Category Archives: Popular culture

I was leaning toward The New Normal, but it’s becoming too popular

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They’re wearing out my name before I’ve even adopted it.

I was leaning strongly toward “The New Normal” as the name for my band — you know, the band I’m going to start once I get the name and the playlist all worked out, after which I’ll start recruiting bandmates — but it seems like everybody’s using it every time I turn around, such as here and here and here. If only I had copyrighted it earlier — I would have licensed it to be used only by the band itself, and other people who have paid for the right by, for instance, losing their jobs in this Great Recession. Yeah, I know we have this free speech thing in this country, but I think there should be a rule that you don’t get to say “The New Normal” unless you’ve lost your job.

But I didn’t act quickly enough, mainly because of my great indecision when it comes to picking a name. I could probably decide to go to war, were I a president or a king, a LOT more quickly than the almost four decades I’ve been pondering band names.

Over the years, I’ve considered:

  • The Cotton Pigue Mentality — This was inspired by a certain county official in rural West Tennessee back in the late 70s or early 80s. Trouble is, this would have to be a bluegrass or progressive country band, which would eliminate a lot of my playlist. Also, I would have to have my friend Richard Crowson, the best picker of banjo, mandolin and guitar I know, and he lives plumb halfway across the country, in Kansas. Richard was there when we came up with the band name, so he shares the rights.
  • Citizen Arcane — This was a sobriquet given me by the late Delores Ballard, my dear friend back at The Jackson Sun in the early days of my career. I got that handle because I knew a lot about really obscure, unimportant stuff, and I suppose I was kind of overbearing about it. Delores was generous with nicknames. She also called me “Wa-Wa,” which has possibilities for a band, and “Percival Pedant,” for my insistence as an editor on precision. That last was just way too uncool to make the list.
  • Prussian Blue — It’s a color. In fact, it was one of the first synthetic pigments, whatever that means. I think I ran across it in a dictionary once. I liked the tension between a word with harsh, militaristic overtones (picture a Prussian army officer with a Heidelberg scar) and the dreamy “blue.” Unfortunately, the name was taken by a white nationalist pop duo. I am not making this up.
  • Wireless Cloud — The dream that apparently will never be realized here in South Carolina, since all of our legislative sessions are all about Mark Sanford, rather than legislation.
  • The Irreconcilables — This was a band idea I had very briefly, but dropped like a hot potato after I’d thought about it for 30 seconds. It would have included such politically irreconcilable local musicians as James Smith and Will Folks. I decided that normal bands have enough trouble with artistic differences; why buy extra trouble?
  • The Romeo Clause — this was from a loophole in SC law on the age of consent, which essentially held that you couldn’t be charged for having sex with a minor if you too were a minor. You know, like Romeo and Juliet. Very South Carolina. Disgusting, but I liked the name.
  • Splash Blend — If you recall, there was a brouhaha between Big Oil and the jobbers over whether gasohol had to be blended by the oil companies at the refinery, or whether they could be “splash blended” in the wholesalers’ trucks. Sounded like a band name to me.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of the names. Maybe y’all have some better ideas.

Julie & Julia & me

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Tonight, after we had done all the cooking we could do the night before, my wife and I went to see a movie. Actually, to be more accurate, my wife had done all the cooking at our house, except for a special-recipe cake I made for myself (no wheat, no dairy, no eggs), since I can’t eat the other desserts we’ll be having.

We went to the dollar-movie house to see “Julie & Julia.” Actually, it used to be the dollar-movie house. Now it’s $2.

Anyway, we went to see the movie, and it was cute and all that, but a bit frustrating for a blogger such as myself.

It’s about a woman who does a blog with a gimmick — she’s going to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s famous book in a year — and the blog becomes wildly popular, and she gets a book deal, and it’s made into, you guessed it, a movie.

And the thing is, that’s not going to happen to me, which made me a little sad. I don’t have a gimmick. And I don’t have an obsession that thousands of people will resonate to — at least, I’m not aware of one. I’m not even particularly interested in such things. I know the kinds of things that are engaging and commercial, and I’m not that into them.

The obsession that the blog of the woman in the movie was about was food. This is a very chick thing. Excuse me, ladies, but women get excited about food as though it were sex or something. Some men do, too, but I am definitely not one of those men. My diet is limited by my allergies, of course, and that’s part of it, but I’m just not a foodie at heart anyway. I will fully enjoy my Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, but then I’ll take a nap and not think about it any more. I’ve tried waxing enthusiastic about Dixie Lee field peas and candy pumpkins, but I definitely could not imagine blogging exclusively about such a limited subject. (Foodies don’t think food is a limited subject, but there it is…)

Women are always starting wildly successful blogs, read by other women, about food and shopping and their kids and such, but I’m just not that kind of blogger. For that matter, I’m not into the kinds of things guys usually obsess about, either. Sports, for instance. Sports has the potential for a guy to be the kind of blog money-maker that food and shopping are for women. But I’m not, by American standards, into sports.

So what do I have? Well, I’m really, really into those Aubrey-Maturin novels, and I think it would really be cool to spend a year sailing the world in a square-rigged ship, living on dried peas and salt pork, attacking and sinking the king’s enemies, and blogging about it. But I don’t think it’s really feasible. The obstacles are pretty significant.

I’m really into my grandchildren. But cute pictures I take of them would probably wear thin with my readers.

Then, there’s the fact that I am an actual unemployed guy, the epitome of this economic situation. And the truth is, I have not really tapped into that subject. I don’t tell y’all most of what I’m thinking and experiencing because, well, it’s personal. If I went into perfectly frank detail about what this experience is like, it could be interesting. But it could also chase away every job prospect I have. And I can’t imagine it being commercial. Who pays for depressing? I sure wouldn’t. I mean, I’m living it, and I’ve frankly had enough of it.

