Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Does humor belong in music? Ricin Mama says it does. I’m the best rock guitarist and harp player in the national security field, easy.
If this doesn’t make you laugh or smile, you can’t be my friend. Really. That’s what I told ’em on Facebook.
Details: That’s a castor bean extraction machine operating in Malaysia. Obviously, producing a lot of dust. (This is for the thickheaded in the US who still think castor powder is a WMD.)
Coming from the White House blog, an excellent essay on how inequality in rock music has mirrored inequality in the country. Actually, it is worse. The growth of the winner-take-all society has made popular music even more unequal than American society, generally.
The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large. We are increasingly becoming a “winner-take-all economy,??? a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented – and it is often hard to tell the difference – have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.
These same forces are affecting the music industry. Indeed, the music industry is an extreme example of a “super star economy,??? in which a small number of artists take home the lion’s share of income …
[Krueger explains that digitization and the Internet have greatly decreased income from music sales. This in turn made artists go to performance as the only way to preserve income. As a consequence, ticket prices have exploded. But only for the benefit of the topmost.]
The top 5 percent [of pop music artists] take home almost 90 percent of all concert revenues.
This is an extreme version of what has happened to the U.S. income distribution as a whole. The top 1% of families doubled their share of income from 1979 to 2011.
Krueger also discusses how luck has an increasingly outsized effect on a society distorted by inequality.
Specifically, he shows a study on popularity, one which tested what numerical counts of downloads meant to success.
Here at DD blog I’ve discussed it before when testing effects of Google AdWords campaigns and how view counts are gamed on YouTube. Ranking, as I’ve long maintained, means a lot.
If you aren’t returned in the top page of findings at Google, if YouTube search doesn’t return your video or display it in “recommends” because it has low numbers, you do not exist.
You need luck, you need someone important to promote it on a site with lots of eyeballs. If such things are not available, and luck again has a lot to do with such fortune, then numbers languish. Their are few magical resurrections, few spontaneous rises to the very top.
And, indeed, YouTube music popularity mirrors the yawning inequality Krueger writes about at the White House blog.
From DD blog, a few months back:
Google and its properties, along with social networking sites, have made an environment in which most value is accrued only by numbers of likes, views, inbound links and increasing [counts] which allegedly measure legitimate followers and friends. With web search, this has instated a winner-take-all digital ecology in which there is always strong incentive to cheat, to purchase rigging.
So I discovered that about two weeks after I’d written the linked piece an anonymous account had ripped “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination)??? and uploaded it under their account.
Subsequently, the user — going under the name Mega Grilled Ham & Cheese, rigged its views.
[Note: Mega Grilled Ham and Cheese’s YouTube account was purely engaged in testing how to artificially boost counts on YouTube. Eventually YouTube pinched him off but the point and techniques had been made.]
But back to Krueger’s piece.
In it he shows a chart in which two songs in a research test are shown, rated by download count.
Those tested were invited to download all songs available in the test for free and the songs ranked by popularity. Halfway through the test, and unknown to those tested, the counts presented to half those tested were flipped, that is — the most popular tune by downloads was given the count of the lowest, and vice versa.
Here is the chart…
Says Krueger:
In the alternative world that began with the true rankings reversed, the least popular song did surprisingly well, and, in fact, held onto its artificially bestowed top ranking. The most popular song rose in the rankings, so fundamental quality did have some effect. But, overall – across all 48 songs – the final ranking from the experiment that began with the reversed popularity ordering bore absolutely no relationship to the final ranking from the experiment that began with the true ordering. This demonstrates that the belief that a song is popular has a profound effect on its popularity, even if it wasn’t truly popular to start with.
A more general lesson is that, in addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than your band at the same time.
Quality does have an effect, he adds, but the perception of popularity in a winner-take-all society like ours is a big influence.
“The same forces of technology, scale, luck and the erosion of social pressures for fairness that are making rock ‘n roll more of a superstar industry also are causing the U.S. economy to become more of a winner-take-all affair,” continues the economic adviser.
