Lefty-Backbiting Brouhaha

You'd have to have been living under a rock the last 24 hours not to have caught the Lefty-Backbiting Brouhaha over at Tom Watson's place. An individual traveling under the monicker Pachacutec posted a screed at FireDogLake in which he said of Democratic Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, "She can slurp the gnarly nub of power with the very best, gamely grinning to the gushing finish: a working girl's working girl."

Tom called him on his misogyny:

But in a world where a hero like Mukhtar Mai of Pakistan overcomes court-ordered gang rape and a corrupt regime to help educate the children of her attackers, we kid ourselves that we're advanced enough, cool enough, hip enough, or evolved enough to throw around this low-brow gender-based garbage and think it won't stick - to us, to the left, to the Democrats, to our candidates, to our movement.

Tauscher is an evil, crabbed, nasty individual; no arguments here. In general, I ignore blogs of both the right and the left that wallow in rancorous denunciation of whoever's happened to piss them off in the last ten minutes, and I believe the health and well-being of my liver is the better for it.

In Tom's comments, however (fascinating reading, BTW), Pachacutec managed to piss me off but good:

Face it. We [at FireDogLake] do punk rock posts and you're into Guy Lombardo.

OK. Passion of the moment, blah blah. Anybody can look stupid when angry. Happens all the time.

I'm not particularly offended by the blatant misogyny employed to characterize Tauscher. I see worse fifteen times a day on Comedy Central. I think Tom's comment thread contains a lot of rote lifting of skirts and automated feminist scolding. If you're offended by the word "cunt" as a term of opprobrium, you'd probably better stay out of Britain, where it's extremely common currency among both sexes. As I've observed before, the blogosphere is a tiny, tiny, tiny little cross-section of the American voting public, and what some idiot hothead said on FireDogLake in November of 2006 has zippy chance of becoming an issue in some future election.

No, what pisses me off about Pachacutec's awful, hateful screed is the fact that he went for the cheap laugh by calling his object-of-the-moment a whore. And then turned around and called it "punk."

Pach', kid: Punk happened. Note tense. This weekend I loitered in Claire's Boutique at Tysons Corner Mall while young Betty rooted around for some bauble or another. I was not particularly surprised to find, in among the Hillary Duff-branded bracelets and the Aly and AJ-branded earring collections, a stand dedicated to Green Day-branded necklaces and wristbands for the delectation of teenybopper girls. These treasures came complete with adorable photos of the eyeshadowed lads looking all disaffected and pissed-off, their American Idiot hand-grenades featured prominently on the cheapjack teenaged gauds.

Punk is deader than goddamned Vaudeville. Fuckin' get used to it.

The notion that you can shock, vilify, curse, and gob the bourgeois into recognition of their fundamental uselessness has played, kid. We're shocked, vilified, cursed and gobbed every fucking day by the slime oozing out of our TV sets. We're numb. We've been épaté'd so many times by so many lazy goddamned "revolutionaries" that the sight of some self-appointed artist's hairy moon shining out over the waistband of his dropped pleather pants provokes precisely nothing. We've seen the act, chum. It's easy. It's cheap. It's the laziest, crappiest, most slothful kind of self-indulgence a person can grant himself.

You wanna know how to be a fucking revolutionary, Pachacutec?

How about this: The most revolutionary act you can perform in this fell, death-infected year 2006 is to act like a goddamned adult.

Isn't that just blisteringly clear? Could that be any more self-evident? They act like children, Pach' -- all those bulletheaded, leather-lunged, lantern-jawed jocko-homos down at Little Green Footballs -- if you play their game, you are no better than them. If you, through intellectual laziness and sloppy thinking, go for the cheap laugh at a perceived enemy's expense, you are no better than them. Misogyny's got nowt to do with it -- it's just goddamned lazy to call your opponent a whore and expect to get laffs-n-applause for it.

To continue your metaphor, Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians played in tune, with precision, and were ashamed -- as adults, professionals, are ashamed -- when a note was clammed, a cue missed, a beat dropped. I once gloried in punk's shambolic sloppiness; but it's become the accepted norm. Now it's just fucking lazy, Bad Musicianship.

We -- that's you and I, Pach' -- we can do better than that.

And Where Is Our Nedward Tonight?

Starting at about 9:30 EST, I'll be over at Lance Mannion's place, live-blogging tonight's broadcast of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Come on by, razz the clueless goober! All the cool kids are doing it!

Jazz Aristocracy

The historic Summit Meeting of the Jingo/Lightfoot Clans now over, we slowly reacclimate to Life Not on the Road. The dogs happily resettle into their daily routine (sleep, eat, bark, repeat) and the humans prepare for the hideous Christmas season.

I call to your attention the fact that the photographs of the Soulfinger gig I'd earlier promised, fail to actually appear in this post. Funny story about that....

Thanksgiving Day at the Lightfoot household was only slightly marred by the fact that Bobby (who now, it appears, has had his personality entirely subsumed by that of a rather cranky Indian Doctor of Rock named Anoush Devendra -- as haven't we all at some point or another) was due to play a gig with Soulfinger that night in Hartford. It being the sanctified holiday season, however, roughly half of Soulfinger had begged off the gig, leaving, I was informed, a skeleton lineup of drums, bass, keyboards and...trombone. Yes, the main melodic duties of the evening were to be performed by that King of the Comical Musical Instruments, the 'Bone. The wielder of this instrument, though, was somebody pretty special in Bobby's eyes; he'd given him the Lightfoot nom-de-blog Jazz Aristocracy.

I inadvertently eavesdropped on a phone call from Soulfinger's booking agent & bass flogger, Ace McClintock, to Bobby in the early afternoon: "M-hm. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No I haven't asked him yet. I will now." Bobby put the phone to his chest. To me, he said, "Dude, you want to sit in?"

Gulp.

New England's finest Motown/Stax bar-band. Wants me. To sit in. On guitar.

I spent a good two hours that afternoon boning up on the band's setlist on Bobby's groovy Yamaha axe -- "Knock on Wood," "What's Going On," "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," "Superstition," "Who's Making Love." My nervousness drifted away as I came to the realization that these chestnuts ain't exactly Yngwie Malmsteen territory for a guitarist; as long as I had the home key and some idea of the structure, I'd be able to fake it convincingly. The scariest item on the setlist was "Brown Sugar," the only number to feature the guitar out front. I reached waaay back into deep storage for that one, finally finding it. I was ready.

Even Lori Lightfoot and Wonder Woman were prepared to abandon hearth & home to catch the spectacle of Soulfinger Featuring Neddie Jingo -- they tucked the teenieboppers into their Playstation comas and followed the lads to the gig in their own car.

But, wouldn't you know it, just as Bobby and I were hitting the outskirts of Hartford, his cellie rang. It's Ace McClintock. Terrible news: The gig's off. Whether the cancellation had anything to do with the previous night's shenanigans -- Ace, a great dévoté of the Grape and the Grain -- had fallen out the door of the club during a set and had completed "What'd I Say" from the alley -- or the extremely light turnout this Thanksgiving night, was immaterial. The only thing that counted was that my Date with Destiny was to remain a chimera.

We still pressed on to the club, though -- Bobby had to retrieve his Rhodes and help load out. As we entered, shaking the pissing-down rain from our sou'-westers, Ace greeted us and pressed frothy beverages into our shaking hands. As Bobby got to work, I took a seat at the bar next to a rather unprepossessing figure, already fairly festive from the Jägermeisters he'd been pounding down. This personage, Bobby informed me while coiling patch cords, was Jazz Aristocracy.

We made small talk, did Jazz A. and I, touching on this point and that. Early in the proceedings, I got my first taste of how Mr. Aristocracy had earned his name; he casually let it drop that he'd once been a member of one of the later Chet Baker Nonets.

"Say the who, what -- di-did you just say Chet Baker?"

"Yeah." This with a world-weary sigh. "See, I'd just come off the road with Maynard Ferguson, Chet was looking for a trombonist, and --"

Holy creeping shit! Jazz Aristocracy! I'm sitting here in this shitty little Connecticut bar with Jazz Aristocracy! I almost sat in with Jazz Aristocracy! My cobwebby little guitar riffs and stone-cliché fills, desperately worked out that afternoon, might actually have shared a sonic space with a cat who's played with Billy Eckstine, Mel Tormé, and Dizzy Motherfucking Gillespie!

Jeeeeeeezis!

We stepped outside so Jazz A. could have a smoke under the club's awning, out of the bucketing rain. The thought's been on my mind, Jazz was, as I say, on the outside of more than a few Jägermeisters, so I thought I might as well bring it up.

