B12 Solipsism

“Jimi Hendrix: Live at Monterey” (Experience Hendrix)

By now you’ve probably heard that former Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell has died. The Criterion Collection blog mentions an interesting factoid:

Mitch Mitchell, the inimitable drummer featured in all of the Jimi Hendrix material in Monterey Pop, died this week at age sixty-one. A one-of-a-kind player, Mitchell was the perfect foil for Hendrix and integral to the sound of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. His roiling, explosive approach was a rhythmic analogue to Jimi’s redefinition of the guitar.

For the Monterey Pop Criterion release, we had a hell of a time trying to re-create that huge drum sound from the studio records. The great remote recordist at Monterey, Wally Heider, did a valiant job just trying to get anything on tape. The seven-track master we had to work with had mics being moved and repatched in the middle of songs. Drums were an afterthought to the vocals and guitar, so legendary engineer Eddie Kramer had to build much of the drum sound from bass player Noel Redding’s open vocal mic!

[From On Five: The Criterion Collection Blog]

“Are You Experienced?” (The Jimi Hendrix Experience)

The three first Jimi Hendrix albums¹ are essential to any self-respecting rock snob’s music library.

1. Electric Ladyland is my favorite of the three, but Are You Experienced and Axis : Bold as Love are almost as good [↩]

“Casino (Widescreen 10th Anniversary Edition)” (Martin Scorsese)

I actually didn’t much care for Casino when I saw it many years ago, but apparently it was based on the real life story of Lefty Rosenthal.

On the evening of Oct. 4, 1982, Lefty Rosenthal, the talented professional gambler and gangster-when-necessary who had brought sports betting to casinos in Las Vegas and illicitly run an empire of four hotel casinos, walked out of Tony Roma’s on East Sahara Avenue with an order of takeout ribs. He had just finished dinner with some fellow handicappers, and he was bringing the food home for his two children. When he got into his car, it blew up.

Mr. Rosenthal survived the explosion — later he could not remember whether he had turned the ignition key — but the attempt on his life, for which no one was ever prosecuted, ended his career as one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He left the city early the next year and on Monday, at home in Miami Beach, he died. He was 79 and had lived in Florida since the late 1980s.

His death was confirmed by Eric Yuhr, assistant chief of the Miami Beach Fire Department, which removed the body. He did not give a cause.

Mr. Rosenthal’s rise and fall in Las Vegas, which took place over a mere 14 years, was at the center of Nicholas Pileggi’s 1995 book “Casino,” and the subsequent film of the same name, directed by Martin Scorsese, though in the movie, the account was somewhat fictionalized. (Mr. Rosenthal’s character, played by Robert DeNiro, was named Ace Rothstein.) He began his career as a horse player, oddsmaker and studiously disciplined sports bettor in Chicago, where his nonviolent but illegal enterprises were protected by the mobsters he made money for.

[From Lefty Rosenthal, Kingpin in Las Vegas, Dies at 79 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com]

Mr. Rosenthal is one of those old-timers who were seemingly larger than life:

Frank Rosenthal was born in Chicago on June 12, 1929; his father was a produce wholesaler who also owned horses, and young Frank hung out at the track and devoured the Racing Form. He learned sports betting, he said, in the bleachers at Chicago’s baseball stadiums, Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, where spectators bet on everything: “Every pitch. Every swing. Everything had a price.”

His nickname, from childhood, was of the simplest origin; he was left-handed. Nonetheless, the story persists that it resulted from his testimony in 1961 in front of a Congressional subcommittee on gambling and organized crime, during which he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself 37 times, refusing to answer the simplest of questions, including whether he was left-handed.

He was a clothes horse whose closet was said to contain 200 pairs of pants; a whiz with numbers, especially savantlike in figuring odds; a notorious egomaniac who at one time wrote a subliterate gossip column for The Las Vegas Sun; and was host of a late-night talk show on local television, on which he interviewed celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton, O. J. Simpson and Minnesota Fats, and railed against the Nevada gaming commission.

He was an obsessively detail-oriented businessman who made sure that every blueberry muffin coming out of the Stardust kitchen had at least 10 blueberries in it, and, Mr. Pileggi said in an interview Friday, among other innovations, was the first casino operator to seek out and hire women as dealers.

“Hud” (Martin Ritt)

We knew Paul Newman was ill and 83, and yet the news of his death is still shocking. Long a favorite actor of mine, Newman had made over 60 films; I’ve probably seen 53 of them. Not all were classics, mind you, but enough were so that his performances will be studied and celebrated for as long as film is a viable medium.

Paul Newman, a sublime actor and a good man, is dead at 83. The movie legend died Friday at his home in Connecticut, a family spokeswoman said. The cause of death was lung cancer. Newman reportedly told his family he chose to die at home.

