There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
--Vincent van Gogh
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
A Word in Edgewise
"Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me."
"You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you."
"Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me."
"You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you."
"Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me."
"You, you, you, you, you--me--you, you, you, you, you."
"Why are you trying to change the subject?"
"You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you."
"Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me."
"You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you."
"Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me."
"You, you, you, you, you--me--you, you, you, you, you."
"Why are you trying to change the subject?"
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Quips and Quotations
God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.
--Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame.
--Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Musical Chairs
Those of you who read my essay "American Blandstand" a while back might have gotten the impression that I'm more of a hardass about music than I actually am. In that piece I sort of adopted a snobby attitude as a way of explaining Dick Clark's place in the scheme of things. But my own tastes in music are evolving all the time. If you look at the the music section on my Blogger profile page, you'll see that I have artists as diverse as Janis Joplin and Bing Crosby. More so than literature or even movies, I'm constantly changing, and expanding, my mind on the subject of song.
This started early. I entered high school liking Barry Manilow, and exited a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Lo, these many decades later, how do I feel about those two? Well, I still like Bruce, though I'm nowhere near as fervent a fan I once was. And Barry? Unfortunately for Mr. Manilow, he's currently filed under "What The Hell Was I Thinking?" Maybe in another ten years I'll feel differently.
One act I was snarky about was the Captain and Tennile. In fact, I think Toni Tennile's voice was exceptionally suited for blues and rock and roll. Too bad she never sang any.
I decided to return to the subject of music after listening to an oldies station the other day. First, they played "Money" by Pink Floyd. This is a song that delighted me to no end whenever I heard it played growing up in the '70s, not so much for if its' trenchant critique of capitalism as because back then it was the only time you could hear an approximation of the word "bullshit" on the radio. About an hour after hearing "Money", the same station played "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees.
"Money" and "Stayin' Alive"? Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees? On the same radio station?
You'd had to have been a teenager in the 1970s to appreciate just how truly bizarre that is. Back then, you never heard those two bands played on the same station. The Bee Gees were disco. Pink Floyd was progressive. The Bee Gees were Top-40. Pink Floyd was AOR. The Bee Gees were sequined skin-tight suits, and platform shoes. Pink Floyd was T-shirts, and blue jeans. The Bee Gees lyrics were short and repetitive. Pink Floyd's lyrics were long, philosophical, and symbolic, with the occasional swear word thrown in. The Bee Gees made you want to get up and dance. Pink Floyd made you want to sit down and have a toke.
Pink Floyd emerged from London's underground scene in the late 1960s playing a type of music that many associated with psychedelia, a drug-inspired genre that had emerged from San Fransisco's underground scene (a lot of burrowing going on.) Syd Barrett was the lead guitarist and chief songwriter in those years, and his whimsical lyrics were filled with fairy tail and outer space imagery. Floyd charted a few times, and then Barrett, reportedly driven mad by either LSD or the stress success brings, dropped (or was kicked) out of the band. Within a few years, Barrett had dropped out of sight altogether. So far out of sight, he was routinely referred to in the music press as the "late Syd Barrett" decades before he finally did die! Meanwhile, the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd and others had gone progressive.
Progressive was an attempt to move rock closer to jazz, or, better yet, classical. Rather than the usual riffs and licks and hooks and lyric-chorus-lyric of traditional pop songs, progressive rock, sometimes called art rock, had intricate melodies, intricate instrumentation, and intricate (and sometimes inscrutable) lyrics. The average song was much longer, and often linked with other songs on "concept" albums to form an epic theme or story. So unsuited for Top-40 was progressive rock, a whole new radio format was created: AOR, short for Album Oriented Rock, which dominated FM for a time. Popular progressive bands included Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Genesis (back in the Peter Gabriel days.) But the biggest prog rock band of then all was Pink Floyd, and the biggest prog rock album of all time was Dark Side of the Moon (which contained the aforementioned "Money"), on the Billboard chart from 1973 until 1988.
