Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Happy 100th birthday to the late Mary Lou Williams, who would have been very welcome in the pantheon of immortals born 2 days earlier than May 8. You can hear a bit about her from this so-so commemoration from NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, but her Wikipedia entry gives a much better impression of her place in jazz history from the early big band era well into bop, and then later, into Catholic sacred music.

The fact that she was a teacher and colleague of people like Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie must speak volumes about her charisma and musical gravitas. Jazz was always an insanely macho-asshole culture, where newcomers were mercilessly humiliated in after-hour jams --- "cutting contests" --- by established musicians who had previously suffered the same way and should have known better. (Who knows how many potential giants wept, packed their bags, and took a Grayhound back to the sticks because of this pointless malevolent treatment?)

Anyhow, take a look at her portrait on the Morning Edition site --- looks like a tough lady, all business and sultry in a "forget it, Buster!" sort of way. Then listen to this oddball piece, "The Land of O0-Bla-Dee," recorded by Dizzy in 1947 (I think). Mary Lou composed the tune to accompany a ridiculous "bop fable" penned by a guy named Milton Orent (about whom I can find nothing on short notice). The lyrics are funny but surrealistically creepy, sort of like that Looney Tune from the same era where Bugs Bunny is giving Elmer Fudd Daliesque nightmares. The chart lurches along like the two ungainly sisters of the Beautiful Princess, with stutter-steps, asymmetric lines, and unexpected minor chords at the ends of verses where you'd expect majors. The melody line sounds utterly drunk in trajectory, which vocalist Joe Carroll helps to really "sell" with his delivery.



I knew this tune long before I knew Mary Lou composed it, and I never would have guessed that. It really sounds like something Dizzy would have come up with --- really not a "ladylike" sort of sound at all. And despite the hardened nightclub sexuality of the portrait at NPR, all accounts I've read of her agree that she was a very sweet and dignified lady, as she appears in the 1930s portrait shown below, before another decade of playing with some very tough customers. Happy birthday, Beautiful Princess.

Update: looks like I missed the midnight deadline by a few minutes when posting. Mary Lou's birthday was May 8, not May 9, just to be clear about things for a change.

Another update: while poking around for something else on Google I found this nifty piece about Mary Lou published on 12 September 1949 in Time. Of note: the Time says she characterized Oo-Bla-Dee as a five-course satire of the Bop genre... in 1949! Making fun of the giants!

Ecological 9/11? [updated]

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The headline of this post employs a gimmick that I generally despise, namely the glib sensationalization of pretty much everything for the purpose of a catchy "hed." But in fact this thought is seriously occurring to me. BP is officially clueless about what to do now that the giant cofferdam* has failed to contain the gusher. Even if it had worked, I'm guessing the leak has already exceeded the size of the Exxon Valdez, and probably by a lot. Reporting I've heard about the rate of leaking have been ambiguous (i.e., conflicting or vague numbers about the leak rate), but the Alaska disaster involved about 11 million barrels gallons if I remember correctly. But, as I say, the most feasible idea for capping this thing has failed.

Now consider the reason why the cofferdam solution failed, as reported in the linked story from ThinkProgress above: frozen methane. BP had accounted for running into methane ice and had addressed it through engineering. But they found it forming either in much greater quantities or at a much faster rate than projected. Worldwide there's a lot of this stuff lurking way deep in oceans --- giant deposits of methane gas frozen into enormous slushy masses called clathrates. My senior science advisor has told me in the past that methane clathrates are pretty much benign, ecologically, unless they warm up enough to re-enter their gaseous phase and bubble up through the briny deep into our air supply. Methane, as it happens, is a much more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, meaning ton for ton it traps much more heat than CO2. And guess what can help those clathrates evaporate --- global warming! Ding! I do not know how much methane is venting from the wellhead or how long it will remain frozen in the gulf, but it's not a stretch to say that this spill may have a potentially serious impact on the atmosphere as well as the sea.

Also consider what might happen if the spreading slick were to find its way into the Gulf Stream. I don't know how likely it is that the gulf currents will take this sludge around Flordia and up the East Coast, but it certainly seems like something to be concerned about.

