Bantam Rooster - Run Rabbit Run

I still miss the OG Napster. If it weren't for Napster, and in particular (user name) Soulphisticate, I may never have heard of Bantam Rooster. 

Oh, you say, everything is up on YouTube now, and it's true. But I found Bantam Rooster by connecting to Soulphisticate's list. He always had very cool new shit on there, and it was the easiest thing to check in and look around. If you can do that on YouTube, I don't know about it. 

Question From A Comment

Anonymous asks, on a recent post (The Actual Dying Part, January 10, 2019):

“Yes, dying is easy; comedy is hard. What I’m getting hung up these days on this slide into oblivion is what should I do with my mortal remains: burn it or bury it? Would be interested in your thoughts on this post-dying last bit of personal hygiene...”

Thanks for your interest, Anonymous! Good question. I think it hangs on the issue of visitors to the grave. If there are people in your family who routinely visit the graves of the ancestors and are moved by emotion about it, people who would visit your grave as well, well then go for it! All questions arising post-death should be directed towards the living. The dead don't care.

If I lived in America, I would go with the cremation, myself. No one would ever visit the grave anyway. If you are a veteran of military service, as I am, you could ask that the VA bury you in the free grave that you earned by your service. Those VA cemeteries are so far off the beaten path by now that it's just not worth the trouble. No one will drive to the Dark Side of the Moon to visit your grave. So why bother?

Then tell them to scatter your ashes “in the ocean” or something. No place in particular. “In the ocean” allows anyone to visit your remains at any site overlooking a beach. For God's sake, don't do the urn thing. That's just awful. It just makes work for people, having to care for the urn.

I'll be dying in Thailand myself, and here the situation is a bit different. There are Buddhist cemeteries, but they are few and far between. Everyone gets cremated, down at the temple. It's interesting. They take the top off of the coffin, and pack it with kindling wood. Then the mourners make a last pass, throwing in a flower or a bit of kindling (the cynics). Then they roll it into the furnace and crank it up while everyone stands around, or has snacks, or something.

For poor people, that's it. No one worries about remains. It's a little different for someone with a couple of bucks. It doesn't take much money, but the monks will happily collect bits of your bones from the ashes. These can then be placed in what my Thai wife calls, “a condo.” This is a small section of wall around the grounds of the temple. On the face-plate, a photo of you is displayed, along with your name and dates of life. This is not frightfully expensive. I will encourage my wife to do this, and she will be grateful for the opportunity to visit my remains on my birthday and the anniversary of my death, until she joins me. She will then direct that her bone chips be interred with mine, and her photo displayed next to mine. All of that does not take up one square inch of real estate, and it requires zero maintenance, which keeps the cost low. Having a lot of those things built into its structures enhances the sacred nature of the temple, so everyone is happy.

My advice is to do what will make your survivors the most happy. This usually consists of making things easy and cheap for them. No sense giving them reason to curse you after you're gone.

Flippy's Road Trip

The subject of Ray “Flippy” B. comes up from time to time. I've been a bit under the weather, and a few days of low-energy lying around gave me plenty of time to be ambushed by some unanswered questions from the land of long, long ago. The Flip File came around, and this old mystery presented itself. There is at least a seventy-percent chance that this event actually happened, but it's been a while, and all of it was second hand. I never had the opportunity to talk to Ray about it.

These are the facts. Over the course of a few years, Ray became unmanageable. Beginning in 1968 and really becoming troublesome in 1970, Ray got himself addicted to barbiturates. He was still doing band work in 1968, but he was drinking too much and it was all getting out of hand. He attended my wedding in 1969, but he was a shadow of his real self. He had always been so lively, vivacious even, but all of a sudden he was unconscious much of the time.

We were no angels, mind you. I'm not being critical. We all took the more socially responsible drugs, like weed, acid, a couple of beers, but mostly we kept the pills to a minimum. By 1970 Ray was on an all barbiturate diet. That's a terrible addiction. The tolerance builds up very quickly, and before you know it you're taking four or five upon waking, just to get straight. It's fifteen or twenty to get loaded, whereas the first one, just one, had knocked you on your ass. It put Ray into another world, another stream of commerce, another group of friends. We didn't see much of him for a couple of years.

Onto the mystery. I remember hearing this story about Ray taking a road trip down south. It was all very vague. The version of events that came back to us was that he took the bus, the Greyhound, alone, with the intention of soaking up some musical influences from southern music. I don't know what the plan was, but he didn't make it very far. Somewhere around Nashville he was in a bar, probably a music bar, that would be a country music bar, with his broad smile and his stringy long hair, and his heavy New York accent. Some locals treated him to some southern hospitality. They gave him a terrible beating. After a few days in the hospital, he made his way back north.

That's the way the story was told to us, second or third hand at first. Later on, one of us got confirmation of the broad outlines from Ray himself. He got straight about that time, or not too long after. It's all very hazy; there are a lot of questions but not many answers. Did he take the trip to force himself to get straight? Was the trip some kind of misguided drug run? (The industrial providers for barbiturates were in the south. All of the downs in New York came from the south, in sealed fifty-five gallon drums.) Did the beating knock some sense into him? Unknown.

