Dylan: Lay Down Your Weary Tune

For Black Dog Barking, who wondered in comments why the invisible hand of the market never put this on a commercial album. My answer would be that the invisible hand works in mysterious ways, only a few of which having to do with markets and money.

As noted, the photography is from Miranda Jane, who is unknown to me until now. More of those "invisible college" things that the pointy heads such as myself talk about.

Bo

Bo Diddley (1928-2008)



I had two extremely minor encounters with Bo Diddley. One was when he played at a house party in Marin in the mid-80s, and that was pretty much the extent of it, watching the master work his magic from a balcony on the crowd below, and being a part of that crowd.

The other was a long distance business encounter. I wanted to use lyrics to "Who Do You Love?" in my story "The Ballad of Jake the Snake and the Rock and Roll Kid." But Bo wanted a hundred dollars for the rights to do that, and I was to be paid less than $200 for the story itself, and those weren't the only lyrics I wanted to use. So I fudged the musical quotes and made up my own lyrics to "Who Do You Love?", plus "Oh Well," and "All Along the Watchtower."

But I was tempted to just send Bo the check. I really do think he deserved it.

Rick or Ricky?

Persons of a certain age, the first chunk of the Baby Boon generation, in fact, have a good part of their childhoods projected against television images of the "perfect family." These are almost entirely sitcom families, and the titles of the shows are chatchphrases: "Leave it to Beaver," "Father Knows Best," and "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," are the canonical Trinity. The movie "Pleasantville" over on my newsgroup, which hinges on a fictional TV program that is something of a distillation of these 50s sitcoms, but it is looking through a different end of the telescope, or maybe a different imaging system entirely, than what I'm using here.

The breakout star of "Ozzie and Harriet" was Ricky Nelson, sometimes billed as "Little Ricky Nelson." He was one of the prototypes for the "smart mouthed sitcom kid," who we see in practically every other family sitcom that has ever swam the airwaves. Then he became a teenager, and discovered rock and roll. Not all by himself, of course. There was an entire generation of kids discovering rock and roll at about the same time. But he was on television, his dad had been a bandleader, and "Little Ricky" got himself some regular prime time exposure. He was also gorgeous, and just enough of a rebel to make the girls swoon, but white/safe enough not to scare off the parents. Hell, Ricky was on television, as part of an ideal family.

There are all sorts of downsides to being a child star, one of them being that children take their responsibilities very seriously. And Ozzie Nelson used that as yet another tool in the parental control toolkit. There are literally hundreds of people who depend on us for their livelihoods, the father told his son. So don't screw this up for them. Keep in line. And so on.

I knew none of this at the time, and paid little attention to the O&H show, or, for that matter, "Leave it to Beaver," and "Father Knows Best," although there are a few episodes lodged in my head for each, so I must have watched them occasionally. I just didn't buy into the sitcom family notion, and I'm sure I had Ricky Nelson pegged as another incarnation of Pat Boone, translating real rock and roll into sliced white bread.

I'm not sure how I ran across "Another Side of Rick" and album released in 1968. Memory suggests that a cousin left it after visiting our house; perhaps it was too different from what she expected. As the name suggests, it was Little Ricky trying to grow up a bit, or out, or something. The song that struck me was "Dream Weaver," written, as were many of the songs on the record, by the producer, J. Boylan.

Little girl what's that look clouding over your eyes
Little girl what's all this about life tryin' to pass you by
Yes I'll listen and try to be kind
But remember I'm only a thought in your mind

And I'm a dream weaver
A love receiver and I get around
Yes I'm a dreamweaver
A word deceiver look up and down
Dream weaver's comin' to town

--J. Boylan

Sorry I can't find a video for it. So let's use this one:



Rick continued on his folk-rock trajectory with his Stone Canyon Band, which leaned heavily on the country side of folk, unsurprising for someone with rockabilly roots. But, bills to pay, mouths to feed. It was the same old sitcom grind, only this time it was also his own family to support. So Nelson came to one of the "Rock and Roll Revivals," at Madison Square Garden, and after playing "Hello Mary Lou," went into "Honky Tonk Woman." Oops. Boos and catcalls followed. Then he wrote "Garden Party" about the incident and scored his last Top Ten Hit.

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang, I rather drive a truck…

And it's all right now, learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself.

It strikes the right chord, and informed many a boomer caught between desire and duty. But, there were still mouths to feed, and alimony to pay, and by the 1980s, Rick was backed by neon that said "Ricky." Still, if you listen, you can hear more than memories in his singing. He loved rock and roll to the end, dammit.



