Happy New Year!
We had chicken tacos for supper, yours truly polishing off a box of Trader Joe's California Cabernet, ten dollars for three liters. I don't mean that I drank all three liters, only the liter or so that was remaining. There is this guy who reports on social science research on public radio. His segment often plays while I'm getting ready for work in the morning, and if memory serves it was he who described an experiment designed to test whether people can tell the difference between a ten-dollar bottle of wine and and a hundred-dollar bottle of wine. Turns out, hardly anyone can, but just randomly selected people are slightly more apt than food-and-wine journalists to prefer the hundred-dollar bottle. So, as I suspected, the work product of these guys consists entirely of inserting high-sounding phrases involving "bouquet" and "body" and "a blend of blackberries and cedar" into a template. They don't know jack. Which reminds me of my next door neighbor, an African-American and World War II vet who saw action in the South Pacific, now in his 90s. His wife died about a year ago, and he told me recently that he had visited a lawyer with an eye toward making a will, but left when he found out how much it would cost.
"I'm not paying that asshole $400 to stick my name into the blanks of his god-damned template," Wayne explained to me.
While eating a taco, Amanda discovered she had left her iphone at work. The prospect of spending a long holiday weekend without it catapulted her into the Volkswagen for a return trip to the office. At 6:39, still able to read, I got a text stating that she had retrieved her phone and was "going to stop off at Wendell and Suzy's, be home soon." She walked through the door at 10:39, so it is possible that things were hopping at Wendell and Suzy's. At our house, it was Michigan State versus Alabama, and then, when that proved to be a piss-poor entertainment, a replay of this Bruce Springsteen tribute on PBS. I love Springsteen, unreservedly, and would not have watched a down of that miserable football game If I'd known what I was missing. I happened on it just as Patti Smith was performing "Because the Night." Wow. Other highlights included Mumford & Sons doing "I'm on Fire," Neil Young rocking "Born in the U.S.A.," and, at the end, Springsteen himself, joined by the E-Street Band, including now Clarence Clemons's nephew Jake on saxophone, for "Thunder Road" and "Born to Run." There's only a little dissonance in hearing a zillionaire my age whale out:
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to run.
What with all the police shootings in the news, Jackson Browne's rendition of "American Skin (41 Shots)" seemed more . . . topical. This is the song Springsteen wrote after New York police shot--41 times--a Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo, as he reached for his wallet to produce ID on a summer night in 1999. Springsteen was condemned and boycotted by police groups, which to my mind shows that they were about as familiar with the content of that song as Peggy Noonan was with the content of "Born in the U.S.A." (Noonan was the speechwriter who, in 1984, with "Born in the U.S.A." atop the charts, had President Reagan thank Bruce Springsteen for "bringing a message of hope" to America; the content of the hope may be found here.)
The lyrics that enraged the cops go like this:
41 shots and we'll take that ride
'Cross this bloody river to the other side
41 shots . . . cut through the night
You're kneeling over his body in the vestibule
Praying for his life
Lena gets her son ready for school
She says "On these streets, Charles
You've got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you
Promise you'll always be polite
That you'll never run away
Promise Mama you'll keep your hands in sight"
41 shots and we'll take that ride
'Cross this bloody river to the other side
41 shots . . . got my boots caked in this mud
We're baptized in these waters and in each other's blood
Is it a gun?
Is it a knife?
Is it a wallet?
This is your life
It ain't no secret
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living
In your American skin.
The last stanza is the refrain. The first stanza is in the voice of one of the cops, and it would be an understatement to say that the portrayal, which mirrors what actually happened just after the shooting, when the mistake was discovered, places the police in a sympathetic light. The second stanza is in the voice of a mother fearful that her own son might suffer a fate like Diallo's. In the third stanza the voices are merged in a kind of communal lament that is nevertheless tinged with hope. It's really a beautiful song. Here is Browne performing it at another venue with Shawn Colvin.
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