Of Was and When

The leaves turn color, shiver and fall this month. This next six week stretch offers the least amount of daylight for the year here in the northern hemisphere. The elections and Thanksgiving marked this November. I do appreciate the facade of democracy, and I'm thankful to so many people I know and love.

I found out today I won't be saying, "good to to see you after so many years" to a friend from my childhood. I read his obituary in the local paper this morning. I did not know he lived about 45 minutes away in Tehachapi. I looked for his name in the phone books here locally when I moved back to Bakersfield after having lived in Northern California for thirty years, but never found him or his number.

His father was Frank senior. He was Frank junior, but his mother always called him Dober. The affectionate moniker stuck with his early mates, and I was one. 

Sometimes it seems like just moments ago, Dober and I scurrying to the Y in a much smaller version of Bakersfield crammed inside some parent's car for basketball, gymnastics or handball.  I can still smell the insides of that old building to this day with the odd mixture combining pounds of perspiration with a sprinkle of Right Guard rubbed with dashes of rubber soles and urine. I think the YMCA ritual lasted about two years when gym interest and rides petered out altogether in the early Sixties. Maybe the Beatles killed our Y evenings, but probably the sight of all those screaming girls wanting a piece of the Beatles on television sparked the new peter principle in the both of us.

Around that period I remember my parents giving me my 13th birthday present early. It was a Fender Musicmaster II redesigned from the Mustang model, and an upgrade from the 3/4 scale model Leo Fender introduced and manufactured in the mid 1950s. The gift came with a fashionable small Silvertone amplifier complete with both reverb and tremolo. My mom and dad had caved to my relentless whines of guitar noxiousness, and because Dober's parents had gifted him with a Gibson ES-355 Chuck Berry model  a couple of months earlier. With good luck and parental peer pressure we were both going to be rock stars.

We took lessons together for a year or so, learning the fundamentals, some scales and some songs along the way. The plaster from those little rooms must still echo  "So tired, tired of waiting, so tired of waiting for youuuuu." Sometimes I catch a memory of the many trips to Parlier's Music Store on Baker Street  in the Beetle Dober's dad owned.  Dober was never impressed with audio capability of his dad's Volkswagon Bug.  Over these trips we discovered guitar playing was hard work, and to our amazement we both had crummy vocal skills. We seldom practiced together, though we got together occasionally for sleepovers and wild on-foot midnight meanderings throughout lesser Bakersfield. After a year of joint lessons at Parlier's with two instructors, Jeff and Denny, we went solo citing musical differences.

The next years found us moving to the same schools, but no longer sharing the same classrooms. My extracurricular interests at this juncture began to focus on bank shots from concrete courts or from slate tops covered in felt. Our strokes found different streams and crossed hardly at all. Our parents who had often dined out, and over cocktails shared Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart records together during our fast-friend times of those early Sixties, seemed to lose touch with one another as well.

Sometime in the very early Seventies I saw Frank for the last time. I think it was at the junior college here in town, but it could have been at CSUB or some spot downtown just as likely. I thought he mentioned pursuing a career as a fireman, but from the obituary that thought now seems the stuff of made-up memory-filler from a brief meeting nearly forty years ago.

I read today Frank was a certified public accountant for many years with Deloitte-Touche, the audit and tax consulting giant of financial services. I would have liked to explore the Neil Young refrain "numbers add up to nothing" with an old friend and accountant, and find out what tunes he had been working on over all these years. But, as his chronicle today mentioned some health issues forced a premature retirement and a much too quick departure from this world.

So after all these years, Dober, you remain for me forever young.

For What We're Worth

Gawd! Another election takes place in just a few days. I am so burnt from politics today I feel like like a dude wrapped in gauze, tied to a bed and fed endless liquids of hell juice while forced to view locally produced political advertisements without end. I'm not sure if you remember Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange, but the vision of Alex undergoing his therapy treatments comes to mind regarding the media and our perpetual elections these days.

It would be one thing if elections actually allowed the ruling party to rule in this country, and to make needed changes quickly. If the voted on changes do not work then vote the shysters out of office and put in new ones with different ideas for solutions. But we the people must allow some time to put actual changes in place, and to give those changes an opportunity to fail on their merits. However, in the world in which we live this is not the case today in America the Stilted. 

After four years of Congressional majority, and two years with huge majorities in both houses of the legislature along with the White House, Democrats could only muster a tepid bill of fringe minutiae to address huge wrongs in the finance and credit card sector, a total cave-in to insurance companies over the idea of health care reform and a government backed stimulus package just small enough to stave off the Great Depression while making sure very few of the millions of people who lost good paying jobs under Republican sway will ever see even decent paying employment again. With the hammerlock of the super majority, 60% votes necessary to pass any bill in the U.S. Senate, and a two-thirds majority needed to pass any budget or spending bill in here in my dysfunctional State of California, nothing of positive consequence ever comes to embattled American working families. 

So the loose-screw confederation of amnesiacs, better known as the electorate, will now return control of Congress over to the Republican Party, which sawed the middle class off at the knees this decade with their financial brilliance of perpetual tax cuts for the rich wrapped in distorted terminology of freedom, equality and justice for the individual. The top five percent in this country do great job of convincing the 95% they are one lottery scratch, or one social network solution away from being just like them- wealthy beyond belief and devoted only to their social networked companions.

You might think all those foreclosed upon, unemployed, underemployed, overworked/understaffed,  benefit-less work contractors and outsourced dead industry casualties would begin to get a clue as to who really holds the power in this country. The government did not layoff millions of workers this decade. The government did not cause the collapse of credit, or sell bogus mortgages as gold sealed certificates. That would be the private sector, a sector now swimming in cash and advertising loudly against any fool in government who might want to regulate illegal and unsafe practices, or tax at a socially responsible level the huge hoarded earnings that have wiped away a once vibrant middle class in this country.

It was only September 2008 when the end of the stock market was staring the public in the face as trillions of dollars in value got wiped away as Lehman Brothers and other financial heavyweights on Wall Street teetered on the brink, or collapsed outright. The Dow Jones Industrial average, just six months removed from the huge September stock plummet, and at the outset of the Obama Presidency in March of 2009, stood at 6,500. Today the market is over 11,000. No big job creation has happened from the private sector over that period, but the money guys are printing their dollars or yuan just fine.

