"The Thrill of Victory to the Agony of Defeat"

 

 

 

 

The 2024 Presidential election is over. I find the result to be a frightening indictment of the American electorate's profound lack of critical thinking skills, but not a shocking one. President Donald Trump, a convicted felon, acknowledged rapist and liar, who also tried to overthrow the 2020 election results by leading an insurrection at the Capitol of the United States, defeated the former Vice President, Kamala Harris by a wide margin. Some might call the election close with narrow margins in swing states across the Great Lakes and Southwest but, truly, this was not a close election no matter what the corporate media and their pollsters wanted to sell you during this exhausting, twisted and tumultuous campaign.  The propagandists just wanted lots of advertising dollars to hoard and to ensure no woman was going to get elected President of the United States of America.

 James Brown sang, “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” back in 1966. The lyrics of the song were written by a woman, Betty Jean Newsome. The words ring truer today than they have since 1966. That was the first year after a landmark court case (Griswold v Connecticut) which allowed full distribution of the FDA approved oral contraceptive (The Pill) throughout the United States. This was almost a decade after it had been developed. Seven years later the medical procedure of aborting unplanned pregnancies were guaranteed through the nation with the landmark 7-2 SCOTUS decision in Roe v Wade. Women had finally found a sense of sexual freedom and couples now had choice when to conceive. During that period most of us living then thought these issues were resolved and tried to move on to other matters.

 

During this charged late 1960s to mid 1970s period the term “Politically Correct” emerged. Initially it was used to describe civility and respect when engaged in conversations between the sexes or to power.  Conservatives then set about demeaning the term while describing it as a sign of male weakness and dishonesty. It became a bully term to humiliate those working for compromise and cooperation. Today, because “Politically Correct” sounds a bit dated and wordy, a new term had to be created and so we now have “Woke” to describe both weakness in gender/power conversations, but also those who get screwed and tell.

 Here we are in 2025, and the above referenced cases of settled law have now been completely unsettled and undone by the Roberts Supreme Court. A SCOTUS now comprised of five conservative men and four women. Of the associate justice member women, there are three liberals and one ultra conservative catholic who clerked for a previous catholic SCOTUS member in the 1990s and then worked for the Bush people in Gore v Bush to decide the 2000 election before her Trump appointment in 2020. This SCOTUS has become the most conservative Court in over a century.

 

This is a court where a third if its membership was appointed by President Donald Trump. A Supreme Court currently made up of eight Harvard and Yale graduates with a Notre Dame outlier. A court that today thumbs its nose at precedent and twists language to suit its mood to further religious extremism in government while currying favor with the conservative business elite. While promoting the bizarre concept of “Originalism” in regards to the US Constitution, it turns the US the founding fathers documents and explicit meanings of separating the government from religion into a snake twisted knot of deceit promoting religion at levels never seen in American history.

  

Until the last few months of the 2024 election I thought that the surprising election of 2016 was an aberration, and simply a likely repudiation of Hilary Clinton’s persona. How could the person who so bungled an international health crisis, drove the nation into one ugly violent scene after another over racial profiling with hate filled rants against all minorities and denied the 2020 election results be electable? How do women vote for the man responsible for wiping away their social and medical progress of the past 50 years?

What I failed to realize until November 6, 2024 is that President Donald Trump epitomizes the American fantasy of being able to do what he wants when he wants, to speak exactly, and as profanely, as he wishes at any occasion without any regard for facts or truth. No correctness necessary or wanted. He is THE hero for the hopeless, hapless and helpless mass of the US population who are so upset at their current situation for absolutely no reason, other than the ones a right wing media feeds them 24/7 to divide and antagonize a nation. He is the perfect front man to assault women, minorities, the working class and the curious here in the United States.

 

President Trump remains no friend to most white working class men in the US today, either, but he is the Ringmaster of the Testosterone Circus that parades through American culture every day to bamboozle them.  You witness this male hormone carnival every day through male-dominance-messaging of fear through all media platforms, through sporting events that cannot proceed without a tribute to US military might, through endless shows and movies promoting physical and weapons violence on all manner of humanity, through news streams locally and nationally of daily murders, auto accidents and natural or manmade disasters in every media market of the land. 

Welcome to one Wild World of Courts 2025!

Update

 

Not sure what Google has in store for my little blog site after all these years. I have definitely slowed down on the posts and at this point find my blog being shut out of the Adsense world. Not a huge loss since I've never received a dime from Google during all my years here. The analytics people say I've earned a little over seven dollars for the number of views I've generated in total. I must confess I've been unhappy with the Google blog experience for some  time due to its clunky nature and refusal to allow any smooth and easy audio uploads. It no longer functions the way a social media site should function any longer. I have no interest in doing a youtube program, which is even more restrictive these days. 