The United States, he explains, has the highest inequality among advanced nations. And the divide is getting bigger. The US now also has the highest level of social immobility than all other advanced countries.
The American Dream is now a myth. It was fast fading into it when I was in grad school.
Eventually he gets around to saying, in a very gentlemanly way, that a lot of the inequality has to do with corporate America screwing over the middle class for the last three decades.
Krueger warns, gently, that there will be increasing consequences.
In returning the country to Great Gatsby/Roaring Twenties levels of disparity, the corporate market economy is creating increasing inefficiencies. These inefficiencies spring from research that seems to conclusively show that workers who perceive unfair treatment by corporations exact a toll in efficiency.
Again:
It is not hard to find reasons why the institutions and practices that long enforced norms of fairness in the labor market have been eroded. At a time when market forces were pushing an increasing share of before-tax income toward the wealthiest Americans, the previous administration cut taxes disproportionately for the well off.
Even earlier, in the 1980s when inequality was starting to take off, the nominal value of the minimum wage was left unchanged from 1981 to 1989, causing it to decline in the value by 27 percent after accounting for inflation. The minimum wage serves as an important anchor for other wages, and the whole wage scale was brought down by the decline in the minimum wage.
A lower minimum wage and regressive tax changes sent a clear signal that maintaining fairness was not a priority.
Just coincidentally (ahem), “Taxavoidination” was a rock and roll video on one of the causes of growing economic inequality, corporate tax avoidance, or “profit shifting” to countries which have built finance-sheltering systems for the purposes of tax evasion.
“Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” at the White House blog, is here.
The post title, a not-subtle dig at “Reaganomics” and “trickle down.”
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From a web “health facts” story — left-handed people are so weird.
Left-handed people suffer more fright during the watching of horror movies, readers are informed. And there are more fibers connecting their left and right brain halves, a condition called “asymmetric,” which is said to make one more prone to schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder.
On the other hand, there’s people like me, who are lefties but also largely ambidextrous:
Left-handedness has its advantages, too! The same atypical brain tendencies associated with mental health challenges may also contribute to greater creativity and cognitive skills among some left-handed people.
For example, a study of professional orchestras uncovered a disproportionate number of left-handed musicians.
The GMA review article also notes that lefties are reportedly more likely to excel at music, as well as math and language fluency. Lefties are also reportedly more likely to score over 131 on IQ tests.
Lefties are more prevalent in one-on-one sports, too. Part of my college scholarship money came from wrestling. I wrestled right and left.
I do not play a left-handed guitar. But the dominance of my hands in playing standard guitar is the reverse of that of a right-handed player.
My strong hand is on the fret board. The strong hand of the righty player is in picking.
Does it make a difference? A subtle one, I suspect, having more to do with tonality, composition and choices in material that’s played over a lifetime.
Screw ya, righty. You are so normal.
In a past life I wrote about music. At one publication I took up an interest in rock and roll from the Land of the Rising Sun. They love it there, the enthusiasm of the young for it at the beginning of the 21st century knew no bounds. In fact, enthusiasm was everything! We could use some of that here.
When the Japanese realized their geese were well and truly cooked in the war in the Pacific half a century ago, they came up with the highly popular idea of the kamikaze pilot. However, within that cadre of certifiable fliers was an even smaller group: the men who chose to ride the baka.
The baka was not a suicide airplane with bombs strapped under its wings. It wasa bomb: a big metal cylinder with a cap on one end, a feeble rocket engine on the other, and a ton or so of gelignite and the “pilot” on a wire seat in between. The baka and its rider would be slung under the wing of a bomber, flown out to the scene of the battle, and released in the general direction of a U.S. ship. Theoretically, the rider was supposed to “fly” the baka into an American ship, making a big, smoking hole in the ocean. In practice, the baka did not fly. Instead, it dropped like a stone. Baka riders hardly ever hit anything, unlike their more successful brethren who flew actual kamikaze airplanes. But the explosions could be mighty impressive. You might even think of the baka as an unsmart smart bomb.
