These Things Too

Noot! Noot!

2012-01-24T17:10:00.000-05:00

Bat Masterson, gunfighter, socialist....

2012-01-21T16:50:00.000-05:00

The real Bat Masterson left his career as a gunfighter in the west and went east and on to a career as a newspaper writer in NYC. He died in1921 of a heart attack, his last reported words, found in his typewriter, were these:

"There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way."

More humble....

2012-01-19T16:49:00.000-05:00

Rick Perry* has withdrawn from the 2012 GOP presidential race and endorsed Newt Gingrich because, he said, "Government needs to be more humble."

I have not drank milk in about 15 years, and yet, when I read that, milk shot out of my nose.

*Seen above at the left making gang signs behind Newt Gingrich, who is describing the $50 cheeseburger he had for lunch to a bald man.

It is 1955 and....

2012-01-19T11:48:00.000-05:00

It is 1955 and
it is a week
or two
after my second birthday and
I am standingin long pants
in the dark green water
of the Atlantic Ocean
with my mother
and Marian Anderson is the first African American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera
and the game Scrabble debuts
and the Pentagon announces a plan to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons
andPresident Eisenhower sends the first U.S. advisors to Vietnam
andClaudette Colvin, a fifteen year old black girl, refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white woman after the driver demands it and is carried off the bus backwards while being kicked and handcuffed on the way to the police station
andWinston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister
and the Salk polio vaccine receives full approval by the FDA
and Disneyland opens to the public in Anaheim, California
and the first nuclear-generated electrical power is sold commercially
and James Dean dies in a car wreck
andChristopher Mayhew ingests mescaline and allows himself to be filmed by the BBC
and Vladimir Nabokov publishes his novel Lolita
andthe Mickey Mouse Club TV program debuts on ABC
andthe Reverend Sun Myung Moon is released from prison in Seoul, South Korea
and the Brooklyn Dodgers finally win the World Series
and a time bomb explodes in the cargo hold of United Airlines Flight 629 killing everyone on board
and racial segregation is outlawed on trains and buses in Interstate Commerce in the United States
and Bo Diddley makes his television debut on Ed Sullivan's Toast Of The Town
and the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merge to become the AFL-CIO
and the Montgomery Improvement Association is formed in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black ministers to coordinate a boycott of all city buses
and General Motors Corporation becomes the first American corporation to make a profit of over one billion dollars in one year
and we are anchored
located
situated
sutured
into a
history that swirls around us
like some living
surreal
tornado
and we're not in Kansas anymore.

"Would Mormon number 2, please stand up."

2012-01-09T14:53:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is far from the only candidate in the current GOP traveling circus who has to pay extra for all the baggage. As the New Hampshire primary approaches, Mitt Romney's ability to take all possible positions on all possible topics has finally begun to drag his candidacy down. Quizzed on his position on gay & lesbian rights -- remember, he's running for the top spot in the "God, Guns 'n Gays" party -- Romney's response is simply incredible:

"As you know, I don't discriminate. And in the appointments that I made -- when I was governor of Massachusetts, a member of my cabinet was gay. I appointed people to the bench, regardless of their sexual orientation. Made it very clear that, in my view, we should not discriminate in hiring policies, in legal policies.

At the same time, from the very beginning, in 1994, I said to the gay community, 'I do not favor same-sex marriage.' I oppose same-sex marriage. And that has been my, my view. But, but if, if people are looking for someone who -- who will discriminate against gays or will in any way -- try and suggest that people, that, that have different sexual orientation don't have full rights in this country, they won't find that in me."

The result of Romney's lack of character has been the parade of "Not Mitts" that started with Herman Cain, saw the improbable rise of Newt Gingrich, the corresponding surge of Ron Paul, the come-from-behind arrival of Rick Santorum, all leading to the current rise of Jon Huntsman.

Let's be clear on a few things. No one was more surprised by Newt Gingrich's momentary lead in the polls than Newt Gingrich, who, like Herman Cain, thought he was on a book tour and was never actually running for the nomination. His surge, just like the recent surge of Rick Santorum, is the result of the republican voter gag reflex kicking in at the thought of swallowing Mitt Romney as the nominee.

Santorum, quite possibly the most mean-spirited human being ever to aspire to the presidency, never stood a chance outside the congregation of the First Church of Christ Who Really Really Hates Fags. And Ron Paul is a Libertarian, not a Republican, even if libertarians are really little more than republicans who like to smoke dope.

There were three reasons Rick Perry's chances plummeted once he entered the debates: It turns out he has the intelligence of a broken table lamp; he was a constant reminder of He Who Shall Not Be Named (the last Texas Governor to occupy the White House and almost bring about the end of the United States); and I forget the third one.

Now stop and consider this for a moment: In the most appallingly radical right wing primary season ever mounted in US politics, where the mention of uninsured people dying from untreated illnesses and other people dying from having toxic drugs pumped into their veins by state officials drew thunderous applause, the final result may well be the rise of the one candidate who both worked for and most closely resembles the most "authentic conservative" in the 2012 race -- Barack Obama.

If there isn't an ancient Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in ironic times" there really should be.

Memorize this....

2012-01-08T23:32:00.001-05:00

The new Not Mitt....

2012-01-06T12:26:00.000-05:00

Perhaps, if elected, he will send the big white ball after Newt.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T19:16:00.000-05:00

CSNY&J....

2011-12-27T16:14:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Tom Jones ever since I realized that there were two songs that no other singer alive or dead* could ever sing without looking like an idiot, i.e., "What's New Pussycat" and "Thunderball." Someone on Facebook found this amazing video from Tom's late-1960's TV show that pairs him up with prime period Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the song "Long Time Gone" off the CSN debut album. Everything about this is great -- Crosby's reactions as he realizes this isn't going to suck at all; Stills' vocals, wow! It reminds me of Mick Jagger on the T.A.M.I. Show dancing after James Brown (he can't stand up because his balls are too big).

Jones had a lot of great bands on his network show, and often dueted with them, like he does here with Janis Joplin.

* Yes, but you see, Heino is neither alive or dead.

Harpy Kringle....

2011-12-23T12:21:00.000-05:00

Don't let those atheists take our holiday!

Here's the thing....

2011-12-18T11:04:00.000-05:00

"The Republicans are always talking about American exceptionalism. It's a term they like so well that anyone who won't buy in is considered a pariah. But if America is exceptional, what makes it so? Sure, we have beautiful mountains, but there are mountains in other places.

If there is anything that makes America exceptional, it's... our government. In both concept and execution, it's the government of America that was the great experiment, the ultimate gamble on the ability of mankind to hold together as a community.

It's not possible to love America and hate the American government. We are exactly as exception as our government, and exactly as threatened. That thing they're trying to drown... that's us." - Mark Sumner

It's what I've said all along....

2011-12-14T10:10:00.000-05:00

Writing in the December 14th Daily Kos under the nomme de plume "Something the Dog Said", Bill Egnor asks the question: "Will a Newt Nomination Break the GOP Establishment?":

"The Republican Party has had a checkered past with nominating far Right candidates that can energize the base but completely turn off the general electorate come election day. Now with unemployment hovering around 9% and millions of people out of work for a year or more, the Republican establishment is facing the prospect that they will nominate someone so radical, so callus about the truth and so hypocritical in his personal and professional dealings that he might have trouble wining if he ran unopposed."

Egnor continues:

"What is more than a little bit ironic is that they have done this to themselves. It was, in fact, this very candidate they fear that accelerated the war on expertise and started the idea of political purity as a virtue in the Republican Party.

27 years down the pike the GOP finds itself in the grips of a question that it has answered incorrectly time and again; namely is it more important to nominate someone who is a good conservative (whatever that moving target really is this week) or someone who actually has a chance to win the White House?

The dislike of and disdain for Mitt Romney has led to series of candidates that conservatives have tried on and discarded like a chubby man trying to find a bathing suit that does not make him look fat. Bachmann was too crazy, Perry too dumb, Cain too philandering.

While Newt suffers from two of the three of these (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine exactly which two) he has the experience to hide them better (all except the philandering) than the others.

There is also the matter of time. Peaking at the right time is always a key factor in politics and it looks as though old Newton has managed to peak right before the Iowa caucuses. While he is getting a bit of a run for his money from the Mad Elf of the Republican Party, Rep. Ron Paul, he is the likely winner in the early event.

If he carries Iowa and makes a good showing in New Hampshire, he will be positioned to run the table, up to Super Tuesday. He could very well become the Republican nominee. And that has the establishment shitting gold bricks.

So they are lining up to try to, once again, replace the front running non-Mitt candidate with someone who, if the electoral gods are not kind, can at least make a credible run. But it does not look good for them.

This is the problem with telling your base time after time to distrust the experts. At some point you will want to be able to say 'Trust me, I know best' and have them do it. But a habit of rejecting anyone who has studied up on an issue and has an opinion you don’t like is a hard thing to break.

The base of the Republican Party has decided that it has the power. In a totally objective, small d democratic way this is a great thing, but for the folks riding this tiger at the RNC it is a real problem.

They are right, Newt Gingrich would be a horrible general election candidate, old versus President Obama’s relative youth. A three time serial husband, versus a long and apparently loving and strong single marriage; a history of making things up versus a fact packed record. It is an ugly, ugly hill to climb and it one that would take a freaking quantum shift of reality to overcome and win the presidency.

But the GOP base does not want to hear about it. They have decided, again, that principle is more important than facts.

It could change, perhaps enough people saying the Gingrich is unelectable will percolate into the minds of the Republican voters and they will, with no enthusiasm and with much regret embrace the original anointed candidate, Mitt Romney.

This is not a whole lot better for the Republicans. One of the factors that kept them out of the White House last cycle was the same kind of “Last Man Standing” nomination of John McCain.

He did not have the favor of the Religious Right, was moderately disliked by the money folks and was not very exciting in terms of look or oration. It was not the only factor but it did hurt them by comparison, and so will Mitt if he becomes the nominee.

In the end if Gingrich is nominated it may be a death blow to the Republican establishment as we have known it. If they are unable to reign in their radically base, they have no power at all and there is no reason for the money folks to follow their lead, instead of trying to ride the crazy base tiger directly.

All in all it could not be a better gift for the New Year and the nation to have the self-immolation of the Republican Party continue under the direction of the Bomb Thrower in Chief, disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The floor is yours."

Clueless.

2011-12-05T10:17:00.000-05:00

"Whoever finally gets the Republican nomination will be a deeply flawed candidate. And these flaws won’t be an accident, the result of bad luck regarding who chose to make a run this time around; the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process." - Paul Krugman

Newtie.

2011-12-04T16:39:00.000-05:00

History, rhyming....

2011-11-20T17:01:00.000-05:00

America, 1935.

America....

2011-11-20T16:13:00.000-05:00

Blues for the Bill of Rights.

2011-11-18T12:00:00.000-05:00

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." - First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

Building the Death Star since 1980....

2011-11-18T02:05:00.000-05:00

This piece has been reprinted in various places on the web and I think it is so strong I am going to paste it below in it's entirety. It is by Jack Cluth, from his What Would Jack Do blog:

What happens when an entire political party embraces the Dark Side? How does assuming the worst of Americans, being willing to ignore the social contract, and openly working to advance the interests of the richest among us make this country a better place? Those things don’t do anything to improve America, of course, but that no longer appears to be of any concern to today’s GOP. Today’s Republicans care about two things and two things only- power and money. Our votes are valuable to them only insofar as they’re a necessary prerequisite to gaining and maintaining power. Achieving that goal requires money- lots and lots of money- which is where entities like Citizens United, Crossroads GPS, and the Koch brothers come into play. In the new Citizens United era of unlimited money without accountability or disclosure, buying democracy is far easier than it’s ever been. Republicans really aren’t any different than Democrats when it comes to desiring power and being willing to bend (or break) the rules in order to obtain and aggregate power. It’s just that Republicans have far exceeded Democrats when it comes to demonstrating that discipline, a lack of ethics, and a willingness to be purchased is the path to power these days.

Republicans will never admit to this, of course, but there’s little doubt that today’s GOP is defined by what they hate- immigrants, homosexuals, Liberals, the unemployed- and what they fear- Islam, health care reform, compassion, abortion rights. The GOP has devolved into a party that finds joy in the suffering of others, and revels in denying the less fortunate desperately needed assistance. They define the “have nots” as lazy, shiftless, and unmotivated- happy to suck at government’s teat as they leech off those who work hard and create value. Those without health care insurance deserve to die. The State deserves the right to execute whom they please. Brown People are sneaking into this country to drop anchor babies and take our jobs. Radical Islamofascism seeks to enslave good, God-fearing American patriots and subject them to Sharia- not that many of them could actually define Sharia. Obamacare is a thinly-veiled scheme that allows evil, godless Liberals to force their Socialist, government-run healthcare upon Americans perfectly happy with their health insurance (never mind that 45 million Americans lack health insurance).

Today’s GOP uses fear and loathing as an instrument of policy. In some respects, 9.11 was the best thing that could have happened to the GOP. 9.11 provided Republicans with a bogeyman they could point to whenever they felt threatened. By invoking the imagery and the understandable fear of another attack created by 9.11, Republicans have manipulated that fear to their own advantage. It’s not about making America safer or protecting the Homeland from the continuing threat of terrorism. No, it’s about Republicans using the fear created by 9.11 to generate enough hatred and loathing to deflect attention from their anti-democratic, pro-oligarchy agenda. It’s about using that fear to gain power, and the money they secure from the oligarchy to generate the propaganda necessary to maintain and increase that power.

The idea of the social contract- the idea that we have an implied responsibility to one another- is anathema to today’s Republicans. Self-reliance and Social Darwinism have been redefined as the highest social goal. If you can’t make it in America, if you can’t stay healthy, can’t find a job, and/or can’t keep a roof over your head…well, that’s just too damn bad. Obviously you’re a failure as a human being and deserving of your fate. If you just worked a little harder, you wouldn’t be in the condition you’re in. That those passing these judgments often live in the lap of luxury and know they’ll never have to worry about where their next Big Mac is coming from is as hypocritical as it is reprehensible.

By the definition of today’s GOP, compassion is synonymous with weakness as charity is with enabling sloth and indolence. If you’re unable to do for yourself, whatever your situation might be, you have no right to expect government to do for you. Ill? Disabled? Uninsured? Unemployed? That’s too bad, but it’s not the responsibility of government to do for those unable to do for themselves.

It’s as if Republicans have decamped from anything resembling compassion and migrated en masse to the Dark Side. They’ve rejected anything that smacks of humanity and embraced a Darwinian view of America as a place where the strong rightfully survive and the weak get what they deserve. I don’t know about you, but this philosophy has nothing to do with the traditional Conservatism that Republicans profess to revere. Traditional Conservatism doesn’t reject the social contract. It doesn’t genuflect to the oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. It doesn’t traffic in fear, hatred, and loathing. It doesn’t reject science. It doesn’t embrace fundamentalist Christianity as the ultimate and only authority on what America should be.

Then again, this isn’t about Conservatism. It’s about doing whatever it takes to acquire, maintain, and increase power and control. It’s about enforcing Social Darwinism and Fundamentalist Christianity as the basis of the American experience and the law of the land. It’s about using fear, hatred, and propaganda in order to manipulate the American Sheeple into doing your bidding.

Welcome to American Democracy: the bidding is now open.

Look at history, rhyming....

2011-11-03T11:31:00.000-04:00

"Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history." - Aldous Huxley

1935 cartoon. To those readers who really know their cartoon history, “A.R.” stands for A. Redfield — the sometime nom-de-toon of New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff.

We are the worms....

2011-11-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

A new currency is born: The cost of the Kardashian-Humphries wedding was an incredible $10 million, says Anna North at Jezebel, which will be "henceforth referred to as 1 Kardashian." Kim's sister Khloe's wedding? That only cost $1 million — "or 0.1 Kardashian."

People slow down for train wrecks. It doesn't mean they like train wrecks, it just means that if there happens to be a train wreck, and they happen to be driving past it, they will slow down and look. It turns out the same is true for fabricated train wrecks. People will still slow down. They might be confused for a moment; they might look around for a film crew and movie making equipment. They might mutter, "Aw, that ain't a real train wreck," but they will slow down nonetheless.

We live today in the surreal thousand-plus channel media landscape at the front of the new century. I think of media outlets like baby birds, crowded together, their mouths stretched open; crying, waiting, hoping. Or, maybe the baby birds are the seemingly infinite number of advertisers hawking the new hybrid electric Viagra that gets 40 erections to the gallon (if your trip lasts more than 4 hours, call a doctor). No matter, either way we are the worms dangled above the gaping mouths.

Somehow these various media have found ways to make money based on how many people drive by and slow down. The first part - the slowing down for a peek - that's just basic human nature. Our small furry proto-primate ancestors slowed down to gawk at the lions eating the gazelle to note where the lions were at the moment. But it's that second part that freaks me out.

Its also worth noting, that is, if any of this is worth nothing, that Kim Kardashian's mom, Kris Jenner, ever the businesswoman, has a new memoir hitting stores just one day after the divorce news broke.

Meanwhile, take a moment to review this terrific portrait of twenty couples who put the Kim Kardashian marriage to shame.

Game 7....

2011-10-28T15:40:00.000-04:00

David Freese celebrating after hitting his walk off home run in the 11th inning of game 6

Game 6 of the 2011 World Series had everything in it that I love about the game of baseball; the sheer exhausting unpredictability of it. The Phillies and Yankees should be playing in the World Series; instead, they're playing golf in Arizona. Nolan Ryan, looking like the Yoda of the fastball, should be washing the champagne out of his hair; instead, he's steeling himself for the first Game 7 since 2002.

Yes. The Cards have Destiny on their side, but we understand that Destiny is just a stripper with a skin condition in an East St. Louis titty bar, and Unpredictability might roll up on his Harley and, fueled on meth, kick her to death in front of shocked and horrified onlookers.

The Cardinals have all the numbers on their side and Baseball, while married to Numbers, still hooks up with Unpredictability in that cheap motel by the interstate on a regular basis. Home teams have won the last eight Game 7's in the World Series - a streak that started with the Cardinals beating Milwaukee in 1982. And, if that's not enough, the team who holds the record for winning the most Game 7's ever is.... G'wan, take a guess. The Cardinals, who have won 7 of 10 of the clinching games.

Nobody has ever explained why baseball remains the national past time better than the late George Carlin, and definitely no one has ever made semiotics funnier.

Look at history, rhyming....

2011-10-27T10:45:00.000-04:00

“Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all – the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” – Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago 1968

WWJD?

2011-10-20T13:40:00.000-04:00

"Spoken Word" artists, Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl

Although he is best known as a Punk Rock icon, Jello Biafra's "spoken word" career is best understood as part of a direct lineage from Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory. All three were stand up night club comedians in the 1950s who, as they moved into the tumult of the 1960s, stopped telling jokes and started, in Sahl's case, coming on stage with that day's newspaper and reading the news. If you want an introduction to Biafra's spoken word catalog I recommend the 2001 release, Become the Media, a 3-CD set offered at a single disc price.

