Brother Magpie





















With the blog heading toward indefinite hiatus starting in January, it's time to wrap up four years of contributions from the one and only Chester Magpie, underground pundit. And today Chester ends on what is, for him, a hopeful note:

"The newest media is possibly a Don Juan moment for a mere 200-and-something year-old country of immigrants. Propaganda? Hell yes! But in a way -- and yes it's a John Wayne afterthought -- the complete U.S. broadcast is also an internal education. Love him or hate him, Forrest Gump still has a funny way of spreading democracy.

Also in a way, I thank the 'g' for 9/12 and beyond. I mean it put Will Smith and Phil Jackson in their places, and eventually gave birth to a 'this is not my beautiful house' generation, which I think will be better equipped to deal with all the foul Cheney energy, inevitable since the time of Nixon. It's our destiny."

***

That was the 22nd Magpie dispatch. Here are dispatches 1-21:

05-19-07: White Album
10-30-06: This Time
04-15-06: Tomb Town
01-23-06: Bush/Kill
09-26-05: Chop Chop
05-13-05: USA For Oprah
04-19-05: Laughing All Day Long
03-19-05: Crude
11-17-04: A Really Big Shoe
11-06-04: What A Steal
10-20-04: Presence
07-10-04: Now Watch This Post
05-15-04: Terror-ific
03-23-04: That's The Way It Is
01-24-04: Rebel Yell
12-01-03: Hit & Run
10-22-03: Meat Market
09-11-03: Crumbling Down Over And Over
08-04-03: American Idol 1, God 0
06-26-03: Welcome To The Working Week
04-01-03: Not That Innocent

Revolution

Not long before John Lennon was killed, he predicted during a radio interview that the new president-elect, Ronald "Reegan" (as John pronounced the name), would find that he couldn't possibly satisfy the dreams and hopes of the right wing, just like Carter or Kennedy could not satisfy the dreams of the left wing.

"It's too much for one man, one group, and I don't believe in it," Lennon said.

And yet here we are 27 years later, when a Republican president and vice-president, despite dismal approval ratings, can pretty much get away with blatant lawbreaking, trashing the Constitution and bypassing Congress, largely because of support from the New Corporate World Order ("we don't need no stinkin' democracy") that Ronald Reagan played a big role in helping create.

The right wing worships at the altar of Saint Ronnie...and "Imagine" was banned from a lot of radio playlists after 9/11. I'm afraid Reagan and his cronies made a difference in ways ol' John couldn't have anticipated, even as he wrote of strange days indeed in one of his last songs.

The images and memories live on of the man who harnessed a powerful hybrid of Disneyland and Bob Dobbs energy in a way that no politician may ever do again. And as much as I despised his policies, I had to respect him for his creativity. (Would that our current crass asshole had half the polish.)

Tom Carson put it well, in 2004:


At his funeral, there will no doubt be buckets of false poetry, grievously misrepresenting the man—yes, even if Peggy Noonan shows up, doing her best to be Walt Whitman to his Abe: "When Star Wars Last in Gorbachev's Dooryard Bloom'd." Real poetry is something else again, and you'd be horribly mistaken to think the following suggestion is sarcastic. Please understand I love the place; my proposal is made in a sincere spirit of tribute to an enemy. I think that Reagan, like no other American, deserves the honor of being the first person ever embalmed at Disneyland.

In the true capital of his America, one-upping Lenin in death as he did in life, he could lie in a glass box before Sleeping Beauty's castle—midway between Frontierland and Tomorrowland, right where Main Street debouches onto Carnation™ Plaza. (Oh, you bet: I know my way around Walt's kingdom, and why don't you? Are you some kind of commie?) Picture his sleep. Can Napoléon at the Invalides top this? A hundred years from now, that famously hawk-nosed profile is illuminated by the Electric Parade. Tomorrow's children gaze in awe as Tinkerbell slides down to kiss it, understanding that here lies the man who saved them from the rest of the world's great, killing Something-or-Other: doubt.


