It Hurts to Say Goodbye...Because I'm Smiling so Big

I watched the savant of sanctimony Pat Robertson walk out of the 1988 GOP primary with nine percent of the vote, having captured the party delegations of exactly four states. In 2008 I watched the sultan of smug, Mike Huckabee, go to the elimination that math promised him even though he "majored in miracles," securing about a sixth of the delegates that eventual nominee John McCain would win.

But I can't ever remember looking forward to watching a candidate suspend a campaign as much as I am to Senator Elizabeth Warren's all-but-inevitable annoucement. Even a brief list of her gaffes, fibs and political nonsense would stretch my word count well into four digits. Lying about Native American heritage, lying about her kids attending public school, lying about being fired for being pregnant, lying about...well, you get the picture. The reactor-level smarm of asking the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court to read aloud a question about whether or not his reputation would recover following the impeachment trial, rather than having the guts to say something like that in her own voice and words. The Klaatu-like inability to connect with or react to ordinary human beings in any way that marked a feeling of connection with them. The vacuous speciousness of her "I have a plan for that" mantra describing an assortment of shallow talking points that might work in a science contest diorama of Earth but not in the one everybody really lives on.

I am under no illusions about the ballot choices facing Americans in November. The incumbent, a man who can't get out of his own way for more than 18 hours and whose narcissism and childish ego simply will not allow the national conversation to have anything other than his own exalted self as the center. A man who insists on slapping a thick coat of buffoonery over a few legitimate accomplishments and who thus demands again and again that you remember he is of unfit character to hold the office wherin he sits.

As for whatever rough Voltron slouches out of Milwaukee in July, created Toei-like from the mess hammered together from a pretend-Democrat Socialist, a couple of bored billionaires, the two-term mayor of America's 306th largest city and twenty-plus others not good enough to beat them? No thanks. The only political party of which I've ever been a member is almost dead solid certain to supply a candidate for whom I could never vote. Given the sea in which she swims, would a President Warren really be that much worse than a President Booker, Gillibrand, Harris, Inslee, DeBlasio, Swalwell or Williamson would have been had the stars aligned for them and shot deadly meteors at the entire roster of their opponents? Probably not.

But she is uniquely oleaginous in enough ways, as hinted above, that it will be a pleasure to not see her name when the votin' comes 'round. Yes, as stated before I am merely waiting for the Libertarian Party to put a name on top of the ballot I intend to mark. And certainly, the ability to vote directly against her would have been satisfying. But even more satisfying is learning that the members of the senator's own party will not even present me with that choice. Waving goodbye to a relentlessly scheming simulacra made of relentless ambition and little else is a lot of fun. But, lazy as I am, it will be even more fun for my former fellow Democrats to do it for me.

Real Life Cinema

This graph at Information is Beautiful compares movies that claim to be based on actual events to the courses of those actual events to see how real they are.

As you can see, it varies. And by clicking on a particular spot in the movie, a pop-up will explain how any particular scene in question either matches or deviates from reality. The graph creators researched the movie scenes for accuracy using books they were based on or other resources that describe the actual events. They give a range of options, allowing for some scenes that mix truth and falsehood as well as those which are either dead on or blatant falsehoods. And they have a category for scenes they could neither prove nor disprove because the information isn't available.

The explanatory blurbs at the bottom suggest that the crew behind the graphs will work on some other movies as well. That could be interesting, as sometimes the "true events" named in the promotional material are so drastically altered that the move isn't anything like "true." I can't remember the flick in question, but several years ago a friend after seeing a particularly partisan movie posted that the alleged actions taken by the characters representing real-life United States intelligence agents greatly angered him. I'm pretty sure I never saw the movie, but as he described it I would have been angry watching those scenes as well.

Unfortunately, when I was reading some interviews and articles with the people on whose accounts the movie was based, as well as some of their own reflections on the events it's supposed to show, it turned out that the movie version of those incidents was, well, wrong. It had shifted its pieces around so much that when they were put together they formed an entirely different puzzle. So that rather than being angry at what really happened, I would have been angry at what the screenwriter and producer had said happened, and they had crafted their version of events to evoke exactly that response. We usually call this "fiction," and it's a fine art form. But while things that happen in fiction sometimes resemble events that happened in real life, they aren't based on them. They're still the products of the creativity of the writer, artist, musician or moviemaker. It doesn't make them fake.

But it doesn't make them real, either.

North Americana

With iconic Americana guru T-Bone Burnett producing, The Secret Sisters (Laura and Lydia Rogers) showed up in 2011 with a self-titled album that answered the question, "What if Phil and Don Everly had been women and had released an awesome album of country music about 10 years before their 1950s heyday?"

