Artists United Against Apartheid--the supergroup that time forgot

It’s Christmas again and so as they do every year, radio stations have blown the dust off their 28-year old copy of “Do they Know It’s Christmas,” the 1984 song for Ethiopian famine relief recorded by one-off supergroup Band Aid that asked a question with a very easy answer—no, because most Ethiopians are Muslim and so Christmas means nothing to them.

But that’s another issue.

Band Aid was the first of a spate of one-off supergroups that popped up in the mid-80s to raise money for various famine-related causes in Africa. The most noteworthy of its successors was, of course, USA for Africa, that brought together dozens of superstars who famously checked their egos at the door to record “We Are The World,” a song that went on to sell in the kajillions and dominated radio airplay in the spring of 1985. These efforts were ultimately and undoubtedly good things, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for famine relief and feeding countless numbers of Africans.

But the thing about these songs is that none of them are very good; bland, unimaginative adult contemporary music with shallow, inoffensive lyrics that were mostly interested in tugging heart strings as quickly as possible. This only made sense, really, because when you’re trying to raise as much money as you can to feed starving people, you’re not going to encourage donors to open their wallets by challenging or offending them, and crappy songs are a small price to pay to feed millions. The hungry child who finally has something to eat doesn’t care that his food was paid for by a song that sucks.

But that was not the case with another song by another one-off supergroup that released an awareness single at the same time—Artists United Against Apartheid, organized by Steven Van Zandt to protest the evils of the apartheid system in South Africa and the loathsome, hands off policy of the Regan Administration. The group’s single, “Sun City,” is by far the best song in the genre, as admittedly small as the genre is.

“Sun City” featured an impressive lineup of contemporary stars that matched USA for Africa or Band Aid for the time (just a few: Hall and Oates, Jackson Brown, Pat Benatar and Bruce Springsteen, Van Zandt’s former E Street Band boss), as well as soon to be stars (Bonnie Raitt, Bono, captured in the video still shot above at the exact second he went from sincere to sanctimonious), and a bunch of musical legends (Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Ringo Starr). But what set AUAA apart from the other supergroups, and what gave the collective its musical advantage, was that the song was more concerned with raising awareness to an evil political system and less concerned with raising money, so it didn’t need to appeal to the broadest audience it could. That meant Van Zandt and the rest could produce a song with artistic and political integrity instead of worrying about sales and fundraising.

With that freedom, they put together a song as tough, muscular and original in every way that “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and “We Are the World” are antiseptic and derivative. Opening with a huge African drum beat laced with a searing Davis sax solo, it segues into a choral chant of Amandla, Awethu, Zulu words for power that served as a rallying cry for blacks living in South Africa. When the vocals kick in, pioneering rap acts like Run DMC and Kool Moe Dee lay out the song’s purpose.

As the song progresses, it keeps throwing more and more styles into the mix, with fragments of pop, rock, rap, R&B, jazz and indigenous African rhythms creating a massive, cross cultural wall of sound that is, yes, easy to dance to (it was produced by Arthur Baker, who basically invented the dance mix), until it finally wraps up with a another vicious sax solo, this one from Clarence Clemons.

This mixing of pop and African styles had been done before—by Peter Gabriel in “Biko,” for instance, and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s 1984 album Somewhere in Afrika featured an entire side of African-themed music condemning apartheid (yes Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, of all groups). But no one had fused so many styles so seamlessly, or as epically, as AUAA. Lined up with Band Aid or USA for Africa, “Sun City” was an in your face blast, and that toughness extended to the song’s politics, a direct broadside against the Reagan Administration’s policy of constructive engagement that was little more than coddling a Cold War ally (“they may be dictators, but they’re our dictators”) with an occasional request to please, go easy on your Negroes. This less-than-wrist-slapping policy did nothing but encourage the apartheid government’s ability to dig in against its opponents and sic dogs, fire hoses and APC-riding police officers on demonstrating blacks. Countries around the world condemned South Africa, withdrawing ambassadors and divesting themselves financially, while the U.S. government, for all practical purposes, did nothing, leading to the line in the song “please tell me why are we always on the wrong side?”

The target of the song—Sun City itself— was a luxury resort located in one of a collection of nominally independent black homelands around South Africa that were small, isolated, and completely dependent economically and politically on the apartheid regime, and so not independent at all. The Sun City resort catered to the world’s white elite, in part by attracting superstar entertainers who became a target of a boycott by anti-apartheid activists. Hence the song’s refrain, “I ain’t gonna play Sun City.”

Now, it’s one thing to stake out a political position that says hunger is bad and we should feed those who have no food, and to please keep them in mind at Christmas—it’s noble, kind-hearted and generous, but hardly controversial. It’s quite another thing to call out an ally on its evil political system, and your own government that allows that evil to fester. This is a great way to alienate about half your audience.

Which “Sun City” did. Many radio stations refused to play the song and some record stores refused to sell it, objecting to its hardball politics on a topic more complex and hot button than simply feeding hungry people. It’s easy to know how to feel about ending poverty—it’s a good thing! And I can give money to make it happen and feel better about myself! It’s a lot harder to think about something that’s infinitely more nuanced, and isn’t as easy for an individual to solve that doesn’t require writing your congressman or attending a rally.

Sun City’s star power did manage to bring it some degree of success—any song released in 1985 with Springsteen, Benatar and Hall and Oates was going to generate attention. The single and its accompanying LP sold a few million copies, the video was in heavy rotation on MTV for a time, and it even managed to slip into the top 40, peaking at 38 on Billboard’s Hot 100. But that was small potatoes compared to the success of Band Aid and USA for Africa just a few months earlier.

Even today, the song has been largely forgotten. Check out the YouTube hits—the various links to the “We Are The World” video are pushing 100 million hits. “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is closing in on 10 million. “Sun City” hasn’t even reached 250,000, a number that “Gangnam Style” hits every afternoon.

