Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Further fall-out from miscellaneous internet research.

Boning up for Becca’s game (Anamnesis, it’s called, and there’ll be more to say later, in a variety of fora; in the meanwhile, go read what John and Chas, who’ll also be playing, have to say to each other [and Emily, and Vince] about gaming in general, and I’ve got something rattling around in the back of my head about the four stances and how any truly postmodern art needs to take them into account—is that sufficiently hubristic? But for the moment, I’m distracted—ooh, shiny!), in which I’ll be playing a rather (for me) odd character; then, it’ll be an odd situation in a number of respects: it’s been four years? five? since I’ve played in a role-playing game, and much longer since I’ve played in one I didn’t also have a vested interest in as a GM. (But since the terms probably don’t mean that much to most of you reading this, I’ll skip for now the whole discussion of how the way we went about it ended up making the distinction between GM—the “gamemaster,” running the scenario and presenting the world—and players—the ones playing individual agents reacting to that world—problematic at best.)

But! That isn’t why I fired up TexEdit to type up a new post. No, it’s this article I stumbled over from the rations Journal on urban lessons learned from the Russian experience in Chechnya. There’s 57 lessons, starting from the very general and strategic (Lesson 4: Overall Russian command lacked continuity and was plagued by too much senior leadership at the operational level) to the very specific and tactical (Lesson 52: Helicopters need stand-off weapons), but it’s the first one that makes you stop and go, huh:

Lesson 1: Military operations could not solve deep-seated political problems.

You don’t say.

Oh: and if you think I’m thinking there’s several more of these strategic and operational lessons that Yankee chickenhawks will have an opportunity to learn for themselves in Iraq, well, you’re every bit as smart as I thought you were.

—Filed 8704 days ago to Squawkbox; .

•––• •••–• ••••–

That’s “134” in Morse code, if you read • as “dit” and – as “dah.”

“134” means “Who is at the key?”

This is what 134 wrote in the December, 1864 issue of Telegrapher:

now there is a prejudice against lady operators, and the very word he uses, “prejudice” (being a noun in that relation), which, according to Webster means premature opinion; injury; damage, admits that it is merely a myth. Who that wishes to do right, stops for a moment to listen to the voice of prejudice?

I’d known there were female telegraphers up and down the network that bloomed across the States in the latter half of the 19th century. I’ve read The Victorian Internet. (The comparison is not so half-baked as it might seem. —The first online romance kicked off in 1860-something. Honest.) Prejudice (and myths of women’s fingers having a lighter touch on the wire) aside, there was no qualitative difference between men’s and women’s tapping; women were cheaper than men; Western Union liked cheap. The telegraph hubs in most major urban centers employed dormitories full of women, taking in messages from one branch, retransmitting them down another. Women first began filling commercial telegrapher roles in great numbers with the advent of the Civil War, when male operators were drafted into military telegraphy; when the war ended, and those men came back to find women competing for their jobs, we saw some of the tensions of the late 1940s and 1950s play themselves out in microcosm, 80 years before. Here’s what TA had to say on the subject of the American Telegraph Company training women in Morse code for free in the hopes of employing them as operators—at, he feared, a lower rate than men (and thus more attractive to General Marshall Lefferts, American’s owner):

What operators should do to protect themselves from ‘hard times’ is to keep the ladies out of the National Telegraphic Union, and also as much as possible off the lines.

I’d known this, vaguely, sort of, in the back of the brain, having read that book a couple of years ago, and then jotted down some notes about a 19th century dot-com satire that didn’t end up going anywhere in time. (Think about it: San Francisco was hip back then, too.) —So it was nice tonight, on an unrelated search (looking for various types of radio operator slang and shorthand), to stumble over a paper that sums up the debate that raged in the letters column of Telegrapher on this subject. (Since turned into a book. Hmm.) Here, for instance, is Magnetta’s response to TA:

I asked myself, do I live in the nineteenth century…? or are the days of barbarism rolling back upon us, and are we to do homage to the god of selfishness?...All the spleen that may be vented will not assure us that General Lefferts, in opening a way for ladies to become operators, does it from such selfish motives as those stated. Henry Ward Beecher, and John B. Gough, strive in their lectures to convince people of woman’s proper sphere. General Lefferts does more; he gives us a helping hand, and places us where we can prove ourselves equal to the best of you, if only we persevere.