So anyway — it would be great if I could come up with a gimmick that would make this blog pay off in a big way. Suggestions, anyone?

Top Five Southern Novels of All Time

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Did you see that list of Top Ten Southern novels of all time that Joey Holleman wrote about in the paper Sunday? Were you as outraged as I was to see Huck Finn down at fourth place? Seriously, folks — the only question to be asked about Twain’s masterpiece is whether it’s the greatest novel of any kind ever, much less best “Southern” novel.

Mind you, this is not Joey’s fault, he’s just reporting on the list compiled by the magazine Oxford American.

Now, right off the bat, you have to figure that any mag that calls itself “Oxford” anything is going to be prejudiced in favor of a certain person, even if it is based in Conway, Arkansas. And sure enough, the list kicks off with a Faulkner work, Absalom, Absalom!

And here’s where we get into my own blind spot: I’ve never read Faulkner. Oh, I’ve tried, back when I was young and felt like I had to in order to be an educated person. But a page or two of Faulkner, and I felt like I needed oxygen. I decided that I must hold my breath until I reach the end of a sentence or something, which can be deadly with Faulkner. Anyway, I never got very far. I’ve got several of his books sitting on a shelf to this day, awaiting me. Personally, I intend to read Finnegan’s Wake first, which means Faulkner will have to wait awhile. Sorry, Bill.

So basically, we have a problem in judging this list — no publication called Oxford American could possibly be unbiased with regard to Faulkner, and I’m not in a position to judge when they’re giving him too much credit and when they’re not. So we’re just going to have to throw all the Faulkner books off the list. Sorry again, Bill, but them’s the rules I just made up.

Since three of the 10 were thus tainted, that leaves us with a Top Five list plus two, and now that we have the Faulkner distraction out of the way, we can see more clearly that the list does, indeed, fall short:

1. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren, 1946, 80 votes

2. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain, 1885, 58 votes

3. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee, 1960, 57 votes

4. “The Moviegoer,” Walker Percy, 1961, 55 votes

5. “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison, 1952, 47 votes

6. “Wise Blood,” Flannery O’Connor, 1952, 44 votes

7. “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston, 1937, 41 votes.

See? Huck Finn still isn’t first. In fact, it comes in second to All the King’s Men. Now I’m perfectly willing to assert that All the King’s Men is a wonderful work, one of the best ever — for about three pages.

Seriously, you can read the good parts of All the King’s Men in the “LOOK INSIDE!” feature at Amazon.com, and be done well before they cut you off. I’m talking about the stretch that goes from that wonderful ode to Highway 58, and ends with the paragraph that tells you everything you need to know about Sugar-Boy, ending with:

He wouldn’t win any debating contests in high school, but then nobody would ever want to debate with Sugar-Boy. Not anybody who knew him and had seen him do tricks with the .38 Special which rode under his left armpit like a tumor.

Great stuff. (Never mind that it should be “that rode under his left armpit like a tumor,” or that there’s no reason a grown man would participate in a high school debate anyway. It’s still great writing.) After that, it’s kinda downhill with all that decadent Southern nobility and corruption-of-idealism-by-power stuff. Go ahead and stack the first few pages of Huck Finn up against it, why don’t you — and then tell me it doesn’t hold its own. Never mind that the whole tone changes to deep and dark in the middle part, or then shifts back to that broad farce tone when Tom Sawyer gets back into it at the end. The greatest Southern novel — indeed, the greatest American novel — should have unevenness and inconsistencies. I wouldn’t give shucks for any other way, as Tom Sawyer would say.

Beyond that — well, I’d put Mockingbird ahead of Warren, too. As for Walker Percy — while I’ve read The Moviegoer, and enjoyed it near as I can recall, I was never tempted to re-read it, which means it wouldn’t make it onto a top anything list of mine. (I actually have a clearer memory of Lancelot, which I did not like. That whole “Southern Man as severely dysfunctional loser” theme leaves me cold; a few pages of it is a gracious plenty, as my Aunt Jenny would have said. It’s why I didn’t read past the first chapter of Prince of Tides, and regretted having read that much.)

The absence of Gone With The Wind is of course a deliberate snub, based on its not being highbrow enough or cliched or politically incorrect or whatever. Perhaps it was too popular. And no such list would seem complete to me without either God’s Little Acre or Tobacco Road, if not both. What, the Oxford American folks don’t like books with hot parts? Or are we only concerned with the troubles of the upper classes, and don’t have time for working-class dysfunction? Caldwell’s novels were certainly way Southern; you’ve got to admit that.

We can’t blame the editors of the magazine entirely, since the list resulted from a poll of “134 scholars, scribes, and a few mystery guests.” There is something vaguely un-Southern about this. Subjecting things to a vote seems kinda Yankee to me, like a New England town hall meeting or something. A true Southern list should be drafted by one quirky individual who doesn’t give a damn what anybody else thinks. At least it wasn’t true Democracy, since the electors were hand-picked — in a process that helps us understand why the list has more than a whiff of snootiness.

So now that I’m done tearing down this list, I should post one for y’all to tear down. So have at it:

  1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  3. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
  4. God’s Little Acre, Erskine Caldwell
  5. Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell

OK, one last admission — I haven’t actually read Gone With The Wind, either. But I heard about it so much from my eldest daughter when she was growing up that I feel like I have. And I wanted to put it on the list just to cock a snook at those pointy-headed types who ignored it in the OA poll. I thought about putting Pudd’nhead Wilson at No. 5, just to load my list up with Twain the way they did theirs with Faulkner, or even saying “a Faulkner novel of your choice” in that spot, just as a grudging acknowledgment. But I didn’t.

