Make It Stop

I've been trying to figure out why IBM's TV commercials are so bad, and have been so bad ever since they started using those blue letterboxing bands on them. There is an air of humorless unreality about them, as if some 62-year-old in a gray suit was trying to think of ways to present business as irreverent fun. I have yet to see one that had a believable moment in it, that evinced any familiarity at all with the human condition.

The ones that are airing right now - with some young chin-haired techie explaining the benefits of going green - are among the better ones in the series, rising to the level of the merely bad, rather than train-wreck awful, with their mock-Disney music and at least a halfhearted attempt at justifying greenness in financial terms, when you know that's all that real businesspeople will end up caring about. The acting isn't as annoying as in some of the other spots, like the one when two guys are sitting in desks facing each other and sinking in quicksand while repeating an inneffectual parody of Aaron Sorkin hypertheatrical dialogue, which in its original form was only an ineffectual parody of David Mamet.

That wasn't the worst one, though; the worst one was when a bunch of 24-year-olds in gray suits talking on cell phones at European outdoor cafes attempted to show, through their smug acting, that working for IBM in a bunch of foreign capitals was the coolest thing in the world. No, wait: That wasn't nearly as bad as the one with the short, white, middle-aged middle-management superhero in Malcom X glasses. Lord help the sinners.

I don't buy mainframes, so I am not IBM's target audience (although since I watch hardly any new television other than sports, I get to see these ads a lot). Sometimes I wonder if that target audience, like me, watches these commercials and thinks that IBM is run by a bunch of preening idiots.

You and Julio

One thing I mean to do one of these days is pick up the new hardbound collection of Paul Simon lyrics (and I mean "pick up" literally - I will open it up at a bookstore and check out my concerns but it is wholly unlikely that I would actually buy it) and read the official lyrics to "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard." I have always heard the crucial line in the chorus as "See me and Julio down by the schoolyard," but recently, on several unofficial lyrics site, I've seen the line presented as "See you, me and Julio down by the schoolyard."

Now, it's true that Paul says something like "See-ya me and Julio down by the schoolyard," but I always thought the interpolated syllable was just a little singer's trick, a way to separate the "see" and the "me," much as in the Platters' "Only You." But arguing against it, I get:

* At no other point in the song does Simon slip into the second person.
* The song is called "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," not "You, Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard."
* "You, me and Julio" isn't very idiomatic; "me, you and Julio" would be the more common phrasing.
* The "you" is never enunciated clearly at all, not even once.

(As an aside, "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" is one of only two songs I can think of with a whistling solo, the other being "Dock of the Bay." Am I missing any?)

Simon made a video for the song on the occasion of one of his greatest-hits packages in the 1980s, rather bizarrely featuring Mickey Mantle and John Madden, among others. Inexplicably, Mantle, who was of course a switch-hitter, bats lefthanded against the southpaw Simon in their stickball showdown, adding to the surreality. Check it out:

Waiting for Consideration

Is it just me, or is Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman pretty much the same movie as his later For Your Consideration? They're both about a group of marginally talented people - Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara, etc. - who are trying to put on an unexceptional piece of entertainment when it's disrupted by an unwarranted bit of outside attention. In Guffman, it's a talent scout from New York, while in For it's rumors of Oscar buzz.

There are significant differences, beginning with the fact that Guffman is funny. Since Guffman is about ordinary people, we're much more willing to root for them than the peripheral Hollywood actors in For. The minor characters in Guffman are more indelible, especially David Cross and the too-little-seen Linda Kash as Eugene Levy's wife. And while it's ridiculous to think that some sort of talent agent would descend on a community-theater show in small-town Missouri, that might actually be more realistic than the notion that a Hollywood film would start to get some Oscar talk while it was still being shot.

Still, both films benefit greatly from the presence of Parker Posey. I don't think I've seen a bad movie with Parker Posey in it, although that's probably more of a testament to the number of movies I've seen.

Too Bad He Never Got the Chance to Do One for the Soup Dragons

I was reminded over the weekend that the cover art for Billy Squier's 1982 album Emotions in Motion (great title, eh?) was done by none other than Andy Warhol. This was at the suggestion of Billy himself, who obviously recognized how nice it was that one of America's most important artists was always willing to do anything for a buck.

