The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Dick Cheney has died. I do not know how he lasted this long, with his bad heart, his transplanted heart, his sinful, evil life, but there you go. He didn't last as long as the even more horrific Henry Kissinger, an obituary I should have had the energy to write, cause there's a grave worth dancing on.

There is nothing good to say about Dick Cheney. He did nothing good in his life. Everything he touched made the world worst, until, maybe, the last couple years when he turned on Donal Trump. That is not enough to redeem him, though it is to his credit. The rest? from dodging the Vietnam war (which he obviously supported), to working for Nixon, to Haliburton, to his stint as VP to the lesser Bush, at absolutely the wrong time for authoritarian villains to be in charge, he made everything worse. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 probably sank this country - certainly did massive harm to everything good about it. Rule of law and international respect and not having secret torture prisons and - just awful. And ruining the economy almost as an afterthought. A nightmare that has only gotten worse since.

It makes you think of Trump's depredations. I remember what it was like in 2003 or 4 - people predicting that Bush and Cheney would cancel elections, send the troops into the street. They did not. But now in 2025, people are worried about the same things - and not theoretically, at least as far as the troops in the streets goes. Will we have elections next year? Probably - will they be fair? They haven't been fair in decades, but this one is likely to be worse than ever, with Republican states desperately scrambling to gerrymander the Democrats out of existence. It is bad - and it is, really, continuous with what Bush and Cheney did. Not as overtly, maybe, but they were hacking away at democracy wherever they could back in the day. Trump is just cruder about it.

And yet - Cheney did turn on Trump. So did Bush, and a lot of that gang. With Cheney, I more than half suspect it is because Trump turned on his family - it was personal. Cheney never cared a fig for the country - but he does care about his family. I guess that is something, and if it translates into something good for the country, we can take it. But it's not much, and doesn't change the fact that Cheney and company started us down this road. That's about all I have on that subject.

Other subjects? I do find it interesting to compare that period to the present. in some ways it is not that different - and we did worry that Bush/Cheney would do the things Trump is trying to do. But would they? There is a weird element to Trump I have noticed before, compared to the villains of the past - bad as Bush was, it is hard to say that he didn't, in his warped and ugly way, love his country. That bunch didn't want the same USA that I want - but they seemed to want the USA to exist. They respected - something about it. Maybe the sentimentality - but maybe more. This is a feeling I get more from Bush 2, and some of those around him - Powell, Rice, maybe even Rumsfield - a sense that they were proud to be Americans, and wanted to maintain something about that country. Maybe.

There is none of that with the Trump mob. Trump doesn't care about this country in the least. He doesn't care about the constitution or the laws or the ideals of the USA - he doesn't care about the country as a force for anything in the world, he doesn't care about its well being, he doesn't care about its power. He wants to burn it down and steal the parts. And the people around him - Miller and the rest - want the same thing. That - I never got that impression from Dick Cheney. He might not have cared much about the constitution or democracy or American ideals or anything like that, but he wanted the USA to survive and thrive, to be a source of power he could wield. He and his were Imperialists - and they wanted to preserve and strengthen the American Empire. Trump? wants to steal the copper from the white house.

That's not a lot to say good about Dick Cheney, but in the end, it is not nothing. For all his evil, he was unlikely to commit treason. He didn't - he and his lot did all they could to manipulate elections and suppress dissent and all the other bad things he did, but when he lost, he took it. Again - I can find a cynical explanation - he knew he wasn't really going to suffer, that he could make a buck no matter who won, that the system itself was designed to protect people like him, and they could do a lot better preserving it that destroying it. But even that - low a bar as it is, he got over it. Trump and company cannot get over that bar.

You have to be bad to be worse than Dick Cheney, but there are plenty of them around right now. 

How much of that is his fault? That might have to be the subject of another post (which I'm unlikely to write.) But - well - it is something. 

David Lynch

Has died, aged 78. He was one of the great ones - the greatest American director since Hawks and Capra, I'd say - and absolutely central to how I came to love the movies. Blue Velvet, I think, might have been the first film I saw that made me think that films could be as completely satisfying, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, as a great book or piece of music. He was one of the first directors I noticed as a director - along with Kubrick, Eisenstein, maybe Godard, Kurosawa, Scorsese. I was an odd cinephile - I started as an auteurist art film snob, and moved from there to a much broader love of movies. (Though I suppose I am still an auteurist art film snob, if push comes to shove.) Still - Lynch was definitive. 

There was a stretch, mid 90s, where he slipped back some in my estimation. I moved away from some of my youthful formalism - I fell under the sway of the Capras and Cassavetes and Altmans of the world. Then I saw Elephant Man at Coolidge Corner one day, the first time I'd see it on a big screen, and saw it on the Coolidge's gorgeous big screen - that changed things. The beauty of that film, its humanity, its clear moral and ethical positions, its empathy - it snapped me back to paying attention to what Lynch put on screen. Straight Story followed, and sealed it. Gorgeous films; lessons in empathy - which most of his films are. 

The later films finished the process, won me back, pushed him to the top. I loved Mulholland Drive; I worship Inland Empire. It came out and I saw it twice in two days, then again a couple weeks later. I kept returning to it. It sealed his place at the top of the pile - even if I'd still say Blue Velvet is his masterpiece. All that happened against when the Twin Peaks continuation happened - I loved that almost as much. I didn't write about it as much - I haven't been writing much on this blog in the last few years. But it holds up. And gets right at what I think makes him so great - the artistry, the surrealism, the dadaism, the formal brilliance of his work; but also its empathy - and the way it weaves empathy and horror together. 

