"The whole idea of government is this: If enough people
get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
And here, in small-town New Hampshire, in this veritable world's capital of probity,
we were about to commit just such a theft. If we could collect sufficient votes
in favor of special town meetings about sewers, we could make a golf course and
condominium complex disappear for free. We were going to use our suffrage to
steal a fellow citizen's property rights. We weren't even going to take the
manly risk of holding him up at gunpoint.
"Not that there is anything
wrong with our limiting growth. If we Blatherboro residents don't want a golf
course and condominium complex, we can go buy that land and not build them. Of
course, to buy the land, we'd have to borrow money from the bank, and to pay
the bank loan, we'd have to do something profitable with the land, something
like . . . build a golf course and condominium complex. Well, at least that
would be constructive. We would be adding something -- if only golf -- to the
sum of civilization's accomplishments. Better to build a golf course right
through the Redwood National Park and condominiums on top of the Lincoln
Memorial than to sit in council gorging on the liberties of others, gobbling
their material substance, eating freedom.
"What we were trying to do with
our legislation in the Blatherboro Town Meeting was wanton, cheap and greedy --
a sluttish thing. This should come as no surprise. Authority has always
attracted the lowest elements of the human race. All through history mankind
has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss
commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way
to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit
to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst
off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every
government is a parliament of whores.
"The trouble is, in a democracy the
whores are us."
The sound you can hear by clicking above is a recreation of part of one of the Titanic's distress calls sent by Marconi operator Jack Phillips aboard the RMS Titanic just after midnight on Monday, April 15, 1912.
Morse Code in 1912 did not sound like the neat beeps and boops we often hear in movies. It was basically playing with crashes of static. This signal was recreated for the Titanic Historical Society using vintage equipment, and it's an exact recreation of what the radio operators would have heard that night. As best as my rudimentary Morse code skills allow, the message translates as
follows:
CQD CQD SOS SOS CQD DE MGY MGY MGY
"CQD" was the standard distress call at the time; there were a
whole series of "CQ" codes, and the "D" meant distress. In
1909, an international convention adopted "SOS" as the new distress
signal-- not because it means "save our souls," as is often reported,
but because the three dots, three dashes and three dots are a very distinctive
signal that cannot be confused with anything else, especially by those not very
familiar with Morse. (Even you can hear it, right?) "MGY" were Titanic's
call letters. And the "DE" means "this is."
Imagine sitting in some radio shack on one of the many ships in the North
Atlantic that cold, still night, listening to the staccato mutter of the Morse
spark, and suddenly hearing this call out of the ether. Anyone who heard the
call that night remembered to his dying day the hair rising on the back of his
neck at the almost incomprehensible message -- the Titanic in distress.
Richard Bissell (1915-1977) was an American novelist, best
known for The Pajama Game, the Broadway musical based on his novel 7 1/2 Cents.
Bissell was born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa, and graduated from Harvard in 1936. On his
graduation, he shipped out as an ordinary seaman with the American Export Lines. He also
served time in his family's garment factory, and during the war served as a deckhand, mate
and master on the Mississippi, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Monongahela and St. Croix
rivers.
In 1950, Bissell publishedA Stretch On The River,
one of the greatest American novels ever written. I hate to reduce it to a synopsis,
because there really is no story, but the basic premise is that in the early 1940s, a
young college graduate named Bill Joyce, jaded and disillusioned with the posh life
afforded him by his father's high-class bootlegging business, signs aboard the diesel
towboat Inland Coal as a deckhand.
"I better get in the Army, Georgie. They're
already starting to talk."
"I love that line," Georgie said. "All our
lives we been reading Remarque and telling each other what a line of cheese all that war
stuff is. Now the Community Band goes down the street with the cornets playing flat on the
high notes and right away you wanna get in the army. Smarten up, Bill. You and I don't
have to prove nothing. The one thing we have in common is we don't give a damn for nobody
or nothing."
People were doing the most peculiar things in those days.
"Smarten up, boy," he said. "Leave the
dumbbells settle the war. Remember the line we was brought up on? 'Cannon fodder.'
Remember Paul Baumer? Remember Katczinsky? Smarten up."
The novel, however, is not about coal or the Mississippi
or the war. It is a brilliant character study about the men who work the barges, from the
deckhands to the cooks to the cabin boys to the captain. Bissell's ear for dialogue is
stunning:
"What about this here Hitler?" Diamond said.
"No good," I said.
"That's the way I figure him. And them French and
English, too. I wouldn't trust none of them. They . . . "
"Hey, wait a minute," I said. "They're on
our side."
"I don't give a ----- what side they're on. Take this
here Duke of Windor, all he wanted to do was get to be King. He is so sore they won't let
him be King he marries this here American girl and figures he'll be King of the U.S.A., by
god, if he can't be King of England."
"But god damn it, man, he already was King.
They bounced him out because he married Simpson."
"Sure, that's what they say. You wouldn't
expect them to come right out and admit it, would you?"
