You and What Army

OVERHEARD: BYE-EEE!

THE PLACE: In front of Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village
THE PLAYERS: Guy #1 and Guy #2

Guy #1: So I call her up and I go, "What are you doing tonight?" And she goes, [sing-song voice] "Oh, I'm knitting and watching Sex and the City…"
Guy #2: And you're like, bye-eeee!
Guy #1: Exactly.

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS: YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN

 

    I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas every year throughout my childhood.  It was an actual event — this was before there were VCRs, much less DVDs or TiVo, and you had to wait an entire year before you could see it again.  My family didn't celebrate Christmas and yet this Yuletide classic made a huge, lifelong impact on me.  It's quite a subversive little piece of work.
    The set-up is when Charlie Brown goes to his familiar brick wall and confides to Linus that he's "depressed" because he can't relate to the holiday spirit.   He's alienated by the "commercialism" — a five-syllable concept I needed my parents to explain — of Christmas.  That was a heady idea for an eight-year-old.  In today's parlance, it occupied my mind.
    Everyone around Charlie Brown has been sucked in by commercialism.  For Christmas, Lucy wants "real estate"; Charlie Brown's little sister Sally wants cash — "in 10s and 20s."   Even Snoopy decks out his doghouse with several gaudy box-fulls of decorations and wins first prize — "money, money, money," grumbles Charlie Brown — in the neighborhood's lights-and-display contest.  Charlie Brown's alienation is so profound, he seeks psychiatric help (from Lucy, who, naturally, is more excited about collecting her five-cent fee than she is about helping her patient).  His therapy is to direct the school Christmas play, a non-commercial statement of the holiday's true meaning.
    (The show is larded with sarcasm, yet another intellectual conceit I was just starting to get my head around.  Linus knocks his little fist on a fake Christmas tree with a hollow metallic clang and remarks, his adorable little lisp bearing all the bitterness it can muster, "This really brings Christmas close to a person.")
    Commercialism, it turns out, is everywhere and has devalued everything: Lucy even complains to the piano-playing Schroeder that no musician is great unless they've been on a bubblegum card.
    Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz felt this commercialism thing deeply, and his objection pervades the show in many, sometimes not-so-obvious ways.  The purposely slow pace, simple artwork, deadpan humor and long silences all defy modern glitz and velocity.  In Schultz's biography, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the cartoonist adamantly refusing to allow a laugh track, then de rigeur for network television comedy — Schulz, Mendelson said, wanted to "let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in their own way."  Which is entirely, ingeniously in keeping with the show's message.
    Mendelson objected to Linus' speech from the Gospel of Luke, feeling it would narrow the audience for the show.  Schulz insisted, and it became a classic moment in television history — and not necessarily because it directly preached Christian doctrine.  That speech affected me deeply, and still does.  It showed me — very, very early in life — that consumerism can infiltrate personal relationships, and even your own heart and soul, but that you can refuse and resist even the most powerful forces.  All you have to do is think for yourself.  It changed me forever.
    It's ironic, then, that the reason why the show-closing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" fades out before the final line is that originally an announcer broke in to proclaim that this enduring ode to anti-commercialism was "Brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca-Cola!"  As Charlie Brown would say…  AAUGH!

