a new low in topical enlightenment

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Issue #21 (November 25, 2009)

Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA

Photo by Doug Cawker
















From the desk of Jake Austen

I was researching a cartoon I saw the other night at the Hammer museum and I read that after ABC lost NFL rights a few years back ABC/Disney traded broadcaster Al Michaels to NBC/Universal for the rights to Oswald the Rabbit, the Disney character that preceded/ turned into Mickey Mouse. I thought that was cute trivia and somehow linked to this amazing thread where an intellectual rights attorney/Disney fan is explaining how this "swap" was probably a public relations hoax to mask the fact that Oswald is unquestionably in the public domain. What is great about this lengthy thread is that the lawyer knows what he's talking about and meticulously and in simple terms breaks down the complexities of copyright law as it pertains to characters and stories and films and comics, clarifying many of the well-known cases (It's A Wonderful Life, Ghostbusters/Casper the Ghost, etc.). Many of the Disney fans respond intelligently and pose thoughtful questions that he answers but two posters are really defensive and keep attacking him and saying stupid things, which leads to the lawyer offering spot-on examples of Disney's scary bullying concerning copyright/trademark stuff related to their properties, and linking to articles and Wikipedia pages that make all this stuff very clear. It should be annoying that the dissenters are so dense, and blindly loyal to Disney (at one point the lawyer notes that they act like Mickey is the CEO), but they keep yielding more interesting stuff. And how often does someone on the internet actually know what they're talking about?

Note: There are references in this to a forthcoming video game where Disney will re-brand Mickey as a badass who fights his way through a wasteland inhabited by archival characters like Oswald the Rabbit.

Also note: There are references to dirt concerning Walt Disney and his collaborator Ub Iwerks as to who actually created Mickey. Below are some links to Ub Iwerks' cartoons made after he jumped or was pushed from Disney and before he returned some years later to prep the special effects necessary to make the first animated features.







Iwerks chronology

The Early period: Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, etc.

Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams (1921, Kansas City, Mo.)

Alice’s Spooky Adventure (1924, Los Angeles, M. Winkler)

1st Mickey Mouse: “Plane Crazy” (1928, Disney)

Flip the Frog: “Fiddlesticks” (1930, Celebrity-MGM)

Willie Whopper: The Air Race (1933, MGM)

Willie Whopper: Stratos Fear (1933, MGM)

The Headless Horseman (1934, ComiColor)



Summertime (1935, ComiColor)

Little Black Sambo (1935, ComiColor)

The Old Mill (1937, Disney)
(Fotopoulos: Iwerks’ multi-plane camera was improved on by Disney techs and tested here before its use on features; Iwerks returned to Disney in 1940.)

***

[Iwerks drawing by James Fotopoulos]




Cartoon Addenda

The other big cartoon power, Max and Dave Fleischer:

Koko the Clown’s Earth Control (1928, Inkwell)

Betty Boop in Snow White (1933, Fleischer)
(Fotopoulos: early use of rotoscoping)
















From the desk of Chris Collins...

further SST lore



SST Records has its roots in a small business called Solid State Tuners, owned and operated by Greg Ginn, which in the 1970s built equipment for amateur radio buffs. Black Flag/SST fan Jonathan Haynes, himself a radio operator and builder, had the savvy to snap these two shots of one tuner he encountered, the T-1.

In an email correspondence, he offers a radioman's view of a piece of SST electronics.




To:
Jonathan Haynes
Subject:
SST Tuners

Jonathan,

Would you permit us to use those two shots of  the tuners for a coming issue? We would credit you and link to your photostream or any website you have.

Joe says they had a few of them around the office when he was working at SST in the early eighties. I suppose they might pop up on ebay once in a blue moon.

Are they your tuners? Any story on how you happened upon them?

____

From:
Jonathan Haynes
Subject:
Re: SST Tuners

Of course. They do pop up on Ebay fairly often. The T-1 all the way through something like T-7 are used all over the world by shortwave listeners and radio operators who appreciate old equipment. Ginn responded to an email that this was a relic, and that he didn't see them often.

____

To:
Jonathan Haynes
Subject:
Re: SST Tuners

Jonathan, much obliged to you. So I guess that tuner must be mid-70s or so, right? I don't know anything about ham radio but it looks like a bone simple device.

____

From:
Jonathan Haynes
Subject:
Re: SST Tuners

It's a simple device, but elegant in its simplicity. They do the job.

The tuner basically just makes a piece of antenna wire that you've strung up--it tunes it so that the radio can transmit on that frequency. It adapts different wires to your radio so you don't need to physically trim the length of the wire to resonance on your frequency of interest.

I don't know why Ginn didn't stay in the business, but that's how it worked out, I guess. I can't find his callsign, but I guess he resides in Taylor TX now. I assume he is no longer active with radio.

____

To:
Jonathan Haynes
Subject:
Re: SST Tuners

My dad learned radio in the Signal Corps in the 50s and had an array of tuners and antennas at our house in LA. I don't recall a ham radio but there was a CB; I guess because ham requires a license? Unfortunately I never picked up his knowledge.

There was a book* about Black Flag which speculated that the origin of Ginn's guitar style is in radio. It's like a tuner caught between two signals. That always struck me as unique about him. The only other player I've heard who sometimes seemed to be pulling in two directions at once was Coltrane.

A lot of 20th century avant garde music seems to have one foot in staticky electronic communications.

[ *James Parker: Turned On]
____

From:
Jonathan Haynes
Subject:
Re: SST Tuners

Ginn also seemed obsessed with nasally midrange frequencies. I was impressed with his difficult tone.























Drawing by James Fotopoulos
















From the desk of Joe Carducci…

It will be interesting to observe the behavior at the defense table in the upcoming trial of Khalid Sheik Muhammad. A good test of the justice system and legal profession, although an earlier test just wrapped up as Attorney for Sheik Abdel Rahman, Lynne F. Stewart is going to jail for assisting terrorism; the penalty is just 28 months on paper at least, so what the hell... The Law takes care of its own.

But this new test won’t slide by unnoticed because the second attempt on the WTC worked out differently. In most ways it is our legal system that has broken down, not the health-care system. The courtroom model is fine and necessary in its place, but the prosecutor-defense dynamic can allow each side to be freed of the need to be credible if the judge allows the game-of-it to dominate the goal-of-it. Judges are lawyers and sometimes they look driven by class-consciousness to cause appeals and re-trials -- more likely it's simple free-lance indulgence of their own prerogatives. Who can say? I’m no lawyer.

