The New Issue

1. Hi, it’s me again. Ideally I will review the entire online version of the Tucson Weekly over the next day or two. More likely I will write scattered comments, get bored with myself, and that will be that.

   But I gotta write about Tom Danehy’s column. In case you haven’t read it yet, here is a condensed version:

   “Music ain’t as good as it used to be! Take the list of top albums of the 2000s — please! Look at that crap! But ya know what? If you look at the list of top albums of previous decades, they included crap too! What do ya know about that? Crazy!”

   The problem with Danehy’s entire column is the premise that Top Selling Albums somehow is an indicator of Top Quality Albums. His analysis of the list of previous top albums pretty well debunks that….was that his point?

   I was hoping Danehy would come up with a juicy, thoughtful, funny, turn-of-phrase-ful column after the last few columns, one of which was the subject of an overlong tirade by yours truly, and one of which was small-p poignant (thankfully not big-P Poignant) and thus not a suitable format for Danehy to let his writing wrip. Er, rip.

   But instead this week’s column really just allows Danehy to throw out a few graphs about the state of modern music, and how music is connected to our life experiences, followed by a formulaic list of past Top Selling Albums and Tom’s random responses.

   If the measure of a good column is whether somebody reads it all the way through, then this is a good column. If the measure of a good column is the concentrated description of a thought process or the analysis of a moral/cultural element in our society, then, uh, no.

   That said, if music is the subject I am pretty much there. I have to offer my own responses to Tom’s album list:

   • Harry Belafonte’s “Calypso”: Own it. Mint vinyl.
   • “My Fair Lady”: Own it. Never listen to it.
   • “Peter Gunn”: Own it, as well as “More Peter Gunn.” Listen to it? Yes. Listen to most other Henry Mancini? (“Mr. Lucky,” “The Party,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Pink Panther,” etc.) Yes.
   • Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream.” Own multiple copies. Have the album cover framed. (It’s a hot naked woman covered in cream — basically an enormous cum shot.)
   • The Monkees: Great underrated band with classic songs. The only reason they weren’t taken seriously is they were supposed to be a parody. But listen to “Tapioca Tundra” and tell me it isn’t a great song. Or “The Porpoise Song.”
   • Iron Butterfly “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Sure nobody knows any of their any songs, but does it matter? It’s the ultimate late-’60s song.
   • Saturday Night Fever: Pretty great. The Bee Gees were a great band who got unfairly dismissed because of the backlash against disco and because of their collective resemblance to a white person’s Jesus. Also on that album — the great “Night on Disco Mountain”!
   • Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Great album but if you listen closely you can hear Floyd sliding his way up the ramp that leads over the shark. Earlier Floyd albums are far better in retrospect (my fave is “Animals”).
   • REO Speedwagon: The ultimate butt rock band. I owned their album but it seems to have disappeared. I probably used it to test my oven.
   • Asia: Danehy claims he never heard of it. Ha ha, it’s probably his favorite album. Asia were a “supergroup,” Tom, in which you take excellent musicians from several prog bands, put them together, and waste their talent on the most insipid pop ballads imaginable. The big song was “Heat of the Moment” which was used effectively at the climax of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
   • Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Anyone remember when Michael Jackson was good? His best album is the one before “Thriller,” I believe “Off the Wall” or something like that. It’s better by a nose!
   • Bruce Springsteen “Born in USA”: Far from his best but he deserved it in spite of inspiring stupid jeans bandanas etc.
   • Whitney Houston: So talented they put her in a movie opposite Kevin Costner.
   • George Michael “Faith”: Look at my butt! It’s a perfect circle! (Does anybody listen to any of his songs anymore?)
   • Bobby Brown: Who?

   Hey Danehy, what music do you actually like? What music were you listening to during those early formative Chris Rock moments? I think that would make a better column than just a list of albums from a Billboards chart.

2. The big song was “Heat of the Moment” which was used effectively at the climax of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

   Ahhh now understand why he’s got an Asia poster in his room.

3. Whoops I errantly asked what music Tom likes, forgetting that he had stated, “I wanted to be Sly Stone until I learned that he had ingested half the cocaine in South America.”

   I knew very little about Sly and the Family Stone (except the song “Dance to the Music”) until recently when I bought a used copy of their best-of CD, which is kickass.

   Sorry to hear that Sly was a cokehead, because it’s apalling to know that musicians of the 1960s and ’70s did any sort of drugs. Especially those Beatles. I am so glad that they were squeaky clean and fresh, and did not having a football field’s worth of cannabis pumping through their systems for the entirety of the 1960s, or anything like that.

4. Connie Tuttle’s column is a step up from last week’s piece, in which Tuttle did her impression of Monk on a plane.

   This week’s column has the misleading headline, “If it’s wrong to waterboard, why is it right to dissect frogs?” The mind Boegles at the possibilities if that had been the actual theme of the column! I can see Matt Drudge linking to it now.

   Instead, Tuttle seems to be attempting to exorcise an aspect of her traumatic Catholic-school childhood at the hands of evil nuns who wanted to make children do everything short of crucifying frogs and put little thorns of crowns on the amphibians’ heads.

   I’m not even sure why Tuttle brought waterboarding into the discussion, unless she just felt the need to be topical. I guess Tuttle did touch on the way that we train children to rationalize away their compassion when the “greater good” is at stake. Beyond that the comparison is a little silly. I felt uncomfortable with Tuttle’s whimsical reference to Nazis/Jews and black slaves as well, as she came precariously close to trivializing all of the above. (Is Tuttle trawlin’ for angry letters?)

   I didn’t mind Tuttle’s jokes about the flesh of Christ mixing with Cap’n Crunch, though. Or the joke about it being safe to eat McDonald’s after crapping out Christian McNuggets. That’s not sick, that’s funny.

