Looking Back- Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush

This is the soundtrack LP to a nice English RomCom movie from 1968. The Spencer Davis Group provided many of the cuts, and this one is definitely the hit. 

This must have been a matter of minutes before Steve Winwood left the group and landed in Traffic. The whole group was very professional and quite entertaining. It's a shame they don't get much play outside of the Winwood connection. 

(ed. The soundtrack credits over at IMDB inform me that most of the cuts on the soundtrack, including Looking Back, were, "written and performed by the Spencer Davis Group." There are a few cuts credited as being, "written and performed by Steve Winwood and Traffic." So evidently the transition was in progress.) 

Oliver Mtukudzi -Seiko Mwari

This fellow just died last week, so let's get that out of the way. He was massively popular in Zimbabwe, for reasons musical, cultural, political, and spiritual. He's a great guitar player and singer. 

I rarely make a science of anything, so I'd never heard of him before. I've been listening to African music since the 1970s though. I play the guitar myself, so I've been particularly interested in the African guitar players. Nigerian Highlife music is very guitar-driven, and the musicians of Mali took to the guitar with such passion that guitar based music became part of the bedrock of Malian culture. In the manner of such things, the African guitarists sound African, almost all of them. 

I have said many times that all music is theft, but that's probably just for effect. What is really true is that all music draws on everything that the new player has ever heard. From the wildlife, to the urban noise, to the traditional instruments, everything. When you listen to African guitar players like Mr. Mtukudzi here, you can hear echos of thumb pianos and other traditional African instruments, and local rhythm patterns that have existed for hundreds of years. We all pick up an instrument and look for sounds that we know. It's all pretty fascinating. 

This fellow's music has great merit. I have to put up a Post-It note to remind myself to listen to more of it. 

The Hunter-Gatherer Solution

We think of the dawn of man as having come somewhere around the end of the last Ice Age, between fifteen and ten thousand years ago. That seems to be the time when people really started paying attention, you know, paying attention to the seasons and the stars, counting the days, figuring out that they could influence the characteristics of the plants and animals that they liked to eat. We had long since become the people that we are today; for tens of thousands of years already by then we had looked and thought much as we do today. We were finally getting good at it, that’s all.

How old are the oldest cave paintings? What are they saying now? Thirty thousand years? Maybe they’ve pushed it back, but let’s just say thirty for the sake of this post. The cave paintings prove that we were thinking symbolically. We would have had dogs by then, dogs that could be trusted around children, I mean. Domesticated. We were pretty domesticated ourselves. Tools were getting better. Fire had been mastered. If we were painting on cave walls, I would say that language must also have been developing into something more useful. My hunch is that language had remained very basic for a very long time, because life was straightforward (if not simple) and people didn’t live very long. The use of language requires the same kind of symbolic abilities as the cave paintings, so I am sure that we had bigger vocabularies by that time and were speaking together more effectively.

So, thirty thousand years ago, small bands of hunter-gatherers following crops and game around a tract of land that they were familiar with, communicating better with each other, passing along more information, becoming more successful, and accelerating into what by the year 10,000 BCE was a rush to modernity. What were people like thirty thousand years ago?

I would guess that empathy and cooperation were well established already in human society. I say that with confidence because for a small band of hunter-gatherers, every baby is monumentally important. Infant mortality must have been staggering, so living babies were a matter of survival. Constant attrition in members of the band of all ages would have made every person important. And as for the elderly members of the band, you know, the thirty-seven-year olds, they were slowing down by then but they were precious themselves. Old Og had fallen out of a tree and couldn’t really run anymore, and Uma had had that sloth step on his leg that time, and it didn’t heal right. They had valuable experience, however, and there were plenty of things that they could still do.

In such a small, delicate group, people must have learned to get along, and learned to value every member of the band. The loss of any one of them impoverished them and reduced their security. They must have learned to look out for each other and help each other as much as possible. Or else they would have died off.

I’m also convinced that every band had a group of hunters who were specialists in that trade, and it is likely that the hunter who was a bit smarter and faster and stronger than the others was some kind of chieftain, if only for ceremonial purposes. I believe that the caveman movies and stories that we are familiar with are comically wrong in portraying a constant round of envy and contention, often culminating in violence. A scene like that would be counterproductive, although, being humans, problems must have arisen.

One thing is for sure, any kind of leadership group or individual would have needed to put the well-being and security of the entire band first, or else. If there were a chieftain who was just plain mean, and left old people to die because they couldn’t keep up, someone who was cruel in any way and allowed to band to be reduced because of his character flaws, well the band would just get rid of him, wouldn’t they? Why wait until the fool gets us all killed? Who wants to starve to death because this mean-spirited numbskull wants to go kill a mountain goat and refuses to take us to the place where we all know there will be plenty of fish in about a month? I’m sure that our distant but doubtlessly recognizable ancestors would simply do away with such a chieftain.

