Camelot in LA

I have always thought that "The 60s" is a somewhat misleading phrase, at least when used to define a cultural phenomenon. The problem is that the early 60s were much more like the 50s, and much of what we think of as the counterculture and social revolution that defined the era occurred in the early 70s. I always think of the 60s as beginning with the JFK assassination (1963) and ending with the release of Saturday Night Fever (1977), which ushered in the era of disco. Woodstock, arguably the seminal event of the 1960s, didn't occur until August, 1969, a mere four months before the end of the decade. So, THE 60s and the 60s are not precisely the same thing.

I like to think of the 60s as divided into two parts, pre-Beatles and post-Beatles. Since The Beatles broke up in a horribly acrimonious mess just as the decade came to an end, the event provides a useful bookmark. Yes, there were many other sources of musical genius in the 60s--Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Stones come to mind. But as immortalized in Don McClean's American Pie, The Beatles so dominated their era that it was difficult for others to capture the attention they perhaps deserved.

Enter The Troubadour

In many ways, I find the post-Beatles era the more interesting. I was fascinated by the southern California, easy-listening, country rock movement of the early 1970s. What I did not realize until last night was that virtually all of the musicians that I loved at that time all knew one another and worked closely together, all getting their start in a relatively small club in Los Angeles called the Troubadour.

I was enlightened by a documentary that is part of the great PBS series American Masters entitled Troubadours: Carole King / James Taylor & The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter. It can viewed in its entirety online here. If you have 90 minutes to spare, I strongly recommend viewing it. It is a wonderful time capsule capturing a magical era in American music. If you were to browse through the albums that I loved in the early 1970s, most would have been a product of the artists profiled in this documentary. James Taylor's Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim? Check. Carole King's Tapestry? Check. Linda Rondstadt's Heart Like a Wheel, Prisoner in Disguise, and Hasten Down thew Wind? Check. Jackson Browne's For Everyman, The Pretender, and Running on Empty? Check. Eagles' Eagles and Desperado? Check. CSN&Y's Deja Vu? Check. Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark? Check. This list goes on and on--Elton John, J.D. Souther, Karla Bonhoff, The Byrds, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, and Bonnie Raitt to to list just a few. Even Steve Martin got his start at the Troubadour.

The strange part of this story is how insular this community of singer/songwriters were. All of the these people knew each other. Well. They played on each other's albums. Many lived in the same Laurel Canyon neighborhood in Los Angeles.

It all ended when the intimate collection of friends and collaborators went their own ways when they got huge record deals and began making unimaginable sums of money for kids in their 20s. The transition from marijuana to cocaine also played a role in the dissolution of the idealism and camaraderie that was the Troubadour.

Watching the video, I couldn't help but think of that line from Camelot, "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot." As one of the players interviewed in the documentary--I forget who--pointed out, usually reality fails to live up to the legend, but in the case of the Troubadour in the early 70s, it did.

The Drive-In Theater

I across across an article in the New York Times about drive-in theaters, and how many were still prospering.

Springfield Missouri used to have five drive-ins

• Sunset - Chestnut Expressway
• Holiday - Kearney
• Hi-M - Republic Road
• Springfield - Sunshine/Glenstone
• Queen City - Sunshine/Ingram Mill Rd

Now it has none. The last surviving drive-in was the Holiday, which closed in 1996. The Springfield drive-in was the first to go in 1977.

The demise of drive-in theater has nothing to do with the Internet, cable TV, or even home video. Drive-ins were killed by two forces. First, the rapid increase in property values in the 1970s undercut the drive-in's economic feasibility. Since drive-ins needed to be close to large population centers, they took up large tracts of land that were simply too valuable for a drive-in to support. Second, by the 1970s Hollywood was producing fewer and fewer family-friendly films. There were movies for kids and movies for adults, but not very many that appealed to both, as was common when I was growing up in the early-mid 1960s. The drive-in is first and foremost a form of family entertainment. Some of my fondest memories of time spent with my parents as a kid were Saturday evenings at the drive-in, usually the Hi-M or Springfield.

Another strange thing has happened to theaters in Springfield. In 1996 Wehrenberg opened the Campbell 16 theater. When it opened, Springfield had 9 other theaters, some single screen and other multiplexes. The downtown theaters that I visited in my youth--the Fox, the Gillioz, and the Landers had all closed by the early 1980s.

• The Petite 3
• Fremont 3 Theaters
• The Tower
• Battlefield Mall Cinema 6
• Century 21 (also at Battlefield Mall)
• North Town 4 Cinemas
• Town and Country 6
• Palace Theater
• Springfield 8

Today, only the Springfield 8 and the Palace Theater (second run) survive. Recently, another multiplex was added downtown, the College Station Stadium 14. I was pleased when the Campbell 16 opened, but I had no idea that it would result in 24 other screens closing, including the best theater in town (Century 21) and the most historic (The Tower). The demise of the downtown theaters was a foreseeable result of the shift in Springfield's retail center from the Downtown Square to the Battlefield Mall, but these other closing were all over town.

The result was predictable. Popular films at the Campbell 16 were often sold-out. With the addition of College Station Stadium 14 and Springfield 8 adding three screens, the situation has considerably improved, but for many years Springfield was under served by too few screens.

Politics Can Be So Depressing

ABC OTUS News reports that Wisconsin Congressman and GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan said the following at a campaign rally in Virginia.