While Biafra doesn't own a computer and doesn't use email (except through his record label, Alternative Tentacles), he has taken to the internet in the form of a video journal called "WWJD" which is posted to Youtube. His recent monologue on then Occupy Wall Street movement is alternately scatter shot and insightful.

Will Rogers....

2011-10-11T09:54:00.000-04:00

November 1879 - August 1935

"I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat." - Will Rogers

Metaphors....

2011-10-10T10:39:00.000-04:00

#Occupy Wall Street....

2011-10-09T00:57:00.000-04:00

"The basic movement that says to each person: You are, I am a worthwhile person. I am one of the 99% that are the backbone of and reason America got this far. Why do I have to, beg for a job, beg that I can be seen for a medical condition, beg a politician for some little relief from the inexorable tightening of the screws that go on day after day, year after year, and never lets up? Why do the 1% have to keep grabbing more and more and stealing from the rest of us? Why must this theft continue? Why do I have to have my dignity, self worth violated over and over?" - BeeDeeS

Everyday I read more and more reports that point to the leaderless character of the #OWS movement and it's lack of a clear concise agenda as the primary strengths of the incipient movement. And the argument is not without merit - don't allow any organization to lay claim to leadership because, the second you do, you immediately limit the scope and appeal of the movement.

But there will come a moment when that will have to change, when this movement will have to move pass the simple expression of built up frustration and outrage over the past 3 decades of economic inequities and proceed toward some actual specific action.

It will not be a "revolution." Not in the same sense as those that spread across the Arab Spring. Barack Obama and John Boehner will not flee the Capitol and be discovered by an angry mob hiding in the break room of a Walmart.

I see posts on Facebook by people who, when I tell them they need to vote to stop a return of a Republican White House, tell me I'm wrong and that instead we have to "tear the whole thing down."

So.... This means what? That we shut down every public assistance office, every library, every public school? That we shut down all public utilities, all public transportation, all government services, all government agencies?

The fire hydrants in my neighborhood have been broken for a while; the sewage system in Indianapolis is about 100 years old and in need of some serious repair. Three times in the past week I've woken up, turned the faucet, and nothing has come out.

This is what we need to do, rather than re-elect Barack Obama?

No water, no electricity, no heat, no traffic lights, no police, no fire, no emergency services? Do these people really think a world in which a call to 911 is answered by a recording that says "The number you have dialed is no longer in service" is better?

No banks, no money, no prescription medicine, no salt trucks and road plows after a snow storm. Power to the people. Right on.

At the same time, the #OWS movement fills me with real hope.

I read recently someone who argued that the New Deal ended on May 8, 1970 in lower Manhattan, the day of the "Hard Hat Riots."

The riot started about noon when about 200 construction workers mobilized by the New York State AFL-CIO attacked about 1,000 high school and college students and others protesting the Kent State shootings, the American invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street.

A left political movement that is on the other side of the working class is a non sequitur and has zero potential for growth or success.

But fast forward forty-one years to October 5, 2011 and the statement issued by Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President:

"Occupy Wall Street has captured the imagination and passion of millions of Americans who have lost hope that our nation's policymakers are speaking for them. We support the protesters in their determination to hold Wall Street accountable and create good jobs. We are proud that today on Wall Street, bus drivers, painters, nurses and utility workers are joining students and homeowners, the unemployed and the underemployed to call for fundamental change. Across America, working people are turning out with their friends and neighbors in parks, congregations and union halls to express their frustration – and anger -- about our country's staggering wealth gap, the lack of work for people who want to work and the corrupting of our politics by business and financial elites. The people who do the work to keep our great country running are being robbed not only of income, but of a voice. It is time for all of us—the 99 percent—to be heard.

We will open our union halls and community centers as well as our arms and our hearts to those with the courage to stand up and demand a better America."

Is that the spark that ignites the return of the New Deal? I'd sure like to think so, but, at the same time, I see a whole lot of Ron Paul supporters involved in these protests. Perhaps this represents a teaching opportunity. Perhaps a Ron Paul supporter marching on Wall Street presents a case study in a critical pedagogy of economics that challenge the assumptions of libertarian economics.

I will hope for as long as I can possibly hope.

Einstein on memory beach....

2011-10-04T22:36:00.001-04:00

Einstein
Washed up on the beach
A sorry sight
His unruly
mushroom cloud
of white hair
Wet
Flattened against his skull
His spectacles
Knocked off by a wave
Staggers to his feet
Falls
Laying there for a moment on the sand
He almost looks like a young man again

My father's mother's second husband
Albert
Was a kind man
They lived in West Philadelphia
Girard Avenue
I would spend a week or two living with them
in the summers
at the end of the 1950s

I don't know if we have any photos of Albert
I haven't seen any for many, many years
and in my mind's eye he looks like
Albert Einstein
I imagine
I am remembering the mustache
and filling in the blanks.

Everything old is new again....

2011-09-25T15:24:00.000-04:00

"I thought about it all weekend...."

2011-09-09T14:09:00.000-04:00

Just came across this and it pretty much speaks for itself. Excellent.

Collect the whole set....

2011-09-08T10:27:00.000-04:00

Send the troops home....

2011-09-07T11:46:00.000-04:00

The things we remember....

2011-09-02T13:22:00.000-04:00

Earlier today, playing around on Facebook, I posted a video of my favorite love song. The opening chord reminded me that there is a medieval pudding recipe made from yellow rose petals. Looking for an image of yellow roses I found that they are a symbol of joy, affection and friendship. And it wasn't even noon.

Up, in the air....

2011-08-31T01:12:00.000-04:00

Governor Haircut makes the scene.

History...

2011-08-16T12:41:00.002-04:00

The number of people who believe Rick Perry ought to be President is exactly equal to the number of people who honestly believe that all that's wrong with America is that George W. Bush didn't get a third term.

This just in....

2011-08-08T09:31:00.000-04:00

Reuters News Service is reporting that the bizarre behavior of Congressional Republicans during the recent debt ceiling debacle was actually a gang initiation as Republicans become full-fledged members of Al Qaeda.

Wrong for Indiana

2011-08-07T13:37:00.000-04:00

Vote Wisconsin!!!

2011-07-12T14:37:00.000-04:00

Today is primary day in Wisconsin for the six state Senate seats where incumbent Republicans face recalls. In an attempt to delay the process, drain Democratic resources, and potentially even avoid the recalls altogether, local Republicans are running fake Democrats in the primaries. In fact, they are even conducting get out the vote work on behalf of those fake candidates.

Additionally, it now appears that at least one conservative group is running robocalls telling registered Democrats not to vote at all in the primaries because, supposedly, an "absentee ballot is in the mail." It's blatant voter suppression:

Registered Democrats from all over the district [District 10, Moore vs. Harsdorf] are reporting the same thing. They are receiving a robocall from a group claiming to be a Right to Life group explaining that they don’t have to go to the polling station to vote, “You don’t need to worry. Your absentee ballot is in the mail.”

This is NOT true. Today, Tuesday July 12, is the last day to vote in the Democratic Primary. You DO NOT have time to mail in your ballot at this point. If you intend to vote, go to your nearest polling station today to vote or to deliver your absentee ballot in person. - Daily KOS

This is 1966....

2011-07-09T00:16:00.000-04:00

"History teaches everything including the future." - Lamartine

Who we are now has a lot to do with who we were. This is the second part of a look... an inventory, of the center of what some scholars are calling the "Long Sixties" - the period of 1955 to 1975 in which the cultural revolution of "the sixties" played out.

January 3, 1966. The first Acid Test is conducted at the Fillmore, San Francisco, when tubs of regular and high test Kool Aid are set out for the masses. Also in January, Robert C. Weaver becomes the first African American Cabinet member, by being appointed United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. A B-52 bomber collides with a KC-135 Stratotanker over Spain and drops three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs near the town of Palomares, and one more into the sea. Ooops. Young singer David Jones changes his last name to Bowie to avoid being confused with Davy Jones of the Monkees. Carl Brashear, the first African American United States Navy diver, is involved in an accident during the recovery of a lost H-bomb which results in the amputation of his leg; Brashear would later be portrayed by Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the film Men Of Honor (2000). January 1966 also saw Indira Gandhi elected Prime Minister of India and Simon & Garfunkel release "Sounds of Silence," which hit #1 on Billboard charts. Albums released in January 1966 include Them Again by Them, Ballads of the Green Berets by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, Just Like Us by Paul Revere & the Raiders and Jealous Heart by Connie Francis.

In February 1966, West Germany welcomes some 2,600 political prisoners from East Germany. The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon. The National Hockey League expands to twelve teams. A military coup in Syria replaces the previous government with a Ba'athist regime. The Australian dollar is introduced at a rate of 2 dollars per pound, or 10 shillings per dollar. On 19 February, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin perform at the Fillmore auditorium in San Francisco (LSD-25 is still legal at this time). In February 1966 Wayne Shorter releases Adam's Apple; Boom by The Sonics; The Best of The Animals on MGM; Boots by Nancy Sinatra; She's Just My Style by Gary Lewis & the Playboys; The Sonny Side of Cher; Take a Ride by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels.

In March 1966, the Soviet space probe Venera 3 crashes on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface. The Ba'ath Party takes power in Syria. In an interview with London Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave, John Lennon of The Beatles states that they are "more popular than Jesus now." The U.S. announces it will substantially increase the number of its troops in Vietnam. An Irish Republican Army bomb destroys Nelson's Pillar in Dublin. The Texas Western Miners defeat the Kentucky Wildcats with 5 African-American starters, ushering in desegregation in athletic recruiting. The Labour Party under Harold Wilson wins the British General Election, gaining a 96-seat majority (a great improvement upon the five-seat majority gained at the election 17 months earlier). The Soviet Union launches Luna 10, which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon. On March 3rd, Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay form Buffalo Springfield in Los Angeles, California. The Young Rascals, Gordon Lightfoot, the Mamas and the Papas and The Fugs all release their debut LPs; the Rolling Stones release their pre-psychedelic "greatest hits" collection, Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass); Barbra Streisand releases Color Me Barbra; Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles and Phil Ochs in Concert are released.

In April 1966, Lyndon Johnson signs the 1966 Uniform Time Act, introducing daylight saving time. Bobbi Gibb becomes the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. On April 21st, an artificial heart is installed in the chest of Marcel DeRudder in a Houston, Texas hospital. On April 24, 1966, uniform daylight saving time is first observed in most parts of North America. U.S. troops in Vietnam total 250,000. In San Francisco, the Church of Satan is formed by Anton Szandor LaVey. Haile Selassie visits Jamaica for the first time, meeting with Rastafarian leaders. In April, 1966, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass set a world record by placing five albums simultaneously on Billboard's Pop Album Chart, with four of them the Top 10. Their music outsells The Beatles by a margin of two-to-one... over 13 million recordings. On April 12th, Jan Berry, of Jan and Dean, crashes his Corvette into a truck that is parked on Whittier Boulevard in LA. Berry suffers total physical paralysis for over a year as well as extensive brain damage. The bands Love and The Seeds release debut albums. The Rolling Stones release their strongest LP to date, Aftermath.

On this one day, May 16, 1966, the Communist Party of China issues the 'May 16 Notice', marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and the albums Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde are released (Dylan's "official" release date; the actual release was delayed until late June). And in New York City, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes his first public speech on the Vietnam War. Also release in May 1966, Up-Tight (Stevie Wonder); Midnight Ride (Paul Revere & the Raiders); Small Faces (Small Faces); Black Monk Time (The Monks); Strangers in the Night (Frank Sinatra). On May 17th, Bob Dylan and the Hawks (later The Band) perform at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England. Dylan is booed by the audience because of his decision to tour with an electric band, the boos culminating in the famous "Judas" shout.

In June, the final new episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show airs (the first episode aired on October 3, 1961). Civil rights activist James Meredith is shot while trying to march across Mississippi. Topeka, Kansas is devastated by a tornado that registers as an "F5" on the Fujita Scale, the first to exceed US $100 million in damages. On June 13th, the Supreme Court of the United States delivers its ruling in the case Miranda v. Arizona and establishes the rule that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them. Also in June of 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded in Washington, DC. Released in June 1966, Paradise, Hawaiian Style (Elvis Presley); Gettin' Ready (The Temptations); Yesterday and Today (The Beatles, featuring the infamous "Butcher" cover art); Animalisms (The Animals UK); Animalization (The Animals US); The Impossible Dream (Jack Jones); The Incredible String Band's debut LP; and, on June 27th, the first two "double LPs" in rock music history: Blonde on Blonde (Bob Dylan) and Freak Out! (The Mothers of Invention).

1966 is only half over.

In July 1966, President Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act, which goes into effect the following year. Richard Speck murders 8 student nurses in their Chicago dormitory. He is arrested on July 17. Also in July, groundbreaking takes place for the World Trade Center; Martin Luther King Jr. leads a civil rights march in Chicago, during which he is struck by a rock thrown from an angry white mob; Caesars Palace hotel and casino opens in Las Vegas; the Beatles release the legendary Revolver album in the UK; race riots occur in Lansing, Michigan. In the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong begins the Cultural Revolution to purge and reorganize China's Communist Party. Syrian and Israeli troops clash over Lake Kinneret (also known as the Sea of Galilee) for 3 hours. In July of 1966, the Beatles become the first musical group to perform at the Nippon Budokan Hall in Tokyo and Bob Dylan has his motorcycle accident in Woodstock, NY. Albums by The Byrds (Fifth Dimension), John Mayall (Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton), The Association (And Then... Along Comes the Association) and Beau Brummels '66 are released.

On August 16th, the House Un-American Activities Committee starts investigating Americans who have aided the Viet Cong, with the intent to make these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupt the meeting and 50 are arrested. On August 17th, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic begin negotiations in Kuwait to end the war in Yemen. On August 24th, the Doors record their self-titled debut LP. On August 29th, the Beatles end their US tour and their concert career with a performance at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California. Sniper Charles Whitman kills 13 people and wounds 31 from atop the University of Texas at Austin Main Building tower, after earlier killing his wife and mother. In August, the Beatles Revolver (in the US), The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's East-West and James Brown's It's a Man's Man's Man's World all see their original release.

On the first day of September, 1966, while waiting at a bus stop, Ralph Baer an inventor with Sanders Associates, writes a four-page document which lays out the basic principles for creating a video game to be played on a television. On September 8th, Star Trek, the classic science fiction television series, debuts on NBC-TV. The first episode of The Monkees is broadcast on NBC on September 12th. On September 14th, George Harrison travels to India for 6 weeks to study sitar with Ravi Shankar. Debut LPs by The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane (Takes Off) are released days apart. Also in September, British folk guitarist, Bert Jansch, (Jack Orion) and Donovan (Sunshine Superman) release new LPs.

In October 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton found the Black Panther Party. Toyota Motors introduces the Toyota Corolla. An experimental reactor at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station suffered a partial meltdown when its cooling system failed. The Soviet Union declares that all Chinese students must leave the country before the end of October. The Baltimore Orioles defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 4 of the World Series, 1–0, to sweep the series for their 1st World Championship. President Johnson signs a bill creating the United States Department of Transportation. The AFL-NFL merger is approved by the U.S. Congress. Grace Slick performs live for the first time with the Jefferson Airplane. Simon & Garfunkel release Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, The Kinks release Face to Face, and in New York City on October 8, 1966, WOR-FM becomes the first FM rock music station, under the leadership of DJ Murray The K.

In November, 1966, former Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke becomes the first African American elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction. The actor, Ronald Reagan, is elected Governor of California. On November 9th, John Lennon meets Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery. On November 24th, the Beatles begin recording sessions for their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Charley Pride is signed by RCA, and the Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales (Centre for Automatic and Mathematical Music) is founded in Paris by Iannis Xenakis. The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, one of three albums released that November to use the word "psychedelic" to refer to the sounds within, is released (the other LPs were The Blues Magoos' Psychedelic Lollipop, and The Deep's Psychedelic Moods).

In December of 1966, Walt Disney dies while producing The Jungle Book, the last animated feature under his personal supervision. The first Kwanzaa is celebrated by Maulana Karenga, founder of Organization US (a black nationalist group) and later chair of Black Studies, at California State University, Long Beach. Among the LPs released in December 1966 were debuts by Buffalo Springfield, Cream (Fresh Cream) and Tim Buckley.

The Top 40 songs of 1966 were: "The Ballad Of The Green Berets" Sgt. Barry Sadler. "Cherish" The Association; "(You're My) Soul And Inspiration" Righteous Brothers; "Reach Out I'll Be There" Four Tops; "96 Tears" ? & The Mysterians; "Last Train To Clarksville" Monkees; "Monday Monday" Mamas and Papas; "You Can't Hurry Love" Supremes; "Poor Side Of Town" Johnny Rivers; "California Dreamin'" Mamas and Papas; "Summer In The City" Lovin' Spoonful; "Born Free" Roger Williams; "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" Nancy Sinatra; "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted" Jimmy Ruffin; "Strangers In The Night" Frank Sinatra; "We Can Work It Out" Beatles; "Good Lovin'" Young Rascals; "Winchester Cathedral" New Vaudeville Band; "Hanky Panky" Tommy James & The Shondells; "When A Man Loves A Woman" Percy Sledge; "Paint It Black" Rolling Stones; "My Love" Petula Clark; "Lightin' Strikes" Lou Christie; "Wild Thing" Troggs; "Kicks" Paul Revere & The Raiders; "Sunshine Superman" Donovan; "Sunny" Bobby Hebb; "Paperback Writer" Beatles; "See You In September" Happenings; "You Keep Me Hangin' On" Supremes; "Lil' Red Riding Hood" Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs; "Devil With A Blue Dress On & Good Golly Miss Molly (Medley)" Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels; "Good Vibrations" Beach Boys; "A Groovy Kind Of Love" Mindbenders; "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" Dusty Springfield; "Born A Woman" Sandy Posey; "Cool Jerk" The Capitols; "Red Rubber Ball" Cyrkle; "B-A-B-Y" Carla Thomas; "Walk Away Renee" Left Banke.

Bands that first formed in 1966 include Buffalo Springfield, Cream, Eric Burdon & the Animals, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and The Monkees.

In film, a list of the six films that grossed over $10 million dollars gives an insight into how wonderfully varied the media was at the time.

