The Wretched Timesheeters of the Earth

I'm in the furniture trade  Got a new job today  But stick the cretin  On the number-three lathe

Went down the town To a HM club The sign had a cross Through a couple well-dressed They looked at my coat They looked at my hair An Easy Rider coot Grabbed the edge of my coat Said: 'You're too smart for here' I said: 'I'll see the manager'


He was the manager!

Eat y'self fitter!

Up the stairs mister!

Eat y'self fitter!


Analytics have got My type worked out Analytics on me The poison render I grope about And when I go out My mind splits My eyes doth hurt The musical chairs Have been swallowed up By a cuddly group Who land and rub off Hoping thatWhatever it is Will land and drop off

I met a hero of mine I shook his hand Got trapped in the door Felt a fool, I tell ya


Charmed to meet ya

Eat y'self fitter!

Up the stairs mister

Eat y'self fitter!


Became a recluse  And bought a computer Set it up in the home Elusive big one On the screen Saw the Holy Ghost, I swear On the screen


Where's the cursor?Where's the eraser?Where's the cursor?Where's the eraser?

G-O-H-O-H-O-9-OG-O-H-O-H-O-9-OG-O-H-O-H-O-9-OH-O-9-O-G-O-H-O

What's a computer?

Eat y'self fitter!

What's a computer?

Eat y'self fitter!

The Kevin Ayers scene South of France Plush velvet 

Aback! Aback!Aback! Aback!

Levis Fridays Greek holidays Barratt heritance 


Mit-Dem! Don't wanna be a mit-dem! 

Pick the fleas mister

Eat y'self fitter!

Eat y'self fitter?

Eat y'self fitter!

Who tells you what To tape on your vid. chip How do you know the progs you miss Are worse than those you single out? And what'll you do when the rental's up? And your bottom rack is full of vids Of programs you will nay look at The way they act is, oh, sheer delight Cardboard copyright Make it right! Panic in Sudan! Panic in Wardour! Panic in Granadaland! Panic all over! 

By the wretched timesheeters Of my delight One starry night The powers that be will have to meet And have no choice but to...

Eat each other!

Eat y'self fitter

Eat each other?

Eat y'self fitter!

Portly and with good grace The secret straight-back ogre entered His brain aflame With all the dreams It had conjured It had conjured It had conjured It had conjured

Mit-dem! Don't wanna be amid dem!

The centimeter square

Eat y'self fitter!

Said it purged fear

Eat y'self fitter!

These lyrics are certainly sublime, but what's an HM club? Not that the rest of it is pellucid, but for some reason that's a sticking point for me.

Presidential Politics

During the course of my life, it seems like people have made generalizations about the different parties' success at winning presidential elections--for a while it was said the G.O.P. had done better, during the period when Jimmy Carter's one term came amid 20 years of G.O.P. administrations (20 out of 24 years, with Carter's term making up the other four). However, if we take a longitudinal view of the matter, since World War Two up until 2017 when Obama's next term will end, the two parties are exactly even. In fact, the White House has switched hands every eight years in that period, with the two exceptions balancing each other out.

If we start with Truman (although Roosevelt won the election and served a few months before dying, I'll count the beginning of the post-Roosevelt era from the beginning of that term, which I trust is a benign enough decision as far as its implications go), there were 8 years D (Roosevelt/Truman), 8 years R (Eisenhower), 8 years D (Kennedy/Johnson), 8 years R (Nixon/Ford), 4 years D (Carter), 12 years R (Reagan then Bush), 8 years D, 8 years R, 8 years D (up until the end of Obama's coming term, in 2017).

So it looked like the Republicans had a little advantage if you were around when there were 8 years of Nixon/Ford, Carter, then 12 years of Reagan/Bush. But from a wider angle, it can be seen that there were two times when the party held the White House for only one term during our time period, one each for the Democrats and Republicans. If we draw a line between the Carter--Reagan period and the Bush--Clinton period, they basically cancel each other out, each being a one-termer followed by a two-termer from the other party. The fact that Bush followed another Republican doesn't have much significance if we do the math from Truman through Obama, which shows that there will have been 36 years of Republican administrations and 36 years of Democratic administrations in the period from 1945--2017.

Roosevelt was clearly a special case, since he was elected to four terms, and since he left office that has been made illegal. Before Roosevelt it was an entirely different era, before World War Two, and it seems reasonable to designate the period beginning with the first Truman administration as an "era," although I am not being too rigorous or placing too much importance on that. My thinking is basically  that, since presidential terms are four years and there can  be two for any president, any trend will take a long time to identify, and 72 years is probably a long enough time, whereas things were too different before that to lump in the data with current phenomena. So that's my specimen--1945--2017.

If we accept that as a reasonable sample, then the conclusion seems to be that the Republicans and Democrats basically trade off the White House every 8 years, with no party having much of an advantage, or really any long-term advantage. I am pretty skeptical about the claims currently being made that the G.O.P. is down for the count, if for no other reason than because Romney only lost by about three percentage points. Maybe the demographics are changing, as has been constantly pointed out recently, but there's no reason to think the Republicans can't figure it out, make some adjustment, maybe run a Latino woman, that sort of thing. Not that I think my observations here can help us predict the future very much, there are a lot of variables, but the numbers show that the two parties have split the White House down the middle for 72 years (or will have by 2017, anyway).

