DeRosaWorld

Sunday Morning Music

John Gorka performs Temporary Road.

Saturday Musings

- - Some political notes from the field and a DeRosaWorld poll: I was in Pennsylvania and New Jersey last week and talked a lot of politics with a lot of people. I think Senator Obama is going to take both states by a large margin. Most people I spoke with were Hillary supporters, but it is any Democrat against McCain for them. These are the 'Archie Buckers' the Obama campaign painted with racist colors during the primaries. They have forgiven him.

They are so sick of the Republican Party and President Bush, Jr. that they are supporting Obama. Race may or may not be an issue for them, but not a show-stopper. They are afraid of McCain and despise the policies of the Republicans that have brought about the housing foreclosures, the high price of gasoline, and the Iraq war and shame. Shame, a word I heard repeated.

They are also tired of all the right-wing media bleating on and on and on in defense of the Bush, Jr. Administration. They don't believe it anymore. They are afraid that their sons will be drafted. These are the things they are talking about.

The politics of fear worked too well and now the electorate is afraid of the Republicans.

There is a concern about Obama out here, but it is not the color of his skin. They are worried because they know nothing about him. They are afraid of his inexperience. They are afraid he will fail before he can turn things around. They are now pinning their hopes on an unknown. That is how desperate they are. So if the skinny kid with the funny name doesn’t have any more Larry Sinclairs out there with pictures of him snorting cocaine off his boner, then I think we are going to have ourselves a Democrat in the White House come November…and he is going to get a lot of white support, both male and female, rich and poor.

- - The progressive blogosphere was of a mixed mind this week. Some wanted to be mad at Senator Obama for caving into the FISA bill…and they are right to be mad. What was he thinking?

Others were begrudgingly clapping for Senator Clinton for supporting their man…and they are right to be happy. The Hillary supporters are going to come out strong for Obama in November. Could the same be said of the Obama supporters if the Democratic Party nominee were Senator Clinton?

- - The Stonewall Riots began on June 28, 1969 in New York City on Christopher Street at the Stonewall Inn. The NYC cops got as good as they gave that day. This day is still celebrated in the bars of the West Village. Before Stonewall is a great documentary about the gay community and the times leading up to the riots.

- - I couldn’t fit Don DeLillo’s Underworld into the carry-on, so I took two slim Gore Vidal novels with me, hoping the Office of Homeland Security didn’t open my bag. In A Yellow Wood and Dark Green, Bright Red are two very honest and unique novels. They have been reprinted in England; you cannot get them in America. I got them from Amazon UK. (Beware the weak dollar vs. the euro.)

Two post World War Two novels that the New York Times either didn’t care for or refused to review because of The City and the Pillar scandal. In A Yellow Wood (1947) is a rare look at life in New York City immediately after the war as veterans come home and take up the business of America. And in that glorious time between VJ Day and the Communist witch hunts when American artists thought they could be honest with us and themselves. This is the time of film noir in Hollywood. Something was wrong. The defeat of fascism didn’t bring peace, just prosperity. There was something new out there that was in charge now, and to be afraid of …and it turned out to be us.

Dark Green, Bright Red (1950) is a great example of the cliché “ahead of its time”. This book shows us what America was up to in Central America before most Americans could find Guatemala on a map; empire building, with a little sex in it. If there was ‘special rendition’ in 1950, Vidal would have been shipped off to the basement of the Pentagon for revealing state secrets.

- - Yes, I did have a soft pretzel and of course cheese steaks. Three cheese steaks in fact. I also had some decent Chinese Food, something California is in as short supply as water. How hard is it to make an egg roll with a little hot mustard on the side?

- - Get yourself some good sipping whiskey and buy Emmylou Harris’ All I Intended To Be. At first you’ll sit and feel sorry for yourself and feel the aches and pains of middle age, but by the end you will be refreshed and ready to get up and face the world. She captures that middle-aged need to put your feet up feeling. Fuck the young; let them suffer with the High School Musical soundtrack. This album was made for adults by adults.

- - One last word on flying in modern America. It sucks and the airline industry should be ashamed of itself. If they don't want to do the job anymore, give it up and let us have a lot of smaller, independent airlines with the American, small  business mentality. Let's make the FAA do its fucking job and in this new century let the major airlines go the way of TV news, movies, rock & roll, cheap gasoline and other 20th century Americana. Something needs to change because Americans need and want to travel around this great country of ours and the current major airlines do not deserve our business. Americans do not deserve being treated like this.

Saturday Musings

- Tim Russert’s funeral was a bit surreal. I guess when you serve the Emperor; you get an Emperor’s funereal. The military honors kind of raised the bar for dead journalists, though. I mean what do we do when Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite go? And can you image the funeral pyre for Rush Limbaugh?

- So, our Democrat-Congress gave immunity to the telecoms. FAIL.

