Archive Listing
December 22, 2010 - December 15, 2010

Saturday, February 27, 2010

WINTER. We're digging out from our third blizzard here this month, and despite all the scientific disclaimers, I keep thinking about this episode from the old Twilight Zone. You would too if you'd had a February like we have.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

SUMMITMANIA. It's a joke. Only point worth making? Haley Barbour's:


This is InstaPunk in Room 2010, placing a wakeup call for the hour and minute this ridiculous show is over. Thank you.

Stones Retrospective 3:

TIME IS ON MY SIDE. As the story goes, the success of the Beatles and the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team caused the Stones manager to lock Jagger and Richards in a room and not let them out until they had written a song. That was in 1965. "Heart of Stone" was the first original Jagger-Richards release. Clearly, the Beatles were way ahead of the game. When Sergeant Pepper hit the charts, the Stones responded with the lame Satanic Majesties Request, and it looked as if the Stones were going to flame out as quickly and thoroughly as Herman's Hermits. The Beatles, on the other hand, were rapidly being lionized by knowledgeable music critics. I first heard the 'Pepper' song "She's Leaving Home" in a music appreciation class at my boarding school. The teacher played it for us, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and explained the musical reasons for its emotional power.


Needless to say, this made us deeply suspicious. Which is when the first of many Stones 'miracles' occurred. The truly awful Satanic Majesties was followed, in May 1968, by one of the greatest rock and roll albums ever recorded, Beggar's Banquet. Nothing could ever equal the musical thrill I felt when I heard "Sympathy for the Devil" the first time.


The entire album was a masterpiece. If you want to see the songs and hear the first few seconds of each, go here. More great songs than most bands produce in a career. A few years after "Heart of Stone" was written in a locked room. Cool. For me it was the moment of imprinting. They would be my navigator, because I understood that in a wild time of chaotic political and cultural anarchy, they were the ones who were standing back and observing, commenting, laughing at it all while they stood at the heart of the insanity. The Jagger sneer wasn't just a stage ploy; it was literate and satirical. Which is why all the many covers they have done are not completely tributes. They're also self-conscious commentary. Why everything the Stones ever record becomes a Stones song, neither elegiac nor safe. I was hooked from that moment on. The Stones were laughing and I could too. What a blessed relief.

It was only the beginning. The Beatles released the White Album, which we bought and played, once, liked, and then went back to Beggars Banquet. Then came Let It Bleed, which my roommate and I disagreed about. He thought it was better than Beggars Banquet. I thought it was only just as good.


A second straight album consisting entirely of classics. Not done very often. Taste them here.

By this time, a kind of feud was breaking out. People who liked the Beatles didn't like the fact that the Stones were now billing themselves as the "greatest rock and roll band in the world." People who liked the Stones were saying, "uh, so? What's the point? 'Rocky Raccoon' is rock and roll?" A divide developed.

Meanwhile, my roommate and I were debating. Did "Gimme Shelter + Midnight Rambler + You Can't Always Get What You Want" exceed "Sympathy for the Devil + Street Fighting Man + Stray Cat Blues?" So we we played them all the time to refine our positions. He thought "Midnight Rambler" clinched it. I thought "Salt of the Earth" did. (More about that later.)

Did we notice "Magical Mystery Tour," "Hey Jude," and "Long and Winding Road" when they came out? Sure. But the Beatles were done. Everybody could see that. Which made the Beatles fans more inflexible than ever. And they were already becoming tools of the system. You know.

In 1970, after a spectacular senior slump, I gave away the Valedictorian slot at graduation to a (presumable) Beatles fan of better character than I was. Which I kick myself for to this day. But when I got home I had the consolation of playing this to my private self when no one else was listening.


I didn't say their influence was always beneficial. I just said they were an influence.

HONORARY PUNK AWARD. Lake, our AGW expert, sent me this email today:


Of course we're interested. Here's a slice of what we call punk science, from the second link above:

The biggest problem with Judith’s proposal is her claim that the issue is that climate scientists have not understood how to present their ideas to the public. Judith, I respect you greatly, but you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. The problem is not how climate scientists have publicly presented their scientific results. It is not a communication problem.

