An Open Letter to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences

Academy Members:

It has been brought to my attention that Michael J. Fox, an actor afflicted with Parkinson's Disease, is on TV ads for stem-cell research portraying a man with Parkinson's Disease.

Rush Limbaugh has brought this to our attention, and he is never wrong.

I have seen Fox's stunning performance in the commercial for Missouri Senate Candidate Claire McCaskill. His acting, as always, is superlative. In the 1980's, I was convinced Michael J. Fox was actually a Young Republican, or a werewolf, or a high school timetraveler, and I now believe he actually has severe Parkinson's. If I didn't know any better, I would think he actually really had this disease and he really had it in a bad way. Michael J. Fox's acting was, and is, just that good.

What spirit! What dedication to his craft! One can imagine Fox just immersing himself in this role until all his uncontrollable twitchings ring accurate to the audience! I bet the director Michael Moore and the producer George Soros didn't even have to coach him all that much! He probably did the whole thing in one take, so wrapped up in this role he must have been!

My request is simple. If Michael J. Fox is indeed just acting in these commercials, or, as they say in the business of show, hammin' up the Parkinson's for cynical political gain, he should be nominated for some kind of award.

You may just have to invent a new award. How about "Best Portrayal of a Man Afflicted with Parkinson's Disease?" I think Michael J. Fox would stand a good shot at winning this award. Please give serious consideration to his nomination. Because, in my 34 years of life, I have never seen acting that believable. No, not even on "Melrose Place."

I thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my suggestion.

Yours in Must-Seeing,
Rollie St. Bacon

PS You know that show "According to Jim?" It might actually be kinda funny if Bill Murray played Jim instead of Jim Belushi. Think it over.

Jimmy Carter's Excerpted and Prescient "Malaise" Speech from 1979

--This speech and its perceived bitchiness ("What!?! He's calling us out on our lazy crap? Surely THAT'S not one of the seven habits of highly effective governing!") surely cost Jimmy Carter his Presidency in 1980, and yet, has anybody in government been so honest in these past 26 years? Has anybody since ever been so bold as to suggest that, gosh, maybe a government of, for, and by, the people might have some severe problems because of....the people? Reagan fellated our sense of importance and assuaged the very insecurities Carter had the guts to acknowledge; Bush the First codified myopic self-love into a preemee kind of fascism; Clinton just slowed it down a little bit, and Bush the Second...well, ha ha ha...not much needs to be said about what HE'S done...right? RIGHT?!?
Separated from the perceptions of the times, it's amazing to hear a living/breathing President of the United States question American Decadence, a decadence that has just gotten worse and not the least bit interesting. If you're in disagreement on that one, just take note of what was the big deal last week while Bush Jr. got rid of habeus corpus.....let's see..."Deal or No Deal?"..."Dancing with the Stars?"...Lindsay Lohan's left labial flap?....This Malaise never went away. I wish this speech below could be as quaint as "Disco Inferno," but....nuh-uh. If anything is quaint about it, it's that this was even anything less than a moot point at some moment in our recent collective history. --RSt.B

I know, of course, being President, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That's why I've worked hard to put my campaign promises into law -- and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Water gate.

We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's re sources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like, and neither do I. What can we do?

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

The Suicide Commandos and the Day Rocknroll Really Died

I know when rocknroll died. Me. No shit? No shit.

I even have a date: November 24, 1978.

But wait, you say. I wasn't even born then. Or, you say: There's still plenty of rocknroll around like...like...um....

(See!)

I've been putting off writing this for months now, due to fear of spouting off something that appears on the surface to be nothing but absurdity, but the more I've thought about it, and the closer I've listened to the record documenting the exact date rocknroll breathed its last, the more I'm convinced that it's true. November 24th should be marked black on your calendars, and that's all there is to it. Why? Becuase it was on that day in 1978 that the Suicide Commandos, a Minneapolis band who crossed that evolutionary line between Midwest barband and punk-punk punk rock, played their last concert, and it was documented on the Twin-Tone double LP "The Commandos Commit Suicide Dance Concert," later reissued on compact disc by Garage D'Or Records, and later reissued by Rave Up on LP.

