New Year's Eve

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When Betty Boop sold herself to some 1%-ass mogul in the mid-1930s, possibly Hearst, her life was made for her, henceforth-wise. It looks like she lives in a scale model of Xanadu, in a neighborhood where every mansion even has its own rooster!



This Fleischer Brothers short subject portrays the morning after Betty's birthday party. But I am exercising blogger's license to state that her birthday happens to be 31 December, because first, I'm going for a holiday theme; and second, it's as likely as her having been born on any other day of the year except 29 February. (However, on momentary reflection, I'm thinking she might actually have been conceived on New Year's Eve. That's not a problem, though, since cartoon characters have a virtually instantaneous gestation period.)

Had this cartoon portrayed her 1933 party, it is likely that she would not have awakened alone---there would have been at least one animal in bed with her, and very possibly a spooky clown, too. But this event occurred after 1 July 1934, so our heroine slept alone. Hollywood's golden age of censorship depressed her enough that she put on some weight below the neck and lost some above. Plus most of her spunk (heh heh). Back in 1933, pre-Code, Betty went mano a mano fearlessly with gorillas, skeletons, hungry cannibals, and ogres; but in 1937, she is daunted by the mess her degenerate guests made of her crib. "I'm tired of cleaning things/But I'm tied to my apron strings," she complains. The plutocrat pig Hearst did this to you, baby---run for the hills, Betty! Burn the place to the ground! Call Bimbo and tell him to meet you back at St. James Infirmary!

Too late. Grampy's here. Well, at least he drives a bitchen roadster with four spare tires (just in case!), no doubt one of his original designs. Whatever flows through Grampy's veins, it seems much more effective than a 10% solution of the type Sherlock Holmes employed. Judging by Grampy's reaction to mainlining it at about 4:30, I'd guess a cocktail of mescaline, absinthe, and espresso... on Sunday morning, a few minutes after sunrise!

I think Dave Fleischer might have been trying to sneak something past the Code office at the very end, where Betty sucks down Grampy's thick, foamy head. How about you?

Happy New Year, "gangstas"!

House Cleaning Blues, Betty Boop and Grampy (1937, A Betty Boop Cartoon; Dave Fleischer, Director; Eli Brucker and David Tendlar, Animators; Fleischer Studios), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Merry Christmas to my ectoplasm!

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Jak sie masz, Babies! This year I got you two a nice robot to share! And it's not one of those phony Transformer shits, neither---this one's actually real! You can tell just by listening! Plus, he's "as strong as a moving van"! What could be stronger than that?



It is not widely known that "The Mechanical Man" is the first known recorded example of techno-rap. Also, careful listeners will note a sly postmodern reference to a 1964 Peter and Gordon hit near the end. (Not really.)

The Mechanical Man, Bent Bolt And The Nuts (1966, MGM Records K-13635-A), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Big Otis!

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Santa Crutch has decided it's time to jak sie masz Big Otis so he stops picking through everyone else's Christmas stocking. Sing along!



I think you should work this into the rotation when make your traditional Christmas caroling rounds tonight. I'd suggest premiering it at the Persia VFW post, after guzzling perhaps about half a dozen bottles of Slits beer.

Do be sure to have a Blessed Season on this, the Eve of The Most Beautiful Holiday ever conceived by the mind of Homo sapiens. And if you must drink and drive during this holiday season, drink Slits!

Mr. Businessman, Ray Stevens (1968, from "Even Stevens," Monument 18102), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Speculations on the origins of Marginalia

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Jak sie masz, sir. Let us travel back through the mists of history to examine what I am certain to be a credible account of the Marginalia origin myth.



"They came in tins." Hotcha! I think this explains why that chain mail was all rusted up inside. I am happy that you were able to win the heart of "the missus" (if not then, then eventually) and that your decades of toil enabled you to retire to "the allotment" to produce a bumper crop of "bangers and mash" or whatever it is that grows on your foggy isle. Best wishes to you both.

In my imagination, Swinging London was probably a still a glorious place even at the sunset of Peter and Gordon's recording career. I did in fact enjoy those lads a lot, including---inexplicably---this particular selection. This tune hit in Chicago during the winter of 1967 and helped to keep me company as I walked a predawn paper route with a Montgomery Ward transistor radio about the size of a cinder block in my canvas bag. (It belonged to my sister and played 45 rpm records, too!) It also reminds me of sniffing model airplane glue for some reason. I am certain that you were up to even more glamorous things in those days, in pursuit of your Fair Maid.

The Knight In Rusty Armour, Peter and Gordon (1966, 45 rpm single Capitol 5808), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

...now, you didn't really think I as going to leave you with that thing, did you?



Only three Georgie Fame singles charted in Chicago in the mid-1960s, and this is both the most obscure and my favorite. I've looked for it on YouTube in the past with no success, but now there are several versions posted. I remember being fascinated by the jazzy arrangements of "Yeh Yeh" and (especially) "Get Away." I thought his voice and delivery were about the coolest thing I'd ever heard. Even today, this sound strikes me as unique, and I couldn't really make a very good guess about who influenced his style. I hope this selection isn't overplayed on the oldies programmes in Merrie Olde England, and that it is as much of a flash for you as it was for me to rediscover it.

Get Away, Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames (1966 or 1967, live performance at the Town Hall, Offenbach, West Germany [other performance notes not available]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Oil Can Harry, assume the position

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You are jak sie masz-ed!



Even though I know you are a sock puppet you still deserve a doke during this, the blessed holiday season. I guess these guys may share some of your sock puppet DNA. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any Jim Henson Kraml Milk commercials posted to YouTube, so I guess you'll just have to be content with this. Or not.

Wilkins coffee commercial, produced by Jim Henson (1950s, provenance unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Little Oscar!

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Jak sie masz!



It sounds not unlike "boinging music," some might say. Wikipedia tells me that this insane little bundle of gnat notes began life pretty much as a small throwaway interlude at the end of "Act III, Tableau 1" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean). The video was recommended earlier this season by Nick Scratch in a comments thread.

Flight Of The Bumblebee, performed on button accordion by Alexander Dmitriev (composed c. 1900 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Oh, wait. Doesn't Little Oscar like her present? Well then put this one in your pipe and smoke it!



And take that Doug-Stevenson-looking SOB playing guitar with you! At least he may look that way if you squint hard enough. Booze can help. (Well, of course, booze can help anything... except for maybe the heartbreak of cirrhosis.) He sure gets a lot of tones out of that axe around his neck---horns, percussion... in fact, everything except guitar.

Don't you wish you were the senorita with the pearl necklace back there? She's like The Anti-GoGo Girl, lurking in that low-rent MC Escher-type expedient stage landscape, waiting to strike like an asp! A low-energy asp.

Let's Lock The Door, Jay and the Americans (c. 1965, performance information and video provenance unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Hope in an open sewer

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I don't know much about Vaclav Havel except that he was a playwright who became the president of two different nations (Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic) after the Soviet collapse, and that he appointed Frank Zappa as a U.S. trade and cultural advisor---first formally and then, after pressure from Secretary of State Jim Baker, informally.

Havel was an avant garde author and dissident who was hounded, beaten, and imprisoned for expressing unapproved political ideas. He's someone I'll read more about, someday, but the other day Esquire posted a short essay by Havel contributed to the print mag in October 1993. It was to commemorate Havel's death over the weekend. This passage from the piece struck me:

I've always been deeply affected by the theater of the absurd because, I believe, it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning — in other words, having lost the ground under his feet. As I've said in my book Disturbing the Peace, this is a man for whom everything is coming apart, whose world is collapsing, who senses he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it.

His observation seems precise and perfect to me, and as applicable in this time I share with you as it was 20 years ago. The whole essay is worth reading. Although he is too gracious to say it directly, one gets the idea that the communal effort to rescue Havel from drowning in a subgrade silo of sewage resembled a clown show for almost a half hour until someone came up with the brilliant, obvious way to rescue him. His point is that he would have lost his life if he and his fellow partygoers had given up hope... and not only did he live for another day, but 6 months later he became leader on the global stage.