Lynch is uncanny, unheimlich, as the Germans might have it. Horror comes from the home, the family, the everyday - what destroys us comes from what sustains us and protects us. It's there is all his films - homes that are poisoned, coming apart from within - but with a real sense of possibility and loss. They are all about families being ripped apart - Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, all the Twin Peaks iterations, Lost Highway, Straight Story, Inland Empire - family as comfort and horror. It's a theme a lot of my favorite filmmakers share - Ozu, Capra notably - and Lynch is worthy of them. 

He was, in short, one of the great ones. And every bit as interesting as a person. I will miss him.

A Farewell

I am breaking blogging silence with some very sad news. My cat died last week. It seemed very sudden - Saturday she was having trouble breathing, but she was still moving fine, eating, though with some difficulty; but by Wednesday she was suffering bad, and Thursday morning, she went, while I was waiting for the local vet's to open to take her in. Poor old thing.

She was oldish - 13. Not ancient. I have had her for 12 1/2 years. She has been a superb cat. She was part of a litter my brother's cat had - 4 of them - John, Paul, George and Ringo. They had given away John and George, and let me have my pick of Paul or Ringo. Paul was a handsome boy - black and white tuxedo - but he also seemed a bit too rambunctious. Ringo was playful and friendly, but calmer, and that seemed like a good idea for an apartment cat. So Ringo it was - New Year's 2011.

(There they all are, 13 years ago.)

She turned out to be just about perfect. She was a fun cat, but she wasn't really wild - good in an apartment. She was friendly and social, but not needy - good when it's just the two of us most of the time. She was very sweet and good natured, she loved attention - she could be shy around other people, but 10 minutes later she would be plopped in the middle of the table expecting everyone to pet her. She was a joy.

(Always ready to help out on the computer.)

She was healthy as a horse, for almost all that 13 years. This last week or so is the first time she has given me anything to worry about. She didn't even have hairballs or puke, like most cats - unless she got to eating plastic, which she certainly did. Phone cords, plastic bags, the occasional connecting wire (chewed through the wire from my Roku to the TV, back in the days when I thought a Roku might be handy.) That was it, though. It makes me wonder if she ate something bad this time - I don't know what - but she acted like she might have swallowed something, and it all happened fast. I don't know.

I will miss her. She loved her new couch - 

She loved my old chair. Poor old kitty. Rest in peace, old friend...

Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard has died. That generation has been going - is he the last one left? It is getting close. He was one of the big ones - for me, he is close to the most important film maker of all time. For me, he is close to the best film maker of all time - though no one could pass Ozu. But importance? You can make a case for some of the filmmakers in the silent era - Griffith, Murnau, Lang, Eisenstein, Chaplin - they made the form. But after that? He was a public figure as well as a filmmaker, and he set the agenda for art films for the last 60 years. Sometimes, he did this as much as a figure to define cinema against as what cinema was - but he was still there, at the center of it, making films, talking about films, demanding viewers and readers respond to films.

I responded to his films. He was one of my introductions to art films - back in the 80s, I saw Aphaville, and was caught. It was mind-blowing - beautiful, strange, funny - and for all its difficulty, and his reputation for difficulty, readily accessible. I saw Breathless not too much later and enjoyed it just as much. His 60s films, at least, are usually like this - there is plenty to hang on to as you work through their intricacies. They are still among the most enjoyable films of all time. Alphaville, Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Week End, Contempt - all rich, gorgeous works, entertaining, challenging, inventive, everything. His later films, admittedly, are harder sledding - but they are still gorgeous, and the more recent ones, leaning into the collagist aesthetic he has always embraced, are quite enjoyable as well, in their somewhat more specialized way. 

So - he was instrumental in forming my taste in films, in defining what I thought film could do. I may have been predisposed to artsy films, but he gave me art films that I could sink my teeth into. He made films that remain completely satisfying, at every level, that deepen every time I watch one of them. He was one of the greatest of them all - for me, it's Godard and Ozu at the top, no mistakes. I will miss him. That generation - the New Waves, French, English, Japanese and so on - are almost all gone. And Godard was the center of that generation, and now he is gone. 

Farewell.

Charlie Watts

 Time for this blog to come back to life at least long enough to mark the passing of one of the great figures of rock music, Mr. Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones. The Stones, one has to say, have been lucky - Watts is the first to go since Brian Jones in 1969, and most of them have been pretty active and lively most of that time. And the band, of course, has stayed active all that time, still touring - or intending to tour - to the present. They seem immortal - especially, I suppose, Keith Richards, who should be dead half a dozen times over, but there he is, still at it. But they are not immortal, and now the sanest of the crew is gone.

And so. I am, I admit, too much of a fan of flashy drummers. Keith Moon and John Bonham and Jaki Liebezeit give me shivers, every time. But I know just how vital Charlie Watts was (or Ringo, for that matter.) They make the songs, hold the whole thing where it needs to be, they are near perfect. They are a big reason the Stones and the Beatles are what they are - the best whole package, the bands that got pop music dead right. The recordings, the songs as songs, everything - and the drumming is at the center of it.

So goodbye Mr. Watts. You made the world a better place.