A Top Five list that leaves much to be desired

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So I was reading a review in the WSJ this morning about an incomplete Vladimir Nabokov novel that has been released posthumously, and probably should not have been.

And that got me to thinking about great writers who write in English even though it’s not their first language, and I thought it would be cool to draft a Top Five List of such writers. This would be challenging, and more highbrow than a “Top Five Side One Track Ones” list.

Trouble is, I can only think of two:

  1. Joseph Conrad, who as far as I’m concerned could occupy the whole list alone, even if you don’t go beyond Heart of Darkness. He packed meaning in and around English words in ways that native speakers never thought of. (Or perhaps I should say, “of which native speakers never thought.”)
  2. Vladimir Nabokov.

And I must admit I’m not too sure about Nabokov. People tell me he’s brilliant, but his “masterpiece” has always sounded kinda perv-y to me, kind of Roman Polanski, you might say (which suggests a Top Five Perv-y Directors Whose First Language is Not English, which would also come up short, I’m afraid). So I’ve never read it. A case of judging a book by its synopsis. I mean, I loved A Clockwork Orange despite its disgusting themes — partly because of its creative use of another language (Russian) melded with English slang to create a new language altogether, come to think of it — but I haven’t been interested enough to give Lolita a try.

Anyway, as I wondered who might be third, fourth and fifth on such a list (and maybe second, too, since I’m not sure about Nabokov), I learned that there is a whole publication devoted to such writers — a publication that even sponsors something called the Conrad-Nabokov Award (which provides a broad hint that maybe those two are in a class by themselves). Here is how it explains itself:

This is the third issue of Shipwrights, and perhaps it’s a good time to pause and reflect. This journal is an experiment, really. It may be the only international magazine specifically dedicated to publishing the work of “de-centered” (second-language English) authors. It is, thus, one representation of the linguistic effects of globalization. As the number of second-language speakers of English in the world continues to balloon, it’s interesting to consider a possible future day when we won’t even notice whether a writer in the English literature market is a native anglophone or not. After judging the Conrad-Nobakov Award, Ms. Burroway remarked, “It’s hard to believe that these authors are writing in English as a second language, for all of them have superior command of it.”

Bet you didn’t know that. Not that you needed to.

My Top Five (plus one) local radio stations

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By the way, I should add to my Daniel Schorr diatribe that I love NPR. If I could only listen to one radio station, that would be my choice. That doesn’t mean I have to be crazy about everything I hear on it…

Which reminds me that I was talking radio with a friend today about favorite radio stations. The radio spectrum is so broad that I hesitate to try to create a Top Five list, since there could be a station I haven’t ever heard that would be my favorite if I did hear it. But what I can to is provide a list of the six buttons pre-programmed on FM1 in my truck. I’d be interested to hear what y’all like as well — maybe I’ll do some reprogramming:

  1. S.C. ETV Radio, 88.1 — Or sometimes, 91.3, but the one out of Sumter has more news, which is mainly what I listen for. I like classical music, but NPR is just so well done. The material is better organized and presented than any almost print medium in this country, which is saying something for radio.
  2. WUSC, 90.5 — One of my kids was once a DJ at the station, and I keep it programmed for when I want to hear something really unique.
  3. Steve FM, 96.7 — Yeah, the station ID messages can be really grating — that tedious “we’re deliberately sounding unprofessional” tone — but the song selections are pretty good about 50 percent of the time.
  4. WXRY, the Independent Alternative, 99.3 — The best of the largely contemporary formats locally, near as I can make out.
  5. WWNQ, Flashback 94.3 — Oldies, pure and simple. (This station used to have a format that played Country classics, and for a C/W format was pretty listenable, but a year or so ago they went to mainstream oldies.)
  6. WTCB 106.7 — Occasionally, when there’s no music on the other commercial stations, I switch to this one — and will sometimes stay for a song or two, if they’re playing 80s stuff. (Not my era, but I turn to different stations for different things.)

By the way, those are not actually in order of preference — those are the assigned buttons. You’ll note that No. 5 is out of order. That’s because it replaced a station that replaced another station that DID fit between 99.3 and 106.7.

Of course, about half the time I’m listening to a CD instead — often something I’ve burned from one of my old vinyl albums.

And while blogging, I often listen to Pandora. Two current favorite “stations:” My Erik Satie and Solomon Burke stations. (I threw that in so that the Barrys out there could not sneer at my mundane radio tastes.)

Pickin’ ’n’ grinnin’ in the center of the city

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BillWells

Last night I attended the 8th annual meeting of the City Center Partnership in downtown Columbia. It was the best sort of meeting, as Matt Kennell et al. kept the actual meeting part — in the auditorium at the Columbia Museum of Art — very short, and then we all adjourned to the Gotham Bagel Cafe across the street.

There, I heard Bill Wells’ bluegrass band, imported from clear across the river. And the embarrassing thing is, after living in West Columbia for more than two decades, I think this was the first time I’d heard them. Which is a shame, because they’re good. The low-res video below from my Blackberry captures them doing “Salty Dog,” which somehow put me in mind of the Dillards on the Andy Griffith Show as I listened.

As for the purpose of the meeting, there’s a lot of new energy and optimism in the city center, what with the Nickelodeon having just moved there and Mast General Store on the way. So there was a true celebratory atmosphere.

