cheese it, the cops!

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

Clarity, madness, venality and heroism...

In which Crusader AXE uses a picture of Gina the PTSD suffering IED dog to illustrate how sadness in the face of pain and madness infects us all, confusing the better natures and sparking occasional moments of communication outside the noise media...and then fades away .

Of the sanctity of poverty chosen and the ironic subtext

In which Crusader AXE (St Mary's School, 1965; Bishop Ludden High School 1969; College of the Holy Cross, 1973) ponders the problems inherent in recommending the cannonization of a socialist anarchist, abortion survivior, social activist, feminist and economic radical for Sainthood by the American Catholic Hierarchy, and smiles... 

Early Roman Kingmakers

In which Crusader AXE tips his hat to Crispin, defender of Sarah Palin as an authentic American Voice like Aimee McPhearson or Charles Whitman, and discusses the possibility that Mitt Romney is really an Israeli disinfomration operation and the riots and murders and such are really an attempt to excite sales of Salmon Rushdie's memoirs. 

Just to make Crispy a little nervous in the night...

One of the loose collective that binds Crispin and me -- The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop -- a Vet who's trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he's take some classes...and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. 

This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, including time, simultaneously! What is it? It's all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it's in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we're not in France so it has to be there. Don't blame us, it's in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the "cost" and L is "a lot" and the relationship is undefined...either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it's going to really cost a helluva lot.

So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day...Anybody besides me remember The American 


Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band...The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can't sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn't really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?

 

Looking for the one thing led to a lot of others. Here's some other garage-type stuff from my youth...For example, the Knickerbochers.  Guys were from Yonkers, or someplace else in the neighborhood,  but everybody thought they were either the Beatles or from Liverpool. Yeah...Liverpool, outside Syracuse, home of Heides Hotdogs...

The Beau Brummels were an interesting group. With that name, in the 60s, they should have been dressed in electric suits (really electric, plugged in like Christmas trees) but I guess they just liked the name. Pretty good song...

The Zombies had an interesting kind of vibe and were a talented band. Sort of stuff the Moody Blues originally did before they discovered psychedelia...and flutes.

Here are the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page supposedly playing the Beck riff because he was off being "brilliant" some place. I hate Jeff Beck, although I think his current bass player is hot. Actually, seeing her with that geezer is something I find scarey... I also think this was lip synching. Here's the   Original with Beck --and, I don't hear the difference. To complete the circle of jerks and egos at the time, here's one their first lead guitarist, What's his name, Dick Crampton or something...I read something recently that said that the Minor Pentomic Blues Scale was what differentiated the three of them. Beck rarely uses it; Page was sloppy with it; Clapton precise and thorough. Yeah...sure.

Now, We Five was an interesting group -- kind of folky, with a big voiced lead singer named Beverly. Who had a helluva voice...since by then the folk voices for women were the amazing altos of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, not too surprising that they got lost in the dust. Kind of a shame -- she's dancing, shaking and jiving on stage like she might mean it, in a nice Christian California girl way. 

Syndicate of Sound -- A classic song, but what a waste of two Rickenbackers including a George Harrison 12. Couple of Japanese Squier knockoffs from Kresge's before it was K-Mart would have done the trick for that rif.  Saw these guys in 66, one of the opening acts for the Stones.

Finish up this nostalgia with two organ songs...despite the legend, not  Augie March on both of them.  She's About a Mover  was Doug Sahm, Augie and some other guys. Flip side was his attempt at being part of the summer of love, which I think was horrible. MENDI-cino. MENDI-cino. Mover was a helluva number though...\ Then, of course, there's that great American Band, ? and the Mysterians.

There is nothing about these numbers that doesn't say the yearning of teenage sex, Budwieser and cold duck on a Friday nite after the dance in the gym...who wouldn't like that, again?...

That should ruin the weekend for those of you with daughters!

And for us to pretend to be interested in Hank Williams Junior and the sign at Rick Perry's hunting camp. Been a long time, long time, long lonely, lonely time indeed...

 

so i'm sort of trying to develop a reading of american cynicism of the mencken/bierce variety. and actually, though it doesn't seem that way, folks like that are moralists, even extreme and extremely passionate moralists. they've given up all their naive idealistic hopes, supposedly, but they are exquisitely sensitive to the forces that made them do so: in particular, hypocrisy. i would see bierce and mencken as disappointed emersons, emersons who finally let the actual world destroy their optimism. 

the very darkest and yet most hilarious things i've ever read are the sick stories of ambrose bierce. (like my favorite murder, an imperfect conflagration, or, god help us, oil of dog). amusingly enough, these are often characterized as "tall tales," or even "tall tales of the old west": if you came looking for pecos bill, you'd be in for a rude awakening; that's why i'm going with "sick stories." obviously they owe a lot to swift, though swift in his utmost biliousness could have conceived nothing quite like this. bierce wrote a bunch of stories in this vein, each better than the last.

i think their amazing satiric bite comes from their routineness, which constructs an audience. the narrators just assume that they are speaking to an audience of thieves, murderers, animal-torturers, and ministers of the lord. that is, the stories of bierce characterize the society around him, the american reading public, his very own audience, as crazed psychopaths living just beneath a surface of highly polite, decorous appearance, a punctilious observation of social norms, the niceties of law or business coupled with perfectly routine mass murders. it's not only that that's what people do in the stories; it's that in writing into the world he creates bierce just blandly continuously implies that we are precisely the same.

