Dish used to put it: My God, it's Thursday! Isn't it time for a new Donna Summer album??)"

Garo equated the ubiquity of distribution with the commoditization of experience:

"Now  music arrives to (most of) us after it's been long-vetted by YouTube users, radio stations, Saturday Night Live bookers, and a topsoil of people much younger than us at least 20 feet deep. By the time we receive it, it's been out for months, maybe years; we're therefore no more able to connect it to a specific time and place and zeitgeist than we are to keep straight the various Justins and Selenas and hyphenated rapper sobriquets that buzz around us like lighters at a Blue Oyster Cult concert."

Me knowing that Garo never ran off to join any Blue Oyster cults allows me to duck behind my own naivete.

And whether we opt for Jimm's elevated lanes of memory or Garo's mania cross-offs, I still have appointments to keep. Increasingly the place and time are one because the place I'm headed IS that stitch in time. And that time is not waiting in line for next Thursday's Donna Summer or Ruby Tuesday's Edgar Winter. That all expenses paid vacation knows every rhyme and season. And that's the commiseration of the tunes in our heads and the songs that pulse to the hearts we've developed to contain and express those sounds.

The time-lines are a map. And the only thing more fun than plotting future trips is getting lost completely. Yesterday and tomorrow can move into my musical neighborhood any time they like.

Commander in Speech

When I was working for a political consulting - slash - polling boutique in the late eighties a pre-maturing graybeard named Ed Reilly took me out to dinner. The gesture was a sign of thanks for ceding my personal life to the firm and forbearance for the blank checks yet to underwrite battles yet to be waged. (A personal life would claim me before I spent away a career in politics). The son of a Boston firefighter Reilly managed to straddle the line between a rip-snorting unionist and a pedigree kingmaker, spoiling for both fights and the spoils from winning them. Like so many pre-Aaron Sorkin era politicos, Reilly would ride the painstaking obscurity of his polling outfit to fabulous wealth through the Gucci-laced corridors of K Street.

As I remember the dinner was not about feasting on the vanity and self-importance of trade associations but about the eternal flame that draws all young operatives to the heart of the Beltway, world capital of the influence industry. By then Reilly had little appetite for progressive platforms or blue sky agendas. Most of his client-candidates were moderate or split-the-middle Democrats who appealed more to independents than liberals.

It was late '88 and Ed was still smarting over the Lee Atwater-architected trouncing of sensible Michael Dukakis by pumped-up Poppy Bush 41. "Our party just doesn't get it," fumed Riley. "We invite the press into the backs of our campaign planes and buses because we care what they think and say. Then they go hunting for stories that don't exist." The Republicans care about one thing and that's controlling the message: "They don't give a rat's ass what the media thinks -- no invites, no complications."

I'm reliving Reilly's frustration at the insinuation by Newt of the "Grandiose Old Party" that the non-Fox news media are apologists for Obama's failings. The fact the charge packs as much punch now says what?

* That our discourse has barely evolved -- even backslid over the last generation of elections
* That Gingrich is hot, callous, and ravenous -- three helpings that land far and wide of Obama's plate
* That the messengers are shot down before they can squeeze off their debating points

I'll be wondering about the messenger piece as Obama enters through the Congressional Chamber doors for his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. He will be staring openly into the very real perception of playing the co-star on the national political stage. However, in terms of his efforts to yank the spotlight most of those energies will be channeled on his path to the podium. It may seem like the sideshow lies in the fist-bumps, flesh-presses, and cordial waves 'n winks as Obama makes his way to the center of the hall. But actually, most of his energies will be channeled towards that tightrope walk through the superficial entanglements of the pageantry. The fact he'll arrive nearly depleted once he reaches the podium is not the story here.

The address itself will be a slam-dunk. He'll nail the talk down. No flaps in these gusty political headwinds. Even the melody of his speech will be encoded automatically. Energy-wise Obama will give this address in his sleep and even his fiercest adversaries will know he's in prescient control: the commander in speech. In fact he won't just float over the hall -- he'll have his batteries recharging at the same time. But will that electrify his base anywhere as much as his tentative hold on power unifies the opposition? Obama may be a conciliator-pragmatist-moderate. But in his heart of hearts there is a fierce and uncritical belief that his detractors will do the right thing for the country in spite of their hostilities. That unyielding and romantic calculation has cost the country more than the benefit of a second Obama term.

