Oedipus's Edifice for the Artifacts of Artifice

Alas, poor Google.

The European Commission has really got its knickers in a twist over the company's reportedly unfair competitive practices, which include not only the manipulation of search results (rankings as they appear, etc.) but also "quality scores" assigned to those results, scores which affect ad rates and give prominence to items with direct or indirect links to the company.

It's understandable - after all, when you're so big that your company name is a verb in common use by preschoolers, you're bound to face hurdles and lose focus as you try to figure out just who and what you are, especially as Web 2.0 is becoming Web God-Knows-What with every passing second.

The real story's not there, however. The real super-sicko development is the ubiquity of an offshoot of Google Maps called "Street View." Surely, many of you have - after zooming in on your neighborhood or block via Google Earth - been delighted (or perplexed, or amazed) to type in your address and, lo and behold, view your humble abode from street level.

To all appearances, vehicles simply, patiently trolled the streets, recording everything in a gee-whiz 360-degree panoramic view...the better to...the better to what?

What the hell purpose does Street View serve? Is it for bored cubicle jockeys to check out their house, their folks' house, whatever: Hey, cool, there it is!

Outrage, one supposes, would be so tired and predictable. It probably is. You can't ignore the 600 GB of data picked up by "mistake," by ambient leak. That's real, quantifiable, and no doubt comprises a slurry that's crammed with every manner of credit card number, ID info, and even plans for a few clandestine trysts.

Outrage, yeah, okay...the big thing at the moment is - no joke - websites which rank funny/bizarre/erotic Street View results. Yep. Be it a dog squatting on 13th Street in Brooklyn or a prominently breasted Indian girl walking to school in suburban Des Moines, the clips and blips are there and ready to entertain.

Speaking of rampaging gadgetry, the other day I found myself in the proximity of an airing of Back to The Future II. Fine and well. Trouble is, when Marty surveys the glaring new Mill Valley that the Doc has brought him to, there's one aspect of the city's bustling throng that the film missed. In all fairness, perhaps no one could have foreseen the omission in the '80s, concerned as the screenwriters no doubt were with Griff's bionic implants and giant, holographic sharks.

There were no cell phones.

Nope.

The people aren't walking along while hunched over intently, rapt, transfixed, like a monkey with a new turd.

Maybe in the remake, eh?

CURRENTS

Old Bricks, new Life

My old buddy Steve told me recently that after living in Indiana for quite some time he was making the move back to Michigan.

Michigan?! some (most) will say.

Why?

He's from Flint, and he's pretty damn proud of his Wolverine State heritage, so back he's gone. Commendations, backslaps and best wishes are in order, especially given his choice of locale - it's Sterling Heights, due north of Detroit. Only a short hop up Interstate 75 if he wants to visit Flint.

He could've gone anywhere, stayed where he was, found a swinging new town. He's an IT pro who's been doing it for almost 25 years, so the dude's got options. Back he went, though, and it really knocked me out. He's not wringing his hands about the state's fortunes, or up to any grandiose schemes involving some progressive, Birk-wearing "sustainability" jazz...that's not him. he just feels the need to go back, and hey, godspeed to him.

Puts me in mind of a Huffington Post item from a while back, which mentioned a recent Economist survey that ranked Detroit #40 in terms of livability (that's worldwide, gang), beating out London (#54) and New York (#56)! Make of it what you will, but sometimes things ain't as simple as they seem.

There are cities making handsome rebounds from dire times, with the prime example being Pittsburgh, now apparently a perennial pick for quality of life. Manchester, N.H. comes in with high marks as well, as another example of an area that's overcome the ghosts and stilled, cavernous infrastructure of its industrial past. Cleveland meets that standard as well: no more gritty rep as the "Mistake By the Lake" for them.

Certain areas are blessed with natural beauty, history, and thriving educational and creative communities...how sweet must it be to live in Portland?

Urban "renewal," "rejuvenation"...these can be words that summon up bureaucracies and arbitrary re-drawings with bloated budgets and ill-advised aims. I don't detract from midcentury urban renewal, especially as it razed dangerous, unmanageable slums, but the tradeoff often involved the disappearance of storied, richly historic neighborhoods. That's probably the main danger of renewal efforts, and definitely is its main critique. Where do the old and the funky fit in? What's wrong with a few rough edges? New Yorkers do have a hot new Brooklyn, but they've also got the decay of the Bronx. Gentrification can bring new and affordable housing, but also displace the things ( and the people) that give an area a little character.

The Interstate system contributed to the changing face of the country's cities as well, and left in its wake the seeds of gentrification's ugly cousin - homogeneity. Each highway interchange brings the same gas station/fast food options, the same retail giants, etc. etc. Not good. That's why - when I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1992 I fell in love with it - with the Midwest in general. It took a trip to Europe to figure out why. Here was a city that pre-dated the automobile...the scale of the place was human...I could walk most anywhere, down to the corner store (or bar) and see people I knew. Speak with them. Interact. It struck me as being completely natural and incredible. My son's day care center was like a mini UN, a benefit of living in a university town. Someday I, like Steve, will get back to that place where I feel the most connection.

BOOKS

Sad Eyes, Soaking Rain, Murder

In 2008 the young British illustrator and author Hannah Berry released Britten & Brulightly, her debut.

She brought her love of European comics and film noir to the table, and created a resonant, morose investigator named Fernandez Britten who's been beaten down by his line of work and the facts he must unburden himself of to his clients.

Britten begins the tale by waking up and preparing for yet another day of his glum profession, one that will apparently pass under unendingly pouring gray skies and sodden streets. He's retained by a woman who seeks answers in the death of her husband - suicide? Murder? And, ultimately, why?

Britten's world is superbly rendered in black & white, and comes to tungsten life in the story's color sequences, but it's when color, pale and tentative, bleed into the frame that Berry achieves something more. Her points of view are at once panoramic, sweeping, then locked in on a querulous face or a pair of wounded eyes, smarting with newfound and bitter knowledge.

Bitterness, pain, yes: as Britten pursues his leads, the weight of his career choice settles ever more heavily on his shoulders. Success in his queries leads to connections and revelations that - any more, it seems to him - bring his clients nothing but pain, pain with no redeeming niceties. A solved case is just another squalid, seamy trawl through dirty, felonious laundry. Berry must tread deftly here, and she does. The investigator, upon hearing his partner Brulightly's protracted, breathless assessment that "...there's enough there to ignite a hundred possibilities!..." merely notes glumly that "I lost another hat."

Ah, Brulightly. Well, here's the thing...Britten's partner is a tea bag. Yes, you read that right. As such, however, he's easily concealed and thus can be wherever Britten is. He's also apparently a bit randy, with a penchant for smut, admitting that while he's a tea bag, "I'm a tea bag with needs, Fern." He also gets in a few good lines, as after a narrow escape from a gang of toughs: "Look, I'm sorry: I infused in your waistcoat."

The young writer (still in her 20s) has skills beyond her years.

As Britten has been betrayed by a waiter contact at a tidy little cafe, he retreats to a greasy spoon, an "oily no-man's-land of drowsy static, caught between sleep and wakefulness." It's also in this little diner that Britten's thoughts wander. He slips out into the rain and back into his subject's offices. We're treated to two pages of stealth and shadow before the waitress jostles him back to reality with his order. So Berry goes, confidently ordering the little detective's world, and even its spare, unadorned and perhaps inevitable ending.

Berry's book fits into a pretty amazing continuum, this thing called the "graphic novel," a category where the history of the form, to say nothing of the term itself, seem to be good fodder for debate.

Earlier American examples of graphics with text include artier expressions such as the woodcut-illustrated stories of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward (the latter the subject of a 2010 Library of America reissue series), as well as compilations of popular favorites like Tintin and longer stories from the major comics houses, even Classics Illustrated (still just comics, regardless of lofty aspirations).

Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin's Blackmark (1971), Richard Corben's Bloodstar (1976), Jim Steranko's Chandler - Red Tide (1976) were all referred to as "graphic albums" or comic novels," generally because they really didn't fit under any other heading as such. Along came Will Eisner's A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories in 1978, a collection that had Eisner plumb his Bronx youth to examine the immigrant community he grew up in. For whatever reason, Contract is often referred to as the "first" graphic novel.

Art Spiegelman began RAW in 1980, and it was in that experimental title that he first serialized his Holocaust tale Maus, which later appeared in two volumes in 1986 and 1991. Spiegelman delivered In the Shadow of No Towers in 2004. Frank Miller reimagined Batman in Dark Knight in 1986, and followed its success with Batman: Year One the year after. Alan Moore's astonishing Watchmen also appeared in 1987, and Daniel Clowes gave us the acclaimed Ghost World in 1997.

Marjane Satrapi's account of growing up in revolutionary Iran was the heart of 2000's Persepolis, and Ken Eichenbaum gave us a side-splitting Yiddish tour de force with Hoppel Poppel Kosher Comix in 2002. In 2009 David Mazzucchelli produced arguably the densest, most challenging graphic novel ever - the labyrinthine Asterios Polyp.

Simply put, today's comics reader has more choices than ever, from ambitious projects like Asterios Polyp to scores of compilation volumes and yearly highlight editions. Joining this welcome flood is Hannah Berry. I can't wait to see what she's got next.

FILM

And now I'll tell ya what I am - I'm the Repo Man...

Back in 1984, in the dim, pre-digitized past when expenses such as the cost of film stock were over-arching concerns for a fledgling filmmaker, there appeared a sharp, witty black comedy called Repo Man. It was a seat-of-the-pants production, had a promotional budget of virtually nothing, met with everything from indifference to critical scorn, and it's held up better than probably 90% of the films from that badly aging cinematic decade.

It opens with a fantastic title sequence, as a pre-comeback Iggy Pop delivers the abrasive title track over stark, red-on-black titles, themselves laid over a hopscotching green area map of the Arizona/SoCal badlands. In the opening scene, a highway patrolman stops a weaving '64 Chevy Malibu, opens its trunk and is vaporized in a blinding ray of light. Away the driver rolls, warbling "Clementine," and so begins a funky and quirky story.

Alex Cox was an aspiring young Brit, fresh out of UCLA and looking to make a film.

Two schoolmates, Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy were beginning a production company, and Cox's second effort for the two was a lark called Repo Man, for which he consulted a neighbor, Mark Lewis, who was actually a car reposession professional. At UCLA Cox had created Edge City, shot over four years, and this fictional burg gave the city in his new screenplay a name.

Emilio Estevez had only two films to his credit at this time (one being The Outsiders, where he joined a strong ensemble cast), but he brought a lot of depth and knowing humor to his character, Otto.

Otto loses his crap job, his girlfriend, and a small nest egg in short order, and roaming the streets, encounters Harry Dean Stanton's Bud. Conned into his first (hilarious) repossession, Otto finds himself with a wad of cash and a new status: repo man. He drinks and snorts the nutrients of his new job, watching and listening as Bud shares such wisdom as the "repo code" with him. Otto meets Leila (Olivia Barash, excitable and driven) and is told about the true nature of the Malibu's contents. Or maybe not. As the old sedan is pursued, now with a value of $20,000, the story ramps up to a frantic oddball pitch with Otto hanging on for dear life.

