South Of Heaven

Maybe they should go back to marching bands

Maybe the big Super Bowl halftime show is an idea whose time has passed.

Sunday's performance by the Black Eyed Peas was, uh, at best pedestrian. I'll admit I'm not a big fan of theirs and so I'm not the best judge of their music. Sunday the sound was badly mixed, and it sounded like the vocalists couldn't hear themselves. Not good. But let me defer to another blog to do the hatchet work. Here: Black Eyed Peas Vs. Tron: A Super Bowl Contest No One Wins. The Tron dancers were marginally better than all the faux fans writhing about the bandstand that seem to have been part of the past ten or fifteen Super Bowl Shows.

For 2012, we can only hope for P. Diddy and some swing-dancing Star Wars stormtroopers.

This time last year we had a discussion here at South Of Heaven about other Super Bowl halftime shows. One of Girlfriend's childhood fantasies was to run away and join Up With People. I'll let them slide this year, but we should remember The Who's epic flop as well as Diana Ross arriving on a rescue line sliding down from helicopter.

I understand that it's probably time to retire all those dinosaur acts from the sixties and seventies (even eighties), but the Black Eyed Peas weren't so hot either. Maybe they should bring out some marching bands and show more commercials.

+++

Also, I am pretty tired of all the jingoistic crap and war-selling that goes on at the Super Bowl. Considering how former NFLer Pat Tillman got chew up and spit out over there I'd just as soon that sports events were refuges from reality of our wars. To have Colin Powell, the guy who helped lie us into the invasion of Iraq and the hideous Jerry Jones onscreen together (I had the sound down but I think they were reading the Constitution, a document that Powell pissed on in leading up to that war.) made me nauseous.

 

Commercials that were too hot for the Super Bowl

Here.

Lucky broccoli.

Jack LaLanne

R.I.P.

Trafficking in outrage

 
I was trying to write a piece on Jared Loughner, but it’s difficult to make sense out of an insane man’s ramblings. My point was that having lots of talk from the right about using guns to resolve problems, even if they are only being metaphorical, is dangerous talk because not everyone can tell the difference. However, you can’t couch everything you say in order prevent the insane from misinterpreting you. Every few years some nut commits a horrible crime based on his interpretation of the Bible, and there are plenty of horrible crimes committed by sane people based on the Bible, for that matter.

 
The problem is that insanity is a relative thing. Byron Williams is sitting in a jail after a shootout with California state troopers. He was on his way to San Francisco to shoot lots of people at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU. His only real source of information about the Tides Foundation had to have been Glenn Beck. I’d never heard about the group. Beck, as is his manner, diagrammed how George Soros, today’s International Jew, was using the organization to destroy America.

 
Just for a moment, suppose Beck is absolutely correct and the Tides Foundation is working to destroy America. If you are really a patriot shouldn’t you want to do something about it?

Here is a video made by Loughner, strolling through the Pima Community College campus one night after he was kicked out and his parents had been told he wouldn’t be welcomed back until he’d passed a mental examination:

The guy sounds crazy, eh? He mentions mind control although he doesn’t go into detail about how the mind control works.

 
Let me introduce you to David Wynn Miller, a speaker on the rightwing circuit. One of his principle points is that government controls people by their control of language. It has something to do with adverbs. He also believes that adding hyphens and colons to your name makes you non-taxable in the eyes of the law. Thus, “:David-Wynn: Miller”. This theory hasn’t done well in court. According to Miller there is some connection to the Swiss postal service and the New World Order. He personally has claimed to be a judge and the King of Hawaii.

Miller also is associated with the sovereign citizen’s movement which has something to do with the Christian patriot movement and the Christian Identity movement and other fringe groups. These groups are anti-Semitic.

There is something about the right to print money, which I think brushes up against Ron Paul territory. That was another of Loughner’s obsessions, the illegality of US currency.

As far as I know, David Wynn Miller is not crazy. People come to listen to him speak at seminars. People believe him. People have gone to jail on tax fraud and other charges after trying to use his theories in court. Miller himself  believes that Loughner has visited his website because of some of the things that Loughner has said.

Here is an article that better connects the dots between the two.

(If you think that these theories about money are wacky, go here for an hour-long show about money. It answers questions like where the money went when your house lost half its value recently.)

While people are now sitting in jail for following his theories of tax law and how colons and hyphens makes one a non-taxable human, I don’t think he’s ever told anyone to shoot a Congressional representative.

