No, not these…! (Actually I’ve never been to one of their restaurants even one time.)

Couldn’t resist the joke. I was talking about these Hooters.

The Hooters – All You Zombies (1983) from Flavio Gnoni (-:ENJOYAUDIO:-) on Vimeo.

They were a good band from Philly in the early eighties. As with some other things, it would seem their time might have come round again. Zombies are everywhere of late. Not to mention, uh, Noah!

Might also want to look up Nervous Nights, Day by Day, And We Danced, and Where Do the Children Go?

A Face in the Crowd Trailer from BiteSize TV on Vimeo.

An old movie that is again relevant. Funny how that works. It’s historically significant on multiple levels. It’s the movie that made Andy Griffith a star. He plays a character as dark and complex as the preacher Robert Mitchum played in Night of the Hunter. For all of Griffith’s later success, he would never again show off such prodigious acting skills.

Of course, he had the benefit of the direction of Elia Kazan, three years after the masterpiece that was On the Waterfront, and more years into the descending cloud of lefty opprobrium for his testimony against communists in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. More about Kazan’s possible motives later.

At the time, though, it was considered something of a variation on Citizen Kane, a fictional take on the career of the biggest media superstar of the day, a radio and television host named Arthur Godfrey, who was at one point regarded as the most famous man in America. It was thus, apart from its other interpretations, one of the very first explorations of the impacts and perils of mass media celebrity as a force unhooked from actual achievement.

Like the protagonist of A Face in the Crowd, Godfrey was ultimately laid low by exposure of the contrast between his aw shucks demeanor and his real personality.

I watched it again last night after a long long time of not needing to see it again. It proved something of a revelation in terms of our current cultural and political climate.

The Griffith character is discovered by an ambitious radio host (Patricia Neal, the only woman who could ever have played Dagny Taggart) in the drunk tank of a rural Arkansas jail. He can sing and play the guitar, but his talent at that can’t hold a candle to his instinct for spotting an opportunity to make a score. He’s pure psychopath, incredibly quick to read everyone else’s motivations and vulnerabilities. He’s also a born down-home charmer. The Pat Neal character dubs him “Lonesome Rhodes” and plucks him from nothing to celebrity.

The movie charts his rise from guest talent on an Arkansas radio show to national radio and TV megastar. As I watched I began to understand the dumb-smart traps that killed Elia Kazan’s life and career. Which are some of the same dumb-smart traps that make contemporary progressives so ridiculous and dangerous.

I don’t want to ascribe TOO much vision to Kazan, but I do think he’s grappling with conflicting intentions in this production. He wants both to explain why he was tempted by communism in the first place and why there are times when you break accepted moral codes to bring down a clear and present danger. And I think he wanted to be forgiven; why he made the threat of Lonesome Rhodes into a right wing populist in thrall to evil Republican politicians and crony capitalists.

Given Kazan’s own history, the plot is all over the place. Yet he manages to fight through his own complicated situation to arrive at some brand new insights about the impact of pervasive media. He seems prescient in demonstrating the now accepted truism that all publicity is good publicity. Lonesome openly mocks the product of his show’s main sponsor, which increases sales. He soon becomes a political consultant for a senator who desires to be president. “They don’t need to respect you,” he lectures. “They need to loooove you.”

Patricia Neal and her intellectual admirer Walter Matthau are stand-ins for Kazan himself. Neal the one in love with the romantic illusion of a beast she cannot bring herself to see whole. Matthau the timid intellect that suppresses its doubts and conspires in the fraud until he can no longer stomach the monstrosity of its nature.

There is this kind of duality, even splitting of viewpoints, throughout. Lonesome Rhodes knows he’s a bad man. He just can’t help taking advantage when the evil and weaknesses of others open doors to him. He responds to the virtue of Neal. He despises the gutlessness of Matthau. He is begging to be stopped. But he can also envision the possibility of becoming president himself one day. Which would mean all the drink and pussy any man could ever hope for.

But there is also a bottom line I’m pretty sure Elia Kazan never gave much thought to. The bedrock cultural assumption of the movie is that the vast numbers of people Lonesome Rhodes appealed to were stupid, ignorant, gullible dross. In the end it was the danger of firing them up — against plainly fine policies like Social Security — that required the smart if diffident heroes to bring him down by fair means or foul.