one way to think about this in in terms of war. bierce was at shiloh, chickamauga, sherman's march across georgia, and war of course is the great theme of many of his short stories. what he took himself to have seen was the utter darkness behind the facade of civilization: his great theme.

it's funny to be circling around to mencken. he was the hero of my father and my grandfather: both franklin sartwells, both hard-drinking newspapermen just down the road in dc, for whom mencken was the greatest of their very own kind. i believe they both took on a semi-ironic reactionary stance in politics in conscious homage to their sage. it mattered that mencken came from a working-class background and never went to college; he was a practical newsman with ink on his hands. 

so i have a lovely weathered three-volume mencken autobiography, published by knopf in 1940 and consisting of happy days, newspaper days, and heathen days. they are inscribed "FGSartwell, 1943" and then "and Frank Sartwell, his son, to Crispin Sartwell, his son, on his 21st birthday. June 20, 1979" (that was in the last year of my father's life). but also mencken's undoubted status as a man of letters lent respectability or dignity to the status of newsman. 

bierce and twain were beloved on all the same grounds, and i also have my dad's devil's dictionary. i never met my grandfather, but it would shock me if he didn't cultivate a nice disillusionment with regard to the entire human condition and a humorous leverage thereon, since that is the code of the sartwells!

mencken (1926):

On Cynicism

One of the most curious human delusions lies in the theory that cynics are unhappy men - that cynicism makes for general biliousness and malaise. It is a false deduction, I believe, from the obvious fact that cynics make other men unhappy. But they are themselves the most comfortable and serene of mammals; perhaps only bishops, pet dogs and actors are happier. For what a cynic believes, though it may be too dreadful to put into formal words, at least usually has the merit of being true - and truth is ever a rock, hard and harsh, but solid under the feet. A cynic is chronically in the position of a wedding guest who has known the bride for nine years, and has had her confidence. He is a great deal less happy, theoretically, than the bridegroom. The bridegroom, beautifully barbered and arrayed, is about to launch into the honeymoon. But the cynic looks ahead two weeks, two months, two years. Such, to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Eliot, are the durable satisfactions of life.

 

no telling when, but i have been soaking in mencken (and bierce and twain). mencken is truly astounding. fantastically productive, even while flirting around continuously with hooch and movie starlets (aileen pringle, e.g.), traveling about here and there, and supervising a variety of periodicals.

the prose is almost unbelievably alive, vivid in its every sentence; it arouses my envy. he is an auto-didact of epic proportions, and behind each little declaration is the equivalent of a number of ph.d.s: in history, philosophy, literature. the american language is an immense work of scholarship: tantamount to writing the oxford english dictionary. and even there the prose fucking sparkles. 

he is an extremely strong literary critic: frank, with an almost unerring judgment; he has a way of zeroing in on the writer's weaknesses, but is also capable of cherishing all sorts of surprising things. his assessment of bierce, for example, is harsh and loving and right. but this is entailed by his basically so-right reading of the whole american literary tradition.

throughout his life, people who encountered him professed themselves surprised to find the bitter cynic mencken to be the sweetest and most jovial person imaginable. this is not surprising at all; just beneath the terrible disaffection lurks a real love of human foibles, an inexhaustible curiosity about the human condition, which he fundamentally affirms as endlessly amusing.

the positions are beautifully and amusingly perverse: pitted quite consciously against his age. that his basic commitment in politics was to individual liberty - something he said of himself - is obvious. this is not to say that mencken is always right or in good taste. his germanophilia was sort of amusing on behalf of the kaiser during world war i; after that it got less charming. he had a pretty primitive darwinianism going, part of his reactionary realism, etc. but in a way those are quibbles. my sense is that mencken - a true celebrity in his own time - is comparatively neglected today.

what he got away with is almost unimaginable: screeching anti-religious atheism much more beautifully defended than in dawkins or even hitchens (treatise on the gods); pro-german tendencies; utter skepticism of the political and aesthetic consensi surrounding him; a systematic program to destroy every national myth, starting with democracy. what he has to say about such topics as women and marriage and sex is entirely unacceptably frank, brutal in its sardonic truth. and for all that he was a beloved piece of americana, a kind of norman rockwell character: the barber-shop skeptic. but here with insane chops, introducing nietzsche or ibsen to american audiences, for example. chicks dug him. writers groveled before him. he made baltimore into a kind of anti-romantic paradise, the anti-center of the anti-universe.

the book below tells the almost unbelievable story of mencken roaring through the twentieth century. for one theme, just three little girls, growing up best friends in montgomery alabama: sara haardt mencken, zelda sayre fitgerald, and tallulah bankhead, later depicted doing catastrophic drunken gymnastics at the algonquin, where mencken maintained a suite. admittedly their dads were supreme court justices and state senators. unimaginably sexy high-society fundamentally non-monogamous debs from the deep south on a party tear; oh and brilliant artists of various kinds. what if paris hilton was a genius?

 "Zelda never learned the gentle art of 'policing' her husband's parties," writes sara mayfield. "Instead, she rode with him on the tops of cabs, drank toasts to him from her slipper, and flirted with his friends." zelda is depicted more or less ghost-writing scott's books, and as producing the immortal sentence "plagiarism begins at home."

i've got to say that zelda vid is charming; the youtube tribute is its own little democratic artform.

so i'm sort of thinking my next book will be the american cynic, focusing on the attitude toward life of ambrose bierce and h.l. mencken. for one thing, i've learned the hard way that if you're going to work through people's voluminous complete works, it helps if they are really, really good writers.