RIP Shane McGowan

Remember when you used to hear one song that would be so good that you would go out and immediately buy the CD or album? In my teens, "Fairytale of New York" was one of those songs. It isn't just arguably the best Christmas song ever, but it's among the tops in the punk cannon. And while the album it's on, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, never held my full attention, it does include the superb title track and "Thousands are Sailing."

Vocalist Shane MacGowan always teetered somewhere between having huge punk vitality and being emaciated, wobbly, and literally getting hit by various cars. He was one of those how-does-he-keep-surviving Keith Richards rocker types. And he made it through 65 whiskey-soaked years before succuming to pneumonia this week.

Bursting from London's humming punk world of the 1970s, his band The Pogues (who have plenty of other great tunes, especially on The Essential Pogues) really didn't get big until punk was later fading. Bringing a bit of world beat, from the Irish world that he knew best, ended up being a perfect fit into the band's punk sound. The formula worked from the 1980s and into the 1990s before, after nine years, he was kicked out of his own band for his drug, alcohol, and mental and physical health problems. 

MacGowan's great legacy may be summed up in this line from his obituary in The New York Times:

The Pogues’ emergence had generated a backlash from musical traditionalists in Ireland. The great Irish singer Tommy Makem called the band “the greatest disaster ever to hit Irish music.”

Now that sounds like something to cheer about as we celebrate MacGowan's life!

Also in the same category of punk greats we lost this week is Scott Kempner, guitarist for The Dictators, who passed away at age 69. Although perhaps most known for their anthemic cover of The Stooges' "Search and Destroy," my favorites are "Stay With Me," which has a lightning-flashing lead, "(I Live for) Cars and Girls," with its demented Beach Boys sound, and "Two Tub Man," with its almost-KISS-like sound. RIP Scott Kempner.

RIP Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger advised 12 - yes, 12! - presidents on foreign policy and has passed away at the age of 100. I’m not sure whether he helped Calvin Coolidge as a baby, but he got to just about every other U.S. leader since then.

Hard working literally until the end (he recently co-authored a book on AI), Kissinger is regarded as the most powerful Secretary of State since World War I, having been a top negotiator in deals with China, the former Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Even the current Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, admits to being advised by Kissinger within the past month.

Kissinger was one of the very top - if not top - advisor to Richard Nixon, and he said he would have “excruciatingly long conversations” that would go over and over the same material again and again. Much of the time they would land back on the strategy that the U.S. had to stand up to aggression from all corners of the world or it would lose credibility. This of course extended the awful results in Vietnam, contributing to a long losing and mostly pointless war effort for the U.S.

If you were to ask me, a peace-seeking liberal, I would tell you my opinion is that Kissinger really screwed up this country, making it more war-loving and helping us get to today’s more dangerously isolationist place. But, at the same time, he's always been a bit of a mystery to me (maybe I'm too young) and his legacy remains enigmatic - leaning towards brilliant with a touch of evil.

Remembering 9/11 all these years later

9/11: One Day in America was sitting on my DVR for a long time. The 2021 six-part National Geographic documentary (that they show at the 9/11 Memorial museum and that’s also available on Disney + and Hulu) is still something that is painful to sit through. But it is important to watch and remember one of the darkest days in this country’s history.

I was living with my girlfriend, soon to be wife, at 12th and N Streets NW near Logan Circle in Washington D.C. She had already gone to work in Rosslyn and I was getting ready to leave for my job at the World Resources Institute. I had the TV on and started following the news, never to leave for work that day. Meanwhile she would exit work and, with a plane crashing in sight from her office into the Pentagon, the Metro closed and she had no choice but to walk home from Virginia. We would go out to somberly meet friends that night at the Townhouse Tavern, making our way through silent streets reminiscent of what a nuclear zone must be like.

The show follows events in a generally chronological order, with emotional interviews of key people from that day. There’s the TV crew that were lucky enough to get turned away by first responders, almost surely in turn saving their lives. There are people who were saved from being trapped in offices and under rubble. There is a woman who survived after a piece of one of the plane’s landing gear sheared off her back as it fell from the sky. There’s the woman whose son was one of the small group that attempted to fight the terrorists on the plane that landed in Pennsylvania, which was later suspected of heading towards the U.S. Capitol Building.

The footage, shown from seemingly as many angles as exist, of the planes again and again hitting the two World Trade Towers is - there are hardly words for it - extremely powerful and still so sad.

The series doesn’t go into other types of details, such as where President George W. Bush was that day (reading to school children in Florida) or the political and military hunt and war that was about to be launched in the fight against the Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the attacks. You’ll have to go elsewhere for all that. But what you get here is more than enough.

5 out of 5 stars

Liz Phair revisits her classic debut album at D.C.’s Anthem

When it comes to female indie rockers of the 1990s, I put Liz Phair, Juliana Hatfield, and Kim Deal at the very top. So it was awesome to finally see Phair live last night at The Anthem in Washington D.C.