“Protect from hard times—keep ladies out of Union; also off the lines!” Sir! you weighed your soul in that remark! Please examine that weight closely. But how I shudder as I imagine your mother at home washing your linen, while your sister blacks your boots!

And that’s not even the kicker. Go on, click through, browse; keep your eyes peeled for Josie, and what she has to say. (Josie is my new hero.) —And also be sure to note that 134’s letter itself is preserved in all its glory.

God, I love the internet. Sometimes.

—Filed 8705 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [4].

The perfect murder.

Indeed, under federal law, causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules—a misdemeanor with a six-month maximum prison term—is a less serious crime than harassing a wild burro on federal lands, which is punishable by a year in prison.

If you aren’t reading the New York Times’ series on McWane, Inc. [1] [2] [3], you should be.

—Filed 8707 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

Boom and Bust.

Via TalkLeft (who got it from the Horse): most Americans believe that between 1 and 5 million people live in poverty in the US. It’s actually more like 33 million, at or below the poverty level.

What’s truly astonishing about this astonishing number is that most Americans are also far more generous (and far more realistic) in setting the poverty level than the federal government: 47 percent of the respondents believe that it takes almost $35,000 a year to just adequately feed, clothe, and house a family of four.

The Census Bureau classifies a family of four as poor if its cash income is below $18,104 a year.

(A family of three: $14,128. A couple: $11,569. On your own: $9,039.)

So a lot more people are making a lot less money than most Americans realize.

When you couple that with the fact that 19% of Americans believe their income puts them in the top 1% of income earners, and another 20% hope to be 1%ers when all their hard work finally pays off—

Suddenly, it becomes a bit more clear how Rush can get away with this garbage when the reality of American taxation looks a lot more like this.

A lot’s been bandied about regarding Bush’s unguarded assertion that the dwindling of the long-since-squandered surplus will create “a fiscal straitjacket for Congress”; that the administration’s “real” goal in running up unsupportable deficits while slashing and burning taxes is to force reductions in “unnecessary” government services. The result is a sort of Machiavellian vision of wasteful tax-cut-and-spend Republicans who depend on being voted out of office every now and then (because long term, everyone’s voted in and out of office now and then) so that the hard choices and the unpopular service cuts and meager tax hikes are actually made on the Democrats’ watch. (Since the Bush administration still shows absolutely no sign of curbing spending themselves.) —I think we need to take an even longer view. I think Professor DeLong is quite right to note:

Deep in the core of American ideology and culture is a constellation of beliefs and attitudes: belief that the future will be brighter than the present; that what you accomplish you make with your own hands; that individuals should rely on themselves, not the state; that people can cross oceans and mountains to make for themselves a better life; and that those who succeed do so not through luck and corruption but through preparation and industry. These are not beliefs conducive to social democracy.

We think we’re richer than we are. We think we all have more of a shot at striking it rich than we do. We don’t want to think about how much of our lives is dependent on contingency and luck; we don’t want to think about the one bad day that could be between us and the street. We willfully do not want to see how many people live in poverty, and we don’t want to think about how crushing that poverty really is. We don’t want to admit it could ever happen to us, and even if it has, we want to plan to secure what will happen to us, someday. When all our deserving hard work finally pays off. Any day now.

DeLong is right: this ignorance and moonshine is not conducive to notions of sharing the wealth and leveling the playing field.

So it’s not that Republicans depend on deficit-hawk Rubinomics Democrats to come along and clean up after them. We all depend on Republicans to run the whole shebang into the ground and on the rocks from time to time so that things get so bad our better instincts reluctantly kick in, and we get New Deals and Great Societies and some small measure of economic sanity. A different sort of Boom and Bust.