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

    Tonight, Chris "I Love My Half-assed Witticisms So Much That I'll Repeat Them Ad Infinitum" Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball not only referred to Dick Cheney as "the troll under the bridge" for the kajillionth time, but he also reminded us, yet again, that he knows how to pronounce Dick Cheney's surname and don't you forget it.  The difference was, this time someone actually chided him about it.
     But first, a little of Matthews' usual Hollywood ass-licking: "I gotta tell you guys," Tweety crowed to the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, "I got a call last night at my hotel, the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South" – nice plug there, Chris, that ought to get you the room upgrade you were clearly angling for – "because Polly Bergen the great actress, found out that's where I was staying because my wife mentioned it last night.  You're laughing, Clarence."
     "Mm-hm!" Page readily affirmed, amused by Matthews' unabashed starfucking.  "I remember her well!"
     Matthews finally got around to, you know, actual politics and wondered why the out-of-office Cheney still makes political pronouncements.  "He knows that every time he does," Isikoff shot back, "you'll do a segment on it, Chris, so why should he stop?"
    "Well, I'm the only guy that pronounces his name properly — it's Cheeny," Matthews replied with the smug piousness he habitually attaches to this topic.  "I guess that's why he likes it here."
     "And," Page slyly chimed in, "you get no credit for it, Chris."
     "Well," Matthews replied, utterly unaware he'd just had more piss taken out of him than a kidney patient, "I don't want any."  Aw, shucks.  Not to mention the fact that Cheney doesn't actually "like" Hardball at all — he's never appeared on the show.  If anything, Cheney just appreciates the fact that Matthews not only gives copious, automatic airtime to every self-righteous, hypocritical, intellectually bankrupt, borderline treasonous attack that Cheney makes on the President of the United States, but also still includes a photo of the disgraced former vice-president in the show's bumpers, as if he's still an active player on the political stage.
    And that wasn't the only Matthewsian headcase display of the show.  Earlier, Tweety proclaimed, "It is insane to have to fly to New York from Washington because of the stupid bureaucracy in this country.  We ought to get eminent domain and get a train between here and there."  Isikoff and Page stared at the camera slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, stunned that their macrocephalic host has apparently never heard of something called Amtrak.  How could an elite gentleman who is a favorite of renowned actress Polly Bergen, an accurate pronouncer of Dick Cheney's surname and a patron of the splendid Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South — for reservations click here (now do I get a free room?) — not know of this 39-year-old rail system?
    Chris Matthews is a nut.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

     As noted previously, Chris "Second-Craziest Person in Cable News" Matthews is extremely obsessed with pronouncing Dick Cheney's name correctly. He's very proud of the fact that he knows the right pronunciation and you don't. And the other day, November 17th, he finally had a kind of grand mal fit about it.
    Matthews was in the middle of a conversation with regular guests Democratic party strategist Steve McMahon and former McCain operative Todd Harris about Cheney endorsing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in her bid for the governorship of Texas, when Harris made the grievous error of pronouncing it Chainy.  Hilarity ensued as Matthews grew more and more incensed about Harris' mispronunciation.
     From the MSNBC transcript:

MATTHEWS: Why do you mispronounce—why do you mis—Steve—I mean, Todd, why do you mispronounce Cheney‘s name, on purpose or what?

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: You know...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: His name is Cheeny.

HARRIS: Yes, I know that. Well, I know that you pronounce it that way.

MATTHEWS: But why do you call him Chainy? Why do you call him Chainy?

HARRIS: Why do you call him Cheeny?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: It‘s his name.

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: Yes. No. Well, I‘m not sure that...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I don‘t understand why you go with the—you‘re going with some sort of other pronunciation.

    Every time it says "(LAUGHTER)," that's Harris trying to smooth over the fact that Matthews is a nutjob with OCD, chuckling in order to buy time for thinking about how to get past this insane line of conversation.
     A few minutes later, as they closed the segment:

MATTHEWS: We‘re going to help you with that pronunciation of the former vice president‘s name.

HARRIS: Cheeny. Cheeny.

MCMAHON: Cheeny. Cheeny.

MATTHEWS: Right. Thank you. Look it up. As we always say, look it up.

MILES DAVIS: LIVE IN EUROPE '67 DVD

    Like any credible person, I dig Miles Davis.  But I particularly dig his quintet with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. "All-stars" is not nearly the word — these guys turned out to be a Mt. Rushmore of modern jazz.  So it was really exciting to hear about Live in Europe '67, the DVD that's included in the soon-to-be-released 71-disc (!) The Miles Davis Complete Columbia Album Collection.  After many years of listening to their music, I could finally see these guys play!
    Live in Europe '67 is in black-and-white video but both concerts — October 31st in Stockholm and November 7th in Karlsruhe, Germany —  are well shot and the remastered sound is very good. (There are no plans to release the DVD separately, so if you don't have a pal at Sony/Legacy or don't want to shell out the 300+ simoleons for the box, even though it's an excellent deal, you can also watch it all on Youtube, but picture and sound quality are both sorely lacking.)  I've gotten kind of obsessed with it.