Raising the Debt Ceiling on Inner Drive

In the book The Obamas we confirm the credible assertion that Barack lives in the same town as Michelle and the girls. And even though he can't take the dog for walks he can share the same dinner table at least 5 out of every 7 evenings (baring crises and mid-terms). But the aspiration of family man is one with the sincerity of Barack the soloist:

* The guy whose much more comfortable debating the merits of Constitutional Law than the glad-hander

* The guy more tuned to schools of thought than to the schools that his adversaries' kids just got into

* The guy oblivious to whose dates on what calendar were coming up when the time's ripe to cash in on minting his next round of political capital

We were told by author Jodi Kantor of former Super Bowl parties where guests were invited to crunch pretzels and brewskies. We were told that Barack sat in his assigned chair for the game and never let the affairs of his super bowl party state interfere with the play-by-play or the halftime updates. The President of the United States was on the periphery of a room that he did not work and the evidence is this:

People who would otherwise stab him in the back are now entering through the front. There is no echoing chamber. Even in his own conflict averse party there are no minions, lieutenants, or defenders of the faith. Want to get Joe Biden to shuddup? Make him your veep and you shan't hear a peep. We've gone from the Priceline-like bid-ups on the Lincoln bedroom during the Clinton occupancy to the mothballing of the mattresses and couches. Such is where strange bedfellows come to make exceptions to their unyielding public stances.

Gridlock We Can Count On

If the firework could be choreographed on the percentages then we'd have some positive correlation between unemployment numbers and favorability ratings. Then we'd have an Obama-Romney crash test that the operatives can rationalize. Gingrich is not waiting in the wings. He is fanning the flames of a sunburst as clarifying as a biker weekend tailgating down on a Federal Reserve meeting. See what the 99% elites think of that! What the right-skewing public seeks is the bloodbath that vanquishes the calculation and cleanses the resentments of a white America whose time is past -- except perhaps when it comes to settling American elections.

Obama's been called as many names as he's learned to ignore since the bully-bigots of Indonesia threw rocks at him on his way to school. But the one name he can't ignore is the scorched path between entrance and podium that gets gussied up as Big Gov versus Big Biz. Little Guy versus Small Biz. Taxes on the rich versus sacrifice for all. So long as Obama answers to the name of introvert we're stuck in false choices. It's sealing a deal he never signed up for and is no more prepared to make now than as a school boy in the streets of Jakarta.

So in the end how does Obama justify his second term? America can't forgive temptation neutral technocrats. He could reprise his dress-down of Chief Justice Roberts over Citizen v. United in 2010: The single biggest reason for the side-show status of this season's State of the Union. But as any populist-turned aristocrat like Reilly will tell you: We voters warm even less to knew-all-alongs than know-it-alls.

If the status quo was in friendlier territory, Obama could defend healthcare as a right with the same zeal that Bush 41 got elected attacking abortion and flag-burning. So why does one approach sound like a hail Mary with no time on the clock while the other runs the same clock out by sitting on the same ball? Picking a fight with George Stephanopoulas might keep the drive going. But the best way in is to beat the messenger to the punch of a quiz show called "medical bill in the mail." The answer for us in Massachusetts is that we can pay them off without the help of venture capitalists or loan sharks.

From the front of the envelope to the back of the plane: Thank you, Governor Romney and Chairman Riley.

Self-Reliance and Its Many Dissenters

It's hard to fathom an hour clad and out of bed better spent than last Thursday's OnPoint from WBUR. A spirited forum led host, guests, and callers to philosophize between pragmatism and our perfect worlds.