1. Hawaii (Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow) $15,553,000
2. The Bible: In the Beginning (Michael Parks, Richard Harris, Ava Gardner) $15,000,000
3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton) $14,500,000
4. The Sand Pebbles (Steve McQueen and Candice Bergen) $13,500,000
5. A Man For All Seasons (Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, and Robert Shaw) $12,750,000
6. The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming! (Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner) $10,164,000

1966 also saw the release of: Blowup, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni; Fahrenheit 451, directed by François Truffaut; Masculine-Feminine, directed by Jean-Luc Godard; Torn Curtain, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; The King of Hearts; Our Man Flint; The Wild Angels. 1966 saw the film debuts of Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford and Christopher Walken.

On TV... The Academy Awards air in color for the first time, on ABC.In a post-fight interview, Howard Cosell honors Muhammad Ali's wishes to no longer be referred to as Cassius Clay, contrasting with the approach of most other sports reporters of the time. Patrick McGoohan quits the popular spy series Danger Man (aired in the US as Secret Agent) after filming only two episodes of the fourth season, in order to produce and star in The Prisoner, which begins filming in September. The 1951–1953 CBS sitcom Amos & Andy is pulled from syndication broadcast due to complaints from civil rights organizations. New series of 1966 include Batman, The Green Hornet, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, Dark Shadows, The Newlywed Game, The Monkees, Mission Impossible, The Hollywood Squares and The 700 Club.

In 1966 Cindy Crawford, Rachel Dratch, Edie Brickell, Greg Maddux, Stephen Baldwin, J. J. Abrams, John Cusack, Sinéad O'Connor, and Mike Tyson are born.

Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper, Sophie Tucker, Maxfield Parrish, William Frawley, Bobby Fuller, Montgomery Clift, Bud Powell, and Lenny Bruce died.

In or about this year, one person returning to Haiti from the Congo is thought to have first brought HIV to the Americas.

This is 1965....

2011-07-03T16:25:00.000-04:00

"If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development." - Aristotle

The years 1965 and 1966 represent a sort of peak in popular music, bound up in a kind of homogeneity that would never happen again; shattered by a gradual crawl toward fragmentization and the compartmentalization that defines contemporary popular culture. It is also across these two years that pop begins to morph into rock and lose it's status as ephemeral teenage fascination. As the performers in the post-British Invasion second age of rock and roll travel through their twenties, they begin to take more and more control of the processes that had traditionally been the realm of the "suits" who packaged and marketed the music. In 1965, pop performers are all still well ensconced in "the show business", but the signs are there of something larger lying just ahead.

The fans, too, are growing up, leaving high schools and heading to universities, and in never-before seen numbers. The "baby boom" that was wearing Beatle wigs and screaming at the Ed Sullivan Show just a year ago is now becoming politicized by the perfect storm of the draft and Vietnam, and using the added gravitas of the civil rights and anti war movements to become conscious of itself as a generation in a manner that rarely happens. These things would all reach a boil in the period of 1967-1969, but the seeds of it all are present in the period of 1965-1966.

Sometimes my head gets stuffy with facts. Names, dates and places all jumble together and I occasionally need to stop and gain a better purchase on what things correspond to what things, and what other things are years apart.

As 1965 begins, LBJ, who will be sworn in for his own full term as President on January 20th, first uses the phrase "The Great Society" in his State of the Union address on the 4th. On January 24th, as if ringing a large bell to announce the start of a new era, Sir Winston Churchill dies as "Downtown" hits #1 and makes Petula Clark the first British female performer to top the charts since the arrival of The Beatles. In February, The Rolling Stones Now! and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme are released, and Malcolm X is assassinated in Manhattan.

In March, civil rights demonstrators clash with state troopers in Selma Alabama while some 3,500 US Marines become the first American combat troops in Vietnam. A Russian cosmonaut becomes the first person to ever walk in space while the bill that will become the Voting Rights act of 1965 is introduced to Congress. Also in March, the Temptations have their first hit, "My Girl" while the Supremes have their fourth number one single, "Stop! In The Name Of Love" and Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Bill Wyman are fined five pounds for urinating on the wall of a London gas station. Albums released in March 1965 include Kinda Kinks, The Beach Boys Today!, Buck Owens' I've Got a Tiger by the Tail, Elvis Presley's Girl Happy and Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home.

In April, the US launches the world's first space nuclear power reactor. The Houston Astrodome opens. The 100th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War is observed. My Fair Lady wins 8 Academy Awards, Mary Poppins wins 5. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, convicted of murdering 4 members of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, are executed by hanging at the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men. The West German parliament extends the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. The first SDS march against the Vietnam War draws 25,000 protesters to Washington, DC. Among the albums released are My Funny Valentine by Miles Davis and Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The New Musical Express poll winners' concert takes place featuring performances by The Beatles, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, the Searchers, Herman's Hermits, The Anita Kerr Singers, The Moody Blues, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Donovan, Them, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones.

In May 1965, forty men burn their draft cards at the University of California, Berkeley, and a coffin is marched to the Berkeley Draft Board. The largest teach-in to date begins at Berkeley, California, attended by 30,000. The first skateboard championship is held. Muhammad Ali knocks out Sonny Liston in the first round of their championship rematch. Alan Price leaves The Animals. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger begin work on "Satisfaction" in their Clearwater, Florida hotel room (Richards came up with the classic guitar riff while playing around with his brand new Gibson "Fuzz box"). Bob Dylan performs the first of two concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall, concluding his tour of Europe. Audience members include The Beatles, and Donovan. Albums released include What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid by Donovan, Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock and My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand.

In June 1965 the first contingent of Australian combat troops arrives in South Vietnam. Gemini 4 astronaut Edward Higgins White makes the first U.S. space walk. In the Battle of Dong Xoai, about 1,500 Vietcong mount a mortar attack, overrunning the military headquarters and the adjoining militia compound. A planned anti-war protest at the Pentagon becomes a teach-in, with demonstrators distributing 50,000 leaflets in and around the building. In Algeria, Houari Boumédienne's Revolutionary Council ousts Ahmed Ben Bella, in a bloodless coup. Producer Tom Wilson records a heavy backing band onto the song "The Sounds of Silence", without the knowledge of Paul Simon. The Supremes have their fifth consecutive number one single,"Back In My Arms Again." The Beatles are made Members of the British Empire (MBE) by the Queen. The albums The Angry Young Them, Beatles VI and Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds are released.

And we're half way through 1965.

Turn on the radio and pop music is one loud contradictory swirl of sound rushing out of every AM car radio and hand-held transistor, all playing the same sounds day in day out. The Billboard Top 40 songs of 1965 include "Wooly Bully" Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs; "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)" Four Tops; "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" The Rolling Stones; "You Were On My Mind" We Five; "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" Righteous Brothers; "Downtown" Petula Clark; "Help!" The Beatles; "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" Herman's Hermits; "Crying in the Chapel" Elvis Presley; "My Girl" Temptations; "Help Me, Rhonda" Beach Boys; "King of the Road" Roger Miller; "The Birds And The Bees" Jewel Aikens; "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me" Mel Carter; "Shotgun" Jr. Walker and The All Stars; "I Got You Babe" Sonny and Cher; "This Diamond Ring" Gary Lewis and The Playboys; "The "In" Crowd" Ramsey Lewis Trio; "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter" Herman's Hermits; "Stop! In The Name Of Love" Supremes; "Unchained Melody" Righteous Brothers; "Silhouettes" Herman's Hermits' "I'll Never Find Another You" Seekers' "Cara Mia" Jay and The Americans; "Mr. Tambourine Man" Byrds; "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" Sounds Orchestral; "Yes I'm Ready" Barbara Mason; "What's New Pussycat?" Tom Jones; "Eve of Destruction" Barry McGuire; "Hang On Sloopy" McCoys; "Ticket To Ride" The Beatles; "Red Roses For A Blue Lady" Bert Kaempfert and His Orch.; "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" James Brown and The Famous Flames; "Game Of Love" Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders; "The Name Game" Shirley Ellis; "I Know a Place" Petula Clark; "Back In My Arms Again" Supremes; "Jolly Green Giant" Kingsmen; :Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" Patti Page; "Like a Rolling Stone" Bob Dylan.

In July 1965 the spacecraft Mariner 4 flies by Mars, becoming the first spacecraft to return images from the Red Planet. Edward Heath becomes Leader of the British Conservative Party. President Johnson announces his order to increase the number of troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000, and to more than double the number of men drafted per month - from 17,000 to 35,000. Later in July the President signed the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, establishing Medicare and Medicaid. On July 25, Bob Dylan plays Newport Folk Festival, is booed for playing electric set with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Joan Baez and Donovan also play sets. In July, the albums For Your Love by The Yardbirds, Summer Days (and Summer Nights) by The Beach Boys and Out of Our Heads by The Rolling Stones are released.

In August, cigarette advertising is banned on British television. President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The Watts Riots begin in Los Angeles California. The Jefferson Airplane debuts at the Matrix in San Francisco, California and begins to appear there regularly. The Beatles perform the first stadium concert in the history of rock, playing at Shea Stadium in New York. Casey Stengel announces his retirement after 55 years in baseball. At the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, 66 ex-SS personnel receive life sentences, 15 others smaller ones. The Beatles visit Elvis Presley at his home in Bel-Air. It is the only time the band and the singer meet. The Small Faces release "Whatcha Gonna Do About It", their first single. The Beatles release the soundtrack to their second movie Help! The Paul Simon Song Book, a solo LP by Paul Simon, is released in the UK (but not in the US). Bob Dylan releases Highway 61 Revisited, the second LP in his 1965-66 "trilogy."

In September 1965 Pakistani troops enter the Indian sector of Kashmir, while Indian troops try to invade Lahore. Islamic Republic Of Pakistan observes its Defence day. Hurricane Betsy roars ashore near New Orleans, Louisiana with winds of 145 MPH, causing 76 deaths and $1.42 billion in damage. The Tom & Jerry cartoon series makes its world broadcast premiere on CBS. Sandy Koufax pitches a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs. Donovan appears on Shindig! in the U.S. and plays Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier". The Animals release Animal Tracks and Otis Redding releases Otis Blue.

In October 1965 John Coltrane releases Om, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's first album is released, Donovan releases Fairytale, and Frank Sinatra releases September of My Years. Jimi Hendrix signs a three year recording contract with Ed Chaplin, receiving $1 and 1% royalty on records with Curtis Knight (an agreement that later causes continuous litigation problems with Hendrix and other record labels). The Animals make their fourth appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Fidel Castro announces that Che Guevara has resigned and left the country. Anti-war protests draw 100,000 in 80 U.S. cities and around the world. In Washington, DC, a pro-Vietnam War march draws 25,000. The University of California, Irvine opens its doors.

November 1965: Republican John Lindsay is elected mayor of New York City. Pillsbury's world-famous mascot, the Pillsbury Doughboy, is created. Man of La Mancha opens in a Greenwich Village theatre in New York and eventually becomes one of the greatest musical hits of all time. Bob Dylan weds Sara Lowndes. The Pentagon tells U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson that if planned major sweep operations to neutralize Viet Cong forces during the next year are to succeed, the number of American troops in Vietnam will have to be increased from 120,000 to 400,000. The Supremes have their sixth number one record, "I Hear A Symphony", for Motown Records. Arlo Guthrie is arrested in Great Barrington, Massachusetts for the crime of littering, perpetrated the day before Thanksgiving in the nearby town of Stockbridge. The resultant events and adventure would be immortalized in the song "Alice's Restaurant". Among the albums released in November are Having a Rave Up with The Yardbirds, The Kink Kontroversy, Do You Believe in Magic (The Lovin' Spoonful), E.S.P. (Miles Davis), Farewell Angelina (Joan Baez) and Going To a Go-Go (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles).

December 1965: The Who release My Generation, The Beatles release Rubber Soul, The Byrds release Turn! Turn! Turn! and The Rolling Stones release December's Children (And Everybody's). The Beatles also release their double A-sided single "Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out." Meanwhile, Charles de Gaulle is re-elected as French president and Ferdinand Marcos becomes President of the Philippines. A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first Peanuts television special, debuts on CBS. The Soviet Union announces that it has shipped rockets to North Vietnam. David Lean's film, Doctor Zhivago, is released.

Some of the bands that formed for the first time in 1965 include: The Doors, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Los Jairas, Velvet Underground, and Pink Floyd.

Among the other records released in 1965 were: At The Golden Circle Vol. 1 & 2 by Ornette Coleman. Bleeker & MacDougal by Fred Neil. Catch Us if You Can by The Dave Clark Five. Celebrations For a Grey Day by Richard Farina and Mimi Farina. Country Willie: His Own Songs by Willie Nelson. Creation by John Coltrane. The Fugs First Album. The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume 1 & 2. Hoodoo Man Blues by Junior Wells. I Ain't Marching Anymore by Phil Ochs. Jackson C. Frank. Live at the Regal by B. B. King. Odetta Sings Dylan. Skip James Today! The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death by John Fahey.

In television, Today on NBC goes color. The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC goes color. CBS airs the first color broadcast of an NFL football game, a Thanksgiving Day matchup between the Baltimore Colts and Detroit Lions. My Mother, the Car premieres on NBC. CBS debuts Lost in Space and Green Acres. Meanwhile, on ABC, The Big Valley premieres, and NBC launches I Spy. The Wild Wild West and Hogan's Heroes premiere on CBS. I Dream of Jeannie premieres on NBC, and so does Get Smart.

At the Academy Awards, The Sound of Music takes Best Picture, and Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou) and Julie Christie (Darling) win Best Actor/Actress. The Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival goes to The Knack …and How to Get It, directed by Richard Lester. Other films from 1965 include: Alphaville, (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution'), directed by Jean-Luc Godard; Bunny Lake Is Missing, directed by Otto Preminger; Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, directed by Russ Meyer; For a Few Dollars More, directed by Sergio Leone; The Ipcress File, directed by Sidney J. Furie; What's New Pussycat?, directed by Clive Donner.

In addition to Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Alan Freed, Nat King Cole, Spike Jones, Stan Laurel, Margaret Dumont, T.S. Eliot, Edward R. Murrow, Edgard Varèse, Sonny Boy Williamson and Jeanette MacDonald died in 1965. Rob Zombie, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, Courtney Love, Shania Twain, Slash, Björk, Moby, Andy Dick, Robert Downey, Jr. and Rodney King were born.

Meanwhile, 17 years later....

2011-07-01T20:28:00.000-04:00

This book was written eighteen years ago, published in 1994. I just went back and started to read it for the first time in at least 15 years and was struck by the very first page and how much what we were describing then seems like, with very few changes of names and places, a perfectly lucid description of today.

I'm not at all sure of my point here, I don't think it's anything as simple as "nothing changes" since there is clearly an abundance of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps it is more in keeping with what has become one of my favorite Mark Twain quotations: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

"There is an unmistakable irony in watching the United States offer itself as role model to the various projects of democratization unfolding throughout eastern Europe even as the very activities inherent to notions of participatory democracy (e.g., voter turnout, literacy, etc.) continue their steady decline inside our borders. For those striving for social change, there is an experience of tangible depression in witnessing the growing power of neoconservative ideology. The borders and boundaries of this ideological cultural formation are marked by numerous signposts: the renewed attacks upon the hard-won rights of women (in the holy name of morality), racial and ethnic minorities (in the name of a mythological meritocracy), and gays and lesbians (in the timeless name of nature); the steady increase of corporate and state power; the continued melding together of the state, the market and the media, and the corresponding erosion of an ever-diminishing democratic public sphere; the conflation of the corporate and the public into one vague and amorphous collective philosophy of money and nostalgia; and the declamation that recent gains in multicultural education represent little more than the thinly veiled virus of political correctness (which in a twisted Orwellian logic has as its goals the restriction of free discussion and the subversion of a stable and coherent canon of Western culture). Finally in the face of all of this, the political left has been weakened by a spiraling fragmentation and factionalization into a complex yet redundant theoretical melange of suffocating identity politics and reactionary and nihilistic postmodernisms" (p. 1).

Father's Day

2011-06-19T16:13:00.000-04:00

Grace Kelly and my father, Philadelphia in the 1960s

Just called my dad who is doing well, living with one of my sisters in New Jersey. Born in the second decade of the 20th Century to parents who came to the US in that wave of East-European immigration; a while back my sister managed to track down the actual logs from Ellis Island documenting their arrival from Poland (the original family name of "Dzieniszewski" was shortened to "Denski" a short time later). He grew up in the tough part of Philadelphia, the "Fish Town" neighborhood and made his way during the Great Depression as a pool hustler, gambler, fighter and occasional footballer. Along with another million plus men his age, he joined the Army and fought from the beaches in Normandy through France and Belgium as part of what Kurt Vonnegut would later describe as the "children's crusade" (now that I'm in my fifties, everybody looks impossibly young in the photos from that period).

Coming home after the war, he wanted "a job with a pension" and joined the Philadelphia Police force, eventually retiring as a Lieutenant. Growing up and coming of age in the 1960s with a police officer father made ours a tumultuous relationship. These days, we speak about once a week and that past is well behind us now.

I love this photograph. Grace Kelly and her mother are unveiling a bust of her father, John B. Kelly, a famous Philadelphia native, somewhere in Fairmont Park. The bust is gone now, nobody seems to know where it went; I believe it was removed when a larger sculpture of Kelly as an Olympic rower was installed sometime, I think, in the 1990s. But I digress.

My father is there on the left, one of two Fairmont Park police officers serving as an honor guard. The other guy is Bill Hamilton, who once went to FBI school and brought me a present of a big book on the FBI that he had autographed "To Stanley, J. Edgar Hoover." I don't know what happened to the book, I wish I still had it.

I used this photo a while back to start a rumor in the family that my father and Grace Kelly had an affair and that our brother, Joe, is actually my father's son by Princess Grace. Nobody in my family actually looks like Joe, and Joe looks a WHOLE lot like this bust of John B. Kelly.

Anyway, happy father's day you rascal you.

R.I.P. Big Man

2011-06-19T02:16:00.000-04:00

From Bruce's website:

It is with overwhelming sadness that we inform our friends and fans that at 7:00 tonight, Saturday, June 18, our beloved friend and bandmate, Clarence Clemons passed away. The cause was complications from his stroke of last Sunday, June 12th.

Bruce Springsteen said of Clarence: "Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band."

Tea Baggers on Parade

2011-06-16T13:11:00.000-04:00

Which side are you on?

