Robbie Robertson (1943-2023) and the rock of ages

Posted on August 16, 2023 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were talking about the death at age 80 of Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and main songwriter in the Band, one of the most artful and influential acts in rock ‘n’ roll history.

I’m tempted to use the word “legendary.” Robertson’s most enduring work with the Band — the studio albums Music from Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright — were released way back in 1968, 1969 and 1970, respectively.

“Don’t forget that live album, Rock of Ages,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Is that the perfect title, or what?”

Life on the road took its toll, and Robertson had a gradual falling-out with his bandmates in the 1970s. Their final concert together was captured in Martin Scorsese’s classic film The Last Waltz (1978). After the breakup, Robertson was happy to engage in a decades-long goodbye, recounting for numerous interviewers and in his memoir Testimony (2016) how he and the other Band members — drummer Levon Helm, piano man Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and organist Garth Hudson — drew on American roots music to forge their eclectic, inimitable sound.

Many music fans who are the same age now as Robertson was at his songwriting peak are probably unfamiliar with most of his recordings with the Band and unaware of the long, strange trip he made from Toronto, near the Indian reservation where his mother was born, to commercial success and critical acclaim in America. The obits are informative, but the Band’s history and legacy are complex. How do you explain the miracle of great art?

“I don’t know, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said, rolling his eyes. “How do you do that?”

You don’t even try, I told him. You direct listeners to the Band’s recordings to hear for themselves how Robertson and his fellow misfits — three of them also from Canada, one from Arkansas — evolved into a tight unit that sounded both old-timey and strikingly original. “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there,” Bruce Springsteen said in the documentary Once Were Brothers (2020).

You tell them that the Band spent years mastering their craft by backing up the wild journeyman rocker Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan before succeeding on their own. And how it’s no accident that Robertson, the son of a Native American mother and a Jewish gangster father, populated his songs with colorful outsiders who brought to life his “mythic but authentic” vision of America.

You point to the interviews with Robertson in The Last Waltz. Has there ever been a cooler or more articulate self-appointed champion of rock ‘n’ roll music? Will there be another in our time?

“Your second question is so ridiculous, it don’t even deserve an answer,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Footnote: Robertson didn’t dry up after the Band’s demise. He made solo albums and wrote soundtracks for Scorsese and other filmmakers. His last score with Scorsese was for Killers of the Flower Moon, set for theatrical release in October.

One more: Check out the scholarly, insightful and heartfelt essay on the Band in Greil Marcus’s book Mystery Train; Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music

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DeSantis: Let’s look on the bright side of slavery

Posted on August 2, 2023 by oddmanout215

I showed Swamp Rabbit recent articles about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who backs the state requirement that middle-schoolers in Texas be taught that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The requirement, part of Florida’s new standards for teaching African American history, prompted New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz to air the grievances of an imaginary victim of “white underprivilege”:

An unskilled Florida man said that he deeply regrets having missed out on the opportunity to be a slave. The man said that his “lack of access to enslavement” had made his acquisition of essential skills “impossible.”

“Every day when I mess something up at work, I wonder to myself, would I be doing a better job if I’d been a slave?” he said. “There’s no question that it would have been a game-changer for me.”

At this point it’s no secret that, in a field of Republican presidential candidates who are bigoted, oblivious, or just plain mean, DeSantis is a standout. His politics are as loathsome as Donald Trump’s, but he seems much less likely to appeal to a broad cross-section of voters. He whines constantly and has the charisma of a crash-test dummy.

“Trump can at least make them yahoos laugh,” Swamp Rabbit said. “DeSantis don’t even know what a joke is.”

His attempt to convince voters that there was a good side to slavery is in keeping with his support for Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” which calls for the teaching of an alternative American history that soft-pedals racism and, in effect, bans information that might make public school students feel “shamed because of their race.”

I told Swamp Rabbit that DeSantis’s views on slavery are weirdly reminiscent of an old Randy Newman song, the one that’s narrated by a slave trader who’s trying to coax Africans onto a slave ship bound for America:

In America you get food to eat/Won’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet/You just think about Jesus and drink wine all day/It’s good to be an American

“The guy in the song lies about the future,” I said. “DeSantis lies about the past.”