After a really enjoyable opening set by Blondshell (which, at the moment, has my 21st favorite album of 2023), Phair entered with her crack band and launched right into playing 1993’s Exile in Guyville in its entirety. Even the lesser songs on that release translated really well to the live setting, but I still would have preferred more inclusions from my two favorite Phair albums: 1994’s Whip-Smart and 1998’s Whitechocolatespaceegg.

The sound at The Anthem impressively matches D.C.’s other perfect-sound-always venue The 9:30 Club. The night’s clear highlight, Fuck and Run, really popped and put on full display how wonderful the sound operators and acoustics are there.

Another clear highlight was the first song of the encore, Supernova, off of Whip-smart, which got the crowd dancing and having a great time. We had actually moved back from our 13th-row seats by that point and had a much better view than the one we started with jammed in tight on tiny chairs up front.

Johnny Feelgood and Polyester Bride were next, both from Whitechocolatespaceegg. Spanish Doors off her excellent 2021 album Soberish and Why Can’t I? from her 2003 self-titled release rounded out the encore. See the setlist.

Now I need to get back to reading her book Horror Stories.

4.5 out of 5

Midsommar and Florence Pugh give me cultish nightmares

It's been a long time since I had nightmares after watching a film, but it happened last night after I watched 2019's Midsommar. 

Florence Pugh starred in what I recently said was the worst movie I've seen in the past year, and in some ways Don't Worry Darling has some of the same overly suspenseful vibes as Midsommar. But where that one was boring and not profound, this psychological horrorfest is just the opposite.

Pugh stars as a young woman trying to recover from a monumental family tragedy. Her boyfriend, played by Jack Reynor, is a jerk and not much help on her path towards psychological recovery. That is when a friend invites them and four other friends to a Swedish nine-day festival that only happens once every 90 years. That is one of many pieces of the plot that have been nagging on me; how could these people at the festival seem so deeply entwined with their activities if this is something that essentially only happens once in a lifetime? I'm not sure if it's nonsensical or whether that just makes the movie even more eerily compelling.

Midsommar could almost be called something other than a horror movie. There aren't really monsters per se. The scenery is beautiful, usually bright and sunny. But the imagery and rituals along the way and the audience's questions as to why the characters do what they do are deep, puzzling, and often very unsettling.

I love studies of cults and the ways some people take advantage over others who are vulnerable, which the Midsommar cult does with Pugh's character. She ties the movie together and proves why she is a real movie star. Her ending moment is classic and makes you wonder if she has found a way to erase her pain, no matter how awful that path may be. It definitely makes me want to see some of her other recent vehicles, including Oppenheimer, Little Women, and A Good Person.

5 out of 5 stars

Beach and resort culture have a fascinating history

I’ve been reading The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach. The author, Sarah Stodola, after years as a travel journalist spouting endless positivity at beach resorts, wanted to take a more critical look, to try to determine where resorts and their industry are headed in light of things like climate change and the increase in natural disasters. 

I was probably influenced to read this based on my love of the TV show The White Lotus (she references it right away), which combined the long-held tourist Bob Marley/Jimmy Buffett perspective with the behind-the-scenes dark side of the lives of resort employees.

She concludes that paradise for humans is nature conquered, not actual nature. An infinity pool overlooking the ocean is much better than contending with the sand and waves and unknowns underneath in the sea.

Stodola looks back to the history of human infatuation with the coast. 