"I've been having an email conversation with a guy in Australia on the topic of Musical Archetypes, you know? Like the chord progression i-VII-VI-V, is amazingly often associated with cats--"

I didn't have a tape recorder, so I can't reproduce it perfectly, but here's Jazz Aristocracy's answer as best I can do it:

"Musical archetypes? Archetypes? Yeah, I know what you're talking about. It's the Golden Mean, man. Two over three, man, that's the archetype right there, Jack. The clave in Brazilian music. Voom-tick-n-tick-tick, voom tick-n-tick, that's the archetype right there, man, that's all you need to know, the Golden Mean, the 1:1.618 ratio that comes to us all the way from the Renaissance to today, man, it never changes, it just assumes different forms, dig? From the nautilus shell to the Parthenon to the time signatures in 'Well, You Needn't,' it's always the same ratio, man, it's always that same Golden Mean, the distance from your eye to your chin and from your chin to your bellybutton, it's always that Golden Mean, and that's all the archetype you need right there, all you need, yes, sir...."

Jesus. Yo, Soulfinger. You need a guitarist -- however easily impressed with tall talk from Jazz Aristocracy -- you call me, OK? I can drop whatever I'm doing to sit in, dig? That is, if it means I can sit at Jazz Aristocracy's feet and soak in his grade-A, high-test, primo bullshit. Bullshit for the ages, man. Bullshit from a pro.

You want to know a little more about Jazz Aristocracy, I found this. That's the guy, man. That's the guy.

The Nectarine of My Fourth Vertebra

Things may get a little quiet in the Jingosphere over the Thanksgiving weekend, as we pack up kits, cats, sacks and wives to visit Bobby Lightfoot in St. Ives.

(Actually, there's only one wife, and she's the apple of my eye, the Asian pear of my pancreas, the grapefruit of my left knee, the mangosteen of my uvula, the kiwi of my peritonium, the carambola of my latissimus dorsi, the chewy caramel center of the Godiva bon-bon that is my life.)

I'm reliably informed that I'll be witnessing a Soulfinger Gig on Thanksgiving night -- the middle-aged punters don't stop bein' on-the-make for nuthin' -- and I'll be sure to bring my camera to record the humiliation.

Happy Holiday Hint: Don't anthropomorphize the turkey in front of vegetarians!

Civic Education: A Dialogue

(Crossposted at The American Street)

We owe ourselves, and the United States that we will pass off to our children, to relearn the tools of reason, logic, clarity, dissent, civility, and debate. And those things are the nonpartisan basis of democracy, and without them, you can kiss this thing goodbye. [Applause]...

What happens now, in this partisan-addicted country of ours is, that Democrats are afraid that if they send their kids to civics classes they might not come back Democrats, and Republicans are afraid they might not come back Republicans, but civics -- the expertise needed to understand Western Enlightenment and civil liberties -- is not something you're born with, you have to learn it. And we teach our kids what we want them to know, and we don't teach them what we don't want them to know, and that's not a conspiracy, that's human nature. And you have to -- we have to -- remember that unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle in government -- a miracle that everyone knows is a miracle -- unless we teach what that means, then it will go away in your kids' lifetime, then we will be a fable. We will be a tale told about this place that used to stand up for blah-blah-blah. You have to teach it, you have to find the time and creativity to teach it in school. If you don't, you will lose it to fundamentalists of any stripe, you will lose it to stupidity, you will lose it to the darkness.

And what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty, and if it lasts for more than our lifetime or our kids' lifetime, it is only due to the fact that we put some effort into teaching what it is is, the ideas of America, the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly -- and if you don't teach it. it'll go away. And in the middle of the night, when the towers fall, we will not say, "What am I responsible for?"; we will say, "Tell us what to do!"

And remember, democracy in any form is only two or three hundred years old.... The idea of being personally responsible for your government is a twinkle...and we have to support it or we will else instinctively react as we have for ten thousand years -- "Tell us what to do!" -- and we will chuck these liberties the moment the next terrorist horror happens.

-- Actor Richard Dreyfus, now a senior research advisor at Oxford, on Real Time with Bill Maher, Nov. 17, 2006 (YouTube link.)

---

At a rally to expose the "myth" of church-state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America's God and Country -- a collection of apparently theocratic bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men "for use in speeches, papers [and] debates" -- has sold half a million copies. "Those who control the past," Federer said, quoting Orwell's 1984, "control the future." History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny....

Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase "wall of separation," three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer...wanted me to understand that what Jefferson -- notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom -- had really meant to promote was a "one-way wall," designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn't I been taught this? Because I was a victim of the godless public schools.

"Those who control the present," Federer continued his quote from 1984, "control the past." He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. "Orson Welles wrote that," he said.

-- Jeff Sharlet, in "Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is reimagining U.S. history," in Harper's, December 2006.

Grammar-Boy Redux

Would it be horrendously pedantic of me to point out that the title "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened" is grammatically solecistic, and that "If I Had Done It, Here's How It Might Have Happened" is perhaps a less problematic construction?

Oh. OK. I'll shut up, then.

A Band is Blowing Dixie Double Four Time

Damn it!

This evening, as I hopped out of the truck and ankled toward the house after a long day at the salt mines, the most perfect name for a consultancy company ever just popped into my head:

The Consultants of Swing.

I was ready to lunge for the Trademark and Patent Office website, to dope out how I could register this surefire moneymaker.

Turns out I'm not the first to think of it.

Damn it!

Gimme Some Truth

Crystal City, Virginia, is an awful place. It mushroomed into being in the early Sixties, an oppressive glass-and-concrete wart just to the south of the Pentagon, which is its reason for existence. Its main street is a six-lane highway, uncrossable by foot without grave personal danger, and no businesses or restaurants line the main road -- only chain hotels housing innumerable iron-jawed defense-contractor reps with Trent Lott hair and huge wire-rimmed glasses, in from out of town to finagle this or that bloated DOD deal on behalf of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumann, whose logos decorate every office building. While sidewalks do exist, the residents of Crystal City are encouraged to scurry from point to point by means of a ratlike maze of underground tunnels, dank expanses relieved of fluorescent dimness only by the rare skylight and the depressing neon glow emanating from McDonalds and Subway franchises.

It would take a reward of rare value to get me to darken Crystal City's plate-glass doors, and only the availability of such a bauble explains my presence yesterday in the Conference Room of the Crystal City Marriott. Once a decade or so, I am able to wangle a paid day off -- oh, so professionally developmental, don't you know -- to catch the exquisite balance of corn and roughage served up by the magisterial Edward Tufte.

Tufte's self-published books on information design are stunningly beautiful things that are, now that I've revisited them, curiously difficult to actually read. Tufte himself projects a combination of humaneness with more than a touch of rather delicious arrogance that makes me quite grateful I'm not actually one of his students. Having spent quite some time in the info-design business myself, I found plenty to quibble with in his talk, particularly in the realm of Web design -- quite a few times I found myself resorting to the old refrain: Yeah, pal. Easy for you to say! Ivory-tower design gurus all too often betray a coldness to the predicament of the Working Stiff -- cranky clients, malfunctioning tools, comically inadequate budgets, tragically foreshortened schedules.

But his themes are indisputable and admirable. Summing up his section on the Principles of Analytic Design, he says this:

The purpose of an evidence presentation is to assist thinking. Thus presentations should be constructed so as to assist with the fundamental intellectual tasks in reasoning about evidence: describing the data, making multivariate comparisons, understanding causality, integrating a diversity of evidence, and documenting the analysis. Thus the Grand Principle of analytical design: The principles of analytic design are derived from the principles of analytical thinking.

Tufte's illustration of the masterful information-design skills of Galileo is nothing short of breathtaking: by simple and direct presentation of his astronomical observations in his texts and notebooks (that is to say, by applying Tufte's Grand Principle), Galileo gave life to the profoundly important notion that the evidence of our senses -- and the careful and unambiguous transmission of that evidence -- trumps received wisdom. Cat invented science, didn't he. It's a sad illustration of human idiocy that it took somebody until 1612 to come up with that simple idea -- and that he was put in a cage for doing it.

Tufte is particularly scathing when information-design is used to mislead, to prevaricate, to lie. I've already said my piece on PowerPoint presentations (I'm agin 'em), and much of my objection to that sack-of-shit software predates -- but is in complete agreement with -- Tufte's own essay on the topic, which is magnificent in its spleen. In his talk yesterday, he made the fairly self-evident yet tragically disregarded point that "pitching out corrupts within":

If a corporation distorts evidence presented to consumers, stockholders, and journalists, then it may soon lie to itself. Or, similarly, the chronic problem of government intelligence agencies: once the collection and selection of evidence starts to become fixed around a pre-determined policy line, intelligence agencies may become perpetually unintelligent, confused about the differences between detective work and marketing.