Havel's concept of hope begs for comparison with Obama's "hope" as a political slogan, especially its relevance to the open sewer that authoritarianism and corporatism have made of our nation. To Havel, hope was concrete and imperative for survival, and therefore definitely not a corny or moonbat sentiment. I will have to put some Havel plays on my reading list.

What Child Is This? or whatever

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Gurlitzer, consider yourself jak sie masz-ed! Let's call this one a Christmas carol for the minister's daughter. I suppose it's at least as much a Christmas song as "The Anacreontic Song" is a national anthem.



I don't know much about music theory, but I'd bet that Jimmy Smith and other monsters of the Hammond organ probably play 10-part harmony from time to time, at least for punctuation or other purposes intended to excite the startle reaction in the listener. What do you think, Gurlitzer---have you ever read a part that calls for all ten digits to hit a different tone in the chromatic scale at the same time?

During the 1950s and 1960s, there was this practice in the jazz recording industry of putting a really "white," lame song on an otherwise straight-ahead album. A classic example is John Coltrane's 1961 rendition of "My Favorite Things" from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway production "The Sound of Music." Although there's nothing necessarily wrong with any such given performance (although Sinatra's rendition of "Forget Domani" is certainly wretched), the choice of material always seems dicey to me. I'm guessing it was a way for the label to get the Little Lady of the house listening to bop (or whatever), just like they put "Stairway" on Led Zeppelin IV or "Layla" on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs so the hippie chicks would listen to their "old man's" vinyl.

Any-hoo, "Greensleeves" seems to me like a weird choice for Jimmy Smith, maybe even weirder than a show tune would have. But he plays all the shit out of this traditional melody, along with trio-mate Kenny Burrell's guitar. I especially like the little two-chord vamp that begins the cut and recurs throughout. More generally, I'm a big fan of this Hammond/guitar/drum power trio format, and there's a lot of it on tape. (Buy it on CD or vinyl so "The Cloud" can't take it away from your computer without a warrant or habeas corpus, which seems to be on the horizon.)

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, lady!

Greensleeves, Jimmy Smith (1965, from "Organ Grinder Swing," Verve CD reissue 314 543 831-2 [2000]) via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

Merry Christmas to PaintChick

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Jak sie masz! See if you can guess why this is your Christmas present from Santa Crutch, my knitwit friend.



Jay Ward's spoor is all over this spot, of course. If you watched cartoons in the 1960s then you probably recognize the voices, even if you can't put a name to them. Sharp-eared viewers will catch a military reference to the scrooch gun, which was the principal weapon used by Moonmen Gidney and Cloyd in the very first Rocky And His Friends adventure, "Jet Fuel Formula" (a 40-part epic poem, kind of).

Quisp cereal television commercial (1966, Jay Ward Studios, producer), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical commentary and educational purposes.

For The FiftyNiner

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I'm sure you know many versions of this one, but I'm afraid I'm just not qualified to surprise you for Christmas, Dick Dale-wise.



To make matters worse, surprise-wise, this is certainly the most overexposed track from Mr. Dale's catalog thanks to Pulp Fiction. However, I'm thinking that maybe, if you're a little like me, you may at least appreciate the presence of the lady in the foreground sporting the classic mid-sixties wide track chassis. Also, dig that opening shot---very promising... before the director settled for a wimped-down blackout segue into a pretty static filming of the Del-Tones performance.

But what the heck does Dick Dale need with these Del-Tones, anyway? First, listen for them---are they even playing? I can hear one of the two rhythm guitar players, barely, and a bit of drumkit in places about halfway through. The tenor and bass may be there just to add sex appeal. No, probably not---take a look at these jokers when the film starts jump-cutting between mugshots, around 2:10. Holy kazoosis! And they can't even sway convincingly. No wonder there's only one gal in the audience! And she's probably there with Dale (at least for the evening).

It must have been the FiftyNiner who told me that Dale has some strong Arab roots. Listening to his technique on this cut and so many others, it seems like that should have been obvious, but I never made the connection. It occurs to me that Dale's use of a mode for the lead line, instead of a diatonic scale, gives him something in common with Miles Davis (assuming that my earbones understand it correctly, and they may not). Davis purportedly "reinvented jazz" using that composing technique a few years earlier for Kind of Blue.

So anyway, young feller, Merry Christmas... because you've been jak sie masz-ed!

Misirlou, Dick Dale and the Del-Tones (1963 performance from the Bengal International film, A Swingin' Affair), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

For the Persia Powerhouse

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Jak sie masz! This is for the smokin' redhead who keeps almost everything running on a rural settlement in far-western Iowa.



I recently observed her in action, bouncing between Persia, Omaha, and even Lincoln, Kansas, like a deranged skittle would, but somehow not showing any of the mania or signs of breakdown I'd expect of a woman her age (i.e., my age) trying to take care of everything at the same time. We visitors loved the part where she calmly requested her grizzled spouse to remain seated while she told him that there would be an unannounced dinner guest for Thanksgiving. His reply, something to the effect of "Jesus fucking Christ!", did not seem to faze Rusty at all, and she assured us that he would "be OK" a little later. Then she sent him on an errand that demanded him to pipe down. She's a top-drawer tactician in addition to being a dynamo.

This version of "Powerhouse" is new to me. We all know it from old Warner Brothers cartoons---the main melody and the bridge are used separately in the cartoons for different purposes. But I've never heard it played by harmonicas, or even imagined that such a thing could be done. But here are six swell-looking guys who make it so. If this weren't a gift to a Lady, I'd probably say something like "listen to those motherfuckers go!"

Powerhouse, The Six Philharmonicas (1940, performing the Raymond Scott composition in the Warner Brothers film short subject, "The Dipsy Doodler"), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

And I quote:

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Here's Charles Pierce at Esquire commenting on how this cycle's Republican presidential crop is in a class by itself compared with all other past GOP fields:

Okay, maybe Jon Huntsman is a hyper-conservative John Anderson, and Mitt Romney is a hyper-disingenuous Bob Dole, but Huntsman's polling in the Marianas Trench, and the entire party wishes Romney would die in a fire.

 Also, today's doke.

For the commenter with many names

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Jak sie masz! Dude, you are known by more names than The Prince of Darkness. And even if You are He, I'm confident that you will still enjoy what Santa Crutch is about to stuff up your sock.



I think this selection is the absolute cream of Spike Jones. For one thing, I think the arrangement is just simply better than the original by David Rose; the Rose version begins too abruptly, and the first section is too staccato for my taste. The harp intro on this one is an essential touch that I remember from my childhood as we tossed the original Jones 78s around the living room until breaking all but one---this one.

Even though the cowbell in the first bars of the main theme will startle you, the phrasing is more subtle and expressive than in the Rose production. And listen how Jones passes the melody around every coupla beats to a different---but perfectly logical---instrument.

The second section is played surprisingly straight, with melody on whatever kind of bells those are, alternating phrases with brass, and filled with string flourishes. And the third section relies only on comic vocalizations, not Weird-Al type lyrics as Jones so often does in his parodies. It created a riot in the living room every time we played it when the old folks were gone---it's probably why we only have one of those 78s left. This one was on the turntable while we were slinging the others around, driven loony by the laugh chorus.

So, Lucifer, Happy Festivus (or whatever you secular humanists celebrate these days). Or Happy Monday Night, if nothing else. And look on the flip side of the copy of "Drip Drip Drip (Sloppy Lagoon)" you recently acquired; that's actually the B side on my version of Holiday For Strings."

Holiday For Strings, Maestro Spike Jones and His City Slickers (not dated, RCA Victor 20-1733-A, from the 78 rpm album "Musical Depreciation"), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Christmas doom and redemption

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This Christmas season brings memories of the paterfamilias, to whom we shall refer on this blog as Selig, who used to torment his children into compliant behavior during the Christmas season with a dread three-word phrase that spelled Christmas doom: "jak sie masz". It is pronounced yock-sih-mosh, with minor accent on the first syllable and major accent on the last. In our household, the term was both an interjection---a command---and a transitive verb. The latter usage would be something along the lines of "Get back into bed right now or I'm gonna jak sie masz you!"