Still, it’s possible the song had more lasting impact than either USA for Africa or Band Aid. Artistically, “Sun City” laid the groundwork for some truly remarkable hybrid music in the years to come that combined otherwise seemingly incongruous styles that stretched across genres and continents. Just a few months later, Paul Simon released his landmark album Graceland, one of the finest collections of music ever recorded, and Run-DMC and Aerosmith combined for “Walk This Way,” one of only a handful of songs that you can say truly changed the world.

Politically, too, the song carved out a legacy as part of a growing chorus of disenchantment with constructive engagement that eventually forced U.S. policymakers to adopt a harder edge toward South Africa, and pushed more American businesses and organizations to divest themselves from South Africa’s economy. Within a decade of “Sun City’s” release, Nelson Mandela walked free as the leader of a black majority government, and apartheid rotted in history’s dustbin as yet one more failed idea.

Wayne Gretzky's Lament

My dream has always been to drive the Zamboni. I know that sounds odd coming from the greatest hockey player ever, but in all my years playing the game I have paid only marginal attention to the play on the ice while anticipating the Zamboni’s emergence with the same kind of enthusiasm as the people of Punxsatawny awaiting Phil. Even during my four triumphant Stanley Cup-toting skates, the Zamboni was never far from my mind. Each time, I waited and waited for the Zamboni driver to say, "hey, Wayne, I'll let you drive the Zamboni if you let me hold the Cup." I would have let him hold the Cup for a year, let him keep it in his living room and use it as a spitoon if I could take his Zamboni for just one spin around the ice. Look at those post-game celebrations, you can see my eyes darting from side to side, my ears cocked, desperately waiting for the Zamboni driver’s suggestion, my shoulders slumped in disappointment when it never comes.

I know all there is to know about the Zamboni, that it was invented in 1949 by Frank Zamboni, an American, the son of Italian immigrants, and that his machines are manufactured in Los Angeles. That’s one reason I sought a trade to the Kings, and why I still live in L.A. Not for the sun or the glamour or the plastic surgery, but so I can be close to my true spiritual love.

And, of course, this is my favorite song.

The Zamboni provides the best intermission entertainment in all of sports, better than any marching band or half-court shooting competition, any seventh-inning stretch or overblown Super Bowl halftime show. Round it goes, slow and lyrical as a poem, creating ice as beautiful and perfect as the arcs it turns, ever sharper and tighter, until the circle is complete with a single horizontal dash, like the grand flourish of a great artist signing his masterpiece. A Zamboni driver's touch is tangible and instantly visible. Before the Zamboni is tarnished ice, scarred and ugly, like a back alley in a bad part of town. Behind, the ice is clean, untouched, like virginity restored. When a Zamboni driver goes home at the end of the day he knows he has accomplished something. He knows he has done good work.

"How was your day, dear?" I dreamed my wife would ask me.

"I made something bad into something good," I said proudly, knowing I'd earned an honest day's pay.

But I was cursed with this great hockey talent and despite my attempts to pretend that talent did not exist, to convince myself that I was no better than some beer league hack struggling to stay upright on his skates, I couldn't help but follow my instincts on the ice. Soon my skills had come to the attention of the professionals and I felt obligated to set my Zamboni dreams aside for the NHL. Still, when I sat in the locker room between periods pretending to listen to the coach’s endless motivational and strategic prattle, I was actually thinking of the Zamboni. Just a few feet away it turned its elegant ovals and perfect curves, and I envied the fans who watched from their padded seats. Sometimes it was all I could do to keep from running down the tunnel, struggling against my skates to keep from falling over, until that glorious machine appeared like the face of God, the hum of its engine like the music of a million harped angels.

I never failed to feel a twinge of guilt as I stepped onto ice freshly renewed by the Zamboni. Early in my career I made a point to follow my teammates from the locker room so I could tell myself that at least I was not the one to spoil such beauty. Later, though, after my damnable talent made me a team leader and left me no choice but be first on the ice, I silently asked the Zamboni driver’s forgiveness each time I left those awful first gashes on his smooth sheet of perfection.

Even on my honeymoon, as I made love to my stunningly gorgeous Hollywood  wife, I imagined the two of  us naked on the black upholstered seat of a Zamboni, both my beloveds turning and twisting to the deft movements of my fingers.

I hoped to use my position as the world's preeminent hockey player to bring long overdue attention to the beauty and elegance of the Zamboni and to the dedicated people who drive them. Sadly, no one listens to me. They want to talk only about my skills, my ability to skate past opponents like they stood still, to find Kurri in the slot, to zip a wrist shot through an opening no larger than the puck itself. But the Zamboni? I might just as well offer my analysis of the state of Canadian politics.

Now when I watch hockey on television, it bugs me when the networks show a team of smiling, smarmy announcers in a hypeactively lit TV studio when they could  show the Zamboni turn its magic ovals on the ice. It hurts also to see Zambonis marked up with corporate logos and decorations as if nothing more than tawdry billboards. Does no one realize that something capable of creating such beauty should not be treated as just another opportunity to generate revenue?

On my local cable system I can find no Zamboni Channel among the 58 offerings, nor among the 623 on my satellite TV system. Entire channels are devoted to gardening, cooking, even antiques, but nothing to the Zamboni. Not even a "Zamboni This Week" program on CNN or ESPN. It is clear to me now, however, that I am the one to start the Zamboni Channel. The talent I did not ask for is actually a blessing that allowed me to amass the millions needed to make the world aware of the Zamboni's magnificence. My accountants and financial planners have advised me that such an investment is folly but they cannot deter me because I know that is why I have achieved all that I have. The records and the glory and the Stanley Cups, they were not achieved for themselves, but to show the world the majesty of the Zamboni.

Even on my honeymoon, as I made love to my stunningly gorgeous Hollywood  wife, I imagined the two of  us naked on the black upholstered seat of a Zamboni, both my beloveds turning and twisting to the deft movements of my fingers.

I hoped to use my position as the world's preeminent hockey player to bring long overdue attention to the beauty and elegance of the Zamboni and to the dedicated people who drive them. Sadly, no one listens to me. They want to talk only about my skills, my ability to skate past opponents like they stood still, to find Kurri in the slot, to zip a wrist shot through an opening no larger than the puck itself. But the Zamboni? I might just as well offer my analysis of the state of Canadian politics.