"Admit what?"
"Why that he wants to kick out the Congress and run
it like them old-time kings."
"But he hasn't even been to the U.S. yet, and
they bounced him out over there four or five years ago already."
"How do you know he ain't been here yet? They
never tell you nothing."
"But, damn it, Diamond . . ."
and he often rises to pure poetry in his prose:
The trouble with steamboating is, there's too much of
it. You can't get away from it. In the morning when the barges were wet with the dew and
the hot cakes downed in Karo, all good high school graduates were sitting in clean buses
reading the box scores on the night games, but we were on our knees scrubbing the
pilothouse floor; at noon, when the boys were hard at the egg salad sandwiches at
Walgreen's and the girls were sipping their iced tea, we lay down in our dirty bunks to
listen to the luncheon music of the Diesels; in the evening, when the marquee lights
commenced to twinkle in the streets and the couples strolled past the dime store windows,
we arose from our sad blankets and went at it again. And in the middle of the night, when
the kids were asleep in their trundle beds, the clock ticking in the kitchen and the mice
making merry in the breadbox, we were still at it, pumping the barges, painting the hold,
mumbling, spitting, rolling cigarettes, wondering what was doing on Main Street, and
feeling sorry for ourselves. And it was a dismal feeling when we passed some little river
town in the early evening and heard a bicycle bell under the trees.
**********
Now this young lady was perfectly beautiful and she did
not read Vogue magazine, discuss Braque, Albright or Rouault, did not have to be
cajoled and flattered into bedding, or act real peppy and cute. She did not try to talk
like Hepburn or to put character in her handwriting by separating all the letters, nor did
she talk sexy and then run for cover when cornered. She shut up when she had nothing to
say. She did not quit drinking at a party for fear she might say something natural;
neither did she get drunk and blow lunch. She did not live on fruit salad and diet pills.
If she felt like it she chewed gum. She did not claim to like or know anything about prize
fighting or baseball. She did not say she wished she had time to read some really good
books. She did not give a good god damn what kind of hat the girl at the next table had
on. She didn't want to go to Hollywood and see the homes of the stars. And loving was her
middle name.
**********
After you have been on the river long enough to get the
disease, everything looks different: Chicago is a town 200 miles east of the river. South
Dakota is someplace west of Minneiska and of no interest as it hasn't even a mile of
Mississippi River in the whole state. Lake Superior is an inferior watery deposit of some
kind, in a general northeasterly direction from Grey Cloud Landing. And as for St. Louis,
Quincy, Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, Dubuque, La Crosse, Winona -- what are they? River
towns, of course. Not towns -- river towns. And what a difference that makes.
What possible charm can we attach to any of these towns
other than that the Mississippi River flows past them, touches them? What is John Deere at
Moline? French and Hecht at Davenport? Standard Lumber Co. at Dubuque? Ah, we love and
cherish these mammoth enterprises because they are by the river. What is left of glamour
at Reads Landing? A store with Rice Krispies -- and the river. McGregor, Iowa, is all
tired out but the river keeps it on the map. Lancing, Iowa, would be worse than South
Dakota -- but it's on the river, and in the evening it's better than Lake Louise.
These grand old towns are pretty much shot, now. The
aristocracy has fallen from the firmament and there are no bankers who read Greek in the
evening. Papa and the Kellys and the Schwartzes are the new aristocracy, and they live in
plastic houses with electric cocktail shakers and not a piece of reading material in
sight. And the new sophistications of the inhabitants has systematically eliminated all
action, drama, excitement, and color from the scene. My home town used to have a baseball
team in the Mississippi Valley League and a ball park with pop vendors in lovely soiled
white jackets. It's gone. We used to have an Amusement Park, a roller coaster, and a
Bier-Garten. All gone. We used to have a Fair Grounds, and open-air trolleys to the scene.
Gone. And a racetrack and trotting races. Gone. We used to have a millionaire who kept
peacocks on the lawn, had a private trotting track, and arrived at the mill in a white
suit via 1912 Mercedes limousine. Most completely gone. Why there's nothing really left
there at all except the lights in front of the movie houses and 60,000 people criticizing
each other and buying new-model radios. Except the river. That makes it a place. It's on
the river.
Aside from the river my town is like every other American
town -- the fourteen-year-old girls run around Main Street half naked all summer and the
evening paper is filled with sex crimes perpetrated on fourteen-year-old girls. And we
have the usual town characters -- a half-wit who is a scream, and a bartender who eats
lighted matches; but what makes my town worth coming home to? Why, the river, naturally;
if I had lived in Fort Dodge or Topeka, I wouldn't even have come home for the burial of
relatives.
My favorite part of the book, and the most accomplished
piece of writing, is Chapter 18, wherein Shorty the deckhand trips, falls under the bow of
the barge, and drowns. The chapter is one big five-page stream-of-consciousness paragraph
of Shorty's thoughts as he dies, and it is brilliant.