Clarification: DeSantis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, had this to say about the new curriculum: “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

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A tub of Cheez Whiz shall lead them

Posted on July 26, 2023 by oddmanout215

Jennifer Rubin was bemoaning the GOP’s undying loyalty to the worst president in U.S. history. She may have offended some of her editors at Washington Post with this observation:

And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics.

Right. Just when you think the corporate media can’t get any lamer, they hit you with another puff piece about Donald Trump’s latest adventures on the campaign trail. A few weeks ago, for example, when reporters covered his carefully staged appearance at Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philly, a few miles from my home in the Tinicum swamp.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit listened to me vent about the event and said, “I was in the neighborhood that day, walking to Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar. Why was Trump at Pat’s?”

I reminded him that Pat’s is where you can order a greasy minute steak on a long roll and top it with an artery clogger called Cheez Whiz. If you’re eating a cheesesteak at Pat’s, then your diet is a lot like Trump’s. Chances are your politics are like his, too.

“Trump is the embodiment of the Cheez Whiz lifestyle,” I said. ” He’s even the same color.”

“You’re one of them reverse bigots,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Puttin’ down peeps just coz they’re tacky and don’t eat right.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But my point is that the media were focused on the food when they should have been focused on the questionable legality of his candidacy.”

I noted that Trump was impeached twice while president. That he has since been found liable in civil court for sexual assault, indicted for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, indicted on charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, and likely to be indicted soon in separate cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol and election interference in Georgia.

“Every story about Trump should mention there’s something wrong with laws that allow an indicted lowlife to run for office,” I said. “The laws shouldn’t allow Republicans to nominate an extra-large tub of Cheez Whiz for president again.”

“Maybe not, but that’s for the peeps to decide,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “That’s democracy in America, Odd Man.”

Footnote: We’re not talking about poor people here. Cheesesteaks at Pat’s are expensive. The cheesesteak eaters include many tourists and suburbanites.

Update: Trump was hit with three new felony charges yesterday, none of them related to the Jan. 6 incident. How many rats will flee before the ship finally sinks?

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Behold! Seven-headed dragons just up ahead.

Posted on July 24, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was telling Swamp Rabbit about former VP Al Gore’s recent comments on global warming, which included this one-liner: “Every night the TV news is like taking a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”

“That’s pretty funny,” Swamp Rabbit said, “but I hope he ain’t turning into one of them crazy end-timers.”

“He was comparing the climate crisis to the goofiest book in the Bible,” I replied. “He was making a joke.”

Gore was a divinity student before he became a politician, I explained. He intones like a preacher but he’s down-to-earth and knows what he’s talking about. Some of the people who used to regard his movie An Inconvenient Truth (2006) as alarmist nonsense have realized, belatedly, that he was right to conclude global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels is changing the world as we know it, and not for the good.

I called up my handy-dandy online Book of Revelation and showed Swamp Rabbit the passages about fires spread by seven-headed dragons, the sky darkened by smoke from the abyss, the cities wiped out by seven angels carrying seven deadly plagues.

“Revelation barely made it into the Bible,” I told him. “Some first-century sci-fi writer must have dreamed it up.”

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Give the peeps what they want, right?”

I played “Bad Moon Rising” on my phone and told him the planet might still be saved if we enlighten the hardcore yahoos who think coal is clean and Democrats drink the blood of butchered children to reverse the aging process.

“But we’ll need strong counter-narratives,” I said. “The sort of compelling, science-based stories that Al Gore tells so well.”

Swamp Rabbit chuckled. “I hate to break it to you, Odd Man, but them yahoos like death angels and seven-headed dragons. What they don’t like is Al Gore.”

“They’d better get over that,” I said. “Greece is on fire. Phoenix just had its 24th consecutive day of 110 degree-plus temperatures.”

“Don’t make no difference to them Phoenicians,” he replied, “so long as the air-conditioning still works.”

Footnote: “Bad Moon Rising” might be the most cheerful apocalyptic song ever. REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is another good one.

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A wake-up call, or just an excuse to zone out?