That guy’s a governor? You’re kidding, right?

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SenatorJonCorzine

One thing you’ve got to hand to Mark Sanford — he  looks like a governor, even though he has generally not acted like one. This is a key to his electoral success.

I remember back before he was elected — I guess it was about this time in 2001 — he sent out Christmas cards with pictures of himself with his family. As soon as he received his, Sen. John Courson said to me (and you’ve got to imagine that booming bullfrog voice of his saying it), “Faaahhhn lookin’ family! Kennedyesque…” and said that on the basis of that picture, he expected Sanford to be our next governor.

Anyway, I’m reminded of that today, having just seen a picture of Jon Corzine for the first time (this was on the front of the WSJ). As I previously noted, unlike the national media, I don’t pay attention to state elections in other states because they have nothing to do with me. People elect their governors for their own reasons (sometimes things as superficial as how they look, although of course that’s not the only reason South Carolinians went for Sanford in 2002), reasons that I cannot infer meaningfully from afar, so I don’t try to do so.

Anyway, my reaction on seeing this guy for the first time as he was on his way out (having lost yesterday, for those of you who pay even less attention than I do), was this: “What? This guy is the governor of an actual state? You’re kidding. He looks like a college professor, and maybe not even an American college professor at that. He looks more like Leon Trotsky than a guy who could get elected in this country.” And what’s that he’s got in the back in this picture? Is that a ducktail?

I realize that standards of political pulchritude vary from state to state, that we would elect people in South Carolina that New Jerseyites (or whatever you call them) would never take a second look at, and vice versa. But if I had tried to imagine somebody who could get elected up there and not down here, I would have pictured a guy who would have looked at home hanging around in front of Satriani’s Pork Store with Tony Soprano. Yeah, I realize such stereotypes are the bane of New Jerseyians, who deserve better, but that I could have believed in. Whereas this Corzine guy … if Tony had shown up for his first therapy session and his shrink had looked like this instead of like Lorraine Bracco (and that’s the only role I could imagine a guy who looks like this filling on that show about north Jersey), he would have turned around and walked out.

No wonder this Trotsky-looking character lost. That Christie looks like a regular guy, a guy you might actually imagine being in the, uh, sanitation business.

Getting it wrong, and right, in ‘State of Play’

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Back on this post, we had a sidebar about the film “State of Play” — Kathryn mentioning that I really should see the original British series, and I will certainly put it in my Netflix queue. As it happens, though, I saw the American film over the weekend, and it was, mediocre.

I’m reminded of it again today because I went by to visit folks at The State, and ran into Sammy Fretwell, and told him I had thought  about him over the weekend. That’s because the one detail the filmmakers got right in Russell Crowe’s depiction of a reporter, aside from the fact that he worked on a ridiculously old PC, was his workspace. I would say “desk,” but this was the sort of workspace that has worked itself up into a fortress, with piles of papers, magazines, newspapers, files, publicity packets, all sorts of stuff in unsteady towers of material dating back 10 years and more, stacked on desk, credenza, nearby filing cabinets, and other items of furniture that can no longer be identified.

I saw that and thought, “Sammy!” (And I say this with all respect; Sammy’s a great newspaperman. He’s awesome. This just happens to be a common characteristic of great newspapermen.)

Beyond that, the screenplay was evidently NOT written by anyone who had ever worked at a newspaper. The characters just weren’t right. And they said ridiculous things that only non-journalists would ever say, such as “sell newspapers.” You know how people who want to criticize a paper for a story say the editors just ran it to “sell newspapers?” That’s always a dead giveaway of a clueless layman. I’ve never met a journalist who spoke or thought in terms of “selling newspapers.” Most journalists didn’t care if you stole it, as long as you read it. Selling was the concern of the business side folks (and a poor job they’ve done of it in recent years, huh?). Another real prize bit of dialogue, which you can hear on the above trailer: “The newspapers can slant this any which way they want to…” Who wrote this stuff?

The one really true bit was during the credits, when they show the Big Story that the movie was about going through the production process and onto the presses. They got that just right. I’m guessing that’s not a tribute to the knowledge of the writers. The producers probably just asked a newspaper to produce a page with this story on it, put it on the presses and run the presses. And THIS part got me. I haven’t really felt nostalgic about the lingering death of my industry, but this simple device of putting the camera on the actual physical processes sort of gave me a lump in the throat — the film coming out of the imagesetter, the plate being made, the plate being fitted onto the press… THAT was real.

But nothing else was. Not even the messy desk, as it turns out. When I mentioned it to Sammy, he said I was behind the times. He took me over to his little fortress in the corner, and it was NEAT. He had gotten permission to take three days off from covering the news and spent the time imposing order. It was freaky.

Sort of made me want to go back and make sure the imagesetters, platemakers and presses were still there…

What IS that thing Boeing wants to build?

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Stargate

Whoa. I had thought the plant we were trying to bring to South Carolina (a prospect which is looking better, given Boeing’s union troubles elsewhere) was for building airplanes.

But you know what this photo looks like to me? Yep, the Stargate, from the movie of that name starring Kurt Russell.

Now, that would certainly give South Carolina a leg up into high-tech manufacturing…

And yes, I realize it’s a cross-section of the fuselage of the 787. I’m just talking about what it looks like…

Sg1stargatefront

Best meeting scene ever televised

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Gene Garland, back during this discussion, mentioned the two wonderful BBC mini-series based on the first and third books in Le Carre’s Karla Trilogy.

Nothing better has ever been offered on the telly, in my view — with the possible exceptions of “Band of Brothers” and “The Sopranos.”

