Dean's List

Billy Dean goes to Fredonia. Most of you know who this is, but some may not. Bill was the stereotypical nerd/geek kind of guy when we were growing up. This developed as early as second or third grade, but not before that. In kindergarten or first grade, I remember he was "going out with" (probably a dumb expression at that age - but they called themselves girlfriend and boyfriend) a girl named Melissa Johnson, who lived near him. This is something I recall fairly vividly, since I liked Melissa quite a bit at age 5 and 6. She was pretty much the guest of honor at my 6th birthday party, which was held at McDonald's; she was the person I wanted most to show up. If it would have been just her and I, I would have been more than happy. I believe my grandparents have pictures of the party. She gave me a brown and white striped turtleneck, which I think I wore for my next school picture. Melissa went on to fail one of the early grades for some reason. I don't know why, because she wasn't dumb. Now she's apparently good friends with Destini and they go out to the bars from time to time. Wow! My memory is filled with a bunch of that crap. Anyway, at some point in grade school, Bill became the object of ridicule. He didn't speak very well, had bad breath, and also managed to spit a great deal when he did attempt to speak. Needless to say, he got picked on a lot. I'm ashamed to say that I was one of the people that picked on him. I was not as malicious as some, but I wasn't exactly nice, either. In fifth grade, he threw a chair off the stage after Mike Short made him very angry. He was harassed a lot that year, and I remember wanting to be 'cool' or fit in and lying on one occasion for Mike's benefit after Bill accused him of doing something. Mrs. Schulz (I think that's how she spelled it, but I could be wrong) liked me a great deal, and she asked me if what Bill said was true, and I said it was not. I remember feeling very guilty about that, and obviously for me to still remember it, it must have made quite an impression on me. I still regret lying that day. It certainly didn't make me cool or even get me to fit in for more than a day or two, since I also remember Mike threatening to beat me up later that year. One year in elementary school, Billy's mother was a substitute teacher. She brought in a guitar and made us sing (I really don't know how to spell this) Kumbaya I'm pretty sure there are laws against that, but I didn't know about those then. I remember her telling us not to pick on Bill so much. She told us that he had had a couple surgeries to fix the various problems with his mouth/teeth/jaw and that's why he spoke (and spat) the way he did. So later, in eighth or ninth grade, Bill got shoved into a locker or something and dislocated his shoulder. I don't know exactly what happened, since I wasn't there. But I do know that Bill dislocated both shoulders, and one shoulder was dislocated on two different occasions. I have heard that lawsuits were filed against the offending parties, but I have no actual knowledge of this. I know that Billy threatened Jim Ribaudo in ninth grade or thereabouts and vowed (this was obviously pre-Columbine era) that he was going to bring in a gun to kill him and others. On other occassions, Billy claimed to have been visited by, and spoken to, Jesus Christ. I think I'll refrain from commenting on that. At one point on the school bus, I had angered him in some way and he brought his skinny arm up to gain a tenuous grasp on my neck. Curious, I listened as he spluttered, "I could kill you right now." I laughed, and smacked his hand away with little effort. He looked very defeated. At JCC, Billy quickly developed a reputation for going after the Asian girls on campus. My friends and I speculated that he did this because he figured they were in no position to determine just how odd he was. In April, Bill was arrested for fraud at Office Max, where he was involved in a scam with gift cards and the merchandise purchased with them that totaled roughly $10,000. During the second week of school, we had "Activities Night" at Fredonia. This is held in the Williams Center. Basically, all the organizations on campus have tables and try to recruit people to join their groups. I was at a table for the Fredonia College Democrats (I'm now the 'Co-Vice President', which is the most bogus title I can think of) when Billy Dean approached me and said something like, "Wyatt! I always thought you were smart! I figured you'd be a Republican! What are you doing here?!" I didn't say a word, even though every cheap insult in the world was racing through my mind. When I didn't reply, he went on to tell me that he's in "Pre-Law" and is going to go to Columbia Law School when he's done with Fredonia. This was very, very close to being just too much for me to take, and I had to really restrain myself from saying, "wow Bill, that should really save you some money next time you have to be in court - you can represent yourself..." And I did restrain myself. I figured the kid's been through enough in his life, and I don't need to add any more to it. I just said, "That's good, Bill. That's great." That's been it, except for passing him on a sidewalk and saying hello. Tonight, I got an email from http://facebook.com telling me that William Dean had requested to add me as a friend. Normal practice in this situation, according to proper Facebook etiquette, is to confirm everyone who requests to add you. But I was so aghast that Billy Dean thought of me as his pal and in my confusion, I sent him the following message via the Facebook service: Bill, Perhaps you don't remember coming up to me and saying, "I always thought you were smart - how could you be a Democrat?!" Do you recall this particular exchange? I refrained from returning with any of the multitude of insults that I could have used to respond, and just shook my head. I know you had a rough time in school, and I realize that at certain times in my life I contributed to that. I regret being an asshole to you and to a lot of people. However, I regret those things a hell of a lot less when you act like you did on activities night. I realize that your experiences growing up probably made you hostile toward others, but in comparison to a lot of other people, I think I was fairly decent (eg - I didn't break or dislocate anything of yours and was never a defendant in a lawsuit brought by you or your family), and such an attack was not warranted. Anyway, I know I'm supposed to confirm every friend request I get, just to be polite - and hey, I know I don't get very many because several people on campus routinely think that I'm 30 years old and for that reason among others, I don't make a ton of friends... but I don't understand the progression of you essentially calling me an idiot and then adding me as a friend on Facebook. What gives? Couple that with your obvious devotion to several things which I abhor - politically and ideologically (and the reverse is probably true as well), and I am further confounded. The temptation in getting on Facebook is to search around and add every single person that you've ever met in your entire life, even if you haven't spoken to them (and didn't intend to) in years. I also know that everyone likes to have "_______ has 298 friends" next to their name. I've never really gotten into doing that though. I've always considered it presumptuous to "add" people as friends that I'm not ACTUALLY friendly with. For that reason, I normally wait for others to add me, just so I'm not assuming anything. It's the same reason I usually wait for other people to say hi to me before I say hi to them, which may even have the unintended consequence of some people viewing me as aloof or standoffish, though I am not. Anyway Bill, I think I WILL add you as a friend on Facebook, because it would probably be quite impolite NOT to do so. I just wanted you to know exactly how I felt about the whole thing. _________________ That's about it for now.

25 Years Gone

I'm a few days late posting on this - the actual anniversary of Bonham's death was Sunday, September 25. Saturday night into Sunday morning, I had the pleasure of blasting the 4/27/69 Fillmore West shows on Brett's uncle Kent's stereo while drinking wine around a campfire. On Sunday, I worked at Sears and paid my respects by playing the August 4, 1979 Knebworth show at high volume.

For me though, the day is less about celebrating what the man produced than it is about wondering just what might have been. The 1980 American tour had just been announced and tickets were going on sale. 1981 contained the promises of a new album, about which Bonham and Page had both been quoted as saying that they wanted to be a hard-hitting return to form after what some regarded as a lackluster effort on In Through the Out Door. I've often speculated that a harder Zeppelin album could have influenced the whole direction of the 1980s (think less cheesy keyboard/synthesizer effects). An underdeveloped song called alternately "Fire" or "Say You're Gonna Leave Me" can be found on bootleg copies of some of the band's last work, and it provides a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have realistically expected from a ninth Zeppelin studio release.

