Forward

Accomplishments, yes:

Per Seneca Doane at DailyKos, here's the list reeled off at the 5:00 mark:

The Obama campaign ticks off a list of accomplishments that they presumably think is aimed straight for the heart, mind, and gut of the electorate. Each one rotates up on a panel, one of them every 2.5 seconds. 32 of them over 80 seconds. Here's the entire list:

o 4.2 million jobs saved
o cut taxes for 160 million Americans
o Wall Street reform passed
o 18 tax cuts for small businesses
o Unfair credit card fees eliminated
o 466,000 new manufacturing jobs
o $1 Trillion in spending cuts
o Protected reproductive rights
o Stem cell research funded
o Fuel efficiency standards doubling
o U.S. oil production at 8-year high
o Natural gas production at all-time high
o Renewable energy production at 27%
o First Latina Supreme Court Justice appointed
o $100 billion invested in science and research
o Iraq War ended
o Libya liberated
o Osama bin Laden dead
o Incentives to hire unemployed Veterans
o "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ended
o Unemployment benefits extended
o Equal Pay for women protected
o Health care reform passed
o Seniors' drug costs lowered
o College Pell Grants doubled
o Guaranteed coverage for contraception
o Medicare and Social Security protected
o Auto industry saved

How could America not re-elect this President?

Public Servant Citizen Hero

Newark Mayor Cory Booker saved a neighbor's life last week:

Newark Mayor Cory Booker was taken to a hospital Thursday night for treatment of smoke inhalation he suffered trying to rescue his next-door neighbors from their burning house.

"I just grabbed her and whipped her out of the bed," Booker said in recounting the fire. Booker told The Star-Ledger he also suffered second-degree burns on his hand.

The fire started in a two-story building on Hawthorne Avenue in the Upper Clinton Hill neighborhood, shortly before the mayor arrived home after a television interview with News 12 New Jersey.

Five people were taken to the hospital for treatment: the mayor, a woman from the house and three members of his security detail. The woman was listed in stable condition at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston with burns to her back and neck.

...

After being released from the hospital, Booker recounted his experience at the fire and said he thought he might have to jump out of a window because of the heavy flames.

"We got everybody out of the house, but their daughter’s screaming, ‘I’m upstairs!’ " he told The Star-Ledger.

One of his security officers, Detective Alex Rodriguez, tried to stop him from going back in.

..."Now we actually get into a fight because his job is to protect me," Booker said of Rodriguez. Booker said when he reached the second floor, he was engulfed in flames and smoke.

"I suddenly had the realization that I can’t find this woman." Booker said. "I look behind me and see the flames and I think "I’m not going to get out of here. Suddenly I was at peace with the fact that I was going to jump out the window."

Then he heard her cries in a back bedroom.

"I just grabbed her and whipped her out of the bed," Booker said. The two made their way downstairs, where they both collapsed, Booker said.

Rodriguez, who had helped others out of the house said when he saw the mayor go in, he thought his career in protection was over.

"Once he went in, I said, 'Oh my goodness, this is it.' " Rodriguez, 39, said.

...

"Thanks 2 all who are concerned. Just suffering smoke inhalation," Booker tweeted. "We got the woman out of the house. We are both off to hospital. I will b ok."

Shortly after midnight, Booker tweeted an update, lauding the heroics of one of his security officers: "Thanks everyone, my injuries were relatively minor. Thanks to Det. Alex Rodriguez who helped get all of the people out of the house."

Sure feels nice to read about a politician who's a real-life hero.

I don't know what political ramifications might shake out however for Mayor Booker, but he's shown leadership in rebuilding his city from the top to the streets, and good leadership is a highly transferable skill.

Rushing into a burning building like that is pure leadership: leading the self. Without for a moment doubting his instincts, secure in his intellect, physical capability and clearly an alert individual, he directed his body into the heart of the catastrophe with a clear intention to bring that woman out alive.

Then, of course, he got lucky. God surely asks that we make our own luck, but the two of them were lucky to make it out of there alive.

Lucky that Mayor Cory Booker was present.

The 2,001st Post: What's Obama Done?

I just checked by accident and found out yesterday's Nettertainment post was #2,000. Wow.