In California, the unemployment figures now seem forever fixed at above 12%, and the rhetoric from the conservatives of Republican and Libertarian pinstripes proclaim that more tax cuts are needed to make sure the tepid national economic recovery does not stall with tax rates that will stifle all job creation. This group sat on three-quarters of a trillion dollars in 2008, and now has $943 billion as a stockpile.  Every analyst in the world knows that money will never go into creating much in the way of jobs, because as Moody's points out, "we believe companies are looking for greater certainty about the economy and signs of a permanent increase in sales before they let go of their cash hoards, which they suffered so much to build." Now that is some statement, even in this jaded new Gilded Age.

This brings me to the 2010 election pitting the multitudes of dissatisfied against the contented percentage who have at least $250,000 of investable assets. This group feels very confident about next year, and thought this year was a good one. The group with big money backs Meg Whitman while Jerry Brown, almost by default, stands as the lone iconoclastic figure progressives in California can rally around. Meg Whitman, Wall Street savvy and too rich to even bother voting for much of her life, now resides as the champion of wealthy hubris after spending more than $140 million of her billion dollar fortune on her own gubernatorial campaign. After all has been said and done she has not made a very good candidate for this government job.

I won't bother to get into all the personal attacks levied by and against both candidates, because I have no interest in resurrecting and dissecting the tonnage of toxic mud this campaign spawned. I won't even crack wise and compare the verbiage humorously to terrible recent disasters where toxic mud spewed out of control and wrecked  havoc on so much of the planet's landscape. I will say that in the campaign debate Tom Brokaw moderated in San Rafael there was one very telling question and response that I believe sums it all up. Tom Brokaw asked (in response to Whitman's large personal expenditure on the campaign and her dubious voting record) how she has used some of her fortune to benefit California and all Californians that many of the citizens might not be aware of. You can see and hear the question regarding spending, and  the answer on this Huffington Post clip here.

If you don't trust links, the lady candidate launched into a short voting apology and lengthy attack on public employment unions. She almost casually remembers in the middle of her attack on unions that, "Of course, Griff and I  have a family foundation that supports higher education and health care." She then goes right back on the attack. Listen to Jerry Brown's response and the obvious pride in his family foundation with the million dollars he gave to establish two charter schools, and decide for yourself who puts people first.   

I do not understand why anyone would vote for Meg Whitman, or for Carly Fiorina for that matter. These are two spoiled rich people who have only cuts in government to promote, and no idea on how to pry away investor money into creating jobs for people. Their only mantra is for further tax cuts and more subsidies for the privileged few. I am so saddened these days by the private sector's performance on jobs in so many industrial sectors it has made me sick at heart, and in a state of virtual despair over the future of this country.

High speed rail comes to mind as an example. This is a major effort to create a much needed public benefit, and meets with opposition from private investment that smacks of outright hostility. A very recent paper was published assessing the risks for the public regarding high speed rail. The report says the state cannot afford it, and that the private sector will not build it, or operate it, unless guarantees (subsidies to the private interests) are given to private operators. Of course, Europe and Japan have had high speed rail for years now, and China is busy building high speed rails at a fast clip, but it is just too expensive to put in place here in California, or in other parts of the nation (even though the teetering Obama Administration is fully behind the project).

Pollution is terrible in most parts of California from Redding to Bakersfield in the Central Valley, and throughout all Southern California not situated right at the beach. Putting modern and efficient public transportation throughout these areas seems like a big step in the right direction, but not according to the naysayers. Palo Alto's City Council recently voted down an opportunity to have a station in their city for High Speed Rail, because as their private investor class told them it would create too much traffic. Never mind getting all those cars off the 101 and 280 highways, putting too big a terminal into Palo Alto would be too much to bear for the millionaires of that little part of our world.

Not everyone is opposed to High Speed rail. With tens of thousands of good paying jobs as the big carrot 52% of Californians voted to approve almost $10 billion in bonds to get the project started. The federal government, finally pushing to improve our national infrastructure, earlier this year awarded $2.25 billion of stimulus money to make the start of this project happen within three years time.  Just this week an additional $902 million was given to California for High Speed Rail, and still the private sector drags its feet and hoards the gold.

I am not sure about the outcome of the high speed rail system throughout the country, or even in this state. I am not sure how much of the original concept will come to fruition. I am sure the private sector will have to be bullied by the people to become a major stakeholder, but I am not sure most Americans feel they have the strength to stand against the powerful who hold all the money.

Today the disparity between those who have everything and those who have nothing almost seems insurmountable. There are two very sobering articles recently looking at the growing gap between the classes of the masses. The first is an abstract, Building A Better America- One Wealth Quintile at a Time, by Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely which explores how typical Americans view the current distribution of wealth in the United States, and what they would like to see as an ideal. The stunning summation from the abstract is how wrong the typical American from all five economic wealth classes views how wealth is distributed today in this country, and that the consensus of this survey finds Sweden as the ideal. Who'd of thunk?

Dear reader you owe yourself a look at this abstract to see that 84% of all the wealth in this nation rests with one-fifth of its population and that 60% of Americans hold less than 4.5% of the economic pie. This is not what most Americans believe to be the case today. I guess most people in this country feel their recent ball card acquisitions, or those plastic super-gulp cups in their cupboards, will really appreciate in a few years time.  

Another detailed article on this economic condition from Reuters, written by Emily Kaiser, is found here. Several economists and the intrepid reporter find that from 2002 through 2007 the top 1% of earners saw annual economic growth of more than 10% during this period while the other 99% captured a 1.3% gain over the same time frame. Economists now have begun to question whether too great a gap in wealth creates the type of seismic economic upheavals that we have witnessed both in the Great Depression and our ongoing Great Recession where the gaps between the top and the bottom was very similar.

This recent Reuters article cites a Deutsche Bank strategist, Ajay Kapur, who saw the parallels between today and the Roaring 20s but did not see the meltdown coming. Kapur did note that the U.S. of 2005 and some other nations were developing into  "plutonomies" where the very few and powerfully rich drove the economy and did most of the consuming. Kapur is the former Citigroup analyst who essentially divided the world into two positions-the rich and the rest- for investment purposes. At least he understands the way things are.

Apologies for not writing sooner. I have just enough faith left in me to vote this upcoming Tuesday with hopes for better tomorrows as a result, or at least a firmer recognition of where we all stand. Hope you vote, and see you soon.











 

School Daze And A Few Choice Bricks For A Wall

I now hear the loudspeaker voice lead the kids in reciting the pledge of allegiance at the junior high school here in the land of Colonel Baker. The first couple of days of this ritual echo always takes me by surprise when I'm out skimming the pool and watering the plants. When I went to public school in this town, back in the days when a nickel was still worth a penny, the semester always began after Labor Day, but now classes for the masses convene in August. Everyone involved in education still gets Labor Day off, but now it comes about two weeks into the school year. God knows people need a break from each after getting just recently introduced.