The amazing thing about them is that they are such good representations of books that are essentially about … meetings. Meetings and interviews. Sort of gives me hope that someone will see gripping drama in a story about an editorial page editor. (Guess I need to write the book first, though, huh?) All of the key action happens in meetings. By contrast, the middle book in the Trilogy — The Honourable Schoolboy — was all about action and exotic locales. Which is why the BBC didn’t do that one — too expensive. But it was also the most forgettable of the three. Smiley was in power in that one, whereas in the other two he was in exile, only the Circus couldn’t make do without him. (Perhaps you think, given my situation, I’m harboring fantasies of Oliver Lacon coming to my house one night and asking me to straighten out the newspaper, unofficially of course. Well, I’m not. But it’s an intriguing plot line…)

This could have fallen completely flat on the small screen, but it’s to the credit of all concerned that it positively glittered in the BBC version. And not just because of Alec Guinness as Smiley. The whole cast was fantastic.

For the best use of meeting dynamics ever on television, I invite you to watch the first two minutes and 8 seconds of the clip above, which in a beautifully understated manner, and only one very short line of dialogue, sketches the personae of the four major characters (other than Smiley). Entering the room on the clip are, respectively, the actors playing Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Percy Alleline and Bill Haydon. (As Control said, “There are three of them and Alleline,” the characters whose code names give the book its title.)

This is just so real. If you have, as I have, spent ridiculous amounts of time in meetings with a small group of people you knew almost as intimately as member of your own family, the little touches of how people establish their roles and characters in small ways will ring as true as anything you’ve ever seen. It feels, for me, exactly like the daily editorial board meeting, with each person wandering in in his own unique way and initiating wordless rituals that say so much.

Anyway, enjoy.

Valerie’s story on the Sheds makes the cut

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Remember when I mentioned running into Valerie Bauerlein (formerly of The State, currently of The Wall Street Journal) recently? She was having breakfast at a neighboring table with Tim Rogers, interviewing him for a story on longtime letter writer Clif Judy’s sadly successful campaign to close the Sheds to rehearsing bands.

I told her that sounded like a candidate for the page one feature read in her paper. She said that was what she and her editor hoped for. You know the story I mean — it’s generally at the center of the bottom of the front page. It’s almost always a great read, an excellent example of why the WSJ has long held the reputation of the best-written paper in the country (they told me that in J-school in the 70s, and it’s still true). According to Valerie, this story is called the “A-hed.”

Well, today Valerie’s story made the A-hed. (Although in this case, they ran it on the right-hand side rather than the middle.) So congrats to Valerie.

As for the story itself, here’s an excerpt:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It looks like any other block of garage-sized metal storage units. But Sumter Street Self-Storage has long been the heart of this city’s rock ‘n’ roll scene.

Located on an industrial strip at the edge of the University of South Carolina, “The Sheds” are legend to local rockers — college kids with guitars, gray-beards still nursing band fantasies and hard-core professional musicians who have been cranking up their amps inside the units most nights for two decades.

It was in one of the 139 bays of The Sheds that hometown favorites Hootie & the Blowfish wrote and practiced hits like “Hold My Hand” and “Only Wanna Be With You.” Those songs, included on the 1994 Grammy-winning album “Cracked Rear View,” sold 16 million copies.

But thanks to a nearly two-year campaign by a local activist named Clif Judy, the music at “the Sheds” is coming to an end…

To me, it’s sad about the Sheds; two of my sons have been in bands that rehearsed there.  First, complaints to police helped shut down the legendary punk club “2758;” now the Sheds. What are kids supposed to do?

And, for a less nuanced view, here’s Jon Stewart

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Earlier today, I set forth a morally ambiguous view of the Franken amendment. For the simpler, this-is-such-a-slam-dunk-it’s-funny view, I share with you the way the matter was presented by Jon Stewart.

You can’t say you don’t get all sorts of views here. And there’s no question, this whole gang-rape issue is funnier the way Jon Stewart tells it than the way I do, but… oops — is the way I just put that prejudicial? (Could it be I’m one of those fogeys who is offended by the idea that so many college-educated young people rely on this guy for their news?)

Whatever. Just go ahead and make up your own minds.

Who CARES whether the balloon thing was a “hoax?”

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You may have noticed that I did not write about the famous missing balloon boy when he was allegedly aloft — or when he was “missing,” or when he was “found.”

That’s because it never struck me as real news (and also because, since I don’t watch TV news and God is merciful, I missed most of it). It was not anything about which you or I needed to make a decision as a voter or a citizen. It did not give any of us “news you can use” — seriously, how many of the suckers who watched that “drama” unfold on the telly took away any useful, cautionary information from it? (“Hey, Martha, before we cut loose that helium-filled balloon in the backyard, let’s make sure none of those pesky neighborhood kids have crawled into it. Boy, am I glad I saw THIS!”)

Yes, weird occurrences are a legitimate (although lesser) form of news. And in a saner day, before 24/7 TV “news,” before “news” outlets maintained small air forces in such markets as Los Angeles, ready to go aloft and stay aloft in a tacky modern mockery of the Strategic Air Command’s mission in the Cold War, all in the mad pursuit of live, but meaningless, video (the O.J. Simpson “chase” being the definitive example of such “news” that told us exactly nothing that we needed to know), such a tale would have been reported — once the facts were in. You might read a news feature on a boy’s terrifying drift into the Wild Blue, if he turned out to have been on board. You might even read of how law enforcement was taken in by a crazy story, as you are now doing. But you would not have had breathless live, real-time coverage of what turned out to be nothing. Or perhaps I’m idealizing a better time that wasn’t really better. Perhaps. (“Why, back in my day we didn’t know when our kids drifted off in balloons, and we LIKED it!…”)

The 24/7 TV “news” culture and its twin, “reality” TV, created the Heenes. People like them could not exist in a world without those media forms. And that same culture, by the way, has infected the “serious news” of politics. Otherwise, the Joe Wilson “You lie!” story would have ended with his apology that night. But instead, his supposed “defiance” went viral, and he pulled in $2.7 million (so far), which made him a whole lot less sorry. And thus another media monster was created.

