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Oh My But You Have a Pretty Face: Jesse Winchester’s “Brand New Tennessee Waltz”

Oh my but you have a pretty face,
You favor a girl that I knew.

Oh my.

Jesse Winchester’s lyrics starts out with that expression of startled awe: oh my!

It’s not “holy cow” or “my goodness” or “wow”. “Oh my” is that quick feint with polite astonishment, an involuntary gasp of amazement, too spontaneous to be refined or vulgarized: oh my.

Jesse Winchester was writing about his experience as a draft-dodger. He moved to Canada in 1967 to avoid service in the Viet Nam War. Obviously, he left someone behind. From “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (1970):

Well I left Tennessee in a hurry dear,
The same way that I’m leaving you
For love is mainly just memories
And everyone has him a few
When I’m gone, I’ll be glad to love you.

That line deserves a thought or two: love is mainly just memories? That’s not a shocking idea, really. It’s much the same as saying “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”. It’s certainly much easier to be in love with a memory than with the person who wants you to throw out the garbage and stop switching channels. It leaves aside the issue of whether that kind of love can be real. He’s feeling “like one of your photographs\caught while I’m putting on airs”.

I don’t mind the Joan Baez version of the song, though I find her generally harder and harder to enjoy the older I get. She’s really not a very good singer at all– she just has a lovely voice. Well, she has a voice that would be lovely if she weren’t so damn obsessed with trilling it. Her best work is her slightest: the vocals on “Diamonds and Rust” nicely get under the lyrics instead of on top of them, like thick creamy icing.

When I was about 14, I biked down to Queenston Heights one summer day and climbed up Brock’s Monument, a tall, narrow cement column that culminated in a series of viewports embedded in a coarse sculpture of General Isaac Brock, the hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights, who was shot by the Americans when they spotted him on his white horse in his scarlet tunic.

The stairs up the monument were very, very narrow. I was on my way down when I encountered a small group coming up, so I stopped and stood against the wall and waited to let them pass.

The first person in this group was a girl about my age. She stepped level with me and turned to look at my face. We were just inches away from each other. That was 40 years ago, and I still remember thinking, “oh my, but you have a pretty face”. Not exactly in the words of the Jesse Winchester song, but the sentiment was the same: oh my.

I can no longer actually remember what she looked like. What I remember– and this is true of a lot of our memories, I think– is the intensity of the feeling I had about that face. In my catalogue of a lifetime of memories, of all the pretty girls I’ve ever looked at, I still remember it as one of the most startlingly beautiful faces I have ever seen. She had red hair and freckles and green eyes and beautiful full lips. The average blonde may be more beautiful than the average red-head, but a really beautiful red-head with green eyes is peerless. Her skin seemed luminous. I was so taken aback that I couldn’t avert my eyes and she seemed so startled by my stare that she stared back. She stepped away, up the stairs, and looked back once.

I waited at the bottom for a long time for her to come down, just to see that face again. She emerged a time later, supremely indifferent to my existence. She walked by me and left my orbit forever.

“Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez deserves a mention somewhere, if only for these lines:

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles, and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.

For me, autumn has always been the most “real” season– the cold winds, the warm coats, the sound of dried leaves under foot, the stilled conversations, the sense of diminished opportunity. Memories of summer can drift into haze, ennui, an indeterminate place and time.

And then, Baez sings,:

Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic/
then give me another word for it/
you were so good with words/
and at keeping things vague

Vague, I suppose, and non-committal. “You were so good with words” is both an accusation and a lacerating confession: I believed you. I may have been a fool, but I believed you, and even with the advantage of hindsight, yes, I’m nostalgic– I wish I could believe again.

The Baez song also has a great opening: ”

Well I’ll be damned/
Here comes your ghost again…”

In case you didn’t know, the song is presumed to be about Bob Dylan. I believe she has confirmed that.

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The Gold Standard

You would have to be delusional to not notice that the idea of pegging the value of a currency to gold is promoted almost exclusively by political conservatives. They believe that when the government seizes control of the instruments of valuation– interest rates, bonds, exchange rates, currency– that it will tend to serve the interests of it’s citizens rather than it’s property owners. That is, it’s real goal is to stay in power, so it will tend to act in ways that can be perceived, by its citizens, to be in the interest of most citizens.

