TEXAS KICKS OUT FOUNDING FATHER

Members of the Texas Board of Education just proved what a bunch of dumb rednecks they are by removing founding father Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum. The man who coined the term "separation of church and state" and encouraged dissent irked these God-fearing cretins and was purged, Soviet-style, from history. In Texas, ignorance is safe.

As the second largest textbook market, the decision will have a tremendous impact on book publishers. Referring to this decision, the Washington Monthly says, "What happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas."

"Now where is that Jefferson feller?"

With all due respect, most Texans are too dumb to pour piss out of their own boots. With the exception of barbecue and a fascinating Mexican American culture they had nothing to do with, most white Christian Texans only know football and oil, and maybe Jesus--not the Jewish one, but a blond Aryan version who protects the gridiron. They don't know shit about politics and now they will know even less, as Jefferson gets the axe. As close-minded idiots, they have reasons for despising Jefferson, who was a freethinker and revolutionary who encouraged dissent and ongoing revolution, and once removed all references to the divinity of Jesus from his personal bible, preferring Christ's humanitarian teachings over his miracles. No surprise that the Texans would run him out of town--just like they did that fancy-talking English faggot, Charles Darwin.

According to the New York Times, the Board insisted upon "stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."

Texas school kids will go into school dumb and come out dumb, too, thanks to the Texas Board of Education.

Why not just burn the books? In this photograph from 1933, the Germans protect the Fatherland from dissenting opinions and radical thoughts by setting fire to books that didn't conform to Nazi ideology. They'd get along great with the Texas School Board.

For more information, read the New York Times story here, or a more detailed report in the TFN insider, a publication of the Texas Freedom Network, "a mainstream voice to counter the religious right" here.

LADY GA GA & BEYONCE: "TELEPHONE"

"Telephone" by Lady Ga Ga & Beyonce: for mature audiences only. Language warning.

Since her meteroic rise to dominate pop hyper-kinetic reality, recording artist and provocateur Lady Ga Ga (born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on March 28, 1986) has fueled mad rumors and a love/hate relationship with contemporary music fans. "She's an hermaphrodite," said some, in spite of the fact that many of her skimpy outfits leave little doubt that she's genetically female, while others howled that she was just an attention whore, a media manipulator and self-promoter that would make Madonna look like a shy shut-in. Whatever the case is, she has taken the pop world by storm with her glossy, glammy excess and obsessively choreographed dance moves, her over-the-top production values and her mind-numbingly hooky music. Parents hate her, but the kids love her. She's shocking, sexy, and energetic--qualities that have worked since the days of Jurassic Pop.

Thursday night, March 11th, Lady Ga Ga released her most extravagant creation yet, a team effort with superstar Beyonce Knowles entitled "Telephone." Don't let the simple title fool you, this is anything but simple. An exhilarating joyride through a billion pop references, in one fell swoop the supergirls manage to reference the women in prison movie "Caged Heat," the 1960's television series Batman, Michael Jackson, "Thelma and Louise,"Diet Coke, Bettie Page, "Natural Born Killers," "Pulp Fiction," Wonder Woman and of course Madonna. And plenty more, I'm sure.

Terrible and tacky, crazy and slick, but kind of fun. Sure, she goes too far. That's what they said about the Beatles, Elvis and probably even Frank Sinatra when they were fresh out of the chute. Things change. Get used to it. Back in the 5th Century BC, Heraclitus of Ephesus told us we'd never step into the same river twice, but we never listened. Like Gatsby, we believe in the green light of the past, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .we will beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Okay, boaters. Here's the orgiastic future wrapped in a bow. Old folks might be forewarned: take a couple Dramamine with your usual meds before pushing the "play" buttom. This is a pop roller-coaster, and you might feel giddy or scared or even slightly nauseous as you climb that rickety first hill over this seedy amusement park...but then you're suddenly over the top.

Gaudy? Tacky? Fun?

JIMI HENDRIX PLAYS THE BLUES

"Hear My Train a Coming" on a 12-string acoustic guitar

Jimi Hendrix has a new record. You heard right. Valley of Neptune was released March 9th, 2010--some forty years after the artist's death. This isn't the first time old recordings have surfaced--some hastily packaged jobs were terrible, filled with unfinished studio jams and overdubs, but some unreleased recordings were truly revelatory, such as the 1997 set, First Rays of the New Rising Sun. The Hendrix fan has a right to be wary of "new" material, but from what we've heard, the new music is well worth hearing. Hendrix lives.

