Manhattan during the Ford administration:
I was in 1st Grade. Where were you?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I started 5th grade that year. My reading teacher got me to read All the President’s Men. My life changed.
At the aptly named UC Berzerkley as a freshman/sophomore.
College station KALX was legendary (as for as sorta-underground FM stations could be) as THE place for hearing Punk music you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. And the Mabuhay Gardens in SF was the Club to hear it.
And trust me memories don’t get more ‘Hazy’ than they were for college undergrads in Berkeley/SF in 1975.
Though I don’t remember hearing the Talking Heads much before the eponymous Talking Heads 1977. Which I bought.
http://www.progarchives.com/progressive_rock_discography_covers/5826/cover_12171214102010.jpg
I met my wife in the Student Union of UCBerkely around Thanksgiving ’74-’75 academic year. She was an instructor in Mathematics, I was working in the foundry mills down by the bay.
I’d been out of the Marines for about a year and a half.
I was… uh, negative 3, I guess.
That’s an amazing video. Where on earth did you find it?
I notice they changed the second verse completely before recording the studio version.
As for me, I was 14 and in my last year of high school when this was filmed. Within the year my family would move to two different new states, and I’d graduate early and leave home for good at 15. It was an…interesting time in my life. And I was working from age 15 at radio stations – my first job was at an “underground” rock FM in Chicago – so I was right there when punk hit. And of course it wasn’t too many more years before I started fronting my own bands. Clips like this have a ton of associations – all positive – for me.
Neureut Kaserne, Karlsruhe Germany, US Army
Getting into my first marriage in San Francisco. On Clement Street.
The acoustic guitar on that Talking Heads performance really opened up the sound. Interesting to see them when they were a trio.
I had moved back in with my mom that summer. By the time of this CBGB show, I was in my last days of consistent school attendance. I had never been a truant, but I started cutting some classes in January 1976, so something was going on with me in December ’75. I slowly drifted away from high school after that, never to return. For much of the bicentennial year, I made a habit of going to the City library instead of school. Real juvenile delinquent.
I was still listening to a pile of AM Top 40 radio; the U.S. pop music scene remained tied to that format for a few more years. Dr. Don Rose in the mornings on KFRC 610 AM; that was my meat. This gives you an idea of the horrible, corny taste I shared with much of the hip Bay Area:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIxI8Khh9Vg
The #40 song during Christmas week ’75 was “Wake Up Everybody” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes; the bottom hit was the most uplifting on the list. I’ve grown to have an enormous affection for the #10 hit, though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2SDf42guB4
It’s extremely groovy, builds a real emotional momentum, and has that strange, extraordinarily beautiful bridge. I thought they were the squarest squares at the time, but I was wrong.
Sophomore physics nerd at Queen’s University. Didn’t catch on to talking heads for a couple more years. Saw them in concert in NY in the early 80’s though.
Working 16-hour days organizing a program of demonstration facilitated town meetings for an NGO working with the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission under its “Horizon” program. The program was so effective and widespread that politicians picked up the name “town hall meeting” for their constituent meetings and ignored the methods of issue analysis and proposal formation. They liked the branding. By 1978, there has been one event in every county in the US.
Guess that’s why I never heard of Talking Heads until later.
http://youtu.be/PqQzjit7b1w
Well done, Barack Obama, John Kerry and Maya Angelou.
I was playing the great musics of America…jazz and latin musics primarily, with people like Tito Puente, Thad Jones and Charles Mingus…all over NYC while these clomp-clomp-clomping amateurs were playing their lame little chords and kindergarten rhythms for y’all media-hypnotized children.
Why do you ask?
AG
You’re very dependable, AG.
At least with advocates like AG, jazz won’t need enemies. 😉
“Jazz” has no real “enemies,”, Durito…besides of course the bottom-liners who have found it much more profitable to pass fast-food music off as nourishment, just as is the case everywhere else in this culture. Bottom liners that have created almost an entire culture of bottom feeders. Only those who have been so musically malnourished that they consider the early McDonald’s Big Mac w/fries of the Talking Heads for music even think that they “don’t like jazz.” They have never even heard the music. Not really. Too busily distracted by the latest poofter craze to be able to hear a whole phrase of real music, let alone appreciate the whole oeuvre of someone like Gil Evans or Duke Ellington.