This concludes the nicest post I'll ever write about Ronald "At Least He's Not GW Bush" Reagan.

Now back to the snark lite, with the next three months of pics and captions from the 2007 Reagan calendar given me by my friend Maitland Jones:























"I bet Brezhnev didn't get one of these."























"Hey, this is nothin'. Shultz, bring my horse in."























"See, Dutch, he ate his salad. You eat yours and I'll bring us some Kool-Aid."


Reagan Calendar Pt. 1
Reagan Calendar Pt. 2

More Seussicality

My kids were in The Oregonian last week along with other Seussical cast members. Vicktoria and Andrew are up front, wearing hats:



















Click on photo to enlarge.

You Are Who

The Doctor is always in...

West Beast East Beast
from Oh Say Can You Say?
© 1979 by Dr. Seuss and A.S. Geisel

Upon an island hard to reach,
the East Beast sits upon his beach.
Upon the west beach sits the West Beast.
Each beach beast thinks he's the best beast.

Which beast is best? ... Well, I thought at first
that the East was best and the West was worst.
Then I looked again from the west to the east
And I liked the beast on the east beach least.

Doctor In The House





















I wasn't allowed to take flash photos in the theater today, while watching my kids perform in Seussical, but I was able to get a passable pic of them together (aided by HP Image Zone) from the video I shot.

My goodness it's a lovely thing when both your kids sing wonderfully and happily and often. And they can act, too.

Here are their bios printed in the play program, plus my wife's "director's note" to the audience:

The Cat In The Hat - Vicktoria Hough: Vicktoria is making her seventh appeareance in an MCT show, including starring as Sgt. Sarah Brown in last year's performance of Guys and Dolls. She also just graduated from North Marion High School where she acted in all their theater productions. She will be attending WOU this fall and plans to continue being active in theater there.

JoJo - Andrew Hough: Andrew has been a member of MCT for the last five years. A sightseer, a pickpocket, a slave, a waiter and a gambler. You can always count on Andrew to make the scene. Following in his mom and sister's footsteps, Andrew takes center stage as JoJo in this year's production.

***

A Note From The Director: Three years ago when I heard the CD for Seussical and then talked with Amy (the production's choreographer), we knew we had to do the show.

This cast is amazing, from the first read through to opening night, they have always put their best foot forward. I just love listening to them sing.

I took a different approach with the story, no show girls or glitz. We set the Jungle of Nool in a high school setting with cheerleaders, bullies, smarties, outcasts and the like. Whoville wobbles as you would on a planet blowing through space. I took the liberty of adding a young cat, to be the co-narrator with the Cat in the Hat; once you see her, you will know why.

I am happy to say this cast is full of stars. Each person shines as bright as the next.

I want to thank my directing team of Amy and Alvin. From our first meeting though auditions to opening night, we have been of one mind and I think it shows.

So, sit back and enjoy the adventure. I hope you have as wonderful a time experiencing the show as we have had creating it.

Enjoy,

Pamela

Big Boss Man





















"What a bummer," said the local Portland DJ (now dead himself) to the breaking news that Elvis Presley had died. I was in my bedroom when I heard this, 30 years ago this month, and I remember it was near 100 degrees outside. Then "Boogie Nights" started playing, and in a minor state of shock I went to go tell my mom the news.

I remembered reading a story in Rolling Stone about three months earlier, as a writer compared what would be Presley's last tour to the sad last days of Judy Garland. Elvis was that out of it by then, yet I still liked what I'd heard from him recently -- the singles "Moody Blue" and "Way Down" -- and it remained hard to imagine him checking out right away, at only age 42.

As I say, I liked the guy's music, but he'd begun a serious (and ultimately final) downward spiral just as I started regularly listening to the Top 40, and I think this helped keep me from fully appreciating his body of work until years later, when I bought the The Top Ten Hits compilation. Just couldn't get enough of that -- overall it's still the best Elvis comp that's been released, although the 2000s-era CDs 30 #1 Hits and 2nd to None together cover more quality ground.

