It's Bedtime!

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Time for a story. Once upon a time Old MacDaddy dug a big trench in his back yard, removed more dirt, roots, broken glass, bricks, and chunks of patio concrete than you could shake a stick at. Then he covered the bottom of the trench with manure (regrettably, not his own), then a very special blend of natural and store-bought soil, and dug little holes with a pointed stick to make new homes for 16 of his best asparagus friends (who had been living on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator for a month). Then he planted the asparagi, made cute little mounds of potting soil around them, and took a picture. Finally he fed them some nice fresh water. And that's how Farmer Daddy Brand Asparagus (TM) began its new life. The end. Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Enjoying my hiatus?

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I yam! I could tell tales of physical prowess, ditchdiggery, lumberjackery. But I'm on hiatus, working through some sort of surprise urge to turn the world green and feed all the little birdies. So make up some tales yourself! In the meantime, I share the following words from the final pages of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an instructive 700-page tome by Manly P. Hall (1928):

Ptolemy has been ridiculed for conceiving the earth to be the center of the universe, yet modern civilization is seemingly founded upon the hypothesis that the planet earth is the most permanent and important of all the heavenly spheres, and that the gods from their starry thrones are fascinated by the monumental and epochal events taking place upon this spherical ant-hill in Chaos.

It's Bedtime!

*

Apropos of nothing: RIP Chris Kanyon and Herb Cohen.

Kanyon was a minor figure during the WCW "invasion" of the WWF back around the turn of the century, when professional wrestling was still entertaining. Beer-D reminded me that he was mainly known for entering the ring spouting some sort of lame monologue that ended with the rhetorical question "Who better than Kanyon?" Then, just about anyone would enter the ring and kick is ass seven ways for Sunday. It was his role. HuffingtonPost wants to make something of the fact that he was openly gay, but I doubt that gayness is particularly rare in the wrestling racket. In fact, gayness (and gaylike styling weirdness) were professional wrestling conventions for awhile, and treated in a fairly matter-of-fact manner insofar as opponents of the gay characters never resorted to any particularly homophobic invective. Professional wrestling must be one of the hardest things in the world to do, and "detraining" from it has to be much more complex than retiring from a mainstream athletic career due to the toll of steroids and brutal physical punishment. Peace, Chris.

Herb "Herbie" Cohen was a picaresque character, evidently capable of being a major league motherfucker, who was tightly enmeshed in the careers of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits, plus a menagerie of unlikely lesser lights. The Barry Miles critical biography of Zappa tells of Herbie's alleged mismanagement of and skimming from Zappa's various record labels, not to mention a previous career selling weapons of war to African insurgencies and manning the barricades for the Mothers of Invention at a 1969 Berlin concert in which the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka the Red Army Faction) turned things very scary for the group. Herbie was the subject of many in-jokes on Zappa's albums from the '70s, but they eventually had a non-amicable parting of the ways late in the decade. You can see Herbie rising like a wraith from a crack in the pavement in the surreal wraparound painting (verso) for the cover of Zappa's 1973 Over-Nite Sensation. Now he's a wraith for real.

Oh, and get back to bed! I don't wanna hear a peep outta ya! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Some day I'm gonna be happy / But I don't know when just now



Old friend Larry K. was quite precocious, critical-analysis-wise, as compared most denizens of my suburban Chicago high school (not including Gurlitzer, of course). I remember him explaining back around sophomore or junior year why he liked rock and roll: each song was like a small unit of Truth, packaged in a 3-minute piece of music. To illustrate, he pointed to this song --- "Lies" by The Knickerbockers. And even more specifically, to the two-line extract above the video. I've always felt Larry's aphorism was highly pertinent, and a pretty good criterion for rapid assessment of a pop song's general worth.

As for this group, I knew little without referring to The Wikipedia. A bit of irony related to Larry K's identification of this late 1965 tune with Truth is that it is a dead-on knockoff of The Fab Four about a year and a half earlier. That observation never troubled my opinion of this little rocker, though, because it's energetic, tight, and respects its inspirational material. When I first saw the video I was going to comment on the gratuitous use of a tenor sax as prop for vocalist "Buddy Randell," but the wiki writeup indicates he actually played the thing in real life. Apparently not on this cut, however.

It's funny that these guys are trying so hard to sound like the original British Invasion band but aren't trying so hard to look that way. The suits kind of say "British Invasion," but most of the guys just barely manage to simulate the archetypal haircut (which was already pretty much out of fashion by the anyway). All rely on generous nerdles of "greasy kid stuff" (look it up), and "Randell" is looking quite a bit like a less-ugly version of Wayne "CC Rider" Cochran. That's because "Randell's" recording heyday was in the previous decade, scoring a big hit as Bill Crandle with The Royal Teens on the godawful "Short Shorts" from 1958 (sez Wikipedia).

As regular readers know, I cannot close this post without rating the go-go dancers. I think it's a pretty prime performance --- they add visual rhythm and freewheeling party atmosphere. The ladies know what they're doing, movement-wise, managing both free-form individuality and exuberant synchrony at once. The fine art of go-go dancing was ruined, in my opinion, by the self-consciously "freestyle" arrhythmic thrashing that emerged with psychedelia, and then, later, by the highly contrived efforts to prepackage dancing feminine sexual allure through excessive coaching and wardrobery.

Update: on reflection I think I have something backwards re the dancers. If refreshed memory serves, they wouldn't have called the gals in this video "go-go dancers." I think that term applied to the dancers they started displaying in cages (yes, cages) around mid-1966, perched on pedestals flanking the bands. The classic go-go dancer would have worn a mini-skirt and calf-sheathing go-go boots like the ones first fetished by Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, in her winter 1966 hit. Then came the cages, and the acid-propelled go-go spazzery started showing up about a year after that. (This all comes from grade school memory, so I stand to be corrected by any cultural historians out there.)

Oh, okay --- double feature. Truth? Maybe not. But Beauty of a sort:

Um, *now* it's bedtime...

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...or, I Want This Motherfuckin' Bat Out My Motherfuckin' House!!!

Judas Priest! I'm trying to finish the iPad post and I hear this skittering skud, sort of like a dry leaf blowing across the floor in another room. Could be the wind, but the windows aren't that far open and the air outside is calm. Flying insect? OK, whatever. Mouse? Don't like 'em, but I have my ways of dealing with them. But uh-uh: there's a motherfuckin' BAT, as I say, about the size of a motherfuckin' crow, bouncing around the kitchen light like it thinks it's a moth! Its wingspan --- no kidding --- was about 12 inches! From crown to tail thingie, it was almost 5 inches long.

