Record Club V. 14

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

Log and photos to come...

Monday Night Football Degenerates

Russell Wilson throws a game-winning interception!
And how much money did the ref who called the int a TD, and ignored the offensive pass interference call, have on the Seahawks?

Treme - Season 3, Episode 1 - 'Knock With Me - Rock With Me'

It's back!  I'm the only one watching. And that's fine with me.

First scene ( indicating the core theme of this season)  --  second line for a passed, local musician, "I'll Fly Away." Cops bust it up. Anger stews. Antoine Batiste gets arrested. The feelings for the show, and New Orleans all flood back...
Final Scene -- Terry on a quiet French Quarter Street, worried that his F.E.M.A trailer is contaminated. Ruminates on his ex-wife saying maybe N.O. isn't right for him. Afterall, 'only dreamers and drunks' stay in New Orleans. He takes a look at a local street urchin sharing a taste for a po-boy, "Don't ever change."

Favorite line: "What's there to do that's fun in Indianapolis?" -- Lt. Terry Colson
Second favorite line: "I'm not an adult, I'm a musician." -- Antoine Batistte

Here's a New Yorker review.

And some words from David Simon on the themes percolating in Season 3:

"Everything comes with a cost," Simon says. "That doesn't mean you don't take it. That doesn't mean that you walk away from the money at all points. Money is in neutral. It's the way in which it wraps itself that you have to struggle with and debate.

"A lot of the people who have had the most successful and influential musical careers in America came from New Orleans," Simon continues. "They had to leave New Orleans to do it. Nobody knew who Louis Armstrong was in New Orleans; he had to go to Chicago for that. Staying has its beauties and delights but it also has its costs."

"When you are living in a town that has a retrograde police department, and a disastrous school system, and one of the most corrupt civic governments in the history of the republic, and you still don't want to live anywhere else, the town is doing something right," he says. "Katrina led a lot of New Orleanians to reflect on ... why they can't live anywhere else. It led a lot of people to think about what it is they value in life as part of this community and to hold on to that and do everything possible to serve it and maintain it.
"That's the affirming thing that I find fascinating," Simon continues. "In my opinion, what saved the city, to the extent the city has been saved, has been the city's culture. Not its political leadership. Not the money that was ostensibly directed or misdirected. It's not economics. It's not political. It's community and it's cultural. That's the one thing that New Orleans has gotten right in such a firm and unequivocal way."

Bill Fuckin' Murray

And he's from the suburbs of Chicago.

The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

How Liberal Arts Colleges are Failing America. This isn't just recession babble I bring up but, if I had a graduating high school child, I would seriously offer them the possibility to take a year, two years, or even more to enter the real world before attending college. See the work involved with earning a dollar. And then attend college.  They may appreciate the courses more at that point. Why be in school for 18 years and then automatically go to college for another four? All you know of life at that point is school. And being sheltered.

Episode 5 - Paul W.S Thomas Anderson Go Big or Go Home

The Master (P.T. Anderson) and Resident Evil:Retribution (Paul W.S. Anderson). With special guest Stephen Brower.

Happy Birthday, Bruce

Springsteen turns 63 today. And he ushered it in by playing a show in Jersey that went 'til 2am last night. Here's a letter from the late, great Joe Strummer singing his praises.

Fuck It.

Smokin' Jay Cutler

Smoke 'em if you got them, Jay.

(And this is an exceptional use of the tumblr format.)

Ken Kesey

A letter to his old time friends following the death of his son from a bus accident.

One icy morning in January of 1984, as the University of Oregon's wrestling team headed to their next tournament in Pullman, Washington, the driver of the bus on which they were travelling lost control of the vehicle on a mountain road and could do nothing to stop it tumbling through the guardrail and over a 300-ft cliff. One boy, Lorenzo West, was killed on impact; another, 20-year-old Jed Kesey, was left brain dead. He passed away within days.

Shortly after Jed's funeral at his family's farm, his dad, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey, wrote the following letter to five of his closest friends

(Source: CoEvolution Quarterly; Image: Ken Kesey, via.)

