Satyajit Ray
May 2, 1921--April 23, 1992
Tuesday, May 2
The Plural of "Imaginary Anecdote" Is "Op-Ed Piece"
Nicholas Kristof, NY Times. "Opening Classroom Doors", April 30
Yes, it's time for another round of America's Favorite Parlor Amusement, "If We Captured a Terrorist and Had Only Thirty Minutes To Find Out Where He'd Hidden a Nuclear Device, and the Only Way To Get That Information Was To Let Him Sodomize Nick Kristof on Coast-to-Coast Television, Would You..."
Otherwise known as "Gee, I Could Get To Work So Much Faster if I Didn't Have To Stop for All These Red Lights."
Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama. Alas, they would be "unqualified" for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don't have teacher certification. That's an absurd snarl in our education bureaucracy. Let's relax the barriers so people can enter teaching more easily, either right out of college or later as a midcareer switch. Sure, there are lots of other problems in the U.S. education system. But this is one of the easiest to solve.
And one of the most difficult to solve is the Armchair Quarterback problem. Everybody who went to high school in this country seems to think he could run them. All of them.
I don't know about New York, but in Indiana, which has one of the stricter codes in the country (teachers are not supposed to teach outside their areas of accreditation, for example), Colin and Meryl (she's married to a Westside boy, btw, Steve Gummer) would be welcome to apply for teaching jobs. They could get provisional licenses for a year, after which they'd have to work on gaining full accreditation, and they'd have to comply with the new NCLB-era requirements.
So like many another "snarl in our bureaucracy" so beloved of sidewalk educational reformers, this one is caused, at least in part, by sidewalk educational reformers.
And, of course, like many another punditological magic solution, this one's uniformed (you'd think Kristof, who can galavant around the globe for a story, could have dropped in on at least one public school and checked his facts, huh?). Public school teachers do a hell of a lot more than teach a particular subject.
Let's ask what we might want a public school teacher to do besides teaching a specialty. Identify learning, developmental, and emotional disabilities? Monitor medications? Integrate students with learning disabilities into regular classes? Watch for signs of sexual and physical abuse? Mediate a wide-range of interpersonal problems among young people with varying ethnic, socio-economic, and religious backgrounds? Deal with physical altercations and anger management among hormonally-crazed adolescents? Get to know students and their families, alerting social workers and social service organizations about potential problems? Make college recommendations and give career-path advice to dozens of young people each year?
Meryl Streep been picking this stuff up in her trailer between takes?
One reason to act is that the U.S. faces a growing shortage of teachers. Just to keep student-teacher ratios where they are now, we need a 35 percent increase in the number of people entering teaching.
Maybe we could offer higher pay if we weren't spending $150 billion a year on Nick Kristof-approved military adventures. I'm just spitballin' ideas, here.
The other problem is that the quality of teachers is deteriorating, mostly because -- fortunately! -- women have more career options. A smart and ambitious woman graduating from college in 1970 often ended up as a third-grade teacher; today, she ends up as a surgeon or senator.
Huh, well, she doesn't actually start off as a senator, does she? As an entry-level senator? There are presently 14 female Senators and 67 representatives. I can't find any statistics for it, but I'm pretty sure there are more than 81 intelligent women in the United States, and the remainder of them aren't all surgeons.
The upshot is that between 1971 and 1974, 24 percent of teachers had scored in the top 10 percent on their high school achievement tests. Now only 11 percent have done so. So one study after another has concluded that it is time to relax teacher certification requirements. "Barriers to entry are too high," declared last month's final report of the Teaching Commission, a private blue-ribbon panel led by Louis Gerstner, the former I.B.M. chief. "Confusing and cumbersome procedures discourage many talented would-be teachers from entering the classroom."
Oh, good, some more advice on how to run America's classrooms from a retired CEO. You'd think with all the free advice these guys have been offering for the last thirty years we'd be out of the woods by now. Then again, if he's so smart, how come Gerstner's best move at IBM was dumping $40 million of the stock he'd artificially inflated before he retired?
