rankinblog

Sh*t, P*ss, F*ck, C*nt, C*cksucker, Motherf*cker, T*ts. George Carlin's Dead

Every time I start thinking that all I'm writing here is a death blog I remind myself that we all must die some day.  And that is the stuff of most of art, culture and religion anyways, so it's not like it's inappropriate material.  But to wake up this Monday morning with the ineffably sad news that George Carlin's heart gave out on a Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica hurt my heart and made me sad.  It hit me much worse than Russert.  I think George Carlin represented rebellion and courage, a million laughs and a way of looking at and defining the world without which a free society could not call itself free.

He was what Lenny Bruce lacked in luck and the times and the drug of choice.  He was supposedly there when Lenny was arrested for obscenity, allegedly arrested himself the same night for refusing to present an ID to police. But Carlin would prevail, substituting blow and grass for smack and wine, sprinkle in a dash of the ACLU, a permissive time that Bruce lacked and an unparalleled comic wit; he cracked us up and changed law and society.  His talent was borne on the street corners of 'White Harlem' in NYC, then as a radio man working at KJOE in Shreveport, Louisiana in the Army during the Cold War. 

Carlin's voices and bits hang in the popular consciousness--from Thomas the Tank Engine all the way back to Al Sleet, The Hippie Dippy Weatherman.  He hosted the first Saturday Night Live.  In recent years he had turned more polemic, a bitter apolitical edge and castigation followed by Vicodin and wine and rehab.  His books sold very well, though he still performed for much of the year at age 71.   I would catch him on Imus from time to time and he was the same guy--sui generis, one of the American Originals.  With The Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television, redacted above, Carlin set loose the forces that kicked open the doors for a flood of obscenities that rain down us to this day.  For that he's being tut-tutted by the bluenose Russert nation today, being called a provocateur, a 'controversialist' (what the fuck is that), a member of the counterculture.   He wasn't for everyone, I guess.  But the rest of us will snicker on, and appreciate that the language we all use can be admitted to and incorporated into the public expression.  His wit was perfect, the way with words, a perfect comic timing, jokes as perfect, English haiku.

When I was 12-14 years old, I bought Class Clown and Occupation Foole and memorized every bit, repeating it daily in home room and every chance I got.  Along with masturbation, baseball, divorce, classic rock, masturbation and uncertainty he was surely one of the key motivating forces of my adolescence.  Russert was a swell guy, a hard worker, a well liked guardian of the Status Quo.  But George Carlin was more, a living symbol of the counterculture who survived with a sense of humor, a soldier standing in for Junkie Lenny, Suicidal Abbie, Lost Hunter and their legions, now all lost to the years.

I always stoop to profanity here at rankinblog, partially as an homage to obscenity law, something I studied at length in college and something I've had to follow closely as a professional hazard in the years since.  Carlin had no idea what he set loose in my life and America's when he recorded Class Clown, on my birthday, in Santa Monica, in 1972.  Shit.  Fuck.  I'll miss him.

"We're all fucked.  It helps to remember that."  -George Carlin

12 Step Classics, Volume One

 

For reasons that shall remain obvious, Uncle Brub is a key cog in the recovery movement on the Hawaiian Islands.  He and I are similar in many ways--moods, literary and musical tastes, human genomes.  One of our main parting of the ways is how we measure our craziness.  He cops to being an alcoholic tending towards major depression.  Me, I'm the occasional drunk who understands this world is fucked, no matter that it is the best of all possible ones, to paraphrase my dear Voltaire.  But the divide between us has never kept me from loving him or us from corresponding or providing each other moral support at the darkest times or even ghostwriting for each other if called upon.

So it happened that he dropped out of sad retirement to become a 'peer counselor' and court ordered talking-to for an entire generation of poor, strung out Polynesians on the no account Leeward Coast of Oahu.  Bill W. would beam with pride, were he standing by.  The funny part is that Brub's still sharp as a tack pushing 80, and has found some certified practitioners who agree with him that addiction counseling is one and the same with relationship, chemical, Freudian, and otherwise life history therapy.  In other words, while you're ordered to the bin by a Judge and are required to admit that the crack has got you down, look further towards that lifelong chemical imbalance, bad family relation, or tendency towards evil partners to find the nut-seed-Ur reason.  Crack is wack, but your childhood was the key, G.  It is truly the great leap forward in addiction treatment to compare with anything that has come before in our pampered, wealthy, Western navel-gazing age.

