cheese it, the cops!

cold hard truth

 

there will no doubt be more on george later. for now i just want to say he was the greatest male country singer, by a way. so people who i'd point to as great or paradigm country singers, such as keith whitley and vern gosdin, owed him plenty. he was better than his great contemporaries johnny cash or willie nelson or merle haggard or buck owens, as a singer, in a variety of ways. he had more emotional range and intensity (he was incomparable in that, as everyone who knows anything about this will acknowledge). and also his singing is more central or basic or exemplary of country music than is that of any of the others. the whole idea of what a man does in a country ballad, owes everything to him. it's remarkable that he was teamed with tammy, who of course i think was the greatest female country singer. well conway and loretta were close, but dolly and porter was asymmetrical. he made some great records late, as below. he made some horrendous records like in the 80s, i'm assuming under the influence of coke.

 

that song's by jamie o'hara.

 

 

 

on hugo

i want to say that i am definitely opposed to the cult of personality: one of the saddest symptoms of human patheticness: you're just begging to be subordinated, and your dearest aspiration is to labor under obvious delusions. like this is just pitiful. also i am opposed to authoritarianism for any purposes whatever. it's worth remarking, though, that it was never plausible to equate chavez with the miserable dictators with whom he often associated. i think he was repeatedly and more or less fairly elected (though 'fairly' has to be qualified by his domination of the media). that makes a difference.

He has taken on many of Mr. Chávez’s vocal patterns and speech rhythms, and has eagerly repeated the slogan “I am Chávez” to crowds of supporters. He has mimicked the president’s favorite themes — belittling the political opposition and warning of mysterious plots to destabilize the country, even implying that the United States was behind Mr. Chávez’s cancer.

He has also adopted the president’s clothes, walking beside his coffin in an enormous procession on Wednesday wearing a windbreaker with the national colors of yellow, blue and red, as Mr. Chávez often did.

show some pride, little bitch. just to drive that nail, they'll display his corpse 'forever.' the idea of your body as an icon or sculpture of itself raises amazing questions about representation. one good aspect: it makes it permanently possible to rape hugo chavez, at least in a certain sense, and it adds tremendous symbolic weight to what would otherwise be a mere personal peccadillo. hugo will live forever, but he will never not be dead. looking good, asshole.

decisions, decisions

in honor of the late james buchanan: my refutation of his argument for the necessity of state power. as a free bonus feature you get my (then-)little daughter running about behind me trying to mess up my video because it's taking my attention!

 

the melody of death

one thing i notice about all the year-end death round-ups is that a very high percentage of the people who are mentioned were in the music biz. i think that's an index of the degree wo which music is something that is central to our national identity.

nuke yourself

she might not have been a particularly effective dean, embezzler, murderess, and so on, but she was an extremely impressive suicide. 

She started a fire in a bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. When death did not come quickly enough, she went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. For extra measure, she slit her wrists.

Stereo speaker wire was her final weapon of choice. She took a length of it back upstairs, lowered an attic ladder and hanged herself from it.

most people kind of kill themselves with a whimper of sadness; she assaulted herself repeatedly in a total rage.

dave and thelonious (mostly thelonious)

awww, dave brubek is no more. you know, of all the jazz pianists of that generation - oh man, let's say bill evans, horace silver, phineas newborn, oscar peterson, etc etc - i'll take thelonious monk, especially the earlier stuff, as in the material collected on blue monk. in fact, the title track on that shows what i love. monk is central to what became the bop idiom, but he is completely engaged in many aspects of the tradition. that track is first of all a kind of anthology of blues-oriented piano styles: monk always said stride, but also boogie-woogie, barrelhouse; james johnson, fats waller, roosevelt sykes, pete johnson, maybe professor longhair, even; anyway, there is certainly new orleans on board too. and then he's also putting into play the styles of duke ellington and count basie. ok he venerates these things, but he breaks them apart in a thousand ways, deconstructs them. and with all that, the reading is witty; it's funnny. it's not a museum: he puts the whole tradition into play: he fucks around with them, but even just messing he shows new implications all over the place. the dissonances he runs through on material like that are stunning, really: just amazingly intuitive, wrong but right, dissonant but melodic; i'm trying to think my way into whole different chords on the harmonica on this sort of basis. i guess stravinsky might be an analogy. when he backs off the dissonance, as on the ellington record, he's still brilliant, but the inimitable element is tempered. a lot of these players were always trying to blow you away with how fast they were, or in general how shocking the technical ability: they were almost like liszt or something. (well, not silver or brubek, e.g.) that is not the point at all with monk; in fact i think he's actually specifically refraining from that, and when he does hit it, it's all the more impressive and it emerges organically in the composition/improvisation. he's a subtractionist somewhat in the mode of davis, with whom he did record. but i'd rather listen to monk. 