During the lunchtime break, Tufte signed books for queued-up punters while munching on what looked like small squares of pressboard and a bag of nuts. I lined up for an audience, but instead of Beautiful Evidence, Tufte's latest, I held my copy of Thomas Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Regular readers may remember I had a few things to say about a PowerPoint graphic reproduced in its pages a few months ago. I wanted to get Tufte's comments on it, and maybe snag an amusing autograph. When my turn came, I held up the book and said, "I can't imagine no one's ever brought this book to your attention."

To my surprise, he looked a little puzzled, only half-understanding. I opened the book and showed him the PP graphic in the photo section. "Ah!" he said, "I've heard of this one, but I've never actually seen it!"

Wow. OK. I let him absorb it for a bit, and he quickly began to understand the full horror of it. I said, "It's not actually competely incomprehensible; it's a timeline, chaos on the left, order on the right and these arrows, see, they're pushing--"

He chortled. "Hah! Nothing like a little 'aimed pressure to achieve your end-state over time,' is there!"

"Ain't that great?"

"Great?" he sad a little sadly. Then his voice went very hard indeed. "They've only killed a couple of hundred thousand people."

He did autograph the page. I'm amused now at his refusal to include any commentary on the graphic in his autograph (people were, after all, waiting for their own audiences with the Great Man). It looks like he signed it, as one would a painting:

Laughing to myself over the exchange, my newly-more-valuable book back in my bag, I tottered out of the auditorium to try to find something worth eating in the rat-tunnels of Crystal City.

(Later edit: Here's an out-fucking-standing post, from somebody who appears to know what the hell he's talking about, describing just how deadly is that PPT graphic reproduced above.)

Natch!

As I am one of natuar's proofreaders, this sign snagged my eye as I whizzed past it on my way home from work this afternoon. My fellow motorists were treated to the comical sight of me hippity-hopping down the side of Hirst Road in Purcellville, camera in one hand, cane in the other, dodging giant Ford F-250s to capture this lovely wild typo in its natuaral setting. There was a flap about typos being an endangered species a few years ago -- what with spell-checkers and all -- so it's good to be able to catch one in natuar before they all dye out.

Now natuarlists -- they're the naked people, aren't they? With the butt-towels and the sun-cream and the volleyball? I do hope they manage to put some clothes on while picking up trash on the highway they've adopted. All I'm saying. Kids use these roads.

I can understand a modicum of chapped-assedness among the Loudoun Valley Natuarlist Society at the woeful proofreading down at the state pen where these signs are whipped up by our brethren the Incarcerated-Americans. But that's not a patch on the irritation stirred up by the sign down on Route 28, which has apparently been proudly adopted by the Ted Nugent Untied Sportsmen of America. How many shotgun blasts can one poor road-sign take? Not many -- and that's a natuaral fact.

"She's Leading the Team in the Northeast"

This guy shows no signs of actually being falling-down, weeping drunk. Which pretty much removes his only excuse.

Through All These Years I Burned For You

With trepidation I clear my voice (wobbly and tending to flatness an it may be) and unveil my entry in the great "Cover a Bobby Lightfoot Song Contest" of 2006. In a magnanimous gesture of farewell, I dedicate it to the outgoing United States Congressional Class of 2006. The lyrics are pretty fuckin' apt, thought of that way. Were I some kind of HTML boffin I'd scroll the names on the screen, each miserable, hellbound name fading tastefully into the background as the song plays: Santorum... Talent... Burns... Fuckin' Macaca...

This Goodbye. (Pops.)

To say I was knocked out by Bobby's song when I first heard it last year is to understate the case a bit. His original is utterly gorgeous, detailed, chewy -- an intimidating thing to approach as a musician with an eye to covering it. But it wasn't until I prepared to record it, tweezing it apart note by note, that the full mastery of Bobby's songcraft became apparent.

The first thing that struck me was how Bobby uses major/minor tension to heighten the effect of his lyrics. The first few lines, the lyrics self-reflective and inwardly directed, are sung over a fairly standard chord progression (E/C#minor/G#minor), but when the lyrics begin to introduce a note of anger at the subject of the song ("Through all these years I burned for you...") he introduces an A minor -- a chord not in the home key -- exquisitely underlining the word "years." Through the song, he uses the tension between A minor and A major to surprise us, keep us on our toes. Building surprise by introducing the minor voicing of a IV chord that "should" be major is a McCartneyism borrowed from jazz; "Blackbird," for one example, employs this trick to great effect.

But there's a second, even more subtle major/minor tension going on in this tune. In the line following the one quoted above -- "You see I've burned myself right out" -- the chords are E major/F#7/A major. Now the A is "correct" -- that is, in keeping with the home key -- but the F# isn't. And oh, hey! Check out the word that's being sung on that "incorrect" chord: myself. Once again, an example of the perfect marriage of unexpected tonality and lyric: You burned yourself out? Really? Are you quite sure someone else isn't actually responsible?

I also fell really hard for the lovely syncopation of the "And all these years" line -- to the extent that I included it during the guitar passage, where Bobby left it out of his version.

As you listen to the song, you'll see that the word "goodbye" ends each of the three verses. But it's sung to different intervals each time. In the first verse, it's a quietly resigned descending major second. The second time it's sung, it's a descending minor second to accommodate the B tonality of that beautiful and disturbing and, I think, quite frightening bridge, which hints at suicide ("And ain't there just a million stars..."). It's in that bridge that we really learn what the song's about: towering rage directed inward that we, the audience, can clearly see should be targeted outward toward a capricious lover. You'd never think such cognitive dissonance could occur to the serene and Earth-touching bodhisattva who writes at Bobby's blog.

Rage directed inward that should be targeted outward: Isn't that a perfect expression of Life Under Bush?

It's the interval given to the the last "goodbye" -- an ascending perfect fourth -- that resolves the whole song. In my current mood, it's an immensely satisfying resolution, a transcendent, orgasmic kissoff to those crooked, bile-rising bastards who have made every morning's approach to the newspaper such a frightening event: Good-byyyyyyye!

Because I can't play keyboards to save my life, I've simplified and, I hope, pared down Bobby's arrangement. Where his piano is all subtle colors and delicacy, my fingerpicked guitar has, I hope, a Lennonistic directness. I also closed my eyes and blindly lurched in the direction of George Harrison in the lead guitar bits, and to my quiet, surprised pride, think I may have actually hit the mark in spots. The twin Harrisonian slides that come up during the fade particularly please me; I'd intended them for the guitar passage following the bridge but they were a bit unprepossessing in a lead setting. Moving them to the fade gave me a pleasant surprise.

One last thing: I've listened to both Bobby's original and my pallid copy of this song about 600,000,000 times now, and it's only just now occurred to me what inspired the genesis of the song! "But it's hard to say/The words get in the way"... Where have I heard that before...?

I would have made this instrumental
But the words got in the way

Rock on, Bobby. Rock on forever.

-----

PS: Speaking of surprises, I know it'll come as a major shock to all of you, but Bobby Lightfoot actually did survive the Bush 43 Administration and lived a full and happy life to the end of his days. Here's the proof. Lori Lightfoot took a new name when she converted to Zoroastrianism, but that's her in the pic, all right. What a hottie.

The Senate Is Ours

It's over.

The Associated Press has projected Jim Webb as the winner of the Virginia Senate race:

The Associated Press contacted election officials in all 134 [Virginia] localities where voting occurred, obtaining updated numbers Wednesday. About half the localities said they had completed their postelection canvassing and nearly all had counted outstanding absentees. Most were expected to be finished by Friday.

The new AP count showed Webb with 1,172,538 votes and Allen with 1,165,302, a difference of 7,236. Virginia has had two statewide vote recounts in modern history, but both resulted in vote changes of no more than a few hundred votes.

An adviser to Allen, speaking on condition of anonymity because his boss had not formally decided to end the campaign, said the senator wanted to wait until most of canvassing was completed before announcing his decision, possibly as early as Thursday evening.

The adviser said that Allen was disinclined to request a recount if the final vote spread was similar to that of election night.

MACACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

(Afterthought: If Webb pops up and says he has a Nude Erection for America, I might just take him up on it.)

More of It!

On NPR this evening, DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel was asked what he thought of the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. His reply: "I think the message of the election is clear: the American people want a nude erection..."

Dammit, that was not the message of the election! The message was Iraq, it was corruption, it was subpoena power! It was not about some naked San Franciscan running around with a boner! That's not what we voted for! I mean, it might actually be possible that quite a few American voters actually would regard a disrobed stiffie with a kindly eye -- either behind or in front of it, if you follow me -- but I must insist that our leadership's insistence that American voters expressed a desire for bareback beef bayonet on Election Day does not play well with Values Voters! Stop flogging it!

