Kathy Shaidle recently found the quintessential moment when the Gray Lady that is the New York Times finally admitted that she could really use a dye job. Here’s the opening to a Times piece titled, “In Woodstock, Values Collide Over Housing:”

If they had decided to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, the issues might have seemed simpler.

Instead, a protracted battle over a 53-unit affordable housing project is dividing this still-crunchy town where mellow ’60s vibes and liberal politics coexist uneasily with real estate prices increasingly out of the reach of the humbler classes.

When workers finally began clearing land for the Woodstock Commons project in July, it looked as if the uncomfortable dispute might finally be ending. Instead, new issues kept popping up: the plight of black bears and endangered Indiana bats threatened by the construction; a botched permitting process; uncertainty about water service.

In some ways what is playing out in this Ulster County town is a more colorful microcosm of affordable housing controversies elsewhere. Still, the collision of environmental, neighborhood and social justice issues is making people squirm in a place where the only thing more important than making the world better can be keeping Woodstock the same.

Or as Kathy wrote quoting the above bolded text,  “NYT accidentally summarizes ‘progressivism’ in half a sentence:”

“Progressives” live in the past — a past that (like the one they so often accuse conservatives of romantically yearning for) didn’t exist:

Rosa Parks wasn’t just “tired” — she was a semi-professional activist, trained at a Communist “school”; Alger Hiss was guilty; so were Sacco and Venzetti; there really were Communist spies in the State Department; FDR prolonged the Depression; “busing” increased racial hatred; Bush’s verbal SATs were higher than Kerry’s…

Once you realize that liberals live in a nostalgic past of their own invention and on-going promotion (like Mrs. Havisham or a tragic Tennessee Williams “heroine”) almost everything “progressives” do then makes “sense.”

Freeze-dry the (mostly imaginary) past, but hurry up and change the entire existing social and economic order, seem to be the two modes the left seems to operate in, sometimes simultaneously. You can see it in Barack Obama, with his love of 1930s-era socialism, and his ’70s-era sci-fi obsessions with “green” jobs and global warming.  But it’s folly to cast all of the blame on Obama; it’s been the mindset of the left for the last decade or so.  At the end of 2004, Paul Mirengoff, then with Power Line wrote:

The Democratic party, [Michael Barone] argues, is defined by 1930 era views on social security, 60s views on the state of race relations and the use of military force, and 70s views on feminism. Cosmetically at least, this state of affairs constitutes a reversal of roles from 1996 when the Democrats claimed they couldn’t “stop thinking about tomorrow,” while Bob Dole promised to be “a bridge to the past.”

But the problem for some factions of the far left is that Dole didn’t go far back enough. Or as Pete Seeger once told the New York Times, “I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Just as long as it’s the right village, somewhere far out of sight, where the low-income housing won’t clash with the namesake of the location where half a million high-income hippies had their ultimate moment of nostalgie de la boue.

Speaking of music and “progressivism,” back around 2004, libertarian blogger Radley Balko explored the intersection of  “Tower Records and the Conservative Left.”  When the Tower Records chain fell apart in 2004, a New York Times columnist wrote:

But we have reached what to me, back in 1966, was an unimaginable place — an America where the small-town variety stores have gone out of business because a Wal-Mart opened up out by the highway; an America where with a few keystrokes and a valid credit card you can own virtually any recording you want, the instant it’s released. Somehow it sounds more inviting than it actually is.

It sounds pretty darn amazing to me — it’s also an America where you can read just about any newspaper from anywhere in the world online, or start your own digital version, should you so desire. And the flip-side is that any musician is guaranteed of getting listened to, particularly if he applies just a modicum of self-promotion. If you make it to the top, the odds are greatly decreased that you’ll have your own private plane to tour in, ala Led Zeppelin, but given the Times’ obsessions with equalizing income, that should be a feature from their perspective, not a bug, right?