The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.

And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation. When Michael Mann had to be hauled in front of a congressional committee to force him to follow the simplest of scientific requirements, transparency, you guys were all wailing about how this was a huge insult to him.

An insult to Mann? Get real. Mann is an insult and an embarrassment to climate science, and you, Judith, didn’t say one word in public about that. Not that I’m singling you out. No one else stood up for climate science either. It turned my stomach to see the craven cowering of mainstream climate scientists at that time, bloviating about how it was such a terrible thing to do to poor Mikey. Now Mann has been “exonerated” by one of the most bogus whitewashes in academic history, and where is your outrage, Judith? Where are the climate scientists trying to clean up your messes?

The solution to that is not, as you suggest, to give scientists a wider voice, or educate them in how to present their garbage to a wider audience.

The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.

And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.

And you still don’t seem to get it. You approvingly quote Ralph Cicerone about the importance of transparency … Cicerone?? That’s a sick joke.

You think people made the FOI (Freedom of Information) requests because they were concerned that the people who made the datasets were the same people using them in the models. As the person who made the first FOI request to CRU, I assure you that is not true. I made the request to CRU because I was disgusted with the response of mainstream climate scientists to Phil Jone’s reply to Warwick Hughes. When Warwick made a simple scientific request for data, Jones famously said:

Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?

When I heard that, I was astounded. But in addition to being astounded, I was naive. Looking back, I was incredibly naive. I was so naive that I actually thought, “Well, Phil’s gonna get his hand slapped hard by real scientists for that kind of anti-scientific statements.” Foolish me, I thought you guys were honest scientists who would be outraged by that.

So I waited for some mainstream climate scientist to speak out against that kind of scientific malfeasance … and waited … and waited. In fact, I’m still waiting. I registered my protest against this bastardisation of science by filing an FOI. When is one of you mainstream climate scientist[s] going to speak out against this kind of malfeasance? It’s not too late to condemn what Jones said[;] he’s still in the news and pretending to be a scientist[;] when is one of you good folks going to take a principled stand?

But nobody wants to do that. Instead, you want to complain and explain how trust has been broken, and you want to figure out more effective communication strategies to repair the trust.

We l-i-i-i-ike it. We really do. The Honorary Punk Award is yours, Mr. Eschenbach.

Thank you, Lake.

CHASING OUR TAILS. I've linked this so many times, but they keep taking it down. Damn the Internet. So. It's here. For a moment. Maybe that's how everything works. Enjoy.

UPDATE. Commenter poetry -- "A cold and a broken. This song is the sweetest musical ache never to depress me."

Why we do what we do.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

TBB. Not to sound too self-serving here, but maybe -- with the 2010 and 2012 elections on the way -- it really might be about time for the new generation of activists to take that hard look at the Baby Boomers the mass media have been unwilling to give them.

Just a thought.

Stones Retrospective 2:

CONTINUED FROM BEFORE. Backing up a bit from the first entry. All the way back to freshman dorm. I've written before about the Top 40 song I liked best right before I got sent away to school. But I'd never been exposed to popular music before. Not what the other kids my age were listening to. I'd been raised on Sinatra and the big bands. I entered cacophony. Long echoing halls that exploded with music every evening when classes and dinner were over and before study hall began. Everyone but me had a .45 record player. (Do you know about them? All designed to play a six inch disk one song long.) I got filled in on everything in a few weeks during the fall of 1966:


Which was playing at the same time time as this:


Go ahead. Start playing both the Youtubes simultaneously, then add this ...


...and this ...


...and this...