Stop it, Dems! You're blowing it!

The Allen-Webb Recount

Larry Framme, former chair of the Virginia Democratic Party, sent an e-mail to Couric & Co. this morning, which is posted here. He says,

I ran both the 1989 statewide recount for Doug Wilder and the 2005 recount for Creigh Deeds. It's nice to be on the sidelines for the first time in state-wide recount history. The Wilder and Deeds recounts were about as many as I wanted to run in a lifetime!

There is a big lesson for us this year from those recounts:

The Certified Winner will not lose a recount unless the certified results differ by 50 votes or less. Whichever candidate wants to change the election night result MUST do it in the next few days during the canvas process.

Here is why:

1. The Wilder recount changed about 20 votes net from the CERTIFIED results. The Deeds recount changed about the same number from the CERTIFIED results. Since the certified results are based on the results of the canvases that will be conducted over the next few days, history tells us that there is virtually no chance the RECOUNT will make up a 100 vote difference in the certified results, much less nearly 8,000.

He concludes,

In short, Allen might as well forget about winning a recount and putting VA and the nation through weeks of waiting (remember, under the statutory timetable, a recount cannot realistically be completed until the week before Christmas). However, Allen and Webb better have a lot of lawyers on the ground over the next three days to observe the canvases. The canvases are the ONLY place this election can change.

It's pretty encouraging, although I'm witholding my own optimism until the moment Macaca officially concedes.

Read the whole thing.

(Edit: Richmond Times-Dispatch sez Allen may not even ask for a recount but is waiting to see what the certified (or CERTIFIED, in Framme's style) totals are. Via Blah3 and Skippy, who surmise that Allen's goons might not want the FBI asking too many uncomfortable questions about Robo-Calls, which they're already on the ground investigating. Me, I'm taking that speculation with a grain of salt.)

A Nice Little Bit of All Right

A sweet day. A sweet, sweet day. First a Nude Erection, and now Rummy's bitten it. CNN's called Montana for Tester, Webb's up by 6,708 votes. Fifty Senate seats guaranteed, fifty-one tantalizingly close.

A sweet, sweet day, years in the waiting.

Check this out: Not so fuckin' red now, is it?

I note that The Almighty hath favored Michele Bachman in Minnesota's Sixth, so we'll still have her around to lampoon mercilessly. That'll be fun.

The Insidious Agenda of the Angry Left

I didn't last much past midnight last night watching the election returns, so I had some catching up to do this morning. Bouncing down the driveway in my truck, I switched on NPR just in time to catch Nancy Pelosi's haymaker to the chin -- in one brief sentence confirming everything the lantern-jawed Defenders of Freedom at Little Green Footballs have been howling about San Francisco Liberals:

"The campaign is over. Democrats are ready to lead. Mr. President, we need a nude erection in Iraq. Let us work together to find a solution."

Say what? A nude erection? Oh my whistling Jesus -- what have I voted for?

I just don't think that's a good idea! You retake the House and maybe even the Senate, and you start pushing your pornographic gay agenda the very next day?

Let some time elapse, Madame Speaker-Presumptive!

But it didn't end there! Not a few minutes later, I heard Sen-Elect Bob Casey declaring victory over Rick "That Frothy Mix" Santorum, and he did it again!:

"Tonight, I believe in my heart that Pennsylvania is where the nude erection for America is beginning..."

As I say, this was radio, so I can only imagine the visual that must have accompanied this mortifying declaration.

Guys, this is not cool! Yeah, maybe a raging ten-foot hogan is just what America needs, but you've gotta soft-peddle that kinda talk at least until you're sworn in!

And quit being so smug! You won an off-year erection! That's not so hard!

-----

Turning to humor perpetrated by actual competent professionals, I took Wondie and Freddie to see the Borat movie last night. I thought I was going to cough up a vertebra -- this movie is absolutely fuckin' relentlessly funny. Mercilessly funny. Oh Em Eff Gee it's funny. I'm not going to publish any spoilers, but there's a scene involving a fight in a hotel room that spills out into a Realtors Convention that I quite seriously thought I wasn't going to survive. Noises were coming out of me that should have alerted the medical authorities to come running with a defibrillator.

That said, I have to confess I was a little uncomfortable having brought the boy along. Yes, he's thirteen going on twenty-two, a young man of the world and nobody's idea of innocent, but it's just a little off-putting to be howling at sex-toy humor with your son at your elbow. Even if the joke's at the expense of Alan Keyes.

Go WEBB!

WOOO!!!! Come on Jim Webb!

Been watching all night... Just saw on CNN, with 99% of precincts reporting, Webb ahead by about 2000 votes! After being behind by 7000 for hours! The precincts yet unreported are urban, suburbs around Richmond...

Come on, motherfucker!!!!!

Bloggenschmerz

Regular visitors to these pages may have noticed a weeklong hiatus in posting. (Or hell, you may not have noticed. Well, it happened.)

I have to confess that it has not been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and a series of blows to the head and thorax have left me in a state of bloggenschmerz that I now feel lifting.

Wonder Woman, whom I hereby nominate for beatification and, in the fullness of time, promotion to full-on sainthood, is helping to care for her father, who finds himself in the late stages of Alzheimer's. Last week we had a scare -- he appeared to be showing symptoms of pneumonia, and was remanded to the hospital. He underwent gall-bladder surgery, which the doctors warned could very easily have carried him off in his weakened state. I'm happy to report that the old bull came through it with flying colors, and, after some postoperative lethargy, seems to be improving nicely -- as much as someone with that horrifying condition can be said to improve.

One of the many lessons I've learned while watching my father-in-law slowly disappear over the last few years is simply this: write everything down.

That's not meant to be funny. It's serious advice. Write everything down. Leave words behind. Preferably a whole lot of words. Leave a record of what you thought, what you did, why you did it. People who love you will be glad you did.

Hence, this blog. Come to think of it.

Next, Wondie woke up late last week with a deer-tick nibbling away at the (admittedly delicious) skin of her tum-tum. Then, this weekend, she came down with flulike symptoms. As of this writing she's at the doctor's demanding the meds to help her fight off Lyme disease.

The question does occur: when was it, exactly, when we humans started to allow our hunting-companions to share our beds? I seem to remember that in simpler times we kept the dogs in separate quarters where their vermin could not transfer to our wives' yummy tummy-flesh. I'm not sure it was a wise decision to let them in the house, with their shedding fur and their sloppy eating habits and their throwing up disgusting things on the good living-room rugs and hogging the warm spot on the bed.

-----

I truly haven't been able to face the blogosphere this week, so I don't know how much currency was gained by this story I read in Saturday's Washington Post:

N.Va. Boys' Championship Dream Doomed by a Moment of Vengeance

By Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 4, 2006; Page A01

The South County Raptors, a scrappy football team made up of 12- to 14-year-old boys from southern Fairfax County, were supposed to meet the Herndon Hornets today in the first round of the county playoffs.

Instead, the Raptors are at home, their season over with no possibility of a championship after a league commissioner fired the head coach and the assistant coach this week. Their offense? They moved the commissioner's son from defense to offense for the final game of the season last Saturday, an overtime win that put the Raptors in the postseason.

"Scott does not sit out on defense -- ever," the commissioner, Dan Hinkle, had warned the head coach, James Owens, in an e-mail sent before the season began about how he should play Hinkle's son, 12. On defense, the father said, "he goes in and stays in. That includes all practices, scrimmages and games. This entire league exists so he can play defense on the best team in his weight class. . . . He is my son, I own the league, and he plays every snap on defense."

I have bad memories of my Pee-Wee Football days, when our head coach gave the quarterbacking position to his beloved little blossom, and treated the rest of us proletarians like handservants to his spoiled-rotten Little Field General. I'll let you folks discuss the philosophico-ethical ramifications of Mr. Hinkle's inspiring example of fatherhood. It's what Comment threads are for. Me, I've got some tires to slash.

-----

Oh -- and in case I don't get to say it before tomorrow: You Virginians, do take a minute out of your busy day tomorrow and pop down to your local polling station and pull the lever for Fightin' Jimmy Webb, won't you? Do it two, three times. Feels good. All the cool kids are doing it.

A Goose for the Gander

(Cross-posted at The American Street)

Some twenty-odd years ago, I received a phone call at my desk at Simon & Schuster from an erstwhile colleague. Now a freelance editor, he was trying to palm off a fractious client on me as a moonlighting job. He'd grown frustrated with the client, a retired Russian general who'd fought with distinction at the Siege of Stalingrad and who now wanted to sell his memoirs of that epoch-making battle. My editor friend told the general that his memoir, while undoubtedly a record of heroic resistance to the Nazi invasion of his homeland, lacked the one ingredient guaranteed to make American publishers sit up and whinny: There was not a single sex scene in the whole book. The good general absolutely refused to embellish his otherwise admirable memoir with made-up nonsense about a weekend of unbridled passion at a Black Sea dacha with a toothsome Party apparatchik while the German mortars fell.