I'll celebrate by reprinting an email to a friend who's on the Left and skeptical of President Barack Obama. You know, the kind of leftwing skepticism (a.k.a. circular firing squad) that dogged Al Gore in the fateful 2000 election where some said there would be no difference between a President Gore and a President George W. Bush. And we all know how that turned out.

Leaving aside the massive, publicly stated Republican obstructionism and hard-right/Fox News demonization of President Obama, the massive attempt at de-legitimization by calling him Kenyan, anti-American Exceptionalist, Socialist, Hitlerist, etc, there's this:

Already arguably better than Bill Clinton – four sites, listed in my order of preference, tracking what he's accomplished so far:

• Crowdsourced database – pretty great and current, but have to click to open categories: http://obamaachievements.org/list
• Easy to read, not sure if up-to-date:http://pleasecutthecrap.typepad.com/main/what-has-obama-done-since-january-20-2009.html
• List from this past May – not up to date: http://www.pasquinifamily.com/?p=857
• Just promises kept – from this past February, not up to date: http://planetpov.com/2011/02/13/a-short-list-of-pres-obamas-accomplishments/

Hope to see what Prezbama can do with a second term, especially if Dems can hold the Senate and maybe even flip the House.

And the photo of the year:

Since I sent that email, as if by ESP, there's this video from TPM:

Watch this meme grow -- how much he's accomplished -- as Romney (now looking likely to be Obama's 2012 Republican opponent) amps up the name-calling, lies and smears. As George Clooney says:

And do we really need this guy mucking it up again?

Good Woman

Liz Taylor, RIP. She proved that she walked the walk, from early gay friends (McDowell, Clift) to her unmatched contribution to AIDS awareness back in the dark days of the 1980's.

And her friends remember her for it.

Mimi

ALBANY, NY (08/11/2010)(readMedia)-- The Intellectual Property Law Section Fellowship, administered by The New York Bar Foundation, has been renamed to honor distinguished attorney and section leader, Miriam "Mimi" Maccoby Netter. The program goals for the 'Miriam Maccoby Netter Fellowship, created and funded by the Intellectual Property Law Section' are to increase the representation of lawyers in intellectual property law (IPL) and to provide students with an opportunity to experience IPL practice.

The New York State Bar Association's IPL Section Chair, Paul Matthew Fakler (Arent Fox LLP, New York), said, "The Intellectual Property Law Section owes a great debt to Mimi Netter for her singular and extraordinary contributions that have helped to advance the Section's success and growth. She has been an inspirational leader in the area of Intellectual Property Law and the Section's executive committee voted unanimously to recognize her accomplishments by renaming this Fellowship in her honor."

Netter's continuing overriding interests in law have been influenced by her dedication to education for all, keeping current with emerging areas of the law, and mentoring of attorneys. She has placed an emphasis on women because of their difficulty in gaining access to many areas of legal practice. She became an early member of the New York State Bar Association's IPL section in order to share her early knowledge of IPL and to learn from others in similar situations.

"Mimi Netter is an exceptional lawyer who has worked tirelessly to strengthen the position and standing of the Intellectual Property Law Section within the legal profession," said M. Catherine Richardson (Bond Schoeneck & King PLLC, Syracuse), President of The New York Bar Foundation. "Her dedication to the law has only been enhanced by the many hours she has devoted to public service and the Greater Capital Region community. The Foundation is pleased to join the Intellectual Property Law Section to acknowledge her with this honor."

More including background and other honors here.

Sports News

Who'da thought I'd ever in this lifetime become a Phoenix Suns fan:

There was almost no evidence in the loud arena of the storm stirred up on Tuesday when Suns owner Robert Sarver issued a statement saying the team would wear "Los Suns" on their jerseys, to celebrate diversity on Cinco de Mayo but also to protest the immigration bill passed by the Arizona legislature and signed by Gov. Jan Brewer.

"I'm proud of our owner for making this stand but we're not out there to alienate," Nash said. "We want this to be all about love in our community. People, regardless of whether they agree with me or not, we have love for everybody."

The bill has drawn criticism from civil rights groups and others, including President Barack Obama, who called it "misguided."

Now a Steve Nash fan for life.

And the Suns won.