Yaargh

I planned to write a series of posts on the Kinks, but job hunting, teaching, and finishing my dissertation have sapped my will to allocate enough time to blog. If anyone is reading, I will get back to this blog when I have more time. 

By the way, if Mitt Romney wins this election, it will seriously challenge the "beer" theory. Is there anyone alive who would be willing to have a beer with Mitt Romney if I paid you 100 dollars? I may have mentioned this before though.

WIlliam Faulkner Resigns From the Post Office

As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. 
This, sir, is my resignation.

From Somewhere Else

I haven't been able to figure out what any of this means yet, but it's from a source I trust to usually be interesting and enlightening, and it's short enough to plunk it right on here for further consideration:

Five thresholds of the remote:
i. If it is to preserve its categorical integrity, the Law must suspend itself at whichever place there has been a transgression against it – or else decant itself into the lowly posture of taking offence.
ii. If Law must recoil from every possibility of transgression against it (as an ideal evades contamination by experience) it must constitute itself generally as a preparedness for flight. If it is to preserve itself as Law, it must retreat from, in anticipation of, every likely or unlikely occurrence of violation.
iii. Similarly, Crime, if it is to establish its own reasons within its own world, must not infringe upon the Law, and thereby provide opportunity for other, external reasons to be ascribed to it. 
iv. The secret of successful transgression is forbearance – that is, if the would-be transgressor does not wish to draw the Law into a place where it otherwise would have no business.
v. Community must shrink from the touch of its members – that is, if it is not to be reduced to the level of naming an agreement, or common cause. 

The Beer Test Again

From the New York Review of Books blog:

Part of it is a recognition that Romney has a specific problem, that like Al Gore or John Kerry before him, the former Massachusetts governor comes over as stiff and wooden and fails the beer test: he’s not somebody most voters would choose to have a drink with.

In an earlier post, an EARLIER POST I say (but it's not really a link because I don't know how), I suggested this was an iron-clad indicator of who would win an election. So Romney is doomed, or we'll have to rewrite the book on politics.

I Hate

anti-lock brakes. The way I learned to drive is, you pump the brakes when in slippery conditions rather than lock them. Anti-lock brakes render you helpless, taking your fate out of your hands, and they result in the brakes turning off when you hit big bumps or really want to lock them, which is dangerous. Why does anyone think they are a good idea??

The Kinks

In the rock genre, I think I would say that my three favorite bands are the Grateful Dead, the Ramones, and the Kinks. The case of the Kinks is more difficult than the other two--I could give somewhat objective reasons why the former two are among the very few greatest rock bands, but in the case of the Kinks I'd be hard pressed to say they are superior to the Beatles, for instance (I made a case for the Ramones being in the same league as the Beatles in a previous post. I'd make the words "previous post" a link if I knew how to do so).

If we compare a Kinks album from 1967, Something Else, to Sgt. Pepper of the same year, we'd have to say that, while the high points of the Kinks' album match or surpass the high points of Sgt. Pepper, the minor songs on the former are not of the same quality as the minor songs on the latter (however much I may like them). But I'm not sure that is the truest criterion; anyway, I can say I like the Kinks more than I like the Beatles.

Part of it is Ray Davies' singing, and Dave Davies' harmonies; part of it is the songwriting, and the rest I am not sure of.

The two early Kinks singles, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," present a picture of the band that isn't really sustained beyond these songs, not in the rest of their LP material from the time and certainly not in their later work. But the combination of a raucous, distorted guitar riff and Ray Davies' unsure, almost hesitating, jerky and self-effacing vocal delivery does display the essence of the Kinks in a very concentrated way, even if that exact formula was soon abandoned.

I think the Kinks are a kind of band one comes to love for different reasons than one has for loving the Beatles; there's a certain insistence on minor pleasures and a less triumphalist feel to the whole thing. Even the name, the Kinks, seems to suggest a shadowy and maginalized perspective, as well as a crooked path taken.

Wonderment

A proper sense of wonder seems to me to be an achieved thing--childhood is more a time of ignorance than wonder. We think of a child as open to the miraculous, but it is more the case that children take the miraculous as a matter of course, because they don't know any better. I liked a lot of things as a child and as a teenager, but they didn't amaze me the way they do now, at least not to the same extent. The enormity of a Jerry Garcia solo, a great poem or novel, even something as cliched (as an example in this context, not in itself) as a sunset or the moon is much more astounding or amazing to me as I get older. In the case of cultural artifacts, I suppose part of it is that the older one gets, the more the experience of a life of failure weighs against examples of resounding success, the more things one has tried and the longer one has worked at things so the difficulty of things becomes more intelligible to one, and the portion of one's life that one can defer to some time of future achievement becomes smaller in comparison to the actual record of a completed life of frustration and incompetence. But that is not all, or people who have been wildly successful most of their lives would not have an increased capacity for wonder as they get older, and I think they do. I think whatever reason this is probably bridges the gap from wonderment at Jerry to wonderment at sunsets and moons, but I don't know what the reason actually is. Maybe it's that as we learn and comprehend and taxonomize the world, some portions of it stand out more to the extent that it has become more articulated for us. Maybe, I'm not sure, but I think that's part of it, anyway.

A New Post--A Question is Answered (But Perhaps Not Asked)

The imaginary readers that I imagine closely following my blog and hanging on my every word (narcissistic medium that in many ways is) I now imagine asking themselves the question, "But what is he listening to lately?"