The tone of the book is low-key in its detachment and
indifference to the outcome of events. His relationship with his girlfriend in St. Paul is
remarkably mature and sexual for a book written in 1950, and there is not a trace of
sentimentality in any of the characters. There is not a single dated note in the whole
book.
I was an English major in college (Elizabethan literature,
to be precise), and I have read enough pieces of crap labeled "great literature"
to choke a horse. A Stretch On The River is the real thing.
Bissell wrote some other books (The Monongahela,
Goodbye Ava, You Can Always Tell A Harvard Man, Still Circling Moose Jaw), one of
which, Say Darling, was also produced on Broadway. Later in life, he bought a river
towboat and was known as the only author since Mark Twain to have both a master and pilot
license, all tonnage, for the Upper Mississippi and Upper Monongahela Rivers. He belonged
to eleven historical societies and collected everything from antique cars to saloon
pianos. His prize possession was a majestic eleven-foot mirror from Mark Twain's New York
house. He and his wife and four kids divided their time between their 1909 Stanford White
house in Fairfield, Connecticut, a summer house in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and various
travel locations. He died in 1977.
San Francisco in the 1960s
was a little like the old joke about the blind men and the elephant -- what you thought it
was depended on where you grabbed it. To the beats, it was coffee houses, Birkenstock
sandles and nodding to Ferlinghetti in North Beach. To the hippies, it was the
Haight, the
park and panhandling. To straight bachelors, it was Vertigo, Sam Spade apartments
with pocket-door foyers on Geary Street, and very dry martinis; to office girls it was
looking for rich guys at the Buena Vista and seeing how many times you could wear the
paper dress before it got ratty. To a nice, normal, Rob-and-Laura family like mine, it was
my dad's office building at 49 4th Street, drives down to Pescadero in the VW camper for breakfast, seagrass rugs from
Cost Plus, Sunday morning hot chocolates at the Sea Witch in Ghirardelli Square, and
toe-dipping into some of the other realities in town. It seemed that there was at least
one San Francisco for every resident.
In 1967, the year of the miserably misnamed Summer of Love, my dad bought a
copy of a little, badly-printed guide book called My Secret San Francisco,
subtitled "How to Eat, Drink and Swing in San Francisco on Almost No Money."
(Why my dad, a 35-year-old happily married father of two, was interested in how to
"swing" is a question I refuse to research any further.) The book was written by
Arthur Fleming, and in 68 pages of his unique prose and perspective, he gives a
fascinating look into that particular snapshot in time, when the beats, the hippies, the
Playboy bachelors and perky girls coexisted for a moment in the bright sunshine before the
storm.
I'll shut up and let you read Mr. Fleming's opus. I originally planned to scan
just the text into HTML, but so much of the charm of the book is the Olivetti typography,
the wandering little corrections, and the cut-and-paste layout. So I've scanned the whole
thing as a series of 38 JPGs.
In the summer of 1972, I was 15 years old and working in the office of
Congressman Philip M. Crane of Illinois. It sounds grander than it was – I
basically spent all my time in the congressman’s hot, stuffy attic storage area
in the Longworth Building running an AB Dick 360 printing press for various
campaign-related materials. But I was down in the office quite a bit, as they
also let me draft some letters, play around with their Ur-word processor
(called a MagCard), and make lunch runs.
For those of you kids for whom 1972 is basically the Dark Ages, a little
history lesson. That summer, the Democrats had nominated George McGovern to be
their presidential candidate, and he had chosen a Missouri senator named Thomas
Eagleton to be his running mate. But only a week or two into the campaign, it
came out that Eagleton has spent some time in a mental hospital and had been
subjected to repeated bouts of electroshock therapy. (Think Jack Nicholson in
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”) After a lot of press buzz, McGovern was
forced to dump Eagleton and chose as his replacement Sargent Shriver, the
former head of the Peace Corps and (hey, it couldn’t hurt) Jack Kennedy’s
brother-in-law.
About a week after all this transpired, one of Crane’s earnest young office
workers came running into the office with big news. “Some jerk intern” (as he
put it) in Senator Scoop Jackson’s office was offering to buy up any McGovern/Eagleton buttons, sticker or signs for $1
each. We were flabbergasted. Who in their right mind would want to blow their
money on useless campaign materials? (The notion that this stuff might be
collectable never occurred to us; in fact, back then most people treated all
kinds of stuff we would cherish today as disposable.)
So we gathered up all the stuff we could find. I had a few buttons, and one
of the secretaries had a stack of bumper stickers. (All the congressional
offices did; McGovern’s folks had sent this stuff around to everybody,
Republicans and Democrats alike.) Somebody took it all over to Jackson’s
office, and I got $3 back, which I immediately spent on a Philly cheesesteak at
one of the little food caverns under the Capitol.
Years later, I was reading a biography of Bill Gates,
and there it was: he was the “jerk intern” in Scoop Jackson’s office. Even at
17, his little entrepreneurial mind was churning away. I hope he eventually
made a decent profit on my McGovern/Eagleton
buttons. I like to think that my little seed germinated into the $38 billion Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation. And if I have
any other stuff laying around that he might want – make me an offer, Bill.
