Shelton HullFiled under: Art, Florida, Media | Tags: Anomaly, Jaxunderbelly, Matt Allison, Shea Slemmer, TSI
Filed under: Music, Reviews | Tags: Def Jam Records, ECW Press, Jake Brown, Johnny Cash, Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin: in the studio, by Jake Brown. Toronto: ECW Press. 254 pp, $17.95
The 25th anniversary of Def Jam Records presents music fans with a unique opportunity to appreciate the career of its co-founder Rick Rubin. His long-time collaborator Russell Simmons recently took the opportunity, during a “VH1 Honors” special devoted to the pioneering hip-hop label, to declare Rubin “the greatest producer of all time.” Of course, there are a number of legendary producers whose acolytes would raise vigorous objection to that idea, but you can make a pretty strong case on Rubin’s behalf.
A practicing Buddhist, known as much for his long beard, his omnipresent mala beads and typically barefooted lotus posture, Rubin–the winner of seven Grammy awards–is surely not concerned with anyone’s production-chops hierarchy. His reluctance to engage in the usual industry crossfire is as much a factor in the legend as the intense work ethic he’s displayed during three decades in the business. Few have worked with a vaster array of talent, very few have contributed to more classic records, and no one has put together a resume quite like Rick Rubin’s. Nor would anyone have ever thought to.
Rick Rubin: in the studio (ECW Press) is not a book worthy of its subject, and it’s a terrible advertisement for its author. Jake Brown has written a number of books about major figures in American music, including Alice In Chains, Biggie Smalls, Suge Knight, 50 Cent, Kanye West, R. Kelly, Jay-Z, Motley Crue, Black Eyed Peas, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rick James. (His “In the Studio” series also has volumes on Heart, Prince, Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur.) This one feels like something he put together within a few weeks for money on the side. One hopes there is more to it than that, but I doubt it.
If any first-hand reporting went into this book, there is no way to tell from the way it’s organized. All of the cited quotes were cribbed from other sources, mostly interviews with specialist music magazines. Any original insight is subsumed to a fan-boy ethic that pervades the text. His book is constructed in such a way that Brown somehow manages to make Rubin come off as overrated. However, the nine-page ”selected discography” included at the end of the book, is interesting, if only for the revelations of work one didn’t know Rubin did.
The text itself runs 225 pages, of which exactly 30 deal cover the Def Jam years. This earlier material is handled much more ably; this, along with the Johnny Cash stuff, is the music Rick Rubin will be remembered for. Interesting tidbits abound. For example, Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys discovered LL Cool J’s demo tape while hanging out in Rubin’s dorm room/office. Conversely, Rubin (the group’s original DJ) was the impetus behind their decision to drop drummer Kate Schellenbach and focus on rap. He was the label’s in house producer for its first five years.
When Rubin speaks of crying on an airplane as he listened to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the book—if not the story it chronicles—reaches its narrative peak. From that point neither Rubin, nor this book, are the same. Rubin’s moves to start his own Def American Recordings and shift the focus of his production from rap to rock sparked a new era in his own career; he would go on to achieve commercial and critical heights unseen among his generation. It doesn’t work out so well for the book.
Later chapters dealing with Tom Petty, Slayer, Danzig, AC/DC, System of a Down, The Cult, Mick Jagger, Weezer, Dixie Chicks and Metallica will simply fall flat; even acolytes of those specific artists will be hard-pressed to extract any fresh tidbits from this compendium of public sources. Rubin’s work with Neil Diamond makes for an interesting five pages, while the Audioslave chapter is most notable for the constant subtle digs at former Rage Against the Machine singer Zach de la Rocha.
The book’s author, like its subject, is a big fans of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who have retained Rubin as their primary producer, and whose albums take up 50 pages of the book. A Peppers fan can probably glean some useful insight about the band’s gear and working methods; John Frusciante’s evolution within the larger group dynamic comes through well. But one-fourth of the text? Questionable.
What ultimately sells this book, and cements Rubin’s hall-of-fame credentials, is the Def Jam material, and the stuff on Johnny Cash. Brown devotes 22 pages to the near-symbiotic relationship between artist and producer, who together collaborated on four albums that encompass arguably the finest work by either man. The success of the Cash-Rubin recordings (which can now, thankfully, be had as a single box set) led countless musicians, fans and record labels to revisit the work of past masters and present these voices to a new generation of music consumers. As such, many older artists got the best and/or last payday of their careers as an indirect result. Surely the major Cash scholars will cover all this in greater detail, but Brown writes a nice introduction.
It’s unfortunate that Brown didn’t do the extra work of compiling a fuller listing of Rubin’s credits–more than 100 albums so far, including four this year and seven in 2008. Hell, his resume makes a fine outline for a book. One can think of several artists who’ve worked with Rubin, barely mentioned in this book, that would be worth hearing a little more about: U2, the Gossip, Wu-Tang Clan, Shakira, Saul Williams, Cheryl Crow, Andrew Dice Clay, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Although some of these collaborations yielded only singles, they could also yield some savory anecdotes; surely some of them would be happy to put the guy over in print. Hell, there is nothing about Rubin’s crucial role producing Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”, although, for the record, Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” beat was better. For millions of music fans who missed the rise of Def Jam, the only time they’ve ever seen him was in the video. Worth a mention.
On the whole, Rick Rubin: in the studio is probably not worth the $17.95 it’s asking for. As a survey of his career, and a sampling of the techniques he brings to bear in the studio, it’s merely a passable stopgap. The major writing on Rick Rubin remains to be done, hopefully by Rubin’s own rock-steady hand. But until then, this will do.
sdh666@hotmail.com; October 27, 2009
Crime has been a subject of wide discussion across Northeast Florida—but what else is new? Every bit of nasty business in our headlines of late has been duplicated, to no end, up and down the state, and around the country. We’ll not speak here of specific incidents, but instead of the larger problem, the stuff no one else wants to talk about.
The first thing to remember is that we are involved in a national problem, and no one, anywhere, has got a handle on it, which intensified the burden felt by all cities as they basically improvise new concepts and methodologies of crime control. The early predictions of social theorists were borne out: the economic recession has made crime a lot tougher for civil society to deal with, for obvious reasons.
Police shootings are up, but 2009 was one of the worst years ever, in terms of police officers being killed. JSO has not lost a man in combat with a suspect in some time, which speaks to their skills, but other states have noted some truly awful incidents. The police response has seen an increase in police-involved shootings and other uses of force that polarize the relationship between law-enforcement and the populations they serve. All these trends are certain to continue.
Liberal ideologues are quick to note that actual crime statistics have held stable, or (as in Duval) posted credible drops in recent years. Yay! That still leaves thousands of violent crimes occurring in our state every year, and the billions that must be spent to maintain this delicate “balance”. The vast majority of kids who turn up missing, for example, or women who are subjected to sexual assault, are never even mentioned by the media; they can, at best, hope to be fodder in some chump politico’s year-end reports, which is no consolation to them or their families. We are not talking about numbers on a page; we’re talking about human beings, more of whom are being hurt every day.
It speaks to the soft, sorry style of politics in our state now that whole populations are getting mass-traumatized, with no real response from the people themselves. Residents of the Riverside area are up in arms—literally, in many cases—about a series of rapes that remain unsolved at this writing. The heinous attack on a bicyclist in broad daylight was not reported to the public until a week later, by which time more attacks had happened. The best reporting was done by the Riverside Community News blog, which was first to put out sketches of the suspects.
Likewise, in the week before the recent tragedy in Orange Park, someone tried to snatch a child mere yards from where the girl later disappeared, but local media—caught up in the “Balloon Boy” debacle, seemingly imposed on them by the networks—failed to inform residents of the incident until it was too late. Both are glaring examples of the defects of mainstream media, and of the need for citizens to fill those gaps formerly occupied solely by media and law-enforcement. There are now only a small handful of reporters actively walking the police beat, and almost none who might take pride in knowing the subject inside-out, and that’s bad news for everyone.
Typically, people have come to this writer for solutions, since I’ve been open and up-front about the need for enhanced vigilance within communities for several years. One might think a response of such kind is beneath us, like we don’t want to “stoop to their level”. Well, we’re already there. When good people are being preyed upon, and their neighbors do nothing, we’re getting awfully close to moral equivalence.
With people buying guns more than ever—thanks, Obama!—it would seem the next logical step to use these weapons for the purpose they were designed—protection of innocent life. That would entail more armed (righteous) men and women walking, biking, riding their streets, looking for trouble. No citizen should ever feel alone in the face of predatory violence; these animals are everyone’s enemy, and only a quasi-organized movement to take back our streets will stop them even slightly.
The next generation of anti-American-agitators will need only to piggyback atop the nation’s preexisting vulnerabilities to achieve their goals of destabilization. Violence won’t even be necessary, because there is so much of it already; terrorism will only add to the stresses of a first-response infrastructure that has already been compromised. The system is blown-out. All the former citadels of American power, like DC, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit, have been subsumed with spikes in violence, and the collapse of authority along the southern border means—well, that’s obvious now. There’s nothing random, isolated or coincidental about any of it.
sdh666@hotmail.com; October 27, 2009
Filed under: Media, Politics | Tags: Audit Bureau of Circulation, Denver Post, Editor & Publisher, Miami Herald, New York Times, News Corporation, Philadelphia Inquirer, Rupert Murdoch, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal
Like many of my colleagues around the country, I entered the journalism profession during those now-clearly halcyon years of the mid-1990s—the years when “alternative rock” as still meant something as an organizational concept for musicians and their fans; years when the biggest issue of our politics was the president’s personal life; back when the worst we could expect from terrorists was 100 killed in a bombing, not thousands dead from coordinated next-level strikes; years when it never appeared that the US economy could ever do anything but grow.
Those years were also boom years for the media. Newspapers and magazines were thriving as adjuncts of a bull market built around consumerism, and “information technology”, as yet unassociated with the “IT Bubble”, still promised vast new growth in the media itself. Print media welcomes the expansion of its electronic counterpart; it was viewed as an instrument of its own benefit, not as a competitor that would eventually ruin most of traditional media. It was a time when people were actually spending millions to dollars to launch new magazines and newspapers, instead of shutting the existing ones down. Like my colleagues, I’ve spent most of this decade watching the steady destruction of media monoliths that took generations to construct, while inveighing against the poor choices on the management levels that accelerated the whole tragic process.
The process continues apace in 2009. The most recent numbers compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulation and reported most ably by Editor & Publisher,, spanning the Septembers from 2008-2009, are awful. The usual declines, augmented by the larger economic recession, have pushed readerships to lows unseen in living memory. All of the top-25 Sunday papers posted declines averaging 8.42%.
Of the top-25 circulation daily papers, 21 posted declines that average 13.12%, led by the Miami Herald (-23%) and the once-mighty San Francisco Chronicle, which lost a staggering 25.8% of its readership in one year. The New York Times, whose excesses and abuses have figured prominently in the cracking-up of this monolith, only lost 7.28%, but circulation fell below a million—a sad landmark for the business. (The three papers reporting no figures—Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post and Seattle Times—are presumed to be in comparable straits.)
The nation’s largest circulation newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, was the only gainer (+.61%), and is now the only paper with more than two million paid. It had the good fortune of being owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is apparently the only person in the upper levels of American media who knows what he’s doing. Cynics will point out that News Corp. has thrived by pushing populist buttons, generating more heat than light, perhaps. If one sets aside the Journal as an anomaly among the top-ten gainers, none were by papers with a circulation above 175,000.
These larger declines represent a collapse in the information-gathering capacity of whole cities. The daily paper serves a function that has not been fully eclipsed by its competition—not yet, anyway. That is a generational shift in still-early phases; millions of people lack regular access to such technology, and are as such reliant on traditional media for their news. Plus, the daily paper style is a unique animal in the literary world; it is the language of real-time communication, the last bulwark against a language based entirely on acronyms and emoticons and slang. The collapse of the daily paper industry will lead to a fracturing of language that could make everyday talk incomprehensible and impossible to teach within just a few years. If it isn’t already.
Filed under: Florida, Media, Politics | Tags: arsenic, Cabot's-Koppers Superfund Site, copper arsenate, cresote, Environmental Protection Administration, Friends of wild Iris, Gainesville, napthalen, Wild Iris Books
[The following--lightly edited for style, not for content--was sent in from Fans of Wild Iris Books, a bookstore and cafe catering to the gay/lesbian/hippie/alternative religion community of Gainesville, FL, as well as colleagues, cohorts, confidants, co-conspirators and other sympathetic parties.
The saga of the state's Superfund sites has seen vast, wide, prolific explication, but there is always more to that story. There are two rallies planned for the next couple of weeks, and the store has plenty of extra information. I would encourage any readers in the beautiful Gainesville area to get involved, especially the young activists related to UF, SFSC and the glorious Civic Media Center. Also curious for insight from anyone who specializes in these issues. ]
Have you heard about the TOXIC Cabot’s-Koppers Superfund Site right here in Gainesville??? If not, here are the basics. Located in the heart of Gainesville, the Koppers Superfund Site is listed as one of the EPA’s top toxic sites and has been polluting Gainesville since 1983.
The site is releasing over 32 pollutants/toxins including Cresote, Napthalen, Carcinogenic aromatic chemicals, Dioxins, Copper Arsenate and Arsenic. Huge clouds of highly toxic, carcinegenic dioxin-laden dust regularly blow off the site into and throughout Gainesville. Our soil and air have already been polluted and soon these toxins will pollute our water supply as well.
Koppers will not leave town and clean the site unless WE rally and demand that authories take charge of the situation and protect the health of our citizens. We need volunteers to make calls to Gainesville residents alerting them of the danger and encouraging them to take part in several rallies to continue to garner public and media attention and force Koppers into action. You can also purchase support T-Shirts at Wild Iris Books for only $15 and the proceeds will benefit the costly legal help that we will need to fight for this cause.
Never phonebanked? Don’t worry; we will provide you with phone scripts and answers to all the questions that people may ask. All you need is a desire to save Gainesville from these pollutants. YOU can make a difference in protecting OUR community.
Find out more information about the site here: http://superfund.friendsofwildiris.org/
http://alachua.fl.us/government/depts/epd/pollution/cabotsite.aspx
Please think about volunteering to make some phone calls and help get the message out that Gainesville will not stand for the poisoning of our soil, air, and water. WE CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE! Please feel free to contact me with any questions. No amount of time is too small, even a couple of phone calls can help spread the word. Please forward this message on to anyone who may be interested in helping.
RALLIES
10/24 – 200 NW 23rd Ave (by Koppers Main Entrance)
9:00am – 1:00pm
10/29 – City/County Koppers Hearing, County Building, Downtown Gainesville
4:00pm Onwards
11/7 – 200 NW 23rd Ave (by Koppers Main Entrance)
9:00am – 1:00pm
Signs will be provided – just bring yourself!
Erica Merrell
Friends of Wild Iris
352.375.7477
erica@friendsofwildiris.org
Filed under: Florida, Politics | Tags: Bill McCollum, Sandi Copes, Student Loan XPress
[Attorney General Bill McCollum has continued apace with the pretty good work done by his predecessor, Charlie Crist (whose mostly absentee performance as Governor/perpetual candidate) in combating social predators, human traffickers and profiteering insurance. He has settled nicely into his best niche since Congress. This press release is reprinted in full, because it's such a wild story.
On the larger scale, I'm disappointed that Obama hasn't canceled student loan debt as part of the stimulus plan, since that money represents just a drop in the bucket of larger debt issues, yet still such a big part of the debt-load accrued by an increasing number of young workers. Recent studies indicate that the average college graduate earns his or her B.A. at a cost of $20,000 in student loan debt. With tuitions increasing throughout the decade for colleges, universities and even community colleges and trade schools, those numbers are likely to increase, especially as financial institutions and the federal government curbs its largesse in response to the economic collapse.
The Florida AG's office, BTW, can be followed, on Twitter.]