There was quite a bit of stuff about the Ramones on here for the past year, as I listened to almost nothing else from October to June. That, for some reason, is the way I listen to music; I don't wake up and look at my cds and think "What am I in the mood for today?" as so many people claim they do. That is an impossible question to answer, and when I get to that point I usually just listen to talk radio. Instead, I usually get sucked into one band (or sometimes genre) for an extended period of time. I listened to nothing, voluntarily, besides bluegrass from around 1998 to about 2004 or 2005. At the time, I thought that was about all I'd ever listen to, at least in the deepest throes of it around 2001 or so.

If I was blogging between 2009 and 2011, there would have been a lot of posts about the Grateful Dead. There is a vast supply of live shows available by them, each one different, so one could go a lot longer than two years devoting one's days to Jerry & co., and indeed a lot of people do.

But there is one band that I have long admired and to a certain extent loved, and that has become one of my top few favorite bands this summer, i.e. the Kinks. I liked them as a lad but never got really deep into their catalogue until fairly recently (and there is still work to do in that regard). I realized with surprise a couple of days ago that The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is probably the cd I've listened to the most times over the past five years or so. And after the recent Ramones period I listened to Cheap Trick for a couple of weeks, and since then it's been all Kinks.

So the curiosity of my imaginary readers has been satisfied.

I haven't had much to say about the Kinks though and that, coupled with completing my dissertation, is why I haven't posted here lately. But there are posts now to come; take heart, imaginary reader!

Chuck Berry

Fantastic article about Chuck Berry's lyrics:

http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/chuck-berry-neoclassicist.html/comment-page-1#comment-67863

Who could argue with this:

Compare:
I want to run, I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
(U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”)
Way down South they gave a jubilee
Them Georgia folks they had a jamboree
They’re drinking home brew from a wooden cup
The folks dancing there got all shook up.
(Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”)
Now, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and because I’m one myself I know how devoted rock and roll fans are to their favorite bands, but it must be seen that compared to the Chuck Berry lyric, the U2 lyric is, well, shit. I say this as a fervent admirer of U2 and one who was lucky enough to witness the band perform “Where the Streets Have No Name” in 1987 or so, when to hear it for the first time was to be swept up in a tide of communal idealism. Who could argue with such lofty sentiments, especially when accompanied by the surge of the Edge’s ringing guitar and the most propulsive rhythm section in all of rock? Alas, there isn’t a word, phrase, or image in the whole song not utterly staled by cliché. As in much of the best rock and roll, the majesty of the music disguises the triteness of the lyrics.There’s no triteness to be disguised in “Rock and Roll Music.” It is what “Where the Streets Have No Name” manifestly is not: poetry, or at least a variety of folk poetry that delights in language and its own expressiveness. 

?

Ideology, Science, and Existence

It strikes me that, at the time of The German Ideology, Marx has become (under the influence of Stirner, whom he nevertheless appropriates in a very critical manner) basically an 'existentialist,' in the broadest and most generic sense of the term. His text centers on a critique of ideology. What ideology means for Marx is the following: Ideology is first of all (1) the mistaken notion that human beings suffer under “the rule of concepts.” Secondly, (2) Marx and Engels call these concepts themselves ideology, and thirdly (3) certain spheres of society or “estates” are said to be ideological.

In other words, concepts abstracted from actual existence are ideological. But actual existence can never be apprehended without abstraction because actual existence is singular. Therefore all concepts have an ideological drive, as it were, and any concept can be ideological if it is not in some way referred to existence.

There is not one but two term complements to "ideology"--on the one hand "science," and on the other revolutionary activity, or praxis. Marx does not consider that thinking can be anything other than representation: the method of science is abstraction, but warranted abstraction that is not ideological because it remains referred to existence, and in doing so recognizes its own inherent incompletion. 

Marx leaves the middle ground between existence and representation vacant, and this is why he has often been misinterpreted as some sort of economic or even technological determinist. This is a misinterpretation because it assumes that there is some sort of pure activity or process that is distinct from thinking, but that is wrong--in fact there is no pure process, it's just that there is always a remainder in any representation. Since representation is conceptual abstraction, at the very least it cannot account for its own singularity. Marx does not want to give a complete representation of a pure process, rather he recognizes the constitutive incompletion of representation as such and thus wants to limit thinking, which is his biggest differend in relation to Hegel, of course. Theory is always referred back to practice, not as something wholly other (unlike for Althusser, who thus gets into an epistemological quandary) but as otherwise incomplete. 

What Marx does not consider is the possibility that there may be a non-representational thinking that is precisely concerned with singularity. Marx's thought points to the necessity of (without fully cashing out) an 'existentialism' that does not simply invert the traditional order of priority between essence and existence but (to use an apt but lamentably loaded term) deconstructs the polarity between the two. This would not simply be a method of abstraction, but a hermeneutic approach to the world-forming potency of that which exists. 

Ultimately, however, in order to do this a constructive approach, which goes wholly beyond Marx, would also be needed--to think without representing. This is what Heidegger often describes and also, less often, attempts to enact.  His most notable attempts at enacting such a thinking are probably his essays that deal with the fourfold. 