Do you know how to get a bat out of your house at bedtime? Well, I don't. Forfeiting the opportunity for YouTube fame, because I didn't feel like screwing around with the iPod Nano video camera but did very much feel like getting the bat out of my kitchen, I engaged in an absurd session of chase-the-motherfuckin'-bat-out-the-motherfuckin-house, armed with an Australian truncheon brought back from a vacation by DoubleE and a cardboard mailer. The object was to shepherd the bat toward one of the two open doors, at which time its famed sonar would show him the way to freedom in the wild black yonder. But it didn't. I did herd it to the open living/dining areas, but the creature just strafed me to continually for almost 10 minutes and had no interest in the open doors. Regrettably, then, I had to opt for a less humane mode of eviction, namely one involving a Crossman BB rifle. Not really my style, but then neither is sharing my home with flying rats. Extra pills and booze for me tonight.

iPad: still not convinced (or even tempted)

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Xeni Jardin --- who is hip enough even for me, I guess --- has a gratuitously heady hands-on review of the iPad, sounding like a smitten fangirl. ("iPad fappery," one of the commenters calls it.) Well, her words at least make me wonder about my initial summary dismissal of the device. She assures us that the form factor is just right --- perfect in weight and tactile sensuality. That happens to be my greatest doubt about the iPad, i.e., that it could possibly have great ergonomics for much of what it is designed to do. We'll see. I still think it's a case of trying to improve Hostess Twinkies by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. Or maybe more to the point, trying to improve a Ghirardelli 72 percent chocolate bar by releasing Giant Chocolate Hostess Twinkies. And anyway, just look at the docked iPad with that wireless keyboard: how does that go together, design-wise?

It's Bedtime!

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Here's a nighty-night song for the first summerlike day in my neck of the Corn Belt. I listened to it during an excruciating run through the sunny breeze wearing a Teflon-coated tee shirt inside of which sweat condenses and drains instead of wicking. The video accompanying "Don't Worry Baby" is totally wrong for the music. The tune is a sprightly but pensive teen beat, fraught with portent. Our hero has failed to keep his mouth shut when he bragged about his car, but he can't back down now because he pushed the other guys too far. But The Love of His Baby is promised to get him all horny for a win. Yet it somehow sounds both innocent and important if you sustain credulity. It's a sweet sound: barber shop quartet sounds for the Pepsi Generation, perhaps suitable for a nice fox trot in the back of the gym.

Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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A spring break edition for two very special little men. And also for that healthcare-loving, ballcutting harridan Nancy Pelosi, who has put The Fear of Grandma into bedwetting wingnuts everywhere.



A city I've never been to, but intend to visit on the recommendation of the lads. A place where the panhandlers are polite and even the meth-heads do their best to make a stranger feel welcome. And the only piece of litter to sit on the ground for more than 5 minutes was one that Beer-D and Big Rock Head threw there as an experiment, then later picked up and threw away just like all the townies do.

Good for Pelosi! [updated]

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She has reportedly told pro-sepsis Congressman Bart Stupak to go fuck himself regarding his anti-choice, pro-thuggery stance on the current healthcare reform legislation. Like Josh Marshall says, this is a major development if it's true.

Update:  Here's a little background on Pelosi's attitude, from The Politico (which is insignificant to me) via TPM (which isn't). It seems that Madame Speaker elbowed her way past the chiseled visage of Rahm Emanuel to get all simpatico with the President on HCR. Haha!

Driveway tableau [updated]

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The following is the transcript of a brief conversation, edited to eliminate digressions, between RubberCrutch and Rudy, the latter of whom having borrowed a shovel, had now returned it and was slumped against Big Rock Head's Mazda. His flesh was the color of window putty, but then again it is always that color. Big Rock Head and a neighbor who Rudy calls "Schmuck-meat" are bystanders and catalysts:

RC: Are you OK, Rudy?
Rudy: No.
RC (stoically, after a beat): You're not?
Rudy (irritably): Yeah, I'm OK! I always breathe like this 'cuz I have congestive heart failure!

[Editor's note: updated for narrative clarity.]

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

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I regret that she never stopped by the house to sing this to me in person. Oh well.



Even though this tune is embedded in my substrate, memories are elusive, scrambled. And my memory check on the web transmuted it into a bit of an enigma. A month ago I'd have sworn it was a languid bossa nova composed for Astrud Gilberto by her erstwhile husband Joao. But it looks like memory conflated Dusty Springfield's 1967 performance with a too-upbeat, too-grandiose rendition by Sergio Mendez and Brazil '66 a year later. I know you all don't give a shit about my confusion, but some superficial googling only cleared up part of it yet revealed new puzzles. (I will file this post under a new label: "Thinking Too Much.")

One YouTube uploader claims that the backup band on this lovely arrangement is the Tijuana Brass, but it just sounds too tasteful and understated for that to be accurate. Yet a "long" version of the song, also posted to YouTube, is marred by a weird, tacked-on, muffled 20-second instrumental outchorus that sounds very much like the TJB heard through a bad earache. I've embedded a shorter edit here to exclude that audio carbuncle. The tenor soloist sounds like Stan Getz subtoning with Astrud Gilberto on "The Girl From Ipanema" several years earlier. But the performance seems weak, so it may be a Getz impersonator... from the TJB? Anyway, this arrangement, minus the expunged crappy outchorus, is fully carried by a quiet rhythm section: a guitar, an electric piano, and percussion. (So maybe that was how got a classy performance from the TJB back then --- send them all out to the strip club across the street except for the rhythm section, and give them a nice chart to play.) And furthermore, Dusty (to my ear) does indeed sound like Astrud to some extent in her breathiness and phrasing.

What does seem clear about the provenance of "The Look Of Love" is that it was a musical highlight in the 1967 James Bond parody version of Casino Royale (starring Peter Sellers), and that there are two recordings of it (movie soundtrack and single). And that the title ditty to that same film, called "Casino Royale" of course, was recorded by Herb Alpert and the TJB, and it charted much better than Dusty's version. And that the 1968 Sergio Mendez recording did much better in the states than did Dusty's definitive rendition.

So who the fuck knows? I was expecting this to be a three-sentence post. Anyway, just listen to Dusty Springfield's pensive treatment of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition. (More news to me!) But this is not "lounge music" or "easy listening," as it is glibly labeled by various DJs and fans. Not at all. It's an American standard.

