Fish Fry Prayer Meeting

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I don't know enough about Nelson Mandela to write anything. I will someday read a history of his life and South Africa. Meanwhile, there is one thing I know: Mr. Mandela inspired the jazz composer Abdullah Ibrahim (known as Dollar Brand during the '60s and '70s) to record a really cool song. 



I had never heard this song until earlier this evening, at the end of Fresh Air on NPR. What an unexpectedly jaunty salute to a giant! One of the few world leaders of this era who will be remembered by history for something other than emptying the corporate spittoons on command. I hope Mr. Mandela had a chance to hear this recording and rollick to it, inside.

Mandela, Abdullah Ibrahim (2012, from the album "Water From An Ancient Well," Tip Toe [label catalog number not available at writing]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Balls, it's cold outside!

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At the obsessively metered location I call Moronica International State Park, two of the three outdoor gauges indicate that it's 15 F (-9 C). In recognition of this condition, I have decided to replicate (or, perhaps, perform for the first time ever) The Brass Monkey Experiment. I will report the results on this blog when the experiment is concluded.

Seriously, this is nothing out of the ordinary for central Illinois, and only a mere discomfort to a simple country editor raised in the lake-effect snow zone of southern Chicagoland. (Still, people around here behave as if it's not unlike the 38 parallel circa 1951; pussies!)

The death of Nelson Mandela, through no fault of his own, has pretty much displaced news coverage of this ridiculously insane storm that has been tearing up the UK and points east with tidal surges and hurricane-force winds. My blogging friend from across the deep blue sea, Marginalia, has not yet posted about this weather event, which the BBC reports to be the most extreme since January 1953 (back in my fetal days). I hope he and his friends are safe, warm, and poly-nonsaturated. I also hope that the citizens of that green and pleasant land make it clear to their doltish ruling coalition that they expect more than free-market solutions to storm damage and suffering.

Friday Night Fish Fry

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The song is "The Fever." If you're expecting a cover version of Peggy Lee, you're too damn old. Myself, I'm on the cusp.



I chose this version because of the bonus lead-in comedy from SCTV, which is my favorite sketch comedy show ever. It's hilarious seeing Dave Thomas and Catherine O'Hara bickering with a definitive air of comedy menace. I don't recall ever seeing a bad episode.

Anyway, stick around for Southside Johnny (music begins about 1:05). I didn't know this was a Springsteen composition until long after I'd heard Southside's rendition---first live at The Quiet Knight in Chicago around 1975. When I listen to Springsteen recordings from this era, so much of it sounds pretentious and melodramatic to my adult ears. Not Southside, though. If I had to choose between seeing one of the two performing today, I'd take Southside in a second.

Too lazy to document the provenance of this clip tonight, but as always it's embedded from YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Pigs yokking it up

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The heading of this post obviously represents a slander of pork-based members of the animal kingdom, but it serves the purpose of providing a comparison that most people immediately understand.



The motive for this vandalism is impossible for me to understand. The motive for the perpetrators to record a video of it is simple for anyone to understand: stupidity, ignorance,  profound disrespect for the planet, and probably a sense of immunity from accountability for transgressions that they "didn't really mean." If this clip actually shows what it seems to show, then perhaps these smirking clots of phlegm should spend about a year residing in a federal penitentiary to reminisce about the jolly time they had. Also, let's fine the motherfuckers about $250K apiece, which is the same amount of reparations that a person pays for, say, pirating a copyrighted movie.

Birthday Girl Fish Fry!

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Little Oscar, my favorite geezer lady, is having a birthday for a few more hours, so here's a treat for her from the days when "Doug Stephenson" roamed the earth and Columbia Record Club would send you five---FIVE!---free LPs as long as you'd buy one a month for the rest of your life or send it back within 7 days at your own expense.



Whatever Gary Lewis album this was on, we heard the damn thing about five times a day for the entire summer of 1965 in heavy rotation with Jay & The Americans and Jan & Dean. Probably no one is more responsible for me taking up leaded gasoline for recreational use than Little Oscar and Gary Lewis' goddam Playboys!

I embedded this particular version of the selected tune, however, for reasons that have much to do with me and nothing to do with Little Oscar. See if you can guess what they are. Unfortunately, LO did not have any hot friends like the ones tearing it up above, with the possible exception of Terri W. who I was still slightly too young to "appreciate." But she and her bra-stuffing girlfriends were all nice girls, with no vices other than Pepsi. They were never a pain to be around. And that's about the nicest thing any kid can be expected to say about his big sister.

Happy Birthday, Little Oscar!

Little Miss Go-Go, Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965, Liberty 55778 [45 rpm single; can't track down the album catalog number]), via YouTube, embedded with a claim of fair use because it's Little Oscar's birthday!!!

Editor's note: I read in the liner notes of my CD greatest hits collection that this recording was Take 27! Can you imagine that? I think Brian Wilson must have put together "Good Vibrations" in fewer takes than that.

Origins of the Opt Out movement

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Apropos of this, my "product rollout" of the Opt Out movement is behind schedule. That is OK with me, and it also serves as a demonstration of opting out. In this case, I have opted out of rushing myself. Opting out of self-imposed, imaginary urgency generally has been my first major success with applying the concept. I believe the contagion of phony urgency is a blight on the life of most people; the quality of my own life has greatly improved in direct relation to my success of opting out of this unasked-for, nonconstructive stress.

See? Opting out is easy. Here's how it works: you identify a condition imposed on your life that thwarts the authentic aims of human life---your own in particular---and opt out of it. Opting out is just a simple, elemental exercise of free will. It's one of the two acts of will an individual can exercise: the deliberate choice not to do something. (Since visitors to this blog are all in the fast reading group, they can infer the other way to exercise will.)

The origins of the Opt Out movement, for me, go back to an undated entry in an electronic notebook file midway through the Stupor Mundi phase of this blog during the Bush Junior administration. In thinking about Republican demolition of New Deal institutions and demonization of its ideals, I came upon the Wikipedia article about Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms:

1. Freedom of speech 
2. Freedom of worship 
3. Freedom from want 
4. Freedom from fear

My intent was to promulgate a set of post-Reagan freedoms that could be exercised beneath the radar of the surveillance state. (Let's ignore the unwarranted arrogance that would allow Stupor Mundi to express such a conceit.) My problem with the Four Freedoms (4F---just like FDR!) was that they're really not freedoms, and two of them are different than the other two.

The first two are constitutional rights in the United States, and they're understood by all except the most reactionary to be universal human rights. By definition, a right is inalienable, but the freedom to exercise the right can be abridged by any actor that has coercive power.

The third and fourth are aspirational sentiments, one dealing with material sustenance and the other with psychological wellbeing. Whether they are rights is debatable. Whether they're universally achievable by the will of every human under the sky is not debatable: they aren't.

Beyond the general woolliness of FDR's Four Freedoms is that use of the term freedoms (versus rights) carries the unstated assumption that these laudable aspirations are something to be dispensed by governments instead of asserted by regular people. Stupor Mundi's Four Freedoms would have to be liberties that can be exercised without the permission of any government or corporate authority. As a personal historical footnote of trivial significance, I present an early draft of the SM 4F:

1. Freedom to spend your discretionary income wherever you want to, or to save it.
2. Freedom to change the TV or radio station, or to turn it off.
3. Freedom to not answer your telephone, or not to own one.
4. Freedom to vote for or against whomever you wish.

I do feel these are useful, liberating ideas that everyone should keep in mind. And in fact, they're behind a lot of the opting out that a person can do. But they're obviously not universal or encompassing enough to form the basis of a philosophy or social movement. So the SM 4F lay fallow in my notebook, but not forgotten. Then, later, the following things happened:

• People who call themselves liberal and moderate took nominal control of the executive and legislative branches and yet permitted a neo-Confederate federal nullification clique to push the nation further into authoritarianism than it was under Bush.
• The Occupy Movement scared the living cocoa wheats out of everyone from Glenn Beck to Hillary Rodham Clinton. 
• I read Havel's Power of the Powerless, which introduced me to the concept of parallel structures.
• It finally dawned on me that the concept of opting out of various terms and conditions of web-based services was the only meaningful way to push back against forces that want to fully monetize every human transaction.

