Whistle & Fish

The Internationale
Thursday, 08 November 2007, 05:20 PM

Down the street at the local high school, the marching band is playing martial music, all those pro-military, pro-nationalism anthems designed to swell the heart and set a tear in the eye. After a rousing Irving Berlin tune, what true American can fail to support a little preemptive war on Islamofacism? Line ’em up!

To counteract it, I drag one of my stereo speakers onto the back porch and play Billy Bragg singing “The Internationale” as loud as it will go without cracking the head. No one in this area will understand it, but it makes me feel better.

I’m not sure where I’m going with the blog; I’m quite unhappy with it lately. Until I figure it out, I hope you’ll bear with me.

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Billy Bragg on the Late Late Show
Saturday, 27 October 2007, 07:16 PM

Billy Bragg is my hero. In an ideal world, he, Bruce Cockburn, Bruce Springsteen and the Clash would all appear on stage together. “And I don’t believe we can defeat no axis of evil by putting smart bombs in the hands of dumb people....” Amen, Billy. Tell the truth, brother. Preach.

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Clapton, Boyd Provide Pop Life Insights
Saturday, 27 October 2007, 09:00 AM

Stephen King, whose novels often have rock music at their core, is the perfect choice to review Clapton: The Autobiography for the New York Times. Not only is he a rabid fan of the genre in general and of Eric Clapton in particular, but his history as a recovering alcoholic parallels Clapton’s. He calls the book a “drunkalogue”, parroting the Alcoholics Anonymous catchphrase, and says while Clapton does a workmanlike job of presenting the facts in “dry, flat-stare honesty,” he seldom offers “any real insight into the music he’s spent his life playing.”

There are exceptions:

“Then,” King writes, “there’s the story of one of the most notorious rock acts ever to play the storied Albert Hall in London—the Mothers of Invention. Clapton writes, ‘Frank Zappa’s keyboard player, Don Preston, known as “Mother Don,” broke into the hall’s organ keyboard, which was locked behind two glass doors, and played a raucous version of “Louie Louie” that brought the house down.’”

King says he could have used a few more of those sorts of anecdotes. I’d be willing to bet most readers of Clapton’s memoir will echo his sentiments.

On the flip side, Patty Boyd’s autobiography, Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, gets raves from reviewer Stephanie Zacharek, who calls it a “charming, lively and seductive book”—no doubt a good deal like its author. Ms. Boyd’s muse inspired Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” and Harrison’s “Something”, a song Frank Sinatra called the best love song ever written. Ms. Zacharek writes perceptively:

Would “Layla” or “Something” have been written if Boyd had never existed? Harrison and Clapton would have achieved greatness without her; they’d have hung their dreams on some other girl. But that doesn’t negate Boyd’s story, which is largely about the transformative powers of rock ’n’ roll.

It sounds to me as though, taken in tandem, the two memoirs might offer a view of pop stardom rarely seen outside the inner circle.

(The first chapter of Clapton: The Autobiography is available online at the New York Times.)

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Finster’s Finest Work May Fall into Ruin
Thursday, 25 October 2007, 04:25 AM

Despite all its faults, there is a wonderful tradition in the South of celebrating its eccentrics and reveling in its oddities. For that reason, I knew about folk artist Howard Finster long before the Little Creatures album cover he created for Talking Heads brought him into the public eye. He was the best-kept open secret in the Southern art and culture underground of the late ’70s and early ’80s—a kind-hearted fundamentalist preacher turned folk artist, sort of Jean-Michel Basquiat in overalls—and even as we lauded Mr. Finster’s “discovery” when it occurred, we were also rueful and felt we were losing a weird native son. Howard Finster didn’t care one way or another. He simply obeyed God and kept turning out art.

Today a troubling story in the New York Times (including a delightful slide show) tells of the tension between Chicago art dealer David Leonardis, who has been restoring the Howard Finster Vision House, and Rev. Tommy Littleton, a preacher and real estate investor from Birmingham, Alabama, whose nonprofit group is dragging its feet as Mr. Finster’s World’s Folk Art Church is falling into disrepair. Because I am suspicious of any real estate-selling preacher, I smell a rat; but the real shame is we may be losing a Southern treasure while people harangue about raising money to save it.

