With regard to parasites

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Previously on Fifty50 --- last night, to be precise --- I compared the decay of our democratic and business institutions (not to mention church congregations) to what happens when a parasite thrives without any natural regulation and ultimately kills its host (and, a bit later, itself). But I'm not a biologist, so my parasitism similes may lack a certain technical "oomph" when critically examined. And with regard to the aforementioned post, there's a certain awkward mixing of parasitism similes and engineering metaphors. (That's one reason I write an E-list blog instead of textbooks.)

A favorite Big Hussein Otis metaphor for our current epoch is the 1960 George Pal film version of The Time Machine, portraying a future in which the hideous, animalistic Morlock society lures the passive, survival-challenged Eloi population to its underground fortress for the slaughter. [Editor's note: social metaphors aside, this is an awesome family film that every household should own, and is perfect for playfully scaring shit out of any 7-year-old who hasn't been raised on slasher movies.] I agree with BHO's assessment.

The Morlocks are an interesting crew. In a sense they're an apex predator, but they employ what might be viewed as a parasitic ranching strategy. (Again, caveat emptor with regard to my incomplete understanding of natural systems; Fifty50's technical monitors may feel free to help with refinement and nuance.) I say "parasitic ranching" because, if memory of the movie serves, the Morlocks provided no inputs to the Eloi flock --- no management was involved --- but simply exploited the atavistic Eloi response to civil defense sirens.  So the Morlocks might think they're the smartest guys in the room, and they probably are. But someone with a more sophisticated perspective, who incidentally is not in the room, can quickly grasp that the Morlocks do not have a sustainable "business model" for at least two reasons. First, lacking any stewardship of their food supply, the Morlocks are certain to exhaust the herd and consequently starve themselves to extinction. Second, it may be possible for the herd to organically develop a resistance to the parasite --- that is, adapt.

I wonder what would happen to our latter-day Morlocks if the Gulf Coast Eloi were to come under the influence of a 21st century Huey Long.

Another editor's note: the publicity photo of Eloi Yvette Mimieux and her Morlock captor, for The Time Machine (1960), is reproduced as fair use for purposes of literary criticism and social commentary. Thank you for your attention to this matter.)

Nonlinear times

The Portland Cement Association defines progressive collapse as "a situation where local failure of a primary structural component(s) leads to the collapse of adjoining members, which in turn leads to additional collapse." This dread phenomenon in structural engineering was the immediate cause of mass casualties in the 1995 right-wing terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.*

Progressive collapse also can occur under stresses that are otherwise nominal, but produce catastrophic failure when members or materials have been under-designed or have been subject to accelerated degradation that cannot support a design peak load. [Editor's note: at this point I welcome and invite the intervention of our local mystery technical phenom, who may go by the moniker of Professor Mahatma Kane Jeeves, to correct my imprecisions or to augment my explanations if necessary, or both.] As a general matter, progressive collapse considered a nonlinear event.

Since I first began to grasp the potential magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon oilwell disaster I've felt that this event --- which would probably be containable in an alternate universe in which U.S. democracy can marshal resources to serve the public good about as effectively as it did in the 1930s and '40s --- could start a cascade of environmental, economic, and political failures that industrial age institutions just won't be able to cope with. Our institutions are already run through with stress cracks and fatigue. The human institutions, public and private, have been rotting from the head for 30 or 40 years, and now they're necrotic right through to leech-filled guts. The parasites are killing their hosts. They think it's funny, and that the chaos they create means they're smart. They don't believe the concept of extinction applies to them.

