Category: Television

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The CBC Does One Better Than Cheney

What is this shit? And why is it on the CBC?

I mean “The Border”, a CBC drama about the unbelievably exciting lives of Canadian border guards, who we all know risk their lives every day confronting terrorists and drug dealers as they pour over the border into Canada…

I watched an episode by accident. An Islamic terrorist (sigh) had a bottle of anthrax which his wife– wearing a head-covering, of course– obtained from some U.S. lab (sigh) she had worked at earlier, then smuggled into Canada. The terrorist was headed to the Yonge and Bloor subway line to smash the bottle in front of thousands of innocent Canadians. The Minister of Justice and the chief of CSIS were having a set-to about whether or not there was time to water-board the woman. An RCMP agent decided, instead, to take her baby to the subway station so it would be exposed to the anthrax— if she didn’t tell them where her husband was with the anthrax.

But isn’t water-boarding…. torture! Huh! Only to those wimpy liberals with their foolish toleration of diverse cultures that speak different languages and wear head-dressings! Only to those naïve pussies who don’t comprehend the realities of human evil nature! Don’t you know that CANADIAN lives are in the balance? Not cheap Jamaican lives, or worthless Italian lives, or insignificant Indonesian lives, or damned-to-hell Islamic lives, but valuable, important, fabulous CANADIAN lives!

Slight plot flaw there– since they didn’t know where the husband was, and didn’t really know for sure if he had anthrax, it was slightly improbable that the agent would just happen to take the baby to the one subway station the husband happened to select for this grand infection! Shameless contrivance!

Amazingly, the CSIS agents and police entered the subway station and out of all the people of various nationalities and races immediately picked out the one guilty man. The man with the anthrax. Which an agent grabbed before he was able to smash it on the ground, in front of his own baby, which could have been a telly-tubby doll for all he knew because he never really got a look at it. Come to think of it, neither did his wife, who was shown the agent taking the telly-tubby to the subway platform on a closed circuit television and immediately believed that the evil, Satanic westerners would never lie about whether or not it really was her baby in the white bundle if she had no way to actually seeing his face.

It’s enough to make you really, really, really and truly sorry that you ever supported the idea of Canadian content. Really, really, really sorry. Almost as sorry as after watching “Little Mosque on the Prairie”.

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Dexter

I just happened to catch part of a new TV series tonight– “Dexter”. As far as I can tell, this is a new low or high in television drama: Dexter is a heroic serial killer splatter-analyst who only tortures and murders “deserving” victims. And there it was– in the first episode I watched– Dexter duct-taping a slime-ball to a table in some remote location and perusing his collection of knives and then asking the victim if he was guilty. The victim tried to be evasive– for a second or two– but a quick jab in the head clarified his position and he confessed. He did it. Yes, he offed the girl. Now kill me please.

Dexter does not fly. He does not have x-ray vision. He can’t transport himself from one location to another in the flick of an eye. He can’t bend steel rods with his bare hands. If he did those things, the show would be a fantasy instead, and many people would not watch because they would find the premise silly. I think. But these same people see a man taped to a table being threatened with a knife and somehow believe that he would confess to a heinous crime right away because… because why? Because he believes the man wearing the saran wrap on his face is going to let him go if he only tells the truth?

No wonder over 30% of the population supports George Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush and Cheney are right. If you catch an Islamic fundamentalist and torture him, he will tell you the truth. He won’t make anything up. And it’s enjoyable to inflict unspeakable suffering on deserving individuals, regardless of whether we have an investigation and trial first.

Do most Americans believe this scene? Do they actually believe that torture makes people tell the truth, as opposed to what they think their torturers want to hear so that they will stop the torture?

The CIA doesn’t even do us the courtesy of demanding new information to prove that that the adduced evidence has any kind of validity. They supply the names. “Is Ahmed Mohammed from Egypt a terrorist?” “No? Yes? Which is it you want me to say?” “Whatever is the truth Hamdi.” “Yes, he is a terrorist.” “Are you telling the truth?” “Yes, yes, please don’t hurt me.” “Okay. Thank you. Call the White House and tell them we kept America safe for another day.”