He did get straight there for a while. He got a job that he seemed to like, working for, what? A set builder? A stage builder? Something at the intersection of entertainment and carpentry. He started playing again. He had a new girlfriend, a cheerful little thing from the next town. I saw him once or twice, a few of us did, and he spoke with former band-mates about getting a jam going. He was somewhat sheepish about that lost couple of years, but he did seem like his old self.

And then he died, burned to death in a fire. Those are shocking losses, twenty-two years old and suddenly gone.

Between the ages of twelve and twenty, Ray was a social genius, beloved by all. The entire town loved him. His entire high school loved him. All of his friends loved him. Then, somehow, the light went out. Could the year 1968 itself have had something to do with it? That was a terrible year, all around the world, and it affected many of us deeply. Speculation is probably a waste of time. We'll never know what happened.

RIP, Flip. We still miss you.

Can - I Want More (Official Audio)

Many of our finest musicians enjoy using some reverb in their recordings. Then there are those who get a bit carried away. 

Welcome to the Temple of Reverb! Cue the solar wind! 

ALVIN ROBINSON - DOWN HOME GIRL [Red Bird 10-010] 1964

True low-fi sound! Right from the 45, isn't it? Just lovely. 

And as far as I know, this is exactly the original speed for this record. This post is not slowed down. It's a remarkable record as far as the rhythm goes. It almost sounds like the musicians were having a contest to see who could come in furthest behind the beat. 

And the winner is . . . you and me! The listeners! 

An Explanation For My Absence

“. . . but not an excuse.” This is a distinction that I would sometimes draw for a judge, to see if my humility could buy me a minute or two for an explanation. It usually didn't work, whether I got a chance to explain or not.

I've been quiet, and there is really no excuse. I've been at home. I'm not that busy. It's just that I've been damned depressed.

That will come as a laughable anticlimax to anyone who knows me. “Alert the Media! Khun Fred is depressed!” My life has been an impressive catalog of all shades of depression, with mere extreme social anxiety providing the comic relief. Around the age of fifty, I decided to tackle the problem head on and I was lucky to obtain the help of a very talented cognitive therapist who would remind most people of the Natasha character in Rocky and Bullwinkle. She was of eastern European ancestry, and she dressed all in black with silver jewelry for highlights. Her skin was as white as a sheet of loose-leaf, with the same tiny blue lines visible underneath. She was not entirely humorless, but close. She was, let's say, serious about her work.

She had her work cut out for her with me. At our second or third meeting, she asked me, “how long have you felt like this?” I thought for a moment, and said, “since about 1952.” She laughed at that, but caught herself quickly as she realized that I was not kidding.

It didn't really get any better after a couple of years of sessions with “Natasha,” but I achieved a much better understanding of what was happening. I'd recommend cognitive therapy to any fellow sufferers out there. You learn to spot your triggers, and to avoid some annoying behaviors. That really does make things a bit easier. I supplemented this with a bit of reading, and the unfortunate truth of it is that you can't “get over it.” All of that deep physical and emotional scarring cannot be undone, only better understood. My ACE score is five out of six. Many of us are stuck in our holes.

Able to effortlessly spin silk purses out of any tiny shards of depression that may present themselves, I am naturally very hard pressed by the present daily cornucopia of horrible, depressing news that seems to have taken over the entire world, horizon to horizon. If there are any countries in the world that are trouble free at this point in time, that list is very, very small. Even the usual go-to examples of countries where they are getting it all correct are showing signs of strain. Small, idyllic European countries that in happier times, let's say the year 2000, we would all wish to emulate are becoming polluted by fascists, anti-immigrant hysteria, or one-party rule populism. Not to mention that huge swaths of the globe have gone dark and given up even pretending to be civilized. Many new surprises are being added to that list as we speak.

In 2015, no one could convince me that Donald Trump had a snowball's chance in hell of being elected to almost any office at all, much less the presidency of the United States. This is Donald Trump we're talking about, I would say to myself, everyone in America knows what an idiot he is. What a total con-man. After all, we have forty years of evidence! All of those business failures, the constant, childish sexual bravado, all of that self-aggrandizement, all of that “between you and I” bad grammar, the racist episodes, including the Central Park Five, all of this is public record. Why would anyone at all consider him for any public office?

Just as this impossibility was beginning to look abysmally possible, the cousins over in Merry Olde England were kicking up their Brexit campaign. “Great Britain,” a long in the tooth formulation already, seemed to have gone off a cliff. People were taking seriously a proposal that they sever themselves from the European Union and the European Economic Community. You really must hold onto your hat when you hear an idea so totally fucking stupid. Then they had their vote and that was that. The people had spoken! We've taken our country back! We're through carrying these wogs around! We'd do better to spend that money here at home! They did it, they voted for it, and now, less than three weeks before a “hard Brexit,” without even the feint hope of some trade or travel agreements in place, it appears that they are going to get it, too.

