Then: Shut Up And Play Your Guitar, as Frank Zappa used to say. Now: shut up and call your attorney, as Gibson Guitar Corporation’s Nashville manufacturing plant runs afoul of the eco-police, and gets raided:
Federal agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local police today seized wood, guitars, computers and boxes of files from Gibson Guitar’s Massman Road manufacturing facility.
Sources say the Nashville-based guitar manufacturer is being investigated for violating the Lacey Act, a key piece of environmental law, for importing endangered species of rosewood from Madagascar.
Rosewood is widely used in the construction of guitars and sells for $5,000 per cubic meter, more than double the price of mahogany. The island nation off Africa’s east coast is a key producer of the hardwood, the export of which has links to international criminal activity.
A statement from Gibson released late Tuesday afternoon says the company is “fully co-operating” with the investigation.
“Gibson Guitar is fully cooperating with agents of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service as it pertains to an issue with harvested wood. Gibson is a chain of custody certified buyer who purchases wood from legal suppliers who are to follow all standards. Gibson Guitar Chairman and CEO [Henry Juszkiewicz] sits on the board of the Rainforest Alliance and takes the issue of certification very seriously. The company will continue to cooperate fully and assist our federal government with all inquiries and information,” the company’s statement said.
Madagascar has struggled financially since a January coup and new President Andry Rajoelina issued an executive order in September legalizing the export of rosewood and ebony. The move was decried by environmental groups and political leaders worldwide, as hardwood forests are key to Madagascar’s unique ecology and serve as a habitat for a dwindling lemur population.
Sources tell NashvillePost.com Gibson was involved in a scheme that shipped the wood from Madagascar to Germany and then to the United States.
Ironically, if they made a movie of this, as the old Hollywood legend goes, it would likely be cut up into guitar picks after failing at the box office, thereby bringing things full circle.
L. L. Cool J, currently starring in NCIS: Los Angeles:
“I don’t necessarily subscribe to all her beliefs,” he says, “but I do like Ayn Rand. That’s why I made the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ comment. I think she’s interesting. I don’t do the atheist thing; I believe in God. But some of it works for me.”
Even more risible, though, is the claim that the administration “is going to speak truth to power.” Hello, Valerie? Your boss is the president of the United States! No one is more powerful. As we suggested Friday, it really seems as if Obama and his men do not understand what it means to be president. Because their power is constrained–thank you, Founding Fathers!–they labor under the delusion that they are powerless.
Yet while this is all hilarious, it is also scary when you think it through. Great power entails great responsibility. There is little to suggest that Obama and his aides appreciate their responsibility, and much, including their incessant complaining that the previous president did a lousy job, to suggest an attitude of total irresponsibility.
The job of those in power is not to “speak truth to power,” though it would be nice if they spoke the truth once in a while.
The link to Taranto’s taunt of Valerie Jarrett was timed well with Barbara Curtis’ latest post at PJM. These people are so steeped in Saul Alinsky that they fail to realize that they were written for people trying to topple the system and mau-mau the flakcatchers. But now THEY ARE the flack-catchers and they obviously never really understood the problems of governing. There’s a story in Newsweek about how Obama wasn’t going to be like Redford in The Candidate wondering, “What now?” (Maybe I found it on Instapundit.) But he’s finding out that governing by fiat doesn’t work for long in this country. The tags for his presidency so far seem to be Radical, Naive, FDR, Jimmy Carter, Socialism and Screw Up.
The Professor adds, “Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.”
Queen may or may not have been the first fascist rock group as Rolling Stone once rather astonishingly claimed, but Kanye West seems to be doing his damnedest to catch up:
Mark Tapscott writes, “Rolling Stone Report: Tea Partiers, Town Hall demonstrators too dumb to know they’re being used by evil rich guys”:
Well, isn’t that interesting – an Obamacare advocate and former health insurance communications strategist explains why all those angry mobs showed up to protest at the August Town Hall meetings. Those folks thought they were there because they chose to be there, on their own volition, but they were deceived.
Why? Because it turns out that the protesters were actually just a bunch of puppets, unconsciously being manipulated by sinister hidden forces of evil Rich Right Wingers determined to frustrate health care reform yet again, just as they did when the heroic Hillary Clinton tried in 1993. And how do we know this? Because a former top strategist in the manipulation told a Rolling Stone reporter all about it!