I don't know how much the label paid for the cover art, but Billy bought the two originals - one for the front cover and a slightly different one for the back cover - directly from Warhol for $40,000 apiece. It's hard to believe, but Billy was really very savvy about money. Despite the fact that his time as a star lasted about two years, Billy parlayed that into an apartment in New York's fabled San Remo building on Central Park West, where Bono also lives. A Warhol portrait of Conrad Black sold earlier this year for 185,000 pounds, which is about $280,000 - and who wants a picture of Conrad Black? Wouldn't you rather have a picture of Billy Squier?

Warhol was pretty busy with album covers during the 1980s. He did Love You Live for the Rolling Stones, Silk Electric for Diana Ross and Koo Koo for Debbie Harry, among others. Most of those looked to me more like Andy Warhol knockoffs than works of art by the great man himself, but what do I know?

Ode to Bobbie

Speaking of people who dropped off the face of the earth, Bobbie Gentry released her last album in 1970, when she was only 26. She continued knocking around show business for a while, without a great deal of visibility; her final appearance in the public eye was on "The Tonight Show" on Christmas Night, 1978.

I wonder if they had a hard time finding guests to appear on "The Tonight Show" on Christmas. I'd bet money that Johnny turned the desk over to a guest host that night, which means that Bobbie Gentry's showbiz farewell would have come at the hands of Joe Garagiola or Roy Clark. If anyone has the means to figure out who was hosting that night, please let me know.

Bobbie did marry Jim "Spiders and Snakes" Stafford in 1979, but that lasted about as long as Stafford's hitmaking career.

Light in Your Head and Dead on Your Feet

Gerry Rafferty fell into obscurity pretty quickly after "Baker Street" was followed by "Home and Dry," "Right Down the Line," "Get It Right Next Time" - that's more hits than you thought he had, isn't it? And we didn't even mention Stealer's Wheel. Anyway, by the turn of the Eighties, Rafferty stopped having hits, and more or less stopped making albums after 1982's Sleepwalking.

Heavy drinking apparently didn't help the matter either. This past summer, Rafferty checked into a London hotel, whose other guests started complaining that Mr. Baker Street was relieving himself wherever he pleased, and it didn't always please him to use the loo. When he checked out, the maids discovered an enormous cleaning job: Rafferty had left the room literally soaked with both blood and urine. You probably suspect that I'm making this up, but I couldn't make up such a thing.

Rafferty then checked himself into a hospital to deal with liver damage, which seems like a pretty good idea. But on August 1st, he walked out, leaving all his stuff behind in his hospital room. He hasn't been seen since. Well, he's probably been seen by someone, but you know what I mean.

My, that was unpleasant, wasn't it? Let's end on a happier note: The indelible sax break in "Baker Street" was played by a gentleman with the Harry Potterish name of Raphael Ravenscroft. Rafferty has always maintained that he wrote that sax riff, but Ravenscroft claims that Rafferty handed him the song and asked him to fill in a sax part. "Most of what I played was an old blues riff," Ravenscroft has said. "If you're asking me: 'Did Gerry hand me a piece of music to play?' then no, he didn't." Instead of a songwriting credit, Ravenscroft got a check (or cheque, as they like to say in England) for 27 pounds. It bounced. Come to think of it, that's not much more pleasant than the sad saga of Gerry Rafferty.

Many thanks to Rob for the idea behind this post

Bang! Bang!

Neil Aspinall died earlier this year, but whatever happened to his old running mate Mal Evans? Aspinall and Evans were roadies and gofers for the Beatles in the early days, and Evans showed up on organ in "You Won't See Me" and anvil on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and, most famously, on alarm clock for "A Day in the Life."

Aspinall became the head of Apple after the Beatles broke up, but Evans was more or less left adrift. He claimed to have had a hand in writing a few of the Beatles songs, which would have earned him fabulous royalties, but of course Lennon-McCartney didn't need a third wheel in the credits. (Evans supposedly wrote some if not all of the lyrics for "Fixing a Hole," and apparently really did help suggest the title for Sgt. Pepper by asking Paul what the S & P on those little pots stood for.)

When Lennon went out to Los Angeles for his Lost Weekend in the early '70s, Evans went too. Stuck without much to do, he flailed around a bit, getting himself intoxicated. Finally, in 1976, Evans was living in an apartment in L.A. and fighting with his girlfriend when he pulled out an air rifle. Cops were called, and when they saw Mal waving a gun around, they opened fire. Mal was dead at forty.