I don't like my own melodramatics any more than I like anyone else's. But just consider how a few major stresses could play out directly, and consider the feedback loops that could get started. We have one of the largest environmental catastrophes of the industrial era, but it's not only making pretty birds oily and dead but also destroying the ecological services that provide income for tens of thousands of families along the "south coast." Meanwhile, rich people will not stand for restoring personal and corporate marginal income tax rates to a level that can sustain emergency government response to natural disasters, industrial disasters, or disastrous levels of U.S. unemployment. Bigots and know-nothings blame their usual suspects. Cracker politicians and infotainment media deliberately inflame them. At this point in U.S. history it is no longer unacceptable to puke hate speech over the public airwaves or in "mainstream" political gatherings:

mass unemployment + inflamed bigotry + paranoia = mob action       Eq (1)

What if the Gulf disaster, perhaps with help from a few hurricanes, makes large portions of the coast, including New Orleans, literally uninhabitable both owing to environmental impacts and the fully played-out impacts of a collapsed regional economy. Is it possible that tens of thousands of people --- or hundreds of thousands --- might be displaced? If so, maybe it's a good thing that we have a nice surplus of (decaying) housing stock; they all can move to California, Vegas, and Florida (at least until the tarballs and dead seabirds reach the latter). And don't forget that if nothing else, the BP blowout will most certainly inflate energy prices. And also don't forget about the conversion of the U.S. banking system into a multi-level marketing plan, like Amway and Ponzi schemes.

Meanwhile, I don't understand, in any technical sense, the financial pathology afflicting the Eurozone or what China is doing to the world economy, but many reality-based people who are savvy to those kinds of things are scared about what they could do to us. North Korea and Israel have both done a great service to the cause of international instability over the past 2 weeks. Significantly, the one hot zone stresses the U.S. and China in a big way, and the other stresses the U.S. and its oil protectorates (and oil antagonists).

And no, Chauncey, the "free market" will not prevent a progressive collapse, or stop it once it begins. We don't have a user's manual or a helpdesk for this sort of thing. I've been writing about various aspects of this looming situation for several years as if each aspect is at least somewhat independent of the others. That's because I came to this point in history believing that a robust constitutional democracy and a consensus about the role of government provided all of the stability necessary to break big problems into smaller ones, and then solve them. But the black spew has got me worrying that there will be a much larger price to pay for the Reagan Revolution than crumbling infrastructure and a 3-decade white collar crime spree. It's an event that deeply stresses the economy, the environment, civic peace, and possibly geopolitics.

__________________

* Although the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, also has been attributed --- supposedly conclusively --- to this phenomenon, I feel certain that future historians and forensic engineers (probably members of whatever superior civilization buries our own decadent one) will document something very much to the contrary.

Surreal photo from Guatemalan disaster

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This has got to be the scariest fucking picture I have seen all year. In terms of enormity. it doesn't begin to touch what is happening these days in the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of BP and the Reagan Revolution. But just look at it! Imagine how you would react if the maw of hell opened outside of your picture window one evening. I would run until I dropped, then think about running until I fell exhausted into nightmares about running some more, never getting far enough away.

BoingBoing, where I saw the article a few minutes ago, states that this image is not a Photoshop job, but a real picture from the Guatemalan government's Flickr feed depicting a colossal sinkhole that spontaneously formed in Guatemala City after days of saturating downpours from Tropical Storm Agatha. BB says that other sinkholes like this are rumored to be forming as well. And, as you can read clicking through the first link in this paragraph, the storm hit 2 days after the nearby Pacaya volcano erupted.

I know it's a holiday weekend here in U S A !  U S A !  And I'm pretty unplugged, by choice, from corporate media outlets. But as of a moment ago there still wasn't a peep about this on HuffingtonPost or TPM, both of which have ample space on their front pages for breaking news headlines. Yes, I know there were other important things happening this Memorial Day, but a volcano, tropical storm, and horror movie sinkhole affecting a capital city on our hemisphere warrants attention even on a day when a U.S. official claims that yet another "Al Qaeda No. 3" has been killed, yet again.

Immediate update: actually, HuffingtonPost has an item about the Guatemalan tropical storm way, way down near the bottom of the page, the third subhed in a series of three related to the start of a new hurricane season, after one about Haiti and one about the BP oil spill. I wonder why I didn't see it earlier.

Son of Wise Sayings

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If you think you're 10 pounds overweight, then there's a high probability that you are actually 30 pounds overweight.