Just for One Day

The saddest story in sports, Mark MacGwire comes clean in order to take a pitching coach job in peace. Is it just more evidence of our mass misplaced hero worship?

A real hero, Miep Gies, who protected Anne Frank and saved her diary.

A hero of the cinema, Eric Rohmer.

Her Satanic Majesty's Request.

Terror

Nightmare unemployment numbers. Here's an interactive chart to tell you how your own demographic is doing.

As for the terror at Ft. Hood, here's to the courageous Police Officer who took down the shooter (and managed to leave him alive to stand trial or court martial), Kimberly Denise Munley.

I'm hoping her heroism will be kept separate from the ideological landgrabs on the Right, but we'll see how it plays on Faux News.

Great American

Hard not to tear up watching this 86 year-old WWII veteran's plainspoken plea for gay equality:



Transcript in this post.

Save for a few stubborn states, marriage equality is just a few electoral cycles away.

Gold from Junk

Having finally (if a week and a half after it's opening can seem like a long time) gotten to see the sleeper hit of the summer, District 9, last night, I came away as impressed with the movie, and rookie director Neill Blomkamp as I'd been hearing. There are a number of factors that make District 9 impressive, from being a science fiction thriller with more on its mind than just pyrotechnics -- although delivering a highly satisfying stream of those -- to actually telling a coherent story with characters worth caring about.

In fact, there's a list on Film Junk of the "5 Lessons Hollywood Can Learn from District 9" (the list with my thumbnail descriptions -- for the full thing read the piece):

1. Audiences Appreciate Originality

Yes, there are lots of elements from other pictures mashed into this one, but it has a new attitude, i.e. in the alien apartheid theme, resonantly set in post-real life apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa.

2. Experience Isn’t Everything

Director Blomkamp was backed by producer Peter Jackson to direct a huge budget version of blockbuster videogame Halo when Hollywood got nervous, backed out, leaving them to rebound with this proof of talent.

3. Blockbuster Budgets are Bloated

See the movie and try to wrap your mind around this: District 9 only cost $30 million to make, i.e. the equivalent of about fifteen minutes of Spiderman 3. Guess which one is richer and more entertaining.

4. Mystery Draws People In

And I'll try not to spoil too much, but there will be MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

5. Action is More Thrilling When It’s Rated R

No argument here.

I find it interesting that the site I've quoted has the word "junk" in the title because what I'll address in this post is the success of the "junk aesthetic" in the movie.

District 9 takes place in the midst of tremendous amounts of junk. This is the essential poverty experience, the Soweto of the movie, with Nigerians running black markets in the alien quarantine area as a reminder of the world's biggest slum in Lagos. In this incarnation of poverty, aliens pick through huge garbage piles to survive, decorate or build elements of their shacks with garbage, and even look something like collections of junk themselves, albeit in the "prawn" form that gives them their negative nickname.

Lead actor, an unknown until last week, Sharlto Copley, looks a bit of mess when we first meet him (and gets worse as the picture goes on) and is in essence a non-valuable item in Hollywood terms, i.e. a leading man with zero name recognition (or negative, considering how unusual and new to pronounce his name is to non-South Africans), i.e. junk. And director Blomkamp was junked by Hollywood prior to making this picture.

Indeed, District 9 is almost entirely shot documentary style, with surveillance camera POV's popping in for visual continuity here and there, as handheld is essentially the "junk" style of shooting, i.e. "run 'n' gun", rather than the majestic tableau shot of classic science fiction films from the 1920's through the 1950's, peaking with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey but just as much the dominant style of the Star Wars hexology. Prior to, say, Battlestar Galactica, which made space battle seem like documentary war footage, old matte technology and even motion control cameras required some degree of stasis or stability in shooting in order not to reveal the seams of the layered fx compositing. Here the jerky footage of CGI aliens picking through junk heaps or mixing it up in spasmatic, bloody confrontations with humans seem 100% genuine, a you-are-there feel.

In the real world, it's poverty that makes those stricken human beings appear expendable to the more fortunate. How often have we heard, "Bomb them all!" in reference to corruption infested slums or the poor-as-dirt terrorist breeding grounds of the Middle East? Clean people up and they suddenly have value, but in their most degraded state, starving and emaciated in Ethiopia, or refuges ravaged by war, how often is the reaction that they should just go ahead and die, we'll all be better off -- themselves included.

