Dan Riley's Blog, page 21

Oh, My Pa-Pa

True, Eddie Fischer put a knife in the romantic heart of America when he tore apart its dream couple by dumping wife Debbie Reynolds to marry her best friend, Elizabeth Taylor. And true, on the set of Cleopatra Liz and Dick turned him into the most famous cuckold in history since The Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost hung the horns on Joseph back in 1 B.C. And true too, he abandoned the children he had with Debbie--Todd and Carrie--and married Connie Stevens, the closest thing the 60s had to a Debbie Reynolds clone. And finally true that Carrie Fischer took the rogue in when he was down and out and cared for him till the end.   
The saga of Eddie Fischer as father is probably more common than the sentimentality that will overhwhelm social media this Father’s Day would suggest. Some pretty esteemed pieces of literature give witness to how bad dads can be…The Great Santini, The Duke of Deception, Angela’s Ashes, etc., etc., etc. But in almost all of those tales difficult, troubled dads are afforded at least one redeeming moment...more a tribute to loving and forgiving children perhaps. In Eddie Fischer’s case (ironically enough), he recorded the most popular musical tribute to fatherhood of all time. So on this Father's Day, this one goes out to all the dads out there both living and dead.  

Political Fatigue Syndrome

For those keeping score at home, this is the third or fourth time The Nob
has used this photo of the Emelyn Story gravestone at the beautiful Cimitero Acattolico in Rome.
Two reasons: 1) I love it 2) nothing says fatigue like this says fatigue 
As I’ve written before, it’s pretty well documented that most people hate politics. And with damn good reason…politics are complicated, boring, wrought with dishonesty, and increasingly nasty….sometimes deadly. Long-time political junkie that I am, even I’ve reached a breaking point. After November 2016, I put forth a good faith effort to divorce myself from politics. In more recent months, however, I’ve found myself immersed in it again. Neither approach has been satisfying. I’m quite done viewing politics as some kind of bloodsport for shut-ins…the stakes have become too high for that. And because the stakes are so high, I find it impossible to turn my back on politics completely because politics is inextricably linked to civic duty, which in a democracy is our highest duty. When this wicked period has passed, I don’t want my grandchildren to hear that I was what they called a “good German” in Nazi Germany, someone who said and did nothing while the evil spread. So I keep looking for useful remedies to take until manning the barricades becomes inescapable. 
You sometimes find these remedies in the oddest places. The most recent one I found was in an article titled How to Assess Internet Cures Without Falling forDangerous Pseudoscience in Slate by Julie Rehmeyer. So what the heck can an article about chronic fatigue syndrome possibly have to say about our national politics? As happens, I’ve watched someone near and dear struggle with CFS for decades, and Rehmeyer’s article reflects much of what I’ve witnessed about the malady up close…it’s debilitating, maddening, painful, hard to diagnose and near impossible to cure. It can drive its victims to extremes for answers. In other words it’s like a medical manifestation of our political state.
Rehmeyer, who is both a science writer and CFS sufferer, outlines five principles that have guided her navigation through 0nline patient communities searching for answers. She says these five principles also apply to both journalism and science. I’d go one step further and say they could help the truly conscientious citizen navigate the troubled waters our leaky ship of state currently sails. Below, I attempt to show how Rehmeyer’s five principles might help make online politics less dangerous by avoiding pseudo-information. (Rehmeyer principles in red; my takes in black.)
1. Listen, but nurture your inner skeptic. Demanding scientific proof in a realm science has abandoned will go nowhere, so a kind of radical open-mindedness is essential. But because compelling personal stories can be dangerously seductive, especially when pain and emotion are part of the mix, skepticism is equally crucial.
Never has the need for healthy skepticism been more critical. Evidence abounds that the very vulnerable social media outlets have been overwhelmed and manipulated by false stories (to make matters worse, the term “fake news” has now been effectively applied to discredit legitimate news). More over, opinions based on anecdotes (seductive personal stories) are now held in equal or superior position to opinions and real news articles based on data, research, and established fact. Everyone loves a story…our powerful, global entertainment industry is based on stories, but when public policy is based on stories, the critical, discerning part of our brains is tragically forsaken. 
2. Keep a beady eye out for possible downsides. Is a treatment invasive? Expensive? Potentially dangerous? Will following one course of treatment preclude others? The risks are not always obvious…
The same goes for policy initiatives. If, say, you hate Obamacare and want it replaced, do not fall for just any replacement simply because it satisfies your political desire. Does the replacement increase your medical deductibles? Does it put a cap on your coverage? Does it roll back coverage for pre-existing conditions? We can’t allow emotional, short-term political gains to cloud our long-term, practical judgment. This is where the cliché cutting off your nose to spite your face comes to bear.
3. Evaluate your sources.
In social media, like-minded people tend to associate with each other. As aggravating as it may sometimes be, it’s critical to cultivate relationships outside your tribe to both understand how the other side sees things and to test your own tribe’s take.
3. a. Another thing to note: “Authoritative” sources also need evaluation and scrutiny.  Public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Mayo Clinic are usually, but not always, trustworthy—so give yourself permission to question them, but be sure you have good reason if you decide to disregard their advice.

