Lickety Split

If you read THC during its early months you'll know we are huge fans of Robert Randolph and The Family Band.  The first post on this blog featured one of their tunes - I Need More Love, with its explosive rhythm line, followed by The Thrill Of It with, channeling Jack Black in School Of Rock, a face-melting guitar solo, and then Ain't Nothing Wrong With That with its monster bottom beat.

Robert and the Band just released a new album, Lickety Split.  The Family in the Family Band is Robert's cousin Danyel on bass, his cousin Marcus on the drums and his sister Lenesha on backup vocals. Here's Robert with more on the new record, his family background in New Jersey and his church.

Robert's music is upbeat and fun (and a great live band) with Lickety Split continuing in that tradition.  Enjoy the listening.  This is a (mostly) instrumental cut, Get Ready.
My favorite Randolph tune remains a live performance of Pressing My Way.  There isn't a good performance on YouTube so THC highly recommends purchasing their first album, Live At Wetlands, ignoring the rest of the record and just play Pressing My Way several times.

I'm Ray Barboni

Dennis Farina, one of my favorite character actors, passed away yesterday.  A former Chicago cop who turned to acting after he turned 40, he played a detective for a couple of years on Law & Order (who knows which one).  My favorite roles though were in Get Shorty and Midnight Run (see Here Come Two Words For You).

Here's a scene from Get Shorty in which he played Ray Barboni, a Miami mobster on a trip to LA.  The movie is, despite this scene, very funny and also starred Gene Hackman, John Travolta, Rene Russo, Danny DeVito and James Gandolfini.  Unfortunately, the sequel, Be Cool, was terrible which gives THC an idea for a future post - movies you really liked but which had terrible, awful, horrible sequels.  Anyway, here's the scene from Get Shorty [Language warning].    This is Farina in a more reflective moment talking about the impact of the Depression on his family.

Jerusalem: The Biography

THC recently read Simon Sebag Montefiore's 2012 book, Jerusalem: The Biography.  I'd previously enjoyed Montefiore's splendid two-volume biography of Stalin; Young Stalin (2007) and The Court Of The Red Tsar (2003), the latter of which can be read as a stand alone and is the best portrait of Stalin as ruler.  Because Montefiore focuses on Stalin's day to day relationship with his inner circle (with its changing membership due to "attrition") the book captures not only the cruel logic (from Stalin's perspective) of his actions but conveys a sense of the pleasure he obtained from the malignant manipulation of those closest to him.  One example: when the wife of Poskrebyshev, Stalin's personal secretary, was arrested by the NKVD, Poskrebyshev begged for her release.  Stalin's response?  "Don't worry we'll find you another wife".  Unbeknown to Poskrebyshev, his wife was executed on Stalin's orders after two years in prison, though the dictator professed for years not to know her fate when Poskrebyshev inquired.

Jerusalem, unlike the Stalin books, is not an intimate portrait.  Rather it is a sweeping overview of the 3,000 year history of the city concluding with the 1967 reunification of a city divided since 1948.  The author also has a personal connection with the city as his great-great uncle was Sir Moses Montefiore who in the 19th century played a pivotal role in the revitalization of Jerusalem and his tale becomes part of the story told by his descendant.

The book opens with a quote from Benjamin Disraeli:  "The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth " and ends with one from Teddy Kollek, the long-time mayor of the reunited city after the Six Day War: "Everybody has two cities, his own and Jerusalem".  Montefiore announces his intent at the start:

"My aim here is to write the history of Jerusalem in its broadest sense for general readers  . . . without a political agenda . . .  I tell the story chronologically, through the lives of the mean and women- soldiers and prophets, poets and kings, peasants and musicians - and the families who made Jerusalem."

The author mostly succeeds in that aim, though his book is much more concerned with soldiers, prophets and kings than with peasants, day to day life over the centuries or the economics of the city during its existence.  Perhaps because of THC's familiarity with the Bible and Jewish history I found the most interesting parts of the book, and those from which I learned the most, to be those regarding the Byzantines, the Moslem Conquest and the Crusades and then the slow and steady decline of Jerusalem during the Ottoman centuries (1517-1918) followed by the European led revival beginning in the 19th century.
(19th century Jerusalem)
The only weak part of the book is the epilogue when Montefiore wades into the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and like many commentators runs aground when he fails to avoid the shoals of reality (along with making some factual errors on subjects such as the causes of the Second Intifada).  He indulges in the typical Western even handedness (aka "wishin' and hopin") and fails to understand what actually drives the parties.  For another example, see Fareed Zakaria in Masters Of Conventional Wisdom.  However, this is only a minor defect and THC recommends the book.

To give you an idea of the complexities of deciding the future of Jerusalem and also to correct some of the narratives about recent history please look at the map below which comes from Israel's Documented Story, the blog started by Yaacov Lozowick, the recently appointed chief archivist of the State of Israel.

 

A little history before discussing the map.  The United Nations adopted a partition plan in November 1947 for the Palestine Mandate dividing most of the mandate into Jewish and Arab sections.  However, there was a third component, the Corpus Separandum, the area around Jerusalem, not given to either party and  intended to be an open-area under international supervision.  The boundaries of the Corpus are outlined in blue.  Note that it contains not only the city itself but the entire surrounding region, including the Town of Bethlehem.

