And here we are. Happy New Year! No one is going to miss 2021 - the only thing it had going for it was not being 2020. But it rivals 2020. People kept dying, they kept dying unnecessarily, as vaccines came out and big chunks of the country refused to get them, and prominent political and media figures urged people not to get them, and people kept dying because of it, the disease hangs around and everything remains shitty.
Speaking of things hanging around making the world shitty, Donald Trump, having gotten stomped in the election, tried to overthrow the government. He failed, but he's still walking the world free, to our national shame. He still talks like he is going to try it again, the Republicans are doing all they can to stop enough people from voting to make it so he can win without a coup, though they are all pretty much fine with a coup at this point. The supreme court, a completely illegitimate institution at this point, works on undoing the twentieth century and the Reconstruction amendments. Republicans, in general, have basically adopted Trump's fascism wholesale, running on a constant attack on intellectual freedom and truth. All of which is mostly aimed at running on a platform of putting Black people back in their place. And women, foreigners, gays and anyone else they can find to hate and abuse.
In other words, we suck.
I suppose I can take solace from the economy recovering, though who knows how long that will last with COVID still going strong. I would take more solace if the Democrats were all Democrats. Joe Manchin has decided to singlehandedly betray more or less everything he is supposed to represent - Build Back Better is good for the country, will be good for West Viginia, and is good for the Democratic party - isn't that what a Democratic Senator is supposed to care about? immediate constituents, the country as a whole, and his party? In his case, there is also himself and his donors - he has decided to represent them. Now true - I single out Manchin when the entire Republican party is acting the same way - but they are openly seditious and fascist - they are openly working against the country and their voters. Though to their credit (for what it's worth) they do work for the good (short term anyway) of the Republican Party, which now, is all about power, looting the country, and oppressing Blacks, women, gays, foreigners and so on.
Alas.
Well, I will not belabor politics anymore. How goes it with me? Not great. I suppose things are going along well enough in the general sense - gainful employment that doesn't drive me too crazy, I'm healthy, smart enough to be vaccinated (though not lucky enough to get a booster - I was scheduled for this very day, but the local pharmacy is down a person so closed up at the last minute. Bloody hell.) That all could be worse.
But I have become unspeakably lazy in the last couple years. Just look at the output on this blog! And that reflects general lack of motivation for anything. I don't watch movies anymore, not much anyway. I don't write much, not much of anything. I did Nanowrimo, as usual, and produced almost 70,000 words - though with almost nothing I could imagine being part of an actual novel, in the end. Weird stuff. I used to hope to finally finish something - these days, I hope not to go backwards. And outside of that? I mentioned a couple years ago surfing on YouTube - that's still a thing, but these days, I spend most fo that time scrolling through YouTube looking for something to watch. Sad.
I did knock off a few books last year - most notably autobiographies of Richard Thompson and Will Sergeant - both very fine books by very fine guitar players. I have been worshipping Thompson for 30 odd years; I was reminded this year how much I liked Echo and the Bunnymen back in the 80s, and spent a lot of time this year listening to them. This happened with the Gang of Four a while back - I heard them, remembered how much I liked them for a while, and went back and dove in and have worshipped them since. The bunnymen have gotten the same treatment this year. Don't ask me why it took so long.
All of which does bring up one thing that went a bit better this year: I did listen to a lot more music than I have in a while. I tend to latch on to things - art forms - movies or music or books, or other things, like different sports or games or what have you - and ride them hard for a few years, then - stop. I stopped obsessing about music a while back, after obsessing about it hard for a long time. Strange. This year? I didn't pay m,uch attention to anything contemporary - but I paid attention to some old stuff. The last couple years, really. I will have to write about that some day. This year? Echo and the Bunnymen, the Kinks and Brian Jonestown Massacre got the weight of my attention. A lot of it from YouTube, though I bought records, and listened to them. Interesting. Maybe I will write about it again.
Anyway - there you have it. Something to mark the change of the calendar. I will even end with a resolution of sorts: I want to post once in a while on here. Something. Something besides obituaries and laments about the end of the republic, I hope. Maybe music.
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:
I haven't updated on November 11 in a couple years. The last time was the end of the war itself, ion fact, two years ago. I know I have not been blogging much lately. And the war is over.