• In the 1500s, the British upper class would retreat to spa towns with a focus on the healing power of water. In 1660, a doctor there founded a mineral spring spa which just happened to be near the ocean, so he got the idea to begin marketing the health benefits of ocean water, a resource he had in great supply. By 1736, entire towns were starting to understand the game. Brighthelmstone changed its name to Brighton, easier to pronounce and seemingly sounding like a coastal town worth a visit. “The resort concept took hold.”
• In northern Africa, southern Europe, and Polynesia, people have been surfing since the 1700s, maybe even before in some places.
• Although “paradise” used to be an Iranian word referring to walled gardens, “paradise’s relocation to the shore is a twentieth-century phenomenon.”
• Monte Carlo used to be called Vininaia and changed its name to encourage people to visit, which they did, and the city in Morocco became one of the first major resorting destinations. At first the beach was the thing there, but the realization over time has been to get rid of that and build a marina for the exorbitant yachts and create massive homes all the way up the mountains overlooking the water.
• The Jersey Shore became big time throughout the 1800s for people in New York and Philadelphia wanting to escape the summer heat. Their reasons for visiting rapidly changed from caring for their health to more along the lines of entertainment. It became known as the “American Monte Carlo” and still today has a pretty good claim to being America’s first beach resort.
• With his follow up to The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald helped “immortalize the international beach culture” with his book Tender is the Night. Between him and Picasso, their depictions of tanned skin and “getting sun became something you have the leisure to do instead of something that happens to you while you’re out toiling in the fields.”
• Mark Twain, while working for a Sacramento newspaper, got to be one of the lucky few to steamboat to the Sandwich Islands in the mid-1800s. He loved it and spread the word that what we now know as Waikiki in Hawaii would soon become a hot destination. Hawaii would become a U.S. state in 1900 and, ironically, Waikiki never actually had much of a beach. It was constructed and even today still shows stretches that look more like an industrial port than a world-class resort strip. But sea-level rise is occurring there more rapidly than most places on Earth, and pretty much all experts agree that Waikiki will not exist anywhere close to what it looks like today in a mere 100 years.
• Waikiki was largely able to enter the pop-culture psyche because silent-film superstars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (and much later the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin) vacationed there. Then, after World War II, a strong economy and the advent of paid vacations for the white-collar working masses allowed for more creativity and leeway in their vacation ambitions, even at a time before air travel became affordable.
• I love this quote from the author on the eternal struggle for the beach resort or really any coastal development: “The issue is not that the sand is moving - that’s what nature intended, in fact - but that we insist it stay in one place.”
• Hawaii, taking this insight into account, can be credited with taking some of the most action on climate change in the world - a low bar, but still. It became the first U.S. state to create a law to follow the Paris Climate Agreement and, in 2021, banned the sale of sunscreen to protect coral reefs from bleaching.
• Much of the beach resort culture now seen throughout the world originated in Hawaii, including beach umbrellas in cocktails, colorful shirts, and surfboards. Actions started in Korolevu and Denarau in Fiji that have taken hold most other places include the layout of individual bungalows extended longways down the beachfront, with bamboo walls and thatched roofs, and also the idea (paid for by massive Japanese investment) of moving tons of dirt from a nearby mountain to the coastline and to fill in mangrove swamps to raise the elevation of the island.

CODA will no doubt sing its way into your heart

The whole time I was watching CODA, I was trying to figure out what the title meant. Since the story is largely about music, I figured that could be it. Or that it was the end of the way of life the family in the film knew or that possibly there was a death coming soon in the story.

I wasn’t right about any of that. CODA stands for Child of Deaf Adults, and that’s exactly what it’s about, as the Apple award-winning film is all about the coming-of-age of a girl in a small Massachusetts fishing community whose mom, dad, and brother are all deaf and rely heavily on her to help them translate and navigate life.

Emilia Jones plays the girl, Ruby Rossi, and she, like the entire cast, is phenomenal, having learned American Sign Language for the part.

Eugenio Derbez plays her music teacher at high school and discovers Ruby has a talent for much more than fishing and translating. She has a great singing voice and he works to hopefully get her into Berklee’s music school.

Marlee Matlin plays Ruby’s mom and can’t understand why she would want to be a singer when the rest of the family can’t hear it. 

But along with Jones, it is Troy Kotsur as the goofy and loving dad who adds the comic relief to what is actually kind of a sad, but still uplifting, story. He won the Academy Award for best actor and the movie itself won Best Picture.

I can’t believe it took me a couple of years to get around to watching CODA. It might just be the best thing on Apple. 

5 out of 5 stars

Great Magazine Reads: MOJO offers a teaser to the new Thurston Moore book

Legendary Sonic Youth singer/guitarist Thurston Moore just released his first book, Sonic Life, which is a mix of autobiography and music history. MOJO’s December issue has a great interview about it, a nice appetizer for when I get to the book. He will have an uphill battle to make it as awesome as that of his ex-bandmate and ex-wife Kim Gordon. I place Girl in a Band in my pantheon of true classic rock books. 

Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from the interview:

• Moore essentially knew he wanted to be a rock star when he saw Kiss live in 1974.
• The book delves into a lot of discovery in his teen years of the downtown New York punk scene that he explored from his Connecticut home base with his gay friend Harold Paris, who died in 1990.
• A lot of Moore’s Sonic Youth writing was inspired by elements of American iconography. He was reading books about Charles Manson and his “attack battalion of dune buggies” and, at the same time, hearing Ronald Reagan talking about bringing back the good old days. Moore thought, “bring back those old good days?”
• Even though the band’s final album was called The Eternal, nobody in the band knew it would be their final record.
• There is a chapter devoted to his relationship with Nirvana. 
• In 2003, Paul McCartney approached Moore after a Sonic Youth gig to ask him about his unique approach to guitar tuning. In turn, Thurston asked Sir Paul about his brother Mike’s 1974 album McGear. Paul said, “Nobody ever asks me about Mike” and Moore responded that he knew way more about that than he did about The Beatles! (If you haven’t heard that album - and you haven’t - you should. Plus, it was produced and co-written by Paul.)
• Neil Young’s crew called Sonic Youth “smarty-pants noise rock” when they opened for him in 1991. Perhaps feeling bad because of his team’s mistreatment of Sonic Youth, Neil invites them again to play an acoustic set later in the year and it ended in Gordon smashing her guitar to crowd boos.
• Yoko One was seemingly the only audience member - Evan Dando, Liz Taylor, Lou Reed, and many other celebrities were also there - to not hate a 1998 synth-noise performance by Moore and Don Fleming as the band FOOT. They ended the performance at the New York Roxy after five minutes.

