There must be someone in Martha's Vinyard that can afford a video camera. It would make Obama look capable and leader-like if he just recorded his plan now and gets back to work instead of trying to schedule an appearance before Congress and all the rigmarole that entails.
If he really wants to go up against the Republican primaries, why not do that literally? Show up at the primary (or with teleconference) and take questions from the candidates. What's the worst that can happen, they ask about green jobs or his promise to be at 7% unemployment by now or "Fast and Furious" or Solyndra? He's a former community organizer who got elected President, surely he can take questions from a half-dozen American citizens.
Either way, he’d better have some damned brilliant ideas for reducing unemployment in his speech, ideas that were worth saving until the final third of his term in office. Last month jobs growth was the same as Bluto Blutarsky’s grade point average. [According to the documentary of Faber College available on the Double Secret Probation Edition of Animal House, Senator Blutarsky did reach the White House, so maybe it’s not such a coincidence.]
Obama's Secretary of Labor says she believes "we're going the right direction on jobs" so you know this is the administration that believes in smart power.
For months after returning from deployment, I made CDs for the car stereo in lieu of listening to the radio. At first they were Jim Steinman but after another deployment, I grew weary of Steinman and wished to spice things up with songs I’d acquired since enlisting. Songs that, to my mind, I’d never heard previously in a serious way. I didn’t have much access to amazon.com before and now I could enlarge the music collection tremendously.
Call it an appreciation for the album as an aesthetic creation or the compact disc as a technological innovation, but I’ve a fondness for picking favorite playlists.
Anyway, to my mind I’ve heard the songs properly and have been jumbling them up into jukebox-like CDs for a while now. The only rules were that no Jim Steinman would be permitted unless I hadn’t heard it before (which wasn’t a rule, just a general decision that enough was enough; I play him at work and on the computer) and they had to qualify as song I didn’t completely own pre-enlistment. “Mix tapes” didn’t count, so if I taped it off the radio pre-enlistment, I could hear an internet copy burned to disc and repeated in my car. Keep in mind, it didn’t matter how many times I’d heard the song, even pre-enlistment, only this new listening qualified for serious music appreciation.
Recently I burned a new set of discs and a lot of old favorites left the playlist. Let’s see what remains.
The first CD is the first two albums by Rush. I listened to the entire Rush collection when I bought it on amazon, but now I want to give their body of work a chance to seep in through repetitions in a six-disc player. I haven’t bothered up-grading to an ipod player because that’s just the way I am.
A song from their forthcoming album is included on disc 2, a new addition along with Roger Waters’ “Each Small Candle” and Billy Joel’s “Invention in C Minor” Eddie Van Halen sings and plays keyboards with Gary Cherone’s lyrics and backing vocals for “How Many Say I”, so far the final track on the final Van Halen album. All three are effectively among the last embers of each men’s recording careers. The other new addition after previous material’s purging is Sammy Hagar’s live version of “Give To Live” because the original is awesome but I heard it pre-enlistment.
His last album with VH provides “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” and “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)”, and HSAS album just before he joined VH gave us a cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale” that has been among my favorite tracks. I just listened to it a couple of hours ago before I ever thought of writing this.
“Christmas Canon Rock” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra works all year around, with its anthemic rock orchestra sound and gorgeous female lead vocals. I couldn’t tell you which classical composer’s work they appropriated, but I like the result the way I like Queen and Jim Steinman’s work, and power ballads and much classic rock. The Damn Yankees mixed Ted Nugent and Styx singer/guitarist Tommy Shaw for a similar one-hit wonder called “High Enough” which I’ve been enjoying for well over a year and the copy comes from the ‘best of the 80’s compilation on sale at the PX or Wal-Mart. Gene Chandler sings the gorgeous “Duke of Earl”, Phil Spector brings us “He’s A Rebel” which has inspired musical interludes. Like these two, Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” is another long-time pop favorite I had never appreciated before.
I’d always like Linda Perry’s 4 Non Blondes album, and “Life in a Bottle” comes from her solo album a few years ago. “Hey Girl” is a cover song by Billy Joel to fill out his third Greatest Hits album (the first two are a double-disc set that is one of the biggest selling records of all time). He dabbled in classical music after the River of Dreams but (according to regular tour co-star Elton John) has nothing else to say in music. I’ve played “Hey Girl” before. It was one of the songs I tired of early but didn’t erase from the “Make More CDs” file.
“Making Love Out of Nothing at All” is a Jim Steinman demo of his hit with Air Supply, and the vocals are in a tolerable register. The production is enjoyably raw while suggesting the heights that it reached with Air Supply’s recording budget, and it’s technically *new* Steinman which is always good.
“I’m a Boinger” was one of the two tracks released on flex-disc with the relevant Bloom County collection which I listened to when it came out. The other one is also on these discs, but “I’m a Boinger” has such an awesome lead vocal and hilarious lyrics that it’s my favorite. Remember when records were used to promote things like this?
On disc 3, Sammy Hagar is well-represented with his original version of Rick Springfield’s early-80’s hit “I’ve Done Everything For You” and Sammy’s own last big hit to date, 1999’s “Mas Tequila”. Chickenfoot is represented with the gorgeous ballad “Learning To Fall”. Also his cover of “Free Money” from his late-70’s solo album is the song where I truly realized how awesome Sammy was (except as a lyricist but even he’ll admit that). His early-21st century advertisement for his tequila-bar empire involves a cover of Kenny Chesney’s “I Love This Bar”.
I’d always liked Paul McCartney’s first ‘failed debut single’, “My Brave Face” from 1989, Bill Medley’s “Most Of All You” ballad that played at the end of the first Major Leagues movie, Petula Clark’s “Downtown", Tom Petty’s songwriting partnership with Bob Dylan “You’re Jammin’ Me”, Enya’s “Epona” and “Exile” (as heard in Steve Martin’s L.A. Story) and the Proclaimer’s weird-scottsmen-with-irrestistibly-catchy-melody “I’m Gonna Be (500) Miles)” doing what Dexy’s Midnight Runners did a decade before. All of these I have enjoyed for many months, since I first forsake old Steinman, and heard only in incomplete form before enlistement.
Post-enlistment first-hears, “Beautiful Dangerous” featuring Fergie continues to be a standout track from Slash’s self-titled debut album, and “Catcher in the Rye” retains its enjoyability and quality from Axl’s rival album. “Fall To Pieces” is an enjoyable song Slash co-wrote between G’n’R and what he’s doing now, and about the only listenable Scott Weiland singing I’ve ever heard. Linda Perry’s album gives us two more songs, “Fruitloop Daydream” and “Knock Me Out”.
I’ve recently become a big fan of guitarist Jeff Beck, who first came to prominence replacing Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds and hired Jimmy Page to replace him in turn. Beck and Page were and are longtime friends, and “Beck’s Bolero” is one of the fruits of that friendship. The two guitarists booked studio time to record something. They wanted the Who’s rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keith Moon, but could only get Moon so Page turned to session player John Paul Jones for bass duties. They even talked about forming a band, which Moon said would go down like a lead balloon, or zeppelin or something. Page formed his band, and Beck had an erratic career starting with the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart as the lead singer who went solo. “Beck’s Bolero” is still outstanding.
In the re-release of their catalogue, little looks promising in the way of unheard material from Queen. The a capella opera section from “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a stand-out that continues to amaze, but not much else of worth has been released so far. Steven Tyler’s debut single as a solo artist is a gorgeous ballad called “Love Lives” that justifies him as a singer and (almost) the years of silence we’ve heard since Aerosmith’s last album. He wants to do pop music, as his appearances on American Idol demonstrate and his power ballad stylings during the 80’s were no exception. He’s also the guy who wrote “Mama Kin”, so cut him some slack.
More of the final Van Hagar album gives us “Amsterdam” and “The Seventh Seal”, the latter of which is an awesomely atmospheric hurricane of sound. Eddie the keyboard player and guitar player and producer fights to overcome Sammy. (I think it’s a draw, but I’m not sure who called it). These are fairly new additions as is Sammy’s hilarious “Sam I Am” accounting of his career to date. “Up For Breakfast”, “It’s About Time” and “Learning to See” are the three completed tracks from a few short years later when they reunited with Hagar.
The b-side of Rush’s earlier single “BU2B” is new, as is “Waltz #1 (Nunley’s Carousel)” by Billy Joel, John Phillips Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” and “Suicide is Painless” from the original M*A*S*H movie. Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s new inclusion is “Wish Liszt”, where they play the musical piece,. Best known today from the scene where Daffy and Donald battle it out in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, “Hungarian Rhapsody” by Liszt was favored in old Disney and Warners cartoons and although the TSO does a great job, it falls flat in places (nyuck nyuck). There are places where I think they would have done better to sound like, I dunno, “Christmas Canon”.
A remixed Elvis song became a big hit in England, “A Little Less Conversation” and helped promote 30 #1s in 30 years, Elvis’ anniversary celebrations. I bought the album in AIT and still enjoy “Conversation”. Axl Rose gives us the official “Street of Dreams”, which I’d heard prior to enlistment as “The Blues”. Still one of my favorites of his though. “Ghost” has Slash’s reunion with Izzy Stradlin and is awesome. SSG Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” has featured exactly the sort of build-up I like in my popular music, and I have a personal connection to the unit it was written for. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” is a powerful bass voice of resentment and lament. Ellen Foley maneuvered her vocals on “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and girlfriendship to the Clash’s guitarist that she recorded a few solo albums with some quality material. “In the Killing Hour” is the one I haven’t grown tired of yet, a powerful bolero performance.
Oddly, I’d heard Roxette’s “Crash Boom Bang” pre-enlistment, but I’d never liked it before, so I qualify it as new. An awesome power ballad with a gorgeous vocal and atmospheric keyboards, it’s just a great pop song.
“The Night Chicago Died” is a quirky one-hit wonder, a retelling of a battle between the police and Al Capone with a great call-and-response vocal.
Queen’s rereleases also include the backing track from “You’re My Best Friend”, a standout hit in that it was written by their bass-player and the follow-up A-side to “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I had always thought it a pleasant pop tune, but quite low on my list of favorite Queen songs. Now, hearing it without Freddie’s lead vocals reveals what an extremely talented band Queen were. It’s an outstanding performance and eventually I’ll get around to listening to Freddie’s vocal again. Probably not soon though.
Disc 5 has the two Red Hot Chili Peppers songs I’ve enjoyed since discovering they had a career before “Under the Bridge” (all pre-enlistment). “By the Way” and “Californication” demonstrate the singer’s ability as a lyricist to manage complicated rhymes. There aren’t a whole lot of tools available to the lyric writer, but ability to form coherent polysyllabic thoughts is one of them. I’d heard the songs when they were new, but now I could buy my own copies.
Elvis had “If I Can Dream” for his comeback, Sammy had “Silver Lights” for his start and “Returning of the Wish” from the same album as “Mas Tequila”, Queen also sold the instrumental tracks of “Seven Seas of Rhye” which I love for the same reason as “You’re My Best Friend”, and “Tie Your Mother Down” which is a brand-new addition to this series of discs that I haven’t yet heard properly. G’n’R has “There Was A Time”, Heart had “Stranded”, longtime favorites, there’s this awesome punk cover of “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” that still makes me sing “10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or more, the bloody Red Baron was rolling the score” every time it comes on as it has for months as well.
Two more Sammy songs, one of which I’ve listened to for a couple months is his acoustic rendition of “Dreams” post-VH, and a new one from the same album, “When It’s Love”. His HSAS album also gives us “Missing You” and “Top of the Rock”
Metallica’s “The Unforgiven” continues to be my favorite song of their since I was in high school. Years later, I hated what they did to it with “Unforgiven II”. Now that I can buy stuff legally, I might as well drop a buck on “Unforgiven III” from their latest album which has in common with its predecessors the chord sequences and the general Metallica sound which is worth a buck in my opinion. The Eagles give us “Live in the Fast Lane” which is one of the few songs from the band I really really like.
Billy Joel’s demo “The Prime Of Your Life” is extremely enjoyable. He doesn’t have the lyrics finished yet, although they’re surprisingly developed. It’s light years away from what was eventually released as the vocal-heavy “The Longest Time” with an entirely-different vocal melody and musical approach.
Disc 6 is mostly songs that have come into and dropped out of my listening habits lately. Linda Perry’s “Uninvited” and Sammy’s live “Right Now” are brand-new, as is Jeff Beck’s “Diamond Dust” instrumental (with George Martin’s production).
Def Leppard’s “Two Steps Behind” (about the only song post-Adrenalize I really liked), Queen+Paul Rodgers “We Believe” (my other favorite from the album, so far Brian May’s final Queen composition as far as I’m concerned. He can produce stuff for others, or play with Roger, but all of his other new songs are variations on the “Butterfly” chord sequence, as was the final song Queen recorded with John (for which I travelled to England for a copy), and make up a large part of bootleg Queen songs since “Save Me”. He may have written all the keyboard ballads there were in him.
The release from Roy Orbison’s album at the time he died was “I Drove All Night”, that’s brand new. “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” by Prince was absent for a number of discs before re-appearing (its video was directed by Spike Lee in exchange for funding the Malcom X movie, and probably Prince’s conflicts with Warner Bros’ demands for a single.
Slash’s “Starlight” and Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” have been fixtures since I first started burning these discs, as has the 80’s sounding remake of “Ballad of the Green Beret”. “Stray Cat Strut” was briefly included but not yet erased and appears again. Sammy’s iconic song “Red” is included, as is 1999’s “Red Voodoo”. 1989 brought us Brian May, Roger Taylor, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi and others for a guitar hero’s remake of “Smoke on the Water”, and I’ve enjoyed it for a couple months now, along with a previously-unreleased Steinman demo or a previously-unreleased Steinman song, “Train of Love” sounds like a Motown song. Weird Al’s new album has the Un-Steinman “Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me” which I’ve enjoyed since its release date. John Phillips Sousa was also paid to write something by the Washington Post, hence the name of the march.
That’s what I’m listening to these days. When I’ve burned out on a number of these tracks, I’ve made 2 more Rush CDs taking up more of their early career. By the time I get tired of these, I’ll have winnowed them down to a few favorite songs and making further compilations of their body of work will be manageable.