Big media, government bodies, and academia sometimes get things wrong…very wrong. The most reputable among them have one thing in common: they acknowledge and correct their mistakes. Unless their errors are chronic, this should not be held against them. In fact the opposite is true…if your main source for information has never owned up to a mistake, this does not mean it is superior, it means it is neither honest nor forthcoming. 
4. Constantly look for contrary evidence and alternative explanations. Or, to put it another way, stay humble.
That sounds like a lot of work, but it can really be simplified by conducting a Google search for anything you come across that you might want to pass on to others. Scroll down the first page of your Google search results and see what else is being said on your subject. Read at least one contrary take before passing on your “news” to others. Misinformation is to the body politic what a virus is to the human body. Don’t be a carrier.  
5. Don’t imagine you know more than you do.
Actually this is one point where I’d flip a Rehmeyer principle and say, Don’t imagine you can’t know more than you do. More people fall for misinformation because they don’t trust themselves to distinguish it from the real and useful information. There’s not just Google as a quick and easy tool for cursory research. There’s also common sense and critical thinking, which every one of us should possess and practice. No one of intelligence and integrity should have to be the helpless victim of propaganda. Defending yourself against toxic lies is the same as defending the country. It’s a civic responsibility.
Closing note: yesterday on a private Facebook page I belong to with a strong pro-liberal/Democratic bent someone posted a link to an article aimed to please the prejudices of all the members of the group. But within minutes of the posting, two other members pointed out the obvious flaws in the story and documented the unreliability of the “leftwing” source of the piece. Two messages here: 1) the so-called reality-based community is not immune to being played 2) it takes an integrity-based community to prevent the play from succeeding.

TV as Poetry

"To find the kingdom in one’s own body, and to find one’s own body in the outside world. The body to be realized is the body of the cosmic [wo]man, the body of the universe as one perfect [wo]man." --Norman O. Brown, Love's Body 
I thought I was one and done writing about The Leftovers when I posted this about it here a year and half ago. But this past Sunday, the 3-year run of the HBO series came to an end, and I realized how much it covered the primary concerns of this blog: an appreciation of myth; a sophisticated and measured treatment of religion; and an embrace of love’s body, meaning that this body at this time in this place is really all we ever have and the sooner we accept that the less neurotic we’ll be as a species. In examining all that, The Leftovers often played out more like an advanced college course than a TV show…more likely to provoke wild and deep dorm-room bull sessions than water cooler chit-chat.
It surely has elevated the work of some of our best TV writers, who must pinch themselves every day at the wonder of covering such profound, meaty entertainment. My Mother the Car it ain’t.
Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture says:

I have to say that I felt understood by this show in a very deep way and that’s one of the reasons why I like it so much. Does it mean that I may inflate its quality for personal reasons? Who the hell knows? But I don’t really care. It’s very rare that you find a TV show that speaks to your specific circumstance, even though nothing that’s happening on this show, per se, has anything really to do with anything that I have experienced or probably will experience.  

