It's a Minor-Chord Masterpiece...

Here we are in 2011, eh? Wonder if we'll make it 'til next year, to see if our Mayan grand-daddies were right, y'know, about all that cataclysmic-change unpleasantness? Until then, we can at least track our own individual afflictions. To that end, the CDC has classified and released another new batch o' diseases, for which we may rush headlong to purchase colored lapel pins.

I've helpfully included some of this new guide:

24-Hour Lymphadenopathy (periwinkle), Samoan Leopard Rash (yellow/black), Pinkney's Digit (well, it's pink, innit?), Petulant Toenail (goldenrod), Nervous Folliculitis (aquamarine), Furtive Colon Syndrome (sunburst orange), Echolalia (Red #5), Twilight Sweats (angry purple) and Rapid-Cycling Ennui (either mauve or magenta...oh God, what does it matter?...what does it all mean??!!) and so forth.

So let's all show a little support, eh?

CURRENTS

That was Reveille, Honey

I met lots of different people in my comings and goings while on four years of active duty in the US Army.

One of those that left a deep impression indeed was a hard-charging young female E-6. She was an Aviation Refueling Specialist, and someone who - by anyone's yardstick - was a superb soldier.

She was also as gay as the day is long.

No banner-waving, hysteria, nothing set her apart as someone who also wore BDUs, someone who also had a job to do. That's a good thing about the military: it redirects existing or potential prejudices, so that it is often far easier to simply see someone as another service member.

I don't know what she did in her off-time, and furthermore don't care, but I rather suspect she wasn't hitting on every female with a pulse. There are problems to a degree with the modern military, problems which reflect a society in transition. It's no longer all-white (which it was until 1948) or all-male (which it was until 1978). Yet these within-the-ranks problems largely stem from the successful integration of women into those ranks. Where the "gay" kerfuffle erupted from, I'm unsure.

President Obama repealed the Clinton-era Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy on December 22nd, and there are plenty of people up in arms. Radio's clarion-calling Mark Levin equated the repeal to nothing less than an assault on one of the few remaining bulwarks of our society, but is it really?

Is there really a war room somewhere filled with vaguely tousled, driving-moc wearing, John Varvatos-scented radicals who are chuckling over driving another chink in America's armor? Over the advance in their nefarious timetable toward some swishing, mincing debauched barracks? It's laughable. (For that matter, I saw debauchery in the barracks, and it was pretty damned hetero).

We've all seen and heard interviews of people who were in the military, enlisted or officer, some of whom saw combat, and who lived in mortal fear of being known for who they were. How sad. Here are a group of people who only want to do what they feel is right - they want to do what they believe will defend their country! How is that wrong, O hard-righters, many or most of whom have no idea about miltary life because you've never served?

The icing on the cake is that these people want to serve at this particular moment, during this astonishingly ill-advised and ongoing foreign adventure. That should mean something. Willingness to stick out your neck on the nebulous, shifting (literal) sands of the 21st-century battlefield really is remarkable.

C'mon.

Does every straight person walk around in a state of arousal, entranced by and lustful for every person of the opposite sex they see?? Then why would a gay person? And can I please make a point that I've never seen made anywhere during this whole stupid debate?

I'm mentally going over a list of gay friends and acquaintances I've had in life...gauging, in my mind, the prospect of them going into the military with its privations, difficulties, and most importantly - utter adherence to uniformity and routine. Can I imagine any of them charging the gates to enlist?

No. That's no disparagement, either: most would probably tell you the same thing. A Pentagon report was released recently that dovetailed with the repeal, saying it just wouldn't be the nightmare it's been painted as. Apparently, nearly 70 per cent of 115,000 troops surveyed said the controversy was hot air, as they'd already known of a gay serviceperson.

If I'm wrong, then, someone come along and steer me, er, straight.

BOOKS

A Journey Toward Understanding

Carl Gustav Jung was an amazing man, to say the very least.