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California Fires Force Massive Evacuations
Tuesday, 23 October 2007, 11:29 PM

Without a doubt, the biggest story in the nation today has all eyes focused on wildfires in California that have left 6 dead (two in the fires and four during evacuation), destroyed more than 200,000 acres and forced the evacuation of an estimated 700,000 people, according to the Los Angeles Times. Covering the event is a Herculean task, due to the unpredictable nature of the fires and the tremendous numbers of displaced persons. The Times is basically blogging breaking news. At the New York Times, “The Lede” has become California news.

Of the multitude of smaller stories encompassed by the event, word that the San Onofre nuclear power plant is threatened makes me sweat.

The Los Angeles City Department of Animal Services is warning residents to avoid wild animals displaced by the fires and to bring pets indoors to avoid contact with wildlife.

Google is providing a detailed interactive map showing the path of the fires and evacuation routes.

Officials are now saying it may be days before firefighters bring the blaze under control.

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Woman Stabs Lover To Drink His Blood
Tuesday, 23 October 2007, 09:04 PM

Just in time for Halloween comes a story from Mesa, Arizona about a woman sentenced to 10 years in prison for aggravated assault after she repeatedly stabbed her bound lover so she could drink his blood. Note to the sexually adventurous: Don’t let your partner tie you to the bed if s/he casts no reflection in the mirror. Who says vampires don’t exist?

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Couple Keeps Killer Cat
Tuesday, 23 October 2007, 12:24 PM

I don’t read Russian, but after seeing these photos of what looks like a cross between a house cat and an ocelot in all its domestic glory (including sitting on the commode, dismembering a chicken and trolling for catfish and women in the bathtub), I’m pretty certain the headline reads, “Full Goose Bozo Couple Keeps Killer Cat.” It’s no wonder the Weekly World News went out of business. Who needs a costly tabloid when the Web is so full of oddities?

(I’ve just been informed the cat in question is a fishing cat, a species I didn’t even know existed until just this moment. That’s another great thing about the Web. Through the kindness of friends, it’s a great teacher.)

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Hillary Clinton: Arms Makers’ Darling
Monday, 22 October 2007, 06:14 PM

Hillary Clinton portrays herself as an antiwar candidate, though she has consistently voted to support George W. Bush’s war on the people of Iraq. In fact, much of her recent rhetoric suggests, as president, she might not be able to withdraw troops from the conflict for years.

She also claims opposition to war with Iran; yet, in an article for Foreign Affairs, she espouses the standard administration line, verbatim—citing unproven allegations as fact and stoking the fires of propaganda. Why?

It couldn’t be she is romancing military industrial contributions, could it? The UK Independent reports, “The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party.”

Mrs Clinton’s wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts....

So far, Mrs Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often “bundled” to obtain influence over a candidate.

Ms. Clinton can say all she wants about being an antiwar candidate, but until her voting record matches her campaign pandering, I’ll still consider her the best pro-war Republican running on the Democratic ticket.

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Walt Whitman in Boston
Sunday, 21 October 2007, 03:41 PM

Before they died, both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman saw the “general use” of the electric light in Boston, as Sylvester Baxter describes it in an absorbing article from the August 1892 edition of The New England Magazine entitled “Walt Whitman in Boston.” It is the best of a trio of stories about Mr. Whitman, apparently published as a tribute after his death, including a review of his life’s work (with the great line, “Democracy is the faith that no beauty, or grace, or comfort, or treasure, is too great for any human being.”) in which George D. Black describes him as “our greatest singer of death songs”, and “Walt Whitman’s Democracy,” which explains concisely why his poetry is still central to United States literature:

Whitman aimed to be something more than a singer; he aimed to be an evangel of a new gospel of humanity. He was greater than his work, and whether he will be anything more than a name to succeeding generations or not, he will always hold a place in literary history as a tonic and impulse for this generation, and as one of the heroic figures of our literature.

America has been the democratic heart of the modern world for a century, and it has produced five great Democrats, of varying degrees of greatness, and of wholly different intellectual texture—Jefferson, Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.

A desire to reacquaint myself with the transcendentalists’ understanding of democracy—with Henry Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience”, Mr. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, and Mr. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—has absorbed me for more than a week, and eventually brought me to the Cornell University Library’s Making of America Web site. I’ve been poring over page after page of digital reproductions of 19th century publications ever since. Intellectuals of the era were both enlivened by and enthusiastic evangelists of the American democratic experiment. Though grounded by a strict Christian ethic, they were suspicious of Puritanism, and they were anxious to break free of it and emerge into a humanist modernity. None was more determined than Mr. Whitman. He broke with convention as one might break up twigs for kindling, and he celebrated democracy as no writer before or since; if any 19th century poet demands reading in the 21st, it is Walt Whitman.

