Author: NewMexiKen

Saturday Night Live

We thought we’d go see Asra Nomani when Saturday evening began. Ms. Nomani is an Indian-born, American-raised Muslim. She was a friend of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and killed in Pakistan as portrayed in the film A Mighty Heart. (Angelina Jolie played Pearl’s wife Mariane. Archie Panjabi portrayed Ms. Nomani.)

Nomani is the author of Standing Alone is Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She was scheduled to give a talk last evening on her life as a single, unmarried mother and a Muslim. Alas, she missed her flight to Albuquerque (luckily for her — a landing in Albuquerque is always an E-ticket ride; with yesterday’s winds it would have been more scary than thrilling.)

Plan B — Arlo Guthrie on his “Solo Reunion Tour” at the KiMo Theatre.

Fortunately there were about 15-20 tickets left when got to the box office less than an hour before show time. We ended up in row X, the back of the balcony, but there are no bad seats in the historic and beautiful KiMo (built 80 years ago in Pueblo Deco style as a movie and vaudeville theater; an attraction in itself).

Guthrie was wonderful. Not only did we get “Alice’s Restaurant,” but two hours of a wonderful selection from his repertoire of songs and stories. These included a couple of his dad’s songs, including “This Land Is Your Land” — just enough to give the evening a sense of wonderment and connection to the great folk music tradition of the mid-20th century.

Guthrie also quoted Marilyn Monroe — he said — for a philosophy of life: “When it comes to life’s decisions,” Marilyn supposedly said, “‘What the hell’ is usually the right answer.”

We thought Arlo Guthrie would be good. He was terrific. (And we were glad Ms. Nomani had missed her plane.)

War Is Hell

An unpleasant anniversary worth noting.

A group of South Vietnamese villagers reported today that a small American infantry unit killed 567 unarmed men, women and children as it swept through their hamlet on March 16, 1968.

They survived, they said, because they had been buried under the bodies of their neighbors.

The villagers told their story in the presence of American officers at their new settlement, which lies in contested territory less than a mile from the ruins of their former home.

The officers refused to comment pending the outcome of an Army investigation into charges of murder against Lieut. William Laws Calley Jr., 26 years old, of Miami.

The New York Times

A pretty good line from four years ago

From Sideline Chatter in The Seattle Times:

New England might never have won a Super Bowl, let alone two, had not Gen. George Custer decided to leave Felix Vinatieri — his bandleader and the great-great-grandfather of Pats kicker Adam — back at the fort with his band when the troops embarked for the battle of Little Big Horn.

Added Tom FitzGerald of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Those guys were the luckiest musicians in the world, not counting Ringo.”

March 16th

Today is the birthday

… of Jerry Lewis. He’s 82.

… of Erik Estrada of ”CHiPS.” Ponch is 59.

… of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli’s son Wolfgang Van Halen. He’s 17.

The individual most responsible for the U.S. Constitution was born on this date in 1751. That’s James Madison.

No government any more than an individual will long be respected without being truly respectable.

There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.

Et tu

Today is the infamous Ides of March. Two thousand fifty-two years ago on this day, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by senators who called themselves the Liberatores (Liberators) and claimed they were preserving the integrity of the Roman system. Although Caesar ostensibly refused to be named king, he had no qualms about stamping his face on coins (a spot previously reserved for gods), and he happily assumed the title “dictator for life” in February of 44 B.C.E., just a month before his assassination. The most famous of the Liberators is Marcus Brutus, a man personally connected to Caesar. Brutus’s mother, Servilia, was one of Caesar’s lovers, and Caesar singled Brutus out as a young man of promise and gave him a government position. It’s not certain why Brutus conspired to kill Caesar, but the young man did come from a family of anti-authoritarians — his ancestor Junius Brutus overthrew the last king of Rome in 509 B.C.E.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Pretty cool when you can trace a family tradition (albeit, regicide in this case) back 463 years.

The Ides of March is the birthday

… of D.J. Fontana, Elvis Presley’s drummer for 14 years, is 77.

… of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s 75.

… of Judd Hirsch. He’s 73.

… of Beach Boy Mike Love. He’s 67. Love is the cousin of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.

