Quotulatiousness

April 23, 2010

When old folkies get bitter and vindictive

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:42

An interviewer for the Los Angeles Times found Joni Mitchell in a mood to settle some old scores with fellow 60’s icons:

The Times interviewer referred to Old Nasal Voice in passing, citing his name-change from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. (Mitchell also abandoned her birth name, Roberta Joan Anderson.) Mitchell launched into an unprovoked assault. “We are like night and day, he and I,” she scoffed. “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”

Cowed, the interviewer moved on to safer topics — such as Prince (apparently a Mitchell fan) and sex appeal. Yet Mitchell still had time to slag off Grace Slick and Janis Joplin (allegedly they were “[sleeping with] their whole bands and falling down drunk”), and Madonna. Railing against the “stupid, destructive” era we live in, Mitchell took aim at the Material Girl. “Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.”

It wasn’t all piss and vinegar. Mitchell fondly recalled Hendrix, “the sweetest guy”, and late-night listening sessions together. But even this memory is shaded in frustration. “He made his reputation by setting his guitar on fire, but that eventually became repugnant to him,” she recalled. “‘I can’t stand to do that anymore,’ he said, ‘but they’ve come to expect it. I’d like to just stand still like Miles.'”

February 2, 2010

QotD: Who’s on for halftime? And what does it actually mean?

Filed under: Football, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

This year’s Super Bowl halftime act is The Who, a band that would be eligible for Medicare if its members were American — Roger Daltrey is 65, Pete Townshend is about to turn 65. Now, I like senior citizens who scream into microphones as much as the next guy, but isn’t the Super Bowl halftime format getting a bit geriatric? Last year we got Bruce Springsteen, age 60. The year before — Tom Petty, age 59. Yes, recent halftime shows have been more up-tempo than the 1970 Super Bowl halftime act: Carol Channing. But there have got to be some younger groups out there that merit the Super Bowl stage, and could broaden the appeal to those younger than the Baby Boomer demographic.

Surely The Who will sing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” When rock anthems are heard on television or in advertising, often they are electronically edited to emphasize well-known lines and downplay or delete anything that might make audiences uncomfortable. When this song is heard, the refrain “We won’t get fooled again!” is amped up — it sounds bold and defiant. Done away with are other lines such as “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” or “We’ll be fighting in the streets/with our children at our feet/and the morals that they worship will be gone.” And the following lyrics — what, exactly, do they mean? “I’ll move myself and my family aside/if we happen to be left half alive/I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky/for I know that the hypnotized never lie.” What does any of the song mean?

Originally, the song was received as anti-war or an extremely vague call to revolution. Some thinkers maintain the song is conservative — a disillusioned revolutionary declaring that street-protest tactics are useless. Townshend, who wrote the song, maintains the lyrics are apolitical, and mean, “Don’t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.” Huh? My guess is that, like a lot of what was received as “deep” in this field — Bob Dylan’s music, some of Springsteen’s — the lyrics don’t have any coherent meaning, they’re just a bunch of interesting individual lines cobbled together. I wince to think that a billion people watching the halftime show will nod happily as the line “We won’t get fooled again!” echoes around the world, when the majority of those watching will, most assuredly, get fooled again.

Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ: Colts vs. Saints a contrast in styles”, ESPN Page 2, 2010-02-02

January 22, 2010

London in the 1960s

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

I’m not from London, but the England I grew up in looked very similar to the typical street scenes here (except I grew up in Middlesbrough, so imagine looking at these scenes through a dark gray filter): Wasleso’s London 1960s slideshow.

January 19, 2010

The evolution of music

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

In spite of the portentious title, this is just an excuse to post an old James Lileks quote from a few years back talking about the difference between popular music of the early 20th century with the worst excesses of the 60’s (the “60’s” being defined for convenience as running from about 1965-1974):

Every note is simple and obvious but it still seems remarkable that no one had thought to arrange them in that particular order. It’s the countertheme, to invent a musical term, that gives it spice, and the middle section has a lovely expansive quality that makes you think of Frank Sinatra peeing off a balcony in Vegas. And of course the beat: bum / bum / bum / bumbum bum / bum / bum / bum / bumbum bum.