For Immediate Release
October 27, 2009
Contact: Sandi Copes
Phone: 850.245.0150
Sandi.Copes@myfloridalegal.com
FLORIDA LEADS MULTISTATE SETTLEMENT WITH STUDENT LOAN PROVIDER
~ Settlement resolves issues related to now-defunct helicopter training school ~
TALLAHASSEE, FL –Attorney General Bill McCollum today announced that Florida and 11 other states have obtained a settlement with a private student loan provider, resolving an 18-month multistate investigation. Student Loan Xpress, a subsidiary of CIT Group, will forgive a total of $112.8 million in debt for students who obtained private educational loans to attend a now-defunct helicopter training school, Silver State Helicopters, LLC. Florida was the lead state in the investigation and the settlement negotiations; Florida victims will have over $17 million in student loans forgiven.
“This is an excellent resolution for those students whose dreams of flying were grounded, but who were still stuck with student loans to pay back,” said Attorney General Bill McCollum.
Silver State Helicopters began operating in 2002 as a small helicopter pilot training school and ultimately operated 34 flight schools throughout the country with a total of 2,700 enrolled students. For at least two years, Student Loan Xpress served as the preferred student lender for Silver State Helicopters, providing approximately $174 million to over 2,300 students nationwide. Records showed that only a small percentage of students graduated and drop-out rates were exceptionally high.
By 2008, Silver State Helicopters had discontinued operations entirely and had filed for bankruptcy. Most students were left owing Student Loan Xpress a substantial amount of debt for training and certifications they never received. The Florida Attorney General’s Office received over 300 complaints about the company’s bankruptcy and the student loans still owed. Silver State had school locations in Jacksonville, Ft. Lauderdale, Lakeland, and Melbourne with at least 375 Florida students.
The settlement requires Student Loan Xpress forgive 75 percent of the total amount borrowed to the majority of Silver State Helicopters students. The percentage of loan forgiveness for the remaining students will vary by the amount of training each successfully completed.
In addition to the loan forgiveness, the agreement includes several terms of injunctive relief which will preclude Student Loan Xpress from providing negative information about students who failed to make payments on their loans prior to the settlement to any credit reporting agencies with. Further, in situations where Student Loan Xpress acts as the exclusive private loan provider for students of a private post-secondary, trade or vocational institution not certified or accredited by state of federal authorities, the company must provide written disclosures to each
prospective student-borrower stating the loans do not constitute an endorsement of the school, its principals, or the quality of education or training offered.
A related national private class action settlement was also today filed in Federal court in Florida.
[Mr. Lif is back in Jacksonville tonight, performing at TSI with local legend Willie Evans, Jr., Mr. Al Pete and Night Lite. As such, it makes sense to reprint a short article I wrote previewing his Jack Rabbits gig last May. It's funny, sort of, that I've interviewed Lif least twice, each time being undone by technical difficulties. Maybe the chatter was just too hot!]
Mr. Lif surveys the money jungle
The Boston-based rapper and theoretician Jeffrey Haynes [is] known professionally as Mr. Lif … Lif’s links to the River City were facilitated by the ABs; Lif’s cameo on “Supa Dynamite”–the beat for which was jacked, four years later, for Jay-Z’s hit “Empire State of Mind”–helped drive indie buzz for their debut, 2005’s “…And Now”. They opened for Perceptionists all over North America that year, while the illustrious Paten Locke, aka Therapy pulled double duty on decks in place of new father Fakts One. The Perceptionists’ debut, “Black Dialogue”, boasted beats by Willie Evans Jr., who followed with production work on Lif’s second LP, “Mo’ Mega” (2006) and the subsequent remix record, “Black Mega”.
Evans and Locke also turn up on Lif’s latest LP, “I Heard It Today”, alongside Locke’s Smile Rays cohort Batsauce, Edan, Headnodic, J Zone, Dumbtron, Vinnie Paz and the legendary Philly MC Bahamadia. It was released in May on his own Blood Bot Tactical Enterprises, in the DIY spirit embodied by Obama, whose historic victory was, among other things, a triumph for hip-hop’s aesthetics and values. Its 14 tracks are delivered with the razor-like articulation that makes Mr. Lif one of the most distinctive lyricists in all of hip-hop—the kind of singular voice that self-identifies from the first breath.
After debuting on 1997’s “Rebel Alliance” compilation, Lif dropped a series of singles and EPs from 1998-2001, recording for Def Jux and Grand Royal before a blazing run in 2002 and 2003: “Live At the Middle East” was followed by the “Emergency Rations” EP and his studio debut, “I Phantom”, four singles and at least ten guest spots on albums by El-P, Aesop Rock, Prefuse 73 and future Perceptionist Akrobatik. All told, Lif has probably appeared on at least two dozen albums and factored in the recording of hundreds of tracks as a rapper or producer. And more coming—stay tuned!
Mr. Lif@Jack Rabbits, by Liam Happenstance
sdh666@hotmail.com; May 8, 2009
Nikki Talley at Clemson University
[Also published in this week's Folio, p.64.]
Asheville, NC native Nikki Talley is spending the end of October in Florida. Her Oct. 28 gig at the Casbah is just one of seven planned for the region, starting with a double-shot at Magnolia Fest and ending at the Milltop Tavern in St. Augustine on the 31st. A fixture in the Mid-Atlantic’s acoustic scene, Talley has played around here before, but never as intensively. She has already acquired a core group of local fans whose “vocal” support has contributed to a steady uptick of bookings.
Talley tours in support of her third album, 2008’s To Be a Bird. Its recording was funded by her winnings from “Carolina Idol” in 2007.The spareness of the stripped-down voice-and-guitars dynamic puts special pressure on the artist to exhibit both songwriting skills and a clarity of both voice and instrument. Hardly simple or cliché, it can be totally uncompromising, but Talley appears up to the challenge.
She is mostly self-taught, having learned some guitar from her mother as a child in Georgia. By 19, she was playing bar gigs in Key West. Her debut disc, Brother, was released in 2002, paid for with a grant from her local arts council, while Telling Lies (2006) was home-recorded in Toronto. All tracks from the latter can be downloaded at Amazon, and all recordings can be gotten in person or via Internets.
Talley works as a duet, no drums, with Jason Sharp playing extra strings. The intimacy of the setting, and their telepathic chemistry in performance reflects not only their professional chops, but also their status as a married couple. Asheville’s Mountain Express notes: “Talley’s voice is quietly commanding, and her songwriting evokes a sense of sorrowful exploration.” They’re not just hyping their homegirl—the music is good. It should be no surprise that her sound is so clean. What else would you expect from a woman who makes her own soap?
sdh666@hotmail.com; October 13, 2009
Filed under: Art, Media, Music, Politics, Reviews | Tags: Adam Clayton Powell, American Red Cross, Anita O'Day, Artie Shaw, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Bill Evans, Billy Higgins, Charles Mingus, Charlie Byrd, Charlie Haden, Charlie Parker, Clark Terry, Columbia Records, Dannie Richmond, Darius Milhaud, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Elvin Jones, Eugene Wright, Ganelin Trio, Gene Krupa, George S. Patton, George W. Bush, George Wein, Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Blanton, Jimmy Garrison, Jo Jones, Joe Morello, John Coltrane, John Foster Dulles, Kenny Clarke, Lennie Tristano, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Lyndon Johnson, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Norman Granz, Ornette Coleman, Oscar Peterson, Paul Chambers, Paul Desmond, Paul Motian, Penny Von Eschen, Philly Joe Jones, Prince, Quincy Jones, Randy Weston, Richard Nixon, Roland Kirk, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Vaughn, Scott LaFaro, Sidney Bechet, Sonny Greer, Thelonious Monk, United States State Department, Walter Page, Woody Herman
Dave Brubeck’s 1959 album Time Out is one of the landmark recordings in jazz history. For that reason alone, the 50th anniversary of its release merits celebration. But, on a larger scale, Time Out represents a major development within American culture, one that was crucial to inducing the seismic shifts to occur in our country during the tumultuous 1960s that followed. While it is likely that such shifts would have occurred anyway, with or without Brubeck’s contributions, a strong case can be made that his group, and its most important work, helped accelerate progress on several fronts, advancing the cause of racial harmony while opening the door for later musical innovations.
It is further worth noting that Brubeck’s achievements represent, to a surprising degree, a triumph of conservative values: faith, family, hard work and self-reliance. His ideological compass has always remained pointed toward the California ranchlands of his youth—the kind of environment that was later famously embraced by President Reagan, who fully understood the symbolic value of his years of public brush-clearing and horse-riding. Reagan’s retreats to the ranch implied a desire to escape the Beltway’s rarefied air and reorient himself to the pioneer spirit which drove America’s development in its first century of existence. The simple beauty of such areas communicates an austere dignity that would surely impart perspective on the serious issues all Presidents must grapple with, and so it is make perfect sense that men as different in personality as George W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt would embrace them.
For most of his early life—from childhood, through his years in the US Army and as a music student at Oberlin College—Brubeck existed firmly within the Tradition. Had he not caught the jazz bug early on, he might have ended up as a concert pianist working with symphony orchestras, or a composer of string quartets. He did eventually do a lot of work in these areas, but it was the worldwide acclaim earned as a jazzman that gave him the freedom to expand his musical horizons. Indeed, if his legacy could be summed up in one word, despite all his formalistic trappings, it would be “freedom”.
This legacy of freedom is being celebrated by Columbia Records, which recently reissued Time Out in a special three-disc package, on occasion of the 50th anniversary of the album’s original release. Suffice to say that, if you have never heard this music, then you owe yourself the pleasure of doing so; likewise, people for whom this music is old hat will still find value in its enhanced sound quality and the wealth of bonus material, including photos, performance footage and eight songs recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival between 1961-64. The highlight is an interactive tutorial in which Brubeck, now 89 years old, talks viewers through the melodies as he plays them.
The point of Time Out was to break out of the creative restrictions imposed on the jazz musician by strict adherence to the steady 4/4 beat that had characterized jazz since it first emerged from turn-of-century New Orleans. For the first 30 years of recorded jazz, that beat was maintained by the bass drum, replicating its role in the standard marching band, whose cadences and instrumentation were the basis of jazz early bands. Drummers of the 1940s New York scene, led by Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, shifted the burden of time-keeping from bass drum to the ride cymbal, which opened up the sound and set the standard for what modern jazz would sound like. (The upright bass, adapted from symphonic orchestras, evolved to replace the tuba as a rhythm instrument early on, and typically reinforced the 4/4 beat; its time-keeping role expanded in modern jazz, as the drummers went further beyond the beat, leaving its reiteration to the bassist.) By the early 1950s, all instrumentalists had unprecedented creative freedom in jazz, and the race to find the next great innovation was as competitive as the Space Race.
The introduction of long-playing (LP) records in 1948 quadrupled the amount of time available on an individual record, opened up song structures and brought a vaster range of material to the marketplace. Traditional American musical forms—jazz, blues, gospel, folk—predominated; rock was growing commercially, but did not become a creative force to rival the others until 1964.
The singer Ian Svenonius noted years back that the largest jazz groups are only a quarter the size of symphony orchestras, which are roughly 100 people; Swing Era bands could be half that size, while modern jazz groups of the ‘40s and beyond are usually between three and six people. Today, many artists do huge business as solo acts. Prince, for example, played all 27 instruments on his debut album and for years only used his bands for performances. Computers allow many pop singers and rappers to make albums without using any actual instruments at all.
Traditional European and early American music is labeled with the catch-all term of “classical” largely because of our nation’s record stores. It doesn’t seem to rankle so badly as certain artists who reject the idea of “jazz” as an organizational concept, maybe because the LP ensured that such music would remain in circulation as the country went more toward smaller (and logistically cheaper) groups. Most Americans today would know nothing of classical music if not for LPs and their CD reissues, particularly of the versions recorded in the 1950s and ‘60s. Likewise, although one can see top-notch jazz music anywhere in the world most nights, the closest that most jazz fans can usually get to experiencing serious big-band stuff is CD, or the occasional festival.
Brubeck, who studied with Darius Milhaud at Oberlin, did the industry a favor by wearing his classical affinities on his cuff-linked sleeve. His grounding in that tradition was the impetus to bust out of the 4/4. Max Roach had recorded an entire album, Jazz In ¾ Time, in 1957, and several songs on Time Out are rooted in ¾, as well as the standard 4/4. “Three to Get Ready” is in 3/4 and 4/4. “Kathy’s Waltz” starts in 4/4, then goes into 3/8, while “Blue Rondo ala Turk” starts in 9/8, with Desmond’s solo in 4/4.
Other tracks switch-up the rhythms more explicitly. “Everybody’s Jumpin’” and “Pick Up Sticks” are in 6/4. “Take Five” stays in 5/4 over its five-plus minutes, with Morello’s drum solo the definitive explication of that beat. “Strange Meadowlark” opens with a Brubeck solo running over two minutes with no set time whatsoever—a nod, perhaps, to the nascent free-jazz scene, or to Lennie Tristano, whose solo recordings “Spontaneous Combustion”, “Requiem” and “Turkish Mambo” anticipated much of this.
Take Five has no shortage of highlights, staring with “Take Five”, which is simply one of the greatest songs ever recorded. A masterpiece of dramatic tension, it was an instant classic when released as a single, becoming the first million-seller in jazz history; the album itself would soon follow. To this day, media references “Take Five” to invoke feelings of class and sophistication; it was famously used to launch Infiniti automobiles in America, with cool narration by British actor Jonathan Pryce.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet functioned as a unified whole, working together 16 years, yet each member has distinguished himself as a master of his own instrument. Bassist Eugene Wright is easily overlooked, as he played with little flash and almost no solos, but a close listen reveals how crucial his work was. He kept the group’s forward-reaching sound rooted in the fundamentals, which he learned from the best in hot spots like Kansas City and his native Chicago. Together, Wright and drummer Joe Morello comprised one of the all-time greatest rhythmic tandems, easily ranking up there with such towering twins as Walter Page and Jo Jones (Count Basie); Jimmy Blanton and Sonny Greer (Duke Ellington); Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones (Miles) Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones (Coltrane); Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins (Coleman); Mingus and Dannie Richmond; Scott Lafaro and Paul Motian (Bill Evans).
Naturally, a record built around rhythmic complexity puts special pressure on the drummer, and Morello attained legend status with his work on Time Out. His brush-work on “Everybody’s Jumpin’” anchors a brilliant piece that holds up just fine against its adjacents. “Take Five” is one of the rare examples of a major pop hit built around a drum solo; the other notable case would be “Sing Sing Sing”, an epochal Swing Era anthem by Benny Goodman (and a star-making vehicle for drummer Gene Krupa), recorded in 1937. Like Desmond’s earlier on the same track, musicians and students know their solos better than some know their best friends.
As for the leader himself, Brubeck’s playing is spare but efficient, each note pressed for maximum resonance. His solo on “Kathy’s Waltz” is strictly old-school, with hints of Ragtime, while those on “Three to Get Ready” and “Everybody’s Jumpin’” sound downright modernistic, with overt references to future label-mate Monk.
Ultimately, the real star of the album is alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (1924-1977), a fellow Californian whose musical partnership with Brubeck lasted over 30 years. His sound, which typically enters after a few bars’ introduction by Brubeck, dominates the quartet’s output. Desmond is often dismissed by purists for a coolness of tone that can sometimes border on the antiseptic, but the quiet intensity of his playing can be lost on ears trained to listen for strain, sweat and other signifiers of serious effect. If Desmond’s style sounds effortless, it is only because of rigorous practice. After his death, the author of “Take Five” left his split of royalties to the American Red Cross, which receives annual royalties in the low six figures.
1959 was a year of explosive growth in jazz, and Time Out was just one of at least three major events that year. Columbia also issued Miles Davis’ seminal Kind of Blue, which marked the emergence of a new approach to harmony based on modal scales; this gave the soloist—Davis himself, most notably, as well as collaborator Bill Evans—access to unprecedented emotional range, a major factor in the current perception of jazz as a “romantic” music. Due to the constant reissues over the decades, the prevalence of bootlegging and the pervasiveness of digital downloading, it may be impossible to determine which of these is, in fact, the most successful jazz album of all time; yet both helped shift the business model firmly toward the LP, which had only been around for about a decade at that point.