I have more live Sammy Hagar, but enough is enough on him as well in many ways. I also have a couple of songs by AC-DC that I’ve never liked, but they were big hits and it’s important to have them. There’s the first couple albums by Big Star, another one of those bands nobody’s ever heard of but became influential, they forged the ‘power pop’ sound prominent post-grunge and briefly flirted with being somebodies. They didn’t bear up to repeated listening and it’s only inertia that has kept me from erasing them.
I like to think my email to Jim@JimSteinman.com had something to do with the release of unheard demos, and I have a number of them yet unburned to disc. (including "Train of Love" with Steinman singing) I don’t even have all of Sammy’s albums, or VH’s and I’m running out of interest in burning what’s left. I’ve listened to it, and HSAS/Van Hagar will probably filter in to the disc sooner-or-later. Chickenfoot has a new album coming out and Joe Satriani’s first album will probably come back into my rotation as well. Most of the parodies on Weird Al’s album I wouldn’t recognize as parodies if I didn’t know it was Al. The original songs are certainly worth paying for. I had a yen to own much of John Phillips Sousa’s work and only a few tracks have been represented.
There are Sammy songs I like and will probably return to favor, stuff with Montrose or live versions of VH songs. Some of his covers are more annoying than others. There’s still more of Linda Perry’s solo album, and she’s since gone on to write for other chick singers. A few other Queen demos from their debut album which have great merit but I got tired of them. I got tired of Brian May’s young female singer more quickly, as I tired of Ellen Foley’s best songs (including a 3-song EP which I gather is quite recent). A few Bette Midler songs are charming, most of them written by Sammy. The original cast album tracks from Jesus Christ, Superstar remain as enjoyable now as when I was a kid.
Males using female vocalists are represented in work I’ve recently removed from the discs, tracks like Ike and Tina’s long-playing “Proud Mary” and “River Deep, Mountain High”. Ike’s own “Rocket 88” was removed early on, as were the Shangri-La’s “Remember (Walking In the Sand) - later remade awesomely by Aerosmith - , the Spanish version of “Crash Boom Bang” (Roxette is Swedish! It’s same instrumental tracks! Awesome!) and “Soy Una Mujer” (which topped the pop charts as “Fading Like A Flower” in my younger days). Sonny and Cher’s “The Beat Goes On” may one day reappear, as might Linda Rondstadt and whoever’s “You’re No Good”. Phil Spector and whoever’s “And Then He Kissed Me” may return sooner. “Sowing the Seeds of Love” was a hit by Tears For Fears in the late 80’s that was on tapes I dubbed from the radio first, and maintained another impressive run rarely equaled in this collection of songs. There’s something so distinctly 1980’s and British about trying to be 1960s and American and inspired by 1960s English stars… But I enjoyed the song for all my misbegotten youth and for the last year as well. Dennis Wilson’s “Friday Night” gives a stark other side to the Beach Boy’s life and I like it very much, as does the other Enya track from L.A. Story that didn’t make the cut for this round of CD burnings. The rest are similar novelty tracks, show tunes, covers or mashes, funny or surprising.
I wish I could have included the tv theme songs but Windows seems to have some aversion to certain wmv files being burnt to CD. The long-version of the “Sanford and Son” theme is outstanding.
03 September, 2011
21 August, 2011
A Night at the Osprey
The Osprey was a minor character in a minor issue of Fantastic Four by the Lee and Kirby imitators at Marvel in the early 70's. The FF's arch-enemies had long since banded together as the Frightful Four. In this issue, they had taken over the FF's headquarters and was holding the foursome prisoner despite (or because of?) the villains numbering only three. To protect their branding, the Wizard, the Sandman and the Trapster advertised in the Daily Bugle for a fourth member.
Most of them were cameos to set up for future issues (the Impossible Man) or for reasons of continuity. [I still remember the Texas Twister departing with an editorial note where he would next appear]. Then there was the Osprey.
He had a costume with wings on it, but he couldn't fly, not really. Not at all actually. In fact, if one of the FF (the bad ones) could do something about that, he'd really appreciate it. The Wizard slapped an anti-gravity disc on him and the last we saw of the Osprey, he was sailing out into the wild blue yonder screaming 'heeeeeeeellllpppppp!' Even Wikipedia doesn't have a page on him. They've got one on the Texas Twister!
But the Osprey had his two or three minutes on stage. He gave it a shot.
Last night my Dad and I went to see the Grand Ole Opry. Neither of us are country music fans - I'm certainly not anyway - but he had come to visit and we needed a tourist trap in Nashville. He got tickets for a night nobody I'd heard of was playing (although Vince Gill turned out to be the final host for the night, so I must have missed his name earlier).
I have to say there was something intrinsically Southern about the experience. It seemed like a normal public gathering in a high school auditorium in seats that resembled church pews. Most ages were represented, although I didn't see too many kids who wouldn't have preferred a baby-sitter and video games. Just little ones, and a few on stage.
Notable Virginians aside, the South did not produce the people who founded our nation, they were the people who first moved on, and applied to their new land what the founding Americans had created. Tennessee was one of the first new states to join the US and Nashville as a long history (I assume).
The Opry says it made country music popular, and there's probably a good case for that. They certainly gave it a national forum in 1925 when the weekly radio broadcast went national. Sponsors changed, locations changed, they added a television broadcast. One week Elvis Presley stood at the back of the room along with all the other hopefuls for his chance. They told him he had no future in country music and the following Monday he was back at work as a truck driver.
This was when the modern nationwide media truly came into its own. An illiterate southern redneck like Hank Wiliams could sell records across the country instead of the regional markets as he'd been doing. With the glitter of an Opry appearance, he and other touring musicians could bill themselves as Opry musicians and promote themselves as such. However the Opry had to protect its brand name and charged fees for its use. The musicians were also cut into for touring, simply because they couldn't afford to get too far from Nashville and miss a scheduled appearance. The records could travel, the NBC weekly show could travel, but those who stood in the circle couldn't get too far if they wanted to come back.
Again, this is why the experience seemed so intrisically Southern. The opening act was the most... I don't even know how to describe her. I have no idea how one gets the job of warming up the crowd, much less how the Opry makes the selection. Her act was very calculated to look utterly simple and foolish. Heavy drawling, regular references to likin' the fellers, a sales tag hanging from her hat, an appearance and delivery that was so plain, just so... Almost literally a form of entertainment that could not exist above the Mason-Dixon line (wherever that is), this was delighfully off-putting, like something you know you should turn your nose up at in disdain, but there's something so charming about it.
Some of the performances were quite nice. Standing in the wings, you could see where all the other people on the show that night were milling about. A few other people were present, people who were probably the producer, the director, the sponsor, a girl moving sheet music around. The house singers stayed behind baffles except for their featured spot of the night. The house band was swapped out once for one woman's set. One of the better performers was making his debut appearance and promoting his new single available at Old Country Stores, another regional market that people who aren't from the South would scratch their heads about, but Southerners probably know as a regular part of life. [Or at least it seems that way, who knows how *those people* actually live?]
A group of kids were another act, their main attraction being the smallest and cutest one on the banjo. Quite impressive for what they were, a group of brothers who are doing now what their peers will do in high school, form a band that sounds pretty good. But it's where popular entertainment meets grade school talent show, predating "American Idol" by several generations.
And it still works, those kids will always know they got to stand on that stage with Little Jimmy Dickens, 90 years old with jokes even older. "I take my wife everywhere. She keeps finding her way back" was funny because it was so lame. "I ask my wife if she's cheating on me, she says who else is she going to cheat on" was funnier. His performance included a song from his latest album, released thirty years ago.
The sexy young girls who were really dressed up might have been there for Vince Gill, or because they were going clubbing afterwards and the rest was entirely family-friendly. Just enough off-color innuendo to give the adults a different set of laughs from the kids and enough diversity of entertainment that everybody could find something. The band played professionally, the banjo players did some good pickin', there were a few religious songs, a few love songs. There were regular exhortations of how wonderful the Opry is and interruptions by Hosanna, the Life Insurance company sponsoring this segment, who wanted us to know their name and that they were sponsoring this segment. The other sponsors did the same, whoever they were.
There was a reminder of tradition. The segment's host began moving to commercial at one point, but it had slipped his mind and he had to be reminded that it was Saturday night, which meant it was time for the square-dancers segment. He didn't usually work Saturdays, but the dancers sure did. If you want to know what square-dancing looks like when performed by highly-trained athletes, look no further. Wow. And girls in amazing purple outfits too!
Earlier in the day we had gone to downtown Nashville for the Country Music Hall of Fame. That was fun, although it did help illustrate why museums aren't a good place for music. There's nothing to show. The plaques are nice, with modifications when the honoree becomes posthumous. RCA is heavily represented, Studio B is one of the main exhibits (earning its own tour which we did not go on) and you can at least see the patch of ground where so many people passed over the years to do their turn before the microphone. They had to stay within the circle for maximum audio quality.
Hank Williams Jr. is undoubtedly one of the prime movers of the CMHoF, having found a repository for his father's written legacy as well as his own. And Hank III if the kid straightens up. Hank Sr. was banned from the Opry for drunkenness and a few months later, showed up dead to a concert in West Virginia after a snowstorm in Nashville delayed him. He didn't record at Studio B because it hadn't been built yet, but luckily made a couple of recordings in the period where he could no longer bill himself as an Opry performer. That's probably why he was looking for a few thousand dollar payday in West Virginia, he was getting divorced at the time.
Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill and Taylor Swift are all prominent. It's a good investment from the part of their record companies. Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, the Judds all made good career moves by endorsing the institutions. Amy Grant had hits on the Christian chart and one bonafide pop hit "Baby Baby" in my teenage years. Her song was enjoyable like any other on MTV then, and I still have the issue of "Dr. Strange" that her management threatened Marvel Comics over, because cover artist Jackson Guice copied her image and they didn't want her to be associated with satanism.
[Don't you love the way all this stuff works back into comic books sooner or later?]
Anyway, Amy Grant, past her hit-making years but presumably still a talented singer has an album of Christmas duets with her husband whatsisname coming out. The crossover market works.
THAT'S Southern too. It's something the rest of America doesn't have, the historical memory of foreign soldiers coming in, shooting a few hundred thousand of your people and burning down your homes. Blah blah blah, American Indians, it took the Union four years to tear down the South, for American to kill American.
Lemme tellya, those hills in Nashville are tough. The hills where I live are tough. There's some hardy breeds able to thrive there where us flatlanders are wary.
The South is more than Nashville of course. There's Old Virginia, there's the colonial melting pots of Louisiana and Florida. Texas is eternally Texas (the dumb bastards). Beyond the vastness of Texas, it spreads out into the Southwest which is another region of the country. Above Texas it fades into the farmlands of the midwest and arcs towards St. Louis, bounded by rivers until it reaches our nations' historical spine, the Appalachins. Then the South meets the North in DC, and the ocean becomes the borderline.
There's hillbillies and moonshine, there's church songs and rummage sales, they all have that weird accent, but their money's usually good which is better than some folks I could mention. Except when the people down here congregate in such large numbers, it's done like this, just the same as anybody else.
[As a writer, the potential for story material is amazing, whether it's a sexy Vince Gill groupie or a blue-collar lament to God or motherhood. Or a secret agent on a deadly mission moving through the crowd, there's just so many stories that could be told and I genuinely don't see that reflected in other public crowds, fairs, concerts, bar bands, clubs, etc. Political rallies and churches have their reason for existing and could easily be folded into the mix.
Here's Johnny Cash singing the one song of the night I'd ever heard before, "Lonesome Me".
"My wife looks in the mirror and says she's old and fat and ugly and even the slightest compliment would cheer her up right now, so I say her eyesight is perfect."
Most of them were cameos to set up for future issues (the Impossible Man) or for reasons of continuity. [I still remember the Texas Twister departing with an editorial note where he would next appear]. Then there was the Osprey.
He had a costume with wings on it, but he couldn't fly, not really. Not at all actually. In fact, if one of the FF (the bad ones) could do something about that, he'd really appreciate it. The Wizard slapped an anti-gravity disc on him and the last we saw of the Osprey, he was sailing out into the wild blue yonder screaming 'heeeeeeeellllpppppp!' Even Wikipedia doesn't have a page on him. They've got one on the Texas Twister!
But the Osprey had his two or three minutes on stage. He gave it a shot.
Last night my Dad and I went to see the Grand Ole Opry. Neither of us are country music fans - I'm certainly not anyway - but he had come to visit and we needed a tourist trap in Nashville. He got tickets for a night nobody I'd heard of was playing (although Vince Gill turned out to be the final host for the night, so I must have missed his name earlier).
I have to say there was something intrinsically Southern about the experience. It seemed like a normal public gathering in a high school auditorium in seats that resembled church pews. Most ages were represented, although I didn't see too many kids who wouldn't have preferred a baby-sitter and video games. Just little ones, and a few on stage.
Notable Virginians aside, the South did not produce the people who founded our nation, they were the people who first moved on, and applied to their new land what the founding Americans had created. Tennessee was one of the first new states to join the US and Nashville as a long history (I assume).
The Opry says it made country music popular, and there's probably a good case for that. They certainly gave it a national forum in 1925 when the weekly radio broadcast went national. Sponsors changed, locations changed, they added a television broadcast. One week Elvis Presley stood at the back of the room along with all the other hopefuls for his chance. They told him he had no future in country music and the following Monday he was back at work as a truck driver.
This was when the modern nationwide media truly came into its own. An illiterate southern redneck like Hank Wiliams could sell records across the country instead of the regional markets as he'd been doing. With the glitter of an Opry appearance, he and other touring musicians could bill themselves as Opry musicians and promote themselves as such. However the Opry had to protect its brand name and charged fees for its use. The musicians were also cut into for touring, simply because they couldn't afford to get too far from Nashville and miss a scheduled appearance. The records could travel, the NBC weekly show could travel, but those who stood in the circle couldn't get too far if they wanted to come back.