It’s just—how far off are those rocks? How much further till the bottom? 33 million are there already. How much larger does that number need to get before we see it?

Maybe we all need to get out more.

—Filed 8707 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [7].

Tomorrow belongs to—

Friday, 10 January 2003—the special registration deadline for Group 2: male citizens or nationals of Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, born on or before 2 December 1986.

Remember what happened to Group 1?

Via Boing Boing, here’s Lisa Rein’s invaluable page of resources for those who want to keep the pressure on. “Our security is not enhanced by the targeting of innocent people who report voluntarily to the authorities,” she writes. “This is has resulted in a chilling effect on the cooperation of law-abiding, concerned citizens and immigrants with federal agencies as these agencies are increasingly being seen as over-zealous and, in many cases, all too willing to violate the civil and human rights of the people they come in contact with.”

“I’m totally scared,” says Chedli Fathi, a Tunisian whose student visa expired in 2001. “Because after Jan. 10 there is no exception or excuse for not showing up. But if I go, I can get arrested, and if I don’t go, I can get arrested. In both cases, it is bad for me.”

Those quick to leap on Fathi for staying on an expired visa—and thus being in violation of a law—need to keep in mind what an incompetent bureaucracy the INS is.

Look folks—imagine you’re dealing with your DMV. Imagine Flunky #1 messes up your driver’s license application and tells you to come down to the office. Then, when you do go down to the office as requested Flunky #2 notices you drove there AND you don’t have your driver’s license (because, well, they screwed up your application). Flunky #2’s boss recently decided they now had a no-tolerance policy on such things and he has you arrested and thrown in jail.

Then, of course it doesn’t stop there. The special DMV judge operates his own special DMV court which has its own rules. Speedy trial? Nah. You could be there awhile. Who will support your family? Who knows. Chances for appeal? Not really.

The DMV judge deports you back to a country you haven’t lived in for 10-15 years. Your American children wave goodbye, as does your wife.

But, enough of that, I’ve got to go work on my next Tech Central Station column about the inconveniences of airline security for business travelers and my Fox News column about startling new evidence that Michael Bellesiles is a pedophile.
—Atrios

For what it’s worth: the INS’s own page on Special Registration requirements for Groups 1 – 3.

—Filed 8708 days ago to Squawkbox; .

The handle, and flying off thereof:

Post in haste, repent in leisure; an unexamined screed is not worth uploading; never shoot back when you’re all het up. I’m looking over the past few long stories tossed off the short pier and wincing; watching myself dance out onto any number of limbs past the point where I know a damn thing about what I’m saying simply because I was set off and wanted to do something, anything—and speaking up is all too often confused with doing something. —It is; it frequently is. When you’re saying something substantive; when you’re bringing something to the table; when you’re telling a story you know yourself.

When you don’t know anything about Charles Pickering, Sr., beyond other people’s stories found with a couple of quick Google searches, you should maybe not rush to the Movable Type; when you can only link up to what other people are saying about the Bush stimulus package, you should maybe not bother bringing that to the table (especially if you miss one of the more in-depth kickings around it’s gotten); when all you say on the subject of the coming Iraqi war is “Here, look at these pictures of folks there on the ground,” you should maybe cast about for a little more substance before yelling something inconsidered. (For “you,” of course, read me.)

Sigh.

Everyone’s got to find their niche; everyone’s got to find the thing they give a damn about. I’ve whinged about blogging and tipping points and echo chambers, and this is, indeed, a thing blogs can do, and some of them do it very, very well. Their success is inspiring and even intoxicating. Which does not mean this is all blogs can do, or should do. No.

