Friday, March 30, 2007
Civil War Land in Bad Decline
Peggy and I spent a few days in Charleston, South Carolina this week for no particular reason: Our daughter was in Mexico, we had not been anywhere alone in over a year and neither of us had been to Charleston despite its relative proxmity to NY (an hour and change) and some personal connection on her part. Her father had lived there as a boy, and a famous ancestor of hers,
Charles Pinckney, had called the city home when our nation was new.
Like a lot of colonial cities, Charleston has gone to great lengths to preserve and restore its historical houses and buildings, catering to the tourist trade. (We stayed, coincidentally, in the Charles Pinckney room at the
John Rutledge Inn. Meaning if you do something as significant as represent your state at your nation's first Constitutional Convention, someone may someday leave little mints on a pillow in a room named in your honor.)
A lot of people told us how much they loved Charleston -- great food, they said and we did eat in a few good restaurants -- the best of which was the
Hominy Grill. It bills itself as beloved by locals and there was a lot of neighborhood trade in evidence, though our cab driver warned us, "Don't let them stint you on the grits!" He told us of wandering the streets of Harlem, a white man in a suit, in search of grits only to have waitresses ask him to repeat the word, which he stretched in southern fashion into three syllables: "Grr-ee-yits."
But my friend
Jess Greenbaum had offered another opinion. "I hate Charleston," she told me, with some passion. "Everything is so nice and friendly, as if slavery never happened." The history of slavery in the south pretty much begins and ends in this city and true, there are monuments to the "flowers of Southern manhood" who died defending, well, people's right to own other people. But most of the historical tours we took kept the issue front and center. I didn't hear any of this "War of Northern Aggression" BS I had heard in Savannah, for instance -- though I did blanch at the sight of a carriage tour guide in a confederate cap. Would the guides at Auschwitz wear swastikas, smile and say "Do we have any Bavarians here today?"
What creeped me out about Charleston was the vision of American retirement it presented: elderly couples shuffling about in golf clothes, looking at
bad art, eating in good restaurants and generally acting as if they were just passing time until they died. I'm sure I'm being unfair (I usually am) but it was a bracing vision for a man in his fifties, a reminder to make a note to myself to find another way to live the rest of my days than wandering the earth as a semi-detached overfed spectator, poking at history until I become part of it myself.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Changing lines
No sooner had I put up my last post when the website to which I linked, Dylan Hears a Who, was taken down. No explanation but I suspect that the estate of the late Dr. Seuss (the site featured a "lost" Dylan album, with full cuts of Bob singing "Green Eggs and Ham" etc. complete with Hammond organ and old LP scratches and pops, and one of the funniest graphics -- Carnaby St. era Bob in a Cat in the Hat hat) demanded it's removal. Seuss's widow Audrey Geisel has been quick to quash parodies and such that infringe on the Seuss legacy in the past. Which would be all well and good had she not given her blessings to the loathsome Mike Meyers film of the
Cat in the Hat. That featured a scene of the Cat ogling a Playboy-style fold-out of the kids's mother, meaning I suppose its okay to imply that this beloved childhood character -- who is, you remember, a cat -- wants to shag your mom but not to let some Dylan parodyist sing your beloved husband's rhymes.
O the thinks that you'll think.
Also, Charley and Stephanie were not going to see the Bunuel film Exterminating Angel but rather the contemporary exercise in French soft porn,
Exterminating Angels. No word back from them yet. Charley and Stephanie, that is. Not the angels.
The beauty of Dylan Hears a Who went beyond the funny concept. What made it note (or link) worthy was the loving detail that went into its production. It was a labor of love by someone who clearly DID love Dylan and Seuss equally -- just as the similarly litigation inspiring
Grey Album was made by a deejay who loved Jay Z and the Beatles.
The web of course is rife with change: I threw the I Ching yesterday (a line that Dylan, speaking of who, threw out of his first version of "Idiot Wind") and consulted the same
I Ching site I had recommended in this space last year. But where once there was a fairly full and faithful rendering of the Bollingen Series' Wilhelm translation of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, what's left looks like a handful of fortune cookies. Tossing the virtual coins I came up with
hexagram seven, The Army with this explanation:
The army encamps to the left.
Without fault.
There is not much work to do, so one steps back. Nothing wrong with that.
("Encamping to the left" means that the army encamps while it has no war to fight.)
Compare this to the five page reading Wilhelm gives the same hexagram ("The attributes of the two trigrams are danger inside and obedience outside") is enough to send you back to the library. See you there.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
You've got a lot of nerve
News of funny stuff travels fast on the internet, even when people don't use email to spread the word. Franny and I were having dinner at a place called Go Sushi in Greenwich Village on Thursday night, amusing ourselves by watching the teeming masses that converge at the corners of Sixth and Eighth and Greenwich and, yes, Gay streets at rush hour when
Charley Taylor and
Stephanie Zacharek spied us through the glass. Living four blocks from me in Brooklyn, I never see them and have to run into them in Manhattan. They were having your average film critics' night out -- meeting a friend at a bar and then going to see
Exterminating Angel -- when Charley asked what would become the question of the moment:
"Have you seen
Dylan Hears a Who?"I got home to find the link in an email from Steph, followed by another -- subject line: Click immediately -- from my friend
Jeremy Epstein. I won't ruin the gag for you except to say that it has nothing to do with The Who.