So, about a year ago, I realized that an inherent property unifying the SM 4F might be the negative half of each expression. The liberty not to spend money, for example, or the freedom to deny access to intrusive communications media. These are acts of opting out.

Opting out is inseparable from individual responsibility, and it implies the intentional acceptance of consequences. But so does opting in. In the world that has grown up around us, I think opting out has much more potential as a tool of self-actualization, mutual support, and greater personal tranquility.

Totally impersonal special deliveries

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Special deliveries of cryptic messages to persons known and unknown because I'm too damn busy to catch up with you individually right now:

Beer-D: upon reacquainting myself with a Shostakovich favorite this evening for the first time in over 40 years, I discovered that this composer was the father of Klingon opera.

Anna: I didn't recognize your voice in comments at first, but if you know of Fonzo Serbo then contact me through regular channels. I would be happy to hear from you.

Helm**6: started writing you a note, but thanks first for the one you sent. The story sounds fairly normal to me, actually.

Gurlitzer: I know the blog has sucked and been neglected for a long time, but I was getting concerned that you hadn't shown up in comments lately. Guess everything is OK and I just need to write something interesting once in a while.

Mr. Summers, Class of 1970: good to meet you last month. Somewhat startlingly, I can't find a single hit on Google or Duck with the name of our college and "ACME" or "hundt". Two decades of our alma mater seems destined to swirl down the memory hole.

Little Oscar: Happy birthday! "Take an Indian to lunch this week!" (It's not the precise Stan Freberg reference for the occasion, but it's an appropriate one.)

Free advice for a miserabler hurensohn with a pink tie

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My best guess about the Tea Party nullify-Obama movement and its activities has been that their period of useful idiocy to their paymasters will lapse when corporate oligarchs begin losing money or, alternately, when the political environment becomes too unpredictable to assure a constant and growing return on investment. There have been signs that the day is approaching, with outfits like Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chamber of Commerce making moderate-sounding noises with respect especially to Tea Party intentions to interfere with raising the US debt ceiling. TPM ran the first direct story on the topic today, which I think is significant.

To be clear, I don't think anyone mentioned above is becoming more "moderate." But I do think that there is a growing demand for things to return to post-Reagan normal, meaning that Republicans play conventional bad cop to the Democrat good cop in the march toward globalization and its manifold "benefits" (such as destruction of national sovereignty in the areas of labor law, environmental protection, consumer rights, finance, etc.). So given my pessimistic view of things, I'm not sure there's any benefit to sweeping the Tea Party aside. But I have a plan for Herr John Boehner, galaxy-class sack of chickenshit and all-around SOB, that could exile them to the wilderness in short order.

Although there would be some scheming and logistics involved, not to mention more guts than Boehner ever had at his disposal, it's pretty simple: expel every one of them from the Republican Party.

I don't know the pertinent law, but I'm reasonably sure that nobody can run as a Republican (or Democrat) without sanction by the controlling party committee. For the sake of argument, let's just say that's true. So here's how it would work. If there really is a "silent majority" of Republicans who would vote for a clean CR if there were no danger of being primaried by a TP goon, then simply bring the clean CR to the floor to pass with Republicans and Democrats. But first make it clear to everyone in the caucus that a vote against it will mean that you may no longer promote yourself as a Republican. No more campaign funds or other party support. Most importantly: no rebellious TP'er will be slated as a Republican House candidate in 2014, whether as an incumbent or as a primary challenger.

US election laws make it very difficult for a third-party candidate to make the ballot. And with an irritated donor base consisting of corporate chieftains who don't like being ignored by peckerwoods and no-nothings, one would expect to see campaign money backing GOP party regulars in a majority of the cases.

The risks are self-evident, including a split of the right-wing vote to an extent that could lose a significant amount of GOP seats in swing-type districts. But in gerrymandered "safe" districts, I can't think of any reason why a new "moderate" Republican couldn't win the seat of an incumbent Tea Partier.

Republicans would surely lose the House. But let's face it, they've rarely controlled the House since the Great Depression. Yet the GOP has marched the whole country toward the end of the plank of representative democracy since Ronald Reagan smirked his way into the hearts of disillusioned Baby Boomers (i.e., dudes who couldn't tag enough pussy in the 1970s). Business as usual could return, and we could resume the lurch toward rule by transnational corporations---Republicans dragging regular people there kicking and screaming, alternating with the silky persuasive stylings of hip hierarchs like Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Boehner: feel free to take my advice, but not that you owe me one jumbo Swiss bank safe deposit box stuffed with stocks, bonds, and lots of green stuff from Lloyd Blankfein's wallet.

Fifty50 fall product rollout!

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As Andrew Card once said (i.e., unintentionally confessed) about the timing of the Bush administration's public push for (an unprovoked) war (of aggression) on Iraq:

From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

And right he was. So here's mine:

The Opt Out movement.

There---it's now "a thing." After rolling around the canyons of my mind for at least a year.

You don't get to learn much about it tonight because I'm tired and have already written my quota of text for the day. But it's a real thing, at least to me. Here are a few basic points.

First: it can only be a movement with a lower-case em. In my view, the era of the Upper-case Em movement has been over for over 40 years, except as an adjunct to a sales campaign or a political swindle.

Second: I am not the leader of it, nor is anyone else. I don't even qualify as the discoverer of it, although I do qualify as a discoverer of it. Maybe the first discoverer with an internationally renowned blog, though.

Third: "opt out" doesn't mean "drop out."

Fourth: anyone can participate at no cost and, as far as I can tell, at no personal risk. All you have to do is... nothing.

Fifth: the basis of the Opt Out movement is a set of concrete freedoms that cannot be denied. These are not to be confused with abstract rights that, while inalienable, can be denied by anyone who owns a gun or a bank or a company you may wish to work for.

I'll throw in two other un-numbered points to close: the Opt Out movement is related to my occasional recent references to the late Vaclav Havel and his magnum essay, The Power of the Powerless. And it's arguably beyond the comprehension of the people who felt it was acceptable to wage chemical warfare on participants in The Occupy Movement.

Sound interesting?

No? Then buzz off and go watch the complete second season of Sanford's Got Talent.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I discovered that this track was available at Amazon or iTunes as an MP3 and copped it for my "8th" playlist (meaning radio hits from the 8th grade slice of my life, 1966 - 67). It's part of my vinyl 45 collection, scavenged from a thrift store in the mid-70s, when it was still possible to find original-issue singles in reasonably good shape. But my personal vinyl digitization backup project is perpetually just over the time horizon, and I didn't feel like waiting that long to enjoy the song again. This YouTube version is in glorious mono, which I prefer for my pet radio hits.



My grand observation about this song, other than how solid it still sounds, was going to be that it would have been right at home on a Beach Boys album of the same era. It's every bit the production of "Good Vibrations," in my opinion, but surely didn't cost even a tenth of what Brian's masterpiece did (either financially or in terms of mental health). Then, in looking up this song on Wikipedia, I found that the production has more than one connection to Wilson and his dysfunctional band of surf boys.

Sagittarius was a band in a similar way that The Archies was a band. They were a pickup studio group produced by a gentleman named Gary Usher, who wrote lyrics for some early Brian Wilson compositions. The band he pulled together for this record included stand-in Beach Man Glenn Campbell; and Campbell's later replacement, Bruce Johnston. So the fellas knew something about singing close harmony... so there!

I'd love to know where Usher ganked the scratchy, needle-drop toreador clip during the psychedelic musique concrete-type bridge. Even back in 1967 I was certain I'd heard it before, probably from one or more cartoon soundtracks.

Anyway, it's not heard very much on the syndicated corporate oldies radio stations, which is fine by me.

My World Fell Down, Sagittarius (1967, Columbia 4-44163 [45 rpm single]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

"It would have been bad news - in spades," he wrote

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As my interest has shifted from the topical news narrative to reports on the global deep state, I am somewhat startled at what is available in the public domain (if not on Public Radio). An example, stumbled across this evening: a Guardian report on a declassified document about a 1961 US nuclear weapons accident that few people under 60 have heard of:

The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy's Road.

Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. "The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," Jones concludes.

