Monthly Archives: March 2012

Moe’s Waiting for THE Man

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Moe TuckerThere was one really important band in the 1960s: The Velvet Underground. Sure, there were other great bands like The Beatles at times and The Mothers of Invention for the first three albums. And there are lots of other bands of that period that I still enjoy. Today, I would rather listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival than any other band of that time. But none of these bands were as relevant as The Velvet Underground. My first listen to The Velvet Underground & Nico was transcendent. As Mozart says, ironically, in Amadeus, “I never knew music like that was possible.”

Without a doubt, the greatest song The Velvets ever did was I’m Waiting for my Man. It describes the experience of scoring heroin in New York City in the middle 1960s. And it does it with no sentimentality or romance. It is rare in its power and honesty.

Strangely, the song is listed on the album as I’m Waiting for the Man. Many people use this title to this day. This is madness, of course; “the man” is the authorities—the ones who are going to kill your buzz, not the one who is going to get it going.

The drummer for The Velvet Underground was Maureen “Moe” Tucker. She isn’t very good but then, no one in the band is. Even the supposedly classically trained John Cale sounds like he’s struggling (perhaps he was high). But like everyone in the band, I’ve always liked her, and I will always honor her for bringing me so much joy. But…

I looked her up on Wikipedia today, and found that she has been a big Tea Party supporter. So what? She’s old. A lot of people lose their minds when they’re old. And old hippies have a special problem, being anti-authoritarian; they often confuse who is really on their side. But I was struck by one thing she told the Riverfront Times, “To be honest, I never paid attention to what the hell was going on. My always voting Democrat was the result of that. My philosophy was and is all politicians are liars, bums and cheats.”

This sentiment is very common. But it is very common almost exclusively on the right—among Republicans. My question is: if all politicians are liars, bums, and cheats, why is it you always vote for the party with the worst liars, bums, and cheats?

Moe also said that she was “furious about the way we’re being led towards socialism.” (She is 67 years old; I have little doubt she is on Social Security.) This makes me wonder if she didn’t have a different idea about the song all along. Maybe she thought is was the man. It seems unlikely, though; she almost certainly was doing heroin with the boys way back then.

Update (18 August 2012 1:06 pm)

I’ve decided to disable comments on this article. It isn’t because people keep yelling at me. The problem is that I think most people who comment skim through the article and then yell at me. I am very willing to interact with people on any subject at all. Slean, for example, disagreed but had a reasonable exchange with me. Pretty much all of the others are people who can brook not even the slightest criticism of a band that I too love or people who don’t like my politics but who can’t engage with me about them. So I’m just not interested any more. However, people who think I’m a parasite can send me email. Given that they will no longer be anonymous, I don’t expect to get any. (I will, of course, use stupid and ignorant email messages as fodder for articles that will be read by thousands of people.)

Image licensed via Fair Use.

Jeopardy!

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Jeopardy!It is hard for me to watch Jeopardy![1] The problem is that I’m pretty good at it. The number of answers I can easily spit out would put me above the average player, and the number of answers that are on the tip of my tongue would likely put me among the best.

Of course, Jeopardy! is not exactly a hard game. Final Jeopardy tonight was something like, “The back-to-back Tony award winning musicals in 1987 and 1988 that were set in Paris, France.” I had no idea. But then I thought, “What musicals have there been recently that took place in Paris?” Immediately, one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s tuneless musicals came to mind: The Phantom of the Opera. But that’s all I could think of. For a second. And then, of course: Les Misérables.

So I spend just about every show thinking, “I should really try out for this show.” I can and do even make the case. I work well under pressure and in front of a crowd. I would probably do a lot better on the show than I do at home.

But finally sense comes to me: “Are you fucking crazy?!” The truth is that I would almost certainly not win if I went on the show. That means I would get, at most, $2000 and a lifetime’s supply of Rice-A-Roni. But even if I did win, it would be something between $10,000 (the winner tonight won $9,201) and $25,000. Is that really acceptable compensation for all the money I would be making for Sony Pictures Television?

What’s more, is that enough money to compensate for the potential that I would humiliate myself? All my family, and my more foolish friends, think that I’m smart. At this point, it is about all I’ve got. Ten grand is not enough to destroy their (And my!) illusions on this matter.

[1] My friend Mark Neville used to live with his grandmother who had dementia. She really liked Jeopardy!. In order to occupy her in as painless a manner as possible, he recorded 6 hours of Jeopardy! and showed her the tape every day. She couldn’t remember the day before, so she was perfectly happy. Although I thought that Mark was brilliant, I also thought there was something very wrong with what he was doing. I still can’t say what.

A Late Valentine

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Haunt of Fear No. 12When I was a kid, I thought comics sucked. The only mainstream comic I ever read was Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. It was written and drawn by Jack Kirby. But it definitely wasn’t the art I liked. Kirby is a really important comic book artist. He more or less created Marvel Comics as we now know it. And his style was totally new: extreme perspective implying lots of motion. But it was Kirby the storyteller that I liked. (Stan Lee is overrated.)