Here it's the aliens whose non-human, insect or shrimp-like appearance, caked in poverty, who seem infinitely expendable. So it is the linchpin achievement of District 9 that we develop empathetic feelings towards two in particular, father and son prawn. And herein lies the key to the movie's originality, actually a synthesis of underground or counterculture aesthetics that have been building from the hippies through the punks all the way to Burning Man and beyond, the turning of what other people discard into something useful, fascinating, useful, valuable, beautiful.

The core storytelling trope here is the second look, the reversal that comes from Copley's transformation from go-along mid-level bureaucrat to self-sacrificing action hero, the shack that can be a key, the weapons that are junk unless a being with the right DNA pulls the trigger (and then marvel at the plasmatic destruction that follows), the prawns who can be more than the drones you've come to expect. Like the magnetic powers of one particularly brilliant alien weapon that collects the bullets fired at it and then blasts them all back, Blomkamp revels in the expectations about himself and his "little" film that he fashions with whizzing speed and rock-solid cinematic expertise into a great big science fiction action classic.

Every once in a while there's this kind of independent triumph, recalling the sleeper success of the first Terminator movie, with "junk" actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, an unknown director and cast, that can instantly turn into a major franchise. Blomkamp pokes sly fun at the Halo debacle late in the picture when, in file documentary footage, Copley's character proudly displays a wallet-sized snapshot of his wife in her bridal veil, emphasizing how much it looks like an angel's halo.

Well, if any studio wants to resume making the movie version of Halo with Blomkamp I'm betting he won't come half as cheap as he would have the first time around. And Blomkamp would have to ask himself why bother with someone else's intellectual property, now that he has a not-dissimilar human vs. alien District 10 sequel squarely set up by the conclusion of this picture.

With the reversal of District 9 winning hearts, minds and box office, he's turned an original i.p. (i.e. "junk") into a potential entertainment industry. And with the same achievement, ironically, devalued Halo as late-coming movie competitor.

Junk into gold. Gold into junk.

Alchemy.

Last Man Out

Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy (D-MA) has died of brain cancer at age 77 and with him goes the last of the famed, ill-fated, targeted Kennedy brothers: Joe in WWII, John in Dallas, Bobby here in Los Angeles. Teddy hadn't grown up as the smartest and he certainly had his personal failings, but as one of only two Senators in U.S. history to be elected nine (9) times -- the other being Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) -- and arguably the most successful legislator in U.S. history, this loss feels unexpectedly as large as that of his brothers.

Whereas their Presidencies, if completed and won, might have better rode the changing world of their times than those who took their place and had a more powerful immediate impact than that of a Senator, Teddy's record for sponsored legislation has profoundly modernized and humanized this country.

I like this line from the NY Times piece:

As James Sterling Young, the director of a Kennedy Oral History Project at the University of Virginia, put it: “Most people grow up and go into politics. The Kennedys go into politics and then they grow up.”

Key legislation:

He led the fight for the 18-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft, deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, and the post-Watergate campaign finance legislation. He was deeply involved in renewals of the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing law of 1968. He helped establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He built federal support for community health care centers, increased cancer research financing and helped create the Meals on Wheels program. He was a major proponent of a health and nutrition program for pregnant women and infants.

When Republicans took over the Senate in 1981, Mr. Kennedy requested the ranking minority position on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, asserting that the issues before the labor and welfare panel would be more important during the Reagan years...

...His most notable focus was civil rights, “still the unfinished business of America,” he often said. In 1982, he led a successful fight to defeat the Reagan administration’s effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act.

In one of those bipartisan alliances that were hallmarks of his legislative successes, Mr. Kennedy worked with Senator Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, to secure passage of the voting rights measure, and Mr. Dole got most of the credit.

Perhaps his greatest success on civil rights came in 1990 with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required employers and public facilities to make “reasonable accommodation” for the disabled. When the law was finally passed, Mr. Kennedy and others told how their views on the bill had been shaped by having relatives with disabilities. Mr. Kennedy cited his mentally disabled sister, Rosemary, and his son who had lost a leg to cancer.