Again, this is why the experience seemed so intrisically Southern. The opening act was the most... I don't even know how to describe her. I have no idea how one gets the job of warming up the crowd, much less how the Opry makes the selection. Her act was very calculated to look utterly simple and foolish. Heavy drawling, regular references to likin' the fellers, a sales tag hanging from her hat, an appearance and delivery that was so plain, just so... Almost literally a form of entertainment that could not exist above the Mason-Dixon line (wherever that is), this was delighfully off-putting, like something you know you should turn your nose up at in disdain, but there's something so charming about it.
Some of the performances were quite nice. Standing in the wings, you could see where all the other people on the show that night were milling about. A few other people were present, people who were probably the producer, the director, the sponsor, a girl moving sheet music around. The house singers stayed behind baffles except for their featured spot of the night. The house band was swapped out once for one woman's set. One of the better performers was making his debut appearance and promoting his new single available at Old Country Stores, another regional market that people who aren't from the South would scratch their heads about, but Southerners probably know as a regular part of life. [Or at least it seems that way, who knows how *those people* actually live?]
A group of kids were another act, their main attraction being the smallest and cutest one on the banjo. Quite impressive for what they were, a group of brothers who are doing now what their peers will do in high school, form a band that sounds pretty good. But it's where popular entertainment meets grade school talent show, predating "American Idol" by several generations.
And it still works, those kids will always know they got to stand on that stage with Little Jimmy Dickens, 90 years old with jokes even older. "I take my wife everywhere. She keeps finding her way back" was funny because it was so lame. "I ask my wife if she's cheating on me, she says who else is she going to cheat on" was funnier. His performance included a song from his latest album, released thirty years ago.
The sexy young girls who were really dressed up might have been there for Vince Gill, or because they were going clubbing afterwards and the rest was entirely family-friendly. Just enough off-color innuendo to give the adults a different set of laughs from the kids and enough diversity of entertainment that everybody could find something. The band played professionally, the banjo players did some good pickin', there were a few religious songs, a few love songs. There were regular exhortations of how wonderful the Opry is and interruptions by Hosanna, the Life Insurance company sponsoring this segment, who wanted us to know their name and that they were sponsoring this segment. The other sponsors did the same, whoever they were.
There was a reminder of tradition. The segment's host began moving to commercial at one point, but it had slipped his mind and he had to be reminded that it was Saturday night, which meant it was time for the square-dancers segment. He didn't usually work Saturdays, but the dancers sure did. If you want to know what square-dancing looks like when performed by highly-trained athletes, look no further. Wow. And girls in amazing purple outfits too!
Earlier in the day we had gone to downtown Nashville for the Country Music Hall of Fame. That was fun, although it did help illustrate why museums aren't a good place for music. There's nothing to show. The plaques are nice, with modifications when the honoree becomes posthumous. RCA is heavily represented, Studio B is one of the main exhibits (earning its own tour which we did not go on) and you can at least see the patch of ground where so many people passed over the years to do their turn before the microphone. They had to stay within the circle for maximum audio quality.
Hank Williams Jr. is undoubtedly one of the prime movers of the CMHoF, having found a repository for his father's written legacy as well as his own. And Hank III if the kid straightens up. Hank Sr. was banned from the Opry for drunkenness and a few months later, showed up dead to a concert in West Virginia after a snowstorm in Nashville delayed him. He didn't record at Studio B because it hadn't been built yet, but luckily made a couple of recordings in the period where he could no longer bill himself as an Opry performer. That's probably why he was looking for a few thousand dollar payday in West Virginia, he was getting divorced at the time.
Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill and Taylor Swift are all prominent. It's a good investment from the part of their record companies. Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, the Judds all made good career moves by endorsing the institutions. Amy Grant had hits on the Christian chart and one bonafide pop hit "Baby Baby" in my teenage years. Her song was enjoyable like any other on MTV then, and I still have the issue of "Dr. Strange" that her management threatened Marvel Comics over, because cover artist Jackson Guice copied her image and they didn't want her to be associated with satanism.
[Don't you love the way all this stuff works back into comic books sooner or later?]
Anyway, Amy Grant, past her hit-making years but presumably still a talented singer has an album of Christmas duets with her husband whatsisname coming out. The crossover market works.
THAT'S Southern too. It's something the rest of America doesn't have, the historical memory of foreign soldiers coming in, shooting a few hundred thousand of your people and burning down your homes. Blah blah blah, American Indians, it took the Union four years to tear down the South, for American to kill American.
Lemme tellya, those hills in Nashville are tough. The hills where I live are tough. There's some hardy breeds able to thrive there where us flatlanders are wary.
The South is more than Nashville of course. There's Old Virginia, there's the colonial melting pots of Louisiana and Florida. Texas is eternally Texas (the dumb bastards). Beyond the vastness of Texas, it spreads out into the Southwest which is another region of the country. Above Texas it fades into the farmlands of the midwest and arcs towards St. Louis, bounded by rivers until it reaches our nations' historical spine, the Appalachins. Then the South meets the North in DC, and the ocean becomes the borderline.
There's hillbillies and moonshine, there's church songs and rummage sales, they all have that weird accent, but their money's usually good which is better than some folks I could mention. Except when the people down here congregate in such large numbers, it's done like this, just the same as anybody else.
[As a writer, the potential for story material is amazing, whether it's a sexy Vince Gill groupie or a blue-collar lament to God or motherhood. Or a secret agent on a deadly mission moving through the crowd, there's just so many stories that could be told and I genuinely don't see that reflected in other public crowds, fairs, concerts, bar bands, clubs, etc. Political rallies and churches have their reason for existing and could easily be folded into the mix.
Here's Johnny Cash singing the one song of the night I'd ever heard before, "Lonesome Me".
"My wife looks in the mirror and says she's old and fat and ugly and even the slightest compliment would cheer her up right now, so I say her eyesight is perfect."
17 August, 2011
Meanwhile, in another part of town...
The Republican primaries are becoming a popular ticket, with a Texas newcomer following Obama's bus tour. This one may burn out like previous new favorites.
It's coming down to Betty and Veronica. Bachman is on the 'inside', going along with the system and wowing everybody, Palin is the 'outside' but with a key constituency. Between the two of them, they'll pick an Archie and I would hope that all the candidates are collaborating in making sure any of the others can use their assets.
The veep slot is another unknown card. In theory, male Republican primary winner could pick one or the other for veep and guarantee enough votes period. However, if two males make it across the finish line (as it were) they might risk the 'chick vote'. If they're collaborating, I'd assume it includes the agreement to time everything in accordance with the plans, whatever those are. Everybody involved will be expected to endorse the eventual ticket against Obama.
The biggest upset would be Palin declaring herself a write-in candidate at the last moment, which would probably give him four more years. If matters get to that point, than no one can foresee conditions on the ground right now, so just go with everybody endorsing the plan. "If we don't hang together..." as someone once said.
Bachman or Donald Trump or Matt Damon or somebody could probably declare a last-minute write-in candidacy with enough votes to matter somewhere. Unless he completely chokes doing the "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message" recordings, there won't be any challenge for the Democratic candidacy.
I still think Biden might be switched out. My guess is John Kerry will take over, giving his junior Senator colleague a little help in the executive wing. Or some really surprising candidate like Joe Lieberman. Hillary has been mentioned but probably more out of reflex than anything.
Obama has the black vote. How much of it remains to be seen, and I don't have any evidence one way or the other. [Then again, aren't votes confidential? How do they know in the first place?] The 'let's vote for a chick' vote might outweigh that. Or not.
I'm slowly getting the book into production. I have started editing what I would like to do as a follow-up, another book of roughly equal size. Another single, basically.
This book will have "Life and Polonia", the book I wrote last fall in a seven week period, and in a music industry analogy, the flip side will be an edited version of all the other material I wrote in same period of time. One's the A-side and one's the B-side.
So, carrying that idea to the follow-up single, I've printed out all of my essays about pop culture. Comics, movies, tv shows, music, cartoons, etc. I'm even going to go through my Facebook posts and include every Star Wars joke I've ever made, just because.
The flip side will be a series of short stories I wrote at the end of Basic Training through the next few months, as well as a couple more stories featuring the same characters. The main characters are a rock band and the stories take place at various points in their history. They work as a 'side' to this single.
A third book is in the planning stages. That is, I have a print-out of most of the material and it's ready for editing to make a second draft. This would focus on history, the war, poliics, religion. I haven't decided what the flip side to that book would be, but considering I have a ton of pre-enlistment material and several hundred pages of Facebook one-liners (minus the Star Wars jokes) to choose from, I don't think it will be a problem.
I could see a fourth book, compiling the best of what's left into various word pictures from a journal. I already have a few months of backlog that could be edited for a flip side there, and that's assuming I don't complete another lengthy work of prose any time soon.
I have ideas for another work of fiction. I'd like to do a "Back to the Future" rip-off, where the time travel becomes really complicated as its main gimmick, but it works. Basically taking the cool parts of the trilogy (minus the McFly family) and jam them into one plot-intensive book, roughly as long as "Life and Polonia". If it works, I could see a trilogy (of, well, trilogies).
The "Seth DeSignor" strips are still a source of joy, as are some of the other comics I've made with Microsoft Paint. I could do more with those. It'll end whenever Seth DiSignor himself shows up and a funny in-joke will be complete. I have a few other comic ideas, and have even surprised myself by cranking out a few short short superhero stories on a notepad.
In another part of my brain, the urge to record another album of music is growing. I'd need to replace my recording gear and instruments, but maybe I can find some dumbed-down way of using digital technology. Frank Zappa bought the synclavier and it sat around for a couple years because he had no idea how to make it work. He hired someone to read all the manuals and give Frank basic answers. "How do I make this note?" "You push these buttons." "How do I change them in such-and-such a way?" You push those buttons." That's why most of Zappa's compositions in his final years were on synclavier.
If I have to go back to a cheap 8-track recorder from Amazon, I will, but isn't there a better option?
But as you can see, I have quite a few creative irons in the fire, and too few hours in the day as it is. That's not counting my job, sleeping or anything else. And I'm only a few pages into the second draft of the second book, still beginning the printing process for the first. And I'm lazy.
It's coming down to Betty and Veronica. Bachman is on the 'inside', going along with the system and wowing everybody, Palin is the 'outside' but with a key constituency. Between the two of them, they'll pick an Archie and I would hope that all the candidates are collaborating in making sure any of the others can use their assets.
The veep slot is another unknown card. In theory, male Republican primary winner could pick one or the other for veep and guarantee enough votes period. However, if two males make it across the finish line (as it were) they might risk the 'chick vote'. If they're collaborating, I'd assume it includes the agreement to time everything in accordance with the plans, whatever those are. Everybody involved will be expected to endorse the eventual ticket against Obama.
The biggest upset would be Palin declaring herself a write-in candidate at the last moment, which would probably give him four more years. If matters get to that point, than no one can foresee conditions on the ground right now, so just go with everybody endorsing the plan. "If we don't hang together..." as someone once said.
Bachman or Donald Trump or Matt Damon or somebody could probably declare a last-minute write-in candidacy with enough votes to matter somewhere. Unless he completely chokes doing the "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message" recordings, there won't be any challenge for the Democratic candidacy.
I still think Biden might be switched out. My guess is John Kerry will take over, giving his junior Senator colleague a little help in the executive wing. Or some really surprising candidate like Joe Lieberman. Hillary has been mentioned but probably more out of reflex than anything.
Obama has the black vote. How much of it remains to be seen, and I don't have any evidence one way or the other. [Then again, aren't votes confidential? How do they know in the first place?] The 'let's vote for a chick' vote might outweigh that. Or not.
I'm slowly getting the book into production. I have started editing what I would like to do as a follow-up, another book of roughly equal size. Another single, basically.
This book will have "Life and Polonia", the book I wrote last fall in a seven week period, and in a music industry analogy, the flip side will be an edited version of all the other material I wrote in same period of time. One's the A-side and one's the B-side.
So, carrying that idea to the follow-up single, I've printed out all of my essays about pop culture. Comics, movies, tv shows, music, cartoons, etc. I'm even going to go through my Facebook posts and include every Star Wars joke I've ever made, just because.
The flip side will be a series of short stories I wrote at the end of Basic Training through the next few months, as well as a couple more stories featuring the same characters. The main characters are a rock band and the stories take place at various points in their history. They work as a 'side' to this single.
A third book is in the planning stages. That is, I have a print-out of most of the material and it's ready for editing to make a second draft. This would focus on history, the war, poliics, religion. I haven't decided what the flip side to that book would be, but considering I have a ton of pre-enlistment material and several hundred pages of Facebook one-liners (minus the Star Wars jokes) to choose from, I don't think it will be a problem.
I could see a fourth book, compiling the best of what's left into various word pictures from a journal. I already have a few months of backlog that could be edited for a flip side there, and that's assuming I don't complete another lengthy work of prose any time soon.
I have ideas for another work of fiction. I'd like to do a "Back to the Future" rip-off, where the time travel becomes really complicated as its main gimmick, but it works. Basically taking the cool parts of the trilogy (minus the McFly family) and jam them into one plot-intensive book, roughly as long as "Life and Polonia". If it works, I could see a trilogy (of, well, trilogies).
The "Seth DeSignor" strips are still a source of joy, as are some of the other comics I've made with Microsoft Paint. I could do more with those. It'll end whenever Seth DiSignor himself shows up and a funny in-joke will be complete. I have a few other comic ideas, and have even surprised myself by cranking out a few short short superhero stories on a notepad.
In another part of my brain, the urge to record another album of music is growing. I'd need to replace my recording gear and instruments, but maybe I can find some dumbed-down way of using digital technology. Frank Zappa bought the synclavier and it sat around for a couple years because he had no idea how to make it work. He hired someone to read all the manuals and give Frank basic answers. "How do I make this note?" "You push these buttons." "How do I change them in such-and-such a way?" You push those buttons." That's why most of Zappa's compositions in his final years were on synclavier.
If I have to go back to a cheap 8-track recorder from Amazon, I will, but isn't there a better option?
But as you can see, I have quite a few creative irons in the fire, and too few hours in the day as it is. That's not counting my job, sleeping or anything else. And I'm only a few pages into the second draft of the second book, still beginning the printing process for the first. And I'm lazy.
06 August, 2011
What if Obama ran for...