2011-06-10T12:39:00.000-04:00

"It is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic nation that it have free and independent labor unions." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

"The important role of union organizations must be admitted: their object is the representation of the various categories of workers, their lawful collaboration in the economic advance of society, and the development of the sense of their responsibility for the realization of the common good." - Pope Paul VI

"Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labor. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining-it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process." - Paul Clark

"History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"Every advance in this half-century: Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education... one after another- came with the support and leadership of American Labor." - Jimmy Carter

"The history of America has been largely created by the deeds of its working people and their organizations--there is scarcely an issue that is not influenced by labor’s organized efforts or lack of them." - William Cahn, Labor historian

"Never forget, people DIED for the eight hour workday." - Rebecca Gordon

"Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts." - Molly Ivins

"I want you to pledge to yourselves in this convention to stand as one solid army against the foes of human labor. Think of the thousands who are killed every year and there is no redress for it. We will fight until the mines are made secure and human life valued more than props. Look things in the face. Don't' fear a governor; don't fear anybody. You pay the governor; he has the right to protect you. You are the biggest part of the population in the state. You create its wealth, so I say, "let the fight go on; if nobody else will keep on, I will." - Mother Jones, 1913

"Our labor unions are not narrow, self-seeking groups. They have raised wages, shortened hours, and provided supplemental benefits. Through collective bargaining and grievance procedures, they have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor." - John F. Kennedy

"If you object to unfair treatment, you're an ingrate. If you seek equity and fair consideration, you're uppity. If you demand union security, you're un-American. If you rebel against repressive management tactics, they will lynch and scalp you. But if you are passive and patient, they will take advantage of both." - Congressman William Clay, Sr.

Poll reflects Americans' fundamental disagreement with GOP ideas....

2011-05-20T12:48:00.001-04:00

John Boehner presents the "Pledge to Destroy America."

Last September I wrote a post to this blog that quoted from the letter then President Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar in November 1954:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

The findings of a new national McClatchy-Marist poll make Ike appear more prescient than ever.

Americans do not want the government to cut Medicare, the government health program for the elderly, or Medicaid, the program for the poor.

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted last week to drastically restructure and reduce those programs, while Obama calls for trimming their costs but leaving them essentially intact.

Voters oppose cuts to those programs by a staggering 80 to 18 percent.

Even among conservatives, only 29 percent supported cuts, and 68 percent opposed them.

It was that last finding that caused Taegan Goddard's Political Wire to ask: Did Republicans Just Walk Off a Cliff?

The poll also found the public more mixed on cutting defense spending, with 44 percent supporting cuts and 54 percent opposed. One dividing line is education: College graduates want to cut defense spending by 63-36 percent. Non-college graduates oppose cutting the Pentagon by 61-36 percent.

On tackling the deficit, voters by a margin of 2-to-1 support raising taxes on incomes above $250,000, with 64 percent in favor and 33 percent opposed.

Independents supported higher taxes on the wealthy by 63-34 percent; Democrats by 83-15 percent; and Republicans opposed by 43-54 percent.

Support for higher taxes rose by 5 percentage points after Obama called for that as one element of his deficit-reduction strategy last week. Opposition dropped by 6 points. The poll was conducted before and after the speech.

Let It Be.... Mitt

2011-05-19T12:23:00.000-04:00

The best candidate the Republicans can run in 2012 - from the perspective of the Democrats - is Mitt Romney. Here's why....

Most importantly, he can't win. Unless the military action in Lybia has expanded and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are both still going strong and gas is $6.00 and unemployment is unchanged, President Obama can beat anybody who is even in the "unlikely to run" category (yes, especially IN Governor Mitch Daniels), and Romney comes to the docks with more baggage than a wealthy family embarking on a world cruise in 1900.

But almost as important is this: The "Republican base" (who we refer to as the "back woods, gap-tooth, cousin fucker contingent") is out of control and, high on the list of its various delusions (Obama as Kenyan, Muslim, socialist, etc.) is the belief that the majority of Americans share the Tea Bag desire for a fire sale ("Everything must go! Department of Education... GONE! Federal Reserve... GONE! Medicare... GONE! Social Security... GONE!"). While the Tea Party represents no problem for the Democrats - Q: How many TP members voted for a Democrat... EVER? - it is the Tea Party (and the people who find the Tea Party "too liberal") who will prevent the Republican party from winning the White House for the remainder of the 21st Century.

The smartest thing the Republicans could do right now would be to give the 2012 election to the tea baggers. Let Michele Bachmann run (with Rand Paul as her VP) and test that belief about representing mainstream American values. When the radical right loses the election by Johnson/Goldwater-type numbers, the influence of the radical right would significantly diminish by 2016.

However, should Romney win the nomination and lose, the radical right will return in force, their belief that the White House could have been theirs had the GOP only listened (which means now we talk LOUDER).

The best way to keep the GOPs greasy mitts off the next half-dozen SCOTUS appointments - and that is what this is really all about - is if Mitt Romney wins the 2012 GOP nomination. I don't believe he will - the radical right's influence in the primaries is too strong - but it is the outcome that would make me happiest.

The Greatest Generation....

2011-05-04T18:19:00.000-04:00

Not to take anything at all away from the millions who served in World War II or the 400,000 Americans who gave their lives, but at least those people had guns to shoot back at the people who were trying to kill them. For sheer bravery fueled by moral certainty, I do not see an equal to the men and women who went into the deep American south in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

It was fifty years ago today that the first "Freedom Riders" risked their lives to fight Jim Crow. These are among the bravest and best Americans who ever called this country home. Below is a piece from the Daily Kos that's so good I'm just going to reproduce it in its entirety:

There were only 13 brave hearts when they climbed onto southbound Greyhound and Trailways buses in Washington, D.C., 50 years ago today. But within a couple of months there were hundreds of them, black and white, riding public buses into the jaws of Southern intransigence. They were jeered, threatened, harassed, beaten, jailed and firebombed. Their courage eventually helped crush that unique brand of American apartheid known as Jim Crow. But on that balmy spring day when they embarked for New Orleans, segregation ruled the land through which they were traveling, a forced and illegal separation backed up with billy clubs, tear gas, fire hoses and the fangs of police dogs and policemen.

The Kennedy brothers urged them not to go, even made it a matter of patriotism, just as they would later discourage the March on Washington in August '63. But that admonition from the nation's highest authorities didn't stop them from challenging some of the lowest authorities, the Klan-backed sheriffs and deputies who would stand smirking as mobs of their drinking buddies attacked them. When the beatings had gone on long enough, they arrested the Freedom Riders and charged them with "breach of peace" and violating various other laws, all of which amounted to what they so charmingly called "race-mixing."

Freedom Riders. To this day, those two words give me the shivers. The good kind. Three years after they put their lives on the line, I had the great good fortune in Mississippi to become momentarily acquainted with one of them and spend two months being mentored by another in Freedom Summer. The first was John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and now Congressman from my birth state of Georgia's 5th district. The second was Charly Biggers, eight years older than I and just then finishing a degree at the University of Colorado, where I, too, would graduate in five years.

By 1961 segregated interstate buses had been unconstitutional for 15 years. That was a consequence of the Supreme Court's 7-1 ruling in the case of Irene Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia. Challenged in 1944 to give up her seat on an interstate bus to a white passenger, Irene Morgan refused. A deputy arrived with a warrant. She tore it up and tossed it out the window, saying she had done nothing wrong and had paid the same money as the white passenger. When the deputy grabbed her, she fought back. Another deputy arrived. She scratched and kicked but was eventually subdued, dragged off the bus and charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia's segregation laws. She was thrown into jail. Her other bailed her out for $500, equal to $6100 today.

She was fined $10. But a 38-year-old attorney named Thurgood Marshall took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He didn't argue it on due process grounds. Instead, he argued before the justices that Jim Crow laws in this instance violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and the Interstate Commerce Act by interfering with transportation crossing state boundaries.

But while the ruling was a landmark in civil rights law, there was no enforcement. A year after Morgan was decided, in 1947, Bayard Rustin and 17 other activists from the Congress of Racial Equality took the first Freedom Ride. They called it a Journey of Reconciliation. It turned out to be anything but, however, it would inspire new Freedom Riders a decade and a half later. Led by Rustin, mixed pairs of black and white passengers rode in the white sections of Greyhound and Trailways buses. Through Virginia, everything went all right, but in North Carolina the authorities stepped in. There were 12 arrests and Rustin spent 30 days on a chain gang.

In 1955, in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled for desegregation and explicitly said passengers could disregard local Jim Crow laws. But the commission refused to enforce its own ruling and the racist scofflaws continued as they always had. In 1960, the Supreme Court added another desegregation brick to the foundation when it reversed a lower court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia and required the desegregation of restaurant facilities that were a integral part of interstate bus terminals. Thurgood Marshall again argued the case. That decision and the ICC's unwillingness to act set the Freedom Riders into motion.

Bayard Rustin would be on board just as he had been 14 years earlier. All the protesters had been trained in non-violent methods of resistance and all were either members of CORE or SNCC. The plan was to travel through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, ending up in New Orleans where there would be a rally. But the bus ride ended well short of its destination. No major incidents occurred in Virginia and there were some arrests and quick releases in North Carolina. But in Rock Hill, S.C., John Lewis was attacked and in Winnsboro, S.C., there were several arrests.

It was in Alabama, however, where segregation's enforcers chose to make their stand. What happened there has been told in great detail over the years by many Freedom Riders and other chroniclers, including James Peck, James Farmer, Taylor Branch and Lewis in his 1998 book Walking with the Wind, A Memoir of the Movement. David Fankhauser has posted his recollections on line. The following brief summary draws on some of those and other sources, including this excellent timeline:

Organized in advance behind the scenes by a police sergeant and the Birmingham Police Commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor—who would become even more infamous two years later—a Klan mob of more than 100 ambushed the Greyhound bus well outside the town of Anniston. They smashed its windows and slashed its tires and chased it to about five miles out of town where its flat tires made it impossible to drive farther.

Some threw a firebomb through a window, setting the bus afire. And the mob held the doors shut as they sought to burn the passengers alive. With the fuel tank in danger of exploding, the Freedom Riders escaped with their lives only because an undercover Alabama Highway Patrol officer who was secretly on the bus drew his pistol and forced the mob to open the doors. The passengers escaped, but outside the bus several were attacked, including Hank Thomas, who was beaten with a baseball bat.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Klansmen had boarded the Trailways bus, and when the black Freedom Riders refused to move to the back seats, they were beaten. White Freedom Riders, like 61-year-old Walter Bergman, were beaten even worse as "race traitors." When the bus pulled into Anniston, the mob boarded and beat the Freedom Riders with clubs. The driver managed to get the bus under way and drove on to Birmingham, but there was no respite there. Bull Connor egged on another mob, and several Freedom Riders were severely injured:

The FBI knows in advance that the two busses are going to be attacked in Anniston and Birmingham, but they do nothing to prevent the violence, do nothing to protect the Riders from assault, do nothing to enforce the Supreme Court ruling. Though they well know who the mob leaders are, they make no arrests. ...

Photos and news reports of the burning bus in Anniston and the mob violence in Birmingham flash around the nation—and around world—to the great embarrassment of President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who calls for a “cooling off period” (meaning that CORE should halt the Freedom Ride). He blames “extremists on both sides” for the violence. Freedom Movement activists are both dumbfounded and outraged.

With one bus burned out and an end to the attacks not in the works, Greyhound and Trailways refused to carry any more Freedom Riders anywhere. Eventually, after delays and bomb threats and another menacing Klan mob seemed certain to keep the Freedom Riders trapped in hostile territory, Atty. Gen. Kennedy manages to get them all on a flight to New Orleans.

That might have been the end of it. CORE decided that the risk was too great. But SNCC chose to continue. Hundreds of people, black and white, many of them students, but not a few of middle-age, join the Freedom Rides. By summer's end, as many as 450 have taken 60 bus rides across the South. They have encountered violence from mobs and brutality from police every step of the way.

Among them are John Lewis and Hank Thomas. On May 17, just two days after the attacks in Anniston and Birmingham, they and eight others took the bus from Nashville to Birmingham, where they were again met by Bull Connor. He took them to Tennessee and dumped them by the side of the road. They made their way back to Birmingham. Soon their numbers swelled. In a few days, they embarked on another bus, escorted at high speed from Birmingham by the Alabama Highway Patrol, which disappeared at the city limits. Police stationed at the bus terminal also disappeared, and when the Freedom Riders arrived, it was met by yet another mob, this one comprising perhaps 1000 howling racists. More beatings. John Siegenthaler, a Justice Department official sent to observe the Freedom Ride, by Kennedy was beaten unconscious and left in the street. (You can read more here about the attacks and the aftermath.)

In Birmingham, over the next few weeks, there were 328 arrests. With jails overflowing, prisoners were moved to the segregated Parchman State Penitentiary, a Mississippi prison farm, an experience you can read about here. It was a grim situation, with stinging insects, bad food, worse sleeping conditions and hunger strikes. Some Freedom Riders spent more than 30 days there. My friend Charly Biggers was one of them. You can read about my intersection with him during Freedom Summer here.

The prisoners were eventually all released. And under pressure from Atty. Gen. Kennedy and the emboldened civil rights movement that he and his brother had tried to tone down, the ICC agreed to enforce its own rules. In November 1961, those went into effect, forcing the removal of separate restrooms, drinking fountains, restaurants and other facilities at interstate bus terminals. It was one more step, but not the last, along the way to dismantling Jim Crow.

Today, it's easy enough for anyone to call the Freedom Riders heroes. But they were not viewed that way in their own time, and not only in the land of Jim Crow. The White House was unhappy with them, among other reasons, because of the image of the underside of America they exposed. Local media were predictably terrible in their depiction of these fighters for justice, but the national press presented them as rabble-rousers who were, a mere 100 years after the Civil War began, pushing things too far too fast. That's always the way oppressed people are viewed, of course, no matter how just their cause, no matter how long they have waited.

Today Hank Thomas, who almost lost his life on that Greyhound bus half a century ago, is a businessman in Stone Mountain, Ga. He spoke with the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday:

A few weeks ago, he had planned to travel to Anniston to meet with Cecil Lewallyn, one of the men charged with firebombing his Greyhound bus. (None of the attackers were ever convicted.) Lewallyn reneged at the last minute when he heard “The Oprah Winfrey Show” wanted to record the meeting.

Said Thomas: “They were cowards then and they are cowards now.”

Indeed. A salute to Hank Thomas, Congressman Lewis, and all the other hundreds of Freedom Riders, and especially to you, Charly Biggers, wherever you are.

= = =

If you have further interest, I highly recommend Eric Etheridge's book Breach of Peace, which includes the stories of 40 Freedom Riders, along with their 1961 mugshots and photographs of them as they are today.

Nothing lasts. But then, you already knew that, right?

2011-05-03T13:05:00.000-04:00

It explains a lot....

2011-04-17T11:40:00.000-04:00

The last stage, also called tertiary syphilis (Neuro-syphilis), is the form that is of interest to the mental health worker. Symptoms result from effects caused by the parasites that lead to destruction or injury of the brain tissue.

Among the early symptoms in such situations is a disturbance in behavior of the individual. This initially is minor and sometimes difficult to notice except for those who may know the patient very well. With time, there will be evidence of impaired or failing intellectual performance.

There is loss of power to concentrate on important tasks and many times with a poor memory. These symptoms even when they are easily noticed by relatives and friends may not be obvious to the patient himself.

With time however, behavior deteriorates further to the extent that the patient becomes careless with respect to dress and sometimes in social manners. Subsequent signs are quite varied and may include a feeling of being depressed but at times some patients show excessive happiness and restlessness and sometimes symptoms of anxiety.

About 50 percent of patients with Neuro-syphilis develop epileptic attacks (convulsions) which sometimes may be the first presenting sign. Subsequently physical signs set in which include general body weakness, unsteady gait and sometimes difficulties with bladder control.

Work in progress, number 9....

2011-04-17T10:48:00.000-04:00

LIGHTS UP
NARRATOR SITS ON A DIRECTOR'S CHAIR ON AN OTHERWISE EMPTY STAGE
TITLE:

IX
Current Events

NARRATOR: I do not understand why, but one essential ingredient of “recovery” appears to be guilt.

Maybe it’s part and parcel of the Calvinist underpinnings of American society; an insistence that you need to know that you’ve sinned before you can go and sin no more. Whatever…

When you commit a crime involving alcohol your punishment at certain points along the way will involve being lectured by various organizations. The most well known of these organizations is the monolithic M.A.J.A.F.E. [SPOKEN, “ma-JEFF-ah”], or Mothers Against Just About Fucking Everything.

PAUSE

With one foot planted in Catholic school and the other in the Women’s Temperance movement of the early 20th Century, M.A.F.A.F.E. [ma-JAFF-ah] now has chapters in every State except Hawaii, where it remains too relentlessly pleasant for people to get all that upset at anything.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or M.A.D.D., was one of the last great populist political movements. M.A.D.D. is a text book example of the potential of grass roots political action. Started by a small group of women that no politician took very seriously, by the time they became known nationally they accomplished the most difficult task of all, they changed the culture.

Before M.A.D.D., a DUI arrest over the weekend meant a $500 fine and some embarrassed laughter around the water cooler on Monday morning. After M.A.D.D., it was five thousand dollars and you prayed no one would find out. The culture of alcohol was forever different.

It happened in the early days of the new century that some members of that group, who were also active in anti-pornography, anti-music, anti-poetry, anti-tobacco, anti-anime, anti-comics, anti-theatre, anti-fast food, anti-evolution, anti-union, anti-show tunes, anti-dancing, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-video games, anti-abortion, anti-Santa Claus, anti-Halloween, anti-New York Times cross word puzzle, anti-Harper’s Index, anti-literacy, anti-New World Order, anti-gambling, anti-Catholic, and anti-Islamic groups, [CATCHES BREATH] spun off to form the mother of all aunties.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, most were also members in good standing of M.W.S. (Mothers Who Spank) and S.O.W.T. (Support Our White Troops). It is these women who are tirelessly engaged in monthly letter writing marathons, sending cards, small Bibles and candy bars to our boys on the front lines in the struggle to bring freedom to Iran and Syria as it had been finally brought to the handful of surviving Iraqis still hanging on in the decontamination camps on the border of the [SPOKEN SLOWLY WITH EACH WORD PUNCHED FOR EMPHASIS] great glass desert.

LIGHTS DOWN
END OF PART ONE
INTERMISSION MUSIC PLAYS

I knew I was done when....

2011-04-16T17:58:00.000-04:00

My career as a college professor ended in 1997 after about 16 years in classrooms at four universities. I was rooting around on the web earlier today and something someone posted on some forum for some reason (it's amazing how these things work) suddenly triggered a memory of the classroom I was in the moment I knew I wasn't going to make it in that profession.

It was in February of 1992. I can't remember the class other than it was an upper level undergraduate class full of Communication Studies majors. At some point a discussion started about the conviction of boxer, Mike Tyson, on rape charges. The crime had taken place at a downtown Indianapolis hotel; the trial had just concluded a day or two before at the downtown Indianapolis courthouse, and both of those places were about a mile or less from the classroom.

The discussion among white and black students and male and female students plunged into questions of race and justice and sex and celebrity and was moving along quite nicely until one student offered this explanation:

They had to find Mike Tyson guilty because William Kennedy Smith had just been acquitted (about a month earlier) in another highly publicized rape trial.

There was a pause, and then - and this was the moment for me - every single student agreed with him.

