November 2004 Archives

YIKES this isn't really my list, it's just some stuff we talked about as we wrapped up. I adore the Beatle box except for the packaging. (Still, this fits in with their longstanding tradition of tanscending Capitol's packaging.) The real find is Reigning Sound, which gets better upon each listening. Here's the year-end chat with Robin Young, aired today (click here for audio).

LEAD OF THE WEEK: Kinky Does Parrothead

"THERE is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976..." (in the Book Review)

And why is this guy a regular on every media outlet? Come again? Don't we have video of Buchanan calling for Trent Lott's resignation? Have we ALL taken crazy pills?

From Ron Rosenbaum, in the New York Observer:

In Ohio, where a switch of some 68,000 votes could have changed the name of the next President, the count deserved maximum scrutiny. Especially when the combination of allegedly "spoiled" invalid ballots (93,000) and the number of "provisional" ballots (155,000)—whose examination and tallying is still underway as I write—could have made a substantial dent in the 135,000-vote Bush margin. I think it’s unlikely it would have changed the result but, when we’re told the entire American polity is about to undergo a tectonic shift because of a margin that small, we ought to know exactly what that margin was. And if that means recounts and litigation, so be it...

See also: Something's Rotten in the State of Denmark.

UPDATED 2004 LIST:
Dogs Die in Hot Cars PLEASE DESCRIBE YOURSELF (V2)
This guy sounds distractingly like XTC's Andy Partridge, waiting for that association to drop away...

The Veils THE RUNAWAY FOUND (Rough Trade)
This guy sounds like a cross between Neil Diamond and Bono... but in a GOOD way.

AD OF THE YEAR (category: running series):
For revealing hidden meanings to the Kinks's "Picture Book" (1968): this Hewlett-Packard series dazzles for reorienting your vantage on photos: are we all frozen moments in time, or are pictures continuously coming to life?

MUST-SEE-MAKEOVER (RM):
Danger Mouse: A Hard Day's Mouse.

WHAT'S MY MOTIVATION? PART 366: ED WOOD
By Johnny Depp on the agonizing yet watchable Inside the Actor's Studio (Bravo):his characterization of Wood mixed "the blind optimism of Ronald Reagan, the enthusiasm of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, and ... Casey Kasem."

DROWNED BY HIS OWN TEARS:

Ray, despite a star-making performance from Jamie Foxx, the best soundtrack ever, and the best cast money can buy, including DEBUT OF THE YEAR from Sharon Warren, a real stinker. Fell asleep after two hours.

CULTURE SHOCK:

Walking around Harvard Square last week it was like a trap door opening beneath me to discover the hollowed out space where Wordsworth's used to be. 28 years. Where will tomorrow's movie critics come from? Then, on a routine trip to Davis Square, the sign on Disc Diggers announces it's closing December 30th, leaping up onto the web. We got out JUST IN TIME...

Picked up a few new discs at CD Willys yesterday after getting Moses his Cub Scout uniform. Very handy, Will had a bunch of toys set out for the boys to fiddle with while Dad flipped through the stacks:

Buddy Miller YOUR LOVE AND OTHER LIES (Hightone)
Fiona Apple TIDAL (Clean Slate)
The Knitters POOR LITTLE CRITTER ON THE ROAD (Slash)
Brahms SEXTET, HORN TRIO [Serkin, Marlboro players] (Sony) [iTunes doesn't list this one, but this is a classic.]

Here's my review of Dylan's Chronicles on WBUR's Arts pages. Here's the passage nobody else seems to have noticed yet:

"...In the midst of all this blarney, there are scenes that conjure up dodged bullets. Once, while sitting around Johnny Cash's house after dinner with Graham Nash, Kris Kristofferson, and some others, trading tunes, an anti-Semitic remark from a Country Music patriarch Joe Carter stops the camaraderie cold. Dylan barely blinks. It's not news that the Carter family were paranoid misogynists with redneck vinegar in their veins, but it does seem fraudulent of Dylan, one of the sharper tools in the shed, to glance at it with nary a shrug..."

And here's the last graph without the edits:

But then, as usual, Dylan makes you feel like a grump for calling his bluff when he's getting away with the literary equivalent of murder: this book should have been much longer, but it's infinitely preferable shorter. Perhaps it took him a couple hundred bad songs and sessions to cough up a decent piece of prose. Perhaps he's biding his musical time, feels that the circus has long since passed him by and caught up with again too many times to get all sentimental about it, and the rearview mirror gets boring if you have nothing left to say. Perhaps the notebooks he's kept start pulling him back in, he found inspiration in writing about other people's music, and cranked it out as if a different medium had suddenly sparked the old muse--like one of those dusty crowd-pleasing flips he stumbled on during a slow night on the high-wire. He gives it extra play on a whim, and surprises himself yet again with how much music the words carry, how much the crowd buoys him. Suddenly, catching his balance, he snaps back into the habit of pleasing himself with his innate skill at making the crowd roar. Just for kicks he does it again, then falls backwards down into the net, grinning.

Nancy Franklin's lead is (as SKL would say) "crashingly banal":

"Though there has not yet been a poll to prove the validity of this claim, it’s probably fair to say that most Americans will not be glad to hear that the 2008 campaign started on Wednesday, November 3rd."

