The Cheesehead Revolution

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From completely off my radar I'm now reading about a state governor who has ordered the state police to round up members of the Wisconsin legislature. TPM reports:

...the state's Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker's union-busting budget bill.

There's a whole separate discussion we might have about the state's power to legislatively "bust" labor unions. But the thing to think about is this: since when in the United States can the executive branch of any state "round up" members of the legislature and make them participate in a session? That is how a junta works, not a democracy.

Can the governor also order the state police to round up members of the opposition party for any other reason? What is the legal theory that justifies an apparent violation of the separation of powers in any state of this union? Does the 10th Amendment permit states to establish forms of governance that are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? What specific law are the Wisconsin legislators violating here?

An interesting aspect of this executive coup against workers' rights in Wisconsin, again according to TPM, is that

...Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state's speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.

The denial of a quorum by a minority group of members is a legitimate parliamentary maneuver. It's no more obstructionist than what happens in the U.S. Senate when the minority party filibusters bills that clearly have support of the majority. It's no more obstructionist than Ronald Reagan's famous "veto pen," which he smugly wagged into the Kliegl lights the many times he shot down laws passed by both chambers of Congress in the 1980s. So the issue shouldn't be whether obstructionist tactics are legal, because they are, and Republicans are much more adept at using them than Democrats.

The issue is this: is an obstructionist parliamentary maneuver by members of a state legislature illegal in the State of Wisconsin? How about in other states?

This is going to be really interesting. Wisconsin was an incubator of American progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century, and the tradition persists. Nobody knows how this will play out in terms of union busting, but it should give a significant stimulus to the concept of union solidarity in the Cheesehead state.

And in my opinion there is not a single working man or woman in this nation who has any smidgen of "enlightened self interest" in rooting for "Governor Scott Fitzgerald." "Governor Scott Walker" (duh).

For Marginalia

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In previous comments, Marginalia reminisced about an O.V. Wright single, "Gone For Good." I'd never heard of Wright, but thanks to YouTube I found the song in question. Unfortunately, the poster disabled the embed code so I can't display it on this page. But here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCrSDFK0vk

Give it a listen. The band sounds very "Memphis," and Wright reminds me strongly of someone---Otis Redding, maybe? I like it: this sound has the unmistakable sound of a very specific place in time, and it makes the intervening years fade from memory for a coupla minutes.

And you're right, Marginalia: you really were cool listening to Stax while your pals were listening to the Rockin' Berries. (Nothing against the Berries, but I never heard them until a few minutes ago on YouTube; don't remember them ever charting in Chicago, but then there was a strong regional rock and pop scene that may have crowded them out where I grew up in the mid-60s. I'm guessing from the sound of those guys that they were a group the girls really "dug".)

Aside to Marginalia: I notice you've adopted an alias. I hope this doesn't mean you've had to enter the witness protection program....

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I'll wrap up my current mini soul fugue, as prompted by a flash from Big Hussein Otis in last night's Fish Fry comments Thread. It's my favorite cut by the pride of Harvey, Illinois: The Dells!



Most Chicagoland kids who listened only to the city's two Top 40 stations never heard of The Dells until 1968, with the release of their first crossover single, "There Is." Several more big hits crossed over to Top 40 playlists over the next year, including "Stay In My Corner," "Oh What A Night," and this one, "Wear It On Our Face."

What we didn't know was that The Dells had been around since 1952, and were masters of doo-wop, jazz, and R&B in addition to the soul mode they hit big with in the late 1960s. And what I didn't know until tonight is that they provided backing vocals for the likes of Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, and Barbara Lewis. Neither did I know that the omnipresent Quincy Jones worked with them to help refine their sound.

As inferred by Big Otis in the comments, the Dells were at least indirectly part of the same galaxy that spawned the Twinight label in Chicago, all of them working in the orbit of a large independent soul and R&B promotional firm that handled groups signed to Chess Records, including subsidiaries Checker and Cadet (not to mention national labels like Atlantic, Motown, and Stax). But these guys were the old timers of the scene, all members having been born during the Great Depression---some of them were practically 35 when they released this side, fer crying out loud!

Wear It On Our Face, The Dells (1968, original 45 rpm release Cadet 5599, reissued on CD compilation "There Is," Chess [MCA] CHD-9288), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Maybe the love I'm looking for
Is just a wayward dream
Oh yeah...



Tonight I feel like going back to another Twinight Chicago soul recording from about 1970, which I have in my library on a CD reissue set. These compilations of little-known vintage soul recordings by The Numero Group, which I wrote about a coupla weeks ago, represent something important to me: that first-rate talent grows almost everywhere, and us ordinary citizens would get our fill of swell entertainment without Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Time-Warner, Sony, Disney, and so on.

Listen to the horn attack after the little four-bar guitar intro. That's some top-drawer shit! And the string arrangement is not merely there for "sweetener," but to help sound out the poignant atmosphere created by the plaintive vocalist, Annette Poindexter (the girlfriend of Syl Johnson, the record's producer).

The band is The Pieces of Peace, a congregation of somewhere between five and eight musicians (not clear from the skimpy documentation I've read), which was hired as the house band by the Twinight label during summer 1969. I was entertained to learn, from the Numero liner notes, that this is pretty much the complete band you hear on Young-Holt Unlimited's 1968 hit "Soulful Strut," before PoP signed with Twinight. According to the notes, "neither Isaac Young nor Redd Holt played on that session." (!)

The arrangement was powerful and beautiful, the lyrics innocent and bittersweet. I can think of only one reason, other than possibly a failure of payola, why this track didn't climb high on the soul charts, and that reason is Ms. Poindexter's performance. I don't mean that in a assily critical sense, though, because I personally enjoy it and try to dig in a bit deeper each time I listen. To the casual pop-listener's ear, Poindexter may sound like she's landing north, south and east of every other pitch, and those are the ears that promoters and radio DJs are always surrogating for. So nobody at a Top 40 or Soul powerhouse broadcaster in the mid-60s would likely give her quirky performance, ornamented with gospel sensibilities and half a dozen different kinds of blue notes, the time of day. Sides like this and others issued by Twinight in its heyday were given the "time of night," however, to brighten the hours "east of midnight" for third-shift factory laborers, cabbies, and young African American nightflies in general. In the radio business, this domain used to be known as the "lunar rotation." It was essentially a promotional "limbo" for local musicians, but probably no more hit-or-miss in quality than whatever rocketed up the national pop charts fueled with rolls of hundred-dollar bills.

Wayward Dream, Annette Poindexter and The Pieces of Peace (1970, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records [catalog number not known]; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

February thaw

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Hi. Remember me?

Reintegration of the shoulder bone has been going well, and I'm probably a week ahead of schedule in terms of physical therapy progress. Reintegration of my headbone back into the work cycle has been more difficult.

And regarding my absence from here, it's not as if my mind isn't brimming with verities that I need to share with everyone. What's going on is that it's still fairly hard to align my thoughts into sequences of words that comprise coherent sentences; takes me 45 minutes to squeeze out a 20-minute post still, at least if I want it to apply some craftsmanship.

Also, the house has sort of devolved into a virtual turd mine, and my usually pitiful organizing skills are still in the sub-remedial zone. And although I'm actually a fan of fairly robust winters, this current one has sucked rocks beyond decades of memory. It's been a miserable, bitter, relentless winter just like the ones I remember in the Chicago south suburbs as a paper boy, wearing crappy JC Penney winter jackets made out of stiff polyester and primitive fiberfill, with my skin blanching toward Edgar-Winter white on face and under under useless mittens and footwear.

