* A Dream Deferred: Aunt Bea!

On my GREAT INDIAN pages, I have some incredible Andy of Mayberry dialogue demonstrating the Anglo ideology regarding the Native American, circa 1960. Yep, the discourse presents the Indians as living a healthier, closer-to-the-earth lifestyle, but at the same time—the Indians are "devils." Curiously and/or symptomatically, this last statement (specifically: the "Shawnee—they're devils") has been expunged from the most recent TV version of this sitcom episode—that is, the one I just saw tonight. But I'd already transcribed the "devil" line from the original version on VHS, and so I wonder—uh—why are they erasing such "history"?

But that's the obvious socio-political shtuff. This time I noticed something maybe more precious. It's when Andy comes in and sees Aunt Bea, who's having a great time hammering on the piano & singing, apparently hammered from alcohol for the first time in eons, and Andy says, with a curious look: "You haven't played that piano in years." OH!—now there's an eternal note of sadness for yu'. As a musician who's progressed from various you can't's, I know how hard it is to make the psychic evolutions, and still love to play. "But Aunt Bea! What social/familial forces made it an either/or for yu, Auntie? Why'd yu' have to give up your music?!"

* RADIO RANT: Jammin' w/ Junior to Judas Priest

ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd is quickly climbing the marble steps of my pantheon of most obnoxious radio personalities because of his dogmatic tone, his blithe "I'm right/you're wrong" certitude. When he reported this morning that the Jets had changed to Mozart as their training-camp music of choice and Cowherd lauded the move, an emailer objected that such a preference might connote a certain racial & cultural bias. Cowherd said simply (I paraphrase): "Nope. I'm right, and you're wrong: more smart people listen to Mozart [than to, say, hiphop & metal]. It's just a fact." Well, if you define "smart" people as those with a college degree and all that, no doubt a greater proportion of them listen to classical music. But that's because they've been conditioned by their socio-economic milieu to think that highbrow music is better. There is no cause/effect here: they didn't become 'smarter" (and ergo more future-college-worthy) because Mumsy played Mendelssohn in Sonny's nursery. The real cause&effect involves the monied class's traditional music of preference, a preference that has of course been imparted to their offspring. The actual scientific study, if I recall, simply found that exposure to the elaborate formalism of music from the Baroque and Classical periods of European concert music aided in the development of the brain in early childhood—and this makes perfect sense. But it is hardly a cultural-valuing endorsement of good old Eurocentric art: I'd guess that there are many types of "world" music that would fit the bill just as well here. Did they have their test subjects listen to the complex polyrhythms of African tribal drum groups? To the complex counterpoint of original Dixieland? (To the lyrics of Ozzie Osbourne?—just kiddin'. That the cause of MY stunted development.) I just hope the study was well controlled: obviously, if they just picked parents who "naturally" played Classical music to their kids, versus those who jammed out with junior to Judas Priest, there are a lot of other causal issues involved—again, largely socio-economic.

*Hell=The Root of the—Canal

I got a root canal this morning. No pain, no prob., in a physical sense, but the true hell of the thing was mental. I assume that the dental industry has done lots of consumer studies to get to this point, but the point sucks: I was forced to listen to "piped-in" 60's rock thru the whole thing. (No, it wasn't even a real radio station: this was "elevator" music, on a long loop, I'm sure, for the dentally challenged.) I remember some episode from a 1970's horror series à la the Twilight Zone (Night Shadows?) in which some hippie-loadie dies in a car crash and gets sent to Hell—to a place he thinks is the waiting room thereto, with several elderly people listening to Lawrence-Welk-type music. He waits & waits . . . and finally realizes that he's waiting for nothing, no form to sign, no confrontation w/ Mr. D. This is his eternal (waiting-room-of-a) HELL. Aside from the doo-wop-rock crap, there were a few tunes by the Stones & Beatles, etc., that I actually liked; or used to like: they were totally out of their rightful, their righteous, context. I was being drilled into; I was not in the mood for either musical pablum OR the Beatles singing about "Revolution." I wanted either silence, or—hell—give me Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King," over and over, and over and over. At least let the music be a constant fit metaphor for my current psychic condition. Don't jack me around with "pretend" bourgeois "ain't life great" ditties when surgery into the jawbone is involved. Geez, I just want the à propos!

* "Who the Hell Is Roger Miller?"

