Category: Life

To all my bloggin’ buddies…

You can’t know how much you’ve meant to me.

You just can’t, OK?

I hope your Winter celebrations are going great.

I’m having my annual holiday wallow in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Those Precious Few who have been reading here for a while may have suspected that I am a sap, and I guess this proves it. Until a few years ago, this movie was almost in the public domain, and as a result every local television station in the country had a beat up, dog-eared copy which they ran forty or fifty times every December. In a big market like LA you could catch it any time you wanted, twenty-four hours a day during the whole holiday season. I viewed most of these showings. Gradually it became a “classic,” even though it wasn’t well-regarded when it was released in 1946.

Then somehow NBC acquired exclusive rights to it, and they a.) made everybody stop showing it all the time and b.) decided to exhibit it only once (or twice) a year. As much as I loved to watch the movie, I was OK with these limitations, because by that time I knew the entire movie by heart, and I think it’s fitting for it to be treated with a little more respect. NBC got a nice, cleaned up print of it, so it looked better than ever, too. Some of those old prints were so bad you could hardly see the picture, or hear the great dialog.

But I was not always able to watch when NBC felt like showing it, so a couple of years ago I bought the DVD. Most of the time I try to seem tough-minded and skeptical, but once I year I become a quivering mass of schmaltz, as I worship at The Church of Frank Capra. That’s what I’m doing tonight, as I write.

I don’t know for sure when I became aware of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” but it feels as if I have literally grown up with it. The life of George Bailey is so touching and there are so many indelible scenes in the film that I sometimes lose track if it’s a movie or a rerun of my own life. Sure it’s hokey, and I love the hokey-ness. I know it’s over the top and manipulative, but for a couple of hours each year I give up my heart, suspend my sophisticated disbelief and go along for the sweet, sweet ride.

The moment when George realizes he is in love with Mary Hatch (the fetching Donna Reed) gets my vote for Most Romantic Scene Ever Filmed, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat across a table from my brother and repeated Nick the bartender’s words: “Look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don’t need any characters to give the joint atmosphere.” Has there ever been a more despicable villain than Lionel Barrymore’s “warped, frustrated” Mr. Potter? And surely we could do worse than a guardian angel named Clarence.

I’m not reviewing the film here, or summarizing the story, except to say that each person’s life touches many others, and even if you do only small things the world stands to be dimished if you were never in it. I wouldn’t be missed the way George Bailey was, or welcomed back so enthusiastically, but seeing this movie makes me want to do a few good deeds.

You know. Just in case.

To those who have suggested I write a song about my HugeCorp Blues:

I refer you to Jimmy Reed, who recorded this Al Smith/Willie Dixon composition 46 years ago. Click the little blue button to hear the song.

Jimmy was born in Mississippi in 1925 and was working in a meat packing plant in Indiana when he started making records in the forties. When I think about working that kind of a gig, I can only smile at my own job-related angst.

The blues got Jimmy out of meat packing, and he actually became a pretty big star in the fifties and sixties. He drank too much, though, and he left this world in 1976. If this song sounds familiar to you, it may be because his music has been copied by everybody in the business for the past forty years.

I can hear you, Jimmy.

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BIG BOSS MAN
Big boss man, can‘t you hear me when I call
Big boss man, can‘t you hear me when I call
Well, you ain‘t so big, you‘re just tall, that‘s all

Got me working, boss man, working ’round the clock
I want me a drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stop
Big boss man, can’t you hear me when I call?
Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all

Well, I‘m gonna get me a bossman, one gonna treat me right
Work hard in the day time, rest easy at night
Big boss man, can‘t you hear me when I call?
Well, you ain‘t so big, you‘re just tall, that‘s all

Hey, I’ll bet the Republicans in Congress are glad now they didn’t invoke the “nuclear option.”

You remember — that was when they were holding confirmation hearings on President Bush’s right-wing Supreme Court nominees, Roberts and Alito, and the Democrats, in the minority and with no other choices if they didn’t approve of the nominees, were saying they might filibuster the appointments. The filibuster, for you nonparliamentarians, is a tactic whereby you talk and talk and talk, refusing to end the “debate,” until the other side can’t stand it any more and makes some sort of compromise with you, or just gives up.

The Republicans, who had control of everything in DC at the time, said they would change the rules so they could stop the filibuster, thus not only getting their way, but taking away the only way for a legislative minority to have any influence in government for all time. At first they called this “the nuclear option,” apparently because of it’s potential to scorch the political earth, but then they backed away from that unsavory metaphor and started calling it “the constitutional option.”