My friend did a pretty good impression of the general's outraged objection: "Pippil vere not fuckingk at Stalingrad!"

The unspoken thought went both ways down the phone line: Oh, yes they were, if you're planning to sell any books about it...

I popped into the Purcellville, Virginia, library this morning on the off chance that any of Jim Webb's novels -- now a cause celebre in the Webb-Allen election owing to Allen's hilariously outraged trumpeting that the books contain -- gasp! -- sex scenes! -- were on hand.

Perhaps predictably, there yawned a four-book-wide gap between Weaver and Webster on the fiction shelves. I thought to ask a librarian how long ago the books had been checked out, but realized that a good librarian might take umbrage at the question -- people's library activities being the sort of thing they're touchy about revealing. I can't help but think, though, that prurient interest in Webb's novels might have been piqued pretty recently.

I realize Allen's pretty desperate if he's reached the point of trying to shock Virginia voters with the intelligence that his opponent's novels have sex in them, but I can't help remembering this passage from a "Talk of the Town" piece by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker a year ago, about Scooter Libby's squishy attempts at writing right-wing stroke-books:

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire (“[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted ‘Arragghrrorwr!’ in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him”) to Buckley (“I’d rather do this with you than play cards”) to Liddy (“T’sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .”) to Ehrlichman (“ ‘It felt like a little tongue’ ”) to O’Reilly (“Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants”), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney’s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.

I'm shocked! Shocked!

God Wants Me to Run for Congress

The ineffable Michele Bachmann, a Republican running for the open seat in the U.S. Congress from Minnesota's Sixth District, has prompted a thought, and I wonder if anyone in the woodwork can help me figure it out.

Bachmann had this to say to a Minnesota church congregation recently, speaking about her spiritual development:

And in the midst of that calling, God then called on me to run for the United States Congress. And I thought, "What in the world would that be for?" And my husband said, "You need to do this," and I wasn't so sure. And we took three days, and we fasted, and we prayed, and we said, "Lord, is this what you want? Is this your will?" And along about the afternoon of Day Two, he made that calling sure. And it's been now twenty-two months that I've been running for the United States Congress...

(You can watch the video at YouTube -- but be warned: it's pretty excruciating.)

Now, you can say all you like about the Sin of Pride oozing out of the foregoing. My own secular upbringing may have left me bereft of God's Love and irrevocably doomed to the Lake of Fire, but I do recall from what little religious schooling I received that to claim to know God's will is frowned upon in the politer circles. Be all that as it may, what interests me -- and what I'm hoping to get a little enlightenment on -- is the mechanism by which these citizens are informed of the Almighty's divine will.

That is to say, exactly what form did Old Nobodaddy's bidding take? How was it clarified to Michele that, for example, the Sixth District -- and no other -- was the seat for which she should throw her hat in the ring? From her testimony above, the divine commission came as a complete surprise: Sorry, what? You want me to do what now, Lord?

Now, as far as my poor atheist brain can figure, there are only two possible ways that information of such specificity can be transmitted. First, an unexpected apparition, perhaps accompanied with some pyrotechnics (one's tempted to imagine a flaming rhododendron) but one in which the exchange is largely verbal:



Really, Lord? Is that Thy divine will?



Forgive my denseness, O Lord -- I am but a poor, humble sinner. The United States Congress is a mighty big organization... Wherein shall I fit?



The only other possibility that I can encompass involves some sort of divine affirmation that a decision taken after some consideration is the right one. In other words, you have to have some inkling of running for Congress in Minnesota's Sixth District, and your prayer and fasting while considering the question results in some kind of sign -- a vision of behaloed blastocysts, perhaps, or maybe just a nice warm, fuzzy feeling like you've just peed your pants. In the non-batshit-loony world, this might be thought of as "going away and thinking really hard about it, coming to a decision, and being happy with it."

To boil it down further, you can either testify that:

1) "God wants me to run for Congress";

or

2) "I want to run for Congress, and I think/hope/pray that God's good with that."

Is there any third way? I certainly can't see one.

Quite clearly, Bachmann's testimonial makes Claim 1) above. I would certainly never accuse her of cloaking the second claim with the first -- that is, of claiming that God directed her to run for the open Sixth District seat when in fact the decision to do so was made by her alone. Heavens, that would be lying! In church, no less!

Hence, my interest in the mechanism by which the Lord of Hosts -- who, I might point out, hasn't actually dusted off the Burning Bush act in quite some years, and whose public appearances in the last few millennia are mighty sparse on the ground -- lets a Midwestern
lawyer know that He would smile upon an old-fashioned barn-burner of a campaign in the Sixth.

Anybody?

(I'm also really amused by the three-day fast thing. If, on the second day of your fast, Old Smokey pops in with a choir of angels, trailing glory and hosannahs, and directs you to run for Congress, do you really continue your fast for another day? Haven't you, you know, got your answer? Others have pointed out that it's never a good idea to make important decisions on an empty stomach, and I heartily concur.)

In Which I Go All Doodles Weaver

One of the nice neighbor ladies who share our driveway called the other night, with the somewhat breathless news that a bear had broken into their trash the previous night. She'd happened to be awake about one in the morning, had heard some ruckus coming from the direction of their parking lot, looked out the window, and caught Brother Bruin helping himself to their comestible castoffs.

This came as no surprise to me. Bears, I've read, use our north-south mountain ridge as a migratory route -- cooler west side in summer, warmer east side in winter -- and I've found enormous, berry-husk-laden turds in our orchard before, of a proportion I'm unwilling to blame on the dogs. Or, for that matter, the children.

Our turn for an ursine visit came late last week. Wonder Woman awoke me with the news that she'd just cleaned up a swathe of torn-open trash bags and strewn bins that stretched from the garage into the orchard. We're keeping the trash in the garage now, behind lock and key. And no pic-a-nic baskets. None!

Others have a more profound -- if pretty amusing -- fear of these critters. These are Eastern Black bears, relatively timid vegetarians, who've lived on our heavily wooded mountain forever. If we (and everybody else on our road) keep our trash out of reach, he'll move back up the hill to his accustomed habitat.

When he goes, one source of heartache will go with him. Whenever bears enter my life -- as they so often do -- my hapless brain inevitably starts plunking a banjo, and this deathless lyric enters my head, never to leave again:

Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free...

When an earworm of this tooth-grinding persistence appears, I have to admit defeat and just go with it. My defense is to mess with the damned thing, turn the lyrics inside-out, make up new rhymes, see if I can't get something really filthy or profane out of it. I did this all day yesterday, as I went about my chores. This time, my muse was Doodles Weaver:

Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree
Built him a car -- spilt him a jar -- no, wait -- charred him a quilt -- gilt him a Czar -- no, that would be silly -- kilt him a b'ar -- that's it! -- when he was only three....

Don't know what I'm talking about? In a way I envy you: It's not every day you get to hear a Spike Jones number for the first time. This absolutely slays me, hope it does the same for you:

Spike Jones and His City Slickers play The Man on the Flying Trapeze!

PS: Holy Kazoozis! Doodles Weaver was Sigourney Weaver's uncle!

NLCS Game 7

OH MY FUCKING GOD DID YOU JUST SEE THAT CATCH BY CHAVEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just a Place

1.

1980

Wide-eyed Neddie, in Noo Yawk for the second time in his independent life, on a toot from Kenyon, anticipating a wild night with the Psychedelic Furs and the English Beat at the Ritz. I'm with two-three native friends, guys whose dads are nuclear engineers, dentists, road-paving contractors in Larchmont, Islip, Great Neck. They are sooooo jaded. They wear their world-weariness and cynicism like badges on their Goodwill greatcoats, in among their Tin Huey and Wayne County buttons. We're just wandering the Lower East Side in the early evening, killing time before the doors open at the Ritz. Turn a corner on the Bowery and BLAM! There it is! CBGB! OMF(u)G!

"Whoa!" observes your correspondent trenchantly. "CBGB!"

This may have been a tad hayseed of me. I may have betrayed my sheltered upbringing to my ultrasophisticated companions with this awestruck outburst. An eye or two may very well have rolled.

"Come on! I wanna look in! I wanna see!"

"Jesus, Neddie. It's just a place."

"Fuck place! It's CBGB! Come on! I'm going in!"

Nobody came with me.

The place was empty. Nothing was going on. A bartender was unloading cases of beer. A lone, tall figure leaned his back against the bar, plainly blitzed out of his gourd. He rocked from side to side, unable to find his center of gravity. His hair hung down over his face as he contemplated the floor. He appeared to be nodding out and waking again every few seconds.