My lads have been out of school for awhile now. They may have been the last pair to actually have gotten a decent deal in the California higher education arcade. They made the usual stops in the book gaming halls for the cash strapped, popping quarters into various junior college machines before ending their obligatory stay at two California State University campuses where the final level school-game bosses punched them out their hard fought prize, the paper diploma of no cache.

September always brings out the ranking lists of America's finest colleges from the self serving periodicals promoting themselves as the arbiters of academic taste for the discriminating parent, the worried collegiate administrator, or for the dental office patient stuck waiting in a tight fitting chair with a handful of mags to peruse while some root canal procedure in the back spaces runs long. The lists I saw this year waiting for my tooth cleaning came from Forbes and  U.S. News & World Report.   

Forbes could find no public college or university in their Top 25 list of best academic places. UC Berkeley and UCLA made the U.S. News & World Report  Top 25 at numbers 22 and 25 respectively. Cal and UCLA could not break the Top 50 for Forbes. You can check the criteria on how the lists were made through the links if you wish. They both read like Charlie Brown's teacher sounds to me.

All this windup for the obvious pitch, which finds the wealthy taking their dollars directly to where their familial descendants will go- to a carefully cultivated private school where a building might have the same last name as a well heeled rush student or two of year 2022. When you see what the endowment picture for some of the top tier private colleges and universities on the Forbes and U.S. News & World Report lists look like compared to what the public universities total you get a clearer idea of how class warfare is truly waged in this world.

Stanford University serving about 19,000 students showed an endowment fund of $12.6 billion at the end of 2009 . The University of California system serving ten times the number of students (191,000) carried an endowment fund of just under $5 billion by the end of 2009 for its 10 campuses, but none of that money can go to pay salaries for teachers or defray other education costs. The California State University system, which serves more than 400,000 students, possessed an endowment fund of just under $900 million at the end of 2007, and given what the typical losses have been for the past two years a conservative estimate would put that figure at about $750 million for the end of 2009. Cal Tech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena has a private endowment fund almost twice the size of the largest public university system in the nation.

With all that endowment money (gift dollars as tax write-offs opposed to tax dollars for public benefit) at so many institutions of higher learning  a person might start to wonder why student fees keep going ever higher. I ask myself the same question concerning my energy bills as I keep setting the thermometer higher in the summers and lower in the winters but even with lower usage pay a much higher cost each month over the previous year.

Harvard made a big splash a few years back by utilizing their huge endowment fund to underwrite qualified students at their school with a free ride for all those admitted whose families earned $60,000 per year or less. About 20% of the student body at Harvard utilizes this benefit today, but do not think those who chose this path feel all that comfortable while attending this very elite school.The gulf between the rich and poor today now seems as vast a distance as separate galaxies are from each other throughout the universe. 

You certainly do not see the U.C. system, or the California State University system, underwriting the poor any longer, although more than 50% of C.S.U. students do receive some financial aid. The citizens of my home state now spit fire in full tax revolt, and have no desire to help underwrite a college education for their neighbors children at this time. These modern Libertarians either will send their brood to a private school, or on the other side of the socio-economic door will never send any family member to any college. Fees have skyrocketed the past couple of years at both California higher learning institutions where the cost of education for students spiked up more than 30% over the last couple of years. KCET reported that state supported per student aid has plummeted 50% this decade for college students while the cost of tuition rose $2,500 over the same time frame.

The sad fact for the world remains that we create many more poor each day than we do the very wealthy. At some point, and that point may be nearer than anyone imagines, the poor are going to revolt against the current economic and social systems that have created such huge earnings discrepancies between the chosen few and the neglected multitudes. The likelihood becomes so much greater for violent upheaval when all opportunities for advancement have been taken away from the lower class. Lottery scratch tickets may not convince enough folks that they too can have untold wealth and happiness. Drugs and alcohol may no longer pacify all those trapped in meaningless low paying occupations. In truth no one needs a college education to make these assumptions. It is the law of physics when you apply too much pressure for too long a time the reaction can be rather messy.

A thoughtful electorate might try to remove some of that pressure, and particularly those who fly in the gilded skies above the masses, and who might have the most to lose. Chip in a little more for tax purposes to ease the pressure. Allow the dollar disadvantaged some hope through affordable higher education costs without years of debt to tie them down and dispirit their dreams. Let the Bush tax cuts expire on the top 2% of earners, and allow a tax rate of 20% on capital gains. Instead of having the biggest portions of government money go to the few defense contractors and data stream computer-spy companies, allow some public money to go to places and people where unemployment sits at 15% or above with median per capita earnings at close to poverty. Maybe those shiny gated communities might be saved, instead of potentially becoming little prisons surrounded by mobs of  angry unemployed and uneducated gun-toting freedom fighters searching for the good life, or at the very least the slightly used high-def 50-inch monitor of their choice.  

Roger Waters may have been on to something about those walls and bricks thirty years ago.
Thanks for stopping by.

Historical Fiction

I open the two doors in the morning to catch the breeze, and watch the sun rise a little later each day. I peer through the two doors in the late afternoon, and catch sunset just a tad earlier each evening. Augustus has once more followed Julius on our sturdy rock's yearly revolution around the sun, and I find myself knee deep watching The Tudors these  late midsummer evenings. The fictional license blend of historical people, places and events all set within a great story snares my pea brain every time. I loved HBO's Rome and Deadwood, and this Showtime offering certainly captivates my imagination.  

Since I'm just through season two of The Tudors, I'll reserve final judgment when I finish the series. Both Rome and Deadwood suffered the fate of having too high quality, and thus too costly, productions that were forced to finish their runs before the creators really wanted them to end. Rome's ending was far too abbreviated, while Deadwood just closed like a brilliant play in mid-act because too few asses found the seats and channel each week. Art be damned if ratings points be too small.

The sets and costumes of this current history-as-fiction series I'm engrossed in are the stuff of eye candy. The many intricate plots to advance one group and punish other alliances blends a stew of ancient, modern, barbaric and sublime elements that makes a person ponder if certain animosities can ever be overcome. And really, this makes historical fiction a keen recipe for exploration of our current inescapable dilemmas.

As the news of our every day unfolds with the same unending conflicts between the same unending rivalries it becomes a real struggle for any idealist to imagine peace and harmony for even the briefest consecutive periods of moments. As I watch Henry VIII decide Catherine has lost her value, then remove Anne for failure to deliver, and cozy up with Jane, I visualize these real women of yesterday as the representations of corporate entities, and maybe Microsoft plays the King in our world today. The King's ladies are cast as the various necessary acquisitions to maintain balance, power and deliver a specific type of  product advantage by giving birth to a technological successor of the original. Anyone can conjure from the corporate giants of our digital media communications age the various major nation state leaders to assume the dominion roles of our 16th Century drama. A  collection of the privileged who cajole, bicker, battle and vie for virtual control over the lives and destinies of the common folk.       