It's not to say that the Suicide Commandos, a relatively obscure band, ended rocknroll singlehandedly, but what they were about and what they believed in died--there at Jay's Longhorn (a steakhouse passing for Minneapolis's answer to CBGB's way back when), and everywhere when it dawned on everybody that, no, the Sex Pistols most definitely were not the new Rolling Stones circa 1963, and no, the Ramones were not going to have dozens of number one singles heard on every radio all over the world like they most certainly deserved. The fissures and fragmentations, the whoelsale rejection of punk marketed to kids as "the next cool thing" and having the kids respond, "Who needs punk when there's still Led Zeppelin?", the appalling conservatism of FM radio, the malaise Carter spoke of that's still with us, the sheer lack of interest and stagnation of rocknroll started right then and right there.

But, in true rocknroll fashion, the Suicide Commandos didn't end the band with the hokey tears kids today get up to when their favorite emotive band in their stupid college town finally calls it quits. No, this double record is nothing less than a celebration of the very best of rocknroll.

At least half of the songs on "Commondos Commit Suicide Dance Concert" are covers, going back to Chuck Berry, the Stones, MC5, V.U., Love, the Amboy Dukes, and even a cover of Brian Eno's "Seven Deadly Finns" that this blogger believes is vastly superior to the original. All the covers are hyperdriven tributes from three guys clearly raised to believe that rockrnoll actually, I dunno, means something special. Unlike most "punk" bands, the Suicide Commandos had the chops of a barband with the energy and conviction to give it meaning.

The record is humorous without the facetiousness we've come to expect anymore here at the turn of the millenium. There's something charming about these guys saying "Thanks a lot!" after every song in that Upper Midwest Dickie Adventure accent and then immediately going into the next song. The originals, while not groundbreaking, are possessed with a kind of power and drive that clearly had some influence on the Minneapolis bands that followed the trail they plowed with their bare hands. (I could be wrong, but I think I read somewhere that Commando's guitarist Chris Osgood at one time gave Bob Mould lessons.) My favorite joke on the entire record, besides the silly "Enoesque" noises they make at the end of "Seven Deadly Finns" is when they change "Why am I missing her/I should be kissing her" from the Monkees' "She" to "Why am I Schlesinger?/I should be Kissinger." See, it was the 1970's, and...well...forget it!

Listening to this, you get the feeling that everybody packed into what was presumably a tiny venue was dancing like they would never get a chance to dance again. Oddly enough, they were right. Really, when you strip away all the crap, and I mean all the crap that has latched onto rocknroll and all it's erratically interesting subgenres, what you have is a type of music that gives kids a soundtrack for dancing and an outlet for their emotions, because really, when you're 16, not even J.D. Sallinger or Ayn Rand or Pablo Picasso is gonna do it. No way! Even now, after listening to so many different bands and styles over 25 years, when the words "rocknroll" pop into my head, I think of MOVEMENT. I think of 50's teenagers dancing on couches, or I think of kids tackling Mark Mothersbaugh towards the end of the "Come Back Jonee" video.

I sure as shit don't think of a bunch of smug assholes standing around some stuffy indie-rock bar, exchanging "clever" critiques of whatever the hell is onstage. I sure as shit don't think of message boards, or webzines, or limited editon clit-colored vinyl to be sold on e-bay. I don't think of Steven Tyler singing "God Bless America," and I don't think of Steven Tyler at all, actually.

Nobody dances at shows anymore. They come close when King Khan and BBQ play, but it's still not like the dancing you see at weddings. We need that these days. Now, more than ever.

There's an innocence to this record that I love. There's goofiness and incredible musicianship for such "basic" songs. According to the linernotes, somebody in the crowd of this final show yells, "The Commandos breaking up now is like the Beatles in 62 breaking up!" I agree with this analysis, however drunken and caught-up-in-the-moment it may have been. Yes, it is that good, in a way rocknroll has never been since, and never will be again.