NIMBYism may sometimes, or often, be a hypocritical kneejerk reaction that people have against land or resource uses they would fully support as long as it's not in their back yard. But there are plenty of things that everyone has a right to expect will not happen in their back yard. What happens when a pernicious development happens in the back yard of, say, 5 or 10 or 50 million people? Here's what: Republican Governor Schwarzenegger flipflops without sweating a single bullet. And every law of politics says he was completely correct even though, uncharacteristically, it was also the right thing to do.

Finally, consider just how big this back yard really is when you take into account (1) ruined livelihoods, (2) fatal damage to coastal ecosystems and biodiversity, (3) ruined oceanfront real estate, and (4) destruction of aquaculture and seafood resources. Oh yeah: don't forget skyrocketing energy prices as the good folks at Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips and Chevron and Saudi Aramco (and, yes, BP) go for the jugular of the oil-consuming public to extract the greatest possible return on investment in this holocaust.

The real impact of September 11 for most of us (i.e., those of us who weren't killed, maimed, traumatized, or crazed with grief for someone who those things did happen to at one of the Ground Zeros) was that popular sentiment was manipulated by very bad people into support for two illegal, disastrous wars and one unitary surveillance state. And that act of terrorism --- as spectacular, amoral, and gut-churning as it was --- had no concrete impact on the vast majority of Americans (until our teenagers started killing and being killed overseas, and our civil liberties at home began slumping like a mudslide). I wonder what socio-political witches' brew might start fermenting if the dirt-cheap shrimp disappear from Red Lobster and the sunrise reflects from an oily sheen off Cape Cod.

Update: part of the ambiguity about leakage rates I noted above probably relates to the fact that the media sometimes refer to barrels, sometimes to gallons, and other times to tons. The Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons, not 11 million barrels --- my apologies. The unit conversion for 1 barrel is 42 gallons, meaning that if the leakage rate figure stated here (8th paragraph) is correct, that means roughly a quarter-million gallons ooze in each day. There are two unknowns: one is how long this will go on; the other is whether BP is lowballing the leakage rate for purposes of public appearances. So is the really a possible "Ecological 9/11"? We have to hope not, but the answer is directly related to how many "back yards" are trashed and how many bank accounts are strained as a result.
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* I get to use this word because I've actually written about cofferdams in the past... so there!

An explanation for Gurlitzer

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She of the heading above expressed confusion about this post in the comments thread. Too much shorthand in my work there, or I should say not enough longhand.

What's The Matter With Kansas is a book by Thomas Frank that examines why social conservatives reliably have voted against their own best interests (i.e., for Republicans) for the past 40 or 50 years. Wikipedia says Franks:

finds extraordinary irony in working-class Kansans' overwhelming support for Republican politicians, despite his belief that the economic policies of the Republican party are wreaking havoc on their communities and livelihoods for the benefit of the extremely wealthy.

So do I. So I tried linking to a report about Florida Gulf Coast fishermen who were applying for jobs to help BP contain the spill, but got snookered in return for their modest honorarium of $5,000 by agreeing in the fine print to waive all future rights to attempt recovering compensation for any damage or illness that might result from their efforts. In fact, some fishermen are so desperate for cash that they signed the contract with knowledge of the reamjob. That article included slice-of-life interviews with some of the affected people.

Enter stereotyping. I usually avoid this tactic, but let's face it: the "working class" in the Gulf states looks pretty much like an ultraconservative, government-hating Republican voting bloc. Anyway, instead of trying to find the article I originally intended to link I've found another one that's more to the point: a commentary by Dana Milbank of the Post that I cribbed from Cab Drollery with a bank shot through Eschaton. Here it is, and I think it's self-explanatory: people who live in Republican states usually have the luxury of hating government and taxation for legitimate public purposes because their cynical, scumbag leaders make it so easy for them. And for some reason these selfsame states receive federal dollars well in excess of what their tax bases contribute. But when there's a crisis, by Jesus Joseph & Mary, it's the government's duty to step in and make it all go away.