 
But Sharron Angle, who failed to unseat Harry Reid last fall, said this:  "What is a little bit disconcerting and concerning is the inability for sporting goods stores to keep ammunition in stock ... That tells me the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways?" Since the Second Amendment is the right to bear arms, what the hell is she talking about? And why shouldn’t that be interpreted as shooting for what you can’t get in an election?

 
Sarah Palin, whose motto is “Don’t retreat, reload”, and who had Giffords’ Congressional seat targeted with a gunsight on her website, was outraged that anyone would in any way blame her for any rhetoric that might have pushed Loughner into shooting Giffords. And now that we are know more about Loughner, it’s pretty clear that he’s schizophrenic and was not processing information clearly, whether or not he visited Palin’s website.

But we know that Byron Williams was inspired by Glenn Beck. Here Beck talks about how he wants to kill Michael Moore. And he hears a voice asking him what would Jesus do. Just a joke, right?

Before anyone sends any apologies to Palin, take a look at a news story about her outrage. “Blood libel” historically is the accusation that Jews kidnapped and killed Christian children because they used their blood in the making of matzos. In discussing this horrible incident where the first Jewish Congressional representative in Arizona is targeted for assassination and a nine year-old girl was murdered, you’d think that Palin would have steered away from the term.

But that’s not what Palin is doing. Palin traffics in outrage, and I wouldn’t be surprised that she, or her handlers or speechwriter, specifically chose that term for precisely that reason. Her supporters around the country are all outraged that the liberal media is picking on her again, or some twaddle. And it serves on another level. For the anti-Semites who follow her using the term to defend herself gives those folks a good chuckle.

 

Music Friday: "...Next Stop Is Vietnam"

This is the time of year when people are making their top ten lists, to include the top ten songs or albums of the year. Me, while I'm still a consumer of music I don't hover around new releases. Quite honestly, I've missed the last ten or so waves of new music and when I do discover an artist it's often been someone who's been around for awhile. Right now my favorite CD purchased in the last twelve months is The Bottle Rockets' "Brooklyn Side", a country rock album that came out in 1994. The band had a career, disbanded and reunited before I even discovered them.

+++

 
But the album on my mind as the year comes to a close is a huge collection of songs about the Vietnam War, "...Next Stop Is Vietnam". It's a 13-CD collection (a 14th CD contain files of the lyrics for all the songs) of the musical history of that war. That's over 330 songs, interspersed with soundbites of various events throughout the period. There are pro-war songs, anti-war songs, anti-anti-war songs, songs just observing what was happening. There are country songs, rock songs, blues songs, folk songs, soul songs, novelty songs.

There on the first disc is Barry McGuire's "Eve Of Destruction" (written by P.F. Sloan, who wrote many a hit back in the day), answered by The Spokesmen's "Dawn Of Correction" which tries to respond to "Eve Of Destruction" point by point. For Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier" there was Jan Berry's "The Universal Coward". Berry was Jan of Jan and Dean, who apparently did his military service surfing the beaches of Southern California looking for Vietcong naval forces.

Did you ever hear "An Open Letter To My Teenage Son" by Victor Lundberg? It's one of those awful monologues with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" playing in the background wherein Lundberg tells his son that if he burns his draft card to burn his birth certificate too, because he no longer has a son. There were answer songs to that one, too. "A Letter To Dad" and "Letter From A Teenage Son". There were a lot of "letters" to Presidents Johnson and Nixon (and to Carter, when he gave amnesty to draft resisters). As far as I know, no President ever recorded a letter to the people making records of letters to Presidents (although I received a letter of thanks from Nixon for my military service, which I used to keep in my guitar case along with a pin from my engineering battalion, whose motto was: "Fight, Build, Destroy"). Bob Seger, whose "Like A Rock" was used to sell Chevy trucks for a decade, once did a song called "The Ballad Of The Yellow Beret", of course about draft dodgers. And Barry Sadler makes plenty of appearances in the collection.

One of the worst songs ever recorded, "Little Becky's Christmas Wish", in which a five year-old asks Santa to send her dead brother back from Nam, is also included.

There's plenty of maudlin stuff, lots of jingoistic explanations about how we have to kill them over there before the Vietcong hoist their flag over here. And plenty of anti-war songs which miss their mark too. I'm guessing "Napalm Sticks To Kids" didn't change any minds on the war.

One of the snippets between songs was the announcement by Selective Service that September 14th, my birthday, was #1 in the first draft lottery. (I had never heard that audio before. When it actually happened I'd been at the last Student Peace Union meeting on my campus that I would attend, as I was dropping out of college after that semester.)

The collection drips with irony. It includes The Doors' "Unknown Soldier" but did you know that Jim Morrison's father was commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin when that happened?