Posted on July 17, 2023 by oddmanout215

I forgot to turn off the radio before I left my shack to go to work. My cats, Thoughts and Prayers, were locked in and had to listen all day to scary weather reports on NPR. No wonder they seemed spooked.

“It’s okay, you guys” I assured them. “The weather is getting to all of us.”

Freakish floods in the Hudson Valley and Vermont. Heat domes stretching across the South and Southwest, with highs in Phoenix of at least 110 degrees for 17 straight days and counting. Ocean temperatures that are “beyond extreme.” Endless wildfires in Canada. Here in the Philadelphia swamps, the usual killer humidity plus air quality alerts and constant storm warnings.

Recent online headlines are instructive. “Tuesday was world’s hottest day on record.” “Floods, heat, smoke: Climate change is accelerating.” And “Is it hot enough yet for politicians to take real action?“

The question was posed by environmentalist Bill McKibbon, who noted that most countries “remain dominated by the fossil-fuel industry,” even those that have endorsed caps on oil and gas emissions. He described how anti-pollution measures by Joe Biden in the United States and Justin Trudeau in Canada have been undermined by politicians and lobbyists who back dirty-energy companies.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit walked in clutching a bottle of Wild Turkey as I was scooping Mariner’s Catch into the cat food bowls. He was in a devil’s advocate mood. I told him about McKibbon’s call for more worldwide rallies to fight polluters.

“I ain’t no world traveler,” my mangy friend said. “Why should I care that the Acropolis is closed on account of the heat?”

“Be serious,” I told him. “We live in a small world. Climate disasters in Southern Europe and Pakistan and Greenland affect us all. We’ve got to elect politicians who are enlightened enough to take action.”

“Blah blah,” he replied. “Most peeps in this country just wanna zone out in air-conditioned la-la land. The only thing gonna wake ’em up now is fire and floods, and even that might not work.”

The cats looked at him funny then bolted out the door and into the swamp. “Way to go,” I said. “You scared them away with your doom talk.”

“I ain’t surprised,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Cats got more sense than humans.”

Footnote: “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album, released 52 years ago.

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High Court sides with usurers, not students. Shocking.

Posted on July 8, 2023 by oddmanout215

Last week, to no one’s surprise, the reactionaries on the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Joe Biden’s $400 billion program to reduce student loan debt anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 per student. Equally unsurprising was Bernie Sanders’ response to their ruling:

If Republicans could provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent and profitable corporations, if they could cancel hundreds of billions in loans for wealthy business owners during the pandemic when Trump was President and if they could vote to spend $886 billion on the Pentagon, please don’t tell me that we cannot afford to cancel student debt for working families.

Bernie knows the deck is stacked against working families and that the High Court’s current makeup reflects this reality. That the case against student loan relief had “standing” only because the court accepted the brazenly false claim that forgiving such loans would somehow hurt the state of Missouri.

Swamp Rabbit tossed in his two cents’ worth: “Them students got suckered into taking out high-interest loans they can’t afford to pay back. It’s their own fault, ain’t it?”

“Fault is the wrong word,” I said. “The system is rigged to pile maximum debt onto poor students even though tuition costs get crazier every year. They would have paid a lot less for college back when funding higher education was thought of as a public good.”

I asked him what sort of government conspires with usurious loan-servicing companies — collection agencies, really — to shake down its own citizens as they try to better themselves. What sort of jurists go along with this shakedown instead of endorsing education policies that would help narrow the vast gap between rich and poor in this country.

“Rhetorical questions,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t no need for me to answer.”

I reminded him that the six rightwing justices on the Supreme Court were hand-picked to fight expansion of education opportunities, environmental protection, women’s rights, labor rights and all other causes that don’t serve the interests of the rich and shameless. That sinister fanatics like Leonard Leo have slowly put together a court dominated by jurists who would feel more at home in pre-Civil War America than in our time.

“Who the eff is Leonard Leo? If he’s such a big deal, how come I ain’t never seen no stories about him in the news?”

“Because the owners of the mainstream news media are members of the top one percent,” I said. “No, the top one-tenth of the one percent.”

Swamp Rabbit laughed at me. “You sure it ain’t the top one-tenth of the one-tenth?”