I have been watching The Great War on youtube lately - a neat historical channel, hosted by Indie Neidell originally, that followed the war week by week, 100 years after the fact. I wish I had found that sooner, though I was doing a lot of reading, and taking actual classes, back when it started. Still - good stuff, and so is the World War Two channel Neidell hosts now.
Meanwhile, the word we live in is interesting enough. 100 years ago, the Spanish Flu was winding down, having killed millions, more than the whole war did. In 2020, COVID 19 is in full force still, killing 230,000 or more Americans already, many many more throughout the world, and still going strong. And the fool in the White house who has made this worse is still there -
We did, in fact, vote his sorry ass out last week. Everything went about according to expectations - lots of votes cast, lots of absentee votes cast, Democrats much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, so the election night results looked grim. But the places counting absentee ballots after the in person ballots saw Biden's numbers just rise and rise and rise, and by the time they were done, he had taken most co the contested states - Pennsylvania, Georgia, as well as Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nebraska, by fairly healthy margins. Biden took the popular vote by a very healthy margin. Basically, it was a butt kicking.
But weepy Donnie is still hanging on, raving about election fraud, promising to fight it in the courts, and sabotaging everything he can reach rather than admit the obvious. This is what you get when someone fails at everything they touch and no one calls them on it. It is also what you get when you have a fascist in the white house, supported by a party that knows it can't win elections if people vote. They have to steal the election, they sure as hell can't win it. The Republicans have won one National election since 1988. They have to commit to minority rule.
So here we are. Self-imposed chaos here in the USA. Trump doing his best John Breckinridge - if he can't win the vote, he'll commit treason. I don't know how this gets that far, of course. Trump is terrible at it, his allies are terrible at it - there is no way for him to actually win the election, and I doubt anyone will have the stomach to turn to arms to overturn it. But it's ugly, none the less.
All right. End with the Great War again. This time, Metallica's One, a song, from a book and movie about the war, about all wars - and about the blacklist, while we're at it. Dalton Trumbo writing as much about his own time being silence as about the results of the war, I think. A good way to remember this remembrance day.
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.
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.
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...
I can't say I will miss this last one. Personally, it was not as bad as the year before - 2016 felt like hell on earth. But objectively - 2017 was a shit show. Trump as president was as bad as anyone could ask, and though his incompetence tended to suppress the enactment of his bad ideas, the year ended with one of the worst ideas - that tax cut - going through. I don't know how long it will take for that thing to wreck the economy - but if it isn't quickly undone, it will. But on the bright side, we haven't had a nuclear war - yay!
But along side Trump, we've had mass shootings; we've had terrorism mostly from the right, but a few from foreign agents. (The left mostly behaves itself, though - as usual.) The right - the hard right, the racist right - has been out in force all year,and show no signs of going anywhere. Why should they? Trump is a fascist, and has spent most of the year testing how far he can push his authoritarianism, racism, and so on - his followers gleefully competing with him in their own fascist ravings. As policy, it is mostly aimed at immigrants - though the continual attacks on the media, education, political protests and other activism, voting, could always bear fruit.
It is easy to be depressed. But there are reasons for hope. The one tool we have to make things better is the vote (well - there are lots of tools, but that is the one that had direct and immediate consequences.) And this year, the Democrats have tended to smoke the Republicans at the ballot box. The most extreme instance being the election of Doug Jones overRoy Moore in Alabama - yes, the GOP had to run a child molesting fascist nutcase to lose, but they did lose. And though Republicans have won a lot of special elections this year too, they have done so in hard-right districts, and the Democrats have run them very close. In Montana, in Georgia - if this continues, it bodes well. The Democrats have to overcome a massive structural disadvantage to win the house - a strange thing, but gerrymandering and other oddball vote distributions makes that body remarkably undemocratic - but they might be able to do it. Might have to win 5 million or so more votes to break even in the house - but that has happened before and might again.
Politics: I have written more about politics than anything else here,this year,and more than I have in a long time - politics is maddening these days,but it's also vital. It feels like life or death for the republic, sometimes. And it is hard to be optimistic - the last two years haven't just shown that white resentment is hanging on in the country, and can still hold a great deal of power; it's also shown that the system itself doesn't work. The constitution itself at its worst is explicitly racist (most of that is gone, thankfully, but the Electoral college remains), and often practically racist (the senate, by helping exaggerate rural votes is practoically racist, at this point in history at least) - but the bigger problem is that the system, with its checks and balances and diffusion of power gives overwhelming power to minority groups, if they are willing to use it. The American system depends on the good faith of all participants: and the Republicans are not operating in good faith. There is nothing to force them to operate in good faith - they took control of the courts,in an act of shocking bad faith - so there is no counter to any ofthis except the vote,and the system currently requires a massive landslide toward the Democrats to overcome the system.Depressing.