Here they are last year, locked down - Charlie dapper and amusing, miming along to the rest:

And way back when, just grooving it:

The Sweet Tolling of the Bell

I think I shall post today in honor of the passing of Rush Limbaugh, a man who single handedly refutes John Donne: no one is diminished by his passing. He lived a rotten life, Rush Limbaugh. There was a time when it was hard to tell if he meant a word he said - he was a showman, always, and had the air of a charlatan about him, a salesman, someone who could, with a twist in the road here or there, have been announcing football games or selling used cars. Instead he played a right wing demagogue, but was any of it real? 

There was a time. But there comes a time when who cares? You can mean it or not, but if you are willing to say the things he said, push the positions and politics he pushed, sincerity is beside the point. You are evil, and playing evil is no different than being evil. And he was evil. He grounded right wing resentment and viciousness, for a long time, he promoted it, he shaped it, he kept it going. He was central in creating the fascism that has infested the right in this country for 30 odd years - voicing it, pushing it, making it worse and worse. He hurt the country, and consequently the world, immeasurably. 

He was also a loathsome character as a human being. A drug addict and sex tourist who raved about other people's drug use and sexual behavior. A money grubbing worm. A hateful, abusive creep. 

All right: if you can's say something nice about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all. Well - if you can say something nice about Rush Limbaugh, what the hell is wrong with you? I suppose one should feel sympathy for his family and loved ones - but who the hell would that be? No - he won't be missed, except by his fellow fascists. Fuck them all.

Plague Journal

It looks so innocent, the end of February. I could still imagine a good candidate to vote for in the presidential election, though that hope was probably false. I could imagine a candidate I would not mind voting for, at least, in Sanders. Well. I could go to the Walmart and buy toilet paper, I could go out to eat, I could hang around the house and play games, I don't know. I was looking forward to spring training and baseball, watching Liverpool win the Premier League, watch8ing the C's now and then. Fun stuff! I could go to work, whatever that is worth!

Well, I can still go to work. I can't really complain about work, on balance: I'm doing video calls mostly, isolated from the world and even my coworkers - hey, cool by me! But there's not much else the recommend the last month or so.

Month: March 12-13 were the days when things seemed to click in, at least where I am. That was right after Italy locked down, about the time some of the harder hit American states started to ramp up controlling efforts. I had just put in for some vacation time, to do other things - I told my coworkers it looked like I was wasting my time off, since none of the events I wanted to attend were going to be open in a month, and maybe not even the job itself. They were not convinced, but within a week, yeah, all the events were canceled, most of the workplace's contact with the public was gone - yeah. I mean - a month ago.

It has been a hard month; the country locked down before the horror started to hit - the last week or so, the bill is coming due, and it is not good. I don't know where it will end - yesterday had something like 1800 deaths - horrible, and likely still on the climb. Famous people are dying, John Prine or Adam Schlesinger or Ellis Marsalis and Wallace Roney, others are sick, or at least infected, from Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson. I don't know. I don't know if this is going to rise and peak and fall abnd be gone; I don't know if this is going to rise and fall in little waves as we quarantine and break quarantine and quarantine again - I don't know. I don't know how it ends, how long we can stay locked down, what happens when we stop. Can the economy recover? will it, since what can happen and what will happen in the USA are not always the same.

That was a useless paragraph. Most of what I do is useless. It is a strange crisis in that the best thing you can do is wait for it to get better. It's a crisis that rewards patience and resilience - letting the disease run its course, find a vaccine or treatments, let a level of immunity build up that turns it into just another variety of the flu. That is hard to do, partly because it is so easy to do. You feel guilty. I certainly feel weird, reading about everyone's lock down travails, while I continue to go to work more or less on my regular schedule, never needing to find a way to stay sane alone for two weeks at a time. Which, I have to say, is not something I would have a lot of difficulty with, comparatively. I am fine being alone, at least as long as I am healthy. Though I wish I got more writing done.

All right. This is just to say that he re I am, and to prove to myself at least that I can force myself to do something like this, once in a while. Huzzah and all that.

And maybe dabble in politics? Bernie Sanders finally gave up. The Democrats are left with Biden - my god. But it is far more important to take the senate anyway - Biden and the senate is worth more than Sanders without, so, forward decent people! don't stop, for a moment, reminding the world that Trump is a monster, that Mitch McConnell is worse, and if they can win elections when they are a clear minority, we should be able to take one or two as the majority. Though we'd better ake this one, because we probably won't get another chance.

Though then again - nothing ever ends. So - yeah.

Vote, whatever it takes.

Scott Walker

It's been a couple years since he died, but I wanted to put up something to commemorate Scott Walker. (That's Noel Scott Engel, by the way, the musician, not the goggle eyed homunculus former governor of Wisconsin, who dragged the good name through the mud.) Walker started as a fairly straightforward pop singer, with the Walker Brothers, then shifted to a more sophisticated, darker style as a solo artist, Jacques Brel style, rich ballads with detailed stories and scenes, that became more experimental and surrealist as he went along. He then faded for a while - doing half-hearted pop projects in the 70s, surfacing every decade or so afterwards to release another record of increasingly difficult and experimental material. And then, mid-2000s, he must have found something - because after releasing records in 1984 and 1995, he released three in fairly short order, in 2006, 2012 and 2014, the third with Sunn O))). These records are, to be sure, daunting experiences - but fascinating, lyrically intense and detailed, musically surprising, and anchored as always by Walker's voice.