That reporters’ boss was once considered, forty years ago, as part of a counterculture that was no longer interested in money and material goods. (I know, I know, but that was what they told themselves back then.) In 2000, he was reported to have a net worth estimated at “somewhere between $500 million and $750 million, with earnings in the $40 million-to-$60 million range.”
At Hot Air, Stacy McCain writes, there’s nothing “quite so annoying as fake victimhood”:
Overprivileged people trying to elicit sympathy in the Oprah Age by claiming they are victimized by something that doesn’t actually harm them at all. And if you take the liberal MSM seriously, you have to believe that the entire world is being victimized by conservatives:
The key to this kind of nonsense is the liberal MSM’s willingness to exaggerate both the potential menace of conservatives and the helplessness of their victims. Beyond the transparent political bias involved, this phenomenon damages society in three ways:
It invites weak-minded people to join the Self-Pity Parade. Throughout the 1980s, the media pounded home the message that “Reaganomics” was devastating the poor, who were portrayed as helpless victims of trickle-down policies that only benefited rich Wall Street fat cats. If poor people believed that message, why should they even bother trying to improve their lives? Fortunately, many poor people were smart enough to ignore the media’s doom-and-gloom propaganda, and some of them are now the “top 5 percent” whom Democrats plan to tax to pay for everything.
Fake dangers distract us from the real thing. While the media is out chasing phantoms — global warming, the Cheeseburger Menace, the scary people of South Carolina — people are dying every day in car accidents and innocent kids are being gunned down by drug gangsters. And, oh, by the way, al-Qaeda is still in the business of scheming up ways to kill Americans. But if you believe what you see in the MSM, the looming threat is that Rush Limbaugh might buy an NFL franchise.
Phony victimhood devalues the experience of actual victims. There are today — right now, this very minute — thousands people whose lives have been affected by death, disease and other tragedies. Their daughter is suffering from leukemia, or their son has been wounded in Afghanistan, or their spouse has been killed in a highway accident. They turn on the TV and what do they see? Sob stories about Jessica Simpson’s missing maltipoo, Khloe Kardashian’s pre-nuptial agreement, and the latest on Jon and Kate. Really. Those are the kinds of “victims” the media genuinely care about: Celebrities who are good for ratings.
And the celebrities themselves are happy to play victim themselves. As I’ve noted before, in March of 2008, Billy Joel inducted John Cougar Mellencamp into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. During his induction speech for Mellencamp, Joel said:
“Don’t let this club membership change you, John. Stay ornery, stay mean. We need you to be pissed off, and restless, because no matter what they tell us – we know, this country is going to hell in a handcart. This country’s been hijacked. You know it and I know it. People are worried. People are scared, and people are angry. People need to hear a voice like yours that’s out there to echo the discontent that’s out there in the heartland. They need to hear stories about it. [Audience applauds] They need to hear stories about frustration, alienation and desperation. They need to know that somewhere out there somebody feels the way that they do, in the small towns and in the big cities. They need to hear it. And it doesn’t matter if they hear it on a jukebox, in the local gin mill, or in a goddamn truck commercial, because they ain’t gonna hear it on the radio anymore. They don’t care how they hear it, as long as they hear it good and loud and clear the way you’ve always been saying it all along. You’re right, John, this is still our country and we’ll always be victims of powerful people.”
No matter how big the football stadiums we play, the amount of records we sell, or the size of our net worths.
The other day, I asked Iowahawk, the legendary bard of Des Moines, if he would mind if I adapted one of his recent parodies (at least I think it’s a parody. Who can tell these days?) into a video. Somehow, in a moment of weakness, he agreed; this satiric clip is the end result:
And for 40 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.
As Ed Driscoll notes, “Hollywood Unites To Defend Polanski“. Forget the “What if that was a conservative” question. The more interesting question is “How does this resemble Ted Kennedy?”
On the one hand, we’re asked to justify statutory rape. On the other, some sort of murder. We’ll let the legal beagles split those hairs.
In either case, the left enjoins us to reject standard interpretations of the law, and pursue instead some hand-wavy sort of justice: “He’s an artisté”, or “He’s done so much good legislative penance”.
So I differ slightly with Ed on this one. It’s not so much a dark Kafka moment of the Law attacking an individual, but a bifurcation of the idea of equality under the law into a common and elite branch of law.
Oddly enough, I think that’s what I was trying to say, though obviously now in retrospect I wish I had phrased my thoughts more clearly.