Valleys of Neptune is drawn from two recording sessions in 1969, immediately following the recording of Electric Ladyland (a double album that included such masterpieces as "Voodoo Chile" and "All Along the Watchtower"). Hendrix plays brilliantly, passing through funk and jazz and of course the blues. There is a studio version of "Hear My Train a-Coming," a favorite blues song we present here in two versions: a beautiful acoustic rendition on a 12-string guitar, and a killer live version from a concert on Maui in 1970 (released in the concert film "Rainbow Bridge").

Some people may wonder why Hendrix is still revered so long after his death--people born too late may think of him more as a T-shirt image, a psychedelic space gypsy flying his freak flag, a 60s icon long past taking seriously--but listening to his music sets the record straight. Always exploring, always seeking, a spiritual man in the sense of John Coltrane, he believed in his music and pushed it to the limit. If he'd lived, who knows where he'd be? Forty years after his death, this slight troubadour from Seattle left a trail of recordings that serve as a journal of his long, strange trip from Garfield High to the planet Neptune. Somehow, Jimi's still ahead of his time.

"Hear My Train a Coming," electric, Jimi Hendrix on Maui, 1970

THE OSCARS

the 1967 Oscars--a pivotal year

Sunday, it's the Academy Awards. Generally a dull, glitzy Tinseltown deathwatch that requires Herculean stamina (and maybe NoDoz), this year the Academy is attempting to win an audience by providing more nominees for Best Picture (ten! so you can root for your own favorite, whatever it is) and speeding up the traditionally glacial pace. We hope. In the past few years, the TV audience has dwindled to next to nothing. Other than criminal dullness, part of the problem may be that these days many people watch their movies at home (Viva Netflix!) and may not have seen the nominated films by Oscar time. Without a horse in the race, people don't give a shit. Money is a factor (as usual, commerce trumps art) so there will be heavy pressure on the Academy to include box office blockbusters among the critically acclaimed pictures. When popular favorites are skipped, people change the channel, and that means less people watching those valuable commercials. And of course there are battles being fought on the artistic front.

"The Graduate," a Best Picture nominee from 1967

These battles are nothing new. I'm currently reading "Pictures at a Revolution" by Mark Harris, a lively, well-researched book about the five Best Picture nominees of 1967. Harris says this was a pivotal year where some directors made a decisive break from creaky Old Hollywood and reflected new mores and attitudes, and films of a new sensibility were suddenly in the Oscar line-up; European-influenced films tweaking the Establishment ("Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate") and more traditional social issue melodramas tackling race ("In The Heat of the Night" and the tepid "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner") battled with an old school "sure thing," a musical warhorse from the studios (the execrable "Dr. Dolittle"). Battle lines were drawn, and the good guys won. Well, sort of.

"Bonnie and Clyde" trailer, a 1967 Best Picture nominee

Like any entrenched institution, Hollywood resisted change, and feared movies about race would insult Southerners (meaning "Southern Whites," and yes, many southern theaters refused to screen those films) and worried that films reflecting more open attitudes about sex ("The Graduate" and "Bonnie and Clyde") would offend filmgoers in Middle America. "Bonnie and Clyde," with it's slam-bam mix of violence and laughs presaged "Pulp Fiction" and the Tarantino aesthetic by a long shot, and seemed shocking at the time, and many were outraged that it "glorified" criminal behavior. Sure they got killed in the last reel, but it was hardly a Hollywood ending. The cigar-chomping old guards like Zanuck and Co thought the films coming out of Italy and France were crap, and they didn't think the American public would go for these new, non-traditional American films (non-traditional for their time, now they seem quite tame) that they had inspired. Old Hollywood was crumbling and they knew it. This was a battle for a new kind of film, and it happened at the Oscars.

In any case, despite the odds being stacked against an interesting awards ceremony, once in a while the glossy world of Oscar becomes interesting.

Marlon Brando refuses the Best Actor award in 1972. John Wayne nearly had a cardiac.

HOW WOULD YOU HANDLE DISASTER?

"BARCELONA, Spain – Monstrous waves that smashed into a Mediterranean cruise ship flooded people's cabins, broke windows in a restaurant and sent terrified travelers screaming for doctors, passengers said Thursday."