Now when I watch hockey on television, it bugs me when the networks show a team of smiling, smarmy announcers in a hypeactively lit TV studio when they could  show the Zamboni turn its magic ovals on the ice. It hurts also to see Zambonis marked up with corporate logos and decorations as if nothing more than tawdry billboards. Does no one realize that something capable of creating such beauty should not be treated as just another opportunity to generate revenue?

On my local cable system I can find no Zamboni Channel among the 58 offerings, nor among the 623 on my satellite TV system. Entire channels are devoted to gardening, cooking, even antiques, but nothing to the Zamboni. Not even a "Zamboni This Week" program on CNN or ESPN. It is clear to me now, however, that I am the one to start the Zamboni Channel. The talent I did not ask for is actually a blessing that allowed me to amass the millions needed to make the world aware of the Zamboni's magnificence. My accountants and financial planners have advised me that such an investment is folly but they cannot deter me because I know that is why I have achieved all that I have. The records and the glory and the Stanley Cups, they were not achieved for themselves, but to show the world the majesty of the Zamboni.

Is this art?

Sacrifice

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Apeshaw-Hooman, Inc: A celebration of two centuries of continuous existence

For 200 years, Apeshaw-Hooman Inc. has been one of America’s companies that has continued to exist, achieving a record of accomplishment and service that should have consigned it to the corporate ash heap long ago.

Ape-Man, as it’s referred to in the hip shorthand of  happy and contended employees lunching in well-lit break rooms today, began more than 200 years ago, when a modestly talented handyman named Abraham Skittleman opened a furniture store in Philadelphia in 1810. While other furniture makers concentrated on making finely-crafted work that could be displayed proudly by the very wealthiest of East Coast families, Skittleman’s Furniture instead made average furniture that regular people could afford.

“For it is true when you say I am not a master furniture maker, but for the meager dollars you pay, it is fine stuff, indeed,” Skittleman once wrote, a philosophy that lives on in Apeshaw-Hooman today.

In 1835, after Skittleman died in a tragic lathing accident, the business passed to his only child, his beloved daughter Mildred, and her newlywed husband, Ephraim B. Apeshaw. Ephraim was a longshoreman who knew nothing about making furniture but took over the business so as not to disappoint his new wife and to honor the memory of his father-in-law. Sadly, the strain of a young marriage and running a business took its toll on young Mildred, and in 1837, she suffered a nervous breakdown from which she would never recover. In 1841, when he was assured by doctors that she would need to remain institutionalized for the remainder of her days, Apesahw divorced Mildred and changed the name of the company to the E.B. Apeshaw Furniture Co.

In 1843, he married his cousin, the former Eunice Apeshaw, and their union of love produced five children: sons Carl and Chester, and daughters Constance, Catherine and Victoria. But the responsibilities of caring for such a large family on the meager wage of a struggling furniture maker took its toll on Apeshaw and he sought escape more and more in drink. In 1857, while in a drunken stupor, Apeshaw unwittingly traded two of his children (Chester and Victoria) for the Buckworth Gold Mining Works, a barely-solvent mining company in some western state he had never heard of. Upon regaining consciousness, he remained unaware he had made the trade, and was not made aware of it until 1859, when he received a telegram telling him his miners had struck a huge vein of lead. When he asked what the telegram was about, his business manager told him he owned the mine, and had for two years.

“Say what?” Apeshaw said, the first recorded use of that term (although more than 100 years would pass before it would find its way into popular use in Negro street parlance). More good luck followed in 1861, when the Civil War began, and the newly renamed Apeshaw Lead Mining Co. produced more than 80 percent of the lead shot fired by Union guns during the war. By the time Lee met Grant at Appomattox, thousands had been killed and maimed by Apeshaw lead, and Apeshaw was a wealthy man.

“Indeed, it is true, that my hands are awash in blood,” said Apeshaw. “But my pockets are now filled with money, and such an exchange is one I find acceptable.”

Following the war, Apeshaw used that wealth to build his business empire. He started a shipping company and a railroad that helped to tame the West (the towns of Apeshaw in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming are all named in his honor). The Apeshaw Repeating Rifle was a favorite among Western pioneers and played an important role in civilizing the west against the savage brutalities of the red-skinned primitives.

During this time, Apeshaw became fast friends with Carnegie and Hill and Morgan, and together, they fought hard to maintain the rights and freedoms of business owners to do as they please with their own property, as well as others’. Apeshaw soon expanded his mining company to the British Cape Colony in Africa, drawn by its supply of abundant and inexpensive Negro labor. Soon, he was friends with Cecil Rhodes, and twice had the honor of an audience with Queen Victoria.

“I have a daughter, the youngest, who bears the same name as you,” he told Her Highness.

“We find this excellent,” Victoria replied. “And, We wonder, where is she now?”

“Verily, I do not know,” he said.

Alas, the inevitable end came in 1885, when, in a fit of dementia, Apeshaw jumped off his yacht anchored off Cape Cod in pursuit of a mermaid he was convinced wanted to marry him.

“Nay, I hear the Siren’s Song,” he insisted to others onboard the yacht, who tried to convince him there was no mermaid. “Do you not hear the Siren’s Song? She calls for me, I hear it plain as day!”

His body washed ashore on Nantucket three days later, and was interred on the grounds of his Philadelphia estate.

Apeshaw’s death was just the beginning of the company’s troubles. Shortly afterward, his Western lead mine was veined out and Apeshaw Mining Co. went out of business. The company’s six ships were all sunk during the Boer War, when a nearsighted British squadron commander mistook them for enemy battleships off the coast of Africa despite the fact the Boers had no battleships. Although not a single British shell found its mark, the Apeshaw ships, rickety and long-neglected, fell apart from the force of just a near-miss. The Apeshaw and Western Railroad disappeared when Lorenzo B. Apeshaw, a distant cousin and the railroad’s president, beat up James J. Hill after drunkenly claiming the robber baron made a pass at his wife, even though Lorenzo was not married at the time. The company was sold to Hill and absorbed into the Great Northern Railroad for only $1 to make amends.