Brub and I chatted a couple of weeks back and he described this psychological-addiction paradigm-shift he had finally pushed into clinical study and I said "cazarts, Uncle Brub!  Your PhD's are onto something.  It's not just the whiskey and weed, it's Ma and Da and that crazy cousin who tried to stick a popsicle stick  in your ass when you were nine that have as much to do with your court ordered probation as anything.  Why not talk it out and move on?"

Amid much hearty agreeing and a general trend toward Obamamania, I suggested to him that I would cull my musical library for what I have decided to call the 12 Step Classics--songs that prove the paradigm.

Start with the notion that artists and addictions go together like peanut butter and jelly, Abbott and Costello, cigarettes and coffee.  With that as touchstone I created a series of selections.  In the 1980's losers like me called them 'mix tapes' and gave them to our love objects.  In 2008, I like the idea of someone blaring these songs into a room of deluded alkies, probationed base-heads, socialist-leper-chronics, and asking them to consider what these songwriters were really trying to say and what truth they revealed.  So, cut one in this Ur-text audio file is Hank Williams' Lost Highway.

Ironically enough this cut is from from The Health and Happiness Shows, an amazing series of live performance radio programs that Williams cut for the company producing Hadacol, a patent medicine remedy that was essentially an excuse for Southern Baptists to get their swerve on via drinking alcohol as a 'medicine'.  Heh.  Actually my favorite version of this song was done live, by Jason and the (Nashville) Scorchers, circa 1982, who truly conveyed the fliberty-gibit drunken sway of Hank's warnings in classic slam-dancing cowpunk style.  Scott Munn told me a funny anecdote about two of the 'Scorchers, who apparently met up in the 1990's at some Hollywood boite and talked for some minutes before realizing that they were both in the same band for most of half a decade.  Now that, is drunkenness.   In any event, the lyrics are as important as the actual song, so here is cut one of 12 Step Classics, Volume One, for Uncle Brub and the writhing Hawaiians:

Lost Highway-Hank Williams/Leon Payne--1949

I'm a rollin' stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman's lies makes a life like mine
O the day we met, I went astray
I started rolling down that lost highway

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highway

Now boys don't start to ramblin' round
On this road of sin ,or you're sorrow bound
Take my advice or you'll curse the day
You started rollin' down that lost highway

Hank Williams was the shit, as they say.  More cuts to follow.

Deaths To Report: Moms, Dads, The Atlanta Braves Era

I was hit hard today by the death of Francis Cooley, at 97.  She seemed like the best of moms, remembered by all of her children but most vividly by son Alex, the legendary Atlanta concert promoter.  "My Mother could fit in with anybody," Cooley said.  "She didn't judge people by how young or how old they were or what color they were or what religion.  And I think that transmits itself.  I think people have a social antenna, and when you go in a room, you know if you're welcome or not.  And my mother was welcoming."  Francis liked to hang out back stage, and became mother figures and a happy face well met in the tour grind for Willie Nelson and James Taylor in particular.  I hope they are toasting her, and Alex tonight.  Our thoughts and prayers go with the Cooleys.

Tim Russert dropped dead this afternoon, the Friday before Father's Day, in the middle of cutting vo for NBC for Sunday's Meet The Press, in the newsroom where he ruled.  It's been an immensely sad and ironic afternoon in a media and pop-culture world in America that loves him for his political acumen and everyman style.  Ironically, I was a fat man working hard on a big broadcast when I saw the news come across the wires.  I had airtime to make and no time to grieve.  Though by the time I later delivered the news to a couple of shocked Boomer colleagues, I realized that Tim resonated among most classes and colors, journalists and the lumpen proletariat alike.  As a journalist I thought he did good work on the main, an equal opportunity hangman for hack politicians, laying out their own words in his own inimitable Network TV Power Point quotes, splayed before all of us on Sunday mornings.  In recent days he seemed too insistent to me that Hillary still mattered.  When he moderated big debates he always seemed to grin slightly sadistic behind his chubby fat prelate cheeks and arched brow, serving yet another rolling time bomb on the TV green to kill a campaign, reputation, nomination, or law.  At his best he was a smoldering ball of working-class Christian guilt and rage, hurled against power.  At the same time, I think that Inside The Beltway Journalists are a major threat to our society and should be term limited.  George and Tim and Stephy should all be forced to move to a different market and cover a different beat, and a new group of journos rotated in to protect the truth.