But then, as Balko wrote, in words that echo in the recent Times article at the top of this post:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today’s left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol’ days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we’d now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I’m not kidding. They’re that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a “sign of our sad times.” No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn’t something romantic about the old-stye “family farm” that’s deserving of government protection. Innovation isn’t celebrated, it’s excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dynamism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Getting back to Woodstock, it occurred nearly concurrent with the Apollo moon landing in the summer of 1969. Apollo marked the apogee of the postwar industrial era and its massive engineering projects. And yes, NASA in the 1960s was simultaneously JFK’s Moral Equivalent of War as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, and LBJ’s TVA-style project to help further modernize the south, as space journalist Rand Simberg once noted. But it was still an era that was obsessed with building something, unlike today’s NASA’s obsession with multiculti emotional pablum. Mark Steyn explored this extensively in the early chapters of After America; including quoting from Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at England’s University of Buckingham, who posited last year that “Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined:”

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS, merely excuses for not doing something which we cannot do.

It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to.

However, technological progress in the form of computers, new businesses, and ultimately the Web accelerated exponentially in the 1980s ’til the fall of 2008. The Obama administration has worked hard to slow that progress to a halt as well. One reason for the lack of dynamism is that too many small businesses slows the amount of Federal palms that need to be greased, while simultaneously multiplying the number of cats that need to be herded. That’s a topic that James Pethokoukis recently discussed in his must-read column, “Solyndra, the logical endpoint of Obamanomics:”

No wonder many Democratic strategists predicted their party’s 2008 landslide win would usher in a generation of political dominance. Obamanomics, essentially, would divert taxpayer dollars to the Green Lobby – and then into the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party. This is what crony capitalism is really all about: politicians enriching favored businesses, who then return the favor. Or maybe it’s the other way around, Who cares, really. It’s an endless, profitable loop for both.

And Obama almost pulled it off. The Great Recession conveniently allowed the president to start the spendathon under the guise of economic stimulus. (“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” – White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, 2009). As it turns out, the $38.6 billion loan program for clean energy firms that Solyndra benefited from has created just 3,545 permanent new jobs after parceling out half its dough. That works out to around $5 million a job.

Unfortunately for the Obamacrats, the financial meltdown also undercut political support for cap-and-trade on Capitol Hill. Voters worried the scheme would slow growth and cost jobs. But without permanently and continually raising the price of carbon-based fuels, many green businesses can’t make the numbers work.

But hey, what’s a little magic thinking when you’re riding the unicorn already? Even if it’s on a treadmill.

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Investor and TV personality Jeffrey Carter on “Free To Choose and Farmageddon:”

Last night I went to see the documentary Farmageddon in Chicago. I also stayed for the full panel discussion.

The film is shocking. Documentaries are supposed to shock you. Michael Moore has made millions presenting slanted facts to us. Documentaries are designed to get you to do something.

This documentary illustrates the plight of the organic farmer, specifically the organic dairy farmer. If a dairy farmer wants to sell raw milk, they will be run out of business and many times imprisoned by the federal bureaucracy. The USDA actively tries to run Raw Milk Producers out of the business. They work closely with agents from state agricultural agencies.

The documentary shows film of agents descending on various organic farms and outlets, guns drawn, SWAT teams present. It’s straight out of science fiction and something that you can’t believe happens in America. I can understand a huge police presence when going after a drug lord, but a family farmer? Sure, farmers keep guns but in my experience they aren’t violent people.

Hey, as a candidate, Obama promised the San Francisco Chronicle that he’d bankrupt the coal industry.

…He didn’t say that was the only business he’d try to bankrupt, did he?

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H.L. Mencken, in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

NIETZSCHE was a preacher’s son, brought up in the fear of the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers. Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever finite, variable and all-too-human – when he begins to realize that his father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings, and fallible like himself – then he will fly precipitately toward the intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.

As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother – a preacher’s daughter as well as a preacher’s wife – seemed his logical and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out the silly brains of theologians.

But while Nietzsche declared that “God is Dead” in 1882 (God would seem to provide a rejoinder 18 years later), everyone in pop culture seems determined to pose as His son. The most recent example was spotted at Glenn Beck’s perhaps appropriately named Website, The Blaze. “Atheist Comedian Ricky Gervais Poses as Jesus in ‘Blasphemous’ Mag Cover:”

(more…)

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Ace of Spades and Verum Serum have a couple of interesting posts on what two popular early-’80s songs say about cars, the people who drive them — i.e., you and me, and the artists who wrote the songs. Verum Serum contrasts the Police’s “Syncronicity II” song with Rush’s “Red Barchetta,” for a way to explore a collectivist view of the automobile and the everyday people who own them, versus an individualist view.