So why is this the last rocknroll record, and why is November 24, 1978 the official end of rocknroll? Well, it just is. For a variety of reasons. The Suicide Commandos, like hundreds of other "new wave" bands signed in the 1977-78 feeding frenzy, bombed on Polygram with what should have been their debut "The Suicide Commandos Make a Record," and they weren't asked to make a second LP. Rocknroll, such as it was, refused to evolve, and it has refused to evolve ever since, and if you don't believe me, why don't you listen to your classic rock station in your town, and then we'll talk after you're done "gettin' the Led out."

Stagnant and outright conservative as rocknroll was in 1978, and the culture as a whole, we go into 1979, and there you have John Lydon on "Tomorrow with Tom Snyder" pointing out the obvious: It's dead. Rocknroll is over and it's nothing anymore but boring crap consumed by fools. It's the soundtrack to airports and World Series Commercials. As shocking or irritating as such comments may have been back then, in hindsight, Lydon was right.

If punk was something separate from rocknroll, then post-punk was something different altogether. Post-punk, and all of its offshoots and permutations to this day, begins with the underlying assumption that rocknroll isn't worth trying to replicate and resuscitate unless you're parodying it in lyrics or song structures. Beyond that...bleh...no thanks.

You get post-punk, you get the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, you get No Wave, you get endless museum acts retreading on what's already been retread kajillions of times, and what do you get? You get where we are now. You get Music as Lifestyle, the soundtrack for your Volkswagen while you commute to your dumb job. Not to say that that's necessarily bad, but it's just assumed by this point that there's nothing terribly important about the music. It's just another spectacle in a world full of em, so let's do this because it's better than TV. It's not really much of a force for anything except the long-odd hope that maybe you or your friends' band will get to actually eke out a living at it for a couple years instead of working a day job.

There's no real dancing anymore. If there is, it seems quaint, like a relic of some long ago wonderful time like November of 1978, when this stuff seemed kind've rebellious and at least a little bit countercultural. Now, it's a lifestyle you can buy in one of many lifestyles you can buy at your nearest mall. Now, it's the impotent temper tantrums of some testosteroned shirtless meathead screaming about everything but what really matters most.

I guess all I'm really saying is that, well, since rocknroll has been dead now for 28 long years, what the fuck are you doing with this band of yours or this label of yours or this zine or blog or zlog or bline? It's over! Do something else!

Oh yeah. There's still that Need. Whatever it is about our genes and/or environments that makes us want to do this, even if it is over and ersatz and preplanned and self-conscious and everything rocknroll never should be. A Joyce Carol Oates short story could never make us feel the way "Loaded" by the Velvet Underground could; a book on tape of Dennis Farina reading "Please Kill Me" could never move me like this Suicide Commandos record ever could....so, like a bunch of knuckleheads in a Beckett play, we wait for some band to come along that really really gets it right, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait some more.........

Requiem for a 1979 Ford Econoline Van (1979-2005): Part One

"You really wanna buy this thing, don't you?" Jeremy said as we drove it up and down Lake Street on its test drive.

"Yeah. I do." I said, spinning the steering wheel in the frantic motions needed to execute the 22 point turns the van needed just to turnaround in a Chicago alley, exacerbated from the additonal manuevering needed to get around the steel girders holding up the el tracks overhead.

The exhaust was shot, making the van rumble like a dying muscle car. The right mirror was held together with a complex intertwining of duct-tape. On the dashboard was a giant row of red and blue on/off switches that used to turn on and off reading lights in the back, a bathroom light, a CB, a sink (Uncle Ted from HoZac later christened this a "dick washing station"), and a fridge.

Yes. There was a toilet in the back at one time, fit into a tiny closet for midget babies.

Inside, it was shag-carpteted EVERYTHING. The dude who owned it added a leopard-print steering-wheel cover. Fuzzy dice obligatorily hung from the rearview mirror. There was a requisite air-bubble window, curtains covering the back side windows and the back windows. It had all the makings of a late-70's shaggin' wagon, 25 years too late. There was a cardtable behind the two front seats with four drink holders. Two "captain's chairs" behind the front seats. A couch-bed perpendicular to the whindshield on the van's back right side.