   Tuttle and Danehy are both just shootin’ the shit (no pun intended) this week. Both of their columns start out with a variation on “When I was a kid…” Look at the oldsters go! Somebody get these two together and set them up for some column-writing ROMANCE.

   I can’t imagine what might have triggered Tuttle’s desire to reminisce about science class and dissecting frogs, but it’s not a bad topic for a column, even if her handling of it is kinda random. I’m pretty sure they don’t make kids kill the frogs anymore. When we dissected them, they were already dead and soaking formaldehyde, which gave me a headache. In the future they’ll probably just do Virtual Vivisections ™ with window-sized computer screens and motion-detecting gloves ala “Minority Report.”

5. Connie Tuttle didn’t write this week. Catherine O’Sullivan did. They alternate while Danehy does it weekly (and has been doing it since like 1991 ?)

6. Ohhhhhh…..that’s a really bad mix-up on my part! Damn!

   Brain….not….functioning…..correctly.

   I…..am….a…..robot.

   Daisy……Daisy…..

7. Did I say Tuttle?

   I meant BUTTLE!

8. • Abin Tyler’s guest commentary about water usage is a pretty good overview of the controversy regarding toilet-to-tap, Prop. 200, etc. Appropriately enough, it’s a dry read.

   • This week’s Ask a Mexican offers a fact-filled summary of Lou Dobbs’ use of bad information to make the bogus claim that 80 or so Southwest hospitals have had to shut down due to loss of revenue after treating uninsured illegal immigrants. Dobbs did this in 2006 but has since issued a correction after his dubious sources and wrong information were revealed. It sure would be nice to get more reliable information about the costs and benefits of illegal immigrants — info untainted by prejudice either way.

   • This week’s Skinny by Jim Nintzel has put me on Metaphor Watch. Nintzel — you’re on metaphoric notice! Even though Nintzel wrote a solid post-mortem on the recent elections, he really went overboard with the following two metaphors about John Kromko:

   (1) “Watching Kromko try to win this campaign was like watching Saddam trying to hang on to Kuwait with World War I-style trench warfare during the first Gulf War.”

   (2) “Kromko is like that old boyfriend a girl just can’t get rid of. He seemed attractive with his rebellious spirit and wacky sense of humor, but she eventually came to her senses and gave him the old let’s-just-be-friends speech. Sadly, he won’t stop calling, and he’s really starting to creep her out.”

   Just curious — is Mr. Nintzel trying to get Mr. Kromko to slit his wrists? At least we can be thankful that Nintzel didn’t compare Kromko to Saddam Hussein after being dumped by his girlfriend. (And his pet cats.)

   Another curious line toward the end of the Skinny is this:

   “[Dave Croteau] also didn’t bother to raise enough money to get any of his ideas to a mass audience, but that’s one of those unseemly things that Greens are above. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that they lose.”

   What’s curious about this is the assumption that Greens won’t, rather than can’t, raise a lot of money. Is it possible that Nintzel has taken his Guide to Getting Elected article a little too seriously? If you follow that article, pretty much the only people who should ever run for office are Republicans and Democrats, since other parties have never had much success raising as much money as the Coke and Pepsi of politics.

9. Twizzle in da Hizzle! I think that Greens probably face some significant fundraising hurdles, but it was Dave Croteau himself who proudly told me that “Greens don’t run on money; they walk on principle.” Now, that may be spin that they’ve cooked up to cover for the fact that not many people consider them a good investment, but it’s coming from them.

   I think that if Libertarians and Greens seek office, they should take it seriously and actually do some of things that are necessary to run a viable campaign. It’s not impossible to raise enough money to qualify for matching funds in the city system if you’re organized. Libertarians have done it in the past. Likewise, Libertarians and Greens have qualified for money in the state’s Clean Elections system. It’s hard work, but nobody made them run for office.

10. I love it when you speak jive.

11. I finally read the cover story about Jacob Warner, written by Leo G. Banks.

    It’s written in a clipped, Hemingway style — rat-a-tat-tat sentences. Everything is present tense: Like, this story is happening now, baby! It does make for a faster read. No slow swim through a sea of prose; Leo’s writing skips stones right over the water. You want depth? Fill in the blanks between the mini-sentences.

    It kinda works, because the parts that are missing are the parts you’ve heard before: Native American kid has alcoholic mom and absent father, grows up to be a troublemaker, turns alcoholic, suicidal, screws up, causes somebody’s death, ends up in jail, and turns to art as an outlet.

    I wouldn’t call it a success story. I’d call it a sad life. Personally I want to know how he ended up on the train tracks, especially with another woman in the car who ended up dying. He might have been suicidal but was she as well? What is the story there, and why did he try to commit suicide when he had a pregnant wife? Was he “trapped” in that marriage, was the women in the car his mistress, or was she also suicidal? Maybe the answers were hidden between the lines. In this piece there are a lot of short lines with a lot of space between them for things to be hidden.

    I don’t know if I’d call bedsheet art a “new art form” like Leo does. It’s kind of sweet that he writes in a way that mythologizes the subject. I am sure he appreciates that. I am sure he will especially appreciate that if this story leads to an increase of art sales and that Xbox the guy’s son has been wanting. I say, let the people buy bedsheet art! Get the kid that Xbox! Why not? If I met that man in person, I might even buy him a dr– Oooh, ahhh, I mean, shake his hand.

12. Re: Leo W. Banks’ article and S.T.’s comments–

    It’s tricky with writing about this person because I agree: “I wouldn’t call it a success story. I’d call it a sad life.” However, journalism also relates to giving a voice to the voiceless, and this certainly is an example of this.

    Overall, I thought it was well-written, and when it comes to journalism, writing a story that keeps people reading while equally informing or provoking them is important. Banks hits the spot here.

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