The band had several more popular albums throughout the '70s, but the one that really sticks in my memory is The Wall . A concept album about alienation that featured backing vocals by, among others, Bruce Johnston (author of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs") and Toni Tennille (Hmm...I guess she did sing rock, after all.) One song "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)", which actually did make the Top 40, exploded upon my high school senior class's collective consciousness in the spring of 1980. The song's most identifiable trait was a chorus of British schoolchildren singing, "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control." The children in my American high school were so captivated by this song, they forgot all about the hostage crises in Iran. Kids wrote the lyrics on blackboards. The song was played over the PA system. One day I walked into study hall and saw the following scrawled on a desk:
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WALL
THEN YOU LIKE DISCO
Ah, yes, disco. This brings us to the other group I heard on that oldies station, the Bee Gees. The three Gibb brothers from Australia didn't start out disco. Originally a Beatleslike pop/rock band, they first achieved international success in 1967 with "To Love Somebody", a song covered hundreds of times since. A string of hits followed, but by the mid-1970s they had begun to run out of steam. They decided to give disco a shot. Bullseye! They hit #1 with "Jive Talkin'". Another hit, this time at number #7, was "Nights on Broadway", which featured Barry Gibb singing falsetto for the first time. A year later they hit #1 again with "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing". But their biggest success was yet to come.
Disco had evolved from late '60s funk and soul. It was marked by simple lyrics, soaring vocals, and a 4/4 beat, sometimes called "four-on-the-floor". Synthesizers were also prominent. Nothing philosophical, or inscrutable, about it. It merely asked you to dance. The genre was gradually growing in popularity when Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta and featuring the music of the Bee Gees, premiered in late 1977. I can't think of any other movie during my lifetime that had as much of an impact on the overall culture as that one. Sure, Star Wars, which appeared earlier in the year, got a bigger box office, but that movie's impact outside of theaters seemed limited to toy stores. Thanks to Fever , and the Bee Gees three #1 hits, disco was everywhere! Radio, obviously. It helped revive Top 40, which had been flagging of late. It was also all over TV. There were disco specials, disco dance contests, even disco cartoons. It breathed new life, in the form of better ratings at least, into Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which had faced cancellation. In addition to the music itself, a whole kind of style of clothing, mostly influenced by Fever, became popular. And, finally, actual discos, as in discotheques, the buildings where a DJ played a record and patrons danced, became more popular than ever. It looked like the craze would would never end.
Yet, in the flicker of a strobe light, end it did. Why? Some blamed homophobia. The music had originally become popular in gay clubs. Once this became known, it didn't sit at all well with adolescent males, who put a premium on masculinity (never mind that many of these same masculine males had no problem rocking to a band named Queen.) However, with the notable exception of the Village People, most of the performers seemed to be straight. A good deal of them also seemed to be, well, in fact, were, black. Thus, some have blamed racism. However, disco followed the same pattern of almost every other musical form of the last 150 years: invented by blacks, taken over by whites. Thus you had the Swedish, and very Swedish-looking, ABBA. I've already mentioned the Bee Gees. Oh, wait. Barry, Robin, and Maurice had a brother, who performed solo. Only an albino could get much whiter than Andy Gibb.
Racism and homophobia may very well have taken its' toll on disco, but I suspect what really spoiled it for people, especially teenagers, who in that pre-digital era comprised the biggest segment of the record-buying public, was how quickly the music was adopted and co-opted by the some of the most hackneyed and/or over-the-hill figures in the land. Rick Dees ripped off Disney with "Disco Duck". Former pop idol-turned Polish goodwill ambassador Bobby Vinton came out with the "Disco Polka". 70-year old Ethel Merman put out an album of discoized show tunes. Plugging it on a talk show, she exclaimed, "You gotta keep up with the times!" A lot of people were trying to keep up with the times--with the intent of turning back the clock. I remember reading a silver-haired TV critic's review of a new disco show in which he gushed that the dancing was similar to the Big Band era of his youth. The Generation Gap was turned on its' head. The elders wanted you to like this new music. Alice Cooper might have summed up the feelings of many teens when during a concert he said, "Right now your parents are at home doing this!", followed by a John Travolta-like pose.
By the early 1980s, disco had become a term of derision, which it remains to this very day. Yet it may have been no more than a semantic fall from grace. Researching this essay, I've discovered that such recent styles as techno, trance, and house can be traced back to disco (don't ask me to tell you the difference between any of those styles. I'm now over-the-hill myself.)