Mr. Kennedy was one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s strongest allies in their failed 1994 effort to enact national health insurance, a measure the senator had been pushing, in one form or another, since 1969.

But he kept pushing incremental reforms, and in 1997, teaming with Senator Hatch, Mr. Kennedy helped enact a landmark health care program for children in low-income families, a program now known as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-Chip.

He led efforts to increase aid for higher education and win passage of Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. He pushed for increases in the federal minimum wage. He helped win enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, one of the largest expansions of government health aid ever.

Yep, he even worked with President George W. Bush. Dedicated to doing his job, even with political opponents, if he thought it was for the better of the American people. And Kennedy was known for his friendships across the aisle, most notably with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), with whom he shared what appears to be his final piece of legislation, should it become law.

A fitting epitaph, from Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank:

“If his father, Joe, had surveyed, from an early age up to the time of his death, all of his children, his sons in particular, and asked to rank them on talents, effectiveness, likelihood to have an impact on the world, Ted would have been a very poor fourth. Joe, John, Bobby ... Ted.

“He was the survivor,” Mr. Ornstein continued. “He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he will end up by far being the most significant.”

It's been 41 years since the last brother died. Tonight the final star went out.

Visionary

I'm ashamed to say I've only read three of J.G. Ballard's visionary novels but I think I've always thought I'd read more, they'd be there for me. Well, as of today the author isn't, as Ballard died after several years with prostate cancer at 78 in England. Something interesting said about his work:

His influence stretched across a modern world that he seemed to see coming years in advance.

His dark, often shocking fiction predicted the melting of the ice caps, the rise of Ronald Reagan, terrorism against tourists and the alienation of a society obsessed with new technology.

As Martin Amis once said of him: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader's brain.”

The bands Joy Division, Radiohead, The Normal, Klaxons and Buggles all wrote records inspired by Ballard stories.

I read High Rise decades ago, which Stanley Kubrick should have made into a movie, the story of a fall of a great new modern building, new yuppies and better off increasing to the highest levels, which drifts into primordial chaos as the floors begin fighting each other. Like watching a slow motion car wreck, which is fitting with Crash (made into a sleek, disturbing flick by David Cronenberg) all about auto accident fetishists, and the second one I read about seven years ago, Concrete Island, about a businessman who crashes his car on the way home one weekend and ends up dropping out of civilization by not leaving that piece of highway for a very long time.

His most adventurous piece is evidently The Atrocity Exhibition (that title used by Joy Division) which is actually a number of separate pieces deconstruction and reconstructed together, including his riff on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the main character's psychosis brought on by mass media causing his mental illness.

By coincidence I read his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, published after short stories and other pieces in 1961, which has never gotten a lot of press. I found the vintage edition in a used book shop, and while his work certainly deepened, it's a wild ride, very hard to put down. There's a wind that's been building for a few weeks, growing every day, imagine a single wind blowing West to East around the world, non-stop, unidirectional. Pretty soon pieces of buildings start breaking off and water bodies move, flooding begins, the decimation of houses, the inability to go out doors without being swept away. Relentlessly building, as we follow several intersecting characters in different parts of England, desperate to find a safe place, no end in sight.

I can't wait to read my next Ballard book, and while his death is sad it'll surely renew interest in his books. And the movies from them -- Steven Spielberg's adaptation of his memoir, Empire of the Sun, about how he survived gamely as a child during the WWII Japanese invasion of Shanghai. There's a load of Ballard material here, albeit laid out all Anglo-techie, and a clip of him interviewed very cool montage style embedded with this obit.

I'm reminded of writing about the passing of Polish visionary writer Stanislaw Lem a little over three years ago, soon after I'd started this blog. It's a bummer to be marking the passage of time like, by losing another seminal literary hero. But, of course, there will be more.

Ballard knew how to commit and his visions were lucid. So considering his subject matter, the degree to which our veneer of civilization can easily strip down to primal savagery, meant he was transgressive, especially to his times. And I'd say there's a Fight Club because there was a Ballard and maybe a Caprica.

Dangerous prose, so highly readable.

Sucker Punch

As a respite from the political scene, here's a real-life Slumdog-esque moment from British television that, I'm nearly ashamed to say, does the trick to my tearducts.