The name of the show was a callback to an old song from the early part of the 20th century — “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.” I’ve only heard the first few bars, sung by Bugs Bunny with appropriate alterations: “I dream of Jeannie, she’s a light brown hare.” Old as the song was, audiences in the forties got the joke, just as people today recognize a reference to a song from the 60s.

The difference, of course, is that the 60s aren’t seen as The Past; the 60s are a Timeless Vault of Cultural Touchstones, the apotheosis of Western Civ. Sigh. Well. One of the future Diners will take place in the 60s — don’t ask why, it’ll be explained — and I will use many of the gutbustingly dreadful “psychedelic” records I have collected. It’s obvious from Note One that everyone involved in the effort had so much THC in their system you could dry-cure their phlegm and get a buzz off the resin, but instead of having the loose happy ho-di-hi-dee-ho cheer of a Cab Calloway reefer number, the songs are soaked with Art and Importance and Meaning. You can imagine the band members sitting down to hash out (sorry) the overarching themes of the album, how it should like start with Total Chaos man because those are the times in which we live with like war from the sky, okay, and then we’ll have flutes because flutes are peaceful like doves and my old lady can play that part because she like studied flute, man, in high school. The lyrics are all the same: AND THE KING OF QUEENS SAID TO THE EARTH THE HEIROPHANT SHALL NOW GIVE BIRTH / THE HOODED PRIESTS IN CHAMBERED LAIRS LEERED DOWN UPON THE LADIES FAIR / NEWWWW DAAAAY DAWNNNING!

Five years later it was obsolete. The Jeannie theme, however, will make toes tap in 2476 AD.

There’s more than enough evidence to support James in this notion . . . pick up a random 60’s Psychedelic album and this is what the lyrics are like.

November 6, 2009

Those wild and crazy guys . . . in the CIA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has many purposes, but perhaps its most popular function is to provide some underpinning to the imaginings of conspiracy theorists worldwide. But, according to History House, the CIA was also a pretty weird operation in non-conspiracy terms, too:

[Project MK-ULTRA was] conceived by Richard Helms of the Clandestine Services Department (yes, the CIA actually gives its departments silly names like that), it went beyond the construction of mere truth serums and ventured into disinformation, induction of temporary insanity, and other chemically-aided states. The director of MK-ULTRA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, figured LSD’s potential as an interrogative agent paled in comparison to its capacity to publicly humiliate. Lee and Shlain note the CIA imagined a tripping public figure might be amusing, producing a memo that says giving acid “to high officials would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc.” But Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain,

agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other’s drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a … colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives . . . The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party … a Security memo writer… concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did ‘not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.’

The in-house testing phase now over, MK-ULTRA decided to use the drug surreptitiously in the street to gauge its effects. They contract-hired George Hunter White, a narcotics officer, to set up Operation Midnight Climax, according to Lee and Shlain, “in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment.” Lee and Shlain go on to comment, “when [White] wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse,” White threw wild parties for his “narc buddies” with his ready supply of prostitutes and drugs. He sent vouchers for “unorthodox expenses” to Gottlieb, and later said, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” In case one needs reminding, these claims are backed by recently unclassified information. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger than fiction.

Emphasis in the original.

I have no idea what relationship this account has to the actual facts, but if the mainstream media can get away with running stories without fact-checking, then I certainly don’t feel guilty about this one.

October 16, 2009

QotD: Maturity, fading

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Maturity as a general virtue, however, declined in the Sixties when indiscriminate sexual liberty, detached from responsibility and emotional engagement, became a human right from puberty forward. With no need to defer the gratification of appetite, there was no further need for patience, maturity’s hallmark.

And yet what stage of life could be worse for indefinite prolongation? Adolescence is a period marked by extreme intellectual callowness, thrall to raging hormones, obsession with appearance and social caste, contempt for authority, fascination with the transgression of rules, immoderate self-righteousness and intense sensitivity to perceived offence.

For the negative physical consequences of adolescence as a cultural norm, consider the body-sculpting, porn and plastic surgery industries. Our culture’s obsession with youthful appearance and limitless, Dionysiac sexuality is pandemic.