I spent much of last night "backtracking" my only real responder to these blogs, feeling fairly blown away by her own clever and serendipitous blog entries (link added, on the right), and by those of her other "blog friends." She" is the best noun/pronoun that I can employ here, since it seems that everyone else in their right mind blogs anonymously. Obviously, I'm just a stupid old f#$k in this regard, to the potential detriment of my daughter in a Denver-suburb high school, and my own tenure at a Division I midwestern institution of higher education. But at last, even if I dubbed myself "Freakmeister X," I'd still feel incomplete not linking to my home page; and so . . . .

But what struck me last night was "mahnu.uterna"'s profile; under music, she listed "Roger Miller"! She's so much more hip/contemporary than I am in so many regards that I could scarcely believe that this is the Roger Miller whom I revered in the 1960's—singer/songwriter of "Dang Me," "Chug-a-Lug," and, my favorite, "Do-Wacka-Do." At the time, my other musical heroes were Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Waylon Jennings; but here was a man who did mutlisyllabic rhymes, who wrote songs about London ("England Swings"), who played an eccentric acoustic blues, and who, in sum, cared damned little about the musical norms of either Nashville or the two "pop" coasts. It's hard to describe, in fact, in today's musical milieu, how different he was allowed to be: nobody from the 1980's on has been so popular and yet so à rebours (against the grain).

* RADIO RANT: "The man that hath no music"

Michael Savage was harping on the 60's hippies movement again last night (5/22/07), as the major impetus of contemporary liberalism—itself the ruination of the nation. As a true conservative, Savage even asserted that Plato was right in kicking all the poets and musicians out his his ideal Republic. (An overgeneralization: music of certain less "emotional," more "rational," modes [scales] would still be allowed, if I recall. But no doubt the modern "blues" scale would be verboten.) Plato was "on to something," Savage continued, because artists (read: liberal artists) have always been dangerous to "family" values and social order.

But if you've read Plato's Republic, it's pretty clear that this conservative utopia borders on a police state, run by philosopher-kings whose claim to a greater rationalism is only rivaled by certain contemporary radio-talk-show hosts; social order would be maintained by a military class (the "brawn" to the elite rulers' "brains"), who would keep the workers in line, since this third class could only be mindless bundles of emotions & appetencies (cf. the "lower animals" in Orwell's allegory).

Yes, by God, I'd keep Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix out of the ears of such masses, so easily turned by metaphor and melody. Let them only read (if allowed to do so) lame treatises in support of the party line: this is Savage's true calling, after all, to provide the propagandistic accoutrements for a latter-day politbureau; and as in Stalin's day, such soporifics would be officially dubbed the only "good"—because "true"—art.

Finally, it was rather strange that Savage put forth—uh—Joan Baez?? as the epitome of 60's aesthetic radicalism. The bourgeois coffee-house drivel that was much "folk-rock" of that day was already smug co-optation, the kind of the stuff Savage himself probably enjoyed at one time. I prefer(red) "hippie" music that employed a distortion pedal, at least; but that, too, was quickly co-opted, as "Purple Haze" became a bumper tune for Rush Limbaugh—and (later) Metallica, a musical segue for the Savage-meister himself {1}.  [Impromptu Quot. of the Day: "You know you're gettin' old when your favorite teen-age-rebellious rock anthems start showin' up as background music to car & ketchup commercials." --TCG]  So, really—NOT TO WORRY, Mr. Savage: the radical artists that you fear have damned little chance to "corrupt the morals of the youth" when the youth are corrupted from the crib already, interpellated into the Law of the Father from day one. . . . Quot. of the Day:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
    --Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice 5.1)

{1} In fact, one wonders why all that speed/goth/death-metal bumper music is allowed in the great "Republic" that is the "Savage Nation"—a rabid, visceral, arational subtext that rather deconstructs the message of this man who dons a mask of reason.

* RADIO RANT: "All Praise, American Woman"!

With Mother's Day coming up, some local morning talk show fellow mentioned "American Woman" as a song glorifying good ol' U.S. womanhood—that's why it's also such a popular song on the 4th of July, he added. (I didn't know this, if true.) To his credit, the fellow noted the irony of the fact that it was written and popularized by a Canadian band, the Guess Who (in 1970; their guitarist went on to form another popular band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive). To his discredit, he (and apparently many Americans) have never listened to, or understood, the song lyrics, which pretty much slam that "American Woman," and tell her emphatically to "stay away from me." One might cleverly argue that this is ironic, too, that the fellow really loves her desperately and is "protesting too much." However, the following lyrics belie such a possibility [Quot. of the Day]:

I don’t need your war machines—
I don’t need your ghetto scenes—
Coloured lights can hypnotize—
Sparkle [in] someone else’s eyes—
Now woman, get away from me—
American Woman—mama, let me be—