Sure that’s a characterization— I think Alan Greenspan thinks that only property owners are “real” citizens– but I don’t see it as being unfair. There are a lot of unspoken assumptions at work in this debate, not the least of which is the sense of entitlement the property classes have towards their own wealth. By god, it was never “appropriated”. It was earned.

The Marxists present an eerily coherent analysis of capital and markets as well. In some ways, the two schools of thought acknowledge the same reality– but have different goals. They believe in different entitlements. Property, to a Marxist, has no inherent value: labour does. Property is nothing more than a tool by which the privileged extort real value–labour– from the unprivileged classes.

Jeff Rubin is only concerned– in this column, at least, with preserving the value of property, it’s purchasing power, in the face of economic and social pressures to distribute wealth differently. You have to ask, what is the goal of preserving the value of property? To preserve wealth? Whose wealth? If your goal is an economic system that enables the strong and the privileged to accumulate wealth and power, then Rubin’s ideas make sense. But if your goal is the greatest good for the greatest number of people– it does not. It doesn’t even address that need. It doesn’t even comprehend the idea that such a thing is relevant. It is, by definition, an individualistic system that creates losers.

That is not to say that a system without incentives– pure communism– is a better alternative. But we have a system that works pretty well here in Canada, and it’s not pure capitalism. It’s really a mild form of socialism– health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, etc. The Americans right now have a harsher form of capitalism, but it’s constantly being perverted by powerful corporations who don’t play by the rules of competition, and a government that is shy about playing it’s part to preserve real competition.

What value does gold have? I don’t believe that gold– or diamonds, for that matter– has any inherent value at all. It’s value is, at its core, similar to the value of Enron stock: it is “worth” whatever you are willing to pay for it. But nobody claims to believe that. They all believe that there is something of real value behind that stock. Once investors realized that there was no real value there, Enron stock collapsed. Gold has an advantage over Enron: there is a limited supply of gold, and an unlimited supply of “investors” who believe it is valuable because… there is an unlimited supply of investors.

Our society produces more than enough goods to provide everyone who lives here a perfectly lavish lifestyle. But if you just redistributed wealth without some way of generating more value, society would soon collapse. That’s too bad, but it’s not human nature to work any harder than you have to.

So capitalism does a fairly adequate job of keeping the machine running. It wouldn’t shock me if some day we find a better way to do it.

If interest rates on bonds get too high, the Federal Reserve may just print more money and then buy the government’s own bonds at lower interest rates. People who believe in gold become apoplectic at the very thought of it.

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Ruby’s Lips and Tinted Hair

“You painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair”

Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere? If you know Kenny Rogers from his pathetic later career as a panderer of faux earnest country cliché– the kind of middling pap that has always given country music a bad name– you might be surprised by a song from his early repertoire, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”. The song was written around 1967 by country singer Mel Tillis who had a serious stutter when he spoke but not when he sang. It was covered by– do you believe this?– Leonard Nimoy, among others, but not successfully until Kenny Rogers and the First Edition took a shot at it in 1969.

I always admire economy in writing– that first line is a marvel. In one stroke, he has set the scene and imputed her motives and honesty– her “tinted” hair. Ruby never speaks in the entire song, never answers the narrator, never even seems to respond to him. Ah the poignant “but it won’t be long, I’ve heard them say, until I’m not around”. Don’t go cheat on me now– wait ’til I’m dead. It will be soon.

But the real marvel of the song is how unselfconscious it is. The narrator is crippled and paralyzed from “that crazy Asian war”. But he is proud to have done his “patriotic” chore. Boy, there is one born every minute, isn’t there? He is no longer “the man I used to be” and acknowledges Ruby’s needs as a woman. Then he says:

And if I could move,
I’d get my gun and put her in the ground

which is about as economical as you can get when describing how you’d like to murder your faithless wife, even if it’s not her fault that you are incapable of giving her love.

In the video I found on Youtube, Kenny Rogers appears to be posturing, making a fetish of restraint there, but the girl with the tambourines is fun to watch. And yes, this is an honest-to-god live performance.

Rogers actually put out a couple of interesting songs late in the 60’s, including the weird “I Just Dropped in to See What Condition my Condition was in”, but he was bit too old for psychedelia, and his instincts were not with rock’n’roll. He shortly split from “The First Edition” and went country. He discovered it was more profitable to produce inane, predictable ballads like “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave me Lucille” and “The Gambler”.