...and you'll get some idea of life in the adolescent linoleum halls of the late sixties. Yeah, I know, you youngsters are the supposed multi-tasking ones. But here's a task I'm curious to know if you can manage. No television, no radios, no cell phones. (And, obviously, no computers and no Internet.) Our connection to the outside world, apart from records, was one of these in every dorm:


There were also no phone plans, no unlimited minutes. Our parents wanted us to keep it snappy and hang up. Not happy? Buckle down and cheer up. More money? What for? They feed you, don't they? Money doesn't grow on trees. And, by the way, this is long distance and we love you but got to go now...

So. Say, you're raised as an Anglophile (in full denial of your inborn Scottish awfulness). You're not prepared for the cacophony. And then, after months of it, you hear this song from the brand new coolest band there is. (Something new, McLean? Try rock and roll harpsichord.) Blessed stillness.


And maybe you don't even know where that song came from or how to acquire it, because there are no record stores on campus. You remember but you also forget. Life happens fast when you're thirteen going on fourteen. and then, with your ears full of the Supremes and the Lovin' Spoonful, you stay up too late one night and wind up in the room of one of the darker and less popular freshmen, and you hear an album, an LP, including this song and this song that have nothing to do with Motown or even The Mamas and the Papas:


In an instant you know that nothing will ever be the same again. You're fourteen, for God's sake. The world has lurched in a new direction, and you hate it and love it in exactly the same degree. The pendulum is swinging wildly over the pit. Where can you possibly find a balance that will enable you to survive? You're cynical, afraid, empowered, confused, excited, disappointed, confident, dark, dark, and dark, but still stubbornly alive and getting really angry.

How about this?


A song which will, years later -- delay is a key function of Stones experience (more about that anon) -- become forever associated with your first ever desperately unrequited love:


Which is where we'll end for today.

WEEPING. Hell. I don't know what to do. I got this from Lloyd Pye, who sometimes has good sources and sometimes doesn't. It sounds true, though. Something about the degree of detail persuades me it's true.

My niece is Reina Galjour, midwife, who went to Haiti last week to teach her midwifery, so, the mouth to mouth is what is so scary to me, being the AIDS in Haiti is rampant. I don't know what to consider here, nobility or stupidity. Sharing with you.

so...that's how it's going here. let's see... good news...people are friendly, my creole is coming along, there is beauty here in the land...


I hate to be an ideologue, but this reminds me of a couple of other things. The bill currently on the house floor about granting Hawaiians ethnic self-government or something, which reminds me of the natural state of civilization occurring among Polynesians prior to western colonialism. (No. Don't skip the link. Read every word. Then tell me you see no echoes with what Lloyd's correspondent calls 'birth rape.' I dare you.) Which can't help but remind me of Haiti and all other "natural," non-technological societies so close to nature they must be (in the current progressive argot) green Utopias. Until Mother Nature (a.k.a. Gaia) stomps them to death and reminds us that Utopia is a phantasm and technological civilization is armor against that total motherfucking bitch called Nature.

And I'm also reminded of what I've said previously about Haiti. With respect to the Greens, Lloyd, I'm sure, will be mad at my opportunistic political point. But Lloyd is left and I am right, meaning I am in favor of western civilization and all its technological wonders: you know, the benefits of wealth. So sue me.

Lloyd, on the other hand, can speak for himself. Unlike most of the folks who try and die in the Comments section.

Monday, February 22, 2010

THE BENEFITS OF SELF-EDUCATED MEN. Like most of you, no doubt, I didn't follow CPAC as if it were some conservative Olympics, though in some sense it probably is. I caught up with it mostly after the fact, except for the accident of seeing the Glenn Beck keynote live on Fox News. They announced it was imminent, I stayed tuned out of curiosity, and watched it all. More about that later.

