The heavy metal dates from 1987, Allentown/Bethlehem, smack in the middle of the time of the collapse of “the steel.” The guitar solo was composed as an extended scream.
Metaphorically, a scream of rage, echoing down the years, always gaining strength, howled into the heart of the establishment and blew it to perdition yesterday.
From the album “Brutality,” when I’d given up on science. I couldn’t do 12 years of postdoc for virtually nothing and an only theoretical opportunity at the end of the tunnel. The game was being rigged for everyone.
“So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down…”
For civil society and the propositions to end the death penalty, limit life-saving drug prices to no more than what the gov pays, bond measures for schools, money for infrastructure and the symbolic state measure to repeal the corporate evil of Citizens United. And against adding a whopping 2 dollar tax to the sale of cigs. It would fall disproportionately on the underclass and it ought not to be left to the haves to decide what legal vices the have-nots are to enjoy.
Watched Oasis: Supersonic this weekend, a documentary slated to run one day in the US before going to DVD and streaming services.
It’s a pretty good record of the band’s volcanic rise on the music of the Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? LPs, climaxing with a quarter of a million at Knebworth.
Which mostly meant nothing to me since I missed the boat on them, starting in 1994.
Supersonic’s also a good argument for strong social welfare programs as young people attempt to put something of their own together. “The dole,” informs the movie, financed the Gallagher brothers, first in a lifestyle of buying records starting out as strugglers and, more important, on the trip to a show as an opener in Glasgow. The Glasgow gig got them signed on the spot to Creation when the ower of the label showed up.
Oasis, Liam and Noel Gallagher, were from “council housing” in Manchester, an incredible cultural triumph of the working class, the young men being part of an English economic system that had given up on creating jobs for the working class and youth.
Noel Gallagher, it turned out, was a fantastic guitar pop songwriter. “Live Forever,” one of his first, is a tune the s band immediately realize is special when they hear it performed acoustically. His brother, Liam, is the perfect singer and frontman for the music. The debut, Definitely Maybe, immediately vaults Oasis into the first rank of British pop acts.
Until (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? it’s a continuous rise until Knebworth in front of a sea of humanity.
It had me listening to the three CD deluxe sets of their first three records, the two the movie follows and Be Here Now which marks a fall from peak popularity for music to constant notoriety for fighting and scandal sheet drug escapades.
Oasis singles’, delivered as the second disc of the Morning Glory package are quite an assembly of hits s ranging from rollicking goodtime rockouts to the wistful and elegiac: “Step Out,” “Down Are Way,” “Wonderwall/The Masterplan” and “Champagne Supernova.”
Like most of my countrymen, I whiffed. Attention deficit disorder mixed with a large dose of condescension. Our loss. In 1996 the appeal in their homeland is summed up by a quote from the New York Times:
“What Oasis has done in Britain, unifying an entire country under the banner of a single pop act, a band could no longer achieve in a country like the US. In Britain the band reigns unchallenged as the most popular act since the Beatles, there is an Oasis CD in roughly one of every three homes there.
In fact, for Supersonic the US is not in the picture, something for which the Oasis reputation is much better off. Their debut in country, at the Whisky in LA is shown as a now humorous disaster where the band and crew are so spun out on methamphetamine they were up for days. Rodney Bingenheimer introduces them and the wheels fall off. Noel Gallagher drily points out his set list, written up by a roadie, is different from everyone else’s. And that was only part of it.
Here in the land of the culturally splintered they were a passing fad, only for the coasts, written off by a gourmand at the New York Times as “low priced … cologne,” a band “more like the Rutles, the Beatles parody act of the 70’s that looked like the Beatles and played songs in the style of the Beatles but didn’t blatantly steal entire melodies and lyrics …” Even Noel Gallagher wears a “Rutles pin” jibes the writer.
“[When] it all came together, we made people feel something that was indefinable … The love, the joy, the passion and the rage, and the joy that came in from the crowd,” says Noel Gallagher before the end credits. In Britain, Oasis were a reason for being, music to grow up to.
It’s very amusing in a mean way to see how shook up the pundits are at almost every newspaper in the country. And none more so than those at the New York Times. Faced with the somewhat less than remote possibility that HRC will have blown it by Tuesday, they’re using up all their digital wind in blandishments to those they’ve had absolutely no use for in the last decade. For the love of God, people, you cannot vote for Donald J. Trump. The glaring paradox is these lickspittles to wealth have much to do with why millions of people will be voting for DJT.
Yesterday it was grandee David Leonhardt and today it’s the top shelf chanteur for globalism, Tom Friedman. Friedman has spent his entire career writing how everyone below the super business class and tech industry has to suck it up and get used to the fact that cheap laborers in Asia have eaten everyone else’s hash so billionaires could thrive. There’s nothing for us here.
