Last week, I went to an historical signing and talk at Olsson's Books and Records in Old Town Alexandria. While I was waiting upstairs at the bookstore, the author, whom I recognized from the jacket cover, walked by me to the public restroom in the back. As I browsed through another shelf, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the good professor open the door to an occupied bathroom. A very feminine shriek subsequently filled the store and he quickly apologized and backed away, the door slamming shut again. Dick Van Dyke couldn't have handled the situation with more elan. The only thing that could've been more embarrassing would be having this same woman sit right in front of him during his lecture, which, of course, is exactly what happened. It was glorious struggle to not snicker the whole time. It was a good talk, though, and he autographed my book.
When I was an undergraduate, I did many social things at alma mater. Two of the most memorable were working at the university radio station and joining a debate and literary society. The latter's unique combination of erudition and puerility appealed greatly to me. Oration and onanism in equal measure.
I still go back every so often and am fortunate to still have many of those friendships, especially the ones formed through the annual alumni functions. Every few years, I meet one or two new Washies whom I usually click with right away. They remind me of why I joined way back in the mid-90s.
History of the Washington Literary Society and Debating Union, Part 1
History of the Washington Literary Society and Debating Union, Part 2
History of the Washington Literary Society and Debating Union, Part 3
History of the Washington Literary Society and Debating Union, Part 4
So I'm in one of the kitchens where I work the other morning, and I'm filling up my over sized mug with a nice, steaming cup of Vanilla Chai tea. The best way to start the day, in my opinion.
While I'm there, one of my newer co-workers comes in to put her lunch in the refrigerator. She's Chinese and obviously has some difficulty with English. We smile at each other and say mutual good mornings. I've met her a few times in the hall. She tells me she's heard I'm interested in politics and figured she should ask me where she can find information online about the presidential primaries. "I'm trying to learn more about American politics," she says. So I recommend a couple of comprehensive sites I think are informative and worthwhile. I feel pretty good to have passed along some knowledge.
"Thanks so much! You know," she adds,"I was at Tiananmen Square."
"Really?" I say.
"Yes, I was there. The tanks were all around us."
"Tanks," I say, shamed to know vicariously everything she's talking about and suddenly feeling about as small as, say, a lone figure in front of a snarling phalanx of military might.
An awed and awkward silence filled the kitchen. Still smiling at me, she wordlessly watched me sip my big NPR mug sheepishly.
More co-workers came in and we all talked about whatever despite my best efforts to stand slack jawed in admiration and horror. Of course, in these pleasantries, I didn't mention what I had just recently hung on the wall in my condo next to the cats' scratch post.
The late, great Robert Altman would've celebrated his 83rd birthday Wednesday.
So many of his films are wonderful and infinitely rewarding in various ways: Nashville, The Player, Gosford Park, hell even Popeye. And as A Prairie Home Companion listener, I enjoyed his movie adaptation written by and starring Garrison Keillor. Tanner '88 is a striking political satire and worth revisiting particularly in our current election year. And McCabe & Mrs. Millernot only introduced me to a completely different kind of Western film, it helped me discover Leonard Cohen's music as well as an enigmatic actress named Julie Christie.
As superlative and influential as his eclectic career was, one Robert Altman movie is indisputably my favorite among his work. It's the same one that launched his big screen career: 1970's MASH. I've watched it countless times and enjoy it more with repeated viewings. A problematic shoot, at one point, stars Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould approached the producers and tried to get Altman fired. Gould later admitted this subterfuge to Altman, but Sutherland never did. Consequently, Donald Sutherland never acted with the legendary director again but Elliot Gould went on to star in several more Altman movies, including a revisionist The Long Goodbye, an early 70s film noir exercise that laid the groundwork for the landmark Chinatown a year later.
MASH has some of the best dialogue and editing in film history, and it also features one of my favorite tracking shots of all time. It's obvious in a subtle way, and you could miss it despite its staring you right in the face. I'll give you a hint:
Other than Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, this kind of dark, highbrow irreverence and satire was essentially unknown in American cinema prior to 1970. It took a maverick like Altman to push it through, particularly during a hot and hotly controversial war.
If you've never heard the lyrics to "Suicide is Painless," the famous MASH theme song co-written by Altman's then 14 year-old son Mike, now's your chance. For those of you who haven't seen the film or it's been awhile, a plot recap: "Painless" Paul the dentist (aka Jawbreaker) is unable to perform sexually with one of his many female conquests, so he confides in Hawkeye that he must be gay and therefore will kill himself. Sympathetically, the open-minded doctors of the 4077th step up to help their colleague through a difficult transition:
I've always thought the television adaptation of M*A*S*H* (asterisks now included) diluted the greatness of the original novel and Altman's film (I like my black comedy strong and substantive - not borscht belt). Altman wasn't a fan of the TV adaptation, either, but maybe he said that because he wasn't getting enough in royalties from the show. The movie's theme song, featured prominently in the television's opening and closing credits, sure did, however and Mike Altman actually went on to make more money in the long run from MASH than his father ever did.