But the syndrome of this era’s college graduate is self-esteem/pretense and so the limits of the law are not observed. Thomas Sowell calls the goal this fosters “cosmic justice”. This lawyerly politik projects-out the charges they themselves are guilty of. And so there’s a health-care crisis and it’s unsustainable when, in fact, the real problems are traceable back to state interventions going back to the state-lovin’ thirties and the war and its war-time efficiencies. And these good good things all delivered and adjudicated by armies of attorneys. The pricing problems of medicine are the result of two things mostly: the progress of medical treatment and technology, and the backing up of medical practice in defense of a broken tort-system that turns malpractice into a lottery. Certainly there are incompetent, even fraudulent doctors, but those are licensing and criminal issues and aren’t addressed by the proposals, other than the attempt to punish tort-reform states.

There are very few M.D.s in congress (13 or so, Ron Paul most notably), but there are 162 lawyers, and then staffers and lobbyists… thousands and thousands of lawyers… The judge will be named real soon for this trial, probably be on TV.

***

The Iranian revolution was a leftist revolution followed by an Islamic coup.

Mark Bowden in the WSJ does not mention the Tudeh Party which was the communist party and prepared the ground for the revolution with demonstrations and street stunts they hoped would spread beyond their cadre. Khomeini was still in France. The Islamic clergy was split, but rural believers constituted a third force that perhaps the Tudeh underestimated. Here’s the party line on how the mistake went down:

“The process of the growth of capitalism and its inevitable consequences for the traditional structures of society, endangered the position and professional interests of the clergy. The conservative wing of the clergy who leaned towards the large land owners and the big capitalists, feared the growth of the movement and compromised with the Shah's regime. But the other sections of clergy under the leadership of Khomeini, who were mostly influenced by the petty-bourgeoisie and the commercial bourgeoisie, took an anti-monarch and anti-imperialist (especially American imperialist) position. The struggle of this section of clergy entered a new phase parallel to the growth of the mass movement. In this period Khomeini and his followers worked towards the overthrow of the Shah, which was dominant slogan of the movement. They also took a strong anti-imperialist stance and promised freedom and social justice within the framework of Islamic government. This stance extended the clergy's social position, attracted large masses under the leadership of Khomeini and increased his political credibility. In this way Khomeini managed to acquire the indisputable leadership of the revolution and stand in the centre of the political arena of our country.”


While the commies survived under the Shah, they did not survive under the regime as the provisional secular government was replaced by the Islamic Republic. As Bowden tells it Khomeini took on more for his clerisy than he originally intended. If it's true he hesitated, he may have felt Islamic rule was the one way to debase his own currency and revive royalist sentiment. But the Tudeh might have controlled a secular republic and with the U.S. out of the picture the Soviet Satan was suddenly the pre-eminent threat (the Russian invasion of Afghanistan occurred Dec. 27, 1979, two months after the American embassy and personnel in Tehran were seized, and ten-and-a-half months after the fall of the Shah). Apparently the embassy hostage stand-off was the trigger that doomed the provisional Iranian regime and led to this long, destructive twilight for Iranians. Tuesday’s NYT leads with the dreary details of the police state phase of the revo.

In 1975 I worked at a restaurant in the DePaul area of Chicago that was owned by a hustling Iranian immigrant and his Lebanese-American wife. His three young cooks were Iranian too; there was a religious guy, a homosexual, and a communist, so the revolution might have been fought out right there in that kitchen too for all I know.

***

EU legislators' accession to power next week brings to mind Byzantium, the second Rome, which is in the air anyway as a new possible model now that the first Rome failed as a model. An FT analysis last Friday focuses on the wimping out over the naming of the first EU President and Foreign Minister, Herman Van Rompuy and Lady Ashton respectively, neither likely to fulfill the mandate to stop traffic in Beijing and Washington. But its actually in the trenches of the legislature that power is drained away from the individual nations, and that needs doing before this slow-growth volunteer-empire finds its Alexius I, or more likely Palaeologus. There’s always the third Rome, Moscow under the Tsars, if Rome-Rome falls again to another Hannibal as Constantinople did to the Turks. But now here’s Walter Laqueur to explore the sure-to-backfire Muslim strategy of the Kremlin to dash that third option.

***

Or the Ottoman model; Roula Khalaf on the Middle East defaulting back to the former sick man of Europe, now suddenly the new kid in town.

***

The Ugly American has become the Ugly Chinese. What the Chinese are up to in Africa and elsewhere ought to recalibrate the Orientalist terrors in the hearts of all the heroic Milquetoasts of lit-theory.

***



Much ado about the G.O.P. in the NYT version of the matter of Kevin Johnson, Michelle Rhee, and AmeriCorps.

***

My convenience at your convenience in the matter of Climategate.

***

Chavez, Achmedinejad inspire Peres schtick.

***

Shackleton’s Whiskey found one century later!

***

WSJ’s OpinionJournal.com feature on the hypnotic power of the Siren of Alyeska:

“Accountability Journalism

An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story: 
• ObamaCare bills: 2 
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered: 
• ObamaCare bills: 4,064 
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter: 
• ObamaCare bill: 2,032 
• Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.”


***

And the story untold by anything but the bills due; Robert Samuelson on Age vs Youth.

***

Really bad rock journalism, or maybe it's criticism or p.r.

The WSJ keeps pushing into culture and generally does okay, though no-one buys it for its music coverage even with Nat Hentoff in there occasionally. But this piece on Tom Petty has that old time gold-plated persecution complex last seen in this pure form back when Dave Marsh was cheerleading the similarly suppressed Bruce Springsteen. (Then it was the Stones or Ramones oppressing Bruce, now it's Bruce or the Stooges suppressing Tom.) This kind of juvenilia was somewhat harder to take back then when a generation or two of greater musicians were being shunted to a dead end spur where they’d have to build their own record business. For the piece’s length there’s still no content such as how grindingly samey the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live set was for years until Rick Rubin or somebody else convinced him to stow the band and hire as needed for an arrangement that found the song in all that sausage. Then he produced “Free Falling” and a couple more memorable pop hits. The quality of his reunited Mudcrutch or the Traveling Wilburys shamed his earlier career. Who is it who cares that two out of three experts prefer the Stooges, Tom or the WSJ’s John Jurgensen?