You’ve got to find something you give a damn about, or you won’t do good work. I give a damn about judicial reactivism, fiscal insanity, and grotesquely stupid wars; what I haven’t given a damn about is stopping to think for a moment, marshalling my arguments, finding something of substance and bringing it carefully, deliberately, and as irrevocably as possible to the table. —That’s how I am, sometimes, with politics, with the state of the world as it is; I want to leap up on something and point and shout at the top of my lungs, “Jesus Christ, can you believe this shit?” Or words to that effect. To do something. You know? And when done well, it’s preaching to the choir, and that’s a fine thing to do from time to time; it’s just that preaching to the choir is, in the end, about as effective as pissing in a pool. You get that nice, warm feeling—and then what?

The thing is that the thing I give a damn about is rooting around in pop culture. Digging through the so-called dross for the joy of finding unexpected gems. Watching how people use the stuff and re-use it, poach from it and recombine it; lining up the pieces of it in pretty, signifying patterns; kicking it apart to see what makes it tick. Criticism, I suppose. (A lengthy and whimsical for instance.) —This is what I give a damn about; this is where (I’d like to think, anyway) I can bring something to the table. A table, anyway.

It’s just that it’s so damn frivolous. Isn’t it?

This narrowing of the American mind is exacerbated by the withdrawal of the left from active politics. Virtually ignored by the media, the left has further marginalized itself by a retreat into introspective cultural criticism. It seems content to do yoga and gender studies, leaving the fundamentalist Christian right and the multinationals to do the politics.

That’s Brian Eno, being a wee bit uncharitable and even unfair in Counterpunch. Still. Stings a little. (A lot, actually.)

But what he’s glossing over and I’m being disingenuous about is that the best criticism is at once deeply and transcendantly political (especially gender studies; yoga, too, has that potential), and that in even the most irrelevant of out-of-touch ivory towers, clear, vital, engaged criticism can end up changing the stories we all tell each other and the ways in which we tell them. Which is cool and even in its own (modest-seeming) way, earth-shaking. The potential, at least, is there; the possibility. Sometimes. Now and again. But it takes so goddamned long. It’s almost utterly and frustratingly dependent on contingency and the laws of unintended consequences. And there’s so many pressing needs right here right now and I want to do something—

Eh. Maybe I should go volunteer somewhere already. —Next month. After the taxes are done and the downstairs is ready to rent out again.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

—Filed 8708 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [9].

Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.

Which comes from Donna Ladd’s take-no-prisoners jeremiad against the very idea of nominating Charles W. Pickering, Sr., to the Fifth Circuit Court. “Apologists are actually giving a would-be circuit judge an ovation for once prosecuting the low-life scum of the KKK,” she wrote, holding up to the light one of Pickering’s strongest claims to having reconstructed himself. —This was written, mind you, back before Lott stuck his foot in his mouth and got demoted from Senate Majority Leader to chair the Senate Rules Committee; back before Frist, Lott’s replacement as Majority Leader, vowed to turn the Lott imbroglio into “a catalyst for unity and a catalyst for positive change.”

Well, Bush has just handed him a doozy of a test for those catalysts. —It’s time to dust off the Case Against Pickering, again:

Judge Pickering’s opinions on the bench also raise questions about his commitment to fairness and to the federal courts’ historic role as dispenser of equal justice. Many of his civil rights opinions betray an indifference, and even outright hostility, toward those seeking to remedy perceived injustice. Judge Pickering displays a tendency to inject his personal opinions and biases about the state of the law, the losing plaintiffs, or judges in other cases, raising serious questions about whether he is ruling based on personal views or on the dictates of the law. He has also acted in other ways that call into question his commitment to fairness, including refusing to appoint another judge to decide whether he should be recused when a party alleged that he had a personal bias and threatening or imposing sanctions in cases in which sanctions did not appear to be warranted. He has been reversed by the 5th Circuit Court over decisions in which he not only failed to follow controlling legal precedent, but failed even to mention it.

Set aside for the moment the question of his commitment to civil rights, if you like; refuse to contemplate his past actions, papers written in law school, his support for the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee. Forget that the Fifth Circuit has the highest minority population by percentage of any circuit in the country, yet only one black judge and two Hispanic judges. (We are, after all, a color-blind society, with no need for such corrective action.) Forget the whole Trent Lott deal; he was an isolated case, and anyway, John Ashcroft is still Attorney General. Forget all of this and ask yourself the big question, you know, the one on merit:

Is this man even competent to ride the Fifth Circuit?