I'll take my inspirations from internal quandaries over debating public policies and handicapping horse races any day. Inside, looking out, and taking in a crisp and resonating distance. The broader business of our daily practices and how they present in our public American discourse is much more interesting than arriving at these meanings through the mundane abstractions of our fetishistic tax laws, per capita pollution levels, "good" cholesterol counts, and aggregations buried in the algorithms of Google and Facebook. That's what OnPoint listeners witnessed in a zeitgeist-popping and enigmatic question of Too much self-reliance?

For the panel, host Tom Ashbrook snagged literary critic Benjamin Anastas. Ashbrook was justifiably smitten with Anastas's New York Time Magazine essay, The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’, which raked Ralph Waldo over the "looking-out-for-#1" coals in the December 4th issue.

To Emerson's defenders, self-reliance was never a vehicle for piety or privilege but a reaction to conformity. Professor Alex Zakaris of the University of Vermont described Emerson's rejection of his fellow New Englanders and their casual materialism as a loophole into "moral thoughtlessness." He cited the travesty of obeying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by returning these inventory turnovers to their receipt-bearing masters.

Emerson did not write blank checks to the future from unquestioning urge "to speak what you think now in hard words." His approach was to purge the unreflective gratifications, clear the head. His humility divined this critical self-scrutiny to be arduous work without deadlines to meet: Specifically, the act of learning how to detect our own thoughts free of social conditioning. that's nearly has hard to fathom for some of us as human inventories. We're more anxious being offline than subjected to the zealotry of our now permanent campaigns.

Back to Emerson now -- the pay-off of self-reflection was quite the windfall:

* Dividends of inner peace

* Triumphal, universalist connection of cosmic-like romance: "every heart vibrates to a reservoir of divinely ordained goodwill."

* Did we mention self-reliance as a throw-in?

This is the note he sounds of a consciousness that regulates what comes into our hearts.

But hearts being what they are can clench themselves into thick, over-sized muscles. In the naval-gazing myopic absorptions of our day, we recoil at the stiff price on believing in ourselves at all costs:

* The little CPA in my soul tells me that the one percent are hoarders whose craven capitalism arranged for the decapitation of the middle class.

* The Paul Revere replica in my driveway is revving to defy any law that expands the rolls to make health care a civil right (and a social responsibility).

* I will deny the existence of global warming sooner than I'll acknowledge the disappearance of the North Pole.

Can our swollen egos, bruised by the bumps of social conditioning, fit snugly inside these principles? That we can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the self and its final say on these earthly arguments?

The compromises that manifest in partisanship happens on the group level. You know the groupings. You mean you weren't invited to the shotgun wedding where the bride was given away for the unholy price of a Faustian bargain? We can't pass a normal news cycle without the co-opting of the public interest by parties beholden to interest, or rather the self-interest of groups. Would Emerson say that corporations are people too? What is a more sincere expression of democracy than that?

I can think of one. That's the passions harbored in the festering disaffections of tea parties and occupiers. We're all on the authentic side of the majorities in our distrustful minds. The hypocrisies of autonomous libertarians queue on the receiving end of our reliable beltway punching bags and petty tyrannies: Big Government? Out of my tiny entitlements.

And you can have the FEMA trailer back, honest.

But it's not about the money either. There's another corruption summoned from the death of God -- specifically the departure of the sacred from public life and the language of a higher calling that is not merely mutual but universal. Our essayist Mr. Anastas pushes back, brandishing Sarah Palin's brew of "mavericky charisma." The irony here is that these women and men of God use their direct channels into gated kingdoms, emerging with an endorsement, a charter franchise of "the chosen," and new priorities and roles: now, Gods of women and men.

So many of these internal compasses point vehemently towards righteousness and away from "volumes of evidence" and "stubborn facts." Is that Emerson talking, or the political discourse growling in the belly of our appetites for cable news?

Heart news is fair and balanced!

In guts we trust, and, gut the basis for trusting others.

When does rugged, two-fisted self-reliance decay into a defrauding of the Treasury? The pulpits of the heart are certainly authentic. But is that the stuff of the integrity envisioned by Emerson? If not, the bedrock of the American spirit may just be begging for a quake-induced fracking. What spills into our streets and leeches into our water tables would change us from the outside in.