There are still stories that the fire that caused the plane crash he died in were from freebase ether. The official FAA investigation suggested that it was really an electrical fire, probably from a defective heater. But when drugs enter the narrative, the narrative becomes all about the drugs. Rick Nelson deserved better than death at 45 and idiots making jokes about his demise.

Little girl I could tell you the places I've been
But my words are just whispers that lean on the wind
You must listen and try to believe
And I'll give you a dream I've been meanin' to weave

I could love you, if you want me to
That won't be what it seems
Yes I could love you, if you want me to
Then again I'm just a weaver of dreams

Yes I'm a dream weaver
A love receiver and I get around
Well I'm a dream weaver
A love receiver comin' to town

The Preacher

"Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad." – Malcolm X, on the assassination of John Kennedy

"I meant that the death of Kennedy was the result of a long line of violent acts, the culmination of hate and suspicion and doubt in this country. You see, Lomax, this country has allowed white people to kill and brutalize those they don't like. The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost; that's all there is to it. America—at the death of the President—just reaped what it had been sowing." –Malcolm X, in an interview with Louis Lomax, explaining his earlier remark.


"I was in school in Arkansas when Kennedy was assassinated. When the teacher announced the assassination to the class, practically the entire class stood up and cheered. They stood up and cheered." – a college friend of mine (who is white).

"Store closed due to assassination of nigger-loving President. (Will reopen at 2)" – from newsreel footage seen in recent ESPN documentary "Black Magic" about professional basketball players from historically black colleges.

Could a novelist have come up with a better name than Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

I've been thinking that I should write something about "The Speech," Barack Obama's speech on race and racism in the U.S., given in response to the furor over statements made by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a speech that had some heft to it, and one that took some courage to make, when he could have said the platitudes, had a "Sister Soulja" moment, and maybe slid by that way. It took away some of my concern that Obama was a lightweight, running as a blank slate upon whom people could project their hopes and dreamy wishes that things could be better without effort, without confrontation, without recognizing that the past produces the future.

But it is Wright that draws attention, does he not? That is what a spiritual leader should do, after all. Wright does not say, as some/many on the Religious Right have said, that God smites us with supernatural intervention, sending hurricanes to lay waste to the modern day Sodom of New Orleans, or visiting a plague upon homosexuals for their sins, though Wright apparently does speak of HIV as a government plot, which is merely incorrect. But then people do tend to grant too much imagined power to those they perceive as enemies.

Wright vents an anger that many have felt, an anger that is hardly confined to the black community. Indeed, the anger is nigh unto universal, it's only the object of the anger that varies from place to place and person to person. The Republican Revolution has been attributed to the "angry white male," but that anger is supposedly not directed at "America," merely certain Americans, certain American laws and freedoms, specific American government officials and programs, plus assorted foreigners, ethnic groups, and, as nearly as I can tell various trees, other flora, and wildlife.

It's also been directed at me from time to time, but big deal. I'm better able to take care of myself than most, and I'm a white male myself. And, I do have my own angers.

So perhaps Wright is one of those "blame America first" people we hear so much about, though he has worn the uniforms of both the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Navy. It doesn't really sound like the "blame America" part was really topmost on his life agenda, nor the first thing that occurred to him.

I have a friend in Tennessee who has actually changed congregations over political and moral disagreements with a pastor or the congregation. My friend's support of Barack Obama has been tarnished, and may be withdrawn over this incident, to my dismay.

I said to my friend, "You're a Christian. If you find Pastor Wright's statements to be offensive, try forgiving him first. That is what Christians do, after all. And forgive Obama for perhaps thinking that this was a point of view he needed to hear, regardless of his own personal opinions.

I don't know how much good my suggestion did. In truth, it's harder to make an argument that one does not support with one's own mind. And I am not a Christian, nor do I think that Wright said anything that needs forgiveness.

But see for yourself.



Remember, whatever happens should not be a surprise. The entire nation is built upon an Indian burial ground. -- overheard on the street

Breakup Songs

A few days ago, my local paper ran an entertainment section feature on "Breakup Songs." It also included a "send us your ideas for the best breakup song" thing (the best suggestion was "Heartbreak Hotel"), and, while I don't do that, I do have this here blog and I can hook onto YouTube as well as anybody.