Dexter’s adoptive father knew that he had problems. But Dexter’s problems aren’t the result of an addiction to porn– James Dobson didn’t consult on this series, though he should have (to make it even more stupid)– but the result of some kind of mysterious abuse he suffered before his wise adoptive father steered him towards a constructive expression of his dark impulses: there are evil people out there… people deserving of your deviant attentions…. So Dexter resolves to join the police force so he can find out who, exactly, out there, is “deserving”. And no one is more deserving in Bush’s American than the mythical serial killer — who everybody knows dun it– who gets off on a technicality. Hell, why doesn’t Dexter just off all the lawyers, and the ACLU, and journalists, and environmentalists… and get it over with? Because, in this tract of American entertainment, I’ll bet you Dexter is an environmentalist– but not one of those extremist tree-huggers! He believes in clean coal, and planting grass on those open pit mines once we’ve extracted all the carbon.

All this beauteous dismemberment and sadism, and the concomitant warnings about “adult” content… and Dexter, it turns out, like Bush, is hilariously chaste. No sex education here! Dexter is dating a lovely blonde mother of two– after all, sooner or later someone Dexter personally cares about will have to be imperiled– it’s as inevitable as Dr. House himself becoming sick– but he doesn’t want to have sex with her. Alleluia. At last a program with some family values. At last something James Dobson can approve of for white middle America to watch in between spankings!

Go Dexter Go!

I say it’s peculiar that after all of the reversals of verdicts due to DNA testing in the past few years, television audiences are still so eager to believe that it’s easy to identify who the real murderer is and the TV hero– serial killer or not– never makes a mistake when he goes out there and exercises a little vigilante justice on our behalf.

And America never tires of enjoying the carnage as long as the fig leaf of just desserts is employed correctly. I am not a monster just because I enjoyed the scene in which he butchers a man because the man deserved it. I am not a bad person just because I tuned to this station to watch this show because I couldn’t wait to see some kind of sadistic violence… no no– not me.

This is why audiences have the perversity of Dexter backwards. Dexter is not really a serial killer who conceals his true nature behind the façade of a police man.

In fact, behind the façade of a serial killer, what we really have a is a policeman.

And that is why Dexter may well be the sickest, most obscene program ever broadcast on television. It seriously invites the viewer to enjoy fantasies of dismemberment and torture and inflicting unspeakable pain on human beings under the fig leaf of retributive justice. If you had any shred of belief left in the basic decency of human beings, pray that this show gets cancelled because too few people watch it.

I’m being coy here– okay. I said that Bush and Cheney believe that an Al Qaeda operative would not make things up under torture. But that’s ridiculous. Of course he would, and I have to theorize that most people involved, the torturers, the authorizers of torture, and the monsters in the Bush Administration, and maybe even the victims themselves, all understand that it doesn’t matter if they make things up– all the better. Name names. Tell us what they “did”. They will be arrested, which constitutes proof that the torture worked. They will be tortured and asked if what the first torture victims said was true. Of course it was. Torture works. Lives have been saved. Americans can rest easy tonight in their trailer parks and school gyms and gated communities: Bush and Cheney have preserved your way of life. And it only took a little torture.

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Al Capp Auditions

In an interview, Goldie Hawn, recounted that Al Capp, the creator of “Li’l Abner”, the comic strip– yes, the one that did a rather savage parody of Joan Baez in the 1960’s (calling her “Phony Joany”)–once arranged an “audition” for her for a movie he claimed was going to be made from his comic strip. At the audition, he demanded sex with her. When she refused, he told her she would never work in “this town” because that’s just the way things are done.

Apparently, she was not the only actress to be auditioned by Al Capp.

I feel better having this reason to dislike Capp, since his tasteless parodies of Baez, of course, were political in nature.

He also flew up to Montreal and took on John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in person, at their “bed-in for peace”.  Lennon eventually found him tiresome and asked him to leave.

But then, all good satire– I mean, really good satire– is subtle and nuanced and suggestive, and his parodies of Joan Baez were none of these things.

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James Frey Gets Oprahed

I watched the debate about James Frey’s book, “A Million Little Pieces”, unfold, with interest. If you’ve read through my previous stuff, you won’t be shocked to find that I think the book is a sham and should be relabeled as “Bullshit” (not as “fiction”, because that would require some art).