Back in 1979, I was just starting out as a government contract negotiator
with the Navy Department in DC. They had hired a large number of us recent
college graduates, a bunch of 20-something idiots who thought we owned the
world.
One of our favorite pastimes, I hate to admit, was making fun of the career
bureaucrats in the office who were nearing retirement. One guy, who had been a
Helldiver pilot off the Ticonderoga during the invasion of the Philippines,
spent every day bombastically retelling his story of being shot down, to the
point where we could all recite it over drinks after work. Another guy, long
past retirement age, took his role as floor warden so seriously that he had
stopped doing any official work and spent the day wandering around in his yellow
hardhat, passing out copies of his 300-page manuscript calling for a world
government run by - you guessed it - himself. Yet another guy, who looked like
an old, skinny, even weirder version of Clint Howard, impressed us all with his
dedication and his long work hours - until we discovered that he was, in fact,
living in the office. They were all deep mines of amusement to us.
But the one we made fun of the most was a guy named Stan Casanove. Stan was
a little guy, just over five feet tall. He had a moon-shaped face and a body
shaped like a pear. He wore thick bottle-bottom glasses, had large unwieldy
hearing aids in both ears, and he walked with two aluminum canes. He almost
never talked, and we assumed he was just slow. Some of us got pretty good at
imitating his whispery voice, his halting walk, his way of looking around
without moving his neck. We thought he was hilarious, and he became even more
laughable when, during a fire drill, he pitched face-first down a concrete
stairway (just missing me) and ended up with grotesque stitches across his
face.
Soon afterwards, Stan retired, and we all ponied up a couple of bucks and
took him to the Orleans House in Rosslyn, one of the few decent restaurants in
Northern Virginia back then, famous for its 100-foot salad bar. After we ate,
the boss made a little speech (which showed us he didn't know Stan any better
than we did), and Stan got up to say thanks.
"I know some of you make fun of me," he started. "You say
things behind my back. But none of you know anything about me. You never
bothered to ask about my canes, my hearing aids, my glasses. You never bothered
to talk to me at all."
"Well, let me tell you something about myself. I served in the Army in
the war. I was stationed on Corregidor. And I was captured by the Japanese when
Corregidor fell."
Dead silence in the restaurant.
"They marched us 60 miles, and a third of us died on the way. No food,
no water, and if you collapsed, they chopped off your head with a samurai
sword. I survived the Bataan Death March - and I survived three years in a POW
camp. Not many of us did.
"My glasses?" He waved at his thick spectacles. "One guard
took great pleasure in hitting me upside the head with a wooden plank until I
was blind.
" My hearing aids?" He gestured at them. "A guard didn't
think I was listening to him closely enough, so he punctured both my eardrums
with a stiletto.
"And my legs?" Nodding at his canes, "I didn't leap up fast
enough when the camp commander came to our barracks, so the guards broke both
my legs with a lead pipe and refused to set them.
"But these are just things that happened. They didn't diminish me, or
make me any less a person in the eyes of God. I'm proud of my service to the
country, and the work I have done here at Navy as a civilian. I hope that you
find as much fulfillment in your career as I have. Thank you." And he sat
down.
I have never, before or since, felt as mortified, as embarrassed or as
humiliated as I did at that moment. I glanced at my officemates. The guys were
beet-red, and some of the girls had tears running down their cheeks. Even the
old guys looked stunned.
I grew up as a very sheltered kid, went from a quiet childhood to a good
high school to an excellent college to a good job. But I had never been
confronted by real life like that. I'd never had my immaturity, my cruelty and
my heartlessness thrown in my face like that. I'd like to think it made me a
better person. And I hope my compatriots, all nearing 60 now, took the same
thing from that experience that I did.
This is Astronaut Jessica Meir. She is also a professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. She has a Ph.D in marine biology from Scripps. She spent time diving in Antarctica studying penguins, and is currently studying how geese can fly over Mount Everest. She lived underwater for 5 days to study long-term effects of mixed-gas atmospheres. And she's pretty cute, too. She's either one of those damn overachievers, or she can't hold a steady job.
I can’t believe it’s been almost 50 years since “A Charlie Brown Christmas” premiered on CBS on Thursday, December 9, 1965. I know a lot of you younger folks just look at it as 30 minutes of crappy animation, but let me try to explain why it was such a big deal at the time.
The “Peanuts” comic strip (which we all, adults and kids, read every day in the newspaper) was a gigantic cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, far and away the one pop culture thing that knitted all ages together. We only had 5 TV channels, no internet, no instant access to news or info, and pop music was age-sensitive. What we *all* did was read “Peanuts.” It was cool, because while Charlie and the gang were undeniably kids, they thought and talked about grown-up stuff, to an extent that I didn’t realize until I grew up myself. Charlie Brown was the poster child for angst, self-doubt and bad karma, surrounded by the laid-back Linus, Linus’ bitch sister Lucy, Charlie’s Mitty-esque dog Snoopy and the rest of the gang. No identifiable locale, no adults, they existed in a timeless void never intruded upon by real events. So all they did was talk about their dreams, their inner turmoil, their inability to figure out why we were here and what it all meant. All the kids I knew talked in Peanuts quotes, much like my kids and I talk in Simpsons quotes today.