He was, of course, Joey Ramone.

Back on the sidewalk: "It was Joey fuckin' Ramone! Standing right there! FUBAR! I'm not fuckin' hallucinating, you assholes! He was right there!"

"Right, Ned. Right. Joey Ramone. Let's get some pierogies at Leshko's."

2.

1983

Rent-poor, clothes-poor, food-poor, a year out of college and toiling for a four-figure income, your Ned is domiciled in a roach-ridden, rat-infested first-floor sublet on 28th and Eighth, quickly depleting his record collection at the used-record shop, sacrificed on the Altar of Beer-Money. Didn't exactly have much use for my moth-eaten "Thick as a Brick" and my Mexican pressing of "Let It Be" those days anyway.

Bobby Lightfoot comes down from Hampshire College for a visit. Still only a sophomore, he's got Dreams. Big Dreams. Gonna be a Rock-n-Roll Star, yes sir, Casio keyboard always at the ready to regale us with a newly-worked-out arrangement of Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out." At great length.

He's not yet formed The Malarians, but the pieces are in place, and it's pretty easy to tell the kid's already in a musical zone way beyond anyplace I've ever been. Ambitous. Very ambitious.

We go downtown. Can't even remember why, now. Our wanderings take us to the Bowery, and when I point out CBGB across the street, his reaction's not dissimilar to mine three years earlier. He wants to check it out.

There's a crowd outside, and we have to squeeze our way through it. I look at Bobby, and almost piss myself laughing. His spine is absolutely straight as me winds around people, his eyes are hooded in the best Punk style, he's pulled himself to his full six feet, and he is actually, swear to God, sucking in his cheeks.

Come on, Bobby! They're just people! You're not going to get discovered in this crowd!

I still rib him about that.

3.

1986

I haven't seen a copy of the Village Voice in years, so I don't know if this is still true, but in the early-mid Eighties the back page always had some mighty amusing little ads. One of these touted a phone number, which, when called, triggered an answering machine that played a little fifteen-second snippet of very odd music -- accordions, synthetic horns, weird percussion, with funny, slapdash lyrics about plumbing, airplanes, and Necco wafers. We loved it, we geekazoid inhabitants of Prospect Place, Brooklyn, and called it regularly, phoning each other when a new tune had been posted up.

It's a little hard to believe, in these days of instant Internet-driven fads, but I'm prepared to argue that They Might Be Giants (for the weird little songs on the answering machine were, in fact, their brainchild) invented Viral Marketing.

Be that as it may, a warm night found me and my great pal Paul at CBGB, taking in a They Might Be Giants gig. We sat at the bar, more or less exactly where Joey Ramone had parked his wasted ass five years before. I was a bit disappointed in TMBG's live act; they were standoffish and shy when they needed to fill the room with their presence, and I was quite put off by the fact that considerably more than half of the music I was hearing was pre-taped.

Paul sloped off to the bathroom. As he left, a voice behind me excused itself, its owner trying to get through the crowd to the bar. As he approached my side, I obligingly shifted my stool a few inches so he could belly up and get the bartender's attention. He thanked me, and we started chatting, as one does at bars.

"What do you think?" he said, pointing his chin at the stage.

"Oh, I dunno... I loved their album, but this playing-with-tapes thing, I don't care for that much..."

"Yeah, I know what you mean, you want value for money, you know -- like, I paid how much to watch a couple of guys playing along to their record player?"

"Yeah, exactly!"

The conversation went on in this vein for a bit longer, comparing who we liked and who sucked. During this time Paul returned and reclaimed his seat. I felt a little explosion when he'd oriented himself, and as my interlocutor said, "Well, my date's waiting, gotta get back to my table. Good talking to you...", I was fending off frantic tugs on my shirt-sleeve.

"What the fuck, Paul?"

"Do you fucking know who that was? Jesus Christ, that was Judd Nelson!"

"Who?"

Nelson had, at the time, just starred in "The Breakfast Club" and "St. Elmo's Fire," and was easily one of the most recognizable faces in America. Today it might be as though I'd just passed five chatty minutes with Vince Vaughn, or perhaps Owen Wilson, without knowing who they were.

Recognizable, that is, except to me. I hated Brat Pack movies, anyway. To me, he was just some guy.

I'll always think of him as My Close and Personal Pal Judd.

But I'm Going Naked, Sonny, in the Morning!

I subscribe to the newsletter of The Rocking Vicar, a very amusing weekly in which contributors reminisce Englishly about their misspent youths in the rock-and-roll trenches. The latest issue features a post from Will Birch, the genius behind late-Seventies power-poppers The Records (peace be upon them), about a device he'd bought at the now-defunct Tower Records in LA, that allowed him to slice open shrinkwrapped LPs -- a minuscule boon, perhaps, but we welcome anything that eases life's tribulations.

Highly recommended stuff.

Another poster contributed the UK Top Ten list of albums from the day he was born, October 8, 1966, and suggests that it may very well rank as the Best-Ever Album Chart:

1. Soundtrack: Sound of Music
2. Beatles: Revolver
3. Walker Brothers: Portrait
4. Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
5. Spencer Davis Group: Autumn 66
6. Various: Stars Charity Fantasia -- Save the Children Fund
7. John Mayall/Eric Clapton: Bluesbreakers
8. Herb Alpert: Going Places
9. Kinks: Well Respected Kinks
10. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde

On that day, you could walk into your local record shop and buy at least four, arguably five or even six, of the most influential rock records evarrrr. New. Plus Herb Alpert and The Sound of Music.

So what were they putting in the water? (Wait, I think I know the answer to that...)

As for Your Humble and Obedient, I find myself still under the spell of the Nuggets II succubus*, still unable to shake the Sixties FreakBeat obsession that's been gibbering squeakily in my ear for all these months. First I feel constrained to try a cover of an obscure Swedish band's attempt at Early-Beatle-iciousness, and now this: "I See the Rain," by The Marmalade.

I was utterly gobsmacked to find out that a pop combo I'd ridiculed a few months ago as having the worst band name in the history of the world actually became The Marmalade in the mid-Sixties. Next you'll be telling me Andy Summers played in Dantalion's Chariot or something.

I think the thing that fascinates me most about the Nuggets II collection is that it proudly touts itself as hit-free. Probably the best-known track in it is Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men"; otherwise, as far as I know, none of these marvelous curiosities ever cracked a Top Ten in an English-speaking country. I remain convinced that there's as much to be learned from a period's mediocrities as from its giants.

Jimi Hendrix named "I See the Rain" his favorite single from 1967, and I imagine you'll be able to tell why once you've heard it:

Ladles and genitalmen, I give you... "I See the Rain," by The Neddie Jingo Experience, featuring Noel Redding!

-----
*Succubus? But I barely knowubus!

Reviews We Never Finished Reading

If All This Seems Familiar, Well, It Should

by Ann Hornaday, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 15, 2006

Filmgoers could be forgiven for feeling a vague frisson of deja vu...

Boy, That's One Fascinating Bellybutton

Blue Girl's got an absorbing set of posts up, replying to Tom Watson's exhortation to her and Mannion that we bloggers of Left Blogsylvania should, in this the runup to the election, be using the Inexorable Power of Our Prose to demonstrate the Righteousness of Our Cause.

Blue Girl makes the rather unassailable point that anybody likely to be a Blue Girl reader is also highly likely to be congenial to her politics, and that no argument she can make is likely to sway anyone away from their deepest prejudices. I would apply the same reasoning to the Friendly Confines in which you find yourself now; my careful eschewal of words like "wingnut" and "Rethuglican" have kept this humble blog far from the prying eyes and Technorati searches of those who merit these terms of endearment. (Oops!)

I'm not a researcher, or a teacher, or a student of political science. Besides the occasional satirical squib or horrified observation, I have very little to say in the political sphere that would enlighten, instruct or convince anyone who hasn't already decided about who he or she is voting for in November. And there are many, many, many others who "do" Politics far better than I possibly could.

"But there is turnout. Check that. There is only turnout," sez Tom, and he's absolutely right. But I would put it to him that demographic reality argues against my whooping and hollering about turning out the vote in these pages. A very rough analysis of my Statcounter numbers shows that about half of my "serious" visitors (i.e., not horndogs searching for pictures of Kate Hudson in toothsome repose) come to this blog from overseas. The other half come from every state of the Union -- including many in which the outcome of the midterm election is in no doubt whatever.

It's also worth noting in no uncertain terms that the Blogosphere is a mighty deceptive place. You jump in here, start yakking, and people start yakking back at you, and suddenly you're convinced that everybody in the whole world is in here with you. The truth of the matter is that there are millions. And millions. And millions of voters who don't even use computers, let alone haunt Left, Right or Center Bloggostan looking for a reason to vote.