Mostly I saw the usual clips and snippets. Cheney's "one term president" remark. Gingrich's chief soundbite, whatever that was (Sorry, I can't recall it just now.) Pawlenty's weird "nine-iron" analogy, which reminded me of a carpetbagging slalom skier who couldn't make the U.S. team missing an early gate and plowing gracelessly to DNF just desserts. (To be fair, I've long been prejudiced against the Minnesota governor who stood by lamely for months while Al Franken hijacked a 60th Democrat senate seat under his nose.) The various pundit reactions, smug to disgruntled, regarding Sarah Palin's nonparticipation. The odd hyping at Fox News of Ron Paul's victory in the straw poll -- surprised, exhilarated, condescending? The earnest coverage by Hotair of the event, as if it were some kind of offyear pre-convention, which it wasn't. It was at worst political theater for those who are presently out of power and at best a basis for political soul-searching and debate for those who are presently out of power. In the middle is my offhand conservative Olympics notion, which like many of my free associations is probably right.

That said, there were some speeches of interest, which I have dug up for you belatedly because they might give a sharper focus to some of our own thinking as we approach the 2010 elections. I'm highlighting just three speeches, none of them delivered by politicians, which should tell you something important right away. If you'd like, think of this as an Instapunk medal ceremony. Well, forget what you'd like. I'm the one dispensing the medals. You can protest to the Organizing Committee if you disagree. That's what the Comments section is for, after all.

The Bronze goes to Ann Coulter. Hers was an uneven performance you can see here in full (in two clips), but like a figure skater lacking in certain kinds of finesse who can still pull off the incredibly difficult quadruple jump, she squeaked onto the podium for the most succinct diagnosis of MSNBC's Countdown host ever offered from a dais: "Keith Olbermann is a girl." Five words that provide an encyclopedia's worth of information.

The Silver? A tough call. I'm wavering back and forth even as I write this. I'm giving it to a man I've criticized often in the past, and the reason for my doubt is not that I've criticized him. The doubt is for all the things he did so well in his speech that only a man with the attributes I've criticized could do. George Will's speech was a marvelous demonstration of the superior mind -- and education -- that has a tendency to look down on the less gifted. He was deft in his examples and analogies, witty, funny, learned, educational, as beautifully focused on the essentials of his arguments as he was illuminating about its nuances, and overall as compelling as a bookish non-orator can be in an address of real gravity. He's the reason for the title of this post. He was the top of the line speaker at CPAC. I sincerely urge you to watch all three clips of his remarks contained in this entry at Hotair. I promise you'll want to join in the standing ovation he received at the end.

So what could "top" that? Nothing. But something unexpected and useful could "bottom" it. That's why the Gold goes to Glenn Beck. His keynote address was sentimental, as self-obsessed as an Obama speech on, well, anything, larded with props and mugging and audience asides, unfair in significant respects, and absolutely necessary and perfect as the mongrel bookend to George Will's pedigreed epistle to the faithful. This morning, hardly anyone is quibbling about George Will's brilliant but absolutely traditional reassertion of conservative philosophy. But arguments are already breaking out about Glenn Beck's emotional call to action. (Scroll on down at the Corner for debates about Teddy Roosevelt, etc)

Here is the video of the Beck keynote. Watch it all the way through. Pay close attention to the ways it is different from George Will's speech -- and the ways it is the same. Both are delivering a stern message about the lessons of history, the dangers of repeating proven, catastrophic mistakes made generations ago. We believe George Will because he has spent a lifetime studying our history and the consequences and lessons of that history. We feel the passion of Glenn Beck because he has arrived at a remarkably similar understanding by a late-in-life process of self-education inspired by the personal disasters of an early life lived in accordance with all the wrong assumptions the uneducated are heir to.

Beck is the proof that Will is not just an ivory tower intellectual. The proof that ideas and philosophies of government reach deep into the guts of ordinary lives, as makers and breakers of every value that matters. With his quintessentially American combination of humility and chutzpah, Beck demonstrates exactly how American political history over the past century pertains to individual human experience. Interestingly, for example, it wasn't Will who cited the twentieth century facts that are likely to be most surprising to a conservative audience. It was Beck. His chalkboard summary of the Depression of 1920 -- its depths and the speed with which Calvin Coolidge reforms no one would consider possible today pulled us out of it -- does more to prove the destructive failure of FDR's New Deal than anything George Will said. His quotations of John McCain hero Teddy Roosevelt are earthquake traumatic. One senses, of course, that George Will knows all the same facts. But Glenn Beck knows better than Will the incredible breakthrough importance of reminding Americans that the past is not what we have been taught or blithely assume it is. Which means that the potentials of the future are also not what the most learned -- and cynical -- among us think we're prepared to entertain and pursue.