And I remember suddenly feeling a wave of hopelessness wash over me. It seemed to me that to believe in the sense of that brought with it epistemological and ontological requirements that could take decades to fully suss out.

It still does.

It suggests a worldview in which everything is controlled somehow by a cabal of celebrity rapist Illuminati charged with maintaining a delicate balance of celebrity sexual assault.

For the next five years I tried to work through it, or work around it, ignore it, and I just never could. My friends who still teach are all better at it than I ever was or was ever going to be and I don't mean any of this as any kind of indictment of the profession. It's just the story of what happened to me.

Work in progress, parts 7 and 8....

2011-04-16T00:16:00.001-04:00

LIGHTS OUT
LIGHTS UP
TITLE:

VII

The Possum Pillow

NARRATOR: A direct result of my early release and indirect result of my smart mouth was that I began attending both Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. There are three things you ought to understand before we proceed.

One, I am not an alcoholic.

Two, I am not a drug addict.

Three, I am not “in denial,” thank you very much.

I like to drink and, on occasion, have drunk too much. But after attending a series of AA meetings I can say I am not in the same league with the people I’ve met there. In baseball terminology, I’ve dabbled a bit in double-A ball, while these boys have had whole careers in The Show.

I remember a cold November morning; the usual suspects were joined by an old man, maybe in his 60s, and who had the grizzled quality of a long-ball hitter. Loving our last remaining addictions, everyone stood around for a while before the meeting started, chain smoking cigarettes and drinking cup after cup of a half and half mix of strong black coffee and sugar. After the meeting started, the old man walked to the front and explained that he’d thought about coming to meetings on many occasions in the past but had never done so. But then something happened that changed his mind.

A short time ago he’d come into a little money and was celebrating with some friends. They started at a couple bars and things got a little blurry after two or three in the morning.

Two days later about six-thirty in the morning he woke up. He was covered with snow that had fallen the night before and slept across the railroad tracks at a downtown crossing.

And, he was using the frozen body of a dead possum as a pillow.

PAUSE

Still drunk, half frozen himself, he was taken aback when the possum suddenly opened its eyes and spoke to him with what he recognized as the voice of Robert Young on the old TV series “Father Knows Best.”

NARRATOR USES CALM REASSURING VOICE FOR POSSUM AND GRIZZLED OLD GUY VOICE FOR “CARL”

“How are you, Carl?” The possum asked.

“Uhhhh… not too good. Kinda cold.”

“Head hurt a little, does it?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“I’ll bet. Listen, Carl….”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t mean to lecture or put any pressure on you but… well… look around.” The possum said.

Carl looked around.

“Do you think it might be time to go to one of those meetings, Carl?”

Hard as he tried, Carl couldn’t think of an argument to offer the possum.

PAUSE

The story circulated among my friends for the next month or so and became our code for someone getting a bit too familiar with recreational intoxicants. “Now there goes a candidate for a possum pilla.” One of us would say. “I heard that.” Someone would add.

LIGHTS OUT
LIGHTS UP
TITLE:

VIII

Kathy with a K

A WOMAN IS SITTING IN THE FRONT DESK 2ND ROW

NARRATOR: Kathy with a K sits at the front, sort of in the middle of our angry little group. Kathy with a K teaches English Literature at an area high school and is in her fifth year of finishing her doctoral dissertation. She has had four short stories published and is working on a novel, a secret she keeps from her dissertation advisor.

She has a younger brother and an older sister. Kathy’s father died about seven years ago. Her mother still lives in the house they all grew up in. Her brother lives in Ohio and owns a failing record store. Her sister lives in Los Angeles and is married to a man who is a successful casting director.

If name-dropping were an Olympic event her sister would be the captain of the US team.

Kathy’s sister spoke as if everything she said was a part of an impossibly long sentence that would only end when she died.

KATHY’S SISTER: [OFF STAGE, SPOKEN AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE] SowewenttoSpagotohaveanearlylunchwithMartyScorseseandSeanPenncamebythetableanditwasmaybeaquartertoonebuthewaseitherdrunkorstonedorwhateverandashelefthebumpedintothetableacrossfromusandspilledwateralloverthatnicegirlfromwhat’sthatshowwithDavidSpade?.Anyway,sothenthatguyfromAmericanIdolwhowasatthebarwithwhat’shernamefromthatshowohyouknowtheone….

KATHY WITH A K: [VOICE RISING TO COVER THE LAST BIT OF HER SISTER’S RUN-ON SENTENCE] Arrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!! [PAUSE]

What I want to tell my sister is that I’m happy that blind luck tossed her into the path of the same idiot that blind luck tossed into the path of a good job, and happy that the lack of condoms in extra-extra-small has her ankle-deep in enough yuppie larvae to make California’s community property laws seal the deal.

Let’s hear it for the wonders of a thoroughly random and impersonal universe.

But, like so many people who find themselves beaten with the good end of the luck stick, she talks about her good fortune as if it was the result of thought and effort, complex planning, years of hard work!

I understand that I am not the first person in class to say this, but [ALMOST PLEADING] I am not a violent person!

PAUSE

The holidays are hard enough, aren’t they? I’d had a few drinks before we all sat down, a couple glasses of wine during the turkey and yams and the traditional bean casserole. I was so close to escaping into a nice tryptophan coma when she gets into this manic lecture mode – I swear she was doing coke in the goddamn bathroom all through dinner – and suddenly, this… this… moron who represents everything I detest about Twenty-First Century America is explaining to a room full of our relatives everything I’m doing wrong with my life…. [PAUSE… THEN PICKING UP SPEED AGAIN] And in this screeching fingernails-toenails-finishing nails-roofing nails-on-a-chalk-board-voice…. [PAUSE]

I just wanted her to shut up.

I just wanted her to stop talking.

I just wanted her to finish this inventory of my bad life choices.

[SHE STARTS SLOWLY BUT QUICKLY BUILDS TO A SHEER EXPRESSION OF RAGE] I just wanted her to tell everyone that she has her life because she regularly sacrifices Girl Scouts to Satan and that the simple reason that most major motion pictures suck beyond the realm of suckitudeness is because everyone involved in the industry is the exact same in-bred El Lay dip-shit mouth-breathing mentally defective dick-head that her idiot husband is!!!

PAUSE
EMBARASSED BY HER OUTBURST AND ASHAMED BY HER CONFESSION
EYES DOWNCAST

But I… um… I didn’t say anything. There was this serving fork for the turkey on the table in front of me and I… uh… picked it up and jammed it right into her Botox-filled forehead. [NERVOUS LAUGH AS IF STILL THRILLED BY THE MEMORY]

LIGHTS DOWN ON KATHY

NARRATOR: It was a superficial cut, but head wounds bleed profusely and as the blood poured onto the dishes and tablecloth and her sister screamed, Kathy with a K threw the fork on the floor and started shouting at her mother that there was Botox on the fork now and she could never use it again.

Her brother-in-law called the police who arrested Kathy and took her away in handcuffs as the paramedics loaded her sister into the ambulance with her husband.

Her mother and her brother sat on the couch drinking Grey Goose vodka straight from jelly glasses.

As her mother lifted the glass to her lips the blue and red flashing lights from the police car fell on the painting of Wilma Flintstone on the side of her glass.

She was wearing a spotted dress and she was smiling.

She seemed happy.

LIGHTS DOWN

Work in progress, parts 5 and 6....

2011-04-15T12:40:00.005-04:00

LIGHTS DOWN AND UP
TITLE:

V
Confusion Reigns Supreme

NARRATOR: On our first Saturday morning Ms. Peaksbury asked me…

LIGHTS UP ON DESK WHERE MS. PEAKSBURY SITS

MS. PEAKSBURY: How did you feel when you were smashing those computers?

NARRATOR: [TO AUDIENCE, GAINING SPEED] In my mind I scanned a word list: audacious, blissful, bodacious, courageous, exhilarated, ecstatic, fearless, glowing, heroic, indomitable, inviolable, justified, noble, resolute, righteous, stalwart, strong, sublime, unafraid, unassailable, undaunted, valiant, vindicated, warm, wonderful, and… human.

[TO MS. PEAKSBURY] Confused.

PAUSE

[TO AUDIENCE] And so it was that “confused” became the angry person’s mantra. It wasn’t plucked from the defiant word list that threatened one’s graduation – which is to say, it was not the truth.

It was not “angry” or “mad” which, for some reason, were considered unacceptable answers. Nor was it an obvious uncloaked word of submission that had dominated since it became clear that the truth would, under no condition, set us free. It was not “wrong” or “immoral” or “bad.”

MS. PEAKSBURY: But Robert, if you felt it was wrong and immoral, why did you continue to drive into the other cars until the police shot your car?

LIGHTS OUT
WHEN THE LIGHTS RETURN THE NARRATOR IS AT DESK STAGE RIGHT
ANGRY BOB IS IN DESK A ROW IN AND TOWARD CENTER

TITLE:

Angry Bob

AS THE NARRATOR SPEAKS TO THE AUDIENCE ANGRY BOB IS LOOKING TOWARD MS. PEAKSBURY’S DESK

NARRATOR: Angry Bob is thirty-nine years old, married with three angry kids and a house on the city’s west side. For the past seven years every day Angry Bob drove through the rush hour traffic that slowly made its way toward his downtown office.

Every city believes it has the worst drivers in the world and this city is no different. But Angry Bob actually found the perfect way to express the attitude at the very heart of the city’s motorists.

ANGRY BOB: People here drive as if their families were being held hostage and, if they allow any of the cars behind them to get ahead of them… their families will die.

NARRATOR: Angry Bob’s car was some maroon late-model Ford with 130,000 miles on it and a bit of a knock in the engine. While the interior bore the tell-tale signs of parenthood, the body was in excellent shape with no rust and almost no dings or dents.

Everyday the traffic backs up to a crawl, and everyday people weave their way in and out of the lanes as if they really believed chaos theory was bunk and it was actually possible to anticipate the random flow of traffic.

In the process Angry Bob’s bumper would be bumped and an occasional fender scraped, horns would blare, fists would wave. Taken as whole, it was like some post-modern opera by John Adams or Phillip Glass; Angry Bob On the Beach.

PAUSE
ANGRY BOB SPEAKS….

ANGRY BOB: What annoyed me the most was the attitude of entitlement on the part of the drivers who cut in and out of my lane. They all cross over with a certain confidence, as if they know I’ll hit the brakes rather than hit them.

[ALMOST IN MONOTONE, RAPID] Every morning. Every evening. Coming and going. Squinting into the rising sun in the morning. Squinting into the setting sun in the evening. Breathing in the exhaust. Sweating in the summer heat.

All the time moving so slowly that what was left of my air conditioner threatened to overheat the engine that knocked and sputtered [MIMICS THE KNOCKS AND SPUTTERS HITTING DESK AND STUTTERING]

Day in day out. Week after week. Month after month. Coming and going to a job I don’t like…

PAUSES AND LOOKS AWAY

…to a family that didn’t seem to like me anymore.

Thirsty. Hungry. Tired. Hot. Cold.

And then there’s that one afternoon when a young kid in a shiny sports car cut in front of me, and I hit the brake hard enough to smack my forehead on the wheel as the car behind me tapped my bumper and leaned on its horn.

I looked at the sports car in front of me and, reflected in the tiny rear view mirror, the kid’s eyes meet mine and I watched as the kid mouthed the word…

“Asshole.”

BECOMING MORE AGITATED, ANIMATED

I didn’t smash the sports car, not at first, not like the newspaper and TV said. No, I eased on the gas and gently made contact with the bumper. I saw the kid react and saw the brake lights come on. I slowly pressed on the accelerator and began pushing the sports car.

Now, the sports car could beat my car in zero-to-sixty, no contest. But the sports car was no contest for a full-sized Ford slowly crunching it into the delivery truck ahead of it.

I saw that smug entitlement on the kid’s face downshift into panic.

OBVIOUSLY RELISHING THE MEMORY AS HE RELIVES IT
THROUGHOUT, HE USES HIS DESK AS IF IT WERE HIS CAR PUSHING IT SLOWLY INTO THE DESK IN FRONT OF HIM

The back bumper of the truck was just high enough, and the front of the sports car just low enough, so that the car was slowly being shoved under the truck.

The hood of the sports car started to crumple; the back lights come on as the kid thought to throw it into reverse.

The car behind me was a mid sized Japanese number, silver gray, probably thirty grand. The driver was a woman who reminded me of a friend of my wife’s named Janet.

I’d never done anything to Janet. I’ve never spoken coarsely, never been rude; yet she always looks at me with the look you get when you taste something unpleasant.

The modern world seems stuffed full of women like Janet.

Forty-something, anorexic-thin, carrying water bottles with them everywhere, always in front of me at coffeeshops where all I want is a simple cup of coffee… but they order complex drinks that take a half-hour to make and require machines that looked like they’d been salvaged from old steam locomotives and fifties sci-fi films…

…and every one of them looks at me as if I remind her of the ex-husband who took her youth and then left her for the young girl in the tight uniform making the damn coffee.

PAUSES… RETURNS TO STORY

SHAKES HIS HEAD

So… faux-Janet hits her horn, though why she did is still unclear. It’s as if she needed to express her disappointment. She did this at the exact moment that I decided I wanted some more room in back of me as well.

As the sports car grrrrrinds in reverse in front of me, I throw the car into reverse and slam into the silver car behind me…

PUSHES HIS DESK BACKWARDS SLAMMING INTO DESK BEHIND HIM

…and it’s hood crumples and it rear-ends the mini-van behind it!

Now… the mini-van was driven by another soldier in the Army of Janets.

Faux-Janet had a look of confusion and despair as she looked into the eyes of Janet Three in the mini-van behind her and saw the disappointment looking back at her.

[EXCITEDLY] Disappointment and condescension smashed into each other at the speed of light and released particles of moral superiority and smugness impacting everyone within a mile of the event.

ANGRY BOB SLUMPS DOWN ONTO HIS DESK
THE LIGHT ON HIM IS KILLED AS THE LIGHT ON THE NARRATOR COMES UP

NARRATOR: But by then, Angry Bob was smashing into the sports car again, and again into Faux-Janet, back and forth, three more times. The other drivers around the commotion were now tooting their horns nervously as well. After clearing a space in front and back of him Angry Bob now decided to leave the pack; in his mind was a cartoon of a silver sardine busting through the tin walls of the can… and he smiled.

For the next fifteen minutes, just as Warhol had predicted, Angry Bob drove down the shoulder of the road, intermittently crashing into the cars on his left as he went. Some choices were obvious, cars that edged onto the shoulder to block his path. Some were less obvious. He hadn’t realized, for example, how much he hated SUVs until he found himself crashing into every one he passed.

During his rampage, Angry Bob smashed and crashed into a grand total of seventy-four vehicles. The television news footage shot from a circling helicopter showed the rows of state and local police and sheriff cars that converged on the bashed and battered maroon Ford. As I watched it all unfold live on the local news I saw the cops, guns raised, arms extended stiffly, slowly approach the car as it sat, wheels spinning. When I saw the police open fire I thought I was watching the driver die in a hail of bullets; it wasn’t till later, when I watched the footage endlessly repeat, that I realized that the police had shot the tires and the engine of Angry Bob’s weapon of mass destruction. At the end of his twenty-three minutes of fame Angry Bob’s Angry Ford had been shot over one hundred and nineteen times and had broken both axles. In one newspaper photo the Ford looked just like the car at the end of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

I watched the legend of Angry Bob unfold on the communal TV in jail. It was a long room filled with orange-clothed fans of Angry Bob, cheering him on.

One of the inmates was a fifty-something black man named Lateef who reacted to every news story involving a Caucasian criminal with a recasting of the story that began “If he’d been black they’d a shot his ass.” Whenever he said that, his constant companion Byron would always add, “Yeah.”

Lateef told us, “I knew a brother in Pittsburgh back in seventy five named Louis Watson; we called him L.G. for ‘Long Gone’ after his habit of disappearin’ any time we sent him to the liquor store. L.G. was semi-famous when Jimmy Johnson up in Chicago wrote a song for him, the “Saint Louis Blues”…

EYES CLOSED
SINGING 12-BAR BLUES MEDIUM TEMPO
TAPPING DESK TOP IN TIME
THE WORDS “SAINT” AND “SENT” SHOULD BE SUNG SO AS TO SLUR INTO EACH OTHER

“I got the St. Louis blues, as blue as I can get.
I got the St. Louis blues, as blue as I can get.
We sent Louis to the liquor store, and [STOPS TAPPING, IN HIGHER VOICE DELIVERED AS PUNCH LINE] Louis ain’t been back yet.”

PAUSE

[CONTINUES IN LATEEF VOICE] Anyway, he’s drunk, stoned, whatever, one night about four in the morning and he rear ends this cop car at a red light.

They shot the brother nineteen times!”

[IN NARRATOR’S VOICE] Lateef paused for effect and let his gaze crisscross the room.

Then he concluded, [IN LATEEF’S VOICE] “I’ll tell you what, he’s long gone now.”

“I hear that.” Byron added.

This just in....

2011-04-14T15:52:00.000-04:00

Hint: It's only "class warfare" if we fight back. Otherwise, it's pretty much just a massacre.

See the whole story here.

Work in progress, parts 2-4....

2011-04-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

TITLE:

II
The Prison Notebooks

SOUND EFFECT – METAL DOOR CLANGING SHUT – VERY LOUD
SOUND EFFECT LOUD VOICES DOWN AND OUT

For those of you who’ve never been to prison – [ASIDE] which, today, is to say, haven’t been yet – here are the three things you should know: [HOLDS UP ONE FINGER] One… the noise. It’s never quiet, not even for a moment. Not ever. [HOLDS UP 2 FINGERS] Two… the smell. There’s a sort of very thick industrial cleanser smell that never quite manages to cover up layers of far worse smells underneath. [HOLDS UP 3 FINGERS] And three… [SHUDDERS] the food.

If you gave a room full of monkeys some eggs, flour and a whisk they would produce something edible at least occasionally. No; the only way you can make food this bad is on purpose.

PAUSE
CONTINUES MORE SERIOUS IN TONE

This relentless assault on your senses – the constant din, the pervasive stench, the numbingly horrible tastes, and the all-encompassing boredom of the place – these things combine in their effect like some enormous low-voltage Taser with no “off” switch. Most of the time you’re not asleep, you spend stunned.

PAUSE
CONTINUES WITH RETURN TO MORE UPBEAT TONE

My own time was served in the county lockup, which, in some ways is worse than the big state prisons up north. The lockup is always fifty or sixty percent over capacity which makes it more prone to sudden outbursts of violence.

But it was that overcrowding and my lack of prior criminal record that got me an early release. And it’s the memory of the sound, smell and menu choices that keeps me coming early to the meetings… sitting quietly… and mustering all the sincerity I can as I confess and repent my crimes again and again.