Versions of that sentiment appear the week after every presidential election. But this sentence, buried deep below, is far worse, and people have been fired for less:

"The television news organizations, having burned themselves in the 2000 election by calling Florida too early, and calling it wrong, all bent over backward to hold off on projecting outcomes."

Did ANY of the New Yorker's three zillion editors blanch at that one? "Calling it WRONG..." Excuse me, but Gore WON Florida, the mistake was in calling it too early, but never WRONG. It was wrong only in the same sense that the Supreme Court's decision to annoint Bush was WRONG.

Here's the funniest graph from this weary obituary, but far from the least likely:

Mr. Bush's Republican Party had, during his time in office, so effectively marginalized the opposition Democratic Party that it all but ceased to function in many states. After the suspension of the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate, the remaining 45 Democratic senators were unable to block any of Mr. Bush's appointments to the federal courts or the executive branch of government. The Republicans had so successfully supported Mr. Bush as an infallible and irreplaceable leader that he came to seem, in fact, irreplaceable. There was no figure in the party who did not appear diminished as soon as his or her name was mentioned alongside of his, and the notion of any ordinary Republican actually succeeding Mr. Bush became, in the words of William Kristol, editor of the conservative journal the Daily Standard, "unthinkable." Thus was the strategy devised to introduce a constitutional amendment to remove the requirement in Article 1 that no one could be elected president were he or she not native born, supposedly to permit the presidential candidacy of the native-born Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, the enormously popular and skillful governor of California and the one Republican other than Mr. Bush who did sometimes appear larger than life. It later transpired that the amendment was a ruse: When Democrats attempted to "poison" the amendment by proposing that all restrictions on who might become president be removed (the requirement that a president be at least 35 years old, the two-term limit), the Republicans immediately acquiesced, and as a result of the passage of the 28th Amendment in 2006 and its ratification by the states the next year, in 2008 Mr. Bush announced his candidacy for a third term. He was overwhelmingly defeated that November by former President Bill Clinton...

--Greil Marcus in City Pages.

And if anybody knows how to link to Robert Smigel's "More Fun With Real Audio" McCain segment that aired on SNL, send it on...

Dear Tim,
I am glad you tracked down "That's Where I Went Wrong," and am not surprised that you were evidently a bit disappointed. Thems the perils of nostalgia. The funny thing about this is that I had the same odd desire to track down the song, although I could only remember fragments of the lyrics; then when I was living in Canada it was suddenly playing on the radio and almost fell over. I am very amused that you remember the song's bus imagery, because I couldn't make out the word bus. I heard the lyric either as "this house is awful cold," which didn't make too much sense, or "this horse is awful cold," which, although weirder, seemed more likely, since this was the era of incomprehensible drug lyrics. So you pictured her riding a bus and I pictured her galloping across the Canadian steppe! You ought to do an article about the way a misunderstood lyric will never be corrected in your brain unless someone else points it out to you.

In answer to your question, the Poppy Family's Greatest Hits is in the same vein as that song and the whole album is a living fossil of 1970, and I find it very pleasant to hear. Quite catchy. I only have it in as a cassette (a tiny Canadian issue, I am sure) but I would be happy to loan it or make a copy. No one else I know is the slightest bit interested, especially my wife, who stopped listening to AM radio in 1970 and shares very few musical memories with me. You actually do know the Poppy Family's other "hit," by the way, called "Which Way You Going Billy?", unless this was only played in Pennsylvania, which is entirely possible.

Dear ML,
Yeah the perils of nostalgia, it's never quite as transcendent as you remember, but at least I knew that going in. I was more interested in learning how much correlated with my idealized memory of it, and I worried for a long time that it wouldn't live up to my best hopes. But somehow even that doesn't really matter -- the idealized version lives on somehow. "This horse is awful cold..." There's a series of books called "ExcuseMe While I Kiss This Guy" that is all about misheard lyrics, the guy made a fortune on it and he barely had to lift a finger cos it's one of the prime pleasures of rock'n'roll. Can you tell me what the backup singers are repeating in Steely Dan's "Showbiz Kids"? Apparently its' "Las Wages," which is some Mexican slur on "lost wages," or some such. That one hung me up for a long time. I'll probably go weak one day and download the Poppy Family's Greatest Hits from iTunes just because it's a sentimental curiosity... It's VERY interesting to compare these charts [from the early 1970s], where are you getting them from? I would certainly dig a CD of however many of these you might have.

Dear Tim,
Ah yes, the embarrassment of garbled lyrics. Two friends of mine once told me that "their" song was "How Deep is Your Love?" by the Bee Gees. I said to my friend Tom, who was then in the navy and stationed on a nuclear submarine, I can see why it means so much to you, because of the submarine reference. He looked at me as if I was out of my mind: what submarine reference?! Well, to my undying shame, I had been hearing the lyric "will you come to me on a sum-mer-breeze" as "will you come to me on a sub-ma-rine. " Actually, it would have been a much better song if it said that.

How I get the top-100 lists? I had our college library use interlibrary loan to get me Billboard Magazine on microfilm, 1970-72 inclusive, and I printed out the album and singles charts for various months.

Dear ML,
Let me guess: as keyboard player for your band, you were also lead singer.