- So, our Democrat-Congress keeps funding the Iraq war, no questions asked. FAIL

- Maybe someday someone will explain to me how George Bush, Jr. gets away with frightening and bullying everyone from journalists, to politicians to the military. He seems like a fucking moron to me.

- How’s the price of gasoline at your pump?

- Thank god President Bush, Jr. is visiting the flooded Midwest. It has been rumored he can part the waters.

- NASA confirmed there is ice on Mars. Of course, Earth has brought global warming to Mars by digging up the ice and letting it melt in the sun. If I were the Martians, I'd attack as soon as possible. Send the tripods now, before it is too late and you end up with McDonald's and second hand cigarette smoke.

- The airline industry, remember those guys and the $$$$billions taxpayers gave them after 9/11…well they are going to start raising prices and restricting flying with minimum stay-over requirements. Can we have the 9/11 money back?

- Too bad Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party crushed most of the unions in America. Maybe they would have wanted to help the average American. Ah, well.

- Don DeLillo’s Underworld blogging continues: Last week I finished the Prologue: The Triumph of Death. Now this was no ordinary prologue, this is about fifty pages of new wave cinema edited sports prose about October 3, 1951 and the Giants beating the Dodgers for the Pennant at The Polo Grounds, the same day the Russians set off an atomic bomb. I guess this would be called a tour de force. Among others we meet Cotter, a kid who jumps the gate to see the game and ends up with the game winning ball in his possession.

Part One: Long Tall Sally jumps us up in time to 1992. We meet Nick and learn that in the montage from the Prologue, Nick was the kid on a roof listening to the Game on the radio. He now owns the legendary baseball. He also has a typical, fucked up suburban life in Arizona. But, he also has a strange ex-lover who is painting Cold War era bombers in the desert. See this is a post-modern novel, so things are going to be revealed backwards. Man, some of this territory was covered fifty years ago by Norman Mailer. We get it.; being a middle-aged American male sucks, especially if you only moved to fucking Arizona instead of all the way to California.

The centerpiece of this section of the book is, I think the hot-air balloon ride Nick and his wife take over the nuclear bomber art exhibit. There is also a long passage full of wonder inside a condom store. Nick figures out that one of his friends and co-workers is banging his wife. Lot’s of experimental cross dialog in which you don’t know who is a talking. This just reminds me that John Huston’s Key Largo is on TCM. Huston did some sound/cross-dialog experiments in that movie. I stopped reading and put the television on and watched a couple of movies at the same time. I kept switching channels between TCM and IFC. There was a French movie on about a group of kids who decide to kill the leader of their group, for no real reason.  There is a small scene where two of the kids are riding on a motorcycle and they stop so one of them can throw-up. They were drinking and partying too much earlier. The kid who was sick asks the other if he has any gum because his mouth has such a bad taste in it. The kid offers him a strawberry flavored condom. The sick kid takes it and pops it io his mouth. And I thought. This was better that that entire condom store passage I just read in DeLillo.

Anyway, I am not quite ready to cry “bullshit” on Underworld, just yet. It may be the great American novel and because Cotter showed up again at the end of this section. So we are back in time tracing the baseball.

I’ll keep you posted on Part Two next weekend.

- Speaking of French new wave…Are you ready for this?…Belinda Carlisle has a new album out, Voila in which she sings completely in French. It doesn’t get no better than this folks. The Go-Go’s lead singer has always been a secret favorite of mine.  Guys, if reading Don DeLillo makes you worried about turning 50 or 60, Belinda Carlisle singing Jezebel in French is the cure for middle-aged angst.

Today Is The Day Summer Begins

Yo La Tengo perform Today Is The Day, a very cool song to open the summer of 2008.

Sunday Morning Music

Let's rock. I'm Losing You by The Faces (featuring Rod Stewart).

Saturday Musings

- Tim Russert didn’t want to learn the lesson all working class Irish, Italians and Jews learn the hard way. Never trust the WASPS.

- The Great Game in Afghanistan took a hit this week. About 870 prisoners escaped during a Taliban bomb and rocket attack on the main prison in southern Afghanistan that knocked down the front gate and demolished a prison floor, And in western Afghanistan today, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. military vehicle, killing four Americans.

- Bush, Jr. is still in Europe.

- The Cedar River was a force to be reckoned with this week in Iowa. And Des Moines’ levees were ruptured by the Des Moines River today. Let’s hope the government response matches the task.

- The Supreme Court decided that habeas corpus is an important part of the American Constitution. Bush, Jr. said he would nod his imperial head and abide by the Court’s ruling, although it was only a 5-4 decision….huh?

- The world continues to shake and quiver. Northern Japan took a hit yesterday. Is mother nature trying to tell us something, like “get off”.

- Speaking of getting off earth, NASA’s latest Mars lander, Phoenix has collected particles that offer a snapshot of millions of years of life on the Mars. NASA is hoping to find evidence of the existence of water and life-supporting organic minerals in the polar region. Now wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

- I hope that lift off clip thing that fell off the Space Shuttle doesn’t fall and hit me in the head. Something else to worry about.