That's his life. When did I hear of him? Somewhere in the early 2000s, I imagine, a time when I discovered a lot of prog and experimental rock. Japanese noise bands like the Boredoms and Acid Mother's Temple led me to Krautrock and the more adventurous strands of Prog (Van der Graf Generator or Soft Machine), and somewhere in there, that led me to Scott Walker, specifically the old Scott records. I fell for immediately - the complex, dense pop sounds - the stories and images, the sad powerful melodies, and that voice, deep, rich, expressive crooning - I loved it. And the later records worked as well - they might fit even better with my taste for experimental rock, jazz and the like - fragmentary, constructed pieces, anchored by the voice.

And there we are. He was one of those people who is massively influential, but had become almost completely unknown. But you hear him in those prog groups (Pete Hamill in particular), in Nick Cave, I can hear him in PJ Harvey, Radiohead and a lot of similar British groups, as well as in acts that picked up his style almost whole - David Sylvain, notably. (Another favorite). It is strange to think that he was in fact very popular in the 60s, given how obscure he could seem in the present - though never completely gone. Sneaking into soundtracks (Futurama! Life Aquatic!), things like that. (Though so many of his songs sound like complete soundtracks unto themselves.) He was one of the good ones.

Some video: starting with the Walker Brothers, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any more:



Finding performance video of Walker is very hard. The Walker Brothers were on TV enough (and tapes are preserved), but those aren't live. Walker had his own TV show for a while, but I don't think the video survives - but audio does. This is a recording of It's Raining Today, from his show:



Jump ahead 26 years and what do we find? Jools Holland presenting Walker, live, in the studio, with Rosary, from the Tilt album - full on late career Scott Walker, and live to boot:



What the late albums had, though, are very interesting videos made for their songs. Experimental films to match the experimental music. This is Brando, from Soused, the album Walker made with Sunn O))) - one of the strangest combinations you could imagine, except it makes perfect sense. Walker's deep voice and the band's low end guitar drones - Walker always liked drones (those old songs - like It's Raining Today - are often built on drones) and he fits in almost seamlessly with them. It's an excellent record, that one, a fitting end to his career.

Funerals

I have let things slip here at the Listening Ear, posting every month and a half or so, at least when I don't have another project to work on. I hope I can get some energy back - the Great War was approaching it's end 100 years ago, and I should take some note of it. Maybe by the end of September, when we can honor the Meuse-Argonne Offensive , the largest operation by Americans in the war. I've also completely ignored the events of Reconsruction, which were heating up inthe 1867-68 period, up tp the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Another subject I regret letting go of.

But that's not what this post is about (and besides,with some luck, next year we can talk about impeachment in the present tense!) This weekend, Aretha Franklin and John McCain are being laid to rest, with great fanfare. It is a very clear sign of the decline of this blog that I managed to get up a post for John McCain's death, but not Franklin's. McCain mattered - he was a very famous, powerful, and fairly significant politician, he was a representative of a somewhat more palatable form of Republicanism, a vision of the United States government as a place where competing views are put to the vote, and the winners get to govern, and everyone accepts the outcome - good things. But in the end, he was still just a politician, and while very famous, not particularly consequential (for good or ill).

Aretha Franklin, on the other hand, is one of the central figures in American culture in the last 50 years - she matters in ways politicians can't dream of. Even if soul/R&B music is not what I listen to the most, you can't escape it, and it is one of the great, powerful musical styles in the world - why would you try to escape it? It is as absolutely American a thing as exists: what is American culture? Aretha Franklin answers that as well as anyone.

So: I will keep it simple - the songs I have heard the most, the ones that made her what she is, the ones I will stop what I am doing to try to listen to when I hear them.

John McCain, RIP

I have been away a long long time, but I will drop by once more to mark the passing of John McCain. He was overrated,as a person and a politician, but that is as much a feature of the modern Republican party as it is of himself. He was a conservative, and a war monger, but straightforward about it, and he respected the system, respected his opponents (most of the time - he wasn't above a cheap shot now and then), they usually ended up respecting him. If he was what the Republican party was, in this benighted age, the party, and the country, would be far far better for it. I could live with John McCain as president, even if I didn't like it.

That makes him a bit like George HW Bush. If Bush had won his nomination in 1980, if McCain had won in 2000, they would very likely have been elected president - they would have headed off 2 of the worst presidencies of the modern era; they would have run their policies out and won or lost on what happened next. McCain in the white house in 2001 might have cared more about stopping Bin Laden before he struck inside the United States. Who can say. Then, of course, both Bush and McCain did win the nomination 8 years later - Bush had traded every ounce of integrity by then, and ran a disgusting, racist campaign; McCain - well, he was dead in the water day one, last man standing in his party with the world collapsing all around them - he wasn't going to win, but he picked Sarah Palin as VP and helped legitimize the know nothing Republicans, the racists, fascists and fools. So - whatever respect he might have deserved he gave away.

And so it goes. He served his country bravely, suffered immensely for it, seems to have learned some lessons from his own abuse, being one of the few Republicans to do anything to criticize our own slide into POW torture. (He didn't seem to learn anything from the way he was treated when he was shot down - he was always willing and eager to bomb foreigners indiscriminately.) He was always a prima donna - he knew here the cameras were pointing and made sure he was standing there - he was mildly corrupt (back when corruption mattered, at least a little), he was always a willing to sternly condemn terrible things he'd vote for a week later.... All that, though, just made him a politician. Just a politician, then, but the only Republican in the last 30 years to not act like he was wearing a sheet under his suit, just waiting for a chance to let his true colors (white) fly - and that's worth something. Got him on TV enough, but it also made him seem like a Road Not Taken - a much better road than we have been on.

(You can read Lawyers, Guns and Money for a good run down of his sins; you can read almost everything else for a good run down of his virtues - real as well as imaginary.)

