Snake Oil Exposed- Jim Cramer paved by Jon Stewart

When I tuned in to the Daily Show last night I was expecting about five to eight minutes of Jim Cramer with Jon Stewart, and some Batman circa 1966 bubbles of comic book emphasis -Pow! Oomph! Crack!- popping up at chosen moments to keep our wandering attention span focused on the interview. I expected Jim Cramer to be apologetic, a little funny and chagrined at Stewart's ability to point out the obvious dilemma a Wall Street homer network has when the home team has been consistently losing.

What I got was Jon Stewart deadly serious, and armed with evidence as damaging as Nixon's basement tapes. Stewart kept dialing up taped video camera confessions about rigging movement on Wall Street from the former hedge fund manager turned TV star, Jim Cramer, and repeatedly hammered this defenseless shill of CNBC.

Now we know where all the money went.

It was a reawakening of the Edward R. Murrow spirit in the body of one of the nation's best satirists. This was brilliant, but only a first step. The time has come to focus some legal clout and time on putting into prison the liars and thieves who stole so much money from the world. Those principals at Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers and so many more Bernard Madoff types deserve the Bernard Madoff sentence.

Thanks Jon Stewart.

Desperate Man Blues

Desperate Man's Blues tells quite an American tale in its offbeat fashion and subject matter. This film on DVD from Cube Media explores personal quests, passion of subject matter and the love of music, although this love confines itself to a finite recorded period of music. The film spreads joy in an unpretentious manner as we follow Joe Bussard, American musicologist and record collector, through his daily routine at home and on the road.

Joe hates rock 'n roll. He voices strong opinions from the time we join him and the film crew recording the events and his turns on a marvelous 78rpm turntable. Joe finds the stuff of 45s, LPs and CDs inauthentic. He lets us know homogeneous America offers little real culture of value.

Real culture was tucked away in defined small neighborhoods blanketed behind twisted unique roads. These roads led to places where honesty and individuality was personified and recorded on old shellac records of the 1920s and early 1930s.

I spent a goodly portion of my life on the road travelling throughout America. By the 1980s much of what differentiated regions had been swept away. Lost accents and peculiarly beautiful architecture bulldozed under by big Caterpillars of development crazed speculators looking for quick bucks. As Malvina Reynolds so aptly noted fifty years ago, a nation of "ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." If Malvina were alive today I doubt that she'd be surprised at what America has become. She would enjoy talking to a kindred individualist like Joe Bussard.

Leonard Cohen Tours: Iconclasm Lives

Before the next tsunami (physically and psychologically) hits, which could upset my world again, I mull over one word: iconoclast. The word iconoclast does not get much play these days. I find it curious given the fact that so many of our most sacred institutions, ideas and traditions currently totter under the weight of so much flux and attack. The word is defined as 1: one who destroys sacred images, and 2: one who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions. Depending on your dictionary source (I looked at Answers.com and Merriam-Webster’s) either one could be the first definition.

The height of iconoclasm occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries at the height of the Byzantine Empire. Big happenings over idol worship between Christian viewpoints with statues and paintings destroyed ended up being the result. This behavior surfaced about eight hundred years later during the reformation when Protestants had their way in dismantling idolatrous art from the Catholic Church for a brief period in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. In both instances heads rolled.

In the latter part of the 19^th Century, anarchists embodied iconoclasm by demanding that all governments and government institutions should be toppled and done away with. Disenchanted iconoclastic people targeted the ruling class and assassinated a fair number of influential people, including two American Presidents, Garfield and McKinley. The institutions did not topple by their actions, but in a perverse way the 20^th Century wars-to-end-all-wars ultimately leveled many of the stratified class barriers that had caused the anarchists’ outrage. It has taken only sixty years to use up that window of grace in the western world. We now seem gripped in some epileptic fit of destructiveness that has all institutions on the verge of toppling from their monolithic weight.