This non-representational thinking would open up possibilities for thought and action that are non-ideological, in other words it would not be a conceptual precis of what lies in existence but a signpost and guide for a kind of thinking and action (the polarity of which would thus also become entirely questionable) that shelter singularity rather than seizing it conceptually. In other words, this sort of thinking would be neither science nor ideology, nor even distinct from action in any essential manner.

Hence: Marx and Heidegger, Heidegger and Marx.

P.S.

Here is my current best attempt at star ratings for all the Ramones studio albums (except Acid Eaters) and Joey's solo albums:

Ramones *****

Leave Home*****

Rocket to Russia *****

Road to Ruin *****

End of the Century ****

Pleasant Dreams ****

Subterranean Jungle ***1/2

Too Tough to Die ***

Animal Boy **

Halfway to Sanity **1/2

Brain Drain **1/2

Mondo Bizarro ***1/2

Adios Amigos*1/2

Joey Ramone:

Don't Worry About Me ***

...Ya Know?  ***1/2

Leave Home and (maybe) Final (for now) Ramones Thoughts

First, Leave Home:  This is probably the greatest Ramones album, especially now that it's the 90s and "Carbona Not Glue" has been restored to it. For one thing, it has three of the greatest two-song pairs in music history: "Glad to See You Go" then "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," "Oh, Oh, I Love Her So" then "Carbona," and "Swallow My Pride" then "What's Your Game?" Oddly this is treated as the weak sister of the first three, judging by the internet and the musical press. The cd version has an entire show from 1976 on the special features, and it is amazing. But that doesn't factor into my judgment of course, that would be wrong.

I never heard "Carbona" until 2005! That is like a little gift from heaven, to be allowed to come upon something like that so late in life. Also, "Babysitter" is included in the special features, and that is also a fantastic song that I never knew until '05.

Least Favorite Ramones Classics

One thing about the early Ramones is, the songs are so incredibly great that it's hard to know which ones I like less than the others, since I can potentially always be talked out of it, by myself or by others. In any case, they are all songs I've sang along to and loved and cranked and cherished for decades. Looking at the first four albums, these are probably the songs that hit me a little less than others (leaving aside the covers, of which "Surfing Bird" is the only one that I don't love unequivocally).

First album: nothing.

Leave Home: Sometimes "Suzy is a Headbanger" seems less great than some of the others. This confuses me, since it is clearly so great and I never would think of skipping it, and I love every second of it when I listen to it. "Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy" has at times been one of my favorites on the album but right now it seems to me to be less than, say, "Commando." The last two ("You're Gonna Kill That Girl" and "You Should Never Have Opened That Door") are also confusingly brilliant but nevertheless maybe slightly inferior to "Swallow My Pride," for instance.

"Oh, Oh, I Love Her So"--I used to like this less than others. A friend recently mentioned it was a favorite of his, and for some reason something clicked after that and now it is my current favorite Ramones song. This is why this question is so confusing. (And I have no doubt it is also uninteresting to anyone but a Ramones maniac. You don't have to keep reading. I'll even do the little page break thing.)

Road to Ruin

I have been listening near-obsessively, or anyway pretty much exclusively, to the Ramones lately. Looking at the blog history, I was surprised--I thought this latest Ramones phase had lasted a couple of months, but I was listening to Too Tough to Die back in October, and I know by the time I bought Mondo Bizarro I was listening to nothing but Ramones. I would have guessed this was in April, but the blog tells me it was February. So almost half a year of nothing (voluntarily) but Ramones! Anyway I should have been able to review all the albums by now, but I'm running out of stamina--recently I've been listening to The Kinks, Cheap Trick and Big Star, so the Ramones phase is winding down a bit and that means I may not even listen to them at all for a while--I usually have tunnel vision when it comes to music, I may like a variety of things but I am generally passionately in love with one band, artist, or at least style at a time, and at these times I'm unable to enjoy large doses of much of anything else.

So I will wrap it up (maybe) with a few comments. First, Road to Ruin. This is the hardest album for me to figure out. First of all, there is no question in my mind that this is a five out of five, in terms of stars. Not the slightest doubt, it is a masterpiece. But within that range, when put up against the other three five star Ramones albums, I vacillate about its status. Sometimes I am sure that it is their best album--on paper it would have the best claim to that title apart from the first, which has simplicity, brilliance and epoch-making significance to recommend it. I mean, all of their albums have simplicity and brilliance, of course...the first one has the most simplicity, and also earns a lot of cachet by coming first.

...Ya Know?

This is the title of the new Joey Ramone album released a few weeks ago. The album consists of demos that were stripped down to just the vocals, then instruments were added. It is a lot better than I expected it to be, considering it is composed of leftovers. In fact, it's better than Joey's previous solo album Don't Worry About Me. This clearly isn't four stars out of five; it's definitely three and a half. Hence, this makes me realize I need to downgrade Don't Worry About Me to three stars (which I consider a good rating; a three-star album on Allmusic is usually crap, at least when the rating isn't just random and unrelated to the review! Anyone who reads Allmusic knows what I'm talking about...)

Every song is at least decent, several are very good, and there is one masterpiece, a number called "Waiting for that Railroad." My only quibble is that this song is done up to be basically a power ballad; it might have been better served keeping it a little more understated (for comparison, listen to the acoustic radio version from the early 90s on Youtube). In any case, it's still clearly the rock & roll classic of 2012. Not that anyone seems to have realized this.

