My Obsession Now: The Moody Blues, "Watching and Waiting"

This one took me back a ways.

The Moodies were one of my earliest favorite bands. I'd stumbled across their singles, likely "Ride My See Saw" or "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)", on the radio, and in the '70s the orchestral-sounding arrangements weren't all that common any more so they stood out like beacons amid the legion of guitar wankers dominating the airwaves.

I didn't pick up the band's albums in release order so I had sampled not just Days of Future Passed but also The Present by the time I got around to picking up To Our Children's Children's Children. Days of Future Passed, though perhaps their best-known LP, is not representative of their core sound, while The Present is a mediocre blend of a band that is out of creative juice and early '80s production that polished everything to the same artificial slickness.

To Our Children's Children's Children is emblematic of the band's sound in its prime. Though it boasts no radio hits, it flows relatively well: there are fewer portentous interludes than on, say, In Search of the Lost Chord, and side 2 in particular is a pleasure to listen to from beginning to end. In fact, my current obsession could just as easily have been "Gypsy", the side's opening number, which has been a longtime favorite. "Watching and Waiting" just edged it out for its plaintive lyrics, which suit my current frame of mind a little bit better. It's the kind of song that gets Justin Hayward (though typically not Ray Thomas, credited as co-writer) justly tagged as "lugubrious", and though in the past I remember being a little annoyed by his keening vocal on this track, today it strikes me as just about right. It's also the perfect closer to the side and to the album.

Do good intentions excuse terrible execution?

I heard about this story of the painting restoration gone horribly wrong in Spain earlier this week. A well-meaning elderly woman took on the task of fixing up a weatherbeaten fresco at a nearby church. It turned out so badly, the police initially investigated it as an act of vandalism.

... she could not understand the uproar because she had worked in broad daylight and had tried to salvage the fresco with the approval of the local clergy. “The priest knew it,” she told Spanish television. “I’ve never tried to do anything hidden.”

I believe her. So why was this whole incident treated as vandalism in the first place? Didn't the police talk to the parish priest?

And then there's the bigger question:

What was this woman thinking?

What possessed her to take on this project when she clearly had no idea what she was doing?

Then again, what was the priest thinking? Why on earth did he let a well-meaning but totally unqualified person take on such an important task?

Finally, should she be held responsible for botching this restoration so utterly? I mean, I very much doubt she can pay for undoing her handiwork and then doing a real restoration, but would it be appropriate for the community to criticize her? Or is she clearly so divorced from reality that she simply should be kept the hell away from paint and brushes?

Happy hundredth, Gene Kelly

I'm sorry to say I was unaware until an hour or two ago that Gene Kelly, actor/dancer extraordinaire, would have turned 100 today.

It says something about him that in spite of the general awfulness of his last film, Xanadu, Kelly was still as sparkling and wonderful a presence as ever, and not just because he did his own dancing and roller-skating. If you know nothing of the man, do yourself a favor and ignore Xanadu entirely (try to forget I even brought it up). Instead, check him out in On the Town (with Frank Sinatra) or An American in Paris (with Leslie Caron). Or you could check out a more obscure project of his from 1952, Singin' in the Rain.

Thank you, Mr. Kelly, for giving us some of the most memorable musical sequences in film history.

I'm dancin' — and singin' — in the rain....

The amazing Republicans

It occurs to me that there's something quite astonishing about the Republican Party's presidential candidate selection process this time around.

President Obama has shown his heart is in the right place on certain issues, such as the need to fix this country's extraordinarily dysfunctional health care system. That his efforts have not been unmixedly successful (to put it kindly) doesn't change the fact that he has attempted to make things better.

On the other hand, Obama has been a profound disappointment on key issues: climate change (his silence has been deafening), alternative/renewable energy research, personal privacy, and the prosecution of the so-called war on terror. On the latter subject, not only has Obama continued to emphasize military rather than judicial "solutions" (a sarcastic reference to his fondness for assassination-by-drone), but he has shown a deeply disturbing contempt for the Constitutional protections afforded to U.S. citizens, however odious their views. I don't care if you do believe a citizen threatens the existence of the United States: that citizen first must be arrested, tried and convicted before you can execute him. If he's too damned dangerous for you to follow the well-established rule of law, Mr. President, you have an obligation to explain to the rest of us why. Otherwise you are nothing but a crime boss elected to public office.

I'm no conspiracy theorist but I can certainly understand the visceral fear some people have that Obama is the very embodiment of Big Brother. He's not turning the country socialist, he's doing something even worse: he's turning the presidency into a kingship. Nixon's enemies list has morphed into Obama's hit list. Yet where Nixon had to resort to clandestine burglary, an act whose illegality would cost him the presidency and his reputation, Obama's got the military and the CIA ticking off names on that list almost in full public view. Did anybody four years ago imagine this would be the state of affairs today? I sure as hell didn't.

