A Press More Bumbling Than the Dead Prez
If Gerald Ford was trying to live down his image as a bumbler, he made a curious choice of dying right after Christmas when most of the half-way decent reporters must be on vacation. On a good day, the New York Times annoys the crap out of me, but a couple of doozies slipped in that have really driven me nuts.
In a television column that itself comments on how substitutes are reporting the news of Ford’s death, reporter Alessandra Stanley notes:
On “Today” the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned that she last spoke to Mr. Ford in California last February, “when he came over to see me, and we had lunch.” (It is hard to imagine a former president in his 90s going out of his way to meet a television reporter, so it was hard not to suspect that Mr. Ford was going out of his way not to invite Ms. Mitchell over to his house.)
How clever? What a fucking idiot! Either she doesn’t know that Andrea Mitchell is married to the then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, or else she was intentionally obscuring how cozy journalists and official Washington can get. Either way, it’s outrageous.
More outrageous is Sam Roberts’ attempt to exonerate Ford for his role in New York City’s fiscal crisis. Yes, it’s technically true that, just as Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” Ford never told New York to “Drop Dead,” but their actions and policies made clear the contempt that was summed up in the better copy that the journalists of their day (far better than this sorry lot) screamed in headlines. His defenders may insist that he “liked New York,” but insisting that the city raise the subway fare (part of the completely separate and solvent MTA budget), raise CUNY tuition, end rent control and hack away at public hospitals, museums and social services showed real – I’ll say it again – contempt for what New York stood for politically and for its heroic effort to be more than a playground for the rich and famous.
Roberts finds a number of people to praise Ford’s neoliberal hatchet job, mostly the politicians who subsequently turned New York into a playground for the rich and famous, but makes no attempt for balance. There is no questioning the wisdom of drastic cuts in public spending, nor the dubious “fact” that the crisis was the product of “inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism” (rather than a conspiracy of a handful of big banks that encouraged the city’s debt and then without warning demanded their money back).
The only voice of dissent slips in, almost by accident, from 30 years ago in DC37 chief Victor Gotbaum’s witty complaint that the Ford administration aimed to shrink government down to just police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”
What the Hell Happened to James Brown?
David McReynolds laments the now-obvious gap in his record collection, and asks where is a good place to start with James Brown. And, since he also laments the lack of consideration of arts and culture in our little corner of the the movement, and I need an excuse to get my nose out of health care policy textbooks, I’m wrtiting to recommend “JB40.”
Ordinarily, I agree with that old “Kids in the Hall” joke that “Greatest hits are for housewives and little girls,” but Brown’s career is so expansive and encompasses so many distinct periods that no regular album could serve as a proper introduction. In fact, I just had this conversation with Alan Amalgamated last Friday, and if I were superstitious I would think that I cursed James Brown to die two days later. I’m a “jinxy motherfucker,” Alan says.
To avoid the crap that passes for radio, Alan and I make mixtapes for each other on our carpools out to lawnguyland. My inclusion of “Say It Loud” (yes, I may be as pale as a corpse, but that song is awesome and I do sing along, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”) inspired Alan to posit that the two most influential drummers of the modern era were John Bonham and the guy that drummed for James Brown. He’s the drummer, so he’s qualified to speak about Bonham (I find Zeppelin too wonky and boring), but the sad truth is that the unnamed, unknown drummer for James Brown, whose work is sampled in so many hip hop songs, was at least two different guys. Brown rather famously fired his crack soul band in the late 1960’s for striking for better treatment from their bandleader.
The tight, tight, tight band of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Night Train” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” were conditioned by the stern Godfather of Soul’s fining them for any missed beat or bum note. When they demanded that this practice stop, they were summarily fired by JB. His cocky young bassist, Bootsie Collins, promised to put together a new band for his bandleader. The result was a looser, funkier sound. By simply changing bands, James Brown invented a new genre of music: funk. He is a towering influence over popular music, and (this is how I “cursed” him) I wondered on Friday, “What the hell happened to James Brown?”
This man invented new genres on the fly. He famously rented out the Apollo and other venues for weeks at a time, hired his own staff and promotors and sold his own tickets in order to prevent his art and business from being exploited. He appealed for calm after Martin Luther King’s assassination. He sang chillingly about the destruction that “King Heroin” wrought in the ghettoes. One day folks were “colored,” then he put out the record “Say It Loud” and suddenly folks were Black and Proud. How did he allow himself to become a walking punchline in his later years? The drug addiction. The mugshots, police chases and jail time. The spouse abuse. “Living in America.”
Perhaps now that he has mercifully passed on, younger generations can finally embrace what was cool, proud and noble about him, much as Johnny Cash and Ray Charles experienced career resurgence in death (but please spare us the Hollywood movie).