I know that reality is not as simple as all that, but it kinda just makes me want to say, "Fuck you, neighbors. The federal response will address only the national-level issues related to this disaster, such as future coastal safeguards for the entire nation and a comprehensive energy policy that rapidly dis-incentivizes the use of petroleum for fuel of any kind. If you all who benefit from fisheries --- or jobs therein --- and resorts, hifalutin beachfront properties, and quaint rum shacks want some help from the federal government, then first you need to ask yourselves your favorite question: 'Who's gonna pay for it?' Answer: you will pay through a surcharge on your personal and corporate income taxes, set to take effect as soon as you want it to. Before then, not a cent... socialist swine."

Caveat: the above is somewhat slopplily thought out and authored, but I'm just too damn worn out to revise this evening.

What's the matter with Kansas? [updated]

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Gulf of Mexico tutorial here.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Update: I pasted the wrong link into the first graf, which naturally confused everyone who clicked through. I have replaced that link to a later post explaining myself. Sorry peeps.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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"Interest A-1!" Warning: girls may want to navigate to the "My Little Pony" official site instead of clicking through to watch what he-men were made of in the 1960s.



Are the girls gone now? Good! OK, men, watching The Crusher and cousin Dick The Bruiser, "the shark of the ring" as he's referred to here, was one way a bored 1960s Chicagoland teenage boy might kill time on a Sunday morning when there were no cartoons and nothing else was happening. (Channel 26 if I'm remembering correctly.) As one announcer assures us, "That's blood, fans. That's real, honest-to-goodness blood," spoken with artfully understated hype. It was a simpler time. Really.

This is a classic lambs-to-the-slaughter tag team match. I will direct the attention of younger visitors to the quality of the ringside announcers. The commentary is quite colorful and amusing, but presented in a straight journalistic style that helped to keep us all guessing about whether wrestling was real or not. We never quite knew, although we suspected... but suspected... what?

Worst ever?

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Atrios muses that BP may end up being credited with the worst-ever human-caused disaster. Well, I won't necessarily argue about that because it remains to be seen. But take a look at these pictures from The Boston Globe online (as seen on Eschaton, op cit.). Photos 13 and 14 do a good job of conveying the general sense of what's going on in the water and the puny human response to same.

Even ignoring Hiroshima and Nagasaki as outliers, there are some other pretty heavy contenders for the Worst-Ever Human-Caused Environmental Cataclysm Award. Chernobyl, the flower of Ukraine, would certainly be a finalist. But I think it might be hard (for the moment) to top the utter destruction of the fourth largest lake in the world in Uzbekistan, formerly known as the Aral Sea. But still... maybe we can.

U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!

Editor's note: attentive readers may notice that in yesterday's post on this topic I besmirched Russia only half-accurately as the villain behind certain apocalyptic environmental cockups. Neither aforementioned holocaust actually took place on Russian soil (conveniently for Russians), but were instead "a USSR joint." So take my inexcusable journalistic lapse with a grain of morphine.

Let's make the water turn black

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Our finer citizens, many of whom believe that homos cause hurricanes, may need to consider how cute it is to chant "Drill Baby Drill." It's not cute: it's monstrous.

The drip drip drip of analysis (which BP surely knew two weeks ago) indicates that this disaster is on deck to be America's largest water pollution catastrophe, as projected in this NOLA Times-Picayune graph. I think Russia is still way ahead with China a natural favorite in the coming two decades, if that makes you feel any better. And anyway, don't worry: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is "losing patience," so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So imagine the eastern Gulf of Mexico, with toxic fisheries and black, gooey beaches writhing with dying birds. Then consider the hypoxic dead zone in the northwestern gulf, made possible by petrochemical companies, agribusiness, and luxuriant suburban lawns. Heckuva job, trickle-downers. I wonder if our finer citizens will ever understand that hurricanes are not caused by homos, but by Republicans. (Volcanos, too.)

"To some it might seem creepy what they do."



(Composition by Frank Zappa for a Cousteau Society documentary, via YouTube, performed by Ensemble Modern.)