I am told baka means “fool.” Anyway, long before Slim Pickens rode “Dear John” down to the Soviet countryside and into film history hollerin’ all the way in Dr. Strangelove, young Japanese men had been there, done that, for real. On Collection, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant strike me as the living heirs to the baka riders. They dress relentlessly in black, appear to be patent nutbags, and miss the target a substantial part of the time. But when they don’t, there’s one hell of an explosion.
Collection, a bit over half of which is near unlistenable bombastic r&b greasechain, cries out to be strapped, after the fashion of the baka, under the wing of a massive distribution company in search of competition to smite—or at least to irritate mightily. But “Boogie,” which is not a boogie, sports a fine melody, as does “World’s End (primitive version),” coupled to Wilko Johnson guitar. You see, I liked “Sukiyaki” as a tyke, and have been looking for replacements ever since. Don’t laugh!
The intrigued might also seek out “Hotel Bronco” from last year’s Gear Blues, which is reminiscent of Alfred E. Neuman’s sublime “It’s a Gas!”—published as an acetate-coated cardboard single in Madmag eons ago—except with guitar exchanged for Farfisa and “Sonova beetch!” as blurted lyric.
If TMGE had been alive in 1967, Mike Vernon would have worked overtime to sign them to Deram, they’d have had an instant residence at Klooks Kleek, and someone would be working on an omnibus CD complete with liner notes as we speak. Inspirational to children and many geezers too, Collection gives heart to all who have recorded or ever will record their Marshall dreams in an incomprehensible hybrid of fractured English and some other language.
John Toland’s The Rising Sun tells of the leader of a kamikaze force, presumably including some baka riders, who radioed a message to his superiors saying, “I will crash into and destroy the conceited enemy in the true spirit of Bushido . . . ” Then he went to his doom off Okinawa.
Thee Michelle Gun Elephant bring that spirit to rock and roll. “I want my motorcycle . . . ah ha . . . oh yeah . . . ah ha!” some crazy man sings jubilantly —as the Collection rocket bomb, now not totally unnoticed, goes plunging into the sea.
Americans believe constipation to be a fearful evil. The superstition is dressed up in evening TV ads for psyllium that treat it as religion. Purges make one wholesome, and there can be nothing better in life than to be a laxative addict.
It was a belief while growing up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, too, and what the stiff-necked Pennsy Germans feared they wished upon others. As a consequence, shit jokes—specifically, those in which inferiors suffered the revenge of laxatives or brown-stained toilet paper pasted to the shoe—were a source of glee. Indeed, one of the favored local artists was a “Professor Schnitzel,” who recorded 45s of comedy routines sprinkled with such tales.
The Japanese metal band Bathtub Shitter are a natural antidote to Pennsy Dutch, striking the world’s heevahavas in their intellectual center, the bowels. Lyrics from Lifetime Shitlist are not the crazy Jap-lish they seem, instead employing themes of elimination as metaphors for life. “Persist poor shit” and “Breeze from the hole, snore of the God,” rants the singer; is it Shakespearean or just cookie monster metal growling?
A memory that has pursued me into middle age is one of sadism disguised as care by my mother. The damned woman became possessed of the idea that my brother refused the call of nature while playing outdoors. This led to fever, she insisted, so the common cold became an excuse to administer enemas, which generated screams—half in discomfort, half in humiliation.
The Bathtub Shitters know something like it. While nutbag vocal muttering is all over the record, part of the time the BS mouth is in a studio duet with an exaggeratedly childlike shrieker who sounds like my brother did, cowering in the bathroom.