Dave Lewis has an excellent piece on http://tblweb.com/ - go to the Dave Lewis Diary link on the left hand side and read the 25th September post. Here is a passage:

"All that optimism and hope would evaporate over the next few hours.

The first call came just after 7pm. Carolyn from Newcastle, one of the initial Tight But Loose subscribers told me the shocking news she'd just heard. John Bonham had been found dead at Jimmy Page's Windsor home. I refused to believe it. ''How can it be?'' I explained ''They are in Bray rehearsing''.

I said I'd make some calls. I was in my bedroom so I turned on the radio and waited for the 7.30 news on Radio One. Surely if it was true it would be a lead item. It wasn't and for a few seconds I hung on to the hope it was all a mistake. Then it happened:''This news just in. Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham has been found dead....''

I just couldn't believe it. I rushed down to my Mum and Dad in a state of shock. My brother John came over to calm me down - the phone was constantly ringing from other fans and even a couple of radio stations in America wanting confirmation. John ushered me out to get a drink in a pub across town where I met up with my fellow Bedford Earls Court vets Dec and Tom also both shocked and stunned. I spent the night at Dec's finally going to sleep around 4am.

In the morning in a daze I walked the two miles home stopping in a newspaper shop (further irony - the shop is a stones throw from the house where years later I would move to). There in all the papers was the devastating news in cold hard print. The Daily Mail had a picture of Bonzo on stage at Earls Court on the front ....

I sat on a nearby bench and cried.

The next 48 hours passed in a blur. I stayed at my brothers on Friday. I was too upset to go to work until Monday. I did somehow manage to turn out for soccer on Sunday morning. I couldn't let my teammates down and got through it (we won 10-1 but it mattered little).

My world had turned upside down. Zeppelin had been so much a part of it for so long and it was gone. There was no way it could continue without Bonzo. I did not consider them carrying on from the moment I heard the news. The was grief from all quarters. Obviously for John's family, the group and their entourage.

Selfishly I guess also for myself - matters were further compounded on a personal level as I was undergoing the aftermath and fall out of an intense love affair that had dominated the last few months. The lady concerned reappeared that weekend worried after the catastrophic news knowing I'd be upset. It gave me false hope we might rekindle the affair. That was definitely not on her agenda. More misery.

I rang Unity at Swan Song on Monday. She was very supportive and informed me they all felt the magazine should go out as soon as possible. I wrote a new editorial which was one of the most painful things I've ever written.

I did think about going to the funeral but decided against it. It was just all too much.
The press reaction was another difficult factor to deal with. I had several calls to give quotes out. There was a terrible story in the Evening Standard siting Page's occult interest as the reason for their bad karma. They ran a picture of tour manager Rex King captioned as Bonzo which showed their ignorance of it all. (That trend still continues today: anyone else notice the pic on page 57 of this month's Classic Rock piece - it states the high jinks pic of Plant with a guy with his trousers down is Bonzo - it's actually record exec Phil Carson)

Overall the press coverage in the music weeklies was somewhat muted. There were no big four page tributes or special supplements. I think it gave them the opportunity to brush Zep under the carpet and concentrate on the new wave acts they were now all championing.

Looking back there was little sharing of grief with other fans. This was of course pre Internet days and even though I was in contact with a lot of fans, I think we all found it hard to take in. I also initally found it difficult to play any Zep at first. It was all too painful but eventually there was solace in the music. That above everything still remained."

Here's to the greatest drummer of them all - John Henry Bonham.

Various

So the prospective Fall Break Fredonia College Democrats trip (October 13-16 or thereabouts) to Washington, DC is now in jeopardy, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to go at all. It's going to cost more than we planned on, I guess. Paul, Tia, Ben, Clayt, Jen (DC area 'peeps') - if this is the first you're hearing about my trip down to your area, it's because I wasn't sure I was going to be able to go, and now I'm less sure than before. Since I've taken the days off from work anyway, maybe I'll come down on my own just for the hell of it. I will have to get that American Century paper done ahead of time though, and that's going to be a challenge. Avoiding procrastination? Yikes.

I think I'm probably missing this week's meeting to go to a Nuremberg - Sixty Years Later conference at Chautauqua Institution. I'm going to be up tomorrow by 6:30am to go, which should be fun. I'm borderline narcoleptic anyway, so this may be pushing it, and I don't want to be seen nodding off at a symposium on the Nazi war crimes tribunals....might be a little unseemly...

I may be missing a midterm in my PoliSci class this Wednesday due to the conference (that I'll have to make up when I come back), and I'm definitely missing my Philosophy class tomorrow...but I think this is a pretty valid excuse.

The DC internship situation is coming along. I finally got around to asking two professors for recommendations (Dr. Maulucci and Dr. Stinson), so progress is being made. I need all the paperwork in by the end of October.

This doesn't really go with the rest of what I have here, but that's why the post is titled "Various." Something recently reminded me of this particular series of events, and I thought I'd share what was on my mind.

In the Spring 2000 semester at JCC (I believe it was late March, early April), I had a Statistics class. I knew a couple people in the class, including Rebecca Ball and Aaron. Aaron and I weren't really speaking at the time, unfortunately. This was the first semester after that whole mess of a situation. That's not really the point of the story, though.

Anyway, there was an attractive girl in the class that sat on the opposite side of the room from me. One day as I was walking down the hall after class, she kind of sidled up and said hello to me. As it happens when any pretty girl talks to me of her own free will, I was quite surprised/taken aback, but not so much as when I heard the next words out of her mouth.

Girl: "Don't I know you from somewhere? You look familiar."

At this point, I didn't even have time to think just how much this sounded like the ever-popular pick-up line. I stammered for a moment before saying that I didn't believe we had ever met.

Girl: "That's weird - you look really familiar. What school did you go to?"

I told her that I had gone to Falconer, and she proceeded to ask me if I knew Pat Morales (sadly, Pat died of meningitis about a year or so after this conversation) and if I had ever been at one of his parties.

I answered that I did indeed know Pat, but that I had never been to one of his parties. Then, in what I know Matt and Ben would tell me now is way too much honesty, I went on to say that I hadn't really been invited to very many parties in high school. For whatever reason though, this girl was not to be deterred. She went on to list a variety of ways in which we might have seen each other, including listing her tenure at a McDonald's in Falconer (she had gone to Cassadaga). I finally relented and said that was probably where we had seen each other. All this time during the conversation, we had kept walking out of the building and were now nearing her car with her asking me if I could possibly find some time to help her with some of the Stats homework.

I couldn't really believe what was transpiring as I got her phone number and walked back to my car with an idiotic grin pasted across my face.

Anyway, my initial euphoria quickly wore off as I realized that Ann wasn't really my type. She turned up at Friendly's, where I was a waiter at the time, a couple times over the next few days. We called each other on the phone and actually talked for hours, although the conversations were less than memorable (I couldn't tell you what the hell we talked about for so long, but I know the batteries ran out in my cordless phone every night for four or five nights in a row). I do remember playing those cutesy games where you can't be the one to hang up first and you have to have several attempts before finally - after about half an hour has gone by - you both count down to hanging up simultaneously. Invariably, you get to the point where you don't think you're ever actually going to hang up the phone.

However, in what seems to be a Seinfeld-esque quality, I found things that I was not happy with. First of all, she smoked, which was a pretty big deal to me at the time (less so now, but never exactly a turn-on). She also tanned. Every day. She had a tanning booth in her house. She wore quite a bit of make-up. She looked good, had a nice body, all that - but I clearly remember telling her that with the combination of tanning and smoking, her face was going to develop a leather-like quality before she hit 40. In retrospect, of course, this may not have been the most tactful way to approach the situation, but as you may know, I tend to be fairly blunt sometimes.

We made out a few times, mostly in her driveway if I recall correctly - but it never went any further than that. The reason? There were a few factors. At that point, I hadn't 'been with' anyone, and she had been with two guys. There was the tanning/smoking thing, too. We also talked for hours, but not about anything that was exactly earth-shattering...although to be fair, I wasn't quite as picky in that particular area as I think I probably am now. The major thing was the ex-boyfriend. Apparently they had broken up less than a month before Ann approached me, and after a little while I gathered that they were not exactly done. After we had been seeing each other for a couple weeks, I found out that she was still "seeing" him, too. Naturally, this made me pretty angry. I told her that she had to pick one, since I certainly wasn't going to share. She complained that she wasn't sure what she wanted, feelings were conflicted, et cetera. I gave her one week to decide. I called her a week later, and she said she wasn't ready to quit whatever she still had going with him, and I said goodbye and good luck.
I couldn't imagine her being amenable to things if the situation had been reversed, and I assume anyone would be pissed off.

I called her that August to see if anything had changed and also because I had an extra concert ticket. I was going to see Creed at Darien Lake on September 1st. (Yeah, I know, I know - Creed?! Save it.) I didn't really find out her status with the guy, but she was considerably cooler to me than she had been, so I dropped it. Four weeks later, I met Destini, and you could say that everything probably worked out like it was supposed to except for the part about me fucking things up.

As an epilogue to the story, I had a conversation with Destini (many months after our break-up) about Ann when I came back from Fort Collins toward the end of 2003, and she told me that she heard a rumor that Ann was claiming to someone that she and I had taken things much further - had actually turned a double into a home run. I don't remember the source of the rumor, although I think it might have been Melinda Centi that told Des that. I laughed quite loud when I heard that, of course. Destini and I were each other's 'firsts,' but that wasn't the funny part. It was that any girl would actually claim that she had been more intimate with me than she had - even under duress or extreme drunkenness. Indeed - the very fact that she would say such a thing seems to prove the claim false, since the few girls that I've actually been with would probably rather forget the experience - ha.

Anyway, I have to wake up in about six hours or less and I should get started on that Philosophy homework that would have been due tomorrow but which I will likely now hand in Thursday. It looks like it's going to suck. The Pearl Jam review is going to require some time, and may not get done now for another few days. I trust that Paul and Tia will enjoy the show in Philadelphia. I should have written that up tonight, but this little story had been on my mind lately.

If you've noticed a cease-fire in regard to the posting of NYT editorials, it's because they're now available only on a pay-to-read basis under the Times Select features, which I'm not happy about. Undoubtedly all my rich benefactors will read this and sign me up so that I may continue to provide good topical material for my faithful readers.... is it repetitive to say 'rich benefactors'? Are all benefactors rich?

Something for you to ponder. Good night.

Pearl Jam/Robert Plant Benefit Concert For Katrina Relief

You may have seen this elsewhere already, but I think it's pretty cool when artists I really respect get together for something like this.

September 21st

PEARL JAM TO BE JOINED BY ROBERT PLANT AT KATRINA BENEFIT

Pearl Jam will be joined by former Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant as part of the lineup of the band's Hurricane Katrina benefit, according to Reuters. The event, for which tickets are priced at $1,000, will take place on October 5th at the House Of Blues in Chicago. A spokesperson for the club said that four luxury boxes priced at $25,000 each have already been sold. Proceeds from the show will go to the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, the Jazz Foundation of America and the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic, among other organizations.

PJ Show

Here's the setlist and notes from twofeetthick - my review will hopefully follow fairly soon (in the next couple days). We'll see.

09/19/05 - Air Canada Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada

Ed pre-set: Porch

set: Release, Go, Animal, Save You, Given To Fly, Corduroy, Love Boat Captain, Elderly Woman..., Even Flow, Habit, Daughter/(W.M.A. / Androgynous Mind / Bad), Better Man, 1/2 Full, Black, Do The Evolution, Rearviewmirror

first encore: You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, Present Tense, Wishlist, Harvest Moon, Indifference, Alive

second encore:Blood, Jeremy, Leaving Here, Rockin' In The Free World, Yellow Ledbetter


TFT Notes: With members of U2 in attendance, Ed thanks them for "opening" for them in Toronto (U2 played four nights in a row over the previous weekend). A snippet of U2's "A Sort Of Homecoming" was played before "Elderly Woman...". Ed said, "Speaking as a dirty greasy American" in Habit. "Daughter" is tagged with a verse from "W.M.A.", the "Hey, Hey, it's OK" from Sonic Youth's "Androgynous Mind" and U2's "Bad" ("If I could, yes I would / If I could, I would / Let it go"), and a bit of a call-and-response with melodic "Hey ho, let's go"s. There was also a very short "Bad" teaser before "Habit", with Ed saying he thought "Bad" was best song he'd heard about addiction, before he mentioned that "Habit" was another song about addiction. Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney joins the band on backing vocals on "Harvest Moon". Ed can't seem to find the right notes on the harmonica during "Harvest Moon" so he takes it and tosses it into the crowd. Jeff played all four solo parts during "Leaving Here", and Sleater-Kinney sing backup. The Edge from U2 is setting side stage (Mike's) all night and Bono joins the band for "Rockin' in the Free World". poster

Well...So That Was Cool

Today was the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. lecture in Fredonia. After going through the line and getting my book signed by Mr. Kennedy, I was talking to Laura, Randy, and Matt when I happened to glance to my right.

Destini was standing there in line.

It was the first time I had seen her since July of 2004. Well, I'm not going to try and be cool like I don't remember the exact date. It was July 24.

I gave her a hug, but it was barely reciprocated. With her mother droning on behind her, "how come you don't hug me like that when I see you on campus - ha ha ha" - I tried to ignore it....

I would think that my feelings were quite evident - splattered all over, it seemed - as I asked her what she was doing after the signing and if she had some time to talk. She seemed incredibly disinterested...even apathetic. She then intimated that she had a nightmare last night and then trailed off with, "you know how I am with my dreams...."

Yep, I know.

So I get the impression that she had a negative dream about me the night before and for that reason was reluctant to do anything or say anything to me. I don't know. A few of you know that there were a couple incidents when we were together where she dreamed that I left her/cheated on her and she would go an entire day without speaking to me or letting me know in any way what the hell was going on.

I probably looked rather deflated, since I was. She asked me if I was going to DC in the spring, and I told her that I probably was.

I told her that I would wait for her to come out of the signing, which I did. But when she came over, she talked mostly to Randy and Laura and Matt.

The whole interaction didn't last longer than 10 minutes. Probably not even five. I don't know what I was expecting, but it didn't happen.

Hell, I know damn well what I was expecting, and as unrealistic as it is for me to expect her to be happy to see me, I guess I still thought she would be.

It was evident once again that she has moved well past me in her life, hardened her heart after our relationship, and is just not emotionally engaged in what we were to each other - whereas despite the time that has passed, I am still stuck stuck stuck.

Things are a tad better, or at least colder, with me. I did not get queezy so much as just a bit light-headed and shaky.

I have to remind myself once again that she is far different from the person that she was and really from the person I would want and expect her to be if for some reason we got to be around each other on a regular basis.

Superficially speaking, she was wearing make-up...not a lot or anything, but of course she didn't wear any when we first got together, and I don't think she wore any at all until after we had been together over a year. So it's not as if I have this super hang-up about make-up (although the less, the better), but it's just a tiny indicator that she's not the 2000-2001 era Des. (We were an "item" from 9-28-00 to 10-30-02 and then with some fits and starts thrown in after that for good measure/additional heartache)

I, for that matter, am obviously not the 2000-2001 era Wyatt, either. I'm not sure that's a good thing or a bad thing overall. I imagine that it would probably be a mix.

Anyway, there's probably very little point to all this rambling. Just me talking and using my blog as a public journal, which is undoubtedly unwise, but fuck it, right?

The slight irony is that I had tentatively planned on asking this girl in my College Dems organization to go to coffee or something with me tonight after the meeting, and I was still going to, but circumstances did not unfold in quite the optimal way and I just decided not to, since my "game" - as Matt would say - would have been/is all screwed up from this whole thing.

As a result, I'll be thinking about this all night and probably for a while.

Great.

Liars

It's somewhat amusing in a sad way when liars are offended by accusations of lying. Although you've previously caught them in lies and they have admitted lying, they are nonetheless indignant.

They act shocked..."I wouldn't lie about that!"

You may want to ask, "Really? Can you provide me with a list of what you would and would not lie about? Because that would be really helpful when attempting to determine if what is spilling out of your mouth at any given time is complete bullshit or not. You know - I mean - if you get some time and it wouldn't be too much trouble. I would appreciate it."

Often, liars will act confused when caught in a lie. Sometimes, after some initial floundering, they will find a way to blame you for their lies. This is when it gets really good. Sometimes, if enough time has passed, and you were not grievously injured by the lie, you can develop a slight grin on your face as you wait in anticipation for the liar to explain exactly how it is your fault that they were forced to lie to you.

"But...but....I only said that because you had already said that we....." blah blah blah blah blah blah blah....

You'd like to laugh at the situation, but you can't. You can't laugh because you feel so sorry for the liar. They have to go through life like this. Their whole life. I'm not talking about simple white lies here (although the definition of white lie changes according to who you may ask). I'm talking about people who do it so compulsively that it has become interwoven with their personality. They lie routinely, and have earned the label of liar.

Liars are also confused when you find it difficult to trust them. They ask why you're looking at them so quizzically after they just uttered something that sounds somewhat dubious. You want to say calmly to them -

"Well, because you're a liar, that's why. You have proven yourself to be rather worthless as a purveyor of truth. You are not worthy of my trust. I find it difficult not to reject nearly everything you say as false."

I hope no one takes this rant personally. I'm talking about liars in a general way, but readers may be forgiven if they get the impression that I am talking about one person in particular.

And that can't be right.

Can it?

Notice the fine, but distinct line between lies and sarcasm. Goodnight, kids.

Pearl Jam Site

This site seems to have picked up the slack from www.fivehorizons.com and is doing concert setlists/reviews. I will be joined by Turck for Monday's Toronto show, hopefully from a gloriously close TenClub seating arrangement. We'll see. Anway, I'm looking forward to the show.

Robert Plant - Live in London (Ontario) - September 14, 2005

Setlist:
No Quarter
Shine It All Around
Black Dog
Freedom Fries
That's The Way
Another Tribe
Hey Joe
Four Sticks
Tin Pan Valley
Gallows Pole
Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You
____

Brother Ray (with You Shook Me references)
Whole Lotta Love

Notes:
Plant really reached for some high notes during Black Dog. Freedom Fries was dedicated to Canada's neighbor...

During That's The Way, instead of singing "everything that lives is born to die," Robert repeated the "all the fish that lay in dirty water dying..." and grimaced as he did so, conscious of his error.

While that song was about environmental pollution in 1970, Another Tribe was about the "human pollution" of current events. This was my fifth Plant show of the year, but the first time I had heard Another Tribe live. It was a nice surprise and very well done.

Hey Joe was excellent. It is one of those songs that simply does not retain anything close to the same power in any recorded format and must be witnessed live. The anticipation that builds to the climax of "JUST - LIKE - I - I - I - I - SAID" as the last word is stretched up and up and up is just fantastic. As the band crashes down on the crowd at that moment and they commence the freak-out section, everyone is mesmerized.

Four Sticks was just slightly different from the 2001-2003 Sensation tours. There was a bit more of the light/shade, quiet/loud dynamic added to this rendition.

Tin Pan Valley is now enhanced with a more intense light show and is in the same vein as the version that was played on the Jay Leno Tonight Show in July (with the bombastic opening leading into the subdued electronica and drum track). Skin had a good solo for this song.

Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You is still a crowd favorite, but it doesn't quite do it for me. Even the Page/Plant 95-98 versions pale in comparison to the 1969 Zeppelin performances, but at least the guitar solo had some meat on its bones...although my friend Randy disagreed with me, I thought Skin's strangling of the guitar neck with a few violent snaps of the strings with his picking fingers hardly constituted a good solo. Unfortunately, he hasn't been any better at any of the other shows I've seen this year on this particular song. Apparently Plant doesn't have a problem with how he plays it, but it leaves me a little wanting. I think Skin's playing on every other song is good to excellent - it's just this song that is lacking.

Brother Ray was a definite surprise as the first encore. During the break, a basic Yamaha keyboard was brought out in front of the keyboards set up on the riser. Mics were placed around in a semi-circle and the large hand-drums were set out. Plant was less than pleased with the very claustrophobic set-up of the stage and warned that someone was "going to swing for this - there aren't any swingers here!" Right on cue, Justin Adams stepped forward and intentionally bumped into Robert with an "oh, sorry..." Skin clapped and sang backing vocals while Baggott riffed on the keys, Fuller slapped the stand-up bass, and Deamer and Adams drummed. Plant threw in some blues cliches and even a line or two from You Shook Me with the 'ohhh, yeaaahs' and various other vocal gymnastics. Eventually, Adams walked over to get his guitar and the microphones were moved as the band moved back to their normal positions and Robert talked about the 'Hoochie-Coochie Man' before moving into Whole Lotta Love as the crowd exploded into a frenzy. Robert picked up the lemon that someone had tossed onstage earlier for the "yoouuu neeeeeeed" part of the song. When it first appeared, he had said, "at 57, you wouldn't think that something like this would have any significance, but - I'm happy to report that everything is working quite well, without chemicals!"

There was another "Listen to This, Eddie" moment in the middle of Black Dog. A previous reviewer on tblweb.com thought that this was a reference to Ed Vedder of Pearl Jam, but I would highly doubt it. I think Plant just enjoys the looks he gets from the boot-savvy collector-type members of the audience when he drops the name of the 6-21-77 LA Forum show.

All in all an excellent - but short - show. Hey Joe, Tin Pan Valley, and Four Sticks were definite highlights for me, and the Brother Ray interlude was pretty unique, although the London crowd missed a great song with the removal of The Enchanter from the set. The entire show was on the short side of ninety minutes. I realize not everyone drove four hours to get there like I did, but I got the feeling most people wanted more. It is certainly not as if he's lacking in material to play.

Brown Resigns as Head of FEMA

Undoubtedly, most people saw this yesterday.

September 12, 2005
Embattled Brown Resigns As FEMA Chief
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:01 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Mike Brown, the subject of blistering criticism after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and overwhelmed the government's response, quit Monday as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The White House moved quickly to replace him, installing a top agency official with three decades of firefighting experience as acting director.
Some of Brown's critics agreed with his decision, saying it would put the focus on efforts to manage the aftermath of the disaster, including helping the thousands of people left homeless.
Bush named R. David Paulison to replace Brown.
The president was told of Brown's resignation earlier Monday and spoke to Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff, who was Brown's boss, from Air Force One in the afternoon as he flew back to Washington from an overnight visit to the region.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House did not seek Brown's resignation.
''This was Mike Brown's decision and we respect his decision,'' McClellan said.
McClellan praised Brown's work but conspicuously left out any reference to his contribution to the Katrina efforts.
''The president appreciates Mike Brown's service,'' he said. ''Mike has done a lot of great work on a number of hurricanes.''
Paulison has led the U.S. Fire Administration, a division of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, since December 2001, according to a biography posted on FEMA's Web site. He led FEMA's emergency preparedness force from 2003-2004. He also is a certified paramedic.
He is a career firefighter from Miami who was among the emergency workers responding to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 in the Florida Everglades in 1996.
Paulison also was chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, leading 1,900 personnel and a $200 million operating budget. He was in charge of Dade County's emergency management office.
In an interview, Brown said he feared he had become a distraction.
His resignation came three days after he was sent back to headquarters from the Gulf area, where he had been the government's disaster point-man. It also came a little more than a week after Bush, on his first on-the-ground visit to the region after the storm, said, ''Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.''
''The focus has got to be on FEMA, what the people are trying to do down there,'' Brown told The Associated Press on Monday.
Brown said he spoke Saturday to White House chief of staff Andrew Card and was not asked to resign. Brown said the decision to step down was his.
''I think it's in the best interest of the agency and the best interest of the president to do that and get the media focused on the good things that are going on, instead of me,'' he said.
Brown said he last talked to Bush five or six days ago.
''For anyone to claim that FEMA fell on its face, or that FEMA did not do its job with Hurricane Katrina, I think is just, just incorrect,'' he said.
In a separate interview with AP Radio, Brown said: ''It's never fun being the fall guy, and I'm not certain I'm being made to be the fall guy. But if being the fall guy gets done everything I want to get done, fine.''
Brown, 50, and his agency fell under intense criticism from Democrats and Republicans almost from the moment Hurricane Katrina tore through Gulf Coast areas of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
FEMA's response was criticized as slow and ineffective, posing political problems for a president who prizes his reputation as a leader, burnished after his swift response to the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Polls show most Americans believe Bush could have done more to help Katrina's victims, though they also blame leaders of Louisiana and New Orleans. Bush's overall job approval rating is at the lowest point of his presidency.
Brown had conceded that all the resources the agency had in place before the storm were overwhelmed and that he did not anticipate the total breakdown in communications.
His limited, prior experience in disaster relief also became an issue. Before joining FEMA as deputy counsel in 2001, Brown, a lawyer, was head of the International Arabian Horse Association.
Brown also didn't help himself with seemingly insensitive or ill-advised comments, such as when he said the government didn't know about 20,000 people holed up in squalid conditions at the New Orleans convention center until a day after their difficulties had been widely reported in the news.
Last week, Brown denied allegations that his resume exaggerated his emergency management background. He also canceled, two days after announcing it, a debit card program that was to give $2,000 to hurricane evacuees.
''Michael Brown's departure from FEMA is long overdue, and his resignation is the right thing for the country and for the people of the Gulf Coast states,'' said House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. But she and other critics said more needs to be done to fix the problems that plagued the federal government's response to Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., stopped short of criticizing Brown but said he was pleased with the leadership now in place in what he described as a government-wide failure in responding to Katrina. Brown was replaced in the Gulf area by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen.
------
Associated Press writers Jennifer Loven in Mississippi and Ron Fournier, Lara Jakes Jordan and Randolph E. Schmid in Washington contributed to this report.

FEMA Head Michael Brown: Dismissed, But Not Fired?

Apparently, Brown is no longer in charge of the Katrina devastation, but he is still FEMA director. In other words, he's allowed to handle other disasters, just not this one anymore.

Asked what his immediate plans are, Brown replied: ''I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep. And then I'm going to go right back to FEMA and continue to do all I can to help these victims. This story's not about me. This story's about the worst disaster of the history of our country that stretched every government to its limit and now we have to help these victims.''

And lest we forget... 'The White House had insisted publicly for days that Bush retained confidence in his FEMA chief. Last Friday, Bush praised Brown during a tour of Alabama, telling him, ''Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.'''

[emphasis added to point out how ridiculous the statement is]

Oh, Barbara...

I'm sure some of you have already heard about this, since it was on The Daily Show the other day. Some of the best stuff comes out when Republicans are being candid.

September 7, 2005

Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - As President Bush battled criticism over the response to Hurricane Katrina, his mother declared it a success for evacuees who "were underprivileged anyway," saying on Monday that many of the poor people she had seen while touring a Houston relocation site were faring better than before the storm hit.

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas," Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program "Marketplace." "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."

Mrs. Bush toured the Astrodome complex with her husband, former President George Bush, as part of an administration campaign throughout the Gulf Coast region to counter criticism of the response to the storm. Former President Bush and former President Bill Clinton are helping raise money for the rebuilding effort.

White House officials did not respond on Tuesday to calls for comment on Mrs. Bush's remarks.
______________________

Would anyone care to defend these remarks???

Krugman Column in Today's NYT

Pieces of note:

As Bloomberg News puts it, [FEMA's] "upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management." By now everyone knows FEMA's current head went from overseeing horse shows to overseeing the nation's response to disaster, with no obvious qualifications other than the fact that he was Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate.

All that's missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative deals for politically connected companies, that fails to deliver essential services. But give it time - they're working on that, too.

Can the administration escape accountability again? Some of the tactics it has used to obscure its failure in Iraq won't be available this time. The reality of the catastrophe was right there on our TV's, although FEMA is now trying to prevent the media from showing pictures of the dead. And people who ask hard questions can't be accused of undermining the troops.

But the other factors that allowed the administration to evade responsibility for the mess in Iraq are still in place. The media will be tempted to revert to he-said-she-said stories rather than damning factual accounts. The effort to shift blame to state and local officials is under way. Smear campaigns against critics will start soon, if they haven't already. And raw political power will be used to block any independent investigation.

Best Recently Sighted Slogan...

To Creationists, The Flintstones is a documentary...

Katrina Timeline

Josh Marshall at www.talkingpointsmemo.com has put up a timeline of events immediately before Katrina's impact up to Tuesday.

Keith Olbermann had a video timeline on his show last night, and it's been posted at http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/09/07.html#a4845 - the link to the video clip is http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-Timeline-Katrina.wmv
This is a little more striking than the text-based timeline, of course.

And then there's this priceless use of PhotoShop...
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/09/07.html#a4834
The guitar was presented to Bush on Tuesday, August 30 by country artist Mark Wills. Tuesday was the same day that two levees broke in New Orleans and the same day that Bush announced he was cutting short his vacation.

Mike Brown of FEMA - Quite a Guy

Once again, we have a situation of - "this would be funny if it wasn't so sad..."

MIKE BROWN'S PADDED RESUMÉ.
Legal Brief by Paul Campos
Post date: 09.08.05
Issue date: 09.19.05

By now, the basic contours of Mike Brown's ascendancy to director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have come to light. Journalists have uncovered that Brown had almost no relevant experience for the position and got hired by fema because he was a longtime friend of George W. Bush's close associate Joe Allbaugh. The story being reported, in other words, is that Brown was a lawyer who ended up with a crucial post in the Bush administration because of rank cronyism.

This is a well-known Washington narrative: hotshot lawyer gets appointed to a high government office despite lacking the expertise someone in the position ought to possess. For example, on September 6, The Washington Post fit the Brown scandal into this narrative in a front-page story, saying that Brown has been "caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history."

Yet, far from being a caricature, this description, if anything, understates the absurdity of the situation. The real story of Brown's meteoric rise from obscurity is far more disturbing, as well as a good deal more farcical. It's clear that hiring Brown to run fema was an act of gross recklessness, given his utter lack of qualifications for the job. What's less clear is the answer to the question of exactly what, given Brown's real biography, he is qualified to do.

To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown's biography on fema's website reports that he's a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. This is not, to put it charitably, a well-known institution. For example, I've been a law professor for the past 15 years and have never heard of it. Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)--the organization that, along with the American Bar Association, accredits the nation's law schools. Most prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-aals law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-aals institutions. So it's fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession's hierarchy.

So what did Brown, who received his J.D. in 1981, do with his non-AALS law degree? In 1985, Brown joined the firm of Long, Ford, Lester & Brown in Enid, Oklahoma. When I spoke to one of its former members, Andrew Lester (the firm no longer exists), he recalled that Brown was with the firm for only "about 18 months." Lester, who is a longtime friend of Brown, believes that Brown spent most of his time in the first few years after law school pursuing his own legal practice and representing the interests of a prominent local family. Lester vigorously defended his friend's overall abilities, as well as his qualifications for the fema directorship, pointing out that fema had dealt with more than 100 federal emergencies during Brown's tenure. In any case, despite the claim of Brown's fema biography that he practiced law for 20 years prior to his 2001 appointment as fema's general counsel, it appears that, by 1987, he had already more or less abandoned his nascent legal career. From 1987 to 1990, Brown's resumé includes being the sacrificial lamb for the Oklahoma Republican Party in a 1988 congressional election, in which he won 27 percent of the vote against the incumbent Democrat, and stints as an assistant city manager and city councilman in Edmond, Oklahoma. (According to fema, because of these positions, "Mike Brown has a lot of experience managing people.") By 1991, he had moved to Colorado, where he became commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association (iaha). This position, which never made his FEMA bio, was Brown's full-time job from 1991 to 2001, and it had nothing to do with the practice of law.

Brown's job was to make sure that horse show judges followed the rules, and his enthusiasm for their strict enforcement won him the nickname of "the czar," as well as the enmity of contestants, some of whom sued the Association, as well as Brown himself. According to a September 6 Denver Post article, Brown became embroiled in controversy when allegations were made that, to help pay his legal fees, Brown solicited a nearly $50,000 contribution from an iaha member whose conduct he was supposed to regulate. Lester, who represented Brown in the iaha's suits, told me that this was a misunderstanding, due in part to the iaha's initial unwillingness to fulfill its contractual obligation to cover Brown's legal costs. "People are focusing on these attacks made against him when he was with the iaha," Lester says, rather than looking at the work that Brown had actually done at fema. Brown resigned from his position in 2001 under pressure, and the iaha was reorganized as the Arabian Horse Association.

What, then, are we to make of the claim in Brown's fema biography that, prior to joining the Agency, he had spent most of his professional career practicing law in Colorado? Normally, an attorney practicing law in a state for ten years would have left a record of his experience in public documents. But just about the only evidence of Brown's Colorado legal career is the Web page he submitted to Findlaw.com, an Internet site for people seeking legal representation. There, he lists himself as a member of the "International Arabian Horse Association Legal Dept." and claims to be competent to practice law across a dizzying spectrum of specialties--estate planning, family law, employment law for both plaintiffs and defendants, real-estate law, sports law, labor law, and legislative practice. With all this expertise, it's all the more striking that one can't find any other evidence of Brown's legal career in Colorado.

So what legal work did Mike Brown perform before his stunning reversal of fortune? According to his fema biography, "[H]e served as a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court." Translation: In Oklahoma, he graded answers to bar exam questions, and, in Colorado, he volunteered to serve on the local attorney disciplinary board.

When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer--a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn't attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the iaha, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA.

It's bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don't qualify them. But Brown wasn't a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the iaha, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what's known in the Mafia as a "connected guy." That such a person could end up in one of the federal government's most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works--or, rather, doesn't.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Houses Of The Holy - Album Cover Discussion

This article talks about the making of the album cover for Zeppelin's follow-up to the legendary fourth album. The art was designed by Hipgnosis/Storm Thorgerson (who did a lot of Floyd album covers...later doing Audioslave, Phish, Dream Theater, Mars Volta, et cetera).

Some of the information given in the article is false, but on the whole it's fairly accurate.

My Thoughts on Recent Events

Well, I've made my feelings regarding the recent disaster along the Gulf Coast known mostly through the writings of others. This is due to a few factors. These include time constraints, lack of a computer of my own, et cetera. Of course, I've been impressed with the articles I've posted - that's why I posted them here. Anyway - the time has come for me to air my own thoughts...

Certainly the storm that hit the Gulf area was stronger than any in the US have witnessed in a while. However, it's also true that most of what we've all seen in the media in the past few days is due less to the force of the storm and more to 1) the lack of planning and preparation and 2) the lack of a sufficient response.

I feel like echoing a bumper sticker I saw recently on a car in the Fredonia parking lot:
IF YOU'RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!

If you HAVE been paying attention, you'll know that computer models have shown for years exactly what a hurricane of Katrina's intensity would do to the levee and flood wall system of the city of New Orleans. That's why books and articles with titles like "Drowning New Orleans" have appeared on shelves going back a number of years. They weren't science fiction stories. They were based on real evidence. Obviously we don't have enough federal funding to address every single disaster scenario that could - hypothetically - take place. BUT - this is one that was eminently possible and even probable, especially given the increased number of hurricanes likely to develop in an increasingly warming ocean. Oh wait - that kind of acknowledgement of global warming (AKA "Climate Change" for you Cato Institute devotees...) would require a different administration. The severity of the weather that we deal with will only increase as we allow people in positions of power (politicians and corporate executives) to further neglect the environment.

There are a lot of theories going around on the airwaves and on the printed page. I'm not sure I'm ready to seriously suggest that Republicans in charge of allocating funding for such things consciously said something to the tune of "screw New Orleans - they vote for Democrats when they vote at all...," but you know - I'm not ready to summarily dismiss such a notion either. Certainly the images on our screens of the displaced "urban poor" (who, if you missed it, happen to be overwhelmingly black) did not seem to trigger a lightning fast reaction from Mr. Bush or anyone in his administration.

Perhaps the images of blacks in need in our own country are just as easy for people in power to ignore as are the images of blacks in Africa. After all - July's Live8's principal purpose was for the G8 nations to cancel African debt - a plea that only the United States President was able to almost completely dismiss (check the figures of what Bush promised, and compare them - proportionally - to those of the other G8 countries if you don't want to believe me).

Don't think I'm only indicting Republicans, or accusing them as a group. Democrats have looked at the urban poor as a voting block and only as a voting block for too long, taking them for granted because - after all - where else are they going to go? The Republicans? Surely not. Instead, they will more than likely stay home, believing that no one will actually help them. Hardly anyone in a position of power seems to see people as people anymore. Marketing executives and businessmen see people in terms of dollars and politicians of all stripes see people as votes for and against them. It is their nature, and they must fight hard against it.

I have some reluctance about this prospective Washington internship in the spring (something that I have yet to finalize, by the way). The reluctance stems from my belief that my remaining idealism will be shattered working in a Democratic congressional office as I see firsthand the willingness to compromise things that should not be compromised, all in the name of a few dollars of campaign contributions, or in the interest of getting support for some other piece of legislation. Some people believe that you need to become part of the political system in order to change it, but I'm not sure that this is true. Democrats have become adept at talking about the problems of the poor, and they even manage to do some things in the social welfare system when they're in power. They have their limitations though (see Hilary Clinton's bid for universal health care in 1993-1994, opposed by the American Medical Association just as firmly then as FDR was opposed by the AMA in the 1930s).

I'm getting off topic now...

There will be those people who shake their heads and wag their fingers, saying that the political Left is "playing politics in this time of tragedy, when we all need to come together." This, if you can't see through it, is utter bullshit. It allows those in power to shrug off all legitimate criticism as illegitimate attempts to cash in on others' misery. It is the same tactic that would have been employed after 9/11 had it been necessary. It wasn't necessary, since the Democrats - almost every one of them - rolled over and spread their collective cheeks. Sorry if you don't like my imagery. One person who didn't is Russ Feingold, Senator from Wisconsin. He may be the candidate to watch in 2008. He was one of the only people to oppose the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

The truth is that for the most part, we're really NOT coming together. Sure, we're sending money and donating water and all that. All those things are designed to let us say, "oh, isn't that terrible" while we feel good about ourselves for "doing the right thing" and then we can stop thinking about it altogether.

There will be quite a few people who compare this disaster with the tsunami in East Asia last December, and say things to the effect of "well, if we can take care of foreigners, then we should be able to take care of our own people." This, of course, is distorted morality. What makes people in one country more valuable than those of another?

My father recently brought me the story of one of his friends whom he has grown apart from in recent years. The friend helped build the house where I grew up. He said that this was God's way of wiping out some of the riffraff and undesirables - the poor niggers that had it coming. Some people wonder at times how I developed a negative opinion of organized religion and Christianity in particular. It is because of people like this, who go to church every Sunday and count themselves among the most pious and the most qualified to point out the wrongs of others. And this all takes place when some of the most spiritual people we have in this nation or any other - that is to say the economically depressed blacks in the South - are praying their hearts out and praising the Lord. The irony is just too much for me, and my eyes roll almost to the back of my head.

I don't want to seem like I'm dismissing every religious person, since if that were the case, I would be just as guilty as the bigots I despise.

The nation as a whole is not as well off as people would like to believe. We are still deeply divided by race. We certainly don't talk about it as much as we used to, and perhaps that leads to the perception that everything has changed since the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s. That perception is false. People know what they're supposed to say and what they should say, but that doesn't mean that they believe it. You'll see that when minority candidates run for national office. In the privacy of the voting booth, the ugliness of our prejudices will be on full display.

The point that Paul Krugman made in the op-ed piece I posted last week is one of the best I've seen made. The simple truth is that if the the situation in New Orleans had happened in Maine or Vermont or some other predominantly wealthy white area, the response would undoubtedly have been faster. You may brush such assertions aside if you like, but give them some thought before you do. Poor people are our cannon fodder. They serve and protect us. I'm not talking about Iraq - they would be advised to protect themselves over there, but of course they're not really enhancing our security, and nothing anyone says will make me change my opinion about that. I would love to see a study done on the economic status of people that enlist in the military. The results would be laughable in a horrible sort of way about exactly what they portray about our country, but they would also be incredibly predictable. If you don't know what I'm talking about (and the very mention of this movie will anger some), check out that scene with the military recruiters in Fahrenheit 9/11.

The poor are the labor that grease the proverbial wheels of our capitalist consumer-driven economy. Not just the poor in this country but the poor of all nations. That's globalism for you.

Happy Labor Day.

White House Political Strategy: Blame The Locals

September 5, 2005
White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and ANNE E. KORNBLUT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - Under the command of President Bush's two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.
It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.
The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. It began late last week after Congressional Republicans called White House officials to register alarm about what they saw as a feeble response by Mr. Bush to the hurricane, according to Republican Congressional aides.
As a result, Americans watching television coverage of the disaster this weekend began to see, amid the destruction and suffering, some of the most prominent members of the administration - Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense; and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state - touring storm-damaged communities.
Mr. Bush is to return to Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday; his first visit, on Friday, left some Republicans cringing, in part because the president had little contact with residents left homeless.
Republicans said the administration's effort to stanch the damage had been helped by the fact that convoys of troops and supplies had begun to arrive by the time the administration officials turned up. All of those developments were covered closely on television.
In many ways, the unfolding public relations campaign reflects the style Mr. Rove has brought to the political campaigns he has run for Mr. Bush. For example, administration officials who went on television on Sunday were instructed to avoid getting drawn into exchanges about the problems of the past week, and to turn the discussion to what the government is doing now.
"We will have time to go back and do an after-action report, but the time right now is to look at what the enormous tasks ahead are," Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on "Meet the Press" on NBC.
One Republican with knowledge of the effort said that Mr. Rove had told administration officials not to respond to Democratic attacks on Mr. Bush's handling of the hurricane in the belief that the president was in a weak moment and that the administration should not appear to be seen now as being blatantly political. As with others in the party, this Republican would discuss the deliberations only on condition of anonymity because of keen White House sensitivity about how the administration and its strategy would be perceived.
In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.
"The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials," Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials."
That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.
In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.
Mr. Bush's communications director, Nicolle Devenish, was married this weekend in Greece, and a number of Mr. Bush's political advisers - including Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman - attended the wedding.
Ms. Rice did not return to Washington until Thursday, after she was spotted at a Broadway show and shopping for shoes, an image that Republicans said buttressed the notion of a White House unconcerned with tragedy.
These officials said that Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of the situation's political ramifications. As is common when this White House confronts a serious problem, management was quickly taken over by Mr. Rove and a group of associates including Mr. Bartlett. Neither man responded to requests for comment.
White House advisers said that Mr. Bush expressed alarm after his return to Washington from the Gulf Coast.
One senior White House official said that Mr. Bush appeared at a senior staff meeting in the Situation Room on Friday and called the results on the ground "unacceptable." At the encouragement of Mr. Bartlett, officials said, he repeated the comment later in the Rose Garden, the start of this campaign.
_____________________

...and here's an op-ed by Bob Herbert in the Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05herbert.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fBob%20Herbert

September 5, 2005
A Failure of Leadership
By BOB HERBERT
"Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"
Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.
The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.
Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.
The president didn't seem to notice.
Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces.
Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to notice.
Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.
Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the president of the United States didn't seem to notice.
He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.
After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this administration.)
Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.
And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.
Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.

An Article Entitled "Political Science"

I won't post this whole article, since it's very long. However, here are the first couple paragraphs. The piece is in regard to the Bush Administration's tendency to dismiss hard science and claim controversy or a real dilemma where none exists.

When Donald Kennedy, a biologist and editor of the eminent journal Science, was asked what had led so many American scientists to feel that George W. Bush's administration is anti-science, he isolated a familiar pair of culprits: climate change and stem cells. These represent, he said, ''two solid issues in which there is a real difference between a strong consensus in the science community and the response of the administration to that consensus.'' Both issues have in fact riled scientists since the early days of the administration, and both continue to have broad repercussions. In March 2001, the White House abruptly withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the U.S. withdrawal was still a locus of debate at this summer's G8 summit in Scotland. And the administration's decision to limit federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research four years ago -- a move that many scientists worry has severely hampered one of the most fruitful avenues of biomedical inquiry to come along in decades -- resulted in a shift in the dynamics of financing, from the federal government to the states and private institutions. In November 2004, Californians voted to allocate $3 billion for stem-cell research in what was widely characterized as a ''scientific secession.''
Yet what remains most divisive, according to Kennedy, is not the Bush administration's specific policies, but a more general sense that ''scientific conclusions, reached either within agencies or by people outside of government, are being changed for political reasons by people who have not done the scientific work.'' It is this sense that science is being ''misused'' that has given rise to two Congressional bills....

Frank Rich Column - Comparing/Contrasting

There have been various complaints about the long posts that are not actually my words. The reason for this is that if I only post the link to stories in the Times, they're only freely accessible for about one week. Since I want people to be able to read the articles I reference for longer than one week, in some cases, I've started to post the entire thing. So deal with it.
___________________
September 4, 2005
Falluja Floods the Superdome
By FRANK RICH
AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.
A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.
In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.
THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.

Logan Plant (Robert's Son) Marries, Robert Jams With Band

Here are some photos from the wedding celebration with Robert jamming with a band called Restless.

Sweet, Sweet Relief

If you've talked to me lately, you probably know what this relates to...if not, then I guess you're out of luck.

Krugman Op-Ed Piece - NYT

September 2, 2005
A Can't-Do Government
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

A Letter From Mr. Moore To Mr. Bush

Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore
P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

State Fair Rock

This guy is a little hard on Foreigner, and he does elevate KISS to the stature of Led Zeppelin, but his underlying points are valid.


70s rockers reduced to playing state fairs
By JOHN WENZ
August 30, 2005
So, Foreigner is playing at the State Fair tonight for the low price of “free.”
This is the kind of “free,” though, that requires tickets to the fair, which cost a little bit more than free.
It’s not the Edgar Winter “Free Ride,” which was sort of free, unless you bought the album.
This all harkens to a conversation over some tacos.
Sunday night, I and two of the reporters in our fine section sat in a local bar, eating tacos and listening to tepid classic rock.
A few songs in, someone reflected that classic rock radio is one of the worst things to happen to music.
It’s not necessarily the music itself that is bad. After all, it’s probably the only place to go to get your fill of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and some of the other greats of the era.
But for every Zeppelin, there are 10 dupes who don’t reach even the bottom tier of Page and Plant’s output.
These artists, in turn, get played twice per hour during the so-called “rock blocks.”
And with the increasing homogenization of radio thanks to media conglomeration, these artists are now getting played twice per hour on rock blocks nationwide.
Because they get played twice an hour every hour in every corner of our country, the bands are able to find a striking relevance with their fans, and though they may not fill arenas, the bands still are able to drive in the beer-swilling old guard who just want to rock ’n roll all night and party every day.
I would be hard-pressed to call Foreigner influential. I can name exactly one person who swore eternally by Foreigner: Mr. Z, my high school theology teacher (this is the part where I reveal my Catholic school background).
But I can’t name a single band that has ever name-checked Foreigner, or even covered a Foreigner song. “A String Band Tribute to Foreigner” is nowhere to be found in any Wal-Mart or FYE CD rack, and “Hot Blooded” is now hardly anything more than a relic of a bygone era.
Foreigner would seem to live in their little cultural bubble, a bubble populated almost exclusively by their contemporaries and bar cover bands. They are neither as ruthlessly incompetent as Bachmann-Turner Overdrive nor as refined in their cheesiness as Journey.
They are their own entity in their anonymously bland way. “Cold as Ice,” “Double Vision” and “Juke Box Hero” are hardly “classic” in the same sense as KISS, Zeppelin or Sabbath. But they are distinctly Foreigner: calculating, homogenous and soulless yet propulsive, hard and driving.
They are the quintessential band for hard rock monkeys like any character in “Dazed and Confused.” They play rock, or did until “I Want to Know What Love Is.” But they do so in a way that requires virtually no reflection, and in a non-confrontational way that unites the legion of rock fans.
Mick Jones and his cronies are relegated to K-Tel compilations and fading memories of such glory. Our current musical landscape is producing the next Foreigners, distinctive yet bland.
They are living the “now playing state fairs” clichés live and in living color.
In some ways, it’s curiously sublime. In our generation, they are relegated to a sort of pun, an irony of the bygone era. And to the fans that were there, they are nostalgia, the reliving of times past.
In some way, they continue to live in that same mid-level bubble of 1970s hard rock, doomed to the same fate as their contemporaries. But it’s a bubble that will never truly pop until Mick Jones and his crew are too old to rock.
It’s better to burn out than fade away, according to Neil Young. But how does it apply to the bands that never burnt out and never faded away, but instead were, in some ways, always there?