He saw the emergence of psychotherapy in the first two decades of the 20th Century as a wonderful convergence of medicine and spiritual analysis. As he immersed himself in its practice, he opened himself and his sensibilities (he was a man already given to perceptions of the immensity of human experience, both natural and supernatural) to a world that produced in him insight, revelation, and not a little madness.

It's him that we have to thank for personality "types," for "projection" and the corollary phenomenon of the "persona," for "individuation," for archetypes and synchronicity and that great, dim germ of being, the Collective Unconscious (itself a refinement of and move beyond Freud's personal unconscious). He dwelled from a young age in a seeming receptivity to dreams and (literal, it seems) visions, events which affected him deeply while steadily broadening his personal and professional quest.

The 2009 release of Liber Novum (aka the "Red Book") was cause for celebration, as Jung's trustees were finally releasing this large, brilliantly illustrated journal for the first time. It renewed interest in a man who we'll most likely always find worthy of repeated visits.

Jung scholar Dr. David Rosen made a pilgrimage to Switzerland in the mid '90s to experience Jung's world and dwellings at closer range. He found in his reflections a man who not only hewed to his own (European) experience and understanding but that also discovered deep meaning in the preserved wisdom of the East, and in particular the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu. That text sought to impart the Tao (the "way") and its simple flow, through both life and those who were open to its deceptively simple messages.

Rosen, in The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity (New York: Viking Arkana, 1996) illustrates the connection Rosen made between the two mens' work. The reconciliation of opposites was of prime importance to Jung, and Rosen sees this everywhere in the marrow of the Tao. From the complement and conflict of male/female, water/fire, inward/outward, he drew some of his firmest conclusions.

Consider his juxtapositions from 1916's Septem Sermonos ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), the nothingness and dissolution of the plemora which is contrasted with the ideal state of creatura ("...we die in such measure as we do not distinguish," he wrote); the duality of t'ai chi in contrast with wholeness of wu-chi; the self 1 of the persona, the old (Freud) ego-base in contrast with one's true, revealed self 2, Self/Tao, and the creation of art as an external thing made by an outer person with everyday needs and concerns in contrast to the person themselves as art.

Rosen's path while on his trip contained significant stretches of solitude, and he learned about the duality of that as well. It fed his spirit, but also amplified his understanding of otherness, of the path of enlightenment, of the burden of revealed truths. It's a book that's well-worth reading.

Richard Noll has more to add on the subject of Jung. In 1997 he published The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. Noll exhautively consulted theretofore-unpublished primary sources - thus steering as clear as possible of presuppositions and bias - and produced a biography of Jung that delves deeply into the fads and fancies of Germany during its heady 19th-century glory. These include most of the amusements that swept the rest of the world, including mesmerism, seances and other forms of bogus spirituality, but also the growing fascination with the ideas of Volk and Kultur, of land and blood and the ancient Aryan glories of figures such as Arminius, ferocious fighter of the Romans.

Jung was born into this heady milieu, and even traced his personal family to memberships in several of these proud, emergent, staunchly Teutonic enclaves. Noll makes a case for Jung as the developer of a cult of personality around himself, with plenty of supplicants to appreciate his gifts and insights. He also damns as a peurile hagiography the compilation of Jung's thought that was Meanings, Dreams, Reflections, the 1962 "autobiography" which Noll states was merely cobbled together by Jung intimate Aniela Jaffe and contains little critical effort.

He delves deeply into Jung's 1913 break with Freud, with the conclusion that the disassocation left the younger man in a turbulent period during which his explorations into his own shadows led to a literal self-deification 1916, whereupon he saw himself as a Mithraic god with the head of a lion. As a harrowing of Jung's flawed brilliance, Noll's book bears study.

There are several primers of the man and his work, but those seeking an indepth biographical account (containing, yet again, untapped sources and material) should seek out Ronald Hayman's excellent 2001 work Jung: A Life, in which Hayman succeeds in presenting a truly balanced portrait of Jung and his complexities.

Whichever way the reader turns, there is much food for thought to be had from the playful, wizened seeker Carl jung.