A strong scent of ’80s Brit-midlands metal emanates from the band; BS cover Witchfinder General’s “No Stayer,” although the listener will have to know the original to recognize it without the cue card. Hell, Bathtub Shitter’s best numbers aren’t even extreme. The title track is pretty guitar chamber music, pinched from some source I can’t precisely identify. It’s immediately trumped by a hot r&b riff, “Escapism to Refresh,” one of this year’s better metallized grooves.
Bathtub Shitter want you to regain “Control of Own Hole,” good advice for a citizenry more interested in minding everyone else’s. “Sober lifes will stop [the] bowels” is another shot at an American shibboleth—temperance, this time as a complement to regular cleansings. Perhaps BS describes your life. Would I shit you?
Japanese hard-rock acts are generally pitilessly annoying in some way. Instructive example: Church of Misery, a stoner metal band doing concept EPs on serial killers, in gibberish. To get the slightest enjoyment from them it’s necessary to grant a “get out of jail free” card to whatever feature sticks out as beyond wretched while understanding it’s the result of a great desire to be perceived as enthusiastic and earnest.
Guitar Wolf were basically awful at the American greaser lock ‘n’ loll they venerated. The band’s fringe audience, having never heard the real thing, was ill prepared to grasp their shortcomings. Dressing up like Link Wray and seemingly Vaseline-coated for dramatic rock-action poses, Guitar Wolf always looked like they delivered the goods. And while the trio had a genuine commitment to loud noise, the rhythm was ramshackle, the tone horrible. Eventually, on “UFO Romantics” and “Loverock,” honed reflexes and an animal cunning made some of the Wolves’ unintelligible blurts—like “Shinkansen High Tension” and “Jett Beer”—really invigorating. Accidental evolution or purposeful development? Who cares; on the anthology Golden Black, it finally works when you turn it up enough.
Electric Eel Shock’s Beat Me beats you over the head with ludicrous titles: “I Can Hear the Sex Noise,” “I Like Fish but Fish Hate Me.” The prizewinner in the fools’ hall of fame is “Don’t Say Fuck,” a self-defeating gem which spews the F-word ad nauseam. But the band aims squarely for early-’70s hard rock/metal tunefulness and achieves it, notably in the slash of “Scream for Me.” Last year’s Go USA featured “I Want to Be a Black Sabbath Guy but Should Be a Black Bass,” which was solidly in the Birmingham way even though the title screamed stay away. For this year, the Eel Shocks redo “Iron Man” and dare to affront consumers of dogma by switching between re-creation and a sliced funk delivery. It’s a winner because the Iommi/Butler/Ward tonal magic is preserved.
Loudness were described as furnishers of “brain-destroying” music in Tony Jasper’s sometimes accidentally amusing 1983 book The International Encyclopedia of Hard Rock & Heavy Metal. It was a compliment, the longstanding Japanese band’s high-water mark in print. Subsequently, they were never taken seriously in the West. Martin Popoff, accountant-certified compiler of thousands of metal reviews, dismissed them as “just foreign and weird,” adding, “…they still remind me of Bruce Lee and Godzilla movies.” Damning Loudness with faint praises, Popoff doled out failing scores for Thunder in the East and Lightning Strikes, albums mainstreamed at an American audience in the mid-’80s.
The gimmick was to sell Loudness as a cock-rock and party-metal act, a role for which they were patently unsuited. For this purpose they were eventually adorned with a stateside frontman, Mike Vescera, pilfered from a fourth- or fifth-string U.S. metal band called Obsession, Loudness’s native singer having been deemed too “foreign and weird.” It didn’t help much. Vescera lasted a few records before continuing on as a journeyman, trading marginally upward into Yngwie Malmsteen’s band.
Wounded Bird Records has been reissuing the Loudness catalog for a few years, the first releases being CD editions of American vinyl that revealed a band committing a variety of sins while kowtowing to ’80s ‘mersh metal lowest common denominators. But more recently, the label has introduced, for the first time, a few records made by Loudness after they had disappeared from stores domestically. Paradoxically, they are an artistic about-face and the best of the batch.