Evans was cremated and his ashes were sent home to England for disposal. Somewhere along the way, they got lost in the mail. I am not making that up. John Lennon suggested they look for them in the dead letter office.

Poor George

In this week's New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter pens the following on participatory journalist George Plimpton:

George would often complain that because of the review and the need to make money, he never got around to writing the Big Book, to enter the Pantheon of greats the way Mailer and Styron had. “I could have been a contender,” Maggie Paley remembers him saying. “If I hadn’t done The Paris Review, I could have been a major writer.”

This is presented approvingly, or at least without an audible clucking of the tongue, and I have to say I find it personally offensive. George Plimpton was born to comfortable wealth, ran off to Paris after college, and eventually settled in a spacious apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. (Carter's review is even titled "Lucky George.") There is no evidence that he ever had what the rest of us would call a real job. The Paris Review was a literary quarterly; I can't imagine it took George Plimpton's nights and weekends away from him. He certainly had he time to write a Big Book (he had the time to write several nonfiction books), and he certainly had the money. It is highly doubtful that George Plimpton ever had corn flakes for dinner because there was no real food in the house and his paycheck wouldn't arrive until Thursday.

Even if he had, he could have persevered in his writing. Philip Roth wrote Goodbye, Columbus while he was in the army. William Burroughs worked as an exterminator. Georges Perec worked days as an archivist at a research laboratory, and still managed to crank out an entire novel - A Void - that never once used the letter "e." Plimpton had his entire lifetime and the entire alphabet at his disposal; if he failed to become a major writer, which is undeniably the case, it is solely his fault.

Plimpton was a socialite. There is a panoramic picture accompanying Carter's review showing one of his famous cocktail parties; I recognized Capote, but not Styron or Vidal or Puzo or the several other noted authors who are present. (Just the idea that there could be a panoramic view of his Manhattan apartment should tell you how flimsy his "need to make money" was.) I wonder if Plimpton ever stood up, around 8:15 one evening, and cried "Enough! Everybody out! I need to get a couple of hours of work in on my novel." I bet not.

George Plimpton's entire life was more privileged than that of 99.9 percent of all Americans. He could do whatever he chose, and it is to is credit that he accomplished what he did, which was to edit a literary magazine and write articles and books (he did even publish one novel, the whimsical Curious Case of Sidd Finch, which apparently didn't tap his potential as a writer). But this notion that he wasn't quite privileged enough to do all he was capable of, I think, is pretty disgusting.

The Safety Dance

I was traveling yesterday, and circumstances forced my to carry some but not all of my grooming materials with me. As I was laying my backpack on the conveyor belt, the lady asked me if there were any toiletries in there, and I answered, with some trepidation, that there was a razor in there. She asked if there was any shaving cream, and I said no; I would never be foolish enough to try to bring shaving cream onto a commercial airplane flight.

Of course, were I so inclined, I probably could have done a little damage with that razor - given someone a good scratch on the back of the arm, at least. I'm not sure what havoc I could wreak with a can of shaving cream, although I supposed if I sprayed it up someone's nose, it would be temporarily difficult for them to breathe. Not to mention good for a laugh.

At any rate, I am freshly groomed this morning, and the skies are safe, at least from Barbasol-wielding maniacs.

A Beautifully Mysterious Thing

On Chicago's best song, "Questions 67 and 68," the singer asks, by my count, just eight questions, and that's counting the sole question in the song's chorus - "Can you tell me?" - three separate times. So what were the first 66 questions? And which of the song's questions constitute the next two?

It turns out we're approaching this problem wrongly. The song's writer, Robert Lamm, dated a girl for two years, 1967 and 1968, during which she fostered many questions for him to think about, as girls tend to do. The year after their breakup, he had crystallized some of these questions into a song, and the song charted in Billboard's Hot 100 at Number 71.

Two years later, when "67 and 68" no longer so obviously referred to a pair of years, the single was re-released, and went all the way to Number Twenty-Four in the fall of 1971. Incidentally, my friend Gavin Edwards was discussing on his web site a while back songs in which the title doesn't appear until the final line; here's a sterling example of that.