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Heartstrings...



I always liked the bipolar nature of this melancholy Mersey beat by Gerry and the Pacemakers. It's somewhat peppier than your typical pop ballad, arrangementwise, but the string tremolos, French horns, and reedy oboe lines very effectively evoke a melancholy fugue somewhere far east of midnight. The package is subtle: its topic is fairly standard heartbreak, but the narrator speaks as a trusted advisor --- sympathetic but not sentimental, encouraging but not patronizing. Like other songs I've embedded here, this one always struck me as being Important Music. The orchestration was a factor in that assessment, but there was more to it than that. It was a nontrivial treatment of an emotion that I was fully capable of, uh, emoting for a member of the opposite camp without all the accompanying complications of hormones. (It charted when I was in 6th grade, I think.)

Watch this performance now because it was pulled down a month or two ago for reasons I certainly don't approve of and therefore hold in contempt. I don't know the provenance of the clip, but it's just cool. Check out the nice Mondrian-inspired set, which is shown wide two or three times. This is definitely not a lipsync of the record. Possibly it's a live-in-studio clip, but it might be a lipsync of a prerecorded original performance specifically for the program. The chamber orchestra may have been present in the TV studio, or the band might be playing to the accompaniment of a prerecorded orchestra (bandsyncing, so to speak). Anyway, the performance is a little raw around the edges, which I like. The occasional tempo problems don't bother me at all because they lend authenticity, making it seem possible that some producer actually went through the expense and difficulty of throwing umpty-nine musicians together in a room for a live TV performance to entertain a mob of frenzied teenage girls one day in 1965.

I don't consider this a glitzy, over-rehearsed production number, but just a down-to-earth British Invasion band from Liverpool playing with a pickup orchestra to recreate the feel of the vinyl studio recording for an audience because someone actually cared. Gerry's guitar and the electric piano sound sincerely grimy, without cheapness, backdropped and framed in the ambiance of 19th century orchestral romanticism. Luxuriate in it.

Reality really *does* have a liberal bias

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Here's a concept called "epistemic closure," which I first heard of in a Paul Krugman blog post the other day. I'm glad to see this being talked about in mainstream media in serious, clinical terms rather than the usual flummoxed mockery that most of us are forced to resort to. The post spins off from another one by a guy named Jonathan Bernstein, which you can read here, but I think Krugman makes the point more accessible without even acknowledging FOX News and the like. Krugman sees epistemic closure every day in elite university culture --- in the field of economics, to be specific:

It’s been painfully obvious since the crisis broke that people at Minnesota, or even many people at Chicago, have no idea what New Keynesian economics is all about. I don’t mean they disagree, or think it’s garbage, they literally have no idea what the concepts are. And that’s why they reinvent 80-year-old fallacies when they try to discuss the subject.

The postmodern conservative separation from reality, whether in the Senate, or the corporate infotainment universe, or the freshwater school of economics (i.e., Friedman and the Reaganomics he spawned), is deliberately sustained by simply shunning any information that does not originate with like-minded people. Ironically, this anti-reality bias destroys one of the sacred free-market shibboleths: the "marketplace of ideas."

On the one hand I find this development quite chilling to contemplate. On the other hand, I think that the mechanics of de-evolution and decadence will take care of this species of hominids (homo ignoramus) well before mid-century. That's the good news; the bad news is that the world suffers immeasurably more than it really needs to in the interim.

So, as in all other things, Stephen Colbert is right.

It's Bedtime!

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So get back to in bed right now and I really, really don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!



Credit where due: I copped it from YouTube via BoingBoing. They all copped it from somewhere else, however.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Apropos of Earth Day No. 1, which I deliberately avoided commemorating until today:



This mellow Spirit number may be a bit old for even a precocious 59er to have fetished in 1970, but I remember the sounds, sights, and scents of the odd little hippie dungeon Fred's disinterested parents allowed him to construct in the basement. The room started out as a sort of studwall-framed CB radio shack, but was readily upgraded to alternate uses soon after I saw Easy Rider, bought my first pair of railroad stripe bell bottoms, and scored a nickel bag in the middle of the street during broad daylight in a Chicago suburb called Markham. I don't exactly remember the story of Fred's "evolution" at that point. But the important thing was that he tacked fake walnut paneling to the retrofitted basement studwall and we spent plenty of spare hours there listening to "underground" rock, including this song, gazing at blacklight posters illuminated by genuine ultraviolet tubes, and taking aromatherapy so to speak.

