Sticky Fingers
“Sticky Fingers” is a dark record that finds the Rolling Stones in the mother of all transitions. Freed from both their contract with Allen Klein and London Records and their rivalry with the Beatles, who, upon their break-up, left the Stones as “the World’s Greatest Rock-n-Roll Band.” The record features the official debut of their new guitarist, Mick Taylor, the young blonde blues virtuoso from the U.S.A. who replaced Brian Jones as lead guitarist before Ron Wood claimed that position as his birthright. It also features the debut of Rolling Stones Records, the tongue-and-lips logo and Mick Jagger as consummate businessman. Fortunately, Keith Richards had not yet fully succumbed to the junk dependency that ultimately claimed Brian Jones and was able to keep Mick Jagger in check and ensure that the Stones remained musically vital and interesting (at least until “Goat’s Head Soup”). Nevertheless, “Sticky Fingers” is the druggiest record […]
A Happy Fun Adventure
I killed a cat today. I was walking Elana back to the J train. She asks if we could go to the cheap fruit stand and buy some pineapple. I tell her it’s a little out of the way, but we go anyway. We turn the corner and walk down Jamaica Ave. under the elevated train tracks. Before we walk ten feet we spot a cat in the road. “Ooh, kitty,” she says in that voice that’s affected for babies and kittens, “get out of the way if you don’t want to get hit.” The cat looks dazed. It’s walking in front of cars, slowly and off-balance. It stands in front of a car that’s stopped at the red light. The light changes, and the driver has to back up and turn to avoid the cat, who’s barely moving. We surmise that it’s been hit by a car and debate […]
Grave Concerns
Today’s newspaper is sure to make one consider some grave options. First, there’s Hunter S. Thompson, who, before blasting himself away on Sunday, left instructions to have his cremated remains blasted from a cannon. Second, is the far more grim news that the New York City medical examiner’s office has given up identifying the remains of 1,161 victims whose bodies could not be identified or were never recovered from the World Trade Center attack. Many families of victims have delayed holding services, awaiting discovery of all or part of their loved ones. Others have buried partial remains only to have more parts discovered later. This post is not meant to take anything away from those families’ grief, or from their desire to mark the lives of the ones they lost. I just don’t understand the need that people feel to have a proper funeral. If I had a spiritual bone […]
More On Wal-Mart
My letter to Newsday was published on Tuesday the 23rd. It’s essential to keep up the opposition to Wal-Mart’s siege of our union cities. Wal-Mart opened a store in Garden City a few weeks ago. It’s their first significant toe-hold in the New York metro region, as they seek to open stores in Rego Park and the Bronx. Cities like Detroit and Boston are also on Wal-Mart’s hitlist. Wal-Mart is anti-competitive. They engage in predatory pricing practices that force smaller shops in the areas near their stores to close. True, Wal-Mart drives down prices, but they do this by driving down wages, not just in the communities where Wal-Mart stores operate but in the factories of companies that do business with Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer. They pay sub-poverty wages. They discriminate against women in their employ. They are militantly anti-union. Against a back-drop of all this bad press, Wal-Mart has […]
Save the Plaza
There’s long been speculation that the Plaza Hotel would close its doors. Hotels don’t seem to have a very long shelf life these days. New amenities are rolled out by competitors, new audio-visual and networking technologies are introduced, new demands are made of conference and banquet space. New hotels can build for the modern marketplace, but older hotels have to pay a fortune to be retro-fit. Add to that the usual wear and tear that a hotel goes through (carpets wear thin, wallpaper fades and let’s not talk about those mysterious stains that turn up in the strangest places), and you wind up with the need for a hotel to close operations for top-to-bottom renovations every couple of decades. Many hotels decide to forgo the renovations. They close down, tear down, go condo. The Mayflower, the Stanhope and the Regent Wall Street are just a few of the hotels that […]
Shit In, Shit Out
Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as good as men at math and science. The controversy hasn’t let up, and as Summer’s character has been debated in the national press have come repeated complaints of his bullying and autocratic style, and constant reminders of how he chased Cornell West away to Princeton. It’s over for Summers. I’ve seen this movie before. In my Junior year at Queens College, we brought down our president. Allen Lee Sessoms was appointed in 1995. He was Queens College’s first black president, one of the minority administrators appointed by Giuliani and Pataki in order to dismantle the hallmarks of the CUNY system and kick out thousands of minority students. Sessoms wanted to […]
The Music: The Movie!
“Ray” is not a very good movie, but, as it is essentially a string of re-enacted musical performances, on the chitlins circuit, in the studio and in “mixed-race” concert halls, you won’t really notice until the end of the movie. When the last three minutes of the movie are narrated by on-screen captions that begin “For the next 40 years…,” it feels like the shortcut of lazy screenwriters (which it is), but the truth is that this is a jukebox movie, and, by 1965, Ray Charles had recorded his most legendary work. What was left to re-enact? The Pepsi commercials? The movie is compelling, but it is entirely because of Ray Charles’ brilliant body of work. A documentary might have better suited the material (certainly a talking head interview with Quincy Jones now would have been more impressive than Larenz Tate’s ill-suited pipsqueak impersonation of “Q”), but, the songs would […]
The End of “The Song About The Record Company”
Wow. Oh, boy. Five bands on four stages. Simultaneously. How could it fail? Sunday night’s Grammy’s telecast was the second lowest rated, ever. There are many observations one could make about the Grammy’s, but why bother? Dead people win awards, the best new artist will be forgotten in ten years time, the alternative award is an alternative to nothing, blah, blah, blah. The real lesson from Sunday is that music is just not a mass medium. Sure, everyone listens to music, but their tastes are personal. Television can pump money into a sitcom or TV cop drama, advertise the program endlessly and showcase it at 9 p.m. Eastern (8, Central and Mountain) and millions of people will watch. Likewise, a big budget Hollywood spectacular will almost always recoup its investment, at least after it’s released in Japan. But no amount of financing is necessarily going to make a record a […]
We Built This City on Rock-n-Roll?
I don’t have much sympathy for the plight of the oh-so glamorous Village and Lower East Side. This is the bitter little Holden Caufield in me winning out over the urban planning nerd and the socialist. I just feel like the invading Darwinist hordes, the yuppies, limeys and spoiled NYU students who priced out the previous residents, will get what they deserve. Either they too will one day be priced out, or they will be left with a community that’s been sucked dry of vitality and art. Nightlife is what attracts many to downtown, but high rents are forcing prominent nightclubs to close. The Bottom Line closed not too long ago, and now Tonic and Fez are following. New York University actually foreclosed on the Bottom Line, which couldn’t meet the exorbitant rents that the university charged. The truth is that the Bottom Line should have hired new management years […]
A Letter to the Editor, Re: Wal-Mart
The news that the UFCW had organized a Wal-Mart store in Quebec was hailed as a real breakthrough in some quarters of the labor movement. Quebec has a card-check authorization law, which means the union merely has to present union cards that represent a majority of the workers in the bargaining unit in order to be certified. This avoids the bruising, months-long anti-union campaigns that employers like Wal-Mart engage in when unions in the U.S. petition the NLRB for a union election. Quebec also has a right to a first contract under law. In the U.S., many companies “recognize” the union but never agree to a contract, which leaves the union dead in the water. So, of course, with favorable laws like that (which, by the way, there’s nothing stopping New York or other so-called “blue states” from enacting similar laws), Quebec was recognized as a weak spot for corporations […]