When the partition plan went into effect in May 1948, despite its rejection by the Arab world, the new state of Israel was invaded by Eqypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria which all vowed to wipe it out.  In the course of the 1948-9 war, most of the Corpus was occupied by Jordan, with Israel only retaining West Jerusalem and a corridor connecting it with the rest of Israel (the red line).  The portion captured by Jordan included the Old City of Jerusalem, containing the Jewish Quarter and the Temple Mount.  The Jordanians expelled the Jewish population, demolished all 58 synagogues and cemeteries of the Jewish Quarter, using the tombstones for road paving, and, for the next 19 years, Jews were denied all access to the Temple Mount and the Quarter.                    (Jewish families fleeing Jewish Quarter after surrender to Jordan, June 1948)  During this period, the UN did nothing to enforce the Corpus Separandum.  After Israel occupied the Old City in response to Jordan's attack on the Jewish State in the 1967 War, it turned over jurisdiction of the top of the Temple Mount, which houses the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, to Islamic religious authorities (the Waqf), allowed full access by Moslems to the site and restricted Jewish access. Today the Waqf and Palestinian authorities (as well as school textbooks) deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.  It is very difficult to find a path to peace given the recent history.

There is also a geographical reality of Jerusalem as it exists today that makes division unlikely.  For more on this see Lozowick's posts (including maps and photos) from his former blog, Ruminations, including Nine Logical Outcomes From Dividing Jerusalem, most of which are not positive.

Let's Play Twister, Let's Play Risk

Man On The Moon by REM

Nice video, particularly the last part.

And here's Andy Kaufman from the first show of the first season of Saturday Night Live.

Don't Scare Easy

Sun going down on a canyon wall
I got a soul that ain't never been blessed
Yeah, and I'm a shadow at the back of the hall
I got a sin I ain't never confessed

I don't scare easy
Don't fall apart when I'm under the gun
You can break my heart and I ain't gonna run
I don't scare easy
For no one
- Mudcrutch (2008)

If you don't recognize the name of the band, this may help.  Mudcrutch was founded in Gainesville, Florida in 1970 and broke up in 1975.  Three of the band members went on to found another group - The Heartbreakers - Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench.  You've probably heard of them.

In 2008, Petty invited two of the other original band members, Tom Leadon (a guitarist and, along with Petty, a co-founder of Mudcrutch) and Randall Marsh (drums) to reunite and record a Mudcrutch album.  One of the songs, I Don't Scare Easy, can be heard over the closing credits of the 2008 film, Appaloosa.  The tune has a distinctive Tom Petty sound, driven by his vocals and lyrics and Mike Campbell's Roger McGuinn (The Byrds) inspired guitar sound.
Appaloosa is a Western, based on the novel by Robert Parker, better known for the Spenser series of detective novels set in Boston.  Appaloosa has the same sparse dialogue of a Spenser novel but without the wisecracks.  The films is worth seeing and features Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as the (mostly) lawmen, Jeremy Irons as the bad guy and Rene Zellweger as the woman.  Yes, they are all archetypes.THC was a big fan of Robert Parker, since his first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, when it was published in 1973.  For those who've only read the later Spenser novels or seen the TV series, The Godwulf Manuscript can be startling, as Spenser is rougher and more morally ambiguous than in the later novels.  Parker went on to write 40 Spenser novels (the first ten remain the best) and create memorable recurring characters like Hawk and Susan Silverman, Spenser's long-time love (Susan was memorably detested as a character by many Spenser fans, including THC).
(Robert Parker)

Carhenge

Fantastic news - According to the AP and AZFamily.com the town of Alliance, Nebraska is expected to accept Carhenge as a gift and will maintain the monument ensuring its preservation for future generations!

Say, what??


Our family visited Carhenge three times over the years and it was a wonderful opportunity to share with our children the mystic vibes emanating from a bunch of old cars standing guard upon the prairie.

Carhenge is located just outside of Alliance to which you might reasonably ask - where in the world is Alliance?  Well, it is next to Nowhere.  More precisely it's in the middle of the Nebraska panhandle about an hour north of Scottsbluff and the Oregon Trail, not too far from the Wyoming border and about a five hour drive from the Denver Airport(assuming the timing belt on your rental car doesn't give out halfway there as happened to THC).

Alliance is a town of about 9,000 folks and it's the county seat of Box Butte County with a large Burlington Northern rail yard as the economic engine for the area.   It's a clean, friendly town with a surprising amount of trees for a community on the high prairie.
(Theatre where we saw X-Files movie the 1st night it was released - oh, what we went through to get there on time)

According to local legend the origins of Carhenge lay with a local family of wizards (well, actually farmers), the Reinders, who came up with the idea of a replica of Stonehenge built with cars during a long and boisterous family gathering one evening.                                                                 (Comparison of Carhenge and Stonehenge from Wikipedia).
What gained my admiration was not that they came up with the idea but that when they awoke (presumably) sober the next morning they actually decided to go ahead and build the thing!

When it was built in the 1980s, not all the townspeople were thrilled with the new monument but by the time we first visited in 1992 it had become grudgingly accepted and as its popularity and global renown continued to grow (it now draws 75-80,000 visitors a year) so did local acceptance.

So what were we doing in Alliance in the first place?  Mrs THC's grandmother lived on the outskirts on a ranch or in the town for most of her life (and it was a long life, lasting from 1899 to 2001) and her dad grew up there.  It was a treat for our family to visit her and for our children to hear first-hand about the way life on the prairie had changed over the course of a century (she said the telephone was the most significant change because it ended the loneliness of being on the ranch).   And on her 100th birthday the town of Alliance held a parade in her honor!

So, if you're driving I-80 cross-country take a little detour and visit Alliance and Carhenge and if you're driving up from Denver you can break up the trek by stopping about halfway there at the mothership store of Cabelas in Sidney, Nebraska - take a tour through the photo gallery to whet your appettite.