John Coltrane, who spent five years in Davis’ group, played on Kind of Blue, but his sideman work was soon eclipsed by the Atlantic Records release Giant Steps. After years of rigorous experimentation, 1959 saw the emergence of Coltrane’s mature sound, and he would go on to be, arguably, the last true giant of jazz music, a figure whose very name still inspires devotion that borders on the religious, over 40 years after his death. On the surface, it would be impossible to find two more different men, in terms of tone, technique and temperament, than Coltrane and Paul Desmond—but at the intersection of their styles, as heard on these three albums, one hears the future.
1959 also included major works by Ornette Coleman, who along with Coltrane helped bring Free Jazz to fruition, and Charles Mingus, who recorded three brilliant albums for Atlantic that year. Max Roach had already been first to record pianoless groups, and among the first to openly lobby for civil rights through his music; and Thelonious Monk, whose rhythmic and harmonic innovations made him, in essence, the father of modern jazz. The fact that all these men, with volatile personalities and deep-set musical tastes, all gave respect to Brubeck speaks to his chops and credibility.
Brubeck is rightfully lionized by the left for his role in helping to shape a world defined by JFK’s “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. In generational terms, the Baby Boomers’ collective self-definition is rooted in the 1960s, for better and for worse, and jazz artists like Brubeck, Coltrane and Davis are thus regarded almost as highly as the rock bands that would ultimately dominate the American music scene.
The primary beneficiary of the commercial growth of jazz music was the African-American community, which got its first taste of the free market and was soon able to alter the widespread perceptions of the white majority, and ultimately obliterate many vestiges of racial prejudice in this country. Jazz was the wedge that forced integration; as more and more of the top draws—Goodman, Krupa, Artie Shaw—integrated, and others insisted on playing for integrated audiences, bigotry took a backseat to box-office. By the time of Time Out, integrated bands weren’t exactly commonplace in the US, but they were hardly unusual. Norman Granz’ “Jazz At the Philharmonic”, for example, toured the country with all-stars of all races.
The other major beneficiary of jazz music’s global presence was the United States government, which quickly recognized the value of a uniquely American cultural export. Brubeck, who served briefly under Patton in the Army, would become a front-line soldier in a war of ideas, spreading his vision of musical and personal freedom around the world, often directly in collaboration with the State Department.
The arrival of Louis Armstrong in Europe in 1927 basically introduced jazz to the world; a handful of devoted critics and musicians had imported stacks of jazz records from New York for distribution in London and Paris. By the time Duke Ellington’s band made the same trip, in 1932, jazz had become its own cottage industry, with magazine and radio shows catering to the market, as well as the first generation of European jazz musicians. For the first time, America had a cultural product to compete with Europe, and in this realm we remained well ahead.
The assault on jazz by totalitarian regimes—first the Nazis, then the Soviet Union—only enhanced its appeal to youth across Europe, many of whom risked death to continue playing such music. By this point, the old world had produced its own masters like guitarist Django Reinhardt, while American musicians like Benny Carter and Sidney Bechet had emigrated (not unlike the Japanese who brought judo to the west). World War II brought hundreds of current and future jazzmen into Europe and Asia, either as combat troops or in some musical capacity. The music of the war years deserves its own category in the lineage, but by decade’s end American jazz had become the new music of choice not only throughout Europe, but also in Japan.
Like rock and rap, which came along later, jazz began as an indigenous form of expression within the minority community, then “crossed-over” to become the primary vehicle of white rebellion—a means of drawing cultural lines between generations. Jazz was viciously attacked by the mainstream in the 1920s and ‘30s; such criticisms read now as time-capsule pieces of hyperbolic calumny. By the 1950s, the US State Department saw fit to give jazz its ultimate stamp of legitimacy by backing some leading musicians on international tours conceived as propaganda for post-war America. It was a textbook example of how “soft power” worked in the nascent Cold War.
Penny Von Eschen’s excellent 2002 book Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press) offers a definitive look at the program, organized in 1955 by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and US Rep Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), whose district encompassed the epicenter of modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie’s second great big band took the first trip in March 1956, covering parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. According to the program’s website: “In 1956, 1960 and 1961, Louis Armstrong [toured] Ghana (then the British Gold Coast), Congo, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, and the United Arab Republic. In 1963, 1970 and 1972, Duke Ellington toured the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and Africa.”
These musicians and others—including Carter, Coleman, Davis, Goodman, Mingus, Charlie Byrd, Lionel Hampton, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Quincy Jones, Roland Kirk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry, Sarah Vaughn and Randy Weston—traveled to the far corners of the musical world before the program ended in 1978. Many such areas were suspicious of western interests, and sometimes openly hostile. George Wein, impresario of the Newport Jazz Festival, was enlisted for logistical support. Brubeck was, of course, a major attraction.
In 1958, his quartet toured Sweden, Turkey, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Brubeck’s gigs in Poland that year, repeated in 1970, are considered key moments in the spreading of jazz into the Soviet Bloc. Cadres devoted to “improvised music” began sprouting in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland and Hungary soon after, while at least one major group (the Ganelin Trio) made great jazz in Russia itself. He and Armstrong later collaborated on The Real Ambassadors, a musical and recording based on their experiences, in 1961-62.
The musicians and artists in Eastern Europe (with support from sympathetic parties in the west) drove the engine of progress away from Communism and became totems in the way Charlie Parker was for the Beatniks, or Coltrane was for the Black Power movement. Their records were being smuggled into the West long before the Iron Curtain finally fell, at which point those scenes exploded into the creative powerhouses they are today. When Brubeck and other older jazzmen appear in Europe today, they are held to a similar status as their own native masters.
Japan got its introduction to jazz from occupying American soldiers, and has never lost its taste. As domestic sales of jazz records slumped hard in the 1970s and early ‘80s, the Japanese (typically) provided a vital commercial lifeline, helping to keep it vital long enough for the resurgence driven by CD technology. CDs, of course, were invented by the Japanese, while companies like JVC, Polygram and especially Sony bought up all the major jazz catalogs (Verve, Mercury, Blue Note/Capitol, Columbia) to be reissued in their new format. Every American who values their native culture owes a debt of thanks to those Japanese who rescued all that music from likely extinction.
Leading the way among the reissues that began flooding the market, well past the point of cultural saturation, were Columbia’s valedictorians from the class on ’59, Kind of Blue and Time Out, each of which has been re-released in increasingly completist form at least a half-dozen times (including box sets), while their lead singles, “So What” and “Take Five” have become standards. Both retain almost all of its original freshness and potency, despite three generations of innovation that followed its release. In the case of Time Out, time itself has only burnished the luster of an album dismissed by many top critics upon its release; very few would bother to raise any objection now.
October 9, 2009
Filed under: Florida, Media, Money Jungle, Politics | Tags: Charlie Crist, Haleigh Cummings, Misty Croslin, Somer Thompson
[This column was written a week before the tragic kidnapping and murder of seven year-old Somer Thompson, which occurred on the same day that Misty Croslin was robbed in the parking lot of an apartment building. In the latter case, the media chose to focus on the likelihood that Croslin and friends were attempting to buy drugs when the robbery occurred; typically, the logic holds that anyone using illegal drugs is fair game for any harm that may come to them.
The points raised in the column--which was rejected as being "preachy" and "overwrought"--ring far harsher, in light of subsequent events. A week before Somer Thompson was killed, someone tried to abduct another young girl within a few yards of where Thompson was last seen. Local media was too busy flogging the "Balloon Boy" debacle out of Colorado (which occupied two whole days of media coverage, and continues to linger even after being eclipsed by other, more relevant matters) to report on what had happened in their own city. As such, the people of Thompson's Orange Park community were denied fair warning of what had occurred, and given no opportunity for enhanced scrutiny. It was later revealed that there are at least 150 registered sexual offenders within a three-mile radius of where the little girl disappeared; not one has been sought for comment on the situation.
Recently, a woman was raped in broad daylight on the streets of Riverside, the neighborhood where I've lived since the late Clinton years. The community was not informed about the crime until nearly a week later, by which point there had been at least two other rapes in the area. Typically, the assailants were given ample time to flee; the victim is probably living in fear that the attackers (who also robbed her) may return to silence a potential witness. As always, the response of men in the area was, sadly, sorely lacking.
Sometimes it feels like I've been living through variations on the same nightmare, on an almost weekly basis, in the three years-plus that have passed since I lost a close friend under somewhat similar conditions. Hundreds of women and children--the epitome of defenseless "soft targets" have been killed around the United States since, and these crimes have occurred in stark disproportion in the state of Florida, enough that it can now be considered the nation's capital for predatory misogynist violence. Having already established itself as the "murder capital" of the country (at least, before the steadily deteriorating situation in Chicago altered perceptions), Northeast Florida now faces severe challenges to its plans for long-term growth. That, combined with the economic recession and the self-destructive response of our "leaders", threatens to undo decades of reasonably careful civic planning.
National media has at least been honest enough to call it for what it is: an "epidemic" of predatory violence directed against women and girls, an epidemic exacerbated by the slack, pathetic, exploitative methods of commercial media and the inadequate response of a law-enforcement community stretched to the breaking-point by a civilian political "leadership" that has compromised their effectiveness with constant busy work, of which the treasonous Drug War is just one example. I was especially appalled by the sight of Governor (and would-be Senator) Charlie Crist, who just happened to be visiting the scene when Thompson's body was discovered. While expressing the usual sympathies, he was careful to point out that (reported) crime is down 8% this year, as if that is some consolation to a grieving family. His remarks were directed to the cameras, an unseemly political maneuver that outraged many casual observers, who'd spent two days searching for the girl before Crist arrived to stump.
Having written extensively on this subject, and having taken the rhetoric of retaliation farther than anyone, anywhere, I take all of this shit very personally, and the fact that 2009 is the all-time peak year for gun sales in this state and country suggests that more and more people feel exactly as I do. All that said, your "Money Jungle" reject. Sorry I could not have been more helpful. Somer Thompson, RIP.]
It may not be exactly true that Florida is the nation’s epicenter of pedophilia and other sex-related crimes, but stereotypes exist for a reason. The Sunshine State is prolific in prostitution and human trafficking. It’s a major supplier of talent to the porn industry, which is at least legal. Georgia’s harsh treatment of sex offenders causes many to move south, into a state that’s much easier to blend into.
An ever-growing population means more schools, more kids, more prey for the super-predators that all the world has come to fear—but less oversight, fewer social and moral standards. The best thing Charlie Crist ever did was turn the heat up a little bit, a practice that has continued under Bill McCollum; Crist can own that issue in 2010, if he’s not too busy denying the vicious rumors being pushed by his political rivals. Funny how people who rightly inveigh against anti-gay discrimination are so eager to engage in the politics of personal destruction when it suits their agenda, huh?
We have all followed the tragic story of Haleigh Cummings, the little girl whose mysterious disappearance has tugged at our heartstrings and tickled our gag reflexes for over six months now. Seemingly every detail of the case has played out luridly across our TV screens, with national networks piggybacking their affiliates’ intrusive coverage for all it’s worth—which isn’t much, really. Rarely does the media play any productive role in cases like this. The media doesn’t find lost kids or doesn’t bring down criminals, but they have considerable gifts for prejudicing juries and muddying up the facts in such a way as to greatly reduce the likelihoods of happy outcomes.
But it’s not about happy outcomes, is it? No. It’s about money. The individual reporters may have some compassion for victims and their families, but the institutions themselves couldn’t care less, and their coverage of the Cummings family demonstrates that. Institutions are void of human attributes; they can’t feel anymore than a flag can bleed or statues of holy figures can cry for all the pain they see. At some point, long ago, the coverage stopped being about finding the child and became about destroying what remained of the lives she left behind, and it’s sick.
The case is similar, somewhat, to the death of little Caylee Anthony. Another child disappearance, this one with the worst possible outcome. Again, the media turned on the mother pretty quick; their prejudices were partially borne out by evidence, not that anyone was aware of that evidence at the time. America hates women; misogyny is more of a factor in modern society than racism, in part because blacks already internalized the self-destructive dogma invented and propagated by the white majority. Casey Anthony made two big mistakes: she had a child, and then she lost her.
At no point has it occurred to anyone that one or both of these young people are probably going to end up dead as a result of the extensive mind-fucking they’ve received from people two and three times their age, who have built them up as potential child-killers based on a smattering of real evidence. They would surely have prepared relevant graphics maudlin theme music to mark the occasion, if they had. This is not surprising; our culture is committed to stealing the innocence of all youth, ASAP.
So far, based solely on the public record, one can make a stronger case that Frank Sinatra had JFK killed because he blamed the Kennedys for the death of Marilyn Monroe than that Haleigh Cummings’ guardians were responsible for her disappearance. If there’s more to it, the government will suss that out. But the subtle insinuations of talking heads raise the question: what do they know that we don’t? Nothing, except that the people of Florida have very short attention spans; as such, the only way to keep them motivated on any subject is to douse them liberally with scandal.
Of course, all this would be somewhat acceptable if it helped to bring any of these children home safely. Unfortunately, this dynamic only helps the super-predators; in most of the major cases in recent years, the perps were registered offenders living near the kid, sometimes in the same neighborhood. The fact that we can’t stop/won’t stop such people should be a factor in the thinking of anyone wishing to raise a family in Florida. Those few precious hours, when lives hang in the balance, are typically wasted making sure the families aren’t somehow involved. By the time clearer heads have prevailed, it’s too late to save lives. Every predator knows this, and acts accordingly.
sdh666@hotmail.com
October 13, 2009
Filed under: Art, Florida, Music | Tags: Bossa Nova, Chris Phillips, Chris Spohn, Erzuile, the Sinclair
Chris Spohn’s name may often conjures thoughts of capes and speedos, fireworks and feedback, but the longtime noise-maker has carved out quite the diverse skill-set. A wily veteran of the music scene, Spohn has maintained a fascination with eastern rhythms and harmonies, while last year’s Sing Along with Chris Spohn was a sparkly little gem of acoustic folk. And now he comes forth with a Bossa Nova project, which sounds almost like a rib. Happily it is not. Newly-opened, the Sinclair (formerly the legendary Voodoo Lounge) hosts “Chris Spohn & Chris Phillips – Bossa Nova!!!” on Saturday, September 12, in their second gig after debuting at TSI during the August Artwalk. Erzuile opens. Spohn makes an easy subject; he knows exactly what he wants to say, and phrases with an aerodynamic economy almost musical in itself:
Q: What are you calling the project?
A: We are calling the project Chris Spohn & Chris Phillips – Bossa Nova!!!. We are a duet. Chris Phillips and I have been friends/musical collaborators for over ten years. We are also founding members of Gothic and Crack Rock Asteroids in the 90s. He is a full time music instructor as well as a multi instrumentalist in many musical projects of his own right.
Q: Are you doing original material, covers, or a mixture of both?
A: We are doing mostly original Bossa Nova songs as well as a few Soft Psych numbers and few unexpected covers in this style. We will also feature some electric guitar as well as sitar in these numbers,which will surely be highlights of our set. This is a fifty-fifty split of Chris’ and my original material. A spontaneous endeavor that some how magically arose.
Q: How does your approach to Bossa Nova differ from the stuff you are more commonly associated with (Noise/Acoustic)?
A: We don’t approach it any differently at all. I’m not a Folk or Noise or whatever artist, simply an artist of any and all possible styles. It’s whatever the universe wants really. Being a disciple of John Cage/Al Hanson etc. It all still follows the Happening/Fluxist principals. The only difference is we are forced to work much harder on this project to achieve the desired result of our original proposals and propositions for this particular endeavor.
Q: How long has this kind of music appealed to you? Who exposed to you this stuff, and how did you first like it?
A: We are disciples of all musical forms. Both sharing a mutual admiration for the Brazilian style for many many years. This covers the traditional Jobim/Gilberto styles as well as the later Tropicalia movement i.e. Ben/Veloso/Mutantes etc.
