Is TV Dead?

I'm not done with my sabbatical but since I write for TV, I thought it was important to share this article on whether network TV is going the way of the 8-track. It's from today's NY Times website, on their Room for Debate blog. 

When I have a break in my writing, I'll come back to comment more about this. 

Break Time

I've returned from what was a long and beautiful trip. Turns out witnessing history is fun -- and stressful as I ended up with a pile of t-shirts and a case of pneumonia.  Still, I wouldn't change the experience for anything.

Alas, fun is over. Like our new Commander in Chief, there is work to be done and not a helluva lot of time to do it in.

So, to my small mini-gaggle of readers, this post is to let you know that I'm going on a sabbatical from my blog so I can concentrate on my day job, which is sitting in front of my computer and writing. Sounds a lot like this,  I know, but slightly less fun.

Football's over. The NBA is a big ol' bore this year and even though pitchers and catchers report in two weeks, there's that stupid World Baseball bullshit to interrupt a good ol' spring of meaningless games. Don't get me started. 

I will try to continue to upload and post some photos and video of the inauguration (and other things) as I get to them but for the most part, this here space will be quiet for at least until the end of February and likely a bit into March. 

The one exception will be a new photo feature beginning on February 17 --  a small thing to at least keep you from forgetting me entirely.

The good news is that my current is sure to fuel some good blogging in the future. Hope y'all are still around when I come back.

Possibilities

I’ve been wanting to write about my trip to Washington this week, about standing among the nearly 2 million who witnessed Barack Hussein Obama take the oath of office to be the 44^th President of the United States. I tell you it’s not easy to put this one into perspective. That’s how big it is.

I was going to talk about the day, how we got up early and made it down to the Mall and stood in line for hours and all the people we met and saw and how it felt to be standing there the very second President-elect Barack Obama became President Barack Obama.

But there was something else that happened Tuesday, to me and everyone who was there, bearing witness to a line in history that will mark the moment when America really changed.
It was the largest crowd for an inauguration in the history of the country. Why did so many people feel like they had to be there. I know many people were there because they wanted to witness an historic event -- there’s only one first African-American president – but I think there’s something bigger going on. A much deeper and broader cut into the American landscape.
I saw it on Tuesday first hand. It was on the faces of almost every black person I saw. I saw pride and joy, of course, but I also saw something else, a kind of ownership of the moment. One older black woman told me it was the first time in her life she felt like a real American. Which is fucked up, but it’s true for many American blacks.

For no matter how much progress we’ve made as a nation, discrimination, racism, ethnic stereotyping not only exists but it has many apologists. And while some people will always get advantages that others won’t, the dream that any kid could grow up to be President of the United States was an empty one if you didn’t happen to be white and male. Tuesday that all changed. For every child in America, it’s a brave new world. We don’t have to lie to them anymore. It’s not about equality as much as it’s about possibilities. Hope is here and its real and it’s taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A black man is in the White House. You cannot make it any clearer than that. I love the portent of this moment in American history if only because it’s a rare, concrete moment where we can say without irony that the ideals of our nation, the building blocks of Democracy – fairness, openness, free debate, charity, tolerance and curiosity – aren’t just empty slogans. They’re real.

I imagine a scene that took place Wednesday morning in classrooms all across the country, where all the kids, no matter race or gender, could add a new story to their dreams. “I can do – or be -- anything. I can even be President of the United States.” Anyone who doesn’t think this makes the whole world a better place is just clinging to the past. A past that is dead and buried, relegated to the graveyard of history. It’s not a white man’s world anymore. Oh sure, they’re hanging on for dear life, but now even they know the truth. Rush Limbaugh knows – that’s why he said with glee how he hopes Obama will fail. Because if he succeeds, than Limbaugh is just another dinosaur soon to be extinct.

The moment right after Obama was sworn-in on Tuesday, it seemed to me that the crowd took a beat before erupting in cheers. A hiccup in time. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I think it was collective shock, disbelief at what had just occurred. Like we all needed a moment to let the gravity of it all sink in. President Barack Hussein Obama. We all needed time to pinch ourselves.

It was at that moment that I stood up and the man, a stranger, sitting next to me stood up too and we looked around like we were lost. And then I offered my hand and he shook it. And then we embraced. Two strangers in a sea of strangers holding on to each other, celebrating a shared moment that reinforced our shared humanity.