- I’ve been under the weather lately, knocked down by one hell of a cold, with a slight fever, heavy chest congestion and lots of runny nose. Yesterday I made a lunch out of a can of imported tuna in olive oil from Genoa, Italy, a clove of fresh garlic and some rigatoni. I felt a lot better. I try to hold off the American over the counter medicine if I can, but not this time. Mucinex and Afrin are my bff.

- Glen Campbell has an album coming late summer in which he covers his favorite rock songs. I am so excited. There will be some Green Day and some U2 and god knows what else. That old boy can sing and play the guitar.

- Emmylou Harris, the reigning queen of alt-country also has a new album. All I Intended To Be. I need to catch up with Emmylou. She’s keeps churning out records and changing partners and I just can’t get enough of her.

- Don DeLillo’s Underworld…okay, so the opening is Pafko At The Wall, a tour de force of sports writing that seems like he turned his manuscript over to Oliver Stone to edit. I don know. There is something so un-noble about this so noble a moment in baseball. The kid listening alone on the rooftop and the people spilling out in to the streets captures the uniqueness of the moment, but most of the characters are out of the film noir era, post WW2 America that scared the hell out of the Republican Party and J. Edgar Hoover (and enamored the French). It is a big book and I will blog about it here each week until finished. The opening is certainly crafty, but am I reading the great American novel? I’ll let you know.

Sunday Morning Music

Fleetwood Mac and the USC Marching Band perform Don't Stop (Think About Tomorrow).

Saturday Musings

- Senator Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. (D-IL) age 46 is the presumptive Nominee of the Democratic Party for President in 2008.

- Arianna Huffington can finally relax. Hillary won’t be the nominee.

- The white, male talking heads exploded all at once across the networks when Hillary gave her campaign wrap-up speech after the South Dakota and Montana primaries earlier this week and did not concede the election. Russert, Matthews, Obermann, Toobin, Gergen. It was awesome. You could see they wanted to kill her. MSNB even split the screen like Hollywood Squares so they called all scream at once.

- One thing to be concerned about, Senator Obama lost eight out of the last ten contests to Senator Clinton.

- The Senate Intelligence Committee finally gets to release its 2004 report that proved Bush, Jr. lied to America about the need to go to war in Iraq. Who arrests the President?

- NASA tells us that Bush, Jr. lied to us about their findings on climate change and even changed the data in their reports. Does anybody in the Press want to ask him about this?

- How about those gasoline prices? Ready to throw garbage at Bush, Jr. public appearances yet? No, let’s wait to blame the new President.

- Was talking to a 9/11 conspiracy nut and she said, If everything Bush, Jr. ever told us was a lie, and then challenged me to prove her wrong and I couldn’t, then why would he tell the truth about 9/11? The argument gave me pause.

- Don DeLillo’s Falling Man may be the first really big book about 9/11. I’m preparing myself to sit down and revisit that day. I think this read requires I sit in my chair over a long weekend and don’t get up until the end.

- Bo Diddley has left the stage. My introduction to him actually comes from George Thorogood’s cover of Who Do You Love. As a youngster, I loved to track back music I liked to its roots. Artists like Janis Joplin led me back to Bessie Smith. Elvis Presley led me back to Big Mama Thornton. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac led me back to Etta James. Fleetwood Mac started out as a blues band with Peter Green that led me back to many of the great blues artists and guitarists from the 1940s and 1950s.

- Netflix movie review: There Will Be Blood coming from my eyes if I have to watch this movie to the end.

- This Saturday is Chicken Parmigiana day. First I make the tomato sauce. I have two double chicken breasts. I pound them. A little salt and pepper. I mix egg, milk and a lot of various Italian spices, especially oregano into the mix, dip the chicken. Coat the chicken in Progresso Italian Style bread crumbs, fry it up. Then I put the water on, cook the spaghetti. And of course Chianti.

The Fat Lady Sings

Eileen Farrell sings the aria 'Un bel di' from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly for Senator Hillary Clinton.

Thanks, Hillary! 

Dear Jim,

I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.

When I decided to run for president, I knew exactly why I was getting into this race: to work hard every day for the millions of Americans who need a voice in the White House.

I made you -- and everyone who supported me -- a promise: to stand up for our shared values and to never back down. I'm going to keep that promise today, tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.

I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.

I know as I continue my lifelong work for a stronger America and a better world, I will turn to you for the support, the strength, and the commitment that you have shown me in the past 16 months. And I will always keep faith with the issues and causes that are important to you.

In the past few days, you have shown that support once again with hundreds of thousands of messages to the campaign, and again, I am touched by your thoughtfulness and kindness.

I can never possibly express my gratitude, so let me say simply, thank you.

Sincerely,

Sunday Morning Music

Utah Phillips died this past week. Here are Emmylou Harris, Mary Black and friends performing one of his many songs, Green Rolling Hills.