Well, let's pick through the horseshit and sort out the weed seeds. I don't know whether the supposed tumble of achievement test scores is real or not. Lots more people take those tests than in 1970 (and it's unclear whether those numbers compare teachers entering the profession in the early '70s with today, or if that's a comparison of the entire teaching force). A lot more people go to college these days, and many more professions require higher education. By 1970 my dad (high school education) was the only person at his company doing his job who didn't have a Masters. Second, I'm not sure what relaxing teacher certification requirements is supposed to do to increase average achievement test scores, whatever the point of that is. If someone wants to teach (trust me on this, it's a calling, not a calculated ladder-climbing career choice) why not get an education degree? Or assuming they decide after graduation to pursue education instead of their major field of study, what's the problem with getting additional credit hours? There's lots of grant money out there, and tax breaks to ease the financial strain. Not to mention the fact that most states require teachers to continue their education anyway, a cumbersome requirement which seems to make good sense. If you're called to educate our young, why wouldn't you want to learn as much as you can about the process, as well as stay current?
So, would this be a good time to point out that not all public school teachers are women?
Or that this period we're discussing corresponds to the Yuppification of America? That between 1974 and 2006 we went from a society which valued knowledge to one which exalts in net wealth?
Have Bill Gates, Jack Welch, or Louis Gerstner applied for public school teaching positions, or are they content to use charitable foundations as megaphones? We don't let the B-schools run our universities, public or private. The disproportionate influence these people have over public education is one of the major causes of our current test-happy, math and language to the exclusion of all else public school environment, something which is short-changing public education and is going to explode on us in short order. A C-minus legacy idiot with a business degree is in the White House (that's workin' out well), and a public school student with a lick of smarts must realize that they same foundation chairmen who're fucking with his curriculum requirements every couple years are shipping jobs overseas. Maybe the first thing we need to do to improve education is to take the bullhorn out of the hands of Times Op-Ed writers who think they can lie about it with impunity.
Monday, May 1
Sunday, April 30
Clarification
I just got to this weekend's comments, and apparently (thank you, Scott C., who was kind enough not to suggest I'd stolen it, even in a subconscious, "My Sweet Lord" sorta way) the Rothko Paint-by-Numbers thing will be headed to court. Here's the sort of thing I'd be advised not to say about it if I had competent legal help:
1. In fact I had the idea around 1973, out of the blue, while thumbing a Oui magazine piece about a rather attractive young woman who had been given a Rothko as a gift but didn't care for it. There were accompanying pictures of the young woman, but not the Rothko. Its absence made me suspicous of her entire backstory, and all this tangential ratiocination spoiled the mood. This is not the sort of thing I'd admit unless I was desperate for people to believe me.
2. I'm not sure whether this was the period when the late Michael O'Donoghue was the editor of Oui, though he was the only reason I read it. At any rate I was unaware at that time that he collected paint-by-numbers works and this is purely a coincidence.
3. Though I was the toast of alt.fan.mst3k for about three days in 1997 because my fan club membership (wife, birthday gift) number is in the 800s, I missed practically the whole fourth season, including The Rebel Set, which, I've learned, features Ed ("Chief") Platt as a bearded coffeeshop owner, something I'd remember. I'm not clear why I missed all but a half dozen. It may have been that Comedy Central/Channel screwed around with the time slot, and/or that they didn't do a Thanksgiving Marathon that year, or they did and I missed taping it. I typically caught up with a lot of stuff by swapping VHS tapes every three shows for a 24-hour period on Thanksgiving, because at the time I was a married man with a responsible career and not some punk kid who had nothing else to do but watch teevee.
4. Being a quotidian (in the sense of "fevered") reader of both World O'Crap and its delightful stable of commenters, it would never occur to me to consciously attempt put an MST gag past any of its obsessed, anal-retentive fan base of genetically-mutated memory freaks. I do score in the 99th percentile on any Simpsons quote cascade, but MST, no, although I have set as a goal memorizing the Mike vs. Crow "You watch chick flicks" bit at the end of that Kathy Ireland movie.
1. In fact I had the idea around 1973, out of the blue, while thumbing a Oui magazine piece about a rather attractive young woman who had been given a Rothko as a gift but didn't care for it. There were accompanying pictures of the young woman, but not the Rothko. Its absence made me suspicous of her entire backstory, and all this tangential ratiocination spoiled the mood. This is not the sort of thing I'd admit unless I was desperate for people to believe me.
2. I'm not sure whether this was the period when the late Michael O'Donoghue was the editor of Oui, though he was the only reason I read it. At any rate I was unaware at that time that he collected paint-by-numbers works and this is purely a coincidence.