Just as is the case with great literature, consuming Archie comics simply does not prepare you to read William Faulkner.
So it goes.
Poof on.
AG
Always the diplomat, I see. Narcissus might even be taken aback.
So lame, DD.
I am a music worker…a good one, a real pro…and I consider myself lucky to have been privileged to work and perform with some of the greatest, most original American musicians of the 20th/21st centuries. Nothing more. My own talent…as is the case with everyone w/any “talents” at all…is not my own achievement. It’s simply genetic, and to tell you the truth it is as much about a genetic predilection for hard work as it is about so-called musical “talent.”
I am not narcissistic about it…it’s just what I do best. Some other people do it better. So what? I do keep on working at it.
I ran across a quotation from the great Sufi teacher and musician Hazrat Inayat Kahn recently. I’d like to share it with you.
This “evil”of which I speak…this rotting of the culture…appears to me to be still be avoidable. It’s not too late, although time’s running out fast, and as long as I have breath in me I am not helpless. So I do keep on working at that as well.
You don’t like it?
Simply skip my posts.
You wanna contend? When I have the time…ok. Maybe that’s one way to get the message across.
I do keep on trying. That’s a predilection for hard work as well. It’s genetic. Bet on it.
Later…
AG
No one said a thing about your musical abilities or how you view your musical abilities, whatever those may be. Since we do share an interest in some jazz artists, it is conceivable that I have unwittingly heard you play or have some CD laying about. No way of knowing, nor do I really care to know.
It is your holier-than-thou know-it-all approach to practically any interaction with others here to which I refer. One would get the impression from your posts that you truly view practically everyone here as beneath you. If you can’t see what a turn-off that is, I really am at a loss for what to say.
Yes, there are some real problems facing us. Culturally, we’re dealing with the aftermath of a few decades of “every man for himself” style individualism, which has not boded well for the sorts of collective actions needed to shake up the system. There are some tentative signs that a change is in the air, but cultural shifts do not occur overnight. The technological changes that have occurred in our lifetimes are clearly a double-edged sword: they make a more invasive surveillance state possible while at the same time opening up spaces for communication that did not before exist. Income equality that rivals the Gilded Age, catastrophic climate changes on the horizon, and so on are desperately in need of being addressed by leftists of all stripes much more vigorously than is currently the case.
And so on.
However, I get the feeling that you and I are destined to at best talk past each other. I sincerely doubt either one of us has much to offer that the other would be interested in, and I sincerely doubt that will change in this lifetime. But we both know that already. To state the obvious is perhaps a mistake.
A fellow named Ornette Coleman once had a great quote about the usefulness of making mistakes. Although I forget it exactly, I recall it just well enough to think he was on to something.
There’s also a Bokononist quote about it never being a mistake to say goodbye. Bokonon was on to something as well.
I didn’t know you were a musician.
This explains much.
If only the American culture was not so under the sway of corporations it would be “dependable” in exactly the same way as am I, centerfielddj. And this nation would not be wallowing in the pit of ineptitude into which it has fallen over the past 50+ years.
But…NOOOOoooo. We are there now, and we are going to either stay there or descend even further into mass murder and chaos until the whole thing breaks.
You snark, but we inna dark. So it goes. WTFU.
AG
Keep on pouring out the hate, AG.
No one gets to enjoy things which don’t pass your cultural test. Yes, we GET IT. Stop enjoying Talking Heads right now, you heard him!!!
Please, AG, do tell us the last moments of popular culture and governmental competence which met your standards. You might want to retreat from that 50+ year standard, though. 50 years ago, the military-industrial complex was so firmly established in our governance that our ex-military President chose to focus on it in his farewell speech. About 60 years ago, Eisenhower gave his Iron Cross address.
