As long as you live...

"Remember this as long as you live: whenever you meet up with anyone who is trying to cause trouble between people...anyone who tries to tell you that a man can't be a good American because he's a Catholic or a Jew, a Protestant or whatever: you can be pretty sure he's a rotten American himself. Not only a rotten American, but a rotten human being! Don't ever forget that!"

So spoke Superman, warning youngsters about the so-called "Guardians of America" in a story entitled "The Hate Mongers Organization", from the Superman radio show in 1946, as quoted in the excellent new book "Flights of Fantasy -- The Unauthorized but True Story of Radio & TV's Adventures of Superman" by Michael J. Hayde.

What Have You Done?

Twenty-eight years ago, when I heard a voice on the radio say "John Lennon is dead" ...

Instinctively I steered directly to my old job, to the student newspaper office at Illinois State, to see what I could find on the UPI wire machine and to help with whatever the staff was planning to run. There I met another friend who had the same idea. We were both townies, both still lived near after our respective college "careers," still kept in touch with the newspaper staff. Both of us puzzled at the emptiness of the front offices and the lack of activity in the production room, until the new editor came in. He guessed what we were there for, saying, "Yeah, we heard the news, but wanted to meet the printer's deadline."

1980 and things had changed before our eyes, those who came after had already chosen a new and unexpected path from our own. We would have run a special issue, "deadlines be damned," but these "kids" (three or four years our junior) were too young by birth to carry any unconditional love for Beatles. That's how it was in the those days: you were either old enough to remember seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan's show or you thought Paul McCartney was just the guy who had a band called Wings.

1980: To most of the disaffected youth we knew, Jimmy Carter gave peace a bad name in his failure to deal with pretty much everything, while Reagan picked up enough of those who still felt they had to care about something, coloring the campus world in hues far different from the post 60s era we tried fruitlessly to keep flowering. Hindsight shows a view of us being too busy with a culture we were too young for, that we never got around to making one pure of the past and unquestionably our own. What kind of youth movement revels in the past, instead of rejecting it? Or, is that the way it always appears to be from the outside?

Whatever the past, our future would be one without Lennon the man. His works, his words, his thoughts would continue and we could use whatever time was left to make some sense, something good with them.

So this is Christmas and what have you done?

Not done yet, John...

Leave your own memories here.


WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) from Yoko Ono on Vimeo.

Munny Munny Munny Munny . . . MUN-ny!

What's a Munny? It's a 7-inch-high soft vinyl figure made for you to make of it what you will.

Created by Kidrobot in 2005 they've become popular among artists and toy collectors but have also been inching out of this niche market into the more mass cultural area with kids and 'regular' adults. It’s not enough just to give them a home and a name. Their blank faces and bodies cry out for your imagination, as well – along with whatever materials necessary to make your imagination come to life. Paints, clay, crayons, markers -- even x-acto knives and blowtorches could be useful, though some tools and dress-up material may take a little practice to get them right.

Munnys are actually cute enough to leave as-is, dressing them only in the variable "secret" accoutrements found in each box.

The fellow above is a Munnyata: a Munny piñata dressed in colorful crepe paper and glue. He won’t be alone for long. Soon he’ll be joined by a blindfolded Munny carrying a big stick and wearing a toothy grin, all a-smile at the thought of the candy inside Munnyata. We'll probably hang the Munnyata by a wire for display, and it's possible we'll figure out how to stuff an assortment of treats inside his little body. Several more ideas are in mind and I'll post them here when ready.

You can get more information on Kidrobot founder Paul Budnitz with this interview, and purchasing Munny and other Kidrobot items may be done at their website. If you're in the area, you should visit Star Clipper to make your purchase -- while looking for the Munnys you'll probably run into other things worth buying, but that's OK, too...

UPDATE: The second Munny is on its way, slightly delayed while my co-decorator takes a break.

Don't Look Back

Stumbling back from a pre-Fourth of July barbeque …

Dead-tired from beer, ribs and too much of everything else I manage a decision to drift away on the couch with whatever might be playing on the television. The ‘On’ button brings up TCM’s broadcast of the 1952 film “Above and Beyond.”

All I know about the movie is what I can see. Robert Taylor is a pilot, the head-pilot from the way he’s behaving – giving instructions to the crew. His voice gives no room for nonsense, but his eyes are troubled. It’s a secret mission and he’s the only one with the knowledge of where they’re heading and what they’re supposed to do, the only one on the plane aware of their assignment to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. As they near Japan, he reveals to the crew their purpose and they discover that Hiroshima is the best target. I hear in my head David Lindley’s El Rayo-X recording of Smokey Robinson’s Lot-quote: “Don’t look back…”

Flying over the city, the bomb bay opens, the bomb falls, and… silence. No dramatic music. No serious banter from the crew. No ominous narration.

