‘The Next Day’ a surprise gift to Bowie fans

On with the show, duckies.

David Bowie’s low visibility in recent years led to rumors he might be dying, or simply too bored to record again. At some point, he got over his ennui, if that’s what it was, and began working on The Next Day, his first album in a decade and easily one of the best high-profile pop records of late, no offense to Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, and the other middle-of-the-road regulars on “alternative” radio.

The Next Day isn’t so much about Bowie making a comeback as coming to terms with mortality, a subject he explored decades ago through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and his other exotic self-inventions. He’s working the same territory again but without the masks, which would look pretty silly on a 66-year-old heart attack survivor. In spirit, the new album is reminiscent of Time Out of Mind (1997), the great record Bob Dylan made when it seemed he was all used up.

Most of Bowie’s new songs are sardonic, harshly melodic reminders of his enduring impact on mainstream culture. (Someone should write a book about the cognitive dissonance of all those homophobic, blue-collar corner boys who fell under Bowie’s spell back in the days when music critics were introducing the word “androgynous” to Middle America.)

The dark but jaunty-sounding title song sets the tone — Here I am/Not quite dying/My body left to rot in a hollow tree. “Dirty Boys,” with its rude bass sax and brittle guitar, is a mock-sinister salute to predatory misfits. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” imagines pop stars as otherworldly creatures who take a hostile, voyeuristic interest in normal people. (In the video, the stars stalk Bowie and Tilda Swinton, playing a normal couple in a supermarket.)

None of Bowie’s conceits would matter if he didn’t have a gift for transforming self-obsession into wildly theatrical material that rings true on an emotional level — old songs like “Heroes” and new ones like “I’d Rather Be High,” which has a martial beat and a beautifully transcendent chorus sung from the point of view of a reluctant young soldier: I’d rather be high/I’d rather be flying/I’d rather be dead/Or out of my head/Than training these guns on those men in the sand/I’d rather be high.

The latter song has been playing in my head for more than a week, since I landed a temp job in a corporate setting where I have to fake being normal, not that I’m fooling anyone.

The Next Day includes 13 other new tracks, but you get the idea. A few are less than stellar, but the album as a whole is, yes, better than anything Bowie has done since Scary Monsters (1980). Even some of my fellow geezers might like it.

Footnote: Speaking of supermarkets, I was in the local Super Fresh last weekend reaching for a can of frijoles negros when “Subterranean Homesick Blues” came on the store radio. Don’t steal, don’t lift/Twenty years of schoolin’/And they put you on the day shift. I can think of only a few songwriters whose ironies resonate more deeply with each passing year. Dylan is one, and Bowie is another.

One more: Buy Bowie’s Heathen (2002), too, if you missed it. It’s a good one that got lost in the shuffle.

Cruising mean streets in the popemobile

The mainstream media love big, easy stories — natural disasters, inaugurations, papal elections. The election by the College of Cardinals of Jorge Bergoglio was a softball lobbed right over the plate, and the media knocked it out of the park.

Much was made of the fact that Bergoglio took the name Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, a choice that’s humble or grandiose, depending on your point of view. I couldn’t help but think of Harvey Keitel, in Mean Streets, as the would-be mafioso who secretly aspires to the saintliness of Francis. Which is not to say there’s anything criminal about Pope Francis I; it’s just that he’s a long way from being a saint.

AP reported that Bergoglio, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, “often rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals and regularly visited the slums that ring Argentina’s capital. He considers social outreach, rather than doctrinal battles, to be the essential business of the church.” But the new pope is also a shrewd and personable company man who, as Robert Parry wrote, knew when to speak up for the poor and oppressed, and when to keep his mouth shut:

…Much as Pope Pius XII didn’t directly challenge the Nazis during the Holocaust, Father Bergoglio avoided any direct confrontation with the neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Argentina. Pope Francis’s defenders today, like apologists for Pope Pius, claim he did intervene quietly to save some individuals.

But no one asserts that Bergoglio stood up publicly against the “anticommunist” terror, as some other Church leaders did in Latin America, most notably El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero who then became a victim of right-wing assassins in 1980.

Indeed, the predominant role of the Church hierarchy – from the Vatican to the bishops in the individual countries – was to give political cover to the slaughter and to offer little protection to the priests and nuns who advocated “liberation theology,” i.e. the belief that Jesus did not just favor charity to the poor but wanted a just society that shared wealth and power with the poor…

Church leaders would have us believe that liberation theology inevitably leads to the sort of leftist regime depicted in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, whose protagonist is a deeply flawed priest in Mexico, circa 1935, struggling to maintain his faith while running from a government-sanctioned death squad.