In popular music, 50 years ago the year’s #1 song was “Sugar Shack” by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs. 60 years ago, Frankie Laine sang the #1, #2, and #7 top hit songs. But the Bird sure could blow, and AG made culturally superior art with him and his colleagues. So, things are worse now and getting worser every day, and until the American people become sophisticated enough to elect Rand Paul as our next President, things don’t get better, sez AG. Hey, Arthur, what should the #1 song be in 2013? We need GUIDANCE!
Elsewhere, a half-century ago we were years into the post-Brown v. Board fight to enforce Federal judicial rulings which required the desegregation of public education and other services, and we had many violent years to go. Civil rights activists and minorities were being murdered in the South. The franchise, housing and work were completely unavailable to minorities in many areas of the country. It was past the current discrimination; they suffered absolute denial of rights.
Forget about rights for homosexuals. I was born weeks after JFK was assassinated, and only deep into my adolescence was our popular culture willing to acknowledge the true sexual orientation of Liberace and Paul Lynde. And there were the homophobic murders, beatings, arrests, and all the other pre- and post-Stonewall horrors, oppressions and vicious denials of self.
And you want to talk mass murder? Good Lord, 50 years ago the United States was in the middle of conducting a lengthy series of far, far, far more deadly wars than we are now. We were still in the middle of retreating from colonial occupations of many nations. Almost exactly 60 years ago, what were we doing in Iraq and South America?
Yeah. You just hold your position out there in
centrist…err, ahhhh… center field, bro’. You got a lot of company, that’s for sureI have been fighting the culture wars of which I speak for all of those 50 years, and what I am saying is what I have witnessed firsthand. Things are neither better nor worse here, just different. Now that everybody is supposedly equal all rights are being progressively denied and the so-called “integration” of racial minorities into the culture has in many respects been a total disaster for those communities. The cracks in the cultural wall through which real artists managed to change the culture…and don’t forget, Bird, Diz and the rest of the bebop revolutionaries were in the vanguard of real cultural change throughout the late ’40s and early ’50s…have been closed up almost totally by their corporate overseers in the name of safety and sure profits, the result being that the culture is now a stagnating pool of leftover hiphop and grunge plus the high glitz of Gaga and the rest. No real content; no real emotion; no real life. Just imitation life. No funk!
We are already paying for this error, and it’s going to get worse.
Bet on it.
But y’all will be safe out there in center field, won’tcha. Just clomp-clomp-clomping around in pursuit of virtual fly balls.
Fake City.
The newest video game!!!
So it goes.
In 1963 the total federal prison population of the U.S. was 23,128. Today it is over 200,000
The total prison population (state + federal) in 1963 was 217,283. Now? 2.4 million. One out of every 100 American adults is behind bars.
I get yer “absolute denial of rights,” right here!!!
Howzzat grab ya, bunky?
So-called “liberal” NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio just selected the inventor of stop and frisk, Bill Bratton, to be his new Police Commissioner. De Blasio, who ran his fucking campaign on his multiracial son’s afro and fear of being racially profiled. Ain’t nobody profiling Mayor de Blasio’s son now, betcha. ‘Specially when he’s riding in a city limo surrounded by cops.
It’s rotted out, centerfield. Take it or leave it. Faux everything, including faux “liberals.”
Watch.
50 years ago there was at least room for the truth.
No more.
Too risky.
Bet on it.
How did little Chelsea/Bradley Manning’s “sexual equality” serve him? Her. Whatever.
Bet on it.
We’ve come a long, long way.
Sideways, like a snake.
Bet on that as well.
AG
P.S. Ain’t about “hate,” either. It’s about love and anger.
Different, if you have the capacity to see and hear.
If you don’t?
Them virtual fly balls don’t give a shit. Why should you?
I see the modern problems you document in your posts, AG. I see them and many more. A preoccupation of mine is the undermining of the working class. I was out on the line with the striking fast food workers this week. I’d like to think you were out there as well.