The question about Kenny Rogers moves from, “why did he go bad” to “why was he ever any good?” The answer: he was more influenced by the counter-culture in his early career. And he had a cool chick with tambourines in the band.

What does that last line mean? “For God’s sake, turn around.” A last desperate plea for Ruby to come back. Or does it really mean, “don’t look at me”?

Kenny Rogers is the evil twin of Kris Kristofferson.

Music

Wikipedia on This Song

When Kenny Rogers performed the song in the 1990’s and later, audiences joined in, clapping and laughing, and wailing along-“Rubeeeeeee….. don’t take your love to town!” and you knew that the women in their bulging pastel pant suits were all thinking of waiting for their broken hubbies to go to bed so they see if there was any action in the lounge… Are we all killers? This is a song about a man who was paralyzed in a war wanting to kill his unfaithful wife. A little jarring then, isn’t it, to learn that Tillis was inspired to write this song by a real-life couple known to his family back in the 1950’s, a paralyzed World War II vet, whose wife did indeed take her love to town.

And he did indeed get his gun and “put her in the ground”. Hilarious.

Kenny Rogers can also be glimpsed at the beginning of the Poppy Family’s “Where Evil Grows”, on Youtube. He briefly hosted a syndicated TV variety show in the early 1970’s. It’s a weird video. Watch Susan Jacks’ face– it looks a lot to me like the dancing bit was someone else’s idea. She seems to periodically remember to move her hips. And that is quite an outfit. More on Susan Jacks.

In 1986, the combined readership of USA Today and People magazine– get this– picked Kenny Rogers as the favorite singer of all time. I repeat: the favorite singer of all time. And that poll, my friends, should go down in history as the greatest collective act of aesthetic absurdity of all time.

Does this surprise you: his fifth wife gave birth to twins when he was 65.

In 1994, Rogers couldn’t resist the temptation to insult every jazz singer in the country by trying to pass himself off as one with an album of jazz standards called “Timepiece”.  God help us.

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Huckleberry Huckabee

The first thing people deny, of course, is often what they think you think they are.   And they know you might have a reason to think it.   And so we have Mike Huckabee, insurgent Republican candidate for President, with this gem:

It’s not that we want to impose our religion on somebody.  It’s that we want to shape the culture and laws by using a worldview we believe has value.’

Well, that’s just classic.  We won’t impose our religious values on the general population– we’ll just make laws based on our religious values.

It’s fun to watch Huckabee run.  He must be driving Giuliani and Romney crazy– he has no money, no full-time fund-raising staff, no advertising, no speech-writers.  Yet there he sits, among or at the top of the polls for Iowa and Florida, and just driving them crazy because they have spent millions on this moment and now it’s not theirs.

Naturally, he is going to be a sweetheart for the media for a while.  A man without a paid staff is an accessible man, a man who gives interviews, a man with nothing to hide.  It’s very hard to stay that way if you become a contender.  If you are close, so close, do you want to blow it all off by continuing to speak from the heart?  Don’t you want to run that by a consultant first? Don’t you want to test-poll that position before a select group of average voters?

But by then the fun will be gun and the big guns will be out and the party will close ranks.  If Huckabee is what he thinks he is, a loose cannon who actually believes things and can’t be manipulated like a George Bush, he will scare the hell out of the establishments of both parties.

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America Shoots Down a Passenger Jet: Medals for Everyone!

On July 3, 1988, the United States shot down an Iranian jetliner killing 290 innocent passengers.  A missile was fired from the Vincennes, a U.S. navy destroyer patrolling the gulf.  Sea of Lies – What Really Happened?

The Americans have maintained that this was all a very innocent mistake, or, more likely, the result of provocative, confusing actions by Iranians. I can’t see how a reasonable person would accept that explanation, when the U.S. government itself acknowledged that it had lied about several critical elements of the story, including the alleged location of the Vincennes when it fired the missile: it was inside Iranian territorial waters.

What you had was some trigger-happy ugly American captain, William Rogers, who thought it would be just splendiferous to shoot down something, anything, please! There were other Americans involved, including the captain of an aircraft carrier who made it clear that he thought Rogers was being willfully reckless and provocative and stupid.

Rogers was never punished. By golly, they gave him and his crew a medal. I’m not kidding.

Now, if you were a reasonable person, and not emotionally vested in America the Great and George Bush the magnificent, wouldn’t you think, well, the Arabs might have a reason to be suspicious of our intentions in the Middle East.

