Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's another Louis Jordan "soundie." It looks like it's from a C movie of the 1940s in which a paper-thin script gives The Boys a chance to perform six or seven of their hits on film. Jordan and his band were featured in "Beware!", which was named after the hit I posted yesterday. I don't remember this clip from that movie. The marquee at the beginning fictionalizes Louie's name, though, as was done in "Beware!" There's no band at all, as a matter of fact, and the chorus line is as tame as can be, unfortunately. I offer it here because the only "Fish Fry" recording available on YouTube at this time is a horrible latter-day effort, and to my ears it might not even be Jordan.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Here's a classic piece of advice from Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. He must have recorded it umpty-nine times, as was the practice back in the days when the the master recordings would degrade after a finite number of pressings. It's an oddly laconic version, as compared with his original manic lecture to the hapless youth. But truth is truth, whether served up hot or cool, so listen up cubs!

The biomimicry of the Reagan Revolution

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Here's a fascinating New Scientist article about the life cycle of a very cunning and ruggedly individual worm, Maculinea arion. This caterpillar is the beast of the insect apocalypse, seducing innocent ants to accept it into the breast of their colony, mimicking their queen and feeding them its "sweet fluids." The goal of its vermigenic largesse is to devour all the eggs, all the larvae, and all the adults, obliterating the colony so it can transmigrate into a beautiful blue butterfly for all the world to admire.

Introducing the failPad

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In the previous comments thread, our prolific commenter "Anonymous" glibly predicted that the overhyped new Apple mobile media device would be "stupid." I could faintly imagine innovative possibilities for a highly portable multimedia touchscreen computer, but could not figure out how it could be successfully implemented. Forward-facing camera for videoconferencing and texting? Maybe cool, but cellular nets certainly don't have the bandwidth to support too much of that. Larger touch keyboard with tactile feedback (haptic) technology? Of interest to me, but I really can't see any advantage to a screen that you can't reach at least 3/5 of the way across with your thumbs, because laying the "pad" flat on a table would give the user a lousy viewing angle, and propping the screen up would give the user lousy typing ergonomics.

I felt that all the mockups were wrongheaded --- basically large iPhones with no apparent redeeming social value. Certainly the guy who sent engineers back to the lab a dozen times until they designed a MacBook trackpad with exactly the right texture would have obsessed over the ergonomics of the device, the hand feel, the effortless graspability, I thought.

Nope. Jobs's failPad is, in my opinion, astonishingly banal. The device appears to incorporate zero technical innovation and clumsy ergonomics. It offers no new essential, or even interesting, capabilities whatsoever (unless you think it's important to have a ridiculously high-def 10 in. display that you can hold up to your face with both hands while watching YouTube porns).

Apple didn't introduce a technology innovation today --- it unveiled a new business model for media content owners. I'd imagine that those giant media corporations --- which actually are people just like you and me, granted --- already have a mighty case of blue balls owing to several years of foreplay. These behemoths have gently been urging Apple (like a thousand tiny fingers) to market a stylish new widget that will seduce foolish young consumers into turning their media collections into a never-ending revenue stream for Time-Warner, Disney, General Electric, and all those other friendly folks who rent you content for your life so you don't have to provide your own.

When I read the description of the iPad today I'm sure I felt the same kind of bile rising as Ralphie did when he discovered that the Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring message was just a lousy commercial. Early Apple geek reaction to the failPad in blog comments threads has been pretty negative (about 2:1, in fact), which is uniformly unheard of after any new Apple rollout.

I may be wrong, but I'll bet anyone a beer that I'm not. I think the reason this new offering is so lame is that it wasn't really designed by Jobs and Jonathan Ives: it was developed for control-horny media conglomerates.

Most important thing

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Steve Jobs says the iPad will be "will be the most important thing I've ever done." I guess that's not counting the liver transplant.

Pop culture amnesia

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Stephen Worth, an animation producer of note, has been guest-blogging on BoingBoing for a few weeks, and has been unearthing all kinds of vintage animation, film, and sensible ideas about the forgotten richness of American pop culture. This particular post struck a chord with me for two reasons. First, it's a pretty concise summary of the current state of corporate popular culture and its victims who, for example, like "all kinds of music" as long as it's something they can hear played in stress rotation on a Sirius XM channel targeted to their particular consumer demographic. Second, it reminds me how my own tastes as a youth were molded by giant entertainment corporations which gleefully convinced me that, prima facie, the past sucked, so I would be well primed buy their product.

The video embedded in the BoingBoing post is the grand finale from the 1943 musical "Stormy Weather." I'm struck by how different it looks to me now versus how I imagine I would have reacted to it as a late-night TV movie 35 years ago. It would have been unthinkable for twentysomething Baby Boomers to find anything to admire in it. Tap dancing? Shit --- that's what we were forced to sit through every Sunday night while Selig and DoubleE stared at The Ed Sullivan Show with us as collateral damage. The counterculture had no use for tap dancing because purveyors of Revolution like Capitol Records, Warner Brothers, Columbia, and all their groovy subsidiaries convinced us that we were too hip for it. And the funny thing about it: I do believe it was a more innocent time. For awhile, at least, entertainment corporations were content to throw money at freaks and impresarios, stand back, and let them create both innovative music and bales of cash.

So what changed? Why is the product of today's entertainment conglomerates so much more odious than it was 40 or 45 years ago? My guess: the marketing focus group as a social engineering tool --- a tool that, today, is probably less successful at funding the cocaine habits of entertainment tycoons than at trapping the American mind in an endlessly recursive matrix of multimedia cross references, taglines, brand names, and virtual reality.

