John McCain is starting to remind me of someone — another great old soldier long past his prime who traded his fading honor for a shot at power . . . just not thinking straight, I fear. At any rate, at this point no American who cares about his or her own honor, or the honor of the nation, can afford to support this pathetic old man on his dark journey to moral oblivion.
My friends Lily and Cotty (above) flew into town from Los Angeles this weekend and met up with another old friend, Frank, and his pal Bob, who'd driven here from the same place. They'd all come to volunteer for a couple of days' work going door to door for the Obama campaign, collecting pledge cards and contact information, registering new voters and generally spreading the good word.
They walked (and walked) through middle-class neighborhoods dotted with foreclosure signs (and abandoned homes that will probably soon sport foreclosure signs.) They did what they could — and Frank (on the left below, with Bob) actually managed to get a new voter to register. Such things, multiplied many times over, might make the difference in what still looks to be an election of razor-thin margins — with Nevada a crucial battleground in the contest.
Their virtuous behavior was richly rewarded by the gods of chance here in Silly Town. Lily, who's sixteen, couldn't join us, alas, but the rest of us went off gambling downtown. We ended up at Binion's, where Cotty and Frank hit the craps tables, Bob took his chances at roulette and I sat down at a no-limit game in the poker room.
I was up $96 when Cotty tapped me on the shoulder and said the gang was ready to head home. I cashed in my winnings and was feeling pretty smug, until I heard about Cotty's and Frank's run at the craps table. Without revealing too much specific personal information, perhaps I can say that between them they won about $1500.
They slept, I am sure, the sleep of the just and the sleep of the lucky, a rare but delightful convergence of satisfactions.
An impenetrable disguise . . .
[By Al Moore for Esquire, 1950]
As I've observed before, vaudeville was the premier form of American entertainment for almost sixty years — longer than the era of studio-dominated filmmaking, the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. In those years vaudeville contributed a number of expressions to the American language.
“Big time” and “small time” are expressions from vaudeville. In vaudeville parlance, managers and agents booked “time” — weeks or split weeks in a particular theater or on a circuit. The higher-paying circuits were the big time — the less prestigious circuits the small time. Big and small referred primarily to salary levels, with corresponding implications of prestige. You could also refer to “Keith time” or “Pantages time” — bookings in the Keith & Albee or Pantages theater chains.
The word “killer”, used in a positive sense, as in “a
killer app”, also comes from vaudeville. In vaudeville, an act was a killer if it was so good it
killed the audience — ruined it for the next act. “I killed 'em” or “I slayed 'em” were the ultimate boasts a performer could make, suggesting that he or she went over big but also that they made life tough for the acts that had to follow them on the bill, always an important consideration in the inherently competitive arena of variety entertainment.
You moved up the ladder in vaudeville by becoming “a hard act to follow”. You reached the top of the profession when you were an impossible act to follow.
The stock market rebounded a bit today. The big crash has been postponed — Congress has a little more time to get its act together. With luck, John McCain will stay away from Washington until a rescue bill is passed.
I pulled the truck around to the back of the cabin and put a tarp over it. I'm still spending a lot of time in front of the mirror, practicing my Depression game face.
“Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there . . .”
When I drifted off to sleep this morning I wasn't expecting the House to vote down the credit market rescue bill, but that was the news I woke up to this afternoon. I guess John McCain wasn't expecting it either. Has anyone bothered to tell him that the deal on the bill has collapsed, or is he still out on the stump taking credit for putting it together? Good work on that one, John!
This morning, I was worried that the market had fallen 300 points in half an hour. It managed to fall nearly 500 more points while I was dozing. If you think it's hit bottom, I suspect you're still asleep and dreaming.
Of course you can't blame the House Republicans for voting 2-1 against the bill — Nancy Pelosi was mean to them in a speech before the vote, right there on the House floor, in public. It was like the most popular girl in high school (like, the homecoming queen or something) dissing them at assembly — in front of everybody! You could hardly expect them to be thinking clearly, or considering the welfare of the country, after something like that. It's not like we're dealing with grown-ups here.