But not hopeless. Or - put plainly - in politics, you can't afford to take things for granted,good or bad, because, in the end, what you do determines what politics is. So I guess, keep at it. Vote, argue, work - what else is there to do?
I have to write something about something else. Alright. This was a momentous year - I moved, which has changed my movie watching options for the worst - I compensated with a fair amount of TV, or at least, with some TV - whole first run TV shows, watched first to last! Ken Burns' on Vietnam; and of course Twin Peaks - the latter of which was more or less awe inspiring and brilliant - obviously better than anything else I saw this year, since I barely saw anything else - but as good as anything I've seen on a screen in years. I also watched a good deal of old TV this year,for the TV Countdown at Wonders in the Dark (including the coming Part 2) - but not enough movies.
And so? I suppose the new year is a time for resolutions - and - well: I wish I had some. Or rather, I wish I had some I felt sure of following through on. But I guess the new year is the time for promises, listing the things you hope you do or will regret not doing - I can play that game. So:
1) I hope to post here again, more than once a week (though I suppose that should really be, at least once a week, as I have fallen well short of that unimpressive standard). I know, I know, blogs are old hat - but I am old hat, so, I would rather write for this than for twitter or something like that. Now - I fear if I deliver on this resolution, it will bring a lot of politics - but that is the world we live in, so...
2) I hope I can get back to a more regular film watching regime. Might not be possible to do my habitual 2 new films a week, plus 2-3 older films somewhere - but I need to get in the habit again of watching films. Probably will - I don't lose that habit for long, usually.
3) I hope I write about films, and other subjects - books, TV, music - here - once in a while. It has been a while since I have made a habit of writing longish posts about arts here, and I don't know if that habit will come back (without external stimulus - I get work done for other people, when I can...)
4) I will try to acknowledge the fact that this is 2018. the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, and all the stuff that went on around it - so some Great War blogging might be in order. I hope. Reconstruction blogging, too,if I can - 150 years since 1868 - a vital part of the country's history....
5) Finally, a lot of this depends on my ability to write, in general. f that goes well, then, some of it should end up here.
And so - that's enough for now. Happy New Year!
(And here's a holy shit I'm old moment for you: U2, 35 years ago:)
Well,December 8 - one of those days that the coincidences of bad things sometimes seems too much. 36 years ago, some asshole shot John Lennon in cold blood on the streets of New York; 13 years ago, some asshole shot Dimebag Darrel, guitarist for Pantera, in cold blood on stage in Ohio. I am tempted to make a political remark - what possesses this country not to pass better anti-gun laws? Especially now, when we have routine incidents of mass killings - but tat doesn't seem to have helped. Celebrities dying didn't change gun laws; 27 people shot in a church doesn't change gun laws... We have a problem.
But I'm not going to be able to change it by complaining. Instead - here's Pantera and Dirty Mac, showing what Dimebag and Winston were all about.
I've already managed my World War I post this week, getting the Russians in there along with Third Ypres. But today is Armistice Day and it is good to remember it, and to remember why this day was remembered as a day to bring abut the end of war. The horrors of Passchendaele sum up the horrors of WWI quite succinctly, and those horrors are a distillation of the horrors of all wars. We should keep it in mind, and we should try to stop this stuff from happening.
Here is a documentary about the battle of Passchendaele:
Hello again, Friday. Nice to see that the World Series turned out to be as entertaining as you could hope. I wish they could have finished some of those games a bit quicker - how I long for the days of dueling 7 inning starters! I think the Dodgers might have hurt themselves, over the series - taking out starters before they were really starting to lose meant they wee using most of their pen almost every single day. It started to show. The Astros had some of the same problem, but got around them by putting starters in to relieve, and letting them go for 3 or 4 innings. (Something of a trend: starters pitching better in relief than as starters - from the Red Sox, getting great outings from Price and Sale, to several Astros, to Kershaw and Wood when it was all too late for the Dodgers...) Anyway. This was a good one.