By all means, charge the Heenes with a crime. But remember that from the beginning, this was a bogus story, whether the Heenes were lying or not.

Look at those cavemen go…

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Ever since I watched the start of “Life on Mars,” as previously mentioned, I’ve had Bowie’s song of that name stuck in my head.

It’s not that the tune is so great, when you hear it in isolation. And I find the original Bowie video visually off-putting (I’d forgotten glam went that far, but it does help me recall why I wasn’t into it).

But the way it was used in the TV program — as the background for the pivotal moment when the protagonist is transported back to 1973 — is really effective. I complained that the series disappoints in some ways, and it does, but that was a really good bit.

By the way, that scene bridges this clip and this one on YouTube. Word in your shell-like, to again use a phrase I picked up from the show…

Polanski’s a perv, and they finally locked him up. What’s the issue?

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It’s come to my attention that some people are actually making like it’s a bad thing that the Swiss locked up Roman Polanski.

I can’t imagine why. A word in your shell-like: The guy’s a major perv. Here’s a source who seems to have her head on straight about it. But DON”T READ THIS if you don’t want some pretty horrific details:

Roman Polanski raped a child. Let’s just start right there, because that’s the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in “exile” (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never — poor baby — being able to return to the U.S.). Let’s keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she’d rather not see him prosecuted because she can’t stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let’s take a moment to recall that according to the victim’s grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, “No,” then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.

I don’t even get what she’s on about with that “how awesome his movies are” stuff. Not really. “Chinatown” had something going for it, but it had some pretty perv-y elements to it also, as I recall.

Here’s Calvin Trillin’s take on it, which is also dead-on (and thanks to KBFenner for passing on the links):

A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he’s been punished for this lapse–
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He’ll miss the movers and the shakers.
He’ll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He’s suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.

Why make him into some Darth Vader
For sodomizing one eighth grader?
This man is brilliant, that’s for sure–
Authentically, a film auteur.
He gets awards that are his due.
He knows important people, too–
Important people just like us.
And we know how to make a fuss.
Celebrities would just be fools
To play by little people’s rules.
So Roman’s banner we unfurl.
He only raped one little girl.

What more is there to say?

Take a Look at the Lawman, or, The Trouble with Time Travel

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Seems to me we need a break from our exhausting (to me, anyway) discussion of civility, one in which I find myself engaged deeply in discussion with some of the blog’s worst offenders (Lee, “Mike Toreno”) because I feel like I have to consider them thoroughly, give them every chance, before tossing them out, if that’s what I’m to do to keep order. Oh, the fundamental fecklessness of liberal democracy! Perhaps I should just conjure a virtual Gitmo for them, and to hell with due process! One of my friends, a liberal Democrat (in the big D sense) through and through, says I’m guilty of WASPish diffidence, and perhaps I am…

We need some escapism. Let’s talk time travel.

Yes, I know Stephen Hawking says there’s no such thing (his proof: that there are no time tourists from the future — that we know of, I would add), and I figure he’s probably right. That doesn’t keep me from being a sucker for it as a plot device — “Back to the Future,” the H.G. Wells original, variations on the H.G. Wells original (such as the enjoyable thriller/romance “Time After Time,” which starred Malcolm McDowell as H.G. himself), and on and on. Not that it’s always satisfying: “The Final Countdown,” aside from having one of the least relevant titles ever, is probably the most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. For two hours you build up to the 80s-era USS Nimitz getting ready to go up against the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then the battle is prevented by a plot evasion as cheesy as, “… and then he woke up.” All because the producers lacked the budget to stage the battle, I suppose. The earlier scenes, such as when the F-14s splash the two Zeroes and the confrontation between the Japanese pilot and the historian, are pretty decent though…

I’m always a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my favorite novels to reread when I want to relax my mind is Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. Why embarrassing? Well, when you explain the plot — “It imagines what would have happened if the Confederacy had had AK-47s” — you sound like an idiot. But it really is GOOD.

Let me hasten to add that I like the more reputable A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court much better, and have ever since my first reading as a kid. But the Turtledove book is still enjoyable.

In real life, we all engage in a bit of time travel to the best of our means. We all think back to moments in our past when we might have done something differently. This ranges from bitter recrimination (“What I should have told him was…”) to tantalizing wistfulness. I suspect most guys have experienced in their heads some version of Steppenwolf’s “All Girls Are Yours” fantasy.

You run into trouble with such imaginings when you try to make them believable. First, there’s the device — time machine? bump on the head? For that matter, if it’s a machine, how does it work? It’s generally best not to explain it in too much detail. Michael Crichton made that mistake in Timeline. His characters explain that what they have discovered is actually travel between universes in the multiverse, which somehow magically ACTS like time travel in that if you leave a note for yourself in one universe, you can read it 600 years later (or what SEEMS later) in the other. I could explain further, but it gets more ridiculous the more it tries to be serious. Doc Brown’s “flux capacitor” is much more believable, and more fun.