The material old fans know is Loudness with a wooden rhythm section; an original singer with, take your pick, impenetrable or nonsensical lyrics; or, a sleaze-rocking American vocalist picked for the hair-band audience. But after the band washed out of the U.S market, a second Japanese vocalist, with better elocution, was hired and the rhythm section replaced. Behind all of it was a wall of guitar from Akira Takasaki, the band’s one consistently “brain-destroying” component. Besides suggesting a micro-cult following that you probably didn’t know existed, four ’05 re-releases make a baffling collection that defies pigeonholing and rewards cherry picking.
Anyone trying to appreciate these reissues in one sitting is beaten senseless by the experience. Smaller slices are worthwhile, though, and the band roams so widely around metal subgenres that there’s something for purists of various stripes. Liken it to blind pigs finding occasional truffles or busted watches being right twice a day, but contrary to their meager reputation, Loudness made a few good records.
Shadows of War hits on the backside of Loudness’s American metal ride. It’s mostly awful old Loudness with accordingly cheesy album art, seemingly dreamed up by junior high boys who’ve just discovered a love for two things that don’t belong together — fire and dressing in women’s clothes. The image of the band in silks and bouffants was and is an embarrassment of the most excruciating nature. Singer Minoru Nihara wages a mighty but futile struggle with the ways of the Cinderella/Britny Fox song stylebook. On “Black Star Oblivion” it sounds like he’s shouting, “Drug store maniac!” over and over. Entertaining — but not in a head-banging way. On another tune, “One Thousand Eyes,” he makes shrieking reference to “one hundred voices,” thus creating history’s most subtle examination of people with ten eyes.
But in between the hapless choruses, the listener hears a band that’s supremely heavy when it’s not trying to succeed. Had Loudness dispensed with the sham of writing songs, always a burden, and been photographed in denim and leather, Shadows of War could’ve been great. Loudness, Heavy Metal Hippies, and Once and for All, however, are an entirely different story, the style metamorphosing from Silly MTV Hopefuls to Marauding Visigoths.
Dismissed from having to make it in the West, the band reorganized, drafting their new vocalist from another Japanese stateside non-starter, EZO. EZO was a doomed Gene Simmons “discovery” that relocated to L.A., where a Geffen Records A&R rep took a shine to them in a fit of delirium. Plodding, tortured-sounding, and unwisely dressed up kabuki style, they sold about as well as bottled horse piss.
But the trio of albums made featuring EZO’s Masaki Yamadi as frontman changed Loudness from party metallers to asphalt soldiers. Everything commercial went to a garage sale–the sissyman look, the old drummer and bass player, the Eddie van Halenism. Colors were out, the leather jacket discovered. On Heavy Metal Hippies the band is a bunch of greasy dolts coming out of the woods. Loudness and Once and for All look like black metal albums. Yamadi poses like he’s ready to chew nails. Where’d the kabuki go?
Loudness’s beats slowed down to a slinking and provocative pace. “Twisted” (from Loudness) is dark and funky hard rock; “Ride the Wind” is convincing cruising-&-chain-fights biker metal. On “Howling Rain” from Heavy Metal Hippies Yamadi makes the band sound like Guns N’ Roses for a moment.
Takasaki’s axe dispenses nothing but downtuned frying riffola. Known to be a shredder, he relies instead on knuckle-dragging rhythm and incinerating use of the wah-wah. Occasionally, the white-boy blooz float through the mix. His deathlike tone is infernally crunching, nasty enough to have influenced the underground Japanese grindcore band known for Satan-sitting-on-the-commode symbolism, Bathtub Shitter.
The syntax and general command of English improved, Yamadi and hired lyricists furnish standard street metal fare. There is, however, one peculiar slip-up that adds, maybe unintentionally, to Loudness’s unusual appeal. On the live album Once and for All, Yamadi repeatedly screams “Circumcized! Down and dirty!” Startling and absurd, it burrows into your head as effectively as a good pop hook. Is it a song about unsterile surgery? Is the singer a Touretter making creative use of a tic? Is it a joke? Yamadi laughs and goes “woo-hoo!” to the hometown crowd, so maybe it is.