The NYT has more if not better music writers but this on John Mayer seems to be particularly back-handed in its acceding to his manager’s p.r. needs. Just a live review of his bantering with the babes in the front row and a clear description of his endless blues scales through which he attempts to recoup a theoretical manhood which no-one in the place is buying, though Buddy Guy will endure it if he’s paid and has his own p.r. needs at hand. The bad piece is topped off with a NYT portrait with a leather jacket over a flannel as he leans against the nearest brick wall.

***

Leon Wieseltier is disappointed as he reads President Obama’s body language on the world stage, and the New York Times over his coffee.

***

If we can’t help you, at least help us hurt you.

***

The NYT doughboy has that faux-perverse dream of corralling machismo to do social good, something like the jollies he got cheering on the Iraq war, only this time his reputation will be repaired instead of torn down. “I am a clean-energy hawk.” I’m sure he means it cause he’s still brownieing up to all his former readers he used to spoon-feed business economics to -- they must all have lost much weight. It’s tedious, but it has its own momentum at this point, especially as we seemed to have won the wrong war.

***

Good Guys raising Bad Boys’ kids.

The NYT Magazine this Sunday produced its best issue in memory with three sizeable feature stories. Almost something you’d buy stand-alone. The first is an update on Mikhail Khodorkovsky in prison, the second about globalized agriculture, and the third a kind of backing into the least known social development in America. The story follows fathers' use of DNA testing when they find their wives have been cheating on them and what happens to the parental relationship when children are found not related biologically. The story averts its eyes from the mothers, and it's merely an opening paragraph in the bigger story of good guys raising bad boys' kids, more often knowingly. An untold story because of what it might say about women this far down the road from the oppressive fifties and whatever nightmare was going on before that.

***

Obituary of the Week.
Jack G. Wallenda, Detective in the Richard Speck case.

***



Kobe Bryant, one of NBC’s “most fascinating, inspirational, heroic and notorious figures … of 2009.” Stay tuned to NBC this Thanksgiving when Matt Lauer will deliver the punchline. It will be all the funnier for it being delivered with straight face. Kobe just might cry real tears. Jim Bell and David Corvo are the executive producers.





















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Issue #20 (November 18, 2009)

Route 58 on Okinawa, Japan

Photo by Asakura Akira

















Drawing by James Fotopoulos
















From the desk of Joe Carducci...

A suicide in the city. It didn’t make the news but the Trib made an excellent non-follow-up follow-up feature of it.

***

Here’s another suicide executed more privately but a whole lot more coverage after the fact. School Board President, Daley man, Michael Scott, many threads yet to trace.

***

The Chicago Butter and Egg Board’s market capitalization “is nearly twice the combined market cap of the companies that run the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market.” Book reviewer Dave Kansas guesses that isn’t generally understood because all those guys in ill-fitting color-coded blazers shouting out bids for plywood or gold contracts don’t look or act as rich as the New York or London traders. My brother Mark was a runner on the floor and had shown it to me so in April 1989 I showed it to Kelley when she was in Chicago with her family. It was the week Richard M. Daley was first elected mayor. It was mild trading session when we looked at it from the visitors’ gallery but they got all exercised for the last ten minutes of trading. I told Kelley that those were the guys winning the war against communism, so I don’t want to hear anymore about how no-one predicted the fall of the Wall seven months later.

***

In the matter of Joakim Noah, 2nd-year center for the Chicago Bulls out of the University of Florida, son of tennis great Yannick Noah and Miss Sweden 1978: The press doesn’t often correct itself, although the most Orwellian pages of the newspaper, the Sports section, are also the most likely to offer correction and apologia.

***



Pittsburgh Pirates’ Dock Ellis animated doc

***

The God Gene

NYT science reporter Nicholas Wade doesn’t say, but what might follow his look at the evolutionary advantages religion may have provided, is the question Does a post-faith society need bio-engineering to supplant a loss of faith in Darwinism manifested in negative birth-rates?

Reverend Ike’s Gospel

Because the Western elite believes it has gotten all it can out of the coming of Christendom and the Enlightenment that followed, the maintenance of our twinned culture seems mostly a threat to deliver more hordes of just anybody to the gates of that elite. The tendency of those who have the resources and education to exercise a prerogative is to assume these are the fruit of personal merit; the projected mass id of that new class then seeks to pull up the class ladder. They’d rather organize the poor as a mass than maintain the ladder successful individuals will need. Christianity is growing in sub-Saharan Africa and in China because from there many see the practical social-political-economic value of the story of Christ.

***

Ancient Humors - an historical survey.

The Joke, 1985:

Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, but soon he found the excitement going out of his marriage to Nancy so he turned for advice to Bubba Smith, former football great and actor whom he’d met while Governor of California. The President explained his problem to his old friend and Bubba advised him to walk into the White House bedroom with confidence that night, and before climbing into bed grab his cock and hit it three times against the bedpost. So President Reagan entered the bedroom late that night and hit his cock three times against the bedpost. Nancy sat up in the dark and said, "Bubba, is that you?"

--Next week, another great joke unearthed from beneath the sands of time.

***

James Williamson in and on the Stooges on the Watt from Pedro Show.

***


[Photo by Chris Carlsen]




China Joint

There was a rash of early failed attempts at joint ventures when western corporations first rushed into China in the late eighties.  My sister Julie studied at Fudan University in Shanghai, 1986-7 and got her masters in International Relations from the University of Chicago with an emphasis on NE Asian Political Economy.  I knew she’d return to China so one of the ideas I let pass through my mind after I left SST Records and wrote my Rock book was to follow her to Beijing and license American rock and roll for the two billion virgin ears over there.  It would've tracked The Psychozoic Hymnal, essentially, so Chinese youth might be spared the likes of Bruce Springsteen or Asia.  Lucky for me I didn't try to do that because before you knew it the Chinese were pirating CDs like crazy.  My sister bought CDs on the street for a dollar and if they didn’t work just throw them away, for locals the price was the equivalent of a quarter.  These CDs were manufactured off the books by legit plants that were owned on the side by People's Liberation Army Generals, not unlike the Danone/Dannon m.o. above; the whole economy was bootleg-crazy -- even the legit players (Capitol Records did that here).  If I remember right sometime in the first Bush administration the President on a trip to Beijing shared top-secret satellite images of the offending CD manufacturing plants as a way of responding to music industry pressure to do something in China about their rampant abuse.  Was the implication that we would target the plants with ICBMs?  Luckily Jack Valenti retired before we all were vaporized in defense of Don Henley’s royalties.