Add to that a couple of other pertinent facts.. Egypt is not a democracy. They are America’s friend, however, and more than happy to torture people for George Bush. Jordan is not a democracy. Libya is not a democracy. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy.

The Palestinian Authority was elected fair and square, but America won’t talk to their leaders because— well, they elected the wrong leaders.

It is very hard to explain why, if America wants to bring democracy to the middle east, it doesn’t urge Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Libya to hold fair elections. Are fair elections too much to ask? About simply taking a mild step or two towards democracy by, say, not locking up and torturing your political opponents?

We know why.

We know the real reason why.

And that’s why we know the real reason why America is now trapped in Iraq. It was never about freedom or democracy or Saddam. Never.

But — let’s be fair– I’m not sure that Bush knows it was never about democracy.

But Dick Cheney knows.

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Buying Out the Competition

Many titans of the software industry backed European regulators initially, but Sun Microsystems settled with Microsoft for $1.6 billion in April 2004, while Novell settled in November 2004 for $536 million. RealNetworks dropped out in October 2005 after settling for $761 million. From New York Times, April 28, 2006

Wonder if there will be competition in the software marketplace in ten years? Not if this continues. Microsoft simply pays off competitors who allege unfair practices. It’s so rich, it can afford to do that. Those companies see a large, immediate payoff. The executives in charge of those companies don’t, apparently, care much about the long-term prospects of their corporations competing against Microsoft.

Microsoft is rich because it has succeeded in becoming a monopoly, so it uses it’s incredible wealth to buy off those whom it cheats, who file legal challenges to its hegemony.

George W. Bush’s Justice Department will do nothing. The Republican Party can be bought off too, you know. If you think it’s just this government, think again: the Clinton White House pursued an aggressive strategy against Microsoft and was on the verge of taking real action when Bush was elected. It’s not just “government”. It’s the Republican Party.

The Europeans do take this all seriously and the European Court of Justice (doesn’t that sound to you like a redundancy? Like the “Army of Warfare” or the “Department of Bureaucracies” or whatever) is looking into competition. The Free Software Foundation Europe is fighting on behalf of the consumer and smaller software companies for “interoperability”. Microsoft which makes all the software you need disdains “interoperability” while bragging about it in their sales advertising. Interoperability means you can use a Palm Pilot with your Outlook mailbox. But why should Microsoft allow you to do that? Why don’t you just buy one of the many PDA’s that use the Microsoft operating system, even if you think you prefer the Palm OS?

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Oprahfied Culture

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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It is now safe to fly

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House transportation subcommittee on aviation, after a disturbed unarmed man was shot dead by sky-marshals: “This should send a message to a terrorist or anyone else who is considering disrupting an aircraft with a threat.”

If someone is reported to be carrying a gun or a bomb, do all of our law enforcement authorities consider it good policy to shoot first and ask questions later?

Actually, I’m not all that sure that they don’t, in America.

The surprising thing is that we don’t consider that Rigoberto Alpizar was sick enough to need help, instead of a bullet, but we consider John L. Mica sick enough to elect to federal office.

Has the FBI conducted a study yet— please tell us, how many suicide bombers announce, to the sky marshals, that they have a bomb?

Are you feeling safer now?

As always, after a controversial police shooting, the police investigate themselves, and — always– always!– find themselves innocent, and, in fact, commend themselves, in this case, for hearing the word “bomb” in English or Spanish, at the front of the plane or the back of the plane, while he was running down the aisle or later, or earlier, or sometime during the course of events….

The police and the Air Marshals and all the other armed “authorities” aren’t stupid: all they have to do to convince most Americans that they need to shoot people occasionally is include the words “bomb” and “threat” in their reports, state that certain things are facts that are not facts, and award themselves medals.

Yes– it is important to award a medal to show that we have no doubts about our righteousness and truthfulness and incredible courage and great pension plan.

Most importantly of all– hear this– the suspect must be identified as not one of us. In this case, Rigobert Alpizar– just look at the name!– came from Ecuador. [additional entries May 2008]

Wikipedia Entry

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Sundown with Assassin’s Eyes

I have been listening to a replay of “The 50 Essential Tracks” of Canadian popular music on the CBC lately.  This is a program from last spring which they are running again due to the lock-out.  Note about the link: the Canadian edition is further down the page. 