Vice-President? If Joe Biden (or Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore) is the Democrats preference for the top slot, could that be done? If Obama sits out the next four or eight years, he can watch someone else do the job and try again. How about Ralph Nader or Joe Lieberman? Both of them were credible candidates for the top two slots once upon a time. Nader would provide a long track record of unabashed liberalism to finally prove to the American people that progressive policies work when the right people do them, people unattached to corporate influences or profit-motives of any kind. Lieberman still votes with Democrats on pretty much everything and he was more qualified for Vice-President than Sarah Palin (not that that’s any major accomplishment, right? She’s an ignorant twat.) He also showed up at the Republican Party convention and said ‘don’t vote for my party, vote for the other party’s candidate’ so it’s unqualified bi-partisanship from a long-time committed Democrat.
I’ve never heard of Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi mentioned or President ever, but if you’re looking for senior level Democrats who could sensibly take the top slot, win an election *and* let Obama learn in office for four years, they’d be on anybody’s top ten list. Hillary’s a long shot, just because she looks like she’s ready to claw her eyeballs out if that will release her from the insane hell she’s caged in. I can’t stand the woman and will applaud the way she’s performed under unbelievable pressures for these three years. You can’t govern as Secretary of State, and it’s the closest thing Obama has to a positive role model right now. If she’s up for another go around, she and Bill have earned the chance to try again.
Al Gore seems much happier as a private citizen so I doubt he’s interested. John Kerry’s still fairly young. He spent 30 years as the Junior Senator from Massachusetts, he might have earned another. This way Obama hasn’t wasted the only time he’ll ever get to be President again and prevented the Democrats from winning a popular majority in ’12.
It would keep Obama’s mojo alive and spare the Party from an embarrassing Nader-esque candidacy. Because at this point, as far as the voters are concerned, why not have Matt Damon run for office? He could call himself a Democrat or run as a third-party candidate, either way he’d probably pick up at least 5% of the vote on general principles, By picking Obama for the bottom slot, Democrats would keep his voting base, and conspicuously reprimand someone for failing to meet basic standards that yes, even Republicans consistently meet. GWB kept an AAA rating and the Senate got bills passed under his tenure. These are good things and Democrats only set themselves up for failure by denying it, who’s going to be the first to say it?
The sooner Democrats realize this, the sooner they can salvage something from Obama’s four years in office and go into November ’12 with a candidate people will want to vote for without having to run against Obama specifically. The alternative is surrendering the Oval Office to Republicans who will have a much more pliant Congress in regardless of how the public votes.
I’d be worried about a third-party candidate, a serious Ross Perot-level wacky person with his own money to throw around. [Jack Nicholson instead of Matt Damon, for instance. Or Rob Reiner. Or Carl Reiner. Now I’m just being funny.]
So, in the interest of Democratic Party victory, what odds would there be in moving Obama to the back because of merit? The Presidency is not a learn-on-the-job sort of thing. Ok, now he’s going to take some time to grow, as a person, and the powder is still dry. In a bloody re-election campaign, someone might snap from the pressure and release his college grades. If he doesn’t run as Veep or get installed as a czar by the next Democratic President, he takes a step down, maybe runs for Senator of Illinois again. Does a reality show with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, I dunno.
Or maybe the President goes into private business. He builds a big temple to himself, signs contracts committing to a four-year demonstration of ability, and then sells whatever he’s got to sell. A model private citizen, someone who fervently believes in the government’s right to do as he demonstrated in office will now show how the government does it right.
He says he doesn’t need the income he makes from his books, now he can look at Sasha and Mahlia every day and determine how much they are not entitled to from the government. They’ll need new clothes. They’ll still need food. Obama’s half-brother lives on, what, one American dollar a day? Fidel Castro found a use for his brother, the most powerful man on Earth hasn’t given this guy a job yet? Ok, let him create a job, his own (President of the Company) and his half-brother’s (selling what the former President of the United States produces for the world’s benefit). He will abide by all government restrictions no matter how unfair and he will pay any taxes no matter how socially-unjust they are towards the rich. He will support his fine upstanding wife and raise their daughters to be proud Americans and four or eight years later, he will try again to be President.
In this next election, the Republicans will be unstoppable. The US just lost its AAA++ grade from mucky-mucks in the measuring economics department. As the superpower, our economics grades start at the highest level and number two is measured from there. China and India and Japan and Russia and others are measured according to the standards America sets. All the teachers can look at Obama and tell him how brilliant he is for another four years, maybe that’ll be enough votes to win, but it’ll just give everyone else four years without having to be distracted by events or decisions that turn out completely wrong. Even David Lee Roth gets off-stage once in a while. Surely the President would like to take a long nap.
A victory here for Obama might mean this decade in history is remembered like Ulysses S. Grant was in charge. Great general, drank a lot. Lousy President. Oversaw the end of Reconstruction. Stick with the pre-Presidential track record. ‘As God is my witness, the South shall vote Democratic again!’ as it were.
Life is getting in the way, but inshallah I am tidying up the final ends on having an actual book as soon as my check clears. I do have a timeline and hope the resulting books are sturdy enough to travel. A notion to splurge on myself and see Sammy Hagar play in a far-off city got dashed quickly and easily. Now I'm casting about for another creative project although I haven't yet finished this one.
Music is tempting again. I have a job where I can sing again and I can relate to that kind of 'performance'. I'm actually a bit nostalgic for when I sat down and recorded stuff and some of my vocal takes impress me more than I remembered. Even some of the stuff that flat-out sucks has a fun quirkiness to it, but some of it doesn't suck. I mean, I can't play an instrument to save my life, there's an attitude that compensates. As performance art there's some pretty good snapshots there.
The problem with performance art is that there's no record for virtually any of it. It also leaves no time to practice. I made music for years and showed hardly an improvement as a technical player. Dancing, acting, magic tricks, stand-up comedy, live theater, these are all fields that are primarily performance art, where it's all about what happens in the moment. Singing is generally in that area, but with recorded music in the last century, it becomes more of a production matter. You can make Paul McCartney sing "Let It Be" 100 times in a row at any decibel level by programming the CD player, just like you can watch Mark Hamill blow up the Death Star on a big-screen tv. Books are ideas translated into words and about as far from performance art as you can get.
Tired now. Need sleep. Here's Weird Al's not-quite-Steinman but otherwise a great song. Send it to everyone you know.
I’ve never heard of Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi mentioned or President ever, but if you’re looking for senior level Democrats who could sensibly take the top slot, win an election *and* let Obama learn in office for four years, they’d be on anybody’s top ten list. Hillary’s a long shot, just because she looks like she’s ready to claw her eyeballs out if that will release her from the insane hell she’s caged in. I can’t stand the woman and will applaud the way she’s performed under unbelievable pressures for these three years. You can’t govern as Secretary of State, and it’s the closest thing Obama has to a positive role model right now. If she’s up for another go around, she and Bill have earned the chance to try again.
Al Gore seems much happier as a private citizen so I doubt he’s interested. John Kerry’s still fairly young. He spent 30 years as the Junior Senator from Massachusetts, he might have earned another. This way Obama hasn’t wasted the only time he’ll ever get to be President again and prevented the Democrats from winning a popular majority in ’12.
It would keep Obama’s mojo alive and spare the Party from an embarrassing Nader-esque candidacy. Because at this point, as far as the voters are concerned, why not have Matt Damon run for office? He could call himself a Democrat or run as a third-party candidate, either way he’d probably pick up at least 5% of the vote on general principles, By picking Obama for the bottom slot, Democrats would keep his voting base, and conspicuously reprimand someone for failing to meet basic standards that yes, even Republicans consistently meet. GWB kept an AAA rating and the Senate got bills passed under his tenure. These are good things and Democrats only set themselves up for failure by denying it, who’s going to be the first to say it?
The sooner Democrats realize this, the sooner they can salvage something from Obama’s four years in office and go into November ’12 with a candidate people will want to vote for without having to run against Obama specifically. The alternative is surrendering the Oval Office to Republicans who will have a much more pliant Congress in regardless of how the public votes.
I’d be worried about a third-party candidate, a serious Ross Perot-level wacky person with his own money to throw around. [Jack Nicholson instead of Matt Damon, for instance. Or Rob Reiner. Or Carl Reiner. Now I’m just being funny.]
So, in the interest of Democratic Party victory, what odds would there be in moving Obama to the back because of merit? The Presidency is not a learn-on-the-job sort of thing. Ok, now he’s going to take some time to grow, as a person, and the powder is still dry. In a bloody re-election campaign, someone might snap from the pressure and release his college grades. If he doesn’t run as Veep or get installed as a czar by the next Democratic President, he takes a step down, maybe runs for Senator of Illinois again. Does a reality show with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, I dunno.
Or maybe the President goes into private business. He builds a big temple to himself, signs contracts committing to a four-year demonstration of ability, and then sells whatever he’s got to sell. A model private citizen, someone who fervently believes in the government’s right to do as he demonstrated in office will now show how the government does it right.
He says he doesn’t need the income he makes from his books, now he can look at Sasha and Mahlia every day and determine how much they are not entitled to from the government. They’ll need new clothes. They’ll still need food. Obama’s half-brother lives on, what, one American dollar a day? Fidel Castro found a use for his brother, the most powerful man on Earth hasn’t given this guy a job yet? Ok, let him create a job, his own (President of the Company) and his half-brother’s (selling what the former President of the United States produces for the world’s benefit). He will abide by all government restrictions no matter how unfair and he will pay any taxes no matter how socially-unjust they are towards the rich. He will support his fine upstanding wife and raise their daughters to be proud Americans and four or eight years later, he will try again to be President.
In this next election, the Republicans will be unstoppable. The US just lost its AAA++ grade from mucky-mucks in the measuring economics department. As the superpower, our economics grades start at the highest level and number two is measured from there. China and India and Japan and Russia and others are measured according to the standards America sets. All the teachers can look at Obama and tell him how brilliant he is for another four years, maybe that’ll be enough votes to win, but it’ll just give everyone else four years without having to be distracted by events or decisions that turn out completely wrong. Even David Lee Roth gets off-stage once in a while. Surely the President would like to take a long nap.
A victory here for Obama might mean this decade in history is remembered like Ulysses S. Grant was in charge. Great general, drank a lot. Lousy President. Oversaw the end of Reconstruction. Stick with the pre-Presidential track record. ‘As God is my witness, the South shall vote Democratic again!’ as it were.
Life is getting in the way, but inshallah I am tidying up the final ends on having an actual book as soon as my check clears. I do have a timeline and hope the resulting books are sturdy enough to travel. A notion to splurge on myself and see Sammy Hagar play in a far-off city got dashed quickly and easily. Now I'm casting about for another creative project although I haven't yet finished this one.
Music is tempting again. I have a job where I can sing again and I can relate to that kind of 'performance'. I'm actually a bit nostalgic for when I sat down and recorded stuff and some of my vocal takes impress me more than I remembered. Even some of the stuff that flat-out sucks has a fun quirkiness to it, but some of it doesn't suck. I mean, I can't play an instrument to save my life, there's an attitude that compensates. As performance art there's some pretty good snapshots there.
The problem with performance art is that there's no record for virtually any of it. It also leaves no time to practice. I made music for years and showed hardly an improvement as a technical player. Dancing, acting, magic tricks, stand-up comedy, live theater, these are all fields that are primarily performance art, where it's all about what happens in the moment. Singing is generally in that area, but with recorded music in the last century, it becomes more of a production matter. You can make Paul McCartney sing "Let It Be" 100 times in a row at any decibel level by programming the CD player, just like you can watch Mark Hamill blow up the Death Star on a big-screen tv. Books are ideas translated into words and about as far from performance art as you can get.
Tired now. Need sleep. Here's Weird Al's not-quite-Steinman but otherwise a great song. Send it to everyone you know.
23 July, 2011
"I made it up, and it all came true anyway" - Alan Moore, "From Hell, prologue"
Rock chick whose music I've never heard dies in alcohol-related incident. She was 27, the age of rock'n'roll death. Representative from Oregon suddenly starts copping a guilty plea to inappropriate relationship with internet minor just after a 50-something man marries a 16 year old girl. Anthony Weiner's in rehab.
I've been working long hours and carried it over into the weekend, and somehow I've found time to get much of the 4th draft edited, passing the 75% mark lately. I become more pleased with it, and think it's getting closer to finished. I haven't done the math but I'm pretty sure the first draft took the least time, although I put in more hours per day for that one. More motivated, more free time and I also had a goal that didn't involve words on a blank page. I already had those and didn't reckon with the time involved of editing as opposed to writing.
For the weekend, I've trashed my room. It was sort of a mess anyway, so the best way to fix it is to make it worse. I even tried to do the whole bohemian thing. I'm still wearing the clothes I had on Friday even though I did laundry early Saturday and a shower early today. I tried to sleep on the closet floor last night, just to prove I could, but eventually gave up and found a place to curl up on the bed. I had intended to get a lot hungrier before ordering pizza, but I usually eat more of it when I do.
So you could say I'm not really sure what's going on, but working hard is a consistent part of it. Now I'm trying to decide what to do for a day of rest. Probably not much resting. At the very least I need to restock the closet, move out whatever I can (or at least prep it for moving) and clean up the floor.
The problem is the books really. There are a lot of them and I don't go through them often, but when I want one I expect it immediately. I re-read Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's "From Hell" recently, and had forgotten what a marvelous piece of work, a historical autopsy of the Jack the Ripper murders. Moore just wanted to write a lengthy book on murder as a fixed event in time and space, and wasn't interested in the Ripper murders. When they did catch his eye, he read a bunch of books and picked the theory that best fit the story he wanted to tell. In correspondence with Cerebus creator Dave Sim, he described telling somebody that his version of the story was made up and had about as much bearing on historical reality as Disney's "Pocahantas".
Moore was interested in telling the story. (from "Dance of the Gull Catchers") "As if there could ever be a solution. Dr. Grape. In the horse-drawn carriage. With the Liston knife. Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble [though Moore admits the forensic sense is far and away the most important one]. Our detective fictions tell us otherwise: everything's just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, you've solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce complex elements."
The second appendix is an account of how Ripper theories began, with people who were there adding details or changing details (or both) years afterwards, and these are picked up by others years later and begin dovetailing into each other. Eventually, Moore speculates, someone will start counting up cattle mutilations of the era and come up with a 'space aliens did it' theory.