FILM

The Holy Madman of Network
What can you say about a film that provides a deft, blackly satirical commentary on modern media? That includes serious firepower both in front of and behind the camera? That offers the most deeply prescient monologue ever captured on film?

The film is Network, and it's all the more chilling because it was released in 1976, fully pre-dating the rise of cable TV with its 24-hour news cycle and desperate need for programming, no matter the increasing stench. There was a time when Hollywood still had something to say, and the means to say it. There were identifiable divisions between things - newspapers, TV, movie studios - and you could make a point. Sidney Lumet, at the top of his game, did just that.

Faye Dunaway is the statuesque, resolutely braless (it was the '70s, one supposes) Diana Christensen, a lower-level programming exec at failing TV network UBS. She wants something new, something with theatricality..."angry" shows, anti-establishment stuff. She sees in Howard Beale an opportunity.

Beale has been told he has two weeks left on the air due to flagging ratings. He promptly, on the air, promises to commit suicide one week hence. Given a chance to recant by Max Schumacher (a brilliant William Holden), he launches instead into a tirade: it's all bullshit, this "...daily parade of lunacy that constitutes the news!" Frank Hackett, point man for CCA - the corporation that's poised to take over the ailing station - is apoplectic, but then the ratings come in. Beale's a smash.

He's kept on, but with the proviso that the "prophet" bit be dropped. He's moved beyond such considerations, however, either having had a breakdown of some sort or, as he reports to Schumacher, having truly been "imbued" with some new insight. Hackett, impatient, green-lights Howard as the anchor, literally, of the news, with rancorous result. Beale is a man afire, bellowing at the cowed yet rapt audience the words that they then scream from their windows (and which have become a pop-culture punchline): "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

His star burns brightly. The station's evening news slot is re-done as shtick, with Beale heading things up as its anguished focus. There he is, pacing, feverish, on a black studio set - the audience in his thrall - framed only by a circular stained-glass window, and he eviscerates them. They're idiots, driven completely by the "tube," and he demands they turn off their sets now. "You people are reality!" he shrieks, scarcely in control. "We are the illusion [and] we'll give you any shit you want to hear!"

Lumet and DP Owen Roizman sculpt the characters wonderfully, and perhaps no one more than Dunaway's Christensen: during an illicit getaway with the married Schumacher, her every waking moment is permeated with chatter about her programs and their development. For her, TV constitutes even foreplay.

Television veteran Beatrice Straight gets one of the most shockingly affecting scenes. When Max reveals the affair with Christensen, Straight's Louise Schumacher reacts with subtle gradations of pain, anger, and defiance. Her confrontation takes all of five minutes 40 seconds, yet it garnered her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress - the shortest performance ever to land the award.

Paddy Chayefsky was a seasoned writer who'd worked in TV and Broadway, and whose later works included the stark Altered States. His screenplay offers a healthy dose of the absurd to the proceedings, as at the meeting with Laureen Hobbs (around whom Christensen is building a hopeful ratings hit called The Mao Tse Tung Hour). The topic is ratings and distribution, and a battery of lawyers are present. Hobbs (Marlene Warfield, channeling Angela Davis) seethes at the prospect of her money being tampered with. Her fellow revolutionary (and co-star) finally fires his pistol in rage, closing the argument. "Man, give her the fuckin' overhead clause," he demands.

Ned Beatty's Arthur Jensen appeals to Beale personally, and as the head of CCA he must make the man understand precisely what's at stake. There are no nations any more, as he explains, only dollars, only corporations. "It is currency...that determines the totality of life on this planet," he plays out slowly. "That is the natural order of things today." Beale has stepped on that arrangement. "All necessities are provided," continues Jensen. "All anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused." Thus is Beale armed for his greatest declamation yet.

In another finality, Max leaves Diana. He makes no bones, either, he's the last thing tethering her to flawed humanity, the only bulwark against the "shrieking nothingness" that otherwise constitutes her life. "You're madness, and everything you touch dies with you," he says. "But not me." He's another man from another time, with only memories of bracing newsroom deadlines, Ed Murrow, and a medium not yet given full rein in the minds of its viewers.