It's no overstatement to say that the film was done out of nearly thin air. The repo office was built up from nothing on a vacant lot. A recurring visual motif, hanging pine-tree air fresheners, were actually provided by one of the movie's few sponsors, the other being a grocery distribution company that supplied the movie's priceless generic food and beer containers. The two elements add wonderfully to the already off-kilter air of the production.

The film's popularity is due in no small part to its L.A.-centric soundtrack, which features not only Black Flag, the Circle Jerks and Suicidal Tendencies but also Fear, the Plugz, Juicy Bananas and Burning Sensations (who cover Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso"). Tito Larriva and Steven Hufsteter of the Plugz provide the outstanding score/incidental music.

As the movie's legend grows it's interesting to note the lives it's touched: for example, a man named Sam Cohen - who claims to have been on the development team for the Neutron Bomb - contacted Cox to rhapsodize about the East L.A. locales where the movie shot. The scenes brought back the '20s for Cohen, and the two reportedly shared a correspondence of sorts about the Malibu's eerie cargo. Neat stuff.

Speaking of graphic novels, a book called Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday appeared in 2008, in which Otto (now Waldo) reappears from Mars to resume his earthly exploits. Hmm.
Cox went on to helm Sid & Nancy, Straight to Hell and other fare, but it was this spry indie that he'll be most remembered for.

MUSIC

Burning Skies

As of a July 5th, 1983 concert at London's Hammersmith Palais, Bauhaus were no more. The band's arty, guitar-laced approach had helped lay the groundwork for scores of lesser lights, who proceeded to flog the bloated horse of "Goth" for long years after. Vocalist Peter Murphy went on to a short-lived experiment called Dalis Car while his bandmates, by 1986, were poised to break through the U.S. market as Love & Rockets.

That's not the whole story, however.

Bauhaus's lanky, languid guitarist Daniel Ash had - in 1982 - begun knocking around a few tunes with the band's gear wrangler, a fellow named named Glenn Campling. The two knew each other from Northhampton Art School, got on well, and when they poached Bauhaus drummer Kevin Haskins their side-lineup was complete. This made sense, as Ash and Haskins were the germ of a band called The Craze, which had formed in 1978 with David J. (Haskins). Ash subsequently met Peter Murphy and the act renamed itself S.R. After one more name tweak, (Bauhaus 1919, named for the German design movement), they became simply Bauhaus.

A one-off recording for Indie label Small Wonder resulted in "Bela Lugosi's Dead"/"Boys," then it was on to a label called Axis to record the first proper singles and LP. Axis became 4AD, and the band released In the Flat Field and moved to sister label Beggar's Banquet and growing notoriety.

It was in May, 1982, while his main band was on Beggar's Banquet that Ash released - on 4AD - the first four-tune 12" which was called simply "Tones on Tail." It was the first of six single/EP releases for the band, most of which had both 7" and 12" versions (the latter providing four selections instead of two), and what a statement it made.

Ash drew from a deep well of undeniably compelling riffs, and the three lay out a hazy, stoned, yet expansive and dynamic set that echoes the Bauhaus aesthetic while pointing toward something new and altogether different. Campling, handling bass and keyboard duties, augments Ash well on these earliest of their collaborations, including "A Bigger Splash," "Means of Escape," and two engaging instrumentals, "Copper" and, indeed, "Instrumental." It was a strong debut with only the shadow of a hooded figure on its sleeve accompanied by the words TONES ON TAIL (that name having been born from a note from Bauhaus engineer Derek Tompkins - that the reference tones were on the tail of the tape he was delivering).

Follow-up "There's Only One" brings the band's natural danceability to the fore with a thumping bass intro, while a dub version provides the flipside, "Now We Lustre." From May of '83 comes Tones' most brilliant EP, a haunting and rhythmic piece of impressionistic dreampop led off by the smoky "Burning Skies." As if in a trance, Ash plays out "...the air was alive with piercing sound, and burning skies - the horror did me good, the magic was on my side..." Lyrical ambiguity laces the staccato hook of "O.K. This Is The Pops," one of the band's most gripping, insistent tracks. Side two offers up the mysterious sound collage "When You're Smiling" and instrumental "You, the Night and the Music": all rushing winds and ghost guitar overlaid with Ash's snake-charmer sax. (Of note to collectors is the fact that this EP appeared on BB sister label Situation Two. All the house labels were thereby covered).

By 1984 (and seeing as how Bauhaus was gone) it was time for an LP, and the band delivered the diverse and uniformly strong Pop.

The synth-pulse of "Lions" gets things underway with restraint, because Brits instinctively know that you don't need to come out of the gate like a swinging sledgehammer to make your point. Ash's facility with lyrics and wordplay never got in the way of a dancefloor-filling beat, as evidenced by the stomping three-beat hook of "War." Elusive and ambiguous, "Happiness" ("...happiness...is success. Success brings hope, hope - it's no good...") compels in its coyness. The album is a wonderful palette for creative muscle-flexing, as with the dreamy "The Never Never (Is Forever)" which overlays Ash with Campling's crosshatched synth, and a stream-of-consciousness exercise called "Slender Fungus," itself punctuated with mouth-generated rhythms and a capella trance refrains.

The shadowy companion pieces "Movement of Fear" and "Real Life" are both enlivened by Ash's superb playing, especially the plangent acoustic of the latter. The effort is topped off by "Rain," a piece that collects slowly in pools of synth, surges like droplets falling on a misty ocean shore, then coalesces as one aching sadness which hovers, circles, then fades.

The band nail something special on Pop. Music of this caliber is no "side" project.

A tour of sorts began, though it only ran from May to October 1984. The boys played 27 dates, spread over 15 U.K cities and 10 in the U.S.

Writer Skot Kirkwood notes that in spite of the odd technical problem, the band were well-received, especially by American audiences hungry for more of the intriguing sounds emerging from the U.K. of the day. Campling recalled the reception as being "very warm and positive."

There were more singles in store.

Album track "Performance" appeared in a different mix, coupled with another dub treatment, which resulted in "Shakes." And as the flipside of "Lions," a song appeared which was immediately embraced by DJs the world over, and is known even now through exposure on endless '80s compilations and TV commercials: "Go!," introduced by a fuzzy snake of guitar, Haskins' surgical percussion, and a brilliant throwaway bit of vocal gibberish. Speaking of brawn and bombast, the last single is "Christian Says," and it's a storm-cloud of banshee synth and guitar made all the more ferocious by the jazzy surf vibe and breathy pleasure of the flip, "Twist."

As might be expected, Pop was bowdlerized for foreign markets. No new tale to tell, as it were, since the U.S. and almost everyone else have chopped up Brit releases and repackaged their contents since the Beatles' and Stones' first releases. A few key album tracks were retained for The Album Pop, but these were joined by "Twist," "War" and "Go!," the better to top-load the platter with lots of energy. Oh well. The advent of the CD did allow for the release of the collection Night Music in 1987, but it wasn't until 1998's Everything! that all the band's material was finally available together for the first time. Disc one contains Pop, and disc two all the EPs. (Further note to collectors: the promo disc Something! contains a few other tracks, such as alternate versions of "Go!," "Twist" and "Burning Skies").

Daniel Ash said later that "...out of the three bands that I've been in over the years, that's my favourite...[it was] the most original. There was no commercial consideration there...and it was my baby."

Lasting words about a striking band, itself sandwiched in between two other striking bands.

We should all be so lucky.

PERIODICALS

Excellence as a Standard

First things first.

Last time I around I stated that Vanity Fair had been in print for longer than any other U.S. magazine title except The Atlantic. Not so. Apparently, Scientific American appeared in 1845, and so it takes top honors! Very well. And Vanity Fair doesn't get the #2 slot, either, right before The Atlantic - that honor goes to this installment's subject publication, the evergreen known as Harper's, around since 1850.

It began life as Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and was a sibling of the long-running Harper's Bazaar.

Over time, it has set as its goal the publication of the finest social and cultural critique it can muster, and has accordingly published (at the risk of dropping yet another laundry list of estimable worthies) Horatio Alger, Theodore Dreiser, John Muir, Bernard DeVoto, Woodrow Wilson and Norman Mailer. The tradition continues today as the mag enjoys, just as is the case with several of its storied fellows, circulation numbers that bode well for its continued availability. Hopefully I may say that, at the risk of stating the flamingly obvious, that as society seems to still want to wrench itself away from print, we may still immerse ourselves in a good read from time to time.

Lewis Lapham must of course be mentioned when one discusses Harper's, as he is as part of its spirit in a way that only a few other people are associated with a magazine - William F. Buckley and National Review come to mind, for instance. The polymath Lapham was Managing Editor from 1971-75, then Editor from 1976-81 and 1983-2006. His introductory piece could be about anything that struck him, and it set the tone of inquiry and scrutiny for the issue. (Anyone seeking a collection of his writings may look for Imperial Masquerade, a 1990 collection that discusses the kaleidoscopic Reagan era and its broad-brush sensibilities).

The current issue is a typical bounty, and is begun by Thomas Frank's investigation of the emergence of "content," a word now in vogue that refers to what people read, watch, hear. Content - contents - go into a package, and what happens to a package? It gets marketed, sold, it's put out there into the thrall. Frank zeroes in on this ever-changing, ever-growing phenomenon and its shredding of the membrane between journalism and commerce.

His piece reveals that the trend has only escalated with the rise of the Internet, where there is seldom a block of text without a sidebar, where pop-ups flash and strobe, and worst of all, there are those things that print can never provide - video ads.

He examines those who've been sucked in to providing content on a freelance basis, thus increasingly shifting payroll dollars from salaried professionals to scrambling freelancers. And though such piecemeal writing gigs do provide a degree of experience and gratification, Frank characterizes these story grinders as hamsters, toiling ceaselessly on wheels that churn forth text.

His closing comment neatly addresses not just the state of contemporary journalism but the overarching germ of Capitalism as well: "The only real solution to the hamster-wheel problem is to be the guy who owns the pet store."

The Reviews find Lorin Stein discussing a new study of Emily Dickinson, and a new scholarly work called Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction wherein Ezra Pound and others put

popular print under the microscope. Nathaniel Rich critiques a new Library of America series of Saul Bellow's mid-period novels, which find Bellow flexing his considerable descriptive and narrative powers.

There is again a selection of writings culled from our cultural streams, including an IM'd exchange between a father and his son, stationed in Afghanistan and caught in a particularly perilous situation, and a portion of the screenplay for the never-shot follow-up to Easy Rider. Rachel Aviv reports on the DSM and the ongoing, often baffling, battle against mental illness.

Of course, the Harper's Index is a treat. The Index was a creation of Lapham, and seeks to present wildly diverse data to provide a snapshot of our collective aspirations, foibles and behaviors.

These range from the interesting (Percentage change in the U.S. suicide rate for every 500 meters above sea level: +17) to the dismaying (Rank of carbonated beverages among the best-selling grocery items in the United States this year: 1) to the sublime (Chance that an American believes Ramadan is the Jewish Day of Atonement: 1 in 10).

Then there is the fiction.

Javier Marias gets into the head of a married man who receives letters that cause his mind to wander, Annie Proulx watches the comings and goings of the natural world at her home on the North Platte River, and Don DeLillo looks in on a white-collar criminal who ponders his fate and his status as meek requirer of only minimum security.