As the name Susan Boyle is already worth six million or so worldwide views on YouTube, a triumph for late bloomers everywhere, the question of our prejudicial reactions to packaging is addressed by Colette Douglas Home:

The moment the reality show's audience and judging panel saw the small, shy, middle-aged woman, they started to smirk. When she said she wanted a professional singing career to equal that of Elaine Paige, the camera showed audience members rolling their eyes in disbelief. They scoffed when she told Simon Cowell, one of the judges, how she'd reached her forties without managing to develop a singing career because she hadn't had the opportunity. Another judge, Piers Morgan, later wrote on his blog that, just before she launched into I Dreamed a Dream, the 3000-strong audience in Glasgow was laughing and the three judges were suppressing chuckles.

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It was rude and cruel and arrogant. Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, was presumed to be a buffoon. But why?

The ugly answer:

The answer is that only the pretty are expected to achieve. Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person.

I dread to think of how Susan would have left the stage if her voice had been less than exceptional. She would have been humiliated in front of 11 million viewers. It's the equivalent of being put in the stocks in front of the nation instead of the village. It used to be a punishment handed out to criminals. Now it is the fate of anyone without obvious sexual allure who dares seek opportunity

We're far past a 19th Century world where looks were not yet mass marketed and character was more often the story. Helen of Troy, that's an anomaly of history, mainly because the standards weren't set. Or, a word I used yesterday, the brand, in this case the body brand.

One imagines the happy ending to Susan Boyle's story would not just be worldwide fame but the man to go along with it, the overdue romance, completeness for Susan and closure for the British movie version nominated for those acting and writing Oscars.

Susan is a reminder that it's time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It's people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect.

Are we damned by our sensationalism of the body? Is the brand so pervasive now that our capability to discern character is in steep decline?

Or has it always been thus?

Of Course

As predicted here several days ago, the mainstream press once again underestimated our new President, who not only succeeded in mediating conflicts at the G20 Conference in London this week, leading to a huge market-rallying agreement, but his wife, "the closer," Michelle Obama won the hearts of everyone from an entire girls school to Her Majesty herself.

Yep, he's the most popular politician on the planet by far. It's a long way from when world leaders didn't want to be caught on camera shaking hands with an American President named Bush.

Obama hasn't solved everything in one week, as Ilan Goldenberg points out. There's eight years of sour dealings to overcome, along with the usual problems working across borders. But it's a big refreshing start.

Here's the man himself with illuminating answers to several important question from the world press:



And his inspiring First Lady:



Feels nice to be winners again, doesn't it?

British Invasion

The Obamas have invaded England. The mainstream press, as always, is wrong in their first nervous nelly assessments that he's going to have trouble with the other countries over there. Wrong.

Obama, as always, is in demand. He's making his move to thaw U.S.-Russian relations with a long-overdue round of nuclear arms negotiations. He's got Richard Holbrooke breaking the ice with Iranian diplomats. He finally getting us towards a sensible policy towards Cuba.

He was a star the last time he was in Europe and right now the world thinks of him as their President, even if to the chagrin of their own leaders.

Deal with it. America is back, baby, with the best strategist we've had in ages, and I predict he'll leave an even more popular presence than when he arrived.

Tally ho.

Lux

Joe Strummer of The Clash. Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee of The Ramones. And now, Lux Interior of The Cramps. The punk rock era is taking heavy losses.

The Cramps were unique, even within the unique world of punk. They were the opposite of wholesome. With their thrift shop horrorshow appearance, Lux usually shirtless in black leather pants and pumps, and their original "psychobilly" sound, they combined early 1960's garage rock with B-movie atmosphere and a slightly campy sense of dread. With song titles like, "Surfin' Dead," "Drug Train," "What's Inside a Girl?," "Garbageman," "Bend Over I'll Drive," "Bikini Girls with Machine Guns," "Human Fly," "Two-Headed Sex Change from Space," "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," "Goo Goo Muck," "The Crusher," "Let's Get Fucked Up" and the memorable coinage question, "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?" what is not to like?