Maybe you can design T-shirts. Become a brand. Innovate! Disrupt! Write an app that is downloaded three million times. Get viral on Twitter with a billion followers. Say you can make medical radioisotopes at home out of lead foil and old radium paint and create new microorganisms that eat bark and shit gasoline and antibiotics in your garage. Start a company to harvest the plastic waste piles in China. Engineer 3D meat manufacturing or a thermostat that connects to the internet and promptly gets infected by malware. Make sure it all scales. Invent the next perpetual motion machine! Rent out your couch to someone with less money while you go back to living with mom and dad or a friend. See if you can lease your tool box. Stand in a ticket line for some rich person.
It was destiny that the lazy American be displaced and the jobs sent overseas. To each according to his talent in the global workplace. Plus, war is good. Someone in the Middle East has to “suck on it.”
Root hog or die!
And like Leonhardt yesterday, the seven figure whitemansplainer to beat all whitemansplainers, is sure the Trump Apocalypse will be bad. And he describes what will happen and what YOU must do.
It will “cause enormous instability and systemic vertigo.” Which is bad.
Friedman has no answers. It’s a short column. He’s so damn slack this time he doesn’t even go into the usual brain loop of asking a wise cabby in Mumbai or Singapore for advice to the wounded American voter.
IBM’s Watson wrote a pop song, “Not Easy,” that went to No. 4 in the Apple store for about 10 minutes this month, or something. Demonstrating computers can write shitty songs. And this is going to make songwriters who haven’t been able to make any money with their tunes for over a decade, what, exactly?
And it wouldn’t be Friedman if there wasn’t a stab at a coinage — in this case, STEMpathy workers, as the new in demand thing.
“[Jobs] that blend STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, math) with human empathy.”
Friedman himself has never had any talent in science, technology, engineering and math, global or local.
As for empathy, not seeing that, either.
That’s Tom Friedman getting hit with a cream pie at a lecture. He got off rather lightly. Also note, I wasn’t kidding about him recommending to get on the plastic waste pile bandwagon in China.
And you, too, can have this tune for your device absolutely free (because, y’know, IBM Watson could’ve written it) here.
But this election is different. Trump threatens American values, threatens America’s interests and — as is clear from the financial markets’ dire view of a Trump presidency — threatens the economy …
One week from Tuesday night, the often-depressing campaign of 2016 will be over. Before it is, take a moment to imagine how it would feel to live in a country that had voted for and was run by Donald Trump.
Then go out and do your part to keep America great.
“Post your own voting plan to Facebook, and ask your friends to reply with theirs,” Leonhardt writes.
Yes, Twitter tweeting, Facebooking, top boy, head boy, you’re just a lickspittle … that’s how the song goes. Share, share, share. Save democracy and the American way.
“[A] small, tightly knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cybersecurity firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the internet with their bugs,” it reads at Slate.
Important stuff! “A Union of Concerned Nerds” are about to explain how they almost discovered Donald J. Trump was in league with Russia!
“We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,??? explained one of the academicians who, naturally, wished to remain anonymous.
One of the defenders of election integrity, nicknamed Tea Leaves (BTW, Tea Leaves is Cockney slang for “thieves,” which I lernt from watching The Limey)
They soon began “scrutinizing” a computer in Moscow, from a bank, that was connecting with Donald J. Trump’s domain “in a strange way.” Strange ways on the internet…
The information and data was passed on to a man named Vixie. There was “no higher authority” when it came to this kind of thing.
The transmissions of the suspicious computer in Moscow were deemed indeed very suspicious.
“The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it,??? according to Vixie, as told to the reporter. It’s the interpacket gap, the spacing between the conversations, the total volume.”
Growing fuzz. Interpacket gap.
What could be going on? Influence peddling and other skullduggeries yet to be determined, but suspiciously, very suspiciously, tied to events in the election cycle, like the days between two debates!
F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up??? messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.
“Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank,” reads a sentence from the top of the story.
Oh well. With a week to go democracy still needs saving. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Listen for the “hee’s” and sinister theme invoking the terror of cyberwar near the end.
From the Out & About in the Pasadena Neighborhood desk: An old pick-up truck driven by an old man, older than me, with a “Make America Great Again” bumper sticker. The truck, which sags a little in the mid-joint, is kept spotlessly clean. Someone appears to live out of it much of the time. I see it almost everyday. It has a little American flag hanging from the back.
The Trump voter is definitely not just in the heartland or the deep South, or rural, as broadstrokes from the media have it. They’re not hard to find. And they’re not only the uneducated but still well off. Believe the line the well-educated are only a little bit of it? And misguided, too? Surely there can be no one with advanced degrees who can’t see how deadly Trump would be to the world!
But from Thomas Edsall at the NY Times a week or so ago:
“Trade comes with no assurances that the spoils will be shared equitably. Across much of the industrialized world, an outsize share of the winnings has been harvested by people with advanced degrees, stock options and the need for accountants. Ordinary laborers have borne the costs and suffered from joblessness and deepening economic anxiety … failed to plan for the trauma that has accompanied the benefits of trade. When millions of workers lost paychecks to foreign competition, they lacked government supports to cushion the blow. As a result, seething anger is upending politics in Europe and North America.”