Watching that on a lesser news channel in a hotel somewhere, I raised my right hand to God, and my eyes to the ceiling, and said, out loud, how could they be so stupid? That is the moment when I became convinced that humanity had gone collectively insane. Much of the rest of the world was already there. Now “Great Britain” was joining them. Then I immediately realized that if that absurd result could obtain in Olde England, America could elect Donald Trump. World affairs had become untethered from reality.

And we did indeed follow Britain down that rabbit hole, and it has been a daily nightmare of the dismantling of the American way of life every day since the election. Why wait to get sworn in? Trump just started making presidential pronouncements immediately, and didn't even bother to send a transition team to the White House. Trump already knew more than anyone about running the country! And the White House! The worst of it all, by far, is that not a lot of Americans seem to know, much less care, what is happening.

They just don't believe you when you tell them that the State Department stands almost empty, with its usual duties simply not being performed. They see who is in charge of the few federal agencies that actually have heads at all, the lobbyists, and the former industry executives, and they do not see it as a problem.

See what happens? My fingers begin to tickle the keyboard and before long it's all exclamation points. I go off like Alexander Solzhenitsyn raving about Tsarist prison camps. “They had boots!” he screams from the page. “At least they had boots!” No one needs to hear too much of that.

I should try to be better about putting up some music. I enjoy that, and I know that there are a few of you out there who find my selections entertaining. Something will happen.

I apologize for any inconvenience caused by my negativity.

The Passage On Fox TV

I just watched the trailer for the Passage. Fox made a TV show out of the story. I love those books by Justin Cronin. Three long-ass novels, full of spectacular action and great characters. I was dreading the day when someone tried to squeeze it all into a video format. I was right to worry.

As I feared, it looks like an attempt to force a size 14 foot into a size 8 ½ shoe, where the effort has badly damaged both objects.

But it's early for a full critique. The show just started on the air in mid-January, 2019, and I won't lay eyes on it for a long while yet. Maybe Netflix will pick it up, who knows? For now I'm going to complain about casting. One specific bit of casting.

They took Amy, “the Girl from Nowhere, The One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years,” who “was just a little girl in Iowa,” and turned her from an obviously white girl into a black girl. Yes, I know that there are black girls in Iowa, but Amy's parents are described in considerable detail in the first book. (I'll bet that they changed the Iowa bit too. You know, something urban to go with the black character.)

How could they do that? We live in a world where you are severely criticized if you make a movie out of a book and change an Asian character in the book into a white character in the movie. Black to white, same deal, which is no deal. So, is it still okay to change white characters into anything that you think will help your product? Well, it looks like the answer is yes.

The books are full to the brim with good, solid black characters, and they get a lot of page-time. There was no need to look for a character to turn black to achieve some kind of balance. They went with the black Amy for commercial reasons, probably tinged with racism. The Amy character turns out to be tremendously powerful, and she does, indeed, live for 1,000 years. Maybe they thought a black girl would convey that power better. She's older, too. That really steps on the story line though, because the contrast between her looks and her abilities is part of the story. She's a poor, skinny little white girl from Nowheresville who saves the fucking world. What are people thinking? They probably tested it with audiences who cheered more for the black girl, or were confused about the innocent little white girl. I guess they paid for the rights fair and square, and I have no right to stop them from making whatever mess out of the story that they see fit.

The whole changing the race of characters kerfuffle breaks my heart. Shouldn't Asian actors think twice about opposing the very idea of a white girl playing an Asian girl in a movie or TV show? Certainly, there are more white or black or Hispanic characters than Asian characters in American video products. Shouldn't Asian actors be allowed to play any one of those characters? It seems unfair to play the race card only in one direction. In fact, it seems unconstitutional on Equal Protection grounds.

Let actors play characters, period. Many times the results are spectacular. Harry Belafonte, in the Bedford Incident, played a role that was written for a white character. He did a great job, and it made the movie a very important part of the incorporation of progressive racial ideas into naturalistic settings. It was remarkable in 1964 to see a strong black man being a hard-ass with the officers on a United States Navy destroyer, where the officers mess was still being served by Filipino stewards in starched livery. But no one knew that character before that movie. Same with Ripley in the Alien franchise. That part was written to be played by a man, and not a word of the script was changed. Sigorney Weaver hit it out of the park, but the character was hers to create, having never existed before. Amy exists. People know Amy, and they know the story.

Honestly, I don't think that it will make any difference, nor even rise to become part of the great debate about who can play whom. The Fox show looks awful, and from what I've seen in trailers they've thrown away the source material entirely, grafting some kind of vicious creatures onto a lame detective plot.

May I add that I am not demonstrating in favor of the rights of white actors to play Asians, or Othello, or any Goddamned thing. Let's just leave the small stuff alone, shall we? Can we let actors play characters without restriction while respecting that some characters are part of existing stories? Can you imagine Scout as a nice little black girl whose black father is a lawyer defending a black defendant? No, you cannot. It's all part of the story. That's exactly what is happening here with the Passage.

But like I say. It's probably crap anyway, so who cares?