There were lots of songs by women who tell about how they'll remain faithful until their man comes home from the war. But every now and then a song like Joe Medwick's "Letter To A Buddie" pops up, wherein a friend writes to his buddie serving in Vietnam about how his wife is having a good time while he's away. And conversely, there's the country song "What's Been Going On In Viet Nam" by Ginger and Jean, wherein the singer discovers the reason why her man doesn't seem so passionate on his return from the war:

As I unpack your suitcase
Hidden away I see
A picture of a slant-eyed girl
Pretty as can be
But that’s not all I’m seeing
I’m adding two and two
She’s holding a little baby
And it looks a lot like you

It's interesting what songs became popular with the soldiers serving in Vietnam. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, who wrote "Uptown" for the Crystals and "Kicks" for Paul Revere and the Raiders, had a huge hit with the troops in Vietnam with The Animals' "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" . Originally about escaping the ghetto in New York City, The Animals' version railed against the crushing poverty in pockets of Great Britain at the time. But, of course, the soldiers in Vietnam embraced it for its chorus: "We gotta get out of this place if it's the last thing we ever do." Another very popular song with the troops was Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving On A Jet Plane" for obvious reasons, although the folk group was in the forefront of the anti-war movement.

(During my time at Fort Dix I donated a pint of blood to get leave to go to a George McGovern fundraiser in New York City with a group of anti-war soldiers. Appearing at the event were Peter, Paul and Mary.)

There are a few exclusions from the collection. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Ohio" is missing because they couldn't get the rights to include it (although there are audio files about the event, including one by the father of one of the victims). A number of Creedence Clearwater songs, like "Run Through The Jungle" and "Fortunate Son", because of difficulties with the owners of those recordings, have been rerecorded by Paul Revere and the Raiders. Their inclusion opens up another window into history. Paul Revere, the keyboard player, had been a conscientious objector in the early 1960s before the band became popular and the war in Vietnam escalated. Years later the band became deeply involved with Vietnam veterans' groups and have done much work for charities on their behalf. Bet you didn't know that.

The collection includes songs about the aftermath of the war. The vets. The Ameriasian children abandoned in Vietnam after the war. POWs. MIAs. It's all there. One of the first songs about post-traumatic stress disorder was the sad, beautiful country lament, 1971's "Congratulations (You Sure Made A Man Out Of Him") by Arlene Harden:

He was gone two years, two years that I thought would never end
Now P.F.C. Williams is just plain old Jimmy again
But he doesn't make faces to cheer up the children
The way that he used to before
He doesn't feed pigeons or sing in the shower
I don't hear his laugh anymore
His face has grown old and his touch has grown cold
And his eyes tell of where he has been
Congratulations, you sure made a man out of him

And I know he won't finish that tree house he started
A month before he went away
And although he takes me to church every Sunday
He sits there but he doesn't pray
He keeps things inside like there’s something to hide
And he gave up root beer for gin
Congratulations, you sure made a man out of him

And sometimes I watch him just sit by the window
And silently stare into space
And once when I watched him, I saw as I watched him
A tear trickle down on his face
I knew there and then it’s no use to pretend
I admit it, you did it, you win
Congratulations.

 It's a heartbreaker.

Bruce Springsteen, whose introduction of Edwin Starr's "War" on a live album in the 80s shows where he stands, and who wrote "Born In The USA" and "Shut Out The Light" about returning vets, adds "Galveston Bay", about a Vietnamese family that resettles in the US after the war.

+++

So much of my life has been shaped by the Vietnam War. I was initially opposed to it because in high school, for personal reasons, I had made a promise to myself to never kill another man. Being in the military, where your job was to kill other men, made that promise a lot harder to keep. I spent years avoiding the draft after I was #1 in the lottery. I left the country for a time. I opposed the war during my two years in the army. And I opposed it after I got out during those years I worked at the VA Hospital in San Francisco and witnessed the stream of men who had been mangled emotionally and physically in the war machine. 

And I oppose the current two wars our troops are currently waging. I've spent my life wondering what forces can push a country into wars in places its citizens can't even find on a map. Who benefits?

+++

 
Some of the illustrations in the accompanying book brought a smile to my face. Included is a anti-war draft resister poster of Joan Baez and her sisters with the caption: "Girls Say Yes To Boys Who Say No". And then I turned the pages to see the picture of that little girl, naked and crying, trying to run away from the napalm that was burning into her flesh. And I was filled with such an utter sadness that I could not help from crying. Yes, when I turned to that page I burst into tears.

Every time I see that picture I cry.