The line in ‘Synchronicity II” goes, “Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, Contestants in a suicidal race.”

To which Ace responds:

That is, all you wage-slaves headed to work each day are lemmings in a suicide machine.

You hear this an awful lot from artists. An awful lot. You see this basic idea — the emptiness and awfulness of normal, quotidian life — in dozens of movies, like the empty American Beauty, and damn, if they don’t win Oscars a lot.

Death of a Salesman was about this. So, instant classic.

This is a silly and solipsistic conceit. Let me define that word, in case you don’t know it:

sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.

Taken out of the realm of philosophy, the word is mostly used to describe a non-thoughtful, non-philosophical insistence that one’s own experience can be generalized to all other’s experience. That is, it’s a baby thing. Like babies who lack any sense of perspective outside their own heads, the solipsist is incapable of using his imagination to guess what the world might look like from other vantage points.

We are all prisoners of our own experience, it is true, but the solipsist is a willing prisoner, and generally refuses to even try to see the world from a different point of view.

Now, artists love songs like this, and movies like this, because these movies speak to them. They are of a specific psychological type, mostly. They themselves could not function happily within the confines of what most people would call “a normal life,” and are driven towards more Bohemian, atypical lifestyles.

I don’t begrudge them that. As someone who’s wound up, whether by choice or by chance, in a sort of Bohemian limbo myself, I get why they chafe at the idea of 9 to 5 and nicely-trimmed suburban lawns, myself. (Actually I don’t get the latter and never have — what the hell is the problem with a nice lawn?)

So these songs, and these films, can be said to be the stories of their own lives and their own choices, the rejection of “normal” life and more common non-artistic dreams and ambitions. And certainly, for any successful or semi-successful artist, their choice to take an oddball path can be justified; if it all works for them, wonderful.

But they don’t leave it at that. The message of these songs and movies is that the Square, Normal Suburban Workaday Life just wasn’t for me, because my psychology was such that I couldn’t hack that would always be miserable in such a state; it’s almost always generalized and universalized as something much, much bigger:

The life you lead (assuming you’re not an Artist) sucks and you’re a fool or a coward for leading it.

What? How did we get there?

Not everyone has talent enough to be an artist and produce art on an occasional schedule (when the Muse moves one) and yet be good enough at it so as not to starve. In fact, the number of artists a society can support is surely hard-capped at no more than, say, 1% at the very most, and only during a period of strong, strong economic activity, when artists who can’t make a living on their art can get paid good wages as a waiter or something.

This is so obvious, isn’t it?

So what the hell is the Artist scorn for all non-Artists?

Actually, it’s not artists; it’s leftists. Musically (for reasons I can explain if you’d like, but that would be a whole ‘nother post), country music isn’t my thing, but a few months ago when I spent a week in Texas, I listened to several hours worth of songs celebrating working hard, living on a farm, patriotism, and essentially being a grown-up. I imagine that once the country artist makes it to the point where he has a recording contract, he’s living a fairly similar and hermetically sealed life as Der Stingle was in the early 1980s, shuttling between the recording studio, the video studio, the stage, the hotel and the tour bus; it’s only the scale that’s different. But most country artists are smart and/or sane enough not to insult the people who buy their records and concert tickets. (See also: furious backlash by country fans against the Dixie Chicks.)

And it’s not just leftwing musicians and actors of course. Other performance artists on the left often express a similar level of solipsism. “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me,” Barack Obama told the AP in the early 1990s, as Joel Kotkin reminds us, in this passage highlighted last October by Glenn Reynolds:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

In June of 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted a similar theme in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama on the campaign trail in 2008:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Or average, everyday jobs — which bore the daylights out of the president, and presumably the first lady as well.

At the Weekly Standard today, David Gelernter looks at “Elites Gone Bad” and writes, “What America needs is a better class of left-winger.” Because let’s face it: when you go into the small college towns, and cloistered artists’ garrets like Hollywood, the smug has been rising for 25 years or so, and nothing’s replaced it. And they were angered by the Reagan administration and the Bush administrations,  and each successive generation has said that somehow these elitists are gonna re-embrace their fellow man, and they never do. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to Marxism or nihilism or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-business sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

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What it is about the Middle East that causes self-styled “Progressives” to suddenly mumble, “Nevermind,” ala Emily Litella?