The quote at the top of this post comes from the prologue to "From Hell", back when it was published in a horror anthology, before Moore had decided to become a magician, before the fall-out of the "1963" series (which remains his only real incursion into Marvel Comics-style storytelling). He admitted (in the first appendix that he has no evidence that Queen Victoria's psychic held any of the views Moore wrote into the character's mouth for that scene. Five-ten years later as he finished the series, he was constantly finding evidence that would have proved his point, and through drug-induced magical experiences, began worshipping a sock-puppet/snake god and went to (as Daeve Sim recounted it in Cerebus #186) "the Big White Room. They were all there, Alan informs me. Hawksmoor, Crowley, Vitruvius, Thomas Hobbes, this one and that one. All the Mages of the Ages. 'They are just who they say they are,' Alan observed. 'The Illuminati. Not Jewish Bankers and Worldwide Conspirators. The Illuminated Ones.' I asked if Alan just, you know, saw them or if he had any kind of exchange with them.
"'You know, Viktor [sic], I looked around and I noticed there weren't any women in the room. And I said to' (I forget which one he said it was: doesn't matter), 'There are no women. Is this some kind of faggy boys' club or something, then?'
"This, according to Alan, generated a good deal of amusement."
Moore and Sim would go on to have a lengthy discussion (printed in issues of Cerebus @ #220 and freely available on the internet) where they go into their respective views much more. All these quotes are almost within arms reach from where I type this, so as I say, books are important.
Republicans are displaying several plans to deal with the debt crisis. The administration has set a deadline of 2 August although the President hasn't offered anything more concrete than a budget that received 0 votes in the Senate a few months ago. Has a President ever offered anything to Congress that received 0 votes in its favor? Democrats are sticking with the "Bush tax cuts" as their main point, like they were doing this time last year, like they were doing five years ago and ten years ago.
The Bush tax cuts meant I went from almost being able to pay my rent once with my refund to being able to pay it twice and have change left over. It's not hard to imagine twenty other people in that situation who were similarly aided, and all we have to do to maintain that is not extort from millionaires? I'm fine with that.
Fiscal cuts are coming to national defense, that's a given. I somehow doubt they'll find the money to begin the repeal of DADT. I mean, they're talking about cutting budgets and there's going to be a lot of worthless bureaucratic clutter. Implementing unpopular new DoD programs is going to be atop the list and that one would do it.
Straight guys prefer as few other wangs as possible in their private lives and, Anthony Weiner-type exceptions duly noted - most guys keep those private wangings (to coin a word) to themselves. That's why marriage works best when one partner has a wang and the other doesn't and both are of an age to know what they're consenting to. If being gay is important enough to someone that they refuse to permit other peoples' sex lives to include homosexuality, then they don't know enough about human relation to get married, much less serve in the military.
For marriage, why not just create a new legal concept and specify that it means the same thing as 'one man, one woman + kids/property to be named later'. Or create a new concept for that and let gays have marriage.
For the military, it's not workable. Gays can serve as long as they keep their wangs to themselves. Otherwise, straight soldiers have every right to bunk together without regard to gender, never mind the consequences. But that would be detrimental to good order and discipline. Should segregating soldiers by race become necessary to maintain good order and discpline, that should be an option as well. It's not, because race is not gender is not sexual preference or age. Rank and regulation play too much of an everyday role that someone's always going to feel screwed over and being into other dudes really doesn't need to ever be brought up.
The gays who can serve and maintain/exceed the standards will always be small in number and have already proven their ability under current circumstances, so why invest in DoD-wide changes that can't improve the chances for mission success? Male soldiers will always do stupid things because of their dicks and the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn't need to deal with that in a time of war. Nor do female soldiers, for that matter.
Beyond that, many of the big-government side are going to find a lot of arguments falling away from them as the debt limit argument continues. Ike's argument about the military-industrial complx stemmed - I'm guessing - from seeing a couple of generations worth of businesses that spring from military spending. It's genuine job creation, where people serve and then form a business (or marriage) right off-post. When Jimi Hendrix was a supply clerk in the 101st Airborne in the '60s, he kept getting in trouble for playing in bars right outside post. When Charles Schultz was a machine-gun instructor for units heading to Europe in the '40s, he was praised for his hand-eye coordination that later gave us Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Then there's the daughters, from jailbait to MILF, which congregate. Five or fifty years later, that money invested in the soldiers, their location and equipment was worth spending more than possibly anything else the goverment can spend it on. It'll have to be cut like everything else, but clever leaders will cut the things that don't impact the military's ability to win wars, especially after they've spent the last decade proving it.
The black beret has been removed from regular usage and is now only for dress uniforms. This is several years after the military made the switch from BDUs (the green uniforms) to ACUs (the light grey-blues). It's not like they haven't already spent endless amounts of money focus-testing and brain-storming how to make changes to standard operating procedure. Now they'll see what happens when soldiers who get to wear berets look "special" (in a good way).
Again, rank and regulation are going to piss everybody off. I once heard a CSM say something to the effect that if smoking crack made him a better soldier, he'd be on the stuff and expect his soldiers to do the same. Likewise a soldier who's got a problem with blacks, women, gays or Jews/Muslims/other should shut the hell up and treat other soldiers (and civilians) with the respect they deserve. This inconvenience should be equally spread, so that soldiers whose identity is so wrapped up in skin color, gender, orientation, religion or other that they make it a priority at every chance will need to shut up about it themselves. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
As far as all the 'job-creating opportunities' liberals promise that government can deliver, the military programs are going to be the most successful of those, even the ones that are utter wastes of money.
Some people won't want to hear that. They put 'gays in the military' in the same place as the 'Bush tax cuts', they won't hear any dissenting viewpoint, even when time and circumstances change. Republicans have put forth multiple plans for trying to fix things and I just saw on the internet that they're finishing up yet another one. Harry Reid just asked why there was a meeting he didn't know about and Obama just called a press conference where he said he couldn't get a phone call returned. Some people find out too late that they're not in the loop.
One of the earlier plans involved a short-term fix and would give the President the power to raise the debt ceiling three times on his own judgement. We're nearing the third anniversary of his election and his judgement hasn't been very good, which is why I thought the plan was a lousy one. But the longer it was out there and even attracting some bipartisan support as well as dismissals, the more it was interesting in itself. Ok, in some ways it's a total 180, let's give someone the right wing hates the authority to make this call, similar to Senator McCain's attempt to retroactively change the War Powers Act to justify whatever the hell Obama was doing in Libya.
"Is doing" I mean. American bombs and authority are still involved in Libya and have the orphans to show for it, but Qaddaffi's getting nothing except older. Assad just found some protestors he didn't want to shoot, and they stormed the US and French embassies. Funny how that worked. The French reported that they used "live ammo". Good thing there wasn't another hostage crisis, huh?
Anyway, so the debt ceiling's still there, an unalterable deadline, and some Republican had the idea of giving Obama the authority to make judgement calls in this matter. Obama rejected it and didn't counter it with any plans of his own. The Senate hasn't passed a budget in 800 days, so far the House is doing all the heavy lifting. Maybe that's why Harry Reid didn't know about any deal. Even Nancy Pelosi didn't tell him. Sarah Palin just put on facebook that Obama is a lame duck. That's the way it goes.
At the end of his second term, GWB said that there was no money left and the cupboards were bare. He also defended the government bailouts of the auto industry, insurance and housing, saying that he was destroying capitalism in order to save it. He invested his re-election capital in privatizing Social Security, for whatever that's worth nearly a decade later.
Done writing this post now. Maybe later. It's Sunday afternoon.
I've been working long hours and carried it over into the weekend, and somehow I've found time to get much of the 4th draft edited, passing the 75% mark lately. I become more pleased with it, and think it's getting closer to finished. I haven't done the math but I'm pretty sure the first draft took the least time, although I put in more hours per day for that one. More motivated, more free time and I also had a goal that didn't involve words on a blank page. I already had those and didn't reckon with the time involved of editing as opposed to writing.
For the weekend, I've trashed my room. It was sort of a mess anyway, so the best way to fix it is to make it worse. I even tried to do the whole bohemian thing. I'm still wearing the clothes I had on Friday even though I did laundry early Saturday and a shower early today. I tried to sleep on the closet floor last night, just to prove I could, but eventually gave up and found a place to curl up on the bed. I had intended to get a lot hungrier before ordering pizza, but I usually eat more of it when I do.
So you could say I'm not really sure what's going on, but working hard is a consistent part of it. Now I'm trying to decide what to do for a day of rest. Probably not much resting. At the very least I need to restock the closet, move out whatever I can (or at least prep it for moving) and clean up the floor.
The problem is the books really. There are a lot of them and I don't go through them often, but when I want one I expect it immediately. I re-read Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's "From Hell" recently, and had forgotten what a marvelous piece of work, a historical autopsy of the Jack the Ripper murders. Moore just wanted to write a lengthy book on murder as a fixed event in time and space, and wasn't interested in the Ripper murders. When they did catch his eye, he read a bunch of books and picked the theory that best fit the story he wanted to tell. In correspondence with Cerebus creator Dave Sim, he described telling somebody that his version of the story was made up and had about as much bearing on historical reality as Disney's "Pocahantas".
Moore was interested in telling the story. (from "Dance of the Gull Catchers") "As if there could ever be a solution. Dr. Grape. In the horse-drawn carriage. With the Liston knife. Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble [though Moore admits the forensic sense is far and away the most important one]. Our detective fictions tell us otherwise: everything's just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, you've solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce complex elements."
The second appendix is an account of how Ripper theories began, with people who were there adding details or changing details (or both) years afterwards, and these are picked up by others years later and begin dovetailing into each other. Eventually, Moore speculates, someone will start counting up cattle mutilations of the era and come up with a 'space aliens did it' theory.
The quote at the top of this post comes from the prologue to "From Hell", back when it was published in a horror anthology, before Moore had decided to become a magician, before the fall-out of the "1963" series (which remains his only real incursion into Marvel Comics-style storytelling). He admitted (in the first appendix that he has no evidence that Queen Victoria's psychic held any of the views Moore wrote into the character's mouth for that scene. Five-ten years later as he finished the series, he was constantly finding evidence that would have proved his point, and through drug-induced magical experiences, began worshipping a sock-puppet/snake god and went to (as Daeve Sim recounted it in Cerebus #186) "the Big White Room. They were all there, Alan informs me. Hawksmoor, Crowley, Vitruvius, Thomas Hobbes, this one and that one. All the Mages of the Ages. 'They are just who they say they are,' Alan observed. 'The Illuminati. Not Jewish Bankers and Worldwide Conspirators. The Illuminated Ones.' I asked if Alan just, you know, saw them or if he had any kind of exchange with them.
"'You know, Viktor [sic], I looked around and I noticed there weren't any women in the room. And I said to' (I forget which one he said it was: doesn't matter), 'There are no women. Is this some kind of faggy boys' club or something, then?'
"This, according to Alan, generated a good deal of amusement."
Moore and Sim would go on to have a lengthy discussion (printed in issues of Cerebus @ #220 and freely available on the internet) where they go into their respective views much more. All these quotes are almost within arms reach from where I type this, so as I say, books are important.
Republicans are displaying several plans to deal with the debt crisis. The administration has set a deadline of 2 August although the President hasn't offered anything more concrete than a budget that received 0 votes in the Senate a few months ago. Has a President ever offered anything to Congress that received 0 votes in its favor? Democrats are sticking with the "Bush tax cuts" as their main point, like they were doing this time last year, like they were doing five years ago and ten years ago.
The Bush tax cuts meant I went from almost being able to pay my rent once with my refund to being able to pay it twice and have change left over. It's not hard to imagine twenty other people in that situation who were similarly aided, and all we have to do to maintain that is not extort from millionaires? I'm fine with that.
Fiscal cuts are coming to national defense, that's a given. I somehow doubt they'll find the money to begin the repeal of DADT. I mean, they're talking about cutting budgets and there's going to be a lot of worthless bureaucratic clutter. Implementing unpopular new DoD programs is going to be atop the list and that one would do it.
Straight guys prefer as few other wangs as possible in their private lives and, Anthony Weiner-type exceptions duly noted - most guys keep those private wangings (to coin a word) to themselves. That's why marriage works best when one partner has a wang and the other doesn't and both are of an age to know what they're consenting to. If being gay is important enough to someone that they refuse to permit other peoples' sex lives to include homosexuality, then they don't know enough about human relation to get married, much less serve in the military.
For marriage, why not just create a new legal concept and specify that it means the same thing as 'one man, one woman + kids/property to be named later'. Or create a new concept for that and let gays have marriage.
For the military, it's not workable. Gays can serve as long as they keep their wangs to themselves. Otherwise, straight soldiers have every right to bunk together without regard to gender, never mind the consequences. But that would be detrimental to good order and discipline. Should segregating soldiers by race become necessary to maintain good order and discpline, that should be an option as well. It's not, because race is not gender is not sexual preference or age. Rank and regulation play too much of an everyday role that someone's always going to feel screwed over and being into other dudes really doesn't need to ever be brought up.
The gays who can serve and maintain/exceed the standards will always be small in number and have already proven their ability under current circumstances, so why invest in DoD-wide changes that can't improve the chances for mission success? Male soldiers will always do stupid things because of their dicks and the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn't need to deal with that in a time of war. Nor do female soldiers, for that matter.
Beyond that, many of the big-government side are going to find a lot of arguments falling away from them as the debt limit argument continues. Ike's argument about the military-industrial complx stemmed - I'm guessing - from seeing a couple of generations worth of businesses that spring from military spending. It's genuine job creation, where people serve and then form a business (or marriage) right off-post. When Jimi Hendrix was a supply clerk in the 101st Airborne in the '60s, he kept getting in trouble for playing in bars right outside post. When Charles Schultz was a machine-gun instructor for units heading to Europe in the '40s, he was praised for his hand-eye coordination that later gave us Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Then there's the daughters, from jailbait to MILF, which congregate. Five or fifty years later, that money invested in the soldiers, their location and equipment was worth spending more than possibly anything else the goverment can spend it on. It'll have to be cut like everything else, but clever leaders will cut the things that don't impact the military's ability to win wars, especially after they've spent the last decade proving it.