[Editor's note: updated to provide some sorely needed coherence.]

Economic fundamentals that are ridiculously simple

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It's Friday evening so I don't want to get too deep into anything, but here's what I consider to be a huge idea that is simple enough for a high school economics student to understand. It's called The General Theory of Second Best, the title of an article explaining an economic model referred to by economists as "Lipsey-Lancaster." I first heard of it a week or two ago on Eschaton in a sort-of throwaway post by Atrios (who is an economist). I'm a nonspecialist in pretty much everything except Simple Country Editing (TM), but this theory is so darn simple that it seems impossible to argue with. That is, I don't see why it's not declared a Law instead of a mere Theory.

The crux of the theory, as I understand it, seems to be this: we don't exist in a perfect world, so therefore it is inevitable that many aspects of it are unavoidably non-optimal. That seems like a noncontroversial statement. Well, so what?

This: for 30-plus years U.S. public policy has been driven primarily by the myth of the perfect free market, and how this myth applies not only to economics but purportedly every other domain of life (such as "the marketplace of ideas"). The ideologies of laissez-faire economics (and its pernicious soul sister, Libertarianism) are based on the concept that if we all just leave everything alone, selfish individuals will collectively behave in the greater interest of society because the Free Market Faeiries (as Atrios calls them) will make everything function perfectly. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and fan of all things dumb such as South Park, refers to certain shibboleths of free market economics as The Underpants Gnomes Theory of [Fill In]: Phase 1 --- declare that free markets are perfect; Phase 2 --- ???; Phase 3 --- a ideal economy!

The unwavering belief in the failed ideas of free-market economics by our ruling elites has poisoned the public discourse, bankrupted governments, and enabled financial services corporations to loot the wealth of the U.S. middle and working classes... repeatedly... for decades. And these ideas are based on a demonstrable (if not provable) fallacy: that free markets always function perfectly without government intervention or regulation. But it seems that over 40 years ago, some guys named Lipsey and Lancaster put forth the outlandish idea that we don't live in a perfect world, but instead in a second-best world. Nothing can always be "optimal." And sometimes, lots of things are very sub-optimal indeed. And that unless your idea of an ideal market is one that deliberately creates speculative bubbles to scam wealth from middle-class investors, and your idea of enlightened self-interest is to profiteer while almost 20 percent of the population is unemployed or severely underemployed, then someone has to do something about it.

Lipsey-Lancaster seems like such a simple, bulletproof idea in its basic form that it's hard for me to understand  (1) why a well informed person like me never heard of it until 2 weeks ago and (2) why it isn't invoked as a knockdown argument every time some know-nothing wingnut policy wonk lectures us about "government takeovers."

[Editor's note: the previous essay was hastily written and not meticulously sourced because the author is late for his Friday Evening Prayer Meeting. Also, it's too long because he didn't have time to write a short one.]

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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The tune is new to me, but Rosetta Tharpe and Lucky Millinder sure ain't.



"Now he's my king / he makes me sing / four or five times."

Rosetta Tharpe, usually referred to with the prefix name "Sister," spent most of her career shouting gospel over her own guitar accompaniment. The Wikipedia writeup refers to it as "early rock and roll" guitar, but she was playing this style as early as the 19 fucking '30s! You have to hear it to believe it. Either she invented it, or one of her direct influences did. (The Wikipedia article seems poorly edited, incomplete, and lacking focus, so don't take it as the "gospel" truth nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK d'0h! So I'm writing some of this purely from a partially faulty memory.)

Anyway, Sister Tharpe brought her manic gospel shouting style to popular music early in the Big Band era, and I believe most of her recorded performances were with Lucky Millinder's band. In this setting she sang purely secular songs, or tunes that might be interpreted as either secular or sacred (like the Staples Singers did decades later). It should also be noted that Sister Tharpe was quite a showboat even in gospel settings, and her third marriage was sanctified in front of 25,000 paying customers at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, 1951. That ceremony was followed, of course, by a gospel set for the crowd.

Lucky Millinder is one of my favorite big band leaders. He wasn't an artist with a capital A like Ellington, and he didn't create a whole new jazz-blues sound like Basie, but he was everywhere for a time, backing up big-name vocalists (in the "race music" industry) like Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, and others. Millinder and his ensembles provided dance music and entertainment without lofty artistic pretensions. The charts popped, the bands swung with the best, and everything (to my ears) always sounded tight and ultra-professional.

It's Bedtime!

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This is what it looks like on a clear night at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, if you're Dr. Manhattan. Now get back to bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!


The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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With the sun climbing to about 35 degrees at high noon these days here at the 40th parallel, I'm already starting to get nostalgic about Winter 2010. How about you? Good. Here:



"Shh! Don't tell my mother. She still thinks I'm in the army."

SM requiscat in pace

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StuporMundi is no more
     for what he thought was H20
     was H2SO4

This is the second time I've borrowed that rhyme from a Scholastic Book Service volume of dumb kid humor. The first time was when I was in 4th grade, and that "borrowing" was in fact my one and only act of plagiarism ever (that I can recall).

Long live RubberCrutch. Best wishes to the rest of you, too.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

Ladies! Just look at these Invasion-era cutie-pies: The Walker Brothers!



Check out the bouncer who pushes a coupla kids away at the lower-left side of the screen right at the beginning. "Sorry lads, strictly business, you know." Lots of teenie-boppers of all genders probably wanted a piece of Scott, John, and Gary "Walker" in their heyday. In fact, in this clip it looks like most of the audience members are dudes!?! Anyway, personally, I'm partial to Scott's casual-yet-gentlemanly "mod" suit, but I'm sure plenty of you can't take your eyes off that electric ant hill John is packin' below the belt, not to mention the tantalizing glimpse of midriff. Gary, on traps, is wearing a sweater that Big Otis might have purchased at Zayre in Canterbury Gardens to jazz up his sophomore junior wardrobe.

The acoustics in the TV studio are just celestial, and when the crowd does sing-along backgrounds on the chorus it sounds like a host of archangels. Can't figure out where they stashed the orchestra, though.

To my 5th-grade 7th-grade ears, this sounded like a Very Important Song, and I imagined the Walkers to be grown-ups just like Frank Sinatra. But they appear to have been expatriate American surfer dudes who found a niche in Swinging London. I could, and have, listened to this song over and over again. But even as a runt I felt that the composer wasn't even trying when he penned that lame bridge. (Even if you don't know what the "bridge" is, you'll know it right away in this song; it's the part where it sounds like a page of the score was missing so everybody just faked it for eight measures. Too bad the nice German man talks over the out-chorus, but I still think it's a primo clip.