And I’m not just talking about the departure. I mean the family configurations, the traveling, where they live, how they live, all that stuff. I don’t have any tangible connection to any of that. I just know there’s something about the feeling of the show that returns me to that place that I was in in the months and years immediately following my wife’s death. And I like it.  

Roger Ebert talks about movies as a machine that generates empathy. I think they can also generate other emotions, but I like the idea of this show being this machine or chamber that I can enter once a week, and it will return me to the emotional or mental space that I was in, and I don’t have to approximate it. It’s actually how I felt.

Maureen Ryan wrote in a painfully beautiful essay for Variety:

“The Leftovers” is the observer, viewing human particles who exist in many modes and places and times. They, like us, are here and there, with the living and the dead, hopeful and undone. Here and not here. Gone and left behind. (Echoes of a classic music video from A-Ha.) The thing that unites the characters of “The Leftovers” is that the Departure confirms their worst fears: That they didn’t deserve to be loved, that they didn’t deserve a family, that they were always in an unstable environment, that, sooner or later, the rug was going to be pulled out from under them. They were waiting for it, on some level. In the wake of this worldwide and intimate tragedy, they’ve split; They exist across many dimensions. Like subatomic particles, their trajectories cannot be predicted.

In a lighter vein, Alan Sepinwall’s review in Uproxx suggested that the seeming random, sometime shocking, always provocative progression of the show might be due to a Mad Libs approach that the creators pay homage to in the final episode:   
I like that idea and believe it may be closer to the truth than even Sepinwall thinks. After all, how to keep generating ideas for a show based on the very premise that at one moment 140 million people all over the world simultaneously disappear…not in nuclear holocaust or biochemical attack…but for totally unexplained reasons. How, in fact, to keep up with less dramatic (maybe) but still jaw-dropping actual events:
                                          James Comey                      screws                               Hillary Clinton     (Name a federal bureaucrat)                          (name highly qualified candidate)
allowing                                      Donald J. Trump              to be elected president.(name utter asshole)
How they did it is less of a concern to me than the fact that they did it at all. The Leftoversundeniably took on big subjects that no TV show, no movie, not even the terrific book it is based on by Tom Perotta ever dared take on. The Leftovers leads us in a thousand different directions, but the one I want to follow in this post is the dichotomy between belief and skepticism. The show actually debunks the idea that there is dichotomy at all. Although it establishes representative characters in Ship of Fools tradition—the man of God, the woman of science, the lawman, the nurse—unlike other entertainments of that genre, the destiny of these characters is not fixed by their superficial distinctions. Indeed, The Leftovers explores the fluidity between character types. In the most dramatic examples, Nora, the professional skeptic, gets swept up in a desperate and fierce belief and her God-fearing brother Matt arrives at a place where godlessness suddenly seems comforting. At a time when we are increasingly open to the idea of gender fluidity, The Leftovers dared to explore spiritual fluidity. In her must-read essay (whether you watch the show or not!) Mo Ryan writes, “The veil between here and there is tissue-thin.” This brings me, as usual, back to Norman O. Brown who in Love’s Body wrote: “The world is the veil we spin to hide the void. The destruction of what never existed. The day breaks, and the shadows flee away.”
I have often observed how difficult it is to create entertainments centered on human kindness that don’t ultimately melt into Hallmark card sappiness. I cherish my memories of the few that have succeeded at that (e.g. The Elephant Man and Il Postino). The Leftovers joins that select company for the way in which so many of its major characters at one point or another take time to listen and empathize with those who are their opposite, or opposition. There are so many redemptive moments when characters you least expect step through the veil of adversarial illusion to express linkage with and kindness to polar others.
There’s one notable exception to this, of course…the Guilty Remnant, which is clearly in the show to represent fundamentalism (both religious and secular). Given the enormous latitude the creators have allowed themselves, they can expose the Guilty Remnant to two entirely different fates. In one they are blown up; in the other they survive but only after admittedly giving up on their “stupid traditions”...their rigidity...their fundamentals.   
Throughout the entirely of its 3-year run, The Leftovers persistently--sometimes painfully, sometimes playfully--pulled at the veils of illusion that we all hang in our living rooms. Neither religion nor science was spared. The “Book of Kevin” ends up with the new holy book in the ash heap, and the science-facilitated afterlife from the Book of Nora gives way to Nora’s very simple, unsentimental declaration, “I’m here.”
In my near 50-year love affair with Nobby’s Love’s Body, I’m often asked to explain it, and I’ve gotten better at it with time. But if anyone would prefer a dramatized version of it, you couldn’t do better than watch The Leftovers, where, as Nobby tells us, “The antimony between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only metaphor; there is only poetry.”