That's when climate change may arrive at our better selves. And we'll take credit for a hotter sun coming up in the mornings of tomorrow.

Lori McKenna and the Power of Suggestion Love

There are all kinds of therapies and fallacies and ointments that apply the marshaling of mental tugging and heart chugging. Our positive thinking powers and prayerful mantra-making are cast into the pantheon of attraction. On the face of it this is called "fortune." We seek on the hope that we will sow. But perhaps the larger goal (if not the more inflated fantasy) is that fortune will pursue us. Below the surface of fortune are its plumbings and fixtures -- the channelings of what we're out to attract...

- Not the seeds we sow
- Not the hands we're dealt

But the circumstances we aspire to claim us -- our hearts and minds conspiring to pry open this simple, binding assertion. There is no destiny without the pathway and us wayfarers are capable of no more and no less than fumbling for these doorways -- whether we turn out to be trailblazers, road kill, or that oddest of travelers: someone whose path travels according to plan.

These mileage markers don't arrive in my shins when I hit the pew kneelers. These soul deductions aren't meted out by cost-to-benefit calculations. Such revelations don't happen in the best prepared lectures or in the most densely packed lecture halls. But an epiphany or two have been known to slip out at least once or twice between performer and audience at venues of reverberating dimensions.

The most recent demonstration occurred last Sunday evening where Lori McKenna was holding court for six consecutive shows over the three-day holiday weekend at Club Passim in Cambridge.

On the surface Ms. McKenna is a mainstay member of the Boston folk scene. She's a troubadour with an attentive eye for emotional detail. Her band is a cabaret jangle that only she can march to. But her parades attract a diehard following that will gratefully hole-up in Passim to catch every show, regardless of the playlist or the backing players. Her Wikipedia blurb is incomplete without the fairly prominent footnote that McKenna is a major presence in a far larger pond. She's part of a tin pan alley braintrust stoking the starmaker (and sustainer) machinery vested in Nashville Tennessee. I say 'footnote'  not because this is an insubstantial source of achievement or revenue for a Boston folkie but simply because country western music never wet my wagon and has little to do with my appreciation for her greatness.

So then, what's the cosmic interplay between a local folk act and the meaning of universal wish fulfillment?

I could tell you that she engages her audience like a personal confidante. It's an authentic experience that you don't get with an insufferable celebrity. Of course, you could dismiss this as the expectation any fan-bonding rapport carries in the price of entry -- that two-way intimacy traveling both below and above the main stage.

I could tell you that her sincerity pumps through her songs with that rough-hewn diamond of a voice. You could toss this off as vocal training or the only choice available to the impassioned artist on a starvation diet of creative redemption: they do what they do because they do what they love. With a precious gift comes to incessant need to share it -- even when there's no transaction to complete, there's a loop to close. And this love is impervious to the pay-outs.

I could impress on you how Lori exudes the housewife life in the town she grew up in where her biggest lifestyle choice was buying a bigger home in the same town. OK, now we're getting somewhere.

It's not about the realty market in Stoughton, Mass. It's about the detour the RV takes when those power brokers make their pilgrimage from the Capital of Living Country to the do-hick backwater where Lori buys her groceries and scribbles down inspirations at delinquent traffic lights.

But how is it that the wife of a plumber and the mother of five gets to do the one thing in her life that entrances her for eight hours at a clip? It's not industry connections or pedigree lineage or even impeccable songwriting credentials (although she's helped move piles of Faith Hill and Amanda Moore through the inventories of the check-outs of Wal-Mart home electronics departments).

It's the uncompromising way she got there. She sang in her voice about the firsthand experience of her life. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw tried on that voice and made sure they could fit into it just fine. By the time Lori had established her sound, fame itself needed to relocate and spend time away from its own fame roots -- just to be in collaboration with McKenna.

And that's where the channeling happens. For those of us with mounting boundaries, narrowing margins, and near misses we can't abide a build-it-and-they-will-come proposition. For Lori it's as if the guests have already arrived and she has a dozen or so shiny new songs she'll be hauling to the local mall in her minivan for their seasonal outfits.