Stanley Cavell

It has been a couple days, but I want to say something about the death of Stanley Cavell. He was, as I have said before, near and dear to my film loving heart. He was formative for me, along with Sarris and Ray Carney and Audie Bock, one of the critics who formed how I looked at and thought about films. But he was also probably definitive - one of the critics who became a constant touchstone for how I thought about film - Cavell and Bordwell, Burch, Kracauer, Pasolini.... Everything I saw, I filtered through Cavell - every comedy and melodrama at least, and those are, in the end, my favorite types of films. He was an inspiring critic, and he was a superb writer. A philosopher and a film writer, an academic - that can lead into some dark corners in the world of prose - but Cavell was very readable, without sacrificing any of his ideas. He makes sense of films he talked about in a way almost no other critics did.

Also part of one of those fun days you get in places like Cambridge. There was a night, a dozen years or so ago, when the Harvard Film Archive showed three Laura Mulvey shorts, with Mulvey speaking - and the Brattle was showing a Barbara Stanwyck double bill, Baby Face and Night Nurse, and Cavell was in the audience. Ah, the missed opportunities, I thought then.... I am lucky, too, that I did hear Cavell speaks couple times - an essay on O Brother Where Art Thou, for instance, a film he properly believed was a masterpiece. Well.

Cavell was one of the best. I will miss him, and continue to treasure his work.

The Death Lobby

Well - almost a month since my last post. Looks like every post I make this year is going to have a disclaimer at the top lamenting how lazy I have become. I wish I could do better than post every time someone important dies, but that seems to be a pattern as well.

Two people I know died this week - a woman I knew almost entirely online, though we both lived in Boston, and would see each other around once in a while; and a man who was one of my family's closest friends when I was a kid - both are hard to deal with. And Billy Graham died - almost a hundred years old. (The other two both died too young - that's not a fair distribution of years on this earth; they would have made better use of the extra 30-40 years he got.) I can't get too nasty about Rev. Graham - he was a huge part of the cultural landscape where I grew up, the greatest evangelist, the model for all us white protestant evangelicals.... He was presented as a hero, a completely benign figure - and by the time I got old enough not to care about his religion anymore, the next generation of white protestant evangelicals were running rampant, and by god did they make him look good. He never quite embraced the overt fascism of Swaggart and Falwell and Bakker and Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, the whole disgusting crowd, including his own vile son Franklin, as bad as any of them. But he never quite did anything against them - and he probably went along with most of their political beliefs.He had no guilt about cozying up to the likes of Tricky Dick. Still - treating religion as primarily a matter between you and your god is not going to destroy the republic - he did that, or did it more effectively than the others; there is nothing in Graham's approach that obliges you to take one side or the other politically. You could get converted and actually go do some good in the world, if you were inclined: publicly at least, for most of his career, maybe when he was actually in charge of his career, he made religion a personal decision (if not a private one, exactly.) Behind it all might have been the same neo-confederate viciousness that animated the next bunch of TV preachers (and of course, the love of money), but you could take the meat and throw the bones away, with old Billy.

That's harder to pull off now. The big news in the world these last two weeks has been the latest mass shooting at a school - another horror show, with the usual reactions in the wake... But a twist - this time the survivors of the attack immediately took to the streets and TV camera and their social media accounts to demand gun control. They've been driving the conversation - they are putting the NRA defenders on their heels a bit. Publicly, I guess you could say: Marco Rubio might look like he's about to cry when he's on stage, but we all know he can comfort himself by counting the 0's on his NRA campaign contributions. The subject is a hard one to say anything new about - there's no real mystery about how to address the problem: gun control. The usual sensible, limited responses - ban assault rifles and military gear; longer waiting periods, stronger background checks, closing loopholes for buying guns, imposing more national laws, so you can't buy a gun off the shelf in one state and drive to the next state to gun down some teenagers. And most of this is very popular, and would pass easily, if it were put to a referendum (and everyone voted.) But that isn't the problem - the problem is that the Republicans control the legislature (and presidency, though that's not where this can be solved), and they are on board all the way with the NRA. And well compensated for it.

It's another instance of the failure of democracy in this country - the public supports gun control, like they support public health insurance - but that will never pass. Or - it will not pass until Democrats control the legislatures again. People skirt around the fact, talk bout "politicians" or "congress" as though the reason nothing gets done is that no legislators support gun control - but that is not true. This is a partisan problem. This problem is caused by the Republican party. Democrats would pass something - by the time they were done, it would be watered down and ineffective, but it would be something, it would save couple thousand lives a year, and Republicans would run against it because it didn't go far enough (pure shamelessness is part of their MO) - but it would pass. But nothing will pass with Republican votes.

So vote. Voting is the key. Voting, voting, voting. Voting and money - the other thing that might move the GOP is if you can get at the source of their cash. The NRA is starting to see sponsors withdrawing - if their money starts to dry up, their contributions might - cut off the cash cows and you can see change. we'll see.

Meanwhile - the NRA and their patsies (including the dumfounded dipshit in the white house) run through a bewildering array of bullshit to steer the conversation into a ditch. Arming teachers? I was flipping through channels on TV last night, and on PBS, some lady was explaining how it might work - I didn't stay long enough to see what side she was on, but it doesn't matter. People are discussing arming teachers as a response to classroom shootings - am I hallucinating? Part of it is clearly just meant to muddy the waters - get people arguing about arming teachers, or compare gun control to deporting illegal immigrants or something and the debate disintegrates into nonsense and trivia and nothing happens.... But you also see price tags: 14 million dollars per school district to buy guns? You don't think the gun lobby sees that and starts drooling?