Then, what are the rules — is history mutable, or not? And if not, why not? And let’s not even get into the grandfather paradox. And if you go back to a point within your own life, can you see your younger self as a separate individual (in which case you might have a lot of explaining to do to yourself) or are you back inside that earlier version of yourself, only with what you now know in your mind, like the Steppenwolf back with all his past loves?:

At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in early Spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly…

Anyway, I’m thinking of all this this week because I rented the first two episodes of “Life on Mars” from Netflix. Premise: Cop in Manchester, England, in 2006 gets hit by a car, wakes up as a cop in 1973.

Promising. You’ll recognize it as the “Connecticut Yankee” device — physical trauma, followed by the time dislocation, which the protagonist can’t explain and at least at first doesn’t believe in, but has to come to terms with. In this case, the hero keeps hearing voices and other sounds that persuade him that he’s in a coma in 2006, but then he is beguiled by the richness of irrelevant detail in his 1973 existence. He keeps thinking, Why would I have imagined that?

I’ve enjoyed it so far, but ultimately it falls down on an important measure for time-travel fiction — the evocation of the visited era. The writers of the show seem unable to go beyond bell-bottoms and vintage cars. Their notion of the difference between being a cop in 2006 and 1973 is that back then the office was a lot grungier, and the cops liked to slap subjects around and disregard proper procedure. Oh, and it took longer to get stuff back from the lab.

Which, I’m sorry, is pretty inadequate… I was in college in 1973, and people were just as insistent upon rules and standards then as now (despite their really, REALLY bad taste). And ultimately, watching this show, I don’t really FEEL like I’m back in that era. And I realized why when I watched a bit of the “making of” video — the writers and others who made this flick were too young to remember that date, which still seems pretty recent to me. The protagonist would have been 4 years old in 73, and the writers and producers seem to be his contemporaries.

Not only that, but they get their idea of what the 70s were like from watching cop shows of the period. In other words, since Starsky and Hutch bent the rules, that’s what real-life policing was like. Sheesh.

The soundtrack’s pretty good, though. The sequence in which the cop is hit by the car and goes back happens to the strains of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (hence the title):

Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

… first on an iPod, then on an 8-track.

I’m going to watch the next disc; I’ve got it ordered. To see if he wakes up or whatever. But I’ve seen time travel done better…

What’s with this ubiquitous pseudo-Beatlemania?

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Beatles

Once again, I am puzzled by Beatlemania.

The first time, I was living in Guayaquil, Ecuador in early 1964. Communicating with the States — or Britain, for that matter — was a cumbersome affair, hardly speedier than in the Napoleonic era that I enjoy reading about in those books I’m always on about (just finished reading The Fortune of War for the fourth time). The only television we had was one local station that was only on the air from about 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night, and ran mostly American cartoons and TV shows dubbed into Spanish. Imagine being an Ecuadorean and trying to grok “The Beverly Hillbillies” with Granny and Jethro speaking Spanish out of sync with their lips, and you will begin to see the roots of whatever appreciation for the absurd that I today possess. For our part, we didn’t bother — we left our TV set gathering dust down in the bodega with the shelves of canned goods ordered from the Navy Exchange in Panama, for the entire two-and-a-half years we were there.

But we did occasionally see The Miami Herald, although generally a couple of weeks late. And it was on the front page of one of these old papers that I saw the shouting banner headline, “Beatles Hit Miami,” or something like that. I thought it referred to an insect infestation of Biblical proportions, given the huge play.

Eventually, I figured it out, and was entranced. My Beatles fanhood in those early days was probably intensified by the difficulty of keeping up with the Fab Four at a distance. I occasionally found a 45 for sale in a local tienda (I think my first was “Love Me Do”), and I still treasure the first album I ever owned, an Odeon release titled, “La Banda Original de la Pelicula ‘A Hard Days Night.”

Anyway, to bring you to the present day — I fear that I am fated to remain confused by the most recent manifestation of Beatlemania. Or perhaps I should say “alienated” rather than “confused,” because I sort of understand it, but am put off by it. This one is different.

This one doesn’t arise spontaneously, up from below. It’s not a cry of love from the fans. It seems a calculated effort to impose enthusiasm upon a new generation, imposed from above by the masters of the marketing universe.

Note the display I photographed moments ago in the Barnes & Noble from which I am blogging. Not that I’m criticizing Barnes & Noble; I love Barnes & Noble as Winston loved Big Brother. Drinking wonderful Starbucks coffee, listening to “Instant Karma” via Pandora, sitting near a foreign chap wearing a T-shirt that proclaims “FREEDOM AND EQUALITY FOR PALESTINE” who looked furtively about him as he sat, seemingly expecting someone to challenge or argue with him or something, and in another direction a cute schoolgirl bent low doing her homework with an ipod in her ears, who kindly watched my laptop while I ran to the head… WHOA! The caffeine seems to have taken hold… where was I?

Oh, yes… nothing against Barnes & Noble. And certainly nothing against Starbucks; my slavish affection for Starbucks is well-documented. But both are very much apart of this vast commercial conspiracy to market the Beatles like mad, all of a sudden.

Is it really all prompted by the release of a video game? That’s the way it appears. I know it’s not a plot by Michael Jackson, who sneakily snapped up the rights to the Beatles’ songs years ago, because I seem to have heard that he is no longer among the living. It got quite a bit of play, as I recall.

So what’s it all about, Alfie? And how should a true Beatles fan react?

(un)Critical Mass(es)

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Let’s have a little discussion about human nature.

First, take a look at this story from yesterday’s WSJ, which reveals the rating inflation that plagues (or blesses, depending onyour point of view) the Web:

The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.