It turns out that “JB40” is out of print. I’m sure there will soon be dozens of collections, anthologies and rehashes put out to capitalize on Brown’s death. Some may be good, some will certainly be cheap and poorly chosen. Do yourself a favor and look in the used racks for a copy of “JB40” if you want a satisfying overview of James Brown’s entire, fascinating career.
The Land Where It’s Never Christmas
The Guardian of London has a heart-warming seasonal story about a small town called North Pole in Alaska, where it’s Christmas 365 days a year and all the town’s residents (including the school children) answer “letters to Santa” that come in from around the world. Last spring, a group of about a dozen of North Pole’s sixth graders were caught “making a list and checking it twice.” Their Columbine-style massacre plot was narrowly thwarted. Perhaps the incessant holiday “cheer” drove them to it, writer Jon Ronson wonders?
I was thinking about North Pole while doing some grocery shopping this morning in Kew Gardens, the Land Where It’s Never Christmas. All the shops are open as normal. Perhaps they’ll close an hour early for the big day in deference to the rest of society. There are no Santas around, the streetlights are plain and unadorned and almost no houses are decorated. It’s bliss. This is a less-advertised perk of living in a majority Jewish neighborhood (and, being Queens, those who aren’t Jewish are Hindu, Sikh, Taoist, Buddhist and Stewardess). Sure, it’s hell to find parking on a Friday night, but you won’t be driven bonkers by the whole “X-Mas Atmos.”
Serving on my co-op’s board, it has come to my attention that my apartment has probably doubled in value in the last three years. If we promote this whole “No Christmas” thing the way that North Pole promotes its “Year-round Christmas” thing, we could probably redouble our home values with all the Scrooges beating a path to our doors. But if I ever do sell, someone please remind me of this post. Just start singing “Jingle Bells,” and my Pavlovian response will kick in: “Never leave Kew Gardens.”
Cults Bands of the “80’s-90’s”
The other day I was debating who might be the “most influential bands of the 90’s,” which is a more polite way of saying “whose fault are the 00’s (uh-oh’s),” which is awfully unfair to a host of excellent bands. It’s not their fault that popular music fractured into a multitude of sub-genres, or that mass media melted down into niches like blogs and podcasts. It’s certainly not their fault that rock and roll is a highly derivative art form, for they did not choose their followers.
Easily, one of the most influential bands of the 90’s was Pavement. Slackers, shoegazers, ironic smartasses – it’s almost as if they bothered to draw up the blueprints for modern indie sensibilities. But they were too busy getting stoned and covering “School House Rock” songs. A lot of misguided critics and fans expected Pavement to do something Important ten years ago. Following a series of overdubbed home recordings and lo-fi e.p.s in the early 90’s, then band released two excellent long players, which offered increasingly competent musicianship and mysterious, occasionally cheeky, lyrics that hinted at greater depth and empathy. Real voice of a generation shit.
But 1995’s “Wowee Zowee” was a rambling, shambolic mess. Anything resembling a message was lost in the cacophony of genre pastiches and rubbish lyrics. The critics howled in disgust, the casual listeners dropped away and Pavement settled into the comfortable niche of cult artists. Ten years on, “Wowee Zowee” sounds like the band’s greatest artistic statement – precisely by not saying much of anything. It’s just a lot of jamming on good grooves, and occasionally throwing out an interesting turn of phrase. Matador Records continues to reissue Pavement’s albums in deluxe editions that include b-sides, demos and outtakes. The “Sordid Sentinels” edition of “Wowee Zowee” finally places the excellent single “Painted Soldiers” (which was promoted with a funny video of Spiral Stairs firing the other members of the band) on a proper Pavement album. Other highlights include an Australian radio set puts Malkmus on lead vocals for a strangely Lou Reed-ish “My Best Friend’s Arm” in which one can finally make out the lyrics (“Mt. Holyoke is my favorite friend and a college?”) and an acoustic demo of “Fight This Generation” that sounds more sinister than sarcastic.
It should not have come as a surprise that Pavement would settle for cult status. A formative influence on Stephen Malkmus was the ultimate cult band, the Fall. A first wave punk band from Manchester, centered around the prickly personality of Mark E. Smith and his mostly paid associates, the Fall are the kind of cult that brainwashes. The typical Fall song drones on repetitively around a catchy groove while Smith growls and howls something incomprehensible and (if you’re lucky) Brix Smith coos a beautiful harmony. The new(ish) double-disc collection, “50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Can’t Be Wrong” provides the easiest indoctrination into the cult of Mark E. Smith.