My friend PZ sends a line from an old pop song — “They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad.” I fear that Tuesday will in fact be much worse.
O. k., then — bring on the big D. I got the truck running and loaded up. I hear there's opportunities in Mexico for folks who aren't afraid of a little hard work . . .
I'm writing this just after seven in the morning Pacific Time. After working all night, I was getting set to go off to bed when I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach — a sense that the bail-out bill crafted by the geniuses in Washington wasn't going to work, that the markets would feel the same way about it . . . and that the American economy was about to go under, suddenly, in one fell swoop, today.
I turned on the television and saw that the Dow Jones Average had plummeted three hundred points in less than half an hour. I hope things won't continue in that vein, but I have a horrible premonition that they will. If the House Of Representatives approves the bail-out bill in the next few hours and the market continues to fall, it means that Washington has waited too long — dithering around for a John McCain photo-op and other exercises in political posturing and giving more banks time to fail, undermining investor confidence beyond repair.
As I head off to bed once again, I have a feeling that I might wake up in a world that has been utterly changed.
Boy, do I hope I'm wrong.
As you undoubtedly know, John McCain and I have been working tirelessly over the past few days to rescue America from its worsening economic crisis. John felt it necessary to suspend his campaign for the Presidency in order to spend more time on the phone asking people how things were going, while monitoring events closely on CNN.
I suspended this blog, vowing to contribute only “Freedom Bulletins” until the crisis was resolved. This is Freedom Bulletin No. 2.
John also threatened to withdraw from the first Presidential debate, in order to dramatize the seriousness of the situation. Simultaneously, working in close coordination with John's staff, I threatened to leave the dishes in my sink unwashed until Congress made meaningful progress on a rescue bill.
Our unprecedented actions bore fruit — Congress did make meaningful progress towards a bill, John showed up at the debate and I am making plans to begin work on my dishes any day now.
All of this has taken a terrible toll on John and myself, both physically and emotionally. Last night I decided I needed to take a break from the almost unendurable strain, so I headed off to the Paris, Las Vegas casino to play some poker.
[Image © 2006 Paul Kolnik]
I played for about six hours and showed a profit at the end of the session of $31 dollars. $31 may not seem like a lot of money in real terms, but it's actually very hard to win any money at all at a Las Vegas poker table. Sure, there are a lot of tipsy tourists who are easy to best, but there are just as many local sharks who know how to strip you of your chips, your dignity and your sense of self worth.
Driving home at about 3am I heard on the radio that Hank Paulson believed a deal on the bail-out bill was done. I raced home to await his call thanking me for my efforts to get America out of this mess, but he must have been too exhausted to contact me at that hour. I understand this, and feel that no slight towards me was intended.
I poured myself a beer, averting my eyes at all times from the kitchen sink, stretched out in the La-Z-Boy and smiled. I didn't feel like a hero — I had only done my duty. I thought of the extra $31 in my wallet, the prospect of America solvent and prospering once again, and the dance Fred Astaire and Ann Miller do to Irving Berlin's “It Only Happens When I Dance With You” in Easter Parade.
I thought of one poker hand in particular from the evening now coming to a close. I was dealt AK of spades. There was a fair amount of betting before the flop — the pot was sweet. I stayed in, of course. The flop came with the makings of a low straight, but two of the cards were spades. A guy bet 20 bucks, I called and everybody else folded. I figured he was drawing to the straight. The turn brought another card in the straight sequence. My opponent bet 15 bucks. I figured he'd made his straight and was feigning weakness, hoping for a call. I called. The river brought a jack of spades. My opponent bet $30. I raised him $30, sensing that was the most I could induce him to call. He thought about it for a long time and called.
At the showdown he turned over his nut straight. I turned over the nut flush. Life was good.
[Image by W. L. Warner]
Yesterday evening a deep coastal cloudbank was driving in across the whole
horizon, eating up the headlands beyond the Ventura County Fairgrounds.
It was the last night of the fair and the lights of the Ferris wheel
glowed spookily in the mist, miles away. Wild rays of sunlight, like
banners, seemed to flutter over the headlands at the edge of the cloud
bank.