Argument is pointless. There is no reason to argue with people who would suggest something like arming teachers. There is no point arguing with people who whines about kids eating tide pods, so how can they understand gun control? or who equate voting with mass murder (they support background checks for guns, if you'll support stronger ID laws for voting!) Or who think the answer to gun violence in schools is more prayer or banning baggy pants. Or just arguing ith people who claim that gun control is a terrible attack inindividual freedom, so propose turning the country into a police state to protect us from all those unregulated guns. It's madness. Fuck them all.

Right now, I say just ban them. No more guns. If you have to repeal the second amendment to do it, fine with me, it was a bad idea in 1790, and it's completely pointless now - though it also clearly allows for all the gun regulation you need. That's my argument. It's probably not my position - but I'm not making laws, so it's not on me to find something fair and reasonable. I'll do that when there are actual laws being discussed. The NRA works very hard to frame the debate in cultural terms - guns as fetish objects, as a sign of a kind of toxic masculinity mixed with white resentment - fight that.

The Fall

Well, after saying I was going to try to post here once a week - it's been three. Yeah, I know. And what brings me back? The all too constant theme of this blog - another obituary.

A couple, I suppose - last week was Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer from the Cranberries, purveyor of beautiful and moving 90s pop, dying mysteriously in London, aged 46. A sad story - her songs were haunting and powerful, and though I didn't pay much attention to them when they came out, they were work that could hold you. It's a shame.



And then this week - about the only think Mark E Smith had in common with Ms O'Riordan is that they both sang back tot he audience sometimes (she apparently did it early because she as shy.) And they were singers and they died this week, both dying fairly young. Though you'd never know that from Smith - he was 60 - but he looked like he rode those 60 years hard. For a long time, he's looked the part of a dissolute working class British rock star.... Though maybe not always - look at them in 1988, on Tony wilson's show, Brix in ful 80s new wave mode, and Mark - tall, sleek, almost handsome, rocking that purple turtleneck while Wilson pays tribute: "if there was a holy grail, only Mark Smith would be allowed to touch it" -



The years were not kind - but he didn't slack. Working through to the end - this is from last October, confined to a wheelchair, looking very ill, but still raving away like always, compelling and controlling, the center of everything.



The Fall were one of those bands, there were a few, that I heard, when I was young, loved every time I heard them - but didn't, quite, pursue at the time. I don't know why. The Fall, Gang of Four, Wire - post punks all? Maybe. I won't explain it. Tried to make up for it later, but its a daunting proposition with the Fall - lots of records to pick through, and they never really slowed down, putting out new records all through the 00s, always interesting. As it happens, in my dotage, this might be my favorite period/style of music - post-punk, lean, sharp guitars - these bands, PIL, American groups like The Minutemen and Mission of Burma, no wave, early Feelies - which I would expand to include a few groups that pre-date punk (let alone post-punk) - Television, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, or the punk groups that worked this vein, like Joy Division, the Buzzcocks... (And any style that includes Pere Ubu and Television is going to be my favorite, it is true.)

The Fall were as good as any of them. Propulsive, repetitious riffing, a mix of garage, Krautrock, art rock - Smith ranting over all of it, anchoring the sound, playing around it - almost monotonous, but always rhythmic, with bursts of - otherness.... Vocals like the guitars, then. With the relentless propulsion of the drums and bass in the back - they are endlessly great.

Live Set, 1981:



And still great in the 2000s - here's What About Us? at a festival - "he was dealing out drugs to old ladies" -



I admit - it's hard to parse out what he's raving about a lot of the time, but when you get to the lyrics, they are worthy of the rest - clever, funny, weirdly erudite... Especially how funny they are - jokes and wordplay and mockery - they didn't take themselves to seriously, obviously. What more can you say to something like this? Video to "Eat Yourself Fitter" - words, images, their attempts at dancing - "saw the holy ghost on the screen"...



And so on. I suppose ultimately, though, being who I am, utterly in love with the electric guitar, what caught my ear in the 80s and holds my ear now are the guitars - the riffs - the sound - their propulsive fury. And so to leave you with Brix Smith knocking out one of my favorite riffs ever, Cruiser's Creek, live in 1985 or so...

Friday on my Mind

Hello Friday, hello two more obituaries in the music world - what can you do? I'm getting old... Fats Domino was one of the big ones - popular and fantastic, helping establish what rock and roll was, and thrilling in his own right. Here he is on Sullivan....



And Ain't that a Shame:



And this week also saw George Young's demise. Another one who had a neat career on his own, with the Easybeats and Flash N the Pan - though the little brothers rather surpassed him.

Nothing else that bugs me more than working for the rich man.. You bet! Friday on my mind:



And later, Young and Harry Vanda recorded as Flash N the Pan, new wave almost before new wave existed. (Complete with making fun of the younger Young sibs...) Done my time in hell...

Tom Petty

I still try to get in here ad post a music post,if nothing else, every week. Unfortunately they all seem to turn out to be obituaries. This week it is Tom Petty. I like Tom Petty - I remember hearing Breakdown, way back when, and thinking, that's such a cool song... Then Refugee came out, which is when he started to get a lot of airplay - that was all over the radio, Refugee, I'm the Night Watchman - that might have been just about the best music you were likely to hear on the radio in 1979.... And he kept on going, and was always solid, and sometimes fantastic. Sometimes, maybe, in the 80s, he seemed to fade into the background - duets with Stevie Nicks, nice pop songs on the radio... But unlike most 70s rockers trying to be relevant in the 80s, he didn't really embarrass himself. "Don't Come Around Here No More" makes some gestures toward fashion, with its drum machine sounds and Dave Stewart cameos - but it's still a solid Tom Petty song, and mostly he just kept on going, doing what he was good at and letting people come to him.