that's basie leaning on the piano; wish i knew what he was thinking. he's both emulating basie and tearing him up. basie is the very essence of swing, and one thing that's so right about monk is that he also never did not swing. like i hate to say a lot of those bop players in my opinion lost their way in technical fireworks, and lost both the blues base and the swing time. i mean by the time you get to 'fusion,' it just don't move. but monk swings; that's what that funny laid-back, in-the-cut kind of time meant. here's the more virtuosic thing i mean.

death claims the only guy since the megalithic to make a living counting from one to ten.

nihilist party loses a spokesman

well charles lane has a point about gore vidal, who was sort of an evil crank. however, i'm pretty much willing to forgive anyone with that prose style for anything. lane quotes vidal on the death of vidal's nemesis (and presumably lane's hero) william f. buckley: “I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.” perhaps this is supposed to be an illustration of vidal's 'nihilism,' really it's just a typical perfectly-made insult; i'd be proud to have produced that sentence. one thing to consider about someone like vidal: ok he had a cultural presence. but the actual effect of his own opinions on anything real was miniscule. so go ahead and just do your beautiful ugly thing. i figure he and buckley are perched in a glass booth above hell quibbling for opposite reasons with satan's politics, which currently dominate our blasted nation.

buckley wrote well, though not invariably. he did not write as well as gore vidal.

doc

aww, so long doc. not only was he an encyclopedia of american roots music, but he was among our greatest guitar players and loveliest singers (he played a mean harmonica too). that "will the circle be unbroken" album was key to my discovery of the music i love.

doc watson, earl scruggs, ricky skaggs, alison krauss: that there is a band!

losing some soul

i reviewed a donna summer show long about 1981 for the washington star. i remember saying something like this: 'the sex kitten stuff has distracted from what was there all along: the best soul singer of her generation.' now in the late 70s i went straight from grateful dead to ramones. the hippies and punks both coded as opposite of disco, though there were continuous overlaps as well. it was, in my imagination and that of a lot of others, authenticity as against artificiality, and sincere expression as against commercialized, pandering claptrap. i don't think i consciously had on board then the sexual-identity aspect of this distinction, which is not to say i wouldn't have said that disco was gay. also since then i have gotten very worried about the authentic/artificial distinction, in pop music and elsewhere: i got onto the post-modern suspicion at some point, and at some point it occurred to me that springsteen was as much enacting a gender role as was rupaul. 

disco, like a lot of really straight-up pop, has aged well; it is unpretentious, for one thing. and in retrospect - as i suddenly saw at that donna summer show - it is more continuous with and central to the unfolding of african-american popular music than it seemed at the time. donna was framed in state-of-the-art production - not very stax - and actually had a pretty eclectic oeuvre (for example, the great 'hot stuff' sounds as much like foreigner as like gloria gaynor). but at the heart there was a churchy shouter: not that far from aretha, though more malleable. even if disco was a producer's studio form, donna put on a great live show. in the other direction, disco is as fundamental to hip hop as is funk, and herc and flash sampled nile rogers's 'good times' incessantly.

now however, i still gravitate towards an aesthetics of authenticity in pop music, even if i can't defend it. and in the culture wars of the 70s, i'd still go anti-disco every time. i have to say that the idea that hedonism is liberation is one i just can't gravitate towards: cocaine and promiscuity just aren't going to save you: demonstrably, i would say. so if you're nostalgic for gay bathouse culture of the late seventies, i'm just going to try to disguise my disgust at the whole thing. i still think the disco bands looked silly and that the production was too processed. i might still long for recognizable instruments, and not think that moroder's electronic tracks for 'i feel love' etc overall had the most positive influence.

but i do have a bunch of disco on my computer, and it did produce some insanely catchy and delightful music.

stop-stop

see ya chuck brown. looking back on it, late seventies/early eighties dc was a rare music scene, what with the invention of hardcore: bad brains, teen idles. also the excellent blues revival bands that were still the basic dc bar fare: the nighthawks, e.g. i remember go-go shows at big concrete barn downtown: chuck brown, touble funk, rare essence etc. when kool herc started working the turntables in the bronx, he did it to extend the break or the drum bit. go-go just did it with squads of actual percussion instruments. go-go had a cool swing, but it also git a bit incessant after a few hours.