First up, you’d think that Prince, who debuted on the national scene in the late 1970s as an androgynous, pushing the boundaries kind of guy, would want his fans in the Middle East to have the same freedom to experiment. So much for that idea:

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Film&Music, Prince said: “It’s fun being in Islamic countries, to know there’s only one religion. There’s order. You wear a burqa. There’s no choice. People are happy with that.” When asked about the fate of those unhappy with having no choice, he replied: “There are people who are unhappy with everything. There’s a dark side to everything.”

Prince embraced religion in 2001, when he became a Jehovah’s Witness. “I was anti-authoritarian but at the same time I was a loving tyrant,” he told the Guardian. “You can’t be both. I had to learn what authority was. That’s what the Bible teaches. The Bible is a study guide for social interaction.

“If I go to a place where I don’t feel stressed and there’s no car alarms and airplanes overhead, then you understand what noise pollution is. Noise is a society that has no God, that has no glue. [And thus the 53-year old musician sounds like every 53-year old parent within earshot of a sports arena that's booked Prince for a concert -- Ed] We can’t do what we want to do all the time. If you don’t have boundaries, what then?”

He’s got his. Those of you in the Middle East, you’re on your own. Rand Simberg notes how immediately appalling Prince’s language would sound if it were applied to the American South rather than the Islamic Middle East.

Next up, there’s Amnesty International, which in the mid-1980s, ran commercials full of Hollywood celebrities and rock stars offering toasts to “freedom.” I’m pretty sure I watched this one on MTV more than a few times back then, including during Live Aid, if I’m not mistaken. Look fast for the late Ron Silver halfway through the ad, 20 years before becoming a PJM contributor:

Freedom? Dude, put the collar back down on your polo shirt, take off the Wayfarers, and get your mind out of the 1980s:

If you need a refresher, Hamas conducted a raid (probably illegal, as terrorists never wear uniforms) and snuck across the border, attacked an Israeli outpost, and kidnapped Gilad Shalit.Wikipedia uses the word “capture.” Um, yeah. Like Bruno Hauptman “captured” the Lindbergh Baby.

He has been held illegally for five years.

Those who “captured” him are making threats and demands, like legal armies always do.

Shalit’s captors issued another demand to the Israelis, demanding that Israel release an additional 1,000 Palestinian prisoners (in addition to all female and young prisoners, as previously demanded) and end Israel’s incursions into Gaza.[38] Two days later, the captors issued a 24-hour ultimatum for meeting their demands, threatening unspecified consequences if Israel refused.[39] Hours after the ultimatum was issued, Israel officially rejected the demands, stating that: “there will be no negotiations to release prisoners”

So, of course Amnesty International must protest this and demand his release, right?

Wrong.

If a better example of the utter moral collapse of the human rights community exists, it would be hard to find. The statement is one of passionless brevity — just a few sentences long — and expresses no opinion on the standing of Hamas, or on its 2006 raid into Israel, or on the legitimacy of its goals and methods. Remarkably, it doesn’t even demand the release of Gilad Shalit. The most that this allegedly courageous and principled human rights community could bring itself to say to the terrorists of Hamas is that they should improve the conditions of Shalit’s imprisonment.

As Ace concludes, “If donating directly to Al Qaeda and Hamas feels too risky and too dirty to you, try us! We have Bono.”

Back in 2003, Steven Den Beste noted that Amnesty International “is demonstrating that when the cards are down, its soul is for sale.”

I’d say that for both AI and Prince, those transactions have now been concluded.

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Schaefer  — it’s the one beer to have, when you’re having more than one Moog synthesizer:

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Clarence Clemons, RIP, at a far too young 69 years old.

Update: Roger Friedman, who says he first broke the story of Clemons’ now-fatal stroke last week, writes:

Here’s the thing about the E Street Band, which has zillions of devoted fans who can argue their merits for weeks at a time. In the end, the sound of that band came from Clarence Clemons. When Bruce Springsteen released “Greetings from Asbury Park,” he certainly established himself as a premier singer songwriter ready to inherit the mantle from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Paul Simon. But when Springsteen released “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle,” suddenly his intentions were clear. This was an R&B band that combined that poetry.