In one scene, set in a barn, the priest tries to finish saying Mass in time to escape the killer cops. Greene describes the priest as he sees his fear reflected in the eyes of the faithful:

Heaven must contain such scared and dutiful and hunger-lined faces. For a matter of seconds he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy — it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty.

Greene’s priest seems to have more in common with the leftist Romero than with Bergoglio, who “visited the slums” but wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t played ball with right-wingers who killed advocates of the poor and oppressed.

The question now is whether Bergoglio, as the boss of bosses, will actively fight for slum dwellers or merely praise their poverty as he cruises past them in the popemobile. He’d be a lot more interesting if he tried to walk the walk, or at least revealed himself to be a man in conflict with himself, openly struggling with his flaws, like Greene’s priest or Keitel’s mobster.

Food for thought: If the pope had an iPod, would he download the Chips’ “Rubber Biscuit”?

Are perfect storms the wave of the future?

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) has a cheesy script, but the spectacle of New York City immersed except for the upper floors of its tallest buildings is worth the DVD rental fee and doesn’t seem silly in our post-Superstorm Sandy world. In one scene, survivors of the weather catastrophe huddle in the New York Public Library, burning books in a big fireplace to keep from freezing.

Now scientists are saying effects of global warming almost certainly enhanced the impact of Sandy. This is from Cornell and Rutgers researchers:

So while [Sandy] does appear to have been the perfect storm, we can, unfortunately, expect many more as we move toward ice-free Arctic conditions in the coming years (see “Experts Warn ‘Near Ice-Free Arctic In Summer’ In A Decade If Volume Trends Continue”).

Polar bears might not be the only creatures who’ll have nothing left to stand on. It’ll be like that old song — “Row Your Boat Down Broadway,” I think it was called.

Shoeshine boys debate job creation

[The job creators] have no intention of creating jobs now or in the future. They don’t have to create jobs and there’s nobody out there to make them do it. They simply will reduce the number of jobs they have now and grind the remaining employees, most of whom have no recourse any more, either to the government or to organized labor. The job creators thereupon will get rich not creating jobs, and they will continue to get rich not creating jobs, because creating jobs costs them money. Any politician who says anything else is lying to you.
– Charles Pierce, in Esquire

Did I tell you about getting my shoes shined while working at the Curtis Center? A stocky guy, about 50, sneaked up with a battered shoeshine kit as I was sitting on a bench in Washington Square, eating my lunch and watching Colonial ghosts roll dice on the slate walkway. (Ghosts are everywhere if you’re in a ghostly frame of mind.)

The big guy asked for money and I gave him a bunch of change to get rid of him. The next thing I knew he was kneeling and smearing gunk on my shoes and rubbing it in with a brush.

– Whoa, don’t do that.

But he kept adding gunk and buffing and telling me my shoes were special, they needed special polish. He finished and I got up to go because he wouldn’t leave, and he started dissing me.

– You give me two bits for that shine. That ain’t shit.
– That was two bucks, not two bits. I didn’t even want a shoeshine. Who gets a shoeshine these days?

He told me he was trying to make a living, I could do better than two bits. He flashed a weary grin. I got in his face and pointed at the Curtis Center.

– You think I’ve got money because I’m dressed up? I’ve got a five-day job over there and that’s it, I’m as broke as you. The big corporations are screwing everybody. No unions, no long-term contracts, no benefits. They bleed you dry and blame you when there’s no more blood. It’s a new world, dude, open your eyes.
– It ain’t my world. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

I decided to not give him more money until he acknowledged it’s a new world and we’re all screwed. I told him the company I was temping for was hugely profitable even though it made drugs with so many side effects you have to use five-point type to fit them on the same page.

But all I got was that smile — that ancient stupid stoicism that has kept the poor down forever — and the feeling that I was the jerk. So I gave the man five more dollars and slouched back to the Curtis Center, where I did my dirty job and didn’t make a peep.

Being white in Philly Mag

[Update: I walked into a South Philly CVS and saw that headline again, screaming at me in bold white caps, and I thought oh no, race war, end of the world!]

It’s hard to read Philadelphia Magazine‘s March cover piece, “Being White in Philly,” by Robert Huber, as anything more than an exercise in cynicism. Huber had to know that his confused personal impressions regarding race relations didn’t add up to an actual story. And his editor surely saw that the piece was ill-conceived and unresolved, more likely to stir up resentment than encourage dialogue between black and white city residents.

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking OK, Philly Mag has been publishing variations on the same racist theme for decades, so why bother commenting on it? I guess because the article seems so disingenuous. Huber affects the “why can’t we all get along” tone of a white Rodney King, but with little bombs of condescension that could only have been meant to provoke:

But like many people, I yearn for much more: that I could feel the freedom to speak to my African-American neighbors about, say, not only my concerns for my son’s safety living around Temple, but how the inner city needs to get its act together.