I don't know if there's any direct connection between the first Earth Day and "Nature's Way," but Wikipedia says that Spirit began recording the Dr. Sardonicus album in April 1970. I'm guessing yes.

15 minutes of fame

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If Andy Warhol were alive today he would have to retract his overquoted epigram, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, since he ain't and I am, I'll tell you why.

I've been mystified by the encroachment of Facebook into the lives of pretty much everyone under 30 and a shocking number of people over that age. I'll allow for the possibility that social media could possibly serve some minor constructive purpose in postmodern society even if I can't tell you what that would be. My best take on it has been that Facebook exists for people who want to star in their own reality show; people who understand that the only rule for becoming famous is to become well known. Social networking technology provides such people with a powerful, cannibalistic multimedia "platform" that they can use to dedicate their lives to collecting "friends" and "fans." For the mass of them, I will say, stereotypingly, the quest for said friends and fans involves relentless online disclosure of every thought fragment that causes three synapses to fire. And between those events, there's a world of fun to be had trolling banal data streams issuing from every other fellow contestant. When everybody "follows" everybody else on the World Wide Web, then everyone is world-famous for the duration. This amounts to a shocking rebuke to Warhol's vision, which in any case was more akin to a knowing wisecrack than a profundity.

But today I learned that the world is even better for fame-seekers --- right now --- than my dystopian best guess for the future. Big Hussein Otis sent me this New York Times technical bulletin on the latest colorful timewasting trend to emerge from social networking: a cornucopia of new business models based on specialized social networking web sites for sharing "TMI," as the post-Friends generation likes to say:

A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

The reporter continues to reveal that "Blippy" members share access to their Gmail accounts with the company so it can publish their purchases, thereby greatly increasing the "Blippy" members' street cred by about a zillion I suppose.

In the pithy blurb he sent with the link, Big Otis observed: "those silly millennials --- making the world safe for fascism." I disagree. If this is where American society is headed there will be no need for fascism. After all, the Morlocks did not need to resort to fascism in order to feast on the Eloi --- all they needed was a scary-sounding air raid siren and a docile population with one highly motivating conditioned response. The siren in our real-world postmodern case of course, like the Sirens of Ulysses, is every bit as sinister as what the Morlocks used. But unlike The Odyssey and very much like the Eloi, few today are tied to the mast or have intentionally plugged their ears. So Silicon Valley scumbags glibly brag about their super new business models to The New York Times. Here's how it works: a generation surrenders its privacy to corporations in order to build a "fan base"; American society is rewarded with a terminal load of gangrene.

Update before I'm through: I don't fully or exclusively blame the "millennials" for their victimhood. Besides the prime mover in this sickening trend --- the information-industrial complex --- plenty of blame belongs to Baby Boomers and their clueless concepts of what it means to be a good parent and a good citizen. (Hoy, I need to get me to the prayer meeting.)

Double feature!

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For my wiseass friend, "Anonymous" (if that's truly your name), in the previous comments thread.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You know she was a dancer / She moved better on wine



I don't have much to say about this lummox-rocker*, one of my favorites of all time, except that I heard it over and over again on an 8-track in Fred's hopped-up red GTO around 1970-way and permanently bonded with it. I consider it the original cowbell song, and the overdrive bass riff sounded like an entire orchestra to me (back 1970-way). The story behind the composing of Mississippi Queen was new to me as of tonight, though.

As an aside, the video accompanying this tune is almost A-OK with me, lummox-wise, except that the footage from Two Lane Blacktop is squashed left-to-right and the motorcycle stuff doesn't belong at all. I love the color of Steve McQueen's Mustang, too.