By 1914, the Apeshaw Co. had been reduced to nothing more than a single knitting mill in Massachusetts making average socks that could be afforded by the nation’s poor immigrants who didn’t have the time to knit their own. But once again history saved the company’s backside by delivering a war just in time. The company’s knitting plant was managed by one Klaus A. Hooman, a German immigrant whose brother served on the General Staff of the Imperial German Army. Seizing the opportunity, Hooman secured numerous contracts to knit not only socks for the growing German Army, but pantaloons, underwear and, later, gauze bandages. The contracts kept Apeshaw Co. alive until 1916 when, sensing a change in the political winds, Hooman cancelled his contracts with his brother and sought contracts with the British, Canadian and American armies.

“Dearest Ralph,” Hooman wrote his brother. “It pains me greatly to leave you abandoned in a moment of such distress and need, but I know upon which side my bread is buttered.”

Klaus Hooman was a man with little focus or patience and he may have suffered from what is known today as ADHD, or it could be that he was simply a hyperactive pain in the ass. Yet this always annoying restlessness provided with him a forward-thinking vision that paid off in 1917, when America did indeed enter the war on the side of the Allies and the company was rewarded with the largest sock and pantaloon contract granted by the United States Army (the company also received a contract to manufacture life vests for the United States Navy but the contract was cancelled after it was learned sub-par materials allowed the vests to become fully waterlogged in just minutes). Hooman used the good fortune to maneuver control of the company away from Nelson “Nelly” Apeshaw, a distant cousin of E. B Apeshaw’s second cousin’s grandson who had no interest in running the company and never showed up for work. On Nov. 11, 1918, Klaus Hooman renamed the company Apeshaw-Hooman, Inc., and a new chapter in the company’s history had begun.

You work hard, you deserve to have your candidate elected

At least our politicians aren’t assaulting each other, like they are in Greece, but the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen here sometime soon. The Scott Walker recall circus is finally behind us, but that’s not going to end the divisive politics, not as long as enough people are disconnected from reality enough to believe the president was born in Kenya. 

So why is this happening? How has the political system gotten so completely gummed up? Plenty of explanations have been floated, some of them crazy some of them convincingly coherent (here’s a recent one that’s very much on the coherent side). 

But it seems like so many attempts to explain how we got to this point come from some ideological source and presume some kind of nefarious plot committed by people of the other ideology. I don’t normally go in for plots to begin with, especially one of this vast scale, because eventually someone would spill the beans. Besides, many of these explanations come off more as an attempt at self-deception, finding excuses  for why voters would vote for a candidate or a party the writer doesn’t like because I suspect the writer has too fragile a psyche to accept the fact that good, reasonable people can make informed, rational decisions that disagree with their own. 

So here’s an explanation that has nothing to do with ideology, though it might be just as crazy as what the conspiracists come up with. It seems to me that the rise in the divisiveness of our politics parallels at least in part the rise of the consumer culture. Go back to the 1970s, when consumerism was really starting to take hold in the country. What you bought became an increasingly important part of your identity, and it was no longer Mr. Moneybags buying the Cadillac and the Armani suit to send the message that he was rich and better than you. Now it was the kind of gum you chewed or lip balm you used or shoes you wore. 

Bubble Yum or Bubblicious? The choice said a lot about you (or so we thought). I was cursed with wearing Toughskins jeans because my mom worked at Sears and she could buy them with her employee discount, consigning me to dweeb status for years because cool kids wore Levi’s and only total dweebs wore Toughskins (Sears was clearly already starting to have branding issues even then).

The 1970s was also The Me Decade, when narcissism and self-obsession became not just acceptable, but expected. Looking out for Number One, the book told us, and we should accept nothing but the best because nothing’s too good for us. Marketing and advertising followed along, insisting that the best way to get what we want was to wear the right shoes or the right perfume/cologne, or shave our legs with the right flesh-burning chemical. Even schools got in on the narcissism act, telling kids that if we can dream it, then we can live it and nothing can hold us back. It’s all about YOU, you good lookin’ hunk of a person. If you want it, you deserve it, you’re entitled to it, and nothing, NOTHING should stop you from getting it.

This rampant consumerism has only exploded in the decades since, with out of control branding reaching into every nook and cranny and crack and crevice of our lives. Advertisements are everywhere, sponsorships are omnipotent. Hip hop and hipsterism are both based on living your life with the right brands. Companies try to figure out how to build brand awareness in toddlers. You can’t even escape it going into a bathroom anymore (or the men’s room, at least) because so many stores sell advertising space above the urinals to reach an extremely captive audience.

What all this has done is to train us to expect to get what we want, and to accept nothing less because it’s all about YOU. You can custom order just about anything, from cars to computers to furniture. You can build your own burger or bear. Getting a blue shower curtain isn’t enough anymore, it has to be falling water blue but because just plain old blue doesn’t go with the remodeled bathroom like falling water blue. Any restaurant that puts “no substitutions” on its menu is not going to stay in business long.

It’s gotten to the point that this is considered a part of our birthright as Americans, to buy what we want, to get what we want, and nobody better try to stop us.  

And all the time this has happened, our political discourse has become increasingly harsh and the battles more rhetorically violent (yes, I know that our political system was torn up during the 1960s and 1970s, too, in many ways even more so than today, but those conflicts were of a different nature, with protestors objecting to the political system in general, not one side or the other. For the most part, the people inside the political system still got along). Liberals loathed Reagan in the 1980s and his pro-defense, anti-union policies, but the toxicity hadn’t progressed to the point that he couldn’t toss back a few drinks with Tip O’Neill and find common ground. In the 1990s, conservatives’ obsession with Bill Clinton caused them to ratchet it up a notch, working to stop any legislative action on his agenda. When his political skills proved superior to theirs, they impeached him and tried to remove him from office.