Relaunch of the Chinese Armada - last seen 1430.


[Drawing by Henry Carlsen]

***

Belling the Cat, episode Noughty Aughts

I guess David Segal and his editor don’t read their own paper, in this “parlor game” as they have it they’ve tried to tag this decade-ending since 1992 according to their archives, with William Safire prognosticating about it even earlier. They have failed to name this decade in their daily brutalizing of their three or four hobby-horses, so it obsesses them still. This is how the NYT measures its cock, no? One thing is for sure about the last eight years, George W. Bush’s reputation can only rise and Barack Obama’s can only sink.

***

Here’s more like it - what you buy the NYT for, though it begs a question, does the U.S. still throw parades for its returning soldiers, or are we now Germanic peaceniki?

And here where the NYT reminds us that we’ll always have France, or at least Black Africa will, may God help them.

***



It's Spiro Agnew's world; we just live in it.

It takes the Bangor Daily News to note the fortieth anniversary of Spiro Agnew’s calling out the news media of that day, and that was the peak of the Manhattan provincialism which chasing the naivete of the youth culture led to real problems understanding ourselves. Michael Socolow provides a link to the speech itself and it’s a masterpiece co-written with Pat Buchanan and William Safire. The Nixon brain-trust was very advanced and it is still with us weekly (on PBS!) on The McLaughlin Group, where Buchanan and McLaughlin still radiate with Nixonian toxicity as those Manhattanites once were sure they’d nailed it. The last Nixon hand, Monica Crowley is on the Group now too. Lyndon Johnson had Doris Kearns Goodwin collating his memoirs and papers at the end of his life, and Richard Nixon had Crowley (b. 1968). Nuff sed.

***

I'm in the middle of work for a book about film actors, and inevitably I'm finding interesting work by some actresses alongside the men. The book is about film acting and how the new art of the motion picture shaped a school, or rather an orphanage of acting outside of the traditions of theater. So these actresses may not be the greatest of thespians, nor in most cases great stars either. But they have that thing the camera could find in their dialogue reading, their mark-hitting and also in their idle moments of being-in-performance. I'll assume knowledge on your part of Veronica Lake and Joan Bennett, but here's the shortlist of some overlooked interesting actresses-women-careers.





Gail Russell

Born in Chicago, her family moved to Santa Monica. Didn’t want to act but her mother wanted her to. She was good but didn’t believe so. She’s in a number of great westerns and good ghost stories: The Uninvited (1944), Salty O’Rourke (1945), The Unseen (1945), Angel and the Badman (1947), Moonrise (1948), Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Wake of the Red Witch (1948), The Lawless (1950), 7 Men from Now (1956), The Tattered Dress (1957). John Wayne was a good friend to her but he was married and she needed more of him to have a chance. Apparently he told her over and over, “Gail you just got to say no to some of this shit.” She didn’t and died young; make a good movie.





Carole Matthews

Miss Chicago 1938, did a lot of low budget films and some television, the kind of productions made up of first-takes -- acting passages are often more interesting this way. Apparently still alive though she retired from the screens. I first noticed her playing opposite Charles Bronson in Showdown at Boot Hill (1958). Also, Massacre River (1949), Special Agent (1949), Cry Murder (1950), No Man of Her Own (1950), Red Snow (1952), Meet Me at the Fair (1953), City of Bad Men (1953), Shark River (1953), Port of Hell (1954), Swamp Women (1955), Betrayed Women (1955), Assignment Redhead (1956), Strange Awakening (1958), Look in Any Window (1961), Tender Is the Night (1962).





Jean Wallace

Another Chicagoan. She had a flat, evanescent delivery at best and her marriage to Cornel Wilde, who she met on The Big Combo got her some interesting roles in his later self-directed productions. Here she sings the theme for Beach Red over the opening credits. Her bios claim she survived two suicide attempts. Look for these: Jigsaw (1949), The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), The Good Humor Man (1950), Native Son (1950), The Big Combo (1955), Storm Fear (1955), The Devil's Hairpin (1957), Maracaibo (1958), Lancelot and Guinevere (1963), Beach Red (1967) No Blade of Grass (1970).

***

Michael Hurley’s new album:



***

Manny Farber and Robert Palmer; Library of America and Scribners; Robert Polito and Anthony DeCurtis.

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Polito (Library of America)

Some books you just order sight unseen because they represent an important writer in a way one can trust. Other books… Right on the cover of the new collection of Robert Palmer’s music writing are the names Anthony DeCurtis and Robbie Robertson crowding in so you know you got trouble. On the back are testimonials by Bono, Yoko, Mick, and God-knows-who-else, Bruce probably? I forget; I didn’t buy it. No doubt, despite this it must have much great writing between the covers, but sometime after Bill Stevenson was out of Black Flag for the last time but before Black Flag finished its final tour, they got two unusual “high-end” reviews. One was a live review in Downbeat, the other an unusually perceptive appreciation of their final album, “In My Head” and a reading of the band’s development toward it. Bill came over to SST for whatever reason and I handed him a copy of Robert Palmer’s review which had just run in the New York Times. As Bill would do he grabbed it and read it in place, then looked up and asked, “Who told him all this?” I laughed and told him “Nobody!“ It was my last week at SST and I took the quality of the review as in part a cosmic joke; Black Flag was expected by most of us to be finished later that year. A hard thing to imagine for most of us. There wasn’t much music-oriented coverage of the band. And in truth what we know of as music criticism is usually about far less interesting aspects of popular culture disguising rank press-relation duties. And as expected Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone editor and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dead-weight does not include it in this collection. Here it is though. Rollins reprinted it in his book, Get In The Van, so I think we can assume Henry thought it exceptional as well. The difference in these two collections may just be how the two arts rank on the publishing world’s hierarchy, but that won’t change much if the Rolling Stone mast-head keeps its purchase.

***



Good to see more interest in the old East European rock scene.