Substituting “inner city” makes Huber’s generalization seem even more insulting than it would have if he’d used “blacks.” His professed yearning to speak to his black neighbors reminds us that he didn’t quote, and perhaps didn’t even speak with, any black Philadelphians while doing his research, if you can call it that.

The article will piss off blacks while appealing to the magazine’s core demographic — reasonably well-off and well-educated whites who respond to ads for luxury cars and liposuction. Huber and Philly Mag are saying it’s OK for these whites to think of themselves as tolerant despite their fear and loathing of blacks; that it’s only natural to feel this way about people who, after all these years, still can’t get their act together.

Huber was writing more about class than race, but acknowledging this fact would have called attention to the superficiality of his analysis. He offers a brief history of white flight from Philly, but mentions none of the underlying socioeconomic factors — red-lining, gentrification, wage stagnation, de-industrialization, etc. — that have widened the gulf not only between whites and blacks but also between the well-off and poor of both races.

I was there, growing up in a Philly neighborhood that was transitioning from white to black in the 1960s-1970s, running with other white kids who were engaged in an ongoing street war with black kids. All the shootings and stabbings were manifestations of forces that all of us, black and white, couldn’t control or even understand.

Articles like “Being White In Philly” do nothing to shed light on why these forces persist. But such articles do boost print sales and online traffic, and that’s the bottom line.

Footnote: I like this from Stephen Marche, in 2011:

More than anything else, class now determines Americans’ fates. The old inequalities — racism, sexism, homophobia — are increasingly antiquated. Women are threatening to overwhelm men in the workplace, and the utter collapse of the black lower middle class in the age of Obama — a catastrophe for the African-American community — has little to do with prejudice and everything to do with brute economics. Who wins and who loses has become simplified, purified: those who own and those who don’t.

Chavez was flawed, but he had Bush’s number

Right-wingers celebrated the death this week of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calling him a dictator and much worse, but only because he wouldn’t play ball with American oil companies or refrain from criticizing hypocrites who put a noble spin on American power grabs in Iraq and other countries. Efforts by Chavez to improve life for the poor in Venezuela were sloppy and wasteful, but at least he wasn’t a front man for the sort of corporate thugs who run the show in our country.

And he had a flair for using humor to cut through the bullshit of those who are front men for corporate thugs. One of his finest moments was his speech at the United Nations in 2006, a day after George W. Bush spoke there:

The Devil is right at home. The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house. And the Devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the Devil came here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today. Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the Devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

Even so-called liberals — Nancy Pelosi and her gang — didn’t like that speech. But Chavez was right. Watching videos of Bush lying to sell the war in Iraq, which started almost 10 years ago, is enough to turn the stomach of anyone with an ounce of decency, or a sense of humor. Bush was a front man for smarter villains, but stupidity is no excuse. He was the elected chief, and in that role willingly caused as much death and destruction as Saddam Hussein.

Chavez fought for the poor. Bush fought for Halliburton and ExxonMobil. The irony is that Bush — who had everything handed to him, even the presidency — probably will live into very old age, cocooned in wealth, still smelling of sulfur but far from the real world he and his homies did so much to harm.

Footnote: The mainstream media played a big part in helping the mediocre Bush become the monster who started two wars and wrecked our economy, but that’s another story.

Thank Obama, the anti-FDR, for the sequester

America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
- David Byrne and Brian Eno

It ain’t pretty, the damage Barack Obama has done to working people by trying to cozy up to Republicans over the last four-plus years. Glen Ford of the Black Report Agenda put it this way:

…It was Obama who swallowed whole the corporate argument, previously championed by Republicans, that the national debt was Crisis Number One and that entitlement programs were the root cause. From the moment in January of 2009 when Obama served notice that Social Security and all other entitlements would be put on the chopping block, he became the chief mover and shaker for so-called entitlement reform. He created the model for austerity, through his Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission. It was Simpson-Bowles that provided the basis for the massive cuts offered by President Obama in 2011. When the Republicans balked at even a modest tax increase for the rich, it was the White House National Economic Council Director, the corporate deal-maker Gene Sperling, who came up with the sequestration scheme, which was timed to explode right after the 2012 elections. The idea was to make every popular constituency in the country scream – and accept the inevitability of massive entitlement cuts…

After the election, many Obama voters waited for a sign that he would focus this time on helping the working poor rather than corporations and banksters. But even the most devoted Obama groupies must know by now that he doesn’t measure prosperity by the number of Americans making a living wage, but rather in terms of corporate profits.

Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy was the New Deal. Obama wants his to be the Grand Bargain, which would open the door to the total dismantling of New Deal legislation. That’s how far the Democratic Party has fallen.