Subsequently, the band has intermittently released new albums and toured like clockwork every summer while making headlines for various extracurricular mishaps: the accidental drowning death of Dennis Wilson in 1983; the legal battles over Brian’s conservatorship between elements in the Beach Boys’ camp and his control-oriented (and since-deposed) psychologist, Eugene Landy; and Mike Love’s lawsuit against Brian, wherein he claimed to have coauthored certain Beach Boys songs credited to Brian alone. Burdened by these and myriad other subplots, the Beach Boys at time seemed to be rock and roll’s longest-running soap opera. At the same time, they’ve been responsible for some of the most perfect harmonies and gorgeous melodies in rock and roll history, and it is for this vast accumulation of timeless music for which they will ultimately be remembered and celebrated.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Sylvester Stewart. He’s 65.

Sly and the Family Stone took the Sixties ideal of a generation coming together and turned it into deeply groove-driven music. Rock’s first integrated, multi-gender band became funky Pied Pipers to the Woodstock Generation, synthesizing rock, soul, R&B, funk and psychedelia into danceable, message-laden, high-energy music. In promoting their gospel of tolerance and celebration of differences, Sly and the Family Stone brought disparate audiences together during the latter half of the Sixties. The group’s greatest triumph came at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. During their unforgettable nighttime set, leader Sly Stone initiated a fevered call-and-response with the audience of 400,000 during an electrifying version of “I Want to Take You Higher.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Ry Cooder. He’s 61.

He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in the American roots music, and, more recently, for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries. Cooder was ranked number 8 on Rolling Stone’s “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”

Wikipedia

… of Eva Longoria Parker, desperate at turning 33.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S., was born on this date in 1767.

Why Gmail?

Since it was made available, NewMexiKen has used Google’s gmail for all my email. Here’s why:

  1. It’s free.
  2. I wanted an email service I could easily access on any computer, anywhere there was internet access.
  3. I wanted an email provider that wouldn’t change. (Remember @home.com?) I figured Google was going to be around for a while.
  4. I had tried Microsoft and Yahoo! and didn’t like the clutter of their web-based email.
  5. I wanted to use my email with Outlook (now I use it with Apple Mail). Gmail permits that; HotMail did, but weirdly; Yahoo did but you had to upgrade ($).
  6. Gmail’s spam filters are excellent, catching about 99% of all spam. The spam never gets to my computer. I never see it.
  7. I am able to forward email from older email addresses (such as @comcast.net) through gmail, so I don’t have to worry about getting everybody to change their address book.
  8. Now gmail has IMAP (rather than POP) mail. IMAP automatically syncs my gmail with any mail application — Apple Mail on two computers, my iPod touch and online. If I delete a message one place, it goes away and isn’t cluttering up my mailbox next time I open one of the other email programs.
  9. If I delete a message inadvertently, it stays available in gmail’s trash — on the web — for 30 days.
  10. It’s free.

Gmail

Just sayin’

This Democratic presidential business would have been over some time ago if Hillary weren’t a woman or Barack wasn’t an African-American. Give Clinton the 10-15% of the voters who won’t vote for a woman or Obama the 10-15% of the voters who won’t vote for a black and it would have been over in February.

We can quit congratulating ourselves on the historical breakthrough anytime now.

Herbert Hoover

Feel a little like taking your money out of the bank and stuffing it into your mattress?

“The market is in the process of correcting itself. I believe there ought to be action, but I’m deeply concerned about law and regulation that will make it harder for the markets to recover.”

That’s Bush speaking today, not Hoover in 1929.

The Definitive 200

“The Definitive 200 is a list of 200 ranked albums that every music lover should own … celebrating classic recordings by favorite iconic and contemporary artists.”

I believe I’d seen this list before but passed it by until today. NewMexiKen certainly likes music lists and maintains several in iTunes, but they are almost always lists of single tracks, not albums. That’s because I am a child of Top 40 radio and grew up listening to singles, not albums. Nevertheless The Definitive 200 is a pretty interesting list.