Wise Sayings

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This edition of Wise Sayings is contributed by the very wise Beer-D.

Solving problems has never solved anyone's problems.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

It's Bedtime!

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So get to sleep, you little cockblockers! It's a school night!



I always enjoy watching a nice black-and-white British Invasion clip like this, but in the current case the boyish ease of Billy J. Kramer on stage softens the song's actual tense atmosphere. I remember listening to this in 1964 on my turquoise GE tabletop radio and, even as a pre-teenager, directly sensing the seething frustration in Kramer's performance as he tried unsuccessfully, with tight-lipped plastic smile, to charm, cajole, and bribe his girlfriend's little siblings to shut up and go away. The kids have the upper hand throughout, though, and it seems that Kramer's second greatest desire as the song closes is to plant the tots in a shallow grave.

Little Children, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas (1964), via YouTube.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I mowed the back yard tonight for the first time in several weeks. I'd purposely allowed the grass to go to seed, which I find helps to crowd out weeds somewhat effectively.

While plowing over a patch of no particular distinction, my peripheral vision rapidly picked up a teeming movement. Turning for a direct look, I was horrified to see what appeared to be an endless stream of scrawny infant mammals trying to erupt from the turf. These creatures---"bunnies," I presume---appeared as an apparition both revolting and pitiable at once. I immediately killed the mower and went to inspect for casualties. While pleased to find none, the sight of these animals trying to boil out of the earth, without much success, struck me with queasiness. What had I done? Stripped away their shelter, brutally but unintentionally like some reckless minor god who drinks too much.

I ran back into the house to grab my Sony F717 in order to bear witness to this cunicularic cataclysm I had caused. Yep, there they were, still roiling in dumbfounded terror (I presume), not knowing whether to run toward the light or away from it. Due to its weak sensor and lens focal length, the Sony was not the ideal camera to use in this low-light situation, and I didn't feel I had time to optimize the exposure, camera support, etc. The pictures aren't great, but this one best captures the nature and range of motion of these hapless creatures. Click through it for a larger view.

Now, if you are an animal lover and believe that it is appropriate to petition the ALL-ONE with prayer, then please feel free to use this Friday Evening Prayer Meeting to invoke protection for these infant rabbits. Myself, I will try to bear witness to the circle of life because I fear there is a high probability that any of the various neighborhood predators (excluding Rudy, who prefers starchy food) will attempt to devour these succulent, downy creatures before the sun rises over the alley. It was ever thus.

Fun fact: did you know rabbits are "hindgut digesters"?

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Fire Water: makes ya spend every quarter...



I first heard of Stick McGhee (not "Sticks") about 30 years ago courtesy of my early "race music" advisor, Larry K. I don't know much about Stick except that he was the little brother of bluesman Brownie McGhee and that he died youngish. He came to my attention on a Larry K. mix tape of Carolina beach music that included this tune and another (in my opinion even better) side called "Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice," the latter of which you can listen to here on YouTube. I chose not to present that tune on this blog because some well-intentioned knucklehead pissed all over the song with an insufferably distracting video pastiche. But you go and listen anyway, I Command You. And I'll interject that some years ago Beer-D perceptively noticed that the melody to "Whiskey" is a traditional old timey tune performed as "In The Jailhouse Now" by the Soggy Bottom Boys in the Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I'm not a musicologist but this music has a reedy, swinging New Orleans boogie woogie sound to it. Listen how it swings --- a perfect tempo and beat for kids dancing the Shag on sand-covered floors in Virginia Beach dives. Stick has a terrific laid-back delivery and a voice like a tenor sax. And the lyrics are just plain delightful: a tribute to all the wittily named "craft" moonshine the adults could get ahold of if they knew what to ask for. God help them all after the happy hour (6 - 8), when they could get two "Moon Graveys" for the price of one. Also, listen for the little gender-bending joke near the end --- quite sophisticated for the mid-'50s.