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Hey Joe, where you goin’ now with that gun in your hand?!
Updated for modernity! Featuring the ricin letter!
Like, like, like, like, like.
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Press play and it runs itself.
Upper middle class white music journalists, when discussing the blues, make no sense to me. I ran across a rock critic chat on it on social media this morning. And it immediately hit me, although I like the blues and play it a lot, why it was an exchange best avoided.
Scholars of popular entertainment can spoil what was thought unspoilable with an ability to suck the vital juice out of anything. What usually happens when one encounters this is a creeping feeling of embarrassment because you can’t canonically list all the old folk blues artists or successfully debate who belongs in unique sub-genres of your own coinage.
Before you know it you’re actually questioning if you know anything at all.
Well, I know quite a bit.
I learned to love the music’s capacity on guitar decades ago because I had records by ZZ Top and the British groups in the white boy blues boom of the late Sixties and early Seventies. And I picked up the harmonica in middle age because, as a folk instrument, it was just made to be easy to play.
Harmonica, and folk musics in general, are supposed to be simple and inviting. It is music that anyone with human DNA can dip into. You can write what you know, tell stories, make daily observations.
In America this has been turned into a genre where reverence to various stodgy pieties and ways-of-performance are embalmed as benchmarks and methods of accounting and keeping score by white American ruling culture. You cannot bring a sense of humor or alienation to it, two things that are as much a part of old folk musics as community experience.
But if you want something wrecked for the day’s enjoyment, find some pop culture critics to talk about it.
In any case, I realized I’d more than enough tunes over the last three years to make a blues album that has some relation to my American existence.
And here you have by example, what I’m talking about, Stumbling Into the Future Culture of Lickspittle. Running time = a little over 26 minutes.
That looks short. But it’s a good length to show breadth of style and the human touch. And it is definitely not repetitive (Go from “Pasadena 2012 Blues” to “Good Boy” and tell me that) although many of the songs are in the same key.
The alternate title occurred to me after I’d left the YouTube playlist: Culture of Lickspittle Blues. D’oh! So I changed it from the original post and URL marker.
How to ruin anything by crowd-sourcing the opinions of upper middle class white pop music scholars.
The raw evidence.
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Was planning on posting a continuation on natsec rent-seeking but just couldn’t today.
Didn’t have it in me (as spied on Twitter) to live up to the recommendation directed at someone else: “Become DickDestiny and go all out pls. [Give him the] Beat down … ”
This song, a lot more polished that the vinyl recording by virtue of the Letterman band, was from a release just before The Breeders went platinum in the mid-90’s with The Last Splash. And it is 150 plus seconds of why rock and roll exists.
There’s this too.
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Newton — Pine Grove Municipal Swimming Pool Splash Party, ca. ’71-’72.
Taken by my father, George C. Smith, Jr., a Polaroid of my rock n roll band, Newton, at a Pine Grove swimming pool splash party. He could never get anything right, cutting his son almost entirely out of the picture. Did it occur to him to back up a couple steps or take an angle?
No.
It’s the only thing left, besides some childhood books, of my old life in Pine Grove, PA. I’d forgotten about it until this week when I opened a trade paperback, bought a few years ago in Pasadena, and it fell out. I’d been using it as a bookmark. The polaroid is still nice and stiff after forty-some years.
Credits, from left to right, classmate Rodney Felty, Mike Pijar on drums, Ray Symons and me. Harry Brommer, an old friend and the pool’s handyman, built the stage we played on. Part of the reason we got the gig was because two of us were lifeguards AND I had a Fender Vibrolux Reverb amp. John Herber, the swimming pool supervisor had had a band in that played through Fender “reverb” amps the year before and liked the sound.