And now? I've been chipping away at Ken Burns' Vietnam war series - almost too depressing to watch more than an episode a week... Interesting to be reminded that yesterday, 11/2, was the 49th anniversary of the day Saigon pulled out of the Paris peace talks at the urging of Tricky Dick and company. 49 years since Nixon committed treason to get elected president. Meanwhile, every day in the news, we're reminded it's been a good deal less than 49 years since Trump committed treason to get elected... That and watching the Democrats continue to try to tear themselves apart - is it 1968? It is horrible watching Democrats continue to try to undo the results of last year's primaries, while the Republicans are trying to undo the results of the Civil War...
But that is all the politics I can stand for today.
So - Friday - some music. Maybe 1968, huh? Kind of cool to hear the Velvet Underground in the middle of the 1968 episode of the Vietnam War - this one, in fact,shown here with some nifty animations:
Meanwhile the Beatles:
And the Stones, taking on the political world of the time:
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...
I want to check in briefly, long enough to say something about baseball, which seems to be approaching the eldritch apocalypse of a Yankees Dodgers world series. I don't want to be too quick to write of the Astros - they can win two in a row from the Yanks if they have to - but...
I dread Yankees and Dodgers in the series. The AND is important - I don't particularly dread either the Yankees or the Dodgers. They are, to be sure, franchises I loathe (loyal New Englander that I am), but the Dodgers have long been an afterthought, almost enough to make you feel sorry for them. One never feels sorry for the Yankees of course... And more than that, their current collection of players are both rather likable. It's hard not to like Aaron Judge or Cody Bellinger, Corey Seager and Gary Sanchez - as a pure, neutral baseball fan. in that sense, it's been hard to find teams to hate int his post-season: almost all of them are young, up and coming squads - at least full of young, exciting players - even teams that got there by buying up stars mix it with their own good young players - there aren't any teams to cheer against, as collections of ball players. Just those franchises, and even that is mostly the combination - Yankees vs Cubs or Nats would not have been terrible. Someone to cheer for, someone to here against, and a villain who, if they win, would be rather entertaining doing it. Same with the Dodgers, against any of the AL teams besides the Yanks.
But this combo: ugh. So go Justin Verlander! put the in their place! win two ore, Astros, and save us the indignity of 1977 reborn!
Though 1977 was a way better year than 2017 on principal, so....
Anyway on a very different subject - where I was last week: Feelies, still at it after 40 odd years. Not the first time I've seen them...
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:
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...
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:
This is very near and dear to my heart. For my money, Monty Python's Flying Circus is the best show ever on television.
What was it? A sketch comedy show, made by a group of writers and performers (and a doctor) from Cambridge and Oxford, plus an American animator, aired at the end of the 1960s and the early 70s on BBC; some of it was recorded in front of a studio audience, but this was augmented with material shot outside the studio, as well as animation. It ran 3 1/2 years, 45 episodes in total. After it ended, the troop continued to work, together and separately; they made a compilation film from reshot versions of some of their best sketches, a way to distribute the material in those pre-video tape days (and before the show went into syndication, in the US at least); a couple years later, they made an original film, a spoof of King Arthur tales (and Eisenstein), that became much more of a success. Somewhere in here, the show was picked up by PBS in the United States, and soon became a hit, which encouraged PBS to start picking up other British comedy shows. They also made records, right from the start, and went on to make more films, to perform live and so on, generating a fair amount of product. However these things were received when they were made, by the mid-70s they were part of the culture, and easy to find - on radio, syndication, by word of mouth. By the end of the decade, and into the 80s, Monty Python had sunk very deep roots in youth culture, here in the USA at least. For me and most of my pals, anyway: you walked around high school and college quoting them and stealing their jokes, you watched the reruns on PBS and you scrounged up the VHS of the Holy Grail and watched that, over and over and over, you wore it out, you bought the records and listened to them, you sang the songs (sit on my face and let my lips embrace you!), you learned the names of philosophers and cheeses and many, many synonyms for death, you heard of things like Watney's Red Barrel and Biggles and Algy that might not otherwise have jumped the pond, you made jokes about your idiom, you learned what litotes was, you picked up many excellent insults (sniveling little rat faced git), and years later, you saw Godard's Weekend and recognized half a dozen Monty Python bits. Well, I did.