3. Though I was the toast of alt.fan.mst3k for about three days in 1997 because my fan club membership (wife, birthday gift) number is in the 800s, I missed practically the whole fourth season, including The Rebel Set, which, I've learned, features Ed ("Chief") Platt as a bearded coffeeshop owner, something I'd remember. I'm not clear why I missed all but a half dozen. It may have been that Comedy Central/Channel screwed around with the time slot, and/or that they didn't do a Thanksgiving Marathon that year, or they did and I missed taping it. I typically caught up with a lot of stuff by swapping VHS tapes every three shows for a 24-hour period on Thanksgiving, because at the time I was a married man with a responsible career and not some punk kid who had nothing else to do but watch teevee.
4. Being a quotidian (in the sense of "fevered") reader of both World O'Crap and its delightful stable of commenters, it would never occur to me to consciously attempt put an MST gag past any of its obsessed, anal-retentive fan base of genetically-mutated memory freaks. I do score in the 99th percentile on any Simpsons quote cascade, but MST, no, although I have set as a goal memorizing the Mike vs. Crow "You watch chick flicks" bit at the end of that Kathy Ireland movie.
Happy Birthday
Reverend Gary Davis
April 30, 1896--May 5, 1972
What a remarkable run of muscian birthdays for April: Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, Billie Holliday, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Richard Thompson, Lowell George, Roy Orbison, Don Gibson, Iggy Pop, Albert King, Leon Russell, Johnny Shines, Alberta Hunter, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Cliff, Merle Haggard, Tiny Tim. December has all the commedians. Which explains why my guitar playing is so funny.
Saturday, April 29
Bill Kristol, Serial Prevaricator
Kristol, on C-SPAN, 8/21/2002 responded to two callers who questioned his own military service this way:
1) "I was a little too young to be drafted in Vietnam."
2) "I was a little too young for Vietnam."
At the time I couldn't find a DOB for Kristol, but his age, listed in a couple of bios and a feature story, gave a birthdate of 1952 or '53. Neither was "too young to be drafted", let alone to volunteer, but there is a complicating factor which I happen to know first hand, having been born in '53 myself. On June 28, 1972, Richard Nixon announced that no more draftees would be sent to Vietnam (a decision which sent two of my friends there, as they had volunteered after receiving low lottery numbers). That was the draft class of those born in 1952. The draft lottery for 1973 was held in February, 1972, but Nixon and the Congress fought over an extension of the law, and Congress allowed it to expire in mid-'73. Very few men were drafted that year.
So Kristol, while clearly futzing the issue, and avoiding talking about the chachickenhawk charge behind the two callers' questions, might have been technically correct the first time, though not the second.
And you're probably no more amazed than I to find out that his birthdate was December 23, 1952. Kristol was eligible, and had his number been low enough he very well could have been "drafted in Vietnam". As it turned out, his number was in the 180s while the draft reached only into the 90s that year. (Incidentally, it might be useful to note here that nobody involved in the draft lottery is fuzzy on his own details, assuming his memory still operates.)
Jump to Thursday, April 27, 2006. Kristol is the guest on The Colbert Report, and Stephen's already knocked him silly (his opener, "Project for the New American Century, how's that going?" had Kristol sputtering like an oxygen-starved candle). The interview turned to where manpower is supposed to come from for our next several invasions:
STEPHEN: Were you drafted? You're of Vietnam age, right?
KRISTOL: I was a little too young.
STEPHEN: How old were you in 19...72?
KRISTOL: I was 19.
STEPHEN: That's old enough.
KRISTOL: I was in the lottery for one year, Nixon cancelled the draft, so I didn't volunteer.
Ah, a truthful dependent clause! At this rate Kristol will issue an entire truthful sentence by 2014.
Bill Kristol, News Hour, August 20, 2004, shilling for the Swift boaters:
Some of the charges have I think held up quite well and they're willing to debate these charges against anyone. I think you found this last night against people who know a lot about it; it's really unfair, Mark. You're really slandering someone like John O'Neill who is a perfectly decent man who strongly believes....
1) "I was a little too young to be drafted in Vietnam."
2) "I was a little too young for Vietnam."
At the time I couldn't find a DOB for Kristol, but his age, listed in a couple of bios and a feature story, gave a birthdate of 1952 or '53. Neither was "too young to be drafted", let alone to volunteer, but there is a complicating factor which I happen to know first hand, having been born in '53 myself. On June 28, 1972, Richard Nixon announced that no more draftees would be sent to Vietnam (a decision which sent two of my friends there, as they had volunteered after receiving low lottery numbers). That was the draft class of those born in 1952. The draft lottery for 1973 was held in February, 1972, but Nixon and the Congress fought over an extension of the law, and Congress allowed it to expire in mid-'73. Very few men were drafted that year.