Lest we forget, this guy is fast and strong, so my guess is that the second-best hunter would get the job of smacking old chiefie in the head with a huge rock while he was sleeping. The new chieftain would then get a talking to from the circle of elder females, and the band would have fish again that year and make it through another winter.  

They couldn’t afford to fool around back then. Every single thing that happened every day was a matter of life and death. We’ve got it a lot easier now, and to prove it we do nothing but fool around. Right now we have a whole ruling class that does not give one good Goddamn about the security and prosperity of our band, our tribe, our nation-state, our people. They do nothing to help us, they allow the least of us to die from neglect, and they care only about lining their own pockets and hoarding wealth. And it’s all a big yawn to most people, as though there were nothing to be done about it.

Our primitive ancestors would be ashamed of us. They would never have stood still for such a failure to care about the future of the group. We have lost some of our essential humanity in the interim. I only hope that we can regain our will to live before it is too late.

At My Front Door Crazy Little Mama by The El Dorados

This great hit was released in 1955. The recording is really clean for the era. Most studios still had trouble with drums, but it sounds like a full drum kit here. Great record all around. 

I woke up yesterday and within an hour or so my entire head was taken over by this song. I hadn't heard it for a long time; I wasn't thinking about it at all; but there it was. I've been thinking about it for thirty-six hours now. Why? 

Things just pop into our dreams unbidden, often in response to some unfinished inquiry that our mind has been chewing on. I think that this song may have invaded my subconscious because, tell me if I'm wrong, it seems to begin with a presentation of the chorus. 

My notes go like this: chorus; verse; verse; chorus; sax solo; verse; chorus; nice, long ending. 

This is always interesting to me, because Beatle maniacs love to claim that a major proof of the genius of the Beatles was beginning She Loves You with the chorus. They claim that no one had ever done this before, which is a silly thing to say, the long history of pop music being what it is.  

I would love to hear a comment from someone who had a much better understanding of the song form and musical theory than I do. I'm just some kind of gadfly-hobbyist-know-it-all. Help me out here. 

(Watch, the comment will be from a Beatle fan, telling me how wrong I am, and how great they are!) 

Bad Astronaut - Jessica's Suicide

Might as well enjoy YouTube before they fuck it up. 

Die Ganze Welt Ist Beschissen

One of the saving graces of writing a blog is that it doesn't really matter what you write about, because almost no one is reading it.

During the entire 20^th Century the world seemed to be in imminent danger of running off the rails and into the gorge all at once, ending in a huge, fiery explosion and killing just about everybody. Everything about the 20^th Century, including the prosperous bits, had an air of mania and desperation about it. The 21^st Century, so far, has not been like that.

Not that it has necessarily gotten any better. If the previous century threatened sudden obliteration, our new century settles for the slow death of everything that we need to live. The environment; our infrastructure; food crops; the existence of fish; the social contract; our peace of mind; democratic norms; the medical standard of care; education for our children; our government and the governments of many countries around the world; effective pharmaceuticals; all concepts of privacy or security; all in a state of slow, quiet degradation, culminating perhaps in unburied death, or maybe just mass casualties and sheer misery for those poor souls remaining alive. The old air of mania and desperation has been replaced by despair and depression. Mania and desperation evidently required hope, a commodity that has become functionally extinct. I'm thinking that yes, Mr. Sacks was right when he sang his little song. “The whole world is shitty.”

Why Today, Mr. Fred?

What's so special about today? Why pick today to get your knickers in a twist and harsh everyone's mellow? Choosing one thing from the vast catalog of nightmarish horror that besets us would not only be impossible, it would also be a waste of time to try. Like rearranging the deck chairs on the half-sunken Titanic. Nobody seems very well informed about the extent of the problem, and very few people who have had a glimpse of it appear to be overly concerned.

Most people are either oblivious, or they believe that the world has always been like this, teetering on the edge of destruction. There have always been fluctuations in weather, haven't there? There have always been wars, and the threat of more wars. There has always been disease, in fact the disease part was much, much worse in olden times! This very Pollyanna-like attitude very optimistically holds that humanity has been through worse, and it has always prevailed. Trump? That's nothing! We've survived Caligula, Napoleon, and Hitler!

Well no, honey-child, the blogger patiently explained, nothing like our life-threatening 21^st Century has ever happened before. There has never been man-made warming of the atmosphere and the oceans before, not on this or any other scale. It simply has never happened before. There have never been seven billion people living on the earth at one time before. Something like three billion of them are under forty-years-old. There has never before been a commercial human society that was willing to stake its entire future on the efficacy of fiat currency (the idea that money is worth whatever people will pay for it, and no longer grounded in any kind of equivalency computation). There has never been a time when technology and productivity have made such giant leaps on such accelerating time scales, and in a related development, there has never been a time when the prosperity generated by lesser advances was not shared with working people.