Q: In what ways is the Bossa Nova stuff consistent with what you’ve been doing before? Is it in any way related to the kind of stuff you were doing as part of Tropic of Cancer, or previous experiments with Eastern sounds and rhythms, like Percussion Psychdelia, or “Futuristic Sounds of Chris Spohn”?
A: Many of the Experimental/Noise artists have musical talent and ability beyond the public’s common perception. This should be a trend soon in Jacksonville with many artists coming out with surprises and new bags of tricks. I personally believe in the evolution of the artist and this is a showcase of our evolution and ability to blow minds in a whole new genre. At some point it is sure to become something else as the style evolves. We don’t plan to play this set/show more then a few times before this evolution is inevitable. I have also contributed original Bossa-type numbers into Tropic of Cancer and Acid Magick.
Q: What kind of comments did you get after the first show?
A: We played our first show at TSI to rave reviews. Everyone loved it, but we knew it could be better. This was the inspiration to do the Sinclair show. We envisioned a high class production in a classy establishment. The Sinclair was perfect. Dress to impress, emulating the 60’s Bossa scene, champagne toast, long stem roses for the ladies, a first class act. It’s always important to set the bar high. It challenges you, as well as the future artists to come. This has always been a top idea at the forefront of all productions I have concived. That is the artist/intellectual aspect behind all my work.
Q: Do you have any other shows lined up for Sept-October yet?
A: As for other shows, it’s Sinclair Sept 12th, then retreat and analysis to further better our best, and the best is yet to come!
Filed under: Media, Politics, Uncategorized | Tags: Chicago Sun-Times, Robert Novak, Roland Evans, Valerie Plame
"old-school"
In memory of Robert Novak, the ace political reporter who died earlier today, below follows a reprint of a column from almost exactly a year ago, written shortly after he’d announced his retirement due to the brain cancer that ultimately claimed his life. Novak’s fight with cancer was consistent with the man’s working method–he exceeded expectations after a diagnosis presumed to be imminently fatal. Instead, he was even able to return to work, sparingly, later in 2008; his courage was rewarded by getting to watch the major changes that have occurred in this country over the past year. To paraphrase Diamond Dallas Page: You may have loved him, you may have hated him, but you will never forget Robert Novak. RIP.
Bye-Bye, Sourpuss!
The sad news of Robert Novak’s pending demise offers yet another opportunity for those who remain to ponder our world as reflected in the life of a major figure in this history of American journalism. He was, above all else, an exemplar of tradecraft. Words are, first and foremost, instruments of control—or, at least, influence—and Novak’s application of them, for better and for worse, has shaped the future he will not live to see.
Novak, now 78, was old-school down to the nucleus of individual cells in his bone marrow. Never met him myself, but I would bet my tab at Steamworks that the man’s feet carried the permanent smell of shoe leather. Seriously, who else but Robert Novak would title his own memoir The Prince of Darkness? Working first with the late Rowland Evans, and alone since the 1980’s, Novak wrote one of the longest-running political column of his time. He “achieved” the contemporary record upon the death of William F. Buckley in February; it ended after 45 years, two months and 20 days.
His final week in the business really sucked. He got fed bogus information that John McCain intended to time the naming of his running-mate for Barack Obama’s now legendary first foreign tour. When it didn’t happen, Novak cut a promo on his sources and his days were numbered from there. A couple days later he hit an elderly pedestrian, in broad daylight at a prominent Beltway intersection, and just left; he was eventually stopped by a bicyclist, who just happened to be a high-level Washington lawyer who may or may not have already known him, and subsequent tests revealed a malignant brain tumor. That would explain why he didn’t know he’d hit someone, and also why he believed anything coming from the McCain camp. 
Novak was unabashedly ideological; his slants and biases were never concealed, but he rarely did anything that was cruel and unfair. Except, of course, for the time he got caught up in that Yellowcake hype and passed a poison meme about Valerie Plame, for which he and his associates paid an awful price—expulsion from the federal government, for certain officials, and the beginning of the end of Republican control of Washington. Never mind that what he wrote was true, though stated sloppily; that operation was a catastrophic blow to his reputation that he hadn’t time enough to work through.
It says something of the man’s character that he was willing to tangle with a woman who can shoot her initials into a wall with an Uzi—allegedly—on behalf of an administration that he was always skeptical of. Like so many of his peers in recent years, Novak traded his credibility for access. His last five years were as good as the 40 before it (and isn’t everything good after a 40?), but tainted by his association with a war that he didn’t have any real passion for. It was not even a month ago that this writer spent damn near an hour trying to sell the skills of Novak on a colleague who had touted the vastly inferior hack David Brooks as the current high-water mark of political columnists. That two such writers could even be rationally compared speaks directly to the dangerous condition their business, and our country, is currently in.
Novak’s situation is, in his professional parlance, “perilous.” He made the formal announcement after suffering a seizure at Cape Cod, where he had presumably gathered his loved ones to tell them. It remains unclear whether the accident or the seizure was the impetus for the tests that revealed his cancer, but maybe he already knew. Novak’s May 15 column contained an ominous note: “I would like to die in the saddle without retiring. … I cannot write a column without reporting, and hope I can continue to do so and newspapers see fit to print me so that I can celebrate my 50th anniversary. In case I don’t make it, however, I thought it proper to note 45 years of columns.”
It’s about over now, that era, those days when journalism was populated with giants and wizard wordsmiths who functioned at the highest levels of American Power. As is typical of election years, the attrition rate among journalists has been intense, but Novak, like Tim Russert, cannot be replaced, merely remembered. It is an unfortunate consequence of the serious work he’s done that many people will celebrate his death and hope he suffers on the way out. (A list might start with all the people who lost money, and worse, working with Brewster Jennings.)
August 4, 2008
Filed under: Media | Tags: CBS, Dan Rather, Drug Policy Alliance, Jan Warren, Nicole Richardson, Peter Jennings, Rockefeller, Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite
As a child, the first human being whose identity I was able to actively discern, outside of my family and their circles, was Walter Cronkite, who then held the anchor spot that he effectively invented at CBS News. I was born in 1978, at the tail-end of his run; my first years were thus his last in the day-to-day operations of television news. My life would be much different now if my grandmother had been partial to another network.
The industry would soon experience dramatic changes. All the old frontline anchors of the era were being replaced by newer bodies with fresher blood—men like Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings. Nowhere was the shift more dramatic than at industry-leading CBS, where Cronkite was succeeded by Dan Rather. The most trusted man in America was replaced by one of the most dynamic personalities in journalism history. Rather got into an on-air shouting match with George Bush in 1988 that pioneered the style of cable news (and has since been removed from YouTube, probably by Viacom), just a few years after taking a public beating that would inspire REM’s hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” And that was the way that was.
28 years after his formal retirement, the man who told America that John F. Kennedy was dead has gone off to meet him. If there are yachts in Heaven, they are on one now, and if Cronkite didn’t already know “what really happened” that day, now he does, and that is more than can be said for the rest of us. Cronkite outlived pretty much everyone he came up with in the business—including his mentor, Murrow, and the entire crew with whom he covered World War II—and dozens of colleagues half his age, and less.
There has been so much written and said about Cronkite in the last few days that there isn’t much that I could add to the copious praise, and encomiums crafted while he was still alive. I would like to note, however, that one of Walter Cronkite’s last public acts was to put himself on the record as being firmly supportive of the decriminalization of marijuana. In a letter written in 2006, on behalf of the New York-based nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, he laid down four pages on the subject, pages that stand out among the final words from one of history’s master communicators, and in so doing has left behind yet another valuable gift for future generations.
A reader long familiar with my positions on drug policy e-mailed me a few months ago to let me know she had received the letter, and it was the first I’d heard of it. She forwarded it to me, and it went into a file for reference the next time I wrote on the subject. Cronkite died before I could give his promo the hype it deserved, but at that point he was surely writing for the eyes of history, as much as for contemporary audiences. In that spirit, I reprint the letter here, in full, with best wishes for Cronkite’s spirit and his family:
As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: “And that’s the way it is.”
To me, that encapsulates the newsman’s highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.
Sadly, that is not an ethic to which all politicians aspire – least of all in a time of war.
I remember. I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost – and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.
Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens.
I am speaking of the war on drugs.
And I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara [who preceded Cronkite in death by nine days] admits what is plain for all to see: the war on drugs is a failure.
While the politicians stutter and stall – while they chase their losses by claiming we could win this war if only we committed more resources, jailed more people and knocked down more doors – the Drug Policy Alliance continues to tell the American people the truth – “the way it is.”
I’m sure that’s why you support DPA’s mission to end the drug war. And why I strongly urge you to support their work by giving a generous donation today.
You see, I’ve learned first hand that the stakes just couldn’t be higher.
When I wanted to understand the truth about the war on drugs, I took the same approach I did to the war in Vietnam: I hit the streets and reported the story myself. I sought out the people whose lives this war has affected.
Allow me to introduce you to some of them.
Nicole Richardson was 18-years-old when her boyfriend, Jeff, sold nine grams of LSD to undercover federal agents. She had nothing to do with the sale. There was no reason to believe she was involved in drug dealing in any way.
But then an agent posing as another dealer called and asked to speak with Jeff. Nicole replied that he wasn’t home, but gave the man a number where she thought Jeff could be reached.
An innocent gesture? It sounds that way to me. But to federal prosecutors, simply giving out a phone number made Nicole Richardson part of a drug dealing conspiracy. Under draconian mandatory minimum sentences, she was sent to federal prison for ten years without possibility of parole.
To pile irony on top of injustice, her boyfriend – who actually knew something about dealing drugs – was able to trade information for a reduced sentence of five years. Precisely because she knew nothing, Nicole had nothing with which to barter.
Then there was Jan Warren, a single mother who lived in New Jersey with her teenage daughter. Pregnant, poor and desperate, Jan agreed to transport eight ounces of cocaine to a cousin in upstate New York. Police officers were waiting at the drop-off point, and Jan – five months pregnant and feeling ill – was cuffed and taken in.
Did she commit a crime? Sure. But what awaited Jan Warren defies common sense and compassion alike. Under New York’s infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws, Jan – who miscarried soon after the arrest – was sentenced to 15 years to life. Her teenage daughter was sent away, and Jan was sent to an eight-by-eight cell.
In Tulia, Texas, an investigator fabricated evidence that sent more than one out of every ten of the town’s African American residents to jail on trumped-up drug charges in one of the most despicable travesties of justice this reporter has ever seen.
The federal government has fought terminally ill patients whose doctors say medical marijuana could provide a modicum of relief from their suffering – as though a cancer patient who uses marijuana to relieve the wrenching nausea caused by chemotherapy is somehow a criminal who threatens the public.
People who do genuinely have a problem with drugs, meanwhile, are being imprisoned when what they really need is treatment.
And what is the impact of this policy?
It surely hasn’t made our streets safer. Instead, we have locked up literally millions of people…disproportionately people of color…who have caused little or no harm to others – wasting resources that could be used for counter-terrorism, reducing violent crime, or catching white-collar criminals.
With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this effort – with no one held accountable for its failure.
Amid the clichés of the drug war, our country has lost sight of the scientific facts. Amid the frantic rhetoric of our leaders, we’ve become blind to reality: The war on drugs, as it is currently fought, is too expensive, and too inhumane.
But nothing will change until someone has the courage to stand up and say what so many politicians privately know: The war on drugs has failed.
That’s where the Drug Policy Alliance comes in.
From Capitol Hill to statehouses to the media, DPA counters the hysteria of the drug war with thoughtful, accurate analysis about the true dangers of drugs, and by fighting for desperately needed on-the-ground reforms.
They are the ones who’ve played the lead role in making marijuana legally available for medical purposes in states across the country.
California’s Proposition 36, the single biggest piece of sentencing reform in the United States since the repeal of Prohibition, is the result of their good work. The initiative is now in its fifth year, having diverted more than 125,000 people from prison and into treatment since its inception.
They oppose mandatory-minimum laws that force judges to send people like Nicole Richardson and Jan Warren to prison for years, with no regard for their character or the circumstances of their lives. And their work gets results: thanks in large part to DPA, New York has taken the first steps towards reforming the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws under which Jan was sentenced.
In these and so many other ways, DPA is working to end the war on drugs and replace it with a new drug policy based on science, compassion, health and human rights.
DPA is a leading, mainstream, respected and effective organization that gets real results.
But they can’t do it alone.
That’s why I urge you to send as generous a contribution as you possibly can to the Drug Policy Alliance
Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing war on drugs about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion. The Drug Policy Alliance is the one organization telling the truth. They need you with them every step of the way.
And that’s the way it is.
Sincerely, Walter Cronkite
RIP.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, City of Jacksonville, Fraternal Order of Police, Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, John Peyton, Nelson Cuba, Police and Fire Pension Fund
As city employees in other divisions are preparing to purge each other, to bring budgets into balance, law enforcement faces potential changes that will directly affect the futures of hundreds of cops up and down the chain of command. At issue: a pension fund that, like the retirement savings of almost every single American, is severely imperiled by the unfolding collapse of the global economy. A leader whose run began at odds with core constituents, who openly defied the judiciary over a courthouse that may very well never be built, is ending his run at odds with a police union whose support was arguably the tipping-point for his victory in 2003.
As part of John Peyton’s plan to balance the budget for FY 2010, and to create more freedom to deal with the uncertain immediate future, Peyton has proposed significant changes to the structure of the Police and Fire Pension Fund, which maintains a place of relative privilege compared to other civil servants reflecting the dangerous nature of the year. Peyton proposes to raise the minimum eligibility requirement for a full payout from 20 years to 25. While 25 years is still five less than the 30 required for other employees to cash out, this change alone directly affects the immediate future for hundreds of police that are currently edging closer to the 20-year mark. It is doubtful that many of them are willing to work an extra five years for money already promised them.
Further, Peyton proposes to eliminate the guaranteed 8.4% annual rate-of-return for those officers remaining on the job. Such guarantees ring false in these uncertain times, but in the previous era they acted as a common enticement to draw the savings of American workers into what were essentially Ponzi schemes run through the major brokerage houses, who routinely broke the law to ensure such return. The idea of Peyton canceling a guarantee that was never realistic to begin with may strike some as the epitome of tough fiscal conservatism, but for the prospective pensioners he is all but admitting that they will be lucky to see any return on their investments at all.
The Police and Fire pensions are a single entity, yet JFRD officials have been meek on the subject by contrast. Maybe it’s because the police have driven public discussion on the subject, or maybe because the department is stuck, typically, in a litigious mess with overtly racial overtones, and can barely muster the political stroke to keep certain firehouses operational, never mind the pensioneering. Maybe they choose to left the higher-profile FOP do the heavy lifting, while JFRD makes the public safety arguments in seeking to stop the proposed closure of some fire houses.
Given that no cop can predict when or if injury could end his or her career and force them to rely on their pension to ensure their family’s security, they must wonder if anything will be there for them. This sends a bad message to younger cops, who will have to watch loyal veterans getting shortchanged through no fault of their own. It remains unclear how the fund can continue to grow, with the markets in the tank and the city underfunding it even during years of peak growth. For a police force whose vulnerability to corruption is a matter of public record, the rhetoric employed by both Peyton and Cuba may be sowing seeds of disaster to be reaped by the next generation.
Weeks before Peyton had unveiled his budget proposal, the Jacksonville Community Council, Inc. had released Our Money, Our City: Financing Jacksonville’s Future, the 68th report in its 34 years highlighting major long-term issues the city has had dealt with in the consolidated era. JCCI could be regarded as our equivalent of the Council of Foreign Relations, an all-encompassing think-tank of sorts that counts almost all of the city’s major players in politics, media and business. As such, these reports collectively are an indispensable resource, worthy of anthology treatment.
The new study goes right to the problem: revenue from property taxes has dropped, and the declining market means less income into the privatized pension funds, which have been underfunded even during periods of peak economic growth. The pension plans of city employees are administered in two independent categories: General Employees and Corrections Officers, and Police and Fire. All are currently underfunded; the latter was never fully funded, while the former has not been since 2000.
