Friday Night Fish Fry

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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

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

The new national currency: stupidity

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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

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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

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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

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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]

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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.