People have been parodying Dylan pretty much since he started singing, and small wonder. As former Bowie sideman Mick Ronson, who toured with Dylan on the
Rolling Thunder Revue once remarked, "He sounds like
Boo Boo Bear." That's not completely fair, of course, though it is funny. Sort of like my son remarking upon hearing
Tom Waits for the first time, "Is that the
Cookie Monster singing?"
To the delight of us diehard Dylan fans everywhere, Bob is still having the last laugh: recording some of his best albums in his sixties, writing one of the best rock star bios to date (and it's just
volume one!), and hosting the delightfully bizarre
Theme Time Radio Hour on XM. Some scoff that his is not a voice for radio but whose was? Wolfman Jack?
I'd like to know what Dylan thinks of Dylan hears a who. For that matter, I'd like to know what Alicia Keys thinks of being name-checked in a Dylan song. The answer is out there, I'm sure. Email me if you know. Word travels fast on the internet.
Friday, March 09, 2007
A message to you
Yesterday, for the second time this week, Rudy Giuliani's face came through my mail slot and it was enough to give me the heebie jeebies. First there was NY magazine's alarming cover story,
What America Sees in Rudy and yesterday came Newsweek's take on the phenomenon
The Real Rudy. Both stories were fueled by polls showing the former mayor winning a primary race against his GOP contenders (as McCain is starting to look like Bogey in The Caine Mutiny and Romney a total chameleon) and even a squeaker against Democratic hopefuls Clinton, Obama and Edwards.
Frightened yet? Maybe it's because you don't live here. I'm addressing anyone who reads this space who does not live in NY and has a chance of voting in a primary election that might mean something. The chances of you voting in a Republican primary are slim, granted, given my dyspeptic rants against the evil incompetence of Bush et al, but like the cancer that Rudy successfully fought, the must be dealt with early.
According to Stephen Rodrick's piece in New York (the better written and reported of the two features), Giuliani has a little trouble in the hinterlands where his native accent and demeanor (fuck you and the cab you came in on) present a hurdle -- until he starts invoking 9.11 ad nauseum and then everyone from grannies to truck drivers tear up and start writing checks. I can remember the aftermath of that day quite clearly, thank you: our daughter's best friend lost her father, some close friends of ours were downtown and severely traumatized. Some of them even left town. And I remember how the rest of the nation felt. In October 2001 I was on assignment in Minnesota and the photographer I was with asked me to stop telling people I was from NY because it made everyone stop and pray and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Since that moment of heartfelt national unity we have seen unspeakable attrocities committed and an unconscionable war waged, all under the guise of payback. Our rights are being undermined and we have been treated like mushrooms (left in the dark and fed shit) by the media, all in the name of patriotism. After six years and counting of bullying and modern McCarthyism we do not need another tough guy in the White House. I'm
no fan of Hillary but I think we could do a lot worse than to have a president who bases her campaign on listening instead of shouting people down.
Aren't you glad
Joni Mitchell is back? 'Twas she who sang, "What time is this/To trade the handshake for the fist?"
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Living with the law
I was driving back from Bay Ridge last Saturday, getting ready to listen to WFMU's lovably inane
Fool's Paradise -- "a two hour excursion to nowhere featuring vintage rockabilly, R&B blues, vocal groups, garage, instrumentals, hillbilly, soul and surf" -- when I chanced on an interview with one-time Buddy Holly sideman
Sonny Curtis. Sonny missed that last plane ride with Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens and went on to write an eclectic collection of enduring rock staples. Sonny would be assured a pretty good table in that big club in the sky if he had written nothing other than "I Fought the Law," but if you throw in "Walk Right Back" and "Love Is All Around" (aka the Mary Tyler Moore theme, famously covered by the Replacements), you've got bonafide rock royalty.
Not that you'd know it to listen to him. What struck me most about Sonny (I had no idea he was alive, let alone making phone calls to punk stations in New Jersey) was his humility. We're not talking phony showbiz without-the-little-people-who-would-I-be kind of cheese; Sonny is a guy who feels fortunate to have eked out a career making the music he loves, and that he arguably helped invent, and sounded authentically flabbergasted to hear
DJ Michael Shelley refer to him as a legend. To hear Sonny tell it, he just caught some good breaks. It was all about work, an endless hustle, one that led him down commercial alleys to put processed bread on the table (he wrote jingles for MacDonalds to the "You Deserve a Break Today" theme). He's playing next month in Connecticut with some semblance of the Crickets. Bring the family.
This is a guy who, as a teenager, wrote "Rockin' Around with Ollie Vee" for Holly. It's the first song you hear the Crickets play, at a skating rink, in the
Buddy Holly Story, and one of the first old rock songs I discovered in high school, when the Blind Faith version of "Well All Right" led me back to the original, a Holly song that svengali/sleaze bag Norman Petty conveniently claimed to have co-written -- and Sonny wouldn't even say nothing nasty about Norman Petty, which is easier than taking shots at Colonel Tom Parker.
And how can you argue with the logic of lines like "I needed money 'cause I had none"? When Bobby Fuller sang "I Fought the Law" it had a kind of wistful fatalistic quality while the Clash cover ripped the doors off the jail cell as Joe Strummer led a doomed prison break through the joint, Hate and Love tatooed on the knuckles of his hands, taking no prisoners. It was Sonny who gave them -- and Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead and who knows how many others who covered that song -- the tabula rasa to write their confessions on. And rather than feel resentful for not basking in the glory, Sonny just sounds like he's happy to be around and playing. He deserves a jail break today. Call him a free man.