There is more stylistic variety on this album than its predecessor, and that is also good. It is a long album (15 songs) and might be better in two installments. This is because, despite the fact that there is more variety, there is a certain similarity of tempo throughout.

Ed Stasium, the producer, said Joey's pitch was perfect on the demos, and so nothing was auto-tuned. I was a little skeptical about this, but today I saw a short promo video with Richie Ramone (who plays drums on a few tracks) and he also said that Joey's pitch was perfect--and then added that this is surprising because, if you listen to a live Ramones recording, no matter how well or poorly the band could hear themselves, Joey's pitch was always off! This seems like a bit of an exaggeration but Joey's live vocals in the 80s were often definitely not great (although in the studio they usually were great. [According to me, not Richie] ).

Other highlights: "Going Nowhere Fast," "New York City," "What Did I Do To Deserve You?", "Seven Days of Gloom,""Party Line." That's a lot of highlights, but it is a long album. Again, nothing on it is bad.

DMC on the Beastie Boys

"The Beastie Boys are one of the greatest groups, and I'm not just talking hip-hop — the Beastie Boys are one of the greatest groups in history. You could call them the Ramones of hip-hop."

Don't Worry About Me

Joey Ramone's 2002 solo album of that name, which I finally caught up to a few days ago, is way better than I expected it to be. I suppose I didn't expect as much based on the things I've read about it, on the internet and elsewhere, which for the most part were by no means negative but rather sort of lukewarm.

The cover of "What A Wonderful World," the only widely familiar thing from the album (I think it was in a movie or two), is really a beautiful piece of work. So is the second song, "Stop Thinking About It," which is a nearly perfect song in the way that so many of the best Ramones songs are. "Maria Bartiromo" and the title track also stand out, and "Searching for Something" is something remarkable--catchy, beautifully constructed, musically mature and narratively complex--it seems like the kind of thing the Ramones might have done if Johnny let them grow up.

There's nothing really bad on the album, but it will take some more listens for me to decide how high to rank a few of the songs. The cover of "1969", while well-executed, doesn't do much for me, and "Venting" and "I Got Knocked Down" don't seem like particularly strong songwriting efforts after three listens.

Anyway, the new Joey album comes out this month, we'll see if they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel or if his left over recordings have more to offer (at the very least it will include "Waiting for that Railroad," so it has to be obtained). This one I am inclined to give 3.5 stars out of five.

***1/2

UPDATE: after living with this for a little while, I have downgraded it to three stars (still a good rating in my system).

***

The Seventies: Am I Deluded?

Warning: this is an extremely idiosyncratic and self-indulgent post; feel free to tell me I'm delusional or incoherent.

Lately I have been thinking that I grew up during a time of cultural richness that was perhaps unique for generations of American children. Most people my age, I think, are aware of most of the things I'm talking about below, but there's not much comparable that I've seen among younger folk, and to a lesser extent maybe not as much among older folk (the edge over the latter being that in my time high culture and politics were mixed in with popular culture for kids as a matter of course). But this seems absurd, and has never occurred to me before, so maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic.

Scandalous Revelations!

I've been reading the memoir by Joey Ramone's brother Mickey Leigh, entitled I Slept With Joey Ramone. It's a decent book without too many shocking revelations, but there was this titillating tidbit on page 72:

My brother was in agony, desperately trying to hang onto his sanity. He began listening less to the heavier rock & roll and more to soft, introspective music. We had heard that James Taylor's song "Sweet Baby James" was about the time he'd committed himself to a mental institution in Massachusetts for nine months. [Joey] got heavily into the song and that album.

Wow! Somehow this is way more shocking than hearing that Joey was into the Airplane, the Dead, and Quicksilver, which doesn't actually seem all that weird to me. And way more shocking that he was into the whole album.  Think about it: Joey Ramone was into James Taylor.

Robert Caro

I'm not sure when I first came to the conclusion that I had to read the books of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, but there were already three of them when I started (now there are four and soon, one hopes, there will be five). I had read an excerpt or two in the 90s and then there was a bunch of hoopla when 2002's installment, Master of the Senate, was released, and I read an excerpt of that one too. It was all compelling and very readable stuff and Johnson came off as a fascinatingly entertaining character, an impression I already had from reading Arthur Schlesinger's (fawning, even hagiographic) biography of Robert Kennedy. I read about the books one too many times, someone mentioned how much they liked them, and next thing you know I checked them out of the library and started reading them.

Although the three volumes I've read so far comprise, by my quick estimate, 2500 pages, it didn't take very long to read them. The books were far better than I could have ever imagined, even taking into consideration the fact that I must have been pretty sold on the idea of them already to undertake such a reading project. Caro's prose is a bit much at times if you stop and think about it, but he keeps you glued to the page. The New York Times magazine did a piece on him this week and the author does a good job of describing what's a little bit excessive about Caro's writing:

Caro has a bold, grand style — sometimes grandiose, his critics would say. It owes something to old-fashioned historians like Gibbon and Macaulay, even to Homer and Milton, and something to hard-hitting newspaperese. He loves epic catalogs (at the beginning of “The Power Broker” there is a long list of expressways that would not be out of place in the “Iliad” if only the Greeks and Trojans knew how to drive) and long, rolling periodic sentences, sometimes followed by emphatic, one-sentence paragraphs. He is not averse to repeating a theme or an image for dramatic effect.