Magazines such as Harper's feed something in oneself...sometimes by the simple fact that they continue to appear.

TUBE

A Little "Night" Music

Few television writers - maybe none - every got at the wormy heart of human desire better than Rod Serling.

After proving his mettle in the medium's dim early days he was rewarded with The Twilight Zone, a vehicle for his immense gifts and prodigous energy and one for which he shone brightly. After five seasons of having produced the great bulk of the screenplays he took a break, and except for a failed Western series called The Loner (1965-66) he was on hiatus until he got the itch to try another anthology series.

Television was now in color, production values were a little more advanced, and Serling had the name and rep to craft a program the way he wanted. The result aired on NBC in 1969 and was called Night Gallery, owing to the pilot program, in which Serling discussed a series of paintings which then introduced the episode's stories. The pilot featured Roddy McDowell and Ossie Davis in a tale of cross and double-cross, and Joan Crawford as a vicious millionairess who wants eyesight - at any cost. The Crawford segment, "Eyes," marked the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg and was, accordingly, an exciting piece visually. Serling never backed away from heavy subject matter, and "The Escape Route" featured the flight and eventual damnation of an aging Nazi war criminal.

As of the 1970 season, the program's title sequence featured a series of images which tile outward toward the viewer and draw him in for the intro. Serling appears, hair voluminous in late-'60s fullness, walks thoughtfully among the images hanging in the gloom, faces the viewer, and gives his intro monologue. It's as compelling as the old Twilight Zone setup, because with Serling and the writers at hand the story was a safe bet to be a good watch.

The show shared something else with its storied predecessor: its star power. It was a who's who of TV star wattage, and featured performers such as Cesar Romero, E.G. Marshall, Agnes Moorehead, John Astin, Patty Duke, Bill Bixby, Jack Cassidy and Carl Reiner. Serling again adapted works from writers like Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson (whom he'd also worked with on Zone).

It was back to the typewriter for himself as well. He wrote 35 of the 98 stories, and even garnered an Emmy nomination for "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar," in which a fading, alcoholic executive watches as the world he knows slips away from him. And though the stories sometimes dealt in sci-fi much as Zone had, such as with the doomed lunar expedition of "The Nature of the Enemy," most often Serling and his writers plumbed the depths of everyday people and their often extraordinary desperation.

These flawed human subjects often cast their own die, as with the crewman from the Titanic who escapes by posing as a woman. The "Lone Survivor" finds himself at the confluence of personal fate and capricious chance, with hideous recompense for his actions.

For its first season the program rotated in NBC's lineup with three other shows, but for 1971-72 it achieved autonomous status. Yet despite being an hour long for its first two seasons, it was cut to a half-hour for its third (and final) season. Making matters worse was that upon entering syndication, its hour-length episodes were often cut up to fit, sometimes other footage was dropped in to pad a segment, and so forth.

As he'd ceded his Executive Producer status to try to roll back the pressure on himself a bit, Serling found himself at odds with Jack Laird, who'd assumed the role and was responsible for much of the patchwork. Complicating things further was the fact that Laird wrote fully 16 of the episodes himself. Enough was enough. Serling left, only to die of a series of heart attacks in 1975. He was 50.

Columbia House released the show piecemeal on VHS, but thankfully Universal saw to it that the show was released on DVD, beginning with Season One, in 2004. And so we're left with one man's final contribution to out popular culture, and that blessedly from a time when TV still meant something, when a man could trump commercials for dish soap and lowbrow variety shows and leave behind something with insight, something real.

Ongoing thanks for your interest.

To my Russian friends, da svidaniya!

See you again soon as we confront - *gulp* - 2011.

From November, with Love+

First off, sincere thanks to those who've dropped by here, and a big welcome to those from overseas! It's great to feel like one's words are getting a bit of love. As Jagger once sang, "...your servant am I--and so shall remain..."
So we're off, eh?

CURRENTS

This Land is...Whose Land?
Fighting over cultural and language differences that go back many hundreds of years. Squabbles over institutional reforms. Drives for secession and re-alignment. It's just another day in the hotbed of political and social turmoil that is...Belgium.

It appears that the Flemish separatist party NVA is about to sweep past all obstacles, including PM Yves Leterme, to achieve its goal of a separate Flemish state, thus effectively rending the country in two right through its middle. The North can then go about its business as an independent entity with the historically potent name Flanders, while the South carries on. The Flemish keep their Dutch, the Walloons their French, and everyone's happy, with a bilingual Brussels right in the center. This drama will undoubtedly add another wrinkle to the EU, itself already an administrative nightmare.
Speaking of the French language, it's at the heart of Quebec's waxing and waning drive for separatism. Although the Eastern province is majority French in its language and culture, its withdrawal will probably never occur, either as an independent nation or even a fully equal partner to a greater Canada: there is simply too much interdependence between these provinces, and it's not just issues of their economies and legal systems. This hasn't stopped an impulse for autonomy that stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century, however. Further complicating matters are large pockets of French speakers in the other provinces, and even aboriginal inhabitants of the provinces, who've become increasingly active and vocal over time.

With regard to France proper, it's emblematic of the post-colonial world. The country enjoyed cheap labor in the Postwar era, but those laborers (like other laborers in other countries) had children while French birthrates declined. Accordingly, France, faced with not only increasing numbers of migrants but also with other cultural waves such as a fascination with American pop culture, began to panic and so pulled in the reins. Efforts at cultural preservation were upped, signified by the compulsion of prominent media to eliminate creeping linguistic influences and tendencies.
France as colonizer? Then you get Indo-China (reborn, after that last bit of unpleasantness at Dien Bien Phu, as Vietnam)... you get Algeria, you get messy wars. And not to harp on the country, but they've also shown themselves plenty willing to expel problematic ethnic groups. Witness the country's indigenous bands of Roma - recently told to get packing - to Bulgaria, Romania, anywhere else.
Past colonial holdings. Influxes. Migrations. Expulsions. The UK shares these phenomena, as do, as long as we're at it, most of Western (and even Eastern) Europe and the Scandinavian countries. The EU, as it seeks to manage a scene that pulses and fluctuates daily, conducts its affairs in the face of endless dilemmas, in which the Greek meltdown was but a symptom of a larger, inherently unstable political landscape.

Will humankind ever be able to come to grips with its history, with its deeds and misdeeds and colonizations, enslavements, wars and endless national re-drawings?
Perhaps not. A cynic would say probably not.
The Roma now continue to wander, as they always will, unlucky enough to have been born pre-destined for expulsion.
On a large enough scale, expulsion becomes diaspora, a mass movement of a people over time. The Ashkenazi Jews are a good example. Compelled to roam Europe, and later the world, upon the creation of the state of Israel they sent the Palestinians away, and that group has been on the road and living in squalid refugee camps ever since. Continual expansion of Jewish settlements, while appearing to be a workable short-term solution, only erode chances for any two-state solution in the region.

One alternative to expulsion is genocide, as can be attested to by the Tutsis of Rawanda (a group favored during Belgian colonial times for their "lighter-skinned" appearance), the Kurds of Iraq, or those crushed under Ceaucescu.
Africans hauled away to the Americas and the Caribbean are certainly a diaspora, one whose travel goes on as well. Of those transported to America, 6 million migrated northward and westward between WWI and WWII, the largest migration this country has ever seen.

We've not even yet mentioned religion, divider supreme.
Complications arising from this element, which often spills over into other aspects of governance affects not just Belgium or Quebec but also the Basque separatist movement of Spain. The Basques, an ethnic minority and region in Spain with roots in antiquity are an illustration of the modern world's grappling with the issues of a people who still feel the call of older ways.
The partition of India and Pakistan (so that both may hew to their own religion and the culture that - any more - grows up fully around that religion) is now a tale of one common people, split in two and eyeing one another coldly behind walls of nuclear missiles. If that example's too old, Darfur is probably going to split in 2011 into North (Muslim) and South (Christian and animist).

If one were to pick just one patchwork land of separatism, rivalries, animosities and deprivations it'd sure be the former Yugoslavia. That little stretch of land on the Balkan peninsula contained Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Bosnians, Serbs and Montenegrans who were slapped together under the first of several ideological systems in 1918 in the wake of WWI, where the victors employed the folly that they could exuberantly erase, re-draw and cobble together any sort of man-made entity, from Czechoslovakia (created from whole cloth from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to the Palestinian Mandate.
Man-made national entities reached their apotheosis with the creation of the Soviet Union, of course. You can't span eleven time zones without herding together vastly unsuitable bedfellows.

I've only pondered these things to try to think about what's next. We try - or our leaders do - to produce things like NAFTA, the EU (with its dreadfully bad idea, the Euro), the UN, and so forth. We're too big, though. And with each passing second, there are too many of us. If we're lucky, we're born into this circus with a roof over our head and a bowl of carrot soup at night...not treading a gravel road, cowering under a whip or dying in some tyrant ideologue's gulag. So if we never, ever settle as a species, at least some of us can be thankful for those small blessings.

BOOKS
Huey Newton, the People, and a Continuing Climb...
On a sultry August morning in 1989, David Hilliard was awakened by a call from Melvin Newton.
"David, wake up," he began. "Huey's dead."

Huey Newton was indeed dead, shockingly, and not at the hands of police, rivals, detractors or assassins. His killer was a drug dealer. Newton's life, his accomplishments, his example, both his flaws and his ongoing potential, were silenced at gunpoint. He was laid to rest in Oakland, the city of his youth and the place where he'd given the energies of his youth to try - simply and ultimately - to make life just a little better for those in his community.
Hilliard's response was to gather long-neglected notes and begin to write the book that, in 1993, was released as This Side of Glory. He'd been Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party during its late-'60s heyday, and in writing the book he sought to flesh out the story of the Panthers, but also to come to grips with his own demons; the struggle for meaning in an ever more complex America, and the continual siren song of his addiction.

His book joined Newton's own remembrances, published in 1973 as Revolutionary Suicide. Also on this very particular shelf belong Eldridge Cleaver's 1968 collection of essays, Soul on Ice, Stokely Carmichael's 1967 book Black Power, George Jackson's 1970 account Soledad Brother and Amiri Baraka's stunning Blues People (published in 1963, when Baraka was still known as LeRoi Jones).
These men, and many other creative lights like them, had several things in common. Most had been uprooted from a South where Jim Crow still thrived to move "up South" to the bigger cities where their families could find more work. They'd gravitated to petty crime, run afoul of the law for reasons both real and fabricated, and begun to spend significant stretches of their young lives in the system.
They also had intellect in common, and a questing spirit. Whether in gatherings of other young seekers, in community college classes or simply by virtue of their own curiosity, they read the growing body of Black literary giants then available. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were augmented by Kenneth Clark, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. Exploration of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth led to increasingly more challenging fare: not only earlier Black voices such as W.E.B. DuBois but also everyone from Castro to Ho Chi Minh. These books spoke of not just a struggle, but a universal, systemic struggle, and it galvanized these young seekers.