TITLE:

III

George Orwell in Anger Management

NARRATOR: We will read now, from the Anger Management Handbook:

“Unexpressed anger can create other problems. It can lead to pathological expressions of anger, such as a personality that seems perpetually cynical and hostile. People who are constantly putting others down, criticizing everything, and making cynical comments haven't learned how to constructively express their anger. Not surprisingly, they aren't likely to have many successful relationships.”

[PAUSE] Hmmm….. [BEMUSED] Now that someone is actually working on my biography I’d kinda like to meet him, clear up a few things, double check some dates, the usual stuff.

WALKS BACK TOWARD BIG DESK
SITS ON THE EDGE

See…. My problem is this: What if cynicism is the only sensible response for the true romantic in the postmodern world? Which is sort of what Oscar Wilde was asking in his famous quotation: “Only someone with a heart of stone can look upon the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

PAUSE
DISMISSING THE THOUGHT, HE CONTINUES

The whole culture of counseling has a certain… Smurfs vibe to it.

You remember the Smurfs, right? The tribe of tiny animated blue people who preached the joys of cooperation to the very generation of people who, now in their thirties and forties, seek to make me more cooperative?

The only Smurfs who had individual personalities were those portrayed as incompetent curmudgeons who would inevitably see the error of their ways and return to the safe conformity of the greater blue pack.

Just as AA refuses to allow for the possibility of a glass of good Bordeaux with a nice beef carbonade, so too does anger management fail to recognize that a punch in the nose or swift kick in the balls might be the proper response in some situations.

I’m not a violent person; I don’t believe in corporal punishment in schools

– except for college, but that goes without saying –

I’m against the death penalty, dog fighting, cock fighting… I’m not that sold on prize fighting or the NFL or NHL for that matter. But I do believe in the possibility of righteous anger.

NARRATOR TAKES A BOOK FROM HIS DESK AND OPENS IT, FLIPS THROUGH SOME PAGES TO A MARKED SECTION

A few weeks after George Orwell had gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War he wrote in his diary, “I’ve been here for two weeks and I haven’t killed my first fascist yet. [PAUSE EYEBROWS RAISE] If we could each kill one fascist they would quickly become extinct.”

Maybe his math needs updating, but he has a point, and his anger was a righteous anger.

CLOSES BOOK, PLACES IT BACK ON HIS DESK, CONTINUES

Woody Guthrie’s banjo had, written around the edge of the top, “This machine kills fascists.” I just don’t mention that to Ms. Peaksbury.

NARRATOR WALKS STAGE RIGHT
ALL LIGHTS OUT BUT THE LIGHT ON THE DESK ILLUMINATING THE “Ms. Peaksbury” NAME PLATE

LIGHTS UP
TITLE:

Big Black Dookie Eater

In prison, a guy who’s pretending to be crazy by eating his own feces is called a “dookie eater.” This always reminds me of the moral of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night,

“You are who you pretend to be, so you must be very careful who you pretend to be.”

For no apparent reason, a couple years back my dog, Butchie, a black Lab mix, suddenly became a dookie eater. One day in the middle of winter out in the snow he found a frozen dog turd… and the poopsicle was born.

Now I have to search the yard before I let him out and shout at him everytime he stops to examine the ground. The problem has not affected my pit-bull, Sundance, who has become the main supplier of the yard snacks. I don’t know how long this will go on. I suspect that at some point either he will stop eating it or I’ll stop caring that he does. This is how most of my problems get solved.

I’m telling you this because in jail there was this 20 year-old four hundred pound black kid with a row of big gold teeth in front who smiled all the time in this odd way that was as if he was hearing the voices of dead stand-up comedians…

NARRATOR ROLLS HIS HEAD A BIT AS HE SAYS

…Nipsy Russell, Godfrey Cambridge, Red Foxx, Richard Pryor….

He would smile, mutter to himself and roll his head, but never actually look at anyone. He was being held in the county jail temporarily before heading up north for good to a maximum security lock-up.

His name was Maurice Maurice Morris, his street name was “Two Times,” and he’d killed six people; four in his family and two more later that same day. After I got out I looked up the story in the newspaper.

The paper said he had the mind of a very large and very strong six year-old child and had developed a problem with crack cocaine. The first four people who died were people who told him that he should stop using crack when that was the last thing he wanted to hear. The last two people who died were people who wouldn’t share their crack with him.

I don’t know what it could feel like to have your life be completely over, but still find yourself alive and stuck inside it.

I wonder if there are ghosts, and if that’s what they feel like.

Or, maybe when your life turns to shit, eating shit just seems somehow logical, I don’t know.

As I was being processed before my release I was put in this small room that had two wooden benches and one door. I’d been there for about twenty minutes when the door opened and, for some reason, they brought this kid in, sat him on the bench across from me, and left us there. When they brought me in they handcuffed my left hand to a metal bar by the side of the bench. The guard who brought the kid in just told him to sit and be quiet and left.

Now, the words [AS IF SPEAKING TO PRISON GUARD] “Uh, excuse me, but shouldn’t you handcuff this huge dookie-eatin’ mass murderer, or give me back my bat?!?” never got past my chest, regardless of the volume they played at in my head because, in the movie that was playing in my head, when I said them the guard stopped, looked at me, looked at the kid, said “Now you behave,” smiled, and left.

So I didn’t say anything.

Maurice Maurice looked at me and smiled. He laughed softly to himself. Rolled his head, he looked at my handcuffed arm. For some reason his gold teeth seemed...

enormous,

out of proportion to the rest of his face.

Maybe there’s some primal connection between shit-eating and cannibalism because I sat there with the “pa-WOOSH pa-WOOSH” sound of my own heart pumping blood roaring in my ears, trying not to seem concerned and trying to imagine how I might fend him off when he jumped on me, and what it would feel like when those big gold teeth chomped down on my throat.

We were together all of three minutes when they returned and took him away.

I never saw him again.

Work in progress....

2011-04-13T12:53:00.000-04:00

Below is the first section of a work in progress. It began as a short story developed in a writer's group a few years ago. In an exercise we each took the first line from a song off the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album to use as our first line. Later, at the suggestion of a friend, I reworked what I had into the form of a stage play. As I continue to work on this I want to use this blog to post some sections and solicit comments and reactions.

____________________________________________

The set is very simple. A large desk and a few student desks suggest a classroom.

Scene titles are introduced by the NARRATOR who can do so with some flip cards or something similar.

The character of the NARRATOR is the voice of the play; it is through that voice the story is told and unfolds. The NARRATOR is the voice of EVERYMAN [used in a non-gender specific way] and throughout the play a series of actors, male and female, can play the part of the NARRATOR. They can be of various races and ages. Some sections will be more appropriate for some actors than others, but the use of multiple actors both signifies the “everyman” concept and makes manageable the amount of dialogue any one actor must learn.

TITLE:

Lucy in the Sky (With Diamonds)

NARRATOR: [IN SLOW, CALM, HYPNOTIST’S VOICE] Picture yourself on a boat on a river…. All you see is the blue sky… all you hear is the sound of the water and birds…. all you feel is the gentle motion of the boat…. [PAUSE]

BACK LIGHTS UP SLOWLY TO REVEAL THE SET WITH EMPTY DESK AND CHAIRS

LIGHTS UP SLOW ON NARRATOR SITTING AT DESK IN FRONT STAGE CENTER RIGHT

NARRATOR’S DESK HAS A COUPLE BOOKS AND NOTEBOOK ON IT

NARRATOR: [TO AUDIENCE, AS IF COMING OUT OF THE TRANCE HE JUST PUT HIMSELF IN, SHAKES HEAD, COUGHS] So… we sit here, eyes closed, and concentrate on our breathing in this high school class room on this Saturday morning.

[LOUDLY SCOOTS CHAIR AROUND TO FACE FRONT AT AN ANGLE]

An even dozen of us, here for different infractions: A couple of barroom brawlers, a scattering of spousal abusers, a couple NBA fans; a woman who stabbed her sister in the forehead with a serving fork at the family Thanksgiving dinner; a frequent flier whose carry-on luggage was lost; a rush hour driver who, much like Popeye before him, [IN POPEYE VOICE] “had all he could stands till he couldn’t stands no more,” and a biker, who threw onto the roof of a nearby church, the gun, mace and club of the cop who stopped him. Having made clear the things he would not allow happen, he let himself be arrested and taken away quietly. Which, if you think about it, sort of makes him the poster child for “anger management.” [PAUSE]

And me.

Like most chapters from the Book of Bad Decisions, my story begins, “So anyway, I was drinkin’….?”

You can call me a Luddite if you want, that’s fine. Just don’t call me a “technophobe.” I don’t fear technology, a fact my crime will readily attest to. No one who fears computers would break into a store full of computers.

The store claims I did over six hundred thousand dollars worth of damage before the police arrived but my lawyer is working on that. For me, the night is still a bit of a blur. All I can really say for sure is that, after you take a full go-for-the-cheap-seats swing with an aluminum baseball bat and connect,

NARRATOR TAKES SWINGING BAT MOTION

[SPOKEN WITH WISTFUL AFFECTION]…after you watch those first shards of beige plastic fly… in slow motion… turning in the air….

PAUSES… LOOKS OFF INTO THE AIR

It’s true, the Bible does say “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” But I think that anything said in the pre-computer age has to be taken in context. I do believe that, had Microsoft been around in ancient Samaria, we would find “Blessed are the PC smashers, for theirs is a righteous anger.” Right there in the Sermon on the Mount.

NARRATOR STANDS AS HE SPEAKS AND PRODUCES AN ALUMINUM BASBALL BAT WITH WHICH HE TAKES A FEW PRACTICE SWINGS, SMACKS IMAGINARY DIRT FROM HIS SHOES, FLIPS BAT IN THE AIR ONCE OR TWICE

In my own memory of that evening I see myself as a Ninja warrior in a martial arts movie. The invincible swordsman; the masterless Samurai. The silver bat my sword, the tables and shelves of PCs, soldiers in the enemy’s overwhelming force.

Once I gave myself over to the experience, it was indescribably beautiful in the way that violence can become something beautiful, if the heart is pure.

NARRATOR SWINGS, SLASHES, STABS IN MOCK MARTIAL ART MOVES

NARRATOR REMIANS IN MOTION THROUGHOUT THIS

I am somewhat large and was brandishing a shiny weapon at the time and it is a not-so-minor miracle that I didn’t die that evening in a hail of hollow-point cop bullets as I spun around, startled by the shouts of…

FINALLY SMASHING A DESK, HARD

… “FREEZE!!!” [SHOUTED VERY LOUD]

NARRATOR STANDS, FROZEN IN PLACE, OUT OF BREATH

A whole bunch of police were standing there, .40 caliber Austrian-made semi-automatic hand guns trained on my chest.

PAUSE

THE NARRATOR LEAVES THIS FANTASY/REENACTMENT, GETS RID OF THE BAT AND CONTINUES, SITTING

Now this had the immediate effect of ripping me out of my own private Hong Kong action movie like a cop’s flashlight – WHACK! – to the back of the head.

NARRATOR STANDS NOW SPEAKING OFF TO THE SIDE, HANDS CLASPED IN FRONT OF HIM

Your honor, I’m not making excuses for what I did. It was… the… [FINDING THE WORDS] unfortunate intersection of a profound hatred of computers, and a corresponding affection for single barrel bourbon and hydroponic marijuana.

NARRATOR LOOKS DOWN QUICKLY

PAUSE

NARRATOR RETURNS TO SEAT

[TO AUDIENCE] One of my many problems is that I often sound like I’m smarting off, even if that’s the farthest thing from my mind. That was a particularly good example of that.

Now I have to attend AA meetings, NA meetings, and an anger management class, all of which are hands down more enjoyable than prison so I shouldn’t be complaining.

And, while I believe in my heart that the wanton destruction of a half a million dollars worth of PCs should count towards the 400 hours of community service the judge added to my sentence, I know enough to not bring that up.

LIGHTS OUT
SOUND EFFECT - CROWD OF PEOPLE TALKING - ENTERS VERY VERY LOUD

Today in Madison, WI....

2011-04-06T14:04:00.000-04:00

The matinee sign of Madison’s old RKO Orpheum Theater.

Ike....

2011-04-01T18:43:00.000-04:00

Ike and Tricky, mid-1950's.

"Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer." - Dwight David Eisenhower, remark at a cabinet meeting, as quoted in Since 1945 : Politics and Diplomacy in Recent American History (1979).

Philadelphia Story....

2011-03-29T11:25:00.001-04:00

Street mural of Frank Rizzo in South Philadelphia

Frank Rizzo joined the Philadelphia Police Department in the 1940s, rising through the ranks to become Police Commissioner in 1967. He served in that role during the turbulent years of 1967 to 1971.

One of the most well known actions taken by Rizzo's police officers were the raids on the Philadelphia offices of the Black Panther Party on August 31, 1970. The raids took place one week before the Panthers planned to convene a "People's Revolutionary Convention" at Temple University. The officers performed a strip search on the arrested Black Panther members in front of the news cameras. The picture ran on the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News, and was seen around the world.

A biography of Rizzo, with an introduction written by future police commissioner John Timoney, recounted: "Of one group of anti-police demonstrators, he is reported to have said, 'When I'm finished with them, I'll make Attila the Hun look like a fag.'"

I was born and raised in the City of Brotherly Love and moved out of Philadelphia shortly after Frank Rizzo took office as mayor for the first time in 1971. No other figure better epitomizes post-WWII Philadelphia than Frank Rizzo.

One friend of mine was a bouncer at a bar on Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia at the time and told me this story.

One day a friend of his who was a canine officer with the Philadelphia Police Department stopped by the bar. While he was there, the mayor stopped by to see someone. The mayor approached the police officer, looked at his dog and asked,

"Does your dog eat niggers?"

The cop, answered nervously, "Um... yes, your honor."

The mayor, of the fifth most populous city in the United States, reached down and patted the dog on the head.

"Good doggie" he said, and smiled.

"Kyle's Box" (Solo 12 String)

2011-03-28T16:43:00.000-04:00

New recording from about a month ago, played on my friend Kyle Baker's 12-string, via a Sure SM-57 microphone into an old Sony portastudio cassette, transferred to digital by my friend John Staughton earlier today.

Probably a track from a new project called Music for Films.

Record Collector Dreams: The end of the line....

2011-03-27T17:53:00.003-04:00

I have been a record collector for as long as I can remember. I remember being maybe 12 or 13 and showing a friend some Beatles 45s I'd found, early 45s on the Vee Jay and Swan labels rather than the orange and yellow swirl Capitol label we all had. And I can recall how he seemed sad that I had these things that he didn't have, and his sadness suddenly struck me as a wonderful thing.

That's the spark, right there. A collector is born.

While there are all sorts of rational reasons to preserve the historical record, to archive original copies of any and all recordings because of what they tell us about who we are by shining a collective light upon who we were, at it's very heart, record collecting is entirely irrational.

The impulse, the drive to collect seems, to me, to arise from the odd intersection of the ancient and the modern; the unexpected dance of primal totemic object with commodity capitalism.

The insanity of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

After more than four decades of collecting I do believe I am done. There is something in what is, for me, the last piece to finally fall into place that says something about the lunatic nature of this practice.

TWO EARLIER EXAMPLES

Bob Weir's Ace LP (1972) has this back cover photo:

But in 1977 or thereabouts I saw a copy that a friend had and it had this back cover photo:

For the next 10-15 years (and remember, this is before the internet changed all the rules) I searched for a copy with that black and white back cover photo. Why? Sorry, couldn't tell you. I probably found over a thousand copies in record stores in the years that followed, all with the same color photo as my copy. In the early 1990s at Attic Records in Pittsburgh I pulled out a copy of Ace and... there it was. The black and white back cover photo. I stood there for about five minutes holding the record in my hands; then I put it back in the bin and walked away. I was surprised, but it turned out that all I really needed to do was FIND one.

Record collecting had always been the equivalent of trophy hunting. Here was the record collector as birder.

Sometime in 1964 my friends and I actually sat around and argued over whether the Beatles were better than the Dave Clark Five.

Like Ace, I had a similar experience with the alternate front cover photo of the first Dave Clark Five LP.

There is an endless supply of that first album in shops and thrift stores all over the US. But what was (again, pre-internet) extremely hard to find was a copy of that record in the very first cover, without instruments.

The cover was clearly changed because the no instruments photo is just genuinely horrible, cropped poorly, and looks awful. Regardless, I had the one and I needed the other. After twenty-plus years of looking I finally found one in a tiny shop on Torresdale Avenue in Philadelphia. At the time however, $20 was the absolute most I'd ever paid for a record and the shop wanted $50 so I had to pass. About three years ago I went looking on eBay and, lo and behold, like many previously "super rare" LPs the alternate cover version was readily available. Like the guy who was denied steak as a child because it cost too much, I spent about 2 months gorging myself until I had a dozen copies.

I did the same thing for a while with mono copies of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper.

I have a good friend who has over 40 copies of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Not my friend, but he has an interesting blog.

Recently I obsessed over a legitimately rare LP, but one that nobody else really wanted all that badly. The folk pop duo, Chad & Jeremy, made one very cool psychedelic record in 1967, Of Cabbages and Kings, and followed it with a very good progressive LP in 1968, The Ark.

My record collecting obsession had been reduced to two objects. First, I had a desire to find a copy of the very rare original "error" cover of The Ark on which the word "ark" was misspelled.

I finally found one and, while it was not inexpensive, when it arrived I was able to, for roughly two weeks, take the two records out and set them on the table or on my lap, side by side, and look at them. They were mine. I had them. It felt great.

And I have to further clarify that last point: I say that fully congnisant of how absurd, unimportant, and thoroughly lame a thing it is. But it felt great.

I have since sold off all the copies of Glad All Over and Sgt. Pepper* and both copies of The Ark and, like all kinds of ridiculously rare and valuable LPs I have had and sold in the past, I don't miss them, not even a little bit. Selling them insures that they are going into other collections of other people who will continue to gaze at them and feel good for reasons that neither of us can actually articulate.

Which brings me to my last inexplicable desire; to the end of this road.

While I am not a big Gordon Lightfoot fan, I do really like this particular album.

My final quest as a collector has been to find all three cover variations for this record.

A bit like Traffic's Mr. Fantasy album that was originally released as Heaven Is In Your Mind, the title of Lightfoot's LP was changed when "If You Could read My Mind" became the big hit single.

I've had both versions for some time, but once, years ago, I was looking through the dollar LPs at Amoeba Records in San Francisco and found a third cover, one without any text. But it had been a bad day and my search through this enormous store had turned up nothing else and I decided I wasn't going to just buy one $1 LP that I'd have to haul back on the plane with me, so I left it there, never to see it again.

Until now.