So, now that I've given you some insight on Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees, and the styles of music they represent, how do I feel about them both being played on the same radio station? Well, as I'm basically liberal, I believe in inclusiveness. I welcome all forms of diversity. It's from you. It's from me. It's a worldwide symphony!
Except...
It's all right to like both Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees, Janis Joplin and Bing Crosby, Bruce Springsteen and, maybe in another ten years, Barry Manilow, once all those artists, whether still active or not, have basically been assigned their place in musical history. But can you like everything in the heat of the moment? Can you like everything and at the same time create whole new musical genres in the heat of the moment? No matter how mainstream or commercialized the two musical styles I've described eventually became, they both had their roots in the "underground". Undergrounds attract rebels. You don't rebel against that you like. Progressive rock grew out of the psychedelia of the counterculture. During that era, young people, at least the most outspoken of young people, rebelled against their elders for liking everything from the Vietnam War to ballroom dancing. Disco was first popular among blacks and gays, two groups who were counterculture before counterculture was cool, each retreating into their respective undergrounds for reasons of practicality and survival, rebelling against those who did not like them. I've left out punk rock so far, but that genre came about partially because, in a London Underground much changed from the one that existed ten years earlier, a young rebel named John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, loathed Pink Floyd as much as Pink Floyd fans loathed disco. People associate creativity with thinking outside the box, but the reason one wants to escape that box in the first place is because they don't like what's inside.
Then again, sometimes it's not so much the artists as their fans who do the rebelling. According to the many Elvis Presley biographies I've read (my mother was an avid fan, and passed the books along to me), he liked Dean Martin and singers of that ilk just as much he liked the blues coming out of Beale Street in the early 1950s. Yet his teenage fans, unaware of this and chafing under a sterile culture, saw Presley's music as a radical break with the past, and it became just that. Although Pink Floyd fans may have loathed disco, the members of Floyd themselves didn't necessarily share that sentiment. My ears were apparently too musically illiterate to recognize it at the time, but while researching this essay, I was surprised to discover that the radio version of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)" is a disco mix! Had my classmates, ears apparently as musically illiterate as my own, gotten wind of that, not only would they have burned every copy of The Wall they could find, but also Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle, Wish You Were Here, and Animals as well. But my classmates instead saw the song as a bulwark against disco, and we now have a hybrid for the ages.
You never know what you'll like above ground.
This started early. I entered high school liking Barry Manilow, and exited a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Lo, these many decades later, how do I feel about those two? Well, I still like Bruce, though I'm nowhere near as fervent a fan I once was. And Barry? Unfortunately for Mr. Manilow, he's currently filed under "What The Hell Was I Thinking?" Maybe in another ten years I'll feel differently.
One act I was snarky about was the Captain and Tennile. In fact, I think Toni Tennile's voice was exceptionally suited for blues and rock and roll. Too bad she never sang any.
I decided to return to the subject of music after listening to an oldies station the other day. First, they played "Money" by Pink Floyd. This is a song that delighted me to no end whenever I heard it played growing up in the '70s, not so much for if its' trenchant critique of capitalism as because back then it was the only time you could hear an approximation of the word "bullshit" on the radio. About an hour after hearing "Money", the same station played "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees.
"Money" and "Stayin' Alive"? Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees? On the same radio station?
You'd had to have been a teenager in the 1970s to appreciate just how truly bizarre that is. Back then, you never heard those two bands played on the same station. The Bee Gees were disco. Pink Floyd was progressive. The Bee Gees were Top-40. Pink Floyd was AOR. The Bee Gees were sequined skin-tight suits, and platform shoes. Pink Floyd was T-shirts, and blue jeans. The Bee Gees lyrics were short and repetitive. Pink Floyd's lyrics were long, philosophical, and symbolic, with the occasional swear word thrown in. The Bee Gees made you want to get up and dance. Pink Floyd made you want to sit down and have a toke.