There wasn’t much coverage back when Systematic and a few other companies were trying to distribute the Plastic People of the Universe album. It was a beautiful gatefold production with a large square booklet put together by a graphic company/record label in Paris called S.C.O.P.A.-Invisible. We distributed some of their other releases which I’d probably been turned onto by Archie Patterson of Eurock fanzine (he worked at Music Millennium back then), but this release was pretty expensive so we ordered small at first. I was traveling to London in November 1979 to check out Rough Trade as we were about to move our company from Portland to Berkeley to help them set up an American branch and combine our efforts to build distribution in the America. I thought I’d check out Jacques and Andree at S.C.O.P.A. in Paris and a distributor in Sweden as well (which allowed me to see Ebba Grön!). I worked out a better price and some free promotional copies to send around so we got 300 PPU albums shipped to us. We didn’t get much press at all; Only the New Republic did anything significant that I remember. And it took two years to sell them all. Tower was only a west coast chain at that point. Anyway, don’t tell me there’s a history of Plastic People of the Universe coming from Anthony DeCurtis with a blurb from New York Times columnist Bono.

***

Here’s good writing on Wino’s new band, Shrinebuilder by Ben Ratliff.

***

It is a side question worth asking based on the apparent fearlessness of Kremlin and Forbidden City as they run interference for their neighbors' nuclear programs.

***

The Christian Science Monitor reviews reports on the second terror attack on Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. This may mean the Islamizing of Pakistani intelligence has ended and it's really coming in from the cold.

***



Horse Nations

The NYT art review passes along a lot of great information about the Plains tribes. I knew that the horse got up to the tribes and triggered a revolution in tribal warfare and remade their cultures long before ranchers and farmers moved in on them, but I didn’t know that horses “originated here… but by 1492... had been extinct in the Western Hemisphere for 10,000 years.” The museum is in the old Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan which is also worth seeing.

***

The United States of Mexico’s legitimate government meets every fifteen days in a former garage. No wonder.

***

Argentina has Brazil-envy and the WSJ terms them Brazil-skeptics.

The piece quotes an op-ed by former Argentine Central Bank Governor Fraga blaming some part of the Argentina disease on the lost would-be governing class of 70s student protestors who were imprisoned, exiled, or killed, apparently he thinks on the level of say, Red China. One thing they will never run short of down there is pride. This book El Dueño seems to anticipate the likely criminal prosecution of former President Nestor Kirchner when his immunity courtesy the presidential term of his wife Cristina ends in 2011. The author then apparently guesses at what new crimes might be necessary to keep Nestor as well as his somewhat better half out of prison cells thenceforth.

***

Stability vs. Freedom in Ukraine elections

Olena Prystayko studies the post-Soviet states for the EU. She diagrams next year’s presidential election in Ukraine: “Unfortunately, we should admit that ‘candidates for stability’ outnumber ‘candidates for freedom.’ In fact, there is only one ‘candidate for freedom’ -- the current President, Viktor Yushchenko. In his disastrous rule, the absence of attempts of oppression of political and other freedoms may be his best achievement.”

***

Cuba running out of beans! Reportedly possesses a surplus of bean-counters.

***

(Thanks this week to Glen Friedman, Matt Carducci)
















Underground Naval Headquarters on Okinawa, Japan

Photo by Asakura Akira


















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Issue #19 (November 11, 2009)

Facing "Angel" on El Panecillo, Quito, Ecuador

Photo by Lindsay Olson
















Carillon, Rotary Hill, Naperville, Illinois, November 8, 2009

Photo by Joe Carducci
















War in Repetition: a Book Review
by Chris Collins

Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Greenwood Press), 1982; by Martin van Creveld




"In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one." (Napoleon Bonaparte)

There's a striking impression one takes from reading Armageddon by Max Hastings, a history of the end of World War II in Europe. By autumn of 1944 the momentum of the Normandy breakout, after reaching the German border, had curdled into awful yard-by-yard slogs like Hürtgen Forest. The U.S. Army by this point, in distinct contrast to its enemy, simply could not get its men to follow orders and advance.

Why was this the case? Martin van Creveld has a possible answer. His book Fighting Power coldly contrasts the German Army and the U.S. Army in the war to underscore the superior performance of the former organization in virtually all engagements. At the time of the Normandy invasion, the eastern front was tottering and about to break, splitting the Germans between the two fronts, yet they often managed to hold Anglo-American forces back while at a constant and often severe manpower disadvantage.

Van Creveld eliminates cultural factors as causes, deducing from tests administered by the U.S. Army that individual Americans are fine soldier material. What he turns his eye to instead is the nation's prevailing business doctrine of Taylorism. Taylorism might be boiled down into the aphorism "don't send a man to do a machine's job." Its objective is to attain maximum efficiency within a business and thereby profit by extirpating the main impediment to efficiency, human nature. Administrative uniformity, control, and predictable performance is the sine qua non of this discipline; in decayed form it resembles the intimately familiar feature of American life called bureaucracy.

Applied to an army, it created a stiff process-bound edifice which, while facilitating a complex logistical setpiece like the D-Day invasion, effectively denied itself access to some of the better human attributes, such as improvisatory problem solving skill and personal initiative. A marketplace in the aggregate may be a predictable beast. An enemy guided by a strategic mind is not necessarily so. When the unpredictable happens, those better human attributes are called for.

What of composition and morale? German units were oriented around towns and provinces, and while this arrangement shared by the British Army of WWI sometimes led to the destruction of a town's young men in a day, it also created an esprit de corps largely absent in the U.S. Army with its clerical superstructure and insensate allocation of personnel.

The U.S. Army was oriented to maintain units at paper strength through replacements. "American divisions," Van Creveld writes, "preserved the teeth to tail ratio by acting like some huge meat-grinding machines that processed men on their way from the replacement system in the rear to becoming casualties at the front." War memoirs from the time often describe green and disoriented soldiers funneled into a company only to be killed before anybody could learn their name. The supposedly efficient shuffling of soldiers to-and-fro like so many memoranda, Van Creveld says, "produced a system that possessed a strong inherent tendency to turn men into nervous wrecks."

The German Army, on the other hand, did not not replace casualties, instead preserving organizations in their reduced numbers and bolstering their lines with fresh units. The fresh units in turn were initiated into combat as one, suffered and fought as one, and, even while being ground down, were not altered in their core composition. It's to these factors, not to any Nazi ideological fever, that Van Creveld ascribes the superlative performance of the Wehrmacht all the way through to the end of the war. Had its numbers not been depleted by the war in the east, driving it out of Africa, Italy and western Europe would have been an even bloodier affair.