But even then, we always got a February thaw. Ours here in central Illinois would appear to be on the way in the upcoming week, starting tomorrow. I'm hoping that when I kick back the slabs of compressed ice pellets we've been walking on for almost two weeks I will feel tumescent shoots drilling skyward through the scalp from my mental bulbs. I've about had it with living like a ghost.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You'd be blue
Without a neighbor next to you



This is a Chicago band, The Notations, from 1971. I may have heard a snippet of this track while surfing the AM dial when Chicago's two Top 40 stations were either playing the same song at the same time... or crap at the same time. Edging up the dial into "police band" territory I'd sneak a listen to Chicago's mighty soul giant WVON-1450---"The Voice of the Negro." Sadly for me I never stuck around long in that radio neighborhood for it to become a habit. Having been acculturated as a South Side/south suburbs kid starting in the mid-1950s, I absorbed by osmosis the idea that there was something "wrong" with, and even "dangerous" about, listening to the negro stations at the frontiers of the dial, including Chicagoland's thousand-watt jazz beacon in Harvey, Illinois, WBEE-1570. (Fortunately for me, I rediscovered WBEE after dropping out of college in 1973, and this listening experience accounts for a considerable amount of my jazz "ear" knowledge.)

The Numero Records Eccentric Soul reissue series is a compilation of "lost" recordings from America's regional and farflung soul music markets, including (believe it or not) Columbus, Ohio; Tallahassee, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona! This side is reissued on "Twinight's Lunar Rotation," an outstanding two-disc set of singles issued by the top Chicago local soul label. This Numero compilation is the best of the crop that I own, but there is lotsa strong stuff on the other half-dozen Numero compilations of different soul labels that I own. There are numerous tracks on this and the other compilations that were certainly worthy of charting nationally, and many others that might have charted but for a vocalist who was out of his or her league with top-drawer material.

There is no legitimate reason why "A New Day" should not have charted nationally, in my opinion. There were probably two problems, one being failure to tap into the crossover market using progressive promotion techniques (i.e., payola) and the other being that this sound is very reminiscent of hits by The Esquires (e.g., "Get On Up"). In the case of the latter problem, the issue would probably have been the "dated" sound because the top-charting Esquires hits came and went in 1967. You see, 1971 was probably thought to be light years beyond the 1967 soul style in the ears of the national labels. Nevertheless, here it is: a gem of upbeat, feelgood soul---a flawless performance, in my opinion. These Numero compilations feel like a glimpse into the soul music scene from a closely parallel universe. There's lots more where this came from.

A New Day, The Notations (1971, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records A4KM 2409; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Microeconomics

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President Barack Obama made a unilateral commitment to economic stimulus Tuesday evening before a joint session of Congress by delivering the largest shovel-ready project of his two-year administration to date: the 2011 State of the Union address.

Today's doke [updated]

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Shared with permission from Married To The Sea, 18 January 2011. The authors, Drew and Natalie Dee, give away digital carloads of "humour" for free on their website. If I wore wacky tee shirts, I'd probably buy 20% of my wardrobe there.

Update: this is a self-referential "torn rotator cuff" doke. Please make a note of it.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Following a bit on last night's subtext, here's another band and song for "purists" to hate---this time, "rock purists."



Yes, I know the costumes and slap-happy comedy was lame, and certainly performed for edification of the emergent teeny-bopper cult. Also, while I don't know anything about their production methods, it would not surprise me if most of Paul Revere's big hits were laid down by studio musicians even though the lads could play their instruments. But the hard rock sensibilities of the Raiders jab holes through the facade and production value. It would have been very uncool to admit to anyone that I liked Paul Revere upon my arrival as a buzzcut nobody at Hillcrest High School in 1967. But as I began collecting 45 rpm singles in the 1970s I could hear, through more well informed ears, that lots of pop acts---including this band and the Monkees, for example---had much more going on for themselves than the era's longhairs would ever acknowledge.

I don't think a person has to listen too hard to hear some Stones-like guitar and energy in "Good Thing" and other Raiders tracks from the mid-60s. Of special interest to me in this tune is the movement of parallel fourths and/or fifths both in the vocals and guitars---they're the odd-sounding harmonies that sound vaguely oriental and a little incomplete, which Aerosmith and many others made heavy use of decades later and to this day.

The most capable dancer, which some of the YouTube commentators seem to think is Goldie Hawn, is featured near the front of the set and distracts attention from the weird gunplay subplot that ends up getting under another dancer's feet. "Good Thing" was issued in Chicago about this time of the year in the winter of 1966-67, when there was a shortlived pop music style fascination with the Victorian and Roaring 20s eras, which accounts for the dancers' flapper-style dresses in the midst of American Revolution drag. Anyway, it's a bit of flavor from an eclectic time in American pop music; three minutes of upbeat full-color rock, dancing, and tomfoolery.

Good Thing, Paul Revere and the Raiders (1966, from "The Spirit of '67," Columbia Records CL 2595 [mono], via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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As I've maybe mentioned here before, many self-described "jazz purists" either dislike or make excuses for Charlie Parker's interest in large band and orchestra formats near the end of his life. I don't share either of those views. The quality of each recorded effort varies, of course, just like in real life. And the observation---not a profound one, really---that Parker did these performances to sustain or enhance his income is immaterial to me. As they used to say in England during the Renaissance, "Shakespeare got to get paid, son."



Entertainment corporations tell us that rock and roll is "the soundtrack of our lives," but I'd argue that for individuals born before, say, the Kennedy administration, this style of music is every bit as much a part of our "soundtrack" as rock is (at least those of us who grew up in a major urban area). I'm not saying that Parker, specifically, was necessarily a component of our collective unconscious, but rather the orchestral setting for musical treatments of jazz standards and show tunes that our parents used to have on the car radio, during folding and ironing time, and so on, was endemic and burned deeply into our little neuro nets.

To the postmodern youthful ear, which often hears pop music from the past through a filter of campy irony, this cut may sound like something that "Mad Men" used to boink the secretary to after hours. But the best of the lush sounds from this era---say 1950 through 1960---have a deep resonance to those of us who were innocent kids waiting to be fed homemade burgers and fries on Saturday night or cruising southwest down U.S. highways toward a vacation in the era immediately before rock ascended into prominence. So to all those ultra-hip jazz purists who look down on Bird's big band and orchestral digressions, I say "fuck you, asshole."

My feeling is that this track could have been the outstanding gem of Parker playing in a big band setting were it not for one inexcusable "clam" that would have sent Buddy Rich on a spree with a butcher knife had he been conducting the band. It's in the last 10 seconds of the track; should be easy to hear. The perp, Danny Bank on baritone sax, was not slaughtered after the session, however, and went on to record an estimated 10,000 tracks in his distinguished career.

I Can't Get Started, Charlie Parker with Big Band (1952, originally issued on 78 rpm single as Mercury 11096-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

I want a space bike!

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Space bikes aren't yet available to the American consumer---they didn't even have them on Star Trek TNG, fer chrissakes! But thanks to the Retro Thing blog I see that some progressive companies are now marketing a cunningly hybrid technology torn at the same time from the annals of the past and future. It's called a velocar, a human-powered personal vehicle built around a recumbent bicycle frame. Recumbents have been around for a least a century, and velocars almost as long. Some historians, in fact, propose that the first velocars date to a much earlier era (Illustration 1). I'd guess that they originally failed because neolithic engineers could not effectively design a power-transfer train using only rocks, pointy sticks, and animal hides.

The concept of robust human-powered vehicles, however, was both sound and feasible. Now, 21st century entrepreneurs have improved on the historic mobile phallus motif by applying advanced materials to both prehistoric and modern designs (Illustration 2).

I'm partial to the Velomobiel Quest (Illustration 3), which is faithful to its weenie-type roots while purportedly applying many simple but powerful design concepts. One big improvement, if well executed, is the isolation of the drive train from the elements in order to avoid heavy maintenance requirements. Also, the tires can be changed without removing the wheels. Another improvement is the snappy road speed made possible by using computer-assisted aerodynamic design in combination with ultralight materials, including removable weathertight hardtops.

Illustration 3. Velomobiel Quest.