The sun, a bright red viscous disc, appeared through the mists just before it disappeared into the ocean.
These sorts of phenomena turn the blank landscapes of the sea and sky into
theatrical spaces, which seem both awesome and manageable — a place
one might act in, given the appropriate role, mythological and
ritualistic. Conditions also in which gods might step down into our
world.
[“Freedom Bulletin” No. 1 — no more posts until Congress solves the credit crisis!]]
Inspired by John McCain's example, I have decided to put country first and suspend this blog until Congress passes legislation to solve the nation's credit crisis.
I will continue posting as usual, but I will not think of my entries as “posts” — I will think of them as “Freedom Bulletins”. I encourage everyone to think of my posts as “Freedom Bulletins”.
If my “Freedom Bulletins” lead to a rapid solution of the deadlock in Washington, I will let the American people decide, in their own way, how to honor my sacrifice. If they wish to place a small historical marker at the site of my birth, so be it. If they wish to erect a full-scale equestrian statue on the Mall in Washington, so be it.
I am not going to quibble about such things at a time when our nation is in peril.
These are hard times, likely to get much harder. But believe it or not, we are climbing Jacob's Ladder. Every rung goes just a little bit higher.
That's right — every rung goes just a little bit higher. Don't take my word for it — listen to the testimony of the Staple Singers, in their wonderful version of “Jacob's Ladder” on the album Freedom's Highway.
The band Wilco is offering a free download of a cover they did of Bob Dylan's “I Shall Be Released” if you go to their web site and promise to vote.
Remember, cute girls love guys who vote!
The circus was a fixture of American popular entertainment as early as the colonial era. It competed vigorously with fancier forms of theatrical entertainment in the first decades of the 19th Century and survives in several forms today. It was always evolving — the only constant being the “circus”, the ring, which for most of circus history existed primarily for a horse or horses to race around.
In the early 19th Century, if you had a clever horse and a tent, you had a circus — all the rest was filler on the bill.
Dan Rice (above), described in the subtitle of David Carlyon’s biography as “the most famous man you’ve never heard of”, started out in the 1830s as the traveling exhibitor of a learned pig — it could count and tell the time. Then Rice got a horse and a tent and became a circus showman, the most famous of the 19th Century. P. T. Barnum (below) lent his name to an enterprise that became the most famous circus of all time, but wasn’t himself predominantly a circus man. He wasn’t even responsible for his circus’s immortal motto, “The Greatest Show On Earth’, invented by someone else as a topper to “Dan Rice’s Great Show”.
Rice was an accomplished horse and animal trainer but earned his immense renown as a clown, of a new kind. He sang and danced and did physical comedy, sometimes in blackface, and enacted parodies of Shakespeare, but captured the fancy of the nation with his comic monologues — often of a topical nature, ranging over the subjects of national and local politics (in whatever town his circus happened to be playing.) His specialty was audience interaction, improvisation in the moment — quick wit on the fly.
He so impressed the public that he was thought of as a great and wise man — a bit like Will Rogers in the 20th Century — and he was recruited to run for political office, including the Presidency, on more than one occasion.
Though he was the chief draw of his “Great Show”, it was still a circus. Its featured animal act was a horse named Exclesior, who could do astonishing tricks. Later on, when “menageries” (of exotic animals) became part of the circus, Rice enlisted an elephant who could walk a tightrope, a rhinoceros who could obey a few simple commands and a trained camel.
The menagerie of exotic animals developed apart from the circus, as an adjunct to the “museums” of curiosities which flourished in the 19th Century, and in which Barnum mostly specialized. The idea was imported into the circus as a new-fangled attraction.
In Rice’s day, the circus was a show for grown-ups, featuring plenty of sex, in the form of scantily-clad female performers, and sometimes crude humor. It morphed into a children’s fantasy only at the end of the 19th century — when its cruder offerings were moved over into the adjoining midway.