But I'm not complaining. The one-sentence paragraphs are hilarious, but the books are (all) masterpieces.

I have been recommending these books ever since, whole-heartedly, but I have only ever succeeded in convincing one other person to read them--I guess a multi-volume biography of LBJ is a hard sell. But that person has become as enthusiastic a fan of the books as I am. 

In two weeks the 4th volume comes out. Caro was to have finished the series with this volume (at one point there were only going to be three), but he is now planning on writing one more. They have been coming out at a rate of, on average, one every ten years. Caro is 76 years old. He has apparently made a will stipulating that, if the last volume isn't finished when he dies, nobody is to finish it for him. So now fans of Caro are holding their breath, hoping that he stays healthy. God forbid he gets hit by a train or something. It would be a real tragedy. After all, he hasn't even gotten to LBJ's presidency until this latest volume, which supposedly only goes up to 1964. 

If all goes well, though, the fifth volume will be finished before Caro is. I plan on rereading the first three before I read the fourth. These are some of the greatest books of our time, and also some of the most pleasurable to read. I cannot recommend them highly enough, read them now!

Let Us Pause To Marvel At The Uncanny Genius That Was The Ramones In 1976-77

It's Alive is a remarkable live album; it plays like a greatest hits collection, or, since the Ramones never had a hit, perhaps it's better to say a "best of." There are 28 songs culled from the first three Ramones albums. There is no filler, there are no weird outtakes or interesting experiments, and nothing is included to showcase one or more of the musicians--every minute of the album is a full-bore frontal assault on the hypothalamus. There are no low points. It's a remarkable achievement for a band with only three studio albums--every song is taken from the albums, every one could have been a single, the songs are not embellished yet there is never a moment when one is tempted to think "do I need a live version of this?" As if that's not enough, however, take a look at the remaining songs from the first three Ramones albums, the ones not included on It's Alive:

Beat on the Brat

I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement

Loudmouth

53rd and 3rd

I Remember You

Carbona Not Glue

Swallow My Pride

What's Your Game

You Should Never Have Opened That Door

Locket Love

I Can't Give You Anything

Ramona 

Why Is It Always This Way?

This could be an exceptional "best of" collection. In fact, every song from the first three Ramones albums could be a "best of" selection. How many bands in rock history could have a "best of" collection taken from their first three albums as good as the above list of songs not on It's Alive? Probably none; maybe not even The Beatles, and if we add the other 28 songs, definitely not the Beatles! That's a powerful argument for why the Ramones are on a very short list of the absolute greatest rock bands of all time. 

The Beatles' genius was more diverse than that of the Ramones; they were more innovative and adaptable after the initial phase of their career. The Ramones' palette was much more limited than a lot of bands, probably than most other bands. But that was a good bit of the point of the Ramones; every song was a manifesto for simplicity and sticking with what works and jettisoning the rest (although the claim repeated ad nauseum that the Ramones were a three-chord band is simply false). And, if anything, that makes the Ramones' achievement even more impressive: they managed to write the greatest 2-minute pop song anyone had ever heard over and over and over, filling whole albums with them (This wouldn't be an easy claim to make about the albums that followed, but "I Wanna Be Sedated," "She's The One," "Do You Remember Rock n Roll Radio?," "Rock n Roll High School," "The KKK Took My Baby Away" and "Psychotherapy" didn't even exist yet when It's Alive was recorded).

Considering that It's Alive was recorded at the end of 1977, and the first Ramones album was released in early 1976, it's positively staggering to consider what the Ramones achieved in less than two years. I doubt any other band, ever, could claim to have produced as many great songs in a comparable period of time (even subtracting the four cover songs, that's still 38 classic original songs). If anyone wishes to contest this claim in the comments below, I'm all ears.

Brain Drain again

This is one of two Ramones studio albums I never previously owned or was at least extensively familiar with. The few times I heard it in the 80s I was not impressed. For one thing, I was turned off by the notion that the Ramones did a song called "Pet Sematary" and didn't really give it a chance. I was always turned off by Stephen King as a youth, probably because all my classmates read him while my typically anguished and alienated teenage existence was spent reading things like Joyce, Faulkner and Yeats (if that sounds snobby and pretentious so be it).

But now I like "Pet Sematary," mostly because of Joey's singing. It's definitely lightweight and corny, but for some reason these qualities seem less threatening when considering a 20 year old album than when deciding if "the new Ramones" is worth buying. I do not skip this song.

I love love love "I Believe in Miracles," out of proportion, I am sure, to its actual merits. Again this is mostly due to Joey, I think. The guitars on this album, by the way, are not recorded in a very satisfying way. Anyway this song is the greatest, even if it isn't. Lyrically it's like one of those embarrassing celebrity memoirs where the protagonist exults over their salvation from drugs, only to publicly fall from grace again..."I used to be on an endless run/Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one" writes Dee Dee, 12 years before dying from a heroin overdose. But Joey sings it, not Dee Dee, so it is easy to downplay the autobiographical aspect of it...

Zero Zero UFO is perplexing, not bad but not great, I generally don't skip it. "Don't Bust My Chops" isn't terrible but I often skip it. Unlike "I Believe in Miracles," it's probably better than the enjoyment I get out of it (almost none) would indicate.