Obvious issues to investigate would be user safety and theft prevention, but these are already live issues for anyone who commutes by bicycle. Retro Thing commenters complain that the vehicle is too expensive because they're "just recumbent bikes with canopies," and that you can buy a new economy car or used luxury car for the $8K--14K price tag. I feel that these concerns are too dumb to rebut directly. But consider the benefits of a weathertight, ultralight human-powered car that has enough cargo space for some groceries or a small shopping trip to the strip mall.

After manufacture and shipping, these vehicles would eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and, therefore, local carbon emissions. Human-powered commuting would inject a significant cardiovascular exercise routine into driving chores. Insurance costs should be much lower because, presumably, a velocar driver can't achieve the same level of slaughter or property damage that a drunk can behind the wheel of an SUV or a town car. One other huge, but less tangible benefit: this vehicle is probably very much owner-hackable like any bike, and like most cars were through the 1950s. Sustainable transport could reopen a niche in the citizen-engineering world, recalling a time when many ingenious Americans were more interested in playing with carburetors and crankshafts than passive entertainment and recreational shopping.

One might wonder why the fuck we ingenious Americans would have to look to the Danes to market solutions for affordable, sustainable transportation considering that the U.S. has zillions of underemployed trainable workers, lots of low-interest cash theoretically available for lending to startups, and supposedly a surplus of entrepreneurs who would like nothing more than to make some money "putting America back to work again." Caveat: I do not consider "it's not as simple as that" to be a valid response. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

A Petraeus scenario for 2011

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Longtime readers should remember my cheeky piece of 2007 political speculation which put General Dave Petraeus at the center of several presidential campaign scenarios. I evolved it to account for certain unfolding actions, but I still think any of them was sound enough to have been worthy of exploratory development by wealthy GOP "thought leaders." In all of its forms, my Petraeus speculation was based on certain non-farfetched assumptions. Not to belabor them at this time, here is the gist:

1. To win back the White House, Republicans need to stick with the strategy of nominating someone who hasn't left a long trail through Washington or the public media, because quite apart from their professed ideologies, the field of "possibles" is littered with the unappealing and the unsavory. The reason that GOP officials or their pundits can launch trial balloons for people like Barbour, Bloomberg, and Huckabee is because launching them for the likes of Boehner, Christie, and Jindahl is, prima facie, preposterous.

2. The establishment's favorite political narrative is that our nation needs "bipartisan" solutions as put forth by "respectable moderates." It is desperate to find us candidates that can "rise above partisan bickering" to continue cramming the Reagan/Bush agenda down our throats.

The GOP is so bereft of candidates who are attractive on even a casual personal level that I was convinced then (and still am now) that their only hope to win the 2012 presidential election without stealing it is to appoint a "standard-bearer" who is cut from a completely different mold in terms of superficial appeal. I believe the Republicans will quickly discover that the time is ripe for General Petraeus to step forward. First, a general has "gravitas" with the American people and, as usual, US political culture makes people stop and think real hard before criticizing a soldier. Second, I believe that Republican power brokers and rank-and-file voters consider him telegenic, and potentially even "sexy." (I may have more to say on that later assuming I don't get skeeved out thinking about it.) And third, many people perceive military general officers as dutiful public servants who are not distracted by ego and ambition, so Petraeus would be helped to whatever extent Americans are looking for a Man On Horseback to "deliver" us from our troubles.

All of that is arguable, of course; I'm just saying that for a number of superficial and calculating reasons, Petraeus would be comparatively easy to sell to the "middle wing" of our body politic. I'll tackle this topic, hopefully, in small pieces as time passes instead of continually trying to formulate "unified field theories" like I did during 2007-08.

I'm dusting off this scenario, though, because certain people in the GOP seem to be thinking along approximately the same lines. For one thing, there is a group that thinks Petraeus is entitled to some rank inflation to put him on a par---militarily and in terms of visibility---with history's handful of five-star generals such as Dwight Eisenhower. And for another thing, this right-wing "Vets for Freedom" group is already trying to push Petraeus into the limelight in preparation for a presidency bid.

Starting rehab this evening

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Hello everyone. Thanks for your attention to the matter of me and torn-up appendages thereof. Beer-D gave you a simple accounting of surgical success and my general quality of life following the event. He was not able to share with you the feeble state of my willpower and low functional achievements since Tuesday. I've found little enjoyment in being so helpless in the face of an obvious fact, which is that my body is at least 90 percent functional. Cognitive inaction takes a greater toll than an inconveniently located mashed-up shoulder. So I've decided to begin rehabilitation tonight at levels higher than clavicle.

I will catch up with greetings and throw in a handful of bon mots to prevent adhesions as I putter around the demesne tonight.

Cutty, feely open thread

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A few "housekeeping" matters for you, in the form of my first, very own "open thread." In case  you don't know, "open thread" is a blogging term for a post that is of little inherent interest but serves as a pointer to a comments section where readers may intercommunicate.

I will direct the vassals of my domain to use the comments thread, if advisable, to pass along any news of interest about my condition and wellbeing in relation to some arthroscopic surgery I'll receive on Tuesday. This will take my left shoulder offline for several days, and it probably will stymie any significant typing by RubberCrutch. My hope is that there is no news at all to report, other than "all is well," and that immobilization of the shoulder won't have me away from the keyboard for more than, say, 36 hours.

I'll probably be away from work for close to 2 weeks, and will start fast on PT in 1 week. This pretty much constitutes my "vacation" for the upcoming year, so I intend to enjoy it to whatever extent possible. I've laid in a case of assorted affordable organic wines for medicinal purposes.

I'm still a little behind on responding to commenters from over the holidays and the past weekend; I feel like a jag about this because it's always my intent to share words with people who take the time to read this page and then write something about it. To me, blogging at a third- or fourth-tier scale is the only meaningful internet social medium; Facebook and Twitter seem worse than useless for purposes of... well, anything; blogging is not only social, it's also personal. I hope to catch up with all commenters before tomorrow noon, which is showtime.

If there is anything to be reported about my condition, it will be posted in the comments section by Beer-D or Big Rock Head. Talk to you soon.

---Love, RubberCrutch

Last Giffords post, I hope

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Before I leave the political aspects of the Giffords massacre behind in preparation for several days of phony debate and false equivalency to pollute mass media channels, I'll reprint below a comment on my post entitled "And Dove bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous," contributed by that frequent and prolific Fifty50 visitor, "Anonymous." It evidently didn't make it to the comments section because Blogger thought it was too long or something, but it came through via email notification. Without further comment (except in the comments section):

yes, let bygones be bygones. Sage advice.

I put Fox news on (something always done with utmost caution) yesterday to see how they were reporting what MSNBC and CNN were doing their 24 hour work on. Hey, on Fox we could learn about smokeless cigarettes--a news infomercial since nothing else was happening in the country.

The right was momentarily caught unprepared to spin this stuff but guys like that "Fineman" give them a break to recover and crank up their propaganda.

The 74 yr old sheriff of Pima County AZ did the country a big service yesterday by stating very clearly what the hell is happening in AZ and in the US. Let Fox spin that. But many other issues are and should come up because of this, especially once the identity and circumstances of the other victims are made public.

Such as health care: the medical help the victims require as well as the mental health help guys like the shooter never get anymore (doesn't take a psychiatric degree to read that youtube shit and diagnose a schizophrenic).

Such as gun control: why the hell is a guy like that carrying around a police/ military style weapon? Why does he have access to it any more than he does to plastic explosives? And so much for the idiotic NRA rationale that in states like AZ with open carrying gunslingers the bad guys won't stand a chance. That could have been an NRA convention and, with that weapon, he could have hit 19 people just that quickly before anyone could react.