So Kristol, while clearly futzing the issue, and avoiding talking about the chachickenhawk charge behind the two callers' questions, might have been technically correct the first time, though not the second.
And you're probably no more amazed than I to find out that his birthdate was December 23, 1952. Kristol was eligible, and had his number been low enough he very well could have been "drafted in Vietnam". As it turned out, his number was in the 180s while the draft reached only into the 90s that year. (Incidentally, it might be useful to note here that nobody involved in the draft lottery is fuzzy on his own details, assuming his memory still operates.)
Jump to Thursday, April 27, 2006. Kristol is the guest on The Colbert Report, and Stephen's already knocked him silly (his opener, "Project for the New American Century, how's that going?" had Kristol sputtering like an oxygen-starved candle). The interview turned to where manpower is supposed to come from for our next several invasions:
STEPHEN: Were you drafted? You're of Vietnam age, right?
KRISTOL: I was a little too young.
STEPHEN: How old were you in 19...72?
KRISTOL: I was 19.
STEPHEN: That's old enough.
KRISTOL: I was in the lottery for one year, Nixon cancelled the draft, so I didn't volunteer.
Ah, a truthful dependent clause! At this rate Kristol will issue an entire truthful sentence by 2014.
Bill Kristol, News Hour, August 20, 2004, shilling for the Swift boaters:
Some of the charges have I think held up quite well and they're willing to debate these charges against anyone. I think you found this last night against people who know a lot about it; it's really unfair, Mark. You're really slandering someone like John O'Neill who is a perfectly decent man who strongly believes....
7th Heaven
Speaking of Colbert, a comment from Anonymous (he gets around) at TBogg's put me square in the middle of an Althouse/Amba love fest over their superior parsing of Colbert's "real" opinions.
Amba:
Professor Althouse, on Stephen's rattling off John 3:16 during his interview with Paul Begala:
Unless you, y'know, watch one of the six religious channels on your cable, or PAX, or catch a crowd shot in any domestic athletic contest that happens to be on.
Really, now, using a routine on a comedy show to defend your monotheism for you? Isn't that just a tad needy, if not actually sacrilegious? (By the way, it's too bad you ladies missed him bamboozling Peggy Noonan last month.)
Cripes, it's someone who didn't understand the show praising the take of someone who was watching the insides of her eyelids, apparently. Colbert rattled off John 3:16 without looking. So can I. It's not exactly obscure. "That's the Christian sound bite," he told Begala.
There just seems to be no earthly use in trying to explain about acting and movies and fiction and such to these people. Althouse is certainly entitled to her interpretation, but if there's a riskier target than Colbert for analysis by Comcast I'm not sure who it might be. (There was the time, many years ago, when Peewee Herman shared a letter with Dave he'd received after an earlier Letterman appearance. He didn't share the contents with the audience, but the gist was that a doctor had written him informing him that he--Peewee, or Paul, it was unclear if the letter writer even understood this was an act--was suffering from some syndrome or other, involving the gonads, no doubt, that caused extended juvenile traits in men.)
I've known several actors, working actors, students, acting teachers, who could, and did, do exactly what Colbert does on his show: slip into an obvious character at once convincing and recognizable as parody, especially if you knew their real opinions. Hell, I had a teacher in high school who was also a part-time actor/director, and a fake persona was practically his only public persona. For that matter, I--no thespian--became aware in sixth grade, when we had to read a story to the class every week, that I had a talent for deadpan comedy, which coupled with a frightening Germanic visage got me exactly nowhere, but could be used to get people to leave me alone. It's called acting.
And that's what Colbert does, and he's found a remarkable fit for his talents. So did Steve Carrell, but you don't hear a lot of microencephalic bloggers insisting he must be a secret pinhead.
Amba:
Before you watch this fascinating video of Steve Colbert interviewing -- and utterly bamboozling -- bestselling atheist Sam Harris (The End of Faith), read this post at Althouse: "Colbert and the dissonance between religion and comedy."
If I had not read this post, and the Colbert interviews touching on religion that it links to, I would have assumed, like the friends who are visiting me right now, that Colbert was purely making fun of religion, parodying a fundamentalist believer in Biblical inerrancy. "After all, he was on 'The Daily Show'!" So he must be a straight-up liberal humanist, right? Not exactly.