As the madness grows, Diana proposes a truly radical measure to save the station. Hackett and company sign off on it, and Beale then charges, howling, into the void.

Lumet was already a formidable presence when he directed the film. His imprint shaped 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Fail-Safe and Serpico. The year previous, he'd helmed Dog Day Afternoon, another triumph. He picked up a Golden Globe for Best Director, Chayefsky received Best Screenplay, while Finch and Dunaway scored Best Actor and Actress. The latter three repeated their feat with matching Oscars (Finch, sadly, posthumously), while Straight was awarded the aforementioned Best Supporting Actress Oscar: the film's nominations totalled ten.

As if to underscore the movie's enduring passion and message, it was named one of the Top 10 Movie Scripts by the Writers' Guild of America in 2006. It was a fitting capstone for a film that remains as gripping as it ever was, with a message more resonant now than ever.

MUSIC

Brothers in Arms

In May 1974, Island Records released Kimono My House by expatriate Los Angeleno brothers Ron and Russell Mael, whose band was called Sparks.
The group weren't unknowns: they'd already appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test to mixed reception. The appearance wrinkled a few brows, but spread awareness greatly and increased their growing fanbase further. They'd soon blow the lid off the premier UK program, the venerated Top of the Pops, on which they umlimbered a stomping workout called "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us." The single hit #2 UK, the LP #4. Sparks' reputation as left-field, larger-than-life innovators with boundless energy and sui generis sensibilities was established.

They were products of '60s L.A., and pursued art and film studies at UCLA while soaking in both the Sunset Strip scene and the progressive new crop of bands from England. Music seemed a natural outlet, and after a couple of attempts at forming a band (Moonbaker Abbey and Urban Renewal Project), they settled on the name Halfnelson.
Halfnelson produced a 12-song demo called A Woofer In Tweeter's Clothing which - its status as a demo aside - came in a deluxe package, the better to catch the reviewer's eye, perhaps. The band's lineup settled, by 1971, as Ron on keyboards, Russell as vocalist, Earle Mankey on guitar, Jim Mankey on bass and Harley Feinstein on drums, and this is the group that caught the ear of Todd Rundgren. Rundgren lobbied Albert Grossman for the act to record for Grossman's Bearsville label, with Rundgren producing.

The album was recorded and released as by Halfnelson, even as a February 1971 name change to Sparks took place. Here was the fruit of the brothers' efforts, and it's as if they sprung, fully formed, from the forehead of L.A.'s creative community. Even among fans the debut is perhaps underrated, even though it offers arguably the most consistently amazing pop debut ever from US shores.

We kick off with a perfectly constructed, pleasantly cantering number called "Wonder Girl," a song that was the germ of their UK popularity, then encounter "Fa La Fa Lee," an arrangement marked by bold tempo changes and Ron's interactions with both guitar and rhythm section. The taut "High C" fully anticipates swooning, anthemic '70s FM before it even exists, but still makes room for vocal flourishes aplenty. Next, "Fletcher Honorama" is an elegant slice of psychedelia appended with music-hall piano that appears as through ether.

The grandeur and world-weary cabaret vocals of Russell transform "Simple Ballet" and "Slowboat," two swaying, moody, quietly insistent songs that build into undeniable emotional crescendos. Earle Mankey contributes the vocal on "Biology 2," a mutated love ditty driven forward by a synth riff that beats Devo to the punch by half a decade. The group's unique orthodoxy informs "Roger" and "Saccharine and the War," which simply cannot be explained: "Big Bands" percolates along nicely until jumping in for the finish with a rocking conclusion complete with a spoken overlay.

The LP ends with a six-minute "No More Mr. Nice Guys," which perfectly measures out its coiled energy and ends in a rain of distorted guitar and pounding piano.

Warner Bros. picked up the record for re-release (as by Sparks), but not before one more recording for Bearsville. This time the group chose their demo's name for the LP, and so began the recording of A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing, with engineer Thaddeus Lowe as producer.