When we found out that there was going to be a Peanuts special on TV that Christmas, we were all excited. I was a little more apprehensive, because the fall of 1965 was full of TV disappointments for me. I was a gigantic nut about the space program and the race to the moon, and I’d looked forward to the premiere that fall of two space-themed TV shows – “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Lost in Space.” Jesus, what crap. Within weeks, I was yelling at the TV like any self-righteous 9-year-old who had had his dreams shattered: “Astronauts don’t wear their uniforms to work! Why does Roger Healey have an Army Corps of Engineers badge? And they don’t live in Cocoa Beach! Why are you showing an Atlas launch but saying it’s a Titan? Who brings their kids into space with them? Doesn’t June Lockhart ever take off that stupid silver suit? Why hasn’t someone pushed Dr. Smith out of the airlock? Arrrgggghhh!” I was so aggrieved by how wrong TV got those two shows that I didn’t watch the first season of “Star Trek” the next year, opting instead for “The Tammy Grimes Show” (something my parents still bug me about, since, based on the ratings, I was the only one watching it) and “That Girl.” Good thing I don’t bet on the horses.
But I digress. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” premiered during the flight of Gemini 7, and just three days before the planned launch of Gemini 6. (There is a reason those numbers of out of order, but that’s for another post.) I had never felt as excited to be living in the present as I did that week. Americans are orbiting the earth, Charlie Brown is going to be on TV, and Christmas is only 16 days away. Hot damn.
The gold standard of animation was, for me, the lavishly-done Looney Toons that Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng did for Warner Brothers – Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the gang. The Peanuts special didn’t look like that. It was a spare, jerky, cheaply-done animation, but it somehow, given the times, looked modernistic, avant-garde and hip – the same way that “South Park” looked edgy and cool when it premiered. But the hippest thing about it was Vince Guaraldi’s score. He had previously hit the charts in 1962 with the wonderful “Cast Your Fate to the Winds,” which I read somewhere was Jack Kennedy’s favorite song. We had never heard that kind of hip, trendy jazz score applied to a cartoon before. (Even today, I always hit the “replay” button when “Linus and Lucy” comes up on my playlist.) And for the voices, the producers, working on a tight timeline and a shoestring budget, went with real kids, not the kind of Walter Tetley/June Foray adults-pretending-to-be-kids we always heard in cartoons. Even the fact that the kid playing Sally screwed up her lines, and they didn’t bother to fix it, was electric.
The combination of the animation, the score, the voices, and the adult theme – seriously, a bunch of kids worrying about the commercialization of Christmas by “a big Eastern syndicate?” – all blended together into the coolest damn thing we’d ever seen. The ratings were huge and the reviews were glowing, despite the fact that the producers and Coca-Cola, the sponsor, were convinced that it was going to be a major disaster and almost pulled it at the last minute. Because what we really needed was another episode of “The Munsters,” right?
It was all we talked about at school the next day, and for the following week. We felt that TV had actually spoken to us at the right level for once. I mean, it’s hard to take Captain Kangaroo seriously when we were regularly doing nuclear attack drills, earthquake drills and tsunami drills at school. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” aimed higher than that. Ever since, I’ve had a big warm spot in my heart for it, and up until I bought a VHS copy of it in the late-80s, I watched it every December when they rebroadcast it.
And beyond all that, we have this to thank the show for. From Wikipedia: “The popularity of the special practically eliminated the popularity of the aluminum Christmas tree, which was a fad from 1958 to 1965, when the special portrayed it negatively. By 1967, just two years after the special first aired, they were no longer being regularly manufactured.”
My first computer game. A friend and I played this thing endlessly on a GE mainframe terminal at my old high school in the mid-70s. All text-based – you had to print out each turn on a dot-matrix printer to keep track of where you were. (The terminal didn’t even have a screen.) You also had to be able to calculate cosines (on paper – no calculators!) to know which way to point the torpedoes, and it took three or four days to complete a game. And I hate to admit it as a taxpayer, but we spent a lot of time in the early 80s playing this on the mainframe computers at the Navy Department.
My grandfather, Bob Fleming, and me in the summer of 1960. He was 53 and I was 4. (I’m 59 now, which is kind of a horrifying thought.) I was thinking about him this week while watching the Cubs advance in the playoffs. “Champ” (our nickname for each other) was a huge Cubs fan, and one of my best memories of my childhood is sitting in the dark on the back balcony of our two-flat in Irving Park, Chicago, listening to the Cubs on the radio. (Away games only, of course – Wrigley Field didn’t have night games until 1988.) The only lights were the glow of the radio dial and the tip of his Luckys as he chainsmoked a pack, while knocking back one Heileman’s Old Style after another. The murmur of the crowd blended with the hum of the Northwest Expressway a block away. He never said anything, but made a satisfied grunt whenever the Cubs scored a run. He died, of throat cancer of course, in 1983, and I know he’s watching over the Cubs and saying, as he did every season, “This is their year.”