Pink Floyd emerged from London's underground scene in the late 1960s playing a type of music that many associated with psychedelia, a drug-inspired genre that had emerged from San Fransisco's underground scene (a lot of burrowing going on.) Syd Barrett was the lead guitarist and chief songwriter in those years, and his whimsical lyrics were filled with fairy tail and outer space imagery. Floyd charted a few times, and then Barrett, reportedly driven mad by either LSD or the stress success brings, dropped (or was kicked) out of the band. Within a few years, Barrett had dropped out of sight altogether. So far out of sight, he was routinely referred to in the music press as the "late Syd Barrett" decades before he finally did die! Meanwhile, the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd and others had gone progressive.
Progressive was an attempt to move rock closer to jazz, or, better yet, classical. Rather than the usual riffs and licks and hooks and lyric-chorus-lyric of traditional pop songs, progressive rock, sometimes called art rock, had intricate melodies, intricate instrumentation, and intricate (and sometimes inscrutable) lyrics. The average song was much longer, and often linked with other songs on "concept" albums to form an epic theme or story. So unsuited for Top-40 was progressive rock, a whole new radio format was created: AOR, short for Album Oriented Rock, which dominated FM for a time. Popular progressive bands included Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Genesis (back in the Peter Gabriel days.) But the biggest prog rock band of then all was Pink Floyd, and the biggest prog rock album of all time was Dark Side of the Moon (which contained the aforementioned "Money"), on the Billboard chart from 1973 until 1988.
The band had several more popular albums throughout the '70s, but the one that really sticks in my memory is The Wall . A concept album about alienation that featured backing vocals by, among others, Bruce Johnston (author of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs") and Toni Tennille (Hmm...I guess she did sing rock, after all.) One song "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)", which actually did make the Top 40, exploded upon my high school senior class's collective consciousness in the spring of 1980. The song's most identifiable trait was a chorus of British schoolchildren singing, "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control." The children in my American high school were so captivated by this song, they forgot all about the hostage crises in Iran. Kids wrote the lyrics on blackboards. The song was played over the PA system. One day I walked into study hall and saw the following scrawled on a desk:
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE WALL
THEN YOU LIKE DISCO
Ah, yes, disco. This brings us to the other group I heard on that oldies station, the Bee Gees. The three Gibb brothers from Australia didn't start out disco. Originally a Beatleslike pop/rock band, they first achieved international success in 1967 with "To Love Somebody", a song covered hundreds of times since. A string of hits followed, but by the mid-1970s they had begun to run out of steam. They decided to give disco a shot. Bullseye! They hit #1 with "Jive Talkin'". Another hit, this time at number #7, was "Nights on Broadway", which featured Barry Gibb singing falsetto for the first time. A year later they hit #1 again with "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing". But their biggest success was yet to come.
Disco had evolved from late '60s funk and soul. It was marked by simple lyrics, soaring vocals, and a 4/4 beat, sometimes called "four-on-the-floor". Synthesizers were also prominent. Nothing philosophical, or inscrutable, about it. It merely asked you to dance. The genre was gradually growing in popularity when Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta and featuring the music of the Bee Gees, premiered in late 1977. I can't think of any other movie during my lifetime that had as much of an impact on the overall culture as that one. Sure, Star Wars, which appeared earlier in the year, got a bigger box office, but that movie's impact outside of theaters seemed limited to toy stores. Thanks to Fever , and the Bee Gees three #1 hits, disco was everywhere! Radio, obviously. It helped revive Top 40, which had been flagging of late. It was also all over TV. There were disco specials, disco dance contests, even disco cartoons. It breathed new life, in the form of better ratings at least, into Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which had faced cancellation. In addition to the music itself, a whole kind of style of clothing, mostly influenced by Fever, became popular. And, finally, actual discos, as in discotheques, the buildings where a DJ played a record and patrons danced, became more popular than ever. It looked like the craze would would never end.
Yet, in the flicker of a strobe light, end it did. Why? Some blamed homophobia. The music had originally become popular in gay clubs. Once this became known, it didn't sit at all well with adolescent males, who put a premium on masculinity (never mind that many of these same masculine males had no problem rocking to a band named Queen.) However, with the notable exception of the Village People, most of the performers seemed to be straight. A good deal of them also seemed to be, well, in fact, were, black. Thus, some have blamed racism. However, disco followed the same pattern of almost every other musical form of the last 150 years: invented by blacks, taken over by whites. Thus you had the Swedish, and very Swedish-looking, ABBA. I've already mentioned the Bee Gees. Oh, wait. Barry, Robin, and Maurice had a brother, who performed solo. Only an albino could get much whiter than Andy Gibb.