That kind of adoration doesn't always hold up. Things get into the culture (some part of the culture, large, small, who cares), they become cults of a kind. And later? Some of them you outgrow; some stay the way they started out - shared jokes and references and the shared memories they can point to. These things can be fun, smart, perfectly good works of art or entertainment - but they never really go beyond that; their quality never quite surpasses the joy of sharing a fun secret with people. I've felt that way with, oh - watching Star Blazers with the physics majors back in college; or with a few films - Better off Dead or Reanimator and From Beyond or watching early Beavis and Butthead or South Park. But then there are things, things that start the same way, as a shared reference among your friends, that you look at later, or over time, and realize they are better than your love of them. They are just as good from a distance as up close. They are as intellectually stimulating as they are amusing. You realize, this thing is great. I've seen films make that move, for me, and in the culture - The Big Lebowski might be the best example, which went from being dismissed, to become a cult favorite, to being seen as something like a masterpiece. (That's my trajectory for the film, and not just mine I think.) Monty Python started at that cult favorite stage for me, but every time I come back to it, the deeper, smarter, more comprehensively brilliant it becomes.
It is the best. But what makes it the best? I think to answer that, we must go to the tape:
(Makes you wonder, by the way - I wonder where the Semi-final of Part 3 of Kierkegard's Journals, starring Richard Chamberlain, Peggy Mount and Billy Bremner would come in this poll?)
Let's start with the obvious - it is very funny, as funny as anything on TV. That is especially true of its peaks - The Piranha Brothers, the Dead Parrot Sketch, the Upper Class Twit of the Year, the Ministry of Silly Walks - any of those are as good as any 5 or 10 minutes of television anywhere. But it is also true that over 45 episodes, with half a dozen skits a show, and maybe another half dozen bits every week, it is hard to maintain the high points. There are bad skits, there are bad episodes - but not a lot, and "bad" is definitely relative. There is almost always something to hold on to - a turn of phrase, a visual gag, a half-serious idea - to make everything at least a bit interesting. And those peaks are very high peaks. Taken just as comedy; and it is remarkable what a range of comic styles it offered. Over-educated verbal play to be sure, but also plenty of physical comedy, plenty of satire - political, social, cultural, parody and other cultural references, plenty of low humor - bawdiness, toilet humor, it is irreverent, scatological, sometimes very nasty (cannibalism jokes abound), and often deliberately, and knowingly, offensive. Racial, ethnic, gender stereotypes abound, sometimes rather nasty ones. But part of what makes it so good is that all these comic modes get mixed up relentlessly - The Royal Philharmonic Goes to the Bathroom - and never seem to stand still. What exactly is being made fun of doesn't stay the same very long - usually because everything is being made fun of at once.
All that, I suppose, is what might make it the best comedy ever aired on television; there's more, and that's what makes it the best show. It's not just how funny Luigi Vercotte describing Doug Piranha's way with words is - it's that it is almost beautiful. The words themselves, in their best verbal sketches, are beautiful, as words, as performances. The way Palin lists off Doug's literary tropes; the way Cleese declares that parrot dead; the way Palin says of the space alien out to win Wimbledon, "he wasna so much a man as a blancmange!" - the images are absurd, and the words flow. And the ideas behind the jokes swerve and twist, shift registers, like the way the satire shifts from Dinsdale's ultraviolence to Doug's sarcasm, or the way the mostly verbal comedy of the Dead Parrot sketch turns into something bit different when Cleese walks into what is supposed to be different pet shop, to see the same guy behind the counter, the same cage on the floor. Along with everything else going on in the sketch, the show has just made a joke about generic props on TV - but here, Cleese's character notices, is startled by it - for him, the world is changing shape. Everything has shifted a bit further into surrealism, beyond the verbal absurdity, to a surreal world. Only to completely break the illusion, with Cleese stepping out of character and Chapman coming in to break it up before it gets any sillier. That fluidity is fundamental to the show , it;s always there. The comedy shifts registers, sketches break in the middle, turn into something else, characters in one walk off into another, the world changes around them. Most episodes maintain this kind of protean world - there can be a kind of continuity, but it's continuity of jokes, or words, or performers, who find the world swirling around them like they were Buster Keaton in the Playhouse, or agent Cooper at the end of Twin Peaks.
(Speaking of fluidity - look how that clip starts with comedy about language, shifts to satire about greedy doctors, then to film parody, and jokes about TV interviews, then a joke about adaptation - spinning always everywhere at once.)