Dear Wendell and Larry and Ed and Bob and Gurney:

Partners, it's been a bitch.

I've got to write and tell somebody about some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry, you're the best backboard I know. So indulge me a little; I am but hurt.

We built the box ourselves (George Walker, mainly) and Zane and Jed's friends and frat brothers dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond. Page found the stone and designed the etching. You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box — clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. The handles of thick hemp rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Girl by Owsley 15 years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, unfurling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and killed a snow goose. I told him be sure to save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this in white silk for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the brocade into the box.

It was a double-pretty day, like winter holding its breath, giving us a break. About 300 people stood around and sung from the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had Xeroxed — "Everlasting Arms," "Sweet Hour of Prayer," "In the Garden" and so forth. With all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on his fiddle. While we were singing "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," Zane and Kit and the neighbor boys that have grown up with all of us carried the box to the hole. The preacher is also the Pleasant Hill School superintendent and has known our kids since kindergarten. I learned a lot about Jed that I'd either forgotten or never known — like his being a member of the National Honor Society and finishing sixth in a class of more than a hundred.

We sung some more. People filed by and dropped stuff in on Jed. I put in that silver whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross soldered on it. One of our frat brothers put in a quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every 15 minutes for five years. Faye put in a snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork all Grantwoodesque in front of the old bus. Paul Foster put in the little leatherbound New Testament given him by his father who had carried it during his 65 years as a minister. Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while the boys each hammered in the one nail they had remembered to put in their pockets. The Betas formed a circle and passed the loving cup around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses when a member is leaving the circle to become engaged) (Jed and Zane and I are all members, y'unnerstand, not to mention Hagen) and the boys lowered the box with these ropes George had cut and braided. Zane and I tossed in the first shovelfuls. It sounded like the first thunderclaps of Revelations...

But it's an earlier scene I want to describe for you all, as writers and friends and fathers...up at the hospital, in cold grey Spokane:

He'd finally started moving a little. Zane and I had been carrying plastic bags of snow to pack his head in trying to stop the swelling that all the doctors told us would follow as blood poured to the bruised brain. And we noticed some reaction to the cold. And the snow I brushed across his lips to ease the bloody parch where all the tubes ran in caused him to roll his arms a little. Then more. Then too much, with the little monitor lights bleeping faster and faster, and I ran to the phone to call the motel where I had just sent most of the family for some rest.

"You guys better get back over here! He's either going or coming."

Everybody was there in less than five minutes — Chuck and Sue, Kit and Zane, Shan and her fiance Jay, Jay's dad Irby, Sheryl and her husband Bill, my mom, Faye...my whole family except for my dead daddy and Grandma Smith down with age and Alzheimer's. Jed's leg was shaking with the force of his heartbeat. Kit and Zane tried to hold it. He was starting to go into seizures, like the neurosurgeon had predicted.

Up till this time everybody had been exhorting him to "Hang on, Old Timer. Stick it out. This thing can't pin you. You're too tough, too brave. Sure it hurts but you can pull through it. Just grit your teeth and hang on." Now we could see him trying, fighting. We could see it in his clenching fists, his threshing legs. And then aw Jesus we saw it in his face. The peacefully swollen unconscious blank suddenly was filled with expression. He came back in. He checked it out, and he saw better than we could begin to imagine how terribly hurt he was. His poor face grimaced with pain. His purple brow knitted and his teeth actually did try to clench on the tubes.

And then, O my old buddies, he cried. The doctors had already told us in every gentle way they could that he was brain dead, gone for good, but we all saw it...the quick flickerback of consciousness, the awful hurt being realized, the tears saying "I don't think I can do 'er this time, Dad. I'm sorry, I truly am..."

And everybody said, "It's okay, ol' Jedderdink. You know better than we do. Breathe easy. Go on ahead. We'll catch you later down the line."

His threshing stopped. His face went blank again. I thought of Old Jack, Wendell, ungripping his hands, letting his fields finally go.

The phone rang in the nurses' quarters. It was the doctor, for me. He had just appraised all the latest readouts on the monitors. "Your son is essentially dead, Mr. Kesey. I'm very sorry."