Racism and homophobia may very well have taken its' toll on disco, but I suspect what really spoiled it for people, especially teenagers, who in that pre-digital era comprised the biggest segment of the record-buying public, was how quickly the music was adopted and co-opted by the some of the most hackneyed and/or over-the-hill figures in the land. Rick Dees ripped off Disney with "Disco Duck". Former pop idol-turned Polish goodwill ambassador Bobby Vinton came out with the "Disco Polka". 70-year old Ethel Merman put out an album of discoized show tunes. Plugging it on a talk show, she exclaimed, "You gotta keep up with the times!" A lot of people were trying to keep up with the times--with the intent of turning back the clock. I remember reading a silver-haired TV critic's review of a new disco show in which he gushed that the dancing was similar to the Big Band era of his youth. The Generation Gap was turned on its' head. The elders wanted you to like this new music. Alice Cooper might have summed up the feelings of many teens when during a concert he said, "Right now your parents are at home doing this!", followed by a John Travolta-like pose.
By the early 1980s, disco had become a term of derision, which it remains to this very day. Yet it may have been no more than a semantic fall from grace. Researching this essay, I've discovered that such recent styles as techno, trance, and house can be traced back to disco (don't ask me to tell you the difference between any of those styles. I'm now over-the-hill myself.)
So, now that I've given you some insight on Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees, and the styles of music they represent, how do I feel about them both being played on the same radio station? Well, as I'm basically liberal, I believe in inclusiveness. I welcome all forms of diversity. It's from you. It's from me. It's a worldwide symphony!
Except...
It's all right to like both Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees, Janis Joplin and Bing Crosby, Bruce Springsteen and, maybe in another ten years, Barry Manilow, once all those artists, whether still active or not, have basically been assigned their place in musical history. But can you like everything in the heat of the moment? Can you like everything and at the same time create whole new musical genres in the heat of the moment? No matter how mainstream or commercialized the two musical styles I've described eventually became, they both had their roots in the "underground". Undergrounds attract rebels. You don't rebel against that you like. Progressive rock grew out of the psychedelia of the counterculture. During that era, young people, at least the most outspoken of young people, rebelled against their elders for liking everything from the Vietnam War to ballroom dancing. Disco was first popular among blacks and gays, two groups who were counterculture before counterculture was cool, each retreating into their respective undergrounds for reasons of practicality and survival, rebelling against those who did not like them. I've left out punk rock so far, but that genre came about partially because, in a London Underground much changed from the one that existed ten years earlier, a young rebel named John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, loathed Pink Floyd as much as Pink Floyd fans loathed disco. People associate creativity with thinking outside the box, but the reason one wants to escape that box in the first place is because they don't like what's inside.
Then again, sometimes it's not so much the artists as their fans who do the rebelling. According to the many Elvis Presley biographies I've read (my mother was an avid fan, and passed the books along to me), he liked Dean Martin and singers of that ilk just as much he liked the blues coming out of Beale Street in the early 1950s. Yet his teenage fans, unaware of this and chafing under a sterile culture, saw Presley's music as a radical break with the past, and it became just that. Although Pink Floyd fans may have loathed disco, the members of Floyd themselves didn't necessarily share that sentiment. My ears were apparently too musically illiterate to recognize it at the time, but while researching this essay, I was surprised to discover that the radio version of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)" is a disco mix! Had my classmates, ears apparently as musically illiterate as my own, gotten wind of that, not only would they have burned every copy of The Wall they could find, but also Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle, Wish You Were Here, and Animals as well. But my classmates instead saw the song as a bulwark against disco, and we now have a hybrid for the ages.
You never know what you'll like above ground.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
In Memoriam: Joanne Siegel 1918-2011
Model forLois Lane, later married co-creator Jerry Siegel.