A jak sie masz-ing would commence when Selig set down his bottle of Drewery's on the kitchen counter, snatch the receiver from the chrome cradle of the flesh-colored* wall phone, and twirl out a sequence of numbers on the rotary dial. He was calling The North Pole, of course, and I remember listening with dread as that dial chik-chik-chik-chikked it's way back to rest, awaiting the next pluck of Selig's index finger to advance the fateful call.

The intent of this exercise was to modify the behavior of an irritating child before Santa picked up the line. When successful, the old man would hang up the phone without having to rat out the kid. But if any of us called Selig's bluff long enough for Santa to pick up, then Christmas perdition was imminent. You see, jak sie masz is "Eskimo" for something like "Don't leave [Big Otis or Little Oscar or Gooch or Piggly Wiggly or The Gobber] any presents this year!"

I remember this technique being highly effective for behavior modification purposes between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Almost always, the offending child would back down long before Selig's call to the Jolly Old Elf was completed. Nevertheless, there were  instances when some of us actually did get jak sie masz-ed (certainly BO did). However, I further remember that Selig would later phone Santa to annul said jak sie masz. I do not know why the old man would relent after he cast the die, given that he was monster enough to unleash this weapon in the first place. But Santa complied with his directives.

Well, now it so happens I am happy to announce that apropos of nothing I have been inspired to revive Selig's innovative holiday personnel-management tactic here at Fifty50. Long story short, I have jak sie masz-ed the whole bunch of you! But don't worry---it works differently here at my place in the 21st century. Being a progressive citizen, I have prebuilt amnesty into my call to The North Pole: I know you've all been rotten this year, but you can't help it because you're not normal. For that reason I've instructed Santa Crutch to deliver each of you a nice, bloggy Christmas present sometime this month. So look out.
_________
* A more accurate description would probably be "caucasoid-colored."

Not exactly a purported image of Jesus in a piece of French toast

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But it's even better! See the outwardly mediocre photo below and try to find the super-awesome subliminal image embedded within it.

Shot at the Cowboy Monkey, Champaign, Ill., Friday evening whilst Big Rock Head was blowing some section work with the Parkland College In-Your-Ear Big Band.

And I will hasten to add that, no, the ugly motherfucker at center left is not your genial host. How could you even think such a thing?!?

Click to enlarge. Taken with an iPhone 4s in available light using its digital zoom capability. The camera in the thing is quite impressive. I'll share some of the landscapes I made over Thanksgiving in western Iowa, on the estate of one of this blog's correspondents.

Lament

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I'd have an easier time believing in an all-loving God if my back yard were infested with yellow-fin tunas instead of squirrels.

Saturday matinee

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Come on, you fool! Do you want to get trampled?!?



In my view, Lois Lane is the real star of most of these 1940s Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons. She definitely wears the pants in her little menage with Kent and Superman.

First, she's always chiseling in on Kent's assignment, or stealing it outright, and ends up being the main reporter. (Not sure how Kent even keeps his job at the Daily Planet, considering his apparent lack of enterprise as compared with Lois.)

Second, she's the genuinely fearless member of the cast even if she does end up being humiliated on the dastardly villain's "sawmill" every time (in this episode, put into bondage over a cauldron of scalding, molten steel that the bad guy evidently keeps on the front burner, just in case). Superman needs no courage since he knows that he is inherently invincible.

Third, Lois must be stronger than hell judging by how she keeps her lunch hooks embedded in the robot's steel trapdoor at 3,000 feet while Superman helplessly bumbles off into a web of high-voltage power lines despite his supernatural physical endowment.

For purposes of brevity, I'll leave aside the discussion of intelligence since even a 6-year-old can discern that Superman is a dimwit. Lois is always doing dumb things in these animations, but Kent/Superman is just a dope, plain and simple.

Finally, I'd bet that Lois is a lot of fun behind closed doors. One can imagine her hollered warning to Kent (top of this post) to, in another context, double as an invitation to a night of fun in her own little BDSM dungeon.

Enjoy the animation and the industrial deco settings. I love how the robots slouch when they're deactivated instead of just locking down at attention---much more work to do things the Fleischer way, but the result was superior.

The Mechanical Monsters (1941, "Superman" cartoon by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures; Steve Muffatti and George Germanetti, animators; Dave Fleischer, director), via YouTube, a work in the public domain embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Your right to peacefully assemble

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I am perversely thankful to the Bush/Cheney administration for pulling the friendly mask off the authoritarian homunculus living at the core of Movement Conservatism. I assume they dropped the pretense of neighborly Reaganism because they felt they were dealing from a position of unassailable strength---strength that can be reinforced when ordinary people "dummy up" due to a gnawing fear of government reprisals. Still, the illusion of certain democratic customs such as the freedom to peacefully assemble must be maintained in order to support the traditional story line that America is the greatest nation in the 6,000-year history of Earth, because at least we know we're free.

From my vantage point it seems that we are now seeing historic new limitations on the right to peacefully assemble. It appears that those limitations are triggered when nonviolent protests start to seriously interfere with The Spectacle that is the establishment media narrative about political economy. So as a result, we wake up to an image of "The World's Policeman" (so to speak) waging chemical warfare on University of California - Davis students sitting peacefully as part of an Occupy protest. Even when the state has a legitimate law enforcement interest in removing nonviolent protestors from a site, no manner of intentional (i.e., premeditated) brutality is justifiable. The world may note that the victims don't appear to be rowdy, body-painted, bongo-playing dopers, not that such an appearance would justify brutality anyway. My point is that the people being sprayed are probably pretty much like you and your neighbors (or their kids).

The risk that establishment interests take when deploying this kind of force is that ordinary Americans---the Silent Majority of the 21st century---may actually both note and remember with revulsion images like the one above (shot by one Louise Macabitas and found in an online photostream). With that thought in mind, watch this YouTube clip:



I suggest that you watch the whole thing, but especially around 6:15 in the video. These brave kids, as well behaved as anyone could possibly expect under the circumstances, pull off something amazing with nothing but words and The People's Microphone. And, to the establishment, it is much more threatening than bongos, throwing bricks, or setting fires.

In coming weeks I'm afraid we'll see more incidents involving movement infiltrators and provocateurs for the purpose of marginalizing the protestors. Even worse, I also feel that the despicable SOPA legislation now before Congress is aimed not at "online pirates," but online protestors. This legislation, which I've intended to write about and will try to get to, will give both government and industry powerful tools for suppressing online political dissent under cover of "protecting creator's rights." YouTube is dead in the SOPA crosshairs. And, finally, look for a huge push to formally outlaw the recording or photographing of police activity occurring in the public domain.

Also, look for Officer Pepper Spray to become America's next Joe The Plumber.

I should note that I found the media embedded above at Balloon Juice.

And I quote:

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Rudy, holding forth on the topic of squirrels:

They eat anything.
They're like rats!
They are rats. With tails!

Europe tries government/industry "partnership"

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It's a fact that Europe has a long history of experience in government/industry "partnership," dating back to Renaissance-era royally chartered corporations up through its 20th century experiments with centrally controlled fascist and socialist economies. But now we have the governments of Greece and Italy, the very cradles of democracy, diving head-first into partnerships that must be the envy of American corporatists:

The question now, in both Italy and Greece, is whether the technocrats can succeed where elected leaders failed — whether pressure from the European Union backed by the whip of the financial markets will be enough to dislodge the entrenched cultures of political patronage that experts largely blame for the slow growth and financial crises that plague both countries.

Some said there was cause for optimism. “First, the mere fact that they have been asked in such difficult circumstances means that they have a mandate,” said Iain Begg, an expert on the European monetary union at the London School of Economics. “Granted, it’s not a democratic one, but it flows from disaffection with the bickering political class.”

To understand the government/industry partnership aspect, you need to know that the new "technocrat" Greek Prime Minster, Lucas Papademos, is an MIT-educated economist who has worked for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank. Italy's new PM is likely to be "technocrat" Mario Monti: economist and politician, a two-term member of the European Commission, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and international adviser to that most ancient of US democratic institutions, Goldman-Sachs.