So I'm ok today that God, Yahweh, Sam Hain or the Forces Of SatanClinton put a limit to Tim's term.  It's sad, but then again.  To my agonizing Boomers I said cheer up.  It's just like Dale Earnhardt, who died quickly, doing the thing he loved most, just like Tim.  For those left to grieve you have my thoughts and wishes for G*dspeed.  The son he raised to manhood and his wife will be well taken care of.  A new Russert will emerge.

As for my Atlanta Braves, the dying goes harder.  Of course, I loved them for nearly 20 years before 1991, worst to first, the coming of age of a Hall of Fame pitching staff and a run of good baseball that lasted until our very own century.  It's been an unprecedented run  but for the last two seasons my Bravos have skittered along, a .500 team, brains shot out by the hunter, cable tv deal over, a 90 million dollar payroll and a bunch of old players breaking down, stumbling, brainless, into the ditch.  It's the end of a golden era for Braves fans and it's just as sad as the passing of Frances and Tim in it's own way.  Matter of fact, they both shuffled off with some dignity and high regards in the last couple of days.  The 2008 Braves will be mocked and ridiculed and ignored like festering string-warted ogres by all baseball men who behold them in future years.  The statistics won't lie.  I'm prepared for a long siege of bad baseball.  Turner Field's interstate 75-side billboard should have giant block letters with full visual effects warning traveling fans headed past, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

 

Bodies, The Exhibition: Update

It's funny when you write a blog and keep the comments open.  Over the 4 plus years that rankinblog has sputtered and flared, a handful of posts have actually continued to receive comments years after they slid from the front page.  I'm sure this is due to the vagaries of being Googled, and I'm not counting those spaminator comments that shoot weird psycho-sexual streams of random consciousness at any post that will have them.  Particularly when you entitle a post Don't Miss Britney's Snatch.  But the most continuing real comments come for my soul dump about my time playing a squeeze box called My Dark Accordion Past.  It turns out there are dozens of people similarly warped as I was by door-to-door accordion salesmen in Southern California in the late 1960s.  They email me and respond to that post on a regular basis.  I appreciate hearing from them.

But my topic today is an update to my original post on Bodies: The Exhibition.  This one has received a ton of posts and emails, ranging from the thoughtful to the mouth-breathing.  I found the whole thing perverse then, and I still do.  At the time I suggested there was some evidence that those cadavers flayed and encased in rubber and plastic for entertainment purposes were not donated willingly.  That they might be Chinese prisoners and forced laborers who in a final act of degradation were pimped out for highbrow, high-ticket entertainment and exhibition to Western yokels.

Well--news comes last week from ABC that the company which created and promoted this entire sick enterprise now has to admit they don't know where the bodies come from: 

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says the company that has made millions of dollars with U.S. exhibitions of plasticized human bodies used "the remains of individuals that may have been tortured and executed in China."

In announcing what he called the "grim reality" of an official investigation triggered by an ABC News "20/20" report, Cuomo said the company, Premier Exhibitions, "despite repeated denials...had no way of knowing the true source of their human exhibits and no meaningful documentation to support their claims that the bodies had been donated for such a use."

As part of the settlement, Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions will disclose on its web site, in the entrances of any New York exhibitions, and in its New York advertising that it cannot confirm the bodies and parts being displayed were not, or did not belong to, Chinese prisoners who may have been victims of torture and execution.

This kind of reminds me of the Mark Lane-Howard Hunt lawsuit in which Howard Hunt sued Lane for claiming he was a conspirator in the JFK Assassination.  Hunt ended up, on the record, not being able to prove he was not in Dealey Plaza November 22, 1963.  In other words, Premiere Exhibitions can't prove the cadavers were voluntarily donated, and they can't prove they were not Chinese prisoners.  Either way, there remains a sickening stink about this whole thing that has now been legally established.  So, continue enjoying the exhibition, armchair Ed Gein, but understand your karmic cost for enjoying it.

Happy Memorial Day Wishes From Hillary

If you had any doubt about the dark, sinister realities of Clintonism, hopefully Hillary's ongoing overtly expressed hope that her opponent finds his own bloody Ambassador Hotel pantry will educate you.  Personally, I never had any doubts that Clinton and Company were willing and ready to go there.

Bobby Kennedy's campaign motorcade stopped briefly in front of my elementary school in Pomona, California a day or two before he was gunned down.  I was a third-grader, and we all yelled and whooped and chanted for him.  He waved and shook hands and moved on, tan and sandy-haired, carrying an entire nation's hope and foreboding along with him to his imminent date with destiny.  It's a memory that I'm proud to remember here on Memorial Day Weekend.  The notion that Hillary Clinton takes every opportunity behind closed doors to pray that Barack finds his own Sirhan in time to advance her wretched career doesn't surprise me.  I hope it is a (yet, another) wake up call to her deluded supporters.