Frey says “the emotional truth is there”. Nobody said it wasn’t. It isn’t, but who said it wasn’t. The emotional truth is weighted to an enormous degree by our understanding of what is true and what is not. But who cares? But most people don’t like liars. We especially don’t like liars when they try to manipulate our emotions with their lies. Like James Frey.

But nor should it surprise anyone that Oprah defends the book. The “underlying message”, she said, “still resonates for me”. Oprah’s entire career has been built on catering to her audience, delivering something that “resonates” with millions of viewers. And what “resonates” with millions of viewers? Manipulation and pre-packaged pseudo-emotional experiences.

“A Million Little Pieces” is about, in part, the ordeal of pulling yourself out of deep shit by your bootstraps and remaking your life into something good. How can you not feel cheated if the author misrepresents the actual scale of the problem? If his own triumphant journey started halfway down the track? This book has implants.

Oprah is not a journalist. She is an entertainer. The Oprah show is always, first and foremost, about Oprah. Every interview is about Oprah. Every gift she gives does not announce to the world that this cause or this person or this service is so worthy and so honorable and so true that it deserves a gift. It announces that Oprah is so worthy and so honorable and so true because she has bestowed this gift on people she deems worthy. When she interviews Elie Wiesel, the show is about Oprah being somewhere up there with Eli Wiesel– the high priestess of compassion on those with low self-esteem– the holocaust is incidental.

Oprah says she chooses books of the month based on the quality of the book. But if the author won’t show up on her show to conduct a session of mutual admiration, that book no longer deserves a second of her time. If she had any class or journalistic integrity, she’d keep the book as her choice and promote it and say, “just because the author doesn’t like schmoozing with a tv celebrity doesn’t mean the book isn’t worthy of your attention.”

Now Oprah might rightly complain that this is a bum rap because most news “journalists” in America do what she does.

And that, sadly, tragically, is true.

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Copyright and Copywrong

(From a discussion on usenet)

Skip this if you don’t want to be bored. But if you think the CD as the medium of distribution for music might soon be obsolete…

Actually, your point is well taken. I have often thought and said that I wish some days that the copyright-holders get exactly what they wish for. Because it would kill them off more quickly. What I believe is happening is that copyright holders want it both ways. They want to benefit from widespread exposure. Then they want to assert the right to not expose their work.

I firmly believe that if the government had required Microsoft to put effective copy protection on all of their products, we wouldn’t have the monopoly we have now. And I firmly believe Microsoft knew that, and that is why, when Word Perfect, for example, removed copy protection from their product, Microsoft almost immediately did the same. It is therefore hypocritical of Microsoft to demand protection from competition, by asserting their copyright. Compete!

And, in fact, you can easily see that Microsoft has been very circumspect on this issue. They know dimly what Google understands completely: there’s a lot of money to be made in giving away your product.

As for music, copyright holders want their music exposed, on radio and tv, in promotional tie-ins, scandalous newspapers, etc., etc. If you truly believe that Ashley Simpson gets her face on my local entertainment section because even a Kitchener, Ontario newspaper believes she is so talented she deserves it, God bless you, but I don’t. She is there because her corporate Svengalis want her “exposed”. They want you to see her face. They have established a very sophisticated and effective system of promotion that ensures that her face will be on magazine covers. They will also want you to hear her music– why else would you buy her CD? Most commercial radio stations only play music by artists they believe will obtain wide exposure through tv and magazines. One hand washing the other. They all profit by selling advertising, not music.

Since I have no intention of spending one red cent on Ashley Simpson products, I would have no problem with her corporate Svengalis being absolutely, totally successful in preventing me from being exposed to her music, her face, or her tantrums, without having paid for permission. Go to it! Please– be absolutely successful. Prevent her music from ever being downloaded to my computer, or played on my radio station, or her face from being on my tv, or in my local newspaper, unless I actually offer you money for it.

I have absolutely no problem with finding my music by reading reviews or hearing personal recommendations from people I know instead. I also like to support local talent.

But that, of course, does not happen. And up until recently, this system worked to the advantage of the big corporations, who could control access to the actual product, the CD. Now the corporations have lost control over the actual product, so the system is becoming unbalanced. But only if you believe that for the rest of all time, we must all consume music by purchasing a discrete material product, and music companies must only profit through the sale of that physical product.