Then one day they woke up in the minority.

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So now that the Democrats have won, I am learning to relax a little. I used to be a fun guy. I wrote about possums and persimmons and kinky sex. Six years of a demagogue in the White House and his pre-emptive war and other criminal behavior and his rubber-stamp Congress made me a little cranky. It seemed that the only time I had the energy to post here was when I was pissed off or scared about something the neocons were foisting on us. Most of my blog friends went away, so I know it must not have been all that interesting, but I couldn’t help it.

Look, I know that the Democrats (my side) didn’t win a Great Victory last week. I know that voters were just sick and tired of the war in Iraq, thought it wasn’t working, we weren’t winning, it was costing too much money and too many lives. I know they were just sending a message to Washington that they were dissatisfied.

It was an election the Republicans lost, rather than one the Democrats won.

I’ll take it, but I have no illusions, and the Democrats shouldn’t either, if they know what’s good for them. Now that they have gained a little power and they have a voice, I hope they will take strong and moral positions on the great questions of our time, and show us why they should be given a further mandate in 2008.

I hope they’ll be honest, hard-working, inspirational, effective and worth voting for again. They only have two years, and there is a big mess to clean up, and the Republicans will probably try to block a lot of their efforts, but today, at least, I have hope.

And so, in the spirit of reaching out, and in the hope that some of The Precious Few who used to read here and sometimes even participate will return, I hereby pledge to knock off my tedious and cranky political rants and start having good old bipartisan, meaningless fun.

For as long as I can.

But really, that might be a long time.

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Now, have any of you space travelers seen this really large image of The Colonel? I saw it when I was in orbit the other day, and I had to go around a few more times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. An 87,500 square foot KFC logo. Gotta get me some o’ that Popcorn Chicken.

I would personally like to welcome the “Reverend” Ted Haggard over to the dark side.

Some will suggest that covert dalliances with a gay male prostitute by a man who presumes to the leadership of 30 million evangelical Christians and who preaches that homosexuality is a sin could be nothing less than the very pinnacle of hypocrisy, arrogance and hubris. But here at revision99, the Blog of Love and Accceptance, Pastor Ted would be an honored guest, and to heck with the name-calling and the finger-pointing.

Remember when Jimmy Swaggart got caught with a hooker? Man, that was some good television, Jimmy all humble and repentant in his white three-piece suit. “Ah have sinned,” he intoned, and he actually wept. How could you not forgive the guy, no matter how much money you had sent in to the ministry? And hookers! I mean, if women are evil temptresses, hookers must be the shock troops, the painted and perfumed Special Forces. Of course they would target men of God like Brother Jimmy, and use his natural manly impulses against him and all that is holy. And then after he did penance and got absolution he went out and met up with more hookers like, within a year. You just can’t ever turn your back on hookers.

But really, we could have seen that one coming. Jimmy was, after all, cousin to legendary hellraiser Jerry Lee Lewis, who married another cousin when she was just thirteen years old. Just growing up with a guy like Jerry Lee has got to bring you into at least a passing acquaintance with Satan. So Swaggart’s fall from grace was really more like stepping off a steep curb and almost twisting your ankle. Haggard’s fall is shaping up to be much more dramatic, the stuff of tragedy.

Pastor Ted has said that he went to the gay male prostitute for a massage while he was in Denver, but he didn’t have sex with him. But then while he was being massaged, the topic of snorting meth came up, as it will do, and Ted decided “Well, why don’t I buy some meth from this man?” And so he did. But then after he had the meth, he saw that it would be wrong to ingest it, so he changed his mind and threw it away, unused. And did I mention – no sleeping with the massage guy?

Come on Ted. You don’t have to tell these lame stories. No one believes you anyway, and really, we would be so proud to have you join us and embrace our San Francisco values. If you’re gay, or even if you’re just open-minded, you’re all done with the Christian Right. They will be dropping you like a smelly gym sock. We, on the other hand, could use a man like you, with good organizational skills and leadership qualities, not to mention charisma up to here. We on the left are not so judgmental as those rigid old fundamentalists. As for your very important White House connections, I understand it would be hard to give that up, but when you think about it, after this next election, are you really going to want to be bothered with all those Monday morning conference calls?

And Ted: We’re liberals. We have better drugs.

I went out last week and bought a new guitar amplifier.