Her-schel Wal-ker

It all comes down to football among Southern men.  At least since Grant humiliated Lee at Appomattox.  Football is war by other means, and the blood ties and brown liquor that flow on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays in the Fall of the year throughout the Old Confederacy can make for lifelong relationships and a social lubricant with a new stranger.  "Thomasville?  You from Thomasville?  William Andrews sure whipped our white suburban asses when we went down from Lakeside to play you in '75."  And so from there backs are slapped and commiseration made.  The deal gets done, the traffic citation becomes a warning, a social order remains intact.  Don't call this a racial trope, black and white find common ground together on this subject.  This is mostly the realm of our Scotch-Irish testosterone heritage, which plays out among all stripes this far down the generations.

I attended the University of Georgia as the 1980s were aborning, and happened to be enrolled in 1980, when Herschel Walker came, anointed and glowing in a mystical light, to save the day for Vince Dooley and the legions of the red and black.  I watched him play his freshman year, in person, and I can say that it was the most miraculous play I've ever seen on a football field.  The only things I would compare it to are possibly Gayle Sayers' rookie NFL season and maybe even Bo Jackson in the SEC just a few years later.  But Walker, from tiny, dirt-farm Wrightsville in Johnson County, could run over, around or through anyone who tried to tackle him that year.  The rest of the team was average by and large, but it didn't matter when all Buck Belue had to do was turn around and hand or toss it to Herschel.  I can remember several games at Sanford Stadium that fall, swaying in the sun, the ice long melted in my Wild Turkey and Coke (I had begun to read Hunter Thompson by then), as 30,000 Bulldog fans shouted "Her-schel!" across the field to 30,000 more who shouted back "Walker!"  Nirvana achieved Bodhisattva at the New Orleans Superdome that New Year's Day, when Herschel, who separated his shoulder on the opening drive, gutted it out and our defense stood and we whipped the Fighting Irish and won the mythical National Title.  I was there that day screaming like one of Beowulf's own wingmen, waving a bucket-sized cup of Dixie Beer and paying homage to Her-schel.  In short order he became National Champion, Heisman Winner, Multi-Million Dollar Player.

So it was that after all these years I ended up hanging out with him for a while the other day.  He's on a book tour these days, with a fractured memoir about his lifelong suffering with dissociative personality disorder and I was able to talk a little football and reminisce.  He looks like he could strap up and run over Bill Bates again today.  He's always been an enigma to a world that has certain expectations of running backs or jocks in general.  He's been reading and writing poetry since high school, he was his class valedictorian, he came back to school after turning pro to finish his degree.  If you look him up you will find that if you roll his USFL numbers into his NFL numbers they stack up with anyone in history.

Usually around celebrities I am very nonchalant, but here was the Apollo of my youth himself.  We talked a little about the 'Dogs.  He's bullish on this year's team, thinks Thomas Brown will stick with the Falcons.  His main point about writing about his personality disorder seems to be to convince anyone to get help who thinks they need it.  I never ask for autographs.  This time, though, I printed off the image above and had him sign it to me.  "God is good," according to Herschel's inscription to me.  There was a brief time on the gridirons across the South when Herschel was a God.  He was a man among boys, as they say.  It was great to see him the other day and shake his hand and see that he seems to have made it through better than most.

Vampire Weekend, Me Likee

Yeh.  I know, pretty thin gruel here lately.  I could be going off about the Obama-Curious George T-shirts or Arlen Specter crying for justice for the NFL.  It's all I can do some days just to keep up with the day job, come home, put on the striped shirt and referee between Kat and the Little Rose Bud, who grows a few more thorns every day some times, eight years old and knows it all, hormones-aborning.  Rolling her eyes and stomping away in mirror reflection to her mother's histronics, which sends Mom off.  Thweeeeeet!!!!  I blow the whistle and console and cajole and send them to neutral corners and finally collapse, into my bedsit, reading Feiler or Horwitz or The Economist, sleep coming dull and slow.