Such as the role of government: I didn't notice any private business dealing with that mess. Like evacuating the scene, like getting the injured to medical facilities, like the state university med school they were moved to itself. The public law enforcement entities handling the crime scene and investigation (city, county, state and federal--all taxpayer supported). No, the only role I noticed for the private sector in all this shit was the strip mall stage on which it took place. There is a very good reason for the taxes a society pays-- many of them demonstrated in this tragedy.

So lets sit back, take the "fineman's" advice, give our Randian and Paulian-worshipping brothers and sisters the benefit of the doubt, and hear what they have to say. Already the Alaskan snowbilly has pointed out that the "surveyor's" sights on her website were misinterpreted. Reload babe!

Achtung, "Howard Fineman" [updated]

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For your information, "Howard Fineman," the only "connection" between 9/11 and the Giffords massacre is a cute little shorty named Christina Taylor Green, who will never walk the earth again. Thank you for your attention to this matter, you marinated schmuck.

PS: get a haircut.

Update: BoingBoing has the pseudo-hipster version of Finemanism---a pot-stirring but pointless foray into look-how-serious-I-am above-the-fray-ism. As with Finemanism, this sort of pseudo-philosophical prior restraint on discussing national-scale calamities and discussing relevant precursors has the effect of telling everybody to shut up until the right-wing noise machine takes command of the discussion, figures out a way to blame liberals and---even better---the victims themselves. After which our corporate mass media escort us off the topic and onto the next one of their choosing.

And Dove Bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous

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Predictably, it begins: the call for "civility" by a Beltway pundit, "Howard Fineman," who hopes all of us will emulate George W. Bush "at his ardent best" on a 9/11 rubble heap, as he lathered up the nation for the willy-nilly destruction of Afghan places and people completely uninvolved with the Bin Laden cabal. Or Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband as he drooled platitudes about "God and the Bible" and "tolerance, forbearance, and love" a few days after a right-wing conspiracy executed the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

This "Howard Fineman" creature is the worst that corporate media has to offer. He asserts, with only the same information at hand that you and I have right now, that the Giffords massacre was "not about politics, ideology or party." And that, therefore, an appeal to "civility" is the salve to be applied. While posing as a voice of reason and moderation, this "Howard Fineman" instructs the nation to avoid discussing the level of accountability that might be assignable to the right-wing media and political ringleaders. These animals who have clawed their way to wealth and power by trading on unvarnished prejudice and violent political rhetoric over the past several decades must not be connected with the predictable fallout of their actions. We must avoid analysis, one supposes, because this might create discomfort for "Howard Fineman" and his paymasters, and the horrible, horrible people he shares cocktails and finger foods with to gain personal validation.

Never fear. I am certain that President North Star will lap up every refined droplet of "Howard Fineman's" wise counsel. And that as a result of same we Americans can look forward to a new Era of Good Feelings that will usher in a hundred years of prosperity and peace. Long Live "Howard Fineman"!

Then and now

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As I revisited Zappa's "Mom and Dad" earlier this evening I was slightly taken aback by the condemnation of police as the Establishment's agents of political violence. I believe that was true: impulsive police disrespect for and harassment of "longhairs" was known by most of "us" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, if not from first-hand experience, then from the accounts of our friends and acquaintances, and certainly from continual news reports. Each individual circumstance differed, of course, and two reasonable people could have reached opposite conclusions about many of them. Also, cops also certainly created uncomfortable circumstances for "hippies" caught in the process of committing a crime, and I doubt that rednecks got any gentler treatment when apprehended committing the same acts. Nevertheless, after sifting through those ambiguities, it was clear then and now that the police, and even the state National Guards, were agents of suppressing lawful political assembly and expression.

This evening, in a TPM report about a possible accomplice in the Giffords massacre, here's part of what Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff Clarence Dupnik had to say to reporters at a news conference:

The sheriff spent several minutes directing his anger at the "vitriol" he said comes from radio and television personalities. "That may be free speech, but its not without consequences," Dupnik said.

"I hope that are all Americans are as saddened and as shocked as we are," he said.

"We need to do a little soul searching."

Arizona in particular, he said, has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

I think it's fair to say that law-enforcement officers tend to be socially conservative in any location. So it's heartening to me that one from an especially "conservative" corner of the nation would directly acknowledge misgivings to a national audience that certain social worldviews in his jurisdiction have gotten way out of hand.

I believe that the typical sworn law-enforcement officer, like the typical soldier, is indoctrinated with a clear concept of duty and professional mission that trumps individual beliefs. I know we can point to racially motivated police brutality, for example, as one of many indicators that cops are no more perfect than any other sector of society. But my point is that at this point in time, police are not largely in the business of suppressing liberal political expression. That task was "privatized" somewhere along the way.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Convened a day late this week, instead of a Fish Fry, out of respect for five six who died in the Arizona political massacre today, and the rest who were maimed or traumatized. This is Frank Zappa's tender, seething commentary on the consequences of right-wing political violence. Different era and M.O., but the victims are still innocent.



Mom and Dad, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1968, from "We're Only In It For The Money," originally issued on Verve V6-5045X), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Giffords on NPR

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As I suspected, the Arizona congresswoman targeted in today's assassination attempt is the same one I heard on All Things Considered while driving home from work on 5 January 2011 (had forgotten her name). I remember quickly becoming exasperated with her opening statement, smelling of namby-pamby "centrism," regarding what she intended to do during the 112th Congress:

First and foremost, work with the Republicans. I come from the state of Arizona, which is a pretty bipartisan state. I formerly served in the minority, know what it's like to work with my Republicans in the majority and in the minority. And that's truly what American people want. I do think it's important, though, to look back on the reflection. 

But her tone and her words soon became much more nuanced as she pushed back against the Republican midterm "mandate" nonsense. She easily handled the remarks of know-nothing Illinois Republican Pete Roskam while clearly and succinctly taking down the main Republican talking points against HCR. By the end of the piece I came around to thinking that she might be a good egg after all.

"Barring info...speculation benefits no one"

*

That is NPR's rejoinder about the Giffords shooter and his motives. They're concerned about "speculation."

Little "speculation" is necessary when facts are available.

Rep. Giffords's Republican opponent Jesse Kelly had campaign rally shoot-in to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office."

The federal judge shot dead in today's incident, John Roll, had previously received right-wing death threats by telephone that required intervention by the U.S. Marshals Service.

One account, a second-hand attribution to the Democratic National Committee Western States Director, posted by Atrios, has the perpetrator calling out the name of each victim he shoots.

Anybody following national news for the past several years knows that Arizona has a highly expressive right-wing gun culture that has normalized the concept of bringing firearms to political events. (Sorry, don't have time to find a link right now.)

So, NPR, why don't you take "political junkie Ken Rudin" off the pontification beat this evening and assign him try some real reporting on the alleged shooter's internet ramblings? Based on an initial look at samples posted to TPM, the shooter would seem to have been motivated to a large extent by psychosis. But in the few of his utterances I've glanced at so far there appears to be a stack of kindling cut fresh from the right-wing noise bush. As one would expect, those political assassination attempts that are not the work of paid hit men are typically the finale of a grand vision obsessing an individual who has lost his mind. We don't have to go too far out on the "speculation" limb to write a reasonable first draft of what went wrong in Arizona today.

Hideous

*

And not only hideous, but very much foreseen and publicized by DHS over a year ago.

Do you remember what happened when DHS released that memo about the rising threat of right-wing extremism? And do you remember the howling about this from right-wingers at the time, like the samples captured at the bottom of the HuffPost article linked above?

And do you remember how DHS chief Napolitano fumbled against that right-wing pushback? And, finally, do you remember how, when questioned by TPM this past September about actual examples of right-wing domestic extremism over the year since the original DHS memo had been issued, she referred to it as "ancient history"? I do.