     When Live in Europe '67 was filmed, the Davis band was headlining a European package tour tour with Sarah Vaughan, Archie Shepp and Thelonious Monk — a mindblowing bill.  It must have been a pretty weird time for Miles Davis though.  His friend and former bandmate John Coltrane had died that summer, he'd endured some serious health problems, he was going through a divorce, he'd recently turned 40, free jazz was the "new thing" but it wasn't his thing, and his records weren't selling as well as they used to.  Davis also happened to be making some of the most brilliant music of his career, with a recent string of incredible studio records:  ESP (1965), Miles Smiles (1966), Sorcerer (1967), and Nefertiti (1967), cut with four younger musicians who challenged and inspired him like few had before.
    All kinds of revolution was in the air — this was just after the "Summer of Love" when Sgt. Pepper ruled the pop charts and psychedelia began radicalizing popular music.  Out there in the world, racial unrest was raging even as Thurgood Marshall had been named the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court.  To different degrees, African-Americans, gay people, young people and women were all experiencing a heady rush of both liberation and rage.
    All of that was the volatile backdrop for changes within Davis’ quintet, which had formed in 1963.  Up until ‘67, Davis had made the band play relatively genteel takes on the standards and Davis originals that his previous quintet had covered.  But by the fall of '67, this line-up was well seasoned, they now had an extensive catalogue, virtually all of which they'd written themselves, and each of them had received rapturous critical acclaim.  Carter, Hancock, Shorter and Williams had graduated to another plane of music-making and were tired of playing music the old way.  It was time, as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons would say, to release the hounds.