In reading these young mens' writings some 40-odd years on, one is struck by their intelligence, by their will toward educating themselves, by their own emergent, individual voices.
Newton absorbed everything he could, and sought out Kafka, Camus and Kierkegaard in addition to his regular literary diet. He was most heavily impressed by Malcolm X, however, and that man's life and sacrifice led him beyond a simple daily regimen of reading, study and discussion on the block and in the streets of Oakland. Malcolm X's example, together with the Bay Area's ghettoization and brutality toward its Black residents, spurred him to action. In 1966 he co-formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with friend Bobby Seale.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published Revolutionary Suicide in 1973, the year before Newton's flight to Cuba. He'd several years before criticized Eldridge Cleaver's departure for Algeria, on the specific grounds that leaving took one out of the struggle - that it was impossible to remain involved and committed while so far away. Because of this criticism, and for a widening gulf in the two's beliefs and philosophy, the Panthers fragmented and threatened to dissolve under the weight of both internal disputes and external expectations and pressures. In so doing they became emblematic of the Black cause in general. As the '70s stretched forward into the frantic, event-crammed 1980s and beyond, the early lights of Black awareness succumbed to paranoia, access to money and easy notoriety, the hollow ring of rhetoric, and the ghosts of long-ago rallies and fervor. They'd outlived their beaten, jailed, murdered young colleagues...but for what?

None of those later developments, no sickness, no debauched, shadowy deeds, no madness, can take away from these written works, however. Their words ring true, and outlive the young hands that wrote them. Newton continually stressed this in his words and writings, that he was but one man, his but one voice - the only thing that mattered was the People, their cause, their desperation for meaning, for life.
In his book, he makes the distinction between "reactionary" suicide and "revolutionary" suicide.
The first, he states, is but the natural reaction to despair, the final act of a broken, beaten life. The second, he holds, is the sublimation of the individual to a greater good, a struggle, a contribution of vital life energy so that even if the individual should perish, his death would prove a catalyst for ongoing work, the righteous fight. It would transform a (probably) violent death into a beautiful symbol of strength and perseverance.

Through a strong family upbringing he learned dignity and self-respect, but there were also the examples of the street, and in particular a brother of his, known as "Sonny Man." Sonny had it made, but as Huey grew and watched, the youngster concluded that his brother had no true freedom. His flashy lifestyle depended on hustling, and that within a system where all involved knew the limits, and the outcome. Another brother, Melvin, ingrained the love of reading in Huey, and changed his course markedly.
In 1966 he drew up the plans for the Panthers, a group that was initially created for one reason - to actively watch the local police, a body that had no problem with keeping the city in line using any measure of force it deemed necessary.
The "10-Point Plan" followed.
It included not just demands for an immediate end to police brutality, but also for more relevant educational offerings, decent housing, employment opportunities, and such niceties as the right to a trial with a jury that actually reflected one's peer group, i.e. one that included Blacks. The 10th Point, however, packed the greatest punch. It demanded a plebiscite (referendum) in which Black America might deliberate its future, including continuation as a part of the United States. If this seemed radical, the text immediately followed this demand with the text of the first half of the Declaration of Independence. Right there, in black and white, was the framers' description of evils, "abuses and usurpations" which demanded - as duty - that men of conscience "throw off such government." Huey's generation couldn't live under lies and oppression any further.

The emergence of the Panthers coincided with Cleaver's rising star, and the increasing visibility of SNCC's Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Far from being unified, these growing factions juggled a fracturing, Vietnam-embattled country, scrutiny by everyone from the media to the glowering eye of J. Edgar Hoover (who declared the Panthers the "greatest threat to internal security" the country faced), and a wildly disparate counterculture, wherein hippies, Yippies and longhairs screamed, sat in and tripped for a bewildering array of causes, many half-baked, reactionary or fraudulent outright.
Huey was shot down in an October, 1967 traffic stop and went on to a show trial where he was accused of shooting and killing one of the arresting officers. After 33 months in prison he emerged to a changing Oakland, and a reunion, some months later, with Bobby Seale. He feared that the community was - after the initial enthusiasm for the Panthers' efforts - somewhat put off by the berets and bandoliers. He opted instead to step up the group's various "survival programs," which included a breakfast program for schoolchildren, sickle cell testing, prison outreach, and other efforts. These programs differed from those proposed by such figures as Cleaver, who seemed to be merely about fiery speeches, forced hands and overturned, routed enemies.

What, then, is Newton's legacy...what did he and his colleagues leave?
They left a release from shame for an entire people, a mass consciousness awakened, and they left an awareness in the entrenched power grid that business-as-usual would no longer be acceptable. The problems faced by Oakland have never totally gone away, nor will those for the rest of a country in which old wounds still linger and in which groups form, splinter, speak, and shout against an endless national wind.

Once in a while, though, we're given a glimpse, however fragile and however temporal, that more is possible.

FILM

Harvey Milk's Campaign for Hope
There are famous Lefties out there who, even though they haven't done anything to speak of for a long time, periodically emerge from their mansion to emote about this or that issue. (Sorry Babs, we both know it's the truth). That charge can't be lobbied against Sean Penn, however. He continues to deliver excellent work, and he's in Haiti even as you read this, busting ass to help the truly helpless.

No surprise that he signed on to play Harvey Milk, the country's first openly gay elected official, in the 2008 biopic about the slain leader. The film is excellent, and worthy of the acclaim and awards with which it was lauded, but it took a while to see completion. After Oliver Stone toyed with making the film in 1991, Gus Van Sant was briefly attached before also backing away. In the running to play Milk at this time were Robin Williams, Richard Gere, Daniel Day-Lewis, James Woods and even Al Pacino. Van Sant came back to project in late 2007, and the film began shooting in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood in January 2008. The cast, crew and production team came together for a textbook shoot, and filming wrapped in March.

We're drawn in from the movie's beginning, as Penn's Milk sits at a kitchen table and records his reflections while shots of a frenzied post-murder press conference are intercut with his recollections.
After a brief look at the no-longer youthful Milk as he prepares to leaves New York City for San Francisco in 1970, Van Sant affords us a look - by way of vintage film and still photos - at the birth of the Castro as gay destination. This intro is almost a travelogue for the spot-on recreation of early-'70s San Francisco. It's a vividly drawn world, and Milk and lover Scott Smith (the incredibly versatile James Franco) soon decide to set up a camera shop and fully embrace their new home.

Neighborhood and city problems lead first to Milk's political awareness, then to his becoming politically active. As he takes stock of the changing city with its changing needs, he realizes he's found a purpose for himself, something that seemed to be receding as he entered his forties.
He tells an early potential backer "I'm not a candidate. I'm part of a movement. The movement is the candidate, that's the difference. You don't see the difference. I do." After two unsuccessful bids for city supervisor (in 1973 and 1975) and a shot at state Assemblyman (1976), he finally succeeds with a run for city Board in 1977.
An Anita Bryant-endorsed California Senator, John Briggs, brings the movie's tensions to crisis point with his introduction of Proposition 6, which sought to ban gay teachers from the state's schools. Additionally, Milk and his growing acumen have drawn the ire of Milk's tightly wound colleague, Dan White (Josh Brolin in a brilliant, disturbed delivery). So moves the story until its wrenching conclusion, an ending all the more shattering for its finality.

It's understandable that Van Sant deal with only the last few years of Milk's life: to sketch the first 40 years would mean a much longer, unmanageable feat. Milk's Navy service, his tangential involvement with the Goldwater campaign, his (wary) acquaintance with People's Temple founder Jim Jones, and other aspects of his life, while interesting, would pull away the story from its needed arc. A man named Jim Foster, as it turns out, was active in the Bay Area's gay political scene for ten years at the time of Milk's increasing prominence, and held out resentment for the newcomer.
Van Sant skillfully, even economically, tells the story. As a gay filmmaker who began producing short pieces in his teens, he'd earlier explored human complexities with Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, and acted as executive producer for Larry Clark's stark, unblinking Kids. Seemingly, for every subsequent triumph such as Goodwill Hunting, there was a misstep, like the painful shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. He packed the insight of his entire career into this film, however, and its eight Oscars and other awards and appearance on dozens of Best-Of lists were the result.

Penn, living fully in the skin of Harvey Milk, rallies his staff as Prop 6 looms with a feverish passion: "If you want real political power," he says, "try telling the truth." As a testament to a man who persevered, even though his personal and political lives were seldom wrapped up into neat packages, Milk is a worthy, masterfully wrought film.

MUSIC

For Posterity - a Beautiful Remembrance
Back in high school I loved music, and was lucky enough to catch the tail end of FM radio's glory years which ended with the noxious ascent of tightly formatted playlists.
I'd periodically hear a moody, beautiful song called "White Bird," which I mistook for a Jefferson Starship tune (it was 1979-80, after all). It sounded for all the world like Gracie's voice, and the fellow accompanying her could've been Marty or Paul...
No, it was a group who'd come out of the Bay Area music explosion of 1965-67 called It's A Beautiful Day. I'd seen the cover of the group's self-titled debut album over the years, on which a young woman in a flowing dress stood on a hilltop under a blue sky filled with clouds that scudded like dreams. On the back of the LP's gatfold jacket hung a gull in midflight, swooping over a misty oceanscape. So where did the band go? Why are they not better known today?

After coalescing in San Francisco the band headed northward to Seattle, where they lived in an old Victorian and very nearly starved while honing their sound. Going nowhere, stuck in a bad management situation, they were contacted by Bill Graham and asked to fill in for a date on Cream's farewell tour. That performance got the word spread, and led to a deal with CBS Redords that resulted in the debut album being released in 1969.
What sort of music did they play, though?

David LaFlamme was a classically trained violinist, and he and wife Linda - who provided piano, keyboards and even harpsichord - joined vocally as the core of the group. Hal Wagenet was guitarist, Pattie Santos contributed additional percussion and vocals, and Mitchell Holman (bass) and Val Fuentes (drums) added rhythm. The result was an extremely strong ensemble sound that layered texture upon deft texture, often with an almost hypnotic effect.
The sound is introduced immediately with the album's first number, which was "White Bird." A lilting rhythmic track is overlaid with a sheen of LaFlamme's strings, which sets up a simple lyrical refrain of a "...white bird - in a golden cage - on a winter's day - in the rain..." Perhaps not surprisingly, the lyrics were born of the group's being sequestered in that chilly Northwest attic while watching the cold rain outside.
A guitar bridge interweaves with LaFlamme's sharp glissando, as the two coax the tune toward a fierce climax before returning to the simple, evocative refrain. It sets the mood perfectly for what the listener knows will be something altogether different.
Indeed, lest you be swayed further by the grainy dreaminess of "Hot Summer Day," Wagenet then charges the air with a torrid squall of guitar that would do Jorma Kaukonen proud. "Wasted Union Blues" sounds not like Jefferson Starship, but greatly like that band's original fiery incarnation. It's an ode to psychic burnout that's nonetheless elegant and driving and a little (wondefully) over-the-top. This time it's a violin/piano pairing that push and pull before abating into a dreamy daze.