Your PermaGov pretense has many areas of strong correlation with the facts. Yet, progress has been made in many areas. Your unwillingness to acknowledge this, and your decision to pretend that there are no differences between the modern Republican and Democratic Parties, reveal a willful blindness that undermines your credibility.
All number of women’s issues. Voting rights. Climate change and collective bargaining rights for workers. Access to quality health care and healthy, safe food. Constant major warfare meant to maintain a belligerent hegemony over the world. A scorched-earth use of parliamentary procedures and aggressive use of a polemicized judiciary to attack basic rights and democracy itself. On these and many other issues, today’s GOP elected leaders and their base voters have become radicalized. You fail to consider many of these issues in your writing.
You constantly document the Obama Adminstration’s use of drones while taking no note at all when, in the course of the last week, Republican Congressmen said we should use nuclear weapons on Iraq, and minimum wage, financial regulation and health reform laws should be repealed. Perhaps those statements are not notable this week, but if that is true, it is only because similarly nihilistic statements were made my major and minor Republicans last week, last month, last year and last decade.
What wafts off your posts is this: you are the sole holder of integrity. You grudgingly dispense the status of integrity to few others, mainly those who express their political views with a similar despairing misanthropy. You say you want change in our governance and culture, but you need the support of others to make change happen, and your rhetoric repels when it needs to attract.
My “rhetoric” aims to awaken. Sometimes a good smack is a useful awakening tool. Been there, had that. A number of times.
I take the path of blame gladly, and I repeat Hazrat Inayat Khan’s message and some of my own thoughts from an above comment:
I have most certainly stopped talking “nicely” to people who do not get the gist of what I am saying. I tried that for years, and it was about as effective as warning to a flock of sheep about those Judas goats they all like so much.
Other choices besides being nice?
Silence…which contradicts that “But the evil that is avoidable he roots out without sparing one single moment or effort” lick.
Or…in your face.
Plus of course personally living every possible hour of every possible day free from the culture that is destroying us.
Your misunderstandings…pure MSNBC/liberal gobbledygook…of what really needs to be done are endless.
You write:
It’s not “fast food workers’ pay” the is problem, it is fast food itself!!! It is poisoning the American people on every level. Solve the poisoned food problem in the U.S. and there would be thousands of jobs opening up. Skilled jobs, not being some low-wage caretaker at a progressive poisoning table. No for-profit media that depend on Big Corps for their advertising will really attack that problem or they would be off the air before their artificially sweetened chemical dessert showed up.
There are no “women’s” issues. Just human issues. Help men or women and you help all. Separate the sexes into opposing interest groups…including LGBT “issues”…and you are well on the way to control of the individual groups. Control wins elections. Not “doing good.” Control. Control each artificially separated “group” and then you control the dialogue. You control the dialogue as far as possible away from the real problem, which is rapacious corporate greed and power.
If you are not allowed to fairly, thoroughly and independently view the candidates…and you are not, bet on it, especially not in nationally important elections…then you have no “voting rights,’ you only have a multiple choice test/fast food menu order.
Ye gods, man!!! Do you really think that Obamacare allows “access to quality health care?” Bullshit!!! It has done nothing whatsoever to effectively break the Big Pharma/Big Insurance/Big Med stranglehold on the healthcare system of the U.S. It’s just more smoke and mirrors, hiding behind which are many of the largest contributors to the both the DemRat and RatPub parties. Bet on that as well. Hiding back there behind the curtain, raking in yet more money for even worse healthcare.
What? You missed our “Peace President’s” body counts since 2008? Please!!! He just makes better excuses and tries to keep things more secret.
Both parties run this game for all they are worth whenever they have an edge. This latest filibuster stunt? Just the Dem version. Meant to win. Or perhaps better, meant to create the appearance of winning.
The phrase “basic rights and democracy itself” is open to so many varying opinions that it’s a Pandora’s box of potential bullshit. Do I have the “basic right” to arm myself in self-defense? No? Who says so? Is it “democracy” if it is rigged and censored by the corporate-owned media before it even gets a chance to begin to play itself out? I think not, myself.