Atrios translates this trendy new European "technocrat" phenomenon for regular people:

Well the consensus seems to be we need to just install bankers as the leaders of all the countries, and the only way any of us can survive is if all the richest countries of the world are turned into 3rd world hellholes after the middle class gives all of their money to rich people.

I believe this concept is what is really behind the sentiment expressed by certain celebrity pundits that what American really needs is a billionaire philosopher-king like NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the helm because, after all, he's so rich that he has no reason to seek personal gain from the presidency. Mitt Romney is the poor man's Michael Bloomberg.

When government "partners" with industry

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The US Constitution assigns to Congress the authority to regulate commerce. The idea that the Commerce Clause is widely understood to mean that the federal government should encourage or promote the development of commerce doesn't seem outlandish to most of us. However, the idea that the government should be a "partner" of industry is fairly new, at least in America. What that means, practically speaking since the Reagan Revolution, is that Industry (with a capital I) considers it the duty of the federal government to remove barriers to corporate profit-making irrespective of the justice of social usefulness of doing so. That expectation has come to include the even more dicey concept that government operations should be conveyed into the hands of Business (capital B) for purposes of "efficiency," which is a euphemism for wealth transfer from the US taxpayer into corporate bank accounts.

This idea was expressed most elegantly by Robert Kennedy Jr. in a speech I heard broadcast on my local pubic radio station a coupla months ago. Asked by an audience member to explain his understanding of the controlling legal ideology of the Roberts Supreme Court (the current one), Kennedy quoted his law partner: "corporations always win."

When it's person versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

When it's government versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

And when it's the person versus government, government wins. This happens because government is the "partner" of industry, whose job it is to look after the legal interests of the corporation. In general terms, their interests have largely merged over the past few decades. Industry is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of America; the federal government is the Executive Vice President for Human Capital.

Republicans are at least candid about this; Democrats are not. That, in my opinion, makes the Democratic Party the more detestable of the two.

I offer the above as a spirochete's-eye view of some mental synthesis I've been working through in order to reboot my thinking process. I think all of us could benefit by trying to refresh our perspectives on who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Today, for reasons of news topicality, I'm thinking that the typical Democrat plays Joe Paterno to the Republican Jerry Sandusky. The Democrat goes through the motions of doing the right thing in the eyes of his "base." But everything he does is for the aggrandizement of The Corporation. Any way you look at it, humanity is considered only an incidental feature of the environment, and one that The Corporation won't miss when it's gone.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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What's he building in there?
We have a right to know.



I know I have a few neighbors who ask these questions about me ever since they figured out that my new workbench will easily downcycle into a coffin for Rudy at such time when he finally drives Cindy berserk. This performance makes a nice Halloween composition.

Only Tom Waits could invent a town called Mayor's Income, Tennessee---what a card! I want to post more of his work in the future. I know of almost no other artists who have been as versatile and, at the same time, consistently successful as Waits over the span of a 40-year career. Usually a pop musician is either one or the other, but Waits isn't really a pop musician; he's in a class by himself.

What's He Building? Tom Waits (1999, from "Mule Variations," Anti/Epitaph CD 86547-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Occupy Indian Summer

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While running an errand to Lowe's this afternoon I beheld this crew occupying the northeast corner of Prospect Avenue and Market View Drive in Champaign. The afternoon was crystal clear, warm, and bathed in that special gold sunlight that we get in these latitudes during the first month of autumn. I decided to visit them to get a sense of how my conservative university/corn-cob town may or may not have plugged into the national zeitgeist. Two things surprised me about the event.

First, the group's motliness impressed me as an asset, not a liability. This aggregation of 20 souls was pretty much the same demographic cross-section I'd expect to see at the Target two blocks to the north on any given weekend. The oddest guy in the crowd was the one wearing a "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirt and a home-made comparative US income bar chart drawn on poster board. Several demonstrators appeared to have participated in previous Occupy meetings, but most seemed to be first-timers judging from the chats I had. The crowd had a sort of tentative mood, not knowing exactly what they should be doing other than holding their signs and waving at cars. So they pretty much just did that, and in doing so they gave the clear appearance of unified purpose. It struck me as an organic aggregation, not one of those prefab demonstrations of lame, (usually) liberal political theater where people half-heartedly chant trite, pre-rehearsed rhymes. This group did use the "human microphone" technique to read the 29 September 20111 "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City." Their effort in this also seemed tentative---not self-consciously uptight, but sort of iffy... possibly because there was no one to hear the words except themselves (everyone else was in cars) and the Declaration is damn long to read out loud using such an approach. Nevertheless, all of this added up to an oddly touching experience for me: a not-quite-random meetup of individuals with an impulse to connect, getting to know each other on the spot, voting on whether and where to get together again.

The second, and even more interesting surprise, was how many car horns I heard honking in support while standing at that corner---possibly averaging 6 - 8 a minute at one point. The participants I talked with said it had been pretty much like that for the hour-plus they had been standing there, with only two or three rude remarks having been shouted from passing vehicles. (I heard none while I was visiting the scene.)

Is it possible that there really is some sort of self-organizing grassroots phenomenon in its early stages of nationwide formation? As long as the Occupy movement remains positive, cooperative, nonviolent, non-hierarchical, and noncommercial, maybe it has the potential to address a deep need in a society that is becoming exhausted by its alienation from itself and sick of the depravity that corporations have infected it with.

Blind Justice!

*

Here's a snap of the first band up today in the Prairie Crossroads Blues Society battle of the bands at Memphis On Main, Champaign, Illinois. The band is named for Mr. Tim Donaldson, center with Fender Strat; and Roger "The Doctor" Prillaman, left with stacked keys. Tim is the owner of The Blind Man, a Champaign window dressing boutique, and Roger is an Urbana attorney. So: Blind Justice!

Tim and Roger are geezers of approximately RubberCrutch vintage. Tim's longtime aggregation, the No Secrets Band (which I think must have been named after Carly Simon's nipples), broke up a few years ago, and he has been playing with his talented sons and one of my talented sons for almost a year. Roger was a mainstay in Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets, which was probably the leading Champaign-Urbana bar/party band through some of the 1970s and much of the '80s (not sure---didn't get out much back then).

On tubs, in background with head bisected diagonally by Roger's mic boom, is Ben Donaldson, a graduate of Champaign Central High School's nationally renown jazz program. The ultra-handsome gentleman plucking bass strings at the right, also an alum of the Central jazz program, is Dave "Rock Head" C****," who officially adopted that stage name as of today. (The crowd seemed to be tickled by it.) The 20-minute set included one original composition by Big Rock Head entitled "Weathered Man."

Winner of the battle gets to compete in a national battle at Memphis at some point.

Would you like some fresh-ground strychnine on your salad, Sir or Madame?

*

You probably know that former pizza mogul Herman Cain has a tax-reform plan he calls 9-9-9, a triple-decker version of a federal flat-tax program affecting personal income, purchases, and salaries payed by employers. He claims it will make the administration of taxation dirt simple while reducing everyone's tax burden.

Paul Krugman's blog links to a Tax Policy Center analysis of Cain's 9-9-9 proposal with respect to its impact on US taxpayers. Anyone who learned about regressive taxation in school can correctly guess the results.

A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000.

So give it up for our GOP executive superhero of the week and his outstanding Plan 9-9-9 From Outer Space! Or at least do that if you wish to carpet-bomb the economy with kryptonite and dull your hunger pangs by eating lead paint chips.

By the way, the Tax Policy Center is no hippie commune; it's a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. I don't know anything about the latter, but Brookings is a right-leaning think tank that is about as Establishment as you can get.

Occupy Uganda

*

Here's another noodle-scratcher from the Obama administration. Last Wednesday,

the U.S. deployed combat troops to central Africa to serve as advisers to regional forces battling the Lord’s Resistance Army.

[...]

A total of 100 combat-equipped troops will eventually be deployed, with the rest being dispatched in the next month, according to the letter. “However, although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense,” Obama writes.

Yes, advisers only; won't engage the adversary unless absolutely necessary. Check. As Rocket J. Squirrel used to say, "That voice. Where have I heard that voice?"

