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Sunday musical Tribute: "Hay Fever" by the Kinks

I still like this song but nowhere near as much as I loved it when I was a small child. There are better songs on Misfits but maybe none that are quite so much fun from the perspective of a child that likes to boogie and giggle at the same time. And these lines here are pretty damn good:

I can't stay cool 'cos I'm starting to sneeze
I can't make love when I can't hardly breathe
We start to dance and my nose starts to bleed
There must be a cure for this hay fever
Is there a pill or a powder I can take
I must get a cure, for my romance is at stake

"Rapture Schadenfreude Turning Sinister"? Socially Healthy Joviality? Both?

Oxy's billboard image made me think about this recent post by conservative blogger Ed Morrisey of "Hot Air."

Morrisey follows a report by Tiffany Stanley, a reporter for The New Republic, which charged her with following the reactions of the Camping crowd after the Rapture deadline had come and gone.

Snippet from Stanley:

Yes, there was a certain humor to this. But the more I looked into the story, the more it began to turn my stomach to think of spending my Saturday evening in someone’s living room, waiting for that gotcha moment when they realized it was all a lie—leaving me to file a story the next day, poking fun at their gullibility. I decided I couldn’t do it.

Yet the media coverage has continued, and now to me, the schadenfreude has turned sinister. Based on the high traffic the articles are garnering, it would seem as if many of us are intrigued voyeurs, gleeful in knowing the exact day when these people will experience their life’s greatest disappointment. We feel superior, knowing that even though they told us we were heading for death and destruction, now, they get theirs.

Snippet from Morrisey's response:

Well, that’s not totally unjustified. Camping first predicted that Christ would return in 1994 — in fact, he published a book predicting it, although the title 1994? included a very convenient question mark. People who follow doomsday demagogues even after a spectacular failure put themselves in position for some ridicule, not to mention the false prophet himself.

Still, these are real people, and their individual stories are troubling. One mother with three children stopped working and saving for their college tuition, and her apathy about their future has become all too apparent to her kids. Another young couple with one baby and another on the way have spent all of their money in anticipation that they won’t take it with them. For most married couples, pregnancy is a time of hope and optimism, but not for this couple. And there are hundreds or thousands of people just like them who will face very difficult times indeed for having believed in a charlatan.

Both Stanley's and Morrisey's prose are worth reading in full, though I flatter myself that these snippets are well-chosen. Readers might also get a kick out of the comments section.

Hmmmmm. Is it true? Does the post-Rapture rhetoric, such as that in the billboard Oxymoron has shown us, reflect something mean-spirited our mendacious about the secular crowd? Or are there other things at work here?

Um, yeah...

It must be difficult for Camping to address his congregation today. Well, what's left of his congregation. As Harrogate says, heh.

Road-Themed Songs Deserve to Be Taken Seriously

Here is Springsteen's celebrated Dublin performance of "Further on up the Road." It's a beautiful thing. I listen to it as much as possible.

Album Cover of the Week: Misfits, by The Kinks

For some time, now, I have been paying homage to album covers on my Facebook page but the level of engagement possible on a social networking site is so much more limited than it is on a vaunted blog such as The Rhetorical Situation. So this is the first of what will be weekly installments of Harrogate's Album Cover of the Week.®

Most if not all of these album covers are going to be gleaned from those which in my estimation contain great music--this one certainly fits that bill. But sometimes the cover art of an album which one detests muscially, may still merit attention. I encourage other contributors and commenters to get in on the discussion not only of the album covers that I place here in these installments, but also of those which you would like to share, or talk about.

So here is one of my very favorite album covers ever, from the Kinks Misfits (1978):




Misfits as a Rock 'N' Roll Album really is a wonderful piece of musical art that one can listen to endlessly and never feel cheated. Here is the song list, a few of which I will probably post through the week:


1. "Misfits" – 4:42
2. "Hay Fever" – 3:33
3. "Black Messiah" – 4:08
4. "A Rock & Roll Fantasy" – 4:58
5. "In a Foreign Land" – 3:02
6. "Permanent Waves" – 3:48
7. "Live Life" – 4:47
8. "Out of the Wardrobe" – 3:37
9. "Trust Your Heart" (Dave Davies) – 4:11
10. "Get Up" – 3:22


So, what do you think of the cover? I have always been able to look at it for long periods of time and keep noticing different things about it.

Monday Morning Response to Last Monday Morning's Video Response

Oxymoron posted a wonderful video a week ago today, and I want to honor that here. It is also making me think about how many great songs there are out there with the governing metaphor of a Road. Here is one that I like a lot:



Oh. And BTW. The album is Youthanasia, the cover art for which ye see above. Dovetailing with my previous post, I just think this is some seriously fabulous cover art!

Question of the Day: Are Album Covers Dead?

As many of ye know from The Facebook®, Supadiscomama recently got me a turntable and I have been having a lot of fun with it, rediscovering some music that I haven't listened to in over a decade (by the way, I also hooked up my Tape Deck and have simultaneously begun a cassette-gathering endeavor, but that is a different story....). One thing I have noticed while going through all this vinyl is the vividity of the album cover art. The covers are just so very much bigger than what any of us are used to looking at any more. You take a record like Hendrix's Axis Bold as Love, and look at the 12 X 12 version and it really does seem to lay the CD cover in the shade.