Professor Althouse, on Stephen's rattling off John 3:16 during his interview with Paul Begala:
I was struck by this moment on the show. The interview was going very well -- Begala speaking crisply (about speaking crisply) and Colbert slipping in perfect zingers. And then Begala wants to use the New Testament to prove a point about how he got through to Clinton. I felt that, reciting the verse, Colbert was not being the Colbert Report character but that his own religion was dictating that he had to say the verse as a demonstration of his own faith, and it wasn't right to fool around with that. I can't say why I feel so sure. The Colbert character would, I think, have been more pleased with himself to know the verse. You'd have felt the preen. I experienced this moment as a startling statement of faith, the kind of thing you don't normally see on TV.
Unless you, y'know, watch one of the six religious channels on your cable, or PAX, or catch a crowd shot in any domestic athletic contest that happens to be on.
Really, now, using a routine on a comedy show to defend your monotheism for you? Isn't that just a tad needy, if not actually sacrilegious? (By the way, it's too bad you ladies missed him bamboozling Peggy Noonan last month.)
Cripes, it's someone who didn't understand the show praising the take of someone who was watching the insides of her eyelids, apparently. Colbert rattled off John 3:16 without looking. So can I. It's not exactly obscure. "That's the Christian sound bite," he told Begala.
There just seems to be no earthly use in trying to explain about acting and movies and fiction and such to these people. Althouse is certainly entitled to her interpretation, but if there's a riskier target than Colbert for analysis by Comcast I'm not sure who it might be. (There was the time, many years ago, when Peewee Herman shared a letter with Dave he'd received after an earlier Letterman appearance. He didn't share the contents with the audience, but the gist was that a doctor had written him informing him that he--Peewee, or Paul, it was unclear if the letter writer even understood this was an act--was suffering from some syndrome or other, involving the gonads, no doubt, that caused extended juvenile traits in men.)
I've known several actors, working actors, students, acting teachers, who could, and did, do exactly what Colbert does on his show: slip into an obvious character at once convincing and recognizable as parody, especially if you knew their real opinions. Hell, I had a teacher in high school who was also a part-time actor/director, and a fake persona was practically his only public persona. For that matter, I--no thespian--became aware in sixth grade, when we had to read a story to the class every week, that I had a talent for deadpan comedy, which coupled with a frightening Germanic visage got me exactly nowhere, but could be used to get people to leave me alone. It's called acting.
And that's what Colbert does, and he's found a remarkable fit for his talents. So did Steve Carrell, but you don't hear a lot of microencephalic bloggers insisting he must be a secret pinhead.
Friday, April 28
Friday Filler
More Top 100 from six grade:
21. Paint It Black, Rolling Stones
I am not now, nor have I ever been, what you would term a Stones fan. I've owned precisely three of their albums, the great run from Beggars Banquet to that one with the zipper on the front (Sticky Fingers, I had to look it up), sandwiching Let It Bleed, one of the all-time great rock and roll records. Before that it was singles, admittedly a pile of 'em: "Satisfaction," "As Tears Go By," "Ruby Tuesday". "Paint It Black" is probably my favorite song from that period, and probably my favorite on this list.
The Stones' schtick just never worked on me, even before I was old enough to appreciate that Mick was a London School of Economics boy trying to be ethnic. Maybe it's just that I was always a Brian Jones man, since he seemed like the only one who didn't take himself too seriously, although as we learned later, he had help. And here you've got his weed-wacky, trebly faux-raga noodling with Charlie threatening to crash through the wall behind him, and Mick not too far in front, for once. And sure, they went on to greater things, but they also became the world's most successful self-parodists in short order.
22. My Love, Petula Clark
I dunno. Someone explain to me how a pushing-40, middling musical theater star with a personable but totally unremarkable voice cranked out like two-dozen Top 40 hits? This was Dionne Warwick-Bacharach/David without Warwick and Bacharach.
23. Lightin' Strikes, Lou Christie
The sequel to the scandalous "Rhapsody in the Rain", which featured presumed teenagers presumably doing the Dirty Hula in a definite car. Great bridge (with the syncopated "Stop!" from the background singers) into Lou's incredible falsetto, but in his normal register he simpers rather than sings, and even back then lines like, "If she's put together fine/And she's readin' my mind" creeped me out. Not from a feminist point of view (I was 12 and it was 1966), but from the braggadocio of the thing. Even though, supposing that someone had "given me a sign that she wants to make time", I probably couldn't have stopped, either.