The consequence of failure in the corporate world today has been transformed since Henry's time. No one tied to a stake and set ablaze, or submerged in a boiling vat of water if caught working on behalf of the wrong allegiance happens today for those on top. In this era we have the golden parachute for thieves and scoundrels of the court who betray the public and private trusts.  For common people in many places today you simply are not allowed the device, the access, or the ownership of content without major compromises.
 
Change is all around us, even though so many things seem to remain fixed. Sunset arrives and the two doors close.

Thanks for the visit.

Reunion Reflections

Three weeks ago today I was sitting in Sacramento at a Mel's Diner table with my good friend, Mike Farrace. I had the keys to the highway ready for my four hour drive home, but at that moment was chowing down a tasty omelet with big splashes of Mel's java reliving thrilling days of yesteryear while we were both coming to terms with the mundane realities of this year. Getting old is not golden, and rust never stops.

Mike's a really bright guy who created Pulse! Magazine for Tower Records, and oversaw our Internet business model for many years. Never mind that as a home grown Sacramento lad he had just spent the last half-an-hour cruising through midtown completely lost trying to find a little breakfast restaurant on C Street, which after a stop or two for directions from bemused locals sweeping walkways and pruning hedges in the McKinley Park area of Midtown, we discovered so full that a wait of the entire morning was going to be our ultimate reward. Hence, Mel's flavorful cups of boiled coffee with grilled broken eggs amid conversations of technology, music and the man we both revered.    

I made the trip that mid-July weekend to Sacramento to see my friend, mentor and  former boss, Russ Solomon, get a small commemoration at the location where he started his once immense recorded entertainment empire. The Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, delivered some warm and heartfelt words of thanks to the man of the hour. A band comprised of several old Tower Records employees serenaded the hundred or so music-business-refugees who gathered in the blistering heat of the mid-day sun paying their respects to a true visionary of the 20th Century. 

It felt like home again with all the familiar faces and voices. Heads now etched with a few more lines under a little less hair bobbed and weaved in the afternoon glare shaking more salt than pepper trying to find the shade. All the eyes danced as youthful as ever, those bright ocular organs suspended in the marvel of life's design, which thankfully masks the wear of time to all but the most keen observers.  The sounds of patchwork dialogs the gathered fans engaged in waiting for the main event soothed my ears like a cool lotion rubbed into parched skin.

The morning of the event I spoke with Russ in the kitchen of  his lovely home, a conversation just like the hundreds of talks we used to have in his office, which was always open. Nearing 85, and with his beautiful wife, Patti, Russ still looks like Russ, loose around the edges but as sharp and keen as the finest blade of cutlery you could find in any kitchen nook when you peer into his eyes and listen to him speak.

We took turns pointing out the obvious business failures of industries over the last age, and the whys. We updated each other on some figures of note we had news of, talked of schisms and current passions while sharing some funny lines along the way. In every conversation  I have ever had with Russ I have always  come out of the discussion with a better understanding of the world around me.  Our two hour chat that Saturday July 17 morning ended too soon, but as was usually the case when the king held court during his long reign as the record guy, he had an appointment to see a host of friends who also hung on his every word.

As I walked out through the big double door entrance of his "two bedroom pad" and looked at the many pieces of sculpted art in the front of the home, memories seemed to escort me to my car. I remember bringing my two now-grown sons to this place many years ago as very young boys to the Stanley and Wendy Goman wedding reception. I still see Wendy putting some cake on Stan's face with laughter and oohs simultaneously erupting from the crowd.  A host of dinners and parties cascaded behind those broad and sturdy doors over the years when any, and almost every, idea seemed conceivable and doable when taken with the right amount of Opus One, or with some other lovely Meritage.

Many of the sculptures, now staring at me in this quiet setting, lived as anti-corporate signposts during a previous existence and adorned the halls of the offices on Del Monte Street for many years. In that past life they gave off an irreverent charm, much like Russ himself, to the people doing business with MTS. The art displayed at 2500 in many ways was the public persona of the  man- complex, intelligent, modern in all respects, and filled with humor. The culture of the company for so many years reflected this amalgam of motive and charm. Be very serious about your work, but don't take yourself too seriously.

Russ appeared that very hot July afternoon on the corner of 16th and Broadway in casual attire, and spoke with such utter humbleness about himself and his accomplishments. He thanked all the people who ever worked for him, and said it was those people who deserved any and all accolades for any lasting achievements the company merited. He handed over the keys to the new owners, Johnny and Dilyn Radakovitz of Dimple Records at the Tower corner.

The heat in the shade was obviously causing my corneas to sweat a little as Russ handed over microphone and keys. Having caught up with Chris at the ceremony, I recreated his Hopson Fade by my lonesome, and walked quietly to my car parked behind the Tower Theater phoning my sons to arrange a dinner meeting that evening, and so avoided  any appearance of being emotionally hammered by people who knew me to be so stoic at public events.

The evening found me in the company of my youngest son (my oldest could not make it due to illness) at Taylor's Kitchen, being served some fine food and some delightful Northern California micro brewed beer by my pal and former cohort in crime, Steve Nikkel. For many years Steve and I teamed up on the video side of the Tower entertainment battlefront waging the good fight for video commerce supremacy. He looked good in black behind the bar carrying on a multitude of conversations with the several dining patrons. We had a blast chatting, listening, munching and drinking.

Back in my hotel room with time to think and very little on the cable, I tried to put the day, and the weekend, into some sort of context. I thought the work choices for the younger set appear to have narrowed considerably over the past thirty plus years. Irreverent and fun are words that no longer fit in the current workplace. So many occupations, professional and otherwise, have taken on an almost militaristic quality today with blind devotion through strict chain of command models operating from centralized decision making locations. The job world has become the antithesis of everything Tower, and Russ Solomon, embraced and nurtured.

I packed my bags.

Now back in Bakersfield, CA three weeks removed from the reunion weekend, I note the progress of the new Target store being erected at the site of a former Robinson-May location at the Valley Plaza mall.  Bakersfield, like so many cities, has become a retail outpost for only the few big-box retail giants who remain, and who slug it out in a commercial war that most closely resembles a Highlander script. The mall is owned by General Growth Properties, a company $27 billion in debt and trying to re-emerge from a year long bankruptcy. The once vital shopping destination now seems in a death spiral and desperately needs traffic Target usually provides. The stores and the offerings at the Target and Valley Plaza border on dreary with an emphasis on boring. 