"Punishment Fits the Crime" is a fascinating artifact. It is sung by Dee Dee but is nothing like any of his other efforts. It might be one of the worst songs ever recorded, I'm not really sure, but it's still kind of engaging and I don't always skip it. I don't know what it means, and the closest genre I can ascribe to it is probably glam metal...Here's the chorus: "Let the punishment fit the crime/The footprint on the sand of time/The philosophy of the poet's rhyme/Make a man humble in his prime." Laughably bad stuff but I almost enjoy it sometimes.

"All Screwed Up" almost hits the target but not quite. I do not generally skip it. There's a kernel here worth keeping but I am not convinced they pull it off. "Palisades Park" is a good idea but for some reason the cover doesn't work, I don't know if it's too fast or what exactly happened. After that is "Pet Sematary," already reviewed above. "Learn To Listen" I skip, there's nothing very enjoyable there, it's kind of a hardcore mess.

"Can't Get You Outta My Mind" is brilliant, maybe even a classic, I like it more and more and I'm no longer convinced the Pleasant Dreams outtake version is better, this one is probably a bit heavier and the Mama's and Papa's harmonies on the first being pared down a bit may not be a bad thing.

"Ignorance is Bliss" is so-so but I don't always skip it. "Come Back Baby" and "Merry Christmas" are both very nice Joey numbers, never to be skipped.

So: five really good ones. I am going to upgrade the stars on this below, because this is a much more engaging album than I thought.

Stars

These are all potentially subject to revision (except the first four) but here's an attempt at rating all the Ramones studio albums, five stars maximum:

Ramones *****
Leave Home*****
Rocket to Russia *****
Road to Ruin *****
End of the Century ****
Pleasant Dreams ****
Subterranean Jungle ***1/2
Too Tough to Die ***
Animal Boy **1/2
Halfway to Sanity **1/2
Brain Drain **1/2
Mondo Bizarro ***1/2
Adios Amigos*1/2

Brain Drain, Adios Amigos, Halfway to Sanity

Brain Drain is not quite as bad as I remembered. The guitar could be mixed higher. This is a weird album, there's plenty of stuff that is kind of amusing but very little that is really very good. After I listen more I'll perhaps review it. "Can't Get You Outta My Mind" is a great song but I'm still fairly convinced the Pleasant Dreams outtake is better.

Adios Amigos still sounds awful to me, a lot of pop punk that sounds like it's almost good enough to be TV commercials.

Halfway to Sanity is way better than I remembered. I hadn't heard it since the 80s, when I liked it for a while then cooled on it. A song I forgot existed--"A Real Cool Time"--is pretty good. "Weasel Face" is not that bad. "I Wanna Live" is better than I'd remembered. I'm still puzzling over what I think of "Garden of Serenity," it's definitely not that bad, but is it good? I could be convinced either way. The problem, as with so many late songs, is the lyrics--do they say anything to me? Finally, "Bye Bye Baby" is back in my good graces, it's kind of like an early-60s girl song, especially with the drum beat.

"A Modest Proposal": A Modest Proposal

To my list of phrases which should be discontinued immediately ("...And its Discontents"), I would like to add "A Modest Proposal." As usual, if you have to ask why you'll never know.

Someone Wasn't Paying Attention

It's started again already:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/character-and-its-discontents/

Ten Underrated Ramones Songs

Or at least ones I don't hear about much, and are, as far as I know, uncompiled. I take it as obvious that nothing from the first 5 albums qualifies.

In The Park
I Won't Let It Happen
Mental Hell
She Belongs to Me
Death of Me
Don't Go
She's A Sensation
What'd You Do?
Can't Get You Outta My Mind
Stares In This Town

It's Alive

I just listened to the Ramones' It's Alive and here are a few thoughts:

I always considered this one of the best live albums ever, and even one of the best albums ever. But it's hard to hear it the same way after Marky's revelation that everything aside from the drums was re-recorded in the studio.

On the other hand, it does not sound like overdubs...hearing Johnny hack his way through "California Sun," it's downright hard to believe Marky isn't exaggerating.

This version of "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" has always been my favorite thing on the album...Johnny's brief guitar break seems to me to be one of the greatest things ever done with an electric guitar. All the pathos of the song is distilled into a few fuzzy chords...it's an astonishing experience to hear the guitar swell into the break, and after a few seconds it's all been said and the vocals return. This version made "Here Today" one of my favorite Ramones songs.

"Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World" is one of the most powerful songs ever recorded, both here and on The Ramones. It should have ended this album too. Apparently the lyrics sung live: "I'm a Nazi baby, I'm a Nazi, yes I am!" were unacceptable to the record company, so the studio version has "I'm a shock trooper in a stupor, yes I am!" Since the next line, either way, is "I'm a Nazi schatzi, I'll fight for fatherland!" it's hard to see how it makes much difference. I actually think the substitute lyrics are better than the original, but on this album, and every time I saw the Ramones live (in the 1980s), the original lyrics were always sung. So maybe the studio version has a slight edge because of this. (Note, in case any non-Ramones fans are reading: Joey and Tommy were/are both Jewish, so the lyrics should not be taken straightforwardly).

"...And Its Discontents" And Its Discontents

It's time to retire "...and its discontents." I don't think any explanation is needed, but any reader who requires one should send me a SASE and it will be duly furnished.

Elections and Beer Revisited

I'm rethinking my remarks about Nixon in the previous "elections and beer" post. I realize this is all confirmation bias, whatever that means, but we don't worry about such things here at BLECCH!