What an effectively interesting directorial choice for a Hollywood picture of the 1950s, I think. Then I realize this silence is not part of the picture, as the Emergency Broadcast System sound erupts from the speakers. I’m not tired anymore. This can’t be. Not now. Not like this…

Then the slow scroll of large white text crawls across the screen: “THIS IS A TEST. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY YOU WOULD BE INSTRUCTED TO TURN TO CHANNEL 14 FOR DETAILS.”

My heart settles down, the soundtrack to the film restored, as the crew grimly observes the fiery destruction of their work. No one is happy, no cheers and high-fives, no “Go USA” chants. When Taylor asks for confirmation of the hit, he repeats back what he hears: “Success.” The way he pronounces it, though matter-of-factly, resigns the word and their work to fate. You can hear slightly sarcastic quote-marks around the word.

“Just great,” I think and continue my stumbling on to bed, where I’d discover an old book better for sleeping-off to than anything else I might find on the tube that night.

Ragtime Revisited

Jon Savage, the author of "England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond" -- one of the best books on the Punk Scene of the 70s and ... beyond -- sends his thoughts further back in time for another cultural epic, "Teenage -- The Creation of Youth Culture."

Hard to imagine there was a time when the term "teenager" did not even exist, but Savage here attempts to open our eyes to that period, beginning with the late 19th century, when the most-famous disaffected youths were either murderers or poets. It's still a little hard to imagine more than merely coldly intellectually as, unfortunately, Savage's text, a couple of hundred pages in, feels mighty dry. Perhaps "England's Dreaming" burned a little brighter with emotional context because those years chronicled were experienced first-hand by his younger self, whereas these years he could only dig up from some pretty old works. Savage reportedly steps up the emotional content later in this book along the way, but in the meantime, there's much to learn here for my original topic, ragtime.

Savage wrote (p. 56-57):

Staffed by recent immigrants and the children of the lower middle class, the popular music industry readily struck a chord with its core audience, being unafraid of raw emotion, sentimentality, and heart-wrenching scenarios.

However, for many young Americans, lachrymose weepies like "After the Ball" did not fit the bill. They wanted something that better accentuated their sizzling synapses, and they began to find it in the new music that was all around them, even if it was still ignored by the music industry. In "Maggie," Stephen Crane's heroine and her gangster lover enter a downtown saloon where an "orchestra played negro melodies and a versatile drummer pounded, whacked, clattered and scratched on a dozen machines to make noise." The drifting sound of the music "made the girl dream."

Stephen Crane's 1893 novel, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" (which can be read online here ) is a horrifyingly descriptive tale of growing up in the multi-cultured slums of the day. The seemingly-noisome pounding, whacking, clatter, and scratch of the music described above made a terrible and beautiful kind of sense: Terrible in its reflection of their everyday life, beautiful in that they were able to make something artistic and moving from its chaos. If you consider ragtime making a new beat out of old songs, putting a different kind of rhythm to the generic waltzes and marches, then it's not difficult to see the music as a reflection of the status quo as filtered off of a broken dirty mirror.

Savage continued:

Popular music provided one way that blacks could begin to enter American society. … life for most Negroes was grim. The lynching statistics – over one hundred a year during the 1890s—were only the tip of the iceberg. "Most had no future nor hope of acquiring any," writes Louis Armstrong's biographer James Lincoln Collier. "They could look forward to nothing but work, poverty, disease and death. A philosophy of carpe diem [was] the only sensible position in such circumstances."

A hard core concentrated on pleasure, on the heightened sensations of the moment, in the red-light areas to be found in cities all over America: Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas, New Orleans. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the spread of these districts provided regular employment for the large pool of traveling musicians. Playing in the saloons and clubs became a viable rite of passage for many young black men and women. The wider American public's taste for Negro music had already been whetted by the popularity of minstrelsy, and by the late 1890s, it was ready for something less ersatz.

Therefore, the black artists of the day (like the punks of the 70s) saw “No Future” written on their possibilities and said, “Nothing tomorrow? So let’s see what we can do -today-, then…” The spontaneity necessary to feel alive could not be bound by notes on a page, it could only be freed by the rampant rhythm of their hearts – by the never-before-heard melodies only hinted at by Sousa and Strauss.

The youth of the day, in looking for the Reality behind the masks they saw their parents wear and prepare for their own future, their years-ahead all planned out like more notes on a page, found ragtime.

More to come after I've finished the book, but in the meantime a tangent question:

If ragtime put new beats to old music, have hip-hop and sampling brought us full circle -- with old beats put to new music?