Linda introduces "Girl With No Eyes" on a celeste (a keyboard instrument with hammers that strike metal plates to produce a resonant ringing), and her and David's duet create a wistful song that's delicate and powerful in its restraint.
Holman and Fuentes power the insistent groove of "Bombay Calling," which is followed by "Bulgaria," in which a cool, arid opening unfolds into a warm swaying riff that gains intensity as the violins sweeps in and locks into the rhythm. These two pieces lay the groundwork for album closer "Time Is," an urgent gallop where the band allows itself to flex a little musical and vocal muscle. Again, it's a seamless effort that ebbs, flows and crests over an almost ten-minute span.
Ten minutes?
Is this some laborious, prog-rock navel gazing?
No - even though the track makes room for a generous drum solo (!).
The group's playing touches on folk, singer-songwriter, and every stripe of euphoric, vaguely doomed musical foray of its acidic day. But there's too much here to wedge the record into some stale category. It's a (truly) lost gem, a remembrance of a time when young musicians were pushing boundaries and, thank providence, record companies were weighted with enough people who could see that their vision should be preserved.

As an aside, a site called psychedelicsight.com states that the CD currently goes for upwards of $100 on Amazon. This is for a few reasons, including lingering legal nastiness with former manager Matthew Katz (who, the piece further elaborates, also adversely affected the career of Moby Grape). Regardless, I've picked up three copies on vinyl over the years, including a beautifully heavy Dutch pressing (it's called GOODWILL, gang).

All of this aside, give this group a listen if you can. "White Bird" hit #118, while the LP itself managed a respectable #47. Follow-up Marrying Maiden even bested that, to reach #28. After a few more '70s releases, including a recording from Carnegie Hall (and several personnel changes), the band packed it in until a 2003 reunion.

None of which breaks the spell of that initial, glorious LP.

PERIODICALS

Vanity Fair: 21st Century Fox
It's tough to find a general-interest magazine with a brain these days.
There are a few out there, though, such as Esquire, which combine some good reading with the celeb stuff.
There's a magazine out there that's got an older pedigree than anyone except The Atlantic (which began publication in 1857), and that's Vanity Fair.

It was originally a British magazine, published between 1868-1914. It covered politics, the arts, and culture, and was known for its writing and especially its caricatures of the famous of the day. Lewis Carroll and P.G. Wodehouse were among its contributors, and it covered much ground.

As it was ceasing its run an American named Conde Montrose Nast was in New York, and preparing to take up the magazine's name and spirit. He converted a men's fashion magazine named Dress into Dress and Vanity Fair in 1913, and by 1914 the title was simply Vanity Fair.
The magazine did live up to the spirit of its precursor, and published Huxley, Eliot, Stein, Wolfe, and theatrical critique by Dorothy Parker. In spite of its success it fell victim to the Depression, and was folded into Vogue in 1936.

It was dormant until a March, 1983 re-launch. Again the goal was a quality magazine, and again that standard was met. Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Sebastian Junger and Maureen Orth all hang their hats there now, and the results are solid.

So: after a healthy number of pages whereon all manner of David Yurman'd, tiger-cub bustiered,
feral-eyed young models display their wares, it's on to the content. "Fanfair" tops off the reader's tank with current doings in books, movies, music, restaurants and so forth. In "Fairground," the culture gets its pulse taken and settles in for a lengthy exam. In the September issue alone, Hitchens discusses his battle with cancer, James Franco talks about his new role as the young Allen Ginsberg, James Wolcott remembers NYC dive Max's Kansas City and Lisa Birnbach discusses her belated follow-up to The Preppy Handbook.

More awaits in the "Vanities" section. In that same September issue, for example, was a feature piece on Stefani Germanotta (currently treading the boards as Lady Gaga). It was interesting, in that I knew nowt about her before, and now I'm a little more acquainted with her thinking. That's never a bad thing. Of course, the current issue features her new co-star, the occasionally omnipresent Cher. That's okay though. All in the service of knowing what's afoot out there.

All in all, a worthwhile read.

TUBE

Toni Collette and the Phenomenon of Tara
I sat, bewildered, and wondered what I'd write about re: television.
The answer arrived in the form of a red Netflix envelope. My wife ordered the first season of the Showtime series The United States of Tara. I'd only ever heard the show's name, so I was game. Four episodes in, and I'm hooked.
The show follows a woman who's an interior decorator and housewife, who also happens to have Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her other selves tend to appear in times of stress, and so we meet "T", a wild teen who steals daughter Kate's clothes and comes on to Tara's husband Max, "Alice," a '50s housewife who both charming and no-nonsense, and even "Buck," a male persona who talks of Vietnam and loves to bowl and swill beer.
Writer and columnist Diablo Cody had already written Juno and Jennifer's Body when she was approached with an idea from DreamWorks. Steven Spielberg wanted to develop a story about this particular woman and her family's efforts to carry on with some kind of normality.

The 38 year-old Australian actress Toni Collette was chosen for the role of Tara, and she immediately began to slip into Tara - and her alters, as well. Collette had a long list of films to her credit, including Muriel's Wedding, About a Boy and Little Miss Sunshine, and she is astonishing as Tara. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she pauses, and when her eyes refocus it's as an alter, and her husband, teens, and less-than-supportive sister must react accordingly.

Five seconds into the pilot, Tara sits down in front of a camera and collects herself, knowing she's headed for a change soon. "This is Tara, obviously," she says. Remarking on a job assignment, a ridiculous mural for a pregnant matron, she states "It's what I do...I create opulent environments for women who hemorrhage money." Moments later she's headed uptairs, exchanging exhausted for slinky, and "T" is not far behind. It's clear that something special, somthing high-powered and original and hugely entertaining is afoot.

I've got to get Showtime, I guess. Season Three kicks off this spring...

Very well.

As a final thought, I'd sure like to see an end to the continued exhuming of Natalee Holloway and L'il JonBenet Ramsey (now appearing on a fresh round of tabloid covers). It's not just a zombie cockroach like Nancy Grace propping up the industry for these two poor souls, either - it's the girls' media-drunk parents, and everyone who can't tune in or pick up the Tattler fast enough.
For shame, people.

Now let's have a drink.

Things new, things old...

No time for a lot of chit-chat. Let's get to it, shall we?


CURRENTS


Electile Dysfunction
I'd intended to wait until after the election results were in to post these thoughts, but then I realized how pointless that would be. As I'll hopefully show, the election will change nothing. I could post today, tomorrow, two years ago or three years hence. No difference. No change.

I could watch, fervently biting my nails, while young millionaires duke it out with old millionaires for a chance at the trough. I mean, look at the stakes here - we're talking nothing less than The Future Of Indignant Rhetoric!
What...you expected something else? Substantial debate? Any sort of tangible reform? Accountability among our elected saviors? Whoa - slow down there, Woodrow Wilson! That's not the way we do it around here!
We do a shell game that fleeces the rubes while preserving a noxious and cynical status quo. That's it.
One of the most absurd aspects of this campaigning back and forth is surely the dark, looming bogey of "Obamacare." Here's a President who's done what many Democrats have openly espoused, and it's like it's a shock. It's a crisis - something to be overturned, to be reversed, a horrible affront. The GOP had a majority most recently from 2000-2006, but was anything done to truly address healthcare? Hell no. It was business as usual, let it ride, never any real change. Now, because the hated other side has done something (no matter that it's a divisive, bureaucratic leviathan), it's a clarion call. "Let us overturn Obamacare," cry the Boehners and the Roves and other such NeoCon rockstars..."we'll do something that works!"

Play another 18 holes, liars.

And what of Obama? He became utter poison to many dems on the campaign trail. I don't recall anyone ever telling a president, sitting or otherwise, to "shove" his endorsement, as did Rhode Island's Frank Caprio. It's hard to rebut the ire, perhaps, given the bailouts, stimulus and coddling of everyone from BP to Hamid Karzai to Wall Street, as well as tossing out stupid speech points such as references to "shovel-ready" jobs.
Conferences and speeches do nothing but generate acres of paper to fill presidential libraries.

What of the 11th-hour infusion of cash into GOP war chests? Now maybe we can stop hearing endless yapping about George Soros. Ezra Klein of The Washington Post nailed it when he noted that campaign finance reform has stayed the same over time: it started broken, is so now, and will only get worse in the future. We've seen PACs beget SuperPACs, and it's amazing. What do these trainloads of money buy? More yard signs? More TV time? More print? What does it matter? Unless the money imbues the candidate with a special, luminous presence - a personal magnetism - then yes, it only buys yard signs. Looking deeper, however, what it does buy is indeed no mystery.
It buys influence, persuasion, the assurance that candidate x will go a certain way when this bill or that initiative comes up. How can anyone pretend otherwise? The words "campaign," "finance" and "reform" should never appear in a sentence together. It's a funny concept, a sick, funny fantasy that cynical, flag pin-wearing fixers bandy about endlessly, abetted by media flacks who treat it as something that might one day happen. Rubbish.
Money is the lubricant of the process, and it leaves a sticky green smudge on the pins and their wearers alike.
Why don't we just cut to the chase and have the boards of Citi and J.P. Morgan occupy Congress? In an age where GM is partially owned by the government, let's pull away all the screens fully and become a plutocracy. The bottom line with PACs and lobbyists (and both parties have scores of them, let no one tell you otherwise), is that they're entrenched firmly. They're going nowhere.

In addition to locust-swarms of lobbyists, two more pernicious elements serve to muddy the waters.
Activist judges (at the extremes of both poles) can easily turn any issue or ruling into a pinball - endlessly shuttling, endlessly in play - a pinball that will create commentary and outrage, sometimes over generations. Recently the Supremes gave the finger to both the IRS and the Federal Election Commission with their ruling that corporations no longer had limits on contributions. This was done, naturally, under the auspices of "free speech."
The other element - unelected and hungry for revenue and ratings - are talk-show hosts. They're largely onetime DJs (a rare exception is Mark Levin, who's actually a true scholar), who've discovered that they can string together bluster and bile with strings of factoids laid in their laps by research assistants. These kingmakers (cf the 1994 "Limbaugh" Congress) can drum up (or "gin up" as Limbaugh and his vocabulary CDs would say) a spiel to address any event, any development. Their admiring throngs are poised for the next breathy defense of the mystical, sacred workings of the Market or announcement of further tour stops, and have largely forsworn any voice that veers from their AM or cable (or both) oracle.
It was only today (Election Day) that El Rushbo dispensed again the Limbaugh Rule: if it's got a "D" by its name, don't vote for it. If it's got an "R" by its name, vote for it. Classic schtick, but his listeners don't get the joke.

Much hay is made over the ideological "differences" between the parties. Any half-bright schoolchild can distinguish Dem bullet points from GOP, but if you look one inch beyond the fiery catalogue of iniquities that each pol accuses the other of, you'd see that there's no quantifiable difference between the two. One thing remains ironclad - you've got to move to the center to budge the tar pit one slight bit. It's about power. The getting, the keeping, the consolidation. Nothing more.
As far as "independent" candidates go, they've once again shown up the true nature of the Game. Rand Paul has one gaping flaw: he's no Ron Paul. Has he appeared mainly to display a temperament that's apparently shrill and thin-skinned? It seems so. He can join the quirky queue of his predecessors - the Naders, Kuciniches, Andersons, Perots - lamentable, pitiable sideshow attractions, footnotes. Yes, indie candidates are unusual, even weird, but no more so than "mainstream" office seekers (pity the poor voters of Alaska, Nevada and Delaware). Sometimes a mainstream candidate will even take the extra step or two out into Whack-Land, as evidenced by the current fetish for lambasting anything to do with the words FEDERAL and GOVERNMENT. Apparently, these sages have realized that legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a monstrous overstepping that smote our Founding Fathers in their noble breasts.
Sometimes their chatter makes sense, as with the call to end such useless organs as the Department of Education, or Energy, but crying bitterly over the fact that Blacks have escaped Jim Crow?
Indefensible, stupid, misguided folly.