I think I’ve been pretty clear though, about how disgusting I think Polanski’s original act was. In contrast, I wonder if Whoopi Goldberg has an ounce of shame over her remarks today on the View?
When I was running university film societies in the 1970s and early 1980s, I considered Roman Polanski’s Chinatown the best film made in the 1970s. I don’t know what I would think today because I haven’t seen it for three decades. And I still consider Rosemary’s Baby one of the best horror movies ever made.
I mention this because good artists are not necessarily good people and bad people are not necessarily bad artists.
That last sentence is actually a topic I explored back in the very early days of Blogcritics, with an artist whose sins, though venial, were, to the best of my knowledge nowhere in the league of Polanski’s.
Finally, to bring this post full circle, regarding the Kennedy clan, “U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy fears that supercharged passions fueling the national health-care debate may lead to violence.”
Is it just me, or does Lady Gaga look like she’s just stepped off the set of the 1980 Rock Hudson miniseries version of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles?
Woodstock was an occasion of enormous pointlessness. I’m loath to give the New York Times credit for anything, then or now, but the newspaper did run the following editorial on Monday, August 18, 1969:
The sponsors of this event, who apparently had not the slightest concern for the turmoil it would cause, should be made to account for their mismanagement. To try to cram several hundred thousand people into a 600-acre farm with only a few hastily installed sanitary facilities shows a complete lack of responsibility.
And The Road to Woodstock proudly quotes the editorial–further proof that Michael Lang’s porch light may remain on, these 40 years later, but he’s still not home.
“We shared everything,” Lang gushes on page 4, and on page 226 he blithely notes, “There were two fewer Food for Love stands on Sunday. . . . Angry kids . . . fed up by the prices and the wait, burned them down Saturday night.”
This be-in required some “Be All You Can Be.” Lang, with utter deafness to irony, says, “A local politician requested that the National Guard . . . supply helicopters. The guard agreed, and their helicopters transported donated food.” (And let us note that the National Guard also did a heckuva job at Kent State the following spring.)
“We recognized one another for what we were at the core, as brothers and sisters,” Lang intones. But a music journalist, present at that core, described a wooden bridge between the performers’ area and the stage as crossing “over the wall separating the stars from the main mulch.”
Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life. “The lighting of candles,” Lang says, “would set a precedent that carries on to this day. The candles became lighters, which have since become cell phones.”
And Woodstock had deep political meaning: “Out of that sense of community, out of that vision, that Utopian vision, comes the energy to go out there and actually participate in the process so that social change occurs,” said Abbie Hoffman, shortly before he killed himself. In the meantime Abbie had written a book, Woodstock Nation. Like everyone else I have never read it, but I’ve been to that country–overcrowded, muddy, lacking in food, and public order. It’s called Bangladesh. (And wasn’t there a concert that had something to do with that place, too?)
Abbie Hoffman was the source of the one amusing Woodstock anecdote. You’d think you’d get a lot of funny stories from filling a cow pasture with half-a-million adolescents. But no. The Who were playing. After “Pinball Wizard,” Pete Townshend turned away to adjust his amplifier. Abbie rushed onstage, grabbed the microphone and began a political rant. Townshend “whacked him in the head with his guitar.”
It was one of Pete’s best licks. And here’s another: “The people at Woodstock,” the book quotes Townshend as saying, “really were a bunch of hypocrites claiming a cosmic revolution simply because they took over a field, broke down some fences, imbibed bad acid, and then tried to run out without paying the bands.”
Watch any episode of Mad Men to to get a sense of the cool Rat Pack/JFK/ Mies van der Rohe aesthetics of the beginning of the 1960s. Watch Woodstock andGimme Shelter immediately afterward to begin to understand how badly the American left’s cognitive dissonance after JFK’s death augured that decade so badly into the ground.
Related: A must-see! This is by far the best, most accurate translation of the lyrics sung by Joe Cocker during his interpretation of the Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends” onstage at Woodstock.