Breakdown, live in 1978:



Refugee, same show:



don't Come Around here no more, as 80s as he got, I suppose:



Free Fallin'

Hefner after Dark

Just popping in for a bit - another obituary, I suppose - Hugh Hefner, of all people. I had,I fear, forgotten he was alive - well... He has, I suppose, what one might call a mixed legacy. Mainstreaming porn - is that good or bad, actually? He supporting civil rights and LBGT rights. He was a skeevy old man (after a lifetime of skeeviness) - he exploited women all his life. He published great writers and writing. He - he was - all that and more.

I wil leave it to others to figure him out. I will say that when he pushed other people's culture - he didn't mess around. When he ran a TV show, he brought in some really good guests - some of the best late 60s music clips come from that show. Like - Ike and Tina Turner (speaking of mixed legacies...) on Playboy After Dark, doing Sly and the Beatles, CCR and the Stones. (Plus Doug Kershaw in a purple suit? oh, the 60s...)



(Speaking of which - nothing to do with Hef, but here's Kershaw, flying the velvet and fiddling his ass off...

Grant Hart

Though I hesitate to big foot my own post, I have to here. It is Friday, when I usually try to say something about music - and god damn it - there's another obituary to write about. Two actually, though one in front of the mics and one behind....

Grant Hart is dead. He was 56. He had cancer. It's still too soon. I've written about Husker Du - it's probably true that I've listened to them less, thought about them less, than the other bands I loved in the mid-80s - but that is praising with very faint damns, since I go back to all those groups a lot. Replacements and Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers and Feelies and REM - and Husker Du. I could praise them with faint damn by saying they were the third best band out of Minneapolis in the 80s - you know, after Prince and the Replacements.

That's trivia, I guess. I sure liked Husker Du. I started buying their records when they came out; a friend of mine who knew them gave me a tape of a bunch of their early stuff, singles, maybe, pus Metal Circus, and I gave that, along with tapes of some of their newer records, to another friend, and we wore them out (we wore out a lot of tapes), driving around the South Shore. (That reminds me - he bought New Day Rising on his own, maybe because I hadn't bought it yet...) So yeah.

I have to admit as well, I always liked Hart more than Mould. He was a better singer, and he had a better way with melodies - and, I think, usually a better way with words, though both of them seemed to be slipping by the end... Mould talked about how much he loved the Beatles, but Hart's songs were the ones that sounded like the Beatles - at least like the early, direct, Beatles impersonators, like Badfinger and ELO. (Not coincidentally, the guy who kept their tapes in his car was a huge ELO fan; and I have always adored Badfinger. Everyone loves the Beatles, obviously.) So - all right. A sad day.

The other obituary is for Paul Hamann - who, following his father Ken Hamann, was a major studio force for bands like Pere Ubu - and thus, another rather important person in my world.

So: here's Hart solo, singing So Far From Heaven, from his recent Paradise Lost album:



And here he is with Husker Du in full flight, doing Books About UFOs:



And Hart solo, singing one of those magnificent ballads from Candy Apple Gray:



And here is a Pere Ubu video for We Have the Technology, produced by produced by Paul Hamann:

Yachts and Krauts and Rocks

Hello again, another Friday - and, well - another bunch of obituaries? Yeah, that's the way it goes when you start getting old. Your heroes - etc.

So - I have some actual substance coming to this humble blog soon, so I won't make this one all that long. Just check in to say goodbye to Walter Becker and Holger Czukay. Representing a couple different angles on the rock/jazz intersection, but a fine one. These are two bands I should have put in my Band of the Month series - Can is hard to fit, because they are hard to fit to that 10 favorite songs format - they are an album band, and their songs are themselves long, complicated things - they don't fit the conceit so swell. Steely Dan - is more a matter of being one of those bands like Dylan or Bowie - bands you heard all your life on the radio, so maybe didn't by as many records by; bands I took a bit for granted when I was younger, and liked more and more as I went along. Now, to write about them, I feel like I need to dig into the rest fo their catalogue, move past the hits. Not that the hits ever stop.

All right - here's the Dan, with Becker doing a long ramble in the middle of Hey Nineteen:



And live on Letterman, doing Josie - with some tasteful guitar work from Becker in the middle..



And - since I have some oddball Can stuff below - here's the Dan on American Bandstand, miming to My Old School. Fagan and Skunk Baxter are hamming it up, but Becker seems unimpressed:



And also passing this week, Holger Czukay - the second member of Can to die this year, after Jackie Leibzeit. Start with something quirky - Cool in the Pool, by himself:



And - disco era Can - miming, too, if I am not mistaken... a, uh.... something...



I have to get closer to the roots for this - here's Mother Sky:

Madness and Beauty

Another Friday, another week for the ages, huh? Trump manages to top himself, threatening North Korea with "fire and fury" bringing back happy memories of the Reagan era, and the real possibility of nuclear holocaust. Granted, North Korea may or may not be able to do the United States a lot of harm in such an exchange - but that is no comfort to South Korea and Japan, and if we did launch an unprovoked attack, successful or not, that is the ruin of the United States. Should be. It is a minor comfort that Trump is such a blowhard and habitual liar that nothing is likely to come of it - but he is fool enough to try it.... Anyway, for desert, he thanks Russia for expelling American diplomats, so he can save payroll. Quality guy, Trump!