I could go on, but why? Go tune in your own version of “the right media” and zone on out into cliché land w/the rest of the sheeple.
I will add this, though.
“Despairing misanthropy?” “A ‘few’ others?” I am immune to either despair or discouragement…witness my hundreds (thousands, even) of posts and comments on various leftiness blogs over the past 10 years. I am far from being a “misanthrope”…in point of fact I have a real belief in the continuing evolution of the human race…and there are far more people out there than just a few who see things similarly to the way that I se them. They…we…simply don’t get much media coverage so you think that there aren’t many of us. Get your nut out of the media and into the non-virtual world and you would learn much. Just because I don’t much like your act or the act of many other leftiness sheeple that makes me a “misanthrope?” Hell no. I just don’t like you very much.
I trust the feeling is mutual.
Have a nice day.
It’s pointless to increase the bargaining leverage of low-wage service workers, says AG. Instead, the entire edifice of a major portion of the economy needs to be town down immediately.
How will we achieve the elimination of the American fast food industry? He doesn’t say. Will he acknowledge that one of the things I chose to mention in my brief list of particulars was “Access to health care and healthy, safe food?” No. Is he as extreme as any Tea Partier in claiming that the ACA is helping no one and is causing “worse healthcare?” Yes.
I could go on, but we’ve made our cases. Glad to let it rest here.
Giving the FDA some real power would be a good start. So would be using the bully pulpit to truly oppose processed food intake of all kinds. But of course that will not happen as long as the corporate edifice that supports both parties stands to lose serious money on the deal. It’s the same thing with the financial industry. Giving the SEC some truly sharp teeth, not hiring slime like Jamie Dimon and Timothy Geithner plus standing up at that same bully pulpit and publicly denouncing the entire corporate banking industry would be revolutionary. But it won’t happen. Instead we continue on our downward spiral and you continue supporting the forces that are driving it or at best not making any real efforts to reverse it. And then you get your panties all in a twist when someone points this out. You have made no case except “Continue as we are.” That case stinks like there is something dead in it. And there may very well be. Us.
AG
The Republicans are just about running on a platform of ELIMINATING the FDA and the SEC. Their entire Senate caucus filibustered the President’s choice to head the newly created CPFB because they wanted to prevent the agency from functioning. Congressional Republicans just shut down the government and expressed happiness that food and environmental inspectors were prevented from protecting the public. Yet you persist in your fantasy that Obama’s not just as bad, but is EVIL, because all your policy preferences weren’t implemented yesterday.
No, i persist in my observation…not a fantasy in the least if you take even a cursory glance at the interests that finance big-time politicians…that the Dems are the good cop and the Rats the bad cop, both in the employ of the same masters. Would I rather deal with the good cop if given a choice? Sure. Does it make any difference in the long run? Apparently not. We are prisoners either way. An economic imperialism-based economy and a system totally run for the benefit of the enormously wealthy will in the end fail of its own contradictions, and all we are doing now is playing out the string. Whether the Rats eliminate watchdog agencies like the SEC and FDA or the Dems simply prop them up as totally ineffective, two dimensional images for the benefit of the inchoate, media-hypnotized public, the end result is that massive business interests are free to do whatever it is that they want.
Read this for more. (From 2010…the situation has not gotten any better under Obama. Bet on it.)
Classic benign neglect.
That’s how it works, bubba. Wake the fuck up.
Bush or Obama, Christie or Clinton.
Bet on it.
What remains the same?
Bet on that as well.
AG
AG, I question your observational skills.
For example: it requires Congressional approval to increase staffing levels and pay for regulatory agencies like the SEC. The POTUS appoints the heads of the Executive agencies, but the President does not control their funding.
The first Congress under Obama created a large regulatory bureau with broad enough powers that the Congressional Republicans completely freaked out and tried to prevent the CPFB from doing its work AT ALL. Oh, and the evil Obama signed the Bill creating the bureau into Law and nominated a competent, appropriate leader to run the CPFB.
I can share your unhappiness with many of Obama’s actions and rhetorical positions without accepting your fantasy that he is evil.