I’m sure Elia Kazan thought this was a no brainer. It’s why he became a member of the American Communist Party in the first place. The idea was never to put the proletariat in charge. It was to protect the proletariat from their own misguided beliefs.

So, as I watched the portrayal of a flyover country populist as a stone psychopath, I thought of phrases like “bitter clingers” and “tea bagger racists.” I understood why they hate Rush Limbaugh so much and with so much self-congratulating superiority even though they have never listened to his show. He’s just Lonesome Rhodes all over again. The smart progressives among us love the people, all right; they just can’t stand to be close enough to smell them.

1957. That’s how long the smart, highly educated, beneficent ones have been condescending to the rest of us. They learned the media trick early. Why they have lost all their reluctance to lie about everything all the time. It’s for our own good.

Do you start to see?

I have some dire posts to do later on, but here’s a vaccine against despair. New York’s police department played the fire department last night, and they had a huge brawl on the ice. Cool.

I got to see their annual football game last fall. They narrowly escaped a similar brawl there but only because the refs refused to penalize the police department for brandishing sidearms during their game ending goal line stand.

Apparently, the wussification of America hasn’t succeeded completely yet. Grin.

Bear that in mind as I get apocalyptic later.

OLD BUSINESS. Thanks to the computer savvy and devotion of my lovely fiancée, the mysterious recording of Save the Last Dance for Me has been identified. It charted at No. 18 in 1974, exactly the right timeframe. I had it all correct as to the tempo and the single-word effect of the key lyrics. What I had wrong was the sex of the singer. Not a Brenda Lee type woman but a 14 year old boy. What did I know? It was a label in a jukebox. Everybody in upstate New York played it constantly, from bikers to B-school partiers. Imagine the booming J-box sound and the girls dancing next to the pool table in the yellow unlight of a Trumansburg bar in winter.

Maybe you had to be there.

Want to play eight ball for money?
(I win often. Ask my wife. Witness.)

Sigh of relief. I know all your songs. My most urgent question: someone sang “Save the Last Dance for Me” who never shows up on the lists. She had a sharp salty voice. I fell in love with her, played it every time I found her on the jukebox. Who was she? (Not Emmylou Harris or Dolly Parton. Sharper, quicker, sexier.)

Answer me this and then we’ll get down to brass tacks. Like, is it, contrary to my conviction, Brenda Lee or is it not Brenda Lee? You know. Not that many raspy tough women’s voices. Listening to her I got involved in the worst bar fight of my life. Guy I was with went nuts, threw the bartender against the back of his own bar. Shattered the mirror and mostly him too. We had to run to the cars and peel away. Can still hear the refrain. Despite all my Internet expertise, can’t find her.

Help me out.

Much much more to talk about.

The remains of Lady Laird’s engagement ring. She didn’t kill Raebert.

The new ring arrived yesterday. I put it on her finger myself.

She said she’d do it again. After we’d argued about the Pope. You should all be so lucky.

Raebert is hiding. As he should.

I live with the guy. I should know. He needed to tell her again. You all do.

In classical music, modern is a relative term. But Philip Glass is a post-modernist icon of those who would abandon as obsolete the neoromantics, the impressionists, the romantics, the classicists, the baroque, and even Gregorian chant. Philip Glass is famous for having done a “Paper Symphony.” Actually done with paper. Akin to what I suggested Glenn Gould had done with human voices late in his career.

Of all genres, I have been most resistant and reactionary in this sphere. I’ve openly liked all manner of contemporary artists, notwithstanding the fact that the good ones become fewer and fewer. Jazz has deteriorated to Kenny G and pissing contests between the ones who are still trying to play, although little of note but the occasional vocalist (Patricia Kaas, say) breaks through even a little. Rock is dead. The growlers and wall of metal nihilists appeal to, uh, libertarians but no one else. The elitists like the Oxbridge geniuses Radiohead (whom I have also conceded to have merit). But they just don’t get the juices jumping, which is the whole point of rock and roll.

American Idol has spent how many years trying to find singers? They can’t find any. (Amy Winehouse and Adele materialize on their own like quarks with half lives of nanoseconds and disappear into the mythology of the 27s.) Just endless — and I do mean endless — Whitney Houston wannabes who compete on ball fields all across America to see how many extra syllables and destructive trills they can introduce into a national anthem they hate but was last played with brilliant hatred by Jimi Hendrix, long dead and buried.