The black beret has been removed from regular usage and is now only for dress uniforms. This is several years after the military made the switch from BDUs (the green uniforms) to ACUs (the light grey-blues). It's not like they haven't already spent endless amounts of money focus-testing and brain-storming how to make changes to standard operating procedure. Now they'll see what happens when soldiers who get to wear berets look "special" (in a good way).
Again, rank and regulation are going to piss everybody off. I once heard a CSM say something to the effect that if smoking crack made him a better soldier, he'd be on the stuff and expect his soldiers to do the same. Likewise a soldier who's got a problem with blacks, women, gays or Jews/Muslims/other should shut the hell up and treat other soldiers (and civilians) with the respect they deserve. This inconvenience should be equally spread, so that soldiers whose identity is so wrapped up in skin color, gender, orientation, religion or other that they make it a priority at every chance will need to shut up about it themselves. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
As far as all the 'job-creating opportunities' liberals promise that government can deliver, the military programs are going to be the most successful of those, even the ones that are utter wastes of money.
Some people won't want to hear that. They put 'gays in the military' in the same place as the 'Bush tax cuts', they won't hear any dissenting viewpoint, even when time and circumstances change. Republicans have put forth multiple plans for trying to fix things and I just saw on the internet that they're finishing up yet another one. Harry Reid just asked why there was a meeting he didn't know about and Obama just called a press conference where he said he couldn't get a phone call returned. Some people find out too late that they're not in the loop.
One of the earlier plans involved a short-term fix and would give the President the power to raise the debt ceiling three times on his own judgement. We're nearing the third anniversary of his election and his judgement hasn't been very good, which is why I thought the plan was a lousy one. But the longer it was out there and even attracting some bipartisan support as well as dismissals, the more it was interesting in itself. Ok, in some ways it's a total 180, let's give someone the right wing hates the authority to make this call, similar to Senator McCain's attempt to retroactively change the War Powers Act to justify whatever the hell Obama was doing in Libya.
"Is doing" I mean. American bombs and authority are still involved in Libya and have the orphans to show for it, but Qaddaffi's getting nothing except older. Assad just found some protestors he didn't want to shoot, and they stormed the US and French embassies. Funny how that worked. The French reported that they used "live ammo". Good thing there wasn't another hostage crisis, huh?
Anyway, so the debt ceiling's still there, an unalterable deadline, and some Republican had the idea of giving Obama the authority to make judgement calls in this matter. Obama rejected it and didn't counter it with any plans of his own. The Senate hasn't passed a budget in 800 days, so far the House is doing all the heavy lifting. Maybe that's why Harry Reid didn't know about any deal. Even Nancy Pelosi didn't tell him. Sarah Palin just put on facebook that Obama is a lame duck. That's the way it goes.
At the end of his second term, GWB said that there was no money left and the cupboards were bare. He also defended the government bailouts of the auto industry, insurance and housing, saying that he was destroying capitalism in order to save it. He invested his re-election capital in privatizing Social Security, for whatever that's worth nearly a decade later.
Done writing this post now. Maybe later. It's Sunday afternoon.
16 July, 2011
Can't Get This Stuff No More
I'm still working long hours, plus trying to get this stupid book finished. This weekend I'm housesitting two large slobbery dogs.
Syrian protestors attacked both the US and French embassies recently. The US is contemplating a lawsuit against the Syrian government in response. Apparently Assad - who shoots protestors he doesn't like - didn't go far enough to stop these protestors.
This is just stupid. Why do we even have diplomatic relations with Syria? Why aren't we bombing them like we are Libya?
And how's that going, by the way? It's been months. Qaddaffi's given up very little in that time. This is the sort of paper tiger bin Laden talked about as a reason for war against us to begin with. For our reputation in the Muslim world, this is a disaster. Sure we proved in Iraq and Afghanistan that when people give us problems, we shoot them and move on, but times change, leaders change and now we're at best coasting on those achievements.
[And let's not forget that GWB spent a long time going to Congress and the UN and building up forces for Iraq. The world woke up one morning to discover we were engaged in Libya with a dubious mission and a command structure that was even moreso.]
I'd certainly like to think we're doing the right thing with Libya, but I don't see how. Opening another front in the Muslim world could be a good step, and there's no good reason for Qaddaffi to keep breathing, but this is almost a deliberate show of weakness, especially when you consider how we've ignored Syria. What are we proving other than that our allies in NATO couldn't defeat a hot dog stand without the US and Britain holding their hands?
Europe, Canada and similar nations have been coasting on the benefits of Western Civilization for a long time without having to pay the price for it. At this point, the US, UK, Israel, Australia and Japan are it for the defenders of civilization. And Japan's got their own problems at the moment.
[Which, I've probably said before, they have been handling astoundingly well. There's almost no news coming out of the country, but that's a good sign, that they're handling the influx of massive disasters and picking up the pieces in a manner exactly unlike the weak-willed soft-boned slugs and leeches that whine about every little thing. It's inspiring and even a little scary. Maybe they're the *true* master race?]
The Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape charges have fallen apart, as the accuser seems to have been entirely lying about them. Apparently she's a prostitute, the sex was consensual and she immediately started talking to incarcerated boyfriends about how much money she could take him for. DSK's reputation has definitely suffered, perhaps deservedly given the other accusations women have flung at him, but this is how the system works.
A rich powerful socialist was hauled off a plane because he was charged with a felony. The immigrant accuser had rights which must be respected. When she turns out to have no credibility, the case is dismissed (and kudos to the prosecutors for not milking it for their own career). Nobody comes out any better for it, but considering other recent cases like Roman Polanski or the Duke Lacrosse Team, this is definitely a sign of a working system of justice.
Trying to think of other stuff to write. I feel a bit guilty for neglecting this blog, which is nearing its fifth anniversary. Facebook posts make it so easy to just fire off a one-liner whenever I come up with one, and with all the other stuff going on, I don't have as much incentive to try to come up with a long public monologue about something. Obviously I could write shorter ones, but that just isn't as appealing.
Van Halen is edging towards their first new album since 1998, after several trips through rehab and changes of lead singer for Eddie. It's strange, I was never a huge fan of VH when they were a genuinely functioning band [which pretty much ended with the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album and the zeitgeist-snagging video for "Right Now". I liked that song and a couple of the videos with David Lee Roth, mostly because of the sexy girls and his screen persona, that was about it.
The ill-fated reunion with Roth that blew Sammy Hagar out of the band in '96 caught my attention, and then suddenly a switch flipped in my head and I went out and got Best Of Volume One, with the DLR reunion songs. [This has also happened with Johnny Cash; one day I don't have the slightest interest, the next I must get a sample of their work] I certainly enjoyed both eras represented, with a slight edge to the Sammy Hagar era.
I freely admit that the Van Hagar era sounded like more of a generic hard rock band than the records with David Lee Roth. Sammy had more experience as a pop songwriter in addition to being a guitarist himself, and I can understand why some people would think the Roth era is somehow purer for its lack of polish.
But what few seem to recognize is that Roth didn't bring much to the table. He did a great job with what he had, but his voice is limited and his lyrics are barely better than Sammy's. [I love Sammy, but his lyrics are competent at best]. Roth was a great dynamic frontman, but as his solo career demonstrates, it's all sizzle. His self-absorption is also a wonder to behold. During the '96 reunion, he went out of his way to steal all the attention from other members of the band. Even when Eddie - the guitar wunderkind without whom none of this would be possible - mentioned he was getting hip replacement surgery, Roth told him "this night's about me, not your hip."
Roth has never been able to get beyond Van Halen because he can't do anything without EVH's guitar to insinuate himself around. Sammy, by contrast, had a well-established career before joining VH and when the band originally signed a record deal, some of the executives even suggested he replace Roth.
In 2002, when Sammy and Roth went out on the "Sans Halen" tour, the set lists demonstrated this point. Sammy played a total of 8 songs from his time with Van Halen, filling out his set with songs from the rest of his career ranging from "Red" (1977, remade a couple years later by Bette Midler) through "Mas Tequila" (his most recent hit from 1999). In comparison, Roth played 8 songs from the first VH album alone, and only one song from outside VH, "Yankee Rose". He played covers done by VH ("Pretty Woman", "Ice Cream Man"), but his only two solo hits are a cover of "California Girls" (most notable for its video entirely focuses on women in bikinis; not even the pre-"Frasier" Jane Leeves who also appears in it, fully clothed) and "Just a Gigolo", a song from 1929 that has been covered by everybody from Louis Armstrong to Betty Boop.
Sammy has said - and I have no reason to doubt him - that besides the novelty of two former Van Halen singers touring together, part of the reason was to jolt the Van Halen brothers into action. This didn't really happen, they would reunite for a tour with Sammy a couple years later, a tour with Roth a couple years after that, and nothing since then. I also think Sammy was just trying to get along with Roth, whom he'd never met before the tour. Maybe they could swap a couple songs or sing a duet, you know, something the fans would really like. He was thinking it might lead to a stadium tour, Sam and Dave and Van Halen and be huge. No such luck. Roth made a lot more money than he'd been making - he insisted on being paid what Sammy got paid, even though it was Sammy's usual fee which he wasn't even close to earning on his own - but refused to have anything to do with Hagar other than that. The Van Halen brothers didn't rise to the bait.
So Sammy had a really good thing going without ever joining Van Halen. Roth didn't, but he does have those VH records to show for it. Now, over a quarter century after he left the band, they're finally recording again.
I don't know what they expect. The music business they knew is totally gone. They might get some airplay, and will probably sell a number of copies on the novelty alone, but this won't go anywhere. There are several reasons for this, but probably none more central than the lodestone of the band, Eddie Van Halen.
A Dutch immigrant with a family tradition of music, the guy's a guitar genius. He doesn't play difficult chords, but plays them so unbelievably fast and with such control that any teenage metalhead (or adult, let's not fool ourselves) will be enraptured. His "Eruption" solo is the first thing on Best Of and when I heard it, it was like 'oh, ok. THIS is why everybody's loved Van Halen for so long. See, I didn't get that before.'
(live from '94)
Eddie also has (to put it mildly) a serious weakness for alcohol. Sammy's autobiography describes the devastation on tour, and ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli (who was so cute on "One Day At A Time") probably describes the same thing at home in her own book. Ok, it's a common rock star failing, but most rock stars aren't responsible for multiple diamond albums (signifying more than 10 million copies sold). EVH was able to indulge himself far beyond the limits of humanity and it's possible there's not much left.
Having proven his guitar hero bonafides, Eddie went on to demonstrate the potential for crossover in different music areas by playing the guitar solo for Michael Jackson's "Beat It", and he applied his considerable musical ability to learning keyboards with the same devotion he displayed on guitar. [Alex Van Halen described going out on Friday nights as a teenager to party while Eddie stayed at home to play, and coming back six or eight hours later to find Eddie hadn't moved, he was still playing.]
People blame Sammy for making Van Halen's music "commercial" (like that's an insult), but "Jump" was keyboard driven and deservedly a classic song from 1984. Three seconds into that song you're hit by the infectious synthesizer riff and it doesn't let up. Sammy was able to write ballads as well as rockers, and had far more range as a singer, but he didn't force EVH to write that sort of music. One can hear the studio wizardry required to make DLR's vocals suitable for the reunion songs on Best Of. He never had to sing in that key before.
[I also think it was a collaboration with Brian May that helped lead EVH in that direction. Queen was taking a break in 1983, and bored in Los Angeles, Brian May called up EVH and asked if he wanted to do some jamming. The resulting mini-album The Starfleet Project is a guitar fan's wet dream and I'm sure the interaction with another guitar god in a huge pop band led Eddie's thoughts to replacing a troublesome lead singer as well as expanding his own musical range.]
Perhaps none of this is clearer than with the way Michael Anthony was forced out of the band. By his own admission, he didn't participate in any of the writing, but neither did Alex Van Halen. Alex, however, was the brother of the guitar hero. The bass player didn't have any such luck. Anthony's role was reduced in the band until he was ejected for reasons no one but Eddie seems to know. He only played bass on a few songs on the album they made with Gary Cherone and Eddie played bass for the reunion songs with Sammy (on the follow up greatest hits album commemorating the reunion tour from 2004; are you keeping all this straight? There will be a test later). Eddie didn't even want him on that reunion tour except that Sammy insisted, and even then Anthony was given much less money.
This makes no sense. Anthony's no more of a drunken fool than anyone else in the band, he's an awesome bassist, and his replacement is none other than Eddie's teenage son, whose birth was commemorated on the FUCK album with the instrumental "316" (his birthday). This sort of misdirected resentment can only be a recipe for disaster - even if it led to a string of multi-platinum albums, the devastation on their lives and souls would be worse. Anthony, fortunately, has found other work with Hagar since then, but even the most die-hard of Roth fans have to be wondering why he was removed in the first place. Even VH's website briefly removed him from all album credits until they realized how stupid that looked.
After firing Sammy and realizing they still couldn't work with Roth, Van Halen hooked up with Extreme lead singer Gary Cherone, destroying that promising young band in the process. [Extreme opened for Roth on one of his first solo tours and he told them they were good enough to take the crown from Van Halen. Anyone who saw their Queen medley at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert knows this wasn't hyperbole.]
[Heh, Gary even opens with "Mustafa", that Muslim call-to-prayer I mentioned a few posts ago]
Extreme were an extremely talented group. I don't think they really clicked with the public because they wore their influences - Queen, Van Halen, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, others - extremely loudly. Beyond their one major hit, the acoustic ballad "More Than Words", they didn't have much of an impact on the rock scene. It's a shame because, again, they were extremely talent, especially guitarist Nuno Bettencourt. Here's my favorite Extreme song, from their third album, "Rest In Peace", whose lyrics sound like a hippy peace anthem unless you actually think about them. "Make love not war sounds so absurd to me/we can't afford to say these words lightly/unless our world will truly rest in peace" Great band, very artistic, everything they need for an awesome song except the actual songwriting.