I also read that Barnes & Noble is now up for sale, as though any other company would want to buy the elephant in the swimming pool with the drain plug wide open. The company that may have suffered the worst blow when this announcement cropped up was Borders, which makes this year probably the last one for that once very cool book seller. It looks like the Mr. Riggio probably wants a private equity partner to take B&N off the public shares roll. The future for print-on-paper with all that devoted shelf space won't be necessary with e-readers and cellular devices. Chock up another victory for consolidation and another big loss for human beings who enjoyed getting together for cultural purposes while crossing all economic lines.

The reunion weekend with Russ and the old gang was a good way to mark the end of the social arts shopping era. The keys are in new hands, and offer a glimmer of proof that small enough and local enough can survive the toughest of times. It will be up to a new constituency to bring back real choices in the various marketplaces and the wages to support those choices.

Thanks for coming by the site for a read.



Photo by Borenstein. Pictured: J. Thrasher, Michael Moore, Russ Solomon and Mike Friedman in an office where cut ties became art.

The Real Glue of the Tattoo

 

I admit it. I don't read nearly enough books. I have no excuse. Shit, I'm unemployed, and going along these days under the various guises of self-employed Internet entrepreneur, political activist, volunteer, musician, retired executive or Special OPS man (Occupation Pooper Scooper for our four fur-balls) as calling cards for the few folks who actually inquire what I do these days. Every response filled with a small kernel of truth designed to distort the ugly reality of the day. Gosh, you would think with all these skills of disinformation I've acquired the last several years I would now hold public office, and would be dining with the small and powerful group of men who can really tell whoppers in the Boardrooms and in the halls of Congress.

The point is I have the time to read books, but hardly ever actually start and finish one at this juncture.

I used to read books regularly years ago. I have shelves and shelves of worthless (in today's world of commerce) bound paper I have amassed and ingested through the years, but over time, and with technology changes, I began to soften my brain more and more with music and film. Two hours, and a pack of lies to myself, convinced me that every movie based on a book with a great soundtrack behind it afforded me all the intellectual muscle needed to discourse with all the other great minds of my time. I found many compadres in this category of intellectual titan-hood to discuss philosophically the rituals of the day broken into small sound-byte segments for easy digestion.

I did begin to find topics outside of pop culture difficult to address with my intellectual cohorts as the film world became a total extension of cartoons and comic book heroes. Ultimately, I realized I had no superpowers, which might be the reason I have no job today. I also had to admit even the President I voted for had no superpowers either. He just claimed he might have some superpowers. The only big budget films made today all have characters with superpowers. If art is a mirror of society, today's mirror must be one of those circus carnival types of glass you find in the fun-houses where fat becomes thin and short becomes tall to great peals of laughter.

Given the grim economic reality of the world today, I can no longer take most of the films put up on the big screen seriously, or otherwise. There are a few feature length films I find worthwhile, and some of them actually make a little money, but I have found the lengthy time in between these pictures too great these days to wait upon. 

A case in point is the recent announcement from Hollywood that the American movie studio system has announced plans to make The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Mr. current James Bond, Daniel Craig, is set to star in this obvious big budget picture. This a masterful book, and the first in a trilogy from a man, Stieg Larsson, who died shortly after turning over the three manuscripts to his publisher. The books (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest) generated tremendous worldwide buzz due to the intricate plot matters involved in each novel, the brilliant character development of the various protagonists (all without superpowers) and to the social outrage eloquently discussed in the main subjects covered within the nearly 1,800 pages of print that comprise this epic achievement.

Hollywood generally dumbs down to imbecilic most great works of fiction, which is why comic books make for such a great alternative for a town short on new and engaging concepts. The Swedes have already completed filming this Millenium Trilogy, and all three books made into films will be available at some point this year. I might watch the series, I might not. My bet, however, is that the Swedish films will be superior in every critically thinking way to whatever Hollywood concocts for a public they now thoroughly believe is brain dead. The American film, or films if the box office on the first picture reaches critical mass, will look great. The gloss from the cinematography will shine more lovingly than the custom paint job on a Ferrari. Sadly, there will be a Chrysler product underneath all those of shimmering pixels of celluloid as the finished American film.

The original Swedish title for the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was Man som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women.  Won't see that title on the big screen or at airport book racks anytime soon, but that is the major point of the series. Yes, the byzantine plots take the reader through financial corruption, computer hacking, ethical and moral decay, government crime and abuse of power along the many twists and turns of compelling literature, but first and foremost are the detailed systematic abuses and crimes committed against women.

A person can dream that a work of art might instill a new perspective for people to view the world, and that positive changes might happen quickly as a result. That is a pipe dream. One can realistically hope that a small chip against an ingrained and inflexible institutionalized practice might get noticed, and some other members of our society fed up with the bully tactics of the institution might start to chip away at the injustice as well, until one day there is little of the malignancy left. And so I hope that men and boys will read these important books of fiction for the greater truth found in the tales.

Maybe you would be surprised to learn, based on several surveys conducted in both the UK and US book markets, only 20% of men in both countries read fiction at all these days. That is a very sad modern day comment. When I think of it, I learned a great deal more about Southern California reading Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley and  Ross MacDonald than I ever learned watching the evening news and reading the Los Angeles Times.

Thanks for the visit, and enjoy a good read.

Have MRSA Baby, Have MRSA On Me

The Rolling Stones did a number some 45 years ago, Have Mercy, and I've got a youtube clip below with Mick and the other original Stones performing the tune to canned squeals of delight.

Today's play on words directs your attention to a crisis condition many of you may not realize we find right under our noses now. MRSA is an acronym for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is a fairly recent bacterial strain of infection that is related to an old nemesis found usually in extended hospital stays, a Staph infection. MRSA was first detected by scientists in the United Kingdom in 1961.

Staph infections, generally, have not been considered altogether too serious unless your system is thoroughly compromised due to a surgery, or due to a serious illness like pneumonia, and any infection poses a grave threat to your health at that juncture. Staph infections usually get treated with antibiotics and routinely clear up after the necessary dosages deliver the knockout blow to the bacteria.

MRSA, however, is a mutant strain that resists these antibiotics, and now poses a grave threat because there are so few drugs left in our nation's medical supply cabinet to treat this recent type of infection.

How bad is the MRSA problem?