For their follow-up three years later, the Rogers' sisters felt like expanding their pallette, both in terms of recording their own music as well as covers, and in advancing their sound so they didn't get pigeonholed as purely a retro act. Put Your Needle Down brings the same great harmonies heard in the debut, but this time allows them to roam into 1950s girl-group territory like their Brandi Carlisle co-written "Black and Blue" and  garage-band rock like their cover of P.J. Harvey's "Pocket Knife."

The sisters wrote more songs on Needle than they had on their debut, even receiving permission to finish out a Bob Dylan demo, "Dirty Lie," from Dylan himself. In their hands it gathers up some torchy, blues and jazzy elements that would have made it a great flip side to Peggy Lee's version of "Fever," setting it up as probably the album's best track.

Fans looking for more of the same as they heard in the debut album would have been pleased mostly by the very Everlyesque "Lonely Island" and disappointed by a lot of the rest of what they heard. The Rogers sisters were in just as fine a voice as they were in the first record but their desire to stretch themselves didn't amount to Secret Sisters Part 2 and may have put them outside of Burnett's sweet spot as a producer. Needle did not sell as well or garner the approval of the earlier record and led to the pair getting dropped by their label. Legal troubles added to their burden and they considered leaving music performing.

But eventually signed as an opening act by Carlile for a 2015 tour, the Rogers' found a muse again and would return to the studio for 2017's You Don't Own Me Anymore. This time produced by Carlile -- herself a wide-ranging synthesist of American music styles -- the album was a crowd-funding success that earned a Grammy nomination. A fourth album is due later this year.

Even if Needle didn't have the pitch-perfect recreation of the 1940s-era sound of their debut and was held down by a couple of songs that could have been better left for some more work, it's still a clear sign that The Secret Sisters and their music are worth blabbing about.

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When The Band wrapped up its career as a touring outfit in 1976, people probably envisioned several solo projects would commence forthwith. Between Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel, at least, there lay the potential for a wide range of folk-influenced, meat-and-potatoes mid-tempo rock to spread throughout the charts in the next few years.

But that didn't happen -- what did happen was the group reforming in 1983 without Robertson, who himself didn't record anything new until a self-titled album in 1987. He explained the hiatus: "I wasn't so sure I had something to say." The desire to do music that both meant something to him and sounded different from what he had done with his former bandmates fueled the experimental nature of several of Robbie Robertson's tracks and his decision to work with Daniel Lanois as a producer.

Although it didn't wind up being a "concept album," Robertson's songwriting began with the concept of a mythical "Shadowland" parallel world that drifted alongside the real one, following the shadows left by clouds. It let him roam from writing "Fallen Angels," a tribute to his former bandmate Manuel, who had taken his own life in 1986, to the indictment of the ravenous culture fame machine, "American Roulette," to the lament of a Native American soldier damaged by his wartime experience in "Hell's Half-Acre."

Robertson's reflection on his Native American heritage helped build the lyrics to "Broken Arrow" -- one of the reasons it sounds better than the Rod Stewart remake even though Stewart's a better singer is because Robertson is exploring his own history though it. He approaches a warning about environmental issues in "Showdown in Big Sky" from the same perspective, mixing it with gospel and biblical imagery that will also swirl together in "Testimony." Lyrically, the most ambitious song is probably "Somewhere Down the Crazy River," a noirish memoir of a steamy nighttime encounter that alternates spoken-word segments with the titular chorus.

Sonically, Robertson travels from the hard rock of "American Roulette" and "Hell's Half Acre" to the anthemic "Sweet Fire of Love," and "Showdown" -- the former being an actual collaboration with U2. "Fallen Angel," featuring backing vocals from Peter Gabriel" and "Broken Arrow" are the most Lanois-ish songs of the album, heavy with synth atmosphere. "Crazy River," as befits its storyline motif, alternates between spare instrumentation behind the narration and its soundtrack-like chorus, backed by an echoing Sam Llanas of the BoDeans.

Having waited 11 years to be sure he had "something to say," and having spent three years and $750,000 crafting that something, Robertson showcases both how much of The Band's best work came from Robertson himself and how much his later experiences in moviemaking and movie music had influenced him. He may not have been as direct and focused as a solo artist as he had been when part of an ensemble, but the new vision and reflection spawned in the intervening time made for a fascinating new direction for one of rock music's most deep-thinking wordsmiths.

Swimming His Own Path

Although one might think that the annoying little ditty "Baby Shark" is so well known that everybody knows the words, Sherman the shark proves that such assumptions may not be warranted.