Neither the COJ nor its employees pay into Social Security, so the pension funds are their only source of retirement income, although the city pays Medicare taxes on employees hired after 1986. Employees contribute 7%-8% of their salaries (Police and Fire receive another 4% from “Chapter Fund Contributions” derived from fees on property casualty insurance); the accumulated cash is invested, and any returns revert to the funds. The retired employee can receive up to 80% of their salary; the low end is determined through calculating years of service, average monthly salary, and an annual accrual rate. Police and Fire is a little simpler: 60% of the average salary earned in the two years prior to retirement. The City is required to contribute any extra money needed to ensure retirees receive their promised benefits, which vary by person.
Herein lies the rub. During the years of significant market growth, the profits on pension investments exceeded calculations, and the city didn’t pay into the fund at the levels they needed to. The city’s contribution to the General Employees plan has been roughly halved in 15 years, from 22% to 10.4%, although from 1997-2006 the percentage hovered between 10.6% and 3.1%; it paid in nothing from 2001-2003. However, its contribution to the Police and Fire plan has grown by a factor of ten, from 3.5% to 32.1%. Unfunded liabilities only continued to grow, especially in the Police and Fire plan.
When the market tanked, obliterating hopes for future profits, the city still had less than was needed to meet the predetermined level of support. The result is a fund that has always been underfunded. Although the General Employees fund did run at or near parity from 1997-2002, the Police and Fire fund was underfunded by 10% in 1995 and at 13% in 2000. The gap has only expanded since. As of 2008, the General Employees Pension Fund was only funded at 82% of its current obligations, while the Police and Fire Pension Fund was funded at a shocking 49.1%.
In other words, the fund contains about half as much money as it should, and no one offers any guarantee that such a massive gap can be closed. What this means, exactly, for the next wave of retirees (and remember, the Baby Boomers have reached retirement age) is a matter under discussion right now, at the highest levels. Jacksonville currently lags behind other major Florida cities, which are generally funded at the acceptable levels that our was a decade ago; notwithstanding the likelihood of similar problems headed their way, this will make it harder to compete for the cream of recruitment talent—in Miami, for example, their Police and Fire fund enjoys a 7% surplus!
This is the third time JCCI has weighed in on the subject of the Police and Fire Pension Fund alone; previous recommendations from reports issued in 1977 and 1992 were only sparingly adopted, despite the establishment consensus implied by them. At least one ranking JCCI member expressed frustration: “All of those things have been highlighted before … We should not be facing such severe challenges as we are now.” He hopes that JCCI will not be revisiting the subject again in 2024, but it’s more likely that JCCI won’t exist at all by then. Officials have been busy meeting to discuss how to deal with possibly losing all city funding. 30% of the staff has already been cut, and those remaining face pay cuts and a freeze on any raises. That is their thanks for warning us.
Like many other agencies, JCCI has relied on the City of Jacksonville for much of its financial support. While it is run as an independent non-profit, JCCI received as much as 70% of its funding through its two primary contributors—COJ and the United Way of Northeast Florida—with 30% coming from other sources. That ratio has been inverted in just two years. The United Way is cutting funding another 25%, while much of COJ’s contribution has already been cut. The city continues to provide funding for the studies dealing with Race Relations and overall Quality of Life indicators, but the latter is set to be cut by 40%; without the tax increases, all city funding could end. JCCI thus spends its 35th anniversary fighting for its own survival.
This is what happens when you betray your leaders. The union backed Peyton against a sitting sheriff, Nat Glover, a longtime JSO veteran who understood the needs of his cops better than anyone running that year. When he lost the endorsement of his own peers, to someone who had no public profile just a few months earlier, it sent a message to voters that Glover had serious deficiencies as a leader, so severe that the cops didn’t back him even though a Glover victory would have essentially handed control of the city to JSO. Any issues with the pension fund would have probably been better addressed by Glover, whose financial interest is obvious (to the tune of $89,000 a year).
In bowing to petty politics, the union behaved in a way more typical of the Mob, where people are killed by their best friends and today’s boss is tomorrow’s bullet-bait. For whatever flaws he may have, John Peyton is not Michael Corleone. The offer he made to the union could have been refused, but it wasn’t, and like most politicians who induced acts of abject treachery from a rival’s supporters, he double-crossed them. It should have been clear in 2003 was that the entire nation was on the verge of fiscal calamity, and that anyone promising rates-of-return higher than the already-crippled market was probably lying, or just irrationally exuberant. Remember, we’re talking about professional bullshit detectors, here, not the kind of rubes who sign papers without reading them. How could they be moved to act so starkly against their own interests?
JSO bears the burden for a generation of poor social policy and a decade of economic recklessness practiced in the name of perpetual growth. While the incidents of corruption and excessive force have been exhaustively documented by local media, their appears to be an imprecise understanding of their role. JSO is not responsible for creating vast unknown hordes of well-armed, wilding teens and ‘tweens. It’s not their fault the school system sucks. nor their fault that this city was designed precisely to preclude public transportation as a practical choice for the majority of citizens, thus yoking us all to America’s blood-feud with al-Qaeda—which, of course, is funded by our “allies” at OPEC. And above all else, JSO was not responsible for letting hundreds of violent felons out early, so they could go on to commit the majority of our city’s murders.
All of that is the fault of the civilian leadership, and of the citizens that resolutely failed to hold them to account. Now that it’s too late, and everyone’s dreams for a better life in a better city have been put on the chopping-block, the bonds between heels have dissolved, and the dirty tricks have begun—well, continued. Nelson Cuba, whose reign as president of the local Fraternal Order of Police has been dotted with controversy, called for all officers to boycott gas stations owned by Gate Petroleum, a company whose long association with the Peyton family is widely considered a crucial point for understanding Peyton’s rapid ascent and his subsequent performance as Mayor. Sheriff John Rutherford, whose own run has coincided with Peyton, immediately came out against that proposal, offering the briefest glimpse of longstanding internal dissent among officers.
The response from City Hall to the subtle pressures being exerted by FOP was immediate and decisive. By way of reinforcing the need for revising the plan, a list of the leading pension-takers in city government was released. The list included former Sheriffs and Fire Chiefs, as well as career functionaries in other agencies, some of whom are taking home six figures in annual income from their pension plan. It was like bringing a rocket launcher to a knife-fight, with similar levels of collateral damage, but effective nonetheless. As city departments are already being pressed to accommodate new rounds of budget cuts, which will necessarily entail eventual cuts in both base salaries and benefits, as well as layoffs, the result will be government that will be smaller, and vastly less effective.
The JSO rank-and-file disagreed about the boycott of Gate, long associated with the Peyton family, whose persistent police presence was an invaluable selling-point for late-night business. Over in Riverside, the Gate on Stockton St. is generally regarded as an unofficial police substation, and locals in distress have learned that Gate stations make effective safe-havens. In some parts of the city, Gate stations positioned near major intersections or highway ramps actually serve as informal staging-grounds for the DUI shakedowns that will be increasingly important to a city starving for revenue. As such, the boycott could potentially alter police procedure, with unknown results. Others argued that boycotts are beneath the dignity of a department that is supposedly “above politics”—the sort of self-definition common to cops nationwide, who need to maintain a semblance of objectivity as the political climate changes.
However, still other officers assert that, on a matter as important as their retirement, which are already dangerously underfunded and will soon be underfunded even more, the option of silence is not available. If the pension fund collapses, which is quite possible if this recession continues too far into the next decade, the consequences would be beyond catastrophic, not only for the police but for the citizens, whose only organized protection against crime would be dramatically undermined. The only winners in such a scenario would be this city’s ever-growing criminal class.
It’s worth noting, at this point, that the problems facing city government now are not all their fault. The cuts to state property taxes constituting the core of Charlie Crist’s current legacy as Governor came into effect with FY 2008, as city and municipal governments moved to mitigate their effect in preparing their own budgets for that year. FY 2010 began for most states on July 1—although Jacksonville, like the federal government and private industry, begins FY 2010 on October 1, by which time states have begun to parse the data from their first fiscal quarter—and a report from the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities suggested that as many as a dozen American states were already in the red, before the year had even begun. Other reports from around the political spectrum imply the scope is closer to comprehensive.
For what it’s worth, Jacksonville is not alone. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), whose report “State Budget Troubles Worsen” was released on June 29, paints a disturbing picture of the immediate future. For starters, Montana and North Dakota are the only states not projecting budget shortfalls for FY2010; the other 48 states’ shortfalls exceed $165 billion—nearly one-fourth of their budgets. “Even before the new fiscal year starts on July 1, new shortfalls of $23 billion have opened up in the adopted budgets of at least 12 states and the District of Columbia,” according to authors Elizabeth McNichol and Iris J. Lav. Worse, estimates from 29 states suggest shortfalls totaling between $38 billion and $180 billion, for fiscal year 2011.
Florida projects a shortfall of just under $6 billion—not even a tenth of California’s crazy $54 billion shortfall, but still 22.8% of our state’s budget. This is only slightly more than the $5.7 billion shortfall for FY2009; readers may recall the contortions needed to get last year’s budgets balanced. But last year’s budgets were mostly approved prior to the major economic meltdown, which started with bad housing numbers from last summer and then accelerated as the stock market collapsed in earnest on “Black Tuesday”, September 29. By the time FY2009 began, two days later, all Hell had broken loose, and any budgets not already facing shortfalls would face them shortly after.
The choices being faced by local leaders is so stark that Peyton has started his own website to walk citizens through the labyrinth of proposed changes. FixItNow.cc is his hedge against the uncertain reception his proposals have received—not only from long-standing sources of dissent, but from key political allies, as well. Peyton, whose personal discipline and work ethic has drawn praise from even hard-core apostates, has taken the offensive, placing the budget crisis in the context of larger developments and stating, implicitly, that nothing could have been done.
While the budget negotiations are technically a matter for the mayor and city council to reckon with alone, in reality the process plays out against a backdrop spanning over 700 square miles. Never are the citizens of Jacksonville so pervasive engaged as during the annual budget process; a cynic might argue that a more consistent, active engagement would have spared the people much of their pending pain. Peyton is prevented from term limits from running again, and has given every indication that his electoral career is over; his lame-duck status leaves him reasonably immune to the usual political pressures, while empowering him to make the kind of hard choices most chief executives would refrain from even suggesting in their first term.
Peyton, however, is not alone in this process. His budget proposals must be approved by a majority of the City Council—19 men and women with their own political agendas and their own constituents to serve. Among them are several who have either already decided to run for mayor in 2011 (though none have said so publicly, yet) or are considering it. As such, Peyton’s successor will almost certainly be voting on his budget proposals, and the nature of those votes will bear directly on a campaign that is now less than two years away. It’s impossible to say if, or how, that will influence the budget negotiations or the ultimate vote, but clearly Peyton intends to set the pace for these critical debates.
(Recall that, within a year of taking office, Peyton had already run afoul of supporters like JB Coxwell, and pension shortfalls were among the financial management issues raised in a PowerPoint presentation distributed among interested parties in 2004. For a while during his first term, Peyton was rumored to have been targeted for a challenge from within his own party in 2007. Ultimately, however, Mike Weinstein’s insurgent campaign failed to thrive, and whatever issues existed between the two were squashed—in public, at least—as Weinstein went on to a useful career in Tallahassee.)
While the FixItNow site exists ostensibly as a repository of Peytonesque talking points, it does his opposition some favors, as well. For example, while touting cost-cutting efforts by the Peyton administration (such as eliminating 400 COJ positions since 2006), it notes that “the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission – the job creation arm of the city – is half the size it was when Mayor Peyton took office in 2003.” Given the current state of job growth in Jacksonville, it was maybe not the best example. Peyton plans to cut another 100 city jobs, while departments will be asked to “trim” five percent off their operating budgets, while freezing all pay increases and experimenting with furloughs for some employees, which amounts to a pay cut. (These cuts apply only to “non-public safety” aspects of local government.) This, in addition to his promised “reform” of the pension plans.
Even if the entire proposal is approved verbatim, the city will still be $50 million short by current estimates, raising the specter of still-deeper cuts that go right to the fundamental functionality of the city. These could include: closing two fire stations, five libraries and ten community service centers; canceling the World of Nations and the Jacksonville Jazz Festival; closing the Ritz Theatre and LaVilla Museum, as well as the Equestrian Center and the Sexual Assault Response Center (truly beyond the pale); eliminating citywide recycling and many of the social and cultural programs we all take for granted, including “virtually all” children’s programs. For a mayor whose legacy is staked on a commitment to early childhood literacy, this must be a very bitter pill. En toto, this is the nightmare scenario; Jacksonville may never recover after such cuts take effect.
Peyton’s solution—tax hikes—is, at best, a stopgap measure that might provide enough revenue to keep the budget balanced. Evidence accumulating from around the country suggests, instead, that the collapsing global economy, and the states’ botched response to it, is driving down tax revenues faster than new tax increases can mitigate. With nearly half (46.7%) of the General Fund generated by property taxes, and the assessed value of all that property continuing to fall as jobs erode every day, there is very little chance that revenue from property taxes or sales taxes will rise to projected levels. Looming further in the horizon is the possibility that Jacksonville could lose the rights to host the Florida-Georgia Game, which would eliminate millions in revenue, as well as a major component of the city’s national image.
Raising taxes will enhance the COJ’s outlook, but at the potential expense of the private sector. For decades, a major selling-point for Jacksonville was that boasted much lower levels of taxation than the rest of Florida’s major cities. The danger here is of raising taxes to the level of Orlando, Tampa or Miami, without any corresponding uptick in the quality of life. Now is a time when we may really pay dearly for the inconsistent efforts of local leaders to build a solid cultural foundation, to say nothing of a quality education system, that could actually compete with these other cities for what is looking to be a significantly decreased number of tourists and relocating taxpayers.
If one cares to trace all of this back to the moment that the US housing market stalled out, in 2007, we are now in the third year of an economic recession that has only accelerated with time, and which defies prediction, even in the short-term. This is the context of these unfolding pension dramas. There is probably nothing that could have been done, in regard to fiscal policy, that would have prevented this situation; The issue is to what extent it could have been minimized. Depends on who you ask.
July 14, 2009
Filed under: Florida, Politics | Tags: Dan Davis, Jerry Holland, John Peyton, John Stafford, Tia Mitchell
The Florida Times-Union reports that Jerry Holland, a former City Council President who succeeded the late John Stafford as Supervisor of Elections, has drafted a bill that would “consolidate” state and local elections, beginning with the round currently slated for spring 2011, which would be rolled forward about six months to coincide with the national “mid-term” elections set for November 2010. This writer has opposed such a proposition on those occasions when it has come under discussion in previous years, but is now considerably more sympathetic, with caveats.
There are two strong points to be made in favor of this idea, which did not originate with Holland but is basically now his issue. The first point, made cogently in Tia Mitchell’s July 19 T-U article, deals with the potential savings of having one ballot process, instead of two; this could save up to $3 million dollars in the FY 2011 budget. The other is that, in the short-term, merging the two will increase voter turnout for the pivotal local elections ahead. Any gimmick that gets more people out for one of the most important decisions local voters have ever been asked to make.
Local policymakers are in dispute on the issue, as they have been on almost everything, including the FY 2010 budget, which is currently being negotiated. Councilman Dan Davis was mentioned in the article as considering putting Holland’s bill into play, and the savings argument alone gives it plenty traction. Lost amidst all this, however, is the fact that each of the 19 City Council members are potential mayoral candidates in 2011 (or, 2010). Those who plan to make that jump will have to make that decision by next summer, if they want enough time to distinguish themselves within what should be a very crowded field. If the elections are moved up to November 2010, then the window for any declaration moves up, as well.
In other years, this might not be such a big deal, but the city is fighting an existential struggle of sorts right now, and every vote taken by the council on the budget and related matters directly impacts the backdrop of the next election, as well as the situation the next mayor will face. With that being said, it may be in the city’s best interests—as well as the best interests of whomever becomes our next mayor—if any councilpersons planning to run for mayor were to say so now, so as to avoid any potential conflicts-of-interest. (As a journalist, I’ll go on record now as saying that I am considering it myself, and that I am more likely to do so under emergency conditions. Full disclosure.)