The Free Congress Foundation says yes, on the basis of three of over a thousand decisions—and writes off Pickering’s paper used to strengthen enforcement of Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation laws as “an academic treatise on a legal question” and support and even use of the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee as a vote between sealing or burning the Committee’s records.

Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.

The questions to ask yourself, now; is the appalling hubris of renominating Pickering to better grease the skids for the renomination of Priscilla “Enron” Owens? Are both nominations designed to draw attention away from the unabashed looting that’s the centerpiece of the Bush plan for “economic recovery”? Is the whole mess nothing more than a contrived bundle of awfulness to distract us from North Korea? Why hasn’t Tom Ridge declared a mauve alert yet? And how much more cynical do we have to get to keep up?

—Filed 8709 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Synonyms: accessory, accomplice, affiliate, ally, auxiliary, branch, buddy, chum, clubber, co-operator, cohort, collaborator, compatriot, comrade, confederate, consort, fellow, mate, offshoot, pal, partner, peer, playmate, sidekick.

When he sat down with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in a Chicago hotel suite on July 18, former Missouri Senator John Danforth assumed he was the only one in the room being considered for Vice President. After the intense three-hour meeting ended, Danforth came away thinking he might be offered the job. It never occurred to him that Cheney, the man in charge of Bush’s selection process, was also his competition. “Cheney flew [me] up to Chicago,” Danforth recalled last week. “I took that to mean Cheney had declined it.”
—from “How Bush Decided: His choice of Cheney says a lot about how the Governor sees himself and what he learned from Texas and from his father,” 1 August 2000, cnn.com.

It is assumed you’re reading Talking Points Memo on a daily basis; certainly, he’s a must-read on North Korea, as he has been on South Dakota, as he has been on Trent Lott, as… You get the point. But I wanted to take a moment to make extra special sure you all read “Vice Grip,” his latest for The Washington Monthly. —Paradigm shift begins at home, after all.

—Filed 8710 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Denying whuffie.

So I haven’t read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom yet but I have read this squib on Boing Boing about how the Guardian dubbed whuffie as one of the 25 technologies and notions that hold the most promise over the coming year:

It’s the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie—that’s what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.

See, I use Sitemeter to check the stats on this blog-thing. (Arguably too much.) It’s down this morning; I can’t see how many people have visited, or where they’re coming from.

I’m also using blogrolling.com to build a blogroll. I went to do some work on it this morning, and it’s gone from the internet; there’s something up (at least temporarily) with the URL. Since the rolls are hosted at blogrolling.com, blogrolls all over the net (like the one at Rittenhouse Review) are gone, kaput, nada. —So people who might otherwise have browsed through to new sites can’t. At least, temporarily.

Obviously, there’s plenty of ways to host this stuff yourself and not be dependent on other people’s bandwidth or server issues. But for those of us without the requisite skillset, well, they’re darned useful.

But they’re also a glaring weak spot in any economy of whuffie.

—Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just cranky. More coffee, then off to work. Whee.

—Filed 8710 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [2].

États Rouges, 2050.

She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was, in fact, quite typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the alter when she said the Communion service. By 2037, when she was tried for heresy, convicted and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, and it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant our her final years in obscurity. But we are a people who do our duty.

I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved that at last, after so many years of humiliation, the majority had taken back the culture. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared about the lawn before the Maine statehouse that August afternoon were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.

—Bill Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, as published in the Washington Post, 30 April 1995.

According to Fichte a “real völkische community” would egalise itself once the nationalist consciousness started growing. All members of this community would be entitled to a fair and sober existence, if they would keep themselves far away from “foreign influences” and “decadent luxury.” Just like Fichte, the Khmers believed the “völkische” body to be a biological organism that could only remain healthy when completely isolated from “foreign countries.”