Tammy Bruce breaks out the flying pig award for punk rocker Henry Rollins, and Vanity Fair magazine, both astoundingly enough:
In Vanity Fair of all places we finally have someone asking the right question. This astounding event inaugurates the first Tammy Blog “Flying Pig Award” recognizing and lauding the right thing from quarters least expected. Below is a snippet. Please do read the whole thing, and the comments attached to the article are also worth a read. Some of the more thoughtful remarks about a young woman the left would prefer be forgotten. (HT Kruiser)
…I am very well known, a United States senator. My family is incredibly powerful. There are allegations that I had been drinking heavily hours up to the time I got into the vehicle with the passenger. I deny this for the rest of my life. That at no point did I make an attempt to call for rescue would probably be considered by many people to be outrageous and horrible, perhaps a crime that would carry a prison sentence. Can you imagine what the parents of the deceased would be going through when they found out that their 28-year-old daughter died alone in total darkness? I serve no time. Not inconvenienced by the burdensome obstacle of incarceration, I seek to maintain my elected position. I am successful and remain a senator for the next four decades. Would any deed I performed in that time, besides going to prison for the negligent homicide I committed all those years ago, be enough to wipe the slate clean? After my passing, would you fail to mention the incident and the death of this innocent person in reviewing the events of my long and lauded life? You wouldn’t forget about her, would you? That would be negligent.
There’s something lurking just under the surface of the Lake Worth Lagoon.
Greg Reynolds of LagoonKeepers.org recalls, “Channel marker ten is the first time we saw the unknown creature.” “I hollered out…and said what is that? We followed it, started taking video.”
This mysterious creature was caught on tape by the LagoonKeepers.
In 1987, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring jazz to be “a rare and valuable national treasure.” Nowadays the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is taught in public schools, heard on TV commercials and performed at prestigious venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, which even runs its own nightclub, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.
Here’s the catch: Nobody’s listening.
No, it’s not quite that bad—but it’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak.
Last year, I linked to a David Brooks column about the efforts of Bruce Springsteen sideman and supporting Sopranos cast member “Miami” Steve Van Zandt to add rock and roll to high school curriculums. Brooks wrote:
It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.
If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.
Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. [Gee, not Springsteen, as well?--Ed] He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.
And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.
Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.
As I noted in response:
Education used to do this as well. Not so much, anymore.
But back to the main point of Brooks and Miami Steve. Jazz was essentially frozen in amber as a creative force once Lincoln Center hired Wynton Marsalis to be its “Musical Director of Jazz.” Miami Steve wants to do the same thing to rock. And it’s not like education isn’t already dominated by Present Tense Culture.
(Or, for another way to look at Brooks’ column: this just into the New York Times: Pop culture is fractured and demassified, something that Alvin Toffler predicted 28 years ago.)
In the 1940s, Miles, Dizzy, Bird and Charlie Christian used their Manhattan nightclubs as a laboratory to invent bebop, eventually killing the swing orchestras dead in their tracks. While bebop and its offshoots produced some brilliant music, by and large, it wasn’t a genre you could easily dance to. Which is why, as Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote in 2000’s If It Ain’t Got That Swing, the teenagers of the 1950s found an alternative: rock and roll. A few years later, Berry Gordy’s Motown borrowed from the assembly lines–not Detroit’s, but Hollywood’s–and adapted Tinseltown’s studio system approach to music, and produced hit after hit.
As Teachout concludes:
Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. But there’s no sense in pretending that it didn’t happen, or that contemporary jazz is capable of appealing to the same kind of mass audience that thrilled to the big bands of the swing era. And it is precisely because jazz is now widely viewed as a high-culture art form that its makers must start to grapple with the same problems of presentation, marketing and audience development as do symphony orchestras, drama companies and art museums—a task that will be made all the more daunting by the fact that jazz is made for the most part by individuals, not established institutions with deep pockets.
No, I don’t know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. If you’re marketing Schubert and Stravinsky to those listeners, you have no choice but to start from scratch and make the case for the beauty of their music to otherwise intelligent people who simply don’t take it for granted. By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners—not next month, not next week, but right now.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page’s ongoing hostility toward pop culture has taken a bizarre new turn (even by the Journal’s standards) with this new essay by Bret Stephens, who decided that it would be fruitful to compare the exploits of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong to the accomplishments of the recently deceased Michael Jackson. One of the conservative movement’s best and brightest minds when it comes to foreign affairs, Stephens is apparently unhappy that our celebrity-obsessed media has wildly over-covered Jackson in the last few weeks (geez, the media goes nuts over a reclusive pop star’s mysterious death — that’s a real news flash, huh?) while largely ignoring the achievements of the man who first walked on the moon 40 years ago.