For the more pernicious negative intellectual and political consequences, consider the universities. In academia one finds a ruling cadre of grey-haired, jeans-clad university teachers pickled in Woodstock-nostalgic revolutionary amber, still rebelling against their parents’ conformity and hypocrisy, still contemptuous of their parents’ institutions and values, even those that stabilized family life and nourished communitarianism.

The political correctness these ideologues embody, Epstein shrewdly notes, is a peculiarly adolescent phenomenon: “Political correctness . . — from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory — could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: . . . Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses [and] the possibility of slights, real and imagined.”

Barbara Kay, “The decline of maturity”, National Post, 2009-10-16

September 1, 2009

Woodstock: not so much remembered, as hallucinated

Filed under: History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

I wasn’t at Woodstock. I didn’t want to be at Woodstock. I wasn’t even consciously aware of Woodstock until long after it happened. I have my excuses: I was not quite nine years old at the time, for a start. I point this out not because of any wanna-be-boomer longings, but because Jon (my former virtual landlord) frequently accuses me of being a hippie, or at least wanting to be one.

P.J. O’Rourke, however, has a different excuse:

I was slightly disappointed to be missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it had turned into a catastrophic, drug-addled, rain-drenched disaster area lacking food, water, shelter, and Port-A-Potties. Then I was furious to be missing Woodstock.

What this says about 21-year-old boys I needn’t tell anyone who has been, dated, or raised one. Furthermore, Sunflower’s suicide attempt was the result of a fight with her mother about a department store charge plate bill for a $128 peasant blouse and had nothing to do with Sunflower’s desperate romantic feelings for me.

To top it off, a few years later I became a Republican.

What with one thing and another, I was always touchy on the subject of Woodstock. I’m over it now, thanks to various books celebrating the 40th anniversary of too many people in bad haircuts going to an upstate New York dairy farm for no good reason. I’ve counted three of these books so far. Since counting to three was as much as most Woodstock attendees could manage on goof butts and silly pills, three is where I stop.

This is actually from a review of three books about the Woodstock phenomenon (or cultural disaster, take your pick):

The Road to Woodstock is “by” Michael Lang, one of the two original promoters, “with” Holly George-Warren who is coeditor of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and thus, presumably, knows the alphabet. I have no idea how much of the book Lang wrote, but he doesn’t seem to have read it. He is described therein by a pair of ex-business partners as having “a face that is, by turns, evil, wanton, fey, impish, and innocent.” This is more than I would let ex-business partners of mine say about me in my book.

And yet, if you reverse the order of the adjectives, you get the progress of the sixties, perfectly delineated.

It was not, by the way, a decade: The sixties were a strange episode of about 80 months’ duration that started when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia (roughly the 1966-67 school year) and came to a screeching halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.

August 28, 2009

Ted Kennedy

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Virginia Postrel looks at the differences between the glamour of the JFK and RFK images and the non-glamorous career of Ted Kennedy:

Ted was the Kennedy who lived. He was, as a result, the Kennedy who wasn’t glamorous.

Jack is forever young and forever whatever his adoring fans imagine him to be: the president who would have gotten us out of Vietnam (rather than the one who got us in) or the original supply-sider (rather than a textbook Keynesian), the ideal combination of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. We learned decades ago about Jack’s compulsive womanizing, but it is those selective images of the beautiful family that remain in collective memory. Life recorded no adulteries, no dirty tricks, no secret injections. The JFK of memory is a man of vigor, not an Addison’s patient dependent on steroids, painkillers, and anti-spasmodics. He is the personification of political glamour.

Bobby, too, is glamorous — the tough guy turned symbol of youth and idealism, more photogenic than Gene McCarthy and more mythic. No one wonders how he would have held together the fractious Democratic Party of 1968, because he never had to. Like his brother, RFK is a persona, not a person, all hope and promise and projection.

In an age of cynicism and full disclosure, political glamour is a rarity — not because politicians lack good looks or wealth or celebrity but because we know too much about them. We too easily see their flaws and imagine even more than the flaws we do see.

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