He lived a long and active life, encompassing acting and directing for stage and screen, philanthropy, political activism, auto racing, and the “Newman’s Own” line of foods.

After serving in World War II as a tail gunner, including missions in the Pacific from an aircraft carrier, Newman studied acting at Kenyon College and quickly found stardom on the stage. His Broadway career began in 1953, co-starring in the hit play “Picnic,” and as recently as this spring he was planning to direct a summer theater production of “Of Mice and Men,” until illness prevented him.

…

An outspoken liberal, Newman placed 19th on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” and cited that as one of his proudest achievements.

How can you choose Newman’s best roles? He almost always had his choice of films, working with such directors as Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, Richard Brooks, Otto Preminger, Arthur Penn, Alfred Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Robert Altman, and the Coen brothers.

He had a huge hit in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), co- starring with Robert Redford. They teamed again in “The Sting” (1973). His acting nominations came for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), “The Hustler,” (1961), “Hud” (1963), “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), “Absence of Malice” (1081), “The Verdict” (1982), “The Color of Money” (1986), “Nobody’s Fool” (1994) and “Road to Perdition” (2002).

Other important performances were as Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956), as Billy the Kid in “The Left-Handed Gun” (1958), “Exodus” (1960), “Torn Curtain” (1966), “Slap Shot” (1977), “Fat Man and Little Boy” (1989), as Huey Long in “Blaze” (1989), with Woodward in “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge” (1980), and the Coens’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994).

[From Paul Newman: In memory :: rogerebert.com :: Featured]

“The Long, Hot Summer” (Martin Ritt)

The New York Times obit concludes:

Decency seems to have come easily to Mr. Newman himself, as evidenced by his philanthropic and political endeavors, which never devolved into self-promotion. It was easy to take his intelligence for granted as well as his talent, which survived even the occasional misstep. At the end of “The Drowning Pool,” a woman wistfully tells Mr. Newman, I wish you’d stay a while. I know how she feels.

First, sad news that Ms. Child died¹. Even though she was 91, and obviously not at full strength, she was always so full of life. We really love watching her cooking show when they run marathon episodes on PBS.

Second, she was a spy for the OSS? Wacky. Though, there were a lot of famous persons who worked for the OSS during WWII.

Before Julia Child became known to the world as a leading chef, she admitted at least one failing when applying for a job as a spy: impulsiveness.

Details about Child’s background as a government agent come into the public spotlight Thursday with the National Archives’ release of more than 35,000 top-secret personnel files of World War II-era spies. The CIA held this information for decades.

The 750,000 documents identify the vast spy network managed by the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA. President Franklin Roosevelt created the OSS, the country’s first centralized intelligence operation.

Child’s file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

The OSS files offer details about other agents, including Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, baseball player Moe Berg, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and film actor Sterling Hayden.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt; and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.

[From JULIA CHILD, SPY: Julia Child a World War II-era spy -- chicagotribune.com]

We’ll miss you, Ms. Child.

1. according to the so-far brief obituary, Ms. Child died in her sleep August 12, 2008, at her home in Santa Barbara [↩]

RIP, Tina

Sad news indeed. Friend of this blog, and friend of me, Tina Oiticica Harris has passed away after a long bout of anarchic illness. We’ll miss you Tina!

Around 3am this morning, I woke up with a weird sense of anachronism about Tina’s 56th birthday.
Unfortunately, Tina-la-vecina as she was known in the Santa Monica Unified School District checked in Hotel California on Monday and isn’t available to solve this riddle.

[Click to read more An anarchic birthday]

“The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of An American Icon” (Ronald K. L. Collins, David M. Skover)

Regional news outlets can find any national event and find the angle that links the story to the local market. Apparently, George Carlin got his second start in Chicago (or not, the NYT Obit claims Carlin started doing darker, topical humor in 1970, quite a few years past 1962)

The show was on a Tuesday night, Dec. 4, 1962, at the Gate of Horn, 1036 N. State, according to the Sun-Times report the next morning. One of the vice detectives checking out the show described it this way: “We were there about a half hour when Bruce appeared on the stage and from the first few minutes of his routine the air turned blue. Every other word [was] a four-letter one, and he spared nobody, including the clergy and the police department in his abuse.”

According to The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, one of the comic’s signature bits, “Christ and Moses, [YouTube with photo montage of Bruce and audio recording of this bit]” was the bridge too far for the cops. In this bit, the two holy men unexpectedly stop by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, causing a panicked Cardinal Spellman to beg the pope’s help. (“We’re up to our ass in crutches and wheelchairs here!”)

At that point, the police stopped the show and arrested Bruce, charging him with “giving an obscene and lewd show.”