"Situation Wanted — Female ARTIST MODEL: No experience."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer classified ad, 1935.
"Joe [Shuster, the other co-creator] was taking art lessons and felt that he needed someone to pose as the Lois Lane character for the Superman story. So I posed...I remember the day I met Jerry in Joe's living room. Jerry was the model for Superman. He was standing there in a Superman-like pose. He said their character was going to fly through the air, and he leaped off the couch to demonstrate."
--Joanne Siegel, in a 1996 Plain Dealer interview.
"One of the things [Shuster and Siegel] were particularly interested in is how would a woman look like if she was being carried in the arms of someone flying through the air. So they set up a chair that had arms on it, and my mom draped herself across one arm and her legs across the other arm, and Joe drew her in that position."
--Laura Siegel Larson, Joanne and Jerry's daughter, in a Los Angeles Times interview.
"Situation Wanted — Female ARTIST MODEL: No experience."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer classified ad, 1935.
"Joe [Shuster, the other co-creator] was taking art lessons and felt that he needed someone to pose as the Lois Lane character for the Superman story. So I posed...I remember the day I met Jerry in Joe's living room. Jerry was the model for Superman. He was standing there in a Superman-like pose. He said their character was going to fly through the air, and he leaped off the couch to demonstrate."
--Joanne Siegel, in a 1996 Plain Dealer interview.
"One of the things [Shuster and Siegel] were particularly interested in is how would a woman look like if she was being carried in the arms of someone flying through the air. So they set up a chair that had arms on it, and my mom draped herself across one arm and her legs across the other arm, and Joe drew her in that position."
--Laura Siegel Larson, Joanne and Jerry's daughter, in a Los Angeles Times interview.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Quips and Quotations (St. Valentine's Day Edition)
Oh, darling, the ice caps are melting, but what does it matter, as long as we have each other?
--Kurt Vonnegut, on the possible consequences of including a romantic subplot in one of his novels
Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it.
--George Carlin
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
--Dorothy Parker
It does not matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you do not do it in the street and frighten the horses.
--Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who spent a good deal of her life in the 19th century
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.
--Woody Allen
Still waiting for Sally Field.
--Marty Volare
--Kurt Vonnegut, on the possible consequences of including a romantic subplot in one of his novels
Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it.
--George Carlin
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
--Dorothy Parker
It does not matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you do not do it in the street and frighten the horses.
--Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who spent a good deal of her life in the 19th century
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.
--Woody Allen
Still waiting for Sally Field.
--Marty Volare
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Power Points
Today I'd like to talk about an old movie, the unrest in Egypt, and the rock band The Who. Some disparate elements there, so you should find something to interest you.
The old movie is Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), and if you haven't seen it and would like to, you might want to stop reading now. I mean, I'll try my damnedest not to give away the ending, but mistakes do happen.
Taking place in the waning days of World War II, Spencer Tracy stars as a one-armed man who arrives in the small western town of Black Rock to look up a Japanese-American farmer. He's met with immediate hostility as soon as he gets off the train. Black Rock's town boss is played by tough-guy actor Robert Ryan, who sends his two goons (tough-guy actors Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine) to harass Tracy. To no avail. Tracy's mere presence in the town is destabilizing. Some people, such as the local doctor, played by Walter Brennan, think Tracy is just the man to uncover the secret the town has been hiding for the past four years. For Tracy soon comes to suspect the Japanese-American has been murdered, and Ryan is the prime suspect.
One of the things that makes this movie so interesting to me is that the murder in no mere isolated act of immorality. It has actual consequences for Black Rock as a whole. In order for the secret to be kept, the citizens are harassed into silence, and out-of-towners are immediately bullied in to leaving. The local economy suffers as a result. A melancholy sets in. Black Rock is dying, just so the town boss can get way with murder.
We find out that Tracy lost his arm while fighting in Italy. He almost lost a lot more than that. It turns out that the Japanese-American farmer's son died saving Tracy's life. The son was awarded a posthumous medal that Tracy wanted to give to the father, impossible now.