What if someone mentioned in conversation that MRSA now kills  more people in this country than AIDS? Would that shock you? According  to the CDC more than 18,000 deaths in 2005 were attributed to MRSA, which was roughly 2,000 more fatalities more than HIV/AIDS for the same year. Another troubling fact concerning this new killer bacteria finds very little current statistical data published today to give citizens the heads up. The last major study of significance available to the public by the CDC only gives information from 1999 through 2005.

I was in Sacramento a couple of weeks ago, and spoke to several of my old business friends. I speak to people here locally. Most people have never heard of MRSA, not to mention that this mutant staph infection now kills more people than AIDS. How is this possible given the information age we now live in?

The first stumbling block in giving people vital information about their health are the hospitals and their owners. Hospitals do not give out the numbers of  those patients treated for MRSA to the public. No big surprise that one of the major incubators of the problem would prefer not to let patients know going into the place that this dangerous and lethal staph infection more than doubled in incidence over the six year study period from 1999 to 2005.

The second major blackout on information for the public regarding MRSA occurs from the factory food industry. A study published in January of 2009 by University of Iowa researchers documents finding MRSA on pigs and humans at a large hog facility in Iowa. The researchers studied two corporate hog production operations, and the one with the highest pig concentration had 70% of all pigs with the bacterial strain ST398 and 64% of all workers with this type of staph. It has only been since 2003 in the Netherlands that the transmission link between pigs and humans of MRSA was established.

The fact that one hog production establishment had 27,000 pigs spread over several smaller locations with no MRSA found might lead one to make a very compelling argument against the horrible CAFO conditions most pigs are forced to endure in this country. A second sound argument against CAFO production facilities on all livestock is the tremendous antibiotic usage that occurs on the animals caged and raised in these facilities.

The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production estimates 70% of all antibiotic use in this country goes into the livestock we eventually eat. The PBS program, Frontline, reported that Stuart B. Levy, MD estimated that somewhere between 15-17 million pounds of antibiotics are used sub-therapeutically in America each year. There is a growing consensus in the scientific community that this large unregulated use of antibiotics is directly related to human beings being increasingly at risk from bacterial infections like MRSA. The federal government under President Obama is pushing the FDA to take stronger action against indiscriminate antibiotic use on livestock, and to potentially ban many antibiotics from the food production operations.

You may wonder why I do not call these livestock operations farms, or ranches. It is because these operations have absolutely nothing in common with those pleasant terms. These are quite simply factories used to destroy and part out animals in the cheapest way possible. If throwing dead parts of other animals into the feed along with antibiotics is cheaper than allowing an animal to be an animal before it is slaughtered then so be it. But, please do not ever suggest to me these caged operations are in any way related to a farm or ranch.

There is a tremendous push back from the so call "farm" states in this country against the removal and ultimate elimination of antibiotic use for sub-therapeutic reasons on livestock. Money is all that matters to the very few companies and their paid people who control the current food industry in America today. An informed public is essential to change the unsustainable methods currently employed by the animal factory owners.

To break up these giant food monopolies will not only serve our overall health much better, but can also mean that true opportunities in food production could happen for so many of the currently displaced and unemployed.   

Thanks for stopping by.  

Sprung a Leak Everywhere

Welcome back. Is it just me, or has the entire planet somehow begun to spring more leaks than a dialysis patient strapped to a bed of nails? I needed to vent today on some current situations, and so I hit the keyboard this morning.

BP put a Tom Terrific cap on the hole at the bottom of the sea. Maybe it will hold, maybe it won't, but the just fired CEO will get something like a million dollars per year from an executive pension, plus all his stock options. Screw the pooch and get a fat reward for your failure. It's good to be CEO with an airtight corporate contract.

Still hot and hopeless for most people here in California's Central Valley. The unemployment now staggers along in Bakersfield/Delano at just under 16%, according the last BLS statisitics. Double-digit unemployment figures suck, but when when you add four of the bottom five lowest median income averages found in California coming from Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties into the hose you get a dead zone that makes the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf Of Mexico look like they are teaming with life again. Way too few jobs, and those available do not pay much in these parts.

I have often wondered why people in this area of California continue to take such brutal economic beatings, and never challenge those who rule the range. A report very recently from the Brookings Institute clarified matters for me. In ranking education for the top 100 metropolitan markets in America, Bakersfield finished dead last at numero 100. Fresno came in at #95, with Modesto at #97 and Stockton at #99.  There are precious few Masters and Doctorate people frequenting the old San Joaquin Valley these days. Hard to vote to force a change when you cannot read the ballot.   

One place in the USA where cushy still finds a home happens to be in the very place most Americans hate the most, our nation's Capitol. The Washington D.C. area booms happily along with heaps of industry and corporate investments blocking out all the whining noise from the rest of the country. The Washington Post spent over two years investigating Top Secret in America. The reporters uncovered a huge chunk of our tax dollars this decade created nearly one million Top Secret clearances from over 1,900 private companies that are now needed to spy on everyone here and everyone around the world for our safety.

I am actually surprised there has not been a million man/woman march on Washington D.C. just to fill out government job applications these past two years. But, of course, working stiffs could never get Top Secret clearances to ever work in all these great jobs that still have lots of openings, but working stiffs can do the census leg work for chump change on a temporary contracting basis. The Washington Post describes how these very elite eavesdropping workers all live in beautifully exclusive Maryland and Virginia suburbs and send their little boys and girls to best possible private schools who train them to be future spies and make large sums of money off all those little fees, assessments and taxes from the 98% of the human pool without a Top Secret clearance.

Maybe you groove on having these government people intercepting your computer keystrokes, your phone conversations and tracking your every movement throughout each and every day via GPS, Google and various cellular phone applications. You and I paid for it, we just don't get much benefit from it.

Oh, did I hear you say something about protecting all the teaming jobless and uninsured in this country from the nefarious foreign folks who kneel on a cloth each day at the appointed time and bow to the East in prayer with hopes of annihilating  all western infidels? Is that what we the people of the United Plutocratic States of America shiver in fear from these days?

Truly, I am much more concerned with young, illiterate and armed Billy Joe, Miguel, Duwann and Ashanti looking for a score in my neighborhood  than I am from all the people in the Middle East and Asia these days who have a grudge with our government's foreign policy. Does anyone really buy an Afghanistan, Iran or Iraq preemptive strike on the United States? Could any dirty bomb do more harm to this country than what British Petroleum has caused since April?  So why do we spend trillions we no longer have on spy versus spy games that resolve nothing?