Right-wing celebrity pundits using mainstream communications media fire up haters with eliminationist rhetoric covered by a veneer of sick humor. Right-wing politicians refuse to disavow pigs like Limbaugh or Beck, and will even express sympathy for the seething fans who are infected with this violent, schizoid ideation. How many times have you hears a senior Republican establishment figure say something to the effect of "Well, I may not agree with the rhetoric, but I certainly understand why these people are so angry."

But "centrist" shape-shifters like Napolitano and President North Star, who always approach this topic without candor in order to spare themselves a scolding from John McCain and Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson, share in the accountability for this abominable political massacre. I'm sure that all we'll hear about this from Responsible Democrats in the coming days are abstract platitudes about the horror of it all in This Great Nation founded on principles of blah blah blah; and boilerplate expressions of how everyone's thoughts should "be with the families" of the victims. But not a goddam meaningful word about the hate mongers or their mesmerized audience.

Editor's note: yes, I am aware that we don't have many confirmed facts yet about the alleged shooter or his motives. I see no point in being "even-handed" at this point, but I will immediately apologize for jumping the gun when it is proven that the shooter is a smelly, card-carrying ACLU socialist vegan.

Way to keep the eye on the ball

*

Among President North Star's highest priorities for the new year? Using the Justice Department to intimidate WikiLeaks sympathizers not accused of any crime. Unconscionable and futile---a waste of resources and good will.

I intend to write a bit about the new era of whistleblowing the world entered last year, but there are reasons why I must select my words carefully. It's probably legal for me to say that I think this has been the most fascinating and asymmetric application of political expression I've ever been aware of. Kind of like that guy in Tienanmen Square standing in front of a column of tanks in 1989, except packing a coupla Romulan disruptors and a Jem H'Dar cloaking device.

As nearsighted, misguided security apparatchiks busily labor to make a martyr of Julian Assange, they may discover that he has something in common with the mythical hydra. Some people may still think the President really can play 10-dimensional chess, I'm pretty sure he's no Hercules. Even if he were, why not labor to decapitate the criminal Wall Street hydra, for example? (Oh wait, I already know why: because we must not hold banking racketeers accountable for their crimes, but we must instead "reach out" to them and give them high-level policy positions in our administration.)

Editor's note: my intent for the new year is to write less about topical issues like this, because it feels pointless. RubberCrutch has bigger fish to fry.

Wise sayings

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"I'm at Dapper Dan man, goddamit!"

Editor's note: yes, this is a quote stolen from my birthday twin. No, not The 59er---George Clooney! And furthermore, I hope your new year has started out exactly as you wanted it to. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Out of office message

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Hello. RubberCrutch will be unavailable until the year 2011. Thank you for your attention to this matter.



Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer, Morphine (2000, from "The Night," Dreamworks 00445-00562), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Childhood traumas revisited

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Christmas has two esses in it...

*

...and they're both dollar signs.



Sad but true. I felt obligated to offer this light musical entertainment on Christmas Eve in order to soothe the nerves of Oil Can and Mrs. Harry. Last night's presentation evidently triggered a bout of post-traumatic stress in the little guy---something about somebody putting Coco on the rug or some such.

The milquetoast, Bob "Peace On Earth" Cratchit, is portrayed in this Stan Freberg production by cartoon voiceover actor Daws Butler---a brilliantly talented man who was, in my opinion, cursed by having to portray an endless procession of lame cartoon characters, mostly for the hack Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. Until digging up the previous link, though, I did not know that Butler voiced the part of Aesop's son on Rocky and His Friends.

Freberg's sentiments here as as bitter as any he ever expressed on record---but bitterly hilarious, of course. Various "Mad Men" of the day felt touchy about Green Chri$tma$, however, and worked hard to suppress promotion of the record and airplay of same for a few decades. To this day it's rarely heard out here in radioland. To this day, reality is an affront to the senses and sensibilities of some delicate souls.

Green Chri$tma$, Stan Freberg (1958, Capitol Records F 4097), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: if you pop outta bed one more time I'm gonna jak się masz you!

Ghosts of Christmas past

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Here is a Christmas entertainment that incessantly appeared on the family TV screen in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. I do not remember what Little Oscar thought of this. But our late sister, little Piggly Wiggly, was a huge fan of this throughout her life, and she was very proud to have located it on VHS in one of her last years and pass it on to several of us. She was a nut about all things Christmas, but I know that part of her nostalgia for this short was related to the name of the second "dwarf"---Coco---which she related to a 1950s incident in a Chicago-area restaurant involving myself, a broken bout of constipation, and my trudging into the dining area with little pants around ankles protesting about someone putting "cocoa" in my... well, never mind. Myself, I must confess that I only enjoyed this feature because it heralded the coming of Christmas (presents), and because the refrain of the elves' names was fun to sing in tiny ridiculous low voices, and because Peggy was so damned amused by the whole thing. For her whole time on earth, which ended in 2005, she addressed me as "Coco."

Anyway, if you were sentient in 1956 or later and watching Channel 9 in "Chicagoland" around Christmas, I'm sure you can sing along at least with the refrain. Now brace yourselves.



Here's the thing: with all respect for our dear sister, I'm afraid that this "story so queer" is, to me, is a hellish thing to watch as an adult. Just look and listen.

The misty opening scene is simple and gorgeous in its own right but, honestly, it begins looking like a set from The Wolfman and quickly morphs into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari---very expressionistic, but far out of whack, atmospherewise, with the season to be jolly. The face of Santa, reading a book entitled "Girls and Boys" with his eyes plastered shut, smiles in a fashion presaging that of the grave-robbing Mr. Sardonicus from the eponymous Castle horror film of 1961. The three elves succumb to that contagion by the end of the feature, and the penurious quality of the stop-motion animation completes the overall atmosphere of oppressiveness.

Then there's the soundtrack. The lead vocals for the verse alternate between a creepy-sounding reverberated androgynous chipmunk-style voice, a "dwarf" I guess, and an a capella barber shop quartet---both accompanied by a mellow choir of banshees. The female chorus that leads on the refrain sounds like an infernal calliope piping out church lady harmonies.

I don't mean to be a wiseguy, but I honestly don't understand how this animation became a Chicago Christmas "classic," as it is called in most writeups I can find on the web. I find it disquieting as an adult, and potentially even qualifying as raw material for toddler holiday nightmares. But it is what it is, and my pixie of a little sister adored it for decades.

(And incidentally, it's way past your bedtime, goddamit!)

Hardrock, Coco, and Joe: The Three Little Dwarfs, Stuart Hamblen (1961, Centaur Productions), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: while researching for this post I found an interesting thing or two about the composer, Mr. Hamblen, which serves to connect some dots between HC&J and a future Fish Fry in preparation... if I can remember.

OK, OK! Heh heh!

*

I coulda sworn I told the little feller not to pop out of bed, but there he is jumping up and down on the furniture for an "encore." OK, Luigi: here is your... encore.



Holy Kazoozis---it's Grace Jones! (Grace Jones?!?) I don't recall seeing this lovely beast ever looking quite as comely as she does here, tantalizing Pee-wee Herman's inner homunculus after he almost cluelessly returned her to sender. It will not escape fans of The Dance that Ms. Jones begins her musical interlude with a coupla preliminary burlesque moves, but then loses herself in song without unhinging her outer candy shell or staying long enough for it to melt in one's mouth or hand.

I assume Reba's letter carrier union protected her from reprisals for the misdelivery. Had Mailman Mike still been on the Playhouse route, no doubt he would have tried unwrapping and poking around in the giant box before delivering it. And then Ms. Jones would have found it necessary to rupture every organ the poor guy had, leaving only one of them untouched.

Action-packed, Pee-wee!

The Little Drummer Boy, Grace Jones (1988, from the primetime TV special, "Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special," CBS), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

It's Bedtime!

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Since I'll be spending my holidays, as always, in the eye a typhoon fueled by booze, pills, and burlesque dancers, I will get an early jump on my Christmas posting. Which is to say, I have a video confection here for The 59er and, incidentally, the rest of you. As The King used to say on Peewee's Playhouse, "Let the cartoon... begin!"