     Both nights, an announcer introduces each musician as they walk on stage.  Carter, nearly as tall as his bass, is a saturnine figure with a whisk-broom mustache; Shorter immediately exudes a sweet and unassuming manner; Williams appears even younger than his 21 years; Hancock looks like a divinity student. Everyone is in tuxes with bow ties except Davis, who sports a light-colored pinstripe suit with wide lapels, a handkerchief jutting from the pocket, a fancy watch popping up past his sleeve; he is, as always, impeccably stylish.
    Other than that, there's no ceremony about taking the stage.  Davis doesn't acknowledge the audience or even the band; he just steps to the mike and begins playing the head of the first tune, even as Carter and Williams are still getting settled; nonetheless, everyone jumps right in and it's off to the races.
    Both sets open with "Agitation," Carter and Williams playing at blazing speed, with Hancock playing desolate, Debussy-like chords that paradoxically seem to accelerate the music.  Out of nowhere, Williams presses out a swelling snare roll and everyone shifts into a relaxed swinging rhythm.  Dramatic shifts like that are the rule: At the Stockholm show, everyone stops as Hancock completely breaks the momentum with a very bleak, eerie solo on "Agitation."  Carter craftily eases it into a swinging rhythm that Williams soon latches onto – it’s really brilliant.  They don't do nearly the same thing days later in Karlsruhe, so how did they know to stop for Hancock’s solo in Stockholm?  Put it this way: there’s a reason they called one of their albums ESP.
    They pull this tempo/rhythm magic trick constantly, whether at the top of a solo or at some mysterious point within it, spontaneously changing direction en masse, like a school of fish. The band called that approach "time, no changes," which essentially means that the progressions were in the rhythms and not the chords.  Instead, the band riffed off of a kind of communal tonal center, following the soloist; that requires phenomenal concentration, sensitivity and teamwork to pull off.  Watching the musicians in this trance-like state — in particular, Shorter plays as if deep in prayer — is a great cue for how to get into this music.
    They're playing large auditoriums before seated audiences of well dressed northern Europeans, with blinding bright TV lights and big '60s cameras cluttering the stage, but it seems to have zero effect on their staggering intensity and focus.  During Shorter's solo on the Karlsruhe "Footprints," the camera pulls right into Hancock's face as he lays down sparse but strategically propulsive chords, profoundly thoughtful and deliberate.  The way he lays his hands on the instrument, it's more like he's feeling its aura than actually playing it.
    This is a far cry from any of their previous live recordings. For one thing, Williams is explosive, chopping up the rhythms, dealing out thunder and lightning with a plangent bass drum and cymbals, his left stick dancing on the snare like a bead of water on a hot skillet.  And while Davis still calls for older tunes like "Walkin'" or "'Round Midnight," the band deconstructs them at breakneck bebop-velocity tempos – way, way faster than the originals Davis recorded over a decade before with a much different band.  It's more like "Sprintin'."  It's as if they were in a hurry not to get to the end of the tune but to get to the next kind of music.
    The Stockholm show in particular is shot fairly claustrophobically, favoring very long close-ups of the musicians' faces, particularly Shorter and Davis.  And that’s good, because that's where the action is — their faces.  During a solo on the Stockholm "Footprints," Shorter shudders with passion just before peeling off a quiet, fleeting little lick; that’s not something you’d catch on record, and it's just so heavy and intense.  It’s funny how many of the profile shots of Davis with his horn look like potential album cover photos.  Look at Carter's wonderfully equine face, impassive, as both sets of fingers seemingly dance to their own tune, producing a blazing yet steadfast anchor. And check out Williams' fierce expression as he unleashes salvo after salvo of bass drum and cymbal bombs, determined to kick this music a little further down the road.
    The cinematography is pretty straightforward but you can still catch interesting little moments, like Davis' odd tic of pressing his index finger to just in front of his right ear and shaking his head after he finishes a solo or when, in the midst of the Karlsruhe "I Fall in Love Too Easily," Davis seems transfixed by the huge, vivid shadow of Williams on the curtain, his arms flicking out at the flapping cymbals. Later in the set, during "Walkin'," Hancock sits with his hands resting on the keys, and you can see he’s as alert and engaged as he would be if he were playing; when Shorter walks away from the mike, Hancock seamlessly kicks into an uncanny imitation of what Shorter just played, with Davis observing from a distance, index finger resting pensively on his embouchured lips.
    Interesting that Davis generally plays short solos, and when he's not playing, he walks off stage.  And yet his sensibility, not to mention his huge charisma, looms over everything, beginning with the band's cool, austere intensity.  As they play this fast, intricate music, no one seems to tap their foot or sway or snap their fingers while the other musicians are wailing away.  They're heads-down, eyes-down, locked in their own five-way world. There are almost no breaks between tunes, leaving little space for applause, so the sets unfold like one long suite.  They're in, as jazz critic Frédéric Goaty says in the set's liner notes, "a state of grace."
    Part of what was revolutionary about this band was that the usual foreground/background dynamic is compressed or even inverted::  Hancock and Williams (and, more subtly, Carter) don't play behind the solo, they play with it.  Liberated from comping or timekeeping, the rhythm section is incredibly expressive, which not only means that you can tune in to any of the players at any time and hear something really exciting, but that you can listen to the entire band through the prism of any instrument that’s playing at the time, a Cubist jazz.  It all fits together, a sprawling, loose but ingeniously interlocking sound, something the frequent montage effects of the Karlsruhe footage seem to be emphasizing.  Listen to the way Hancock plays spare chords to offset Williams' busy drumming, and never drifts much lower than the middle of the keyboard, allowing Carter to fill out the low end.  Both Davis and Shorter play elliptically, allowing plenty of space for all the wild invention exploding behind them.
    And that ties in to what was happening in at the time – the "new thing," i.e., free jazz.  Davis' quintet certainly wasn't playing free jazz, but it wasn't bebop either.  Some have called it "freebop," but that's a hideous term.  Suffice it to say, it was one of those rare middle ways that are more fascinating than the extremes, pushing the envelope with style and precision, experimenting with form instead of dispensing with it.  The approach influenced everything from the dense, prodigious jamming that would soon dominate heavy rock to late-'90s jungle techno.
    Miraculously agile and telepathic, Davis' "second great quintet" had taken the "time, no changes" approach as far as they could take it.  And when artists as protean as those guys have taken something as far as it can go, you just know something else exciting is about to happen.  Sure enough, when he got back from that '67 European tour, Davis added electric guitar and then electric keyboards to his music and changed his approach to arranging – distorted electric keyboard would pick up the guitar chords and also play more or less in unison with the bass, and there would be a definite backbeat and a blues flavor; you could kind of dance to it.  Fusion was born, and Davis never returned to the electrifying acoustic music captured on Live in Europe ‘67.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