I thought the Washington Post three-part series on Top Secret in America would have long legs and would be in the news for months, but with the very recent WikiLeaks.org  release of over 90,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan the Washington Post story just disappears into the shadows, just like their just reported spies do. I know our government is all up in arms over this brazen public display of classified documents, which gives readers the inside look at how we prosecute war currently. In all honesty, though, who can be surprised at this juncture about anything we do anywhere on earth after so much deserved negative publicity from Iraq, Afghanistan and every place where we set up a secret prison to interrogate enemy combatants over these many recent years.

The war leaks uncover just more secret society wormwood beneath the shiny veneer on the decks of our teetering Ship of State. Everyone now shouts about the deficit and our incomprehensible national debt, but still refuses to address the rot. Most of the world's economic deterioration stems from rewarding a tiny percentage of the population while exploiting the desperate multitudes who try to survive day to day. The conservative mantra of tax cuts as an economic salvation only helps those with luxury suites, never those in steerage or business class. I hardly think you argue for much in the way of tax increases if all the money not already destined for Social Security and Medicare ends up funding a bigger secret government military machine and subsidizing cartels in food, energy, telecommunications and finance.

Thomas Jefferson argued for a self sufficient agrarian society where the citizens farmed and sustained themselves while bartering for services with goods they produced. Alexander Hamilton argued for mercantilism, a heavy dose of nationalism based on trade barriers and bullion, which needed banks, currency and an investor class to fuel speculation for profits. Jefferson died penniless, and farmers are nearly extinct in America today. Hamilton was shot to death by the country's first gun toting Vice-President, Aaron Burr, in the famous duel of 1804. Hamilton's vision is the battered rough framework of our economy today, even immersed in the quasi-globalist corporate culture of aristocratic self interest. 

Here is an interesting statistic: since 2001 over 13 million Americans have filed for bankruptcy. That averages out to more than 1.45 million people going bust each year this decade.  How bad is it today? The cumulative mortgage debt is now twice as high as the total net worth of all housing in the USA. Banks now own more of the housing market in this country than all the individuals in the nation do.  The biggest joke on the American public is the stock market. Today 83% of all stocks are owned by 1% of the population. One last fact for you: the average federal government employee now earns 60% more than the average worker in the private sector.

I remember a vivid scene from James Cameron's epic film, Titanic, where the great vessel raises its bow to the dark star-filled frozen sky as the stern sinks into waters. The economic imbalance today feels every bit as skewed as that boat before the ultimate fall.

Seven Years This Seventh Month

The seventh month of the year pulls into time's station today. I melted down last month with a "June Swoon." "June Swoon" comes from an ancient baseball sports writer's tag the San Francisco Giants wore proudly for many years in the 1960s and early 1970s. The team always started out each season with great promise and lots of Ws. By the end of every May the Giants always seemed to be bona fide contenders to win the pennant. Then June came around to suck the life out of the Giants' baseballs, and some hated rival always seemed to come out on top by October.

Anyway, my blog faded and folded for the month of June. No excuses, really, just the swoon over life in America these days. My wife and I ditched our television satellite service last year, which brought some sanity back to my head for awhile. I did not miss the big sporting spectacles nearly as much I thought I would, and the calm from not seeing endlessly repeated commercials, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and every other overpaid mouthpiece all-dolled-up and angry as hell about everything truly refreshed my spirits.

I experienced a calmness while reading some of the horrific headlines of violent confrontations coming from the US-Mexico border, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq, Africa and Southeast Asia. Yes, it bugged my peace vibe, but I had a new zen about me from my courageous and thoughtful stance against corporate media, and could now refrain from launching into terrible tirades about the stupidity of war and premature death. 

The usual political divisive wrangling of the Right-Left Death Match 2010 became boring and increasingly meaningless in my new found net-only plug-in world. Rants against our President and his response to fiscal crises, or the health care reform initiative, made no impact on my serenity. Even the many food recalls from tainted livestock and produce, along with the growing number of stories on our nearly used up last line of anti-biotic defense against new and more virulent bacteria did not dispel my fresh new sunny disposition.    

Yes, I was good through May. The oil bursting on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in April would be contained by the corporate crooks with big damage, but not total devastation damage to the region and beyond.

I was a little saddened to see Dennis Hopper die right before Memorial Day, but actually found a zany bit of humor in his passing. By then the oil rupture had surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst oceanic oil spill on record. (Does spill sound right to you? Spill always implies tipping a tea cup to me. This was no spill.) Kevin Costner was on hand that week to deliver a new technology and save the day. I had to chuckle, maybe just a bit nervously, that Waterworld had come full circle here in 2010 in a cosmic joke kind of way with the Deacon sailing off into the sunset on his broken down tanker, Valdez, while our futuristic Hollywood hero saves the day. Into June the nervous chuckle was gone, and although Kevin's considerable efforts have made a small difference in the Gulf waters, the flood of oil continues at an astonishing high death rate for life in that large body of salt water. 

As June days ticked away my calm began to recede much like the oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico's waters, I began to ponder that it has been a full seven years since moving from Sacramento, and my reason for being in this city now rests in a little wall niche on the Panorama Bluffs. My beautiful wife, who dutifully joined me on my elder care road, these past several months has been cursed with some allergic reaction to something we eat. She has gone through three doctors an over the course of three months trying to find the culprit for the digestive disorders and hives she now endures. She has had every test the mind can conceive, but no answers.

For several years we have read and followed the food stories in this country. We have substantially altered the types of foods we eat  in response to these articles on food. Less meat, more vegetables, very few processed foods. We have not had ground beef in nearly four years. We don't even say the word burger any more. I digest food much more easily than I used to, and I have none of those Tums bouts of acid-reflex or heartburn any longer. My wife has hives, and they do not seem to want to go away no matter what plain basic ingredients we use and what major food groups we avoid.

Both of us do realize we live in the very worst area when it comes to air pollution. More harmful particulates sit on this city than on any other in America. The actual worst oil disaster in terms of volume of oil "spilled" happened in Kern County one century ago. This was the Lakeview Oil Gusher out between Taft and Maricopa of 1910. The Gulf hemorrhage is about half way to the Taft Disaster. Much of the southwest portion of Kern County was literally soaked in oil. Much of those chemicals I am sure still sit in that large stretch of scrub and dirt that make up the extreme southwest quadrant of Kern County.

Knowing where we are both locally and nationally, and now fully realizing what lurks just below and just above the surface here in my current habitat, dissolved the last vestige of my calm about a week ago. So here we are starting the seventh month on the anniversary week of seven full years in Bakersfield just as agitated as ever. So much so, that I went out two days ago and purchased a converter box and antennae for my television set. I guess I missed the serenity of the constant lies that can only be gained through television commercials.      