Thanks to The 59er for suggesting that I dedicate a few posts to commemorating Christmas. I'm happy to be challenged to find my own take on a topic of interest to others in the small cadre of people who spend their valuable time checking this blog a few times a week. The text that follows is animation-related, not Christmas-related, so you can stop reading here if you're not interested in the former.

This cartoon is another in the small series of Color Classics by Fleischer Studios through Paramount, released in December 1936. This is a really good print, and includes the original title cards. My eye isn't educated enough to know whether the almost gaudy coloring is faithful to the original Technicolor print or a restoration job; even if the former, it's A-OK with me---much better than the version I used to watch with my sons on VHS tape.

The opening scene is a vivid specimen of the Fleischer "Tabletop" background animation technique. What they did was draw, paint, and build miniature theatrical sets on large turntables. The sets were rotated in front of a fixed camera to simulate situations like walking down a city street, but unlike straight 2D backgrounds a realistic parallax shift would be evident between the closer and more distant planes of depth. In this example the animators also use a zoom effect to simulate how it would look if we walked in the front door of the orphanage.

The manic Grampy is, in the Fleischer universe, a pal of the latter-day Betty Boop. Once he gets his noodle cranked up, he can sustain enough high-level frenetic energy to rival Popeye himself. And although I think the Flesichers intended Grampy to be kind and lovable, which he is, there is a certain unmistakable lack of full control in his lunacy. His compulsive laughter reminds me more than a little of Greedy Humpty Dumpty, who became unhinged at the thought of riches in the cosmos that did not yet belong to him. Yes, I'm afraid Grampy is a nut.

But just look how inventive Grampy is with found materials: he epitomizes American Ingenuity at its best. And since there doesn't seem to be any food, or any adults, around the orphanage, the tots probably won't have to bother dismantling the toys made of china and flatware. They'll die happy, which I guess is the eternal human goal when you think about it.

Christmas Come But Once A Year, A Max Fleischer Color Classic (1936, Dave Fleischer, Director; Paramount), via YouTube, public domain.

Editor's note: now get to bed, goddammit, and I don't want to hear another peep outta ya!

Without a poke [updated]

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This pig is only slightly more likely than I am to be the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. Why the bad outlook? Because he says things out loud that the mainline Republican power elites only think silently to themselves or discuss in secure undisclosed whites-only men's social clubs. Alpha-Republicans and their shadow government of right-wing publishers, think tanks, and foundations may mostly be crypto-segregationists, but they know enough to hide their true philosophies and objectives from the light of day because even in this coarse age, polite society is still repulsed by intentional expressions of unvarnished bigotry. Buffoons like Barbour draw unwanted attention to the hidden agenda with their dewy reminiscences about how swell segregationists actually were---nice, neighborly sorts of fellows, actually (because it really felt like that to them, probably). Still, they get treated with lace gloves as if they "misremember" or are "confused." Bah!

The corporate news media will seemingly float a trial presidential balloon for any Republican who hasn't been photographed having sex with a 15-year-old outside Utah.

Update: in order to help explain the bitter tone of the text above I had meant to include this link to Atrios, who today excerpted a 1956 article by the legendary David Halberstam on "white citizen councils." Chilling shit.

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Went to buy some cheap detergent
Some emergent nation 
Got my load



"Can't Afford No Shoes" (lyrics here, because it's hard to catch most of them without reading along) was not an evergreen crowd-pleaser in Frank Zappa's live performance repertoire, but I don't understand why. The Recession/Depression economics theme was surely of concern to Zappa's audience from the time this song was released in the mid-70s well past beyond the sunrise in of St. Reagan's Morning in America. (It certainly was to me, as late as 1983!) And the composition was about as straight-ahead of a hard rocker as Zappa ever recorded.

The instrumental arrangement is explosive, as you will hear if you jam in your waxy little earbuds and crank up the volume. The rhythm section is really punchy, and the guitar tones are aggressive. Based on the liner notes in both copies of this album that I possess, it looks like Zappa is playing the slightly unhinged slide/Dobro-sounding solo about halfway through. He usually delegated this sound to Denny Whalley, who was actually playing with him in 1975 (maybe an album-credit oversight?). If there's a harmonica down in the mix on this track, and I can't tell on this low-fi YouTube clip, it is being respirated by one Bloodshot Rollin' Red, known in the personal mythology of all Zappaphiles as Captain Beefheart, the charming avant-garde multimedia artist what I composed a humble eulogy for yesterday.

The vocals are, in my opinion, somewhat marred by the inexplicable self-mocking delivery that seemed to self-sabotage any number of Zappa cuts that had all other necessary elements for a big radio hit. Johnny "Guitar" Watson, one of FZ's musical idols, is credited with vocals on two other cuts of this album, but I'm pretty sure I hear him in a supporting role on this track as well.

I think this song is "low-hanging fruit" for some band to revisit today and hit big with.

Can't Afford No Shoes, Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention (1975, from "One Size Fits All," reissued as RykoDisc RCD10095), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: clarifying edits made to the first narrative paragraph in response to commenters. Thanks, commenters!!!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Momma was flattenin' lard with her red enamel rolling pin



On the way home tonight I heard on the radio that Captain Beefheart had died. It made me sad.

Beefheart, whose "straight" name was Don Van Vliet (sorta rhymes with fleet), christened his stage persona in honor of an uncle who used to brag that his schlong was the size of a beefheart; Van Vliet and his childhood companions nicknamed His Avuncular Highness "Captain Beefheart."

This tune, from his most influential album, Trout Mask Replica, features Mister Beefheart in what I think of as his radio reporter voice. A more common vocal style he used over the course of his recording career was actually a very profound (and piercing) channeling---not mere imitation---of Howlin' Wolf. (Follow the link provided by "Anonymous" in the comments section if you want to hear an example.) But here, in a suave, well modulated rap not rhythmically tied to the accompaniment very closely, he recites one of his lovely avant-garde poems. Like so many of Beefheart's lyrics, this one is full of vivid and absurd imagery that is not only entertaining on the face of it, but kind of starts making more and more sense with repeated listening. The Magic Band chugs relentlessly beneath the vocal track, sounding very rickety and odd. But, like the lyrics, the music becomes increasingly accessible with each playing.

There are plenty of accounts of Beefheart's important but sporadic lifelong artistic relationship with Frank Zappa, who produced the breakthrough Trout Mask. In many ways, artistically, Beefheart and Zappa perfectly complemented each other. I suspect that most of the regrettable personal problems between the two were driven by Zappa's need for ego dominance and recognition as the sole genius behind any project he was involved in. (Zappa is a major hero of mine, but one who wore two enormous feet of clay.) And it also seems obvious to me that Zappa's own lyrics owe much, much more to Beefheart's influence than he ever acknowledged. Also, Beefheart was notoriously poor at remembering the words to songs in live performance, and often got lost even when he was holding the lyrics right in front of him. You can hear this in a number of places on the 1975 Zappa/Beefheart album that centers on a live performance in Austin, Texas. This Beefheart idiosyncrasy must have made a maniac of Zappa, who was a tyrannical perfectionist and control freak.

Anyway, I earnestly hope that the good captain has ascended to a plane of existence where the poetic phrases he utters are instantly rendered into arabesques of painterly visual reality along the lines of the canvasses to which he dedicated the latter part of his career... and vice versa.

Old Fart At Play, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band (1969, from "Trout Mask Replica," reissued as Reprise Records 2027-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I start out clean each day/
Shoot 'em down shoot 'em down shoot 'em down shoot 'em down



Music like this confirms to me that I'm not the typical older-generation crank to think that pop music became pretty uniformly bad starting in the 1980s. Why? Because along the way I've found a nontrivial amount of bands that have dug deep to innovate on the root forms, whether extending them in terms of form or rethinking how rock and pop should sound. I think that what this relative handful of groups has in common is that you can't point to much that obviously identifies them as eighties, nineties, or tenties music. Another thing is that they do not sound like the product of teen focus groups and coke-sniffing producers. In my view, they say something... whether there are lyrics or not.