I disagree with a fair number of songs on the list, and especially “The Hockey Song” by Stompin’ Tom Conners, which is something like #13. Novelty songs do not belong on “Top 50” lists. They belong on juke-boxes in run-down restaurants in small northern Ontario towns.

I like “Four Strong Winds”– it’s a great song– but not quite enough to justify a listing in the top 15. It’s straining under the weight of that kind of honorific.

I liked seeing “Echo Beach” up there, along with “The Weight” (both of which should have been higher).

Yesterday, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” came in somewhere in the top 20. Here are some of the lyrics:

I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where yah do what yah don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you’ve been creeping ’round my back stairs

and

I can see her lookin’ fast in her faded jeans
She’s a hard-lovin’ woman got me feelin’ mean

And then he warns her again to stay away from his back stairs and his porch and his Juno awards.

Does this belong in anyone’s top 25? How exactly do you look “fast” in your faded jeans?

I think I understand what happens to the career of a singer-songwriter. You start out trying to write the best damn songs you can, about real people you know, and real experiences you had, and you strive to say something fresh and original. So Gordon Lightfoot writes five or six genuinely interesting outstanding songs (“Early Morning Rain”, “Sit Down, Young Stranger”, “Whispers of the North”, and “That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me”) and a dozen or so pretty good songs. And then…

Then you become successful and famous. Everyone tells you you are great songwriter. And it’s time for some new material. And you’re strumming around on your guitar and you come up with a little riff and the word “Sundown” comes into your mind and you make it a chorus and then you add a few aimless verses and your producer adds some background instrumentation and vocals and presto, another hit.

Does Gordon Lightfoot actually know any “hard-lovin’ ” women who wear satin dresses and creep around his back stairs?  I’ll bet he doesn’t.  (Actually, he does– sort of: the song is allegedly about Cathy Smith, infamous for helping John Belushi leave this world.  Look it up.  I would offer that this does not remedy the use of cliché or the essential hypocrisy of the song: condemning a woman for her morals after sleeping with her. )

(I’ll bet he also had no intention of slipping away on that “endless highway” either.)

And what exactly does “hard-lovin'” mean? That she makes him pay up front?

This is the same woman The Guess Who ran into back in 1970:

Don’t you start coming around my door
Don’t want to see your shadow no more…

Come to think of it– this woman probably moved on to Malibu where she ended up at party with Bob Dylan:

There’s a woman on my lap, and she’s drinking champagne
She’s got white skin and assassin’s eyes

Yes Bob:  a “hard-lovin'” woman.

Bizarrely… Nana Mouskouri recorded a French language version of the song.

Update: 2014-08-19

Here’s what Gordy himself has
to say about the inspiration
for Sundown (>From Reddit, August 22, 2014:)
:

Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my
desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good lookin’! And that’s how I wrote the song “Sundown,” and as a matter of fact, it was written just *around* Sundown, just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album.

But that is not what the song is about at all.

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President Torturer

From the Washington Post, July 15, 2005:

But the Pentagon working group’s 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that “in order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”

Do Americans read any of their own news? What do they think about this stuff? The man they elected to the highest office in the land is an admitted torturer. No, he didn’t personally kick or beat these prisoners, or take their clothes away, at Abu Gharib or Guantanamo, or put women’s underwear on their heads, or make “use of military working dogs” — whatever the hell that means. He is simply in charge of it. He has authorized it. He has approved it. His representatives have begged the Supreme Court to let him do it. Let me, let me, let me use a cattle prod on someone’s genitals. Please.

There is nothing complicated here. There is nothing convoluted or difficult to understand about the situation. Mr. Bush belongs to a political party that claims that they are the ones standing up for “values”, for principles, for accountability and integrity. And they torture people. And they don’t deny it. That is the ultimate expression of the real moral values in this political environment, of the men who claim to be more godly than John Kerry: we want to torture people.

The only thing more depressing than this, is the fact that in the next election, I doubt very much that the Democrats will run someone who will make a point of saying “I won’t allow any torture”. No, no, no– that would make the candidate appear to be a wuss. Then the Republican candidate will say, “I represent the party that will torture people. I will beat up and kill people on your behalf.  I am willing to be your killer and torturer. Vote for me.”

Of course not. He will say that he is opposed to gay marriage and that he supports education and motherhood and apple pie.

And he’ll probably win.

But wait– doesn’t that mean that he is our man. He is doing our will. WE torture people?

Yes.