Exiled in May

Exile On Main Street is all the music news that fits during this month of May 2010. When it was originally issued it ushered an end to a third chapter in the Rolling Stones volatile and continuing book of life and song. 

When I think back forty plus years, I remember my first girlfriend really hating the Rolling Stones. She hankered for The Bob and all those folk tunes and artists that were beginning to fade in the last years of the 1960s. Simon and Garfunkel were her last refuge at the time, although the Jefferson Airplane's softer moments offered her some solace if the right smoke could be produced.

When she and I first hooked up in 1967 The Bob was recovering from the mysterious accident, and folk was for that-moment-in-evolution a combination of rock being exploited for all it was worth with a 12-string ring on an augmented chord in nearly every recording studio. She dug The Bob from the days of Freewheelin' to Another Side. For all the great sounds of The Byrds and Arthur Lee's Love your ears bled from the way-too-many manufactured stringed-clones in the pop universe at the time. Folk-rock was so pervasive even a sideman like the young Glen Campbell could  walk from the set of Shindig to record Mr. 12 String Guitar for World Pacific Records with all the hits of the day covered in breathtaking mono. It could have been a Sears exclusive.

In the early 1960s mainstream pop music was a lot like most of the mainstream pop music of today, but instead of American Idol it was Teen Idol time. Elvis was Hollywood, and reigned over the Fabians, Bobby Rydells, Neil Sedakas, Wayne Newtons on the male side of the platter while Lesley Gore and big-hair-bouffant girls from the stables of Phil Spector and Shadow Morton with names like the Ronettes and Shangri-Las dug out their flip-sided claims with  those Supremes' girls of Motown to balance the airwaves.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1964, along with the other British Invaders, wiped away most of those manufactured idols of  the early Sixties with a new raw attack that owed their sound to the rock and blues artists of the 1950s. But, by 1967 most American pop radio music was coming from Detroit at the hit house of Berry Gordy's Motown Records, and the West Coast with the bands that populated the Bay Area and Los Angeles. From across the water in England, an American in London, Jimi Hendrix, along with Cream now captured youthful imaginations. The Rolling Stones had suddenly become a faded page from their own Yesterdays' Papers song, just like so many of the first wave of British Invasion acts, while the Beatles soared on with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Rolling Stones anti-Beatles stance had worn thin with the public by 1967. Tunes like Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl alienated nearly all of the girls I knew during that period, and the move to a more psychedelic sonic ornamentation on records like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesty's Request left "all the young dudes" baffled and put-off.

Most kids in the US had no idea at the time of the travails the collective individual Stones were having in England. The British authorities had begun to crackdown on the pesky drugs of choice for 1960s youth. As the Summer of Love shone on London, Los Angeles and San Francisco with emerging new bands like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, the Stones were being hauled into jail as examples to impressionable teens that cannabis intake would not be tolerated. As a historical piece of minutiae, Donovan was the first to get busted in Britain, but the Stones got all the headlines and much of the blame. In 1967 my girlfriend did not care, maybe they would just go away.

It seems odd today that the band stood on the brink as 1968 came around. They could not tour due to legal issues and seemed on the verge of collapse. Their rivals, The Beatles, had given up touring and were a studio and marketing machine during the last years of the Decade of Change. Both groups, for very differing reasons, brought in new management in 1967 to help deal with all the unpleasant shit- the business end of the music business.

Andrew Loog Oldham got the boot first as the Rolling Stones manager in 1966, and then in 1967 as their record producer. Their Satanic Majesty's Request was self produced by the band with less than desired sales results. Allen Klein picked up the manager mantle and Jimmy Miller would become the band's producer beginning with Beggar's Banquet. 

When Exile on Main Street first saw the record bins on May 12, 1972 most every guy I knew dug the record for the obvious collection of strong songs included on the two long playing vinyl records. It was not The White Album, however a lot of critics in their reviews that spring and summer referred back to The Beatles ultimate release in some effort to compare breadth, and to maintain some media chatter of interconnectedness between the two iconic British rock bands. Tremendous songs from Tumbling Dice to Soul Survivor are sprinkled liberally on every side. Resignation found its way on many of the tracks, but with a fierce determination and swagger to counter weigh against the permeating doubts of dislocation. 

The inclusion of what sounded like rough takes and unfinished mixes, particularly on Side 3 between Happy and Let It Loose took the steam out of the record for a lot my buddies and party-mates. Several girlfriends in my frenetic 1972 just did not groove to Turd On The Run, although they loved to "scrape the shit right off your shoes" in harmony when Sweet Virginia found its way on any sound system. The Stones were now so entrenched in the culture of the world after the success of the previous three classics, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers that ladies just gave the band's audacity and overt sexual stance a grudging pass. They were just, well, The Stones.

 In the blinding speed that passes/passed for pop culture history, when this record found its first needle in 1972 Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison had all arrived and passed away from the first point in time that the Rolling Stones stood in the mouth of pop music oblivion in 1967. The Stones had lost Brian Jones to a murky death at his own home over this period, and the Beatles were no more. Cream was now a historical footnote, and three bands removed from Eric Clapton and his growing addiction.  Jimmy Miller would produce only one more Rolling Stones album. The young guitar virtuoso, Mick Taylor, who had quickly replaced Brian Jones in 1969, had just two records left with the band before moving on to obscurity.  Young girls bopping with the young boys in 1972 to Let It Loose and Stop Breaking Down had no clue who did Under My Thumb, and did not care.

The band plays on with various bass players, keyboardists and their 1975 found Rolling Stone guitarist, Ron Wood, all these years after the May 12 1972 release. They discovered a new, inventive and very sympathetic producer, Don Was, to keep their tracks fresh sounding, if not quite as shocking in this age of 24/7 pornography. There are a truckload of great tunes they have produced since these fellows were caught in Exile on the European continent almost forty years ago sweating out the music amid the basement steam and drug use.

The best parts and the worst parts of this newly polished and reissued with obligatory-bonus-track-material gemstone hears the band capture so viscerally our beauty and flaws here in the west. We can be beautiful, profane, scarred, passionate, brutal, forgiving and resilient all in the moment of life. These characteristics define our humanity, and maybe this was some crowning achievement to squeeze that truth out and  Shine A Light for the rest of us to embrace, and be okay knowing it is just who we are- imperfect one and all. It was never a concept album, but over all these years really became one.

If you've never owned the LP, or the Cassette, or the CD of this album do yourself a favor and get the new spit-shined grooves on CD. Listen to the whole damn thing a few times to get the context. Find a copy of Melvin Van Peebles' movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to view while listening to the album, then kickback and discover the spirit of the 1970s, which seems a lot like today.

Thanks for stopping by and for the read.