Update: temporal references corrected, with thanks to Big Hussein Otis.

It's Bedtime!

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Enough is enough! I have had it with this motherfucking snake and this motherfucking baby! Now get back to bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Obama's "hypercompetitive bantam rooster"

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Dan Froomkin, who formerly authored a very popular liberal political blog for the Washington Post before being fired for... authoring a very popular liberal political blog... published a piece today at HuffingtonPost that considers the contributions of Rahm Emanuel to Obama's "success" as a political leader so far. As the President's Chief of Staff, Emanuel has more access to Obama than any other person in the administration. Of the President's "hypercompetitive bantam rooster" Froomkin says

He is a Bush Democrat in that he has allowed Republicans to traumatize him into submission. Emanuel operates on a battlefield as defined by Republicans, where the terrain is littered with the specter of imaginary but profoundly terrifying GOP attack ads. His reflexive approach is the strategic retreat.

You can see Rahm's pernicious influence again everywhere: in the White House's failure of leadership (until last week) on healthcare reform, or its fetish with "bipartisanship," or any other failure by Obama to even look like he is trying to act on behalf of the people who elected him.

Cenk Uyger, also at HuffingtonPost, has an interesting hypothesis about Rahm's future that is supported by the flurry of hagiography Froomkin refers to in his article. I do hope that Cenk right.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

Charlie Mingus near the end of his career at Umbria, 1974. This band is very similar to the power quintet that recorded Changes 1 and 2. I was extremely lucky to see the Changes band twice within 3 months in 1975 at Amazing Grace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Ill. I like this Umbria lineup even better because it replaces the mediocre (in my opinion) trumpeter Jack Walrath with a guy I never heard of named Hamiet Bluiett on bari. And Bluiett is even wearing a crazy hat, just like Mike I.! With George Adams on tenor, this is a monster wall o' sax! Mingus is making it look easy to pluck that enormous instrument of his, too.

When I saw the Changes band, in the company of the late, great Count (Brad, not Basie), I remember him as being quite subdued. A nonmusical highlight of the first evening was seeing Mingus pick up a cigar from his ash tray and put it in his mouth. Then, after about three very long seconds he removed the cigar from his mouth, turned it 180 degrees on its axis, and chomped back down on it with the lit end out this time.

Above Top Secret

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Items like this give me the willies. Few remember today what Daniel Ellsberg is remembered for. [Editor's note: the previous sentence is lexical nonsense, but it has a nice Yogi Berra feel to it, so we'll keep it intact and start over with a new paragraph.]

I think it's accurate to say that most people today don't really understand what Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg did to become famous starting in 1969, but when I read about it as a mature adult it's truly a mind-blower. You don't have to be anyone special to get a Top Secret clearance, you only have to demonstrate a need to know information classified at that level and convince a nice FBI agent that you're not a current or potential traitor, or highly susceptible to bribery or blackmail by one. So it seems reasonable to me that there must be at least some levels above Top. If Ellsberg says there were 10 levels above when he provided orientation for new National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger --- and I don't know of any reason to doubt him --- then maybe now there are 15 or 20.

It's a shibboleth of conventional wisdom, smugly accepted by everyone from Josh Marshall to Glenn Beck, that people who suspect that some national events are shaped by large conspiracies are "conspiracy theorists," and that "conspiracy theorists" are ipso facto lunatics. Therefore, all reasonable adults know that grand covert conspiracies could never take place because that would just be crazy. The conspiracy to conceal the truth about the unwinnable Vietnam War from the public never happened, and neither did the conspiracy to cover up the Watergate burglary. The Warren Commission Report fully explains away compelling visual forensic evidence of a President's murder that we all can see with our own two lying eyes. And all of the questions raised by theologian David Ray Griffin in his densely footnoted 9/11 Contradictions are "spurious" just because some of them are. Good thinking!

Just to avoid being misunderstood, like every other responsible adult I'm aware that the country is full of conspiracy nuts. But just what exactly do we suppose is locked away in those Armageddon-proof safes where the Top+10 files are archived?

Fuck it. I'm heading for The Saturday Night Fish Fry!

Friday Night Bonus Reel

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While I'm on the subject of  "Buddys," here's a guerrilla recording made on the bus of one instantiation of The Buddy Rich Big Band, date unknown to me.



"Whattaya play?!? CLAMS??!!!"

If you like that, there's more here. I especially like the Beard Confrontation starting at about 5:40. "I got a right hand on your fuckin' brain if ya want it!!!"

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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In my opinion, here is the best version of this Neil Young tune that you've probably never heard.



Buddy Miles was a very portly gentleman I principally knew of in connection with this band, The Buddy Miles Express, then as the drummer for Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies. Me and old high school pals had a laugh when we found out Buddy was the lead vocalist for the California Raisins in those 1980s "California Raisin Advisory Board" commercials. And that's the reason I bought four California Raisin figurines at a garage sale some years ago.

It was sad for me to look Buddy up on Wikipedia and find out that he died in 2008. But I was also startled to discover how ubiquitous he was in the music industry during the 1960s, having played with Ruby & the Romantics, the Delfonics and Wilson Pickett, then later forming Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield. His pop was George Miles Sr., a successful jazzman who had his own band and played with heavy dudes like Ellington, Basie, Bird, and Dexter Gordon. Also was not aware that his mom nicknamed him as a reference to tubs maniac Buddy Rich. But according to the accounts I've read, Miles was an all-around nice guy.

Neil Young fans will disagree, but in my opinion Buddy has always owned this song. I think it could have been a monster Top 40 hit, but six-plus minutes was still too long to play on AM radio in 1969. Could have made Neil a rich(er) hippie.

I read the news today. Oh boy.

*

Whenever I read a story like this I wonder if assassination has become a sensational new American trend in the 21st century or if it's always been this popular. I hear myself and others rationalizing that maybe it's always been this bad but largely hidden from view before most people had access to the Internet. I've caught myself almost becoming blasé with every new report of a workplace shooting, a mini campus massacre, or personal assassination orchestrated by an aggrieved, insane individual. But this story stuck out to me, as did the last sentence in it:

The shooting occurred three days after a 32-year-old man with a history of mental illness opened fire in a middle school parking lot in Colorado, wounding two students. 

The latter shooting was perpetrated Tuesday in Littleton, Colorado, and surprisingly didn't seem to get overly lurid national news attention. That's good, but also made it easy to miss what with all the news about the Winter Olympics and Tiger Woods losing his "Gatorade" endorsement.