I haven't posted anything here for almost 4 years. That's stupid. Blogger is a good platform, and I need to stop cluttering up Facebook with my TL;DR posts. So all the action is going to be over here.
Some guy with a telescope, a camera and an accurate watch caught the International Space Station crossing in front of the moon. You have to be quick, since the transit only lasts 0.3 seconds.
NASA has sunk so low that they now have schoolkid contests to name their unmanned spacecraft. First Sojourner, then Spirit and Opportunity, and the just-launched Curiosity. All so proper and bland and reeking of schoolhouse correctness.
Which is why I was so glad to see the winning names of the two GRAIL satellites that just went into orbit around the moon. Finally, some recognition for some truly great Americans:
Daylight has been growing shorter every day since June 22 of this year. At the current rate of change, there will be no daylight left at all by next summer. The people I’ve talked to all agree on this. It’s settled science.
We must fight this! I propose an international meeting of all 194 countries, in some central location, like Fiji or Cancun. We will establish a legal framework to punish those nations that use too much daylight, and provide billions of dollars in relief to those small developing countries who, solely as a result of their distance from the equator, are more affected by global daylight change.
All those who claim that GDC is not anthropogenic, or part of some kind of natural cycle, will be ostracized. These deniers must be stopped!
The United States is the primary villain in all this. They use far more than their share of daylight, with the main offenders being San Diego, New Mexico, and, for some reason, Philadelphia (it’s always sunny there, apparently). They have made some token efforts to restrict daylight use, in such backwards places as Wasilla, Alaska, but on the whole they consume over 24% of all global daylight. (Unfortunately, I lost all the original data to support this figure, but it’s true. Don’t be a denier!)
In support of this effort, I am organizing a protest. Occupy Waikiki will show our resolve to affect global political thought by hanging out in tents and trying to come up with some kind of coherent message. We especially need the kind of open, uncluttered minds that can see how capitalism and personal freedom are the major causes of this crisis, and how they can be stopped. Also, if you’re mechanically inclined, your expertise is required - to get this movement started, we need lots of tools and cranks. Be sure to bring your sunscreen!
We’re also organizing a world-wide observation of this crisis. At 12 noon local time on December 10th, we want everyone in the world to turn off all light-emitting devices, douse the lights and sit in a dark room for an hour. Use this time to show solidarity with other GDC fighters the world over, and think about what you can do to Shed Light on the Problem (tm). Be sure to get your kids’ schools involved in this. You’d be surprised at how enthusiastic your kids will be at the idea of spending an hour in a dark room with their schoolmates.
This country was built on the drive and moxie of those self-selecting few who got off their asses, came here and tried to better themselves and their families. When my Scottish and Welch ancestors packed it in and made the long perilous journey to America in the 1830s, they left everything behind because the opportunity for freedom – economic, religious, political and personal – was worth the complete upheaval in their lives. The same holds true today for those poor benighted souls, trapped in corrupt, lawless and obscenely poor conditions south of the border, coming to America today.
The new immigration law in Arizona is just the latest in a long line of racist, xenophobic and hateful crap the Government has thrown in the way of legal immigration.
“Why can’t they come here legally, just like my grandpa did?” Well, the US immigration policy isn’t like it was in the old days. Download and take a look at this graphic, which details the obscene barriers that our criminal politicians have erected over the years to keep these poor folk from pursuing their dreams, pursuing the same freedom these self-same morons pay lip service to daily from their corrupt perches in Congress.
As a libertarian, I think the US should have an open-border policy – come here, work five years, take a test and you’re a citizen. That’s the way your forefathers did it, and doubt if anyone today regrets their grandparents’ decision to come here or the ease with which they were able to become citizens. Go check out the little hovels your ancestors came from, and tell me if you prefer that they’d been denied the opportunity to come here.
America is becoming a close-minded nation of the well-to-do eager to deny others the same opportunities that this nation afforded their ancestors. We need the energy, verve and work ethic of immigrants willing to come here and work for their own betterment. Their spirit and drive are vital to this nation.
When I was in high school, I loved Sylvia Plath. All high school students love Sylvia Plath. All that angst, the self-hatred, the Holocaust obsession, the June Cleaver suicide - what's not to like? I memorized "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" and all the rest in hopes of impressing girls with my deepy deepness.