That model has been made obsolete by technology and the music industry (and Hollywood and television) are crying the blues and they refuse to accept it. They are the carriage-makers of our era. They deserve to go out of business because they have failed to adjust to changing market realities. In retrospect, does anybody doubt that if the music companies had moved aggressively to make their entire catalogues available as paid downloads in a high quality format that they would not have made a killing? It took Apple to show them it could be done. But it might well be too late. As with prohibition, individual transgression has been replaced with a transgressive infrastructure that will not be easily suppressed.

Google, iTunes, eBay, and Amazon, and even Microsoft, are the new emblems of astute corporations that understand where the market is going and what it wants. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth is misplaced. The music industry should sit down together, face the fact that the old model of business practice is now obsolete, and move on to something new, or join the other dinosaurs in the museum.

Congress, despicably, in exchange for ready election campaign cash, is doing everything it can to keep an obsolete business model afloat– this from alleged believers in a “free market” (“free” for everyone else). It’s like requiring train companies to keep stokers employed. Or more like when a city in Bolivia tried to make it illegal to save rain water in order to help a private American company make a bigger profit with it’s monopoly on the water supply.

The museum is full of creatures that failed to adapt.

Finally, I absolutely believe that a very profitable music business model can survive downloading. How does Google make money?

The difference is, the Recording industry will have to work hard and use their brains. That might be asking too much….

A recent documentary film producer was asked to pay $10,000 for the rights to use a six-second cell-phone ring tone that was derived from the theme from ROCKY (Gonna Fly Now). Tragically, he couldn’t afford a team of lawyers, so he had to pay a negotiated amount less than that, even though he was not convinced that he had to pay, legally, for it’s use in a documentary.

That is not really farce anymore: it’s tragedy.

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Flight 93: The Movie

Am I supposed to feel good about the fact that the makers of the upcoming film, “Flight 93”, have received “cooperation” from all of the families of the passengers?

Some of these families were concerned that earlier accounts of the flight only paid attention to the “heroes”. They want to ensure that their family member gets some exposure as well. This smells of political correctness. Maybe some of the people on this plane were assholes? We’ll never know, because that is not the kind of “exposure” the families want.

I don’t hesitate to acknowledge the terrible sufferings of the families and victims of 9/11. It was a traumatic event, unprecedented in scope, certainly deserving of respectful acknowledgement and a certain degree of sensitivity from the media and film-makers.

But they are not the only ones who have died in the world in the last five years, and not the only ones who have died tragically. And I am sure the the families of all victims, whether of violence, inflicted by misguided governments or fanatic organizations, or the random violence of criminals and psychotics, or the horror of illnesses that strike without reason or logic, all feel that their sufferings are unique and unparalleled and deserving of deferential respect.

But nobody seems willing to publicly challenge the families of the 9/11 victims, whether on the issue of the preposterously excessive compensation they receive (why on earth are they and they alone entitled to millions of dollars in pay-outs when even the families of soldiers are not?) or, in this case, on how history looks at the event.

“Flight 93” is being directed by Paul Greengrass, who directed “Bloody Sunday”, about the 1972 riots in Ireland that resulted in the deaths of 13 unarmed demonstrators. He is a good director, and the film seems promising.

But, is Mr. Greengrass making a home movie? Is Mr. Greengrass making a movie that these family members will be proud to show at family gatherings in the future? Or is he making a movie that strives for accuracy and truth?

It all fits with a trend. We are now inundated with biographical films that are approved by the families or friends of the subject. Not one of these films would admit that they are dishonest in any way– the people who approve of them (and sell the rights to the stories) love to tell Oprah or David or Conan that the movie will show “warts and all”. But they usually only show the warts you don’t mind people seeing, or the warts everyone already knows about. Ray Charles didn’t mind that you knew how many women wanted to sleep with him or that he did drugs and Johnny Cash doesn’t mind if you know that he did pills and alcohol and chased June Carter. But if either of these guys, or Mohammed Ali or Patsy Cline or Buddy Holly or Loretta Lynn or even Jerry Lee Lewis did anything really reprehensible (that you don’t already know about), it aint going to come out in the film.

It is partly due to the onerous provisions of current copyright laws. It has become nearly impossible to make a biographical movie without getting permission from the various stakeholders, whether it is the copyright owners (of the music or images), or families. When the “Buddy Holly Story” was filmed, they actually had to use fictitious names for the Crickets because they had sold the rights separately from the Holly family. That is bizarre. If that is really the result of current legislation on copyright, the legislation needs to be changed. As his highness said in “Amadeus” (a movie without the problem because all of it’s principals were long deceased), “this is stupid”.