What I liked about Kamandi is that it is a post-apocalyptic story about a kid on his own. The stories were interesting, unlike the stupid stories about Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. I’m just not into superheroes. But something like Kamandi, though rare, was interesting.

Then in 1971, East Coast Comix started publishing reprints of the EC Comics from the 1950s. They focused on the horror comics—Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear—but published other things like their western and war titles. I was in love!

To start, these comics were really well drawn by people like Jack Davis and Ghastly (Graham Ingels). Davis is (still alive at 87) just great, but Ghastly: he was, well, ghastly. When you read comics he drew, you try not to touch the pages for fear the ink will come off. No one could draw someone’s heart being ripped out of their chest like Ghastly!

What was most important about all the EC comics was how well they were written. Unlike superhero comics, you didn’t know how they were going to end. Sure, EC had its cliches. In particular, they loved revenge stories—especially in the horror titles. I remember one from Haunt of Fear No. 12 (This is probably not exactly right—I haven’t read it for 30 years!):

There is a nice old widower garbage man. During his work, he grabs broken toys and such. Then he repairs them and gives them to the local children, who understandably love him. Two evil real estate types (think: Mitt Romney) want his house for some development deal they are cooking up. But the old man refuses to sell. So the evil duo go about setting the town against him. They spread rumors that he is a terrible person and that he lives in filth. On valentines day, they get all the people to send him vicious cards. The old man disappears. Finally, the authorities break into his house and find that the old man has hanged himself, but they are surprised to see what a nice tidy place he has. A year goes by and the old (dead) man claws his way out of his coffin. He finds the younger of the evil men and kills him. He then sends the man’s heart to the other as a valentine.

Great right? At least for a ten-year-old.

Maybe the stories weren’t so great. There’s no doubt they were much better than all the other comics of the time. But I suspect they were great. William Gaines and Al Feldstein (still alive at 86) pulled stories from a lot of great sources. I first read H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde in the pages of EC Comics.

What’s more, EC Comics introduced me to a whole world of comic books that were more than the popular tripe of the day: from Bernie Wrightson[1] and Vaughn Bodē[2] at that time to so many talented artists today. Just the same, I wish comic books were not called “graphic novels” and that they weren’t sold in Barnes & Nobel.

Here is the story of EC Comics, a video made for the Horror Hall Of Fame awarding publisher William Gaines:

[1] Some of Bernie Wrightson’s work:

Bernie Wrightson

[2] Some of Vaughn Bodē’s work:

Vaughn Bodē Schizophrenia

$57,000 Per Day

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According to Think Progress, Mitt Romney’s wife Ann, told Fox News, “We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing, it can be here today and gone tomorrow.” The couple’s total income last year was $20.9 million dollars (they have a total wealth of about a quarter billion). This is over $57,000 per day. It’s a miracle they’re getting by.

Lucky and Stupid

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LuckyI’m sorry to be once again discussing Lucky’s speech. But I was reading Theatre in Spain, 1490 – 1700 (really good), and I came upon a sentence that talked about the sine qua non of the theater. It means literally “without which not” or more or less “an essential element.”

That means that “qua” means “which” or “as” or “the character of.” Aha!

Lucky’s speech starts:

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension…

Now it seems pretty obvious what Beckett meant here: a personal God which has the character of a white beard and the character of being outside the bounds of time.

My only question: if this is so obvious, why have I never read anyone discussing it, even as one possible explanation. It could be that it is just too obvious. Or it could be that academics don’t give the word much thought because they don’t have to. And actors don’t give it much thought because they aren’t pedants.

But I feel better now.

Fear and Loathing in Politics

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Dog Whistle PoliticsIn an article, 2012 or Never, in New York Magazine, the always interesting and often funny Jonathan Chait discusses the long-term (but not long off) trend away from Republican and toward Democratic dominance. This is not exactly breaking news. What’s more, there is a counter argument (which Chait discusses): political parties are not stagnant. But that’s good news. Over the last forty years, the Republican success has not been their own accomplishments; it is rather the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama: the most conservative, free market socialists to ever be elected president. We hope that this demographic change will cause the Republican Party to move to the left.

This will not necessarily happen, however. I do not think the our nation really became more conservative along with our government. Instead, the Republican Party has been really good at getting people who don’t agree with them about policy to vote for them anyway, by distracting them. It is What’s the Matter with Kansas, or, more to the point, political magic: vote about millions of dollars going to the poor while I take billions away from you to give to the rich! Nothing up my sleeve—or even in my conscience!

Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal makes the argument that the Republican hegemony over the last several decades have been due to racism—especially southern racism. But I don’t recall him quoting any studies (but he may have, I lost my copy of his book). Regardless, Chait lays it out very clearly:

But the dominant fact of the new Democratic majority is that it has begun to overturn the racial dynamics that have governed American politics for five decades. Whatever its abstract intellectual roots, conservatism has since at least the sixties drawn its political strength by appealing to heartland identity politics. In 1985, Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist, immersed himself in Macomb County, a blue-collar Detroit suburb where whites had abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. He found that the Reagan Democrats there understood politics almost entirely in racial terms, translating any Democratic appeal to economic justice as taking their money to subsidize the black underclass. And it didn’t end with the Reagan era. Piles of recent studies have found that voters often conflate “social” and “economic” issues. What social scientists delicately call “ethnocentrism” and “racial resentment” and “ingroup solidarity” are defining attributes of conservative voting behavior, and help organize a familiar if not necessarily rational coalition of ideological interests. Doctrines like neoconservative foreign policy, supply-side economics, and climate skepticism may bear little connection to each other at the level of abstract thought. But boiled down to political sound bites and served up to the voters, they blend into an indistinguishable stew of racial, religious, cultural, and nationalistic identity.

The future may indeed be bright. I am certain that this history is correct. But I fear that it will repeat in ways that only the hateful conservative movement can predict.

Totebagger

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I learned a new word today from Atrios: Totebagger. The word (actually “tote-bagger”) is defined by Urban Dictionary as, “A left-winger, an antonym of ‘teabagger,’ from the tote bags offered as premiums for donations to public TV and radio stations.” This definition is, as is typical of Urban Dictionary, useful but inaccurate. A related definition is for the word totebaggery, “Display of middlebrow mediocre taste that is supposed to be sophisticated, i.e., conspicuous consumption of Starbucks coffee or The New York Times.”

I find the two definition interesting because they show how conservatives (and other liberal haters) conflate political beliefs with lifestyle choices. Many books by the likes of Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly that purport to be arguments against liberal ideas are really just rants against the lifestyles of the upper-middle class.

I think a better definition would be:

Tote·bag·ger  noun  \ˈtōt-bag-gər\

A socially liberal and often economically conservative person who is typical of consumers of NPR, The New York Times, and The Economist Magazine.

Origin: 2005 or earlier. Contraction of “tote” and “bagger.” Refers to the tote bags offered by NPR and PBS for membership pledges. Often assumed to reference “teabagger” but the word is older.

“I admit I still get a bit surprised when I read/hear otherwise very smart very liberal people singing the greatest hits of David Brooks and the Totebaggers.” —Atrios

Death as Public Good

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Andrew Breitbart - RIPA lot of people are talking about Andrew Breitbart dying. In general, the script goes something like this: I disagreed with him, but he wasn’t who he appeared to be; the private man was different and I morn his death. The problem with this is that no one would be talking about Breitbart if it weren’t for his public image. I don’t know the private Andrew Breitbart. For all I know, he was a great guy. I can only talk about the public Andrew Breitbart, both because that’s all I know and because that’s the only person anyone reading this will care about. And that Andrew Breitbart was a lie propagating fear monger.

I can imagine what it is like for his family. The man was only 43! It must be shocking and painful for them. It must be a horrible blow to all of his personal acquaintances.

But for the world? Unfortunately, the institutions Breitbart created (Big Government and so on) will go on spreading lies and fear. I’m sure we will continue to suffer along with James O’Keefe for many years to come with the mainstream media ever willing to accept new stunts by this serial-liar. In that way, Breitbart lives on. And that’s bad. But I expect that these ventures of his will lose much of their gloss; they will have less influence. Also, Breitbart won’t be around to go on supposedly liberal news programs to justify his propaganda, as he did last year defending the Sherrod video on ABC News. For these reasons, we can be very glad that he is gone.

Andrew Breitbart didn’t have to die in order to stop having a pernicious effect on our culture. He could even have had a political awakening, like David Brock. But he did die. And I just don’t see the down side for our culture.

Update

Matt Yglesias tweeted: Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead.

Big Hollywood Dicks

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Samuel L. Jackson has been on the cover of Ebony Magazine many times. But last week’s cover really annoyed me. This isn’t so much because of this particular cover. It is how often I see men (and women to a lesser extent) on the covers of magazines chomping on a big fat cigar. If it were only that cigars are health nuisances for the smoker and the public, that would be one thing. (And enough of a thing.) But I can’t get past the whole phallic nature of it. “Look what a big dick I have!” they seem to be saying.

My response is, “Not have, are.” Can’t we limit the dicks to Cigar Aficionado Magazine?

<%image(20120301-ebony.jpg|450|581|24 February 2012 issue of Ebony Magazine)%>

Mitt Romney: No We Can’t!

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This is taken from The Daily Show. Romney said, “[Obama] raised the national debt; I will cut, cap, and balance the budget. He passed Obamacare; I will repeal Obamacare. He lost our triple-A credit rating; I will restore our triple-A credit rating.” Jon Stewart continued, “He killed Osama Bin Laden; I will reanimate him—bring him back to life. He married Michelle Obama; I will divorce Michelle Obama. He told you, ‘Yes we can’; I’m here to pledge to you, ‘No, no we can’t.'” Here is their idea of a Mitt Romney “Nope” poster:

Mitt Romney - Nope - No we can't