The Jones being quoted is a gentleman named Parker Jones, whom the Guardian identifies as "a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons". The title of this post quotes a remark by Mr. Jones in characterizing the results if that fourth safety switch had failed along with the other three.

It seems clear to me that the archives of the global deep state must be jam-packed with files that are every bit as exciting as this one. Read the whole Guardian story; it's short.

Friday Night Prayer Meeting

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Another piece (of several posted previously) masterminded by one of the most ubiquitous music men of the past 60 years.



I can't remember what I've written about Quincy Jones in the past and don't feel like looking it up, but his fingerprints are all over jazz, pop, rock, and movie scores that even people somewhat familiar with the man wouldn't suspect. The Wikipedia writeup covers a lot, but misses interesting projects. He worked for, with, or over everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Lesley Gore, Billy Eckstein, Michael Jackson, and Steven Spielberg. He did lay his share of stinkers along the way, unfortunately. His "Soul Bossa Nova" is loathsome, and practically ruins his 1962 album Big Band Bossa Nova to my overly delicate sensibilities (it's that stupid, flutey theme used in Austin Powers movies). Also, his experimentation with trying to make Louis Jordan into a rock and roll star on Mercury is interesting for an occasional listen, but the results are fairly sickening to a Jordan fan even if they sound swell in a way.

The album where this track originates, Walking in Space, is a record that made a number of alienated white high-school boys feel pretty hip. In listening, you can probably tell why. It's lush, it swings, and it's easily accessible to anyone who wants to hear. Upon recently repurchasing this album on CD, I find that I'm not quite as enamored with it as I was in 1969. Of course, I'm also no longer enamored of railroad-stripe bell bottoms and my electric blue spread-collar button-up type shirt purchased from Chess King.

Even when I was a teenager, there was a thing or two that sat wrong with me about the sound, but I couldn't put it into words. (I was just then emerging from my Leaded Gasoline Phase.) Today I'd express that uneasiness as two related criticisms. One is that the whole project pretty much talks down to many jazz listeners, even younger ones, with its relentless mellowness and too-easy solos. That recording session was staffed with major stars of all jazz eras up to that time, including "moldy figs" like Kai Winding and Snooky Young as well as younger giants like Roland Kirk, Ray Brown, and Eric Gale.  My other beef is that Jones uses only background vocals throughout without any prominent lead. (Even the solo vocal on the title track is produced like a background.) The orchestral setting seems designed to showcase a strong vocalist, but instead Jones arranges for an ethereal collection of background voices who serve roughly the same purpose here that go-go dancers served in mid-sixties rock. Today, this strikes me as somewhat creepy.

But I'm being too much of a dick about it. There's no reason to be any more of a snob about the sound of this album than Thriller, which I really enjoy a few times a year. I have plenty of space in my life for hookey, easy listening music, which is why I put it on the player tonight.

Killer Joe, Quincy Jones (1969, from "Walking In Space," Verve 314 543 499-2 [2000 CD reissue]) via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Posting about topical current events is pointless

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[Editor's note: the following text isn't written very well.]

I'm about done with trying to post about stuff that's in the news now-now-now. I'll fade away sometime during this Syria issue and try to focus on a bigger picture with reference to journalists and writers who perform real reporting and analysis outside of the disgusting narrative-formation machine.

Was just listening to President Peace Prize on the radio, in high dudgeon, ask his "liberal friends" how they could reconcile their beliefs with images of children writhing and dying on cold hospital floors in Syria. This kind of argument is one of the core tactics of classic propaganda: an appeal to emotion that bypasses reason. Therefore, it's not an argument at all. Since our schools don't teach rhetoric and applied logic, this cheap-jack public speaking technique ties most people in knots---especially liberals who are "troubled" by issues such as the Obama-propelled NSA surveillance state and the proposed launching of missile attacks on weak countries without a compelling US national interest. Liberal blogs are full of sentiment along the lines that while they don't agree with the President on these issues, he's still a sincere and awesome man who they like and who shares their values. And this sentiment also carries a halo effect to produce comments like this one from Balloon Juice:

Even with the NSA and Syria and whatever other Watergates I’ve forgotten about, it’s hard not to feel good about the future of the Democratic party right now. 

All because Rush Limbaugh wrote a stupid book that must be mocked. Why should this fool be cheered by the future of a Democratic party that can swallow any Republican-type policy atrocity as long as their own guy is in charge? It's as if they think Republicans don't already control all three branches of the government through obstructionism, domination of mainstream media, and undiminished mastery of fomenting the worst instincts of the populace. The Democratic version of this crypto-fascist performance art is acceptable because they like their president's style?

Apropos of a bigger picture, I'd like to suggest a few books that offer some nonconventional perspective. Importantly, they were authored outside the corporate narratives that constrain our imaginations. Start with Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television, by Jerry Mander. You can get by with reading Part I of the book; Part II is the same material, but written in a more scholarly style with documentation and references. (A significant amount of the material pertaining to the physical harmfulness of CRT-based TVs is passe or overcome by later developments, but all the important principles remain valid and prophetic, in my view.)

If you want to improve your understanding of political conservatism and all its apparent self-contradictions, read The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin. Starting from the correct proposition that universities do a poor job of educating students---even political science students---about conservatism and its origins, Robin gets to the origins of the ideology back to Thomas Hobbes, who even predates conservative godfather Edmund Burke. Using the writings of all the seminal conservative thinkers, up through Ayn Rand and Bill Buckley (and later), Robin makes a compelling case that the real tenets of conservatism are much different than what it's proponents have professed to the rest of us.

Finally, track down a copy of Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless to read, from the pen of a 20th century dissident with more guts than an abattoir, how authoritarian states begin to lose their hold when citizens refocus on the true aims of life. And remember that formulation: the true aims of life, or the authentic aims of life, or the genuine aims of life.

This last document is important for what I wish to start writing about as I can purge myself of the "dailiness" of the corporate narrative machine. Following it is such a drag, and trying to discuss it with people who believe in it ("news junkies") is worse.

Most interesting thing you'll read this week about foreign relations

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I've always considered this a gorgeous pop song, with the mix and more economical edit of the original single being the superior version.



As a lad I responded little and thought even less about pop music lyrics. The main reason is that the words sounded largely unintelligible to my ears, and so I paid attention to vocals almost exclusively in terms of their musical characteristics.

About 10 years later, when my brain was fully developed and I could both understand the words and parse their meaning, I remember being shocked by just how sociopathic the lyrics of this tune really are. By this time in "rock and roll history" (i.e., 1966), there were plenty of really cold lyrics about boy/girl-type stuff, such as Under My Thumb and Norwegian Wood (although I didn't "get" those, either). But, for cryin' out loud, I Saw Her Again is not only pretty, but quite a sweet and jaunty little production. As I say, this tale of a man deliberately and remorselessly exploiting an unsuspecting woman is downright creepy.

Only tonight, when I as looking for a version to post here, I learned that the story behind the composition is even more twisted than I'd suspected. The following is an extract from the notes posted about this cut at YouTube:

Mamas & Papas leader, John Phillips revealed in an interview that the "I Saw Her Again" was composed after he learned that Michelle Phillips (John's wife and fellow group member) and Denny Doherty (also a group member) were having an affair while the group was on tour. He laughingly told Dick Bartley that he wrote the song "so Denny would have to sing it on stage every night and feel guilty".  

You may remember reading in recent years that Mr. Phillips is said to have been quite a piece of work, so his expressed mirth in the above text supports the squick factor of the whole production, as I experienced it when I first paid attention to the lyrics. And because of that (but not the whole drugging-his-daughter-for-incest thing, which allegedly occurred 13 years later), I enjoy this song now more than I ever did before. It's analogous to a principle used in formulating perfumes: every world-class scent includes a minuscule portion of a gut-wrenching odor such as vomit, urine-saturated rags, or rotting flesh. Maybe this is why some of our greatest artists are, in their personal lives, monsters. Or the converse may be true.

Also, for historical interest, go to the notes on YouTube to find out for once and for all whether the famous false start on the outchorus (at 2:15 in the video) was intentional or not. Hint: it was a production error---just what it sounds like---but producer Lou Adler thought it sounded awesome, so they kept it.  