     Chris Matthews is the second-craziest host on cable news, and he has a number of strange, almost OCD, tics that he repeats endlessly on his MSNBC show Hardball.  One thing he does a whole lot is gloat about how he knows how to pronounce Dick Cheney's name correctly.
    You see, the former vice president says not "Chainy," but "Cheeny."  Matthews rarely fails to mention Cheney's name without signaling that he's taking special care to pronounce it right, pausing briefly before emphasizing the name and then smugly looking at the camera as if to say, "Go ahead, I dare you to tell me I'm saying it wrong."  He really loves the fact that he knows how to pronounce "Cheney" and you don't.
    But often, that's not enough for Matthews, and that's when he sanctimoniously reminds his audience that he knows how to pronounce Dick Cheney's name correctly.  He never gets tired of it.

September 7, 2006
"And on Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney, that‘s how he pronounces it, exclusively on Tim Russert‘s Meet the Press."

October 25, 2006
"…he was deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney, that‘s how I like to pronounce it, on domestic policy."

June 21, 2007
MATTHEWS:  Thank you very much, Jeremy Bronson.  Let‘s bring in Ron Christie, a former aide to Vice President Cheney, and Robert Raben, former Clinton assistant attorney general.  You like that pronunciation, don‘t you?
RON CHRISTIE, FORMER ADVISER TO VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY:  I do.  And you do it every time.
MATTHEWS:  Well, it‘s the way the family does it.

March 16, 2009
"Former vice president Dick Cheney—that's how he pronounces his name…"

March 24, 2009
"The on-going story of Dick Cheney—by the way, that‘s the way the family pronounces it, Cheney, in that Dickensian fashion."

May 21, 2009
"Back to today‘s main event, President Obama versus former Vice President Dick Cheney, and that‘s how the family pronounces it, that Dickensian way, Cheney."

May 22, 2009
Matthews discusses the controversy about how to pronounce "Cheney" and cites an NPR interview with Liz Cheney and another one with Lynne Cheney.

June 18, 2009
CHICAGO TRIBUNE COLUMNIST CLARENCE PAGE: And you are right.  Cheney is the original pronunciation.
MATTHEWS:  It‘s the correct pronunciation.

July 15, 2009
"By the way, the name is pronounced “Cheeney.”  Just ask him."

July 23, 2009
"Cheney—that's how you pronounce it…"

August 31, 2009
"We know where Dick Cheney stands. And that's how you pronounce his name, by the way, Cheney."

September 4, 2009
"It‘s pronounced “Cheeney,” by the way."

September 28, 2009
"Up next:  Could we see another Cheney in public office?  Actually, she pronounces it Cheney, unlike her dad."

September 29, 2009
"…daughter of the former Vice President Dick Cheney. He pronounces it differently."

September 30, 2009
"…the Cheneys—rather the Cheney and the Cheney—they pronounce their names differently…"