The series, while cute at best in the initial seasons and later almost embarrassingly sentimental and self-serious, doesn't have the heft and nuance of the film's rich character portrayals, particularly Hawkeye and Trapper John. Their small screen portrayals are lightweight, I believe, but, until I saw this hysterical clip, not light in the loafers.
That MASH-up, if you will, is funnier than any episode of the show ever was. Watch it again. Those edits are dazzling, and I'm not above admitting I absolutely love that Queen song. My surgical cap is off to whoever put that together.
Robert J. Samuelson, one of my favorite op-ed authors and someone I consider a non-partisan expert on economic matters and policies, published this today:
"Political candidates routinely indulge in exaggeration, pandering, inconsistency and self-serving obscuration. Clinton and McCain do. The reason for holding Obama to a higher standard is that it's his standard and also his campaign's central theme. He has run on the vague promise of "change," but on issue after issue -- immigration, the economy, global warming -- he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates. These issues remain contentious because they involve real conflicts or differences of opinion.
"The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media -- preoccupied with the political "horse race" -- have treated his invocation of "change" as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's major problems when, so far, he isn't."
I'm as passionate about politics as anybody can be outside of actually holding a substantive elected office, which, hey, may happen someday, who knows? In high school, I was president of the Science Club, after all. How many states of matter could I carry with those credentials? (But seriously, folks...)
So I'm naturally excited as any other moderate or progressive especially would and should be who's ready to move on from eight indelibly horrible years of George W. Bush's criminals and cronies. I still clench my jaw bitterly recalling my vote for Al Gore back in 2000, the same year I also helped elect Hillary Clinton when I lived in New York City. I spent over half a decade in the most urbane city in the world, and I think she's been a fine Senator who has genuinely worked across the aisle to build bipartisan support not just for the Empire State but for all Americans. I liked Obama's speech in 2004 and was pleased he won an Illinois seat in the Senate during an otherwise awful year for Democrats.
I've gone back and forth between the merits of these two candidates quite a bit over the past several months regarding who I genuinely think would be the best president and who I think is the most electable. Sometimes it's the same individual, sometimes it's not. Recently, I read Dreams From My Father and have the Audacity of Hope, as I'm trying to learn more about Obama. I also attended a Clinton campaign rally in Arlington a few weeks back where I was fortunate to meet the distinguished senator, shake her hand, and get her autograph on my copy of Living History.
Voting in the Virginia presidential primaries, Gwen and I deliberately split our votes - one for Clinton and one for Obama. We both really had been agonizing over whom to support. Despite fevered protestations coming from both campaigns, these two really would have quite similar administrations from a policy point of view. For a realistic moderate who is conservative fiscally but leans to the left socially, as I am and I think more of the country is becoming, the question ultimately becomes who is more electable, I suppose, against John McCain. Sometimes I think that's Obama and sometimes I still think Clinton could do it.
One thing, however, has really put me off the Obama campaign. His crusade, if you will. Let me put this in earthy, coarse language so my point isn't lost. And let me crucially note I voted for the Illinois senator in the Virginia primary.
Most Obamamaniacs need to get the fuck over themselves.
"And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — "We are the ones we've been waiting for" — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you." That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."
"The Obama campaign's instruction to their volunteers to steer clear of policy questions. How can we truly bring about real political change if the movement the Obama people are building is devoid of ideological content, content merely to mouth gauzy generalities about "coming together" and "yes we can"? Such a movement becomes a cult or personality rather than engine for social justice and political transformation. And personality cults can be a huge turnoff to those who are not already drinking the Kool-Aid..."I worry, however, that some Obama supporters have become so emotionally invested in him that they would not support Clinton if she eventually prevails. And that would be tragic. Voters are fed up with Republicans, have moved significantly to the left on many political issues, and are more open to voting Democratic than at any time in years. Democrats are well-positioned to finally to enact a progressive agenda and maybe even achieve long-deferred progressive goals like universal health care and labor law reform...
"So I say, we should all get a grip, stop all this unseemly mooning over Barack, see him and the political landscape he is a part of in a cooler, clearer, and more realistic light, and get to work."