24. Wild Thing, Troggs
What can I say? The height of garage-punk, in popularity, at least, and good dumb fun. Also part of the progression from The Kinks' early stuff to proto-psychedelica, which has pretty much been relegated, unfairly, to Rhino re-release liner notes. Their ballad "Love Is All Around" is a nice piece of work.
25. Kicks, Paul Revere and The Raiders
An anti-drug song before I got my first toke? Say it ain't so, Sixties haters! But look, I don't care what it says about me, for four or five singles these guys rawked, albeit in a white-bread sorta way and tricorn hats.
26. Sunshine Superman, Donovan
I do wish Mr. Leitch hadn't shown up here, because I have always had a visceral dislike for the guy and his namby-pamby flower power lyrics, but for a while he produced an interesting body of work. I just don't like it.
27. Sunny, Bobby Hebb
Covered by everybody, probably because syrupy optimism never really goes out of style. I guess it's R&B, though it sounds at times like a soul singer's attempt to climb the Country charts. One of those songs that just seems inevitable and you'd be hard pressed to put in its proper decade if you didn't know it.
28. Paperback Writer, The Beatles
Another double-A side (with "Rain") and a pointer to Revolver. It's less than six months from the release of Rubber Soul, yet the boys signal they're not slowing down for nothin'. Incredibly dense--sure, they had the best technology of the day, but it's still forty years old now and still no one's done it better.
I remember the first time I heard it, first week of June, last day of school, in the basement rec room of my girlfriend Rhonda (Help me!). She played this side first; I thought it was great, but it didn't make me forget "Norwegian Wood". Then "Rain", and after I picked myself up off the floor I was more interested in music than girls. At least for a day or two.
29. See You In September, The Happenings
See Seasons, The Four, or Freshmen, The Four. Sneaked through a time warp from 1962. Think "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" without the Symbolism.
30. You Keep Me Hangin' On, Supremes
Not sure how this is at #30 while the much-inferior "You Can't Hurry Love" was just out of the Top Ten. The girls at their best, and whenever, as here, Barry managed to keep Miss Ross' emoting to a minimum her natural wounded haughtiness was like a nail gun. If someone said, "There ain't nothin' I can do about it," to you like that you'd check your teeth for loose filings.
21. Paint It Black, Rolling Stones
I am not now, nor have I ever been, what you would term a Stones fan. I've owned precisely three of their albums, the great run from Beggars Banquet to that one with the zipper on the front (Sticky Fingers, I had to look it up), sandwiching Let It Bleed, one of the all-time great rock and roll records. Before that it was singles, admittedly a pile of 'em: "Satisfaction," "As Tears Go By," "Ruby Tuesday". "Paint It Black" is probably my favorite song from that period, and probably my favorite on this list.
The Stones' schtick just never worked on me, even before I was old enough to appreciate that Mick was a London School of Economics boy trying to be ethnic. Maybe it's just that I was always a Brian Jones man, since he seemed like the only one who didn't take himself too seriously, although as we learned later, he had help. And here you've got his weed-wacky, trebly faux-raga noodling with Charlie threatening to crash through the wall behind him, and Mick not too far in front, for once. And sure, they went on to greater things, but they also became the world's most successful self-parodists in short order.
22. My Love, Petula Clark
I dunno. Someone explain to me how a pushing-40, middling musical theater star with a personable but totally unremarkable voice cranked out like two-dozen Top 40 hits? This was Dionne Warwick-Bacharach/David without Warwick and Bacharach.
23. Lightin' Strikes, Lou Christie
The sequel to the scandalous "Rhapsody in the Rain", which featured presumed teenagers presumably doing the Dirty Hula in a definite car. Great bridge (with the syncopated "Stop!" from the background singers) into Lou's incredible falsetto, but in his normal register he simpers rather than sings, and even back then lines like, "If she's put together fine/And she's readin' my mind" creeped me out. Not from a feminist point of view (I was 12 and it was 1966), but from the braggadocio of the thing. Even though, supposing that someone had "given me a sign that she wants to make time", I probably couldn't have stopped, either.
24. Wild Thing, Troggs
What can I say? The height of garage-punk, in popularity, at least, and good dumb fun. Also part of the progression from The Kinks' early stuff to proto-psychedelica, which has pretty much been relegated, unfairly, to Rhino re-release liner notes. Their ballad "Love Is All Around" is a nice piece of work.