What more can be said about the negativity surrounding this circus? Memo to candidates: avoiding mudslinging and concentrating instead on empty boasts containing focus panel-pleasing keywords like "jobs" means nothing. It's smoke - mist - hot air - just more talk. Just once I'd like to see someone run on a platform of

STASIS PARALYSIS CORPORATE SERVITUDE

It'd be a refreshing change.

Lastly, although there's no movement the Machine can't co-opt (see you on the flipside, Tea Party), and no individual it can't sway, there have been a few concrete things to emerge from the muck, such as the Civil Rights Act, maybe FMLA or the AWDA. Decent men and women have held office, and will do so in the future. I would never suggest otherwise. When confronted with the harsh realities of our political system, though, the obvious conclusion is that their benevolent energies would best be expended elsewhere.

I've extracted myself from the process. I'll leave the hand-wringing, offense-taking and denunciations to others.
It's a liberating feeling, truly.

BOOKS

The Seer of Tamworth: A Pop Shaman is Born

Julian Cope Head-On/Repossessed. Thorsons Press (London: 1999), 408 pp., paper.

In early 1989 Julian Cope was at a crossroads. Behind him lay a past as leader of Liverpool's ballyhooed The Teardrop Explodes - a place in the scruffy legend of Postpunk. Ahead was investiture as the patron saint of brilliant, drug-addled, visionary Popdom. At odds with his label's management, he sat down and poured out his story. That bout of writing, remarkable in both its detail and ferocious humor, became a book called Head-On.
He was born October 21st, 1957 in Wales, and raised in an English Midlands town called Tamworth. A literary bent was augmented by an eclectic thirst for music which took in German prog, singer/songwriters Tim Buckley and Scott Walker, and the verbal New York City slap of Patti Smith and Television. College life, in a town near Liverpool, burst the doors wide. Cope recalls hours spent gazing over display cases in record shops, and fretting over a controversial physical image that steered him increasingly toward troublw with campus "real-ale rugby types," and fending off starvation on a diet of tea and toast.
The early days of outsider club Eric's is well documented, as packs of youth show up to gauge each others' appearance, see bands, spread rumors of bands yet to be seen, and cobble together endless sputtering attempts at collaboration. It's a fantastic evocation of a subculture trying to define itself - to live in the moment, yet be mindful enough to leave behind some artistic artifact as well.
Punk, by 1980, had become a cartoon, largely banished south to London where the New Romantics, Oi! and Antmusic waited in the wings to supplant it. Cope and his extended circle of friends in Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds kept to a stripped-down sensibility, cultivating a deadly serious pose even amid raucous times and sharp, engaging music. These were the days of Joy Division, The Fall, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks/Magazine, and the intial efforts of fellow Liverpudlian antagonists Echo and The Bunnymen.
The fledgling Teardrops returned from a quick trip to New York and were completing their first LP, Kilimanjaro. The rest of the band had indulged in drugs during the trip as a matter of course. A joint was now handed to Cope, who continually expressed dismay and scorn for such hippie indulgence. ("I was so anti-drugs. I though the Clash had sold out when they'd got on their spliff and reggae trip. Now I was the bass player in bloody Hawkwind."). He smoked, felt knots of tension and the psychic flotsam of a lifetime collect at the top of his head and wisp away into irrelevance.
A subsequent ingestion of acid sealed the deal. This was indeed a significant moment. The young Julian, supping up a new and totally alien psychoactive diet (in ever-greater quantities) reacted as if he'd been reborn, as if he now had access to a personal creative spirit, and the courage to forge something uniquely his. Everything changed, almost overnight.
The reader is led through this new life of wonder. It's creativity by default, art out of stupor one moment and breathtaking, hilarious risk the next. Whichever way his young life had gone until then, whatever music he might have made, Cope shows exactly how something completely new rose in and from him, and how that detached, impudent (yet ever-clever) persona led him more and more toward an angular, strange, amplified life.
Pleased with the results of the first book, he later penned memories of the years between the Winter '82 breakup of the Teardrops and his transitional, late-'80s frustrations. Those memories became Repossessed: Shamanic Depressions in London and Tamworth (1983-89). The two books were republished in 1999 as a single complete chronicle.

Cope's recollections point up an aspect of British Pop that is distinctly the island's own: a snide, almost jeering arrogance that most plainly manifests itself in a periodic disregard for such niceties of the biz as recording, promotion, and the opinion of beleaguered fans, and an indifference to making shows on time (or indeed, making them at all). To that end the group joined such notorious acts as the Smiths, Happy Mondays and later Oasis and the Stone Roses as practitioners of a musical expression that found release and popularity despite the musicians' efforts otherwise.
That kind of attitude can only be born on a small island where sport, drink and music are often the only outlets for the young. To a British kid Pop is suspect on its face: crap until proven otherwise, and even then it's a pitched, subjective battle to defend. Julian and his friends, enemies, rivals and female dalliances knew this in their hearts. It informed their entire lives. The stakes are higher, the music held closer to oneself.
Cope, unconsciously, weaves "types" into his story that draw specific demarcations as to class, occupation, taste and so on. For a boy born into a world of Teds, Mods, Hippies, Ferry and Bowie knockoffs and finally bondage-trousered poseurs, he ultimately abandons the clothes-and-hair stakes and directs his energy into his art.
Even though musician and band biographies have been around almost since the beginning of rock 'n' roll (largely as cash-ins), in the last 20 years there have been an avalanche of them. This seems natural, as we digest what's come before. Cope's memoir takes us back to one of the last few genuine upsurges in Pop's fecund, turbulent history. He blazed his own trail, and in so doing became one for the most underrated lyricists to emerge from the UK. This book captures the cultural, musical and personal madness that started that journey.

FILM

Dark Horse
In Postwar America the Soviet Union and Red China were so vast, so sprawling that they were almost an abstraction. Most people heard them mentioned daily, lived with the pronouncements of their leaders, and internalized a steady disquiet about those countries' aims, real or imagined. There weren't, however, many artistic treatments of their supposed intentions. One of the first was Richard Condon's 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate.
Director John Frankenheimer had an interest in adapting it for film, and enlisted the aid of screenwriter George Axelrod. The two obtained the rights cheaply, and although no studio would touch the proposed project, the pair - with the enthusiastic backing of Frank Sinatra - eventually gained the green light to film.
The story concerns itself with a soldier who, on patrol in Korea, is betrayed and captured alongside his men. Through brainwashing he's conditioned to be a blank slate, a killing machine, a weapon to be deployed in a shocking manner when sent back to the States. It's this premise that drew in a stellar group of actors for its film adaptation. The cast includes Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw (the young soldier in question), Frank Sinatra (as his C.O., Bennett Marco), Janet Leigh (as Marco's paramour, Rosie), and James Gregory and Angela Lansbury (as Shaw's parents, the McCarthyesque John Iselin and his vicious wife).
Released on October 24th, 1962 as Americans huddled under the very specific threat of a nuclear exchange, moviegoers were placed directly into the action as Shaw's patrol is overrun and captured. The stark titles appear over David Amram's coldly beautiful score, and the story is underway. A jump-cut trades Amram's strings for a Sousa march, played on an airstrip for Shaw's homecoming, at which point we also meet the oily Senator Iselin. Shaw, filled with disgust for his stepfather, declines to appear as a stooge for the latter's campaign - a position that will muddle the very specific plans set up around his return from combat.

Sinatra's enthusiasm resulted in a compelling turn as Major Marco, and his recurring nightmare sets up the first of many brilliant sequences. The patrol, brainwashed and conditioned, believes itself to be waiting out a storm in the lobby of a hotel. They slouch, smoke, and think nothing of the garden party speaker in their midst. As the camera begins a slow, 360-degree arc, the attendees are revealed to actually be ranking Chinese and Soviet scholars - the "speaker" a Chinese conditioning expert. Pieced together from six separate filmed combinations of "garden club" ladies and communist officials, it's a brilliant segment.
Time and again, Frankenheimer's camera crew and his and Axelrod's judicious, economical editing create powerful set pieces that move the story forward seamlessly. And though it states the obvious that shooting in black-and-white provides a lush, moody tone that's simply superior to color, that is utterly the case here. The interiors (amazingly, mostly created from whole cloth on a soundstage) are vivid, solid and smoky chambers which envelop their characters and absorb their tension. The characters themselves benefit as well, especially Harvey's contemptuous Shaw and Lansbury's softly wicked Mrs. Iselin. Their finely calibrated performances are immutably captured in Frankenheimer's lens, each barely containing the turmoil within.
To say that the story moves almost unbearably toward a truly shocking ending betrays nothing, as Axelrod's adaptation, including several extemporaneous moments, plays its cards out very shrewdly. Watching the movie again reveals just how much we've lost over the years, not only with basic content but with the basic mechanics of film, the skills that once elevated this medium to the level, above mere entertainment, of Craft.
There was, around the time of the movie's 1988 theatrical re-release, a story that claimed the film had been pulled shortly after JFK's assassination. This was later shown to be false, as the movie completed its initial run and was even shown on television a couple of times over the years. Whatever the case, it proved a very popular film, inspiring subsequent efforts such as Frankenheimer's own Seven Days in May in 1964, The Parallax View (1974) and the Charles Bronson vehicle Telefon (1977).
Its 1994 entry into the National Film Registry properly enshrined this magnificent tale, and bestowed upon it rightful status as a true classic.

MUSIC

Letting the sunshine in...
The truest, most vivid reflection of '60s counterculture didn't come from a book, a movie or a high-profile Rock band.
It came from two shaggy young New York writers who joined forces with a clean-cut composer to create a resonant, lasting meditation on youth and its restlessness and questing spirit.
James Rado and Gerome Ragni's friendship began in 1964. The two realized something was going on among not just the bohemians of the Village but in society at large, and influenced by alternative theatre pieces like Megan Terry's Viet Rock, they set out to put together a show of their own. Partnership with family man Galt MacDermot gave sound to their emergent lyrics - a pastiche of ideas about rebellion and celebration that they named Hair.
The show opened off-Broadway in 1967, and was staged on a simple set using found objects and castoff clothing, really whatever the cast appropriated and deemed visually interesting. American Indian and religious motifs were woven into the tableau to lend a spiritual yet funky air. In January 1968 the show closed at the Cheetah, then re-opened three months later on Broadway proper with some dramatic changes. Tom O'Horgan was brought in as Creative Director, there were 13 new songs and the show now packed a serious dramatic wallop.