But really, Patterson Hood lyrics and nonsensical Hillary-hate?  Surely I can do better than that for you, my public.  Heck, the day job has me hanging with some newsworthies and artists and the occasional oddball across the transom to such a degree that it would be worth a thousand sniggers here, but there's been no time, no energy.  I'm hopeful the summer sun will perk me up.  Or at least the Preakness this weekend and Indy the next.  I need to see some momentum, some high stakes racing, hoofs thundering on the knife's edge of snapping, Driver 8 snapping the wheels loose in the short chute at the Brickyard and exploding in a sickening explosion of carbon fiber, burning ethanol, all of technology and heroism wrought low.

Instead I'll leave you with a recommendation for my favorite new band.  They're called Vampire Weekend and they play June 11 at The Variety Playhouse her in ATL if you are so inclined.  Jon turned me on to them after the Passover Seder, dragged me into his Dad's room to play them for me on YouTube.  If that sounds pathetic, understand that Jon is a year older than I am.  We are kindred old farts, seeking solace in new band.  Vampire Weekend is the best combination of Talking Heads, The Partridge Family, and King Sunny Ade and His African Beats that I've heard.  Earnest, Columbia grads with a good groove and the white man soul of David Byrne.  Check them out if you have the chance.

Suck It, Hillary

Patterson Hood Keeps A Finger On The Pulse

THE RIGHTEOUS PATH

I got a brand new car that drinks a bunch of gas
I got a house in a neighborhood that’s fading fast
I got a dog and a cat that don’t fight too much
I got a few hundred channels to keep me in touch
I got a beautiful wife and three tow-headed kids
I got a couple of big secrets I’d kill to keep hid
I don’t know God but I fear his wrath
I’m trying to keep focused on the righteous path

I got a couple of opinions that I hold dear
A whole lot of debt and a whole lot of fear
I got an itch that needs scratching but it feels alright
I got the need to blow it out on Saturday night
I got a grill in the backyard and a case of beers
I got a boat that ain’t seen the water in years
More bills than money, I can do the math
I’m trying to keep focused on the righteous path

I’m trying to keep focused as I drive down the road
On the ditches and the curves and the heavy load
Ain’t bitching bout things that aren’t in my grasp
Just trying to hold steady on the righteous path

There’s this friend of mine I’ve known all my life
Who can’t get it right no matter how hard he tries
He’s got kids he don’t see and several ex-wives
And a list of bad decisions bout eight miles wide
Trouble with the law and the IRS
And where he’ll get the money’s anybody’s guess
He’s a long way off but if you was to ask
He’d say he’s trying to stay focused on the righteous path

Trying to keep focused as we drive down the road
Like we did back in High School before the world turned cold
Now the brakes are thin and the curves are fast
We’re trying to hold steady on the righteous path

We’re hanging out and we’re hanging on
We’re trying the best we can to keep keeping on
We got messed up minds for these messed up times
And it’s a thin thin line separating his from mine

Trying to hold steady on the righteous path
80 miles and hour with a worn out map
No time for self-pity or self-righteous crap
Trying to stay focused on the righteous path

Patterson Hood / Drive-By Truckers © Razor and Tie Music (BMI)

Elegy For Shipfeifer's On Peachtree

Atlanta is pretty much legendary for paving over our history.  No building or neighborhood with any character is too important that it can't be torn down and replaced with some bloodless profit driven McMansion or development.  So it really shouldn't have come as any surprise when I took the family to Shipfeifer's on Peachtree for a gyro dinner yesterday evening and found the place closed, locked up pending a new lease, tenant, or the insatiable needs of a bulldozer and a dump-truck.

Shipfeifer's was always my first choice for a first date.  It had a great patio right on Peachtree, and if your date was not going well, you could always nurse your beer and watch the people and cars passing by.  They served excellent gyros.  Their cottage fries with feta dressing were one of the true junk food delights.  They even served a passable red velvet cake for dessert.  For a number of years I worked across the street, and I could always find solace in sneaking away from the corporate shark tank for some greasy comfort food.  It was even the setting for many off-site lunches over which careers and loves were pondered.  To go in a moment from eager gyro anticipation to the end of an era was more bitter than an old pot of coffee.

Online reviews indicated that ownership had changed and service and quality had suffered in recent times.  God knows that the food business is a chancy gig.  Most places don't last long and Shipfeifer's had hung in since 1974 at the same location.  So now they're gone, likely to be torn down or converted into some sort of fucked up latte stand for bored and stressed out office-dwellers to drop in for a $5.00 cup .  But for me, for the ghosts of the loves I passed the time with there, it won't ever be the same without the chance to sit once more on the patio, watch the traffic pass, languidly sipping a cold one and dipping a crisp cottage fry into the heavenly feta.  Progress sucks sometimes.