Sigh.

Fits And Starts

                                                               

The stuff of dreams in August of 1987.

I was headed to Sacramento to oversee all the video purchasing and distribution for Tower Records as the new Video Product Manager.

How did this come about? 

 

 

That thought was on my mind a lot during this period of time when the nation had a President Ronald which rhymes with Donald and the country was embroiled in one political controversy after another. The time stamps on the USA clocks indicated this was Iran-Contra time. The days and months when President Ronald was funding secret military efforts through illicit & illegal arms sales to Iran in an effort to overthrow the Sandinista leftist government in Nicaragua by the Contras, who were operating in Honduras causing mass migrations northward. The Savings and Loan institutions were collapsing under the weight of the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volker, and his ramping up the discount interest rates the banks charged to other banks for borrowing purposes to halt the high inflation leading to almost a third of all Savings and Loan institutions to be closed in a decade's time. And if that were not enough, 138 Ronald Reagan Administration officials were ultimately investigated, indicted or convicted for their "public service" in the 1980s. The figure remains the highest conviction rate total on record for administrative members of any United States President. 

 

 

Up to this 1987 point on the historical flow chart, I'd recently worked for nearly six years at two Tower stores. I started as a clerk and moved up to assistant manager status before I found myself managing the video store on San Antonio Road. I worked under 3 managers Randi, Kenny & Kevin) during this period, one of which was a Regional Manager for the San Fransisco Bay Area Tower Records stores. I'd been part of the fledgling A-team crew setting up new stores on the video side in the mid-1980s. At this time, I was living in a two-bedroom condo in Mountain View with my wife and two young boys aged 5 and 2 as a Tower Video store manager when Jennifer interviewed and hired me for the open position at the Tower corporate offices in West Sacramento, CA. 

 

 

My wife at the time was the big bread earner while working in Silicon Valley as a risk management statistician. I had the fun job, and was determined to make a success of it at Tower's headquarters. Thus began an uneasy alliance between us as partners/parents/spouses that would unravel for period before finding the yarn to piece the relationship back decades later. 

 

 

I've been very lucky.

 

 

If you want to hear how lucky? Here is podcast interview I did with Bob Zimmerman in the fall of 2022 for his Oral History of Tower Records project. Interview.

We'll be back in a few weeks time with an update or two. See you.

 

View from theTower

View from a Tower

I took some time off from my little blog site to ponder what might be of interest to readers going forward on these pages of ether. During these past months several things have helped direct me to a new path here. Much of my life has been about the pursuit and consumption of pop culture in its many forms and the exploration of history. It has given me context, perspectives with both frustrations and comfort over the many challenging world environments I've witnessed in 7 decades.

 

 

One of the things that helped in the decision to move this blog into memoir/historical territory was that my sister recently sold her home. She lives in the mid-Atlantic region which is on the opposite side of the country from my home here in Nor Cal. She's lived in her little house with some acreage for over 25 years doing a variety of ventures but finally realized, as the years wore on, that the body was a little less forgiving now and small projects had become major ones. So, given the crazy real estate rise in prices throughout the country she decided this year was the time to sell. And, did so just in time. 

 

Moving is a big deal. I can tell you that because I've moved 20 times over my adult life. It has always been a pain in the ass leaving, deciding what stays with you, or what goes away, getting acclimated and then reliving the ordeal all over again. You begin to feel like Sisyphus rolling that stone over and over again. For my sister, one of the keepsakes that needed to go were boxes of old family photos. We talked on the phone and I asked her to send them to me. Some of the photos date back over 100 years but most were shot from the 1950s to 1990s and cover family from all over the country. I was shocked to find so many photos I'd never seen before (most of them to be honest) and I promised my sis that I would digitize the pictures and put them on a disc or stick and mail the shots back to her. As I type this, I've almost finished the project but it has taken over two months to do so, due to a lot of cleanup work necessary to get many of the old black & whites into decent looking shape. 

 

I did learn a little about the processing of photos from back in the day. The scratches or dots found in many old black or white pictures, which can look like little stars on a very dark background, can be caused in a variety of ways, but generally can be laid to processing problems in the dark rooms. Some occasions find small particles trapped in a camera or film mechanism within the camera to put a scratch across an entire roll, but that is a pretty rare instance.One of the things I had to remember, before blaming the photographers for their ill kept tools was that the home photo market was really quite new and exploding right after World War II with hundreds of labs and new "technicians" opening in a very short time.

