Three for the road

1. Attitude

I'll never forget being the only white guy in a rundown picture theatre in Astoria the summer of 1989 when the afrocentric Do the Right Thing came out. The papers - well, the Voice - were talking about nothing else (black critic Stanley Crouch panned it). There's an excellent profile of Spike Lee in the September 22 New Yorker which captures his still burning attitude, and how that has hindered his career. It closes with the writer John Colapinto asking Lee why he hasn't directed a TV ad for the Obama campaign: after all, the Obamas went to Do the Right Thing on their first date:

“You gotta be asked to do that stuff,” Lee said. “Look, if they need me, they know where I am. And in a lot of ways they might—” He paused. “You know, that shit could be used against them, too. ‘Spike Lee, the man who said so-and-so and so-and-so. Now he’s doing commercials for—’ ” He shrugged and smiled. “Sometimes you might be a liability,” he said finally. “Just got to lay in the cut.”

Elsewhere, he says that having a black president would change everything, people's psyche, and specifically African-Americans: “They don’t have to be shuckin’ and jivin’—doing the tap dance—to make a living. And I mean that ‘tap dancing’ figuratively, not literally, because no disrespect to the world’s greatest tap dancer, Savion Glover.”

I don't know Savion Glover, but the quote reminded me of a great black variety performer who grew up in the dying days of minstrelsy and ended up being patronised by Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack. A while back I came across this clip, in which Sammy Davis Jr paid tribute to a host of other performers, with Harold Arlen's timeless 'One for My Baby'. I must read Davis's autobiography ... that's odd, it was called Yes I Can. He achieved a lot in an era when he couldn't stay in the same Las Vegas hotels in which he was performing. What would he have done in this era?  

2. Mrs Brown's Daughter

The jury is still out on Tina Brown's new site The Daily Beast. Smartly designed, exuding that mix of brains and glitz, you can see why the investors went for it. But so far it feels a little corporate. The Huffington Post probably has similar backing and Rolodex of contacts, but has a guerilla madness about it that gives it an edge. The Huff's shrillness is off-putting, so maybe it's just a left alternative to Fox News; as a Hoboken friend pointed out to me in the 80s, yes the Village Voice has some good stuff in it, but so often it just seems like a smart, far-left answer to the (sensationalist, right-wing) New York Post. But this piece from The Daily Beast is an excellent use of the web: "How McCain Can Still Win". The design is so simple but clever: just by rolling your mouse over the image, you can read a precise of what several well-informed pundits think of McCain's chances. Despite what the polls say in the battleground states, hearing what the more rabid Republicans are saying - the ugly face of a more widespread, hidden racism - I'm not putting my share portfolio on an Obama victory. Oh that's right, I don't have one.

3. Type Cast

My first awareness of Helvetica was early in 1968 when a quasi-relative in the US sent out some buttons from RFK's doomed campaign. At the time the font seemed so fresh, so bold, so obviously from somewhere else than New Zealand in the era of Holyoake and one-channel TV. If you haven't seen it, the documentary Helvetica is fascinating. Here's a montage.

There are other viruses that we could eliminate first, but the use of Arial is certainly somewhere on the list. It's the rich man's Helvetica - Bill Gates is responsible - but the poor man's sans serif. Minnesota graphic artist and type designer Mark Simonson has an elegant site sharing his knowledge - and love - of classic type faces, and he has a great piece called "The Scourge of Arial":

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world. Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

Also worth checking out is his obsessive take on the errors film designers make when being lazy about the retro type faces they use. And recently he has cast his eye over the type in Mad Men: it must be very distracting looking at everything through a typographer's eye, sometimes you couldn't see the woodblock for the trees.