Cherone didn't overplay his role in the band who just wanted a lead singer. His album wasn't a hit - the only non-hit album Van Halen ever had - and he just didn't fit. I think his youth was a part of it as well, but there's no telling. With most of a second album recorded, he amiably left. When Van Halen was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, he was notably not included and to his credit, said he was only a small part of the history that the fans (himself included) were celebrating by the induction. To Van Halen's credit - well, Sammy and Mike Anthony's, since they were the only two who showed up - they thanked him for his role. Yes, he was only a small part of the band's history, but it was still a part and he deserved the public recognition.
The Hall of Fame induction was symptomatic of the problems surrounding Van Halen since Sammy left (the first time). There were endless discussions on who would show up. According to Hagar, he wasn't included in the original induction list even though he was in the band longer than Roth and with more hits to show for it. He suspected his manager left him off the list just so he could get him added and look good in Sammy's eyes. Whatever, then the question was who else would appear. Eddie refused to have anything to do with Sammy or Mike, and this was on the cusp of the reunion tour with Roth. But at the last minute he had to go to rehab, and Alex stayed away as well to support his brother.
Roth was more than willing to show up. However they were being inducted by Velvet Revolver - made up mostly of ex-Guns'n'Roses members - and he insisted on singing "Jump". Apparently the Hall of Fame has some say in what songs are played by inductees upon their induction (why?) and they didn't want that, but were still willing to accomodate him. However, Velvet Revolver didn't have a keyboard player and weren't about to play with pre-recorded tapes like other bands would (like, you know, Van Halen).
[I respect Slash's desire to not play with pre-recorded tapes, that's totally fine. Queen was the same way, which is why it took them years to figure out how to play "Bohemian Rhapsody" live. But it's the f*cking Hall of Fame, you mean they can't FIND a single person who likes Van Halen and is willing to learn keyboards for "Jump"? Isn't anybody else going to be at that dinner, the keyboard player for, I dunno, Journey or some shit? You'd get to play with him (cool) and celebrate Van Halen (cooler) and play "Jump" (still cooler) with David Lee Roth (awesome) who's the one being celebrated by the Hall of Fame. What am I missing here?]
[Slash, by the way, played lead guitar for "Little White Lie", the first song on Sammy's first post-VH album, which is all about his problems with EVH. Since this was just before Slash left G'n'R, methinks he could relate to the issues of a volatile singer/guitarist relationship.]
In the end, only Sammy and Mike showed up to represent the band they used to belong to. They were as complimentary as possible towards everyone else. Eventually Eddie left rehab and the reunion tour with Roth actually happened. Those fans who'd been waiting 25 years for it got what they were after (I guess).
And now they're finally ready to release the follow up to "1984" and the Best Of reunion songs. Oh. Joy.
Has DLR learned to sing in different keys? If not, there's going to be a problem. Reportedly - as in I've heard it from one or two sources but I have no idea if it's the truth or not - he needed extensive help from the producer to put vocal melodies to Eddie's songs way back when. He does a great job of growling and screaming, but he's not that talented as a singer. One doesn't suppose he'll do much better now that he's been spoiled and pampered for decades and Eddie still knows how to play keyboards.
In some ways it's similar to problems with the Who (a big influence on VH). Roger Daltrey could growl and scream with the best of them (the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again" being the best example) and was an amazing front man, but he did not have a melodious voice. "Behind Blue Eyes" is probably the closest he ever got to a delicate vocal, and that only works because it turns into a hard rocker halfway through. [much like "Bohemian Rhapsody", come to think of it]
Pete Townsend taught himself to play keyboards for the Who's third album and with this skill came a wider range of song possibilities. "Won't Get Fooled Again" wouldn't be possible without the keyboards.
[well, sorta...]
But with the compositional opportunities afforded by keyboard playing, Roger Daltrey had a good reason to feel even more threatened by Pete Townshend's dominance than before. This reached its climax with the Quadrophenia album which was more keyboard than anything, and Townshend's raging alcoholism didn't help. Fists were thrown, Townshend spent some time bleeding and unconscious and Daltrey had a bit higher standing in the band than before. Roth actually has done things such as mountain climbing which have tested him as a man, but he's never had to live a poor downtrodden life where rock music was his only salvation like Roger Daltrey did, or Sammy Hagar.
I'll probably get the new album when it comes out, but more out of curiousity than anything else. Van Halen was part of the zeitgeist for a time, and such things aren't dependent on the chronology of cause-and-effect. It would be easy (and tempting) to say that overall, they were a huge, influential band simply to prepare them for Sammy Hagar's time with them. [For a different example, the Beatles would never have become the Beatles without Pete Best spending a few years as drummer, but he was in no way suitable for what the Beatles did, what they became, or what they've meant to rock music for the last 40 years.] But for whatever reason, Eddie is still walking and talking, his brother is still playing drums and they have a bass player Eddie constructed in his bedroom one drunken night back in 1990. And they have that guy who sang "California Girls" and honestly believes his voice provided the soundtrack for several generations of young people.
I don't know what they're doing, I'm just fascinated by the fact that they're still around.
Amazing, I've written all this about Van Halen (a few hours ago I was trying to think of something to write) and I still haven't tackled Aerosmith, truly the greatest American rock band ever. Someday...
In closing, I'd like to link to the Youtube clip of an early Van Halen singing Montrose's "Make It Last", but the embedding feature has been disabled by Youtube at someone's request. Roth once said that Sammy had to sing his (Roth's) songs every night but he would never sing a Sammy song. "Make It Last" was written by Sammy Hagar, so Roth was probably the one who demanded it.
Here's Sammy taking questions from his career, probably promoting his autobiography with Rolling Stone.
Syrian protestors attacked both the US and French embassies recently. The US is contemplating a lawsuit against the Syrian government in response. Apparently Assad - who shoots protestors he doesn't like - didn't go far enough to stop these protestors.
This is just stupid. Why do we even have diplomatic relations with Syria? Why aren't we bombing them like we are Libya?
And how's that going, by the way? It's been months. Qaddaffi's given up very little in that time. This is the sort of paper tiger bin Laden talked about as a reason for war against us to begin with. For our reputation in the Muslim world, this is a disaster. Sure we proved in Iraq and Afghanistan that when people give us problems, we shoot them and move on, but times change, leaders change and now we're at best coasting on those achievements.
[And let's not forget that GWB spent a long time going to Congress and the UN and building up forces for Iraq. The world woke up one morning to discover we were engaged in Libya with a dubious mission and a command structure that was even moreso.]
I'd certainly like to think we're doing the right thing with Libya, but I don't see how. Opening another front in the Muslim world could be a good step, and there's no good reason for Qaddaffi to keep breathing, but this is almost a deliberate show of weakness, especially when you consider how we've ignored Syria. What are we proving other than that our allies in NATO couldn't defeat a hot dog stand without the US and Britain holding their hands?
Europe, Canada and similar nations have been coasting on the benefits of Western Civilization for a long time without having to pay the price for it. At this point, the US, UK, Israel, Australia and Japan are it for the defenders of civilization. And Japan's got their own problems at the moment.
[Which, I've probably said before, they have been handling astoundingly well. There's almost no news coming out of the country, but that's a good sign, that they're handling the influx of massive disasters and picking up the pieces in a manner exactly unlike the weak-willed soft-boned slugs and leeches that whine about every little thing. It's inspiring and even a little scary. Maybe they're the *true* master race?]
The Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape charges have fallen apart, as the accuser seems to have been entirely lying about them. Apparently she's a prostitute, the sex was consensual and she immediately started talking to incarcerated boyfriends about how much money she could take him for. DSK's reputation has definitely suffered, perhaps deservedly given the other accusations women have flung at him, but this is how the system works.
A rich powerful socialist was hauled off a plane because he was charged with a felony. The immigrant accuser had rights which must be respected. When she turns out to have no credibility, the case is dismissed (and kudos to the prosecutors for not milking it for their own career). Nobody comes out any better for it, but considering other recent cases like Roman Polanski or the Duke Lacrosse Team, this is definitely a sign of a working system of justice.
Trying to think of other stuff to write. I feel a bit guilty for neglecting this blog, which is nearing its fifth anniversary. Facebook posts make it so easy to just fire off a one-liner whenever I come up with one, and with all the other stuff going on, I don't have as much incentive to try to come up with a long public monologue about something. Obviously I could write shorter ones, but that just isn't as appealing.
Van Halen is edging towards their first new album since 1998, after several trips through rehab and changes of lead singer for Eddie. It's strange, I was never a huge fan of VH when they were a genuinely functioning band [which pretty much ended with the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album and the zeitgeist-snagging video for "Right Now". I liked that song and a couple of the videos with David Lee Roth, mostly because of the sexy girls and his screen persona, that was about it.
The ill-fated reunion with Roth that blew Sammy Hagar out of the band in '96 caught my attention, and then suddenly a switch flipped in my head and I went out and got Best Of Volume One, with the DLR reunion songs. [This has also happened with Johnny Cash; one day I don't have the slightest interest, the next I must get a sample of their work] I certainly enjoyed both eras represented, with a slight edge to the Sammy Hagar era.
I freely admit that the Van Hagar era sounded like more of a generic hard rock band than the records with David Lee Roth. Sammy had more experience as a pop songwriter in addition to being a guitarist himself, and I can understand why some people would think the Roth era is somehow purer for its lack of polish.
But what few seem to recognize is that Roth didn't bring much to the table. He did a great job with what he had, but his voice is limited and his lyrics are barely better than Sammy's. [I love Sammy, but his lyrics are competent at best]. Roth was a great dynamic frontman, but as his solo career demonstrates, it's all sizzle. His self-absorption is also a wonder to behold. During the '96 reunion, he went out of his way to steal all the attention from other members of the band. Even when Eddie - the guitar wunderkind without whom none of this would be possible - mentioned he was getting hip replacement surgery, Roth told him "this night's about me, not your hip."
Roth has never been able to get beyond Van Halen because he can't do anything without EVH's guitar to insinuate himself around. Sammy, by contrast, had a well-established career before joining VH and when the band originally signed a record deal, some of the executives even suggested he replace Roth.
In 2002, when Sammy and Roth went out on the "Sans Halen" tour, the set lists demonstrated this point. Sammy played a total of 8 songs from his time with Van Halen, filling out his set with songs from the rest of his career ranging from "Red" (1977, remade a couple years later by Bette Midler) through "Mas Tequila" (his most recent hit from 1999). In comparison, Roth played 8 songs from the first VH album alone, and only one song from outside VH, "Yankee Rose". He played covers done by VH ("Pretty Woman", "Ice Cream Man"), but his only two solo hits are a cover of "California Girls" (most notable for its video entirely focuses on women in bikinis; not even the pre-"Frasier" Jane Leeves who also appears in it, fully clothed) and "Just a Gigolo", a song from 1929 that has been covered by everybody from Louis Armstrong to Betty Boop.
Sammy has said - and I have no reason to doubt him - that besides the novelty of two former Van Halen singers touring together, part of the reason was to jolt the Van Halen brothers into action. This didn't really happen, they would reunite for a tour with Sammy a couple years later, a tour with Roth a couple years after that, and nothing since then. I also think Sammy was just trying to get along with Roth, whom he'd never met before the tour. Maybe they could swap a couple songs or sing a duet, you know, something the fans would really like. He was thinking it might lead to a stadium tour, Sam and Dave and Van Halen and be huge. No such luck. Roth made a lot more money than he'd been making - he insisted on being paid what Sammy got paid, even though it was Sammy's usual fee which he wasn't even close to earning on his own - but refused to have anything to do with Hagar other than that. The Van Halen brothers didn't rise to the bait.
So Sammy had a really good thing going without ever joining Van Halen. Roth didn't, but he does have those VH records to show for it. Now, over a quarter century after he left the band, they're finally recording again.
I don't know what they expect. The music business they knew is totally gone. They might get some airplay, and will probably sell a number of copies on the novelty alone, but this won't go anywhere. There are several reasons for this, but probably none more central than the lodestone of the band, Eddie Van Halen.
A Dutch immigrant with a family tradition of music, the guy's a guitar genius. He doesn't play difficult chords, but plays them so unbelievably fast and with such control that any teenage metalhead (or adult, let's not fool ourselves) will be enraptured. His "Eruption" solo is the first thing on Best Of and when I heard it, it was like 'oh, ok. THIS is why everybody's loved Van Halen for so long. See, I didn't get that before.'
(live from '94)
Eddie also has (to put it mildly) a serious weakness for alcohol. Sammy's autobiography describes the devastation on tour, and ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli (who was so cute on "One Day At A Time") probably describes the same thing at home in her own book. Ok, it's a common rock star failing, but most rock stars aren't responsible for multiple diamond albums (signifying more than 10 million copies sold). EVH was able to indulge himself far beyond the limits of humanity and it's possible there's not much left.
Having proven his guitar hero bonafides, Eddie went on to demonstrate the potential for crossover in different music areas by playing the guitar solo for Michael Jackson's "Beat It", and he applied his considerable musical ability to learning keyboards with the same devotion he displayed on guitar. [Alex Van Halen described going out on Friday nights as a teenager to party while Eddie stayed at home to play, and coming back six or eight hours later to find Eddie hadn't moved, he was still playing.]
People blame Sammy for making Van Halen's music "commercial" (like that's an insult), but "Jump" was keyboard driven and deservedly a classic song from 1984. Three seconds into that song you're hit by the infectious synthesizer riff and it doesn't let up. Sammy was able to write ballads as well as rockers, and had far more range as a singer, but he didn't force EVH to write that sort of music. One can hear the studio wizardry required to make DLR's vocals suitable for the reunion songs on Best Of. He never had to sing in that key before.
[I also think it was a collaboration with Brian May that helped lead EVH in that direction. Queen was taking a break in 1983, and bored in Los Angeles, Brian May called up EVH and asked if he wanted to do some jamming. The resulting mini-album The Starfleet Project is a guitar fan's wet dream and I'm sure the interaction with another guitar god in a huge pop band led Eddie's thoughts to replacing a troublesome lead singer as well as expanding his own musical range.]