“Whatever,” I said, “Let’s just say the media bosses have no desire to rock the boat by pushing stories that don’t serve the interests of their class.”

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Now showing: TCM vs. corporate philistines

Posted on July 1, 2023 by oddmanout215

Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face

“Zaslav is at it again.”

I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that the same high-level hatchet man behind the mission to make CNN more rightwing recently took action to dumb down, or perhaps destroy, the only TV outlet that shows quality films on a routine basis. That’s Turner Classic Movies, of course, which dips into every movie era and genre, showing everything from classics to obscure curiosities, 24/7, with intros from knowledgeable hosts and no commercial interruptions.

“You mean David Zaslav?” Swamp Rabbit said. “The CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery who hired and fired Chris Licht? The media boss who answers only to guys like John Malone, the rightwing billionaire and leading shareholder at WB Discovery?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy,” I replied. “Zaslav the bigshot corporate cutthroat. He’s supposed to be a film nerd, but he fired all the talented staffers who molded TCM into a unique repository for movies that not only entertain but also shed light on the historic and cultural trends that shaped the world we live in today.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “TCM ain’t perfect. They have a lot of turkeys on their playlist, and they show them classics too often. At this point, I think I could recite all the lines in Casablanca from memory.”

I shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that. You should memorize Citizen Kane, too. And My Man Godfrey. Fill your head with content that makes you think instead of with reality TV and video games.”

I told him we’re all lucky that film directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson intervened, possibly before Zaslav might otherwise do irreparable harm to TCM. Lucky that those guys apparently are skilled diplomats as well as first-rate artists, able to talk Zaslav into believing it’s better to be thought of as an enlightened patron of the arts than an all-powerful philistine.

“You don’t know how their talks with Zaslav went down,” Swamp Rabbit said. “You don’t know what he’s planning to do with TCM’s humungous library. With them naughty pre-Code movies like Baby Face, and screwball comedies, and noir from the ’40s, and sci-fi from the ’50s. And so on.”

That’s true, I told him, but maybe the three of them convinced him there’s more to life than mergers and maximizing profits. That the world is more than a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

“You stole that line from Network, Odd Man. Your problem is you think movies are like real life.”

“The best movies are like real life,” I said, “except with better dialogue and storylines that are more coherent.”

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Birds of a feather fish together

Posted on June 25, 2023 by oddmanout215

Justice Samuel Alito (left) and hedge fund manager Paul Singer.
What’s that smell?

I showed Swamp Rabbit an online photo of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and hedge fund manager Paul Singer enjoying a super-expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008. Singer brought Alito along, providing him with a free ride on his private jet and other goodies.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “If you’ve seen one photo of corny old white guys holding up dead fish, you’ve seen ’em all. What’s your point, Odd Man?”

My point was that Singer, as most news junkies now know, is a billionaire Republican megadonor whose hedge fund was involved in multiple cases that came before the Supreme Court in the years after the fishing trip took place. Alito should have reported his paid-for trip and should have recused himself from cases involving Singer’s hedge fund. He took neither action and recently thumbed his nose at reporters who exposed his obvious ethical lapses.

Swamp Rabbit chuckled. “Ain’t you the polite one. What you call ethical lapses is what other peeps call bribes.”

“Don’t be crude,” I said. “You can’t use a word like bribes just because Alito took big gifts from Singer then voted in his favor when the supremes ruled on that multi-billion-dollar case involving Argentinian debt. You can’t even call it influence peddling. Show some respect. We’re talking about the highest court in the land.”

We both had a good laugh at that phrase. I noted that Alito is no more guilty of ethics violations than Justice Clarence Thomas, who accepted expensive gifts and favors from Harlan Crow, another billionaire Republican megadonor, or Justice Neil Gorsuch, who sold an expensive property to a high-powered lawyer who also brought cases before the supremes.

“I could go on,” I said after we finished laughing. “Let’s just say all the Republican-appointed supremes use the same moral compass in the performance of their duties and always claim to be beyond reproach thanks to vague passages in the Constitution regarding separation of powers.”