Lux's heavily echoed voice combined with Ivy's throwback 1950's guitar sound were the infectious aural signature of a band that will undoubtedly have more songs licensed after death than in life. It kinda suits them, as they basically brought Halloween every night they played. Per the otherwise unheard of "J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology" on the liner notes to their Gravest Hits debut e.p.:

In the spring of 1976, The CRAMPS began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock’n’roll aided only by the sickly blue rays of late night TV. While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n’roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups. As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves.

Perhaps the most memorable show the The Cramps ever played, make that any band ever, was Live at the Napa State Mental Hospital, immortalized in grainy black & white video (available on Amazon). It went something like this:



Tributes like this one are coming in. While there was always (to me, at least) a distance to The Cramps that kept them from being quite as, uh, lovable as maybe The Ramones, their individuality, sharp edges and bracing individuality inspired a higher form of respect, like the kind one might have for a particularly terrifying roller coaster.

Yep, they were strange. They were skanky. And they were way, way cool.



He's with Elvis now.

Man of his Word

A friend of mine who worked for George Bush in 2000, turned against him but abstained in 2004, and worked for Obama in 2008 always used to say that he couldn't vote for any politician if he didn't know where he stood. Case in point was Hillary Clinton, who's famous "triangulation" meant that he was never sure if she meant what she said or would flip it around based on political winds. Same with John Kerry -- not enough definition.

Hence his staunch support for Barack Obama, and here's yet another case study from just a couple days of actual governance that our new President meant what he said:



And yet another:

Seems almost lost in the hub bub of all that is happening these past few days, but yesterday President Obama issued an order that eliminates one of George Bush and Alberto Gonzalez's first vile collaborations.

A nasty little executive order Bush issued to make secrecy the rule of his administration.

Executive Order 13233 limited access to the records of former United States Presidents. It was drafted by then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and issued by President George W. Bush on November 1, 2001.

At the time it was issued in November of 2001, the Society of American Archivists and the American Library Association felt that the order

"violates both the spirit and letter of existing U.S. law on access to presidential papers..." and "potentially threatens to undermine one of the very foundations of our nation."

...Well yesterday when President Obama issued his Executive order to

...establish policies and procedures governing the assertion of executive privilege by incumbent and former Presidents in connection with the release of Presidential records by the National Archives...

Reading though that order I was struck by his assertion that outside of certain

"Presidential records (that) might impair national security (including the conduct of foreign relations), law enforcement, or the deliberative processes of the executive branch.

There is now established a specific way for these records to be released. There is also a bill H.R.35to codify "procedures for the consideration of claims of constitutionally based privilege against disclosure of Presidential records." But until this happens this is a good start and makes me feel all the more confident in our new President and his intention to act as a real agent of change.

I was just so heartened to get to the end of reading the Executive Order and reading the words...

Sec. 6. Revocation. Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked.

When the history of Obama's transition and first 100 days is written, it will be as textbook.

This is how it is done.

Big Sunday

Not just the games sending Arizona and Pittsburgh to the Super Bowl, but a remarkable collection of actors and musicians saluting the upcoming Inauguration, with Abraham Lincoln gazing down upon the proceedings, the incoming President and his family, the half million people gathered there.

Here's the end of what he said when he spoke at the end:

That is the belief with which we began this campaign, and that is how we will overcome what ails us now. There is no doubt that our road will be long. That our climb will be steep. But never forget that the true character of our nation is revealed not during times of comfort and ease, but by the right we do when the moment is hard. I ask you to help me reveal that character once more, and together, we can carry forward as one nation, and one people, the legacy of our forefathers that we celebrate today.

Here's how Pete Seeger and Bruce Springstein closed it out, with 500,000 singing along:



Hell, yes he can.

I Can't Believe It's Not BULLOCKS

Or, Never Mind the Butter:



So John Lydon, a.k.a. the great punk rock hero of the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten now thirty years ago, just got paid gobs of cash to hawk butter. The most shocking part is seeing him in a typical kitchen set. And while the ad does play off his often less-tame sense of humor, it's still a massive sell-out...or is it?

After all, the recent Sex Pistols reunion dates were called the "Filthy Lucre" tour. And their second and last album was called The Great Rock & Roll Swindle.

And what says English more definitively than such a punk icon?

I'm sure there's no "limited supply" of Country Life butter over there and expect sales to soar. It may seem "pretty vacant" of Johnny, but those are your "problems" as he's a man with a monthly mortgage to pay (here in sunny Los Angeles), not "a 12-inch squirrel."