Tap dancing? It's all about dudes and babes playing jump-jazz percussion using castanets bolted to the soles of their shoes, while bounding across tabletops, grand pianos, and what-have-you. The Nicholas Brothers must have had adductors with the proportionate strength of piranha jaws. So if you have 10 minutes to spare, click through to the YouTube video clip embedded in the BoingBoing post. There are more dancing zoot suiters, foxy babes, and African-American GIs than you can shake a stick at, plus Cab Calloway keeping the tempo and Lena Horne dolling up the joint.

Wise sayings

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It is awesome when the stock market surges on the prospect that healthcare reform will fail, but it's an abomination when the stock market retreats because there's talk of restoring bank regulations that, if the Republican Congress and Clinton hadn't dismantled them, would have prevented the current U.S. economic depression.

A parody of a parody

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The old adage about American politics, updated here using post-feminist lanaguage, was that the difference between the children and the adults is that the children want to be something and the adults want to do something. Today, though, the children don’t even want to be something --- they just want to be seen as being something. With few exceptions, Democrats are children. Or “wimps,” as Republicans have successfully branded them for 30 years. (So are Republicans, though, but that’s beyond my scope here.)

Just look at Obama and other Democrats like Jim Webb now tripping all over themselves to put a halt to a critical legislative process in order to wait for some neophyte Tea Party Republican to be seated in the Senate... so that he can lock down the filibuster for the minority party. This guy is literally a nobody, but they want to grant him a veto over legislation that was nailed down long before anybody outside of Massachusetts heard of “Scott Brown.” The only way this makes one f@*#king bit of sense is if Obama is just simply more interested in being seen by the public as always being the man who takes the high road, even at the expense of his own agenda and even his gross personal ambitions. And what is Webb up to? Maybe he is more interested in being anointed by the media as The New Maverick of the Senate than he is in expanding health coverage to unfortunate average Americans and cutting the federal deficit through good government. To these men... I mean boys... it’s not even about being something: it’s about appearing to be something.

About 10 years ago the phrase “perception equals reality” came into vogue. You noticed, right? But the trouble is, perception equals reality only for solipsists, psychotics, and gullible consumers. And what we have now is a political and policymaking establishment that seems truly to believe that government is about managing the perceptions of the rubes.

And then there are those Real Democrats --- “real” because they perceive themselves to be --- who think now’s the time to scapegoat progressives (i.e., liberals). Why? Because some liberals (1) have fought tenaciously for the agenda on which they ran for office and (2) now they talk about playing the same kind of hardball with their votes in the House like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, Mary Landrieu et al. have been doing all along in the Senate. Real Democrats are angered by a progressive bloc in Congress that might hold their votes hostage until they extract some meaningful concessions from their Real Democrat colleagues (legislative and executive). This is supposed to be dirty pool, you see, or “irresponsible.” Spare me. Liberals have compromised with moderates every f@*#ing step of the way, and not only on healthcare reform. Frankly, liberals have gone 10 extra miles to appease some very bad men and women who make a career of burnishing their images as “responsible” public servants on talk shows.

There may be a large bloc of Real Democrats who will weep to see their dream of healthcare legislation die this winter. From the commentary I’m reading these days, many Real Democrats now view healthcare reform much more as a Democratic political totem than as a public policy imperative. And that’s the main reason why they’ve stood by while Max Baucus and his warty playmates denuded the Senate legislation of its most important potential policy virtues (e.g., universal coverage and cost reduction for the government). Real Democrats cried crocodile tears while Baucus, Snowe, and their playmates stalled and vandalized, but now they are furious about filthy liberals like Howard Dean and HuffPost and FireDogLake who want to extract a coupla pounds of flesh on behalf of their own constituencies. But hey, why should anyone care about the fury of wimps?

Real Democrats have failed the public and themselves, since the onslaught of The Reagan Revolution, by dealing with the devil as standard operating procedure. It’s the easiest way to grab and hold a seat in The Club, after all. Yes, that’s right: cowardice and self-hatred are now entrenched personality traits of the modern Real Democrat. The way he and she copes with it, of course, is by psychological projection to an external scapegoat --- the filthy, irresponsible liberals. It’s the same way that Republicans cope with their own failures, after all. Unfortunately for Real Democrats, though, their little club can’t get along any better without the progressive bloc than it can without the Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe bloc. So they’d better come up with a Plan C, or else just become Real Republicans. Because most of them already are, and not closeted very well. (Rockefeller Republicans, maybe, if not Nixon Republicans.) Yes, the Elite Real Democrats should just join the Republican Party and accelerate its destruction from within using their own time-tested wimpiness. Not only are Real Democrats wimps, as right-wingers correctly point out: they are parodies of wimps.

Incoming

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Seems like I've spent the past month, psychologically and socially, in a place much like Porky Pig depicts in my previous post. Except I share none of Porky's good humor on the matter.

One implication of my hiatus is that I'm rejiggering this journal of mine to some extent --- something I may have already hinted that I was thinking about.

Another agenda item, less important except in terms of personal vanity, is that I'm about sick of the StuporMundi ID. I borrowed it from one of my previous incarnations during this current life, sometime in the '78 - '79 timeframe. At that time the moniker was borrowed from a medieval emperor, who also used it as a nickname. It means Wonder of the World. Although I'm not surrendering that status, I'm about ready to surrender the handle. And I'll do it as soon as I figure out what to replace it with. Suggestions are welcome, but that don't mean I'm gonna listen to them.

Watch this space for more exciting details soon!!!

The Obama Age of Aquarius

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