Beck is darker and more apocalyptic than Will. He is also, ultimately, more hopeful. It wouldn't occur to Will to go deep-down sentimental and histrionic about the real text and tone of the inscriptions on the Statue of Liberty. At some level, Will either assumes we know that history, or we remember the diplomatic complexities of the European political context that inspired it, or understand that there's no going back to the simpler times when the words on a statue conveyed something of real import. He's too caught up in his awareness of the philosophical demons that transform allegory into procedural battles among dynastic political families, Borgia popes, and their vassals. His education and experience have diminished his sense of the possible. A mongrel like Beck has hybrid vigor. He wants to move the stakes of the game outward, beyond the traditional bounds. It's not quoits, in Beck's view. It's Quydditch, and you're allowed to fly.

Of course, I'm sure George Will didn't approve of Beck's speech either. I'm not aware of any response thus far, but I think we can use Bill Bennett's reaction as an indicator. Which is why I'll severely fisk what Bennett said at NRO this morning:

Saturday Night Beck [Bill Bennett]

There’s a lot to say about CPAC. This morning the major papers are highlighting Glenn Beck’s speech. I like Glenn a lot and I think he has something to teach us. But not what he offered last night.

Analogizing his own struggles with alcohol to the problems of our polity and in our politics, he said, “Hello, my name is the Republican party, and I have a problem!” “I’m addicted to spending and big government.” ”It is still morning in America.” ”It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding, hung-over, vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day. But it is still morning in America.” And, again, “I believe in redemption, but the first step to getting redemption is you’ve got to admit that you’ve got a problem. I have not heard people in the Republican party yet admit that they have a problem.”

Glenn is among the best talkers in the business of broadcast. I am not sure he’s a very good listener. Actually, I'm pretty sure he is a good listener. As the third most popular radio talk show host in the land, without the authority of Harvard degrees and cabinet credentials, he either taps into what people care about or he's a graveyard shift deejay in Iowa City.

First, there is a good and strong tradition in alcohol and drug treatment that personal failings should not be extrapolated into the public sphere; that too often when this is done, conclusions are reached based on the wrong motives and, often, the wrong analysis. This sounds suspiciously like rote 12-step orthodoxy to me. They probably say that to all the neophytes who have just quit drinking, drugs, gambling, and sexual promiscuity to prevent them from becoming too self-righteous and preachy about the faults of others, not to prevent them from understanding the world from the standpoint of personal experience. Glenn has made that mistake here and taken to our politics a cosmologizing of his own deficiencies. This is not a baseless criticism; they are his own deficiencies that he keeps publicly redounding to and analogizing to. It is wrong and he is wrong. Oh? Personal failings of human beings have nothing to do with public failings of institutions conceived and administered by human beings? What a relief to know that the founders's fears of government because governments are run by human beings were, well, unfounded. When did you become a statist, Bill? Or am I too harsh? When did you become a partyist? Governments are vulnerable to human sin and parties are not. Interesting theory. I'm waiting for the 600-page book. Or is the simple fiat "wrong" your last word on the subject.