Can it be done otherwise? Check out “Backbeat” about the Beatles’ early career. It’s a great film.

On the other hand, I just realized that I hadn’t applied my own theory: who is shown most flatteringly in the movie? Without a doubt, Astrid Kirchherr, depicted as a fascinating, sophisticated, clever, sexy fan-savant.

I just checked a few web-sites. According to this one, Astrid was indeed involved in the production. How about that.

I do not look forward to the inevitable biopic of Bob Dylan, even though the story of one of the most compelling artists of our age should be an important and significant film. Bob Dylan controls the rights to his music. Nobody will be able to make a film without the music, thus, without the approval of Bob Dylan or his estate. I have no doubt that when it comes, the owners of the rights will proclaim, loudly and insistently, that the biography will be “warts and all”. And I have no doubt that it will really be a highly selective and probably distorted picture. [2008-05: I was wrong. The Dylan film, “I’m Not There”, was brilliant. Dylan, after seeing “I Walk the Line”, let it be known to director Todd Haynes that he could have all the rights he wanted and make the film he wanted because Dylan was not going to demand approval of the script or the film. He didn’t want a typical “biopic”. He wanted to leave the judgement of how the film was made to the director. Hallelujah!]

A fair question is– is that any better or worse than the type of biography we get from Albert Goldman,

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Our Moral Decline

Would you be surprised to find that, in the view of this website, public morality is in decline? What? Again? It is? Oh my goodness! Whatever will we do?!

www.holybible.com is a fairly representative Christian commentary on our day and age, our times, our era, our epoch, our cultural milieu. (It even, of course, like almost every other “Christian” website in the world, has a pitch for your money on the main page, for a CD or worship of songs, though I should acknowledge that it’s a relatively low-key pitch for the genre).

Or, like me, would you be more inclined to think about just how shocked you would really be if you ever happened to stumble into a website somewhere, by a Christian journalist or pundit, that expressed the thought that public morality was improving?

Seriously. I thought about that a lot. Why would it seem totally weird to read a comment like, “it is clear that our society is less sinful now than it was 50 years ago”? But you know that you are never going to hear that from a Christian journalist or pundit. Not in your life.

If virtually every single Christian commentator thinks the world is getting worse, not better, they must be right– right? They can’t all be wrong.

But if society is in decline, when, according to these punsters, was it ever in incline? It must be declining from somewhere. It must have improved, from the barbaric ages, at some point. Say, the 1950’s. The America of Ozzie and Harriet and the Beaver.

Do they have a picture in their minds of rural villages dotted with white churches, milk-maids tending the cows and baking apple pies, young boys fishing at the creek, fathers mowing the hay?

That’s nostalgia. That’s sentimentality masquerading as social conviction. Even a cursory survey of the real historical record reveals that the 1950’s was actually an age of profound immorality. Racism was not only tolerated, it was accepted. Sexism was embedded in the infrastructure of the workplace. Materialism and conformity were promoted as “healthy” social values. Sexual abuse was ignored, if even reported. And it was the official policy of the U.S. government that, if necessary, 100s of millions of people would be killed to stop the Soviets.

You would think that Christians would be among the first celebrate the achievements of the civil rights era, or the accomplishments of U.N. peace-keepers, or the land-mine treaty, or democracy in the Soviet Union, the disarmament movement, equality for women, peace. Nyet. Doesn’t matter. Has no importance. The important thing is that 13-year-old girls use the f-word in movies. That’s it! It’s the end of times!

This is all a bit like the “values” argument conservatives love to wave around. We poor liberals believe in diversity, tolerance, progress, human rights, community, the environment, and equality. It’s such a shame we don’t have any values. Hey bubba– lets get a six-pack and some buckshot and drive your Hummer down the back roads of Idaho so we can shoot some helpless furry creatures and talk about values. Right, Bobby-Bob– like the sanctity of the right to own guns, and the sanctity of the right to pay our employees a low minimum wage? And the sanctity of the right to send people to jail for 99 years for stealing a cell phone? Damn right we have values…

I frankly believe that even if 90% of the population stopped fornicating and drinking beer and thinking kind thoughts about minorities and the poor and suddenly decided to go to church on Sunday instead… even if all of that happened, the Christian commentators would continue to tell you that the world is in moral decline…. because that’s what they do. That’s their bread and butter. That’s their mental frame-work, their cache, their frame of reference. They could not do without it, and they would not feel powerful and mighty without that cudgel with which to whack you in the face: listen to me, or you will burn in hell.