Filed under: Media, Music, Reviews | Tags: All Tomorrow's Parties, Kelley Deal, Kim Deal, Mark Lanegan, Steve Albini, The Breeders
Bags That Rock: Knitting On the Road with Kelley Deal (Lark Books)
The new Breeders EP, Fate to Fatal, was released on April 21, 2009. iTunes offers .99 electronic downloads, but no CDs are being printed. The band issued 1,000 12-inch vinyl pressings of the record, available through their website and selected retail outlets, with sleeves screen-printed by hand, for about $15.00. The covers were designed by artist Chris Glass, who recently crafted the logo for President Obama’s infamous “American Recovery and Investment Act”. With only four tracks, running under 20 minutes in total, the EP is most likely only a teaser for a more expansive release timed for later this year, but you never know until you know when it comes to the Breeders.
“Fate to Fatal” was recorded at The Fortress in London last year, while the Breeders were touring London in support of Mountain Battles. Tracks two and four, “The Last Time” and “Pinnacle Hollow” were both recorded in Kim Deal’s basement, in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. “The Last Time” also features vocals by Mark Lanegan (of Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age); this occasion marks the only time a man’s voice can be heard on an official Breeders recording! Both these tracks function as mirrors of each other; the dissonant guitar of the former is reasserted in the latter, as Lanegan’s laconic vocals are referenced, sparingly, by the Deals on “Pinnacle Hollow”, which itself calls to mind aspects of “Sinister Foxx” from Title TK.
Track three, a cover of Bob Marley’s “Chances Are”, features the dual Deal harmonics that have become a calling-card for the band’s sound in this decade. “Chances Are” is also notable for reuniting them with an old running buddy, the great Steve Albini, who has figured prominently in their careers since helming the decks for Pod nearly 20 years ago. He has also produced their last two albums, helping them apply the “All Wave” concept, where no digital equipment is used in the process of recording and mastering the albums; the approach served to highlight the texture of the arrangements and the beauty of the Deals’ voices, singly, in melodic counterpoint or their exceptional dual harmonics. Fate to Fatal demonstrates that Kim Deal has internalized much of what she surely learned after countless sessions with Albini, as the overall quality of the recording achieves the same standard as the last two albums. Albini’s genius really comes through at higher volumes; whereas some music, especially guitar-based rock, washes out at a certain level, the Breeders stuff retains its clarity.
Inevitably, some of the Deal’s collaborative material is very hard to find, at best; this include a sublime session with Kris Kristofferson, which yielded a cover of “Angel Flying Over the Sea” for the Twisted Willie tribute to Willie Nelson, and an entire album that Kelley Deal recorded—as “The Last Hard Men”—with Jimmy Flemion, former Smashing Pumkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and former Skid Row front-man Sebastian Bach. There were also songs recorded for a “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” tribute and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, not to mention at least two entire albums’ worth of Breeders’ tribute material. Unfortunately, all that stuff is out-of-print, for now. One hopes that eventually they are able to make it available for newer fans, the ones working their way backward from Mountain Battles.
Kelley Deal’s own solo recordings get short shrift in the larger Deal discography, mainly because they were released on labels much smaller than 4AD/Elektra, which has released essentially everything that Kim Deal has been involved with—the Pixies, the Breeders and her one-off project, the Amps. She formed a group called Solid State 6000 while in rehab in Minneapolis, releasing an album (Go To the Sugar Altar) and EP in 1996. She changed the name, and the Kelley Deal 6000 released Boom! Boom! Boom! in 1997. This album was an instant classic for the few thousand people who ever got to hear it, and a true gem in the sisters’ larger output. It compares favorably to the Amps’ eponymous 1995 release, which is close to perfect. But this material is also out-of-print.
(It is interesting how, during the extended hiatus between Last Splash and Title TK, Kelley actually did recording than Kim. Indeed, the twins have evolved notably distinct musical personalities as the years progressed. Kelley has a slightly higher-pitched voice, the fine and mellow scotch to the high-end cigar sound of her sister. Again, the “All-Wave” process really helped illuminate these qualities.)
One might not have guessed that, after producing two albums and five EPs in their first five years of existence, the Breeders’ brand would lay almost entirely dormant for five more, nor that their triumphant return in 2001 (with Title TK) would go without follow-up for six. While the individuals within the band have performed and recorded steadily for the better part of three decades, official documentation has been fleeting at times. Kim and Kelley Deal, the twin sisters who first performed as the Breeders in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio in the 1980s, have contributed to hundreds of tracks by some of the most acclaimed musicians of our time, yet they have not quite gotten full credit.
Fate to Fatal is a further indication that those fabled gaps in activity are a thing of the past. The Breeders have toured extensively over the last couple years and maintained the same basic core of musicians with whom the Deals rebuilt their brand a decade ago. As Josephine Wiggs and Jim McPherson moved on during the wilderness years, the classic Breeders lineup was halved; Title TK was thus essentially the debut of an entirely new band with a new sound that only lapped earlier incarnations. Joining the Deals and Steve Albini were guitarist Richard Presley, bassist Mando Lopez and drummer Jose Medeles. Presley was not present at the Fate to Fatal sessions.
You can find dozens of recent Breeders clips online, either at their website or YouTube, including the first video from Fate to Fatal, wherein the phrase “title track” is given a whole new meaning by St. Louis’ Arch Rivals roller-derby team. appearance at Shake-It Records in Cincinnati on April 18 (International Record Store Day) previewing the new material, three days ahead of the official release, and much of the music (though quality varies) from “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, May 15-17. Landing the coveted spot hosting that festival—which included X, J-Zone, Bon Iver, Gang of Four and Heartless Bastards—signified the band’s relevance to the current indie scene.
Another recent development of note is the release of a book by Kelley Deal in 2008. Bags That Rock: Knitting on the Road with Kelley Deal was published out of Asheville by Lark Books (a division of Sterling Publishing, based in Canada). Its 127 oversized pages document Deal’s prevailing non-musical passion—crocheting. It seems kind of random, but Deal’s interest is sincere, and her talent for this most gentle art is obvious. The book functions as a treatise on the salubrious effects of knitting on the mind and spirit, as well as a how-to guide for making 20 of her own designs for yourself. You could purchase them through KelleyDeal.net, but that site is defunct and there is nothing about selling handbags on the Breeders Digest site.
2010 will mark 20 years since the first Breeders album, Pod, was released by 4AD. At the time, they were known primarily as the side project of Pixies bassist Kim Deal and Tonya Donnelly, who was a member of Throwing Muses alongside Kristen Hersh before setting out on her own with Belly. With Slint drummer Britt Walford on hand under a number of aliases (including Shannon Doughton on Pod and Mike Hunt on the Safari EP), the Breeders amounted to an alternative rock super-group at a time when such music was becoming the dominant cultural influence in the US and Europe.
Aside from the attention generated by “Cannonball”, however, the Breeders existed well outside the industry radar, a favorite of critics, fans and fellow musicians (most famously Kurt Cobain, who tapped them as the opening act on what ended up being Nirvana’s final American tour) that did solid but unspectacular business with Soundscan and was never subject to the mythmaking machinery of commercial media. MTV devoted a significant amount of air time to the group during their two-year run behind Last Splash, but never picked up the scent after they returned to the music scene with the exceptional Title TK in 2001. Maybe the Deal sisters, then 40, were too old for MTV’s youth-oriented marketing scheme; maybe their fans, who carried the network during its crucial transition from hair metal to gangsta rap, were no longer of that choice demographic.
In any event, neither of the albums released by the Breeders in this decade have garnered the kind of attention they did at their mid-‘90s “peak”, and that’s unfortunate, because the music has been very good. While a Breeders album is sure to have its bland instrumental digressions and occasional throwaway tracks, the Deals’ songcraft has always been extraordinary, easily comparable if not superior to all the stuff that’s come along since they did. If this were still the singles-based industry of a bygone era, the Deals might be among the biggest acts on Earth. At the very least, they would have certainly earned a lucrative living writing songs for others. But as it stands, they will have to settle for being one of the most quietly effective musical organizations of our time, a crucial living link between the century that just ended, and the one that has just begun.
The Deals, during the recording of "Mountain Battles".
Filed under: Media, Money Jungle, Politics | Tags: Barack Obama Republican Party, John McCain, Sarah Palin
The political trajectory of Sarah Palin will prove highly instructive to future generations of political leaders. President Obama has almost certainly internalized some lessons of his own regarding his former opponent in the epochal 2008 elections, even though he is unlikely to say so. He will have noted the nastiness underlying many of the elements that coalesced around him, and he will be wary of the moment when those forces turn on him. And that day is coming—sooner, rather than later.
Palin’s abrupt and unceremonious (albeit probably temporary) exit from politics came after a year that was, by all accounts, equal parts nightmarish and dreamy. The light of national media was focused on her with paralytic intensity and a distinctly offensive tone unseen since the days of Osama bin Laden, who of course will return some day, and we’ll all have to pretend to be shocked. Unlike bin Laden, Palin has actually been handed a defeat, dealt not in debates, nor even de ballots, but courtesy of a deliberate campaign of character assassination. It was one of the most shameful episodes in American history: an entire family being run down for sport, for the amusement of a chickenshit mainstream media that is itself directly complicit in many of the lethal challenges facing America. As the global economy collapsed before all of our eyes last year, as US allies were hit with chaos and instability resulting from our failed policies, some salary-sucking suits in DC and New York were rhapsodizing about the Palin girls’ reproductive organs.
The useless McCain campaign gave her a couple days’ notice—barely time to load all her weapons and wipe both guns and bullets clean of fingerprints. They spent a quarter-billion dollars being beaten so badly even Tim Tebow couldn’t help them, but a quarter-million for their Vice-Presidential nominee’s wardrobe. Obama’s got bespoke bulletproof overcoats, the McCains and Bidens are dressed like the millionaires they are, and Palin’s in thrift-store gear. McCain’s only chance to be President ended when he let Bush’s people run down his daughter in 2000; eight years later, he stood silently by while his storyline daughter caught hell on his behalf, and it continues.
McCain’s pathological desire to be loved by elites half his age blocked him from making the right decisions for his agenda, yet he can’t be bothered even trying to assert control over the perception of his legacy. McCain’s hapless, pathetic staffers served as primary sources for countless media attacks, starting before the campaign was even over, and he knows it. Either he directed them, or he didn’t, but he’s a loser either way. Reagan lied under oath to protect his team, but it appears the famous McCain temper can now be manifested only toward his wife—allegedly.
The Palin phenomenon further illustrates a) how pervasive misogyny really is in this culture, especially among supposedly “educated” people like political pundits, and b) how readily complicit American women can be in their own collective oppression, abuse and exploitation. It might have seemed unthinkable, had it not just happened to Hillary in the primary. Both have lived the lives promised them by feminism. They fought their way into the most exclusive boys’ club there is, while raising a family, only to catch heat from cadres of cuckolds and cold fish whose kids stupefy in day-care while their parents rot in “assisted-living facilities”, as chains of oral history stretching back to the dawn of time are severed forever, sacrificed on the altar of wage-slavery.
The slippery slope from Clinton’s cankles to Palin’s pudenda leads directly to the kind of issues young girls are plagued with today, from simple eating disorders to the persistent yet strangely still unaddressed specter of rape, kidnapping or murder. A cynic might suggest that the Palin’s famous fertility invokes envy among her peers (she was a sportscaster once), whose childbearing years were either squandered having meaningless sex, facilitated through a succession of experimental contraceptive devices, or snuffed out with alcohol, drugs and nicotine—and the ones who can have kids are unlikely to find quality sperm outside a laboratory, unless John Edwards is around. But such talk is only acceptable in regard to Sarah Palin, so it goes unremarked.
Her political shortcomings are obvious, as was the need to ensure the Obama victory. She is clearly not ready to be President—otherwise, she would have grasped the need to make a few examples of people. A bunch of men who can’t open a can without electricity cutting promos on a woman who kills and cleans her own wild game—well, I’m no fan of hunting, but it’s a skill worth having. Especially now, right? Sure. At 45, her matriculation continues; good luck!
sdh666@hotmail.comBreakshot: A Life in the 21st Century American Mafia, by Kenny “Kenji” Gallo and Matthew Randazzo V. Beverly Hills: Phoenix Books. 382 pp.
My review copy of “Breakshot” arrived in the mail courtesy of co-author Matthew Randazzo V, a New Orleans-based journalist and true-crime author best known for his searing rendering of events surrounding the life and death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, who allegedly murdered his wife and young son before hanging himself over the course of a weekend in 2007—a weekend, in fact, when Benoit had been booked to win the ECW belt in a pay-per-view held in Jacksonville, FL.
Based on the quality of “Ring of Hell”, which despite its tragic undertones is one of the best books ever written about that business, this writer was enthusiastic about sampling Randazzo’s newest project. Knowing nothing about it, my only expectations were that it would be interesting, but not nearly as compelling as the Benoit book. This is among the rare occasions when being wrong is a good thing. “Breakshot” moves at a ruthless pace through the quintessentially Ameican life of Kenny Gallo, aka “Kenji”, aka “Ken Calo”, aka “Kenji Kodama”, aka “Ramon Gomez”, aka “Ramon Gonzalez” and, of course, aka “Kenny G”. (“Kenny Gallo” isn’t his real name, either.)
Like his namesake, this Kenny G. is blowing massive quantities of hot wind, but it seems that very little embellishment was needed for his tales of thuggin’ and buggin’. Randazzo must have had a great time transcribing these tales and fact-checking the insanity playing out in these pages. Gallo’s gallery of hoods and heavy-hitters ranges from small-time crooks and hustlers to some of the major players in American organized crime. Anyone who thinks he’s bullshitting, which may be inevitable in the course of reading the book, should be wary of the fact that the United States government has spent millions of dollars on him, firstly in trying to incarcerate him, then by using him to incarcerate others. The book’s title, “Breakshot”, was their code-name for him, “derived from my ability to singlehandedly knock the Colombo Family leadership pyramid into disarray like the first shot in a game of pool”, and as usual, it made perfect sense.
He is marked for death in certain circles, yet the version of him that exists in the book exhibits very little outward concern. In fact, he readily admits to reveling in the danger he faced almost constantly during a criminal career spanning three decades. Some people do that work because they have to, because they come from circumstances where it’s all they know and alternative options are precious and few. Gallo is not one of those people. He came from a upwardly mobile family of Japanese immigrants who carved out a very good living through hard work and adherence to traditional values. Gallo was given access to the perks of privilege, attending the best schools (where his classmates included Will Ferrell and Zach de la Rocha) and making the kind of grades that would earn scholarships to the school of his choice. Instead, he willingly channeled his physical and mental gifts into a career trafficking cocaine for the infamous Medellin Cartel.
Eventually, the feds got their man, which is how it almost always works out for major-league criminals, and Gallo went the route of numerous gangsters before him: he became a rat, a snitch, a stool pigeon, a penitito who wore wires in service of the government for several years in the late 1990s and early months of this decade. In the process, he helped bring charges against members of some of America’s most feared mob families: the Gambinos, the Colombos and the Luccheses. That is as heavy as it gets in the United States, besides the brutal insurgent cliques of foreign gangsters from Europe and Asia, not to mention the Mexican cartels, whose strength increases every day, to the point that longstanding enemies like the Bloods and Crips have taken to cooperating against them. And Kenny Gallo fucked them like porn sluts in a gangbang. Dangerous shit.
Today, Kenny Gallo lives under yet another alias, this one concocted by the Witness Protection Program, but to say he lives anonymously would be incorrect. Gallo’s blog contains yet more promos on his hapless former colleagues, who have been getting the business from federal prosecutors in this decade, in large part due to the information he acquired for them. He stays active in martial arts, keeping his body and mind sharp for the lethal challenge he knows could come at any moment, from any direction, without warning. Sounds intense, but he’s as ready for anything as a human being can be.