It tells the story of a young man named Claude, who encounters a group of drop-outs intent on shedding the expectations and pressures of modern life. Within that rejection is the germ of a new way, a new approach to life that emphasizes joy and temporal pleasure as the truly desirable path toward happiness.
The success of the play took its three creators by surprise, as did its spread. It ran on Broadway for 1,750 performances over four years, and in London for almost 2,000 performances. Rado & Ragni played various parts in both the New York and Los Angeles productions, and watched as their work spread to Europe, Asia and South America as well. Interestingly, the play changed, evolved and took on a life of its own. Wherever the piece went it incorporated local references and themes. Musical numbers were changed, expanded, traded. It was the antithesis of the rigidly scripted, traditional theatrical approach, and its free-wheeling nature and content drew the wrath of some.
The play's celebration of all things hirsute (wonderfully summoned forth in the bittersweet title song) is a shot across the bow, but other songs charge the ramparts. The kids itemize their chemical options in "Hashish," then catalog various sexual variations in "Sodomy." One of the Tribe, a militant Black character named Hud, rattles off a laundry list of slurs in "I'm Black/Colored Spade."
These confrontations are needed, but it's the several core songs which give Hair its dynamic impact and staying power. From declarations such as "I Got Life" and "Easy To Be Hard" to "Where Do I Go?" the songs create a yearning for something which may or may not be attainable. Of course, "Aquarius" and "Good Morning Starshine" are linchpins of the show, and have since been re-recorded and re-interpreted endlessly. One example of the material's easy adaptation was the Fifth Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" which the group took to #1 in 1969.
The Original Cast Recording was released in 1968, garnered a Best Original Score Grammy and sold 3 million copies. It was followed by a recording of the London cast, and even a Version Originale Francais. Of note is RCA's follow-up release, 1970's DisinHAIRited, which collected various numbers which fell in and out of the performance, some of which never appeared on stage. This addendum moved to its own brassy propulsion and contained acid-dipped mountain folk, lysergic Vaudeville, and breezy Hippie whimsy of every stripe.

Revivals of the stage show sprang up in 1977, 1985 and 1988. There was even a 1979 film adaptation with Beverly D'Angelo and Treat Williams. In 2009 it reappeared on Broadway, and it's been a fixture in some venue or other ever since.
The sages of the era inhabited a spectrum that spanned heightened awareness and exploration (Kesey, Leary et al) all the way through disruption and unrest (Eldridge Cleaver, the Yippies). The Hair Tribe embody both in a swirling, ecstatic rush, and thus the play and its music will always offer a spectacle of life, love and joy.

PERIODICALS

Warhol's world...and Beyond
A pretty, throwaway bauble--now in its fourth decade and growing ever more complex? That's Interview magazine.
The magazine was begun by Andy Warhol and British journalist John Wilcock.
The premise centered on celebrity and its shiny trappings, and served to document the frenzy of New York's last shabby-chic, coke-fueled heyday. Stars spoke candidly with other stars, and a format was born. Maybe it was meant to last, maybe not, but it captured the beautiful people and their doings. Having Newton, Mapplethorpe, LaChapelle, and Avedon around can't have hurt on the visual end, either. The magazine has persevered, though, and come into its own. The beautiful people remain, but readers may also avail themselves of an indepth look into our increasingly fertile, interdependent cultural life.

In addition to capsule reviews such as Agenda (everything from books and theatre to art showings, furniture, and various odds and ends) to Capture (trends and passing notes of interest), each issue features hot figures of the moment, such as Kristen Stewart and James Franco, but also young comers like Augustus Prew and Felicity Jones. Music is well-covered and eclectic, introducing such widely varied performers as M.I.A., Danish Pop sensation Nanna Fabricus, Brooklyn-based Jay Electronica, and Capetown's frenzied, confrontational duo Die Antwoord. Then there are the pieces on artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Larry Clark and Romain Gavras.
The publication's best profiles help us sort out the onslaught of images and input we're now asked to process, as with a fine piece on Los Angeles artist Shepard Fairey. Fairey is the man responsible for the instantly iconic Obama "Hope" poster, but also for the "Obey Giant" campaign which featured a stencil-sprayed Andre the Giant hovering above a series of cryptic slogans. The interview contemplates the creative process, but also the snares and distractions the lifestyle creates.
Most strikingly, Interview occasionally forces the reader to confront biases and presuppositions, as with its story on Brian Donnelly, who began as a graffitist, then moved on to guerilla modification of existing signage before producing his own work, which includes sculpture, toys and other unexpected creative choices as well. Donnelly, grounded in the arts and artists of the past, proves to be no cheap vandal. Current Nike CEO Mark Parker confounds as well, having put together a traveling art project called Stages that at once ponders the Tour de France and the altogether different battle of cancer.

Part of the magazine's scope does indeed involve the fashion world, and as New York City is one of the three or four crucial fashion cities in the world, this is to be expected. It must be remembered that a) it's not going to cover the happenings in Des Moines and b) even if there were radical goings-on there, they still wouldn't receive the mag's attention. It is what it is. Come to the City, it says, and there are a large percent of creative types who will, who do, and that's the point.
My greater point is that when a designer is profiled, it's invariably within the context of his or her inspirations and collaborations. Almost everything here is a study in collaboration on some level or other, and the resultant picture is a thriving artistic milieu. Most people will never drop in on the Missoni family while they're being painstakingly shot by radical film auteur Kenneth Anger, but through these pages, they can be there if only vicariously.

TUBE

Good times with Good Eats
On February 11th, 1963, a lively, matronly woman named Julia Child debuted a new program called The French Chef on WGBH Boston. Her surprise smash 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and an engaging personal style made her a natural for television, and she became a household name in the popularization of cooking as well as the expansion of American palates.
Brit Graham Kerr followed in her footsteps. Grounded in cooking and catering from a young age, he enjoyed early success with his first book, Entertaining with Kerr. This he followed with The Galloping Gourmets, a name which he used (in the singular) for a hit show which aired from 1969-71 and is remembered fondly today.
A fellow named Alton Brown took in these influences (as well as an avowed affection for shows such as Watch Mr. Wizard) and created a show which first aired on Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW in July 1998. The show, simply titled Good Eats, was picked up a year later by Food Network.

Brown doesn't simply discuss food and its preparation, nor just the proper tools, implements and tips to optimize one's results. He provides the history of his subject, be it a sauce, beverage, dessert, side dish or centerpiece of a hearty meal. He works in the physical properties of his subjects as well, presented in laymen's terms, and so creates a fascinating whole as he explores the episode's theme. This exposition is discussed throughout his prep, with an array of visual aids from basic (Tinkertoys, blackboards) to elaborate (custom props to illustrate specific concepts).
A recent airing of the episode "All Hallows' Eats" was a great reason to explore the properties of sucrose, in this case its differing aspects when used in candy corn, candy apples and popcorn balls - all deftly whipped up by Brown in the course of just one taping.
The program turns on its infectious, playful energy and is clearly a vehicle for imagination. Brown dispenses lightning-fast cultural in-jokes and references, and the episode titles are a reflection of this: "Crepe Expectations," "The Dough Also Rises," Cuckoo for Coq au Vin" and so forth. Cast and even family augment his presentations, either as themselves or as a number of recurring characters, and he's quick to feature guest chefs, writers and dietitians.
In a medium that's long felt compelled to dumb itself down to hold viewer interest, Brown is having none of it. He's carved out a niche to amuse and teach about a subject that's so much more than stuffing something in our mouths, and we're the luckier for it.

So ends number two.
It was fun!
If you like it, hey, subscribe.
We'll see where it all goes.

(Ideally) Bringing the Noise...

By the time of the Dead Kennedys' 3rd LP (1985's Frankenchrist), Jello Biafra was straining the limits of the hardcore format, or at least its parameters. The closing track, "The Stars and Stripes of Corruption," passed the six-minute mark handily, and Biafra was forced into squeezing too much verbiage into too little time. After follow-up Bedtime for Democracy he put the band on hold to a) attend to his obscenity trial but also to b) embrace spoken-word, where he could truly stretch out and fully develop his ideas.

So who cares?

I'm just saying that this blog will expand upon ideas that are too hard to pursue elsewhere, either as a testy crack on Facebook or (worse yet) lobbed into the laps of another batch of co-workers who are baffled by anything outside their comfort zone, or who simply don't give a damn. I'll also get to natter on about books, movies and so forth that I feel are worthy of a look, and in that regard hope that some interesting conversation can be established. There's nothing better that finding a new movie or band, and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.

So if we're all bundled up and have had a nip for the road, let's get underway.

CURRENTS

"Yes We 'Stan!...er...Can!"

We've supposedly pulled out of Iraq, but it's a bit too late. We were overexcited - frenzied even - while we were in there, and we've left some of Uncle Sam's pearls behind...reportedly, about 50,000 such pearls. The poor, bedraggled country is now knocked up, and within a few months we should be seeing a healthy, happy regional command outpost there, ready to charm the area and its endlessly combative inhabitants.

Mazel Tov!

Now we can consistently turn our attention to the country so dusty, mountainous and full of Old Testament movie props that it makes Baghdad look like the Biltmore: Afghanistan.

If it seems intractable, if it seems endless, if it seems like a money-pit...an insoluble quagmire, that's because it is. One simple reason is the currently debauched nature of war and its philosophies. Over most of humankind's history, war was waged for many reasons, most of them shameful, misguided or irredeemably evil. The end goal remained the same, however: the utter and complete destruction of the enemy, period.

Therefore, two very shameful aspects arise about Iraqistan. We didn't go for any proper reason, and once there we didn't utterly destroy everything in our path. Stupid, disingenuous, manipulative deceit seems to govern our foreign policy, and when you apply such an approach to war you get lives wasted, blood and money poured into the sand. For nothing. The chickenhawks who've burrowed into the far Right and made cozy nests have been quick to chime in about Vietnam being past us and bristling at the mere mention of any comparisons.

As far as Vietnam goes, if Iraq was where we played out those comparisons that indeed existed (nebulous, unilateral aggression against a sovereign nation under fabricated pretenses; failure to address the subsequent enemy response, instead tying the hands of the average soldier through top-down bureaucracy; a "mission" that changed and evolved until it was unrecognizable; a populace that was largely one thing by day and another by night, with widely shifting sympathies; enrichment of the corporate war machine, and so forth), Afghanistan is where we'll establish a record for engagement in a vast, ongoing enterprise that could easily bankrupt us and diminish our armed forces' strength when we may need it most.

Oh, and when we were mired in Vietnam, we could afford to lose a million dollars' worth of helicopters a day. We were then enjoying the most freakishly robust economy the world had ever seen. Those days are long gone, and we've now got to look over our shoulder every time China farts or there's a blip in the Euro's fortunes...

You can't blame Petraeus. He's prosecuting the war as best he knows how, as a good soldier does. To expect him to wring his hands or discuss withdrawal is not in his nature, so to put him back in that position just clouds the entire discussion.

We've got to move past the mentality of waging a major European campaign, over a static, identifiable landmass, with rigid boundaries, quantifiable troop movements and Xs, Os and arrows that can be pushed and pulled around a chalkboard. It was easy to identify the German soldier: he was the fellow in the snappy Wehrmacht gray with the coal-scuttle helmet who was trying to kill you, day or night, rain or shine. He wasn't a smiling pushcart vendor by day and a stealthy, creeping assassin when night fell.

Furthermore, if we're going to continue to pursue that most dubious of Vietnam holdovers, the "train them to look after themselves" goal, we'd better drum up a better crop of candidates.