25. Kicks, Paul Revere and The Raiders
An anti-drug song before I got my first toke? Say it ain't so, Sixties haters! But look, I don't care what it says about me, for four or five singles these guys rawked, albeit in a white-bread sorta way and tricorn hats.
26. Sunshine Superman, Donovan
I do wish Mr. Leitch hadn't shown up here, because I have always had a visceral dislike for the guy and his namby-pamby flower power lyrics, but for a while he produced an interesting body of work. I just don't like it.
27. Sunny, Bobby Hebb
Covered by everybody, probably because syrupy optimism never really goes out of style. I guess it's R&B, though it sounds at times like a soul singer's attempt to climb the Country charts. One of those songs that just seems inevitable and you'd be hard pressed to put in its proper decade if you didn't know it.
28. Paperback Writer, The Beatles
Another double-A side (with "Rain") and a pointer to Revolver. It's less than six months from the release of Rubber Soul, yet the boys signal they're not slowing down for nothin'. Incredibly dense--sure, they had the best technology of the day, but it's still forty years old now and still no one's done it better.
I remember the first time I heard it, first week of June, last day of school, in the basement rec room of my girlfriend Rhonda (Help me!). She played this side first; I thought it was great, but it didn't make me forget "Norwegian Wood". Then "Rain", and after I picked myself up off the floor I was more interested in music than girls. At least for a day or two.
29. See You In September, The Happenings
See Seasons, The Four, or Freshmen, The Four. Sneaked through a time warp from 1962. Think "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" without the Symbolism.
30. You Keep Me Hangin' On, Supremes
Not sure how this is at #30 while the much-inferior "You Can't Hurry Love" was just out of the Top Ten. The girls at their best, and whenever, as here, Barry managed to keep Miss Ross' emoting to a minimum her natural wounded haughtiness was like a nail gun. If someone said, "There ain't nothin' I can do about it," to you like that you'd check your teeth for loose filings.
Thursday, April 27
Like Still Trying To Resuscitate Pork Chops A Week Later
Peggy Noonan, "The Big Three: Here's what the president should focus on in his last thousand days"
This slays me:
Just who is this supposed to fool? The hunting of Bill Clinton wasn't "giving in to the destructive spirit of the age" (and if it had been, I can name at least one professional Catholic sennightly columnist who danced with the Devil through two terms). It was a concerted and well-financed effort to ensnare a president from the other side. And I don't recall Let's Pull Together, America Is Under Attack! being much of a rallying cry after the first World Trade Center attack, or the bombing of the Murrah Building, or the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
So, no, Peg, as always in this destructive modern age, we're not in the same boat. Your boat sank in the desert some time ago. And no, I'm not mixing my metaphors. That's where you steered it.
Ah yes, the calm confidence of the Christian holding four aces *, and who imagines that's the hand she'll ever be dealt over and over.
Look, I know that for the two-three thousand people nationally who Give a Shit, the excitement of Tony Snow's appointment must equal the day it was announced that Larry Bird would be returning to Indiana to coach the Pacers. But there aren't any new flags flying on my block this morning, even though the doofus on Channel 8 news last night reported that the new Press Secretary was "a familiar face". (Familiar to whom? The 1% of the population that watches FAUX News?) No, America isn't waiting for George W. Bush to reinvent himself. It's waiting for him to get the fuck out of town without screwing things up any more than he already has. Kinda funny how the Republican blatherocracy loses sight of the "real America" when it's had enough of them.
That president you've fawned over all these years is done. Unrestrained Republicanism is not just a total failure, it has managed to do what a group of insane religious criminals--or Nazi Germany, for that matter--could not: bring America to her knees in just four years.
This is where we parted company over twenty-five years ago, Peg, not that it would ever have worked out between us: the phony politics of phony feel-good headlines. It was unfortunate that Reagan got 'em, and it was really unfortunate, for all of us, that Bush II did. You imagine now that Commander Codpiece can jump through that open window of opportunity and soar back to his accustomed heights. Take a look. He's that broken rag doll down on the sidewalk, Peg. He's been there for some time, and it'll take much more than the next thousand days to pick up all the glass.
* Mark Twain
This slays me:
To criticize the White House--if the criticism is serious, well-grounded and well-meant--is helpful, and part of a long and good tradition. But allowing philosophical estrangement to leave you wishing the administration ill is to give in to the destructive spirit of the age. That too has a tradition, but not a good one. Five years ago this September history took a dark turn, and though we can forget it in the day to day, we're all in this together.