Oh yeah, and in terms of "this day in history," I just happened to learn on the FM robot oldies station that on this day in 1983 Mountain bassist Felix Pappalardi met his maker thanks to some "criminally negligent homicide" served up with a bullet by his wife, Gail. (Poor guy had to retire early due to partial hearing loss incurred by entertaining a generation of lowriding stoners. Peace, Felix.)
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* To the best of my knowledge, the term "lummox rock" was invented by Larry K.

Local color goes national

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Champaign, Ill., Mayor Jerry Schweighart (SCHWY-hart) has earned his 15 minutes of fame on HuffingtonPost.

See, Mayor Schweighart is a birther, and he can't understand why his opinion is controversial. It's controversial because President Obama's birth certificate has been produced for the record and the "Kenyan version" was exposed as a counterfeit before the election (but I'm too lazy to look for the links on a Saturday morning). OK, whatever. This is no surprise to residents who have long known of Schweighart's far-right-wing orientation. But he's some kind of imposing fascist strongman, or even a strong mayor for that matter. He generally avoids inflammatory interjections into city politics, other than the odd periodic stupid comment that a few wingnuts applaud and everyone else ignores.

Predictably, the comments thread on HuffingtonPost is every bit as clueless as anything Crazy Uncle Jerry might utter. According to a commenter called "What's going on," everyone should sign a petition to "help us citizens of Champaign get this guy out of office." Commenter "LouisGA" declares that at "Champaign town meetings" the mayor "insists on wearing his white sheet and hood." No, he actually doesn't.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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The Buckinghams made Joe Zawinul a lot of bread with their peppy cover of this extra-mellow number he wrote for the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1966. The Buckinghams version was a hit in the spring of 1967, during weather just like we're having in the backfilled swamp called Champaign, Illinois, by its Caucasoid settlers. So I'm putting it up here tonight as a bit of multisensory nostalgia for myself. I am a fan of the Buckinghams performance, but the original version isn't heard widely enough for my tastes. Besides, I think the Cannonball version even got some AM radio airplay in Chicago during spring 1967, but maybe on a "straight" station like WIND, WGN, or the thousand-watt wonder WBEE. So here it is.

Cannonball has long been a favorite of mine, busting onto the New York scene in the mid-50s sounding much like Charlie Parker, to my ear, without being a copycat. He was a meticulous technician on the alto, more deliberate and less of a daredevil than Bird; not as fast in terms of "clock speed," but always full of power, self-assurance, invention, and joy dee veever. There are no Cannonball acrobatics on this classic piece of soul jazz, though. The session was recorded live at "The Club," which was actually a large recording studio outfitted with a bar, tables, and invited guests for "the club atmosphere." One thing I enjoy about the whole album, which is entitled "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," of course, is how Cannon loves holding forth for the audience between numbers in his rich, stately voice. He had that easy manner with an audience that is needed to transform a great musician into a beloved entertainer.

Asparagus ranch update

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Regarding my April 14 post on the topic of Farmer Daddy Brand (TM) asparagus, old pal Anonymous asks the eternal question: "Are you sure those roots aren't upside down?"

There are a number of fairly plausible reasons why one might plant asparagus ass-up in the rich Illinois soil. But I'm going to have to go with "gut ignorance" on this one. See, they give you a set of occult details on how to prepare an asparagus bed --- how deep the trench, how much manure at bottom, how much soil over the "crowns," etc. But they never fucking tell you that the "crowns" point downward into the dirt, unlike any other crown devised by man or god. So I double-checked with the friendly girl at the nursery and she said I could just pluck them up and capsize them back down. Which I did. But now I've probably got them too deep in the pure manure so they may not like that.

If I have to start over, at least this time I'll only have to dig 6 inches out of the trench to re-prepare the bed, and there won't be any major root-busting or rubble excavation to put up with.

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!

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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...

*

...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)

*

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!

*

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

*

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]

*

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]

*

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]

*

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

*

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

*

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!

*

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

*

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

*

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!

*

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"

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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!

*

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.]
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* I'm pretty sure this is accurate, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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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

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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!!!