All of the top 100 lists that have been submitted reflect these facts. But no one wants to admit that music itself seems to be dying. Maybe the new kids will break through. Whining solipsistic feminist balladeers. Shocking shockers who still dream they can outdo the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen. They can’t. They’re fakers in ever more elaborate costumes. The last angry rock band was the Clash. The last innovative rock composer and performer was Peter Gabriel. The last folk rock geniuses were Leonard Cohen and Warren Zevon. They’re the key. They had some education and knew what they were talking about on top of their musical and poetic talents. Good luck with that in the age of pop stars whose tweets routinely contain three grammatical errors within the 140 character limit.

So called serious contemporary music is dead. What’s left is pop and a handful of outliers. Pop. A generation dominated by Madonna progressing into Lady Gaga with accelerating speed. Justin Timberlake can sell a million records without a single memorable cut.

Sure, we all listen to some songs we like. I mentioned the outliers. But it’s not an insult to tell the younger ones that it’s not just age we have over them. We have a perspective they may regard as condescending, but it’s a view from a different height.

I do not close my mind to new talent. It’s just getting harder and harder to find. Here’s what I wrote when I discovered I’d been wrong about, gulp, post-modern composer Philip Glass:

INSISTENCE REDUX. I had to comment on the inauguration. I’ve done so. But I want to end the day with something more important and lasting.

Commenters reacted with appreciation for the Philip Glass tour de force, The Hours. I listened to every piece recommended, and I thank everyone who recommended. They were all good, some extraordinary. Yet I found myself coming back to The Hours, which I remind you I found by accident, and in particular the video of its performance.

I keep watching it, and somehow the music, the performer, and the video have become one in my mind, a transcendent gestalt I may never be able to separate into component parts. Sorry. Not trying to be opaque. The music is genius. The pianist is inspired. And the video of this performance is greater than the music or the pianist. It’s a glimpse of perfection.

Why I’m redirecting your attention in the wake of yesterday’s buffoonish celebration of empty self. Watch THIS thing again. And especially all of you who think I don’t understand the unique strengths of womanhood at its best.

You have to watch it full screen in hi-def. That’s when you start to feel her hands. Not young hands. Weathered but not old either. They’ve washed dishes, changed diapers, maybe darned socks, felt for where it hurts with exquisite sensitivity, rushed quivering to the face at awful news, plied the pen to do the books and write the checks, and most likely tended a garden or picked a crop.

We can’t see her face. But we get to hear her heart. Everything has happened to her and nothing will ever make her stop.

We see her in profile. What is the piano? This grand Steinway is no phallic symbol. Its curves are female, its voice mightier than sex. The insistence is not prayer, not mother love, not carnal desire. It’s not even what we call vitality. It’s the ferocity of life as we’re supposed to live it, not in passive appreciation but in the hungry perseverant never ever subsiding passion which fills every hour with the life that IS what we mean when we speak of God.

So I keep looking at her hands. Where the music is coming from. Her frail bent back. Where the power is coming from. And Glass, presumably, is being channeled through her bun.

Regardless, none of this art will ever be brought to you by the collective action sponsored by the government.

All right, maybe I’m a little bit crazy right now. But if I weren’t, I’d be concerned that maybe I’m a little bit crazy in the aftermath of a catastrophic proof that the country as a whole has gone completely batshit crazy.

Persevere nonetheless.

Here endeth my day.

What I wrote a week after the second inauguration of the Post-Modern Sun King.

Am I really impeding the march to greatness of the Millennial Generation? If I were, they could articulate their vision. Please do so.

Believe me. I’m more ready to hear the new and brilliant than you could possibly know.

Brave and faithful and true.

The Deerhound Diary website has frequently promoted the virtues of gigantic dogs, which we do not deny.

However.

We also support the value of much much smaller dogs, like Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds, and Greyhounds, many of which weigh far less than a hundred pounds.

There’s also Raebert’s little sister Eloise. A pug who competes every year at Westminster in the “toy” category but always loses because thanks to our vet, she’s too lean and lightweight to qualify as representative of her breed.

Smart as a whip too.

Eloise wishes she had a Pomeranian to talk to. That way there’d be something to talk about. Not just all the intellectual stuff the sighthounds get up to.