The election of George W. Bush brought a few months of peace, when Democrats and Republicans got together and actually passed a few bills (unfortunately, one of them was No Child Left Behind, but that’s another matter), but September 11 brought that to an end and soon liberals were complaining and accusing, and the parties went back to plotting each other’s destruction. 

Now it’s gotten to the point where it’s just ridiculous, with the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans refusing to go along with even routine bills if it means Obama could claim a victory and making up stupid stories about his citizenship.

And as noted before, it’s not just at the federal level. California Republicans pitched a fit and had Gray Davis removed as governor, and now we have liberals crying about Walker in Wisconsin.

But what’s the link between these two?  The connection is that sometime in the 1980s, we started applying the consumer ethos to our politics—that is, I want what I want, and I’m entitled to it. At some level, we think we have the right to get what we want not only in a hardware store or at Amazon.com, but in government, too. If I want Candidate A elected president/senator/governor, well, damn it, Candidate A had better be elected because if he’s not, somebody is robbing me of my right to have what I want.

Unfortunately, in politics, you can’t go somewhere else to find what you want. If Lowe’s doesn’t have a falling water blue shower curtain, then we’ll go to Home Depot, or Overstock.com. In politics, if Candidate B wins an election, then Candidate B wins the election. But marketing and consumerism have so thoroughly trained us not to accept anything less than what we want that we can’t accept it if Candidate A doesn’t win. Even worse, there’s no recourse—it’s not like we can demand to see the manager because Barack Obama or Scott Walker won an election.  

And so we get angry and frustrated and pitch hissy fits and when Walker does things that his opponents don’t like (things that he promised he would do during the campaign, by the way, and which a majority of voters evidently approved of by voting for him), they have sit-ins and chant silly slogans and try to oust him in a recall election. When Barack Obama wins the presidency, instead of accepting the fact that a black man won the presidency, his opponents do everything they can to stop him politically and make up absurd stories about his birthplace. 

All the while, we justify this silliness by accusing opponents of trying to destroy the country and the constitution and we must stop them from robbing our rights and liberties, disguising our self-obsession as national security.

Which is why I don’t think the gridlock or the harshness or the nastiness or the stupidity will end anytime soon. Marketing has done too good a job convincing us that we’re entitled and deserving, so that now, losing an election no longer means losing an election, it just means adopting different strategies to get what you want. 

Gatsby and the silver screen

I picked up The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time not long ago, inspired I suppose by the release of the trailerfor Baz Luhrmann’s film that’s due for release later this year. It’s a good clip, one that gets your attention, focusing on the book's dark menace and filled with so many of Fitzgerald's iconic images—the wild party, Daisy’s shirt orgasm, Gatsby’s circus wagon, the Negroes and the white chauffeur, the Eyes of T.J. Eckelburg—that it seems almost self-conscious, as if Luhrmann is telling Gatsby-philes “see, I read the book, I know what it’s about.” Behind it all is Kanye West’s and Jay Z’s ‘No Church in the Wild,” a song that’s not only a compelling musically but shares the book’s theme of a society that worships all the wrong things.

I’m not sure, though, how you can make a movie version of The Great Gatsby and make it work. The book operates on many levels that can be translated to the screen by a talented director like Luhrmann—a love story, the slow unmasking of a mysterious stranger, an historical document of the Jazz Age, a critical analysis of The American Dream. Dozens of movies every year include one or more of those themes. But the level the book operates at most successfully—the level that sets it apart from so many other great works of literature-- is that it’s just a damn good read, and translating that to film seems pretty much impossible. So much of the joy of reading Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s words, his turns of phrase, his sense of humor, the way he says the obvious in a way nobody did before and hasn’t since. It’s so well written it takes only as much time to read as your average bodice-ripper; it’s about as third as long as those idiotic vampire novels but infinitely better.

Fitzgerald’s writing style is ahead of its time, with its irony and droll humor. Even though it was the umpteenth time I read it, I still laughed at Gatsby’s attempt to manufacture a meet-cute with Daisy or the way Wolfsheim pronounces “gonnegtion.” Like all great works of literature, you’re compelled to go back and re-read Fitzgerald’s sentence, but with Gatsby it’s because you do it because the sentence is fun to read, not because you’re trying to figure out what the author is saying. How Luhrmann manages to translate that to the screen will depend on whether his film is successful. It’s one thing to tell the right story and film the right icons; it’s another thing to make it as fun to watch as the book is fun to read.

Eventually, Fitzgerald would wind up in Hollywood himself writing screenplays and re-writing others while he slowly drank his life away. His last novel--The Last Tycoon--was about a Hollywood studio head and was left incomplete when his liver finally blew up. So there's a certain irony at work here, that while he worked on all kinds of screenplays himself, his greatest book is pretty much unfilmable.

Famous people from Duluth (sort of)

The only month it has never snowed in Duluth is July.

That's what it's like in my hometown in Minnesota, a place where winter never really goes away, even on the warmest, most beautiful summer day, when Lake Superior is an azure jewel and the sun throws diamonds on the crests of the waves and the forest pushes against its shore like a rich, green emerald, and you know that when you die and go to heaven, you could only be so lucky if heaven is exactly like this. But even on those most beautiful days, it takes only five minutes for the wind to switch from off the lake and the temperature drops 40 degrees in a minute and a fog bank rolls in and the rain starts falling and the phenomenon known locally as "colder by the lake" takes hold, and that's when you think it just might snow. No matter what month it is, no matter how beautiful the weather was a minute ago, you think it might snow because, deep in the back of your mind, you know that the only month it has never snowed in Duluth is July. And you know, too, that sometime, long ago, before the French paddled in and opened their fur trading posts and started keeping weather records, it surely did snow in July, and one Chippewa standing on the shore of Kitchee Gummee turned to another Chippewa on the shore and said, roughly translated, "what the hell, it's snowing in July."

So you think, what's keeping it from snowing now, even on the most beautiful summer day? Certainly not history.