It begins with another girl, as "Girl From Germany" puts Lowe's meaty mix on display. There's still a lithe counterpoint that's pure Mael, however. The barnstorming gallop (with calliope interludes folded in) serves notice that again, the listener needs to buck up and prepare for something different. Brisk strings enliven the charming chamber pop of "Here Comes Bob," and it's followed by a strange, martial, alien dream called "Moon Over Kentucky," wherein Russell offers cryptically that "...I'm just finishing my first encounter...what a letdown..."

The boys retool Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Do Re Mi" and the result is the Sound of Music by way of Sparks. The elements of "Underground" fade in and out, as if transmitted from afar, indeed, underground. There is another clutch of oblique tracks, including "Nothing is Sacred," "Angus Desire" and a snippet called "Batteries Not Included." All of which brings us to closer "Whippings and Apologies" which Ron kicks off with a sly bit of John Cale's viola (ca. "The Black Angel's Death Song") that he works into a turbocharged raveup which ends the record...and Sparks Mk I.

One indication was the album's penultimate track, "The Louvre." It's sung in effortless French by Russell, and is so smart, agile and Continental that it's a damned monster. It demanded a move, demanded something. Island Records provided that opportunity, but only if it involved the brothers alone. Bringing over a full band would've been a big step. There had been a handful of UK tour dates thus far, so Ron & Russ were able to recruit Martin Gordon (bass), Adrian Fisher (guitar) and Norman "Dinky" Diamond on drums. Muff Winwood (who'd begun doing A&R for Island after the Spencer Davis Group folded) would produce.

The glittered throngs ruled the streets of London in 1973, when Ron began writing the songs for a new album. What he delivered (even though the group continued to defy categories and any sort of labeling) was a gift from the Glam gods. Opener "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" was a shot across the bow and declaration of newfound focus. Speaking of the track, Ron opined "...it's written in A and by God it'll be sung in A." He wrote what he wrote. Russell adapted and dug deep to vocally meet his brother's standards. The next song, "Amateur Hour" was the LP's second single, and its addictive hook took it to #7, a nice companion for the "This Town" #2 posting. The comic narcissism of "Falling in Love With Myself Again" is a big nudge-and-wink for Marlene Dietrich in 3/4 time. Ron again: "Quite honestly, I never liked myself. I'm not my type." The song needs huge guitar, huge drums, and they're here.

The boys' wry humor is everywhere on display here, as on "Thank God it's Not Christmas" (as that's the one day a person can't escape to be alone), and "Hasta Manana, Monsieur," a thematically simple ode to a guy trying to chat up a girl. It soars, though - an anthem on an album of anthems - with lashings more guitar. The track chosen for the US single was "Talent is an Asset," a perky and infectious number wherein those in the orbit of the young Albert Einstein hope he'll remember them when he's famous. Cheeky and enigmatic, "Here in Heaven" and "Complaints" set us up for the swaying pomp and ambiguity of "Equator." A fellow looks around, muttering "...equator, equator, you said you'd meet me here..." so where is his girl? A tootling sax provides a melodic little squib over the falsetto tradeoffs of the title, then we fade. Thankfully, the most recent reissue of the record appends it with the b-sides of the two UK singles, so we're given "Barbecutie" with its pulsing, knotty rhythm, and the blistering guitar underlying "Lost and Found," a punchy number meant to be heard from a single. Thank God for their inclusion.

Fan and writer Madekine Bocaro notes that Karl Stoecker was called in to shoot the LP's sleeve. This was a bit of a coup, as Stoecker was in the midst of shooting acts such as Mott the Hoople: he was also shooting the legendary early Roxy Music sleeves at this time. Two models from Japan's Red Buddha Theatre got dolled up in geisha gear and posed amid an air of amused disdain. Set against a stark, apple-green backdrop, the shot proved an enduring image for an enduring album.

Indeed, if we pull the LP back into the mortal coil of slots, categories and genres, a thought occurs to me. If I posit the band's debut as the greatest US pop debut ever, can't I lay claim to Kimono as being the greatest power-pop release ever? Sure I can, and why not?