Now there's a song fit for a 4th of July parade. . . . So: play along! (preferably, w/ a little "tube-screamer" fuzzbox effect)::::

 B5 D5     E5         D5 E5
------||------------------------------------|------------------------------------||
------||------------------------------------|------------------------------------||
------||o-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------o||
----7-||o--9-9-9-9-9---7-9---9-9-------7----|---9-9-9-9-9---7-9\------------7---o||
-9--5-||---7-7-7-7-7---5-7---7-7---9---5----|---7-7-7-7-7---5-7\--------9---5----||
-7----||---------------------------7--------|---------------------------7--------||
 4  &      1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &        1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &

* "This Ain't the Summer of Love"

I was a touch too young to remember Woodstock—that "Summer of Love"; what I did remember from that era—a few years later, in high school—was a radio report that heroin was being smuggled into the U.S. . . . in the bodies of dead American soldiers killed in 'Nam. I don't think the phrase "This ain't the Summer of Love" occurred to me then, but all the same, a deadly chill ran up my spine for the first time, of disillusionment regarding the whole human enterprise. And obviously, that glorious (or whatever) "season" has retreated further and further into the ideological distance [Quot. of the Day]:

This ain't the Garden of Eden—
There ain't no angels above—
And things ain't what they used to be—
And this ain't the Summer of Love—
    --The Blue Öyster Cult

Of course, the Rush Limbaughs and Jerry Falwells of the world would play the "Pat Tillman" card on me: "If you only believed, son!" Okay, we can get into the heavy theological argument about how an omnipotent "God" could allow all this murder and mayhem, about notions of privatio bono and all that. But I'm tired—and so I'll be as knee-jerk dismissive as they are: [mild expletive deleted] ME.

* "Bumper" Tune

My wife has been nagging me for several years to try my hand at podcasting my own "radio show"—but I have neither the time or inclination. But I did find the time to create a "bumper" tune for any such eventuality, in GarageBand: it's the mp3 file in the right-hand column, just below my profile. (Yeh, I experimented w/ "auto-starting" the song, upon page loading, but I know from my own experience with others' pages that such a procedure can be irritating as hell to the web surfer.)

* Iraqi Ditty

[Revised from a February 1991 journal entry; for the first Gulf War, but still applicable today (please sing it to your favorite show-tune melody):]

We've got a death wish for eternal night—
So let's go start a war to set things right—
    Let's do to the Iraqi
    What we did to Nagasaki—
George Bush don't wanna talk, he wanna fight—

[Added 4/27/07:] Suggested chords (for a schmaltz-country version):
    I    I    I    I
    I    I    V7    V7
    I    I7    IV    iv
    I    V7    I    I

* "Cowboy Song" (Meets BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN)

If you let your mind roam free—like the "buffalo"—you can hear Thin Lizzy's old 1976 tune "Cowboy Song" as a precursor to the movie Brokeback Mountain. Yes, it's ostensibly about yearning for a "certain female," but most of the lyrics have homoeroticism written all over them.

The "frisky" first chorus is as follows:

Roll me over and turn me around—
Let me keep spinnin' 'til I hit the ground—
Roll me over and let me go,
Running free with the buffalo—

The second verse begins—

I was took in Texas—I did not know her name—
Lord, all these southern girls seem the same—

Hmmm. "Pretty cold"?! Most telling are the closing stanzas (symptomatically[?] omitted on most of the web versions of the lyrics!):

[spoken:] Roll me over—
And I'll turn around—
And I'll move my fingers
Up and down—up and down—

It's okay, amigo—
Just let me go—
Ridin' in the rodeo.

[sung:] Roll me over and turn me around—
Let me keep spinnin' till I hit the ground—
Roll me over and let me go—
Ride me in the rodeo—

Roll me over and set me free—
The cowboy's life is the life for me.

* RADIO RANT: Conservative Bumper Tunes

[2nd subtitle: Conservative Contradictions III]

It first struck me years ago, when I heard Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" as a lead-in or lead-out bumper to the The Rush Limbaugh Show. How incongruous, I thought, to play such "hip" hard-rock tunes—and to give the show a greater "hip" feel for a wider, younger audience?—VERSUS Rush's own moral-majority message, against we Lefties' supposed drug abuse, profligacy, etc. (common subjects in the very bumper tunes the conservative talk show hosts often play, BTW). Glenn Beck's custom theme song sounds like some knock-off of the Friends TV song: so 90's pop-rock (and now so dated) in its sound. Michael Savage goes them all one better with some thrash-speed-metal theme à la Metallica; this can't be what he listens to in his spare time?! Of course, cultural critics have long pointed out the rather fascist elements of heavy metal; and I can imagine the Savage Nation (as he dubs his acolytes) stomping their jackboots—er, banging their heads—to the ideological beat right now. . . .