This week I will have all three variations and I will sit them up, side by side, on the floor by the stereo, and I will sit with them in my lap and look at them. And it will feel great.

And then, I think I'm done.

After decades of researching obscure different single mixes and alternate take album tracks and trying to somehow use the aura of the original object to get ever so closer to the sound, the moment of each individual big bang, it really comes down to the secret pleasures and desires of different back cover photographs and label fonts.

So think of this then as a small ethnography, a participant observation study, illustrative of the fundamentally irrational practice of record collecting which, no matter how it might be disguised, will always have it's secret pleasures that are so admittedly trivial and silly that it may be hard to find another collector willing to confess them so openly again.

Call me fearless and foolish.

NOTE: For other speculations and recollections about record collecting and record collectors see my other posts here, and here.

* Actually I do still have a red vinyl Japanese mono Sgt. Pepper LP (in addition to mono and stereo CDs) which edges closer to the "sell" box every trip through the crates.

Elizabeth....

2011-03-23T12:09:00.000-04:00

February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011

Just in case anyone still wonders if the 20th Century is really over.

2011-03-15T12:49:00.000-04:00

"In Luke's eyes, sin defines our lives in ways both pathetic and monstrous. And Luke knows that monsters exist: entities with human forms but no souls inside. Lacey, who extinguished cigarettes on her baby's arms. In the face of monsters, a mere seven deadly sins seems almost charming., and certainly out of touch with the twenty-first century. Luke thinks sins badly need updating, and he keeps a running list in his head of contemporary sins that religions might well consider: the willingness to tolerate information overload; the neglect of the maintenance of democracy; the equating of shopping with creativity; the rejection of reflective thinking; the belief that spectacle is reality; vicarious living through celebrities. And more, so much more" (pp. 111-112).

Keep pushing.....

2011-03-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

Madison, Wisconsin, 3.11

Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires

2011-03-13T11:29:00.000-04:00

"John Steinbeck once said that 'socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.' This helps explain why American culture is so hostile to the idea of limits, why voters during the last energy shortage rejected the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan, who scoffed at conservation and told them it was 'still morning in America.' Nowhere does the myth of progress have more fervent believers." - Ronald Wright (An Illustrated Short History of Progress)

One way to look at it....

2011-03-09T12:36:00.001-05:00

I have been traveling in time, uncontrollably, for over half a century.

The effects are slowly killing me.

Questions for Republican canadidates....

2011-03-08T12:24:00.001-05:00

If you should find yourself someplace where you have the opportunity to ask questions of a Republican candidate or office holder, here's a short list. You might want to print this out and carry it in your wallet in case the opportunity arises. Here goes....

* Ask to see his birth certificate, and say you want to see the long form.

* Ask if he agrees that guns should be banned from the floor of the Republican National Convention. Ask him if he wouldn't feel safer if most people there were armed.

* Ask him if, since he believes the private sector is more capable and competent than government, he believes in privatizing America's nuclear arsenal.

* Ask if he would support a Constitutional Amendment that would make it a crime to burn the Holy Bible.

* Ask him if he believes the Ten Commandments should be the basis of American law.

* If he does, ask him what he thinks the average prison sentence for blasphemers should be.

* And ask him if we criminalize lying, how there could ever be enough Republicans left in Congress for a quorum?

What he said....

2011-03-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

"These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland ... They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." - Ronald Reagan (Labor Day Address at Liberty State Park, 1980)

Where Charlie gets it....

2011-03-04T21:09:00.000-05:00

Martin Sheen and Ava Gardner (and the poor shlub who has to drive them). Found at my favorite blog: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.

How Much Is Enough?

2011-03-03T21:56:00.001-05:00

In a recent Face Book post, New Yorker Phillip Sicks contributed the following illustration:

"A million is ten times a $100,000, and most of us know people who make $100,000 a year, so if someone makes a million a year, we might not know one like that, but it does not seem such a big difference.

A million is just ten times a 100,000. It might mean that with a million a year could you afford a very nice place in some parts, not all parts by any means, but some parts of Manhattan. That's the way we might think about a million dollars.

The very rich, such as the Koch brothers, inhabit a whole different world. A million a year is nothing to them.

The median income in the United States is about $50,000. Suppose the average worker took his pay in $100 dollar bills for the entire year on one day. He would get a stack of bills about 2 inches tall, weighing about a pound. He could carry his year's salary home in his two front pockets without it being noticed.

If he got a great idea and became the one person in thousands who can be an entrepreneur, and he made a million dollars a year which he collected all on one day, he would get a stack three feet six inches tall, and he would need a briefcase to take his money home. The million dollars would weigh about 20 lbs.

The Koch brothers control a conglomerate that gives each of them revenues of 50 billion dollars each year. On their once-a-year payday each would get stacks of $100 bills 33 miles high. If one brother wanted to take his yearly income home with him, he would need some 1376 fully loaded semi-trailers to carry the money home. His salary in $100 bills would weigh 5500 tons.

Knowing how the Koch brothers behave, they would probably save money by hiring scab drivers and overloading the trucks so the pavement is ruined, but they have more money than us, so they are better than us, right? Normal laws don't apply, or if they do, they can just buy a legislature or two.

Now this is the really sick part. If the rich are able to break the public unions, it will make very little difference in tax savings. The economists explain this by pointing out that private workers have had their wages so depressed for so many years that there is no slack to take out of public workers wages.

Public workers already make slightly less in salary than comparable workers in the private sector. They make slightly more in benefits. Reducing the benefits for public workers will drive their wage package so far below the private sector that no one will take public jobs. The younger workers will not stay in the public sector. Why should they?

This dispute is not about money. Even if the Koch brothers were able to save local governments billions of dollars, which they can't, do you think they would let the governments pass it on to the public in tax savings? Let's just say their track record of spreading the wealth has not been the best.

This dispute is about who will dominate this society for the foreseeable future. The last thirty years have seen most people of average means stripped of political and social power.

The Koch's and the rich want to make sure that nothing, no Democratic Party, no union, no federal, state, or local law, regulation, or ordinance can stand between themselves and a couple more truckloads of money each year."

Years ago I found a speech that William Sloane Coffin gave to a meeting of Quakers. In it he spoke about the US military budget and the $1 billion dollar cost of a new nuclear submarine. To put it in greater perspective, he asked his audience to imagine one trillion dollars, roughly a third of the cost to the US for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember, these numbers are at least 20 years old:

"Let's talk a trillion. For one trillion dollars, you could build a $75,000 house, place it on $5,000 worth of land, furnish it with $10,000 worth of furniture, put a $10,000 car in the garage and give all this to each and every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and Iowa. Having done this, you would still have enough left to build a $10 million hospital and a $10 million library in each of 250 cities and towns throughout the six-state region. After having done all that, you would still have enough money left to build 500 schools at $10 million each for the communities in the region, and after having done all that you would still have enough left from the original trillion to put aside, at 10% annual interest, a sum of money that would pay a salary of $25,000 per year for an army of 10,000 nurses, the same salary for an army of 10,000 teachers, and an annual cash allowance of $5000 for each and every family throughout the six-state region - not just for one year, but FOREVER."

That may not happen anytime soon, but at the very least the Obama Administration could start with a full frontal assault upon the billionaire's tax loop hole, and use the power of the bully pulpit to do it.

Boycott Companies Who Sponsor Hate

2011-03-03T19:18:00.000-05:00

Media Matters reports that at least 300 advertisers have dropped their ads from Glenn Beck's Fox News program since he called President Obama a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Here are his March 3 sponsors, in the order they appeared:

    * Goldline
    * Tax Masters
    * Solutions From Science (MySolarBackup.com)
    * News Corp. (Huckabee)
    * Weslend Financial
    * Rosland Capital
    * Comfy Control Harness
    * Lifestyle Lift
    * Packrat.com
    * News Corp. (O'Reilly Factor)
    * Lear Capital
    * American Advisors Group
    * Peachtree Settlement Funding
    * Realtybid.com
    * News Corp. (Justice with Jeanine)
    * Goldline
    * Lifestyle Lift
    * News Corp. (On the Record)
    * Foundation for a Better Life
    * IRStaxagreements.com
    * Energytomorrow.org
    * Merit Financial
    * News Corp. (Wall Street Journal)
    * Solutions From Science (MySolarBackup.com)
    * Energytomorrow.org

Album cover art....

2011-03-02T12:47:00.000-05:00

There are quite a few web sites that feature odd record cover art, but I've never seen another that has the wealth that LP Cover Lover features. Organized into a huge array of categories, the site is a bottomless pit and I would caution you to go there only if you have the next 2 or 3 hours free, because once you start you just can't stop. Here are just a handful of examples grabbed at random.

Stop me if you've heard this....

2011-02-27T15:55:00.000-05:00

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it.

The CEO reaches across and grabs 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Party guy and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

Cops for Labor....

2011-02-26T16:28:00.000-05:00

Images of people protesting for their rights in Egypt and across the Middle East have fill our TV screens and they have filled our hearts with feelings of passion and support. But the images coming from the protests in Madison, WI, are making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my eyes well up. We can only hope it continues and that it grows across the flat strangeness of the American Midwest, into Ohio and Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky, down into West Virginia and beyond.

We knew -- you must have known -- that hegemony has its limits; that there would come a point when the far right would push too far, too fast. And that's happening in Wisconsin.

From inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, RAN ally Ryan Harvey reports:

“Hundreds of cops have just marched into the Wisconsin state capitol building to protest the anti-Union bill, to massive applause. They now join up to 600 people who are inside.”

Ryan reported on his Facebook page earlier today: “Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin:

‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’"

Madison, February 2011

2011-02-25T16:20:00.000-05:00

Application for a Grant
by Anthony Hecht

Noble executors of the munificent testament

Of the late John Simon Guggenheim, distinguished bunch

Of benefactors, there are certain kinds of men

Who set their hearts on being bartenders,

For whom a life upon duck-boards, among fifths,

Tapped kegs and lemon twists, crowded with lushes

Who can master neither their bladders nor consonants,

Is the only life, greatly to be desired.

There’s the man who yearns for the White House, there to compose

Rhythmical lists of enemies, while someone else

Wants to be known to the Tour d’Argent’s head waiter.

As the Sibyl of Cumae said: It takes all kinds.

Nothing could bribe your Timon, your charter member

Of the Fraternal Order of Grizzly Bears to love

His fellow, whereas it’s just the opposite

With interior decorators; that’s what makes horse races.

One man may have a sharp nose for tax shelters,

Screwing the IRS with mirth and profit;

Another devote himself to his shell collection,

Deaf to his offspring, indifferent to the feast

With which his wife hopes to attract his notice.

Some at the Health Club sweating under bar bells

Labor away like grunting troglodytes,

Smelly and thick and inarticulate,

Their brains squeezed out through their pores by sheer exertion.

As for me, the prize for poets, the simple gift

For amphybrachs strewn by a kind Euterpe,

With perhaps a laurel crown of the evergreen

Imperishable of your fine endowment

Would supply my modest wants, who dream of nothing

But a pad on Eighth Street and your approbation.

(FREELY FROM HORACE)

He's actually onto something here....

2011-02-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

This fellow might be onto something here; let's see....

Income Growth Exponential at Top, figures from 1970 - 2000:

* Lower 90% incomes dropped 0.1% from $27,060 to $27,035
* From 90-95%, incomes grew 29.6%, from $80,148 to $103,860
* From 95-99%, incomes grew 54.2%, from $115,472 to $178,067
* From 99 to 99....5%, incomes grew 89.5% from $202,792 to $384,192
*From 99.5% to 99.9% incomes grew 145% from $317,582 to $777,450
*From 99.9 to 99.99% incomes grew 322% from $722,480 to $3,049,226
*The top 13,400 (.01%) incomes grew 558%, from $3,641,285 to $23,969,767

The redistribution of the nation's wealth to the nation's wealthiest has been picking up speed since the start of the first Reagan administration in January 1981.

It shows no signs of slowing down, and it is fueled by the vast hordes of lower income workers who show up carrying signs like the one above, inexplicably unaware of the myriad ways in which they and their children and grandchildren are being royally hosed by the forces they dutifully protest in support of.

"As an intended consequence of the Bush tax cuts, the share of federal taxes paid by the bottom 80% of taxpayers has increased, while the share paid by the top 1% has dropped. And that's before the elimination of the estate tax scheduled to take effect at the end of the decade, which will further reduce taxes on the wealthiest households. President Bush has repeatedly announced that the main economic priority of his second term will be making his tax cuts permanent. If he realizes this goal, he will have succeeded in passing the most regressive tax program in U.S. history. He will also have chosen tax relief for the rich over strengthening the Social Security system on which low-income workers, disabled workers, widows, and surviving children depend to avoid poverty. The tax code already favors those at the top. High-income households can afford to buy or build larger homes to take advantage of the tax deduction for mortgage interest payments. The top 20% of earners receives more than two-thirds of the benefits from tax deductions for private retirement savings. Most Americans are deeply in debt, and 95% can't afford to take advantage of such deductions." - Bloomberg Business Week, November 2004

When will people begin to protest the actual redistribution of wealth in America?

Sign of the times....

2011-02-20T02:34:00.000-05:00

A man holds up a Wisconsin workers support sign in Tahrir Square.

The Republican strategy....

2011-02-19T11:10:00.000-05:00

Former Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, continues to be among the most perceptive analysts working today. This was the February 17, 2011 post to his blog and it is posted here in its entirety just in case someone might find it here who would otherwise have missed it.

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.
Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich – making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts.

The battle over the federal budget.
The first is being played out in the budget battle in Washington. As they raise the alarm over deficit spending and simultaneously squeeze popular middle-class programs, Republicans want the majority of the American public to view it all as a giant zero-sum game among average Americans that some will have to lose.
The President has already fallen into the trap by calling for budget cuts in programs the poor and working class depend on – assistance with home heating, community services, college loans, and the like.
In the coming showdown over Medicare and Social Security, House budget chair Paul Ryan will push a voucher system for Medicare and a partly-privatized plan for Social Security – both designed to attract younger middle-class voters.

The assault on public employees
The second part of the Republican strategy is being played out on the state level where public employees are being blamed for state budget crises. Unions didn’t cause these budget crises — state revenues dropped because of the Great Recession — but Republicans view them as opportunities to gut public employee unions, starting with teachers.

Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker and his GOP legislature are seeking to end almost all union rights for teachers. Ohio’s Republican governor John Kasich is pushing a similar plan in Ohio through a Republican-dominated legislature. New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie is attempting the same, telling a conservative conference Wednesday, “I’m attacking the leadership of the union because they’re greedy, and they’re selfish and they’re self-interested.”

The demonizing of public employees is not only based on the lie that they’ve caused these budget crises, but it’s also premised on a second lie: that public employees earn more than private-sector workers. They don’t, when you take account of their education. In fact over the last fifteen years the pay of public-sector workers, including teachers, has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education – even including health and retirement benefits. Moreover, most public employees don’t have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year.

Bargaining rights for public employees haven’t caused state deficits to explode. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights, such as Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, are running big deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many states that give employees bargaining rights — Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana — have small deficits of less than 10 percent.

Republicans would rather go after teachers and other public employees than have us look at the pay of Wall Street traders, private-equity managers, and heads of hedge funds – many of whom wouldn’t have their jobs today were it not for the giant taxpayer-supported bailout, and most of whose lending and investing practices were the proximate cause of the Great Depression to begin with.

Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

The Distortion of the Constitution
The third part of the Republican strategy is being played out in the Supreme Court. It has politicized the Court more than at any time in recent memory.

Last year a majority of the justices determined that corporations have a right under the First Amendment to provide unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission is among the most patently political and legally grotesque decisions of our highest court – ranking right up there with Bush vs. Gore and Dred Scott.

Among those who voted in the affirmative were Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Both have become active strategists in the Republican party.

A month ago, for example, Antonin Scalia met in a closed-door session with Michele Bachman’s Tea Party caucus – something no justice concerned about maintaining the appearance of impartiality would ever have done.

Both Thomas and Scalia have participated in political retreats organized and hosted by multi-billionaire financier Charles Koch, a major contributor to the Tea Party and other conservative organizations, and a crusader for ending all limits on money in politics. (Not incidentally, Thomas’s wife is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization that has been receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to the Citizens United decision. On his obligatory financial disclosure filings, Thomas has repeatedly failed to list her sources of income over the last twenty years, nor even to include his own four-day retreats courtesy of Charles Koch.)

Some time this year or next, the Supreme Court will be asked to consider whether the nation’s new healthcare law is constitutional. Watch your wallets.

The strategy as a whole
These three aspects of the Republican strategy – a federal budget battle to shrink government, focused on programs the vast middle class depends on; state efforts to undermine public employees, whom the middle class depends on; and a Supreme Court dedicated to bending the Constitution to enlarge and entrench the political power of the wealthy – fit perfectly together.

They pit average working Americans against one another, distract attention from the almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the top, and conceal Republican plans to further enlarge and entrench that wealth and power.

What is the Democratic strategy to counter this and reclaim America for the rest of us?

When in Rome....