+++

It may be too much to pin down which songs stood out for me. Certainly, Bob Dylan's "Masters Of War" hurls vitriol against war profiteers and is easily movable to our current foreign entanglements. I found myself deeply touched by Glenn Campbell's "Galveston" , in which a soldier cleans his gun and dreams of his woman and his hometown. In that song is an admission by the protagonist, "I'm so afraid of dying", which slips by casually but which is so true that that truth lifts the song above the maudlin. Just as there were women praying that their men wouldn't die in Vietnam there were soldiers who feared that they would die before they could see their loved ones again. Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" lifted me up with the hope that people would actually start asking that question, What's going on? Kenny Roger's "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town" touches me when the disabled vet begs from his wheelchair to his cheating wife, "For God's sake, turn around." There's John Prine's "Sam Stone" about a vet who came home addicted. "There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes." Tom Paxton's "Born On The Fourth Of July". (I met Ron Kovic in the emergency room of the VA Hospital in San Francisco.)

And then there's Edwin Starr's classic, "War". Before I ended up in the army I hitched across Europe. In every bar I stopped in in every town that I visited "War" was on the jukebox. "War. Good God, y'all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing."

Except profits. Lots of profits in war.

+++

Here is a blog by a New Zealander who comments on his wartime visit to Saigon in conjunction with "...Next Stop Is Vietnam".

Here is the Facebook page for the album.

 +++

Over the years I've written a few anti-war songs. More than I've recorded. My friend Lou wrote a song, "Blood In The Gasoline", about the first invasion of Iraq back in 1991, to which I'd added more lyrics and new music. But I never recorded it. Time slipped by. Who needs a protest song about a war three wars ago, or twenty years ago? But after listening to this music, yeah, maybe I should record it.

I did write and record a song back in the early 80s, "Mystery Prison", about the MIAs in Vietnam. Jingoists were stirring up emotions about those men lost in Vietnam, that somehow Vietnam was still holding onto them. I happened to be on a vacation in Hawaii when the big news was that the remains of some of them were being sent back stateside. In the song I wrote, "We can't start another war till we know where they've gone." But I was wrong.

Mystery Prison

 

Annoying "Holiday"

If you've watched TV over the last month or so you probably heard this song in the background of various Honda commercials. It's "Holiday" by Vampire Weekend. Maybe you hate it too. You know, after hearing it a million or so times.

Vampire Weekend is a band of New York preppies who allegedly play afrobeat.

In the commercial you hear the vocalist say something like "I wouldn't have no fear." What does having fear have to do with buying a Honda, you ask? Well, nothing, it's what happens when your advertising department buys the rights to a song and sticks it behind cute graphics of happy people throwing snowballs and loading up their Hondas with presents.

Here are the lyrics:

Holiday, oh, a holiday
And the best one of the year
Underneath my sheets
While I cover both my ears

But if I wait for a holiday
Could it stop my fears?
To go away on a summer's day
Never seemed so clear

Holiday, still so far away
A republic on the beach
I can't forget just how bad it gets
When I'm counting on my teeth

But if I wait for a holiday
Could it stop my fears?
To go away on a summer's day
Never seemed so clear

A vegetarian since the invasion
She'd never seen the word "bombs"
she'd never seen the word bombs blown up to 96 point Futura
She'd never seen an A-K in a yellowy day-glo display
A t-shirt so lovely, it turned all the history books grey

I got wheels, I got Cutter spray
And a healthy sense of worth
Half of me is the gasoline
But the other half's the surf

But if I wait for a holiday
Could it stop my fears?
To away on a summer's day
Never seemed so clear

So what is it about? I don't know, but it's not about a winter holiday. Perhaps the Fourth of July, covering his ears from the firecrackers? That's my guess. I knew a Vietnam Vet who would leave San Francisco on the Fourth of July because the fireworks would give him flashbacks of the war. The same with Fleet Week when the Blue Angels are flying over the City. He used to be part of HALO teams there.

But, of course, the preppies probably know jack about post-traumatic stress disorder. Anyway, something to ponder that next thousand times you hear the song while happy, skippy people dance around their Hondas.

A very important day in my life

I was in the process of dropping out of college. That evening I was coming back to my dorm from a Student Peace Union meeting. I asked someone in the lounge where my birthday, September 14th, came in.

This.

Blast from the past: a doctor's radio network

Back in the mid-seventies I worked at the VA Hospital in San Francisco. I had a friend who was a psychiatrist there. At the time a lot of guys were back from Vietnam with with PTSD as well as guys whose whose schizophrenia blossomed while in uniform. And, of course, plenty of veterans from the previous wars who may have needed psychiatric assistance.