So it's a holiday in other people's churnery. God save my toast. Cholesterol in the U.K., it's coming some time, may-be. To quote Noah Cross played by John Huston in Chinatown, "Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

And now you can add once-banned rock & roll revolutionaries to that list as well.

The Coolest Hand

Paul Newman was the coolest leading man of his generation. He wasn't the historical gamechanger that Marlon Brando was, who preceded him by a few years, nor was he the counterculture hero embraced by the mainstream that Jack Nicholson became. In a certain sense he was a transitory figure, one of the last stars in the studio system, one of the first to achieve independence while remaining astride the box office, a naturalistic actor who didn't have to mumble, a politically and socially conscious actor who made it seem effortless to be so.

It's hard to imagine a world without Newman. He was of my father's generation and had that postwar modernism that looked forward with pleasure but still respected from whence he came. He made it seem like there was somebody sane out there to look up to, a lack of shame between what he did on the big screen and how he lived his life when he was off. By being a man of Westport, CT rather than Los Angeles, CA, he stayed one of us, if maybe having the best time of all of us. What else can you say about a man who took up auto racing at age 47 and ended up building a team?

He was having fun on the screen as well. In his two classic films co-starring Robert Redford, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, he was the brains to Redford's beauty, and the two of them basically invented the buddy film, albeit with more heft than most that followed. There was no couple you'd rather be with, and their interplay was a joy to watch over and over again. What made it work was the very smarts underpinning Newman's performances, that his characters knew their times were running short, making those moments together so much sweeter, and bonding us to Newman for not underestimating our intelligence. Highlights include the early contest for control of the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang from the first film, and one of the best poker games ever put on film in the second.

The other two Newman pictures I recall most fondly are Cool Hand Luke and The Verdict. I discovered the former on one of the many Saturday nights when my parents went out and NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was my weekend education. Newman again reinvented the anti-hero, a 1960's symbol without any of the heavy-handed trappings that might date the character now. From the opening scene, the only one in a city and in freedom, a drunken Luke takes the heads off a sidewalk full of parking meters. The lights from the cops shine on him and he gives up that awesome shit-eating grin, and that's it, straight to life on the chain gang and "a failure to communicate." Newman's ability to capture Luke's embrace of the absurdity of his situation, his ability to rally his fellow prisoners by example as much as exhortation, and his shortfall in understanding the true gravity of the world in which he is trapped forged an enduring archetype, the man-child rebel who wouldn't hurt a flea, somehow it itself a threat to the Vietnam-era establishment.

The Verdict, a highlight of Sidney Lumet's directing career as well, takes an opposite tack, telling a story of redemption as a washed-up, alcoholic, ambulance chasing lawyer gets changed by a case that leads him against the very Boston political machine that gave him his career in the first place. Lumet has written about Redford originally being cast in the role and the constant re-writings of David Mamet's original script due to Redford's discomfort in opening the movie as a drunk loser (maybe just a better understanding of his own screen strengths), which all went away when the role went to Newman. The movie builds to a remarkable jury summation scene, delivered in an unbroken take by Newman, and a top-notch open ending on the one dangling plot point -- a telephone ringing while Newman drinks black coffee, a changed man on the brink of a decision of forgiveness, something he himself needed so badly at the start of the film. And we're with him the entire way.

So while it's quite right to be sad that we're living in a world without Paul Newman anymore, there's plenty to celebrate about a long life lived well, with a strong marriage, enduring philanthropy, great performances and damned good salad dressing. The unique, ever-fresh personality of Paul Newman will endure in trove of great movie star roles (and a handful of solid directing efforts) that extends across six-count 'em-six decades, his Hole In the Wall camps for disabled kids, as well as grocery stores everywhere.

Like George Kennedy's Dragline says at the end of Cool Hand Luke:

"He was smiling... That's right. You know, that, that Luke smile of his. He had it on his face right to the very end. Hell, if they didn't know it 'fore, they could tell right then that they weren't a-gonna beat him. That old Luke smile. Oh, Luke. He was some boy. Cool Hand Luke. Hell, he's a natural-born world-shaker."

Amen, brother.