The last one I bought was in the 70’s. I bought it used, it was old even then, and I still have it. It’s a Fender Twin Reverb, pre-CBS blackface, a true classic. It runs on vacuum tubes – no transistors. It was built in May of 1964, in the days before printed circuit boards and integrated circuits (“chips”), at the Fender factory in Fullerton, just about ten miles from where I live now, and where I lived then.

I’ve lived in a lot of places in between, and the Twin has come with me everywhere. I put a new set of tubes in it about twenty years ago, and I had the two twelve-inch speakers reconed in 2003 (yes, they are the original Jensens). Mostly, though, I just plugged in and played, and it has never falied me. My Levi’s have worn out, I’ve blown several engines, replaced a dozen televisions and suffered through countless hard drive crashes, but the Twin just soldiers on, no matter what I throw at it, or what I throw it in.

It’s been thrown in the backs of trucks, the holds of airplanes and even into a couple of ferry boats. Mostly, though, it goes in the trunk of my car, and therein lies the problem. The damn thing weighs too much. The tube design requires a big heavy transformer, the hard wiring is done on a steel chassis, the speakers have huge magnets and heavy frames and the cabinet itself is, to put it mildly, built to last. It weighs 69 pounds, and you practically have to hold it at arm’s length to wrestle it into the trunk of my car. To some, this might not seem like such a big deal. To you I say go move your own amps. I have to move this one, and by the time I get where I’m going with it, I am out of breath, my arms hurt, my back is sore and I don’t feel like playing happy songs.

At least that’s what I told myself as part of my campaign to convince myself that I needed a new amp. I am cheap, you see, and that cheap voice in my head kept saying “You are no longer a working, traveling musician. You don’t need a lightweight amp.” To which the Little Boy Who Wanted a New Toy would respond “If I had something a little easier to move around, maybe I could get out to some gigs, restart some old relationships and make a little money – enough, perhaps, to pay for a new amp. So it would be a wash. So shut up.”

This debate went on for a couple of months. Remember, it was way back in the previous millenium that I bought my beloved Twin Reverb, so I was not about to take lightly the prospect of getting a new one. In the end, the side of me that really wanted a new amp struck a deal with the cheap side: “We’ll just go look. We won’t buy anything unless it’s really cheap, really light and sounds bitchin.”

So off we went, one of us thinking “Heh, heh, we’re just looking,” the other fondling the wad of cash in my pocket.

And we were both horrified at what we found. Talk about sticker shock. Workhorse amps like my Twin were now selling for a thousand dollars. If we wanted something affordable, there were a whole bunch of solid state amps, cold, elctronic boxes with little or no personality and complicated control panels that made no sense to me. Some of these amps actually had buttons on them that you could press to make the amp simulate an old Fender Twin Reverb. (Note: The simulation might have fooled someone who hadn’t been actually plugged into the real thing for decades, but to me it sounded exactly like, well, a simulation.) There had to be other choices.

And there were. There were “vintage” amplifiers, new amps made to look and sound old by small boutique companies, hand-wired to fifty-year-old specifications, all tube, covered in tweed Tolex and purposely “distressed” so they looked like the real thing. They had style, they were small and lightweight, and if you wanted to play edgy, chunky blues-rock, they sounded great.

And they were priced like diamonds. I played one, a perfect little gem, a five-watt amp with a 10-inch speaker, and it was $995! If you’re not sure about this, be advised that most rock bands would drown out a five-watt amplifier with the first power chord. Considering this and the fact that the engineering was done more than fifty years ago by Western Electric and Leo Fender and must be public domain by now, I’d say that $199 per watt is just a bit much. “Don’t they get it?” I thought. “Musicians are poor.” Amps from this company that were powerful enough to cut through a real band start at around $1500, and you can easily spend twice that. The cheap side of me waited in the car while I tried these babies out in the store.

In the end, even the Little Boy could not pull the trigger on that kind of money, no matter how much he wanted a new toy. Those “reissue” type amps looked great and sounded fine, but every time I thought about the price tag I found myself unable to shake the feeling that someone was trying to make a sucker out of me.

I shopped and pondered for another couple of weeks. I decided I had to have a tube amp, despite the added cost and weight, so my choices were somewhat limited, as the majority of guitar amps on the market today are solid state. But here’s the thing about solid state: A solid state amp, used correctly, will amplify an electric guitar. As long as you don’t overdrive any stage of the circuitry, it will reproduce more or less faithfully the signal you put in it, and it will do this coolly and efficiently, and without any coloration. If you step over the line, though, and give it too much level at any stage, it will freak out and distort, and transistor distortion is not a pretty thing.