The list was compiled by NARM, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, in cooperation with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

BEATLES – SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
PINK FLOYD – DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
MICHAEL JACKSON – THRILLER
LED ZEPPELIN – LED ZEPPELIN IV
U2 – JOSHUA TREE
ROLLING STONES – EXILE ON MAIN ST.
CAROLE KING – TAPESTRY
BOB DYLAN – HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED
BEACH BOYS – PET SOUNDS
NIRVANA – NEVERMIND

Continue reading The Definitive 200

Best line of the day, so far

“The price of oil rose to the point where it’s now sold exclusively through the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog.”

Bill in Portland Maine reporting on things that happened while he was away — many good lines.

Including:

“Eliot Spitzer thought he could get away with the kind of financial shennanigans that he used to bust people for as a prosecutor. He was—how you say—utterly, terribly and unbelievably wrong. If you, dear reader, take away one lesson from this whole sorry spectacle, remember this: if you’re gonna hire prostitutes, never pay cash. Barter barter barter! (Hint: the sexiest words in the English language to a hooker are, ‘Hey…how ’bout I go back to your place and clean your gutters?’)”

Bear down

Eliot was excited about his new rifle and decided to try bear hunting.

He traveled up to Alaska, spotted a small brown bear and shot it.

Soon after there was a tap on his shoulder, and he turned around to see a big black bear.

The black bear said, “That was a very bad mistake. That was my cousin. I’m going to give you two choices. Either I maul you to death or we have sex.”

After considering briefly, Eliot decided to accept the latter alternative. So the black bear had his way with Eliot.

Even though he felt sore for two weeks, Eliot soon recovered and vowed revenge. He headed out on another trip to Alaska where he found the black bear and shot it dead. Right after, there was another tap on his shoulder.

This time a huge grizzly bear stood right next to him. The grizzly said, “That was a big mistake, Eliot. That was my cousin and you’ve got two choices: Either I maul you to death or we have ‘rough sex’.”

Again, Eliot thought it was better to cooperate with the grizzly bear than be mauled to death. So the grizzly had his way with Eliot and tore him a new one. Although he survived, it took several months before Eliot fully recovered.

Now Eliot was completely outraged, so he headed back to Alaska and managed to track down the grizzly bear and shot it. He felt sweet revenge, but then, moments later, there was a tap on is shoulder. He turned around to find a giant polar bear standing there.

The polar bear looked at him and said, “Admit it Eliot, you don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”

The Lost Children

The week before last Margaret Talbot had an article in The New Yorker on the T. Don Hutto Residential Center near Austin, Texas. Hutto is a detention center for illegal immigrants and their families, though not Mexican nationals who are immediately returned to Mexico when apprehended. The immigrants at Hutto (there is another center like it in Pennsylvania) are held awaiting action on their case. So are their children.

I’ve been trying to read this article for several days. I get through about three or four paragraphs and I throw the magazine down in disgust. The story it tells about us and our country is just too depressing.

Read along with me a little:

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.

Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

The adults incarcerated committed no serious crime. The children, of course, committed no crime at all. And this is how we treat them. Sometimes I am just so embarrassed to be an American.

You really should read this article.

March 12th

James Taylor is 60 today. He’s seen a lot of fire and he’s seen a lot of rain by now.

Liza Minnelli is 62.

Jon Provost is 58. Who? Timmy on Lassie.

Courtney B. Vance is 48.

Dave Eggers is 38.

While he was in college at the University of Illinois, his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.

Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, “On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There’s a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started.”

Eggers had to drop out of college to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to San Francisco, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents’ deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called their publication Might Magazine, because the liked the fact that the word “might” conveyed both strength and hesitation. The magazine developed a cult following for the way it satirized the magazine format. Each issue included an erroneous table of contents, irrelevant footnotes, and fictional error retractions. In one issue, they wrote, “On page 111, in our ‘Religious News Round-up,’ we reported that Jesus Christ was a deranged, filthy protohippy. In fact, Jesus Christ was the son of God. We regret the error.” To raise money for the magazine, they sold the contents of their recycle bins to readers.

Excerpt above from The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media, which has more on Eggers and also has commentary on Jean-Louise Kerouac, who was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on this date in 1922, and Edward Albee who is 80 today.