I Saw Her Again, The Mamas & The Papas (1966, Dunhill 4031 [45 rpm single]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

I wonder if there will be a "debate" on this one

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Kerry Doesn't Rule Out Boots On The Ground If Syria 'Implodes'

I wonder what he doesn't rule out when America implodes.

Unstated assumptions

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It would be helpful for purposes of coherence for the author to explain the unstated assumptions of this post and this one:

President Obama is "going to Congress" about Syria exclusively as an exercise in political theater. I'm old enough to remember his inspirational, New-Deal-type State of the Union message back in January, in which he made a lot of pretty noises about his intention to act on the wealth gap, climate change, and so on. His speech was to thank all the progressive-leaning suckers (including me) who voted for him in hopes that he would repay us by being a more liberal-minded president than Mitt Romney. For more than 4 years now, however, he has been consolidating a terrifying surveillance state into a permanent feature of our democracy. He has done nothing to keep banks from literally stealing houses and possessions from victims of financial racketeering (because "these cases are very complicated"). He has exercised no meaningful political muscle on behalf of basic liberal causes such as reproductive rights, voting rights, or card-check legislation to give union organizers a fair shake.

President North Star knows that the Congress will authorize any action against Syria that he likes. And he also "knows," as expressed by anonymous administration sources via authorized leaks, that he doesn't need congressional approval as long as Secretary Kerry can rattle off half a dozen justifications for military strikes in the style of former Ubergruppenfuehrer Powell.

Some time ago, US policy and media elites determined that The State need not be bothered by the collective opinion of its citizens in matters of military aggression.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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A nice, nostalgic kettle of fish for you to fry:



This is the UK release of a brisk little ditty by a cheeky group of RAF personnel. The lyrics were toned down for the US market, supposedly, but the only difference I can detect here is the inclusion of a line about birth control... which would still be too controversial for the US pop charts here in good old 2013.

I noticed on the label that the tune was composed and produced by Jonathan King, who is best known (to me) for his 1965 wimp-rock ballad "Everyone's Gone To The Moon." Evidently, according to Wikipedia, Mr. King has had his hands in lots of projects over the years, ranging from work with Genesis, 10cc, the Bay City Rollers, a film called Vile Pervert: The Musical, and a 2001 conviction on charges of sexual assault of five teenage boys between 1983 and 1989.

It's Good News Week, Hedgehoppers Anonymous (1965, Decca F.12241), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

President Peace Prize asks the world what he believes to be a tough question

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I listened to the President's statement today about the inevitable message that will be sent to Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad in the form of Tomahawk cruise missiles that are certain to destroy a number of people not named Bashar Hafez al-Assad. I was listening out of a portion of the corner of one of my two ears, so my brain has no accurate transcription of his remarks, and I am too lazy to look them up. (Plenty of others are busy doing that right now, though, so go read their stupid blogs if you like your disingenuous political speeches to be quoted directly.)

Anyway, there came a point where President North Star asked The World if they were prepared to deal with the consequences of "doing nothing" about Assad's terrifying new way of dealing death to his citizens. I guess this was the President's way of challenging The World to justify the position that a nation should hold its fire until an achievable military objective can be defined and articulated. I suppose the President thinks his question is tantamount to The Riddle Of The Sphinx. It's not, really. One retort might be along the lines of "yeah, conducting chemical warfare violates the norms of 'civilized warfare.' And so does committing an act of war against a sovereign nation that doesn't pose one scintilla of a military risk to the citizens of the United States.

Also, does anyone remember President Peace Prize "sending a message" to the President of the University of California - Davis 2 years ago when her campus dicks waged chemical warfare against peaceful student protestors during the November 2011 Occupy sit-ins?

If the President wanted to "send a message" to Mr. Assad about using chemical warfare against his citizens, why didn't he do that 3 days before the attacks, since US intelligence agencies knew in advance that it was going to happen? Or, at least, why didn't he "send a message" to the intended victims of the gas?

Wait: do US citizens still get to ask rhetorical questions these days?

President North Star wants to send a message

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There may have been a bygone era when the pen was mightier than the sword. But that was then. Now, President North Star---the most peaceful Earthling of 2009*---evidently believes that the cruise missile is more powerful than a menacing diplomatic cable to a pipsqueak tyrant in the Middle East.

If it were possible to fly a few Tomahawks up the fundament of Bashar Hafez al-Assad and his senior staff in order to "send the message" that he needs to die, then war hawks and doves would at least have an issue to debate. But it seems more likely that the people who will be dying in the inevitable "surgical strike" on Syria had no meaningful role in the acquisition or use of banned chemical weapons last week. And, to me at least, it seems just as likely that Mr. Assad will go about his business using whatever materiel suits his purpose.

If President North Star would like to send someone a message, my suggestion would be to marshal his eloquence and aim it at Russia and China. Those are the actors who thwart the (potentially) constructive involvement of the only authority that has any business intervening with force against Assad's government, namely the UN. Why not spend a week or two letting the world know who provides Assad with his munitions and cover? Why won't President North Star use his pulpit to take the world to church on this crisis?

(Answer: because it might disrupt some corporate cash flows).
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* Unimportant observation: looking back at the text of the post I linked to above, I'll take a puny victory lap about the main point, but cringe at how naively I framed it. Yuck!

There *are* no liberals

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My heading is an exaggeration, since Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alan Grayson qualify. But this is a point I've been trying to make more and more for the past 8 years. This piece by RJ Eskow makes the same point, but mostly not as directly as it could be made. Here's the guts of it:

Since his re-election, Barack Obama has proposed to cut Social Security, echoed the deficit hysteria of the right, continued to negotiate NAFTA-like trade deals in secret (hidden from Congress and the public but available to 600 “corporate advisors”), and continued to privatize the military/national security state. (He has also pursued the most aggressive anti-whistleblower presidential campaign in American history.)

And yet 85 percent of registered Democrats either “somewhat approve” or “strongly approve” of Obama’s performance, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. While the level and intensity of Democratic support has dipped somewhat, these figures are still surprisingly robust for a President who moved to cut Democrats’ signature achievement – Social Security – and whose other economic policies are so out of line with his party’s base.

Eskow's point is that corporations are using social policy to distract liberal voters from issues of economic justice just as conservatives have been doing with "Kansas" for decades. Democrats and progressive-type voters will tolerate an awful lot of right-wing economic engineering from their liberal heroes as long as they are on the right side of the gay-marriage and immigration arguments.

Since Day 2, the Clintons, in my view, have been the archetypal smiling-faces-sometimes conservatives---every bit as despicable to me as Joe Lieberman. They know how to charm you into silence as you watch them steal the silverware. President North Star earned a lifetime membership in that club of vipers upon following his terrific New-Deal-type inauguration speech rhetoric with centrist appeasement... as if Social Security is his to compromise away. At this point I think I'd rather have Rand Paul than Hillary Clinton as the next president.

Democrats are Tylenol: they keep the fever low enough that the virus can stay in command.

Maybe he could move to Arizona [updated]

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It may be the case that George Zimmerman now sees Florida's Stand Your Ground law as a sort of double-edged petard:

His brother said the former neighborhood watch volunteer was still processing the reality that he wouldn’t serve prison time for the killing, which Zimmerman, 29, has maintained was an act of self-defense. A jury found him not guilty of second-degree murder late Saturday night and declined to convict him on a lesser charge of manslaughter.

However, with many critics angry over his acquittal, his freedom may be limited. “He’s going to be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life,” Robert Zimmerman Jr. said during an interview on CNN.

Somebody should have thought about that before, as Johnny Cash once described it, he shot a man in Sanford just to watch him die.

It's a counter-intuitive outcome, though: when you "stand your ground" it comes to pass that your "freedom may be limited." Maybe even as much as Trayvon Martin's.

Update:  now, according to a musician's son, there's evidently stand your ground, freedom-of-expression style:

Lester [Chambers] was just assaulted on stage at The Russell City Hayward Blues Festival by a crazed woman after dad dedicated ‘People Get Ready’ to Trayvon Martin. He is on the way to the hospital now.

Tick tock Tick KOO-koo!

Vocabulary builder

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From an interview show on my local public radio station, I just learned that there is an engineering term of art for the stuff that comes out of the rear end of an aircraft jet engine that has "ingested" a bird. They call it "snarge."