(To further illuminate his critique, one might note the astonishing valor of the U.S. Marines in the Pacific campaign, where their stalwart performances in assaults on island fortresses like Tarawa and Iwo Jima rate high in the annals of military braveness.)

Still, one has to ask, could the U.S. really have produced a vast and fearsome war machine like the Wehrmacht? Perhaps, as Max Hastings observed, not without ceasing to be the United States. And, as Martin Van Creveld allows, no civilians suffered such depredations at the hands of the U.S. Army as they did at those of the armies of Germany and Russia.

***

Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian, in 2004 produced a superb essay on the paradoxes of modern warfare, "Why Iraq Will End As Vietnam Did", written around IDF general Moshe Dayan's journey to report on the Vietnam War. It's still an important read.

[Charcoal Drawing: "Down the Net" by Kerr Eby (1944), from the U.S. Naval Historical Center]




On a slightly less serious note, internet columnist Gary Brecher ("The War Nerd") contemplates the American Civil War and its art: "I May Not Know Much About Art, But I've Got a Gun"

















Drawing by James Fotopoulos
















From the Desk of Joe Carducci...

BLACK FLAG


I guessed/predicted in Rock and the Pop Narcotic that regarding Black Flag there was never enough sales for the real publishing industry to ever write a check to get to the bottom of the band's story.  Back in the late 1980s when I wrote R&TPN only Faber & Faber was even issuing original music titles, and indeed they were the only publisher to take a look at my manuscript.  But the 80s/90s roll-out of Tower Books, Barnes & Noble, and Borders did spur a short golden age of the music section in book stores.  That's over now.  But Omnibus in the UK, which once had the only book on Black Sabbath in print, now issues the first comprehensive book about Black Flag, first in the UK, soon here.  Spray Paint the Walls is very well reported and assembled by Brit music writer Stevie Chick, author of the better of the recent Sonic Youth books.  Neither Greg Ginn nor Henry Rollins sat for interviews but their voices are included from earlier interviews, and more importantly Chuck Dukowski spoke to Chick - a first I believe.  The story, laid out from the band's earliest practices in 1976 to its end ten years later, makes a far more dramatic book than the usual shelf-fillers with their stretch to make the empty stories of various chart-toppers sound exciting and crucial and against the odds.  I read a rough draft; I'm sure most of the minor Anglocentric miscomprehensions of timelines, causalities and geography are still in it but the book is powerful because it does the story justice.  And those miscomprehensions are shared by most American music writers as well so what the hell...

Excerpt:  Black Flag Polliwog Park episode from Stevie Chick's book.


[Robert Arce's BF doc production still: Keith Morris at Polliwog Park, Manhattan Beach, California, 2009]



SST addendum

It's nice that interested younger folk bother to struggle to make sense of the SST Records' corpus.  I left the label when catalog numerology reached into the eighties; it got past three hundred.  This SST thread immediately runs through the favorites and then gets into much less familiar territory.

This blog is another good example of musical archeology and features a running digging up of SST-related arcana.  And here's another that regularly circles back to SST.

***

It's a small issue and I don't want to be Christgau about it, but in Monday's NYT review of some formerly East Bloc underground rock bands at Le Poisson Rouge, Larry Rohter writes "But for the young people who helped bring down Communist regimes... pop music was a profoundly subversive force, inspiration and vital tool of protest for challenging and undermining a totalitarian state stricter than any parent."  There's trivializing in all directions in this sentence, even after my editing it down.  Rohter is a foreign correspondent so maybe its an Arts editor who knows elite critocracy's preference for "pop" texts over "rock" messes, but the context in the East was different in ways Larry tries to dramatize but his own construction is so tired he falls asleep and forgets about it by the end of his sentence.  There was a real thing once upon a time called Rock and while it sold big and was broadcast in the West, it was not connected at all to East European state-enforced "Pop" in all its bullying civic utility, nor was it connected to Pop in the West which was in general fundamentally popular.  The musicians Rohter talks to in his piece say interesting things about how it all happened for them, but the shape of what they were doing back then is misrepresented, if that matters.

***

Here's the BBC "Krautrock" doc; not that good but of interest mostly for its contemporary interviews with members of some of the key bands.  But as Steve warned me, the filmmakers seem to consider the crowning achievement of the Germans to be two David Bowie albums.

***

Hmong Qeej-mania:

Master

Kids

Duet

***

Pedro Bell on Monday's Sun-Times' front page.

***

Christopher Nolan's brother's escape plan; check Alex Garcia's beautiful shot of Harry Weese's three-sided window-barred MCC.

***

Chinese capital and labor applied to Indian infrastructure cuts time by 80% and Indian labor 100% where possible.

***

Submission means never having to say you're an infidel, no matter what kind of pagan you are.

***

The WSJ doesn't use its editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz very well.  She should host a television program something like the one Tina Brown did on CNBC several years ago - a cultural review from New York.  Instead she's rarely one the half-hour Journal Editorial Board program on Fox News Channel that Paul Gigot insists on head-manning.

***

WSJ:
Stalin didn't need genetics as a science so it became a socialist false-science led by the charlatan Lysenko.  But Stalin needed math to recalibrate trajectories of his bombers so mathematicians became a privileged elite.

***

States love walls.

South Korea might just as soon not unite Korea; their second thoughts became conscious when they saw Germany unite, although they had third thoughts as soon as China allowed some website to make the case that North Korea's territory belonged to the Manchu Empire as Sinkiang/East Turkestan once did.  There's a steady display of high-brow exasperation with some grad-school fantasy of Western triumphalism only they can see.  This yields labored recuperation of the Pax Sovietica by the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Fred Halliday, and others - there's a ton offered at Arts & Letters Daily on this anniversary week.  These double-domes could just slap the bumper-sticker "Another World Is Possible" across their foreheads and they'd offer as much insight in a fraction of the time.

***

Rami Khouri on the still standing Arab Wall.

***

The EU military chiefs now report to Europe's top diplomat, so do not piss Europe off whatever you do.

***

Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Serial Killers.