 

This was a huge new business that Kodak came to dominate with labs and processing centers and that local small biz camera shops tried to compete in for a generation or two. New tech combined with the urgency for speed meant some scratches on many of the early prints. The factory processes to get the prices down and the product turned around more quickly has generally meant lower quality, which Americans have accepted along the way to get those lower prices. Polaroid developed the instant picture development process that arrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I still remember coating the finished pictures with a filmed goo that was brushed on lightly just after the picture developed after a minute or two.  For the camera enthusiasts, classes emerged all over the country to cultivate and nurture the craft and technology but very few I know today still practice the old art  and craft with the 35mm cameras and assortments of lenses to match.

 

Nearly all of my childhood, and most of my teen years, find the pictures in black & white. As I browsed through my family's pictorial history, I felt a little like an out-of-body mind-projection character from the silent film era. In my little cowboy outfits or other long gone fashion statements of yesteryear I could almost hear myself shout out, "Shane! Shane!" or some other plea to join a technicolor world with sound. It's a digital world we now live in but history is always with us. We should not forget the lessons we learned along the way. We should be able to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

 

Another reason for repurposing the SilverThreads blog to a historical memoir theme rather than a periodic observation site about current events came about with a request to do an interview about my career at MTS Inc. (Tower Records/Video to the world). Bob Zimmerman, a friend and former coworker at Tower, emailed me about doing an interview on his Podcast (2500 Del Monte Street: The Oral History of Tower Records). I was reluctant to do so for a couple of reasons, but thought about it and happily opted to contribute to Bob's exceptional podcast project.

 

My reluctance stemmed from a couple of incidents since I left the company back in the late spring of 2003. Colin Hanks and Sean Stuart made All Things Must Pass, a beautiful and powerful documentary about Tower Records that came out in 2015 to critical acclaim. I spoke to both Colin and Sean on the phone and we had a few e-mails during the time (2007-2010) they were making the documentary, but they decided to bypass the video aspect of the Tower story altogether due to time and budget constraints. Video was too large a category to cover given the limited parameters the film makers felt could be conveyed, and was never mentioned in the documentary. It was their vision and their call, which I respected and still do. I did not want to talk about the experiences for a long time afterwards, and just went on with my life

 

It has been 19 years since I left the MTS campus in West Sacramento and 16 years since the company was shuttered up for good. In those years, the retail landscape in America has been obliterated and especially so for those who offered music, video and book products to the public at large. Many of the adventurous and brave companies and people creating the content and distribution of the magic that music, film and print brought to the world have also been swept away without a trace.

So here we are,deciding finally to talk about some of my experiences and a few accomplishments Tower Records video footprint achieved during my time at the helm of that division within the company which was known as Tower Records/Video.

As Years Go By

 

 

I know this makes me a true geezer, but I still remain on an ancient Yahoo account for a lot of my e-mails. I check the box a few times a day, partially due to a ton of political junk that now arrives in my box hourly that I just go and clean out, but also for the rare stuff of interest I occasionally discover in this mail box.  On a recent trip to the Yahoo box, I was surprised that a news feed popped up a banner story on Marianne Faithfull commenting on her old Rolling Stones liaisons this time with Keith Richards. I thought those Wild Horses had been ridden and beaten to death over the decades, but I guess not if the participants remain as the high profile marks for our media of current click bait fate.This story came out just a week or two before a sad reminder of what the years ultimately reduce us to when it was reported that Marianne Faithfull checked in to a London retirement/assisted living facility this past month.

One of the true iconic characters of the 1960s, Ms. Faithfull got me thinking on how she has managed to not just survive all these years but how she thrived through them to this day.

If you want to make something you need a spark. Art, architecture, literature, music, war and widgets of all makes and sizes arrive through some form of inspiration. When I think of major inspirations throughout recorded history I think of all the gods & goddesses invoked from Isis, Shiva, Zeus, Allah and Jehovah with all their varieties of flavors first and foremost for inspirational assistance in getting tasks done. All those texts, exhortations, all those various scribblings and paint strokes on whatever-surface-would-do, all those notes played or sung and all those confrontations of conflict around the world going back thousands of years owe a great deal to the “Devotional” category of inspiration for moving our lazy butts to do something.

 

A subset of the Devine inspiration going back a long ways has been the elusive and ethereal Muse. Possibly, at least in the western world, Homer’s entreaty to Calliope for creative genius to guide his hand for both The Iliad and The Odyssey remains the most famous. Virgil, many years later, called on this same muse for The Aeneid.  Calliope for many historians remains as the chosen muse of these giants of literary achievement, although John Milton chose a different muse, Urania(muse of Astronomy and one of Calliope’s eight other sisters), for his epic Paradise Lost in the 17^th Century. And yet for Homer, Virgil and Milton the motivation of the main characters centered on the actions driven by the central woman in each poem. Helen, Dido and Eve truly set the tables for the poetic feasts of these epics.