Christina Lamb recently published an indepth examination of the country's armed forces, especially its burgeoning "police" force, in the Sunday Times of London. She found ragtag bands of stoned, unbathed, largely illiterate opportunity seekers who think nothing of promptly exchanging uniforms and weaponry for money, taking kickbacks routinely and gearing their routines toward the next opium-clouded solicitation of UN troops. The icing on the cake is the open practice of donning makeup and dandying up in general as a prelude to a night of cruising their comrades.

This is all fine and well outside a war zone - hey, whatever. Knock yourself out. But is it wrong of me to expect to see ranks of soldiers locked in formation, with looks of grim determination etched into slablike, impassive faces, weapons at the ready to dispel and dispatch the frothing bogies coming over the hill? Isn't that what I, the American taxpayer am shelling out for? I'm not really thrilled about ponying up my hard-earned billions for grimacing ass-kickers with mayhem on their mind, and instead getting the cast of a Kabul summer-stock Cats.

Maybe I can just numb myself to endure several more years of occupation in that sandpit, doling out further trainloads of money so bedouins can load up on Blu-Ray players and Tommy shorts. At least - I beg - shut up with the "...fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" jazz. Then I gotta just close up shop.

BOOKS

Larry McMurtry and the Printed Page

It'll be interesting to see how the Kindle (Amazon) vs. Nook (Barnes & Noble) contest plays out. Granted, they're diverting little devices, and apparently all non-copyrighted material is available free. Who knew? Now you can mull over The Prince or von Clausewitz's On War gratis. Cool! I'm still a book person, though, who's happy that the printed page is still not only alive, but thriving.

I do find it odd that when I walk into my local Barnes & Noble that the first thing that I see when I walk in the door is a Nook kiosk. I mean, if all your customers buy a Nook, what about your store full of dead-tree copies?

I'm just sayin'.

I first encountered Larry McMurtry through the film adaptation of his novel The Last Picture Show (which remains possibly my favorite movie ever). From there it was on to other of his many novels and memoirs, including the drily hilarious Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Therefore it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon another collection of his recollections and observations, 2008's Books: A Memoir.

I had no clue that yes, he'd pursued an enviable life as a man of letters, including the penning of Lonesome Dove (considered to be a towering and evocative Western, even though it was intended to deflate the Western mythos) but that he considers himself above all to be in the book trade...a seller, hunter, wrangler of books. How interesting!

After his early years in north central Texas, following an almost-accidental exposure to a small cache of books, McMurtry discusses a move to San Francisco and his initial involvement in the pursuit of books as avocation, commodity and thrilling quarry all in one. After subsequent periods in Houston and then on the East Coast as an increasingly shrewd and repected dealer, he repaired again to Archer City, his windswept hometown southwest of Wichita Falls.

It's from there that he offers this vast life's accumulation of books, spread over four buildings, and continues to pour forth words from a serviceable old typewriter.

Now there's the mark of a writer who's stubborn for all the right reasons. We need people like him, those who care not about passing trends and dire pronouncements about dying this and declining that. Vita Brevis, Ars Longa - and McMurtry, even if it was in a roundabout, distracted way - would be the first to agree.

FILM

The Walls Have Ears

Germany's young have only to ask their elders about the ugly wall that tore the country asunder for a generation, that is, if those elders will talk about it.

Writer/director Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck appeared on the cinema scene in 2006 with his initial offering, Das Leben der Anderen, or The Lives of Others. At the center of a superb cast are an interrogator for East Germany's Staatssicherheit (State Security Agency), the "Stasi," named Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) and his boss, Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur). As there is favor to be curried in any situation in East Berlin in 1984, the two set their sights on a possibly subversive playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch).

Dreyman's girlfriend, prominent actress Christa-Maria Sieland (a fantastic Martina Gedeck) has caught the eye of a local senior Stasi official, and by creating doubts around Dreyman and many of his far-more radical colleagues, she may be more readily available. So begins this finely wrought examination of hypocrisy and naked abuse of power, abuse that becomes increasingly evident as Wiesler begins his surveillance of the playwright's home and friends.

While the film received a mixed reception in Germany - owing to several factors, including discomfort with the country's period of East-West polarity and charges of soft-pedaling the Stasi's brutality - it was a hit there regardless and went on to great worldwide acclaim, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, a Golden Globe nomination, and hearty receptions at film festivals from London to Vancouver to Copenhagen.

Gabriel Yared's austere score underpins the developments perfectly, and somehow manages a simmering foreboding while remaining moored in the characters' basic search for decency and meaning.

Wiesler's search quickens after his theft of a volume of Brecht from Dreyman (and his subsequent immersion in its language) that brings to mind nothing so much as Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 - reading a furtively filched book to his wife and her friends until the women are uncomfortable, distraught and angered. Wiesler is swayed by these lives he monitors, and his position gnaws at him. It's enough to raise the eyebrows of Grubitz, who is ever the true believer and vigilant of those who'd stray.

Grubitz, in fact, is at center of the film's most subtly terrifying scene. He overhears a junior staffer telling a joke about (party chairman) Erich Honeker, joins in the laughter then coldly asks the man's name, title and department. As the man blanches in fear Grubitz erupts again in laughter.

The film's title holds, at its heart, the sad truth about totalitarianism and its obsessions: in expending your energies in pursuit of offenses real and imagined, you only lose yourself.

MUSIC

The "Thin White Duke" Redux

Of exceeding joy to Bowie-philes is the reissue of his 1976 LP Station to Station.

Apparently the base package comes as a 3-CD set, and includes an often-bootlegged show from the Nassau Coliseum tour stop. More tantalizing is a 5-CD/DVD/triple vinyl package that contains that material in addition to a raft of memorabilia as well, and would well justify the knocking over of a 7-11.

Bowie broke in the States with 1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and by the time of the following year's brilliant Aladdin Sane had become certified Rock royalty. Writers and photogs alike fought for a few precious moments with David, wife Angie and even platform-booted toddler son Zowie (who these days is better known as film director Duncan Jones, which is Bowie's birth surname). Further muscle flexing occurred with an unusually strong covers album called Pin-Ups, woozily decadent Diamond Dogs and the unfairly maligned Young Americans.

It was in a coddled mid-'70s Los Angeles that the singer found himself: a little nuts, stir-crazy and helped along in his caged tension by mountains of blow. There'd be one more record before his escape to Berlin and the cleansing trio of stark recordings he'd make there. That record was Station to Station.

Sleek, anodyne and concise, the album joins Bowie with two superb guitarists, Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar, the latter of which played alongside the singer through his later early-'80s Pop breakthrough. Much has been made of the differing musical styles on hand, seeing as they include further explorations of his "soul" mood on "Stay" and the hooky classic "Golden Years," but also the wildly divergent strut of "TVC15" as well as a delicate, insistent piece like "Word on a Wing." Some critics got on board, some scratched their heads.

And what a boarding it began as. The listener hears a locomotive leaving the station, wheels grinding forward, chugging forward ever faster as it builds, and is joined first by bass and then the angular scratch of plectrum on string. Bowie primes us for "The return of the Thin White Duke," cold, detached, and "...throwing darts in lovers' eyes." His insistence grows as he develops the song's motifs, growling "...the European canon is here" as he prepares for a physical - and psychic - departure from his numbed American stasis.

The choice of Nina Simone's "Wild is the Wind" as a closer offers a laser-focus, close-but-untouchable moment, then he's away again...another dim night, another smoldering Gitane...

PERIODICALS

Rock Rag as Hagiography: Carving the Past in (Rolling) Stone

As I'm prone to trawling for stacks of magazines (as a bulwark against slow stretches at work), I recently happened upon a stack of Rolling Stone.

Like many other music & culture lovers I cut my teeth with the magazine as a teenager, along with other titles such as Crawdaddy, Circus and the wild 'n woolly Creem. Accordingly, I've followed it over the years as the content shrank and the slickness and glad-handing hero worship ballooned, seemingly with no end in sight.

The magazine was started by Jann Wenner, a Bay Area college kid who began to publish as a way to spread his enthusiasm about the new (and in 1967, Pop was absolutely new) sound. It was the kind of place where you could submit a few pieces and find yourself a staff writer, as did Cameron Crowe. Also in the firmament were Dave Marsh, Robert Christgau, Ben Fong-Torres and many other writers who made substantial contributions. There was even room for the sprawling, occasionally coherent eruptions of Hunter S. Thompson, and loads of coverage of the turbulent political and social ferment of the time.

Then came a 1977 move to New York City, just in time for a Studio 54-enamored era of seeing and being seen, and from then on the die was cast. Although there were still another 10 - 15 good years left in the old girl, the magazine seemed now to be cultivating flash, while simultaneously calcifying into a wax museum for its aging subjects.

This coincided with further attention paid to garbage that the previous staff would've roundly hooted out of play, including rapt examinations of seemingly every talentless bimbette who's shown up to a cover shoot ready to get nekkid. Where can one even start? With the listing of ringtones on the charts at the back, thus granting this pathetic trend credibility? With the breathless embrace of hip-hop, even as that movement swallows it own tail? Memo to whitebread RS: repeated references to "Fitty" gain you nothing but laughter within the cloisters of hip-hop's ruling mandarins.

Worse yet are the fall-back options of the truly lazy...the "100 Best" this or the "500 Best" that. How many times can we see Dylan, Van Morrison and Hendrix sealed anew in amber? Worse still is the new trend of having the performers emote about each others' work, where you're sure to find endless variants of so-and-so "just totally going to another place" on record x...after a while, or seen over time, the effect is numbing.

So that's where we are with this particular eminence grise...until the old guard finally all die off and we're left with 6-page feature rhapsodies about (shudder) Jack White.

TUBE

TV Seasons: No More in Our Cultural Blender

We've just finished the fourth season of Mad Men, an addictive show that's not just watchable for its writing, but for its fanatical re-creation of 1960s New York City and the besotted, smoke-wreathed denizens of its advertising world. It was an enjoyable season, but truncated nonetheless, at least by traditional television standards. A strange inversion in scheduling hobbled it as well, as it began in the summer and is closing in mid-autumn.

The words "season finale" can now be chucked about anywhere, anytime, regardless of whether only six or seven shows have aired. Apparently the new format or standard is that there isn't one. Perhaps this is just pointless kvetching, but I do it for a reason.

Television was once a stable entity. That is to say, the programming season began in September and concluded in late May, making way for summer re-runs while viewers were ostensibly otherwise occupied. Shows were given a chance to build an audience - to stumble and address shortcomings. One prominent example is Seinfeld, which took two solid seasons to generate buzz. If it hadn't surely begun the trend, though, the '90s introduced the concept of the "mid-season replacement" shows, which were usually delivered en masse in order to roll the dice and hope something struck a chord.

Part of the problem was the advent of cable, and later, satellite. Suddenly there were 24 hours per day, seven days per week to cram full of...something. Although the days of a mass cultural touchstone, such as M*A*S*H or The Carol Burnett Show are gone, it's a shame that it's still tough to even cobble together a niche audience.

I remember those heady days of grade school, when the three networks showed previews of their new Fall cartoon lineups. Cafeteria discussions of the comparative merits of these lineups took on the gravitas of a UN Security Council meeting...ah, but that was another time.

So concludes this first installment. I hope it's been good to you. Peace.