***

We need a Grand Unified Theory of Socialisms too so that these smart people can stop spinning their wheels as they try to split the molecular bonds between the real National Socialism of Hitler's Germany, the half-hearted version in Mussolini's Italy, the fake International Socialisms of the U.S.S.R., Mao's PRC, and Trotsky's brain, and the long-theorized existence of International Socialism.  A piece by Patricia Cohen in the NYT anticipates the English translation of a book by Emmanuel Faye that seeks to read Martin Heidegger out of the field of Philosophy, Heidegger:  The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy.  Fayeism will have to throw many more People's History notables onto the pyre in order to purify the priory.  A simple scan of the legitimacy granted Eugenics by polite progressive company in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reminds one of the scale of the problem politics was going to have with scientism.  A new round of which is probably around the corner.

***



Ancient Humors - an historical survey.

The year was 1989 and the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini had just issued a fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie over his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in his prize-winning best-selling novel, The Satanic Verses.

The Joke:

- Did you hear Salman Rushdie has a new book out?
- He does?
- Yes, it's called, "Buddha - You Fat Fuck"


Next week, another great joke unearthed from beneath the sands of time.

***

WSJ:
"Detroit's Abandoned Industrial Landscape Has Become a Playground for Pranksters."

***

WSJ 2:
"Colleges simply want to avoid approaching the dreaded 60-40 female-male ratio.  At that point, men start to take advantage of their scarcity and make social life miserable for the women by becoming 'players' on the dating scene."

***

Nice use of Youtube to illustrate baseball sign-stealing

***



My uncle, Donald Hartlaub, died a couple weeks ago.  He was the honest mechanic everyone was always looking for.  He moved to a DX in Aurora, Ill. when Standard pressed him to use his reputation to move more tires than he could honestly advise his customers to buy.  One of ten kids, the first five born in Cincinnati and the second in Chicago, he enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor.  One of the precious few lies he ever told was claiming he could swim so as to be able to fly scout missions over the Pacific.  They flew two-man canvas-bodied bi-planes catapulted sideways off of ships.  The planes on return landed in the water and were picked up by a crane and returned to the catapult.  Don was a pilot and the navigators vied to go with him as they figured a pilot who couldn't swim was likely to be very good at staying in the air.  He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the rank of Lieutenant Senior Grade, successfully completing 49 missions.  The photograph below is of the officer crew of the USS Denver CL-58; Don is fifth from the left.



***

(thanks this week to Steve Beeho, Roger Trilling, Mike Galinsky, Jake Austen, Matt Carducci...)


















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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Issue #18 (November 4, 2009)


HDR Photo by Doug Cawker




















Drawings by James Fotopoulos

















From the desk of Joe Carducci...

Meat Puppets II (SST 019)


Curt Kirkwood – Vcl., Gtr.
Cris Kirkwood – Bs.
Derrick Bostrom – Dms.

Produced by Spot and the Meat Puppets
____

If I remember the story, while in high school Curt played lead guitar for some older guys in a working cover band, while jamming on the side with brother Cris on bass. The oldest Kirkwood stuff I have on tape is from 1978 and features them rounding out a Phoenix College classical quartet; they play it straight even on their electric instruments which mix novelly with flute and violin. Their friend Derrick followed punk rock and convinced them to form a band. The Meat Puppets soon got to open for Monitor, an art band from Los Angeles making one of its rare forays out. I first heard about them from Laurie O’Connell of Monitor; I’ve repro’ed her 1980 letter to me about them in my book about Naomi Petersen; Laurie didn’t follow punk rock but really liked them. Chuck Dukowski tells me that it was the Sun City Girls who opened for Black Flag on their first trip to Phoenix and that they didn’t see the Meat Puppets until they shared a bill in Riverside, California.

The Meat Puppets were playing L.A. and S.F. regularly by 1981, and once I left Systematic Record Distribution in Berkeley for SST in L.A., I often went out with Black Flag on short runs to Arizona or up the coast, with the MPs often on the bill. Laurie put the Meat Puppets on L.A. shows with Monitor, Non, Nervous Gender, and Human Hands. Chuck worked the Meat Puppets into the SST scene via gigs with the Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, the Descendents, and Red Cross. All of the early SST bands were first and foremost live bands – the Meat Puppets most of all. Their treatment of their own songs and the covers they’d seemingly pull out of the air was always musically different and exploratory.

Once in Berkeley some punk purists’ complaints were rewarded with a set-long noise jam; other gigs might resemble a tightly focused picking parlor, or stomping biker rock or hazy psychedelia. Then they’d go into the studio and come out with yet another surprise. Recording the early Meat Puppets was trying to catch lightning in a bottle. This was successfully done by my lights only five times: “In a Car” off the first 45, “H-Elenore” from the “Keats Rides a Harley” compilation, and “Walking Boss,” “Melons Rising,” and “Saturday Morning” off the first album. Those tunes are live-in-studio!

Derrick explained to me as they prepared to record their second album that from the beginning of the band Curt and Cris could play anything, and now that he also could play anything they were no longer a punk band. “II” is the best balance of their early, wilder approach and their later professional approach. Spot tells me that the basic tracks were done in under eight hours, but the overdubs were bumped by scheduling problems (we had to work around Dokken and Great White at Total Access Studio in Redondo Beach). Cris walked back to SST early one day and we had a good conversation about art and drugs in the unusually quiet office as night fell. I remember Curt, Cris and Derrick as the kind of low-key, deep people you’d be talking with and no-one would think to turn on a light so you’d end up talking in the dark with only the flashes of their lighters when they fired up their pipe. So anyway, Dokken’s “Tooth and Nail” turned out great as we all now realize, but then, rather than wait around, the band went back to Phoenix. Spot flew out and they finished the album at a small studio called Chaton. Total time: about 35 hours he reckons.

We didn’t have a record player at SST so I heard the album mostly from the final eq master cassette Spot brought back from K-Disc mastering. Even then, we didn’t play cassettes that much either. Spot would check his tapes on a small cassette box as sessions progressed from tracking, mixing, to the mastered version. Mostly we had the radio on at SST: country, black, rock, college, big bands & ballads, Hispanic… SST was a live music record label; we documented the best live bands before they destroyed themselves. Greg Ginn, Chuck, and Spot were doing this from the beginning of the label when Black Flag first recorded in January, 1978. Even when they had no money they’d run bands like The Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, The Stains and Overkill through the Media Art Studio in Hermosa Beach just in case the bands didn’t last -- hardly the m.o. of any other record label I can think of.