reed

well my old teacher (at u of maryland, '76-'80), the poet reed whittemore, died a few days ago. the death was not surprising: the man was born in 1919. he was a quiet and gentle person, so when the blades came out you were shocked. everyone got cut anyway. he was a wonderful teacher, and introduced us in the most vivid way to twentieth-century poetry, many of the great figures of which had been his friends/mentors/contributors to his magazines etc (e.e. cummings, for example; william carlos williams -probably his hero and closest poetic compatriot (his bio of williams was titled poet from jersey (just right for the extreme matteroffactness of both his subject and himself); ezra pound, whom reed talked about visiting in st. elixabeth's asylum). he supervised my honors thesis, which was a "theory of poetry" (for god's sake) and i was the poetry ed of the college literary magazine under his direction.  i wrote many gigantically-ambitious poems that sucked, thinking of him as my only audience. i don't blame him for the suckiness. he tried to help, but i wouldn't listen.

his poems were maybe not the utter apex of the century, though he did get a lot of recognition too. they were extremely prosaic: flat, almost, in a way that became a fashion decades after he'd perfected the style. it was a sort of anti-poetry: in a way it was an argument that the tradition of poetry in english was pretentious, grandiose, affected; he always emphasized that the rhythms of ordinary language were poetic enough to be getting on with. he did hit many grand themes - god, truth, love, nature - but always to puncture their grandness or bring them down to earth. also he often just wrote a little joke. both on paper and in person, he was about the least pretentious major literary figure who ever existed. i don't think he thought that poetry could save the world.

ok ive been re-reading for the first time in twenty years or more his book the mother's breast and the father's house. it's amazing how so many of the lines come at me now with an air of extreme inevitability or so much familiarity that they seem like my own internal monologue. i'll type in a couple.

 

Haiku #1

A traditional haiku has seventeen syllables.

Hasn't it?

 

 

Rocks

Is the world a dream?

--The waking is always to facts that are like rocks

And lives that are like rocks

To poverty that is not an abstraction but a great rock

To sickness and loneliness and loss and emptiness

That are all rocks.

 

Is love a dream?

--It would be clever to say that one must climb up the other

    rocks to arrive at the love rock.

Or that love is a rock hidden in life's moss

But to say such things is to be out of love

 

If there is love

        and I think there is

It survives the saying only with difficulty

It needs prayer rather

I will not play with it

 

But of the rocks that are hateful to man and surround him

So that it is as if he were deep in a great rock canyon and calling

    for help and only to rocks

Of such rocks it is safe to speak

They need to be hammered at through the ages by man in his 

    prison suit

They need to be broken up into smaller and smaller rocks.

 

A Teacher

    "And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."

 

He hated them all one by one but wanted to show them

What was Important and Vital and by God if

They thought they'd never have any use for it he was

Sorry as hell for them, that's all, with their genteel

Mercantile Main Street Babbitt

Bourgeois-barbaric faces, they were beyond

Saving, clearly, quite out of reach, and so he

G-rrr

Got up every morning and 

G-rrr

Ate his breakfast and 

G-rrr

Lumbered off to his eight o'clock

Gladly to teach.

 

 

It Is Not Clear

It is not clear

Where we go from here

Or for that matter

Who we're.

 

 

bye, earl

earl scruggs was among the handful of great instrumental innovators in twentieth-century american popular music. comparable figures are people like louis armstrong, little walter, jimi hendrix. the banjo in his hands yields an amazing combination of rhythm and melody: it's the most percussive of the string instruments, and scruggs created the role of the banjo virtuoso in bluegrass: during his solo, he drives the band faster and faster, like an accelerating train. the other people i mentioned above actually played behind the beat, giving their playing a kind of relaxed swing even in a furious solo. but actually earl has somewhat the same effect: you start wondering whether there's any limit to his speed, and then it almost sounds easy. still the right expression playing like that would be a grimace of extreme concentration, like roy clark.

you hate to say someone shouldn't change, but the semi-electric earl scruggs revue albums in the 70s with his sons etc were not very good.

killed by death

nothing kills a pop star like death. whitney isn't quite on the michael level, but any rational person has already had enough of the stirring tributes and endless re-hashing of the addiction. ok her version of dolly's 'i will always love you' is astonishing. first time i heard it was at the gym at vanderbilt; i just stopped dead, couldn't believe what i was hearing, especially because it was already one of my favorite songs. she had good poppy moments, such as 'how will i know.' on the other hand 'the greatest love' is just dreck. her mother was a great gospel singer; 'the greatest love' just replaces god with...oneself, about the worst and most implausible and most pitiful idea we ever had as a species. don't believe me? ask whitney's 12-step sponsor. the song was a high point in the wave of contentless self-esteem-enhancement and unearned self-worship that in particular women have been surfing for decades. but, like a good spa treatment, all the plastic surgery you can absorb, and all the chardonnay in the world, you deserve it. anyway, i'd say i was at best indifferent to most of her records. great singer, basically meaningless, extremely middle-of-the-road material.

i'll never forget a review i read of the bodyguard (wish i could recall the name of the reviewer). he said that when whitney houston and kevin costner kissed, 'it was like two boards clacking together.'