McGovern seems like a real wet blanket. Hunter Thompson, an ardent supporter, speculated that he had no sense of humor. The same HST spent an hour talking football with Nixon one time, however, and reported that Tricky Dick knew his shit. This sort of thing--knowing your shit about football--makes you pretty beer-worthy, indeed the fact that Nixon was interested in anything at all aside from winning elections makes him more beer-worthy than a good many politicians.

It's true that Nixon's visage seems to symbolize "no fun," i.e. non-beer-worthiness, but McGovern's rigid earnestness might clear out a bar even quicker. So I'm giving 1972 to Nixon.

As for Hubert Humphrey, I have read a bit about him but rarely seen film of him in action. He was reputed to be some sort of liberal 'firebrand' in his early days, but at least judging by Robert Caro's account in his biography of LBJ, he seemed to be a pretty pathetic character by the time he ran for president. So I am giving Nixon the benefit of the doubt in 1968; it's at least plausible that he was more beer-worthy than Humphrey at this point.

Set My Chickens Free

I'm sure some of you will remember this, from the Freak Brothers comic:

Elections and Beer

I was thinking about the current political standard of who one would "like to have a beer with," and it seems like a pretty iron-clad predictor of general election victory. The only exception is Nixon; most sane people would probably have a beer with anybody before Nixon, or even do anything rather than have a beer with Nixon. But consider:

Obama v. McCain: most I imagine would drink with Obama.
Bush v. Kerry: Definitely Bush.
Bush v. Gore: Definitely Bush.
Clinton v. Dole: Definitely Clinton.
Clinton v. Bush: Definitely Clinton.
Bush v. Dukakis: Bush by a whisker.
Reagan v. Mondale: Reagan wins.
Reagan v. Carter: I'd go with Carter but most people would probably go with Reagan.
Ford v. Carter: Carter by far.
Johnson v. Goldwater: I doubt there'd be anyone on the planet better to have a beer with than LBJ.
Kennedy v. Nixon: See my above remarks about Nixon.
Ike v. Stevenson: Ike for sure.

I don't know enough about most of the also-rans before that (Dewey?) but if it wasn't for Nixon winning twice, this would be pretty well infallible, and even so Nixon didn't run against particularly beer-worthy opponents. Although, if Bush's two elections were fraudulent that introduces another wrinkle...

Halp!

That last post indicates that I don't know how to post a video here.

<object style="height: 390px; width: 640px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nU615FaODCg?version=3&feature=player_detailpage"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nU615FaODCg?version=3&feature=player_detailpage" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="360"></object>

Bad Predictions

In 1991 Ice T said:

Mandela did 27 hard ones

Not in a windowed room

But in a barred one

While his wife had tears in her eyes

The man is a hero he needs a Nobel Prize

But that will never happen so I'm gonna keep rappin'

Freein' my brothers' minds from their entrapment

To silence the Ice, they'll probably put a bullet in me

But I'm prepared to die, Mandela's free!

Mandela won the Nobel prize in 1993. They didn't put a bullet in the Ice.

My List

Here's my attempt at a list. I couldn't imagine putting them in order so they're more or less chronological or, within albums, track order (but from memory so maybe not exactly right). The list is kind of arbitrary, especially for the first three albums where I could think of any number of substitutions. This list is geared toward what I feel about it right now, over time of course songs rise and fall for me, with an eye to what is really 'best' not just what I'm not sick of, but also with an eye to favorites not just 'best.' All in all a confusing mess.

I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend
Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World
Glad to See You Go
Swallow My Pride
Teenage Lobotomy
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Questioningly
She's the One
Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio
Danny Says

I stopped there because that's ten, but that means I stopped with "End of the Century" since I was limiting myself to two songs per album and couldn't justify less than that for any of those albums. But as much as I love a lot of later Ramones material I don't think any of it would bump any of those. "The KKK Took My Baby Away," "Howling At The Moon," and maybe "I Won't Let It Happen" or "Death of Me" would probably be the prime contenders. I've always loved Psychotherapy, but does anyone really think it's one of the top ten?

List From Elsewhere

From the web, the ten best Ramones songs in countdown-type order :

10. “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School”

Fun fun, indeed, just like the movie that’s named after it.

9. “I Wanna Be Sedated”

For such a sad song, it sure has made a lot of people happy. Even four year olds love it!

8. “Beat on the Brat”

According to Dee Dee Ramone, Joey wrote this song after watching a mother go after her kid with the titular sporting implement.

7. “The KKK Took My Baby Away”

This one has been covered by many, including Pearl Jam and Marilyn Manson. We dare you to name another song with that distinction.

6. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”

For all his sneering, Joey Ramone was a softy deep down. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” best encapsulates this romanticism.

5. “Cretin Hop”

Named after a street in Minnesota, this not-quite-two-minute gem is featured in the movieSLC Punk.

4. “Rockaway Beach”

Dee Dee Ramone knew the Queens beach was “not far, not hard to reach,” which is one of the reasons he frequently visited it and wrote a song for it.

3. “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”

When Thurston Moore covers your song on Gossip Girl, you know you’ve done something right.

2. “Judy is a Punk”

One and half minutes of perfection.

1. “Blitzkrieg Bop”
If you don’t think this is #1, you’re simply kidding yourself.