And from Fred Siegal in the City Journal earlier this month:
"It will be ironic if in the name of post-partisanship we manage, with the contrivance of both Left and Right, to elect Oprah’s candidate, a man with a narrowly partisan record who has never demonstrated a capacity (rhetoric aside) either to lead or to govern. Only Clinton derangement syndrome can explain the alliance of so many otherwise thoughtful people of both parties who speak well of the candidacy of a man with scant knowledge of the world who has never been tested and has never run anything larger than a senatorial office. The question that we need to ask is whether this man—who candidly admits, “I’m not a manager”—can manage the vast apparatus of the federal government. Will packaging be enough to deal with our problems?"
"Pollster Frank Luntz asked college students at a recent focus group to name the candidate they were going to vote for. All of them said Obama, but when Luntz followed up by asking them to name a single accomplishment of the senator, they couldn’t name one. Nobody could name a single accomplishment that Senator Obama has achieved...
"Obama has a history of voting 'present' — which is neither a vote in favor or against — on controversial items so that nobody will know his real stance on an issue. In the Illinois legislature, Obama voted present on bills that would prohibit partial-birth abortions, a bill that reduced the sentence for carrying a concealed weapon and a bill that required adult prosecution for firing a gun on school grounds. In 1999, he was the only member of the legislature not to support a bill that protected the privacy of sex-abuse victims by sealing their court records. This is the man who wrote in his book, The Audacity of Hope, 'You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair and or just.' "
Lastly, this article from this week's issue of The Economist:
"None of this is to take away from Mr Obama's achievement—or to imply that he could not rise to the challenges of the job in hand. But there is a sense in which he has hitherto had to jump over a lower bar than his main rivals have. For America's sake (and the world's), that bar should now be raised—or all kinds of brutal disappointment could follow."
As I said, I voted for Obama in the Virginia primary but I still have concerns. After two terms of what historians are already noting is likely the worst presidental administration in United States' history, Americans deserve better than new age slogans.
These recent Obama plagiarism allegations are nothing to be taken lightly, moreover. For a man whose campaign and vision is based on soaring speeches and being a new and different kind of public servant, to crib words - ironically a "Just Words?" flourish about the power of rhetoric - is disturbing. It doesn't matter if other politicians, including Hillary, do that to varying degrees, as well. He's selling himself as the CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. So far, that change has been words and apparently some lifted, unattributed words.
I can't emphasize this enough: it is not remotely cynical for me to have these concerns about Obama and his campaign. It is VITAL I have these concerns, and I believe it's important for others to have them, as well. Obama fires people up at rallies decrying cynics, but that's a pejorative designed to make his supporters feel good. There are legitimate reasons to be skeptical about him and what he can really do to bring about change to the Washington culture and the American psyche.
Should Obama be forthcoming, admit he's not perfect, and then start offering more realistic, detailed proposals about how to fix the government other than being purposely vague in talking about solutions?
Yes, I hope he can. And, more importantly, yes he damn well should.
The most derivative, phony, and shitty band in mainstream music for well over the past thirty years. If I never hear "Love in an Elevator" again it will be too soon.
Not sure how I did this, but, despite the best efforts of Ticketbastard crashing my web browser, I still somehow got a great ticket this past Saturday morning for Radiohead at the Nissan Pavilion on May 11th. (Now the show is sold out.)
I'm in section 101, behind "the Pit", a general admission, SRO mass huddle for the youthfully disaffected. Normally, I'd stand, but, since I'm in my mid-thirties now, I'll take a nearby seat with a great view if it's available. (Plus I can still bang my head up and down during "Planet Telex" or "The Bends", should the guys roar through those now 13 year-old riffs.)
I last saw Radiohead in 2003 on the Hail to the Thief tour. That concert was at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and I was on the lawn. I decided this time to go for broke and get a better seat, which I did. Better still is I didn't remotely go broke - top tier tickets were only $61. Quite reasonable in this day of egregiou$ re$ale$ on $tubhub.com or wherever else people go to get raped by the concert industry.
I definitely want to hear "Fake Plastic Trees" live, since they didn't play it the other time I saw them. Though I've never tried to quantify them, that may be my single favorite song from the 90s:
With Herbie Hancock's recent Album of the Year win this past Sunday for River: The Joni Letters at the Grammy Awards, I was thinking today of Joni Mitchell's collaboration Mingus. Elvis Costello did something similar back in 2001 with "Hora Decubitus". Costello is also on Hal Wilner's Weird Nightmare Mingus tribute, which I first heard in college and led me to explore the vast and wonderful catalog of, well, weirdness that is Charles Mingus.