It shouldn't be difficult to find real statistics indicating that this is in fact a postmodern development rather than a visibility increase with respect to the American norm for murderous behavior. I don't feel like doing the research, and believe that my gut reaction is sufficient evidence for my own purposes.

Everyone can speculate about the compound causes so I will, too. America's collective nonchalance about the entertainment value of bloody violence is certainly one driver --- how could it not be when children are raised to think teenage splatter movies are funny? The coincident rise in individual social isolation and mental illness also are at the foundation. Now, the emergence of a hideously antisocial postmodern conservative Christian worldview that is neither conservative nor Christian may be completely unrelated, but it seems to me that it isn't. After all, postmodern America is a place where the idea of government-inflicted torture inspires "debate" and "ethical quandaries" instead of universal moral outrage.

Editor's note: even though the author is sermonizing above, it does not constitute your Friday Evening Prayer Meeting. You can find that right here.

Ten-dimensional Rigelian Chess in the Neutral Zone

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I can't keep up with it, being just meat and bone and a small nugget of gray matter on a stick. In my guts I feel it would be expecting too much to view the President's healthcare reform "summit" as an intentional gimmick to trap Republican Senate leadership into showing the public how gormless they are; how unprepared they are to withstand any rhetorical pushback; how full of shit they are. But the Republicans themselves have already let that cat out of the bag: they fear it and are stupid enough to say so. And, significantly, Obama has proactively taken ownership of the "Obamacare" sobriquet by throwing his own proposal on the table, so his own executive prestige is on the table, too. To me that means Obama is going to use all his good offices to make sure we have a Democrat-driven healthcare reform package signed into law within a few weeks if not sooner. Likewise, Sen. Dick Durbin (majority whip) also put his manhood on the table by declaring that Democrats will move forward to pass legislation without Republicans. They really have no choice now except to do it or reap permanent contempt from all sides, forever.

Good show, blokes. Except Obama, Durbin, and others like Tom Harkin are pretty much declaring that the public option is dead in the process. Why? In a game 10-dimensional Rigelian chess, you see, it doesn't matter that most people in this country are strongly in favor of government-administered health insurance for people who can't afford private insurance, or that analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that a healthcare bill would be less expensive with a public option than without one. (Google your own sources tonight, kids; I'm tired.) What really matters, according to the rules of this game, is The Spectacle and, especially, how the adversary perceives it.

Maybe we'll get something and maybe we'll get another 9 months of melodrama. Will Glenn Beck holler "rape!" at a NARAL convention? Will Harry Reid get another Lieberman tattoo on his inner thigh? Will Barack Obama carve an "O" in Sarah Palin's forehead for real this time? I'd be satisfied with a more modest spectacle: Democratic Senators publically dripping contempt on their esteemed sociopathic friends across the aisle.

When Republicans declare that most Americans oppose the House and Senate healthcare reform proposals, I wonder why 33rd Degree Rigelian Chessmaster Obama doesn't kindly reply that two-thirds of that opposition comes from people who think the law needs a public option. And then kindly order Reid, Durbin, Pelosi, and Hoyer to make it so on penalty of immediate reassignment to administer umox at a Ferengi leper colony. It would be a regular spectacle.

It's Bedtime!

*

And I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!



As requested by Big Otis for some reason. If he wants to hear any more rapping by Lorne Greene he'll just have to start his own crappy blog.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

Here's the situation
And how it really stands
I'm out of circulation
I've all but washed my hands



To my knowledge there was never a recording like this before 1966 or afterward until the late 1970s. I liked it as a kid but never fully appreciated it until I nabbed my own copy while collecting "old" 45s in the mid-seventies. I don't read rock publications but must assume that a herd of pre-Reagan punk bands have paid their proper respect to The Music Machine (and this minor hit in particular). The embedded video is one of two on YouTube, visually clearer than the other but appearing somewhat staged. My preferred version can be viewed here. It's more authentic looking, but YouTube has disabled the embedding so I can't show it to you here. Crank it.

Bye now, payola later

*

A helpful post on TPM indicates that Senator Evan Bayh cannot bring his $13 million home with him when he retires this year, as I thought used to be the case. However, he can ladle the gravy to whomever he likes, subject to Federal Election Commission rules. So at very least, Bayh gets to be a philanthropist and Big Man On Campus --- the campus of "moderate" Democrat copperheads looking for campaign handouts, that is. So a little man of the Senate can now buy himself some big respect. (At least until we find out about the goat that is still behind the curtain.)

Evan Bayh makes a deal!

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Evan Bayh's surprise announcement about not running for re-election to his Indiana Senate seat has so far inspired two theories: one is that his stated reason for doing so is genuine and the other is that he may "have his eye on the presidency." Neither theory explains why Bayh's move was so abrupt that it caught most of his own Senate and campaign staff members by surprise. So, without more hard information, I'm not "Bayhing" either of them. (Thank you.)

I suggest that we consider analyzing the Evan Bayh puzzle using the analysis tool known as The Monty Hall Problem. See, Evan is playing Let's Make A Deal. He knows that behind two of the curtains are goats, but behind the other curtain is: A NEW CAR! Like every red-blooded American, Evan wants A NEW CAR. He already knew which curtain he would pick. But, say late last week, someone in the control room whispered into his earpiece that his curtain has a goat behind it. So today Bayh chose a different curtain, and behind it was an awkwardly truncated Senate career... and a $13 million Senate campaign war chest* that he gets to keep!

Evan Bayh is not running for President because that's definitely a "goat" for him; no chance for that to turn into anything other than a way to blow $13M out his vent feathers. And he is not retiring because he feels the Senate is broken, because he is well aware that he's one of the main people responsible for breaking it. So then what is he doing? To find out, we need to follow the Monty. If we can find out who whispered to Evan from Master Control (National Inquirer? Larry Flynt? Justice Department?) then we will know which goat he left behind his curtain.

[Editor's note: the author grudgingly admits he's probably all full of shit on this one.]
___________________
* I'm pretty sure this is accurate, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

Come along if you dare.