Obama's a smart man. A part of me wonders just how bad the classified intelligence reports he's receiving must be for him to be acting as imperially as he is. A part of me, in other words, wants to believe his heart is in the right place on national security, too.

But much more of me wonders just why in the hell such a smart man, who also is no slouch as a communicator, can't explain clearly and concisely (and without compromising national security) just why he looks much more like our recent national nightmare, George W. Bush, than even George W. Bush did.

My disenchantment with Obama's unexpectedly authoritarian instincts (in addition to his enthusiasm for drones as an instrument of foreign policy, he has misspent considerable federal resources on a pointless crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, and his deeply misguided obsession with secrecy led pretty much directly to the Wikileaks fiasco) makes me his worst nightmare as a voter: I'm a reliable Democrat who is so pissed at his mishandling of a variety of issues, I'm actively looking for reasons not to vote for him.

And yet, I'll be voting for him in November.

Why?

Because Mitt Romney, while the least objectionable and most electable of the major Republican candidates this time around, is still a scarier prospect than another four years of Obama. If I hadn't been convinced of that before, his choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate would have pushed me off the fence in a scalding hurry.

The Republicans should have had this race sewed up. Obama's facing the worst economy in decades and tremendous disappointment among much of his base.

Yet the Republican primary process, by relentlessly squeezing out the last drops of suspect moderation from every single candidate, resulted in an image of the party and its standard bearer that is, well, scary. Scary in the way Rasputin was. Get past Romney's suits and professional candidate's smile (and his ridiculously unconvincing attempts to look and sound like just an aw-shucks kind of guy), and you can see the crazily inconsistent yet infuriated, burn-the-whole-place-down, anti-D.C. irrationality of the Tea Party and die-hard libertarians (who are not one and the same). Even if you believe the would-be czar might have the goods (and in Romney's case I remain deeply skeptical), you can't help seeing that he's in thrall to a crazy-eyed zealot, or in this case, a whole bunch of them.

And it scares the crap out of you.

It scares the crap out of me, anyway.

Republicans' embrace of the most reactionary, intolerant, and fantastically greedy elements of the far right over the past three decades has allowed Obama to make a real fight out of this election.

Because however bad the Obama administration has been, there is every reason to believe a Romney administration would be worse.

Only the amazing latter-day Republicans could pull off such a feat.

How our money is coming back from China

Per a New York Times article by Michael Luo, Neil Gough and Edward Wong, some of it is returning through the hands of billionaire arch-conservative Sheldon Adelson.

In May 2004, the Sands Macau became the enclave’s first foreign-owned casino. On opening day, a mob estimated at 20,000 pushed over crowd-control barriers, ripping doors off their hinges. In its first year, the casino’s profits exceeded its $265 million cost.

By 2007, when the Sands opened its second casino in Macau, the $2.4 billion Venetian — the largest casino in the world — the formerly crime-infested backwater had become the world’s undisputed gambling capital. With Macau providing two-thirds of the company’s revenues, Mr. Adelson had become one of the richest men in the world.

And near the end of the article:

The Sands now has four casinos in Macau, which supply about half the company’s profits.

Our Walmart purchases make Chinese manufacturers richer. They blow that money in Macau at Adelson's casinos. He takes those profits and buys our elections.

This is not a healthy flow of capital.

Fix our broken agricultural subsidies

Please, Congress (and my fellow citizens), listen to this man.

We have become dangerously focused on corn in the Midwest (and soybeans, with which it is cultivated in rotation). This limited diversity of crops restricts our diets, degrades our soils and increases our vulnerability to droughts. Farmers in the central plains used to grow a greater diversity of food and forage crops, including oats, hay, alfalfa and sorghum. But they gradually opted to grow more and more corn thanks to federal agricultural subsidies and expanding markets for corn in animal feed, corn syrup and ethanol.

The man is Prof. William G. Moseley, writing in an opinion piece in the New York Times.

Whether we're talking about crops, manufacturing, intellectual inquiry, the human gene pool, or our own talents and interests, diversity is the key to survival on this ever-changing planet.

Either we embrace that fact, or we will go extinct as a species.

It's that simple.

Joe Arpaio: the Rolling Stone profile

I had a vague idea the sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona was a blowhard and a fearmonger, but Joe Hagan's profile clearly shows that Arpaio is something much worse.

Arpaio is an unabashed carnival barker. And his antics might be amusing if he weren't also notorious for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America.

Arpaio's unabashed hypocrisy in pretending to enforce the law while actually pandering to his constituents' basest prejudices (not to mention indulging his own egomania) is stunning. It's not enough for him to harass the brown of skin, either: he's also touchy enough to send his underlings after his critics. He's the schoolyard bully who grew up and learned he could keep preying on the weak if he got a badge.

It all comes back to those voters who keep reelecting him, though. As bad as this piece makes Arpaio out to be, those voters are not one jot better. They know what he's doing and they not only condone it, they applaud it.

(Courtesy of LongReads.)