The music, thanks to Clarence’s horn, was now elastic. He gave it swing. “Rosalita” is now a concert favorite but when it first was heard it was nothing short of magic.  Proceeding into “Born to Run,” Clarence–I mean, it’s him on the cover with Bruce–is the signature sound beyond Bruce’s voice. The band is great, Steve vanZandt is a genius, etc. But suddenly the whole mission is defined, and you wait to hear that clarion call to know what’s coming–it’s The Big Man.  There’s a hint of it on”Spirit in the Night,” but by the time “Thunder Road” is done, the Clarence Clemons sound is established like a national landmark.

Replacing Clemons will be as difficult for Springsteen as replacing John Bonham or Freddie Mercury in their respective bands. It will be interesting to see how Springsteen proceeds from this devastating loss to his sound. Or as John Nolte writes at Big Hollywood, “Today we mourn the passing of the Big Man and also the E Street Band itself … because it’s impossible to imagine one without the other.”

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If you’re a Canadian fan of Bill Cosby, don’t expect him to perform his stand-up routine north of the 49th Parallel anytime soon, based on what he told one what he said earlier this month on Twitter:

Dear @jinkerjacket your Canadian Gov requires a huge payment from my earnings. You’ll have to view me tax-free here: http://bit.ly/CosbyApp

As Kevin Hilferty of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity adds:

It is a commonly held belief that famous performers do not take tax rates into account when deciding where to go on tour. Mr. Cosby proves this to be incorrect.  Actors and comedians are normal people like anyone else, and as such are influenced by tax competition. All things equal, areas with lower tax rates will receive more business than those with higher tax rates. This tax competition helps restrain the size of government because politicians realize that jobs and investment can cross borders (or not cross in this case) if they get too greedy and impose high taxes.

This is an important lesson for governments considering raising taxes on non-resident performers. Actors, comedians, and sports stars all might make a lot of money, but they still want to keep that money by avoiding high taxes. While it may seem like an easy source of tax revenue to politicians, it may just end up keeping their constituents from seeing the shows they desire.

One late night a couple of weeks ago, I watched Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile, a documentary released last year on the making of 1971′s Exile on Main Street and available in streaming form from Netflix. The early part of the documentary lays out why one of the quintessential British rock groups recorded arguably their definitive album in France. The Stones’ desire not to lose their earnings to the British government is a reminder that while Keith Richards has long said that the Stones and the Beatles were always friendly musical competitors, in many respects, the Stones served as a counterweight for some of John Lennon’s sillier and grandiose attempts to play to the rafters.

In 1967, Lennon swore that “All You Need is Love;” Keith later responded (and I’m paraphrasing here, as I don’t have the interview in front of me), “All you need is love? Try living on it sometime.”) And similarly, in 1971, Lennon as a solo artist wrote “Imagine,” in which he sang “Imagine no possessions.” Almost concurrently, the Stones were saying nuts to that — they left England and moved to France, where they recorded Exile, to avoid having their wealth confiscated by the rapacious taxation of high-earners by the British government.

Oh and speaking of Lennon’s longtime writing partner, Paul and his wife paid as much attention to the precepts of “Imagine” as multimillionaire Lennon himself, as Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago in the London Telegraph after the Live8 concert to (as best I recall the purpose of the concert), convince western governments to forgive Africa’s debt:

Seven years ago, you’ll recall, Sir Paul’s wife died of cancer. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state.

That way she could set up a “qualified domestic marital trust” that would… Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the immortal words of Lennon and/or McCartney. Big deal, you say. We’re into world peace and saving the planet and feeding Africa. What difference does it make which jurisdiction some squaresville suit files the boring paperwork in?

Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. By filing for probate in New York rather than the United Kingdom, Linda McCartney avoided the 40 per cent death duties levied by Her Majesty’s Government. That way, her family gets all 100 per cent – and 100 per cent of Linda McCartney’s estate isn’t to be sneezed at.

For purposes of comparison, Bob Geldof’s original Live Aid concert in 1985 raised £50 million. Lady McCartney’s estate was estimated at around £150 million. In other words, had she paid her 40 per cent death duties, the British Treasury would have raised more money than Sir Bob did with Bananarama and all the gang at Wembley Stadium that day.