More good stuff followed: Propaganda and Indiscreet came on the heels of Kimono, then Big Beat and Introducing Sparks before a fascination with Giorgio Moroder and others in the synth movement led to a new avenue for the band, No. 1 in Heaven, the first of many reinventions. They've never rested, either, releasing albums through the 2000s, and still to critical and fan acclaim (although their highest US chart psotion was #63, for 1974's Propaganda). In May and June of '08 they held the "Sparks Spectacular" in London. For 20 nights they played their 20 albums to date, and on the 21st night, June 13th, debuted Exotic Creatures of the Deep. The current release is The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman - a commission from Swedish National Radio that imagines a 1950s trip to the US by the director, and acts as a meditation on the differences between US and Euro culture and arts. Ripping stuff.

So where else can you find a band that's cited by so many as being directly instrumental in their creative birth, including Morrissey and Kurt Cobain?

The brothers anticipated everything. Influenced everything. Transcended everything.

They are Sparks.

PERIODICALS

Greatest Britain

I recently headed over to the bookstore, eagerly awaiting the new issue of Mojo magazine. It's a music pub from the UK, and as far as I'm concerned leads a quality field of magazines from over there. Further refining my statement, it's the greatest music mag I've ever seen, period.

I approached the music section of the magazine racks and was floored.

There was my title, only the current issue was packaged - in a deluxe, heavy vinyl slipcase - with a 12" vinyl album!! The record celebrated the 40th Anniversary of the release of Let It Be, the Beatles' swansong, and featured a crop of current-day artists covering the LP's songs. Amazing. The disc was housed in a gatefold jacket, and the whole thing made for a splendid package. I gladly ponied up the pittance of $20 and hurried home with my treasure, convinced anew that the magazine is the best thing going.

Of course, after the delight of the record there was still the joy of reading the magazine. This issue featured a cover story on Paul McCartney's life in the wake of the Beatles' breakup - his initial solo efforts and work with Wings up through the release of Band on the Run. It was illuminating and entertaining. That piece was augmented with two other features: an article on the Beatles' last year in the studio and the friction between them as they left 80 hours of Let It Be tracks in the can and produced Abbey Road in one last, heroic effort, and a story about the misguided Apple Enterprises, which dreamed big, produced little, and went through trainloads of money before folding. Gripping stuff from the boys' orbit...great writing the lot.

That's only the beginning. There are deeply informative pieces on Herbie Hancock, Brian Wilson's new Gershwin-related project, and an interview wherein Sheryl Crow discusses her top 10 Soul influences. There are excerpts from a new Bob Marley book which feature rare photos of the singer from 1975 - 76, shot by Kim Gottlieb-Walker as she moved among the singer and his world. That's one of the great things about Mojo - every issue features a fantastic collection of images, either new or from Pop's back pages. Their pics, whether of musicians or events or the physical ephemera of Pop - records, flyers and so forth - each issue is chock-full of eye candy, and it complements the text wonderfully.

The feature pieces are bracketed first by What Goes On, which celebrates news and happenings new & old, passings, and often things of significance that might be otherwise lost to us. Currently featured are remembrances of Sugar Minott, Tuli Kupferberg and Harvey Fuqua; Radiohead drummer Philip Selway's new solo record, Mississippi (by way of Australia) roots-blue singer C.W. Stoneking, and Duane Eddy's personal and musical rejuvenation. Gaelic chanteuse Imelda May is profiled, and the TimeMACHINE segment remembers the US groups who flocked to the UK during 1963 tours.

The other end of the issue features the comprehensive media review called, quite rightly, Mojo Filter. Here are musical releases new and reissue, books, DVDs and live shows, all presented with an eye toward the same critical quality as the features writing. In addition to dozens of records, the new history of Rough Trade is reviewed, as are a Leonard Cohen 1972 concert DVD, the censors-angering Iranian film Persian Cats, and a Neil Young/Bert Jansch appearance in Oakland.