There is always philosophy running just under the comedy in Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's there in the show's consistent deconstruction of comedy - explaining their jokes, dropping (or mocking) their punchlines, showing the process of writing the joke, or introducing the writer ("Eric wrote a sketch"), or making up a a whole sequence out of writing a joke (The Funniest Joke in the World.) Even more, though, it's in the linguistics of the show - the magnificent verbal comedy, and all the verbal play, the puns and anagrams, the love of names, titles, phrases, words, all the jokes about words, all the jokes about figures of speech (it's a pun! no, not a pun, what you do call it when it's the same backwards as forwards?), all the sketches that hinge on some kind of linguistic problem. TV presenters indicating pauses and punctuations with gestures; semaphore versions of Wuthering Heights; a talk show host making his speech first in a normal voice, then in a high pitched comic whine; policemen who can only hear you when you speak in a certain register; people who only speak the beginnings, middles or ends of words; people who multiply every number by 10; people who speak differently in alternating sentences - this list could go on a while. But it adds up - the use of language (use and abuse) is always there, thematically. It's funny - but it's informative, too - it is philosophy; some sketches come close to being as much concrete enactments of philosophical (or linguistic) problems as Dekalog is. (Though here the philosopher is more likely to be Wittgenstein.)
Let's take the poet McTeagle:
There's a good deal of fun being had here with the pretensions of modern art; there's a joke on the idea that calling something art makes it art. But then again - Ewan McTeagle's "poems" are not that far from being poetry after all. Note their economy, their rhythms, their directness: "If you could see your way to lending me sixpence. I could at least buy a newspaper. That's not much to ask anyone." The Pythons are poking fun at modern poetry, maybe at William Carlos Williams ("I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox..."), but they're doing it by writing lines that get most of what they need to have to be poetry. They almost sound right, even if the material is a joke. And the sketch is packed with jokes - making jokes about Scotsmen, mocking pretentious critics, and of course parodying a real historical figure, the poet William McGonagall. And that joke has some layers to it: McTeagle's joke poems are probably genuinely better poetry than McGonagall's was. (Especially if you like modern poetry.) But the joke shifts again - it might start by taking the piss (from McGonagall, maybe the likes of Williams, definitely the critics it is mocking), but it gets harder as you go to dismiss the idea behind it - if you say you are making art, that's art. Or maybe, the admiration in the sheer bloody mindedness it takes to persist for someone as bad as McGonagall. And there is no getting around the fact that, whatever these poems are as poetry, they are hilarious as comedy - and as verbal comedy. And that good verbal comedy is not far from being poetry itself. I offer as evidence:
A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!
It's the old stockbroker syndrome, the suburban fin de siecle ennui, angst, weltschmertz, call it what you will.
Oh, we use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and sealed in a succulent, Swiss, quintuple-smooth, treble-milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.
Someone whose boots I would gladly lick clean until holes wore through my tongue, a man who is so totally and utterly wonderful, that I would rather be sealed in a pit of my own filth, than dare tread on the same stage with him. Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparably superior human being, Harry Fink!
He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.
I'll do what I like, because I'm six foot five and I eat punks like you for breakfast.
Oh, I've had such a morning in the High Court. I could stamp my little feet the way those QC's carry on.
Listen, I gotta fight the lion. That's what that guy Scott's all about. I know. I've studied him already.
Well there are three things we can do with your mother. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her.
Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
I wandered lonely as a crab.
Look how serious I've gotten.
I love how the show flows, all those changing registers of comedy, its all-consuming appetite for culture - pop culture, high and low culture, anything, everything. I love its parodies, and how easily it switches from making fun of a pretentious TV talk show to Mummy references, to a ridiculous musical interlude, to chicken fighting archeologists. I can't make anything like a list of the cultural references in the show - but I can suggest the range. Art films (Pasolini, Godard, Visconte), Hollywood prestige films (Hitchcock, Peckinpaugh), Hollywood epics (David O Selzer! 20th Century Vole!), B movies (monster films and westerns and noir and spy pictures etc), even underground films (parodies of stag films and the like) - they hit everything. Usually in a way that is both very funny in itself, and makes you want to go watch a low budget Mummy picture, or something with Rock Tree and Doris Dog. They get the same range in literary references (the poet McGonagall to Shakespeare's Gay Boys in Bondage - wait: how many types of literature is that parodying at once?), art references, jokes about history, the law, politics, sports - anything. (Anything goes in, anything comes out - fish, bananas, old pyjamas, mutton, beef and trout.) (Thus mocking Cole Porter, World War II documentaries, censorship, and making a modestly serious anti-war statement.) (Etc.)