As you can see, back in 1968 the bands knew how to do a credible lipsyncing job. (The Who probably even knew how to do it, at least before botox penetrated the blood/brain barrier of Ellen DeGeneris lookalike Roger Daltry.) Also, to my eyebones, this is a relatively rare example of '60s footage in which the go-go dancers enhance the ambiance instead of detracting from it like arrhythmic, limp-muscled runaway teenie-boppers. The galloping rhythm section kicks ass, so does Ted Nugent's guitar. I've long felt that the lyrics glorify the mystic experience rather than psychedelic hipness, the drug mystique, or simple hedonism.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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As far as psychedelic scare stories go, this one is pretty tame. After all, don't we all hear the primal scream of the hot dog in real life? Myself, one early experience revealed to me that my flesh was composed of the same material as Hostess Twinkies (R). It wasn't as horrible as the experience of biting into a hot dog (much less curb-stomping one), but it did get me thinking. I'd think the documentarians responsible for this piece of work could have found a hot dog face more outre than a Wishnik troll doll. (Danny Baldwin and I used to decapitate the things to creep out the girls, most enjoyably with devices of Baldwin's own nefarious design.) Anyway, across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not, here ya go: a cautionary tale.



I really wish that people didn't feel it was necessary to shit on a nice period piece like this with some stupid logo intended to imply that some postmodern asshole contributed to the intellectual property somehow. I hope the next time that the proprietor of alldumb.com bites into a hot dog, he severs a few veins impacted with spirochetes.

Wise sayings

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[Editor's note: this edition of wise sayings is provided 2 days early, via the good offices of Beer-D, so you have time to bathe in its wiseness.]

The only thing worse than being alone on Valentine's Day is not being alone.

Maybe, but I have reason to doubt

*

This guy, whomever he may be, thinks Obama may be launching a campaign to draw Main Street's attention to the  sharp contrast between Democrats, who are trying to conduct the people's business, and Republicans, who have no goal other than to prevent the majority party from governing.

Well, maybe. If so, then Obama is beginning a thrilling gambit in his game of 10-dimensional chess --- maybe analogous to deliberately ceding the lead to the other team at halftime, then launching the third quarter with an onside kick and blinding touchdown drive that leaves the bad guys befuddled and deflated. And the crowd goes wild.

In order for this hypothetical tactic to work any magic, congressional Democrats in both chambers would have to get behind the quarterback and mash some Republican heads without worrying about how it might look to the Washington Post editorial board. In other words, the President and congressional Democrats would have to start ruthlessly working on a constructive agenda so regular people could have a taste of what progressive good government has to offer in contrast to the zombie Reagan agenda.

Nope, I don't see it happening. Just expecting more 1-dimension tiddly winks as usual, as Big Hussein Otis has called it.

Tuesday Night Bedtime

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And I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Now this is what life is all about: Frank Zappa and the "Roxy" Mothers providing a classic primer on "imaginary diseases" (as Frank used to call things like smelly feet and BO). I saw this band and several variants five or six times between 1973 and 1975, including this very lineup in Bloomington, Ill. He even makes a reference to Tom Waits, who was opening for FZ when "Heart of Saturday Night" was released. The deliciously average-looking Ruth Underwood is shown here wearing only a bra on top, but not because it was her custom to dress like a "ho." It's because it gets pretty fucking hot under stage lighting, especially when you're darting around like a whirling dervish between 10 linear yards of mallet percussion instruments, drums, cymbals, and what-have-you. In Bloomington (1974) they had to briefly pause the show because she fainted due to overheating (after her solo on "Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?" I think).



I think this video comes from Zappa's Dub Room Special DVD. The performance, probably from the 1974 Roxy shows, is extra-nice for several reasons. First, it's not rushed in tempo, which was a classic Zappa shortcoming in latter-year live performances. Second, this version isn't retrofitted with AAAFNRA* litter, which Zappa continually did to keep things interesting for himself during nonstop touring, yet he does tweak the lyric to acknowledge the presence of Waits backstage, keeping things spontaneous. And third, FZ edited in some claymation by Bruce Bickford, who seems to be as closely in touch with his own id as Robert Crumb. This animated video flourish is, in my opinion, an example of AAAFNRA at its best.
                                                
* Unfortunately for many fans, including me, these ad hoc AAAFNRA modifications to lyrics, melodies, and arrangements often amounted to little more than in jokes for the band or weak second thoughts on how to present the original piece.

Ruled by superminority

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Maybe you've heard about this jagoff of a U.S. Senator from Alabama who has abused Senate protocol rules to put a blanket hold on all of President Obama's nominees until he extorts some public funds for projects in his state. This isn't traditional legislative logrolling for the purpose of maximizing the bacon one brings back for the hometown crowd, which happens within routine lawmaking practice. It's the exercise of a secret active veto over pretty much any Senate activity by a single bad actor.

I haven't read the stories about this closely enough to know how the obstructionist's secret identity was revealed, but my understanding is that, at the very least, the Senate Majority Leader by definition must know who has placed the hold... and that it's considered not very gentlemanly for the Majority Leader to "out" that person.

So not only do Democrats feel they can't control the legislative agenda without a Senate supermajority (i.e., 60 votes as needed to overcome the threat of a filibuster). They don't even feel they can act on a routine presidential nomination if a single member of the club decides against it... because holding that member publically accountable would seem impolite.

All of the above, while not unique or profound observation, I present as background for a couple of Paul Krugman blog posts wherein he describes the abuse of the nobility's liberum veto in 17th century Poland. This familiar-sounding political dysfunction greatly contributed to the collapse, breakup, and annexation of that country, by its neighbors, at the dawn of The Enlightenment elsewhere in Europe.

So the bad news is that America seems to be swirling helplessly around the drain that empties into the septic tank of feudalism. (Think of nobility such as the Duke of CitiCorp, the Prince of General Electric, and the Archbishop of Viacom.) The jury is still out on any good news this may portend.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This is for Gurlitzer, if you're still out there. Don't know about you, but this was the first rendition of Stormy Monday I ever heard. Many hipsters would say this version is absurd, what with the Hammond organ sounding like a couples skate at the roller rink, and Lee Michaels with his earnest white-boy falsetto. But it hits the same spot as Wagner does on my aural palate.

Tuesday Night Bedtime

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And I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!!!

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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

The biomimicry of the Reagan Revolution

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

Introducing the failPad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most important thing

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

Pop culture amnesia

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

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

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

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

Wise sayings

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

A parody of a parody

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incoming

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

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

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

Watch this space for more exciting details soon!!!

The Obama Age of Aquarius

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Fair use claimed: reproduced for purposes of social commentary.

See how it works?

*
It works like this: Jay Rockefeller denounces Howard Dean as "irresponsible" for suggesting that lousy HCR legislation be scrapped, but he doesn't denounce Joseph Lieberman (King of the United States) as irresponsible for aggressively acting to scrap the HCR legislation unless Rockefeller's public option was removed from the language.