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Saturday Night Prayer Meeting

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To limber up the blogging muscles again, I present a 50-year-old gem from the twilight of Kennedy Rock.



NPR had a piece about this tune on Friday, which I half-heard out of the corner of my ear. It comes from the brief era of Top 40 radio when adult middle-of-the-road hits could chart alongside hot rod and surf music on Clark Weber's Silver Dollar Survey countdown. I've always loved the spring-loaded trombone ensemble schmaltz mixed down just right.

The genre of Kennedy Rock is a personal conceit that popped into my head about 20 years ago. Examples fall along a spectrum of jazz-inflected pop and slickly produced pop with soft-rock "sonorities." Many examples, such as Bobby Vee's "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes", are arranged around nifty chamber orchestras and recorded in rooms whose acoustics you can actually hear. Other, like "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby and The Romantics, start exploring the use of the studio as an "instrument" instead of just a room to record in. I imagine that Kennedy Rock was targeted at young housewives and working girls who hung onto their AM radio listening habit after graduating high school.

All of this is strictly in my own head, you understand. I've been meaning to systematically analyze the "genre's" characteristics, though, because I actually feel that it's a real thing. Two difficulties I've had: one is that this flavor of oldie gets very little airplay, so it's just plain hard to call examples to mind; the other is that I've found it risky to buy MP3 oldies singles because companies that license these songs for reissue often ratfuck the original mixes, thereby spoiling the listening experience. So my research and enjoyment of this (imaginary) genre has been thwarted by sleaze merchants.

Anyway, go ahead and revel in this one, from the age of "Sputnik" bubble gumballs, Universal Studios monster trading cards, and bald, bespectacled AM rock disk jockeys.

Sukiyaki, Kyu Sakamoto (1963, Capitol Records [catalog number not known]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Fixed

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Hello. More later, soon. But I've finally gotten around to fixing the link to my notification, so from now on I'll know pretty quickly when you, the reader, has responded to a post. I hadn't realized how important that was in helping me to stay engaged with the blog, but it is. So, it's fixed.

President North Star gets all enigmatic

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In Santa Monica on Friday, in reference to the NSA Prism project, President Obama said that

... if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Ten-four.

Will a member of the White House press corps ask the President what the problem is and what he intends to do about it? His words sounded to me like a threat.

Incidentally, when I was searching for a transcript of this quote, the top Google hits were nuthouse sites like teaparty.com and breitbart.com. No progressive media have taken note of the statement, as far as I can tell. Naturally, wingnuts will vomit outrage about three words President North Star lays end to end, so their current reaction is more of the same and not to be taken seriously. But he wasn't talking to them: he was talking to civil libertarians, good-government advocates, and regular people who are sickened by the police state infrastructure Cheney and Bush built here over 10 years ago.

Reactionaries have no problem with a well functioning police state as long as they control it. The Obama administration does not fear them. It fears the rest of us. The President took off the Centrist mask yesterday and threatened everyday Americans. I wonder what he meant by it.

Real Scandal No. 1: Global Banking Conspiracy

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Even at the ten-foot-pole distance I keep from news media I am still hearing echoes of the "IRS scandal" in which field personnel applied certain keywords to screen for potential tax-evasion schemes by possibly illegitimate nonprofit political groups. Arguably, depending on the specifics, the story could be important enough to continue dissecting. I don't buy it, though: problem discovered, plausible explanation extracted, congressional hearings held, officials held accountable with loss of jobs, and dire warnings of jackbooted IRS thugs hiding in the hosta patch.

I've heard no echoes, though---not even on The Liberal NPR---about

the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments.

The Libor scandal is last year's news, so corporate media and political celebrities long ago directed everyone to look forward instead of indulging in fingerpointing and recriminations in order to avoid Tearing The Nation Apart With Partisan Bickering. So, fair enough: no echoes.

But have you even heard a peep about this one anywhere outside of Rolling Stone?

Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

Matt Taibbi reported on the ISDAfix, um... fix in April. I understand that this was literally months ago (as of today, at least). But, seriously. Considering Libor and ISDAfix only, this is an issue of price fixing and insider trading that rigs markets encompassing about $880 trillion in financial assets. According to my arithmetic, that's getting close to $1 quadrillion.

If you are interested in the parallels between the crime syndicate and international financial institutions, I recommend that you read Taibbi's whole piece. If you're not that interested, at least keep in mind the figure of $1 quadrillion when you hear Tea Party conservatives complaining about the (phony) looming Social Security bankruptcy or marveling about which planet a stack of dollar bills in the amount of the (falling) federal deficit would reach.

Think about it next time you hear Fiscally Responsible Moderates lament the fact that public-sector pensions, mass transit, and safe bridges are no longer luxuries "we" can afford, because transnational financial pirates routinely loot the funds supporting such projects.

At the very least, do click through to the Taibbi story and read the first paragraph. It's a perfect Fifty50 footnote for any story I tag with the label sympathy for the wingnut.

Fake scandal No. 1: IRS and the Tea Party 501(c)4 groups

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Selective IRS scrutiny based on political beliefs, associations, or activities is (supposed to be) unlawful. Best I can tell is that the Cincinnati IRS people were using a certain criterion to flag new 501(c)4 applications to review. They exercised poor administrative judgment (I see that occasionally from my den in the woodwork of a government agency), and were ordered to stop by upper management. The Inspector General found no evidence of political motivation.

Still, it shouldn't happen. Clear rules for flagging potentially suspicious paperwork should be developed by IRS executives with participation from field offices. Also, the law needs to make it crystal clear that improper IRS scrutiny is unlawful not only when it affects the Tea Party, but also when it affects groups whose names contain words like occupy, environmental, progressive, peace, and so on. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what I might be talking about.

Are Democrats using this occasion to point out (for once) that Both Sides Do It? To make sure that all Americans are protected from IRS harassment rooted in political criteria? No. They have been busy all week stepping on their own dicks, acting like Democrats invented the weaponization of the IRS. They should bring heinous examples of Republican abuse of IRS powers into the public record... not to excuse the Cincinnati field office, but to insist on a "bipartisan effort" to prevent the IRS from chilling political activity irrespective of which wing of The Property Party holds the presidency.

Even more dangerous than laissez-faire capitalism: Satire

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Texas Governor Rick Perry was disgusted by this political cartoon back in April. Too fucking bad. I recommend Pepto Bismol, an Ambien, and 5 years in a US Civics re-education camp for what ails him.

Wall Street Democrats

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This detestable specimen of politician, starting Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband and including herself, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and about everybody short of Alan Grayson and Elizabeth Warren (so far as I know thus far), are the real drivers of ruination.

Despite what R.J. Eskow says in the article above, though I believe that President Obama knows exactly what he's doing when he drives liberals to distraction by "negotiating with himself" on promoting long-term rot of the safety net. The bait and switch method begins with bait---

According to The Narrative, he believes that conservatives will play nice with him on Capitol Hill if he shows that he's serious about "deficit reduction" at the expense of no one who works Capitol Hill.

No, President North Star is not naive. And neither are the politicians who I used to refer to as "spineless Democrats." Whether this is what Obama wanted when he was running for the office or he has just surrendered to the inevitability of global hegemony by a transnational military/industrial/banking/infotainment complex, he and his party are intentionally giving radical conservatives all the fertilizer they need to infest our polity like a tropical fungus.

Thanks to President North Star, the "left" position on safety net programs is that they must be "gradually" trimmed back because they are unsustainable. Pretending that he represents the adult faction within the monkey house, the President tells us that the way forward is for Republican thought leaders to erect a so-called permission structure (i.e., comfort zone) that will enable lunatics to fall in line... and endorse a policy that they've been drooling over for 50 years. Note the denial of the author of that linked post, though, and the denial evident at the top of the comments thread: they seem to think this is all the work of "centrist" Democrats. Well, other than the two I mentioned above, I'd be interested for someone to show me a Democrat national officeholder who isn't a centrist. That is, a Wall Street Democrat.

It is these despicable people, posing as traditional liberals, who are willing to accept cuts to a legacy of political genius that is not theirs to bargain away. They're not "naive," and they could turn it around in 6 months if they wanted to. But they don't.