Tracy eventually gets some of the town members to open up. Ryan murdered the farmer both out of spite--he discovered water on some supposedly worthless land that the town boss had sold him--and anger over Pearl Harbor. The townspeople also agree to spirit Tracy out of town, as his life is now in danger. Unfortunately, his ride, played by Anne Francis, is still in cahoots with Ryan, and drives Tracy right into a trap. She gets killed herself, as Ryan doesn't want any witnesses, no matter how helpful they may have been. In an exciting climax, Tracy, with his one good arm, throws a Molotov cocktail at Ryan, setting him aflame.
Tracy returns to Black Rock to find out its' citizens have risen up and thrown Ryan's two goons into the slammer. The people have reclaimed their town.
Oops--Gave away the ending. Sorry about that, Chief.
Now on to Egypt. Technically, the country is a republic, meaning sovereignty lies with the people. However, the country has also been under a state of emergency for almost 30 years, meaning sovereignty actually lies with a dictator, one Hosni Mubarak. He doesn't refer to himself as a dictator. No, Mubarak calls himself "president". That sounds like a elected position, and for years he did run for election and reelection, all of which he won handily, as his was the only name on the ballot. Eventually, he did run against actual opponents in fixed elections. He won those, too. One of his opponents was thrown behind bars right after the election. Whatever his title, Dictator or President, Mubarak is clearly the boss.
Mubarak rationale for the three-decade old state of emergency is that his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated, right in front of him. Well, it's certainly understandable that Mubarak doesn't want the same fate to befall him. There's a simple way to avoid being the victim of a presidential assassin. DON'T BE PRESIDENT. But that would be downwardly-mobile, and Mubarak is too ambitious for that. So, instead, he resorted to the usual methods: suspension of civil liberties, and jailing people (an estimated 17,000) without a trial. With all the secret policing going on, you sometimes need to grease a few palms. Mubarak's estimated worth is $70 billion. That's a lot of grease.
The political system in Egypt is typical of a lot regimes over the years, be they ostensibly on the Right or Left: they exist solely to keep one man in power, and to let that man enjoy the fruits of that power. As the country the man rules is basically beside the point, it suffers, it stagnates. A melancholy sets in. But sometimes anger sets in as well.
Last June, a young Egyptian named Khalid Said was dragged out of a cafe by police for not having "papers" and beaten to death. The government claimed he choked to death on dope he swallowed as he was being gently clubbed. A lot of desperate Egyptians have been brooding about this murder ever since. But what to do? Tunisia provided the answer. Another North African country with a similar political system, its people rose up this past December and January after an impoverished and frustrated young man set himself on fire in front of a government building, and forced the Tunisian dictator or president or boss or whatever the hell he is to flee. The impoverished and frustrated Egyptians have now followed suit. As of this writing, Mubarak is still clinging to power, and the protests continue.
You may have assumed by now that I'm rooting for the protesters. Well, you're right, I am. But only up to a point.
I do worry about what happens after Mubarak leaves. The Czech government fell in 1989 after an uprising. After a rocky start, it's a functioning democracy. However, when the Iranian government fell after the 1979 uprising, a Shah was replaced with an Ayatollah. Not much of an improvement.
Toward the end of Bad Day at Black Rock, Walter Brennan suggests the town can come back. Spencer Tracy replies, "Some towns do and some towns don't. It depends on the people."
But I promised you The Who, didn't I?
I'll tip my hat to the new revolution
Take a bow for the new constitution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
It's easy to give away the ending to a movie. A revolution? Not so easy.
The old movie is Bad Day at Black Rock (1954), and if you haven't seen it and would like to, you might want to stop reading now. I mean, I'll try my damnedest not to give away the ending, but mistakes do happen.
Taking place in the waning days of World War II, Spencer Tracy stars as a one-armed man who arrives in the small western town of Black Rock to look up a Japanese-American farmer. He's met with immediate hostility as soon as he gets off the train. Black Rock's town boss is played by tough-guy actor Robert Ryan, who sends his two goons (tough-guy actors Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine) to harass Tracy. To no avail. Tracy's mere presence in the town is destabilizing. Some people, such as the local doctor, played by Walter Brennan, think Tracy is just the man to uncover the secret the town has been hiding for the past four years. For Tracy soon comes to suspect the Japanese-American has been murdered, and Ryan is the prime suspect.