Perhaps none of this is clearer than with the way Michael Anthony was forced out of the band. By his own admission, he didn't participate in any of the writing, but neither did Alex Van Halen. Alex, however, was the brother of the guitar hero. The bass player didn't have any such luck. Anthony's role was reduced in the band until he was ejected for reasons no one but Eddie seems to know. He only played bass on a few songs on the album they made with Gary Cherone and Eddie played bass for the reunion songs with Sammy (on the follow up greatest hits album commemorating the reunion tour from 2004; are you keeping all this straight? There will be a test later). Eddie didn't even want him on that reunion tour except that Sammy insisted, and even then Anthony was given much less money.
This makes no sense. Anthony's no more of a drunken fool than anyone else in the band, he's an awesome bassist, and his replacement is none other than Eddie's teenage son, whose birth was commemorated on the FUCK album with the instrumental "316" (his birthday). This sort of misdirected resentment can only be a recipe for disaster - even if it led to a string of multi-platinum albums, the devastation on their lives and souls would be worse. Anthony, fortunately, has found other work with Hagar since then, but even the most die-hard of Roth fans have to be wondering why he was removed in the first place. Even VH's website briefly removed him from all album credits until they realized how stupid that looked.
After firing Sammy and realizing they still couldn't work with Roth, Van Halen hooked up with Extreme lead singer Gary Cherone, destroying that promising young band in the process. [Extreme opened for Roth on one of his first solo tours and he told them they were good enough to take the crown from Van Halen. Anyone who saw their Queen medley at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert knows this wasn't hyperbole.]
[Heh, Gary even opens with "Mustafa", that Muslim call-to-prayer I mentioned a few posts ago]
Extreme were an extremely talented group. I don't think they really clicked with the public because they wore their influences - Queen, Van Halen, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, others - extremely loudly. Beyond their one major hit, the acoustic ballad "More Than Words", they didn't have much of an impact on the rock scene. It's a shame because, again, they were extremely talent, especially guitarist Nuno Bettencourt. Here's my favorite Extreme song, from their third album, "Rest In Peace", whose lyrics sound like a hippy peace anthem unless you actually think about them. "Make love not war sounds so absurd to me/we can't afford to say these words lightly/unless our world will truly rest in peace" Great band, very artistic, everything they need for an awesome song except the actual songwriting.
Cherone didn't overplay his role in the band who just wanted a lead singer. His album wasn't a hit - the only non-hit album Van Halen ever had - and he just didn't fit. I think his youth was a part of it as well, but there's no telling. With most of a second album recorded, he amiably left. When Van Halen was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, he was notably not included and to his credit, said he was only a small part of the history that the fans (himself included) were celebrating by the induction. To Van Halen's credit - well, Sammy and Mike Anthony's, since they were the only two who showed up - they thanked him for his role. Yes, he was only a small part of the band's history, but it was still a part and he deserved the public recognition.
The Hall of Fame induction was symptomatic of the problems surrounding Van Halen since Sammy left (the first time). There were endless discussions on who would show up. According to Hagar, he wasn't included in the original induction list even though he was in the band longer than Roth and with more hits to show for it. He suspected his manager left him off the list just so he could get him added and look good in Sammy's eyes. Whatever, then the question was who else would appear. Eddie refused to have anything to do with Sammy or Mike, and this was on the cusp of the reunion tour with Roth. But at the last minute he had to go to rehab, and Alex stayed away as well to support his brother.
Roth was more than willing to show up. However they were being inducted by Velvet Revolver - made up mostly of ex-Guns'n'Roses members - and he insisted on singing "Jump". Apparently the Hall of Fame has some say in what songs are played by inductees upon their induction (why?) and they didn't want that, but were still willing to accomodate him. However, Velvet Revolver didn't have a keyboard player and weren't about to play with pre-recorded tapes like other bands would (like, you know, Van Halen).
[I respect Slash's desire to not play with pre-recorded tapes, that's totally fine. Queen was the same way, which is why it took them years to figure out how to play "Bohemian Rhapsody" live. But it's the f*cking Hall of Fame, you mean they can't FIND a single person who likes Van Halen and is willing to learn keyboards for "Jump"? Isn't anybody else going to be at that dinner, the keyboard player for, I dunno, Journey or some shit? You'd get to play with him (cool) and celebrate Van Halen (cooler) and play "Jump" (still cooler) with David Lee Roth (awesome) who's the one being celebrated by the Hall of Fame. What am I missing here?]
[Slash, by the way, played lead guitar for "Little White Lie", the first song on Sammy's first post-VH album, which is all about his problems with EVH. Since this was just before Slash left G'n'R, methinks he could relate to the issues of a volatile singer/guitarist relationship.]
In the end, only Sammy and Mike showed up to represent the band they used to belong to. They were as complimentary as possible towards everyone else. Eventually Eddie left rehab and the reunion tour with Roth actually happened. Those fans who'd been waiting 25 years for it got what they were after (I guess).
And now they're finally ready to release the follow up to "1984" and the Best Of reunion songs. Oh. Joy.
Has DLR learned to sing in different keys? If not, there's going to be a problem. Reportedly - as in I've heard it from one or two sources but I have no idea if it's the truth or not - he needed extensive help from the producer to put vocal melodies to Eddie's songs way back when. He does a great job of growling and screaming, but he's not that talented as a singer. One doesn't suppose he'll do much better now that he's been spoiled and pampered for decades and Eddie still knows how to play keyboards.
In some ways it's similar to problems with the Who (a big influence on VH). Roger Daltrey could growl and scream with the best of them (the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again" being the best example) and was an amazing front man, but he did not have a melodious voice. "Behind Blue Eyes" is probably the closest he ever got to a delicate vocal, and that only works because it turns into a hard rocker halfway through. [much like "Bohemian Rhapsody", come to think of it]
Pete Townsend taught himself to play keyboards for the Who's third album and with this skill came a wider range of song possibilities. "Won't Get Fooled Again" wouldn't be possible without the keyboards.
[well, sorta...]
But with the compositional opportunities afforded by keyboard playing, Roger Daltrey had a good reason to feel even more threatened by Pete Townshend's dominance than before. This reached its climax with the Quadrophenia album which was more keyboard than anything, and Townshend's raging alcoholism didn't help. Fists were thrown, Townshend spent some time bleeding and unconscious and Daltrey had a bit higher standing in the band than before. Roth actually has done things such as mountain climbing which have tested him as a man, but he's never had to live a poor downtrodden life where rock music was his only salvation like Roger Daltrey did, or Sammy Hagar.
I'll probably get the new album when it comes out, but more out of curiousity than anything else. Van Halen was part of the zeitgeist for a time, and such things aren't dependent on the chronology of cause-and-effect. It would be easy (and tempting) to say that overall, they were a huge, influential band simply to prepare them for Sammy Hagar's time with them. [For a different example, the Beatles would never have become the Beatles without Pete Best spending a few years as drummer, but he was in no way suitable for what the Beatles did, what they became, or what they've meant to rock music for the last 40 years.] But for whatever reason, Eddie is still walking and talking, his brother is still playing drums and they have a bass player Eddie constructed in his bedroom one drunken night back in 1990. And they have that guy who sang "California Girls" and honestly believes his voice provided the soundtrack for several generations of young people.
I don't know what they're doing, I'm just fascinated by the fact that they're still around.
Amazing, I've written all this about Van Halen (a few hours ago I was trying to think of something to write) and I still haven't tackled Aerosmith, truly the greatest American rock band ever. Someday...
In closing, I'd like to link to the Youtube clip of an early Van Halen singing Montrose's "Make It Last", but the embedding feature has been disabled by Youtube at someone's request. Roth once said that Sammy had to sing his (Roth's) songs every night but he would never sing a Sammy song. "Make It Last" was written by Sammy Hagar, so Roth was probably the one who demanded it.
Here's Sammy taking questions from his career, probably promoting his autobiography with Rolling Stone.
03 July, 2011
Here are more...
Well, sleep is obviously the enemy. This does leave me less time for whining about politics or the state of society.
24 June, 2011
Who is Seth DeSignor?
Long days at work. Things have gotten so rough, I've been putting in late nights as a stripper. Don't believe me?
I don't know what this all means or where it's going, but these were fun to make and I have ideas for more. I just can't let it take over finishing the book. I'm still not halfway through the fourth draft, and it's over three months since I had intended to have a finished product. Work's also been going well.
I could say more, but I obviously haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately, so I should catch up on some of that.
But my goodness, these were fun to make.
Here's a larger version of "Great Wall of China" by Gerhard.
19 June, 2011
And so this is Father's Day, and what have we done?
And now the Republican slate of candidates includes two women, the one everybody hates because she might run and the one who's actually winning.
What would "Gilligan's Island" be without Maryanne and Ginger? Even Peter Parker had Gwen and Mary Jane. The shadow of Diane Chambers followed Sam Malone's life [and now I'm picturing a Van Halen analogy where Rebecca is Sammy Hagar so let me try to get back on the original subject]
Michelle Bachman won a lot of fans with her appearance at the recent debate. It's certainly amusing that so much of the hatred went to Palin that she was able to advance this far without anybody noticing. About all I know of Bachman is that she was accused of being a witch in her last election, and not by the intolerant religious right either.
I'm still sexist, I don't want a woman President. But if we must have one, at least the latest candidates are going through the same motions every other candidate does. Except they're not, because contrary to what feminists have said, the personal is *not* the political. Palin wrote emails to her unborn child and so far as we know, her husband isn't texting pictures of his wang to college students and porn stars. Palin's emails were considered public property and legions of volunteers rushed to read them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the rush to announce Palin-hatred reminded me of nothing so much as a woman who incessantly talks about how awful a certain man is, bringing him up at every opportunity, and it's clear to everyone else that she needs to change her panties. She's as awful as any other Presidential candidate (successful or not), ok, that's a given. She's not even a candidate, so why worry about it? Howard Dean, Al Gore and John Edwards (to pick three names at random) don't arouse such loathing from their opponents.
The White House's current occupant has showed us how difficult the Chief Executive position is for anybody and the concepts of leadership, authority and responsibility aren't easy to communicate to anybody who's never consciously experienced them. Having a family - one man, one woman, a given number of kids - is how most people experience that, consciously or not. Running a business, getting a promotion, holding elected office, owning property, these are all ways people can choose a more difficult - more *conscious* - manner of experiencing leadership, authority, responsibility.
A new scandal - which may or may not go anywhere - has Obama spokespeople rejecting some form he signed in the mid-90's about his stance on gay marriage. It makes a funny joke, he won't acknowledge his own signature, and I've given it little notice. I don't know what his position on the form was, or who he's sent out to give an unconvincing explanation, or who was asking in the first place. Whatever his answer was, gay groups and Democrats were apparently happy with it in the mid-90s up until just recently. The spokesman (or Obama's defenders on the internet; as I say I'm not following the details) say that some staffer shoved the form under his face and it wasn't a literal promise, just a rough statement of principles that all candidates get.
Which they do, but the guy who signed it is still responsible for upholding it. Maybe he was lying, maybe he genuinely believed whatever it took to get elected, but the buck still stops with him whether he was a city-councilman, mayor or candidate for Veep. And that goes whether he's responsible for property or a family or a business or an elected post. And if he'll lie about his legal stance on dudes who are into other dudes, what else will he lie about?
[Chicks who are into chicks are a different story because, you know, that's kinda hot.]
Ok, after John Edwards, Al Gore, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, what will he lie about? None of them are noted for their ability to say 'ok, you caught me, I'll accept the punishment without complaint.' [Although to be fair, Al Gore has responded admirably, as one would expect of a gentleman and a southerner. He's become ungodly rich selling snake-oil or similar. One doesn't have to disagree with current global warming theories to see that. But the people currently trying anything to rebrand the latest climate change theories have proven, time and again, that they are allied with people who use bombs and bullets to enforce their will. Grant Morrison gave PETA a free ad directly on the pages of "Animal Man", and look what they've done since.
[Remember "Animal Man"? That DC comic from the late 80's about a guy with the powers of any animal? He had a very few appearances in the DCU Universe since his creation but only comic geeks would know that. Grant Morrison was such a comics geek, he started off with a miniseries that had a few neat ideas. I'd never heard of the character, there was nothing in Brian Bolland's promo art that appealed to me. I can take or leave stories about animals, had never heard of the character and had no idea people actually sat down and made the damned things. Made comic books, that is, not animals which are natural beings worthy of respect for what they are. They have their own ways and settle them with the plants among themselves and that's fine. If they can write and draw a cool DC comic, that's fine, just as it would have been in 1961 or 1941.
The ad must have drawn me to the comic, because I looked at the first issue and it appealed to me enough. They were doing superhero stuff I liked but in a different way. A very well-done sitcom family mixed in with villainous silhouettes and scenes that show someone put thought into the nature of a superhero world, television appearances and putting on a jacket because a skintight outfit is embarassing. The first issue ends with this inexperienced but very likeable superhero confronting a smashed laboratory and a merged pile of monkeys. It was familiar, yet different. The straightforward honesty of Morrison's storytelling and the clean, natural art by Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood were appealing. The second issue built extremely multiple storylines quite well. Not for kids, if you consider a drawing of someone's brutally-severed arm unsuitable for children, or a drawing of a dead deer, both of which happened in the second issue.
Obviously when the DC editors saw this, they knew they'd hit a bossible source of wealth. Morrison's career has demonstrated that they were right - in bad ways too, I find it almost depressing to look at the collected volumes and see a lot of what I see in modern comics, except without the clean storytelling. The coloring alone is much more interesting than the computer crap. But I digress.
It was in the first issue he had to write after being asked to do more than a 4-issue miniseries that really sealed the deal. My Dad was talking about how amazing "The Coyote Gospel" was. The passion play starring Wile E. Coyote in which the hero plays an irrelevant role, leading to a twenty issue storyline that combined metafictional theorizing with the decades of DC comics characters and the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" itself. You know, the one where they killed Supergirl and Barry Allen and changed everything forever.
Anyway, the stories continue. They're something charmingly British about the Mirror Master appearance, in which a villain invades the hero's home and beats him every step of the way. The hero's wife comes in with her arms full of groceries, asks the villain what he's doing there and kicks him in the nuts. Isn't there a little "Jiggs and Maggie" in all of them? Or Al and Peg Bundy? Or their cute 'cousins'?
But it's there for us, just like for our fathers and for theirs. The rest is just what we have to do to get through life.
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