The announcement was masterfully delayed until Friday afternoon, which is the part of the weekly news cycle where authorities typically bury the release of negative or controversial news. Yet the announcement of other important "foreign policy" news---a positive development in the eyes of most people, I'd think---was also obscured by its timing:

The U.S. is abandoning plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past a year-end withdrawal deadline, The Associated Press has learned. The decision to pull out fully by January will effectively end more than eight years of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, despite ongoing concerns about its security forces and the potential for instability.

Just in time for deployment to... where? Uganda? Iran? Cardassia Prime?

Seriously, has someone just discovered huge new deposits of mineral wealth in Uganda?

Brazen and bizarre, indeed!

*

It looks like the movers and shakers may be coming around to the RubberCrutch view of the absurd hype the Justice and State departments applied to the arrest of some Iranian-American guy who allegedly was involved in a cunning plot to exterminate the Saudi ambassador to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Reuters reports via TPM (anonymous sources, admittedly, and possibly Obama opponents with a political axe to grind)  that "officials" have

questioned the wisdom of the White House strategy in using the affair to rapidly push for tougher sanctions on Tehran, increasing regional tensions.

"A lot of people basically feel really suspicious about this," one official said, questioning the White House's motivation "in ratcheting this thing up so quickly."

Exactly my point. That, and the remarkable similarity of the initial journalistic language and perspective on the event, which gave strong evidence that corporate media and blogs were largely working from on set of administration-spoonfed talking points. "Pack journalism" isn't really news in itself, and it was pretty much considered the norm (with disgust) even back when I was studying the trade in the late 1980s. But this particular example seemed unusually blatant given the strikingly uniform vocabulary and attitude about the story.

Again, to be clear and with due respect to nuance, I am not dismissing the probability that there was some kind of plot in the works, nor am I jumping to any conclusions about how serious the plot may have been (even though we have strong indications that the suspects may fall into the category of "bumbling amateurs"). My points are that Obama officials handled the release of this information with noteworthy incompetence given the foreign policy implications of prematurely boiling up a potful of turds with Iran; and that the initial media coverage serves as a clear example of journalistic malpractice.

Brazen administration, bizarre media coverage. But why? I don't buy suggestions that it was intended to be a distraction from the rotten economy or an election-year stunt... because (1) no competent strategist could seriously believe that it could provide a convincing distraction, and (2) it's not an election year! The timing of the thing just makes no sense considering how high of a profile the news was given. Any alternate concepts out there?

The honorary Grandma Reinhart workbench

*

Here's a project I've been occupying myself with at a leisurely pace for the past few weeks. This workbench turned out to be quite an edifice, exceeding my expectations for mass and rigidity. The undercarriage is made of select-grade two-by-fours joined with eight Simpson Strong-Tie framing brackets and about a zillion #8 Phillips wafer-head screws. The black composite feet are designed for four-by-four uprights, but they work with the bench legs fine (although the aesthetics are slightly disappointing.

The work surface accounts for the bench being named after late Grandma Reinhart, the grandmother of a coworker who allowed me to salvage some doors and fixtures from her run-down farmhouse before it was demolished a few years ago.

I started with an out-of-square  four-panel interior solid wood door and somehow mated it to a 3/4 in. layer of plywood, struggling a bit with two circular saws to make them nearly the exact same size. They're joined with wood glue and a row of #8 wood screws across the width about 3/5 the distance from the left edge. This rigid, massive assembly (2 in. thick) is joined to the undercarriage using 14 #10 wood screws (4 in.), somewhat carelessly countersunk and then backfilled with good old Plastic Wood (the shit is hard to work with skilfully, at least for me). The edges of the work surface are crudely finished out with 2.5 in. furring strips, mitered at the corners. The right surface overhangs the undercarriage an extra 5 or 6 in. to support clamping and maybe a specialized wood vise.

After sanding reasonably smooth with a succession of abrasives down to 220 grit, I put a coat of urethane on the work surface this afternoon. Also cut a bottom shelf that will drop into the bottom part of the frame after installing half- by three-quarter in. pine stops around the inside perimeter. The last phase will involve soaking the thing in successive coats of sealer to protect against the nasty garage environment.

I think this citadel could easily support the full weight of an 8 cylinder, 6 liter diesel engine or one of Rudy's hams, whichever is greater. Experienced woodworkers and builders would, of course, be amused by my pride in this humble piece of craftwork, but I'm fairly impressed with my accomplishment. I troubled over it so diligently because it's what the engineers call an enabling technology, meaning that it gives me a platform for executing projects that will contribute to the utility and aesthetics of my beloved house. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, if you like.

The Brazen and the Bizarre (Part 2)

*

It may be that this alleged perp isn't even "fast and furious," let alone "brazen and bizarre":

"He's no mastermind," David Tomscha, who once owned a used car lot with Arbabsiar, told the Associated Press. "I can't imagine him thinking up a plan like that. I mean, he didn't seem all that political. He was more of a businessman."

"His socks would not match," Tom Hosseini, his former college roommate, told the New York Times. "He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan."

Friends told the Times that Arbabsiar smoked marijuana and drank alcohol freely and had a string of businesses, "selling horses, ice cream, used cars and gyro sandwiches," leaving a "trail of liens, business-related lawsuits and angry creditors" in his wake.

Gary Sick, a former member of the US National Security Council and an expert on Iran and the Middle East, thinks the story as presented may sound farfetched (as opposed to brazen):

Iran has never conducted — or apparently even attempted — an assassination or a bombing inside the US. And it is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and US intelligence agents.

Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the US. Yet that is what happened here.

Perhaps this operation is just as it appears. But at a minimum both the public and the Congress should demand more detailed evidence before taking any rash or irreversible action.

Yes: let's have more detailed evidence, please, before we make with the bombs and stuff. Now, I don't really think the government's announcement of the alleged Iranian plot was designed to provide Eric Holder a reprieve from his problems with Darrel Issa's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Issa is a troublemaker with plenty of outstanding questions about his own pees and queues, anyway.) But can you blame Republicans if they try to paint the announcement as Obama-administration trickery? If this plot had been announced while the President was still named Bush-Cheney, what would be your gut reaction to it?

It's Little Oscar's birthday!

*

Here's a Happy Birthday Doke for Little Oscar, The Prettiest Girl In Candyland.



Those are merely rumblings of mutiny even though they may sound like the feisty chitterlings of my big sister. I always thought it was sort of special that her birthday fell on Columbus Day, until much later when I found out what a shitheel and doofus Columbo reportedly was. Anyway, Terrill Maureen, please enjoy some alternative universe history with your doke tonight.

Columbus Day, Stan Freberg (1961, from "The United States of America: The Early Years," Capitol W/SW-1573), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Smells like somebody is wagging a dog

*

If there’s one thing that the poodle media agree on today, it’s that the alleged Iranian/druglord plot to kill a Saudi ambassador in Washington is "brazen." Brazen and bizarre, in fact! Why, did you know that one of the alleged malefactors even showed a gross disregard for innocent human life by dismissing the significance of “collateral damage” resulting from blowing up the ambassador’s favorite DC eatery? Brazen! Even Hillary Clinton thinks so:

"This plot, very fortunately disrupted by the excellent work of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals, was a flagrant violation of international and U.S. law, and a dangerous escalation of the Iranian government's long-standing use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism.... This kind of reckless act undermines international norms and the international system," she said.

"Iran must be held accountable for its actions....We will work closely with our international partners to increase Iran's isolation and the pressure on its government, and we call upon other nations to join us in condemning this threat to international peace and security." 

As Frazier Thomas used to say, "Hold the phone!" The fact that this episode rises only to the level of an allegation is important aside from any due process considerations for the accused. Here's our Secretary of State making a thinly veiled threat that reasonable people might understand to be the overture to another "coalition of the willing" cattle call. That's what I call brazen and bizarre, actually, over-reactionwise. Does this administration have a "Persian Fall" in mind? Is it an attempt to sow more discord within the fractious Iranian government? A Justice Department dog-and-pony show to distract Republicans and the media from the Fast And Furious cockup?