Forgive the breathless prose, but not for nothing is this my go-to music read.

Lest anyone consider Mojo a beautiful fluke, I'm also regularly edified by other such titles as Q, Uncut, Record Collector and Classic Rock. The current issue of Classic Rock came packaged in a school-style pocket folder, and included a CD (also standard with Uncut and Mojo) and a 2011 calendar which featured recipes from metal musician such as Doro Pesch, Andreas Kisser (Sepultura) and Bobby Liebling (Pentagram)! Then there's the magazine itself - another rich stew of features and stories.

The cover story, about the Who's recording of their 1970 giant Live at Leeds, was followed by an interview with Nick Mason, the tale of Pantera's breakout hit Cowboys From Hell, Bev Bevan and The Move, New Model Army's tireless approach to recording and touring, a behind-the-scenes account of Springsteen's recording of Born to Run, and tons more...and if that weren't enough, consider Classic Rock's specialty sub-publications, AOR and Prog.

Incredible.

I took Rolling Stone to task in the first posting for this blog, and it's a shame. Has almost every US rock mag abdicated its throne entirely? If that is the case, I've still got my glossy treasures from abroad.

TUBE

'Tween-Age Wasteland

We're awash, to all appearances, in a glittery television stage prop of tightly choreographed, adorably shaggy, infectiously beaming 12 year-olds. That they are moving forward like the Mongol hordes, increasing in number seems obvious...that they seem poised to become mainstream pop's contenders in perpetua perhaps less so. They're swaying, bopping, issuing forth pleasing bleats from a series of carefully crafted templates, with the whole shebang run through filters, equalization software and other studio refinement. It's a delirious, undulant playground where the riffs never end and the puppy love never abates. And it leads, dear reader, to the wealth of a sultan for all involved in its creation and marketing.

To look at this infantilization we should go back to the '40s, to the years before R&B and hillbilly boogie fully combined to produce the first ranks of rock 'n' rollers.

Those two musics were performed by adults, moreover, by adults playing instruments. In the case of R&B, there were bandleaders working their groups through challenging arrangements. Shows had to dazzle, and had to sustain interest and energy over several sets a night.

The arrival of pop/rock changed all that. At the risk of rehashing a commonly known capsule history, the Baby Boom saw to it that 1950s America was populated with hordes of teens. The music on the radio, in the record shops, at school dances and at kids' bedsides naturally reflected that. Pop skewed younger.

After the first wave of idols was dispersed there was total market saturation by properly vetted, safe, clean-cut teen idols, the better to control the stuff. Sap was king. The British Invasion blew that away but the invaders were still, once again, teens.

As a counterpoint to the new "maturity" of the '70s (Joni Mitchell, Seals and Crofts, Gordon Lightfoot et al) there was Bubblegum. This phenomenon was less an organic development than a wonderfully marketed production machine that often used studio talent to prop up the marquee vocalist(s), and targeted even small children. They had money, they could buy singles as well as a teen. Even though glossy fan mags had been around since Elvis and Ricky Nelson's heyday, these mags were born anew to print up the likes of Donny Osmond, Tony DeFranco and David Cassidy.

The arrival of Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett and such spritely imps as the Bay City Rollers was a license to print money, or at least endless special editions with huge, fold-out posters. Blessedly for the industry, there's been no flagging in interest and demand for these magazines. Once everyone realized that a steady flow of pretty young things (both male and female: all cuddly) then the path was clear.

The '80s delivered Joey Lawrence, who used a cuddly-doofus TV role to launch a beat-driven pop career, as well as a group of young hatchlings so perfectly groomed for stardom as to have lain in wait like a Soviet sleeper cell. I refer, of course, to the April 24th, 1989 premiere of The New Mickey Mouse Club.

Its six-year run gave us Britney, Christina, Justin and J.C., no surnames necessary.

As we now posit the first three of these as our towering pop giants, our yardstick of units moved and tastes influenced, don't we need a new batch of performers?