It was an uncharacteristically cool summer night and most of the audience did not swim at all.
Both my parents are dead now — George Jr., the keepsake photographer, and Mary Elizabeth Smith. The photo doesn’t make me miss them.
They had the good luck to be part of the time when the middle class was at its height in the USA. The first college graduates in their families, they found jobs straight out of Penn State, my father as an accountant for Alcoa Aluminum, my mother as a school teacher at Pine Grove Area.
They had no debt, lived in apartment for about one year before moving into a new home in the freshly-minted Legion Acres subdivision of the Pine Grove borough.
My mother was able to quit her career as a school teacher to have children and start it right up again a few years later, scarcely missing a beat. Alcoa Aluminum felt the early wave of the great de-industrialization of America and closed the largest extrusion plant in the world in Cressona, PA. My dad’s job was spared. He quickly transferred to a small bottlecap producing facility near Lancaster.
I visited it once, a pathetic place, mostly automated where you had to wear plastic ear plugs all day. Alcoa, it seemed, could still domestically make soda pop bottlecaps at a profit in the late Seventies.
I never liked my parents much. Besides the outward physical similarity in looks, I had nothing in common with them. They were mediocre. Although they had a good start they were ill-suited to raising children, mostly because they lacked empathy and warmth. They took what society and time gave them, doing just what everyone else they knew did.
That was OK. America is and was a huge country, one where you can’t have a vibrant civilization (which we don’t have) where everyone has to be at the very tip-top of the global totem pole in coveted skills.
They didn’t have to deal with the stupid lies we’re fed daily by the 1 percent and Tom Friedmans of the country. My parents thought the United States would always be the best place in the world. They were full of aphorisms about it.
“Time is money,” George Jr. always said, a lesson he learned from business. Yes, in corporate America your time is worth less and less money, maybe almost nothing.
Neither my father nor my mother liked writing, or music, or language and thought, or reading. (Paradoxically, my mother became a reading teacher later in her career. She did not read books and took mine when she needed to put something in her middle school classroom library.)
And they didn’t understand science at all although they believed it was very important I be trained as a scientist.
So as I got older the family disconnection always worsened. It was happening when I was playing guitar in Newton at the Pine Grove swimming pool.
Whose kid was I? Not theirs. We shared nothing, not a single blessed value. What, when, who or why? There were no answers.
So I’m looking at the swimming pool photo, again this week: Half-assed but good enough for three-quarters.
I’ve outlived the man who took it. My father died in the mid-Eighties, younger than I am now. Not a moment in our lives has been the same. DD came along a few years after he was gone. We would not have been pals.
Another ugly paradox: Corporate health care gave him the best benefits to be had, no questions asked. These kept him alive for five years after cancer struck. Congruent with modern America, I’ve had no health insurance for a number of years. Before that I had a program familiar to many, one that only pays for treatment of catastrophic illness, one that will eventually kill you. No treatments for the dozens of things people normally need to go to the doctor for.
This is what my parents had for life. It was not because they were spectacular examples of American exceptionalism, because they had some mythic work ethic, some always fresh and absolutely essential worth in the machine. It was because they came into the economic system before it had turned into a grinder that would gradually pit all against all. The country had enough leaders who believed a great society should not just be a matter of fortune at birth and root, hog or die.
You never can tell what an old photo will trigger in the head.
Something you miss? Or a distant condition already vanishing when the photo is taken, then quickly gone, the flickering half-life of a short-lived isotope, a fluke.
In the age of Google the memory of a family name is framed by the member who’s the best writer. Often not the person you want it to be.
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From Lorenzo’s Cartoon Festival, local morning television out of Philadelphia when I was young. Another good clip is here.
Like Jimmie Riddle, it’s hard not to smile.
No, you’re hardware isn’t malfunctioning. The music is in only one channel.
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With Jackie Phelps, most famously.
With Bob Luman.
Why? Because it’s not depressing.
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