A fella like me bears more labels than DVDs from the blowout bin at Blockbuster, but one to which I have always answered proudly is “jazz fan”. Sure, I listen to everything—rock and rap, classical and pop, blues, folk, country and indigenous musics from more countries than hold portions of the US national debt—and have published hundreds of stories about the stuff, but at the end of the day it is jazz, “America’s classical music”, that remains the dominant influence on my life and work.
Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni, aka Louie Bellson (1924-2009) may be best-remembered a) for his groundbreaking interracial marriage to singer Pearl Bailey—Wikipedia notes their having the second-highest total of appearances at the White House—and b) for conceptualizing the double bass drum set up at age 15, setting the stage for men like Keith Moon and Neil Peart. He took it around the world, onto over 200 albums and into concerts and colleges with almost every jazz hall-of-famer to work in his lifetime. He could also handle four drum sticks like a vibraphonist uses his mallets. But for me, he was maybe the most important musician ever.
Looking back, it feels somewhat remarkable that my active relationship to jazz (not counting tag-along trips to the local festivals) only goes back 15 years. I remember the exact day my obsession began: July 27, 1994. Louie Bellson was the third guest on a new show being hosted by Conan O’Brien, who will become the fifth host of The Tonight Show later this year. Bellson, who followed Michael Moore and the late Isaac Hayes, was there promoting Black, Brown and Beige, his recent CD of music dating from his 1950s run with Duke Ellington, whom I had never heard of.. After watching his performance of “Skin Deep” (now buried forever in NBC’s archives), I was hooked.
In the hoary old days predating e-commerce, it took two days of calls to realize that no, I couldn’t just go to the mall and buy it, and two more days to find a store that had any idea what it was or how to find it. A week or two later found me in Avondale, at a Turtles Music inside the shopping complex on St. Johns Avenue, since defunct, looking through the jazz section of a CD store for the first time in my life.
The Bellson disc itself was never a particular favorite; his sound was not well-served by early-stage full-digital recording. Most old-school jazz CDs are digitized from their original analog masters, and while that sometimes wreaks havoc in other areas, most often the bass, the drums generally sound pretty sweet in stereo. However, all music was recorded in mono for the first half of the 20th century, creating a total crapshoot in terms of the arrangement of the instruments around the single microphone, ambient noise and, of course, the generally crappy upkeep of the resulting masters. I had no idea what any of that meant back then, but another ancillary joy of being a jazz fan is that you learn a lot of miscellaneous information along the way.
The bottom line is that Bellson never registered the broader cultural impact of contemporaries such as Elvin Jones, Mel Lewis, Shelly Manne and Max Roach, but he was crucial in very specific ways. As a college freshman I bought a cheap old no-name snare drum to practice rudiments during idle moments, because there was just so much free time at the University of Florida, right? I went to the lovely Alachua public library in search of drum instruction videos, and the only one they had was a Louie Bellson video from 1981! The word “paradiddle” induces ironic laughter to this day.
The liner notes to Black, Brown and Beige mentioned two other famous big-band drummers named Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich; to my pleasant surprise the store had their epic 1955 record Krupa and Rich, newly reissued on CD. I must have bought and re-bought the thing ten times since, because it’s the auditory equivalent of Behold a Pale Horse—once you lend it out, it’s gone forever. That album introduced names like Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Ben Webster and, most crucially, Dizzy Gillespie. It became my personal Rosetta Stone, and Louie Bellson set that in motion.
Louie Bellson died shortly before what would have been his 85th birthday, a week after the loss of another legend, angel-voiced singer Blossom Dearie (1926-2009). They were both quite old, and their exits from this stage of life was hardly unexpected (it is axiomatic that when working jazz musicians stop taking bookings, death is not far off), but still it makes this fan feel suddenly much older himself. RIP
sdh666@hotmail.com
February 17, 2009
A message received just moments ago from within the local Young Democrats suggests a dramatic new development in the race to succeed Florida’s retiring junior senator, Mel Martinez. Already Rep. Kendrick Meek has led the way to capturing the Democratic nomination, but apparently he’s about to face some serious competition in the form of fellow Rep. Corrine Brown, who has held her spot in Congress since 1992 and in fact developed as politician alongside Kendrick’s mother, former Rep. Carrie Meek.
Brown brings considerable DC experience, while Meek can claim to have played a crucial role in helping President Obama win Florida, and the nation, in 2008. He has already appeared with Obama in Fort Myers, where the latter was selling his economic “stimulus” package (in the company of none other than Governor Charlie Crist, whose diminished profile among state Republicans has been balanced by the bipartisan support offered by the new administration) and is reportedly soon to appear in Jacksonville with former president Bill Clinton. It will be interesting to see if that does happen, given Brown’s longtime association with the Clintons. She and Bill both took office in 2003, and the Clinton-era budget appropriations allowed Brown to develop her lead slogan, “Corrine Delivers!”
Delivery is what it’s all about in that business, and while Meek has earned a positive record during his run in Congress, he will have a hard time convincing Democratic power-brokers (especially up here, in the northern part of the state) that he can bring home more money during these delicate financial times than Brown. But then again, a lot of Dems have never liked Brown–she talks too much like the southern black woman she is, and nothing raises the ire of the college-crowd liberals like the southern dialiect–unless it’s being cynically appropriated by Obama, that is.
This primary could demonstrate whether there is any lingering beef between the Obamas and Clintons. If Meek is the president’s man, the Clintons could show off their sustained stroke by backing Corrine against him. If Clinton fails to back Corrine’s US Senate run explicitly, and makes that gig with Meek, then she will be just the latest woman to be used up and thrown away by Bill Clinton. But, as always, one can grasp the internal logic of such a decision.
Filed under: Money Jungle, Politics | Tags: Israel, Kadima, Labor, Likud, Livni, Money Jungle, Netanyahu
[In light of this week's national elections in Israel, I thought it prudent to post an old column written as preview of the last round of national elections in 2006. Most of what was written then could stand unedited in regard to what's going on now, except that the Labor Party's power is entirely restricted to playing a junior role in a Livni coalition gov't, and a much smaller role under Netanyahu.]
Exit the Mermaid
A rough guide to the 2006 Israeli elections.
The only good to have possibly come of the tragedy that befell Ariel Sharon in January 2006 is that his departure from the scene forces others to step up their game in time for the rapid activity that is likely to occur in the region over the period between now and, say, 2012. One of these persons is Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who has already been described as “Israel’s Hillary.” That’s the highest compliment to be paid either lady.
Sharon was a special person, but remember that he was a 77 year-old man, five-seven and 250 pounds, who’d spent 40 years working spots where instant death was always a possibility. We’ll never know if Kadima was in some way a reflection on his own mortality. “The Little Mermaid” personally brought Livni into his breakaway Kadima coalition, and she emerges from his debilitation as the party’s second-leading figure, behind only acting PM Ehud Olmert, a former Jerusalem mayor and skilled fundraiser. All this has major implications for America.
Likud has been split on settlement issues for two years. It’s possible that Sharon’s exit clears the path for a reunited Likud that could win an outright majority, but not likely since the issue is so polarizing. (International meddling in Israeli affairs doesn’t help.) To dismantle Kadima would require senior Likud loyalists to cede key Ministerial positions to folks like Livni and Ohlmert, who bolted from Likud to follow Sharon and were about to pound their old mates in the March election. Polls taken before Sharon’s stroke had his party up on both Labor and Likud, despite the Netanyahu Factor.
Former PM Benjamin Netanyahu is considered almost universally to be a future PM. The fact of his ascent has been simply a technical matter. He possesses many of the attributes people look for in a leader: young, handsome, a clearly-defined political ideal, military experience, and a legacy. His late brother Jonathan is an Israeli war hero, and his father was an intellectual who participated in the founding of the country. Today, “Bibi” stands out as a major figure, one of only a handful of Israeli politicians recognizable to non-Israelis, and the only one currently likely to reclaim the big chair.
When Netanyahu resigned as Finance Minister in Sharon’s cabinet to protest the Gaza pullout in 2005, it set in motion the unraveling of Likud and the new reality of Israeli politics. After Netanyahu resigned, Sharon replaced him with Ohlmert and left the party he’d helped found in the 1960s. Kadima drew Ohlmert and Livni from Likud, with some tacit support from Shimon Peres. Sharon then called for new elections, a right the PM shares with the Israeli Knesset via the No Confidence vote.
Lost in all this is the Labor Party, which has struggled to rebound from the death of party icon Yizhak Rabin in November 1995. Shimon Peres, a twice-former PM who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat, succeeded Rabin and was promptly defeated in 1996 by Netanyahu, who lost in 1999 to Ehud Barak. Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000 helped spark the second intifada, which began the next day. The resulting tumult brought Sharon to power, five years ago, and left Labor scrambling to find itself. It could be said that the US Democratic Party has a similar predicament, except that Labor has shown signs of actually solving the problem. Of course, Labor chief Amir Peretz has no shot at the Prime Ministership this time, but he could emerge as the third or fourth key member of the post-election coalition.
The Sharon situation, in some ways, mirrors Rabin’s assassination, in that both were embattled PMs with Bibi Netanyahu on their trail. Both were suffering from the internal perception of weakness and capitulation to Palestinian terror, even as both were being hailed as peacemakers abroad. One key difference is that Rabin did not die with elections 100 days out and with Iran weeks away from going nuclear.
The main question of March 28 is whether Ohlmert can (or should) hold back the challenge of Netanyahu. Whoever wins must then act quickly to build a coalition that can hold up through the tumult of 2006; expect Livni to play a major role in that. At this point Israel really has four “major” parties: Labor, Likud, the upstart Kadima, and the sum of all the smaller parties in Israeli politics. Any could do benefit from the situation. The strength of Israeli civil life should carry them through the difficult days ahead.
sdh666@hotmail.com
January 7, 2006
Filed under: Art, Media, Music, Politics, Reviews | Tags: Atavistic, Lydia Lunch
Vocal Ease: An Interview with Lydia Lunch
Three decades in, and Lydia Lunch (born 1959, and presumably indestructible) remains one of the most dynamic figures in all of showbiz. She is, at once, utterly accessible and very much not. A career that began in 1973, when the teenaged Lunch took the train into NYC from her native Rochester, with nothing but “a small red suitcase, a winter coat, and a big fucking attitude”, has expanded to nearly every major city in the world, most of the smaller ones, and come to run the gamut of multimedia: fiction and nonfiction, poetry, music, spoken word, film. She’s probably done some dancing, too.
Even as Lunch, a highly disciplined and exacting performer, is always looking ahead, the year 2008 has seen much cause for looking back. Her first recordings with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, “Orphans”/“Less of Me”, were released in May, 1978; the occasion was commemorated by a reunion of the band at a sold-out Knitting Factory on June 13, also with two new releases from her longtime label Atavistic. Shut Up and Bleed contains 29 songs recorded by Teenage Jesus and her side project, Beirut Slump, between 1977 and ‘79, making for the fullest documentation of her earliest years yet.
Whereas that project is intended to be definitive, Video Hysterie: 1978-2006 is more a collection of odds and ends, 24 videos covering 95 minutes. Besides stuff from Teenage Jesus, the DVD features Lunch in a dozen other collaborations with artists like Joseph Budenholzer, Mark Cunningham, Terry Edwards, Roland S. Howard and Pepe Sarto, including material from her groups 8 Eyed Spy and Shotgun Wedding.
Her earliest works, while compelling, offer only hints at the protean force she would become. Hers is one of those singular voices, the kind that can never be mistaken for another’s. There may be no better pure polemicist of her generation; her voice is as much a weapon as an instrument, and she applies it in service of an articulated feminist vision encompassing social justice and sexual freedom that deserves to be considered, for lack of a better word, a seminal influence on the two generations of men and women who have consumed her work since the 1980s.
She has been characterized as the female answer to Henry Rollins, her longtime friend and collaborator (she has the Black Flag bars tattooed on her neck), and there is some logic in that, since they work through similar themes and run in many of the same creative circles; but there is a crucial difference: Whereas Rollins has deservedly gained a considerable amount of mainstream attention in recent years, from major-label book and music deals to Hollywood films and cable TV time, Lydia Lunch has been effectively frozen out of American media like few artists of her stature. This was commonly blamed on the sexually explicit nature of her film work with R. Kern (notwithstanding the fact that Rollins was involved in that stuff, too), but the nature of modern celebrity obliterates that fact. From The Brown Bunny to One Night in Paris, any prohibitions that once existed on such graphic depictions have clearly been lifted, and Lunch could certainly be considered an influence on that trend, even if she’s not yet a beneficiary.
SDH: What music have you been drawn to lately?
LL: Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista, Baba Zula from Istanbul, the new Firewater, Pearlene, Budos Band, Strings of Consciousness from Marseille, JG Thirlwell always, Tricky’s latest, Barry Adamson, and a hot 2 piece improv group from Barcelona, Les Aus. Oxbow’s The Narcotic Story is my favorite thing from the past year
SDH: Whose idea was it to prepare the DVD retrospective?
LL: It was an idea whose time had come. I’d been working on getting it out for a few years, worried that if something wasn’t done with the original low-fi VHS copies of the early performances the tapes would just disintegrate.
SDH: How does it feel to watch video of yourself from 30 years ago?
LL: Since I create on intuition and gut instinct its interesting to see the teenage terror already so set in her ways. Amusing. It’s like watching my own daughter. Which is why I never had children. One of me is enough.
SDH: How did you select the pieces for the DVD?
LL: I wanted to present something as representational of my musical schizophrenia as possible, but was also limited to what actually existed as a document.
SDH: What drew you to Barcelona, after having lived in so many other places?
LL: The architecture, its perverse, outrageous history, it’s respect of art and artists, the pace of daily life, which is relaxed yet extremely stimulating. The fact that Spain is 30 years out from under the fist of Fascism as AmeriKKKa has entered into it. I left before the last fraudulent election. I knew what was coming. I had to get the hell out.
SDH: Was the Teenage Jesus reunion a one-off, or is there be more to come?
LL: It would have never happened if Thurston didn’t suggest it to accompany the launch of his NO WAVE book. My sadistic nature was thrilled to take to the stage and abuse the audience with such a horribly ungodly din. Fun. We’ll do All Tomorrow’s Parties under The Melvins invite in Dec in the UK. But at most perhaps three more gigs in Europe after that and then it’s buried for another 30 years.
SDH: What was it like to walk some of those same NYC streets where you began, after you and the city have changed so much?
LL: Heart breaking. I despise what NY has become.
SDH: What is the nature of those changes? The common perception among those of us who merely visit is that NYC today is much cleaner, safer and prosperous than it was in the 1970s and ‘80s. Who are the malefactors?
LL: It’s been made unaffordable by a 25-year plan by the banks and real estate brokers who were responsible for the ghettoization of the Bronx and Lower East Side in the 1970’s. Who strategically burned out these areas encouraging wide spread urban blight, forcing people from low rent or rent controlled buildings by stopping public service to them, letting whole neighborhoods rot, until they could be bulldozed, rebuilt as condos or overpriced shoebox apartments, thereby stripping NYC of it’s unique character and gentrifying the whole city. Read Dead Cities by Mike Davis.
SDH: What do you consider to be your finest work?
LL: Stinkfist with Thirlwell, Crimes Against Nature, Shotgun Wedding with Rowland S Howard and Smoke in the Shadows.
SDH: Is there any single project you could point to as being what you’re “all about”?
LL: No, which is why I need so many vehicles in which to drive the point home.
SDH: Is there any piece of your own work that you return to more than others?
LL: More so in spoken word, because most of the God bashing End Times Global predictions and political accusations I was spewing under Reagan and Bush the father are even more terrifying when we realize exactly what has happened to AmeriKKKa under the son of the son of a bitch’s evil manipulations.
SDH: Having lived overseas for much of the decade, and given your own special expertise in human psychology, how would you characterize the Bush 43 era?
LL: The gang raping and slave trading of the planet by an evil cabal whose twisted roots go back for generations, whose motto of GOD GUNS AND OIL have done more devastation to more people, countries and land mass than I have the time to detail here. History will speak for itself. Start with Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.
SDH: What does Lydia Lunch do when she’s not being Lydia Lunch?