And the sorrow rung absolutely honest. I said something. Zane picked up the extension and we watched each other while the voice explained the phenomena. We said we saw it also, and were not surprised. Thank you...

Then the doctor asked a strange thing. He wanted to know what kind of kid Jed was. Zane and I both demanded what he meant. He said he was wondering how Jed would have felt about being an organ donor. Our hearts both jumped.

"He would love it! Jed's always been as generous as they come. Take whatever you can use!"

The doctor waited for our elation to ease down, then told us that to take the kidneys they had to take them before the life support was turned off. Did we understand? After a while we told him we did.

So Faye and I had to sign five copies apiece, on a cold formica countertop, while the machine pumped out the little "beep...beep...beep..." in the dim tangle of technology behind us. In all my life, waking and dreaming, I've never imagined anything harder.

Everybody went in and told him goodbye, kissed his broken nose, shook his hand, squeezed his big old hairy foot...headed down the corridor. Somebody said it might be a good idea to get a scrip for some kind of downers. We'd all been up for about 40 hours, either in the chapel praying like maniacs, or at his bedside talking to him. We didn't know if we could sleep.

Chuck and I walked back to the intensive care ward to ask. All the doctors were there, bent over a long list, phoning numbers, matching blood types, ordering nurses...in such a hurry they hardly had time to offer sympathy. Busy, and justly so. But the nurses, the nurses bent over their clipboards, could barely see to fill out the forms.

They phoned the hotel about an hour later to tell us it was over, and that the kidneys were in perfect shape. That was about four in the morning. They phoned again a little after six to say that the kidneys were already in two young somebodies.

What a world.

We've heard since that they used twelve things out of him, including corneas. And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.

With love,

Ken

P.S. When Jed's wallet was finally sorted out of the debris and confusion of the wreck it was discovered that he had already provided for such a situation. He had signed the place on his driver's license indicating that he wanted to be an organ donor in the event of etc., etc. One man gathers what another man spills. 

Bears Vs. Packers (Week #2)

The worst that Cutler has to offer. Yes, there was pressure on him but it was as if he'd reverted to his ways of three seasons ago. Throwing against the grain, forcing balls into covered areas, frustration getting the better of him.
And Brandon Marshall was no help, dropped two touchdown passes.

Louie - Late Show Part 2

There was an eerie David Lynch quality with Louie in the waiting room talking to the receptionist. And then he meets Jack Dahl. And who is Jack Dahl? None other than David Lynch. Despite the Lynchian undertones breathing throughout, this episode is about when an opportunity presents itself one needs to fight for it. And fight for yourself. Not shying away, but believing. Not cowering, but getting strong.

Bears Vs. Colts (Week #1)

And so it begins. The Bears first possession is an utter mess. Bad snap, dropped ball, going backwards. Ugly. Second possession -- Cutler's first pass of the 2012 season -- pick six. Cutler didn't even see the linebacker. I think to myself, maybe I should get the NFL audio package, and not waste all this time at bars at 10am in the morning. Listen to the games (removed a bit from the emotion) and get some work done. Be productive.
The first quarter really is no better. Cutler starts 1 for 10. To break out of the rut, and gain some rhythm, Cutler begins going to newly acquired Brandon Marshall. The two can count on each other. Cutler needles some passes where there's essentially no opening, and completes them. This is dangerous farther down the line this season. Making passes he shouldn't risk because of his arm strength. He goes 10 for his next 10. The field opens up. The Bears win this game handily against an inexperienced Colts team
Final score : 41-21

NFL Week # 1

Picks as of Thursday, Sept. 6 (sportsbook.com). Going heavy dogs for the first week.
Cowboys +4
Bears -10
Browns +9
Bills +3
Redskins +10
Titans +7
Jags +5
Texans -10
Rams +9
Falcons -1
Packers -6
Bucs +3
Cards +3
Broncos pick
Ravens -6
Raiders +2
Chargers/Radiers Total Points 44

The Moviegoers Episode 4 (Lawless/The Ambassador)

We're talking Shia LaBeouf's acting chops, the season of Megan Ellison, and pygmies.