That's why Duluthians believe that, no matter how beautiful the weather is right now, in the next 24 hours, it might snow; and no matter how lousy the weather is right now, in the next 24 hours, it could get worse.

Duluth is a city that pops out of nowhere and then quickly disappears again. It's a strange place for a city, really, out in the middle of nowhere, further north than any other city except maybe Stockholm or Helsinki and a handful of cities in Canada and Russia. It's hundreds of miles from anything else, and in the winter, it seems even further than that. It's a great place for a settlement, probably, given its huge harbor and strategic location, but a city of Duluth's size was never meant to be where it is.

Duluth, like northern Minnesota in general, is not like the rest of Minnesota, nor the rest of the Midwest. Northern Minnesotans identify more with the "Northern" than with the "Minnesotan," and sometimes seem to have more in common with Northern Wisconsinites and Northern Michiganers than other Minnesotans. It is not like Lake Wobegon, which has become the image of Minnesota in the popular imagination. The north is fundamentally different, a different economy, geography, ecology, history and ethnic background. While Minnesota is a farm state, northern Minnesota doesn’t have more than a few hundred acres of farmable land because this is where the glacier stopped. After it scoured the rocky topsoil from the rest of the Midwest to reveal the fertile land beneath, the glacier left in place the mountains of gabbro and shale and slate in northern Minnesota, then dumped on top of it the tacky, worthless soil dragged up from the south, soil so hard and infertile only the heartiest of trees can find life in it.

Because of it, northern Minnesota is not an easy place to live. Don’t believe what you see when you visit Duluth today, a quaint old port town with hip restaurants and funky boutiques and charming ice cream shops. All of that is a façade, a collection of twee built for the tourists only in the last 25 years. In the real northern Minnesota, the one where I grew up, the land is hard, the weather is hard, the work is hard, and the people are hard. We are not descended from the soft–hearted if slightly dense people of Lake Wobegon that Keillor writes about. We come from a hard drinking, hard living, hard checking people who made our living ripping iron ore from the ground, loading ships and trains when the temperature is 20 below, trawling for whitefish in an unforgiving lake, and chopping down trees and dragging them through the forest. For fun our people hung out in taverns that were little more than corrugated tin shacks with dirt floors and skated around frozen ponds, beating each other silly with hockey sticks.

Which is probably why northern Minnesota attracted so many hard people to begin with, the Swedes and the Finns and the Norwegians, the Croats and the Bohemians and the Czechs, hard people with hard lives of their own who came to America for at least the promise of a life that, in the future, might not be so hard. And it may have been why the Zimmerman family came from Eastern Europe, with the hope that one of their descendants might someday have a better life than the one they left, never having any idea what would happen when one of those descendants, a boy named Bob, grew up and changed his last name to Dylan.

Bob Dylan was born in 1941 in St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, the same hospital in which I was born 24 years later. I realize the two events were a generation apart, but it is a small connection to fame, tenuous as it is, the fact that I and one of the greatest poets, finest musicians and worst singers in American history were both welcomed to the world in the same city in the same hospital, undoubtedly a single degree of separation between us because surely, some nurse or doctor or orderly who tended to me also tended to baby Bobby Zimmerman. We both gulped our first breaths from the same air in the same delivery room, and both cooed contentedly while looking up at the same lights in the same nursery, which creates a rather jarring mental image, when you think about it, of Bob Dylan cooing contentedly.

I always thought that would make a good conversation starter, that I was born in the same hospital as Bob Dylan, a wire-thin but nevertheless real connection to a celebrity that someone in our celebrity-obsessed culture might find impressive. I was wrong. Whenever I tell people this, I mostly get an uninterested "oh" and a look of "why are you telling me this?" Only once did it generate any kind of real enthusiasm, when I mentioned it to an aging hippie who still had a shaggy beard and a rainbow in his mind and had yet to come to grips with either the 1970s or the 1980s.

"I was born in the same hospital as Bob Dylan," I said. A look of awe washed over his face, as if I had just told him I was really Bob Dylan's secret love child, the one he had with Janis Joplin but nobody knew about. After a moment of gazing adoringly he said with all sincerity, "That makes you a great man."

Fortunately, I've never invested into my own self-worth that kind of reverence for Dylan. I see my connection to him as nothing more than the worthless trivia and feeble conversation starter that it is. Duluth never had any kind of impact on Dylan, anyway. He left the city when he was 5-years old, when his father got a new job on the Iron Range and moved the family north to Hibbing, which is probably just as well for Duluth, given what Dylan has had to say about Hibbing since he bailed on the city after high school on the first available Greyhound bus (a company that, incidentally, was founded in Hibbing). Dylan grew up in the 1950s and Hibbing in the 1950s was a conservative, blue collar, working-class place that didn't have much patience for weirdoes or poets or femmy artistes, and since Dylan was all of those things (as well as a Jew, something else that didn't sit too well with a lot of conservative blue-collar types back then), he and Hibbing simply never got along. He fled after high school and devoted a certain amount of his life to bashing Hibbing, making sure everyone knows just how rigid and oppressive and smothering it was to grow up in such a place.

Had he stayed in Duluth, I'm sure he would have said much the same thing about his life there because 1950s Duluth was also a conservative, blue-collar, working-class place that didn't have much patience for weirdoes or poets or femmy artistes (not to mention Jews). As it is, his memories of Duluth are mostly a half-forgotten haze (as are, no doubt, most of his pre-1960s memories, and probably most of his 1960s memories, certainly his Woodstock memories, and maybe even a few of his post-1960s memories.) He mentions the city only once in his music, referring to it in one line in a song I've never heard as a foggy place on a hill.

Still, this hasn't stopped Duluthians from claiming Bob Dylan as their own (as I'm doing right now). Duluth, like most small, out-of-the-way places that have few claims to fame, grasps what little claim it has and hangs on like a pit bull with lockjaw. For instance, many Duluthians believe that Mark Twain once said "the coldest winter I have ever spent is a summer in Duluth." It isn't true. No matter that summers in Duluth are cold, Twain said no such thing of Duluth. He said that of San Francisco. As far as anyone knows, Twain never came anywhere near Duluth.