Backlog

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I have lots of backlogged tabs to post about (or discard). Writing has been sparse because of some considerable but harmless pain---both elective and unbeckoned---that I've been enduring. Just distracting; not organic. But it does interfere with the focus.

Raise your hand if you smell horseshit

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NPR, my picture window into the corporate media bordello, has been flogging the marathon bombing story all week despite the fact that one of the suspects is as dead as bacon and the other one is in tighter custody than The Joker (Chechnyan pun intended). You see, it's just desperately important that we find out how Tamerlan was radicalized as long as there's some way we can link it to his overseas travel a few years ago. Because if we find that out, then we have a genuine case of "international terror" by "Muslim radicals." And that would give authorities to deploy killer drones in US skies under a plan that even the libertarian Rand Paul can approve of (see paragraph 5).

Since it's still somewhat early in terms of crafting the official marathon bomber narrative, it's a good time to observe how the process works. News editing decisions help to create a bias toward an official narrative by highlighting certain facts (or rumors or unsourced assertions) that support it while ignoring other facts that don't fit the story line. And so this week the storytellers are busy composing a portrait of vicious, desperate international terrorists who had New York City in its sights next. The trouble with that story line is this and this. Have any of you heard, via mainstream news media, that there are good reasons to ask whether our present-day Saccho and Vanzetti really were planning to take their pressure cookers to Manhattan? I haven't. Yet mitigating facts are right out there in public, non-obscure reporting channels like The Boston Globe and Esquire.

And furthermore, how about this: despite initial media reports depicting a teenage Chechnyan desperado shooting it out with police from his bunker in a Watertown, MA, drydocked cabin cruiser, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not armed when he was captured. He was halfway shot to pieces, though. My point isn't to second-guess how police do their jobs in a situation like this, but to second-guess the editorial judgments being applied. Those judgments make sense to me only as intentional decisions to shape and burnish a narrative.

Dave's Delivery Door

Editor's note: Big Rock Head has resumed his visual art enterprise, entitled Dave's Delivery Door. It will be in syndication at most of these same blogs as long as he permits. Click it to enlarge it. All Delivery Doors are copyrighted by the artist sometimes known as Big Rock Head.

Speaking of The Narrative

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Charlie Pierce made this contribution to the discussion the other day at his verbose and annoying, yet quite rightminded blog at Esquire:

We had the event. Then we had the mourning. Then we had "Indomitability Day." Then we had the healing of the interfaith service at which the president gave a fine speech, and the demonstrations of solidarity at the Bruins game. That is the pattern of these things in our public lives, until the next one of these things happens, and then we do it all over again. We did it for Tucson after Columbine. We did it for Aurora after Tucson. We did it for Sandy Hook after Aurora. And, this week, we did it for Boston after Sandy Hook. It's the modern Stations of the Cross, with theme music, and logos, and Wolf Blitzer. We were done. We were healed. And then the Tsarnaev brothers came home. And one of them got away.

Pretty much so.  In the editing racket, we refer to that kind of thing as "boilerplate." It's worth contemplating how this news media narrative---and all the others---emerge into our lives as the Official Account of Public Occurrences.

The Narrative

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I woke up this Saturday morning listening to NPR "correspondents" stitch together a narrative of Boston Marathon international intrigue with Scotch tape and John McCain's used dental floss. As far as I can tell, an NPR "correspondent" does no actual reporting, but spends his or her workdays gleaning bon mots from think-tank experts, corporate spokesmen, and politicians speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The two suspects immigrated to this country from Chechnya (when the youngest was 8 or 9), you see, so therefore they must have been Muslim sleeper agents. It doesn't matter to the liberal NPR that no verified fact in the public domain indicates any foreign connection other than the suspects' country of origin and one trip to Russia by the older brother to renew his passport. Or that no third-party financing or logistical sophistication is evident in the known facts. Or that evidence known to date link only the older suspect to radical Islamic thought (via YouTube content)... and only within the past 5 years or so.

Meanwhile, NPR dutifully informs us that even though Boston police say the public threat has ended, Federal officials are likely to use a "public safety" exception to the surviving suspect's Miranda rights in order to grill him for "intelligence" (not "evidence") without a lawyer present. Then, implicitly accepting that possible approach to American law enforcement as legitimate on its face, they inform us that Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding that the surviving suspect be tried as an "enemy combatant."

Watch how this unfolds. I think it is an excellent opportunity to observe how corporate media assemble a narrative for the public. It is a feat of rhetoric, not news reporting. Techniques for producing a mass-media news narrative include the unwarranted emphasis of some facts over others; the omission of certain facts that don't fit the emerging narrative; unsupportable extrapolation from known facts to serve as a sort of roadmap for fleshing out the consensus narrative; injection of purported facts from anonymous sources; and so on. Watch how the coverage plays out and pretend you're the front-page editor for the Fifty50 Daily Pap-Smear---ask yourself where each presented fact came from, whether there are conflicting facts on the record, whether the item presented is a sourced fact, an opinion, or a speculation.

Also, ask yourself why officials and corporate media were reluctant to call the Boston Marathon bombing an act of terrorism until the suspects could be publicly branded as foreigners.

Friday Night Fish Fry

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Tonight, for some reason, I feel like offering something violent for our entertainment. But not cheaply topical with respect to certain national news events of the week. So put this in your pipe and smoke it:



In case you can't understand the words, this performance is a medley of perspectives on nonapproved drugs---namely, bassist Mark Sandman's musings on his own daily drug experimentation upon himself sandwiching a succinct description of US war-on-drugs policy. I selected this specific video to show this oddly instrumented power trio in action. If you like the feel of it, find a higher-resolution version of this song on YouTube and play it back at earbleed level through your little earbuds. You really need to hear their studio performances on CD-grade recordings to hear what this combo is all about.

There are half a dozen reasons why this is one of my favorite bands of all time, but I won't use the present space to tell you why, and it doesn't matter anyway. I'll just say that I can't think of any other band that sounds so unusual and accessible at the same time.

Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'em Down, Morphine (live at Nightstage, Cambridge, MA, 26 May 1992 [recording provenance unknown] ), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Boston strangler marathon bombing tea party

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I'll confine my contribution to the story of America's Bombing with a few stray notes about media coverage of it that I haven't seen in writing yet.

First, I'll look for some Beltway celebrity pundit to declare that during the "national tragedy" in Boston, the social media "came of age." Specifically, I expect someone to compare the Reddit crowdsourcing detective forums as well Facebook and Twitter sleuthing to how television news reporting "came of age" on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. The contribution of Reddit editors is certainly significant and worth considering, but celebrity commentators are always compelled to turn one thing into another, well known thing that we all can relate to. I'll leave the topic (for the moment) by stating that any such comparison is shrinkwrapped horseshit.

Second, instead of regurgitating all the corporate media reporting failures this past week, not limited to CNN and Murdoch's New York Post, I'll point to a really competent aggregator of confusing and contradictory breaking news reports: Greg Mitchell's Pressing Matters blog. He has been way ahead of other aggregators I follow (such as TPM and Huffington Post), pulling together news from a wide variety of sources and commenting minimally to provide a professional, old-school journalist's interpretation. Most of his remarks are directed at helping the reader to avoid overinterpreting the reporting or to point out examples of bad journalistic practice. I only noticed one or two ham-handed quips in all his liveblogging over the past 2 or 3 days.

Third: Boston was not on "lockdown," as all media were breathlessly reporting this morning. I say this because the use of that term is nonsensical. You can't put a city on "lockdown"! As far as I can tell, no curfew was declared either: the police told people in Boston and environs to stay off the streets and to "shelter in place." Both seem to be sensible recommendations. And I'll add that the phrase shelter in place is a legitimate term of art for terrorism and hostage-type situations. The use of lockdown, though, is an example of what I see as a creeping compulsion by media and their slavish consumers to glamorize every aspect of life as if it were an action movie or made-for-TV drama. The news, you see, becomes much more thrilling to consume if described in terms of entertainment programming. I think of it as a social disease---an infection of real culture with the virus of mass media narrative. In my lifetime I've seen journalism migrate from (1) traditional news reporting, to (2) finding the "story" in the news to "help" the audience understand, to (3) intentionally communicating durable "story lines" to which facts are fit and cherrypicked against. This last stage is The Narrative. Many media and political scholars argue that the narrative long predates my perception of memory of it, and I wouldn't argue against that. But I think my basic point here remains intact.