Also arrested were the club’s owner and bartender, as well as one George Carlin, 25, who refused to show ID. Carlin and Bruce shared a ride to the station in the back of a paddywagon, and when they were booked they both gave the same local address on East Delaware.

The incident left its mark on both comics. Carlin changed the tone of his comedy to be much more topical. He was arrested himself 10 years later in Milwaukee for performing his infamous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine.

“He was really a force for exposing hypocrisy,” Carlin said of Bruce in a radio interview. He later added: “Lenny Bruce opened the doors for all the guys like me; he prefigured the free-speech movement and helped push the culture forward into the light of open and honest expression.”

Bruce, meanwhile, was found guilty and later said this about our fair city: “Chicago is so corrupt, it’s thrilling.”

[From Carlin's comedy was born in a Chicago paddywagon :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Entertainment]

Lenny Bruce, right as usual.

John Nichols of the Nation has a nice collection of Carlinisms. Like:

“Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians,” [Carlin] explained in a routine that challenged all the premises of today’s half-a-loaf reformers. “Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck.

Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans.

So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.‘”

and:

Recalling George Bush’s ranting about how the endless “war on terror” is a battle for freedom, Carlin echoed James Madison’s thinking with a simple question: “Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

and a favorite of mine:

“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else,” ranted the comedian whose routines were studied in graduate schools.

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want,” Carlin continued. “They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

“Class Clown” (George Carlin)

Any student of American language and culture should have a moment of silence for the passing of one of the greats, George Carlin.

George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and groundbreaking routines like “Seven Words You Can Never Use on Television,” died in Los Angeles on Sunday, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He was 71.

The cause of death was heart failure, according to Mr. Abraham.

[snip]

In 1970, Mr. Carlin discarded his suit, tie, and clean-cut image as well as the relatively conventional material that had catapulted him to the top. Mr. Carlin reinvented himself, emerging with a beard, long hair, jeans and a routine that, according to one critic, was steeped in “drugs and bawdy language.” There was an immediate backlash. The Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas terminated his three-year contract, and, months later, he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club. Afterward, he temporarily abandoned the nightclub circuit and began appearing at coffee houses, folk clubs and colleges where he found a younger, hipper audience that was more attuned to both his new image and his material.

By 1972, when he released his second album, ”FM & AM,” his star was again on the rise. The album, which won a Grammy Award as best comedy recording, combined older material on the “AM” side with bolder, more acerbic routines on the “FM” side. Among the more controversial cuts was a routine euphemistically entitled “Shoot,” in which Mr. Carlin explored the etymology and common usage of the popular idiom for excrement. The bit was part of the comic’s longer routine “Seven Words That Can Never Be Said on Television,” which appeared on his third album “Class Clown,” also released in 1972.

“There are some words you can say part of the time. Most of the time ‘ass’ is all right on television,” Mr. Carlin noted in his introduction to the then controversial monologue. “You can say, well, ‘You’ve made a perfect ass of yourself tonight.’ You can use ass in a religious sense, if you happen to be the redeemer riding into town on one — perfectly all right.”

The material seems innocuous by today’s standards, but it caused an uproar when broadcast on the New York radio station WBAI in the early seventies. The station was censured and fined by the FCC. And in 1978, their ruling was supported by the Supreme Court, which Time magazine reported, “upheld an FCC ban on ’offensive material’ during hours when children are in the audience.” Mr. Carlin, refused to drop the bit and was arrested several times after reciting it on stage.

[From George Carlin, Irreverent Comedian, Dies at 71 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com]

A true talent who will be missed.

Wow. Mr. Brown practically invented modern funk and R&B. A great talent. His song’s lyrics were usually simple, but that wasn’t the point: you could (nearly had to) dance to the monstrous beats and grooves.

“James Brown - 20 All-Time Greatest Hits!” (James Brown)

James Brown, 73, Dies; ‘Godfather of Soul’ - New York Times

James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured ”Godfather of Soul,” whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died early Monday, his agent said. He was 73.

Brown was hospitalized with pneumonia at Emory Crawford Long Hospital on Sunday and died around 1:45 a.m. Monday, said his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music.
…
Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie’s ”Fame,” Prince’s ”Kiss,” George Clinton’s ”Atomic Dog” and Sly and the Family Stone’s ”Sing a Simple Song” were clearly based on Brown’s rhythms and vocal style.

If Brown’s claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

I could probably sing you every note of the every song on the compilation referenced above (20 Greatest Hits), and in fact, if you happen to wander through my hallway today, you’ll hear my pale parody of Mr. Brown’s gutteral ‘Hunh’ as I sing along.

Check out this album too:

“In the Jungle Groove” (James Brown)