So I have been glad to set Mr. Whitman in historical context, to read eyewitness accounts of his life and to ponder how his life intersected others. “Walt Whitman in Boston” reflects on his later life, and reveals a number of priceless historical nuggets. He loved the work of French painter Jean-Francois Millet and wondered, “Will America ever have such an artist out of her own gestation, body, soul?” He visited Concord and spent an evening with Mr. Emerson and Louisa May Alcott in Mrs. Frank B. Sanborn’s back parlor, lines that reminded me how much Ms. Alcott’s Little Women displays the roots of an organic feminism grounded in humanism. Mr. Whitman dined with Mr. Emerson, visited the graves of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and stopped by the site of Mr. Thoreau’s hermitage at Walden Pond.

He had a keen sense of the absurd. After spending an evening watching a balding, middle-aged Italian actor play the adolescent Romeo, he quipped, “I’m afraid an old fellow like me is not so impressionable as he was in his old theatre-going days.”

The poet John T. Trowbridge visited Mr. Whitman, and the two discussed a time when, deeply discouraged and on the verge of giving up Leaves of Grass, Mr. Whitman received a letter from Alfred Lord Tennyson that filled him “with new cheer and courage.” Mr. Trowbridge replied, “And Tennyson has shown his admiration for you in no more genuine way than in being directly influenced by you in his later style.”

“Do you think he has?” asked Whitman simply. “Most undoubtedly,” said Trowbridge.

(Why didn’t I recall, though all my reading, that Walt Whitman and Lord Tennyson were contemporaries? Yet I remember elephants walk on their toes, and the left testicle of right-handed human males generally hangs lower than the right.)

I’ll have to save a study of why my brain catalogs one thing ahead of another for a different time. Now I’m off to read the later work of Lord Tennyson. If this entry seems scattered, it is because my I am grasping at straws to keep from drowning in a sea of contemporary bad news and succumbing to a depression incited by grief over our ailing democracy. I want to escape into a time when the concept still had ethical value and was celebrated rather than scorned.

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Dissecting Harold Robbins
Monday, 15 October 2007, 01:00 PM

Harold Robbins’ books always pissed me off. Not that they were important enough to matter, really. For me, his novels fell into a category reserved for people like Jacqueline Suzanne and Joan Collins’ sister (I can never remember her name): highbrow trailer trash. They weren’t exactly pornographic—my mother would have never read porn—but they walked right up to the edge of it and leered down into the abyss. They were violent, sex-drenched soap operas. They made me angry because I knew writers, good writers, who couldn’t get their work read, much less into print, while writers like Harold Robbins raked it in hand over fist. The bastards.

I first got acquainted with Mr. Robbins through a book called A Stone for Danny Fisher, a novel I read only after I learned the Elvis Presley film vehicle “King Creole” was based on it. It was one of two or three films that actually pushed Mr. Presley to act, and I liked the story of a tough jazz singer in New Orleans making a break from organized crime. It turned out Mr. Robbins’ book had little in common with its film adaptation. In the novel, Danny is a lower-middle class Jewish kid with a knack for boxing who lives in the suburbs outside Brooklyn. He takes money from mobsters to throw a Golden Gloves fight and then double-crosses them by winning the match. A few years later he goes into the black market with his former manager, encounters the same men he betrayed, and is machine-gunned to death. Hardly “King Creole”, but still a page-turner and not a half-bad book. From there Mr. Robbins’ body of work goes downhill. Fast.

So did his life, according to Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of his biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex by Andrew Wilson. As she describes him, Mr. Robbins wasn’t someone I’d want to be much around:

“We structure the deal first, and then Harold worries about the writing,” his lawyer said in 1967, when Robbins was on top of the world and largely indifferent to the rest of it. Neither the Vietnam War, the Moon landing nor Woodstock would interest him as much as his yacht and villa in the south of France, or the pimp-style wardrobe that he favored while giving parties. Friends pad this biography with endless accounts of how Robbins “knew how to live the good life.”

There is a sort of poetic justice in the way the good life finally unravels, but it would be mean-spirited to revel in it—and it still wouldn’t get my friends’ novels published. Michael Korda, who edited Mr. Robbins manuscripts, says, “He was as disagreeable and odious in the days of his success as the days of his failure.” I like to think it’s the disagreeable man, showing through in his novels, that caused me to dislike his work.

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