Last: NPR's so-called counterterrorism correspondent on All Things Considered tonight, "Dina Temple-Raston," behaved like a colossal douchebag by repeatedly telling everyone how taking the suspect alive was a top priority in order to get "intelligence" from him about "the plotters," with thick implications that we already know that the bombing was a coordinated foreign terrorist operation. No verified fact reported so far remotely supports that kind of language; everything that I've read and heard up to this moment indicates that two guys created some crude antipersonnel IEDs out of household materials and may have had their getaway car in queue for work at a body shop as late as Wednesday morning. Some plot! It may actually turn out to be true, but even the liberal NPR should know that it's best to wait for some facts to emerge before extrapolating too far along The Narrative.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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On account of I miss hearing from Gurlitzer lately, here is some bait to lure herself out of her lair. I'm pretty sure she was in our party at the Roosevelt University Auditorium in Chicago in December 1971 to hear the boys "premier" (or so they said) this very song: Mother.



Listen to the intro by poor Terry Kath: he sounds like his brain has been toasted to the size and mental capability of a raisin. I think it's hilarious that he start's picking out the stock lullaby theme (go-to-sleep, go-to-sleep...) as he's talking, then dribbles off like he's got the somnambulas.

As an adult I became pretty critical of Chicago because I felt they squandered their talent. I stopped following them after their third album, from which this is, er, from. (Not counting Carnegie Hall, which was their fourth.) I feel that none of the members improved an iota, technically, after "Chicago Transit Authority." Knowing little about the band, biographically speaking, I would assume that they were a victims of their meteoric rise to fame and hip-capitalist management. I can almost hear it: You boys could be as big as The Beach Boys if you let us help you write some "relevant" lyrics and pick out some nice "threads". We can also make your hair look sexier while still being hip! Yeah---and you can have all the "pot" you want for free! So I feel the fellas became too famous, wealthy, and high for their own good, and ours too. Maybe that's unfair, but I felt that much of their second album was pretty much only going through motions dictated by some insidious devitalizing force. By the third, it all sounded canned and labeled to me. Their lyrics explored the safe perimeter of pseudo-profundity, and the ensemble horn arrangements mostly sounded like rote variations or fantasias on riffs from Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon.

No one in the band was a virtuoso... and I feel that's actually OK. After all, Chicago was just a rock band... of which some of us had unduly high expectations if we were suckered by the most-of-them-studied-music-at-college marketing. (There's not a thing wrong with a good street-quality jazz-rock band in my book, but I wanted Chicago to exceed the high points of the first album every time out.)
 
The Carnegie Hall album is full of distracted, mediocre moments. But this track is not one of them, despite Kath's soporific introductory ramble. The composition isn't much but isn't bad either---head-shop-type lyrics about man's inhumanity to Mother Nature, changing meters several times before a 5/8 section that is supposed to "resemble industry, and money-making, and pollution". But what a surprise to my cynical 21st century earbones! I'd forgotten. Everybody sounds like they really mean it on this cut, especially during the 5/8 jam! James Pankow starts it with some frantic trombone that may draw from bop chops he learned at college. And Walt Parazaider, bless his heart, really takes his chances on tenor. Maybe he's just running up and down arpeggios from his methods book, but he just gives it up and dives in. Hard to believe this is the same guy who struggled with improvising Dixie and Battle Hymn of The Republic on flute a little earlier in the program. Then Pankow comes back at the end with quite a sensitive elegy-type solo that even made me feel emotional when I reheard it for the first time after buying the Rhino reissue several months ago. The whole collection, even with its flaws, is like an under-appreciated friend.

Mother, Chicago (1971, from "At Carnegie Hall," CD reissue Rhino R2 76174), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Agenda 21 and sympathy for the wingnut

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The slang term wingnut, as I understand it, as I understand it, originally referred to someone who was considered to be deranged or seriously unbalanced. These would be people who expressed fervent belief in highly improbable phenomena such as abduction by aliens, Soviet mind-control infrastructure, or water fluoridation as a government plot to accomplish something other then reduction of toot decay. At some point it began to be associated mostly with right-wing paranoids and political reactionaries. People referred to as "Birthers," "Truthers," and "conspiracy theorists" would fall under the definition of "wingnut."

Liberals and moderates gleefully dismiss the concerns of wingnuts. TPM's new-media mogul Josh Marshall, born in 1969, has written derisively of the idea that any reasonable person could believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. An even more reality-based (and fiercer) commentator, the Jesuit-educated Charlie Pierce, routinely makes fun of wingnuts who fear that the UN's Agenda 21 will steal our golf courses. Even if we agree that Pierce is correct in his explicit critique that paranoia about World Government is a long-established reactionary article of faith and political lever for Republicans---and I do agree---it's still very much worth taking a closer look at possible explanations for that underlying fear.

Have you ever heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Me neither---not until last week:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership isn't getting enough attention (by design, it seems.) The idea is that a supranational body would be empowered to override national regulations if a country had a regulatory regime in, say environmental policy or copyright policy, that was more restrictive than other countries, it would be forced to bring its regime in line with the others.

At this point, 11 nations are participating in negotiations to establish the rules. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that this "partnership" would impose the most restrictive copyright laws, particularly the odious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on all member nations, overriding any less-restrictive member-nation laws. The DMCA inserts copyright law into every transaction and purchase that involves computer software, and is responsible for postmodern customs such as electronic automobile keys that cost $300 and the outlawing of hacking consumer products that you have legally purchased.

The broader idea is the elimination of national regulatory authority over production and distribution of manufactured goods, natural resources and "intellectual property."  To be clear, this is not an instance of "free trade." The elimination of the public domain under copyright law is a restriction on trade. A bad one.

For purposes of this presentation, I'll go a step further to say that the "broader idea" is to eliminate the concept of national sovereignty wherever it interferes with the extractive corporate business model, whether the mission is to mine natural resources without restriction, lock up cultural resources permanently, or extort wealth out of a nation.

If you think the Trans-Pacific Partnership sounds like a skunk works for developing the procedural infrastructure for a "world government," you might be a wingnut. You might also be correct. I'm not prepared to say one way or the other at this point. But I am pretty sure that there is something underneath all of it that should be very concerning to everybody, including clear-eyed moderates and liberals.

Could a person be in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership while opposing Agenda 21? I'll bet a Republican could. The point would be to distract The Base (including people I might refer to as "innocent wingnuts") with a terror of the pan-racial "liberal" UN and its black helicopters. Meanwhile, transnational corporations could consolidate their control of the globe using national governments as their agents. But it's interesting to consider what might happen if wingnuts were to gain a clearer view of the real threat to their national sovereignty at the same time polite society tried to appreciate the fears of a wingnut.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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This is very cute. Be sure to watch the post "performance" "interview" with Dick Clark.



It may be my modern sensibilities, but I think that Dick Clark is being a bit of a dick with the boys, at least unintentionally. It appears there's a partial language barrier to which Mr. Clark may not be sensitive. However, he does seem to try to provide some context after the fact by explaining that big-time entertainers (such as himself) don't know their own itineraries most of the time.

I notice that the group spells the word "premiere" the way I remember learning it. For a coupla decades I had assumed that I'd just learned an incorrect spelling of the word in my remedial elementary school education.

I post this song with respect to Senor Rodolpho Murga, who taught me how to make pozole last weekend. Tonight I tried my own batch solo. Tomorrow will tell how it came out.

Farmer John, The Premieres (1 August 1964, live lipsynced* performance on American Bandstand, ABC-TV), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.
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*The fellas should have at least put someone on stage holding a tenor sax to produce a better illusion.

Wise sayings

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In Free-Market America, money spends you!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I'm happy that the robot oldies stations haven't put this jam into stress rotation up to this point in history. Nothing ruins an oldie like an oldies station.



These lads say "fuck the second and fourth---we're gonna hammer the first and third too, and maybe even the uh-four!" Even in 7th grade,  through the 2.5 in. speaker of my turquoise GE tabletop AM radio, I could tell there was something huge about the sound of this tune. But luckily we had a tube-driven, all-in-one Olympia entertainment console (with 9 in. elliptical satellite speaker!) so I could hear it up close in hi fi after school on the Dex Card show. It's a monster!