On a more pleasant note, I actually enjoy many of the Coast to Coast AM bumpers. There are the expected "ooh-OOh" standbyes, like BÖC's "The Reaper," Fleetwood Mac's "Hypnotized," and Golden Earring's "Twilight Zone." But besides the fact that I love the techno theme song (Moroder's "The Chase"), I occasional get turned onto "new" songs (e.g., Alannah Miles' "Black Velvet" and Métisse's "Boom Boom Ba"); and I often rediscover some tune I haven't heard in years. Thus I was recently inspired to figure out the guitar to old 1970 Santana song "Samba Pa Ti"—rather a jazz-solo, bossa-fingerstyle version. Here's the tab to the first section (I'll send anyone the entire tablature upon request, plus the full key to my more esoteric symbols below):

 |------------------pickup notes::::------------------------------------3--|
 |------------------------------------------------------------3------/5----|
 |--------------------------------------------------2-4-/5-----------------|
 |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
 |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
 |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
                                           1  &  2  &    3    &   4   &  
::A1::
   GM7                                  Bm7
||------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
||(1h)3=======---3====-----------3----|--/7========---7====-----7h8p7------|
||---------------4====-------0h4==----|---------------7==========-----7----|
||---------------4====----------------|---------------7================----|
||------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
||-------------------3----------------|-------------------7============----|
      1   &  2   &   3   &   4   &        1   &   2   &   3  &  4     &

   Em7                                  Am7
 |------------------------------------|---------------------------------3--|
 |----------/8-----8==---8-------5====|====-------------------3------/5----|
 |----------/7-----7==---7-------5====|====----------2-4-/5----------------|
 |----------/9-----9==---9-------5====|====--------------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |---0========-------0====------------|---5=======-------------------------|
     1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &        1   &  2   &    3   &   4   &

   GM7                                  Bm7
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |(1h)3=======---3====-----------3----|--/7---7====---7====-----7h8p7------|
 |---------------4====-------0h4==----|---------------7====----------------|
 |---------------4====----------------|---------------7====-----------9----|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |-------------------3====------------|-------------------7----------------|
      1   &  2   &   3   &   4   &        1   &   2   &   3  &  4     &

    Em7                                  Am7     v
 |------------------------------------|---------------5h7p5-5---3h5p3------|
 |----------/8-----8==---8-------5====|====----*5---------------------5----|
 |----------/7-----7==---7-------5====|====----*5--------------------------|
 |----------/9-----9==---9-------5====|====----*5--------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |---0========-------0====------------|---5--------------------------------|
     1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &        1  &  2  &  3     &   4     &
     
   D9                  [harm.]          Am7
 |--*5-------7------------------------|---------------5h7p5-5---3h5p3------|
 |--*5----------/12===--!12!==--------|--------*5---------------------5----|
 |--*5--------------------------------|--------*5--------------------------|
 |--*4--------------------------------|--------*5--------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|---5--------------------------------|
     1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &        1  &  2  &  3     &   4     &

  D9 v                                 D7 v          [single attack:]
 |--*5--------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |--*5-----5---5---5h7p5\3====--------|---3--------------------------------|
 |--*5--------------------------------|---5-------------------5p3/1p0h1/3--|
 |--*4--------------------------------|---4--------------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|---5--------------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
     1  &  2   &   3     &   4   &        1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &

   Am7                                  Bm7                       v
 |------------------------------------|--------------------------*2--------|
 |---------------5========---5--------|-------3-------5b(7)---3--*3--------|
 |---2-----------5========---5--------|--/4----------------------*2--------|
 |---------------5========---5--------|------------------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |-----------------------5====--------|------------------------------------|
     1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &        1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &

   Am7(9)                               D9
     v   v   v   v   v   v   v
 |--*7---5---5---3---3-------3--*5====|============================--------|
 |--*5-------------------5------*5====|============================--------|
 |--*5--------------------------*5====|============================--------|
 |------------------------------*4====|============================--------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
 |------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
     1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &        1   &   2   &   3   &   4   &

  D7 v
 |---------------------------------3--|| [to the top . . .]
 |---3-------------------3------/5----||
 |---5----------2-4-/5----------------||
 |---4--------------------------------||
 |---5--------------------------------||
 |------------------------------------||
     1   &  2   &    3   &   4   &