Given that she’d enjoyed all the blessings of life in these islands since 1968, Gordon Brown might have felt justified in reprising Sir Bob’s heartfelt catchphrase at Wembley: “Give us yer fokkin’ money!” But she didn’t. She kept it for herself. And good for her. I only wish I could afford her lawyers.

Of course, if it seems amazing to see celebrities as arch-liberal as Cosby and Paul and Linda McCartney suddenly become fiscal conservatives when it’s their own money that’s on the line, it’s a reminder of Conquest’s First Law of politics, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

(Of course, when they start telling you what you should do with your wallet, watch out. Or just tune out.)

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I’m a day late to this one, but read Brad Schaeffer at Big Hollywood for a look at Townshend’s contributions as a musician and songwriter. As for how he wrote those songs, since so many early bloggers had a background in DIY music, here’s a look back at a post I wrote in 2003 for the then-nascent Blogcritics Website on Townshend’s “Scoop” series of albums, which helped to popularize home music recording, beginning in the 1980s, as the first affordable cassette four-track machines began to enter the market.

But years before that, beginning in the early 1960s, Townshend was first recording his music at home, initially on large reel-to-reel machines. Townshend, then a fledgling songwriter in the earliest incarnation of The Who, initially couldn’t read music. To make up for that, he started “writing” his songs by overdubbing first a drum track (first with real drums, eventually with drum machines), then a guitar track, then a bass track, and finally a vocal track to present his bandmates in The Who with an audio demo of his song.

Today, the technology has advanced sufficiently so that the line between “demo” recordings and the finished product has blurred — and the recording technology inside a $35,000 Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early 1980s is inside almost any PC with a good quality soundcard and the appropriate software. And actually, the video below is a little outdated, since it promotes the benefits of 64-bit computing for recording, a technology that’s now fairly ubiquitous. But it does a good overview of what’s possible these days with the right hardware, software, and musical chops:

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Signboard of the Day, for those who think JFK, not to mention Eddie and the Cruisers were documentaries:

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As Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt discussed yesterday, evidently you can no longer have Kung Fu Fighting in England. The song I mean; presumably karate lessons are still kosher:

Hugh Hewitt: Now settling down to the serious stuff, Mark, today you also talked about the fact that we dare not sing Kung Fu Fighting in a pub in Britain.

Mark Steyn: No, this is a guy who is a singer in a bar on oldie’s night, and he was singing Kung Fu Fighting, which as I’m sure you know, Hugh, was Billboard’s number one record in the United States in December, 1974.

HH: Oh, you bet.

MS: And a couple of people happened to be passing by and heard the song, and they were Chinese. And they reported it to the police, and the police on the Isle of Wight arrested this guy for racism, for committing a racially aggravated offense. As I said, this was a number one record in the United States, number one record in the United Kingdom, in Australia, all over the world. But apparently it’s now a hate crime. And on a certain level, it’s funny. But at a certain level, the stupidity of Western civilization is reaching a tipping point. And I’m tired of this stuff, which is why I don’t regard Kung Fu Fighting as the acme of Western civilization. But we are committed now to defending this song to the end. I’m in favor of it, I don’t know whether the Isle of Wight has a national anthem, but if it doesn’t, I want it to adopt Kung Fu Fighting as their national anthem.

HH: And I want to say, we are heard by the internet around the world, so at this very moment, as I read the lyrics from Kung Fu Fighting with Mark Steyn humming in the background, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, those cats were fast as lightning, in fact it was a little bit frightening, but they fought with expert timing.

MS: Right.

HH: They were funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown.

MS: Yeah.

HH: We are now, I think, in peril of arrest if we go to the Isle of Wight, Mark Steyn.

(more…)

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I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, when after all it was Rebecca Black.

If only someone could convince Joe Pesci to don his David Ferrie fright wig and sing “Friday” in character, that would be an awesome parody video.

(H/T: 5′F)

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Between Maureen Dowd and Pinch Sulzberger, you really get the sense that the last people on Earth who still believe in the myths of the 1960s are hold up in their redoubt at 620 Eighth Avenue. Here’s Dowd shocked that Bob Dylan would cave to Communist China’s censors in order to make a few bucks performing in Beijing:

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.

“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.

But Maureen, it’s the other guy’s country.

Related: What would Sebastian Cabot do?