But a vacuum tube is like a living thing. It gets warm when you turn it on (don’t we all?), and it responds emotionally to the signals you give it. The pickups of your guitar convert your fingering and picking and hammering and sliding and bending of the strings into electrical impulses that are a picture of these gyrations, and the tubes in your amplifier receive this information and work with it in intuitive ways. The tubes talk back to the guitar. The attacks, sustains and vibratos become a conversation between the guitar and the amplifier, and the amp becomes a part of the instrument. If you push it hard, it will distort, but smoothly and musically, thickening the sound, adding harmonics and overtones that are as unique as your playing style.

So yeah, it had to be tubes.

I was on a budget, so I had to try out amps that I might not have considered in the past: makers like Peavey and Carvin and Crate. Some of them sounded pretty good, but buying one of these would feel a little like buying a Hyundai. I rented a Sonata a few months ago, and it actually seemed like a pretty good car, but I can remember when – not too long ago – Hyundais were falling apart before you could get them home. Eventually I went back and tried one of the first amps I tested. It was more money than I had planned to spend, but not as much as the breathtaking price tags on the custom-made “retro” vintage-look units. Looking at those made me wake up and adjust my thinking to 21st century reality, which is everything costs more than you expect except DVD players, which now come free if you buy a movie on DVD.

I took my guitar and a thing I use called The Pod (another story) into a store and asked them if I could play this amp that I was considering. I messed around with it for about 45 minutes (thank you, Guitar Center!). I still had my pocketful of cash. The amp sounded way cool. Really clean on the clean side, gritty and bluesy on the dirty side, responsive and LOUD. I put all my stuff away, and asked the nice kid who was helping me if he would consider an offer that was somewaht below the asking price. I made my offer, we went back and forth for ten minutes, I got to the end of the line (actually the very edge of my budget) and the kid was saying, in effect, that he’d dig a hole and bury the amp before he’d sell it to me for that, so I thanked him politely and headed for the door. They held me up at the door for a moment, because I had a guitar with me and they had to make sure it wasn’t one of theirs, and while we were doing that the manager caught up with me and agreed to my deal, somehow twisting it around to make it seem as if it had been his plan all along. I didn’t care how he framed it. I got my amplifier. And this is what I got:

A Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. After all that shopping and thinking, I went back and got a smaller, modern version of the amp I’ve been using for much of my playing career. All tube design (so not that modern, I guess), one 12-inch speaker, half the power of the Twin, 45 pounds. I’ve only had to lift it into the trunk of my car once so far, and that was while it was still in the shipping box, but I have high hopes that I’ll be able to toss it in there at least as many times as I did the old one, without sustaining injuries, so that should give me something to do with my spare time for quite a while to come.

So, to review:

• All tube
• Sounds bitchin
• Weighs less
• Looks cool
• Got my deal
• Louder than a thousand banshees

All I need now is a band. Call me.

Here’s a landmark event in the history of the world.

Tomorrow morning, October 17, 2006, President Bush will sign his Torture Bill, known officially as “S-3930,” the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Under this law,

• it will be legal for the U.S. government to use “alternative interrogation methods” to extract information from prisoners.
• This information will then be considered legal evidence for use in a trial.
• The President will have unrestricted discretion to label anyone an “enemy combatant.”
• Once you are labeled an enemy combatant, you will not have recourse to any court should you wish to challenge the reason for your arrest and detention, which…
• …could go on forever, and you might never be told why, or…
• …be allowed to see the evidence against you (unless it’s your own confession, given as a result of being forced to stand in a “stress position” for forty hours with no sleep, or perhaps being waterboarded).

So that’s bound to make us safer, eh?

I was going to link to some pages describing and depicting the alternative interrogation techniques permitted by this law, but it was just too fucking sick and disgusting. Look it up yourself if you want to. I am ashamed that this gang of brutal assholes in our government is pretending to represent me to the world.

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In other news, Trader Joe’s has had to pull all bags of their delicious Banana Crisps because of some mislabeling snafu. So, while airplanes are still allowed to fly right into New York City and crash into skyscrapers, we are protected from mislabeled snack foods.

There’s some confusion…

… regarding what defensive action was taken by the U.S. military on September 11, 2001 when four airliners were hijacked all at the same time. There might have been some fighters in the air over New York after one of the airliners hit the World Trade Center, but nobody got shot down, or even challenged. Nothing much happened by way of air defense after the second plane hit the second tower, either, or when the other two airliners were pretty much known to be up to no good.