Just who is this supposed to fool? The hunting of Bill Clinton wasn't "giving in to the destructive spirit of the age" (and if it had been, I can name at least one professional Catholic sennightly columnist who danced with the Devil through two terms). It was a concerted and well-financed effort to ensnare a president from the other side. And I don't recall Let's Pull Together, America Is Under Attack! being much of a rallying cry after the first World Trade Center attack, or the bombing of the Murrah Building, or the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
So, no, Peg, as always in this destructive modern age, we're not in the same boat. Your boat sank in the desert some time ago. And no, I'm not mixing my metaphors. That's where you steered it.
With the appointment of Tony Snow the first round of staff changes seems ended, and the desired effect is achieved: a new start, with new people.
The sense of newness will last for a while because the reporters who tell us the news need a storyline. They need, as they say, a narrative. The narrative they will go with now is: "Staff Changes Being Felt Throughout White House / May Signal Policy Changes."
The next story line will either be "Staff Changes Fail to Stop Listless Drift" or "Shakeups Yielded New Dynamism".
So the story now is change, and the story a few months from now is the change that change wrought.
This is a time of opportunity. White House staffers can work to help create the future headline they want.
Ah yes, the calm confidence of the Christian holding four aces *, and who imagines that's the hand she'll ever be dealt over and over.
Look, I know that for the two-three thousand people nationally who Give a Shit, the excitement of Tony Snow's appointment must equal the day it was announced that Larry Bird would be returning to Indiana to coach the Pacers. But there aren't any new flags flying on my block this morning, even though the doofus on Channel 8 news last night reported that the new Press Secretary was "a familiar face". (Familiar to whom? The 1% of the population that watches FAUX News?) No, America isn't waiting for George W. Bush to reinvent himself. It's waiting for him to get the fuck out of town without screwing things up any more than he already has. Kinda funny how the Republican blatherocracy loses sight of the "real America" when it's had enough of them.
That president you've fawned over all these years is done. Unrestrained Republicanism is not just a total failure, it has managed to do what a group of insane religious criminals--or Nazi Germany, for that matter--could not: bring America to her knees in just four years.
This is where we parted company over twenty-five years ago, Peg, not that it would ever have worked out between us: the phony politics of phony feel-good headlines. It was unfortunate that Reagan got 'em, and it was really unfortunate, for all of us, that Bush II did. You imagine now that Commander Codpiece can jump through that open window of opportunity and soar back to his accustomed heights. Take a look. He's that broken rag doll down on the sidewalk, Peg. He's been there for some time, and it'll take much more than the next thousand days to pick up all the glass.
* Mark Twain
Wednesday, April 26
Danse Macabre? Isn't That French?
I'm more behinder than usual, even, but I didn't want to let last Friday's Gallup poll (Gallup News story here; interesting quotes at Mercury News there) pass without a mention. Twenty percent of your fellow citizens say "Immigration" is the most important problem facing the country, trailing only the 29% who answered "Iraq". Our new #2 problem has never polled in double digits before.
No, really. It's like reading that Americans think "Simon Crowell's bad attitude" or "That commercial with the annoying song" is among the nation's most pressing issues. And I have yet to convince myself that saying even that much isn't superfluous.
But there's more: first, among self-identified Republicans and "leaners" immigration actually tops Iraq 27-25, thereby putting to rest for all time the claims that "short" "brown" and "talks funny" have nothing to do with the war. And second, there's the comments of the Poll's editor-in-chief Frank Newport, who apparently was embarrassed enough by the results to just toss all pretense out the office window:
The surprise of the poll was immigration's surge, he said, because it had never polled above the single digits until the issue exploded recently with massive protests and a bitter Senate debate.
"It's not a problem that Americans on their own perceived," Newport said. "They're not anxiety-ridden over immigrants or afraid to see their jobs taken."
While he predicted concern over immigration would fall if politicians stop talking about it, he said the intensity of feelings about Iraq is far deeper.
"In poll after poll, month after month, Iraq is at the top," he said.
Well, now, if it's just a concern because politicians are talking about it, maybe you should just poll politicians. I like the corollary, too, the Grand Old Talking Point ever since 'Nam: if the news would stop talking about it the war would go away.
But seriously, at least one in five Americans is now officially clinically insane, and willing to let a stranger on the telephone in on it. And that doesn't count the ones who aren't polled because we've already locked them up. Until "The basic uninformed ignorance and ovine attention span of a large number of Americans" turns up on the Top Five we're not gettin' out of this.
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