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Attention, ShopRite management: The Scorpions are a fine heavy metal group.* They are not a fine example of supermarket muzak. The same can be said for AC/DC, the Georgia Satellites, and Elvis Costello, all of whom I heard while making a quick expedition to one of your stores today. Regarding Mr. Costello, “Pump It Up” ** is one of the finest songs about masturbation ever written; for that same reason, it is also not a fine example of supermarket muzak.

Plus it’s insulting to the musicians. How must it feel to walk out of a recording studio knowing that your group just nailed the dirtiest, nastiest, rudest heavy metal song ever recorded in the history of man, and then 20 years later hear it on the speakers of a suburban supermarket walking down the frozen foods aisle? Back when I was a kid, rock and roll was something hard and bracing with a veneer of still being slightly “underground” that you had to seek out; supermarket muzak was all syrupy strings and soothing melodies.

At some point in the mid-1990s, I guess, that all went out the window. Back in 2007, in a meditation on “Present-Tense Culture” and Alan Bloom’s The Closing Of The American Mind, Mark Steyn quoted Bloom’s statement that “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself,” and added that in terms of music for public consumption, “We are all rockers now.” And when your local supermarket’s muzak is indistinguishable from your local Classic Rock FM station, despite having a much more diverse clientele, both statements are more true than ever:

Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

Regarding that entire society with a rock aesthetic, a couple of years earlier, after hearing The Cars’ “Drive” on his local supermarket’s muzak, James Lileks wrote:

Not their best song, and I believe it was one of those “let the bassist get one out of his system” numbers. Still, this represented victory. In my skinny-tie days we had the conceit that our music stood in opposition to THE SYSTEM, whatever that was. The grocery stores played Muzak versions of songs that were muzak to begin with – I mean, you don’t truly understand the banality of the melody of “Horse with No Name” until it’s played by a string section. In retrospect I miss the Muzak; I really do. Part of me now wants a grocery store that’s brightly lit with big googie graphics and chipper music-to-seduce-Stepford-wives songs percolating away in the rafters. But that’s over; we won. There’s no alternative to the old alternatives anymore.

Or as Lileks wrote last year, “In fact if I managed a store today I’d play the old Muzak; some could enjoy it Ironically, others could enjoy it for what it was, cool and distant, a soundtrack of idle consumerism.”

Plus with the whole Mad Men early-’60s fad, it would seem pretty cool to shop in a store that looks like this — and sounds like it, too.

* I saw the Scorpions in concert at the Philadelphia Spectrum around 1985; my hearing finally returned at 3:27 PM on Tuesday of last week.

** My old rock group played “Pump It Up” once or twice back then; the chromatic main riff was certainly lots of fun to bash out. Before it become music to shop for Fresca.

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Well, sort of — DirecTV has recently added an interface to their HD-DVR set-top boxes that allows customers to search for content not just on the to-be-expected DirecTV channels, but on YouTube as well. So it was quite amusing to search on “Silicon Graffiti” and watch episodes of my video blog on the big screen. There’s some pixelation of course, but the videos uploaded in 16X9 720P hold up reasonably well, particularly if the only motion is a talking head. (In other words, watching a bootleg copy of Star Wars somebody uploaded to YouTube on your 55-inch TV, versus watching the HD version that the Spike channel shows from time to time, will likely be a disappointing experience, to say the least.)

20 years ago, the buzzword in home theater was convergence — with technology such as this, and Amazon’s recent MP3-cloud player thingee (if you’ll pardon the technical jargon) it’s increasingly a reality.

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“Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ Pulled From YouTube,” Mashable reports:

Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” the much-maligned but still catchy pop music video that’s taken the web by storm, has passed into nothingness. The video was removed from YouTube by the original publisher (Black’s record label, Ark Music Factory) as of 4 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.The single is still available for sale on iTunes, but all you’ll find among the 11,500 YouTube search results for “Rebecca Black Friday” are parody videos, remixes and commentary. In fact, the entire account that originally housed “Friday” has been closed.

Love it or hate it — and chances are, you hate it — Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” had racked up an impressive 64 million YouTube views since its inauspicious debut last month. However, when it comes to sentiment, “Friday” was killing it, and by “it,” we mean “any feelings of charity or kindness you may feel toward Ark and its teenie bopping popsters.”