I remember also hearing once that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in Duluth for a time, even wrote part of The Great Gatsby there. I can understand how this myth was birthed because Duluth actually is mentioned in the book, and plays a small but pivotal role in the story. It's where John James Gatz (nee Jay Gatsby) worked as a poor and penniless menial laborer after leaving his father's farm, and where he meets a rich and wealthy tycoon who lives on a mammoth yacht in Lake Superior. The tycoon takes Gatz under his wing, puts him to work on his boat and takes him on a fabulous ocean voyage to exotic ports around the world (never mind that in the pre-World War I years you couldn't get from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean on a boat of that size, but Fitzgerald was never known for his knowledge of geography). It's Gatz's first taste of wealth and the good life, and it's where he makes the decision that he, too, wants wealth and the good life, and he will do anything to get it, a decision that sets in motion the chain of events that leads to his tragic downfall.

Unfortunately, Fitzgerald did not write any part of that book in Duluth, nor did he ever live in Duluth. The only time he ever came to Duluth was as a child, when he and his mother took the train north from St. Paul to begin a pleasure cruise around the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, little Scott came down with tonsillitis and he spent the vacation recovering from surgery in a Duluth hospital (quite possibly St. Mary's Hospital, the same hospital where both Bob Dylan and I would be born several decades later).

Duluth's other claim to literary fame is that it was once the home of Sinclair Lewis, chronicler of small-town oppressiveness and hypocrisy and the first American to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Unlike the other two, this claim has merit because Lewis did, in fact, live in Duluth for two years in the mid-1940s. He shacked up in an impressive and charming manse in the city's tony East End hillside, and wrote one of his last novels, the Duluth-set "Cass Timberlane."

Duluthians don’t often claim Lewis as their own, though. Duluthians came across as looking like stupid, backwoods yokels in “Cass Timberlane,” and Duluthians are very sensitive about their image, especially when they’re portrayed as stupid, backwoods yokels. Back in the 1980s, Sam Shepard made a movie in and around Duluth called “Far North,” starring his longtime companion, Jessica Lange, who grew up in the town of Cloquet, not far from Duluth. Cloquet is a smelly little paper-mill town of which I have very distinct memories, even though I’ve only been there maybe twice in my life. The paper mill in Cloquet was so huge and so revolting that when it was going full steam, it produced a flatulent stench so powerful I could smell it at my house, a good 40 or 50 miles away. Airless, humid summer days were the worst, when the whole of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region smelled like an overflowing outhouse.

(I might add here that I am but one degree separated from Sam and Jessica, too, and once washed their dinner plates. As a high school student, I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Duluth when they came in to eat. When the waitress gave me Lange’s dirty plate she said “this is Jessica Lange’s plate.” I washed it anyway.)

So Shepard makes this movie, and it ends up showing Duluthians and northern Minnesotans in general as stupid, backwoods yokels. The area’s bigwig Chamber of Commerce-types were devastated. When they first heard that  Jessica Lange was coming home to make a movie in northern Minnesota, written and directed by her famous companion and big-shot playwright, they were overjoyed, convinced it would be a homage to the people they saw themselves as; good, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people of the North. The film even had its premiere in Duluth and all the area blowhards came and partied and patted each other on the back for the wonderful p.r. the film would no doubt generate, then settled back in their seats to see themselves portrayed as stupid, backwoods yokels. They were horrified. After that, whenever Jessica Lange came home to visit her family, Sam Shepard was not with her, at least in public. He probably never will be able to visit, either, because Duluthians hold grudges. Consider that it’s been near 70 years since “Cass Timberlane” and Lewis still has not been forgiven for his hatchet job.

Which is probably just as well, anyway, because by the time Lewis arrived in Duluth, his Nobel Prize was a long, long way in his past and most every ounce of talent had drained from the man’s body. By then, he was a peevish, bitter old coot with a grudge against everyone, and "Timberlane" is generally considered to be the worst book he ever wrote, if not one of the worst books ever written by a once-great writer. Criticized as narrow-minded, boring, silly and mysoginistic, it probably never would have been published had it not been written by a man who once won a Nobel Prize. After it met with critical derision and commercial failure, Lewis left Duluth, moved to Italy, and died not too long after.

So perhaps Duluthians don’t bear a grudge against Lewis, after all. Maybe they’re just good judges of literature and know that his sojourn in Duluth is not something to lay claim to.

With Bob Dylan, though, Duluth has a legitimate claim to a legend. It’s safe to say that only a handful of Americans have had as great an impact on our culture as Dylan and Duluthians try to connect themselves to that. Take, for instance, 1986, when the city sponsored an all-class reunion for anyone who ever went to school in Duluth. It was an attempt to get residents who fled the dying, post-industrial Duluth to come back and see the lively, post-urban renewal Duluth, the growing vacation town with a lakefront park and charming shops and brick streets, a shining little jewel on Lake Superior and no longer the dirty, grubby, smoke-belching, filthy little industrial dump that they all remembered. Some brilliant Chamber of Commerce-type on the organizing committee decided that Bob Dylan should come, too, even though Dylan graduated from Hibbing High School and went to Duluth’s public schools for only one year of kindergarten.

So the public relations machine spun to life in its hopeful attempt to convince Bob Dylan to return to a town where not much happened in his life, aside from the fact that it started there. Letters and press releases were mailed, telephone calls no doubt made to his agent by the dozen. Invitations to those of us who actually went to school in Duluth assured us in big, bold letters that Bob Dylan had been invited, yes, that Bob Dylan, the famous singer, hinting that he would no doubt come, might even give a concert, and we don't want to miss that, do we? So we better be there to see this landmark event in Duluth’s history.

What a wonderful chance to get national publicity for Duluth, the Chamber of Commerce-types thought, to show those East Coast national media people that the city was no longer a poster child for the Rust Belt, the dirty, grubby, smoke-belching, filthy little industrial dump. New residents would flock to Duluth, new businesses would open, the economy would explode, Duluth would be a boom town. With a little sycophantic fawning, Bob Dylan could become a great economic development tool for Duluth.