Learning some simple facts about the very misunderstood country of Israel

Noa Tishby grew up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and became a child actor. After she got out of the mandatory Israeli military, she moved to Los Angeles and found herself having more success as a producer. 

She started realizing that very few people in the U.S. had any idea about the history of Israel. They would ask her severely misinformed questions like “how do your parents feel about you being modern and not wearing any head gear (also known as the Muslim hijab).” She eventually realized she was spending lots of time telling stories about her homeland and what Israel was and is all about.

Some basic facts:

• Israel is a very “freaking modern” country. It is not, say, Afghanistan.
• There is huge difference between a kibbutz and a settlement.
• It’s the only country in the Middle East that “has been an uninterrupted democracy since its founding in 1948, after the United Nations granted the Jews a state after the horrors of the Holocaust. The Arabs were also granted a state at the time, but they chose to refuse it and start a war.”
• Israel is not a colonialist state. It’s a refugee state that was decolonized from British rule. Sounds a lot like another country we’ve all heard about.
• It’s not really an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s more like Israeli-Arab, which makes Israel a serious underdog, with its population of 9 million compared to the 21 Arab nations surrounding it with 423 million people.

Tishby's new book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, is a fascinating read at a time when we all need to be reminded that we should all be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and anti-Hamas, a terrorist organization that has the sole aim of wiping out Israel and uses international aid funding to build attack tunnels instead of schools and hospitals. Further, it uses that funding to build these tunnels under schools and hospitals, as a way to use innocent and usually vulnerable Palestinians in Gaza, where Hamas is based, as human shields for themselves.

There have been a lot of slogans thrown around social media and at protests recently that contain a lot of half truths at best. I like Tishby’s slogan best. “Free Gaza from Hamas” says it most humanely.

She also reminds us of the many beautiful things about the very existence of a Jewish state, which is maybe a little like if Washington D.C., a tiny liberal enclave, were dropped into the deepest rural reddest parts of the U.S. South. Here are just a few examples:

• There is a “built-in liberalism in Judaism and Zionism”
• Debate and dissent are a key component of a “highly Jew-y culture”
• “The Jewish holidays are connected to the moon.” That's pretty cool
• It’s a place you can be super secular and still carry a Bible in your bag because being a little weird is cool
• But to leave God and religion out of it for a second, Jewish people - despite what a lot of people not relying on archeological or written records often claim - are indigenous to the land of Israel not just since 1948 but rather for about 2,500 years, even back before the time that one dude was wandering around there in his hippy hair and sandals and spreading messages about peace and humbleness. That’s all very different than the state of Palestine, which, oh yeah, has never been a state. Not that it shouldn’t be a state, but just that is has yet to ever be - in case you hear folks in their antisemitism using a lot of talking points about indigenousness and how Israel needs to “give that land back.”

And, by the way, my above D.C./Deep South analogy isn’t entirely accurate. Israel is in fact about the size of New Jersey. But hopefully my sloppy comparison makes a point. It takes about six hours to drive the whole way north to south and about an hour to get west to east. So it’s small and you could say it’s a “rough neighborhood” with the likes of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran surrounding it. 

One of the truly odd things about Israel is why such a place - with almost no natural resources and a very limited supply of fresh water - is the origin of Judaism and Christianity as well as the home of the third-most holy place for Islam.

These are some of the details from the very start of Tishby's book, so as you can see, it's very interesting and she is a great and funny storyteller. I'm excited to keep reading it.

RIP Rosalynn Carter

Rosalynn Smith was young Jimmy Carter's sister Ruth's best friend back in 1945 when he asked his sister to set them up. It was practically settled from the start that Jimmy and Rosalynn would work hard to make the world - beyond just Plains, Georgia - a better place.

Rosalynn Carter would go on to become one of the most politically active first wives in history, right up there with Eleanor Roosevelt. She has died at age 96 in Plains from dementia. 

While they served in the Oval Office from 1976 to 1980, they arguably went on to have much more influence in their post-presidential years. They focused largely on human rights and democracy and did a lot of Habitat for Humanity house building. She focused on mental health and, under her watch, the office of first lady became a federal position for the first time.

Jimmy is still alive at age 99 and their marriage is now the longest ever for a presidential couple at more than 77 years.