Mashable adds, “We’ll keep an eye on the video’s URL; the clip may pop up again shortly. In the meantime, we have reached out to Ark for a statement on why the video was pulled in the first place.”

Fortunately though, in the interim, Phil Connors can rest a little easier in the morning:

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YouTube Direkt

Update: Our short national nightmare is over — or has only just begun; the video has been restored. No word yet as to why it had gone down the memory hole in the first place, although, as Mashable notes in an addendum, “Ark Music Factory owner Patrice Wilson reported that his YouTube account had been hacked last Thursday; however, he reported back yesterday that the account status was ‘all good.’”

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The other day, James Lileks described the new novel he’s working on:

Tuesday night I write the penultimate denouement, if that’s not a contradiction. It’s set at a hockey game the night of the day John Lennon was assassinated, when everyone stands and puts their hand over their heart and sings along with “Imagine.”

Ahh, the transnational anthem. Funny though, I associate Lennon’s death with this this sporting event, which I recall watching vividly, followed by the strange hush over my fellow classmates the following morning — particularly given how flat the “Starting Over” and the Double Fantasy album had only recently seemed, even to us confirmed Beatlemaniacs:

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YouTube Direkt

Of course, the Beatles inadvertently ushered in the era of rock lyrics being studied in classrooms for the deep hidden meaning buried in their subtext; that unfortunate practice of academia is taken to its ultimate extreme, here.

Yes of course, it’s a parody. But for how long?

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Good’s website’s home page is a gorgeous photo of a concert stage — bathed in dazzling spotlights. His blog details the dozens of cities he has travelled to for concerts. The man has the carbon footprint of a small village. Yet he condemns electrical power.

Good’s fatuous claims about mankind’s glorious past before electricity aren’t just a jarring contrast to his own high-powered lifestyle. They’re also factually false.

Before electricity, mankind’s state of affairs was bleak. Life expectancy 200 years ago was just 35. Good is 39 years old and should think about that.

Life wasn’t just shorter. It was brutal, and grindingly poor. It’s not hard to imagine. Just look at those parts of the world today without power — over a billion people have to cook their dinners on an open flame. There’s not a lot of room for pop music in the world’s most excruciatingly poor countries. They’re too busy trying to survive.

It must be tough for pop stars to reconcile their hedonistic, materialistic, high-carbon lifestyles with liberal cliches like “reduce, reuse and recycle.”

Other showbiz types such as Al Gore and James Cameron just bluff it out, and hope we’re too starstruck to notice the chasm between what they preach and what they practise.

Maybe Good will prove his skeptics wrong. Let’s see if his album will be called: “Matthew Good Unplugged” — a live album from Pyongyang.

Beyond putting on concerts bathed in electric lights, playing electric instruments powered by electric amplification, why is someone who is publicly against electricity on the Internet in the first place?

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As Charlie Martin notes at the Tatler, sixties icon Owsley Stanley died this weekend in a car crash:

Famous as the producer of street acid in the 60′s, and as audio engineer for the Grateful Dead, Owsley “Bear” Stanley has died in a car crash in Australia.

For those not of a certain age, this will mean little.

Owsley was known (almost universally by his first name) for the potent strain of LSD he concocted:

Lyrics sung by The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa reference Stanley and his brushes with the law, underlining his influence.

Stanley produced an estimated pound (half a kilogram) of pure LSD, or roughly 5 million “trips” of normal potency of the hallucinogenic drug, after enrolling in 1963 at the University of California at Berkeley and becoming involved in the drug scene that underpinned the hippie movement, according to the BookRags.com website.

He was an accomplished sound engineer who worked for the psychedelic rock band The Grateful Dead and inspired the band’s dancing bear logo.

Sam Cutler, a firm friend of Stanley since 1970 when Cutler became the band’s tour manager, described him as was “a wonderful man and a great teacher.”

“His death is a grievous loss to his family and the tens of thousands of people from the ’60s on who were influenced by his work with The Grateful Dead,” Cutler said.

Well that’s one way to put it. Syd Barrett, Brian Jones and other acid casualties could not be reached for comment.

(Headline via James Lileks, by way of Bob Terwilliger.)

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“Lady Gaga eyes legal action over breast milk ice cream.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office.

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