By the 1870s, Rice’s brand of verbal comedy had been absorbed into “variety” — a very crude form, for male audiences only, centered in urban areas, usually associated, physically and commercially, with saloons. This was the form that got cleaned up for mixed audiences (ladies as well as gents) of middle-class patrons in the 1880s and renamed vaudeville. It still had a lot of circus in it.
Tony Pastor, the impresario who led the way in cleaning up variety and did the most to popularize the new designation “vaudeville”, had gotten his start as a knock-about clown in one of Dan Rice’s circuses — and knock-about clowning always had a place on the vaudeville stage. So did the comic monologuist — carrying on a tradition pioneered by Rice.
Horses were gone, of course, along with the rings they raced around, but trained animal acts remained. One of the most popular and fondly remembered acts in vaudeville was “Fink’s Mules” — sometimes called the greatest opening act of all time — in which a blacked-up Fink engaged in a losing contest of wills with his expertly trained animals.
Dan Rice also had a mule act, with two mules that only he could ride. He’d dare audience members to try their luck with the animals, who inevitably bucked them off, to the delight of the crowd.
Horses and feats of horsemanship stayed in circuses, even though the exotic animals became the real stars, but horses took center stage in Buffalo Bill’s arena shows, a kind of circus masquerading as a historical pageant.
The chaotic popular entertainments of the 19th Century, always evolving, left their mark on the popular entertainments of the 20th Century — via vaudeville, which fed the Broadway and Hollywood musical with images, acts and talent, and supplied silent film comedy with its greatest clowns . . . and the rodeo, which carried on the circus’s and Buffalo Bill’s celebration of the horse. The classic American circus survives only in the two companies of The Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey “Greatest Show On Earth”, but another kind of circus, classier and adult-oriented, thrives on the Las Vegas Strip. Now called “cirques” (as in “du Soleil”), they form the core of Sin City’s permanent live-performance attractions.
The continuum revealed in all this is not much remarked upon, a result of the 20th Century’s insistence on seeing itself as “modern”, freed from the shackles of the Victorian era, but also of the age-old tendency in show business to emphasize novelty. “A 19th-Century Attraction Reborn and Refurbished!” isn’t an ad line that’s going to pack them in on a Saturday night in the 21st Century — though it would offer a more reliable indication of pure entertainment value than almost any other.
It looks as though even the national media have decided it's o. k. to use the “p” word — even if they have to teach the American public what it means.
Perhaps this will lead to a little press questioning of the administration's new eight hundred billion dollar bail-out proposal. Who exactly is it meant to benefit? Tellingly, Treasury Secretary Paulson
doesn't want to put a cap on executive compensation even for those
institutions that the American tax payer is being called on to rescue. As The New York Times reported:
Mr. Paulson said that he was concerned that imposing limits on the
compensation of executives could discourage companies from
participating in the program.
“If we design it so it’s punitive
and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the
way we need it to work,” Mr. Paulson said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Let’s
talk about executive salaries. There have been excesses there. I agree
with the American people. Pay should be for performance, not for
failure.”
But he quickly added: “But we need this system to work, and so we — the reforms need to come afterwards.”
Think about what he's saying. The major financial institutions are in such dire straights that unless tax payers assume their bad debts, they will likely collapse, taking the whole world economy down with them. But they might opt out of the bail-out if their top executives have limits set on their compensation.
In short, the executives would rather see their companies and the world economy tank than give up a dime of what they might be able to squeeze out of the crisis for themselves.
It's amazing that Paulson could say such a thing with a straight face. He's essentially admitting that the CEOs of America's major financial institutions are sociopaths. But that's plutocracy for you — personal shame and civic responsibility have no place in it.
Jack White (of The White Stripes) wrote and produced the theme song for the new James Bond film Quantum Of Solace and performs it on the soundtrack with Alicia Keys. The movie is coming out in November but you can listen to the song now here.
It's awesome — funked-up John Barry with a nod to McCartney's Bond song and a lot of White Stripes drive. Jack's work is big because he's got so many strains of music rattling around in his brain and no firewalls of convention, attitude or fashion separating them. You could say the same of Armstrong, Presley, Hendrix, Dylan.