We’ve come a long way from the days of epic poetry to today’s humble little world of pop music filled with poetic smatterings of love and hate, or the various takes on the current states of recent events. However, one constant for so many years in the pop/rock arena as the creative inspiration in so many songs and public commentary has been the varied nod to muses which motivated the artists.  Over my time on the planet Marianne Faithfull has been The Muse of choice for so many of the musicians I’ve followed. But as the years wore on her own voice began to match in quality the many great songs she inspired.

 

I think back to some obscure weekday night some 57 years ago being transfixed by a young blonde on NBC’s Hullabaloo Show singing As Tears Go By. This was a Rolling Stones’ penned tune they would not record until months later on the album December’s Children that this sweet and breathtakingly beautiful girl named Marianne Faithfull sang to perfection.  She became the It Girl of my young teen dreams and fancies and a big driver to get better on my new electric guitar.  G-Am-C-D and so on……

In the ensuing four years Marianne was married to Nicholas Dunbar, had a child and then divorced the man. She, also, had several minor pop hits, appeared in a few pop culture films of the day and began a tumultuous relationship with all things Rolling Stones, befriending Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and becoming Mick Jagger’s lover. Then the drug bust happened for marijuana possession that was highly publicized with Marianne wrapped only in a bearskin throw when police and papers arrived. She seemed everywhere with Jagger through  the late 1960s appearing by his side in Morocco on a vacation and then with the Mahareshi Yogi and The Beatles during their India sabbatical in 1968, all the while contributing in “spirit” to a number Stones classics along the way to the end of the decade. 

The songs about or attributed to her influence during this period range from Sympathy For The Devil, No Expectations, Live With Me, You Can't Always Get What You Want, Wild Horses, Let It Bleed, You've Got The Blues, Bitch and Sway. She embodied the spirit of, what many argue, are the 3 best albums in the Rollings Stones illustrious canon of recorded music, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.  

By the start of the 1970s Marianne Faithfull had said a bitter goodbye to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones circus. A long and protracted dispute took place over a songwriting credit for the song, Sister Morphine, which Faithfull wrote with Jagger. It took years to resolve the royalties and credit issue and for much of the 1970s she faded into a life of addiction and withdrawal. It seemed The Muse was dead, certainly for the Stones that glimmer had been lost. And yet, as the 1970s decade ended who popped up with a new voice and attitude but Marianne Faithfull. 

Her late 1979 released album, Broken English, launched a successful rebirth to her career and remains to this day an important and profound record to hear. Shel Silverstein's The Ballad of Lucy Jordan with John Lennon's Working Class Hero composition stand out for me along with the title track for piercing and provocative interpretations by Faithfull of brilliant and distinct songwriting. The scorching and X-rated song, Why'd Ya Do It remains a harrowing 6 minute opus on infidelity. The song, although many interpreted it being about her time with Mick Jagger, was actually written for Tina Turner regarding her relationship with Ike Turner. Turner declined  to record and release it. 

 

Since the debut of Broken English, Marianne Faithfull has released 16 albums, which makes a career total of 22 since Andrew Loog Oldham "discovered" the young lady. I remain especially fond of a Child's Adventure, Kissin Time and Vagabond Ways as adjuncts to Broken English. Marianne Faithfull at 75 years old still remains a social force.What a life.

As a closing little paragraph or two here, I offer up another Muse of those days and a bit beyond with the mention of Pamela Des Barres, the inspiration for Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous screenplay and movie. I just finished reading her incredible memoir, I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, which is now 35 years old and still rocking the book business.Here is the story of a driven woman searching for ways to standout, achieve success, attain status and in love with the culture and stars of her day. 

 

I am no fan of the term groupie, but I understand how the word was coined. Pamela Miller in those 1960s & 1970s days was the supreme groupie, who astounded me over the pages of this book with the cast of characters she knew (and most biblically) in the world's entertainment scene. This book and story is a treasure trove of places and people populating Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s. Great portraits of people leaving their large or small impressions on the City of Angels and beyond fill the pages. From Frank Zappa and his wife Gail to Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page the book is a who's who of the music and movie world of those days and the places they frequented. 

San Francisco and London have always been the typical locales that get all the press for the cool and crazy or sad and violent pop culture days of hippiedom and rock excess. I loved this book because Los Angeles finally gets its due as the main driver for so much of what really went down back 40 to 60 years ago and remains in the consciousness of so many to this day. If you want a fun and informative reminder or historical reference of the counter culture of those long ago days I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie truly delivers the goods. It's a little salacious, which I love.

Thanks for stopping by, this past month was a busy one. Hope we catch up again soon.