Solo Jam

One of the ways that Google Maps, as well as several other mapping apps, determines traffic level on a street is how many phones are sending their locations to the Central Scrutinizer -- oops, sorry, I mean, to the app.

So a fellow in Berlin put 90 phones in his little red wagon and walked down the middle of a Berlin street. Although the traffic was light enough he could literally walk down the middle of the road the app read the presence of 90 slow-moving phones and signaled to all users the presence of a traffic jam.

I think I'm just going to get my church members to check in with their phones on Sunday morning, in order to give me some really good attendance numbers, and then let them go on about their business while I take a nap.

He Was Spartacus

In 1996, Issur Danielovitch was given an award for lifetime achievement in his field. He'd suffered a stroke the year before and it limited his speech, and so his son and friends urged him to just say "Thank you," when presented with the award and then leave.

But Issur -- who years before had changed his name to the more movie-friendly "Kirk Douglas" -- said he looked at the crowd and felt he had to say more. So he did, thanking his four sons for being "proud of the old man," thanking his wife and thanking the people who were saluting him with the honor. Douglas went on to write several books about his life after the stroke, which stretched from the mid-90s to today as he passed away at the age of 103.

Douglas's death leaves only very few connections to what is sometimes called Hollywood's "Golden Age," a time when public relations departments, studios and cooperative media worked together to make sure that the great stars of the time remained larger than life instead of tarnished by the tawdry characteristics found in lesser mortals. Douglas, though by any measure one of the great stars of this era and a definitive movie tough guy, was one willing to step outside the illusion. He claimed that as the producer of Spartacus his championing of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo played a central role in breaking the so-called "blacklist" of leftist writers and actors following the McCarthy anti-communist fervor. That claim's disputed today, but it seems clear that when someone of Douglas' stature weighed in by using and crediting Trumbo that the list's power had greatly evaporated.

Douglas played in more than 90 movies and dozens of stage shows. In addition to the stalwart Spartacus, he's probably best remembered as the tough guy, bad or good, whose seemingly jovial smile masked a hair-trigger ability to detonate an explosion of violence, either verbal or physical. Like many of the biggest names of the movies' golden years, he was an icon in almost every appearance -- but unlike some of his contemporaries, he had the acting chops to help you see the character instead of the actor.

Super Sundry

-- My preferred National Football League team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won in their first Super Bowl appearance in 50 years. This win fit their post-season pattern in that they came from behind with a blizzard of scoring in just a few minutes of play, led by uber-QB Patrick Mahomes. The lesson for opposing teams seems to be not to let Mahomes get behind by more than 10 points unless there is under, say, 12 seconds to play in the game.

-- Demi Lovato sang a fine rendition of the national anthem a little bit more than a year after being hospitalized for a near-fatal opioid overdose. It was only her second public live performance since she took a break following the overdose for treatment.

-- Megastar couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé stayed seated for Lovato's performance, which is understandable given that Jay-Z is partnering with former San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick in his activism trying to call attention to the injustices faced by minority populations in the United States. Many people objected, which is understandable given that the anthem and flag are widely considered to represent not simply our nation but also those who have sacrificed greatly for it, and that a show of disrespect to the flag is often seen as a show of disrespect to those people. Many news outlets covered the protest gesture, which is not understandable at all.

-- Kansas City defensive tackle Derrick Nnadi has been sponsoring one free adoption at the KC Pet Project after every Chiefs win. So after the Super Bowl victory, Nnadi said that the adoption fees for every animal at the project's shelter which became eligible for adoption on or before Feb. 2 would be covered.

-- The halftime show by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez drew criticism from people who believed it to have been inappropriately suggestive. Many women argued back, saying that women who had no real problem with Adam Levine's shirtless performance in Super Bowl LIII did not have much room to criticize the ladies' saucy work in SB LIV, and they criticized the women for tearing other women down instead of supporting them. From what I could tell, many of them emphasized their criticism by calling the critics "Karen," which has become a word expressing derision towards a certain kind of middle-class, usually white woman who leans a little bit towards self-righteousness. I wasn't able to find any actual Karen who criticized the show, although I suppose there were some.

-- Most of the commercials were stupid and boring. The lone exception was the Bill Murray ad for Jeep, which reprised his Groundhog Day movie about a man who keeps repeating the same day in his life. The Doritos ad had the brief moment of Sam Elliot's mustache helping him in his dance contest against Lil Nas X but was otherwise silly.

-- Super Bowl LIV was followed by Fox's The Masked Singer. In 1970, the last time Kansas City won the Super Bowl, the game was followed by Lassie. Super Bowl IV is the clear winner here.