So, anyway, the point is I listened to Mingus' Let My Children Hear Musicthis morning as I drove to vote in the Virginia presidential primary. As corny as it sounds, since I'm recently married and hope to begin a family in the next year or two, I can't wait for my children to hear music of all kinds.
Mingus was an irascible and difficult man, notorious for a number of reasons. Triumph of the Underdog is a good place to begin your own explorations of this twentieth century jazz giant.
One of the principal actors in arguably my favorite movie of all time died. Roy Scheider will always be Chief Brody first and foremost in my mind, as well as most other moviegoers he's entertained for decades, but he had other notable roles particularly in the 1970s:
I don't care what's possible or not. It's just a movie, yes, but Jaws is still pretty close to the best movie of all time, in my experience. I saw it in a theater when I was six or so years old, and the impression, the experience was so visceral, I may as well have rocking back and forth on the doomed boat with Hooper, Brody, and Quint. As I got older and more sophisticated in my appreciation of film, I was pleased to see how Jaws holds up as a thoughtful, at times funny thriller with real characters, particularly Scheider's Police chief Martin Brody. He's a nuanced Joe Everyman fighting his biggest fear (the water) manifest with a malicious maw. At the end of the day, how can you not admire the hell out of a public servant doing whatever it takes to protect his citizens?
Away From Heris a good but heartbreaking movie, well deserving of its many accolades. (It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006, when I was there for a conference. My wife, who loves to tag along when I travel for work, stalked all the red carpet events, and I think she may have seen the luminous Julie Christie, who is as beautiful today as she was 40 years ago.
These days, I have Yo La Tengo's "Tom Courtenay" in my head more often since Ms. Christie's in the media for her Oscar nomination. That's not a bad thing at all.
I wonder if Paul is jealous it's one of John's songs that's going across the universe and so he's secretly pleased that this particular composition is being hurled out of our galaxy.
ATU is probably my favorite song off of Let It Be. Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright do notable covers, as well. This video below was directed by former Fiona Apple boyfriend and current Oscar nominee P.T. Anderson:
Coincidentally, Gwen and I just got the two-disc version of Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe" movie out of the library. It could be interesting, I don't know. The Beatles' images and music have saturated pop culture for nearly half a century now and are consequently quite malleable. I'm eager to see what they did. However, I tread with caution as I loathed Taymor's 1999 version Titus Andronicus. My God, is that a pretentiously unwatchable film. It's Shakespeare's most vulgar and vile play, admittedly, but there is such a thing as overdressing a pig, apparently.
...is when you'll be still be watching Peter Bogdonovitch's exceptional and exceptionally long documentary Runnin' Down a Dream. I saw it yesterday afternoon on the Sundance Channel. Four hours, folks. Just under 240 uninterrupted minutes about Tom Petty in one sitting. For the record, here are...
Other Things I Could've Done in Four Hours
1) Driven to New York City
2) Driven to North Carolina
3) Driven halfway to New York, turned around, and driven back (and still caught the movie's final credits)
4) Watched most of the last quarter of the Super Bowl - including all the time-outs - where Tom Petty is the halftime performer later today (I hope Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell doesn't flash his nips, no matter how tempting)
I did enjoy the movie quite a bit despite or maybe because of its seemingly interminable length (which, to be fair, goes by at a pretty good clip). I especially liked the new interviews and great archive concert footage. Eddie Vedder is one of many luminaries lauding Petty and his decades of achievement. The film features a great version of Vedder with the band on "The Waiting" at a 2006 show:
One of my favorites has always been "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," Petty's early 80s duet with Stevie Nicks. This song did so well on the Billboard chart, it effectively killed concurrent airplay for the actual Heartbreakers single at the time, "A Woman in Love".
One of my earliest and best MTV memories is the 1982 video for "You Got Lucky" fromtheir Long After Dark album. It's got this great, post-apocalyptic art direction, and a new wave synth melody so sturdy that it probably would survive a nuclear exchange. I unfortunately can't embed it here. There's an entire Tom Petty YouTube channel worth checking out, however.
Runnin' Down a Dream has many great behind the scenes moments (and how could there not be with FOUR HOURS TO FILL?). The prolific Jimmy Iovine, who produced the Damn the Torpedos album, is arguing with drummer Stan Lynch on the follow-up recording. Iovine isn't happy with the anemic percussion. Stan, never one to shy away from expressing an opinion, wonders aloud why the producer isn't on "the other side of the glass". While the Heartbreakers chuckle, Iovine blinks, shakes his head, and storms out, muttering "Fine. Well, you're going to sound like the Motels on this album."
I guess that's an effective way to shame one of the most hard-rocking American drummers from the 70s and 80s. For the record, though, I've always liked Martha...