50 Years Ago Today, Sgt. Pepper Taught the Kids to Listen

Collector's Edition, Side 1

Well, it may not have been exactly 50 years ago to the day, but it was to my utter amazement 50 years ago that the Beatles Sgt Pepper was released. I’m blessed…or cursed depending on the subject…with a very good memory, so it’s not all that remarkable that I remember the day it first appeared in record stores. As always in those days, dear friend John Robinson was the first in all of Hartford—maybe all of New England--to buy it. Also, as always, Hartford was not really the proper venue to celebrate such an auspicious event, being known as The Insurance Capitol and not quite the Hip Capitol of America. So we immediately motored up to Boston--better suited as Hub of the Universe--shook out some Boston University friends from their dreary studies, and soon had the music poring out of a dorm room in Miles Standish Hall, filling the hallways and stairwells with students oohing and aahhing at the melodic revelations emitting from that newly minted vinyl. The album cover got passed around too, as if it were the Mona Lisa.
I didn’t realize how long it had been since I had listened to the entire album beginning to end until I went to write this post and found that I don’t own a CD version of it. I have my original 1967 vinyl, and a later reissue when the original took on too many pops and scratches, and the collector’s item picture above and below, which I have never played because it came with a warning that it had a minimal play life. The long lapse between playing it may sound like an indictment of the album’s staying power…surely that crossed my mind…but it did help set me up for a fresh listen…or as fresh as one can listen to an album 50 years old that you’ve already heard maybe a thousand times…sometimes without even trying, as Johnny Rivers would attest. 
The most notable thing about the album was that it was early on anointed as the first “concept album.” This perception was influenced by a number of factors…the first two cuts, of course, clearly established the conceit of an alter ego Beatles band, Sgt Pepper’s, led by fictitious Billy Shears, and then the way the cuts merged into one another without the typical break, and then that album cover, rich in meaning and portent of a post-Beatles era. In subsequent years, the boys themselves spent a good deal of time debunking the whole concept album idea as one of Paul’s personal ambitions that he ran up a flagpole to no one’s salute. Still, when I revisited the album for the writing of this post the concept notion along with the relative worth of the individual songs was foremost on my mind. Herewith, a few observations:Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is upbeat and filled with an air of excitement.A Little Help from My Friends is also upbeat, though tempered with a sly vulnerability and charming humility; it’s among a handful of Beatles songs that can be a group sing-along at any festive occasion, and for that reason I believe that it may outlive the album itself in popularity.Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is the most controversial cut and the one most responsible for giving Pepper the rep as a druggie album; John Lennon was aghast at how a drawing by his little boy, which gave the song its name, could be so misconstrued as a reference to LSD. There’s a lot of such mass misconstruing with Sgt Pepper, which actually helped get it accepted as the first work of art to emerge from pop music.Getting Better could be the theme song for so many films of the 60s about angry/confused young people finally being saved by love.Fixing a Hole continues the motif of “getting by”, “getting better”…life may seem broken, but its fixable.She’s Leaving Home is, for me, the most underrated song on the album; again someone…a young girl this time…trying to improve her lot in life; it’s full of the harmonies that Paul McCartney says he lifted from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, but whereas the Beach Boys harmonies are sunny and sweet, these are lacerating, mocking and sad giving McCartney’s somewhat kitschy narrative a real sting.For the Benefit of Mister Kite, like Bill Shears, Mister K will perform for you and help you dance and sing through life; moreover by this the last song on side one we have been treated to a rich aural circus of sounds…bells, chimes, animals, dog whistles, sirens, instruments of infinite variety…and its clear that part of “the concept” at play here is to make us listen with kaleidoscope ears.Within You Without You is perhaps destined to be the least appreciated song on the album; George’s beloved Indian instruments were clearly better served on Lucy in the Sky.When I’m Sixty-Four is without doubt the Pepper song I’ve gone back to the most often, especially as I closed in on my senior years…that hopeful theme of a light at the end of whatever tunnel we’re stuck in at the moment: getting to rock Vera, Chuck and Dave on your knee is every grandparent’s fondest dream.Lovely Rita is another McCartney gem. Lennon once ruefully commented that Paul writes these little novelistic tunes, odd in that Lennon more openly pursued a literary career. But he was right…with Rita, Eleanor Rigby, the unnamed woman in For No One, the abandoned parents in She’s Leaving Home, McCartney was a master at sketching memorable characters in 3-minute songs.     Good Morning Good Morning begins to twist the theme of possibility…the character in this one gets increasingly desperate trying to “save his life”, until it ends with him finding sad purpose in giving someone the time and vainly hoping for a hook up in a movie theater. It is a necessary turn to the dark ending that awaits us, the listeners.
The Beatles and their producer George Martin may have insisted that “the concept” album idea died on the vine, but why then reprise the intro song to "close the show", only to come roaring back with A Day in the Life as an encore? That song totally upends all the optimism, possibility, hopefulness that filled the music before it with a thundering crescendo of despair and emptiness. The Beatles probably produced a hundred good-to-great songs, but the one real masterpiece is A Day in the Life. People 50 years hence may joyfully sing along with Help from My Friends and When I’m 64, but A Day in the Life will always be the one that makes people stop what they’re doing and listen.
It’s ironic that in discussing the writing of the song with Lennon, McCartney says:

John got “he blew his mind out in a car” from a newspaper story….We transposed it a bit. In fact he crashed his car. But that’s what we were saying about history: Malcolm Muggeridge said that all history is a lie, because every fact that gets reported gets distorted. Even in the Battle of Hastings, King Harold didn’t die with an arrow in his eye; that’s just what the Bayeux Tapestry says--they put it in because it looked better.

And so it is with all myth...it is a distortion of reality to create a story we’d rather hear. In the creation of myth, those who hear it are as much a part of the creative process as those who tell it. Whether the Beatles ever actually followed through on McCartney’s grand idea is now immaterial. Fifty years on, Sgt Pepper stands as the first and most successful concept album, and its greatness is enhanced by that mythical standing.  


Collector's Edition, Side 2

The Dutch Dance to Dylan, #6

We bring down the curtain with a dance for all our Jewish readers.... 

The Dutch Dance to Dylan, #5

How about one more for the road?
Dutch Dance to Dylan singing Moonshine

The Dutch Dance to Dylan, #4

The hits just keep on comin':

A dance to Dylan's Man on the Street

The Dutch Dance to Dylan, #3

Another rare clip:No More Auction Block

The Dutch Dance to Dylan #2

Second rare clip:
The Dutch do Dylan's Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Blues

The Dutch Dance to Dylan, #1

Some years ago, old friend Peter Johnston handed me a video tape of a show on Bravo he had recorded for me, knowing what a Dylanphile I was. It was a performance by a Dutch modern dance troupe interpreting a handful of old timey Dylan recordings. It is among my most prized pieces of Dylanology, and a joy to watch whether you choose to view it sincerely or ironically. The Nobby Works will be featuring more of these rare clips exclusively for the next few days in celebration  of Bob's birthday. So quit your low-down ways and enjoy: 



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