In the real world, more bad news for entertainers. Last week, Sam Shepherd, Jeanne Moreau and June Foray died - this week, Glen Campbell. One of those figures who rested in the back of the culture back when I was young, always there, popping up on TV, on the radio, always there, but never quite in the foreground. You get too used to them, start to lump them in with the real fly by night types.... Though I don't know, I remember always liking Campbell, always happy to hear his songs come on the radio, willing to sing along. I still know most of the words to Rhinestone Cowboy. Going back and listening now, yeah - he was the real deal. And so: here's Rhinestone Cowboy, live on Midnight Special:



Wichita Lineman:



Gentle on My Mind, with a neat guitar solo; he has a way of shifting from country to jazz and back in these guitar breaks - very nice:



And for purer instrumental glory, here's a duet with Roy Clark:

Stars, No Stars

Happy Friday, if happy is what it is. It has turned hot, even here in the vacation state - making it a challenge to find ways of getting around the heat. I stick to my chair - it is warm. There is respite here, though, it ids always cool by the river...



I should, coming in here once a week, manage to find something to say about the world. Donald Trump is still president, though still a fool; Republican health care savagery is on hold, though it's hard to get rid of it; John McCain is gravely ill, leading to a certain amount of hand wringing, at least on left - he voted against us, he got a free pass sometimes for talking like he might vote differently, but he never did - but you still had to respect the man. I certainly suspect that if he'd managed to win the residency in 2000, we'd be a lot better off... I hope he recovers, as a person, and really - if all Republicans were John McCain, we'd be a lot better off. It is a luxury to have opponents you can respect - who can respect Donald Trump? What kind of monster would respect Donald Trump?

On the other hand, McCain did elevate Sarah Palin to prominence, and that is part of why we have the scum we have now in Washington, so... I've never quite been able to shake the conviction McCain did that to make sure he'd lose in 08 - that's a mighty price to pay for getting Obama elected though.

Enough politics. I could note the passing of another rock star, Chester Bennington or Linkin Park - however, the less said the better, lest I bring up my opinion of Linkin Park. Its too bad about him, though. All musicians are, in fact, heroes, as musicians - I don't have to be a fan to respect them, and mourn their passing. Though I'm not posting any Linkin Park at this blog...

What else? TV countdown at WITD, but I hope you know that my now. My parts of that are still a ways off, though I hope to do some writing on the subject here, too... On that score - TV? I am, for the first time in a long while, watching a TV series in (nearly) real time - Twin Peaks Return, of course. I could be watching Game of Thrones in real time - I have HBO these days, first time in ages (I had it in 2010 just long enough to watch the first season of Treme in real time - that was a promotional offer, so that was all of that.) I did watch 4 seasons of Game of Thrones in a bunch a couple years ago, then read the books - so it might be tempting. But it is on opposite Twin Peaks: it is incomprehensible to me why someone would watch GOT over Twin Peaks. (Obviously, in this day and age, you DVR both - it comes down to which you watch first.) Maybe it isn't incomprehensible - GOT is a fine show (well - the first 4 seasons were - the 5th sounded like it jumped the shark pretty badly; even though I hadn't read the books when it came out, it sounded as though the show went completely off the rails that season. It sounded like a violation of the books - and of the show that I had seen to that point, since the show still felt like it matched the books, more or less. Maybe - through 3 seasons anyway. That is a topic for another day.) But even at its best, compared to Twin Peaks - it feels like, I don't know - comparing Lord of the Rings to Ulysses. For all of Tolkien's powers, it shrivels to nothing beside Joyce.

I know that's a minority opinion, all of it - that Twin Peaks is that much better than Game of Thrones - that Joyce is that much better (and worthy of your time) than Tolkien - and, probably most of all, that Joyce is that much more enjoyable than Tolkien (though that is true: Ulysses is a joy to read; LOTR is a chore. The Hobbit or the Silmarillion, I can make a case for - but reading the Lord of the Rings would be work, and I'm not going to do it. This is as a source of pleasure alone - never mind quality...) A minority opinion, though getting back to the TV shows - one that might mark certain boundaries. Twin Peaks is probably the cinephiles' choice - it certainly seems that way on Twitter. It's a show for movie lovers - though probably a minority form of movie lover - cinephiles - taken in all its connotations... The difference tends to bring out the way TV and films are different - GOT is TV, all the way - and TV is far more literary than film. That is one of its strengths - it can tel different kinds of stories, differently - long, complex stories, with complicated relationships among characters, with the stories, relationships and everything else made explicit, explored - words are powerful, and TV allows for words to be used differently than film, as such... This version of Twin Peaks puts it all in the images and sounds, the editing, the flow of information - a film; if you were making literary comparisons, more like a poem than prose....

That's part of it, though not all. It is also simply true that Twin Peaks is better than Game of Thrones - the way Ulysses is better than Lord of the Rings. (Or A Song of Ice and Fire, for that matter.) It's art - or better art; it beats it at its own game. And to be honest, some of that is due to the fact that TwinPeaks - at least this version of Twin Peaks - is completely in the care of David Lynch. I am very fond of David Lynch - in ways I can sometimes articulate and sometimes not. I'm not quite sure I can articulate why Twin Peaks The Return is so good, yet - but it is, and it is something I can't miss.