 

sophocles in happy valley

you often hear the term 'tragedy' used to mean almost any bad thing. but aristotle could have used joepa rather than oedipus as his model.

etta and johnny

it's remarkable that etta james died almost simultaneously with johnny otis: they showed the hybrid vigor of miscegenation. they almost seemed to want to switch races, with etta going all blond and stuff and johnny preferring to be photographed with his face in shadow, so he could pass. i do think etta was at her best as a pop/r&b singer rather than in the straight blues.

the associated press: "James had been suffering from dementia and kidney problems, and was battling leukemia," while her husband and kids went to war over her estate. dude, that really, really sucks.

crap tornado

i'm saddened by the fact that kim jong il could die only once. there is infinitely much evidence that human beings are fools, but the fact that that chump could actually rule millions of people - that they would more or less do what he told them to do - is a decisive demonstration. i love a good cult of personality. throw in a raft of marxist jive and you've got a perfect storm of horseshit.

greengrocers in mourning

vaclav havel, who has died after enduring many health problems for decades, was a hero of mine. his essay "the power of the powerless" (there are excerpts here) did as good a job as possible in showing what ordinary life was like in a totalitarian nightmare, and suggesting how to resist, or how to keep some sort of hold on reality and dignity in a world dedicated to destroying both. it was hard to watch him struggle with being politically powerful himself; really his instincts were anarchist. on the other hand, there's no one i would have more happily voted for for president of anything.

hitchens, cockburn, islamophobia

simon brings my attention to cockburn on hitchens. i say this piece is based on three basic insights: (1) people who disagree with me are evil. (2) people who are more successful than me are evil. (3) people who are better than me at what i do are evil.

let me say something about the neo-con hitch (and also his friend martin amis), with their embrace of the concept of 'islamo-fascism,' and their suggestions that islam itself needed to be suppressed because of the terrorists who appeal to it. the anti-communist right-wingers of the fifties and sixties had cracked moments, and a really psychotic overreaction suggesting things such as that dwight eisenhower was an agent of the international communist conspiracy. they engaged in an active process of putting everyone under surveillance for intellectual purity, a kind of parody of what they were supposedly fighting against. but however, communism was a frigging nightmare, and if you weren't an anti-communist in 1961, and if you are not an anti-communist now, you were/are extremely wrong, an advocate of totalitarianism and evil. that joseph mccarthy was terribly wrong and extremely dangerous to liberty does not entail that josef stalin was ok. and in this case, if you have anything nice to say about al qaeda-type terrorism (like one of my colleagues at mica, who was in the habit calling osama a 'freedom fighter'), if you do anything to try to take the sting out of the sheer irrational evil, you are really really wrong. and if you think it can be detached entirely from islam, i think you're misguided, as i think the attempt to completely detach stalinism or the khmer rouge from marxist communism is a pitiful rationalization. and obviously hitchens' anti-religious fervor both fed and was fed by his 'islamophobia.' so: i think this led him into numerous extremely wrong conclusions. it led him to endorse something like a world war for the suppression of islam as a whole. but, there was a truth at the heart.

also, opinion journalism is not itself violence or repression. there's no point in vaguely holding hitchens responsible for invading iraq. what he did was write; that doesn't force anyone to do anything. this is one reason why we should defend freedom of expression at its widest scope. the right response to hitchens is to refute the arguments; if he kicked your ass you had no one to blame but yourself, and you should have tried again. i'll give cockburn this: he did try to do that. he is no match for hitchens in argument or polemic or wit, but that just means he needs more craft.

also if he was wrong on this, it of course does not follow that he was wrong in his literary judgments, or his picture of the history of ideas, or whatever it may be. he was often right about such things, and spoke from a depth of knowledge and reflection that made the arguments compelling even if not right.

master of perversity

i deeply admired christopher hitchens, and regarded him as a model: for his extreme erudition (often in unusual corners), the sharpness and quantity of his writing, his absolute refusal of any conventional wisdom. now some stuff you should recall: he spent years trying to discredit mother teresa, for some reason; he hated hated the clintons, especially hillary, and eviscerated them in essay after essay over a couple of decades; he supported the iraq invasion. in short, he had tremendous perversity and was always trying to shock and anger people who would otherwise be thought to be more or less people like himself. these are things i also admire, though i disagreed often. don't judge a writer by how much you agree; judge him by how well he writes, how bold he is, how much he knows, how intensely himself he is.