2011-02-12T12:00:00.000-05:00

"In the fire blue forests, faded and forgotten
I crawled through the cotton fields, picking for cotton
The overseer sneered, his whipping was rotten
With ecstasy.
In child-like terror I tore out the tap roots
Cards of the lash were calling to follow suit
I dashed for the swamps, the hounds in hot pursuit
Jealously.
All through the night a figure of fright, as I hid my head
And the buried their nose in a cut of my cloths, now torn in shreds
And they never would leave until they believed that I was dead
But I'd never curse their names
Oh, who am I to blame
I know I'd do the same
Endlessly.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

Frail and afraid in the mists of the morning
The snakes and the spiders were sadly performing
The bark of the dogs kept up the warning
Inside the wood.
Sweating and swearing I crawled from the manger
The highway appeared to take me from danger
Is there anyone here who would pick up a stranger?
Oh I wish you could.
Then someone replied "would you like a ride?"
"Come in" he said.
We drove for a while, he gave me a smile and a piece of bread
The hammer was hard in the chrome of the car as I cracked his head
Then we took off in a spin
Oh I smashed his skull again
Oh thank you my good friend,
I feel so good.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

Late in the evening I came to the city
I fell to the sidewalks sighing for pity
A diamond was dropped from the hands of the pretty
To be so kind.
Cowards and corpses were busy competing
The rhymes of the riots were busy repeating
I raced to the corner and sped from the speeding
To save my mind.
Latches and locks, companies of cops ran from the rain
There was silk in the stores for the whims of the whores
That shone with shame.
I asked for a light from a priest in the night
Then I fanned the flames.
And the traffic all stood still
To see if someone had been killed
I was glad to leave a thrill
So far behind.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

A monk and his mother were dancing so dandy
A topless nun was handing out candy
The beautiful bishop broke out the brandy
The kiss we crave.
They stuttered and stammered, would I feel like staying
We fell to our knees, feverishly praying
the salt in the salt-peter seemed to be saying
Be brave, be brave.
I reached reached for a robe, I preached and I probed
And I taught the tune.
And the greed for the guilt was played to the hilt
As I promised doom
I toyed with their fears, until coins and tears filled the room
Then I took off down the road
Laughing madly like a toad
God bless every soulless soul
That would be saved.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

A chorus of children were passing the hours
I joined in their fun and gave them my flowers
Covered with kisses and showered with showers
That they repaid.
Taken and trusting, would I be their teacher?
She looked so appealing, I wanted to touch her
Just out of reach, unable to reach her
Their hands were raised.
Charmed by the chalk, the lessons were taught, inside the class
They studied the rules of the samurai schools, they had to pass
The room was adjourned, the lessons were learned,
I turned on the gas
And I watched them make their pleas
They passed the test with ease
I gave them their degrees,
They made the grade.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

Feeling my weakness, a coward for company
I joined the ranks of the hot and hungry
To teach what it means to have love for your country
We marched away.
We lowered our lives for the lines of a border
We danced with the mothers, played with the daughters
We followed our fantasies, following orders
It was child's play.
After the war the bullets were bored so we capped the game
With cynical smiles we put them on trial to place the blame
Now what kind of beast would love such a feast
Have you no shame?
So we hung the by the feet
Oh, we shot them in the street
Oh, the victory was sweet
on victory day.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

The bread and the circuses came to be nearing
The Saviour or somebody must be appearing
Pagans and pageants were all disappearing
Inside my head.
The stones on the statues were staring and stalling
Caesar and Cassius were cursing and calling
The empire had risen and now it was falling
Or so it seemed.
The crown and the cross seemed empty and lost in dark despair
And luminous lies, death in disguise were everywhere
The canvas was cold, the story was old, I said my prayers
Then I crowned him on the head
Oh, I blessed him as he bled
Oh At last, the king is dead
God save the queen.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do.

Now nothing remained for building or burning
The losing of lovers was all I was learning
A time for escape and a time for returning had come to me
Back through the ashes and back through the embers
Back through the roads and the ruins I remembered
My hands at my side I sadly surrendered
Do as you please.
The hero was home, proven and grown, I fell on the floor
Mad with romance they started to dance, their star was born
I bled like the rain, exploded in pain, then I screamed for more
Oh, make me feel sublime
Release me from my mind
Oh, Kill me one more time
And set me free.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in Rome do as the Romans do."

Bob Dylan has "Desolation Row." Phil Ochs has "When in Rome."

I think it's a tie.

Honey, can I jump on it sometime?

2011-01-30T11:29:00.000-05:00

Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, you look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime?
Yes, I just wanna see
If it’s really that expensive kind
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, if you wanna see the sun rise
Honey, I know where
We’ll go out and see it sometime
We’ll both just sit there and stare
Me with my belt
Wrapped around my head
And you just sittin’ there
In your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, I see you got a new boyfriend
You know, I never seen him before
Well, I saw him
Makin’ love to you
You forgot to close the garage door
You might think he loves you for your money
But I know what he really loves you for
It’s your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music

Alexis de Tocqueville x 10....

2011-01-29T09:45:00.000-05:00

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

"In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them."

"The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through."

"As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"

"What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class."

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."

"In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end."

"In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own."

"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it."

"I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women."

"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness."

11.9....

2011-01-28T10:53:00.000-05:00

The percentage of American workers in unions last year, the lowest proportion in more than 70 years, according to the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of workers in unions fell by 612,000 last year, to 14.7 million. About 20 percent of workers were in unions in 1983; the figure was 35 percent during the mid-1950s, according to labor historians. Last year “was a very tough year for unionized workers,” said John Schmitt, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “We’re seeing declines in the private sector, and we’re seeing declines in the public sector.”

Can anyone anywhere really believe that the corresponding stagnation of worker wages and rise in corporate profits are actually unrelated?

Read our lips....

2011-01-26T23:53:00.000-05:00

Best. Sign. Ever.

2011-01-24T10:01:00.000-05:00

A thing of beauty, isn't it?

Hollywood endings....

2011-01-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

Every few days I go to my local library and flip through their DVD collection. I usually get box sets of TV series I've either missed or that air on channels I don't get. Occasionally I pick up a feature film or two, especially if it's something recent that I've read about. I don't go to see films in theaters anymore; the stress of dealing with other people distracts me for days before I even go. The last film I went to see in a theater was Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan anti-bio pic, I'm Not There. During the opening credits there was a fire alarm in the mall where the theater was and everyone was evacuated. I got the message: no exceptions.

I'm not a big Oliver Stone fan. I never made it through the first 10 minutes of Platoon; I can watch JFK if I watch it as a comedy. I am a fan of Natural Born Killers however, and I was surprised by World Trade Center because he avoided any whiff of "conspiracy" and never gave a second thought to the hijackers, choosing instead to tall a story about the first responders, which is the only important story to tell in all of that.

I thought Wall Street (1987) was OK, although it would have been thoroughly forgettable but for Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko. I like Michael Douglas (having finally forgiven him for his part in the ruining of Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) so when I saw the DVD of the Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, on the library shelf I brought it home.

The film is worth seeing for Douglas' performance alone. The subtlety and nuance he brings to the post-prison, broke and broken Gordon Gekko sent me back to the internet to look up the number of individual muscles in the human face (a lot). And watching Douglas appear to age backwards as the events unfold forward and he builds another fortune is a particularly stunning part of that performance.

But watching the film also became another reminder of the diminishing effects of the "Hollywood ending." I use the phrase to describe that peculiar effect the ending of a mainstream Hollywood film has upon the film as a whole - specifically, the way in which this sort of ending takes what might have been a very good film, and suddenly body slams it onto the concrete pavement of mediocrity.

For example....

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) would have been considerably more powerful (and shorter) had the credits rolled when William Hurt's character Louis, having just been released from prison, is getting on a bus still undecided about what he will do next.

The Devil Wore Prada (2006) is well worth seeing for Meryl Streep's performance as Miranda, but if the credits had rolled in the scene toward the end where Miranda sits in her limo with Andy (Ann Hathaway) and the film had ended with Andy still undecided about the choice that lays in front of her, it would have been a far better film.

The end of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps actually ruins the film. The Gordon Gekko we see at the very end reminds me of the Rocky Balboa of Rocky IV, a mutant who bears no resemblance to the human being in Rocky (1976). Even more however, the Hollywood ending of Money Never Sleeps is Oliver Stone losing his nerve and folding like a cheap suit. For ninety minutes we are told, in tremendous detail, how we were screwed, how we are being screwed, how we will be screwed in the future, and how we can't do a goddamn thing about it.

But wait... yes we can... maybe... look... happy.

In the end then we are screwed by Wall Street, just like this film is screwed by this Hollywood ending.

Happy birthday, Dr. King.

2011-01-16T15:49:00.000-05:00

I love this photo because it's so unlike all the images we usually see of Dr. King as an orator, leader, preacher, fighter, Nobel Peace Prize winner. Instead it is a candid moment, Martin clearly enjoying the warm of friends. I'd like to think he made that 11 ball.

Second Amendment Solutions....

2011-01-09T19:52:00.000-05:00

"We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.” - Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, March 25th, 2010.

People who look like people....

2010-12-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

While I was walking through the Warhol retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art yesterday I was struck by the resemblance my friend, writer and artist, Reg Darling, has to Andy Warhol.

A few nights ago I watched the DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film, Notorious, and noticed how much my friend and Boston attorney, Heather Leary, looks like the young Ingrid Bergman.

Ho ho ho, ho ho ho ho ho....

2010-12-20T20:06:00.000-05:00

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

There ain’t no Santa Claus on the evenin’ stage
There ain’t no way t’ pull the curtain
‘N hide from hunger’s rage
There ain’t no town t’ stop in
There ain’t no time t’ stop in
There ain’t no straw for my horse
There ain’t no straw for my bed
There ain’t no comfort in cold boards
There ain’t no rumours or food for my stomach
‘N someday I’m gonna be saved
‘Cause I gotta eat ‘n drink ‘n breathe ‘n sleep
‘N I’m ah slave
Down in hominy’s grotto there’s ah soul die’n ‘n leavin’
Every second on the evenin’ stage
There’s ah soul die’n ‘n rottin’ ‘n pickin’
Some new kinda cotton
With his fingers broken ‘n his heart ‘n back forgotten
There ain’t no Santa Claus on the evenin’ stage

Captain O Captain....

2010-12-17T21:06:00.000-05:00

"The stars are matter, we're matter, but it doesn't matter." - Don Van Vliet (January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010)

The Heater from Van Meter....

2010-12-15T23:49:00.000-05:00

Bob Feller

(November 3, 1918 - December 15, 2010)

In 1985 I went for a job interview for a faculty position at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. I checked in to my room at the College Inn and was scheduled to have dinner with a member of the department faculty that evening. It was a 4 or 5 hour drive from Athens, OH, to Wooster and I laid down to take a nap before dinner. I had the TV tuned to a baseball game, the Cleveland Indians were playing and I watched a bit and dozed off.

When I woke up I had this odd disorientation for a moment when I saw the TV, which was now showing the ballgame in black and white. It was raining in Cleveland, and the game that I'd been watching had been delayed; the TV station was filling the time with some highlights of old Cleveland baseball. But when I woke up I saw that Bob Feller was pitching and, for the briefest moment before my head cleared, I fully believed I had somehow traveled back in time.

In 2008, the New York Mets signed Venezuelan pitcher Johan Santana to a six-year contract worth $137.5 million dollars.

In 1936, baseball scout Cy Slapnicka signed the 17 year old high school pitcher, Bob Feller, to the Cleveland Indians for $1 and an autographed baseball.

Here are some other things about Bob Feller worth repeating:

* He spent his entire career of 18 years with the Indians, ending his career with 266 victories and 2,581 strikeouts.

* He was the first pitcher to win 20 or more games before the age of 21.

* On October 2, 1938, Feller set a modern major league record of 18 strikeouts against the Detroit Tigers.

* On Opening Day in the 1940 season, Feller pitched a no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox. This is the only no-hitter to be thrown on Opening Day in major league history.

* He pitched three no-hit games and shares the major league record with 12 one-hitters.

* He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility.

* On December 8, 1941, Feller enlisted in the Navy, volunteering immediately for combat service, becoming the first Major League Baseball player to do so following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. Feller served as Gun Captain aboard the USS Alabama, and missed four seasons during his service in World War II, being decorated with five campaign ribbons and eight battle stars.

* One year after his return to Major League action, in 1946, he registered an incredible 348 strikeouts while pitching in 48 games, starting 42 of those games. That year Feller was 26-15 with an ERA of 2.18 while pitching 36 complete games.

* In June 2009, at the age of 90, Feller was one of the starting pitchers at the inaugural Baseball Hall of Fame Classic at Cooperstown, New York.

The Anthem....

2010-12-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

So anyway, I'm sitting here looking around on the internet for stuff about my old friend, Paul Major. When I knew Paul in the late 1980s and 90s he was the #1 rare record dealer for obscure DIY 60s and 70s psychedelia in the US. At some point back then I went to New York on business - this TV media conference that is a whole other story in itself - and spent one night at Paul's apartment across from the gates of Columbia University on the upper west side listening to strange records with Paul and Mike Ascherman until dawn. I remember it was a weekend of a blizzard and the city was remarkably quiet. I walked out onto Broadway (I think it was Broadway) about 6 in the morning, one set of lights coming down the otherwise empty and frozen street. One lone taxi to take me back to my hotel; it was a fun New York night.

Sometime later, the next summer I think, Paul and his daughter stayed with us when they passed through on their way to Kentucky to visit his father. His daughter was about 9 or 10 at the time; we went downtown to the Eiteljorge Museum of American Indians and Western Art where we saw the Caughnawaga Mohawk artist Richard Glazer-Danay's "Bingo War Bonnet," a hardhat with acrylic paint and decorations.

We decided that "Bingo War Bonnet" was the name of the greatest unknown private-press psychedelic record of all time. Maybe you had to be there, I know it made sense at the time.

More recently Paul has resurfaced as "Top Dollar", the lead guitar player in The Endless Boogie Band, a NYC-based loud electric jam band whose earliest recordings are now very rare and expensive, which seems only right.

But I digress....

In my internet search I came across a page from the archives of The Brooklyn Vegan discussing Paul Mawhinney's collection of over 3 million records which had been offered for sale and had caused a flurry of comments from various record collector types. Those kinds of discussions always remind me of a story I heard somewhere about two old guys sitting around bemoaning, as old guys will do, the present as only the palest imitation of the authentic past.

"I'll tell you what," said the first old guy, "those times will never come again."

Hearing this, the second old guy paused, then spoke, correcting his friend. "Sure they will, but just not for us."

In that thread on The Brooklyn Vegan, someone posted an anonymous comment in the form of a lyric he or she called "The Anthem" and it offers a similar sentiment but with greater detail.

THE ANTHEM

Yeah, I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge to the kids from France and from London.
But I was there.

I was there in 1968.
I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.
I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.
I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
I'm losing my edge.

To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

But I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.

I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge.
I can hear the footsteps every night on the decks.
But I was there.
I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.
I was working on the organ sounds with much patience.
I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band.
I told him, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a dime."
I was there.
I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
I played it at CBGB's.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I've never been wrong.

I used to work in the record store.
I had everything before anyone.
I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.
I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.
I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.

But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.

I'm losing my edge.

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s.

I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

But have you seen my records? This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, The Trojans, The Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harrassment, a-ha, Pere Ubu, Dorothy Ashby, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League, the Normal, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Monks, Niagra,

Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra,
Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc,

Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force ("just hit me"!), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron!, the Slits, Faust, Mantronix, Pharaoh Sanders and the Fire Engines, the Swans, the Soft Cell, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics.

You don't know what you really want.

Who doesn't love a happy ending?

2010-12-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

A 47 year old gay man was arrested at San Francisco International Airport after ejaculating while being patted down by a male TSA agent. Percy Cummings, an interior designer from San Francisco, is being held without bail after the alleged incident, charged with sexually assaulting a Federal agent.

According to Cummings’ partner, Sergio Armani, Cummings has “multiple piercings on his manhood” which were detected during a full body scan. As a result, Cummings was pulled aside for a pat-down. Armani stated that the unidentified TSA agent spent “an inordinate amount of time groping” Cummings, who had apparently become sexually aroused. Cummings, who has a history of sexual dysfunction, ejaculated while the TSA agent’s hand was feeling the piercings. The TSA agent, according to several witnesses, promptly called for back up. Cummings was thrown to the ground and handcuffed.

A TSA spokesperson declined to comment on this specific case, but said that anyone ejaculating during a pat-down would be subject to arrest.

I Want YOU....

2010-11-30T11:56:00.000-05:00

Pay attention.

2010-11-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

"An era can be said to end, when its basic illusions are exhausted." - Arthur Miller

Pope Benedict XVI: Universal health care is an "inalienable right" of man.

2010-11-19T18:35:00.000-05:00

Many of the Catholics I know are conservative Republicans, the lingering effect of the "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon of the early 1980s. I will be very interested to see how they take the news below:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI and other church leaders said it was the moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay.

Access to adequate medical attention, the pope said in a written message Nov. 18, was one of the "inalienable rights" of man.

The pope's message was read by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, to participants at the 25th International Conference of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry at the Vatican Nov. 18-19.

The theme of this year's meeting was "Caritas in Veritate - toward an equitable and human health care."

The pope lamented the great inequalities in health care around the globe. While people in many parts of the world aren't able to receive essential medications or even the most basic care, in industrialized countries there is a risk of "pharmacological, medical and surgical consumerism" that leads to "a cult of the body," the pope said.

"The care of man, his transcendent dignity and his inalienable rights" are issues that should concern Christians, the pope said.

Because an individual's health is a "precious asset" to society as well as to himself, governments and other agencies should seek to protect it by "dedicating the equipment, resources and energy so that the greatest number of people can have access."

"Justice in health care should be a priority of governments and international institutions," he said, cautioning that protecting human health does not include euthanasia or promoting artificial reproductive techniques that include the destruction of embryos.

Care for human life from conception to its natural end must be a guiding light in determining health care policy, the pope said.

In his own written statement, Cardinal Bertone had strong words in support of the need for governments to take care of all citizens, especially children, the elderly, the poor and immigrants.

"Justice requires guaranteed universal access to health care," he said, adding that the provision of minimal levels of medical attention to all is "commonly accepted as a fundamental human right."

Governments are obligated, therefore, to adopt the proper legislative, administrative and financial measures to provide such care along with other basic conditions that promote good health, such as food security, water and housing, the cardinal said.

Private health insurance companies, he said, should conform to human rights legislation and see to it that "privatization not become a threat to the accessibility, availability and quality of health care goods and services."

Cardinal Bertone recommended that government leaders in poor countries use their limited resources wisely and for the good of their citizens.

The governments of richer nations with good health care available should practice more solidarity with their own disadvantaged citizens and help developing countries promote health care while trying to avoid a "paternalistic or humiliating" way of assisting, the cardinal said.

Cardinal Bertone warned of the "war of interests" between pharmaceutical companies and developing nations who have little access to medicines because they can't pay for them. He said that those manufacturers should not be driven by "profit as the only objective" in the creation and distribution of medicines.

Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, said in opening remarks that to have good health "is a natural right" recognized by international institutions.

Despite such recognition, he said, great imbalances persist and developing nations find themselves with inadequate structures and without the ability to provide basic medicines to their people. Wealthier countries, on the other hand, have a "technical" approach to the sick, which ignores "the sick person in his entirety and dignity," Archbishop Zimowski said.

The council, created by Pope John Paul II 25 years ago, will continue the church's mission to serve the sick and promote health for all, the archbishop said.

By Sarah Delaney
Catholic News Service

Song to John Boehner (aka "The Very Thing That Makes You Rich Makes Me Poor")

2010-11-03T12:07:00.000-04:00

A bump in the road.

2010-11-03T09:57:00.000-04:00

Seriously.

2010-11-02T00:40:00.000-04:00

Jon Stewart's Closing Remarks at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

2010-10-31T20:38:00.000-04:00

Oct. 30, 2010
Washington D.C.

“I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate--just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more. The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker--and perhaps eczema.

And yet, with that being said, I feel good—strangely, calmly good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month old pumpkin and one eyeball.

So, why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own? We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!

The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. But Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live our values and principles form the foundations that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done. Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do—often something that they do not want to do—but they do it--impossible things every day that are only made possible by the little reasonable compromises that we all make.

Look on the screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. (points to the Jumbotron screen which show traffic merging into a tunnel). These cars—that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car-a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it—the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car—an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear—often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by conscession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay—you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

If you want to know why I’m here and want I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.

Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you."