Possibilities.

And it’s not temporary. There’s no turning back now. Because somewhere in America, there’s a little boy or girl who dreams of being President and nobody can tell them it can’t happen.

‘Cause it just did.

Bearing Witness

I'm too cold and tired to write anything much now but I didn't want to go sleep without posting a few photos of the day. It was a remarkable day, and wonderful and crazy, inspiring, awesome and a hundred words I can't think of right now. You just can't imagine what it was like to be in that crowd of humanity and have such a warm feeling of hope and possibilities. History, people. History.

I'll have more to say when I have a chance to gather my thoughts. Until then, here's a few photos (some of which were taken by my brother, who had a longer lens than I did and was therefore, able to get much closer to the action).

The sun rises on a great day in the nation's capitol.

My brother with Blanche and Bessie, two sisters we met from Detroit.
Bessie was at Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech.

Like father, like son.

The Capitol

The podium was right in front of that red draped doorway.

President Obama takes the Oath of Office.

The crowd. Wow, right? I mean wow.

Obama Nation

Okay, so I'm in Washington, DC for tomorrow's big swearing in. And I got great seats -- hella great. I mean I'm in the VIP section and I'm sitting down. Not up where the beautiful people sit, but pretty damn close.

I'll be getting up at the crack of dawn and walking three damn miles to the Capitol in the freezing cold. I'm psyched though. Hella psyched.

And I'll be posting from the event (if I can) and putting up photos and (I hope) video with my new tiny HD video camera.

I'd love to blog live but having lived in California forever, I have a feeling I'll be too cold to be typing anything on my iPhone. But stay tuned -- I'm sure I'll have plenty to say and post afterward when I'm back at my brother's house, watching the parade on TV. In front of the fire.

The pictures on this post are of the official program and my ticket. It also came with a photo of our new President and Vice President. (Pardon the lousy iPhone photos. I'll have real pictures from tomorrow. )

Cover This and That

My musical education began among the stacks of my parents' record collection. They had a pretty good mix of stuff, a wee bit of classical, a whole bunch of 20th century vocalists, dixieland, some straight up jazz (pre-1950), show music of course, and a nice collection of American folk music. Names like Bessie Smith and Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ella, Dinah Washington, Bobby Short and Billie Holiday, Judy Garland and Mezz Mezzrow, Louie Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Oscar Levant, The Weavers, Odetta and The Kingston Trio. They had one Beatles record.



My favorite time to listen to them were the rare days I'd stay home from school and have the living room to myself. I would pretend to be Judy or Ella or even Frank and then belt out tunes to the empty room. The dog didn't care that I sang off key.

Eventually I moved on, but I didn't move on completely. I had a brief relationship with AM radio pop music until I discovered FM radio and it blew my world to pieces. From there, I found my own little two-lane blacktop road to outlaw country, then bluegrass and off into whatever hip hop, pop or rock caught my attention. The thing is that no matter what anybody says, it's all connected. Rap to country to show music to pop to R&B to bluegrass to punk to hip hop and on back to rap and every other kinda way you want to play it. Seriously, there ain't no Kanye West without Kurtis Blow and their ain't know Kurtis Blow without George Clinton and no Funkadelic without Little Richard and no rock and roll without Hank Williams and no Hank without Leadbelly and no Dylan without Odetta. Round and round you can go.

My tastes run pretty wide, but I'm a sucker for great lyrics. Must be the writer in me. I think this also comes out of my formative music education -- the stuff that had the greatest impact on me, from the 60s anti-war folk music to the songs of Gershwin and Cole Porter to Dylan and Springsteen, was as much about lyrics as melody.

The one test of a good song lyric is how often it is successfully covered. Back in the day when the songwriters mostly worked for hire, it was not uncommon for popular songs to covered by many different singers and bands. When I was a kid, I used to make a game of finding as many recordings of a particular song as possible. I would collect them on one cassette tape (remember them?) and note how each singer interpreted them. It can be an interesting education in how to sing a song when you hear how two different great singers do the same song.

In today's music world, of course, singers write their own songs and those who do are at the top of the food chain, Covering a song takes on all sorts of mechanization's. It's not so easy -- or even marketable -- to cover a big artist's big song. You're bound to be compared to the original. And almost always not in a favorable way. But occasionally, just like the sequel can be better than the original, so can the cover of a good song.