Sure, Jay is upset, he confesses. But that doesn't mean "...I take my football, and run home and sulk, and complain, or hold out for $100 million for something in West Virginia," he assures us. No, he mans up to it all and... blames Howard Dean.

Wherein I have a sissyfight with JMM

*
It should be evident to anyone who reads this that Josh Marshall is my media hero, mainly due to the accomplishments of his TPM investigative reporting unit and his fine capacity both for issuing political ridicule and championing human decency. But today, with this post and a few earlier ones, the lad has disgustipated me. Just like that, both the public option and Medicare buy-in are dead at the hands of the King and Queen of the United States, Joseph and Olympia. But Josh thinks that furious progressives (not to mention the majority of Americans) should bend over and take it for the good of the Democratic Party. I wrote a note to tell Josh, politely, that he's full of shit. Here it is, for what it's worth:

“Ravening masses,” Josh? Really? Pheeewwww!

So many “responsible” liberals, like some who pontificate in your comments threads and sometimes you yourself, always seem ready to provide cover to “serious” politicians like the putative King and Queen of the United States, Lieberman and Snowe, when they bargain in bad faith in order to destroy progressive public policy initiatives that are favored by a majority of Americans. These people enable the erosion of majority rule by lecturing us about how "something is really better than nothing," and that if we threaten to pull our support then we’re “taking our marbles and going home.” We’re engaging in political theater instead of political activism. We need to grow up. Or whatever.

Progressives are authorized by you to speak our piece --- gosh, thanks!!! --- but not to use our own political muscle to sabotage King Joseph’s health care vision for us peasants (which is to say, no meaningful reform whatsoever plus increased costs for many, many working people). Withdrawing support from this ugly policy initiative would be irresponsible of progressives, you say; a “cop out.” Pheeewwww! You rarely reek of sanctimony, but today you sure do.

Joe Lieberman, with constant backroom assistance from Rahm Emanuel in the White House and the entire GOP as a pom pom squad, blocks and scuttles majority rule in this country, and “responsible” liberals cluck a pretty good game about it. But in the final analysis, betrayed progressives are expected to STFU, accede to King Joseph’s proclamations, and “improve it” later. Tell me: what makes you believe that it will be feasible to “improve it” later if King Joseph and Queen Olympia do not wish it to be improved? Seriously: what makes you think that is a possibility?

This situation represents an epic failure of Democratic leadership, especially by Obama, who is supposed to be, um, a leader after all. Since you are a “political junkie,” I will direct your attention to Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” Machiavelli’s contribution to political science was not his prescriptions for achieving ends by any means, but by describing what successful leaders from history *did* to achieve their ends. And, as you’re fond of saying, it wasn’t through bean bag. I’m not suggesting that President Obama lead his adversaries to their demise behind a velvet curtain, Caesar Borgia style. But geez: RTFM! For starters, you don’t invite a Fifth Columnist from the other side into your tent, at least not if you expect to keep your own counsel. Next, you do use your charm, your guile, and your muscle to compel people (particularly opportunists) to get with your program. Neither Obama nor Harry Reid seem to have any idea whatsoever about how to get anything done, except on behalf of King Joseph and Queen Olympia. Step back and ask yourself, what is really going on here? If Obama really believes he’s playing 11-dimensional chess, as Atrios likes to joke, then he’s stalemated in half of the dimensions and checkmated in the rest.

If this useless HCR legislation represents a “responsible” liberal’s idea of the best the Democratic Party can do to help our constitutional democracy start clawing its way out of the hole after 30 years of Reagan Revolution, then you can have it. It makes zero real-world difference if policy wonks see some advantages to passing the current legislation: there’s nothing in it for me or anyone I know. It makes zero difference to me that scuttling this version of HCR would be an embarrassment and a 2010 electoral disaster: they deserve it.

To be more specific, the “responsible” Democratic Party does not deserve the support of progressives as it has “progressively” been undermining our interests since the day Ronald Reagan smirked his way into the Oval Office and tore out the solar panels. I totally advocate that progressives should “pick up our marbles and go home.” They’re *our* marbles! And you can’t succeed without them any more than you can succeed without Lieberman’s marbles. Politics ain't bean bag. So go ahead, “responsible” liberals: call us “cop outs.” Cluck about us from now until the inauguration of President Lieberman and Vice President Snowe. Maybe that will be change you can believe in. But not me.

So then, Josh wrote back:

"[StuporMundi], You might want to adjust your sensor for facetious post titles."

And then, my tit for a tat (and I'm done, because basically he's a mensch):

Maybe my sensor does need adjusting, Josh. But judging by the body of your post, the title doesn't seem facetious at all. Your point appears to be that the ravening masses need to get with the Lieberman/Snowe/Landrieu program because it provides "monumental gains" relative to something or other. And that progressives who want to use Lieberman's tactics to scuttle the legislation are irresponsible "cop-outs." So maybe the title of your post is facetious in your eyes only, but actually an accurate indicator of your intended meaning. (Incidentally, there was something more to my note than the throwaway comment about the title of your post. Maybe there was some substance, maybe not.)

Judging from what you wrote, it seems that in your view this HCR legislation must clear the Senate *not* because it's good for U.S. citizens, but because it would be an electoral disaster for the Democrats to come away empty handed. If that's the case, so be it. If the Republicans are going to continue dictating regressive national policy through people like Lieberman and Snowe (and helpmeets like Rahm Emanuel), then let's allow the GOP to directly control the levers of government so they can be fully held to account when all the chickens come to roost. Today Krugman said, not ironically, that this nation is well on its way to failed-state status. I agree, and am not sanguine about that.

That's all. A bunch of recycled words about my hissy fit in the blogosphere today. This Lieberman/Snowe agenda is pretty much what I've been expecting the Senate to come up with. We've been treated to 6 months of political theater: Garfield Goose on the Little Theater Screen. My political contributions for the foreseeable future will be routed to progressive Democrats challenging apparatchiks like Harry Reid and Claire McCaskill and Max Baucus in primaries.

Update before I'm done: JMM and I had one more exchange but it's not worth reporting because I need to log off and download some more purple booze into my gullet.