Although Disney dropped such crap as The Cheetah Girls into our laps, they've also given us Miley Cyrus, whose alternately hysterical/sentimental Hannah Montana headed up a brand that would've made Sinatra blanch in envy, and Walt Disney label Hollywood has seen to it that her musical legacy is firmly in place. Her network colleague Selena Gomez graduated from Barney to The Wizards of Waverly Place and her own band-of-sorts, Selena Gomez & The Scene.

After contributing to various Disney efforts she signed to Hollywood as well, went gold and platinum, and now oversees an empire that also includes a clothing line and film projects. Demi Lovato also left Barney behind, and now heads up Sonny With a Chance. Her second album, 2009's Here We Go Again debuted at #1 on Billboard's Hot 200. She appeared in 2008's Camp Rock, which leads us to another smash sensation - The Jonas Brothers.

Nick Jonas began performing at 7, so it's not surprising that the sibs' hegemony is so strong now. Over a four-record career they've built a staggering fan base, and achieved ready renown with their 2008 nomination for Best New Artist at the 51st Grammys, and winning of the Breakthrough Artist Award at the Peoples' Choice Awards. (I absolutely give them credit for their work with diabetes and such groups as the "Change for Children" foundation, but that still doesn't make me a fan).

Sisters Alyson and Amanda Michalka leapt to prominence as Aly and A.J., (currently performing as 78Violet), and their merchandising empire concludes our tour of the Disney machine...to date.

Although it's never had the muscle of Disney, Nick - descendent of the cable veteran Nickelodeon - has served up several young warblers.

Drake Bell rose handily from Drake and Josh to release a series of records and burnish his profile accordingly. Miranda Cosgrove (another D&J vet and toothy star of iCarly) dutifully cranked out a soundtrack to her show, on the Columbia-affiliated Nickelodeon label, before issuing a proper debut, 2010's Sparks Fly. Then there's her duet with Big Time Rush, "All I Want for Christmas is You." As far as Big Time Rush, is concerned, they're four guys who were cast in a show and then had a music framework built up around the show. Their debut, B.T.R., was released on Nick/Columbia as a precursor to a major tour.

Such simplification is nothing new. Few things dumbed down music more than the ascendance of the first immortal wave of boy bands. New Kids on the Block, 'N Sync, Backstreet Boys, O-Town, and 98 Degrees preened and thrust their collective way toward instant stardom, as did their "urban" counterparts in Boyz II Men, All 4 One and New Edition. In 1999 Dream Street represented this undying well of material, and launched the career of Jesse McCartney (a huge Disney content-provider). After MTV, perhaps there was/is no turning back.

Television's launching pad aside, the rise of stuffed toy Justin Bieber (whose dicovery on YouTube led to multiplatinum success) is perfectly of a piece with the new game, but there are other youngsters amassing a pile by storming the gates. Avril Lavigne perfectly embodies the cynical latter-day ATM that styles itself "pop-punk," while the pleasingly robotic Taylor Swift has bleached "country" of every trace of substance and created a lucrative, purring replacement sound that neither threatens nor comforts.

The road to exposure, let alone stardom, once led through a church choir, or a streetcorner, and often thankless toil in clubs and dives. Now it's not just music by corporate design, it's music (and fame) by instantaneous decree, as displayed on hideous circuses like American Idol and America's Got Talent (although these affronts are a column unto themselves).

Again, you can't lay this at the door of a huge, lumbering record label, as the traditional record label is a thing of the past. This is something larger - this is domination at every level of the game.

MTV got us a long way toward where we are, but the rise of the Internet finished the trip.

We're now in its moment, with handheld toys that can send and receive, "like" and Tweet any little pop-chick or boy band anywhere on Earth, any time. Today's target audience, when it's not squealing in tandem, is alone in its own psychic biosphere, texting twee pronouncements on the flashing spectacle on their tiny glowing screens. It's disposable wonder.

At least a 45 was something you could hold in your hands.

So there we have it.

And as my rebbe Bob Dylan once put it, "He not busy bein' born is busy dyin'."

Cheers!

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.