In my last year of college at UVa, I took a poetry writing class from Hank Lazer, and we had some of the class sessions at his house. It was the usual small, eclectic college professor bungalow - think Donald Sutherland in Animal House. At one point, as we all sipped some cheap boxed wine - ah, the pre-Reagan college days - Hank mentioned that he had a series of rare, obscure LPs of famous poets reading their works. He started pulling them out of the orange crate - Frost, Lowell, Schwartz, the execrable Gary Snyder. And - oh my God - Sylvia Plath!
We all leapt up. Plath! Put it on, man! We were absolutely psyched to hear the favorite poet of our generation - not quite boomers, not quite Gen X, more like the Gilligan Generation - read her works in her own voice. We waited for the pain, the anger, the suicidal shadows ---
Hank dropped the needle on "Daddy."
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe . . .
We all stared at each other in shock. I'm not sure what we expected Sylvia Plath to sound like. I assume we all expected that neutral, sincere interior voice that we all hear in our head when we read, a voice reflecting our own experiences, our deep English-major earnestness.
But Sylvia Plath doesn't sound like us. She sounds like - well, she sounds like Martin Short doing Katherine Hepburn. An elitist, Northeastern rich girl's voice, Margaret Dumont behind the perfume counter, the uppity voice that orders some liveried fellow to bring the car around, the kind of trust-fund girl that, while she may loathe him, regularly calls Daddy to get her out of a jam. Plath was only 30 when she died, but you'd never know it listening to her - there is a matronly and snooty edge to her voice that absolutely puts your teeth on edge. Plath's voice was so out of whack with her poetry and her photos and the way we all pictured her that after five seconds of "Daddy," we all broke into deep, crying, holding-our-sides laughter. We never did here the rest of the poem.
And that recording killed Sylvia Plath for me. I have not been able to read her work since.
Over the last 35 years, I've told lots of people about the record, and no one believed me. Despite decades of prowling record stores, I was never able to find that recording again. But last week, I started looking around on the net because her son, Nicholas Hughes, the one-year-old in the next room when she killed herself, himself committed suicide. (He'd been a professor of oceanography at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks - not the place you'd expect Sylvia Plath's son to end up, but we all have our paths to trod.) And, lo and behold, I found the recordings on YouTube. Click here to hear it, but don't do it if you like Plath. You'll never be able to read her again.
I had a few hours to kill after dropping my daughter off at a Blues Alley concert last month, so I decided to hop over to Ben's for a chili halfsmoke. I'd only been there once before, and loved the atmosphere, the history and, of course, the food.
I got my food and went to sit down. I wasn't in my seat more than 10 seconds when an elderly fellow in a leather jacket hurried over to the table.
"You know where you're sittin', boy?"
I looked at the little chrome and vinyl chair and the wonderful Formica table.
"No. Where?"
"That's where Barack sat."
"Really? Right here?
"Yessir." He pointed to the chair on the other side of the table. "And Fenty sat right there."
Before I was done, two other people, including a little kid who couldn't have been more than 10, breathlessly informed of the same fact. It made my halfsmoke a little more perfect to realize that just a month earlier, Barack Obama's butt was in the same place as mine.
Makes me wonder about the other famous patrons. Did Ella sit here? The Duke? Dr. King?
Back in 1967, I was 10 years old, and my family and I lived in Pacifica, just south of SF on the coast. My dad was a bit of a stereophile, and one day he announced that he had found this incredible new station that was playing cool music. On a Saturday evening, he pulled out the big unwieldy reel-to-reel tape recorder, put the microphone in front of the speaker, told us all to shut up, and recorded two hours of KMPX.
What a great collection of stuff! Imagine a radio station today playing the following songs:
"Buy You A Chevrolet" by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (vocals by Goeff and Maria Muldaur)
"Let's Go Get Stoned" by Ray Charles
"National Hotel" by Ian and Sylvia
"Day Tripper" by Sergio Mendez and Brazil 66
The great " Green Rocky Road" by the doomed Tim Hardin
"Candy Colored Dragon" by Jameson
"Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum (along with a discussion of where the organ bit came from) and the lesser known B-side, "Lime Street Blues."
"There is Something On Your Mind" by The James Cotton Blues Band
and a long, weird song about a guy using a pepperoni for a pool cue
along with traffic reports ("be sure to turn on your lights -- the freeway is a fright") and discussion of the previous night's Ravi Shankar concert.
That damn tape was my dad's "party tape" for years. I thought we had lost it long ago, but I recently found the first hour, cleaned it up and made an MP3 of it. You can download it from: http://www.scottpcook/kmpx/kmpx.mp3
Listening to it, I got a little obsessed with it. It really is a piece of history, recorded at the very moment when radio, and most of society, was poised to head off in many weird directions. So, lacking any other hobbies, I decided to research it.
First, some history.In the early 60s, the top-40 powerhouse in SF was KYA, 1260AM, with the legendary Johnny “The Teen Queen’s Dream” Holliday, Russ “The Moose” Syracuse, and Emperor Gene Nelson.One of my fondest memories of my youth was spending the night in my tent in the backyard, with my little transistor tuned to KYA at my side, and hearing, for the first time, "Eleanor Rigby," Paperback Writer," and "Paint It Black," one right after the other, in an orgy of brilliance. My brain hasn't been the same since.