One of the things that makes this movie so interesting to me is that the murder in no mere isolated act of immorality. It has actual consequences for Black Rock as a whole. In order for the secret to be kept, the citizens are harassed into silence, and out-of-towners are immediately bullied in to leaving. The local economy suffers as a result. A melancholy sets in. Black Rock is dying, just so the town boss can get way with murder.
We find out that Tracy lost his arm while fighting in Italy. He almost lost a lot more than that. It turns out that the Japanese-American farmer's son died saving Tracy's life. The son was awarded a posthumous medal that Tracy wanted to give to the father, impossible now.
Tracy eventually gets some of the town members to open up. Ryan murdered the farmer both out of spite--he discovered water on some supposedly worthless land that the town boss had sold him--and anger over Pearl Harbor. The townspeople also agree to spirit Tracy out of town, as his life is now in danger. Unfortunately, his ride, played by Anne Francis, is still in cahoots with Ryan, and drives Tracy right into a trap. She gets killed herself, as Ryan doesn't want any witnesses, no matter how helpful they may have been. In an exciting climax, Tracy, with his one good arm, throws a Molotov cocktail at Ryan, setting him aflame.
Tracy returns to Black Rock to find out its' citizens have risen up and thrown Ryan's two goons into the slammer. The people have reclaimed their town.
Oops--Gave away the ending. Sorry about that, Chief.
Now on to Egypt. Technically, the country is a republic, meaning sovereignty lies with the people. However, the country has also been under a state of emergency for almost 30 years, meaning sovereignty actually lies with a dictator, one Hosni Mubarak. He doesn't refer to himself as a dictator. No, Mubarak calls himself "president". That sounds like a elected position, and for years he did run for election and reelection, all of which he won handily, as his was the only name on the ballot. Eventually, he did run against actual opponents in fixed elections. He won those, too. One of his opponents was thrown behind bars right after the election. Whatever his title, Dictator or President, Mubarak is clearly the boss.
Mubarak rationale for the three-decade old state of emergency is that his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated, right in front of him. Well, it's certainly understandable that Mubarak doesn't want the same fate to befall him. There's a simple way to avoid being the victim of a presidential assassin. DON'T BE PRESIDENT. But that would be downwardly-mobile, and Mubarak is too ambitious for that. So, instead, he resorted to the usual methods: suspension of civil liberties, and jailing people (an estimated 17,000) without a trial. With all the secret policing going on, you sometimes need to grease a few palms. Mubarak's estimated worth is $70 billion. That's a lot of grease.
The political system in Egypt is typical of a lot regimes over the years, be they ostensibly on the Right or Left: they exist solely to keep one man in power, and to let that man enjoy the fruits of that power. As the country the man rules is basically beside the point, it suffers, it stagnates. A melancholy sets in. But sometimes anger sets in as well.
Last June, a young Egyptian named Khalid Said was dragged out of a cafe by police for not having "papers" and beaten to death. The government claimed he choked to death on dope he swallowed as he was being gently clubbed. A lot of desperate Egyptians have been brooding about this murder ever since. But what to do? Tunisia provided the answer. Another North African country with a similar political system, its people rose up this past December and January after an impoverished and frustrated young man set himself on fire in front of a government building, and forced the Tunisian dictator or president or boss or whatever the hell he is to flee. The impoverished and frustrated Egyptians have now followed suit. As of this writing, Mubarak is still clinging to power, and the protests continue.
You may have assumed by now that I'm rooting for the protesters. Well, you're right, I am. But only up to a point.
I do worry about what happens after Mubarak leaves. The Czech government fell in 1989 after an uprising. After a rocky start, it's a functioning democracy. However, when the Iranian government fell after the 1979 uprising, a Shah was replaced with an Ayatollah. Not much of an improvement.
Toward the end of Bad Day at Black Rock, Walter Brennan suggests the town can come back. Spencer Tracy replies, "Some towns do and some towns don't. It depends on the people."
But I promised you The Who, didn't I?
I'll tip my hat to the new revolution
Take a bow for the new constitution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
It's easy to give away the ending to a movie. A revolution? Not so easy.
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