Six To Eight, Stick McGhee (1955, King Records), via YouTube.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Well you don’t have to lie ‘cause I’m no fool.
I can see you don’t want my love at all.
I know... I still love you.



Here's another example from that tiny sub-genre of rockin bipolar romance-gone-bad lullabies like we shared at the previous Prayer Meeting. In my opinion, "Everybody Knows" is a real gem of pop-rock art: an irreducible kernel of universal young-adult experience (a piece of Truth, as Larry K. would say) presented in a rapidly alternating manic-depressive form, both lyrically and musically... in one minute and 40 seconds!

I really like the brash yet minimalist set used on this Shindig performance, as on many others from the British Invasion era. Probably the result of trying to make the most of a small production budget. Well done! And I have no problem with a reasonable lipsync job for a performance primarily intended for a TV audience (as opposed to the hack job The Who did at Superbowl Previous) since the studio audience was there to eavesdrop and was not the actual target audience.

I made up my very own rock trivia question based on the Dave Clark 5 (i.e., never previously heard by me). Here it is: Name the group that had two different songs of the same title on the pop charts four years apart. It's the DC5, as I say, with this tune and another one called "Everybody Knows" from 1968. The latter is completely forgettable, in my opinion, which makes this an excellent '60s music trivia question (even though I, myself, think trivia sucks). And Lenny Davidson is no Mike Smith --- I'll take a coupla lungsful of gravel versus a quart of treacle any day! (As long as they're someone else's lungs.)

Everybody Knows, Dave Clark 5 on Shindig (1964), via YouTube.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Please don't destroy these lands.
Don't make them desert sands.



Shapes Of Things, Yardbirds live in Germany (1966). Via YouTube. Keith Relf's shirt is beautiful! I want one! He can keep the haircut, though.

Freedom Muffins?

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In the comments thread of my most recent edition of Wise sayings, our friend from across the Atlantic, Mr. Barry Coidan, posted a preemptive and seeming defensive comment about Americans (me in particular?) blaming Brits for the super-awesome oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico. In my case that actually wasn't so, and I in fact agree pretty much 100% with Mr. Coidan's comment because let's face it: BP is not a Merrie Olde Company run by and for a jolly bunch of droll, quick-witted Limeys, but a global multinational energy corporation that is no more or less profit-crazed, ruthless, and unethical than any of the other five "supermajors" such as, say, ExxonMobil, Chevron, or ConocoPhillips. (U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!)

There's probably no news in this here Mobile Press-Register report (Mobile, Alabama, that is) about the spill that you don't already know if you're even halfway following the saga. But take a look at the comments thread, such as this one from the appropriately named "yellohamr":

The British are no better at fixing oil leaks than fighting the Germans. American will half to bail tham out of both.

Yes, perhaps the hapless Brits will half to depend on American Halliburton, everybody's favorite American oilfield services corporation, with headquarters in good old American Houston, Texas, America, to bail tham out! You remember: good old American Halliburton whose Chairman and CEO works and lives in Dubai, UAE, "to Focus [the] Company’s Eastern Hemisphere Growth." I wonder if the United States has an extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, it seems like Barry C. was justified in his prophetic defense. Americans can be expected to trade in their Freedom Fries for Freedom Muffins. Starting in the Deep South, predictably.

Wise sayings

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Golf balls. Fucking golf balls!

Plan C (From Outer Space)

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I guess we all can rest a bit easier tonight. According to Reuters, BP has a cunning new plan to plug their deepwater runaway gusher in the Gulf of Mexico:

"They are actually going to take a bunch of debris -- some shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that -- and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak," U.S. Coast Board Admiral Thad Allen told CBS News.

That's right, Ladies and Germs. Golf balls. And shredded tires, too. Sounds like a plan.

According to the Reuters report, BP also is drilling a relief well in order to stop the leak by relieving oil pressure at the well head, "but that could take three months." No, I don't feel like multiplying 90 days times 210,000 gallons per, either....

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.
_____________________
* 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.)
________________________
* 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...

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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.