The top DJ at KYA, however, was “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue.As the 60s progressed, however, Tom found that the songs he and his friends listened to were not the same songs he was being asked to play on KYA.So in late 1966, Tom got out the SF Yellow Pages and started calling radio stations until he found one that was interested in playing some different music.
The station he found was KMPX 106.9 FM, which at the time did mostly Italian and Portuguese language programs for the large immigrant fishing population in San Francisco.(People nowadays don’t think of SF as a blue-collar kind of town, but remember that Joe DiMaggio was a fisherman’s son from SF).The station was struggling, as were all FM stations at the time – most people didn’t have an FM receiver, despite the fact that the format had been around since the 1940s.(My family were the first on the block to have an FM receiver in 1966, and I didn’t have one in my car until 1978.)In fact, KMPX was so struggling that the phone had been disconnected, but Tom managed to negotiate a deal whereby the owner let him have the slot to play whatever music caught his fancy.Tom went on the air on April 1967.
This concept later became known as “underground radio” or “rock radio” or “FM rock,” and to give credit where credit is due, Tom was not the first weird DJ at KMPX – a few months earlier, a Detroit DJ named Larry Miller started his own free-form show from to on KMPX.Between the two of them, they reinvented radio. Within a year, KMPX was “the stereo voice of San Francisco,” and the voice of a weird new generation.
My first question to research was the date of the recording. The DJ gives a few clues:
He mentions that the foreign language shows were being phased out. According to some articles I ran across on the web, all the foreign shows were eliminated by August, so the tape must fall between then and the format's premiere in April.
He tells everybody to be careful when driving, because it's "that weekend."
There was a Ravi Shankar concert at the SF Auditorium the night before.
He occasionally gives the current time.
I figured the traffic reference must refer to the Memorial Day weekend (remember those damn Memorial Day traffic body counts?), and I browsed around at some vintage concert poster sites until I found the Shankar concert. The tape was made between and on Saturday, May 27, 1967.
And in the course of my research, I found this photo: the KMPX staff, circa 1967.
Look closely at this picture.(People tend to forget that major components of the SF style in ’67 were Western outfits and big friggin’ guns.)First that’s Howard Hesseman – yes, the Howard Hesseman, who 11 years later became immortal as “Dr. Johnny Fever” on WKRP in Cincinnati, the coolest TV sitcom ever made, standing at upper left next to his wife. Next to Mrs. Hesseman is
Dusty Street, who is still in the biz and now serves as a DJ for Classic Vinyl, live from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for SiriusXM.Three over from Dusty is Carl Gottlieb, DJ name “Egg,” who later went on to take Peter Benchley’s shitty shark novel and turn it into Jaws. (He wrote the script, and played the newspaper editor in the film.)Larry Miller is the odd little fellow in the Prince Valiant haircut in the right rear, next to some arch blond salesman who happened to wander into the lobby when the picture was taken.
Seated in the middle is Tom Donahue, in his new counterculture beard, with his child bride Raechel in the derby on his lap.Tom, alas, died in 1975, but Raechel has been in radio ever since, and until recently held Dusty Street's current job at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Tom also innovated in hiring mostly women to serve as the radio technicians and engineers, and a lot of them stayed in the business also.
I could go on about each of the people in this picture, because just by being at KMPX in 1967, they all became radio legends. (And I’d *love* to know who that psychotic looking blonde next to Rachael is.)
But back to the tape.What to say about the music? In addition to the above songs, the hour also included a bluesy version of "The Twelfth of Never" by Lou Rawls, an unknown piece by jazzman Jonah Jones, a Guaraldi-like version of "A Hard Day's Night," "Uskudar" by Herbie Mann, "Another Girl" by the Beatles, "Egyptian Garden" by Kaleidoscope, and (an especially cool find) "Miserlou" by the Devil's Anvil, a kick-ass proto-punk band supposedly from the Middle East (but actually from Brooklyn). Counting the first bar of "River Deep Mountain High" by Tina Turner that ends the tape, that's 19 songs in 57 minutes, an astounding amount of music. Of course, there are no commercials , despite the fact the KMPX was definitely a commercial station. Still don't know what the story is there.
The only thing that still bugs me about the tape is the name of the DJ. I think that was my dad's favorite part of the tape, actually, because he thought the guy sounded like Pat Paulsen. I distinctly remember that in the now-lost second hour of the tape, he said his name was Vince Something-or-other, but I can't find any record of a Vince at KMPX. I sent a scoped copy of the file to Raechel Donahue, Dusty Street, Larry Miller (who is now a faculty member at the Art Institute International in Boston) and the Bay Area Radio Museum, and no one recognized who the laid back Saturday afternoon DJ’s voice.I also sent the file to the master of cool, Gene Sculatti, but I haven’t heard back from him yet.
I’ll keep researching. Enjoy the file.
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