In any case, Ed played jazz guitar and as I was interested in all guitar he and I played together for a time. At a certain point I threw my lot in with some punk rockers, the Vah-Mitz (the name derived from the VA Hospital), and Ed, upset at my abandonment of jazz for punk, parted ways.

 
Long story short. When we played together Ed would pass along a lot of the free junk that the doctors used to get from the pharmaceutical companies. For example, he gave me a big blue paperweight in the shape of a stelazine tablet. I had that for years. Lost it somewhere along the line.

Another thing he gave me was a special radio, meant only for doctors. It picked up a sub-frequency that broadcast information only for doctors' ears. Mostly, the programming consisted of advertisements by drug companies, but it also broadcast what appeared to be lectures. Quite honestly, I didn't understand much of it. I thought listening might make me more knowledgeable in all things medical, but nothing stuck. It mostly put me to sleep.

At some point the radio stopped working and I tossed it. From time to time I wondered if this alternate channel of communications still existed, or if it had moved to another frequency. Whatever.

Well, the internet has the answer to all things. Here is a story from the New York Times in 1981 discussing the demise of the network. Bet most of you never knew of this.

The Physicians Radio Network, a round-the-clock service sponsored by several giant pharmaceutical companies, will discontinue broadcasts on May 31.

In 1974, Visual Information Systems, a division of the Republic Corporation, initiated the station exclusively for doctors - it currently reaches 80,000 physicians in 69 cities. Jay E. Raeben, president of Visual Information, said that his company had ''failed to persuade enough of the industry that the radio was a medium important to use.''

Transmitting on an FM sideband frequency, or subchannel, which could not be picked up on a standard radio dial, the network permitted doctors to communicate among themselves, more freely perhaps than might be possible before a listening lay public. This feature, however, contributed to the station's downfall. The necessary special receivers were distributed to doctors upon request and without charge. Mr. Raeben said that the cost of manufacturing and mailing such equipment had diminished revenues substantially. Used by Advertisers

Physicians rank as the profession most vigorously sought by adverstisers, because their prescriptions largely determine the profits of billion-dollar drug companies.

''Surveys show that P.R.N. affected sales very positively, especially as it impacted new products,'' said Robert E. Devinna, director of advertising for Roche Laboratories, one of the sponsoring companies. Eight minutes of every hour on the air are devoted to advertising. Programming focused on scientific breakthroughs and significant operations, such as the recent surgery on the Pope.

''P.R.N. rarely announces new drugs,'' said Mr. Raeben, who also acts as managing director of the station. ''We made a very considerable effort to insure that programming was not in the interest of the advertisers.'' If a new drug were announced, it would have to be newsworthy in itself, he asserted. May Turn to Journals

Mr. Devinna of Roche Laboratories thinks that some of the major drug companies that advertised on the network will probably turn more to medical journals now. He views this as ''shortsightedness of the marketing industry,'' and added, ''Traditional advertising channels are cluttered - it's a shame to see P.R.N. die.''

Of course, now the drug companies advertise during "Jeopardy!" and "Wheel Of Fortune".

Merry Christmas

Nothing says the holidays like Awkward Family Photos.

This website has plenty of those bad photos that probably shouldn't have been saved, but were.

For ex, here is Catwoman with children at the beach:

 

Here's a Christmas photo, of a family wrapped up as presents:

 

Then there's the Star Trek family:

 
And if the kid can't blow out the candles Dad can whack them out:

 

And aren't these people a little too curious about the couple kissing?

 

And nothing says awkward like wedding pictures:

 
There seem to be hundreds of awkward photos on this site. A great way to spend a rainy or snowy afternoon.

And here's another song for the season:

Christmas For Cats

Merry Christmas!

A Christmas card

 

I found this picture on the web last Christmas season.

It's one of those pictures that I look at and wonder what the back story is. The picture appears to be downtown San Francisco, that's Market Street on the left. There's a closed Broaster Chicken in the background. The woman is a little punky/slutty, but in festive holiday way. The black boots, the thigh-highs, the thighs, those fuzzy balls on her outfit. She's smoking a cig, she's got a tattoo. She's looking up expectantly, her lips apart, surely waiting for Santa's kiss.

It's not clear whether she's been a good girl or a bad girl, but has apparently passed whatever code of conduct Santa works by. He's got his head bent, maybe he doesn't trust the beard to stay on. A moment after that picture was snapped those lips met, I bet.

I look at the picture and wonder where they'd been, where they went after that kiss, what happened to them. Will they share a Christmas kiss this year?