And now, five years later, apparently you can still hop in a light plane, fly right into New York City and crash into a skyscraper.

So here’s my question: Exactly what has the government been doing for the past five years to “make us safer” from terrorists? I mean aside from pissing off the entire Islamic world, alienating most of our allies and allowing two members of the “axis of evil” to get atomic bombs.

I guess if I were a terrorist, I’d be loading up my Cessna with explosives and getting ready to meet the 72 virgins in Manhattan.

Just thought you’d like to know that John Lithgow is a national treasure and his new show, Twenty Good Years, (NBC Wednesdays) is very funny.

I’ve been a fan of Lithgow since he played the crossdressing (or was it transgendered? — somebody help me out here) pro linebacker in The World According to Garp. He’s often been a terrific, creepy bad guy in movies, but to my mind he really hit his stride as the clueless-yet-arrogant leader of the band of alien invaders in Third Rock From the Sun, sent to Earth to study the locals, and perhaps getting a little too chummy with them.

The new show looks great: a touching premise (that may have some legs), funny, intelligent writing and Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor as the odd couple at the heart of it.

In other news, 30 Rock, the Tina Fey vehicle produced by Lorne Greene, sucks ostrich eggs. It’s the lead-in to Twenty Good Years, and it is a study in what not to do if you want to put on a show. Black stereotypes, gay stereotypes, evil corporate executive stereotypes, diva stereotypes, cat-throwing and burping jokes. I almost said burping gags, but the word “gag” is too close to home. If you missed the premiere, lucky you. If you saw it, bet you won’t be watching next week.

I’ll meet you for coffee, and we can be home in time to catch Twenty Good Years.

Boy, am I disheartened.

The Republicans are committing so many outrages lately that I feel like moving to a shack in the high desert, with nothing but a short-wave radio and an old guitar. Come to think of it, I might not take the radio.

I don’t want to talk about the outrages. If you are breathing oxygen you know about them, at least in general terms. And there are so many good writers expressing their outrage so much more eloquently than I can, I won’t add to the static.

Yes, enough about the outrages. What about me?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how this administration isn’t merely incompetent, greedy, corrupt, immoral, dishonest and drunk with power. None of these are good leadership qualities, but we as a nation have suffered through a lot of bad elected officials, and they have often got us going off in the wrong direction. It’s been painful, but somehow we seem to get past these lapses in group good judgement, correct our course, throw the bums out and get on with things. For a recent example of this take a look at President Nixon.

But I’m trying to resist joining the growing chorus of voices saying that this President, abetted by this Congress, is not just enjoying the spoils of victory, but is selling out the very ideals that the nation was founded on, turning the country into a great big ignorant international bully, codifying a doctrine of preemptive war and torture when it suits them, abrogating treaties, mocking friend and foe alike, while trampling on cherished civil rights at home and claiming all our wealth as their own.

I’m trying to resist saying those things and thinking those things because I don’t want this to be the scary end-times of our democracy, the days that history will view as the beginning of the end. I don’t know what the world would look like if The United States were to abandon its dedication to life, liberty, justice, equality and of course the pursuit of happiness.

Over two centuries the country has grown into an enormous and powerful giant and I’ve been quick to criticize the giant when it is cruel, when it is stupid, when it is unfair, when it is selfish, when it is repressive. Because the United States is simply the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and its behavior affects everyone living on the planet, and even the very planet itself, and because I grew up believing that this country was committed to using its great power to light the way to peace and freedom for the rest of the world.

I don’t know what the world will look like in fifty years, but you don’t have to look very far back in history to see that we could be headed for a new world order, one in which an armed and aggressive United States patrols and plunders the continents in a state of permanent war, dominating everyone, feared and hated by everyone; while at home we’d live in fear, not of terrorists but of our own government; and hundreds of millions of powerless worker drones would labor endlessly to enrich the high-born and well-connected few.

I’m hoping the world doesn’t look like that. I’m hoping that the American people will correct course, throw the bums out and get on with things. If we do, and if a new generation of leaders can rebuild U.S. credibility, and once the bills are finally paid for our current excesses, a kid might be able to stand up in U.S. History class without fear and ask “What the hell were they thinking?”

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Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright:
You can’t be forever blessed.
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest.
That’s all I’m trying… to get some rest.

— from American Tune, by Paul Simon (The blue button plays the song)