The only really good breakup song in the original article came from noting that Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" isn't a very good breakup song, but "Graceland" is. Moreover, that gives me an excuse to indulge my fancy for world music:



Elvis Costello has some truly fine venom in a lot of songs, but he's sorely underrepresented on YouTube. Here's an EC tribute band doing "One of These Days" and then, the real long ball, "I'm Not Angry (Anymore):"



Another one that I'd like to include was "Dim" by Dada, but the versions by Dada itself on YouTube are all from live shows, and the sound sucks. But someone did do an amateur vid using the album version of the song, which really digs into the heart of the breakup beast:

No one told me the trouble I was in
before my life went dim.



But my real find was when I was checking on songs from the Low Millions album "Ex-Girlfriends," which has some fine, fine breakup songs (and one non-breakup song "Nikki Don't Stop" that is hot enough to melt your headphones, so there are no videos of that one). The one that caught my attention, well, the why of it should be obvious. Here is "100 Blouses," illustrating the relationship between Mal and Inara (Firefly, Serenity). Very, very well done.

Ironophilic

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a thumb. Edward Teller had a hammer, and every problem he encountered, his first thought was, "How could I use a thermonuclear weapon to solve this?"

Teller once proposed to map out all the dangerous asteroids in the solar system, the ones that might someday cause major damage to Earth. He suggested that a thermonuclear explosion on the far side of the Moon could generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used as a radar pulse, with returning echoes showing even small asteroids.

In "The Day of the Dove," on Star Trek, The Original Series (as it is now known), an alien entity sets up the Enterprise as it's own personal negative emotion larder, pitting humans against Klingons in an eternal battle, meant to supply it with "negative emotions" which the alien eats. Hey, this was as good as it got on Third Season Star Trek. One interesting point in it was that the alien healed the wounds of anyone injured in the battle, making the entire endeavor a lot like the legend of Valhalla. The Klingons, at least, should have dug the setup, but apparently didn't like being manipulated, the ingrates.

If a single starship's worth of humans with negative emotions was enough for one of the creatures, imagine how many there are floating about Earth. One can only imagine what ancient atrocity sent a big enough pulse of brutality and pain out into the void, announcing our presence to that particular race.

Still, fear and anger aren't the only foodstocks, I expect. We have such a variety here. As time went on, I imagine that either the aliens developed other, more refined tastes, or different aliens, with different needs, came upon our little emotion laden treasure trove.

I'm not sure if irony is an emotion, but there is little doubt in my mind that the irony eating aliens are here. Perhaps we first came to the attention of the sarcasm lovers, sarcasm being the most fragrant form of intentional irony. I would expect that those guys showed up sometime during the height of the British Empire, the British being such masters of sarcasm. Irony, of course, is more subtle, but potentially more nutritious, if prepared correctly.

The most essential form is Unintentional Irony, of course. If we had not already come to the attention of the UI connoisseurs, I am sure that the giant pulse of it that occurred with the award of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger alerted them to the rich lands awaiting their arrival.

So, without further ado, here you go guys. Chow down.

Merry Christmas, Early, but Rocket Mail is Undependable

In the spirit of the holiday season, here are a few ditties from the wonder that is the Jonathan Coulton Project:

Chiron Beta Prime



Code Monkey



RE: Your Brains

Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe, and Smith

In among our glamorous life of science, engineering, fiction and technical writing, street performing and puppet shows, and the occasional truck driving/running a thrift store gig, Amy and I do some transcription work. One of them was during the brief existence of Wired Television, and boy, did they pay through the nose for having a short deadline over a major holiday. Another was transcribing interviews for someone's thesis on the psychology of transgendered individuals and I will say absolutely nothing more about that. Whatever the legal limits of confidentiality, some people deserve an absolute respect for their privacy.

Then there was the one from a conference at The Foresight Institute on Nanotechnology, back when nanotechnology meant little robots that would make you immortal rather than carbon nanotubes.

There are also the video projects, which often involve me stripping the audio off of a videotape, then digitizing it so we can use the cool transcription software on it. It's still typing, not voice recognition, but being able to slow the thing down to match your typing speed (just one of the whizbangs for digital transcription software) is a godsend. The first one we did was for a documentary project on a group that tries to keep military recruiters out of high schools, so we got to see Cindy Sheehan before she became famous. I can report that, whatever else has happened to her since, the loss of her son was as devastating as you can imagine, and, as far as I'm concerned, she gets a free pass on anything she's done since then.

Then there was the documentary on Sam Wagstaff.

Wagstaff was the patron and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, of whom I've written previously. In fact, and this is a little strange to me, recently the Mapplethorpe essay here is the single most viewed essay on this blog. Is there some art course that is studying Mapplethorpe now? Many and mysterious are the ways of Google.