Why is it so illogical to constantly, consistently, always proclaim that public morality is declining? If it doesn’t already seem absurd to you, here’s why. Suppose that your salary were declining every year, year after year, without fail? How much salary, exactly, would you now have?

If you started at, say, $30,000 in 1970, and your salary declined continuously since then, you would have almost none of it left. But that’s silly. Nobody’s salary declines like that.

In the same way, public morality cannot be in constant decline. But have you ever heard any of these pundits that morality ever improved in any particular year? No, and you never will: where’s the money in that?

 

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Grey’s Atomic

Not sure why “Gray’s Anatomy” ever bothered with the hospital setting in the first place. Why not just have it among a bunch of nuclear physicists somewhere. They could fall in love, out of love, break each others’ hearts, romance each other while experimenting with atoms, and then, every once in a while, a bomb goes off and they kill a million people and one of them says, “you broke my heart. You never believed in me.”

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“Strong Religious Beliefs”

“One of the things we’re playing with is having characters with strong religious beliefs included in some of our new shows,” Mr. Reilly added. “This would not be the premise of the show, but we could have a character who simply has this strong point of view.” NY Times, November 20, 2004

One of the most infuriating things about the political and cultural debate of the past few years is precisely this piece of bs elicited from the network executives on the subject of values on television, from an article that largely observes that even in the bible belt, people are watching dirty tv shows. Do as I say, not as I do.

All right. So, since Bush was elected with the support of the Christian Right, and they are getting all the media attention lately, and because they are a bunch of medieval cry-babies whose idea of pluralism is allowing Hindu and Moslem students to leave the classroom while the 10 Commandments are recited, let’s think about having a character on a tv show espouse “strong religious beliefs”. As if.

And if you think I’m picking on the Christians– I am a Christian.

Sounds to me that someone is buying into the preposterous evangelical myth that the media is controlled by radical liberal feminists, homosexuals, atheists, and socialists and, therefore, the Christians are entitled to some space for their views. If only!

If only there was a single character on any tv show that ever actually said anything like:

“Those fundamentalists like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell give me the creeps. How long before they start burning witches?” Or, “Why does the government allow advertising directed at children?” Or, “We’ve looked at all the evidence and questioned all the suspects, and we still have no clue as to who committed this murder. Should I beat someone up until he confesses?” Or, “He was a great soldier. He killed many people for his country.” Or, “Our kids are getting fat from eating at McDonald’s too often.”

The day we hear characters speak like that is the day I’d be delighted to hear a character say, “I think it would be wrong for you to have sex before you are legally married.”

I don’t object to values being discussed on tv. But I do object when narrow-minded right-wing bigots insist that they are the only people with “values”, as if people who voted Bush, and for his tax-cuts for the rich, have values, while those who voted for Kerry because he might actually do something to preserve the environment and protect endangered species, don’t have values.

The word “values” is being used, by conservative Christians, the way “quality” is now used by a lot of people. We want “quality television”. Which is, television with “values”. Right.

 

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Grace Slick and the Phantom Microphone

In the mid-1960’s, television realized that it had to acknowledge that there was something going on out there in reality-land that did not conform to the standard paradigm of the way big people do things in America– because there was money in it (which was exactly the way big people did things anyway) and so they deigned to acknowledge rock’n’roll and decided to occasionally allow a rock’n’roll band onto the Ed Sullivan Show or Hootenanny or Hullabaloo.

But what do you do with them? How do you pose them? What do you put in the background? How much do we have to pay them?

They discovered that if you played the recording while the band faked a performance of the song, you didn’t have to pay very much for the performance. It was technically promotion, not a performance. Union rules didn’t apply. So Dick Clark, who I really believe is the king pimp of all television pimps, week after week, on American Bandstand, featured musicians standing in front of real teens from America lip-synching to their own tunes. Did they think we were fooled? I don’t know. I’m not too sure.