Outside, it was tan and brown, with red and orange stripes. The exterior actually looked like a textbook for a college class from 1979, some attemtpt at flash to get an 18 year old excited about College Algebra.. On the top was a TV antenna and two airhorns on either side. In front of the driver's side window was a Q-Beam light. None of this worked, and it hadn't in some time.

"I like it. I want it. I'm gonna buy it," I said.

At first, the van was owned by Born-Again Christians, who drove around and spread the Bible. Before me, the van was owned by this hard rock band quite fond of the usual things hard rock bands relish: marshall stax, jack daniels, poon-tang. They were pros and they needed a bigger van to lug their massive equipment around. Our band wasn't crippled with such excess in the amplification department. Or professionalism.

"You need to take this to a mechanic and find out how much it's gonna cost to get it legal, because right now, it isn't." Jeremy said. This was two months before his two month stint in the band, and his own band was still just something he was talking about with Frank and Anna and even me (for about a minute). He used to fix cars, and even if he didn't used to fix cars, he would still know much more than I do because I have the mechanical inclinations of a right-brained, left-wing, college knowledge liberal prof.

"Definitely," I said, seduced by the ridiculousness of it, how beattohell and glorious it was, this choking dying relic from the van culture of the 1970's. Immediately, I thought it was like a van version of Keith Richards--an unremorseful outlaw living the way it wants to live in a sea of sterile white Honda Civics whose exhausts will never choke from too much poison, whose rugs will never get pissed on from too much beer, whose wrinkles, lines, nooks and crannies will never stash anything the least bit illicit. Shit--only the front seats had seatbelts, and those were only lapbelts!

Driving a van like this around town and around the country, I thought, there would be no way anybody could possibly mistake who I am and what I do. There was nothing subtle about it, and in its present condition, it was perfect for the band.
*
After buying it, and before fixing it, I immediately drove Rosinante (as the van was christened, after Don Quixote's old mule) to Milwaukee. MOTO needed a ride, and I was filling in on drums for them. The exhaust was too loud for conversation, and the smoke filtered into the back enough to make those sitting in the back a little dizzy.

Paul slammed the side door while the windows were open, and the first of many window cracks started. It was like everybody who ever set foot in the van once I purchased it figured out a way to damage it in ways big and small. I lent it to Dr. Filth so he could go to work; he kicked the side door to make it shut all the way and put a dent in it. Cigarette burns. Stashed and forgotten old takeout food found months later, molded and redolent of truckstop toilets. Broken cabinets. Shattered windows. Torn curtains. Drinkholders disconnected from the cardtable. It was always something, and it started with Paul.

Driving it to Milwaukee was just to see if it could even go 100 miles, much less way out West for touring. There's nothing like a rumbling 1979 customized van with 200,000 miles to make you want to live your life completely in the moment. After all, this thing could self-destruct at any time. Or so it felt.

But it didn't and we made it to Circle A, filling in on drums for the last time for MOTO before Dennis was made permanent. The audience smiled and some danced and many sang along, and it was a noticeable contrast with sitting behind the drums for the band I was in, where people just stepped back a little bit and brooded on their miserable early-21st century American lives.
*
The exhaust was fixed through brilliant West Side Chicago Latino Mechanic Engineering. Hole-ridden pipes were removed and replaced and remolded into a complex calculus of criss-crossings bent and redirected into one pipe that emerged from above the van's back right tire. However, it would have set me back another $300 to get Rosinanate to pass the emissions test. As it stood, it was about as good for the environment as an Eastern European/Soviet-Bloc era power plant, but it was enough to deal with that when the demand for the test came in. For now, the exhaust was silent and it actually went out the exhaust pipe instead through the van's floor.
*
The previous owners had it breakdown in Tupelo, Mississippi, where the mechanics were nice enough to repair everything that possibly could have been repaired, as well as guaranteeing the parts for 100,000 miles. Naturally, this kind of above-and-beyond repairmanship ran the hard rock dudes a bill that ran into the thousands, so they had to work their rockclub jobs for months before they could get it out of Mississippi. So, when I got it, I was given a receipt of all the work that had been done on it, culminating in a rebuilt engine, but also including enough to fill an 8 page receipt.