The King of the United States; or What We Can Learn About Current Events from The Little Theater Screen and William Shakespeare

When I was growing up in Chicago, the must-see after-school show for kids of a certain age range was Garfield Goose and Friends. See, Gar was the self-appointed King of the United States. His Prime Minister and "mouthpiece" was one Frazier Thomas (not pictured in the photo at the left, which, incidentally is being reproduced in compliance with the Fair Use Doctrine for purposes of education and social commentary). Nobody except Frazier could understand Gar's furious declamations, which consisted of the clattering together of a two-piece fiberglass bill, signifying nothing. Frazier also used his good offices as the official interpreter for all the other mute puppets on the show. By "interpreter" I mean that Frazier basically put words in their mouths because any sound that issued was incomprehensible to the viewer. Frazier Thomas served as the affable, long-suffering Enabler In Chief for a delusional Monarch.

Joe Lieberman, our current King of the United States, is similar to Garfield Goose in that he is operated by an unknown puppeteer with a hand way up his ass, and the sounds he makes are insanely grating on the ear. The corporate media, our current Royal Enablers, are similar to Frazier Thomas in that they presume to tell us exactly what Joe Lieberman's sociopathic performance art piece means by putting words in his mouth for us to hear. Unlike Joe Lieberman, Garfield Goose never did anyone harm when off camera. And unlike our corporate media, Frazier Thomas would often challenge The King's intelligence, motives, and ethics, and the substance of these challenges would be borne out in the end as Gar got his comeuppance about this thing or that. And he'd also show us Clutch Cargo cartoons on The Little Theater Screen.

I am utterly dumbfounded, even as I and so many others have fully expected it, that our constitutional democracy has come to this: the triumph of minority rule as ceded by the representatives of the true majority to the party of know-nothings, bigots, Wall Street, tea-baggers, and no doubt more than a handful of holocaust deniers.

It's pointless to blame Joe Lieberman, a known serpent who is behaving exactly like a serpent. I blame Barack "Othello" Obama and his lieutenant, Rahm "Iago" Emanuel. Evidently Iago's machinations have the Moor of Hawaii utterly unable to lead the nation or his own congressional majority, and so suspicious of his own Mandate For Change that he's getting ready to smother the life out of it like Desdemona in her chambers.

Afterword: This current disgusting healthcare reform episode, plus the concurrent military escalation in "The Stans," compels me to dust off the Petraeus-Lieberman Dream Ticket Theory for 2010. Not my dream, you understand; just my theory. Most Democrats deserve to have their asses handed to them for this travesty, but not mine and yours as well.

What I learned from the Bible this week

I have been working my way through the Book of Genesis, words by God Almighty with pictures by Robert Crumb. It is interesting to read reputable translations, unexpurgated and basically unedited except where Crumb jumped between different translations to restore a "Behold!" or select a more scholarly and precise choice of words than King James's crew provided. I say interesting because Judeo-Christian ideas and references so permeate Western Civilization that many of us don't recognize the full extent. Irrespective of any literal or allegorical truth found in the text, reading this book is to me a very similar experience to reading a good history.

I found the story of Noah and the Ark to be intriguing. This adventure was much more of an ordeal for Noah and his stalwart family than I ever received in Sunday School. The narrative is vivid and it plays out over a time scale that makes the flood and its rescission almost seem plausible. The three gentlemen pictured at upper left are Noah's three sons, Shem, Japheth, and Ham. I immediately noticed that Ham appears to have an anger problem, as if about to exclaim "Get busy, Porkypine, we got a job to do!" as a prelude to a smack in the kisser. And Shem seems to be cooking up a wisecrack, apparently vulnerable to the same lapses of judgment that plagued his distant descendant, Samuel Horwitz.

I claim "discovery" of this charming coincidence in the same way I claim "discovery" of Saturn about 25 years ago in my backyard telescope after returning from the fridge with my third beer, after the earth had revolved a few degrees through the ecliptic. I performed a quick google search to discover that, sadly, comics publisher Dan Nadel had made the same connection back in October, shortly after publication. (Schmuck probably got a free review copy, but I had to save my hard-earned shekels to purchase mine.)

As far as I can tell, this is the only "gag" Crumb embedded into his Old Testament illustrations. Somehow, this works for me and I think it might not offend me even if I had a long-nurtured reverence for the text. When you look at Crumb's drawings of the ark, sealed with hot pitch, it's easy to see these three lunkheads tripping over each other and bonking each other on the noggin with 8-cubit two-by-fours.

Editor's note: fair use is claimed for the image of Shem, Japheth, and Ham, which is reproduced here for purposes of literary critique and education. The art panel is copyright 2009 by R. Crumb; the text is in the public domain as previously furnished by The Lord and His earthly designees.

Analysis of my paralysis

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My "paralysis" is metaphorical, thankfully, but genuine in that very sense. I've simply lost the capacity to comment frequently on an unprecedented upwelling of mass psychosis and psychopathy that is represented to news consumers as "populist vigor." Rising rapidly to the top of my reading list is the Book of Revelations (or whatever its official name is), in which it is shown that the end times will be characterized by a polar reversal in how the damned human race assesses good and evil. I'm starting to think that the Jehovah's Witnesses may be more credible interpreters of reality than The New York Times.

That's not all. I've been deeply affected by the sight of Barack Obama futilely scampering around to co-opt snakes and sworn enemies under his imaginary big tent of collegiality. Maybe Obama really is playing some awesome game of 10-dimensional chess in which he's five moves ahead of all opponents on all planes. But I have no way of guessing, and he's used up all the benefits of my many reasonable doubts. Basically, it appears to me that he's using the Oval Office for approximately the same purposes I feared Hillary Clinton would: to symbolically appease credulous liberals with rhetoric and tokens while nurturing same cabal that began delegating our national sovereignty to a world government administered by banks and industrial corporations 30 years ago. (Sometimes I think the Black Helicopter crowd, in some sense, may have a more accurate worldview than Tom Friedman --- they are just hallucinating about who is pulling the strings while Friedman revels in the glory of the institutions that really are pulling the strings.)

For the past several weeks I've been trying to figure out what to do with this blog. It seems impossible a the moment to write a meaningful opinion essay on public affairs. The data stream is fully choked with disinformation and what Situationists called The Spectacle. I'm leaning toward a radical de-emphasis of direct commentary on The Spectacle since it's about like trying to document all the faces that appear in the clouds when no one else is looking.

Let's see what emerges. Something asymmetric, I hope.

Dumb sayings

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One medium latte, including tip: $4
Closing costs on house refinance: $1650
New 15 foot steel garage door and opener: $2400
New radiator, head gaskets, timing belt, water pump, and thermostat: Pricey....