It's not just about suiting up a proper tune and its cadences. Lori told us at the show that her 22, 20 and 17 year-olds were later joined by her "back-up babies" of 10 and 7 through the power of suggestion love. Her gal pals had started their families and presto -- the seven-year itch is scratched off the list.

But that's the shine the future takes towards the wish-granting authority of those who have no names for what they want and the talents to claim those desires.

Lori told us she was going to wake up the Monday before Christmas and slip on her favorite adornment for wrapping gifts: an oversized sweatshirt, perhaps with a hoodie? That's the kind of prophetic clarity us mere doubters can face with sober confidence, boldface sincerity, and lucid luck. The lucidity lies in knowing the ingredients that go into the making of one's own luck.

On that score Lori McKenna has written her own ticket and it's been punched to more than one destination of choice.

Theme Parks of Future: The Food Museum

I recently caught up with a winter hibernation guide to imbibing in the stylized aura of shimmering Mad Men cocktails. It reminded me of the lingerings of respectable grown-ups drinking with impunity. They maintain their own obliviousness when the tumbler is shaken by the vaunted fictions of the camera. And what of their children? Are we still smarting from their own pungent tipsiness?

What characters sense and taste in memories and cinema is the ultimate stirring. It is an enterprise bursting to infect the communications pathways of entire marketing planets. Ladies and gents: from our gaping doors to your devouring eyes we bring you the Museum of Food.

That's the taste we smell through our sights -- the entrees and spirits captured in the evocative restaurants of film and the eat-in kitchens of classic sitcoms. The Food Network, the literal version of eye candy, has spawned a foodie offspring on most of its rivaling channels. The contents of those 2D sauce pans and table settings jettison chefs into a select crowd of scientific entertainers. Imagine when you swap out the kitchen help for the celebrated dining scenes, staffed by fully established franchises of fame. Who needs to reheat yesterday's leftovers when you're rolling out the specials on today's menu?

Knowing one's audience is to understand its taste for celebrity appetites. The campaign is zipless in its execution. No introductions are necessary. The script writes itself. The credit goes to that recipe -- the one insisted on by the audience. Which audience? Do you need to ask, dear? We're all on a first name basis here.

The familiar ingredients free us to portion control our connections to food events (formerly known as meals). They situate us in places (formerly known as physical locations). These seasonings could only be conjured up by our shared emotional histories with the actors we park under our cultural limelights.

So what does this have to do with more posts about museums and food?

A food museum would be the showcase for the re-enactment of celebrity meal scenes. From a tourism angle the concept is eminently franchisable. Each licensed property answers to the expectation of aromatic exhibitionism. The gift shop is the cafeteria. The advertising and the photo gallery are one in the same. Each chapter would festoon their cultural watersheds, local flavors, and neighborhoods of community food rituals. In effect, the first food chain set to endless variation. That's the pull of culinary sensuality in the food court of public opinion.

How could this play out theme-by-theme among the planet's food enthusiasts in the great dining halls of any Cosmo city of our vast global village?

• Science wing: Food as medicine, nutritional supplements (friend or faux), organics v. industrial farming ...


• Sports arena: Ticketed bake-offs between master chefs, gaming concessions since the Romans ...


• Spiritual chapel: Biblical scenes and customary rituals ...


• Fashion runway: Dinner jackets, cocktail dresses, bulking up of American XXL ...


• Design pavilion: Interiors of watering holes from neighborhood taverns to western saloons, and Irish pubs ...


• Philanthropy: A percent of the proceeds go to local food pantries ...

Apart from the charitable donations I haven't landed a single loaded insinuation on the inflammatory minefields of food policy. Sure I'm letting obesity suit up as its own fashion statement. But do you hear me leafleting here for animal rights? How about the subsidizing of empty, cheap, diabetic-inducing calories? We're going to have to take that fight outside our 501c3 status, food museum goers!

We're going to have to stock those future flame wars in the freezer section and score brownie points on what we know. That would not be hunger but appetites -- especially the gurgling bellies of stars from stage, screen, tables and bar stools. Hey bub -- I can still see their mugs on the wall while I'm waiting for my own table to clear.