So. The lesson to be learned is this. If you're a musician from Chicago, or any northern city for that matter; hell, if you're a musician from any large city anywhere, if your touring vehicle breaks down, you should pray that it happens in Tupelo, Mississippi, because Mississippi mechanics, especially Tupelo mechanics, care about the vehicles of musicians and want to do everything they can to make sure these modes of transport are in tip-top shape, and damn the cost!
*
These hard rock guys knew that band Nashville Pussy. One of the members, not one of the two women who french kiss onstage to the delight of thousands of intoxicating concertgoing men, told them that he wanted to keep the van in his backyard.

It was, after all, that kind of van. It was the kind of van nonchristians of the 1970's would take their dates and drive them someplace far away from civilization and present these not quite suspecting women with the ultimatun: "Screw or walk." I remember a party my Aunt and Uncle threw in Peoria when I was 8 or 9 years old. There was this guy there in his early 20's who was a friend of my cousin J who was also in his early 20's. There was a lot of snickering amongst the adults because they knew that this girl was coming to the party who was friends with my cousin K (she was just a little bit younger than J) who went on a date with this guy who was friends with my cousin and was pretty much given this ultimatum from his van. When she showed up, there was considerable laughter, like a marginally funny practical joke at the office, the kind of joke you don't hear in offices anymore. Or parties even.

When, long after the van was no longer mine, the hard rock dudes told me this story about the Nashville Pussy guy wanting to keep Rosinante in his backyard, I imagined the van there in Van Heaven. I saw it as a large grassy square of a backyard on the edge of a deep forest. Birdbaths and a mulchtrail would lead right to the van's sidedoor. You'd go in, and God would be seated in the far captain's chair, holding a case of Billy Beer. "Want one?" God would ask, and you would take the Billy Beer because it's God.

Clint Howard dressed exactly as Eaglebauer from "Rocknroll High School" would be in the other captain's chair, rolling a joint on the cardtable between he and God. "Ready to party?" Clint would ask.

On the couch would be, of course, the three ZZ Top girls from the video to "Give Me All Your Lovin'," acting kinda frisky, not unlike the way they might if they would be interested in taking off your clothes and having their way with you, while God and Clint Howard cheer you on. Rosinanate would be a rockin', because that's how it happens in Van Heaven, and if I knew what purgatory I sent Rosinante and if I had the financial wherewithal to do it, I would tow it to the home of the dude in Nashville Pussy, and he could keep it in his backyard as a kind of protected preserve for what's left of Van Culture.
*
The band I used to be in booked a tour of the West Coast. In Chicago, the van didn't stand out quite so much because you see beaters wheezing down Western Avenue all the time...ancient Oldsmobuicks like what your grandparents drove only with more dents and shinier rims. Outside Chicago, into the rest of America and the teeming masses of fools who will go down in history as being stupid enough to give George W. Bush a SECOND TERM in the White House, the van was severely out of place.

I loved that. I loved how this thing was built under the assumption that people would drink beer in the van because that's what you do in vans. I loved how there were hardly any seatbelts because, come on! nobody wears those things anyway! I loved how there was a couch in the back to just stretch out and relax. Rosinanate hearkened back to a less paranoid less puritanical, freer time.

I think this was in some ways why the van always made people happy, even if the brakelights didn't work and even if the right rearview mirror hung by a thread and it backed up traffic for miles when climbing mountains. In Central Washington, a lady in a neighboring car took a picture of us. In Seattle, the people hanging out outside the gig applauded when we pulled up in the thing right in front of the club. Before shows, after shows, hell, even during some shows when the other bands were average mersh, the van was the best place to hang out as long as the temperature outside was neither too hot nor too cold, because the a/c didn't work and the heater only worked in the front.
*