5 x 5

1. Olympic Cleansing
As Beijing is left with the clean-up and the bill, the uglies can return and the city’s protest parks can once again fill with joyous folk going about their business, I was thinking of earlier Olympic protests. That image from the 1968 Mexico Olympics of the American athletes on the dais holding up Black Power salutes has been etched in my mind for 40 years. Tommie Smith and John Carlos had just won medals in the 200 metres, and made a statement, whereas this year’s winner made an exhibition. Then I ran into a Latin-American expert, who told me about the Tlatelolco Massacre, which took place in Mexico just days before the 1968 Olympics. Protests against the oppressive government ended up in 200-300 people getting shot. If this was on the NZBC news, it was after my bedtime. “The Olympics must go on,” declared IOC dictator Avery Brundage, “This had nothing to do with the Games.” Curious fashion facts, from the days of black and white TV: Smith and Carlos wore one black glove each, from the same pair. Part of the reason was they thought they’d have to shake hands with Brundage, who had worked hard to get a segregated South African team into the Games. And in Tlatelolco, the government sent in two militia groups: the regular army, and the president’s own Battalion Olympia, disguised as civilians. So the army would be able to spot the others mingling with the unarmed protestors, each member of the Battalion wore a single white glove and white sock. As the bullets started to fly, the Battalion shot a general, so the army then blitzed everyone in sight. The Battalion dropped its cover, crying out “Don’t shoot – we’re the Battalion!” Any ruthlessness in Beijing didn’t happen in front of the cameras.

2. Life is a Hurricane
Next week it is three years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The Independent interviews the editor of local paper the Times-Picayune about its impact on the paper, and what happens when the world moves on and you’re the only ones left dealing with the mess. “Imagine how newspapers in this country would have reacted if 160,000 people – about the population of Brighton – had been homeless for three years, forced to find lodging in distant towns or to survive in trailer parks.”

3. The Godfather of Soul
Jerry Wexler’s impact has been so vast – on popular music, and my own take on it – that I’ve been reluctant to get started on it. Luckily, there have been a couple of great blogs with terrific music links, the Adios Lounge and the B-Side. The key points have been well covered everywhere – Aretha, Muscle Shoals, Dusty in Memphis – but still two pieces that moved me most I read back in 2000. Alex Halberstadt’s profile in Salon is excellent, but best of all was Austin, Texas writer Raoul Hernandez’s funny, thorough piece about Wexler’s often ignored impact on country music. Wexler produced two albums for Willie Nelson – Shotgun Willie and Phases & Stages – that sold poorly but led to his breakthrough, Red-Headed Stranger. I still think Phases & Stages is Nelson’s best: he could still be bothered to write songs, and this concept album about a breakup (from the male and female points-of-view) was simple, brilliant, and heart-breaking. And it was produced in Muscle Shoals. (Both albums also have unforgettable opening lines: “Well it’s a Bloody Mary morning, she left me without warning, sometime in the night” … and “Shotgun Willie, sits around in his underwear …”). Yes, ‘I Never Loved a Man’ is mind-blowing, and Dusty in Memphis is masterly. But Aretha’s Young Gifted and Black is her masterpiece (here’s ‘Oh Me Oh My’), and Phases & Stages is Willie’s. A few years ago Marty Duda interviewed Wexler and his former Atlantic colleague Ahmet Ertegun for a National Radio series. In separate conversations, both these ageing dynamos queried Marty’s American accent and in wistful asides said it must be great to move to New Zealand: to get away from the rat race. And now both have gone. (Here's an NPR interview with Wexler.) In his Salon piece Halberstadt describes Wexler as “a musical innovator, a brilliant producer, a shrewd businessman, a master manipulator and a shameless carpetbagger”. Wexler was so dogmatic that his autobiography The Rhythm and The Blues even quoted others who had a different perspective on events. Sam Moore, formerly of Sam & Dave – who got left high and dry by Wexler – gives an artist’s perspective, and also comments on how the Scientologists prevented him from saying goodbye to his friend who wrote ‘Soul Man,’ Isaac Hayes.

4. Rainbow’s End
Harold Arlen’s classic ‘Stormy Weather’ is never far from my mind, especially this winter: songwriting perfection. Ted Barron at Boogie-Woogie Flu agrees; for a week or so he has just posted some wildly varying versions, including Arlen himself, Lena Horne, plus Memphis group the Reigning Sound’s garage-punk version from 2002. After that you’ll be looking for some more Arlen, but over the rainbow. So did Billy T James, and with the punchline of this clip he nails my nagging problem with Arlen’s other octave-leaping classic. (Includes cameo appearance by Max Cryer.)

5. Get Your Kicks
I recently had to give a talk on geography and music, a rich area. Distracting me from writing it was this addictive musical geographer’s toy from The Word. And afterwards I came across this 50 Songs for 50 States project by the Boston Phoenix. Many of the classics are better than you’d predict, and there’s a very high hit rate for recent visitations. By comparison, the Guardian’s Laura Barton takes a road to nowhere.