We didn’t consider the Meat Puppets college rock or hardcore any more than we thought Saint Vitus were. The bands that lasted more than one record had to figure out for themselves how much to cede to the inhospitable, often deathly studio process; most ultimately just surrendered to it. To Spot’s credit he was never the undertaker.

Unlike their first and third albums, “Meat Puppets” and “Up on the Sun,” “II” perfectly integrates all the wild psychedelia, close picking, light/heavy, fast/slow, tuneful/atonal experimenting they’d been doing for years. Once it was released they went on their first U.S. tour, and then went out again with Black Flag. In this period the guys in Black Flag, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Saccharine Trust, and Saint Vitus all raved about the Meat Puppets’ gigs they were seeing. And we – each other – were the only people whose taste we trusted, so that’s a judgment that’ll do until Kingdom come.

Just before they went into Total Access (a 3 day lockout this time) to record “Up on the Sun”, they played at the Music Machine and sounded more like Steppenwolf. I’m still waiting for that album! The first three Meat Puppets albums put me in mind of the three middle-period King Crimson albums of ten years earlier: “Lark’s Tongues” is rough and spacey like “Meat Puppets,” “Starless and Bible Black” is the most vivid representation of the band’s live, experimental search to find its voice just as “II” is for the MPs, and “Red” of course, like “Up on the Sun”, is fully realized and therefore the band would likely only falter from thereon. It must be an iron law of rock.

But I hear good things about the reconstituted Meat Puppets from folks who remember their lightning-in-a-bottle days. Be nice if they could at least bend that iron law.

(a version of this appeared in ATP’s “Don’t Look Back” 2008 giveaway publication)

[photo: The Meat Puppets, 1983, Total Access Studio, Redondo Beach; by Naomi Petersen]


***

II-era Meat Puppets interview, Flipside 1982

***

SPOT returns to L.A.

He hasn't been to the west coast in over a decade, but he’s on his way, playing better than ever on guitar and banjo -- won‘t vouch for his clarinet but if he whips it out don't make any sudden moves, just request "Stranger on the Shore".

December dates:
1 - Tuesday at the Spirit Room, Jerome, Ariz.
2 - Wednesday live in the air over KXLU
3 - Thursday at Harold's, San Pedro
4 - Friday at Pike restaurant, Long Beach
4 - Friday later 11pm live in the air over KXLU with Stella on "Stray Pop"
5 - Saturday at Echo Curio, Silverlake (tent.)
6 - Sunday at Liquid Kitty, West Los Angeles
9 - Wednesday at the Hemlock, San Francisco

***

“American Boogie” (2009, 88m., in Sensurround and 4D at least!)

Produced & Directed & Written & Performed & Acted & Curated by Michael Hurley
Watch this ten minute clip, it’ll seem like twenty minutes so it’s well worth it:



***

Dezerter, Pankrti live in NYC at Rebel Waltz: Underground Music from Behind the Iron Curtain.

***

Reprise recording artists:

Mance Lipscomb
Link One
Link Two
Link Three

and from Mike Whittaker:
Captain Beefheart TV ad

It was banned from KTTV; Makes me wonder what was on Creature Features that night?

***

Verlyn Klinkenborg on various Memphi.

***

from Jay Babcock:
Julian Cope on Blue Cheer, after Dickie Peterson’s death last month.

***

Prospect mag review of “Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen”.

***


Wednesday, Nov. 4, 1:30pm at MOMA

D.W. Griffith 1913/1914 early five and six-reel features 'Judith of Bethulia' and ‘The Avenging Conscience‘, both starring Blanche Sweet and Henry Walthall, and they feature players like Lillian Gish, Harry Carey and other DWG regulars. The first was his last for Biograph.

***

From Kateri, re the Nov. 15 Brendan Mullen memorial:

“Hello all --
The memorial for Brendan Mullen will take place on Sunday, 15 November, at the Echoplex (entrance at 1154 Glendale Boulevard, Echo Park, 90026; between Park and Montana avenues, just south of the Sunset Boulevard bridge and up the alley on the east side of Glendale Boulevard; there are city parking lots south of Sunset off of Lemoyne, Logan and Echo Park avenues and there will be valet parking). Doors open at 4 p.m. (all ages are welcome). The memorial starts at 5 p.m., with an Irish wake to follow.

The Echoplex is where Brendan booked his last show, a reunion of Masque bands to celebrate the publication of his book Live at the Masque: Nightmare in Punk Alley. Many thanks to Liz Garo, queen of the Echoplex and a booker extraordinaire whom Brendan mentored early in her career, for her graciousness and generosity.

The memorial is open to everyone who would like to pay his or her respects to Brendan. I hope I have reached all of Brendan's friends, but it's certainly possible I may have missed some folks, so please help get the word out. Also, musicians: Anyone who wants to jam unplugged during the wake is welcome to do so. We will have Brendan's drum kit there.

Kateri XO
katbutler8@hotmail.com”

***

"Berlin: Symphony of a Great City"
(1927, Walter Ruttman/Karl Freund)

Check and see if Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, Christian Marclay, and Lee Ranaldo can top Edmund Meisel's original score.

***

An oddly Robert Ryan-centric issue of the Chicago Reader.

Ryan's Letter
Ryan's Letter 2
The Essential Robert Ryan

***

Advertising as a weapon. How not to sell green to rednecks.

…and then there's Citgo:
Ad One
Ad Two

***

Kosova's national anthem.

The Bill Clinton Statue in Pristina is two feet taller than the John Wayne statue at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California.

***

Honduras is in the Eye of the Beholder --

The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
South Atlantic News Agency -- MercoPress

***

Wall Street Journal on a roll:

Book Review: "Where Do Jews Come From?"
People Review: "Why Are Egypt’s ‘Liberals’ Anti-Semitic?"
The Forgotten Ghosts of College Football: Univ of Chicago, Tulane, etc.

***

The IBD is reading the Health Care Bill and finding, surprise, a Lawyer vs Doctor subtext.

***

The FT's books roundup on the lost peoples of central Asia.

***

Liege Lords of Chicago and the lost peoples of Cook County

***

When will we learn that you can't force democracy on Europe - No Means No; Yes Doesn't Mean Yes.


















Painting by Josh Mason






















To receive a weekly update notice for the NV, send an email to newvulgate[at]sbcglobal.net with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. To stop receiving notices, do the same with the word UNSUBSCRIBE.

• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer