BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'Love Goes to Buildings on Fire'

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire:
New York City, just like I pictured it

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes (2012: Faber and Faber); Paperback (Reprint Edition); 384 pp; $16.

My stated reason for being in New York in 1973 was to go to school, but my real intent was to immerse myself in leftist politics and rock and roll culture. Almost every weekend I headed to the Village and Lower East Side in search of weed and music or politics.

There were plenty of protests even after the heyday of 1968-1972 and the issues were still the same. Imperialism, war, poverty, racism, and police brutality. The music, however, was starting to change. There were rumblings of something new in the dives and occasional street fair.

I remember seeing a band (I think it was the New York Dolls or their predecessor) near St. Mark’s Place one Saturday afternoon. I was not into the poor quality of the music, but found the presentation fascinating and unlike anything I had seen before. Still, though, my primary musical preferences were Bob Dylan, the Stones, the Grateful Dead and the Beatles.

One weekend a friend and I saw a poster for a rock show at the Hotel Diplomat near Times Square. The show featured a woman whose book of poetry I had just bought on the Lower East Side. The book was called Witt and the poet's name was Patti Smith. The show I remember I remember because of Smith. The hotel I remember because it’s where Abbie Hoffmann got busted for coke and then went underground.

I was a scholarship student at Fordham University in the Bronx. So was almost everyone else on the floor of my dorm. There were only a couple of us white-skinned guys on that floor. The rest were Puerto Rican and African-American. I heard more salsa than I knew existed. Smoking pot, discussing Marxism and Eddie Palmieri was how I spent many Saturday nights.

Sometimes, nobody in the dorm would go home for the weekend. On those weekends, the music leaking under the dorm room doors with the pot smoke included the Allman Brothers, the aforementioned Palmieri, Earth, Wind and Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, the Dead, and Bob Dylan.

I left New York after seven short months. A floormate from Teaneck, New Jersey, had just introduced me to a new band on the scene known as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I saw him in Maryland a few months later.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

The changes I felt were soon to rule the world of popular music. This is the story rock music writer Will Hermes tells in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever. Recently released for the first time in paperback, Hermes’ text is more than a look at music in New York. It is a history of the city during the period covered that rarely mentions economics and politics yet ekes them.

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale. Like his namesake, he carries the message that punk rock shouted and salsa sang. The period herein may have been the last time New York mattered as much as it did in the world of popular culture.

Jay-Z may still be there, but there is no creative center any more. In fact, the dispersion of that center into the global world may have been the unforeseen result of the bands, beats, and jazzmen Hermes writes about so wonderfully.

Lurking behind Hermes’ tales of Patti Smith and Richard Hell; Afrika Bambaata and David Murray; and the multitude of others that star in this book is the spectre of corporate greed destroying culture and pretty much anything else it touched. Indeed, this included an attempt by Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld to make Manhattan default. Yet, while this attempt to force austerity on the world’s cultural capital ultimately succeeded only partially, the mélange of cultural mixes did create what became termed world music.

This is a book about Debbie Harry and Eddie Palmieri; Bruce Springsteen and Grandmaster Flash; Abe Beame and CBGBs; Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton. It’s a book about the clubbers and the brothers and sisters attending the DJ contests in the Bronx and the punkers bleeding in the Bowery. The names are so familiar that some are forgotten.

The cover art is by Mark Stamaty, formerly of the Village Voice (back before Murdoch destroyed it). He is also the author and illustrator of one of my favorite children’s books, Who Needs Donuts? The drawings he does are cartoonish, encompassing and busy, as if he was on stimulants. They are the artistic representation of the story Hermes has written down.

In a nutshell, that story is about the birth of hip hop via the transition of the beat; the C-section that was punk and the future of rock and roll that was Bruce Springsteen. Love Goes to Buildings On Fire isn’t about passing a torch. It’s about that torch enveloping the past and the future of popular music in its flames.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Marilyn Katz : Guns? Don't Wait for Congress

Image from WorldMeets.US.
Or Godot:
Guns? Don’t wait for Congress

With gun enthusiasts stockpiling weapons in light of impending federal regulations, what is a concerned citizen to do?

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / January 21, 2013

With 300 million guns out there, the reality is that neither the laws passed by governments nor the most elaborate fantasies of the survivalists -- with police knocking down every door to unearth hidden arms stashes -- will eliminate guns or gun violence.

Three hundred million. That’s the number of guns, from assault rifles to pistols, in the United States today, with the numbers rising each day as gun enthusiasts arm themselves against the local, state, or federal actions being pushed for by gun control advocates. That’s one gun for practically each and every American alive today -- even though only a third of us own them.

President Obama has put forward a series of proposals aimed at curbing gun violence in the U.S., and urged Congress to reinstitute a ban on military-style assault weapons and to require universal background checks for gun purchasers. But with 300 million guns out there, the reality is that neither the laws passed by governments nor the most elaborate fantasies of the survivalists -- with police knocking down every door to unearth hidden arms stashes -- will eliminate guns or gun violence.

So, what to do, besides hope or despair? Despite the odds, quite a bit -- with or without congressional or state action:

• Face the facts. While 9,000 people were killed in gun-related homicides in 2011, another 19,000 used a gun to take their own lives -- in many cases the spouse, parent, or child of a gun owner. Men in homes with guns are twice as likely to be killed in a homicide, women three times more likely. Get rid of your guns -- you’re more likely to be a victim if you don’t.


• Address the reality on the streets. Inner-city violence, especially among youth, is undeniable and tragic. Guns are the leading cause of death for black men under 25, and “leadership decapitation,” or police targeting gang leaders, may have unintentionally escalated rather than decreased violence. Pastors, parents, and police might instead resurrect the old strategy of forging a no-gun policy accord among gangs. The gangs might not go away, but the up-close and personal knife fights of West Side Story are preferable to the drive-by shootings of today.


• Make it personal. In irresistible films and shows from Batman to Reservoir Dogs, Dexter, and The Sopranos, in the computer games we play where an enemy’s death improves one’s score, and even in the nightly news, the message that violence can solve problems permeates our culture and is far more pervasive and consistent than our chosen intentional moral teachings. Whether or not you are raising children, you might consider banishing these “entertainments” from your home and your life. Organize a sports league, take up dancing, read a book -- you’ll be more literate and fit.


• Reexamine what society considers “normal.” Those turning 12 this year have grown up with constant war, exposed to daily death counts from faraway places and casual discussions comparing drone killings to assassinations to outright hand-to-hand combat. Anyone under the age of 80 has experienced only one decade in which our nation was not at war. And our country’s military budget is not only the biggest in the world -- it’s greater than the sum of the next 13 biggest military budgets combined. If we want to phase out homicide as a means of resolving conflict, we might insist our nation lead by example.


• Reconsider the “other.” Ironically, even as our nation becomes more diverse, we are ever more economically segregated, with our images of the “other” too often drawn from films, TV and the news rather than from life. Our image of cities and the lives of their residents are informed by The Wire or Treme, our images of Muslims by Homeland or Glenn Beck. This is not without effect. From the slaughter of churchgoers in Wisconsin to the New York subway platform deaths of innocent citizens, to the "arming of America" in light of the Obama election and reelection, demonization of the “other” has a real cost. While we may not be in favor of censoring media, other measures such as restoring civility to political debate and seeking out more diverse life experiences would seem useful correctives.


• Follow the money. Guns are not simply lethal; they’re lucrative. According to The Wall Street Journal, manufacturers like Freedom Group, which makes the Bushmaster and Remington, saw their profits soar last year, with Freedom Group earning $237.9 million in the third quarter alone. Another big winner was Wal-Mart, which in 2011 began selling guns at more locations, as part of its attempt to recover from a severe slump. Now, with guns available in 1,800 of its 3,800 stores, Wal-Mart is the nation’s leading seller of firearms and ammunition, and gun sales were up 76 percent last year. With 90 percent of Americans living within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart, I’d make a suggestion: Consider doing your grocery shopping at a retailer where you can’t pick up semi-automatic weapons along with your cereal.

History is pretty clear: If we want change, we have to make it. From women’s suffrage to civil rights, from the establishment of the eight-hour day to pesticide control, our legislators have always responded to citizen action. As always, the future is in our hands.

This article was cross-posted to In These Times.

 [An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.

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Ed Felien : Batman and the Culture of Violence

Batman image from Batman: The Amimated Series / Wikimedia Commons.
Batman, The Joker, Nazis
and the culture of violence in America

Plato recognized the subversive value of art. He knew that art didn’t just hold a mirror up to society and reflect everything. It holds a lens that selects, frames, and distorts.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2012

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” -- Oscar Wilde

Should we blame the Batman movies for the tragedy in Aurora? After murdering the people in the movie theater, James Holmes put his guns in his car and calmly told the police, “I’m the Joker.” He had booby-trapped his apartment so that anyone entering it would have set off massive explosions probably killing many more people. This begins to sound like The Dark Knight, where The Joker blew up a hospital because he was frustrated in getting revenge.

What explains the perverse pathology of The Joker? At one point in the movie he says he mutilated himself in sympathy with his wife who had been scarred by a knife, but later he says:

You wanna know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker and a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me and says, "Why so serious?" Comes at me with the knife. "WHY SO SERIOUS?" He sticks the blade in my mouth. "Let’s put a smile on that face." And...

In the comic book original, The Joker is disfigured by falling into a toxic vat while robbing a chemical factory. The story of child abuse and watching his mother be victimized by his father is the invention of Christopher Nolan, the writer and director of the series.

Nolan was praised by critics for making The Joker psychologically believable. Whether the incident of child abuse actually happened to The Joker is irrelevant. The story is so compelling and horrifying that it seems to justify even more horrible acts of revenge on an indifferent world. Anyone who has been victimized and feels that the world has turned away could identify with The Joker’s demand that the world take note of his dimension of pain.

Nolan’s comment on the tragedy in Aurora was self-serving and willfully naïve:

I believe movies are one of the great American art forms, and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.

The Joker is fascinating in his capacity for violence and destruction, but no one would call him “joyful” or “innocent and hopeful,” and The Joker is more than half the weight of The Dark Knight.

Children learn to speak by imitating their parents. They learn to act by imitating role models. Cultural values are taught by popular culture. What is acceptable is what is popular. Don’t artists have to accept responsibility for the lessons their art teaches?

This is not a new question. The last time it was debated seriously was when The Beatles’ White Album was blamed for inspiring Charlie Manson and his gang to murder Sharon Tate and four others in August of 1969. Certainly, today, we consider The Beatles joyful, innocent and hopeful, but there are songs on the White Album that are very dark.

Consider even the deliberately humorous “Bungalow Bill”:

Hey, Bungalow Bill
What did you kill
Bungalow Bill?

The children asked him if to kill was not a sin
“Not when he looked so fierce,” his mummy butted in
“If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him”
All the children sing


Or, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”:

Happiness is a warm gun
( bang bang shoot shoot )
Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is
(bang bang shoot shoot)
When I hold you in my arms (oh yes)
When I feel my finger on your trigger (oh yes)
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because
happiness is a warm gun, momma
Happiness is a warm gun
-Yes it is.
Happiness is a warm, yes it is ...
Gun!


Or, “Little Piggies”:

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
Always have clean shirts to play around in.

In their sties with all their backing
They don’t care what goes on around
In their eyes there’s something lacking
What they need’s a damn good whacking.


Even the comic “Rocky Raccoon” has a dark edge:

Rocky had come equipped with a gun
To shoot off the legs of his rival
His rival it seems had broken his dreams
By stealing the girl of his fancy


Parts of “Yer Blues” are downright depressing:

Black cloud crossed my mind
Blue mist round my soul
Feel so suicidal
Even hate my rock and roll
Wanna die yeah wanna die
If I ain’t dead already
Ooh girl you know the reason why.


And Charlie Manson could believe that “Sexy Sadie” was talking directly about Sharon Tate:

Sexy Sadie how did you know
The world was waiting just for you
The world was waiting just for you
Sexy Sadie oooh how did you know

Sexy Sadie you’ll get yours yet
However big you think you are
However big you think you are
Sexy Sadie oooh you’ll get yours yet

We gave her everything we owned just to sit at her table
Just a smile would lighten everything
Sexy Sadie she’s the latest and the greatest of them all
She made a fool of everyone
Sexy Sadie
However big you think you are
Sexy Sadie


But the song that was the biggest hit from the double album, the song with the longest legs, was “Revolution.” When John and Paul sing:

You say you want a revolution
Well you know
we all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know you can count me out,

It’s probably John who ad-libs “in,” so a playful struggle goes on between the two as they go: “out” “in” “out” “in.” So, it’s left as an open question as to whether a revolution will mean destruction.

The Beatles didn’t pick those ideas out of thin air. They were the air that everyone was breathing that listened to popular music and wanted the war in Vietnam to end, and wanted racism to end, and wanted the oppression of women to end. The Black Panther Party was talking about armed self-defense and “Off the pig!”

Panther Bobby Hutton had been killed by the Oakland police after he had surrendered in 1968, and Fred Hampton was killed by federal authorities sleeping in his bed in 1969. The Weather Underground began its violent campaign against the war in Vietnam and draft boards in 1969.

Did The Beatles’ White Album cause the Tate murders? Of course not! Did they reflect the cultural values of the period? Yes! Did they have a responsibility to critically evaluate those ideas in their art? Do all artists have a responsibility to critically analyze the cultural values of their society, or is creating art enough of a responsibility? Was Sam Goldwyn right when he said, “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram”?

But this question goes back 2,500 years before The Beatles’ White Album. In Book III of The Republic, Plato seems to argue in favor of banning both The Beatles and Batman:

If a man, who through clever training can become anything and imitate anything, should arrive in our city, wanting to give a performance of his poems, we should bow down before him as someone holy, wonderful, and pleasing, but we should tell him that there is no one like him in our city and that it isn’t lawful for there to be. We should pour myrrh on his head, crown him with wreaths, and send him away to another city.

Plato recognized the subversive value of art. He knew that art didn’t just hold a mirror up to society and reflect everything. It holds a lens that selects, frames, and distorts. It judges society, and Plato knew it was possible that such judgment might find fault with his philosopher-kings. Plato believed it was best to eliminate the possibility of heresy while it was still outside the gates.

But, of course, Plato must have known that the instinct to create art that could reflect an idealized or distorted culture was an instinct in all of us. All of us have the capacity to create art, and whether the art reaffirms or criticizes society is a reflection of the individual artist’s point of view.

The Beatles’ White Album is a reflection of the popular resistance to the war in Vietnam, and, while it doesn’t articulate a coherent strategy, it seems in some songs to condone and romanticize armed struggle and guerrilla warfare.

The story of the Dark Knight is about Batman trying to save Gotham from a mad bomber. It sounds a lot like George W. Bush trying to save the world from Al Qaeda after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City.

At one point the movie asks the question that has troubled philosophers and governments since the beginning of civilization: Is torture ever justified? The question is posed in the way it always is, “What if by torturing someone you could get valuable information that would save lives, you could prevent a bombing that could kill innocent people?”

Batman beats up The Joker to get him to reveal where he is holding two hostages. Christopher Nolan seems to be saying torture is justified in trying to save lives, as we see the Dark Knight inflict pain on The Joker.

There is a direct link between Christopher Nolan’s script for Batman and George W. Bush’s script for his dark knight. Dick Cheney explained the Bush Doctrine on Torture to Tim Russert a few days after 9/11:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

When they said we will use “any means at our disposal,” Bush and Cheney set themselves up above the law. Because the crime of 9/11 was so horrible, they felt using horrible means of retaliation simply balanced the scales of justice.

“An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind” is attributed to Gandhi.

Bush and Cheney did violence to the rule of law with their public justification of torture. If all crimes are allowed to balance the scales, then there is no law, and justice is simply the foot of the strongest on the neck of the weakest.

Someone who believes they have suffered a horrible injustice is then permitted to use whatever means they like to punish society and balance the scales.

Anders Breivik could justify killing 77 people associated with the Norwegian Labor Party because he believed their philosophy of multiculturalism was threatening the racial purity of Norway. Wade Michael Page could justify randomly killing six people in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, because he believed they were a threat to racial purity in America.

These are examples of racial extermination carried out by Nazi fanatics, and, if there is no rule of law, then their justification of their acts as a defense of racial purity makes as much sense as anything else.

America has lost its moral compass. More innocent women and children have been killed by drone attacks than were killed in Aurora. The President has a Kill List of people to be assassinated without trial or due process. We are supporting atrocities in Syria and claiming it is a popular rebellion.

It is probably true that life does imitate art. The killer in Aurora thought he was imitating The Joker. But, to disagree with Oscar Wilde, it is probably true that art more often imitates life. Batman was imitating Dick Cheney in his use of torture. The collapse of moral values, the end of the rule of law, the random violence are justified by the state and then rationalized by the individual, and they find their expression in art.

Batman is not responsible for the moral corruption of America. The government and the billionaires that own the government are responsible. And we’re responsible for letting them get away with it.

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly. Read more articles by Ed Felien on The Rag Blog]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Papa Had a Brand New Bag

Papa had a brand new bag:
James Brown was 'The One'

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2012

[The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, by RJ Smith (2012: Gotham); Hardcover; 464 pp.; $27.50l.]

When I was in junior high back in 1967-68, many of my Saturday afternoons were spent at the outdoor basketball courts across the highway from my house. These courts were where I learned about many things besides basketball, which I was never very good at.

Sex, beer, and music were the three favorite subjects of conversation. By music, I mean everything from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin, Joe Tex to James Brown.

The blacktop courts were midway between the lily-white suburban development I lived in and the so-called “colored” section of town. That asphalt served as a neutral zone for anyone who wanted to play ball.

Like I said before, I was never very good at basketball (or any other sport for that matter) but was appreciated for my smart ass banter and musical knowledge. These were the days before iPods or even boom boxes. Hell, 8-tracks had barely made an impression on our youthful culture back then. The only source of music that was portable was the transistor radio.

In the Baltimore-Washington, D.C.area, there were three or four stations that played the songs people were listening too. WPGC-FM and WCAO-AM played the Top 40 hits of the day while WOOK and WUST played soul and R&B. While radio was not as divided into niche markets then as it is today, the fact is that the very few performers were heard on both stations. For example, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were never heard on the soul stations, while Bobby Blue Bland and Joe Tex were rarely heard on the Top 40 stations.

There was one man, however, who was heard quite often on both formats back then. His name was James Brown. We would choose our teams and play pickup game after pickup game. Since there were usually more than 10 kids hanging around, the odd guys out chose the music (unless we were convinced otherwise).

Whenever the current hit by Brown came on the brothers would start vamping. Doing the slide step as they neared a basket or attempting a split at mid court. Then they would tell us lighter skinned guys to not even try. We knew we couldn't dance like Mr. Brown. That particular period of time was when James Brown truly was the King of Soul, when he really was The One.

This was also a period when racism had very few shadows to hide it. Black men were subject to whatever wrath a white man felt like imposing on him. Black men with money and power like James Brown felt that wrath perhaps less often but in greater measure when they did feel it.

When he released his single "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)", Brown was making it clear: he didn't really give a shit about racists keeping him from his music, money, and people. Never much of a militant, James Brown was always proud, even as a street urchin cum hustler in Augusta, GA.

A new biography of Brown, titled The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, places that pride in the context of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It opens with the story of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in colonial Georgia that saw slaves killing slave owners and increasing their ranks as they marched through the area just south of Charleston, S.C. beating their drums, singing and dancing in rebellion. Forty slaves and 20 whites were killed during that rebellion and never again did Georgia legally import slaves from the African continent.

With the story of the slave rebellion as his jumping-off point, biographer RJ Smith writes a tale that evokes Mr. Brown's insistence on freedom, his pride, innate musicality, and the high-energy life that helped earn him the title of the hardest working man in show business.

Smith gives the reader a fantastic story: from Brown’s roots in Augusta, where he entertained soldiers on weekend passes with his dancing while hustling them down to the brothel where he lived with his aunt, to his casket’s tour of three cities after Brown’s death in 2006. The text details the complexities of a man who, with this bandmates, created a signature musical style that many have used as inspiration but none have successfully duplicated.

It also traces the political journey of a black man in the United States during a time when the world of Black America underwent a sea change. Never a militant, but always an individual proud of his racial and personal identity, Brown’s politics included Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon; Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond.

His support for Nixon’s 1972 campaign led to a boycott attempt by several African-American organizations and individuals that had some success. Smith relates a tale of 10,000-seat arenas with less than 2,000 concertgoers. When I thought about seeing a concert of his in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1972, my African-American comrades convinced me not to go because of Brown’s support of Nixon (it didn’t take much -- I hated Nixon). They passed out leaflets in the parking lot discouraging attendance. At the same time, Brown’s singles were still being played on the radio and still selling.

At a recent anti-racism rally in Burlington, VT. held in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a black teen talked about his struggle to maintain a positive self-identity in a culture that insists on labeling him and other black males in as negative of a light as possible.

I will paraphrase his statement here: I am going to be me. Part of that is saying "Hi" to my neighbors even if they won't say"Hi" to me. Part of that is dating who I want. Part of that is being black. I am going to be me.

James Brown would have agreed with that young man. His political actions, his insistence on doing things his way musically and otherwise -- all of these actions, writes Smith, stem from a combination of Brown’s ego, mistrust, and determination.

To hear Smith tell it, James Brown definitely did not come from comfortable beginnings. He movingly describes just how tough it was. Anything that came easy made Brown suspicious. This didn’t seem to change as he grew older and developed into one of the world’s best-known people -- his fame in Africa rivaled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, while in the United States very few acts sold more records than Brown.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Brown gave hundreds of shows every year, went through wives and mistresses almost as quickly as he did towns and cities when he was on tour, and spent money quicker than he could count it. The magic of Smith’s writing is that Brown’s life is told in as captivating a manner as Brown lived it. This is a classic rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story, but with a twist: it's Alger's "Ragged Dick" as an African-American bootblack who rises above his station.

Smith, who is also the author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance, and a former music writer for the Village Voice and Spin magazine, has done a public service by writing this biography. His approach to the narrative does more than detail the life of James Brown. It captures the essence of a James Brown performance and manipulates that essence -- its franticness, its passion, and its sheer jubilation -- into a story about one of the world’s greatest musicians and performers ever.

In Smith’s telling, it becomes clear that James Brown’s myth was not only larger than life, so was James Brown himself.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Bob Simmons : Two on the American Radio Revolution

Dead Air and Early '70s Radio:
The formatting revolution
in American radio

By Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog / January 26, 2012

Kim Simpson, author of Early '70s Radio, and Jan Reid, editor of Bill Young's Dead Air, will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, January 27, 2012, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91-7-FM in Austin and streamed live to the world. They will discuss the American radio revolution of the '60s and '70s. Rag Radio is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday at 10 a.m. (EST).

Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio, by Bill Young, edited by Jan Reid. (CreateSpace, 2011); Paperback, 302 pp., $19.95.

Early '70s Radio: The American Format Revolution, by Kim Simpson (New York: Continuum, 2011); Paperback, 288 pp., $32.95.

Two books about media, radio in particular, have recently been released for the public's consideration: Kim Simpson's Early 70's Radio The American Format Revolution and Bill Young's Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio, edited by Jan Reid.

Both books cover roughly the same era of American radio broadcasting: the turbulent late 60's and the decade of the 1970's. Early 70's Radio is more of a weighty cultural criticism full of well-researched information from those decades. Dead Air, on the other hand, is a personal memoir and first-hand tale from someone who fought in the trenches of the media war and lived.

If you're a student of American media or cultural analysis of the period, then these books may be worth your time to explore.

For those too young to remember, or who need to be reminded, the 60's and 70's were times of tectonic shifts in American culture and society. You know, assassinations, Vietnam, black power, feminism, energy crises, impeachments, etc. It was a rockin' time for sure. In the middle of it all, jockeying for position, or just to stay alive like Eliza on the Ice, was the medium of radio, trying to lead, hoping to follow, and to continue to be or become a key part of its listener's lives.

In those days radio wanted to be, and perhaps was, a “social network” -- before there was any concept of such a thing. Radio sought to be more than just a medium, radio wished to mediate the culture around it.

In the 60's and 70's, radio went wherever we went -- in our cars, in our homes, at our work. Our little buddy was there, talking to us, playing the tunes that defined our hearts, blabbing about the navel lint of our lives, shocking us, informing us, and cajoling us to buy some product that likely as not we were better off without. Waterbeds! Hot tubs! A Mercury Montego!

That box was more than just another media choice. We didn't have 500 channels of TV, we didn't have the Internet. We didn't have PDA's and cell phones. We only had... that little radio and some guy sitting on top of an Astrodome or flagpole telling us what it was like. We could take it with us, in our car, to the beach, to the mountains, in our bedrooms at our most intimate moments. Radio could be there, defining us, refining us, and perhaps keeping us from the loneliness of just being alive in our skins.

A stupid disk jockey might irk us, please us, or maybe clue us in about an event that simply should not be missed. We could dial up our tastes -- country, rock ‘n roll, hit music, the marischino strings, music and news from dusk till dawn -- helping to release endorphins in our brain.

Mood elevators? Who needed Miltown or Prozac? We had K-Lite or K-Life or K-Whatthehell to keep us in the corral. Let it snow, let it snow I've got my radio to keep me warm. Radio made us feel like we belonged to something. It wasn't a country club, it wasn't a sorority or fraternity, but dammit, we belonged to... something. Good morning, sunshine... we're here to getcha' goin'. Looks like it's gonna be breezy so wear a slip, OK?

Talk about pressure! As they used to say in Creem magazine: Boy Howdy!

Imagine what it must have been like to be the guy in charge of remaining relevant to an audience of some 20,000 people at any given moment, to do something to maintain your "cume" (your listening audience's total numbers) of one or two hundred thousand people a week. Do you think you might feel a little, um, squeezed, a little apprehensive?

Pity the poor PD (Program Director) of a major city radio station. His DJ's hate him, his manager beats him like a rented mule, the sales department thinks he is a tyrant and a stubborn jerk for not allowing some manufacturer of specialty latex products to be advertised on the air.

The league of decency is on the phone, the record promo men are in the hall with the latest directive and LP from Columbia’s Clive Davis. Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun says play this, or we break your legs. What is your weakness pal? You like girls? You like drugs? Money? As PD, you are the key to all their locks, and they are going to find a way to pick you.

Out there in the street are listeners who depend on you. They don't know it, but they do. You're the gatekeeper, you are the chef, you are the culture cop protecting them from inferior or bogus goods. You are the juggler trying to keep six things in the air: a chocolate cake, a running chainsaw, a medicine ball, your kid's birthday, your wife's anniversary.

David Bowie once sang, “It ain't easy to go ahead when you're goin' down.” On top of all that was the fact that your audience was shifting and changing more than a woman looking at her closet before church.

Gordon McLendon on the air at KLIF in Dallas, 1948 / History of KLIF.

Top 40 or “All hit Radio” was the invention of a couple of guys, mainly one Todd Storz, who had noticed back in Omaha in 1955 or so, that people would put quarters in jukeboxes and play the same song over and over. People didn't get tired of the song and move on. Listeners were getting some kind of rush from the repetition.

Storz had the revelation that most people don't listen for more than an hour or two at a time. A radio station could repeat itself as much as it wanted. In fact, repetition was good, not bad, as had been thought before. People liked knowing what they were going to hear.

Hit radio was born and prospered like an army base hooker. This of course led to competition. But for years Storz and his buddy, Gordon McClendon, made millions on that simple idea.

Dead Air: The rise and demise of music radio is about Bill Young's experience from inside that radio circus -- from its rosy innocence in 1955 to the days of deepening cynical market research in the late 70's and beyond. Young worked the wheelhouse of a couple of Gordon McClendon's flagship stations in Dallas and Houston, leading them to top ratings and helping to maintain McClendon's fortunes, until the day the music, or more accurately, the music machine, began to cough, sputter, and spit parts out on the highway.

Call it a challenge? I think so.

Once the format was discovered in 1955, radio operators had it pretty easy until the late 60's and early 70's when Americans began to evolve into walled off cells of opinion, class, and age. Marketers who kept their fingers on the pulse of the tastes and desires of the public noted with great interest the erosion of our “one nation indivisible under God” into increasingly distinct demographic and psychographic profiles. Market consultants and psychiatrists started testing “consumers” from behind one-way glass to try to figure it out.

The teenagers were coming of age. That wise guy Bugs Bunny was growing a beard, smoking pot, and singing, “I ain't marching any more.” The kids that had liked Mickey were now on a C-131 headed for Nam. Black guys who had watched the news from Birmingham in the 60's were wearing berets and saying things like, “By any means necessary.”

Pity the poor radio stations trying to figure out where their audiences were going. Again, “Boy howdy.”

By the late 70's it was estimated that over 100 different radio “formats” had evolved. It had Bill Young scratching his head along with several hundred other radio programmers and tipsters around the country. What the hell should I play? To whom am I playing it? Teens, young adults, housewives?


Dead Air is a self-published work edited by historian, novelist, journalist Jan Reid, and is the story of Bill Young's relationship with hit radio in Texas at Houston's KILT, Dallas' KLIF, Waco's WACO, etc., and the myriad of people with whom he came in contact. Personal saga time.

You know the plot line. Youthful yearning hick shows up on doorstep of local East Texas radio station, and uses wits and pluck to work his way up to... Waco. And from then on folks, it's all history. Bright lights, big city. Houston, Dallas, um, Tyler.

This is not to denigrate those accomplishments, given that succeeding in popular radio, whether in Mid-America or on the more sophisticated East or West Coasts, was akin to scaling icy mountains or driving in a Grand Prix race where all the cars were driven by psychotics who would just as soon run into you as win the race. Becoming a success in Top 40 was not easy for the men at the top, middle, or bottom.

Bill Young gives us a taste of what that long-gone world was like, a whiff from the inside of the glass-windowed rooms where the mics were live and the air had better not be “dead.” Young was behind the mic in Dallas the day they killed the President, he was on stage when the Rolling Stones wondered if they should flip their cigarette butts at the audience before they started playing. He crawled atop the Astrodome as his deejay pal finished his 400th hour living up there.

It might be said that Dead Air's virtues are also its limitations. As a personal memoir it is a success; as an inside history of the game, it works too; but as a book for the reader who is trying to understand media and its relationship to the broader culture, well, don't look for much of that here, folks.

A lot of Dead Air is a list of names who are only familiar to people from within "the industry" whose careers were important to trade publications like Billboard, Cashbox, and Advertising Age. Sure, some were hometown hero DJ's to teenaged listeners. But the other names like Bill Drake, Buzz Bennett, Bill Stewart, Don Keyes, Claude Hall? Who they?

Radio cognoscenti know them; most people though, didn't then, and still don't. Fame is so fickle, especially in the world of pop music and radio. Who remembers Jobriath, David Blue, Frankie Ford, Nervous Norvus? One of these days no one will know who Howard Stern was. Praise Jesus!

KILT disc jockeys. Bill Young is second from left.

It was said by someone somewhen, that radio was/is the bottom rung of the show business ladder, and one wishes in a way that Dead Air covered a bit more of the “up-close-and-personal” of what it was like to be a deejay at the time. You know, the “cleaning up after the elephants” stuff.

Maybe Bill Young should have included some vignettes of what it was like to “work in the window,” with the DJ on display as listeners drove past the studios, where DJ's might be threatened with a stick of dynamite, or had to worry about someone taking a pot shot at them?

A portrait here and there of the radio guy who lived with a U-haul trailer on reserve for the day when he would be transferred to another city or be fired and forced to move from Oklahoma City to Detroit inside of two weeks. DJ's? Born to be fired. (Radio bums!)

Or maybe a story about the vicious RKO Radio program director who installed sun lamps in the studio so that when an announcer wasn't up to snuff he could turn the lamps on remotely to make him sweat. At the end of the week, the DJ with the best tan was on the shitlist.

Or saddest of all, maybe something about all the losers who forewent college to be in the “entertainment business” and found themselves burned out and tossed out of media at the ripe old age of 40 with a taste for the fast life and no skills to back it up? Being a deejay might have offered brief fame, but for many it was a one way ticket to Palookaville. Mama told you not to join the circus.

Young talks a bit about the development of innovations like hot clocks, stop sets, day-parting of music, limited rotation, “jingle packages,” etc., which may be of some interest to media junkies, but in the long run were only about how thick or thin to slice the baloney and still make people think they were getting a sandwich. Just how many ways could one devise to play the same 30 records anyway?

Flagpole sitting DJs might promote the call letters of the station so their station would be remembered in the listener surveys and make a strong showing in Pulse or the Arbitron ratings, but they made the real rubber meet the road by simply playing the artists who were the rage of the moment.

Picking hits with a tip sheet and sales charts? Could Donald Duck have done it as well? Who knows? But when it came to self-promotion and log rolling, the guys mentioned in Young's world were tops. And that programmer who came up with a new innovation about how to arrange a limited play list of 30 hits and a hundred oldies in some new manner? He was the “genius” of the month… Ok, ok, of the year?

Big bucks would be dangled by one of several radio group owners. Gordon McClendon, Todd Storz, Don Burden, and the others would hire this “programmer of the year” or subscribe to the tip sheet that seemed to offer insight into which way the ever-skittish crowd would respond to certain sounds.

Advertising fortunes rode on being right. Pimple cream merchants and Ford dealers waited for the ratings to offer the big payoff to the stations that could pick the ponies. “I want men, 18-34 goddammit. I want housewives who like those Saturday sales. We've rented balloons and searchlights, some people better show up or it's your ass.”

But Young does make a good argument that the showcase for the music counted for something. The frame around the picture made the music more important, and since this was his world, one should not expect that he would not emphasize that.


And a wild bunch some of those handmaids to the music were. What a gang of cut-ups! Setting each other's news copy on fire while on the air! Ha ha. And consorting with record promo men who wanted to (gasp!) give them money to play records! Never mind that Nixon was being impeached, or that Jimmy Smith from down the street just got his ass shot off in Veetnam.

One can't help but notice from the blurbs on the back of the book that the same cast of mutual backslappers is still at it. Kent Burkhart, Chuck Blore, Ron Alexenburg, Sonny Melendrez all have comments about this book “written by a radio legend.” These guys could promote a dust bunny from under your bed. Of course it would have to be a “good” dust bunny. In fact a dust bunny with legs! “This dust bunny is breaking wide at 18 with a bullet. Got your finger on my trigger, now pull it.” Those guys are going to be promoting each other's coffins.

Always lurking in the background of Young's story is the doppelganger image of Herb Tarlek -- with his plaid jacket and white tasseled shoes -- from WKRP in Cincinnati, anxious to promote turkey giveaways dropped from helicopters like bombs in a parking lot at the A and Poo Feed Store. But admit it, if you liked WKRP, you liked Herb Tarlek (played by Frank Bonner.) “I swear, I thought turkeys could fly!”

Herb Tarlek of WKRP in Cincinnati, played by Frank Bonner.

While reading Young, the older reader's mind wanders back to the time of the dreaded teenagers to whom the radio dial had been abandoned while mom and dad watched the glowing tube in the main rooms of the house. Junior and Missy retired to their rooms to listen to Danny and the Juniors, Earth Angel, and Connie Francis, germinating their own world that would eventually lead to the fragmenting of both the culture and the audiences into worlds that not even the most statistically minded sociologists could predict. (Think Married With Children.)

England? The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan? What would those voices mean to someone who was playing the music of Leslie Gore, “It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to?”

But Bill Young was there, caught in the middle of it, “too cool for the room, too square to be rare,” helming one of Gordon McClendon's ships-of-the-line through the stormy media waters. “You may fire when ready, Gridley. Damn the torpedos.” Don't worry about that FM program director Tom Donahue declaring in Rolling Stone that, “Top 40 is dead and its rotting corpse is stinking up the airways.”

And it did take another five years to die and for the culture to morph into Disco, Contemporary Hit Radio, Middle of the Road, AOR, Urban, Country, and News/Talkers, and all their subgenres. It also took an assassination of a president, his brother, and a civil rights giant, a horrible and unjust war, the popularization and mass use of drugs (both legal and illegal), the rise of FM radio, LP records, and cable television to split the listenerships into microsegments that became an advertiser's nightmare of demographics, psychographics, and statistical weighting.

Bill Young was there and lived to tell the tale for students of mid-America, mid-century, and media-as-a-message. If that stuff interests you, then dig right in.


Working the same fields, but plowing much more refined furrows, is the book by Kim Simpson, Early 70's Radio The American Format Revolution.

Simpson, also a musician and a host of folk music shows on Austin's KUT and KOOP, is from a different generation than Bill Young, and approaches the period as a historian and studious cultural critic. Born in 1969, Simpson experiences the 70's mainly as research first begun in his dad's stashed archives of old Billboards, Cash Boxes, and Record Worlds. Curiosity led him further.

He was fascinated by the genesis of the idea of “formatting” -- that is, the process of trying to design a medium to fit the perceived preferences of a preselected “target audience.” It was an idea that was in its complete infancy in the early 70's, and Simpson thought that he could follow its development and demonstrate that a study of “hit radio formats” could provide a unique and useful means for examining and understanding the period and the culture as a whole.

In Simpson's words:

Radio historians, having recognized the early 70's as a watershed in the medium's history, refer to the era as the "format explosion," the "crossover explosion" or the “FM revolution,” among similar descriptions. These all fit the bill -- if commercial radio's format offerings numbered in the single digits at the beginning of the decade, they had multiplied, according to a Broadcasting magazine tally, to an industry-wide cornucopia of 133 formats by the end of the decade, all but six of which could be classified as “Popular music" in one sense or another.

[….] the radio business's formatting efforts were a cultural phenomenon that mirrored the identity issues with which the nation as a whole, had been grappling. It was no mere coincidence that this change in the radio landscape toward audience segmentation occurred in a period rife with heated politics, identity anxiety, and social fragmentation amid a steady stream of large scale disappointments and chronically insoluble social problems (Vietnam, OPEC, Inflation, and Watergate to name just a few).

In this light, commercial music radio formats, however industry driven, served two cultural functions, both of which appear as recurring themes throughout this book: (1) they provided a means whereby radio listeners could reimagine and renegotiate identity be it their own or another's; and (2) the formats acted as coping mechanisms. For example, they could serve as escape hatches through which radio listeners might opt out of the social turmoil and anxieties of the day, while functioning for others as well-defined identity headquarters that offered meaning and resolve in equal measures to their corresponding demographics.

“Boy Howdy!” Once again, you just said a mouthful.

Well, is/was it true? Is that what music radio formatting was/is all about? Bubblegum, heavy metal, folk-rock, singer-songwriters, jazz, country, light-country, mellow, elevator music, classical, AOR, AAOR, MOR, Urban, Quiet Storms, Indie/College, Bluegrass, and so on through the spectrum of bins at your local music store? What the hell does all that mean? What do those tea leaves mean, Gypsy woman?

Well bless Mr. Simpson, he tries to make heads or tails of this ball of confusion of cultural demarcation. Genre's, sub-genre's, incongruent glops of cross-referential music emerging from the variety of eras and socioeconomic partitions, divided by race, culture, age, background, geography, and whatever other cultural identifiers offered for a lost people to grasp to find a sense of themselves.

Once, in Bill Young's day -- what Simpson (and others) call the days of “Unformatted Innocence” -- radio and other media were broadcast out over the broad waters of the American landscape as though there was one body with one set of ears.

In the early 70's, right about the same time people started recognizing the significance of Marshall McCluhan's Understanding Media, the advertising world and the broadcasting world, moving in lockstep, recognized that the stuff they used to do was hopelessly naive and ineffective in reaching the people they wanted to motivate to do the things they wanted them to do. And what they wanted was for people to buy products, not to mention to buy the products that were luring them to buy more products.

(One of the great ironies of music radio was that probably the most salient merchandise that they were selling was not the “products” they were advertising with the “commercial spots,” but was the very program material they were playing on the air. The recordings from the major and minor labels were ads for themselves! This hasn't changed a bit and continues to this day unabated.)

No wonder the major record companies vied so heavily for airplay. Their “product” was being used to advertise itself. The promo men from Atlantic, CBS, Warner Brothers, and from Hi, and Sarg, London, and from the local one-stop distributor lined up at the radio programmer’s door. “Pleeeze, play my record.”

And if the product was good, and was played in the right way, to the right audience, then listeners would tune in, and the station could sell more actual advertising to local merchants and manufacturers of goods and services. Maybe it was as the Marquis de Sade who once said, “All of them engaged in happy mutual robbery.”

Pity the poor programmer who had to negotiate among all these competing interests. (Wait, is that a spot or a song? Are they selling “Lady Came from Baltimore” or Lady Schick Razors? How do you know? Is the DJ talking to me, or selling me something?)

And pity the poor cultural critic who has to parse this into its constituent pieces. Boy howdy!

Progressive radio pioneer Tom Donahue. Image from Bay Area Radio.

So there goes Kim Simpson with his fine book, to make his contribution to the understanding of media and of pop culture. Watching Scotty Grow, Soul Crisis and Crossover, MOR and Soft Rock, Casey Kasem, Robert Plant, Country Music, oh hell, it's all here.

I am here to warn you, this book is not light reading. It is deeply researched, it is thoughtful, it is rich with facts and insights of both Simpson's and of the ideas from the source material.

Since he is doing his work from archives, from studies, and from interviews with the personalities of the times, he occasionally makes an error. He talks about the original FM revolution which ostensibly started in San Francisco, where he gives credit to Tom Donahue for “owning” the first “underground” FM station, KMPX. Simpson missed the fact that Donahue owned nothing and went on strike with his staff against the station owner who refused to share in the new gold mine that Tom and his rag-tag staff were creating.

But Simpson bravely wades into the fray. He covers every aspect of the culture -- feminism, religious broadcasting, news, racism in media -- from Olivia Newton-John to Frank Zappa, Black Sabbath to Merle Haggard. He studies all of the musical genres that are covered by bellwether artists and tries to give context and meaning about how they fit into the wider culture. It is a staggeringly difficult thing to do, but somehow he seems to pull it off.

And what does he predict from all this? More of the same of course. (Satellite radio, mood oriented. Terrestial radio, demographic oriented -- but radio still needed, ostensibly for its “communal listening experience.”) But in further fragments and segments, maybe even a segment that goes back to the unformatted innocence of music that is incongruously served up as a bunch of this and that. Only in a highly segmented spectrum could an unsegmented format be included. It's full circle time.

And all of it exists and continues to morph because of the wild multiplication of technical media delivery systems. Cable, Internet, over-the-air FM and AM, TV carriers and sub-carriers, satellite radio like Sirius, ad infinitum. Anyone need an all-Dolly Parton station? Technical change allows, nay, demands cultural change. Napster becomes Pandora, Pandora becomes Spotify. Next please! Everybody into the ditch!

So, Dead Air, and Early 70's Radio. Both recommended for people who like this kind of stuff. But as they said about the Magic Theatre in Steppenwolf: “Not for Everybody.”

[Bob Simmons has been a radio producer and personality, oil biz entrepreneur, video maker, voice talent, construction worker, newspaper publisher, writer, and sports editor. Simmons has a storied career in radio, where he was a pioneer in the underground format, and has been a producer and personality at legendary stations -- including KUT, KPFA, KSAN, KKSN, and KFAT -- in places like San Francisco, Austin, and Portland. Read more articles by Bob Simmons on The Rag Blog.]

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Larry Ray : Donald Trump and the Two-Headed Cow

The Great American Sideshow! Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
The Great American Sideshow:
Donald Trump: See the two-headed cow!

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2011

America has always had a fringe element of nuttiness but most everyone knew it was nuttiness and not to be taken seriously. Before today's instant mass communication, conspiracy claims, wild headlines, mean gossip, and outright lies were mostly the stuff of checkout aisle tabloid newspapers. Today many people can't, or refuse to tell the difference.

Nightly prime time TV programs take the lowest road, from the intellectually lightweight "Biggest Losers," where morbidly obese people vie weekly to see who has lost the most weight, to "reality shows" documenting unreal races, contests, and nail-biting competitor eliminations.

The reality is that these carefully scripted competitions are shot with huge film crews hovering all around, documenting supposed intimate spontaneous adventures that have nothing whatsoever to do with reality.

But millions of people never miss these nightly shows. And, sadly, many of these viewers make little distinction between reality and total hogwash while watching TV, surfing the internet, or emailing wild electronic missives back and forth to one another. These minimally discerning and vocal folks have become a new and easily manipulated political bloc.

So when Donald Trump, New York real estate developer, marketing mogul, and reality show producer, popped up all over television recently, saying he should be our next president, lots of folks thought that was a great idea. The next day's polls ranked him number two behind favored Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

Never mind that Trump's eccentric, egomaniacal ranting, including questioning President Obama's legal American citizenship, was not a serious testing of the political waters at all. It was an age-old carnival barker ballyhoo designed to "turn the tip."

"Turning the tip" is old carny lingo meaning to attract the gawking townsfolk meandering on the carnival midway to a specific attraction... almost always the sideshow. The barker, usually wearing a straw pork pie hat, would taunt, tease, and invite,

"Have you seen Bossie! The world's only living two-headed cow? It's all on the inside! Step right up. Be among the few who will ever see a living, breathing two-headed cow! Only 10 cents, a thin dime, limited viewing, so step right up!"

And people dug into their pockets for that dime, crowding the barker's ticket stand while another carny quickly opened then closed a corner of the canvas entrance flap offering surreptitious peeks at the bizarre wonders inside.

Once jammed in the tent, people were led quickly past a dimly lit rude stall with a straw floor where a badly stuffed small cow sporting a bit of creative taxidermy stood motionless. The "professor" inside the tent repeated Bossie's astounding medical history all the while urging folks to move along, offering, for only a nickel more, the rare chance to see Jargo the dog-faced boy.

Next day at school the two-headed cow was all anyone could talk about. Everyone knew someone who had seen this mutant marvel the night before. Various accounts had the cow being milked while one head slept and the other ate. I imagine that had anyone brought it up at our 50th class reunion, many would have still remembered seeing that two-headed cow ... or someone who had.

Trump doesn't want to be president, not for a minute. But he does want to "turn the tip" of voters wandering the American political carnival midway into his own private tent to gorge his own insatiable ego and sense of power... Trump's own personal real-time reality show.

In an America where, for a disturbingly high percentage of our population, the misrepresented, trite, and false have become reality, it was a no-brainer for Trump. The ridiculously coiffed megalomaniac is already part of today's media side show and well knows all the divisive bally to spout.

When daytime radio and cable TV's stock-in-trade is now largely a corral full of two-headed cows of varying intellect like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachman, and wildly dressed Tea Party people ranting about "taking back" America, they become the norm and it is harder to find a really unusual two-headed cow.

So, instead of summarily dismissing Trump as a wealthy blowhard, America's mainstream media instead, day after day, touts this new, particularly outrageous, bellowing two-headed cow... because two-headed cows still always attract viewers, especially if they have bad hair.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor who now lives in Gulfport, Mississippi. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Gloria Feldt : Gender Disparities and Aniston-O'Reilly Spat

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly attacked Jennifer Aniston for her comments on single parenting. Photos by Sykes, AP; Lovekin / Getty. Image from New York Daily News.
Women's Equality Day:
Aniston comments on single parenting
Get O'Reilly all riled up

By Gloria Feldt / August 27, 2010

Jennifer Aniston sparked a classic Bill O'Reilly firestorm when she said a woman doesn't need a man to have children and a perfectly fine life, thank you very much.

Defending not her personal situation but the character she plays in The Switch, her hit movie about a single woman who chose to be impregnated by a sperm donor, Aniston opined, "Women are realizing... they don't have to settle with a man just to have a child." O'Reilly retorted that Aniston trivialized the role of men, saying she was "throwing out a message to 12 and 13-year-olds that, 'Hey, you don't need a dad,' and that's destructive."

It's no accident that this pregnant pop culture moment occurred near the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage, Women's Equality Day, August 26. The Aniston-O'Reilly tiff highlights both the progress women have made and how far we are from reaching parity from the bedroom to the boardroom. We might be able to make babies on our own, but according to the White House Project, only 18 percent of leadership positions across all sectors are held by women.

That includes women like Mary Cheney, either clueless or co-opted or both, who even as she endorses anti-choice, anti-gay candidates, claims her own same-sex relationship and pregnancy choice are private matters.

It includes women like my Pilates instructor, who spent her life savings on achieving a high-tech pregnancy at age 42 and told me, "If men would step up to the plate, women like me wouldn't be in this situation" of deciding solo whether or not to experience motherhood.

But the focus on these 50,000 or so exceptional conceptions overshadows the concerns and needs of the six million American women who become pregnant the old-fashioned way in any given year.

Besides, separating biology from destiny is just one of many expansions of freedoms women have aspired to as far back as 1776, when Abigail Adams urged her husband John to "remember the ladies," threatening that the women would rebel if excluded from the Constitution (Yes, the same document Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers want restored to its original state when enslaved African-American men were counted as 2/3 of persons and women were ignored completely).

The Founding Fathers did not heed Abigail's plea, the women did not rebel, and as a consequence it took until 1920 for women to achieve ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing them the right to vote.

And just as those against women's suffrage alleged it would trigger the demise of the patriarchal family, what sets off the O'Reilly Factors of the world isn't so much concern that high-tech turkey-basters will replace the penises they hold dear. It's terror that the power over others -- hegemony they've assumed as their gender's birthright -- diminishes in proportion to the rise in women's power to set the course of their own lives.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Power isn't a finite pie where a slice for you makes less for me. It's an abundant resource. The more it is shared, the more the pie grows, and the more everyone thrives.

But if men have not yet figured this out, neither have women decided it's time to use their power to make the rest of the changes needed to reach full equality.

A recent Harris Poll found three out of five Americans say the U.S. has a long way to go to reach gender equality. Not surprisingly, there's a gender difference: half of men feel inequality remains whereas 74 percent of women agree. But the startling finding is that both men and women across the age spectrum downplay the importance of rectifying gender inequality, saying there are more pressing issues to fix.

That kind of self-abnegation to which women are still acculturated is why AOL's electronic greeting card selections celebrated August 26 as National Toilet Paper Day as recently as 2007, yet the company had no card for Women's Equality Day. Popular culture will continue to imitate what we talk about and what we pay attention to in our daily lives.

And while it's relatively easy for a celebrity like Jennifer Aniston to get attention for any subject, it's much harder for the rest of us to shine the public spotlight on other important issues impinging upon equality.

Today's challenges to reaching a fair gender power balance are rooted not so much in legal barriers as in eliminating lingering constrictive cultural narratives, such as assuming mothers are less competent workers, thus paying them less than men or than women without children.

Women can't wait for a Jennifer Aniston to lead the charge for change, and we don't need to.

It took just one woman, unknown to the paparazzi, calling AOL's oversight to the attention of 10 of her friends, asking each to forward the message to 10 more, to start a viral protest to AOL. An avalanche of complaints ensued, and Women's Equality Day cards magically appeared.

Assuring that attention is paid by media, decision makers, and policy makers -- and by women ourselves -- to social and perceptual barriers standing in the way of a fair shake has become the women's equality issue of these early decades of the 21st century. If we can accomplish that, women's possibilities will indeed be unlimited.

O'Reilly will continue to be offended. But isn't that just another sign of progress?

[Gloria Feldt is the author of the forthcoming No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. The article was distributed by truthout.]

Source / truthout

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Sorcerer's Apprentice : Tipping Points and Paradigm Shifts

Conducting the planets:
Tipping points and paradigm shifts

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / May 16, 2010

We've all become tutored in the past years about "tipping points":

• the warming of the ocean releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere, which warms the ocean, which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere...
• the melting of the permafrost discharging floods of methane into the atmosphere, which warms the air which melts more permafrost...

I don't have to go on. Yeats nailed it right after the First World War:

"Things fall apart," he wrote. "The center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."

With the industrial/scientific revolutions came "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" -- surely the myth of an era just passed. Most of you are old enough, or young enough to remember that marvelous sequence in (early!) Disney's Fantasia, where Mickey Mouse -- to the accompaniment of Paul Dukas’ symphonic scherzo, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice -- tries to get the multiplication of uncontrollable brooms to stop "fetching water" after his magic command.

A detail I particularly love is Mickey awash in a whirlpool, hanging onto, and frantically searching, a book of magic for the missing words, trying to find the formula to make the water stop -- and licking his finger to turn the page. I find this both hilarious and profound.

Goethe, 143 years before Disney, noted this significant tale in a poem once memorized by all German schoolchildren:

Stehe! Stehe!
Denn wir haben
Deiner Gaben
Vollgemessen! --
Ach, ich merk es! Wehe! Wehe!
Hab ich doch das Wort vergessen!

[Stop! Enough!
For we’ve had
Our fill of your gifts.
Oh, I see it now, oi, oi, oi!
I’ve forgotten the magic word!]

Fortunately for the apprentice, the master finally returns to make all things well.

The theme of losing control of our tools is caught most beautifully for me in a little passage from Lewis Mumford (1952):

It is as if we had invented an automobile that had neither a brake nor a steering wheel, but only an accelerator, so that our sole form of control consisted in making the machine go faster. For a little while, on a straight road, we might feel safe, and even, as we increased our speed, gloriously free; but as soon as we wanted to reduce our speed or to change our direction or to back up, we should find that no provision had been made for this degree of human control -- the only open possibility was Faster, faster!

(The same might be said of capitalism.)

Think of Mickey's dream in which he stands on a rock conducting the planets and the comets and the sea, the surprisingly benign aspiration of a little mouse-man given complete control of the earth and its elements, a naive, diminutive Everyman sharing Tom and Huck’s dream of “having a spectacular lot of fun without being malicious.”

But now with us, the dream has turned malicious, the master does not return, the magic word seems lost. And with the recent, uncontrolled, seemingly uncontrollable Gulf oil "spill" (like knocking over a wineglass?) we -- as a culture -- may have actually tipped. Tipped into a paradigm shift.

The old paradigm: Go for it! If it breaks, we can fix it. Isn't science wonderful?

And behold -- the new paradigm: WE CAN'T FIX IT. There is no magician, even with three PhDs or 90 billion bucks.

This -- for some -- is startling. For others -- many others -- it means death. If "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was the myth of the time just passed, the myth for now is Endgame.

Our Faustian civilization has reached its allotted time, and the end is Marlowe's, not Goethe's.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Al Sandine's 'Taming of the American Crowd'

The Cyber Crowd:
Reinventing the Crowd for the Age of Cyberspace

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 18, 2010

[The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees, By Al Sandine. (Monthly Review Press, November 1, 2009); $18.95; 240 pp.]

Near the end of his thought-provoking, timely book about the role of the crowd in history, Al Sandine writes that, “the disembodied realm of cyberspace is the very antithesis of a culture of crowds.” I hear what he’s saying. I think I know what he means.

But is his statement true? Have we as a culture actually come full circle? Have our contemporary aggregates of human beings truly turned into the opposite of those electrifying crowds that dominated the 19th-century and that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called “the century of the crowd.”

I have known large and small, angry and reverential crowds over the course of my lifetime, and many of the crowds I have known Sandine describes vividly in The Taming of the American Crowd. The crowd is, of course, mercurial and fickle. It takes its coloration from the culture and the society around it. It can be revolutionary or racist, and it can lynch just as well as it can adulate.

For centuries, large groups of human beings who gathered in the streets, who demonstrated, and who marched on buildings like the Bastille in Paris, and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, were defined as “the mob.” And the mob was regarded for the most part by journalists, historians, czars and kings as hateful, irrational, and self-destructive.

One of the earliest and one of the most insightful books about the insanity of crowds is still Charles MacKay’s 1841 study, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Most of the studies of the crowd in the 19th century were written from the point of view of the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. They weren’t on the side of the downtrodden and the outcast.

Then, along came Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who recognized the vital role of human beings acting together to change history through peasant rebellions, and working class strikes and riots. In the 1960s, a group of historians, many of them English, such as E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and George Rude, followed in Marx’s footsteps, wrote “history from the bottom up,” and turned the mob inside out.

To Thompson, Hobsbawm, and Rude -- who wrote two transformative works, The Crowd in History and The Crowd in the French Revolution -- crowds were politically conscious groups of individuals united by common experiences and common goals. They were savvy not stupid, mindful not mad. To the new, leftwing historians, crowds were the heroes of modern times, and their work inspired the students and the activists of the 1960s.

Indeed, the civil rights demonstrators and protesters, and the and anti-war crowds of the 1960s seemed to be a continuation of the popular insurrections of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, when workers sat-in to demand the right to organize in unions. In the 1920s and the 1930s, the two most effective and creative magazines of the bohemian and the radical left were entitled The Masses and The New Masses. To belong to the masses was something to be proud of.

Then, something dramatic happened: the masses lost their appeal and their teeth. Sandine tells the story of the “taming of the crowd” in crystal clear prose that has real punch. He roams all over the United States and Europe; he goes back to ancient Roman times, too, and draws parallels between the era of the emperors in Rome and the popularly elected officials in our own day and age.

He shows how mass society diluted the power of the masses, and how the mass media alienated and fragmented the citizenry. Add malls to TV, mix in the advertising industry and public relations, and the result is a consumerist society in which rebellion is turned into a strategy to market good and services. This book provides valuable social and cultural criticism.

Sandine is both more optimistic and more pessimistic than I am. I am not yet ready to say as he does that, “the disembodied realm of cyberspace is the very antithesis of a culture of crowds.”

Cyberspace can be a place to educate, mobilize, and build a sense of community. It can be a stepping-stone toward physical proximity in the same time and place for the purpose of protest and rebellion. So, in that sense I am hopeful about the possibilities for cyberspace, which like all spaces in our society can be contested space, and space that we ought not to surrender without a struggle.

But I am also less sanguine than Sandine when he describes the progress that has been made since the 19th century. “In the United States today, there are no buyers for the kind of crowds that once served powerful interests,” he writes. “No one rents a crowd to drown out the speech of an opponent... No one furnishes liquor, food, and pyrotechnics to partisan parades, as politicians did in nineteenth-century.”

I suggest that Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, and the tea-baggers of today are as insidious as any demagogues of the past, and that crowds today are bought, sold, and manipulated. The roar of Fox is used to drown out opponents. Fireworks and spectacles divert the attention of voters from genuine social problems.

Near the end of his book, Sandine points out that about 2,000,000 people attended Obama’s inauguration and that “there was not a single arrest.” He notes that the crowd was characterized by “docility.” I would have said that it was characterized by respect, and that many if not most of the people who attended were proud of the fact that America, which had long been a racist society and still is in many ways, had overcome its racism and elected an African American as president. The racist mob had turned into a crowd proud of its transcendence of bigotry.

What seems to be true of crowds is their unpredictability. They are alive, volatile, and protean. I can still feel the sense of exhilaration of being in the streets of Washington D.C. during the War in Vietnam, along with one million other Americans to demand that American troops come home and that the bombing stop. That was a time. It was a terrible time, and it was a wonderful time too, when to be in the thick of a crowd was to be truly alive and a part of history in the making.

As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm noted a year ago in the Spring of 2009, the present global crisis demands that, “Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp.”

We will have to reinvent the crowd. We will have to reinvent it for the age of cyberspace. We already are.

[Jonah Raskin was the Minister of Education of the Youth International Party. He teaches media law at Sonoma State University.]

• Find The Taming of the American Crowd by Al Sundine on Amazon.com.

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