So, why today? What was the straw that broke the camel's back? There wasn't one. The cumulative effect of just every damn thing requires me to let off some steam once in a while, lest the entire engine blow sky high.

There are, however, things great or small that push my anxiety level up more or less permanently.

Social Security

My blood pressure goes up every time a correspondence from the Social Security Administration hits my mailbox. To be fair, I visited their office in the Federal Building in West Los Angeles a few years ago and a very nice man helped me quickly and efficiently after a very reasonable wait in a comfortable lounge area. I have also received timely assistance from a very nice man in the SS office in Manila, in the Philippines. I was very grateful for their assistance, and I thanked them effusively. There have been problems that arrived in the mail, though, and I am nine time zones away from California. Even Manila would be an expensive, time consuming, international visit. The real problem is that the entire enterprise is unwieldy, inefficient, probably running Cobal on sixty year old computers, the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing, and no one above the level of the two gentlemen who assisted me in person cares what happens at all.

Here's a good example. I turned sixty-five several years ago and got the materials for Medicare. I read them carefully and decided to sign up for parts A and B only. I live overseas, and I have no plans ever to reside in America again, so the odds are that I will never receive any Medicare benefits at all, because our congress, in their rush to please American companies at the expense of the working man, has mandated that only medical services rendered within the United States may be offset by Medicare. Note that Medicare would save a fortune paying for care provided in my local market, rather than the four or five times that amount for work done in the U.S., but that's another story. I signed up on the off chance that I might come down with something downright horrible, like Parkinson's Disease, or ALS, or something like that. A life sentence with a ton of money required every month. There are huge penalties when you say no to Medicare at sixty-five and then want to sign up later.

I paid them for the first year out of pocket, about $1,300, and then when my Social Security kicked in I had the money deducted every month. It went on that way for years.

Last week I got the notice in the mail telling me that my benefit amount was being raised by some insignificant amount. The form also showed a breakdown of my benefit and any deductions therefrom. THERE WERE NO DEDUCTIONS LISTED. And sure enough, this month's direct deposit was in the exact amount of the new benefit. Like I mentioned, they had been taking out over one hundred dollars every month for years for Medicare, and during that time I have received mail from Medicare, and I possess a Medicare members card. On its own motion, the Social Security Administration dropped me from Medicare.

This is the level of consideration that we can expect from our government. That much is disturbing, but I quickly realized that I'm better off without it. I'll take the $1,300 every year, thank you, and I'll save it to pay for medical services over here. They'll be keeping the $6,000 that they essentially stole from me in the five years that they let me keep paying every month, but we can't let little things like that ruin our precious days. We've got bigger fish to fry.

Our Government In General

Nothing about Washington DC is recognizable when compared with the government that existed only sixty years ago. That was a smaller country, only 200,000,000 people or so, and everything moved at a much slower pace. Communications, transportation, everything. People got jobs and kept them, often for their entire lives. Almost everyone who was working had a policy of Blue Cross/Blue Shield medical insurance that covered all family members. If someone in your family was crazy, there was a government hospital for that. For my parents generation, the money that their parents received from Social Security was enough to live on. Cars, refrigerators, TVs, they were all made in America. Things were much tougher for black Americans, and if anyone among our family or friends was homosexual, we didn't know about it, but in general things were more cooperative and secure than they are today.

Now we live in a “you're on your own” nightmare. The difference is that equality has been replaced by liberty. Equality, paid for by fair employment practices and progressive taxes, has given way to a system in which the rich are at liberty to keep almost all of their money and corporations are at liberty to gouge workers as terribly as possible and reduce thereby their overhead. Every American is free to sign up for all of the medical insurance that he or she can afford, and if you can't afford any, well, then you don't have any. We still receive Social Security benefits, but it's not enough for anyone to live on. We get Medicare, but if you get sick enough the co-pays and the medicine will suck almost anyone's bank account dry in a couple of years, probably including the equity in your house, if you are lucky enough to have any. After that, it seems like the plan becomes, sell the house, move into an RV, and work until you die. I've noticed that more and more people are going to Mexico for affordable medical treatment. (You may be surprised to find out that the dentists and doctors are excellent in Mexico, and the quality of the care is very high.) More Americans, myself included, are choosing to live overseas.

Welcome to the 21^st Century! If you're not living in a van and working seasonal jobs in Amazon warehouses, you're way ahead of the game.

The Gories - Hey Hey We're The Gories

Even the anti-music was better in the 20th Century.