Second, for him to continue to say that he does not hear the Republican party admit its failings or problems is to ignore some of the loudest and brightest lights in the party. From Jim DeMint to Tom Coburn to Mike Pence to Paul Ryan, any number of Republicans have admitted the excesses of the party and done constructive and serious work to correct them and find and promote solutions. A few bright lights does not a party make. And bright lights have been known to go out when some whip cracks loudly enough. (Mixed metaphor pun intended.) Does the term 'Gang of 14' ring a loud bright bell? Is voting against the president's elephantine budget the same as calling for actual, honest-to-God spending CUTS? Even John McCain has said again and again that “the Republican party lost its way.” Please stop it with the McCain crap. He's much angrier about earmarks than he is about trillion-dollar deficits. He's got the mind of a bookkeeper. He doesn't mind monstrous spending. He just doesn't like venial entries in his great big ledger. These leaders, and many others, have been offering real proposals, not ill-informed muttering diatribes that can’t distinguish between conservative and liberal, free enterprise and controlled markets, or night and day. Muttering diatribes? I gather that's a slap at Beck. The man doesn't mutter. He has a chalkboard. He writes on it more legibly than my sixth grade teacher ever did, and he uses facts and figures I never heard from you. Did you predict this recession halfway through Bush's second term? No? Who's muttering now? Does Glenn truly believe there is no difference between a Tom Coburn, for example, and a Harry Reid or a Charles Schumer or a Barbara Boxer? Between a Paul Ryan or Michele Bachmann and a Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank? If you -- a trained scholar -- look at the actual transcript, I think you'll find he made a distinction, just not one you like. He said, "It's not enough to suck less." He's right. Once again, the party is not measured by its leading lights; it's measured by what the party does as a group. The Democrats have slavishly followed Pelosi, Reid, and Frank, which makes them suitable stand-ins for their party. Republicans by and large have not voted as Coburn, Ryan, and Bachmann recommend. Which makes them exceptions, not exculpatory exemplars.

Third, to admit it is still “morning in America” but [sic] a “vomiting for four hours” kind of morning is to diminish, discourage, and disparage all the work of the conservative, Republican, and independent resistance of the past year. The Tea Partiers know better than this. I don’t think they would describe their rallies and resistance as a bilious purging but, rather, as a very positive democratic reaction aimed at correcting the wrongs of the current political leadership. The mainstream media may describe their reactions as an unhealthy expurgation. I do not. There's nothing unhealthy about expurgation after excess. It is frequently ugly. But not as ugly as the sleight of hand you're performing here. When people who would otherwise go to work and bear the burdens of the republic as they have done for generation after generation without taking to the streets in protest find it necessary to adopt the tactics of sixties radicals for the purpose of making it known that their government is entirely out of control, it does represent a "bilious purging." And to claim that they are not also reacting against a Republican Party which claimed it would abide by a 'Contract with America' and immediately surrendered to every temptation of power, influence, and pleasure offered by their positions is ludicrous and insulting.

A year ago, we were told the Republican party and the conservative movement were moribund. Today they are ascendant, and it is the left and the Democratic party that are on defense — even while they are in control. That’s quite an amazing achievement. But anyone who knows the history of this country and its political movements should not be surprised. America has a long tradition of antibodies that kick in. From Carter we got Reagan. And from Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama we took back a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, with midterm elections on the horizon that Republicans and conservatives are actually excited about, not afraid of. uh, "we took back a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate"? No. We deprived them, by one (or three or four) wavering vote(s) of a guaranteed filibuster-proof majority. That's a very different thing. The Republican Party is still in intensive care. Conservatives, independents, and renegade Democrats are still trying to figure out who can they can trust, why they should, and what possibly empty promises are worth another life-or-death bet on the fate of our country. Beck is expressing their doubt and distrust in terms you should be listening to. Not lecturing about.

To say the GOP and the Democrats are no different, to say the GOP needs to hit a recovery-program-type bottom and hang its head in remorse, is to delay our own country’s recovery from the problems the Democratic left is inflicting. The stakes are too important to go through that kind of exercise, which will ultimately go nowhere anyway — because it’s already happened. Gorblimey if you aren't sounding like every Democrat at election time who tells black people, "Now isn't the time to question whether we've kept all our decades of promises to you. If you don't vote with us now, they'll be burning churches in Mississippi and dragging your people behind pickup trucks in Texas. There is no history. There is only NOW, and the bus will be waiting outside your project housing at 9 am. There will be malt liquor for every registered voter.