LL: Do you mean when I’m teaching the cat to box or scouring the 10,000 books I still need to read or bawling my eyes out over the devastating effect architecture has on me when it’s murdered ghosts leek into my bloodstream as I stalk abandoned villages in search of kindred spirits, or sitting quietly in a room contemplating regicide?
Whatever I fucking feel like doing.
SDH: What do you like to eat/drink?
LL: Any food spicy enough to make the person next to me faint with fever.
I don’t drink recreationally, but I do like a fat Hennessey before I hit the stage. Just to warm the throat.
SDH: Why have you not been afforded the level of mainstream attention that some of your friends and collaborators?
LL: Because as an aggressive woman I’m still too much of a threat to the status quo. Fine by me.
SDH: You probably couldn’t care less, but as a technical matter, are there aspects of your methodology that have alienated some common outlets, namely MTV?
LL: Inability to kiss ass, smile pretty and hold my tongue. On the other end of the spectrum, I’m not a train wreck crashing into a bank like Amy Winehouse, Courtney Love, Britney Spears or a dozen other celebrities who can’t handle their drugs and whose every hideous mishap is vomited across the tabloids by paparazzi bottom feeders who make a killing over documenting other people’s self destruction. Sick, stupid schoolyard bullshit. Sells papers. Count me out.
SDH: Who was the last person who hit you, and why?
LL: I haven’t been struck in rage since I was slap boxing in high school. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
SDH: When was the last time you felt in imminent danger?
LL: 1984. A roadtrip out to the Death Valley with a maniacal ex lover with a Manson fetish. Obviously I’m a bit craftier than Charlie or his many followers. Haha. Use your imagination to fill in the blanks.
SDH: Violence against women and children (aka “soft targets”) is an epidemic all over America and around the world. What is the basis of such violence, and what can be done now to mitigate it?
LL: People who feel frustrated and powerless and who have probably been victimized themselves will often look for the nearest available target to rage against. I think we need to teach school children from a very early age to recognize when they are being abused in the home and to report it immediately. We need to deal with this issue in a child’s early development by empowering them to feel strong and safe enough to have a place to not only report what’s going on in the home, but then have agencies step in and remove the offending party. And offer therapy and anger management to the whole family. Abuse is so often trans-generational, so society must find a way to deal with in the home in an effort to stop the cycle from continuing. A battered child often ends up battling back or turning the blade inward and self destructing. Starting here would certainly help address the issue.
SDH: Who was the last person you hit, and why?
LL: A Russian soundman 2 years ago in Moscow. He got so drunk during my show he literally fell face first on the soundboard, causing a vomit inducing feedback of even more annoying noise than what I was already creating. I had warned him to watch his intake before the show. He had to be carted away. The next day he sheepishly showed up ridden with guilt, seeking benediction. I backhanded him twice in the face, for which he bowed and thanked me.
SDH: Are you trained in any style(s) of martial arts?
LL: No, but I enjoy boxing, especially with my own shadow.
SDH: Have you ever owned any weapons? If so, what’s your preference for self-defense?
LL: An acid tongue, quick wit, a brutal left hook and a Smith and Wesson .357. Living in The Murder Capital of New Orleans at a time when 17 cops were arrested in the early ‘90’s made it imperative that I could defend myself in a city that still endorsed “The John Wayne Law”, which meant you could carry a gun on the street as long as it was in plain sight. If you’re going to own a gun, it should be mandatory that you are trained to do so. I was. Since we won’t be able to keep guns out of criminal hands and with America remaining the world’s largest arms dealer with sales to foreign countries this year alone topping 32 Billion dollars, there seems no way to curtail the proliferation of guns or heavy artillery. I think every American has not only a right, but in most cities a need to own a gun, kept in the house, to protect yourself from outside invasion.
SDH: Who do you support (if any) for President in 2008?
LL: Certainly NOT John MCCON and his Stepford wife Cindy who were involved in one of the biggest financial disasters this country has ever faced (besides the one it’s in now), THE SAVINGS AND LOAN SCANDAL—WHICH BANKRUPTED MORE BANKS AND PEOPLE THAN WE WILL EVER KNOW. The bank that MCCON’S son runs was just bankrupted- start there for who I do not want.
SDH: What do you think of McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin?
LL: One look at Sarah Palin and you see the rapture of religious delusions and the self righteous bullshit and hypocrisy which it fosters emanating from her very soul. She is one sick twist.
SDH: Have there ever been political candidates that you fully supported?
LL: Jesse Ventura. A true outsider that calls it as it is.
SDH: Have your political views changed significantly over the years?
LL: Not one bit.
SDH: What would a candidate have to say/do to draw your vote?
LL: Talk is fricking cheap. Obama went into his community, CARED ENOUGH ABOUT THE PEOPLE THERE TO TRY AND MAKE A CHANGE. A real human being, not a hot headed ill tempered old man who has sucked enough corporate dick to give him a rictus grin and his rifle toting gun moll who thoroughly believes she has a hotline to God’s pipeline and AmeriKKKa’s superiority complex must be advanced at all cause. Because IT’S GOD’S WILL!
SDH: Where is the balance between the state’s support/promotion of art and its need to “regulate” that support? Is an agency like the NEA entitled to pick and choose which projects it puts money into?
LL: I personally try not to deal with any type of “agency”. It’s tricky. I have never directly applied for any grants and wouldn’t even bother in the USA, but many of the venues that have put me on, especially in Europe, have been funded—museums, galleries, theaters—which I think helps democratize the system because these spaces need to present many performances a year, so the chance of being able to actually perform or create something is greater as a whole if you target the venues themselves than attempting to apply for one or two grants which might be available and for which hundreds of artists might also be applying. Many grants charge a fee for you to even submit a proposal, which is ridiculous.
Grant writing is its own art, or a very specific craft, really. Formulaic. Unless you master the language, in other words, sweet talk enough politically correct bullshit to sway whoever the jury is, or have friends on the committee, or they’ve seen your submissions enough times, it’s basically a big waste of time or a crap shoot.
Any artist that can actually get a grant has mastered a mechanical talent which probably has nothing to do with the art itself. Good for them. I don’t have the time to spend or the energy to waste trying to manipulate the English language in a way that makes what I do palatable to a select committee of appointees who might fear being held responsible for my words or actions.
You have less to answer to as an artist doing a single performance in a venue which garners long term support from the city council, but is administered by open minded curators who understand the need for expansive discourse. Too many strings attached to most grants to make even the concept of applying interesting to me.
SDH: What is the most outrageous thing that someone has ever asked you to do?
LL: Date a poisoner who practiced his craft on our first date.
SDH: Regarding porn, and the sex industry in general: how does one reconcile the more salutary aspects (if any) of the industry with the environment of extreme exploitation that it exists in? What is (or should be) the government’s role in all of this.
LL: We need to address the American puritanical double standard of sex itself. Where violence is encouraged and exploited and sex is allowed only as a tool to sell products. The government needs to stay out of our bedrooms, the only exception being when it involves the welfare of children.
Pornography’s goal is twofold: To satisfy urges that might not be met in real life, and to make money. Sure a lot of porn sucks, is ridiculous, outdated, exploitative, stupid, crude, ignorant, demeaning. But so are sports and most rock music. In the last 20 years the face of pornography has changed radically in that there are so many alternatives that exists within the genre. And it needs to be diverse. Who the hell can sum up what turns us on? For me at least, my libido is extremely moody. Sometimes I want to see the most ridiculous low brow porno bullshit to get some weird part of my psyche off. Other times, I don’t care who it is or what they’re doing, I don’t want to see these naked supposedly horny freaks frolicking at the foot of my bed.
SDH: Have you ever done anything, in work or in life, that you regret?
LL: Not yet…but I’m open to suggestions.
SDH: Are you conscious of being an influence? If so, does that affect your approach?
LL: If I was truly an influence there would be more confrontational, trouble talking, noise making hard core cunts creating an awful ruckus. As I see it my style and attitude may have been co-opted, but the substance of what I represent has not. I feel more like a footnote in other people’s career than a cultural influence. But give it time. I ain’t going nowhere.
SDH: Have you ever considered taking up a spot in academia?
LL: I taught a semester at the San Francisco Art Institute. I’ve done a lot of workshops, lectures and speeches at Universities, but to enter into it full time does not interest me. I quit school in the 10th grade because it could not provide me with the tools I needed to begin doing what I did, shortly after I left. Which was move to NYC and start Teenage Jesus.
Word association:
Amy Winehouse: “Great last record mainly due to The Dap Kings. I prefer Sharon Jones, whom they originally played with.”
Coco Rosie: “All weirdos welcome but I prefer Jill Tracy. Dark poisonous cabaret. Her Diabolical Steak and Bittersweet Constrain are classics.”
Regina Spektor: “Ridiculous.”
Sasha Grey: “Any woman that can get Rocco Siffreidi to say no to something must be doing something right.”
Meredith Monk: “It’s always inspirational when someone so unique continues to create. Diamanda Galas. Karen Finley. Wanda Coleman. All important.”
The Parkins sisters (Zeena and Andrea): “Fantastic musicians.”
SDH: Who’s on your current list of collaborators/projects?
LL: Working on a few tracks with Sir Alice from Paris, Philippe Petite of Strings of Consciousness on a CD that’s almost finished of word-based psycho-ambient material, and a track with Eugene Robinson of Oxbow, some songs with Baba Zula; continuing to tour my multimedia performance Ghosts of Spain in Europe with James Johnston (Gallon Drunk, Bad Seeds) and Ian White. My anthology Will Work for Drugs will come out on Akashic next spring.
SDH: Do you have any plans for your birthday?
LL: Celebrate another 50.
SDH: If you could go back and speak to yourself in 1978, what would you say?
LL: I wouldn’t need to tell her anything, she knew exactly what needed to be done.
http://www.myspace.com/lydialunch
sdh666@hotmail.com; www.myspace.com/sheltonhull
Bob Novak has had a shitty month of July. First he got fed bad information about John McCain possibly announcing his VP pick during Obama’s overseas trip, then he ran over a man almost as old as him while driving around DC, and then he is abruptly diagnosed with a brain tumor while vacationing at Cape Cod–the same spot where Teddy Kennedy incurred whatever symptoms inspired him to get checked out for what was eventually diagnosed with brain cancer. The nation’s longest-tenured living political columnist is now off the job for the first time in 45 years, and may or may not return. This prescient column, from a couple months ago, might end up serving as his epitaph, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that yet.
There isn’t much to be said about Ric Flair that hasn’t been said already, often by Flair himself. Yet he remains a seemingly endless source of entertainment for pro wrestling fans. In an industry where gimmicks go stale and fans’ tastes shift faster than Harley Race on the Autobahn, Flair has maintained a prominent place on weekly television for 30 years, in a genre that is narrowly-defined and widely ridiculed but is consistently high-ranked for the whole history of cable TV and PPV.
How many people who were in top position on US TV in 1978 are still there now? Susan Lucci? The attrition rate of TV news anchors has been staggering–from Jessica Savitch and Max Robinson to Peter Jennings and Tom Snyder, with dozens inbetween. David Letterman got over in 1981, so he might be the closest thing in terms of limelight longevity. Tom Brokaw had already retired from the nightly anchor spot at NBC, where he dominated in ratings contests against Jennings and Dan Rather, but the death of Tim Russert led to his return, as host of “Meet the Press”. Rather, of course, is all money on a live mic, and that makes him more like a wrestler (maybe fellow Texan Terry Funk) than most of the younger generation of reporters, who come off as brazenly fluffy and project nothing of inner grit beneath the shine.
Anyway, “Nature Boy Ric Flair: The Definitive Collection” comes after Flair’s retirement weekend, where he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame before losing to Shawn Michaels in Houston at WrestleMania XXV. That match is included on the set, but Flair’s hour-plus HOF speech was not–a disastrous gambit to get more people to buy the WrestleMania DVD. This is the second time WWE has done a Flair set–both triple-discs–and combined they make for a very effective introduction to a legacy that will probably linger in some form for as long as human beings exist.
The documentary that comprises disc one of the new set is up to the usual high standard WWE has for such things; production values are never an issue with their product. What is an issue, though, are the matches themselves. They are lucky that Flair is Flair, and people will buy the set just to have it. (This, is the saving grace of archival media. No one will ever know how many Ric Flair tapes were sold or traded just on the underground level, entirely independent of official releases, long before the Digital Age. He’s like Too $hort or Sun Ra, in that sense.) Only three of Flair’s 16 world title wins have been included on either collection.
Whereas the first set was comprised of groupings of matches and promos around specific feuds with Dusty Rhodes, Barry Windham, Sting, Ricky Steamboat and Terry Funk, along with documentary clips and extras like his 1992 Royal Rumble victory and his 2003 match with HHH in Greenville (though it oddly doesn’t include Flair’s promo to set up the match, which was one of his best of this busy decade), the second set is mostly a hodge-podge. That’s not to say the matches aren’t good; they are nice to have. Matches with Jack Brisco and Harley Race from 1982; the legendary draw with Sting from 1988; a 2 of 3 falls match with Kerry Von Erich (who is clearly buzzed beyond belief) from ‘82; a great defense of the Intercontinental title against HHH (in a cage!) from 2005; a match with Roddy Piper from ‘91 and a short but sweet six-man tag pitting Flair and the Andersons against Rhodes, Magnum TA and Manny Fernandez.
It says something about Flair’s nature that he would commission a brand-new robe, arguably more elaborate than any before, for what he knew would be his last match. Flair went down after three Michaels superkicks; one is typically a finisher. Michaels’ Asai moonsault onto the announcers’ table was one of the great “Holy Shit!” moments from this year. It may be impossible to cherry-pick matches for a Flair project, but it was unfortunate that some of his better stuff from the ’90s wasn’t included, nor his title defense against Road Warrior Hawk from 1986, nor his street fight with Mick Foley from 2006, nor any of his work with Steve Austin, Brian Pillman, Eddy Guerrero or Ron Garvin, Ricky Morton or Randy Savage. But it doesn’t really matter, since they will surely do another volume sooner or later.
Encountered the following essay after the death of its author, former Fox News host and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, who died from colon cancer on July 12. It is among the more earnest and sensible expressions of faith I’ve read in recent memory, and worth anyone’s time:
‘Blessings arrive in unexpected packages, – in my case, cancer. Those of us with potentially fatal diseases – and there are millions in America today – find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God’s will.
Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence ‘What It All Means,’ Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.
The first is that we shouldn’t spend too much time trying to answer the ‘why’ questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can’t someone else get sick?
We can’t answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer. I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care.
It is what it is, a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out. But despite this, – or because of it, – God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.
Second, we need to get past the anxiety.
The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.
To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life,- and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth.
We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many non believing hearts – an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away.
Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live fully, richly, exuberantly – no matter how their days may be numbered.
Third, we can open our eyes and hearts.
God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease,- smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see, – but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance; and comprehension – and yet don’t.
By His love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.
‘You Have Been Called’.
Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet, a loved one holds your hand at the side.
‘It’s cancer,’ the healer announces. The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. ‘Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.’
But another voice whispers: ‘You have been called.’
Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter,- and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our ‘normal time.’
There’s another kind of response, although usually short-lived an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tiny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions. The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change.
You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft.
Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies.
Think of Paul, traipsing through the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes ( Spain ), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.
There’s nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue, – for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.
Finally, we can let love change everything.
When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city.
From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.
We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us, that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God’s love for others. Sickness gets us part way there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy.
A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two peoples’ worries and fears. ‘Learning How to Live’. Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God’s arms, not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live.
They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love. I sat by my best friend’s bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer.
A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was an humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. ‘I’m going to try to beat [this cancer],’ he told me several months before he died. ‘But if I don’t, I’ll see you on the other side.’
His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn’t promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity, – filled with life and love we cannot comprehend, – and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.
Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?
When our faith flags, he throws reminders in our way.
Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it. It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit.
Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up, – to speak of us! This is love of a very special order.
But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense.
We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.
What is man that Thou art mindful of him?
We don’t know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us who believe, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place, in the hollow of God’s hand.’
T. Snow