With that in mind, this is going to be the first in an occasional series featuring interesting cover songs that are markedly different than the original.

The first of these is a song by Radiohead, called "Black Star." Radiohead is, of course, a major British band, one of the most critically acclaimed of recent years. Full disclosure: I tried to get into them but I never really got their thing. Frankly, I find them a bit pretentious. But they are enormously praised by music critics so they must have something going for them. It was their second record, Bends, that brought them critical acclaim and launched them into the stratosphere of big-league bands. The last track on Bends was this little song called "Black Star," which you can listen to in my Vox Stash here.

It's a fine song with a nice riff, very typical Radiohead, somewhat overwrought and maybe slighly over-produced, filled with the requisite guitar mashing. In their hands, it's just a notch below power-pop rock and roll, the kind of songs that precursed bands like The Shins, The Decemberists and Death Cab For Cutie.

It doesn't stand out as being great. In fact, I don't think I ever played it again after listening to it the first time. And I would have completely forgotten it if not for Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

Welch and Rawlings are what I like to call modern throwbacks. Welch was born in New York and raised in Santa Monica, California but her musical style is firmly middle-of-the-country. Combining traditional forms of folk, bluegrass, country with a dose of rock and roll, she and her musical partner Rawlings, have developed a signature style all their own. In her four studio albums (and one live one), they have performed original material, traditional songs and covers by artists like Emmylou Harris and Neil Young.

Welch has a distinctively beautiful voice that is at once angelic and just a little rough to be interesting. But if it's her voice that brings their songs to life, it's Rawlings' guitar playing that gives them a soul. The guy can seriously pick. I don't like to throw the word "genius" around too much but if anyone deserves the title, it's Rawlings. Even if you don't like their style, it's hard not to appreciate just how great a musician he is. And his star shines extremely bright on their cover of "Black Star."

The live recording is included on an EP from last year (and available through iTunes). Their version bears almost no resemblance to the original. It's almost as if it's a completely different song, from a teen-age emo piece to a sweet, achingly soulful folk tune. Welch sings it with a pathos that seems forced in the hands of Radiohead's lead vocalist Thom Yorke and Rawlings, well, listen to his solo guitar stuff -- he tears it up. (Seriously, even if it's not your flavor, listen to it all the way through -- that's how you play acoustic gui-tar).

Check it out here, on my Vox stash.

Touchdown!

I'm traveling this week and next. Came down to Florida for a stopover to visit my parents before a trip north to D.C. for Obama's Inauguration ceremony.

Anyway, already been on two jets, about to hop on a third before taking a train to New York City for a day and then another flight back to the bay.

I don't travel that much these days. I don't like to fly. I used to love it but I lost the love for it after spending five years as a sportswriter which is the same thing as living on planes and sleeping in hotels every night, in cities that all look so alike half the time you have no idea where you are when you wake up. Believe or not, I let a shitload of frequent flyer miles expire just so I didn't have to get on another airplane.

When 9/11 happened I wanted to give up flying completely. Not for any reason except like the rest of us, I went through this period of thinking that the world is a fucking dangerous place and if I'm gonna bite the big one, I'd rather it be on familiar ground. Ground being the operative word.

So anyway, a couple hours ago, my brother and his two young children arrived on a US Airways flight into Sarasota, Fla, airport. They arrived safe and sound and I'm kinda still amazed that my bro's kids are so damned cute. It's all so very weird to me, I'm telling you. Whatever. My folks don't have internet access (well, they do but it's something from another planet that's called "dial-up") and so I rolled on over to the local Starbucks to log on to the world wide web before I went into shock from withdrawal (and I'm not talking about coffee).

And the first thing I see is this amazing story on the front page of the New York Times' website. Holy fucking shit. I mean, really. I'm one of those people who thinks I'm going to survive a plane crash. I swear to God. These people actually did. Ditched in the damn Hudson River. How many times have you been in a plane and read that "Your Seat Cushion May Be Used as a Flotation Device" and could not even imagine that? Motherfuck, right? I mean I grew up along the Hudson River. There are fish that would breathe air just to get out of that water, but man, who doesn't think that it was the best fucking sight those 148 people ever freaking saw?

The full story is here, though there's obviously more details pouring in. I hope it's true. I hope everyone made it and I think they should give that pilot and his crew a freaking medal.