As once again testified by my The Facebook® page, I have long been a huge fan of Album Cover Art anyway, and I have always said one of the reasons that I didn't want to give up on CD's and go totally digital (one of the many, many, many, many reasons), was that I would miss the physical object that also includes the Cover Art. Think about the cover to Nirvana's Nevermind. I mean, good God. That's a work of art right there. But what if the art form really did diminish to an irrevocable point wih the emergence of the CD, and the newest Digital formats are simply the final blow?

Now, I guess I don't have that sensitive of an ear, but in the end I have decided that I cannot REALLY tell that much of a difference between the sound put out by Vinyl and that by a CD or even in the digital format--not enough to justify some of the absolute scorn I see being heaped upon CDs on audio forums. But the album cover art is another issue.

So with all these ruminations out of the way, here is my Question of the Day: What do you guys think of this quote, which I have posted from an audio forum I have been reading around in lately?

LP covers were great. The art aspect of covers was really lost with CDs, which have less than 20% of the space of LPs to work with. The art and originality of the covers was often as important as the music, sometimes more so. Even covers that were "just" photographs, needed great photographs when they were blown up to 12" by 12" size. I have a Best of Mississippi John Hurt gatefold album that has two great photographs inside of Hurt smiling while playing, and gives you a wonderful perspective of his wizened, Buddha-like face and the sheer likability of the man. Something that cannot be achieved with the postage stamp sized photos in CD booklets. Not just sound quality has diminished with CDs, but the whole magic aura surrounding albums from the 60's and 70's. This was a time when music was more than just music, but entered and influenced your life. Album covers were a big part of this. Would the Beatles, and others, have had as big an impact on the world if their music had first been released on CDs rather than LPs (how many would spend time examining the Sgt. Pepper cover if its size was 5" by 5"—get out the magnifying glass)?

Monday Morning Video Response

I wonder if Jackson Browne ever looks back and sees that his journey was not as arbitrary and without purpose as he indicates below.

Saturday Night Musical Tribute

In honor of Oxymoron:

Some Thoughts on The Social Network, and a Question of the Day

Not too long ago, we watched The Social Network for the first time, and I was very impressed with it.

My interest in the movie going into it was twofold: on a personal level, as an enthusiastic facebook user who nevertheless maintains heavy skepticism about the ultimate healthiness of social networking; and also on a professional level, as a writing teacher who more and more has been bringing issues surrounding digital culture into the classroom. I had my rhet/comp classes this semester read Time Magazine's writeup of Mark Zuckerberg, and in the process of breaking down the article my interest in how facebook came to be was much heightened.

One interesting thing about the movie, on a rhetorical level, is the irony of the title. Very little time is devoted to facebook, facebook use, or the exploding phenomenon of social networking. The "social network" of the movie, rather, explores the (pretty ruthless) tendrils emanating from Zuckerberg and his activities, both on the Harvard campus and then later, by virtue of Napster co-found Sean Parker, Zuckerberg's "arrival" in silicon valley.

As many have noticed, the Zuckerberg charcter that this movie gives us comes across as quite socially incompetent--if not actually sociopathic. That is, Zuckerberg is represented in the movie as someone who is a genius but who seems to lack the capacity to even imagine the impact of his actions on others, let alone truly care about others. Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckeberg in this regard was quite good, as were most all of the supporting cast--especially Justin Timberlake's portrayal of Parker, which I believe deserved every bit of hype it got--really, his performance may have even been underrated.

However. For me, the movie's overt representation of Zuckerberg as a quasi-sociopath raises, I think, very serious questions about the ethics of making movies about public figures in their own time. The Time Magazine writeup pretty much demolished a key premise of the film: more specifically, that Zuckerberg's rise was triggered by having lost, and wanting to impress, a girl that, for all the millions he made, he could never get back (this motif was rendered even more heavy-handed by the fact that the movie explains Sean Parker's Napster achievment on the same terms. Parker has gone on record saying that the movie's portryal of him is almost wholly fictitious). But in truth, as Time's writers made clear, Zuckerberg already had the girl when he started Facebook, and he is still with her today. Further, the magazine writeup went out of its way to demonstrate that Zuckerberg is actually quite socially adept--unless he feels like someone is wasting his time, at which point he tunes them out.

Time's worries about Zuckerberg were mostly aimed at his cavalier posture towards Privacy and Privacy Rights. But that's perhaps another topic, for another post.

What I am interested in asking here is this: How serious of an ethics problem is it, when a movie projects a highly stylized, and for that matter very unflattering, interpretation onto a person--public figure or not--in their own lifetime? The last line of the movie features one of the legal team saying to Zuckerberg, before walking out the door: "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be."