Holder said the two alleged plotters had not yet acquired explosives but had arranged for nearly $100,000 to be wired to a New York bank account in the name of the hired hit man as a down payment. The proposed hit man was actually an informant working for U.S. law enforcement.

What in the world are "Iranian-backed emissaries," by the way? The US has no diplomatic relations with Iran. Did he mean to say "guys hired by someone in Iran"?

So all day I was reading about and hearing about this brazen and bizarre "terror" plot, with media personalities from BoingBoing to the "mothership" oldies network declaring with pre-rehearsed incredulity that it sounded like something straight out of a "spy thriller." Yes, it does, doesn't it? I wonder where all our media mouthpieces got their talking points this morning.

Just to be clear: good for the FBI and DEA if they stopped a terrorism plot in the early stages. And yes, we should be concerned if Iranian officials were in fact financing a plot of the nature reported. But is it really any more brazen and bizarre than, say, an airline passenger with a smoldering bomb in his underpants? Or that day when a bunch of Saudi nationals hijacked and crashed some passenger jets in America? Or a State Department employee gunning down two men in the streets of Lahore, Pakistan? Just asking (don't want to drone on and on about it).

Saturday Night (After Hours)

*

If you're like me---and who isn't?---you'll agree that this tune would be a good soundtrack for demolishing something or someone. First savagely, then with surgical deliberation. Then savagely again, and again. And again.



Not that I would ever do such a thing.

I think this track offers a very rare combination of rhythmic sophistication, meaningful dissonance, electric lyricism, and brute force. I think I'll categorize it as "Lummox Art Rock."

Please conform to the usual routine: earbuds jammed into the tympanum or cans epoxied to the side of your skull, turned up to 11 if your device supports that many megatons. Apologies to anyone who was expecting "Lollipops And Roses" by the Tijuana Brass tonight.

Lark's Tongues In Aspic, Part II, King Crimson (1973, from "Lark's Tongues in Aspic," Atlantic SD 7263), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Wise sayings

*

It does no good to measure twice and cut once if you don't start first by thinking three times.

Bank shot to a good line

*

In his blog post pointing to Bloomberg's expose of the ultra-right wing Koch brothers (e.g., their breaking the trade embargo with Iran and stuff... allegedly), Paul Krugman acquaints us with the following bon mots from his econ colleague Brad DeLong:

[T]he hard right is worse than you can possibly imagine, even if you take account of the fact that it’s worse than you can possibly imagine.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK! D'OH!

Saturday Night Fish Fry (after hours)

*

My favorite version of the two 1970 vinyl releases by Joe Cocker:



Strangely, whenever I hear Cocker's performance of The Letter on my local FM feed of a generic corporate oldies "station," they do not play the one that actually charted on Top 40 AM radio. Instead they play the album cut, taped live on Cocker's 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which wasn't part of our collective high-school rock and roll experience. Speaking for myself, one of the relatively few who coughed up the ruinous price of, what? $4.75 ? for the double LP, it was a little depressing to hear the live performance. The horn solos were poorly crafted and sounded distant, and the whole shape of the mix felt wrong in comparison with the single, probably because of the difficulties mic'ing practically 3 dozen musicians out in the field. The performance here, though, was a studio rehearsal recording that was rushed out by A&M records to promote the tour while it was still in progress. The horns have real presence in the studio mix, especially the straightforward, rocking trumpet and tenor solos.

So why does the "mothership" corporate oldies network, which seems to occupy 97.9 on the FM dial no matter what city you drive through, play the album version instead of the hit single? My guess is that it has something to do with bundles of "intellectual property" that they license from the corporate copyright holders and force-feed to listeners until they sicken of it. And so, in the bargain, they colonize our pop music memories just like the East India Company colonized south Asia 400 years ago. Countless original performances and mixes become unknown to younger generations of listeners. Yet there's a backhanded benefit to this trend: lots of goodies that have been stashed in the closets of collectors eventually emerge on places like YouTube, unruined by corporate stress rotation.

The Letter, Joe Cocker with Leon Russell and The Shelter People (1970, 45 rpm single A&M 1174), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Fun fact: Cocker is 40 years older, to the day, than Beer-D. Please make a note of it.

And now, Mr. Crutch

*

But first a word from our alternate universe sponsor:



Fuelers and funny cars... SUNDAY!!! I tried to find a nice 1965-era Santa Fe Speedway jingle for you because they were really catchy. No dice on YouTube, though, so here's the next-best of the genre. Often imitated, as the Earl Scheib commercials used to say about their cheap paint jobs, but never duplicated.

After hours

*

Apropos of nothing, here's a nice snapshot of Norma Jean Baker looking young and somewhat indisposed, getting fingerprints all over her 10 in. 78 rpm hit parader. I wonder what's going on here: it's a flash photo, but the outdoor light could indicate either twilight or dawn (noting that her makeup looks too fresh for a dawn after a late night). Her face and hair style look similar to her appearance in a 1954 wedding photo alongside Joe DiMaggio; did he take the picture? (Lucky slob.) The room's furnishings look mismatched and ratty, so I'd be surprised if the picture was taken in her own home. Questions, questions flooding the mind after hours.

Image linked from How To Be A Retronaught; original post attributed to Dangerous Minds.

Friday Night Fish Fry

*

Or, in my case, 16-day weekend. Fuck the Prayer Meeting tonight---arf!



Just closed out the fiscal year in the lab I work for, so I'm seizing an opportunity to take 2 weeks off, end-to-end, for the first time in memory (excluding medical leave for recreational activities such as torn tendons, broken bones, and surgery).

I intend to spend most of my time off in meatspace, my preferred domain, demolishing stuff, feeding birds, pedaling a bike, and taking photos---but there are two blog "initiatives" I want to take. One is trying to get my pathetic keyword (i.e., "label") taxonomy under control---you know it's a mess when you have a couple dozen keywords with only one or two links. Keywords are supposed to help you, my most intelligent and discerning readers, navigate this site. The other effort is less trivial: making a transition to a different interpretive framework for my observation on political economy and mass culture. I have been mulling this for a long time because I've concluded that my ideas and way of expressing them become trite when accepting the default narrative frame maintained by everyone from Drudge to FireDogLake, Fox to PBS, Limbaugh to Scott Simon. Time to get asymmetrical. More soon; if not, please gently remind me. Thank you for your attention in this matter. Now please allow me to finish my homemade electrochemical chili in peace, won't you?

Seven Day Weekend, Jimmy Cliff, Elvis Costello & The Attractions (1986, from "Out Of Our Idiot," Demon Records - Fiend CD 67), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Interesting: Jimmy Cliff gets top billing on this cut. Was he still a bigger star than Elvis Costello in Thatcher-era UK? Also: on this compilation disc we learn that Elvis was the original Napoleon Dynamite (as credited on his 1982 recording of Imperial Bedroom), a full 22 years before that movie was released about the goofy kid using the same monicker, which in my opinion is slightly underrated by IMdb users (I'd give it a solid 7.3).

The "help" these days

*

Sometimes I think that Alice couldn't wash steam out of a tea kettle.

The new national currency: stupidity

*

I see that liberal bloggers from Balloon Juice to TPM are in high dudgeon because the Tea Party supports a bill to withdraw 1$ bills from circulation and replace them with dollar coins. For some reason they consider this idea to be outrageous. John Cole denounces it as "just weird" and Josh Marshall claims that such a change would be "a huge pain in the butt (perhaps literally) for every American."

The criticism, you see, is that dollar coins are a huge waste of money because nobody uses them, and consequently $1 billion worth are stockpiled in vaults where they do no work but cost tax dollars to store and secure. It must be true: even NPR said so back in June!

Critics of the dollar coin seem to think that eliminating the greenback would force them to carry several pounds of coins in their pockets from now on. Why exactly would that happen? Can you think of any reason why a person would have to carry more than four dollar coins at one time? One, maybe: when the 7-11 cashier or bartender has no fives in the register. Happens every day, doesn't it?

If you've fed a parking meter or vending machine lately, you know that neither provides much of a service or product for less than a dollar. To get a few hours of parking or a plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper you need to have 6 or 8 quarters handy. In my experience, vending machines spit out a used dollar bill about as often as they accept it.