Here is one of my favorites: Morphine. No historical or critical essays tonight, except to say I think it's funny that the recurring phrase they use in the framing passages sounds like a mild perversion of the famous Joe Walsh riff from "Rocky Mountain Way" (find it on YouTube if you don't recognize it by name; you should recognize it right away).

Now, you know the routine here at the fish fry: mash those earbuds into your head and turn up the volume to 11.

Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'm Down, Morphine (1993, from "Good," RykoDisc), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

President North Star

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At his December 7 press conference, President Obama declared his belief that this country was founded on compromise:

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal. This country was founded on compromise. I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union. So my job is to make sure that we have a North Star out there.

See, I thought that this country was actually founded on the basis of an uncompromisable "abstract ideal," namely the right of a peoples' collective and individual right to self-determination. This concept was concisely and eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Maybe what the President actually meant was that the U.S. Constitution was hammered out in an epic labor of debate and compromise so both the humble and the aristocratic founders could get behind it. If so, that's true. But you can't compromise if you don't negotiate. Obama allowed senior congressional Republicans to take the restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for the rich completely off the table before the first bag of Cheetos was opened. That's not compromise; it's a surrender to winner-take-all tactics. And it pivots the responsibility for intransigence onto his own party. Smooth move, President North Star.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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As of this afternoon I neither knew that James Moody was still alive nor that he died yesterday of cancer at age 85. My first acquaintance with this great saxophonist's music was in the 1970s, on a reissue of Eddie Jefferson's 1959 "vocalese" album The Jazz Singer. Jefferson was a genius at composing lyrics for famed instrumental melodies and performing them in a bop style, including all the inflections and phrasing idiosyncrasies of the originals. Moody's best-known melody originated in 1949 as an improvised solo based on an older composition called "I'm In The Mood For Love." Ten years later Moody played tenor on Jefferson's rendition, and in a funny turn of fate, he ultimately embraced the vocalese version and staked his own claim on it. Here is a 1991 performance of Moody's Mood featuring the great man on the vocal, in the company of other giants including Lionel Hampton, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, and Hank Jones. Just listen to how the melody unfolds, with inventive flourishes surely inspired by Charlie Parker.



Unfortunately and oddly, I can neither find a version of Jefferson's rendition nor Moody's 1949 seminal performance, so you can't gain a full appreciation for development of the melody or its nuances. Moody was a saxophonist, and his vocals were mostly novelty affairs along the lines of how his mentor Dizzy Gillespie would sing. His performance of Moody's Mood here, like others I've heard, is both heartfelt and hilarious, but it doesn't communicate the stunning greatness of the solo. But it definitely conveys something about the man.

I've recently bought several late 1940s recordings of Dizzy Gillespie's experimental bop big band---an ill-fated venture due to postwar music industry economics---and discovered that Moody was right there with Diz at the beginning of an era. I intend to pay closer attention to liner notes as I listen to these discs in coming weeks so I can try to better appreciate James Moody's earliest excursions into bop, even before Moody's Mood.

Moody's Mood For Love, with Lionel Hampton and the Golden Men of Jazz (1991, "Live At The Blue Note," Telarc Jazz), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Let freedom ring

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Hillary Clinton, from a speech on 21 January 2010:

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship.

The title of the speech, of course, was "Remarks on Internet Freedom."

It's funny, see?

The mask is off

*

Just one more post about President Obama's cynical, stomach-turning political calculations, which I wrote about yesterday. I'm gratified to see that Paul Krugman reads this turn of events, politically, about the same as I do:

What’s particularly striking is that Obama seems passionate about denouncing his progressive critics, even as he has nice words for the people who have spent two years trying to destroy him. 

(Be sure to click through to the Tom Tomorrow cartoon that Krugman links to, by the way.)

I had intended to follow up my weekend posts about Obama's situation to add some coherence to my thoughts. I see no point now. If he had any cognitive dissonance about his role in life, which was only education speculation on my part, I'd say he's now found an effective denial strategy and is acting accordingly. Sleep well, Mr. President. Dream of your legacy: "At Least I'm Not George Bush or John McCain."

Arrogant and pathetic

*

There is far too much to say about this three minute clip of Obama's press conference today than I have time or stomach for now. One or two paragraphs after the clip.



Yes, this is the debate we had about the public option all over again. He was wrong then and he is wrong now. The public option is the least-cost, least administratively complex way of providing universal healthcare to all Americans now. He knows it and so does everyone else. But it wasn't good for the insurance industry. So he compromised the best interests of the American people and fiscal responsibility away to the insurance industry. And, no, Obama has not achieved "healthcare for all Americans"; not even close. And his Republican successors, who he doesn't demand compromise anything substantive or enduring, will tear up his "signature piece of legislation" a day or two after he vacates the White House.

And today: the principle of progressive taxation with representation is not an "abstract ideal"; it's a concrete policy issue, and without it we would have had no "American Century." His compromises with enemies of tax fairness are not noble; they're cynical and craven.

This clip is the arrogant, sanctimonious manifesto of that phony kind of centrist whose truly abstract ideal is to imagine that he can raise himself above the fray of partisan politics. His statements are marred with faulty logic and festooned with distorted historic examples. He plays at distancing himself from the extremes on both sides of the spectrum, with a few stern words for Republicans (not in the clip), yet giving them them what they want. Then he deeply insults the ideals and motiviations of his base; in a year from now he will whine about his liberal primary challenger.

Underneath it all, what strikes me about this clip is the President's petty tone. I'm sure he's trying to sound defiant, but he sounds arrogant and wounded.

Voters did not elect Obama to be a centrist and an appeaser of failed right-wing ideologues, but President Obama pretends to believe differently. And because of that, in 2012 we will most likely have a new President. What a pathetic performance.

December 7: a suitable day for a nice stab in the back, I guess.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

If the Beach Boys had been able to continue in this direction, with Brian Wilson channeling his musical explorations back into a commercial rock vein rather than what Mike Love called "Brian's ego music," this group might have gained a whole new relevance in the late '60s and early '70s. Unfortunately, other things happened.



It doesn't take my ear much imagination to hear something very much like Chicago at their peak form during the "CTA" era. Swap out the low-rent piano and bass lines with something jazzy, use a larger drumkit played around the beats instead of straight up and down, throw some reverb on the horns, put Pete Cetera on lead vocal. I owe this observation in part to old pal Larry K., who reported to me some years ago that he saw a Chicago/Beach Boys mashup during the mid-70s in The Windy City, and Chicago did in fact perform Darlin' with Petey on lead vocal and other beach men participating. I can hear why that would have worked then by listening to this track.

Darlin', The Beach Boys (1967, from "Wild Honey," originally released on Capitol Records T-2859), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

OK, I gotta settle down now

*

Between my current fevered speculations, which are intended to develop a plausible hypothesis about what is really wrong with Obama and his political flubs and miscues of the past 2 years; and some mind-bending reading about current events that I intend to comment on soon, I'm now ready for some west and welaxation. West and welaxation! That's right. So here's a nice-ish photo I shot last night from the back door of the garage.

I made the image on my mighty Nikon D700 using a Nikkor 24mm prime lens opened up to f/2.8 and with an exposure of 1/40th of a second (hand-held). Of interest to old-school photographers, I set the ISO to 6400---16 times faster than the old Kodak workhorse fast film, Tri-X. I didn't even bother to correct for visual noise, which would plague most digital images made at this speed on lesser cameras.