The Associated Press reports that freak waves--over 33 feet high--took two lives and left fourteen injured. The cruise ship, the Louis Majesty, was 24 miles off the coast of Cabo de San Sebastian near the Spanish town of Palafrugell, when the wave hit.

How would you handle disaster? How would you behave if the ship was going down? A recent study analyzing survivors' behavior on sinking ships says it all depends.


The Titanic and the Lusitania sank just three years apart, and in many ways they are thought of as sister tragedies--both gargantuan ships with roughly the same amount of people on board ending in disaster--but the differences end there. The Lusitania was torpedoed and went down 18 minutes after being hit, and the Titanic remained afloat after hitting an iceberg for over two and a half hours--enough time, according to a recent study, for social rules to come back into play. People behaved differently on the two ships.


"Precisely how long it takes before decorum reappears is impossible to say," says an article in Time about the study by Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich and David Savage and Benno Torgler of Queensland University, "but simple biology would put it somewhere between the 18-min. and 2-hr. 40-min. windows that the two ships were accorded. 'Biologically, fight-or-flight behavior has two distinct stages,' the researchers wrote. 'The short-term response [is] a surge in adrenaline production. This response is limited to a few minutes, because adrenaline degrades rapidly. Only after returning to homeostasis do the higher-order brain functions of the neocortex begin to override instinctual responses.'"

In a ship wreck, it takes time to be civilized. What about the high-stress, alienating culture we live in? Are we too rattled to get beyond "fight or flight" and use our higher-order brain functions?

Read the rest of the article about the study in Time Magazine HERE.

ALL THAT JAZZ

A few jazzy numbers from Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Bill Harris, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald and others from a short movie filmed in New York City, 1950. What a stellar group of musicians! Stop, look and listen.

FROM THE NEWSSTAND

Get out there and read. It frees the mind from the moronic barrage of advertisement-driven entertainment and sound byte reductions of reality. It's the long form, the extended meditation, the architecture of intellection. It helps clarify our own thoughts and feelings. It reminds us how to think for ourselves.
If you can't find a good book, read a magazine. Here are some of our favorite stories from the newsstand in the past few months:

Looking for life lessons? Paste magazine chronicles "signs of life in music, film & culture." They've given us some life lessons from Martin Scorsese. Read "Salute Your Shorts" HERE.

"Life Lessons," directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Nick Nolte and Roseanne Arquette; the only good thing about the trilogy "New York Stories." A cranky old painter with a beard who argues with his Muse may seem too close to home for sheer escapist entertainment, but that's not what Marty does anyway. He does more than just entertain. You might call this short "Mean Streaks."

Trying to write? Trying to write a novel? Trying to write a decent sentence? The Guardian UK asked writers Elmore Leonard, Zadie Smith, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen and more for some fiction-writing rules. The resulting collection of lists, "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction," is loaded with tips. Read it HERE.


We all know about pedophiles in the priesthood. The New York Review of Books has a fascinating story about pedophiles who go into law enforcement, specifically the Texas Youth Commission, the state's juvenile detention agency in the godforsaken West Texas town of Pyote. Read "The Rape of American Prisoners" HERE.

Roger Ebert fought cancer for years and underwent disfiguring surgery that left him unable to speak. He still writes prolifically. His story is sad and inspiring. Read the Esquire portrait, "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man," HERE.


In case you missed this in 2009, here is "Tent City, USA," in which George Saunders spends a week in a homeless camp outside of Fresno. Saunders, a brilliant short story writer, documents the comedy, tragedy and grisly details of life in the tents in this moving piece from (surprisingly enough) GQ. Read it HERE.

Another favorite from 2009: Joshua Wolf Shenk, writing in The Atlantic, followed a study at Harvard that followed 268 undergraduates throughout their lives that resulted in "the broadest longitudinal study we have on lives and happiness." Read "What Makes us Happy," HERE.

One more thing: Walter Kirn, author of "Up in the Air," contributed this review of Sam Shepard's new short story collection, "Day Out of Days," to the New York Times Book Review. As usual, Kirn is whipsmart and colorful, shell-gaming us with jazzy connections and painterly descriptions and just the right degree of snark, and the review stands as a great piece sui generis. Read it HERE.