I bring this all up because I find it fascinating that old core struggles never seem to die. They are like those ash covered hot spots in the aftermath of a forest fire. Changes we prefer to think as revolutionary, become illusory when put to the fire. There will be new growth in the forest. The forest may thrive and be different for many years, but it is inevitable that the cycle of flames will reappear to reduce it in time.

Art mirrors life in the same respect, with accepted formulae crushed and rebuilt around some new perspectives that will die and pass into something else again. Through all these passages art remains intrinsically art, the creative expression of life.

There a very few iconoclasts in the world of artistic endeavors today. In the world of film the last great iconoclasts are all memory with the passing of Robert Altman. He and Sam Peckinpah were the last true movie directors to obliterate all those quaint film notions regarding bogus film-western values of virtue, cleanliness, chivalry and death where the good guys always won. The Wild Bunch remains the finest western ever made and it broke every story telling rule in the process. Above all, there were no good guys, only choices and actions. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller ranks right under Peckinpah’s masterpiece as a tremendous film achievement recording much the same struggle. Through Altman’s eyes the old west is reduced to a rainy dark dreary mining camp where the players are drawn to a small brothel and bar as the object of conquest. The brooding themes in Altman’s classic are expanded with the brilliant soundtrack composed by Leonard Cohen, one of the few living iconoclasts of popular music.

The first three Leonard Cohen albums were reissued on compact disc back in April 2007 by Sony/BMG. These are Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room and Songs of Love and Hate. These three album reissues marked the fortieth anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable musical career. If you had to pick just one get the Songs of Leonard Cohen. This album contains most of the material from McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well the wistful tune Suzanne. The ubiquitous producer John Hammond produced this first Leonard Cohen album. I was googling and discovered Suzanne has been covered more than 1,200 times to date.

Two other records from the Leonard Cohen vault that I've grown old with and love are I’m Your Man and The Future, which whisper brutal truths of life in sinuous baritone. Songs like Waiting For The Miracle, Closing Time and Democracy from The Future all are epic tomes on the human condition whose themes are unlike any other in the annals of pop music. Anthem is another beautiful and tragic expression of life where the chorus intones, “Ring the bells that still can ring…. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.”

Atom Egoyan crafted an excellent film, Exotica, around the strange bonds between an exotic dancer and an obsessive club client who are locked in time to Cohen’s Everybody Knows. The song is on the album, I’m Your Man. Don Henley did a tremendous cover of this song that appears on his greatest hits album, Actual Miles.

In the world of music there was a gifted young man, Jeff Buckley, the son of another gifted young man, Tim Buckley. Both the father and son died tragically at very young ages. On the Jeff Buckley album, Grace, there is the most beautiful cover of a Leonard Cohen song my hears have inhaled. The song is Hallelujah. If I had to pick a top 100 song list this one would definitely be included.

If you're a fan, Leonard Cohen has a tour in full swing coming to a region near you. I've enclosed a link below that has all the concert information, and other cool Cohen confidences. If you cannot make a concert this time around, there is also an amazing documentary tribute DVD that was done a few years back entitled Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man. This DVD features performances by U2, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and others. It recounts very effectively this poet and songwriter’s Canadian roots and travels of time, thought and life. Really a great view if you have not seen it. I hadn’t realized how closely Al Pacino resembles Leonard Cohen until I viewed this recently. Check out www.leonardcohenfiles.com if life needs a fresh look. Comments always welcome, spin one of your own.

The Same "American Tune"

March Madness takes on a very new meaning this year, 2009. I sit typing and watch the rain here in "drought" headlined California. It looks like we dodge a fatal bullet to our reeling economy in the Golden State this year with these late winter downpours. There will probably be enough water this year. It doesn't appear to brighten many people's outlook on life, however. People I chat with, of varying ages, seem to be under a dark cloud that this is the worst of times for America, ever.

I was listening to some compilation CDs I put together a few years back. I still engage in the practice of personal deejay in my unfailing pursuit to convert all my analog tapes and records to shiny disc. (Pity, CDs are almost as retro and useless today as my albums of tape and melted plastic grooves. Technology advancements to make sure obsolescence occurs to make you repeatedly buy the same shit over and over again.)