I kid. We love Eloise. Or we wouldn’t have charged a careening SUV to save her from getting smushed a week after our wedding.

We ARE a toy friendly site. And we can prove it.

Raebert has more toys than Westminster.

Lake and I had been sparring about Bjork. Understandably he’s in favor of all things Icelandic right now. But there’s a limit. He wanted me to watch a Bjork video called Mutual Core. He also recommended a song by a talented young female rock vocalist from somewhere else (see above). I watched and responded by text:

Watched Mutual Core. I concede she is loud.

Lake, you know I love you, but we’ll have to agree to disagree about Bjork.

However, I did listen to Metric’s Black Sheep. I thought, okay, until I dialed up this old veteran:

But then I got to thinking. How had she been earlier in life? We’re talking Patti Smith here. She was a groupie, an addict, a wannabe who somehow made it. Would she have been better or worse decades ago?

Here’s what I found.

So I sent that to Lake too. With an observation.

Here’s an earlier version of the same same song, same artist. Sad realization. Those of us us who were on the edge did really and truly spend ourselves.

I keep wondering where my energy went. I’m thinking I spent more than anyone is supposed to have. Not on heroin and cocaine but on the war it’s now clear I’m losing. Still, I look at Patti Smith and feel a curious camaraderie.

Haven’t heard back yet. I know he’s on the road and quite busy so I’m not implying he’s nonresponsive. It’s just that I keep coming back to the fact there is this huge gulf between the generations. I have done more to wage war against the Boomer Generation than any other person any other person can name. But the measure of our crimes is that we had so much more talent than any subsequent generation.

The music of the sixties and seventies was an unprecedented explosion in every genre of music. Today people yearn for the 80s. The 80s were shit compared to the late sixties and early seventies. The whole 21st century is shit compared to the 80s. That’s not old guy talk.

It’s just the facts, Jack.

Glenn Gould from probably anybody on Vimeo.

I feel about words the way he felt about music. Later in life, he began to feel about words the way I do. In the documentary “32 Short Films about Glenn Gould” he began at the end to realize that the way people talk is itself a kind of music. That you could play people’s conversation like an orchestra. Make compositions of it.

Contrary to all the teachings I ever received about what literary writing consisted of, I have always conceived of it as an oral art, the sound of a voice talking to others. I have construed it also as multiple voices contending. I have done a symphony but never, or rarely, a concerto. I am a composer of words, but like Glenn Gould I am more interpreter than impresario.

I play the keys of the keyboard. He was a stiletto, a perfectionist, even a pointillist. I am the wild-ass thing that only happens in writing of the oral kind, where there is no predetermined score or sentence. I am Ring Lardner with a scalpel, Evelyn Waugh with a heart, and Mark Twain with a computer. Why what I do can be compared to Glenn Gould.

Not that I am competing or presume to be his equal. It is that I, like him, have spent my life trying to turn fingers into clear moments. I play, I hit the keys, and you hear every word hit your mind. Not always singly. But like a drum riff. No matter what voice I’m using, and I’ve used dozens, you feel yourself penetrated by a tattoo of thoughts, images, ideas, and voices that make a difference in your perception.

When I was young I wanted it to be poetry. Older I wanted it to be drama and story. Older still I wanted it to be clairvoyance. You keep pushing, you see.

When I look at him I am cowed. He went around the bend. I’m trying very hard not to do that. All the same forces are at work. I want to be alone. Completely alone but for my wife. I want all of you just to be an audience. I want to keep you as far away from me as possible. But I fail.

Writers are not musicians. We need human contact that goes beyond strings and keys. As much as I want to be solitary, isolated, and free of human contamination, I also need to feel your lives, or else my own life ends.

When I reach out, it is not a ruse. It is an expression of what I am. When I say I care, I do. Even though the portrait of Glenn Gould above is, to me, frighteningly similar to the view I have of myself. I am not like you, any of you. What my wife puts up with in me is beyond my comprehension. I am not violent. I am ever so perseverantly alone and detached from everything that home life is supposed to consist of. I USE Raebert to pretend I’m an ordinary sort of fellow with a big dog keeping him in check.

The reality is that I’m a freak, whose big dog does keep him in check by needing water, going out, and two meals a day. Without that I would be shutting down completely. I don’t know how to play the words people need anymore. The natural response of someone who has been the best at words all his life is to fold inside, tighter and tighter until there is nothing left, not a single syllable.