“Daddy says the ethnic cleansing is an obsession to the Angkar. The Angkar hates everyone who is not a real Khmer. The Angkar wants to clean the democratic Kampuchea from all other races. They are seen as the source of all problems, all corruption and all injustice. Only when they are gone, the real Khmer culture wil florish again,” Ung writes in her book. She must keep at distance from “ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and other minorities that are racially depraved.”

—Eric Krebbers, quoting in English the Dutch translation of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father.

Via Atrios, Archpundit, and Joe Conason. “The first Civil War was, on the whole, a gentlemanly affair,” writes Bill “Brother Number One” Lind; “the second one wasn’t.” —Well. The first time is a tragedy, the second a farce; and those who do not learn from history are doomed to end up on its slag heap.

—Filed 8710 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

Too much woman (for a hen-pecked man).

“What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?” asks Phil.

“Me?” says me.

“As an example. What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?”

“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”

“You didn’t date Nico.”

I love it when Phil comes to visit.

We picked him up this morning for a late breakfast and a few hours of general bumming around. The plan, as laid out yesterday, had been to maybe do some record shopping.

“No,” he says, at breakfast. “Scratch that. I blew my budget yesterday. Unless…”

When Phil trails off like that, it’s an invitation to prod him for more. This is always worthwhile. “Yes, Phil?”

“Well, I’m trying to fill in some of the gaps in rock history between, oh, Char Vinnedge and, oh, Chrissy Hynde…”

Jenn and I grin at each other. “Who?” says Jenn. —She’s asking about Char Vinnedge, of course. I mean, if you don’t know from Chrissy Hynde, well, read this and go buy some albums and listen to them and then come back. Not to be snooty or anything. But.

Anyway: Char Vinnedge: as Phil tells it, back in 1964 the Beatles came to America. Vinnedge went to see them in concert and (like most screaming young girl fans) left with the burning desire to form her own band just like them. So she dragooned her sister and a couple of friends into playing the songs she wrote and they called themselves the Luv’d Ones and if they never quote broke out of the Michigan circuit back in the day, we can in this 21st century buy a run of their stuff off Sundazed Records and with the benefit of hindsight note how ahead of their time they were and how Vinnedge was a guitar god of the first water and if we go a bit overboard sometimes, assuring folks they weren’t the puppets of record company executives, they weren’t a marketing gimmick at all, why, that all-girl band really did play their instruments, well, it’s understandable. (We’re frequently reminded the Monkees could play their instruments, after all.) —But the Luv’d Ones are unusual. They were ahead of their time. They blazed a trail, back there in the mid ’60s, for all that it’s gone largely unnoticed.

Rock history, then, from Char Vinnedge to Chrissy Hynde.

“Well,” says Phil, “for one thing, there’s the Joy of Cooking.” And can we stop for a moment and reflect on how fucking cool it is to name an American roots-folk-rock band the Joy of Cooking? “They were formed in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when I think both of them were in their 30s. So they were doing rock songs about housewives being abandoned by their husbands and having nothing to do all day but drink, you know? But they weren’t an all-woman band. They had some guys who would come and play their instruments and keep their mouths shut. And anyway, they aren’t the ones I’m looking for. Not today…”

“Oh?” I say.

“Fanny,” says Phil. “Fanny and Birtha.”

“Fanny,” says Jenn.

“And Birtha,” says Phil. “I’ve got one album by Fanny, but it sucks. Still. It’s an all-woman heavy rock band from like 1971. And Birtha I think put out two albums, and everyone says they’re better than Fanny, but I’ve never seen either one anywhere. So I’m safe. I’m not going to find them. I mean, I blew my music budget yesterday…”

So we pay for breakfast and Jenn heads back to the house to work on the latest page of Dicebox and Phil and I stroll down Hawthorne to Excalibur, where he picks up a 1973 copy of The History of Underground Comics (out of print). “I blew my music budget,” he says. “Not my buying-neat-stuff-on-a-whim budget.” And on our stroll back to the car, we happened to pass Crossroads Music, and since Phil had already blown his music budget and anyway he was not going to find what he was looking for, he was safe, right?