After that small digression, on one of my homemade masterpieces there spilled into the air Paul Simon's American Tune. The song first appeared on Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon album in 1973. At the heart of the song is the line "You cannot be forever blessed." That's the way the country felt during the decade of the 1970s. Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, high unemployment, rising interest rates.

It didn't get any better for most of the 1980s. Unions met Reagan and took it on the chin. There is a splendid documentary, American Dream, now almost 20 years old which covers the plight of organized labor when pitted against large corporations in America. The film deals with the Hormel meat packer strike in the 1980s but seems eerily topical today. The 1980s had the precursor to our latest financial woes with the Savings & Loan meltdown, the insider trading of Ivan Boesky and junk bond shenanigans of Michael Milken to ponder. We also witnessed the art of the leveraged buyout from private equity firms that decided mob economics could work on big scale with the RJR Nabisco deal.

I still remember the wild initial-public-offering ride of the 1990s followed by the collapse of the dot.coms from 2000 to 2001 and of course, 9/11, which put the nation on its collective heels, and ushered in an era of no recovery for anyone except the very top of the earnings pyramid until our latest greed-splurge bubble burst over real estate and credit crunches.

To Paul Simon's point, many of us in the USA just haven't been blessed for a long time. A lot of individuals, and families by extension, did leverage everything they had to create an unsustainable lifestyle that now looks like an aberration rather than an American reality. We be back to square one without much to show for all our efforts but more debt.

All this seems bleak, but really that is not the case. We are still in the same boat we were floating in about 36 years ago. Really, no worse for wear as a nation just a little nervous around the edges. There are great opportunities to be had today if we pull together and build a stronger network that includes all of us.

Dog Days of the Music Biz

This weekend ends it for February 2009. Where did all the good times go? I peer in the mirror and see middle age branded indelibly in every line (lots of lines) upon a face I sometimes hardly recognize staring me down. The value of my holdings plummets in precipitous free-fall of late.

Also, many items I held in high esteem are very low on the mass market of worth these days. I never thought music, art, literature, journalism and film collectively would be worth less than a big dairy's lagoon of trapped methane. But that is what has come to pass.

I feel shitty about the current state of the music business today. Hard to believe we live in a world of commerce for music product that is controlled by Apple and WalMart. Or that Front Line Management would become Ticketmaster and dominate the concert market to such an extreme. Honestly, did you ever imagine that the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC and Journey would decide to sell any of their releases exclusively through WalMart? Did you ever imagine that mp3 sound would become the standard of the music industry? Why bother with a recording studio if you want make a product that has an audio range a little better than a telephone receiver? Cassette tapes are high fidelity compared to mp3s. What happened?

I get the fact that people want to be paid for their work, and that file sharing put a big crimp in royalty payments. Al Kooper wrote a great piece on Napster back in 2001. You can find it on his website, which I've linked here, and on the old side panel with other artists I find pertinent. (It's a cool site, and the man who brought a Norman Granz soul-jazz-blues element to the rock world 40 years ago with Super Sessions still has some juice.)

I recently wrote a brief few lines on this blog about record labels, and their total irrelevancy today. They were very important when the men who created the vision with like minded artists collaborated on music and put the sounds into the air and on the streets. That model broke down along the road somewhere in the late 20th Century.

Selling art like a commodity demeans and devalues art. Exclusives kill commerce, competition and creativity. This "new" business model only furthers a monopolist's control of content and marketshare. This type of deal only favors music artists who have become brands. The other 99% of musicians who toil honestly and creatively have no shot in this economic model. This is the blatant reality of an American Idol world, where the only creative forces in play are the promotional tools to get you to think this crap has any value. It doesn't.

Dream a little dream of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk selling exclusively to Sears or Montgomery Wards back in the day. Maybe you can picture Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly doing an exclusive deal at Woolworths or J.C. Penney's. Creeps you out doesn't it? People were technologically more primitive back about 50 years ago, but they weren't stupid. Can't say the same today.