Did they think we were stupid?  Without a doubt.

On Ed Sullivan, the bands usually (but not always) really played. You can see cords going from their guitars to their amps– a dead give-away in that era. If there are no cords– it’s lip-synching. Thank you Ed. And it is now time for you to stop introducing Jimmy Morrison and the Doors, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, and Mick Jagger and the Stones, as “something for the youngsters of America”. Weird, wasn’t it? Dean Martin would come out and put all the adults to sleep with songs about pillows that you dream on, and then Mick Jagger would come out for the “youngsters” and tell them he couldn’t get no satisfaction.

The other way you could tell if it was really live was if you heard a mistake. And that’s what gives Grace Slick away in this performance of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. It’s real. It’s live. Grace misses the beat on “pill” and has to speed up to catch the beat on “one pill makes you small”. That is her smiling, I’m pretty sure, because she just made a mistake in front of 25 million people. She’s cute, isn’t she? It’s endearing. One minute, she is a poised artist, delivering the amazing goods, the number one hit single in America. Then, just for a second, she’s an embarrassed little girl again who turned the wrong way on the dance floor.

There are a lot of great songs from the sixties, and a lot of great performances. There are only a few performances of great songs. And there are even fewer performances that are so monumental that they seem to leap from their era and genre into a kind of stratosphere of transcendental moments in life. There was Hendrix performing “All Along the Watchtower”, and Dylan doing “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in London, and the Beatles doing “Hey Jude”. There was Jimmy Morrison doing “Light My Fire”.

And there was Grace Slick performing “White Rabbit”. You have to hear Grace Slick’s voice to believe it. It is incredibly big and powerful and you might believe it could be heard above the electric guitars and drums even without amplification. The only other female singers I can think of with a voice of comparable size are Mama Cass Elliot and Janis Joplin. Grace was sexier than those two and the next top twenty female singers combined.

Grace Slick’s voice probably couldn’t have been small if she’d wanted it too. The first lines of “White Rabbit” are delivered with as much restraint as you could possibly muster for a Sherman tank of a voice. Then she builds, with an insinuating vibrato, like a whip being drawn back. She builds and builds until, by the last lines– “remember what the dormouse said…”– her voice is in full bore, a wall of sound coming at you like a freight train, tidal and relentless, slashing guitars just barely able to provide seething rhythmic foundation to this thing of power and explosive fury.

While Grace Slick was singing like this, the Grammys for best female vocal performance went to Barbara Streisand, Eydie Gorme, Bobbie Gentry, Peggy Lee, and Dionne Warwick. That’s why I haven’t paid any attention to the Grammys for about 40 years.

Grace Slick had beautiful blue eyes and long black hair. She was uncompromising— she quit Jefferson Starship when they went commercial. She drank too much. She got married and divorced, married and divorced. She had one daughter, China, who would be about 30 by now.

“White Rabbit” was written by Grace Slick, inspired by the Lewis Carroll book.

Alice discovers that one pill makes her larger and one pill makes her small. But the pills that mother gives her don’t do anything at all. That about sums up the 1960’s.

White Rabbit was used in a movie called “Go Ask Alice” which purported to show you the true experiences of a bad girl who did some drugs and thereby ended up as a teenage prostitute in Los Angeles and eventually died of an overdose.

If I recall correctly, it wasn’t a terrible movie. But we knew that mother made this film.

Grace Slick – Live

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Grace just missed the beat.  Looking at yah with those very intense eyes.

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Grace suddenly looks down.  You wonder why.  She was staring, fetchingly, right at the camera– right at you.  Then she looks away, as if she suddenly saw something important

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Mystery solved– it’s a second camera.  She was coached to look at the camera but someone missed a cue and didn’t switch for about five or six seconds.  Dig the psychedelic background?   Higher consciousness, baby..

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Grace sings to an electrical outlet.  I’m not kidding.  This is from a performance in which the band lip-synched to “Somebody to Love”– there are no cords on the guitars.  So Grace decided to sing to an electrical cord instead of a microphone, and, yes, she’s laughing and making fun of the whole thing.

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From the same performance.  The tambourine player, back row, far left, is holding a cigarette in his left hand.  Notice there are no cords on the guitars.

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One more from “White Rabbit”.  Costuming by Cecil B. De Mille.