I’m explaining, not quitting. You see, Raebert is here. Lady Laird is here. She understands everything I am telling you. She shouldn’t love me, but she does, and he does.

He sniffs my right ear every morning. Can you still hear me? Yes.

What Glenn Gould didn’t have. He had plenty of smart people around, but he didn’t have an ocean of love. They were all trying to figure him out and fix him somehow. There is no fixing of this particular condition. For months, years, I kept waiting for my wife to tell me there was something wrong with me. Then I realized she had told me the truth when she said she loved me the way I am, accepted me as her husband the way I am. I still wake in the middle of the night feeling guilty, but my love for her keeps growing. Why do I believe in God? Because he gave me her. She frightens most men, but she comforts and cares for me.

Why I can still serve you. As long as I am able.

Raebert thinks the Laird coat of arms is just a pillow. He hasn’t read the ‘Spero Meliora’ motto. “I hope for better things.” But he’s just a dour Scot.

Maybe I dissed Tim’s Japanese video games soundtracks on his Top 100 list. I have no recollection of that. (At this point, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?!) I do not recall. I was in another meeting. And so forth.

But unlike the federal government, I actually listened to three of his musical recommendations, because he had a story behind all of them.

Since you asked, RL, I will try to explain the Japanese stuff concisely, without making your eyes glaze over. Admittedly, it feels silly inserting this into these other ongoing conversations about some heavy musical hitters. Anyway, there is a canon of shared experiences amongst anyone who has played the Final Fantasy video game series. Much of it is useless stuff that occupies my brain cells, like Star Trek TNG trivia. One exception, though, is the music. I still like a lot of the music.

The theme from the Suteki Da Ne song is woven into several other tracks throughout one particular game and, what can I say, it got stuck in my head. Definitely an autobiographical track, like you said.

Similarly, the JENOVA song is from an earlier game and plays during certain battles. This song popped into my head whenever I had to walk around on campus during my plebe year of school. We couldn’t talk and had to walk at a very rapid pace and absolutely wanted to avoid being stopped by any upperclassman. Every “stroll” out of the barracks was a battle, and I would never be stopped for walking too slowly if I walked in time with this fast-paced tune. And I never was. Didn’t plan it that way, it just happened. We don’t have much control over which songs get stuck in our heads.

Here’s the JENOVA song:

Anybody out there who doesn’t get it? There are warrior times in life, whether you’re in the military or not, and there are times when you need a soundtrack in your head to propel you through the daunting parts. For me it’s usually Stones or Ennio Morricone music from Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. For Tim, it’s drawn from the burrow where the Iliad has been hiding throughout the age of Christendom. In the place where fables and myths and heroes always hide from the scornful eye of the judgmentalists, the popular culture.

Hector and Hecuba, Achilles, Helen, Briseus, Ajax, and Agamemnon continue to flourish in locations where many never look. And in Tim’s case, how interesting that an Asian inspiration would presage his assignment in Korea, where he discovered another of his Top 100:

About the string quartet song: Like a Stone was played on the radio constantly while I lived in Korea. It’s a dull song, like I said, and it could actually be a contender for theme song of my time spent over there. I volunteered to go to “freedom’s frontier” before 9/11, thinking that would be where all the action was. Instead I found a culture that had been mired in bureaucracy & bullshit for about 50 years. All the training was fake. When we weren’t doing fake training, we were picking up soldiers from the MP drunk tank. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Browsing iTunes one day years later, I came across this group called Vitamin String Quartet. They specialize in doing covers of atypical things, like pop & rock songs. I saw they had one for Like a Stone and couldn’t conceive how it could possibly be performed by a string quartet. It blew me away. They give the music a passion & intensity that is absent in the actual song and transformed something I was never fond of from a time in my life I wasn’t fond of into something I really liked.

Plus, I played in a quartet while in band so I know how tricky it can be. Each person has a role to play and no one can hide in the section. From a musical standpoint alone, I think the performance is great.

So here is that song too.

There’s always a story that makes sense of your music, and always music that makes sense of your story. Now that we have lists, we have the basis for exchanging real experiences with one another. Music is the knock on the door. Words are the welcome into a hospitable home.