There, Tom, is your Turnout.

Blogs are Global. Turnout is Local.

With something like this thought in mind, a couple weekends ago I marched up to the Jim Webb tent at the Lovettsville Octoberfest, buttonholed a woman with a clipboard, handed her $100 and allowed as to how I'd like to volunteer. I put my daytime, evening and cell phone numbers down on a signup sheet, told her I'd be happy to do phones, stuff envelopes, man tables -- everything except do door-to-door canvassing. (Bad hip and near-pathological aversion to Real Live People. 'Nuff Sed.)

I never heard back from her.

A friend of mine who's heavily into the local Democratic Party machine told me Webb's campaign is pretty disorganized. So be it.

So I'm trying again.

Wish me luck.

Beguiling the Time

Computer games bore the bejabbers out of me. Ennui overtakes me as I watch over Freddie's shoulder, his avatar striding some war-torn landscape engaging in hand-to-hand combat that he is eventually guaranteed to lose. The instant he overcomes his adversary, another one pops out of the bushes and off they go again. What's with all the agitá? What do these cartoon figures have against each other? Wouldn't they all be just happier if they knocked off the Warcrafting, rolled some doobage and told tall tales about chicks? Well, son, I think, there's four hours you'll never get back.

Yesterday, citing a sore hip, I slagged off work and took to my bed. (It really was sore; I'm beginning to knuckle under to the inevitability of a replacement -- but enough of that for now.) A look at the books on my bedside table stirred no excitement, and my thoughts rather unexpectedly strayed to a copy of Myst IV: Revelation I'd been given some while back. I'd laid it aside because it crashed on my old Mac laptop; but this new, more testicular one might handle it better. What better way to beguile the time on an unexpected afternoon in bed? I found the box on a shelf, threw on the software, and presently found myself blissfully, meditatively enthralled, wandering through a beautiful house built around a desert-canyon lagoon while soothing New-Agey music played unobtrusively. Sure, there were puzzles to solve, a backstory to unravel, but -- and this is the vitally important point -- nothing was trying to kill me!

I just hate it when things are trying to kill me. Don't you?

The appeal of the Myst series for me how unhurried the gameplay is. Rather than sock-pow frenzy, you're invited to explore these quite stunningly rendered landscapes at your leisure before you even bother to try to solve the puzzles and move on to the next level. I was quite tickled to find myself really admiring and envying the kitchen in the fantasy house in Tomahna, the first world: So simple! So austere! Yet so sumptuous! I really wish my kitchen were cantilevered impossibly out over a lagoon like this! I could really get some cooking done in a kitchen like this one! Yes, sir!

What? Puzzle? Save Achenar's daughter from the evil clutches of her malign brothers, destroyer of worlds? Who cares! Dig this kitchen!

But, as ever, my training as an interface designer also kept trying to assert itself -- to my chagrined amusement. I know the devices and doohickeys that one's meant to solve -- machines you have to repair in some way, codes you have to break, natural-world science you have to apply -- must necessarily obscure their own functionality, else they'd be pretty piss-poor puzzles. But in my "waking" life, as it were, this is precisely the sort of thing I'm paid to work very hard at avoiding. I kept asking, "Really, Achenar? You'd design a whole electrical system such that two obscure little symbols engraved on a terminal device provide the information necessary to run it, and the key to the symbols is to be found in a drawer in a desk in your bedroom all the way back on the other end of the house? Wouldn't it have been a more practical matter to simply put up a little sign?"

Or, "Really, Achenar? You'd build a lovely home clinging to cliffs over a lagoon, and then make inter-room navigation dependent on a single bridge that changes position to connect rooms depending on which way you push a control device? What if you really needed to go to the crapper all of a sudden? Is that really great design?"

Ah, well. In these games nobody ever has to go to the crapper. Maybe that's their problem over at Warcraft. They're all plugged up. They should relax, let go. Second door on your right. What's that? How do you open the door? Ah... I shan't tell you and spoil the puzzle!

(Later edit: I once wandered into a video-game store in a shopping mall, to placate Freddie's pleading. Remembering how much I'd enjoyed the Playstation version of Myst III, I inquired of the tattooed clerk (who could easily have been played by Jack Black) if there were any games in his shop that weren't about killing, mayhem, bloodlust, and the skillful manipulation of unintuitive, thumb-intensive combinations of R-1 and X and Triangle buttons. Games like, you know, Myst.

(After staring at me as though I'd just sprouted a penis from my forehead, he just grinned and shook my hand. "No," was all he said.

(I find this less than credible. I put it to my wise and cultured readership: Are there any other games in this vein? No killing, no anxiety, no obscure button combinations to be found on page 125 of the manual? Just, you know, puzzles. And trippy landscapes. Surely there must be!)

Fantasy Football

I was having a nice chinwag with the lads from the Sports Desk a few days ago. The talk very quickly turned to their Fantasy Football league, and there ensued quite a lot of somewhat mystifying insider palaver on injury reports, lineup changes, and the effect of Clinton Portis on the Washington Redskins' offense.

Playing the innocent ingenue (the pleasures of this pastime being completely lost on me), I asked them for a rundown on just how this Fantasy thing works. I received a five-minute lecture on drafts, player performance, the points system, and league standings.

"That's very interesting, I suppose," I mused. "But, uh, wouldn't you rather be having, you know, sex?"

I didn't mean with each other, but from the stunned silence that greeted my innocent question you'd have thought that's exactly what I had implied.

Blithely, I chattered on, "You know, given the choice between Clinton Portis' yards-per-carry average and a round of mindblowing boffage, I'm pretty sure I'd take the rogering every time. Women? Football? What's to choose?"

Oh dear. Might have hit a sore spot there.

Sorry, fellas. I hear there are chicks on eHarmony who just love guys who are way into sports...

Gram the One-Eyed Snake

Rep. Ezra Canney-Pickham (left) and his correspondent, Elmo Trotwoodie, in the days before the scandal broke.

In the wake of the burgeoning Foley instant-message fiasco, it appears that many who would rush to defend the status quo ante take the tack that this sort of thing goes on all the time. No one at this point will be unaware that Tony Snow declared, the Monday after Foley's resignation, "I hate to tell you, but it's not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill. And there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails."

Promoting the idea that wholesale institutional depravity is simply business-as-usual in Washington is, I suppose, one way of dealing with the problem. Other vested interests have pointed to the case of Democratic Rep. Gerry Studds, who was caught boffing a 17-year-old male Congressional page in 1983 -- as if this were simply a matter of balance. Congressmen bugger about thirty pages a day, it seems to suggest, and now it's simply the GOP's turn to get caught. Move on. Nothing to see here.

But that "naughty e-mails" business interests me as a student of the history of literature. The transcripts of the Instant Message conversations that ABC News released is sleazy in the extreme, not only because of their deeply icky motives, but because the conversations themselves are so depressingly banal. The Congressman even appears to reply earnestly to his victim's Away message early in one conversation, which does not exactly belie a parfait gentil knight in the Art of CyberPederasty.

It's immediately clear that the Instant Message does not threaten the Shakespearean sonnet's place in the literature of the seduction of the underaged. It's a painful harbinger of the degradation of our times to compare

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion

with

Maf54 (8:04:58 PM): love to slip them off of you
Xxxxxxxxx (8:05:08 PM): haha
Maf54 (8:05:53 PM): and gram the one eyed snake
Maf54 (8:06:13 PM): grab

(It may be nauseatingly squalid, but this four-line exchange is also excruciatingly funny black comedy. Come on, let's admit it. I can't help but notice the ten seconds that pass between "love to slip them off of you" and the painfully nervous "haha" that follows, and the fully twenty seconds that pass between "gram the one-eyed snake" and the entirely unnecessary correction of the typo. There's a whole novel in those pauses.)

It's tempting to declare the Instant Message the doom of artistic pedophilic seduction, but in truth it's been a long, slow death. A little-remembered scandal that erupted on the American scene in 1882 has amazing parallels to the Foley case, but no one in the press or broadcast media has yet mentioned it -- despite the opportunity it presents to demonstrate Tony Snow's hypothesis.

In that halcyon year, a Democratic Congressman from Ohio's Third District, Ezra Canney-Pickham, fell hard for a Congressional page from Georgia named Elmo Trotwoodie, apparently a young man of no insignificant personal charm. After Trotwoodie, then aged seventeen, finished his period of service, he returned to his home in Goshen Villa, near Savannah. Canney-Pickham pursued his passion by means of the Instant Message of his day, the telegraph.