The first task of a serious political analyst is to see things as they are. There is a difference between morning and night. There is a difference between drunk and sober. And there is a difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. To ignore these differences, or propagate the myth that they don’t exist, is not only discouraging, it is dangerous. Hmmmph. Read your own last paragraph. Then get back to me, Mr. Bennett.

Why Beck gets the Gold. George Will wouldn't have upset Bill Bennett. But Bill Bennett needs to be upset. He needs to be chastened. Until he is, we need Beck every bit as much as we need George Will. But we do need them both. Every one of us lives in the space between George's top and Glenn's bottom. I don't even care how that sounds. Because Bill Bennett sounds so much worse.

AS PROMISED. I grew up in the radical sixties. So obviously the Stones aren't the only band about which I have piercing memories. But they were the anchor band, meaning they were associated with my keenest memories and they were also the band that both sustained me in my darkest days and filled me with joy when times were good. Over the years, I've also come to appreciate that the Stones were for me more than even Frank Sinatra was for my parents and their peers. If you came of age in the Sixties, music wasn't an accessory or background or ancillary effect of memory. It was of a piece with all your memories, ineradicable and a catalyst for time travel inside your life. When you're time-travelling, though, it's dangerous. You need traffic signs. Pillars. Things to hang onto. These are mine.

I've done more than most to slam the Boomer generation. But in this one respect I feel sorry for everyone who's come after. Whenever I talk to younger generations about their musical postulates -- the songs they don't need to apologize for because they were sixteen and fired up and listening to the car radio -- they nominate nonsense. Baby boomers in comparison are like the residents of Vienna during the most productive period of Mozart. Everything they imprinted on was a classic. Motown, Beatles, Who, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't make us better. It just means we have an automatically superior soundtrack to our lives. Like we're an MGM musical and the rest of you are a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movie. Worse for everyone else, the sixties were like some throbbing intersection of the whole history of music (apart from classical and opera), awakening a curiosity about every American genre from blues to jazz to country to rhythm & blues to rock and roll, because all of them were braided into the firestorm of counterculture music.

In my softer moments, I console myself with the thought that this is the one saving grace of us Boomers. We never learned how to think but we created our own version of the Aborigine Dreamtime. For a brief moment in time we wedded consciousness itself to a music that made sense in some weird way of our otherwise doomed lives. Our children don't have that. It's such an inarticulate and ephemeral attainment that it can't be passed on. We transmitted the habit of music but not the soul of it. The addiction but not the life of it. And as we grew old, we lost the life of it ourselves, fading into parodies of what we once derided and denounced.

Sorry. I'm sorry. I know this will seem to many of you like a metaphor for sex, which it isn't. True, you youngsters have entirely lost the magic of sex, but we were doing that, too, even in our day. Music was our last connection to sex, and as it died in us, sex died, too. It is now entirely dead. Like rock and roll.

Where was I? Oh. The Rolling Stones. My first acquaintance. In boarding school. I was fourteen. Two years in. My roommate -- he died years ago at the age of 40, so buzz off -- had this album called "Got Live if You Want It," and it didn't have a jacket. I think it was his because it wasn't mine, although he said he didn't know where it came from either. But the record was a lot like both of us, an unloved survivor. We were neither of us good housekeepers and that scratch-grayed LP kept turning up in the back of the closet, under laundry, underfoot, and the thing was, whenever we found it we played it and it played. For two reasons, I thought at the time. There was so much female screaming as the Stones performed it couldn't have mattered if there were scratches. AND our record player had such a primitively heavy tone arm that it didn't care about scratches. It's only now, years later, that I entertain a third possibility: that record was our personal portal to the generation we were destined to become a part of.


I'll stop here. Obviously, the Stones story is going to consist of more than one post. But this is where it began. YouTube may actually have more than one cut of "Got Live If You Want It." Look it up. When you do, imagine a remote time, forty years ago, when two adolescents were standing on the cusp of the radical era. We were in love with every girl we saw, and the only way we could see them was in the songs we played.

btw. Penny, shut up. I'll ban you without a thought. Not kidding. NOT.

Back to Archive Index