Enter the Miscarriage Police

The triumphant return of the famous Assy McGee Award®. The Award possibilities these days are endless. But wow. You really cannot, cannot, cannot make this stuff up. In addition to the usual attempt to overthrow Roe v Wade:

Franklin wants to create a Uterus Police to investigate miscarriages, and requires that any time a miscarriage occurs, whether in a hospital or without medical assistance, it must be reported and a fetal death certificate issued. If the cause of death is unknown, it must be investigated. If the woman can't tell how it happened, than those Uterus Police can ask family members and friends how it happened. Hospitals are required to keep records of anyone who has a spontaneous abortion and report it.

This country is losing its fucking mind. The fact that someone, even one person can attain political power with such an agenda, suggests that the nation in which that it a possibility might well be a hellhole. Combine that with the fact that there is nothing extreme about Rep. Bobby Franklin in the context of the party to which he belongs. Combine that with the fact that there is only the barest legitimate opposition to this bad craziness in the US political system, and you've pretty much got a good probability that this country is a hellhole.

Scott Walker and Women

Here's an interesting writeup on Scott Walker's "crusade" against women's rights.

Before linking to Mother Jones, Charles Johnson pithily notes:

Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker is not only trying to destroy public employees’ unions. For years, he’s also been working hard to force women back into the Dark Ages

Heh.

Wisconsin: Not a Last Gasp, but a Homage

Why has the situation in Madison, Wisconsin, emerged as such a galvanizing issue for liberals nationwide? While the specific dispute over the collective bargaining rights of workers would seem to be enough, I have a feeling that there is something deeper to this that has, hitherto, gone mostly unexplored--namely, the presense of a widespread sense that what we are witnessing is a last gasp, of sorts, for liberalism in the United States.

On a policy level, it is hard to imagine the dispute in Madison ending in any way other than with a victory for Governor Walker. All they have to do is wait for the protests to quiet down, the media cameras to roam elsewhere, and the Democratic legislators to return. And I think that at bottom, the protestors and those of us who sympathize with them, know this. But still there is something to the fact that they are playing out the string. That is the nature of a last gasp. That is, on all except a few red meat social issues like abortion and gay rights, I believe that we are in the early stages of a broadcloth surrender of American liberalism as we know it.

Even in the paralytic days of 2002, as the US solidified sweeping tax cuts, passed the Patriot Act, and careened into initiating a second war, liberals did not show signs of entirely giving up. But now we look at the political landscape in its totality, the cost of the last eleven years, and all we see is wreckage. Consider:

• The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue unabated. Where are the protests? Where is the opposition? (It is fashionable now to speak of "war fatigue," and that economic concerns have emerged as primary. Perhaps there is something to this; although it's too bad that the deaths and the billions spent are not thereby rendered any less real.) I think that the anti-war protestors saw there was absolutely no way to stop US military adventurism, and so gave up. Look for very little hue and cry when the next one starts.
• Debate over government's role in the economy has been overtaken by quibbles over how much spending to cut, and where to cut it. The possibility of making meaningful changes to our tax code has been eviscerated and liberals know it.
• Relatedly, liberals have surrendered the idea that corporate power could be checked by governmental regulations.
• Um, it goes without saying that liberals have surrendered on health care as well.

Never in my lifetime have I seen such lethargy, such absence of liberal narrative or vision as we have known it in this country. Workers rights, poverty, education, the environment--all have been rendered less than afterthoughts in our national conversation. The words "Liberal," "Progressive," &c. will not go away however--they are simply shifting to mean different things, different priorities. Perhaps it will mean things like battling the repeal of child labor laws and opposing conscription.

In context, those will certainly be worthy battles, and they may even be winnable.

I think that, knowing something like this in their gut, liberals turn their eyes to Wisconsin and feel something stir. Maybe it is less a last gasp than a homage.

Sunday Happy Musical Tribute.

Seriously?

 Like Harrogate, it has been a long time since I blogged here.  Typically I blog at Pieces of M, as my blogging has been focused on my job search, my work and teaching, and my mothering.  However, the things going on in the U.S. are really pissing me off.  Sure I get that the U.S. is in serious debt.  I get that.  I also get that the budget needs to be cut, or my great-great-grandchildren will also be in debt. That said, I don't think the way to go about it is by cutting programs that benefit/provide services for individuals without insurance or who can't afford insurance.  I mean seriously, cutting Planned Parenthood and PBS?  Reproductive rights and the arts?  Seriously Republicans?  Could you be a little creative at least?  Like, I don't know, taking a pay cut or increasing taxes on individuals who make over $200,000 a year? 

After a Long Hiatus

Harrogate Returns.

Tuesday Musical Tribute

Reconsidering the 14th Amendment

Top Republicans are making the case that Congress should repeal the 14th Amendment. This is a new strategy in the fight over immigration since repealing the 14th Amendment and ending birthright citizenship would bring an end to "anchor babies."

This seems to be anther case where the Republican "right to life" begins at conception and ends at birth.

See here and here.

Parenting and Happiness, again....

Over at Democracy and America, there is a critique about the marriage and happiness article in New York Magazine. The critique is well worth the read.

While I have a few more thoughts on the issue, especially concerning the definitions of the terms, the role of agency in parenting and marriage, and the notion of identity, I will try to work on a longer post tomorrow when I am not teaching and only writing.