One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five…

Did that surprise you? It did me, a bit. But then I got to thinking about the one place where I’ve done a lot of rating — Netflix, where over the years (in a vain attempt to teach the site to predict my preferences) I’ve rated more than 2,000 movies. And since I love movies, and do a certain amount of selection before watching them, I knew I had given really high ratings more often than really low ones — specifically, I had awarded 5 stars (to such films as “Casablanca,” “The Godfather” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”) 156 times, and 1 star (examples: “Dances With Wolves,” the made-in-Columbia “Death Sentence” and “Dune”) only 24 times.

Still, if you count up all the movies I’ve rated between 1 and 5, you come up with an average rating of only 3.4. And if you factor in the 815 flicks I’ve rated as “Not Interested,” awarding them a 0 score, it drops to 2.0. But that’s misleading, because some of those are good flicks that some time or other I gave that rating just as a way of saying I wasn’t interested in seeing them at that time. But if you count just a fourth of those, it lowers my average to 2.9.

Which is about where you’d expect me to be. I’m a born critic — flaws leap out at me, and I remember them. And my detractors (such as those who think I’m too tough on Mark Sanford) see me as all criticism, as one who never gives my subjects their due. Actually, though, some of my detractors (such as those who were furious that I continued to admire John McCain throughout the 2008 campaign) attack me for the opposite trait — the fact that I can the good outweighing the bad in some people and some things. (You ladies who love Jane Austen may think of me as a health mix of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, only without their wealth.)

Back to human nature: Why would folks be so overwhelmingly positive on the Web (except, of course, here on this blog)? The story in the Journal speculated as follows:

Culture may play a role in the positivism: Ratings in the U.K. average an even higher 4.4, reports Bazaarvoice. But the largest contributor may be human nature. Marketing research firm Keller Fay Group surveys 100 consumers each week to ask them about what products they mentioned to friends in conversation. “There is an urban myth that people are far more likely to express negatives than positives,” says Ed Keller, the company’s chief executive. But on average, he finds that 65% of the word-of-mouth reviews are positive and only 8% are negative.

“It’s like gambling. Most people remember the times they win and don’t realize that in aggregate they’ve lost money,” says Andy Chen, the chief executive of Power Reviews Inc., a reviews software maker that runs Buzzillions…

Aha! I think I understand… at least, I now understand a possible reason why people gamble.

I don’t know about you, but I have not gambled since I was in college. I went through a period when I shot pool (nine ball being my game) and played a few hands of poker. But the last time I played pool for money and the last time I gambled with cards are etched unforgettably on my mind because of the spectacular ways in which I lost. My opponent at the pool table had had a shocking run in which he had pocketed the nine ball on the break several times in a row. After hours in which no one had had a hand nearly as good, I risked all (even writing a check to another player to get cash to stay in the game) on a full house — only to lose to a full house that was one card better (queens as opposed to jacks).

I’ve never understood, since then, why people would gamble. But this tendency to remember the anomalous wins more clearly than the losses would explain it.

But is that truly human nature?

Frankly, I find myself doubting the very premise of the story. As a newspaperman of 35 years experience, I am so accustomed to hearing from the people who are AGAINST something, or who didn’t like something in the paper, that such universal satisfaction seems unlikely to me. Take letters to the editor. One of my favorite examples were the letters we got for a week or so after U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001: They were overwhelmingly against U.S. military action. I knew they were not representative of South Carolina, not by a long shot, but they were the people who were taking the trouble to write. And that seems to me to be the norm.

Yet this story is saying otherwise. What do you think is true, and why do you think it’s the case?

Like Jane Austen writing about television

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Today, I’m listening to Jethro Tull on Pandora, the virtual radio station site. I’m often disappointed by Pandora because it seems their collections don’t go very deep. And sometimes they don’t even touch the surface in the spot where I want them to. For instance, I created a 10cc channel that keeps throwing Queen songs at me on the grounds that they are “like” 10cc. On my Donovan and Elvis Costello stations, they keep playing Beatles. Hey, I love the Beatles, but when I want to listen to them I’ll tell you.

Then there was the time that I had a hankering to hear Roger Miller’s “Dang Me,” so I created a station by that name. And it played me a couple of Roger Miller songs that I didn’t want to hear, and then other songs “like” Roger Miller. But so far, no “Dang Me.”

I strongly suspect Pandora to be a subsidiary of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, famous for its drinks machine that produces a substance that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

But I’m enjoying the Tull station a bit more. Not that I’m getting pure Tull, of course, but the stuff that Pandora judges to be “like” Tull is mostly enjoyable. Led Zeppelin’s “Rain Song.” Some live Who. And, I’m happy to say, quite a bit of Tull.

Including recent Tull, which is a bit of a shock, because I didn’t know such an animal existed.

For instance, did you know there was a Jethro Tull song titled “Dot Com?” Seriously; I’m not making it up. This is a surprise coming from a band that I associate with “Aqualung.” And no, not the one that the kids listen to. To me, Tull is quintessential 70s. I hadn’t even thought about them in years. It was only when a real radio station (94.3) played “Thick as a Brick” this past week that I was reminded of their existence, and created the station just to, shall we say, do a little living in the past.

The Jethro Tull of my memory lived in a universe that had not thought of, and could not even have imagined, anything called a “dot-com.” It was, I don’t know, like finding a previously unknown Jane Austen novel that’s about television. You know, like:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sitcom in possession of a laugh track must be in want of a joke.

I’m picturing Mr. Darcy earning his “ten thousand a year” hosting “So You Think You Can Dance,” on which he repeatedly refuses to dance with attractive young women on the grounds that they are “tolerable,” but not “handsome enough to tempt me.”

Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was weird.