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

    Let's see… what fresh idiocy has Hardball host Chris "Tweetybird" Matthews perpetrated lately?
    Well, Tuesday night, Matthews ridiculed GQ magazine for its choice for ninth place in its ranking of the 50 most influential people in Washington.  "And here's where the list gets really limp and, to be honest, ridiculous," Matthews opined.  "Former vice president, out-of-office politician… Dick Cheney."  Then, after a round of commercials, the generic bumper back into the show features President Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, and… wait for it… Dick Cheney — you know, "the "former vice president, out-of-office politician" who actually doesn't matter anymore.  (Cheney is also featured in another bumper for the show too.)
    Later in the show, Matthews weighed in on some key upcoming races, calling the governor of Texas a "wackjob" and hoping Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison wins the open Senate seat there.  He went on to openly favor several other candidates in other races before coming to the race for the US senate Democratic primary in his home state of Pennsylvania. "I'm not taking sides on that one," he said, "because I would love to moderate that debate." Huh, so Chris Matthews pulls punches for the sake of advancing his career?  What other journalistic compromises has he made in his own self-interest?
    Finally, Tuesday night's show also featured this gem from Matthews: "You say Rush Limbaugh, I say phone sex with a traveling salesman.  Think about it."  Um, I'd rather not think about it, Mr. Matthews.  Because you are absolutely insane.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT KATY? INSIDE THE MIND OF A HEALTH CARE REFORM HATER

    Ever wanted to calmly ask one of those people who yell at health care reform town halls where they're coming from?  The other night on MSNBC's Hardball, guest host Laurence O'Donnell interviewed a woman named Katy Abram who went to a town hall on health care reform and hollered at Sen. Arlen Specter, "What are you going to do to restore this country back to what our founders created according to the Constitution?" She added that she was 35 and had never cared about politics before but that this issue had "awakened the sleeping giant."
    Abrams claimed that one of her main objections was that "they want us to pay more, or it sounds like they want us to pay more [taxes]. So that's the root of my frustration. This was the straw that broke the camel's back."  O'Donnell pointed out that only families making over $250,000 a year will see any federal tax increase and asked whether Abram's family fell into that extremely rare bracket. "I don't even know," she replied. "My husband takes care of the bills and everything. You know, he takes care of us, and that's all that matters."  Of course, the overwhelming odds are, Abram will actually see her taxes go down, not up.  And she clearly has no idea whatsoever how health care reform might affect her.  Watch the video — she reveals her complete ignorance in literally every reply she makes.  It's appalling how little she has thought this through.
    Then O'Donnell asked her why, after things like 9/11, the war in Iraq and the bail-outs, only this issue had gotten her attention.  "I always seemed to have faith in the government," she replied. "And, honestly, I didn't really care. I had other things going on, you know, getting married, having children. It just... it wasn't a priority in my life."
    OK, sure, she was too busy raising kids to pay any mind to 9/11.  Makes sense.  But now she has little or no faith in our government.  Huh, I wonder why this woman, like so many of the gun-toting reactionaries who oppose health care reform even though it would be in their interest, somehow managed to preserve their faith in the government through the misguided war in Iraq, the bungling of Katrina, the unauthorized surveillance of American citizens, the trillion-dollar deficit and all the other massive blunders of the previous administration.
    Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the photo above.  Sure, that sign in the foreground is hilarious, but if you look carefully at another sign in the picture, the one just above and to the right of the center of the photograph, you'll see it says "Where's the birth certificate?"  Let's not kid ourselves:  This has nothing to do with defeating socialism or preserving the intentions of the founding fathers.  Because people like Katy Abram have absolutely no clue what those are.  No, this is all about Obama.
    And no, I haven't the faintest idea what to do about it.

"REALLY?"

    Has anyone else noticed the recent trend of using "really?" to communicate more of a tone of indignation rather than surprise or disbelief?  So it's more like "you actually have the nerve to do that [to me]?" as opposed to "you're kidding!" or "wow!"
    I first saw it in a commercial for Travelocity, where there was a hipster website-developer-type guy whose hotel room was made into a living hell by construction noise.  Every time he'd try to ask his girlfriend where his flip-flops were, a jackhammer would start up and drown out his words.  Finally, he rolled his eyes, flung out his hands and said, "Really?"
    Now I hear it everywhere -- it's the new "kewl" or "suh-weet."  Funny how that happens.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

    Hardball host Chris Matthews, aka Tweety, just claimed that the two presidential candidates are "like Raymond Burr on a ship, watching a monster movie."
    I am not kidding.  The man is a nut job.