Globalization has not just damaged making things. It’s converted survival into a winner-take-all, make artisanal goods or crawl grub street economy. Make high-end trivialities and conveniences for the upper classes, do an endless succession of no-win freelance gigs for about nothing, or liquidate what you have left in an internet buyer’s market. It’s had a widespread effect, the cost of which to the non-select — diminished lifespans, widespread narcotics addiction, suicide, to name a few things in the news — is finally being measured.
You want to write off tens of millions of people who you don’t agree with on much of anything because we believe them to have made poor choices, not be educated the right way, or because they are bigots?
I can’t do it and believe me, I’m acutely aware I did more than my share For Escape from WhiteManistan. No one deserved what bad national leadership and economic policies favoring the elites did to them or people they knew or more distant family members over the past few decades.
I recently saw Michael Moore’s Trumpland. It’s a hurried-up release of his live show put on in Wilmington, Ohio, in Trump territory although I’m not sure there were many Trump voters in the theatre crowd. Part of his monologue, the backdrop of which is large hanging photos of Hillary Clinton from various stages in her life, centers on that Moore doesn’t believe Trump voters are all racists. In Michigan he’s talked to Trump supporters and tells the audience they they know the guy’s odious.
Reading from a notebook, Moore recognizes this is a revenge vote. He gets it, he says. His first and best doc, Roger & Me, went deep into the why that’s only become worse.
Moore goes onto say this is the dying white middle class’s (the 2nd America as the LATimes patronizingly put it last week) chance to throw a bomb into the “establishment.” Trump is “your Molotov cocktail,” and they can deliver the “biggest F— you ever recorded in human history” to those who’ve been running the country.
“[He’s] the human hand grenade they can legally throw into the system that’s stolen their lives from them,” Moore continues.
Moore thinks the anger justified. So do I. I want to throw the bomb.
But in the end he implies Trumpland ought not to do it because it will only feel good for “a day, a week,” “possibly a month.” And they would regret it, at which point the movie goes back to some comedy, spoofing a Trump inauguration.
And this is something our six figure explainers haven’t been able to do. HRC hasn’t done it. She won’t even go near the territory unless you count a paragraph or two from a speech to bankers she tried to keep secret.
Moore riffs on a Trump rally where the candidate tells his audience and Ford Motor Company directly that if the manufacturer moves production to Mexico, he’s imposing a 37 percent tariff on their cars. With Trump it’s balderdash. But it’s something Moore points out you’d never hear from any other politician.
There’s been nothing for the Trump voter or anyone who believes Hillary Clinton’s blandishments and “Stronger Together” motto are empty pandering. And in the context of the election’s daily spew such things have become progressively more intelligence insulting. What together, precisely? Define your terms.
There’s only been a slow grudging admission that globalism has largely screwed Americans, except for the top and their educated shoeshiners, the alleged meritocracy, now frantic to suppress the revolt. They brought fossilization to the economy, a condition in which wealth and corporate power chisels whatever it can from everyone else stuck in it. And that they might have to pay for it in a way they hadn’t planned on has them all at the barricades.
You see, they say in opinion after opinion, you just don’t see that globalism is always good, perhaps it needs only some tinkering, and there’s nothing to be done, anyway, wouldn’t be pragmatic, not prudent. But, jeezus, everyone has to keep that guy out of office because he’s not who we are.
Few of our influencers, certainly Hillary Clinton, will never come right out and admit there’s a rightness to “they’ve had it coming,” to a satisfaction in the chance she would be denied what she believes to be destiny. Clinton hasn’t had to answer to it (only in polls which her show virtually as disliked as Trump) because she’s running against Trumpwhere a strategy of phoning it in worked. (I’ve read her promises and policies book. There’s no need to go into the details of how empty it is once you get past the language of uplift.)
For her entire career she’s been at or near the epicenter of grasping American wealth, rule by the boilerplate from elites, and war without consequences for those who’ve made all the mistakes.
There’s been no discussion of issues this cycle. Zero on global warming. And Clinton has fobbed off any anger at her and government by blithely saying that such an emotion doesn’t solve anything. Neither has she. It’s all been verbal kung fu to the miscues and unfolding sordid biography of Trump: theatrical eye-rolling, jeering laughter, blaming the Russians, Julian Assange, now the FBI, always someone else in league with the enemy, and a “I’m the only one standing between you and the apocalypse” joke.
Hillary Clinton has more than done her part to earn the biggest election F— you! in history. The dilemma is in resolving the delivery of a share of it, of belief in the legitimacy of revenge, and conscience.
The emails never bothered me much, but Hillary’s statement urging all the parties involved at Standing Rock — protesters and pipeline company — ” to find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest” fills me with revulsion. This as the soldiers and cops closed in on on the tribespeople. — Barbara Ehrenreich, Facebook, 10/30
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