Anyway, Amy did most of the video transcription and I did the timestamping. Having a timestamped transcript allows preliminary editing to be done without having to watch the video. It saves a lot of time, and when you're done, hey, great, you also have the transcript.

The documentary was called Black White + Gray, and it seems to have been quite a success, and good on James Crump, the director and the guy who hired us to do the transcription work. I haven't seen the film yet; I've just seen pretty much everything that went into it, which is weird, isn't it? I do recommend the trailers on the linked web site.

The New York Times review of the film notes:

In particular, Patti Smith, the poet and rock star, offers tender descriptions of her friendship with both men.

Ms. Smith’s friendship with Mr. Mapplethorpe began in 1967 when they were both art students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They were living together near the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970s when Mr. Mapplethorpe first brought Mr. Wagstaff to meet her. “Sam came in and seemed totally at home in my mess,” she recalls. “We liked each other immediately. He had such a great sense of humor and had such a nonpretentious and nonsanctimonious spiritual air.”

Wagstaff was clearly a charmer, as the archive footage of him revealed. You can't help but like him in his interview with Dick Cavett and in the other footage of him in still earlier days. He charmed Mapplethorpe (though his wealth couldn't have hurt), and he charmed Patti Smith as well.

It's Patti Smith that was the revelation to me in viewing the raw video footage. I've been a fan of hers since the 1970s, of course, how could one not be? But seeing her in a simple setting, not performing, just reminiscing about those she loved, those who died, the expansiveness of her humanity seemed to flow from her like the wind from the sea.

I know I may being sappy here. But the only word that I could think of to describe her was "magnificent." The human race cannot be as vile as it sometimes seems, not when it can produce creatures as magnificent as Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Patti Smith.

I Can't Resist These

"The Pied Piper of Basin Street" featuring Jack Teagarden:



Ecstacy: Louise Brooks, set to the band Underworld.



And if you want to know "Why Louise Brooks?" you can read this.

Killus

It occurs to me that there should be at least one place where the two most famous Killus' in the world can be found together. So here you are, Killus presents Killus, doing Rape Your Dreams:

The Sweet Science

In 1896, a New York State Senator named John Raines sponsored legislation that banned liquor from being served on Sunday in New York. There was an exemption to the law: restaurants attached to hotels were still allowed to serve liquor on Sundays.

In response, many saloons purchased the buildings in which they resided (or a near neighbor building), called themselves “hotels,” and rented out the rooms by the hour to the sort of patrons that rented rooms by the hour, i.e. prostitutes. This was a classic loophole, producing classic unintended consequences.

Contemporaneous to the “Raines Hotels” was another loophole, this one in Federal and State Laws governing boxing, or prizefighting. Here, pugilistic competitions were allowed, provided they were as a “scientific demonstration.” Although the phrase “Sweet Science” first entered the language in 1824, in Pierce Egan’s Boxania, in which he used the phrase “the sweet science of bruising,” I have long suspected that the boxing loophole did more for the phrase than anything else.

Boxing is a very artificial fighting style, in that grappling techniques such as used in wrestling (or Aikido) are expressly forbidden. Of course, by “forbidden,” I mean, “used in a tactical way.” Hugging your opponent in a boxing match is a way to disrupt the current activity and obtain the intercession of the referee. This technique was the key to Buster Douglas’ defeat of Mike Tyson in the match that lost Tyson his title.

Tyson was from the “street thug” school of fisticuffs, no surprise there, since he had been a street thug. There was a time, briefly in his early career, when it appeared that he might have it in him to also become a technical boxer. The Tyson-Spinks fight was the culmination of that, a fight that has become legendary as over-hyped, since Tyson dropped Spinks in a minute and a half.

It was an interesting minute and a half, however. Tyson is usually seen as simply a bruiser, and there was some of that in it, of course. But his approaches to Spinks were technically brilliant; Spinks threw punches that Tyson slipped, but he also used the rotation of slipping the punch to cock his entire body for the follow-up. The effect was devastating. Spinks tried to block the return punches, but they had the entire force of Tyson’s body behind them. Blocking was useless against such power. A faster boxer than Spinks might have been able to dodge the blows, but it’s awfully hard to make a strike and then dodge when the return comes back at you so fast.



The young Ali could have done it, however. Ali was so fast that he got away with things that would have been suicide for most boxers. During the first Liston fight, Ali (then Cassius Clay) regularly evaded Liston’s punches by going straight back, something that should and would have been a straight trip to the canvas for anyone but Ali. The result was that Liston was punching air, and destroyed his shoulder over the course of a few rounds.



Tyson, except for a few brief glimpses of something greater, is of the Liston school of boxing, a street fighter tuned up and tamped down for the boxing ring. After the Spinks fight, Tyson’s father-surrogate trainer died, Tyson married and divorced Robin Givens, ran his car into a tree, and was then jailed for rape. Somewhere in there any hope of becoming something more than he was, died.

I think that the three most interesting boxers of the 20th century (certainly in the heavyweight division) are Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali, though opinions differ.



I don’t think there is any way to rank the three of them; their times were so different not even theoretical matchups make any sense. The first two ended their lives in poor circumstances, victims of both a sport and a society that feeds on celebrities then discards them when fashion shifts and age dulls their luster.

Ali still remains something of a creature apart. The connection that the boxing glove allows between physical force and the human brain works both ways, and neural damage is the frequent, perhaps even inevitable result. In Ali’s case, pseudo-Parkinson’s has frozen his face, but its very immobility now resembles the mask of a Mayan god, and only the eyes convey the powerful and generous humanity that still resides within.

Afterlife

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there’ll be hell to pay
”Hell” – Squirrel Nut Zippers (CD: Hot)

Occasionally I scan back over the essays I’ve written over the past couple of years, and yes, there’s a lot of writing about death, one way or another, even before I had my intimation of mortality in the form of a fingernail-gone-really-bad. A friend of mine once observed that she thought that a lot of people considered me “morbid and macabre,” and who am I to disappoint my fans?

In the A&E Network show, the host, James Lipton has a question that he asks every guest: “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?”

My answer would be “Well done. You get a free replay.”

That can be taken as the reincarnation option, of course, but I have a few revisions I’d make to the standard version. I’ll get to those in a little while.

The first version of the “belief dependant afterlife” that I think I recall is from Mark Twain, but he may have been taking a page from James Branch Cabell (or given the dates, vice versa), who had the afterlife both dependant on the individual’s religion and beliefs during life, but also subject to clerical errors, allowing one character to get the wrong afterlife because of tombstone erosion, the ultimate in typos. Robert Heinlein borrowed the Cabellian view in Job: A Comedy of Justice.

Reincarnation figures big in religions that don’t cotton to heaven and hell. One way of looking at the “Great Wheel” that’s featured in Hinduism is that this world is hell, and you are condemned to stay on the Wheel until you do a good enough job of it to get off into Nirvana, a sort of joyful non-existence (I’m simplifying here because it’s important to be able to compress centuries of religious thought into facile one liners). I think the important thing about Nirvana is that you’re supposed to be beyond all the petty desires, annoyances, pleasures, and minutia that, to me, make life worthwhile.

One unexamined feature of most reincarnation beliefs is that the incarnations are sequential in time; previous lives are in the past. But really now, there’s no need for that to be the case, is there? If something can transcend death and invoke various heretofore unknown (and unprovable) principles of the universe, surely time shouldn’t be a constraint. So there’s no reason not to have a reincarnation that can work backwards in time, allowing your next incarnation to be Alexander the Great, or, more likely one of the guys Alexander killed on his twenty-third birthday as part of the celebration.

The usual end result of this is the “everyone is everybody” scenario, the Mystical Experience, We-Are-All-One, where there’s a single, universal soul that inhabits everyone, and it’s time to sing Kumbaya, dammit, the marshmallows are ready and so’s the camp fire.

But if reincarnation can go backwards in time, there’s no reason for it not to go sideways, into one of those parallel universes that we hear so much about (and that I’ve written about more than once). Alternately, you can view it as a really big version of the film Groundhog Day.

If we get our afterlife of choice, here’s what I want: When I die, I want another go at it. In fact, I want all the goes at it. Not all of everyone’s lives, all of my lives. I want every single quantum possibility of my life, starting at conception. That includes every variation on what happens during my life, of course, like this earthquake happened on a different day, that snowstorm didn’t happen so I get to go to the banquet where I get the short story award when I was 15, Lee Harvey Oswald trips and sprains his ankle and can’t climb the stairs of the Book Depository, even the one where that single atom of potassium decays one second later, to no significant macroscopic effect.

I have no idea how many lives that is, except that it’s a lot. Nor do I really know how many of them can be considered “mine” given the slippery nature of identity. And since there’s no way for there to be any memory or awareness of those other lives, there’s no way to know if I will get / have gotten what I want.

Is that any comfort in the face of the knowledge of personal mortality? Let’s just say I take at least as much comfort from it as from the prospect of singing in a choir for all eternity.

Reasons to be Cheerful

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