I've collected some of my favorite Elvis songs in my YouTube Favorites lists, and here they are:

Jailhouse Rock
Return To Sender
Viva Las Vegas
Suspicious Minds
If You Talk In Your Sleep
Guitar Man
A Little Less Conversation

Also, here's part one of the Elvis: One Night With You special (which leads to links to other parts of the show.) It was recorded at the NBC Studios in Burbank in June 1968 for Elvis' Comeback Special shown later that year.

And from near the end, here's backstage footage from before a June 1977 concert in South Dakota, a little of which was used in the CBS special Elvis in Concert.

Rudy Can Fail

Thanks to PlusDistance and phleabo at No More Mr. Nice Blog for their sublime snark.

Rudolph Guiliani? The guy who, says phleabo, bravely climbed to the top of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and personally batted away no less than 10 hijacked planes with his BARE HANDS?

The guy who, in the words of PlusDistance, ATE the planes and crapped out perfect Guantanamo-sized metal cells, with a terrorist in each one?

Uh, no. A new article in Harpers Magazine by Kevin Baker (so far, print-only) sets the record straight:


Giuliani himself was fortunate to still be there. Against the advice of numerous security experts, he had insisted on situating a lavish, $61 million emergency "command bunker" on the twenty-third floor of the forty-seven-story 7 World Trade Center tower. The tower contained no fewer than sixteen different emergency generators and sat over 109,000 gallons of oil in a Con Ed substation; the comman bunker added another, unprotected, 6,000-gallon fuel tank suspended above the mezzanine. When burning debris from the twin towers fell on 7 World Trade, it went up like "a blow torch," in the words of investigative reporters Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, who note in Grand Illusion, The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 that Giuliani's defenseless fuel tank acted as a giant fuse.

The Office of Emergency Management that Giuliani created failed utterly to coordinate rescue efforts between the city's Police and Fire Departments. Even worse, it also failed to ensure that the New York Fire Department had an effective system for communicating with itself -- a deficiency that had been exposed by the original 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and one that led eight years later to hundreds of firefighters' being cut off in the towers, without any way of receiving word that the buildings were about to collapse. Guiliani, on site throughout the disaster, made no attempt to devise any other means to keep the firefighters informed. In 2004, as New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn make clear in their book 102 Minutes, Giuliani lied against the memory of these men, falsely testifying before a fawning 9/11 Commission that they had refused orders to evacuate.

In the days and weeks after the attack, Giuliani failed to ensure that the workers digging out Ground Zero had adequate protection against hazardous waste, an oversight that that it now seems may have led to serious, long-term health consequences for thousands; proposed that his term in office be arbitrarily extended for an indefinite period in order to deal with the recovery from the attack; and placed his mistress and future wife, Judith Nathan, on the board of a charitable fund for families of the attack's victims.


Read the whole thing, if you can. I've seen Steve at No More Mr. Nice Blog effectively rag on Giuliani (and warn about the serious and underrated possibility of Rudy being elected) for many months, but this article has become for now the definitive first place to go for a look at Nightmare Rudy, the new Dark Lord, a potential American Mussolini. The perfect guy for Republicans who think Bush doesn't go far enough in being an asshole to liberals and foreigners.

He's also been known to enjoy wearing women's clothing. Not that his GOP brownshirt brigade will care:

Still Life

I go to the doctor for my yearly checkup tomorrow, my third since I was told in 2004 that my blood pressure and cholesterol were at dangerously high levels.

Blood pressure meds have kept my BP good since then, and altered diet plus enough exercise gave me acceptable cholesterol levels in the 2005 and 2006 checkups. But this year so far the pressure of a busy schedule has cut down my exercise time and led me to too many moments like this:

I don't expect a passable cholesterol level this time, although body chemistry can be an unpredictable thing. In any event, maybe watching Andy eat over and over will help me (and you?) cut down on the Dollar Menus.