Try Too Hard, The Dave Clark Five (1966, 45 rpm single, Epic 10004 [US]*), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

* I've got the disc squirreled away in my Felix The Cat-type doctor bag with a few dozen other 45s I picked up in thrift stores during the '70s for about a dime apiece.

Wake up, Useless!

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It's time for another cartoon!



In this episode, Waldo and his entourage are pursued by the hapless stock Jay Ward mafioso One-Way Waldrip, who speaks in the Bogart-like voice often heard in other Ward features such as Super Chicken and Tom Slick.

The Wikipedia writeup on this series is flawed and ambiguous, but offers some clues about why my memory of this Hoppity Hooper is so fragmentary. First, the production history is odd. "Ring-A-Ding Spring" was produced by Ward studios in 1960, but when the series was sold to ABC, production went to Gamma Studios. The scripts and voices were all Ward, but the visuals were animated by the same outfit that did Tennessee Tuxedo, Underdog, and Commander McBragg. Hoppity didn't have any native second features, but was filled both by recycled shorts from Rocky and His Friends, The Bullwinkle Show, and some of the Gamma features noted above. The Rocky show, Bullwinkle, and George of the Jungle, by contrast, all had a suite of dedicated shorts (with some cross-pollination from Rocky to Bullwinkle). As a show, Hoppity had a weak identity, even at the level of kid experience. A Marxist media critic might say that this represents an inflection point where the American art of the "cartoon show" overtly succumbed to commodification. Ironically, that view could partially explain why Hoppity Hooper is not today commercially available as a boxed set: it wouldn't "package" well as a series. A related problem is that it might be difficult to acquire the rights to recreate a Hoppity package featuring shorts from other Gamma productions.

Anyway, YouTube lets us see episodes of this almost-lost series. And thanks to the good offices of a fellow traveler, cartoonly speaking, I momentarily have access to other episodes not currently uploaded to the web. The obscurity of Hoppity Hooper really enhances their "flash value" to me.

"Ring-A-Ding Spring, Part 3," Hoppity Hooper (1962, Jay Ward Productions), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

The best-case scenario sucks anus

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Ever since liberals discovered that President North Star isn't too damn proactive about being liberal---maybe around the time of his stimulus initiative---there's been an annoying denial meme. There are several flavors.

One varietal is that Obama is "naive" about bipartisanship and the good faith that supposedly validates it. This idea is based on the premise that "he doesn't understand that he's dealing with maniacs."

A related variant is that Obama has been a tactical blunderer, always pre-negotiating his policy proposals with himself in order to present a reasonable centrist position that everyone should be able to agree upon without rancor. His losing tactics are the consequence of his belief in the good faith of the "maniacs."

One other variation of the denial meme is that President North Star would really do this or that progressive thing, as we all wish he would, if only it were possible in the "present political climate." Unfortunately, the situation forces him to aim low.

As I say, all of these ideas are forms of denial by people grieving a betrayal of their expectations.

Obama is not naive about the politicians who are deranged by the fact that he's a (two-term) presidential usurper---he's the Jackie Fucking Robinson of major league politicians, and even had to deal with the indignities of racist campaign tactics from Hillary Rodham B. Anthony Sojourner Truth Isis Clinton and her loathsome taxidermied pachyderm dick of a campaign manager, Mark Penn. So, no, if he's betraying the expectations of liberals, it is not because he's naive about his political enemies.

Obama is also not tactically incompetent at politics. His mastery of retail politics is obvious, considering those three certain things he had to overcome in order to be elected to his present office---he's black, he has a Muslim-sounding name, and he's a Democrat in a bombastically conservative "post-911" political ecology. His approval ratings have soared the more he speaks like a progressive. Destroying the right-wing ideologues, rubes, and crypto-Confederates in Congress should be simplicity for a youthful, media-savvy Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer with considerable rhetorical skill.

And finally, no, Obama is not constrained by the "politics of the possible." (Refer to the previous two paragraphs.) He knows how to lead and he knows how to go over the head of Congress to the American public.

To borrow a phrase, I think these denial memes amount to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" by liberal Obama partisans. Here's what I think is the truth: President North Star is pursuing the exact policies he is looking for and, to a large extent, achieving them. Obama is arguably no more liberal than either Clinton---willing to embrace corporatism, globalism, and Reaganomics while surrendering the concepts of public goods and services, meaningful progressive taxation, and government as the necessary protector of American human rights.

As pertains to the sequester, but also to the longer political game over the next 4 years, I'm bummed to agree with Heather Digby Parton:

Look, he's never been straight with the American people about this, I don't care what anyone says. He never admits that he's put cuts to Social Security on the table, ( and even hardcore deficit hawks like Alice Rivlin admit that Chained-CPI is a cut.) He never says upfront that he's been willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare. He always says he's willing to make "tough choices" and will do things "his own party won't like." He never comes right out and says what her means about "entitlement" cuts.

President North Star has already conceded on fundamentals. His fans will consider it a victory if we "only" have to settle for raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages, and indexing their benefits to the chained CPI.

Here's our partisan ecology today: Democrats are Republicans; Republicans are Confederates; the Tea Party is the Brownshirts; and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the Democrats.

Wake up, Useless!

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It's time for another cartoon!



In which we discover the secret of Ring-A-Ding Spring. Sorry about the "spoiler" in the YouTube preview thumbnail above.

Hoppity's hometown, Foggy Bogg, Wisconsin, shares a bucolic Great Lakes vibe with Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, but sounds much more inviting to me (preferring temperate swamps to gangrenous toes). Waldo and Fillmore are itinerant swindlers, but adopt the town as their hideout/headquarters.

From what I read, this set of episodes was the Ward/Scott pilot for the series. The fist two episodes were produced in 1960, with Alan "Fred Flintstone" Reed voicing Fillmore before being contracted to portray the Kramdenesque caveman for ABC. Bill "Bullwinkle" Scott took over Fillmore duties in parts 3 and 4, but I don't detect any jarring change in the bear's tone or manner with that change.

Surprisingly to me, Hoppity is not voiced by June "Rocky" Foray, but by a woman named Chris Allen. I can find little about her with my limited search engine skills (partially due to her very common name), but most of her credits seem to be with the Hanna-Barbera studio. I think she's pretty good.

Hans Conreid, a Hollywood character actor whose career was extended by Ward for the benefit of all of us, creates a perfect maniac in Professor Wigglesworth. Another thing I like about the character is the percussion accompaniment to his brainstorms, starting in this episode at about 1:20 in the background and rising to a crescendo (with reprise!) over the next 25 seconds or so. This sound effect appears in most Ward/Scott creations, but only very briefly. I wonder if it was created by Spike Jones or an associate. It really should be a standard ringtone for the iPhone. (And I'm gonna make it one or my name isn't Lattimore!)

This episode is music-heavy, which I've noticed in a handful of shorts from this era of the studio's output. It may have been experimentation; to my ears it sounds somewhat awkward. I assume they went sparser in the sound bed for economic reasons, though, as opposed to purely aesthetic ones. Also take note of the general style of art, especially the backgrounds, which is very similar to the landscapes featured in the Metal Munching Moon Mice story on Rocky and His Friends around that time.

"Ring-A-Ding Spring, Part 2," Hoppity Hooper (1962, Jay Ward Productions), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry!!!

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I don't think anybody plays the role of comical ultraviolent maniac like Louis Jordan.



I don't know about you, but to me this guy sounds scarier than any rap-chart "gangsta" I've ever heard. There's no preening here; he's a natural-born Method Actor. In the right time---meaning at least 15 years after his prime, unfortunately---I think Jordan might have been a very successful mainstream comic actor.

(Editor's note: not my fault, but I apologize for the crappy visuals that the poster attached to the front end of the video. At least he uploaded a masterpiece for us to enjoy, though.)

Dad Gum Ya Hide, Boy, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five (1954, from "One Guy Named Louis: The Complete Aladdin Sessions"; CD reissue Capitol Jazz CDP 7 96804 2 [1992]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.