a writer who provokes and irritates you is better for you, and more interesting to read, than a writer who confirms what you already believe. i can't imagine why leftists keep reading krugman, or conservatives krauthammer. you could write that shit yourself. the leftists should be reading krauthammer and the rightists krugman, obviously. the audiences of fox news and msnbc need to switch. they would be more entertained. all the 'echo-chamber' shows is that that you believe you need authorization even to think. you'd be thinking more, and more clearly, if you sought out a challenge. hitchens challenged a lot of people, and was actually pretty unpredictable (although also obsessively repetitive with regard to his eccentric preoccupations), which has mere ideologues like krugman or krauthammer beat all hollow.

people indicate that it was lovable that he drank scotch all day and chain-smoked. i imagine that the vices were a little less amusing in reality than in theory - a little less charming up close than from far away - and that they killed him.

d

oh dang. so long heavy d.

jobs

i don't know whether steve jobs really 'made the world a better place,' etc. but one thing he did was bring aesthetics to information technology: apple made many beautiful objects, which is one reason they sold so many things. it's not just the shape of the unit, but the interfaces or even the ways apple shaped a whole online environment. on the other hand, they exercised excessive proprietary control of that environment, and you have to ask also about labor practices etc. no amount of money can overcome mortality.

i'm already tired of the endless tributes: "what was it about steve jobs that allowed him to entirely transform reality??" etc etc. morning joe: he's a combination of thomas edison and john, paul, george and ringo (also benito mussolini, sounds like). it took people ten seconds to reach extreme hyperbole, and ten minutes to reach extreme repetition. 

bye, flanny

it's weird how you can feel like you know someone without ever meeting him. i've got to say i was shocked by the death of mike flanagan, the orioles pitcher/exec/announcer. i saw him pitch many times, particularly in the o's world championship season of 1983, when i lived a few blocks from the old memorial stadium. he was a sort of neighbor, or at least he lived (and died) rural halfway between here and baltimore. i loved him as a color man on o's broadcasts; he was very funny, laconic, low-key but also sharp. one sad fact about us people: a lot of times you really can't see that anything's wrong. he shot himself in the face, making the body hard to identify, and apparently was in despair about money. fuck.

there is too much death.

and byebye jerry leiber

geez we seem to be in a die-out phase in the music biz. how about the writer of 'stand by me.'

so long nick ashford

you'd have to say that nick ashford had the best process - it might be an insult to call it a a jheri curl - of the 70s.

(that's george benson and stevie with nick ashford and valerie simpson.)

obviously, he wrote some great songs: start with 'ain't no mountain high enough.' also some turkeys, for my money: 'i'm every woman.' chaka is a particular woman, i believe, but nick not.

 

lay back and listen as i catch up on my pimpin

and freak this duet just like ashford and simpson.

(listen to the baddest

rhyming apparatus)

winehouse

the thing i want to say about amy winehouse is just that i think the very worst idea you can have is to create a public persona around substance abuse: just hitch your wagon - your repertoire, even - to junk. you know this idea had its good and bad outcomes, from like de quincey or baudelaire or whatever to some of these beatnik and hippie-types. maybe right at this moment you feel loyal to your substance: later you're just going to have to turn against it even if you don't stop. the last thing you want to do is to stake your persona on loyalty to shit like that.

so long jerry ragavoy

while i'm at it, let me assert that janis is the greatest rock singer who ever lived.

s'long

carl gardner of the coasters.

 

so long gil scott-heron. i hope he died without cocaine in his system. i was never much of an aficianado, though of course i used to listen to 'the revolution will not be televised.' i think he's mischaracterized as the father of hip hop, though he did spoken-word over music. (i'd say the same about last poets.) i'm not certain that the people who actually originated hip hop, such a kool herc and grandmaster flash, had ever heard these folks, though they may have. but the fundamental source is jamaican dub and dj music. hip hop is only in place when you have turntabling/sampling, and if you listen to early emcees like the cold crush brothers, it certainly would be hard to detect an influence from people like heron, in style or content: early hip hop emceeing was characterized by extreme rhythmic structure and rhyme that just wasn't there in heron or last poets, and there's almost no politics for awhile: it's a party style. one might say he anticipated hip hop to some extent, and he may even have been an influence on the political turn in the late 80s (as in krs one), or on later use of jazz by people like guru, but even on that i would take some convincing. that's not say the stuff isn't good. that last album - i'm new here - was quite something.