Needless to say, this looks to me like some pointless piling onto the Tea Party by some self-righteous nincompoops. I've often said that liberal ideas are too important to entrust to liberals. Likewise, dumb ideas can easily find a new home in a liberal skull.

Last night I emailed Josh Marshall about his post to ask if he was serious, and to explain what exactly would be the drawback of widely circulating $1 coins. He broke my heart with no reply. Because there isn't a good one, if these ninnies were to think about it for two minutes. So you say a cashier doesn't want to accept 1$ coins? Tell the shift manager you'll shop at Walmart until their policy changes. And if you, the shopper, doesn't want to accept a $1 coin as part of your change, then leave it in the jar for Jerry's Kids! Oh, but your change includes four 1$ coins? If you're not rich enough to leave them in the tip jar, then I guess you'll become an eager adopter of this strange new monetary artifact, just like everyone else.

As an alternative approach, you could ask the cashier for a whole roll of dollar coins, then take it home and fuck yourself to sleep with it! (And by "you," I mean "the indefinite you." Thank you for your attention in this matter.)

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

Here, I think you will agree, is an undeniable kernel of Truth from Louis Jordan.



Of all the many matters in life on which myself, Beer-D, and Big Rock Head concur, I believe that we are most closely at unity on the particular point Jordan makes in this performance. How about you?

Something that always strikes me about Jordan---in addition to his considerable power as a composer-arranger, bandleader, entertainer, vocalist, and alto screecher---is what an authentically good-natured man he must have been. The guy just sounds fun, as if he could radiate pure joy into pretty much any situation. I've wondered if he intended that his lyrics for Fat Sam From Birmingham should serve as a slightly jollified autobiographical portrait of himself.

A Man's Best Friend Is A Bed, Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five (1947, 78 rpm single Decca 28543-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Peculiar marketing judgment

*

While waiting in line for an Rx at my neighborhood drugstore I found myself studying the early pregnancy test shelf, vaguely musing how new and unreliable that technology was back when I was in fighting form, reproductionwise.

Since then, these devices have evolved beyond merely returning a certain color that correlates positively with pregnancy---I think it was blue in the early '80s---sort of like testing pH with litmus paper. Today the competing vendors use different indicators for pregnancy-positive and -negative results. One test kit uses + and - signs, another uses | and O symbols, and a third uses a pointless and almost illegible LED display that indicates "pregnant" or "not pregnant." Hmm, I thought to myself: consumer choice!

Then I noticed that the CVS house brand test kit illustrated the product on the box as showing a positive (+) result. So I compared it with the three other brands of test kits on the shelves, and discovered that all but one depicted the test wand as displaying a positive pregnancy result. One brand---it has the word "blue" in the trade name, but I can't remember it---showed the display indicators as insets to the main product illustration, but the test wand was simply showing a blank result, as it would when one removes it from its sterile wrapper.

It seems to me that most people who are anxious to get early pregnancy test results---"up to 5 days before period!" as the most serious brand proclaims---are probably looking for a negative result, not a positive one. So it made me wonder what kind of unholy alliance between corporations and the religious right might have cooked up this subtly anxiety-inducing packaging. And then I realized that it was a self-answering question.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

After last night's post I suppose it's incumbent upon me to prove that I'm not just a random, bitterly nostalgic geezer who believes that no one has recorded anything worth listening to since some arbitrary holy moment in my youth. So put this in your pipe and smoke it.



I think it's safe to say that most people my age (high Baby Boom era) would probably consider this selection to be "noise" just as our parents condemned the Stones or the Rascals as "jungle music." Myself, I view of Seattle grunge in general as an antidote to the sterile, vacuous sound of Reagan-era rock and pop that I was lamenting here last evening. These grunge bands used instrumentation and even production values that could be replicated in any working-class garage or basement assuming a few thousand dollars of investment in recording gear and a mixing board. Pure, primitive rock and roll. I remember that there was a certain amount of hype about the Seattle sound in the early 1990s as if grunge were revolutionary and unprecedented. It wasn't; it was a throwback to the '60s and early '70s with which there was nothing wrong other than pretending that one invented it when one actually had not. Grunge lyrics were, of course, uncensored existential despair for jaded kids, but I don't think that was so much a Seattle innovation rather than a generational change in community standards for rock lyrics trafficking in despair.

This track reminds me of early '70s Alice Cooper in some respects. The chord progression, if you can call it that, seems to be variation of the classic I - IV rock chord change, but using a mutated and dissonant variant of the tonic chord. The band pretty much vamps on these chords throughout, using the mutant tonic chord almost like pedal tones. But the harmonic environment creates plenty of elbow room for the musicians to play pretty much any notes they wish at any time. They do it with discipline, though, using scales, modes, and passing tones for harmonic coherence. As far as my ears are concerned, the vocalist can hold his own with any idol of the "classic rock" era. Lyrics? My mind is too literal to understand much poetry, but I reckon they have something to do with addiction and one-upsmanship originating in some sort of personal rivalry or hostility. I don't care---my earbones have historically processed vocals as one instrument among the ensemble. Never could understand the damn things, either in terms of diction or meaning.

Retarded, Afghan Whigs (1990, from "Up In It," reissued 1991 on "The Grunge Years," Sub Pop SP112b), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

* 

This may be a nowhere song for many people my age, but I'm always surprised at my emotional response to it. And this reaction has no specific, schmaltzy boy/girl origin; I had to plumb the shallows of my wee brain to put my finger on it. It's about what happens when you don't notice that you've passed a fork in the road.



As pitiful as this sounds, even to me, the 1970s were the best time of my life. And that's even considering some particularly tough sledding in the '73 - '75 timeframe. I suppose memories may take on a lovely, saturated Kodachrome-type patina because our problems didn't turn out to be impossible after all, while the power and romance of wide-open possibilities turns out, for too many of us, to be a high point that can never be replicated once we start the march toward diminished options.

This pensive Earth Wind & Fire single charted in summer 1979, a time I now consider to have been an indescribable rare sunset diffusing into the crisp twilight of a formative era that was destined to end abruptly. I think I even knew that at the time, meaning I sensed the morning that would emerge east of midnight would for some reason, inexplicable to me, twist itself into a deformed and crippled facsimile of a new day. Morning In America dawned brightly to many, but to me colder than it looked through my window; languid, dank, and low in oxygen. For one thing among many, the general character of rock, soul, and pop music seemed to degenerate almost overnight. Suddenly, human vitality was aggressively being displaced through heavy application of digital production methods and all the romance that Big Business has to offer. To my ears, it all started sounding like music produced to sell instead of music to listen to and dance to. Previously, barely a majority of it had struck me that way; I'd always found plenty to like, ranging from Zappa to horn bands to wimp rock to New Wave and Power Pop. Now, in the stale new dawn of 1980, it seemed that almost nothing of that remained.

Some might complain that this track is little more than a clot of overproduced schlock romanticism. Myself, I think it finds a very sweet spot between intimacy and lushness. The layers of keyboards---there are sounds like a concert grand mic'ed for pop timbres, a classic '70s Fender Rhodes electric piano, an analog synthesizer---are washed in a classy orchestral mist. And in back of it all, those swinging, mellow EW&F horns fingerpainting together in the open spaces. If I make an allowance for poetic license, I can almost hear these poignant lyrics as an elegy for social comity, which was soon to fall ill through a plague that very few people (myself included) knew was starting to creep in from under the baseboards. But then, that's just me projecting my ruminations onto the rest of the world. Enjoy the song; I wonder what memories it might tweak in you.

After The Love Has Gone, Earth Wind & Fire (1979, from "I Am," Columbia 35730), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: I've done some editing and rewriting to flesh out the mental shorthand I was dealing out last night.

DSL smashup

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Looks like I had to take the advice of Big Hussein Otis and pitch the old DSL modem/router. The new one appears to be performing according to specs, meaning that when I turn it on it stays on.