What any of them would have realized had they listened to Dylan's music is that Dylan doesn’t think much of sycophantic, fawning, Chamber of Commerce-types. He never bothered to respond to their invitations, which should have been a real big hint that he wasn’t going to come, but the organizers were confident he'd be there, making one of those surprise appearances that an eccentric mercurial artiste like Dylan is known for. But when the parties ended, the tents taken down and the reunion finished, Dylan was nowhere to be found. Organizers were disappointed he never came. I wasn't. It was obvious to anyone with ears that he’d wanted nothing to do with Duluth. That’s another thing Bob and I had in common.

But momentous events in life tend to change even the most jaundiced attitude and here again, Bob and I are similar in our sort-of-but-not-really parallel lives. For Bob,that event was turning 50, and having turned 50 he began to realize that he was growing old, as old as the people he railed against in his 1960s protst songs, and for probably the first time since the Upstate motorcycle accident, he began to grasp a sense of his own mortality. And like most people who see their own mortality approaching from ahead, he turned around and looked behind him, started to wonder what it was like back there, and that maybe he should stop by and see once more where it was he came from. And so he did, and it evidently softened his view of hard Northern Minnesota. After stubbornly refusing for years to play his hometown (or show up for its phony high school reunion), Dylan has since performed in his hometown twice, and from all reports, they were marvelous concerts, with Dylan playing with more energy and pleasure than many had seen from him in recent shows. He was friendly, joked with the crowed, talked about driving by his old house and told what few stories he remembered about his childhood there. Many believe he actually seemed to be having fun.

For me, that momentous event was the birth of a child, a little boy, and now that I can see life through a little boy’s eyes again, I can see my own little boy memories a little more clearly. What I see is a mostly safe and happy place in Northern Minnesota, with frostbite and a puck to the head the only real dangers that ever confronted me. It was a unique place to grow up, hard and often difficult, sure, but that’s a good thing to have in your blood, and we made the best of it. How many other places in the United States do kids go skating at the corner ice rink in the winter as surely as they play baseball or basketball in the summer.

Now, when I look at Northern Minnesota, I don’t see it as the place I got away from, I see it as the place I come from. I suppose that’s one more thing that Bob Dylan and I have in common.

Have fun in Los Angeles, Vikings! Don't forget to Skype!

I have to admit that I don’t have a dog in this Vikings stadium fight. I’m only a casual football fan at best and I’ve never had an emotional attachment to the Vikings. When my friends and family-members were devastated by four Super Bowl defeats as a kid, I shrugged. When Favre threw that interception in New Orleans, I laughed. It’s just not my thing.

And as for the stadium itself, I tend to be against this sort of hostage-taking situation in general, with billionaire owners demanding sports palaces from the taxpayers at little expense to themselves. But as a resident of Baja Minnesota, this story is pretty much moot to me. If Minnesotans feel that building a football stadium that will be used eight or ten times a year is an appropriate use of their tax money, well, that’s no skin off my teeth.

It seems, though, that the stadium is on life support, all but killed by the Tea Party and far right elements in the GOP in the state House of Representatives. It’s not that the House members didn’t approve a stadium bill—they did. But it’s not what the Vikings wanted nor agreed to, and it’s loaded with so many poison pills that it’s highly unlikely the Vikings and the NFL will go along with it. They killed the stadium without making it look like they killed the stadium.

This isn’t mean to be an obituary for the Vikings because there is still hope they can survive. The Senate could revive the original bill and pass it as written, then hope that language survives a conference committee and the House leadership persuades enough of its members to forget about whatever positions they took on Monday  and give it a thumb’s up in a second vote. But anybody who’s paid even a little attention to politics the last two years knows the Tea Party doesn’t compromise and it doesn’t change its vote. Ron Paul is more likely to endorse Barack Obama.

There’s also the chance the Vikings decide that 50-plus years of history and a huge and hugely passionate fan base in the Upper Midwest aren’t worth abandoning and cancel the moving vans, choosing instead to work with whatever sausage comes out of the legislature. But anyone who’s watched stadium/arena politics knows that’s about as likely as the Tea Party having a change of heart.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to admire the Tea Party folks for sticking to their guns and doing what they promised to do when elected, which was to cut spending, cut taxes, and get the government out of business they didn’t think it belonged in. And if they can’t do that, they stop the legislative wheels from turning and effectively shut government down. And that’s exactly what they did. Governments don’t belong in the stadium business, they argue, and so they killed the stadium.  Inelegantly, of course. The far right will never be known for its sophistication and nuance. But they lived up their campaign promises, and for that you have to give them credit.

More amusing to me, though, was the anguished tone of Vikings fans wailing and gnashing their teeth on the Twitters about the House debate. Clearly, these are not people who have spent much time paying attention to politics. The horse trading, the debate, the grandstanding, the over the top rhetoric, the death-by-amendment process must have been like watching a Czech movie without subtitles.  This is how it gets done, people. This is how the legislative sausage is made. Behold democracy, in all its ugly glory.

I wonder how many Vikings fans who voted for Tea Party candidates in the last election are surprised by this. They shouldn’t be. They wanted government off their backs, they wanted their taxes cut, they wanted freedom and liberty. They wanted to stick it to liberals and moderate weenies and the Big Money that they believe controls the government. In the stadium debate, they got exactly what they voted for.

So there’s now a reasonably high probability the Vikings will decamp for Los Angeles after next season, following the Lakers west from Minneapolis, although the Lakers weren’t a big deal because the NBA was kind of a joke in the 1960s and so nobody cared that they left, except Sid Hartman. This leaves Vikings fans with little recourse but to keep calling their legislators and hope some political leader can pull a rabbit from a purple helmet. It will likely be futile. The Tea Party’s mode of operation is forward, no compromise, never reconsider, never give it a second thought, because to do so is selling out. It sticks to its guns and its campaign promises for good or ill, and if you don’t like that, then you’re just another political enemy.