Remember the line, we're not red states, we're not blue states but we're the United States of America? I want to be a uniter, not a divider? I tell ya, I've served with three presidents since I have been in Congress, this is the most partisan atmosphere I have ever seen. This is not uniting, this is dividing.

In these comments Ryan clearly hopes to tap into the revulsion most persuadable voters have for extreme partisanship. Although he doesn't say it directly, he clearly suggests that this hyper-partisan atmosphere is Barack Obama's doing.

It has become almost a cliche to refer to statements that are not only false, but which actually state the exact opposite of the truth as Orwellian, after George Orwell's portrayal of "doublethink" in the novel 1984. One source defines Orwells doublethink as "a thought process in which ideas that are obviously self-contradictory are accepted as true based on the fact that an authority figure is asserting them."

By that definition, Ryan is a truly Orwellian figure. The run-up to his selection as Vice-President has seen a GOP nominating and primary process in which the party he represents consistently weeds out any candidate who dares to voice the apostasy of bipartisanship. Consider this description of a GOP retreat that occurred shortly before Obama's inauguration.

The Republican strategy, from even before Obama was inaugurated, was to oppose him in lockstep. . . . Grunwald describes a retreat the House Republican leadership took in January 2008, before Obama was inaugurated. The second slide in the presentation read “The purpose of the Minority is to become the Majority.” Pete Sessions, the Texas Republican giving the presentation, added, “This is the entire Conference’s mission."

Not long after this meeting, Senate GOP Minority leader proudly announced that "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Long-serving and reliably conservative GOP Senators, such as Indiana's Richard Lugar and Utah's Robert Bennett were defeated in GOP primaries because they were perceived to have betrayed the party by occasionally working with Democratic colleagues. Richard Mourdock announced on friendly turf--Fox and Friends--"I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view." See the doublethink? For Mourdock, bipartisanship is pure partisan uniformity. Ryan laments the loss of bipartisanship while working feverishly with his party to destroy it.

George Orwell would find the current client quite familiar.

Romney Selects Sarah Palin as His Running Mate!

Well, not exactly.

Paul Ryan is not Palinesque in being both uninterested in and uninformed about public policy. He is not like Palin in vanity or rhetorical viciousness.

He is, however, very much like Palin in that a GOP presidential nominee--concerned that his moderate past may undermine support from the conservative base--has swung for the fences by selecting a running mate that is both high risk and high reward. Ryan is, like Palin before him, in Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's phrase, a "Game Changer."

Was it a wise choice? That depends on how you view the current state of the race. If you believe that Romney is seriously behind and needed something to kick start his campaign, then Ryan might be a good choice. If you are losing anyway, a risky choice can only help. This was clearly Romney's own view. He abandoned his earlier pledge to select a "boring white guy" like Tim Pawlenty or Rob Portman. Ryan is a white guy to be sure, but he is certainly not boring. Why the change? We can only guess, but the Obama campaign's relentless efforts at portraying Romney as a richy rich plutocrat, out of touch with ordinary folks was clearly working. The culminating event may have been the conservative freakout over a Romney aid's audacious suggestion that the electorate should consider Romney's own record as governor of Massachusetts.

So, Ryan will no doubt shore up the conservative base, and I suppose that it is possible that the selection may put Wisconsin into play, which had been looking increasingly out of Romney's reach. Finally, Ryan is an attractive candidate in that he is personable and serious-sounding. He possesses serious political skills. That's the up side. What's the down side? Um, where to start?

• Ryan is the author and promoter of a plan to fundamentally restructure Medicare, transforming it from guaranteed health care for the elderly into a voucher plan in which retirees will be given a fixed amount of cash with which to purchase health insurance on the open market. It polls terribly. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, won a traditionally GOP seat in upper state New York running against the Ryan Medicare plan. As David Frum pointed out today, "Romney has transformed a campaign about jobs and growth into a campaign about entitlements and Medicare."
• Ryan reinforces the very aspect of Romney's positions that Obama has been savaging. Obama has been saying that Romney wants to raise taxes and cut benefits for the middle class to fund an huge tax cut for the very wealthy. Ryan is on record supporting such a plan, the only difference being it is even more radical in this direction. Whereas Romney wants to maintain the preferential tax treatment provided to stock dividends and capital gains contained in the Bush 2003 tax cut (traditional sources of income for the very wealthy), Ryan wants to eliminate taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inherited wealth entirely. However, serious the Buffett secretary problem is now, Ryan's plan would make it immeasurably worse.
• Unlike Ohio's Rob Portman, Virginia's Bob McDonnell, or Florida's Mark Rubio, any of whom could almost certainly put a key battleground state within reach, Ryan only marginally improves Romney's chances in Wisconsin. Furthermore, Ryan is a leading member of Congress, one of the least liked institutions in the country. 
• Unlike Chris Christie, who might have conceivably helped Romney with independents, an area where recent polling look increasingly bad for Romney, Ryan will likely make that problem even worse.

For political junkies the Ryan choice makes the race much more interesting. Ryan has very strong views and is the most ideologically extreme candidate for Vice-President since at least 1900 and is roughly as conservative as Michele Bachmann. I am particularly interested in seeing whether the media exposure resulting from this choice will transform Ryan in the public's mind from a wonky deficit hawk into a Randian class warrior, a portrait that is much more accurate, as I have claimed previously here and here. We will never know whether the choice improves Romney's chances of winning the White House. Personally, I doubt it, but it will be fun to watch.

I Told You So

I think that this falls into the category of "I told you so."

I have been saying this for at least 25 years.