After I got back online tonight and came here I decided to "check out Blogger's streamlined new interface." It certainly does look "cleaner" (I'm typing into it now), but it's got me all disoriented now, eyebonewise. I've had enough of computers this week and will come back tomorrow. Now I'm gonna go read some Will Eisner Spirit reprints from 1941.

Meanwhile, please stay tuned for more exciting new content... whenever.

Wise sayings

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I'm starting to think that even the people I totally agree with are idiots.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Although there are three more weeks of summer, as etched into the DNA of The Creator's very own Firmament, corporations have trained us to call off the season immediately after Labor Day. The drones have to get to work preparing the Xmas retail displays, which need to be set up by the Friday before Columbus Day. So here's something to transition all my fellow drones out of "official summer" on a sweet note.



The "official" Beach Boys song for this time of year is, of course, "All Summer Long." I sort of like that one because of---not in spite of---it's bouncy vapidity and Norman Rockwell-HBO depiction of California teenage glory in the mid-1960s. The truth of that place and era for most kids was probably more about bullying, under-age drunkenness, and finger-fucking in the front seat of a 1951 Plymouth than "miniature golf and hondas in the hills." (Wait... I'm starting to like the song less and less the more I write about it.)

Anyway, the title track of the Pet Sounds album is an instrumental gem that has a sort of valedictory quality that well suits the manufactured occasion of a summer's end. The percussion throughout reminds me of crickets and cicadas like I'm hearing right now through the open screen windows. The beat wafts by like a balmy, early-evening breeze. As progression unfolds toward an ultimate series of formal, brass-driven stock ending-type cadences that have more in common with Sousa than rock and roll, subtle temporary key changes are injected that keep the mood bright. And the closing fade sustains an optimism that your pet sounds will always be around. (Unless you're dumb enough to store them all in "The Cloud," from which some corporation will steal them from you in a coupla years and make you pay for them again.)

Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys (1966, from "Pet Sounds," Capitol D 100513 [1990 CD reissue], via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: the Wikipedia article on this album has some interesting information, but I must say that it's also chock full of thinly sliced horseshit. First, Pet Sounds is not "a heralding album in the emerging psychedelic rock style." It's just not. Period. Yes, Brian Wilson was using psychedelic drugs during 1965 and 1966, and an alternate version of "I Know There's An Answer," called "Hang On To Your Ego," has acid-driven lyrics. But just listen to it: what you hear is fairly standard surfer-type rock and pop arranged for a zillion different instruments---brilliantly, in my opinion---and mostly moody lyrics that are more characteristic of youthful depression than psychedelia.

Second, Pet Sounds is not an example of "Baroque pop" because, despite what Wikipedia has to say, there never was any such fucking thing! God help us! Yes, Wikipedia has an entire article on this nonexistent musical genre, and claim that the term has been in use since 1966. Well, maybe some early rock critic looking for attention coined the term, but no regular people ever did. Almost all of the references used to document the existence of this made-up genre were published in the 21st century (the rest are 1990s), possibly written by people who were raised more on rock music magazines than on rock music. You know: poseurs.

Now I'm so worked up I have to go burn some Delhi saffron incense and meditate....

Fifty50 housekeeping notes

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After treating my router to a milkshake made of Fleet's Phospho-Soda and epicac, directly before a nice waterboarding session, it seems to be performing its mission here at Fifty50 Headquarters once again. The previous situation was getting old very fast and cannibalizing the time that I prefer to dedicate to you, my valuable readers. (I'm afraid I may be forced to use the same prescription on a nice lady named Alice who, after six years of working for me as a contractor, still doesn't seem to fully grasp the concept of "washing silverware.")

Also, apropos of nothing, I've changed the setting for the comments page so you no longer have to deal with that irritating popup window. Now we're set up just like the big kids over on the next block.

Finally, I've enabled the blog's settings to load a mobile template, specially designed for "smart" phones, which customizes the display when Fifty50 is viewed on such devices.

Please form an orderly line for purposes of thanking me. I do so hate it when the masses "teem" with spontaneous delight.

Yesterday's doke

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Provided yesterday courtesy of John Cole's brother:

“Fox News. You know what that is? Nickelodeon for people with dementia.”

Please make a note of it.

Today's doke

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The Invisible Army has been ratfucking my DSL router for several weeks. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Sunday after hours

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There is only one reason I'd ever post such a thing to this blog. See if you can guess what it is.



A Walk In The Black Forest, Horst Jankowski (1965, Mercury Records [catalog information unavailable]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: some wags might consider this tune 1965's answer to Kyu Sakamoto's 1963 hit, "Sukiyaki," and also to the eternal question "Who won World War II, you so smart?"

Friday Evening After Hours

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This balls-heavy power trio track from Frank Zappa's Apostrophe(') album has always been linked in my mind to the approach of a certain monstrous, torrential chain-lightning storm as heralded by gorgeously hideous thunderheads the color of lead and a curiously refreshing 20 mph wind out of the west.



I'm certain that this tune would make a terrific soundtrack for the approach of Hurricane Irene assuming that (1) you and yours are personally safe, (2) all irreplaceable valuables are secured in a watertight fortress, (3) you are fully insured, and (4) you don't live within reach of the storm surge. Lotta ifs, I know. But what else can a Simple Country Editor offer other than best wishes and exciting incidental music?

Seriously, this is one of the most interesting power trio jams I've ever heard, with Jack Bruce strangling a dramatic fuzz-bass fanfare-style solo from his instrument right out of the gate. Then, once Bruce's hyperactive "preliminaries" are concluded, Zappa slips in from rhythm to an aggressive, precision solo that reminds me of a serpent's tongue made out of piano wire. It slashes its way through or around all obstacles popping out of the rhythm bed, where Bruce is still strumming away like Oedipus plucking at his own optic nerves. This is one of those tracks (and albums) that you have to own on high-quality physical media and pump hard through a nice set of real headphones at 11. Even on a simple track like this one, Zappa had a lot of things going on deeper in the mix that are lost in MP3 files and computer headphones.

I hope anyone in the hurricane path who might be listening and reading along comes through it all with nothing worse than a wet bird, as Sinatra used to say.

Apostrophe', Frank Zappa (1974, from "Apostrophe(')," DiscReet DS 2175), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

The wealthy elites "smash and grab," too

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I know we're all supposed to dutifully wind down our attention to the Steve Jobs resignation and join around the national hearth to watch Hurricane Irene lash East Coast homosexuals and liberals with the beastly righteousness only nature can dispense. Also that our Federal Reserve chairman thinks our economy will continue to grow over time even though he sees some "clouds on the horizon" because unemployment is still over 9%.

But the fallout from global austerity economics has not abated just because the Brits have swept up the broken glass from their mid-month wave of rioting. In a comment from an August 13 post, Marginalia of London noted that the looting was a political act despite the fact that the rioters may not have realized it. I agree.

Everybody knows that rioting, looting, and arson are heinous acts that punish the innocent much more than any legitimate object of political opprobrium. Pundits on both sides of the Atlantic responded with scolding in high dudgeon: shame on the nihilistic children; shame on their useless parents; the problem is that nobody knows how good they really have it any more; et cetera.

But most of us are still waiting for celebrity pundits to tut-tut the misbehavior of the elite global financiers who have been "looting with the lights on" for a decade or more:

[England's] riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable.

Click through to read the entire Guardian piece by Naomi Klein---it's a pippin. I copped the link from Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice, who also notes that PM David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson were both members of the obscenely wealthy and destructive Bullingdon Club during college years.

Klein's most interesting point, in my opinion, is another one of those truths that are hidden right in front of our noses: that Western media are quick to laud the high political ideals of rioters, looters, and insurrectionists in Bad Countries like Iraq, for example, because

this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves.

As the article says, though, London isn't Baghdad. Maybe not (fewer minarets, for one thing), but maybe turning London into Baghdad is part of Premier Cameron's and Chairman Murdoch's 10-year Great-Leap-Ahead Plan. It's almost as if Western nations are deliberately avoiding the tested, straightforward solutions to depression economics (i.e., stimulus and employment programs) in order to do some social engineering through the magic of Disaster Capitalism. If corporatists love anything more than tax cuts for themselves, it's political crackdowns.