The correspondence attracted the attention of the local paper, the Savannah Inquisitor, and it was a matter of only a few months before the entire nation hung on its every dispatch. Below we reproduce the salient portions of the lewd exchange.

---

Canney-Pickham
Twatleigh Tower
13th Street
Washington, DC
June 14th

HOW FAVORITE YOUNG GANYMEDE DOING STOP ALL LOVE EZRA

---

Trotwoodie
3 Sparta Terrace
Goshen Villa
Georgia
June 15th

TIRED AND SORE STOP WALTZING IS ARDUOUS STOP ELMO

---

Washington, DC
June 16th

MASSAGE IN ORDER STOP ALLOW ME APPLY HEALING ART OF EAGER FINGERS STOP APPLYING UNGUENTS NOW STOP SORE MUSCLES RELAXING STOP HEAVENS AM IN TURGID STATE OF LUBRICITY STOP YOUR EZRA

---

Goshen Villa
Georgia
June 17th

UGH STOP TOMORROW FIRST DAY LACROSSE PRACTICE STOP ELMO

---

Washington, DC
June 19th

LOVE WITNESS THAT STOP APOLLONIAN APPENDAGES RUNNING STOP JESUS AM LUBRICIOUS STOP DID ANY FEMALE PERSON GIVE MANUAL GRATIFICATION THIS WEEKEND ALL LOVE EZRA

---

Goshen Villa
Georgia
June 20th

BELLE AND SELF BROKE OFF RELATIONS RECENTLY STOP ELMO

---

Washington, DC
June 21st

WEARING UNION SUIT QUESTION MARK DID YOU GRATIFY SELF THIS WEEKEND STOP AM NEVER TOO BUSY FOR SELF GRATIFICATION LAUGH OUT LOUD STOP NEVER STOP DONT STOP STOP DONT STOP STOP EZRA

---

Goshen Villa
Georgia
June 22nd

NAUSEA ENSUES STOP SLOW THINGS DOWN STOP AM ONLY SEVENTEEN STOP NOT EIGHTEEN UNTIL FEB 23 STOP SERIOUSLY STOP STOP STOP STOP ELMO

---

Washington, DC
June 23rd

HAVE TRIED UNGUENT IN THE HAND QUESTION MARK SLOW RUBBING WORKS ADMIRABLY FOR ME STOP TRY TOWEL AND LOTION STOP FULL STATE RIGIDITY AND MAJESTIC MANLY TURGIDITY ENSUES STOP LOVE YOU COMMA EZRA

---

Soon after this point the Inquisitor wrote finis to the Congressman's predatory career.

Plus ça change, eh what? Let us this aphorism bear in mind while condemning Foley to hell: There but for the grace of -- no, wait a minute....

The Plain People

The Amish are averse to any technology which they feel weakens the family structure. The conveniences that the rest of us take for granted such as electricity, television, automobiles, telephones and tractors are considered to be a temptation that could cause vanity, create inequality, or lead the Amish away from their close-knit community and, as such, are not encouraged or accepted in most orders. (Source: Amish 101 - Amish Culture, Beliefs & Lifestyle)

An admirable asceticism, too often misunderstood by we English. The Amish don't object to technology per se. What they distrust about it is its inherent divisiveness, its tendency to tempt vanity. If a modern device or technological advancement can be shown to improve life or the common safety without introducing competitiveness or vanity, most Ordnungs adopt it without cavil. Thus vaccination, electric lights on buggies, community telephones, electrically heated homes -- for which they often produce the power themselves, with windmills).

As I say, all very admirable, nearly Buddhist in its rejection of complexity. Were it not for all the silly monotheism, I might be tempted to apply for the straw hat and the chinstrap beard myself. Although perhaps I might not qualify for membership. I lack the requisite forbearance, the humility, the patience. While I'm intensely aware of technology's darker side and sympathetic to those who reject it, I lack the ascetic self-control that would prevent me from attending a funeral unencumbered by the mechanical advantage and efficient leverage afforded by a baseball bat.

And

Who Is IOZ?, the funniest blog I've stumbled upon in quite some time, eructs something that's been stewing in my mind as well. How do you raise righteous indignation against a Keystone Kops version of Fascism?

If I'm going to suffer through the detention-and-disappearing state for the next year, the next ten, or the next fifty, then by fucking god, I want banners, rallies, party congresses, black uniforms, ominous dear-leader portraits scowling from every wall. Maybe that's the genius of our nouveaux authoritarians: central casting. How can you create yourself as a revolutionary against these people? If Leni Reifenstahl returned to make George Bush's Triumph of the Will, it'd come out of the cutting room as State Fair. In their preternatural boobery, they make radicalism seem like overreaction. We should be storming the White House in mass demonstrations, but what would we do when we found our native strongman reading Archie comics on the shitter?

Blogrollery

Goddammit.

I am one self-centered turd.

Supposed ta be buildin' a goddamn community, here, a Twenty-First Century MetaCollective, a balls-out leap into the unknown that we all take together!!!

An' here's me, month after month, sitting in front of the goddamned mirror, gazing deeply into the strange, unnatural beauty of my own (admittedly captivating, limpid-pool-of-deep-deep-water-resembling) eyes.

Fuck me and my narcissism!

Let's fix that, shall we?

Will Divide, of Huck and Jim, 's been commenting here with lucidity and an impressive command of lit'ry insight, most of it, apparently, learned at the feet of Deadwood's David Milch. Welcome to the blogroll, cocksucker! I loved this post about the imminent demise of the Party We Do Not Mention in These Pages. His name is either a verb or not, depending on whether you want it to be.

Patrick of Blowing Sh*t Up with Gas has likewise been mixing it up in here most engagingly for some time. Dude, Oranges and Lemons is great, but the XTC album you want is either Skylarking or Apple Venus Volume One.

Fuckin' sidesplittingly mordant post.

No Comments.

Trouser-endangeringly mordant cartoon by the artist's own hand.

No Comments.

What the hell's a mordant guy gotta do? Turn mordant somersaults?

Go enjoy the mordancy of the highly mordant Fred Wickham of Bullseye Rooster. When he's rich and famous for his both mordant and extremely mordant observations, maybe he'll remember the Little People who made it all necessary.

There. Now, back to that mirror....

Vive la Différence!

ALLURING EYES. Slender and smart, irreverent, romantic, and really attractive. Passionate Ph.D. who breaks Ph.D. mold. Keen intellect, balanced by gentle, soft, sensual side. Graceful, with delicate features and gamin look -- reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. Tender, affectionate, socially conscious, with knack for playful adventure and good grasp of life's complexities. Delights in Italy, hiking Yorkshire moors, South African safari, Red Sox, Patriots, frozen yogurt, Picasso, Miró, cooking bouillabaisse. Athletic, yet noncompetitive, addicted to golf, often finds it too disheartening to keep score. Interested in primitive art, psychoanalysis, Latin music, Eugene O'Neill, Op-Ed pages. Seeks kind, educated, attractive, fit man, 55-70, with capacity for love.

-- Personal ad chosen (nearly) at random from the October 16, 2006, New York Review of Books

MODERATELY HAIRY. Mustard-keen and button-cute, rapier wit always at the ready to puncture pretentious poppycock, Eusty-Prize-winning otolaryngologist -- but not arrogant about it -- seeks sensual playmate to explore life's possibilities. And talk about your broken molds! A veritable gazelle on the jai-alai court or the croquet lawn, with beautifully formed, graceful calves, preternaturally lovely, swanlike neck and a tail as prehensile as his mind -- reminiscent of a young Claude Rains, he's been told more than once, but without the disquieting Frenchiness and with a (very small, barely noticeable, really) port-wine stain. Patience of a saint, a very companionable drunk and a great listener when his female companions feel like droning on and on and on and on about "life's complexities." Relishes the queer little back streets of Anacostia, rafting the Pacific, exploring the wine-bars of the Manila godowns, shamanic ayahuasca rituals with the Urarina people of Peru, eating boiled dog with the Orang Asli on the banks of the Rajang River, rooting for dear old Denison. Easy conversationalist in Farsi, !Xhosa, Medieval Danish and Hochdeutsch. Interests include taxidermy, Linear B, Transcendentalism, Sudoku, COBOL, LeRoy Nieman, Richard Speck, collecting car batteries, antisemitism, Def Leppard. Seeks slender, smart, irreverent and attractive woman, 50-65. It would really, really, really help if you look like Audrey Hepburn. Must like anal. Reply to: NeddieJingo@aol.com.

-- Personal ad submitted for the October 30, 2006, New York Review of Books

Ubiquitous Robotic Companion Is Into the Life

It's probably a good idea not to rely too heavily on Alta Vista's BabelFish to translate your Korean-language website into English. All I'm sayin'.