Score: Birtha, by Birtha; Charity Ball and Rock and Roll Survivors, by Fanny; and a copy of Sandinista on vinyl, which isn’t one of the gaps Phil was trying to fill, but is pretty thin on the ground at this moment in history, so.

And so I got to hear Birtha, and I got to hear Fanny, and I think I agree: Birtha’s the better band. The opening track on the album—“Free Spirit”—gets this chugging beat underway that cries out for some Quentin Tarantinoid to dredge it up for a perfectly obscure moment of transcendent pop-culture swagger on film. And if Shele couldn’t quite do the Janis she was trying for (I think it was Shele), well, she hit close enough to not have any regrets, I think. —But I’m perverse: I think I like Fanny better. Of the two albums we heard, I’d be more likely to play Charity Ball than Birtha. More range—no, not quite; more ambition in what they were reaching for, even if they weren’t as successful in pulling it off. It was a more fun album, in some respects. But I want both albums in the house—it was like—okay. There’s the Replacements song, “Alex Chilton,” right, which is one of the best songs ever. And it’s about Alex Chilton, who was the prodigy kid behind Big Star, whom a lot of people who know from music talk about but you don’t hear all that much. So I finally go out and get the CD that has Big Star’s first two albums together, and I play it, and it was—but I need to digress again. Back in high school there was a cool radio station in Chicago whose call letters escape me. Michael Palin, looking for a quick hit of cash, did a couple of rather funny television commercials for them. In one of them, he was inexplicably holding a pizza while informing the viewer that this particular radio station did not play its music over and over and over again from some pre-programmed hit list. Variety, that was the key. A wide spectrum of songs. He looks down at the pizza, and sighs. Holds it up. “And to think,” he says, “This was once ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”

Maybe you had to be there. But: the point: Big Star is pretty squarely in the genre called Classic Rock; it’s what you’d hear on the radio in the upper 90s to the low 100s, I guess, and don’t those stations usually have a morning Zoo? “Aqualung” and Foreigner? You know? Big Star would in style and approach and general sound fit seamlessly into that format. —Except that it isn’t pizza.

And neither is Birtha. And neither is Fanny.

And now I want to hear some Luv’d Ones, too.

“They weren’t the first, though,” says Phil. As if one could ever point to anyone and say, that person, there, that’s the first. As if the category we’re talking about—women rock instrumentalists? Rock bands fronted by women who wanted to front their own rock band?—were anything more than a vague sketch. Fanny and Birtha weren’t the only points (we could maybe hunt around for whatever Bitch put down on tape somewhere) and of course Char Vinnedge wasn’t the first (if you wanted to get silly about it, you could point to maybe Bessie Smith).

But Phil wants to talk about somebody else. “Nope. There was somebody earlier…”

“Who, Phil?”

He grins. “Kathy Marshall, the Queen of the Surf Guitar. She was 13 years old. She played a lot with Eddie and the Showmen and blew Dick Dale off the stage. And guess how many recordings she has.”

I shrug. Phil holds up his thumb and his forefinger and makes a circle with them.

“There’s a couple of acetates somewhere of two songs written for her that nobody’s pressed,” he says. “That, and maybe six pages of photos of this 13-year-old girl in a cute little dress with a Fender Stratocaster in the Encyclopedia of Surf Guitar. She apparently lives in Orange County these days. Had a couple of kids. She’s what, 52?”

And then we talked about whether one can categorically state that Death is a character in every Coen Brothers movie (I can’t find it in The Big Lebowski and I’m not entirely certain about The Man Who Wasn’t There) and what you’d maybe put on a mix tape that begins with “Mink Car” and ends with “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”

“Hey,” says Phil. “What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?”

I love it when he comes to visit.

—Filed 8711 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [1].

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