Finally, let me talk about the men who made this show. It's rather unique in being almost completely self-contained: the 6 principals wrote and performed it, supported by a very solid crew, including some excellent supporting actors. (Carol Cleveland and Connie Booth, the Fred Tomlinson singers, in particular.) The fact that they wrote and played all of it gives it a lot of the unity it has: its fascination with language, history, films, art, literature, its surreal, absurdist tone, all remain through the series, and come up immediately in the work the members of the troop did later. They have thrived afterwards - John Cleese maybe the most, as writer and performer - though Eric Idle and Michael Palin had long, interesting careers as actors, and Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam both turned to filmmaking. Gilliam's work on the show contains a lot of the things I've been harping on about - most of the imagery is found imagery, old magazines, cartoons, high and low art, as well as his own drawings, all of them combined to create worlds that are capable of anything. Nothing in fixed - everything can turn into anything. He's followed those ideas through his film career. Graham Chapman might have had the most disappointing post-Python career, struggling with alcoholism and never living up to his promise as an actor. He was good - maybe better out of the sketch comedy of the show - Arthur and Brian are almost well realized characters in the films. He didn't have Cleese's comic virtuosity, or Palin's versatility, or Idle's ability to find a Type he could embody. (No one does smarm better than Eric Idle: another word I learned from the Pythons, by the way.) He was always a fine part of the ensemble, but only really seemed to emerge as an individual performer in those later films - especially Life of Brian, where he excels.
In any case, the fact that the 6 of them made the show - wrote it and played most of it and maintained significant control of it, is surely how it stayed as good as it did. It gave it the unity it had - and it meant that it was easier for them to stop, when they started to run out of ideas.
So to finish this off - I am going to make two lists. First - my favorite sketches - then, my favorite episodes. Because it's not enough just to run yourself over in a car - you have to get through the course and shoot yourself, to become twit of the year! Best sketches:
1. Piranha brothers (Season 2, Episode 1)
2. Upperclass Twit of the year (1.12)
3. Dead parrot (1.8)
4. Science fiction sketch (Scotsmen and a Blancmange at Wimbledon) (1.7)
5. The Ministry of Silly Walks (2.1)
6. Election Night Special (the very silly party seems to have risen quite far since those days) (2.6)
7. The Argument clinic (3.3)
8. Scott of the Antarctic (2.10)
9. Archeology Today (2.8)
10. Lifeboat (How long is it? that's a rather personal question!) (2.13)
And episodes: the show tends to be thought of first through its skits rather than the episodes - but some of them are quite strong. There are a few with complete narratives (the Cycling Tour, in particular), and others where one or two sketches take up the whole show. Those, I admit, tend to be the ones near the top.
1. Dinsdale (2.1) - silly walks and the Piranha brothers, in the same show?
2. Spanish Inquisition (2.2) - Spanish inquisition and courtroom charades, as well as those semaphore classics
3. Man's crisis of identity in the latter half of the twentieth century (1.5) - confuse a cat, police raids, a nightmare job interview - this is the 5th episode of the show, and probably the first great episode. They started slowly, started to get up to speed around the 3rd and 4th episode (Idle's Nudge, Nudge sketch is in episode 3) - but this one is the one that really nails what the show can be.
4. You’re no fun anymore (1.7) - This one has the science fiction sketch, scotsmen, tennis and a blancmange.
5. Cycling Tour (3.8) - a complete narrative, in which Mr Pither attempts a tour of Devon and Cornwall - only to rescue Clodagh Rogers who turns into Trotsky, le revolutionaire, then Eartha Kitt....
6. Royal Episode 13 (2.13) - this has some fine linguistic games (men who only speak the beginning, middle or ends of words), historical jokes (13 reasons why Henry III was a bad king), and then the lifeboat and undertaker cannibalism sketches, just in time for the Queen to tune in...
7. Scott of the Antarctic (2.10) - “I played Mrs. Jesus Christ in a geological siscline!”
8. The Naked ant (1.12) - this one has Mr Hilter in Mineshead, the upperclass twits, etc.
9. Archeology Today (2.8) - has archeology today, of course, but also the judges, Mr. and Mrs. Git, hunting mosquitoes with a bazooka, and so on.