“The justices are our ultimate legal authorities,” I added. “They decide what women can and can’t do with their bodies. They rule on student loan relief, voting rights, the environment — all the big issues. They’re appointed for life. It’s no wonder they hang out with some of the most powerful people in the country. Birds of a feather flock together.”

“Birds of a feather fish together,” Swamp Rabbit said, chuckling again.

“Exactly,” I replied. “This seems especially true of vultures.”

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DeLillo’s ‘airborne toxic event’ is still unfolding

Posted on June 20, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit dropped by on Sunday to wish me a happy Father’s Day, but we ended up talking about that strange day earlier this month when the air smelled like burnt toast and the skyline looked like a blurry photo viewed through a sepia filter.

“I woke up with a hangover and smelled the smoke and figured the swamp was on fire, ” he said. “It wasn’t, so I went back to bed.”

I got up that day and investigated. A talking head on the Channel 6 news alerted me to the source of the smoke — wildfires in Canada — while I was ordering a slice of Sicilian at Vincenzo’s, near the swamp. A code red air quality alert has been issued for Philadelphia and the surrounding region. The pizza man sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” but he stopped joking when the talking head said there would be no Phillies game that night because of poor air quality.   

The pall lifted a few days later but not before the news media made clear that the air will only get worse as climate change caused by fossil fuel burning makes wildfires “more frequent and intense.” A Philadelphia Inquirer article offered suggestions on how to cope: Avoid driving. Stay indoors when you can. Close windows. Wear a high-quality mask.

“I’m surprised they didn’t just tell us to stop breathing,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Wildfires are only part of the pollution problem, I reminded him. In February, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, and local residents flipped out after receiving conflicting “expert” opinions on how dangerous the leaked chemicals were. This real-life incident and its aftermath were strikingly similar to the “airborne toxic event” in Don DeLillo’s bleakly funny novel White Noise (1985), which touches on our refusal to directly connect such toxic events to our ongoing assault on nature.

“Bleakly funny?” Swamp Rabbit said. “What you mean by that?”

“We fret about pollution all the time,” I replied. “The more we fret, the more we pollute. You don’t think that’s funny?”

Footnote: White Noise, like many great novels, is prophetic. One of its main characters says, “It’s no wonder they call this thing the airborne toxic event. It’s an event all right. It marks the end of uneventful things. This is just the beginning. Wait and see.”

The novel was made into a Netflix movie last year.

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Energy update: Clean vs. dirty in Texas showdown

Posted on June 17, 2023 by oddmanout215

“You and them other cynics were wrong,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Texas ain’t gonna cut back on wind and solar. That creepy little gov’ner and his oil cronies can’t win on account of there’s too much money to be made in renewables.”

He was dissing me for assuming last month that Gov. Greg Abbott and his fellow yahoos would succeed in their effort to block expansion of the renewable energy industry in Texas.

In the end, Republicans in the State Legislature who were itching to strike a blow against progress suffered a setback because, as one energy consultant put it, “a remarkable coalition of environmentalists, industry organizations and business groups — including more than 50 chambers of commerce, manufacturers, generators, oil and gas advocates and others” helped shoot down most of their proposals.

“They got together and took on the anti-woke, anti-wind-and-solar gang,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That ain’t no easy task in Texas.”

Some of the details are in a New York Times column by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, who noted that “clean energy provided about 25 to 30 percent of Texas power last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2002,” and that “green-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act are poised to create more than 100,000 jobs in Texas by 2030 — which would add more than $15 billion to the state economy over that time.”

“You’re too quick to think the worst,” Swamp Rabbit said. “When all’s said and done, the polluters are gonna go with the green, ’cause that’s where the biggest profits are.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” I replied. Texas is the No. 1 wind state, but progressives will have a hard time defeating the forces that keep green energy generation sites from linking up with the sort of far-reaching grid that’s essential for distribution. Most of the grid has yet to be built. And there’s the problem of the giant energy companies that benefit from incentives but continue to stall the actual transition to renewables.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “They’re hedging their bets, but they’re gonna do the right thing when the time is right.”

I tossed one of his empty beer cans at him. “Sorry to bust your bubble, friend-o, but time is not on our side.”

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