Apparently oblivious to the fact that in addition to being a genuine kook, Jackson was a hugely popular and innovative force for several decades in popular music, Stephens tosses him into the dustbin of history, saying that while most “half-way educated people” will continue to honor Armstrong a hundred years from now: “It’s also a safe bet that in a century the name Michael Jackson will be familiar only to five or six cultural anthropologists and, possibly, a medical historian.”
Indeed. Name the troubadour who topped the charts in 1492. Or for that matter, in 1903 when the Wright Brothers took their first flight.
In the Wall Street Journal, Bill Wyman (no, not the former bass player with the Stones) writes, “Am I the only one who sensed, amid the raucous hoopla that followed Michael Jackson’s death, something antiquated in the air?”
The hip-hop era, profane and insistent, [and also surprisingly antiquated -- Ed] continues with little obvious influence owed to the supposed King of Pop. Superstar franchises like Bruce Springsteen, the Police and the Rolling Stones [ditto -- Ed] efficiently sweep across the world’s stages, pulling in $300 million, $400 million, even a half billion dollars. Jackson barely appeared live in the last dozen years of his life.
Jackson’s fame was a simulacrum from another era — or eras, to be precise, because he managed to glide effortlessly out of the slightly musty world of 1970s soul into the bright and incandescent MTV age of the early ’80s. But that was more than 25 years ago, before Public Enemy or Nirvana, before Eminem, Jay Z or Lil Wayne.
There was another way Jackson seemed from a previous time. And that is the obsession with victimhood that ran through all of the commentary and memorials that followed his death.
Marlon Jackson, one of the original members of the Jackson Five, gave this version of his late brother’s life at the memorial service: “Being judged, ridiculed — how much pain can one take? Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone.” The Rev. Al Sharpton got the crowd cheering with his litany: “He outsang his cynics, he outdanced his doubters, he outperformed the pessimists. Every time he got knocked down he got back up!”
Even the head of AEG, the promoter of the series of London concerts Jackson was set to perform, hit this note in Billboard: “To me, the success of [the memorial] is measured by the fact that I think we were able to really humanize my friend and erase those caricatures that the press had created of him.”
From Brooke Shields to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) everyone was on message, echoing the talking points Jackson himself threw up in the shadowy years before his death. Somehow or other Jackson convinced himself — and seemingly, his family and partisans — that he wasn’t a powerful musical superstar. He was instead a victim of some mysterious stew of health maladies, public persecution, and secret sadnesses that, we were to understand, made this frail man-child shiver with fear.
The reality is different.
Read the rest, which dovetails remarkably well with Mark Steyn’s obit for Jackson.
Update: On the other hand, this is more than a little scary to watch: found via Hot Air, Us magazine has a newly released video of Jackson’s 1984 Pepsi commercial gone awry, resulting in the singer’s scalp and face being burned. Us bills it as “How Michael Jackson’s Pill Addiction Began” — which again implies the same sort of passive victimhood that Wyman decries above.
“I don’t think people fought and gave their lives so that some guy can sit in his bedroom and be mean. I don’t think that’s what freedom of speech is,” he continued. “Freedom of speech is really about assembly — for us to collectively have an idea. We want to get our point of view out so we can assemble and I can appoint you to be the spokesman.That’s freedom of speech — to be able to collectively speak for a sector of people. But somehow it’s turned into ‘I can be an asshole whenever I feel like, say whatever I like, be disrespectful to people and not be courteous.’ It’s not good for our society. Not being courteous is not really freedom of speech. …
Because mean people suck. Including Cougar himself, Cuffy notes, quoting this flashback to 2004:
Whoopi Goldberg delivered an X-rated rant full of sexual innuendoes against President Bush last night at a Radio City gala that raised $7.5 million for the newly minted Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards. Waving a bottle of wine, she fired off a stream of vulgar sexual wordplays on Bush’s name in a riff about female genitalia, and boasted that she’d refused to let Team Kerry clear her material.
Other celebs also competed to bash Bush. Singer John Mellencamp sang a specially written song that called the president “just another cheap thug” and ridiculed him as the “Texas bambino.” [ed --- the title of Mellencamp's "little diddy" is actually "Texas Bandito".]
Federal agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local police today seized wood, guitars, computers and boxes of files from Gibson Guitar’s Massman Road manufacturing facility.
A statement from Gibson released late Tuesday afternoon says the company is “fully co-operating” with the investigation.