10. The Ant, an Introduction (1.9) - llamas, lumberjacks, hunting films, and a quiet evening at home ruined by unwanted guests - "what's brown and sounds like a bell?"... Though as it should be, the scatology gives way to a cheerful Christmas carol as the credits roll - "Ding Dong Merrily on High," obviously, after that bell joke...
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:
Been a couple weeks since I managed to post - has anything happened in the world? Has Donald Trump done anything stupid?
Yeah. I was away all last week, doing work, and didn't really get to opine on the disaster in Charlottesville, or the "president's" "response" - or the follow up "free speech" rally in Boston last weekend. At least not here. Got into another argument on Facebook with a crazy cousin and his fascist pal, but that doesn't really count - that's just venting. As of today, I suppose, the world has moved on - what happened a week or two ago is ancient history, something to be deleted from history books in Texas 50 years from now - but I don't think I will move on just yet.
Start at the end: let me do something that pains me, link to Andrew Sullivan: The Boston Rally Exposed the Left’s Intolerance of Free Speech. I see quite a bit of this around - mild (or strong) lamentations about the left silencing speech. Now - you can take this a couple ways. The first is simple - the Boston rally came a week after the Charlottesville rally, a week after a white supremacist murdered a woman (while trying to murder more) - people can be forgiven for thinking the Boston rally was going to be a repeat of Charlottesville, if the right wingers got their way. You can be forgiven for thinking this rally was an excuse to incite violence.
But there is an even simpler answer to disingenuous commentators like Sullivan: they held a free speech rally in Boston and 40,000 people showed up to practice free speech. Maybe if one side or the other had turned violent, you might have a case - but that didn't happen. You didn't have anything like the dipshits with machine guns prowling around Charlottesville - you just had people expressing their views and freely assembling. On both sides, to the rare credit of the right wingers. The only way to cast this as anything but a triumph for the first amendment is to let the right wing protesters define the kind of speech allowed at a free speech rally - let them define free speech as their speech only. The protesters knew better; most people know better. Now this gets to the core of how the right is operating these days: find words Americans value, apply them to yourself, even when you are practicing something else. If you bring a gun to a rally, you are not protecting free speech - and really, looking at their usual causes, it's clear that freedom of speech is only relevant as far as it lets them get away with their fascism, and as a cover for their real purposes. Which, as Charlottesville showed clearly, but most of their actions indicate, is white supremacy.
Which at this point is basically open fascism. They weren't pretending otherwise at Charlottesville, with their nazi armbands and confederate flags - but it's hard to see how Trump's rally in Phoenix is any different. Or his policies - the one thing he has accomplished as president is to get new forms of discrimination made into something like law. The travel ban (and deportation campaign), the ban on trans soldiers in the military - things like that. The Republicans are incompetent governors, but they know how to oppress minorities. And oppressing minorities goes to the heart of what fascism is. And war-mongering - but that might be a post for another day.
There are a lot of posts for other days in my head, I have to say: being the Civi War nerd I am, you would think I have something to say about statues of traitors in the public square! But again - another day...
Today I have to leave us with - more Glen Campbell? With Hurricane Harvey bearing down on the Texas coast, this might be in order. Looks like it's landing a bit south of Houston and Galveston but hurricanes are big evil things, and the whole gulf coast is in danger. Stay safe Texans.
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:
Friday, so I should post something. Spent a busy week, traveling to Vermont, up to Ft Knox and Ellsworth, rummaging around. HAven't gotten into a fight on the internet in a week or so - that has to be worth something. There is nothing really encouraging going on in the world - Trump continues to self-destruct and he and his allies continue to double down on the fascism, riling up the base and all - ugly and depressing. Things look a bit less like the end of the world is at hand this week than last - but it still is going to be a long hard slog to November 2018, or 2020. (Trump's enemies aren't helping - the "left" has to slag the "liberals" and vice versa - god help us all. As long as you vote for the Democrat, I will be happy.)
All right, no more of that today. Instead, here are a couple bridges, crossing the Winooski and the Penobscot rivers.
And here is some music in honor of all this wandering - Hank Snow!
And Ricky Nelson:
And, speaking of bridges - and, well - we're a couple weeks from a dismaying anniversary, aren't we? Take it, Elvis....