This picture astounds me in terms of how capable this camera is of capturing high-quality images in low light. The key light was a mercury vapor security light that inflicts itself on my property from the alley. I did very little postprocessing, just tinkering a little with the white balance to reduce the red/magenta tint of the light source, then applying the Adobe Bridge vignetting tool in the RAW processor to eliminate the "irising" effect at the corners of the frame, which is inherent to most wide-angle lenses.

I was amused by this sight last night because the patio looked all set up to host a conclave dedicated to booze and cigars, with the only obstacle being about 4 inches of highly packable snow covering everything. By afternoon today, incidentally, we had about 10 inches on the ground here in my small city on a swamp.

Eluding me: the obvious

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Eluding me where? Hiding in plain sight, as usual. What has eluded me? Democrat "succession planning" if President Obama were in fact experiencing the sort of collapse that a decent but naive man might suffer if he were psychologically unsuited to wield brutal, overwhelming power in the manner a U.S. President must deploy it.

If the President were in fact melting down, and if he did indeed want out, then we can assume that top Democrat leadership is well aware of it. Assuming that said leadership is not directly involved in a conspiracy to hand over the nation's full executive, legislative, and judicial authority to the Republican Party, then they will probably want to hang onto the White House into 2012.

Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution specifies that "In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President...." This portion of Article 2 has been modified and extended by the 20th and 25th Amendments, but the fundamental succession remains the same as it was in 1790.

If the President resigned owing to his inability to execute his duties, it would be unprecedented. But this has been a decade of unprecedented developments in our humble democratic republic. I'm sure you can think of as many as I could list here. Putting aside the personal humiliation that might go with a historic abdication, I can easily believe that an introspective, spiritual family man would at some point readily submit to this humiliation in return for the opportunity to salvage his soul and his life.

Were that to occur, the successor would be a veteran Democrat insider who may even be capable of rising to the occasion. And his successor to the vice presidency? That would depend on his own ambitions. But it could be either of two alpha females: Hillary, if Biden wants to retire or revert to the vice presidency; Pelosi, if he wishes to try on the office for a full 4 years. And in case it isn't obvious, all of this speculation falls into the category of thinking outside of the conventional wisdom; it amounts to guessing, not prediction. And I should also be clear that none of this speculation represents wishful thinking on my part.

For your "empty messaging" collection

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Yes, for sure! Progressive Democrats are certain to resonate to this kind of twaddle while the Obama White House is simultaneously busy with futile but chilling expressions of authority that will seem inexplicable and evil to any person who has grown up with open access to the internet. You know what kind of people those are: Obama's base.

I believe it's inevitable that President Obama will have a stiff primary challenge in 2012 from the progressive wing of his party, and that it will be strongly supported by the progressive wing of society at large.

Another Obama problem

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Independently of my speculations about the President's problems in my previous post, I think that a real on-the-ground problem he needs to solve immediately is the lack of a formidable chief of staff. Whatever reasons one may have to mock and despise Rahm Emanuel, by all accounts I've read he was well suited to the rigors of controlling access to the President and, for whatever fool reason, could inspire dread in a certain number of people. (Probably including Obama, regrettably.)

Interim Chief of Staff Pete Rouse, according to his Wikipedia writeup, has paper qualifications for the job. But he looks like kind of a pud to me, so therefore that must mean he's a lightweight (a portly one, nevertheless).

Perfect candidate for permanent Chief of Staff? Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. Perfect, that is, if you enjoy the Clinton brand of Davos democracy. Which I don't. But you must acknowledge that it would be an ace move on Obama's part that would drive Republicans berserk. Therefore, I say "make it so!" After all, we can't expect anything progressive from national Democrats now, at least not until Madame Speaker throws her granny shawl into the ring about a year from now.

Of course, it occurs to me that if Obama really did hire Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband as Chief of Staff, it might ensure that Obama self-deposes about a year from January to clear the deck for Hillary and head Pelosi off at The Castro.

The "why" of Obama's problem [updated]

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Here's my contribution to the grand parlor game of Winter 2010, namely trying to figure out what's the matter with President Obama.

The "what" of the problem was evident pretty much from the start. He has kept his counsel with establishment Democrats and Blue Dogs while dismissing the priorities of the people who voted him into office. He has been preoccupied with "reaching across the aisle," pulling it back each time with another missing wristwatch or gold ring, for the futile pursuit of meaningful bipartisanship with adversaries who are intent on destroying his presidency. He fails to provide vocal, energetic leadership to achieve his purported goals, and fails to use his rhetorical skills to talk over the heads of bitter political enemies straight to "the American people." And finally, he concedes negotiation points to the predators and parasites in advance of the negotiating, which lets them know that they can make him cave on any issue. For a long time, cautious optimists felt that all these tactics were part of some super ninja political strategy that would, without warning, explode forth and overwhelm his regressive opponents. Myself, I discarded the idea that he was a 10-dimensional chessmaster upon his continual dereliction of duty during healthcare reform negotiations.

The "why" of it is a puzzle. Paul Krugman has an idea about it---an extension of observations he has been making for at least a year. The gist of it is that now everyone is seeing what Obama is made of: nothing. Could be. It's possible that Obama was never anything more than a legislator-poet; a guy with a great broadcast voice (when he's not stammering all over himself) and enough charisma to be able to make any of his ideas seem perfectly reasonable to a wide spectrum of people.

A competing idea, just as prosaic as Krugman's but with more of the ring of truth to me, is that while Obama really does possess the attributes of leadership, intelligence, ideals, and virtue that so many of his partisans clearly perceived during the election cycle, he is psychologically and unemotionally unsuited to the level of power he stepped up to. Only four years after logrolling small-time downstate legislators as an Illinois state senator, and having served barely enough time in the U.S. Senate to be oriented into its ways, voters granted Barack Obama his own DEFCON4-grade mansion, airborne command fortresses, bulletproof limousines, personal praetorian guard, and enough power to annihilate all but a dozen nations on earth with relative impunity.

Obama, the dedicated family man---kind, laid-back, hip, spiritual---must try to sleep every night under the inevitable weight of ordering or consenting in assassinations worldwide, the launch of predator drone attacks that kill innocent people, and "renditions" around the globe (I think we can assume that these have not stopped). Immediately upon his election, masses of ignorant, resentful people were whipped into a lather of hate for this well-meaning man, who epitomizes the so-called American Dream, by gleeful corporate news conglomerates, vicious national politicians, and demonic infotainers. He surrounded himself with bad (as in Evil) people in key positions, thinking it to be politically savvy because establishment Democrats told him it was "reality"), and has been cuckolded continually by their bad faith and world-destroying policy recommendations. Certainly he is now aware that he no longer has a significant political constituency---only a relative handful of people who think he's better than McCain would have been.

My current thinking, regretfully, is that Obama's talents and ambition got him to the Oval Office, but he had no idea what arriving at that destination would do to him mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It would be a miracle if he is not demoralized, despondent, isolated, afraid, and fed up. A sign of such a miracle would be if the President were behaving defiantly, deconstructing the malevolent intent of his political adversaries and proactively selling his own positions directly to the American people.

The increasing pace of Obama's political gaffes suggests to me that he's now doing it on purpose. It is possible that he is desperately hoping for a serious, qualified primary challenger. If one emerges and can poll at around 35 percent among likely Democratic voters, I'd have every expectation that he would be greatly tempted announce his intention not to seek reelection on similar grounds that LBJ pleaded after he was almost beat in the 1968 New Hampshire primary by Gene McCarthy.

A hypothetical primary challenger in 2011, like McCarthy in 1967, would most likely be a deeply dedicated progressive who is skilled at retail-level politics and at home in the corridors of power; somebody who has been in The Game for awhile. (No Blue Dog or Clintonista would even have a legitimate pretext for challenging Obama since he has been their cat's paw for 2 years now.) My guess at this point? Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

[Editor's note: I updated this post on Saturday morning to present a more nuanced viewpoint in the last several paragraphs than I was capable of accomplishing on Friday night.]